Why is this conversation in the past tense?

Because of so-called “walled gardens” like Facebook and iTunes, that’s why.

Earlier this week, I wrote “Search Engine Marketing: I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means” in response to Wired magazine’s article, “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.” Their point was the Internet is simply a collection of pipes that form a content delivery system. The “Web” is essentially HTML sites that do not block search engines. iTunes is an application, not a web site. Facebook is (mostly) private and can’t be crawled by search engines. They are walled gardens.

This means that search engines aren’t as omniscient as they used to be.
…Which means they aren’t as influential in Internet marketing as they used to be.
……Which means that links aren’t as valuable as they used to be.

During JitterJam‘s weekly Creative Coffee session this morning, we were talking about how to identify influencers in social media. As we kicked around various ideas and returned from tangents, one of the ideas that crystallized was that in our brave new world of social media, the coin of the realm is changing from links to people.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “The Tipping Point,” he examines the phenomenon of messages going viral. One of the main ingredients to an epidemic, he suggests, is a set of people with specific gifts:

• Mavens are “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.”
• Connectors “link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together.” People tend to think of the Internet as a single, enormous, amorphous glob of people when, in fact, it is a series of groups. Connectors act as the information conduits between these groups.
• Salesmen are the charismatic persuaders.

As we try to establish our own influence online and spread our ideas, we still need to be doing SEO and collecting links. But we need to leave room in our piggy back for the new coins of the realm also; mavens, connectors, and salesmen. They are the ones with the keys to the walled gardens in which search engines are persona non grata.

P.S. If you’re in NH, I encourage you to stop by JitterJam on Friday mornings (8:30 – 9:30) for Creative Coffee. It’s a great forum for idea exchange. Today’s session included Ric Pratte, Marty Watts, Michael Conway, Joe Merrow, and Karen Grimmett.

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I’ll be conducting an inbound marketing workshop at the ISA Marketing & Sales Summit in a couple of weeks. We’ve just launched a blogging contest that is giving away an iPod Touch. Although I’m judging and not eligible to win, I’m linking this article to help spread the word.

Browser content (i.e. HTML on port 80) now accounts for less than 25% of all Internet traffic.

Your entire Internet marketing strategy may be based on a mirage. Many companies are focused on search engine optimization and pay per click campaigns. This is all well and good as long as Google remains the gatekeeper of the Internet. But here’s the thing; there’s a new sheriff in town and the entire 18 year old ecosystem of the world wide web is in danger. This is according to Wired Magazine who today published “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.”

The premise of this article is that we are willingly giving up the freedom and openness of the traditional world wide web in favor of a more closed, less free version; apps. Wired argues that like the rail system and electrical grid before it, the Internet is entering a period of consolidation and domination by a few power brokers.

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen).

Now. let’s keep in mind that Wired is not entirely unbiased in this debate. They and their publisher, Condé Nast , have put a large portion of their eggs into Steve Jobs’ basket. But to paraphrase the late Kurt Cobain, “Just because you’re biased doesn’t mean they’re not right.”

Tilting at Windmills

We laughed at Prince when he said it, but this article should make every marketer’s blood run cold. If our usage of the Internet is indeed moving from open, HTML-based web sites to the walled gardens of applications and streaming content, it means that search engines are indexing an increasingly small piece of the pie. They simply aren’t the ubiquitous arbiter they once were, since much of the Internet’s activity is happening outside of their field of view. Basing an entire Internet marketing strategy on search engines is like looking at a windmill and seeing a dragon.

That doesn’t mean that you should halt your search engine marketing tactics. It does, however, mean that it should be a shrinking share of your overall marketing strategy. The question then becomes, “What fills that vacuum?”

Gift Marketing

Moore’s Law has resulted in bandwidth and storage costs that are becoming too cheap to meter. This enabled the Web 2.0 sites we’re all using today and led to the emergence of social networking. Consequently, we’re able to scale our peer groups and get increasing amounts of information and recommendations from trusted sources instead of advertisements and algorithms. The problem for marketers is that much of this takes place inside the walled gardens of Facebook. As the old saying goes, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

And so we have brands jumping into social media. However, one of the problems they’re grappling with is the juxtaposition of norms; economic versus social. They’re not used to this whole social thing and many of them are trying to transplant the old advertising models that were based on economic norms into the world of social networking.

