SMOjoe.com

For three years, Rob Campbell the prime innovator at Smojoe has been experimenting with conversational marketing using the social web to affect Google search results for strategic keyword targets.

And now I, Rob Campbell am the first Smojoe Centurion, because I can deliver one hundred stories with links.

Smojoe Social Media Manual, version #3 outlines exactly how social marketers should engineering multi platform brand stories, and how they should measure results. It’s available right here for $19.00 CAN and is thirty seven pages of detailed information about how to market websites.

Social Media Marketing is without a doubt the fastest growing new sector of advertising in the world.

Each Smojoe Centurion is a one man marketing army and a respected contributor and member of one hundred different niche communities, and probably has one of the most findable avatars on the web.  Grounded in their own expertise they are comfortable with, and indeed profit from being, internet celebrities.

Having so many different passions means a social marketer can influence different types of people by creating primary, secondary and tertiary media in different niches.

Using articles, blogs and discussion forums these Jedi Warriors are the best idea sneezers in the business, and their participation in any campaign yields valuable social capital for the client website.

Lenzr has been a terrific catalyst for trying new things, and writing final reports every sixty days necessitates regular patrols of the landscape.

The simple lessons that I’ve learned, and the hundred places where I can go talk about my clients with links and photos have made me a Smojoe Centurion.

Story Funnels To Buck Stops

The best online storytellers leave different bits of the same brand adventure in articles, blogs and discussion forums all over the web.  The mechanism of this successful   marketing ideology can be crystallized in one simple observation; they build story funnels to buck stops.

The search for experts drives the internet, but the search for stories rules the social web.  Building story funnels to buck stops means hand crafting a dozen different hooks (things that people might find interesting) before publishing anything, and then using the bits of content to funnel readers toward the client’s website or primary conversion page.

The client website must have ‘conversion tools’ by which readers can be converted into customers. This is a magical place, and the subject of a different blog post. Right now we’re just building the funnels.

How to plant multiple platform brand stories on the social web

There is a method to Smojoe madness, a ritual exists wherein certain elements are planted first to build and compound with other elements.  For example, pictures are posted on Flickr and Photobucket first thing so they can be embedded later in blogs and niche discussion forums.  Little bits of text with links are prepared and assembled opposite links to photos on a HOT SCRIPT document.

Smojoe plants the content top down. After research and preparation, I start writing the most compelling stories as exclusive articles (or photo essays, factoidz, or videos) and then cycle down through four types of less exclusive user submitted content digesting ideas and leaving links back to clients. Second stage is blogging, third stage is discussion forums and it all ends with someone micro blogging and bookmarking the best content that was created at the end of each cycle.

The interesting thing is that readers usually encounter these story cycles from the back end first; they hit a blurb on Twitter, and then come to a discussion forum where they find a link to a blog post with a Flickr photo gallery widget in the sidebar. The Flickr images have descriptive text with links to an article in a popular niche eZine which links to a product page in the client’s e-store, the buck stop.

Story Funnels to Buck Stops is particularly effective when marketers can compel readers to follow their ideas across four different social media platforms to brand their minds forever. However, at the end of the day, the most measurable result is the increase in Google search traffic over the target keywords.  This is because the Smojoe Centurion who started all the conversations was careful to target just one or two keywords in the link text back to the client. The increase in 3rd party links buried in rich media conversations positively affects the Google PageRank algorythme and the target site will appear higher in SERPS for that keyword  after the next update.

There are three photo contests on Lenzr this summer, with three different prizes.

Its now the middle of July and Lenzr.com is off to a great start. All three of contests are up and running and offer great prizes. The whole competition will end midnight 31 August 2009, but for me and everyone watching the spectacle, the real rewards come when Google updates the PageRank value Lenzr.com and then the client websites.

So far in the very first Lenzr contest period, the debut summer competition, the best prize for photographers to win is without question the reward that has been posted in  Summer in Toronto. Here the lucky winner gets their choice of smart phone* and that prize is compelling because people want to know what phone will the winner chose? Which phone would you choose?

Summer in Toronto - This web challenge is the place to show us what the word ’summer’ means to you. Snap and submit good pictures and you could win a smart phone.  Get shots of football players and urban fisherman and flaming cocktails on the patio of a sweaty flamingo bar. Take pictures of kids and dogs at the beach, or damming up a creek, or riding their bikes in the streets. Whatever makes you think of these warm summer months when the weather outside is cold and miserable summer. The reward is compelling.

The winner will choose a brand new state-of-the-art smart phone, courtesy of the best cell phone deals website in Canada, and be prepared to tell everyone WHY they have selected this model, when they could have any brand or device available on the market.

