Category Archives: search

Recommended Reading 11/11/08

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@dunkindonuts joins @starbucks in the Twittersphere

Looks like a battle to the death (with two shots of amaretto, no froth in the milk).

Wall Street Grows Bearish On Online Ad Market

J.P.Morgan slashes its outlook for the second time in two months. While it still sees growth in online spending, display advertising is flat and all other categories will be down from 2008.

Interactive Ad Spending Will Top Out in 2009: Report

Looks like a rough year ahead for ad spending of all kinds. Print and broadcast will take the biggest hit, but even most categories of online ad spending will stay flat or fall, according to Borrell Associates.

People Search Engines Gain Sophistication

Emerging services act as a nexis point for information about individuals. New services scrape content from around the Web and increasingly mine public databases to enhance profiles. Quoting:

  • People search engine Spock is working on a service that will give users access to public records stored in public databases across the Web. The service, scheduled to launch mid-January, will have a $1.99 monthly service fee. Subscribers will gain access to links and data mined from government and municipally databases such as mortgage brokers and courthouses, as well as social network pages at MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.

BusinessWeek Rounds Up Twitter Wannabes

Yammer is a microblogging service for enterprises that lets companies create private discussion groups. Blip.fm attaches music clips to short messages. Zannel attaches photos. Seesmic adds video-sharing. “Twitter co-founder Biz Stone expects the site’s user base to grow 10 times its current size in the next 12 months.”

Capturing social media success in a bottle

Gary Vaynerchuk grabbed national visibility with a video series about wine. Now he’s dispensing social media advice. Quoting from the piece: “Companies go into social media half pregnant,” he says. “They want to be involved, but don’t want to put in the time to be authentic and real and execute properly.” What else is on his technology-loving radar? “I am very high on Twitter and Ustream, and I think Seesmic has a dark horse chance to be extremely important,” he says.

Is YouTube the right pipeline for you?

Examples of recent social media campaigns. Quotes from the article:

  • Amazon MP3 is a simple concept — Twitter users simply sign up to Amazon MP3, which sends alerts about special MP3 download deals and includes a link where they can take immediate action. The model appears almost too simple, but since its launch, more than 5,700 people have signed up for this quick and easy direct connection with a global brand.

  • Fiserv launched a Facebook application called MyMoney that lets users search, join and manage funds from their credit union account from their profile pages. To leverage Facebook’s viral capabilities, every person who adds the MyMoney widget then alerts their friends, which creates a powerful, self-propelled ripple effect.

  • Coca-Cola recently released a Facebook application for its brand Burn. The application allows users to create a customizable virtual avatar and then “go out,” either with existing friends or new ones. The next day, users can check their avatar’s blog to see what went down the night before.The application recently crossed 150,000 installs with more than 85,000 users active on a monthly basis.

  • Liberty Mutual transformed a one-way conversation broadcast on TV into a site that features a blog and video, all designed to get people to take a more active role in their community — all while interacting with the Liberty Mutual brand.

Great (Media) Depression Looms

Diane Mermigas paints a gloomy picture for ad spending, saying no one really knows how deep the recession will be or how long it will last. Using Disney’s recent dour earnings report, she predicts continuing broad declines in mainstream advertising spending and a dramatic slowdown in online ad growth. Quoting Mary Meeker: “The best way to counter the unknown depth and breadth of the recession is to persevere; master the mobile Internet, learn how to monetize social networks, create a cogent business model, get a foothold in emerging markets and provide digital consumers with value.”

LinkedIn and Reid Hoffman: Recession Ready – BusinessWeek

BusinessWeek profiles Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and one of the most successful investors in Silicon Valley. His advice to startups: it’s all about financing. Get your hands on the money first and then worry about developing the product. Many Web 2.0 startups won’t make it through the coming downturn, he says. Assume that those who do have a long-term value proposition.

Quoting from the article:

  • Recent casualties: Music site Social.FM, travel site TripHub, and news site Thoof have closed their doors.Seesmic, a Web video company, laid off 7 of its 21 employees in October.

