Marcu Taylor's Blog, page 32

The Future of How Google+ Will Affect Search Rankings

Back in August, I ran several experiments to try and find out whether Google’s +1s had an impact on search engine rankings. The results suggested that in almost all cases Google +1s did have a positive impact on rankings. However, a lot has changed in the past four months, so I’d like to share where I think Google is going with the impact of Google+ on search rankings.

Results from my Google+ rankings experiment in August 2011

It’s clear that Google is going all out with Google+ and it’s no secret that it’s becoming the central hub of all their services – Google Search is beginning to integrate with Google+, as is Gmail, YouTube, Analytics, and AdWords. It’s only a matter of time before we see Google Maps, and Google’s other services beginning to integrate into the social network.

What’s interesting is how Google is starting to connect the dots between people and businesses with their related content, topics and online activity. Who you have in your circles will give Google an idea of how influential you are about various topics, which, as a content creator will allow them to position your content more accurately in search results.

Google recently made a big jump in connecting the dots between people and content with the introduction of the rel=”publisher” and rel=”author” tags.

How rel=”publisher” and rel=”author” tags will impact rankings

Over the past few months, Google has introduced the rel=”author” and rel=”publisher” tags to webmasters as a way to connect your website with your Google+ profile in search results. There have been several case studies already suggesting that the images shown next to search results with these tags increase click-through rates, but I think Google has plans for these tags to become far more profound than just impact CTR.

Below are some examples of what the new rel=”publisher” and rel=”author” tags look like in search results for my website TheMusiciansGuide.co.uk.

In combination, the rel=”author” and rel=”publisher” tags will give Google some incredibly strong signals that they’d be silly to not take into account for ranking search results.

One of the most profound signals is that Google will be able to tell apart content written by people with a relevant community from those who don’t.  If an author of a blog post on scuba diving has an online network with no one interested in scuba diving, Google might question whether that author is actually relevant to that topic. This means Google will be able to further drop the rankings of low quality content sites, and replace those rankings with websites written by people who genuinely participate in a community around the topic they write about. Using Google’s logic, that person is likely to be more knowledgeable.

This means that Google will also be able to recognize content written by influencers who are highly respected in a certain niche and reward them with higher rankings.

 

Google +1s will become one of the most accurate ways of ‘voting’ for a website

Likes and tweets are both great signals for determining a site’s popularity, and while there is avery good correlation between how much a site is shared on Twitter & Facebook and how it ranks in search results, both tweets and likes are incredibly easy to manipulate, as I’ve proved in previous experiments, making them a highly flawed method of voting.

Google +1s and what I’ll call ‘Google + signals,’ on the other hand, are incredibly hard to manipulate. This is because Google can tell whether you’re a real person or not by investigating your Google account history, such as the videos you’ve watched on YouTube videos, the e-mails you’ve sent in Gmail, and the searches you’ve made on Google. They can then determine whether you’re a genuine vote or not by looking at the context of your interests and relationships.

I think Google is onto a real winner with the data they’re collecting from integrating Google+ into search results and I think what we’re going to see in 2012 is an incredibly personalized search experience based around whose circles we’re in, who we add into our circles and what activity we participate in online. As the dots become increasingly connected, Google can only become more intelligent about how they position search results for us.

Final Thoughts

It’s hard to know exactly what’s around the corner for Google+ at the moment, as every week there seems to be some exciting new development. That said, I think it’s fair to say that Google+ is going to become more and more of a ranking factor as Google continue to integrate it with their existing offerings. My advice? Get on there now, start growing your network on circles and get your tags implemented.

If anyone else has any thoughts on what Google might be doing with Google+ from an SEO perspective, I’d be very interested to know, you can either drop me a tweet at @MarcusATaylor or leave a comment below.

The post The Future of How Google+ Will Affect Search Rankings appeared first on Marcus Taylor.

