So with that in mind I’ve thought up a very rough reputation management framework that can double up as a process for getting ranked on the terms that bring in the money.

Its more than an SEO trick

The broad model here is to get

• Feedback on what a business is doing to make iterative changes to the products or services from the feedback cycle
• Manage reputation, both positive and negative
• Use the online ‘ecosystem’ to spread the good word about a product or service.
• Keep clear of trouble from regulatory authorities who can affect you

The Preparation

Agree messaging for Professional / trade / consumer

Define online hotspots of interest and commercial intent:

• What keywords should the product or service be found on
• What kind of site / blogger / thought leader should be associated with this and how can their positive comments be given prominence around
• Most relevant searched phrases
• Brand terms for the client

Create the right environmental conditions to ignite consumer demand.

• Build a ‘tribe’ of followers, who you support and in turn will evangelise on your behalf. This is where you have a two way ‘conversation’ with your community of customers.  This was famously done with the Obama online campaign or with Lady Ga Ga and her ‘little monsters’
• Manage reputation very carefully.
• Be seen as transparent, honest, serving the user/customer as best as possible on value and service standards.

The Actions

Monitor sentiment towards the brand online using online monitoring tools like Google alerts and http://www.trackur.com/

If there is prominent negative sentiment:

• Respond to it immediately and be transparent and honest
• If its something where the brand has done wrong and can’t / won’t rectify, then abondon the client! or bury it by up-ranking other content above it (the resource calibrated by the reputation damage caused)
• If there is positive sentiment towards the brand, but the content is not prominent, then use SEO to get it up-ranked for critical phrases like brand phrases and get it referenced in other big conversation hotspots

Reach out to thought leaders who can evangelise the service or product

• As with Offline, if you can make it easy for these people, they will find it easier to write about you. Give them the ingredients from which they can make up their own minds about the product or service.
• In online there is a massive long tail of writers and thought leaders. In accumulation they are very valuable. Have online press packs and all the ingredients from which they can write up their own informed views
• Give your tribe the resources to feel included and tools they need to talk about you
• Have a contributing presence wherever there is an important and prominent conversation about you or where there could be an important conversation i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Chat Groups, Linked in
• Your comment / feedback points on your site or 3rd party sites

Give prominence to the positive feedback on the product or service

• Have these reviews rank on search engines on keywords users would naturally search for when thinking of the product/service
• If possible, gather reviews and testimonials from users and re-publicise them.

Structure feedback into:

• Reviews with ‘useful? yes/no’ and ask for ratings. Ratings out of 5 stars (standard rating formula online) so you can get a positive rating for the company / service that you can disseminate to 3rd party sites
• If its a product then encourage existing customers to write about your products on 3rd party sites i.e. reviewcentre.com Amazon.com

Support/Education:

• Have a comprehensive help section online
• Online Press pack (giving evangelists the information they need to propagate the service)
• Forum with knowledgeable staff at hand to answer specific questions
• A staffer out online engaging with users who are asking questions. This person would also engage in important conversations that ‘can be found easily’

As I was saying earlier, this is only an outline, but hopefully it will give you a sense of the scope of activities that can be undertaken.

More reading on the subject:
http://www.sempo.org/learning_center/articles/ElixirSystemsOnlineRepMgmt.pdf
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/03/online-reputation-monitoring-beginners.html
http://www.radicallytransparent.com/
http://mashable.com/2010/04/25/word-of-mouth-marketing-stats/

• My 2000 calorie diet in preparation for the kayak marathon World Championships in September, where I’m racing doubles in the masters class.
• Going on a Bing Diet…

Yes, I thought it was time to give Bing a go and I found it worked! You can try the  search engine blind tase test and see for yourself! (popout)

(FYI as of July 2009 the overall results were:  Google: 41%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 28%)

The main difference between Google and everybody else is that they pad out their brand so we become too inert to move somewhere else for our search results. There is a high chance you use one or more of these  services  (wikipedia/popout) and every time you do, you probably love Google a little more for giving you some great service for free.

But if you are tired of the slow erosion of the search results with real time search, video search, news search, then maybe like me you might try a simpler easy engine like Bing.

And it seems I’m not the only one. According to Hitwise who published some interesting stats recently, it’ s all go for Bing!.

(Since this is a quick post, I’ve copied and pasted from Search Engine Roundtable:

Microsoft relaunched their search engine Bing on June 1, 2009, just over a year ago.

On June 1, 2009 Bing’s market share, according to Hitwise was 5.25%. A year later, according to Hitwise it is 9.85% share. If you do the math, that is about 88% growth year-over-year, not too far under double growth!

Here are some of the latest stats from Hitwise:

Of course, growing share from 5% to 10% is nice, but it still shadows Google’s share. In June 2009, Google had a share of 74.04%, June 2010 Google’s share is 71.65, so that is a 3% decline.

Google really doesn't listen!

A friend of mine who manages a BIG PPC account with Google told me the other day (over a beer) that when he sends an enquiry to Google about some random account management issue, if he telephones, there will be a 30% chance  they will actually pick up the phone. It takes on average 5 different conversations to resolve the problem.

So thats  about 15 ‘no contact’ calls to fix an issue.

If he emails, he gets a response between 3 and 12 days. These responses are generally generic, so he usually has to email back and query Google’s response between 2 and 4 times,  which takes another 3 to 12 days to get a reply on per query.

So thats at least 15 days for a useful answer.

BUT… if Google have an outstanding invoice with my buddy, they chase every day and often twice a day. When he responds to the Googler chasing the money, 4 out of 5 times he doesn’t get a reply from his contact. So the other month, he was put on final reminder!

Conslusion: Google have  really bad customer service. But we know that of course.  

BTW – Bing do care and believe it or not they do have attentive and helpful customer service staff, I just hope they win more market share!

Nick's Technology Charter

I’ve been working on a code of practice when it comes to marketing and technology. It’s just a personal thing that ive been thinking about for a while, so I thought it would be helpful (to me at least) to write this out.

The idea is to have a simple charter, so when suppliers offer marketing technology services, the purchaser has a core set of principals to work by.

