I’ve been so heads down in client audits that I didn’t discover this until, ironically, doing another audit for another client. However, I also don’t recall seeing many blog headlines in my Netvibes, so perhaps this one has rather floated under the radar a bit. Even a quick scan in Google doesn’t turn up much beyond this post, ‘Linkedin adds rel=”Nofollow” to profile links‘ over at Kingpin SEO, which dates this change around early-mid November. Based on my recent audit schedule, would make this about right.

But what about the twist? Well, it appears that the nofollowing isn’t absolute. There are profiles with custom anchor text and default anchor text that have nofollowed links and those that are still followed.

There are basic free profiles and, as far as I can tell, at least some version of paid accounts that are nofollowed. This is probably smart; otherwise, if the paid accounts would earn followed links, they might run risk of scrutiny from Google for essentially creating a system of paid links.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, there are profiles both within and outside the “industry” that are nofollowed, so it doesn’t appear to be just targeted at SEOs.

The real twist however is that there are profiles that even have a mix of followed and nofollowed links. It will be interesting to see if nofollows are eventually rolled out to all profiles and all links.

While the true value of these links and the juice they past may have been questionable, it was nice knowing that they did provide an opportunity to try to pass some value back. It also meant that people were more likely to link to their profile pages without nofollowing the links, even when they may have nofollowed every other external link. Perhaps this means that LinkedIn may have also indirectly cut off some of the link juice they received as well if people start nofollowing links back to their profiles.

Regardless, these links are still important and I would still advise clients and individuals to take advantage of them. These links continue to provide an opportunity for discover, if not for bots, for the ultimate audience, the humans who click them.

The good news is, if you now find your links nofollowed, at least you know you are in good company:

Perhaps LinkedIn should offer up an alternative button though for people to place on their websites, one for followed and one for nofollowed

Why are social media costs so challenging to measure? Social media is about more than just ROI. Unlike areas of a business that have very specific and direct cost and revenue associations, social media costs are a combination of your goals, metrics, direct costs and time; of which, many of these may actually be soft measurements.

Along with hard measurements, social media costs include many soft measurements. I think of hard measurements as those that are very defined and clearly measurable. Let’s say that it costs you $100 to have an article written, or maybe you write it yourself, in which case you can calculate the amount of time for research, writing, editing and eventual publishing, based on your salary. We might even be able to regiment that someone will spend exactly 3 hours a day, 5 days a week responding to blog comments. Again, we can associate some hard cost measurement to these activities.

However, social media is largely associated with soft measurements, and therefore, is as much about the value of the activity as it is some ROI to be gained. Unlike the examples above, time is often hard to directly measure because, unless you have dedicated staff where you can directly associate 100% of their time and salary, social media activities will often happen when they happen, often in small chunks or bits of time.

Even then, time can still be a soft measurement. Social media success is based on networking, relationships and conversations, which often have to happen long before they are “needed.” To get some great content pushed out into the social venues may take time invested to build up rapport and connections with leaders within the venue. To drive fans, followers or links to your content or website takes time invested in participating within the venue; just like blogging success requires commenting on other blogs as much as it does writing great blog posts.

Sure, you can measure the creation cost of content used for social media activities, but your metric for success may be in inbound links to the content or improved rankings within the search engines. How do you directly associate that value to sales, leads and revenue?

Social media often operates on a soft timeline. While some activities are done with a specific time goal, such as tweeting a sale that ends tomorrow, many of the activities done today may not have a specific timeframe and could pay off immediately, in a week, a month or even 6 months or more from now.

If all this sounds challenging, you’re right. If all this sounds like I’m saying you don’t need to measure impact, results or costs of social media, then you might want to go back and reread the previous blog posts.

In fact, I’m saying quite the opposite. Because of the soft measurements and the incredible time suck that can come from social media – admit it, we’ve all sat down to take 5 minutes to read a blog post, tweet something or interact in some way, only to see an hour or more fly by – establishing metrics and measuring your social media efforts is critical. Without measuring results and the costs associated, you have no way to determine whether a certain activity or venue is valuable. Just realize that ROI may not be the best way to qualify social media activities. Social media is about connecting with your audience and that’s a value measurement.