Respond to Everyone

Ever since I read Predictably Irrational, I've been amazed at how true it is that 'the busier a person is, the better they are at answering e-mails'. The thing is, it's not being busy that prevents people answering emails, it's their attitude towards their inbox that counts.

You never know how much your response might mean to someone

Several days ago I emailed Derek Sivers asking whether he had any advice on what to see when I'm in Singapore next month – he responded to me straight away. Derek is one of my biggest inspirations as an entrepreneur, speaker and writer, and so his response meant the absolute world to me.



The same thing happened when I emailed Gary Vaynerchuck, Chris Brogan, Penelope Trunk and Rand Fishkin. I can't imagine how busy these guys must be, but they're so damn good at responding to their emails, and for a while I honestly couldn't figure out why they cared so much. Then it hit me.

These people see the value and the opportunity to care in their inboxes. Rather than looking at their emails as a burden, I suspect they view their emails as an opportunity to help people, and develop relationships with the people they care about. After all, good relationships form the foundations for everything – from business, to friendship, to finding a partner.

Busy people are also more productive than non-busy people. Rather than leaving their inbox on in the background or checking it every few hours half-heartedly, busy people tend to dedicate a set amount of time each day exclusively to responding to e-mails, and then they close their inbox down for the day.

Try it – block out a bit of time each day or every few days to respond to your messages, and then respond to everyone. You don't know just how much your response might mean to someone and the consequences it might have for you and that person. I'm going to be practicing what I preach, so feel free to drop me an e-mail if you want to keep in touch

Image Credit: Kraftwerckk

Listening > Talking

The value of a conversation is often greater for the person listening, because listening allows you to learn something new, whereas talking only gives you an opportunity to regurgitate the things you already know.

The trouble is that talking about ourselves and the things we enjoy makes us happy, which makes us crave the need to talk, and talk, and talk. Another way of looking at this is that by giving others the opportunity to talk about themselves we make them happy, whilst giving ourselves an opportunity to learn new information.

When we make someone happy, they often give us a smile. Smiling is highly contagious and releases the same amount of stimulating hormones in our bodies as picking up a wad of £20,000 according to research by Ron Gutman. What I'm saying is that if you make the person you're with happy, you both get a huge boost of feel-good hormones.

This isn't just the case in the real world.

Just like in real life, the benefit of entering the social web and participating in conversations as a brand or individual is as much about listening to what's being said as it is about talking.

Let me demonstrate with a few examples…

My favourite time of the year is approaching (Christmas), and naturally, lots of brands are trying to talk about their Christmas products on the social web in the hope that people will buy from them.



But who's listening to the tweets that tell us that people are happy to pay 4x as much money for handmade Christmas cards? Which brands are monitoring the hashtag #primaryschoolmemories which is currently trending and largely talking about Christmas cards? Which brands have social web trend monitoring in place to tell them that Christmas cards peak in number of searches on December 3rd-6th every year, but are a dying trend online, despite still being popular in Austrailia and South Africa?

I don't think there are too many brands doing this. A few searches on the social web back me up.

Surely, it's almost undisputable to say that for a company who sells Christmas cards, an hours worth of listening on the social web and creating actionable research around that product or market is more insightful and valuable than an hours worth of scheduling promotional tweets.

To sum this up, whether you're a brand or an individual, online or offline, listening is more valuable to you than talking. Sure, it's harder to measure and you're going to have to action the insights you find, but that's an opportunity to innovate and advance.

Who Should Represent Your Brand on the Social Web?

This post originally appeared on State of Search

Given that engaging on the social web can benefit your brand's marketing, recruitment, PR, sales, customer service, and other departments, the question of 'who should manage and represent your brand on the social web?' will inevitably arise. The answer is, all of them.

I believe that all employees with a passion and interest in representing the brand should be encouraged to. Utilising the expertise and networks of the people within your business is incredibly valuable when it comes to engaging on the social web and is not something that can be easily outsourced.

