Facebook: Free Market Research

No, not scraping my friends. There is a legitimate way to get some great market information from Facebook and I’m going to show you how. It all starts with the nifty invention of Facebook Ads, which was designed to help businesses target their audience based on demographics and other factors. It attracted Facebook spammers, local businesses and a few clever marketing firms, but as I’ve found there are many uses to this feature.

Here’s an example of research results you can extract from Facebook Ads:

For the Infographic above, here is the example scenario:

• I own an online football shop, based in Singapore
• I stock only Nike and Adidas football boots
• I want to create an ad to sell football boots

What I wanted to answer: Which brand of boots would be more likely to return my investment on advertising online in Singapore?

OK here we go…

Cliché #2,834: “Think outside the box”…

1. Go to the Facebook Ads page http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/
2. Create a sample advert by simply typing in any URL and continue into the next page. There is no fee required to access the following Facebook statistics.
3. You should see a targeting window at this point which will display search criteria (location, demographics, likes & interests), you can also select advanced targeting options which will give you more options to narrow your search
4. It’s as easy as typing in ex. “United Kingdom” and you will notice an estimated reach statistic according to what you’ve selected.
5. The results for specific search criteria such as likes & interests: “Nike” are entirely dependent on how many people have selected “Nike” as an interest.

The main problem with the ad creation page is limitation. For the next few examples I’m looking to find everything relative to Nike, Nike Football, Nike Football Singapore and Nike Singapore. Using the search box in my personal Facebook profile I can start my research.

Problems with Search that can prevent accurate results

1. When comparing different likes & interests there is currently no way to remove duplicates. Ex. One person (or profile) can be fan of both “Nike” and “Nike football”. You might be tempted to scrape Facebook, and sort the data in a spreadsheet. I don’t suggest it, and it might be worth taking the time to read about lawsuits concerning this matter.

2. Sometimes you will find groups in the Likes & Interests search and it won’t actually be a valid group in Facebook. Here was my experience searching for “Adidas football Asia”

 

 

3. The search can seize and display previous results. This is a software error, if you notice that the same search suggestions keep appearing you need to refresh the page and start over.

4. The search will sometimes display multiple groups for the same like & interest:

For reference purposes: to get my results I used the following search criteria:

Location: Singapore
Age: Any to Any
Gender: All
Interested in: All (women, men)

Conclusion

Using this method as your only source for your market validation would be a grave mistake, instead use it as an add on to your other primary and secondary sources. When it comes to finding legitimate information through Facebook, this is by far the easiest method, provided that your results aren’t just a bunch of fake profiles. Yes, fake profiles. There’s alot of them and of course these people will randomly join groups to maintain their status as a real person.

So what’s the answer? Make sure you use a sample size of at least 10,000, 100,000 is even better.

On a personal note, try not to use this tool with an evil marketing grin. Facebook has been inundated with redundant, devious and deceptive advertising that has put even the most novice of users out of the “CLICK HERE TO GET YOUR FREE CREDIT SCORE” game.

Be sure to read Sam’s post on behavioral re-targeting.

Here’s an excerpt:”If you want me to buy your product, do something good, make a better product, hell make a better advertisement. Convince me your shoes can make me walk on water, make me laugh, draw pretty pictures, find someone that I trust to endorse your product. But, please, don’t trick me and stop following me around for Pete’s sake.

Enjoy!

 

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could find out if people liked your video, or hated it so much that they left right after the first scene? YouTube can answer that.

Welcome to Insight.  Insight is a free innovative tool available in your YouTube account that essentially transforms your videos into focus groups, giving you detailed statistics for each of your uploads. Within Insight, you can find an innovative tool called Hotspots that essentially gauges your audience level:

The Hotspots feature, or the “film critic” as I like to call it, works like this:

• Your video plays next to a graph which shows you the high and low points of the video
• YouTube compares your video’s abandonment rate to other videos of similar length
• The graph is represented by a green (low point) or red (high point) line
• Quite simply, if the graph goes up (hot), less people are leaving your video and possibly even rewinding to watch a scene again
• When the graph goes down (cold), viewers are either fast forwarding to a good part or leaving the video entirely

Trust me, Hotspots is your most ruthless critic.  It’s not for the faint-hearted.  Compare it to asking your good friend what they thought of your video.