For instance, if you want to reduce the cost of your IT marketing spend, a good way would be to :
-          never be dependent on a any supplier,
-          use open source code so you don’t get tied into expensive licensing agreements
-          reuse code to reduce the security and cost overhead.

My personal charter for technology in outgoing marketing.

Strategy
-          Low coss
-          Secure
-          Reliable
-          Flexible
-          Easy for end users to use

Supplier / vendor
-          Non dependence on any supplier
-          Never be taken advantage over, through licence cost escalation
-          Own the source code / have the right to use the code in perpetuity

Characteristics of Software
-          100% open to code level inspection i.e. open source code
-          Commonly used
-          Secure
-          Flexible
-          Understood by the business
-          Inexpensive to implement

Technical development infrastructure
-          Version controlled where possible
-          Reusable i.e. build a library of code
-          Standardised i.e. work to a set of agreed coding standards
-          Interoperable code where possible i.e. coded in a modular way, so chunks of code can be reused

Visuals
-          Working to brand guidelines
-          Fulfils usability guidelines

Process optimisation
-          Multi streaming of projects i.e. High / Med / Low : Security Risk, Complexity, Degree of Integration

Simple!

The clever part is building up a standard framework, so as the diverse parts of a company do their thing, each new piece of technology can then be potentially reused on some other part within marketing.

In practice, this means separating the content management system from the dynamic elements of a site. Making those dynamic parts modular and easily reusable on any part of the content management system so you get the benefit of accumulated libraries of code. The other thing (for most marketing) is that the content management system should not be the expensive bit. Open source CMS’s are getting better and better and cheaper to roll out.

A good place to look at open source software ‘out of the packet’ is http://www.opensourcecms.com

I was riding home tonight on my motorbike thinking of the reality that has struck home. Yes, the era of SEO’ers gaming the system wholesale might just start getting a lot tougher. And today I saw a the most visible sign yet of harder times for this species of online marketeer.

To preface what I am about to explain, its worth understanding a little about how Google think. If you have ever read complexity theory, you will know that within eco systems, there are depths of complexity we will never know about. A good example of a ‘micro eco system’ is a flock of birds flying in an apparently random way, but somehow working cohesively as a ‘mega mind’. It looks impossible, but in fact its all held together by a few simple rules:
- speed of a birds reaction
- external forces in play (wind)
- distance from the next bird
- desire to follow the bird in front
Change any of these variables and the whole character of the flock will change.

Have a look at this video and it will make sense to you:

And so with Google, they think ecosystems. They understand that great complexity is ruled by relatively simple forces.

Now you are thinking in a certain way, let me carry on…

Google have announced they are now beta testing this:

https://google.com

Whats relevant? – it’s the ‘s’, as in Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections . They justify the test by saying this:

“A few notes to remember: Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn’t reduce the data sent to Google — it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode. Our hope is that more websites and services will add support for SSL to help create a better and more consistent experience for you.

We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It’s a helpful addition to users’ online privacy and security, and we’ll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings.”

Ref their announcement / The Register comment

So off the back of
- a number privacy disasters including Facebook and Google buzz,
- The federal trade commission and its efforts to stamp out bad marketing practice on the Internet
- European legislation on ‘opt in to store cookies‘
There is a pro privacy climate.

That’s good, sort of if you’re a consumer. For marketeers of course is just more stuff to deal with when trying to accurately target customers. (I won’t go there right now)

Google now tell us that we can surf privately. We can avoid being snooped on, so its got to be good for you. In thory – yes,  in practice NO. When did you last hear about a user suing because of surfing habits being revealed?

But what this does do, is make google a ton of extra $$$$$$$$$

How?

By switching over to https surfing, off the privacy card, Google will block all referrer data and IMHO they will also block this data in Google analytics. This referrer information will no longer contain keywords users came to the site on and also what they converted on.

If you are a professional SEO’er, you are gaming Google to get your site in places where ‘the money lives’. Every time a user clicks and converts on your SEO driven result, that is money Google could have made from AdWords.

To accurately game Google, you need to know what phrases convert, so you can spend money on linkbuilding for that phrase. Of course you can run an AdWords campaign and it will give you very good keyword intelligence. Now imagine you have this data and you run your expensive SEO programme but you cant track anything from Google natural search. You are getting conversions, but where from? How can you manage spend when you have little idea on what actually converts?

Now you are driving with a fogged up windshield. You will know what your rankings are (probably) But you won’t know be able to attribute ROI to phrases.

That means

>> less resource and accuracy within SEO

>> which in turn means more intensity within AdWords auctions

>> which makes Google loads more $$$$$$$$$

And all because they use a simple lever: imposing secure search.

There are other things going on that will affect their positive revenue uplift:
- More blended search / News search / Real time search / wikipedia pages, pushing out commercial natural results
- Reduction of the long tail. Webmasters are already seeing a drop of between 5% and 15% in long tail search volume, therefore concentrating users around fewer keywords and so making it easier for advertisers to advertise on these results.
- Category wide downward revision of quality score which I have seen recently with brand phrases.
- Bigger emphasis on ranking brand sites, knowing how bad they generally are with converting uses on anything other than dedicated landing pages.
- Attacking any sector where search is a factor: Product search, travel, mortgages
My guess is that this intensifying of AdWords auctions will uplift their revenues by 15% – 20% overall within 12 months.

So what am I doing about this?

Well, I’m going to restructure my sites, so I an run unique ‘join now’ buttons per page and then use tools like SEM rush to work out what pages rank for what and then match this all up to give me a reasonable idea which pages produce the best results and rank for the biggest terms.

It’s all a hack workaround, but its better than no accurate data.

So to wrap up, Google used to say “don’t be evil“, but they have dropped this mantra in favour of “You can make money without doing evil.”

They are not evil as individuals. But as a collective they are great at misdirection, deception and silence. They are moulding the shape of the Internet in a way that makes them more money and sell us the idea that its good for us.

You can say Micro$oft are evil, but I see them as a heavy thug barging smaller people out of its way. At least you know that’s what they are about. Google on the other hand are feeding us with happy pills (gmail / docs / youtube / tricks in the SERPS) and getting us to love them whilst sucking the financial lifeblood out of us until we can pay no more and our ROI goes negative.

