Search Advisory

The only problem with being on a panel at a conference is that you can’t simultaneously speak and take notes for a blog post. Here’s what I wrote about the panel I

was on prior to it happening.

I did play on the PPC side, along with Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media. At one point, the guys on the SEO side weren’t saying what I would have been saying if I were them, so I briefly jumped the fence and defended SEO (I’m a Libra – I can do that!). Andrew called me “Benedict Arnold” and the session got even more lively after that!

I gave a brief PowerPoint presentation before the debate, which you can view here. Of course, the ultimate lesson is that the best approach is to use SEO and PPC together!

I’ve been a conference-going fool so far this year, and I’ve learned a lot about using social media at conferences, as well as using conferences as social media content.  Here are my thoughts to date.

Using Social Media at Conferences

I admit that I’m still trying to get hooked on Twitter.  I’ve figured out what my primary goal is with it – to promote Prominent Placement’s content (such as blog posts, Facebook fan page updates, Flickr photos, etc.).  Promoting our content obviously helps build awareness of our brand, hopefully ultimately leading to more clients.  So I want to get a lot of Twitter followers so that our content can be distributed more widely.

One good place to find like-minded Twitterers (Twits?) is at a conference.  The first thing I do is find out what the official hashtag is (such as #oms10 or #smx).  Then, during sessions, I live Tweet.  I pick brief sound bites or factoids that the speakers share and tweet them, including the hashtag (and ideally the speaker’s Twitter handle, such as @gregjarboe – I also follow all the speakers).

I watch the Twitter feed from the event (by either clicking on a hashtag – once it’s published it becomes a live link – or by putting the hashtag in the Twitter search box).  Here I can see other attendees that are also live tweeting.  I click on their name to read a little bit about them, and if it seems like we’re kindred spirits, I follow them.  Most of them will follow me in return.

If I’m posting good stuff, the other attendees will retweet my tweets, which makes them visible to their followers.  Also, people who aren’t at the event will pick up on the event’s hashtag and start reading the live Twitter feed – they’ll also retweet my posts.  Numerous people will start following me due to this.

At OMS, I found that I was toggling back and forth on my netbook between Word (to take notes in) and Twitter.  I often copied a sentence out of my notes in Word and pasted it into Twitter.  Pretty soon, this got old, and I found that I was mostly posting on Twitter, figuring I’d simply use my own Twitter feed as my notes.  Of course, this just works for pithy little sound bites, nothing over 140 characters.  So any beefy notes went into Word instead.  I also made sure to copy/paste my Twitter feed into a second Word document at the end of that day just in case my Twitter feed became “unavailable,” as content sometimes does on Twitter.  (I had recently learned a painful lesson about “owning your own real estate” online.)

It was interesting to read other attendees’ tweets, see their profile photos, and then find them in the crowd.  More than once, I’d join someone at a lunch table and we’d find out that we were newly following each other.  However, I did discover one issue that I’m still not sure how to solve.  While I have a personal Twitter account, I prefer to use the Prominent Placement Twitter account for all business-related activity.  That’s where I want to gain followers so as to promote PPI’s content.  But there’s no photo of me on that account – just a PPI logo.

Realizing people could be reading my tweets while sitting next to me and never know it was me, I ended up tearing a PPI logo off of one of my business cards and sticking it into the corner of my name badge’s plastic holder.  I also had just reprinted our business cards to include our Twitter handle, so that helped.  I’m not sure there’s a better solution to this issue than that.

Using Conferences as Social Media Content

With social media, content is critical – no one’s going to listen to you or connect with you if you have nothing to say.  Conferences offer a plethora of good quality content.  Obviously, I’m not talking about plagiarizing other people’s material – I’m recommending becoming a reporter or curator – compiling volumes of information, sifting through it, summarizing it, and giving credit to the authors.