Question 1:  How did you like my video?

 

Friend:  Um, ya it was ok, I guess…

Now if Hotspots could speak, here’s what it might say:

HOTSPOTS: Even Jeremy Kyle’s shows are better. I started thinking about cheeseburgers 3 seconds in.

Okay?  Squirming in your seat yet?  It gets better…

Question 2: Was there any part of the video you liked?

 

BOB: Um ya, there was a cool part about a guy laughing or something like that.

HOTSPOTS: The only scene worth rewinding happened at 3:03 (guy with a hyena laugh) until 3:10, then I started thinking about cheeseburgers again.

Although YouTube won’t exactly give you these kinds of answers,  it will definitely help determine your video’s effectiveness. Use the “film critic’s” advice to find out if the scene with the Ferrari was the big hitter, or maybe if your video was just too long. Ensure you make the most from that graph, it can reveal more truths than just comments and ratings!

Need some inspiration? Have a look at a video with over 200 million views:

So how do you make a great video? Here are some tips:

1. Plan it out: Is it going to be funny, serious etc..
2. Invest in a good camera and microphone, it can make the difference
3. Waiting on fade screens for too long will cause your viewer to lose attention. If you must, try and add music, text etc..
4. Be original, no matter how hard finding that new idea may be.
5. Short and sweet. Most of the top videos are rarely over 5 minutes. Coincidence?

A great post by Chris Pirillo may guide you in the right direction in his compilations of a top 50 tips list to making YouTube videos.

Here are some other great videos on YouTube:

If you haven’t used this tool yet, I strongly urge you to get in touch with YouTube Insight accessible through the Insight dashboard in your YouTube account.

More information can be found on the Official Google blog, by the YouTube team.

Have a look at the statistics for your video and find out if you’re made for Hollywood, or maybe…..public broadcasting.

Happy YouTube-ing!

Photo Credits:

Meatloaf Graph http://www.peter-ould.net

 

As I write this, Sam is busy delivering meme training for the company. For those interested in memes, social media and viral videos there really are no words to describe how immensely, insanely amazing the old spice campaign has been. This video sums up the whole thing:

Silverfish Handcatch!

To make this post useful in some way – why not consider how you might actually engage with people next time you’re running a social media campaign – don’t treat it as broadcast, treat it as a two way conversation.

I realised the other day that the internet is a lot like mediaeval England. The power that some of the top people online hold is really similar to the old school ruling system.

Someone like Matt Cutts has so much power over the entire lives and livelihoods of so many people, and you practically have to appeal to get an audience with him so he can decide the fate of your website – sounds pretty feudal to me!

Read on to see where everyone else fits in…

Thanks so much to Leonie for her awesome design skillz!

So, back in the day, SEO content had two objectives: 1. optimise for search engines; and 2. be interesting to users.

And that was the order of importance.

After all, writing for the search engines meant more people would see your content. So you did everything you needed to so the spiders could understand what your content was about.

But search engines have been adding social media posts to search results, which means the old objectives’ order of importance is shifting.

Now if you want your site to rank well, instead of writing primarily for search engines, you need to write for both search engines and users, so that no matter how someone tries to find content, you’ll be there.

Then: Writing for spiders

Now: Writing for users

This is not so much a shift in technique as it is a shift in perception.

Long ago, if you wanted to be found by people, you needed to have content that ticked all of the search engines’ boxes in a fairly consistent, predictable way.

Now, you need to do that in a subtle enough way that people don’t get turned off and in an exciting enough way that they actually tell other people.

How do you do this?

Well, start by keeping in mind that you’re writing for people, not for spiders.

You don’t want your information to be inaccessible to spiders, but at the end of the day, SEO is about getting people to your site.

Sure, search engines want to get people to the right content, but people aren’t just relying on Google to help them find what they want anymore. More and more they’re relying on each other to recommend things. So you need to write in a way that encourages or compels people to share.

Find your target audience.

This is not wait-for-people-to-come-to-us SEO. This is proactive. Search Twitter, Facebook, all those things, and see what your target audience likes and shares with each other.

Figure out what they respond to, and do it yourself.

Does your 18-35 year old single male demographic love lists? Do your mums from Manchester like home decorating tips?

Think about how you can do something like that – just make sure it’s relevant to your industry. Put your own spin on it.