I know this sort of behaviour has gone on for generations, and its just what happens when business goes greedy. I only hope Bing comes good and takes Google on.

—

BTW – I’m on a BING diet – and I’m liking it much! Here, try this: the blind search engine taste test

and you might like BING too

Were talking about Glenn Beck, who Wikipedia describes as

Beck has become a well-known and polarizing public figure, whose provocative views have afforded him media recognition and popularity, along with controversy and criticism. To his supporters, he is a conservative champion, defending traditional American values from progressivism, while to his detractors he is notorious for conspiracy theories and incendiary rhetoric.

He airs the Glen Beck show on Fox TV. It’s a commercial channel and it needs advertising to warrant the show to be shown. No advertisers equals no show.

No show means he can’t disseminate his vitriol as effectively.

So this group stopbeck.com have been lobbying advertisers to NOT associate their brand with this guy and its working! As of the last month, no sponsors have been associated with the UK show and if you look at the list of current advertisers versus ones who have walked away, you can see there is a ratio of about 1:2

It tells me that brands are more sensitive than ever before to how easily negative perception can escalate. Once they could have relied in people not talking amongst themselves, but with the Internet that has all changed. This IMHO is a great manifestation of markets becoming conversations

Smackdown: WordPress loser on security

I’m such a fan of WordPress, I’m speaking at the 2010 UK Wordcamp – and I’ve met Matt Mullenweg (founder of wordpress, who I found inspirational). In fact I advocate WP nearly whenever I can for small / medium sites.

The bits where WordPress are great on  is flexibility and massive community, so tons of great add-ons.

But where I work, we are obsessed with security and because WordPress is  moving so fast, every change on the CMS means a security review and every change on a plugin means another minor review. That’s fine, except it’s lots of reviews and so lots of time spend rubberstamping.

The other BIG issue is the security gap betweenWordPress and MT - the article explains it in more detail. I don’t have up to date info on WordPress and security holes, but I imagine it has improved a lot over the last 2 years.

WordPress V MT security

Another reason I’m not a fan of WordPress for enterprise blog / news publishing is that MT can handle hundreds of users across hundreds of blogs in a single instance of the CMS. Of course you can say that WordPress  MU will do it, but from what I can understand, its a whole world of complxity and hacking to make it work well. Forinstance, things like extensive role management are native in MT, in WordPress the role manager is a 3rd party addon.

With Movable Type as you may know, it renders static files with a few dynamic elements. In other words you get a server full of flat HTML files that don’t need a database to render them. Of course WordPress for the most part is dynamically rendered.

This is important because its nearly impossible to do a cross side scripting attack on Movable Type. This is demonstrated by their security record. More secure = happier ‘powers that be’.

WordPress gets upgraded about 3 times more frequently than MT and if you don’t upgrade, you are likely to get hacked. Upgrade = security review because its new. And on it goes.

So there you go…I still love WordPress, but for BIG multi user, multi blog I’m waiting for a little more maturity.

All things Google

Click on the thumbnail to see the full sized image (580px × 3959px)

Fail? - no, just another way to pimp for marketeers

Ive read that YouTube is now spreading the auto-captioning tool across all YouTube videos.  So this adds captions (like you see on translated movies) to the video.

One interesting point is Google is using the assembled data and algo’s from its directory enquiries and mobile applications services to get the accuracy rate up.

Google are making a big thing of accessibility.  However the bit I find most interesting is how they now analyse a video, extract words have time stamps for those words and so can now use their word based algos to index the videos and include more relevant videos within their blended search results.

So now welcome to a whole new world of spam as marketeers  manipulate video to get into the hottest search results.

Google’s post on auto captioning

The Reg talking about it’s spread into all videos on YouTube

Noisy, but quiet at the same time

I get asked what is going on in SEO and where I think it’s is going and I have 2 sets of answers:

On whats going on?

Not that much if you are just a regular SEOer working on pimping your property. The tricks don’t seem to have changed that much over the last 3 years. There are no big new exploits to play on, its all just settled down and rolling along.

This is evidenced by looking on the SEO social bookmarking site Sphinn.com – lots of recycled stuff about core SEO housekeeping, but nothing really that new.

The new stuff is with Social, but from an SEO view, the only interesting thing here is how Google is leveraging social to connect the whole of the Internet as one giant social network. That’s cool, but not relevant if you are looking to punt out mortgage applications!

Where SEO is going?

1. Its here to stay and its becoming more and more important as the Internet becomes  more ‘socalised’ i.e. as web sites who care about traffic conform to certain architectural practices; These practices revolve around being index-able and bookmark-able.

2. Its dying slowly as the engines get better and better at holding out against manipulation from SEO’ers like me.

Of course this is ‘onsite’ versus ‘offsite’ classification of things.

I am lucky to manage a reasonably large SEO operation and I have access to stats across my SEO work and my colleague’s PPC activities. I’ve seen a slow and progressive shift towards users getting more comfortable with clicking the paid for ad, as opposed to the natural search listing when they are doing a commercial query.

Of course this all makes sense when you see the huge push on quality of advertising. Google know when users don’t really discriminate between paid and natural, they will have won the battle.

By the same measure, I’m seeing fewer commercial results within the informational queries.  This has a bunch of consequences, the greatest being a shift of money towards paid for as the easiest pathway to buying a product when you are ready!

So in conclusion, for as long as techies build sites in ignorance of the web ecosystem, SEO’ers will carry on patching up the damage. But Gaming the system for rankings will get a lot harder and will gently roll into online PR.

The end is not nigh - yet

So according to Search Engine Land Google Caffeine is a few months away from roll  out and we won’t be able to see which data centre its being rolled out in.

There are two points here:

a. In SEO, something BIG is most probably happening, but its like a slow moving tide where there are few noticeable markers to work off.

b. Google have learned how to manage their PR (sort of – ref: buzz mess up) and through obfuscation they will control the situation one small slightly visible step at a time.

What are we in for? I’m not sure really. Professionally its business as usual. I had thought of taking a very proactive stance and working the social media stuff, but im not that sure which bits will have greatest effect for Caffeine, so I’m just holding back to see what changes come.

