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December 27, 2007
Ultimate Search Conference: Day 4
Day 4: Thursday, December 27, 2007
Keynotes for the Day
Keynote with Jim Lanzone – SES San Jose
Closing Keynote with Matt Mullenweg -- BlogWorld
Blogs, Vlogs & Automobiles Track
Top Takeaways
- If you only buy one accessory, buy a good tripod. People were not made to hold camcorders stable.
- The goal of producing YouTube videos is to get them back to your Web site to view ads and explore your other content.
- If you want videos to rank you have to surround them with HTML.
- There is an absolutely compelling reason for search marketers to start podcasting – Universal Search.
- Eighty-two percent of local search users make contact after viewing a business local advertisement.
Getting in the Video Game – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Brett Tabke, Robin Liss and Michael McDonald
Video Search Engine Optimization – SES San Jose
Speakers: Sapna Satagopan (moderator) Gregory Markel, Jeremy Clem, Sherwood Stranieri and Stephan Baker
Podcasts & Audio Search Optimization – SES San Jose
Speakers: Detlev Johnson (moderator), Daron Babin, Amanda Watlington and Rick Klau
Local & Mobile Search – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Detlev Johnson (moderator), Gregory Markel, Alex Portal, Dan Perry, Brian Gil, and Eswar Priyadarshan
A-List Blogger Training
Top Takeaways
- Building relationships is about people, not selling.
- Use your company blog to keep fires on your own site. Don’t allow them to break out all over the Web.
- Not everyone should blog. The blog isn’t going to change your culture. It will just expose you.
- Blogs are great conversation tools because they give you the illusion of an individual conversation.
- Corporations aren’t blogging because of the fear of being criticized and the fear of losing control, but when you have your own blog, you control it.
Building Relationships with Other Bloggers -- BlogWorld
Speakers: March Harty and Brian Solis
Corporate & CEO Blogging -- BlogWorld
Speakers: Paula Berg, John Earnhardt, Pete Johnson, Jennifer Cisney, and Brian Lusk
How to Use Digg to Assplode Your Blog -- BlogWorld
Speakers: Jeremy Wright, Tris Hussey, Aaron Brazell
Creating Conversation With Your Readers -- BlogWorld
Speakers: Alex Hillman and Jake McKee
SEO Survival Tips Track
Top Takeaways
- To maintain a positive working relationship between yourself and a client, set business goals up front.
- Clients are coming to you looking for trust, performance, strategy, thoughtful leadership, and technology and tools.
- The best way to learn about SEO is to absorb all the knowledge you can from books and SEO blogs, and then apply it to an actual site.
- For work from home businesses, coworking is the next evolution of the work place. It’s like a café that doesn’t kick you out.
- When your hobby because your job, you’ll have to work to find new ways to unwind.
How to Make Friends & Influence Clients – SES Chicago 2006
Speakers: Danny Sullivan (moderator), Ed Kim, Scott Orth, and Rob Murray
So You Want To Be A SEM? – SES San Jose
Speakers: Misty Locke (moderator), Dan Perry, Pradeep Chopra, Jessica Bowman, David Wallace and Michael Gray
SEM Pricing Models – SES San Jose
Speakers: Misty Locke (moderator), Rand Fishkin, Lance Loveday, Ken Jurina, and Mike Murray
Survival Tips for Network Bloggers -- BlogWorld
Speakers: Leora Zellman and Mary Jo Manzanares
Lisa’s Top Picks Track
Top Takeaways
- Go through your content looking for the holes. Then write content to fill them.
- As a blogger, you write for one person and one person only – Yourself.
- Don’t try and control the blogosphere. It won’t work and you’ll just build resentment.
- In blogging, popularity is about consistency and being brave enough to plow forward.
- The Chinese version of Google uses a guided search format since there are so many characters in the Chinese language.
Don’t Fake It: The Secret to Writing Kickass Content -- WordCamp
Speakers: Lorelle VanFossen
Trench Warfare – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Rohit Bhargava (moderator), Karl Long, Jeremiah Owyang, Kent Nichols and Steve Hall
One Billion Searchers – SES San Jose
Speakers: Mike Grehan (moderator), Stephen Noton and Bill Hunt
The Future of New Media Publishing Tools -- BlogWorld
Speakers: Anil Dash and Leo Laporte
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/27/07 at 5:00 AM | Comments (0)
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December 26, 2007
Ultimate Search Conference: Day 3
Day 3: Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Keynotes for the Day
Morning Keynote with Marissa Mayer – SES San Jose
Keynote: Steve Berkowitz – SES New York
Social Media 2.0 Track
Top Takeaways
- Universal Search changes the way users scan from an F shape to an E shape. Users notice images before text so they scan where the picture is, then the text next to it to see if it is relevant.
- Personalized search results increase the amount of time users spend on the SERP, the fixations and the percentage of clicks.
- With personalization, SEO becomes more about studying things like search patterns, current tasks, Web history and social patterns than keywords.
- Create something viral that draws people in but then have something else that keeps them there.
- If you’re not experimenting with link bait, you’re already behind.
Universal and Personalized Search: This Changes Everything – SES San Jose
Speakers: Jake Baillie (moderator), Gordon Hotchkiss, Bill Slawski, and Greg Boser
Personalization, User Data and Search – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Chris Sherman (moderator), Jonathan Mendez, Richard Zwicky, Dave Davies, Gord Hotchkiss, Tim Mayer and Sepandar Kamvar
Monetizing Social Media Traffic – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Rand Fishkin (moderator), Vanessa Fox, Michael Gray, Alexander Barbara, and Laura Fitton
Linkbaiting: 96 Strategies – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Jake Baillie (moderator), Todd Malicoat, Andy Hagans, and Bill Hartzer
Advanced SEO Track
TopTakeaways
- Empower brand evangelists and give them the resources to do the link bait and viral stuff for you.
- Paid links that pass PageRank violate Google’s guidelines and must be disclosed.
- “Google’s campaign is about creating fear and uncertainty and doubt. They’re trying to convince you that by buying or selling paid links you are breaking the law or being unethical. Google is not the government.” – Michael Gray
- It’s not enough to be on the first page when it’s only the first result that is above the fold. In today’s world, content is more than copy. There are tools and other media to worry about.
- If someone comes to your site after an “allinanchor” query, they’re probably not a legit user. It’s your competition coming to check up on you.
Better Ways – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Danny Sullivan (moderator), Alex Bennert, Greg Boser, Jim Boykin, Christine Churchill, Todd Friesen, Cameron Olthuis and Aaron Wall
Are Paid Links Evil? – SES San Jose
Speakers: Jeffrey Rohrs (moderating), Michael Gray, Matt Cutts, Todd Malicoat, Greg Boser, Todd Friesen and Andy Baio
Give It Up! – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Matt Cutts, Jennifer Slegg, Mike Grehan, Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Todd Friesen, Greg Boser, Bruce Clay, Stephan Spencer, Shari Thurow and Jill Whalen
Competitive Intelligence – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Jake Baillie, Andy Beal and Larry Mersman
Advanced PPC Track
Top Takeaways
- Day parting allows search marketers to target ads based on their customers' actual buying cycle and habits.
- Google’s Website Optimizer is a good tool for testing new traffic sources.
- The search marketers who are getting the most out of their pay per click campaigns are utilizing syndication, geo-targeting, keyword match type and day parting.
- Be cautious of dumping all your long tail phrases into one bucket. By doing so you’ll lose the detail of your info by putting them into arbitrary groups.
- The reason behavioral targeting is so effective is because prior actions are key. What a consumer does is far more important than where they live or who they are.
Pump Up Your Paid Search—SMX Advanced
Speakers: Jeffrey Rohrs (moderator), Brad Geddes, Ben Perry, and Matt Van Wagner
Advanced Paid Search Techniques – SES New York
Speakers: Jessie Stricchiola (moderator), Jon Kelly, Sharon Crost and Eduardo Llach
Paid Search & Tricky Issues – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Jeffrey Rohrs (moderator), Bob Carilli, Mona Elesseily, and Michael Sack
Post Search Ads – SES San Jose
Speakers: Misty Locke (moderator), Kevin Lee, Dave Carberry, Michael Benedek and Richard Frankel
SEO/SEM Issues Track
Top Takeaways
- If you don’t set client expectations early on, the client will manufacture their own that are unreasonable, which just propagates the idea that SEOs are unreasonable.
- Distinguishing between click fraud and badly performing ad is tough. The data looks very similar and requires human judgment to examine what’s going on.
- Use statistical analysis to look at multiple data points for your clicks. Don’t rely on ROI.
- Bid management tools have a place in SEM, however, you can’t just automate your campaign and forget it. It’s not just the consumer path. It’s also the marketing intent.
- If you’re going to buy links, stay off the radar and don’t piss off Google.
