Ciao, Enrico!

Great natural search work doesn’t necessarily need a great product – many times it just needs a great client.

I’ve been doing some optimization for a friend’s website this week, and I’m glad to say, doing that stuff is still fun. Aside from the keyword research, and thinking about how a user would look for what the site is all about, it’s nice to have a client, essentially, who trusts you.

Often times, people who hire out for SEO know they need to get this work done – but the fact that they don’t entirely understand what is being done seems daunting. If I had to guess, I’d say it has something to do with justifying that part of the marketing budget to their bosses. I’ve also had the small business clients who are doing everything out of their own pocket, so they’re even more interested in the details of what’s being done. It stands to reason – you don’t just want to throw money into a hole because someone told you it would be a good idea. You want to know what you’re paying for.

What is generally not fun is having to explain why some keyword phrase the client is intent on mastering is a waste of effort, and why the keyword phrase they despise is actually the best way to get the kind of traffic they want. My peers and I have always called these, “ego searches.” Even though the phrase they want has little to no search volume behind it, they must have it. Frankly, I would consider just nodding my head and saying, “you got it, chief,” a form of thievery. If they insist on going this route despite my sage council, then they’re on their own. But it is often just a waste of money and working hours.

Insisting on not trying for a phrase that aptly represents them, however, is far more foolish. Years ago, I worked at a Barnes & Noble, which had a Starbucks Cafe. The Starbucks representative came out to train us, and insisted vehemently that the Frappuccino was not a “Frappuccino.” It was, in fact, a “Frappuccino Blended Beverage.” This is how we were to say the product at all times. Starbucks must have unclenched since then, because I haven’t heard this tortured piece of language since. They must have realized that no one ever uses the added, “blended beverage” when ordering one.

What if for search they decided they just had to own the phrase, “frappuccino blended beverage?” “Frappuccino” gets about 100,000 searches a month, and the “blended beverage” version gets somewhere between none and zilch. So why bother putting in the work to get that whole phrase, when no one is searching for them that way? Sure, it will go to help in the fight to own the “Frappuccino” searches, but that’s not the point – if you can’t benefit from that entire keyword phrase, ditch it. The people looking on Google for information decide how your product is referred to. If you want to change that, you’ll need to spend a LOT on advertising to change their perceptions. (After all, Kentucky Fried Chicken didn’t become KFC by going door to door and handing out pamphlets.)

For these reasons and others, I think doing the best possible work in search, or any marketing for that matter, has a lot to do with a client trusting your judgement and experience. While there are times we’re wrong, (an axiom of advertising is, “no one knows the client’s business better than the client,”) we do know the medium better than the client. That’s why we’re being paid to do the work. You should have a strong hand in your campaign, but if you are more of a collaborator than a king handing down proclamations of what can and cannot be done, you’ll see your campaign does a lot better a lot faster. In my opinion, having a client that is a partner unleashes me, allowing me to do all of the things that will make their campaign better.

Geosocial networking is social networking that is relative to where you are – and in my humble opinion, it’s where this communications revolution will be headed next. I’m not talking about information posted about a place, like the restaurant reviews in Yelp, though that is geosocial media too.

I mean the kind of posts people make when they are out on the town, relating real-time experiences as they happen.

