You gotta check out this WebProNews video interview at ACCM 08 of Steve Spangler - the science teacher turned catalog company CEO/Emmy award winner/keynote speaker/toy inventor:

In the video, Steve talks about how his Mentos + Diet Coke experiment turned into a YouTube sensation and how he was able to leverage it for his own marketing purposes. Steve is a client of ours and he even mentions Netconcepts (thank you Steve!!) as his experts behind the scenes helping him, which was really cool to hear.

Also in the video Steve shows off his cool flaming wallet, and how he is privileged to receive "special treatment" at airport security because of it. Um, yeah, that's not the kind of attention that you want, Steve

What you don't see in the video is that Steve also has a flaming business card holder. It's hilarious when he whips out one of his business cards and he has to put the fire out on the flaming card before he hands it to you. I'd LOVE to have one of those card holders and then troll the trade show floor and then hand over a flaming card to overaggressive, hard-selling vendors - but WITHOUT putting the fire out! hehe

I'd like to add some additional context to my last post on Social Media Power User "Hacks". In that post I provided some power user tips for social media marketing and optimization. These power user tips are meant to augment or supplement the necessary prerequisites of creating great content, being a valuable member of the social site/community, and being authentic your interactions (rather than deceitful or dishonest). Guerrilla tactics aren't a replacement for adding real value.

There are some ethical must-haves (underpinnings) of social media interaction such as engaging in meaningful conversation, instilling trust, being authentic, etc. Entering the social space without an internal moral compass is a recipe for disaster. Although such ethical must-haves wasn't part of my preso (you're rarely allocated more than 10 minutes to speak on an SES or SMX panel), don't think it's not important. It's THE most important thing.

Put another way, social media marketing isn't just a bunch of tricks and shortcuts, it's mostly about being adding value in an honest way, with the tricks and shortcuts added on to give you that little edge over your competition.

And when applying those aforementioned guerrilla tactics to gain the edge, you must exercise restraint and use good judgment. Don't just go hog wild and use every "trick in the book" and do it to excess.

Now consider this example of moderation versus excess... Sending a good friend a site with the StumbleUpon toolbar is totally acceptable. But compare that with sending an army of "friends" that you don't know a truckload of URLs to sift through. The latter is spammy, unethical, and reckless; you'd be foolish to engage in such behavior. You'd torch your account, burn relationships and ruin your reputation.

In line with that thought, you certainly don't need to employ the whole kit and caboodle of guerrilla tactics. For example, that tip for friending bands in MySpace may be totally unnecessary. Hopefully you can get to a critical mass of friends on MySpace without adding low-value friends (low value as in not likely to have meaningful interactions with you and not in your target market) such as all the bands and musicians that you like. But if you are at only a handful of friends and can't seem to get over the hump, it's nice to know that there's something you can do besides just sit and wait for people to friend you; you can proactively friend bands that you like. Granted an artist like Weird Al Yankovic isn't going to be terribly interactive with you, so at some point in the future you're likely to remove that friend from your ranks. Incidentally, that particular tip of friending bands came from a jewelry retailer I interviewed for the Marketing on MySpace article I wrote for MarketingProfs last year. Here's the quote:

...when starting off, you need to get Friends. It's kind of a bragging right on MySpace. If you have too few friends, it'll be tough to get the good ones—the ones who will end up buying from you. So, before you go after those, get a few hundred "bad" friends—bands are the easiest. They'll give you a respectable number on your Friends list, and will leave comments on your page—giving a little realism boost to your profile—making the addition of friends of the "good" type that much easier.

Finally, your focus in your social media marketing shouldn't be solely on gaining links. The links are mainly a byproduct of being a good social citizen. Of course they're still an essential byproduct nonetheless if you are an SEO. But it shouldn't be your main driver for participating in social media. Taking such a self-centered and short-sighted view will backfire. People will see through it. Operate by the principle of "pay it forward". Karma, in other words.

Live long and prosper.