SEO Reputation Problem – SES San Jose
Speakers: Jeffrey K. Rohrs (moderator), Shari Thurow, Kristopher B. Jones, Jennifer Laycock, Jonathan Hochman, and Kathleen Fealy
Auditing Paid Listings & Click Fraud Issues – SES New York
Speakers: Jeffrey Rohrs (moderator), Shuman Ghosemajumder, Tom Cuthbert, Reggie Davis and John Marshall
Debate: Is Bid Management Dead – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Jeffrey Rohrs (moderator), Robert Ashby, Peter Hershberg, Misty Locke, and Chris Zaharias
Link Buying – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Detlev Johnson (moderator), Rand Fishkin, Jim Boykin, John Lessnau, and Aaron Wall.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/26/07 at 5:00 AM | Comments (0)
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December 25, 2007
Ultimate Search Conference: Day 2
Day 2: Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Keynotes for the Day
Keynote: Satya Nadella – SMX Seattle
Roundtable: Content is King! (Again?) – Ad:Tech San Francisco
SEO-friendly Content & Design Track
Top Takeaways
- Good site design is invisible because it’s seamless and just “works”. Bad design is noticeable because it’s clunky, makes people squint and is altogether frustrating.
- Don’t get your keywords from your CEO or from a spreadsheet, get them from your audience.
- Search engine friendly design does not mean that the sites have to be ugly.
- Good content isn’t mysterious. It’s the regular pages on your site.
- Teach your writers about social media and encourage them to become knowledgeable of social media sites and their demographics when writing towards them.
Stay Invisible With Good Design -- BlogWorld
Speakers: Liz Danzico
SEO Design & Organic Structure – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Todd Friesen (moderator), Mark Jackson, Lyndsay Walker, Paul Bruemmer, Alan K'necht
Effective Action-based Copywriting – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Brian Clark, Heather Lloyd-Martin and Jill Whalen
Content Creation: Cranking It Out – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Ted Ulle, Robin Liss and Rae Hoffman
Understanding Analytics Track
Top Takeaways
- Search marketers must look beyond the last click or the last ad seen in order to find a richer story.
- Track robot and spider activity to find out how many days it will take for your pages to get indexed.
- Don’t use redirects to hide tracking URLs. They may help make your URLs look pretty for users, but they wipe out your ability to track.
- Don’t assume anything.
- 82 percent say that Web analytics is poorly understood and/or not used in their organization.
Measurement & Metrics – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Rick Bruner (moderator), Young-Bean Song, Chad Parizman, Darren Stoll, and John Squire
Web Analytics & Measuring Success – SES New York
Speakers: Allan Dick (moderator), Laura Thieme, and Stacy Williams
Issues in Analytics – SES San Jose
Speakers: Alex Bennert (moderator), Eric Enge, John Marshall, Avinash Kaushik, and Jonah Stein
Analytics Tracking Performance: Beyond the Page View -- PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Joe Laratro (moderator), John Marshall, and Scott Orth
Intermediate SEO Track
Top Takeaways
- Search Information Marketing uses search data and intelligence to improve marketing. It entails using users' own words to get a better understanding of who they are, what they’re looking for, and what’s important to them.
- Spam is about the intent and the extent to which you use a technique.
- Test a small number of variations: Rule of thumb is less than 100 conversions per combination.
- Apply different weight to different actions. Downloading a white paper is more valuable than looking at a banner. Identify when the action took place. When you convert, those drivers are calculated in different ways.
- With personalization, the engines are trying to better match a page to users’ interests. You must give them enough information to determine the topic of your page.
Putting Search Into The Marketing MixM – SES New York
Speakers: Gord Hotchkiss (moderator), Bill Mungovan, Curtis Dueck, and Misty Locke
Penalty Box Summit – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Danny Sullivan (moderator), Peter Linsley, Aaswath Raman, Tim Mayer, and Matt Cutts
Multivariate Testing & Conversion Tweaking – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Gillian Muessig (moderator), Tom Leung, Glenn Alsup, Philippe Lang and Rand Fishkin
Personalized Search: Fear or Not – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Danny Sullivan (moderator), Matt Cutts, Michael Gray, Gord Hotchkiss, and Tim Mayer
Paid Search Boot Camp Track
Top Takeaways
- Know what your company is doing at all times. You don’t want to get into a situation where you’re outbidding yourself. There is no SEM’s Dumbest award.
- The lifecycle of an API is only 6-9 months at most. If you’re going to adopt an API program, there is a cost involved.
- Evaluate second tier PPC engines based on a cost/benefit analysis.
- Consistent reporting is key to successful PPC management and optimization.
- Track only what is important to you and forget the rest.
Benchmarking a PPC Campaign – SES New York
Speakers: Alan Dick (moderator), Cam Balzer, Mike Moran, and Martin Laetsch
Search APIs – SES San Jose
Speakers: Anne Kennedy (moderator), David Flesh, Dan Boberg, Julienne Thompson Hood and Jon Diorio
Beyond the Majors – SMX Advanced
Speakers: Jeff Rohrs (moderator), Scott Greenberg, Matthew Greitzer, T.J. Kelly, Anton E. Konikoff, and Tom Paraboschi
Contextual Ad Programs – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Detlev Johnson (moderator), Brian Axe, Jay Sears, and Tony Wills
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/25/07 at 5:00 AM | Comments (0)
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December 24, 2007
Ultimate Search Conference: Day 1
Welcome to Day 1 of the Ultimate Search Conference! Below you'll find your agenda for the day. So, go grab a bagel and some coffee and jump in. You have a long day of sessions and great speakers ahead. Enjoy!
Day 1: Monday, December 24, 2007
Keynotes for the Day:
You&A with Matt Cutts – SMX Seattle
Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan – SES NY
SEO for N00bs
Top Takeaways
- Make it easy for the search engines to find, spider and index your content by getting rid of any unnecessary roadblocks.
- Good directories are human-edited, offer static links, aged and have high quality backlinks. Avoid all others.
- Use content to build links. When you produce interesting content, people will naturally want to link to you.
- There is no penalty for duplicate content, it’s a filter.
- Help protect your content from scrapers by using your brand name, absolute links, and hosting images locally. Take legal action when necessary.
SEO Advanced Q&A – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Bruce Clay (moderator), Aaron D’Souza, and Sandor Marik
Linking Strategies – SES NY
Speakers: Justilien Gaspard, Greg Boser, and Jim Boykin
Duplicate Content Issues Duplicate Content Issues – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Aaron Shear (moderator), Rahul Lahiri, Derrick Wheeler, Evan Roseman, and Priyank Garg
Converting Visitors into Buyers – SES London
Speakers: Mike Sack (moderator), Sarah Bubb, Alex Bennert, and Brian Clifton
PPC Basics Track
Top Takeaways
- The 4 Pillars of PPC: Positioning, Test & Learn, Standards, and Integration.
- Determine what your metrics are before you start and decide if you have the knowledge level to optimize PPC campaigns inhouse.
- Quality Score is a way for search engines to rank ads based on a variety of factors. There are two Scores—one that affects your minimum bid and one that affects your rank.
- It’s users who ultimately define the quality of an ad, not the search engines.
- Don’t be afraid to experiment with the look and feel of your ads in order to make them more “clickable” and increase conversions.
Pay Per Click Strategies – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Dana Todd (moderator), Daina Middleton and Mike Solomon.
Meet the Search Ad Networks – SES NY
Speakers: Rebecca Lieb (moderator), Doug Stotland, Stewart Easterby, John Kannapell, James Speer, and Brian Schmidt
Ads in a Quality Score World - SES NY
Speakers: Gord Hotchkiss (moderator), Joshua Stylman, Andrew Goodman, and Jonathan Mendez
Optimizing your Site for Contextual Ads – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Detlev Johnson (moderator), Matt Daimler, Jaan Janes, and Aaron Wall
Social Media Overview Track
Top Takeaways
- Social search includes things like shared bookmarks, tagging engines, collaborative directories, personalized verticals, social Q&A sites, etc.
- The future of search is the integration of social knowledge to guide you to the right community.
- Social search gives site owners a chance to open up the deep pages of their site and expose the stuff that’s not getting attention.
- Link bait helps your site rank by giving it global authority, topical popularity, trust metrics, temporal influence, PageRank, anchor test, and topical relevance.
- Viral is an effect, not a cause. It’s about others evangelizing your content.
