Power girl on the prowl…

At first gape, these questions seem easy, yes?  “Of course, yes, socialize everything” you shout!”  “After all, isn’t the ‘net  all about social media these days?” How could it be wrong to ever consider omitting the all-powerful and ubiquitous social media click-me-now badges?

Caveat:  We understand that as social-trust augments and even partially supplants trust rank in how content is ranked by search engines, having influential tweeps and and wielding one’s own street cred’ is of paramount importance. This article is not about whether social media participation is important. Of course it’s important.

However when herding traffic to social KPIs, there can be implications in how other crucial KPIs are impacted,  serious analytic concerns and business decisions at hand.  There’s no one size fits all.  While it’s often a good decision to drive traffic from landing pages and email blasts with “follow me/friend me”  links, there a number of issues to consider–especially when socialization is not the primary KPI.  For the sake of clarity, let’s define secondary KPI:

“Secondary KPI” is an additional goal a) if the primary KPI is not reached or b) in addition to the primary goal.

Analytics & Outbound Links Exiting Directly to [Community]
(Third party social assets like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc..)

There are a few analytic problems to sort out, so we’re all on the same page. So far as tracking socialization as either a primary or secondary KPI directly from an email, how do you measure success exactly?  What are viable metrics to track the outbound click (from email or landing page ) directly to [Community]

• First, we all know It’s fairly easy to track an outbound click directly to [Community] from an landing page or email. Google Analytics does not track exit clicks, in the form of destination URL, out of the box. It can be accomplished with a hack.  Most email platform analytics track outbound clicks and destinations by various methods. If technology is lacking, you can always tag outbound links to [Community] and use a script on a domain you track using redirects. Unfortunately tracking the outbound link is not enough data.
• Once users get to  [Community], unless you own [Community], you can’t directly associate clicks from that email (or landing page) with behavior in  [Community] like fanning, grouping, sharing, signing up for an app’, any desired action, etc…How do you measure the KPI?
• We must depend on less empirical, though somewhat effective correlation methods to track the ROI of direct links to [Community] from emails and landing pages.
• We like this formula: (Exits to [Community] Per Day) Graphed to (Signups/Follows/other actions Per Day). We need to see a correlation of escalating traffic and Signup/Follows/Actions. Good testing can make this, otherwise speculative metric, useful. So far as the report all I personally need to see is lines lines moving from left to right on a graph.

• Graphic email exit maps show how traffic bleed and spray effects conversion. Similarly analytic overlays illustrate how users click out from an HMTL page.  Show us on a chart  please. Does the traffic forsake the commercial funnel for the social click? Is that the desired action for the page? Are we bleeding conversions?

• 13 different exit options are nice in a pretty HTML email, but doesn’t one of the paths have more value unless the email is about general branding? If not, should one path  be designated as the primary KPI?  We market for a reason usually. Sometimes good marketing is about removing customers’ options. Herd them like sheep we say.
• If selling or hard-core marketing is the KPI, we often advise that client’s insure that “being social” is always the secondary KPI, so long you can prove it does not distract from the primary conversion. Sometimes putting the links to [Community] should be on the thank-you.php page or on the next page in sequence IF users don’t convert.
• Sometimes it makes sense to sacrifice conversions for happy social BFF pals, but make that decision intentional, data driven and based on real business priorities.
• Never underestimate the value of conversations and making friends. To this author’s mind, socialization should nearly always be, at minimum, a secondary KPI.

Our General Rules:

• I usually want to see traffic I pay for go to a landing on a site I control first, even if it’s from a little Facebook button in an email or landing page.  I don’t own Facebook and ultimately we can’t control it, only work in harmony. The exception is when socializing is the primary KPI. In that scenario it can make sense to cut down on click-count to primary conversion. All the normal caveats regarding the limitations of tracking behavior in third party sites apply.
• Should there be Facebook buttons in every email? Right! Of course there should be…That’s easy to say right? Not…I.M.H.O. sometimes we should place buttons, even much of the time… but not all the time.
• When we do place buttons, consider herding traffic to our feed or landing page, which prompt  FB savvy visitors to login using FacebookConnect.  Then they’re already logged in with a few clicks.
• Sometimes email blasts and landing pages are rather guerrilla in their intent, with immediate, even difficult financial objectives. Saying that we should “always” point them to Facebook like saying there should “always” be PPC,  “always” be Press Releases or always be in Forums, etc…That’s not a mature approach as these sorts of absolutes ignore other business considerations.
• Is the real question here is what are you doing with the Facebook friends you already have? Are they engaged? What’s do their offpage engagement metrics look like? What percentage of buzz surrounding certain content is on site, on page, off site, where, how often, when, who…and how influential is that “who” guy anyway?

Not many humans are social 24/7, nor should marketers be. We’ve even had times where we recommended a nice tight little email/landing page funnel that, instead of spraying traffic in general (albeit good) directions all over the Internet, we supply fewer options to focus.  Honestly dude, sometimes we just don’t have time, inclination or money to be social .

Can’t Squeeze Social Blood
This is especially true when a marketer is engaging in activities which barely have associated analogies in physical life.  For instance, there are no gigantic “Laundromat” analogy-applications on Facebook because real people actually tend to be disengaged and separate when washing clothes in public. Go figure…

Social Media Mirrors Physical life. As I think about it, there are very few analogies in physical life that line up with “Download $2 Walmart Coupon.”  Ok, maybe some guy wearing sandwich boards or a leaflet temp’ in Times Square. Sure their occupation is noble but we don’t ever end up…umm….hanging out, hooking up, you get it.

Coupon clipping in physical life is cool but humans don’t tend to physically congregate around the theme. Does this mean that it’s not a good idea to connect with customers at any given time…like while purveying coupons? Nope. It’s usually a great idea to make friends.

Should marketers attempt to socialize every single impression in any channel? Or, are there sometimes compelling reasons to avoid impacting the conversion funnel? There are so many channels, it’s hard to imagine that it’s always appropriate to place those link to Facebook and Twitter.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge advocate and participant in social media.  Our agency has a humbling roster of SMO (social media optimization) clients, who inspire the hell out of us. SMO is crucial, especially at the intersection SEO.

One thing for sure, there’s “no one-size-fits-all” policy.  Let’s test and push the social envelope. Let’s always remember to place our customers in a well laid funnel, ask for the money and be careful where we fragment the objectives, for any reason.

To fill the void, this post offers wary small business owners, CMOs and marketing managers a 30,000 guerrilla vendor gut-check litmus test. Use these 20 procedures as first-line-of-defense screenings to evaluate whether your experts have kept current or are messing with your livelihood.  You may be surprised by the results.

We intend this exercise to be technical enough to get past the obvious, yet easily executable by non-technical marketing folks without relying on any third parties or expensive professional tool sets.  These screenings do not utilize Google’s WebMaster Central, which can require third party support to install and verify- still, the simple tests herein are quite insightful. After installation of some basic tools  and after a few practice rounds, you will be able to perform this self-audit in about 8 minutes or less on any site.

The only assumption we make is that you have access to Google Analytics, a free web analytics solution installed on most websites these days. That said, if you don’t have ready access to analytics, it’s not a deal-killer and you can still proceed. The testing also requires you install the Firefox browser if you don’t have it already along with a couple of plug-ins. Don’t worry, it’s simple and we’ll walk you through the installations. We hope you’ll find the insights gained well worth the effort.  (Even for the uninitiated, the sum-total of all setup installations called for here, is approximately 3 minutes.)