Here in Toronto, I just finished my presentation on the Social Media Success panel. I shared some "hacks" for some social sites and services -- and when I say "hacks" -- I mean in the good sense of the word, not the evil sense. In other words, the way that the book publisher O'Reilly uses the word in their series of books such as Google Hacks. O'Reilly define "hacks" as "tools, tips, and tricks that help users solve problems." Such hacks tend to be aimed at intermediate-level power users. Here's what I covered:

Wikipedia

• Build up your street cred (long & virtuous contribution history, user profile page with Barnstar awards) before doing anything that could be construed as self-serving. It's not good enough to be altruistic on Wikipedia unless you demonstrate it. i.e. It has to be visible as a track record (i.e. do squash spam and fix typos and add valuable content, but don't do it anonymously).
• A link on a high-profile article is worth gold, as it builds your credibility and visibility with journalists and bloggers. Negotiate with an article's "owner" (the main editor who most polices the article) before making such an edit to get their blessing first.
• Monitor your articles-of-interest with a tool that emails you (e.g. trackengine, changenotes, urlywarning, changedetect). Don’t just rely on Wikipedia’s “Watch” function.
• The flow of PageRank can be directed internally within Wikipedia with Disambiguation pages, Redirects, Categories.
• Make friends. They will be invaluable in times of trouble, such as if an article you care about gets an "Article for Deletion" nomination.
• Don’t edit anonymously from work. This could come back to haunt you. Have you heard of WikiScanner??

Wikis
There are plenty of other wikis out there that are a lot more edit-friendly than Wikipedia where you could contribute valuable content, get links, and build relationships. Examples include ShopWiki, The NewPR Wiki, WordPress Codex, conference wikis such as the Web20Expo. Some even pass link juice, which is a nice bonus.

Digg

• Strip away all commercial links during the initial Digg swarm. Digg alpha geeks are repelled / repulsed by overly commercial sites.
• Friend popular Diggers. Better yet, if you can convince a popular Digger to submit your story, you'll significantly increase your chances of the story hitting the Digg home page. Consult the Top 100 list of Diggers for the most popular "power users".
• Time your presence on the Digg front page for daylight hours
• Craft a killer title using this formula from Muhammad Saleem: number + adjective + key phrase. E.g. “13 Most Chilling Haunted Hotels” or “16 Incredibly Unconventional Hotel Rooms”

StumbleUpon
You can "force" your friends to view your request to stumble a particular URL using the “Send to” function in the StumbleUpon toolbar. They have to view your URL before they can continue with their random channel surfing. Don't abuse it, or your tick your friends off.

YouTube

• With most popular YouTube promotions, YouTube gets the links and the original site usually does not. Stack the odds more in your favor by creating a microsite and making the microsite URL your username. e.g. “willitblend.com” is BlendTec’s username.
• Use as many tags as possible while still being accurate.
• Run a contest and recruit popular YouTube users to enter. Their video submission will get pushed out to all their subscribers. e.g. Intuit’s brilliant Tax Rap contest.
• Be creative but unpolished. A great example of this is SolarDave’s SES San Jose spoof with cut-out figures as the actors.
• Some other examples of successful YouTube videos include Eepybird’s Bellagio Fountain of Diet Coke + Mentos, BlendTec’s “Will It Blend?” series, the Heroes spoof commercial (“Zeroes”) – an NBC creation, and John Cleese Backup Trauma webisode

MySpace

• You need a good number of friends. No friends and you look like a loser, just like in the real world. You can establish critical mass quickly simply by friending bands. They’ll take anybody! Also models (male and female), fiction authors, actors, go-go dancers, and DJs work too. Find them using the “Search Profiles for People with Similar Career Interests” as part of MySpace’s Search function. You can remove them later on when you no longer need them.
• Long page load time will drive your profile visitors away. Disable HTML in your comments so users can’t fill your page with slow-loading pictures of LOLcats etc.

LinkedIn

• Add links to your website, blog, and one other URL and select “Other” so you can specify the anchor text. Don’t use the pre-selected categories “My website” etc.
• Add a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker) or two to your network. i.e. a “promiscuous sneezer” (in Seth Godin-speak). You can find LIONs on the TopLinked.com list. e.g. Flip Filipowski
• Add your email address to your “professional headline” so folks 4+ degrees away don’t have to waste an InMail to contact you.
• Questions posted to LinkedIn Answers can also serve your own purposes e.g. “We’re looking to hire an SEO analyst and are willing to pay whatever it takes to get a top-notch person. What job boards do you recommend?”

Flickr

• Always use tags – as many as possible while still being accurate. Put multiple word tags in surrounded by quotation marks
• Make descriptive titles for your photos
• Create thematic Sets for your photos
• Links on profile, set and collection pages are not nofollowed
• If the photo is location specific, go into Flickr’s tools and geotag the picture.
• Go into the Flickr set tools, and locate the location on the Yahoo! Map, then drag the picture onto the map to pinpoint its location.
• Creative Commons license your photo and put how you want the user to credit you in your photo’s description.