Think of it this way…  You’re having a dinner party and invite some close friends. Your doorbell rings and it’s a smarmy, uninvited used car salesman. He lets himself in and starts denigrating the car in your driveway and listing all of the special deals they have. While this behavior may have been tolerated on his lot, it certainly doesn’t belong at a dinner party and you kick him out. Imagine, instead, your best friends call ahead of time and ask if they can bring this really cool guy who was great fun at their last barbecue. He shows up and in the course of normal conversation finds out you’re having trouble with your headlights. He takes a look and shows you how to adjust their alignment and fixes the problem. You find out later (from your friends, not him) that he works at a car dealership and you commit to visiting him when it comes time for you to upgrade your vehicle.

In this new trust economy, companies are going to have to start thinking much more in terms of social norms. Even though the name of the game is making money, they are going to have to follow a different set of rules than they’re used to following. The first rule of inbound marketing is creating compelling content that people want to share. The secret to creating this content is thinking of it as a gift.

Is repackaging your brochure into a blog post a gift? Not so much.
Is showing up unannounced polite? Definitely not.
Do gratuitous, insincere compliments build trust? Not exactly.

Search engine optimization is certainly not dead. But as Hans and Fanz said, “Hear me now und believe me later,” that giant sucking sound you hear in your marketing strategy is the vacuum being created as search shrinks. You need to be prepared to fill it with content marketing that focuses on building new customer relationships socially.

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Traditional marketing approaches like advertising, trade shows, direct mail, and cold calling are becoming increasingly less effective. Peoples’ attention spans are spread thinly across a wide array of media, making them harder to target and they are getting better at avoiding interruptive messages like commercials and sales calls. Outbound marketing is getting harder and more expensive.

Conversely, inbound marketing is an approach that uses the Internet to attract quality attention to your web site, generate leads, and convert them to customers. This workshop will introduce the five steps required to implement inbound marketing:

Manchester Chamber of Commerce members can register for the session from their Calendar of Events.

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But if your web site is guilty of this, visitors will simply leave or (worst case) become annoyed enough to share their frustrations with others.  That’s why it’s important to understand why people are coming to your site and provide them with 1) the resources they’re looking for 2) in a way that makes it easy to find.  Reviewing your website analytics every day is one way to stay on top of traffic patterns and understand where people are going on your site.

If I’m not articulating my point well enough, maybe this infographic from xkcd will get the point across.

People go to the website because they can't wait for the next alumni magazine, right? What do you mean, you want a campus map? One of our students made one as a CS class project back in '01! You can click to zoom and everything!

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s High Five deals with two ends of the social media marketing spectrum; fun and failure.

I wrote about the historic influence of games last October when I predicted that the future of software is Facebook.  There have been some major business moves involving big money this week, illustrating how pervasive entertainment is in the world of Internet marketing.  But games can get a little rough and like mom used to say, “It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt!”

#5: Disney About To Acquire Playdom

Disney is obviously the 800 pound gorilla of fun and games.  They tend to be a bit conservative as a company, so it’s not a shocker that they are a little late to the social space.  But any company with the brand power and balance sheet of Disney can make big moves quickly.  Their first major move was the acquisition of the children’s game site Club Penguin.  Establishing a stronger beach head in social gaming gives them more channels to keep their brands in kids’ faces.

Link: TechCrunch

#4: The Web Means the End of Forgetting

It is said that an elephant never forgets, but neither does the Internet.  Cautionary tales of moments in which relatively minor lapses in judgement are posted online and lead to long term personal and/or professional consequences continue to pile up.  What happens at the night club not longer necessarily stays at the night club thanks to ubiquitous smart phones and social media.  This New York Times article focuses on personal reputation, but obviously brands are no less vulnerable to an ill advised Tweet or boneheaded Facebook photo.

Link: The New York Times

#3: Will Zynga Become the Google of Games?

For all its hype and media coverage, Twitter has yet to turn a profit.  The creators of FarmVille and Mafia Wars, however, are on track to eclipse $500 million this year.  Yeah, that just happened.

Link: The New York Times

#2: Expert Notes Few Marketers Do Social Media Well

It’s no longer disputed that social media is (at the very least) the most important marketing game changer since television.  And so it’s natural for marketing companies to update their service offerings to say they can implement social media marketing.  The vast majority of them are ill-prepared and simply applying old techniques to a new technology.  Anyone can slap together a Facebook page and create a Twitter account, but how are they measuring success?  Is it integrated to an inbound marketing strategy?

Link: MediaPost

#1: Older Actors Upstage Youth at Comic-Con

You can always tell when an element of pop culture jumps the shark: the old fogies start showing up.  As Hollywood increasingly goes back to the future by recycling classic comic book stories for “new” films, purists inevitably balk and rebel.  Kind of like the changing demographics on Facebook, no?