Please note: There are many ways to appraise the success or failure of an SEO program. Consider the methods highlighted as screenings to throw up flags surrounding obvious danger signals. While not likely, there are some rare cases in which false positives are possible. So, contact an SEO professional right away following any negative results.
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Part 1: Setup | Install Tools

[If Firefox is already installed on your computer, go ahead and skip to step 2. If you have the SearchStatus Plugin installed & configured to monitor PageRank & mozRank and GoogleAnalytics installed, skip the 5 setup steps and proceed directly to the screening.]

Step 1: Install Firefox Browser [Level of Difficulty: Easy]
Okay, let’s do some preparation. First, if you browse the web with Internet Explorer or Safari, you’ll need to install the Firefox browser.  It’s totally free. Firefox allows users to install “plug-ins,” which extend the browser’s capabilities in useful ways. Here’s the link to download & install Firefox. Just follow the instructions.

Step 2: Install Plugins [Level of  Difficulty: Moderately Easy]
Install SearchStatus Plugin for Firefox for more advanced SEO analytics. It’s simple- just click “Add to Firefox.”

Then click “Install Now.”

When prompted, restart Firefox.

You’ll know that the installation was successful by the new analytic-indicators in the lower right-hand corner of the browser after restart.

Step 3: Configure Search Status [Level of Difficulty: Easy]
Configure Search Status Plug by right clicking (or Control-Click on Mac) on the SearchStatus Icon.

Enable mozRank. (AlexaRank and Google PageRank are enabled by default.)

Step 4: Login to Analytics [Level of Difficulty: Easy]
Get a hold of the login for your site’s GoogleAnalytics. Here’s how you determine if your is site is running Google Analytics. First, navigate to your site’s homepage.  Select “View Page Source.”

If your site has Google Analytics, then you’ll see code that looks like this…

…just below the </body> HTML tag close to the bottom of the page.  This means Google Analytics is installed, at least on the homepage of your site.  If your site does not have Google Analytics, don’t worry it’s not a deal killer.

Congratulations! You’ve installed every component needed for our self-audit. Let’s get started with the screening. By the way, for you SEO pros, though this starts with the basics, we hope you’ll find a couple of off-the-beaten-path nuggets in this post.

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Part 2: 20 First Line of Defense Screening Procedures

Large PageRank/mozRank Disparity
Except for traffic driven by keywords from organic SERPs, PR (PageRank) is Google’s only public indication of algorithmic regard for a web page.  It measures raw strength of inbound linking, which is an important part of each mainstream search engine’s organic algorithmic.  While PR often does not have a direct bearing on how a page or site indexes, total lack of Homepage PR can indicate a serious problem.

SEOmoz’s LinkScape tool offers an independent analysis of the web’s link graph and serves it up as mR (mozRank). Remember, we enabled mozRank in the SearchStatus plugin. Since linkscape does not “know” Google “penalties,” a high mR against a low PR may well indicate that Google has spanked a site.

In this case the PR of this client’s site is 2 while the mR is 5.01.  As it turns out, the client’s precious SEO firm purchased a lot of spammy links, so much so that we ended up writing Google to ask for “reconsideration” after cleaning things up.

Egregious Duplicate Content
Entire volumes could easily be written surrounding intricacies of the duplicate content scourge. Failing this most basic test portends serious SEO incompetence.  To begin, type in the website’s address, starting with the “www.”

Then try navigating to the same homepage without the www.

If they both work, without one redirecting to the other, there are problems.  Proper server set up should only allow one version of the site to exist for indexing. Google’s WebMaster Central offers a setting to specify which version you prefer for indexing, but then again those who set things up incorrectly from the get-go usually  don’t know to specify this in WebMaster Central. We used to see this problem a lot but frequency is decreasing as even loser-SEOs learn ass from elbow.  No competent SEO firm would allow this condition to exist without fixing it straight away.

Duplicate Title & Description Tags

Title tags are essential clues for search engines and count big time towards SEO. Description tags appear in the browser code and are often what’s displayed in SERPs (search engine result pages) as the anchor text leading to a page. Best practice is to have unique, descriptive, keyword rich title tags for each of your webpages.

Though they no longer count towards SEO, description tags should also be unique and communicate solid marketing messages.  Meta description tags are often what’s shown in organic SERPs beneath the link.

Duplicate title tags in particular are a problem for SEO, often leading to one of the versions being minimized in the SERPs. Duplicate description tags are also poor, negligible practice.  To run a simple check for duplicate tags, try the free SEOmoz Crawl Test tool. You have to create a membership and login, but there’s no fee to join.

SEO Bullshit
“This post is about the boundary waters and the waters boundary. I covet moments trail the waters boundary, for the water’s-SEO bound keyword bullshit (Ely, Minnesota MN) the Boundery Waterz R. La, La , La, La , La, La, La -a!”

If your site reads like bullshit, then it is, dude. Write for people, not just search engines. SEO specialists challenge webmasters and marketers to meet customers’ needs by keyword advised copy writing.

Slow Load Time
Matt Cutts, Google’s affable search team spam cop, says the web should be real fast, like “flipping through a magazine.”  How fast is fast enough? We tell clients to test their load speed and time, and compare it to key SERPs competitors.  The free pingdom tools are pretty choice.  Take a look at aimClear blog’s homepage load speed and time compared to TopRankBlog, a similar style publication in the same industry.

aimClear Blog Load Time

TopRank Blog Load Time

This does not mean that TopRank is great at load time, only that aimClear Blog is at least not much better or worse than category-leading sites for load time.  Remember that load time is transient and changes are based on a variety of factors. Your SEO firm needs to be concerned about average load time, communicating about its growing importance. If they’re not, it’s a problem.  On a more basic level, load time matters (of course) for users.  (Ummmm…)

Little or No Video Results
These days, video-SERPs have become an SEO staple. YouTube itself is arguably the world’s second most important search engine. As the SERPs become even more blended with news, video and other verticals, it’s easy business to source, post and rank sweet video for universal search organic prominence.

From long-tail keywords like “marty weintraub producer” to sexy short tail “avatar,” not much impacts search sentiment as significantly as video.

Mid and long-tail keyword spaces are the frontier of Universal Search. SEO firms that don’t push towards at least a simple video strategy and associated tactics aren’t doing their job.

Little Keyword Traffic for Brand Terms
This is very important. Login to Google Analytics and select “View Report.”

Then click on “Traffic Sources/Keywords.”

Make sure to choose “Non-Paid” to view organic KW traffic.

Unless the brand name is the be-all end-all sole purpose of the site (some sites are like that), healthy SEO efforts usually drive targeted organic keyword traffic. After all, that’s one of the main functions of SEO.  If your Traffic Sources / Keywords report looks like this (all branded terms) it could be a bad sign:

Notice below that traffic to aimClear Blog is not just about our brand, but a healthy mix of relevant keywords as well as brand terms.

If your traffic sources consist of only branded terms, perhaps mixed with a small handful (or none) of the terms targeted by SEO in your Google Analytics organic keyword report, then your SEO goals are not being met. I would argue this is one of the only ways to truly judge SEO success.

By the way, aimClear Blog covered a site-clinic session at SMX East during which Matt Cutts critiqued a certain site. Apparently we covered it a little too well.

