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3 Digital Marketing Insights Gleaned from Malcom Gladwell

Published October 20th, 2011 Industry, Paid Search, SEO, Social Media No Comments

Malcom Gladwell Portrait by Alex Beck

Last week, I found a great TED talk by one of my favorite non-fiction authors Malcolm Gladwell which really got my digital marketer mind moving. I have enjoyed Malcom Gladwell’s works ever since I read Blink for the first time 6 years ago. While I feel he does gloss over some of the more scientific reasons behind his thoughts, I believe he does a great job illustrating interesting concepts about human psychology and its dramatic effects on our environment. This in my opinion, is what we marketers are trying to do every day. As digital marketers our main goal is to understand our customer’s digital needs and desires in an effort to influence them to purchase or consume our said service, product or content. We spend our days filling the world with fantastic campaigns loaded with wonderfully crafted headlines and magical visuals meant to influence our audiences, but are we being as effective as we could be? Below I will be going over concepts from Gladwell’s books Blink and Tipping Point and his TED talk, pointing out 3 cool insights I feel you can walk away with to increase your success rate as a digital marketer.

While most of you I’m sure have read these books, I will warn you right now, this post contains SPOILERS. If you wish not read these spoilers, I would recommend checking them out at your local library or making the purchase from your favorite book outlet.

1) What can spaghetti sauce and pickles tells us about our audiences?

Here is the video of Malcom Gladwell’s TED talk I mentioned above. If you have some time, I highly recommend watching this whole presentation before reading further.

The first thing I took away form this video is how often I hear the question, “What is the BEST PRACTICE here?” When my client is talking about a specific web page or marketing tactic, and the term “best practices” comes up, I feel it is used in the same way that the Pepsi and Vlasic folks were asking for the “perfect” product for their customers. In my observations marketers and clients are always looking for the “perfect” marketing solution that covers the bases for all of their target audiences. Which in my opinion always leads to muddled concepts and half-assed attempts at speaking to everybody and really never getting through to anybody. Gladwell illustrates in his examples about how there is not a “perfect pickle or spaghetti sauce” that works for everyone, but rather “perfect pickleS and perfect spaghetti sauceS” that work for certain clusters of people. In marketing we already cluster through our target audiences, but often we forget that within in those audiences we have rather different groups of customers.

I have run into this exact phenomenon while I worked at my previous digital design agency and we were debating a fix for the supposed horrendous side navigation. My designer and I who we’re “experts” and understood design best practices felt that the current side navigation design made the page look to cluttered and since there was so much copy that side navigation we felt was almost unusable due to the fact that it was really hard to identify any text at all. As we spent the next hour explaining to the client the virtues of cleaning up the nav, she told us, that in fact they had tried to do this the year before and we’re promptly bombarded with support calls and emails form angry customers who now could not find what they were looking for and how dare the company change the navigation which worked so perfectly before. Like most cocky agency folks, my designer and I were not having it, and we wasted 30 minutes of our client’s precious time trying to persuade her that in fact, the way they tried was not properly executed. Luckily she did not budge, she knew the type of ”pickle” some of her customers liked and no design best practice was going to tell her otherwise. Looking back on this as a more experienced marketer, I would have actually recommended that we run a test where we cookied all previous customers, so that they would always be shown the old side nav and then I would run an A/B test on all the non-cookied visitors testing site interaction and overall conversions for the site to see if a more “best practice” nav performed better if we took out the old customer who likes things the way they are bias out. The takeaways for all of you marketers out there would be; next time you are looking for those best practices that have helped others in the past, take a step back and think about your different audiences and how they are segmented, then ask yourself, am I using the right “pickles”?

2) Getting the “buy-in” that matters

In the book Blink, Gladwell looks at how some very trained professionals can make some extraordinarily big, seemingly calculated decisions in seconds and be almost 100% accurate. My take away from it, was that people who have been doing things long enough just develop a rhythm with their craft through hours and hours of practice and exposure and literally just “go with their gut.” I think most of us have at least some experience in this, but what about in the marketing world? Sometimes decisions are HUGE and if they end up being wrong and you’re answering to your CEO with your reasoning that “it just felt right”, you probably will be clearing out your desk that afternoon. Usually we are presenting our work unseen by most of the company outside of high level folks who we need “buy in” from. As we prepare our final presentation to the “big-wigs” before final sign-off, have we taken the time to get the real “buy-in”? For most of the companies I have worked with, there are people have been talking and working with the real customers for decades, and while they may not know how to use Mail Chimp or Sales Force, they can tell you know from their gut whether a marketing message or visual is going to resonate with the customers. Personally one of my favorite clients always gave us a creative brief full of insights from her trusted folks in customer service and the folks who actually manufactured the product we were marketing before any concepts had been created. No matter what, we saw great results every time we focused on those specific insights from the brief. By speaking with people who fight the good fight everyday, we can get great feedback in a minimal amount of time. Understandably, we need to respect other people’s time, but I would bet there are a lot of successful marketers who are making time for a quick 5 minute conversation with people at the front lines, like their customer service or engineering folks. I would also bet that an ounce of their insight is worth a pound of their execs. So next time you have that big email campaign to send out, or if you’re going through a site redesign, go talk to those great folks who fight in the trenches day in and day out and see what they have to say.

