Will Marlow - Filed under 'Twitter'

March 2, 2010

Can Twitter or Facebook really boost your search engine optimization (SEO)?

One huge myth is that if you use Twitter or Facebook to link to your website from your status updates, you'll increase your Google PageRank (in other words, your website will get pushed to the top of search results), because Google famously "counts the number of links" to your website to determine how "relevant" your website is. Lots of links = great search engine optimization, right? But you can think of the major Internet companies as co-conspirators in a plot to determine "relevancy," because back in 2005 they all decided that whenever someone links to a website in the "user generated content" area of another website, they would start inserting an invisible "nofollow" tag. This means that ALL links in a Twitter feed have a hidden "nofollow" tag embedded in them (same with Facebook), and this makes them invisible to search engines. To be clear, this means that the target of the link doesn't look any more attractive in the eyes of Google, Yahoo or Bing.

I know this will be painful for some people to hear, but if you use Twitter and get retweeted 50,000 times and drive tons of new visitors to your website, your search engine optimization won't change a bit because of it. This means that you need to be ready to engage those thousands of new visitors so that they become daily or weekly or monthly visitors who love your site and products.

PS - Did you know that the word "Page" in Google PageRank does not refer to "webpage," but to Larry Page, the Co-founder of Google and creator of the Google PageRank system? Just another fun Internet fact.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Read more about Will Marlow here, or email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // Facebook Google Google PageRank Larry Page Online myths Search Engine Optimization SEO SMO Social Media Optimization Social media strategy Twitter

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February 22, 2010

Eight things you need to know about Google Buzz

Google launched Buzz 13 days ago, and after spending some time getting to know it better, I wanted to write a quick introduction for people who are still wondering (a) how it works, (b) how it's different from other social media platforms and (c) why they might want to use it.

In everyone's favorite list format, here are the answers to those questions:

Google Buzz works in the following way: you access your Google Buzz account through Gmail, and the service allows you to post "updates" which have no character limitation. Your posts can include rich media like pictures and videos. Gmail has over 200 million users, which means that the scope of Google Buzz is huge, because each Gmail user was given a default Buzz account along with followers from among their email contacts. As you post updates, the people in your Buzz network can leave comments, register a "like," or send you a message.
Unlike Twitter, which has one feed that shows everything you say (whether you're writing your own original post, or commenting about someone else's post), Google Buzz let's you comment on someone else's feed without using your own feed to do it. This means you can have conversations with thousands of people, while only updating your own feed at your own pace.
Unlike Twitter, there are no follow limits on Google Buzz. This means you can follow thousands of people, and potentially earn lots of follow backs. Buzz can get away with this for two reasons: (1) 13 days is not long enough for spammers to flood the system with noise, and (2) it is not yet open to third party apps the way Twitter is, so every time someone follows someone else on Buzz, they physically need to follow them. This places a natural limitation on the amount of following that can be done, which itself is a protection against spam that doesn't exist on Twitter.
On the same topic of follower numbers, unlike Twitter (or Posterous), you don't need to display the names of the people who are following you OR the number of people who you are being followed by and are following.
If you comment on someone else's Buzz update, you'll start getting updates in your inbox when other people comment on that thread. This is jarring at first. It makes it look like you actually have email in your inbox. However, it appears that Google simply wants to bring these updates to your attention separately from all the other Buzz noise, because if you've commented on it you've highlighted its importance. This feature will definitely annoy some people, and I wouldn't be surprised if Google introduces filtering options. Many people consider their inboxes to be sacred and don't want non-email to fill it up. However, this aspect of Buzz underscores the fact that Buzz is really an "email-based" social media tool, which is where it derives a lot of its uniqueness. Even if the hype that is surrounding Buzz right now dies away, it may have strong staying power due to its email roots.
So how is Google Buzz the same as Twitter and Facebook? All three platforms occupy the same category: they are all outposts (to borrow Chris Brogan's term). This means that Buzz is a great place to meet new people, have new conversations, and to develop a new traffic stream to your primary web base, which should be a blog or a website that you use to deliver real value and host your most important work.
So why would you want to use Google Buzz? If you are interested in truly interacting with people, the features on Buzz are creating lots of rich interactions. I have over 8,000 followers on Twitter, and far fewer followers on Buzz, but I can already see that my Buzz posts are generating as much or more engagement than my Twitter posts. It is important to avoid fake success metrics like follower counts and fan lists when measuring success in online media. It's much better to look at the number of comments, clickthrough numbers, re-posts, "favorites," "likes," and links. These measures are much harder to fake, and right now the features on Buzz (and its early adopter user-base) have made for the most engaged/engaging platform around.
The final point I'd make about Buzz is that if you divide the world between Twitter and Facebook, you'd see Twitter as the best tool for "pushing" information to lots of people, and you'd see Facebook as the best tool for "pulling" information in from the people you choose to connect with. In my opinion, the strength of Google Buzz is much more in its ability to let you "push" information out than pull it in, which makes it more of a threat to Twitter. But it took more than 13 days to build Google Buzz, and it'll take longer than 13 days to reach a final verdict on where the platform is headed. I hope this was a useful early analysis for you.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Read more about Will Marlow here, or email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // Facebook Google Google Buzz Social Media Twitter