It sounds obvious, but many businesses give a variety of social media responsibilities to the PR team, the tech team or external agencies, which is fine, but social media is not about using tools, it's about extending your current business activities into the landscape of social media to identify opportunities. It should therefore ideally be the responsibility of the people within the business, assisted by those with experience in recommending tools and strategies to increase effectiveness and productivity.

The first step to creating an effective and sustainable social media strategy is creating an internal structure that makes the most of employee's strengths and interests.

However, getting employees to engage on behalf of the brand is easier said than done, and there are many potential issues that need to be prepared for prior to jumping in. Remember that everything you publish on the social web represents your brand and adds to your brand's online shadow, and this is why I believe businesses encouraging staff to engage should implement a social media council.

The power of having a Social Media Council

Given that the brand's involvement in social media may benefit multiple departments within a company, it makes a lot of sense to have a social media council made up of a representative from each major department involved in the brand's social media strategy.

The role of the social media council is to develop the guidelines, policy and direction to allow anyone within the business to represent the brand on the social web effectively and safely.

An example social media structure incorporating a social media council:

The collective wisdom of the social media council will be incredibly powerful, but without someone who can objectively absorb the social media council's goals and provide a strategy that utilises the tools, networks and techniques available to achieve those goals, the council's wisdom and power will not be used to its full potential. This is where I personally believe an outside expert or social media agency is best situated in a social media strategy (in most cases).

When the social media council and head of strategy have produced a carefully planned strategy and set of guidelines, it should then be safe and effective for employees to interact on the social web on behalf of the brand.

When you know who is going to represent the brand, the next step is how.

How to represent your brand on social media

One of the most commonly debated questions when brands enter social media is 'how should we represent ourselves?' With so many options to choose from it's important to remember what your brand stands for and how you want to be perceived on the social web, because there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to setting up your profiles.

Do you want to 'humanise' the brand by getting employees to tweet from personal accounts, giving insight into their lives? Or does your brand need to retain its mystery and glamour by not presenting itself as overly 'humanised'? Here are some guidelines, which are by no means factual but simply my perception of what different account structures suggest about a brand.

Account structure
Impression that this gives the brand


Company account with anonymous person twe­­eting
Impersonal, mysterious, corporate. Does not 'humanise' the brand. This approach works well for 'mysterious' brands that are not expected to be personal or accessible.


Company account with employees tweeting from company account
Personal and gives the brand a 'humanised' element, but lacks insight into the lives of the people behind the company. Often results in an inconsistent mixture of corporate & personal tone / message.


Company account with fictional character tweeting
Personal, fun and interactive. Lacks the human element, but if a brand is well associated with a mascot, this can be effective. Wonga, SEOmozand Compare the Market are great examples of brands using this approach.


Employees tweeting from personal accounts
Highly personal and human, gives insight into the lives of the people behind the company, reducing the friction between the brand and customers.


Company account with employees tweeting + employees tweeting from personal accounts.
Good balance of being personal, human, allowing people to develop relationships with the people behind the brand if they want to, but company account also maintains corporate feel.

The decision of which approach to take should be decided between the social media council, who will be able to make an informed decision on how the brand needs to be represented to achieve the goals outlined in the brand's social media strategy. Here are several examples of different approaches that brands have taken, to give you inspiration on which may work best for you.

Example of a brand account with fictional characters tweeting on behalf of the brand:

Example of a brand account with employees tweeting (see left hand 'tweet fleet'):

Example of a brand account with employees tweeting as well as from personal accounts:

Final thoughts

I asked some industry experts what their thoughts were on who should represent a brand on social media and how. A big thanks to Rand Fishkin and Luke Brynley-Jones who kindly shared their thoughts.

"I believe strongly in enabling authentic social media use by employees and encouraging those who want to participate more with the brand and community to do so. However, I'm not a fan of forced social contributions – for some folks, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ aren't great public outlets."

