Measuring social media ROI can be quite a hassle sometimes. The main misconception begins where the wrong metrics are being used, considered that we’re dealing with an environment of its own which cannot be analysed with the most traditional kpi’s.
Some really truthful insights about social media and ROI, from now on better known as return on ignorance:

Nowadays video counts for an impressive amount of content. Making this content available to search engines is therefore a crucial aspect in SEO, so that they can be correctly indexed and bring some more traffic to your website. If SEO often focuses on text content, there’s plenty of things which can be done to improve your video content and gain a good amount of organic traffic.

According to a study recently released by Nielsen, time spent online by users watching videos increased 45%. Also overall number of streams and streams by users increased significantly on month-to-month and year-to-year basis. If videos are considered this important by users, SEO on-site video optimization becomes a necessity, not just a secondary task to a more traditional search engine optimization.

First things first: file types currently crawled by Google

Google can crawl the following video file types: mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv, .swf, so long as the files are accessible via HTTP. Metafiles requiring a download of the source via streaming protocols are not supported. Just make sure you’re video is available in one of the mentioned formats and you should be fine.

What to optimize videos for?

Videos can searched through Google Video, Youtube or generic Social Media platform.

However the same optimization focus might easily be applied to all of these sources, considering that Google alone and Youtube make up for a 90% of all video search queries. A slightly different approach might be considered if we want the video to spread virally through social networks, hence some strategic planning ahead of the launch and  strict

URL structure

As for generic pages, the video URL must comply with the most typical URL optimization tips: avoid too many nested folders, keep your video file name clear and with relevant keywords separated by an hyphen.

Page text

Content surrounding the embedded video is considered relevant as well, so make sure you add some relevant text description to your video in the same frame or page area. It must be something related to the video, able also to spark some interest on the users and make sure your keywords are always present.

File names

Always keep your keyword list at hand, you’ll have to make sure that the video file name contains at least some of the keywords you want to be ranked for.

Create a video sitemap

If your website features a significant amount of embedded videos, you’d better get a video sitemap. A video sitemap would definitely help Google when going through your website trying to index and categorize your content, making sure no video gets lost or not indexed.

How to manually create a video sitemap

1. Create a text file and save it with an .xml extension.
2. Write the following lines at the beginning of the file:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>

1. Write the following to the bottom of the file:

</urlset>

1. Create an entry for each URL. The <loc> tag is required; the others are optional.

<url>     <loc>http://www.yoururl.com/</loc>     <lastmod>2011-01-01</lastmod>     <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>     <priority>0.8</priority> </url>

1. Upload your Sitemap to your site.  The file should be located at www.yoururl.com/sitemap.xml

Google’s webmaster central states, “Video content includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site.  If Google cannot discover video content at the URLs you provide, those records will be ignored by Googlebot.” As such, each video URL entry in the sitemap must contain:

• Video Title
• Short Description
• Play page URL
• Thumbnail URL
• Raw video file location and/or the player URL (SWF)

Further information on the topic available here.

Sentiment Analysis: the next big thing in SEO?

We’re all quite familliar with the autocomplete feature of Google. However it seems that autocomplete does not work properly on a specific set of keywords. Try to search for bittorrent or any term related to scientology or Falung Dafa. Google is not properly helping you out with any suggestion.

If a certain set of keyword seem to have magically disappeared from the autocomplete feature, a large number of compromising keywords is still available to autocomplete. Here’s a few examples:

Some reactions from here:

Google won’t autocomplete searches for “bittorrent,” but if you are interesting in learning how to kidnap someone, make meth, build a bomb, cheat on your taxes, or shoplift, they will happily autocomplete your search for you.

A good bunch of suggestion for what you might to look for on the internet…

Quite self-explanatory, there’s no need of any further comment on this. While Twitter and Facebook show a almost linear increase (Myspace seems linear as well in its fall), Tumblr increase in number so fast to seems like exponential.

via ILoveCharts

If you browe the web long enough I’m sure you’ll find plenty of guides and articles about Adwords and how to get the best results from your campaigns. In spite of how useful this guides can be, getting to know what not-to-do can be equally as useful, considering how important is to avoid mistakes rather than actually trying to do the right thing.

1. Bidding to low from the very beginning

You’ll never know how good or bad your adverts are unless they will show up in the first positions. Don’t be afraid of getting a lower quality score for bidding to high from the beginning, things will even out in the end, but you need to know your adverts perfomance on the first positions.

2. Mixing content with search campaigns

Search and content campaigns behave in a completely different way, thus with different performances and optimization routines. Mixing up the two will make decision making and optimization harder.