Social Search Overview – SES NY
Speakers: Chris Sherman (moderator), Grant Ryan, Tomi Poutanen, Apostolos Gerasoulis and Seth Godin
Linkbaiting & Viral Success – SES NY
Speakers: Rand Fishkin, Jennifer Laycock, Chris Boggs, and Cameron Olthuis
Viral & Word of Mouth – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Daniel Stein (moderator), Jamie Byrne, Benjamin Palmer, Gaurav Misra, and Sean Carver
User Generated Content in Search – SES San Jose
Speakers: Rebecca Lieb (moderator), Andrew Goodman, Matt McGee, and Lee Odden
Branding 101 Track
Top Takeaways
- We’re moving from a world of interruption to an environment of engagement. We have a consumer that is no longer ‘I’ shaped but “T” shaped, they’re broad and deep.
- Users gravitate towards companies with strong communities because it allows them to have a deeper interaction with that company.
- You no longer own your brand. Your brand is a conversation.
- Buzz monitoring involves finding the discussion areas to capture, understand, and report the products, issues, and opinions that consumers share between and among themselves.
- Anything negative out there is a risk. Don’t think that just because it's not ranking yet doesn't mean that it won't.
Is Advertising Really The Solution? – Ad:Tech San Francisco
Speakers: Pete Blackshawn (moderator), Scott Wilder, Beth Thomas-Kim, Paul Woolmington, and Tip Rose
Word
of Mouth Marketing – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Brett Tabke (moderator), Louise Rijk, and Greg Hartnett
Buzz Monitoring – SES San Jose
Speakers: Chris Sherman (moderator), Rob Key, Andy Beal, and Jonathan Ashton
Brand Management – PubCon Las Vegas
Speakers: Joe Laratro (moderator), Jessica L Bowman, Lauren Vaccarello, and Matt Tuens
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/24/07 at 5:00 AM | Comments (0)
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December 21, 2007
Friday Recap
Happy, Friday, happy people!
The BC office is abuzz with excitement today. Why? Because Santa came and visited and there were presents to open and delicious treats to enjoy! I knew you guys wouldn’t believe that Santa took time out of his busy schedule to visit us, so I made sure I got some pictures. [Excuse me? Who got pictures? --Susan] Here are a couple. You can see the rest on the Bruce Clay, Inc. Flickr Page.
Barry Schwartz was first to inform me that it was snowing over at Ask. Snow! I heart snow.
NBC5 in Dallas/Fort Worth compiled a list of The Most Annoying Christmas Songs of All Time. Typically I enjoy these sorts of things very much, but what crazy person added Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree to that list? Blasphemy? Not only is that a superb Christmas song, it’s also the best part of Home Alone.
While we’re talking about lists, eMomsAtHome created a list of the 10 Most Influential Dads in the Blogosphere, including familiar faces like Jeremy Schoemaker, Darren Rowse and Scoble. Best of all, the list comes with pictures of babies! Yay for babies.
Another list: 11 “Don’t-Tell-The-Wife” Secrets Men Keep. Number 9 is my favorite.
A big thanks to the always dreamy Pat Sexton who brought the Fish ‘n Flush to my attention. Now when I go to conferences, I’ll just leave the bathroom door open and the kitties will have food for a week!
The BBC reported on a giant rat found in a remote area of New Guinea. According to the article, Uber Rat is five times the size of rats commonly found in most New York apartment buildings. Gross.
WebProNews continued its quest for a Pulitzer with an expose on the methods people use to end relationships. Fifteen percent of people say they’ve had a relationship ended via text message. I suppose that’s better than 4 percent who’ve had their partner mysteriously disappear. People are freaks.
Worst Idea Ever: Having the cops pull people over good drivers and award them with Starbucks gift cards. Also, isn’t that illegal?
Dear Macy’s, people shop online to avoid standing in line and dealing with people. Please get your site fixed. Kthx. Love, the Internets.
Joe Peacock had me in giggles with his story about espresso beans. [I wouldn't have survived school without chocolate covered espresso beans. --Susan]
Here are some pics of Nintendo NES-influenced weddings. My all time favorite has to be the one with the guy wearing the power glove. That’s just an amazing amount of awesome right there. [I like the ninja attack. Everything is better with ninjas. --Susan]
Yoda pizza is extra delicious, but not as delicious as a bacon flowchart.
Things I Learned From Boing Boing This Week:
- Bad things happen when a man loses his glasses at the car wash.
- If the stress of the holidays is becoming too much, why not try laughter yoga?
- No! Don’t put the baby in the blender. Bad. Stop it!
- A heartwarming photo of a crocodile carrying around a severed arm in his mouth.
Programming Note: We’ll be closing down the offices for the next week due to the holidays approaching. Make sure you keep an eye on the blog next week for our Ultimate Search Conference series. It’s going to be a blast! And if you need me, too bad. I’ll be in New York. Huzzah!
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/21/07 at 4:43 PM | Comments (1)
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The Cat Post
[Hi. If you’re looking for anything at all search engine optimization-related, you may want to skip this one. There’s no SEO here. Just cats. Bruce, you may also want to look away.]
Susan promised me, and I promised you, that today there would be a cat post. I’ll try and contain my excitement but I’ve been waiting two years for this. Huzzah! [Wait! I didn't say they could have their own post! How did we get to one post when I said one picture? I blame Matt Cutts for this. --Susan] Quiet. We’re talking about my cats.
Here, I want you to meet my babies.
This is Swat.
She’s the older of my kitties and is what most would affectionately call “a lap cat”. Like an infant, Swat cries at you until you pick her up and shower her with love and affection. Careful, though. When Swat gets overly excited, she’ll try to bite your face. Chins are her favorite.
This is my Jack Jack.
Jack is my sweet, sweet baby who escapes through windows, darts out doors, gets trapped in the fridge and breaks things in his spare time. Now that he’s learned how to open up cabinets, nothing in the apartment is safe. Don’t tell Swat, but Jack and I have secret morning cuddle sessions where his purrs reach jackhammer levels. I would never admit to having a “favorite”, but if I did, it’d be him. Isn’t that right, Jack Jack?
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/21/07 at 11:21 AM | Comments (5)
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Best Conference Ever
Today we’re announcing the best conference of the year. It’s Bruce Clay Inc.’s Ultimate Search Conference and it’s happening next week! [It might just be the greatest con of the year. --Susan]
Don’t worry, for the Ultimate Search Conference 2007, you won’t have to take time off work, shell out money for airfare or even sell your unborn child for a room at the Wynn. You just have to tune into the Bruce Clay blog all next week.
We’ve attended and liveblogged an amazing number of conferences this year, covering everything under the blogging and Internet marketing umbrella. With all these conferences under our belt, we thought it’d be fun to take a look back at the best Internet marketing conference sessions of 2007 and compile our favorites into our own virtual Ultimate Search Conference. So, that’s what we did.
On Monday, December 24, the Ultimate Search Conference will kick off with four tracks, 16 sessions and 2 keynotes each day. The fun will last four days (Friday is the traditional “networking” part with all the alcohol; feel free to get your drink on at home) and will include sessions pulled from the SES, SMX, PubCon, BlogWorld and WordCamp conference series. Only the best sessions with the best speakers have made it into our virtual show. Each morning, we’ll be posting a daily agenda to help you navigate through that day’s scheduled panels. We’ve also included Top Track Takeaways in with each agenda to help you get the most out of your virtual conference experience.
If you want a sneak peak at what sessions we’ll be offering, check out the full at-a-glance agenda. Pretty sexy, eh?
Damn straight! And make sure to check out the Lisa’s Top Picks track taking place on Thursday. Shockingly, that’s a list of some of my favorite sessions from the entire year.
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Date/Time |
SEO for N00bs |
PPC Basics |
Social Media Overview |
Branding 101 |
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Day 1: Monday, December 24, 2007 |
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9:00am – 9:45am |
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10:00am-11:00am |
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11:00am-12:00pm |
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12:00-1:30pm |
Lunch |
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1:30pm-2:30pm |
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2:30pm-3:30pm |
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3:30pm-4:00pm |
Afternoon Break |
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4:00pm-5pm |
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Date/Time |
SEO Design |
Understanding Analytics |
Intermediate SEO |
Paid Search Bootcamp |
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Day 2: Tuesday, December 25, 2007 |
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9:00am – 9:45am |
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10:00am-11:00am |
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11:00am-12:00pm |
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12:00-1:30pm |
Lunch |
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1:30pm-2:30pm |
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2:30pm-3:30pm |
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3:30pm-4:00pm |
Afternoon Break |
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4:00pm-5pm |
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Date/Time |
Social Media 2.0 |
Advanced SEO |
Advanced PPC |
SEO/SEM Issues |
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Day 3: Wednesday, December 26, 2007 |
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9:00am – 9:45am |
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10:00am-11:00am |
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11:00am-12:00pm |
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12:00-1:30pm |
Lunch |
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1:30pm-2:30pm |
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2:30pm-3:30pm |
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3:30pm-4:00pm |
Afternoon Break |
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4:00pm-5pm |
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Date/Time |
Blogs, Vlogs & Automobiles |
A-List Blogger Training |
SEO Survival Tips |
Lisa’s Top Picks |
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Day 4: Thursday, December 27, 2007 |
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9:00am – 9:45am |
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10:00am-11:00am |
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11:00am-12:00pm |
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12:00-1:30pm |
Lunch |
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1:30pm-2:30pm |
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2:30pm-3:30pm |
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3:30pm-4:00pm |
Afternoon Break |
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4:00pm-5pm |
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Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/21/07 at 9:00 AM | Comments (5)
See more entries in SEM Events, UltimateSearchConference07
December 18, 2007
Do Your Customers Know You Exist?
