Search and Social Synergy

November 13, 2008 – 5:52 pm

MODERATOR:
Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce, Inc.

PANELISTS:
Mike Grehan, Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media
Adam Lavelle, Chief Strategy Officer, iCrossing
Julie Sun, Senior Manager, SEO, MTV Digital Media
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, SearchEngineLand.com

Here is a quick overview of each speaker and their major points.

Danny Sullivan:

  • Honestly, I didn’t take notes for Danny’s presentation because he said the whole thing would be blogged the next day on Search Engine Land. Well, I couldn’t ever find it. If you can, can you post the link in the comments or email me?

Julie Sun:

  • The Digg community doesn’t typically like big brands (in fact, there can be some ugly backlash if the brand isn’t fully transparent). But is a great place to read feedback. Example:MTV launched a new video site, and some of the immediate feedback was along the lines of, “Oh great. Another video site that doesn’t work outside the US.” In actuality, the site worked just fine outside of the US, and after addressing the issues that led to the problem in the first place, this issue was nipped in the bud.
  • Julie pointed out a potential flaw and/or exploit on Facebook. She said that when you do a Facebook search, the first results page will be whichever one was created first (pizza example). is this true? Does anybody know for sure?
  • Facebook recently opened up their pages (not profile pages) to crawling, so we’ll probably be seeing them show up on the SE’s SERPs more often.
  • Use Yahoo! Answers to get a #1 ranking before your site even launches. I liked this one. Everyone knows that Yahoo! Answers is one big SEO racket, but why not use it as a surrogate for your brand until your site goes live? Good stuff.
  • Don’t blindly jump into a social media marketing campaign just because you have a good idea. Make sure that you have the proper resources before starting. No sense in starting something potentially great that you will have to abandon once it builds steam.
  • Know your goals beforehand. Are you branding? Are you looking for traffic?

Mike Grehan:
This presentation was all about the crossover between search and social media.

  • The communituies will drive the engines. This is the likely future of search.
  • Librarything.com is an excellent example of user-driven search. Check ou its tons of UGC.
  • Mike talked about an example of making a short video that he published to several different video hosting sites. He tagged it in such a way that it would compete with a moderately competetive term (he didn’t say which one). Within 3 days, several of the videos were ranking in the top 10 for that term. The point? Google is obviously listening, and HTML is not the future of content - nor is it what the search engines will eventually be prioritizing.
  • Textbook SEO will disappear completely (nothing new there).
  • DAO: Digital Asset Optimization. This is defines as offsite SEO using social media.
  • Mike claims that the number one source of Google’s information is their toolbar. He didn’t elaborate, but I’m curious to know why. Mike? Are you reading this?
  • He Quoted Andrew Tomkins who suggests that HTTP and HTML will become obsolete.

Adam Levelle:

  • If you think that you are in charge of your own brand, you are not. Eventually, nearly all information about any brand will be UGC. Most will be crap, so the SEs will be in charge of filtration.
  • Case study: The company was able to radically decrease negative sentiment by merely answering questions. Here is a great argument for getting involved. You don’t even have to initiate anything - just answer people’s questions.
  • Clive Thompson of Wired is quoted: “Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system.”
  • Measuring social media is still very difficult. One tactic that Adam tried was to track the links posted and clicks received via every different social media site on which they had activity. He mined the Omniture data in order to do this, and it was horribly tedious.
  • Measuring social media is not the same as ROI.

-Drew

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Mobilizing and Leveraging Consumer Insights

November 12, 2008 – 6:40 pm

Mobilizing and Leveraging Consumer Insights: Best Practices for the Digital and Social Media Age

MODERATOR:
Jeff Flemings, Senior VP, Renaissance Planning, VivaKi

PANELISTS:
Kay Madati, VP, Audience Experience, CNN Worldwide
Michael Lazerow, Chairman and CEO, Buddy Media, Inc.
Jeff Hunter, Innovation Toolkit Director, Cereal Partners Worldwide, General Mills, Inc.
Marc Ruxin, Chief Innovation Officer, Digital, McCann Worldgroup San Francisco
Chris Pan, Head of Brand Solutions, Facebook

Discussion highlights included:

  • CurrentTV’s election coverage that ran a  Twitter feed and a Digg feed below video window.
  • Dont’ try and create something new. pick something you know people will already engage with and center your social media campaign around that.
  • Obviously you have to give people a reason and a chance to engage.
  • Don’t merely set up a SM listening system. Create concrete goals for engaging and make a plan for converting participation (offline or online) into a way to generate revenue.
  • Brand relationship networks (groups of brand enthusiasts) can help you understand why/where to engage and develop new ideas and campaigns.
  • Consumers now have more of a face than ever. Therefore, even though so much of social media is driven by technology, there needs to be a layer on top of that that is driven by emotion.
  • The challenge isn’t finding people but rather learning about them and knowing which content to direct them to.
  • How do you build relationships with consumers? How do you create one-on-one engagement with an ongoing dialogue? If there is a local event, how do you communicate it to the correct people? The quest to answer all of these questions is driving the evolution of a new type of CRM. Can you create or nurture fans that will help you promote your own brands?
  • Any advertiser who is getting involved with any social media space needs to understand the expectations of that space before getting involved.

Take-aways

  • Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day is a must-read for any social media marketer. It’s available for sale at Amazon:
    It was written by Dave Evans of ClickZ, and it came highly recommended from several members of the panel.:

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Obama, Apple and Ice Cream

November 12, 2008 – 5:40 pm

Keynote: Obama, Apple and Ice Cream - Building Brand Passion Among Millennials

This presentation was overseen by Samantha Skey, Executive VP, Strategic Marketing, Alloy Media + Marketing. The focus was on the panel of six “Millenials,” who can be generally defined as people born between 1980-2000. At this presentation, the Millenials were between 18 and 21 years old. Our panel was made up of Carlos, Emily, Dash, Brianna, Joe, and Nicole.

To open the keynote, each panelist was presented with an image of either the infamous Barack Obama “change” poster, the icy-white, beveled Apple logo, or a carton of Ben&Jerry’s ice cream. They were then asked to say the first thing that came to their minds.

The discussion opened, as had already become a trend at ad:tech, with Tuesday’s election. A huge amount of young people turned out to support the campaign. This fact led to a discussion of “Obama-nomics,” which was defined by Ms Skey as…

Obama-nomics: reach (access + utility) = cause adoption

The idea and/or hope is that this method lends itself to development of brand passion. The suggestion is that Obama’s campaign was hugely successful with younger people, so can we leverage the same principles in every-day marketing?

The majority of the presentation was questions being asked of the panel. So I’ll run down some of the more interesting points:

  • The majority of panelists watch their television online via services like Hulu. Exceptions include top favorite shows, breaking news and sporting event. Although most agreed that they use Twitter for the latter two items.
  • If you could only have one gadget, what would it be? Responses were limited to phone, laptop, and iPod. Most responded “phone,” and the reason given was staying in contact with friends and family.
  • Is there anything you think phones shouldn’t do? Most replied “no,” but at least one person suggested that phones are too complicated already.
  • How do you use your phones? Primarily texting, and talking is secondary.
  • What are some of your favorite TV commercials? Target, Subway, Sony Bravia, anything with good dancing and/or choreography, Sonic, NBA, Nike. The most common reasons given for enjoying a commercial were humor and relatability.
  • Where do you notice that you see or watch the most ads? Internet, the subway, on the street, Facebook. Also important are art/aesthetics and any ad that carries a special offer or deal (e.g. free prints at Shutterfly and Snapfish). Most agreed that Facebook ads are probably the most useful because they are so highly targeted and seem unobtrusive.
  • Polls show that 49% of Millenials say that they like the appearance of social responsibility. But this “green” trend carries a risk. There is a backlash against compaines who spend money on “green” campaigns because they are trying to cleanse their reputations as polluters.

At this point, I actually started to feel sort of weird, like I was at a zoo. Here were all of these people in the audience in their 30s, 40s and 50s, and we were all dissecting everything these kids had to say. It made me giggle just a little bit to think that everyone in the room was furiously writing down every last word that these kids uttered.

The discussion turned to a group called “The Reachables.” This group consumes more media than any other group, but ironically, they are the hardest to reach. Here are some stats on The Reachables:

  • Willing to consume advertisements if they accompany content that is cheaper or free than ad-free content.
  • 62% report learning about new and/or popular brands via advertising channels.

The most interesting take-away for me was that we, as advertisers, can learn a lot from Millenials as they shape the future of social interaction. But the panel’s concept of privacy was virtually non-existent. Most expressed dismay about the fact that their personal information or photos could be used by the company that owns the service on which their information appears. They saw it as an invasion of privacy. I guess they’ll be some of my future reputation management clients.

