360DigitalInfluence

I’ve just completed a successful day at Search Engine Strategies in NY, with tons of great panels, Guy Kawasaki keynote admitting how good he is at spamming twitter, and plenty of iPhone giveaway business card drops.  The last panel of the day “Video Search Engine Optimization: 2009 and Beyond” featured some good presentations, saving the best for last; Matthew Lui, YouTube Project Manager, Sponsored Videos.  I was able to flipcam is speach.  

If you can get past the video quality, my shaky arm, and the jerry curl in front of me, there is actually some excellent information in here about video search engine optimization, and the YouTube advertising platform  Enjoy!

For my second interview of Search Engine Strategies speakers I’ve had the privilege of connecting with Sharad Verma from Yahoo!

Sharad is a senior product manager for content, crawl, and indexing systems of Yahoo Search Technology. Before joining Yahoo in 2007, he worked for multiple Silicon Valley startups.   Sharad graduated from IIT Bombay (India) with a degree in chemical engineering in 1999.

Sharad will be speaking on the panel Discovering the Power of Linking: Link Building Basics, as well as several others.  The term “Link Building“  is often discussed among marketing and pr professional, however, more often than not a genuine understanding of what goes into this effort is lacking.  Hopefully Sharad will be able to clear some things up with this Q&A.

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I will be attending Search Engine Strategies in New York March 24th - 26th.  In preparation for the conference I’ve had the privileged of interviewing Marjorie Madfis, an Interactive Marketing Manager and Web Editor at IBM. She will be one of the speakers in the session Key Points in Launching a Global Website.

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So you’ve finally gotten used to seeing the above little logos on a lot of the websites you visit. Maybe you’ve even “Dugg” a blog post, “Stumbled” a website, or “Tweeted” an article. Well, the extent of your foray into social media engagement as you browse the Web has only just begun. The following two logos will start to pop up more and more in 2009:

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While personalized search was officially launched on Google in 2005, I believe 2008 will be remembered as the year that the concept of “personalized search” went mainstream. I’m making no claims about the usefulness of personalized search itself.   The reason I’m calling it out as a best of 2008 is the fact that increased knowledge of its existence, via Google’s SearchWiki, will help to shift the focus of SEOs, online marketers, and most importantly, the client, from search rankings to website analytics and conversions.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever Googled your name. If you didn’t raise your hand your either ashamed to admit it, or it just never occurred to you.   Well I can promise you its occurred to a lot of other people. But don’t take my word for it.   Seth Godin’s got a concise little rant about it.   If you are the CEO of a company your customers, partners, competition, and future employees are all Googling your name, and what they find directly impacts your companies corporate reputation.

Growing concerns about reputation management are evident from this Google Trends graph showing an increase in the number of people searching on the term “reputation management”, as well as the number mentions in online news sources.

Search engine optimization companies everywhere are shifting part of their focus to market their ability to provide search reputation management, and companies are popping up everywhere that focus solely on search reputation management.

Enter Twitter…

Twitter is so appealing to the Google search algorithm that they somehow coerced Twitter into adding a “nofollow” tag to the profile section of user’s tweets. Unless you are an SEO nerd like myself you have no idea what that means, but suffice it to say that Twitter could be used by spammers to game Google’s algorithm for providing relevant search results, if this measure was not taken (I’ll save the anti-nofollow post for another time).

Here’s a great example of the power of Twitter on Google.   A search for “kevin rose” (no quotations), the founder of Digg, returns over 5.5 million results on Google, and his Twitter page is third behind his personal website.

So essentially the point I’m trying to make thus far is get on Twitter and use your full name as your Twitter handle.

With all that said, the fact that your Twitter account will likely appear in Google when people are searching for you doesn’t really answer how Twitter is such a powerful tool for managing your corporate reputation, but hopefully it at least convinced you to start using it.

Cutting through the clutter with its 140 character limit, Twitter is forcing people to be direct with their intentions, and as a result it has become arguably the most effective tool for communicating online.   You can help to manage your companies reputation by communicating with Twitter.   In keeping with this blog series format of follow, create, and engage, here’s what you should do once your on Twitter to manage your corporate reputation.

Follow - Follow people talking about your brand, your industry, and maybe even you.   Listen and Learn.   If you claim to use Twitter to listen to your customers, make sure you follow a substantial number of them.

Create - Share interesting information about your industry, and anything else for that matter.   Just like a popular website or blog, if you continue to guide people to helpful, funny, or insightful stuff they will come back for more.   Like with all other social media platforms the most important thing is to be authentic. Do not try to push an agenda without being transparent.   Be yourself and update often.   The more you update the more Google crawls your page.
Engage - Don’t be afraid to join the conversation.   Nothing like the CEO of a major company mixing it up with the commoners to get people to like you and your brand (if you play your cards right brand ambassadors are ripe for the picking on Twitter, and influential ones at that).

CEOs are on Twitter right now managing their corporate reputation.   If you don’t believe me check out BusinessWeeks Twitter Rolodex of company heads.

How are you using Twitter to manage your corporate reputation?

