Today, we have with us an interesting personality - Neil Patel, co-founder of ACS.
Neil is a respected authority in the social media arena. He’s a man the industry looks upto for his experience with the social media and seo, which explains why he’s a much sought after Marketing Consultant today.

Thanks Neil for this interview, next time we’ll have an audio one, people always love to listen to you.

1. How did you start with Social Media, when did you recognize the potential and how did you get involved with it?

I got started with social media once I noticed that people were getting thousands of links from sites like Digg.com. The way I got started was by first networking with the top users who were successful on these sites. By interacting with these users they taught me how to leverage the social web so that I could be successful.

2. Which is your personal favorite and which works best for business/clients?

Not sure exactly what the question means, but if you are referring to social sites… then my favorite is Facebook. If you have a successful application on Facebook you can consistently get over 20 million pageviews a month.

Although Facebook is my favorite site, it doesn’t work well with all clients. Due to this, I would have to say that Digg is best for business/clients. It is much easier to leverage Digg than it is to leverage Facebook.

3. Everyone is talking about getting on the front page of Digg and being popular on SU, Is that all to it, or do you think efficiency is measured in any other way on these tools?

It may sound easy, but there is a lot to leveraging Digg and StumbleUpon. Success can be measured by getting on the front page of these sites, but ideally it should be measured by the amount of traffic/links you get.

4. I’ve read that you’ve done something on YouTube as an experiment that taught you the potential of social media (especially with videos), could you explain us what was it and how did it happen?

I have no clue what you are talking about.

Overall YouTube is a great site to leverage. Because of universal search you can create videos and get them ranked for competitive terms on Google.

The only experiments I can recall were faking views to see how many days in a row I could get a video to be number 1 on YouTube. Or how few links you can point to a YouTube video so that it would rank for competitive terms. And lastly, how many users I could force to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

5. Now, big brands like Virgin and Coke are opting for social media marketing, recognizing the potential of online space. Could you please tell me your thoughts on it?

I think it is great that companies want to embrace the social web. Once more large brands start leveraging it, social media marketing will become more mainstream.

One thing I think many companies don’t realize is that you can’t control what people think of you; especially on social web. Due to this some companies may end up with a sour taste in their mouth.

6. What according to you is a good strategy (generally) for offline retail brands to adopt when they get to the online space? (Like Nike)

I think it is good for companies to adopt it when they get into the online marketing space. But before they try and jump in, they need to try and understand how it works.

7. Personally I believe Social Media Optimization is dead. Agree/ Disagree - what are your thoughts on it Neil?

I don’t think it is dead. I think it has just really started to become mainstream. More people are leveraging the social web and more companies and getting budgets for social marketing.

8. Digg, SU, Sphinn, Mixx now there are lot of them and each has a typical character to it considering the user behavior - If I were to ask you to match these sites with a particular crowd, how would it be? Ex: - Digg = Geeks?

I wish it was as easy as Digg = Geeks, but as these sites keep on evolving more people are starting to leverage them. Due to this it is hard to say that one persona type uses each site. For example on Digg people who are into politics also love the site and in many cases these users are not geeks.

9. Are there any “loop holes” available in the Digg system still? We’ve heard you knew a couple of them earlier.

Not really anymore. There are still things you can do like build powerful accounts or network with other members, but the best loop hole is to write great content. Sadly, writing good content isn’t much of a loop hole.

10. Suppose “Mani Karthik of DailySEOblog” is a new entry to the online space, what would you recommend as a strategy to me to get popular on the social media.

Best advice I could give is writing really detailed content such as how to guides. Things that are timeless usually do well and build the most links

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How to get on top of Digg? How to get popular on Digg? How to get a front page Digg?
These are questions being thrown upon day in and out at the forums, at the coffee club and everywhere bloggers get together. Everyone wants to know how to get to the top quickly with the minimum effort. It would be nice if someone found out a hack that helps anyone to get on top of Digg in 24 hours. Unfortunately there have been none so far, but yes there are theories flying around that claim to put you on top of Digg, or make you power users on Digg in even less than 48 hours. I wished if one of them truly worked.

