Digital Brand Expressions - Official Blog

Pause Before You Plunge Into Plus: Google + For Your Company/Brand

2011-11-08T18:45:00.003-05:00

You probably have heard the news –
Google+ is now open for business(es). And I’m sure for many the announcement comes with an almost instinctive blind mandate from management to claim your place in the new space NOW. But this isn’t like the land rush when Facebook opened vanity URLs and, if we’ve learned anything from our collective previous jumps into social waters (including that one), it’s probably best if you take pause before you plunge into Plus.

One obvious reason is that it’s new and there’s some exploring/learning that needs to be done to develop best practices for implementation from a technical perspective.

But technical aspects aside, perhaps the biggest issue to address before diving in to Google+ is -- how does this new channel fit in to your already established and ongoing integrated strategic marketing plans as well as your tactical implementation resources? You need to ask or re-ask yourselves the core questions that formed the basis of entering the social landscape in the first place:

o What are my goals for this channel?

o What does success look like? How will it be measured?

o Will this require more real dollar budget allocation for advertising or promotion that we have learned is an important component of many Facebook campaigns?

o Who is going to be responsible for managing this
new social channel/platform? Do they have the time to add this to their
plate? How will they be trained?

o How will this channel be handled differently and/or integrated with other digital channels? With other offline channels?

In other words, as with DBE’s Phased Process for Social Media, the key to success with Google+ will be doing the thinking and planning first. Then you can act with confidence and with the expectation of reporting success.

Google’s Query Deserves Freshness

2011-11-07T15:21:00.002-05:00

Google recently announced a search algorithm update that should promote fresher and more relevant search results. Although Google makes over 500 changes to its algorithm annually, the majority of updates do not affect a large percentage of search results. The new update, which seeks to build on the Caffeine web indexing system, will affect approximately 35% of all search queries.

According to Google’s engineer Amit Singhal, the following topics deserve fresh results:

Recent events or hot topics. For recent events or hot topics that begin trending on the web, you want to find the latest information immediately. Now when you search for current events like [occupy oakland protest], or for the latest news about the [nba lockout], you’ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old.

Regularly recurring events. Some events take place on a regularly recurring basis, such as annual conferences like [ICALP] or an event like the [presidential election]. Without specifying with your keywords, it’s implied that you expect to see the most recent event, and not one from 50 years ago. There are also things that recur more frequently, so now when you’re searching for the latest [NFL scores], [dancing with the stars] results or [exxon earnings], you’ll see the latest information.

Frequent updates. There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if you’re researching the [best slr cameras], or you’re in the market for a new car and want [subaru impreza reviews], you probably want the most up to date information.

Our Take

While Google has indicated they understand that different search queries will require varying degrees of “freshness” based on a searcher’s intent, we are wondering how well Google will be able to match intent with result.

Google is anticipating 35 percent of searches are around this kind of up-to-the-minute data, which leaves a majority of searches still prioritizing on the “relevancy” of the data over its “recency.”

Premium Google Analytics

2011-09-30T10:27:00.002-04:00

Google has launched a paid version of Google Analytics. For a fixed cost ($150,000 a year in the US), it will offer 24/7 customer support, robust data processing and service guarantees.

What is new in the paid version?

The general feature set and user experience remain the same as the standard product.
The new Google Analytics premium is not about features, there are few capabilities available on the premium version that are not available on the standard version.

Who is it for?

The new version audience is mainly enterprises that receive a high amount of traffic and need a certain commitment from Google’s part on data collection, up-time, and support. It is also critical for sites who want to process data more frequently and without sampling.

Google Analytics Premium – Fact Sheet

Processing Power

Guaranteed processing for up to 1 billion hits per month (vs. the 10 million a month for standard accounts).

Faster, intra-day processing

Service Level Agreement around data collection, reporting, and processing

99.9% on Collection up-time

98% on on-time Data Freshness (within 4 hours)

Advanced Analysis Tools

Up to 50 Custom Variable slots (vs. the standard version that provides 5)

Unsampled report downloads for custom report requests

Unaggregated report downloads for large report requests (up to 1 million rows per download)

Dedicated Support

Custom training and support

24/7 emergency support line

Our Thoughts

GA Premium’s flat annual fee is less than many large scale users currently spend on web analytics. The unsampled reports and the SLA are great differentials (which were always used by Google’s competitors on the field).

Google Analytics is by far the most used tool, and this can only count in favor when an enterprise is choosing a tool. Another advantage is, should you lose your web analytics budget, you can downgrade to the standard Google Analytics without losing your data or needing to switch tags (and can upgrade again later). We would definitely recommend it for our enterprise level clients.

On a side note, Google continues to enhance the features on its free version as well. For example, it introduced "multichannel attribution" earlier this month, and rolled out "real time reporting" just yesterday.

Change for Kids Changes Work

2011-08-15T18:26:00.000-04:00

DBE has been providing pro bono support to a few small, non-profit organizations, including Change for Kids. This organization partners with New York City public schools to empower underprivileged children by providing them with a broad range of innovative literacy, arts, and music programs. Some of the measures we implemented when we took control of their Google Grants campaign include:

• Structure keywords into smaller, more closely related ad groups to build on the existing keyword list to significantly increase the number of keywords used
• Revamp ad copy and strengthen the calls to action.
• Keep the local advertising reach, but supplement it with a national component

We mention this now as we were very pleased to recently receive this update on the campaign from Colin Smith of Change for Kids on the performance improvements made by Rob Trautner, who heads our pay-per-click programs here at DBE:

Just wanted to let you guys know that in addition to our page visits going from about 200 a week before your help to 1,592 last week, we had a group that heard about us through the AdWords campaign just throw a fundraiser for their birthdays. They'll be donating over $1,000 to CFK from it (enough to provide a year of visual art to more than 5 children who otherwise have had all their art programs cut). And that's before we overhaul our website over the next 6-9 months. Thank you again for all your help.

Good Example of a Good Event

2011-08-01T15:21:00.000-04:00

Last Wednesday I attended, and spoke at, Custom Media Day, a day-long event sponsored by the Content Marketing Institute and the Custom Content Council that promised to “focus on the content marketing industry specifically from a custom content providers view. Attendees will walk away with tangible ideas on how to monetize content marketing and learn new business processes that will lead to success.”

I’d been hearing great things about Joe Pulizzi, for a while and was pleased to be accepted as a speaker to this event. (My topic was SEO and Content Marketing. You can download the presentation here.)

It was a great event, absolutely delivering on what it promised--new insights for content publishers. The other speakers included Tom Stein of Stein + Partners, Chris Sullivan of Bunchball, and Nicholas Pavach of Zinio.

Others and I tweeted heavily the many great tidbits coming out of the presentations (#cmday2011). Speakers presented an interesting combination of new statistics, interesting spins, tested approaches and more. The questions posed by the audience were equally engaging and insightful.

But what impressed me most was the impressiveness of the entire experience. I admit, sometimes I get bored at events like this. Frankly, events seldom turn out to be as good as I want them to be. But the information and perspectives I gathered from this event, through the presentations, Q&A, and break-time conversations with other marketers, kept me energized and thinking for days. I’ve been sharing what I gathered at the event with my team, our clients, and our partner companies, passing along the value of the event and the time I committed to it.

And while all of those strategic benefits are the real value, I have to say that the logistics were well orchestrated too. The venue (Scandanavia House--lots of natural light, large conference room, patio on one side, Park Avenue on the other), the friendliness and helpfulness of the support team members, the food and beverages—it was all just so well done and obviously well planned.

If DBE decides to host an event like this, we’re going to host an event like this!

Thanks to Joe Pulizzi and the Content Marketing Institute along with Lori Rosen and Custom Content Council for a really great experience.

Google Pushing the Button

2011-07-08T11:43:00.002-04:00

Google has released the +1 button to the public and now it's available for use on websites. The button allows signed in users to recommend client sites to their friends, with the click of a button - much like Facebook's 'Like' button. Before users had to click the button within the search results but with this latest update you can add it to your site and they can +1 your site while checking out a specific page.

Additionally, Google is now showing the +1 button in the organic search results for Web sites that have added the button to their sites - even for users that are not signed into their Google account. Although, with so few having added the button so far - it's not something you're seeing a lot of yet.

However, if you are signed in to your Google account the +1 button is everywhere for both sites that have added the button and ones that haven't. It even changes color and does an eye catching shimmer if you mouse over it.

Google believes that fans of sites can now recommend businesses to their friends and other contacts to see. It also believes that businesses will see more improved and qualified traffic. Although Google sees this as a win-win situation for consumers and businesses alike, unless more businesses add this tool to their sites, many will never see the “+1’s” at all.

Client Lists SEO By DBE As One Of Best Successes

2011-06-13T10:49:00.000-04:00

This Month, B2B Online Asked Leading Marketers:

“What single recent marketing initiative are you most proud of?”

Our client, Kirsten Bjork-Jones, director-global marketing communications, Edmund Optics answered:

“There are two. One is our continued effort in search engine optimization, just because that is tied to the most justifiable ROI. The other I'm most proud of is our grant program for universities. We're giving away $60,000 worth of free optics products this year to support outstanding undergraduate and graduate optics programs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It's rewarding to see the great things universities are doing involving optics, everything from cancer research to sophisticated biotech applications. We're also supporting universities that are just starting optics programs and are using actual research equipment. We run this program globally.”

For the rest of the article, visit: http://www.btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110608/CMO_NEWSLETTER/306089999

Mobicize's Craig Rohrbaugh on Mobile Phone Privacy Concerns

2011-05-24T14:04:00.000-04:00

Mobicize, Inc. is a strategic partner of Digital Brand Expressions and a company that is helping clients of all sizes adopt mobile best practices with business-generating mobile web sites, apps and more. We asked Managing Partner of Mobicize, Craig Rohrbaugh, to comment on a recent post on issues with mobile phone privacy on Media Post Online http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=150339&nid=126689.

Here's what Craig had to say:

Mobile privacy fears may be legitimate—but don’t stop using your smartphone. There’s been a lot of talk in the news recently about mobile privacy. More specifically, what information are Apple, Google and others collecting about your mobile usage. As the technologies and techniques used in mobile marketing and advertising are new and can be targeted to the individual, it allows for a unique opportunity for companies to develop targeted marketing strategies that are distinctive to this media. That’s very attractive to marketers and advertisers, as your phone provides the first ever one-to-one marketing channel. This also represents a benefit to the consumer, as they now can receive information that is meaningful and relevant to them based on permission based preferences.

As we’ve seen in the past, it takes time for legislation to catch up to technology. Legislators are already stepping up to the plate to ensure that online privacy laws extend to mobile, and that parameters are put in place to ensure that individuals’ rights are protected. Now that the issue is becoming so well publicized, companies and agencies are putting policies in place to ensure your privacy is protected even before laws go into effect. So, do you need to worry? Probably not, but be sure you have a clear understanding of what you are agreeing or opting-in to. You will also want to make sure there is a means to opt-out and as an added measure, you can turn off your GPS when you are not using it for navigation or app related engagement.

For more about Mobicize visit www.Mobicizeme.com.

Radio Interview on State of Search Survey Results 2011

2011-05-17T17:16:00.002-04:00

What are you doing Thursday evening at 7:00 ET? Why not join thousands of other listeners as our VP of Client Services, Marc Engelsman, talks with international web radio program host Matt Dalbey about the 2011 SEMPO State of Search survey results? Click here for more information and the link to the program: http://www.genwebmarketing.com/radio/

The survey has been getting a great deal of publicity due to some of this year’s more startling findings, including several statistical forward surges for the industry as well as some surprising pendulum swings in the opposite direction of years past. Tune in to find out more on Thursday evening.

Introduction to SEMPO 2011 State of Search Survey

2011-04-13T13:23:00.001-04:00

SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, released its annual State of Search Survey today. As the lead for this initiative, I’d like to share the “introduction” I wrote for the report as it captures the overall value and spirit of this survey and SEMPO as an industry thought leader. In future posts, I will delve into the interesting stories the data is telling about how the digital pull of search and social media are continuing to be integrated in marketing efforts overall.

"SEMPO is proud to be delivering this seventh edition of its annual State of Search Survey Report. We’ll let the report and the data contained in the following pages and charts speak for itself, and hope that in turn it spurs dialogue among its readers as we seek as an organization to help our industry learn and grow through better understanding of the changes/challenges that are constantly upon us. With that in mind, here are a few thoughts to help put the data into context:

Seven years of data provides a solid retrospective base to see how far the industry has come—particularly in terms of tactical usage and investment. We have strived to maintain longitudinal integrity in this regard while still providing opportunity for probing new developments, e.g., Google Instant and the Microsoft/Yahoo Search Alliance this past year.
We have also started looking for insight on future developments and this year’s report leads with the emerging trends and technologies search marketers feel will have an impact on the industry in the coming year(s). We feel this predictive component also helps marketers do a better real-time assessment of where they are and where they may want to be in this highly competitive space.
The depth and breadth of participation in this survey can not be understated as a key element of its value. With participants from 66 different countries, and with only half of the total respondents coming from the United States, this report represents the true global nature, reach and impact of the search marketing industry.
We continue to be unique in our approach to the survey by inviting participation from both advertisers and agencies and then presenting the results in segmented fashion to allow for comparison and contrast. Regardless of which side of the aisle you are on, we encourage you take advantage of the perspective being offered by your compatriots and your counterparts.

Finally, thank you to all who participated in this year’s survey. Your voice is what makes this such a valuable report year after year.

Measuring the Changes in Marketing Measurement

2011-04-12T15:24:00.000-04:00

Living in the world of pay-per-click as I do, I don’t hear much about reach and frequency these days. I got to thinking about my past life as a media buyer and planner — actually several past lives ago — when the bulk of my days were spent crunching numbers and making forecasts about the behaviors of the people underneath those data points.

Then along with so many others (well, truthfully, ahead of many others) I shifted to the world of digital marketing (1986 was early in). By 1997, most marketers had gotten over the “wow” of having a website and the demand for meaning came into play. Measuring website traffic was all the rage and driving traffic from various points on the web became the yard stick (and a booming business).

Back then, measurement was all about the clicks. And it stayed that way for a few years until we collectively hit another tipping point, about a year or so ago, when it stopped being about the interim action (the click) and attention was shifted to beyond-the-traffic data. Business actions — leads, orders, donations, inquiries, patient visits –whatever next step the marketer was pursuing — became the measure du jour.
Notice how I didn’t say “end result?”

That’s because now we’ve collectively begun to focus on the real value of getting a potential buyer to pay attention. And the website isn’t the only place we’re factoring those values. As the role of social in the marketing mix increases, companies are also beginning to look at their customer data differently.

They’re starting to see that web analytics and CRM solutions that work together to seamlessly pull, organize, and report on the results of marketing activities, online and off — are no longer an option — they’re business necessities. We’re less excited about one-hit wonders that create lots of activity but no ongoing business value. Questions about the real long term value of viral buzz (The Old Spice Guy) and Groupon et al abound.

Fully utilizing measurement systems will enable marketers to get much better at predicting the lifetime value of the customers that marketing pulls into their brand’s sphere of influence. It will also help marketers get at the insights that will enable them to do more of the marketing that is generating those closes. And maybe we’ll stop calling them “closes” and start thinking of them as “opens,” as in “open doors” to continued relationship building, organic business growth, and the ongoing dialogue that facilitates them.

Social media engagement is seldom a component in the measurement tools conversation, one tending to be right brain and the other the left. But if you think about the streams of business drivers that keep flowing towards the sea, merging and moving forward faster as they near the ocean of business exchange, you see that the convergence of social media conversations with customers and success measurement tools is a natural one. It’s also a required next step in the measurement continuum.
The convergence of social media engagement and tech tools to measure success not only makes delivering, engaging with, and tracking customer activity better. It provides the very conversation and data needed to create a circular effect of improved Marketing (big “M”) all the way around.

So reach and frequency became traffic became clicks became business actions became closes and is on track to become “opens.” And then?
Let’s keep on innovating and we’ll see what comes next.

This was originally posted to the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) Blend Blog on 3/23/11. For more posts from senior marketing executives, check out the MENG Blend at http://blog.mengonline.com/

Google +1

2011-03-31T15:34:00.002-04:00

Google has announced the +1 button yesterday, similar to Facebook Like button.

A small percentage of Google search users on Google.com in the United States searching in English will now see a +1 button next to search listings, when they are logged in. They can use the +1 button to publicly show what you like, agree with, or recommend on the web.

When a person clicks the button, he/she’s “+1′d” it. When they do a search when logged into Google, any results that they’ve +1′d — or which have been +1′d by those in their network — will be enhanced.

- Those with Google Profiles can “plus” things; everyone else cannot.
- Google account holders who are signed in will see all the +1′s and personalized “recommendations” even though they cannot add their own pluses without a Google Profile.
- Also, +1 buttons are not available on Internet Explorer 7.

More information on participating in +1 is here.

Effect of +1 for Paid Ads

According to Christian Oestlien, Google’s Group Product Manager for Ads, +1 will appear on all Google search ads by default. However advertisers will be able to opt out by submitting this form.

Advertisers will be able to see stats about which ads are getting the most +1s.

it will not impact ads quality and paid rankings.

Google's early tests showed there was a lift for ads that featured +1 annotation.

A user “plus-ing” (endorsing) an ad will not count as a click to the advertiser.

Users don’t need to specifically endorse ads for their pluses appear on ads. There’s a common infrastructure for social +1 on both the organic and paid side. So, if you +1 a particular page in organic results, then for the paid ad that uses the same URL, +1 appears.

In the future Google intends to cluster URLs so that the +1′d URL and the AdWords URL don’t have to be identical for +1′s to appear in the ad.

+1 and Organic Search

Google is working on a +1 button that you can put on your pages, making it easy for people to recommend your content on Google search. If you want to be notified when the +1 button is available for your website, you can sign up for email updates.

Google notes that they will “start to look at +1’s as one of the many signals [that they] use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking”.

At this point, we don’t know how much traction it can get from the consumer side. And, it is very likely that the feature will get abused quickly by spammers.

White Hat SEO

2011-03-02T20:27:00.003-05:00

Our clients always seek our our expert opinions in the findability arena. As a white hat findability company, we always keep our clients safe by sticking with Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Last year, one of our clients approached us and asked our opinion on Conductor. One of their board members had suggested Conductor as an SEO firm for companies with a large number of keywords/SKUs.

We advised our client that Conductor operated more in the gray-black hat arena (i.e., borderline “spammy”) and did not feel it aligned with our strategic/content-oriented/white-hat approach.

Our client understood the difference (they had heard us refer to black and white hat SEO often, including in the roundtable ) and agreed that our approach was preferred.

Fast forward to this year: on 2/16/11, Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google, posted at the Google webmaster thread

People on this thread have already mentioned Conductor, and I've confirmed
multiple times that paid links that pass PageRank via Conductor violate our
guidelines.

Conductor Exits The Paid Link Network Business

Matt Cutts’ comments seem pretty clear. Using Conductor’s paid link network is seen by Google as a manipulation of their ranking algorithms and is against their guidelines. Conductor appears to have seen the writing on the wall because just days before this discussion, Conductor posted to their blog that they will no longer be offering any link-building services. They have sold the assets to another company (whose services will presumably also be in violation of Google’s guidelines).

Lastly, we are happy to see only positive impact to our clients’ results with Google’s recent, big algorithm change that has affected 12% of the search queries.

Google's Recent Algorithmic Change

2011-03-01T08:28:00.003-05:00

Background

In recent months, Google promised that it would take action against content farms that were gaining top listings with “shallow” or “low-quality” content.
In a blog post, Google’s Matt Cutts said that the search giant has made great strides in the spam game:

As ‘pure webspam’ has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to ‘content farms,’ which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. We take pride in Google search and strive to make each and every search perfect. The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better.

Last Friday, Google announced a change to its ranking algorithm that is designed to disregard such material:
Google says this update is meant to reduce rankings for low quality sites and to provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

Industry Talk

Some people argue that Google should use personalized search to decide how to return "content farm" search results. For example, if you have a history of ignoring or backing out of pages on SiteXYZ.com, Google can simply stop showing you results from SiteXYZ.com. In other words, Google can let you make the editorial decision about SiteXYZ.com instead of having to "kill that site."

But, most end users will be happy with Google’s method, which will save them a lot of time clicking on junk sites and this is what matters to Google.

Implications

We have seen many content farm sites taking a hit, and sites that were at the edge of that line have also been affected.

This is one reason DBE always sticks with the white hat guidelines recommended by the search engines, and as such, we are glad to see only positive changes with our client results.

How Google Looks at Social Media

2011-02-22T17:26:00.000-05:00

Last week Google announced updates to Social Search, a feature that makes it easier to view information posted or shared by the people in your social networks.

The search engines are increasingly looking to social media for cues on how to better tailor their results to the needs and interests of users. If you’re wondering how social media is impacting your organic search engine rankings, please read on.

