Search Advisory

Larry Chrzan of Blue Horseradish presented an ingenious framework for the different types of inbound links a company might pursue.  He put them in a framework of “The 7 P’s of Link Trust.”

Larry Chrzan after his presentation on link-building

Read more…

The most important thing that human beings do, according to Steve Patrizi, is make decisions.  Which brings us to The Decision-Maker’s Dilemma – I can make a decision quickly, but I may make a mistake.  Or I can be right, but it may take too long to gather all the information I need.  So how can we be fast and right in our decision-making?

Steve Patrizi, VP of Marketing Solutions for LinkedIn

Steve Patrizi, VP of Marketing Solutions for LinkedIn, was the keynote speaker for the first day of The Power of eMarketing conference in Baltimore last week.  His presentation focused on LinkedIn’s new “Signal” product, currently still in beta, which will help businesspeople filter through the deluge of information available today in order to make faster, better decisions.

“More data will be created in the next four years than in the history of the planet,” said Mark Hurd, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, in June of 2009 (meaning we’re more than one year into his four years!).  So how can we wade through this deluge of information to find what we need? Read more…

Forget third party bid management tools, says David Szetela, CEO of Clix Marketing and undisputed pay-per-click expert.  Google’s Conversion Optimizer is all you need.  It’s the most efficient campaign management tool on the planet because it’s got data across all advertisers, which third party tools don’t have.  And it has data on sites’ conversion rates.  (I must note here that some of us see this Big Brother-ness as a negative, not a positive, but in terms of sheer volume of data, David’s right, Google can’t be beat.)  David recommends bidding based on Target CPA (cost per action).

During David’s presentation on Advanced Pay-Per-Click for SEMPO Atlanta last week, he covered a number of topics, including turbo-editing with AdWords Editor.  (That involved a lot of screen shots, which isn’t conducive to recapping in a blog post, unfortunately.)  He also said that since Bing/Yahoo now have roughly 30% of the market share, anyone only advertising on Google is missing the boat.  There’s an easy way to export your Google campaign in a format that can easily be uploaded to Microsoft’s adCenter – there’s a link to David’s instructions here.

David Szetela of Clix Marketing speaks on Advanced PPC for SEMPO Atlanta

Google’s remarketing (aka retargeting) is also worth investing some time and creative thinking in.  (We explained what it is toward the end of our April newsletter.)  David showed an ad that was displayed for one of his ecommerce clients, shown for site visitors that started to make a purchase but abandoned the shopping cart.  The ad’s description read: “You were so close – come back and finish your buy & take 20% off!“  Another ad for a luggage site read “We miss you – please come back, we have a cool new tote just for you.”  This “welcome back” language was echoed on the landing pages, and these campaigns were both highly effective.  (Video on remarketing from Clix Marketing.)

The previous day was the first day Google had publicly spoken about their interest-based advertising, which is still in beta.  This will enable advertisers to target searchers by their interests, which has the potential t be more powerful than placement targeting and more efficient than keyword targeting.

Facebook advertising was also covered.  Ads with images consistently outperform those without.  Images with facial expressions are usually best.  Facebook’s responder profile report will tell you people’s favorite TV shows, musicians, etc. – you can use this information to be very specific with targeting, ad copy and landing page copy.

If your goal is to build your Facebook fan/likes database, then the landing page should be on Facebook.  If the goal of the Facebook campaign is something else, such as driving ecommerce sales or lead generation on your site, then a page outside Facebook should be the landing page.  Increasingly, however, conversions in addition to “likes” can be done right on Facebook – David recently met a company in New York that’s about to launch Facebook store pages.

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social network.  If you’re selling a product or service to white collar professionals, it’s definitely worth using.  Note that this isn’t necessarily limited just to B2B marketers – those selling luxury/high priced B2C items can also find their audience on LinkedIn.  The ads don’t even look like ads – they’re one line of text across the LinkedIn page.

