CloudBurst Consulting

Don’t be afraid that you might lose control of your brand when consumers talk about you and spread their messages via social media channels.  Most conversations regarding brands (both online and offline) are positive. 

The Keller Fay Group did an interesting study of hundreds of thousands of conversations and found that about two-thirds of word-of-mouth references to brands were mostly positive with fewer than half who believed negative buzz! 

Obviously, some industries will get better buzz than others such as food brands and kid’s products and no surprises what industries receive the lowest – telecommunications, financial services and healthcare industries to name a few.  Another interesting fact was that amoung female Internet users in North America, have a greater motivation to share good brand experiences than bad ones.   All in all, most consumers who give advice to others seem more interested in directing friends and family toward brands they like rather than away from brands they have had issues with –

The moral to this research … let your consumers and advocates talk about your brand and, when appropriate, don’t forget to also engage in the conversation which lets them know you’re listening and care about what they are saying.

If you are, you might want to head on over to some of your favorite stores/companies on Facebook.  As of November 3rd, Facebook announce a major effort to get masses of people involved when they announced “Facebook Deals.”  If you have a smartphone (600 million people do), the Deals allow local businesses to create coupon savings and other incentives for smartphone users.  You might want to take a look at the video they produced showing how the service will work for users as well as how it will work from a business perspective.   

Wouldn’t you know it the Gap and 24Hour Fitness were two early adopters that started immediately making Deals! 

This is something you are probably going to  

So, I’d say it was time to hurry on over to Facebook and see if you can get some of your holiday shopping done early 🙂 

Google decided earlier this week to change the way it provides local business listings.  When searching for local business info, previously you would have seen this:

You got a little map with a list of nearby local businesses matching your search.  Since this map consistently showed up above regular search results, some businesses could rank high for keywords that they didn’t otherwise.  Now that’s all changed.  Here’s what it looks like now:

Gone is the map inserted into the results – it’s now on the right side, pushing down any PPC ads that didn’t appear in the top 2 or 3 spots, off the page.   And the listings of nearby businesses has been integrated into the regular search results, potentially shoving a lot of previously well-ranking websites further down (or off) the page.  This has concerned some and angered others.  However, since it’s launch on Tuesday, Google seems to be tweaking the layout still.  So who knows what we’ll ultimately end up with.

What does this mean for your business?  It means it’s now more important than ever (although it was pretty important before, too) to make sure your business is listed properly with Google Places, in addition to any Search Engine Optimization and/or Pay-Per-Click campaigns.  What do you think – is this a bad change or is it better for searchers than the previous method?  Is it better for businesses or worse?

What’s that famous phrase that Bill Clinton used?  Oh yes, “It’s the economy, stupid!”  Well, we can easily update that quote to 2010 by revising one word … It’s the community, stupid! 

Yes, in today’s online, interconnected world, it’s all about community.   It’s not a good idea to approach social media by asking for favors or promoting your brand before you’ve actually started a conversation and it’s not all that hard to start a conversation in an online environment.  People like to connect, be heard and share information.  So if you’re looking for recognition without putting forth any type of effort, you might want to think again. 

There’s a great quote that would be very appropriate for social media and that is “Come bearing gifts.” 

It’s really similiar to a personal relationship in that if you give of yourself, you’ll find that people will be anxious to give back to you!  However, if you think that just putting your business website address out there and not spend any quality time getting to know the potential people on some of the social sites, then you are wasting time and effort.   It’s all about  creating avenues of engagement with the people around you and that means putting some effort into posting comments, resharing content and more.  If you communicate with people and let them know who you are, what you’re about, who you represent and what you stand for, these people will be more inclined to be receptive to your message.  In the end, it’s relationships that lead to business …

If they still seem somewhat of a mystery, I recommend the “How Internet Search Engines Work” article over at howStuffWorks.com.  Although the engines deliberately keep some parts of their operation secret, the basics of how they work are public knowledge.  And some of this information can be used to determine how search engine-friendly your website is.  The sooner you have a basic understanding, the better you can position yourself and your brand/services on the web.

