Marketing Pilgrim Published: “In Preparation for the SXSW Social ‘ME’dia Echo Chamber” plus 6 more |  |
- In Preparation for the SXSW Social ‘ME’dia Echo Chamber
- Amazon Faces Patent Lawsuit Over Instant Search; Google Next?
- An Ivy League Call for the Sunset of SEO
- Advertising Comes to Skype
- Foursquare 3.0 Has Something “Special” for Merchants
- PubCon Austin Day One Recap
- 35 Killer Tips from London SES 2011
| In Preparation for the SXSW Social ‘ME’dia Echo Chamber Posted: 10 Mar 2011 07:28 AM PST
So what am I getting at? Well, I am preparing myself for the onslaught of the ultimate expression of 'me' as the social media world floods Austin, TX for SXSW and strains the area's bandwidth with tweets and updates starting with "I am with", I am at" "I am the god of" etc etc. It is likely that this year's event will be loudest echo chamber ever created by mankind. Sound negative or snarky? I don't think so because as the social media world grows, and in particular the industry that was spawned by it, the sounds of people's cries for attention are growing louder. In many cases, when someone has nothing of value to add but needs to be heard anyway, they just try to be the loudest. That's what's beginning to happen in the social media space and it's interesting at times and incredibly ridiculous at others. Honestly, how many times can the same principles of the 'new world order' of communication be rolled out before it starts to make redundancy look fresh in its wake? How many times can different people say the same things and it not get annoying? How much can one person really 'know' about something that is so new and rapid in its growth that the rules have likely changed before their wisdom is dispensed? I point back to a post about "How to be a Twitter Guru" written by someone you may be familiar with. Take that examination of tweets and observe just how many of those formulaic pronunciations of higher knowledge and cooler lives will come from the Texas capital over the next few days. Be prepared. So how am I preparing for this echo chamber onslaught? I am training myself to ignore all individuals and only pay attention to product and service announcements. This is the news that comes from such an event. Of course, there will be the social 'ME'dia glitterati opinions of these new developments and their importance to the continuation of the human race. That's nice but I'll form my own opinions, thank you very much. So enjoy the festivities. Tell the world where you are, what you are doing, who are doing it with, how you smell, what you stepped in and where you vomited. I'm sure someone will be listening. The only trouble is that they will be listening to the echo chamber where everyone else who is such an individual will be saying much of the same things.
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| Amazon Faces Patent Lawsuit Over Instant Search; Google Next? Posted: 10 Mar 2011 06:57 AM PST TechCrunch picks up on an interesting lawsuit just filed. It appears that MasterObjects is suing Amazon for patent infringement over its use of instant search results. You know what they are; you start typing your search query and then Amazon suggests what you may be trying to find. It looks like this:
Anyway, what’s interesting is that MasterObjects names only Amazon as a defendant. Interesting, because Google, Bing and many others offer instant search results like this. So why aren’t they being named in this lawsuit. Well, we don’t have official word, and MasterObjects may not want to tip their hand, but I have a theory. <Queue conspiracy music> Instant search for Amazon is a nice feature but not an essential part of its business model. Sure, it’s going to fight this lawsuit, but probably not as hard as, say, Google–which lives and dies by its search technology. Amazon will, more than likely, settle this suit because it doesn’t have enough skin in the game. MasterObjects will likely accept some small licensing agreement and the whole world will think this is finished with. Except, now MasterObjects has a little bit of precedent. Maybe not a legal ruling, but if Amazon caves in anyway–or actually fights and loses–MasterOjects has leverage to take on the big guns. If it had attacked Google from the outset, it would have faced a big ole can of Google legal whoop-ass, without much in the way of ammo of its own. If it can get a victory over Amazon–however small–then it can scare the heck out of Google. Any suit it files will have history to support MasterObjects’ patent claims. <End conspiracy> OK, so maybe that’s not what MasterObjects has in mind–maybe that’s just how my sinister mind works. What are your thoughts on this? Can MasterObjects get a win over Amazon? Will Google and Bing be next? Go!