  • Hoffman’s advice to entrepreneurs is hard-boiled pragmatism. Hoffman urges them to focus first on financing—and only later to hone a product or service. He describes the launch of a company as a sea crossing. The financing rounds are islands, where each venture can replenish its provisions. The goal of the product strategy is to carry them to the islands. In short, it’s the financing, not the products, that keeps them alive

Cell phones part of traffic monitoring network

Your cell phone can now be turned into a transciever that tracks the speed of traffic. When merged with data from thousands of other cell phones, municipalities can create real-time maps of traffic conditions and alert drivers of routes to avoid. This is experimental at this point. Developers say the whole thing is anonymous and that no one will be able to track your route or speed. The software can be downloaded for free.

Search Is the New Circulation

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From my weekly newsletter. Sign up in the subscription box to the right.

Recently, I had the chance to speak to two classes of junior and senior public relations majors at Boston-area colleges about changes in the media landscape. I find these sessions to be as enlightening to me as they are to the students because I learn a lot about their preferences and motivations.

With the accelerating collapse of the newspaper industry fresh in my mind, I was particularly interested to understand their news reading habits. “How many of you have read a daily newspaper either in print or online within the past day?” I asked. Nearly every one of the 45 hands in the two classes went up. “How many of you subscribe to a daily newspaper?” I followed up. Only one student raised her hand.

Welcome to Generation Y, the group of people born in the last 30 years who define the future of business and media. Every one of the students in these classes has grown up in a world where information is free and instantly available. The concept of paying for news is as foreign to them as the horse and buggy.

These students will enter the workforce over the next five years and they will shake our assumptions to the core. While they have some brand loyalty, their real affiliation is to information.

What do I mean by that? Well, if you’re like most communications professionals, you probably subscribe to several Google Alerts. This service e-mails you whenever the terms you specify – such as your name, your company name or a topic that interests you – turns up in Google’s search index.  Google Alerts have no concept of brand.  An article on an obscure website is as likely to top the list as one in The New York Times.  When you use Google Alerts, your loyalty is to the topic, not the source.

If you are a TiVo user, you know that you can subscribe to programs based on actors or even subject matter.  You don’t care which network carries the program; your loyalty is to the content.

These are just two examples of the ways in which attitudes toward media brands are changing.  While trusted sources will always have a special value, we are constantly discovering new sources of trusted information and modifying our assumptions about the value of trust.  For some information, we still want to consult the big media brands in order to get the real story, but for less important information we might be satisfied with any source as long as we get the basic facts.

The great equalizer in this equation is search.  Computers have no brand loyalty and search engines are tuned to deliver the results that best match our queries, even if the source is unknown to us.  Search is, in effect, the new circulation.  In the pre-Internet days, we gave publishers permission to get a slice of our attention for a one-year period.  This had great value to the publishers because they could be reasonably certain of a known audience for their products.

In the new world, there is no certainty beyond relevance to the terms that an unknown audience may or may not find interesting.  This is pretty scary if you’re a publisher.

It’s scary for marketers, too.  But it’s also liberating.  Next week I’ll discuss some of the implications of the death of media brand loyalty on our assumptions about marketing and public relations.

What You Probably Don't Know About Links

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I got a press release today from a PR pro whose client has an interesting story to tell.The company makes a security product that combines cellular and global positioning technologies to alert people when valuable items have moved beyond a specified location. This particular pitch told about a customer who had recovered an expensive motorcycle just 20 minutes after it was stolen, thanks to the clever technology.

I have a half-dozen blogs, including one that deals with location-awareness, and I thought this would be a nice item to mention.I searched for the headline on Google, but came up empty.So I contacted the PR person directly. He responded that the press release actually wasn’t posted online anywhere. “It’s a media alert that I distribute to generate press,” he said. “I was definitely not trying to get blog coverage.”

There are a few questionable assumptions in that statement, including the fact that 95 of the top 100 newspapers in America now have blogs. For the purposes of this newsletter, though, I want to address the importance of having a Web copy of anything you send out for media consumption.

Web ≠ Print

chainsThe reason I searched for an online version of the press release was because Web publishing differs from print publishing in some fundamental ways. Look at any prolific blogger and you’ll see that their entries are full of hyperlinks. This practice may look strange to someone who doesn’t write principally for online consumption. Is the blogger being lazy by linking to source material instead of summarizing it?

Actually, quite the opposite is true. The comment-and-link approach leverages the strength of online media to minimize wasted time for the reader and while making the blogger more productive.