Do you post news items on your website?  Do you know if you’re getting maximum exposure by being listed at places like Google News? Andrew Shotland has a thorough list of the do’s and don’t’s of posting news content on your website, and how to help it rank better on places like Google News.  Of the 21 tips provided, here is a sample of a few key items:

2. Submit Your News Site Map to Google

6. Make Sure Article URLs Are Permanent and Unique

14. News Articles Must Contain Text (Seems like a no-brainer but it does actually happen that news stories are posted with little or no actual copy)

It’s no surprise, but just because your company has a website and is “wired,” doesn’t mean that the company is well branded.  Search engine optimization has taken on numerous definitions over the past ten years, especially with social media now in the mix.  So for all the services that SEO supports, we can’t forget that the search engines favor companies that are also well branded.

Unless you’re Apple, Coca Cola or one of the multi-million/billion dollar companies, online branding takes time.  The search engines know if you are spending time in the social networks in order to connect with goodquality content and information that you are definitely trying to build and grow your brand.  You never knowwhen you will eventually lose any rankings you may have had if you are just looking for temporary loop holesin the search engines to boost your rankings. It’s obvious that Google is attempting to push any clutter awayfrom page one positions of the search results and replace it with information that is relevant to a person’sparticular search query.  However, the challenge lies in the fact that there are other sites that can supplygood, useful information other than the branded ones.  The difference is what has temporarily gotten throughthe loop holes and what has arrived there from being a good source of information.

So what’s the best approach to building your brand online?

First give people something to connect to – is it your logo, company phrase, etc?  Your target market needs to be able to spot you in a crowd (and as we know, the Internet can be very crowded).

Social media can always help strengthen your online image and brand.  If you only communicated once on a daily basis with your audience and reached out to new members that could become your fans, you’ll automatically be creating that branding image.  Linkedin is an obvious choice, but don’t forget the Twitter and Facebook crowd either.  And, of course, it is imperative on a monthly basis to put out some sort of communication efforts such as a steady stream of good quality articles along with news worthy PR releases.

It’s bound to happen … the search engines will figure out what search results got there by accident and what really deserves to be there!  You never know when search engine algorithms will be a huge factor in branding.

We haven’t put out a reaction to Google Instant, that has some in our industry pulling their hair out and others sitting back and laughing.  Some think it’s the death of SEO while others think it will be ultimately discarded as a failed experiment.  The reality is somewhere in between.  Until it’s been around for a while, no one really knows what it’s impact will be on users and how it will affect website rankings.  So we’ve resisted the urge to pile on along with everyone else.  Just a couple of weeks in, however, some ideas on possible scenarios are starting to emerge.

First of all, it hasn’t changed searches when you use the built-in search box of any modern browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc…).  Using the browser’s search box works just like the old search, and will until that changes.  And my guess is that a lot of people use that box instead of going to Google.com.

Secondly, there is an early report indicating that Google Instant is actually encouraging users to scroll further down a search page than before.  This appears to be due to the fact that Google Instant’s suggestion box pushes all of the results down the page, and users appear to be compensating by scrolling further to see more results.  This same observation also indicated a trend that users are less likely to go several pages past the first.  A bit of a mixed result there and worth keeping an eye out.

Clearly Google Instant will change some things about user behavior and ultimately what keywords businesses should be targeting but the fact is that we’re still very early in to this experiment.  Time will tell whether people need to panic or not, but even these early results show that it may make expert SEO even more important than in the past.

[Cat photo credit .schill and Mrs eNil]

It is common knowledge that publishing a blog offers great opportunities for direct communication helping to inform people that might know nothing about the company and reaching current customers on a one-to-one basis.