Google is currently looking at social media in 3 main ways:

1) If a person logs into Google, the search engine might give higher priority to things his or her friends have posted or shared. This is called Social Search and it does not affect the general search results that non-logged in users see. Since this affects only personal search results, it’s not something that businesses can directly influence other than to make their content easily shareable or tweetable.

2) Google is also incorporating tweets, videos, etc. into the Universal results format. To ensure that your company has an opportunity to appear in these listings, it is important to maintain active social media accounts and to build social authority by being a trusted user. This has always been the case, and is unrelated to Google Social Search.

3) Lastly, Google and other search engines are looking at social signals and author authority as ranking factors. This involves detecting which links are becoming popularly shared and if they are being passed along by authoritative users. Again, to leverage this for SEO, businesses should make their online content easily sharable and should maintain active accounts that can help gain the attention of other authoritative/influential users.

See, We Told You Doing It White Hat Is the Only Way to SEO

2011-02-13T16:15:00.000-05:00

For those of you who missed the wonderful article by David Segal in the 2/13/11 New York Times business section on JCPenney's foray into black hat optimization and Google's response to it, be sure to pour a cup of coffee and read Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets slowly.

What's really validating for the team here at DBE is how we've helped our clients win in the search engines through "Real" SEO--the kind that takes strategy, patience, great content, and the expertise to know when something is "too good to be true."

SEO not an overnight success, but it does consistently work and the results tend to be long lasting. Real SEO is an investment in strategic marketing that works with the rest of the marketing mix.

We have seen repeatedly that Google does seem to have a church and state separation between its natural listings and the paid ones. That being said, I find it hard to believe that Google knew nothing of JCPenney’s efforts. I also cannot believe all that SEO only delivered 7% of JCPenney’s traffic. It had to be much closer to 60-70% at a minimum for the period of time they were showing up for every imaginable search, unless in addition to spending money on a bad optimization program, they failed to invest in the right web analytics and CRM tools too.

Facebook Pages Upgrade

2011-02-11T11:23:00.008-05:00

Facebook is upgrading company Fan Pages to look the same as personal profiles. Starting this week, companies and brands may take advantage of the opportunity to be among the first to upgrade their Pages. All pages on Facebook will appear in the new layout beginning March 2011.

This is an exciting change because it opens up new opportunities for networking on behalf of your brand and offers increased controls for Page admins.

Notable features include:

Latest photos appear across the top of your page:
The most recent photos that you post to your Wall or photos that you tag your Page in will appear at the top of the Wall. This area will not include any photos posted by your fans (unlike on personal profiles where your friends’ tagging updates this section). To hide a photo, roll over it and click X.

Show the Top Posts on Your Wall:
You now have 2 Wall filters. You can show posts by your page and top posts from Everyone, a new way for people to see the most interesting stories first. As an admin, you'll have additional filters for viewing posts on your page. To set a default filter for your Wall, go to Edit Page.

Use Facebook as Your Page:
You now have the flexibility to interact with the other areas of Facebook as a page, rather than having to use your personal profile name. You can also get notifications when fans interact with your page or posts, see activity from the pages you like in your news feed, Like other pages and feature them on your page, and make comments as your page on other pages. To use this new feature, go to Account and select Use Facebook as Page.

New settings:
You can set defaults for your email notifications and how you post to your page - as yourself or your page. You can also select which featured pages appear in the left column. To manage your settings for email and posting preferences, go to Edit Page and Your Settings. To select which pages appear in Likes, go to Edit Page and Featured.

Since Facebook is now sending email alerts for new postings on Pages, you can also set keywords as a Moderation Block List. There is also a Profanity Filter which can be set to None, Medium, or Strong.

The downside is that Tabs are now less visible. They’re minimized as links in the Left sidebar. These are really only meant to be landing pages for first-time visitors to your page or for Facebook Ads – otherwise it is unlikely that many fans will click over to view them.

For more information, read Facebook’s official notice regarding the change. To see an upgraded Facebook Page in action, visit Digital Brand Expressions' Page at http://www.facebook.com/digitalbrandexp.

Google and Bing Debate

2011-02-04T13:14:00.004-05:00

Some of you might have heard about the latest Google vs. Bing debate. For those who haven’t, here is the background:

1. If you have opted in for IE8 Suggested Sites or installed Bing toolbar,

From its privacy policy http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/privacy.aspx on Suggested Sites,

“When Suggested Sites is turned on, the addresses of websites you visit are sent to Microsoft, together with standard computer information. "
"To help protect your privacy, the information is encrypted when sent to Microsoft. Information associated with the web address, such as search terms or data you entered in forms might be included.”

This means Bing can get your Google queries and Google search results.

2. Google now claims that Bing has been using this and copying its results and using it in as a ranking signal in its own search results.

Google manually ranked sites for 100 different gibberish search terms that had no results in Bing or Google. 20 engineers then installed the Bing toolbar and performed searches for those gibberish terms using Internet Explorer, clicking on the page they'd previously manually ranked at the top of their own results.

In 9 of the 100 tests, Google claims they started seeing the site they'd manually ranked show up ranked #1 over at Bing.

3. Bing says it is one of 1000 signals they use.

We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.

4. Google’s engineer Matt Cutts asks

If clicks on Google really account for only 1/1000th (or some other trivial fraction) of Microsoft’s relevancy, why not just stop using those clicks and reduce the negative coverage and perception of this? And if Microsoft is unwilling to stop incorporating Google’s clicks in Bing’s rankings, doesn’t that argue that Google’s clicks account for much more than 1/1000th of Bing’s rankings?”

Looking at the hundreds of our client site results, we don't see that Bing and Google's search results are close enough. We also wonder, if clicks on Google really account for only 1/1000th of Bing’s relevancy, why not just stop using that data and reduce the negative coverage and perception of this? We will have to wait and see how Bing reacts.

PR News' Digital PR Guidebook

2011-01-11T12:12:00.005-05:00

PR News released their Digital PR Guidebook, which includes a section written by DBE president/CEO Veronica Fielding:

“Get Your Company ‘Found’ With Robust Content and SEO Strategy”

Why is sound content strategy essential to SEO success? Ms. Fielding covers the three most important steps to creating compelling web content to support your SEO program, including strategies for keeping content frequently updated to leverage Google Caffeine's faster indexing speeds, incorporating links and generating online conversations around your brand.

The guidebook can be purchased on the PR News website.

Marketing Trends for 2011

2011-01-05T15:41:00.003-05:00

As we kick off the new year, the team at DBE has been having lively discussions about how marketing and communications will evolve in 2011. After hearing so many diverse thoughts on the subject, influenced by my colleagues’ unique areas of expertise, I opened up the question to some of the incredibly smart marketers we know and partner with as well.

I asked what are the most important tactics, strategies and ideas that should shape marketing and communications plans in 2011. Here are some insights I thought were especially powerful:

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“Definitely, marketers will be looking to incorporate mobile into their mix in 2011. If they haven’t done so already, they will want to develop a mobile version of their website so that key information can easily be found and read, and they will be exploring exciting, new marketing tactics like 2D barcodes, location-based technologies and games, and apps to connect and engage with their customers via their smart phones. Very cool!”

Carl Stoltenberg, President of Howard Design Group

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“Experimentation with mobile will be hot on marketers’ New Year’s Resolutions for 2011. While mobile marketing has been around for several years now, like social media a year or two ago, it’s reaching the tipping point of being applicable to a wider swath of businesses. Curiosity and experimentation will reign. We’ll see a lot of missteps, some very public guffaws, lots of follow-on strategizing, and then a fairly swift adoption of mobile as another marketing channel, or, as our VP of Client Services, Marc Engelsman coined, Mocial, because really, mobile and social are increasingly intertwined these days.”

Veronica Fielding, CEO, Digital Brand Expressions

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“Quality counts. Design matters. Words regain meaning. PR still packs a punch. Mobile commerce kicks in. iAds everywhere. Write once, run everywhere. Video reigns supreme. And, virtual events go mainstream. These are just a few of the important threads that will continue to shape and redefine brands in 2011 and beyond.”

Christopher Faust, Founder & CEO, Fastlane

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“I think 2011 will be a year of marketing experimentation. There are a lot of relatively new avenues; Facebook ads, Twitter, Foursquare and other geo-location services, for example. I think we’re going to get a better picture of which ones will be viable and which ones will fizzle out. With the continued growth of the smartphone market and other portable devices like the iPad, I think a greater emphasis will also be placed on mobile advertising this year.”

Rob Trautner, Manager of Paid Search Programs, Digital Brand Expressions

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“Grabbing more mind share is a great way to capture more market share in 2011. While the media landscape has become more fragmented, we have seen how much impact that many "pockets of influencers" can have -- from Mommy Bloggers and Natural Products Fans to traditional Business Editors and Finance Market Analysts. The key is to prioritize your targets, and then weave your company's value proposition into the themes or storylines that are most fitting for their platforms, and most compelling to their audiences. Done right, a thought leadership campaign can provide a significant boost to your products and services marketing programs - building loyalty as much as news sales.”

Kevin McLaughlin, Principal, Resound Marketing

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“I believe that YouTube will play into every company’s marketing tactics. YouTube is now the 2nd largest search engine for the English speaking language and allows businesses to engage with users on a different level. Create videos this year to highlight a product, generate buzz, and most importantly to spark creativity!"

Megan Mesgleski, Search Marketing Programs Coordinator, Digital Brand Expressions

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“First, make sure there is a marketing and communications plan in place - one that includes both strategies and tactics. Too often, organizations get caught up in all of the tactical initiatives they can implement to market themselves, but lose sight of having an overall plan that can be updated and that reflects the basic business goals and objectives of the organization. Francis De Salle once said, “Be who you are and be it well.” In other words, don't try to do everything just to do it – in 2011, use the tools that fit well within the marketing mix for your organization and do them well.”

Irene Maslowski, APR, Maslowski & Associates Public Relations

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“In 2011, marketers will refine their integration and differentiation in the social media space. A Facebook Page, YouTube Channel, Twitter account or other profiles can live on their own, but they’re most effective when there is interplay with traditional marketing efforts. It’s more than including “Like us on Facebook” in a brand’s print materials. Marketers will need to ask themselves, what sets my Twitter account or Facebook Page apart from the rest? If you’re not providing value to your customers, then you’re not going to get ahead of the pack.”

Pam Abbazia, Manager of Search & Social Media Programs, Digital Brand Expressions

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"The basic communications strategy will remain unchanged in 2011: determine and utilize the most effective means to communicate with end users. While the use of social media will continue to rise as a direct communications tool, traditional indirect communications methods through the press, industry analysts and other industry influencers will remain crucial. It's the combination of these methods that build the foundation for invaluable relationships, and will establish a company as one that listens and has valuable input to contribute to the conversation. "

Kristen Keller, founder, Keller PR

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It should come as no surprise to anyone that 2011 will see a dramatic shift to a greater concentration on SEM (SEO and SEA) and Social Media Marketing. For many companies these venues will provide new and more targeted ways to connect with and engage prospects and customers. These combined with more digital marketing efforts will allow advertisers to better measure the effectiveness of their marketing communications efforts. These more contemporary solutions should also reduce expenses when compared to more traditional media deliveries.

However, marketers have to be careful to first develop a sound strategy before simply jumping in with both feet. I have heard so many companies say that they need to have a social media presence without first determining their goals and objectives for the program or how it works into their overall branding and marketing mix. I’ve seen a new level of frustration as marketers face a media that in many cases they are not comfortable with or informed enough about. And, it is inevitable that some of the social sites like Facebook will become ecommerce sites. This will present new challenges for many companies.

For me the bottom line is that there are a lot of advertisers out there who are looking for help. They want to be educated about the opportunities in social media, emarketing, and SEO. Where once agencies were selected more for their conceptual and creative abilities, the criteria for selection will now fall heavily on their ability to teach and inform clients, as well as the implementation of their recommendations.

Bob Gagauf, President – brandwerks3

How do you think marketing and communications will be reshaped in 2011? Tell us on our Facebook Page.

Do Not Track and Net Neutrality and Findability Marketing

2010-12-17T09:13:00.001-05:00

Tis the season that websites will be tracking Santa around the globe and that GPS tracking devices will be gifted aplenty. It’s also a time when the FTC is exploring implementation of “Do Not Track” options for websites and online advertisers along the lines of its “Do Not Call” guidelines that were set for telephone direct marketers.

On the one hand, there are privacy issues with respect to how tracking information from online/offline purchases to social media profiles to web browsing/clicking behavior can be aggregated to reveal more about an individual than they have provided by choice at any one of these “locations.” It’s a case of 1+1=“all about you” and it was a lively topic at the DMA conference at which I recently spoke recently.

On the other hand, online publishers are making the case that tracking allows them to provide more relevant content to the individual albeit usually in the form of advertising. To them, tracking makes for a better online experience for you. Of course, it makes for a better bottom line experience for them and that is really what is driving this side of the debate.

Meanwhile, the FCC is looking at the issue of “net neutrality” and how providers like Comcast and Verizon may be able manage the flow of online content to your computer and/or mobile device – perhaps opening up the potential of tiered internet pay plans much like how cable systems operate today.

One thing is for sure – all this activity reinforces the importance of the Findability Marketing we are doing for our clients. Search engine optimization, paid search and social media marketing puts them in the position to be found freely by their customers when and where they want instead of via tracking, limiting/forcing access, etc. In other words, our clients are positioned for success regardless of what any Federal (blank) Commission may mandate.

BDI’s Financial Services Social Communications Event

2010-11-30T16:42:00.002-05:00

As one of the sponsors of BDI’s Financial Services Social Communications Event in November, DBE was able to talk with many financial industry insiders to gauge the interest in social media and what marketers feel the risks and opportunities are in the channel. Here are just some of the insights we heard:

“It’s too early – clients don’t get it.”
“It’s risking leaking the wrong information to clients.”
“We’re being regulated and validated – you are who you say you are.”
“Social media is where the eyeballs are.”
“It’s an opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership and expertise.”
“We can engage with customers and get ideas from them.”
“We have an opportunity to enhance customer touchpoints and engagement.”
“Social media lets our customers know us better and have more access to us.”
“It’s risky when there’s no clear defined social strategy.”
“We’ll need to respond to criticism.”
“Data leakage is a huge risk.”

Marc Engelsman, VP of Client Programs & Services, led two roundtable discussions on social strategy for financial services brands at the event. According to Marc, the biggest obstacles these brands are facing with social media adoption are “less about the regulatory environment and more about getting buy-in from C-Suite and Senior Management who don’t yet see the value in the channel.”

At the event, case studies presented by marketers at Citibank, the Wall Street Journal, HSBC and others, described different approaches to social media strategy for financial services brands. While live-tweeting during the case-study presentations, Marc used the term “mocial” to describe the presenters’ theme of social-mobile convergence within the strategies they shared, which other Tweeters agreed is the direction things look to be going.

BtoB Magazine Best of 2010 Awards

2010-11-11T09:54:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I attended BtoB Magazine’s “Best of 2010” awards luncheon in NYC, honoring the top creative talent in business to business marketing this year. The awards highlighted some of 2010’s top creative in print, video and online, as well as twelve of the top marketers who forged ahead in a particularly challenging economy. The list of marketers recognized at the event included Marcy Schinder of American Express OPEN, Tom Haas of Siemens, Ted Gilvar of Monster Worldwide, Cynthia Green of DuPont, and John Kennedy of IBM Corp who won top honors as Marketer of the Year.

As part of the awards ceremony, BtoB Magazine assembled all of the top marketers into a panel for some Q&A, asking them what worked in 2010, what strategies would carry over into 2011 and what budgeting changes might be in store for the coming year.

The common thread among the panelists’ answers was that these marketers had shifted resources into the digital space and would continue to do so. This shift is consistent with a report released by SEMPO earlier this year showing respondents planning to spend 43% more on search engine optimization, 50% expecting to spend more on paid search, and 59% increasing budgets for social media.

The rationale behind this shift seemed to be a mix of actionable metrics, lower out-of-pocket costs, ease of integration, and overall ongoing, measurable successes. This is also what we’ve been hearing from our clients as they’ve come to rely more on search and social media marketing as a cost-effective way to continue growing in a down economy.

DBE congratulates all of the winners of BtoB Magazine’s Best of 2010 Awards.

Interview with a Link Building Expert: Getting Results

2010-11-09T13:00:00.002-05:00

Last week I had a chance to sit down with Nicole Valentine, one of the architects of DBE’s highly successful link-building program. Here are some highlights:

Q: What is link building and why is it important for marketers to understand?

A: Link-building is a component of search engine optimization (SEO) designed to obtain links to a website from third-party authority sites. It’s important for marketers to understand that link building is a critical part of a real SEO program – if it’s not being done in-house or it’s not something their SEO agency is doing, that will severely impact how successful their SEO efforts will be.

Q: How does link building impact a client’s SEO program?

A: Real SEO encompasses a mixture of on-site technical optimization, content optimization and cultivation of the kind of inbound links search engines evaluate within their algorithms to determine how high up in the search results a website should appear for various search terms. An expert link-building program works to obtain links from authority sites, resulting in top search engine positions for business-driving search terms.

Q: What are the major components of a successful link building program?

A: It starts with extensive research to identify what the opportunities are for obtaining inbound links that will impact SEO. From there it’s all about building relationships with webmasters and providing them with something valuable, whether that’s the link itself or stellar web content written to include the links we’re trying to place.

Q: So, how do you approach such an intensive research process?

A: We’ve developed a mind map that we use to guide our research. It provides a general framework, but each client requires customized research methodologies, so we’re continually tweaking the process and going in different directions based on the specific needs of each of our clients.

Get Ready for Facebook Riot #297

2010-11-03T10:43:00.004-04:00

Judging by the lack of outrage and backlash that normally accompanies a major Facebook feature launch, I’m guessing that most of my friends haven’t noticed the new “relationship analysis” feature that showed up this morning. Notice the new link that appears under my friend Debbie’s Facebook profile photo, inviting me to “View You and Debbie”:

Clicking this link shows me a full page of information on who our mutual friends are, the Pages we both “Like,” anything we’ve posted on each other’s Walls, any photos in which we’ve both been tagged (Facebook will even display one of these photos prominently in the top-left corner, like a profile photo), comments we’ve made on each other’s status updates, and more. It’s basically a clickable summary of all my Facebook interactions with Debbie Sem.

And it goes further. There’s a “Browse Friendships” link in the top-right corner that allows me to view this relational summary between two other people – Debbie and her mom, for example. In fact, we now have access to a set of search boxes that lets people search for and see all of the interactions between any two people they're friends with on Facebook.

Clearly, this new feature doesn’t override Facebook’s privacy features, meaning that whatever content is posted utilizing any sort of privacy setting, will still only be viewable according to those settings. And it’s important to remember that anyone you’re not connected to (friends with) on Facebook does not have the ability to view your Facebook interactions with another person.

So, while I don’t think it’s necessarily a hot new stalking tool, it does provide an easy way to analyze relationships between the people you know. For business people utilizing Facebook as a more social version of LinkedIn, having that sort of relational information at-a-glance could prove extremely useful.

My guess is that we’ll see a solid week or two of protest, and then there will be a collective resignment to this new level of transparency.

Meet the New Twitter: Update on Twitter’s Redesign

2010-09-15T16:05:00.006-04:00

On Tuesday, Twitter announced that it is rolling out the new version of its website interface. The streamlined design improves the experience of using Twitter.com in your browser, effectively reducing the demand for third-party apps such as TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop.

The design mirrors that of the recently released Twitter iPad app. While followers, favorites and trending topics still appear in the right-hand sidebar, frequently accessed features such as mentions, retweets, searches, and lists have been relocated to the top of your timeline.

Twitter users no longer need to leave the site to view photos and videos. Thanks to partnerships with YouTube, Flickr, USTREAM, Vimeo, Dailybooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, Twitvid, and Yfrog, multimedia content is now integrated into the Twitter stream.

You can also learn more about other users without having to leave your Twitter homepage. Clicking on a username will pull up details of the person’s profile in the right panel of the screen and clicking on a tweet will display additional tweets from that user, as well as other related information.

This has the overall effect of increasing the amount of time each user spends at Twitter.com, making it easier for Twitter to deliver impressions for its advertisers. The updated interface’s similarities to Facebook should also get a warm response from Twitter newbies who have often complained that Twitter is too hard to use.

To learn more, please visit: http://twitter.com/newtwitter

Social Media Adoption Survey

2010-09-14T15:08:00.003-04:00

Please take a minute to respond to our survey on who drives corporate social media adoption:

http://www.digitalbrandexpressions.com/selectsurvey/TakeSurvey.asp?PageNumber=1&SurveyID=3KMm83MLl853G

It's just two quick questions and should only take a minute or two.

Thank you!

What Google Instant Means for Paid Search

2010-09-09T12:21:00.000-04:00

You have to hand it to Google; they’re shrewd. The timing of Google Instant’s announcement is no coincidence. It’s a calculated, competitive move designed to draw attention away from Yahoo and Bing’s merger into the Search Alliance.