Well, taking into consideration some basics, there are few facts all of them agree on.

• To get a front page Digg, you have to -
  - Be Popular
  - Have lot of “friends”
  - Have submitted lot of stories prior
  - Be popular on Digg
  - Have commented on many articles
  - Be regular with using Digg
  - Have a good reputation on Digg

Many of these points are easy to listen than achieve. For instance, it’s known that you have to have a good “following” or “friends” on Digg to get a top Digg. The reason is that when you submit an article, there has to be enough guys to digg the same without even checking the title, but just because you Dugg it first. Now, this is linked with “Reputation”. One would digg a story you submitted even without checking it’s title, only when they believe that whatever you are digging will be good, the truth may be/may not be right. “Reputation” on the other hand is linked with “Reference”. Where does one find you first? Either they could’ve found you on one of the top Dugg article OR they could’ve “befriended” them. “Reputation” is alos linked with “Image/Brand”. When one first sees you, what do they absorb from your profile? When you have some already top dugg stories, people get the idea that you are a top class digger. OR they might see the number of articles submitted and make out if you are active on Digg or not.

REFERENCE
( Seen first on top diggs/from a friend )
V
NO. OF FRIENDS
( the more the merrier )
V
REPUTATION
( based on latest dugg story/ top duggs )
V
HISTORY
( Topics active in/ top diggs )
V
V
Action : ADD AS FRIEND

So essentially, being a power user on Google has got to do more with “influencing” people and “making friends”.

Keeping all this in mind, here are a collection of resources that are worth a read and bookmarking. The best resources on the internet that will tell you how to be popular on Digg and always hit a front page with your submissions. It sounds a bit glossy, but there is value in each of these articles for sure.

• Become a power user on Digg in 48 hours -Earner’s blog
  Non realistic article, but the theories makes sense.
• Factors that will help get a story popular on Digg - Forum discussion
  A good thread where there are lot of information on the basics. There is some non-sense as well.
• How to submit stories that make to front page of Digg
  Pretty good article that gives a good insight on the behavior of Digg users.
• How to get popular on Digg - 15 Tips
  A presentation that will give you pointers on getting popular. Great illustration.
• What type of content is popular on Digg?
  A cool article that illustrates the crowds behavior and how you can utilize it. The statistics are awesome.
• Tuning your content for Digg
  Chris G has a small write up on writing content that is favorable and “likely” to get popular on Digg.
• Tips from a top 10 Digg user on how he made it to the top of Digg
  John TP extracts the best of tips from a active top 10 digg user.
• How to get on top of Digg
  Not a great article, but some excellent pointers on the importance of titles.
• How to be a top Digg user?
  Interesting article, especially the mentions on the shady practices and why you shouldn’t do them.

There are many more articles available, but many of them are repetitive and does not pass any value at all. Hence you won’t find them in this list.

Did you ever had an opportunity to Google your name/product/service/company name and come up with a negative result? An abuse or some comments on a sleazy site? Cases of damaged/torn online reputation have been reported more than any other time these days.

With lot of UGC (User Generated Content) thrown up these days, the possibilities of your online reputation getting damaged is high. Online Reputation Management is important for companies and brands these days. Here’s how I would depict it in a flow chart.

Googler looking for information associated with your brand/name ===> Uses search engines
Scans top results on Google ===> Finds information regarding you/product/brand
If positive review ===> Buys/commits to you.
If negative feedback ===> Ditches you.

In the process flow, the crucial point is when he makes a decision. And precisely at that point, if you don’t have the vital information, then you lose out.

So how do companies or brands make sure that they preserve their online identity?