3) What SEO/SEM tactics can The Tipping Point teach us?

The Tipping Point, the book that brought the buzzwords “stickiness”, “influencer” and “context” into the lexicon of every modern marketer. I’m not sure if this was the first book to explore how trends and epidemics seem to start in small isolated environments and then almost with out warning, go “viral” and spread exponentially throughout a population, but I’m pretty sure this was the first book that modern business folks read in masses. The most obvious insights we can glean from The Tipping Point are around Social Media practices. Now there have been numerous posts and presentations about this topic, so I will not write one more word about it. For those of you interested, here is a great presentation on that very topic- Increasing Social Media ROI using Gladwell Tipping Point Framework by Colleen Carrington.

The key-takeaway I got from the book is for those who dabble in the SEO and SEM space. One concept we can take away as digital marketers from The Tipping Point is the idea of predicting trends by watching the trendsetters. For our clients industries there are key people, blogs and publications that represent these trendsetters. Right now, they are using the new “buzz words” that are going to influence how the general population will start to search for terms in your industry in the next few months or years. By identifying these sources and keeping tabs on this content through through RSS feeds or just your weekly readings, you can start identifying these new keywords. Now what are we going to do with these new keywords? Since we are predicting what will be happening in the future buying these keywords and changing copy on our pages right now would not be the wisest move. What we can do though is use Google Insights to track the popularity of these keywords, so when you begin to see an upward trend this is when to start revising content along with getting the jump on some cheap clicks early in the game. Also, if you use the iGoogle dashboard you can create a gadget for these trended charts to check them out on a daily basis with minimal effort on your part. This simple and straight forward practice can help you start seeing huge gains and make you look like the rock star in your next reporting meeting.

Beyond just Malcolm Gladwell’s works, I’m sure that there is a wealth of knowledge out there as well that we digital marketers would love to apply or own little spin to. I would love to hear from any of you digital marketers, are there are any great not-strictly-marketing focused books or presentations out there that any one would recommend or if you have some other great digital marketing insights you have taken from Gladwell’s works, please let me know in the comments.

SHARE ALL THE THINGS!

Published August 25th, 2011 Analytics, Industry, Social Media No Comments

Two exciting things happened last month in the social sharing space. First, Google released their Facebook killer Google+ and the now ever recognizable +1 share widget. Second, for you fellow Google analytics nerds out there, they made it easier to track all of these share widgets out there with their new social interaction tags. This got me to thinking about sharing as a concept in general. During a digital strategist meetup my good friend Alex C. Williams from Trendline Interactive and I were discussing this topic and how he was trying to increase sharing actions for his client’s email programs. What came out of this conversation was an undeniable fact, 99% of websites and emails have these features, and 99% of them were doing a pretty bad job with them.

As I started my research for this post I began to see what I can only describe as laziness. On most of the sites I visited these poor little widgets looked like they got placed haphazardly somewhere on the page. I could literally see the developer/designer checking it off the “best practices” list. If this is true, then why the hell are there literally billions of dollars being pumped into measuring how many shares, likes, re-tweets, +1’s, karma and all the other verbs people of came up with to describe one simple thought and action – “Hey, I think this content is neat and I bet others would think so too.” Why are there not hundreds of posts about optimizing these features and functions like we do our button Call to actions (CTA’s) and form designs?

Here’s my opinion on it.

The first thing we must do is think about the placement of those widgets. I believe anywhere in the vicinity of the content you wish to share is good. They can be at the top of the article or after the last sentence of your post works to. Now, the second thing… for Christ oh-mighty please put a frickin headline by it to promote ACTION. If you just have “share this” written by the buttons you’re better than some, but we both know that just an extra 2 minutes of copy writing could go a long way. If you stop reading this post now and go do this, I’ll have felt this post a success. If you wish to continue, I’ll give you some examples of some surprising sites who are doing this really bad and others that are doing it just right. For those of you who wish to read the whole thing, I’ll conclude with my personal thoughts on what social widgets I think are necessary and which ones you can throw in the trash.

Example #1 – So bad and you won’t believe what site this is.

