Will All You Learned About SEO Be Worthless?

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Search_LightLast week, Google changed the rules of Web search with a relatively low-key innovation that I expect will permeate the search engine giant’s future strategy.

Google Social Search is an experimental program that integrates content from a user’s social network into search results. When enabled, the first page of Google search results includes a few links at the bottom to related content from a member’s social network. Google derives this information from the profiles people build when creating a Google account. It also taps into other Google tools to make assumptions about what’s important to a member.

For example, if you subscribe to blogs in Google Reader, the search engine now presumes that that content is important to you and elevates it in search results.

Social Search continues Google’s efforts – which began with a year ago with SearchWiki – to customize the search process. SearchWiki enables logged-in users to shuffle their own search results, promoting some and demoting or eliminating others. Users can also annotate their search results. Social Search goes one step further, and it’s a big step. The search engine now makes assumptions about your interests based upon your friends network.

This has tremendous utility. If I want to find a steakhouse in Dallas, I can now see recommendations from my friends directly in my search results. Google already annotates some commercial results with reviews it gathers from online review sites. It’s a small step to expect that I’ll soon be able to promote my friends’ reviews to the top of the heap.

Social Web

Last week, I had the chance to discuss these developments with Mike Moran, whose book, Search Engine Marketing, Inc., remains one of my favorite texts for understanding the Internet. I proposed to Mike that Google’s ambition was to make the entire Internet a social network. His response was that they’re already mostly there.

In his analysis, Google is extending the customization features of SearchWiki to now include input from trusted third parties. According to a post by SMR Digital, we’re already at the point where no two registered Google users see the same results for most of their queries. And this is just the beginning. For better or for worse, Google knows a lot more about our online behavior than it uses.

For people like myself who regularly use Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Documents, the company is now in a position to capture a great deal of information about what I do online because it can peek inside most of the written content I create. The obvious privacy issues aside (and I’m not a believer in Big Brother), this puts Google in a position to evolve its search strategy in a much more customized direction. Google can only go so far before the “creepiness” factor sets in, but there’s still plenty of runway to experiment in making the search experience more personal.

Search Party

For marketers, this has interesting implications. Many of us are now comfortable with the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) but what will we do when every user’s search results are unique? We could be looking at a future in which search engine performance is determined as much by opinions from people online as it is by page titles and domain names. Although inbound links already factor into Google’s search results, the relationship of the people doing the linking to the person doing the searching will be a new variable. Seo.Services itself may become a social pursuit.

Don’t underestimate the value of social search. Compete.com estimates that search.twitter.com attracted nearly 3,000,000 unique visitors in September. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to Google, but it’s up 550% year-over-year. Now that Twitter has a deal with Microsoft to deliver its search results over Bing (and speculation is that a deal with Google will follow) we are likely to see more creative efforts to integrate social content.Three years from now, the SEO tactics we’ve work so hard to learn may seem quaint indeed.

Useful Guide to Social Media ROI

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Here’s a clever and instructive slide presentation from Olivier Blanchard about how to calculate the ROI of social media efforts. It’s fairly simple but effective is getting beyond the popular but ultimately pointless process of tracking followers and friends. Olivier suggests a way to overlay that information on financial data to yield genuine insights.

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

Big Blue’s Social Media Numbers

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From yesterday’s BtoB magazine NetMarketing Breakfast in New York, here are some facts and figures from Adam Christensen, Social Media Communications Manager at IBM, about Big Blue’s use of social media tools:

  • Internal blogs: 17,000
  • Members of the Beehive social network: 60,000
  • Daily page views on IBM’s internal wiki: 1,000,000
  • Participants in its four Innovation Jams: 500,000
  • IBMers on Twitter: 3,000
  • IBMers on Facebook: 52,000
  • IBMers on LinkedIn: 198,000

For a company with 400,000 employees, those numbers are pretty impressive. They’re all the more remarkable when you consider that, 20 years ago, IBM had one of the most buttoned down command-and-control cultures of any company on the planet.

Adam works on strategy and standards for IBM’s global social media activities. Follow him on Twitter.

