This is a Quick Update things are crazy this week, Mat and I are speaking at the eTourism Summit next week in San Francisco. We are pumped to be there. We plan on opening up the travel industries minds to Viral Content and SEO in general. We have some sweet screen shots of stats from our latest viral campaign that got our client over 109,000 Uniques in two days. It was sweet, it got 25,000 hits from Reddit which is the most I have seen from them, I would be interested to see if our readers have seen more.

Social Media for Firefox has been updated today to version 1.0.14 in order to fix some problems we have had with Del.icio.us. We also noticed last night that Reddit has changed how they handle things. We have fixed that as well, the only thing now is you have to be logged into Reddit in order for the tool to work. They changed their search function that we use.

Social Media for Firefox has had over 20,000 downloads, and according to Webmaster Central we got over 5,500 links. We also rank for “Social Media” in the top ten and are pretty stoked on that. Also I have had numerous people say that they have been able to drive their accounts into the top 500 users on digg because of the tool. I had a bunch of people email me and say they hit the digg homepage for the first time with the tool. Same with people focusing on Stumble and Reddit.

Mat and I are speaking next week at the eToursim Summit Nov. 8th and 9th. Im speaking on two panels one on Reputation Management and the other on Social Media. Mat is speaking on Blogging. They may be like 10 tickets left but I doubt it, if anyone is going that reads us regularly let us know.

All my family was evacuated in California but no one lost their homes, we were very fortunate. I had a friend whose entire yard front back was scorched, along with their truck sitting in the driveway. Yet their house was 100% untouched. Got to hang out with Cameron Olthuis and his family this week cause they had to leave SD and that was a lot of fun. Our wives hadn’t met before and our kids got a long really good.

Hope everyone else is doing well, sorry for the personal post and no meat on some new technique. We will be posting some sweet things we have been testing in Social Media leading to conversions soon.

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If you are writing for Diggers, Stumblers, or Rss Subscribers in my opinion there is nothing more important then applying the “Inverted Pyramid” to your writing. I’m not Darren Rose or Brian Clark but I have written a lot of blog posts, submitted a boat load of stories to social sites, and I have tested technique after technique. The inverted pyramid has become my most effective tactic for grabbing readers or votes. The inverted pyramid is exactly what it sounds like, it is taking the meat and the core of the story and putting it at the top. It is a little more than “above the fold” which is making sure you have your most compelling info above the “fold” or “scroll” since we are talking websites. This is more about the title and then the content. It is giving up the pay off without users having to click through to read the full story. It works for readers with all attention spans as it maximizes the information the reader absorbs.

I learned about the inverted pyramid from the book, “Made to Stick” in the book it says the origin is rumored to come from the Civil War. Reporters would try to get back to their offices with information regarding the latest developments and their lines of communication would get cut or interrupted repeatedly by the war happenings. Due to the lack of time they had to convey their message they learned to communicate their information with the most important aspects first. When you have 15 seconds on the wire with your editor you`are going to go down the Page from most important facts to the least.

This is the same with today’s media, our lines are cut every minute through a new IM, text, email, phone call etc… when I go through my friends stories on digg I will go through all 200 plus submissions in minutes scanning and digging based off of the info in the title and the description, but mostly title. How many times have you seen a good story and thought, “that would be doing a lot better if it had a different title.” You will see this a lot on digg and reddit, where the commenter’s will correct the submitter and say, “the title should of read…” or that is an awesome story, too bad the title was so bad.” The opposite is true as well, you will often see stories with great titles make the homepage of a social site only to have the entire audience say, “Tricked by the title” or “I thought that story was going to be a lot better.” When you are on “Up and Coming” on Digg it is the Title and only the Title the users see. On Reddit you don’t submit a description at all, everything revolves around the title.

A lot of people think that creating grabbing and creative writing is hooking the reader through vague leading stories or words all the way through trying to build anticipation until the very last paragraph. It is common to see people build up and up until the very end only to let you down by stringing you along. This works in a mystery novel, but not on blogs and social sites. When you follow this type of writing you will commit writing suicide or what Journalists call “Burying the Lead.” You are just going to make your readers become disenchanted, loosing interest in your posts. Don’t make your readers think about what your story is about. You will see more links, more comments and more rss subscribers if you make it a habit to give away the farm in the title and in the opening paragraph.

