Behind The Feeds

I had a great discussion with RSS Ray last week. If you missed it live on WS Radio, you can read a bit about it here. Or download the media files here and here.
Part 1

Part 2

Search engine marketers used to be primarily concerned about their web site. Then they realized that syndicating content to other web sites improves search results. Now search marketers need to adapt to a new “off website” challenge – the rise of social networks. According to Nielsen, 23% of all time spent online in the US is spent in social networks.

This shift of time and attention is creating two big changes in the world of search. First, customers and prospects seeking results that are more “real-time” and/or influenced by trusted friends are increasingly searching inside social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Second, leading search engines such as Google and Bing are using users’ actions and relationships to rank search results. It is a dynamic area with major announcement from the search engines nearly every week.

Can you improve your search results by using social networks? Join SimpleFeed CEO Mark Carlson as he explores these topics in two coming events.

On June 1 at 9am PDT Mark will be on the “Online Marketing with RSS Ray” internet radio show on wsradio.com.

On June 14^th at 3:30 PDT Mark will be speaking at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exposition with Catherine Paschkewitz, Product Marketing Manager, HP Home & Home Office Store.

At the AlwaysOn OnDemand conference today on the HP Campus. Fun to check out HP’s latest products and hear their CEO discuss HP’s newly unveiled strategy.

HP CEO Léo Apotheker discussing poor mobile phone reception in the Adirondacks – been there!

While the conference is primarily about Cloud Computing and its implication, there is of course plenty of discussion on Social. From the Gordon Ritter at Emergence Capital panel – nearly all enterprise SAAS start-ups are building in social features, but it is only working well in communication apps. From Mark Gorenberg of Hummer Winblad – last year CEOs wanted a social strategy. This year they want to see ROI. For companies that can measure, they are seeing 4-7x the funnel conversion vs. other programs. We are seeing similar results!

SimpleFeed is pleased to again be sponsoring the Responsys customer conference, Interact. This year’s event is centered around the theme “The New School of Marketing,” Responsys’ catch phrase for integrated efforts across web, email, mobile and social. Entertainment was highlighted by Cyndi Lauper and old school musician who has re-invented herself as a blues artist.

Cyndi, shown here demonstrating her social listening skills, put on a great show.

Couple fun factoids from the conference.

PacSun – “Facebook Fans are our most loyal audience.” She also explained how the daily offer to their Wall is their most popular content. Facebook “At Mixi (the leading social network in Japan), 80% of the traffic is from mobile devices.

iPad users got an early holiday present in the form of a new version of Flipboard, the “App of the Year” on iPad. While there are lots of new features, the biggest was Google RSS Reader integration. Let’s take a deeper look at the implications for marketers of this functionality.

If you have not played with it, from Flipboard you can click on the “+ add a section” and see many new content options. After selecting Google Reader and entering your credentials your RSS content is now presented like all other Flipboard content enabling rapid content consumption via flip, expand, etc. The default organization is time based, but the top pull down allows navigation by feeds/folders.

There is the ability to share, star as well as post to Twitter, and Facebook. Another nice feature is the ability to take any feed and make it a top level “section.”  

There are some other limitation for RSS power users, most notably that content is only marked “read” in Google Reader if you open the content item. But just as Flipboard is not for power Twitter users, Flipboard is not (yet?) for power RSS users. And that may be a great thing.

A common complaint with RSS is that it “feels like work” to people. These people feel a need to play “whack a mole” with their feeds getting unread items down to zero. So they prefer the TV/Radio-like experience of Social Networks – dipping in during free moments and not worrying about what they might miss.  That sort of casual engagement is good for big usage numbers on the networks, but not great for those B-B marketers with complex products or B-C marketers with personalized offers. Thus, people tend to use RSS is for things they need to do their job or live their life which leads to a more engaged subscriber.

But perhaps Flipboard has the opportunity to bring RSS mainstream. It can take advantage of the greater volume of richer RSS content without the perceived “work.” The most significant limitation to this future is that you need to have Google Reader set up to get RSS into Flipboard. Let’s hope Flipboard is working on an “add to Flipboard” button (and SimpleFeed is happy to help!).

Let’s take a break from cutting edge Social Media marketing and return to the workhorse of “off-web-site marketing,” RSS. Why? Because of the avalanche of positive press about RSS this week. Yes, internet influencers are saying nice things again about RSS.

Yesterday, John Battelle, who never writes enough, wrote on his addiction to RSS. He suggested RSS was “professionalizing. It’s the Beta to the VHS of Twitter. Higher quality, better signal, but more expensive in terms of time, and used only by folks ‘in the industry.’”

Twitter vs. Facebook vs. RSS issues do not matter much to SimpleFeed – we are a major publisher in all three mediums. But I am not sure that analogy works. We don’t view Twitter/Facebook/ RSS as redundant technologies. Obviously, Twitter and Facebook are superior social technologies, but the ephemeral nature and limited content of social mediums make them poor choices for information vital to your life and/or career. If you want to track information deeply, RSS cannot be beat. Perhaps a better analogy is books vs. television.