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February 17, 2010

How schools should approach "online community building"

A few years ago, it was very fashionable for schools to invest heavily in building custom social networks that were designed for their alums to use. The upside of building your own social network is that you own all the data, and you make all the big decisions that determine what happens on the social network. The downside of building your own social network, however, includes:

You can't begin accruing any benefits until you successfully get your alums to create user-names and passwords, and get them to actually spend time on the social network.
You need to spend a lot of time making decisions that don't advance any of your goals but are necessary in order to create a positive user-experience for your alums (these decisions include things like placement and size of buttons, navigation of the site, and all the things that companies like Facebook invest millions of dollars in figuring out).

What's the alternative to building your own social network? The alternative is what I call "online community building." This involves identifying all the primary social networks where your alums and donors spend time, and establishing a presence (or an "outpost," to borrow a term from Chris Brogan) that connects you to the community. You accomplish this by following the rules and conventions of each specific social network - remember, if your alums are spending time on Facebook or Twitter, it means that they themselves are largely acknowledging that they respect the rules and conventions of the platforms.

You create value by focusing on your innate advantages: (1) you are organized, and you can keep your alums and donors updated on events and news; (2) you have access to key members of the community, and can provide interviews, pictures and videos; (3) and centrality - you are at the center of things, and you can use social media to enable your volunteers to help you deliver content to the community. I'll have more to say about online community building for schools and charities in the future. The important thing to keep in mind is that focusing on this approach allows you to spend your time on the things that you're good at, which include connecting to your alums in a way that they appreciate, and on the other hand outsourcing the decisions that generate zero value for you, such as determining the layout of a registration page, or the size of a "submit" button.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Read more about Will Marlow here, or email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // Facebook online community building Social Media Social Media for Higher Ed Social Media Optimization Twitter

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January 20, 2010

The Point of the Official Retweet Button

A lot of people who are very knowledgeable and experienced at leveraging Twitter do not understand the point of the "Retweet" button that Twitter launched last year. It doesn't make sense to them for a number reasons, including:

1. It was unnecessary, because retweeting is one of the most popular activities on Twitter and it needed no encouragement to continue.

2. Twitter is famous for its lack of features, so in the absence of a need to change behavior (see point 1) it makes things more confusing as to why Twitter would spend time and energy on this particular new feature.

3. It makes retweeting even more confusing than it already is for new users, because it gives two options that seem to accomplish the same thing in different ways, with some users preferring one way and other users preferring a different way.

The reason for the new feature, however, is all about monetization. One of the cool things about Twitter is that every Tweet is equal. Twitter streams are all about timelines. If a good Tweet is shared with people, who share it with their own friends, the viral spread is organic and rapid. This awesome characteristic, however, makes Twitter very difficult to "search" because one Tweet looks the same as all the other Tweets (with the exception of Tweets that are favorited more often than others). And "search" (that is, "searching for relevant Tweets") is one of the most promising ways for Twitter make money (and for it to make good on the $1 billion valuation it earned recently).

So it shouldn't be surprising that Twitter introduced the retweet button, which seems to be an effort to minimally dilute the experience while adding a layer of potential for it to increase the likelihood that the company will produce significant value. The big question is, are people using the retweet button enough? (For the record, it seems that my followers are retweeting me the old way at a ratio of about 4:1, with four penciled in retweets for every one "push-button" RT using the new feature.)

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // How to measure Twitter influence monetization of social networks ReTweet revenue Twitter

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January 15, 2010

Results from Day 3 of Twitter Experiment (with Chart)

In 24 hours, I have lost another 100 followers. (Remember, on the first night, I lost almost 2,000 followers, which must include all the people who use applications to auto-unfollow people who are no longer following them.) As the chart shows, my follower count stands at 8,893.

