Disclaimer: The following post is very long. If you do not like long blog posts then click here to read the one-line summary.

A big complaint I hear in the SEOmoz Q&A forums, and in the industry in general, is from SEOs that have clients that sell boring things that they believe cannot be adapted for Social SEO Campaigns. Those poor SEOs that are tasked with promoting key words like "buy door hinges online", "junk removal smallville" and "personal injury claims".

Well Boo Hoo! Get your head out the sand and get creative!

As an agency-side SEO analyst, I have found that the more boring the industry the more interesting the social campaigns can be. The following blog post describes the actions I have previously implemented to effectively promote a client in the personal injury claims space.

If you are not familiar with the industry the following statements may shine some light on what I was dealing with.

Hellishly Spammy: some of the links I seen would make a black hat pharma SEO wince.

Terrible Reputation: due to some unscrupulous firms, the industry was branded as "ambulance chasers".

Un-sharable Content: can you imagine sharing a link on Facebook for a Fatal Accident enquiry or Road Traffic Accident, then reading below Joe Bloggs "Likes" this.

So, how did I combat these issues?

Step 1: Produce Great Content

The title of Step 1 is slightly misleading; it really should say "Create Epic Content". I hate to say it, as it is rammed down our throats on every industry blog, but it is true. Nobody wants to hear a shitty marketing message; they want a real solid resource created by a real human.

When we were creating the content we wanted it to be as sharable, scalable and linkbaitable as possible. Therefore we decided to create an "ask the expert" daily video, where users could ask there question via an email or blog comment and we would get a solicitor to stand in front of a camera and answer the question. We used a Facebook comments plug-in for our blog to stop any spam and also to connect the questions with real people.

Side Note: having real people visible asking questions on your site via Facebook is a massive trust metric and can make very positive impacts on your conversion rate. Try putting a Facebook Like box somewhere on a sales page and watch conversions skyrocket!

Analyse the Response

Offering this service allowed us to really tap into the long tail keywords in this industry as we started to see patterns in the questions people were asking on our own site.

This meant that we able to answer peoples' questions directly and also able to create headlines for blog posts that were directly related to the searchers intent. Double Win!

As we started to look at the broad set of questions that were coming in and comparing them to the demographic data (thank you Facebook), we started to see trends appearing in the types of questions and the ages of the users. We were actually getting around 50% from students asking legal questions and 50% from potential clients asking about injury claims.

Create Context and Reach Out to Users

At the point when the claims company was starting to rant and rave about students taking the piss out of the service and not using it for its intended purpose I transformed the perceived pain into a business asset.

I knew the student users would never be customers, but I believed that they could be a vehicle for gaining:

• Lots of backlinks
• Lots of free content
• Lots of social shares of said content

Therefore, we created a competition where the students would win a fully paid summer job at the personal injury firm, based solely on the merits of their social network power.

In order to enter the contest you had to complete tasks at different stages, and then get your peer group to vote on your particular contribution via retweets and Facebook Shares in a similar style to the X Factor or American Idol. In order to give you an idea about the amount of work involved in this competition I will outline the processes.

Stage 1

Students were asked to write a blog post on topics picked by the firm* (free content for the win!). The blog posts would then be vetted and the top 20 would be put up on the main corporate blog. The students then had to get their friends to vote on their post by getting retweets and Facebook Shares on the post. (free online promotion for the win!)

*Actually picked by me after analysing the keywords we really wanted to rank for. Moo HaHa!

Stage 1.5

As this was happening we were busy creating relationships with industry bloggers, making up press releases and contacting the Universities to tell them that this was going on and offered them a press pack to help write about it. We got a bit crafty and put a keyword in the competition title and made sure that HTML versions of our promotion packs were available as well as plain text.

HOT TIP: Whenever you deal with Universities DO NOT email them. Pick up the phone and arrange meetings. Make the effort to go see them and they will happily accommodate you when you need links, etc.

Stage 2

The top five blog posts were then put into a final that involved creating a video of why they should win the competition. The finalist then had to get their friends to vote on them for a final time via their social networks.

Stage 2.5

As the videos were being voted on we went for round two with the bloggers and online newspapers. As we already created the relationship with the Universities, a simple phone call was all that was needed to get them to add new information to their websites. This time the concentration was on getting the Universities to promote their students by getting the wider student body involved in voting by getting faculty members to blog about it and putting it through their main PR centres, all creating lots of juicy links.

Stage 3

Announce the winner in the most dramatic possible fashion.

In retrospect, we really should have announced the winner and then had a winner's party or a ceremony to make a bigger deal out of the event. This would of allowed us to thank all of the people who blogged and tweeted about the competition and also would have solidified any relationships the firm had created during the course of the competition. It would have also given us some more clout with larger news centres and would have allowed for us to invite some news camera crews along thus, helping the companies offline reputation.

Step 2: Produce Great Content

Client: Ok let's face it. Nobody cares that I am selling door hinges at rock bottom prices. Or that I have invented a new way to recycle junk. Or that I have just started a partnership with a trade union.

Me: Correction. You customers don't care about that stuff. But people in your industry do. So why not use them to promote your content and get those retweets, shares and plus ones?

Client: Why would some other guy retweet/share/+1 my content?