Looking for some more thoughts on measuring social media? Be sure check out these great posts by Don Bartholomew, Social Media ROI Part 1: Framework and Social Media ROI Part 2: Research Approaches.

Social media measurement presents some interesting challenges compared to the more typical site or page metrics. The most direct measures, such as traffic and conversion on your website, are only part of the picture. By the very nature though, much of your social media efforts will take place off your website. But let’s make it easy and start internally before we move to the more challenging external measurements.

Like site optimization, it is helpful to identify or create a landing page target on your website for your social media campaigns as well. Not all of the traffic and gains from social media will flow into your target page, but it will help your efforts to have a defined target to build your efforts around. This is especially true when focusing on link baiting efforts as an intersection of social media and SEO.

Some of your social media efforts will be indirect, just interacting with others and building your social media rapport and authority, and that is okay, even required. However without some focused targeting, you may find you’re spending a lot of energy on social media with no real purpose and fewer gains.

Target pages don’t have to be newly created or strictly for your campaigns, especially since they may generate inbound links over time as others (hopefully) link to them. What this will do though is to help sync and consolidate your social media efforts with all of your other SEO efforts. Then, as you mention target phrases in your social media campaigns, you’ll already know where it needs to link to, rather than having random linking to different pages. This is especially critical if you have a team working on your social media.

Global tracking, such as total traffic being sent to the site from each of the venues you are targeting, will provide a bigger picture view. Now with your target page, phrase and promotion combination, you can at least connect a page to your specific efforts. You’ll want to monitor your specific target pages for referring traffic from the venues you’ve targeted:

• record the dates you promoted your target (begin a timeline as you may re-promote over time)
• track referring traffic from each venue promoted in (also have benchmarks prior to promotion)
• also track ranking positions and traffic for targeted phrases

As you can see, much of this internal tracking isn’t all that different than what you should already be doing. Of course, things like rankings and targeted phrase traffic won’t be exclusive to your social media efforts.

Social media marketing measurements should also extend beyond your site though, which is where the measurements get a little more challenging. Depending on the venue, you may only have minimal or no visibility of the types of metrics you rely on for your own site. If the site allows you to embed an image, such as an avatar that could be hosted on your own site, you can get a rough idea on page views by tracking how often the image is served up. However, like any kind of “hits” reporting, this can be highly skewed.

So rather than focusing on the more traditional site metrics, your off-site social media metrics will be more focused on popularity and activity measures. Fortunately, these types of measures are often reported in some way by the social media venues.

Whether they are called friends, fans or followers, one of the core metrics you’ll want to track is how many of those you have. This however, is only part of the picture. Social media is about conversation and interaction. These counts are purely quantitative, but what you want to strive for is qualitative measures. Sorry to say, but some portion of your fans will be inactive. You’ll want to try to understand what level of quality you have achieved by establishing metrics for:

• how many fans actually interact with you
• average number of comments, votes, etc. for your individual efforts (posts, videos, etc.)
• mentions to your efforts
• how many of your fans cross over into other venues (while this may seem to lower your total reach counts, it improves your quality counts as it means you are reaching a greater level of involvement)

Like any reputation management efforts, social media measurement wouldn’t be complete without social media monitoring. You will want to employ the same types of tracking you do for your general reputation management, but look for mentions, links, etc. back to your social media campaigns or profiles. The further you move from your own analytics on your own site, the more challenging and less precise these metrics get. But, without any metrics, you are completely in the dark.

If all this sounds a bit complex, well, it can be. Moreover, these are just a few of the basics to get you started. Understand that real value will come from tracking over time, monitoring the ebb and flow of the various metrics in relation to your activities. Social media marketing can be a huge win or a giant resource black hole. Investing time and resources into social media without some level of measurement is simply irresponsible mismanagement.