So this content can become tweets (as discussed above), blog posts (as I’ve done here), and more.  I took photos during the events and posted them on our Facebook fan page (here’s OMS and SMX – I still need to add them to Flickr too).  I also did video interviews with our staff, having them recount their top takeaways every day.  Unfortunately, using my iPhone as the camera (which is surprisingly do-able for video quality), the audio quality wasn’t there, so I trashed the videos.  But I’ll be getting an external microphone before the next conference!

I had one other brainstorm before I left.  When I set up my email autoreply, I included links to the blog tags that would include the coverage of both events (such as these for OMS and SMX).  I also included a link to my Twitter feed and our Facebook fan page for photos.  I haven’t yet figured out how to track or quantify traffic this may have generated, but it’s another opportunity for my contacts – those emailing me while I’m away – to be able to keep up with what I’m doing and learning in real time.

No doubt the use of social media in conjunction with conferences will continue to evolve and become more sophisticated, but that’s what I’m doing today.

I took 16 pages of notes during the four days at the Online Marketing Summit last month, and was delayed in posting summaries of key sessions by blog drama.  In making up for lost time, I’ve pulled out some quotes from OMS that resonated with me – apologies to any of the speakers/authors to whom I can’t give credit:

• “The inescapable conclusion is that anyone who thinks advertising is the key to sustainable online businesses in any field other than search should think again.” John Naughton, The Observer, 12/6/09
• More people are watching more videos on YouTube than are running searches on Google.  If you’re not looking into video and YouTube, you’re missing the biggest opportunity out there today. (More on this.)
• If you take a broad definition of search engines, per ComScore, these are the top search engines today (in order):  Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook.
• (Regarding site design, coding and content)  We are the janitors of the Internet – cleaning up other people’s messes and putting everything in neat little piles.
• With Universal Search, the days of the 10 blue links are over – SEO will go the way of the buggy whip if that’s all we focus on.  Search marketers need to change with the SERPs (search engine results pages).  (This was the topic of our March newsletter.)
• The number one item that ranks highly with Universal Search is video.  Number two is news, three is images, four is a combination of the three above items, and five is maps.
• We need to become comfortable with the idea of “asset optimization” – optimizing all digital assets, not just web pages.
• Google seems to be treating links in tweets from people with lots of followers differently from those with few followers.
• “Nofollow” means “Nofollow some of the time.”

My favorite Red Sox fan, Greg Jarboe, extolled the virtues of videos and YouTube.

While Google Video will crawl your website and find/index any videos hosted there, they account for less than 5% of the market in terms of video viewage.  YouTube doesn’t crawl sites – all videos must be hosted on their site – but since they have 84% market share, that’s the way to go.

In December 2009, according to ComScore, there were 9.7 billion core searches on Google and 13 billion videos watched on YouTube.  So anyone not getting into video and YouTube is missing today’s biggest online opportunity.

How are people finding videos to watch now?  Forty five percent discover them directly on video sites (including YouTube); only 6% find them with traditional search engines.  Forty four percent find videos because they’re embedded in blogs.  Two percent each discover videos through social networks or social bookmarking sites.  Less than 1% use specialized blog search engines.

YouTube’s mission is for people to be able to discover, watch and share videos.  These are three distinct tasks.

Getting Your Videos Discovered

The best way to ensure your video is discovered is to optimize it for YouTube’s search function.  YouTube says that they “combine sophisticated text-matching techniques to find videos that are both important and relevant to your search. Our technology examines dozens of aspects of the video’s content (including number of hits and rating) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.”

Many people use the same keyword research tools that they use for traditional SEO in order to determine which keywords to target on YouTube.  That’s not necessarily bad, but people do search differently on YouTube (one simple example is that they don’t include the word “video” when searching on YouTube).  YouTube does have a keyword suggestion tool, but currently it’s not very good.  The best thing to do is to look at their search suggestions – start typing queries into the search box and see what YouTube.  That’ll tell you what more people are searching for.

Where should you put your keywords?  Optimize the video’s title (120 character limit) – think of it like a headline and if you include your brand name, put it last.

