Wordpress

Gio Galluci spoke at WordCamp Dallas 2009 on extreme social media promotion hacks. The overall theme of the talk was to add value to existing conversations, be helpful, and stop trying to hard sell and start attracting people by really living and owning the space you talk about.

White Hat + Black Hat = Blue Hat

Here are a few key points from the session:

• Don’t blast your brand out to everyone. It doesn’t work.
• Be Honest
• We need to get over ourselves
• Add value to the conversations that are already going on
• Don’t be a “marketer”
• Integrate your blog into your current marketing mix
• Spot selling and start influencing
• Marketing and social media deal in the same currency, social capital.

SEO Focal Points

• Click thrus are about humans
• keywords and phrases are about  humans
• backlinks are about search engines
• anchor text is about search engines
• big and small search engines share data

Hacks

• Create content that generates conversations within your community.
• Controversial content generates traffic
• You don’t always have to agree with your audience. In fact always agreeing is boring.
• Research what keywords people use to search for your topic so you can taylor your content.
• SEO Optimize your YouTube videos
• SEO Optimize photos on Flickr by using descriptive anchor text and link back to your site.
• TweetAdder let’s you keyword search Twitter profiles without breaking Twitter’s terms of service.
• Tube Toolbox let’s you optimize your YouTube traffic with breaking YouTube’s terms of service.

Measuring Success

• Reach
• Relevance
• Influence
• Authority
• Engagement

Consider this as you move around within the online social space.

Social capital = reputation = access to resources / access to more connections = reciprocity (favors added up) = public accomplushments = increased levels of trust = reputation = more social capital: wash rinse repeat. You’re not selling, your helping people solve their problems.

More on this later…

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com