Link: The New York Times

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Today I’m commenting on the current plague of companies looking to enslave college students and recent graduates in order to help them establish a presence in social media.

I subscribe to multiple Craigslist RSS feeds and every single day there is at least one advertisement from a company looking to bring in unpaid interns for various jobs.  Many of them are mundane, computer-oriented tasks but many of them look just like this one:

Do you tweet, blog and use social media like Facebook all day, every day? Are you a creative individual who can take things to completion? Does the event industry interest you? You may be the perfect fit for our next internship!

[company name removed] is looking for a detail oriented, knowledgeable and passionate person to help develop its’ social media campaign.

The perfect candidate will have experience in all areas of social media; Facebook, Twitter, Blogging Platforms. Have exceptional writing skills. Proficient in MAC and Basic HTML. A passion for weddings is a plus!

This is an unpaid internship, but has great potential to become a full-time position. Internship credit is available.

Please email resume. No phone calls please.

Aside from the spelling errors and poor grammar, what’s so bad about this?

Crime Doesn’t Pay

That’s right, if your internship doesn’t meet six federal legal criteria you are violating federal labor laws.  Many employers mistakenly think that they can hire unpaid interns because they are providing enough value through the experience the interns gain.  However, this is the wrong perspective. They need to consider whether or not the person materially provides value to the company.  If so, they must be paid.  If not, why are you wasting everyone’s time?

Hobbyist Vs. Professional

Let’s try rewriting the advertisement listed above using a different profession and see how it may turn out…

Norm Abram is the seemingly superhuman master craftsman who has hosted the PBS television show, "The New Yankee Workshop" for some 20 years.

Do you caulk, paint and watch television programs like the New Yankee Workshop and This Old House all day, every day? Are you a creative individual who can take things to completion? Does the construction industry interest you? You may be the perfect fit for our next internship!

[company name removed] is looking for a detail oriented, knowledgeable and passionate person to help develop its residential construction business.

The perfect candidate will have experience in all areas of construction; hammers, nails, saws. Have exceptional painting skills. Proficient driving Fords and Chevys. A passion for subdivisions is a plus!

This is an unpaid internship, but has great potential to become a full-time position. Internship credit is available.

Please email resume. No phone calls please.

Sounds absurd, no?  Just because a person knows how to use a hammer or circular saw doesn’t mean they know how to build a load-bearing wall, right?  And watching Norm Abram every weekend for two years doesn’t mean you’ll be able to build a ten foot Clancy sailboat from scratch.  Knowing how to use tools does not mean that a person understands how to design, finance, construct, and sell a home.

Well, just because a student posts pictures of friends’ compromising antics on Facebook and has a few thousand followers on Twitter doesn’t mean they understand how to effectively architect, implement, and measure a social media marketing campaign.  That’s even assuming that the business already understands how the social media marketing strategy will fit into its overall marketing strategy, but they frequently do not.

What’s the Harm?

Here is a short list of some of the missteps that can lead to more harm than good:

• It is possible to attract the wrong audience. The first rule of search optimization is, “do no harm.”
• Blogging carries legal responsibilities including copyright infringement and Federal Trade Commission regulations.
• Facebook’s Terms of Use are complicated and even contradictory. Violating them can get you banned.
• Anything worth doing is worth measuring. Fan and follower counts do not tell the story.
• Creating compelling, engaging content is challenging and dynamic.
• Hope is not a strategy.

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s High Five is a special edition: It lists my top five TED presentations for inbound marketers.

The first rule of inbound marketing is Creating Great Content (PDF).  Since you won’t get far without it, and because so few people provide advice on exactly how to create remarkable content (except for this guy), I thought I would share my five favorite talks to help and inspire inbound marketers.

#5: Jacek Utko designs to save newspapers

What happens when an architect is hired to redesign a newspaper?  He treats the pages as a canvas for creating posters that tell stories.  The inbound marketing lesson is to pay attention to design.  And by “design” I mean creating something the world did not know it was missing (Paola Antonelli).  This means fully leveraging the form, fit, and function of all of the electronic canvases available to us.

#4: Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man

Think “45 degrees.”  In this talk, Sutherland discusses how to add product value by changing perception – in one case by turning something 45 degrees – and hilarity ensues.  It’s worth watching for the entertainment value alone, but the inbound marketing lesson here is that remarkable content can actually add value to your products and/or services by changing their perceptions.

