Gary Price of ResourceShelf dropped me a line last week with some links to very cool content repositories on the web that have recently opened up or expanded. Browsing through a few of these got me thinking that the sheer amount of information available from non-profits, organizations and government entities could make for some very powerful viral material if packaged properly.
Examples might include:
- Library of Congress' Prints and Photographs Collection (Virtually any product or service could make some cool historical linkbait with this material)
- 9000 NASA Press Release Photos (the Digg & Reddit crowds go wild for photos of space)
- The Access 2 Archives Project in the UK looks like it was designed in 1994, but I'm guessing you could probably mashup Oliver Cromwell and William Wallace in an AJAX timeline with this goldmine.
- How about Footnote.com, who's partnered with the Archive.gov and offers 17 million+ documents (and they're adding 2 million more every month). The coolest part? They've got a community of historian buffs digging through and publishing their own comments and stories on the material - social media marketing for Abe Lincoln fetishists and UFO conspiracists, right?
- Want some linkbait for the SEO world? Try an analysis of this publication from Yahoo! that Gary recently linked to.
- Some cool financial linkbait would be easy to craft with the data from this book industry salary guide (maybe toss in some data from Payscale and Salary.com to help round it out).
- There's even a chart that shows how Americans spend their time from the US Department of Labor.
- Last, there's links to great viral content like Inc.'s 5,000 fastest growing private companies - definitely some opportunity for research, segmentation and a few nifty charts based on that data.
With endless possibilities like these, there's little excuse for lacking the creativity to craft something specifically relevant to your industry and viral-worthy enough to spread far and wide on the web.
More inspiration? Just visit Resourceshelf or Gary's other site - Docuticker. Every piece I linked to was provided by Gary in the last few days - the man's a literal encyclopedia of sources and thanks to his blogs, that information does bubble to the surface.
Wow everything from Chinese eyeballs to dangling nodes time to warm up the Markov generator.
Stochastic process anyone?
How long after this post is up do you think it will take before I unsuspectingly Stumbleupon or Digg, or possibly create one of the following.
Top 10 Library of Congress' Prints and Photographs
Top 10 Nasa Press Release Photos (Hint Adult Diapers)
Top 10 Abe Lincoln fetishists (Hint one of them was boys)
Top 10 UFO conspirators (Hint The CIA)
Top 10 ways Americans spend their time according to the US Department of Labor. (Hint masturbation)
Now taking bets...
That's precisely what I'm hoping you'd do, Bob :)
Rand do you think if I mention Venetian chastity belt it would help get this thread Digged?
That Yahoo article is just more evidence that people spend WAY too much time "teching out" over PageRank.
Hopefully this topic will be presented as more of a process at the training seminar. :D
I agree. This is a good list of resources. But I'd like to see more information about how you (Rand) might use these resources to make link-bait worthy content.
Ye, me too. I am looking at these sites and thinking, "well how am I going to be able to use it to my advantage?" I see they are .gov sites so that's good, but ... isn't the idea to get a link from them, not me creating content and then linking to them?
I am sorry if I sound clueless, but I really am still behind on this social marketing thing. Trying to keep up with ya guys.
Can anyone give some examples how this can be used?
Thanks.
The information and content on many government sites is free to use with no copyright.
Which doesn't mean that you should just reprint any articles or republish any pictures. That would send you off down the same dead-end street as those who republish the Open Directory data or use article directories.
But what you can do is take one set of information, combine it with another, and display it in a different manner. Use it to make something more interesting or more useful than the original sources on their own.
Walking from my computer to the front door just now I could think of three ideas, but the possibilities are endless with sources such as these:
Here is an excerpt from the Bureau of Labor website:
And Valik, this has nothing necessarily to do with social marketing. Sure, you can use ideas like this to aim at social media sites but you could also create something which would be useful for schools sites, or university users.
Wow, stever! Now this makes sense. Thanks so much for explaining it so well. This is great.
Rand. you forgot to mention that one should not scrape the material, but integrate it on your Website, comment about it, and massage it.
If one is just copy and paste it even using an API when available the pages will go supplementary quicker then you can say 1.3 billion Chinese eye balls!
I had that happened with Hotelclub data that I added via an AP{I to my travel Website. The country pages got indexed in the main Google index but the hotels under each country went supplementary, even when I added Viotor sightseeing for the hotel pages it did not bring the pages out of supplementary.
Aparently Google reads content blocks and compares them for duplicity. I guess the only way would be to get the pages out of SUP is to add user generated unique comments. For 25,000 global hotels is a hign thing to ask!!!
So, my site with PR 4 just cannot support the content structure. But tripadvisor.com with PR 8 can do it!
So, I doubt if the comments module would help unless I would hire 1,000 Indian workers to invent some comments...and I am not into this type of folly.
The end result my hotels for Asia that I have direct contracts with started being penalized seen as duplication, so I had to disallow the Hotelclub content in robots.txt to start getting Google hits again for my Asia hotel pages.
Getting syndicated data is very good, but bge prepared to do alot of work with it, and make sure you are not duplicating your original data.
Of course. You can't just add the content to your site. The point is their is useful content available that can help webmasters create their own unique content. You may not even need to use the content in any form other than to get new ideas for your own websites.
I still can't get over, "quicker then you can say 1.3 billion Chinese eye balls!"
After travelin in China from Shanghai to Laos border over the past one month, 1.3 billion Chinese eye balls may not sound as a far fetch thing at all...and when I went to some turist sites, I felt that all 1.3 billion of them were staring at me...but China is getting very powerful so some content for the Chinese market would be greatly advised...QQ a messanger program in China is being really used like hell every day...
Awesome score! Photos are huge on social media right now... they take very little effort to enjoy.. and this is a goldmine.
I'll echo the "great resources" theme! I'm really interested in taking a look at the Yahoo Research paper on PageRank. I wonder how well your shameless linkbait article will work to get links to this article! Nicely done -- I'll be interested to see how many links you all get to this one.
Added thumbs up despite general "cat-bag-farm" feelings.
Seriously, there is a LOT of free-use governmental-stroke-open-source stuff out there just looking for ways to tie it together. And I think, to be fair, there is more than enough to go around and/or there are few enough people who will be innovative with it.
This is the junction at which I agree with your whole link-bait argument, Rand, rather than the general SMO community's tired and clichéd Six Ways To Eat A Twinkie While Listening To Your Ipod blog posts.
(I posted Twinkie and then realised I didn't know exactly what it was. I think I would rather have remained in ignorance...)
Agreed these make great jumping off points for linkbait. The difficult part will be to create something that appeals to the Digg / Reddit crowd that does not alienate real customers / prospective clients at the same time. It seems like that's the fine line that good B2B or service industry linkbait always needs to walk.
Nevertheless, sources like these do get the juices going.
Yes, but.
I have never in my life submitted anything to Digg or Reddit. Yet I too see plenty of opportunity in the resources. There is a whole "traditional" internet world out there which is more profound and more expansive than the self-referential and self-pleasuring cocoon of social media.
That comment wasn't aimed at you, by the way, davidmihm, but more to the confusion of the words "website" and "blog" which seems to becoming more common on SEOmoz.
Yes, I'll admit that I probably should know more about social media (and plan to rectify that soon, Jane!). But equally there are those who appear to consider that the internet and marketing were born at the instant of the conception of Web 2.0.
Nice resources, thanks a lot. Beside it´s a excellent source, it´s also a n article which brings me of thinking in new ways. I´m just wondering if those digger communities may be get banned if they are getting so public like now on seomoz?
Business in the front party in the back.
I'm a fan