social media conflict Archives by Mark Murnahan

SEO and Social Media: Picking Chicken Poop from Toothpaste

I have heard many arguments separating SEO and social media by trying to decypher which is more valuable. Many of the people arguing this point are on one side or the other, and miss the point that they are both tactics which work together toward an overall strategy. Many people also seem to miss the fact that they are largely the same thing.

Here are a few questions that marketers use for producing arguments:

Which is more important … SEO or social media?
Which discipline provides the higher return on investment?
How do you calculate the ROI of social media?
SEO? Isn’t that some sort of fairy dust?
How do you separate chicken poop from toothpaste?

OK, that last one was my own personal interpretation, but seriously … how can people get this so mixed up that they stand in their corner arguing their respective knowledge without coming together in the center and having a big group hug?

SEO opens a lot of doors for companies. Having their greatness spread across the Internet in a way that people will find it when they search for something is extremely productive. People still ask me the question “how will people find my website?” To me, the question seems pretty easy … they will search for it! Having great information on a well prepared website and making it available to search engines is a “no-brainer”. Well, it is a “some-brainer”, because a lot of people still don’t really grasp it. In any case, it is very valuable, and backed up with a lot of facts. It also provides a lot of value to back up your social media marketing endeavors.

Social media is a great way to discover the people who may be interested in searching for you. It is often a proactive approach where you can add yourself to the mix. It is also a great way to learn more about those people who are already searching for you, will be searching for you, or may never search for you but will take a recommendation from others they trust. It also provides a lot of value to your search engine optimization endeavors.

I find that a lot of people get these two fields very confused, both by trying to separate them and by trying to merge them. SEO and social media both have their own unique qualities, but the reality is that trying to separate them is about as easy as picking chicken poop out of your toothpaste.

Both of these areas of Internet marketing are the same in many ways. Search engines use popularity of a website measured by incoming links pointing to the website content as a major factor for ranking. Social media also uses the popularity of website content as a major factor for ranking. What a lot of people fail to realize is how much they both work the same, and they both work in synergy.

I would be pleased to carry on in my typically lengthy way of writing until my brain hurts from extolling the values of these various marketing tools, but I have already done that. After all, have you seen my blog title? It is titled “SEO and Social Media Marketing Blog“ for a reason.

Today, I want you to jump in and help me to explain how both are intertwined yet diverse.

If you can offer a better way to describe the relationship of SEO and social media than to say that it is like trying to pick chicken poop from your toothpaste, I will offer you a kiss full on the mouth. I have nice fresh breath, but I can assure you that I have found a whole lot of “chicken poop in my toothpaste”.

I still brush regularly.

Photo credit to andrein via Flickr

Polarize Your Audience and Stop Making Everybody Happy

Polarizing an audience does not mean that you are telling them to go away or that you do not appreciate them. When you polarize your audience, you set yourself apart from the crowd and you often gain respect. If somebody does not respect you for who you are, you probably did not need that respect anyway.

I am first going to explain what I mean by polarizing an audience, and then give you my recent example that happened with an article I wrote titled “Era of The Social Media Dubeshag”.

Stop Trying to Make Everybody Happy!

Sure, you are in business, and you want to be certain that anybody and everybody will want to buy your products or service. You want everybody to love you, I get it. Have you ever considered the downsides? Yes, the downsides can be that your biggest fans are indifferent. They are not the kind who will drag their friends, family, and complete strangers kicking and screaming to buy your brand.

Looking around the business world, you can see many very successful instances of polarizing an audience. A good example may be in Apple Computer’s decision to not support Adobe Flash Player in their iPhone and iPad products. Other examples are available in the soft drink market with Coke and Pepsi, and extreme examples occur in politics. Who wants a wishy-washy politician, anyway?

Do Facebook and Google Polarize Their Audience?

Once you know your brand, stand strong to it. I don’t mean going around and intentionally making people mad at you, but don’t be a chicken either. Just look to Facebook for an example. Facebook is not at all afraid to polarize their audience. They are in the news for it every time they make a big change, but you don’t hear them apologize for how they run their business, or the culture of their brand. Does it work for Facebook? Consider this: If Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest in the world with over 500,000,000 (yes, five hundred million) users.

Google battles against whole countries, like China and recently Italy. I don’t think I need to go into a lengthy argument of how Google polarizes their audience. They are famously polarizing, just as most massively successful brands are.

Sure, you can say that Facebook and Google do not have any real competition, but they do, and in huge order. Many people just don’t look at them as having competition because they are so extremely large and tower over their competitors. In any case, consider who you hear more polarizing stories from … Google or Dogpile?

Today’s Murnahanism: Being famous often requires the guts to be infamous. If you just want to please everybody, give up now, before you get hurt!

