Articles Tagged with Social Media

Has Crowdsourced Content Jumped The Shark?

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“We asked these 8 sharks for their opinion…”

Shark montage (a sharktage...?)
Like infographics and guest blogging before it, there are fears in the industry that crowdsourced content – where you ask multiple people to pass on their favourite tip/tool/etc. – may have jumped the shark, in that it has been done-to-death and fallen in quality, making it a less worthwhile content marketing tactic.

I was going to save blogging my thoughts on this until after I talked about CR 25 at BrightonSEO in April, as two of CR 25‘s posts were crowdsourced content (and one of them became one of the campaign’s most popular posts), but following Peep Laja’s tweet stating that if a “list has more than 5 items, it’s shitty curation,” plus the fact that: a) a lot of the replies he received agreed with him, and b) crowdsourced content in particular often contain tens or dozens of participants (or ‘items’), I wanted to give my thoughts…

Crowdsourced content is popular because it’s pure ego-baiting – people love to be asked their opinion on something. And by doing so, they’re likely to share it via social media. Oh and the more people you ask, the more content you get, resulting in a lengthy blog post in the 1,000s of words that’s likely to hit the long-tail like crazy. So if you ask 50 people to contribute to a post, you have 50 potential tweeters at the ready and a long blog post on your hands.

The ‘SEO echo chamber’ strikes again…

The problem with crowdsourced content is that it has been done-to-death… in the SEO/content marketing industry. I won’t link to any real-life examples as I don’t want to come across as a hater, plus I’m genuinely grateful when I’ve been given the opportunity to contribute to them myself (e.g. I recently shared my biggest link building success story of 2014 – and hell, I even did one myself a couple of years ago!), but things tend to get a little overboard when 15 SEOs are asked for their favourite link building tip, or 43 SEOs are asked for their favourite SEO software tool, or 161 SEOs are asked their favourite colour…

But do you know the trick that we’ve been missing, which I didn’t even realise until recently, which may completely change your view on crowdsourced content? Stop asking your peers and start asking your clients/customers.

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The Launch of CR 25 – 25 Blog Posts in One Month

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Happy New Year everyone!

January is going to be a busy start of the year for me…

CR 25 Cake logoI’m really excited and proud to announce the launch of CR 25 today. To celebrate my parents’ company’s 25th anniversary as an IT recruitment agency (which became a recruitment agency in January 1990), Computer Recruiter are publishing 25 blog posts in January 2015: one each day from the 2nd to the 30th, excluding Sundays. It’s been over 6 months in the making, culminating in me running around like a panicked headless chicken in December in order to finalise and sign-off on everything in time…!

Coming up during the month we have guest bloggers, crowdsourced content, interviews, an event list, an infographic (because if you’re doing 25 posts, there has to be an infographic…!), a historical timeline, a live-blogged local event, helpful resources for jobseekers, nostalgic posts… and even a bloody quiz. Guest bloggers and other contributors include Computer Recruiter’s past and present candidates and clients as well as some well-known figures in the IT/Web/tech or jobseeking/recruitment sectors in South Wales.

For me personally, I’m really intrigued to learn what performs well content-wise. What will get the most tweets/RTs? The most Facebook Likes? The most links? Whether the campaign ends up being a successful or a failure, I’ll be talking about it at BrightonSEO April 2015, by which time I’ll have a clear idea of how everything performed a few months on. I’ll probably also write up a case study about it for YouMoz, too…

To find out more, please feel free to read the introductory post (published earlier today – “Post 1 of 25”), the About page and the press release.

Let the fun begin! Wish me luck…!

Getting Around LinkedIn PPC Ads’ Poor UK Geographical Targeting Options

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Update (15th April 2015) – I’ve just been alerted to the fact that Cardiff is now a target location (yay), making this entire post pretty much obsolete (boo)! Good news though.

Cardiff panoramic shot
I do a bit of work for Welsh ICE (as mentioned before) and recently looked into the possibility of launching a LinkedIn Ads campaign for them.

Fingers on map imageAssuming that it would have similar-ish geographical targeting options to Google AdWords (Google’s PPC platform), which allows you to target a city/town or a radius around any point (such as a postcode), I was surprised to learn that – as far as the UK is concerned – you can only target 30 towns/cities, ranging from Birmingham to Twickenham, and containing no Welsh or Northern Irish locations such as Cardiff or Belfast. Either side of where Cardiff would (should?) be, we have Cambridge and Chelmsford, the latter of which has half the population of Cardiff, and Hemel Hempstead (another one in the list) only has a quarter of the population of Cardiff. (Wikipedia population links for Cardiff, Chelmsford and Hemel Hempstead.)