Do pretty much whatever it takes to hold on to their fleeting attention spans, and don’t be afraid to a bit controversial, funny or silly.

Which is pretty much what you did when writing linkbait, right? That’s what I mean by a shift in perception. It’s not just about the links; it’s also about the views, the shares, the likes – what people do when they respond to content, rather than what spiders do.

Then: Keyword-focussed content

Now: Sharing-focussed content

Times were, you could just stuff your paragraphs full of one word or the other, and the spiders would realise that you were talking about that word. Then when a customer looked for that word, the search engine would know which pages on the internet were talking about it.

Now, to be visible to customers, you have to create content that is easy to share.

How do you do this?

Make your content easy to scan and digest.

That way users can quickly know whether or not they find your content useful (hint: if they think your content might be hard to read or understand, they will immediately look elsewhere).

Loads of images, for example, keep people scrolling as photos are easy to comprehend quickly, and they are easy to share with other people.

Then let your target audience know it’s out there.

Just don’t be creepy or overly aggressive.

And always keep in mind the share-ability of headlines and opening paragraphs.

Twitter has its character limit, sure, but you don’t see long-winded expositions on Facebook, either. Much.

So be brief, especially in headlines. Headlines should be short, clear and compelling, so that people who retweet can add a comment without changing your headline.

Then: Repetitive content

Now: Varied content

My grandpappy told me of an era when content needed to stay fairly consistent (read: repetitive) so search engines would know what you were all about. Those were simpler, more innocent times.

Now, of course, people get bored by repetition, and bored users do not return to sites. Search engines have of course gotten much more sophisticated, and they can tell when users act like your content is useless. They do this by measuring things like bounce rates.

So you need to write content that is so attention grabbing that users want to come back.

How do you do this?

You do want to be relevant to your industry, but you need to be unique.

No one cares about a window cleaning company’s take on the US presidential elections, right?

But maybe that window cleaning company can demonstrate a bizarre connection, like showing that window sales soar right before a Republican is elected. That is interesting and totally shareable.

And also made-up, but you get the idea.

But it also proves another point:

Your content can deviate from what your business strictly does.

So a post that shows a correlation between clean windows and elections has little to do with the day-to-day aspects of cleaning windows, but it gets people clicking on your site. And telling other people. And coming back later.

 

If you put up this interesting, shareable content regularly, and you should rank in normal search results and in real-time, Twitter and Facebook searches. Which means you’re everywhere people look for information online. And even the people who didn’t know they were looking for you will find you.

 

Photo credits:

Google lego by manfry on Flickr

Cheerleader by Rick Scully on Flickr

Man decorating tree by meemal on Flickr

Cutest fight ever by Sarah_Jones on Flickr

Window cleaners by pmorgan on Flickr

You just spent a hearty amount of time with consultants, at a conference, or in front of your computer screen learning about linkbuilding. The plan is perfect and the execution is going just as well. Rankings are going up, traffic is sky rocketing, and your boss loves you.

Then you notice a competitor is climbing the rankings one day. You do some research to identify what they are doing (hey, you might learn something new!) and alas, they are copying all the links you have built. Every good directory you found, the content you built, and the tactics you are using are being copied.

No Fair! Right?

Copying is Common

Think back to any good SEO training and you will see a part on competitive analysis, the same goes for link building training. Experts tell you to utilize tools like SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer and Linkscape, Raven’s Site Finder, and so many more to identify those good links that you can duplicate.  It’s a great tactic, until someone does it to you. So how do you deal when someone does it to you?

Get links they can’t duplicate easily!

The trick here is to get the good links, the golden ticket links … editorial based links that only come from consumers. And how do you get them? Well that’s the no so easy and non-duplicable part.

Go Unique

You have to have a site/company/idea that is truly unique and demanded by the public. Think about the wins in this world. They were the companies that started it. They had the “idea” and pushed for it. Think about Snuggies. That could have been a massive failure, but now is a complete win. It was a novel idea and they pushed it hard.

Go Viral

Brainstorm a great idea for a contest, an infographic, something that people will link to. Remember the snuggie. That went viral because people thought the idea was so ridiculous that they had Pub Crawls in Snuggies. And now, they make them for your dog. They are hits at every Christmas party.

