My Geeky Valentine: Candy Heart Link Bait
Filed under: SEO, Social Media | Tags: link bait, link building, promotion
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The folks at Necco developed a sweet link bait campaign for Valentine’s Day to celebrate the introduction of new social messages like “TWEET ME” and “TEXT ME” — design your own Sweethearts conversation hearts.
This fun little bit of link bait gives you the power to say whatever you want in your candy heart conversation! Feeling romantic? Bitter? Sad? Witty? Sweet? No problem, say it with digital candy in public on Twitter or in private via e-mail.
Dear search geeks, here’s a sample Valentine for you and our favorite search engines. Try it yourself; the app is available free for the iPhone as well as at the campaign’s microsite.
From a link building standpoint, Sweethearts is putting a lot of effort into generating buzz for the app and the launch of the new candy messages on their Sweethearts Twitter profile and their Sweethearts Facebook profile. Nicely done, Sweethearts — good interaction with fans and frequent but not overly repetitive tweets and posts about the app and the launch.
The piece I see missing is consistent cross channel promotion. There’s a blog / Twitter contest that doesn’t mention the app and some strong news articles focused on the new candy messages that may or may not mention the app but don’t include links to it. So there’s a some promotion of the candy and the new messages happening, but it’s not being tied consistently together to also promote the link bait outside of Twitter and Facebook. In addition, there’s no mention of the app on the official Necco Sweethearts product page, or the games page, or the news page. The Necco homepage does have a large image feature and link, but that’s the sole mention as far as I can see.
The app is one piece of the launch’s promotional campaign, but it’s an inconsistently mentioned piece. From a link building standpoint, the app represents sweet link bait. But it needs promotion to succeed as link bait. Without promotion, link bait is like a tree falling in the woods. If no one sees it fall or stumbles over it later, it may as well not exist. Which means it won’t drive the quantity of links that it could with stronger promotion. Stronger ties with press relations, online marketing for the necco.com site, e-mail campaigns and other marketing channels would strengthen consistency of promotion for the app and naturally generate more links.
I only stumbled over the app as I was tweeting something else. I happened to notice the small suggested app link on my Twitter homepage and clicked it because I love Sweethearts. They were my favorite Valentine’s candy as a kid. The Twitter link is a boon, but it rotates with 15-20 other links. It’s not a persistent, visible presence to drive eyeballs or link juice to the app’s microsite.
Maybe the app wasn’t designed as a link building tactic. That seems likely since it has no links to pass link popularity in to any other Necco or Sweethearts web content or social profiles. I find that extremely surprising. The app developer gets a link, iTunes gets a link for the iPhone app store, but Sweethearts doesn’t link to its own site or profiles. OK, perhaps SEO and link building weren’t taken into account at the beginning. But since Necco has already spent the resources to dream up and develop the app, why not link back to the primary Necco site, promote the app more strongly with the promotion they’re already doing for the new messages launch, and get more buzz and link popularity for the campaign’s cost?
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Cars vs Greeting Cards: Critique of Social Media Campaigns
Social media spectrum: Complex VW campaign vs simple American Greetings
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I’m really looking forward to tracking the progress of two social media campaigns currently in progress, one complex and one simple.
Smart & Simple
American Greetings has launched a fun and easy Twitter Valentine’s Day campaign that asks followers to tweet a response to 14 daily questions and tag them with #LoveAG. Each day one winner will be chosen to receive $350 in gift cards.
Today’s question: “You’re a Grammy Award winner (like our beloved Taylor Swift) & you’re writing a love song-what’s the chorus?” Horrifying, humiliating, horrendous … but I admit I did submit my own awful chorus. Yesterday was “What does it feel like to fall in love?” Who knows what tomorrow will be, but I’ll be checking in to see.
American Greetings
That’s the entire campaign! Simple, engaging, brilliant! No content creation, no media development, no promotional costs. Just a good idea, $4,900 in gift cards, and the daily discipline and creativity for 14 days to tweet like crazy on the same topic without sounding bored or repetitive.
Could it be better? Even the best campaigns can be better in hindsight. The contest comes from the corporate branch of American Greetings (http://corporate.americangreetings.com, http://twitter.com/amgreetings). The consumer ecards and interactive site has a separate site and Twitter account (http://www.americangreetings.com, http://twitter.com/ag_ecards), which sadly is not participating in its corporate sister’s Valentine’s fun. In addition, I see no mention of the contest on either the corporate or www site, though there are plenty of other Valentine’s promotions. Why not include a homepage link with a fun visual, a blurb in the e-mail newsletter, a press release, shout it across affiliated Twitter profiles and the forgotten Facebook profile? Use the channels the company controls to get more impact for the campaign’s effort.
