It wasn’t a documentary by any manner of means, it was a light-hearted comedy called ‘Confessions of a Shop-a-holic’, and I actually learned something. No, not about my shoe shopping … urm… never mind, about how it can work if you appeal to different every-day people on a very every-day level.

I reckon I’m an every-day person (with a mild shoe, bag and hat thingey going on…), so I wanted to give it a try with a brief touch on accountants, lawyers, PR folks, customers and shareholders. Let me know how you think I did…

Accountants - who want to make a profit online

‘Something for Every-one’ means great web profits, which means a great income statement and a good-looking balance sheet.

… - who want to make a loss online

Objective: to mess with Something-for-everyone

Hire a poor search optimizer and watch your web income fall. Follow up with a really inept sponsored search person and make a bigger loss pretty damn fast. In fact the more money you give them, the more they’ll lose. Tidy it up and it’s a great way to lose money ‘legitimately’ but you still need to show some kind of business case – though that’s not your fault, the VPF should have that nicely in-hand, and he in-turn can blame the COO and CEO and the Prez – and so on… You’ll likely miss a jail term – maybe.

Lawyers

‘Something for Every-One’ means you can ensure you get your legal speak in the right place, and where people can find your terms and conditions, privacy policies and more on the web.

You even get a step up because if you work with the ‘real SEO’ team and the web devs, you can make sure the bits you don’t want the public to see are still there for the right people, but not for the general public. An intranet is best of course, but there is always more. (I did a measly three years of undergrad law, and those three years left me knowing that from a legal stand point, there is ALWAYS more – it’s pretty much 100% guaranteed.)

General Admin

This is a pearl in obeisance to the ocean of general admin ‘stuff’ that makes up the day of the people who actually make the economy run (hat-tip).

SEOs (the ‘something for everyone’ folks) give you a new, different type of person to hire, a new type of training to employ, a different salary range to decipher and apply, and a different personality in entirety to deal with from an HR perspective and a general admin perspective. Define what you need (not what you want) well ahead of time because I have yet (after some years) to find any SEO that fits any stereotype, pigeonhole or preconceived idea of what an SEO should be, do and become.

Public Relations - Interested in positive PR

Utilize the SEOs (the actual search optimizers and something for everyone folks) for the benefit of your online press releases, include them in your PR drive to enable their creation of new pages around new taglines. Even better, assist them in their drive to write what they fondly call ‘link-bait’, and work with them in the social networks to create a PR/SEO optimized (not redundant, and yet somewhat) approach to dealing with detractors and supporting evangelists in real time.

… - Interested in negative PR

Go head-to-head against everything mentioned above. It will work. Even better, strive to pee-off the social networks as fast as you can. Again, 100% Guaranteed.

Customers

SEO (something for everyone) means they can find what they need when they’re already pre-qualified in terms of intent. The level of intent may vary, but that’s where really good SEOs (the optimizing type) have worked with design and dev to ensure a quick, effective targeted conversion funnel.

Customers find what they want and need, and get to buy it online in a usable, friendly, approachable, non-threatening, secure manner. Something for everyone hits the masses right there!

Shareholders

These guys are sometimes likened to the accountants who ‘don’t want a profit’ – but rarely. Most investors are short term, want a fast profit, don’t want undue risk, and have less than a million dollars.

Question:

How can we make their shareholding work for them short-term to encourage them to stay for a longer term?

Answer:

Where possible, offer them a track record of growth, something tangible apart from FS (Financial Statements), invite their feedback on the web-tangible to engage them (unlikely to have any feedback but the perception of involvement is created), show them proof of online sales performance and improvement (hello SEOptimizers* and other online marketing folks) via summary analytics data, and show them the potential for growth in the online arena via research. It’s there, even in these down times. It has a track record of outperforming traditional methods in terms of ROA.

The asterisk (*) above is to testify to the fact that for most well defined and optimized online businesses or web sites, the organic traffic nearly always outperforms any other form of online advertising, including PPC in terms of both pure traffic and conversions, naturally resulting in the lowest cost per conversion apart from email, which is generally far more targeted, and limited in scope…

 ‘Something for EveryOne’ – It’s SEO, it works, it’s undeniable, it’s cheaper than almost any other form of online exposure, and it can be tailored to support every on and offline marketing initiative.

…

Something for EveryOne? …. It’s SEO…

Twitter

SEO is Misunderstood

Background

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term that was coined in July 1997, where it was used publicly in what was perceived to be a spam message, hardly an auspicious beginning. Over the years, the term ‘search engine optimization’ has become synonymous in the eyes of the general public with spamming techniques, and with the deliberate manipulation of the SERPs (search engine results pages) to reflect less than optimal results via ‘black-hat’  or spamdexing techniques.

Regardless, the SEO industry has grown and continues to grow as many marketers, web developers and planners have realized that SEO can legitimately - effectively and efficiently - assist their online brand exposure, sales and other marketing objectives.

So What is SEO?

It’s a multifaceted discipline and is the practice of the following 4 summary points, and more:

·         Understanding a website’s primary online objective and how that fits in with the businesses overarching marketing objective, which in turn should be supportive of the business model and corporate strategy. How? By understanding the client, and the economic and industry landscape at a bare minimum.