For this, the content has to be of high quality along the lines of linkbait and capable of going viral. It gets picked up by various social media properties and earns lot of link love. Yet, there are people who complain that they are not having success in using this technique. One of the major reasons for failure is the inability to build relationships.

The most impressive feature of social media is that links obtained are completely organic, very editorial in nature and highly valuable. The more number of social media properties that link to your site, the greater is the domain diversity and so is their domain trust. All these factors definitely boost your site on the SERPs. The success of social media in promoting your site also depends on the service or product you provide.

There are a few steps you can take to improve your external link profile. It is true that visitors from social media sites may not be targeted or suitable for your product/service that you offer on your site. But interested users will certainly provide links to interesting stuff on your site.

1) Indirect Process Of Link Building:
Use of social media for link building, albeit a lengthy process, is extremely rewarding. It is not a hands free process as some would like you to think. The general belief is that you create user accounts on major social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Digg and Reddit with your user profile linking back to your site. Other users would follow your profile links and end up on your site. This can happen if you are a celebrity and not otherwise.

The indirect method can be diagrammatically represented as:

The indirect process of link building involves having quality content on your site. You must register (if you already are not part of online communities) for user accounts on the major social media properties.

First and foremost, build relationships amongst the various online communities. Get to know others who share the same interests as yours (and hence your specific industry relevant product/service) and paritcipate in conversations. If it is a discussion, leave a comment that adds value to the conversation and to the topic in whole. Be courteous and polite to everyone. Avoid hype and flame.

You must also realise that promoting a baby nappy product on Digg will never see the light of the day as the Digg community is dominated by tech savvy younger crowd. A more mature gathering can be found at Facebook or Gather where such products can be targeted to the right crowd. Ensure that you put in efforts to gain traction in the right places.

Assuming you are an established user in particular social media sites and you have a good following, a good post with a catchy title linking to great content on your site gets popular and goes viral and gets linked to by other sites, blogs, forums, press releases and rss feeds. Rand at SEOmoz refers to these propagators collectively as Linkerati. It is the links from Linkerati to your site that helps your site climb up the rankings on the SERPs.

2) Update Your Social Media Properties:
If you have an active blog going on your site with regular updates, most social media (SM) sites let you have a feed directly from your blog. This helps in keeping your social media account fresh and regularly updated. Some of the SM sites have their own internal ranking (Squidoo is a good example) and if your post is a featured lens, it gets lots of eyeballs and also gets promoted to the major search engines.

2) Thou Shalt Not Spam:
Everyone hates spam and the social media community is very intolerant of spam. If you try to post links to irrelevant stuff or excessive self promotion using your profile on various sites and you get reported, your account can be terminated. You will be shunned by the rest of the community. It is not easy to change your reputation online because negative comments cannot be edited or removed. It will be an uphill battle to salvage your reputation after the initial damage is done.

3) Engage With Your Community:
Not everyone can produce viral content at will. Linkbait is a double edged sword that has to be used carefully. It can be extremely successful or damage your reputation irreparably if done the wrong way.

Even if you cannot put out great content, you can be an active member and promote other people’s posts and become a popular figure in the community over time. Anything you say or do after attaining that position will give you lot of leverage.

4) Share Selflessly:
If you take an active part in the community and retweet your friends’ tweets on Twitter, share others links on your status update on Facebook, dig colleagues posts on Digg, stumble sites on StumbleUpon etc, you are sure to earn lot of goodwill from the community and others will generously pass their link love to you by promoting your posts and tweets and the like.