Emergency in Toronto - Toronto Firemen and Health Care Workers and Police are always trying to save time and to be the most conscious of wasted seconds and lost minutes. They are trying to save lives. This web challenge asks the photographers living in the city to look to the firetrucks and get a shot of them as they pass. Take a minute to record a moment of their lives, and be sure and report where and when you snapped the shot.

The Esquire Verve 2020 men’s watch with stainless steel band and butterfly clasp is a fine reward. This waterproof timepiece is very stylish with four diamonds. The prize is to be awarded by a time management speaker named Steven Prentice who has become rather famous for innovating social media solutions in busy offices. He also lectures on how technology can save time.

Best Toronto Skyline challenge asks photographers to submit wide angle images of the Toronto skyline. Please show us our great city dominating the horizon, and try to get unusual angles from rare perspectives. This contest is sponsored by the photo contest itself, and the winner receives a Pentax Optio P70 compact camera. The web challenge is designed to celebrate our Megacity’s urban sprawl.

On Lenzr.com, the contests change every two months. These prizes are all relatively easy to win, especially if you have good photographs that inspire other people’s appreciation and support.

Local photo contest website Lenzr.com launched on July 1st 2009.

Happy Canada Day! The fireworks all over Toronto are bursting to celebrate the birth of this nation, but to me, the pyrotechnics are popping for Lenzr.

After a two months gestation period which began when the notion was first conceived on my chalk board, and then transcribed into a seven page IA document (drawn on the fabric of experience learned from Dumpdiggers.com), William Webb of Innate Media Group delivered a demo on June 15th and now finally the beta site at Lenzr.com/toronto is presently running the first photo challenge.

At the core of this photo contest website you can hear the echoes of the photo battles for old coins and marbles that occurred last fall in the Dumpdiggers Arena. As a website designer, I gained a lot of wisdom making the antiques social networking site at Dumpdiggers.com. Lenzr was built on the knowledge that photo contests can make boring businesses socially relevant, and that’s the key to findability in this age of earned media. Using the photo contest mechanism to dispense coupons doubles the effectiveness of the innovation as it collects and confirms email addresses.

Lenzr Photo Contest Evolved From Dumpdiggers Arena Photo Battles

In Dumpdiggers.com, the photo battles in the Arena were just too darn short; they would only last a week. The contests were over and done with before anyone knew about them and respected collectors would show up in the forum and ask about photo battles in their niches long after they’d expired. The optimum length of a photo contest is three months, and if you maintain that tempo you can structure four contests a year and make them seasonal. Here’s the chronology of photo battles on Dumpdiggers.com

Lenzr.com photo challenges last for two months, and so there are six contest periods every year. But please understand that Lenzr.com is not a typical contest website that exists only to market one company. Rather, this destination was built to showcase very specific user submitted photos in an internet love affair with Toronto; it really is all about the art and the glory of winning the game is probably more important than the prize to most of the participants.

As you can see above, the model is similar to other ‘hot or not’ type of websites where you don’t have to be a member to vote. So casual passers-by can pass judgment on images and their votes are counted, and so are their IP addresses.  So voting becomes the best way to screen the images, one by one, in an interactive digestion of the material.

The first ever Lenzr photo contest is sponsored by Lenzr itself. The challenge will end August 31st and will award a shiny new digital camera to the lucky winner as it chronicles the story of their picture on the Lenzr blog and in other partner sites. The 12-megapixel Pentax Optio P70 is a super compact camera with a wide-angle 4x optical zoom lens (27.5-110mm equiv.). It has a 2.7-inch LCD display, Advanced Face Detection, Smile Capture, Blink Detection, and Pixel Track Shake Reduction “to assure sharp images with low noise even in poor lighting.” The camera can also capture 720p HD video at 15 frame-per-second.

Lenzr’s partners include many local Toronto bloggers.

Lenzr also has an alliance with All Canada Contests.

Lenzr is already an individual category on Toronto-Forums, a popular discussion forum website anchored in the GTA. Its hoped this forum will become the best place to discuss contests and sponsors and even individual pictures. This is where winners will be announced and winning pictures profiled. New ideas for contests and sponsors and photographers and friends can hook up in here to discuss Lenzr.

The very best facet of Lenzr is the library and the legacy of winning photos it shares with the people of Toronto. The archives at the rear end of the website will someday become a treasure trove of free images for anyone to use in blogs and forums, and also as postcards and calendars and rotating headers; the content will spawn photo widgets with free pictures of Toronto for the rest of time.

The Search for Miss Teen Canada–World (MTC-W) comes to a dramatic conclusion on Saturday July 25th in downtown Toronto, but regional finalists are actually competing now, online.