Pleasing Everybody Satisfies Nobody

I have said it many times that “I do not try to please everybody, and that pleases some people very much.” I strongly believe in this statement and it is with me at all times. What it means to me is that I will not waiver from who I am just to make people like me. It seems that if they do not like me, they dislike me with emphasis. Conversely, if they like me, they like me very much and they are brand-loyal. I try to leave very little room for indifference.

So What About This Dubeshag Article?

I created a new word for our chubby or less-than-Clark-Gable friends in the social media world. I called them “dubeshags”. The genesis of the word was in good humor, and there is what some would call a very funny back-story. You can read the article and judge for yourself.

It polarized an audience in a pretty big way. I was accused of all kinds of crimes of social media for writing it, such as using popular names to build popularity. I explained my reason for writing it in an addendum to the article and it included the statement as follows:

If you think I wrote it for attention, I would have left it as a draft if I didn’t want people to read it. Sure, I want it to be read. Maybe you just blog for the entertainment of your cats, but I do it for public consumption.

The moral of the story is this: Whether people loved it or hated it, the word “dubeshag” is no longer a secret. In roughly 36 hours, dubeshag went from zero listings in Google and no recognition at all to over 500 listings in Google (and later over 25,000); over 120 Digg.com diggs; a handful of votes on Mixx.com, Reddit.com, and StumbleUpon.com; was re-blogged on many blogs; has been tweeted to hundreds of thousands of Twitter users; created an interview on Social Blade; and has flattered a few of the dubeshags who were mentioned.

Who cares if it made a few people pout? Certainly not this author.

Author’s Addendum: This was a strange example, but it does show a few key things pretty clearly. It shows that original content can spread fast. It shows that with a little know-how, you can build a lot of incoming links. It shows that even if you step on a couple toes, you can still be very well branded and have an audience like the kind I mentioned … the ones who will tell a lot of people.

It is funny that since I wrote this and was away for an event at my son’s school for a couple hours, the number of listings for dubeshag on Google keeps going up. In a short time it increased to tens of thousands of pages talking about dubeshag, and linking to the article. So it should kind of make a person wonder what happens when you do that several times per day? What happens if you do it for six months, a year, or longer?

It amazes me how some people still wonder if this whole SEO and social media thing is really worth looking into or not. To those in doubt, I hope I have given you some food for thought, and I hope you will investigate further. Stick around and read some more. You may find that there is a lot more to it than you think.

Avoid Making Assumptions in Social Media

The particular incident I will explain occurred on Facebook, but can happen anywhere. I read a Facebook status of a person who was contemptuous toward the American judicial system. The person who wrote it was angry about the way the laws of his country work. He had a bone to pick. I suspect that anybody with a parking citation could give some criticism of the court system. Is it perfect? Of course not, but when compared to many nations, it is pretty effective. Whether we adapt our behavior to live within the laws, or not, is our choice, but this is not a legal argument … it is a blog about misunderstanding and making assumptions.

I had a reply for the Facebook status. Replies are accepted on Facebook. If you do not want a reply, it is generally a good idea that you keep it off your Facebook wall. My reply was based on my opinion of his status message. It made him angry that I gave my honest response. Perhaps he would have preferred that I lie.

He took my disagreement as public disrespect toward him. He was angry because he thought everybody should agree with him. I came to find out by calling him on the telephone that the reason he was so passionate about the topic came with a back-story. His Facebook status did not come with a back-story, or perhaps I would have commented on that, too. It seems that he is angry that a bunch of his family members are in jail as a result of a grand jury indictment that he thinks is unfair. My opinion is that a grand jury is usually not something to mess with, and those kind of indictments do not normally come without cause. I think there is a pretty good assumption that you have broken the law before they assemble a grand jury.

I have never faced charges before a grand jury. Come to think of it, nobody in my family has ever been indicted by a grand jury. Five of his family members were, all at once. Darn the luck, somehow this guy’s whole family seems to be getting the shaft. What an amazing coincidence that the courts are picking on his family all at once … and all of them innocent. Darn the luck, he presented a statement for others to comment on it … but preferably in his favor.

In any case, this very passionate individual was angry that I made a reply that did not suit his agenda. He made the assumption that everybody reading his Facebook status would respond to his lengthy story of his innocently imprisoned family rather than to this individual comment he made. In fact, he even said, in our telephone conversation, that “Most of the 400 people on my Facebook know the whole story behind it.” If you make this kind of assumption, you are delusional and bound to encounter many disagreements.

The point here is that if you make a brief statement about something, it is unwise to assume that everybody knows your lengthy story behind the statement. If it is in a Twitter or Facebook status update, be sure that if you do not want people to respond to only a portion of your message that you give them the whole story for their consideration. Otherwise, be happy that they took the care to reply to what little information you gave them.

On a similar note, it is best that if a person does give you a more complete story that you do not simply comment on the title of the story. What I mean by this is that if you comment on a Facebook or Twitter update that has a link associated, be sure you are not only commenting on the subject, but rather on the whole story.

This is just one of many simple ways to avoid conflict in social media. Please tell me what you think. I await your comments.