SEO Werkt!

Teens in Tech, an annual conference in Silicon Valley, celebrates the elite and high-powered designers and programmers in the industry that are too young to swig a beer.

They may be college dropouts with dimples, and they certainly say the word “awesome” a lot, but these teens are a force to be reckoned with. At an age where most of us are still taking AP classes, these kids were hustling products, snagging meetings with investors, and teaching themselves to build mobile apps.

We’re at Xerox PARC, a famed research and innovation hub a stone’s throw from Sand Hill Road, and these teen mavericks have some wisdom to pass on. Listen up, kids.

Gumroad’s founder and CEO, 19-year-old Sahil Lavingia

On building companies: “Before you start something, ask yourself: Could you see yourself working on this ten years from now?”

On raising funding: “Raise money when you don’t need to. I put my first million dollars in the bank, moved to San Francisco and got a loft. Use the money to build things that are difficult and valuable, and help you build focus.” 

On building companies: I think products keep me alive. Ask yourself “why” before you starting something? My “why”? I want to build products. I think a song is a product. A product is a way to outlive yourself. 

Kiip’s 20-year-old head product designer, Adam Debreczeni

On networking: Even if you’re 16-years-old, go out and email people. I would never have had opportunities if I hadn’t. Just reach out to talented people, especially if they’re not famous yet. Talk to me now! I don’t have an entourage. But have your parents spell-check your emails first!

On startups or school?: For the four years you’re in school, your job is to become a better person. Don’t rob yourself of that experience.

Read more here about Peter Thiel’s $100,000 fellowship for talented teens to drop out of school. 

On playing tough: It is weird being on the phone with the VP of Marketing at Disney when you’re 19-years-old. There are benefits though. This girl I was crushing on in college was into One Direction. So I got some props from her when I did some design work for them.

On delegating and designing: People are going to criticize you, so stop googling yourself! Instead, if you’re really stoked about your work, make sure you show it off. Put your work on Dribbble, it will push you to become a better designer.

Alexander Bass, lead designer, ONE inc. / teen star of “That’s so Raven” 

On snagging opportunities: We were going down in the elevator and Cory and Michael said “we like you. … Go home, check your email, and we’ll make you an offer.”

On Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley: Acting … it’s not a burning love like I have for design and products. But if you’re on TV, they’ll listen to you more. I have learned to accept rejection, be humble, and work with people. In design, you also have to remove yourself from the process and do what’s necessary. I don’t get mad or take something personally. I think the creative process is similar. 

Mark Daniel, 18-year-old CEO of GoalHawk 

On making the move to Silicon Valley from Nashville: I always had this incredible ambition and wanted to make products that impact people on a real level. I also hope that one day I won’t have to worry about money. Growing up, my dad has always had a six-figure corporate job, but we were over-extended and in 2009, we lost everything.  

The collegiate route or the startup?: I’m going to Babson College. It makes sense for me to do both, unless my startup takes off. If it doesn’t work out, I really don’t want to be left in a vulnerable spot.

Advice to fellow entrepreneurs: If you try to do everything, you’re destined for nothing. Stay humble. There’s an infinite amount to learn from every single person. 

Images courtesy of Michael O’Donnell (@Photo) 

Filed under: Entrepreneur, VentureBeat

Conventional wisdom says booking a vacation yourself will save you a lot of money—but conventional wisdom isn’t always right. New (and old) methods of booking travel can save money in ways that weren’t possible just five years ago, so we decided to find out: In 2012, what’s the cheapest, most efficient way to book a vacation. More »

Microsoft’s Bing search engine launched its social sidebar last month and the company has been adding features and support for additional social networks ever since. The core of Bing’s social efforts, however, is its Facebook integration and the company today announced a nice new feature for Facebook users on Bing. The social sidebar already allowed users to ask their Facebook friends questions right from Bing, but with today’s update, Bing is also allowing users to tag up to five of their friends whenever they ask a question. This, says Microsoft, will allow you “to effortlessly tap into the collective wisdom of your social network, and get input from your friends who are in the know.”

Chances are, after all, that you already know which ones of your friends are most likely to be able to answer your questions about a restaurant or event. Now, you can make sure that these friends will definitely see your question from Bing in their Facebook stream.

Overall, this is just a small update, but it clearly shows that Microsoft continues to invest in improving Bing’s social features. Just two weeks ago, for example, Bing added support for Foursquare tips to Bing. The company clearly believes that its users are looking for social search, but so far, Microsoft hasn’t shared any data about how its users (and how many of them) are using these new social features.