This comes from one of the leaders in tech and internet news, and you think they would know better. The first thing we see is that the share buttons for the article are 435 pixels downward from the actual article content and then to put the cherry on it, there’s a giant rule dividing the share section. I’m sure the UX people out here would agree, at least put the damn buttons by the damn content. Without some visual cues, how am I really even know what I’m sharing? Rule number one, put these buttons in context with the actual content. The second major fail is the lack of a headline CTA. Where’s the reason I should share? Why should I click one of these buttons? Rule number two, at least tell me what these buttons are supposed to do. This might be suprising, but this is actually a screenshot from Wired.com. All of their article pages are seriously like this. :(

Example #2 – How can there be so much creative thought put into this blog, but absolutely none into their sharing section?

For this article I asked my good design friend Elliot Olson what some of his favorite design blogs were, and he directed me to Fastcodesign.com. I myself was very impressed with the overall layout and elements. And then I went into a post detail page. Much disappoint ensued. How can they be doing so many things right visually and than when it comes to sharing this beautiful site to the world, this sound is sadly appropriate. Considering the creativity of the content and overall design of the site, I feel this section should be just as cool as every other piece on this site, but it looks like it just got slapped on because there was whitespace available. See what I did there my designer readers? At least they are better than Wired’s buttons and are placed in context of the article.

Example #3 – Now we’re getting somewhere.

I did say earlier that there were a few sites out there doing a good job and the Huffington Post is one of them. While, I would agree the amount of real estate taken in the actual article seems a bit much and the share headline is a bit weak. Take a second to look at how much utility they get out of these boxes, AWESOME! They do an amazing job with 8 ways to share, plus a one-click action email signup…bravo. Notice that this does not end up looking like a Nascar stock car like we see in some sites out there. Designers and developers take note, with a little bit spacing and background colors these pesky buttons can not only look great, but the amount of utility in such a small space can be dramatic. The placement is also great with absolutely no confusion about what article you will be sharing. Huffington post you definitely get my “SHARE ALL THE THINGS AWARD”, nice work.

Example #4 – My personal fave.

Now this last example might not be the best one out there, but I think it illustrates the points I’m trying to make, plus it’s on my favorite analytics blog, Occum’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik . Besides just being overly simple and to the point, it exemplifies what just 2 more minutes thinking about the “headline CTA” can do. Why yes Avinash, I did like this post. Ok, I’ll share it. See, this isn’t hard to do. His placement is also nice, right at the end of the article, no design elements, just a relevent CTA, some buttons and voila. We’ll also give extra points to for having some old school share buttons for the paper pushers out there.

I promised some thoughts on what actual share buttons you should have and what you can throw in the trash, so here it goes. No matter who you are or what your site is about have the big 3 – Facebook’s Like, Google+’s +1, and Twitter’s Re-tweet. They make it so easy to add these buttons and everyone uses at least one of these sites, so stop being lazy and do it. Now comes the hard part, what about all the rest? Is your audience b2b? I would say LinkedIn would be a smart choice. Is your content weird photos in Portland? Perhaps you should have a Stumbleupon button or maybe a reddit link (Digg is dead. Sorry Kevin.). Better yet, look at your data that you collect on your site and see if you historically have gotten referral traffic from one of these sites, if so ADD IT!!! Lastly, for those of you who use Sharethis or Addthis icons, personally I believe these are relics from when we were trying to figure out what this share thing was going to be about. Personally, the metrics I have seen on these being used on sites have been abysmal at best. Last but not least, email sharing. I’m going to get some flack for this, but honestly when was the last time you actually wrote someone an email to share some web content? That’s what I thought. Now let’s go SHARE ALL THE THINGS!

Standing Out In The Noisy World Of Facebook

Published June 1st, 2011 Advertising, Email Marketing, Social Media No Comments

It has been recently discovered that 92% of marketers (SocialMedia Examiner) use Facebook as a marketing tool – this makes it by far the most popular social network among marketers by a wide margin, with Twitter falling in second with an 84% adoption rate. It’s of no surprise that Facebook has begun reaching saturation in its country of origin, as the massive social network now counts just over half the US population as members. So what does this mean for businesses?

For businesses Facebook represents an unprecedented marketing opportunity that transcends traditional middle men who connect companies directly with customers. The only way to benefit from your social media marketing through outlets like Facebook is by standing out in an increasingly noisy world.

When it comes to the consumer behavior, numbers do not get better. According to a new research by digital consultancy Beyond, 23% of consumers prefer receiving information from brands via Facebook, instead of a brand’s website (21%) or company blog (3%). This movement is encouraged by marketers who do not doubt anymore promoting their Facebook page instead of the official site. For example in recently, certain brands such as Orangina and Sony sign their TV commercial with a “facebook.com/nameofthepromotion”. Other brands such and Ben&Jerry have announced they will simply stop emailing, using in the future Facebook newsfeed instead.

