Many of us have heard that Microsoft is dumping Jerry Seinfeld from their recent ad campaign. Apparently this strategy was always set to play out and Microsoft announced it will move into “phase two” of its campaign on Thursday. Seinfeld will bow out to a menagerie of personalities like author Deepak Chopra, actress Eva Longoria and musician Pharrell Williams.

So can anyone tell me what they’re trying to achieve here? I’ve read that Microsoft is attempting to reach the average user but IMHO these ads are just way to awkward to reach anyone. I mean, they definitely made you stop and watch but it was entirely due to the unusual pairing of Gates and Seinfeld and the fact that Gates was in a commercial at all. The campaign cost Microsoft $300 million to produce and Jerry received $10 million of that. So far it’s probably the shiniest turd I’ve ever seen.

Microsoft, I know you’re having a hard time trying to reach the Apple demographic but you’re not going to win them over when you use a celebrity that was on a sitcom that ended over 10 years ago. I personally loved Seinfeld and who didn’t? But you have to get a bit more up-to-speed with the times and the personalities that reflect that. You tried advertising on Digg which seemed like a good strategy since the Digg demo is loaded with Apple fans but I guess that wasn’t enough or maybe it just didn’t work.

Here’s the thing…as a social media and search marketing expert I know you can promote a piece of content to the point of exhaustion without much traffic in return. The reason being is that if the content isn’t good, controversial, funny, entertaining, or unusual enough then you’re not going to get anywhere, no matter how much money you spend. So if your content is Vista which is a buggy resource hog, or it entails spending lots of time and money turning photo albums into big-ass interactive tables, or riding the ipod’s coattails with the uncool Zune… if the content blows, you’re not going to get anywhere no matter how much money you spend on promotion. Start making good and innovative products like you did 23 years ago and the people will follow. Photosynth for example, is badass…make more stuff like this and then integrate it into mobile applications. You might want to improve on a mobile OS however (think bigger screen) if you’re going to fight both Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android.

So save those ad dollars and put it into R&D because even though we all love Jerry, he’s not going to make us want to go out and buy Microsoft products. You’re going to end up spending a lot of time and money chasing the tails of the innovators when you should be making revolutionary products like you did…23 years ago.

Updated with your recommendations on June 17th, 2009! Updates are listed in the approved comments.

Need SEO, SEM, or Social Media help? Hire Squareoak!

Your social news site suggestions will be considered for inclusion after the quality/trust of the social news site is ascertained. This list will be updated regularly.

Happy Holidays! : )

Auto
AutoSpies – Auto News, Reviews, Car Photos, Auto Show Photos, Spy Shots

Blogs & Websites
Spicypage
Afrigator – African blog aggregator categorized per country

Business
DailyHub – Social Content for Business Geeks
KillerStartups.com – The Next Big Thing on the Internet is here. You pick it.
Small Business Brief

Christian
blogs4God – Popular Posts by Christians who blog

College
Campus Reader – America’s College Newspaper

Computers & Technology
Tweako

Culture
BARKS – Art, Music, Film

Deals
Agent B
Dealigg.com

Developers
DZone – fresh links for developers

Domaining
DNHour.com

Educational Resources
Qoolsqool

Entertainment
ShowHype

Environmental
Hugg 2.0
Plant Change
Fivelimes

Fashion
Stylehive
Chictini.com

Fishing
Angling Masters

Gadgets
Meme or Lame

General
Blipoo
Blogmemes
Digg
Hypediss
iFancyIt.com
IndianPad
linkfilter.net
Mixx
MySpace News
Newsvine
NowPublic
plime
Reddit
Shoutwire
Socialogs
Thoof

Health & Medicine
Dissect Medicine

Internet Marketing
PlugIM
Marktd
Online Advertising News

Microsoft
DotNetKicks

Music
Metalz
Musigg
Screamfeed

News
BuzzFlash

Off Beat
FARK

Parenting
Babblz

Photography
PhotographyVoter

Politics
News Heat

SEO/SEM Related
Sphinn
SEO Tagg

Shopping
iliketotallyloveit
ThisNext
eBay Wiki
Kaboodle

Social Action
Care2

Sports
ArmchairGM
Ballhype
Bikespace
FanNation
Fanspot
FitLink.com
Golf Finder
Golfer Linkup
High School Playbook
iLovetoPlay
Infield Parking
oobgolf
ScoreGuru.com
Sixer – Connecting Cricket Fans
SportsMates – The Global Sports Social Network
Sportsvite – Find people to play with
Takkle – High school sports network
UltraFan
ZexSports
ZigaZoga – Soccer

Tips & Tutorials
Daytipper
Tipstrs
TTiqq

Web Design
Pixel Groovy
DesignSiteUp – Vote on great web designs, submit yours for consideration.