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| An Ivy League Call for the Sunset of SEO Posted: 10 Mar 2011 05:48 AM PST
The latest version of this 'SEO is a black art and ruins the online world for the common man (and journalist)' mantra comes from the Ivy League of all places. Richard J. Tofel has written an article for Harvard's Nieman Foundation entitled, "Someday the sun will set on SEO – and the business of news will be better for it". Pretty provocative title for a guy who is writing for the art rather than the traffic, huh? Here is a quick sample of some quotes from the article. Of course, to see them in full context would be the best way to understand the author's point (or according to the comments the lack thereof and the lack of several other things as well) but, hey, who's really interested in the truth in the online space, right? Here's some fodder for the angry SEO to jump on.
Well, well. Looks like someone woke up on the wrong side of the algorithm, huh? The comment section is just as provocative as everyone from SEOs to reference librarians take sides. As you can probably guess, the angry ones are the SEOs. They are never hard to pick out from a crowd are they? So the debate rages on and now the intellectual elite are poking the beast that is the SEO community. As these attacks on SEO increase in frequency, I wonder if they will simply become the opinions of the 'outsider who cried wolf' or if there will be any impact on the 'art' of SEO? Honestly, it all seems pretty funny because calls for the death of SEO have been made for as long as the commercial Internet has been in existence. As we all know, there are some serious issues in the SEO space due to unscrupulous techniques. That happens in every industry (can I get a shout out for the financial world?!) . There are also many benefits to the practice when done 'by the rules' but the trouble is that the rules aren't like the rulebook for baseball where a change is made, written in the book and it becomes the rule with little room for interpretation. No, SEO has no real rulebook because the rules of those running the show are trade secrets and can't be published for the world to know. Instead everyone is left trying to figure out what works and that kind of 'structure' in an industry will simply lead to people doing whatever they can to gain advantage until they get their hand slapped. That's human nature and the Internet brings out the absolute best and worst of it all day every day. So whether you like engaging in these 'SEO is a dying, black, devilish art' scuffles is entirely your call. I find them more amusing than anything else because in the end, SEO will continue to exist and evolve as the search engines do. That's my street level take on this. The intellectuals who try to poke holes in the practice only give a place for SEO's to vent and pour out their venom with nothing being solved. All in all it makes for interesting content at least. So SEO's of the world unite! Go waste your time jumping on someone who is trying to pee on your cornflakes and would otherwise get no attention at all if the SEO community weren't so defensive. I'll just sit back and watch and know that nothing will change because of any of it. Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!
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| Posted: 09 Mar 2011 03:22 PM PST Put this one in the “surprised it hasn’t happened before now column,” Skype will start showing ads on their desktop application beginning this week. Skype says that the 650 x 170 pixel ads will run only on the profile home page but given that they added an enormous, useless box to the top of their chat screens, it’s likely that this will soon be ad space, too.
Despite the amount of real estate the ads will take up, they really aren’t that intrusive as long as they remain graphical. But Skype says they’ll be happy to run video ads and that can get annoying seeing as the whole purpose of the app is to communicate (listen) to others. If customers have to wait for the car commercial to end before they can dial, that’s going to be a problem. Skype is also offering Click & Call ads which allows the viewer to contact the advertiser without leaving the application. Is this likely? How many people will decide to put off their scheduled Skype meeting so they can click and chat with a Visa rep? Visa is Skype’s first advertising partner. Groupon, Nokia and Universal Pictures are also on board. Rather than selling the ads in-house, Skype is working with three advertising companies: Meebo in the US, Ad2One in the UK, and Ströer Interactive in Germany. Skype’s Cheif Marketing Officer, Doug Bewsher says the response from advertisers has been very positive, but what about the response from customers? As you might expect, the company blog is already filled with people complaining about ads that haven’t even appeared yet. The one question that remains unanswered, is what happens with paid accounts? One would assume that paid accounts would be exempt from advertising, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Says Bewsher:
The Skype blog tries to reassure the frazzled few by saying that “you may only see ads occasionally. Our initial plan is to show an ad from one brand per day in each of the markets where advertising is being sold.” They also assure that the ads won’t pop-up and interrupt your conversation. A very good thing. But then there’s this:
Which leads to this:
Does the fact that Skype is now running ads bother you? Is it a legitimate privacy concern or just the price you have to pay for access to an excellent online tool?