·         Conducting online competitive and market research on behalf of the client. This is not simply limited to keyword research; this is about understanding the search query language and intent of the online target market, their search patterns and behaviors, their demographics and personality types (grouped averages), how they interact with the web, where their sticky and stumbling points are (what your users like, and what they will leave) and much more.

·         Analyzing the client web site’s onpage elements in terms of the research findings and best practice SEO. The objective being to assess how usable and navigable the site is to human uses and spiders, as well as how well the site answers the interest and likely search behavior intent of the client’s target market.

This is analyzed in terms of onpage content relevance and includes a remit of other variables that require some nifty foot-work; there are usually some brand or legal requirements, some usability issues to contend with, friction with creatives and marketing, difficulties with CMS or other backend database limitations, unclear expectations, unreasonable goals, and on-and-on so the wheel turns.

·         Understanding the importance of effective backlinking strategy, integrated social media strategy and the ability to work effectively with public relations and social via innovative and best practice strategy to boost buzz in the blogosphere via the social networks. This in turn is all about creating or enhancing the Trust and PageRank of a site via efficient backlinking from trusted, related, authority resources.

The Challenge?

Personally, I’m really, really tired of the uninformed or the simply ignorantly arrogant stating with utter conviction that SEO is a ‘waste of time’ and that it is conducted only by ‘snake-oil salesmen’.

Actually, effective SEO is pretty hard work, it’s not that easy, and it is a big deal. In my books, SEO remains misunderstood by the masses and I’m fast turning into Ms. Cranky-Pants when it comes to answering these detractors.

SEO is Under-utilized

Background

Search engine optimization has never really had a home. SEOs float between being considered web developers, content writers and online marketers; a jack-of all trades but master-of-none apart from the mystical ability to ‘work’ the search engines.

So Where Should SEO be Aligned?

To be honest, it depends entirely on the seniority of the position and the requirements of the role - much as with most other jobs. But my summary take will consider an SEO lead/management position, and it is this; an SEO lead should be able to:

·         effectively project manage a team of SEM folks (both organics and PPC)

·         work hand in glove with IA, design, copy/content writers and development

·         understand as much as we know we can about search engine optimization without hands-on the actual algorithms themselves

·         have a good understanding of client/in-house brand integrity, design philosophy, content methodology and legal requirements

·         be able to hand code html and have a sound understanding of most web development techniques, and popular CMS and analytics programs

·         train best practice SEO based on discipline functions from a very high level down (that’s not as easy as it sounds)

·         work with other online and offline marketing leads to ensure that SEO is aware of - and if necessary included in -  all marketing initiatives to ensure that there are targeted pages created for tag-lines used in billboards or TV ads (e.g.)

·         ensure full integration with public relations to contribute to all online press releases as well as to have a heads-up on all offline releases to facilitate on-site answer and speak to targeted search query follow up

·         work with social, R&D and XD (experience design) when social and keyword research provides insights to new opportunities or threats, or identifies competitive strengths or weaknesses.

The Challenge?

Being an effective SEO manager or lead requires patience, dedication, tenacity, humility, credibility, diplomacy and so much more that that topic alone deserves a post of its own.

Hopefully I’ve covered some points worthy of highlighting here, but I’d love to hear what you have to say!

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Optimising web content for both human users and search engine spiders should not be a mutually exclusive endeavour; at its most basic content should be, and needs to be, optimised for:

1. human users - ensuring topical relevance, clarity and usability, and
2. spiders - ensuring topical relevance, ease of discovery and crawlability.

It is an undisputed fact that on the web, ‘content is king’. This adage applies to the importance both human users and spiders place on quality, relevance and quantity of ‘readable’ content on any given web page. Much as a human user does not look at an entire site at one glance, neither do search engine spiders view web sites in a single crawl. Spiders view, index and rank pages on an individual page-by-page basis.

The search engines are trying (and succeeding) in their quest to make their spiders more ‘human-like’ in their interpretation and understanding of web content. It is the search engines objective to present the most relevant results to human users in the search results in order to improve their own relevance - and usability - for their set of stakeholders. The best way to do this is to have spiders rank pages according to topical relevance in a manner most likely to answer a human search query intent; this requires an algorithm that ‘thinks’ as much like a human as possible.

It is not the objective of search engine optimization to spam the engines, to detract from usability, or to have final control over content. It is the objective of effective search optimization to complement online marketing initiatives, support web content and enhance usability, crawlability, clarity and topical relevance.

Two search optimization best practice components worth expanding on for the purpose of this post include;

1. Search query intent, and
2. Search query language.

When conducting keyword research, it is important to determine the search query language, as well as the search query intent of your online search-based target market.

·         Search Query Language refers to the actual phrase or keyword string human users physically type into the search box when conducting a search

·         Search Query Intent refers to what they are actually hoping to discover in the results returned

One of David Ogilvy’s quotations speaks very well to the idea of focusing on search query language and utilizing it in your web site to answer search query intent:

“If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language in which they think.”

A further quotation by John Ilhan identifies that in developing your offering, you need to answer the intent of your primary users, not provide them with information you think they might want:

“This may seem simple, but you need to give customers what they want, not what you think they want. And, if you do this, people will keep coming back.”