For that reason (and many others), I much prefer each brand to have its own, corporate voice that's not uniquely tied to an individual. At SEOmoz, that brand voice is represented by Roger Mozbot, our mascot, and while many folks use the SEOmoz Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. accounts to publicly speak "as the brand", they don't identify themselves as such. It's like getting into the Mickey Mouse costume at Disney World. As far as park attendees are concerned, you're Mickey. Nothing more. And when you take off the suit, you should be who you really are."

- Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SEOmoz

"Staff should be encouraged to participate in social media, but within a clearly defined framework set out by the company. The framework can be open (e.g. Zappos) or closely managed within a CRM process (e.g. Dell), but the bottom line is: it needs to be clear and understood from the outset. The question is: how can you leverage the personal knowledge and networks of your staff without either (a) courting PR disaster or (b) crushing them under brand guidelines and CRM Service Level Agreements? The answer is: carefully."

- Luke Brynley-Jones, founder & CEO of Our Social Times

Who do you think should manage and represent a brand's social media presence? I'd be interested in hearing people's experiences with different strategies, so feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter (my handle is @MarcusATaylor)

What Motivates People to 'Plus one'?

Today I've been trying to find out what motivates people to hit the plus one button, and based on several conversations I've had with plus-one'rs I've concluded that there are four primary motivations behind why people 'plus one' content:

To share & recommend information with their followers on Google Plus and Google search
To bookmark content for future reference
To have their name & face pop up next to content (personal branding)
To increase sales and traffic through increasing rankings, click through rates and conversion rates.

The latter motivation only really concerns people who 'plus one' their own content, so if we were to ask 'what motivates people to plus one other people's content' there are only three key motivations – to share and recommend, to increase personal branding or to bookmark.

That said, my gut feeling is that the majority of 'plus ones' outside of the Google Plus network are driven by people with a vested interest in promoting their own content – I cannot prove it, but I did run a poll that suggested that trend might be true (although based on a small sample size).

It could be said that if you don't use G+ as a bookmarking tool or to share content with your followers, your +1s are probably a form of self-promotion. I'd be interested in hearing any counter arguments against that statement in the comments.

For me personally, I prefer to use automated services like Trunk.ly to aggregate and bookmark the content I like, and I don't have a particularly engaged audience on Google+, so the benefits for me +1ing a page are very minimal, other than marketing benefits and helping people within my circles find great content when they search, of course.

Can any web page get naturally +1'd?

Ask yourself, what might influence someone to 'plus one' a page like the one below?

This type of page does not lend itself naturally to being shared, therefore the most likely motivation for someone who does not have a vested interest in increasing the page's visibility online is to bookmark it for future reference.

Highly searched-for useful services also attract +1's. In this case, the benefits tend to be either for personal branding reasons or to help people in your circles find better content when they search for related services in the future.

If there's anything I've missed or if you can think of other reasons why people plus one content, I'd love to know!

A big thanks to Mike Essex, Pritesh Patel, James Carson for sharing ideas!

Everything I Know About Effective Blogger Outreach

Early this week I wrote a blog post on the SEOptimise blog giving away everything I know about effective blogger outreach. For those of you who missed it, here's a summary and link to the full post.

Image Credit: ekai

What I Learnt About Blogger Outreach From Marketing Get Noticed

A 5 second meeting in person is worth 100s of e-mails

When contacting high-profile bloggers, a five second in-person introduction has an incredible impact on increasing the likelihood of that blogger helping you out. Busy people tend to use 'filters' to manage their time efficiently, and one of the major filters that busy people use is 'have I met this person in real life?'

I cannot emphasise enough how beneficial it is to attend blogger conferences as a means for improving your outreach campaigns. Second to this, a simple tweet telling the person that you dropped them an e-mail seems to significantly improve response rates as it suddenly presents you as a real person in their world. Being 'real' to someone outside of their inbox is effective for outreach.

Scalability is awesome IF combined with quality & selectiveness

It's common sense that sending 100 e-mails is more effective than sending 10 e-mails, but there are two other parts to this equation: quality + selectiveness.