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| Foursquare 3.0 Has Something “Special” for Merchants Posted: 09 Mar 2011 02:04 PM PST
With the new system, you’ll have a choice of five new customer options and two loyalty programs for existing customers. Under the new heading you have Flash Specials. These are rewards that go out for a very short period of time to the first people who check-in at a specified location. Combine this option with a Facebook fan page blast and you’ve got a very powerful tool for bringing in business on a slow day. The Friends Special is a great way to get your current customers to spread the word for you. This option is designed to reward people who check-in along with two or more others in the same time period. Swarm Specials are similar but depended on a group of strangers checking-in Groupon stiyle. One of the most powerful options is the Newbie Special, where a person gets a reward the first time they check-in at a location. For return customers, Foursquare has options to reward multiple visits and special rewards for those who achieve Mayor status. The new Foursquare 3.0 upgrade is an excellent tool for small businesses looking to up their foot traffic. But as we’ve seen with Groupon, care must be taken to not overextend. To get the most out of these specials, they should be just that — special. A Flash Special that happens everyday at noon, isn’t that special after all. Visit the Foursquare blog for more details. Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community
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| Posted: 09 Mar 2011 01:44 PM PST
My day started out by watching the keynote presented by best selling author and social media expert Jeffrey Eisenberg which I covered in detail in a previous post. Then, like a swarm of ants, the attendees flowed out of the main conference room into a series of smaller rooms to begin their day. I started with a stiff cup of coffee to help ward off the effects of free beer from the PubCon Kickoff Party the night before, but after a little caffeine and a brief chat with @andybeal I was ready to embark on my journey of knowledge. Essentials Overlooked by 90% of Affiliate Managers Main Points: 98% of affiliates sign up for affiliate programs and do nothing. Weed out these time wasting affiliates and focus on those who will run your offer and send conversions! In affiliate marketing, relationships are everything. Be open, honest and responsive with your affiliates to help ensure your competition doesn’t get the referrals you should be getting. Keith Posehn advocated the support of real time tracking pixels for affiliates to help them optimize their PPC campaigns. Everyone advised merchants to be very clear with program agreements especially with points like cookie length, which click wins, payment terms and approved/disapproved keywords for search marketing. I especially liked the tip by Geno to include a summary in the agreement for people who don’t read the agreement in full. Of course, you should always read every agreement in full. Try providing content packages to affiliates including things like your logo, banners, canned descriptions and other promotional material. This goes along with my personal philosophy of “give the customer the tools to make the decision”. You’re going to have a lot more luck with people running your offer if you make it easy for them. Missy Ward covered affiliate prospecting in detail including a few horror stories of what she labeled “stalkers” guessing at her email address, posting on her Facebook account and reaching out to her on Twitter. It was a good reminder for affiliate managers to be respectful when trying to reach out to publishers. Local Search, Places, and Mobile Main Points: Over 4 million Google local business listings have been claimed and there are nearly 2.2 billion local searches per month. 