What is worth mentioning is that if search optimization of content is not effectively integrated into a comprehensive web content strategy, there will be negative impacts on all three of our stakeholders, and that impact is compounded over time.

Without effective search optimization. (Please click image. Sorry folks, it’s worth it - and yes that’s how I spell ‘behavioural’ - no hiding. Canada rocks!)

Conclusion?

Content is King, but optimised content is the King’s muse….

Follow Laura on Twitter and join the fray

Some tools have changed, and some are newer than my SEO age (mum’s the word) but as the landscape has changed, I will include them anyway if they are relevant for new entrants to the wonderful world of SEO!

That’s what this post is about. Please add your favourites in the comments!

1. Simulated Crawl

GSiteCrawler gives you full URL list, aborted URL list, some duplicate content, page sizes, page-by-page data, additional external 1-click tools and more.

2. Server Header Check

This tool has helped me figure out quite a few mysteries regarding “WTH happened to my rankings” and other everyday stressies when URLs have been fiddled with. These guys have a host of other tools – well worth checking out.

3. SE Advanced Operators

There are lots of these around, but this is a firm favourite. Maybe not so pretty, but pretty comprehensive is better than aesthetically pleasing in some cases…

4. SEO Gap Analysis

While not fully comprehensive and a bit out of date (and no, I don’t agree with everything here), this is – regardless – a pretty good guide should you be asked to conduct an SEO gap analysis, and not know where to start.

5. Web Page Speed Report

When you’re just starting out, this can be of help to identify what’s up with a client’s pages without trawling through reams of crappy code.

6. URL Strength

Trifecta is a free SEOmoz tool (it replaced the Page Strength Tool). You have to register/log-in to use it, but it is free. I admit that if SEOmoz is at 38% there’s not a ‘huge whole hell of a lot of hope’ for us small SEO bloggers, but the instant backlink and brand check is quite nice to have in one tool, and it’s nice to give to clients as a benchmark.

7. Competitor Discovery & investigation

SEODigger is now SEMRush, and the things you can do for free include:

• Discover competitors’ sites with common Google keywords
• Get list of Google keywords for any site
• Get list of AdWords keywords for any site
• Check your competitors landing-pages for SE and AdWords traffic
• Investigate long-tail keywords for any domain
• …and more

Yes there are lots of other tools paid and free, some general (Google Trends etc), and some more specific (AdGooroo, MarketLeap etc).

8. Code to Text ratio

Yes, for a while I got quagmired in this tool – so for those of you who do, here, I’ll make it easy for you. Yes the ratio is important, but seriously, don’t beat yourself up about it unless it’s really, really dire – which in most cases it’s just not. This site, again, has ample other free tools – enjoy!

9. BackLink anchor text

I’m sure there are more, better tools somewhere, but this has always worked for me, and as I simply copy and paste into excel for data sorting it works. It’s never entirely accurate, but its free and it’s a good sample in most cases.

10. FireFox

Ok, so the FF plugins are fantastic, and there are many more. My favourites are SearchStatus, SEOpen and RoboForm, though there are lots and lots and lots of other awesome plugins available. My recommendation – make that this months task!

11. Twitter

Yeah, there are LOADS of Twitter tools, and assuming you don’t have a paid for RM/SMM tool or the time to use every tool, then my two absolute favourites are Twitter Search and BackTweets. It depends on what you want really.

12. Reputation Management

Google Alerts is still free. Not always complimentary, but free, so it evens out.

.

.

.

MORE—- A small sample of other great free tools site for SMM and RM

- -SEM

WebSiteTips

- -PPC

ClosedLoopMarketing

- -SEO

Google Webmaster Tools

Top 15 by SocialSEO

136 Tools by SEOCompany

- -RM

16 Tools from SitePoint

10 brand monitoring tools from Mashable

- -General Fun Tool test Kit

MSN adCenter Labs

OK, so I hope this has given you a head-start on the game if you’re new. It’s by no means fully comprehensive. It’s also excluding numerous fantastic paid for tools, many of which I now use thanks to bigger budget and the fact that I’m inhouse, but this is, in a nut-shell post, some tools I used when starting out.

- Blogs/Forums/Tutorial Sites

No matter how many free or paid tools you use, if you don’t have a guideline of what is important or when to use what, you may get overwhelmed, so my advice is to use these 7 resources at the very least when you get going:

- Pandia

- WebMasterWorld

- SEOChat

- SEORoundTable

- SearchEngineLand

- SearchEnginePeople

- SearchEngineWatch

- Official Blogs

- Google

- Yahoo!

- Live/MSN

And even though there are many others that are better, I got my start with this little forum a long, long time ago.

CONCLUSION!

There are innumerable fantastic, quality personal blogs about SEO, PPC and RM that can help. Keep looking until you find the one that works best for you and gives you what you need. Word to the wise – don’t overload your RSS feed; you’ll feel overwhelmed and you’ll feel inadequate. This industry moves fast. Stick with some of the blogs above to start as you find your feet with your preferred writers, and follow twitter experts picking and choosing your reads.

