ReutersiPhone 4

The launch was accompanied by the usual queues of enthusiastic users who waited from Thursday night the opening of the Apple Stores eager to grab the new phone by the Cupertino company.

In Rome’s Apple Store the iPhone was already sold out at 11 in the morning after around 3000 units were already purchased. In Milan (Carugate) there have been reports of a fight breaking out because the supplies weren’t enough to satisfy the request from customers who had been queueing up for hours.

However, there seem to be resistances expressed by Italian buyers which are to be found, more than in the whole Antennagate issue, in the embarrassingly high price of the device.

The 16 GB model starts at 659 Euros, the equivalent of about $ 856, a price that’s far too high even for a country like Italy, where the circulation of iPhone among fanatics is something like 1.2 million units, with an average penetration of 1 every 50 inhabitants (/a>).

The alternative is buying the iPhone 4 at a way lower cost or even getting it for “free” taking advantage of the many different offers by phone carriers (3, Vodafone, Tim). The downside is the mandatory subscription plan with questionable economic viability in the medium term.

Probably the best solution for those unwilling to spend all that money at once is to buy an unlocked iPhone in an Apple store taking advantage of financing solution.

However, we’ll wait for more in-depth analysis of sales numbers in order to evaluate what will happen in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

ReutersiPhone 4

The launch was accompanied by the usual queues of enthusiastic users who waited from Thursday night the opening of the Apple Stores eager to grab the new phone by the Cupertino company.

In Rome’s Apple Store the iPhone was already sold out at 11 in the morning after around 3000 units were already purchased. In Milan (Carugate) there have been reports of a fight breaking out because the supplies weren’t enough to satisfy the request from customers who had been queueing up for hours.

However, there seem to be resistances expressed by Italian buyers which are to be found, more than in the whole Antennagate issue, in the embarrassingly high price of the device.

The 16 GB model starts at 659 Euros, the equivalent of about $ 856, a price that’s far too high even for a country like Italy, where the circulation of iPhone among fanatics is something like 1.2 million units, with an average penetration of 1 every 50 inhabitants (/a>).

The alternative is buying the iPhone 4 at a way lower cost or even getting it for “free” taking advantage of the many different offers by phone carriers (3, Vodafone, Tim). The downside is the mandatory subscription plan with questionable economic viability in the medium term.

Probably the best solution for those unwilling to spend all that money at once is to buy an unlocked iPhone in an Apple store taking advantage of financing solution.

However, we’ll wait for more in-depth analysis of sales numbers in order to evaluate what will happen in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

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/a>

Sponsored by /a>, well known social media evangelist /a> recently gave a presentation to an enthusiastic group of marketers in downtown Minneapolis to introduce the concepts behind his new book:  /a> The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate and Measure Success in the New Web. The following is an overview of his presentation:

Relations vs. Relationships

There’s something interesting that’s happening right now on the web:  relations are starting to matter more than relationships.  The key lesson for marketers, and what the rest of this overview discusses, is that people will engage around content that compels them in networks where that content spreads.

We are all going to have to shift from relationships to relations:  having more thinner (but still relevant) connections is starting to matter more.  As a marketer, this shifts the power balance.  People are connecting around /a> rather than demographics, and this means four degrees is the new six degrees of separation.  In plain English:  we’re all becoming better connected and users are vitally important to the equation of how information spreads.

A way for your marketing to succeed is to take the approach of a sociologist, an anthropologist and a philosopher rather than a traditional marketer.  That’s because it is people who are in control of the ideas that spread.  The web has changed things and marketing and PR have changed along with it.

Context Becoming as Valuable as Content

The challenges go deeper than marketing approaches.  When you join a company, you’re not given a /a> and /a> account like you are an email account.  You already have those things.  And companies aren’t sure what to do or how they can leverage their own team members to increase their digital presence.  Your team members are vitally important because “content being king” is evolving into an era where context is king (yet, content still remains quite the powerful queen).  Context is proven to show who you are connected to and why around every conversation.  Your team members are a key ingredient to providing context, their actions equating to a type of social currency for your brand.

Speaking of content, how people react to your company’s content (something now public) equates to the stature of your /a>.  Reputation, trust and relationships are earned through these reactions and how you connect contextually is the experience prospects seek.

Content and context define the future of successful marketing.  You’re no longer marketing to individuals, you’re now marketing to “an audience with an audience.”  And every time they react to something you do, it shows the power of relations vs. relationships.  But without /a> and relevant context, you can never reach “an audience with an audience” effectively because you’re missing part of the equation of why people share ideas.