To understand this phenomenon, look at the way we used to publish. In the print world, journalists typically have to excerpt or summarize any material they reference because they have no choice. The only way to convey information is to include it in the story. This makes articles longer and creates more work for the reporter, who has to guess what source information is relevant. It also means that good information is more likely to be left on the cutting room floor.

Online, the dynamic is very different. By linking to source material, the writer minimizes the amount of background information that has to be summarized. If the reader wants that information, he or she can click through to the source document. There’s less time spent creating extraneous content and less time spent reading it.

This tactic is a core reason why some bloggers appear to be so prolific. Instead of wasting time reinventing the wheel, they can focus on the most relevant information. You need to understand this practice if you want to play fully in the online publishing world.

Personal Productivity

I personally maintain four blogs — paulgillin.com, joyofgeocaching.com, mediablather.com and newspaperdeathwatch.com – and manage to post to all of them frequently. I use comment-and-link combined with some clever online tools to keep the content up-to-date. For example, if I see something interesting online, I can easily bookmark it, type a brief summary or comment and save everything online. My bookmark service knows to gather up these entries every day and post them to my blog automatically (here’s an example of the result).My time expenditure is minimal and I focus only on the material that I think is most important. For audio or video content, there’s practically no other way to do this.

Marketers who want to incorporate online journalists into their communication plans need to understand this tactic and build it into their strategy.Link-and-comment isn’t a copout or a shortcut.It’s a tactic for minimizing waste. By posting every press release online, you not only make it easier for bloggers to reference the information, but you also make sure it’s you who tells the story and not some third party. Why would you have it any other way?

As for the press release I received earlier today, that company is out of luck. Had the press release been available online, I would have linked to it and recommended it to my readers. But reprint the whole thing? That’s just too much trouble.

Not Optimizing For Search? Shame On You!

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From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

I meet with corporate marketers and their agencies these days, I’m frequently surprised to learn how little they think about search engine optimization. This is despite the fact that Google alone processes an estimated 750 million queries daily, and that IT professionals are some of the most active and advanced users of search engines.

One reason for this, I suspect, is that marketers are trained to be good at “push” marketing. Their craft has traditionally involved intercepting customers with messages that grab their attention and inspire action. Customers, however, are becoming more resistant to these tactics. Increasingly, they engage with companies and products on their terms when they’re ready to make a buying decision. That’s a much better time to reach them. The trick is to show up on their radar when they’re in this “pull” mode.

Google is now the universal homepage. Look at your traffic logs and you’ll probably see that search engines vastly outperform any other referral source. Yet many marketers devote lots of time and money to creating beautiful homepage designs that are rich in animation and graphics. Not only are these pages rarely seen by today’s web site visitors, but images and Flash animations are almost useless at attracting search engine traffic.

Successful IT marketers are learning to reverse the push model. They know that buyers start the research process in a search query box and that the sites that make the first page of results get 10 times the click-throughs of anything else.

The Great Equalizer
You might think search engines favor the big brands, but that’s not the case. Try this: Type “router” into Google and look at the results. Note that only four of the top 25 results are vendor sites. Now type “PC.” Note that the only vendor in the top 10 results — Apple — doesn’t even market its products as PCs! In fact, neither of the top two PC makers in the US market even makes the top 100 results on Google.

Now look at what dominates search results for both terms: sites that provide definitions and helpful how-to advice. This should tell you something. Your search engine performance will be greatest when you deliver content that helps customers make good decisions through practical, impartial guidance from knowledgeable sources.

Search is the great equalizer. The leading engines’ proprietary algorithms are designed to screen out material that their developers consider uninteresting. Your challenge is to match your content to their preferences.

Start by choosing the search terms that really matter. Be specific. Get general agreement that these are the terms you want to dominate in search performance. Marshall all of your internal web site contributors to reinforce those terms every time they write.

Discard terms like “industry-leading” and “innovative.” No one searches for those words. Start a blog or discussion forum. Both are search engine magnets. Pick up a copy of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt. It’ll tell you a lot of the ins and outs. Make SEO a basic consideration in every marketing campaign. Then let those buyers reel you in.

This article originally appeared in Network World’s ITiki newsletter.

Don’t Become an SEO Junkie

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This article originally appeared in BtoB magazine.