Google is also extremely talented at finding new ways to squeeze additional profits from AdWords. The jury may be out as to whether or not Google Instant is an improvement to search usability. It definitely has the potential to be a headache for paid search advertisers.

First of all, ad position will fundamentally change. Ads will still be in a top box and right column as they are now, however, those results are all pushed down by the query prediction drop-down. Ads that were previously above the fold may now be below the fold, reducing visibility and click through rate. Bidding for top positions becomes more important. Google makes more money.

Recorded impressions will also be affected. According to Google’s Inside AdWords blog “an impression is counted if a user takes an action to choose a query (for example, presses the Enter key or clicks the Search button), clicks a link on the results page, or stops typing for three or more seconds.” While the first two parts of that statement pretty much fall in line with the way impressions are generated now, the “stops typing” impression is problematic. This will very likely result in bloated numbers of unqualified impressions, reducing click through rate, and thus negatively affecting Quality Score. This, in turn, hurts quality discounts, and forces the advertiser to bid more for better placement to compensate. Google makes more money.

Finally, while Chicken Littles are once again proclaiming the death-knell of SEO, what this truly represents is an assault on the long-tail. A well structured paid search program contains lots of highly detailed, specific keywords. Typically these keywords are high quality and low cost. The Instant method of serving ads will result in more matches on broader keywords which are more competitive and of course, more expensive. Google makes more money.

Google controls the search market and can dictate how the industry develops. If the advertiser doesn’t have the knowledge of AdWords inner workings and experience to adjust to Google’s changes in real time, then they’ll be the ones Google makes more money from.

Google Instant - Thoughts on SEO and User Experience

2010-09-09T10:03:00.004-04:00

Google has announced Google Instant yesterday. With the new change, as you start to type your search terms at Google.com, Google Instant automatically shows results for a popular search that begins with those letters. If you don't see the results you want, just keep typing and the results will dynamically update.

Searcher’s Take

Though it is supposed to help with search experience, it could drive the average search user crazy.

So far, I have seen many complaints from users such as these:

- Using Firefox 3, and occasionally getting blank screens when I search and then hit enter/right click/"search." Go back, enter search term again, hit enter, get blank screen.

- When correcting a search using the backspace key, I am being slowed down by pages results being displayed again.

- Google Instant limits the search results to 10 (even when I have set the preferences to show more that 10 results in one page)

So, there is some “getting used to” needed from the searcher, and some tweaks needed from Google to improve user experience.

Impact on SEO

Google Instant only affects the searcher’s experience, and does not affect SEO. While the searcher gets a preview of many search results as the query progresses, websites need to stay optimized in order to get better rankings with Google.

One minor issue I anticipate is with the keyword research process. If you are using the Google tool to get the keyword search frequency, beware that Google might inflate the numbers due to the way it calculates search frequency. I.e, Google might count it as a search if a user takes an action to choose a query (for example, presses the Enter key or clicks the Search button), or clicks a link on the results page, or stops typing for three or more seconds. As we have always stressed, Google search frequency numbers should only be treated as directional, and not as the absolute.

Opt Out

If you don't want to see results as you type, you can opt out by clicking the link next to the search box on any search results page, or by visiting your Preferences page.

But you need to note that, when you opt out, Google saves that preference on a cookie, so you'll stayed opted out until the cookie is cleared. Also, the preference will only apply to that particular computer and Internet browser, and it is not tied to your Google Account.

If you're concerned about seeing inappropriate content, you can enable SafeSearch at the "strict filtering" level to help avoid sites that contain pornography, explicit sexual content, profanity, and other types of hate content.

Finally, if you have any questions or thoughts about the impact of Google Instant on search marketing, be sure to contact your search marketing partner. As always, the team here at DBE, our team is prepared to answer our clients’ questions and help them navigate the ever-changing search arena safely.

Google Instant

2010-09-08T16:50:00.009-04:00

Google finally came clean today on the big announcement they’ve been teasing over the past couple days.

http://www.google.com/instant

Instead of just doing predictive text as you type your query, Google will deliver predictive results.

Say, for example, you were super-excited about the new Kings of Leon song (and you wanted to drag the example out an extra step or two). Here’s a succession of screenshots of what it would look like:

(If you are interested in the song, it’s here: http://radioactive.kingsofleon.com/)

Ready or Not, Here We Combine

2010-09-07T09:31:00.001-04:00

Go to Yahoo.com and search for something. Scroll to the bottom of the page. See the “Powered by Bing” note? The Search Alliance is already in place for organic search results. That was step 1 of the transition.

Step 2 involves the paid search results. Yahoo has already run tests delivering Bing ads for a small percentage of the search queries that occur. This transition is being rolled out to all US advertisers over the next two months. Staging in Microsoft’s adCenter management program should occur in September, with ads being completely converted and live in October.

If you haven’t worked with adCenter before, or you’ve never considered advertising anywhere other than Google, there’s a lot to catch up on. The Search Alliance will make up almost a third of the search landscape. That’s still only half of Google’s search share, but it’s enough that you should at least consider diversifying. If you don’t know where to start, check out the Search Alliance Readiness checklist we created for advertisers who aren’t sure how the upcoming merger will affect their paid search campaigns, then tell us how we can help.

Twitter Highlights Exclusive Deals with @EarlyBird

2010-07-09T14:07:00.002-04:00

This week Twitter announced the launch of @EarlyBird, an account which features exclusive offers from select advertising partners. Twitter users will only see these promotional messages if they opt-in to follow the account, or if someone they’re following retweets an @EarlyBird message.

Twitter is likely to expand this advertising channel by creating similar accounts which focus on geographic areas (New York, Miami, etc.) and interests (fashion, tech, music, etc.). Together with Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends, @EarlyBird gives Twitter one more potential source of revenue.

Many companies have already adopted Twitter as a tool for sharing special news and promotions with their customers. The @EarlyBird account offers these companies a way to promote their special offers to a broader audience and connect with people who may not be following them directly. It also provides a positive experience for Twitter users who want to stay updated on relevant discounts, but who don’t want to clutter their Twitter streams with updates from dozens of companies. The downside for users is that, since this is paid advertising, you're probably not going to see messages from brands who don't buy-in.

Here are highlights from Twitter’s @EarlyBird FAQ…

What is @earlybird?

Twitter @earlybird Exclusive Offers are special time-bound deals, sneak-peeks, and events that are promoted by the official Twitter @earlybird account. We partner with select advertisers and retweet offers that they have crafted only for the Twitter community. Our advertising partners determine the terms of the offer, including availability, amount, and price.

Is there a catch?

Given the name and nature of the account, it won't surprise you that offers are always time-sensitive and sometimes supply-sensitive, so they may run out quickly. Our advertisers are responsible for the terms and conditions of each offer, so please review them if you have any questions.

Does Twitter make money from this?

Yes, we earn revenue through our relationships with advertisers. Our focus will be to try and make these deals interesting and of value to you. We take pride in being selective about the type of deals we highlight and hope they will be an exciting way to start your day.

Google Me or Facebook Me?

2010-07-06T11:34:00.002-04:00

Google has dabbled in social media in the past – with limited success (do Orkut and Google Buzz ring a bell?). But, if recent rumors are to be believed, the search engine giant is at it again with plans to develop a social network, dubbed “Google Me,” to rival Facebook.

You may wonder why Google keeps trying to reinvent itself as a social service when it has already attained search dominance, but this is an important competitive leap for the company to make. Facebook's graph of "Likes" and in-depth data on the preferences of its users positions the social network to transform into a leading search engine and targeted advertising network.

Pete Cashmore, founder and CEO of social media blog Mashable, shared his thoughts on the matter in a recent column for CNN.com. Highlights:

“Facebook's mountain of personal data could also provide the backbone of an ad network many times more targeted than Google's keyword-based advertising. If Facebook were to launch both a search engine and ad network, it could put a significant dent in Google's more than $23 billion in annual revenue.”

“Google … is exquisitely talented at solving problems with algorithms. But when it comes to the touchy-feely stuff -- like human interaction -- it falls flat.”

“If the search giant [Google] is able to pull off a half-decent Facebook rival, the fast-growing social network will finally have a competitor to keep its power in check.”

Social Networking in the Corporate World

2010-06-24T14:23:00.004-04:00

In the ever-growing social media landscape, social networking in the corporate world is becoming more important in all aspects business. The options for using networking to your company’s advantage are endless. Here are a few key insights to common challenges faced by businesses venturing into social networking.

Social Networking in the Corporate World: Brand Awareness

A 2009 Cone study reports that 95% of social media users expect brands to be present on social sites. Two key questions marketers should ask themselves when implementing a social media brand awareness campaign are: 1) Is your message reaching your intended audience; and 2) Is that message effective? Through social media, you can target your audience, and in some cases, let your audience target you. Your image - your corporate brand – is defined by how you create it. The trick with social media is: you are what you create, but is what you create always what you are?

Social Networking in the Corporate World: Consumer Interaction

Consumers are all about instant gratification and having a presence on social networking sites helps your business keep up the pace. 78% of survey respondents expect brands to interact with them via social media channels. It is crucial to be accessible and responsive to your network. Encourage interaction from all ends, but monitor this interaction as well. Every thread of your social network links back to your business and affects your image.

Social Networking in the Corporate World: Employee Usage

Keep in mind that many of your employees probably visit social media sites on a daily basis and are familiar with the functionality. Use these sites as a knowledge base and training center for them to share what they know and continue learning from peers and management. Don’t limit what your employees can do in the social network. Boost morale, loyalty, confidence and retention by supporting internal networking.

If your business isn’t taking social networking in the corporate world seriously – now’s the time.

DBE Releases Results of Social Media Study

2010-06-22T12:07:00.001-04:00

Digital Brand Expressions released its new research report on how companies are adopting the use of social media throughout their organizations. This study, conducted by DBE, looked at if companies are using social media, how they are approaching its incorporation into business communications, if they have a strategic social media plan in place, and which business units are involved in the planning, measurement, and use of social media.

Some interesting highlights from the report include:

While 78% of respondents indicated that their business is actively using social media, only 41% reported that these activities are covered under a company plan.

Of companies with a social media plan in place, 94% include marketing activities within the plan, but only 16% include Human Resources or recruiting activities

Of those companies that don’t have a strategic plan but think it is important to create one, the number one activity rated as important to include in a social media plan is allocating resources for ongoing activities

Download DBE’s Corporate Social Media Study:

http://www.digitalbrandexpressions.com/services/corporate-social-media-report.asp

More information on DBE’s Enterprise Social Media Program can be found here:

http://www.digitalbrandexpressions.com/services/enterprise-social-media.asp

Confessions of a Closet foursquare User

2010-06-17T13:26:00.000-04:00

I’ll admit it; I’ve turned into a foursquare addict. I’ve been keeping it hidden. My account isn’t connected to Facebook or Twitter. First, there are the obvious privacy issues and risks coinciding with a program designed to tell people where you are, and where you aren’t, at all times. On top of that, I’ve seen the derogatory comments in response to Twitter posts like “Jimbo just became mayor of the Parking Garage.” Even I find those updates annoying and agree with the “Who cares?” sentiment. But when I blurted out “Suck it, Pierre!” in the middle of a crowded deli line after ousting him as mayor, I realized I was hooked.*

Now it’s affecting my plans and decision making. I have to go back to certain places often enough to keep mayorships there, but I need to go to new places too. I went to a different ATM this morning because no one had set up that location yet. I have to go to the diner because someone ousted me as mayor, and I have to take it back. When I go see Toy Story 3 this weekend, I have to go to a specific movie theater, because with 1 more visit, I think I’ll become the mayor. That will be my ninth mayorship, and I’ll only need one more after that to get my Super Mayor badge. Competition and little trinkets make me happy. Don’t judge me.

As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, discounts and freebies make me happy too. That’s where foursquare comes into play for marketing purposes. It’s not terribly useful for general advertising. You have to be very close for a place to show up in your list of options. There is a “Special Offer Nearby” feature. Starbucks seems to have a stranglehold on this, offering a free coffee to the mayor of a location. In a business that thrives on repeat visits, that’s the way foursquare marketing can work. Give rewards to the people who come back most often, to generate recurring business. It’s effective, but it’s not for everyone. And that’s okay because I’ve got my eye on a free coffee.

*Names have been changed to protect my foursquare nemesis.

Cutting Through the Social Media Hype

2010-05-27T12:16:00.002-04:00

As we’ve rolled out our corporate social media program over the past two months – the first process-driven, enterprise-wide service available – we’ve heard two things from marketers, executives, industry analysts and the press:

DBE is, indeed, the first to approach social media across all business units with a smart, clear and proven adoption process
We’re the gazillionth company this week to talk about social media and all the super-awesome things it can do for brands

Here at DBE, we, too, are bombarded with news and info about social media every day, and we’re constantly talkingwith companies, many of them start-ups, pitching the newest social media tools. So we understand the challenge that businesses face in wading through the hype around social media to get to the information and resources that will actually help their bottom line.

So, here are some tips to help marketers and executives get information they can use:

Take a step back
You can pretty much ignore all the pitches, tools and articles that tell you what you can do until you’ve built a framework that informs what types of social media activities you should do.

Stay in the adoption “safe zone”
Let the early adopters handle the trial and error when it comes to new social networks and tools. Check back 3months or so after you first hear about the “next big thing” and work the learnings gleaned from early adopters into your own strategy. Get started when it makes sense for your business while avoiding being a late arrival or missing the boat

Partner with a social media firm
Unless you have a full-time social media expert on-staff, it makes sense to partner with a firm that specializes in this area. Social media experts like Digital Brand Expressions that take a test and learn approach are continually examining, researching and vetting the value of social media tools and services. Your social media partner should have a thorough understanding of your business and be able to pass along insights and ideas specific to your brand and your company objectives.

Visit http://www.digitalbrandexpressions.com/services/index.asp for more information on Digital Brand Expressions’ social media services.

Google TV

2010-05-25T14:23:00.002-04:00

Google has recently announced Google TV. Here is a video that explains Google TV.
Google TV will become available in the US in fall 2010 in television sets, Blu-ray players and set-top boxes through partnerships

Google TV brings the search browser to the television. Consumers searching the Web on Google TV will see the same results and ads that are visible on their computers.

Impact on SEO

The fact that your website will be viewable from TV with the use of Google TV opens up a whole new type of audience. Hence the number of searches and the number of visitors SEO can bring to your site will increase.

Since user can toggle between search and TV, they would want to do the search quickly and will most likely not go beyond the first page of results. SEO is going to be needed more than ever to bring your website to the top of search results and make it findable.

Content will still be the king, and some changes and design elements will be needed to make the TV viewing experience better.

Changes in Design Elements

To get the website to display properly on TV’s, websites must be simple, easy to navigate, designed for big screens.

Text must be readable from a distance.

Sound is now a viable interface element.

Always display an easy way for users to return to their previous location. Don't rely on the back button.

Limit vertical scrolling

Avoid highly saturated and very bright colors.

Google provides more guidelines for the web developers here.

Conclusion

Success of Google TV will lie in consumer satisfaction. Others such as Apple and Microsoft have tried connecting consumers to the Internet through the TV, servers and set-top boxes and have failed. How Google TV will fare in the wild, we might only be able to tell when we test the real thing.

Facebook & Your Privacy

2010-05-13T13:49:00.003-04:00

When I first joined “The Facebook,” much of the allure of the social network was that it was only available to a handful of people. You could only create an account if you had an email address from certain schools (starting with Harvard and other Ivy League institutions, and eventually any college or university). It was a big deal for users when they opened the site to high school students, and a bigger deal when Facebook opened registration to anyone over the age of 13.

Since the early days, Facebook has always pushed to become more inclusive (and, some might say, more intrusive). Each step of the way, users have complained, yet most have gotten used the changes. But where do you go after welcoming in a global audience? A natural next step is to make those profiles more public, so that you don’t even have to be a Facebook member to access some or all of a person’s information – and that’s exactly what Facebook has done.

The social network’s most recent round of changes, which include Instant Personalization of partner sites and an updated Privacy Policy, have met with harsh backlash from privacy advocates and concerned users. In fact, earlier this month, public interest groups lodged a formal complaint against Facebook with the FTC.

One of the most persistent complaints is that Facebook makes it too difficult for users to understand and control their privacy options. While Facebook does offer granular control of your privacy settings, the following infographic from the New York Times illustrates exactly how user-unfriendly this system can be:

People want to be able to decide what they share on the Web, not have companies dictate it to them. Part of the challenge Facebook is up against is the expectations it created by beginning as a Walled Garden. People join Twitter with the understanding that what they’re posting is shared to the world, but most Facebook users didn’t sign up for that type of exposure. It’s a bait-and-switch if you don’t make these changes easy for users to understand, and force them to opt-out rather than allowing them to opt-in.

To counter its critics, Facebook will supposedly hold an all hands meeting today at 4pm PST to discuss user privacy issues. It remains to be seen whether this will result in the rolling back of some of the social network’s newest features, adjustments to its data sharing policies, or the addition of new tools to help users protect their information.

Twitter Finds Its Business Model

2010-04-13T14:07:00.004-04:00

Twitter announced today that it will be rolling out paid advertising, known as Promoted Tweets. This move is meant to bring in revenue and put a stop to questions about “What is Twitter’s business model going to be?”. COO Dick Costolo will discuss this offering in detail at today’s AdAge Digital conference and tomorrow at the official Twitter developer conference, so we can expect to hear much more about Promoted Tweets in the coming days.

Promoted Tweets are not traditional advertisements. These are organic tweets that brands want to promote to a wider audience. They act just like normal tweets which appear in your timeline, but they will be clearly marked as “promoted” and will gain special placement at the top of some search results pages. Think of it like paid search advertising, but your status update takes the place of ad copy. Only one Promoted Tweet will appear on a search results page at a time and, if the tweet does not “resonate” with users (measured in the form of replies, retweets, and favoriting), Twitter may stop displaying it. Promoted Tweets must also be timely, delivering information that’s relevant to what's currently happening.

This new advertising system will be unveiled in phases. This will allow time for Twitter users to get used to seeing Promoted Tweets and for Twitter to develop a system that pleases both advertisers and users. Initially the Promoted Tweets service will only be available to partners, including Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks and Virgin America. Over time the service will be available to other advertisers and Promoted Tweets will begin to appear outside of the Twitter search results.

What does this mean for brands? Twitter is putting a premium on the quality of its user experience. If you were hoping for an easy way to promote yourself on Twitter without having to invest in the community, you’re out of luck. You can’t just “buy Twitter ads” and be done with it. Once Promoted Tweets are available to all advertisers, you will need to maintain an active Twitter account and post engaging tweets that can then be featured through this system. Promoted Tweets can also be used for proactive reputation management -- if your brand needs to get out in front of a conversation (for instance, respond to inaccurate or negative media coverage), this will be a great way to make sure your messages are front-and-center for other Twitter users to see.

Did Google Just Get iPwned?

2010-04-08T16:40:00.001-04:00

“Search is not happening on phones.” When Steve Jobs speaks, hyperbole follows. Based on their acquisition of AdMob which is currently being challenged by the FTC, I think Google would probably disagree with that statement. In the world of mobile OSs, though, Google’s Android is second fiddle to the iPhone by a large margin. Apple dominates Google in this environment almost as much as Google dominates Yahoo in the PC-based search engine competition.

“People are using apps, and this is where the opportunity to deliver advertising is.” So the announcement today that Apple is building “iAd” into the iPhone 4.0 operating system, which will be available for iPhones in the summer and iPads in the fall, is fascinating. The potential of these in-app ads as demonstrated by Jobs is revolutionary in terms of entertainment and interactivity value. For example, a sample Nike ad had the ability to custom design sneakers, as well as store location services built into it. A Toy Story 3 ad had video clips, promotional artwork (which could be set as the phone wallpaper) and games. I imagine it wouldn’t be too much of a step further to add showtimes and ticket sale capabilities.

In true Jobsian fashion, Apple said there is a potential for over 1 billion impressions per day. Without knowing how much of the ad platform is predicated on multitasking, this may be an over-estimation. The ad content is run without leaving the app that presented it. Multitasking will not be available for the iPhone 2G or 3G or early iPod Touch models.

There’s a lot to still be determined about the ad development and buying process, but from a creative perspective, this could potentially revolutionize and define what mobile advertising will be for years to come.

Will Brands “Like” Facebook’s New Round of Changes?

2010-04-02T10:40:00.002-04:00

The social media marketing world is abuzz with word that Facebook is set to change how users interact with Brands on the site. Currently, when a user comes across a company or brand’s Facebook Page, he/she can choose to “Become a Fan” by clicking a link or button. The new format changes the language slightly, invoking an already widely used Facebook function – the “Like” link or button.

The reason for this change, according to Facebook sources, is that users are already comfortable “liking” content on Facebook and do so twice as often as they “fan” something. I think most Facebook users thoroughly understand the current difference between liking content and becoming a fan of a content source, so is Facebook comparing apples to apples here?