Well, it’s not possible to completely create a positive environment for every online identity, be it a person or a company or a brand. And with products and services, it’s a different story altogether. With everyone writing their reviews (and then re-writing it again) on all services and products online, it’s come out that unless you have a fair amount of both negative and positive results, you are not seen as a genuine guy. So the idea is to minimize the negative results and keep control of the online identities.

What if you had negative reviews about you on the SERPs?

Well, before dealing with the problem, let’s understand that there may be more than two situations to this.
One - Where you’d have genuine negative reviews, like for example if you have a product or service, that’s been honestly reviewed by bloggers. If it’s a not so good product, then of course people will write/report about it honestly. There might occur both good and bad reviews.

In such cases, a healthy approach using SEO and effective SMM strategies, can get you out of the situation. However, if the product/service is a failure product, then we might have to fight a but hard to clear all the negative results. Honestly, that’s an utopia. What really can be done is to minimize the number of negative results.

Second -The case of wrong identities
This happens with names and individuals more than companies and brands. Like for instance if someone else is sharing your name, you’ll have a tough time sharing resources online for each other.
Last day I had come across two cases where the person was suffering from negative reputation, because of wrong online channels. His name was associated with a negative story on one of the authority sites, while the only thing he had in similar was only the name, He wasn’t the guy in the story. But, when others search for his name online, they might come across the negative story causing him trouble.

In such cases, a clever mix of SEO, SMM and online branding can solve the problem.

Essentially, Reputation Management is very important in todays scenario when people use the online space heavily to find information about things.

Brands, Companies and Individuals have to harness the power of social media to build their reputation online, or else it’s going to be too late.

Many a times, I get asked, what do you do in social media marketing? And before I answer, there would be a warning saying - I already submit to Digg and other social media sites…so what is it that you do apart from that?

That’s an interesting question altogether. The fact is that social media marketing is not just about Digg, or submitting to a few sites as Digg. There is a much larger picture to be revealed.

Submitting to Digg is in itself a big chapter. We’ve discussed it on this article and this one.

Anyone can submit to Digg. But not all of them get popular, be it a great story or not. There are strategies you must follow while submitting to Digg, a lot depend on who the submitter is, what the crowd is, what your story is about, who are your contacts, how long have you been digging…and 1432 other things as well. And that’s exactly the reason why everyone’s story isn’t the top dugg one. Precisely, that’s why you need experts help on it.

Coming back to social media, there’s more to it than Digg. It’s about connecting the dots. Between you and your target audience.
Your target audience is spread out and scattered everywhere on the internet. But what’s interesting is that every online entity has a target audience. Be it a porn site, a scientists blog or a movie review blog. The problem why your site is not popular is because you have either not connected to your audience at all or that you are with the wrong audience.

And the initial step of a social media marketing campaign is to find your target audience, define them and track them. Studying them for their behavior and delivering them “food” is the final stage of social media marketing. It almost ends with it. Post this phase, you start getting results and the beauty is that the bounce rate is very minimal unlike SEO.

So essentially, Social Media Marketing doesn’t end with digg or SU, it only starts there. A careful full stretch social media marketing goes through as many processes and steps as a market researcher and an ad-agency would go through combined with that of an SEO. It is a healthy combination of all that, and only someone who is well verse in all of these fields can help you through a successfull social media marketing campaign, or else you get stuck with a few submissions on digg with one number diggs.

It may be a big deal getting lots of fans on Digg. Most of us get minimum ten friend requests daily and there is a whole bunch of friends on Digg.Now, how many shouts do you get on email everyday from all of these friends? Quite some isn’t it? And how many do you reply to or digg? Well, keep the answer to yourself.

The question is - How can you effectively use the friends and community on digg to market your websites on Digg?
The answer probably is in the question itself - You are trying to “market” your sites.

Digg is a community where everyone is on the look out for networking. The basic motive of course is to harness the power of community. Let me take you through the process of “digging”.

Step 1.
Submit a story.

Step 2.
Shout/share it with your friends.

