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Linking Social Media with Search Engine Marketing

July 31st, 2008 Posted by: Bill Gadless

In a recent blogpost, we talked about how the new social media shouldn’t be thought of only as a means to raise your Google page rank.  While that’s still true, there is a rapidly growing relationship between social media and search engine marketing (SEM) that’s worth exploring.

In his recent ClickZ piece, “When Does Social Media Matter in SEM?”, Erik Dafforn offers this clear-cut test:  “Social media officially matters to SEM when search engines’ algorithmic treatment of social media sites intersects with user queries.”  I.e., when social media pages start showing up in search-engine results pages, it’s time – maybe past time – to take notice.  And it’s easy to verify that they are indeed hitting the SERPs more and more these days.

What this means, of course, is that your company and/or brand will increasingly be discussed on the Web, whether you contribute to the discussion or not.  The bad news here is that your company can’t pretend to be perfect anymore, or totally hide its problems.  The good news is that fewer people expect a company to be perfect;  or as Erik puts it, “Companies are graded today based on the grace they use in responding, not hiding the problems themselves.”

So what’s a company to do?
Just because your public no longer expects your company to be perfect – or because you can’t totally control the communication anymore – doesn’t mean you should stop working to influence as much of the SERP for your company and brand(s) as you can. Here are some useful sites in your constant battle for SERP real estate…

LinkedIn Company Profiles –  Check out LinkedIn, and chances are that scads of your employees – many of them former, some perhaps disgruntled – have listed your company in their profiles, often with an inaccurate description of the company.  Recently, LinkedIn released a beta version of its company profiles facility.  Your HR department must get into LinkedIn to consolidate and verify company information;  otherwise, your LinkedIn company profile will be only as accurate as the details individual users have supplied.  LinkedIn regularly offers additional information about verifying, updating, and configuring corporate profiles.

Yahoo Pipes –  The best information aggregator you’re probably not using, Pipes is an extremely powerful tool that enables you to sort specific RSS feeds (as well as other data) and extract only the information you require.  Awhile back, you may have noticed Pipes pages showing up in Google, Yahoo, and Live.com SERPs for specific companies, as well as for people within those companies.  Like all organically generated results, the likelihood of Pipes pages showing up in queries related to your company, product, or service is directly related to the quality of the information in your feeds.  But there’s no reason not to jump-start the discovery process by building and tagging your own Pipes.

For help fitting these or other social media features to your B2B, your Web marketing consultancy is a good place to start.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy, Search Engine Marketing