#3: Scott McCloud on comics

Fasten your seatbelt for this one.  Scott McCloud whooshes down his road to discovering the answer to the question, “What does a scientific mind do in the arts?”  He describes how comics funnel words, pictures and symbols through the single conduit of vision.  The inbound marketing lesson in this talk is… well… there isn’t one, there at least a dozen but he covers them so fast you really need to buy his book, “Understanding Comics” to get the full picture (pun intended).  I think his lectures and writings are pure marketing and advertising gold for our highly visual Age of Content.

#2: Steve Jobs: How to live before you die

OK, I cheated a bit because, technically speaking, this isn’t a TED talk.  But I don’t care because it’s important enough.  History will remember Steve Jobs for many things, and his communication skills and persuasiveness will likely be very near the top of the list.  In fact, there was a terrific book written on this skill - The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs (highly recommended).  His commencement speech at Stanford is well known and has been watched by millions.  The inbound marketing takeaway in this talk is simple: it’s simplicity.  After a quick, self-deprecating joke about never having graduated college, Jobs gets right to the heart of the matter by saying, “Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life.  That’s it.  No big deal.  Just three stories.”  In all of his presentations and speeches, Jobs is ritualistic about setting expectations up front.  He tells you exactly what he’s going to say, continually reminds you where you are in that continuum, and always manages to under-promise and over-deliver.  His presentation style is an entire encyclopedia on being remarkable.

#1: Seth Godin on standing out

Who better to teach how to be remarkable than the guy who wrote a book titled “Purple Cow” and marketed it by giving it away in a milk carton?  Godin is Remarkable Royalty, the Earl of Extraordinary, the Duke of Different, the King of Compelling, etc…  The inbound marketing lesson from this talk is that success “is not always about what the patent is like or what the factory is like.  It’s about can you get your idea to spread.”  At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.

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Jon DiPietro will be hosting this workshop at the Marketing & Sales Summit on Wednesday, September 1st from 1:00PM to 5:00PM. The cost is $150 – visit the

Primary Goal

Participants will develop an understanding of the components of effective inbound marketing and its advantages over traditional, outbound marketing.

Abstract

Traditional marketing approaches like advertising, trade shows, direct mail, and cold calling are becoming less and less effective. Peoples’ attention spans are spread thinly across a wide array of media, making them harder to target and they are getting better at avoiding interruptive messages like commercials and sales calls. Outbound marketing is getting harder and more expensive.

Conversely, inbound marketing is an approach that uses the Internet to attract quality attention to your web site, generate leads, and convert them to customers. This workshop will describe how to craft compelling content and optimize it for search, share that content effectively on social networks, convert visitors to leads and leads to customers, and measure it all.

Outline

1. Introduction and Concepts
2. Content
   1. Being Remarkable
   2. Blogging
3. Search Engine Optimization
   1. Off Page
   2. On Page
4. Sharing
   1. Social Networking (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)
   2. Hosted Media (Slideshare, YouTube, Flickr, Scribd)
5. Converting
   1. Landing Pages
   2. Lead Nurturing
6. Measuring

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is, “Google v Facebook: Clash of the Titans.”

#5: MailChimp Integrates Facebook Likes Into Email Campaigns

This is an interesting, though not very surprising, development. It’s an interesting application of online/social media marketing with “old school” outbound email marketing.

Link: All Facebook

#4: Why Facebook Killed A $100 Million Baby

Have you ever sent any of those annoying “gifts” to Facebook friends?  Me neither. But apparently there were plenty who did.  Facebook’s announcement that they are shuttering the gifts ecosystem signals their progress toward the Credits business.  This next generation will establish a global system for games and applications to raise revenue using a universal Facebook “currency.”

Link: All Facebook

#3: 7 FBML examples to rock your Facebook fan page

Many don’t realize the extent to which they can customize fan pages.  Facebook uses a variation of HTML called “Facebook Markup Language” that allows for highly customized tabs and this article provides some common examples of how this can be implemented.

Link: Web Distortion

#2: Google Secretly Invested $100+ Million In Zynga, Preparing To Launch Google Games

Since Facebook’s launch of its social search platform earlier this year, there’s been lots of talk about its threat to Google’s supremacy.  We’re now learning about Google’s strategies and tactics for counter-striking.  As with so many innovations in the history of computing, one of the first beachheads will be gaming.  If you’re dubious about how influential games could be, you may want to read The Future of Software Development Is… Facebook?!?!

