Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts’ founder and president, interviewed Chris about his experiences with managing SEO for a large business. Read more about how Chris Alan’s experience working for a large website can help you understand SEO from a different perspective.

What types of keyword metrics are important to a business?

I think that anyone managing a SEO campaign is going to care about the volume of searches that are associated with any keyword, the likely click-through rate that they would be able to get given the current competition (for that keyword) and the anticipated or actual conversion rate that they could get for that size of the transaction and the profitability of that transaction. All general business effectiveness evaluations that you would want to do for any type of sale (but certainly with paid or organic) you care about where that lead comes from, what the size of the market is, and what the likelihood is that you’ll be able to sell effectively vis-a-vis your competition.

What do you do to ensure that your landing pages for natural search perform well?

We do a lot of research on how to make our landing pages as effective as possible. I can’t get into any details about the techniques that we use, but I would certainly encourage anyone who has engaged in a search engine optimization campaign to put in place systems that you can use, just like you do with your paid marketing, to determine the effectiveness of that landing page.

It’s a little bit harder with SEO because, unlike the SEM campaigns, you can’t just just switch out those pages very easily unless you’ve created technology that’s allowed you to do that. Of course with SEO, any changes you might make on that page might actually affect your rankings so you have to do something that allows you to make changes on the page but maintain your rankings. If your ranking drops, that might be why your numbers are off, not just because the page is less ineffective. So it’s a little bit trickier with SEO than with SEM, but it certainly can be done.

If a person has a sufficient budget to do both an SEO and an SEM campaign, which most businesses do engage in these things, certainly you can do this kind of testing with your SEM campaign. Then, once you have that worked out, apply those results to your SEO campaign.

What are the top factors in SEO to optimize your really large website for Google?

Personally, I don’t think the things you want to focus on are all that different between a big or a small site. I think anyone doing an SEO campaign has to pay attention to the basics. I’d break it into three sections: you have content or on-page factors, you have internal linking and external linking. I generally separate out internal and external linking because, of course, of the way that you can evaluate and the way that you manage those are generally completely different. I tend to think of SEO in those three areas.

Some large sites do have special considerations because they might be created with large, complicated CMS systems, and sometimes those systems weren’t designed with any consideration for SEO. Some of those systems may introduce problems that a normal website wouldn’t have, so I sometimes add a fourth dimension to SEO which is: things that might block spiders or hinder search engine performance against your site.

Clearly, if a search engine spider can’t get in and index your site (especially with a large site if you’ve created an impediment for that spider) you’re going to have a hard time ranking for anything. People who are doing this for a site of any size will want to check that out first but, if you have a large site, it’s much more likely that you’ll find issues that could be anything from: having certain browser requirements (like if you require your browsers to have javascript-enabled), if you require cookies, or if you require a certain version of a browser. All those can be impediments for spiders. So certainly, that’s something that anyone would want to check to make sure that their site is simply accessible.

What is one of the biggest pitfalls you’ve seen large, online businesses fall into?

One of the biggest errors that I see, is the way that people regard their site. Often, people who approach SEO think about the content on their site and then go to work on their site. That’s what I call a “content” or “supply” orientation. You have a particular product (or service) and you have some information about that particular product (or service) that you tend to think about in certain ways, based on being an industry expert or industry insider. If you work on your content really hard, you can have a very myopic view of what exactly you’re doing.

In almost every engagement, I would find examples of keywords and content that people would try hard to optimize which was not actually something that anybody was looking for. An example I frequently use, is for a campaign many years ago for a wooden box manufacturer in San Diego. One of the keywords I suggested to them was “wooden crates.” Their response was, “But we don’t sell crates, crates are kind of low-end palettes and things like slatted palettes.” Because the word “crates” appealed to me, I was an uneducated consumer, but I encouraged them to test that (keyword). So, rather than use that in a SEO campaign we put that (wooden crates) into a paid campaign and it turned out to be one of their most effective keywords, much more effective than what they suggested was their product (wooden box or wooden shipping container). People would sit down at Google or some other search engine and type in “wooden crates” when they’re actually looking for a “wooden shipping container.”

So I think often, when people have a specific industry knowledge they use certain terminology and have a bit of a blind spot about how they’re customers think about and look for their products. In the oil industry they don’t call it “oil” — they call it “hydrocarbons” — so you’ll hear a couple of oil execs talk about hydrocarbon-this and hydrocarbon-that. Of course, you and I talk about gas and for an oil industry executive that’s kind of a misnomer yet that’s the terminology that you and I use. So I think anyone who’s attempting to engage in an SEO or, for that matter, a paid campaign should really should think hard about evaluating the demand side of the equation. What are people looking for? Then, quantify the volume and value of what they’re looking for.

What sort of tools and tactics do you think would be valuable to start analyzing external links from scratch?

I think the first tool that anyone who’s wanting to engage in SEO is Google’s webmaster tools. If you’re thinking about SEO or are currently engaged in SEO, and you’re not using Google webmaster tools, I think you’re missing one of the best opportunities out there. It’s good, it’s useful and it’s free. I don’t recommend it because it’s free, I recommend it because it’s good. It’s just extra-nice that it’s free and it’s information that would be very hard to get any other way with the precision that you can get from Google’s webmaster tools. Google actually gives you a glimpse of how they view a site and you can see these things like an inventory of who’s linking to your site in a much more useful way than you can get from the Google search engine like the links command. Links:yourwebsite will show you links pointing to your site but it won’t show you all your links. The Webmaster tools doesn’t necessarily show you every single link that’s out there but it will show you a lot more links than the link command through Google. I highly recommend that because it can also show you whether or not you have any spider impediments. That’s the first place to start.

I think that anyone is an avid reader of SEO books will find numerous techniques for your site. I think the key is to find legitimate ways to do it. There are so many illegitimate ways to get links, everything from trying to sign up in guest book entries to trying to do the same thing in forums or any other blog comment tools. These things take a huge amount of time and they ultimately are not very effective because a lot of those paid link pages tend to be transient anyway, they go away.

It’s really annoying for people who operate a site to see people fill up their comments pages with what are obviously gratuitous messages designed to put a link in there. It’s really not an effective technique. So, in the end I think that anything that is likely to result in someone linking to you along with a legitimate way is something that you should consider and there are no real easy answers for that. So there’s not real any good, quick cheap ways to do it because if anyone finds a good, quick cheap way of doing it Google decides that it doesn’t adhere to their quality guidelines and they’ll figure out ways to discount it through their algorithm or editorially. It’s a very short-term kind of a strategy and ultimately not very effective.

Mike Moran is an author and pioneer in search marketing at IBM Corp. Since the early 2000s, Mike has worked to establish ground-breaking strategies on a corporate level, in order to implement SEO changes on a massive scale.

Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts’ founder and president, interviewed Mike about the unique challenges that mega-corporations have related to SEO implementation, understanding the ROI and hidden benefits behind SEO, and what the solutions are to solving those challenges. Read more about how savvy decision-making and well-written processes can help solve SEO implementation problems on a corporate level.

Stephan Spencer: Hi. I’m Stephan Spencer, founder and president of Netconcepts. I have here with me today, Mike Moran. Mike is the Distinguished Engineer and Product Manager of OmniFind Enterprise addition, an IBM software group. So, he’s part of the huge IBM company. He also is the co author of the book, “Search Engine Marketing, Inc.” I understand, Mike, you have a new book that’s just come out, as well?

Mike Moran: Yeah. It just came out last week. It’s a book on Internet marketing called, “Do It Wrong Quickly” on how the Web changes the old marketing rules. And it’s basically about helping people understand the attitude change they really need to take to do Web marketing. It’s not the same as traditional marketing where you really need to make sure you do things right the first time. You can’t screw up a TV ad because you’ll blow your whole year. But, if you’re doing Internet marketing you have an opportunity to try something out, see how your customers are responding to it and maybe change it if it’s not working.

So, it’s not that I’m telling people to do it wrong on purpose. I’m asking them to admit that what we first try is almost always wrong. And instead of us trying to convince each other that everything we’re doing is OK we, instead, need to be open to the feedback from our customers and figure out where to go from there.

Stephan: What great advice. Yep. So, “Let’s Do It Wrong Quickly” and is that also published by IBM Press?

Mike: It is.

Stephan: OK. Great. Well, congratulations on yet another book.

Mike: Thank you.

Stephan: Share with our listeners a little bit about what you do at IBM and what you have done. I understand that you’ve been involved some SCO initiatives at IBM. I also understand you’re involved on some internal search initiatives. Can you tell us a little more about that?

Mike: Sure. The job title that they gave me is Distinguished Engineer which is means that it’s an executive level technical position which is basically the kind of thing that maybe a CTO would be in a smaller company. So, I’m in charge of technical strategy, and, whatever new things are happening.

And, I’m doing that on behalf of the IBM team that’s responsible for our enterprise search engine. So, it’s the kind of search engine you would install on your intranet, or, as a site search for your external website. So, we offer integrations with commerce engines to help you sell more. We also can help your employees find things better. And, so, all those kinds of things are part of the OmniFind product line.

We also have a free search engine that we do in conjunction with Yahoo that you can download that does up to a half a million documents. It’s very easy to install. And, it’s gotten a lot of great reviews.

We’re also working to deliver analytics capability for customers. So, beyond search, you often need to analyze information, and, be able to, to see from the text what kind of conclusions you can draw. So, you might be examining your product feedback from your customers. So, people are sending you email telling you that they’re having problems with products or services that you offer. And, you might want to analyze those things to see if you can find some patterns in that. And, so, that’s what OmniFind Analytics division does. All sorts of different tech stories into technologies that we, we, we sell and I work on.