Meetup.com
Get involved with local Meetups and get your meetup.com member profile page linked from the meetup’s page, which will pass juice to your profile then on to your site.

Actually there are many social sites with profile pages that pass link juice. Here is a nice list of some of them.

Blogs

• First, get involved via comments and build rapport. Careful about making the commenter name keyword-rich. That can look spammy and get your comment deleted by the blogger.
• It's helpful from a PageRank perspective to comment on blogs that “dofollow” comment links. e.g. Mark Cuban’s Blogmaverick.com, Rimm-Kaufman Group's blog.
• Submit to blog carnivals. Host one (requires that you have a blog). Start a new one.
• Be a contributor to a group blog (e.g. BusinessBlogConsulting.com, Shop.org Blog)
• Be a guest blogger on someone else’s blog (e.g. TechGazing.com, Problogger.net)
• A Tip Jar indicates the blogger is desperate for cash and is open to having sponsors help support them.

Twitter

• Create a microsite dedicated to Twitter e.g. twitter.zappos.com
• Avoid getting your message junked by a recipient's email spam filter or adding to an already overflowing inbox by using Twitter's direct messages.
• Influence the top influencers in your Twitter network by influencing those in common with you. Identify the common “friends” with tweetwheel.com. You can send your request for them (e.g. to check out your latest post) as a direct message.

And finally, here is my PowerPoint from the session. Enjoy!

If you're a search marketer and you dabble at all in social media, there is one program you're probably already taking advantage of: StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon gives some great returns with a relatively small time investment. I've discussed StumbleUpon before, in the context of an interview with social media guru Neil Patel, but let's take a closer look at how it works...

With the StumbleUpon browser extension installed, with the click of a button you get sent to a random page. Once there, you can give the page a thumbs up or thumbs down and then move on to "stumble upon" the next random page. Think of it as channel surfing, but on the Web. You can select your categories of interest so that the random pages are more targeted to your tastes. You can leave a comment about what you like/dislike about any page.

It doesn't take very many thumbs-up votes to send hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site - even if your site is brand new. It sounds easy, just start voting for your content.

But there's more to it than that... there are some important social media "tricks of the trade" that will help maximize the opportunity.

The most important thing is to have mutual friends. As you follow people on StumbleUpon, you will see more pages that they like. The idea is to follow people with similar interests.

The trick comes in when you begin to use the "Send To" option within the browser extension / toolbar. This option sends a site, along with a personalized message to your friend. The friend is forced to view this site before they can continue with their random stumbling. Do you see where I'm going with this? In the message you can ask them to thumbs up your page -- the more thumbs up a page has, the more traffic it will get from StumbleUpon. Your friends will probably ask for you to do the same for their sites in return. One hand washes the other...

What are your favorite tactics for maximizing your StumbleUpon traffic?

When anyone first gets into social media, on any site, there is one thing they all notice quickly – there are power users. Power users are the ones who submit a ton of stuff, comment on everything, have hundreds if not thousands of friends and followers. To someone just diving into the world, it’s rather intimidating. How can you compete with that?

This is the wrong question to ask. What you should be asking yourself is how are you going to network with these power users. Sure you could just be their “friend” and vote their stories up… but that isn’t going to get you noticed and it for sure isn’t going to put you in a position to ask them for favors. To the new user these power users are “famous” and what happens is the new user doesn’t try and connect – they don’t think they can. They see these power users as unreachable.

The truth of the matter is these power users got to where they are, have tons of friends and followers, because they are social people. Some of the nicest people in the world are the power users of social media sites. As I have said before, social media is about being social – not anti-social.

If you’re just starting out on a new network, give it a try – reach out to the big guys and get yourself noticed. You might just be surprised by the results.

When you use any social media outlet, one of the major hurdles is making friends. How you go about making friends will make or break your reputation on whichever service you are on. One of the best ways of making real friends and connections through social media is using instant messaging.

You can find users AIM/MSN/Yahoo names generally in their profiles and can start sending them messages instantly. They have their usernames listed so people can find and talk with them. They do not have them listed to just be spammed with “vote for this please, thanks” messages. If they don’t know you, why would they vote you up just because you asked them?

A good way to go about first contact with anyone on a social site is to be genuinely interested in them. After the initial "Hello I found you through X," ask them about their latest blog post or what they thought about something you saw they voted up or down. Ask them about their business, what they do, what they are interested in, how they got their start.

I chat with people every day and when someone is actually interested in what I do (or at least seems that way) I’m more likely to be interested in them. I’ll take a look at their profile on whatever social site they found me though and maybe check out their blog or website. When people just spam me with “vote for” or try and start a conversation without introducing themselves and just looking for free tips – I ignore them.