1. The biggest example of geosocial media can be seen in the news coming out of Iran these days – a coup is under way, and it is fuelled by Iranian citizens’ ability to post video about what is going on in their region now. It is the kind of media attention the major news outlets simply cannot capture themselves, and they know it – which is why they keep using the footage themselves.
2. Politics starts at home, and now it can be viewed by the entire world. So if you are a politician and you turn evil, you’d better expect your neighbor to train a camera on you from now on.
3. Smart phone apps have all the ease-of-use of a laptop when it comes to networking. They are also capable of pinpointing your location via GPS. When these phones become truly mainstream, people will be willing and able to post about where they are and what they’re doing. When people use their cell phones to post remotely to Twitter that they’re out somewhere doing something, that’s the heart of geosocial networking right there.
4. Posts that tell people that you’re sitting at your computer, again, are boring. The biggest complaint people have about Twitter is that it’s a bunch of people posting, “Eating chicken for dinner,” as if anyone would care. Geosocial media allows you to go out into the world and see new things.
5. This kind of networking is fun – and can add to your experience. Disney knows this – they are currently working with Verison to develop a park navigation app for visitors. It’s a smart application of existing technology no one else had considered before. Once it takes off, expect to see more of this kind of thing at malls, swap meets, state fairs, and other large area events and locations. (Once the people who go to the state fair have smart phones, of course.)
6. These applications also allow you to share images of where you are and what you’re doing. Again, this is a whole lot more interesting than pictures of you sitting at your desk at work. (I’m not pointing fingers – I have a LOT of those in circulation myself.)
7. Facebook is going to need to grow into a new space. While they currently dominate the market of social networking sites, they have the same flaw MySpace had: Too much talking, not enough listening. It is possible to spend hours on Facebook loading picutres, watching videos, and playing games without ever talking to anyone. Even if one did, on average a person’s followers are friends they know in real life anyway. Since geosocial is about meeting people in your immediate vicinity, whether you know them already or not, it would introduce a lot of users to that aspect of social networking a lot of us like the most: Making friends and learning something new.
8. Photography sites like Flickr and Picasa, as well as video sites like YouTube, already have geotagging functions in place. With all of the camera phones out today, this lets people not just create photo albums but placecards of where they’ve been to go with the pictures. Now that the iPhone and G1 have video recording as part of their standard packages, expect to see a lot more videos geotagged as well.

If you want to look into how geosocial works, check out some of these sites and see if one of them works for you. My personal choice is Brightkite – I used it extensively to record my trip to Disneyworld earlier this year. You may feel more at home with one of these others:

• Brightkite
• Google Latitude
• Loopt
• Whrrl
• Fire Eagle

I was with everyone else when the announcement of Bing.com was made. “A conversation engine? What the hell is that!?!”

Well of course, kids, that’s marketing. Microsoft couldn’t beat Google at search, so they just changed “search” to “decision.” So now they own the “Decision Engine market” because Google never thought of that particular euphemism. It’s not unlike when Starbuck’s started serving “Frappuccinos.” Ice blended drinks had been around for years, but since no one thought to call them, “Frappuccinos,” Starbucks became the winners in the Frappuccino business.

But so what? Bing’s been out a little while now, and I’ve had a chance to tool around with it. And I am happy to announce, Microsoft has effectively become Ask.com. The layout and sidebar features offer the same content, and the results are of the same quality. If Ask is paying attention, they really might want to consider whether or not they’ve been in the decision engine market all these years.

Their media searches are much better than they have been, but this is more a sign that Microsoft has learned to catch up. It has videos from the major sites (Youtube, Vimeo, Viddler, Metacafe) as well as the media outlets and their own video. (Fox, NBC, USA Today.) The results are far less anemic than I remember MSN or “Live” results being. Welcome to the party, Bing.

Ditto for the image searches – a lot of content, not a lot of deciding. Is that unfair? Perhaps – but Microsoft made this label up, so they should have to answer for it. If I do an image search for, “pizza,” how exactly is this different than if I do an image search on Yahoo?

The web search results (I have to stop calling them “decision results” – it’s silly) are roughly the same quality as Google. The layout incorporates that “Universal Search” philosophy that has taken two years to become an overnight success. But those maps and images and accompanying information appear at the bottom of the page instead of the top. IMHO, It’s a rather lame way to differentiate themselves from their search brothers.

I also find it rather disappointing that Bing didn’t incorporate one of Google’s better features, offering the correct spelling of a word if you search using the wrong spelling. You see, I had no idea how to spell “Frappuccino” when I kept referencing them. While Bing didn’t clue me in to my error, Google did. It’s an easy feature that should have been included, especially since so many of us need copy editors in our daily lives.

