CloudBurst Consulting

Social media is an interesting animal and one that has been capturing the attention of companies for quite some time.   But the big question for most companies is how best to use this platform to their advantage – by the way,  if you’re looking to create more traffic to your website, you definitely do not want to use social media as a tactic!

Take this example:  Let’s say you walked into a room with a large gathering of people – what would be the polite thing to do? Would you immediately start telling people all about yourself and how great you are, or would you first listen to some of the conversations and then decide how (or if) you might be able to engage in those conversations to benefit some of the people? 

Most people (especially on the Internet), no longer have patience for “in your face” conversations that revolve around marketing and selling.  Rather, the social online arena is one where you start to build relationships by listening, rather than talking.  Listen to what your potential customers in your market are talking about; become more focused on these customers by providing assistance and building goodwill.

It is critical to realize that you are not the center of attention and it is no longer possible to take control of the customer’s dialogue about your product or service. Rather, keep in mind that you are in a conversation with others to interact with your prospective customers in providing them with content that matters to them. 

With or without you, conversations are happening online!   Take a look at this simple video created by CommonCraft addressing “Social Media in Plain English:” [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE[/youtube] 

The times are a-changin’ as ICANN, the American authority that regulates domain registration on the Internet, has announced more specifics about its plan to allow anyone to create their own top-level domains.

So if you can afford $500,000 to $1M you can register .gary as a top-level domain just like .com, .org and all the other dot names.   Due to the  high cost, however, only large companies like Nike and Amazon will be able to afford these domain suffixes.  Pushing small- and mid-sized business out of the game.  Which seems oddly contrary to the typical democratic access and control afforded to everyone by the web.

What do you think?  Should we be calling, as some have, for this US-based business to open up the regulation to other countries and Internet participants?  Is this high price a good thing, preventing a giant mess, or bad because only the wealthiest companies and countries can afford them?

Blind Search “Taste” Test

Almost everyone has heard of the famous Pepsi Challenge – blind taste tests in which the company consistently scored higher than Coca Cola, and which were a significant part of Pepsi’s marketing at one time.

Well this concept has been applied to search engines, specifically showing “naked” search results from Yahoo, Bing and Google side-by-side.  You review your results and then click which one you think provided the most relevant results.

Take the Blind Search “Taste” Test, you may be very surprised with the results.  I know I am shocked after having picked Yahoo in my test.  Shocked.

Which one did you pick?

Well, if you want to win market share as a revamped search engine, the answer would be Microsoft’s promotion of Bing!

The question now is, what search engine is so good and has more meaningful features that you would actually not use Google?  And, with Google having almost a 70% market share of the search engine usage, that will call for some pretty stiff competition.

comScore recently released some early indications that are somewhat positive for Bing – even though the initial trials seem to be favorable, it will definitely be interesting to see if these initial results turn into market share growth.

So let’s get back to the question why Microsoft would spend that kind of money in this economy?  Seems as if local search represents a huge, relatively untapped revenue source.  There are numerous estimates out there and it looks like the local search industry could eclipse $15 billion dollars in the next several years … yes, I guess spending $100 million for a portion of that return just might be worth the investment.

Interesting tidbit on why Microsoft chose to name the search engine “Bing.”  Supposedly the name was “memorable, short, easy to spell and function well as a URL around the world.  Also, the word would remind people of the sound made during ‘the moment of discovery and decision making.'”

One of my favorite blogs is Erin Doland’s www.unclutterer.com. Being very particular about cleanliness and neatness (more the latter than the former), I find great tips I can put to use keeping my work, personal and online lives nicely organized.  It also helps me to feel a little more sane when I read about how much more obsessed she is than even myself.

With the eruption of Twitter’s popularity I now regularly encounter spam followers.  While it’s pretty easy to keep the spam tweets/posts out of the way, since by default you only see messages from the people you’re following, it’s not as easy to ignore spam profiles. Because of their craftiness and lack of transparency, it’s sometimes difficult to know if a new follower is someone you actually met before and forgot or if they just want you to sell you something.

Ms. Doland’s new service, Nest Unclutterer, is designed specifically to help sort the wheat from the chaff (sorry, old farmer’s adage from  my rural Minnesota upbringing).  Using rules-based logic, the tool scans your followers list for people that are most likely just spammers and prompts you to block them.  You can also create a “white list” of followers that should never be blocked.

It’s Twitter simple, easy and uncluttered.

The existence of Twitter spam and tools like Nest Unclutterer just underscore the importance of making sure that you’re not abusing these new channels of communication for your brand or services.  It’s important, perhaps now more than ever, to have relevant advertising that speaks to your consumer’s needs and engages them.  All of the popular social networking tools are less tools for broadcasting messages than they are for having conversations and providing something of value.