Link: TechCrunch

#1: Google’s Facebook Killer “Google Me” Confirmed By Former Facebook CTO

Information is starting to emerge about Google’s response to the Facebook threat.  This article provides evidence that Google is planning something, and we later learned about the weaknesses they intend to exploit.  Check out this Sneak Peak at Google’s Facebook Killer.

Link: Gizmodo

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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His encore book is “Cognitive Surplus – Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age,” and it is vintage Shirky. Every page is dense with original ideas about how social media is going to affect society. The very title of the book suggests that there is a surplus of brain power up for grabs. But since cognitive capacity is a zero sum game, the surplus has to come from somewhere. This begs the question, “Where do people find the time?”

The Essence

Shirky tells a story about a conversation he had with a television producer who was trying to determine whether or not to have him on her show. He talked about the controversy of Pluto’s “delisting” as a planet and the sudden spike in activity on its Wikipedia page. Shirky waited for her to follow up with questions about the social implications of this phenomenon, but “Instead, she sighed and said, ‘Where do people find the time?” Hearing this, I snapped, and said, ‘No one who works in television gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from.’”

The 1970's television show "Gilligan's Island" had many pondering the eternal question, "Ginger or Mary Ann?"

He estimates that there are roughly a trillion hours spent watching television worldwide each year. The advent of the industrial age and, with it, the 40 hours work week meant that the post World War II industrialized societies had an abundance of free time and television swooped in and soaked up most of it. We laughed at ourselves for spending so much time contemplating the such mysteries of the universe as, “Ginger or Mary Ann?“.

Social media represents competition for our free time. The big difference between it and television is that our every use of social media is, by definition, a creative act. Whether it’s uploading vacation photos to Flickr or sharing pearls of wisdom on Twitter, we have made something that didn’t previously exist. We can debate the value and merit of this content until the cows come home, but what is not debatable is that watching television creates nothing.

The question now becomes, what will come from the creative activities of “The People Formerly Known as the Audience” as he calls them?

Means, Motive and Opportunity

In three of the book’s chapters, presents the implications of the Cognitive Surplus in the framework of a legal argument; means, motive and opportunity. “The harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways, relative to their old status as consumers and couch potatoes.” They payoff in the book comes from the motive and opportunity topics, where the rubber truly meets the road.

The Skinny

Why it rocks:

The book is fruitcake-dense with ideas, evidence, and challenges. It looks well beyond the horizon of such comparatively insignificant questions as “Google versus Facebook”, or “How much is a follower worth?” Cognitive Surplus is a book about how human beings will harness each others’ brains in order to work together at changing the world.

Why it doesn’t:

It’s not the easiest read in the world. Not because of his writing style, but simply because you spend so much time contemplating the implications of the machine gun pace of ideas he unleashes.

The Verdict

This is an important book. It may not necessarily be important to you, but the concepts are far reaching and somewhat mind boggling. If you’re wondering what role LOL Cats may play in the future of mankind, Shirky goes a long way toward putting all things social media into context.

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The title of the presentation is “The Real Life Social Network” and it exposes some fundamental differences between the way our relationships exist in real life versus the way they are modeled on Facebook (or pretty much any other social network for that matter). Given Google’s specialty – writing algorithms that model relationships – it’s easy to see how their background in search algorithms has imprinted the thinking in this presentation.

Groups

One fundamental design flaw with most social networking applications is that they force us to into using one generic group of “friends.” Adams says his research indicates that people actually have between four and six groups of relationships. When they examined 342 groups that people used to describe their real life networks, only 15% actually contained the word “friend” at all! Furthermore, 61% of the names were unique, which means that there is not a lot of common ground in terms of how we categorize our real life networks.

Connections

Not all connections are created equal. Adams talks extensively about “strong” and “weak” ties between people. Strong ties exist among family and close friends and tend to be in the single digits. Weak ties make up the remainder of our relationships, which caps out at around 150 (see Dunbar’s Number). Any connections beyond that are classified as temporary connections.

Privacy

While it seems almost too easy to assault Facebook for privacy concerns, Adams does so by tying it in with the concepts of groups and connections. If it’s true that we have these different relationship groups and that the strength of our connections within each of these groups varies, then it logically follows that our desires for and expectations of privacy will differ greatly as well. It will be important, not to mention challenging, to support these different models in a way that is easy for people to understand and implement.

The interactions between these different groups and different types of connections is a complicated dynamic that, according to Adams, is greatly oversimplified in current social networking applications. Presumably, this document is a sneak peak at Google’s major push toward a new platform that aims to end the threat Facebook poses to Google in the form of social search. They’ve clearly identified three major weaknesses that they plan to exploit.

