Mark Traphagen @marktraphagen

Digital Marketing Consultant/Teacher/Speaker | VP Content Strategy for AimClear | Content Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Mandolin Maven 🏳️‍🌈 he/him/his

Recent quotes:

Google Core Update January 2020 - First Data and Analysis - SISTRIX

Google remains on the same path with this core update: Domains that relate to YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) topics have been re-evaluated by the search algorithm and gain or lose visibility as a whole. Domains that have previously been affected by such updates are more likely to be affected again.
- sistrix.com

Sick of Marketing-Guru Futurists? What WON’T Change in 2020 - Aimclear® Blog

Sure, the next hot channel, automated techniques, platform evolution, super computing hacks, staffing trends, and other futurist fare can be illuminating – if not mildly entertaining.  However, year after year, what matters more to actually going about the business of being an evolutionary marketer are timeless precepts—realities that seem to rarely change.
- aimclearblog.com

5 SEO Realities SEO Professionals Struggle with Most

Google owes you nothing and likely will continue to put more paid in front of organic results (so you better get good at SEM too – it’s an opportunity to grow your practice, stop complaining).
- searchenginejournal.com

Notifications | LinkedIn

Screen time, not so bad after all? Despite fears that device usage has sparked higher rates of depression and anxiety, new research from Oxford suggests such concerns are unfounded. In fact, researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute found that moderate screen time — up to two hours a day — was associated with positive social effects. One potential reason for the mixed messages about screen time? It’s possible that those who are suffering from mental health issues may gravitate to social media, making device usage an effect or symptom of such conditions, not a cause.
- linkedin.com

Welcome BERT: Google’s latest search algorithm to better understand natural language - Search Engine Land

Can you optimize for BERT? It is unlikely. Google has told us SEOs can’t really optimize for RankBrain. But it does mean Google is getting better at understanding natural language. Just write content for users, like you always do.
- searchengineland.com

The Elements of a Good Company Apology

If an apology is warranted, companies must then answer three key questions to properly craft a response: Do we tell the truth? On whose behalf are we acting? How do our actions benefit those who trust us?
- hbr.org

McDonald's drops CMO role and creates a new SVP marketing technology role (under the CIO) - Chief Marketing Technologist

I think this does give us another significant point on the curve that martech is increasingly a core competency at leading companies. Even though this role reports to the CIO, I think we’re justified in declaring that martech is marketing (not the entirety of marketing, of course, but a major component of its operations and strategy).
- chiefmartec.com

Man Who Built The Retweet: “We Handed A Loaded Weapon To 4-Year-Olds”

[…] button also changed Twitter in a way Wetherell and his colleagues didn’t anticipate. Copying and pasting made people look at what they shared, and think about it, at least for a moment. When the retweet button debuted, that friction diminished. Impulse superseded the at-least-minimal degree of thoughtfulness once baked into sharing.
- buzzfeednews.com

Study shows how thought leadership delivers real ROI, if it’s done right | VentureBeat

The 2019 Edelman-LinkedIn Thought Leadership Impact study found that close to 70 percent of decision-makers decide if an organization can actually deliver based on their thought leadership, and 75 percent said it leads directly to signing on the dotted line.
#content-marketing #thought-leadership - venturebeat.com

The 6 Essential Stages of Influence You Must Master

Influence is also a powerful tool for moving people from passivity to partnership.
#content-marketing #digital-marketing #influencer-marketing - buzzsumo.com

Audience or authenticity? Why building an audience strains your soul | Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}

We want to be heard. And if you’re humble enough and patient enough, the audience will tell you how to reach them.
#content-marketing #audience #personal-branding - businessesgrow.com

Status as a Service (SaaS) — Remains of the Day

The reason that matching the basic proof of work hurdle of an Status as a Service incumbent fails is that it generally duplicates the status game that already exists. By definition, if the proof of work is the same, you're not really creating a new status ladder game, and so there isn't a real compelling reason to switch when the new network really has no one in it.
- eugenewei.com

Status as a Service (SaaS) — Remains of the Day

[…]some networks reward those who gain a lot of followers early on with so much added exposure that they continue to gain more followers than other users, regardless of whether they've earned it through the quality of their posts. One hypothesis on why social networks tend to lose heat at scale is that this type of old money can't be cleared out, and new money loses the incentive to play the game.
- eugenewei.com