Getting Started

One of the easiest things to do is see what’s happening right now.  An approach that can be used is a “30 day window” to see a snapshot in time of what’s happening around a brand.  For a brand unsure about how much conversation was happening around their products – a sample search can reveal a staggering amount of messages across social platforms.  In many cases it’s a shock and can result in disbelief from management teams.  A /a> should be required for every brand to monitor the situation in an ongoing fashion.

Getting at least a snapshot is a good first step, and ongoing monitoring is even better, but equally important is to consider the data in perspective.  Or to put it simply:  share of voice vs. share of conversation.  Share of voice only gives you a partial view as it assumes everyone is talking about companies in a given industry.  A more relevant approach is to look at share of conversation.  As an example, consider  Old Spice – in the discussions on the social web regarding “body spray,” how well did they do?  While the overall conversations and reactions generated, putting it into context truly provides meaning of share of conversation.

Share of conversation matters more than most consider.  People are actively using the social web as part of the decision making cycle, and so this is the socialization of more than just marketing, but business as a whole.

Conclusion

How are you adapting to the socialization of business to help move these things in the right direction?  You need to extend divisions so that they are responding to consumers at the right point to become trusted and a part of the community.

All companies need to realize the fact that they are now in the media business, and that every company is now a media company.  This strategy is potent enough several companies embracing it have developed brands of media so popular they’re putting out best-selling books.  The influence they have over their markets is that big.

Influence is the ability to inspire desirability and measurable action and outcomes.  It is more than a click or more than a view.  As marketers, creating content and context to ultimately form influence is how to achieve long term, sustainable social media success.

For more on getting started in social media, consider creating a /a> to plan your /a>.

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The sheer volume of social media marketing and search engine optimization advice posted online can make it difficult for companies to make sense out what direction they should take. There are many models and approaches to leveraging  optimized content for discovery through search and how to develop social networks to engage customers and promote content.  It comes down to fundamentals and I think the following Four pieces of the Social SEO puzzle can help companies of any size get started in a more meaningful way on their journey towards becoming productive on the social web.

Listening, Content, Socialize and Measure could just as well be represented as a cycle, but I think the forward direction is important because you can’t reach outcomes without action. Any good social media marketing effort needs to begin with some kind of Listening program. That means using social media monitoring tools to collect, sort and manage social content according to topics being monitored.  Content is the glue that makes search engines work and content is a critical part of the social sharing experience within social media. Speaking of sharing, socializing with other like-minded individuals as a personal experience can fold well with brand interactions as long as the needs of the buyer persona has been reconciled with business objectives. Successful efforts within the social web can be measured, and should be, in a variety of ways.  Measurement justifies objectives and it’s important to identify the right tools for monitoring real time and web analytics.

Here are a few more details on each of these steps. I encourage you to think about how your company is implementing these steps in your own social media marketing efforts. Are you taking shortcuts? Are you following through? Have you found more important steps to follow?

Listening

An essential start and ongoing component for a /a> and optimization effort is to leverage listening tools.  As companies struggle to understand where the social web fits within their online marketing strategy, a social media monitoring program (listening) should be implemented immediately.  Collecting social web data, organizing and managing it is essential for tapping into the conversations, influencers and real-time marketing opportunities that abound in today’s internet environment.  While there are many things you can listen for with a social media monitoring effort, here are four key elements for Social SEO success:

• Social Channels - Which social destinations are your customers frequenting? Social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn? Or Twitter? What about media sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube? Forums, Blogs or Social News and Bookmarking sites? Social media monitoring will help you decide which social channels you should start testing and digging into deeper for participation, networking and promotion.  For example, why invest in videos if the majority of influencers in your category spend their time on Twitter?
• Social Keywords - Good social media monitoring tools analyze tags, comments, anchor text and other forms of text to identify keywords associated with the monitoring topic. That keyword insight can help identify topics of interest as they emerge and influence content strategy decisions as well as social media optimization. Social conversations influence search behaviors and if you can identify relevant concepts that are emerging in popularity on the social web, why not create and optimize content around those topics so you’re easily found via search engines?
• Influentials – A listening program will help identify the influentials within the topics you’re monitoring providing the ability to prioritize who to connect with. As Brian Solis mentioned yesterday, Influence is the ability to affect intended outcomes and if you can provide influencers with something of value to them and their networks, it increases the reach of your own message and content substantially.
• SERPs - Social media monitoring tools don’t track search engine results pages and that’s why you should. All major search engines purchase data feeds from different social media sources and incorporate social media content within search results. Therefore, it’s important to monitor search results for key terms relevant to your business and identify what social sources are being included.  If Google is showing blog posts above the fold for a competitive keyword phrase, it might be easier for you to get exposure by commenting on those blog posts with a link back to your site or making blog posts about that topic on your own blog.