According to Compete, Bing currently owns almost 19% of the U.S. search engine market and both its market share and overall query volume on the site continue to grow at a steady clip.

Scott Stratten‘s new book, The Book of Business Awesome, launches today. If you’ve read his first book, Unmarketing, you won’t need any convincing to get the new one. Scott’s piercing advice and often humorous analysis of what companies are doing right and wrong or should do to build awesome experiences for their customers are sage nuggets of wisdom.

And as Scott does often, he has put together some awesome to go along with the launch. The first 250 people to pre-order one copy get another copy for their local library. The first 125 to pre-order two copies get the library copy plus a free mini-poster of Scott’s trademark, “Jackass Whisperer,” comment. (See one on Scott’s post here.) For people who order more quantities, there’s more benefits. Scott’s post has them spelled out.

If you aren’t familiar with Scott’s work, here’s my take on The Book of Business Awesome to whet your whistle, as it were:

It’s actually two books in one, set up as a flip-book. There’s The Book of Business Awesome, then, if you flip it over and look at the back cover, you see that the back of the book is the cover of The Book of Business UnAwesome. The juxtaposition of case studies in both give the optimist something great to read and the pessimist something, too. Both “books” are awesome in the stories they tell and advice they give.

The books are not just a bunch of chapters with a bunch of advice. It’s a series of stories, woven together that make for an easy read and some good head-nodding realizations. You won’t underline stuff as much as you’ll just think, “I’ve got to remember that story to tell to my staff at some point.”

The Book of Business Awesome is about learning to focus on you and your customer experience so that every employee is a touch point for a customer to say, “Damn! That was awesome.” The Book of Business UnAwesome is full of stories and lessons that show you the cost of not being awesome. The way each is presented is pretty compelling, making Scott effort … well, awesome.

Some of the early chapters in UnAwesome are just flipped perspectives of the same chapters in Awesome. Again … making it pretty awesome.

No, neither “book” is very long. Both run about 150 pages, which is half a typical business book. If you’ve read UnMarketing, you know lengthy chapters aren’t Scott’s thing. There aren’t any, “My mother is a fish,” write-offs, though. Each is just long enough to make the point.

There are chapters also focused on social media, public speaking and more of an individual “become awesome” conversation set. If I have any criticism of the book at all it’s that these seem a little out of place if you’re a business owner and marketer looking for inspiration in the enterprise. But even those folks need to understand social media, speak in public and serve on panels, so the connection is there.

The best thing about this book (these books?) is the case studies. Again, you’ll underline less and make note of the good stories more. That’s helpful in explaining your points to higher ups and the like. It’s also useful in keeping the advice and lessons of the book in mind down the road. Even after reading Scott’s story of the chef at the Hilton Garden Inn in Chapter 1 (of Awesome), you’ll forever think twice about judging someone who is apologizing for your bad experience.

There are dozens of neat stories and piece of sound advice tucked in these pages. Some of them you’ve heard from Scott before through his rants on YouTube or in speaking engagements. But all are still sound and worth hearing again, or for the first time. I love the ideas of remarrying your current customers, that marketing is a verb and that PR stands for “People React.” I won’t spoil those chapters for you, but rest assured, there’s some great nuggets of wisdom in there for you to chew on.

The bottom line here is that Scott Stratten’s second major book offering is as good, if not better, than the first. Buy it. It’s worth it.

In september mag Nederland weer naar de stembus. Zou de aankomende verkiezingscampagne eindelijk de boeken ingaan als de campagne waarin sociale media definitief doorbraken? In dit zesde deel in de serie over de rol van sociale media bij de aanstaande verkiezingen, bekijken we hoe de uitslag van de verkiezingen te voorspellen is met behulp van de ‘wisdom of crowds’. Lees meer

Editor’s Note: Rob Saurini is a hard working developer at TechCrunch, except for today. Today, he just wants to watch the Olympics, like a true patriot.

So I’ve been sitting here for the past couple of hours searching for a way to watch the Olympics Opening Ceremonies when I should probably be doing actual work.

Nada. Zilch. Zip. The best I could do was a live blog here or there. Well, that and the spammed links in Google as well as questionable sites that try to manipulate you into downloading a shitty plugin or answer a bogus survey.

NBC, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen to air the coverage at 7:30pm EST in the US. I think this sends a clear message to the rest of the world. “You can wait while we get as many advertisements as we can with what amounts to the largest pre-game show in the history of ever. Also, fuck you.”