So, before I worked with IBM’s Internet Search product, I worked on IBM’s website for eight years at ibm.com. So, I had a whole bunch of different roles there. But, one of the things that I worked on that might be most interesting to your listeners is that I was pioneered their search marketing campaigns. So, the first time they ever did search marketing that was something that, that I was involved with, and, I continued to manage that until I left ibm.com.

And, that’s where we got a lot of ideas for the first book that we wrote. I worked on that with Bill Hunt. And, we figured out an awful lot of things that you need to know to do things in a large company. There’s a lot of other books out there and great information that’s out on websites about what kind of knobs to turn and dials to switch around. And, there’s all sorts of technical information to tell you how to get people to change your website so that it’ll rank higher.

The problem with all that stuff is that you often don’t know what the genesis is for that. So, you don’t know why you’re doing it. You don’t know what the payoff is. And, you also don’t know how to do it in a large company.

And, so, those are the kinds of things that we set out to add to the book that we wrote that’s in addition to the kinds of things that you would normally get for just the technical information of how do you write your content, and to track links, and all that really important information. We wanted to ground it in business and, we also wanted to make sure that people who worked in large organizations would know how to get those things done.

Stephan: Right. So, there are so many organizational issues and politics and all that, you have to be really good at that as much as you are at technical issues, like, solving your rewrite issues, and, redirects and, and, your internal linking structure.

Mike: I think that’s right. The thing that we found is that the most difficult parts of search marketing in a large company had to do with getting everybody to do the right thing. And, in fact, it’s true of all sorts of Internet marketing. There’s no way to centralize the kinds of things that you need to do. But, you do need to coordinate them.

And, that’s what makes it so challenging in a large company. So, you’re never going to have a blogging department. And, you can’t outsource your search marketing totally to an agency. There’s no way for you to just make somebody the czar of Web marketing. It doesn’t really work.

What you need to do instead is to figure out how to speak with every specialist that you have in the company and be able to teach them all what the new parts of their job are.

And, that’s a really difficult thing. So, it’s true for trying to get blogging going within a company. It’s also true for search marketing.

So, you need to make sure that the webmaster knows how to code a robots.pxt file. And, you have to make sure your copywriters know how to use the terms within the pages. And, you need to make sure your product people know how to name their products. So, there’s all sorts of things that each specialist needs to know how to do.

And, in a large company, getting everybody to do those things and have them do it consistently, and, have them do it over and over again. And, making sure that those things don’t get undone over time is a real challenge. And, so, that was a lot of what we set out to figure out is how can you make these kinds of things happen? And, how can you do it in such a way that other large companies could learn from it?

Stephan: So, what were some of the things that were stumbling blocks or hurdles that you had to get around at IBM to get these search marketing initiatives accomplished?

Mike: Some of the things that were hard might seem easy in a small company. Some of things that, for small businesses, they just totally struggle with are things like attracting links. Well, IBM had links in spades. I mean, we had a million links to all of our pages.

We were having problems just getting the right words on the pages. We were having trouble even getting copywriters to understand that they needed to put certain terms on the pages because that’s what people were searching for. Nobody had a clue that people were searching for these things.

And, so, just being able to get people to centralize doing keyword management and to be able to roll out that kind of information throughout the organization I mean, we’re in over 90 countries on our website, and, in over 30 languages and, so, all these kinds of things really daunting.

So, there were a few things that we did. One of the first things we did was put together a scorecard. And, what the scorecard had on it was it was a roll up of all of the statistics that we gleaned from crawling all of our own pages.

So, what we did is we analyzed, for example, how many of these pages flat out didn’t have a title on them not didn’t have a good title. But, we had found that over 13 percent of our pages had no title on them at all which in organic search marketing basically, means you’ll never be shown.

We did the same kinds of things for description information. This was back in the early 2000s when descriptions meant a little more than they do now. But, we also looked for broken links. We looked for all sorts of things that would cause your search ranking to really be hurt, or, your crawling to be hurt.

And, what we did was roll up all those statistics country by country, division by division and, we set benchmarks where they had to be yellow for this thing. Or, green if you got over a certain benchmark. Or, if you were well under what we were looking for, then you’d be red.

And, so it needed to be very simple because it was for executives. And, so, if every month, you bring the executives in the room and you tell them that they’re red and their whole organization is not doing a good job in this area, they really didn’t understand what that meant. They didn’t know what it was I was trying to get them to do. But after a few months of being embarrassed, what would happen is they’d go back to their teams and say, “I don’t know what Moran wants, but whatever it is, just do it because I’m so tired of going to this meeting and being told I’m red again.”

It was basically management by embarrassment where the executives don’t want to be embarrassed in front of each other. So, then what they did was they figured out how they were going to get their organizations to do these things because somebody thought it was important and they were just trying to look good. That’s basically one way that you can go after this stuff. At a larger organization you can use processes and procedures against itself. So, if you can build all these jobs into the job descriptions and into all the policies and all the things that people do in large companies to keep things going, then you can get people to really do a lot of work.

Another thing that we did was we actually looked at how many different organizations in IBM were bidding against each other in paid search. We used that number to actually justify hiring a central search team. If you can imagine how many different parts of IBM were bidding against each other for the word “Linux” because they have Linux services, and servers that run Linux and software that run on Linux and everybody had a Linux something.

By just analyzing the keyword “competition” that was intramural and how much money we were wasting by bringing all those bids over to Google instead of just having one consolidated page that showed all the things we could do in Linux and letting the customer decide which way they were going after they got to the IBM site that helped us to really reduce our cost and make sure that we did a good job of being able to justify hiring a central team.

Stephan: That’s great. I love that management by embarrassment. That’s great. That sounds like a book title.

Mike: Maybe it will be.

Stephan: So, what were some of the successes that you were able to accomplish besides getting people to not have red on their spreadsheet anymore? What sort of tangible benefits did you bring to IBM.com from the search marketing initiatives?

Mike: Well, we had less than one percent of visitors coming from search engines when we started back in 2001. Within just a few years, we had gotten to 25 percent. We were shocked because we really didn’t think we would get that high a percentage coming. The assumption was, “Well, most of our customers already know who they are.” They know how to type dotcom after IBM or they bookmarked the site or they’re coming back to a certain place. But, what we found more and more is that customers really were discovering us and that they didn’t know that we had certain things that we sold and we were doing an awful lot of work to bring the stuff in.

If you think about how organic search, once you’ve got it into the DNA of the organization where they just do this kind of thing automatically, there really isn’t any cost to it. It doesn’t cost very much at all. I mean, paid you have to really look at what you’re spending on that so that you can figure out what your return on investment is. But organic, it’s all startup cost, and once you get everybody trained and they’re doing things, they just start doing keyword analysis automatically, and there’s really little cost associated with it. All that just drove tremendous amounts of revenue.

Stephan: Would you say is that there’re some things that are automated or in place that there’s no additional cost that are scalable, the SEO tactics on the IBM website?

Mike: I think that some of the things that really don’t cost very much are things like optimizing templates. If you look at how most organizations that are of any size are using dynamic websites that’s really important because it holds down your cost of content management and it can allow you to change things very rapidly. All those things are good, but a lot of search marketing consultants shudder when they see that kind of situation because they know that it can be extremely difficult to make changes to a site. It’s much easier to change a static site where you have files of HTML that are just lying around. You can pick out a few pages and make the changes.

The good thing though is that if you can figure out how to get these organizations to change things, then when you change something, you’ve actually changed thousands or even millions of pages at the same time. So, you can make these optimizations in the templates. At IBM it will obviously be WebSphere that we’re using to deliver Web pages. But no matter what your portal or application server system is, you could be making those kinds of templates changes so that you have a good title. You have good descriptions. You have things that are happening based on people just entering things into the content management system. Suddenly, they ripple out into a very strong HTML representation of the page that the search engines really appreciate. Those are the kinds of things that, once you got them done properly, they seem to just run by themselves.

Stephan: These different content management systems out there, WebSphere being one of them, and e commerce platforms and so forth, they vary in the search engine friendliness factor. Let’s just say, for example, that you have a relatively search engine unfriendly platform that doesn’t allow you to do much with the URL structure and that’s not very optimal. It has lots of parameters in the URL, the ampersands and equal signs after the question mark. What sort of issues did you have getting past those barriers with the IBM.com site?

Mike: Those were some of the most painful things. Back when we started, IBM’s products were not very search marketing friendly. The WebSphere commerce, WebSphere portal server, all those products did not have the ability to create static looking URLs. So, what happened was that it was hard to get Google to crawl those things. We had to do all sorts of things to get pages out there that Google would crawl and I’m just using Google short hand for any search engine but, we worked with those IBM product people and now I’d say that our products are very search friendly. So, we had to work with them for quite a while to get that to happen.

Now, if you use WebSphere commerce, you’ll not only have a chance to have your URLs come out so that they look static URLs and they’re very easy to crawl for search engines, but you can automatically generate a sitemap the way they describe at sitemap.org, as Google pioneered, so that you can even control how frequently your pages should be crawled and what kind of priority to enhance. Those kinds of features are things that, if you’re using a dynamic system from another vendor that doesn’t have that kind of capability, you really ought to work with them and talk to them and make them understand because I don’t think that they’re doing this on purpose. I think it’s just out of ignorance. So, you have to really work hard to make sure that those are the kinds of things that you aren’t stuck with, because that can really hurt your organic search marketing.

Stephan: Are there still things that are still left to be done, or may never get done, at IBM.com in terms of search marketing?