Check out the pretty pie chart and you tell me if you were surprised.
That’s right, a recent NPD Group study found that 73 percent of the 600 Internet users surveyed had no idea that Google Docs or other Web-based office suites even existed.
See, that’s not good. Because, as really smart and experienced marketers will tell you, in order for people to buy or use your product, they need to actually know about it. I know; it’s a complicated principle but try hard to wrap your head around it if you can.
I’ve read some commentary on the study and I’m hearing a lot about how Web-based office suites need to come with bar codes and be packaged better if anyone is going to give Microsoft a run for their money. That’s all well and good, but truthfully, I’m not at all interested in that. I was more intrigued by this from a brand perspective. I mean, how bad do you and your promotional abilities have to suck for 73 percent of users not even to have heard of you? Granted, the study was based off a very small sampling of Web users and may not be 100 percent representative of the current market, but still. That’s an alarming number.
One of the reasons mainstream users don’t know about Google Docs is because Google hasn’t done much to promote it. They have a habit of throwing stuff out there to see if it sticks, and then if it shows signs of life, they’ll go back, clean it up and make a more public launch. If you’re Google, you can afford to do that. If you’re anyone other than Google, you can’t.
I think it’s important for businesses to realize that regardless of what product or service you’re trying to launch, it’s your audience who will decide whether or not it will be successful. You can give it all the bells and whistles and upgrades in the world. If it doesn’t meet their needs and get them excited, you’re not going to go anywhere. It’s your job as a marketer to get them excited. And I think that’s a process that starts long before the product is even released.
Research Your Audience: Your first step in all this is to research your audience. Know who they are, know what kinds of advertising they respond to, know where they hang out online, know what they’re doing offline, know what problems their facing. You should be able to identify how the product will work inside your brand and in your community.
Use Email Newsletters To Build Buzz: Yes, it’s very 1990s, but it works. If you’re getting ready to launch a new product, make sure your audience knows about it. Once the product is in stable development and there’s little chance of the whole thing being scratched, start talking to your customers about it and get the buzz going. Don’t wait until launch and then spring it on them. The earlier you bring them into the development process, the more connected they’ll feel to the product and your company, and the stronger brand evangelist they’ll be. If you’re creating an email newsletter, you may also find it beneficial to create separate newsletters for different customer types, which can be grouped by demographics or purchasing authority. If you have a company blog, you’ll obviously also want to build buzz there.
Target The Loudmouths: Who are the people most vocal about your industry and company? Identify them and make sure they know what you’re working on. This group doesn’t necessarily have to be the early adopters or biggest bloggers. If your company has a strong community around it, reach out to the community leaders. Advanced publicity and promotion can be the deciding factor in whether your product succeeds or fails.
Put Someone In Charge: If I’ve only learned one thing in my short working life, it’s that a leaderless project will fail. Someone has to be in charge of keeping everyone on task and getting things off the To-Do list and onto the Completed list. Dedicate a Web promotions person or team to reach out and get the conversation going. Sometimes this one little thing makes all the difference in the world.
Post Launch Email: You’ve researched, you’ve launched, you’ve promoted—but did anyone notice? Send a post-launch email to help gauge customer feedback and reactions. It will give you the opportunity to see what worked and what didn’t, while also allowing you to put out fires that may have sparked.
Unless you’re Google, you can’t afford to launch products and then realize after the fact that no one noticed. Be pro-active enough to take to take the steps necessary to get your product in your customers eyesight from the very beginning and keep it there.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/18/07 at 2:16 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Branding
December 14, 2007
Friday Recap
Hey, hey!
If you’re following my Twitter feed (and for that, I’m sorry), you may be aware that we had a slight crisis here this morning. Well, I just wanted to let you know that it has been handled. Eventually Susan and I were able to find someone to procure us with some donuts and things were okay again. It was pretty rough for a moment there, though. Susan was beside herself. Here, I shot a video of her. Scary. [That is the second time you've used that cat to make a joke about me. Get new material, Barone. --Susan] Yes, but it’s the first time I’ve used it on the blog. The last time it was on Twitter!
First off, some search engine optimization humor courtesy of Richard Ball. Head over to Richard’s site and check out the sweet Meta tags Burger King is touting for their Whopper Freakout campaign. Hot.
GSINC is running a fun charity contest. You vote for the five people you think were the most influential in search this year and the winner receives $500 to donate to the charity of their choosing. Finally, a vanity contest where everyone wins! Go vote and help spread the love.
Xfep.com compiled a list of 15 Amazing Women in Blogging. The list includes faces like Gina Trapani, Dooce, Lorelle VanFossen, Liz Strauss, Wendy Piersall, and many more. Check it out.
I’m not sure why this sent me into giggles, but Dave Rohrer felt the need to rant this week about grounding children and how today’s youth will someday regret the mischievous photos and videos they’re uploading onto the Internet. Wow. I never realize how old and cranky Dave was. :)
Here’s some important information for the SEO men and Rae Hoffman to enjoy: A list of where you can go to watch NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL games online.
Singing and dancing dimpled 7-year-olds are supposed to be cute, right? So then why is little Anthony terrifying? [Make him stop winking at me! --Susan]
As if surgery wasn’t scary enough, the Consumerist tell us that 1,500 patients have surgical objects accidentally left inside them every year. Fifteen hundred!
Nathan Weinberg opened up his feed reader and found my biggest nightmare. Luckily, it was only a glitch. Otherwise, OMG, feed overload!
I know Matt McGee thinks user-generated content is the best thing since sliced bread for small businesses, but what happens when you allow users to submit reviews and they use that area to write love sonnets about the Bic pen?
Airport security told a nice German man that he couldn’t bring his liter of vodka on the plane with him. What did he do? Oh yeah, he drank it. All of it. He was then rushed to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. Dude, just get a drink on the plane!
Priced at just $40, can you afford NOT to have the Pedal Exerciser under your desk? I don’t think so. Also, that reminds me: People, please take the time to double check your URLs to make sure you’re not misspelling important keywords. What’s a “pedla”?
In what is probably Wikipedia’s greatest accomplishment ever, a 16-year-old boy used the site to pass through enough security checkpoints to almost get him a personal meeting with President Bush. Unfortunately for him he ended up meeting with the local police instead. You win some, you lose some.
In case you were wondering, it is possible to have too many cats. They’re like giant cockroaches. Oh, and some people have really sick senses of humor. Sounds like something Susan would do. Poor, Tom.
To continue our cat theme, here are some signs you’re having a bad day.
Some lessons learned from watching Judge Judy. I wish I knew about that co-signing a lease thing last year. I’d be a few thousand dollars richer right now!
Things I Learned From Boing Boing This Week:
- Cops are helping thieves locate cars filled with holiday goodies for easier stealing. What? That’s totally what they’re doing.
- W00t is officially a word. [W00t! --Susan]
- A vibrating bracelet that alerts me of an incoming phone call? Now that’s jewelry I’d actually wear.
- And I thought my little brother had big ears.
- Crème-filled bananas? Why even bother with the banana? Just stuff your face into a vat of marshmallow already.
- The Atlantis space shuttle was attacked by a giant spider. Do not want!
Big Announcement: Matt, are you listening? Due to popular demand, next week’s end of the year Friday Recap will include photos of my Jack Jack and my Swat. It’s taken two years to finally break down Susan, but we’ve done it! Huzzah! [I said one photo, that's it. --Susan] No way! You said I could display both cats. You never said they had to share a photo.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/14/07 at 3:37 PM | Comments (5)
See more entries in Fun Stuff
December 13, 2007
Competitive Search Engine Optimization
One of the objectives we lay out in our SEO training course is that to be successful in search engine optimization and earn your rankings, you have to make yourself equal to, and then ultimately better than, your competition. I think is a pretty logical goal. If you want to rank higher than your competition and get your site seen by users, it makes sense that you would have to better than they are, right? Right!
But there’s a learning process involved. You can’t be better than your competition without knowing who they are, what they offer and what’s important to them. For that, you have to do a little digging.
I had the chance to attend last week’s Competitive Intelligence session during PubCon. Overall, the session was great and I came away with a lot of super information. However, you may remember that I was just a touch uncomfortable when one of the speakers began advocating techniques that would leave me unable to sleep for a week, things like staging phone calls to the significant others of your competition in order to find dirt. As a result, I thought I’d present my own list of angelic ways to keep tabs on your competition.