My guess is that:

a. The investment we have made in making our little corner of the Internet a better place, will pay off in a big way as the algo gets to understand how to filter for quality better.

b. Seo will migrate to social engineering.  Social engineering, as in using PR to rustle up noise in the social landscape and align it will SEO objectives.

So its all change, just not quite yet and it will be slow.

Obama Twitters

Things that struck me about the Obama campaign….the lack of spend on social and how they used evangelists so well to get engagement with so many young people. (See below for the numbers)

So this leads me into my next point aobut Social:if the cause or brand is right, social will just take off (with a little push)

I really think this kind of social media interaction is critical for a brand…. the right brand. Having 1/2 million followers on twitter or 200,000 face book fans in your group does not necessarily mean real engagement. I think its very easy to think big numbers mean a wonderful dialogue with your community, when in fact it may jsut be effective marketing in play.

I also feel more and more that certain brands are ‘social’ by their DNA. And since social is largely self driving when a community picks up on a brand, i.e. they use the simple and effective stuff out there and just self organise. Its why I often find it strange how social media consultancies can charge so much for apparently so little, when as I say prominence in social will come from being and exceptional business and servin your customer in an exceptional way. the equation:

Good formula:

Be a purple cow + feed the conversation = manifestation of love of your brand within social.

Bad formula:

Be mediocre + No dialogue with your customers = pay for prominence and no love / engagement.

The Slideshare :

The definitive ‘silo’ blog post on presentations onsocial media

The slideshare on Obama:

Obama Media Spend

Brand Interaction Strategies

Social marketing

What brands can learn

Miley gives a very coherent explanation on why she had to say adios to the microblogging craze.

So with this one out , who will be next? and importantly will the flattened twitter graph pick up again (I think not…)

Going flat - oh dear

BTW – I do think Twitter is amazing, but it needs to distill, ie. there has to be mass unfollowing so users can focus on the people they are interested in, as opposed to scoring numbers because they have X followers.

I also see it as an amazing ‘portable’ chat space where memes can evolve rapidly , leading to potent communication – and then die to emerge somewhere else coalescing around another idea or event. Twitter trendsmap will give you a feel for this.

Twitter trendsmap

There is an addendum to the Miley twitter axing:

“To my dearest fans,

You all are the closest thing to my heart & it breaks my spirit to hear that some of you feel neglected since I deleted my twitter. It was a wonderful way to stay connected to you & I really felt like during that time we became very much like friends. Twitter is a beautiful thing if used for the right reason. I love my job so much that it is hard to believe sometimes that it is considered “working. But, in the end it is still a business and I do need some sort of a “normal” life as well. I often complain to the ones closest to me that I don’t seem to have much of a private life any more and part of that is my fault. How can I whine about my life being to public if I am the one telling the world what I am doing? Some things in my life need to say in my life only and not on some gossip site. I never want any of my fans to feel like I don’t love them or care about them BUT, sharing the same love and respect for me I need to have the space to grow as a person and make some mistakes. I need to be able to live and learn in private. I never want to quit entertaining it is my life, my love, and my passion but I can’t have my personal life be other peoples entertainment.

Twitter is not the only thing I am cutting back on. This is not an attack against this particular site, I just think kids all over the world could maybe take a little vacation from Cyberspace. My problem with the internet is it makes negativity so available. It allows people to anonymously hurt others without any consequences. That is not the real world. Not only that, but if we spent more time enjoying what we are doing besides tweeting about it, we would enjoy our lives a whole lot more. I have very little free time and the moments that I do have I should be spending with my family and friends and loving every minute of their company.

Now of course rumors have been started that Liam is the reason that I deleted my twitter. I hope my true fans know how stupid that is. I had mentioned to him that someone made a fake twitter with his name and we both starting chatting about how ridiculous it is. Liam is a wonderful friend and he did not try to make me delete my page, he just helped me realize how much time I was wasting on that site.

I really hope you all know how much you mean to me and how much I truly care about each and every one of you. I will keep in touch through Mileyworld and MileyCyrus.com as I did before twitter. I love you all.

Blessings

Miley Cyrus”

Shame there is so much ‘snake oil’ at the moment, because there are good bits in social and once you understand the core of social i.e. relationships and shared experience, then it all makes sense. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about then this Youtube video will enlighten you: (This one is not actually a joke)

I think we need some warm bodies

A quick post…Some time ago I wrote a post with a pdf link to the leaked Google human reviewer document written in 2007. As some of you may know there has been a little more ‘openess’ in the big G and following that theme, this article gives great insight into how they use humans to augment the algo.

A few nice quotes:

Q: Can you give me a sense for how you approach evaluation?

A: We use two main kinds of evaluation data. One kind is we have human evaluators all over the world for whom we have a workflow system. They come to it and are fed things to evaluate. A typical thing is: Here is a query, you’re speaking French in Switzerland, here’s a URL, tell us on some kind of scale or some set of flags and description how good of a URL is that for that query.

Q: Who are these human raters?

A: They’re not volunteers. They’re paid, through contractors from third parties. We look for a basic level of education and communication skills, and in particular our one requirement is that they need to be able to some level in English. Other than that, what we’re really looking for is a broad cross-section of folks. Not a technology background, just like to use the Internet. We have some screening around testing of their ability to do some of the tasks we want them to do and follow the instructions.

Q: How important are the human raters vs. the more automated methods? And do you get alerts if search results or search behavior is not what you expect?

A: The human evaluators are pretty important for us today. The more automated or user behavior/click-based things really give you complementary kinds of data. Both have noise in them: Human evaluators make mistakes. Clicks are hard to interpret; people click or don’t click for all kinds of reasons.

It’s well worth taking some time out to trawl through this lot since it will give you a much better idea of how Google uses humans to help it’s search engine.

Hmm, thats interesting Teddie

I was on a speaking gig the other night and the title of the talk was ‘Search is Dead, Long Live Search‘. So I was up with:
Ciarán Norris – Head of Social Marketing & Director, Invention at MindShare (social media)
Teddie Cowell – SEO Director, Guava (SEO agency)
William Tunstall-Pedoe – CEO & Founder, True Knowledge
Alan Patrick – Consultant,Broadsight
CHAIR: Jon Myers – Head of Search / Associate Director, MediaVest

I've got something important to say!

