I Love Mixx, but I’m Still a Digger

You can’t help but notice all the discussions going on about Mixx these days, from my favourite bloggers like Tamar and Tad, to top news sources like TechCrunch - it’s like the time sphinn was launched with all these updates in my RSS reader about the same site.

If you’ve missed out on all the news; Mixx is a bit like Digg, where users submit stories and other users vote on them, the stories that get a lot of votes and are deemed interesting appear on the ‘popular page’. Mixx is unique in that it offers some great story, picture and video sections and I especially like the process for submitting pictures.

So, like the title says I love Mixx, here’s a few reasons why:

• I can see stories from topics that interest me straight away (click on the image above)
• Voting for stories and leaving comments are fast, something that digg seems to be getting worse with
• A lot of my friends are on there (Tad, Tamar, Muhammad, MrBabyMan, Zaibatsu, Greg etc) and that’s one of the reasons I love StumbleUpon so it’s good to see others have moved over as well
• It’s new, theres no bitchyness in the comments and theres a lot of good, unique and most of all diverse content that is making the homepage of the site

Mixx is taking a lot of my time away from Digg, so why don’t I just leave the giant (Digg) alone?

Well…I can’t, and there’s a few reasons for that as well:

• I like the homepage, although some of the stories might be clutted with tech dicussions or ron paul articles, I always find a lot of interesting content that I’m tempted to share with colleagues
• It still drives the most traffic, although 95% of my time on the site is for personal reasons, when it comes to helping out clients or others, having a successful submission on Digg can drive a lot of traffic and get the story in front of people who can link
• It’s Digg - although that might seem pretty silly, Mixx is going to be compared to Digg for a very long time until / if it becomes a bigger website. Digg is famous for what it is and it’s still first on my mind when I want to find interesting news from around the web
• I love the comments section, although it’s one of the things a lot of people hate I just find some of the comments hilarious

So for now I’m mixxing (pun intended) up the sites I use on a regular basis — on a personal level not company…

Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Propeller, Facebook, Mixx. How are you shaping up?

6 Comments / November 30th, 2007 / Social Media

Leave a Comment and Get free Linkbait / Viral Content Ideas

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Need an idea for that killer article or tool to help gain mass amounts of traffic and backlinks? We have not only had success for our clients but have been featured on the Digg Homepage with this post about the Top Digg Users and on the StumbleUpon buzz page with this post about the Top StumbleUpon users. Both helped drive massive amounts of traffic (Over 100,000 pageviews) and of course the links that followed wern’t bad either.

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34 Comments / November 22nd, 2007 / Social Media

Giving my First Presentation on Social Media Marketing

Since I made the move to South Africa, life has certainly been a lot different for me. Getting to devise strategies for some of the worlds biggest companies into how they can go about getting Social Online is a pretty big responsibility at the age of 18 but definitely something I love.

The thing is, the real reason I’m here is to head up the Social Media team, so now comes the time when the training begins. With 2 months down and just less than 4 weeks before my flight back ‘home’ to England, I’m doing my first of many presentations to the gang here from the basics to advanced sectors of Social Media Marketing.

Here’s a look at some of the presentations I’m going to be doing:

• Building Social Media Profiles & Understanding Viral Content
• Reputation Management
• Writing Viral Copy (this one is for the copywriters)
• How to Create Social Media Proposals (we seem to get new business on a daily-basis)

Now for those who don’t know me, I’m not the most confident person in the world so while I’m sure ill be nervous (there’s only about 10 people watching) I think it’s going to do me the world of good and I will have gained a lot of confidence after doing so. You never know, it may even help me build up the confidence to apply to speak at a much bigger event.

I’m doing a test of the presentation today (Building Social Media Profiles & Understanding Viral Content) and doing the full thing on friday, here’s a look at what it will cover:

• What is Viral Content
• Examples of Social Media Success
• Sites to Register On (for our team of staff to get busy with)
• How to Use These Sites
• Reasons for Using Them
• How This Can Relate to Your Clients

I’m still debating my future over here in South Africa but it certainly won’t be the work that puts me off coming back; my life is in the UK afterall. I’m hoping I’ll have some new found confidence after all this and help BlueSouth have a stronger team that understands more about SMM than any other internet marketing company out there.