90% of search engine users perform local searches. David pointed out a neat little trick using Google maps to determine what Google knows about your geolocation. Apparently Google streetview cars also detected wifi networks, stored that data and can then use the data to help triangulate your location. The trick to see what Google knows about your location is to connect to wifi, open Google maps and then click on the little circle above the zoom bar. Bingo, you know where Google thinks you are. Brian gave a nice tip on how to merge multiple Facebook places and pages into one. The method involves using the “merge facebook page” button starting with the “worst” place pages continuing through to the best Facebook page. The reason for this is that the last page you merge to wins. Brian also noted that businesses interested in obtaining more local search traffic should take advantage of tags (Google maps, etc.) and Deals (Foursquare, Facebook Places, etc.) to help their listings stand out. William stressed the need for local businesses to obtain citations from organizations like chambers of commerce and other high-value sources to help with local search optimization. Shawn Collins : 7 Mistakes Affiliates Make Main Points: Shawn rocked his presentation as always and provided insightful observations on things that publishers often overlook when launching their campaigns. Shawn covered key points like making sure to read program agreements, choosing your audience, selecting your ad inventory, staying available to users, capturing leads (people who don’t convert directly) and sticking with your campaign long enough to see results. Shawn was cool enough to provide his presentation on Slideshare so check it out. Bottom To Top SEO On an Ecommerce Website Main Points: I don’t usually gush about speakers, but Rob Snell is awesome. His fast paced colloquial southern accent punctuated with a common sense ROI approach to SEO was a pleasure to watch. His main advice was to follow the money. He showed a series of slides illustrating keywords from his hunting dog website and which keywords where actually driving revenue. He then groups these keywords into million dollar buckets (apply your own revenue buckets) and then plans his SEO efforts based on the bucket he want to address. Rob also has a really neat trick for finding pages on your site that are lacking backlinks with specific anchor text. Out of respect for the sanctity of Pubcon I won’t detail the specific method, but if you beg Rob on Twitter maybe he’ll cough it up (sorry Rob). Link Building 2011 – Hot Topics Main Points: This session started out with a bit of a scary moment. The speakers all agreed to abandon their presentations and jump right into Q&A. Luckily having access to such a great set of link building minds created no shortage of questions to fill up the time. Michael Gray provided a non-stop stream of one liners and funny analogies covering link building including “You want your links to work more like a push-up bra rather than a breast augmentation” (I still don’t know what that means) and the phrase of the conference #spamoflage (making paid links look natural). Several key points from the session included the reduced value of article submission sites after the Farmer update, how being number 1 makes you a target for manual review, networks for link building are bad (duh) and a reference to a great case study regarding link building called the “Mormon SEO Strategy“. How You Can Use Twitter To Create A Million Dollar Business (Like These 2 Geeks) After all the sessions ended and all the attendees streamed out into the parking lot, minds spinning with a wealth of newfound knowledge, the nighttime festivities began with the unofficial PubCon party hosted by @davidgonzalez. Brett Tabke and Shawn Collins gave a rousing account of their use of Twitter to grow their businesses. Their inspiring stories where littered with great tips, tricks and a variety of tools. Networking was in full swing with liquor fueled Internet marketers rambling around talking about SEO, PPC and affiliate marketing. Day 2 has already begun as I pound out the last few lines of this post. I’ll do my best to get the daily update for day 2 up today. In the mean time, try to check your jealousy and hurry up and register for PubCon Vegas in November!
