One Egg, One Hundred Baskets: Social Media Leverage

Thursday, May 29th, 2008 by Guest

One Egg, One Hundred Baskets: Social Media Leverage

Warning this article is rated M15+: contains aggregating scenes, marketing language, social media/networking explanations and a sloth.

You are a smart cookie and you have definitely heard of social media and social networking. You have also seen around the place that you can use these tools to help you to market your stuff, but where do you start?
Contemplate for a second, how much effort are you putting in on one blog post/article….First you write it, all nicely SEOd. You might add a picture or two; flick some links to friends and then hope your PPC advertising, back-links and organic searches bring the boys to your yard. Sounds like a pretty hit and miss affair to me with no clear direction or required outcome.

It is time to become the Social Leveraging King or Queen and squeeze every last drop of goodness out of the tools that are freely available to get the traffic rolling in. This strategy acts as a platform wrangler and drags the big names of social media, networking and aggregation together. We are going to create one page/blog post that will hit on social aggregator from ten different directions.

But first, a picture of a sloth.

Step 1
Write some quality content, or buy it, or con some university student to do it for grades. No point going to any effort trying to promote a piece of crud, write something decent! By all means ensure it covers all of your keyword bases, is SEOd up the wazoo, but don’t pollute the internet with more garbage than is already out there. Quality is everything.

Step 2
Create a slideshow presentation that covers something in your article. Go wild with PowerPoint or Keynote and again make sure the presentation is quality. Avoid using just boring words; add pictures (like a sloth!). When completed upload the presentation to SlideShare (http://www.slideshare.com), be smart with your titles and tags, always ALWAYS brand your slides and put in a link to where the full content is to be hosted.

Step 3
Now use your screen capturing video software to make a movie of that presentation. Again make it interesting with some voice over. Be funny, people love funny, or if you can’t be funny at least don’t suck. Boring (not radio) killed the video star so get some passion going, not the heavy breathing type, but the “I am excited about this subject”. Excitement breeds excitement.

Can you guess what is next? Yep, upload your recorded presentation to your favorite video hosting platform, as long as it is YouTube (for this strategy). Again be smart with your tags, hosting URL and title and if you did not obey my command re branding your slides, then you really must brand your video.

Step 4
You did talk on that video didn’t you? I hope so because you need to now produce a transcript of what you said. Type it up and upload to Scribd (http://www.scribd.com/) as a nice PDF that can be embedded later on into your site. Broken record announcement, descriptive title + good tags + hosting URL = good results.

Step 5
Stick your carefully crafted quality content, video and transcript into a web page or a blog page. I prefer blog because of the widget that pings Twitter with a tweet that I have just posted, but you can do that manually.
Posting a tweet to Twitter will not only be immediate notification to those that follow you, but most of the blogging world also has their API recording somewhere on their blog, so there is some extra linkage/keywordage for zero effort.

Step 6
Get your stuff Stumbled, all of your stuff. (http://www.stumbleupon.com) The video, slideshow, transcript, blog post and picture of the sloth all need a good Stumble. This is where the great content comes in, better quality, quicker positive Stumbling, leads to more traffic. The first Stumble for each item is pretty critical as it carries the description and tags that will distinguish it from other similar content, but all your tags and titles will make it easy for the Stumbler to know what you want there.

Step 7
Now check out your FriendFeed stream. Look at all of that information flowing directly to your 140+ thousand closest friends (well if you are Robert Scoble), all of which are looking in the one place now for their social networking needs.

Just like an RSS feeder, FriendFeed cuts out the need to log into places like FaceBook every five minutes to see if something has changed. Master using FriendFeed now because it is destined to be one of the best social networking/media tools for the next 12 months.

FriendFeed will bump your link/content up the stream every time someone makes a comment or “likes” it. This means your work can be bouncing up into view for a period of time rather than a once off event, I don’t know about you but to me that is an awesome feature that makes FriendFeed all the more valuable. Think about it.

Behold the diagram of what we’ve just accomplished…

Wow! One piece of content creating all of that input to the fast growing world of FriendFeed.
It doesn’t stop there either; there is a nice gap to the right where you can add in extra steps like your FaceBook posting, Seesmic video etc, etc. They too will populate the FriendFeed stream with your links and information.

