I’ve been using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to get vast quantities of work done quickly and cheaply over the past several months.  The tool has evolved from it’s earlier days, and many people I’ve spoken with have outdated ideas about what the tool can help you achieve.  It’s not the easiest tool in the world to use (like Fiverr.com), but if you know how to start out the right way, your chances of success are greatly improved. Here are my tips on how to use mTurk for the first time to easily get quality results.

Set Reasonable Expectations for Yourself on the First Pass

Expect that your first mTurk HIT request probably won’t be completed perfectly the first time. You really have to test your ability to write clear, concise directions; see what you get back and then refine.  Don’t spend too much $ on the first test, because you may have to do it a couple times.

Avoid combining too many tasks in a single HIT request.

For example, if your job requires someone to go to Google, search for a keyword, and then enter data into a spreadsheet AND then cross-reference that data against another resource, that combination of multiple tasks might be enough to slow down the mTurk worker (aka “turk”), confuse them, or just generally lead to lower quality.

Specifically, here’s what you should do:

1. BREAK OUT jobs into specific tasks and SEPARATE the tasks as unique HITs.
2. CREATE numbered bullets for each micro-task within each HIT.
3. USE all-caps on the action words.
4. PROVIDE examples of each step successfully executed.

This is the basic approach I’ve used for hundreds of successful mTurk HITs, and the benefits are:

• More accurate / better quality work
• Faster results
• Happier Turks that are eager to work with you again (and at lower rates)

Eric W. Kratzer, founder and CEO of Open Run Studios, an internet agency specializing in Online Marketing, Branding, Strategy and Production for the Performing Arts, approached me to help his team accelerate their new business prospecting process and reduce their marketing research costs. After implementing my suggestions regarding their initial mTurk HIT, Eric said:

Ian…I took your advice and broke our original [HIT] into two steps. I ran the first HIT last night and it was ready for me by this morning. It looks like it came out perfectly on the first go! The average wage was $1.21/hour on our first project and $.52/hour on our second.. Thank you so much for inspiring us with your own mTurk experience and advice!

What Tips Would You Suggest on How to Set-Up Effective mTurk HITs?

Last week, a few days before the 2010 midterm elections, I was contacted by Columbia University Television regarding a story they were filming on the topic of how social media is transforming political campaigns.

The producers for the story reached out to me via Facebook after viewing my presentation “Andrew Cuomo vs. Carl Paladino: A Search and Social Media Analysis” on Slideshare.
Unfortunately, I was travelling out of town on business last week and was unable to meet them in New York to film the interview. So they interviewed Michael Bassik, Senior Vice President of Global Strategies Group instead.
Here is the final video story:

Here’s my presentation that led to the news team contacting me:

And here is Global Strategies Group’s Case Study:

Earlier this week, Twitter announced the launch of Twitter Promoted Accounts, which is a new advertising feature being rolled out to a handful of companies this week.  In the announcement, Twitter used Xbox as an example. 

Well, here’s our first example of another Twitter Promoted Account from @ExpressLisaG

One of the first Twitter Promoted Account Examples - Retail Apparel - Express

So what’s the impact of Express using Twitter Promoted Accounts?  Well, the first way to measure the success is in the number of followers (yes, it’s a measure of success):

Express Twitter Followers Spike After Launch of Promoted Accounts

Her average number of daily new followers has increased 7x as we can see here:

7x increase in average daily new twitter followers, since launching Promoted Accounts

But I think @ExpressLisaG ‘s Promoted Twitter Account is more interesting than simply the increasing follower count.  I think it demonstrates a few Twitter best practices that most stbrands and many people still struggle to follow:

