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Strangely compelling

If you’re like most people, you can recall a time in your life when you might have wished you had more friends. 24 hours ago I thought about how nice it would be to become a tad more popular and decided to do something about it. Today I have people from all over the globe clamoring to make my acquaintance and I’m struggling to figure out how to stop the madness. Frankly,  I’m not 100% sure I have figured out the best way to put the genie back in the bottle.

You see, in my quest to stay current on all things social media, I recently started playing Mafia Wars. Mafia Wars is a very simple — yet surprisingly compelling — game you play with your pals on Facebook and/or MySpace. The goal is to become the wealthiest, most powerful mob boss you can be. And, in the world of organized crime, you need a lot of troops to make this happen. Unfortunately, most of my real-world friends have lives. They have jobs and families. They choose to spend their free time constructively. Far too few were interested in helping me satisfy my virtual bloodlust.

Typical real-world friend

So I did what I had to do and visited the Mafia Wars forums where you can actively recruit new Facebook friends to join your mob. Without giving it much thought, I added myself to a list of folks looking for new “associates.” I figured this would be a good way to find a few dozen like-minded psychopaths to help me crack a few safes and break a few knee caps. I was wrong. It wasn’t dozens of people, it was hundreds. I’ve been getting friend requests from people around the globe at a rate of about 1 every 30 seconds.

On the one hand, this is kind of cool. My “family” is now a force to be reckoned with. I’ve also become an international sensation. And, most importantly, I do have a lot more younger, hipper and better-looking friends than I did yesterday.

Typical virtual-world friend

On the other hand, I’m wondering how long it will take for my virtual popularity to subside. I’m beginning to think I’m going to continue getting requests from strangers wanting to join my mob long after my interest in the game ends (I give that another week tops). It also occurred to me last night that my fellow mobsters have the same access to my Facebook information as my real-world friends. This meant I had to pull some personal information off of my profile.

When I decide to call it quits, I’m going to need to put the e-mail I use for social media experimentation into the witness protection program for a while until things cool down. I’m also going to have to spend a few hours “unfriending” people so my Facebook account is once again manageable. I suppose that’s all part of the fun.

This whole episode is yet another example of just how powerful social media can be for important as well as trivial matters. It also serves as a reminder of the need to use caution and common sense when messing around with applications such as this. Had I used my work e-mail for this adventure, I would have caused myself a ton of unnecessary grief.

But, at least for today, I’m going to enjoy my popularity, rally my troops and whack a few rivals. I think I’ll also be able to earn enough money to buy that casino I’ve had my eye on.

Can this woman make you feel happy? I'll bet she can.

I like social media. It lets us do some amazing things. One of my favorites is that it provides a simple conduit for people to be able to quickly and easily share little snippets of happiness with others.

Lots of these snippets can be found on YouTube. Two of my favorites come from a show called Britain’s Got Talent. The first one is of a former cellphone salesman named Paul. Paul is just a regular guy who isn’t someone likely to be described as classically handsome. He certainly doesn’t look like a kick-ass opera singer, but he turned out to be just that.  And, if Paul is a one-in-a-million kind of find, then this show must have auditioned at least two million people, because they also found Susan Boyle, an unemployed 48-year-old who has never been kissed. Like Paul, she absolutely killed.

This one seems too simple — its just some hippie passing out free hugs. It is still pretty awesome.

This one is about a young man with Autism who performed some amazing feats on the basketball court. The achievement on its own is enough to make you smile, but it is even cooler to see a group of high school students actually being supportive of a kid with a disability.

And speaking of disabled, my dad, a former airline pilot himself, really liked the interview with “Captain Sully” about the successful landing of his disabled airplane in the Hudson River. Apparently, landing on the water without tragic results is no easy feat. My dad flat out thinks it isn’t something he could have done even after 30 years of flying. It is rare to hear an airline pilot admit that there is anything they can’t do, so this makes me even more impressed by what Captain Sullenberger was able to accomplish.