Me: Because, not only are we going to create amazing content, we are going to become a news hub for the industry and allow other people to contribute to the site. We are going to share other peoples content in our social stream and we are going to talk to other content creators about what they are doing in the industry

Client: How long? How much? Why? What's the point? How will this make me more money?

Me: "Falcon Punch to the Head"

How It Was Done

Create a blog on your website on the premise that you are going to become an industry hub for information.

When we created the blog we got as much of the company involved as possible and asked for the strongest writers to be regular contributors so we would have a new piece of quality content going out every day. After the blog was created we started submitting it to a couple of aggregators (Technorati, etc.) and list websites. Also using Google’s advanced operators I searched for "top 10", "best of the year", "top 100" style lists for legal blogs and resources.

After pulling off this raw list of URLs from Google, I imported them into excel and stripped out any duplicates. I then used the SEOMoz API to pull in the MozRank and the number of backlinks to each domain. Using this data I sorted the list to push the domains with the highest MozRank and unique backlink count to the top.

I then went to the websites to find out the twitter handles for the top websites.

I then started contacting all of the website owners to let them know about the new blog and asked if they would like to contribute or if they would like to add us to their list.

Building Your Twitter Following to get More Retweets

This subject is a blog post in of itself; therefore I will just give a quick overview on what we did.

Using Follower Wonk I searched for twitter users that were also in the industry. I then exported them all to CSV then uploaded the CSV of names to Export.ly. Export.ly then pulled off all the people that were following the original list along with some critical information like their website address, followers and friend count.

I then dumped all this data into excel and stripped out duplicates. Using the SEO Moz API again, I pulled off the backlink and MozRank information. I then sorted the list according to highest SEO authority. This produced a list of high authority websites in the industry along with their twitter handles.

I then went to the top 100 sites, subscribed to them in Google Reader and Followed them on Twitter.

DON'T BE A DUMBASS LIKE ME

At the time I went to the websites and subscribed to their blogs on Google reader and followed the twitter accounts manually. But if I were to do it again I would use a tool like Tweepi, to automatically follow a list of twitter users. Also, I would of used a RSS feed discovery tool to bulk find the RSS feeds of the target sites then import into Google reader...if anyone knows of one please mention it in the comments below. ;-)

As I have now established a media base for the industry, I get the client involved.

I give them access to the Google Reader account and I set them up with a Twitter client that can schedule tweets. At the time I was using Hootsuite as it also has analytics and some agency side functionality that lets multiple users work on the same account and send messages to each other. Very cool stuff!

HOT TIP: At present, I am trialling a new Twitter App called Buffer. It schedules your tweets for you and dynamically changes the time according to how many people retweet you. It basically automates your tweets to give you the furthest reach. Excellent stuff!

I then tell them to open up the Google Reader every day to scan the top blogs for four posts that interest them. I then get them to note the Twitter handle and the URL of their favourite blog posts and get them to schedule four posts to go out at varying times of the day, making sure they copy in the author on twitter.

This builds relationships with the authorities in the industry but also provides your twitter followers with the best information about your industry from a diverse range of sources.

As our posts got retweeted, we also got mentioned in some #followfridays and a couple of Daily Twitter papers. Gradually our follower count started to increase. Now when the firm puts out new content on their blog they have an interested readership that want to share and link to their posts, this providing great SEO value and moreover creating a great business asset.

The next step for this firm was to start a link outreach program by contacting all the twitter followers that we wanted to get links from.

Step 3: Produce Great Content

Every man and his dog and on Facebook but most of the companies on Facebook don't have a clue why they are on Facebook. The other day I had a company registered to a personal profile try to add me as a friend. Yuck!

Facebook is a tough nut to crack but there are some simple things you can do to make it work for your boring ass company.

The following is what I implemented for the personal injury firm.

1. Set Up a Facebook iFrame

This is effectively a mini website present within Facebook itself. This allows for you to have a part of your site with all the same functionality available to Facebook users without having them click off somewhere else.

2. After the Facebook iFrame was setup we started some targeted Facebook Ads to drive traffic to the Facebook site.

HOT TIP: When creating the Facebook iFrame, remember to design it for a width of 520px, no one likes horizontal scrolling. Also, if you are putting any contact forms or calls to action on your Facebook site then make sure the contact form redirect the user to a unique thank you page (so we can track it in analytics) and that any call to action link is tracked (either by adding parameters to the end of the link or using a link shortener like bitly or dftba.)

3. Test Different Images, Headlines and Descriptions.

As you drive people to your Facebook page, you need to nurture and interact with those who like your page to keep your content in there news stream and also to keep users interested. Create Facebook Quizzes and Polls, share the odd joke, share the odd link. Whatever you do, DO NOT spam your own content constantly. This is the quickest way to get zero followers.

Summary

Well dear reader thank you for reading all the way through this very length post. I hope it has helped and inspired. In summary....

Just make cool stuff and tell people about it. Nobody cares that the new loan product has X% over 3 years. But they do care that the biggest bank loan ever recorded was $52 Bazillion which was used by an eccentric rich guy to make clones of Rand Fishkin which were used at SEO presentations all over the world so he could be a two places at the same time. Make it fun and it will gain shares and links. Put it in front of people and tell them about it. Email them, Tweet Them, Shout at them in the street- anything to get the voice heard. Just make sure when you are shouting it is something we all want to hear.

If you enjoyed this post please follow me on twitter @rosstav and join the conversation.