Women
sk*rt

Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht host the online show Diggnation where they can be seen commenting and recapping on the week in Digg and other online happenings. From the comfort of a couch with laptops and beers in hand, Kevin and Alex go over some recently submitted content by yours truly. Squareoak submitted Geeky Weddings LMAO which to date has received 2285 Diggs. You can forward to 26:16 to hear the commentary. Thanks for the mention guys!

With all this chatter about people asking each other for Diggs, Spinns, Del.icio.us saves, Reddit votes and…Propellers, wouldn’t it be nice to have a social news site that was unsusceptible to gaming? With that said let’s take a look at Digg and combine its current model with new anti-gaming ideas.

1. First we need to look at how Digg votes are attained:

• Inside the Digg system: via natural user interaction and by ‘shouting’ to your friends
• Outside the Digg system: via sending the story URL to potential voters via IM and/or email

For this new system to work, we would have to filter which votes were attained inside the system alone. If a user were to access the story URL from an outside referral address, the vote wouldn’t count.

2. What if someone just creates multiple user accounts with unique IP addresses?

You could deter this tactic by ignoring votes that come from users who enter in a story’s URL directly without first accessing the main site. In order for a vote to be considered, there would have to be evidence of a bread crumb trail or a referral address within the system. If the user is on www.domain.com and enters in www.domain.com/story and there’s no link on www.domain.com to www.domain.com/story, the site would ignore the vote.

3. What if someone arrives on the site, logs in, searches for the story’s title, and then votes?

Voting using this method would work, but the weight of this vote would be less than 1. More like .25.

Implementing simple voting caps like this might ensure the integrity of the content’s actual popularity. The Digg community already does a pretty bang-up job at separating the wheat from the chaff but even if the content is valuable or interesting and deserving of votes, it can still be gamed. Once a story goes popular then a mob mentality sets in. People think that since a story has received (X) votes in (X) time then it must be something that deserves their attention and probably a vote. Often, this exaggerated popularity can push even mediocre content to a more prominent position within the site.

However, preventing the exaggeration of a story’s popularity on Digg could turn off some users. Social sites that gain enormous popularity seem to have a good balance at appealing to both the average end user and those who wish to influence them. If the influencers could no longer leverage a site, traffic might drop, even while the improved gauge of actual popularity could bring more/new users to the site.

Wikipedia is a site that is extremely difficult to employ for marketing purposes and is not the medium of choice for most influencers. Nonetheless, Wikipedia was receiving 917,000 hits per day as long ago as October 2004. Wikipedia was built on user participation and our need to document knowledge. Because of this the perceived integrity and value, Wikipedia enjoys great popularity.

Overall, improving the filters that maintain voting integrity within Digg may not only prevent gaming, but could also increase traffic by boosting the site’s perceived value.

Common Forms of Linkbait
Informational
Controversial
Humor
News
Tools

Benefits of Linkbait
Links – duh!
Link profile
Traffic
Branding
Bookmarks
Media Publicity

If you are looking to spread the word about a relatively boring industry then search Digg, Reddit, etc. to find what’s worked on these sites in the past pertaining to this industry.

Throw out ideas. Get them up on the whiteboard. Brainstorm.

Once your content is published you have to submit it to the social bookmarking and news sites.
Make sure you tag the story properly. Relevance and popularity are essential in choosing categories.

Keys to Promotion
Power account
Good titles & descriptions
Proper category & tags
Targeted sites

Top 10 lists
How To’s – Be Helpful and make sure your guide is easy to read
Current Events – In my opinion the best way to get instant results. Relaying accurate info is very important.
Offbeat or Extreme – Hardest to get your clients to approve but can be very succesful
Images – Use within a post and be unique

Crafting Social Linkbait
Research is extremely important
With the current events you need to know what’s happening
With the how-to guides you need to research what’s effective and working

Title & Description
Title’s and descriptions are where we see the most errors
Needs to be simple, strong, and focused
Once you have a title you need a story to back that title up
Make sure you capitalize the first letter of each word
Avoid spelling out numbers

Interact & Share
You need to have buddies to add comments and promote your story
Make friends on the social media sites that you use
Get you friends to vote on stuff
Return the favor when they ask

Social Media Tips
Relate to the community
Use images
Limit Ads
Offer a summary
No spelling errors, jargon mistakes, or bad information
Is it duplicate?
Check what worked before
Digg effect
Be link worthy
Submit at the right time

I’m sure I’m stating the obvious a bit here but has anyone else noticed that Google’s backlink data within webmaster tools isn’t displaying any data? It lists how many links are pointing back to each page but when you click on the link list it doesn’t display anything. Additionally, whenever I attempt to do a site: or link: request within Yahoo, it churns forever and isn’t returning results. I’m not sure what’s going on in the world of backlink data but when a reporting mechanism works 99% percent of the time and then suddenly doesn’t, especially within the two major search engines, it’s a bit disconcerting.