Even with minimal time investment, when done properly, your social medial efforts will increase exposure for your business as well as helping you rise in search engine rankings. While Facebook is becoming the biggest relationship marketing tool for brands, it seems like that instead of increasing traffic to the company website, Facebook is actually absorbing it. This leaves marketers across the globe wondering whether their brand websites will disappear and if there will still be a need for an official website in five years.

Does this mean we should start ignoring company websites? Most definitely not! The dependence between Facebook and websites will increase, but especially from a global point of view – there really is life beyond Facebook. Only promoting a product in one social platform decreases the possibilities to reach all the potential audience out there. Most of the world is still not on Facebook and having seen the rise and fall of various hot, “world changing” platforms it would not be the most brilliant idea to kill the only secure place brand has in the Internet – the official webpage.

From SEO perspective, using only Facebook Page would drop search engine results considerably, pushing brand lower in ranking and decreasing amount of quality leads.

It also should not be forgotten that a marketer is still the master of his own website, controlling its structure, organization, design, content, SEO, marketing operations, customer data etc., while Facebook Page is defined…well by Facebook. Do brands really want to become fully dependent on Facebook and its rules, allowing it to control, restrict and have their say on the content, design and campaigns? I do not think so.

To stop the trend, start using Facebook to drive traffic to the official website. For example, create a Facebook competition/campaign which requires going your website, announce you will publish the competition winners in your official website, tell your fans about a special offer they can download from the website etc. It is also possible to integrate e-mail marketing with social media, increasing brand’s own customer database.

Facebook is just another way to promote an official website. More importance you give the platform, less power you have over your own campaigns. Do not let tail wag the dog.

Social Search Just Got Real

Published March 30th, 2011 Industry, SEO, Social Media No Comments

Today, Google rolled out their new +1 feature. The +1 is similar to a Facebook “Like”, but for search. There’s a lot of chatter about Google attempting to compete with Facebook by making search results social, and how much of an influence this will have on search results and user behavior. Here at SwellPath, there are a lot of different views on how this new feature is going to play out and why it may be good or bad for users, advertisers, and websites. Found below are contrary viewpoints on the topic, one on why the +1 is going to make a big splash in the search world and influence users, SEO, and online behavior, and another on why the +1 is going to fizzle out before it really has a chance to get going.

How The +1 Button Is Going to Be Big For Search

by Mike Arnesen
Search Analyst & Strategist at SwellPath and all around web development geek

The +1 button is going to change search, user interaction with results, SEO, and paid search advertising, here’s why:

+1 and SEO

Of course, Google isn’t socializing search just to connect people; they’re doing it to collect more information and deliver better results. So, is the +1 feature relevant to SEO? You bet it is. Just like when Google and Bing announced they were using social signals from Twitter and Facebook as a ranking factor, today’s announcement further inflated social’s value.

Still, when it comes to using +1 to succeed in SEO, how can you optimize user behavior? When it comes down to is, increasing your site’s +1s is entirely in the hands of users. For now, the way to increase +1s requires the same things as traditional SEO: onsite optimization, backlink authority, and (to a lesser extent) management of social signals. All of these factors will help you work your way up the SERPs and that’s what is going to be important in building +1s. Why’s that? A user is much more likely to +1 a result in the top five compared to a result on page three. It follows the same theory as SERP click through rates.

It will be interesting to see how the +1 experiment plays out, but my guess is that it will be extremely beneficial to build +1s to your site. Will Google start using +1s in its algorithm outside of logged in searches in the future? We’ll have to wait and see.

+1 for Webmasters

Similar to Facebook’s “Like” button, Google is planning on rolling out a +1 button for webmasters to include on their pages. This simplifies the whole process of leaving a +1 and puts more control in the hands of webmasters. Once this feature is rolled out, a user who decides they like your website won’t have to navigate away from your site, find you in the SERPs and then +1 you. They can do it all on page.

Like vs. +1

For SEO, the +1 is going to be much more valuable than a Facebook “like”. The Facebook “like” button will send signals to Facebook (to display in profiles and streams) which then has a chance to promote social sharing that Google and other engines can pick up on. With the +1, you’re sending a signal through a direct link to Google. There’s nothing Google has to interpret or rate; the user is telling them explicitly that the page they +1 is a good result.

Why The +1 Button Will Not Have an Impact

by Chris Sullivan
PPC & Media Specialist at SwellPath and general search nerd

In theory, the +1 button does have the potential to transform search, and create more meaningful results for users, however, it will not get enough traction in order to have a significant impact. Here’s why:

Traction With Users

It seems to me that Google is trying to imitate the success and ubiquity of Facebook’s Like, but for search results (which is to some extent already being done through a partnership with Facebook and Bing). There are a few different issues with this. The reason that users Like content on Facebook is because it was posted by people that they already know, that they care about, and that they have chosen to see. The appeal of Liking content across the web is that their built in, pre-existing group of friends will then be able to see this content.