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The article discussed the obvious questions this situation begs: How much is a follower worth? How much do people really pay attention in social networks? In Levey’s case, this situation has very little downside. However, if you’re a business or non-profit the wrong follower demographic can actually be doing you a disservice.

Negative Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of maximizing your web site’s visibility to search engines in order to obtain the highest possible organic search ranking. While there are lots of things you can do to have a positive impact on SEO, there are also plenty of actions that can hurt. One example is inadvertently emphasizing keywords that you don’t necessarily want associated with your site.

“Shut Up, I’m Talking” exemplifies a different type of negative optimization; guilt by association. Social search differs from web search because it relies on the demographics of your fan base to determine relevancy. In Levy’s case, his audience demographics don’t differ all that much from Justin Beiber’s. That particular audience probably isn’t heavily weighted by people interested in reading about Middle Eastern foreign policy.

Marketing Takeaway

Levey’s fan page is an extreme case and many could make a reasonable argument that it’s a good problem to have. However, the risk isn’t really that your fan page or website will have and abundance of the wrong kind of attention. The risk is that, on a smaller scale than this example, your website will optimize for the wrong keywords or your fan page will appeal to the wrong demographics and cost you traffic. Search engine optimization must be deliberate and involves examining every aspect of your presence, including the title of your Facebook fan page. You do have a Facebook fan page, right?

Like the Hippocratic Oath, the first rule in search optimization is “Do no harm.”

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week’s High Five theme is, “Social Media Grab Bag.”

#5: Government websites get the chop

As part of the UK government’s austerity measures to combat rising debt levels, it announced that it will be shuttering over 600 web sites.  But that’s not the interesting statistic. As Chris Rand puts it, “Sadly, like most public sector projects, the cost of running them is eye-watering.” He cites one example in which a UK government web site cost over $7M to build and received just under 400k visitors at a cost of over $15 per visitor.

Link: BMON

#4: Former Facebook Executive Adam D’Angelo Confirms New Google Social Networking Effort

There has been some Buzz (rimshot) about Google’s next move to combat Facebook’s growing threat in the social search space. This article suggests that Google drastically underestimated Facebook’s potential and never made social networking a company priority – until now.

Link: Inside Facebook

#3: How To Rank #1 In Facebook Search In 60 Seconds For Any Term

My reason for highlighting this article isn’t so much for people to learn how to accomplish this feat, but to understand the implications of the 21st Century Land Grab. Whether or not you intend or a ready to fully engage in social media marketing, it’s important to plant a flag to prevent someone else from claiming your territory.

Link: All Facebook

#2: How This Author Got 674,716 Facebook Fans (Worth, Uh, $92 Million!)

Like the previous article, the most important lessons of this story aren’t the most obvious. While the author and columnist question the true value of a Facebook fan, what struck me was the negative impact that such a throng of the wrong fans can have on your brand. Like accidentally optimizing for the wrong keyword, having a fan page populated by the wrong demographic can be just as damaging.

Link: Advertising Age

#1: Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

There are a trillion hours per year of “spare time” that are currently spent watching television. When you think about social media and wonder aloud, “Where do people find the time?” now you know. Shirky wants to start talking about how we should be using this cognitive surplus.

Link: TED: Ideas worth spreading

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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That’s where the concept of a “content conveyor belt” can help.  This presentation introduces the idea and explains its advantages and how to set one up.

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"For all your real estate needs" courtesy of SeanMcTx on Flickr (Creative Commons)

Everybody has heard the familiar axiom that “The three most important things in real estate are location, location, and location.”  The same is true for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), where your “location” is your domain name.  It’s one of the most important aspects of optimization and there are four common mistakes that hurt your website’s ranking.

Let’s use the real estate metaphor to describe them…

1) You’re a Squatter

In the real estate sense, squatting refers to setting up residence in a home you don’t own.  The Internet equivalent is setting up your website as a subdomain that belongs to someone else.  For example, jondipietro.wordpress.com.  There are a couple of reasons this is a bad idea.  First, you never build any search authority because it all belongs to the domain (wordpress.com) and not the subdomain.  In other words, there is very little difference between “jondipietro.wordpress.com” and “elmerjfudd.wordpress.com”.  Another reason this can be dangerous is that you could (theoretically) be evicted at any time.  While the risk may be low for a site like “wordpress.com”, just ask Ning users how that worked out for them.

Solution:  Find and buy a domain (but see below first).  You can purchase .com domains for about $11 per year and most hosting services (WordPress included) support using your own domain name on their platform.