Best of luck, and remember this industry is about helping you help yourself and your clients, and waiting for you to get to the point where you can contribute back. We have a bad rep – no longer deserved, and never to the extent it has been sensationalized. Learn. Discover. Explore. Experience. Test. Refine…and continue.

Your learning’s in the end will help the industry as a whole. And one-day, please share your preferred tool set with the rest of us!

Follow Laura on Twitter

Which forms of UGC to leverage, why, where and how can be a challenge to even the most professional marketing team.  Please read more about UGC and SEO here.

VOC (voice of customer) is another part of the same puzzle. Traditionally:

• “…[VOC] is a market research technique that produces a detailed set of customer wants and needs, organized into a hierarchical structure, and then prioritized in terms of relative importance and satisfaction with current alternatives.” Wikipedia

Usability Study

I was recently provided detailed information as part of a team knowledge sharing initiative on a usability study that one of my colleagues spear-headed across Canada and the UK.

It’s interesting that no matter how objective you try to be, once you have been working on a specific account for any period of time, you will be myopic on certain points, complacent on others and oblivious of yet more.

Some feedback from these studies that I can freely share include the following three general points:

1. Don’t ever assume that your online market is nearly as tech savvy or internet experienced as you or your team are. Issues with misunderstood navigation, unseen buttons, confusion on how to even begin to find the site from the engines were not uncommon, even though most issues identified seemed like total no-brainers to the more internet experienced internal team – even those not on the accounts in question – we’re not (in most cases) selling to our technical/internet peers. I’m not saying that our target markets are less intelligent, I’m saying that they don’t spend all day working in html, refining Google advanced searches, using Google and Yahoo operators, visiting numerous completely diverse sites for research, competitive intelligence or pure interest reasons.
2. Don’t assume that features and functionalities you think will be of great interest and benefit to the customer, actually are. Mistrust, uncertainty and the pure search and swap instinct is very prevalent. If you are offering something fancy or informative, make sure you provide them with full information on what they are getting, whether it be in the form of information during a download, or an explanation to the effect that the retailer testimonials they are seeing are not purely self-promotion (link to the original – that simple, but so often overlooked – heck, we know it’s real… right?).
3. Many usability victims… err, test subjects actually think that they are only expected to provide negative feedback. Make sure you ask them to tell you what’s positive. In some cases, it might be the opposite (less common) so ensure that you tell them you want feedback on both their positive and negative experiences and feelings. Try to get them to quantify all feedback via a simple scoring system including positive and negative scoring throughout to keep that top of mind.

What about UGC?

Well, let’s backtrack a little. This usability study was regarding test subjects’ experiences with the web site itself. Admittedly unless a site is particularly awful or particularly blindingly awesome, not too many people comment on the actual site usability of their own free will, and usability is pretty darn important if you’re involved in ecommerce.

BUT… what about conducting a usability test for an online application. I guarantee some of the feedback would be ‘great, fast and easy’ as well as ‘so slow’. Well sometimes, UGC is as effective if not MORE so than usability studies for gaining real time interaction and feedback from real customers as they are using your app/product/service. So what can you do?

1. track the social networks (Google alerts; Radian6; Twitter Search and more)
2. aggregate the feedback and see which comments on which features are the most prevalent (more ‘this is slow’ or more ‘this rocks with speed’)
3. respond to every positive and negative comment and follow up with PR and feedback where possible/required and take it offline if it gets too long, or too confusing – you have other followers
4. feed learnings back to product development and marketing on a regularly scheduled basis (don’t ping them with every tweet, post or comment; they’ll hunt you down and disconnect you)
5. blog about interactions with the socnet including after-the-fact product/app/service fixes based on feedback with a big thank you to all followers/commenter’s etc
6. link out of comments and twitter posts where possible and relevant to followers/readers to specific pages within your site encouraging readers to go to the site with a snippet of highly relevant info followed by an ellipsis ‘…’.
7. Never comment or tweet/forum etc spam. Just don’t do it.
8. get back to initial pure voluntary commentators/tweet peeps when you have a usability study or other research factor on a feature or function as a potential add to your test target market – it’s predefined and you already have an in… awesome J

Why bother with UGC when we have VOC?

• It is likely that when you really impress someone on the socnets (social networks) with customer service, you may well turn them into a fan as opposed to a neutral or a potential/real detractor.
• It is possible that you will generate a ready made contributor base for future usability studies
• It is possible that your socnet folks are UGC addicts themselves with their own blogs, and if you engage them effectively, they may very well blog about your product, your site, or your twitter account/blog/forum etc. All exposure in the socnets that is positive is a good thing, weither indirectly or directly for SEO – both in terms of pure backlinks, but also in terms of SERP real estate and exposure… this is the minefield of the longtail, if you can harness it effectively. Referral traffic is very likely to spike if you make this work, so don’t keep your SEO analytics figures (if you use GA for example) limited to actual organic/non-paid traffic; after a socnet initiative go in and measure before and after referral traffic along with the long tail of referral sites… you may be very pleasantly surprised. I did that today for an SEO post mortem one of our sites – over a 200% increase in referral traffic over a specified period of time. (You can monitor Twitter backlinks currently with BackTweets – one of my faves).
• MOST importantly, if you have free VOC in the socnets, track it, harness it and use it as real time, real people studies of how your real customers feel about your offering (product/service/app etc) in real time. It’s the best kind of VOC out there from a purely qualitative point of view if you record and feed it back accurately and appropriately. It may not be quantitative, but you can assign values to comments (positive and negative) and thus determine a mean value as well as outliers and other statistically significant data to provide some form of non-qualitative data to your stakeholders. Make sure you explain your methodology, but don’t blind them with your process.