My big theme was around how Caffeine ( yes that one again ) is going to change the landscape where spamming is going to get tougher and tougher. Along with that will come the split out between:

- Boring commercial brand owned stuff that users don’t particularly want to look (you pay for prominence via PPC)

- Interesting stuff written by individuals about those boring brands, where they help makes sense of what is the best consumer wise. (you have to have something interesting to say & be on the consumer side as a brand)

For anyone not familiar with the BIG idea, it comes from a site called cluetrain.com where they say ‘markets are conversations’. Think of amazon and its reviews, then think ‘web wide’ where forums and ‘real conversations’ happen and imagine Google filtering the results so you get those ‘conversations’.

An interesting screen grab:

Its that red box!

So from trying a few searches, the multi links are still generally at the bottom of the page, but assuming users like this stuff, you will see that block rising and you will see stuff like this crowd out the ranking where the ‘brand sites’ used to live.

If you think its my imagination, check this post on the google glog talking about this new kind of forum block.

On the general theme of the commercial index being eroded by informational listings, check this: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=casino

(screengrab below)

It's the red box again!

To wrap up:

Here is my message from the Chinwag night. “If you are a boring brand, or not that clever with ‘social engineering’ I.e. creating a footprint so Google thinks your site is important to their users – then you will pay dearly through PPC. ”

And lest you forget, Google is a public company and so is only interested in sustainable maximisation of profits.

By the way, I do think there is a BIG future for SEO with Google, but it will take a very different route than the hack/spam route we hear so much about. And honestly I’m only beginning to really figure it out.

Infamy at last

I did a very time consuming powerpoint presentation for wordcamp UK on seo for wordpress, where I went through all the best plugins I have used over the years for SEO.

I’m glad to say it’s been picked up by an SEO guy in Malaysia who give my PPT some praise – so thanks for the respect Ruhan

The post with my PPT on SEO for wordpress

Tweetmeme - very addictive

I was at a gathering of Twitter’ites orbiting around Jeff Pulver a substantial investor in Twitter and had the pleasure of briefly meeting Sarah Blow the person responsible for community on Tweetmeme.com.

They say:

TweetMeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. TweetMeme categorises these links into Categories, Subcategories and Channels, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what you’re interested in.

I’m glad I did meet her, since I’m now a fan of this amazing new site. I guess its a bit like Techmeme in that its not about users directly voting for stuff, but to me it’s a bit like Digg (but far better) because its about twitterers just doing whatever they do and tweetmeme picking up their output and organising it, i.e. the vote is a by product of normal activity, leading to a far better gauge of sentiment.

The problem is that sites like Digg and Reddit are user submitted content which are voted upon, with some algo filtering and some human filtering. Its the human stuff that causes problems since you get into the area of qualitative judgement on what is good. So you often end up with news sources on Digg being banned for some random reason and so there ends up a covert form of censorship. In other words popular is not necessarily represented on Digg or Reddit.

So I will be using this site along with Reddit for my ‘meme’ fix and I think you should too.

BTW an interesting article that echoes my feelings on Digg: http://www.searchandsocial.com/seo-blog/decline-of-digg/

Price Comparison RIP

Andy Beal tells us that Google is getting into the finance business by offering mortgage quotes….

It appears that LendingTree, a leading online mortgage quote provider, has taken umbrage with the company, Mortech, that provides some of the power behind LendingTree’s service. As a result, Google gets to play as well.

“LendingTree recently learned that Google imminently plans to launch a loan aggregation service in late August or early September of this year that would compete with LendingTree,” the complaint says. “Lending Tree has also learned that Mortech intends to make its pricing engine services available for use with Google’s new service and will send information related to mortgage loan offers to be displayed to consumer on Google’s Web site.”

This is MASSIVE news…for some time I have been saying its only a matter of time before Google point their technology at other profitable areas where search technology can be used to great effect…Price comparison. This  is made for Google and they obviously feel finance is a good place to begin.

So if you have a business that aggregates information where you have a slice of commission for a sale generated, then watch out.

—

Google release data to tell us that ad positions don’t affect conversion. So its a case of prominence giving more volume and your landing pages giving the extra performance. My take away: take more care over your landing pages.

—

The definitive SEO checklist. It’s a massive SEO compendium created by  Seomoz. They say:

The following ranking factors were rated by our panel of 72 SEO experts. Their feedback is aggregated and averaged into the percentage scores below. For each, we’ve calculated the degree to which the experts felt this factor was important for achieving high rankings as well as the degree of variance in opinion, estimated using the standard deviation of the contributors’ answers. Thus, factors that are high in importance and low in contention are those where experts agree the most that the factor is critical to rankings.

—

I thought this comscore data might interest you…Its the global and international share of search. Global = everything. International = Everything except the US. And yes the big G is the gorilla.

Compare sites fast

Clarence was talking to me about its SEO uses and having given this the weekend to think about it amongst doing the usual weekend stuff, I think I have an opinion…

It’s fine as a general quick look at the results, but for hard core SEO, typically you would want to use a rank checker. And when using that kind of tool, you would probably track Google / .Com / Co.uk / Bing / Yahoo.
By using this kind of tool, you get historical data an in tabular form, so you can get it onto a spread sheet.

So in conclusion, fun tool that I intend to carry on using as an on the fly comparison tool. My only big question is how they plan to make money out of this!?

gfixler, a Reddit user discovered a hack/vulnerability on the Sears e commerce web site and he was able to create an item called:

Grills to cook babies and more > Body part roaster.

So gfixler being the joker I expect he is, posted this on Reddit on 20th August.  Sears ordered a retraction, says this:

We discovered earlier today that someone visiting our site had defaced a limited number of product pages. It’s important for our customers to know that we have no reason to believe that any of our customer or financial data were compromised.

We’ve already taken steps to prevent this from happening again. We sincerely apologize to any customers who may have seen this on our site.

Post gets unreasonably deleted. All hell breaks out on Reddit and Sears get the PR disaster hey deserve!

So my take on this is:

• if you own a site that can be hacked like this, hold your hands up
• thank the hacker publicly
• fix the problem
• invite other hackers to have a go, asking them to tell the developers about any bugs on the site
• and repeat
• and get some love from unknowns who have the power to help or smash your brand online

I did a screen grab – there are 31 mentions of  ‘*uck Sears’…and so has been one of the bigger ‘memes’ online for the last day or so.