Sluggy Patterson
Going for the Gusto
On the other side of the spectrum, Volkswagen pulls out all the stops for their “Punch Dub” campaign that spans TV advertising, Twitter, Facebook, a YouTube Channel, a Posterous blog and their primary vw.com site. They’ve created a personality (Sluggy Patterson), an online game, video content, and more, all leading up to their spot on the Super Bowl. That’s a whole lot of promotion, friends. It’s sparkly, it’s now, it’s what cool is supposed to be.
The problem is (cringe) I just don’t care. This campaign feels like it’s talking at me, not engaging with me.
OK, so maybe I’m not the target demographic for VW’s Punch Dub. I’m female, I drive a Prius, I live in a rural town in Wisconsin, I probably won’t watch the Super Bowl. Sure, I like crotchety old guys with grizzled senses of humor as much as the next gal. And it’s neato that VW created this character around Slug Bug, a cherished childhood game that admittedly still creeps into my mind as I drive. But I don’t feel compelled to log in today to see what Sluggy has to say on his blog, or video, or tweets.
That said, I’m not exactly American Greetings’ target audience either. I might buy 6 traditional greeting cards a year and I hate ecards. Sorry, AG, I’m a Snapfish photo card girl.
So why does American Greetings’ simple campaign speak to me and VW’s fancy multi-channel campaign not? For me it’s the engaging factor. It’s the invitation to participate in the fun rather than sit at a brand’s feet and wait for it to speak at me. What do you think?
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Chickens, Eggs & Link Building: Visibility Requires Links, which Require Visibility
Finally, the chicken and egg dilemma solved on a t-shirt
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Being the new kid on the web is hard. You need links to boost a site’s visibility, but it’s awfully hard to get links naturally without visibility in the search results. Sites can’t link to you if they don’t know you exist, right? It’s a little like the classic chicken & egg causality dilemma. But not really since if you don’t have a site you wouldn’t care about links anyway. Whatever.
The point is, link acquisition is hard work. Researching topically relevant sites and crafting the right approach for each takes time and creativity. Cutting corners leads to poorer conversion to links at best, and outright spam at worst.
BK's Subservient Chicken
On the surface, link bait seems like an easier way to build links. After all, you just have to think of something totally cool that could go viral. “Subservient chicken? Ha, I coulda thought of that.” OK, fine, dreaming up a great idea is a good start, but what about content creation and promotion. The “If you build it, he will come” theory only worked when the interwebs were very, very small. And not really then, either. Let’s assume the audience actually gets to the bait. Once they devour it, cross your fingers that it will cause enough of a reaction to convert to links.
Frankly, if link building was easy, everyone would do it. It would be easy to spam. Which means that it wouldn’t remain valuable for long in the search engines’ eyes. Which also means it would cease to be effective for SEO, and we’d all be talking about something else.
For now, links rule the roost. What’s your go-to link building tactic?
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Covario Acquires Netconcepts: Software and SEO Services for Results and ROI
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Covario Acquires Netconcepts
Netconcepts is officially Covario. As of 7 a.m. CST today, my fellow Netconcepts search geeks and I are now Covarians. We’ve been acquired by Covario Inc., the leader in enterprise class search advertising software and services, headquartered in San Diego, CA.
“With the acquisition of Netconcepts and the GravityStream technology, Covario is bringing a unique solution to advertisers to help them accelerate their ability to present their brands on all the major search engines globally,” said Russ Mann, Chief Executive Officer of Covario. “By coupling the predictive analytics in Covario’s Organic Search Insight with easy execution capabilities of Netconcepts’ GravityStream technology, advertisers will be able to identify the SEO actions that drive better rankings, and then deploy those strategies quickly, and in a highly scalable way to achieve their ROI goals.”
I’m looking forward to being part of Covario’s:
- D3 for SEO (Data Driven Decisions). Love the focus here. SEO theory & planning without implementation is a waste of time. But SEO implementation without data on which to base decisions is terrifying. This acquisition combines a solution that drives decisions (Covario’s Organic Search Insight) with a solution that implements decisions (Netconcepts’ GravityStream technology).
