Once during a rather large Intellectual property enforcement, one respondent replied with a firey e-mail stating we were persecuting him, and he was just an honest businessman who wasn’t doing anything wrong. I began to compose a reply immediately, calmly and logically presenting supporting data for our claim, and before I could finish my response and hit send, I was greeted with another e-mail from the same person. This time the man was borderline depressed and apologetic, and remarkably, only a few minutes had elapsed. I deleted my first e-mail response that I was composing, since the whole tone had changed, and before I could re-write another e-mail I was greeted with yet a third response. This was puzzling since I had yet to respond at all? The tone of this e-mail was a willingness to work with us if we could provide sufficient proof of Trademark, good faith usage, etc. I decided this time my response was getting written, hell or high water. I sent out the response with all necessary proof, and I heard nothing back for the rest of the day.
The next morning the man was back with a vengeance. He was going to figure out how to destroy the company, ruin my life and make us pay for having the audacity to call him on his actions, according to the e-mail. I replied calmly and logically, staying on the issue at hand and ignoring his fantastical word imagery and terroristic threats. I reminded him of the law that he was actually breaking, only from the intellectual property standpoint, and I attached supporting evidence that we would use to defend our claim and rights. I sent the e-mail. He replied with a statement along the lines of : “you’ll be hearing from my attorney.” and it ended.
Later that day we received an e-mail containing an authcode for domain transfer and an apologetic e-mail for causing so much difficulty.  To this day, I am unsure if that issue honestly ever resolved in that man’s mind or if he is still plotting my demise?
Contrary to the last respondent, there is no need to get overly excited if you receive a cease and desist letter. It is honestly a courtesy extended to you in the hopes of preventing expensive legal action, no matter how it may feel. Here are some tips if you are a lucky recipient of a Cease and Desist:

Tips

1. Really read the letter. Many times people in their haste either throw the letter away or pick out one element and get hung up on it. Getting hung up on one point also may lead to you to inadvertently escalating due your frustration over simply being in this situation. Without reading the letter fully, you have no idea what you have done, to whom, or how long you have to respond to these claims.

2. Respond! If you Choose to ignore the issue, that is usually taken as an admission of guilt by the offended party! In fact, what you are doing is “escalating”, whether by accident or design. Throwing the letter away can lead to you getting sued, and doesn’t rectify the situation at all. This is akin to an Ostrich putting its head in the sand.  Having said that, I recommend composing a response after seeking advice as needed, and then walking away for 30 minutes to an hour before sending. Perhaps even wait until the next day or obviously let your legal counsel respond. In most cases, emotions will hang you, not the plaintiff, so re-read and remove the emotion from your response before sending.

3. Remain open. Take a look at what they are saying, and get comfortable with the idea that you may be in the wrong, even by accident. Most Cease and Desist letters simply want you to do just that; stop the behavior they have a problem with.

4. Remedy the situation. If they have a point, and you can fix this situation, you probably should. If they are wrong, then get professional counsel ASAP and counter the accusation by using a professional with evidence of your own.

Remember, do not let your emotions get the best of you.

With the popularity of do-it-yourself shows on Television and the internet, many businesses have adopted this ideology in their business, and tried to manage their online reputation management (ORM) on their own. This can be as disastrous as attempting the above heart surgery at home; some things are better left to experience.
Here are some common misconceptions and actual statements that I have had given to me as a reason to not use professional ORM services:

“I was thinking of paying some high school kid to manage my social media marketing for a couple of hours per day after they get home from school.”

If this is your plan for social media, perhaps you would let the person who is good at mowing grass also cut your hair? This analogy, while a bit extreme, correctly reflects the situation: Teenagers are great at taking overhead camera-phone pictures, and posting the pictures and writing “how they are feeling” on their favorite social media sites. Some may even be more technically proficient than just the average user’s abilities. Does this mean they will expertly manage, protect and promote your online business identity? Social media has the stigma of being wholly juvenile, while the reality is that when properly applied, it is also a powerful reputation management tool. Nielsen Online’s March issue states that Social networks and blogs are now the 4th most popular online activity. This now ranks ahead of personal e-mailing.  Social media and online communities also account for almost 10% of all internet time that is spent.

Social media is capable of boosting search engine results in your favor with demonstrable and rapid increases in ranking on search engines. In addition, when you read negative commentary about your business or person, is your skilled teenager aptly equipped to strategically reduce the relevance of the negative posting while enhancing the positive search results in your favor? Most importantly, when the time comes for legal action, what kind of action will your teenager take?  This leads me to the next misconception:

“I have a good attorney who handled my divorce. If an online reputation management issue comes up, I always use him.”