When writing your Titles or Headlines all you have to do is follow one simple exercise and that is finding the core.

Finding the Core: Why are you writing your article? What is the point you want to make and what are you trying to get across?
Guy Kawasaki in “Art of the Start” talks about how companies should adapt Mantras instead of Mission Statements. He rags on MBA’s coming straight out of college and using the same 5 paragraph nonsense all inclusive mission statements. If I recall correctly he even conducted an experiment that used an automated software to build mission statements and those were seen as the better when compared to the statements written by someone from the actual company. Nike is the icon of Mantra with “Just Do It” Southwest Airlines applies their mantra to all decisions, “The Low-Fare Airline” if it doesn’t help them stay “The Low-Fare Airline” then it doesn’t happen. You don’t fly Southwest to eat Salmon. Missions Statements bury the lead, Mantras are the epitome of the inverted pyramid.

Take your article and re-read it and tear it down to it’s bones. If you had to say one thing or had to use only one sentence to tell this story what would it be? Write down your answers and play with them and you will come up with your “Inverted Pyramid.”

As mentioned above I first came across these ideas through the book “Made to Stick” there is a section in the first chapter talking about James Carville and the successful Presidential Campaign he ran for Bill Clinton. One day he was frustrated with how things were going inside the campaign among his staff and he went to the a big white board in the middle of their office and wrote, “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” This is obviously the wheels on what became Clinton’s victorious campaign. He also told Bill who is very smart and can talk for hours about any policy in great detail, that “If You Say Three Things, You Don’t Say Anything.” This helped Clinton to always bring his message back to the Economy.

Whether it is for you landing page for your website, that sells a product or a service, or in your blog posts or social news submissions, take an extra second to think about what you are trying to convey and break it down to it’s core. Then use that as your “Campaign” or your message and you will see more readers, votes and comments.

If you care anything at all about Viral and Sticky Marketing you have to read, “Made to Stick” it is the “Unofficial” Social Media Bible.

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This is an addition or follow up to my post Viral Social Media Ideas for Boring Industries. We had a lot of comments of people asking for advice with their “boring” sites or topics and I got a boat load of emails asking similar questions. I wanted to outline some tactics you can use to research and ultimately better prepare your article or piece of viral content prior to launch.

How does the saying go? “Don’t reinvent the wheel, just make it better” something like that? This goes the same way in social media and news, you don’t need to create something from scratch to have success. I feel some people just sit there and try to think of a new ground breaking idea that will shake the earth (or the net), when instead they should be looking at tweaking what has already worked. You want to start at the site that is your main target, whether it is Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, etc… Go to that site and use their tag or search feature to look for topics that are related to your industry. If you want to do a viral piece on Divorce, search “Divorce” if you want to research “Cheerleaders” (one of the emails we got) do the same.

Digg Search: Digg search sucks, but there is still some good things that can come out of it, like changing the parameters to only show new stories or only show popular stories and stories with the most votes. Remember though, just because it didn’t make it popular doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. A lot of people use Digg and still think all you have to do is submit some good content and it will make “popular”. This is far from the truth, unless the the War in Iraq ends or the War in Iran begins and you submit the first story you are out of luck without an active contributing account. When researching ideas this is a gold mine, as I can’t tell you how many gems I have found that were submitted by users with no friends that received little to no votes. It can pay off to search deep into the results as there are a lot of stories that should of made it that never do.

StumbleUpon Buzz: Will show you the recent articles that have been stumbled and that are hot right now, use this page to do a keyword search or to select a tag related to your niche and then browse through the stories. This is usually what is hot now, not what was hot a year ago. One way to see older stories is to use StumbleUpon groups and then look through sites in that group or submitted by users in that group.