Content

Content makes the Social SEO world go round.  One of the biggest growth areas in Online Marketing is the business of creating, optimizing and promoting content. Brands are becoming publishers, which isn’t really new, but becoming more common.  Big brands have funded TV shows, Radio networks and other forms of editorial ie content, for years. The ease of publishing online provides many opportunities for companies to engage customers with content. It’s no longer enough to simply publish features and benefits information on products and services. Customers want more.  Marketers would do well to create a content marketing strategy or as I like to call it, a Content Marketing Optimization Strategy.  Inventory content assets such as web pages, images, video, audio, rich media and file types such as HTML, PDF, MS Office docs, Structured Data Feeds and RSS to assess what can be promoted via social channels and be ranked in search results. Map search keywords to search engine optimization content. Map social keywords to social media content.

If content can be searched it can be optimized and a well planned digital asset optimization effort that works in sync with social networking and promotions can efficiently get content to those that want it and also facilitate better search visibility. That is the essence of Social SEO.

Socialize

With insight into the appropriate social media channels, influentials and a rock solid content marketing optimization strategy in place, it’s important to have a plan on how to connect with the communities where customers and prospects spend their time.  Three key pieces to socializing your marketing efforts include:

• Buyer Personas – Research what your customers do on the social web. What are their social information discovery, consumption and sharing preferences. What influences them to share and buy?
• Grow Networks – Time strapped marketers often fail to spend time growing networks. Some try to buy friends literally or through repeated incentives. Spend a small, but consistent amount of time growing networks organically. That might mean 10-30 minutes every day commenting, friending, following, liking and updating on a daily basis. There is no substitute for participation when it comes to growing a network that can have a real effect on your ability to promote content that gets passed on and on and on.
• Promote – Plan to develop a cycle of social interaction by reconciling the needs of buyer personas with business goals in your content marketing strategy. Grow networks that you can promote optimized content to.  Blogs can often serve as an ideal hub for this kind of content with spokes to the various social channels for content promotion such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc..  A cycle of social participation starts with creating & promoting optimized content & assets. That content gets noticed, shared & voted on, growing awareness.   The increased exposure attracts more subscribers, fans, friends, followers & links. Increased links & social  exposure grow search & referral traffic. Traffic & community help with research to develop & further grow your social networks for content & SEO.

Measure

Success comes in many forms and with social media marketing and social SEO, it’s the combination of social media monitoring and web analytics that provides the most actionable value. Social media monitoring tools are not only effective for initial Listening, but also to determine the social effect of your optimized content marketing on the social web. Off site engagement can be monitored, measured and analyzed in combination with web analytics tools that provide insight into what social traffic does once they get to your web site. Leveraging monitoring and analytics to inform future content creation, keyword optimization and social promotion is essential for staying ahead of the competition and being effective at meeting customer needs.

Obviously, the implementation of such a simplified strategy can vary widely according the the purpose, but with so many companies unwilling to commit to developing an overall /a>, experimentation becomes a more reasonable alternative. Following a basic structure like the four steps listed above can help make a social media test or even a modest social media marketing program a lot more productive.

img src=”http://24c.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/fd8f5350e9l-feed.png.png” alt=”Email Newsletter” width=”48″ height=”37″ border=”0″ align=”left” style=”margin-right:10px;” /> Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
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img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-1173″ title=”world-cup-2010-mexican-fans-celso-flores” src=”http://seo2.0.onreact.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/world-cup-2010-mexican-fans-celso-flores.jpg” alt=”" width=”500″ height=”333″ />

Mexican Fans by /a> (image added by sombrero expert optimizer Tad of SEO 2.0)

“The New SEO – Search Engine Organization!” is a guest post by Albert Gouyet, Vice President of Product Marketing, /a>.

With the World Cup Finals in South Africa already becoming a distant memory, it’s that time again to draw analogies between team sports and marketing activities. Today’s topic: SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Disclaimer: if you are a soccer fanatic, still struggling to come to grips with your country’s failure to win the World Cup, you probably should stop reading now! All others please read on…

In this World Cup we saw the success of teams with a balanced structure that exhibited high-levels of co-operation

- think

• Spain
• Holland
• Germany

- and the failure of those that relied primarily on the brilliance of individual players – think Brazil, Argentina, and England. (Italy and France were so bad, they fall into a category of their own!)