I must confess The Search For Miss Teen Canada is my favourite client right now, and that’s because I just love how social media has evolved their business model by adding new value to their sponsorship packages.

As the MTC-W organization, under the guidance of Ellen Smith at EnCourse Business Development Agency, gears up for the July 25th 2009 pageant, Miss Teen Canada World sponsors have never had it so good.  These firms get buzz from community involvement, brand mentor ship, and they enjoy the positive PR boost that comes from supporting such an exciting high profile event. But now what’s really tasty is the OnSugar social media icing on the cake. Let me explain.

This year, and for the first time in history, Miss Teen Canada World will be judged in part on the qualities of her personal blog. Now the prettiest and smartest, most congenial girl must also be a web savvy computer geek capable of recording and managing her experience at the center of a powerful MTC-W social net.  Cool huh? Nerds rejoice, and so do the businesses that are connected to this interactivity.  That’s because if you’re selling anything in the online teen marketplace today you know how important it is to get incoming links, esp deep links that connect to  product information pages. Simply put, the new MTC-W pageant is now a great way to get those links. Lots and lots of keyword focused deep links…

Did I mention… There’s fifty finalists. And as of May 20th 2009 each of them has started an OnSugar blog. Here are some links to the earliest adopters.

http://kylawills.onsugar.com/
http://wendyhuang.onsugar.com
http://karmenguillas.onsugar.com
http://oliviawolter.onsugar.com
http://cassandratracy.onsugar.com/
http://taylorstronski.onsugar.com/
http://genevievejones.onsugar.com
http://annissacheyne.onsugar.com/

Think about it. Each one of these girls is probably a very influential ‘agent of her tribe’. I’ll bet most of them have a thousand friends on Facebook. Now they’re on Twitter, and soon they’ll be holding down accounts on Flickr and StumbleUpon, and on each platform they’ll share thoughts and ideas and blog about the products they find in their gift bags.

In a recent Orato article: How Social Media Saved A Beauty Pageant, I’ve listed these three primary changes. Here’s how social media has vastly improved beauty pageant business model.

1. The pageant now advertises itself. The contestant blog squad grows over time engages many tribes at once and becomes more and more connected in the weeks leading up to the event.
2. Contestant connectivity yields new incentives for sponsors promoting their own ecommerce websites. Multi platform brand conversations occur as teenagers record their experiences on four different fronts - they use their OnSugar blogs, and their Twitter (search #mtcw09), Flickr and Facebook profiles. Companies that sell online can easily donate something to the contestant gift bag to reap potent storytelling and link love.
3. The quality of the experience is improved, and better shared. Blogging, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook provides a new conduit for these young people to ‘be their own kind of beautiful’ as they record the most poignant moments of their journey to share them with followers.

MTC-W is the only Canadian teen pageant recognized by the Miss Teen World competition (which occurs in Houston Texas in August this year), and that’s because it’s the only organization that produces regional events in all ten provinces, and fund raises for Free The Children. But these accreditations alone are not enough to insure financial success. It’s this brand new social media stuff that’s turning heads here, and its fun to show skeptical marketing managers what’s actually possible in a beauty pageant.

On Thursday April 30th, Smojoe had lunch on the patio of Jack Astors at Yonge and Bloor with Julian Brass of Notable.TV, and together we enjoyed a terrific social media marketing brain share over fajitas and fresh tomato juice.

Short story, today’s lunch occurred rather spontaneously because I happened across Julian’s ad while trolling Toronto craigslist marketing and PR boards on the weekend; he was on there Friday looking for an intern to help out a busy social media start-up. No I didn’t apply for the job, I wanted to know more about the start-up.

What does he do exactly? Notable.TV is a streaming video site that targets 25 - 39 year old people and shares exclusive ‘insider moments’ from some the most noteworthy and inspirational happenings all over the country. The Features section showcases Notable Happenings that must be seen, while other sections cover Fashion, Music, Events, People, and All Access.

So who is Julian Brass? A sharp dressed twenty five year old guy with a BComm from the University of Guelph, Julian Brass has a background in business, events management, and online audience building. Right after finishing school, he managed consumer acquisition strategies which included online and offline marketing, PR, advertising, affiliate management as well as planning his own events and partnerships for a silicon valley firm called Engage.com That’s where he worked with hip California ad agencies and PR firms to develop affiliate networks, event strategies and membership initiatives. Last fall he escaped back to Toronto with all their secrets.