Don’t worry, you can still watch the events live, right? Not a fucking chance. You need to have a subscription to a cable or satellite TV service. If you have one of those you can watch at the official NBC Olympics website as well as on your smartphone or tablet.

Since I only have Netflix, I guess I’ll just have to continue my X-Files marathon and absorb the Olympics in text form later. Or you know, do some work.

PBS has been kicking butt lately with its viral video series (for reference, see this Mr. Rogers clip or the Bob Ross Remix). In a new YouTube vid, PBS gets super meta and tackles the whole concept of memetics and viral videos.

“Whether rooted in comedy, spectacle, schadenfreude, cuteness, politics, performance, or deep meaning, the idea of viral videos, and the huge audiences they generate, have forever changed the values and potential impact of video online,” the video description reads.

The long-ish video features words of wisdom from YouTube trend wizard Kevin Allocca, meme-meister Brad Kim of Know Your Meme, and Casey Neistat, one half of the Neistat Brothers filmmaking duo.

This vid is the latest in Off Book, PBS’s series of web originals about web/nerd life and culture. Other topics include a treatise on the evolution of 8-bit art and a short documentary on the culture (hah!) of Reddit.

Filed under: offBeat

Stamped, the ex-Googler backed startup for sharing your favorite things, is rolling out a major revamp of its product today, and is adding a buzz-worthy lineup of new strategic investors, including celebrities like Justin Bieber, Ellen Degeneres, Ryan Seacrest, NBA all-star Baron Davis, Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun, as well as media companies The New York Times Co. and Columbia Records. Also going in on the round are notable tech industry names like Google Chairman Eric Schmidt (via TomorrowVentures), Brian Lee of ShoeDazzle, LegalZoom, and The Honest Company, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad (his first investment), CrunchFund, and Metamorphic Ventures.

Not surprisingly, current investors Bain Capital Ventures and Google Ventures also participated, bringing the company’s total raise to date to $3 million. But while the celebs will bring new eyes to the service, it’s the app’s redesign that will be the big draw once the celebrity shine wears off.

“We’re Not A Way To Rate Things”

The Stamped mobile app first arrived on iOS back in November 2011, as an alternative way to mark and share the things you like in the real world. Instead of giving something one star or five-star rating, for example, you would just “stamp” it, meaning you approve. But the company was soon – and perhaps unfairly – lumped into a growing crowd of “rate everything” apps which included the likes of Kevin Rose’s now-shuttered Oink, and eventually, even a social/local/mobile spoof app Jotly, from UberConference’s maker Firespotter Labs.

“Because of the way other services have been launched around us, we were kind of grouped together, but that was improperly done,” says Stamped co-founder and CEO Robby Stein of the trendy rate-it-all space. “We’re not a way to rate things,” he clarifies. “We’re a way to share your favorite things. We want you to have one beautiful place to stamp your favorite movies, books, restaurants, and anything that you love, and create one home for all that to live.”

What’s New In The App

With the relaunch of Stamped version 2.0, the service is aligning itself up with that original vision. The new app does feel less like a simplified rating system, and more like a social discovery service. Part of that comes from a new section in the app called “The Guide,” which lets you find new things to “eat/drink,” “watch,” “read,” etc., as recommended by your friends.

“The big thing we’ve always wanted to do is move from the wisdom of ‘the crowds’ to the wisdom of ‘your crowd,’” says Stein. To get closer to that goal, the startup has been staffing up with more ex-Googlers, including Paul Eastlund, a former tech lead from Google Maps, new designer Anthony Cafaro, and new engineer Geoff Liu, also formerly on Google Maps.

Not only has the redesigned app introduced the new “Guide” section, but the overall experience has been improved, and includes things like a richer, more media-rich news feed of shared items, and more notably, integrations from several third-party services to flesh out what you can actually do in the app. Now, you’re not just reading about what friends recommend, you can also stream music from iTunes (previews), Rdio, or Spotify, for example; it connects to OpenTable for reservations, pulls menu data from SinglePlatform, and offers product details from Amazon or, in the case of apps, the iTunes App Store.

Friends can like, comment or add items their friends share to personal to-do lists in the app. These activities are visible to others in the news feed section, in a somewhat Path-like style which uses friends’ profile icons to show engagement at a glance.

Stamped Arrives On Web, Too

Another new component to the service is the expansion to the web, offering an online home for your collection. “I think it really becomes a reason why people keep stamping things,” Stein says of the new website, “because you’re building this beautiful thing…now when people ask you, ‘what are favorite places?,’ ‘what music are you into?,” they can just look at this interest profile that represents all the things you love.”