“I compare becoming a fan of something to, essentially, adding someone as a Facebook friend,” says Shawn Perry, an avid Facebook user. “I see a huge difference between liking something on Facebook and indicating that I want to continue to see updates about something in my News Feed. I’m curious about how Facebook is going to differentiate between these two activities so that users know what will come of each action they take.”

How will brands and users feel about this change?
For brands that have spent the past 2-3 years building momentum for their Facebook activities, using “Become our Fan on Facebook” and “Visit our Facebook Fan Page” badges on-site and off, there are going to be some rebranding efforts ahead to help smooth the transition. While it will remain acceptible to continue using the “become our fan” terminology, over time it will need to phase out in order to eliminate user confusion.

Pam Abbazia, Manager of SEO and Social Media Programs, weighed in with some additional thoughts:

“At first glance, it feels like a semantic bait-and-switch to use the ‘Like’ button as the opt-in mechanism for Fan Pages. ‘Like’ is a casual act, while ‘Become a Fan’ implies a commitment to receive Page updates in your News Feed. We may see a rash of accidental ‘fan’ opt-ins early on but, as Facebook users get used to the change, it could improve traffic to Facebook Pages and improve overall engagement in the network. A potential downside is, brands may have to work harder to engage fans because there will be more competition from other pages in the News Feed. You’ll need to be special to stand out.”

Facebook hasn’t made an official announcement, so it will be interesting to see how they handle the roll-out. Hopefully, like most of the improvements they have implemented in the past, this change will enhance the relationships brands are building within the Facebook community.

The growing influence of individual-to-individual (i2i)

2010-03-12T09:41:00.002-05:00

While Web 2.0 continues to confirm its establishment, individual-to-individual (i2i) communication gains momentum with becoming one of the most valuable influencers in the consumer’s decision process (i.e. problem recognition; information search; alternative evaluation; purchase decision; purchase; post-purchase behavior).

Perceptive businesses have harnessed the influence of the individual to positively impact brand loyalty and brand reputation. These companies understand that the game is no longer just Business-to-Business (B2B) or Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and to that end, have invested the resources to identify and engage the individual influencers that motivate target audiences.

Inattentive businesses have neglected that i2i has become an important part of the cognitive process for selection between various alternatives. Many are suffering from a non-participative risk and losing years of costly earned brand loyalty to individuals that may or may not have an association with the corporation. Others have established a presence but haven’t taken the time to understand how to leverage these channels. These companies are missing opportunities everyday to engage with the influencers and reinforce the brand’s position.

As a global society we are shifting away from an environment in which businesses have an uncontested authority. Furthermore, the new media arena has changed the dynamics of many industries, inviting an overwhelming variety of options for retail and business consumers. As a result, the influence of trusted i2i communications is becoming a vital component in the search for solutions.

The savvy business owner will ensure that the integrated marketing approach no longer only focus on maximizing the business impact on the consumer mind but will additionally support the requirement to personally engage the individual. Resources within the company will need to be allocated to ensure that you are leveraging every opportunity to communicate clearly and consistently to these valuable influencers. Understanding the i2i relationship is a critical component to having a successful brand in a world of 24/7 information availability.

Leverage the opportunity to engage with the new influencer (the individual):
- Join the platform that your target audience chooses to communicate
- Show up, engage, strengthen a relationship, and build trust
- Listen with empathy, not to push your own agenda. Opportunities will follow.

To learn how to better engage with individuals or more about i2i communications in the new media you can contact Nick Giacopelli (ngiacopelli@digitalbrandexpressions.com) at Digital Brand Expressions (www.digitalbrandexpressions.com).

Follow: http://twitter.com/nickgiacopelli
Connect: http://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasgiacopelli

Yahoo and Microsoft- The Superfriends

2010-03-10T17:34:00.001-05:00

It’s now official that Yahoo and Microsoft will be merging their paid search platforms. They’re making their plans to move forward under the banner of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. Are they a legitimate threat to Google? Probably not. For the sake of argument though, let’s pretend this is going to work. What do they need to do to catch up to the market leader?

1. Strike while the iron is hot. Google is somewhat vulnerable right now. They’re distracted between Android, Buzz, Chrome, Wave, the Google phone, etc. There’s also been a pretty vicious backlash over the privacy debacle that Buzz caused. This is the best possible time to grab for market share. Unfortunately, the Search Alliance as they’re calling themselves, will not happen until the end of the year. So this one’s out. By the time they’re ready to launch a unified platform, Google will have developed something that actually works to counter.

2. What’s in a name? Search Alliance? Really? Was The Unified League of Cooperative Search Engines taken? Their main competition has them beat, hands down, in branding. People don’t search. They “Google it.” Do better than something that sounds like it came out of a name generator.

3. Make it easy. The plan is to use the Microsoft AdCenter platform as the ad management system. The online interface is cumbersome and unintuitive. It could be worse though. It could use Yahoo Panama system. Microsoft’s desktop tool is also better than Yahoo’s, though I find it can be somewhat iffy with saving and uploading all the changes that have been entered. The truth is, the Search Alliance needs to build a new system from the ground up. It needs to at least be competitive with AdWords and AdWords Editor.

4. Get results. Yahoo will be supplying the ad inventory. The thought is that this will guarantee Yahoo more revenue, and it benefits Microsoft to have access to a larger audience. What’s really going to happen is that Bing’s competitive advantage- the highest conversion rates of the 3 major engines- will disappear. Yahoo will flood them with ads, and as a result, costs will increase for advertisers while performance declines. This can’t happen. Find a way to keep costs down and quality up.

5. Work with me here. One thing the Search Alliance is getting right: Yahoo’s staff will provide support to agencies. I shudder at the thought of having to work with Microsoft’s staff regularly, and I feel for the individual advertisers who will be stuck with them. I’ve never gotten a straight, useful answer from someone at Microsoft. Their editorial policies are the strictest of the major engines, but their staff seems incapable of clearly explaining policies or providing assistance to find resolutions. When I have a problem on Yahoo, I make a call, and it’s taken care of.

So that’s it. Provide a good product. Keep the cost down. Make good customer service a top priority. And change that ridiculous name. Even if all of these pieces fall into place, it may not be enough. At least it will be interesting to watch.

Social Media Corporate Policies

2010-03-09T17:08:00.002-05:00

According to a recent survey by Manpower on social networking policies and businesses, only 20% of the businesses worldwide that responded have corporate social media policies in place.

Creating and implementing policies governing employees’ usage of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites is a topic in much discussion among business policy makers today. Social media usage affects employees and decisions makers in all areas of the company, from the C-suite to HR to Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, and IT. Consequently, all of those areas need to be involved in the development of the corporate social networking policy and how employees use social media when their communications are a reflection on the business.

Businesses frequently cite one or more of these reasons for hesitating to move forward with an employee usage policy for Facebook and other social media sites:

1.The Real Opportunity: while social media policy development affects the entire organization and therefore must involve the entire organization, many members of the management team are not familiar with or comfortable with social media as a business tool. Their resistance to see past the early stages of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as personal environments keeps them from fully understanding the ways these and other social media sites have transformed into broad communications channels for a wide variety of businesses and their stakeholders. In fact, some of the biggest, quantifiable successes in the social media channel are coming from B2B marketers.

2.Where to Begin: most companies don’t have a workable process in place to move through the steps required to develop a customized social media adoption plan for their organization. Adopting social media throughout the organization means that all employees need at least a basic understanding of social media sites: how they look, how they work, and the connections they are capable of forging. At the same time, these digital outposts need to be understood in the context of how they can enhance business communications. While the senior decision makers in the organization understand business protocols and communications, they often have little or no hands-on experience with them. Conversely, less seasoned team members are entirely comfortable with social media as personal communications environments but often lack the business experience required to think through the situations and scenarios required to develop workable policies and protocols. Without a knowledgeable guru to guide the enterprise-wide process, companies suffer months of spinning in place, false starts, and, in the worse case scenario, embarrassing public fumbles.

3.Uncertainty about what employers can ask employees to do/not do, on their own time: with employees responding to email around the clock and working with teams around the globe, the line between personal time and work time continue to blur. As companies provide mobile devices and other technology solutions to make working anywhere anytime easier for employees, the line between company use and personal use is almost non-existent. Many companies are torn between the need to protect themselves from inappropriate behavior by employees during business hours on business equipment and the desire to leverage the benefits that being active in social media environments are bringing to companies.

4.Fear of viruses, malware, and other system crippling intrusions is another obstacle that has many companies clamping down on access to social media sites through company systems.

5.Loss of Productivity: This is probably the biggest reason that 69% of companies in the Americas don’t have employee social media usage policies in place. While they often cite fear of system security as the issue (see #4), more often than not that is the mask management puts on its greater fear--that access to social media sites will make employees less productive. A lot less productive.

According to the Manpower survey, among companies that do have a social networking corporate policy guiding employee usage of social media, 63% report that it is instrumental in curbing productivity loss due to enabling employees to use social media while working. A quick Google search on “employee productivity social media” shows a mix of opinions—with five articles being clearly pro-usage, three being strongly anti-usage, and two being neutral.

As with most issues affecting morale, productivity, and leveraging new technologies, the answer isn’t for companies to put their heads in the sand but rather to full explore the risks and rewards as they pertain to their specific organizations.

DBE’s five-phase enterprise social media adoption process is helping our corporate clients explore the benefits of social media for their entire organization (HR, IT, marketing, sales, customer service, etc.), assess the risks to reputation, productivity and other factors, and to develop policies and protocols that guide their employees behaviors in the social media space when they are communicating on behalf of the company. It also helps them understand the ways their off-the-clock social media behaviors can affect their employers and themselves.

By leveraging a proven process for helping your company adopt social media best practices for your organization, you greatly reduce the risks and exponentially increase the opportunities social media communications present to all areas of your business, while being 100% in control of how your company moves forward.

GetClicky with your Crazy Egg – 2 Cool Tools

2010-03-01T12:29:00.013-05:00

In the last few weeks we came across 2 tools that we think are pretty cool and wanted to share:

Crazy Egg: Their tagline is “visualize your visitors” and with their heat mapping tool, you can get a quick picture of how visitors are navigating your site and what areas are generating the most interest. True, Google Analytics’ site overlay feature does something similar, showing click through rates for different elements on a page, but we think Crazy Egg’s heat maps are more user friendly and better for quick assessments of what is and isn’t working. Here’s an example of a Crazy Egg heatmap for the DBE Services page:

The tool is relatively inexpensive, too. For sites with 10,000 visitors or less per month, it costs just $9 per month and goes up to $99 per month for sites with 250,000 or fewer visitors.

GetClicky: GetClicky is a web analytics program. We’re big-time Google Analytics fans here, but GetClicky provides some juicy additional data that we’re definitely intrigued by. It provides all the usual tracking, but where it seems especially useful is in tracking downloads. In addition to providing how many of a particular download occurred, GetClicky will also tell you information about the individual user who completed the download, including:

link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CACAFFE%7E1.DIG%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml">

What company or ISP they came from
How they arrived at your site, and if it was from a search engine, what keyword they used
What time they performed the action
How long they spent on the site

link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CACAFFE%7E1.DIG%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml">

If you had the time and resources, this could be a great little prospecting tool to see who’s been checking you out and who you might want to reach out to. It can also provide a clearer picture of who is interested in your content to help inform your marketing strategy or future content development.

GetClicky also provides Twitter Analytics. We haven’t played with this feature yet, but from their website, it sounds a lot like a HootSuite or TweetDeck, but integrated directly into your web stats. They say you can enter keywords that you want to monitor on Twitter and GetClicky will “do the rest”, plus you have the ability to reply or retweet directly from GetClicky.

Again, the tool is pretty inexpensive, starting at just $9.99 per month and increasing from there: http://www.getclicky.com/help/pricing. (There’s a free version, too but the data it offers is more limited).

We’ll keep you posted as we continue to find new tools that we think are worth sharing.

Blogwell Blog

2010-02-25T15:12:00.003-05:00

Well, I attended Gas Pedal’s Blogwell event in San Diego last week to hear how leading brands are operating in the social media space. The case study sessions I sat in on included Starbucks, USAA, Community Medical Centers and State Farm. There was also a “keynote” in the middle on social media ethics from the event organizer – the Social Media Business Council. All the sessions were illuminating in many ways and below you will see the tweet-trail of highlights I generated during the course of the afternoon. However, let me first provide some overarching observations for your consideration:

While all these brands (and others represented at the conference) are certainly well into their use of social media, this is still new territory for them and they themselves are still learning how to best leverage the social space. In other words, even if you are just starting out in exploring social media, you are really not that far behind and have the benefit of learning from other brands’ experience (successes and failures).
Even these large enterprises are struggling with resource allocation for social media both in terms of staff and budget.

o In terms of staff, most only had 3-5 people tasked with social media responsibilities in total. And these people often had cross-functional responsibilities – social media and digital marketing, social media and public relations/public affairs, social media and advertising, etc.

o In terms of budget, most did not have dedicated social media allocations but were siphoning funds from other sales/marketing buckets. The ability to provide management with compelling ROI data was cited by many as a barrier to getting more direct budget.
Every single presentation mentioned the importance of getting senior leadership to champion social media across the enterprise.

All in all, I walked away from the conference feeling very energized and validated in terms of the 5-Phase Process DBE is using to help our clients enter the social media environment. From name-claiming to auditing to strategy to tactical implementation is certainly the right path to social media success.

Here's the tweet-trail:

@marc_engelsman
4:06pm, Feb 16
At Blogwell conference in San Diego - already met some good people in the enterprise social media space #blogwell #social #marketing
4:31pm
starbucks: social fits within larger digital strategy
4:40pm
starbucks: build internal coalition across enterprise. c-suite, legal, hr, mktg, etc
5:00pm
starbucks: social media part of digital budget now but stole from other projects initially
5:18pm
usaa financial: built on wom and using social for brand reputation
5:23pm
usaa financial: using ratings/review apps to facilitate social engagement
5:28pm
usaa financial: also using webinars to share expertise
5:39pm
usaa financial: transforming call centers to contact centers to handle social scale up
6:20pm
#blogwell social media blurs editorial and advertising line
6:23pm
#blogwell create social media policies and training programs to stay ethical and lawful
6:35pm
#blogwell ftc says brands are responsible for social media monitoring - can't claim ignorance
6:57pm
community med ctr: uses leadership blogs, employee podcasts for social
7:00pm
community med ctr: bloggers include drs, nurses, exec staff and others
7:07pm
community med ctr: testing twitter and mobile texting of health tips
7:18pm
community med ctr: employee engagement important goal of social strategy
7:37pm
state farm: social media balancing act includes personal vs business use
7:41pm
state farm: brand name claiming issues on all social properties at start
7:44pm
state farm: risk vs reward includes risk of NOT participating
7:47pm
state farm: need to provide employees path for asking questions re social use
8:01pm
#blogwell thanks for a great afternoon of social media case studies

SEMPO's State of Search Survey

2010-02-09T14:11:00.003-05:00

As you probably know, DBE is a member of SEMPO – the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization – and have been so for as long as the organization has existed.

We view SEMPO as a critical player and thought leader helping educate believers and non-believers alike on best practices in this ever-evolving industry.

That’s why we’re not just a member of SEMPO -- we’re an active member attending sponsored events, getting SEMPO Institute certification, and participating on various committees. Currently, I am serving on the Research Committee as the lead on SEMPO’s Sixth Annual State of Search Survey.

This important initiative is unique in the way it provides parallel tracks for advertisers and agencies as it probes for the latest trends in search marketing strategies, tactics, budgets, metrics and more. I have used the results from previous surveys to help our internal teams as well as our clients gain a better appreciation of the value of their search marketing efforts as well as a sense of perspective for where they fit in comparison with others. That’s one of the real values of a long-term tracking study like this and, for that reason, this year’s version has retained many of the same questions as the past surveys.

However, as previously mentioned, search is an evolving industry and so there are also some new questions in this year’s survey that were added based on emerging trends. For example, there are more in-depth questions about social media as part of the search marketing mix and about how metrics are being used to illustrate return-on-investment (ROI) during this period of heightened spending scrutiny spurred by economic conditions.

I invite all our clients, our partners and our friends in the search industry to take part in the survey -- http://bit.ly/SEMPO-search. You don’t have to be a member of SEMPO to take the survey and all respondents will have access to the final report. It takes only about 10 minutes and the more participants we get, the more valuable the results will be for all to see. Thank you and be sure to check back here in March for my analysis of the results.

Google Remarketing

2010-02-04T10:11:00.002-05:00

During our recent meeting with Google, I heard about an interesting Google’s service called Google remarketing.

What is Google Remarketing?

Remarketing is a new beta service offered by Google to qualified Adwords’ clients. The product helps you reach users who have previously visited your website and is used to drive increased conversions on the Content Network using display ads.

You will be able to define groups of users that you want to target, such as shoppers who have abandoned after adding items to the cart. For example, Google Adwords will serve ads to them as they browse other sites on the Content Network after leaving your site. You will be able “re-market” your products to visitors in real time. All you will need to do is install a small amount of JavaScript onto your site to provide tracking and to configure Adwords to target specific users.
Effectiveness of Remarketing Technology

According to Advertise.com, remarketing has been shown to improve ad response up to 400 percent across several Advertise.com clients. According to this SEMPO article, remarketing is the most-under utilized marketing technology.

Here is how the technology works:

- When a user visits your website, a cookie gets dropped in to the user’s computer.
- The cookie tracks where the user left your site (for example, abandoning the shopping cart, just visited the home page and left or left the membership page without signing up)
- When the user (using the same browser) visits other sites that are in Google;s content network, based on which page the user visited or from which page the visitor exited your site, you can display the ads (promoting no shipping fee, a coupon, membership benefit, etc.) to the user in those content sites.
- The user clicks the ads and comes back to your site and converts.
- Based on your sales cycle, you can tell Adwords how many days the ads are to be displayed(1 to 180 days) and the frequency.
- After the user makes a conversion in your site, the display ads will stop showing to the user.

Benefits

Remarketing technology has these inherent benefits:

- Customizes the message based on user’s browsing and purchase history
- Recognizes user intent
- Controls the frequency of views
- Governs daily advertising spend
- Excludes ads from appearing on select domains.

Issues

The two issues we are:

While privacy concerns are always a hurdle for behavioral targeting, Google confirms users can opt out. After you opt out, you will not receive interest-based ads.

Also, since the cookie is set for the browser, if the same user uses a different browser, Google will not get the information stored in the other browser.

Interested?
Since Google remarketing service is still in beta, it is not publicly available. If you want to catch the boat sooner, you need to contact your search marketing agency or your Google rep.

Socializing Your Organization

2010-01-28T15:02:00.001-05:00

If 2009 was the year that businesses jumped into the social media channel in a big way, then 2010 is already shaping up to be the year that they’re taking a step back to get more strategic.

We’re seeing public, private and not-for-profits looking for a more structured approach to leveraging this here-to-stay channel. They’re looking for help in assessing the ways departments and employees are using social media now and in developing policies, procedures and detailed protocols for moving forward in brand-aligned ways.

There have been too many companies big and small being embarrassed by brandjacking incidents, overzealous employees spilling confidential beans, and employees very comfortable with social media for personal use not realizing—until it’s too late—that there are differences between communicating personally and communicating on behalf of their firms.

The continual blurring of the lines between personal and professional time is one factor driving much of intra-company debates as to when employees are “on the clock.” Another driver is who owns the content that employees create when it’s created “on their own time.” Still another is how much a company can dictate, or suggest, in terms of what employees choose to tweet, post, or blog about.

To get a better understanding of where organizations are along the 5-phase process that DBE has identified for enterprise-wide adoption of social media as a communications channel, we’re fielding a survey. It’s short, taking about 3 minutes to complete. Once the results are tabulated, we’ll be writing an analysis to share our findings. If you’d like the results delivered to you, take the survey and make sure you provide your email address at the end.

We’re expecting to close the survey in mid-February, so give us 3 minutes now and we’ll give you some good insights to help you see where you company stacks up compared with others of its size—and how to work with your colleagues to make your company an engaging player in the social media channel.

3 LinkedIn Tools You Ought to Try

2010-01-28T07:35:00.000-05:00

If you’re one of the more than 55-million people who use LinkedIn for professional networking, you may be familiar with popular features such as LinkedIn Groups, Company Profiles, and Job Search. But did you know that there are many more networking and research tools available to you?

Here are 3 of LinkedIn’s lesser-known features that you may want to try:

Reference Search: Want to learn more about a potential employee, employer, or business partner? Reference Search allows you to enter the names and years that a person worked for a particular company. LinkedIn will then show you which people in your network worked with your candidate during that time period so you can contact them for more information. (Note: You must upgrade to a paid account before you can use this feature.)

Productivity Tools: Build your network more efficiently using the Microsoft Outlook Toolbar, Browser Toolbar for IE or Firefox, mobile apps, widget for Lotus Notes, and other tools. You can quickly and easily search for people, stay connected to your network, sync LinkedIn to your address book, and more. These tools only take a moment to download, yet can help you save a lot of time in the long run.