E-mailing 100 bloggers is pointless if your product or offering isn't good enough. The key to getting a good response rate in an outreach campaign is to give the blogger an irresistible offering. I personally like to sit down with a pen and paper before writing an e-mail campaign and list every possible benefit that I can offer to the blogger, so that my e-mail naturally becomes focused around them and not what I want.

Also, being selective can be very beneficial. Rather than e-mailing 100 Average Joe blogs, could you use the time spent contacting them to get featured on five or six major blogs that would then influence 500 bloggers to write about your product? If your product or offering is awesome, you should be able to get featured by high-profile bloggers.

Picking up the phone is the most effective way to get what you want

A pretty simple concept that I've talked about before; a phone call can sometimes take a little bit longer than an e-mail, but it gives you the ability to adapt to the blogger's immediate response, which is not something you are able to do over e-mail.

If a blogger doesn't have a phone number listed, I'd recommend dropping them a tweet asking if it's okay to get in touch by phone with them.

Busy people are better at time management

I remember reading an interesting concept in the book Predictably Irrational, which suggests that busier people tend to be better at responding to e-mails. The theory behind this is that busy people tend to be better at time management and actioning opportunities.

When contacting people for pre-publication reviews of Get Noticed I was shocked to see the first replies come in from CEOs of major corporations and various New York Times Best-Selling Authors.

Don't be afraid to contact the A-list bloggers just because they're 'out of reach', you'd be surprised at how accessible they are.

What I Learnt About Blogger Outreach From Writing Get Noticed

Be in the right place at the right time, all the time

One of my favourite chapters in Get Noticed is 'How to Be in the Right Place at the Right Time, All The Time'. Most of us assume that when we we're supposedly in the right place at the right time, it was a stroke of luck. There is in fact more science and probability at work than we might immediately recognise. Lets break it down:

You were prepared either subconsciously or consciously with specific and clear objectives about the type of person you wanted to meet.
You were both in the same place (either geographically, or virtually)
You were perceptive enough to make the connection with them.

The first step to being in the right place at the right time, is knowing exactly what that place is. Who are the people you are trying to meet and where do they spend their time? If the answer is tech bloggers, then analyse where tech bloggers spend their time and be there. Attend technology conferences and meet-ups, write for the blogs they read, spend time in the cities notorious for tech blogging.

Being in that place 'all the time' requires you to analyse how your time is spent and replacing the 'unsociable' hours with sociable hours. I met a lot of great people by being 'in the right place at the right time' whilst writing Get Noticed by writing the book in cafés and restaurants (a sociable venue) rather than in a home study or office (an unsociable venue).

Broadly speaking, there are three main categories for how we spend our time: at work, at home, at hobbies. Working out how you distribute your time in each category and finding ways to make each aspect more 'sociable' can increase your odds of meeting more of the people who will help you.

Understand and be sensitive to a blogger's accessibility

Just like celebrities, bloggers are both accessible and inaccessible in different places. Understand where it is that bloggers are most accessible and use that channel to cut through the competition and get their attention.

My experience has shown me that e-mail is relatively ineffective when contacting high-profile bloggers, when compared to Twitter and attending conferences, which are both channels where bloggers tend to be far more receptive.

Some bloggers will openly state on their blogs how they like to be contacted, some will consciously or subconsciously design their site in a way that pushes you towards their preferred channel of communication (i.e. if they have their Twitter link or phone number at the bottom of every post and only a fairly hidden link to their e-mail on one page, you're probably best contacting them via Twitter or telephone!)

Utilise your existing network

When you do things for altruistic reasons it makes you feel genuinely good about yourself, especially if you've helped out a friend. Utilising your existing network is a powerful way to reach bloggers if your current network is likely to know the sort of people you need to meet. Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I ask for a lot of virtual introductions to new people who are relevant to what I'm doing. This works amazingly well, as I always link to those who help me out as well as those who I virtually meet in the blog posts that I write.