Given the marketing budget behind Bing, here’s what I think will happen: They will continue to grab up more and more market share in search, just as they did with Live, just as Ask did two years ago. But eventually people will stay with Google, because they’ve been using it so long. They definitely have a better product then they had before, but the majority of users still don’t search things – they “Google” them. (Google’s own hand in redefining the market shows itself in this.)

So who will benefit the most from this? For now, my Dad – he got a Hotmail account sometime during the Hoover administration, and as a dedicated Luddite has no intention of switching to anything else. This means every search he does is on a Microsoft product. He is typical of his age group, so boomers will continue to be the base for MSN/Live/Bing, while the rest of us use Google, our Moms use Yahoo!, and Twitter Search will be the choice for the truly smart ass among us.

Microsoft’s one shot at getting a leg up will be to promote themselves as the search engine for pre-teens and teens. In ten years they will be in that target demo that Google has now, and those of us who are the current target… won’t. Microsoft definitely has the money to keep their advertising juggernaut running forever if need be. If they can manage no to re-brand themselves yet again, and do real work appealing to their future adult customers, then I think it will have a shot.

I just read a great phrase on Seth Godin’s Blog: “Scalejacking.” Dave Balter used this to describe going to a site that has a great number of users, trying to divert them to your promotion (whether they’re quality visitors or not,) getting your 1% conversion rate and calling it a day well spent. A good example would be the marketer who puts together a Twitter following of 30,000 users from anywhere, interested in anything, without any common values – just so when you post a link to your event on Upcoming or new white paper you can show how you got a huge number of page visits.

Being able to show large numbers is always important in proving the success of any campaign, particularly on line where it’s easier to prove large numbers. I take exception, though, to people who look to a follow count as a measure of success just because they can’t prove anything else. Marketers may try to tell you they’ve won a great battle for you by gaining a large follow count because they know the referral traffic from that Facebook Page – to say nothing of the conversion rate – in no way justifies the work that went into it. So instead they point to the huge jump in followers – and that just isn’t meaningful success.

Imagine this: You run a business in Phoenix doing custom hang glider detailing – let’s call the company, “Pimp my Glide,” because I’m just a whore for puns. You then go to Facebook and amass a huge following by giving away a lunch with Paris Hilton. (She’s a friend of your family’s, so the cost to you is only a meal for two.) In a few hours you have thousands of people on your page. A minority of them are in Phoenix, even fewer hang glide… but lookit all them followers!

Just getting followers is actually very easy work. Turning them into customers requires more finesse. This is the kind of thing PPC marketers have known for years. You can get people to your landing page easily enough, with the right keywords and budget; but getting them to continue through the chain to actually filling out a contact form and then buying something is the real goal.

Smart social media marketing requires this same dedication to getting visitors to cross that finish line, not simply getting them to a profile page, possible clicking on a link, and then calling it a day.

Not exactly a topic relating to SEO or social, but this is free, so you get what you pay for – E-mail marketing is a great example of something that works, but didn’t used to. The Direct Marketing Association found that the ROI on e-mail marketing is $57 for every $1 spent – and that’s not peanuts, but you have to do it in a way that doesn’t offend or push away. Namely, you can’t spam them.

Just a couple of years ago the common man on the street would tell you any e-mail you get from a business promoting something is called spam. That’s it, that’s all, no discussion, it’s all garbage. The industry had gotten so many get-rich-quick types, that e-mail exploded in a very bad way. When people started getting e-mail addresses in the mid 1990s, getting any e-mail was kind of neat, at first. For a short while no one seemed to mind getting unsolicited mail, and would even on occaision click through to see what they were selling, since they were so forward thinking and ahead of the curve as to send an e-mail about it.

It didn’t take long for those e-mails to become a nuisance, though. Blocking all this junk became a big problem as most people know. Personally, I’d jump to a new address ever 5 years or so just to start fresh. The overly enthusiastic spammers ruined the industry for everyone else, and it looked like it would stay that way.