Mike: There’s always stuff that’s left to be done, because one of the things that we talked about in our book that we’re hoping is different from other books, and I’m pretty confident that it is, is that we really show you what the return on investment is for taking these things all the way through from idea to implementation. So, what that tells you is that you’ll know when maybe it’s more advantageous for you to be working on something else because that might have a higher return on investment, even though there’s more work to be done in search.

I would say that at IBM.com, some of the things that we still need to do is I still don’t think that we’re doing enough in paid search. I think that we could be doing more there. I think it’s always a battle to try and coordinate all of the organizations and really communicate best practices. I know that every few months, even though I don’t work at IBM.com anymore, I get brought in on phone calls with people around the world where they’re hoping that I can help train people and help them understand.

There’s a continuing battle because there’s always turnover in a large organization, of people moving from one part of IBM to another or from one job to another. They don’t understand all the things that they need to know, that maybe their predecessors did. That kind of thing, where we want to find a way of capturing the corporate knowledge and making that easier to pass on rather than just having people show up on phone calls to be trained, I think that’s one area that we’d really like to work on and I’m not sure I have a real good idea for how to do that yet.

Stephan: I guess, looking ahead in your crystal ball over the next couple of years where IBM.com could be in terms of search marketing and where the search engines are heading because of course, they’re changing, they’re evolving as time goes on. So, where do you think things are going to set in two or three years time? What’s going to be different?

Mike: I think that the big thing that you see coming is kind of an explosion in terms of content. When you look at things like what Ask.com is doing and what Google is doing in universal search that they’ve given to see much more of that where, in addition to the regular vanilla Web pages that always came up in the search result, you’re going to see images, videos, blogs and all sorts of different kinds of information.

So, that’s been a focus area for IBM.com for a couple of years now, not because we were doing it in anticipation of Search coming about, but because we just thought this was the right kind of way to go after our marketing message. The assumption that we make, which I think is usually going to be borne out, is if you do the right thing in terms of the content, eventually the search engines are going to reward that. So, the fact that we’ve got thousands of people writing blogs, the fact that we’ve got lots of videos that are up with software demos and all sorts of ways of using this kind of new media, I think that really helps us when the search engines decide, “You know this stuff is really important once you start integrating that into the regular search results.”

I think the same kind of thing will happen as personalization becomes more prevalent because the thing that we’ve really emphasized, Bill and I, over the years is to really have a target customer in mind for everything that you do. So, it’s important to write your content in terms of a specific audience, you know, specific set of personas. By doing that, I think you’re going to set yourself up to personalization because as the search engine does a better job of understanding what it is that different kinds of people want to see from the same search query, I think that you’re going to see more targeted messages, have a chance to resonate a lot more with search engine the same way we’re reading that they resonate with the people.

Stephan: What are some of the personas that you were targeting with IBM.com?

Mike: When I first was working on search marketing, we have done some really good work that showed that there are several different kinds of customers that tend to rely on IBM. Some of them are, what you would call Web savvy. They’re people who absolutely to research and buy everything they can on the Web. As opposed to some other people who, they might be interested in learning information on the Web but they might be much more likely to close an order for 50 servers offline.

So, we’ve looked at several different kinds of personas that cut across that way that basically has to do with what kind of buying behavior they have. By analyzing that, we’ve been able to target our content so that there are different kinds of messages that are pointed at people, whether they’re trying to learn on the Web or whether they’re trying to compare things or whether they’re trying to buy.

Stephan: OK. So, back to the question of looking ahead several years. Where do you think the IBM product WebSphere, I guess, WebSphere commerce, WebSphere portals, servers where are those going to be? If you had to the crystal ball gaze again, in a couple of years’ time in order to better service this brave new world of personalized search and universal search and so forth.

Mike: I think what you’d going to see is more integration of different kinds of feedback mechanism. So, one the things that I really emphasized in my new book, “Do It Wrong Quickly”, is that the feedback mechanisms that you need to enable are different from the kinds of things that you enabled for offline marketing. You’re not really looking for the number of homes reached or you’re not necessarily looking only at target demographics for your message. What you’re really looking for is how many people have seen it and how many people have been responded to it? If possible, how many people have bought or done with whatever the conversion is on your website.

If you look at where vendors who sell Web tools need to go in the face of that kind of trend, you’re going to see more integration of metric. I mean, when you see Google coming out with a free offering for website optimizer where they’re doing multivariate testing, I think you’ll going to see those kinds of things integrated into the Web platform so that it becomes very easy for someone using a content management system to begin to make those kinds of changes and say, “I’d like to test these 13 different things. Then, what the optimization program tell me which ones seem to be getting the highest click rates.”

So I think, the kinds of Web metrics and Web analytics vendors, I think the multivariate testing vendors, I think all those kinds of capabilities, you’re going to see more and more built in to the Web publishing platform so that companies have a very easy way of being able to not only create content and publish it to the Web, but also be able to optimize that content not just for search marketing but for conversions.

Stephan: That can lead to actually to an interesting problem. If you have optimization of conversion rate through, let’s say Optimost or Offermatica that sort of multivariate testing system. You might end up with an optimal “version” that is best at converting customers, but it might end up devoid of all those important keywords because that was one of the other versions that didn’t perform so well. Yet, when you optimized for search positioning, you may not take into account that there’s a particular version that would resonate most with your customers and, therefore, get the best conversion rate.

Mike: Yes, I think that that is certainly possible. So, I think one of the tricks is to avoid what I call “suboptimizing” which is picking only a piece of the equation such as getting high rankings in Google or reducing your abandoned carts. If you pick too small an area to optimize, you will be able to optimize that but it won’t necessarily optimize your total outcome. That’s why, when I talk about that with metrics, I think that the most important to me from a marketing point of view, you’re interested in impressions, you’re interested in selections, and you’re interested in conversions.

So those are the things that you have to keep balancing at each other because if you find that you’re not able to optimize all of them with a single campaign, I think what that’s really telling you is you know what you’re doing. I think that you’ll never going to have a situation where one particular design or one particular message is going to optimize everything across the board. You have to have the tools available to you that what you do the tradeoffs so that you’re optimizing the overall outcome even if each particular step of the way might be suboptimal if you just looked at that one thing.

Stephan: So, what does IBM look at, then? For IBM.com, you talked about impressions, selections, and conversions. How does that all map out and relate to the ROI? What does this picture look like to let’s say a top level IBM executive?

Mike: On both of our books, we kind of lay out the techniques that we’ve pioneered at IBM.com that we call the “Web conversion cycle”. What that allows you to do is allows you look at what your return is based on all these analytics. So, the kinds of metrics that we’re talking about here are basically activity metrics. They don’t really tell you how much that’s worth. By understanding, for example, for an online sale what the profit is is associated with that. That gives you a real idea of what the value is of driving an additional visitor to your site.

But a lot of companies and IBM is especially true for these cases they have offline sales. So, most companies that have website, they do not have a shopping cart on their website. What they do is a fairly minimal part of their sales, and IBM is no exception to that. What is really important is to be able to tie whatever your online conversion is to link that to move people offline.

Look at how car companies do it. You can go to Cadillac and build your own car and you can say, “I want this kind of upholstery, I want this kind of engine in it.” All kinds of things that you can pick and you can configure everything you want, and what you do, you print the whole thing out. You walk that into the dealer and say, “Give me one of those.”

Now, the reason that works is because people will do almost anything to spend half hour less with the car dealer. But, there are also ways that you can tie your offline sales to the Web. You can do something as simple as putting a phone number on the website that is not used anywhere else in your marketing communications. So everybody who calls that phone number is moving there from the website.

You can do Contact Me forms. IBM has a Call Me button. So if you press that button, then we know what Web page you were on and we will call you back, I think within 30 minutes, with a specialist and the product for the page that you pressed the button for. So those kinds of things are all ways of you tying what’s going on on the Web to your actual sales offline and that helps you understand what the return on investment is.

Stephan: Right because that’s actually for business to business companies. That’s one of the biggest problems. I’ve got all this budget that I could spend but I’m not going to spend it because I don’t know that it would actually generate a positive ROI. If you can track the long lead times and that offline purchase through unique 800 numbers, and so forth, that would help justify a bigger and bigger spend.

Mike: I agree. The other to keep in mind is that a lot of the people who are saying well, “I don’t want to spend that because I can’t justify the ROI, ” they are the same people who have no problem dropping loads of money on trade shows and other kinds of offline marketing that may be more traditional. So print ads, TV, they’ll spend all the money on that and they have no ability to tie things back on those either.

So, sometimes I think the Web is held to a higher standard of proving its ROI than the thing that you’re taking the money away from. I think we need to be careful to work very hard to try and get the ROI in place so that we’re using good direct marketing principles to be able to prove what the worth is of our investment. But I think we also need to be careful about looking at what the alternatives are and whether we are applying the same kind of rigor to those.

Stephan: Very good point. Let’s just go back to where we think search is heading and so forth. There has been a lot of talk about The Long Tail, Chris Anderson’s excellent book, his blog and all the articles and everything. There is just so much about The Long Tail. Do you have any thoughts on how The Long Tail is going to play out over the coming years in terms of search marketing, in terms of conversion and online sales?

Mike: Yes, I think that’s a seminal book. It really explains to people, one of the major differences of the Web versus other ways of marketing. I think that you are going to continue to see that play out. I think we are only at the beginning of understanding The Long Tail because I think that as marketers get savvier, there is going to be more and more content that is more and more tightly focused.

