Interview with Search Specialist Lisa Melvin about SMX Social Media and Google’s OpenSocial

Our veteran Search Specialist Lisa Melvin recently attended the SMX Social Media 2007 Conference in NYC. The gathering was part of the Search Marketing Expo Conference Series and brought together SEO professionals to discuss the state of social media.

I chatted with her about her experience at the conference and forecast for social media in the future. I also had a chance to ask her what she thought of the recently announced Google Open Social that has been causing a stir in the social networking communities.

Bonnie Jones: Lisa you recently attended the SMX Social Media Conference. So tell me what you learned about the current state of social media today.

Lisa Melvin: The SMX Social made me realize that social media today is really not that different from what we have done in the past. It’s just taking place on a much grander scale with new and improved tools.

Had I not been online, doing what I do (search engine optimization / online marketing) for the past ten years, I might think it’s all about del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, MySpace and Facebook. But social media is actually much more than that. Social media includes those message boards and forums from Web 1.0 days. The communities have grown exponentially because social media sites took the idea of connecting like-minded people and provided them with profile pages and a wide range of more powerful tools to help them connect and interact with others (friends).

So to a certain extent, social media marketing has become an amplified version of word-of-mouth marketing, where you have something to say, and with a click of a mouse your friends can tell their twenty friends who in turn tell their twenty friends — all in a matter of seconds.

BJ: What are some of the most interesting tactics or developments in social media you heard about at the gathering?

LM: A great deal of the overtones in social media and the information discussed served to reinforce the beliefs and practices we’ve already accumulated in our own social media activities here at work.

One of the simple tactics mentioned for Digg that would have never occurred to me was researching articles that had been submitted in the past but not done well and then resubmitting them with improved titles and descriptions. I’m not sure it’s something that folks will have the time or inclination to do, but it’s definitely an interesting way to go about building additional activity on a Digg account.

I think the most eye-opening tactics I heard at SMX revolved around the actual timing of social marketing efforts. I’m not talking about timing your actual activities to revolve around relevant information, that’s a given. I’m talking about timing your activity down to the minute of execution. For example, Michael Gray (of Atlas Web Service) noted in his presentation during the Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging session that the del.icio.us popular page is updated approximately every 4 hours and that marketers should actually time their efforts to take advantage of the update timing. It’s kind of like that old eBay notion of listing a hot item for sale on a Sunday afternoon, to take advantage of the reportedly higher traffic time to coincide with your bid closings.

It was also useful to learn that removing ads from a page submitted to a bookmarking site or other social media site helps boost its chances at popularity. This makes sense given that most social communities have a fairly anti-commercial attitude and tend to respond negatively to too much advertising and marketing.

BJ: How about social media with regard to search engine optimization and online advertising?

LM: For search engine optimization, the effects of social media are potentially huge. Since garnering strong, natural back-links is an essential part of SEO, it certainly helps to get people talking about you and linking to your web site.

In previous forums you might have been interacting, asking and answering questions and garnering a link or two along the way in exchange. But it came at a price. You had to subscribe to or consistently read over forum posts and actively participate in that community in order to gain credibility and offer answers or advice when it was appropriate. In return, you’d get a link or two…; most likely in your bio.

Today’s social media scene can produce hundreds of links to one of your site pages with a single offering, but it too comes at a price. You have to optimize that offering for the community you’re targeting and actually offer some value in order for it to catch on and get passed from friend to friend. You also have to build your credibility (profile) and interact within the community itself if you ever hope to actively participate in your own efforts by submitting your own company content once and a while. Because cliques of friends often control most (if not all) of what makes it to the popular pages, without friends in these communities, it can be impossible to get the ball rolling.

BJ: Were there any cautionary tales about working with social media that you heard at SMX?