Phrase Density Scrape Results Offer Mostly Irrelevant Phrases
Run your site through a phrase extractor and see what comes back. The densest terms on the page should be what the site is about.

aimClear Blog looks pretty healthy:

This Ad Agency site does not:

Other Warnings Your SEO May Not Be Up to Snuff

Excessive Outbound Linking
Real SEOs don’t fragmented link-energy with hundreds or (gasp) thousands of links that engines probably don’t crawl. They organize that quantity of data in page-systems, usually a CMS (Content Management System) that’s at least sorted by based main level navigation.

Little or No Outbound Linking
Reciprocally, many SEOs believe that linking out to relevant and trusted sites is an important component to Google’s organic ranking algorithm.  If your SEO company is not encouraging you link out to complimentary and non-competitive sites, you may be wasting important ranking energy.

Little or No Off-Page Engagement
Hold on to your shorts! Social engagement, on-page and off, have become important clues to search engines and will likely advise organic ranking in the future, if not presently.  Check out PostRank as a measure of your site’s off-page engagement.

No Organic Conversion Tracking
We’ve all been working with PPC conversion tracking for years.  It’s a warning signal if you don’t receive reports associating keywords and other non-paid referrals with goals such as form submissions, phone calls and sales.

Monthly or Other Recurrent SEO Charges… For What?
SEO is not “set it and forget it.” However, it should not cost hundreds or thousands per month to get reports.  Take time to perform several screenings of your site with this self-audit. If the screenings come back positive and you’re paying a monthly fee, ask what the fee is really for.

Bonus Warning Signs

• Ranking reports without personalized search training. Read up on personalized search.
• Incomplete or no XML Sitemap.
• Missing other universal search verticals in the SERPs, like News & Images.
• Spammy Linkbuilding to the site.
• Poor, little or no internal link building.
• Non-descriptive internal link anchor text.

It can be tricky for non-SEO professional to vet vendors, especially given the rapid pace of ever-shifting best practices.  It’s no wonder there’s a greasy backside to the SEO purveyor landscape.  Certainly, deeper diagnostics are available by verified access to Google’s WebMasterCentral and several other tools.  We hope this self-audit has been a useful gateway to the world of SEO evaluation.

If you enjoyed this post, you also may find “Is Your PPC Expert Asleep at the Switch? 6 Minute Self-Audit“  and SEO Site Audit, a Guerilla Webmaster’s Guide.” beneficial.

Follow Marty on Twitter @aimClear

Here at aimClear, we’re proud of our in-house authors. Like many publications we also open our pages as a community platform to host guest bloggers. Sometimes guest posts are written by industry professionals whose practices are perceived by some as controversial.

Wait. Let’s stop right there. “Controversial.” That word can carry a negative connotation, one of altercation, agitation, even acrimony. But on the flip-side of the coin, “controversy” can be a beautiful thing. Controversy when hosted on a public, unbiased, progressive platform, such as a third-party blog, can function as an open invitation for conversation- healthy debate, passionate exchange of perspectives and core occupational beliefs. Other times, visitors with an unrelated agenda attempt to ruin the discourse.

As with all of our articles we hope such conversations germinate in the form of lively comment threads. We all thrive when readers absorb content and feel moved to take the experience to the next level by engaging the author or other commenters– right then and there. Harmonious, supportive comments are always nice… but sometimes there’s nothing better than a spicy swap of opposing points of view. Hell, we’re no strangers to a fight.

I may be stating the obvious but, when we publish a guest blog post, aimClear is not the author, or some schmaltzy endorser. We’re not saying we love or hate the blogger or topic. Think boxing: we’re not the referee breaking it up. We’re not the coach dabbing sweat and holding the spit bucket. A good blog editor is the Master of Ceremonies offering the mic. We’re hosts.

To emphasize, we’re careful to conclude each guest blog post with the same standard disclaimer: Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily aimClear. It’s crucial to note that our mission with guest blog posts is to provide a neutral platform where industry professionals can explore their perceptions, practices and principles, even… or especially… when they may be taken as contrarian.

Two weeks ago, aimClear published a guest blog post by Dennis Yu called, How To Make 45K a Day Scamming Facebook Ads. That’s a contrary sort of title, no? If you’re unfamiliar with Dennis Yu, note that there are differing opinions surrounding his work as an affiliate marketer.  We have no opinion.

Back in November of 2009, Jeremy Schoemaker (@shoemoney) published a blog post that really dug into his personal and professional experiences with Dennis Yu (not all sunshine and pussy cats). This was totally Schoemaker’s prerogative as it’s his blog and he can certainly write about any topic of his choosing. The post accrued 210 comments, many of which disparaged Dennis and thanked ShoeMoney for the heads-up. This may not have been the friendliest post or comment thread, but the relationship between one and the other, the relevance, was obvious: the post was about Dennis Yu… the comments were about Dennis Yu.  Everything was above board and everybody stabbed everybody else in the front. Bravo!

On the other foot, Dennis’s guest post for aimClear Blog explored the anatomy of alleged Facebook PPC ad scams. It did not address his professional work, his personal life… in fact, he barely used the words “I,” “me,” or “mine” at all.  The post was about marketing! The thread amassed over a dozen comments, agreeing with the post’s perspective or opposing it… a.k.a. healthy conversation surrounding an apparent controversy. Bravo again!

That said, one comment in particular offered genuine criticism speaking to the alleged Facebook ad scheme discussed in the post.  The commenter even shared that he had a sketchy past himself.

Spliced between the penultimate sentence and the final sentence of this comment, Harrison decided to add, “For all of you please see [this],” including a link to the ShoeMoney post, “to see the real dennis” (his capitalization, not ours).

Really, Harrison? Was that necessary? Doesn’t almost every affiliate and their mother know about ShoeMoney’s post? Why do our readers have to know Shoe’s vision of “the real dennis” in order to understand the main points and intent of this blog post? What value did your external dropped-link resource contribute to the topic at hand? That’s like saying you need to know about Michael Jackson’s trials to dig the song Billy Jean. Bunk!

After aimClear President, Marty Weintraub, allowed the comment, our publications manager (moi) asked herself a few salient questions and decided to trim the comment, removing the “take a look at how Dennis sucks” afterthought and irrelevant link to the ShoeMoney post. We no found redeemable merit in attacking the author. Out of respect, Harrison was notified via email.

Shortly after, Harrison left another lengthy comment, pictured below. We removed additional language  where he went into some detail regarding experiences with Dennis Yu and, uh, shared unrelated matters  regarding Dennis and Harrison’s mom and dad. We also thoughtfully pruned parts where Harrison reproached Dennis’s participation in various ventures and flat out called him crappy names, all the while proclaiming that he himself was simply “trying to help [us and aimClear Blog' readers] not fall for [Dennis's] con and just feed his reputation with free publicity.” Fail!

We contacted Harrison, again to let him know we had edited personal attacks out of the comments thread and publicly made note with an inline bracketed message. That’s just how we roll, above board.

Marty even inserted a short and general disclaimer about aimClear Blog etiquette as a separate comment. This was out of respect for Harrison and our readers. We do this in the rare occasion when we feel compelled to remove user generated content.

While we don’t reveal private exchanges that take place between our staff and readers, suffice to say that multiple individuals raised the concept of freedom of speech-impinged to us via email.

To those confused persons who believe this matter to be a freedom of speech issue, y’all could learn something from limited-time-only Miss California, Carrie Prejean. Horrified by the aftermath of her controversial (there’s that word again!) response to a pageant question about gay marriage, Ms. Prejean argued to the point of tears that her holy first amendment, her freedom of speech, had been ripped away.