• Transparency – she clearly states in her Twitter profile that she works for Express (she’s the CMO)
• Personality - her twitter name, profile and tweets all work together to give us a glimpse into her personality
• Authentic Engagement- Lisa is interacting with her followers in lots of great ways.  She’s not only answering customer questions, thanking people for mentioning Express and her social media efforts, but she’s even reading her followers’ blogs and then connecting back with them on Twitter!  That is something I almost never see brands do on Twitter. Lisa – what’s your preferred social media listening tool? Got any great tips!?
• Mix of Promotions – Lisa is mixing in promotional tweets to contests, sales, new products, which I think makes for a great balance overall. People want promotions with personality!
• Advanced Tracking – not only is she using bit.ly to track clicks (which reveals at least one initial anecdotal insight – see below); she appears to be integrating Express’s Omniture Site Catalyst Web Analytics package into her tweets as well as we can see in the &CID parameter in the long URL below:

Example Long URL of shortened URL within tweet: http://www.express.com/london-sweater-27904-20.pro?Mft=london+sweater&Mpper=3&Mpos=1&Mpg=SEARCH%2BNAV&Mrsaa=*&Mrsavf=SIZE_NAME&Mrsavf=category&Mrsavf=Color&CID=937

Example Shortened bit.ly URL: bit.ly/b8d5eO

Bit.ly Tracking Reveals a Recent Express Tweet Received almost 200 clicks

That’s a lot of clicks!  Now, granted she’s got over 22,000 followers, but 181 clicks being driven to a highly-relevant landing page is pretty fantastic.

A similar recent tweet for Men’s Peacoats received only 22 clicks, so I wonder if Express could use this type of data to inform SEO landing page testing going forward?

Anyway, I found @ExpressLisaG ‘s twitter account via Twitter’s Promoted Accounts, and I have to say, I’m pleased. Impressed actually!  Nice job to Express and Lisa’s team overall!

If you found this post relevant, valuable, or simply interesting, please bookmark this page, subscribe or simply retweet. Thanks!

With SMX East wrapping up, I thought I’d provide a couple of good resources in terms of conference recap coverage:

Twitter, SEO and Search:

SEO Roundtable has been doing a great job with live blogging the various sessions. Here’s the session on Twitter, SEO and Search:  (wait for the live-blogging app to load, and you’ll get lots of great commentary, charts and images from the session).

Facebook SEO:

SearchMarketingSage has a nice review of the Facebook SEO session, including a review of the Facebook SERP, a list of factors that influence how pages are ranked within Facebook Search, and how to optimize status updates to rank for a variety of Facebook search types.

If you weren’t able to attend SMX East, and you’re in the New York area tomorrow, there’s another opportunity to get up-to-speed on the latest search and social strategies, again right here in New York:

The SEMPO NY Working Group is hosting “Search meets Social – Advertising”, a discussion with Facebook, LinkedIn, and MTV on how search marketers can exceed their customer acquisition goals via social network ad campaigns.

Speakers Include:
• Don Steele, VP, Digital Marketing at MTV
• Brett Wein, Sales Director at Facebook
• Dale Durrett, Director, Eastern Region Marketing Solutions at LinkedIn

The event starts at 7:30 on Thursday October 7th at:

Yahoo! – Times Square Conference Room
111 W 40th St, between 6th and 7th
12th Floor
New York, NY 10036

I’m hoping to make the event, so if you’re there too, be sure to say hi!

And for a review and initial results of a recent Twitter Promoted Trends and Tweets campaign, check out this post about Chevrolet’s Twitter and YouTube real-time marketing campaign from the Paris Auto Show last week.

(Pic above from SMX East)

Social Search – Recommended Reading (either before or after watching the Social Network):

Have you been wondering about Facebook Search, Facebook Likes, and how to leverage them for your business?  Maybe you’ve heard of Twitter Annotations, Social Objects, or Semantic Search even?  Well, it all ties back to Social Search and it’s getting bigger and bigger  (even if Facebook Credits has a way to go).

So check this out: Gigya just released a new whitepaper that blew my socks off today.

Note: I am NOT affiliated with Gigya (although I have had discussions with them for various clients in the past), but I HIGHLY recommend this paper to any readers of this site:
The Gigya whitepaper covers:

• Where social and search intersect
• The Open Graph and social network search
• What you need to know about the Facebook Like and Twitter Annotations
• Action items for websites today

I really can’t do the whitepaper justice by just mentioning highlights, so I recommend you download the whitepaper here:  http://bit.ly/cBaaIC

If you like what see, feel free to Like this page on Facebook.  There’s even a handy box to the right…just click Like, and then let me know if you’d like a free SearchandSocialmedia.com T-shirt.  If there’s enough interest, I bet I could convince NYC Pop Artist  M.Dreeland to design something cool for us.

