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Social Media Explorer

Facebook Group And Brand Page Best PracticesYesterday

Image via CrunchBase

Facebook is an easy place to engage a group of people around your brand. The social tools, group functionality and free brand pages give companies, clubs and organizations an unprecedented level of access to a group of interested consumers. The easy advertising tools also allow businesses to promote themselves to the 100 million (or thereabouts) users on the social network, not to mention the social advertising that takes place when someone joins your group or becomes a fan.

But as easy as companies, brands an organizations find the interface and as powerful as the feature set its, messing it up can be easy to do and the negative repercussions very powerful in driving people away from your brand.

With a tip of the cap to Collin Douma (links below), I thought it appropriate to begin a list of Facebook Group and Brand Page Best Practices For Brands. This is, by no means, a complete list, but something we can all add to. (Hint, hint: Comments are a good place for you

Web Analytics Basics For BloggersOctober 3

Bloggers, being writers at heart, are often not “numbers people” by nature.  While I do have a passing acquaintance with basic math skills like balancing my checkbook, and actually worked as a bookkeeper a few times in my somewhat eclectic career path, Excel spreadsheets do not fill me with impish glee by any stretch of the imagination.  

In short, Danica McKellar I am not.  (Although my driving habits on the commute home might indicate an irrational belief that I’m Danica Patrick.)

And yet, in the last couple of years, I’ve learned to embrace numbers and various mathematical calculations in the form of web analytics.  

Why should a blogger care about analytics?  

• Setting measurable goals.  If you’re serious about blogging, then you need to set goals for attracting and engaging an audience. To determine success or failure to reach those goals, you need analytics data.  
• Attracting advertisers.  We talked about this a while back in the post on offering demographic data.  While demographic data can make a blog more attractive to advertisers, having an accurate measurement of your traffic is the baseline for consideration for most sponsors.
• Selling stuff.  If your blog conducts any kind of

Patrick O’Keefe Offers Community Management Expertise On SME-TVOctober 2

With companies and brands clamoring around the buzzword of “community” recently, it only makes sense they would be looking for experienced advice on building and managing them. While I would certainly welcome all comers, there are a good number of community experts out there. One is Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network, who has been managing online communities since 2000. I caught up with O’Keefe for an episode of SME TV at Blog World & New Media Expo recently, where we both served on a panel together.

Exploring The Relationship Between Social Media & SearchOctober 1

We try to keep a reasonably tight editorial focus on social media here. The name of the blog is, after all, Social Media Explorer, not Random Internet-Related Stuff Explorer.

(Note to self: Mention to Jason in passing that while he’s working out the details of the blog revamp, to just consider a name with a broader scope. WebCrunch is kind of catchy. Fallsaleizer?)

Anyway.

For a moment, I’d like to widen the scope a little, and look at the sticky relationship between social media and search engine optimization.

Up to this point, there have been two distinct camps: the blogging/social media crowd and the SEO crowd. While there are a few people who move in both circles, there is also a history of discord between the two. Social media peeps complain that SEOs abuse and “game” the social web, effectively lowering the human value of those networks for material gain.

SEOs complain that bloggers, social news power users and other social media types are pimping the system in their own way, and are often woefully uninformed about the basics of how search engines index and rank sites.

On the other hand, I also see a lot of cross-pollination of ideas among the top players on both sides.

The fact is, search and social are, if you’ll pardon the pun, intrinsically linked. As long as Google dominates search (which all evidence points to be

Here’s To Knowing Your AudienceSeptember 30

The first rule of communications, and thus the first rule of social media, is to know your audience. While I can draw anecdotal conclusions about you from comments, reaction, in-bound links and more, I don’t really have a whole lot of information about you.

Because I’m going through the thought process of a reorganization and redesign of Social Media Explorer, I’d like to zero in on you and your expectations of the content you find here. Feel free to offer as much or as little as you’d like in the comments, but please take a moment to answer this question so I can get a better understanding of what type of content we should focus on:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Thanks for the input and for continuing to read Social Media Explorer. You make my day, everyday.