Jumat, 11 Maret 2011

Marketing Pilgrim Published: “Aol’s Methods in Firing Hundreds Revealed” plus 9 more

Marketing Pilgrim Published: “Aol’s Methods in Firing Hundreds Revealed” plus 9 more

Link to Marketing Pilgrim - Internet News & Opinion

Aol’s Methods in Firing Hundreds Revealed

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 07:40 AM PST

While it's bad enough that a lot of people lost their jobs yesterday in the latest round of Aol's effort to become viable as a company again, apparently they went about it in a way that left many with a bitter taste.

BusinessInsider spoke to an insider and published this account of the firings.

Managers had no clue if anyone on their teams were getting laid off. They were called into a separate meeting as a diversion, and then those being laid off were called into another and axed in a big group setting.

They pulled 20-30 people into a conference room and told them they “Don’t have roles at aol anymore.” [Severance is] 1 week for every year worked.
It’s really quite appalling.

Managers came back after their meeting to find out people on their teams were gone.

Managers weren’t told beforehand or asked who on their team should go if necessary. And nobody knows how the hell they picked who got laid off, as some of them were absolute top performers in some cases 50-75% of some of the most successful teams/sites AOL has.

Honestly, it's no fun to report on these layoffs. I think it is necessary though to let people know how an organization is run and if this account is accurate it appears that Aol is a bit of a train wreck.

Of course, that train has some happy new passengers who are resting their heads on pillows of cash like Arianna Huffington and Michael Arrington but they earned their keep.

What's troubling is that they have tied their fate to an organization that seems to be in constant disarray. When it makes news it rarely has a positive spin to it and one has to think that morale is pretty low by this point.

It's sad to hear about people losing their jobs but the way this company appears to be running they may find themselves looking back and thanking Aol in the future.

Chrysler Social Media Agency Told To Hit the Highway After Twitter Foul Up

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 06:59 AM PST

Even after taking the step of firing the employee who posted an amusing yet incredibly misguided tweet to Chrysler's Twitter account, social media agency New Media Strategies out of Arlington, VA has been fired by Chrysler. The tweet that caused the hubbub read:

There was then a move to make nice

Then there was this statement from Chrysler as reported in the USAToday

Chrysler Group LLC will not renew its contract with New Media Strategies (NMS) for the remainder of 2011. NMS has agreed to support us with an orderly transition until a new agency has been named. We thank them for the work they have provided to us and wish them the best as they move forward.

Social media agency takeaways

  • Watch who you hire because people can be incredibly stupid
  • Watch who you give the keys to regarding client accounts
  • Keep selling because accounts come and go

Companies using social media agency takeaways

  • Consider bringing social media activities in house
  • Find out who has access to accounts if you choose that route
  • Be careful who you trust

Anything to add, Pilgrims?


When Google Does Good

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 06:23 AM PST

We like Google here at Marketing Pilgrim. Oftentimes it's because they doing something to madden the online world so we can write about how silly they are. Other times we wonder why they aren't doing more. And on occasions like today, we point out something good.

With the earthquakes in Japan there is a tsunami alert that has been issued. Google is using it's traditionally message free home page for search to alert the world. That's well done.

It's easy to poke holes in a company that is doing probably too many things at once but it's important to recognize when they use their power for good as well.

Let's pray for the people in the regions under these alerts and hope they stay as alerts only.

Update: Google has also put a Person Finder into effect

Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Hey Google! Where’s My Google Voice for Apps Mail?

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 04:49 AM PST

It’s been almost 7 months since Google announced that you can make Google Voice calls from within your Gmail account.

It’s been almost 7 months of waiting and wondering just when exactly Google plans to add this feature for us Google Apps for Business users. You know, the ones that actually pay to use Google’s services?

You’d think that Google would have figured this out by now. But, no. Google Apps, despite being one of Google’s few premium subscription products, seems to be the red-headed step-child of new product features. We just don’t get these features added when Gmail does.

Adding salt to the wounds, we learn that Gmail users will now be able to click any telephone number in an email and call that number using Google Voice.

Well, isn’t that special!

Hey Google! When do us Google Apps users get these shiny new features?


Google Instant Search Under Attack

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 04:32 AM PST

Just a quick update.

After speculating that Google’s instant search would be the target of a patent lawsuit from MasterObjects–just as soon as they had finished with Amazon–it looks like the company’s not going to hang around for an outcome.