LinkedIn Ads UK Location Targeting screenshot
Aside from the fact that it seems rather odd that they only offer a select few UK towns/cities, I honestly think that LinkedIn are shooting themselves in the foot by not offering more. While LinkedIn’s main focus is on B2B, and a lot of UK B2B businesses could probably cater to a UK-wide customer base, there are still businesses who are restricted by geography. For instance, for Welsh ICE, while they’d certainly like to attract more businesses to Wales as a whole, it makes sense to mainly concentrate on the South Wales region, given that they offer office space and co-working facilities. Similarly, I also have a Cardiff-based cleaning client and a storage facility provider client with two locations in South Wales – they’re only going to be interested in receiving leads from South Wales-based prospects as well, as they are also pretty much limited by geography. In other words, there could be a lot more businesses out there that’d happily use LinkedIn Ads if they sorted this out and improved their location targeting options…

However I dug a little deeper, looking at the LinkedIn Ads system’s other targeting settings, and while it’s not foolproof, I found a way that Welsh ICE can still target on a (sort of) geographical basis. Here’s how:

1) Target local/regional university graduates

A lot of people stay and live in their university town after graduating, so one way could be to target the alumni of particular universities. For the Welsh ICE campaign, we could focus on Cardiff Uni, Swansea Uni, Cardiff Met Uni, Uni of South Wales, etc. By doing so, they’re effectively saying: “you’ve graduated in South Wales… now why not start a business here?”

LinkedIn Ads School Targeting screenshot

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Offline (Face-To-Face) Networking For SEOs: My #maximpact Guest Slot

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#maximpact Hangout screenshot
#maximpact Offline Networking logoI’ve been a huge fan of Max Minzer’s #maximpact series of Google+ Hangouts On Air ever since I first discovered and joined in on one back in August last year. Since then, I have become a regular attendee, alongside the likes of the mighty Steve Webb (a.k.a. US Steve), Barrie Moran and Tony Dimmock.

43 episodes and nearly a year later, I was delighted to be asked to be the main speaker on a topic close to my heart: offline, face-to-face networking for SEOs. The Hangout took place this past Thursday (24th July).

During the Hangout we talked about:

  • My networking approach, which is not to sell – just getting to know people, listening to them and answering any questions that they have. “Anti-sales is the best kind of sales.”
  • Going to events on your own. What’s best to do? Try and go where you know someone is going, or bring a friend with you.
  • How networking doesn’t have to be seen as your traditional business networking events. Networking is what you make of it. You can network at social meetups (just so long as you don’t just sell, sell, sell – that’s sleazy). Just give people help and advice.
  • Researching events before you go – e.g. finding out who else is attending.
  • Networking at events where you’re also speaking, especially in terms of keeping calm or not acting too aloof or egotistical!
  • Networking at conferences, of both the SEO and non-SEO variety.
  • Not being one of those networkers who tries to leave a conversation the moment they realise that the person they’re talking to isn’t a potential customer/client – it’s not about selling to the person in front of you, it’s about getting to know them and vice versa. “You have no idea who knows who.”
  • Using social media (especially LinkedIn) for following up and keeping in touch with people after you’ve met them in person.
  • How to handle ‘hecklers’, i.e. people who have a negative impression of SEO when you meet them.

Here’s a link to the event page on Google+, which contains a few comments as well as a video embed, which I’ve also included below:

I also have an interview with Max in the works (similar to some of the interviews I’ve done before), which I hope to publish very soon.

3 Things I Learnt Muting 50 World Cup Twitter Hashtags

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Deflated football imagePeople who know me well know one thing about me: I’m not a fan of football. So much so that one time, when I guy I didn’t know for very long asked me over Facebook if I’d be keen to join him in a game of 5-a-side, an old school friend of mine joined in in the comments in what can only be described as “hysterical laughing”…

With World Cup fever taking over these past couple of months, I got in the habit of muting WC-related hashtags on Twitter. I did the maths following on from the final and found out that I’d muted 50(!) of them altogether (you can see the full list below). Looking back, I learnt 3 things…

1) Football fans love their consistency

It irks me when you go to an event and people on Twitter use 2 or 3 different hashtags for the same thing – e.g. #EventName, #EventName2014, #ENAbbreviated, etc. etc. It sucks because it’d be good to have all the event-related tweets all in one place, assigned to one hashtag. Well, with football, that ain’t gonna happen…

The Germany vs Brazil game saw #BRA, #BRAGER, #BRAvGER, #BRAvsGER, #BrazilvsGermany and #GERBRA all in use as once. Football fans: WTF? Seriously, you guys needs to decide on a consistent hashtag and go nuts on that one.

2) Muting some hashtags is a tricky business (if they overlap with other topics)

The mighty #CRO… Conversion Rate Optimisation or Croatia? Suffice to say I left that one unmuted (or thinking about it, I could’ve just muted it for a period of time – e.g. one month, instead of forever – but never mind)…

3) No matter how much you mute…

…You’ll never be able to stop some tweets – especially those where people don’t use a hashtag.

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