(Click on the image to see the page in high res.)

Sears PR Disaster!

Front page Computer Weekly

I pitched the editor of Computer Weekly on this and happpily he took  the article. And I guess the subject resonated with him, since I’ve been given front page placement!

For those of you who like technical stuff, this article in The Register gives a very complete view of what’s going on.

I guess it resonates with me since I know first hand the power of having a flexible ‘future proof’ platform that acts as an enabler. So in short, brace yourselves!

Caffeine is a new update from google and unlike the bluster of the Bing merger with yahoo, this is the first emergence of something that will probably change the world – and I don’t think im exaggerating…it will level the SEO playing field and let sites that have genuine merit rise up the rankings, overshooting the sites gamed by SEO’ers. This will mean better reach into better information and thus help the knowledge flow and so ‘change the world’

In essence it’s a massive new infrastructural update of the Google search algo that allows it to work more efficiently and faster. This means they are paving the way for a far more comprehensive search algo. In short (IMO) its the death knell of SEO and the emergence of social engineering as the best way to get ranked.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/help-test-some-next-generation.html

“Based on the blog post, we can guess that this new infrastructure may include ways of crawling the web more comprehensively, determining reputation and authority (possibly beyond the link graph and what’s typically thought of as PageRank), and returning more relevant results more quickly, although Google’s Matt Cutts told me that the changes are “primarily in how we index”.
http://searchengineland.com/caffeine-googles-new-search-index-23823

Powerful stuff.

All eyes in the UK will still be on Google

Nice! Ive been published in Computer Weekly ! the only downer is that 350 words just does not do the subject justice, so I thought I’d a little more to it.

My main assertion is that in the UK, the Microsoft/Yahoo deal probably won’t matter all that much…Ive speculated that were looking at 18 month before any real action.

The article on BingHoo is here : Opinion: Will the Microsoft Yahoo deal change your online marketing?

On the PPC side, I’m fortunate to work with a really clever PPC guy (Kemley Sellars) and last week we had been discussing how this will affect him.

His view is that Microsoft have lifted their game as far as making it easier for PPC managers to upload accounts and manage them. Its now almost a simple porting across and if you ask nicely … they will even build the account for you. Of course you could say its desperation but then I prefer to thing it’s helpfulness.

But share is declining and traffic talks. So its a small side show until something bigger rolls in.

On SEO it’s a case of a spammed and an Algo that just is not as mature as Google’s (this tool will give you some idea: http://www.blackdog.ie/google-bing/ ) And with the Yahoo deal an arms race has escalated with the prospect of a commercially viable amount of traffic in the US (about 21% market share on BingHoo) to go and spam to get ranked and thus make revenue from.  And yes spamming is cold hard big money making.

So of course Bing is going to have to up its game, but can it? Remember there is a stream of patents churning from the big Tec companies and Google is a major source of patentable technology (Bill Slawski’s SEO by the sea have a ton of stuff on Google Patents) So for every innovation that gets nailed by a patent is obviously a technology competitor won’t get to use unless they pay a massive price.

My feeling is that Microsoft will not be able to catch Google on search software. Same on Hardware to power this massive infrastructure – Google is genius ! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform and if they can run a server for 30% less than anyone else, that means more servers and lower running costs.

More servers means >  more computational resource for their data infrastructure >  for the right money > and that means a more sophisticated algo, to get you better search results.

And then there is a sense of mission and shared identity within Google and Microsoft. I have had the pleasure of meeting a number of Googlers and Microsoft people and whilst they are all very nice, the Googlers stand out as having a real shared sense of mission. Theirs is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Everys single one of them I had met seemed to have this enshrined in their makeup as a mission. Microsoft? I don’t know what it is. Do you? Try a search and see of you can find anything here

So weaker technology, probably less effective hardware and a lack of a clear virtuous mission spells a road to failure.

Well worth 5 minutes of your time:

thanks Fi for the vid

The BIG thing was community. WordPress has tons of it.

WordPress makes it easier to publish online. This in combination with Google means more useful opinion and information can be found more easily . This free flow of information makes the world a more open place. And that hopefully means more knowledge, truth and so power to the citizen.
I know its lofty thinking, but when you hear Matt Mullenweg speak, his vision and everyone’s combined commitment will help the flow of knowledge. Yes WordPress is more than some php code.

This gives you an idea of how he thinks:

“Matt Mullenweg, founder and lead developer of the WordPress publishing platform, explains how the open source philosophy and “Golden Rule” apply not only to technology — but to such fields as politics, economics and environment. Recorded at Wordcamp Montreal 2009 by Christian Aubry. Licence: Creative Commons BY-SA.”

The Event
There were about 140 people at wordcamp uk. Of those I would say 50% were developers, 35% semi technical / marketing and the rest a mixed bag of site owners and the curious.

Wordcamp UK

I did 2 sessions, one on SEO and wordpress (see below) and another session: Web Doctors fix it session, where a bunch of us went through a group of sites including:

• http://www.realfresh.tv
• http://www.martinbloomphotography.com
• http://www.p45camp.com
• http://www.bristol247.com
• http://www.curiousfu.com

My SEO slideshare:

Having been to a number of big conferences, the ones that cost about £1200 for 3 days… I thought wordcamp was way beyond anything ive been to in terms of:
- community togetherness
- sharing of knowledge
- networking
– enlightenment (yes big big word, but relevant here)

I felt privileged being in the company of so many bright people who understood the true nature of the Internet and its capacity for change. In conclusion I reckon I’ve learnt some more about the spirit of the people who drive the Internet. As a marketing person, this is invaluable.

Kudos to everyone actually, since we all made this work.  But how about a few names…

• Tony Scott
• Hayley Niuserre
• Mike Kimb Jones
• JONNYA
• P45 GUY
• VIXX
• CHI CHI
• Dave Mee

For more feedback on the event: http://wiki.wordcampuk.tonyscott.org.uk/Main_Page#WordCamp_UK_2009_event_reports

and another 10 great ‘decks’ on social

Happy social media employee!