Google lacks this backbone. Because of the massive failure of Google Buzz, people do not have that previously created network of people that they would be +1’ing (is that really what this is going to be called?) a search result or ad to. Without an existing network, the entire appeal of recommending content goes away. For people who do have established networks through Google Accounts there may be an incentive, but I would bet that these networks include many business contacts. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my professional connections to be privy to my search activities and interests.

Searching Has A Purpose

This ties in with the lack of established network I outlined above, but at this point search is an activity that has a purpose. Users search because they want something. They enter the query, click on the result they want, and put Google out of their mind. Whereas on a network like Facebook, users are meant to spend long periods of time, passively clicking through pages, reading updates and comments, and viewing photos and videos.

It is possible that the +1 button will change this behavior by making users want to check and see which pages their connections have +1’ed (again, really?) and that Google could become more of a destination rather than a means by which users find content, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Lack of Integration

Mike outlined how webmasters will eventually be able to add the +1 to their site, so users will be able to +1 content after they click off of Google. Until this feature is released and widespread, I don’t see anyone using +1. At this point Google is expecting users to search, click through, explore the site, and then either run the same query again and +1 the result, or use the back button to return to the SERP. Users simply are not going to do this. If someone were to not go through this process, and to click the +1 before actually clicking through on the search result, this would ruin the entire purpose of the +1. The site that they +1’d may actually be of very poor quality, which is a complete counter to the positive impact this feature could have on search result quality.

Even after the on site integration for the +1, this will continue to be an issue for paid ads. How is a user supposed to know if the ad is +1 worthy before they click through?

How to Get Started With Google +1

Love it or hate it, Google +1 for social search is something to watch in the coming months. Whether or not it catches on and becomes a larger factor in both logged in and logged out search queries and ad serving remains to be seen. Initial reactions aside, we recommend taking Google +1 for a test drive. Let us know what you think.

As of today, Google’s +1 is only available for users through Google.com. The international rollout should follow soon. To opt in, you’ll need to log in to (or create) a Google profile and visit Google Experimental. Find the “+1 button” experiment click “Join this experiment”.

Once you’re opted in, try surfing around the SERPs and test it out. Start by pulling up the websites you love and giving them a +1. It’s also interesting to see who in your circle is already using the feature or if you are totally ahead of the game.

Is Facebook Advertising A Bargain Right Now?

Published February 7th, 2011 Social Media No Comments

Last week I came across a Quora question about whether Facebook advertising is a bargain right now. I thought this presented an interesting jumping off point for a blog post. We feel that Facebook advertising is a bargain for marketers right now, for several reasons. Ultimately this is because the space isn’t very competitive right now. It isn’t competitive for several reasons, and in my answer I listed the primary ones as a misunderstanding of how to use the medium, and failure to optimize campaigns.

There is a perception out there that Facebook advertising “doesn’t work”. There is data to support this – or back up the notion that most marketers aren’t using it right. Webtrends in particular is pumping out some great data on Facebook advertising, some of it suggesting that click-through rates are lower than traditional online display click-through benchmarks. The numbers definitely match up with what we have seen – from campaigns that weren’t well run. We’ve also found that campaigns that are well managed, and focused mainly on social impressions, had much higher click-through rates. This hits on the major differentiator Facebook has – the social graph and access to the interests of everyone in a viewers social circle. Leveraging social impressions (ads served to “Friends of Fans”) is critical to a solid Facebook ad campaign.

Just as critical is having realistic goals. Expecting someone to click-through to an off-Facebook page, and complete some type of conversion goal might be unrealistic, unless it is a very compelling offer. Expecting a Friend of one of your fans to like your ad and page is much more realistic. So, if your immediate business need is to sell widgets through your own ecommerce site, Facebook advertising is probably not the best option place for you to spend your dollars right now. If your objective is to build up a network of people who are interested in your products and your brand, in a medium with which you can communicate to them, then it makes much more sense.

Optimization is simply about having an active campaign that is constantly being refined and tested. Stagnant campaigns flatline on Facebook; active campaigns are rewarded. Being active takes time with Facebook – the interface is not like AdWords, and it is difficult to be efficient. However, using a tool that leverages the API, or simply investing the sweat into Facebook’s interface, is well worth it. Combining this will a well crafted testing and optimization strategy is critical to generating those higher click-through rates that make the medium a bargain.