Service Provider Directory: Looking for a web designer, attorney, personal trainer, or other service provider who does top-quality work? You can tap into the combined experience of LinkedIn’s members by searching in the Service Providers Directory. Profiles are listed by category, location, and total number of recommendations. A service provider doesn’t need to have a LinkedIn profile for you to submit a recommendation, you only need their name and email address.

(How can you make sure your own profile is included in the Service Provider Directory? If you fall under one of the predefined service provider categories, simply ask your clients to recommend your work. When a client posts a recommendation to your personal LinkedIn profile, you’ll automatically be added to the directory and, as you gain more endorsements, your rank will improve.)

Google Real Time Search

2009-12-08T17:00:00.002-05:00

Google has announced several search enhancements in the past two weeks (including the extension of personalized search), but one of the most buzzed about items is the addition of real time search to its results pages.

Google has teamed up with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca to provide searchers with a “dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web”. Now, when you perform a Google search, you may see a scrolling box that features live tweets, blogs, news and other web content included in the top results. In short, Google sticks another "universal result" in the search results when they feel a real time result makes sense. This is the next step in Google’s efforts to provide its users with the “freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results” possible.

Here’s a screen capture which shows what the scrolling results look like:

Google offers the following video demonstration:

If you’d like to see real-time search in action, please check out:

Search results for [Tiger Woods] – http://www.google.com/search?q=tiger%20woods&hl=en&gl=us&esrch=RTSearch&rtfu=1260284459&usg=b8a9

Search results for [Copenhagen Summit] – http://www.google.com/search?q=copenhagen%20summit&hl=en&gl=us&esrch=RTSearch&rtfu=1260285144&usg=4dd7

Here is a round-up of the DBE team’s “real time” reactions to this new search enhancement:

Deepa Maran, Group Manager, Technical Services: “SEO is not changed by this development. However, it is another reason for companies to develop their social media presence if they want to be involved in the real-time/breaking news stories in their arena.”

Marc Engelsman, VP of Client Programs and Services: “The real time results in the Tiger Woods and Copenhagen Summit examples appear in different places. It also looks there are still 10 organic listings on these pages so I wonder if rankings will not be impacted technically as opposed to visually above/below the fold.”

Ann Pyle, Group Manager, Client Services: “I was just looking at the real time results for Tiger Woods and saw some curse words and other inappropriate language from tweets – I wonder how Google will deal with that moving forward?”

Pam Abbazia, Manager, SEO & Social Media Programs: “It seems like Google has a few bugs to work out in terms of the importance/relevancy/value of the tweets they show (perhaps this is where the new retweet button would play a role).”

Rob Trautner, Manager, Paid Search Programs: “If Google is deciding based on some search frequency criteria to add this to the search results, it’s pretty responsive. The Curtis Granderson trade just happened, though the rumors have been circulating for a few hours.”

Google Extends Personalized Search

2009-12-08T16:54:00.003-05:00

Google recently made the announcement that it is extending Personalized Search to signed-out users worldwide based upon 180 days (approximately 6 months) of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. If you use 2 different browsers in your computer, each browser will be assigned one identity.

Depending on your search pattern and the websites you click from the search results, Google can customize your future search results. This means that you no longer need to be logged into your Google account to see results that are tailored to your interests. It’s important to note that this will only affect the organic search listings and should not impact paid advertisements displayed by Google Adwords.

For instance, if you were to visit Amazon.com on a regular basis using a bookmark or by typing the URL directly into your browser, it wouldn’t affect the way your Google results are displayed. But, if you searched for [best selling books 2009] in Google and clicked on the result for Amazon.com, then Google will note your selection. The next time you search for related book queries, Google may show Amazon.com higher in the results.

How can you tell if Google is personalizing your results? Look at the upper-right of the search results page and you’ll see a “View Customizations” link which will let you see how they've customized your results and also let you turn off this type of customization.

What is the impact for SEO?

From DBE’s perspective, the search engine optimization process doesn’t change. If your website is sufficiently optimized, Google’s algorithm will recognize that it is relevant to the targeted search term and display it accordingly. But, it is important to note that you may see varying search results if you’re using different computers or different Web browsers.

Here are some pointers for helping your site perform better in Personalized Search:

Improve your click-thru rate. Shorter URLs and clear meta tag descriptions will help your website’s click-thru rate from the search results.
Reduce your bounce rate. The page of your site which ranks for a given keyword needs to meet the searcher’s expectation so he or she doesn’t “bounce” (leave your site immediately after arriving on it).

Your site’s click-thru rate and bounce rate will tell Google whether a searcher liked the site or not, and will help determine if your website should be given a higher ranking for the searcher’s future related searches.

Danny Sullivan has posted a nice explanation of the new customization feature at Search Engine Land. You can also learn more about search personalization by watching this video from the Google team: http://www.youtube.com/v/EKuG2M6R4VM.

Google and the FDA

2009-11-15T12:56:00.003-05:00

As you may be aware, the FDA issued warning letters to a number of pharmaceutical companies earlier this year regarding their use of search engine advertising to market prescription drugs. The FDA’s finding was that these text ads (35 characters headline and 70 characters over two lines of body copy) did not adhere to the standards of warnings and risks fair balance that they require in other advertising media (TV, print, etc.).

This past week, the FDA conducted hearings on how they might best regulate internet marketing (including advertising and social media) and took testimony from of number of vested interests including Google.

Google posted its presentation and here are a few observations I thought might be of interest:

Google makes a good case regarding the growing use of search and online research for health-related information – 4.6B searches; 3x growth in 3 years – and actions taken as a result. The point is that people are going to the internet and the FDA needs to take this bigger picture look at how consumers receive and process medical information and modify its policies regarding advertising and other forms of internet marketing to provide the best possible access to health information.
Google uses sharp declines in click-through rates as an indication that text ads since the FDA warning are “less transparent and relevant.” This is undoubtedly true. I have to point out though that these declines in CTR’s also mean significant drops in pay-per-click revenues so don’t think Google is solely altruisticly motivated.
Google’s recommendation is to have fixed warning/risk information included in the text ad with 62 characters available for modification. The examples they provide are for searches on the product brand name. But what if the search is “generic” instead like on “seasonal allergies?” Also, this would seem to provide pharmaceutical companies with a significantly greater advertising footprint (and likely competitive advantage) over other advertisers, for example, lifestyle websites promoting similar topics.

Clearly, the hearings were just the start of the discussion and there will likely be changes/modifications before anything is finalized some time in the future.

And this leads me to a final and bigger question: how can government agencies like the FDA keep up with the fast-evolving sphere of the internet and provide time-appropriate oversight?

LinkedIn Tests New Design

2009-11-09T12:33:00.004-05:00

LinkedIn, the leading social network for business professionals, recently announced that it is testing a new design that will make its interface less cluttered and easier to navigate.

According to the LinkedIn blog, new features include:

1. A global navigation bar at the top of the page that provides convenient access to all LinkedIn services.
2. Simplified local navigation within each of the LinkedIn areas (Profile, Contacts, Groups, etc.).
3. More room available for page content. Less scrolling.
4. A cleaner, less-cluttered look.

Here is a screenshot of the redesigned LinkedIn homepage:

Here is a screenshot of a redesigned LinkedIn profile page:

You’ll notice that the navigation menu at the top of the screen is more prominent and the navigation bar that appeared on the left-hand side of the screen is now gone. This leaves more room on the screen for information about your contacts. By getting rid of the clutter, LinkedIn becomes much more user-friendly. This should entice more people to use LinkedIn for professional networking and may also encourage individual users to spend more time using the site on a regular basis.

Don’t worry if you haven’t noticed a difference in your own LinkedIn account yet. This design is currently available to a select group of users, but may be rolled out to a wider audience in the coming weeks. If you’d like to see a visual comparison of the old and new designs, visit Mashable.com to see side-by-side screenshots of the two interfaces.

Welcome Back, Blogger – An Untweetable Story

2009-10-14T07:50:00.004-04:00

Dear DBE Blog –

It’s been a while since last we connected. To be honest, I found someone else who made it easier and faster to tweet - I mean share - information. But now I’m back (see I didn’t forget your password) because something important has come up that requires more than can be handled in 140 characters.

Citibank and Gfk Roper recently released results from a survey of 500 small business executives under a headline that I find to be a misleading conclusion. Furthermore, buried in the story is information that I think is far more relevant and valuable for readers. Let’s start with that:

“The survey found that general search engine sites such as Google and Yahoo! trump small business-focused sites and the WSJ.com as destinations for small business owners to seek business advice or information. 61% of respondents say they rely on these search engine sites…

…42% of small business owners and managers reported that in the past year they have made greater use of their company's website to generate business leads and sales. Among companies with 20-99 employees the percentage rises with 57% saying they have made greater use of their website.”

The misleading headline is that small businesses are “not joining the social media conversation” citing that 76% have not found social media outlets to be useful for generating business leads/growth.

Excuse me, but isn’t it more significant that 24% of small businesses are finding social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to be helping their business?! Doesn’t that positive interpretation of the data seem more in line with the other data showing small businesses are relying more and more on the internet?

Of course, my conclusion is that smart companies are finding competitive advantage through integrated use of findability tactics including search engine optimization, paid search and, yes, social media marketing.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions. Click http://ow.ly/udtN for the press release.

P.S. to Blogger: Thanks for posting all 2,019 characters at one time and hope you understand that I couldn’t resist using the url shortener. As a reward, I’m going to treat you to more readers by tweeting about you…

Slimming Down with Facebook Lite

2009-09-11T14:05:00.000-04:00

The public preview of Facebook Lite launched yesterday. If you have a Facebook account, you can log in and try it out at http://lite.facebook.com/.

For those of you who may not have heard of Facebook Lite yet, it is not meant as a full replacement for the standard Facebook interface. Available internationally, it is a back-to-basics version of the social network which is intended to aid mobile users and those with slow Internet connections.

Here are the major differences between the two versions of Facebook, as explained by PCWorld:

The profile page on Facebook Lite removes many of the bells and whistles from the traditional version and keeps only the basics: your wall, info, friends, and photos and videos. The status and sharing interface is unchanged; however, you can't view wall-to-wall posts or invite friends to an event.

The most notable omissions from the new Facebook Lite interface are the third-party applications. Only a handful of Facebook's own applications are available, so that you can get a reasonable experience from the site. Other changes include birthdays and contacts moved at the top of the feed and real-time updates at the bottom of the page.

Also of note, Facebook has introduced a new "@"-based tagging system for status updates. If you use Twitter, this may sound very familiar. Facebook will be rolling out this change over the next few weeks, so you may not be able to access it yet. To learn more, check out this post in the Facebook blog: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=109765592130.

These moves are widely viewed as part of Facebook’s effort to beat Twitter at its own game. The announcements come on the heels of Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed, the introduction of real-time updates, the addition of privacy settings which allow you to open your profile to the public, and several other Twitter-esque changes. Whether this will be enough to slow Twitter’s growth remains to be seen, but it’s clear that Facebook isn’t content to rest on its laurels while the “next big thing” steals its thunder.

Microsoft and Yahoo! Announce Deal

2009-07-29T12:57:00.002-04:00

Earlier this morning, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that they’ve struck a deal, essentially merging their search properties. They tout that the agreement will provide the scale necessary to fuel innovation and development to compete with “one company that dominates more than 70 percent of all search” (read: Google).

Here are the specific details of the deal. For more information, read the entire “Microsoft, Yahoo! Change Search Landscape” press release.

The term of the agreement is 10 years;
Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!'s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms;
Microsoft's Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.
Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft's AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter's automated auction process.
Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.
Yahoo! will innovate and "own" the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology.
Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo!'s network of both owned and operated (O&O) and affiliate sites.
Microsoft will pay traffic acquisition costs (TAC) to Yahoo! at an initial rate of 88% of search revenue generated on Yahoo!'s O&O sites during the first 5 years of the agreement.
Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.
Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo!'s O&O revenue per search (RPS) in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country.

It’s certainly too early to know exactly how this will shake out, and we’re still more than 2 years out from full implementation (they’re hoping for regulatory review and approval in early 2010, with completion of the integration 24 months after that). However, here are some of the initial thoughts from DBE team members:

Deepa Maran: The integration will begin in the United States with organic search and then with paid search ads. The integration will then expand to other countries and regions.

The search brand at Yahoo! will remain "Yahoo! Search" but it will have a label at the bottom of the page that says "Powered by Bing." (Yahoo will use Bing's search algorithm). Nothing is changing now, not until they get regulatory approval, so we have time.

Re: SEA (search engine advertising, aka PPC), we won't have to worry about managing both adCenter campaigns and Yahoo campaigns, just adCenter.

Marc Engelsman: For searchers, the algorithm merger is most likely a good thing as it will provide a strong competitive alternative to Google. There will be continued investments in improvements to make search results more and more relevant and meaningful to users by both Google and Yahoo!/Bing. I also think that this may increase the likelihood of users conducting the same search on both Google and Yahoo!/Bing, particularly if Google’s initial results are not satisfactory.

From an SEO perspective, we have always liked MSN’s algorithm as it puts more weight on onsite tags/content (vs. Google’s inbound links emphasis) and ergo is faster to index our clients’ optimized pages. And, for paid search, using the same ad interface should provide economies in terms of ad set-up and bid management. It will be interesting to see if this also may lead to slowing/reversing the seemingly endless rise in cost-per-clicks.

Rob Trautner: In response to Marc’s CPC comment above, I think it will have the opposite effect on CPC. The consolidation means you’ve reduced the inventory of ad space, making the remaining territory more valuable. Also, if this works and Binghoo increases their market share, there will be more competition for that limited space.

From the PPC management perspective, I have issues with both Yahoo’s Panama and Microsoft’s AdCenter. They both have built-in bottlenecks that create headaches. The advantage of AdCenter winning out is that they already have a Desktop editor, and that makes most aspects of set-up substantially easier. The online management interface though, is slow, clunky and unintuitive. That doesn’t even begin to address how fluky AdCenter is when it comes to actually displaying ads, especially since the switch to Bing. This is one area that they will really need to fix to ensure that this is successful. If Yahoo ad impressions drop to Bing levels, then running SEA on their network will be practically useless.

At first, I thought I would be working on “next steps” today, but the next step is “Wait. Then wait some more.” Implementation time is going to be an obstacle. First they have to get through regulatory hearings, which predictions indicate will be in 2010, then it will take up to 24 months to execute. That’s almost 3 years! Just think about what was happening on the internet 3 years ago then imagine how different the playing field will be 3 years from today. Google Wave will be running full speed (in its 2nd full year of beta.) We’ll have 6th generation iPhones, 4th generation “iPhone killers,” and mobile internet will be standard on pretty much every phone. That doesn’t even factor in the devices we haven’t seen yet.

Microsoft and Yahoo have their work cut out for them. Separately, they’ve both been trounced by Google. Combined, they’re still trounced by Google. If the best they can do is pool their resources to try to catch up, this will fail. They need to leapfrog Google technologically to truly compete, and at the pace that Google is developing and innovating, that’s going to be very difficult.

Ann Pyle: Even with their joined forces, Microsoft and Yahoo!’s market share is still less than half of Google’s 65%. It will be interesting to see if they can overcome that gap through their combined resources, expertise and technologies, but time is the enemy (see Rob’s comment above). The pressure is on, because if they don’t get it right, they run the risk of sending their audience to the only other option out there – Google.

From a management perspective, this deal will make monitoring and reporting easier, with only 2 major search engines to keep track of. Though this does mean re-benchmarking in terms of visibility numbers.

Rob says “Binghoo”, I say “Bingya”. Which will become the overused, annoying amalgam media latches onto first?

How Do I Measure the Success of My Social Media Strategy?

2009-07-27T18:07:00.001-04:00

Most marketers recognize that social media marketing is a powerful way to reach new customers and enhance their brand’s online presence; however, many are beginning to realize that it’s not just enough to launch a campaign. They also need to measure social media’s impact on the bottom-line, especially during a recession when budgets are tight.

Many struggle to quantify the results. What tools should you use? What metrics do you track? While keeping tabs on your total number of fans or followers is a good place to start, companies can also measure their social media activities against other metrics, such as sales volume, website traffic, and customer engagement.

Without a clear goal, it is impossible to determine the ROI of your social media efforts. To determine which metrics are the most valuable, marketers must first answer the question, “How do we define success?” Is your company’s goal to increase customer satisfaction? To generate buzz and promote brand awareness? To increase sales or drive website traffic? Your answer will shape both your campaign strategy and how you measure its progress.

Once you’ve set a goal, tracking your results becomes a simpler task. Many of the basic web analytics tools available today are free or low cost. They not only track and monitor traffic, but can also measure social media’s impact – how people are hearing about your business, which efforts are bringing in the most traffic (blogs, forums), and whether you are attracting the right people.

For example, Omniture has a new application that measures the popularity and success of Facebook applications. And, Google Analytics has begun providing flexible segmentation definitions, which provide in-depth insight into behaviors (customer engagements, conversions, etc.). Google Analytics also helps track the interactions with social media widgets and video components.

The most successful organizations are adopting tools and methodologies that help them listen to and learn from customers and prospects. Digital Brand Expressions recommends that all organizations using social media to harness brand awareness set up at least some basic monitoring to analyze what’s working and what’s not.

Here are additional tips for measuring the success of your social media strategy:

Research plug-ins and tools, such as Bit.ly, Facebook Insights, Twitalyzer, PostRank and SocialToo, which can supply data about your social media outposts.

Set up specific campaigns and event tracking for social media – choose analytics software that can track specific events.

Aggregate your analytics – record all your information in one area or build a spreadsheet for analyzing your numbers. Use your social media analytics to engage your audience.

Use event tracking to follow the user engagement with the social media elements (videos, any social media application, etc.) that are in a site. Tracking fans, followers, etc. over time shows how interest is growing and helps you refresh your content and share it through other channels as interest grows.

Learn more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site so you can write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting websites.

Regularly measure the ROI of your social media marketing efforts. Size isn’t always the most important factor when it comes to measuring return on investment. With social media marketing, the two core metrics are influence and engagement.
Determine which of your social media efforts bring more traffic and make a visitor more likely to use your product/service.

How are you currently measuring the success of your social media strategy? To participate in DBE’s social media analytics survey, please visit http://www.digitalbrandexpressions.com/SelectSurvey/TakeSurvey.asp?SurveyID=5K1763LI3p4KG.

The Value of Twitter

2009-06-09T12:36:00.003-04:00

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

2009-05-27T14:39:00.002-04:00

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

2009-04-22T12:11:00.001-04:00

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?

2009-04-16T18:30:00.005-04:00

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?

2009-04-08T14:44:00.002-04:00

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.

DBE 90% - SEMPO Average 54% (or less)

2009-04-01T11:36:00.003-04:00

I don’t know about you, but I found this slide from SEMPO’s 2008 State of Search Survey troubling on several levels when looked at it wearing my industry glasses.

First, what does it say about the average paid search agency if only 19% of its clients can say they are very happy with their SEA programs? And only 54% can say they are happy to some degree? With these confidence levels is it any wonder more and more advertisers are taking their campaigns in-house? Or that the ones who are still outsourcing are treating agencies more and more like vendors instead of partners?

Second, does it really make readers of this report feel better to see that these mediocre-at-best findings represent “a significant leap from” previous years? Is it going too far to compare this to the idea of a car company reporting that its crash test results improved from 2 stars to 3 stars on a 5-star rating basis?

Third, while the above covers paid search agencies (and is included in the executive summary made public), the full report includes results for SEO agencies and they did not fare better. In fact, they were actually rated a little lower in terms of the happiness quotient.

In a business where referrals and references are critical for new business development, you would think search agencies would do a better job of client service. And don’t think it’s just the nature of the business (like used car salesmen) because DBE’s Client Satisfaction Survey results revealed a 90% client satisfaction level. So client satisfaction can be achieved and until the rest of the paid search and SEO agencies catch up, we’ll keep using these results to differentiate DBE from the other average Joe search firms out there.

Google Improves Search Result Descriptions

2009-03-27T15:55:00.006-04:00

Google recently announced two changes in the way it shows search results – longer snippets and enhanced search refinements.

The official Google blog talks about the changes in detail, but let’s talk about the snippets here. A snippet is the few lines of text that appear under the dark blue title in the search results.

So how does Google choose the snippet for your page? The search engine chooses snippets from three sources:

- If the meta tag description of the page is relevant to the search query, Google uses the meta tag description for the snippet.
- Otherwise, Google combines the most relevant part(s) of the page and uses that text as the snippet.
- If for some reason, Google is not able to crawl your page, Google will try to use the description of your site found in the DMOZ directory.

Why does Google go through this much trouble? Well, choosing the right text to use to describe a page can be essential to how well the search engine delivers results.

Up until last week, the image below shows how Google used to display the snippets for any description. As you can see, the blurbs were limited to 155 characters.

With the new change, when you enter a longer query (one with more than three words) Google will increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information.

These longer snippets give more information about the sites and enable the searcher to decide which site(s) has all the information he/she is looking for.