Del.icio.us: Is the usually the first place I go as it operated more like a search engine and returns decent search results, (I use it more than Google on new and fresh info). It has a good search feature, so enter your keywords and it will list the URLs that were tagged with that keyword the most. You will almost always find something here it is very useful.

Reddit: options can change to show the search options by showing either the “New” or “Rank”. New is obviously the newest articles related to the search, but Rank is not a list of the relevant articles with the most votes, it is more of a meta search it seems to bring back the stories that have a higher Keyword density or repetition in the Title.

Youtube: This works really well as you can alter the results by choosing “Date Added” to get fresh results, “View Count” to see the videos with the most views and “Ratings” to list the videos with the best ratings.

If any of the sites search results are giving you a hard time you can rely on Google by doing a “site:domain.com keyword phrase.” I use this a lot with Digg, SU and Youtube.

You will often find that in your searching your ideas will change, be open minded and really take a look at what works in your niche. I’m not saying copy down the successful content and reposting it on your site. Get ideas from this. If you see that widgets or viral tests work well in your broad categories think about how you can do that on your site. If most of the results display stats or studies come up with some new research backed by some data. Don’t blog spam by taking a popular story off Reddit, posting it on your site then submitting it to Digg. That is blogspam, and it takes away from the original content creator. Use this as a brainstorm to get and idea that there is actually stories related to your site that do make it popular on the social sites.

Again as in the previous post if you are stumped on viral ideas with your boring site, drop us a comment or email and we will definitely help out. You can take nearly any industry and create some viral content.

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I did not make much fuss blogging, or talking about Netscape turning into Propeller when it all went down a week or so ago. I know so many were talking about how this will be the end for the popular Netscape program, and predicting all kind of bad things. I just laughed them all off, just like everyone saying Digg was going to die about a year or so ago.

I think its a good time now, to talk about why I will continue to use Propeller. REASON ONE: If you keep a close eye on your SERPs and brand management you will notice how Propeller is already helping out with that. That alone should be reason enough to even just have an account with Propeller, right?

If you need more convincing, then how about this - REASON TWO: I had a client call me today and talk about how much they love the traffic they are getting from the new Propeller. Out of only hundreds of visits, they had received several qualified leads, and two of them have closed down for large amounts, making my client very, very, very happy. Most of my clients had enjoyed traffic from Netscape, and thought they were receiving new love from a “new” traffic source. They were surprised to learn of the switch!

These two reasons are good enough for me, even though I will continue to use Propeller for so many others. What are your thoughts about the new Netscape social network?

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A while ago when Pownce first came out I tried (for a second) to get an invite, but never got one, so I lost interest and forgot about it until today. Today, a buddy of mine, Brandon Buttars hooked me up with an invite, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to ask if anyone else wanted a Pownce invite? I got 6 of them, so I will give them to the first 6 commenters that ask nicely.

This is also going to be a good test to find out if anyone even cares? Do you already have a Pownce account, and do you use it? What do you use it for? Has it been useful, or a waste of time? I guess the main test will be if I am able to give away all 6 invites. If you care and want to add me, here is my Pownce - http://pownce.com/Matt_Siltala/

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My new best friend Pierre Far brought to my attention via a post last night that there may be some problems with our new Firefox extension Social Media for Firefox. He stated that there were somethings being sent to a Data Base that looked concerning to say the least. Dazzling Donna also covered it and the story is on Sphinn right now.

I am thankful for them posting this and I would of done the same if I noticed something fishy regarding a new tool I just installed that a lot of people were exited about.

Immediately after Pierre posted on his blog, I replied and emailed him directly giving him full access to our Data Base reports so he could help me recognize any wrongful data that was being stored. We did set up a data base and the reason was to watch for problems in the vote reporting especially for SU and Reddit as they do not have API’s and we have always had issues with them. Pierre noticed that there was some problems particularly with less protected sites that was leading to the recording of things that we had no idea of. Things like URL strings having the user name in them etc..

Upon this info we immediately deactivated the reporting and we now have a new version available that has no ties whatsoever to any reporting or database.

