Marketing Pilgrim Published: “Aol’s Patch Needs 8,000 Bloggers .. Now .. For Free” plus 4 more |  |
- Aol’s Patch Needs 8,000 Bloggers .. Now .. For Free
- Why Social Finally Works With Search
- The FTC Rallies Against Fake News Ads
- Traffic From Social Media Has Highest Bounce Rate
- Demand Media’s Stock Drops Like Its Google Traffic
| Aol’s Patch Needs 8,000 Bloggers .. Now .. For Free Posted: 27 Apr 2011 05:27 AM PDT
Forbes tells us
So it looks like recent journalism school grads from across the United States can rejoice that they will be able to "get a job" and build their resume by saying they wrote for Aol! Pretty cool except that job carries no pay. The devil’s in the details, right? This just goes to show how 'committed to quality' Aol is. It looks like the reality is that they are just turning into another content farm who are giving their farmhands absolutely nothing (except a lame resume reference that anyone who knows the industry will see is a cattle call to get someone who can fog a mirror to write something / anything). Forbes continues
No one likes a fire drill?! That’s rich, especially after he said that the opposite was told to these people just at the end of last week! These guys are funny, aren’t they? Oh and if you knew the platform was being launched on May 4 who do you wait until the end of April to start recruiting bloggers in numbers that might be bigger than some towns Patch serves? To Farnham’s credsit, at least he admitted that it’s a fire drill. Let’s hope no one gets hurt. Oh and remember the report that made such a splash which touting the hiring of 800 Patch employees? Well, let's not get crazy and think that it was a priority. Sounds like it was more about some positive press than anything else.
So let's cut to the chase here. It simply seems that Arianna's empire needs some indentured servants but without the benefits. (So you are aware, indentured servants, according to Wikipedia, were typically a young, unskilled laborer contracted to work for an employer for a fixed period of time, typically three to seven years, in exchange for transportation, food, clothing, lodging and other necessities during the term of their indenture. They included men and women; most were under age 21, and most became helpers on farms or house servants. They were not paid wages). At least they got something for their efforts! This whole Aol, Arianna, Patch as a start-up drama has already run its course. It's obvious they are flailing at anything to make this work. Aol's high profile properties like Engadget have already seen their best and brightest 'get out of Dodge City' after the takeover by the empress. One wonders if the clock is clicking over at TechCrunch as well as they become more fully assimilated into the 'Aol way'. You don't really think that Aol will keep their hands off any of their properties completely, do you? So what is your take on Aol, its properties and its prospects? Do you care? Will Aol ever be truly relevant again as a brand or should anyone under the Aol umbrella work hard to separate themselves from what seems to be an ongoing business course case study of a company that can't seem to get out of its own way?
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| Why Social Finally Works With Search Posted: 27 Apr 2011 03:51 AM PDT
"Why would I want to see what my Facebook friends "liked" or "shared" in my Google results?" "Who cares whether my website has fewer +1s than the next guy if I have better content?" "Tweets shouldn’t pass PageRank – what the heck does a Tweet tell me about whether a result answers my query?" Yeah, yeah. I’ve been there, too. I’ve heard and given every excuse in the book about why social data in search results is a poor user experience, a mistake from a relevancy perspective and opens the door to manipulation and gaming even more so than the much-maligned link graph. But in the last 12 months, I’ve had to swallow my pride and accept that social media is not only here to stay, but massively useful to improving search engine results. It’s been fun to bash on social the last half-decade, and with products like Google Buzz and Yahoo! 360, there’s been no shortage of targets, but the times, they are a-changing. Why Does Social Finally Work with Search? In my opinion, there are two major drivers. First, it’s critical mass. More than 10% of web users in the US actively use Twitter (more than 25% of us have accounts, but the majority go unused). More than 80% actively use Facebook. Blogs are consumed and commented on by 80%+ as well. 44 million people in the US and over 100 million worldwide have LinkedIn profiles. Social is popular, useful and used and it’s no longer dominated by early adopters. Chances are good you have a grandparent with two or more social accounts of one variety or another. Second, it’s (finally) been successfully productized into search. The first real success, in my opinion, belongs to Google’s "results from my social circle," e.g.
Those two search results from Techipedia and OutSpokenMedia wouldn’t normally appear in the top 10, but because I’m connected to Rhea Dryesdale and Tamar Weinberg via Flickr, I see the content they’ve shared. More importantly, those results are actually better than anything else on the first page of results for my query.
The Integration of Search + Social Has Changed Marketing Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that, because we haven’t seen the entire story, a major shift hasn’t happened – it has. If your job involves social media marketing, you have to be familiar with SEO best practices and techniques or you risk losing out on the relatively higher-value traffic driven by Google + Bing. If you do SEO, likewise, social media is now a major opportunity to market your content and make it more visible in the search engines.