Newsflash, hotshots: freedom of speech is “the right to speak, or otherwise communicate, one’s opinion without fear of harm or prosecution,” and that’s prosecution in the legal sense. If we were the government, and you typed that comment, and we trimmed it here and there, then you might consider your freedom of speech impinged. But we ain’t. We’re aimClear.

“Freedom of speech is not a blanket guarantee,” Marty pointed out the other day. “For instance, it is against the law to engage in hateful speech that results in a mob being incited to murder, even if the victim is a pedophile. You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded movie theater and it’s against to law to liable, which means saying disparaging things in public that are not true.”

Here’s a simple run-down of our blog comment-expectations, in the ever-eloquent words of Marty Weintraub (who was visibly upset) for you and the “sniveling immature monkeys who think they know about American law:”

• “If you take issues with the alleged facts, call us out. We’ll publish your comments right away and admit if there’s been a proven error.  Our blog is replete with appropriate redactions, apologies and respectful discourse. Otherwise, fuck off.”
• “If you have issues with any content’s tone, hoist the flag, pal, and we’ll step right up.”
• “If all you want to do is publish some out of context bullshit case study to prove that someone sucks, go somewhere else because we’re more ethical than that.”

The Editor’s Take
To my mind it boils down to this: had the blog post been a flagrant touting or damning of Dennis’s character, Harrison’s comments would have been applicable, and therefore, remained intact.  By truncating the comment, we weren’t defending Dennis Yu’s  honor like some knight in shining armor- we were preserving contextual relevance.  We barely know Dennis Yu but the post raised what still seem to be serious issues regarding Facebook’s ad platform.

If a blog post addresses marketing tactic, blog comments should address the tactics, and not question the personal constitution of the author.  This is not “Law and Order.”  You’re welcome to tell us we’re wrong. Tell us the assertions are off the mark. But discuss the freakin’ point at hand as opposed to using our pages as your personal pissing posts.  Take your petty playground name calling outside and grow up, please. </rant>

I had the pleasure of holding a candid interview with Matt this week on the eve of the 2010 SEMMYs (don’t forget, folks- SEMMY finalists will be announced this Monday, January 25, public voting begins January 29, winners are announced February 1st!). Here’s what he had to say.

| aimClear: Firstly, thanks for your time today! I notice in your background you’ve been an online marketing consultant for over ten years. That’s quite a stretch- you were there when Internet marketing arguably began to truly gain traction with consumers. Could you give us a brief overview of how you got started in search industry?

In a previous life, I was a TV and radio sportscaster/host. But in smalltown USA, that doesn’t earn a guy enough money to support a family. So, when my wife and I were about to have our first child, I gave up my ESPN dreams and turned my web site hobby into a job designing web sites for the local ISP/web host in town. Stayed there for almost 10 years. Early on, it became painfully obvious that even the coolest site around was pretty useless if no one could find it. So I started trying to figure out how Excite and Lycos and others ranked pages, discovered Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Watch, and taught myself SEO. Or maybe I should say that Danny taught me? Probably a mix of both.

| aimClear: An impressive leap! The past decade has proved to be a tremendous period of evolution for this field. What are the biggest differences you’ve noted between then and now?

SEO is certainly a lot more mainstream these days, more accepted by companies big and small as a necessary aspect of online marketing. Of course, there are still countless business owners who have no clue what it is. But back then, it was much more mysterious than it is now. I remember saying to clients that we needed to develop their web site a certain way — we needed to “do some SEO” — and their eyes would glaze over or they’d think I was gonna spread pixie-dust to bring people to their site. Now, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone who calls himself an SEO. The growth of our industry is remarkable.

| aimClear: That’s for sure. Poor cats. What concepts and principles of online marketing do you think will never go out of style?

Give people what they want. SEO principles are no different from traditional marketing. You want to create something great that people want and get them to talk about it to as many people as possible. Offline, we call it word-of-mouth marketing. Online, we call it linkbuilding or social media marketing or SEO. You want to have something remarkable and get people talking about it. Those things will never go out of style.

| aimClear: Just like a classic black hat. I mean dress! Now, as an online marketing consultant who’s worked with corporate behemoths and mom-and-pop shops alike, have you noticed more obstacles with one over the other?

No, I don’t think there are more or less obstacles for a big company or a small company; it’s just a different set of obstacles. I like working with small business owners because you can really make a difference in their lives, in their companies, for their employees, etc. I don’t find it very fun helping Big Brand add another $500,000 to the bottom line. But it’s a joy to help a mom-and-pop reach a point where they can hire a new employee, for example.

| aimClear: Definitely- that must feel quite rewarding. You’re co-creator of the SEMMYs, annual awards doled out to the cream of the crop writings about search and online marketing. Could you tell me a bit about your motivation behind hosting them?

A few years ago, Loren and the crew at Search Engine Journal were doing annual awards that honored bloggers and blogs. I think I won “Best Local Search Blog” one year, for example, and it was very cool to be recognized that way. But it occurred to me that there was no recognition for all the great content that bloggers and web site owners create. I just thought it would be cool to say — “The industry thinks this is the best article about SEO written this year.” Just like Hollywood honors individual films with the Oscars, I thought there should be a way to honor individual pieces of content.

| aimClear: Oh my god, I get it now. Oscars, Emmys, SEMMYs! Genius. Have you noticed the criteria or caliber for SEMMY nominees and winners evolve since they began in 2008?

Well, the first year was pretty much a trial run. No one else knew about it until the web site launched, and I was the only person nominating articles. So, for the most part, if your blog wasn’t in my feed reader, you probably weren’t going to be nominated. That was pretty lame, and I said as much on the SEMMYs web site. I said that, if the industry responded favorably to the idea of the SEMMYs, I’d find a way to make sure more blogs and authors had a chance to be nominated. With a few exceptions, the response was good and so now there’s an eight-person committee that nominates articles throughout the year. And yes, that’s really made the caliber of nominees dramatically better each year.

| aimClear: Do you predict changes or raised bars in the years to come?

It’s funny… every so often I think there’s nothing left for people in our industry to write about. How many articles can we possibly write about “Top SEO Mistakes” or “How to Setup a Killer PPC Account.” And yet, people continue to create some tremendously creative and helpful content on a weekly basis. It’s amazing. And so yes, I do expect the bar will keep going up. We’re marketers, after all — if we want exposure and recognition, doing the “same old” won’t cut it.

| aimClear: Very true. On the About the SEMMYs page you explain that you hope for the award system to serve as “a complement to the excellent existing awards.” The parallels in honor and genre are apparent… but in what ways do you hope the SEMMYs stand apart from similar search marketing awards and honors?

Oh, I don’t know … that sentence mostly refers to Loren’s SEJ awards that I mentioned earlier, but he hasn’t done those in a couple years. There are always those “Top Blogs” and “Top Marketers” lists that you see, but I don’t think anyone else is focusing on content, so that’s what makes the SEMMYs unique. Long ago, I thought maybe Danny would use Sphinn and its voting system to create some kind of awards based on content. That would make the SEMMYs less unique, I suppose. But now that I’m the Editor of Sphinn, I don’t think I need to worry about that. Mwuhahahaha!

| aimCle ar: That’s quite the conniving chortle you got there! On a more serious note,  over at MattMcGee.com you paint yourself as a guy who, among other things, loves “big, juicy cheeseburgers, and ice cream. With M&Ms. The ice cream that is, not the cheeseburgers.” Have you ever actually tried big, juicy cheeseburgers with M&Ms? I smell a viral 2010 treat…

You know … I have not actually tried that. But I think we’re having burgers tonight, so I’m gonna stop here and go scour the kitchen for M&Ms!