As personalized search comes in, you’re going to be targeting things even more. What that’s going to do, is it’s going to cause searchers to be even more specific about what their searches are because they know that they’re going to get a really targeted answer to it. I think that there is going to be an even longer tail. That tail is not going to be just based on keywords, it’s going to be based on demographics as well.

As you personalize search, you’re not going to have the concept of being number one for a certain keyword. What you’re going to have is a situation where you were number one for a certain demographic for the keyword. Or, you will want to know for what percentage of people you were number one for a particular period of time. What your average ranking is, is another way to think about it.

So those kinds of things are going to create an even longer tail. Just as today, you can go to Microsoft and pay more to have your paid search ad shown to a certain demographic, I think you’re going to see more and more of that as personalization really starts to take root. I think it’s going to be a Long Tail but it’s going to be a Long Tail that has multiple dimensions.

The advice I have been giving to small businesses who are starting to get frustrated because they take their successful offline business and they put it online and they think, “Wow, we’re going to be opened up to all these new customers. This will be great.” The problem is, they’re not doing anything to really specialize themselves.

I was working with a company that sells bedding. I said to them, “What is your unique value proposition?” They said, “Well we have very high quality and we have low prices.” And I’m like, “OK well how many of your competitors could say the same thing?” And the answer is, “All of them do.” So what are you really going to specialize in? Can you tell me that you are selling mattresses that are sealed against dust mites so that somebody who has allergies really should buy this?

You have to get very, very targeted when you are a small business to be able to break through the clutter. I think those are the kinds of things that are going to really be the things that separate the winners and losers as we go forward.

Stephan: So how can a small business with a small product line, a small number of SKUs, compete with a huge big box retailer, somebody that’s got tens or hundreds of thousands of SKUs, has tons of content on the Web and therefore tons of potential in terms of Long Tail SEO? How does a small guy compete against that?

Mike: Well they compete against them successfully every day. I, far more often, come across large companies that are lamenting that all of their affiliates have higher rankings than they, the merchant. They want to know, “How come we can’t get number one for our own product?”

The reason is because they’ve often focused on a catalog approach. They’re not taking advantage of the Long Tail even though you’re right; they have the potential. They’re not taking advantage of it. What they’re doing is, they are putting up catalog pages. So here’s the feeds and speeds. Here’s the specs, here’s the features and here’s the comparison chart against four of our products.

You know what they don’t do? They don’t actually talk about what problems they solve. They don’t tell customer success stories. They don’t have that kind of rich textual content that allows you to grab hold of that Long Tail. Instead of telling me this is a problem we worked through at IBM instead of saying, that I have a blade server that runs cooler than other computers, I mean that’s nice. For somebody who’s shopping for a blade server, because they already know they need one, that’s great. But how about the person that’s typing in, “overheating computer room.” They are not going to find that page. They don’t even know that getting a new kind of computer that runs cooler is even an option for them. They may think they’re looking for an air conditioner or they might be thinking that they need to move to a larger computer room space. They don’t know what they need to do. They just know they have this problem.

So we call this problem oriented content, learn content, because that’s the thing the customer is doing. They’re not ready to shop yet where they’re ready to compare things. They’re certainly not ready to buy; they’re really learning. They know they have some itch they need to scratch. What they’re looking for is information that’s almost unbiased in its nature.

You have to almost think like a newspaper reporter where you are explaining, OK look if you have an overheating computer room, there are really several things you can do to fix it: You can get a bigger computer room, you can turn off a bunch of your computers and use fewer computers, you can get a bigger air conditioner or you might want to look at this blade server thing where you can get computers that are a lot cooler. They don’t throw off so much heat and if you do that, then you’ll probably find your computers are going to run faster as well. And by the way, we happen to sell that. If you want more information, click here.

That’s a different kind of page than most marketers are used to writing. It’s not full of hype. It’s not this breathless stuff that says, “Act now and get freon ice crusher.” It’s more helpful information. It’s the kind of thing where you’re really trying to help the customer solve their problem and you’re saying to yourself, “Hey, if I do that, enough of that business is going to come to me.” That’s the kind of thing that big companies can easily do but so can small companies. I find small companies, right now, are doing that a lot better than the large companies.

Stephan: I’d say that is true. At Netconcepts, we have focused on that approach of building a lot of learn content. If you go to our corporate website, netconcepts.com, you’ll find a whole learning center. It has screencasts, articles, blog posts, webinar recordings, podcasts; you name it, tons of stuff. It definitely does work in our favor not just in terms of search marketing and getting that Long Tail searcher in but also getting them converted into a customer.

Mike: I agree and it also, I will bet, is the part of your site that gets the most links because it is that kind of unbiased really helpful content that somebody is willing to direct their reader to. They are much less likely to direct their reader to some catalog page that says here are the specs for a blade server. They’d be much more likely to direct them to a page that says here’s a really helpful article about what to do if your computer runs too hot.

That’s the kind of content that helps small business get the kinds of links that they need because that’s what the big problem is for small businesses. We talked about what happens with big businesses, where they’re struggling to get all the rowers rowing in the same direction. You have all these people. You’ve got to tell a million people what to do and get them all to figure it out and do it consistently every day and that’s hard. But also, hard from a small business point of view, is how do they get attention, how do they get links, how does anybody pay attention to what they’re doing. By writing this kind of content, I think you are far more likely to see it happen.

Stephan: And there’s a way to not just write the content from a learn perspective but also to write it in a way that it becomes link bait. It becomes so humorous or entertaining or useful that people just can’t help but link to it.

You asked the question, is the learning center one of the most linked to areas within our site. It is one of the most, but the actual most linked to piece of the site, is our plug in that we developed, the free plug in for WordPress, called SEO title tag. That went viral because tons of WordPress bloggers are looking for some free optimization tools to plug in to their WordPress software. So here’s a great free piece of software that you can just download and use.

Mike: That makes sense to me. If you think about it, it’s the same thing. The attitude that you bring to either creating a tool or writing content is, your whole idea is almost one of altruism where you are saying, “I’m going to do something that’s useful and I’m not going to get anything for this. I’m going to let it be free. People can have it; they can do whatever they want. My assumption is that if I do those things, enough good stuff is going to come back to me that is going to help my business.” It is a very different attitude from the way old line marketing has been done.

So I totally agree that tools, because it’s this useful thing for people and that kind of content that really solves people’s problems. When you really go out and solve somebody’s problem for free, you’re going to find a million links coming to you because that’s what people are looking for on the web. That’s what they want to provide publicity for.

Stephan: So, are there any examples of really cool, free tools or link bait that ibm.com offers that has worked well?

Mike: I think that we’ve got a number of different things. We have configuration things that help people to figure out what kinds of things they need to do to use their computers.

The other thing that we do is we’ve got a lot of white papers. Why we don’t use any other color paper, I don’t know. But they like to have a lot of technology discussions or discussions of services. Those things attract an awful lot of links because they are really kind of giving away some of the secrets and some of the inside workings of some of our products and services work. When you do that, you find that you get a lot more people linking to it.

I don’t think things from IBM are going to go viral because it’s just not a consumer market and it’s not the kind of thing that’s going to work that way. But I think within their own market segments, they become very widely known.

I’m not sure that you’ll always need examples of hits. I think a lot of what you need to do is to just do basic walking and tackling. One of the things we did a couple of months ago, is to put big and del.icio.us buttons on a lot of our content pages because it’s just making it that much easier to highlight it for the next person.

So it’s great if you have the kind of campaign that Blendtec does when they say, “Will it blend, ” and you have people all over the place talking about what you’re doing. It’s terrific; you ought to try for that kind of thing in certain kinds of markets. But a lot of what you can do is just very basic stuff that allows all of your messages to be easier to pass along because that’s the thing about the Web is if you look at the whole social media marketing approach, it’s really how do you get word of mouse. How do you get people to pass along everything that you have to say so that it amplifies everything you do?

That is, to me, in some ways more important than trying to find something that goes viral which is very, very hit or miss.

Stephan: So the social networks are really gaining in popularity. Of course, there are the major ones, MySpace and Facebook, but I keep hearing about new ones all the time. Catch up is a new one I just heard about a couple of weeks ago. I just can’t even keep track of them all anymore. How does IBM play in the space of social networks. You mentioned putting big and del.icio.us buttons but that’s just like a baby step, right? So does IBM have a presence in any of these social networks?

Mike: A lot of our consultants are in Facebook and LinkedIn. I think that for kind of a personality based sale, like, “I would like to hire this consultant,” I think those kinds of things make a lot of sense for IBM. But I’m not sure social networks make sense for all marketers. I think that there are a lot of things in social media that can make sense. I think that we’ve got a big presence in Second Life. It’s not just to be there just to be there. It’s that we want to make sure that we are delivering value so we’ve delivered virtual conferences that way where you can actually interact with experts.

I also see private virtual worlds popping up, where there are companies that will now host an event for you. It’s kind of like Second Life meets WebX, where they have all that kind of 3D Avatar like experience that you get from Second Life but they also have all the control and metrics and lead generation and follow up that you can get from WebX.

So I think you need to look at what the technologies are that are coming out and really see how they fit into your marketing strategy. I don’t think you just jump on these things just to say you’re in them. I think experimenting is good and trying something out to see if it works is a great idea. I mean that’s what “Do It Wrong Quickly” is all about but I also think that are too many people that are feeling stressed. It’s like, “Oh no, another social network started. What do we do now?”

I think really you need to focus on making sure that you understand what the value is that you’re trying to drive. You can look at each opportunity as it comes along and you can kind of decide, “Well this is the same as those kinds of things. What did we do there? Does it make sense to be in 13 of them or should we only be in three?”