2) You’re Subdividing

While this is usually a positive thing in real estate, it’s terrible for SEO.  This means having separate domains for your company and other related sites, which could include things like blogs, events, or products.  For example, let’s say I planned on launching a whole separate web site for “Inbound Marketing Workshops.”  I could host the site at “inboundmarketingworkshops.com” or use a subdomain like “workshops.domesticatingit.com”.  There are advantages to the first method – it is keyword rich, for one thing.  But there is a big problem too.  When I launch the site, it will have zero juice.  I would have to build it all from scratch because it is a brand new domain with no inbound links and no authority.  However, by making it a subdomain, I gain the benefits of two years of SEO from “domesticatingit.com”.  The converse is true as well: as the new site builds traffic and links, it will benefit the overall optimization of the domain.

Solution: Generally, though not exclusively, it’s a better idea to create a subdomain and point it at your new web site so that you can leverage any existing search quality and authority.

3) Your Sign Stinks

Let’s face it – registering a short, memorable, descriptive, keyword-rich domain name is difficult, if not impossible these days.  There are so many domains in existence, registering yours always involves trade-offs. So what constitutes a stinky sign?  Well, it could be confusing by including words that aren’t part of your optimization strategy.  For example, if you include the word “Boston” because that’s where your office is then you’re essentially telling search engines that you’re a local business; which may or may not be the case.  Another factor is getting the words in the best order.  Google gives less weight to every word in a URL or page title, so the further you go in a domain name, the less valuable the word is.

Solution: Leave out words that don’t target the search keywords for your business, and try to keep the most important words as close to the left as possible.

4) You’re Slumming

This last one’s a little controversial as the consensus is somewhat split in the SEO community.  The idea here is that if you set up shop in a run down part of town, people will tend to think less of your business.  The Internet equivalent here is having a “low rent” TLD (Top Level Domain) like .info.  At issue here is the fact that these TLDs are so cheap that they are frequently used by spammers, but it’s not entirely clear whether or how much that hurts SEO.

Solution: In my humble opinion, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

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These words came from Rudolph Giuliani’s stinging Republican National Committee speech in 2008.  Putting politics aside, I doubt any competent entrepreneur or business leader would argue the wisdom of this sentence.  In a business setting, change for the sake of change is unthinkable.  Why are you making the change and what is its benefit to the business?  And assuming change is warranted, hoping for it to happen isn’t exactly a recipe for success.  Nonetheless, the fact that “hope and change” won the day politically is a testament to the power of those two words.

They are so powerful, in fact, that we see companies implementing change for the sake of change and hoping that something good will come of it.  Case in point…

59% of businesses using social media have no plan!

Digital Brand Expressions released a survey last week indicating that only 41% of respondents who utilized social media did so as part of a company plan.  In other words, the rest of them made a business change and are hoping for the best.  As Dr. Phil might say, “How’s that hope and change thing working out for you?”  Probably not really well.  These companies may be having fun and possibly even raising their brand awareness, but is that all there is?  Where’s the beef?

Inbound Marketing Is a Strategy

Social media marketing can be very effective when used as part of a complete inbound marketing strategy.  If you are creating valuable, remarkable content on your website, then social media is a great way to promote that content and draw qualified visitors.  But if your website doesn’t have well designed landing pages and effective calls to action, you may as well be giving someone directions to a dead end street.  Page views don’t pay the rent!

Social media can be an effective, inexpensive marketing tool when integrated with a sound strategy.  But hope is not a strategy.

Photo credit: Waponi on Flickr

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Primer (I promise this won’t hurt)

Most of the statistical jargon we use (like averages, medians, and standard deviations) apply to data populations that follow a normal distribution, also popularly known as a “bell curve.”  This describes data that is more or less centered around an average (or “mean”) value.  The median is a line of demarcation, having half of the values above and below this number.  The general shape of this bell curve is defined by the standard deviation.  A high standard deviation results in a short, wide bell while a low standard deviation results in a tall, narrow bell.

Graph depicting a normal distribution and its mean.

The key to normal distributions is randomness.  Without a process that is truly random, you will not have a normal distribution and terms such as average and median can be thrown out the window.  This is a common pitfall in statistical process control, where processes controlled by machines are sometimes not as random as people think.  The caution here is that if you’re going to measure statistics like average, median, and standard deviation you must be sure that the data population forms a normal distribution.   Otherwise, the numbers will not mean what you think they mean.