I agree it is always good to have a competent attorney. I can say the same about a competent plumber. I will take the next step and say that, I don’t want either one filling in for the other’s job, if one isn’t available.    A common misconception is that using people who specialize is always the most expensive choice. I have attorneys as clients who use our ORM services and add their legal fees to our fees and then resale the services to their own clients. Had their clients chosen to use our specialized services in the first place, they would have saved the added legal fees; using an ORM specialist in most cases is actually a more cost effective route. In regular dealings with issues of this nature on a daily basis, ORM specialists insure that they have all the necessary tools and contacts are already in place.  We have contracts and agreements pre-secured to streamline many of the pitfalls that the divorce attorney would have to source, contact and make arrangements or contract with. When we receive a new client, our team goes to work with each specialized service we provide and there is no learning curve for the client  to wait for; we already know what we are doing and how to do it, expertly.  This leads me to the next misconception:

“I have a web marketing team, and they should be doing this.”

Marketing is one thing and Legal is quite another and mixing legal and marketing is something entirely different, however this mix is a situation that ORM specialists exist in and actually thrive under. When it comes time for enforcement, having someone who understands the full issue and how to properly enforce your case is of utmost importance. Many marketing personnel may be expert with standard marketing techniques, but only know the basics or, are ignorant about how to properly submit your website to search engines. ORM specialists know how to optimize your site submissions and how to put your best foot forward when it comes to your online presence. Additionally, they have the knowledge to prevent the easily crossed line that gets you banned from search engines for your perceived or accidental deceptive practices. This industry’s requirements are far from a cookie-cutter or standard approach; each situation possesses unique pitfalls and challenges, mainly due to the variety of clientele. Adapting a specialized solution may seem easy enough, but if you try the next misconceived solution, you may learn a more expensive lesson than you ever imagined.

“I am just going to buy one of those ORM kits online”

I have never personally seen a kit of this nature for sale, but if I did, I would be looking for a bottle of snake oil included. “One-size-fits-all” solutions rarely, if ever, fit any solution and don’t perform any one task very well. We have all seen what a “website-in-a-box” website looks like, and you can identify these sites on first sight in most cases. Also when you step back and look at what you are doing; you are using a widely available solution that anyone with similar cash can use and achieve similar results to you. The obvious net result is that you will rank the same as any of your competition using the kit. I would submit that you can achieve similar success by doing nothing, and save the few dollars spent on your “ORM in a box”.
Remember that when your online reputation is at stake, how much do you value it? Do you trust the team that has existed through the internet changes since the inception of online reputation management, or do you trust the neighbor’s kid, the plumber or maybe the ORM in a box to handle your reputation?

Do-it-yourself is fine for adding a deck or setting tile, but it can be hazardous to your online reputation.

Microsoft has released with little fanfare the new Search Engine dubbed “Bing”. This is the replacement to the beleaguered Live platform that has just never caught on with internet users.

We have given Bing and test drive here at Metamend and are pleasantly surprised. The SERPs deliver a nice clean page of results with the option to view further information on the listing with the simple hovering of the mouse (on the right side of each listing). This keeps the listings nice and organized, however we are seeing some problems with this feature always working as it should using the Firefox browser (no surprise) – in Internet Explorer it works like a charm.

We are hoping that the clean results Bing is putting forth is a trend with the new Search Engine incarnations on the horizon – “Keep it clean and give me what I am looking for”. The balance between providing “suggestions” to users and the risk of over delivery to the human eye is a tough one to convey. This has been lost even with the mega Search Engine giant Google with Organic, Local, Video, and Paid listings splattered all over the page. Let’s hope Bing stays on track well beyond the preview (beta) release.

As Bing is still in the preview stages we will be able to comment more on the functionally and validity of the results once the kinks are worked out. Some of the features to take note of are:

1. The continuous and fast loading images search results page gives you all of the goods on one page
2. The video search is definitely in a next generation format as the small thumbnails preview on a mouse hover – very attractive and time saving.

Our SEO services team will keep an eagle eye on this new release from the folks at Redmond and will comment in the future.

The Release Notes from the Google AdWords Team are impressive as the new additions will prove to be extra time savers and will save one from flipping from the editor and the online Client Center as often. Some of the key features are:

• Fine Tuned Import and Export Campaign Functionality

This allows you to tailor your imports and exports with more precision. For example one can specifically select active campaigns to download with a click of the mouse.

• Download Resume

A solid addition to the tool which allows you to resume a campaign download if you are interrupted during the process. This is a great feature if a large campaign you are downlading  cuts off during the procedure.

• Conversion Metrics

This function expands on the latest AdWords tracking metrics data with new columns illustrating “many-per-click” and “1-per-click”.

• Keyword Count

A very handy addition which allows you to view how many words there are in a particular phrase.