For celebrity watchers, there’s an obvious draw to the new Stamped (what does Bieber like?), and for others, it may be about seeing what books NYT recommends, perhaps. But where Stamped still needs work is helping regular users build up their own collections of things – something that, while easy enough to do, can still feel like a bit of work to do at scale, in order to really create a holistic picture of your interests. The ability to import data or make suggestions based on your activity on some of these third-party services would be a good addition in the future. Stein says that they’re “still exploring” other integrations right now.

While the size of the strategic round is not being revealed for competitive reasons, Stein notes that this is the first time Stamped has confirmed numbers related to its funding. Combined with an earlier seed round, the company has now raised $3 million in total funding to date. Beliebe it or not (yeah, I went there), this isn’t Bieber’s first time out as a V.C., nor Seacrest’s, nor Ellen’s. Celeb investing is the new “I just wanna direct.”

The new Stamped app is rolling out starting now. The updated version will be available in iTunes here.

Below, Bieber:

The conventional wisdom is that Zynga has social games locked up on Facebook. But the social network is eager to dispel that idea, even if Zynga has 243 million monthly active users, or more users than the next top five players combined, according to AppData.

Sarah Brooks, game strategic partner manager at Facebook, said in a talk at the Casual Connect game conference in Seattle that plenty of new players have come on the scene in the past year in social games. She said more than 130 games have ore than 1 million monthly active users on Facebook.

King.com, for instance, now ranks at No. 2 on Facebook with 51 million monthly active users. In August, the company launched its first Facebook game, Bubble Witch Saga, and got to 3.5 million monthly active users in its first month.

Other up-and-comers include Peak Games, Cook Apps, and Fresh Planet, maker of SongPop. OMGPOP also saw a fast rise to the top with Draw Something early this year and was acquired for $183 million-plus by Zynga.

New genres that have emerged include hidden object games, which a year ago only had two titles. Now there are at least a half-dozen hits, Brooks said. Those include Victorian mysteries, romance games and titles such as Disney’s Animal Kingdom Explorers.

There has also been a boom in casual arcade games. More than 75 million monthly active users are playing bubble shooter titles, where you shoot bubbles at fruit hanging on trees or something like that. Big hits in the arcade space include King.com’s Candy Crush Saga, which has 13 million monthly active users, GameHouse’s Collapse Blast!, Panda Jam from SGN, and Diamond Dash from Wooga.

Casino games are in a boom, as evidenced by WGT’s $500 million acquisition of Double Down Interactive, a social casino game company which has a big hit in slot machine games. Sports titles are also catching on. And hardcore games such as Kixeye’s War Commander are taking off. Other hits include Citizen Grim and Total Domination.

Filed under: dev, games

Posted by Kenny Martin

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we'll be discussing ways that you can improve your social and email calls to action to make them more effective. Often times, when wandering the web, you'll find web pages that are filled from head to toe with all the possible calls to action that are available. By limiting your usage of these calls to action and by placing them purposefully, you will a significant increase in your conversions.

As always, don't forget to leave your tips, tricks, and pieces of wisdom in the comments below. Happy Friday everyone.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about how to make your social and email calls to action more effective. I've drawn out a page here that I think represents what a lot of us see on the Web, what a lot of us do, particularly when it comes to blogs, but also when it comes to a lot of e-commerce types of pages, pages on the Web that we use for B2B types of content, really, any pages that you find where there's social calls to action, calls to action that want you to take some . . . subscribe to me, follow me on Twitter, subscribe to my email, become our fan on Facebook, follow us on Google+,
post to our Pinterest Board, whatever it is.

All of those types of actions that are generated on the Web often follow this format where you see, okay, here's a site. Here's the menu. There's a page title. And then they'll be just littered, literally littered with calls to action. I'm going to highlight in red all of the places where I see social calls to action oftentimes simultaneously. Over here on the sidebar, we'll use this left-hand nav that kind of pops out. Then we'll have some areas up here that have got a few. Oh yeah, make sure to put our Facemash on the right-hand side to show off all our Facebook. Oh, and let's have our tweets. Then we'll have the subscribe to email. Oh, at the bottom of the post we've got to have it there too.

Are you kidding me? I know you really, really, really want people to follow you on these social services and subscribe to your email. But is this the right way to go about it? Imagine if it was an e-commerce page, and it was just littered with buy buttons. Everything always said buy, buy, buy, add to cart, add to cart, add to cart. Kind of crazy. Right?