If you need to meet sport bloggers, send a few e-mails to your friends or send out a tweet to see if anyone can help you out – don't feel like you're burdening your network, you're not, in fact you're helping them, too.

Be likeable, genuine, and understand a blogger's motivations

I receive a fair number of outreach e-mails to my personal website e-mail accounts, and the #1 reason why I don't reply to some of them is because they've forgotten to mention or outline what the benefit is to me.

Why should I waste half an hour helping someone I've never met increase their rankings and profile by blogging about them? There are plenty of reasons, such as: it gives me extra content, I could receive affiliate commissions, a free product to test, promotion from their company's social media accounts or an invite to an exclusive webinar, but they rarely mention my motivations.

Also, remember that only 7% of communication between humans is 'what you say', 93% of what you say is non-verbal communication, which means that if you're e-mailing someone, 93% of your communication is lost in translation as the recipient cannot see your body language, facial expression, and to some extent, tone.

This means that you need to make 'what you say' compensate for the lack of non-verbal communication by ensuring that your tone is likeable and that the core message to your e-mail is genuine and honest.

Warning! The Social Web May Harm Your Physical & Mental Well-Being

I'm halfway through reading Engage! by Brian Solis and just came across a really great quote from John Freeman that was posted in the Wall Street Journal about the impacts that consuming new media in real-time is having on our well-being and information digesting habits.

In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and personal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget. This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, workplace meltdowns, and unhappiness.

I like what John is saying and agree that the overlap in personal and work life is becoming increasingly blurred, but I do not entirely believe the claims to the social web increasing the rate of illiteracy. I think the access to a larger variety of immediate news & information has made us better equipped to find and digest higher quality information throughout the day that in the long run benefits our learning. Of course, due to the nature of having to scour through fast-paced activity feeds, it has impacted how we read 'real time news', but I don't think those short-term bursts of skim reading have any long-term impact on our ability to sit down and enjoy reading a long novel, slowly.

Here's another great quote on how the social web is impacting attention spans is this one from Linda Stone, who suggests that the social web is causing more instances of Continuous Partial Attention.

Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multi-tasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them. When we multitask, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We're often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing. We give the same priority to much of what we do when we multi-task—we file and copy papers, talk on the phone, eat lunch—we get as many things done at one time as we possibly can in order to make more time for ourselves and in order to be more efficient and more productive.

To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention—CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter. We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking

Your thoughts?

The Launch of Get Noticed!

Today, Rob Lawrence and I launched our co-written book ‘Get Noticed‘ which is a guide on standing out in a busy space, be it getting your story or music heard, growing your personal brand, or simply meeting more of the right people.

The post The Launch of Get Noticed! appeared first on Marcus Taylor.

How to Get Links & Features in News Publications The Easy Way

Getting yourself featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, and industry publications is a PR, social and SEO dream. If you want to be featured in these articles you have to provide something newsworthy (emphasis on provide i.e. not necessarily 'create').

Lets cut to the chase – hundreds of thousands of articles are written by journalists for publications every day, and those journalists are out there looking for people to contribute to their articles. Based on the concepts from Get Noticed about 'being in the right place at the right time, all the time' I've learnt some cool ways to get the attention of journalists when and where they're most accessible.

In this blog post I'd like to share a few of the techniques I use to find relevant opportunities to get news features.

Tip 1) HelpaReporterOut.com

HARO is an incredible concept that started out as a private Facebook group. Quite simply, journalists post queries when they're looking for public input and then people like you and I can 'pitch' our feedback to these journalists to help them complete their article.

However, the real gold in HARO lies in their newsletter. The website is great, but the newsletter is greater – every morning I receive a list of the latest journalist queries sectioned by industry that I can then pitch for.

Here is an example of what their newsletter looks like:

When you click on one of the links in the newsletter it shows you the journalists contact details, what the article brief is, whether they provide a link, and their writing deadline.