Although it is still early to look at the results for RTs and @replies, here's something interesting to chew on: In the last 12 hours, I have been retweeted or @replied approximately 23 times on one post. This is WELL ABOVE average, and a new record for any of my Tweets (my viral Tweets are typically retweeted three or four times).

This surge of retweets can be explained by two things, I suspect. First, as Twitter guru Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) says, the best thing you can do to get retweeted is to Tweet good shit, and the Tweet that was responsible for almost all of the RTs and @replies was about how in just several days, the amount of money donated via text message to Haitian disaster relief has surpassed the total amount of money given to all charities and causes via text message last year. (That is interesting, and highly retweetable.)

But the second explanation is that, as I guessed, Twitter reach is not dependent solely on maximizing the number of followers you have. I had 12,700 followers on Monday. Yesterday, I had 8,940 followers. But after losing over 25% of my followers due to my own massive unfollowing, my Twitter reach (as measured simply by @replies and retweets) rose by a factor of more than 5x.

Prediction for the weekend: I still expect to see a more rapid loss of followers over the weekend, as some people tend to update their Twitter feeds only on Saturdays.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // Followers How to measure Twitter influence Posterous Twitter Twitter Influence Twitterholic Unfollow Unfollow Experiment

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January 13, 2010

Results from Day 1 - Did Bots or People Disappear?

As this chart from Twitterholic shows, less than 24 hours after unfollowing 12,000 people, I was unfollowed by over 3,500 followers!

My first observations/conclusions are as follows:

1. So far, no one from the list of people I interact with regularly has unfollowed me.

2. There were LOTS of bots and spammers following me, who were only interested in a recipricol follow (which I'm happy to lose).

3. There is a big advantage to following back your followers, in that you can always tell if someone is following you just by looking at their feed. If I don't ever go back to a 1:1 ratio, not being able to know this will take some getting used to.

4. I am going to add the initial people back very quickly, because I miss the DMs that this group sends me (I don't miss DMs from spammers or bots).

and lastly,

5. There are many people who take the "follow back" ethic very seriously and personally. I received more than one email angry email suggesting that I was being very rude. If that's the case, I apologize. I tried to take precautions against this by warning people in the days leading up to this experiment (which served the dual purpose of telling me who is reading my Tweets). In any case, my reason for doing this experiment was not to be rude, but to learn more about the dynamics of following/unfollowing on Twitter, and for the next several days I'll be monitoring what happens.

(PS - Interestingly, although my goal was to make it down to zero before adding people back, Twitter's odd numbering system never let me get down below 92 people on my follower list, despite not having a record that I was following anyone. In addition to that, Tweets from people who I no longer followed continued to show up in my feed until I replaced them with newly re-followed people.)

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // Follower Count How to measure Twitter influence Social Media Social Media Plan Social media strategy Twitter Twitterholic Unfollow

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January 12, 2010

Day One of Twitter Experiment: Unfollowing 12,000+ People

Today I am beginning to unfollow 12,000 people, making my way down to zero. Currently, almost everyone I am following is also following me back. And starting last Friday, I began informing my "followers" of this experiment, and anyone who has been paying attention to my feed has had ample time to hear me announce that I am culling faux-followers, and that I will quickly begin to add people back who I interact with, or who reach out to me, or who I am interested in.

Yesterday I wrote about what I hope to learn from doing this.

On Friday I wrote about why I am doing this.

Today I just want to write briefly about which Twitter tools I am starting with. I am going to use Tweepi, which my friend Russ Dean helpfully turned me on to, and once I get beneath a certain level (say, around 10,000), I will use Twitter Karma, which works for Twitter accounts that are not humongous, but begins to fail when it needs to deal with too much information.

I will report back on whether these two tools are sufficient, or if I stumble upon others, or if I end up needing to unfollow folks by hand!

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // How to measure Twitter influence Social Media Social Media Experiment Twitter Twitter Influence Unfollow Web Analytics Will Marlow

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January 11, 2010

Twitter Experiment Part 2: What I Hope to Learn from Unfollowing 12,000+ People

On Friday I wrote about my plan to do an experiment in which I unfollow 100% of the people I'm following right now, and then I'll re-follow only people who are not spammers or bots, and who I'm actually interested in. I am keeping a list right now of people who I interact with, or know, or who I find interesting, and I'll re-follow that list very quickly after I hit zero. If you want to be added to that list, just @reply me, or send me a DM, or email me at will@alumnifidelity.com.

On Friday I talked about WHY I was doing this. In this post, I want to talk about a few things that I hope to LEARN from doing this.