Conclusion

UGC and VOC are part of the same puzzle – they’re just on different sides of the board. Don’t lose one, or you may scupper the other.

Follow Laura on Twitter

The process that this went through consists of far more than I can do justice to here, but I wanted to share some really cool learnings with you all.

First: If you have a home page, don’t be unwilling to change it if the VOC warrants such a change.

Second: Make sure you listen to your customers. This can take the form of customer reviews, feedback through the socnets, usability studies and numerous other forms. Your budget and existing level of engagement may dictate your initial approach.

Third: Don’t keep changing your home page willy-nilly as that will confuse your users, and if you do change it, make sure you keep your primary brand message as consistent as possible.

Fourth: Ensure you approach any redesign, especially a VOC driven redesign with clear objectives based on your predetermined KPI. In this case a primary objective was to provide a much clearer ‘decision point’ to facilitate the navigation of first time users to their true product of choice, and…

Fifth: Facilitate their optimal engagement path, leading to a more streamlined and facilitated conversion path.

Here was the challenge and the result along with VOC feedback:

1. The original home page was very Online Product focused, not a bad thing, but not beneficial to the numerous CD/download customers

• “Home page was sneaky in that it wasn’t clear Intuit is directing people to the online tax returns.”
• “Ended up in the preparation of a return online which is not what I wanted.”
• “The download version of QuickTax I was looking for was not immediately apparent as an option, though I did later find it at the bottom of the page.”

2. The XD (experience design), usability, marketing and copy messaging folks came up with this new home page

The VOC now tells a NEW story

• “The homepage made my selection easy. The options were straight forward.”
• “Clear information on the opening page.”
• “Easy site to navigate and purchase download software.”

The Analytics Results in a Nutshell

• The new design achieved what it set out to do for desktop sales increasing them by 17% with immediate effect, with no negative impact on online sales.
• The site has since experienced a 14% increase in task completion

Lance (who spear-headed the project) had 3 Key-insights for Take-away:

1. What the business wants isn’t always good for the customer
2. Listening to customers can change how the business thinks
3. Behavioural and attitudinal data are the judge and jury in the court of expert opinion

Follow QuickTax and me on Twitter!

Disclaimer: nothing I say here may or should be attached to any employer, current or previous. This is my personal blog. The views expressed on this page are mine alone and not those of my employer.

I only made it to the Bat Cruise (awesome, live music, cruising on Lady Bird Lake, great people) and then to the incredible Salt Lick thingey-do. Picture beer-donkeys, chicken s**t bingo, mechanical bull riding, live western band, great Tex-Mex and fantastic hosts, great people… and you can’t do it justice.

I wanted to put a summary of my key learning’s down for everyone, and hopefully show you how much you all missed and how much you really should try to go to next years.

First, if you didn’t see their see zany intro on ‘The Forbidden Zone: Missing Influentials’ I highly recommend it (+/- 5 minutes excluding outtakes).

CONTAGIOUS MEDIA

This is basically the media you apply to any viral strategy you employ online via the socnets, or aimed at the social network market.

It works best when targeted at personality types (I particularly liked the “mullet” definition applied to personality – work in the front, party in the back!). The idea is to split your target market within a social network by personality type and target those personality needs and wants via different approaches.

The Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti explained how they apply real time metrics and template movement facilitation to their editors to move popular topics up the page, less popular topics down the page, and offer front page real time involvement based on user interaction. In the background they have links to popular socnet conversations, sites, topics and offer great web-wide interaction for all readers. A measure of their enormous success is in their growth, and in Jonah’s incredible entrepreneurial ability and foresight regarding socnet interest including the Nike Sweatshop initiative featured on NBC.

Apart from targeting personality types, it also works best when the expectations are set to those types regarding rewards for involvement: for some folks it is reward enough to be part of a community – for them pure collaboration is the name of the game. Others want something tangible; so you can think contests, rewards, sweepstakes etc… it is well worth exploring your social network targets, defining your markets and then nailing your personality types and developing your engagement strategy based on those learnings as well as your objectives. If you want pure collaboration, that market is approached differently to a market that you may want to engage to encourage pure viral spread in the form of open sweepstakes.

YOUR INFLUENTIALS

A big take-away for me was the fact that it is possible to identify your major influentials; your multipliers. In the case of the speakers on this topic, affluent middle-aged women were their target multipliers. How to target them? Well, I’m not going to spoil next years conference for you, but apply basic target marketing based on demographic strongly salted with socnet requirements, and peppered with the online bus objective for your initiative.

Another big take-away was that supporting evangelists and dealing with detractors is not the be-all and end-all of your approach. What you really need to be doing is turning your neutrals into fans, and then your fans into ambassadors.

