A Marketing Mix

When I meet you or your company or your product or your restaurant or your website, I desperately need to put it into an existing category, because the mental cost of inventing a new category for every new thing I see is too high.

I am not alone in this need. In fact, that's the way humans survive the onslaught of newness we experience daily.

[I struggle with this - both as a human user or consumer and a marketer. What label(s) do I need to consider?]

From The Original Article: "Facebook has regained domination for traffic driving over StumbleUpon, in fact, StumbleUpon seems to have dropped off quite dramatically this past year, but despite that fact, it still comes in as the number two traffic driver in social media well ahead of Twitter and edging out both Youtube and Pinterest.

With the tremendous buzz that Pinterest has been generating over the past few months and the fact that it was recently recognized that Pinterest drives up to 4x as much retail buying traffic as Facebook, the fact that StumbleUpon still drives more traffic than Pinterest is a big deal.

Then you look to YouTube, arguably the world's largest search engine, and it comes inbelow StumbleUpon as well, but just a hair ahead of Pinterest for the third place spot in real traffic driving among the major social media".

Read More: http://socialmediatoday.com/reyactive/650306/surprising-results-which-social-media-really-drive-more-traffic

Yesterday afternoon Google’s search engine results page (SERP) included clickable menus for select websites. [1] Here is a screenshot: If you click on a menu item, it loads another group of links.

Why would Google include menus in its search results and what are the implications for searchers, advertisers, and website owners?

First, these menus produce a better experience for searchers. You can quickly find the most relevant pages from within Google’s search results.

This saves you time. This feature also benefits advertisers and Google. If users are spending more time browsing Google’s search results they are probably more likely to see and click on a sponsored result. Higher click-through rates on ads equates to more revenue for Google.

Full Article: http://blog.intigi.com/google-launches-serp-menus/

From the original article: "In the biggest study of its kind, we have found that there is strong correlation between the amount of tweets about a URL, and its Google ranking.

Key Stats

1) Study shows that URLs receive a significant boost in Google rankings when they are shared on Twitter

2) The effects of this boost seem to level out at around 50 tweets, and the subsequent benefit of gaining additional tweets is minimal until around 5,000 tweets

3) After 5,000 tweets the average ranking of URLs improves considerably
URLs receiving over 7,500 tweets almost always rank inside the top 5 results

4) Average rankings are heavily correlated to the number of tweets about each URL".

Full Article Here: http://www.branded3.com/tweets-vs-rankings

From The Original Article: "For years, the best way to gain rankings in search results was to have:

1) Accessible pages featuring
2) Quality content
3) Targeting the right keywords
4) In a way that naturally earned external links

Now a huge social reach is a competitive advantage in SEO. If you're doing SEO today, I think it's no longer possible to ignore the growth of your social connections as a big part of your SEO strategy.

Honestly, I expect in 18 months, Twitter followers, Facebook connections, LinkedIn account size and engagement across these won't just be social metrics; they'll be KPIs for our SEO, too".

Full article Here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/social-annotations-in-search-now-your-social-network-rankings

According to research by BlueCaribu it is in fact Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, that is still dominating businesses thoughts, with 9.1 million related searches every month.

The complete research carried out by BlueCaribu is presented in this awesome info graphic they have produced.

Why are we listening to signals when we can do the research ourselves? (More on the Advertising as Cult theory)

The Internet was supposed to make us smarter shoppers. So why should we still listen to the signals that brands send us?

Beth Kanter wrote a very complete and interesting piece in NTEN's latest edition of their quarterly journal for non-profit leaders. You have to download the journal but it's worth it and it's free (you just need to register). 

It's been fascinating for me to see how non-profits seem to embrace Social Media in general and Content Curation in particular - Beth of course being a key advocate in that move.

The broader take-away that I see for those of us in all sorts of organizations, as independant professionals or SMB-owners is the validation it brings to the model. When tightly-budgeted NPO's embrace a practice as a group, you can bet they're not wasting their scarce resources on a hype. They have to be efficient and as Beth puts it in the article: "Putting content curation into practice is part art form, part science, but mostly about daily practice. You don’t need to do it for hours, but 20 minutes every day will help you develop and hone the skills."

This is precisely where we see the opportunity with curation for professionals: building up a good practice that fits with one's daily routine and that -as Beth puts it - brings great "unexpected benefits".