BTW, from a communications standpoint, this interview shows that there is simply no substitute for competence. “Sully” is not a trained spokesperson, but he comes off better than a lot of corporate CEOs in this interview. He has earned the ability to be confident based on a lifetime of hard work and it shows. Confidence combined with competence is easy to recognize when you see it. I particularly like the part 6 minutes and 44 seconds in, where Katie Couric asks him if he was praying during the ordeal. He responded by saying that he was so intensely focused on the landing that he thought of nothing else. I admire people who look first to themselves for solutions to their problems. Those people make me happy.

I’m adding this video because just thinking about doing this makes me happy. It also makes me pucker.

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

What stuff on YouTube makes you happy?

This is kind of cool. Tonight on the Daily Show, John Stewart was talking about the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama and the Naval base near Manama. In this segment, he brought up this old clip from the Muppet show:

He then told viewers to go do a Google search on Muppet Scat to see what comes up. It didn’t take long before Muppet Scat became the most searched for term on the Internet. Click on the screen shot below and see for yourself.

By the time the show aired here on the West Coast, the online buzz had already begun. When I performed my “Mupet Scat” search, I saw that  one blogger — who used many of the same blog SEO techniques I wrote about earlier this month — had already been able to get his post on the topic to show up on first page of  Google results for that term. This provides yet another example of how powerful and immediate blogs can be for search engine optimization. Very cool indeed.

View the Daily Show episode below:

By the way, my heartfelt thanks to the Navy SEAL snipers and all the men and women in the U.S. military. I’m grateful that we have so many good people serving our country who are willing to do the really hard jobs that most people don’t have the skill or stomach to do. Keep up the outstanding work.

Update: It took fewer than two hours for THIS post to make it to page one of a Google search on “Muppet Scat.” Plain and simple, SEO for blogs really works. Click on the image and check it out.

Was Coke right in sharing ownership of its brand?

Coca-Cola is one of the world’s biggest and most well-recognized brands.  It makes me wonder how many billions – or perhaps even trillions – of dollars the company has spent to get there. That’s why it was particularly refreshing to read a recent story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the way the company reacted to the success of a Coca-Cola Facebook page that the company did not create.

The page was actually created last year by a pair of 29-year-old Coke fiends in Los Angeles. Dusty Sorg and Michael Jedrzejewski created the page for no other reason than they were passionate about the beverage.  It turned out to be a very popular page. Within a few weeks of its inception, it had hit 75,000 fans.  After the first million fans, the Facebook administrators contacted Coca-Cola to see if it wanted to take over management of the page.

Fortunately, Coke’s director of worldwide interactive marketing declined. His thinking was that if the company took the page over, it would be seen as an intrusion and it would lose some of its grass-roots appeal and credibility.

Instead, the company rolled out the red carpet for the page’s creators and invited them to headquarters for a sit-down. Ultimately, the decision was made to take a collaborative approach to managing the page between Sorg, Jedrzejewski and a small group of Coca-Cola employees. Today the site has 3,365,220 fans and is the second most popular page on Facebook page right behind Barrack Obama’s.

Coca-Cola superfans given the red carpet treatment

In today’s world, a company cannot maintain complete control over its brand no matter how hard it tries or how much money it spends. Brands are being discussed, debated and mutated all across the Internet. And, while companies can’t control their brands, there is still a lot that can be done to influence the discussion. At the end of the day, the key is to for a company to become a legitimate part of the community having the discussion. Relinquishing complete control of your brand can do wonders for your company’s image.

Some smart executives at Coca-Cola were well aware of this fact when they addressed this particular situation. This type of thinking may well help Coke become the choice of a new generation.

The first step in getting someone to read your corporate blog is helping them find it

If a tree falls down in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound? Some say yes, some say no and people with better things to do couldn’t care less. But what if we replace the tree with your company’s blog and the forest with the Internet? Now you’ve got a brain teaser worth considering. Your business can have the best, most compelling  blog in the world, but if nobody ever reads it you aren’t making any noise. And if this is the case, what’s the point?