One final consideration that is important in considering the bargain-factor, is taking into account the long-term or lifetime value of a new Like. Leveraging the Facebook “network” is limited right now, but there are are myriad of opportunities it may present to marketers in the future.

Facebook SEO Now a Reality

Published June 27th, 2010 Industry, SEO, Social Media No Comments

When Facebook announced Open Graph and everything that came along with it I wrote about how I thought Open Graph integration would become part of almost everyone’s websites. I wasn’t explicit about the primary way in which I suspected this would happen, but these were the main questions I had at the time:

1. Would having Open Graph meta data in conjunction with Like buttons become as necessary for sites, from an SEO perspective, as having proper meta descriptions, title tags, and other on-site components of a solid SEO strategy.

2. Would SwellPath need to begin scoping this into our SEO engagements for clients?

In our opinion, the answer to both of these essentially became yes this week. Earlier this week, All Facebook reported on larger sites with Open Graph integration having pages returned in Facebook search results. It is now clear that Facebook will be indexing pages that have Open Graph integration and have been Liked. These are not “Facebook Pages” but actual pages from other domains.

Now when I bring this up to many people, the response is something along the lines of: “well, how many people are going to use Facebook to search the web anyway?” My response to that is pretty simple: how many people thought they would use Google for email in early 2004? Or how many people thought they would use Google for analytics in early 2006? How many people thought they would use Facebook for showing friends their pictures 4 years ago?

You see where I’m going with this: consumers will shift their behavior. I have no doubt that there is at least the potential for many Facebook users to suddenly find it far more convenient to just search from the page their on.

And what about Facebook’s partnership with Bing? Is it possible that Facebook will give Bing access to this data also? That Bing will begin incorporating the “social value” of pages into their results? I don’t see why Microsoft wouldn’t jump on this opportunity if it becomes available. Alternatively, we might see the relationship between Bing and Facebook sunset as Facebook takes on the search industry solo.

Some concerns here revolve around Facebook’s ability to crawl and index. Google, Bing, and Yahoo, have all been doing this for a long time, and have the technological components in place to crawl and index the web at amazing rates. Will Facebook be able to “catch up”? If they can’t, who will be left out? Likely the “little guys”, i.e. the long tail, which is a fundamentally valuable (the most valuable?) component of Google’s search results. My feeling is that technology can be bought for a high enough price; Facebook has been building the technological infrastructure to handle this, and they have been and will continue to hire the appropriate people to lead this initiative.

Bottom line: this will stick, and SEOs, publishers, retailers, and anyone else who wants their content to be delivered to Facebook users better begin implementing Open Graph functionality into their sites. If we’re wrong about this, that’s great; one less thing to worry about with SEO. I don’t think we will be though, and I don’t want us to be. Disruption is good for any industry, and search is no exception. I’d love to hear others thought’s on this, and how they think this will affect SEO.

Semantic SEO: 5 Keyword Research Techniques & Tools

Published June 7th, 2010 SEO, Social Media No Comments

Semantics in search is evolving quicker than ever with the inevitable convergence of search and social. Search engines have been using latent semantic structure for a while to classify pages and uncover the meaning of a user’s query. However, semantics is no more transparent than it is in social content and the relatively recent indexing and inclusion of social content unveils an evolved direction from the search engines.

With keyword research as the foundation of SEO; incorporating a more semantic approach is essential and also effective to find variations and relationships of keyword groups to drive optimization and IA. Extracting meaning from keywords and additionally identifying variations to drive your SEO strategy takes time and experience. Here are 5 semantic keyword research techniques and tools:

1) Social Media Monitoring

Most marketers use some social media monitoring app to track brand or competitive mentions. For keyword research though, it’s just as valuable. We use Jive’s Market Engagement, formerly Filtrbox (full disclosure, Jive Software is a client) for ongoing keyword research. Trackur and Radian6 are 2 other popular monitoring tools.

Tracking your keywords will help to build a conversation environment and emerge other uses and variations. Jive Market Engagement is great because it shows you the conversation cloud around your terms, or terms most likely to appear with your keywords.

2) Tags

Tags are a way of classifying information, but for keyword research it’s a focus group. As users tag their social bookmarks, they’re essentially telling you how they would classify and structure your website.

Let’s use Foursquare as an example. There are over 4,000 Fouraquare bookmarks on Delicious and probably 5 – 10x as many tags (multiple tags per URL). Spending a bit of time pursuing user tags can returns some interesting results:

Geolocation, community, game, hyperlocal, ridesharing, application, geo-locator, lbs, social media, social media location, blackberry, gps, tools…

Not only can you look at tags but users’ descriptions about the domain -

“…explore their environments using cell phones.”

“…no more location updates. Yay.”

“…and also a game.”