Now that Google increases the snippet size for a page, is it better to stick with the old limitation of 155 characters when writing the meta description tag for a page or should you go beyond the limit? DBE recommends staying within the 155 character limit so that the text doesn’t get cut off when searchers use shorter queries. The objective is to create a description that would entice the searcher to click through to your site. In addition to keeping the snippet short and sweet, we recommend writing the meta description tag so it includes a mention of your targeted keyword and gives an accurate, compelling overview of what the page is about. A snippet from a well-written description tag can help you gain a higher click-through-rate and drive more conversions.

Be Aware – Brand Awareness Tops Online Sales For Search Marketing Purpose

2009-03-26T17:41:00.003-04:00

SEMPO recently released the results of its 5th Annual State of Search Survey for 2008. The survey covers a wide range of search marketing topics and provides perspective as it presents data from advertisers/companies engaged in search as well as from search marketing agencies like DBE.

One of the advantages of an annual survey is that it provides the opportunity to spot subtle yet significant shifts in trends. One of this year’s trend shifts that caught my eye was on this slide showing how advertisers responded to the question “What is your company using search engine marketing to accomplish?”

For the first time, the answer “To increase/enhance brand awareness” outscored the previous number one response “To sell directly online.” Granted the score was close (63% to 61%), and it was weighted by advertisers with over 500 staff, but still this is significant. In fact, the fact that the larger advertisers showed an even greater spread between awareness and sales (70% to 56%) just illustrates the point further – search is more and more a mainstream medium.

Reinforcing this shift is the continuing trend of search marketing poaching dollars from traditional media as reported in the survey as well as the dedication of budgets directly to search as a stand-alone line item.

I’ll let you chew on this for now and post some more observations soon.

How to Write SEO-Friendly Web Copy

2009-03-20T11:33:00.001-04:00

Optimizing the copy on your website doesn’t mean stuffing it with keywords so that it’s an unreadable mess. This is a spam technique which can harm your site’s ranking. Google encourages webmasters to “make pages primarily for users, not for search engines,” so your first goal is to write for your target audience, bearing in mind the factors valued by the search engines (in much the same way that you might follow, or sometimes ignore, the rules of grammar in order to effectively communicate a message).

Here are a few tips for integrating keywords into your copy without sacrificing the overall quality of your writing:

Use as many or as few words as you need to use to say what you need to say. However, a good rule of thumb is to shoot for copy that’s approximately 250 words in length. This gives you enough room to get your message across while naturally working in 3 to 5 mentions of the keyword.
Use keyword variations. Let’s say your keyword phrase is “big blue widgets”. Instead of repeating “big blue widgets” over and over again, switch things up so some of the mentions appear as “large blue widgets”, “full-sized widgets in blue”, and so forth. This makes your copy read more naturally and helps your website show up for related keywords.
If you’re a brick-and-mortar store that’s trying to rank for local search queries, place your address in the footer of each page, but also mention your location somewhere in the page copy. You could place your address in the footer as “700 Success Road, Princeton, NJ 08542”, then mention the areas you serve in your body copy (“serving Middlesex and Mercer counties” or “serving New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania”)
Include keyword mentions in your headers. Header tags (H1, H2, etc.) are a great way to define your page’s structure and emphasize keyword phrases. (This is also helpful because people read differently on the Internet than they do on paper. Try to keep things scannable with headers, lists, and bullet points.)
Include keyword mentions in your hyperlinks. Instead of saying “Click here for more information on our widgets” with the link embedded on “click here”, try writing “Visit our big blue widgets page for more information” so the link is embedded on “big blue widgets page”. This gets the point across to the reader while letting you work in another keyword mention. It also helps with SEO because the search engines look to link anchor text as an indication that a page should rank for a particular keyword.

By keeping these optimization tips in mind as you write, you can easily create copy that appeals to your readers and is also SEO-friendly.

False Prophets

2009-03-03T14:11:00.002-05:00

One of our clients got an “SEO Tip” from an online advertising vendor the other day. Fortunately, they called us for verification before implementing it on their own. Turns out the “tip” was more of a “trick” that could actually have devalued our client’s website in the eyes of the search engines. Imagine this outcome after everything the client has invested and we have done to improve their visibility.

But how many others who got this so-called tip, who don’t have the benefit of expert advise and counsel, actually went ahead and did themselves a disservice while thinking the opposite to be true?

And this is the problem with an industry that lacks clear guidelines or standards or a one-stop resource that can help separate best practice from malpractice.

SEMPO is doing its best (and as Circle Members we at DBE are doing our part to help) but I sometimes worry that this is in effect preaching to the choir; the ones who already know the right way from the wrong way. How do we reach the myriad of vendors who, hopefully, honestly believe they are passing on some good advice and the equally myriad of webmasters who are willing to take this advice on good faith alone?

One can only hope the ROI mindset that has seen a revival in these economic times will drive more to avoid the snake oil promise of miracles and see the light of true search marketing tactics that lead to accountable success.

Facebook Pages vs. Facebook Groups

2009-02-17T14:30:00.005-05:00

What is the difference between a Facebook Page and a Facebook Group? Is one better than the other?

According to Facebook:

Pages can only be created to represent a real public figure, artist, brand or organization, and may only be created by an official representative of that entity. Groups can be created by any user and about any topic, as a space for users to share their opinions and interest in that subject.

For artists, businesses, and brands looking to establish a presence on Facebook, both Pages and Groups offer similar levels of user interactivity via features such as the Discussion Board and the Wall. However, Facebook Pages offer several distinct advantages including greater visibility, customization and measurability.

Here are some of the benefits of launching a Facebook Page versus a Group...

Facebook Pages:

Your logo appears in each member’s profile with a link to the Page
Customizable and will work with Facebook apps (add a blog, video, etc.)
Provide detailed statistics about visitor traffic and demographics
Can be promoted via Social Ads
Messages are sent to each members' Notifications page
Pages never display their admins' names (so you can maintain a personal/professional distinction)
Unlimited ability to send messages to members

Facebook Groups:

Your logo does NOT appear in members’ profiles, only a single text link to the Group
Not very customizable and do not work with Facebook apps
Facebook doesn't provide you with traffic or demographic information
Cannot be promoted via Social Ads
Messages are sent to each members' Inbox
Admins’ names are posted publicly in the Group
Admins can't send messages to all members once the Group exceeds 5,000 members

Facebook Groups tend to be related to common interests, such as "Support New Jersey State Troopers" and "1,000,000 Strong For Stephen T Colbert," whereas Facebook Pages are specially designed for business use. Barack Obama and Coca-Cola use Pages to connect with fans on Facebook. Guess who else uses Facebook Pages to promote themselves? Facebook does.

Facebook will also launch a new design for Pages in the next few weeks. Pages will look much more like user profiles. The new design will not only make the Pages look less cluttered and more dynamic, it will also work to make sharing more prominent and viral.

What if you've already created a Facebook Group and want to switch to a Facebook Page? No worries. You don't have to start from scratch. Fill out this form and Facebook will transfer over the group members and any discussion board posts, reviews, posted items, and Wall posts to your new Page. (Unfortunately, any videos and photos will need to be manually transferred.)

[ Update 02/24/09: Jon Newman of The Hodges Partnership, a public relations firm in Virginia, shares his company’s reasons for switching from a Facebook Group to a Fan Page. Click here to read his blog post. ]

Search Marketing and Casual Games Connect

2009-02-17T11:35:00.006-05:00

If you asked me a week ago what the connection was between the search marketing and casual games industries my answer would have been simply that SEO and paid search are highly effective traffic-driving tools for online game portals and that Slingo, a leading developer and publisher of casual games, is a client of ours. Of course, that was before travelling to Hamburg, Germany to present at the Casual Games Association’s (CGA) aptly named Casual Connect Conference. Now I see that the connections run far deeper:

Search marketing and casual games are young industries. Both have seen rapid growth over the past ten years and are continuing to evolve and mature at the same time.
Acquisitions, mergers and consolidation are happening as both industries struggle with revenue models, metrics and market expectations. Rumors are commonplace.
In spite of this intra-industry volatility, each is well situated to not only survive but thrive in these lean economic times as each offers marketers effective and efficient means of reaching target audiences.
Both search and casual games need to deal with emerging platforms like mobile and social media networks like Facebook. And how far off is the prospect of your TV becoming your portal to searching the Internet and game downloads instead of your computer?
There is no dearth of people looking to get a piece of the action in these “hot” industries. Unfortunately, the really good practitioners are few and far between and the rising level of mediocrity hurts each industry as a whole.
Organizations like the CGA and SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization) are important as outward-facing evangelists for their industries as well as inward-facing catalysts for improvement and sharing of best practices.
Finally, both industries are filled with fun, friendly and smart people. And that’s why it was my pleasure to make connections with some of the casual gamers at the conference and I hope to keep in touch with them.

January Travelogue

2009-02-13T14:36:00.003-05:00

Dear DBE Blog –

Been on the road a lot but thinking of you all the while. Time to recap some January highlights:

January 21, New York City: Judging for the 2009 Effie Awards for the New York American Marketing Association. I like the Effies because they put emphasis on results over creative; marketing integration over a single execution. Reviewed many name brands that integrated their campaigns with a dedicated website (good), some had social media marketing aspects (better) but none of them integrated SEO/SEA keyword tactics (bad – especially as these campaigns were not lacking for budget). The closest anyone came to search was the presentation of a Google Trends chart showing increased searches on the product name as evidence of results of other marketing efforts. Bottom line, search marketing is still not part of the mainstream integration mix. This means there is still tremendous opportunity for smart marketers to not only win on the Web, but to beat the pants off their better known brand competition.

January 26, Philadelphia: Marketing Executive Networking Groug (MENG) Chapter Event with Tierney presenting how to handle media interviews. Good line about how you control interactions with the press because you control what comes out of your mouth. Think it also applies to reputation management on the Web as you control your Facebook and other digital outpost profile content.

January 27, Basking Ridge NJ: Perfect segue to presenting to the New Jersey AMA on how to leverage your personal brand online via search marketing tactics. (Visit our Facebook Page to check out some pics and video from the event.) Most attendees are on LinkedIn, but are not using it fully. Some are on Facebook, but aren’t sure how to use it for professional advantage and/or how not to use it for professional disadvantage. We ended the presentation with the announcement of DBE’s new consulting service for executives, Jump Start Social Media.

I just realized that I completed an AMA trifecta in less than a week – NY, NJ and PA (seeing as the President-Elect of the Philadelphia Chapter attended the MENG event at my invitation and has since joined the network).

Enough for now. I need to gather my thoughts on my trip to the 2009 Casual Connect CGA show in Hamburg, Germany. The casual gaming and search industries have more in common than you might think.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

2009-02-11T13:25:00.000-05:00

"What is search engine marketing, and how is it used?"

If you and your team are new to search marketing, it can be a little unnerving. So many terms to absorb, so many strategies and options. Questions about technologies, techniques, 'black hat' versus 'white hat' optimization, bid management approaches, Flash and SEO, social media, and so much more.

Our team has heard it all before, so don’t feel overwhelmed or intimidated. In fact our president and CEO, Niki Fielding, was recently interviewed by Love To Know's Business section for an article on search engine marketing. It's a great overview of SEO, paid search, and social media marketing for anyone who's just learning the ropes.

We've helped many companies sort it all out to arrive at solutions that work for them. Just contact us and we’ll help you get up to speed. You’ll be tossing around jargon in no time!

To Tweet, or Not to Tweet

2009-02-09T17:17:00.005-05:00

What is Twitter? Why should I use it? Why would anyone want to know what I’m doing, and vice versa? Isn’t Twitter too time-consuming? I bet only teenagers use Twitter, right?

Whether I’m talking with friends or business associates, I hear these questions pretty often. To be honest, I asked them too – but then I gave Twitter a try and quickly moved through the 5 stages of Twitter acceptance. Now I adore Twitter. In fact, I posted my 400th update this week (see image at top). I use the micro-blogging service to communicate with friends and colleagues, to share articles that I’ve found interesting, to gather info for new projects, and to learn from and talk with people in the industry.

I’m not Twitter’s only admirer. Many business people swear by Twitter as an invaluable tool for professional networking. Dozens of brands, including Zappos, Comcast, JetBlue, Marriott International, HR Block, and Rubbermaid (as well as several of our own clients) have jumped at the chance to use Twitter as a platform for interacting with customers.

Still have your doubts about Twitter’s value? I recommend reading “Ending The Twitter Mystery: What People Think About Twitter—And How They Use It,” by Scott Abel, CEO of The Content Wrangler. In the article, Abel explores why and how people use Twitter by talking with members of The Content Wrangler Community (myself included).

Of course, the best way to develop an appreciation for Twitter is to try it out. Sign up for your own account and try following a few friends and brands that you love. You’re also welcome to follow me @PamAbbazia – I’d love to hear how Twitter works for you.

#BrandMonitoringFAIL

2009-02-02T17:10:00.002-05:00

Society Needs to Catch Up to Social Media, Part 3 (The SuperBowl Edition)

While watching SuperBowl XLIII last night, I decided I would live tweet my opinions on the commercials as they came up. Nothing out of the ordinary – I liked some and disliked others.

Looking back now though, something happened right before halftime that has me thinking. (Yes, I do occasionally think.) I tweeted that I had my 3D glasses ready for the Monsters vs. Aliens trailer and the Sobe Lifewater commercial. Within minutes I had an @reply from “Lee the Lizard” (@sobeworld). At first I thought, “Hey, that’s kind of cool. They’re monitoring for mentions of their name and they’re playing along in character.” This is exactly what companies should be doing. I sent them an atta-boy tweet later.

Now that I’m thinking about it a little more though, I’m disappointed. I sent 15 tweets mentioning 11 specific brands or products. I had also sent a tweet last weekend expressing my feelings about a product made by another of last night’s advertisers. So out of 12 mentions, I got 1 response. One response?! Clearly companies still aren’t getting it. They have to be active and involved. Last night, eleven companies got it wrong. Congratulations to Sobe for getting it right.

This is an ongoing series of blog posts about the effects of social media in corporate culture and society in general. Part 3 was supposed to explore the business applications of social media and discuss why IT departments need to be less restrictive with those tools. I promise you that will be Part 4.

Why don’t we just call it “Customer Engagement and Conversion?”

2009-01-07T17:35:00.004-05:00

I’ve spent some more time looking at the Marketing Executive Networking Group (MENG) 2009 Annual Survey released Monday – particularly at the marketing concepts that were grouped under the umbrella “Marketing Basics.” Here they are in order as ranked by respondents:

Customer satisfaction
Customer retention
Marketing ROI
Brand loyalty
Segmentation
Quality

Marketing ROI is the one mentioned in my previous blog that has a direct correlation with the measurable value of search marketing as a medium (and the one in the group that jumped the most over 2008 results).

Now, looking at the grouping as a whole, I think I also need to expand and expound on the impact of search across all these basics.

Regarding customer satisfaction and retention, I was reminded of a presentation by Peter Blackshaw, Executive Vice-President of Nielsen Online Digital Strategic Services and author of the book Satisfied Customers Tell 3 Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000. The title pretty much says it all about the growing power of consumer-generated media and the importance of proactively managing your brand’s reputation across social media and other digital outposts. And, in case you weren’t aware, DBE added social media marketing and management to our search umbrella several years ago.

You could say that social media also covers brand loyalty and quality to an extent but I’ll go further because of the proven impact on brand awareness and positive perceptions created from high rankings on search engine results pages. As reported in our December newsletter, several studies have shown the combined power of top natural positions gained from search engine optimization and paid search advertising listings.

Now as for segmentation, all forms of search marketing naturally segment/personalize results based on keyword phrases chosen by the searcher. In this sense, the searcher is already prequalified and predisposed to your brand based on its relevance to his/her search. What other medium offers segmentation that gets you so close to customer action?

So rather than looking at these concepts as Marketing Basics, look at them as “Customer Engagement and Conversion” concepts or, better yet, as “Search Marketing” concepts.

Who Gets the Credit?

2009-01-06T15:30:00.000-05:00

The path from click to conversion can be a winding one. Not every click-through from the search results leads directly to a conversion. Visitors come back to your site several times before making a purchase or may complete the transaction via a phone call or in-store visit. Where does the process begin? Who gets the credit? Let’s look at a few scenarios:

Scenario 1: Your potential customer found your site through your organic search results on Google or another search engine. After checking your site out, he or she bookmarked it, came back at a later date through the bookmark, and made a transaction in your site. Will the organic search result be credited for the conversion, or will this appear as direct traffic?

Scenario 2: While searching for the product or service that you provide, your potential customer found your site through your paid search campaign. This person checked out your site, went to compare against a competitor, then decided to revisit your site a day later. This time he forgot your site address, so searched for your company’s name, clicked on your organic search listing, and bought your product. Would your paid search campaign or the organic search result be given credit for this conversion?

Scenario 3: Same as scenario 2, but this time he found you through the organic search results first, and later come to your site through the paid search results and completes the transaction. Which one – organic or paid search results, will get the credit?

By default, the referrer information gets updated to reflect the latest referral information when a visitor returns to your site, and your analytics program gives credit for a conversion to the last referrer a visitor used. This is the case except when the last referrer is direct- that is, the visitor uses their bookmarks or types your URL directly into their browser’s address bar.

So for scenario 1, your organic search results are credited for the conversion. For scenario 2, your organic search result is given the credit, since this is the last referrer. For scenario 3, your paid search result is given the credit.

What can you do if you want to give credit to the original referrer? For example, in scenario 2, it is actually the paid search result that introduced your site to your prospect and made him to convert, but the organic listing is the one getting the credit. Shouldn’t your paid search be given credit for the conversion? How will you be able to measure the effectiveness of your various campaigns if you do SEO (optimize your site to appear in your organic result), SEA (paid search campaigns), and/or Social media campaigns?

Well, if you use Google Analytics to track your site’s results, you can achieve this with some advanced coding and setup. You just need to modify the Google Analytics tracking code in your site, and then apply an advanced filter in your Google Analytics setup.

Your Google Analytics consultant or your webmaster should be able to help with this advanced coding setup.

With the code, you need to simply check if the visitor is a first time visitor by looking for the presence of _utma cookie in the visitor’s computer. (This is always set for a visitor and its presence indicates a returning visitor.) If the visitor is a new visitor, then grab the referral information, and store the referral information as a visitor label by calling __setVar(). With this code, you are saving the first referrer information before it gets updated at the subsequent visits. Then, use the advanced filter in your Google Analytics setup to overwrite the referral info to include both the referral info (current referrer) and the visitor label you saved (first referrer).

With this setup, you will be able to track the very first referrer that drove your prospect to your site, and will be able to measure the effectiveness of your various campaigns accurately. This will help you gauge the true value of your search marketing programs and ensure that you get the greatest ROI.

MENG 2009 Annual Survey Confirms Trends Shifting to Search Marketing Concepts

2009-01-05T15:43:00.004-05:00

The Marketing Executive Networking Group (MENG) just released its Second Annual Survey on Top Marketing Trends. The survey respondents were 89% senior level executives (vp and up) evenly split between B2B and B2C marketing arenas. And here is what they said were the Top 5 Main Trends heading into 2009:

As it did last year, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in solidly as the Number 2 marketing trend with a statistically significant increase over 2008. The Viral/WOM grouping (consisting of Word of Mouth, Viral Marketing and Blogging) jumped into the Top 5 from Number 8 last year with its own significant increase. While these both have obvious connections with the search marketing concepts we advocate here at DBE, a closer look at the other top trends shows how search concepts continue to become integrated with marketing thinking.

For example, the Marketing Basics grouping includes Marketing ROI which had the third biggest individual concept increase from 2008 with a jump of 12 points. (The first two concepts with bigger jumps were Credit Availability and Housing Markets.) Of course, the metrics of search make it one of the most measurable media in terms of Marketing ROI.

The Personalization grouping has a number of terms that we include in our search marketing umbrella – Competitive Intelligence, Data Mining, Lead Generation, and E-commerce. Plus the Innovative Branding group includes Leading through Analytics so I could make the case that aspects of search marketing can be found in all five of the leading marketing trends for 2009.

Oh, and by the way, mentions of New Media also increased in the 2009 study moving it to Number 8 behind Green Marketing and Multicultural/Ethnic Issues. New Media includes Mobile Communications, Electronic Media, SNS (Social Networking Sites), Web 2.0, CGM (Consumer Generated Media) and Long Tail – all search-related terms, too.

Oddly enough, the MENG survey also reports that the Top 5 buzzwords marketers are “most tired of hearing” are (in order) Web 2.0, Social Networking, Social Media, Blog and Viral Marketing. Even the MENG release on the study finds this anachronistic as many of these same marketers previously said they don’t yet know enough about these new media.

My thought is that if senior executives are tired of hearing about these trends now, they better buy some ear plugs because the buzz around these and all search marketing concepts is only going to continue to rise in 2009.