I look forward to learning:

How many people unfollow me, and thus, how many people on Twitter are only interested in following people who follow them back.
What happens to my "click through" rate.
What happens to my @reply and DM rate.
Whether this generates new word of mouth buzz and leads to new followers.
What this does to the overall visibility of my Twitter presence.

Confession: I'm also hopeful that I will be able to provide more evidence that having a large following is NOT a good measure of influence on Twitter. I believe that there is a misconception going around that a Twitter feed is only valuable if it "reaches" hundreds of thousands of strangers, as evidenced by huge follower lists. Firstly, I think that Twitter can be valuable even if it reaches ONE person who you wouldn't have reached with another mechanism. Secondly, I think that huge follower lists are faux-metrics. Hopefully my experiment can illustrate why the second point can be misleading, and possibly it can help people appreciate their small but committed core of followers, who are the source of true value on Twitter.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // Follower Count Followers How to measure Twitter influence Social Media Social Media Experiment Social Media Plan Twitter Unfollow Will Marlow

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January 8, 2010

Twitter Experiment Part 1: An Intro to My Twitter Strategy, and What I Plan To Do

(Click here for the second part of this post.)

Before I get to the problem with my Twitter strategy (and what I intend to do about it), I want to explain a few things first.

As of today, I have 12,730 followers on Twitter.

The way I've built my following is fairly simple. I post updates that are focused on my expertise (education technology, charitable fundraising, and web marketing), and I make myself easy to find for people who are interested in the same topics, I update at regular intervals daily, and I follow back individuals who follow me unless they are a spammer or look weird.

In addition to this, I have been on Twitter for awhile, and in my early days I proactively sought out other like-minded and interesting Twitterers and I introduced myself to them by following them. Many times they followed me back, @replied me, or interacted with me offline. I also talk to people via Twitter, respond to DMs, and maintain public profiles on Flickr and at this blog at www.willmarlow.com to give my followers more insight into my personality and my work. In addition to all of this, as the cofounder of AlumniFidelity.com, I am regularly interacting with customers, investors, and end-users who are tech-savvy. This has led to lots of my followers.

I also never engage in obnoxious spam activity or use obnoxious Twitter “clients” that alienate the people who I hope to interact with.

One problem with my Twitter strategy is that my liberal “follow back” approach (like Guy Kawasaki, I follow people back as part of Twitter courtesy), I have accumulated a large number of spammers and faux-followers in my following column, which I have recently gotten sick of. It occurred to me that I’m currently following a large number of feeds that I don’t read, and the fact that I’m following them increases their own credibility (spammers try to build up followes for that reason, I’m compiling a list of users who I interact with regularly, or whose insights I appreciate, or who I happen to know are legitimate users, and I’m going to unfollow all 12,400 people, with the exception of this relatively small list.

If you are NOT a spammer, and I’m currently following you, please @reply me or DM me if you want me to add you to my private list of people who I will follow back after I hit zero.

I’m not sure how long it will take me, but starting in 6 days, I’m going to unfollow all 12,400 people, until I reach zero, and then I will slowly begin adding followers who I’m truly interested in.

To summarize: problem = I’m following too many spammers and bots on Twitter. Solution: unfollow everyone, and re-follow only a select number of people who I am actually interested in.

As always, send me an email if you want to chat about any of this.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // Best of WM Followers Social Media Social Media Experiment Social Media Plan Twitter Unfollow Will Marlow

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January 5, 2010

Let Yourself Be Found (Flip the Switch)

Proctor & Gamble, currently the world’s 8th largest corporation and over 170 years old, was the first company to put a toll-free 1-800 number on all of its product packaging. The first year after doing so, it received 200,000 phone calls from customers offering ideas or complaints. P&G, with revenues of almost $80 billion in 2009, spends hundreds of millions of marketing dollars aimed at identifying and locating customers. But all it needed to do was flip a switch and suddenly 200,000 customers reversed the process and started finding P&G.

Nonprofits, schools, and companies are beginning to think of social media the same way. Just turn on the channel (with a blog, a Facebook profile, Twitter, YouTube, or a specialty service like AlumFi), and let your donors, volunteers, and customers find you. Take their messages seriously. Respond to them over the same social network with which they contacted you. You’ll have richer communications, better relationships with your base, and a better year overall than you would otherwise have had.

Will Marlow is the co-creator of AlumniFidelity, where he helps schools such as the University of Virginia, William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University, as well as about 25 other schools and nonprofits, with online fundraising and marketing campaigns. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // blogging Blogs e-Commerce Facebook Fundraising Marketing PR Social Media Twitter

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