You can access the new version 1.0.12 by going to tools in FF and selecting “add ons” and then “find updates”

or you can delete it through add ons as well and install a new version here.

I will be the first to admit to this Folly I take full responsibility. I do not know how to program, nor do I plan to learn. I sent the tool in beta to a programming friend he was too busy to check it out, and I should of waited until he did.

This was not intentional I apologize to the SEO community, we created this tool to help us build better SM accounts and it definitely helped us, we wanted nothing but to share it with everyone else so they could do the same. Mat and I have built 97th Floor from the ground up, it is our source of income, and our passion. We would never intentionally do anything that would jeopardize users of our product.

Again I apologize know now that you can build those power accounts without the 97th Floor Big Brother Watching Over you. Everything that was recorded has been destroyed and deleted.

Again this was an innocent mistake that I will not back away from.

On a positive note we have had some people report that they are already experiencing very positive results with reaching first page glory on the different social sites.

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Over the summer we have been building some sweet tools to help us save time while finding good content to submit to social sites. It can take a lot of time out of your day to find really good content that would be suitable for the audiences of Digg, Reddit, SU and others. So we developed a tool that does just that for you.

It is called Social Media for Firefox it is a status bar extension and you can read the FULL DETAILS HERE.

After downloading it and testing it out please comeback to this post and leave us feedback or comments.

Thanks to Cameron Olthuis for testing it with us and Modern Blue Web Design for programming and design

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If you are not adapting social media into your marketing strategies you need to be. I still talk to so many people that either don’t understand the potential of a popular social media campaign or think they work in an industry that is not viral. All you need is one first page Digg, or one successful Stumble and you will be hooked for life. Traffic, subscribers, links and mind share they all spring from a successful social media campaign and any business can benefit from it. This post Mat did last week on some simple tweaks with Craigslist, has brought over 4k visitors and a whole bunch of subscribers in about 3 days. A digg and a bigger Stumble will bring much more, but when social media can bring 4k new visitors in 3 days on a post that wasn’t planned to go big at all you can see the importance.

We still hear from very large companies and individuals that they don’t see how Social Media can be leveraged to help their business and that there is no content that would make their business sexy. I wanted to take some specific industries that we have come across or been asked about and give some ideas for viral content. Especially since the Google algo is currently heavily favored on any viral campaign even if it is non related. You get a first page digg for something not related to your site you will see your rankings go up across the board. It is still better to come up with a related story though, as that will bring correct anchor text, subscribers and all the other benefits aside from links and traffic.

Trade Shows
The Trade Show and Display industry is full of old school ugly sites, with old school buyers and clientèle. Correct me if I am wrong but I don’t see a trade show blog flooding feed readers world wide. However there are a lot of things you can do with this industry in order to generate some buzz and get some links. If there is a big event that you provide a large amount of displays and product for, or that you would like to sell a large amount of displays and product for, create a post about that show with maybe some of these ideas, “Sexiest Booths Babes from Such and Such Convention” stole that from Shoemoney, or twist it and make it “Ugliest “Booth Babes from Such and Such Convention.” You could do, “17 Trade Show Displays that will Hurt Your Sales” and show all kinds of stupid displays with crazy lights or colors, or just plan idiotic designs. Or do, “Best Booths of Such and Such Convention 2007.” If done right these articles can be spread throughout the social sites and will generate links around the convention that you are targeting and you will rank for it and become a trusted brand for companies looking to represent themselves at that trade show or any other show for that matter. If you really wanted to get in front of the the elite “Linkerati” make those posts about SES, SMX or Pubcon as seo’s will pass the link love all day long.

Student Loans or Continuing Ed
If you are offering college type services like, school loans, continuing ed, or skill set training play off of the success of “High School Musical” and create a Youtube video called “College Musical” or “Drop Out Musical“, about partying, frats, dropouts etc… It would need to be no more than a couple minutes, maybe you make it a series to keep the links coming and release a new video every so often. If you made the songs and dancing really well, but covered funny college topics it could be very funny and generate a lot of buzz. You might think this would be more work than it is worth, but when you compare it to a weeks fees in ppc in the College Loan industry it may be money well spent. If you do a video make sure you watermark your url in the video and put it in the intro and credits, and launch it from your site to try and get the links to your site and not the Youtube URL. Also try to work some keywords in the the Youtube title, in case it does get a lot of direct links. This way you will get an extra position in the search results.
*If I was a college and I wanted to attract a lot of new students from throughout the US via the internet, I would be marching down to the drama department with some tunes humming in my head.