Back in my days as an editor at an Internet company, I learned to live and die by traffic. Page views, unique visitors and traffic growth were our gods, and we became very good at driving the numbers.

Too good, in fact. Our editors discovered that there was an assortment of cheats and shortcuts they could use to create traffic spikes. Top 10 lists, stupid customer tricks, contests and “was my face red” anecdotes were guaranteed hits that could ease the constant pressure to achieve number goals.

The problem was that the traffic was junk. Visitors came, but they didn’t stay or register. There was no way to monetize their visits, other than with a few low-cost banner ads. Worse, overindulgence in these tactics made a site look shallow and juvenile, which actually drove away the serious businesspeople we were trying to attract. Most of these practices were eventually discarded.

That experience came to mind recently as my inbox and RSS reader filled up with an assortment of “Best of 2007” collections. Hundreds of these articles dealt with traffic optimization strategies, everything from headline writing to tricks for driving visits from Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com. One blogger posted an impressive 8,500-word list of the top marketing blog posts of the year, most of which dealt with traffic strategies.

A lot of this advice was very good, but I shudder to think that marketers may take it too much to heart. Today, they are at an intersection of opportunity and challenge. Their opportunity is to become content producers on par with the mainstream media that have long been the gatekeepers. The challenge is that the online marketing world still lacks consensus on how to measure online success, but there are companies as indexsy seo agency that can help improve your online results.

With no agreement on metrics, many marketers will fall back to Web site traffic as the gold standard says the CEO of https://placementseo.com/seo-reseller-services. But this puts them at the risk of resorting to gimmickry and sensationalism in order to get attention. When everyone else is shouting, the urge is just to shout louder.

The ever-increasing influence of search and recommendation engines only raises the stakes as Google has become the universal home page, most of those who could really be considered one of the best seo experts right now, would agree that because of this an army of consultants has sprung up to figure out how to beat the system. Marketers that hew too closely to their recommendations risk delivering boatloads of traffic to content that is, well, junk.

It will be years before the industry hammers out a consensus on metrics, so don’t wait. Have a discussion with your leadership about the need to measure success with factors that really count: registrations, repeat visits, sales orders and whatever else affects the bottom line. Make sure your goals and compensation are tied to meaningful results. Learn from the search optimization experts, but don’t let them run your life.

 

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A look ahead at tech PR in 2008

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In the final Tech PR War Stories podcast of 2007, David Strom and I stretch out a little and ruminate on what’s ahead for 2008. Here, in no particular order, are our predictions. It’s going to be another wild year for tech PR, but one in which savvy PR pros can elevate their status with employers and clients:

  • The end of beats at technology publications. Reporters will become more generalized and contract experts will contribute more of the specialized coverage;
  • Fragmentation in coverage of technology; it will come from a variety of sources;
  • Google will buy Second Life and Skype. Paul sees big opportunities for the search giant to leverage those core technologies into franchise businesses;
  • PR pros will have to do a better job at creating meaningful relationships with press. They’ll also have to reach out to unexpected places for coverage;
  • Increasing concerns about privacy in social networks. Facebook’s Beacon was just the tip of the iceberg;
  • The Wall Street Journal will become a free service. Rupert Murdoch has already made it clear that he wants to take the paper in this direction and that will have big implications for tech coverage as the Journal asserts itself as a major online news force;
  • The rise of social search, addressing some of the inherent limitations of search. Mahalo and WikiaSearch are early proofs of concept of an evolution of the search utility;
  • Vendors will increasingly become publishers and will need help from PR people to create useful and interesting content.

Download the podcast here (19:00).

Spock does people search

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Spock debuted yesterday and it looks pretty cool. It’s a search engine for people. Queries return only results about people, and the depth of those results is impressive. I searched on my own name and found a listing with my correct age, a biography snipped from LinkedIn, a photo and tags related to my interests and background. I could claim the bio, if I wanted, and add to it, kind of like a public Facebook profile.

A search on “1967 Red Sox” turned up dozens of mini biographies of players and fans from that year, all with similar elements.

In some ways, the service is like ZoomInfo’s People Search feature, but the two sites are oriented very differently. Spock returns only information about people, whereas ZoomInfo is aimed at business research. I think specialized search is going to be a big business and this is an interesting new entry.

Warning: the site was experiencing a lot of technical problems today and was only sporadically available.