What does this have to do with SEO? In most enterprises, SEO tends to be more of an “Argentina” when it needs to be more of a “Spain” – in other words, less dependent on an individual SEO specialist and more reliant on a team efforts, or a “search engine organization” approach.

You can have the most brilliant SEO mind in the world managing your SEO or you might have outsourced it to the premier SEO specialist firm. But if your web-developer updates your site without any understanding of the existing backlinks that are driving the authority for your natural search rankings, all their genius will count for naught! (For those of you who didn’t see it, Germany, with their team-base approach, destroyed Argentina 4-0!)

SEO Team Line-up

So what is the optimum team line up for the search engine organization?

Goal Keeper – Web Developer

If this guy drops the ball, you’re in trouble (ask England!). Often forgotten unless he makes a mistake, the web developer needs to ensure all the key internal and external links that drive the SEO authority are pointing to the right content.

Defense – Product Marketing

Very much a self-contained unit, just like the defense in a soccer team, the product marketing group lays the groundwork for a successful SEO operation. Leveraging the market intelligence generated by the SEO manager, this team incorporates the critical keywords into all marketing collateral and website material. They also need to avoid costly defensive mistakes; for example, breaking SEO by creating new content that targets keywords already covered by better pages.

Strikers – Marketing Communications/Media Relations

If these guys are shooting blanks, you’re not going much further than the group stages (again, ask England!) The life blood to a successful SEO operation is content that is relevant to your target market. Much of the content will be generated internally, but the real “goal” is to secure high profile articles in industry-respected media outlets with backlinks driving authority to your website.

Midfielder – the SEO Manager

The Maestro! He/she is in the middle of everything and orchestrates the SEO play. For example, he/she ensures that the “goalkeeper” is aware of the impact of website changes, works with the “defense” to ensure the correct messaging is incorporated into all product marketing, identifies sources of backlinks that need to be targeted, and works with the “strikers” to develop relevant content and backlinks, etc.

Sports analogies aside, for SEO to really be successful and become an integral, revenue driving part of your marketing program, it takes a team effort that is well coordinated, balanced and based on cooperation and playing off the strengths of the entire team, not just one individual.

When it comes to being a Search Engine Organization, are you Spain or France?

Albert Gouyet is BrightEdge’s Vice President of Product Marketing. He brings over 20 years of broad technology and senior management experience from Netscape, AOL, Sybase as well as venture backed private companies.

At AOL, Albert was Vice President of Web Clients and Services where he led the team responsible for developing and implementing a new strategy for Search for Netscape and CompuServe, which culminated with the game-changing partnership between AOL and Google.

For the record, Albert is a native of France and can be reached via email: agouyet at brightedge.com.

Related posts:

1. /a>
2. /a>
3. /a>

img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-1173″ title=”world-cup-2010-mexican-fans-celso-flores” src=”http://seo2.0.onreact.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/world-cup-2010-mexican-fans-celso-flores.jpg” alt=”" width=”500″ height=”333″ />

Mexican Fans by /a> (image added by sombrero expert optimizer Tad of SEO 2.0)

“The New SEO – Search Engine Organization!” is a guest post by Albert Gouyet, Vice President of Product Marketing, /a>.

With the World Cup Finals in South Africa already becoming a distant memory, it’s that time again to draw analogies between team sports and marketing activities. Today’s topic: SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Disclaimer: if you are a soccer fanatic, still struggling to come to grips with your country’s failure to win the World Cup, you probably should stop reading now! All others please read on…

In this World Cup we saw the success of teams with a balanced structure that exhibited high-levels of co-operation

- think

• Spain
• Holland
• Germany

- and the failure of those that relied primarily on the brilliance of individual players – think Brazil, Argentina, and England. (Italy and France were so bad, they fall into a category of their own!)

What does this have to do with SEO? In most enterprises, SEO tends to be more of an “Argentina” when it needs to be more of a “Spain” – in other words, less dependent on an individual SEO specialist and more reliant on a team efforts, or a “search engine organization” approach.

You can have the most brilliant SEO mind in the world managing your SEO or you might have outsourced it to the premier SEO specialist firm. But if your web-developer updates your site without any understanding of the existing backlinks that are driving the authority for your natural search rankings, all their genius will count for naught! (For those of you who didn’t see it, Germany, with their team-base approach, destroyed Argentina 4-0!)

SEO Team Line-up

So what is the optimum team line up for the search engine organization?

Goal Keeper – Web Developer

If this guy drops the ball, you’re in trouble (ask England!). Often forgotten unless he makes a mistake, the web developer needs to ensure all the key internal and external links that drive the SEO authority are pointing to the right content.

