Search Engine Marketing Blog

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation announced yesterday that their social networking site, MySpace, will not hit its annual revenue target of $1 billion, falling short by some 10%.

Revenue in the third quarter fell from $233 million in the preceding 3 months to $210 million.

As discussed in this blog previously, there is certainly a place for marketing in the social networking sites but are they really the best place to find buyers desperate to buy your product or service?

Will Murdoch offload MySpace if it’s not the cash cow it first seemed? Now, who’s got money to burn?

“Phone call, Mr. Gates..”

Digg.com is a Social Media website that allows you to share articles, videos and images with others.

What most people don’t know is that Digg is also an excellent tool for getting your pages found quickly. Did you know that Digs submissions can be indexed and ranked by search engines within hours? This is ideal if you’re looking to get your site noticed straight away for topical related content or if you’re running a marketing campaign. You don’t even need your submission to have a high Digg rating. Most submissions can be indexed with simply one Digg and sometimes in hours.

Submitting your targeted page couldn’t be easier. Once you have opened your Digg account, simply “Submit New”, enter the URL of the page your wishing to drive visitors too, choose the media type, add a brief description and your done.

Being able to gain almost instant exposure for a subject you would otherwise have to wait to be ranked for opens up endless opportunities and could drive traffic to your site that you would have otherwise missed out on.

I wrote a post back in February that highlighted social media marketing problems.

Now, eMarketer have just published an interesting article (UK Advertisers Shy From Social Networks) that takes data from a recent study conducted by SPA Research and Synovate.

The article refers to a number of major UK companies that have tried the social networks only to move away. No great surprises there as clearly this platform is not going to be appropriate for all-comers.

As with anything new online, there’s going to be a lot of hype surrounding the ‘next big thing’. When it comes to marketing, the same ‘old’ rules apply: Understand your market, your goals and test.

When it comes to Social Media, Web 2.0 or whatever it’s called, there’s a lot of companies trying to find a way to cash in on the trend of connecting with people (known or unknown) online and finding happiness in having so many friends…

Anywhere there’s a gathering of people, there’s sure to be advertisers wanting to unlock some cash from these social groups but how effective is it?

At this point I should declare that at Impact Media, we are performing a full evaluation of the Social Media space but do not currently offer professional services in this area.

Aaron Wall has recently published a great article - The Inconvenient Truth About Social Media Marketing - which basically suggests this area does not monetise. Of course, others would beg to differ and, looking at some of the multi-million dollar tie ups between major software companies, search engines and the current darlings of social media, you’d have to believe that there is gold in them there hills!

Purely from a marketing perspective, I guess my advice to anyone looking at investing in this marketplace right now, is to tread carefully and ensure that you take small steps and carry out tests just as you would any other Internet marketing platform. If you’re a business looking to sell more products or services, I would also ensure that you’ve fully exploited the more orthodox search marketing efforts, e.g. search engine optimisation and pay per click before moving into Social Media.

Meanwhile, I’m off to buy myself a white elephant