I’ll keep you all updated on how it goes!

9 Comments / November 20th, 2007 / Social Media

Social Media Marketing is Not SEO

I think we’ve all been guilty of the onslaught of social media information these past few months. A quick look on Sphinn even shows you how popular the subject has been within the majority of online marketing blog’s. Don’t get me wrong, Social Media Marketing can produce some great results for clients, but it certainly shouldn’t be used as a substitute for other marketing channels.

Positives of SMM

• Can send a large amount of traffic to a site over a short-time period
• Enables people to share information faster than ever before to the masses
• Backlinks can be gained by the thousands if a content-piece ‘gets out there’
• It allows anybody or anything to get on the map quicker than ever

Drawbacks to SMM

• You can’t guarantee results and success often relies on the participation of others
• It can take an awful long time and a lot of work before any results are seen
• For big companies it can appear to be ’spammy’ or ‘unethical’ and give them a bad name if not done correctly
• The Process of getting involved in communities and interacting with others is time consuming and when working for clients it can be hard to show where your work went

SMM & SEO Fuse Together

Those who understand both of these marketing sectors well, will understand that Social Media Marketing and SEO compliment each other in many ways. We certainly aren’t saying that they can’t be offered as seperate services, but to get the best bang for your online marketing efforts both should be considered and at least mildly utilised.

So how do / can they work together?

Blogging - Although blogging is a completely seperate thing on it’s own. It gives you a platform on which you can add viral / linkbait content that you can then have promoted around the web. Blogging was offered as an SEO tip to me nearly 2 years ago and I have been doing it ever since. It gives you more pages on a site that can be indexed by Search Engine’s and allows you to rank for less searched keywords but that can still drive a lot of traffic overall (long-tail).

Community Participation - Blog Commenting, Forum Posting and content creation on other sites not only helps you increase your brand online and helps leverage traffic from within the community but any links that you are getting on these sites are obviously also going to help with your link-building efforts. With this in mind you might want to check your on-site SEO is up to scratch so you are getting link-weight pointed at pages that have some form of decent web design structure (titles, meta-data, relevant content), and linking with relevant anchor text.

Keep Your Viral Content Relevant - One of the reasons SMM is so popular is that it can bring a massive amounts of backlinks to a content piece, for e.g. Google Webmaster Central reports over 450 backlinks for our post on the Top 50 StumbleUpon Users. If you are a company that offers something like ‘conservatory building’ or ‘window cleaning’ it can be difficult to think up some viral content. That still doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to create a piece on ‘The World’s Ugliest Dogs (and Owners)’, even though the backlinks might help generally it would be much better to stay in the home improvement / development niche when thinking about content. This can help with specific rankings for certain keywords as people often use link anchor text that is the same as the title of the story they are linking too and it’s likely to get more backlinks from the relevant niche.

In Conclusion

Social Media Marketing has been viewed as an easy way to build backlinks, it certainly doesn’t replace making titles unique, setting up a nice internal linking structure and cleaning up those duplicate pages. Who would really benefit from links pointing at a page with the title ‘Home’ or ‘Company Name’? If you want to read more on the subject stay right here on our Social Media blog, or check out some of our favourite blogs on the subject which include Social Desire, Collective Thoughts, Blogstorm and the Ignite Blog.

7 Comments / November 19th, 2007 / Social Media

Social Media Marketing Ebook - What would you like to see?

With my deep interest in social media, creating viral content and watching it spread; being paid to do what I love is pretty awesome. I’ve been in South Africa for 2 months now and have gotten to work with some pretty huge clients, one’s that I certainly couldn’t imagine working with at the age of 18 and certainly not leading their Social Strategies.

I’ve come to love the topic after finding it to be a great way to build backlinks and buzz, and basically want to get everything written down in an e-book or site section that will be updated every few months (a bit like SEOBook). Whether this will be free or paid I’m still unsure, I’m thinking towards the free option.

I have a lot of topics in mind and a lot of them have already been written but I would like to know what else you guys would like to see in the Ebook, so please feel free to leave a comment below, you might just get a mention in the credits and thank you’s.

16 Comments / November 13th, 2007 / Social Media