When I presented this paradoxical statement during a talk on communities at Pubcon New Orleans, I was surprised at how the audience nodded and understand what I meant. They didn’t need me to spend time discussing the difference between the self-promotional, “it’s about me” community member vs. folks who don’t hide behind facades and participate in discussions with no agenda.

Let’s look at a presentation I gave in the fall of 2009 in Philadelphia, PA on building online communities. Here are the communities I discussed:

• Forums
• Twitter
• Twitter Lists
• MySpace
• Facebook
• Digg
• Blogs
• Sphinn
• LinkedIn
• Amazon Reviews
• Niche communities by vertical/theme/topic/demographic
• StumbleUpon
• Friendfeed
• Plaxo
• YouTube

How many of these are still in use 4 years later?

Every online community has its own mission. Some are better at creating that mission than others. In the cases of Digg and Sphinn, they eventually became ego-driven, competitive and sometimes unpleasant to participate in. Members who felt they needed to prove something made every post about them. It’s like walking into a party where you don’t know the people and the one in the corner with the loud voice has a small crowd standing around listening to how great they are, their business, their kids, their travels, etc. It’s tolerable for 5 minutes and then you get the sense that this person is there to promote how great and wonderful they are rather than interacting, listening to others, meeting people and learning new things.

It’s Not About You

Another example of community exploitation can be found in technical communities where discussions focus on how-to, where-to, and when-to topics. The failure of these communities is the lack of spam control. Forums and some blog communities allow profiles and signatures. The purpose is to allow people some insight into the member. It’s nice to be able to put a face on a good post or if you get great advice, learn more about the person who shared it.

Unfortunately, the ability to provide information about yourself is a spammers’ heaven. They join forums for the sole purpose of making a profile and a signature with their web site URL in it. They have no intention of participating in the forums. In fact, most of these so-called “members” are bots.

This behavior has created an industry of spam-Knights with tools, devices and clever solutions that save the online community from seeing the absolute chaos occurring behind the scenes. Even the bots and spammers aren’t aware of what’s really happening. It’s like cloaking in the old days of SEO, where what you see isn’t what is really there.

Pinterest has stepped into the path of no return by allowing companies to use it for marketing. By offering this option, the purest part of Pinterest is gone. It began as an underground community of mostly women sharing products they liked. They tried them first. Their referrals were authentic and not driven by any rewards. While this is still how most people use the community today, it’s now far easier to be taken to a product that was marketed to you rather than a simple browse and Pin experience where you went where your spirit led you rather than advertisers.

Twitter, when it started out, was more like instant messaging on steroids. Before a billion people joined it, it was easier to find your friends or professional comrades and shoot the breeze in 140 characters and hash tag lingo. The conversations were funny, light, and a link to somewhere more likely offered because it had value to a discussion. Today’s Twitter is a community of link drops and promotion with little or no discussion about the link. Thankfully, in the search marketing industry, there are great examples of exceptions. Some people are natural conversationalists and they do generate conversations there. Conferences encourage discussions on sessions by creating hash tags and encouraging attendees to share freely on Twitter.

What wrecks conversations in any online community is the intent of the conversation. If you come off sounding high and mighty, the result is an angry thread with push back. Sometimes you may come off sounding like the Queen of England and you didn’t mean to. This happened to me a few years ago at a well-known SEO blog community. I defended something (I forget what it was) and was immediately shot down. No matter how hard I tried to rephrase or clarify my points, I was shown the door by the people in that discussion. I didn’t belong in that community.

It’s About You

If I could pass along one great lesson from my 17 years of moderating, participating and owning online communities, it would be to find your people.

Certain communities are about you and this is their goal. LinkedIn, for example, built up a strong reputation over time by figuring out how best to present their community members. Rather than a one gigantic forum, they allowed people to form their own groups. This let’s everyone try them out first to see if they feel at home there. I find that some LinkedIn industry related groups are unfriendly to new people or will only allow discussions to go live that meet some mysterious standards. Some industries are cultures that don’t allow outsiders. I found this out the hard way. Never, ever mention the word “SEO” or “search engine marketing” in usability and user experience groups. I learned to lurk and keep my mouth shut or leave altogether.

Facebook is about you but not in the way you might think. You can quite easily create a persona there and create the illusion of being someone you are not off-line. This is the paradox. How you present yourself online is how people will see you.

This is different than purposely promoting yourself. In any online community the membership only knows what you share about yourself and how you share that information. The persona you create is based on how you write online, pictures you share, links you show, who you’re connected with, where you live, and every single piece of personal information you offer including where you “check in”.

