The Value of Twitter

Yesterday, Marc Meyer posted a list of 20 Twitter Brands Behaving Badly on Social Media Today. Inspired by this list of the 100 most mentioned brands on Twitter, he noted that several of these highly discussed brands are choosing not to engage with their audience on Twitter. Worse, some of these brands missed their opportunity to claim their brand name on the site, and now brandjackers are controlling their Twitter presence by controlling the content posted by their brand name.

Twitter is somewhat of an anomaly within the world of social media marketing. Where brands have been quick to recognize the value of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Myspace, developing and maintaining a presence on these sites, Twitter has been often overlooked as a fad. The number of blogs and articles pondering the long-term worth of Twitter is astounding. Perhaps no other social networking site has been looked at with such ongoing scrutiny. The time has come to acknowledge that Twitter is here, it’s highly utilized, it’s growing and it’s worth every marketer’s time.

While we have not been surprised to see how Twitter has grown in the past year, it has been interesting to note that the fasting growing demographic on Twitter is the 45-54 age range, offering further confirmation that not only is Twitter not a fad, but it’s full of highly influential users:

Brands of all sizes and across all industries should be paying attention to Twitter now if they have not already done so. Proactive brand username claiming and reputation monitoring are the absolute minimum activities that all brands should employ as their Twitter strategy. Stop waiting for a consensus that Twitter is a viable marketing channel – too many brands have missed the boat and we’ve all seen the repercussions.

Google Rich Snippets

Does your website feature reviews of products or services? Here’s a recent development from Google that may affect the way your site appears in the search results:

Google has launched a search results enhancement called “rich snippets” that uses meta data from web pages to display additional details (both content and meaning) about pages in the results. This initial launch supports reviews (with sites such as Yelp) and people’s profiles (with sites such as LinkedIn). This provides an opportunity for the user to preview the results more clearly.

For example, for the search query [Salt Creek Grille], Google shows the average user rating, the total number of reviews, and the price range for the listings from Yelp.com.



Similarly, the search results from LinkedIn on Google show the person’s location and job title so searchers have a better sense of which result matches the person they’re looking for.

Where does Google get this data?

Google is getting this information from the meta data coded in the site. Webmasters can use two open standards (microformats and RDFa) to annotate structured data on their sites. Both standards allow markup of information on web pages.

How does it help site owners?

While the initial launch will be limited to a specific set of partners (including LinkedIn, Yelp and CNET Reviews), the intent is that soon anyone who marks their pages up with the appropriate microformat data will be able to make their information understandable by Google. This technology would allow people to explicitly search, for example, for only printers that had an average customer review of 3 stars or higher.

Once your site is marked up, you can let Google know that you’re interested in participating in Rich Snippets using this form: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/request.py?contact_type=rich_snippets_feedback

While Google will accept both microformat encoding and RDFa encoding, it also plans to work toward the development of a common vocabulary for the structured data. Google is hopeful that other web services will also adopt this standard.

At this point in time, if you have reviews about products or services on your site, DBE recommends marking up the data and informing Google about it. For other types of sites, we recommend holding off while Google develops a common vocabulary for data marking. Hopefully, there will be applications for it on a range of websites. In the meantime, other tools are being developed that will make the markup process easier.

Meet the New Boss- My Take on the New AdWords Interface

I’ve had a few weeks to try out the new Google AdWords interface and I like it a lot. In fairness, it is still in beta and there are some kinks to work out, but I find it to be very effective and intuitive. Part of that may stem from my familiarity with AdWords Editor. The branching folder system for campaigns and ad groups with tabs across the screen for settings, ads, keywords, and networks seems to have been taken directly from Editor.

Numerous people have complained about the speed of the new interface based on the Twitter comments I’ve seen. That hasn’t been my experience at all. Although there now is a small load time when you begin looking at campaign information, it’s not much longer than it was in the original interface. Other sections that used to take forever to load, like the Account Access screen or Billing Summary, now come up almost immediately.

I have no doubt that for the day to day setup and management of a PPC program, the new interface is much, much faster. It goes back to that branching structure. Instead of tabbing through every ad group to see keyword performance and make changes, you can view all the keywords in your campaign on one screen, and edit them in-line. Pause keywords, change bids, even edit match types without leaving that screen. The same goes for campaign status and daily budgets; it can all be changed from one screen. Setting up new ad groups with keywords and ad copy can also be consolidated to one screen.

They’ve even added a copy function that allows you to replicate keywords and/or ads in another ad group. This is a good beginning, though it feels incomplete to me. If Google could somehow reproduce their off-line drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste, and copy-and-paste functionality, I might not even need AdWords Editor anymore.