The trick is knowing when they send out their newsletter so that you don't miss the boat. HARO usually send out their newsletters at 10.42am and 10.42pm so it pays to be on your e-mail at these times to be able to respond quickly.

Tip 2) Monitoring Twitter Hashtags – #journorequest, #haro, #prrequest

Twitter is an invaluable tool for journalists and bloggers to carry out research for articles. Most journalists use the hashtags #journorequest, #haro, or #prrequest when looking for people to submit their thoughts. Below is a screenshot of some of the opportunities on the #journorequest hashtag.

However, since copying and pasting the above screenshot there have been another 20 tweets posted on it, so you're going to need to filter what's relevant and what's not. I recommend creating an RSS feed of a Twitter search for '#journorequest AND your keywords OR #haro AND your keywords etc' to pull out only journalist requests that are relevant to you.

Tip 3) Find journalists by Using Clever Google Search Queries

Not all journalists are going to be using Twitter, and if you're looking to scale up your efforts and get featured in not only news publications, but on blogs that are looking for input you're probably going to want to use Google to scan Q&A sites, forums, and blog posts for journo requests.

Here are a few Google search queries that can help:

I would advise searching for these queries with 'past 24 hours' or 'past week' selected to filter only recent results.

Tip 4) Lanyrd.com

Lanyrd.com is a search engine of conferences that you can attend. This is a bit of an odd tip, but one that is too good to not include. If you ask yourself the over-riding question of "where do journalists or bloggers spend their time?" and split your answers by 'online' and 'offline', you would probably find that many of the high-profile editors and journos you're trying to reach spend a large chunk of their time at conferences, and not only do they spend their time there but they're also most accessible in those locations.

Journalists are a nightmare to get the attention of when they're at their news desks or writing stories as quite often they have tight deadlines and mountains of work to get through, but at conferences and events it's quite likely that you could get their undivided attention for a few minutes to find out what they're writing about, what they're looking for, and of course, how you can help.

I strongly recommend using Lanyrd to follow which conferences the journalists in your industry are attending and then using plain old e-mail or Twitter to arrange a meeting at the event.

Understanding Journalist's Accessibility to Your Advantage

In Get Noticed, we came up with a concept called 'The ACE Process', which is a set of stages that you can apply to meet any person in the world, whether they're a celebrity, a journalist, or just someone who would be a good friend.

The ACE Process stands for 'align' 'connect' 'engage'. When meeting someone, you must first align with them where they're accessible to meet you i.e. be in the same place as them (geographically or virtually) where you are both able to connect.

It's easy to be in the same place at the same time as a journalist, especially virtually via e-mail, but these places tend not to be where they are most accessible. Learning more about the concept of spotting and creating accessible pathways to get people's attention can be really valuable when it comes to this sort of outreach.

If anyone is interest in these concepts, we're currently looking for advance reviewers of Get Noticed. You can sign up for your copy on WeGetNoticed.com.

Image Credit: shironekoeuro

Takeaways From Social Media Marketing & Monitoring 2011 London (#SMM11)

Today I attended and spoke at SMM11, one of the UK's leading social media marketing conferences. It's been a really awesome day with lots of great people and I've learnt some amazing tips to take home. In this post I'm going to summarise a few of the key takeaways from my favourite talks of the day.

Note: I'm writing this from Social Media Marketing & Monitoring and am pretty exhausted! Apologies for any poorly worded sentences and/or spelling mistakes! I promise to revisit this when i'm back in the zone

First of all, a big shout out to Luke and the team who organised SMM11 – this was without a doubt one of the best digital conferences I've attended to date. I've been to a fair few digital marketing conferences over the years such as SMX, SES, and SearchLove, and what immediately stood out about this conference was the quality and variety of information being shared. All of the speakers I listened to had a really interesting and varied area of expertise – from gamification, to location marketing, and even expertise in defeating Simon Cowell – always good to know!