Imagine how much fun the search engines have figuring out the professional you vs. the off-duty you. Some of you solve this by choosing one of you to put online. I’m a Gemini. There’s about 10 us. Good times.

Online communities offer the potential for global unity because we’re learning how to talk to each other. Look around and see what communities are thriving. There’s a very good chance that community is interested in knowing you, not what you do for a living.

The post Social Communities: The Conversation is Not About You appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

1. Structured Data Tool

Test the structured data of any page using this simple tool from Google. Just put in the URL and hit Preview. It will show you the search engine result with icon, tell you if it is connected to an author, allow you to see if the email of the author is verified, check on the publisher markup and more. You can also do a custom search.

Warning: Mind that the actual search result may look differently (Google isn’t showing author’s photo for ALL claimed content but at least you’ll see if you have done everything right!)

BONUS!

Here’s an awesome browser bookmarklet that takes you to the tool results with on click: Get it here

2. Google Plus Authorship Plugin (WordPress)

Wordpress is the blogging platform of choice for most people. So having this plugin is definitely a positive, allowing you to fully integrate your posts with the service. Quickly authorize your posts using this plugin, monitor your submissions and more. It only takes three steps!

3. Author Stats within GWT Labs

Google is still playing and experimenting but looking at your claimed content stats within Google Webmaster Tools will be revealing (and fun!)

• See which articles are definitely showing your picture in search results (not all of the claimed content does that)
• See the ranking and click-through of your verified articles!
• Note which unverified articles are assigned to you (and guess why!)

Bonus: Google+ Ripples

Once you have your post verified under your authorship, you will want to keep an eye out so you know how it is being shared, and where. This can be done using Google Ripples, a gem of a feature that many people don’t realize is available through G+. In the corner of your post, click on the arrow within a circle that brings down the option menu. Go to View Ripples, which will bring up a page showing you a visual diagram of how your posts has been shared, commented on and is making an impact on the community.

Do you know of any good tools you like to use to enhance the effectiveness of Google Authorship? Let us know in the comments.

The post 3 Google Authorship Tools appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

But what they will always be most famous for is their search engine. Every once in awhile they tweak it, adding in a new feature. I still remember my shock and awe when they put in their more advanced Google suggest tool. I have never been given so many unhelpful suggestions in all my life. Yet, I would find myself going to those suggested search pages just out of sheer curiosity. Google kills my productivity.

What I’ve learned doing since then is finding lots of inspiration!

Here are three tricks to using Google’s auto-suggest for content creators!

1. Watch Your Spelling

It sounds stupid, but if you misspell something it can actually really confuse Google. Sure, if it is a common search term you don’t have to worry and it will automatically fix it in results.

But if it is something more obscure, in another language or close to another keyword, you have no way of knowing what you will get. I mean it, go to Google right now and misspell a single letter in a word, even one often used. You will get a whole lot of suggestions, and I bet not a single one will be right.

2. How To… Content Inspiration

How-to pages in every niche are very popular. Any time I need an idea for a trustbait article, this is my first tool to try!

Interestingly, I have also found that ‘how not’ has some bizarre results (think linkbait!). Like “How not to dress like a mom”, and “How not to kill your baby”. Thankfully, this last one appears to be a book title, not something people are often seeking advice about.

Results become even more interesting when you go back to the phrase you just types and add a wildcard inside:

3. More Content Inspiration: Moral Dilemmas

Is it right? Is it wrong? Well, asking this question will get you very different results on Google. “Is it right to kill” is one popular question, alarmingly. But one of the most frequent suggestions for “is it wrong” is “Is it wrong to date my cousin?”

I like to think these two questions were asked by the same unstable person, as are some of the other popular suggestions. Like “Is it right to clone humans” and “Is it wrong to mast”. Which they either didn’t finish, or else I have the wrong idea. I will assume it is the latter, and just inform the search user that, no…it is not wrong to masticate. You have chew your food well before you swallow!

Have a good search trick for Google suggest? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credits: 1, 2.

The post Get Inspired With Google Suggest: 3 Tricks for Content Marketers appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

When a user clicks “Like” a few things happen. Right off the bat, it connects the user to the website in Facebook’s open graph. It also posts a story to the newsfeed and appears on the user’s timeline. These things happen regardless of whether you’ve optimized your Like buttons or not. Facebook will take a look at the page in question and get the title, url, image and description. Sounds great, right? Less work for you! Not quite, sadly. Facebook has no way of deciding which image on the page best represents your brand, which is why many people will end up with random icons or other irrelevant images along side their newsfeed stories. It’s also possible that it won’t retrieve other data properly, such as the canonical URL.