It appears that the company is ready to go after Google right now:

I asked Masterobjects why they waited until now to sue Amazon.com, which started offering 'search suggestions' (using technology which Masterobjects alleges infringes it patent) back in 2008. I also asked why they singled out Amazon specifically.

In a brief response, the company tells me that they will not comment on either this case or the complaint they've just filed against Google, revealing that the search giant is effectively already under legal attack by the software maker.

I say that’s a big mistake. If you’re going to fight a patent lawsuit with the heavyweights of the internet, you invite them into the ring one at a time. You don’t try and take them on all at once. I guess they never watched the Royal Rumble as kids. ;-)

 

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Google Adds Eject Button for Content Farms

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 02:03 PM PST

Google is taking more steps to create a truly personal search experience. Now, if you don't like results from a site you a can remove those results from that domain completely from your future searches. Talk about the ability to get rid of content farms!

The Google blog states

You've probably had the experience where you've clicked a result and it wasn't quite what you were looking for. Many times you'll head right back to Google. Perhaps the result just wasn't quite right, but sometimes you may dislike the site in general, whether it's offensive, pornographic or of generally low quality. For times like these, you'll start seeing a new option to block particular domains from your future search results. Now when you click a result and then return to Google, you'll find a new link next to "Cached" that reads "Block all example.com results."

Read between the lines and this option could really impact content farms as people who are a little more discerning can eliminate seeing these results completely. With this option if you really don't like content farm content you can block associatedcontent.com and Presto! No more craptent. You can then follow that up with all of Demand Media properties like eHow.com, Answerbag.com and more. Imagine the fun.

As for site owner's ability to truly understanding who sees their sites in search, this could create issues if there is widespread use of the option. That’s just another obstacle for SEO’s to talk around but that is well developed skill already in the search industry.

Of course, not all decisions are permanent as you can go back and manage which sites you have blocked. You will also be told whether results that you blocked would have shown up in the results.

So Google continues to indirectly admit that quality is better left in the hands of the searcher on many levels. The subjective nature of what quality content is obviously escapes the bounds of an ‘algorithm only approach’ when cleansing search results of junk. I suspect Google wouldn’t say this but they are in a bit of a fix when it comes deciding what a true good search result is so they are pushing more of that responsibility to the end user.

What’s your take on how this might impact an SEO’s job? Will people actually block an entire domain from search results or is that too much? Can Google’s algorithm really help make quality decisions for each individual? What’s your take on these efforts to clean up the SERPs?

LinkedIn Launches Industry News Aggregator

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 12:38 PM PST

There’s too much information out there and not enough time in the day, so why not let your industry peers help you sort through the clutter!

That’s the pitch for LinkedIn’s new social news aggregator LinkedIn Today.  Set up newspaper style, the program delivers “top” stories for the industries LinkedIn has associated with your professional profile. The stories are a mix of items shared by your network, your peers and “professionals” (ie, everyone else) and mostly they appear to be gleaned from Twitter.

At a glance, there appears to be a lot of options and levels of information that you can narrow down yourself with a variety of check boxes. However, a lot of what you’ll find here is just more noise and clutter. For example, some stories have a small blue banner with a number. Click this and you’ll see a list of people who shared this link on Twitter. You could use this list to find new people to follow on Twitter, so that’s helpful.

From there, you’re given a breakdown of these Twitterites by company, by industry and by location. By checking boxes, I can see how many “online media professionals” in the Los Angeles area shared the story about the LinkedIn Today launch. The answer is one but the question is, do you care? Are you more apt to be interested in people who Twitter from Los Angeles say than those from New York? The real purpose here seems to be giving B2B marketing pros an easy way of finding potential clients in their field or area. Not that that’s a bad thing, but let’s call a monkey a monkey, shall we?

My initial reaction to LinkedIn Today is that it’s creating more clutter, not less thanks to two big issues. First, the multiple boxes and columns don’t make for easy scanning. The best aggregators are straightforward lists with headlines and summaries that let you scan the contents in seconds.

Next, the sources are ridiculous. In the News and Noteworthy section I have an advertisement for CDBaby (I love them but it’s not news) and a link to what looks like a downloadable music bootleg. Very nice, LinkedIn, very professional.

Of course, that’s the main problem with pages that are curated by a computer, especially those that use popularity as a prime factor. I don’t think a graphic on how to beat the Watson Computer on Jeopardy is as interesting as the 143K people who shared the link through StumbleUpon.