Step 3.
Grow your friend circle.

Step 1 and Step 2 are comparatively easier steps, but what matters most is the third one - growing your network.

How can you grow your network on Digg?

Anyone might have easily guessed that digging the maximum number of stories is enough to take you get popular on Digg.
Well, I don’t know about everyone, but this happened to me. I thought digging the maximum number of articles on digg can get me  popular. And I made it even a practice to digg a good number of articles every day, religiously. But, there was no big difference in the “popularity” as such.

Now, the bigger question is - What do you mean by popularity on Digg?

Well, popularity (or I’d call it power) to me is the power to submit a story and declare that this story is going to get 1000 diggs in the next couple of hours.

Unfortunately, that’s not a guarantee and I wonder if the top diggers would say such a thing. But essentially, what all of us are aiming to is to be able to submit a story and when you share it with friends, all of them digging it.

I’d call it the the  Digg Power Quotient.

Digg Power Quotient = (No. of diggs on an article in an hour / No. of friends in the circle) / No. of diggs from the community in an hour

This may not be the best metric though sometimes because we’ve all seen cases where a guy with less than ten friends submitted a story that made it to the top. Excluding all those “miracles”, if there is someone who has a very healthy “Digg Power Quotient”, then I think he has the potential to make a story popular.

This article may not make any sense at all because Digg is an unpredictable community sometimes, and things can work at a totally different pace and dimension than expected, for the good or the bad. But some pointers on how to be a popular guy on Digg is interesting !

What practices will get you popular on digg?

Again, with all the unpredictability taken into account, let me share a few observations.

1 - Digg ONLY relevant articles that are related to your interest.
In the frenzy to get more numbers, people go around digging anything and everything, and end up being everywhere. This may not look good on you if you are trying to build an image. For example, if you are a techno geek who blogs on technology, it makes sense for you to digg through articles in the technology corner and not the fashion and lifestyle section.
The reason is that, when people find that you are more active in one particular category, they’ll derive an impression that you are an authority on that topic and this is good for brand building.

2 - Participate in the community
In the rush to digg more articles, we tend to forget the fact that Digg is a community. A very sensitive community. Digg’s popular members are all very well networked and communicate with each other a lot on the digg platform. They see it more as a place to share thoughts with like minded people. And anyone who can’t adapt to this, may stand out of the crowd. And handling things single handed is not a good idea on digg.

3 - Comment as much as you digg
Rather than digging or submitting much , try commenting more, at least as much as you digg, and you will see the results. Commenting is a good way to generate interest among the community and gain trust. Here again, you got to really genuine while commenting or you’re gonna get burned out spamming.

4 - Create a circle of “trust worthy” friends
Friends are always good. The more the merrier. But make sure they are “trust worthy”. By trustable I mean, you got to make sure that whenever you send a shout, you get the story dugg by him. Well, it is not possible all the time, but a 90% hit ratio is satisfactory.There are a lot of guys who’ll add you and keep bombarding with shouts, at the same time never responds to your’s.

5 - Don’t digg stupid articles
Aww…did someone had to tell you this? These days there are lot of “spam” being submitted to digg. The titles make no sense, neither the description, nor the URL. If you are on a digging spree, it is most likely that you’ll digg one of those articles. So keep away from them so that, people don’t misunderstand you for a spammer.

6 - Respond well to shouts
Next time when someone see your shout notification in their email, they shouldn’t go “Oh no!  Not that guy again! “. The simple solution is that you have to respond well to others shouts whenever they send you one. Only then will the community recognize you a trust worthy guy.

7 - Create trust among the community
This is probably the most important and significant thing out of all these stuff mentioned here. And probably the most non-comprehensive. It is easy to talk about it, but to measure as to how much of it you actually earned is quite difficult. Simply because there are a lot of metrics that go into it, and it takes time to gain trust.

