I have been following this story for a while, besides it’s comedic nature, it really shows the power of social media and bookmarking sites. Through social media, high profile bloggers and news portal links, Google now ranks, Stephen Colbert and colbertnation.com, number #1 for the Google search “greatest living american“. He has done this before by saying he wanted to be ranked #1 on Google for “giant brass balls“, which he does, but how?
This shows the power of human networks in the digital era. All of the so called “Colbert Nation” members (viewers, fans) have been banned by some services, but beyond the social networks online, your can use existing organic databases to build a social community that can rank you for anything, even “giant brass balls”. If done correctly this could really help your brand if evangelical people can start using social networks more to promote your brand and site without paying search engines and with honest consumer feedback about you and your products/services.
Whether Mr. Colbert has a giant brass ball business or he is the greatest living American or not, it’s obviously debatable and not the purpose of this post. But social media and bookmarking can have a dramatic effect on your rankings in the search engines. If you have the power and compelling stories, the right social marketing campaign and existing human networks, you can rank you for whatever terms you want, as in the case of Stephen Colbert, even if he is not the greatest living American or runs a brass ball company. The next day on the CNN Blog they announced, Stephen Colbert just dropped a Googlebomb.
You can read a letter about this from Mr. Colbert here.
See a clip of Colbert getting his made up word “truthiness” in wikipedia.
[tags]stephen colbert, greatest living american, colbert nation[/tags]
Leave a Reply