Yes, I know it is easier said than done to go viral, but you have to work at this so that you beat your competitors out in the end.

Go Social

Then you have to be there when your customers need you. Being a good company that responds to customers, in good times and in bad, are the ones that will get the link. Be that company that changes a bad post from an irate customer into a great post about how you went out of your way to help them.

In the end, the best way to deal with copycats is to be unique. Don’t go after the directories. Don’t do what is easy. Don’t use a company to link build, use your idea/product/service to do it for you. That is what will spell success now and in the future.

Imagine my surprise as I was sitting in the Philly airport, reading a copy of Lucky Magazine, that I should come across something I love. It’s an advertisement from Bing. Yes, I said love. It’s a blatant advertisement, and it’s from Bing (stop groaning, they are getting better!).

The total win is that they are using the community (aka Blogger Jen Lula) to reach online shoppers. Magazine readers like me who go online to find the products we like in magazines. Priceless.

 

Here is what Bing is doing right (and wrong) and what you might think about in your social and link building plans.

Mix Your Style in with the Medium

Bing’s Play: The ad looks just like any other section of the magazine with specific articles of clothing and accessories, cost and designer. It’s well integrated with the magazine’s feel, but also has a blatent “Presented by Bing” at the top.

If you are doing a campaign with Facebook, Twitter, Lucky, or Men’s Health, match your campaign to your company and the medium. You want to be transparent in the fact that you are advertising, but also want to keep the continuity of the publication. Think about adding a blog into your site using wordpress. The best theme is going to be your own site. You want a seamless transition between your site and wordpress. In a magazine, having an ad look something like a page from the magazine with good content is awesome. But make it plain as day that it’s you, not the magazine editors. No hiding things.

Involve the Community

Bing’s Play: The social part of this is that the advertisement included a shout out to a fashion blogger and included some fashion ideas for readers.

Including a member of the community is a sure fire way to get in with the crowd. But more than that, it opens up the playing field for that community leader. In this ad, Jen will surely add more readers to her blog from this exposure and I am sure will become a Bing user for some time. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved, including the brand. Remember karma is a real thing in business. Show the love, and the love will be returned.

Give them a Reason to Visit

Bing’s Play: Included in the ad is a giveaway integration with Bing, Style, and Jen.

Be one of the first 75 readers to upload a photo of your favorite Bing fashion find to StyleSpotter.LuckyMag.com and win a studded cluth from Lucky. Visit StyleSpotter.LuckyMag.com for expert shopping advice from Jen.

You can’t get much better than a push to purchase from a Bing search and then throw in consumer generated content to Style, and reference the expert level advice from Jen. This promotion has it all within 2 sentences. When pushing a social media/link bait promotion, don’t make it all about you, and give people a good reason to visit and link to your site. The more it’s about them, the better your campaign will do.

Include New, Fun Technology

Bing’s Play: In a final knock out punch, they included a mobile tag to be read by Microsoft Tag on the user’s mobile device.

Talking to the younger generation is all about what else their mobile phone can do. This little tag stands out on the page (differentiation, think 1998 when magazine ads didn’t always include a URL) and makes the user use a Microsoft service.

Downside: the link goes to mobile Bing only. Now how cool would it have been to include in that tag a link to all the products on the page and where they can be purchased? #justsayin

One Note to Bing

You have search boxes to the products on the page, but they are VERY general searches. How about for a month or so having a one-box type of thing displaying that product for that very general search? Or at least hand coding those glasses into a search for “oliver peoples eyeglasses” because that frame just would not show up for me. Minor fail there guys.

An Honest and Open Letter to Facebook: You Are on Notice

Before I get started, I would like to affirm that these are my own thoughts and are in no way reflective of Distilled or any of its other employees opinions or beliefs. Viewer discretion is advised.

 

Dear World,

I have read a handful of articles in the last few weeks about why people are or are not quitting Facebook. I have been sitting on the fence now for the last week or so and have been dangerously close to pulling the trigger and ending what has been a rather tumultuous relationship. At the risk of sounding like a hipster, I genuinely do miss the old Facebook.

