What happens when Netconcepts’ president Stephan Spencer gets such blogging and marketing luminaries together over the phone as Seth Godin, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, Steve Rubel, Debbie Weil, BL Ochman and Toby Bloomberg? An amazing discussion about the possibilities and future of marketing blogs, that’s what! Produced by MarketingProfs.com.
Read the Executive Summary: part 1 and part 2
Download the Transcript: PDF (600 K)
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Yahoo’s just released a very cool new search engine called Yahoo! Creative Commons Search. With it you can search all the Creative Commons licenced content on the web. For those not familiar with Creative Commons, I’ve blogged about it before. In summary, it is an alternative to copyright, where some rights are reserved by the author, but not all. It’s as quick and painless as can be for the author: you simply fill out this form that specifies how you want your material used out in the marketplace and the license is generated to place on your site. For example, your license can require attribution, restrict to only noncommercial use, allow for the creation of derivative works, etc.
There is a wealth of content out there under a liberal Creative Commons licence that will allow you to reuse and repurpose that content in your own projects. But finding that content used to be hard work. (Actually there was previously another way to search, but it wasn’t as comprehensive, and it wasn’t from a major search engine). Now it’s just a search query away, thanks to Yahoo!
I can hear you asking yourself: “That’s all fine and good, but what use will I have with it?” Here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing:
These are just a few ideas, and of course you have to abide by the terms of each content-owner’s license. Idea #4, for example, would be considered commercial use if that library of pages were serving as landing pages to get searchers who find you to buy something. IMPORTANT: Don’t just assume that because it showed up in the search results, it’s licensed under Creative Commons. Some plain ol’ copyrighted material will have undoubtedly snuck into the index. No search engine is 100% perfect. I didn’t have time to test it out much myself, but it seems to pass muster with Tara at ResearchBuzz, so it must be pretty good!
An insightful reader on Slashdot commented that it would be brilliant if Yahoo! took the next step and launched a Bittorrent tracker that was limited to Creative Commons licensed content, with a centralized directory-style index. Bittorrent, if you aren’t familiar with it, offers super-fast de-centralized file sharing on a file-by-file basis. It can be used to download legitimate files, like a trial version of a software program or music under a Creative Commons license. To get started, you need to have the Bittorrent software installed on your computer, and you’ll need to have somehow obtained a Torrent file for a particular big file that you want. This Torrent file is tiny, and it contains information about how to connect with others who have parts of the file you want. But where do you find these Torrent files? That’s where a tracker comes in. More on Bittorent later, in a separate post.
With that, I’ll let you get on with using this new Yahoo! engine to “embrace and extend” to your heart’s content.
Oh, by the way… If you want to learn more the fascinating story of copyright law (no, I’m not kidding! The way Larry Lessig tells it, it really IS interesting!), check out Larry Lessig’s speech at OSCON, with audio syncronized with his Powerpoint slides. Larry is the brains behind the Creative Commons and an overall brilliant lawyer/author/blogger/Stanford professor.
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Where is SEO heading? What are the trends and new opportunities? And what are the real issues facing the industry?
A panel of 12 experts predict…
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The competition is heating up as companies awaken to a universe of marketing opportunities - providing their customers can find them, that is!
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DM News covered a controversial new JupiterResearch report on RSS. The blogosphere was quick to respond. Some of the marketer-bloggers that I hold in high regard ?Į Seth Godin, Bill Flitter, Rok Hrastnik, and Rick Turoczy ?Į weighed in with their thoughts. Others chimed in too, as chronicled here. Some even trashed DM News, like in this thread at Threadwatch.org ?Į unfairly in my opinion (Remember the expression “Don’t shoot the messenger.” DM News after all, is only reporting on the JupiterResearch study and its conclusions.). Here’s my reaction to some of the points made in the article/study:
“RSS is not well suited to promotional-offer-oriented content because it does not offer the targeting and personalization capabilities of e-mail, the report said.”
Having been part of the team that developed an email marketing service (namely, GravityMail) from the ground up and honed it over a number of years, with extensive targeting and personalization capabilities built-in, I argue that you CAN target and personalize RSS to the same or similar degree. In fact, you can personalize/customize based on each subscriber’s demographics, psychographics, clickographics, or a combination of all of the above. In order to do so, of course, you’d need to be providing unique feed URLs to each subscriber, not a generic feed URL like www.mycompany.com/myrssfeed.xml. There’s no reason why you can’t collect information from each subscriber before and/or after they subscribe, and then use that information to deliver laser-targeted promotional offers. It’s also feasible to collect data on viewing and click behavior, then use that information to fine-tune the offers over time. You can measure the encoded content reads in RSS items like you would measure HTML opens in email campaigns (both done using “web bugs”), and you can measure the clickthroughs through clicktracked URLs embedded in the feed. More on this here. As Rok notes, out-of-the-box solutions for RSS personalization and targeting already exist: e.g. ByPass, RSS AutoPublisher, and SimpleFeed.