When Twitter launched four years ago, it (perchance inadvertently) gave businesses the most precious gift imaginable: an intimate glimpse into consumers’ daily lives. It gave them the power to monitor brand reputation in a clean, accessible interface. Corporate brands like @Zappos & @Zappos_Service, @Starbucks, @DellOutlet, @JetBlue, and @TheHomeDepot, as well as personal “brands” like @StephenFry and @AlyssaMilano have been wildly successful with social media because they’re structured, devoted, attentive, engaging and personable.

Tragically, there are also bandwagon-jumping companies and celebrity glory-whores who go at Twitter like a portly dude at a buffet. They use it as self-centered bullhorn and nothing more.

Look- the versatility of social media is undeniable.  Twitter’s technology lends itself to a multitude of demographics with myriad interests, motives and objectives. In that regard, @UserA doesn’t really have the authority to blast @UserB for “using Twitter wrong.” The use is open to interpretation. Just like some people put cucumbers in their salad, some people put cucumbers in their facial regimen, and some people put cucumbers in… well, you get the picture.

Still, in the broadest sense, the fundamental function of Twitter is arguably one of communication. Lest we forget, boys and girls, communication is a two-way street. As such, tweets are a two-way street. But some self-indulgent socialites and clueless corporations haven’t gotten that memo.  Worse yet, some of them cultivate enormous followings simply because of their offline notoriety. Irksome. (Some fall flat on their face, never to exceed 700 followers despite their brick-and-mortar success… a refreshing taste of karma.)

Let’s sit back and collectively shake heads at their blunders so that we may learn from them, shall we?

1) You have 822,780 followers. You follow two people. | @DaveJMatthews

Dear Mr. Dave J. Matthews: you follow two people, and that tells us you don’t care what’s going on in your fans lives. May we assume those 800k+ followers are fans? Oh, and why do you have 800k+ fans when you haven’t tweeted in almost three months? That’s not an invitation to come back, though. The Internet can do without your useless white noise.

2) Your feed consists of status updates. And only status updates. | @Yankees

This feed is literally lobotomytastic to look at. While informative, the monotony is mind-numbing. This is what the MLB RSS is for. The Yankees are shooting themselves in the foot (those are pretty useful for athletes, aren’t they?) by not taking advantage of Twitter’s dynamic platform and exciting community-building potential.

3) You don’t interact with anyone. And the only person you RT is one of your directors. | @DisneyPixar

It’s mildly understandable why people like @BritneySpears have gazillions of followers and get away with merely tweeting (or ghost-tweeting) about their day-to-day and comeback concerts. But it’s difficult to imagine waking up and thinking, “I must know what Disney Pixar is up to! To the Twitterfeed!” What makes companies fun to follow on Twitter is when they engage their audience in a meaningful way.

4) You share would-be Zen gems through a f*cking API. | @yokoono

That’s a really nice sentiment to share with your friends on Twitter! Except, the inspirational tweet was fed through an automated API. That totally negates the whole Zen-factor. The impact of such sentiments would increase exponentially if it was actually passed from one person to another.

5) You use your 160 character Twitter bio as a legal disclaimer. | @DrPhil

This is just wrong. And insulting. And wasteful. And worthless. Abandon Twitter bios often top the list of Twitter profile no-no’s, but in this case that’d be more tolerable than this bullcrap.

6) You dove into Twitter because it seemed cool. And then you just, like… stopped. Then you started using an API for your PRs. And we all hated you a little bit more. | @tgifridayscorp

Companies who thrust themselves into Twitter without a clear set of goals are setting themselves up for humiliation. Just because Twitter is free doesn’t mean the marketing campaign should be half-assed. This pitiful stream of tweets will haunt TGI Friday SERPs for all eternity. (Hat-tip @PureDriven for this example.)

7) You don’t encourage, you expect. (And you @mention yourself. Seriously?) | @coldstonecream

Coldstone makes some wicked tasty ice cream. But what kind of success can they hope to achieve with social media when they talk at people rather than with them? The last @mention they exchanged with another real live human being was in April of 2009. (Hat-tip to @MerryMorud for this laughable gem.)

So you see, boys and girls…

While we can’t stomp our feet and blast these people for trashing the concept of Twitter, they certainly are screwing themselves out of the as-yet unparalleled power of Twitter as a tool for social interaction. Why? Because they’re not interacting. They’re not sharing. They’re blaring.

When you click on the ad, you’re taken to a page to claim your prize.

Facebook members who see this page might know it’s not real—that Southwest is not running a promotion, but that someone else is collecting your information to resell and run their high volume email deployment activities.

In the off chance you scroll down the page to the minuscule print, there’s mention of you needing to submit a credit application and be accepted for some financial products.  Unfortunately, many people don’t read that fine print. If they did and clicked to view the Official Rules, they’d see that they have to complete several offers within each of 3 categories—in this example, it’s complete some Top Offers, some Premium Offers, and some Prime Offers:

Notice that the “Green Tea 1000” is just $4.95—you only pay shipping and handling.  But then you’re billed a recurring $95 for the “Value Direct Program,” aptly named, since it puts value directly into the pockets of these affiliates.  Whatever you’re getting, it’s just more “free” stuff, which requires further and further purchases.

Now let’s look at the Prime Offers.

Again, more of the offers called “rebills,” because that’s exactly what they do.  They’re also euphemistically called “negative option,” since unless you jump through some hoops, they’ll keep charging your card.  Is this evil?  Probably not, since Columbia House was sending cassette tapes in the mail even when we were  in high school years ago.  What’s going on in these Facebook ads is just an updated version of what you see on late night TV.

Let’s look at the Premium Offers.

Ah, now you have to complete several of these offers requiring minimum purchases of at least $2,000.  The furniture offer appears cheaper with a $1,500 minimum, but note that it’s before taxes and shipping—and lest we forget, furniture is not cheap.

Let’s take a look at the privacy policy.

You have now given complete permission to these guys to sell your personal information to anyone they like and to message you any time they like via email, phone, SMS, and direct mail.  It’s not technically spam, since it’s complying by the law—they are spelling out in detail what they’re going to do with your data if you actually care to read it.

“But wait!  There’s more….”

You’re also agreeing to subscribe to a premium SMS service.  Have you heard of mobile phone offers like LuvCrush and IQ Quiz?

In trying to get your “free” tickets, you’re now signing up for recurring weight loss products, credit cards, mobile horoscopes, dating sites, anal laxatives, and stuff you’re just dying to buy.

But even if you don’t buy anything, they still get your data.  And here’s what else they publically claim they’re going to do with it:

This is part of something called Behavioral Targeting or Retargeting. The affiliate can “cookie”  you and now can tie your cookie and IP with other instances where you’ve been seen on the web.  If  an affiliate wants to, he or she could target people who have just finished a purchase on Expedia.com and show those people ads wherever they go.

It’s amazing personalization that’s done for your benefit to “provide advertising or special offers that we think will interest you.”  Large data aggregators, not just folks labeled as “spammers,” are combining their databases together to form a complete picture of you.  They have access to public records such as drivers’ license data and phone books—then can tie it with product warranty registrations and forms that you have completed on the web to claim your “free” prize.  Scary, huh?

Let’s look at one more example.  Here we have “free” gas being offered.  It could be some teenager somewhere, since I took this snapshot on January 6^th—but maybe it was already January 7^th in their country.  You’ll see the ad targets Maine residents, though I’m listed in Colorado.  The affiliate couldn’t get their dates or locations right—to properly take advantage of the hypertargeting that Facebook allows advertisers. It also means that Facebook’s ad review team let it slip through, too.