David recommended that every company have their own company LinkedIn page.  Advertising on LinkedIn allows marketers to target by company size, job function, industries, seniority, gender, age and geography.  Ads can be bought on a CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis.  LinkedIn’s tracking is rudimentary at this point and doesn’t include conversion tracking.

The click-through rates and conversion rates for Facebook and LinkedIn are roughly equivalent to Google’s display network, which is typically lower than Google’s search network.  This is because people seeing ads on regular sites or social networking sites are usually in a different mindset than those actively searching.  David recommends driving to a softer conversion action (“Sign up for our newsletter” rather than “Buy now!”) on Facebook and LinkedIn.

As for Google’s display network, anyone may download a free sample chapter of David’s book “Customers Now” which covers how to create text and graphical ads that sell.

Follow David on Twitter at @szetela and view his slides on Slideshare.

Tomorrow, we’ll cover Stephan Spencer’s VERY Advanced Search Engine Optimization presentation.  Click here or on the “sempoatl10″ tag below to see all the posts in this series (a new one will be added at 6 am EDT daily through Friday, October 8).

I was privileged to appear on a panel last night with Toby Bloomberg of Bloomberg Marketing, Erika Jolly Brookes of Vitrue (also a client of ours), and Collen Jones of Content Science.  Our moderator was Julie Gareleck of Junction Creative.  The event was put on by StartupChicks, led by the inimitable Jen Bonnett.

StartupChicks Digital Strategy Panel

We talked about the importance of a digital strategy – what it is, common misconceptions, how to approach it, value it’s provided, tactics that worked and didn’t, results, and recommendations for new business owners.  We were fortunate to have a good amount of time to delve into the topic in depth, and got some great audience questions.  Some of the points that seemed to hit home for the audience included:

• Everything starts with content.  You’ve got to have content to optimize (SEO), as well as to publish via social media, in an enewsletter, etc.  Have a strategy as to what kind of content your target audience wants, and how to get it to them.
• It’s best to own the platform your content is on, so you control it and it doesn’t just disappear one day (this was my point – I’ve written about this before).  This is a concern with blogs hosted on Blogspot, etc., and note that you’re just renting space on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• In terms of measurement, worry about quality as well as quantity.  It doesn’t do you any good to have a ton of Twitter followers or Facebook fans if they’re not your target audience.
• While digital media is very measurable, don’t forget the “unmeasurable” benefits, such as branding impacts and becoming a thought leader through blogging or social media.
• It’s great to follow best practices, but test and measure everything, because you’ll be surprised as to what works!
• Non-digital marketing efforts that the panelists still use include public relations, speaking engagements, and attending conferences/trade shows.
• We had a long conversation about business versus personal personas online.  It’s uncomfortable to many to blend the two and let the business audience know about you personally.  But it often works to your advantage – business people are people and they prefer to do business with people they like and trust.

This is just a small sample of the discussion – I’ll link to additional blog posts in the comments as they’re published (and feel free to do so yourself).  Live tweets can be viewed here or here, and more photos are on Prominent Placement’s Facebook page here (please “like” us while you’re there!).

Bottom line, it was energizing to have so many entrepreneurial women in one room!

(And props to one of my favorite restaurants, MetroFresh, for the amazing catering!  Speaking of digital strategy – sign up for their daily enewsletter.  It’s so entertaining that I read it every single day, and you can bet I eat there more often as a result.)

Nearly a year ago, we wrote about how to leverage social media for search engine optimization purposes.  That newsletter issue was well-received, but since much has changed since then, it’s time to update the list of worthwhile social media sites.  While there are many good reasons to undertake social media for your business, we’re focusing here only on SEO benefits.  To refresh your memory, there are two primary ones:

• Social media offers additional content that can be optimized and show up in the search engine results pages.  We touched on this in our March newsletter, “Making the Most of the New Search Engine Results Pages.”
• Often, you can build links into your social media content that point back to your corporate site, potentially increasing its organic rankings.  Note that all links are not created equally – links that redirect (such as on MySpace) don’t pass along any “link juice,” and links that are “nofollowed” pass along less link juice than regular links.  Also note that when you can control the text of the link to use your keywords as the “anchor text,” that’s also a significant SEO bonus.