Before someone can read your blog they have to find it. And the best way to make sure people find any kind of online content is to make sure it is search engine optimized. This month I had the privilege of attending Searchfest09 to hear what some of the industry’s leading SEO experts had to say about their industry (which is a LOT more interesting than you might think). SEO is part art, part science and part magic. It is something few will ever completely understand.

Fortunately, you don’t have to become an expert to add some significant SEO punch to your corporate blog. There are a lot of great tools and techniques available that are easy to understand and implement.

Getting Started with SEO for Blogs

Use WordPress — WordPress is the Microsoft (and Apple) of blog platforms. It is easy to use and there are a lot of SEO functions built right in. In addition, because WordPress is built on an open platform, there are literally thousands of people developing cool plug-ins that you can add to make your blog do all sorts of wonderful things. And there are LOTS of great SEO plug-ins available. If it is a corporate blog, consider making it a part of your company Website (like www.koifishcommunicaitons.com and www.koifishcommunications.com/blog). This way, every time you add a new post, it helps your Website’s search ranking as well. Even if your blog is already established somewhere else, moving to the WordPress platform is probably a smart investment. Be forewarned, however, it is a very good idea to identify a few WordPress experts and resources before you embark on your journey.

Understand the basics — Do a little reading about things like title tags, description tags and keyword tags. Learn how to develop an overall keyphrase selection strategy. If your company Website is search engine optimized, learn the keyphrases used there as well and integrate them appropriately. The better you understand these these basic principles, the better your blog SEO will be.

Install good SEO plug-ins – The All In One SEO Pack is a plug-in that will allow you to customize the title, description and meta tags for each post. There are several other tools that will do the same thing as well, but this one seems to be one of the most popular. Also, investigate tools that will allow you to customize the URL of each post to include your chosen key words.

Keep SEO in mind when writing copy — When writing for the Web,  you are writing for two audiences — readers and the search engines. Your readers must always be your primary focus. They must find your content compelling and valuable. That said, there are a lot of simple things that can be done including:

• Use Keyphrases repeatedly (at least three times) in your post
• Use titles and subheads to reinforce keyphrases and make your copy more readable
• Make title tags interesting and compelling
• Make sure the copy in your title tag and description tag appears in your body copy
• Invite readers to comment

The topic of SEO copywriting can’t be effectively tackled in a single blog post. It is a subject worthy of ongoing study. The best book I’ve found on the subject is “Successful Search Engine Copywriting” by Heather Lloyd-Martin. She also provides a lot of good information on her blog.

Use Web analytics – WordPress has a great blog stats plug-in that provides you with a wealth of information about your blog and your readers. It includes a report on the actual search terms that were used to get to a particular post. This is a great way to see if your keyword strategy is working and to consistently fine-tune your process. In addition to the WordPress plug-in, it is fairly easy to add Google analytics to your blog as well. Google offers this same capability and it is always nice to compare and contrast multiple analytics tools, as none of these tools seem to be perfect.

SEO is a Journey

In reality, SEO for blogs is much like SEO for Websites. In fact, from a search engine perspective, it is exactly the same. The only difference is that you don’t have to be a programmer to implement the fundamental components into your posts. And a blog post written using sound SEO practices can sometimes jump straight to a #1 Google ranking for a particular keyphrase in a matter of hours.

SEO for blogs does require a significant amount of extra time and effort but the payoff is huge. While it may seem daunting at first, it really isn’t that hard once you get the swing of things. Keep in mind that complete mastery of SEO is not attainable — even by the most experienced professionals. It is a continuously moving target. SEO is a journey, not a destination.

And, of course, you can always outsource the creation, management or even writing of your corporate blog. If you choose to go in that direction, make sure that the person or agency you hire has a full understanding of the SEO aspect of blogging. If you’d like more information on this important topic, feel free to drop us a line.