 

It’s not that I really mind if my father reads my status updates, or that a potential employer may find pictures of me holding a beer in a picture or twelve. I genuinely believe that for my generation (of 20somethings) there is a different attitude about these things. First, I think we’re smart enough to detag and protect our profile and images well enough that these images should be relatively difficult to find if it’s a concern. But secondly, if a Presidential candidate can admit trying cocaine and still get the job , I hardly think that it’s reasonable to rule me out of a less important job for imbibing from time to time.

Don’t Push Me, ‘Cause I’m Close to the Edge

Reason 1: Privacy

The first reason I nearly quit is that I, like so many others, have a genuine issue with Facebook’s privacy standards and carelessness with personal details. Again, this goes beyond my worrying about people finding pictures of me making a fool of myself, it’s much bigger issues.

For example, the fact that TechCrunch recently ran an article about how easily a user could read other users (even with whom they were not friends) personal conversations on Facebook chat is a clear indication of the types of dangerous loopholes that may still exist in the coding. For a site worth so many billion dollars, it hardly seems to be locked up very tight.

 

Reason 2: Nostalgia

The second reason I nearly quit is because I miss the old Facebook. I’m not trying to say that Facebook should have kept the doors closed to the general public. In fact, the openness of Facebook and the access it provides me to old friends and family long lost are one of the few reasons I’m staying.

However it is my opinion that every single update to the system has made the platform less user friendly. Whilst some of the features added along the way have been great (sharing photos, chat, embedded images and videos) they have been poorly executed. I used to enjoy interacting with people on Facebook, now I just rely on the newsfeed.

 

Reason 3: Greed

Facebook no longer really does anything for me. I get most of the quality/interesting articles I read from Reddit or Twitter. I find it difficult if not annoying to navigate thanks to recent changes. The “notifications” system has gotten worse (I don’t even check my emails from Facebook anymore and it stopped working on my smartphone) and it takes for granted the purpose “The Facebook” was designed to fulfil.

It was a great way to figure out who the cute girl in your class was during Undergrad, but it’s no longer an effective way for me to meaningfully engage with other users. I can hardly find my friend’s birthdays on the thing anymore and my head nearly explodes just by landing on the homepage. Facebook is no longer a manageable and useful social media platform for me anymore.

 

Reason 4: Vanity

The fourth reason I nearly quit is because Facebook has made me more self-centred. I am not trying to absolve myself of responsibility, in fact, I know I let it happen and I am to be blamed. Facebook went from a place where I would happily go see what my friends were up to at other schools or on their year abroad to a point where I was so overwhelmed by the constant flurry of activity that I could no longer be bothered.

I have a pretty sad confession to make and I doubt very much I’m alone here: if I’m not tagged in a photo, I usually don’t care. This obviously isn’t always the case, but when my newsfeed is filled with images of people I have spoken to since I was 13 years old and 50 new pictures of their babies, my A.D.D. kicks in and I end up browsing aimlessly before ending up back on my own homepage, usually forgetting why I signed on in the first place. And more often than not, if someone hasn’t posted something on my wall I don’t remember to check what they’re up to either.

This is, unfortunately, a part of growing up. You lose touch with people you care about, but I have a dreadful feeling that this process was made a lot quicker as a result of Facebook and the mindscramble I receive every time I log on.

 

Reason 5: Fear

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I find the advertising practises of Facebook to border on unethical. I know some may find this amusing (or even hypocritical) coming from an SEO, but it’s true. I’m not against marketing, and I’m not against people helping me find what I’m after- in fact it’s my job to ensure this. Paid advertising campaigns through Facebook that resort to tactics like “targeting people with misspellings in their profile” for alcoholic beverages is abhorrent.

The level of targeting that Facebook peddles to advertisers as the holy grail of advertising success provides some pretty obvious and despicable opportunities for the less honest amongst us to take advantage of people and manipulate them into buying things they neither need, nor want.

And as is the case in the above REAL example, this leaves a lot of room for advertisers to hurt the industry and society a great deal. And though they will claim it’s not their job to police these advertising schemes, it illuminates quite clearly the positive efforts Google has taken to combat some of these issues (such as penalising sites advertising steroids and other illegal substances).

 

So, Why on Earth am I Still on Facebook?

Reason 1: Forgiveness
I’m willing to give Facebook a chance to get their shit in order. At this point, it is not so much what they have done with their massive databases of information (that they own whilst your account is alive) it is what they reserve the right to do with it that scares me.