Enter the power law distribution, also known as a Pareto distribution or the 80/20 rule.  Unlike a normal distribution, these values are not symmetrical, but highly weighted against one end of the graph.  This type of relationship typically represents social and economic data patterns, and is especially true in social media.

Graph of a power law (or Pareto) distribution and its mean

A power law distribution can represent participation rates in social media; for example, the number of contributions (Y axis) per participant (X axis).  It can also be used to describe a demand curve; for example, the price of a given product (Y axis) versus the demand for it (X axis).

What I Think It Means

This is very much a case of caveat emptor.  I’m not saying that the word “average” is meaningless in power law distributions, just that it has a very, very different meaning than most people understand it to have.  If you read, for example, an article that talks about the “average number of retweets/posts/likes” etc… then you must first determine whether or not the data population from which it was calculated is a normal distribution.  This can be done pretty easily through a mathematical calculation but many of the people touting these statistics don’t know how or even why they should.

So before you make any decisions based on what the “average” person does, make sure it means what you think it means.

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Many non-fiction writers (I’m looking at you, engineers and scientists) ignore the power of storytelling when creating a presentation or writing a white paper.  Prompted by Mitch Joel‘s book review of “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years,” I wanted to write this post about adapting the principals of storytelling in non-fiction writing.

One trait common to most engineers is the compulsion to disassemble stuff and see how it works, and I am no exception.  When I reached a position in my career that I began to give frequent talks at industry events and workshops, I decided it was time to open up the hood of effective presentations and see what made them go.  Like an amateur auto mechanic in over his head, I was soon staring at a garage littered with parts and an engine compartment with a gaping hole.  As I started putting the pieces back together, it began to dawn on me that these same parts can be used to create engines for all content; blog posts, white papers, presentations, marketing brochures, web site pages, emails, etc…  And the crankshaft that turns them all is storytelling.

Are You Talkin’ to Me?

If you’re thinking that the subject matter of your blog post, white paper or presentation is to dull, boring, scientific, etc…, then yes – I am talking to you.  As an engineer, I was guilty of boring writing, and most engineering and scientific stuff I read is much the same.   It is attributable to left brain thinking, which processes information sequentially, one detail after another.   We feel the need to provide information in a linear, start to finish, beginning to end fashion where each fact or detail logically builds on its predecessor.  There are two problems with this approach. One, it’s boring!  Two, the reader may not last long enough to get to the good stuff because you haven’t given them a reason to be interested.  Your content must be remarkable.

So what is remarkable content?  It’s an email that with a subject line that is compelling and content that gets its point across succinctly, maybe even entertainingly.  It’s a presentation that not only keeps people awake, but inspires.   It’s a white paper that feels more like you’re reading a Stephen King novel than the phone book.  It’s a blog post that poses a simple question and ends up starting a movement.  Compelling content takes a good idea and makes it great, and it takes a great idea and puts a dent in the universe (as Steve Jobs would say).

Storytelling’s Secret Sauce

As humans, our brains learn from actions and consequences, and conflict is always in the middle. We have a need, a desire, a lust to find out what happens.   How does the story end?   All conflict begins with what Robert McKee calls the “Inciting Incident”, which is an event that “radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life.”   The remainder of the story is a quest to restore that balance and that can only be accomplished through conflict.

Once the inciting incident is established, it’s time to move the story along by creating “acts.”  I’ve developed a template based on his techniques that I’ve actually turned into a worksheet that is proving to be very effective for crafting book chapters and blog posts.   I think if Mr. McKee ever saw it he would either think it was a clever adaptation of his teachings or else lose his lunch – I’m not sure which.

In a nutshell, the template begins with an inciting incident, then contains a series of action/reaction complications centered around a controlling idea that inevitably reach a climax, at which point the closing value of the story (relative to the opening value) is revealed.  McKee wrote an entire book on this subject, so this one sentence hardly does it justice (I spend more than a full chapter on this subject in my upcoming book, “Social Media for Engineers & Scientists“).  However, keeping this structure in mind can go a very long way towards making your non-fiction writing more compelling and memorable.  Find the inciting incident for your subject, and then take the reader on a journey from a life disrupted to some sort of salvation.

If we compare this approach against the traditional, exposition-style of writing that permeates most non-fiction writing, it looks something like this:

Remember that all stories are character driven. Your challenge is to identify the conflict in your story and personalize it for your reader by attaching it to an emotion. The frustration of knowing a control valve PID loop can perform better. The accomplishment of achieving a software certification. The friendships that are formed at your non-profit group’s meetings.

When you have a story, tell it.  When you don’t a story, write it.  It can be done!

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