Group items tagged

nclude all your other social site links.

Include your website, and location

get creative and make your cover image something to talk about.

generate Circles for in-store customers; online customers; partners; industry leaders; business friends; coworkers; etc.

Make sure you use them. And then, make sure you use them well.

Write targeted updates to send out to targeted groups

Using Circles can extend the life of your updates (and blog posts), and can your them to resonate better with each of your segmented connections.

Don’t post your update to them AND send them an email to notify those in your Circle about your recent post:

The email option lets you make sure an important post will reach the Circles you need it to (like to customers, if you’re posting about a social contest marketing campaign, for example).

But don’t overuse this function! It’s particularly annoying if your Circles have not asked you for continual updates! It’s spam.

People do not like to hangout with people who only talk about themselves.

80% of your posts should be about lifestyle, customers and stuff other than you; 20% should be about you and your products.

Another big no-no is not addressing negative comments on your posts. Bad comments will happen. It’s an open forum, and not everyone is going to agree with you, or even like what you do.

judge how to respond to comments on your updates.

If it’s an inappropriate comment - delete it, but I’d try to tell the commenter first - not doing so can lead to even more PR problems for you...)

Find communities that suit your business niche, and join them.

join a few business-related ones - start to network, and you never really know where those connections will lead you.

Engage, share others’ posts, comment. Treat Communities like a networking breakfast, or trade show. These can be your customers! Give them respect and interest, and they will likely reciprocate!

Do not post a link - and not include at least a brief comment!

Make sure your product pages, blog post pages, website and other other relevant landing pages have an easy to click G +1 button!

That’s not to say there isn’t any room for humans in Demand’s process. They just aren’t worth very much. First, a crowdsourced team of freelance “title proofers” turn the algorithm’s often awkward or nonsensical phrases into something people will understand: “How to make a church-pew breakfast nook,” for example, becomes “How to make a breakfast nook out of a church pew.” Approved headlines get fed into a password-protected section of Demand’s Web site called Demand Studios, where any Demand freelancer can see what jobs are available. It’s the online equivalent of day laborers waiting in front of Home Depot. Writers can typically select 10 articles at a time; videographers can hoard 40. Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort — because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work. The average writer earns $15 per article for pieces that top out at a few hundred words, and the average filmmaker about $20 per clip, paid weekly via PayPal. Demand also offers revenue sharing on some articles, though it can take months to reach even $15 in such payments. Other freelancers sign up for the chance to copyedit ($2.50 an article), fact-check ($1 an article), approve the quality of a film (25 to 50 cents a video), transcribe ($1 to $2 per video), or offer up their expertise to be quoted or filmed (free). Title proofers get 8 cents a headline. Coming soon: photographers and photo editors. So far, the company has paid out more than $17 million to Demand Studios workers; if the enterprise reaches Rosenblatt’s goal of producing 1 million pieces of content a month, the payouts could easily hit $200 million a year, less than a third of what The New York Times shells out in wages and benefits to produce its roughly 5,000 articles a month.

But once it was automated, every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas. So Rosenblatt got rid of the editors. Suddenly, profit on each piece was 20 to 25 times what it had been. It turned out that gut instinct and experience were less effective at predicting what readers and viewers wanted — and worse for the company — than a formula.

Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has since discovered: Online content is not worth very much. This may be a truism, but Rosenblatt has the hard, mathematical proof. It’s right there in black and white, in the Demand Media database — the lifetime value of every story, algorithmically derived, and very, very small. Most media companies are trying hard to increase those numbers, to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it — perhaps an impossible proposition — the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.