8 - Sharing is the key
While digging keep asking this question - “When is the last time I dugg a story just because it was interesting?” n
Essentially, the idea is to keep digging interesting articles from the web so that you can share it wit the world. Keep away your marketing interests and genuinely participate in the community. It will reward you.

Social Media is the buzz. And it’s the carrot to many. A power user is a member with influential powers and has the potential of making any given article popular on the social medias.

Becoming a power user on all the social medias is sure big deal, despite everyone using the social media only a few make it to the top or grabs the powers of a power user. Now, it’s a fact probably that no one can make it easily to the top as a power user in a short time. It requires the effort and time that it deserves. But there are pointers for sure that will help you make it to the top if you get your basics right. It’s all about doing the right thing and following the right methodologies daily in a very religious manner, and one day you’ll find yourself there on the top showered with digg and stumble requests and friend invitations.

So what are the good practices that you should follow to make it  to the top as a power user on the popular social medias?

Understanding Which Social Media works best for you - The behavioral differences of the popular social media sites

First off let me tell you that each social media channel has it’s own unique quality. You cannote use all the media at the same time to get a story popular. Each community has it’s own characteristics and behavioural pattern.

Digg
- Is a news oriented website where there’s no place for internet marketers and bloggers.
- The community gives more importance to breaking news, exclusive stories and articles.
- The community is more techno savvy and if you are targeting to get the attention of technology related crowd, then Digg is the best place for you.
- Digg community does not entertain marketing, self promotion and press releases kind of articles.
- They give more value to the “uniqueness” of the stories and the real value it passes on to the community.
- The secret of getting popular on Digg is to get the maximum diggs in the shortest time span. If you get late getting the diggs, you lose the game.

Stumble Upon
SU is a community which has a different chemistry altogether from Digg - it loves sharing all the lite things(photos, videos, funny stuff) and in between some news articles too.
- SU community does not like anything that is related to promoting your blog.
- Neither does it like people selling their service or products.

Linked in
- Linked in has a very focused community.
- It’s a no nonsense one with no frills but all serious guys out there. Business consultants, CEOs, bloggers and the like.
- If it’s business that you’d like to promote, then probably this is the right place.

Here are the good practices to become a social media power user.