Defense – Product Marketing

Very much a self-contained unit, just like the defense in a soccer team, the product marketing group lays the groundwork for a successful SEO operation. Leveraging the market intelligence generated by the SEO manager, this team incorporates the critical keywords into all marketing collateral and website material. They also need to avoid costly defensive mistakes; for example, breaking SEO by creating new content that targets keywords already covered by better pages.

Strikers – Marketing Communications/Media Relations

If these guys are shooting blanks, you’re not going much further than the group stages (again, ask England!) The life blood to a successful SEO operation is content that is relevant to your target market. Much of the content will be generated internally, but the real “goal” is to secure high profile articles in industry-respected media outlets with backlinks driving authority to your website.

Midfielder – the SEO Manager

The Maestro! He/she is in the middle of everything and orchestrates the SEO play. For example, he/she ensures that the “goalkeeper” is aware of the impact of website changes, works with the “defense” to ensure the correct messaging is incorporated into all product marketing, identifies sources of backlinks that need to be targeted, and works with the “strikers” to develop relevant content and backlinks, etc.

Sports analogies aside, for SEO to really be successful and become an integral, revenue driving part of your marketing program, it takes a team effort that is well coordinated, balanced and based on cooperation and playing off the strengths of the entire team, not just one individual.

When it comes to being a Search Engine Organization, are you Spain or France?

Albert Gouyet is BrightEdge’s Vice President of Product Marketing. He brings over 20 years of broad technology and senior management experience from Netscape, AOL, Sybase as well as venture backed private companies.

At AOL, Albert was Vice President of Web Clients and Services where he led the team responsible for developing and implementing a new strategy for Search for Netscape and CompuServe, which culminated with the game-changing partnership between AOL and Google.

For the record, Albert is a native of France and can be reached via email: agouyet at brightedge.com.

Related posts:

1. /a>
2. /a>
3. /a>

See original here:
/a>

I’ve been familiar with /a> as many have, for several years. We’ve done a few /a> with Brian and he’s contributed to popular posts here like this one on /a> and this one on /a>.

I have to admit that based on his early writing, I thought Brian was overly confident about the opportunities with social media. When I finally met him in person at a Media Relations conference we were both speaking at, I gained a much better understanding and appreciation for the talents and insight behind the evangelism for what has become the most significant change to the web since the introduction of search engines.

As a successful author, speaker and owner of Future Works, Brian has many opportunities to face tough questions from clients, peers and conference attendees.  In the realm of social media, it’s not unreasonable to have a lot of /a> about the who, what, why, where, when and how.

How to start? How to create a strategy? How to find customers and influentials? How to create engaging social destinations? How to promote without offending? How to measure? How to report?  Those are just some of the critical questions answered in Brian’s newest book, /a>.

I promised Brian to talk about Engage! here months ago, which was a no-brainer since we already did a review of “/a>“. While I thought about a variety of perspectives to take on sharing my opinions of this book, nothing stood out until now. In the course of answering many social media questions on a daily basis, I’ve often referred Engage! to people as a resource. Therefore it makes perfect sense to share some of the top questions this book answers for marketers. Essentially, this is a list of 10 reasons why you should check the book out.

1. Where does social media fit in marketing and communications?

2. What social tools and technologies are available? What are their differences and how do they work for marketers?

3. How do you manage multi-channel social media participation? What tools are there for listening, publishing, promotion and measurement?

4. Search results can be optimized, how do you optimize social media?

5. How do you develop social networks and distribution channels?

6. What are social champions and how do we find, engage and develop influentials?

7. How do you develop a social media strategy?

8. What are the logistical and process considerations for planning, implementing and managing social web participation for companies?

9. How do we foster and manage social customer relationships?

10. How can we develop social media teams in an organization and create a model for social participation within our organization?

There you have it. Ten key social media questions that the new Brian Solis book, Engage! answers for communications professionals, business owners, marketers and social netziens all over the web.  If you have different or more questions than those listed above, by all means visit Amazon and get the book. If you need a person to walk you through the answers, then you can always talk to us at /a> .

If you’re in Minneapolis tonight, be sure to come and see /a> from 6-8pm.

img src=”http://24c.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/fd8f5350e9l-feed.png.png” alt=”Email Newsletter” width=”48″ height=”37″ border=”0″ align=”left” style=”margin-right:10px;” /> Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
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Perhaps part of the /a> was link anchor text on expired domains & cybersquatting efforts /a>.

Not to fear, Demand Media is a trusted Google partner, /a> against the same activity which would get your website removed from the search results.

Google’s blind eye and double standards toward the large MFA spam sites /a> that /a>!

Read the original post:
/a>