AdGooroo's Top 20 Fastest Growing PPC Categories - August vs. July

Does the fact that the fastest growing categories include home improvement, motorcycles and travel indicate that an economic recovery is afoot? 

And for a humorous take on how to potentially use the data above, be sure to check out the comments section of the AdGooroo page where the above chart was originally posted.

Since launching Promoted Tweets in April, Twitter has kept the program in a fairly tight state of beta.  Finding information on the results of these campaigns has been difficult, so if you have research that points to results, please share.  In the meantime, here are 5 examples of various strategies that companies are using to leverage Twitter Promoted Tweets:   

Financial Services – Twitter Promoted Tweets Example – Zecco 

Zecco uses Promoted Tweets as an awareness-builder and a tool to engage the target audience when they search on Twitter for both branded and unbranded keywords (e.g. branded: zecco, unbranded: $vix).   

Financial Services Promoted Tweet Example

 The strategy for Zecco is to come to the trader — rather than drive the trader to the Web site. According to Zecco CEO Mark Ranieri: 

For Zecco, Promoted Tweets is more of an awareness-building marketing channel than a customer acquisition one. It’s an interesting new way for us to expose a broader population of investors to the unique value and investing insight they can get at Zecco. Currently, Zecco uses an integrated marketing strategy consisting of a mix of acquisition marketing, social media, and branding and other communication activities, with the bulk of the focus on customer acquisition via SEM.”

Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) / Retail – Twitter Promoted Tweets Example – Starbucks

Promoted Tweet Example on an Unbranded Keyword

   Consumer Packaged Good (CPG) – Twitter Promoted Tweet Example – Red Bull  Red Bull’s strategy with Twitter Promoted Tweets is to connect it’s on-site content (e.g. photo galleries of Red Bull sponsored events) to the Twitter community: 

Promoted Tweet Example - Red Bull Entertainment Industry - Twitter Promoted Tweets Example - DisneyPixarTwitter Promoted Tweet Example - Entertainment Industry - Disney Entertainment Industry - Television - Twitter Promoted Tweets Example - Bravo Bravo uses Twitter Promoted Tweets to increase engagement among fans of its shows who either search explicitly on Twitter or people who are participating in the conversation via the use of hashtags (e.g. #realhousewives): Bravo Promoted Tweet

So far, the results of these efforts have not been widely publicized, so if you know of any case studies, please share!

• Have you seen other examples worth noting?
• How can we research Twitter Search Trends (not just mentions of keywords on Twitter)? In other words, is there a tool like Google Keyword Tool for Twitter that shows how frequently people are actually searching for specific keywords on Twitter?

The Business Development Institute hosted the Mobile Social Communications Conference on Wed. Sept, 15th in New York City. 

This was a great experience with some truly innovative speakers as well as a large group of attendees who are actually driving real business results and utilizing mobile social technologies at the forefront of the industry, including FourSquare Co-founder Naveen Selvadurai, McDonalds’ Head of Social Media Rick Wion, as well as BJ Emerson, Social Technology Officer, Tasti D-Lite, and Buzzd CEO Nihal Mehta.

Conference Recordings and Transcripts:

You can find an audio recording of the keynote speakers here. And the Twitter hashtag transcript for the conference event can be found here.

Initial Conference Hightlights:

Naveen Selvadurai, co-founder of Foursquare:

• Naveen cited AJ Bombers as a shining example of how small businesses can utilize FourSquare to drive sales, new customers and loyalty.
• AJ Bombers offer free cookies to customers who link their FourSquare account to Twitter, something similar to what I recommended in Twitter Marketing: An Hour A Day. 
• They also throw Swarm Badge Parties at their locations (and on boats for the I’m On A Boat badge), which has proven to drive a major lift in sales. 
• You can hear Naveen speak about AJ Bombers and FourSquare at the audio link below, and you can find a nice review of the Swarm Badge Party program by Stephan Antonas here.

