Social media and SEO may not look like brothers in arms, but they cannot succeed without each other either. While social media stimulates off-site conversation and interaction with your customers, SEO aims to pull traffic to your website. However, these two marketing disciplines have more in common than you may think. A recent article in presented a nice summary of the intersections. Here’s a summary:

• Social media is all about generating interesting content to share with social audiences. As this content is shared, distributed, and discussed on forums, it creates linking opportunities. The quality and quantity of these links can have a big impact on your SEO
• Social media can help you draw traffic to your website for less competitive keywords.
• Social media users tend to search for terms that are lower in the sales funnel. You can use this knowledge to optimize your PPC spend.
• Social media can offer deep insights into search terms that are popular and useful to your audience right now. This kind of real-time optimization can be rich dividends on SEO.
  

At the end of the day, we have to stop thinking of search and social media as two separate marketing silos. Just as online advertising may affect the in-store customer experience, social media impacts brand awareness and SEO in online marketing. It is essential for marketers to integrate SEO and social media in the right way to leverage greater benefits.

Memorability has been one of the greatest strengths of email marketing, especially compared with other channels such as print, broadcast and direct mail. However, metrics are useful only if they are taken of advantage of. It might be time to move beyond the basics and truly exploit the breadth and depth of available email metrics. Read More

Viral marketing includes marketing strategies that leverage social media to swiftly propagate and explode marketing message to millions of prospects in no time. Viral marketing campaigns are an ideal choice for creating a titanic buzz and brand awareness in a cost effective manner.

Here are some popular viral marketing campaigns that caught maximum eyeballs:

Simplicity Works!

Take a look at this ‘How to Sell a Soap’ video that shows how implementing viral marketing can transform a tough marketing challenge into a cakewalk! The video was a grand success for the Germany based company that promoted it.

What’s Free?

Anything, from information to coupons, services to software, customers love what is free. Attaching freebies to any campaign is the simplest way to catch maximum eyeballs. Take for example, the case of Hotmail. Way back in 1996, Hotmail pioneered what is viral marketing today. Each email sent from a Hotmail account included a small, subtle ad for Hotmail- a strategy that yielded 500,000 registered users. The number reached 12,000,000 users in less than a year’s time. As the user-base expanded into the millions, Hotmail had millions of these free ads floating on the Internet across the globe!

Surfing to Attention!

This staged video on dynamite surfing brought a whopping 10 million views for Quicksilver and did a great job by making the brand immensely popular in no time.

Go creative

In a unique campaign to promote a tax website, marketers staged a theft of Nascar with the website’s address and managed to get almost $1 million worth of exposure on television, absolutely free of cost within a few days.

The Celeb Touch

The Nike video showing Ronaldinho taking a delivery of a new pair of boots and performing some amazing football tricks brought 23.5 million views.

Interact and Instigate

The Burger King - Subservient Chicken is one of the oldest pieces of viral marketing around. The unique interactivity of writing in a message box what you wanted the chicken to do and it would seemingly do it was an instant hit and within 24 hours of launching the campaign received a million hits. The number reached 20million within a week. In a year the viral received around 14,000,000 unique visitors and helped promote the new sandwich. Here’s a video of the interactive chicken:

The rules are simple- be creative, clear and compelling. Instigate something that arouses interest and see your message transform into a gigantic viral for promoting your brand.