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| 35 Killer Tips from London SES 2011 Posted: 09 Mar 2011 08:15 AM PST
Here are our 35 top tips from the London show. 1. Content Marketing:
"You need to understand what your customers want. What do they want to consume? What do they want to learn from or share?" "Rich content can open doors for influencing customers and clients, it can draw in business, attract talent and save costs on recruitment. It can also make money from marketing partners" "Segment your audience. Define their personas and build content for those persona types. Use social platforms they use such as Facebook or Twitter” "You have got to be patient with content marketing …you have to stick it out. A few articles or a few videos won’t tend to attract thousands of visitors. It can take a blog a year plus to gain traction. If you set up a YouTube channel you will need to build up lots of videos gradually" "Think of ways that you can connect with customers as if there were no search engines" 2. SEO:
"Site speed is important – avoid code bloat. Use pingdom to check site speeds for competing sites and get an average…you don’t want to be the slowest" "Overcooking anchor text can kill you in Google. Use your brand and domain name as links, as well as natural phrases like “click here” to mix up your anchor text" "Google is looking at click through rate (CTR) for organic results. Your CTR wants to be equal (ideally above average) in comparison to competitors…a good call to action in the title can increase the click through rate" "Links are the most critical and most difficult part of SEO. Google values links, Google penalizes link buyers and getting the balance right is hard" "The Perfect Link uses relevant anchor text, pointing at a relevant page, from a relevant site" 3. Link Building:
"The more brand links you have, the more brand/ authority you are likely to have in Google. For smaller clients – it can be an idea to build brand links for 6 months to build authority" "Links are the most important ranking factor. If your site is well optimized then you should spend 90-99% of your time on link building" "How we do competitor analysis? Take the 20 top keywords and get the top 20 websites for each key phrase. We make sure none of the competitors are duplicate, then capture all the links for all the competitors" "Figure out how many brand links you need and get them. Then get anchor text links" "My advice is never ever to use a link network to buy links…we turn them off and we have never noticed any ranking changes. So my advice is turn off any link networks if you've got them” 4. Affiliate Marketing:
"Be transparent in your activity and have a USP. If you're not unique replicate and be smarter" "To be a good affiliate marketer you must add value – not just for Google but for your partners too" "Plan to be big from the outset" "Think about joint ventures …I think they are good…especially if a skill gap exists” "Affiliate marketing can be a risky business…especially if you rely on Google. Diversify – have multiple niches. Don’t rely on Google traffic" 5. Conversions:
"Conversions are killed in 3 areas 1/ Not understanding prospects 2/ If people can’t get what they want on your website or can't find it 3/ If people can’t be persuaded to use your company. In that case you need to gather the objections they have" "Think of ways you can become more than just a store. Can you create a community with your customers so they won’t want to defect to another retailer because they won’t want to leave your community" "Two major mistakes Ecommerce sites can make is not capturing contact information from people who are browsing and not having a well optimized thank-you page to either up-sell from or to refer a friend" "The ideal website would be to take what a real sales person says/ does and put that online, because a real sales person will always out convert a website" "Get people to check things on your website. Ask them to try and use your shopping cart – it will help remind you about things you have missed" 6. Analytics:
"What Google analytics shoves into your face when you first log in may not be the useful KPI to your business. But average order value is a phenomenal KPI value to have…. not conversion. If you have a long sales cycle conversion rate will be less useful" "A bounce rate of 50% is quite common. Under 50% is good. 70% is quite bad. Anything above 70% is really bad" "People who are successful at analytics get results and can make tons of money…but you need to use segmentation" "Asking website users questions, is one of the most important ways to get insights you will never get in Google Analytics. Use a survey tool like 4Q to achieve this" "A few caveats about conversion metrics…If you have access to more than one tool your metrics will show different results. You will get more lift and meaningful improvement from the 98% that didn’t buy rather than the 2% who did" 7. SEO Tools:
“With Spokeo you can find out a lot about people with the tool. You put in a name or email. This tools is useful for link building discovery to get contact information. For competitive intelligence this tool is pretty scary” “With clues.Yahoo.com you can type in a search phrase. It’ll give you demographics about who is typing that search phrase and will also show you a previous query and next query. This tool can be good for SEO, content production” “SEM Rush identifies your traffic and gives it the Adwords value. It can also show how many phrases your website ranks for in the top 20 and it can show where traffic comes in based on URL and keyphrase/ value” “Clictale is the other 1/2 of what you need for analytics. Clictale shows mouse tracking, click heat maps, scroll reach, conversion analytics and more” “Blekko is useful to show a site's most trusted backlinks. You can also use slashtags to limit the results to return under certain criteria such as /people /date /blogs /forums. Its also possible to search a URL and track other related sites for adsence code like: asite.com /adsense. Blekko can also compare sites and show inbound links, unique domains and how many reciprocal links exist. You cab also find people who are copying your content with the duplicate search” Note: Gareth Davies has worked in SEO since 2002 and is director of the SEO agency GSINC Ltd. Thanks to Gareth for bringing us this great wrap up!
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