Yes, I know there is a massive recession underway – so who on earth is hiring !?, but randomly I’ve been peripherally involved in helping a friend hire a new staffer to handle a social media role.

The main idea is to become a part of a community and from within, promote certain services. A problem is how to filter applicants, so you get it right 1st time. My experience is that its not qualifications, it’s time spent online, the innate nature of the person and their ability to ‘socialise’ very well online in a structured way.

Also for marketing,  since social media is about influence not buzz, its critical to find candidates who are natural influencers.

So I wrote this email to help out:

Questions you should ask

- Have you got a blog? or do you guest blog or write on any site? yes? whats the URL?
This shows that they like to give their opinions and share them online. It also shows they have some initiative, since it takes effort to set  up and run a blog. the popularity of their work obviously shows they can make themselves prominent online and that they like being at the centre of attention.

- Have you ever done any affiliate marketing i.e. got your own affiliate site?
If you don’t know what affiliate is see here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing.
Its not that likely they have done any, but if they have thats great. it shows genuine initiative and commercial awareness, which is important since ultimately they are an extension of your sales function. Its not terribly important whether its been a big success, just that they learnt from this and can apply their knowledge to the business.

- Do you understand SEO?
Trick question, since very few people do…and its a great opportunity for people to dig themselves into a hole.
If they do understand the principles, it will help your online marketing by another 30% or more.
People who do know it will talk about sites they have done and search rankings they have achieved. The more commercial and commonly used the phrase and the higher ranking the better.  So ‘car insurance’ is better than ‘under 18 car insurance kent’.
For a 101 guide to seo see here: http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-1-page

- Do you hang out on forums? which ones? and how long have you been there? and how many posts have you done on these forums?
More is more…so more time spent, more forums and more posts  is all good. This shows the person can embed themselves within communities and become trusted. Building trust is core to all this social stuff.

- How many friends do you have on facebook? what groups are you a member of?
On facebook over 120 friends is good – 600 is very good and above is really working the system. This just show how much of an online socializer the person is. Lots of friends means they can build contacts easily.

- How many connections do you have on linkedin?
Same as facebook.

- Do you use twitter?
If they have over 600 followers then good, but great if the person has fewer following than followers. i.e. more follow this persons updates, then he or she follows. If they bang on about how awesome twitter is, then bad, since there is not a great deal of utility for marketing in twitter (yes it’s true!).

- What other social networking communities are you a member of?
In SEO there is sphinn which I do some stuff with. Do they hang out on any specialised communities and if they do, how prominent are they? more is more here.

- What is your ‘handle’
People usually have a handle like anddroid or whatever when hanging out on the forums. Type it into google and see how many times the handle comes up. If 1000′s of times then good.

Show me the money £££

I’ve been looking at ‘web 2.0′ sites and ideas surrounding how they can possibly make any money. This interesting project has loads of nice ideas and in late July some of these are going to get built!

Social Innovation Camp

Some of my thinking on this:

Just looking at this list: http://scotland.sicamp.org/?page_id=47

Nearly all of these ideas are based around exchanges, but as ever with this kind of thing its going to be critical mass that gets them off the ground.

So I reckon the basis of a great web 2.0 marketing architecture is:

- Site is of use to a niche group of the web searching public. You have to start niche since there is too much competition for anything mass market.

- Get mass decentralised participation (wiki’s) so it self generates. More is more whe you think about the long tail and the easy by which you can find stuff on teh most obscure subject.

- Organise your site so engines can get in and comprehensively index.  Search engines typically account for about 50-60% of a well built site’s free traffic and they are critical to the word of mouth effect on the internet.

- Make the content very ‘linkable’ so the engines and ‘connectors/mavens’ (bloggers etc) give these sites authority. Linkable is another word for socially acceptable on the internet. The more social standing you have, the more prominence you will gain.

- Make sure the meme behind the idea is very strong. If you can put it into 6 words, great! The simpler, the more useful, the greater chance it has of spreading

- Build the site so its in the self interest of the user to pass it on.  The clever thing hotmail, gmail, various IM’s, user reviews on Amazon, facebook apps, facebook, linkedin, any social network site has, is more people is more for me.

- Low barrier to participation, high barrier to exit. So its easy to get started with and hard to leave. Think web hosting, email accounts, photo upload sites facebook. In fact anything where you get a ton ov value, where you invest a lot of time, where its reall hassle to move on.

Then you have a good chance of reaching critical mass and thus making the site worthy of taking revenue as a middleman. Obviously people don’t readily pay for information, but if the site offers enough utility, then there is a space for charging:

- To advertise if the exposure is great enough, but craigslist shows us that there are only certain things that are chargable (cars, jobs, property) I think the caveat is that people will pay if they are sure they will get  a sale, otherwise they just go where the risk is lowest i.e. a free site

- To pay for the utility a site offers, like flickr pro. The catch is that you really have to offer something exceptional.

- If your informaiton can make individuals a profit, then its also chargable. Webmasterworld.com / expertsexchange  /ft.com / wallstjournal.

- When you reach critical mass and you are the only real choice…you can charge, but only enough to make users not go somewhere else / or where you stifle usage and so kill off the critical mass.

Since ad revenues have tanked and probably will continue to do so for a long time (or ever), there is no point in depending on ad revenue for income. Besides, until ads are really relevant, they just fall into the old school disruptive model of marketing. And thats really not web 2.0   

YouTube noise

The big headline is: for every minute passing, 20 hours of content is uploaded onto YouTube.

This means the odds of having a hit on youtube are slim… Why? Well lets assume the average video length is 2.5 minutes. That means as you watch your 2.5 minute video that you spend your marketing dollars on, another 1487 competing videos have been uploaded.

This is why I’m very sceptical about active ‘YouTube’ marketing, simply because the odds of getting above the noise is very low. I think its far better to wait for someone to break out above the noise and do a deal with them. Then at least you have a fighting chance of getting some prominence. Of course you cant change a video and add your message that has been a hit, but you can add commentary and links on the description of the video and you may end up there via video adsense.

All in all, I’m probably just going to use YouTube for its utility as a great way of playing video within a 3rd party site.