There should be one place where there's that one call to action, but instead we've overwhelmed. We've let the social web overtake our normal logic, our better knowledge of UI and UX practices, and we're delivering an experience that is essentially, "Where's the content man? If I subscribe to you, it's because I want to follow your content, and all you're telling me with your page is, 'Follow me.'"

This is a little overwhelming, and so I wanted to provide some best practices, some ways, some tips to help streamline this process and make it a little bit better. Let's walk through those. First off, as you can imagine, one of my top tips, one of my best ones is limit the choices. Don't overwhelm. I mean this two ways. I mean, number one, limit the choices in terms of decide where you're getting your best usage, your best customers. Limit your network to those places.

If Twitter and Facebook are the place for you, great. If it's Facebook and email, great. If it's Pinterest and it's LinkedIn, fine. You can provide, if you want, and a lot of people will do this, where they'll put one section up in the top right-hand corner. That's got the little icons for each network so that all of those are findable, sort of like the contact us page and the about us page or the terms of service and legal use and privacy policy. Those things are findable. Great. That's fine. That way, someone can go to any page on your website and, "Hey what's these guys'
Twitter? I want to tweet something at them. Great. There it is, right there."

In terms of calls to action, things where you're actually trying to get the subscription, where you're saying, "Hey, here's our Twitter box, and subscribe to us, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to our email," in terms of those calls to action, limit those choices. I would highly recommend max, max one to two. Really, seriously, you should only be trying to drive one or two social email actions on a single page. That should probably be relatively consistent.

You also probably don't want to overwhelm, meaning there's no reason to have this many. If you've got one box that's got them all somewhere on the page, in the footer, near the header, at the top, great. Then you want to have your one call to action in the place . . . this is tip number two. Promote where the action is most likely to happen.

I'll give you a great example of this. If you follow OkCupid's blog, which is called "OkTrends," I urge you to check it out. They have lots of phenomenal, interesting content there. What OkTrends has done is a ton of testing to see what's most effective. They found Facebook to be their most effective channel. What happens is, as you scroll down and are reading the page, in fact you'll see something like this. I've reached the bottom of the content, right, so all the content's up here. They have great graphics and images. Then here are the comments starting down on the bottom of the page. What you're going to see that's fascinating is as I've scrolled down, as soon as I reach the bottom here, where I've essentially said, they can detect via the browser, via JavaScript, hey, this person just reached the bottom of our content, the end of the blog post. Now is exactly the moment where we're going to drop down this little blue thing up here, and it's going to have a message sort of written in here that's like, "Subscribe to us on Facebook," or "Like us on Facebook."

Brilliant timing. They know which of the right call to action is to make, and they're making it at the time when you've finished consuming that blog post and you are most likely, because clearly, you've been engaged throughout reading the post. Think of asking for this at a time in normal conversation before you've even given the value proposition. Right? It's not like I tell you, "Hey, I want you to share what I'm about to tell you with all your friends." "What is it? Why do I need to share it before I know? Shouldn't you ask me that after you tell me what it is?"

And that's exactly what OkTrends is doing here, and that's what I would urge you to do as well. Make it happen at the call to action time. If there's content that makes someone scroll down a page, I really like having it at the bottom. At the same time you're asking for the add a comment or make a purchase on a page, that's the time to ask for that sharing activity. Prior to that, it's just a little odd. It's a little out of place.

Customize. Don't just use the standard calls to action. Right? Standard calls to action would be like the Tweet Me button, or the Facepile, embed, or those kinds of things. Those can be fine. Those can work. You can certainly test them, but I really like customizing, because the problem with the standard ones, especially those Facepile, Tweet Me, and that kind of stuff is that those buttons, those images, those graphics, those embeds, they start to look the same across page and sight and all over the Web.

When that happens, ad blindness happens, banner blindness happens. This is the same sort of thing that advertisers talk about with branding advertising that the ads just don't stand out anymore. People stopped noticing them. If you can customize, if you can make it unique, you can add your color scheme, you can your brand, you can add clever messaging, you can make it unique and different from what everyone else is doing on the Web with their social, that's when you'll stand out. That's when you'll have a much different experience that makes people stand up and pay attention to what you're showing them.