Also worth noting is the weird Google results mentioned over at Search Engine Land and by Aaron Wall.

There are hundreds if not thousands of sites out there that will allow you post content. Some have been around longer than others and are sometimes more established which can potentially provide you with a louder voice when spreading the word. This Guide will help you get the most for your link building efforts and hopefully show you how to avoid spammy pitfalls while implementing your campaigns.

Definition
There are sites that are strictly for bookmarking, meaning that the text fields simply require the URL, Title, Description, and Tags, i.e. Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Bluedot.us, Simpy, etc. However there are other sites that fall under social news (Reddit, Digg, Shoutwire), Social clipping (ClipClip.org, Clipmarks), How to Guides, Directories, List sites, and tons of niche sites that fall under these categories. So how do we make sense of all this noise so that we can most effectively leverage them? First we have to save, then organize.

Organization & Categorization
Different folks have different ways of organizing their campaigning efforts. For me, I use FireFox and store all my useful search marketing links as such:

You can see the large amount of subcategories that I have under link building. The most used categories are the Bookmarking (General) and Social News (General) but you can see that these verticals branch out to other niche sites like Social News (Shopping) and Social News (Tech). It’s important to make sure that the content you are submitting is relevant to the site you’re submitting to. If we submit content about baby products to the tech site we’ll obviously get zero attention and probably some angry readers. Additionally, this won’t help you build a presence within these sites. Since most of these sites have a social or sharing aspect to them, you’ll want to aim towards building a trusted profile. You’ll want to be seen as someone who is contributing to the site’s intent and not just peddling your wares.

Accounts & IP Addresses
It’s best practice to open an account in every site with the same username, password, and email address. This keeps things simple and you won’t be running around trying to remember the unique password you created for dogmeetscat.com. Also remember that most of these sites record your IP address and associate it with the username and password that you’ve created. If you create three accounts with three separate gmail addresses for dogmeetscat.com, they might know that these three accounts are coming from one IP and are most likely being used to spam the system. Don’t be surprised if you’re IP address gets banned if you’re doing this.

*If you have to be a dick you could use open wi-fi networks to create accounts. This way you can have 3 accounts for dogmeetscat.com and have a unique IP address for each account.

Fields: URL, Title, Description, and Tags
When bookmarking your content, be sure to change the Title and Description of your post for each site that you post to. This prevents the bookmarking sites from ranking for the content you’re trying to get your URL to rank for. It will also look less spammy, because there’s no way that 10 different people will submit the same URL with the same description. Maybe the same title but entering the same title and description for every site you post to will obviously indicate that a single person was submitting the same content to multiple sites.

Use common sense and practice these same methods (non-duplicitous) when submitting content to social news, directories, list sites, how to guides, wikis, etc. Oftentimes you won’t be able to add anchor text with your keyword phrase to these locations. If you can, great! If not, the next best thing is to make sure that the keyword(s) that you’re trying to rank for are contained within the URL of the content to be submitted.

How to expedite the bookmarking process
There are a few services out there that can help you post quicker by basically populating the javascript bookmarklet links of the bookmarking sites with your content and then displaying the posting link for your quick posting pleasure. Here are a known few:

http://socialposter.com/
Good but it’s slightly buggy when it processes the content for submission. It sometimes adds symbols to the information or removes commas. It also directs you towards using the same Title and Description for each post. User interface is pretty bland but it does a good job at speeding up a tedious process.

Alexa: 46, 261
Compete: 97,436
Yahoo! Backlinks: 6,658

http://www.onlywire.com/
Another mass bookmarking application. This one records your account information. However these guys seem rather shady because in their TOS they claim they have the right to add their own affiliate links into a user’s bookmarks.

Alexa: 5,122
Compete: 39,477
Yahoo! Backlinks: 51,294

http://www.addthis.com/
AddThis is a widget that blog users can add to the bottom of their posts. When you click on it, you can choose from a list of 34 different bookmarking sites to post to. This is not a web app, simply a widget.

Alexa: 3,206
Compete: 2,067
Yahoo! Backlinks: 3,199,868

We here at Squareoak would love to hear more information about this topic. If you have anything to add or know of other web applications that perform similar functions, we’d love to hear it.

Happy Bookmarking!