The performer meets the producer meets the programmer, Julian Brass knows he can actualize his own destiny by building himself a role as host in a web video profiling business.  The bold endeavour combines his web skills with his show business savvy and lots of diverse marketing experience. He;’s a good actor, and over the last five years he’s built an impressive resume of TV host credits, fashion show MC appearances, and some film and tv work. He’s been honing his skills in front of the camera.

Smojoe can help Julian build Notable.TV’s audience and daily traffic with some basic link building packages. Fifty keyword focused incoming links will secure some popular search clauses and raise his website’s overall page rank. I showed Julian how to amplify his own social relevance by bookmarking his video content on StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious and Reddit. Putting the names of the artists and events he profiles in the titles and tags of his video media should bring a steady flow of search traffic in direct proportion to the star power of the celebrity subject.

Julian and Notable.TV can help Smojoe by showcasing some upcoming client events on his streaming video site.  Julian Brass just became another piece of Smojoe’s VIP social media package, and I gave him a fair price to resell my link packages. It was a good lunch.

I’m not usually this far behind… Yesterday I did a search for more information on a new free blog site called On Sugar and that’s when I found an article about On Sugar on TechCrunch where I learned that it launched last November.

Six months later this enterprise is still growing.  Now people are asking if perhaps one day it might challenge WordPress dominance. Okay I’ll admit that isn’t likely, but I am surprised this handy new parking lot isn’t already more popular… at the risk of sounding cliché, On Sugar really is blog candy.

Petite Fashionista mentioned On Sugar in her how-to-blog seminar last month. I’d never heard of it before and wrote it down. And I was impressed with the look and smell of it immediately…

Sugar Inc must be more popular in the United States than it is in Canada because honestly I’d never seen one before and I look at a lot of Canadian blogs. This company launched the site or around September 2008. The Drupal-powered OnSugar platform is designed to be simple but also versatile. It has a proven track record as the Sugar blog network is written using the same technology and this has been around since 2006. Navigation is a breeze because the program is very intuitive – it’s the kind of code you write after years of empiric testing. This easy-to-use program gives registered members the necessary tools to create unique looking blogs with lots of cool features like photo galleries and polls. The above mentioned TechCrunch article said something about access to a large repository of free images from Getty which I couldn’t find at first, but later spotted in the image upload area of the website. The preview displays white text in the bottom corner of each pictures that says ‘Getty Images’ because nothing is ever 100% free in this life.

Bloggers working On Sugar are still able to monetize their sites through standard ad networks like AdSense or Glam which can be inserted easily into the sidebar using the blank text / html widget. But On Sugar has added something new, a ShopStyle widget option.

ShopStyle was acquired by Sugar last fall. The software lets bloggers create visual spreads of real-world products and then collect a piece of the action - they get a cut of any sales that result from the widgets. This is just the beginning of an entirely new ad network - more on that later.

On Sugar employs the following state-of-the-art internet technologies:

* Drupal - open source content management system
* Akamai - Entire platform uses the Akamai content delivery network

* memcached - Extensive use of memcached

* Smarty - Template engine
* sIFR - (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) is a technology that allows you to replace text elements on screen with Flash equivalents.
* TinyMCE - Rich Text Editor
* LLMP - Linux, lighttpd, MySQL, PHP
* Fully documented API

Key Platform Features:

* 10 different post types: (text, gallery, spread, poll, quiz, quote, link, chat, video, & audio)
* Free access to a hundreds of thousands of Getty Images®
* Fun drag and drop “spread maker”.  Create your look with thousands of fashion images from hundreds of online retailers through ShopStyle, e.g. ShopBop, J. Crew, Net-a-Porter, and others.
* ShopSense: Make money by linking to products and retailers NEW
* Build your audience of followers with automatic notifcation of new posts
* Follow your favorite sites and view an aggregated feed of your followed sites
* Post by email NEW
* Automatic update of your Facebook and Twitter status NEW
* Multiple sites per account
* Multiple authors per site
* Easy import from Blogger, Wordpress, & Typepad
* Full domain support
* Free

Key Site Features:

* Drafts/Timed Publishing
* Search
* Archives
* Pages (e.g. About Me, Galleries, Videos, etc)
* Widgets for highlighting content from your site or around the web ( Flickr, Twitter, etc)
* Related posts from your site or, if you choose, from sites you follow
* Completely customizable themes

Have a look at my Dad’s beekeeping blog: CampbellsHoney.onsugar.com is a terrific example of what’s possible and just how it easy it is to use 0 even a 78 yr old beekeeper from Canada can make a fine and useful information portal.

There are nine other properties in the Sugar network:

FabSugar.com - fashion and trends focus.

BellaSugar.com - beauty and skincare.

BuzzSugar.com - entertainment news and reviews, for must-see movies, albums, MP3s and TV.