Brand Marketing Due for a Makeover

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LuckiesAs corporate marketers dive headlong into the annual ordeal known as the annual budgeting cycle, Forrester Research has released an interesting new report that challenges some assumptions about brand management. It costs $499, so see if you can borrow a copy from a friend. This summary will give you the high points.

The October 9 report is entitled “Adaptive Brand Marketing,” but that’s really a fancy term for “turn on a dime marketing.” Author Lisa Bradner attacks several traditional assumptions about brand marketing. They include the notion that any individual can orchestrate all of the channels needed to deliver message, the primacy of channels over customers and the belief that just a few core messages are sufficient  to communicate value.

Those simple concepts are becoming almost quaint today as channels of communication are fragmenting, customers are self organizing into affinity groups and the cost of switching continues to decline. Customers increasingly want direct contact with and influence upon the products they use. They are no longer satisfied to be spoken to as a mass; they want messages that address their individual needs. If they don’t get this, Bradner explains, they’re quick to take their business elsewhere. She quotes Forrester research showing that for consumer packaged goods, more than 80% of consumers now indicate a willingness to switch from their regular brand of product to a private-label alternative. The recession is no doubt pushing that trend along.

Start With the Customer

“Adaptive Brand marketing starts with the environment — customers and a deep understanding of their needs and behaviors — and then designs the most appropriate channel mix for engagement,” she writes in a sentence that nicely sums up the thrust of this research. “Spending and planning decisions are daily — not annual — events.”

As a longtime media professional, I found that last comment particularly meaningful. The end of the year is typically a time when media salespeople go into overdrive trying to get their events, supplements and special projects on their clients’ advertising schedules. This sometimes means trying to convince somebody in November that they should spend money on a marketing program that won’t run until the following September. The idea that anyone can predict their needs that far in advance was always a little silly. Today it’s downright ludicrous.

The Forrester report proposes a new model for brand marketing that embodies an iterative approach to planning. Frequent testing guides message development and the best ideas are funded almost instantly. It also suggests that analytics based upon the massive amount of data we can now collect about customers’ online behavior should guide tactics, not hunches and experience. In fact, the report is critical of the whole idea that past experience counts for much of anything. Rapid shifts in behavior driven by constant customer conversation have created an environment that changes too quickly.

Bradner concludes that the four P’s of brand management (product, price, promotion, place) will be replaced by four new Ps: permission, proximity, perception and participation. In a nutshell, this means that brand marketers will need to request permission to speak to their customers, listen and respond with customized messages and invite customers to collaborate on product evolution. She also suggests that the term “brand manager” is outmoded because no individual can coordinate all the necessary market conversations. She argues instead for brand advocates who live close to their markets and constantly experiment with new messages.

The timing of the research was a bit ironic coming, coming out the week after a PRWeek and MS&L survey reported that 70% of marketers say they have never made a change to their products or marketing campaigns based on consumer feedback on social media sites. Perhaps this is because we’re still early in the evolution of these new media, but with blogging now well into its fifth year of hyper growth, it seems odd that marketing pros should be taking so long to get the message.

I came upon this research in the course of an ongoing discussion with a household-name consumer goods company with which I work. The marketers there were quite taken with its conclusions, and this is the type of company that leads entire markets in new directions. We shouldn’t underestimate the scope of change that Adaptive Brand Marketing would require. On the plus side, we wouldn’t spend each November frantically assembling annual marketing budgets. But we would have to learn to live in a world of nearly constant change in plans and priorities. Welcome to the new reality of 21st century business.

Odd Concept

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Last night I attended the public launch of Book of Odds, a website that fulfills a need that I’m not sure exists with an operating model that’s reminiscent of the early days of the Web.

Book of Odds is about the likelihoods of everyday life. It can tell you, for example, that the odds that a white female will die from an accidental drug overdose in a year are one in 25,360 or that a major league baseball player hits for the cycle about as often as a pitcher throws a no-hitter.

Book of Odds logoInteresting stuff, and if Book of Odds were a doctoral thesis, I’d say bravo. But this is a company with a significant investment behind it. “For the past three years, away from the eyes of the world, we have logged over 50 man-years to produce what we believe is the missing dictionary,” wrote president and founder Amram Shapiro in an invitation to the event.