Status as a Service (SaaS) — Remains of the Day

a new Status as a Service business must devise some proof of work that depends on some actual skill to differentiate among users. If it does, then it creates, like an ICO, some new form of social capital currency of value to those users.
- eugenewei.com

Status as a Service (SaaS) — Remains of the Day

As with cryptocurrency, if it were so easy, it wouldn't be worth anything. Value is tied to scarcity, and scarcity on social networks derives from proof of work. Status isn't worth much if there's no skill and effort required to mine it. It's not that a social network that makes it easy for lots of users to perform well can't be a useful one, but competition for relative status still motivates humans.
- eugenewei.com

Status as a Service (SaaS) — Remains of the Day

As with cryptocurrency, if it were so easy, it wouldn't be worth anything. Value is tied to scarcity, and scarcity on social networks derives from proof of work. Status isn't worth much if there's no skill and effort required to mine it. It's not that a social network that makes it easy for lots of users to perform well can't be a useful one, but competition for relative status still motivates humans.
- eugenewei.com

Status as a Service (SaaS) — Remains of the Day

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of little fortune, must be in want of more social capital." So wrote Jane Austen, or she would have, I think, if she were chronicling our current age
- eugenewei.com

My Perfectly Healthy Obsession With Query Syntax

Knowing that a term is informational only gets you so far. If you miss that the content desired by that query demands a list you could be creating long-form content that won’t satisfy intent and, therefore, is unlikely to rank well. Query syntax describes intent that drives content composition and format.
- blindfiveyearold.com

10 Social Media Trends That Will Matter Most in 2019

“While I continue to use social as a promotional channel, particularly for our content, I am finding the highest return on time spent in using social to be social with non-competitive influencers, business owners, thought leaders, etc.” he said. “This has led to many opportunities for joint projects, client referrals, shared content ventures, sharing of data for studies, and more.”
- searchenginejournal.com

All the good words are taken | Seth's Blog

The hard part is showing up in the right way, in the right places, for enough time that people decide to seek you or your word out in the first place. The hard part is in doing the deliberate, slow work of earning permission, building a tiny circle, the smallest viable audience. Over time, the tribe embraces you, the word (your word) becomes the shortcut to get more of what you offer.
#content-marketing #seo #digital-marketing #branding - seths.blog

Does Content Marketing Actually Work? The Data Says Yes.

When comparing overall growth rates between companies deploying a content strategy with those who aren’t, the content companies are seeing roughly 30% higher growth rates than folks not using content marketing.
#content-marketing #digital-marketing - profitwell.com

Why Are Instagram and YouTube Telling Us to Get Offline? | Rewire

“They’re just trying a different approach than Facebook to reach the same goal,” Traphagen said. “Rather than radically altering their user feeds, they are allowing users to get a better picture of their own usage, which they probably believe will lead to better self-regulation of the time those users spend on social media, resulting in happier, more engaged, users when they are present.”
- rewire.org

How well do you understand Google? - The Content Myth - SISTRIX

the content is focused on the search intention, the content is timeless, the content is regularly being updated, it has a good UX, allows the user go deeper with internal links and it satisfies the user.
- sistrix.com

New Google Core Search Algo Update: What We Know

In March, Google stated specifically that there was nothing wrong with pages that were not ranking as well, they were simply rewarding pages that were under performing previously. So there is no quick fix of things that site owners could change about their pages that lost rankings.
#google #search-engine-optimization - thesempost.com

Facebook Algorithms Means Quality Content Wins | BuzzSumo

Social networks such as Facebook are places for engagement and discussion, and are likely to be less useful in future as a source of traffic referrals. Google has established itself as the dominant source for traffic referrals and paying attention to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has never been more important.
#social-media #facebook - buzzsumo.com

Twitter Ramps Up Fight Against Abuse and Malicious Bots - Bloomberg

For the first time, Twitter is going to require confirmation of an email address or phone number to sign up for an account. The company, which promotes itself as a place for public conversation over news and events, has long been criticized for making it too easy for malicious actors to create multiple spam accounts. Twitter said it would work with experts to make sure the changes don’t harm users in high-risk environments where anonymity is important.
#social-media #twitter #spam - bloomberg.com