Anyway, Battelle’s post garnered the second highest number of comments ever on Searchblog. That is almost hard to believe given the high profile topics he discusses. So not surprisingly, he is back today with a much longer piece on RSS. While he lauds RSS’s unique benefits and discusses FM’s use of RSS, he laments it poor advertising monetization. I would suggest he is monetizing his RSS Readers effectively through events, and lead generation to FM. Just like SimpleFeed customers monetize through social and web site sales and lead generation.

Another delight this week is Om’s post “Flipboard: Future is HTML5, RSS & New New Advertising” which exploded on to Techmeme. In the post. Om speculates that “It’s not hard to imagine Flipboard showing content from Google Reader” and  Flipboard CEO Mike McCue says “Flipboard wants to make it easy for folks to consume RSS-based content, but offer it in a manner that mainstream users will find palatable.”

This statement lead to screams of delight throughout the halls of SimpleFeed as usability is the biggest impediment to RSS usage by consumers. Further, we view the iPad as the big content consumption growth story of 2011 with Flipboard leading the way. In fact, we are such fans of Flipboard that we are working with some of our customers to optimize their content publishing for Flipboard.

But that is a topic for a future post.

Internet Retailers and Publishers typically use Feeds and Social Media to communicate directly with customers. However, many Brands and B-B companies sell through distribution channel partners. Their end-user customers increasingly use social media, but channel partners often lack the time or expertise for social media marketing. Yet failure to communicate effectively with customers, results in lost market share. So what is a company to do?

A session at SocialTech this week discussed Cisco’s efforts to get its 13,000 channel partners to begin using social media. Like all global organizations, Cisco found varying degrees of enthusiasm for, and understanding of, Social Media amongst its partners. Luanne Tierney of Cisco discussed her plan.

1. Present data to partners demonstrating that Social Media is not just for kids (66% of social media users are between 25 and 55).
2. Demonstrate how Social Media can works for Cisco (CTO has 1.4 million Twitter followers).
3. Create “Cisco Partners Velocity” a program of content and conferences which trains channel partners on the foundations, execution and maintenance of social media programs.
4. Participate – Cisco set up its own blog and social sites to continue the education.

SimpleFeed is great at automating the publishing of company approved and highly relevant content to the Twitter and Facebook presences of channel partners. However, we have seen many companies struggle to get their channel to embrace social beyond this baseline content. While the above sounds simple and straight forward, I find it a very valuable approach to a difficult problem. For many enterprises, this is where social media rubber meets the road.

Interesting survey from BtoB and Business.com exploring how B-B marketers are using and measuring social media to impact search results. Long survey short, it is just starting, but look promising.  Of the 464 marketers surveyed 57% said improving search results was one of their top goals in using social media. Specific tactics include driving inbound links through posts and expanding profiles and accounts on social networks.

So is it working? Yes, but too early to say. 44% of the respondents have seen an increase in traffic from search engines since launching their social media efforts. On the other hand, 41% of respondents said they are not measuring the impact of social media on search. Lots more interesting data here.

As you can tell from our blog posts, this is an area of focus for SimpleFeed. With our automated publishing tools we are helping leading edge marketers develop best practices in using social media to improve search results.

Just back from OMMA Social which SimpleFeed sponsored. Lots of great content but the one that stood out was one of the first direct marketing case studies on Facebook sharing that I have seen. It was presented by Christine Morrison, Social Media Manager for the Turbo Tax division at Intuit. You can watch the video here.

Taxes do not seem to be an inherently social topic, but Intuit is a learning culture that tried a couple initiatives during the past tax season. Basically a user of Turbo Tax’s web-based tax service could share/like the service. Intuit presented a slide that represents the new sales funnel for social marketing. Expose a large number of visitors to the share/like opportunity and only a small number do. However, once that share/like goes to their friends’ newsfeeds and attracts comments, the message reaches a larger number prospects than those who saw the original share/like opportunity.

Thus the “funnel” bulges in the middle. Intuit found those who saw the item in their newsfeed were four times more likely to click than through to TurboTax than those who saw an online advertisement. While Intuit was understandably evasive on actual numbers for competitive reasons, they did share that this was their number one online program for getting new customers – Wow!

Today is the last day of Useful Social Media’s Corporate Social Media Summit. In short, it was way beyond “Useful” with lots of ideas on strategy, best practices and KPIs presented by Fortune 500 practitioners.

For me, one theme really emerged – companies that attached their social presence to a social cause are seeing huge success. The examples were everywhere. Besides the often sited Whole Foods, Pedigree launched a program promoting pet adoption and saw their Facebook Fans increase from 50,0000 to 950,000 in four months. Even B-B players, such as Interface (a carpeting company that promotes sustainability) has had great success in their social efforts. The conference even provided a dramatic example of marketing failure when an animal rights activist group seized the podium to protest one of the presenting company’s policies.

Lisa Foley of Pedigree laid out a clear approach – find a cause people believe in, want to identify themselves with, and want to share that affinity with their friends. Of course the cause needs to be consistent with the brand and a core value of the company.