Marketing and money making opportunities

Through all this insanity, I do kind of see some marketing opportunities lurking forward. Picture this: You manage an e-commerce site whereby you sell animal products and dog shampoo. Guess where you will be able to find an audience to push your products to? Especially since e-commerce have taken flight on Facebook. You might be spamming all those people with offers and discounts – but if they are mad enough to release their dog’s relationship status on Facebook – they might just fall for your sweet discounts. You don’t even have to spam them. Just follow their discussions and you will instantly find gaps or needs in the market. Go fetch!

Zuckerberg is doing it

Mark Zuckerberg just proved to us how ‘valuable’ or ‘special’ it is for your puppy to get a Facebook Page. Aaaawww how cute, I do sense the love between him and his puppy. The only thing left for his puppy is to learn how to grow crops on Farmville. Wait a minute! That gives me another money making thought that will boost ROI. Facebook Game Developers can develop games that will entertain your domestic animals and keep them busy for hours.

Opinions from Facebook users:

Judith Saul says:
To me facebook is a toy, a game; it’s friendly banter and jokes. It’s not an arena (to me) where it’s all that important to be honest. I don’t divulge on facebook where I work, went to school, what my true email address is… none of that. And I have FB aliases. One of my stuffed animals has a page of its own. I use my aliases to test things, like what happens if I share/send something. It’s also the account that signs up for silly games. I’ve noticed that most of my Farmville neighbours have followed my lead. They all have aliases so they can generate gifts and such without waiting for their neighbours to send them.

So a facebook page for a dog? Sure why not? What harm does it do? There’s actually an app specifically for that, called Dogbook which several of my friends have signed up for. There’s another site called myArfie.com that is basically the same thing — a place to share info about your dog with other dog lovers. I have dog friends on Twitter as well. And I follow a miniature pig on facebook. Of course I know these are being penned by someone else but there’s something spectacularly funny and sweet that the posts are in the animal’s voice.

Truffie Truff says:
I think creating a facebook page for your domestic animal is barking mad.
I was taught by my master how to manage basic PC usage. He then purchased a ‘bark to tweet’ software for me so now I can manage my online communications myself.
It’s great for organizing the local Dog community.

Ruff

Mashable Users

A clear example of a puppy in Facebook heaven

Reasons to make use of this application:

• Personal details submitted are kept safe and secure without the worries of spam attacks or personal invasions afterwards.
• It is a free tool offered by Capitec Bank, so why not make use of it?
• Easy understandable which makes for easy money management
• It will track what you think you’re spending each month in comparison to what you end up spending each month.
• A full month-end-recon makes this exciting and valuable to get a better view of where your money’s going and how much you’re saving.
• Neatly showcases data in visual pie charts and graphs for on-the-fly analyses
• Customise your budget accordingly to obtain accurate expense forecasts

TRY ‘THE BUDGETANATOR’ TO INCREASE THOSE SAVINGS

Here’s the interview and we noticed a general theme from the answers..

Danny Sullivan: If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?

Bing: We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.

Google: Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article.

Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are?

Bing: Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan)

Google: Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life

Danny Sullivan: Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it?

Bing: Yes.

Google: Yes we do use this as a signal, especially in the “Top links” section [of Google Realtime Search]. Author authority is independent of PageRank, but it is currently only used in limited situations in ordinary web search.

Source

So the question must be asked, “What authority do you have on the internet and more importantly over your competitors?”.

Having a look at the page authority of my Twitter profile, which has a SEOmoz Page Authority of 54, is a good start to calculating your authority. Another is to look at the ratio of followers vs following. The lower the amount of people you are following vs your followers the better.

What social media has done is created a more honest approach to online marketing, there is no more spammy reciprocal link requests (and if you are please STOP as it will hurt your campaign). People are much more likely to Facebook “like” or retweet an article they enjoyed reading and this will reflect on your social graph, which Google and Bing now are paying attention to. Spammers could create a bunch of artificial profiles but they will get caught out because what will the authority be of those profiles?? It will be a downward spiral of being red flagged if you ventured down this road.

It’s great to see SEO evolving so quickly, now we have search, content, links, social media interaction and blogs all coming together into one all round marketing approach. The companies that are quickest to adapt to this are the ones going to be enjoying high search traffic. The need for social media in your SEO campaign also ties nicely into branding, which Google has mentioned on several occasions.

Summarising the past year in search we have been learning a lot about social media, branding and focusing on building relationships to get links and how this affects SEO. Finally it is all tied together, 2011 is going be an exciting road to travel!

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – The Future of SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Google is incorporating user reviews and ratings into google.com’s search results, it cannot be seen in google.co.za just yet but I have no doubt it’s on its way. There are two sides to the coin here.

1) If analysing it as a single algorithm, it is not the brightest idea the Google engineers have come up with because it can be easily manipulated by companies. There are rumours going around the SEO circles that companies are even paying people to write good reviews about their products and give them good ratings as well. So the reviews may not always be trusted.

2) On the flip side it is Google embracing Web2.0 technology and not relying anymore on their incoming link algorithm. This move by Google also strengthens my belief that Google’s, Eric Schmidt must be taken seriously when he hints they are looking at introducing branding in their algorithm. One must look at this new algorithm as one small piece of Google’s massive puzzle.

So lets try and make these two side of the coins gel and become one, helping us understand why Google released such an algorithm…

There is no doubt that Google will still use their incoming link and on-site optimisation algorithms (together with their analytical analysis of traffic within a website plus the amount of rss subscribers a website has). With this new addition to their algorithms they now have a more refined algorithm. I’m convinced (I have no proof yet) that they will only insert reviews and ratings in their search results with websites that already have a good ranking score with their other algorithms. I very much doubt that they will insert every rating and review from every e-commerce/blog website indexed in the world wide web…

The next two questions we must be asking regarding Web2.0 algorithms are:

1) How soon will Google be able to tap into Twitter profiles and start indexing tweets, and placing an authorative ranking on Twitter profiles?

As you can see in the below image Google have begun a primitive index on Twitter updates. Will this evolve into something more spectacular?

2) Will Google be able to index Facebook pages and use the size of their fan base as part of their algorithm?

I question this theory in my previous post.