It’s one of the other hallmarks of new technology: People using it in a selfish manner that is ruinous. Think of telemarketing, which has died off a great deal, but is still a pain for many who haven’t gotten off the right call lists. And does anyone remember, “fax blasting?” Anytime a new way to be made available for communication opens up, there’s someone who wants to use it advertise to you, whether you want to see it or not, because to them your sole function in life is to buy something from them.

But e-mail had a sharp turn around. For one, e-mail providers got serious about cutting off spam. Google will even flush e-mail directly to your spam folder if it comes from a server that gets too many reports of abuse. In turn, servers have taken to kicking out e-mail marketers for abuse to protect themselves. The 2003 CAN-SPAM act tried to halt spam through legal means, but was a bit of a joke – though enforcement of the statutes relating to porn mercifully kept that kind of spam at bay.

What ultimately has made e-mail marketing work again is the understanding among those marketing professionals who understand that pissing in the well is bad for everyone. It didn’t require threats or fines or even imprisonment to get the best of the e-mail marketing community to shape up. It only took an understanding that if people stayed opposed to e-mails with offers, no one would ever open them, no one would buy anything from those companies, and clients would stop buying that kind of promotion.

So what did they do to get people to trust e-mail again?

• Creating an opt-in list instead of sending to blind addresses
• Immediately process opt-out requests
• Content relevant to what customers want
• Coupons and offers

It’s the kind of attention to what is beneficial to customers that comes back to us when considering how to execute a social media marketing campaign as well. You want to know who these people you’re messaging to are and how best to make them happy. It’s the main reason simply gaining 30,000 followers on Twitter shouldn’t be your end game. I would much rather have 300 followers I know are completely interested in what I have to offer them.

Also, when you share relevant, newsworthy information through your e-mail, you can gain important inbound links from sites rebroadcasting it. This will help you in search, which as you should know by now is all about one-way, quality, inbound links.

Well hey! I managed to turn that one back around to search and social!

The point here is that e-mail marketing works, and there are good people out there who can help you get your name out to potential customers. It is definitely worth a piece of your marketing budget.

This is a short but quick piece of advice: Don’t ever trust the person who tells you to go into social because it’s “neat.” You wouldn’t think there are a lot of people like that, but I’ve run into my share, and they’re a dangerous bunch. They’re the self-titled, “social media experts” – even though the people who really know what’s going on by now know better than to call themselves that. As titles go, “Social Media Expert” carries less water than “Real Estate Expert” does – the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

One of the big problems is trying to get to people who don’t use social to start doing so anyway so they can see the advertising you’re doing. Getting people to use the social media site your company is listed on really only helps that site. It may help the “cause” of social media usage overall, but doesn’t help your company. Therefore, when you hire an evangelist to do your social media, you don’t have a level headed, pragmatic strategist guiding you. You have a fanatic. These people will be able to tell you why some such site or another has a great tool for your company, but cannot or will not defend it in terms of the site’s traffic – the very reason you should be there in the first place.

One example was a client (not mine, thank you) that was listed on Utterli – a fantastic site for recording quick podcast-like posts from one’s phone, which then appear on their site, or can be fed via RSS to anywhere the user wishes. The problem was that there was no indication that the traffic on this site was in any way complimentary to the client’s product. A great deal of manhours were devoted to this project, only to be abandoned because there had been no great swell in traffic or leads as a result. Research on Utterli’s traffic could have shown that the people there weren’t and would not be interested. Unfortunately, this campaign was developed by one of these evangels of Social Media – and if there’s one thing they do not have time for, it’s rational thought.

So remember – while some of these sites have great tools, (photo galleries, audio recording, video hosting, etc.) what you really need to know is how much traffic these sites have, how much work will it take to get a large number of them to see you, and how much more work will it take to make them customers.

Anything else is fluff spoken by the uneducated.

For a while now I’ve been trying to resolve for myself the question of whether blogs are really “social media” or not.

