PissedConsumer.com - Where Did You Go?

For those of you running an online reputation management campaign you might have noticed that one negative listing your competing against, pissedconsumer.com, has disappeared off of Google. For my clients personally, I've seen it drop 5 pages or more (in some cases off of Google altogether).

It's hard to assess the exact cause of this, but PissedConsumer.com ran into some trouble about a year ago because they were trying to game the system. You can view info about it here and here.

Google's rankings have been fluctuating a lot due to Google Caffeine (which hasn't been fully launched yet) so I highly recommend staying on top of search results to see if PissedConsumer.com pops up again.

Anybody else experiencing this?

Top Facebook and Twitter Trends of 2009

Came across some interesting stats that I figured I'd share. Below are the top Twitter trends of 2009 along with the top keywords incorporated into Facebook status updates of 2009. Some of these kind of surprised me.

Facebook:

1. Facebook Applications (Farmville, Farm Town, Social Living)

2. FML (F*&$# My Life)

3. Swine Flu

4. Celebrity Deaths (Michael Jackson, Patrick Swayze, Billy Mays)

5. Family

6. Movies (New Moon, Transformers, Star Trek, The Hangover, Paranormal Activity and Harry Potter)

7. Sports (Steelers, Yankees)

8. Health Care

9. FB (aka Facebook)

10. Twitter

11. Years

12. Lady Gaga

13. Yard

14. Religion

15. I

Twitter:

To everyone who is celebrating, have a Merry Christmas!

Brand Monitoring

I'm not going to make it a habit here to post links to my other blogs, but I wrote a blog post the other day that I felt was worth sharing.

You can view it here: The Importance of Brand Monitoring. To sum it up, I discussed why brand monitoring is important, how to do it properly, and how you can leverage the information to better your business.

This is a really important article for anybody who is implementing a Social Media campaign (especially ones that involve a listening program). If you're not seeing great results with your brand monitoring campaign, you aren't doing it right or there just isn't a lot of information out there pertaining to your brand. If the latter is the case, you can still benefit by monitoring activity relating to your industry and applying what was discussed in the blog post to help leverage your brand.

If you're not doing this, strongly consider it. Again, if done properly you will easily see the benefits.

Facebook Contests - Tips

This should be a fairly brief post. Also, I know that I said I would start blogging once a week at least which hasn't happened yet, but moving forward I will make sure that this is done.

I've see a lot of Facebook Contests run by companies through the "event feature" on Facebook (which I think is a great idea). However, I've also seen these contests fail miserably because they were not implemented properly. If you plan on running a contest through the events feature on Facebook please keep this tips in mind:

• Be Specific: One of the main issues I've seen with Facebook contests is that people don't specify the exact details related to the contest. Assume that nobody has any idea on what's going on (which is probably most individuals involved in the contest). List how people can enter (really really important), prizes, rules / stipulations, and any other possible questions entrants might have. Of course you need to ensure that the copy doesn't become a novel, but by specifying everything related to the contest it will save a lot of time for you in the long run as you won't be inundated with various quesitons.
  
• Contact Your Facebook Fans: Chances are if you're running a Facebook event contest, you already have a Facebook page. Don't just simply post the event information on your fan page wall, reach out to all of your fans alterting them on the contest. All you need to do is click on "edit page" and access the send update feature on the right side of the page. This will automatically ping your entire fan base. It amazes me how few people realize that this is an option considering how effective this is in increasing entrants.
• Invite Your Friends: A lot of people are hesitant to reach out to their friends on their personal profile because they feel it is intrusive. Keep in mind..people love free shit. Sending them an invite to a contest will not be considered "annoying" by any means.
  
• Facebook Advertisements: If you have the budget, run Facebook advertisements. You can target pretty much every demographic possible (based on profile data) including age, gender, location, and interest. Target individuals who represent your brand's target market (and what you're giving away) along with people who list "contests", "free stuff", and other keyword variations as an interest.
• Keep People in the Loop: Stay active on the event wall. Remind people how much time is left to enter, the number of entrants, address any common issues you've seen, etc. This helps to target people who might have joined the event, but haven't yet entered the contest.