Alex Schultz: APIs

One of the most successful viral campaigns on Facebook yet

The election has been a watershed in interactive and social marketing with the first really mainstream multi hundred million dollar use of social media for one campaign. There is a lot to be said about this (beyond hero worshipping Chris Hughes and co.) and I intend to post a few comments about this here.

The best recent completely novel use (that simply couldn’t have existed 4years ago) was run by the causes application. They asked users to donate their statuses to the vote and changed the status to a link and a message to promote an issue in the election or the election itself. Below is a screen dump of how you do it on the causes application.

My understanding is that 5MM plus users donated their status to promote something to do with the election. I am not going to comment on the impact of that on the election but the impact on Causes is incredible. Every one of those status updates (whichever candidates or propositions were being pushed) promoted the causes application. Given the prevalence of status updates in the newsfeed  it is almost certain that every user in the US will have seen the causes application promoted on election day and that real estate was immensely valuable.

There are more ways to game this system and that is in fact a pretty scary spaming opportunity now the idea is out there but this was a truly viral campaign using something that is unique to facebook. Great job causes even if there are debates about whether this is a fair or genuine use of status updates.

How to be an effective seo within your organization: PubCon 08 - be positive

This year was my first presentation at pubcon and I was super excited to get the opportunity to participate. The area of my presentation was to evaluate how to be an effective in house SEO and I was lucky enough to be on the panel with Aaron Shear, Tony Adam, Jessica Bowman and Scott Polk. Lou Ragg was the moderator which in Vegas was pretty cool.

The main topic of all our talks was how do you convince your company to support you in doing SEO and the talks split into two fronts… play company politics or push positive results and momentum. I was definitely in the second bucket.

I essentially had 5 points:

1. alignment
   • You must be aligned with your companies #1 goal in SEO
   • Discard everything but that target: eBay = ROI, facebook = user growth
2. measurement
   • sometimes you can get support just by measuring how much value seo is generating
   • whatever happens you are in a measurable field, you can quantify your impact and so be that guy, measure your results and hang your hat on them
3. results
   • do something simple and get a result to build credibility…
   • for example a really really small thing like swapping “<company name> | <page title>” to “<page title> | <company name>” can drive results and doing that and instantly driving the company’s #1 goal is so powerful
4. double down
   • you got a result… now get more. Keep it small, keep it coming and show that you are an expert
   • I think this momentum building is 10x more positive as an approach rather than going out and producing a powerpoint strategy deck
5. share
   • now start to share your success, start to teach people how to do it themselves. Build that powerpoint and let the senior folks know what you need to do even more.

I think this is the secret to be successful in almost any internet marketing role to get success. You can be the person who says “I am positive”,”I can do more with less than you believe” and above all let your work speak for itself and you can do no wrong.