1. Share
   Social media sites are nothing but places to share. If you used to share interesting stories on email two years earlier, now you have Digg and Su to share. This way the original sources of the story also gets benefited and you get a place to share thoughts with like minded people too.
   So rather than seeing them as platforms that generate traffic, see them as places to share ideas, stories and interesting pieces of articles over the internet.
2. Participate
   Social medias are all about participation. Along with user generated content they are also platforms where lot of ideas and thoughts are shared. Most of the social medias today has the groups feature where people create groups based on their interest. These are excellent places to find similar minded people. I’ve seen that making use of these groups and participating in them attaches a special honour to your profiles in the social media and it helps you get make more friends in the community.
3. Be proactive
   I’ve seen many guys complain that one of their friend/friends on the social media never responds to their nudge and they are simply pissed off. It’s completely understandable a problem. It may ask you - why did you add him/her as a friend in the first place?
   The answer to this question is to get proactive. By getting proactive I mean, making sure that you do everything in the first place that you want your friend to do. If you want your friend to digg your articles and respond to shouts, you respond to other peoples shouts first.
   So give before you start to take. If you make a habit of this, it makes life easier at the communities.
4. Contribute to the community
   Social media sites out there are not marketing channels. They are not out there to buy somethign from you. instead they are out there to learn from the internet, from you. So give them something to learn, if you have the resources pass them on, if you don’t pass it on from other useful resources.
5. Be Regular
   Imagine you were with your friends, wouldn’t you be spending time with them daily? And not approach them when you have something to show off?
   The same formula works here. Be a frequent participant in all the social medias that you want to be popular in. Many of them shows the last login time details so others can easily judge from your login patterns as to whether you are a frequent member or not. If you are not, they probably will take you for a spammer, and I think they have all the right to believe so.
6. Be generous, pass information
   While in the community, make sure that you are a generous person. A generous person is someone who will share value with others without a second thought. In a community others give respect to you based on whether you are generous or not. No matter where you get it from, if you are someone who provides valuable conent to the community, then others will accept you and respect you as a master, yes , even if the information you passed on was not really yours.
7. Buy ideas never sell
   Communities are for everyone, for those who are buying and selling. But make sure you are always on the buying part. At least for a major part of your time. Because there are more sellers in this world than buyers. So when everyone is looking for a buyer, be one, so that you have their attention. At a later point, may be, if they find you interesting, you could be a seller. But let that not be your point of interest.
8. Never promote yourself
   Do you have a product to sell or  service to offer? I’d suggest that you keep away your marketing strategies away from the communities. The problem is that the social media community is so sensitive that they can easily make out a marketing guy and a contributor. So don;t act smart trying to sell your product/service by promoting yourself. That’s for the community to decide.
9. Adapt to the customs
   Every social media site out there is a community. And every community has its rules and customs just like in real ife. So in order to get in to one you got to gel to their customs first. If you stand apart from them, you’ll probably end up being an island. You don’t want that to happen.
10. Its almost like real life
    See communities on social media just like real life communities. They are not a bunch of robots out there. They are indeed a bunch of clever guys like you sitting at eth other end of the world. So try to make friends with them treating them just like you are meeting a real person.
11. Make friends
    Forget diggs or stumbles. During your initial days in the social media, make sure you make more friends than anything. Communicate to them through comments, groups etc and make yourself comfortable with the community and learn what’s happening there. Sit back relax and study tha patterns. Don’t do the mistake of going ahead and digging your favorite story in the very first day. There’s no problem as such but had you submitted after making some friends, it would’ve got a better visibility.
12. Never beg
    One of the mistakes I see people repeating time and again is to beg for votes. Well, I’m not talking about you letting know your friend about a new submission or shots. But begging someone , a stranger may be, to vote for you. This creates a negative impression about you to the other perrson and although he may digg your story, the next time you approach him he’ll avoid you. Because you are not passing any quality or value to him.
13. Develop niche groups within
    This is one of the very effective strategies I’ve seen people use in social media communities. Develop small interest groups within the community so that you can share and communicate with the like minded people. Although, please do not confuse this with closed communities. I’m totally against closed communities, they are no good for the sharing purpose. Let your communities be open so that like minded peple can jon and communicate within.
    
14. Reply and respond
    I understand that you have no interest in responding to shouts on email or IM, and yes you may be completely true. Why do you want to reply to those emails, after all you have someone whoting eery minute. But hey, let me tell you, if you does not reply to any of them - fine, nothing bad. But try responding to each of them. Yes respond to every shout you receive and see what happens. I can assure you that, you’ll have at least 10 guys daily adding you as friend on the network. And that’s not a bad thing. All those guys add you as friend because they respect your actions and they see value in you. So I’d suggest that you try reply and respond to every little nudge that you get on the network.
15. Quick guys are smart
    You knew it already. Quick guys are smart. Here in the social media, being quick means being being qucik in responding, being quick in digging stories up the top, being quick in all the activities in the community.
16. Be the first
    if you got to do exceptionally good in the community, one short cut to getting poplar is to be the first in submitting breaking news or interesting stories. If you pick up the best happening story first, others are sure to follow. but this is no easy task, you got to keep a hawk’s eye on the news that is of interest to the community and act quick once it’s out.
17. Believe in quality
    It’s all about quality. If you have 1000 submissions with all of them stories that have been heard before, no one’s going to even bother talking to you. but if you have a couple of breaking stories and interesting, exclusive ones, that sure is going to earn you the respect you deserve.
18. Give before you take
    Essentially the point to keep in mind is before you start thinking about your returns, learn to contribute and share. Don’t count your returns on the very first day. It’s a natural process of getting popular and doesn’t happen over night. Once you have your basics in place, it will automatically throw you up to the top.