Here’s the page you’re sent to.

Better hurry, since there are only (3) cards left for Maine residents—in the same way that (5) people have a crush on you.  There’s a FedEx logo in the bottom right, which would seem to imply an endorsement or sponsorship.  That’s about as clever as landing pages I’ve seen that say “As seen on Google”—which is nothing more than to say they’ve run at least 1 impression on AdWords account.

So if you want to cash in on this totally awesome Facebook advertising bonanza—and MySpace, too, since they’re far more lenient on ads—follow these simple steps:

• Find a few products of legitimate brands. The more legitimate the brand, the more trust you can suck out in parasite fashion.
• Create pages for a free giveaway. Design them too look as official as possible.  If you don’t know how to write in complete sentences yet, hire an unemployed journalist on Elance or the like.
• Sign up for an affiliate network. You want to create or promote something called an “email or zip submit.” In fact, you can probably skip the first two steps (which require a lot of effort) and just start promoting what’s already there—free cameras, gas cards, restaurant gift certificates, or whatever is hot right now.
• Set up ads on Facebook. Tailor your ad copy so that it implies that the brand is actually sponsoring it.  Use creative copywriting skills to imply that there are only a few left and that it’s for males 50-52 in Duluth, Minnesota only (and make sure that you set your demographic targeting on Facebook to match). If you really want to juice conversions, tell the user that you’re looking for testers of the product (the new Google phone, perhaps) and that testers are allowed to keep the product when testing is done.
• Sit back and collect your money. That is, of course, until you get in trouble, since the FTC will eventually catch up to you.

What about monetization?

Let’s break down the mechanics of how a few bad-apple-affiliates buy traffic on Facebook.

• These inappropriately personalized ads get a much higher CTR than most ads– perhaps 0.3% versus perhaps 0.07%. That allows them to pay as little as 10-15 cents a click, instead of 70 cents to a dollar.
• With an email/zip submit, as these offers are called in industry parlance, there is a multiple page submission process, and the affiliate is paid upon completion of just the first page (about $1.50 a lead, plus or minus).
• Thus, it’s a shared risk between the affiliate (whoever is buying the ads on Facebook) and the underlying advertiser (the ad network or advertiser controlling the offers).
• The affiliate has to ensure that their cost per lead is below their revenue per lead, while the advertiser is risking that the affiliate’s conversion rate is above their projection– that a certain percentage of the folks who complete the first page will go on to sign up for one or multiple offers.
• Even if only 5% of these leads do sign up for one of the offers mentioned here, that’s a cost per lead of only $30 (which is $1.50 divided by 5%).
• If they sign up for 5 or 6 offers, that lead can be worth a couple hundred dollars, making this very profitable from the advertiser’s standpoint.

From the affiliate’s angle…

• If he/she’s being paid $1.50 a lead and 20% of the clicks become a lead (provide their email address), then his revenue per click is 30 cents.
• If his cost per click is 15 cents and he’s earning 30 cents, then he’s doubling his money.
• If he buys a million impressions a day (which is quite small), at a CTR of 0.3%, he’s generating 3,000 clicks and earning 15 cents a click, for a profit of $450 per day.
• If he buys 50 million impressions a day, then he’s at $22,500 in profit per day off gross revenue of $45,000 per day.

Thus, you can see how it’s possible to come close to six figures a day, especially if distributed across Google, MySpace, media buys, Facebook, and other channels.  The question on how much money is being made on Facebook through these offers– nobody really knows.  But if you can determine how many impressions are being served through the self-serve platform and then estimate the percentage of ads that are of this type, you’ll get pretty close.

Why does this matter to us?Jonah Stein coined the term virtual blight, referring to how a few bad ads cause a negative externality on legitimate publishers.  Users might begin to distrust all ads. Milk whatever analogy you like—Little Albert afraid of all white things for life, a cat burned by a hot stove or the vacant drug house that brings down property values in the whole neighborhood.

How about this ad?  Do you trust it?

These are survey ads that affiliates sometimes create on any current topic. Doesn’t matter which.

• Who will win the Super Bowl?
• Should the US withdraw from Iraq?
• Do you think people play Farmville too much?

Or it can be in the affirmative on causes that polarize people:

• Vote now to stop gay marriage!
• Save innocent lives—support banning cell phones while driving.
• Stop Obama’s nationalized heath care coverage (run this in the right states, please).

Then send them to one of those pages—first, a page where they’re prompted to enter their email and then the second page where they enter personal details— since we have to verify you are who you say you are, in case there are spammers out there who will try to rock the vote. Then, get people excited—maybe hot under the collar a little.  That’s how you’d get them to convert.

Facebook, like Google and other advertising platforms, has been doing their best to keep up with spammers. However the very nature of behavioral targeting opens fascinating and difficult new avenues for a small percentage of affiliate-spammers to exploit.

Consumers should be wary when clicking on Facebook Ads and read the fine print.   Meanwhile some legitimate advertisers, who play by the rules, are growing concerned that the value of this massive and emerging channel might erode do to consumers’ lack of trust.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily aimClear.

Obviously, Google is now cruising real-time search and Twitter for SERPs suggestions. Here’s where that suggestion is derived from:

As background, “Suggestions” are inserted by Google at the bottom of some results pages. There are few (if any) proven SEO tactics to place or predict suggestion links.

Here’s Google’s suggestions for “aimClear.”

One suggestion seems to be derived from Google’s real-time search indexing of @seosnack’s multiple retweets of our stuff.

It is unclear what types of searches Google will trigger these new suggestions. For instance a search for “@beebow,” the Twitter handle of aimClear’s Lauren Litwinka, does not trigger real-time search suggestions, nor does her name; no real-time search results, either. (But we still love her .)

The results are also intermittent from search to search for the same keyword and we’ve not found commercial results outside of the search industry as of yet. This may be a limited test.

Anyway, this is an interesting development as Google continues is foray into real-time search.

Over years of conference coverage, we’ve learned that sometimes it’s best to hold onto special sessions for a bit… let the fruits of knowledge ripen… let the excitement of the expo experience tone down before unleashing the insightful splendor into the blogosphere.

That said, it’s now time to revisit one of the last sessions from the last day at SES Chicago. The crowd sitting in on Marketing to Marketers was small, quiet, but eager to learn (and begin). Without a moment’s notice, the panel up and chucked the jumbo room for an intimate round-table audience participation Q&A at Kitty O’Shea’s. Drinks included. No joke.

The revered panel included Matt McGowan, VP & Publisher of Incisive Media, Rebecca Lieb, VP U.S. Operations, Econsultancy, Crispin Sheridan, Senior Director of Search Marketing Strategy, SAP Marketing and moderator Corey Perlman, President eBoot Camp Inc. Their mission: to collectively reveal how marketing to marketers is different than B2B and B2C.

Or is it?

But wait- there was more. On the way to the bar the troupe picked up a few more respected thought leaders of the community including Mike Grehan, SES Advisory Board Co-Chair & VP, Global Content Director, Incisive Media, Anne Kennedy, founder & MP, Beyond Ink, SES Advisory Board, FP & CMO of Joblr.net and Jonathan Allen, Director, Search Engine Watch. (Super sweet bonus of panel experts for those who actually stuck it out).