Intention Deficit Disorder

2008-12-31T11:09:00.001-05:00

If you are a regular reader of the DBE Blog, you have seen our coverage on how Google is constantly trying to improve the search user experience. Deepa’s most recent post covered how Google is using your IP address and recent search history to customize the results it provides. These techniques, along with the previously covered universal search and personalized search, are Google’s attempts at using data it has captured (wittingly or unwittingly) to infer/divine your search “intentions” so as to deliver more relevant search results.

Deepa’s example of a “previous query” application by Google is a good one. If you first search “Chicago” and then follow that with “hotels”, Google might now automatically assume you are looking for “Chicago hotels” and provide search results accordingly by default. I say “might” because Google doesn’t always apply the previous query modification but when it does, if that was not your intention, you have to tell Google to ignore previous searches and redo the search to get the results you wanted in the first place.

Is it me, or do others cringe at the idea of an assuming algorithm? Or should I say presuming algorithm? Does Google really think it’s better to automatically generate an interpretation of my intention because I must be too stupid or lazy to string a two-word query myself?

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the power of the algorithm to deliver relevant results based on my intention as expressed through my keyword queries. And when Google asks did I really mean something else when I mistyped the keyword, I say, “Thank you.” But assuming I really meant something else when I correctly type the keyword(s) I want to search, I say, “No thank you.”

Holiday Greetings from DBE

2008-12-24T09:55:00.005-05:00

I’ve been following Harvard Business Publishing on Twitter (@HarvardBiz). In one of their recent posts, titled “A Christmas Wish for Business: Selflessness”, blogger Susan Cramm said something that jumped out at me:

“During these difficult times, I need a lot more ‘we’ and a lot less ‘me.’”

Looking at our team, I’m proud to say that DBE tries every day to focus on the “we”. Whether that means stepping up when a coworker needs a helping hand, posting a public ‘thank you’ or ‘congratulations’ on our message board in the lobby, or just getting together to catch up on a personal level. Much like Captain Planet and the Planeteers, Voltron, or the Super Friends, we’re happier and more successful when our powers combine.

In the broader sense, DBE focuses on the “we” both by treating our clients as partners and by giving back to the community. Our team members and DBE as a company are active supporters of a variety of national and regional charities.

This spirit carries over into our annual Secret Santa exchange. Each year, the DBE team contributes to charities that are important to our team members instead of buying gifts for each other. We start by each making a list of our 3 favorite charities and/or causes and putting our lists into a box. Each person chooses a Secret Santa recipient from the box and makes a financial contribution to one of the organizations listed.

At our holiday lunch last week, we shared with each other which organizations we donated to and taught each other a little about their charitable missions. Some of the organizations we contributed to include:

We hope you will join us this holiday season by supporting your favorite charity.

To all our blog readers, DBE wishes you the very best during the holidays and throughout the New Year. See you in 2009!

Does Google Show the Same Results for Everyone?

2008-12-23T13:28:00.004-05:00

Starting in February 2007, Google begin personalizing its search results for users who entered a search query while logged into their Google accounts. We wrote our take on Google’s personalized search and its impact on SEO in our blog.

However, that’s not the only way that Google adjusts its search results to fit the individual user. Do you know Google changes your search results even when you are not signed into the account?

Google personalizes your search results by using two additional parameters, your geographic location and your recent search history, when applicable.

Location

For some queries, Google may try to alter your results based on your geographic location. Google identifies your approximate city location based on your computer's IP address and uses it to customize your search results. When Google does this, you will see a note on the top right hand side of your search results that Google has customized your results.

In cases when Google doesn’t get it right, or if you’re looking for local information but outside the area you’re interested in, you might want to override Google’s customization. If so, then you need to click on the “More details” link and click to run the search without the customization.

On a side note, if you are logged in to your Google account, Google will use the location you’ve saved as your default in Google Maps. (By default, Google automatically saves the last 100 addresses you search for into a "Saved Locations" list)

Recent searches

Called Previous Query, it’s where Google might see that you first searched for [hotels] then did another search for [Chicago] and so will effectively combine the first search to the second to make [Chicago hotels]. You’re searching for all two words even though you only put in one — hotels — on your most current query. Another example is, a search for [jordan] showing Jordan’s furniture store rather than Michael Jordan if the immediately preceding search was for [ethan allen].

If Previous Query kicks in, a message saying "Customized based on recent search activity" will appear at the top right of the results. Clicking on "More Details" link from that message will take you to the search customizations page, where you can then discover what previous query was used. Via that page, you can also reissue the query without the previous query being involved.

Despite some privacy concerns and the fact that customized searches may not always generate the results the user wanted, Google stands by personalization as the future of search. Since personalized search is here to stay, let us focus on how this Google customization affects SEO.

SEO Impact

As we said before, if you have a website with good content, your site is not going to be negatively impacted by these changes. As a matter of fact, you’ll benefit as people who are looking for your service will be able to more easily find you. The key, as always, is to ensure that your website is optimized for relevant keywords and, if applicable, for your business’ geographic location.

The only place where personalized search impacts the SEO world is the metrics. Since these personalized searches do not yield the same search results for all users, you can’t rely on your site’s rankings alone to measure your SEO success. You will need to use additional measures, such as the search engines’ traffic delivery to your site, to measure your optimization results. Also, while the rankings you see may not be same as other users the differences in ranking will not be that great.

So, focus on having compelling and interesting content on your site – it will please both your users and the search engines, and you will have a Win-Win scenario irrespective of these personalization changes.

AdSense for Domains – Does Google Care About the User Community?

2008-12-12T15:55:00.001-05:00

Have you ever had misspelled a domain name, and went to a site to find out that the site only showed the sponsored ads with little or no other content? I have stumbled across these sites multiple times, and got annoyed by them, especially when I clicked on those pages from search engine results!

These sites do what is called “Domain Parking” – site owners simply register these domain names which are often misspellings of other popular domain names, and work with intermediate companies such as Traffic parking and sedo. These intermediate companies in turn partner with Google to run AdSense ads on those sites. When people visit the pages with the ads and click on those ads, site owners get a share of that revenue.

There has already been a lot of griping about this service in the industry because these sites offer a poor search experience to the searcher, and the quality of the traffic that comes from these sites is very poor and doesn’t give good ROI to those who advertise with Google’s content network. Mind you, to avoid this kind of low quality traffic, DBE recommends targeting your content network advertising, rather than haphazardly running content match ads.

But yesterday, Google has announced that it is extending AdSense of Domains to all publishers! Now, more and more publishers will try to take advantage of this offer. Search advertisers who opt in for “content network” will get even more of the lower quality traffic. And the searchers, who believe Google’s mission of presenting the world's information in a useful way, will find more garbage results because some of these domains will get indexed by Google and will end up in Google’s organic search results.

This and Google’s recent announcement on allowing bidding on hard liquor and beer show that Google is preparing well to capitalize on this poor economy. Google, please don’t pollute the Internet and at least prevent these Made for AdSense domains from appearing in search results!

Partnership 2.0

2008-12-12T13:14:00.002-05:00

As expected via my tweet yesterday afternoon, the Gala for The Partnership for Drug-Free America last night was stellar. The event was noteworthy for several reasons, not the least of which is that it raised nearly $2.0 million for The Partnership. Quite an achievement during these tough economic times though, as mentioned several times over the course of the evening, all the more needed as these current conditions often lead to increased instances of substance abuse.

The evening certainly delivered resonant messages but it was also the way these were presented that made them all the more powerful. With Charles Osgood as Master of Ceremonies, opening entertainment by the Pilobolus Dance Company, video segments, lively speakers and honorees, and a compelling death and life story from parent spokesperson Gary Neal, the event was in a word – engaging. And, in that sense, it perfectly captured how The Partnership has integrated today’s Web 2.0 world with its traditional media outlets to get the word out about the wealth of resources it offers to families in need.

Sitting there with our client, The Partnership’s head of Digital Product Development, and the President of their interactive agency Something Digital, it was personally rewarding to hear and see the acknowledgement of the numerous engagement assets they have deployed with our two agency’s help – blogs, videos, stand-alone digital outposts, community outreach, parent tool kits, etc. We look forward to working with The Partnership in 2009 and continuing to help more people find the answers they are searching for related to prevention and intervention with drug and alcohol abuse.

Ringing The Bell In Three Different Ways

2008-12-01T15:09:00.003-05:00

I had the pleasure and the honor to be one of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) representatives at this morning’s NASDAQ Opening Bell ceremony. Dana Todd, SEMPO’s Chair, spoke about how the organization has grown in its five years and how significant it was to be ringing the bell on this day – Cyber Monday. Then we got to join Dana for the countdown to the opening and, as I cheered for SEMPO, I felt pride not just for the organization but also for DBE as one of its Circle Members (and one of its oldest members, too, as DBE was founded several years before SEMPO existed).

It also struck me that DBE “rings the bell” every day for our clients as we deliver quantifiable results in all forms of search marketing – optimization, paid search, reputation management and social media management. This, plus the 100% Client Satisfaction rating we received is testament to the team at DBE not just ringing the bell, but answering it as well.

Finally, on a more personal note, the streets of New York chimed this morning with the sound of Salvation Army volunteers ringing their bells. It was a pleasant reminder of the holiday season that I also heard as a call to action. And so I pass on to you the idea that we can all be bell-ringers in our own way this year and every year.

DBE Review of Google SearchWiki

2008-11-25T11:50:00.002-05:00

There’s a lot of buzz and a good bit of confusion surrounding SearchWiki, a new personalization tool from Google which allows people to re-rank, add/delete and comment on search results.

To help set the record straight, here is DBE’s take on Google SearchWiki and its impact on SEO:

How does Google SearchWiki work?

If you’re logged into your Google account, SearchWiki enables you to modify the Google search results to meet your needs. You can change the order of the search listings, add or delete listings, and add commentary. The changes are stored in your Google account for future reference.

It’s a useful, time-saving tool if you search for certain topics repeatedly. Let’s say you’re looking for information on a health condition, checking stock quotes, or conducting research for a school project. With Google SearchWiki, you can eliminate sites that don’t interest you and move your preferred sites to the top of the results page. It’s sort of an alternative way to bookmark sites that you’ve found helpful.

You can also add comments, either as a review of a Web page or as a helpful hint. You can see how other people have edited the search results by clicking on the "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link.

If you perform subsequent searches while logged into your Google account, you will be shown your personalized search results. In order to see the search listings that the rest of the world is seeing – including the results of your SEO program – you need to log out of your Google account. (You can see if you’re logged in or out by looking in the upper right-hand side of the Google screen.)

Does that mean I can make my website rank higher by using SearchWiki?

Not really. As stated on the Google blog, “The changes you make only affect your own searches.” And you only see those changes if you’re logged into your account. It’s similar to how Personalized Search uses a Google account holder’s Web history to deliver more relevant results to that person. You can move your website into the #1 spot for a query, but no one else will see it in that spot. The only thing that gets shared with other logged-in users is your comments on individual search listings.

Google says changes made in the SearchWiki interface will have no impact on the traditional ranking of Web pages. However, it’s still a possibility that Google will use the SearchWiki data as a factor for determining organic search rankings. Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of search products and user experience, tells The Wall Street Journal, that "some of these signals might be used to influence algorithms in the future." It’s not far-fetched to predict that some website owners will try using SearchWiki’s tools in an attempt to spam the search results, and Google will respond by coming up with a way to penalize those who used this spam technique.

Are there any privacy issues I should know about?

For starters, you can’t opt out of SearchWiki so there’s no way to remove the visual clutter unless you log out of your Google account. And when you make a comment about a URL, the comment, your username and, in some cases, your search query will be shown to other logged-in users (there’s no option for private annotation). There’s been a good amount of grumbling about these and other issues -- even prompting some users to create a script that would disable SearchWiki -- so you can expect Google will address these concerns soon.

Update 11/25/08, 12:15pm: In a Q&A with several Google team members, Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand.com got their answers to the following concerns about SearchWiki:

What is Google doing to prevent comment spam?

We’re no longer displaying any comments by default, which we think will help.

What is Google doing to prevent users from impersonating other users (i.e., what keeps me from signing in as “Bill Gates” and saying I love a particular website)?

This is a lot like what you see on the web already: anyone can choose to sign a comment “Danny.” It’s up to the reader to decide how to interpret this source.

At this time, there is nothing keeping a user from pretending to be someone else in Google SearchWiki. As Danny Sullivan suggests, it would be nice if Google instituted a verification process similar to the one used for Google Knol or, if the usernames of those leaving comments were hyperlinked to their Google user profiles.

So you're telling me that anyone can comment on anything, and there’s no filtering? What can I do to protect my brand?

In terms of advice, the need for websites to be vigilant about what people say about them – and on them – long precedes SearchWiki, and is as old as the web itself.

We’ve always been supportive of tools that allow people to better express themselves online, and SearchWiki is no exception.

At the same time, in cases where people express themselves improperly or illegally against websites, we’ve made simple tools readily available for websites so they can take action appropriately.

Google doesn't specify in the interview what the "simple tools" are, but we can assume it includes this online form which allows users to report a policy violation.

What this means for companies is that it's more important than ever to have a reputation management program in place. You should actively monitor what's being said about your brand and have a plan for how you'll respond to the buzz, be it positive or negative. Ignoring the conversation, or hoping it will go away, is not going to be an option.

Should I change my SEO strategy to account for Google SearchWiki?

Not at this point in time. If you follow a white hat SEO strategy, adhere to the best practices laid out by the search engines and maintain a useful website, you’ll continue to earn high rankings for the keywords used by your target audience.

Society Needs to Catch Up to Social Media, Part 2

2008-11-20T17:05:00.001-05:00

This blog post won’t include links to the news stories because they’re a little NSFW (not safe for work) but if you search for “Caitlin Davis” or “Bono Facebook scandal” you should find them.

Personal Responsibility

Part 2 was supposed to be a serious blog post about the business uses of social media. But, like all true Web 2.0 content, the consumer is in control. Besides, I was having too much fun with these real life stories of “Social Media Gone Wild” not to run with this.

First, reader Dave T. brought it to my attention that I completely glossed over the idea of personal responsibility in Part 1, and he’s right. While the gist of that post was that we need to be forgiving of the silly things people have posted on MySpace and Facebook, I DO believe that the people posting those things need to be a little bit smarter. Dave suggested The Grandma Rule: “Don’t post it if your grandmother wouldn’t approve of it.”

Then I came across a story about Caitlin Davis, a New England Patriots cheerleader. She was fired after pictures from Facebook surfaced showing her holding a Sharpie and drawing on a passed out friend. There were some extremely inappropriate words and images drawn on him. In fairness, they may have been drawn by someone other than Davis, but the Patriots couldn’t keep her on as a representative or public face of the team/ organization.

What’s more surprising is that someone as media savvy as Bono can also get tangled up by embarrassing Facebook pictures. As a humanitarian and rock star, Bono has capitalized on technology and new media for decades. He should also be used to constantly living in the public eye. He should know better than to get caught on camera in a compromising situation.

When your life is on display to the whole world, you have to be careful how you present yourself. Ads for alcohol usually say “Drink responsibly.” Maybe Facebook and MySpace should warn users to “Post responsibly” on their upload pages. Either that or implement Vista-like security:
“Are you sure you want to post this?” “Yes.”
“Really?” “Yes.”
“Don’t say we didn’t warn you.” “I won’t.”
“OK. Upload complete.”

Then again, maybe we should just change the “Grandma Rule” to “Don’t DO anything your grandmother wouldn’t approve of.”

This is an ongoing series of blog posts about the effects of social media in corporate culture and society in general. Part 2 was supposed to explore the business applications of social media and discuss why IT departments need to be less restrictive with those tools. That will now be Part 3.

More Proof The Social Media Space Race Is On

2008-11-11T09:43:00.005-05:00

The Marketing Executive Networking Group (MENG) just released the findings of its Social Media Survey with the lead message being “you’re not as far behind as you think.” And while this is evidenced by the two-thirds of respondents who classified their social media expertise at some form of beginner’s level, I don’t think you should take solace in the fact you are not alone. Rather, a closer look at some of the data reveals a real sense of urgency that marketers have about catching up in this emerging media before they find themselves left even further behind their competitors, let alone their customers.

Take a look at this: over two-thirds of these same marketers are increasing their social media budgets next year.

And this: over 95% of the respondents stated that it was critical or important to become proficient in the use of social media in marketing with more than half stating it was “Absolutely critical.”

So, now that the social media marketing race has clearly started, what you are doing to get ahead?

A Slightly Smaller Google-opoly

2008-11-05T14:55:00.000-05:00

This morning the Official Google Blog announced that Google is terminating their partnership with Yahoo. The original agreement called for Google to supply ads to Yahoo and Yahoo partner sites if Yahoo did not have ads to display for certain search queries. From the time the agreement was announced, there were concerns that this would result in a search advertising monopoly for Google. According to Hitwise, Google accounts for more than 68% of the search market, and Yahoo makes up almost 20%. These monopoly concerns, and possible government antitrust intervention, finally resulted in the dissolution of the Google/Yahoo partnership.

Today’s announcement is just the latest chapter in Yahoo’s recent troubled history. Within the past two weeks, Yahoo has announced that it will lay off 10% of its employees, and that it will discontinue its Y!Live service next month. Yahoo’s stock value has dropped significantly since Microsoft’s failed buy-out earlier this year. Today’s news will almost certainly re-open those conversations and result in many more months of stories about a potential Microsoft buyout.

Search Engine Recap for October 2008

2008-11-05T10:52:00.003-05:00

Here is a summary of search marketing industry news for October 2008:

Yahoo Search Marketing

Yahoo search marketing has announced some new features.

They are:

Country-level targeting

City and zip-level targeting (Up until recently, the geo-targeting functionality was around Designated Marketing Area (DMA). FYI, Adwords doesn’t provide zip-level targeting; they say 20 mile radius around zip)

Targeting English-speaking US and Canada Internet users

They will be especially useful for those who want to target geo-specific audience.

AdWords

Adwords has announced two changes:

We all knew that CTR plays a big role to calculate the quality score of an ad by Adwords. Since the ad position in SERP affects CTR, ad in the first position would receive good CTR, and thereby its quality score goes up, while the ad in the seventh position may not get enough CTR and thereby its quality score remains low. Google is now going to change the quality score algorithm to take ad position into account. So while one ad in the top position might have a higher CTR, an ad in the seventh position with a lower CTR should not impact the quality score as much as it did in the past. This would allow all the ads to "compete fairly".

Second change is with the ads above the organic results. With the change, only ads above a certain quality threshold can be in the top spot, above the organic results. In the past, if an ad in position 1 did not meet a threshold but ad in position 2 did meet that threshold, then ad 2 would not be promoted to the top spot. With the new algorithm, it is possible for ad 2 to jump over ad 1 and appear above the search results.

We like both changes.

First Click Free

For those sites that have been having lot of useful content behind registration. Google’s “First click Free” suggests opening up the content behind the registration for Google to index and rank, and when the user clicks on Google’s search result and come to the site, serve the page, and require the user to register in order to be able to see other pages that are behind registration.

NYTimes works this way.

Google has been offering this to News content providers. Recently, Google made it clear it is allowed to be used for regular sites as well http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/first-click-free-for-web-search.html We encourage other sites to take advantage of this.

Google Webmaster tool

When we mention that we found “some pages that are reported as not found” by Google Webmaster tool, we often get asked by the clients where those pages are linked from, and we couldn’t give them the answer.

Now, Google webmaster tool gives those links. We love this!

This feature can be found in “Not Found" and "Errors for URLs in Sitemaps" reports

MSN Business Listings

MSN/Live has enabled us to add/update business listings.

There are multiple ways to edit the business listing

Go to maps.live.com. Search for a business. If you scroll down the search results, there would be a link “To add or edit your business listing, use the Local Listing Center.”
Go to maps.live.com. Search for a business. Click on one of the business and go to the details page. There would be a link “Business owners: edit listing”
Go to maps.live.com/localsearch/default.aspx. Search for a category. There would be a link at the bottom “To add or edit your business listing, use the Local Listing Center.”
Go to maps.live.com. Search for a person name. Click on “Remove my listing” on one of the results
Go to webmaster.live.com. Click on “Business listings”

Do we recommend it for others? Yes – especially for those having local presence.

Society Needs to Catch Up to Social Media, Part 1

2008-10-31T14:07:00.001-04:00

Every so often an article or story comes up about how social media sites have affected real lives. We’ve all seen them. There’s the “MySpace Mayor” ousted by her Oregon town for posting racy photos on her MySpace page. HR departments look at Facebook profiles before making job offers.

Sure, dressing in lingerie and taking pictures straddling a fire truck probably isn’t the brightest move for those with political aspirations. Then again, the pictures were taken before she became mayor, and were only available to her friends. I’m also pretty sure the firefighters didn’t mind.

Not offering a job because a college kid has a picture with a beer on their Facebook page? Or because a photo was labeled “drunk pirate” even though there is no alcohol in the photo? I don’t know about that. I think it’s a bit of an overreaction. Again, it’s not the best idea to publish those pictures, but what percentage of college kids don’t have a drink at least once in four years of college?