Weddings and Bridal Services
This industry would actually not be too difficult to create viral content for, there is a lot of newsworthy info out there and a very large online audience. I still want to cover it because there are so many people trying to compete in this industry online and for the most part they have very little budgets. Somedays we will turn away more than a handful wedding vendors because they want to rank for a decent word, but have no money for it. I always end up talking to them about viral and social media, at least now I will have a post to send them too. Create an article on, “The Ugliest Wedding Dresses of 2007,” or “The 20 Worst Songs Your DJ Could Play at Your Reception.” My mom is a self employed Harpist in San Diego, I could do a study on how there are actually more male Harpists then female and show some disturbing pictures of guys plucking away at the harp (Im sorry you can play whatever you want (maybe it is because I grew up with a mother that played Harp, but I will never hire a male harpist.)

I hope this helps to tweak your thinking, so you can look at your industry and see how easy it is to twist into something “Diggable.” Social media is a good path to defensible traffic, it can also be the secret weapon that your competitor can’t duplicate solidifying your position as number 1. It is easy for a competitor to copy your backlinks if they are all from link brokers and directories, it is impossible if they are coming from the natural growth of a viral idea. If anyone has an industry that they think cannot “Go Viral” please email me chris AT 97thfloor.com and tell me your industry and I will help you. I think it is possible for any site. I used to disagree with that, but I have become a convert from first hand experience.

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I am not a Craigslist master by any means, but after testing a few things out (and failing miserably a couple times), trying to get rid of stuff I no longer wanted, I think I finally figured out some methods of listing that could help those struggling with making heads or tails out of selling on CraigsList. I guess you don’t have to be literally selling products for these techniques to work, you could be offering services or anything else that CraigsList allows. My case study was based on selling a personal product of mine though!

To answer the question that I know you are thinking right now; YES, I really did make $500 bucks this morning on CraigsList in about 10 minutes. I will get into how in just a minute, but I want to give a little more background.

The last two weeks I have been testing and testing on CraigsList, I have been playing around with pricing, images, content - all with the exact same product. I wanted to come up with the best techniques possible to get the most money with the quickest time frame. I can better illustrate some of my findings with screen shots I took of my various listings. There are two that stand out that I think make the point better then anything.

Here is the very first listing that I made:

I made the ad very straight to the point with exact descriptions of what the product was including model numbers and everything. There was no personal touch at all. People are scared enough to buy electronics on places like CraigsList, so this ad might have scared some people off since I got NO emails, or calls for a week with this ad.

The listing that changed it all -

I want to point out the title on this photo compared to the other one. I have done a few things to make it stick out. I only included the things that people are searching for like “60 inch big screen” or “hd tv”. People could care less (from what I found out) about the brand name when doing initial searches. They may ask later on, but the point is to be found so they will ask you questions.

With the second example listing I showed you I got a call in 10 minutes (from time of listing), and it was a guy offering me full price (thus, making $500 bucks in 10 minutes). I probably got 30 calls before I finally took it off (I just wanted to test it out) and 40 emails all ready to buy the tv from me.

What were the main differences in the ad? First ad was not very personal. It was just giving you the specs of the tv and thats about it. The title was doing the same. There was nothing in the title that made it stand out, or made people want to click. Notice on the second ad how I have used symbols *** and wording like “NEED TO SELL” and only keywords that people are using to search.

When going through all the listings at CraigsList there are so many people have to choose from, you need to make yours stand out.

Look at the screen shot below and you will see what I am talking about.

You will see the arrow pointing to my ad, and you will notice a few others that stand out. Do you see the difference? These are the ads that will be clicked on, and these are the people who will make money quickly selling their items.