-Drew

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State of the Industry

November 4, 2008 – 11:13 am

The second morning keynote of Ad:tech was a round table discussion with the following:

MODERATOR:
Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Tina Sharkey, Chairman and Global President, BabyCenter LLC
Rob Master, North American Media Director, Unilever US
Rob Norman, CEO, Group M Interaction
David Morris, Chief Client Officer, CBS Interactive

Rob Norman, an agency guy, started the discussion by stressing that the marketing paradigm isn’t shifting; it has already shifted. It’s time to stop talking about how and when the changes in the marketing world will happen because they are already here. So let’s discuss how to take advantage of new media.

Tina Sharkey said that according to her numbers, email marketing is stronger than ever. She made an interesting point that there is too much crap on the web to trudge through, so when somebody can present digested information in the form of an e-newsletter, people are appreciative.

As an SEO (specifically a Link Builder), I didn’t get a whole ton out of this session. Though I did think it was pretty entertaining when Rothenberg referred to the Obama/McCain election as one of the most important of the 20th century.

-Drew

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Couch Potatoes, Thrill Seekers and Citizen Journalists

November 4, 2008 – 10:46 am

The first keynote of the conference was presented by:

Jonathan Klein, President, CNN/U.S.
& Geoff Ramsey, CEO and founder of eMarketer.com

Klein dominated most of the available time with his discussion about bringing traditional media out of the past and into the present by taking full advantage of interactivity, social media, and user generated content. He opened his presentation with a discussion of the “Obama Loses by a Single Vote” viral video campaign that was launched by Moveon.org. This is an example of the next generation of advertising, whereas the “Mad Men” (the AMC drama about ad men on Madison Avenue) paradigm of media-buying is representative of the older generation of marketing.

Using today’s presidential election as an example, Klein broke the voting demographic into the “next gen” voters who are alienated from politics and stay largely independent of political parties, choosing to align themselves with the issues instead. The realization that CNN has made in the recent past is that many 40-50 year olds share these same ideas now. Therefore the question becomes, “:How does a traditional media outlet like CNN survive?” Klein provided several examples of web 2.0/UGC sensibility that has been injected into the CNN brand. Among those, he briefly touched on:

  • iReport, which is a UGC form of reporting by regular Joes
  • Interfacing CNN directly with Facebook
  • The “Magic Wall,” the multi-touch, interactive big screen
  • Real-time debate scoring, tracked by CNN analysts
  • Rick Sanchez’s new show that pulls news stories directly from Twitter
  • Impact Your World: An opportunity to participate in the stories you read by donating your time and money to organizations that get involved

Klein made the claim that because of these innovations, CNN is now the #1 news network on cable or broadcast for the 18-49 demographic. He also made the claim that CNN is now the #1 site on the web for video delivery. Hmmm….

Not according to Compete.com as recently as May, so he could have meant something different, but there is no question that he made a claim as #1 for video. Either way, the point he was trying to make is that embracing new media is what boosted the viewership so dramatically.

He then talked about how Twitter continues to scoop every news outlet in existence on new stories, Klien stressed how important it is for traditional media outlets to listen to social media and pay attention to where it’s going. The most relevant example was the recent Los Angeles earthquake. It was reported on Twitter less than 30 seconds after the first rumbles. Local news took about 5 minutes and AP took another 10.

During the Q&A portion of the presentation, Klein was only able to field a couple of questions, but I thought one was particularly good: “You are CNN, so you obviously have tremendous opportunities for revenue, but what would you recommend to a smaller media presence who is attempting to convert quality content into revenue?” Klein kind of dodged this one was answering, “You have to join a gang. If you’re not a Blood or a Crip yet, you need to consider getting on board.”: OK, I guess. A moderately funny answer that suggests allowing yourself to be bought by or aligned with a larger media company.

But I don’t buy it. I think that’s a bullshit answer to a good, honest question. Frankly, it was the perfect ending to Klein’s whole presentation given everything he had discussed up to that point. In terms of social media, he didn’t offer a single innovative idea. I suspect that going live with new ideas at a place like CNN is pretty hard. So the initial reaction might be to congratulate this guy for the leaps and bounds he has made at the network, but that isn’t what I am thinking. Integration with social media and UGC isn’t just a good idea; it’s vital. As in, if he didn’t do it, somebody else would have to or else CNN would be dying (or dead).

Klein is, no doubt, a compelling speaker and a seemingly interesting guy, but I didn’t think he presenting anything unique or useful in terms of real-world implementation. After all, how many people at this conference have a brand like CNN backing them up?