I’m not going to say these people are totally blameless. However, there is a societal shift going on. More and more people are broadcasting their lives for the world to see, whether it be MySpace, Facebook, blogs, Twitter. Once that content is out, it can never be completely reclaimed.

Maybe I’m ahead of the curve here because I deal with the applications of social media every day, but I think society has to adjust its perception of these transgressions. Who hasn’t done something silly or stupid in their life? I don’t believe posing for a picture at a Halloween party affects anyone’s ability to do a job one way or another. It really shouldn’t be a factor.

The waters get even murkier as we move into microblogging tools like Twitter. In my opinion, the best users have a strong mix of both professional and personal Tweets. I think this is the wave of the future, and we’re going to continue to see a blurring of the lines between personal and professional applications of social media. It’s time for society at large to acknowledge that.

This is the first of an ongoing series of blogs about the effects of social media in corporate culture. Part 2 will explore the business applications of social media and discuss why IT departments need to be less restrictive with those tools.

SMX East Retrospective By The Letters

2008-10-23T15:05:00.002-04:00

Finally managed to review my notes and gather my thoughts about being a part of the inaugural SMX East conference held in NYC two weeks ago. Using the letters S-M-X as triggers/associations:

S is for – Search, of course. Speaking on Reporting and Scorecarding for Management (see segments of my speech and Niki’s spotlights on proactive Search Reputation Management, too). Supporting SEMPO by stinting at the booth and talking with Katie Donovan about the future direction of the SEMPO Institute. And seeing the emergence of Social Search as a significant subject above and below the surface through the three days of sessions.
M is for – Marketing, naturally. Meeting many peers and sharing matters on our minds. Hearing mentions of media (not just Social Media) but also in context and comparison with mainstream metrics like reach and frequency that CMO’s understand. Also, much was made of the missed opportunities from not integrating search with the offline marketing mix along with mounting evidence of the impact of search on brand measures like awareness and thought leadership.
X is for – Expo(sition), an appropriate name for the wide range of exploring and examining of our industry’s challenges and opportunities with fellow experts. All in all, an excellent event.

You Are Not Alone—Not by a Long-Shot

2008-10-16T18:05:00.000-04:00

Everywhere I go, and I’ve been out and about quite a bit lately, people are talking about social media and what it means to marketers.

One thing is clear: most marketers are still trying to get their heads around social media. While business people have varying degrees of familiarity with social media from the personal side of their lives, few have experience with it on behalf of the brands they support. And while most marketing executives are familiar with the headline grabbing blunders, few can point to examples of companies that are using social media in new, engaging, brand-building ways.

From what I can see, marketers tend to fall into a few categories on the subject of using social media to market their brands:

1. Don’t get it and aren’t going to try—this crowd is passively making themselves obsolete. You won’t have to worry about them in a few years, they’ve raised their hands and said “count me out”.

2. Trying to get it—This is the sophomore group, our friends who know there’s something to all of this, they’re just not sure how much time and energy they need to, or should, invest in getting their heads around it. It’s not that they don’t want to Digg in (I couldn’t resist J), they’re just not sure where/how to start.

3. Get it, trying it, not sure what to make of it yet—frankly, these are the people you can count on to start leveraging social media for their brands, but my biggest worry for them is they’re going to try to take on too much too fast, have embarrassments, not measure, and then call the whole thing a failure. My best advice, which I have heard again and again from others “in the know,” is to take it slow, listen 100x more than you talk, and never engage in deceptive practices. Just as you lead by example so should you participate in the communities that affect and drive your brand.

4. Whiz kids—these are the people who were out there early, made some mistakes, learned from them, and are pioneering onward and upward. They don’t preach to their brands’ communities, they participate with them. Learn from these marketers--they’re the ones who really, really get it.

And while you may think that only the small companies with nothing to lose are the ones guerilla marketing their way into the hearts and minds of their customers, you may be surprised to learn that some of the best efforts are coming from household names. Take a look at Dunkin’ Donuts on Facebook. Sign up to follow The Home Depot on Twitter. Look at Johnson & Johnson’s YouTube Channel. Dell Computers has been engaging with their fans for a while now on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other properties. Many other brands are out there as well.

And here’s another surprising entrant to this space… major pharma.

Case in point—on Tuesday, I attended the first day of the Digital Pharma Conference here in Princeton and sat in on the session conducted by Sam Trujillo, Director of Consumer Marketing in Bayer’s women’s’ health group. He said some really smart things and I like his advice to his fellow pharma marketers, (after he of course cautioned about adverse effects considerations): “You have to put it out there and accept what comes back” and “The power of online [is] you have to let things go where they’re going to go.” Sam shared information about how his company is integrating various media and leveraging celebrity relationships into the online channel. I was encouraged to see the willingness to experiment and learn from this new channel.

Colleen Riley from Pfizer and I had a great conversation, picking up off what was discussed in my and other sessions last week at Search Marketing Expo in NYC—that the conversation is going on with or without your brand’s participation. So don’t you want to at least sit in on the conversation, even if you’re not ready to start conversing? Because guess what—your competitors very likely are doing at least that much, and why should they get to know what your “fans” are thinking while you turn a blind eye and deaf ear?

So while you might not be alone wondering what to about social media, you will be alone if you don’t do anything. That’s why our clients recently received a proactive announcement from us detailing the need to get engaged and our proprietary methodology for ensuring their ventures into the social media space are careful, considered, and brand-aligned.

If you’d like to learn more about how we’re helping our clients navigate this channel to their best advantage, reach out and let’s talk.

DBE Review of Google Chrome

2008-10-09T17:35:00.002-04:00

Last month marked the launch of Google Chrome. The open-source Web browser features a minimalist design and is intended to be faster, safer and more stable than existing browsers. It even comes with its own comic book, which explains Chrome’s features in detail.

After letting the DBE team play with Chrome for a month, here are our thoughts on the browser:

Likes:

Chrome displays your frequently visited pages when you open up a new tab or window.

Typing into the “Omnibox” address bar automatically generates a drop-down menu with predictive text for search queries and suggestions for which site you may be looking for. After typing just one or two letters, you usually find the site you want.

The warnings when you enter porn mode, the private browsing feature, are funny. (The official name for the private browsing feature is “incognito mode”.) This mode is applicable to what the user's computer remembers (what sites user visited, what are the search queries user entered, etc.) that are remembered by the computer.

When you hit CTRL+F and search for a keyword on a page, Chrome automatically gives you the count for how many times the keyword appears and highlights the term throughout the page.

“View source” brings up a separate tab with line numbers and different color coding for the source code. Nifty!

Dislikes:

Some of us miss the traditional search box. Even though you can use the Omnibox address bar to send queries to your default search engine, we miss the convenience of being able to switch between multiple search engines (this feature is available in both IE and Firefox).

Other thoughts on searching with Chrome:
1. To search for keyword in Yahoo, MSN, or any other search engine, type the search engine name and the keyword in the Omnibox address bar. This will give you the option to “Search [Search Engine] for [keyword]?”
2. If you use the Google Toolbar a lot, you’ll need to be patient with Chrome. Google says it has plans to develop some type of generic API for Chrome first, and then it plans to bring another toolbar out.
3. Regarding your privacy, Google engineer Matt Cutts reassures Chrome users that, “If you’re just surfing around the web and clicking on links, that information does not go to google.com.”

Bookmarking could be better. Bookmarks do appear on the start page, but aren’t accessible from an active tab, unless you toggle the bookmark bar on (CTRL+B). A small drop-down option might be nice. (We did find an option in the settings to add a “home” button to the toolbar, which helps a bit with this.)

Those of us with a lot of bookmarks weren’t able to transfer all of them to Chrome.

There are some bugs to be worked out, which is natural since Chrome is still in beta testing. One of our team members noticed that the touchpad scroll on his laptop was not functioning properly. It would very quickly move to the bottom of the page and would not scroll up. We’ve seen similar feedback from other users, so it’s not an isolated problem.

When trying to stream music (Internet radio), one of us noticed that it gets hung up and repeats several times during songs – this never happened before installing Chrome. Can’t say it’s related for sure, but there is a Google Groups posting about video and flash hanging up in Chrome.

Our thoughts from an SEO’s perspective:

Since there is no Google toolbar for Chrome, we’re unable to see a site’s PageRank. In order to perform other toolbar functions, you have to use shortcuts.

Chrome’s Incognito browsing will only affect Webtrends analytics tracking in terms of counting unique visitors to a site. (Since Webtrends and other analytics programs can't set the permanent cookie when the visitor is using the "inprivate" mode visits the site, they won't count the visitor as repeat visitor when the visitor visits the site next time. Since inprivate mode accepts session cookies, Webtrends/any other stats software will be able to track the user's session (what path user took thru' the site, etc.) However, users using this mode will still be counted as organic search visitors. Demographic data/SEA geo-targeting won't be affected either.

You usually can’t see the entire title tag, as the tab is too small. True, all you have to do is mouse over it to see the whole text, but it’s not as easy as just looking at it in IE or Firefox.

Overall, Chrome is a bit rough around the edges, but we like what we see and encourage others to give Chrome a test drive.

Niki Fielding Presents at SMX East 2008

2008-10-07T09:58:00.001-04:00

Veronica “Niki” Fielding, president and CEO of Digital Brand Expressions, gave a presentation at the SMX East conference in New York City on October 6. As part of the Search & Reputation Management panel on Day One of the conference, Niki spoke about how companies can use proactive search engine reputation management to protect their brand.

To read a summary of her presentation, visit SearchEngineRoundtable.com.

Marc Engelsman, VP of Client Programs & Services, will also speak at SMX East on Wednesday, October 8. Marc will be participating in the Reporting and Scorecarding for Management session on Day Three of the conference.

Search Engine Recap for September 2008

2008-10-06T10:12:00.002-04:00

Here is a summary of search marketing industry news for September 2008:

Chrome

Google launched Chrome, its open source web browser. While it carries some bugs to be worked out, we like some of the features that Chrome has brought up. We will be posting our take on Chrome very soon.

Adwords Geographic Report

Adwords has added geographic report – This report provides us with an approximate account the geographic distribution of impressions, clicks, and conversions.

You can use this report to find out how well the ads are performing/not performing in certain geographic locations.

Google Search for Mobile

Last November, Google introduced its My Location feature in Google Maps for Mobile. It uses cell tower IDs to triangulate the location of the phone and then identifies that location on the Google Maps interface. With a bit less precision, it essentially does the same thing that GPS does: eliminate the need to enter a geomodifier to find things nearby.

Google has now taken that same cell tower triangulation approach and brought it directly into Google Search for mobile. Users need to install Google Gears on their mobile phones first before it will work.

What is in it for Advertisers?

1. Google Maps for Mobile currently has no ad inventory - opportunity for advertisers to take advantage.

2. Google Mobile Search has ads, though typically they're well "below the fold." As Google introduces more search ads in mobile and makes them more prominent Search with My Location becomes a potential boon to search marketers.

Search with My Location will initially be available in the US and UK and on Windows Mobile phones.

Yahoo Mobile

Yahoo announced oneConnect and Blueprint for the iPhone.

The oneConnect application is something like a smart address book and communications management tool -- allowing users to see IM, SMS and emails in one mobile environment. It also allows users to integrate social networking apps along the same lines.

Blueprint is a mobile development platform and rendering engine that is supposed to be much easier to use and write for than other tools. Publishers, developers and advertisers can use it to build mobile sites and landing pages.

Android

T-Mobile announced availability of the first Android phone. Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications -- all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation.

The objective of Android is to move the entire mobile industry forward by opening it up. If Google succeeds, on the shoulders of the iPhone's early success, it will benefit consumers and, ultimately, Google. Our SEA specialist has blogged his take on Android.

Putting the “Marketing” Into “Search Marketing”

2008-10-02T16:10:00.003-04:00

I read an article in an ad agency’s newsletter yesterday that talked about how optimization often compromises the integrity of the writing for a web site. Here’s an excerpt from Mint Advertising’s Blue Briefs newsletter:

“That said, I wanted to share a recent real world experience with web copy that has, ostensibly, been ‘optimized’....Here is actual copy from a page on that site:

‘This TV stand, also known as an LCD stand and a screen stand, is made from rust proof aluminum. Great for high traffic areas, this aluminum has a satin silver finish to coordinate beautifully with a variety of décors. The monitor display stand, TV stand has an optional tilting bracket available for purchase. By tilting your television, you give customers a better view of the screen. The TV stand has a wide base to offer great stability to the display. A plasma stand is a perfect TV stand to advertise in an exciting manner that is sure to earn you new customers!’

...At the risk of upsetting our SEO partner and other SEO-centric readers, I want to say that this is the sort of writing I would take a junior copywriter to task for. And it strengthens my belief that while there are all sorts of "tricks" that can be pulled for SEO (and direct mail, and virtually every other measured marketing tactic), to actually deploy these tricks in force compromises the integrity of the writing. As a brand-conscious advertising agency, Mint would never recommend writing copy this way. It's simply not English. Even ‘advertising’ English.”

Contrary to what the writer expected, I was not upset in the least by this article. In fact, this is precisely the kind of example that we would use to highlight what sets us apart from lesser quality SEO companies. At DBE, our focus is on integrating search as part of our clients’ overall marketing strategy, combining search expertise with overarching marketing know-how (after all, most of us here are marketers at heart). A well optimized site is not just about following the rules and repeating keywords X number of times, but about incorporating time-tested search elements while still maintaining the messaging and voice. A good search marketing company will be flexible and understand that sometimes compromise is necessary – if a search recommendation will harm the integrity of the copy, then we’ll revise our approach. Because at the end of the day, we know that it’s about connecting with your site’s visitors and getting them to take action.

And trust me, it is possible to write good copy that is also optimized – if anything, the example provided in the newsletter is more a sample of poor copywriting skills than of optimization gone wrong. Rather than viewing optimization as an obstacle to writing great copy, we encourage writers (including our own in-house team of content specialists) to approach it as a challenge and an opportunity to broaden the exposure of your message. Are there examples of optimization gone wrong? Yes. But there are many more stories of optimization gone right that have increased brand visibility and improved the bottom line, without harming the brand’s integrity.

Helpful Hint: YouTube Video Analytics

2008-10-01T09:25:00.000-04:00

Did you know that when you upload videos to Youtube, you can see how often your videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time? You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos. For example, you can see how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks. Using these metrics, companies can refine their online video marketing strategy and create content that really speaks to their target audiences.

You can find these metrics by clicking under the "About this Video" button under My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Video.

Also, this week Google launched Hot Spots for YouTube. The new analytics tool tells which specific parts of those videos are "hotter" than others, exactly when viewers tend to leave your videos and which scenes within a video they watch again and again. You can find this new feature under the Hot Spots tab within the Insight Dashboard.

For more online marketing tips, please visit DBE's YouTube Guru Channel.

Android and Apple

2008-09-29T10:20:00.000-04:00

Last week, T-Mobile and Google officially unveiled the G1 phone, formerly known as the HTC Dream. As the first phone to market running on the Android operating system, this is a huge landmark in the field of mobile technology. Inevitably the G1 will be compared to the iPhone, so let’s look at some key differences.

By offering Android to cell phone manufacturers as an open source OS, Google has the opportunity to get in front of a huge audience. Unlike Apple’s exclusive contract with AT&T, Google is not locked in to any one carrier or piece of hardware. This gives them an advantage, but it can present a challenge as well.

One of the key selling points of Android is the Android Market, Google’s answer to the iTunes App Store. Anyone can develop applications for Android and make them available in the Market. However, some developers are concerned about having to code and support software for a variety of phone hardware configurations.

Apple has tried (with minimal success) to quality control the applications made available for the iPhone with a vague approval process. They have taken quite a bit of criticism recently for rejecting apps (MailWrangler, Pull My Finger) and rather than reevaluating their policies, Apple’s solution has been to silence the rejected developers. Since there’s no approval process, innovative developers will have a much easier time making their products available to the Android audience. The drawback is that the lack of an approval process could lead to a glut of useless apps that must be sorted through to find the good ones. Even worse would be buggy or malicious software. Google will have to overcome these concerns.

Ultimately the biggest factor in deciding the success of Android will be usability. The iPhone, for all its shortcomings (lack of voice-dialing, no copy and paste, no real-time GPS navigation, among many others,) is easy to use, provides the best mobile web browsing experience available, and serves as an excellent all-in-one media and communication device. That’s a tall order for the G1 and subsequent Android devices to match or exceed. But the effort will officially push mobile technology into its next generation.

Cell phones aren’t just cell phones anymore. They are rapidly transforming into mobile computers. As prices on these devices drop, and new software makes them easier and more flexible to use, mainstream acceptance will increase. I’m locked into my iPhone until 2010, but as a tech junkie I’m excited to see what develops before I get my next phone.

Search and PR – Perfect Partners

2008-09-12T15:27:00.001-04:00

I spent yesterday at the PRSA’s Technology Conference in New York City. Listening to the speakers from a search marketer’s point of view was very interesting. So much of the content seemed strangely familiar, yet somehow new. I finally realized during Brian Solis’ session on measuring social media strategies that the PR world is branching out into an environment that search marketers already live and breathe in. Their intentions are different, but they are seeking to exist in the same space.

PR people and search marketers are poised to be able to work together in a way that offers far more value for our joint clients than if we remain as separate entities. Search marketers understand the social media environment, search engine reputation management and online content distribution – all areas that PR professionals need to move into as public relations transitions more and more into the Web 2.0 space. It makes sense to work together to ensure that clients are getting optimal results for both their PR and search marketing initiatives.

Because search marketers are already implementing social media and reputation management programs for our clients, we have the metrics to support their value – something I heard many PR practitioners looking for at the conference.

Search Engine Recap for August 2008

2008-09-03T15:35:00.002-04:00

Here is a recap of search marketing industry news for August 2008:

Yahoo recently announced Search Monkey

Search Monkey is a set of open-source tools that allow users and publishers to annotate and enhance search results associated with specific web sites.

Now, Yahoo announces that it turned on some of the Search Monkey applications built by the developers. So, Yelp, Yahoo! Local and LinkedIn Enhanced Results will automatically appear in the search results.

For example, if I search for my Linkedin Profile in Google, I get the following result:

Deepamalar Manimaran - LinkedIn

View Deepamalar Manimaran's professional profile on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the world's largest business network, helping professionals like Deepamalar ...
www.linkedin.com/pub/4/0A4/A9B - 18k - Cached - Similar pages

The same search in Yahoo gives the following result:

1. Deepamalar Manimaran - Group Manager, SEM Technical Services at Digital...

Location:	Greater New York City Area
Current:	Group Manager, SEM Technical Services, Digital Brand Expressions

2. www.linkedin.com/pub/4/0A4/A9B

Yahoo claims that these kinds of enhanced results lead to increased clickthrough rate and so far, I like what I’m seeing.

MSN has made significant improvements to its Webmaster tool

MSN Webmaster Tools introduced a number of new features that provide webmasters with more information on their websites’ crawl issues and indexing details, plus new tools like the robots.txt validator. One feature I found particularly interesting is the enhanced backlink data.

While Google WMT also gives backlinks data, data given by MSN also shows how important Live Search views those pages that link to your site. This feature is very useful for analyzing the quality of the links that point to your site.

The crawl issues list is also very useful. While Google also provides this feature, the issues that are listed by Google and MSN are different. By using data from both MSN and Google, webmasters can get a good view of potential issues affecting a site.

Google is going to compute quality score in real time

Google is now set to compute quality score based on the location (where the user is searching) and keyword (for example, “buy books” keyword set to broad match can also be shown for “buy computer books” but now the quality score will be calculated for the exact keyword user is searching for.)

How will this affect advertisers?

If you’re a company that focuses on a certain geographic area, you’ll want to make sure that you have the geo location mentioned in the ad copy and the landing page copy. That way, when the user searches from that location the ad will have a higher quality score, and you will pay less.

In terms of the quality score based on the exact keyword, tight management will be necessary. For example, if you have the keyword “buy books” set to broad match and a user searches for “buy computer books” Google will calculate the quality score based on “buy computer books.” As such, you may get a low score because the site doesn’t necessarily sell/have “computer” mentioned on the landing page. So, Google may increase the click cost to show the ad in the top results and in this case your CPC will be higher. You’ll need to stay on top of the negative keyword list and/or adjust ad copy and landing page copy to cover the different keyword variations.

By making proper use of negative keywords, adjusting keyword matching options, and carefully managing SEA budgets, advertisers can easily compensate for these changes to the Quality Score system

FYI, our SEA expert, Rob Trautner has blogged his take on adwords’s recent changes here.

Doubleclick cookie based tracking

Google announced that they will be utilizing the DoubleClick cookie-based tracking technology to bring more targeted ads and better targeting features to advertisers using their content network.

The enhanced features include:

Frequency Capping enables advertisers to limit the number of times a user sees an ad.
Frequency Reporting lets advertisers view the frequency data, including how many people have seen an ad and how many times a user saw the ad.
Google says the enhancements will also provide "Improved Ads Quality” and better conversion tracking with "View-Through Conversions".

Once these new features are fully implemented, DBE will test them out and let you know our take.