“However, even for use as a supplemental or alternative e-mail broadcast tool, the adoption of RSS for marketing purposes will remain low during the next 24 months.”
My instinct tells me this prediction is going to be waaaay off the mark. RSS adoption of poised to explode. It will be driven by popular web browsers like Internet Explorer and email clients like Outlook shipping with support for RSS built right in, which in my opinion isn’t just inevitable but also imminent. Robert Scoble, technical evangelist at Microsoft and A-list blogger, riffs on his blog: “if you do a marketing site and you don’t have an RSS feed today you should be fired. I’ll say it again. You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed. Saying that RSS is only for geeks today is like saying in 1998 that the Web was only for geeks.” Strong words coming from someone in the Microsoft camp as influential as Scoble.
“However, RSS publishing still faces many hurdles: measuring traffic at least on a subscriber level is nearly impossible to do, which will relegate RSS to a broadcast marketing tool in the near term.”
This claim from the study floored me. Measuring traffic at the subscriber level is anything but impossible. Again, simply provide unique feed URLs to each subscriber and you can track track viewing through web bugs and clicking through clicktracked links. Rok points out some services that offer traffic measurement on a subscriber level: SyndicateIQ, RSS AutoPublisher, SimpleFeed, Nooked, and Feedburner.
“RSS could possibly become as cluttered and confusing to consumers as the e-mail marketing channel is currently”
Not sure where the authors of the study are heading here. I presume they are referring to the spam problem. But email and RSS are quite different technologies in regards to susceptibility to spam. RSS is unspammable: no spammer can infiltrate someone else’s RSS feed, and no spammer can cause an RSS feed that’s full of spam to appear on a user’s subscription list. Perhaps they are referring to advertising in RSS feeds? I’m no fan of ads in RSS feeds, but that’s not spam. RSS is opt-in. If a content producer wants to subsidize the costs of producing that content by taking on advertisers who then add unwelcome noise to that content producer’s RSS feed, well removing the feed from my reader is just a click away.
I do think the overriding message from the article and the study is valid: when it comes to RSS, marketers (including your competitors) just don’t get it, and probably won’t, anytime soon. This comes through loud and clear from Jupiter’s survey findings that 45% of marketers have no plans to deploy RSS to supplement e-mail, and only 5% are currently doing so. So, ponder how you can best leverage this opportunity as the giants in your industry sleep!
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Think what audio books on tape did for the road warrior—turning our cars and airplane seats into mobile universities. Podcasting has the same capacity to change the way we learn and take in new information.
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Doug Kaye, founder of IT Conversations, is one of the true pioneers in the area of podcasting. His IT Conversations site offers a large array of podcasts from many of the top-most thought leaders in information technology. Listen in on Doug and I discuss podcasting — its history, potential applications, challenges, and best successes to date. This podcast was done in conjunction with my article on podcasting for marketers, soon to be published on MarketingProfs.com.
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Want to listen to me rant and rave about the power of RSS as a content delivery channel for search marketers? That was a rhetorical question. Frankly, who wouldn’t! 
So now you get your chance, on my interview on the Chris Pirillo Show, which was just podcasted today. Chris interviewed me last week at Search Engine Strategies. Have a listen.
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I found the eyetracking study from Enquiro and Did-It unveiled last week at Search Engine Strategies and covered in Search Day fascinating. The aggregate heat map shown on the right (larger version here) shows where participants focused their eyes (and their attention) the most. As you can see, the first listing not only drew the most attention; the full listing was read more fully from left to right, than other listings.
Visibility drops the further down the search results you go, and clickthroughs drop even more markedly (as you can see from the graphs below). This got me thinking about Zipf’s Law. Zipf’s Law is applicable to Top Ten Lists, as Seth Godin explains, perhaps Zipf’s Law might be applicable to the SERPs (search engine results pages) too? (In general terms, Zipf’s Law states that being #1 is much, much better than being #2 which is much, much better than being #3 and so on. So dominating a Top 10 list is critical.) Although these graphs don’t follow Zipf’s Law exactly, nonetheless given this data I’d consider it foolish to be complacent if your search listings are not at the very top of the SERPs.
What is it about searchers that makes them so blind to relevant results further down the page? Is this due to the “implied endorsement” effect, where searchers tend to simply trust Google to point them to the right thing? Or is it just the way humans are wired, to make snap decisions, as Malcolm Gladwell insightfully explains in his new book, Blink? According to the study, 72% of searchers click on the first link of interest, whereas 25.5% read all listings first, then decide. My guess is that both effects (”implied endorsement” and “rapid cognition”) play a role in searcher behavior.
A few other important take-aways from the study:
In all, a superb research study. Great job Did-It, Enquiro, and EyeTools!
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The once neutral territory of the blogosphere is enticing corporates who have awoken to the fact that business blogging entails relatively low startup costs. It’s potential for ROI hasn’t been ignored either.
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