Beyond Engagement: Delivering Sales through Social for Captain Morgan

One of my favourite talks at SMM11 was from Marcus Dyer of Edelmen Digital and Mark Wheeler, global digital marketing manager of Diageo. Marcus and Mark talked through the success of a great social media campaign they did with Captain Morgan's spiced rum.

The campaign was called 'The Captain's Island' and was essentially rewarding Facebook fans with 'keys' in return for various types of engagement on Captain Morgan's Facebook Page. Interestingly, Mark pointed out that the brand predominantly use Facebook due to the responsible marketing policies to ensure that the company are only targeting people over the legal drinking age. Facebook is one of the only major social networks that asks for your age on signup, making it more accessible for alcohol brands such as Captain Morgan to use.

The success of Captain Morgan's campaign was largely attributed to tying it in with the real world and thinking outside of the social media platforms that hosted the campaign. Captain Morgan promoted the campaign in TV adverts, in bars across the world, and on the packaging of the bottles of rum.

The What, Why and How of Social Local Marketing

In PJ Verhoef's talk about location marketing, he talked about how to benefit from location-based marketing (beyond the check-in and Foursquare). He displayed some cool alternative platforms for location marketing and gave some great tips on how to link products to location based marketing, whether that 'product' is online information, a physical product, or even your staff members. PJ also gave some excellent ideas for location people using location-based marketing, listening to them using tools such as Geotoko, Valuevine, and Momentfeed, engaging with them, and encouraging transactions using things like Google Offers and Level Up.

How I Beat Simon Cowell Using Social Media

Jon Morter gave an excellent talk on how he used social media to get Rage Against the Machine's song Killing in the Name of to Christmas #1. What I found particularly interesting about Jon's talk was how he used his background in hacking to explore and 'break' social media conventions. For example – Jon pointed out that until recently, you could become the administrator of any groups on Facebook that didn't have already have an admin and then message all of the members of the group. Apparently Jon used this method to become the admin of around 300 Facebook groups, which he used to message the members about his campaign!

Jon emphasised that the victory against Simon Cowell was largely due to reading the fine print and knowing the rules. Jon studied the official chart rules for weeks on end to find loopholes in the system. Some of the loopholes that played a large part in Jon's success were that live track sales also counted as a vote for that song. Jon messaged members on the last day asking members of the Facebook groups to also purchase the live version of Killing in the name of – adding an extra ~70,000 sales of the song.

The key takeaway that I learnt from Jon's talk was the power of creating big stories using smaller outlets. Jon mentioned that he took a small radio station's servers down when he was featured, as a way of creating a newsworthy story. When interviewed on a national radio station, Jon deliberately cut himself off saying 'Simon Cowell is a…' to make it seem that the radio station cut him off – therefore creating another wave of PR. Jon continued this method until he finally received a call from Simon Cowell himself – who congratulated Jon.

bmibaby Case Study: Using Photo Based Networks to Inspire Customer Loyalty & Engagement

This presentation by Rabbit Agency and BMI Baby showed how BMI Baby used Instagram to engage with a large pre existing community of snap happy BMI Baby customers. It was really great to hear a case study of a brand using a niche social network successfully, as most of case studies in social media tend to focus around the major players such as Twitter and Facebook.

BMI Baby encouraged groups of 'Instagramers' (communities of people on Instagram who take photos of their citiy e.g. London Instagramers) to take photos of the destinations that BMI Baby fly to. The campaign received thousands of entries within just a few weeks and allowed the brand to create 'visual inspiration guides' using the photos that the Instagram community were creating.

Final thoughts

SMM11 was an awesome conference, and I thoroughly recommend future events. The people, presentations, and biscuits were all excellent and overall the experience was leaps and bounds beyond the other similar conferences I've attended.

I also promised that I would upload my presentation from SMM11, so here we go!

If you have any questions about the presentation feel free to drop me a tweet at @MarcusATaylor or via e-mail on Marcus(at)SEOptimise(dot)com.