Determine what these folks want, apply an open stealth campaign to integrate and engage them, push the engagement into collaboration via a securely defendable social media plan, and make tactical refinements based on learnings.

1. social media is not that new that there are not a lot of very strong, very savvy players
2. social media is still new enough that even the biggest folks are learning and make mistakes.

If you make a mess of something, own up straight away, apologise and offer an alternative. If something works, give kudos to your socnet members and participators; especially your multipliers.

WHAT ABOUT THE ENGINES?

Another take-away was to make use of the SERPs as a playground for social media target research. Pick some phrases you would like to be associated with, and some you do not want to be associated with… this is very different to traditional keyword research as it is based on wording and commentary you will have picked up in the socnets via reputation management tools (like Radian6).

Check out what Google listings are for those top 10-20 positive and negative terms and proactively target those terms in the social networks, including online PR.

CONCLUSION

This is a small sample of stuff from only 3 sessions I attended (and takes up 3 slides of my 17 slide feedback ppt presentation). Obviously as my employer (Intuit) paid for me to go, my learnings in toto will be applied to our offerings, and I can only strongly encourage anyone who reads this blog to attend next years BazaarVoice Social Summit. It’s interesting and groundbreaking, and the insights are all easily applied and implementable – if you have a progressive management team willing to let you play in the Social space. Read more about how you can encourage your management to do just that!

BAZAARVOICE MENTION

Customer reviews are the way to go regarding UGC integration from a marketing insights and R&D learning platform direction at the very least. Quite simply, these guys rock.

Thanks for reading. Follow me on Twitter and let’s see what we can continue to do together to make social networks a legitimate point of customer collaboration, communication and learning, not just for marketing, but for R&D… better products and better services will make for a greater global competitive advantage for our businesses… we need that, and we can do it, together!

Disclaimer: nothing I say here may or should be attached to any employer, current or previous. This is my personal blog. The views expressed on this page are mine alone and not those of my employer.

Before I go off on a slightly different tangent, entirely prompted by my reading of Steven’s thought’s, I highly recommend reading the post that started me thinking, the comments alone are enormously interesting. The primary point here will deal with one element Steven commented back at me regarding corporations and their potentially inherent ‘fear’ of social media, and I’ll answer with what I believe they can do to embrace social media – effectively.

Of course my ideas are not everyone’s cup of tea. I’ll simply start with saying that a company, or brand, needs to be somewhat proactive, and somewhat non-anally retentive (there just is no nice way of saying that) in the legal and ‘messaging control’ department if they even hope to attempt a successful foray into the socnet space in the first place.

Biggest Fear #1

“You want to WHAT? Over my bloody dead body. Do you think for one moment legal or branding will let you message at random on the internet? Do you not know about our PR requirements regarding disclosure, our editorial requirements our….*sputter**hiccough**burp**wheeze*….”

Yeah I know, over-dramatization, but you get it… and come to think of it, I actually do know of a few folks in rather big brands who would - literally - nearly have a heart-attack at the thought of engaging openly, irregularly and in an non-brand-dictated fashion online - and dare I say - it in a live PUBLIC arena. Oh, the horror…

Solution, Its actually not at all hard…

The decision makers need to understand a few salient points:

1. Social networks are not subject to disclosure regulations.
2. If anyone in a social network sees you using the words ‘aptitude’, ‘due diligence’, ‘decree’ or sees you using poncy typically non-social terminology in your (all of 140 characters) tweets for example, they are likely to not follow you, unfollow you, take the piss, or ignore you.
3. It’s social; define ‘Social’: composed of sociable people or formed for the purpose of sociabilitymarked by friendly companionship with others [wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn]
4. it’s a ‘network’; define ‘Network‘: [to] communicate with and within a group [wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn]
5. Let’s take points 3 and 4 and define ‘Social Network’:

A web of interconnected people who directly or indirectly interact with or influence the student and family. May include but is not limited to family, teachers and other school staff, friends, neighbors, community contacts, and professional support. [http://rrtcpbs.fmhi.usf.edu/rrtcpbsweb/glossary.htm#Shttp://rrtcpbs.fmhi.usf.edu/rrtcpbsweb/glossary.htm#S]

    5.  It’s ’online’; define ‘Online Social Network’:
…actually, there was no definition according to my search on Google for “define:..”, and so I asked some folks on Twitter for their thoughts. A simple, insightful and unbiased answer was simply this from @cyandle:

• A community where you can engage with others online…

Actually, in a nutshell, that is exactly what it is; a means of getting and maintaining the attention of others online by:

• interacting with them, 
•  responding to them,
• answering them,
• collaborating with them

… engaging them; but within the boundaries of what is considered to be socially acceptable, if not in the real world, then in the very real online social world where the rules may be unwritten, but they are very clear, and woe to the faint-hearted or ignorant. Yes, I’m talking to you Mr. Company.

 Can you apply these points to interacting on the social networks as a brand or corporation? YES! In 6 clear ways:

1.  Be transparent. Transparency is good, but not overtly so. Posting comments about or sending people to disclaimers and terms and conditions or privacy policies is not what it’s about.