Fifty man-years is at least a $2 million investment by my calculation. It has produced an impressive resource that is unfortunately built on a top-down model that is rapidly passing from the earth. Book of Odds’ more than 100,000 statistics are the work of “talented researchers from top universities,” according to the FAQ page. Whereas most Web startups today are built on a crowdsourced or do-it-yourself model, Book of Odds has opted to make decisions about what it believes visitors need to know.

It has also invested in dozens of original articles created by professional writers who presumably don’t work for glory. There’s a staff, offices and the company is hiring. Who’s paying for all this?

That’s not clear. Book of Odds is privately funded. Marketing manager Ian Stanczyk told me the business is based on advertising and sales of branded merchandise. For example, you can have any odds statement emblazoned on a t-shirt. Assuming the venture has already burned through at least $3 million in startup costs, it’s going to need to sell a lot of t-shirts. Meanwhile, ad-based business models are a tougher sell than media stocks these days amid the glut of inventory.

Will They Come?

Equally baffling to me is the question of where the audience will come from. Book of Odds has some interesting information, but little that I would call essential or even compelling. Deriving value from its more than 100,000 statements requires an appreciation of the contextual and predictive value of statistics. I suspect that only a tiny percentage of the mathematically challenged American public will be up to the task.

I asked Stanczyk what market research the company had done to establish a need for its service. He couldn’t cite any, but he noted, “How many times have you asked yourself, ‘What are the odds of that?’” To be honest, not that often, and when I have, I’ve rarely felt an urge to rush to the computer to find out.

There’s no question that we need more tools to understand the statistics that continually assault us. A resource that mined public databases to create context from raw numbers could have great value. I would think that 50 man-years invested in building such a tool could yield something really useful. I’m not sure that Book of Odds is it.

I don’t mean to be too hard on the company, and I’ve certainly been wrong before. After all, I thought Meetup was a dumb idea when I first heard it. There is clearly passion behind Book of Odds, and the company’s About and FAQ pages suggest an almost academic rigor to its mission. The founders have created an impressive public resource that they’re giving away for free and they deserve our gratitude.

But the media geek in me says that this is a newspaper launching in an age of blogs, a 1999 business started a decade too late. The company will have to overcome big challenges to become a viable business. Fortunately, its staff is well-equipped to calculate the odds.

How to Host a Great Podcast

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MurrowA few weeks ago I shared some tips on being an effective podcast guest, but what about handling the other end of the microphone? Having recorded several hundred podcasts over the last three years, I’ve learned from my mistakes and you can, too.

There is actually little difference between podcasting and talk radio, but there’s a big difference between any kind of audio recording format and ordinary conversation. Most podcasts take the form of a Q&A interview with an expert guest. If you’re the host, here are some tips to keep in mind:

Prepare, prepare, prepare. The goal of the interview should be to make both parties sound good. The more time the host puts into understanding the topic and the expertise of the person being interviewed, the smoother things will go. It’s even better when the host can share interview questions in advance with the subject. That way, there’s no awkward fumbling while the guest comes up with an answer to an unexpected question.

Use the right technology. This is huge. Many people record podcasts using conference services such as Free Conference Call. While these are great for calls — and you certainly can’t beat the price — the quality of the recording sounds like, well, a conference call.

The best way to record an interview is in person using a digital audio recorder. If you can’t record in person, I recommend recording the call using a computer with a VOIP service like Skype. Any of the talk services from Google, Yahoo, AOL and others will work just as well.

If both parties are using VOIP and decent quality headsets with microphones, the conversation will sound almost as good as if the two of you were in the same room. Even if only one party is on Skype, the sound quality is still superior to that of a phone call. A key variable is to use a headset and microphone instead of the standard telephone handset. Companies like Logitech make headsets that deliver very good quality for as little as $30.

If you’re using a VOIP service, inexpensive software like Pamela, MX Skype Recorder and PowerGramo can record both sides of the conversation on separate tracks with outstanding quality. Gizmo is an open source option, but I don’t like the recording features as much as the commercial alternatives.

Dana GillinFor editing, Dana (my wife and expert podcast editor, at right) and I use the open-source Audacity software. Other free or inexpensive options include GoldWave, WavePad, Wavosaur and GarageBand (here’s a tutorial on how to use GarageBand).