LM: Of course there are always warnings. It’s one of the best ways to learn, right? OPM!! Other People’s Mistakes. Nearly every speaker warned of becoming a social community outcast, either from the standpoint of having been there and done that with accounts that got banned or having been there and done that with campaigns that didn’t quite fly. Cindy Krum (of Blue Moon Works) actually titled her presentation MySpace WHOAs and WOES , with the Smileys converted of course. The most notable woes were what anyone who’s ever attempted to interact within social media sites already knows-that good profiles take time to develop and that it requires an ongoing commitment to manage all the aspects of interacting with the other members of the community. It was nice to see that we’re not the only ones facing those types of issues.

BJ: So what do you think is on the horizon for social media?

LM: When you and I first talked about this on Halloween, I said that I thought that social media’s future would be about merging, allowing user interaction among the various communities in new ways. Then the very next day you sent me a link (yeah, we’re kind of old-school) from the Wall Street Journal story, Google Seeks Bigger Role In Social Networking. Eerie, really.

In addition to the larger players getting involved in social media projects, I also think we’ll see a huge growth in social media start ups. As is typically the case, when the social media “pool” gets a bit too crowded, people start looking for another “cooler place” to hang out. It might happen that the old hang-outs become too commercial, or over-saturated with so many people and agendas that the quality of the content just isn’t cutting it any more, or maybe there’s a sweet new place, just off the beaten path that’s awesome and provides exactly what they need without the hype.

Isn’t that how Google got its start, not to mention Facebook? It certainly wasn’t ad campaigns that got them noticed. It was word-of-mouth, passed around from friend to friend because Google/Facebook was the sweet new place, just off the beaten path that was awesome and provided exactly what people were looking for.

Want an example of this happening already? Look at College.com, the title of their home page is Social Network for College Students Only! or Buddy University, still in Beta, telling college students to “Get the exclusivity you want.” Both sites require a .edu email address to sign up, picking up where Facebook left off when it opened its doors to the rest of the world at large.

BJ: So since you mentioned that article I sent you about Google’s OpenSocial, what do you think about the impact this will have on existing SNS - social networking sites - like MySpace, Facebook, etc?

LM: Facebook did it first and Google has one-upped them by making it easier for developers to write applications that work across the entire social scene, well the social scene that agrees to join in anyway. It’s ambitious and it does tend to make my whole merging’ theory come more to life. MySpace climbed on board, although it’s been rumored that they were actually in on it all along. Everyone is wondering if Facebook will climb on board as well but I doubt it’s likely. With the developments over the past week those two players seem more like foes than allies.

It wasn’t that long ago that talks of Google and MSN making huge bids for Facebook hit the blogosphere. And maybe Google’s timing for the release of OpenSocial was also geared towards overshadowing Facebook’s announcement about their new Social Ads advertising platform, which has been touted by some as a serious contender to Google’s AdWords.

The other big question, and perhaps the more important question, is what users will think of how it plays out and whether they’ll seek out social media sites who have not agreed to play with Google’s OpenSocial.

It reminds me a bit of the YouTube uprising right before Google swallowed them whole. YouTube users weren’t so happy about the news when Google purchased YouTube. Geesh, was that a year ago?

Had Google changed the YouTube site significantly, more of the YouTubers would have likely taken their videos elsewhere. But with the name of the site remaining the same and general cosmetic look and feel remaining the same, there were lots of users who didn’t even notice the man behind the curtain had changed.

Given the Open Social announcement it will be interesting to see if there is any membership shift between Facebook and MySpace. Will people abandon MySpace because they take issue with Google’s growing omniscience in every aspect of the Web, or will they abandon Facebook because they’re not on board with the latest and the greatest?

For a list of OpenSocial partners, see Google Code’s Who’s Using It? page.

Hitwise did an interesting breakdown of the OpenSocial participating networks combined compared to Facebook visitors. The numbers suggest that OpenSocial will definitely tip the scales of popularity between SNS rivals. Perhaps Google’s a tad miffed that they weren’t able to buy a piece of Facebook… and decided to bury the site instead?

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