2.  Be open to negative comments and feedback, and deal with it in a friendly, open manner. If it carries on to the point where it is affecting your profile – just stop communicating with the individual and escalate it to PR or support. You can do that in the social networks. People don’t expect anyone to be online 24 hours a day, not even a big brand due to the inherent nature of ‘sociability’. The people being social on the part of your brand are not supposed to be legal experts, they’re supposed to be real people. They may even have an account that is their own, and not a pure brand profile like @TTaxChristine.

3.  It is possible to communicate with your client base or target market as a brand profile in an open way that does not detract from your brand, breeds humor and awareness, and integrates you into the community.

4.  Forget disclosure rules and editorial limitations and realize that this is a live environment. You don’t have time to check with legal, run to brand messaging, or wait for a deploy date to get an answer out to a confused socnet member, nor to anticipate that PR control will pick up on every negative mention of the brand, or be able to thank evangelists as they mention the brand. Social networks are a powerful tool that allow you to do just that, if you give your social team the flexibility to do so, in real time.

5.  The surprise and often frank thanks of socnet members when you do reply to them in a timely manner is in many cases exceptionally rewarding. Even if they had a negative comment, the fact that the brand took the time to check, apologize, rectify or promise a rectification or pass-on to a department who will get back to them is enormously empowering for the individual, and gives them a more favorable impression of the brand than they had when they made their comment in the first place. If your company is one that never admits failure online or in public, I need to warn you that if it is real, and you don’t admit it, especially to a detractor that has raised a point, and offer a solution or apology, they are likely to have a far more negative influence on your brand than if you do, especially if they have a large following, or are popular in their selected network.

• My 6th and final point on this topic is this; no individual, group or brand can control what is said of them online in the social networks. They cannot answer every detractor, nor build loyalty by answering every evangelist or supporter in a press release.

Thoughts for big brands to take-away…

 Give up some control corporates:

·     Hire social folks

·     Set some ground rules (no swearing, no personal brand detraction, no overt promotion of competition etc)

·     Develop some processes (which networks, when and where; where and who to escalate to for highs and lows) and let them do their thing.

·     Get a decent social network monitoring tool, just as I assume you have a reputation management tool already, even if it is just Google Alerts (check our Radian6, TruCast and TrackUR for starters).

If you let go a bit, you’ll find that the social networks will become a good place for you to interact, get feedback and most importantly collaborate with and gain trust from your core group of followers, and you will find that – if you play right – that group will grow, along with your profits.

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I think one of the more interesting parts of my career growth is something I sort of focused on when I first started out solo, and which is now what pretty much rules my day. I wanted to share some parts of that journey with new and old SEO’s alike to encourage anyone who’s been where I’ve been, felt what I’ve felt and gained what I’ve gained.

(Please read my disclaimer at the bottom of this post regarding employers, past and present).

When I started out on my first foray as an affiliate, I really didn’t know too darn much search. What I did know was that I wanted this little affiliate of mine to make me enough money to warrant me not working 9-5 everyday – enabling me to stay at home with my little son. Despite my husband’s income, we like to travel, and two incomes definitely make things easier, especially when we found out we had twins on the way.

My first objective at the time was simply to gain maximum exposure and traffic for the universe of key-terms identified (via somewhat archaic keyword research back then) on a page by page basis. I slapped a site together in a few days, and with (again very archaic methods) backlink generation, began to gain some traction in the SERPs. Being as new to the field as I was, I realized stats were important, but did not realize how important. I was using the free, early version of statcounter. This is all way before Google’s acquisition of Urchin and the subsequent launch of Google Analytics. I was very focused on simply gaining traffic thinking that anyone who found my site would ultimately be swayed into buying something. Myopic enthusiasm was my driving force, as well as my near downfall.

Despite my babe-in-the-woods attitude, I did finally realize there was a problem when I started to see hits go up astronomically, but with little to no improvement in conversions. Basically, the design stank, usability sucked… the site was a mess as far as human users were concerned.

My second objective was to veer not away from traffic maximization, but towards more relevant traffic sent to a more usable, friendly web page. The end design result is still being used, with some minor modifications, by the primary company today. A baby step in the right direction, but still missing some key ingredients…

I saw a dramatic increase in conversions which pleased me no-end, but then – being a bit of a geek – and upgrading to a paid version of statcounter, I became shamelessly addicted to the analytics data. So much so that I actually fell off the bandwagon a bit and paid more attention to fixing the analytics data than towards usability and conversion rates. I got excited when I saw bounce rates fall, time on site increase, Google share improve, international visits increase… without checking what effect these seemingly positive data changes were having on conversions.

After about 3 months of things stagnating in terms of conversions despite all my work  at tweaking and adjusting things on the site, I actually found that the pages had not changed much despite my incessant fiddling in all that time, and my pay check wasn’t getting any bigger. I actually seemed to have harmed myself in the rankings – not a lot, but to some extent (yes I can hear you laughing).