The next presenter, Geoff Ramsey, sped through his presentation. He essentially was there to make one point:

The economy sucks, but don’t freak out because that’s the worst thing that could possibly happen in advertising. Media spends are going to ether remain the same or improve over the next two years. The only change will be that money will be removed from traditional marketing campaigns and moved to online advertising.

I think this is something that we already know, but it was certainly comforting to see Geoff back it up with some solid data. He recently wrote a paper about the immediate future of marketing that eMarketer.com is giving away free. As soon as I obtain my copy, I’ll make it available here.

-Drew

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Ad:tech New York, It’s Gonna Be Huge

November 3, 2008 – 6:05 pm

SEOMFG is at ad:tech this week, and holy crap is this thing huge. There are a full 3 floors worth of exibitors. I spent today roaming around booths and getting a feel for the show. It’s hard to explain the theme of this convention because it’s such a jumble of industries. A booth for a company that vets leads might be right next to another that provides video compression services. It’s kind of weird to see such a lack of specificity, but I suppose the point is to allow marketers of all kinds to get together. And there are certainly a shitload of people here.

Of course, I’m here for the social media conversations. So I’ll keep you posted about the buzz.

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Eli^4: Autoblogging to enhance your niche affiliate site

October 26, 2008 – 12:24 am

I’ve always been a huge fan of Bluehat SEO…not because I’ve actually done it, but because Eli’s blog is one of the most interesting SEO reads I’ve come across.  Sure, he posts => Google reacts, but either way, it’s good stuff.

So I was doing some brainstorming last night…several people I know have been pretty enthusiastic about blog farming, and I think it’s a really interesting idea without regard to how long it might be viable.

Essentially, the premise is that you’re creating a large number of unique content pages in a semi-to-fully-automated fashion.  We know Google loves blogs (seomfg got out of the sandbox within a week, and had a TBPR on the homepage in less than a month — and we did everything completely legit).

So, let’s say you have an autoblog or blog farm that is generating 5-20 posts a day as an example.  Assume you’re using Eli’s PingCrawl Wordpress plug-in, you can realistically expect to get at least a few backlinks a day (probably 2-to-40, which is a wide range — but either way).

To take it a step further (this was triggered by Aaron Wall’s post on SEO book about WP IP delivery hacks), let’s assume you cloak the entire blog by crawler IP address (I recommend Fantomas’ SpiderSpy for IP content delivery) and 301 everything that Google sees back to your home page — as long as you are either autoblogging or blog farming everything with enough detail that your posts’ titles include your head keyword, you’re getting somewhere between a couple and a few dozen links back to your home page on a daily basis.  And those backlinks show some relevance because all of your fake-blog posts have your head keyword in the title.

Let’s assume your vertical is somewhat competetive.  Whoever is ranking first for your head term is probably lucky to have 10-20% of their backlinks with “head keyword” in the anchor text (unless they rented a lot of links).  So this strategy should pay some dividends, because you’ll be ruling the “head keyword” with inbound anchor text relevance (albeit varied slightly, but also productively).  Especially if you have total control over the title of your auto/farm posts.  Just make sure that most (if not all) of your posts have your head keyword in them somewhere, with slightly different surrounding text.

Hope this is interesting,
=george

PS. It should be noted that, after a short time in this industry, it makes me laugh how poorly people cloak for SEO value.  Look at this example for CareerBuilder — look at the “Jobs” footer link to Careerbuilder.com on usatoday.com with a typical browser UA…and then look at it as Googlebot.  Not that I agree or disagree with what they’re doing (or, especially, how they’re doing it).  But UA checking is for pussies; pay for an IP feed if you’re going to go balls to the wall.

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Hahahahaha Toolbar PageRank

October 25, 2008 – 1:29 am

Just doing some random searches tonight, and I stumbled across Search Engine Genie’s most recent PageRank 10 Sites list.

How funny.  There are now 4 URLs with a toolbar PageRank of 10:

  • Google
  • usa.gov
  • universia.esp

And…wait for it….seriously, get this:

  • Google’s AdSense page

I’m not kidding.

There are several things that are important to illustrate:

1. According to Google, there are no backlinks to the URL that shows a toolbar PR of 10 (https://www.google.com/adsense/login/en_US/ – nofollowed, obv).