Whenever some brainless social media “expert” does their tap dance on the subject, they’re always sure to mention blogs along with Twitter and Facebook and all of the other outlets people already know about. To be honest, so have I – not so much for the socialization or communication, but because they’re a good anchor for all of the other social media stuff a client does. If you write a blog post that day, you’ve got something to talk about on Twitter and Facebook, and those discussions can lead them back to the post, which is on the site, which is where you want the traffic…

But that really just makes blogs content page generators, not calls to individuals to discuss the topics.

You’ve read other people’s articles and posts about, “how to entice others to leave comments on your blog,” right? They beg the question, “Why don’t people leave comments naturally?” I don’t have to strategize how to write Tweets to get people to write back. That’s because Twitter really is what we all mean by social: You talk, people listen, then talk back. It doesn’t require posting agita that gets people angry and makes them write back. (That works too, of course – everyone likes venting, especially if you have a talent for being violently disagreeable in public.)

I started blogging in 2002, before people were bandying about this term, “social media.” Back then, a web log was just the next evolution of the forums I’d been hanging around in for the last couple of years – which were really social. You post a quick topic, and the culture of the forum made people want to post back. Blogs were a way to own the discussion, for everyone to be a moderator. All of the friends I’d known on the forums had done the same thing I did and created a LiveJournal blog. We all friended each other, and then any time one of us had something to say, all of us would comment back. So in that regard, blogging was a social event.

Now everyone in the world has a blog, but not necessarily a network of friends. This is what is missing from blogs – that other catchphrase of the day, social networking. As anyone into this stuff who is a sufficient smart ass will tell you, there is a difference:

Social media is the content people create to reach out to other people.
Social networking is making friends who will be interested in all this content you’re creating.

Creating the content is a no-brainer for most. If you can string a few words together, buy a Flip Video, or crawl enough sites to make a healthy collection of bookmarks, you can get into the social media business. But if you don’t do the added work of reaching out to people who might want to see what you’re doing, you’re skipping that second, equally important step of making a network.

That’s why Twitter works. That’s why Facebook works. The major sites like this have networking inexorably connected to what they do. I don’t get comments on these posts here very often – I get them as tweets or direct messages or replies on Facebook. I don’t mind, I’m not trying to defend my use of time in writing my little blog. Besides, that is how people respond now. It isn’t that readers need to be drawn out to leave a blog response, it’s that they just don’t want to do it on the blog. It’s a lot easier to just post:

@ciaoenrico You’re an idiot – I leave blog comments all the time! And btw iPhone rulez! n00b!

So maybe blogs aren’t social themselves – maybe they’re just fodder for all the other sites that are.

I’m just like everyone else when it comes to McDonald’s: I look down my nose at it, I ask people who go there, “What the hell’s the matter with you?” and Big Macs and fries are intensely yummy. I’m just as hypocritical as the average American. Yee hah!

I’ve been a fan of McDonald’s iced coffee drinks for a year or so now – “Large Sugar Free Vanilla Iced Coffee” just rolls off my tongue whenever I hit their drive through. It’s only recently, though, that I’ve caught McDonald’s advertising. They’ve probably only started the campaign now that the entire coffee line is out of beta testing.

Check this out:

McDonald’s knows that while just about everyone has gotten on board with our national coffee fetish in the last twenty years, it still has that “mystique” that turns people off. The people who enjoy that mystique are just the ones who would say, “McDonald’s iced coffee!?! Eww!” These aren’t the people McDonald’s would easily reach, so trying to convince them their coffees are just as good or better than what you’d find at Starbuck’s would be an incredibly uphill battle.

Then again, Starbuck’s makes too much money to come from just the turtleneck and poetry crowd. Average slobs like iced coffees too, and the majority of us don’t appreciate having to shell out four dollars for it.

Essentially, McDonald’s took that lemon and made lemonade – rather than try to win over the coffee elite, they turned against them, trying to attract the common coffee drinker.

And I think that is incredibly cool. They looked at the market, and determined that the most vocal portion of it is still the minority, and shouldn’t be catered to in their marketing plan. In my opinion, the lesson here is that the people you want to attract aren’t always the potential brand champions, but the ones who collectively represent the most cash.

Sometimes, you just need to be the choice of the lowest common denominator.