This is no different from what you do in search marketing, for example, where you say, “OK, there’s a lot of different search engines out there. How many of them do I really want to operate paid search campaigns for?” And it’s not that paid search is good, bad or different, it’s that there’s a limit to how many you go after. I think that’s going to be true for each of these opportunities.

Stephan: That’s great advice. I see that we’re out of time here but I really do appreciate you spending the time with us. Do you have any final parting comments or words of advice?

Mike: I think the biggest advice I’d like to give people is that they shouldn’t feel as though everything that comes along is something that they need to hop on. But they also shouldn’t feel like they need to wait if they see something that really looks like it works. I think people tend to go to one of the two extremes. There are people who seem very optimistic and every time something new comes along, they want to jump into it. I think there are people who tend to be more conservative and so they want to see something prove itself before it happens. What I’d like to get people to do is to kind of be in the middle of that.

The way you can do that is by looking at everything as being feedback based. If you’re always looking for feedback to tell you whether the thing you’re trying is working, then, what you end up with is, you’re not just driven by whatever your personality is of being aggressive or being conservative. You’re driven by what the numbers tell you. I think if you can get to that kind of rational, metrics based decision making, that’s really what the essence of “Do It Wrong Quickly” is about. It’s about trying something, getting the feedback and then quickly changing to something else if it’s not working or when you are trying to improve it.

I think that’s really the thing that is the hardest thing for people to do, especially for marketers. A lot of them have gone into marketing as a refuge from Mathematics, right? English majors deserve a living too. They’ve gone to all this kind of trouble to make sure that they can find a place to be and the problem is that the numbers have found them. I think you then tend to retreat to whatever you’re comfortable with. Rather than looking for your comfort zone, I think you want to derive comfort from getting closer to your customers.

Stephan: That was Mike Moran, distinguished engineer and product manager at IBM, co author of “Search Engine Marketing, Inc” and author of the new book, “Do It Wrong Quickly.” To order his books, or to learn more about search engine marketing, go to his website, www.mikemoran.com.

Thanks, Mike. Appreciate it.

Mike: Thank you, Stephan.

Bryan is also a high profile speaker, author, consultant, and blogger. He is the publisher of Future Now’s award-winning blog and newsletter GrokDotCom. In additional to his role at Future Now, Inc., Bryan is also one of the founders and Chairman of the Web Analytics Association.

Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts’ founder and president, interviewed Bryan about personas and Persuasion Architecture. Read more about how this unique insight into designing customer-specific content will help you understand how to convert views into sales.

What is the basic premise behind personas?

The basic premise, is that everybody does things for their own reasons. You do things for your reasons, I do things for my reasons. Sometimes they are similar, but they are not–usually–the same. However, humans have an operating system, an operating system that we can track back to the time of Aristotle and Socrates, as well as Jung and Meyers-Brigg, that basically segment people into four, different preferences. Typically, those preferences are: emotional, logical, fast-paced, and disciplined or deliberately-paced. Personas are the deepest, richest part most researched part of understanding your customer, but before we can even get to that point, we start with these four, basic personality types called “perspectives.”

Can you give us an example of how these perspectives can be applied to an online retail purchasing experience?

Let’s say we’re on a page that sells DVD movies and there are four, basic personality types shopping on your site. You’ve got the spontaneous personality type, the fun-loving person who is real hip, real stylish. What do you think they’re looking for when they’re buying movies? They’re going to look for latest releases, what’s coming soon–again, “What’s in style?” You then have your more humanistic personality type, who cares more about relationships, families and romance. What are some of the types of things that you think they might be looking for on a DVD category page? Some of the genres, but also the “top-sellers” or the movies with the best reviews because they care about the social aspect of things. Your methodical purchasers, they’re usually the ones who say, “You know what? I want to drill down and I want to navigate by genre.” They really want to get more detail-oriented than either the spontaneous or the humanistic. Finally, you have your competitives who come in and know exactly what they’re looking for–they just want to come in and get it.

With multiple perspectives eventually leading to different types of personas, should retailers offer one type of content to customers?

You can’t expect, especially in the web — which is such a self-service environment — to design and prepare content that only satisfies one of those types. Fundamentally, the web is a way for people to gather research and then make decisions. By understanding these preferences, for how the different types of people prefer to do that (make decisions), you can use these perspectives to figure out what needs to be on the page or throughout the whole experience to get them to take that next action.

From there, we can go ahead to build up a little bit to understand where these perspectives are in the buying cycle. Are they earlier in the buying cycle; are they later in the buying cycle? How does it relate to what your products are? And we can actually create what we call “profiles,” which is basically a little paragraph, a little picture to give us a little better understand of who that grouping or that mode of behavior is going to be—and then ultimately two personas.

It helps you from everything to “how to develop content” to “What type of content should I offer?” Other questions you might ask are: “Should the content be developed as a blog post? Should the content be developed as a video or a podcast?”

Once you understand who your different personas are, you can get a much richer understanding of “how to deliver to the ultimate visitor” of what they need and how they need to buy it.

What challenges does the typical online retailer face when trying to reach different personas?

The average online conversion rate for a typical retailer today is 2.4% percent. That’s pretty sad when you consider that there are plenty of retailers who are in the high teen-to-twenty percent conversion rate. The biggest challenge is two-fold. They are not necessarily meeting the needs of the customer, in terms of the information gathering that the customer needs. Part of the biggest challenge is also that a lot of retailers are depending upon a lot of the wrong technologies to solve marketing problems. Technologies can certainly assist with marketing problems–but they don’t solve them.

How can persuasion architecture help abandon rates?

Persuasion architecture is based on three, simple questions: Who is it that we’re speaking to? What action do we want them to take? And then ultimately, why should they take that action? Or, what is the information that they need to feel confident to take that action?

If you look at web analytics and look through some of the reports, take a close look at “abandonment rates” (where people exited the sites). Let’s revisit the DVD page example. Say, you go ahead and you get to the category page, where you click on a couple of places and eventually you abandon. Now, most times this action will get attributed to the fact that you were on a product page when, in fact, the cause of the abandonment actually happened at the category page level–although they went searching around afterward to see if they could find something.

The job of a category page is to answer those three questions I asked earlier. For each of the different types of perspectives, profiles or personas on your website, what is the job or responsibility of the category page? The responsibility of the category page is to help you find that right product for you. The challenge is, “What information do they need in order to find that right product?”

]]> http://www.netconcepts.com/bryan-eisenberg-interview/feed/ http://www.netconcepts.com/rei-case-study/ http://www.netconcepts.com/rei-case-study/#comments Sat, 16 Jun 2007 02:01:09 +0000 Netconcepts Case StudiesCopywritingLink BuildingSEOWebsite Audits http://www.netconcepts.com/rei-case-study/

• 200% gain from overall natural search sales
• More than a 250% gain in "non-branded" keyword natural search sales
• Achieved full indexing in Google
• Measurable natural search traffic and natural search sales increase
• Website visibility increased by 1000%.

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Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) is a leading retailer of specialty outdoor equipment and clothing, with revenues reaching close to $1 billion a year. REI is also seen as a leader in multi-channel strategies, offering a consistent sales and brand experience to their members and customers — whether through the 70+ retail stores, REI.com, or their catalog business.

Problem

While REI.com had developed a successful online store, they knew their limited search engine visibility represented a key missed opportunity to drive additional traffic and sales. REI.com didn’t rank well in search engines for many of its top products and the majority of its web pages and products weren’t getting indexed, resulting in greatly reduced visibility. UJ Cha of REI Online said: “it was a problem we wanted to address right away”.
While REI has a great range of products, its website suffered from several problems that were causing many of these products to never appear in search engine indices. The dynamic URLs that were used across REI’s online catalog were a big part of the problem, resulting in the site never being fully spidered. Their natural search visibility problem was compounded by small but significant issues with page titles, site structure, page content and link text, for example.
Understanding they had a problem, REI chose to work with Netconcepts to address its natural search challenges.

Solution

Netconcepts produced an audit report on REI’s website listing the problems and making recommendations on how to optimize the site. Realizing that this task involved a significant amount of work, REI engaged Netconcepts to help make the changes. We began by simplifying the URLs to make them more accessible to search bots and then worked on refining the REI site. As UJ Cha states, “The site in general needed optimizing for search engines” and work was undertaken to ease navigation, focus on keywords and make the site more search engine friendly.
Along the way Netconcepts took the time to help REI’s staff learn more about SEO best practices. As REI changes and updates their website, this training will help them keep REI.com search engine optimal. Netconcepts continues to work with REI to assist with seasonal keyword targeting and further SEO refinement.

Results

UJ Cha comments: “Netconcepts’ work has been very helpful, so far we have been very happy with all the work we have done together in 2004. We have been able to achieve full indexing in Google and we have had a measurable natural search traffic and sales increase.”
UJ Cha continues; “We received more than a 200% gain from overall natural search sales and more than a 250% gain in “non-branded” natural search sales since the start of the engagement with Netconcepts. Having a successful natural search strategy nicely complements our already successful paid search campaigns”.
In fact, the full indexing by Google means thousands of REI’s products are now visible to web consumers that were never visible before. REI’s site visibility has increased by 1000%, increasing overall natural search sales.
“We have decided to renew our contract with Netconcepts for 2005. Netconcepts has opened our eyes, not just on the importance of many of these elements but on specifically how to implement best practices.”