This might be straightforward to some but for a marketer trying to position their offering, this is gold. Rinse and repeat for other social bookmarking sites.

3) Trending

Keywords rise and fall with the advent of new spaces and products. Understanding when to optimize around a rising keyword/topic is key to positioning your page in front of the storm so to speak. Here are some tools we use for trending purposes.

TweetVolume – Compare trends and popularity of keywords on Twitter.

Ice Rocket - View how often a term has been mentioned in social media over time.

BlogPulse – Automated trend discovery system for blogs. It analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.

Trendrr – Tracks the popularity and trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads.

4) Social Search

Sometimes, simple one-off searches can provide the most insight into semantic keyword variations and synonyms.

OpenBook – With Facebook’s new privacy settings, it’s all open. Search FB updates for keywords and connections.

Twitter Search – Search terms in Twitter mentions. Be sure to use their search operators to refine and target searches.

5) Cool Social Tools

Here are some other random tools we find useful to derive keywords from social media.

Addict-o-matic – Aggregate tool that searches sites for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images pertaining to a specific topic or keyword.

Backtweets – Search for tweets linking to any url, and setup email alerts with via the advanced search page.

MentionMap – Great visualization tool that pulls in hashtags as well as relationships between tweeps.

Time for a Facebook Backlash?

Published May 24th, 2010 Social Media No Comments

Facebook made another potentially controversial announcement last week by limiting landing tab options for Facebook Pages to what they describe as “Authenticated Pages”. The requirements for being an “Authenticated Page” are either exceeding 10,000 Fans or getting the page approved by your Facebook Ads Account Manager. Of course to have an Ads Account Manager you must be running ads through their ad platform.

What this means for Facebook Page owners and administrators is that they can now only use the Wall or Info tabs as the default landing page for non-Fans unless they become authorized. This is a major blow to small business Pages on Facebook, as most will not be able to easily achieve 10,000 Fans, especially without being able to use a custom tab to explain the benefits of Liking the Page and enticing visitors to do so. Although I would consider the Wall to be the heart of a Facebook Page, a custom landing tab is an amazing way to introduce new users to your Page and stand out from the crowd by creating something unique and fun for your visitors.

Say goodbye to custom landing tabs for small business

It will be interesting to see the decisions that Facebook makes over the next few months and how these moves change their public perception. At this point the backlash against the dominant social network has been mostly within the tech savvy community, people who follow the F8 Conference are now the ones threatening to delete their accounts. General users, however, are probably in the dark about most of this. These issues may start to gain more mainstream attention, especially as major news outlets start covering them. Time Magazine will start the ball rolling by featuring a Facebook privacy piece as their cover story.

In my opinion, Facebook needs to tread carefully with those in the industry, avoiding changes like the new “Authenticated Pages” decision. The people who are going to be most frustrated about these type of changes are also going to be the most vocal, and Facebook should know better than anyone that backlash will spread like wildfire online.

Facebook’s Growing Problem

Published May 14th, 2010 Social Media No Comments

Yesterday the New York Times published a pretty interesting visual of Facebook’s privacy settings. They’ve broken out every single setting in a neat little tree designed to show you just how expansive (read: confusing) Facebook’s privacy settings are.

Actually, it looks like pretty solid information architecture to me.

Anyways, in the related article Nick Bilton makes an interesting point when he compares Facebook’s privacy policy to the United States Constitution. He highlights the fact that Facebook’s privacy policy is 5,830 words, while the US Constitution is a measly 4,543 words. The caveat here (which will most likely be overlooked by most readers) is that’s the number of words in the Constitution not including the amendments.

Now, I’m no historian here, but I do remember enough from my civics class to know that the main body of the constitution was purposefully left vague, because a couple of particularly zealous members of the Constitutional Convention thought it was important to keep things like the right to bear arms and free speech in a separate, editable portion of the document that would allow it to evolve over time as the country’s needs changed (hence all those amendments). When you run a site with 400 million active users, you don’t exactly have that same luxury.

The Times’ graphic also has a handy visualization of the actual length of Facebook’s privacy policy over time:

When I see this, here’s what I see: as Facebook’s user base grew, so did its privacy policy. The amount of legalese you need to cover your ass when you have a user base of 1 million college students with educational email addresses is drastically different than when nearly half of internet users access your site on a daily basis. Back in the olden days of Facebook, you didn’t really need privacy settings because you had to have a legitimate university email address to create a profile in the first place. I remember friends who preferred it to MySpace, because it was a whole lot harder to create a bogus profile on Facebook.

Ah, memories.

But then those kids graduated college, and lost access to their university email accounts (my university killed my account 8 months after I graduated). Now what? You can’t really tell those people they’re out of luck and will lose their Facebook accounts because now they don’t have a legit university email address. Plus, Facebook isn’t run by a bunch of idiots.