Also optimize the descriptions (5000 character limit).  Be as detailed as possible here (including keywords), short of including an entire transcript.  Include URLs (important – with the http:// part) to your website or other online properties.  Links are nofollowed, but they do generate traffic.

Sidenote: the description is not just for SEO purposes – it also plays a role when someone shares videos with their friends.  They’ll often use the description to give the backstory to their friends.  So tell a great story that’ll be likely to get retold.

Also use keywords in tags (120 characters maximum).  Be as detailed as possible, because YouTube lives and dies by tags.  This is very different from the keyword meta tag on sites for SEO.

Categories are a factor in optimizing videos, but YouTube doesn’t always have good categories.  Optimize each video individually.  If you’re optimizing your YouTube channel, the same tools are used, but the character limits are different.

Getting Your Video Watched

Some large percentage of viewers drop off during the first 10 seconds of viewing.  Fifty four percent leave after 60 seconds.  So just because someone discovers your video, it doesn’t mean they’ll watch it, absorb your message, or share it.   Your video must be compelling – don’t optimize garbage.

Select your video thumbnail carefully – YouTube will give you three choices.  The thumbnail tells part of the story in the SERPs and can affect how many people decide to click and watch it.  Note that the videos displayed on the right side of YouTube’s search results page are paid, similar to pay-per-click ads on traditional search engines.  These ads are “dirt cheap” right now because not many people have used them yet.

Videos that rank high on YouTube also tend to rank high on Google due to Universal Search.  Google pulls videos from a number of sources, but 85% are from YouTube.

YouTube’s Hot Spots tool compares viewership of a video to others of a similar length, so you can see when people drop off on yours or others.  Greg’s takeaway for his videos is to cut out lengthy intros and get right to the meat of the video.

YouTube channels can also be incredibly powerful.  Greg showed the example of a young man named Ryan Higa, who has 2 million subscribers to his channel.  These people have asked to be notified when he has a new video, so they’re not just watching his current content, but they’re asking for future content.  He even sells ads on his channel.

Getting Your Video Shared

YouTube is a video-sharing site.  When a video is shared, it’s endorsed – people are putting their credibility behind it.  So your goal is to make videos that people want to watch and share.

Again, including a compelling story in the description helps.  Consider buying ads on YouTube to promote your video and get some traction behind it.  Promote your YouTube videos and channel on your website, your blog, your other social media platforms, and in public relations efforts.  Use YouTube’s new annotation function to ask viewers to rate your video.  You can also list your URL here.  Google is not currently indexing annotations, but it may in the future.

The always-informative and entertaining Eric T. Peterson made web analytics more interesting than usual.  He advised that the problems of inconsistent data that’s provided to executives in spreadsheet format with no analysis, leading to no reactions, doesn’t have to be.  He gave three steps to follow.

First, organize your output.  Don’t ask for (or supply) spreadsheets.  There’s a hierarchy of analytical needs (yes, borrowed from Maslow ).  Picture a pyramid, with the bottom level labeled “Data” – this would be something like “Our site had 1 million visitors last month.”  The second level up is “Information” (“That 1 million visitors represented a 10% increase over the previous month.”).  The third level is “Insights” (“The reason we had a 10% increase was due to changes in our pay-per-click campaign where we put more budget into lower-cost keywords.”).  Finally, the top of the pyramid is “Recommendations” (“Therefore, as long as the conversion rate doesn’t dip, we recommend continuing to focus on lower-cost keywords and adding even more of them to the campaign.”).

Companies need to have a web analytics strategy, as well as a governance model – otherwise, people tend to do the easiest thing, which is to log in, pull data, and slap it into a spreadsheet.

Second, evaluate your tools.  No one tool does everything you need in analytics.  You need simple presentation tools, a powerful data manipulation environment, flexible data repositories, and a rich analytical modeling capability.  Ask yourself, “Do we have the right tools?  Are we making effective use of the tools we have?  Is everyone well-trained on the tools they have?  Do our power users have powerful tools and technology?”