Give freely without expectations and the links to your site will follow. Selfless appreciation of everything going on in your community is the secret to getting more inbound links to your site. All this takes time and effort and it is not a fly by night operation. Building relationships is the key to your link building success in the social media sphere.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search marketing consultancy, offering organic seo and pay per click marketing services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

However, this has also lead more into jumping in head first without using their heads. Perhaps this is due to the added pressures of a challenging economy or feeling behind the curve. While social media isn’t exactly new, there is plenty of curve left, and using a challenging economy as a catalyst to jump onboard and sinking precious resources into something that you don’t understand or have any idea how to measure is extremely short-sighted.
There are some great examples already of major brands that have successfully adopted social media marketing as a new channel to reach out to the community. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has become practically the default example of Twitter success (hopefully that doesn’t go away with the Amazon acquisition). Those new to social media may be surprised that Tony’s tweets aren’t a spew of product and sales pitches, but rather more of a human connection, with many tweets having nothing to do with Zappos, and those that do, often just extending this human connection between follower and Zappos.

Comcast has their own spin with comcastcares serving as a live support channel that even reaches out to you before you reach out to them. Knowing that Twitter has also become a popular channel where people communicate in-the-moment, ask questions, and often use as a means to voice immediate frustrations, Frank Eliason monitors the Twitter-sphere for Comcast mentions, and reaches out to assist. Similarly, Best Buy just launched Twelpforce as a Twitter based tech help resource.

Twitter isn’t the only social space though. While Facebook is often thought of as a personal pages network, big names like hunting outfitter Cabelas and tools giant Northern Tool have taken to Facebook Fan pages to interact with fans. But these big name, multi-category companies are just one example. Even more niche focused companies like quality men’s shoes provider Allen Edmonds have started to dip their toe into social media with a Facebook presence.

There are many other venues and even more examples, with more being added everyday. There are also numerous blog posts and articles proclaiming the virtues and importance of social media marketing. Before jumping on the bandwagon though, it’s important to understand and start thinking about social media marketing goals, measurement and cost.

So let’s start with goals. The goals used for the “native” site may not always apply to social media marketing, take on less importance, or there may be other or additional goals that are even more important. Just like SEO, it is important to understand what the goals of social media marketing are before undergoing work in this area, especially as measurment may not always be as black and white and it may have additional costs associated with it, both of which we’ll talk about later.

Goals could be anything, but here is a list of 8 common social media marketing goals that might help get you started:

• drive additional traffic to native site
• drive additional sales
• increase followers, fans, etc.
• open additional communication channel, marketing channel, etc.
• increase SERP real estate by boosting social media profiles
• reputation management
• enhance or grow link profile
• increased brand awareness and presence

As you might guess after thinking about these, measurement of these goals, like measuring link bait, may not be as staight-forward as you would like. So I’ll talk about measurement next, but until then, what social media marketing goals would you add to this list? Which of these are most critical to you?

Link bait can be a powerful tool, especially when used in conjunction with a powerful social media network. Like many things however, it generally comes at a cost. Even if there aren’t any direct costs, such as engaging writers or paying for services directly, there will at least be direct time if you or your company creates the link bait yourself, and potentially in-kind costs, such as helping to return the favor or similar for someone else within your social media network.

So at the very minimum, without direct financial costs, the time carries some level of cost…be it $60 per hour, $600, or whatever monetary value you place on your time. With that in mind, it is critically important to at least attempt to estimate the costs involved and measure the impact achieved to arrive at some kind of estimation on the return of the link bait campaign.

Like any kind of off-site effort, it is important to realize that hard and fast numbers may be a measurement luxury. But something is most likely better than nothing, and choosing not to monitor and measure is akin to tossing money out the window while driving down the highway as fast as you can…exhilaration with potentially little or nothing to show for it.

Before engaging in a link bait campaign, it is important to understand the goal or goals of the campaign. Fortunately, goals and measurement often go together, so figuring out one puts you well on the path to figuring out the other.

While the specifics may vary, such as whether the link bait exists on the site or is linked to from where the link bait is launched, some variation of monitoring and metrics can be adapted. Here are three common goals and metrics you may want to consider:

• Traffic – such as direct traffic from people clicking links leading directly to the site, which might be measured based on traffic referrals, or indirect traffic based on brand or topic awareness that leads people to come directly to the site or via searches related to the topic, which might be monitored for increased direct traffic or related search referral traffic.
• Rankings – may be related to the link bait piece itself, an on-site destination based on anchor text signals within the link bait, or combination of both, which might be monitored based on rankings movement over time for the keyword phrases and/or the destination URLs.
• Links – building out the site’s link profile, which is especially important when the link bait resides on the site, and in many ways, probably relates back to traffic or rankings, which might be measured based on tracking overall or specific changes in the link profile.