In closing, all marketers, indeed all business people, should be thinking about how to make the greatest amount of impact with the least amount of effort. Working smarter not harder has been a catch cry forever, but not many people look at how to simplify processes or quantify the effect their effort is having. Putting one egg in as many baskets as possible is the smart way of obtaining a better return for your effort.

This is an entry to Marketing Pilgrim’s 3rd Annual SEM Scholarship contest.

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25 comments on “One Egg, One Hundred Baskets: Social Media Leverage”

PS3 Says:

May 29th, 2008 at 3:34 pm

I’m not suggesting I’m lazy, just limited on time. How long do you think the 7 step process would typically take to accomplish Allison?
Allison Reynolds Says:

May 29th, 2008 at 4:47 pm

Hi PS3

Thanks for the question.

It will take as much time as you are willing to put into it.

The beauty is just about every step of this can be performed by someone else if you are really time poor.

In fact someone smart could be making money right now by setting up putting this kind of work together for businesses…and if there isn’t there should be!

Allison

Allison Reynolds’s last blog post..Twitter Updates for 2008-05-28
MrCooker Says:

May 29th, 2008 at 5:11 pm

Holy cow Allison, quite a nice post you wrote here. Hats off. Finally something different than the usual stuff.

MrCooker’s last blog post..Think twice before you eat fast food
Allison Reynolds Says:

May 29th, 2008 at 5:27 pm

Why thanks MrCooker *blush*. Hope it gave you some ideas

I just read your last blog post… I have been very naughty this week. Must hit the gym!

Allison Reynolds’s last blog post..Twitter Updates for 2008-05-28
MrCooker Says:

May 29th, 2008 at 5:30 pm

It gave me more ideas than the last 20 posts I read about social media leverage.

And I hope you enjoyed the post.

MrCooker’s last blog post..Think twice before you eat fast food
David Temple Says:

May 30th, 2008 at 1:08 am

Nice job Allison, something to do instead of just think about. Keep up the good work and good luck in the competition.

David Temple’s last blog post..SEM Scholarship contest, step it up!
Mike Gates Says:

May 30th, 2008 at 9:27 am

Great strategy Allison.

Another great thing about FriendFeed is, it creates an RSS feed for you. You can submit that feed to RSS directories, multiplying your reach.

I’ve written more about that on my blog
Mike Gates’s last blog post..EcomPeak.com Viral Web 2.0 Twitter Updates for 2008-05-29
Allison Reynolds Says:

May 30th, 2008 at 9:41 am

Thanks Mike and David for your feedback.

Mike great addition to the tactic.

Allison Reynolds’s last blog post..Twitter Updates for 2008-05-29
More Friendfeed tips - video 3 Says:

May 30th, 2008 at 10:44 am

[...] included below and over on edocr.com at Friendfeed video transcript. Thanks to Allison Reynolds 100 eggs post for that [...]
Into the Unknown | The Four Hour Work Week Project - Allison Reynolds Says:

May 30th, 2008 at 6:31 pm

[...] My article is quick and easy tactic to utilise FriendFeed’s social media aggregation service to improve traffic, reputation and visibilty of work created. I would really like you to read it and tell me what you think One Egg One Hundred Baskets: Social Media Leverage [...]
tim Says:

May 30th, 2008 at 7:22 pm

awesome article allison
makes me feel very lazy!
must try some of that a bit more proactively
Chris Gbekorbu Says:

May 31st, 2008 at 6:58 am

Since I just woke up and not yet witty, I’ll be like everyone else and say great post. Doing all of the steps you suggest (and then further leveraging FriendFeed) may be a lot of work and take a lot of time, but if promoting something (especially yourself) was easy, everyone would be doing it and we’d all be successful overnight. But with so many voices vying for our limited attention and so many different outlets for a potential audience to hear us, if we ever hope to be heard, we need to put in a lot of hard work at the beginning. It’s like gardening (not that I’m a gardener)–a lot of hard work at the beginning to get those seeds to grow and you don’t see the fruits (or vegetables) of your labour until much later.
Allison Reynolds Says:

June 1st, 2008 at 9:35 pm

Thanks Chris I am really glad you got something out of this. I like to be practical and outlay an easy to follow process (even if just for myself) and true this does look like a lot of work, but in reality there are only a few more steps than what most people are doing anyway
Allison Reynolds’s last blog post..Twitter Updates for 2008-05-31
HDtv film Thailand » Archive » My del.icio.us bookmarks for May 27th through June 2nd Says:

June 2nd, 2008 at 8:36 pm

[...] One Egg, One Hundred Baskets: Social Media Leverage - Social Leveraging squeeze goodness out of the tools that are free strategy acts as platform wrangler drags big names of social media, networking and aggregation together. create one page/blog post that hits on social aggregator ften different directions. [...]
wholetech blog | My del.icio.us bookmarks for May 27th through June 2nd Says:

June 2nd, 2008 at 9:03 pm

[...] One Egg, One Hundred Baskets: Social Media Leverage - Social Leveraging squeeze goodness out of the tools that are free strategy acts as platform wrangler drags big names of social media, networking and aggregation together. create one page/blog post that hits on social aggregator ften different directions. [...]
Kaye Dennan Says:

June 3rd, 2008 at 2:58 am

Alison
A great article on ‘One Egg,One Hundred Baskets’. I did wonder what eggs you were talking about?? Diagram is great and you certainly see the results from all the work. May look hard but so much easier this way than the other ‘One Hundred Eggs, One Basket’!
Sour Grapes? | The Four Hour Work Week Project - Allison Reynolds Says:

June 5th, 2008 at 11:02 pm

[...] have an entry in the Marketing Pilgrim’s SEO Scholarshipcompetition. There are 30 other articles in that competition, and I have been slowly reading through [...]
Asbjorn Says:

June 6th, 2008 at 2:04 am

Great article, and super diagram.

I love when work gets leveraged and you have really made the process clear

Cheers
Asbjorn

Asbjorn’s last blog post..First Thirtyday Challenge Pre-Season show
Allison Reynolds Says:

June 6th, 2008 at 3:45 am

Thanks Kaye and Asbjorn, really appreciate your words.

I am about to “eat my own cooking” as they say and go through step by step the process for a movie on my blog.

Look out on FriendFeed for the result
Allison Reynolds’s last blog post..Twitter Updates for 2008-05-31
Sunday Seven (or Friday Five, two days late): by the numbers | higher ed marketing Says:

June 8th, 2008 at 9:35 am

[...] One egg, 100 baskets: social media leverage. Andy Beal turns the “all your eggs in one basket” axiom on its ear. [...]
Sh*t! I Nearly Forgot! | The Four Hour Work Week Project - Allison Reynolds Says:

June 26th, 2008 at 4:25 am

[...] is the skinny one what has been happening… I wrote an article with an example of how to use Social Media Leverage and entered it into the competition and then promptly got caught up in some other stuff like losing [...]
Mark Says:

June 26th, 2008 at 1:58 pm

Very well done, Allison.

I liked the graphic “cheat sheet” the clearly sums up the process and what is gained through the effort.

Kudos!
Allison Reynolds Says:

June 28th, 2008 at 3:35 am

Thanks Mark, much appreciated.

I lean much quicker when I can see where the tasks are linked together.

Did some testing with Google search ranking and found that a FriendFeed link that is commented is highly regarded in search results…must be that PR of 6 with follow links…shhh don’t tell anyone
SteveH2008 Says:

October 20th, 2008 at 3:56 pm

Just found your article via the real-time friendfeed. It’s still just as timely and value-packed as when you wrote it - a great synopsis of the process and ways to leverage search engine marketing efforts. Love the diagram too…

Ciao for now - Steve

SteveH2008’s last blog post..Why No Money?
Ever want to know how the whole Social Media Circle works? : Lyons International Says:

October 20th, 2008 at 4:05 pm

[...] came across a great post to day over at marketingpilgrim.com It’s a step by step guide on how to leverage social media for traffic. I especially like [...]

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