A single blog can be beneficial to an organization, but did you know that Google has 150 blogs that is attracting a total of 10 million visitors each month?  Whew!  Google obviously is a great example of companies that are committed to corporate blogs and demonstrate effective ways to connect with their customers, promote the exchange of ideas as well as bring visibility to valued employees and their great work.

eMarketer recently reported that one in three companies in the United States has a corporate blog, with an estimate that proportion is due to increase to 43 percent by 2012.

Needless to say, there is not a one-size-fits-all to corporate blogs as their are various approaches to consider.  Google has a team-driven approach so when someone wants to start a blog, more than one employee must agree to participate and the topic must be approved in advance. 

Other companies assign freelance journalists to report and write articles that are published on the blog and then company appointed staff provide additional contributions.  Or another approach can be a bit more flexible where a single employee can take ownership of a blog in order to bring a voice and personality to the posts.

There are obvious blogging guidelines that all companies should clarify before establishing a company blog – don’t violate non-disclosure agreements; don’t be rude or pick fights, etc.  Additionally, it’s always best to stick with best practices such as ensure the communication is naturally conversational rather than corporate.  Always be sure to correct any error that might have occurred in a post and be sure to have a system in place to review posts before publishing.  It is also critical that someone in the company is the champion for corporate bloggers with a profile similiar to a newspaper or magazine editor that also has the understanding of a new-media guru.  It’s definitely time to find this person and get your company in the  ‘social’ environment!

As of yesterday, Yahoo has completed the switch over to Bing’s search engine results.  This completes part of a larger process that was started last year when Microsoft inked a deal with Yahoo to power their regular search results (paid/sponsored results are not moved, yet).  What does this mean for your website?  Well, one less search engine to worry about.  This makes Google and Microsoft effectively the only search engines you need to worry about for search engine optimization.  Yahoo has some nice webmaster tools, however, and I hope Bing has equally useful ones as they have in the past.

Potentially bad news for Yahoo in the long run.  Once Bing takes over the sponsored/paid results, Yahoo has to rely on its own properties (News, Ymail etc…) to differentiate itself in the market.  Some feel that this is the beginning of the end of Yahoo’s competition in the market, perhaps eventually relegating them to similar also-ran status of AOL.

Is your website ranking well on Bing already?  If not then you definitely want to start getting serious about showing up high on their search engine, because the same rules that apply to appearing on Bing.com now apply to showing up in searches at Yahoo.com.

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[Photo Credit]

Twitter became even more ubiquitous on the web with its launch of a “Tweet” button earlier this month, that can be placed on any web page. If you come across a news article you want to share on Twitter, simply click the “Tweet” button, assuming the author has provided it, and a pop-up window is triggered. This window has a ready-to-publish Tweet already created, using the headline of the article or web page and the URL shortened and included. You can modify any part of the automated Tweet and/or just hit the “Tweet” button and it will immediately go out via your Twitter account.

The most interesting feature of this new button is that it keeps a running tally of how many times an article or web page has been “tweeted.” This is similar to how the Digg button keeps track of how many people like a particular news story, which Digg then uses to determine what appears on their website the highest (the articles with the most Diggs appear at the top). It’s also similar to Facebook’s embeddable “Like” button launched earlier this year – it too makes posting any web page or article to Facebook super simple and keeps a running total of how many people have posted something. In fact it’s not unusual to see the Tweet, Like, and Digg buttons on the same articles.

The big question is whether one of these services is going to get to a critical mass that makes the other unnecessary. For instance, if interest in Digg fades, so too will the presence of its button across the web, but the same could happen to Twitter or Facebook. Although they don’t directly compete, Facebook seems like the obvious successor given that Twitter only provides one particular feature of what is a larger set that make up Facebook (e.g. photo albums).  Or perhaps none will make the others obsolete and instead there will be increasing use of third party buttons that post automatically to everything (Facebook, Twitter, Digg etc…) at once, with one click.

I imagine that eventually users will tire of having to maintain and track data coming at them on multiple networks and something that consolidates reading and posting to these various social networks will eventually overtake use of individual services. What do you think? Will one of these services overtake the other or will a single third party that unifies them all be the ultimate conqueror in this space?