 Rick Wion, Head of Social Media for McDonalds:

• Rick shared that McDonald’s was able to increase check-ins by 33% in one day with an easy Foursquare campaign that cost just $1,000 in gift cards.  For more info on this campaign, be sure to read the UPDATED take by Rick Wion on what exactly the 33% increase reflected.
• Anyway, Rick recommends focusing in-store social media pilot programs on:

redemption process – make it simple

measurement (the value of a check-in is worth exponentially more than an ad impression, because people are sharing that information with their network

tieing results and evaluation back to the strategy. If you’re trying to sell more oatmeal, don’t get distracted trying to tell the overall value story. Just be sure to figure out how oatmeal sales were impacted.

I also really enjoyed meeting a bunch of other really smart marketers leveraging mobile social media.  For example Brian Simpson of the Roger Smith Hotel is someone any healthcare marketer should talk to in order to really learn how social media can help improve patient outcomes.  You can watch Brian talk about his project Cookies and Chemo here. 

By the way, if you listen to the audio recording of session 2 of the conference here, you can hear me asking a question to BJ Emerson’s Social Technology Officer at about the 21:07 point in the recording. Special thanks to Carrie Lewis for live-tweeting praise for my question and including a summary of BJ’s response as well.

Overall, it was a great conference, well-run, efficient, and it attracted a lot of super-smart people. BDI did a great job.

If you have questions, shoot me a message below or on Twitter @iano1000 and use hashtag #bdi

Ian Orekondy

Let’s reflect on a few of the things we’ve learned over the past few years here at Search andSocialMedia.com:

1. Journalists, editors and book authors find expert sources by researching online.  Blogging gives you a way to communicate with them on their terms and yours. A few examples:

• DMNews discovered me through this blog, which has led to my contribution to their search and social media content both online and in print.  This opportunity came to me purely through my blogging efforts.
• MedAdNews quoted me several times after reading my blog and then reaching out via Twitter asking for 2010 pharma marketing predictions.
• This blog’s content was featured prominently in the top-selling book Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day, and the sole form of communication with the author was through this blog.

 2.       Content syndication (or distributed online content) is a winning strategy for me.

• Slideshare is a great place to syndicate content, because it has a huge audience in the tens of millions. It has the added benefit of forcing me to mix up the format of my post content.  Rather than writing a blog post on a topic, I sometimes write in PowerPoint format and post to Slideshare and then link to it from my blog.  This has resulted in significantly more exposure and engagement than I would have received on my blog alone.
  • For example, when I explored the search and social media activities and results of the two main candidates during the 2009 NYC Mayoral Race, I created my post in PowerPoint and distributed the presentation to various bloggers and outposts online, including Slideshare.

• Soon after posting the presentation, it was chosen by Slideshare’s editors to be featured on Slideshare’s homepage, which brought the presentation nice exposure.

Slideshare Editors Selected Ian's Presentation to be Featured on Slideshare Homepage

This exposure then took about 5 days to ramp up until the presentation went viral on Twitter, becoming the most-tweeted Slideshare presentation on 10/26:

Ian Orekondy's Slideshare Email

And the results show how a distributed content strategy (aka syndicated content) pays off in terms of exposure and engagement across the web. The presentation was download 70+ times and 10 websites embedded the presentation on their domain to promote it to their audiences:

3.       Running multiple blogs is not realistic for me. One core domain is enough.

• In 2009 and early 2010, I experimented with creating multiple domains to host content specific to certain niche categories.  For example, for Social PPC blog posts, I created a separate blog on Posterous with a unique domain name.  And for Pharma-specific content, I created a Pharma Search blog. I took this even further and made specific blogs for Pharma Social content, pharma mobile content and pharma search social and mobile content.   The goal was to get higher search rankings on related keywords for those posts.  Did it work, yes.  Was it a big difference, not really.  My core domain (searchandsocialmedia.com) has more authority and with optimized page titles, Google is ranking my posts highly for specific phrases.  That said, the multi-blog strategy may be the better approach, if time were not a very scarce resource.