Go Digging for Holes!
What’s the easiest way to be better than your competition? Fill up all those holes they’re unknowingly leaving behind. And you don’t need to go stalking ex-employees to do that, that’s why the Internet was invented--so that one day we would have the Google. And Ask.com! Whatever your engine of choice (coughAskcough), go conduct some searches and set up news alerts for your competition. Read what people (customers, the media, niche bloggers, etc) are saying about them, what they’re up to and what the conversation around them is like.
Once you have your data, use it! For example, maybe consumers are complaining that your competition, a vintage clothes seller, doesn’t carry enough merchandise for the 20s. Or maybe someone left an angry review because there wasn’t a book on how to get the perfect ‘20s bob in the entire store (Sorry. Our ‘20s-themed holiday party is approaching.) Competitive intelligence is a great way to find new product or service, offering opportunities to win over customers your competition is neglecting.
Or maybe the conversation has nothing to do with products and everything to do with the complicated nature of your competition’s Web site or how their customer service department sucks. If that’s the case, highlight how easy to navigate your Web site is or include customer testimonials touting how helpful your staff is. Help the alienated users of your competition find a new home with you.
Identify Where Their Rankings Are Coming From
There are tons of competitive intelligence tools on the market for search engine optimization. Some are useful and others just throw lots of data at you without really explaining what it means. Here are just a handful of my favorite tools:
- SpyFu: If you want most of the good stuff you’re going to have to subscribe, but even the free version gives you some good nuggets. SpyFu is a fun tool that allows you to input the URL of a competitor and find out their daily ad spend, if they own any other domains, how many sub domains they have, what their average PPC position is, who their top organic competition is, and what they’re ranking for. It’s also a good way to find out which terms your competition has dropped out of their PPC campaign due to poor performance or other reasons.
- Copernic: Allows you to track changes to your competitor’s Web site. Why is this useful? It gives you a glimpse into your competitor’s mind and a hint at where their business is going, what they’re focusing on and if there are any surprises from them in store. For example, maybe they just got rid of all the information regarding their consulting services. Could they be downsizing? Is there trouble in paradise? Or instead, maybe they just added a section about the new consulting services they’re starting which will put them in direct competition with you! You may also find that they dropped a whole section of content for keywords that weren’t converting or that they’re hiring a new blended search intern. Lots of goldmines can be uncovered just by monitoring your competitors’ Web sites.
- SEOToolSet’s Competitive Research Tool: There are a lot of great tools inside our SEOToolSet, but our Competitive Research Tool will tell you your top competitors across all the major search engines, how many pages they have indexed, how many inbound links, etc. To can combine these results with data generated by our other search engine optimization tools to get an in-depth keyword analysis of each top-ranking Web site, and comparative link analysis & comparative keyword analysis of your top competition.
- Yahoo! Site Explorer: If you want to know why your competitors are ranking above you, the first thing you should do is take a look at their links. Yahoo Site Explorer will not only tell you who’s linking to them, but it will give you the links in order of importance.
- Trellian’s Competitive Intelligence Services: Trellian has made a full launch into the competitive intelligence space to help users improve their search engine optimization efforts. One of the tools at your disposal is the Search Term Intelligence Tool that shows search marketers exactly what terms their competitors are targeting. There are lots of tools out there that will help you do that (HitWise, AdGooRoo, KeyCompete, etc), or you can do it by hand, but I find Trellian to be the most user-friendly and intuitive. Whatever tool you want to use is fine with us, but use something! You absolutely must be aware of what keywords your competition is targeting, which ones they’ve forgotten about that you can capitalize on, where you can capitalize on geographic terms, etc.
If you haven’t really played around in the field of competitive intelligence, it’s time to start. I’d recommend outlining what it is you’re looking for before you start and then using a series of different tools so that you can capitalize on the strengths of each. Doing so should allow you to stay abreast of your competitors’ movements without making you sacrifice your soul in the process.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/13/07 at 4:10 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in SEO, Search Engine Optimization
December 12, 2007
Scrolling Ads, Word of Mouth, Email Spam & Fun Stuff
Scrolling AdSense Ads? Why Not a Ticker?
News broke today that Google is testing a new scrolling ad format that allows users to scroll through ads by using little up and down or left and right arrows. gSpy has screenshots and a video detailing how the whole thing works. Go check it out and then come back (don’t forget to come back!).
Good? Sweet.
I just have a question for Google. What planet are you living on that you think people want to scroll through ads? Fine, some people don’t mind ads and will click on one when it seems unusually relevant or interesting. But that’s very different than having users manually click on more ads. Why would they search through ads when they have a fresh search results page staring them in the face? I’m just not sure how successful this is going to be.
It would be interesting to get some numbers on how many click-throughs the “See More Ads” link that Google places at the bottom of AdSense text ads get. Does that button see much traffic? My guess would be that no, it does not.
I get that Google is always looking for ways to increase advertising and encourage people to interact with ads. However, I’d much rather see them do what Quigo was doing where there’s a block of ads and then every few seconds one ad drops off and a fresh one comes on. At least that does a good job of attracting eyeballs thanks to the slow movement. Also, it allows Quigo to run more ads without relying on users to take any type of additional action. To me, that makes much more sense. Or maybe they already do that and I just haven’t seen it?
Do People Care About Blogger Opinion?
The findings of a soon-to-be published study are said to prove that old fashioned word of mouth is more effective than having the backing of “highly-connected influencers” like bloggers.
I was suckered in by the title but, unfortunately for me, the little press teaser contains no actual statistics or data to back up that assertion in any way. It would interesting to know what criteria they used to come to this conclusion. Did they ask people who they trust more, their friends or Robert Scoble? Did they track how quickly information was passed along? Or did they test how many people heard about X from Y and then converted in some way? I’m hoping it was something more in line with the last option.
It makes sense that people would trust their friends and family more than Jason Calacanis or Mark Cuban, and therefore be more inclined to convert. I’d still like to see some data on how exactly the study was conducted. I guess I have to check out this month’s edition of the Journal of Advertising Research. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be online.
Really, though, all this “study” does is prove what we already know – that consumers trust information more when they hear it from someone they know. Good. Take that information and design your product to make your customers happy, all of them, not just the elite. Pamper everyone. Ask for feedback from everyone. Make every opinion count. Do that and you should have no problem gaining some positive word of mouth, regardless of who it’s coming from.
All Email Is Spam!
Okay, maybe not all, but according to Barracuda Networks, as much as 90-95 percent of email is spammy and it doesn’t look like that number is going to die down any time soon. Yikes! The Barracuda Networks study is said to be based on an analysis of more than 1 billion daily e-mail messages sent to its 50,000+ customers worldwide.
Can that really be true? Is 95 percent of your email spam or is Barracuda, “a leader in email and Web security” trying to be sensational for their own good? I’m not sure. It’s worth nothing, though, that Symantec estimates the amount of spam to be more like 71 percent, which seems considerably more likely.
What does your inbox look like? Once you take out all the Twitter notifications and Facebook friend requests, is there anything left?
Fun Finds
Scott Karp explains why he stopped using Twitter. And then the blogosphere went nuts. W00t!
A super, super post from Chris Garrett on How to Generate Post Ideas When You Are Stuck. This post is filled with great stuff!
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/12/07 at 2:54 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Blogging, Branding, Email, Pay-Per-Click, SEO, Search Engine Optimization
Practical Tips To Lift Your Conversion Rate
Hey, guys! I didn’t get nearly enough liveblogging last week, so I thought I’d sit in on this morning’s (or afternoon, depending on where you live) MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook seminar. Something about sitting in on the Multivariate Testing and Conversion Tweaking session last week has me dreaming about landing pages. And chocolate. However, the chocolate dreaming is a pretty natural occurrence for me. I don’t think it had anything to do with last week’s session.
Okay, enough of my rambling, we’re starting.
With us today are Marketo VP of Marketing John Miller, MarketingSherpa Research Director Stefan Tornquist and MarketingSherpa Senior Analyst Tim McAtee. We’re going to be covering findings from MarketingSherpa’s recently updated Landing Page Handbook.
We’re told that the data included in the handbook was gathered from surveys of 4,213 marketers, 3500+ consumers, lab tests and partners research, ‘best of’ research from 650+ third party organizations and 800+ Sherpa case studies.
What kinds of landing pages work best? Below is a screenshot of some of the top tests:
Tim and Stefan go through examples of the different types of landing page tests you can do.
- Dynamic Search Copy: We’re shown a B2C example for a site selling music equipment. They adapted their search page to reiterate what users typed into the search box (“you searched for: Stratocaster guitar on Google”) and increased conversions 48 percent. It’s so simple but it orients the user back to their search. It tells them, “hey, this is relevant content for the search you conducted”.