What does a good businessman do? Offer that same service to MORE people, and make more money.

That means opening up the pearly gates and allowing people with any email address to create a profile. But with that wider access comes more security concerns. Like the MySpace of old, any weirdo can now hop on Facebook and start creating profiles and even impersonating other people. This creates a need for more privacy controls and a more comprehensive privacy policy. With recent advancements in Facebook’s Open Graph, these privacy settings need to be even more complex in order to provide users with the control they need over sensitive personal data.

This data is a kickin’ tool for us marketing types, giving us the ability to put content in front of users they actually care about. As a user, that means you’ll see less of the clutter you don’t care about, and more meaningful content that you would actually find useful or interesting. As a digital marketing agency, getting relevant content and offers in front of user eyeballs means a better chance of snagging that precious conversion, and boosting the ROI of online campaigns.

On the flip side, marketers have an ethical duty not to abuse that precious data, although Facebook isn’t making it easy to convince users abuses won’t happen. Steamrolling straight into the opt-out model they’ve been using with the Open Graph is a bit rude and kinda creepy for the vast majority of users out there. IMHO, Facebook could benefit from adopting a bit more touchy-feely approach to this kind of thing. That said, whether or not their blasé approach to privacy changes will have a lasting impact on the user base is the subject of another blog post.

Do I think personal data should be served up on a silver platter to Facebook and the third party apps that use its platform? No. But I do think we all need to be mindful when it comes to the information we are putting on the internet, and diligently monitor our privacy settings on services like Facebook. After all, the security of our personal information is ultimately our personal responsibility. Facebook is giving us the tools to protect it. Let’s make sure we do it right.

How the Facebook Open Graph Will Change Your Web Site

Published April 27th, 2010 Industry, Social Media No Comments

Facebook announced some major changes last week; in a nutshell, the changes facilitate and enhance how marketers and brands can exchange their own site visitors’ data with Facebook. There are a number of great resources out there, I’ve compiled several in the SwellPath Diigo account.

So, what exactly has changed, and what does it mean for you and you’re own digital marketing initiatives? 18 months ago it was considered forward-thinking to have a link to your Facebook page on your brand’s website; now what is forward-thinking, and what is standard best practices? I’m not sure I can entirely answer those questions in this post, but I can address what I think the key opportunities are, and how SwellPath will play in this space. First, a quick overview on the changes:

The Basics

First, the basic opportunities. The changes allow us to lay the social framework of Facebook into our own web properties. In the simplest form, this is made possible with 5 new social plugins. These plugins allow for integration of data into your site, but also the opportunity for authenticated Facebook users to modify their own profile via your site. For example, we can now put a Like button anywhere, and anyone authenticated on Facebook can click it and indicate that they like an object. Click the Like button below if you like this post (you can wait until you’re finished reading it):

Beyond Basics

In the more complicated forms, this “weaving” is enhanced with the Open Graph Protocol and the complimentary Facebook Graph API. This is where things get interesting, and possibly revolutionary, in terms of how you’ll be able to leverage the new features on your sites. Just as you raced to gather fans of your brand’s page on Facebook, and waited for those fans’ friends to come to your page, now you can gather “likes” of your content (your objects) throughout the web, and links to that content are syndicated through users’ feeds. Likewise, just as proper meta tag implementation for SEO purposes has become a necessity, proper Open Graph integration may also become a necessity to maintain adequate site visibility. It enables Facebook (and whomever else) to quickly “read” and sort the nature of your objects (i.e. content).

Open Graph & Your Site

So, how will this change your web site, or sites you’ll be building in the near future? Well, if you do things the right way, you’ll now be able to “borrow” the social experience we all have with Facebook, for your own site. You’ll at least want to carefully assess how if you can leverage Open Graph to socialize your site, or areas of your site. Once you’ve figured out there are opportunities, you’ll want to work with the appropriate stakeholders to decide the best way to integrate the various options Facebook has created, and ensure you’re optimizing the syndication potential for your content, and that you’re following best practices. While the opportunity that Facebook has created is way beyond the old days of slapping a Facebook icon on your footer, it also is way more complicated, and there are written and unwritten rules that need to be followed.

SwellPath & Open Graph

Here is the shameless plug for SwellPath: we will continue to help our clients navigate the social media marketing landscape, Open Graph now just increases the options we can present to our clients. There no longer is a massive gap between those who can afford to promote their brand through costly Facebook applications, and those who simply can afford to have a vibrant Facebook page for their brand. That gap is gone, and in it’s place are a fantastic variety of possibilities for web designers and developers to creatively loop in Facebook. We’re excited to see these possibilities come to life for our clients and the rest of the industry.