3. Running all keywords with broad matches from the beginning

Unless you’ve got already a comprehensive list of negative keywords, activating all keyword with broad matches might result in a huge amount of impressions with low CTR’s. However it depends on your budget: for the sake of keyword research you might want to activate all keywords with all matches available in the same time,which would result in a more expensive setup, but the insight you might get would be really valuable.

4. Tweaking bids too early

CPC will lower itself once you’ll get a  good quality score, most of the times there is no need to lower CPC yourself. Just give it some time, do not act like you’re always in a rush, Adwords optimization needs time and effort.

5. Forget about testing

Always save some time on adverts testing, beside the normal keyword research. Testing is essential in order to reach good CTR’s, while most people start off running a few adverts and keep the one with the best CTR running indefinitely.

6. Running too many keywords

Fewer selected keywords mean getting more focused on the specific niche you want to get your message to, narrow your focus with different groups of highly selected keywords to increase CTR and quality of your adverts.

7. Forgetting about single keyword performance

A specific campaign could reach a satisfactory CTR giving us some peace of mind but if you dig down another level of analysis you might find out that most of the keywords are no producing any clic and they’re just a waste of impression. Always analyze through different levels and perspectives, through adverts, keywords, campaign performance.

8. Focusing on one (wrong) metric

Do not focus only on a few metrics, try instead to get a global vision of your performance. Most people get focused on they’re ads CTR’s forgetting about cost for conversion or overall conversion rate (in the case you’re dealing with objectives). Even if you’re not using Adwords to increase your sales or you’re just aiming to get some more exposure to your brand, CTRs is not the only thing that counts.

9. Not considering landing pages as a factor affecting overall performance

Beside directly affecting conversion rates, landing pages can also affect quality score and overall campaigns performance. Always build some kind of semantic relevance in between the advert copy and the landing page content and keep in mind bounce rates. These factors can seriously affect your ads quality score hence your results.

10. Give up to early

Managing Adwords Campaign can be quite of a daunting task. You might feel to give up to early unless you realized that it is all about a trial&error process, when everyday you learn something new. Setting up a really successful campaign require mostly time and effort, whether you’re an online marketing consultant or a small business owner.

If you have been wondering what happened in Social Media during the past year, here’s a funny summary from Rob Cottingham. From the launch of Google Wave to Wikileaks hitting newspapers headlines, you’ll find pretty much everything that happened. Enjoy!

I don’t know if any of this will really happen, but in most cases it’s most than just gut feeling:

1 – Smartphones will finally overtake desktop pc  in sales. It’s no news, this has been going on for a while, most smartphone can easily replace desktop for the most essential tasks. Moreover most telco sales pitch uses the phone itself as a driver to sell they’re plans, no wonder if we would see an increase in sales topping current desktop pc sales.

2 – Google to buy Twitter for 4billion dollars – This isn’t news either, rumors have been spreading in the past few months and is probably time for the guys at Twitter to settle down and seriously think about the future.

Moreover, with no idea about a solid and viable business model, they just look like a easy prey for Google.

3 – Android will grow stronger, Nokia in need of a new strategy, Apple will need to face new challanges – The rise of Android screwed up the centralized model of Apple with his iPhone and iTunes platform, Nokia certainly need to invest in innovation and new product or die. Mobile as we knew it are dead, long live to the mobile!

4 – Yahoo! will look for a new CEO – Yahoo! has to finally found is formula, if they already lost quite of a long time a go the search engine war, they need to find someone brave enough to push on innovation.

Quite of a interesting situation though, will see what happens, it’s gonna be fun for sure! And if you wondered how thing actually changed in the past 10 years, that a look at this infographic.

According to this article from Expansion (in spanish), the recently launched Zara.com has reached a astonishing 2% conversion rate for its online ecommerce website.

zara.com daily visitors

About 5000 purchases/day multiplied by the average purchase which is about 40€, makes a whopping 200000€ of revenue.

Quite of an achivement, considering that the average conversion rate of the same segment never really tops 1% global and that the guys at Inditext, are not really keen on investing money in advertisement.

What does this really mean? Brands like these can actually leverage on impulse buying on the internet? Is this really it!?

Ecommerce has always been affected by the whole consumer decisional process, which greatly differs from the real-life one. Consumers plan and consider carefully all different options available prior to the purchase, maybe coming back on the same website more then once within a few days.

If those figures are correct, Zara simply managed to recreate something similar to impulse buying dynamics simply through its massive brand and worldwide recognition… Maybe it is not the case, but surely they will manage to get up to it at some point.