- Focus on brand advertising clients. Netconcepts’ client base has traditionally been ecommerce clients. The ability to service some of each will be refreshing, and enable us to broaden our vocabulary & skill sets into new industries and architectures.
- SEO services team. With a team twice the size, with tools and methods developed by two strong SEO services teams, and with two technology solutions at the ready to compliment the services we offer, I’m really looking forward to leaping forward as a combined team.
- Proximity to the beach. Well, maybe not the beach part since I dislike sun, sand and water. But 70 degrees sounds pretty darn good as I shovel out my driveway again in the dark and cold.
Here’s to a new era for the new Madison Covario team, and cheers to our new mother ship in sunny San Diego, Covario!
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A Yarn about SEO and the Launch of Hobby Lobby’s New Ecom Site
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I joined a knitting circle tonight at my local yarn shop / framing gallery Woodland Studios in historic downtown Stoughton, WI. Like the world of SEO, knitting has a language all its own … one that I don’t fully understand yet. I showed up with my tangled wad of yarn from big box Hobby Lobby, and all those nice ladies (and one man) with boutique yarn and fancy patterns welcomed me with open arms. While feeling warm and fuzzy and needlessly self conscious about my Hobby Lobby yarn, I suddenly realized: 1) I want to give Woodland Studios a link; and 2) I haven’t properly welcomed Hobby Lobby to the commerce world.
WELCOME TO ECOMMERCE,
HOBBY LOBBY!
Launching a new site is one of the most nerve wracking projects for an SEO professional. Let’s have a walk through of their virgin site’s initial SEO, shall we?
Hobby Lobby Shopping Homepage: http://shop.hobbylobby.com
Starts off well enough with a title tag fronted by keywords and ending with the brand. Without doing the keyword research I can’t say whether I would have chosen those keywords, but they look strong at a glance and the brand order is ideal. The H1 heading is optimized with CSS image replacement. I’m not fond of this tactic because it’s too tempting to slide into over-optimization, but Hobby Lobby has done it just right: Only include the exact same words in the text as are displayed in the image.
I’d much prefer to have a separate textual H1 heading to optimize for non-brand terms. Perhaps something like “Hobby Lobby: Arts & Crafts Superstore.” Keyword research would be critical in choosing the right phrase, but something more than brand please! All the other text on the page is navigational or irrelevant to the keyword theme begun in the title tag. A small bit of body copy crafted around carefully chosen keywords coded as anchor text to the appropriate pages would go a long way here.
Hobby Lobby Corporate Homepage: http://www.hobbylobby.com
But hold the phones, there’s another homepage here: the corporate homepage. This site has been around for years and has some strong link popularity to pass along to its daughter shopping site. Unfortunately, the mothership doesn’t link directly to its ecom daughter. Corporate links to http://www.hobbylobby.com/shop/home.cfm and http://www.hobbylobby.com/shop, both of which 302 redirect to http://shop.hobbylobby.com. This 302 redirect prevents the passage of link popularity from the trusted corporate site to the new ecom site, which will likely make its SEO ramp up time longer, especially on a subdomain.
Best case scenario: All links from Hobby Lobby-owned properties link to http://shop.hobbylobby.com with no redirect in place. Next best scenario: Convert the 302 redirect to a 301 redirect to pass link popularity to the fledgling site.
Hobby Lobby’s OTHER Site: http://www.craftsetc.com
Hobby Lobby used to feature product and craft content at craftsetc.com. This old content remains live, but it’s 301 redirected to its new home on http://shop.hobbylobby.com. Interestingly, the new shopping site URIs also load at http://www.craftsetc.com, to be immediately 301 redirected to their corresponding URIs at http://shop.hobbylobby.com. This at least has given the new subdomain an infusion of link popularity at launch. The canonicalizing 301 redirects appear to be handled well at the nonsecure http layer, but have been forgotten at the secure https layer on both sites. I’d recommend a couple of rules to 301 redirect URIs requested at the https protocol on craftsetc.com and shop.hobbylobby.com to the corresponding URI at http://shop.hobbylobby.com.
There are many more areas to discuss, of course. I’ve only touched on a couple of the basics of technical SEO for a launch, but it’s getting late and I’d like to knit a few more rows before turning in. SEO aside, Hobby Lobby’s new site is very nice. I even contributed a review for the aforementioned homespun yarn: Fantasy Epais Colorfusion bulky yarn, 4 stars. Your reviews are crawlable, Hobby Lobby, well done!
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