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]]> http://www.netconcepts.com/rei-case-study/feed/ http://www.netconcepts.com/figleaves-case-study/ http://www.netconcepts.com/figleaves-case-study/#comments Tue, 12 Jun 2007 03:28:23 +0000 Netconcepts Case StudiesCopywritingEcommerceLink BuildingSEOWebsite Audits http://www.netconcepts.com/figleaves-case-study/

• 40% increase in natural search traffic
• Page 1 Google Rankings for their 3 most important keywords
• Indexation has risen over 15% across Google, Yahoo, and MSN
• More than doubled number of back-links

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figleaves.com, is the global leader of multi-brand intimate apparel etailers. The figleaves.com website features 250 brands and more than 30,000 items of lingerie, swimwear, sleepwear, activewear, menswear and hosiery. Brands range from designers such as La Perla and Andres Sarda to basic Playtex and Wacoal. Additionally, figleaves.com provides quality service to over 70 countries worldwide.

Challenge:

After establishing a headquarters in the United States, figleaves.com came to the realization that if they wanted to compete in the global market, they would need an expert SEO company. They had already engaged another search marketing company to help them with aspects of SEO, but figleaves.com wasn’t reaping the benefits that they expected and were starting to experience a decline in natural search traffic. figleaves.com was seeing moderate traffic for a variety of keywords but not seeing the natural search conversion they expected. They wanted to increase natural search traffic to the most relevant pages without making visitors dig through pages of results.

Solution:

Knowing the reputation of Netconcepts and the work of their president, Stephan Spencer, figleaves.com chose to consult with Netconcepts to complete a Natural Search Audit of their E-Commerce site. “Netconcepts’ audit process showed us all the areas of our site that needed attention, and helped us understand how to prioritize them to achieve a search optimized site,” stated Richard Brooks, Search Manager at figleaves.com. Netconcepts prescribed an initial focus on resolving structural barriers like URL structure, linking, and navigation before moving on to content optimization and other SEO tactics. “Netconcepts really helped us to clarify what our priorities should be,” stated Richard Brooks. “Netconcepts’ expert analysis and prioritization of our SEO issues helped us rally the support we needed in our organization to make some real SEO progress.”

Results:

Netconcepts provided the SEO methodology and program structure figleaves.com lacked internally to fully capitalize on their natural search potential. Within the first months of implementing Netconcepts’ recommendations, figleaves.com had already experienced a 40% increase in their natural search traffic. “We now rank on page one on Google for three of our most important keywords: “swimwear,” “underwear,” and “bras,” stated Richard Brooks. One of the most important influences in increasing rankings is the acquisition of back-links. Already, figleaves.com has more than doubled their number of back-links. Indexation alone has risen over 15% across Google, Yahoo, and MSN to top 300,000. Ed Bussey, Senior Vice President and Head of figleaves.com US had this to say, “We got great buy-in during our discussions and have seen great results from your recommendations. When we want to improve our SEO strategy further, we will come back to Netconcepts.”

]]> http://www.netconcepts.com/figleaves-case-study/feed/ http://www.netconcepts.com/toby-bloomberg-interview/ http://www.netconcepts.com/toby-bloomberg-interview/#comments Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:46:23 +0000 Stephan Spencer Cool Friends http://www.netconcepts.com/toby-bloomberg-interview/ Diva Marketing Blog is both an insightful marketing resource and a fun read. Through her company, Bloomberg Marketing, where she is president, Toby helps clients develop integrated marketing plans that utilize interactive tactics such as blogs, podcasts, video, and social media. Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts' founder and president, had the pleasure of interviewing good friend Toby recently via email. Here's what Toby had to say about blogs, social media, and more...]]> A-list blogger Toby Bloomberg is a leading light when it comes to business blog and social media strategy. Her popular Diva Marketing Blog is both an insightful marketing resource and a fun read. Through her company, Bloomberg Marketing, where she is president, Toby helps clients develop integrated marketing plans that utilize interactive tactics such as blogs, podcasts, video, and social media. Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts’ founder and president, had the pleasure of interviewing good friend Toby recently via email. Here’s what Toby had to say about blogs, social media, and more…

The podcast of this interview is now available.

1. There is a lot of commentary in the blogosphere about what a company can do with a blog. They can build relationships with their constituents, put a face to the company and appear more human, build up a network of relationships with influencers, etc. etc. What would be some examples of really innovative things that companies have done with blogs? Feel free to include examples that you have worked on personally.

This is a great time to jump into the world of social media. Although the culture of social media dictates the ground rules: honesty, transparency and authenticity the rest is up to you. Who would have thought that publicly writing a book in the middle of a fish blog bowl would result not in stolen ideas but in a more powerful book? http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/

(Blogger disclosure: I’m profiled in the chapter, Consultants Who Get It)

Or how about involving the readers of a blog to help design its look and feel? The skin of my blog, Diva Marketing, was created “on-blog.” Peter Flaschner, The Blog Studio, and I posted comps and asked our readers for feedback. The end result was a look and feel that was influenced by the people who felt that they had a vested interest in the blog.

Multiple author blogs are not unusual but two companies are putting a different spin on the idea. Mayfield Dairy’s blog includes people from Scotty Mayfield, the CEO to Jan Montgomery, an administrator assistant. GourmetStation’s blog Delicious Destinations also includes several bloggers; however, the authors are not employees. These guest bloggers are a wine consultant, owner of a Tuscan B&B, a customer who loves to travel and a British butler. Each writes about a subject that is ‘on topic’ with the focus of the blog: to provide entertaining information on food, gift giving, entertaining and culture.

(Blogger disclosure: Mayfield Dairy and GourmetStation are clients)

Not a blog but a podcast. MOMASF will give you $2 off the admission price if you download its “ArtCasts”(podcast) on to your MP3 player. Now that is innovation that drops directly to the bottomline!

2. From a marketer’s perspective, where do social networking sites fit into the picture? What sites are important from a marketing perspective and how do you suggest a company get involved in those communities?

I see social networking sites, or communities that are “mashed-up” with functionality for online idea exchange, as the immediate future of online mass interaction. Not unlike data mining consumer generated media, from a marketer’s perspective, identifying niche communities should be part of a marketer’s listening and learning strategy for new ideas and concerns of a targeted segment.

However, unlike pulling data from all over the internet, the conversations are usually focused on the specific niche topics. If a company sponsors/owns a social networking community the CGM data can be overlaid with member profiles providing exceptionally rich informal customer feedback … a peek into trends, product/service usage, and testing new concepts.

Even if marketers don’t participate actively, dropping by the “old standbys” like MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube should be part of an intelligence strategy. I’d also suggest identifying a couple of communities within niches of interest, as well as, keeping an eye on three D communities like Second Life.

More frequently I find that I’m asked how to find social networking communities. It’s more than a challenge to locate them. There seems to be a great opportunity for a new type of search engine that will track and index these new communities.

3. What should a company commit resource-wise to blogging and to social networks? What sort of activities, the hours per week required, and what sort of budget? Presumably some of it will be done internally and some of it will be outsourced. What do you recommend outsourcing? And what do you recommend keeping in house?

This question begs for the “marketing response” – It depends. It depends on your company’s social media strategy goals and objectives. It depends on your company’s financial status. It depends on your company’s human resources.

Unless you’re building a complex social networking community, the fiduciary investment is affordable for any business. Blog platforms range from free to several thousand dollars including setup and graphic design.

Where the investment becomes more substantial is in human resources. The time it takes to maintain a blog is a function of the goals and objectives. For example, if your ambition is to be the Go To Place for an industry that changes frequently, such as high tech, posting short clips 10 times a day might not be unreasonable. However, if your end game is to be positioned as a thought leader, a couple of longer posts a week might be sufficient to achieve your outcome.

Once marketers began to understand that blogs could support strategic objects through conversations and value-added content concepts for business blogs exploded: character blogs, event blogs, CEO blogs, topic blogs. “Traditional” blogs that provide customers with a better understanding of a company or humanizing the organization, as well as blogs that focus on customer or tech information should be written by a people involved with the organization, typically employees. Take a look at Bill Marriott’s blog for an example or a CEO blog that is humanizing a Fortune 500 corporation.

However, blogs that concentrate on only a “topic” could be out sourced if there were not internal people resources to dedicate to the initiative. Freight & Shipping is an example of a blog that focuses on providing content about shipping but doesn’t offer insights into the organization. The goal is not to create community but to leverage the blog as a search optimization tactic while still providing customers with information about shipping and the company’s services.

Other services that can be easily out sourced include monitoring the conversation of consumer generated media and developing blogger relations programs.

4. I don’t think it is in dispute that bloggers are influencers / connectors / mavens / sneezers. Whatever we want to call them, they are really important people for a marketer to reach. What would be some clever ‘outside-the-square’ sort of ways of reaching these bloggers?

Social media is a different philosophy from that of traditional media. Bloggers, unlike reporters, do not want to be ‘pitched’ … they want to be part of an on-going collaboration or partnership. To engage successfully with bloggers entails more than a tradition main stream media release.

Instead of sending random emails (that may or may not ever see the light of a post) to hundreds of bloggers I suggest developing a blogger relations program. It may be more labor intensive than a mail blast or even a Web 2.0 media release that includes photos, links and video. However, if you identify blogggers who write and care about your niche and involve them in an on-going relationship you create win-win-win situations. Win for the blogger. Win for the blogger’s readers. Win for you/your company/your clients.

5. You are a strong proponent of blogging as a marketing activity and, of course, you practice what you preach using your blog to help soft sell your own marketing consultancy. How has that worked out for you? What were some of the biggest lessons along the way? Any mistakes that you learned from along the way as well?