These aren’t the only goals or metrics, but they are probably the simplest to begin measuring, and probably quite similar in theory to what you already measure. It’s important to understand that the monitoring and measuring of these metrics will need to happen over a period of time. While big bang social media driven link bait campaigns are often positioned to hit critical velocity in an extremely short period of time, even then, the most meaningful impact may well come after the initial spike.

This is of course why a clear set of goals at the outset, a plan for monitoring and measurement, and an ongoing measurement and analysis process is so critical to define. Without it, valuable resources of time, money and focus could be expended for weeks, and most likely months, before understanding the true value and cost.

Out of the gate, you may not have specific numbers to hit, aside from comparing to other tactics, but over time, you’ll begin to better understand what works and what doesn’t, which venues and efforts pay for themselves and which leave you with an empty feeling in your stomach…and possibly wallet.

WordCamp is a mini-convention for WordPress and blogging enthusiasts. Some of the content is WordPress-centric, but other content is applicable to bloggers in general, such as how to promote your blog and other stuff.

I’ll be speaking on how to use social image sharing services for promotion. Social media sites such as Flickr allow people to publish and share their photos with many other people, and the site is well-constructed in terms of search engine optimization, so posting images there helps get media distributed all over. Using Flickr can help one gain more attention, inbound links, and overall search rankings.

I’ve spoken on using Flickr for promotion and optimization before, and I’ve written on details of image optimization here a number of times.

I’d further recommend blogging to everyone – I first started blogging here on the Natural Search Blog as a guest, after Stephan Spencer invited me, and it eventually changed my overall career path. Be sure to check out Stephan’s articles on blog optimization, btw, since he’s pretty much the top authority out there on the subject.

There’s still a few seats left for Dallas WordCamp – sign up before they’re all gone!

It is a double edged sword and if done right, you will glow on the winner’s podium with a great name for your product/service/company in the online space reaping rich inbound links to your site from a multitude of powerful and trusted domains. Done wrong, you could end up a social pariah in cyberspace with a bad reputation and poor record of integrity attached to your name and company’s product/service.

In real life, imagine a scenario where Mr X is at a party and he makes a sales pitch to others around him for an innovative product or scheme his company is introducing. People have come to the party to have a good time and would be put off by this approach and keep their distance from Mr. X. This is what happens when someone tries to promote their own product excessively in their online social media campaigns.

The most important step is to leverage the poweful social media sites to your advantage as you get unlimited real estate spaces for free to establish yourself. Create profiles on the major powerhouses like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace and Youtube. Users congregate at these sites and all you have to do is participate. You can be in any niche.

You can do this by having your own blog where you post quality content that is useful and does not harp on your products or services. Update your blog regularly and distribute them as feeds to your accounts on other major social media sites. Users can add these feeds and view them in their news reader of choice.

You can create articles and submit to various article directories. You can create lenses on Squidoo and hubs on Hubpages related to your niche. These are time consuming but at the end of it, you increase your virtual real estate which in turn generate traffic and brings more visitors to your site.

A big mistake that happens time and again is that people initiate these web properties and do not maintain them. Just having a Squidoo lens on its own will not help you leverage it. You have to update it regularly till you manage to push your lens into the top 100 popular lenses. Your lens can rank on Google for the search terms unique to your niche and also get lots of eyeballs on your lens because of the popularity rating on Squidoo.

The next important step is to maintain control over your web property and how users access them. Connect all your social media profiles and services and control the flow of traffic between your various web properties.

By offering unbiased quality content on your social websites, you can woo users back to your personal blog and expose them to your posts. You control the dialogue through your blog posts and allow users to place comments. You can offer newsletter subscription and contact them by email. You can lead users to your other web properties with good clean linking strategy.