Last week I attended an all day training seminar on Google Analytics in order to hone my skills with this fabulous FREE web site analytics tool offered by Google.   If you work with Web sites in any capacity you should understand the basic metrics that are used to   measure the performance of a web site.   The following are some basic concepts that are used to analyze web site behavior:

ALWAYS Define A GOAL for Success - An increased number of visitors should NEVER be your goal for success.   What if the majority of people that come to your site leave within 10 seconds?   What kind of value does that provide?   Just because you are not selling something does not mean there aren’t desired actions you want your visitors to take that represent a deeper level of engagement, and therefore a greater value.   Once you define an action that you want your visitors to take you can measure success based on your conversion rate (the number of people who perform this action divided by the number of people who had the opportunity to perform that task).

The above conversion funnel from the Google analytics interface shows a goal of downloading a press release.   Of the 27,145 people who entered the site on the homepage, 701 people downloaded the press release, which yielded a conversion rate of 2.58%.

Now you can ask yourself the question of what can we we do to improve our conversion rate.   Maybe the press release needs a better call-out on a section of the page that receives more focus.   Maybe the call-to-action copy could be stronger.   Maybe the press release is old news, or worse, not news-worthy at all.   In no way way does a conversion have to be a sale.   Set up goals for RSS subscriptions, newsletter sign-ups, “email-a-friend” or social media buttons clicks.   There is NO excuse not to have goals that represent increased visitor engagement.

Bounce Rate - This is defined as the percentage of people who come to a page on your site, and leave without viewing any more pages.   Bounce rates can range significantly depending on the objectives of the site.   As a very general rule of thumb, a bounce rate of 35% and below is considered good, and anything above 50% could be improved.   Google Analytics allows you to segment bounce rate by entry page and the search keyword which led the visitor to find that page.   The following graph shows what keywords which led someone to this page yielded a below average bounce rate and what keywords yield an above average bounce rate (compared to average of entire site):

The majority of visitors only came to the site once within the selected time period.   As the visitors become increasingly loyal (returned more times) their numbers become less.   Ask yourself what you can do to your site to make people want to return.   Implementing RSS functionality so visitors can subscribe to your feed and be notified every time you make an update is a great way to increase the number of return visitors.   This of course could be debated as many people who use RSS read your content within the confines of their feed reader without returning to your site, but that’s topic for another post.

I have merely scratched the surface of what Google Analytics can offer your Web site.   If you are not utilizing this free tool please do so as soon as possible.   Web behavior data will not provide all the answers, and it will certainly not tell you exactly what to do, but the fact is the numbers don’t lie.   As much as you may think you know what your customers, members, or information seekers want, you really don’t.   The best thing you can do is learn from the numbers, test, test, and test again, which brings us to Google’s next free tool for achieving success with your website: Google Website Optimizer.

I am  traveling back to D.C after an information packed day at the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo in New York.    The day was filled with expert panels, keynote speakers, and  vendors who perked up when they saw  Ogilvy on my ID badge.   I had the option to  attend a number of educational sessions that fell into  one of the following  search related categories: Fundamentals, Stats & Research, Social Search, and  Vertical & Retail.   Hailing from the  360 Digital Influence practice  my initial plan was to  stick to the social search track for fear of missing out on some cutting-edge social media optimization tactics, but as the day wore on I  began to realize that  Word of Mouth Marketing  has a lot to learn from “traditional” search engine  marketing if it is to become the quantifiable, ROI  based discipline  of our dreams.

Search Engine Marketing and the pay-per-click model  are tremendously successful  because of their  ability to  easily track  a campaign’s cost per sale, and how the  money spent on search directly impacts the bottom line.   What happens when the goal of a campaign is not a  sale, per se, but  simply awareness or buzz?   How do we get companies to invest the same dollars?   Even though a  monetary transaction is not taking place, search engines still provide a tracking-friendly environment for us marketers to  influence behavior.   It is our responsibility to work with clients  to  define actions that will  measure the success of a campaign.   Pageviews or time spent on  a site is not enough.   If a  Word of Mouth Marketing  campaign is  going to use paid search to drive consumer engagement, a  Web site or  other online destination must be  designed from day one to  allow for a deeper level of interaction with the content.    Some actions that come to mind are video views, widget downloads, tagging of content on social networks, joining a  community,  posting a blog comment, or subscribing to an RSS feed.   Whatever it is, once the action is defined,  SEM campaigns must be optimized  regularly  to maximize engagement.   Optimization should take place on the ad level, but more importantly on the  landing page level with multiple creative, call to action,  and copy.

On one particular panel at SES today, Eduardo Llach, CMO and founder of SearchRev, presented search strategies and optimization techniques for brand companies.    He went into specific detail on how SEM campaigns can be most cost-effective and deliver the highest ROI.   SearchRev’s ability to interchange multiple variations of a landing page, and serve search ads  during  different  times of day, days of the week, and  geographical location all based on historical performance of the campaign,  allows  companies to  increasingly discover the best  way to engage their audience.   Word of Mouth campaigns can capitilize on this finite level of optimization.   The trick  is to create,  define, and track  the right goals to measure the success achieved from such efforts.  

What actions can you think of that will facilitate a Word of Mouth Marketing campaign  that  can also  be used as a goal to optimize towards when  using paid search?