My blog has become my most significant marketing strategy. High search rankings on key words like marketing blog, have resulted in new clients, speaking engagements, interviews with main stream media and opportunities to partner with people that I would never have met if it were not for blogging. I have been quoted in BusinessWeek Online, Wall Street Journal, Inc and other business publications. One might say that blogging has brought me my 15-minutes of fame. In addition the global relationships and friendships (yes real friendships!) developed through/because of Diva Marketing Blog have been invaluable and most I could not have made any other way than through social media interactions.

I’ve learned the world of social media does not stand still for even a nano second. That there are new widgets, gadgets and people coming on the scene daily. I’ve seen that it’s possible for a new blogger, who understands how to play the game, to catapult to a highly visible position and build traffic through community linking.

I’ve learned that blogging can be more time consuming that anticipated especially if you don’t have a plan. Blogs are hungry beats that demand constant attention.

I’ve learned that if bloggers don’t like what you’re up to they will let know… well not you personally … but the world at-large. The GourmetStation character blog was considered edgy and advent guard at the time of its launch in 2005. The business blogosphere flames threw us a curve ball; however we knew the strategy was right for the brand. We consistently demonstrated honesty, transparency and persistence and eventually even our eventually admitted that we were right in our approach.

I’ve learned that blogging is the ultimate in relationship marketing and by the way it’s fun!

]]> http://www.netconcepts.com/toby-bloomberg-interview/feed/ http://www.netconcepts.com/neil-patel-interview/ http://www.netconcepts.com/neil-patel-interview/#comments Tue, 13 Feb 2007 06:52:05 +0000 Stephan Spencer Buzz MarketingCool FriendsLink Building http://www.netconcepts.com/neil-patel-interview/ Search Engine Strategies, PubCon, and the AMA's Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing. In this interview with our founder and president Stephan Spencer, Neil shares his thoughts on the best social media sites, how to gain traffic and visibility on them, and much more...]]> Neil Patel is a leading practitioner of social media optimization, the new art of weilding tools, strategies, and influence for the purpose of gaining visibility on social media networks and websites like Digg.com, del.icio.us, reddit, NewsVine, Netscape.com, MySpace and even Wikipedia. Neil was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal as one of the top influencers on Digg. You may have heard Neil speak at conferences such as Search Engine Strategies, PubCon, or the AMA’s Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing. His blog Pronet Advertising is one of our favorites on the topic of social media — a “must read”.

We’re proud to call Neil one of our “Cool Friends.” Here he is being interviewed by our founder and president Stephan Spencer…

What are the most important social media sites in your opinion? And why?

There is no particular social site that I feel is more important than another. They are all important because of the varying audience that uses each social site. For example people into politics use Netscape while people into technology use Digg. Because of this it is important to keep an open mind about all of the social sites.

Which ones are the easiest to manipulate, in other words to raise your content to the top?

I have not tried to manipulate any social sites, but it seems the less popular ones like Furl and My Web are easier to manipulate because they have less sophisticated algorithms. Once they become more popular and start becoming abused more it will become increasingly difficult to manipulate these sites due to the growth of their algorithms. When it comes to social media marketing, the idea is not to manipulate the social sites; it is to add value for users by creating compelling content that they are interested in.

What is the traffic potential if you manage to get to the front page of Digg.com, or to the del.icio.us popular page, or any other site that you recommend?

The traffic that Digg drives once a story hits the homepage can vary quite a bit. I have seen some stories get only a few thousand visitors and some have received as much as 20 thousand to 30 thousand visitors.

Del.icio.us on the other hand does not drive as much as traffic as Digg, but if you get on the popular and hotlist page you can usually get a few thousand visitors.

Some of the other sites that also drive great traffic are Reddit, Netscape and StumbleUpon. With each of these, traffic levels could be as low as a few hundred visitors and as high as 10 or 20 thousand visitors. For most social websites, traffic mainly depends on the time of day the story hits the homepage and the topic of the story.

What are some of the more clever examples of companies achieving a high level of visibility on some of these sites?

One clever example that comes to mind is a “Geek’s Guide to Getting in Shape: 13 Surefire Tips” because it did really well on the social sites and was not really related to the topic of the website.

Some of the other companies that achieve great success from these sites are all the web 2.0 sites that try to get on the homepage right when they launch.

If alpha geeks are the primary users of Digg.com, and they are not your target audience, is there still value in achieving a front page story on Digg?

There is still some value of reaching the homepage of Digg because a few of those visitors may love your site. In most cases if your target market is not tech geeks you should look at other social sites that your target audience uses. Getting on any of these can help increase your traffic, readership, branding, and links.

If it is about the links that you get out of it, what is a typical outcome in terms of the number and quality of the links obtained?

When most people judge the amount of links these social sites drive they use Yahoo. Rand Fishkin and a few others have seen up to 2000 backward links every time a story gets on the homepage of sites like Digg. Personally, I prefer using Technorati to check backward links and based on their estimates, you can usually see between 40-200 links for every successful story.

]]> http://www.netconcepts.com/neil-patel-interview/feed/ http://www.netconcepts.com/cnetnews-press/ http://www.netconcepts.com/cnetnews-press/#comments Fri, 02 Feb 2007 15:58:50 +0000 Netconcepts CopywritingPressSEO http://www.netconcepts.com/cnet-news/ Elinor Mills, author for CNET News.com discusses the effect of SEO on newspapers and the websites those newspapers maintain. It may not be a new concept to us but those folks working with the print medium have not had to worry about SEO, until now.

Headlines are a primary focus for print marketers. “Good” headlines can catch the reader’s attention and pull them into the article. However, “good” happens to be in the eye of the beholder. Clever and witty headlines may catch reader’s attention but search engines are not so easily persuaded.

In this article, Netconcepts Founder and President, Stephan Spencer, is sought out for his SEO and content optimization expertise. “The headline itself doesn’t necessarily have to be modified if you know how SEO works,” stated Spencer.

Read this entire article and learn how to find your happy medium between catchy and functional copywriting.

]]> http://www.netconcepts.com/cnetnews-press/feed/ http://www.netconcepts.com/alan-rimm-kaufman-interview/ http://www.netconcepts.com/alan-rimm-kaufman-interview/#comments Tue, 31 Oct 2006 04:09:41 +0000 Stephan Spencer Cool FriendsPaid Search http://www.netconcepts.com/interview-with-paid-search-expert-alan-rimm-kaufman/ It is a privilege to count among our “Cool Friends” Alan Rimm-Kaufman, who leads the paid search marketing agency Rimm-Kaufman Group.

Alan gets around. He’s a regular speaker at SES, DMA Annual, ACCM, Shop.org, eTail, NEMOA, and DMD NY conferences. He writes the internet retailing column for Catalog Success. He’s quoted in the media, including Business Week, and The New York Times. And he’s a Fellow at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce and guest lectures there.

Alan wasn’t always agency-side. Prior to founding his firm, he was the VP of Marketing at Crutchfield, where he helped grow Internet revenues over 450% to $80 million in 2002 and helped earn Crutchfield “best of the web” commendations from Time Magazine, Internet Retailer, BizRate, Forbes, US News & World Report.

So this is what Alan had to say in an interview with me (Stephan Spencer, founder and President of Netconcepts):

What are the biggest problems facing online retailers in relation to paid search? Is it click fraud or something else? And how does one effectively deal with that problem?
The biggest challenge (and opportunity) facing retailers in Paid Search is complexity and the speed of innovation. The industry is changing so quickly — new ad formats, new engines, new platforms, new feeds, new pricing — every week brings new innovations, more options, more complexity. Google raised the bar when it comes to rapid innovation. Retailers and agencies alike need to scramble every week to keep up.

And I don’t see this trend slowing — if anything, it may be accelerating. If you’re into thinking about future, check out Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. While Kurzweil is writing about technology as a whole, I think his core observation — that the rate of change itself is speeding up — applies fully to online e-commerce and online advertising. Expect to see as much innovation in the next 2 years as we experienced in the last five.

Great point. I love Kurzweil’s writings and have warned those who will listen of the rapidly accelerating rate of change. Now, what are a couple of examples of common mistakes that companies make when they enter into the paid search arena and what are a couple of examples of mistakes that seasoned companies make?

Typical mistakes made by newcomers to paid search include using an insufficiently large term list, not understanding the strengths and limitations of their tracking systems, not customizing copy to match the search phrase, not having a firm grasp of their online acquisition economics, and not bidding wisely.

Typical mistakes made by more experienced search marketers include not separating their brand from their non-brand results in reporting and bidding; not understanding the (non)incremental value of their affiliate programs; mishandling dayparting; and overbidding on broad generic terms.

Can you describe an ‘Aha!’ moment you had, something that was like a paradigm shift for you?

I enjoyed (and recommend) John Battelle’s book, The Search. I think Battelle’s “Database of Intentions” concept is critically important to us as marketers, but also to us all as citizens. I had an “Aha” moment when I spent some time surfing leaked AOL search logs. Those logs show first-hand the tremendous power of click streams to track and understand our individual and collective thinking. Search is an amazing technology, a total paradigm shift for advertising and for society.

You have a pretty interesting scientific background that includes complex mathematics. Can you tell me how that comes into play with what you are doing now? I know, for example, we have had some stimulating discussions about graph theory and how that relates to SEO.

Yes, I happily survived (!) a PhD in optimization and statistics at MIT, ihtfp. That background provided me the mathematical chops to contribute much of statistical & optimization horsepower supporting our bid management platform. I also enjoy collaborating with academics to increase our collective understanding of online marketing. We have some great collaborations going with professors at University of Rochester and University of Santa Clara. I also like working with our team on internal studies (for example, see here). And like all good SEM firms, we do a tremendous amount of ongoing staff training on search, marketing, statistics, and web tech – the teaching perspective I picked up while serving as a graduate teaching assistant come in handy.