Make yourself scarce. Your goal as a moderator is to make your subject sound good. Limit your presence in the program to an introduction, questions and occasional comments on the subject’s answers. Unless the interview is really about you, don’t spend a lot of time telling personal anecdotes or restating what the subject said. Guide the conversation but don’t try to dominate it.

Make it a conversation. We’ve listened to too many podcasts in which the host was clearly reading a list of questions. In one of our favorites, the host habitually follows up each guest’s answer by saying, “Excellent.” It’s as if he’s relieved that the answer was completed successfully!

An interview is a conversation, not an exercise. Listen to what your subject says and be ready to follow up on an interesting comment. If the new direction causes a break in the conversation, stop and do it over. You can always fix interruptions in the editing stage.

Avoid yes/no questions. You want your subject to tell stories and expound upon opinions. Avoid questions that force the person to deliver simple answers. A good tactic: start questions with phrases like “Tell us about,” “What do you think about?” and “Give us examples of…” In other words, force your subject to go into detail.

Limit length. While I don’t like to give absolute guidelines for the optimal length of any podcast, 15 to 20 minutes is considered about the norm. If your guest is searingly interesting, let the tape roll, but in general, keep an eye on the clock. Avoid letting answers go beyond about 90 seconds.

Do it over. The beauty of digital recording is that bits are free. If you don’t like the answer your guest gives you, don’t hesitate to record it again. And again, if necessary. Guests will appreciate the extra attention you give to helping them sound their best.

Remember the ID3 tags. Doug Kaye of IT Conversations gave us this advice three years ago, and it’s some of the best we ever received. Most search engines can’t index audio, so your great work is invisible to them unless you fill out the ID3 tags. This is simply a text description of your program, but it’s very important because it’s the only means that search engines have to understand what you’re talking about.

If you want to shortcut this learning curve, contact us about our PodcastNOW! service. We deliver high-quality podcasts without all the trial and error. We also provide training services that can get you up to speed quickly. Dana can even turn you into an Audacity expert in no time using a screen share.

Ending the Hype: A Panel Discussion

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I was delighted to participate in a panel with  Jason Falls, C.C. Chapman, Chris Brogan, Brian Solis and Mike Lewis at the Inbound Marketing Summit last week.  Here’s the full 37-minute panel. It got pretty heated at a couple of points. This group is passionate about discarding old assumptions.

If the video below doesn’t play for you, click here to view it on the Visible Gains site.

E-mail Do’s and Don’ts

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As I write this essay, the founder of Email Data Source is telling the audience at the Inbound Marketing Summit, that email marketing has a return on investment of 44:1. I believe that, and Bill McCloskey’s words remind me that it’s been a while since I sang the praises of this venerable but highly useful marketing tool.

E-mail should be central to your online marketing plan. It’s how you turn casual passersby into steady customers. It gives you permission on a regular basis to contact your constituents. It’s your best tool for driving website traffic and business results.

As a practitioner of e-mail marketing going back nearly a decade, I’ve learned a few simple do’s and don’ts. Fortunately, there aren’t a lot of rules. The most important ones are to be useful and to respect the access that your subscribers have granted you.

Do give visitors to your websites every chance to subscribe to your e-mails. Put a signup form on every page. If you can manage it, squeeze a promo into your e-mail signature. Remember, a Web contact is casual but an e-mail subscription is a relationship.

Do give your subscribers special treatment. Offer them exclusive offers and discounts. Some software companies now give newsletter publishers free promotional licenses to products that are one release out of date. Look for these offers and ask if you can adapt them for your subscribers.

Do use an e-mail service provider. I use iContact, but there are many others, including Constant Contact, Benchmark Email and Lyris. There are even free options. For a nominal cost, you’ll get reporting, tracking and list management you’d never be able to duplicate yourself.

Don’t deceive your subscribers. If you tell them they’re signing up for a newsletter, don’t send them promotional messages. If you say you won’t contact them more than once a month, then don’t do that. Monitor your unsubscribes. If a lot of people are leaving, they’re trying to tell you something.

Do provide a Web version of your newsletter. Mine is here. This makes it easy for people to share your content on social bookmarking sites, Twitter and Facebook. It also makes you discoverable by search engines. Finally, it’s a way for people to respond to you.

