The Atlanta Content Strategy Meetup is an active group that has been very well received by the Atlanta web geek community. The group is quickly growing a reputation for lively meetings and Tuesday’s presentation and discussion was no exception.

Joe Pulizzi, author of Get Content Get Customers,  presented at the Atlanta Content Strategy Meetup last night. There were some great takeaways from the presentation as well as the discussion afterward. The audience was very savvy and included successful local content strategists like Colleen Jones and Richard Sheffield. Below are some of the main ideas discussed during the session:

• The most successful content connects your brand to a higher purpose
• Having a strong point of view helps make a brand stand out
• There will be people who don’t like it, and if everyone likes it, you might be doing it wrong.
• Own your category Or Create A New One – (A concept initially put forth by The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing as astutely pointed out by the ubiquitous Mike Schinkel)
• Reach out to people – sometimes you have to reach out, sometimes you have to ask for an email or phone number – sometimes you have to be social!

I find the point about having a strong point of view particularly interesting. It seems that in corporate culture and rule by committee every content effort moves toward sanitary and homogenized content. I know that they mean well, but sanitized homogeneous content also subtly alienates everyone all at once.

Standing behind your unique point of view, on the other hand, is a trust building mechanism. It gives an edge to the content and makes it more likely that people who share your perspective will share your content.

Old Marketing vs. New

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. – Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks

I was able to ask Joe after his presentation about his experience with the barriers within the corporate organization to the idea of content strategy. A big part of what he is trying to do is to reach out to the traditional CMO or Marketing Executive – to let them know that things have changed, that broadcast media is not going to cut it and media buys will soon exist only to support your marketing initiatives rather than forming the foundation.

This is very similar to the task we run into continually in search marketing so I asked him whether he thought it was a matter of being more persuasive and making a better business case or moving on until you find the CMO who is ready to hear it.

He said that in his experience there are plenty of organizations who are just not ready for this yet. In many cases the best you might be able to do is just push them in the right direction. Everyone wants Social Media but few recognize that a strong content strategy is the basis of strong social media. As local PR expert Julie Squires says, it’s all about the content. My favorite quote of the night was that Social Media without a strong content strategy is like eating butter by itself. I put together this chart that might be useful to make the case for strong fresh content.

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Google TV will change the way that we interact with television. When Google develops a new service, it is interesting to look closely at the potential motives and reasoning the company may have for moving into this space in this particular manner. In this case there are a few major factors that would be easily overlooked.

Ubiquity of Chrome

Adoption continues to grow for the Chrome web browser. It has inched up by a percent month after month until it is now at almost 15% of market share. That is just below IE8. How does this relate to television?

If you watch this video on Chrome OS you will get a better picture of one of the major interests that Google has right now. Chrome OS is meant to replace the traditional operating system. Everything will run in the cloud. Some of the world’s best Google Apps consultants are thrilled with this idea. So how does this relate to television?

The more users become accustomed to using chrome as the interface with Google TV, the easier it will be to adopt it as an operating system.

Behavioral Advertising on Television

As advertising continues to shift and we break into new territory, this change backtracks in a significant way. While most of our discussions have been around moving away from TV and Print because it isn’t “quantifiable relevant targeted tied to metrics” – Google TV will be. They have discussed behavioral targeting to serve the most relevant commercial to you based on all of the data they collect about your activities. Significantly they have even mentioned a quality score associated with the commercials based on whether you click away when a particular commercial shows.

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People often ask about the scale because they want to have a benchmark for how good their posts are doing. Facebook post quality score is probably not a good representative metric to base decisions.

• Difficult to use as benchmark
• Inconsistent scale
• Doesn’t impact you negatively or positively (yet)

Since it is based on a ratio of interactions vs. number of fans the numbers aren’t consistent from one post to the next. It is much easier to get a high post quality score if you have only few fans. Since you have so many fans it will be more difficult to get a high post quality score. While nobody knows what the highest possible post quality score is, it definitely goes to 1,000 at least. You could use this number to compare from one post to the next if the number of fans remains constant or you could pay attention to the trend over time.

Probably the most effective use of this metric would be to use it to determine which types of posts result in the most interaction. This might help to isolate particular themes or subjects that people respond to – when you find something that people seem to like try to replicate aspects or play on a similar theme in future correspondence. It would be difficult at this time to use the number as a true benchmark unless it was possible to compare it to the quality score of other posts maintaining consistent number of fans.

Currently Facebook does not use this score to help or hurt you although this might change in the future. (Google’s quality score, for instance, impacts how much you pay for advertising) The impact on quality score on Facebook PPC Advertising is going to be important to watch and will probably have a big impact on how successful their adserving becomes.

Another thing that comes up is what do the stars mean – The number of stars is a factor of post quality compared to the post quality of pages with the same number of fans.

I frankly think that they didn’t think through this very much and that it will probably evolve to something more useful as time goes on.

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Facebook Pay Per Click Advertising can be an important part of your marketing strategy. We have experienced low cost and high conversion rates from this channel again and again. Because it is a fairly new platform the costs are low and in the final analysis Facebook PPC is always in the upper 20% in terms of return on investment.