The new interface is not perfect. Although the Search Performance Query report can now be run from the campaign management screen, without needing to go to the report center, it still results in “138 unique queries.” Rumor has it that a more detailed (read “useful”) version of this report is coming, but it sounds like it may be a slow process.

There are also some display issues. You occasionally have to scroll left and right to see all the information on screen. Some drop down menus don’t display properly in Chrome. (Explain that one to me- they work fine in IE, but not in the browser developed by Google.) For some reason, the Ad Preview Tool will not load from the Tools menu for me. These are minor complaints, and I expect them to be ironed out by the time the new interface is out of beta.

My overall impression is that the new AdWords interface is faster, more intuitive, and more functional than the previous version. It’s easy to gripe about Google’s near monopoly of the search environment, but they have consistently put out a product that is far and away better than all of their competitors combined. Yahoo and Microsoft have their work cut out for them.

Social Media Know-It-Alls?

Any respectable search marketer knows our industry is ever-evolving. Google’s introduction of SearchWiki late last year and their new AdWords interface are just two examples of significant changes in the optimization and paid search landscape.

General marketers seem to understand this, too, as evidenced by the fact that “It’s too hard to stay abreast of best practices” is the number one reason why they outsource to search agencies like DBE (according to SEMPO’s State of Search Annual Survey). Granted these respondents are already engaged in search marketing to some degree but their answers to other questions in the survey demonstrate they understand the complexities of search and appreciate the value of investing time and money to properly leverage it for competitive business advantage.

Unfortunately, it appears that the same understanding and appreciation for social media marketing is not yet manifest. Or so one would surmise from this Marketing Sherpa Chart-Of-The-Week:

How Knowledgeable Are Marketers With No Social Media Experience?

These are people saying they are knowledgeable about social media marketing when they have not yet used it in any form for their business. The obvious implication is that some personal use of Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter qualifies as “knowledge.”

But knowing how to set-up a personal profile is a far cry from knowing how to effectively manage an online community or generate viral attention for your company’s brand. That’s a task that requires an in-depth knowledge of social media tool sets, familiarity with each of the communities' individual culture, and an understanding of the most effective strategies for building a following. Remember, just like it was when blogs first arrived, for every social media success story, there are a thousand campaigns that fall silent on the web, or worse, that fall flat on their face.

So I guess until we get the kind of research that helps debunk the “anyone can do it” approach to social media, it looks like we’ve got some more explaining to do in the short term (we being DBE and our fellow search/social media marketers). But maybe the learning curve won’t be too long as people see social media is evolving at an even more rapid pace than SEO and paid search.

Subdomains vs. Subfolders – which is better?

A client recently asked us whether it’s better to set up their website using subdomains or subfolders? We get this question a lot, so I thought it would be helpful to provide the answer here, for all of our blog readers.

If you’re not already familiar with these terms, a subdomain is a way of structuring your site so that URLs look like this: http://widgets.abccompany.com/. The same destination using the subfolders setup would look like this: http://www.ABCcompany.com/widgets.

Our team likes to look at this from the following angles:

SEO Perspective:

• Search engines used to treat subdomains as distinct domains, and used to give two additional listings in the search engine results. In essence, it was possible to get 2 rankings for the main domain, plus 2 more rankings for each subdomain. However, Google changed its policy about a year ago and now treats both subdomains and subfolders the same. So where we used to give subdomains an edge because of additional visibility potential, both are basically on level playing ground now.

• It gets a bit murky here though. If Google decides that the subdomains are entirely different from each other, then it may treat them as different sites and rank them accordingly. For example, subdomains of blogspot.com like dbesem.blogspot.com and datacenterdesign.blogspot.com are treated as different sites though they are subdomains of blogspot.com. In most cases, however, Google will tend to show results from different domains to give searchers a more diverse and robust list.

Technical Perspective:

• Subdomains can be a little more difficult for a novice webmaster to set up. They can be managed separately, which can be great for organization purposes, but will consume more time.

• Subdomains also make visitor tracking more difficult, requiring some extra configuration in your analytics software to aggregrate results.

• For subfolders, usually the code is all in the same file storage space. That can make it much easier to find/edit/change code. It can also be easier to move code from one place to another.

For these reasons, unless you have distinct products or services, we suggest going with subfolders instead of subdomains.

If you do offer multiple distinct products or services, there are some marketing benefits to using the subdomain setup. Subdomains help to tie your different offerings together by pairing specific products or service lines to your main domain name (i.e. http://sneakers.shoesrus.com/; http://sandals.shoesrus.com/; http://boots.shoesrus.com/), while creating each as its own unique brand. This is a good approach if you’re trying to build a “separate, but together” theme.