I’d love to hear your contributions/additions to the above points.

So what comes to your mind when you think about link building? Directory submissions, link baits, link exchanges..?

Recently, there was this client of mine who had a wonderful website. It was beautifully designed, good layout, good linking pattern and all that. Onsite optimization was really good on the site. He would easily score a 9/10 on it. So why did he approach me?
He was running short of links. Incoming links that is. The client was already aware of the SEO metrics and suggested me that we go ahead with a link building strategy and source as many links as possible.

Now, in such cases the normal tendency is to go about link hunting. Ask/beg people for links, submit to directories etc. Well, this I’d call is the PUSH STRATEGY.

Some common characteristics of the PUSH strategy are.

- You already have rich content on your website.
- You go about marketing it to anyone and everyone.
- You beg for links to others.
- You submit to directories/ blog comments.
- You get good traffic.

Now there’s nothing wrong with this strategy except for the fact that its a short lifecycle, and you get no or less value to your business.

Imagine this, you have an “Online magazine” which has got amazing content. Now when you go about doing the “Push” strategy what happens is that you build traffic, you interact with the rest of the world, you get the attention you want. But all this happens outside your site. Right? And that’s where you miss the point.

You do everything to let people know of your product, and you get the attention you deserve. But what happens after that? The whole traffic is at your site and you “assume” that people will like your content. Does that ring a bell?

Not necessarily. Now that you’ve invited everyone to your site, all of them needn’t like the content on your site. They wont.

The problem here is “Null Targeting”

Coming back to the example. Your online magazine would’ve been a women oriented one, but while you were marketing your mag through link building, directories and all that, you missed a point. You went ahead calling everyone to your site and that included women, men, seniors …..and the like. So the traffic you got (although in good numbers, wasn’t the most appropriate one for you).

And what’s the result? An increased bounce rate.

Now, in my opinion, the best strategy in such cases would be a PULL STRATEGY rather than a PUSH STRATEGY. Let me explain.

A pull strategy is one where you focus on developing value on your site and naturally allow it to travel places.

In the online magazine example, what could’ve been a better strategy?

Stage 1
Study your target.
Who are they? (In this case, women)
Where can you find them? (Facebook/Orkut/Myspace?)
What content are they consuming right now?
What are the channels they subscribe to?

Stage 2
More time and focus should be given on developing value content (a.k.a kickass content).
Brainstorm with the team and develop viral content that matches with the content your target prefers consuming.
Make sure that once the traffic is here, you have all the content to “engage the visitor”.
Develop tools to subscribe the new visitors. (RSS, Video Channels, Email subscriptions, Facebook applications)

Stage 3
Go to the places or communities where your target is.
Go about delivering your viral content to them.
Spread it.
Do it again.

Results
- Increased traffic (not one time traffic but recurring traffic)
- Reach to the right audience.
- Less bounce rate.
- Increased subscriptions.
- A complete vicious circle of target to conversion ratio.

So, essentially the point is, instead of wasting  time on pushing your content to the wrong target, go about developing value focussed on your target and naturally allow it to travel with a little bit of push through the channels and you’ll see better results, time and again.

Facebook has applications that you can add to your profile, you know that right?
Now, Orkut is planning for introducing applications so that it can harness the full power of social media as such. And talks are in progress and the grapevine is that the applications will be available to all (including India) in June/July.

But here is a neat trick which will get you access to all the entire collection of applications available due for release right now.
See the entire screenshot of applications here.