• Low Cost
• Sophisticated Targeting
• High Return on Investment

Will it Work For Us?

Part of the challenge is where to use this tool. Our audience assessment process can help you to understand where Facebook marketing fits into your marketing priorities. This is important for understanding when it can be effective to use PPC advertising on Facebook as well as when to interact in other ways (Custom Facebook Applications, Branded Facebook Pages, etc.)

What Are the Rules of the Road?

Facebook users are somewhat averse to marketing messages. For that reason it is necessary to use fewer and to do everything you can to camouflage them and really make them count. The best way to camo a marketing message is to make it part of a blindingly desirable value proposition. Invite people to join. Think in terms of what adds value to what they’re doing rather than your agenda.

How Can We Get Started?

As with any PPC initiative a thorough assessment is recommended. This purpose of the assessment process is to ensure that the project matches your needs, the expectations are feasible, and that the landscape is appropriate to the needs. Fill out this form for a free consultation to find out if Facebook advertising matches the needs of your brand.

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Microformats

At the Atlanta SEMPO meeting last night Topher Kohan from CNN spoke on Microformats. Microformats are not new, but they are being used in new ways that affect search. Topher predicts the release of a standardized open source set of microformat tags from the major search engines within the next couple years and states that this will have a huge impact for the future of SEO.

Microformats are a way to provide additional information about content on the web. Significantly microformats make the information portable in other applications. Microformats can enable data items to be indexed, searched, saved, cross-referenced, reused, or combined. With the emergence of social media this additional information can be very useful to users as well as search engines.

Last year Google introduced Rich Snippets which allow them to provide search results with extra relevant information like votes or ratings:

Microformats & Video Optimization

Microformats seem to be particularly relevant for video content. The challenge is no longer getting indexed. Google indexes content extremely quickly to include a tremendous amount of video. With so many videos being indexed it is more difficult for Google to recognize what video should be served for a particular query. Wrapping the video in microformats can help it to rank in the search engines.

Facebook Share helps you to follow where your content goes after it leaves your site. When you use Facebook share you can access a report that will tell you where your video is being embedded, how many views it is getting.

Yahoo Search Monkey allows you to share structured data to help Yahoo display an enhanced result similar to rich snippets.

In September Google announced that they were going to start supporting Facebook share and Yahoo search monkey RFDa Microformat tagging. Topher demonstrated this with actual numbers from his use of microformats with CNN video content. More news and examples are available at http://microformats.org/

I think that it is important to point out that microformats do not trump the other major search ranking factors. As Topher explained, if two pages are equal in terms of all of the major ranking factors, microformats can help one of the pages perform better in search.

Topher also mentioned the microformats cheat sheet which will be useful to guide our efforts in this area.

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Google’s Real Time Search was launched in early December so that is still too recent for the SEO community to effectively reverse engineer anything about how the ranking is done. Everything is very speculative so far, but I can share what I have:

In Google’s description of Real Time Search it describes that the results can come from Twitter and FriendFeed as well as headlines from news and blog posts (more complete list below). Later on they are supposed to also be incorporating information from Facebook and MySpace. Bing will also incorporate Facebook updates into their real-time search although they do not yet have a deal with MySpace.

No clear patterns have emerged as to what rankings the real-time search updates will fall between in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Sometimes it is at the very top, sometimes in the middle, sometimes not at all. Danny Sullivan describes how Google decides whether or not to incorporate real-time updates into the SERPs after a conversation with Amit Singhal, a Google fellow who heads Google’s ranking systems and oversaw the development of the new real time search system – “In other words, if Google thinks something has some real-time component to it, then it will show the section. In particular, if Google sees a spike in information on a certain topic, along with queries on a particular topic, then it assumes there’s a real time situation happening — very simplified!”

What currently comes up in Google Real-Time Search:

• Tweets from Twitter
• Content from Google News
• Content from Google Blog Search
• Newly created web pages
• Freshly updated web pages
• FriendFeed updates
• Jaiku updates
• Identi.ca updates
• TwitArmy updates

Continued from the Danny Sullivan article: “How the information ranked? Singhal said only information deemed highly relevant is included. So spammy tweets, low quality pages and other content might not make it into the real time search “layer” that is used. After that, results are ranked by time.”

Scrutinizing some of the statements made by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Product and User Experience, might reveal more clues “… authoritativeness exists there as well and there are signals there that indicate it. So for example, retweets and replies and the structure of how the people in that ecosystem relate to each other. You can actually use some of our learnings from PageRank in order to develop a, say, a Updates Rank, or an Updater Rank for the specific people who are posting. So this is something we are beginning to experiment with but it is interesting to see that same parallel where PageRank looks at links you can actually look at the very mechanisms inside of these update streams and sense the authoritativeness the same way.” This would seem to suggest that it is the authority of the profile of the user (how many high quality followers or friends you have) as well as whether and how much a person has been retweeted will be taken into account.

There is also some speculation about it evolving toward social search – which would make the results somewhat personalized – the people you follow would be more likely to come up in the real time search.