• Select Duplicates

A supplementary function that allows you to take a quick glance at keyword duplicates with a variety of sort options.

There is no question that the AdWords Editor is a powerful addition to a PPC manager’s arsenal. What we like most about the tool is that it is a significant time saver and truly gives you the power to manage multiple large campaigns at a glance.

In using the term “bursts of attention”, I’m referring to bursts as defined in a paper entitled “Bursty and Hierarchical Structure in Streams” written by Jon Kleinberg of the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. The paper examines a fundamental problem in text data mining with regards to targeting and extracting meaningful structure from document streams that arrive continuously over time. What Kleinberg is referring to in the paper are email and news articles because each of these two delivery mechanisms tends to showcase topics in a brief burst of intensity that eventually dissipate to varying degrees, depending on the permanence of the medium. Kleinberg’s work focused on developing a formal approach for modeling such bursts that could eventually lead to flexible frameworks and establish useful analytics. 

Taken a step further, it is important to note how language can morph after the advent of a burst, essentially building inertia from cultural residue. As SEO specialists can attest, setting a series of keywords is essential to your website’s longevity at the top of the search results page, but staying there will be the hardest part of the job. I believe it was Jack Nicholson who said “Getting to the top is easy – it’s staying there that requires hard work.” In the online world, language can change at an alarming rate, requiring that website owners and administrators be aware of the shifting sands that tend to reshape the landscape of meaning and emphasis. Particularly in news articles, bursts of attention can give birth to new phraseology that must be monitored to see if the changing tides of language have effected the word usage you used to sell your site to the search engines – or if new phrases can be employed to boost your web presence. 

I recently attended a corporate training session with a travelling hype artist who said that, in order reclaim your day, you must turn off the news, listen to Baroque music, and limit your email time. I was alarmed that anyone could get paid to promote the “head stuck in sand” maneuver as a corporate survival tool and I mentioned to the instructor that Baroque music was in some respects the western world’s first attempt at multimedia and was not meant to be tuned out, but rather was meant to be experienced in the full embrace of the arts, and I promptly wrote his ideas off before they escaped his constantly nattering mouth. And I would urge you to say no to this prescription for success if keeping your website current is high on your priority list.

Taking a long, cold look in the mirror, Ask.com admitted in their January post that search engines, including their own, have a fundamental flaw that prevents users from obtaining quick and efficient results. “Many times users have to repetitively rephrase the query before they finally get the answer they want. That’s because today’s search engines are still very sensitive to the way queries are constructed, returning different answers for variations of the same query.”

The new suite of semantic, web text, and answer farm tools devised by Ask.com have been packaged as Direct Answers from Databases (DADS), Direct Answers from Search (DAFS), and AnswerFarm with DADS being the most relevant to the Ask.com bread and butter – providing answers. The way DADS works is to parse the question then in real time form separate database queries from the original question that each return answers from structured data. Ideally, this should negate difference from separate but similar questions and allow Ask.com to deliver the correct answers in an efficient manner.

To increase their association with the grass roots, DADS, DAFS and AnswerFarm are being tested on NASCAR-related search items. The goal of the tests will be to gauge whether the users are getting the correct results faster than a Skol Bandit can hit a spittoon outside the Piggly Wiggly.

Not sure if the rubber will ever hit road with semantic searching, or what’s around the next corner for Ask.com – maybe they should ask themselves and see what kinds words of advice DADS can provide.

Knol is a blending of research and how-to articles that meekly brands itself as “a unit of knowledge”, but it can very easily be seen more as a power pack designed to take on Wikipedia. Even in the confines of beta, Knol has outpaced Wikipedia’s early growth milestones. Capitalizing on the explosion of social media sites, Knol is an environment where posted material can easily lead to community discussion, or be reviewed, tagged and graded by professionals and peers alike. And addressing some of Wikipedia’s shortcomings, Knol allows individual authors to collaborate with colleagues and edit the work of others in the pursuit of a more complete subject entry.

The benefits of Knol to any SEO campaign are obvious. Because Knol is a Google entity, it’s PageRank is a respectable 7, and the best part is it encourages links. If you recall your Article Marketing 101, you’ll recognise a great potential for opportunity in that Knol is a world-class collection of white papers and research findings planted by experts from all walks of experience and varying degrees of expertise, and there is no reason why you shouldn’t pick at the keyboard and offer your body of knowledge.

As the mega-status of Knol continues to grow, its massive web content and reams of pages means it will be a regular feature on Google search results. To date, Knol doesn’t have the draw to displace Wikipedia listings at the top of the search results page but it continues to make gains and getting in now will only add to your site’s movement, especially if you are just beginning to get a pulse.

