Social Networking, Viral Marketing & Viralization

Increasingly, the Internet is becoming a flat(tish - not flat yet but getting flatter by the day) social community. We join on-line cultures such as Facebook and LinkedIn. We share bookmarks to sites we think are cool via services like Digg and StumbleUpon. We participate in on-line knowledge sharing groups, e.g., Yahoo!Answers, Google Groups. We Twitter about everything under the sun. For the business that owns an on-line presence, there exists great potential to leverage these on-line, social communities to generate heightened awareness in the wider universe of the Internet for potential customers of your business' web-presence.

I won't undertake an exhaustive listing of all the approaches that might be applied, but will give some illustrative examples of the general sorts of things that can succeed, if properly used. Let your imagine run wild.

First off, and most easily applied is the currently popular idiom of “sharing” a site with others. All that's required is a non-intrusive but salient collection of links to the various social bookmarking sites and an “e-mail a friend” link. By placing a collection of links in the page, you raise the chances that visitors will share it. I prefer the icon idiom for links to these services; takes less room on the page and surfers recognize the logo icons of the various bookmarking services, even when the images are tiny (see top, right of this page). Part Two of this article will detail a widget I developed for this purpose (not the lightest weight fare for the non-technical reader). The main point is that there's a huge opportunity to have your visitors engage in viral marketing of your websites and services. In order to maximize the effectiveness of this model, you have to make it EASY; some surfers will bookmark your site without your help, but more will do so, if you provide access to the services right on your pages. This puts your site in front of more potential customers and offers the additional virtue of SEO benefits from being widely linked from many other sites. Spiders love pages to which lots of other pages point.

If your shop (or your client's) has a cause, even (especially!?!) if it's just how deeply concerned you are to serve your customers and do business well, promote it on your site. Give it a blog (WordPress is WAY simple...you're there now). If you (and your employees) have the dedication to update the commentary on a relatively regular (or at least frequent) basis, you can provide scads of content directly and simply. This creates more on-line content of interest to people who share the cause. Believe me, there are other standard-bearers for any cause you own; if only a few find your expressions worthy of cross-linking, you will kick your competitors tails SEO-wise. For general (not cross-linked) SEO value, this approach enhances and extends the volume of your content and keeps the change frequency higher; for spiders, “content is king.” as the saying goes. Frequent updates and increasing volume favorably impress search engines (especially appeasing the Google gods).

News items allow the chance to show currency in your grasp of the wider world as it pertains to your business. Providing links to important issues published elsewhere on the Internet can not only make you look savvier and more engaged, but gives surfers a motive to revisit your site and recommend it to others; that is, you pre-filtered pertinent, relevant content, removing the visitor/subscriber's burden to search for it. Again, the nature of news is (definitively) frequently changing - fresh content for visitors, subscribers, and the spiders. Did I mention “better SEO”?

Join a community (or six) and participate (lots) in meaningfully contributory ways (NOT like, “sweet, me too” - express yourself, even [read "especially"] if it's counter the popular trend or originally insightful, as long as it's honest and represents your REAL business model and concerns). If you have expert employees, encourage (maybe even bribe ‘em with a point-system related to positive replies) them to do the same; you retain these folks because you value their skills - leverage that. You (and your employees) don't need to advertise THE COMPANY by talking about it in every post (although a tasteful sig line can include a link to your home-page), but include your (business) home-page, a description of your services, and your values in your profile. The more useful your contributions to the community, the more likely people will be to poke around in your profile and discover your business (or explore the sig link, if you use one).

As promised, I won't flog this horse to death (especially not in all its colors), but I hope this post will have sparked some new and useful ideas for you. Be careful to be REAL, i.e., offer valuable content, and easy tools - accurately assess and express your goals and commitment...take realistically chewable bites. Don't place yourself in the situation of getting bookmarked or linked for the WRONG reasons. Don't approach these resources cynically, and they can launch your site(s) in both direct, grassroots awareness of what you do and about what you care as well as SEO.