Having said that, I will admit that I’m not the target user for LinkedIn.  As a writer, I cross over into a variety of fields, so I’m sure the aggregator had a more difficult time pegging me than it would the head of IT for a bank. Still, I think they’ve got some work to do if they want to make this my first stop every morning.

Have you had a look at your custom LinkedIn Today news site? I’d like to hear your thoughts on how useable and relevant it is for you.


Google Leads in Overall Search While Bing Powered Search Leads in Success Rate

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 11:55 AM PST

It's time for the monthly pondering of whether Google is losing its strangehold on the lead in search market in the US. Experian Hitwise has released its numbers for February 2011.

In Google's position any move backwards is considered trouble so a 2% decrease from January to February is not great news. Bing powered search, on the other hand, continues to show progress moving up 4% from January.

Where Bing claims victory is in Experian's metric of search success rate. Those numbers are unchanged with Bing doing very well compared to its nemesis.

Month to month numbers are hard to draw conclusions from but Bing continues to inch forward and Google seems to have stalled. Of course stalling is relative when your market share is twice that of your nearest competitor which consists of two outlets rather than Google's single platform.

Well, with SEO being close to death should we even care?


Coming Soon: Groupon Buttons on the Cash Register

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 11:20 AM PST

Using your Groupon coupon for 50% off today? No problem, sir. I’ll just hit this button on the cash register and the machine will do the math for me.

Oh yes, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, Groupon is in talks with the major cash register manufacturers to have Groupon buttons added to all their machines.

The article goes on to say that Groupon is testing a number of avenues that “will let merchants account more efficiently for Groupon transactions and returns.”

Returns? Didn’t know you could do that? I’d like to return this tan, please. It’s a bit too orange for my liking. . .

Groupon is big, but is it that big that they need their own button? Says Bloomberg,

The U.S. daily-deals market will grow to $3.93 billion in 2015, from $873 million last year, according to a projection from BIA/Kelsey. Under the most favorable conditions, sales could reach as much as $6.1 billion, the Chantilly, Virginia-based consulting firm said.

Groupon is now under a lot of pressure from other daily deal sites, even Foursquare has added a flash deal option for merchants in their latest upgrade. But still I say, their own button on the cash register? How about a Paypal button on cash registers. Now that would be a helpful way to further online / offline relations.

What do you think? Is this really about making things easier for merchants or is it just a publicity ploy to get Groupon back in the spotlight?

PubCon Austin Day Two Recap

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 09:50 AM PST

Day two of PubCon Austin started with attendees stumbling from shuttle buses and rental cars into the conference. The chamber-of-commerce 50 degree sunny weather coaxed a few winces from those who had a little too much fun at the Internet Marketing Party with @affiliatetip and @btabke the night before, but the mood was positive as attendees prepared for another day of grade A online marketing training.

I b-lined for the coffee station, desperate for a caffeine boost to help me push through the morning sessions. After filling my cup and snagging a tasty muffin, I settled into the main conference room to catch the keynote for the day.

The Search Industry – A View From Inside & Out
Speakers: Daniel Boberg, Tim Mayer

Main Points:

Moderator Joe Laratro guided the conversation with a series of poignant questions designed to get Daniel and Tim’s thoughts on a variety of topical issues.

Google’s Farmer update was the first topic. Dan theorized that the Farmer update is Google trying to determine if content is unique and substantial. The main take away here for me, was to think long and hard about the quality of your content. Tim felt that quality was partially defined by the content available for a specific keyword. In other words, if there’s only low quality content available for a certain keyword the bar may be lower than you would normally shoot for.

Joe then asked what Dan and Tim thought about the attitudes of search engines toward the search engine marketing community. Dan felt they were apathetic because of their own internal distractions and obligations. He asked the audience “Is anyone from Google even here?”. Eyes darted around for a raised hand or the random squirming Google representative avoiding being called out, but no one flinched.

When asked if big companies are treated differently by search engines, Tim pointed out that users expect to see big brands listed in SERPs. He thought that because of this expectation, if big companies like JC Penny where not show in SERPs this would translate into a poor user experience. This, he felt, made it obvious that big companies are treated differently than smaller sites.

WordPress and SEO
Speakers: Michael David, Lisa Brown, Chris Pearson

Main Points:

This was a great session for anyone running a WordPress website. Once the speakers got through the obligatory “the title is the most important SEO factor” type advice, there was some serious meat for the advanced WordPress SEO.