Describe a huge win that you have recently achieved for a client.
This year we helped a Fortune 500 retailer nearly double their tracked direct sales from PPC while simultaneously increasing their ad efficiency by 28%. We’re managing about 250k active terms for them, spending about $250k/month non-peak. Going in, we knew they weren’t advertising efficiently and were certain we could really increase their efficiency and profits. We didn’t expect our efforts would drive top line as well. Very happy client, happy agency.

Can you describe the significance of the initiative you started with standardizing shopping search feed formats? That is a pretty important initiative and I am sure our readers would love to learn more about it and where things are at.

I got really fed up with the comparison shopping engine mess last year. Why do these engines all require almost identical data in different formats? Why don’t they support Unicode and foreign characters? Why do they make extracting detailed cost data (by URL, by day) so difficult, frustrating retailers seeking to optimize their campaigns? Working with the great folks at ARTS and the NRF, along with representatives from the engines, agencies, and retailers, we’ve crafted three feed formats to simplify this whole situation. The specs were released earlier this month and we’re starting to get some traction. More here, get involved!

You used to work client-side for Crutchfield.com. How has that helped you be more effective on the agency-side now?

Great question! I still feel like a retailer, even though I’m wearing a vendor hat these days. My retailer background (VP Marketing, Crutchfield) taught me what it means to have to make every ad dollar pay. It also taught me what I liked and disliked about client-vendor relationships. At our firm we’ve tried to adopt all the “likes” and avoid all the “dislikes”. We take a retailer-friendly approach: high transparency, easy-out contracts, fair and straightforward pricing, no commissioned sales people, etc. I don’t think I’d have that view if I hadn’t been on the other side of the desk for five years.

]]> http://www.netconcepts.com/alan-rimm-kaufman-interview/feed/ http://www.netconcepts.com/gerry-mcgovern-interview/ http://www.netconcepts.com/gerry-mcgovern-interview/#comments Tue, 03 Oct 2006 19:31:57 +0000 Stephan Spencer Cool FriendsCopywritingWeb Marketing http://www.netconcepts.com/gerry-mcgovern-interview/ Gerry McGovern is one of the foremost experts on website content. His books Content Critical and The Caring Economy are definitive. Gerry is one of our “Cool Friends” and was interviewed recently by Netconcepts’ founder and president Stephan Spencer.

I have had the privilege of reviewing Gerry’s upcoming book Creating Killer Content; It is unquestionably one of the best books I have read on writing copy for the web — accessible yet packed with practical advice. Gerry knows how to bring together disparate concepts and weave them into a cohesive strategy, including readability, usability, search engine visibility, conversion and online sales.

Gerry has pioneered a powerful technique for online marketers called Customer Carewords. His clients who have used this technique successfully read like a Who’s Who: Rolls Royce, BBC, Wells Fargo and Tetra Pak.

Gerry is an incredibly entertained public speaker with an enchanting Irish accent. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing him speak live in person and via webcast. As a professional speaker and a consultant, Gerry sells his time at many thousands of dollars per day, which I can say in all candor is an excellent investment. I have been a long-time reader of Gerry’s weekly email newsletter “New Thinking.” Each issue delivers hard-hitting advice. Subscribe here.

Without any further ado, my interview with Gerry McGovern…

What is the biggest mistake that companies make in regards to their website content?
Thinking that customers care one little bit about the company. Customers care about themselves (their loved ones and their community). They hate websites that are organization-centric. How do you know if you have an organization-centric website? If any of your sentences or headings begin with the name of your organization. Stop talking about yourself. The customer knows who you are. They’re at your website, for crikes sakes. There’s a big, fat logo at the top of the page screaming out your name. You’ve already got their attention. Now it’s time to give them some attention.

What’s the best way to be customer-centric? Talk about benefits. Use second person–YOU. Paint a picture for the customer. Speak their language. Use their words. Stand where they stand, feel what they feel. Forget you’re part of the organization and think like the customer.

You ran an agency with over 100 staff. You have also been a solo consultant. What was the greatest lesson that you have learned from each of those two experiences?
The first lesson I learned was that I should have cashed out earlier. I was part of the whole dot com craze and had a company valued at $200 million at one stage. 12 months later it went bust. Seriously, what did I learn? Patience and focus. I’m a slow learner. I make a lot of mistakes, but I’m persistent. Sometimes I hate to learn so I have to work hard to keep my mind open. I think you need a long term plan. Even in an age of major change I still think you need a vision.

When I started on the Web around 1994, I felt that content was going to be really important. I stuck with that idea, and began to research how to create quality web content. It may sounds obvious now, but it was hard to sell the quality content concept during the Nineties. So many people bought into the idea that all you needed was some content management software and that then–magically–quality content would get produced. Without any management. And with little or no cost. Doesn’t happen that way.

Who are the people who most influenced you in your career choice?
I don’t mean to sound arrogant but I was pretty much self-motivated because I had to be. I come from a very rural part of Ireland. The idea of going to college was pretty new around where I lived. I chose marketing, and I really didn’t have a clue what it meant but I knew that it sounded different.

Peter Drucker would be a major influence now. He wrote in such a simple, clear manner, and he was so incredibly insightful. One quote I keep coming back to from him is that we have spent the last 50 years focusing on the T in IT, and we’ll spend the next 50 years focusing on the I.

Why have you dedicated yourself career-wise to website content? What is so special about that, that it has become your passion?
I always wanted to be good at something. I think someone once said that they had failed their way to success, and I certainly feel like that. There were so many things I found I wasn’t that good at–or that I found that I couldn’t really excel at. However, all along I was–in one way or another–working with content. And when I saw the Web the first time, it looked like this World Wide Web of Content. And it also was this huge opportunity. It was new. It was vast. It still is full of the smell of adventure. And I liked that. So I got up on my horse and headed out West to the new lands that content was building.

There is so much content on the web already. I get stressed surfing the web trying to keep up with the blogs in my industry because there is so much content. It is just exploding. The content is already out of control. Our brains can’t take it. Where is this all heading?
It’s a good question. I’m reading a book at the moment on how the mind works. It estimates that we are exposed to 11,000 bits of information a second, but that we are only conscious of 40 of them. (The word ‘bit’ being a technical measure of information.) Whatever the measure is, we’re exposed to a lot more today that we were 10 years ago.

But I think we’ll be fine. We’re going through a period of flux now as we move from an industrial age society to an information age one. The essence of what we need to know remains reasonably stable, in my opinion. Wisdom is not about volume. Quality does not always come with quality. There are long term trends at play. There are core patterns beneath the hum of noise.

First and foremost, we need to manage the content, not be managed by it. We have to stop being email slaves. Being constantly busy is not productive, and it’s certainly not good management. We need to focus more now on what we’re not going to do, on whose blog we’re going to stop reading this week because they’re repeating themselves. And ironically, in an age of content we need to get out more and talk to people–particularly our customers.

Consultants often talk of going after the “low hanging fruit” — the easy stuff that yields the biggest impact. What do you think is the lowest hanging fruit for companies with an online presence today in regards to their website content?
That’s a tough question. I think a lot of websites suffer from a belief by management that all the fruit is low-hanging. That if they just buy this fancy technology they get this amazing ladder that makes all the fruit low-hanging. Unfortunately, I think that if you visited a lot of websites today, you’d find a lot of rotting fruit lying around.

Basically, it’s time for management. The Web has been around long enough for a typical organization to be able to answer this question: Has the Web the potential to deliver real value to our organization? For a lot of organizations, the answer will be no. The website will deliver a little value, but will have negligible impact on the bottom line. For some organizations, the Web has the potential to deliver substantial value. And in that situation, it’s time to get serious. Time to manage, not administer.

Quality content is hard work. I’m sorry. I’d love to say otherwise, but it’s just not the case. But quality content can deliver significant return on investment on the Web.

I notice that you haven’t started a blog. Do you think this whole blogging trend really has something to it? Or is it all a bunch of hot air? Do you encourage any of your clients to blog? Is blog content too ephemeral?
You’d never know I might start one yet! In fact, because of your constant prodding, I’m talking with a group of my partners about starting a joint blog. I think blogging is amazing, and such a positive reflection of an open, inquisitive, questioning culture. There will always be a role for the book but the blog is the conversation where the next book might just be born.

Everything in its place. Let’s not get carried away. Blogging is a new form of conversation; a rough and ready way to share knowledge. It’s a form of research, a way of getting down and dirty and digging into the roots of an idea. To watch a brilliant thinker and writer blog is very illuminating. But I find that quality blogs–that I can go back to time and time again–are pretty hard to find.

I have so far not encouraged any of my clients to blog. Most of my clients–and they include some very large organizations–are still mastering the basics of how to manage content professionally. Blogging may seem simple, but it’s quite a sophisticated strategy, and it requires a very open, sharing culture.

Great content can persuade the reader. What should a company do to convince its website visitors that it is a responsible corporate citizen, one that gives back to the greater community and the greater good?

I buy a lot from Amazon. My sons keep telling me to use play.com because it’s cheaper, but I’m a loyal Amazon customer, and it would take a lot to make me change. The reason I’m a loyal Amazon customer is because I actually genuinely believe that they care about me. Every time I’ve ever had a problem, their response has been simply fantastic–every single time.

There’s so much bullshit in marketing. So many organizations spinning that they love the environment or whatever just as some “branding” exercise. There are organizations out there that I detest because of the way they treat me as a customer. Citizenship begins at home. Organizations should treat their customers right. Show you actually, genuinely care about your customers. If we all did that, I think we’d make society a better place.

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