We focus here on the most popular social media sites.  Everyone’s resources are stretched these days, so we generally don’t invest time in a site until it’s reached a critical mass of users.  In our opinion, roughly in the order of priority, you should focus your attention on: Read more…

A couple of years ago, one of our clients asked us to manage a pay-per-click advertising campaign for them on Facebook.  I turned them down, since “Facebook isn’t search” – I’ve always been proud that we stick to our knitting and focus solely on search marketing.  This particular client predicted that I’d have to change my tune on this stance sooner or later.  He was right – we’ve been managing Facebook PPC campaigns for some time now, and this points to a larger trend in Internet marketing.

In last month’s newsletter, we stated that the search engine results pages have gotten much more complex over time, especially with universal and personalized search being thrown into the mix.  This same type of complexity, of gray area, is creeping across all facets of Internet marketing.  For one thing, what is search?  How is it defined when we find ourselves constantly searching for various things across different media?  For example:

• We search through ever-increasing DVR libraries for TV shows to watch.
• We search for our old friends from high school on Facebook, hoping that one of the Joe Taylors has a photo and that we’ll recognize him after all these years.
• We search through a lifetime worth of songs on our iPods to find the perfect tune for our current mood.
• We search Twitter handles to find the name used by a new colleague met at an industry event.  And we search Twitter when we hear a rumor of breaking news.
• We search through Netflix’s selection of movies to decide what we want to watch.
• We search through the apps in the iTunes store to find the perfect app to tell us what time the sun rises or what foods are gluten-free.

Everywhere that someone is searching for something using technology (whether it’s a computer, mobile device, MP3 player, video game console, or TV), there is a search algorithm.  And everywhere there’s a search algorithm, there are companies (or TV shows or people’s profiles or songs or web pages or movies or apps) desperately trying to be found.

So…search is getting muddy partly due to the explosion in things to search for and devices to search on. Read more…

We were fortunate to have Peter Yewell, the Sales Director for Facebook, speak to us on the last day of their f8 developers conference.  So his presentation was “hot off the presses” in terms of Facebook news.

Facebook has three target audiences: users, advertisers and developers (that build third party apps like Mafia Wars and Farmville on their open platform).  Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. 

We’re at the very beginning of a major shift in how we find, consumer & interact with information.  Two trends:   1. A growing importance of identity and authenticity.  2. Real people want to connect with real things.  These drive everything else.

Facebook’s product is not their website – it’s connections.  With yesterday’s announcement about their new “open graph protocol” (“Like” buttons on websites outside Facebook), Facebook can now enable you to connect with anything that defines you (friends, family, brands, celebrities, causes).  Their asset is the social graph – they don’t own it – we do.

For advertisers, Facebook offers unlimited reach & engagement.  The amount of time spent on their site is staggering.  Marketers should engage their target audiences where they want to be – increasingly, they want to be on Facebook.

How brands are best leveraging Facebook:

1. Make it social: “That’s what I do on Facebook”
2. Keep it simple: “If I understand something, I’m more likely to try it”
3. Optimize for speed: “If it’s fast, I’ll do more of it”
4. Integrate: “Keep it within my Facebook experience”

Facebook’s marketing ecosystem:  Reach +connections = advocacy.

“Become a fan ad” shows friends’ names in the ad that also like that company or product – they call this having “social context”.  Connections like this increase campaign value and offer a +68% lift in brand metrics.  If you have 50,000 fans, 12% of the people you reach will see an ad with social context (name of their friends listed).

Having a brand page (fka “fan page”) is a good start, but it’s “narrowcasting” – you can only push content to people who already are your fans.  This isn’t scalable.  So layer on top of that a bigger ad campaign in order to scale.