- Registration From Tests: Your marketing doesn’t end when someone gets to the form. So many organizations do a great job getting customers into the conversion funnel, but then they abandon them with a bad form. There is no golden rule for how many questions to put on a form. Sometimes it makes sense to have a lengthy form, for other business it doesn’t work well. The more complex the question, the greater degree of invalidity.
When you ask people about budget or the number of employees in their organization, over 50 percent of people said they don’t give accurate answers. Most of the time it’s because they don’t know the information yet, not because they want to lie to you. If you require those questions you’ll get bad data and get more people abandoning the process.
Stefans shares that 22 percent of those surveyed said they still have a “reset” button on their form sitting next to the “submit” button. There is no good reason to have this button! People will hit it accidentally, get frustrated, and then leave. You find this legacy programming a lot on B2B sites.
- Creative Elements: As a creative rule of thumb, make eyeflow easier. Anything you can do to simplify and clarify a landing page will produce better results, unless you’re serving Asian countries.
- Eyeflow and Columns: Most people use 1-2 columns on email ads and search landing pages. You want as few columns as possible. The more columns you have, the harder it is for the human eye to consume your content. The panelists noted that landing pages coming from an email ad are typically simpler and easier to read than landing pages found via search. Often times what happens is that people who come from email ads are going to a very specific page that was designed to be a landing page. That’s not always the case with search. It’s not as coherent. What makes a landing page effective is its focus around a single topic.
- Eyeflow and Typeface: Conversions require more than hip graphics. Your designer may think white text on a black background works well, but your customers will be rubbing their eyes. Verdana 10pt is the most popular font/size combination on the Web even though it’s too small for most people over 40 to read. Make sure your text is black and hyperlinks are blue, otherwise people will have a hard time reading your copy.
- Eyeflow and Buttons: Don’t say “submit” say “add to shopping basket”. Don’t say “click here” say “click here to buy X”. The bigger the item is, the most likely it is to get clicked and to get eyeballs. If someone stands across the room and can’t read the button, it’s too small. You want it to be obvious what you want users to do.
- Organic Search Landings Optimized: Most users (79 percent) who search organically end up on your interior pages, not your home page. You have to be aware of where people are coming into your site.
- Redesign for Mobile: We’re shown the Secrets of Success home page to see how it looks on the PC Web vs. the Mobile Web. Who’s on the mobile Web? The corporate executives who are taking the time they spend in airports and in limos and putting it towards work use. They’re looking through their shortlist of vendors and accessing the sites from their mobile phone. If you make it hard for them to view your site, they’re going to lose interest and move on to one of your competitors. You don’t need to have a mobile campaign, but you do need to worry that your key audience can make sense of your page on mobile devices.
If you can do nothing else, budget for analytics and testing:
- 48 percent of those surveyed say they don’t do any A/B testing.
- 40 percent only test at launch and leave forever.
- 16 percent don’t share test results with agency.
And the scariest data point of them all: 18 percent of those surveyed said that no one even knows their landing page results. Yikes.
Tip: Measure landing pages based on final KPIs, not interim clicks. They mention the SEOmoz landing page contest and how they went about finding their new Premium Service landing page. Found that the long, scroll forever page got less clicks but higher conversions. You have to look at the second stage metrics.
From here, Stefan and Tim take a look at some user-submitted landing pages and basically pick them apart. I’ll share the important stuff that may be applicable your site.
- Test your landing pages, but don’t over test. Having too many test versions means it will take a long time to get anything even remotely looking like accurate results.
- Don’t pass a lead to sales before it’s ready. Manage your leads:
- Score leads so you know who’s ready for sales
- Nurture leads that aren’t yet ready.
- Hand leads to sales at the right time, with value-added information.
- Modify programs as new requirements are found.
- Don’t use a lot of extraneous navigation. You don’t want to distract people from the primary action.
- Place important content, including your action items, above the fold.
- Include multiple points of contact.
- Lay off the long URLs.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/12/07 at 12:23 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in SEO, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization
December 11, 2007
AskEraser, Yahoo Increases Support & A Facebook Upgrade
Ask Gives Users Control With AskEraser
There's lots of buzz today regarding Ask.com’s launch of AskEraser, a new (and very welcome) feature will allow Ask.com users to search anonymously.
If you head over to Ask.com right now (you know you want to) you’ll see a link for AskEraser in the top right hand navigation. Clicking on that link will allow you to activate the feature.
Once enabled, AskEraser will no longer keep track of your search queries or the information related to them. They won’t keep any reference to things like your IP address, User IDs, Session IDs or the actual text used for the query. Unless you go ahead and manually disable it, Ask will hold on to this setting for 24 months.
It’s probably worth noting that when AskEraser is enabled, you won’t have access to personalization options like the fancy home page skins or your MyStuff. So, if you’re a big personalization junkie or emotionally attached to your MySTuff folder, you may or may not want to activate this feature. It’s a decision every surfer must make for themselves: What is more important – search with pretty trees in the background or protecting your privacy on the Web?
Andy Beal exhibited just a touch of Susan’s killjoy mentality when he asked “what’s the difference” considering Ask.com holds only 5 percent of the market share? It’s a valid question. Clearly, the announcement would have more pizzazz if it was Google making it, but the fact is, Google hasn’t made it. Neither Google, nor Yahoo, nor MSN, has agreed to give users the kind of privacy control as Ask.com has. And that’s both notable and worthy of praise. And of course, now that Ask.com has stepped up to the place, it somewhat pushes the hand of Google and the rest of the engines to do the same.
On the other side of the coin, Seth Godin makes a good argument that searchers don’t truly care about privacy. It’s worth a read.
Yahoo Adds Support for X-Robots Tag Directive
I’m a little slow to report this one, but my BFF Tamar made sure I saw the news that Yahoo is now supporting four types of exclusion tags in the robots.txt file. The four new additions are: [drum roll please]
- X-Robots-Tag: NOINDEX -- If you don't want to show the URL in the Yahoo! Search results.
- X-Robots-Tag: NOARCHIVE -- If you don't want to display cache link in the search results page.
- X-Robots-Tag: NOSNIPPET -- If you don't want to display summary in the search results page.
- X-Robots-Tag: NOFOLLOW -- If you don't want Yahoo! to crawl links in the page.
Still Searching for Tamar Palgon on Facebook?
Well, if you are, you may actually find her now! Keri Morgret let the world know via Twitter that Facebook is now allowing users to offer up an alternative or maiden name to make it easier for users to search for them. To offer up an alternate name, head over the Relationship section of your profile information and enter it in.
A quick search for [Tamar Palgon], the unmarried version of our own Tamar Weinberg, shows it's already working.
Yey for the married people! [I wonder if this would also work for nicknames. Can I put in “The Lisa”?]
Share Your Gmail Story
If you’ve logged into Gmail recently and see the link to Share Your Story, you may be wondering what that’s all about. Bigmouthmedia tells us that Google, along with One Laptop Per Child and UNICEF, has launched the new Stories platform as a way for people around world to share their stories about their experiences using the Internet.
You can learn more about how to get involved by visiting Google’s Stories portal page or reading through the Google Groups thread.
Fun Finds
The SEO 2.0 blog created a chart to illustrate the differences between traditional search engine optimization and SEO in the 2.0 world. Is it on point?
Nathan Weinberg shows us how to make a holiday card with any YouTube video. My favorite YouTube video of all time will always be the mom singing on the beach to Boyz II Men. What’s yours?
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/11/07 at 2:22 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Search Engine Optimization
December 10, 2007
Weekend Update
Should You Be Marketing On YouTube?
While a good number of us were misbehaving in Las Vegas and/or Chicago, there was an important discussion taking place on my email list of choice, LED Digest. The question at hand was whether or not search marketers should be using YouTube to reach their audience.
If your audience is ingesting video, then yes, you should absolutely be using YouTube to connect with them and gain visibility. Just because you’re on YouTube doesn’t mean you’re posting videos of yourself falling down the stairs (email me those privately). You can be smart about it. As David Spahr commented in the thread, if you’re a company that sells tea, create a video demonstrating how you brew the perfect cup. There are plenty of ways to make YouTube work for you. It’s also worth noting that even if you put videos on your site, it may also be beneficial for you to upload them onto YouTube as well. It’s no secret that Google and YouTube are BFFs.
I read four days of LED comments on the topics, but it was marketer Jesper Brantberg’s comments that really made me stop in my tracks. Jesper wrote:
“Well, NO! If you run a legitimate business I think your business can be damaged if you try to "sell" your products on YouTube. YouTube is not a serious way to do business. I personally would never buy something from an "ad" shown on YouTube.”
