Always on the lookout for ways to simplify (and understand) complex things, I ran across this column from Erik Qualman in Search Engine Watch.  He’s got this nice quick way to summarize how a company might use social media to promote its products or services (and a couple of the comments on the column add to it). I don’t think you’ll see anything new here, but it really helps to lay out the framework — the pieces make more sense that way.  In bullet points:

• The very first step is to listen to what’s being said in the social media world about your company and your product.
• THEN you begin to interact, without a hard sell, building your brand reputation.
• THEN you begin to make sales through these channels because your brand and your authenticity are recognized.
• AND THEN you continue the cycle by remaining engaged with the customer who bought your product.
• And begin again in a virtuous circle.

Qualman has a nice diagram (see below) that captures the idea as an escalator that carries you in an upward direction by continuously cycling steps up around and down.  Continuous monitoring and improvement, one more time.

Socialnomics Escalator of Erik Qualman

I know a lot of businesses, including my own, that purchase keyword-driven ads on Google’s pay per click networks.  But not too many that also use Yahoo and/or Bing.  If this fits you, you might want to consider adding that extra outlet.

In a flurry of recent back and forths over the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, there’s been a lot of talk about the importance of scale.  The MSN and Yahoo folks think it’s ‘good’; Google tries to downplay it because of decreasing returns to scale (Google should know, shouldn’t it?).

But here’s one little piece of info that cuts through the clutter.  Advertising Age reports that Ben Edelman, who teaches at Harvard Business School, found that click prices at Yahoo were 30% cheaper than Google, and at Bing (Microsoft) 27% cheaper.

Prescription:  mercilessly cut the poorer performers at your Google account and use the money to purchase keywords that convert on Yahoo and Bing.

Here’s a slideshow from one of Hubspot’s free webinars.  This one is on using optimized press releases for both communications and an SEO boost from inbound links.  If you distribute press releases, you might want to spend a half hour looking at this.

After a lot of years working with the traditional Google AdWords interface, the new one now in beta was a shock.  It’s hard to quit what you know so well and what has worked so well.  But after a few weeks of playing around with the new look and feel, I think I’m going to like it. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can take a tour at Google’s new interface page, and below are some things I like and don’t like so far.

One huge thing is the whole concept of in-line editing of ads and campaigns. Instead of going to a new page and setting up a new ad or editing an old one, you can make many changes right in the first ad screen you reach. This general technique carries over for a lot of the functions in the interface and I think is one of the primary design objectives of the new version.

Another thing I like a lot is the way the Search Query report is embedded in the keywords view. In case you don’t know, the Search Query report is one of our most important ways of finding out what search terms visitors actually used when our ads were served and (maybe) clicked. Some of these are broad or phrase match, as well as exact match, so they are invaluable for finding new negative keywords as well as evaluating which sets of keywords are actually triggering the precious clicks. Now we can see these immediately without generating a long and confusing Search Query report.  And you can update your regular or negative keyword lists at the ad level directly from this report.  For a look at this interface, check out SearchMarketing Sage’s post on search query reporting.

By the way, this user enhancement did nothing to improve the mysterious way Search Query reports some clicks and not others. You will continue to see that ‘other queries’ summary at the bottom of the report without being able to see which keywords were used, even though there are often clickthroughs from these impressions.  The reasons Google gives for these bundles of unknowns are not very persuasive — I bet this fuels paranoia about Google’s expanded broad match!

The interface is still in beta and is a work in progress, so maybe the nits I want to pick with it will be fixed.  But right now there’s a couple things I dislike about it.  Ordinary negative keyword handling just plain sucks compared to the old interface with its campaign level access right next to settings edit and the ability to sweep adgroup negatives into the campaign level. And I’ve become a little dependent on Google’s insistence in telling me that my campaigns are not receiving all the possible clicks — it’s ma Google’s gentle way of reminding me I am keeping some of my client’s money away from them — but it also alerts me to opportunities to reallocate resources within the account to get more value out of it.

Overall, I think you will like this Flashy new interface (Google doesn’t need to worry about being indexed after all). It keeps the pressure on the competition, such as it is.

John Battelle is pretty dismissive in his recent post about Twitter.  Not dismissive about Twitter — the opposite:  he’s dissing a report in the NY Times by Sanford Bernstein analysts that Twitter will never develop a revenue stream. Sanford Bernstein says that Twitter is unlikely ever to generate positive cash flow, and will either just fail or last until it is overcome by the next web 2.0 phenomena.

In retort, Battelle says:

Twitter is a very promising service directly in the center of these trends [web 2.0 business applications], trends the “analysts” at Sanford Bernstein clearly do not grasp.

Battelle lists 3 ways Twitter might monetize its traffic:

1. Tweetsense – an advertising platform somehow linked to the content of the tweets.
2. Branded licensing – Twitter collects fees to promote Twitter-based services, for example.
3. SMS revenue sharing – Twitter drives millions of SMS to mobile devices, and there may be some leverage for them to share these revenues.

This deal is not done, but from Battelle’s history with search and the evolution of the online conversation, I wouldn’t bet against him on this one.  And it doesn’t take much imagination to see how powerful Twitter can be as a conversation-carrier that is loaded with search and linking potential.

Using social networks for advertising has proved to be a real challenge for marketers.  Users want the networks for personal socializing and dislike ads.  Yet, the personal recommendation of a product is the best marketing anyone can get, so marketers aren’t giving up.  Marketing Vox posts that in another attempt to harness the power of social networks, Facebook is introducting Connect.  Connect makes an existing third party website (like Hulu, Discovery or Digg) available to a group of friends to view and comment on together.  In other words, this external content becomes part of the conversation.  Want to watch a video together on Hulu?  Do it through Facebook and share the time with your friends.  This makes the event more valuable to advertisers, in theory.  As always, the ultimate force driving this is how attractive the content itself is:  if Facebook friends share an interest in content that is valuable to them, the ads will be seen.  If the content isn’t any good, forget about it.  So, leveraging the content of a site like Hulu makes good sense — and undoubtedly means Hulu will want part of the action.

Marketing Vox has published a post describing Facebook’s new “engagement” advertising –  your ad shows up in the upper right sweet spot and asks the viewer to engage in something: become a fan, try your luck winning a prize, whatever. The kicker is that if you do respond to one of these ads, the fact of your response is sent to everyone in your network.  Will Facebook users want to get spammed by their friends?  Skeptically yours, Glenn.

Ad position is important — higher on the first search result page translates into more clicks (not always more sales!). Google’s Quality Score for your ad is one factor that determines position. It is based on the keyword match between query and ad, your maximum CPC bid, and the quality of your landing page.

Now Google is updating how the Quality Score is calculated. The Score will be calculated dynamically. Instead of a minimum CPC, you will be shown the estimated bid price for a first page ad position. And, the system will no longer mark some keywords as unavailable to an advertiser based on a past Quality Score. See the details in Google’s blog post on Quality Score Improvements.