Web user’s are becoming more savvy every day and it won’t be long before “spammy” techniques are marginalized to the point of obsolescence.  Especially on social networks that users already consider more personal than other mediums.

A fairly accepted, but advanced, practice within the SEO community called PageRank Sculpting has been undone by Google.  I won’t get into all of the details but the important thing to remember is that if your site was making use of PageRank Sculpting (or your SEO experts said they were) then you better find out how that’s going to impact your site.

Essentially all of the links on your website and back to your website from other sites have been equalized.  That is, they now each bear about the same amount of credibility where as in the past certain links were more valuable than others.  Some still are, but a lot of them won’t be.

This just underscores how important it can be to keep up with the rules the major search engines like Google and Yahoo ues to determine what the “best” sites are for any given search phrase.  It also shows that it’s important to know what type of SEO service you’re getting: is it “black hat?”  Are your search engine optimization specialists using under-handed and non-sanctioned tactics to improve your site’s ranking?  If so, a change could come out at any time and wipe your site’s ability to rank on Google or Yahoo at all.  Ever again.

If you don’t know the answers to any of the questions above, it would probably be worth it to have your website examined to be sure you’re not in danger of violating any new rules from the search engines and determine the things you may not be doing that would be well worth it.

Google has launched its next version of its Local Business Center (LBC), the place where you can “claim” ownership of your business listing on Google searches (both for the organic listings and the maps listings).  Now you can do more than just specify your hours of operation and accepted payment methods.  You can now get information from a new dashboard that reveals a bunch of very helpful info like: what keywords did users use to arrive at my business listing on Google?  How many people visited my business listing yesterday?

If your business is the kind that people would want to find on a map, either for directions or more info, then you definitely want to get this setup.  It’s pretty painless and you’re guided through a step-by-step wizard but it does take up to two weeks sometimes to have your listing claimed from the time that you make your first request – so better get going now.  Here’s a nice video Google has put together to provide an overview of the newly-updated service:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjeCmHwqVpU&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marketingvox.com%2Flocal-business-center-lets-smbs-tailor-organic-search-listings-044295%2F%3Futm_campaign%3Dnewsletter%26utm_s&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Not surprising, online videos are once again in the spotlight, but this time, the latest news is especially exciting from an analytical standpoint!  YouTube’s Insight Analytics is now offered through Google Analytics so you can actually see how your video is doing by tracking bounce rates, length of visits, page views and return visits – Thanks Google!

And, there’s more … if your video is tailored to a specific target market, Google Analytics provides information on where the visitors that viewed your video are located geographically and what languages they speak (hum, I’m curious as to how they can actually detect a visitor’s specific language).

C|Net appropriately describes the YouTube analytics offerings as a way for a company to use this platform as “the world’s largest focus group” – if you want to know how a potential audience thinks about your video commercial or promotional content, viewers have the ability to rate the video and leave feedback via a comment section or private message.

Why wouldn’t a company want to track this valuable information – especially since April 2009 figures from Nielsen Online reported numbers for the overall video usage as approximately 119 billion unique viewers who watched seven trillion total streams during that month.  With these incredible numbers, is there any reason why a company hasn’t launched relevant, entertaining or informative videos on YouTube?

I can’t remember the last time I responded to display advertising on ad-supported websites, so I assumed that I was in the majority. Wrong!

Forrester Consulting conducted a study from iProspect indicating that more than half of Internet users (52%) not only responded to display advertising on websites showing ads, but as many initially responded to an ad by conducting a search. These results were certainly eye openers as far as how Internet users responded to online ads:

• 31% responded by directly clicking on an ad
• 27% responded by searching the the product, brand or company by launching a search on a search engine
• 21% responded by typing the company web address into their browser
• 9% responded by investigating the product, brand or company through social media venues

  

So it seems as if display advertising certainly impacts search and, more importantly, it demonstrates the ability of search to also boost the effectiveness of display ads.  This further confirms the need to ensure we are taking advantage of as many opportunities as possible in our online marketing tool box for branding, messaging and targeting! With people spending more time online than ever before, it only makes sense to capitalize on tactics that assist in driving relevant traffic to a website.

Let’s talk about Sitemaps. Not the pretty, user-friendly kind like this or that, but the ugly, albeit necessary “XML” kind. If you don’t know what an XML Sitemap is, then you better get someone who does.

They’re not too difficult to create but have become increasingly important for getting all of a website’s pages into Google’s index.  Consider these findings, revealed by Google at a recent industry event in Madrid (and highlighted by Search Engine Land):

• · 78% of Web pages were revealed to Google via an XML Sitemap vs. Google’s usual method of discovery by web crawler
• · For most web sites, publishing an XML Sitemap and submitting it to Google has the effect of getting a higher % of that’s site’s pages into Google’s index

Using XML Sitemaps results in more pages of your website on Google, and therefore the more of a chance your website has to rank.