(Unless you're a Trekkie like me, you may not fully appreciate this post's title... "First Contact" is a reference to the first time Earth's inhabitants made contact with aliens, specifically the Vulcans.)

SEO is an ever-changing landscape and it's hard to stay current. Keeping up with trends involves work. You have to be out there at least every few weeks reading blogs, looking at what your competition is doing, and testing different theories of your own.

This has been talked about to death on blogs across the internet so I’m not going to say any more about it. What I want to talk about is keeping up with your social media profiles and the massive time investment it takes to be on top.

While you can get behind on SEO by stepping away from the world for several months, all it takes to lose connections in the social realm is several weeks.

Social media is something that if you want to stay at the top of the game you have to be in it, constantly - every day with massive amounts of time spent weekly. You could be the top Digger but leave for three weeks or more and you’re all but forgotten. It’s a constant struggle for the coveted few top spots that most people just simply cannot invest the time in.

Sure, when you do go back to your social media sites after being away for an extended period of time it takes less energy to regain your crown than just starting from scratch - but it is still a massive time investment to get back to where you were.

Being a power user on social media sites can send massive traffic and links to you or your clients pages – but for those truly committed social media isn’t a hobby – it is a "lifestyle".

Social networking is all about being social and networking - duh The question is: How do you do this; what does that mean? It means being active in the community; it’s saying thanks to people who vote your stories up; it’s responding to comments on your blog; it’s posting comments on other folks' blogs. It’s starting topics of conversation and being a part of other conversations.

Be careful though, it is very easy to destroy your online reputation by being a jerk, so watch what you say. Don’t just go and type in your gut reaction to things like you would if you were having a conversation with someone. The same care and attention in crafting responses is required in social networks as in email, since the emotional cues that are present in in-person and over-the-phone interactions are missing in online communications. You have all the time in the world to make your communications and your online persona funny, witty, insightful, thoughtful, ingenious. So take that time. Ultimately, however, your true character is going to shine through - but this is a good thing!

Being honest and open with people is what will net you real friends – friends that if you happen to be in the same city will buy you a drink, show you around, or even put a good word in for you if you’re looking for a job. It’s these kind of real social media friends that will bend over backwards to help you out if they can. If you’re a freelancer or a business owner, they might even recommend you to people they know.

Just by being yourself in social networks you’ll find that you are making friends with people of similar interests and humor types – people with similar personalities that actually like YOU and not just your online presence.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Neil Patel, leading practitioner in social media optimization, recently by phone and by email. Social media optimization is the new art of wielding tools, strategies and influence for the purpose of gaining visiblity on social media networks and sites like Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, NewsVine, Netscape.com, MySpace and even Wikipedia.

There was a great Wall Street Journal article in February talking about social media and the top influencers. Neil was featured as one of the top influencers on Digg.com.

When Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point (a book I highly recommend, btw!), wrote about "connectors" and the power that they wielded to influence large populations of people -- to infect them with new ideas, fashions, fads and so forth -- I really think of people like Neil as the online equivalent. When Neil submits something on Digg, it can yield 20,000-30,000 visitors and cause the featured story's web server to crash!

Making it on to the Digg.com home page is a laudable goal for social media optimization but, as Neil points out, it is not always appropriate or feasible. Digg users are alpha geeks. They are not going to be terribly receptive to articles about home decor or feng shui.

StumbleUpon is another great social media network worth targeting. For those who are unfamiliar with StumbleUpon, it is like channel surfing -- but on the Web. There is a plugin that you install on your web browser that provides a button that you can press to channel surf. As part of the installation process, you select which topics you are interested in. Then, when you hit the StumbleUpon button, you are taken to websites which are given a "thumbs up" by other StumbleUpon users and which are in your areas of interest. I've found some really neat websites just by "stumbling upon" them.

Each social media site network has its own quirks and nuances and politics. Getting high visibility on reddit requires a very different submitter profile, story, topic and so forth than Digg. Getting visibility in Wikipedia is a real quagmire. Stumble Upon is certainly more straightforward than Wikipedia but it has its own quirks and tricks.

Have a listen to my 15-minute podcast interview with Neil, and also check out the text interview (conducted separately by email) which is in the Netconcepts' Cool Friends library of interviews.

Neil will be speaking at the American Marketing Association's Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing, in San Francisco on April 22, NYC on May 25, and Chicago on June 22. I highly recommend attending. I'm chairing the conferences, so I'll be there too!