The first time you run a campaign, it may not be a home run.  This is because you’ve got to get fans in order to see results, and you’ve got to get fans via the campaign – it’s a bit circular.  At first, you’re starting from zero.  But the second time, you’re starting from where you left off.  Biggest successes often come later.  Build a fan base – run a promotion – build a fan base – run a promotion.  Example:  Starbucks event ads (free pastry day): added 1 million new fans, sold out of pastries every store nationwide.  No other advertising was run.

More about Facebook Connect and the new open graph:  Log into Netflix w/your Facebook login – see what your friends have watched and recommended (not just some random stranger).  Take your Facebook identity with you, wherever you go on the web.  Connections happen everywhere, not just on Facebook.  You can currently see the “Like” button on Levi’s and CNN’s sites – click on them and it’ll appear on your Facebook profile and in your friends’ Facebook news feeds.

An excellent panel of social media experts (Jay Baer, Ben Hanna, Chris Baggott, Caitlin McCabe, Lee Odden and Michael Senger) were tasked with answering a slew of questions using 140 or fewer characters.  Yes, their responses were madly tweeted (here’s my live Twitter feed).  Highlights:

• “What’s the biggest myth about social media?” Don’t wait to start until you’re ready (because you’ll never be ready).  Social media isn’t measurable and doesn’t generate revenue.  Since executives don’t use social media, their target audiences must not either.  One piece of social media content can’t do much (just ask Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines about that).
• “What are the biggest mistakes made with social media?” Build it and they will come.  Overcommitment to too many sites – limit them or you’ll never keep up.  Giving social media a month or two to perform and deciding it doesn’t work (this is about building relationships!).  Overvaluing followers – it’s so easy to become a fan that it may mean less than you think (“With friends like this, who needs friends?”).  Outsourcing customer engagement – an agency will never know your customers like you do.  Falling in love with a particular social media channel – let your audience dictate which ones are important.
• “What’s most overrated?” Whatever platform your customers aren’t using.  Facebook ads, since 25% of Facebook users access it from their mobile devices, which don’t display ads.  Twitter in terms of too much focus on the number of followers you have.  A company-sponsored online community – it’s a very slow build.
• “What’s the difference between social media for B2B versus B2C companies?” There’s “more romance” with B2B since it’s a longer sales cycle.  B2C is more immediate and mass market.  Don’t assume Facebook=B2C and LinkedIn=B2B because that’s not necessarily true; the platform may not change between consumers and business buyers, but your message, tactic and offer should.  For B2B, you must be a helpful, relevant resource.  With B2C you can often afford to simply entertain.  With B2B, you usually know who your customers are since they’re in a database, so you can track social media results more closely.  With B2C, that’s much harder (Pringles doesn’t know who their customers are).
• “What about social media and SEO?” They’re yin and yang – social promotes optimized content and provides links.  Use the same keywords and links on social media that you do on your site.  Social media is simply more content to search engines.  Keywords are a good thing – if you want to engage me, speak my language!
• “How should someone new to social media get started?” Listen first, find out what customers want from you and make it easy for them to get it.  Determine your resources and be honest about what you can accomplish.  Blog first – everything else will work off of that “hub” of social activity.  The smartest people in your company are the people you give the phone to – they are used to talking to customers and prospects and should be blogging.

I spent the better part of a day listening to Hallie Janssen of Anvil Media go in depth about social media.  I have discovered that it’s very difficult to boil this much content down into a series of pithy blog posts, particularly after a long day of listening, taking notes, live tweeting, networking, checking email and voicemail, and keeping a business running long distance.  So while I’m passing along the tidbits that seem the most valuable/new/interesting to me, this is far from all the content being discussed at the Online Marketing Summit this week.  (For more, see my live Twitter feed, or search Twitter using hashtag #oms10 to see the deluge of tweets from more folks.)