Given the correlation numbers (remember, correlation ≠ causation), we know that sites and pages that perform successfully in social media tend to perform well in Google. If we’re not learning and leveraging social as much as we have historically with links + content, we’re likely doing our businesses (or those of our clients) a disservice. It may be that today, exact match anchor text links from a few dozen unique domains will provide more benefit than a few hundred shares on Facebook or Tweets on Twitter, but given the historical perspective of the past year, I’m not sure how much longer we can count on that being true. What’s Coming Next Three startup-based products have really given me a sense for where search+social can really go. I think it’s unlikely that all three of these particular companies will succeed and become the next Google/Facebook, but I do believe it’s incredibly likely that features similar to these will find their way (in some form or another) into broad use by the engines+social sites. #1 – Hunch
Hunch maps things I like with things I’ll probably like based on an analysis of their "opinion graph" of data across tens of thousands of users. The more people I connect with and the more things I rate, the better Hunch’s predictions become. Thus, I can run searches across broad product groups and discover userful answers, something that just isn’t possible with Google or Bing today (e.g. try searching for "movies i’d want to watch"). The combination of social data and recommendation layering with non-traditional search functions (like discovery), make Hunch an exciting technology. Even if they don’t make it all the way, I strongly suspect their intuition and progress will be picked up by a larger player in the space and turned into an exceptional product. Netflix already does this in their specific vertical – Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, et al. can’t be far behind. #2 – Trunkly
Possibly my most regularly used new tool in 2011, Trunk.ly is a lifesaver. It automatically indexes everything I tweet or share on any of my social networks and builds a personalized search engine so I can find stuff I’ve lost. It also has the very cool ability to let me follow the links shared by others and search those sources, too. If you’ve ever found yourself in a position of wanting to dig up that link from a few days ago but can’t recall where you saw it, Trunkly’s amazing. It’s surprisingly useful for raw discovery as well – browsing through the links shared by those I follow, I find tons of cool stuff. #3 – Summify
My latest love is Summify, a tool that lets me connect my Twitter and/or Facebook accounts, then finds stories shared by multiples of my contacts and delivers a good-looking, daily digest to my inbox. It’s the new "StumbleUpon" – and the big innovation is that it’s passive. I don’t need to do anything active to get the best of what my contacts find and share straight in my email. Social + discovery + automated filtering/curation = awesome. Personally, I love what search + social have done for me as a web user. The Internet feels more addictive, more interactive, more useful and I get the sense that I can better communicate with others, rather than merely broadcast. However, I’m keenly aware that privacy issues, regulation, potential missteps by the big players and possible cultural backlashes from users are all risks to this evolution. I can say with certainty, though, that it’s far more enjoyable and profitable to be a marketer in a more complex, nuanced and opportunity-laden environment than a static, single-entity dominated field. My heart goes out to those poor marketers in the 1950s – just imagine only having radio, newspaper, magazines, outdoor, television, movies and word-of-mouth in your arsenal… so limiting. Rand Fishkin is the CEO & Co-Founder of the web’s most popular SEO Software provider; SEOmoz. He co-authored the Art of SEO from O’Reilly Media and was named on the 40 Under 40 List and 30 Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30. Rand has been written about in The Seattle Times, Newsweek and PC World among others and keynoted conferences on search around the world. He’s particularly passionate about the SEOmoz blog, read by tens of thousands of search professionals each day. In his miniscule spare time, Rand enjoys the company of his amazing wife, whose serendipitous travel blog chronicles their journeys.
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| The FTC Rallies Against Fake News Ads Posted: 26 Apr 2011 03:16 PM PDT
Even though they do say “advertorial” on them and they are found in sidebars where banner ads usually hang out, people still think they’re legitimate news sources, so they click and they buy the diet product that is hawked at the end of it all. The FTC says no more. They’ve gone to court to stop ten companies who produce these phony ads and they want to force them refund the money to consumers who fell for the claims. The FTC charges that the defendants:
The combination is pretty damning, but what if you separated these claims? Would it be alright to create a phony news site complete with fake comments if the facts were true? Couldn’t that just be seen as creative license? The FTC is also going after them for not disclosing the fact that it’s an affiliate deal.
In total, it all falls under the heading of deceptive advertising and I get that. But you do have to wonder how so many people can be taken in by what is so blatantly an advertisement. According to the FTC, the companies involved have paid out more than $10 million to run these ads, so it’s likely that they’re pocketing a lot more. Apparently, many people do believe everything they read on the internet.
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| Traffic From Social Media Has Highest Bounce Rate Posted: 26 Apr 2011 12:47 PM PDT Now that we have a lot more data in the hopper, it’s beginning to look like social media isn’t the magic pill many people thought it would be when it comes to marketing. Today, we have numbers from Outbrain. This is the company that makes the “You Also Might Like” widget that suggests related content at the bottom of a blog post. They examined traffic from 100 million sessions across more than 100 premium publishers in order to find out how people are discovering content and what happens when they get there. As we’ve seen from other surveys, the majority of traffic comes from search engines (41%) and content sites (31%). They say social media sends 11% of the traffic, which is better than the 1% ForeSee suggested, but it’s still not fabulous. The bigger bad news is that once those social media butterflies land at your site, they don’t stay long.
These results shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. We know that social media is all about instant gratification. It’s the salmon puff on a cocktail party tray. It comes by, it looks good, you grab it. Doesn’t mean you’d like to have an entire meal of nothing but salmon puffs, right? Search, on the other hand, is like going out to dinner. You have a need (hunger), you find a good place, you sit down and you dine for a half hour or more. (It’s lunch time, folks, can’t help the food analogies.) What this means for marketers is that you have to grab visitors in the first few seconds when they hit your site, or those who came in from social media will be lost. You can see more results from this study at the Outbrain blog and thanks to eMarketer for the heads up.
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| Demand Media’s Stock Drops Like Its Google Traffic Posted: 26 Apr 2011 08:29 AM PDT Demand Media is trying to give the impression that everything is OK down on the content farm. They have confirmed their financial guidance for the year but that confirmation is interesting considering the following two realities. Their Google traffic is down 40% after it was Panda-ficated. As a result, Demand's stock as fallen 34% following their much talked about IPO in January. Since pictures are worth a thousand words I'll save myself a lot of writing and you a lot of reading. The chart below came to us from SAI.
There were many of you who were upset that we talked about Demand in less than glowing terms and had predicted that the content farm game's dependency on Google was more than just risky. Heck, even their own corporate reports said that. Now the reality is setting in quick and it's not just Demand feeling the pinch but their stockholders as well. Looks like the latest content farm crop may be a crock. I suspect that shareholders will demand more from Demand sooner than later. Your thoughts?
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