Here’s a recap of the presentations conversations that transpired (on occasion in bullet form to emphasize key takeaways from each speaker):

Perlman: First off, why are we here? Well, we had sessions to fill and marketers are very sophisticated… they can sniff a sale from a mile away.

Sheridan: When I woke up, I had to ask myself: “What did I just agree to!?” I asked my constituents if they had a clear understanding of how to market to different teams.

• When marketing to marketers, understand that there are a considerably greater amount of risks than marketing B2B or B2C.
• You’re required to do stuff that’s new and innovative.
  
• You’re charged with the tremendous expectation to not fail.
• At SAP Marketing, a healthy incorporation of social media has had the most impact on marketers.

From the audience:

Tim Gorski: I heard there’s been a huge upsurge in the male demographic in Facebook. Is that because there’s middle and upper management going to social media like Facebook?

Sheridan: It’s a possibility. We’ve had our toe in the water for a while. Using social media with marketers is powerful. We directed sales from Facebook to our website and our sales have increased.

• One key element is finding out where people go online and what social media platform they are using. Profiling user behavior provides excellent insight for marketing efforts.

Grehan: I asked Lieb to be on the panel as the editor of a marketing publication. Lieb, when dealing with marketers I’ve noticed you get more feedback.

Lieb: I’m biased toward content-based marketing. Thinking about that, I heard independently from three different people in the speakers’ room: “We’re really getting into training and we’re really making money. And we’re doing training because the leads we’re getting from the courses become our best clients.”

• Look to help marketers do their job better. The bottom line is we’re giving marketers valuable actionable information. When they understand, they convert.

McGowan: From my perspective, sitting down with Omniture, or a similar company in that vein, they all talk about their new libraries of content: video, whitepaper, articles, .pdfs,  podcasts, etc.

Grehan: Your job is even more difficult than that. You have to take the creative people and sales people and teach them how to market to marketers because they can’t just throw bullshit.

McGowan: Right, with marketers you must do this to add value. Whatever you are selling must improve their bottom line, whether it’s connecting business with marketers or business to consumers.

• We’re publishers and we put on shows, but what we do is connect businesses with marketers.
• Delegates want to know how to spend their marketing dollars better.
• We like to think of it as a little playground, or supermarket. But overall we want to facilitate those interactions.

Grehan: Isn’t it easier when people have actually received something?

McGowan: Right, but I think in any business, it’s part lead-generation.

• There are two buckets: part of the budget goes to lead generation and the other part takes the leads and markets to them.
• Think non-profits:  if you sign up for a newsletter, they’re probably going to ask you for a donation.

Perlman: As marketers our BS level is up there. But when you see a good job, you know it.

From the audience:

Anthony Wrubel: But I’ve noticed marketing is leaning towards network science. “Give to get.” The expectations from marketers are that they will also get something.

Grehan: Yes, specifically Google has adopted that. When that begins to happen you move from being a broadcast medium to a listening medium.

Wrubel: Yes. You have to align your objectives by listening to the feedback. The “give to get” is just another way to make the benefit clear.

Kennedy: You can’t kid a kidder. ( )

McGowan: I think, possibly, marketers are on the top of the list of the most critical. How often do we get a response from someone in the industry that critiques what you put out there? You have to cut through the crap.

Lieb: I’ll reject a pitch if the marketing sucks; I really respect good marketing. I think you can market to marketers if you’re so kick-ass good.

McGowan: It’s not all that different than marketing to other groups; you just need to know your audience.

Grehan: In all actuality, we’re all selling to each other.

Kennedy: Is there a larger issue (aside from selling booths and tools) of how to market this new science to those who are new to it? We need to know how to get all the marketing disciplines to play nice together. How do we market to traditional marketers and get them to use the keywords we need?

Lieb: That’s one of the biggest challenges. You’re either the traditional marketers of TV and print or the data techie people segregated on a different floor. It’s exceptionally hard to integrate the two because their mindsets are totally different.

Grehan: It’s ironic: a lot of technology companies get their funding when they adopt more “traditional” techniques.

Sheridan: When you’ve got people down the funnel, you have to be sure it does really well. When I first worked at SAP they didn’t have a marketing department. I was working in HR in Canada with Excel spreadsheet. We were so busy we could hardly print enough disks. (Disks, remember those?) Only when business started to plateau did they get a marketing department.

McGowan: A distinction has to be made from marketing to marketers and B2B.

From the audience:

Wrubel (previously employed with Ocean Spray): Search is looked at as an after thought because it’s not understood. In store things are pretty easy to understand, but search is so complex.

Audience Comment

Armen Tatevosian: It comes down to what you are on the hook for.

Grehan: You could distinguish B2B and M2M but in the real world the business owner is often also the manager and marketer anyway… so it’s often the same audience.

McGowan: To get to your point- there is so much brand cache with Ocean Spray as opposed to, for example, Snapple, which was new. We are seeing a massive increase in small to medium businesses because the barriers to entry are lowered. In contraction times we often see the small businesses eat the lunch of large business. I always look at the Nielsen data. But I want to know the actual numbers. Metric based marketing, whatever it is, display search, as long as the government doesn’t intervene is here to stay and the other marketers need to understand it. Big brands don’t necessarily need to be good at search, for example: Cheerios. Their page is a .pdf. They don’t spend a lot of money there because everyone knows the brand.

Lieb: Kraft Foods is selling iPhone apps. That’s really pretty darn remarkable. The iPhone app gives you recipes, Kraft Food based of course, and store check lists.

McGowan: What’s really amazing is that they are selling it.

Kennedy: They’re getting consumers to pay for the marketing!

Grehan: Devil’s advocate. Is it easier for us online guys to market to offline guys because they don’t know?

McGowan: There are also those people who had bad experiences with bad SEOs. They gave us a bad name and now we have to prove ourselves. That’s why we must lead with education.

Lieb: That’s an essential difference. You need to have the educational component. How do you do something that’s incredibly complex and brand new?

Grehan: What do you need to be when you go online? Techie or creative?

Allen: The more signal we create, the better. If it does register, it registers hard. Like Matt was saying, the cowboys have damaged our industry. But if we take this one stand we’ll hit the right people. It’s enabling everyone to be everywhere.

Lieb: For the first conference that talked about spam, we invited the Federal Trade Commission to come and speak. Because we reached out, Clickz became a big part of shaping the legislation. That’s a form of marketing.

McGowan: Some members of the Congressional Department are in attendance this week to figure out how to package this to small businesses. Later, I’ll be meeting with them because we can use these networking connections to leverage the market. Speakers are often our best vehicles to the market.

Lieb: Digital marketers must take a stand. We’re shaping the best practices and federal record.

Allen: One problem we’ve had with B2B what is: “What’s the one message that’s going to work?”

• As marketers we have a massive BS detector and are likely to criticize.
• One great thing about search marketing is that we can manufacture content around ultra niche levels just by collaborating with and listening to everyone.

Sheridan: There is a big connection between marketing to offline people and marketing to marketers who don’t understand search yet:

• We need to educate them on something they’re unfamiliar with, just like traditional marketers would with a brand new product.
• Part of our job is to make them realize the people they’re marketing to are active in these online communities.
• The next step is letting them know what they can actually achieve by marketing with these online strategies.
• These two elements drew attendance though the roof and the feedback scores were admirably high in September- 4.6 out of 6. Marketers came anxious and left calm because they understood, plotted, and adopted a strategy.

Lieb: This all links back to education and training.

Armen: Right, they have a path now, but what I don’t see here are support and next steps.

Kennedy: Which is where search marketers come in. The more we tell, the more we get leads. We wont be able to go out of business.