Reading that over, I guess I somewhat agree with Jesper. I don’t believe that marketers should use YouTube as a way to “sell”. YouTube should be used the same way you use your blog. Use it as a way to interact with your audience and connect with them in their environment. Video’s allow marketers to provide step-by-step tutorials, brand themselves in a new way, and humanize their persona. This is not your chance to record a sleazy commercial with big “Buy Now” logos or suddenly get really pitchy. Use your video to complement the content on your site and then direct users in. It’s more a branding and informational channel than a sales tool.
Embeddable Charts from Google
Today is one of those days when I wish I was nerdier than I actually am. Google has released a new Google Charts API to help users embed pretty charts right into their Web pages. I was going to create a fun chart that shows how my level of awesomeness compares to Susan’s (it’s way bigger), but alas, I am unable to figure out the system. Maybe someone can do it for me and leave it in the comments!
Anyway, as Search Engine Journal nicely explained to me, the Google Chart API allows users to embed maps by returning a PNG format image for several different types of charts, including line graphs, pie charts, bar charts, Venn diagraphs, and something called a “scatter plot”. For a moment I wished I had paid more attention in Math class so that I would know what all of these things are, but then I remember that Math is useless.
Once you get the magic code string, you can paste it directly onto your page via a tag and, viola! A chart! Fun.
Fun Finds
YouTube opened up its YouTube Partners program to everyone, meaning people may actually make money off those awesome fence plowing videos!
Lee Odden was able to track down, kidnap and tie Adam Audette to a chair long enough to conduct an interview with him. I’m a big fan of Adam so it was great to put the name to the face and listen to him talk about search and LED. Kudos to Lee for making it happen!
Matt McGee provided some great PubCon and SES coverage despite the fact that he wasn’t actually there. Well done, McGee!
A quick journey through Flickr shows me that we were on all the same page in Vegas. Did you see that bathtub? Pure heaven! I woke up 20 min early every day just to enjoy it!
Also, Pat Sexton gave the best PubCon recap ever.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/10/07 at 4:28 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media
Blog Council Demonstrates How NOT to Blog
Right before I left for PubCon last week, I was bombarded with emails asking me what I thought about the new Blog Council that was created (and set up as a dot org) to explore blogging best practices and create policies that corporations can use to help them learn about blogging. I didn’t have time to touch on it then, but I do want to make a few quick comments about it.
I think it’s ridiculous.
And I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks so. In fact, I know that I’m not. Lots of people were quick to realize that this whole thing makes no sense because the creators of the Blog Council have done nothing but trip over their own feet since launch.
I suppose the idea is a noble one: Let’s give executives and corporate bigwigs advice on how to blog. Super. It would be great if these cold corporations learned to be human; however, I don’t think a blog council is the solution to that problem. You can’t ask a group of wannabe elders how to best connect with the people who are important to you. The only person who can tell you how to best use your blog to leverage the power of your users is someone who knows about you and the people you call your audience. I don’t care how many CEOs you stuff on that blog council, if they haven’t been able to figure out this blogging thing for themselves, they’re sure as hell not going to be able to help you.
And they haven’t figured it out. In its 4 days of existence, the Blog Council has shown that this blogging thing is completely foreign to them. They’ve set their site up as a blog and yet there’s no way to interact with them via comments, the trackback numbers are off, and of the two posts they have, one is a press release and the other is an FAQ. I’m sorry, but I’m pretty sure that posting a press release is rule number one of what NOT to do on your blog. The FAQ, however, was interesting. This was my favorite part.
6. Will the Blog Council be blogging?Not much. Our job is to provide a community for corporate bloggers. We're not a publisher and we're not promoting a specific point of view. Our members are the ones leading the conversation; our job is to support it. It's less about the Blog Council's voice than helping our members have a stronger voice.
So it’s a blog about blogging with no posts? Oh, this is going to be totally good!
They’ve also already done themselves a great disservice by taking somewhat of an elitist attitude. According the Blog Council Web site, they’re “the community for large companies’ blogs”. I guess those of us who don’t work for a giant corporate can just go back to our corners now. They’re not interested in our opinion. But that’s okay because, as every blogger knows, the blogosphere is all about creating a hierarchy of voices. Yup.
The other major problem with this council of elders approach is that it’s being fronted by people with no track record of blogging success. Getting blogging advice from Coke, which is most famous for its outed flog, is like hiring me to run your SEO campaign. I can spell SEO, I can even blog about it, but that doesn’t mean I know how to do it. We have smart people for that.
During last week’s Search and Blogging Reporters Forum, Andy Beal commented that he found it irksome when unqualified blogs tried to offer advice on becoming a top notch blogger or monetizing blogs. For me, this feels like the same thing. Hearing companies without successful social media histories try and tell others how to use their blog or develop a list of best practices rubs me the wrong way. Especially when so many were doing just fine without their help.
If you want to learn to blog, abiding by the rules set out by this council isn’t going to help you. You don’t learn to do something by hanging out with others who are just as clueless as you are. You learn by doing and by hanging out with other people who are successful. If you want to learn to blog, read other blogs. Create your own blog council made up of voices that you trust and individuals who have a track record of success.
For me, if the Blog Council wants to be successful they have to do one of two things. Either they have to promote their site as a place for bloggers of all shapes and sizes to have an open discussion about the things important to them or they have to focus solely on enterprise blogging and how its member base of only large corporations can use blogs to foster internal dialogue. That’s the only way I see this site having a chance of surviving and being useful. But what do I know? I’m just a small-time blogger.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/10/07 at 12:23 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Blogging, Branding
December 7, 2007
Friday Recap
Hi.
Are you feeling as tired and nonfunctional today as I am? I hope so. It will make this Recap far more enjoyable for all of us. So will looking at Matt Cutts’ cats. His Ozzie looks identical to my Jack Jack, who also happens to enjoy destroying playing in artificial Christmas trees. I’d post a picture of Jack but Susan won’t let me. She doesn’t have a soul.
With both PubCon and SES Chicago taking place this week, you may be feeling a bit run down. Perhaps you’re exhausted from reading all the blog coverage, maybe you lost some money at the tables, maybe you were “networking” too hard or maybe you’re just burnt out from all the mad scootering you did. Either way, don’t let yourself get down. You’re still great. We’re all great. Right, Ze?
Feel better? Yeah, me neither. Maybe I’d be feeling better if I'd gone to SES instead of PubCon. They got snow. Snow makes everything better. Snow is made of magic and fairies. [Lies. --Susan] It’s true. I read it on the Internet!
Lee Odden was at PubCon and snapped a cute picture of the adorable Robin Liss. But let’s face it, it’s really my Ask.com bag that’s the star of that picture, don’t you think? Or maybe it’s Michael Gray’s innocent face.
Michael from Solo SEO put together a list of the best schwag from PubCon 2007. Somehow the famed Bruce Clay tangle made it on the list. I was personally a fan of the digital dice and the funky T-shirts handed out by Sure Hits.
Just a note, if I were you, I’d stay away from Barry Schwartz. Birds seem to drop dead around him. That can’t be a good sign.
Evan Carmichael posted the top 50 SEO posts of the year. Ironically enough, it seems most of the posts he mentioned weren’t actually from 2007. Also, I had no idea that Bruce wrote The Lisa’s Problem With Wikipedia Explained. You would think he would have written about his own problem instead of stealing mine! :)
Problogger outlined the 7 Unhealthy Eating Habits of Unproductive Bloggers which perfectly illustrates why I have gained 50lbs over my two year stint as a blogger. However, the post failed to mention the badness that occurs when you hit up the buffet at the Bellagio and eat your weight in seafood and desserts. Not that I would know anything about that.
The makers of this scale are awesome. Not because they aim to give you your weight in terms of an animal, but because they don’t hide the fact that unless you live in Ireland or Europe, you’re just the “rest of the world” to them.
These people have way too much time, and paint, on their hands.
That is one rebellious bird. You show them, dude!
I thought Tamar had a big mouth, but this guy totally trumps her. She still probably has more schwag though.
Proof that beer is divine. If you turn up your speakers, you can hear the angels in the background.
Susan and I made paper snowflakes when we decorated the office for Christmas. We were pretty excited by our awesomeness. Then we saw these 3D snowflakes. We suck at life.
Life Lesson #983: Be on your best behavior during the holiday season or your parents will sell your Christmas gifts on eBay. Ouch.
The first rule of the slap fight: Make sure everyone knows the rules of the slap fight. Otherwise, you may get a roundhouse kick to the face.
Things I Learned From BoingBoing Today This Week:
- They make ghost towels for those too lazy to cut holes in cloth.
- A chart to help you detect lies on the Internet.
- Feet don’t just come in sizes, they also come in backwards.
- Wikipedia now comes in an edible form.
