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.

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.