The moment I find out that a picture from my Facebook profile has been sold for stock images will be the moment I close the door on Facebook for good.

 

Reason 2: Reliance

Because there is not an equivalent, well populated site where I can easily share things with my friends and family. I live several timezones away from many of my nearest and dearest. I want to make a genuine effort to be better about keeping in touch, but there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to write them all as often as I’d like.

 

If and when there is a better/safer alternative (one that I hope Diaspora will provide) I will consider a move. The only problem will be convincing the most important of my 1,256 acquaintances (they can’t all be true “friends,” can they?) with me.

 

Reason 3: Responsibility

Because as Danny Sullivan points out in this article, the internet is my livelihood. As much as I may disagree with Facebook, I need to understand it to do my job effectively and it’s quite difficult to get involved and advise clients when I no longer use a product or service.

 

Reason 4: Openness

And, ultimately it’s less my privacy about which I’m concerned. I have plenty of skeletons in my closet, but I trust the people I care about enough to know that any truly damaging information would not be aired out on Facebook.

I am a bit of an open book and I am human and I make mistakes, we all do. However, I am fortunate enough to trust the security of my friendships and relationships enough that I don’t worry myself too much with Facebook’s questionable, at best, privacy policies.

Conclusion

To my close friends and family, please treat this as the most public apology I can offer (odds are you ignore my links and photos on Facebook as much as I do yours). I honestly will try harder to stay in touch even if it means picking up the phone, writing an email, or-heaven forbid- a letter or a postcard.

Finally, to you Facebook: you are on very thin ice, consider yourself warned.

Sincerely,

Sam Crocker

Facebook User 2004-?

 

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to include them below or find me on Twitter (a slightly less invasive social media platform).

A friend recently asked me about press releases versus a company blog. He was arguing that the company blog is a more trusted source of information about product releases and other company information. Please note that the idea was spurred by this blog post by Jeff Bullas.

I disagree, but want to check first. I am wrong when it comes to assumptions like this, a lot. It’s always best to ask. So I sent out a very quickly written survey to Facebook and Twitter. The results were interesting at first, and so I took the next step and sent the same survey to an email list of personal, non-Internet related friends and family. All responses were recorded in Survey Monkey. Below is the breakdown of where the responses came from and questions.

Collector	# Responses
Facebook	13
Twitter	64
Email	54

For those that care, I have over 3000 followers on Twitter, over 600 Facebook friends, and sent the email to 111 people.

Survey/Overall Results

1. Do you subscribe to or regularly read any company corporate blogs?

• No (70%)
• Yes (30%)

2. Do you ever read Press Releases when researching new products?

• No (61%)
• Yes (39%)

3. Think about the different forms of communication a company might use online to push information out about itself or new products. Please rank them in terms of perceived trust with 1 being the most trustworthy, and 6 being the least trustworthy.

1. Third Party Review (2.11)
2. News Section of Website (3.27)
3. Company Blog (3.57)
4. Press Releases (3.8)
5. Twitter Stream (4.09)
6. Facebook Page Wall (4.35)

Who can spot the boo-boo in here? The red herring I placed of sorts? I’ll give you a minute to look …

Got it yet?

What’s typically in the news section of a company’s website? Press Releases. But it is different, some place third party mentions. So I had to throw that in there too. To be fair, some of them have been replaced by company blogs, and press releases are on the blog. So it’s all convoluted. This isn’t a scientific study, k?

 

 

 

When taking in all responses, the most trusted source of company information is: Third Party Review. Hold off on the “Well, Duh!” comments, there is more cool information coming.

So news from the company website outranks social media in this study. But the closeness of the top three made me think. So I broke everything out by response collector (Twitter, Email, Facebook).

 

 

 

Twitter

With this subset, which is largely more Internet focused influencers, the results changed substantially when it came to trust. The majority of responders still didn’t read Press Releases (~56%) or subscribe to company blogs (~66%) though, which I find fascinating.

In this subset, the following results were found about trust in corporate communication methods:

1. Third Party Review (1.98)
2. Company Blog (3.45)
3. Twitter Stream (3.63)
4. News Section of Website (3.67)
5. Facebook Page Wall (4.2)
6. Press Releases (4.45)

So Twitter based respondents (discounting the “Duh”-answer of 3rd Party) trust a company blog more and press releases the least. And of course Twitter was more trust worthy than Facebook. No surprise there.