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For years Yahoo has had a paid inclusion program called Search Submit. You would pay a small fee to get hundreds of URLs listed in the Yahoo “Organic” listings (of course, this makes it slightly less “Organic”) but, ethics aside this has been a great program and I’ve seen it make a lot of companies great return on investment especially for ecommerce. The fact that this program was a great way to develop low cost highly targeted traffic was a not-so-closely guarded secret among ecommerce experts, many of which were upset to hear that Yahoo would end Search Submit this year.

Surprisingly a similar program may be re-emerging from the most unlikely of sources. Google has been a long time critic of any type of program that would spoil the impeccable standards of their search results. As this article discusses, the examples of Google experimenting with paid inclusion was within Google Products Search – whether that makes it less fishy is a judgment call.

Status: Confirmed – SSP is dead.

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I am consistently surprised to see professional websites failing to use links in content. This is an important part of the content strategy for several reasons. Links in content are probably the best way to help search engine spiders understand the structure of your site, understand which pages are important and deserve to be ranked higher for specific topics. As discussed in my post Improve Bounce Rate, links within content represent one of the most important factors of usability and conversion architecture – another way to say this is that used correctly, links in content help visitors to your website find what they’re looking for, and that makes them more likely to convert into customers.

Search engines no longer consider only the anchor text of the links. They now take into consideration the context in which the link is placed.

Humans follow links in content using descriptive anchor text like scent trails leading them to their object of interest. One of the reasons that links in content are so good for this is that the content is where the users eyes are looking. Without putting the links in content you expect them to look up, review the navigation to determine the brilliant information architecture of the website, and then navigate to the page where you’re going to make your sales pitch.

The fact that this practice is good for organic SEO while simultaneously improving the usability of your website makes it a rock solid best practice.

There are great examples of using links in content throughout the website for The Community Foundation of Atlanta especially on their Atlanta Charitable Giving page.

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So the common problem with Twitter (or any microblog) is that most URLs are too long to fit into a 140 character message (and still have room for the message).

There have been a few solutions for this, my favorite at this time is a Stumbleupon tool that serves double duty

• Shortens the URL
• Tracks how many people clicked it and at what time
• Shows who retweeted the shortened URL
• One click to submit to Stumbleupon
• Shows who ‘liked’ it in Stumbleupon in the lower right

Here is a pretty good review of the tool by Tim Ferriss

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/06/09/stumble-upon-supr/

The url for the tool is http://su.pr/ – it may still be in beta but you should be able to use the code suprbeta to get an account.

Below are SU.PR screenshots from an article on Viral Video Metrics I wrote for Talentzoo and tweeted.

Do you have a URL shortening tool that you prefer? Tell us why it’s great!

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There was an article in the New York Times today describing a very important test that went on at the end of 2008. This test was performed by Yahoo and several major newspapers to see how well the two could work together to aid each other in serving advertisements.

Yahoo was able to serve ads on the newspapers websites and vice versa. These ads were targeted to the reading behavior of the users.

“a new ad system from Yahoo, currently installed at about 100 newspapers, that allows them to sell graphical ads on their sites that are aimed at specific audiences, like car buyers or sports enthusiasts. The system puts users into those groups based on the pages they visit online, a technique known as behavioral targeting.

This allows publishers to sell, say, high-priced travel ads not only on travel pages but also on any page visited by a user interested in travel. “

By all accounts this cooperation has been a wonderful success in an otherwise challenging year for both parties.

Old Meets New

What struck me as interesting was that during this 2 week test old media veterans were introduced to some of the virtues of online advertising.

The marketing industry is in a very interesting stage. The veteran marketers are struggling to fully understand that capabilities of online marketing. Permission based marketing is replacing repetition marketing. Those who are positioned on the crest of these two waves should count themselves very fortunate.

Danger Lurking in a Strong Position

As an internet marketer I would recommend you pause to consider the potential danger in this otherwise enviable position.

A great number of the young marketers are limiting themselves to online media. In the short term this makes good sense. There is huge demand for online marketing – even in a down economy it’s not hard to get a job if you understand search engine marketing. Companies need search worse than ever. Online marketing is intuitive for a lot of young people who grew up understanding computers and how they work, for whom the internet is not just a series of tubes. On the other hand, the old media veterans have a vast pool of knowledge that will be left untapped if the youth don’t seek them as mentors.

In this article Mike Carlton talks about the lost art of mentoring and why it is so important for the next generation of advertising professionals.

Don’t forget them just because you’re well positioned on the latest trend.

Another strong reason to consider reaching out is the vast supply of connections that these industry veterans have. A very talented internet marketer will quickly realize that skills will only take you so far. At a certain point it breaks down to who you know. Whether it is a direct connection or a friend of a friend, at some point you will unexpectedly need the help of a specialist. It is so important that young internet marketers don’t become silos. Without someone to add the extra umph to your campaign, point out a mistaken assumption, correct your perspective or otherwise point you in the right direction, you might find yourself struggling with a losing battle.

There is a mentoring program at AMA Atlanta.

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