McGowan: Education seems to be the key, whether it’s what can help them (strategy) or (more traditionally) what the product is.

So there you have it, folks- the ultimate conclusion from the tail-end of SES we felt honored to help pass along: education is nothing short of essential when it comes to marketing to marketers; without it, don’t expect to help break people free of the bad taste SEO may have left in their mouths, or be able to successfully converge tech and creative teams’ marketing skills to your benefit, or, well, gain any ground on the M2M front at all.

credit: zenobia_joy

In yesterday’s post, guest blogger and CEO of BlitzLocal.com, Dennis Yu, tackled some important concepts of the local ad firm- specifically the fact that it is sure to kick the bucket in 2010 if industry professionals don’t take proactive steps as soon as possible. Part two of this story will address changes the future has in store for local ad agency fiscal models and a closer look at the crucial dynamics of this evolution.

How will the financial model of local adapt over time?

Firms can take a 50% margin until the market gets smart. Consider the current VC-funded, growth-oriented approach of a pretend composite company… we’ll call it SuperLocal, Inc.

Let’s break it down:

• SuperLocal has 250 employees and 5,000 clients that spend $1,000 a month.
• Assume that 150 of these 250 employees are in sales and each agent is able to manage 33 clients.
• That amounts to $400,000 in annual revenue per employee (33 clients that spend $12k per year, ignoring churn).
• If we assume that the firms allocates 50% of the client’s budget to actual spend, that’s $200,000 per gross margin per year per employee.
• However, the firm must also cover sales commissions at 15% ($60,000) and operations at 20% ($80,000), general overhead at 10% ($40,000)- leaving 5% as a profit margin.

Although this is a skinny profit margin, it is partially offset by scale and other efficiencies. Let’s examine each one in detail to see what the most efficient model could look like:

Economies of scale
The cost of operating a PPC platform should decrease as the number of clients you have in the system increases, as you can allocate over a larger user base. We can assume that operations, which consists of software expense (internally engineered or licensed technology), client support, credit card processing charges, and product development is perhaps 60% variable and 40% fixed costs. Thus, economies of scale will lower operations from 20% to a threshold of 12% (60% multiplied by 20%) at high volume.

Sales expense
Eliminating high-pressure sales tactics and having a greater reliance on word of mouth causes several cascading effects. The influx of ex-Yellow Pages salespeople who are making $100k+ a year is helping current firms achieve their acquisition targets, but at high per sale expense and high churn. Assuming an industry average tenure of five months (50% of clients stay for five months) for SuperLocal, Inc., the revenue per client is five months multiplied by $1,000- or $5,000. A 15% commission on that is $750. Should SuperLocal be able to deliver upon the product, it would seem quite feasible to double average lifetime value.

Thus, you could pay the sales agent half the commission rate while keeping their earnings the same. In fact, if you paid the agent based on retention and allowed them to interact beyond the initial sale, you would give them incentive to keep the client longer. Let’s assume that via product improvements, we can safely drop the commission to 10%.

Platform improvements
Even if we hold the percentage of spend constant at 50%, improvements in how campaigns are built, optimized, and automated should be able to squeeze out 50-70% percent improvements at the same budgets. This is based on our experience with clients that have come to us having been unsatisfied with larger market players. The secondary effect of automation and efficiency improvements is that the average employee can handle more clients.

SuperLocal employees should be able to handle triple the number of clients, given that they are not calling to complain as often; we are educating them on our processes, we are transparent in our reporting, and we set up alerts to notify them of performance improvements we’ve achieved. A 3x improvement may seem drastic until you consider what share of current client interaction stems from unhappy client calls.

The positive spiral effect of platform improvements is that the cost per sale decreases due to tenure improvements (clients stay longer), analyst coverage ratios (they can handle more clients), and automation of non-PPC functions not currently offered. Given higher performance, the company can now service clients who, at $500 a month, were previously not serviceable. Further, existing clients will spend more per month when they have greater ROI. Let’s assume that cuts operational expense in our model from 12% to 10% of gross spend.

Greater client satisfaction
One unnoticed side effect is that clients are less likely to go out of business. The current players are putting small businesses out of business, as these firms are unknowingly putting their last dollar on the roulette wheel and hoping for the best. Cigarette companies face the same issue with potentially killing their customers when they overuse the product. But great client satisfaction will not only help clients stay in business in a tough economy… it will encourage word of mouth effects. Consider Amazon.com- they don’t do any advertising—instead, they offer product marketing via free shipping and other consumer incentives.

Local lead gen companies can eliminate sales expense altogether when the leads come in from happy clients. If you conservatively assume that half of SuperLocal’s clients could come through referrals, we cut sales expenses from 10% to 5%. We can also lower operating costs if we create a social gaming system such that anybody is able to set up clients on the platform, thereby creating a local army of resellers.

The resulting new model is local lead gen

Let’s review what these implemented efficiencies do for SuperLocal and how it changes the model:

Holding media spend constant at 50%, we cut sales expense to 5% and operations to 10%. Even holding overhead fixed at 10%- we allow SuperLocal to inflate executive salaries and buy a shiny office tower– the firm’s gross margin still grows to 25%.

Further, since client tenure (how many months they stay on average) has doubled, the revenue per client is $10,000. The existing sales staff of 150 can now handle 15,000 clients, which is a three-fold improvement over the existing 5,000- this is due to operational improvements and no longer losing customers as fast as we gain them.

The company now has annual gross revenues of $180MM with only 250 employees, just about what ReachLocal has with 900 employees and just above MarchEx. We can even assume that as the company has expanded, they’ve been able to reach down to service lower price points, so let’s drop the average monthly spend to $750. And then assume that they increase percent of spend from 50% to 60%-  effectively sharing back part of the efficiency with their client base.

The gross revenue is reduced to $135MM and net margins fall to $20.25MM… still respectable.

The decrease in price points with automation and efficiency improvements is something our team at Yahoo! predicted 4 years ago- since initially, an improvement in efficiency will decrease spend, as clients are getting the same number of leads for less money. When advertisers are getting ROI, they tend to shift budgets into online channels after 3-5 months. Thus, spend follows a U-shaped curve when we implement efficiency improvements.

Finally, SuperLocal, Inc., has switched their pricing model to cost per call based on a ratecard of geography and category. This has caused them not to gain share from competitors- as there are no dominant players in local yet- but to grow awareness in the market, shed light on unethical business practices, and help force the bad actors out. When that happens, local lead generation will become safe, transparent, and effective- and the overall market will be able to grow healthily.

Transparency in the marketplace is something local online advertising companies should embrace now, rather than wait for the economic realities to force it upon them.

If there were a “Local Bill of Rights,”  this one would be ideal:

• Devote 70 cents of every dollar from clients to buying traffic.
• Show clients the same reports you see.
• Don’t have a direct sales force that hands off to an operations call center; your clients should talk to a trained analyst before and after the sale for greater efficiency and better service.
• Drive measurable performance—calls you can see and even listen to recordings of—as well as organic rankings you measure each month.
• Treat client’s money like it’s your money- so everyone in the company is paid based on client retention and feedback from your rating system.
• Grow the company with your own money- not venture capital- so you can grow at the proper pace and focus on the product, not sales growth.

Transparency leads to efficiency, which leads to the accrual of value in the hands of local resellers and maximum percentage ad spend for the client. The pending convergence of local, social, and mobile will create powerful products for local businesses that don’t cost an arm and a leg.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily aimClear.