You can display your Twitter account on your Web 2.0 properties and get users to follow you on Twitter. You control the communication and let your users control the method of delivery. You make yourself accessible to your users in a multitude of ways.

The third step is to converse. The social media concept is built around conversations between people in the real world who share their likes and dislikes and their personal or professional experiences in cyberspace. For a business owner, this is word of mouth and she can track these conversations and respond to them.

If the owner leads people from her social media sites to her blog, it is easy for her to know what people think of her business/products and also reply to users’ comments. But it is not so simple as people can talk about her at several other places on the web.

The business owner can track these conversations on the web using Google Alerts where she sets up alerts for her company name, products/services and specific keyword phrases. She selects the Type as Comprehensive and the option How Often can be set to As it Happens. Everytime Google encounters a mention of her name or company when spidering the web, it sends an email to her. She can alternatively recieve it via a feed.

She can also use a Twitter search using the above method. She can get a feed of all the searches made on Twitter concerned with her company and view them in real time on her newsreader.

The fourth and final step is to convert the people talking about a company or its products and services. As a business owner, you can easily see the conversations happeing in your niche and you get a clear idea of what people are talking about especially their wants. All you have to do is get to know your target customers’ minds through these conversations and convert them into customers.

The central factor in conversion is the trust you garner in the eyes of the buyer. With your wide social media presence and effective linking of all your web 2.0 properties, your potential customers get to know you better.

A few steps you can take in portraying yourself as a person of trust and integrity are:

• You provide good quality content and advice in your selected niche
• You do not blatantly hype your own products/services and indulge in hardsell
• You respond well and unbiasedly to positive and negative comments about you/your company
• You assume the mantle of a thought leader in your field by adding new dimension of thinking to existing conversations

The strongest aspect of social media is its virality, the parallel of word of mouth in the real world. If you have a good message of value to the world, it is likely to be devoured quickly and transmitted many times over increasing your exposure manifold.

It is now time for you to dig your heels in the social media arena and reap the benefits it has to offer.
This post is based on Don Crowther’s article, “How to Knock A Marketing Campaign Out Of The Park” and is documented by Andy Jenkins in his post called Create, Control, Converse, CONVERT! The True Power of Social Media

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior search marketing consultant at Netconcepts, our Auckland social media optimisation company in New Zealand. He also posts regularly to the Online Marketer blog at www.onlinemarketer.co.nz

I’m not sure that the UI alone is really enough to differentiate Shelfari from the pack, particularly if Amazon over-commercializes it. I think if it tries to push book sales too much, it might easily disaffect the usership and they could easily swing over to one of the handful of competitors.

Amazon has been extremely adept at seeing the potential value of social media, and have been bullish at integrating it. Yet, some of their aggressiveness at pushing their commercial products has seriously degraded the social media value of some of these initiatives. I have more commentary on specifics of this which I’ll share later.

A number of large internet companies have gone the acquisition route to try to combine the benefits of social media into their existing content and commercial sites. Thus far, it’s not entirely clear that this strategy works longterm, because the commercialization of social media sites tends to irritate users and makes their users take a cynical view about their involvement. A notable exception to this is Flickr, a photo sharing site which Yahoo! acquired and which continues to grow in popularity and usage.

Google also sees the potential of book reviews and sharing of reading lists — I recently blogged about how Google added shared reading lists for politicians and pundits.

My course on “SEO 101” is a not-to-be missed session for any search marketer who wishes to learn the basics of “organic” or “natural” search engine optimization (a.k.a. “SEO”). While basic SEO principles are really very simple to incorporate in web site design, most companies fail to exploit them when building out their web pages and internet applications — losing out on traffic and marketshare. Adjusting a site to include just a few of the basics can increase traffic and associated sales significantly.

I’ll be speaking along with the legendary Neil Patel, who is renowned as a social media marketing guru. Neil will be covering the basics of social media optimization, or “SMO”.