Social Media Tools: Listen, Analyze, Engage

Image by Intersection Consulting via Flickr

For those of you not familiar with social media, here’s a brief description: “media that is social”. Funny, but true.

We see so many organizations that begin with social media, and they set up a Twitter or Facebook account and tell us their are doing social media.

When we look a little closer, we can see it’s nothing much at all, and its typically “one-sided”, meaning they only speak about themselves, and nobody is engaging with them.

Maybe the reason is that they didn’t build out a strategic plan with specific goals and targets, as well as not understanding that listening is the second word (after competitive & market research) to learn in social media.

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3 Tips To Easily Get a First Page Google Ranking

Back in the day, performing programming tasks and SEO work to rank at top of the first page of Google – well, it was easy. In fact, just making sure you had the right keyword density (number of keywords repeated on a page) was enough to show up fairly quickly. And, if not – just adding some incoming links from article directories would do the trick.

In 2011, with the social inter-webs, time have certainly changed. While the core concepts of SEO (content+links) are still true, you’ll have a hard time getting listed on the first page of Google without using different strategies.

What can you do?

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McCain Campaign Videos Removed From YouTube

Presidential candidate John McCain is protesting what he feels is an unwarranted removal of several of his Presidential campaign videos from the popular social media and video sharing site, YouTube.

YouTube LLC removed the videos last week in response to several take-down requests claiming violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (DMCA) According to ComputerWorld.com, a letter sent to the company by the McCain campaign Monday called for a special review process to examine the legal merit of take-down requests specifically associated with presidential candidates and their campaigns.

“Overreaching copyright claims have resulted in the removal of non-infringing campaign videos from YouTube, thus silencing political speech,” says the McCain campaign in the YouTube letter,

…which goes on to say that the short clips of news broadcast segments contained within the campaign videos are under ten seconds and are noncommercial uses of the material, and therefore do not violate the DMCA.

YouTube LLC responded via a letter sent to the McCain campaign yesterday saying that it is not a “viable solution to perform a substantial legal review of every DMCA take-down notice.”

Potentially Violent Videos Banned From YouTube

September 16, 2008

At what Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn). is calling his request, YouTube Inc. has updated its acceptable content guidelines to effectively ban videos with the potential to incite violence.

The video uploading and social media site had previously turned down a request from chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental affairs to remove videos produced and sponsored by terrorists which showed assassinations, deaths of US soldiers, and other violent acts.

The new guidelines, which state that “predatory behavior, stalking, threats, harassment, intimidation, invading privacy, revealing other people’s personal information, and inciting others to commit violent acts or to violate the terms of use are taken very seriously.”

Sen. Lieberman is also asking Google, Inc, the parent company of YouTube, to remove all videos that have been created by terrorist organizations, whether they violate the guidelines or not.

While some are in favor of the new guidelines, others believe that they infringe on the right to free speech, and that Internet-based sites should be free of governmental intervention.  Some people, like CEO of IT research firm Techdirt Inc, Mike Masnick, question the lasting effectiveness of banning terrorist produced videos from being posted to YouTube.

“Those videos will quickly pop back up on other sites that won’t take them down,” Masnick told ComputerWorld.com in an interview this week. “Second, most of those videos are preaching to the choir. It’s highly unlikely that very many people are being recruited by terrorists’ causes by a grainy video on YouTube.”

Failure to adhere to the new video submission guidelines could result in a permanent banning from YouTube.