Much like his comically over-sized picture on the session’s official web page, Chris Pearson’s bigger than life WordPress SEO expertise eclipsed the other speakers and turned the session a bit into the Chris Pearson show.

Michael David recommended using the AllinoneSEO plugin, but Chris made a compelling argument that functionality like this should be handled at the theme level. His thought was that plugins slow your site down and as we all know, page load time will affect your rankings in search engines.

Lisa Brown reminded everyone to use permalinks and to un-check “hide my site from search engines” in WordPress.

Chris preached about his method of less-is-more with WordPress SEO. This basically involves going through your web pages and removing elements that are not necessary. Not only does this remove distractions for your visitors but it can improve your page load times and give you a lift in the SERPs. Chris also pointed out that every plugin on your site loads every time a page is called. He advocated sparse use of plugins to help speed up your website.

Conversion and Landing Page Optimization
Speakers: Janet Driscoll Miller, Brian Massey, Kate ONeill

Main Points:

Kate ONeill laid out the basics of coming up with a hypothesis to use as the base line for your A/B testing. Her main theme was to come up with a story for your hypothesis formulated by empathy for what the user is trying to accomplish (it’s different than what you want) and measurable metrics to back up your hypothesis. The concept of creating a story, will help you convey the goal of your campaign in terms you and other people in your organization can understand. Simply saying “a red button will convert better than a green button” just won’t do it.

Brian Massey’s humorous high school chemistry laden presentation covered the importance of using videos on your landing pages. He advised webmasters to remove distractions from landing pages otherwise your visitors “Argon” (yuk, yuk).

Janet Driscoll Miller reminded everyone of many of the things you can test with A/B testing including titles, button colors, page layout, copy, images and videos. She also pointed out that Google Website Optimizer only picks winners based on total conversions and not revenue. For the complete picture, use Google Analytics to see which landing page actually scored you the most dough.

Information Architecture – I
Speaker: Aaron Kronis

Main Points:

Chris advocated the use of country specific TLDs when marketing your product or service in other countries. He recommended the use of 7 localized pages (language, currency etc) for each country specific TLD and links to your normal .com web pages to help round out your site and facilitate your conversions.

Information Architecture – II
Speaker: Ted Ulle

Main Points:

Ted encouraged everyone to avoid thinking of website organization like your company organizes information, your catelog is organized, the content creator organizes information or how any one person would organize information. He stressed that information should be organized how your customers expect the information to be organized.

Ted shared how he approaches organizing content on a website. He starts by using a maximum of 7 items in the top navigation (no drop down menus) and then invites random people not connected to the company to say what main categories they would use to classify specific content. This helps provide insight into where people expect your content to be located.

Negative SEO – DarkSide Protection
Speakers: Gary Shannon, Giovanni Gallucci, Carolyn Shelby, Brett Tabke

Main Points:

Half useful tips and half scare-the-heck-out-you, this session was an eye opening window into the world of black hat SEO techniques.

Giovanni shared a few errr… gray hat techniques including putting links in Flickr descriptions which describe the content owner rather than promoting a specific website. He pointed out that this was within Flickr’s terms of service. He also recommended the use of HideMyIP and HideMyMac when logging into multiple Facebook accounts to help avoid Facebook filters to help prevent people from logging into too many Facebook profiles from the same computer.

Carolyn Shelby recommended the use of BlackSheep to help hide your wifi traffic from FireSheep (wifi sniffer) in addition to building a war chest so you’ll be prepared in the event of an attack on your website. She also seemed to recommend that you host your own server infrastructure so you can control access. I personally don’t agree with this, mainly because a good data center will have higher security than most people can afford on their own and I have yet to see an in-house data room with redundant UPS, HVAC and Internet connections. For me the trade off in redundancy far outweighs the risk of someone using social engineering to gain access to your locked server cabinet or cage (correct me if I’m wrong Carolyn).

Brett reminded everyone of the unofficial definition of SPAM (sites positioned above me) in addition to recommending everyone watch back links for links from bad neighborhoods purchased by competitors.

Closing Thoughts

PubCon Austin delivered the high-caliber speakers and networking one would expect from PubCon. The speakers, moderators and staff where friendly, approachable and helpful. If you didn’t get a chance to make it to Austin, make sure to block out your calendar for Pubcon Vegas in November! If you were at PubCon Austin and you’re staying for SXSWi, hit me up @David_Vogelpohl!
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