- A new way to power your Christmas tree.
Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 7/07 at 3:59 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Fun Stuff
December 6, 2007
Word of Mouth Marketing
Brett Tabke and I rush over next door for the next session (and my last for the day. Lisa and I planned on covering them all but our flight home wouldn't allow it. Bummer.) Anyway, the last session of my Pubcon experience has speakers Louise Rijk, Advanced Media Productions, Inc. and Greg Hartnett, Best of The Web here to talk about how to market via Word of Mouth, hereafter WOM.
Louise Rijk is up first and she'll walk us through what WOM is. Much of what she'll cover is related to social media.
WOM marketing definition: It's the oldest form of marketing. WOM is the act of consumers providing honet information to other consumers. It's driven by influencers with large social networks. Organic WOM is when people naturally talk about something because they're happy about it. If you've got satisfied customers, they're going to talk about it. Good customer feedback helps with WOM. Amplified WOM is when marketers launch campaigns to accelerate the spread of WOM. Social media today allows you to build communities around your brand. You can motivate the right people and they'll become your evangelists. You can use advertising to create a buzz as well. Black Friday is advertising that also spreads via WOM.
How does WOM marketing work? It happens when people are given a reason to talk about a product or service, online or off. It's driven by customer satisfaction, two-way dialogue and transparency.
Online conversations include using tools to spread ideas about products and services through social networks. It's growing.
WOM marketing is based on the principles of influencers to spread a message. People think that online WOM marketing is inexpensive but it really isn't. The success of a campaign is how many people you reach, not how many convert.
How do you recruit influencers? 10 percent of the influencers are the power influencers who reach a lot of people. 90 percent of the rest of the people are moderate influencers. They reach fewer people but there are more of them. You shouldn't ignore that part of the market.
There are four steps that influencers go through: Awarenss research personal experience recommendations
Start by listening online about what people are saying about your product in order to get the unfiltered experiences. There are listening services that will do that for you as well. BuzzLogic is one of them and it returns actionable items for you. [This is similar to brand management research.]
Don’t forget to tap into your in house customer service. You can find your loyal customers that way and reach out to them.
Develop or create something that gives people something to talk about. Target the authority influencers first and their communities. Honesty is key, you have to be part of the community and engage it.
Differences in Social Media Marketing: it's an aspect of WOM marketing. It's online only unlike WOMM which is only 15-20 percent online. It can spread by itself instead of relying on influencers. Not always brand relevant. Message must be outrageous instead of just having a great product that inspires excitement.
Major brand marketers are moving from testing WOMM to including it into fully integrated marketing campaigns.
A WOM campaign generates more online buzz when supported by traditional paid media buys. Greater paid media spend equals greater online buzz. 64 percent of moderate influencers do online research after seeing offline promotions but only 30 percent will transition in the reverse. TV is still a good way to reach influencers but even that is fragmented.
Integration of WOMM and traditional advertising requires extensive planning, integrated execution and comprehensive effectiveness measurement. It's not a one time fix, you can't just send out a single press release and call it a day. You have to stick with it.
I wish she would leave her slides up longer. I can't get more than half of them down.
Reaching the Influencers:
Identify
Motivate
Sustain motivation
Track and Measure
She describes a campaign they created for one of their clients. They started with a free offer as a motivation then started in the social media sites including Flickr and YouTube. They looked out for other influencers as well, bloggers in the space, etc.
They selected 50 influencers and then asked them to complete some other step in order to pass the buzz along--blogs, photo projects in Flickr and videos to YouTube.
It's a matter of carrying through the whole process in order to make an impact.
Greg Hartnett says they basically built the company by WOM and so he's going to use them as a case study. You know why I like case studies? We don't blog them. I'll just take out a couple highlights where it doesn't overlap with Louise's.
He recommends reading Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz and Creating Customer Evangelists by Ben McConnell.
Who are your influencers/happy talkers? Happy customers, online talkers, sweet swag (the people wearing your t-shirts or grabbing things from your booth. Note: Some of them are just swag junkies), eager employees, fans or hobbyists, professionals.
What will they talk about?
- Have a Great Product or Service. Think of Google--they grew entirely by WOM.
- Specials or Discounts.
- Extraordinary Customer Service -- turn that frown upside down.
- Partnering with a Charity.
How do you get them talking?
- Ask for the referral
- Newsletters/Email -- anything that you ever do through WOM you should have an email for
- The Social Network effect
- Blogs
- The power of swag
Don’t put a big cartoony logo on your shirt, try to put something on there that people will actually want to wear. Try to be cool and edgy without being offensive.
He likes Google's Blog search to monitor what people are saying. I have no idea why since it sort of sucks. Has he not ever seen Ask's? He also mentions Technorati. No argument there.
You have to take part in the conversation. There is probably nothing more important than honesty and transparency. If you're in the forums, you need to help, not deliver hype. No one wants to hear what you have to say if your post ends with a pitch.
Have your own blog but also have someone empowered to go out and comment on other industry blogs. Taking part in the overall conversation is important.
Ultimately it's about having happy customers. Focus on it 100 percent. Lead your team by example with respect and ethics. Send thank yous to people. Under promise and over deliver. Make a habit of going above and beyond.
Brett tells us that our name tag holders turn into sunglasses holders. Okay then.
No Q&A, I think everyone is too tired for questions.
And that's it for me! Thanks everyone for reading. We'll be home tomorrow and Lisa will give us some kind of Friday Recap...probably.
Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 6/07 at 4:03 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Blogging, Branding, SEM Events, Social Media, pubcon07
Startup Costs – Getting in the Video Game
We heard in the brand management session that it's important to get into video, so what does that take? Now that another delicious boxed lunch has been consumed, it's time to find out. Brett Tabke pulls double duty here as moderator and panelist alongside Robin Liss of Camcorderinfo.com and Michael McDonald of iEntry Inc.
Brett jumps right in by asking Mike how they got into video.
Mike says they saw an opportunity to jump right in and be a forerunner. Pubcon last year was their first big event that they did video for. Some of their big hurdles were format, resolution, platform, how to imbed and what content management system to use.
It was a lot of trial and error to decide on all those elements. You have to think about what the most common, most popular formats are and try to offer those. You also need to think about offering them in multiple sizes for different connection speeds. He says it was easier for us to figure out how we could embed them on our own and then allow other people to do the same. We wanted it to be easy for someone we interviewed to be able to put it on his site as well. It's more of a branding thing.
It's been commerically viable in terms of paying for itself and putting it on at shows. Google is a big sponsor of conference coverage. It hasn't paid for itself in terms of office space and equipment, however.
They have approximately 6 full time video people. He notes that it's nice to be able to use your designers to supplement your video content, so it's not just two guys sitting there talking. Designers are handy for helping them look dynamic and interesting. They edit using Sony Vegas 8 because 7 doesn't work with Vista (it did a few weeks ago, but doesn't anymore.)
Okay, Robin's turn.
Their number one rule is that it's got to be interesting. Video is an illustrated medium, you need to use video to illustrate things. Three minutes of someone talking isn't interesting. They use video as a marketing tool, as a content piece--they don't sell ads on the videos very much. They do direct sells but mostly they do contextual ads.
They've been doing videos for seven or eight years now. Because the site (CamcorderInfo.com) was about camcorders, they wanted to use videos to show it. They started out using Flash and now they're using YouTube.
She takes a quick poll on how many people have camcorders and how old they are then quickly disclaimers that her recommendations are editorial based and not ads.
CamcorderInfo.com is, in her opinion, a must read. She started it 11 years ago and they do lab testing for their reviews. As she mentioned before, all their reviews are editorial based and not paid for by the manufacturers (though they do sell ads to them.)
Robin notes that the reality is that almost any entry level camcorder is going to be good enough for the internet. If you have a limited budget, $7-800, use about half for accessories. You probably won't need the performance if you're going to be doing Web content because the compression factor is going to ruin it anyway.
You're looking for video and low light performance. In fact, you want low light performance, low light performance, low light performance. The average room is DARK for a camcorder. There's no standardized measure so you're doing to have to look at reviews.
A lot of people are moving toward HD right now and she doesn't think you need it yet. Again, the compression on the Web is such that you're going to be paying for quality that you just never see.
When you're making video online, audio is more important than video. It's the number one mistake that people make. AUDIO is half the equation. People will sit through shaky video but they'll leave if it's terrible audio. So many people just buy the camcorder and shoot something. But if you can't hear something, you're not going to keep watching. People will put up with a shaky or grainy picture but not poor audio.
Manual control is very important as well. Once you really get into making videos, you're going to want to have more control over all the options.
Handling--you don't want your videos to shake. As much as it's tempting to buy your camcorder online, you need to go handle the camera and hold it in your hand. When you're holding two or three lbs out for ten minutes, you're going to need something comfortable.
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