Pick an interest area, and there’s probably a social media site that’s serving a community around it. These sites might be “micro” in size compared to some of the large, well-known services, but they have passionate members who might also be a more targeted audience that you wish to reach. This session tours some of the many smaller communities out there.
Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Speakers:
- Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, KeyRelevance
- Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-founder, SEOmoz
First up: Rand Fishkin
Q: What are Vertical Portals?
A: Smaller social networking sites
Why focus on them?
Traffic vs. Relevance:
- reach the right people, and not just “everyone”
- you can make your voice more heard
- chances are, people involved in that smaller vertical social network are connected to other people interested in that topic
Strategies: How do you find Micro-Communities?
- Search Engines
- Social Media & Web 2.0 Lists
- Recommendations and Networking: ask your friends
Look for:
- Topic Focus and Relevance
- Leverageable features
- comments, create petitions, email accounts, job hunting network, etc.
Dozens of Networks:
- care2
- WebMD
- Library thing
- Yelp: local reviews
- Trulia
- PeerTrainer
- ThinkVitamin
- Minti
- Real Estate Voices
- DeviantArt
- SportsShooter
- Threadless
- Cork’d
- Imbee
- Virb
- Wayfaring
- Couchsurfing
- WIkia
- Wikihow
- Helium
- Elsy
- Bakerspace
- Foodcandy
- sphinn
- The Stranger
- ebay
Next Up: Liana Evans
Highly Competitive Markets
- Medication, casinos, travel, adult, shopping, shoes, personal injury lawyers, wine
Case Study
A Diet client
- client only ranked for his brand name
- PPC: $40k spent in 3 months
- less than 50 requests
- no return purchases
- sometimes you need to start the conversation: people need to know about you before they can talk about you
- So decided to do “Fat Blogging”
- approached bloggers who were blogging about losing weight
- Social Media is more than just web 2.0
- Sent bloggers a free sample
Plan a strategy
- prove you have read the content of the blog you are approaching
Be Honest
- Follow WOMMA guidelines
One of the bloggers they worked with was featured on MSN
Take the good and the bad
- Listen to the audience
Value of Social Media
- over 400 subscriptions
- 308 Trials delivered
- 98% of people reported drinking the free sample
- $600 in sales
Further live coverage here:
Search Engine Land
Search Engine Roundtable
Search Engine Journal