My third objective was to pull back from being a total wally with the site, leave it alone and start generating more relevant backlinks, adding relevant pages if feedback indicated they would be of benefit, and start concentrating on other affiliate initiatives while doing more about staying up to date with the industry, and learning as much as I could from forums and blogs as I carried on building and playing and experimenting. Being the goody-two-shoes I am, I never experimented with black-hat (at least not intentionally). I think I may have missed out on a significant experience and a lot of knowledge relating to SEO, white and black, that can only be gained when getting involved in the depths of what really can be done even if it shouldn’t be. I am not condoning black-hat, nor saying it is something you should engage in. I am saying that in retrospect I would possibly be better armed as a white-hat if I knew more about black-hat techniques.

We ended up moving as a family internationally not long after I had had the super affiliate site for about 4 years, and I sold it to the primary company. Not for very much money as the director of the company who had suggested I get started as an affiliate in the first place was a friend, and had also introduced me to SEO, and trained me initially by sharing all his knowledge with me.

What had happened was that I had been offered a great job at a big agency in our new country of residence as their SEM Manager, and I leapt at the chance of a real job with real hours. One thing no-one told me when I first started as an affiliate was how much time it takes to develop and run a successful affiliate web site. I was happy to try out in the real world again.

At the agency my objectives were dictated by client requirements. I found it incredibly limiting, infinitely boring and inordinately frustrating. SEO was not – in my opinion - a primary consideration to the big brands they serviced at the time. Whether this was due to account manager trepidation or actual client unconcern I am unsure, and even when SEO was on the radar, any input provided was severely curtailed by brand and legal requirements. I did not have much direct contact with any of the clients, most work being shuttled through account or engagement managers, and any impact the SEO team may have made – which I still believe would have been significant – was minimized to the point where I quit due to utter disillusionment after a year and a half. I could bore you with the efforts I went to to integrate SEO, train SEO, and involve SEO… but I won’t. Those in the industry who know me will know that it is very unlikely I left any stone unturned; they will also know that if I say I was unhappy, it took a lot to make me feel that way, and one whole lot more to result in my actually quitting.

My move at that point to Epiar was a breath of fresh air. The services we provided from audit to AccuLink, from MarketView research to the BluePrint of siteplans for IA were all carefully and meticulously structured towards improving the clients online revenues and profitability. The real business of making money for the client, based on clear objectives and well designed processes and procedures was a total joy.

Both of these Canadian companies were agencies, and when I was approached by a friend at Intuit Canada about an inhouse SEO managerial position, I was enormously tempted. I had not had full inhouse experience before, and despite consulting with some very big brands, this would be a challenge and a very real privilege. It was the best move I have ever made.

A typical day for me at Intuit Canada does not ever deviate at any stage away from a few core objectives and principles, all of which I adhere to implicitly not only because they make sense and they work, but because they suit my own personal and career ideals perfectly:

·         Teamwork, honesty, integrity and ethical responsibility – we work with and for each other, and we work with and for our stake and shareholders; many of us ARE shareholders.

·         Growth – the willingness of every member of staff (at least within my remit) to share information, learning’s, insights and potential growth initiatives is fantastic. The trust and respect team members have for each other is omnipresent. The desire team members have to grow themselves is matched by their willingness to help their team members do the same by sharing and mentoring wherever required.

·         Profitability - for my unit - which feeds to profitability up, and up, and up until we mesh with the overall profit objectives. The holistic and inclusive view of Intuit is enormously empowering, very motivating, and is in my case breeding a deep sense of loyalty and belonging. I am not one bit surprised at their status of most admired corporates - and I’m remote!

·         Information sharing walks hand in hand with profitability. The frequency and method by which information is cascaded to teams and individuals from top level execs as well as team members is remarkable. It is quick, open, friendly, to the point, and always aimed at ensuring full understanding, interaction, integration and ultimately at improving communication and profitability, either in terms of staff knowledge, staff retention, staff growth or pure money profits based on ensuring a cohesive approach to any objective. One thing I mentioned in my last speaking engagement at SMX West was the need to ensure SEO is part of the overall marketing strategy, both off and online to ensure that relevant keyword research is done, relevant landing pages are developed, backlinks generated, tag lines employed, PPC amended etc. It’s hard to go wrong when your teams are as motivated to share and learn as they are at Intuit Canada.

Thought for New Market Entrants

If you are starting out in SEO, my humble recommendation is to join as many forums as you can, find some great blogs to read, and get to at least a few conferences every year to meet the people that make it happen for networking, as well as to get first hand knowledge and ask questions of the those who really know what it is that makes an SEO, but more importantly, what makes an SEO a success.

In Closing

SEO is no more special, different or important than any other marketing discipline. It is more profitable when done correctly as, apart from fixed salary costs, there are very few other costs involved. But for it to work well, the SEO’s objective should always slot into the overall online business objective as does a piece to a puzzle. In some cases it may very well be a corner piece, in some cases it may be less vital to success; but always, SEO is vital for long term profitability for any online business hoping to make a buck online for itself, it’s employees and as ever, it’s shareholders. I find SEO an ongoing challenge. It is a challenge I am good at, and thank God, one I like. I have learned much in 9 years. I have much to learn. It is a good industry with a lot of great people, many of whom I am privileged to call my friends,

Disclaimer: nothing I say here may or should be attached to any employer, current or previous. This is my personal blog. The views expressed on this page are mine alone and not those of my employer.

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