YumSugar.com - cooking and entertaining with style and ease.

FitSugar.com - healthy, balanced lifestyle focus.

GeekSugar.com - readers’ guide to great gadgets.

GiggleSugar.com - good laughs and humor.

DearSugar.com - An advice web site.

CitizenSugar.com - Politics and News

TeamSugar.com - user-enabled hub of the network where all members go to discuss the content on the other Sugar sites and maintain their own profile pages.

Addictomatic is fun. Its almost a year old now, but I just found it today.

Addict-o-matic makes me smile.   “Instantly create a custom page with the latest buzz on any subject“, and in that respect it kind of reminds me of Squidoo, but this dynamic search functions effortlessly and without any supervision - which is why I’ll forgive off topic results.

Who created Addict-o-matic?

A quick search brought me to Jason Kincaid’s May 1st 2008 article on Tech Crunch. That’s where I learned that Rollyo founder Dave Pell is behind the innovation.  He also writes Davenetics, the official blog of the next five minutes.

Jason Kincaid, the author of the Tech Crunch article was rather critical of the addictomatic experiment. He cites the lack of a ‘relevance algorithm’ necessary to properly refine the search as the biggest detractor; and it’s true there’s a lot of redundant information, and not everything presented in the results is on topic.

Addict-o-matic has a clean layout

Three columns of content boxes do a good job sorting out the mess of information. Users can add, remove, and rearrange the location of each headline feed, and layouts can be saved by simply creating a bookmark. The site offers plugins to help integrate Addictomatic into browser search fields.

Addictomatic pulls images and headlines from multiple RSS feeds and presents them in small boxes similar to those found on iGoogle and Netvibes. Stories are drawn from top blogs, news feeds, and media sites. Unfortunately there’s still no way to customize the search or add your own feeds (though there are plans to add these feature).

The new search engine landscape

In my quest to learn everything, I’ve investigated the ‘new search engine’ landscape to view the competition.

Popurls didn’t hook me, but I don’t like websites with black backgrounds. Secondly I couldn’t find much information on anything except the biggest subjects and news media keywords.

Alltop couldn’t find ANYTHING. This service produced very disappointing results for just about everything I tried, and of course I tried searching for all my own media first. Alltop asks users to search topics from a preordained menu of categories, and that’s why it’s worthless.

How does SMOJOE use these tools?

Social marketers can use this visual search tools to spot holes in their client’s social media, and find new places to post photos and links.  After I typed “Smojoe” into the search box it became obvious that I still have a lot of work to do to increase this domain’s findability. I could immediately see the places i needed to visit, and the experience actually gave me some fresh ideas - that makes Addictomatic a winner in my book.

There’s a new special occasion on this year’s calendar.

Feb 26th is Do Over Day and this personal holiday is a new opportunity to relive your best memories, or redo your worst projects with an eye on your own self improvement.

The Do Over Day website collects tips and distributes videos, and shares advice on how to spend the ‘holiday’. Select one of eight eCard downloads to send to friends, family and office co workers.

Do you have a nagging TO DO list, or something that needs to be fixed? Did you say something offensive to one of your neighbours? Do you regret anything? Don’t live with guilt of denial, Do Over Day is your best chance to make it right.

Spawned by the Jeff Wills of Toronto based Wills and Co, this social innovation is designed to put a smile on your face, a spring in your step, and perhaps insert a healthy quest into your routine.

And if you join the Do Over Day Facebook group, be sure and post a story about how you will spend Thursday Feb 26th  - you could win one of several spiffy new T shirts like the one seen below.

Bloggers who ‘borrow’ other people’s photos must know that internet technology will eventually catch them. Tin Eye is a website, still in beta,  that’s designed to  let both amateur and professional photographers track their published images.

But will Tin Eye help police photo theft on the wild wild web?

Someday, perhaps, but not yet. Although the program searches 1.2 billion images in just a few seconds, it doesn’t find much. When I experimented on Feb 5th 2009, I was disappointed.  Suffice to say none of my pictures had been replicated by anyone, and I couldn’t even find matches to the ones I’d stolen.

Consequently I’m left believing that one point two billion pictures is a very small fraction of the total amount of images available online.

The Tin Eye blog is just what you’d expect; the author chronicles his company’s achievements and documents their growth. He explains new widgets and how to add Tin Eye to your web browser.

A recent post on the origin of the Obama HOPE graphic is very interesting.  The author plays detective in Will the Real Obama HOPE Photograph Please Stand Up? as he uses Tin Eye software to accurately find the origins of this iconic graphic.

So there is HOPE for Tin Eye yet.