Another great perk with Knol is that you can embed YouTube videos in you text. It is stunning to consider that 99% of videos returned in Google video results are YouTube based, and if you use YouTube as a tool for product demos or how-to walk-throughs, your videos can add meat to your Knol, but can also help you tap into members of your target demographic who may be looking for video on what you have to offer. If you avoid the tacky hard sell, some of these YouTube visitors may follow you to your site and may become optimally converted.

Case in point – in a week that saw advertising revenues shrink across the board in traditional media outlets like the Chicago Tribune and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, it is interesting to note an article that appeared on mediapost.com entitled, “Economy Accelerates Shift To Digital Advertising”. The article’s title implies, and rightfully so, that the shift away from traditional media advertising was already underway before the economy tanked as many marketing budgets heeded the demographic shift away from traditional media outlets to iMacs in coffee shops. But what is interesting in the acceleration toward digital advertising is the implied underlying reason – efficiency. Any form of traditional advertising is inherently inefficient because it does not, and cannot, truly know the audience. As a writer, I know the truth behind the adage “know your audience”, but until digital marketing came along, their were very few marketers who could actually say they knew their audience – sorry, test cases don’t count.

According to the mediapost.com article, here’s the cold hard numbers on marketing expenditures for the near future. I should warn you, these are just projections, but they are based on hard numbers – indicators of where money is going. According to the U.S. Local Media Annual Forecast (2008-2013) by BIA Advisory Services and division Kelsey Group, through 2013, companies will reduce their investments in local advertising in favour of more ad dollars going toward digital rather than traditional media. Further, the article projects that U.S. local advertising revenue will decline from $155.3 billion in 2008 to $144.4 billion in 2013, representing a negative 1.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). “Companies will continue to increase the amount spent on interactive ads, from online to mobile to digital out-of-home that relies on IP platforms to transmit targeted messages. The Kelsey Group estimates the amount spent on interactive ads will more than double from 9% in 2008 to 22.2% in 2013.”

More than double – when was the last time you heard those words applied to growth? I think we’re on to something here.

Social bookmarking is basically the practice of bookmarking a Web page in your browser, as you would normally do, but with a twist. Using an application that understands metadata, you can store, organize, search, and manage your bookmarks for public consumption. The degree of sharing can be tailored to suit individual comfort levels. Bookmarks can be shared with a defined group, or on a larger scale, they can be shared with selective networks, accommodating any arrangement of public and private domains. Viewing of the bookmarks can also be tailored by grouping them by date, or predefined category, or even by search engine. 

By sharing your bookmarks, which I hope would contain several bookmarks to material found on your site, you are bringing attention to your website, and if your bookmarked material is located deep in your site, you may be able to generate additional traffic flow to other parts of your site. In some respects, you can tell a lot about social bookmarking groups based on the set of parameters that distinguishes the group, and if you are able to share your bookmarks with the selective group, you are basically bringing a targeted location to a defined audience, and your material will be available to them even before they perform a search. As others in the group book mark your content, the popularity of the material increases along with the rankings offered by the social book marking site, all of which help to build web presence for your material. 

Of course, there is the dark side of social bookmarking – the evil lunch meat can start to creep into your space. Spammers have caught on to the popularity of social bookmarking, and to cash in, they have unleashed bookmarking campaigns that target the same Web page multiple times with a chorus of popular tags in a hodge-podge of simple-minded greed. But have no fear, contrary to popular opinion, developers are social animals too and love coming up with creative solutions for overcoming abuses. 

Here’s a great article on detecting spam in social bookmarking systems.

Like my veggies, search page results fall into two different categories: organic search results and advertisements. Organic search results only appear in the search page results if they have an association with the user’s search string. In this way, the results are unmanufactured. Manufactured results are advertisements slipped into the search page by the search engine companies to look-like the organic search results. In this way, the advertisements are manufactured. When you contact an SEO firm, the power they possess is to increase your standing in the organic search page results. 

The truth of the matter is that the search page results of the major search engines are a mix of advertising and organic search results with the advertisements often designed to mimic the appearance of search results. This mimicking trend has developed to such a point that many search engine users cannot tell the two apart, but this is nothing new. A 2005 study conducted by the PEW/Internet and American Life Project, entitled “Search Engine Users: Internet searchers are confident, satisfied and trusting – but they are also unaware and naïve” found that “–only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or “sponsored” results and unpaid results. And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not. This finding is ironic, since nearly half of all users say they would stop using search engines if they thought engines were not being clear about how they presented paid results.” More recently, some major search engines have begun to offer slight visual differentiators or clues to distinguish between the two types of results – claiming, it’s only good business sense to do so.

Another underlying component of organic search results is that they are purported to be completely non-biased – that is to say, that the search engine company will not accept any amount of cash to influence an individual site’s ranking. With this stipulation in mind, organic search results help to keep the search engines running clean.