Search and Social : The Definitive Guide to Real-Time Content Marketing

Leverage and implement search and social media together in real-time to win the hearts and wallets of customers

Search and Social is a detailed, hands-on guide to building a successful real-time content marketing platform. Real-time content marketing is the emerging practice of using both search marketing and social publishing tactics to help your audience find you and you them in order to attract and engage customers to ultimately increase revenue. It requires both traditional SEO publishing and social engagement principles, and most importantly, it requires the marketer to be active and present in a synaptic digital world that keeps going 24/7. This book shows you how to develop, implement, monitor, and optimize strategies and tactics for developing a strategic plan that encompasses content, platform, and community management, emphasizing the interdependent elements of search and social together. Including all up-to-date tools and technologies, this practical guide explains how to use the right tools for everything from creating search and social content to effectively using social media platforms.

This book is a must-read for SEOs, social media marketers, content marketers, Internet marketing practitioners, marketing executives, and CMOs. SEO and social media can no longer operate in silos, as each discipline is now reliant on its counterpart to achieve its greatest potential. The bottom line is that social marketers must understand search marketing and SEO to extend the value of their efforts, and search marketers must understand the elements of social to succeed in becoming more visible. “Search and Social” cuts to the chase and shows you the exact areas where search and social overlap, and how this synergy creates the imperative for marketers to shift to a real-time and participatory approach with their publishing efforts. Real-time marketing and publishing leverages social and search strategies and technologies, but also emphasizes the element of being present in your marketing efforts, in a digital world where your customers never sleep.

The book includes details on the combined "search and social" elements of blogs, video, images, forums, keyword research, market research, press releases, social copy writing, content strategy, social media platforms, schema.org, among many others. Some of the new topics that will be discussed and introduced include the share graph, 2nd-tier search visibility, recency as the new relevancy, social relevancy, the living natural language of search and social users, establishing authority and trust with people and search engines, connectedness, acting authentically in the spirit of the target audience, and participatory publishing techniques. The book also provides the follow ways to think and execute on search and social strategies in real-time:

• Outlines how combined search and social technologies have changed the digital publishing landscape forever
• Outlines a process for preparation to act "in-the-moment" with your digital content marketing efforts
• Shows how to optimize social profiles and spaces for extended search engine visibility, and extended visibility in networks
• Provides a new framework for understanding how search engines are becoming more social, and how social networks are becoming more algorithmic
• Illustrates how to use the social graph to build your link graph for search engines, using likes, +1s, Retweets, and more.
• Offers an up-to-date guide for developing, implementing, monitoring, and measuring real-time content marketing efforts
• Provides insight into using social keyword research techniques to better communicate with and find your audience in networks
• Illustrates how networks use traditional search concepts to extend and trigger content, and how to take advantage of these systems in a relevant way
• Features many illustrative, real-world case studies

Rob Garner is VP of Strategy at iCrossing, a Hearst Company, and is a widely recognized expert on the topic of interdependent search and social strategies and real-time content marketing. A MediaPost columnist since July 2006, Rob has been quoted in many major business and industry publications, including Reuters, Mashable, Dow Jones, Forrester Research, eMarketer, Adweek, and Ad Age. He is an active educator and speaker, and has spoken at SMX, SES, SXSW, Content Marketing World, and ad:tech, among many others.