Luckily you can use a set of meta tags placed in the <head> section of your website, called “open graph meta tags”, to tell Facebook everything it needs to know. Facebook has a small form on their Like Button plugin page that guides you through generating these tags, but it doesn’t do a great job of letting you know just what these tags do and why you need them. Each of the meta tags Facebook gives you has a property to identify what it is. Let’s break it down!

og:title

This is the title of the page being liked, and will be the text the user clicks to get to your site. If you don’t specify it, Facebook will grab your title tag. Your title should just be the basics of what’s being shared with no branding information.

og:type

A category for your page. Is it a website or blog? A band? An athlete or author? This doesn’t have much affect on the newsfeed story itself, but it does define where it appears on the user’s timeline. Each user has a section for their Likes which is split into categories. The type that you specify here determines what category your site fits into.

For example, if you have a website for your band you would want to specify a type of “band” or “musician” so that the Like shows up underneath the user’s “Music” category, instead of getting lost among all the other uncategorized Likes which have much lower visibility. Facebook also states that the type you set will affect how often your content appears in newsfeeds. This likely has to do with their newsfeed algorithm, which strives to show users only content which is relevant to them.

og:url

The canonical url that the like button should point to. The Like button automatically grabs the URL of the current page, but you can override it with this tag. The og:title links to this URL.

og:image

This is an important one. Facebook is a bad judge of images, it could pull anything off your page to use for news feed stories. Choose an image that you want to represent your page and put the URL here. It’s what will appear as the thumbnail next to your news feed story, and is a big factor in how much news feed real estate you get.

Recent changes to Facebook’s newsfeed have made it so that Facebook prefers a minimum of 200px by 200px for these images, though they can go up to 1500px by 1500px, which Facebook will resize and crop appropriately. The average size of images in Facebook’s improved newsfeed layout are 600px by 600px, and they (and I!) encourage you to take advantage of it.

Note: Facebook terms say that you can only have 20% of your image be text, so be wary of this when creating these images.

og:site_name

Facebook defines this as the “human-readable name for your website”. If this is specified, it will appear underneath the linked og:title and point back to your site’s domain.

og:description

This one isn’t included in Facebook’s quick form, which is disappointing, so you’ll have to add it yourself to the code block. By default, for the few sentences of description to go underneath the title and alongside the image thumbnail, Facebook will use your meta description. If you want to customize it, you can put a description here instead. Use the space that Facebook is giving you here! A couple word description means less visibility. For a properly optimized Like, your description should be at least two sentences long.

fb:admins

This facebook specific open graph tag connects user(s) to your Like button. Many people skip this, or just leave it set at the default value in Facebook’s form, but this step is essential if you want to see statistics for your Like button. Insights, Facebook’s internal analytics service, is available for all manner of Facebook objects, including Like buttons. The user(s) whose ids are stated in this meta tag will be those who can see this Insights data. Multiple users can be connected by entering them as a comma separated list.

fb:app_id

This tag is used for connecting your Like button(s) to a Facebook Platform application. This is especially handy if you have a large amount of Like buttons and want to be able to reach out to all of the users who have liked anything on your website. Basically, if you want access to your Insights data and connected users for multiple Like buttons programatically, you create a Facebook application and put the Facebook ID for it in this tag.

Note: Not sure what your Facebook id is? User ids have been old news since Facebook switched to friendlier looking usernames for user profiles and pages. If you need to get your user id, check out our Facebook ID Lookup Finder Search Tool! Enter in either the username or the full URL for your Facebook profile or page, and it will give you the numerical user id that you need for the two meta tags above.

After you’ve added the above tags into the <head> section of your website, there’s one more step you need to take in order to see the Insights information for your Like buttons. Navigate to http://www.facebook.com/insights/ and click on the green “Insights for your Website” button in the upper right hand corner. Enter your domain and then click “Get Insights”. If you have added the proper fb:admins tags, and the user id you entered is the same as the user you are logged in as, then it should properly identify your website and you’ll see Insights data in no time!

Note: If you added multiple ids into the fb:admins tag, each of those people must click “Like” on your domain to verify that they want to be an admin. They will not see Insights data until they do this.