Facebook

In the Facebook subset, there were fewer respondents, but still some interesting answers. Facebook was like both other sections in that they generally don’t read press releases (53.8%) or subscribe to company blogs (61.5), but this side is more likely to read press releases. This seems to be in line with the fact that Facebook users are more on the cutting edge, but lean more on the side of your “typical consumer.”

1. Third Party Review (2.15)
2. Company Blog (3.00)
3. Press Releases (3.38)
4. News Section of Website (3.46)
5. Twitter Stream (4.23)
6. Facebook Page Wall (4.38)

The interesting thing here is that they trust posts on a Facebook Wall the least!!! Wow. There are some trust issues there. But what I am more interested in is the fact that the blog still out ranks the press release, but still by a small margin. So the third group was selected of people that are not on the internet all day for the most part.

Email

The email user list, as mentioned before, are NOT internet people. They are my friends and family that have “normal” jobs and don’t obsess over metrics like these. They overwhelmingly do NOT subscribe to company blogs (88.9%), and with little wonder as most don’t know what RSS even is. They don’t generally read press releases (57.4%), but that is still average for the whole group. There is very little play there.

1. Third Party Review (2.26)
2. News Section of Website (2.76)
3. Press Releases (3.13)
4. Company Blog (3.85)
5. Facebook Page Wall (4.52)
6. Twitter Stream (4.61)

With this group, here is the highly fascinating thing, the “News Section” of a website ranks almost as high as the third party review. Fascinating! Remember though, the “news section” of a website is typically filled with press releases. But this was all based on perception, so they might not have made the connection.

What is more telling thought is that the third most trust worthy communication for these “everyday consumers” are press releases. At the bottom are blogs and social media.

The New Media Disconnect

My point in this study was not only to show what people “trust” more, blogs or press releases, but also show the disconnect. What we think as new media purveyors is not always accurate. We live and breathe this world, but not everyone does. Always keep in mind the Browsers Video (below), regular people don’t think like we do.

The marketing choices we make cannot be centered around our own choices, but those of our customers. If your customer is a heavy Twitter user, then yes, using a survey asked of Twitter followers is fine. But the answers change when you get offline. Always know who your customer is, and how to best communicate with them. Don’t let the “feelings” of a social media consultant (yes I am included in that) force your hand in a way that isn’t best for your business.

It’s easy to create linkbait. You pick a topic that people will be interested in, research it using google.com or google.co.uk and write it out or design it or whatever.

Of course, it only works that easily if you speak the same language as your audience.

So what happens if a client comes to you, wanting linkbait that will grab attention in its neck of the woods, and its neck of the woods is, say, Eastern Europe? What then, huh?

Well, luckily for you (and some of my clients), I have a way of figuring out what to do.

To demonstrate how to create linkbait for other cultures, I am going to arbitrarily say we’re dealing with an international restaurant review website that wants to get lots of traffic from Eastern Europe.

Now, we need to create linkbait that is relevant to our client’s target audience, so let’s go for ‘food’, as that is what most restaurants serve and our client ought to be an expert in that area.

Research the area

If you are targeting a particular area, like Eastern Europe, you need to find out which countries have the most internet activity.

If we search ‘internet usage in eastern europe’, limited by Published in the Past Year, we find this internet usage in Europe stat.

This super-useful stat show Poland has 8th largest number of internet users in Europe (around 20 million) and the largest number in Eastern Europe, so let’s target the Polish audience.

Then you should research (that is, read the Wikipedia page for) the country, so you can be a tiny bit familiar with the basic facts – population, geography, history, that sort of thing. It might not play a direct part in the creation of linkbait, but knowing a bit about the people you are talking to will only help you figure out your content, presentation and tone.

Research the topic

First we need to translate ‘food’, since we’ll be doing a country-specific search.

Type ‘food’ into Google Translate, and we can see that ‘food’ in Polish = żywność.

Now we do a Google search for the target term, which results in this:

 

Now we right click on the results to use the Google Global Firefox extension (which you can download here):

 

Make sure it’s searching blogs.

This is pretty simple, since most languages have adopted the word ‘blog’. Just click the triangle, and then select the word that looks like ‘blog’.