Here are some random items from Hallie’s presentations you may find useful:

• Dell has free social media guides for small businesses.
• Announce new product/service launches on Facebook – one client found that Facebook fans, not surprisingly, convert at a 20% higher rate than the average corporate website visitor.
• Facebook ads can be very effective, but if you take advantage of all the targeting options, you may be speaking to a very small audience.  Once you’ve tapped out that audience, you’re done.  One thing that helps is to change your creative very often, even once a week, to get attention and test different messaging.
• YouTube videos rank higher when they have keywords in the video filename, title of the videeo, and description blurb.  Same with Flickr photos.
• Use TubeMogul to syndicate videos to 12 channels beyond YouTube.
• Just like you should register negative versions of your brand name in terms of URLs (“www.brandsucks.com”), you should do the same with Twitter handles (“@brandsucks”, etc.).  This keeps them out of the hands of the disgruntled.
• Twitter analytics: Twitalyzer or Klout.
• More Twitter third party applications: Twitpic, Wildfire, Sprout Publisher, TwtQpon, TwtAway, TwtSurvey, TwtPoll.
• Facebook Fan Pages should use keywords in the page’s title, “about us” blurb, info tab and information box.
• Wikipedia: go to http://stats.grok.se and type in your top keywords.  It’ll tell you which Wikipedia pages for that keyword get the most pageviews.  So if you want to try to add new content to a page related to your industry, choose the page(s) with the most traffic this way.

SoCon 10 offered two breakout sessions after lunch.  There were 12 to choose from in both time slots, so it was hard to choose, knowing that you’d have to miss the other 11 (22 total).  For the first breakout, I selected “Turn Your Company Into a Content Machine,” led by James Andrews, Managing Partner at Everywhere, a strategic communications consultancy specializing in social media.  James’ blog is at TheKeyInfluencer.com.

Since my company is a search engine marketing firm, my goal was to get tips on creating more content for our clients – optimizable content that can appear in the search engine results pages and build links pointing back to the corporate site.  So, in my head, “content” was written content, such as articles.  It quickly became apparent that I had to get out of my box – James’ idea of content was largely video and online events.  He gave a rapid-fire talk with examples of content he had created, either for his own personal reasons, his company, or his clients:

• James recommends UStream for live streaming of events.  Vokle is another option, but it’s still in beta.  SoCon 10 was filmed and live streamed (archive available here).
• When a good friend passed away suddenly, James set up a channel on BlogTalkRadio that same day and 600 of the man’s friends and family were able to connect and talk together, pray, mourn, and console each other.

• At a recent trade show, James “programmed” it, as in TV network programming.  He had a different interview or event scheduled every hour and live streamed it (using social media to promote each event).  He also had a live Twitter feed displayed on the side of the booth to catch the interest of attendees.

• Also at trade shows, James gives the people in the booth Flip cameras and makes them content producers.  He edits the video that night (iMovie is fine for this) and can show the video in the booth the next day, as well as post it online, and then use social media to promote it.

• PitchEngine is recommended for social media press releases – it’s free and they allow you to include images, video, tags, “share” buttons, etc.

• This Friday, February 5, BET, MTV and VH1will broadcast a benefit concert for Haiti.  James is involved in this effort, and he’s promoting it via the Facebook fan pages of the artists that will be performing – many of them have well over 1 million Facebook fans.  This costs nothing more than his time.

• Posterous is a site that allows you to email in a blog post, photo, audio file, video, document, or other content and have it instantly published online.

• When planning to attend BlogWorld in Las Vegas last fall, James and his team at Everywhere wanted to create buzz-worthy content and help a good cause at the same time.  They contacted the Guinness World Records and arranged to set a record for the distribution of the largest mass message through social media.  They found sponsors willing to donate a penny toward non-profit cancer organizations for every Twitter message, Facebook update or blog post including the hashtag #BeatCancer.  This was hugely successful and everyone was talking about it – more importantly, they set the record and raised $70,000 in 24 hours.

James emphasized that ANYTHING can be content.  Our lives are content.  We can make content out of anything if we think outside the box.  Note that everything mentioned above is either free or very low cost – just requiring an investment in time and creativity.

For all posts covering SoCon 10, click here.