2. According to Yahoo!, there are a very small number of backlinks to that URL.

3. This URL doesn’t show up in Google’s cache — yet it doesn’t have a robots tag instructing engines to noindex or noarchive it.  How the fuck is one of the four most important URLs on the Intanet missing from the largest search engine’s cache?

4. Look at this handy JavaScript cloaking on the page.  That iframe redirect is included, not on-page (tricky move, Google): https://www.google.com/adsense/login-box.js

document.write(’n74iframe style7542width:19em;height:16.4em;42 align7542center42 marginwidth7542042 marginheight7542042 scrolling7542no42 frameborder7542042 id7542awglogin42 name7542awglogin42 src7542https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginBox?service75adsense46amp;ltmpl75login46amp;ifr75true46amp;rm75hide46amp;fpui75346amp;nui751546amp;alwf75true46amp;passive75true46amp;continue75https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fadsense%2Flogin-box-gaiaauth46amp;followup75https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fadsense%2Flogin-box-gaiaauth46amp;hl75en_US427674/iframe76′);

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some fairly similar code on some hacked .edu forums that redirected to pillz sitez.

Without speaking to Google’s business interests, I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really find it hard to understand how Adobe’s home page got demoted to a TBPR9; or that Yahoo! is a TBPR9 when Yahoo!’s home page obviously has entirely more backlinks and natural, loyal, willing visitors than the AdSense login page; and especially when the AdSense TBPR10 page is in a sub directory, it uses JavaScript cloaking, and it doesn’t have a link profile worthy to compete in a low-profit affiliate vertical.

But…don’t hate the player, right?  The mouseover on the PageRank button in the Google Toolbar reads:

“PageRank is Google’s measure of the importance of this page”

I’m not going to lie.  If I’m Google, the AdSense page is the second most important page on the web to me, save my homepage.  So maybe we should applaud Google for being transparent in this case.

=george

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Google Webmaster Central - Tricks and Treats

October 22, 2008 – 9:42 am

You can listen to Q&A portion of the presentation below. Please leave a comment and let us know what you thought of the discussion. Did you learn anything?

Another first for Google was their use of Google Moderator for fielding some Q&A from the session. You can see the participants’ questions and the moderators’ responses here:

Google’s Q&A Via Google Moderator

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Do Article Submission Sites Work For SEO?

October 8, 2008 – 3:11 pm

Frank and I were discussing this topic yesterday, so I did some thinking and a bit of research.

Here is an article that Aaron Wall wrote last year:

And here is the Michael Grey post that inspired it:

I wish I could have uncovered something good that was a little more current, so let me know if any of you guys find anything. The valuable information is located in the comments sections of each article. The general consensus seems to be that automated, mass-submission to article directory sites is pretty worthless. I think we would all probably assume that anyway, so the real question becomes, “What, if any, is the value of submitting unique, keyword-rich content with back links to deep pages with good anchor text?” Given that Google did a PR revision of these article submission sites about a year ago, search engineers decided to knock the value of article submission down a peg or two resulting in PR3s or PR0s, according to Aaron and Michael. But I just checked the major submission sites that I know (and sometimes use), and the domain PRs breaks down like this:

  • http://ezinearticles.com/ PR6
  • http://www.articlecity.com/ PR6
  • http://www.buzzle.com/ PR6
  • http://www.articlebiz.com/ PR3
  • http://www.easyarticles.com/ PR4

Not too shabby. So the owners of these sites have obviously taken a firmer stance on editorial guidelines, and the Google search engineers rewarded that jump in quality by restoring some or all of their PR. A comment that was repeated a number times in the above posts was that the real power of article submission services is not in the links that come directly from the submission sites themselves but from the other sites the syndicate/republish the content. This means that we absolutely must track our submitted articles to see where there were re-posted. And we should be doing the very same thing with any original or repurposed content that we publish or promote. This includes blogs and social media interaction on Digg, Delicious, Reddit, etc. Find a unique phrase in the article and set up a Google alert for it. When you receive a notification, check it out. If it’s legit, add it to your tracking documentation (You do have tracking documentation, right?).

Frank suggested that it might be better to create a new blog and/or micro-site and publish the content there. I think this is a great idea, but I don’t think it’s a replacement for article submission. If the value of article submissions is their syndication power, we would likely not be able to achieve the same reach with our own blog or micro-site (unless it’s been around for a while). But if you have the time to publish to both, you could take advantage of the power of an article submission site while simultaneously building up the PR/value of our own site.

Thoughts?

-Drew

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