 

Go through all the top results with Google Translate.

I always have to copy the URL and paste it into Translate in another tab because it doesn’t give you the ‘Translate this page option’, but it still works.

 

Try to categorise the posts by topic, style of post, tone, etc. to find what will work for your client.

In this case, we had:

• Food in the news:
  • Discussing govt policies for preventing Polish food being sold into the black market
  • Announcing charity food drive for Caritas (didn’t make sense)
  • Discussing Michelle Obama’s move to defeat childhood obesity in the States
  • Link to an article about fast food in America
• Just about food
  • Talked about an organic store
  • Vegan blog
  • Discussing popcorn as a healthy snack
• Food-related other
  • Dog blog talking about dog food
• A broken link

 

Do some digging if anything you don’t understand pops up.

For example, the post announcing the charity food drive for Caritas didn’t make sense in Google Translate’s English.

Because 1) I had never heard of Caritas; 2) Caritas was the same word in the original and in the translation; and 3) Caritas is clearly a proper noun, I did a quick English-lanuguage search for ‘Caritas’. The home page of the charity states that it does food drives to help feed impoverished people.

A further search for ‘pead polish’ (a search for ‘pead’ was too generic) reveals the PEAD plan supplies “food from intervention stocks for the benefit of the most deprived people” in Poland.

So this obviously is a charitable food drive organised by Caritas for the PEAD programme.

This won’t ultimately play a part in the linkbait, but we learned something, and learning is its own reward, right?

Writing the post

We can see that the top blogs which talk exclusively about food are related to health: organic shops, vegan diets and healthy snacks are all covered.

The articles also take care to explain what the different diets are, suggesting people are only just now starting to get into these types of lifestyles.

That means there are probably plenty of people in Poland who are interested in healthier diets, but they don’t know how to get started. And in a consumerist society, the place to get started is wherever you can buy stuff, like shops and restaurants.

So we should find some health-related retailers and restaurants in Poland. But let’s narrow it down further. Generally speaking, city dwellers adopt trends more quickly than their country-dwelling counterparts do. And bigger cities provide bigger target markets.

So we should target the biggest city in Poland. Which, thanks to our previous research into the country, we know is Warsaw – it is both the capital and the most populous city in Poland.

Now we want to create a list of health shops and restaurants in Warsaw.

Assuming the client is happy for us to write the post, we simply search for related topics like ‘vegetarian restaurants warsaw’, or even ‘ekologicznych sklepów w warszawie’. This is a non-exhaustive list of what I found:

• Restaurants
  • Biosfeera, a restaurant recommended for its vegetarian offerings
  • Vega, a strictly vegetarian restaurant
• Shopping
  • Organic Market in Galeria Mokotów, an organic food and herbal medicine shop in a Warsaw mall
  • Eko Drogeria, which specialises in organic cosmetics and bath products

All these sites can be translated into English, and then all you have to do is read their descriptions, try to find some reviews and write a short paragraph about what they sell. You can also do an advanced image search for images of the places, labelled for reuse under the Creative Commons license, obviously.

Finally, make sure to finish it in time for it to be translated, if needs be. Try to give as thorough a brief as possible to the translator. They will need to know if you want a word-for-word translation, which would be fine for an information-dense piece, or if you are trying to convey a particular tone.

After all, jokes, idioms and proverbs might not make sense when translated verbatim.

So that’s how I create linkbait for cultures that are not familiar to me. I’m by no means the master of this type of thing, though, so if you have any tips or tricks, I’d love to hear them!

 

UPDATE: I didn’t add photo credits! My apologies to the owners of the photos.

Woman with massive sandwich by Randy Son of Robert on Flickr

Confused monkey by Michael Keen on Flickr

On graph: Black market by People of Africa on Picasa

On graph: Caritas logo by Caritas

On graph: Chubby child by Rrrrred on Flickr

On graph: Fries by freefoto.com on Flickr

On graph: Organic label by Leo Reynolds on Flickr

On graph: Hemp milk by size8jeans on Flickr

On graph: Popcorn by *Micky on Flickr

On graph: Dog food by MShades on Flickr

Women shopping by maalie on Flickr

Gratuitous shot of Warsaw by Pawel Kabanski on Flickr

Hooptie of awesomeness by an0nym0n0us on Flickr