4.       Qualitative analytics drive more actionable insights than purely quantitative analytics.

Google Analytics tells me that my top traffic sources is Google Organic Search from keywords like “search and social media” and “Sidewiki Examples”.  But it doesn’t tell me that 50% of my site visitors are seeking to learn about the Latest News, which I know this because I installed iPerceptions free 4q survey on my site a couple of years ago, and the first question I ask in this survey is What Was the Purpose of Your Visit? Another 20% are interested in learning about search and social media companies and products – which tells me I have a market opportunity here. While Google tells me about the popularity of the content I have already posted, iPerceptions 4q tells me about what I’m not currently addressing or haven’t thought of yet. (See new content ideas at bottom of this post.)

5.       My blog is not for everyone, but I’ve been effective at improving overall user satisfaction over time.

While my blog is improving in terms of user satisfaction, I’ve still got a lot of visitors who were not able to complete their desired task when they came to my site.

• This is a challenge, because my purpose for writing this blog (explore issues in more depth than others to provide valuable perspective) differs from my search traffic visitors purpose for visiting (latest news).
• I’ve experimented in the past with catering more to user’s stated interests, with positive results.

 for SearchandSocialMedia.com:

Analytics Pays Off.

Sure, I’m improving in terms of user satisfaction, but I’m not a news aggregator and I don’t want to be one, so I’m still working on finding the right mix of topics that allow me to dig deeply into an issue with my audience’s expectations for the latest news.  I’m thinking that I could incorporate a widget that displays the latest search and social news to address this audience desire, and improve overall user satisfaction.  Another idea may be to simply do a weekly round-up of search and social media headlines that are useful.  Maybe a weekly summary of links that I posted to Twitter.

6.       Generating content is tremendously challenging, especially when you focus on in-depth analysis vs. latest news.

• I often have ideas for posts, but my approach has been that I would rather not post something if the thoughts are not somewhat complete.  I usually want to delve deeper into an issue than other blogs, so I’m raising the bar for myself.  This has resulted in far fewer posts than I’d like to see on my site.
• I’ve varied the length of my posts, and will probably continue to do so.  A goal I have is to post more frequently, so this may mean some shorter posts, but I have to figure out how to do that in ways that add value to the discussion, rather than just recap news.
• I look at Seth Godin’s blog, where he posts very brief thoughts multiple times a day. He treats his blog almost like a Twitter account that is not limited to 140 characters.  Then I see ViperChill’s blog where he posts far less frequently (every couple of weeks), but with far longer, in-depth exploratory posts.  Both approaches have been successful.  Even after 5 years of blogging, I haven’t figured out the right approach for me.  But I think I prefer longer posts to shorter.

7.       Things I Could Do Better

• Develop/Clarify my blogging goals. To be frank, I’m not totally clear on what my goal is as a blogger. I think a lot of the attraction has been that I want to share what I know.  Maybe more of my focus has been using this blog as a test-bed, and lab for trying out new ideas, techniques and strategies.  If you find it valuable, great.  If not, fine. Another goal of mine is to develop a writing voice that is more compelling and more personal than how I write during the course of my normal day-to-day business operations.  So…
• Bring my unique experiences and perspectives from the real-world into the blog
  • Pull from various client experiences
  • Share what I’m learning about building a search engine business plan and monetization model.
  • Let the East Village add some color and spice to the blog.
  • Create a posting schedule – and stick to it.
  • Promote others’ great work, for example: Monte Isom’s self-promotion campaign and iPhone App

What else could I be doing better?  Here are two ideas based on the iPerceptions 4q survey analytics data…what do you think?

Please help me improve on these ideas to make this blog better:

Weekly Search and Social Media News Roundup

• Ian’s Quicktake on the Top Headlines in Search and Social Media space each week

What About an Agency Recommendation Engine?

• A lot of people contact me looking for help in finding trusted search marketing experts and social media practicioners. 
• Why not create a database and let people access parts of it on this site?

Leave a comment on these ideas below AND find me on Twitter @iano1000

Ian Orekondy