As we know Yahoo is a far bigger spread of websites than one trick pony Google, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Yahoo connects their assets together effectively create a very powerful social infrastructure. How? I don’t really know yet. But I’m watching since I sense some BIG commercial opportunities here.

At the end I met an extremely bright chap – Nick Garner – from Betfair however his top tip of the evening was for us all was to read ‘Scientific Advertising’ – perfect fodder for those wanting to develop the future of ‘influence’.

We were at the ‘freeconomics’ sesison held by Chinwag – read more here, and I met Abigail Harrison, who struck me as very connected in with online PR in general.  

BTW scientific advertsing is a great book and well worth the read!

Reddit Terminally Broken

In my work in Betfair, I have been involved in social media traffic generation. I.e. finding a great writer, getting them to do stuff users will find cool and interesting for 40 seconds. I have spent a lot of money on this and its been reasonably successful for us and the readers we have found over the last 8 months.

Without getting into too much detail here, we can’t do digg anymore because we have been banned…yes banned. And Reddit is now a no go zone.  And for no good reason. We stayed within the terms and conditions of their sites and we were out.

Recently a big wave of censorship  has kicked off on Reddit. To explain more, you should read a couple of very insightful posts on exactly whats going on.

Brent Csutoras

Unfortunately, that transparency and democracy didn’t last at Reddit, who has gone from being one of the most democratic sites, where users determined the quality of content shown on the front page, to a site that is heavily moderated, using a handful of people and algorithm layers to censor and remove content that in many cases has never even broken the Reddit TOS.

Search engine journal

As Brent Csutoras noted in a recent post, there have been a significant amount of people who have been leaving Digg and going to Reddit. The reason for these users moving to Reddit is because while Digg likes to say that they are all about their users, everyone knows that their moderators have a significant amount of control over the content that makes it to the front page (and their trend of having more control has continued to increase over time).
Unfortunately, it seems that my initial impression of Reddit may have been too good to be true.

Essentially they say that bad stuff is happening in Reddit and they explain how the power crazed loonies are infecting the site. I use strong language, since I’m very unhappy about this, both as a user and as a marketing person trying to give something to the community to get some prominence (A fair trade I think)

My point: These sites are fragile eco systems where small changes or vulnerabilities in the ‘system’ can distort the whole site. All it takes is a hard core of people who get a taste for power and wield it promiscuously to ruin a good thing. It happens in countries and governments and its happening here.

My assumptions: There isn’t much money around to run sites like Reddit since the onset of this recession. Ad revenue has tanked and so sites like these probably run in a loss, so they have to use fewer staff. This means less control, allowing for bad people to go off the rails. And on it goes.

The cost of building sites like these is relatively low, since there is now opensource software to quickly build a community,  so I expect the weight may well shift to community sites like sphinn.com which are more manageable in size and have a really passonate following who are very knowledgeable in their specialisation. A nice list of alternatives.

I know the only way you can fight this kind of corruption of quality, is to vote with your clicks and patronise other sites….but please, not Digg or Reddit.

I guess its Mixx for me!

ipadio audio blogging

 Simple ideas like sound libraries could be build up as you have picture libraries. But more importantly it just another form of expression and that’s good. I don’t think the written word is going to be dented by this

Audioboo iphone audio bloggging

From a business model point of view, I guess they will get into the equivalent of radio advertising…or subscriptions for a super fast service.

Anyhow, its another step forward!

What do I mean by that? Well years ago when reputable companies were spamming anyone they could with ‘helpful marketing messages’, Seth Godin wrote permission marketing, a book that helped me understand that if you are lucky enough to have an individual give you permission for you to communicate with them, then DON’T ABUSE IT! And back in 1999 there was a lot of email abuse…

Today he has moved with the times and written Tribes, a book about how anyone can start a movement and gather a tribe about them. This is so reflective of how the Internet can allow people to gather together and how leaders can emerge from nowhere, despite disparate geographical location.

More Seth Godin videos

It was a 2 hour thing sponsored by we are social, an agency in social media. 50 of us gathered in 4 groups of about 12 and were set a task related to accountability in social media i.e. analytics and how campaigns can demonstrate their ROI.

Great fun, but very little on how to define ‘commercial intent’. I do plan to attend more of these, since I did learn a lot about how ‘foggy’ social media marketing is.

SEO is in trouble

I was asked about an SEO company who was bullying one of my friends in the social media space and this was my response (partially edited) :

What a load of !*!^£*$£!!!!. They are just trying to make you feel insecure.

The most important part of SEO is linkbuilding and the main thing agencies fall over on is link building. So that’s why they are very vague on this. So they talk about top rankings, but how are they going to do this? What is their link building plan what sort of sites will they get links from and how much resource will that take. So often they hide behind jargon so they can cover up their incapabilities when it comes to getting the kind of links you will need to rank and not get done for spamming.

And companies like this are going to be in trouble when potential clients sort out their basic SEO and when google finds a better way to rank sites using other then links

Ultimately SEO as we know it is dying. Shoemoney wrote on this and got it basically right,( IMO) he does not cover the incompetence of web developers who ignore SEO 101 stuff. For as long as they carry on, there will always be some fixing to do.
http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/05/07/seo-has-no-future/

This is why I’m spending about ½ of my effort on social… because ultimately google cares only about revenue… and what their users want. So you will see a bigger and bigger split between commercial and informational listings and for prominence on commercial listings, you will have to pay $$$

To me social is powerful because it where those conversations happen that help decide on one course of action or another – in other words, it’s a continuum of a process that has carried on for 1000’s of years. Sadly it was disrupted in the 20th C by broadcast media, but now it returning to its normal state. i.e. the power of individuals sharing information is coming back.

So in conclusion… read seomoz, seobook and webmasterworld and put yourself out as an seo’er since you are far better equipped to handle the link (relationship) building that Google care so much about when they decide on the value of a site

Principles by which to live by.

I had been asked to come up with a guiding set of principles for social media. Short is sweet.

1. Be engaging:?  helpful, entertaining, useful, likable.
2. Listen:?  listen to your community.
3. Participate and contribute:?  get in there and get involved in the discussions going on among the blogs and sites of others.
4. Be real:?  transparency pays off and no one likes a fake.
5. Give: whatever you have of real value to others – give it away if you can. You will be rewarded many times over.