All the other ads will be skimmed through and not have as high of a click through rate, even if they have the same exact product at a better price. The point is to get them to click on the listing! People remember things like "Need to sell" so they get the idea they are getting a good deal, because "I need to sell", and that is why they click!

Hints -

• Use symbols to stand out such as ******* OR @@@@@@@@
• Use ALL CAPS when appropriate.
• Write the ad as if you were talking to a person that could care less about the model number (or brand)
• Use keywords that people would actually use when searching for a big screen tv.
• Use real pictures that you take yourself, and not from the manufacturer.

I had a pretty fun time testing out CraigsList as I have not been a huge user in past, but will be from now on. Just think about this. I probably could have sold the TV for the same price on eBay, but then I would have eBay and paypal fees cutting into my bottom line. I love CraigsList and this post just explained why!

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If you haven’t realized already Social Sites that allow for “Search Engine Friendly” Urls have a relatively easy time ranking in Google. This is due to Google’s over trusting nature on old and large sites. It is true that Google lets old sites get a way with Murder while new sites can’t steal a stick of gum. Don’t believe me? Start to watch how many times Wikipedia, Technorati and Squidoo show up in your every day search results. If you know how to leverage these sites you can get some pretty good rankings in a short amount of time for decent keywords. This method is nothing new in fact it has been overly exploited to the use of Social Media Squatting. Just like buying domains that have your competitors names or products in them you can register those pages at social media sites. I own a squidoo page for one of my old competitors names, I have never done anything with it and never will as we are in different leagues now and I don’t care, but the fact of the matter is I own their name on a large social site. I could rank that page for their brand name and have it filled with all of my companies information. But I digress, social squatting is not the point of this post.

The point is if you notice someone leveraging a social site to rank for a word that you are actively seeking you can poach the work that they have done to rank that page and sneak in right underneath them utilizing Google’s indented rank feature.

If there is a social site ranking in the top 20 for your keyword phrase, go and create a profile on that site with a slightly different URL and similar title tags. Then optimize the text to coincide with the keyword phrase and throw some good links to the page. If you do it right you will see the page show up as an indented rank just below your competitors already existing page.

For example go to Google and Type in Online Reputation Management you will see a squidoo lens on the second page. This used to be on the first page, but it is being re-done and they have lost their title tag and it is now on the second.
I know because our site 97th Floor ranks for Reputation Management words and I have been watching. The lens is labeled with the URL of /onlinereputationmanagement, so when they created their profile they chose their URL to be the main keyword without any spaces. What you would want to do is create your lens and choose your URL to say the same thing but with dashes. If that is taken then say the same with dashes and add a number or something else to make it slightly different like, /online-reputation-management-1 or /reputation-management-online. Then create your profile talking about your services or company linking it to your site and then publish it. Then link to it from your site, your blog or anywhere you can get some good links and you will see it jump through the hoops to an indent rank just below the existing site.

Now if you know what you are doing and don’t mind getting into a little battle you can optimize your social profile better then the first ranked page by passing more authority links to it with varied anchor text and you can replace that pages rank. If you are really good you can actually optimize your profile so well that it will separate you and the indent rank pushing the indent rank to the second page while keeping you on the first. At SMX Seattle one of the best takeaways from the Give it Up Session was explaining,

“Stephan Spencer has 7 tips in 7 minutes:
Secret #1 - Grouped results: Google groups results from the same site together. To find the true position of an indented (grouped) result, you can add a &num=9 to the domain search to see if indented listing drops off.”

This explains that the indented group result is not really the next in line it is most likely number 9 or 8 and Google chooses to move it up next to the other result since it is from the same domain in order to simplify their results.

So you can use that knowledge to steal your competitors rank by creating the profile, grabbing the group indent result, optimizing better and then pushing them to the second page.

This can also be done on Directories or any site that allows for business profiles. If you see a large site with a profile page of one of your competitors ranking you can most likely take advantage of that.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which is used by more than 500,000 marketers