Third, balance your investments – data does not analyze itself.  People are critical to web analytics, period.  This is especially true as data becomes more complicated, and comes from more sources that need to be integrated (social media sites, mobile, the iPad, etc.).  The question is not “Do we need people?” but “How many people do we need?”  Take every dollar that you want to commit to web analytics and spend half on the technology and half on people.

Digital marketing is hard and getting harder.  Measuring your marketing effort is a requirement.  It’s not enough to just slap Google Analytics on the site.  You need a clearly-defined strategy to stop failing.  Your strategy needs to cover people, process and technology, in roughly equal measures.  Done right, the results are awesome.

This morning’s keynote at the Online Marketing Summit was a discussion with John Battelle and Anne Holland.  Both are insightful visionaries in the Internet marketing space.  John founded Wired magazine and wrote “The Search”, among numerous other accomplishments.  Anne founded and then sold MarketingSherpa, and now runs WhichTestWon.com.

Their conversation, as moderated by Aaron Kahlow, covered a lot of territory.  Standout points for me included:

• We’ve heard this so many times but still don’t do it…marketers should be focusing on their customers’ pain points, not their own capabilities/services.  (Anne)
• A brand consists of what one person tells another person about a company or product.  Corporations think they own/control their brand, but they don’t.  (John)
• Marketers are publishers/content creators – that is now one of their value propositions.  (John)
• Creative folks should call the media their ads will run in (online or traditional) and ask them which ads performed the best for other advertisers in the past.  This will tell them what really works with that audience.  This would give them such an advantage, but no one ever does it.  (Anne)
• After you get a new email subscriber and you send them a “thank you” email…that email will have the highest open rate of anything you ever send them, so make the most of it!  Don’t just fill it with boring information about when they should expect their first newsletter from you – put important branding/sales messaging in it.  (Anne)
• Say you partner with (or advertise on) Site X to promote your product.  Develop a special landing page just for those visitors – include language such as “Welcome, Site X readers” along with Site X’s logo.  You’re guaranteed to increase your conversion rate.  (Anne)

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.

Several noteworthy SEO experts were given very brief time periods to talk about cutting edge topics in search engine optimization at OMS. Here’s a recap of the most interesting points:

• Looking for hot keywords for breaking news? Use Google Trends or even Google Hot Trends, Twendz, or Trendistic. Marshall Simmonds from the NY Times offered these up, along with the example of how the Times was scooped for the “plane in hudson” breaking news item when their headlines used words no one was searching for, like “Jetliner’s Icy Plunge Into River.”
• Yahoo’s Laura Lippay gave an interesting talk about how to determine your search traffic opportunity (how much is each keyword and ranking worth to your business?): http://www.tinyurl.com/smartseo.
• Lauren Vaccarello from SalesForce talked about a technique we’ve been using for clients whose sites are lead gen (not ecommerce) – putting hidden fields onto conversion forms that capture tracking information for people who clicked on an organic listing. In other words, site visitors that run a search and click on an organic listing will have the keyword and search engine appended to their record in SalesForce. Meaning the true revenue generated by SEO is now trackable.

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.

Hallie Janssen from Anvil Media offered a plethora of tactical tips for launching a new blog, including:

• Don’t host ON one of the platforms (WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, etc.) because you don’t “own” the platform.  Instead, host your blog on a domain you own.
• Which platform to choose? http://bit.ly/wordpressvstypepad
• Install the best WordPress plugins.
• Best elements to include on the blog as a whole are categories, a cloud widget, blog roll, recent posts, comments, most popular posts, RSS feed, blog search box, and an author section.
• Best elements to include on each post are optimized titles & meta description tags, a customized URL, “retweet this” and “share” buttons, related posts, links to posts by that author (if blog has multiple authors), tags, images and video.
• Blog post checklist.
• Get listed in blog directories.