That’s it! By this point you should have properly optimized Like buttons. Users will see larger images which represent your brand, and an informative title and description, leading to higher visibility and increased reach in newsfeeds. Plus you’ll be able to properly measure your social efforts using Facebook’s Insights analytics service. If you want to customize your social plugins further, you can add additional optional meta tags, which let you specify industry specific data, contact information and even versions of your website in other languages! Check out Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol documentation as well as the official Open Graph Protocol page for more options.

The post Optimizing Your Facebook Likes appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

Last week I wrote that I don’t think social communities are really “social” and nobody disagreed with me. I’m sure many readers do but for whatever reasons did not leave comments. Maybe they didn’t want to use the comment form. Maybe they are lurkers. In larger forums, lurkers come and go and we never have any idea what they think or feel about the discussions. Maybe some people are afraid to respond to online discussions because of a variety of fears that go unaddressed.

Fear is a big reason for not communicating on the Internet. What are people afraid of? They fear sharing too much information. They lack confidence in their own voice. They are deeply afraid of search engines tracking everything they say. Writing is not their best way of communicating. People can be mean if you make a mistake.

The following are guidelines I developed from 17 years of being moderating, owning and being a member of chat rooms, email lists, UseNet, groups, clubs and forums. Have I broken my own rules? Yes. And whenever I did, I regretted it.

How to Write for the Social Communities

1. If you want to get someone’s attention, whisper. This approach is powerful and marketers hate it. The marketing game says, “Join all forums, set up a profile and drop a bunch of one-liner useless posts so that people and engines will find your profile. PS. Post to old discussions.”

As a forums owner who works with other forums owners, let’s clear the air of this. You may get away with this on forums that don’t get traffic and exist only to host ad-sense ads. For legitimate forums with real communities, actions like this are our equivalent of target shooting. Your profile is our clay pigeon. Your posts are shot down on sight and your user name, email address and in some cases, IP are banned. This is our fun part. What you don’t know or don’t seem to notice is that your profile isn’t “live” and available to the community or engines.

The way to converse online is to start quietly and with respect for the community and its rules. Rather than galloping on your great white stallion shouting how much of an expert you are, prove it over time by getting involved with your community of choice.

2. Respect the culture, community, moderators and newcomers. It’s been over 5 years since I’ve had to ban a community member at Cre8asiteforums. Since 1998 there may have been about 5 or so truly banned members and they were also banned from other forums. What did they do? They were rude to everybody in the community. They had no respect for the rules of the community and disregarded moderator warnings. I believed in working with difficult members because often it’s not them, but how they write that’s the problem. In private PM’s I could work out rough areas with a troublesome member but when they would return to the community itself they lost control again.

I learned from this that not everyone should join online discussion groups. Under the cover of being anonymous it’s easy to argue and even take on a personality that is nothing like you are in person. Some of you have to be right about everything. You don’t care about other perspectives because to you, we’re all wrong. To you we are mush brained low lives who don’t deserve to be working in our fields because we’re not experts like you are. You love to call us names and make us feel badly. Being part of a community is not part of your game plan. Disrupting the communities you join is.

Every community has its own way. Some are more tolerant than others. Some are for beginners while others can’t stand newbies. To avoid being a loser, always take the time to get to know the community you are thinking of joining. Forums don’t pay their moderators and administrators. Those roles are performed by volunteers who love the community and care about it. Disrespecting them is your way of indicating you don’t want to belong.

3.Is it kind, necessary, true? This is ancient advice for any kind of dialog and especially useful for social communities on the Internet because whatever you say is going to live on forever and ever and ever. I’ve broken this rule. The last time I did I swore and got into a cat fight on someone else’s web property. Some people will joke around and tell you to “step away from the keyboard”. I was so mortified that I lost my cool that I lost confidence and thought for sure I destroyed my reputation.

The rule of thumb is solid. The proof is at Cre8asiteforums in our members-only pub where I launched a discussion on gun control. It’s now at 8 pages and still active. At no point did anyone lose their cool. With members around the world, opinions are all over the place and yet the entire discussion is extremely smart, respectful and thoughtful. In years past we were able to pull off political discussions without any riots. Facebook can’t even do that.

No matter where you go online, if there is an opportunity to provide feedback, always take the high road. Whether you submit reviews, participate in discussions, leave blog comments that are not spam, converse in Facebook and Google Plus or speak in “hash-tag” language, be nice about it. Be fair. Use humor. Don’t hijack the discussion. If the host has potty mouth, this doesn’t mean you have to if this isn’t really who you are.

Next week’s topic is: The conversation is NOT about you. The conversation is about you.

You read that right.

The post Social Communities: How to Talk Without Causing a Riot appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.