Number four, create an expectation and then, please, fulfill it immediately. This is most important with things like email, but it's also important with tweets and Facebook, etc. What I mean by this is if you have a call to action that says, "Like us on Facebook and get updates like this," or "Be notified when we do these kinds of things," your Facebook feed, the Facebook page should be a list of a lot of those things with not a whole lot else. It should be doing exactly what you say.

If you tell them, "Subscribe to our Moz Top Ten email" – we have a Moz Top Ten email – one of the things that we should probably do is as soon as you subscribe, we send you the last one. We don't do that right now, but we should. We're working on it. That way you get this sense of, "Oh, look, it's just what I asked for. It's as promised. Here we go. This is great."
Now they're delivering on the expectation they've created, and that creates a sense of trust immediately. Excellent way to go about this.

Use relevant social proof, number five. A lot of times people will say, "Oh great, I'll put the Facepile in, or I'll show them who else from their network is following me." Sometimes that's good. Sometimes it's not. Social proof is very case specific. For example, if I am going to be going out and buying a consumer product, maybe I am interested in what my friends are doing. But if I'm going out and I'm buying a product for my business, I might actually be interested in what people like me, who are relevant, who are at companies I know and like and trust, who are influencers and authority figures, their opinions may be much more interesting and important to me than, hey, your friend on Facebook, or hey, your LinkedIn connection bought this. That's kind of less interesting.

So I would urge you to figure out what the social proof is that's case specific to you and then apply that on these pages. If it's we are followed on Twitter by . . . I don't know if we are but Danny Sullivan or Avinash Kaushik or Richard Baxter or Will Critchlow, whoever these people are that you sort of go, "Oh, I know those guys. I really respect what they say." I will also follow SEOmoz or whatever your business is.

This is UX 101. Make the process dead simple. I have started to see these more complex social subscription, particularly email ones, where it pops up in a box and it asks you for more information, wants you to confirm before you do this. If you can, make it dead, dead simple, meaning, if you have an email box, I want it to look like this. Your email, subscribe. When you click subscribe right here, you get a little popup that says, "Thank you. We've just sent you an email to confirm your address. As soon as you click on the confirmation, you'll receive your first email from us." Amazing. Dead simple. Took me, literally, my email, a click and a confirm. Done. Sold. Easy. That dead simple process, that's the kind of thing you want to create, not just here, but anytime you have calls to action, because simplicity will promote higher conversion rate, better funnel mechanics.

Number seven, eliminate the noise from your social and email feed. If you are sending a lot of email blasts to your subscribers, if you are sending a lot of tweets, you're doing a lot of Facebook status updates, and you're looking and seeing the click through rate and conversion rate and engagement rates are low on a number of them and then occasionally high, gets a little spiky, try to focus on the spikes. Get rid of the noise and focus on curating that content better so that you have essentially fewer messages, but more high quality messages.

This works extremely well as people who subscribe to these services start subscribing to more and more. In the early days, very early days of Facebook, early days of Twitter, early days of email, way back in the day, people didn't get as overwhelmed and, therefore, more messages were more welcome. Now signal to noise ratio matters a lot more.

Finally, number eight, so, so important, if you can at all, measure the channel ROI that you're getting. What I mean by this is measure the difference between the value of someone coming from Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or Google+ or email, or whatever it is, your RSS feed. Look at those different channels and say to yourself, "All right, I see that when I get someone subscribing to our RSS feed, that is just a huge value ad, because they come back to us on average 5 times in a month, and within 3 months, they become a buyer, and 60 percent of the people who touch our RSS feed, within 6 months will buy something from us." Fantastic.

Figure out what those different numbers are, and then focus on the channels that matter most to you. It might seem weird sometimes, but I've seen a lot of B2B case studies where LinkedIn is the highest referring. I've seen a lot of case studies where email is a much higher converting source than Facebook or Twitter or any of the other social networks.

Pay attention to this and make sure you focus on the ones that matter most. Don't be persuaded by popular media, social media, technology media that says, "Oh, Pinterest is the next hot thing." And you think, "Oh no, I don't have a Pinterest board. I've got to get people signing up for my Pinterest board and following me on Pinterest." Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold your horses. Is that actually a valuable channel for you? If you don't know, you should test. You should spend some time there. If you do know, and it's low, well, don't bother. Maybe that's not your demographic. Maybe that's not your psychographic. Maybe your customers just aren't there. Maybe, for some reason, the medium and your media don't connect well. That's okay. If you focus this, then you can do a great job on limiting the choices, promoting the right actions, and all of these other things.

All right everyone. I hope to see some fantastic calls to action for your social and email campaigns in the future, and I'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!