There are a lot of applications like

• “Book iRread” - iRead is a social book discovery application. With iRead you can organize your favorite books in bookshelves, rate and review them. You can browse what other iReaders and friends are reading. iRead learns from your book reading tastes and recommends books you will like and also users who read like you. Add application and join the social book discovery revolution!
• India Dekha - India Dekha has been developed by Zoomtra.com in an effort to connect Indian Travel enthusiasts with one another. How much of India Have you traveled or plan to travel to in the future? Make your India Dekha! Map and share it with your friends.
• Music iLike - Add music and videos to your profile, list your favorite artists, and test your skill in the Music Challenge! Join 23 million iLike users to share and discover music.
• Photo Attack - Attack photos of your friends with cool animations! Slap them silly, send them a kiss, splash them with color balloons. No matter what your emotions are we have an animation that can help you to express yourself. Let the game begin. Attack Now !!

and a lot more.

Now, you can add music, photos, and fun stuff to your profile. It’s simple as adding an application.

Now how to get the orkut applications working in your profile?

1. Go to your HOME.
2. Click Edit Profile (On the left hand side panel)
3. Scroll down to locate your “country”.
4. Change your country to “Estonia” (find it in the drop down list).
5. Now go back to the Home,
6. You’ll find a strip that allows you access to the entire list of orkut applications. (Below today’s fortune and profile views text)
7. Click on “Add applications and customize your profile”
8. You’ll get an entire list of available applications. Scroll down to the desired one (se their descriptions along side.)
9. Click on “Add application”
10. You’ll be asked a confirmation, click again on “Add application” - You’re done!

All your added applications will list down in your left hand side panel (see screenshot). Now to really enjoy these applications you need to get your friends use the applications to. That’s the fun part of social media right? So refer more and enjoy more.

Cheers!

Twitter has become a rage. Many bloggers have got into it so much that they’ve started to quit blogging. Some think that twittering eat up most of their time and make them less popular. I’m following like some 98 people and 75 are following me. Every day, there are more followers too.

And let me tell you, this thing is getting messy these days.
So there are 75 followers and 98 that you follow, all of them keep twittering every other second on Gtalk, you try to reply to one with the @somebody tag and nothing happens..You post your tweet…you edit it..tweet again…somebody replies..and that’s about it. What’s the return?

Social Media - did someone say? Ah! Cool. So..being social eh? Well…honestly my friend, it isn’t social. Readers…all of you who get replies for every single tweet on twitter, hands up !
…… None?

Okay, everyone who gets a client signed from twitter hands up…

None?

Hmm..everyone who has subscribers signing up for you through twitter….hands…up??

Ok forget it.

See the point I’m trying to make is that, twittering is essentially bad for bloggers. Really bad.
Here goes my reasons.

1. You are already running out of ideas to blog and with twittering, you end up throwing all of that in two lines.
2. And, no one is interested in your twitters, you don’t find a client in your followers.
3. You think it’s social media, but no one ever talks or take the effort to.
4. Everyone is busy shouting their personal stuff, what they had for breakfast, what they did while sleeping.
5. Blogging superstars lose their charm by offering too much of them up close and in real to the followers (exceptions available.)
6. You tell to the world that you have a serious problem with typos.
7. Whoever is following you either know you directly or through your blog, there are no new acquisitions.

Seriously my friend, I could think of more such reasons but this isn’t doing good at all.
Bloggers, stick back to serious blogging. Don’t shout out to the world what you had for breakfast or what you did while sleeping, you might want to keep it to your immediate circle of friends.
And don’t misunderstand that twitter will bring you new clients or new subscribers to your blog. Who ever is following you are either your readers or your friends.

Essentially, Twitter doesn’t give you anything in return , but only takes away from you - your time, your content and a good major part of your brain.

If you’re a Twitter guy and live around Chennai, keep yourself free for March 23rd (a lazy sunday).

Kiruba is inviting a few folks (not more than 8-10 :-p ) to meet at the Amethyst Cafe, in Chennai.

If you come in, I’m gonna bug you about “Social Media Marketing” and “Search Engine Optimization” and the other 10 ways to use Twitter.

And if you’re a follower of mine on Twitter, I pay your bills*

Hop in to the Wiki.

* Conditions apply