Which reminds me: do invite response to that Web version you just created. Email is boring when it’s one way. Start a discussion.

Do sweat the subject line. Make it provocative or intriguing. However, don’t mislead people into opening the newsletter if you can’t deliver the goods.

Do keep messages brief and varied. Provide several “points of entry” to engage your audience’s different interests. Have fun. The most well-read item in my newsletter is the short “Just for Fun” blurb at the end. Do you think I don’t know that?

Do provide alternative delivery in text format. All service providers support this option. Not all subscribers prefer HTML and they shouldn’t have it forced on them.

Don’t add subscribers without their permission. There’s nothing wrong with renting an opt-in list, but scraping addresses off websites or borrowing other people’s lists can get you in legal trouble.

Don’t underestimate the value of e-mail marketing. This newsletter consumes three to four hours of my time every week. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think it was important.

Going Totally Random With Twitter

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The most frequent criticism of Twitter that I hear is that the service is a waste of time. It’s all about people telling the world what they had for breakfast or how long they’ve been waiting for a bus. Don’t we have better things to do?

I decided to try a short experiment. I clipped a 100-tweet block from my Twitter stream at random and examined the contents to see just how much useful content there was, if any.

A little background first: I follow about 1,150 people and I prune my list with some care. If someone’s tweets are completely irrelevant to my interests, I unfollow that person. I only follow people who interest me or who send me a personal request asking me to follow them. That weeds out the spammers and bots.

Here are my results

  • 42% of the tweets were what I’d call random. These were mostly along the lines of what people had for breakfast or ongoing conversations I hadn’t followed.
  • 12% contained news of general interest (BTW, Twitter has been one of the best places to monitor the ongoing news of the Samoan tsunami this week).
  • 33% were referral links to information that the writer found interesting.
  • 7% were notable quotes.
  • 6% were either self-promotional messages or requests for advice.

Two statistics interested me in particular. One was that 45% of the tweets contained a link. This indicates that Twitter is used at least as much to point friends to interesting information as it is to comment on everyday activities. After all, you can’t link to what you had for breakfast. The other is that at least 20 of the tweets interested me enough that I wanted to learn more.

This wasn’t the kind of reading I would find on a typical news website. Here’s a sampling:

It isn’t CNN.com, but then I don’t use Twitter for the same reason I use CNN. The bottom line is that the 4 1/2 minutes it took me to read 100 tweets yielded at least 20 items of interest. There are other places on the Web where I could consume more information in less time, but it’s a different kind of information. It’s not less valuable, just different.

Newspaper and magazine editors often complain that the rise of customized news services has shortchanged readers by removing the element of discovery that a printed publication delivers. However, the Twitter stream and Facebook news feed deliver just as much surprise and delight as any professional media entity, if not more. The only difference: the recommendations come from people I know instead of professional editors.

It turns out that avid Web users are just as interested in discovery as print readers. It’s just that they’ve found a faster, less intrusive, more personal and more ecologically friendly way to go about it. Is it any wonder mainstream media is dying?

Tweet Your Way to Luxury

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Desert Springs JW Marriott ResortThe Desert Springs JW Marriott Resort & Spa, in Palm Desert, Calif. has a clever Twitter-based promotion starting tomorrow. They call it “Tweet to Retreat,” and it requires followers on Twitter to answer a daily question about the resort to be entered in a drawing for a luxury three-day getaway package.

You don’t have to be a hotel guest to enter. All answers can be found on the resort website. Questions range “from the ingredients in the Angel Kiss cocktail at Oasis Bar & Grille (hint, hint), to the number of rooms at the hotel,” the press release says. Not sure what the (hint, hint) is all about. The release on the website also mysteriously leaves out the detail that you can find answers to the questions elsewhere on the site. That information was only contained in the release sent by e-mail.

Anyway, the hotel has only 280 followers as of this morning, so your chances should be pretty good if you make it a point to check out the daily questions. The prize: “A three-night stay at the resort, including: dinner at Ristorante Tuscany and Mikado Japanese Steakhouse, daily breakfast at LakeView, four 60-minute spa treatments, a VIP table at Costas nightclub, and a choice of tennis or golf lessons for two.” I’m there!