I’ll be on a panel at SMX Toronto this Friday: Search and Social – Insight and Inspiration. The panel will be moderated by Alexa Clark and feature a cross-section of smart folks – Leona Hobbs from Social Media Group, Jeff Quipp of Search Engine People and Ilya Grigorik from Postrank.

I’ve always been passionate about the intersection of search and social and how the two can intersect to provide a rich, contextual experience for users. With the quality of people on the panel it’s sure to be a lively and informative discussion.

If you plan on attending, make sure to say hello!

Being present online these days is standard for any company whose customers can be found in this medium, be it with a website, or taking it further to the social media space. One aspect that remains mandatory, no matter how big or how small you are participating is understanding and being actionable with your website analytics data. Your site data is different from conversational data which comes into play and is layered on when you get involved in the social web.

Setting up your analytics and determining what and how to measure is a key first step in managing your focus and presence in the digital space. Having a strategy in place for reviewing and incorporating the insights gleaned is a must. Doing so up-front will save money and effort in the long-term.

What are some of the things your data can teach you?

• What content are people the most focused on or drawn to? Does it align with your preconceptions of what was important? If not, what are you missing? How can you adapt? What can you do to increase engagement with the content you think should be a higher priority?

• Are there frequently specific areas of abandonment on your website? Why? Is it as simple as a 404 error, or more complex – heavy load time, unclear navigation, mis-labled content, etc.

• What content drives traffic but isn’t sticky? Review it with an open mind. Take off your marketing glasses and put on your consumer hat.

• Where is your traffic coming from? Links? Do you know who the people are who are advocating your content? Are you present where your content is being shared? Are you optimized to encourage sharing?

• What type of search engine traffic are you getting? Is it quality? Do you rank well for some terms and not for others? Are the engines indexing the pages the way you would want them to?

• What are some of the keywords that are driving the most traffic from search engines as well as from social networks? Are they what you anticipated? Do they align with your content and focus? What can you do to adjust?

Taking the time to set a strategy in place can provide a goldmine of actionable data and, if included in review cycles, can continue to be a road map to how your digital presence is managed, and can help refine and focus your marketing initiatives. It’s a must.

[photo credit: jef_safi via Flickr]

This June 8 & 9th the Search Engine Strategies conference will return to Toronto. I had the pleasure of speaking at the event in 2007 and as the landscape continues to evolve, this year looks to have some great sessions on “what’s next” in search, along with the tried and true sessions about SEO & SEM. This year I’m covering SES right here on (3i). I hope to impart some of the goodness I’ll be learning over the two-days and if you have any particular sessions you’d like me to recap, let me know in the comments!

In addition to the keynote by the excellent Miss Rogue, Tara Hunt, author of The Whuffie Factor, the first day has some fantastic sessions, including:

• Is PageRank Broken? The Future of Search
• Universal and Blended Search: Comprehensive Visibility Challenges
• Optimizing for Video Search: Virgin Territory?
• SEO Then & Now: What’s the Same? What’s New? [I'll be featuring an interview with one of the panelists, Anne Kennedy, in the coming weeks on (3i). ]

Day 2 again features some terrific sessions in addition to the keynote by Emanuel Rosen, author of The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited:

• Follow the Carrot: Cool Mobile Apps
• Information Architecture, Site Performance Tuning and SEO
• Social Media: Do Big Companies Get It?
• How to Speak Geek: Working Collaboratively With Your IT Department to Get Things Done

If you are at the conference make sure to find me to say hi, or if you aren’t attending, follow along here and leave me a comment with your perspective on the hot issues being discussed!

As the Social Media Press Release reaches its second anniversary an interesting study was released recently by PR Week that gauges where, and how, bloggers and journalists like to receive company information. It’s a topic that’s picked up steam recently as the major news release companies and PR firms have gotten on-board with the notion of making their news “sharable” and “findable”.

Which brings me to the most recent report and then some thoughts on what “findable” really means on the interwebs as they stand today, and as they will organically move forward with Universal Search and the semantic web (aka Web 3.0). But first, the findings in the report:

Across the board, both traditional journalists and bloggers (approx. 85% respectively) received pitches from public relations folks.

No surprise there, but this is where things get interesting…

Traditional journalists rely primarily on a companies website (89%) for information when researching a story, followed by Google search (73.8%) and personal contact by a PR person (70.9) or press release. On the flip side, bloggers rely on a Google search and the company website almost equally (86.1% and 87.3% respectively) and are just tipping over 50% in the personal contact or press release department (54.4% and 57% respectively).

And then of course the question relating to the title of this post, how about the SMPR?

“What would the ideal pitch look like?” — A personal, concise email – 63.1% across the board, with the highest percentage being bloggers at 70.9%.

When asked about the social media release bloggers were slightly more receptive than the average at 17.7% vs. 7.1% in aggregate including traditional TV, radio and print journalists.

Now of course, no one wants to receive a traditional release with the abysmal stats of 2.5% for bloggers and 19.9% in aggregate.

Finally, video isn’t swaying many editors it seems with 70.1% aggregated journalists and bloggers (60.8%) stating that including video in a pitch doesn’t sway them.

So there are some stats here that make it pretty clear we have a long way to go in wide-spread adoption of the SMPR, although with the echo chamber noise about it, it seems the bubble effect keeps going and SMPRs are becoming major parts of a brand social media strategy but without any thought to the fundamentals about who is paying attention, and perhaps more importantly, how they are doing so.

No offense, but the way SMPRs are being presented range from a blog post format to a traditional ad-agency microsite format to a press release on the wire with some video and “share it” buttons. There is no consistency, and frankly, no context or long-term planning for the most part. It’s a bit ironic, but what I’m seeing happen with SMPRs is akin to the rampant use of microsites in the late 90s/ early 00s… lots of content thrown at the users, no contextual relevancy, no personalization, and an expiry date.

Let’s go back to web principles 101 here for a minute:

Everything you do should be intuitive, findable, and relevant (both in the immediate and in the archive). This is what drives the semantic web, what will drive the future of our online experience, and why tagging etc. has become a standard categorization method across all social media applications and tools.

So about the SMPR…

First off, and I cannot stress this enough, what ever you do online MUST be hosted on your own servers, with your own domain strategy in place, not exclusively on a newswires or an agency’s. Otherwise you are giving away your brand SEO juice and contextual content to a third-party and it provides absolutely no value to you unless that third-party has the built-in organic relevancy for your brand that you do (I cannot even imagine an example). Leaving aside the obvious SEO elements, from a conversational, and a web usage standpoint, search is where people go first to find information they’re looking for unless they are triggered by a friend’s recommendation or conversation. That’s where, if they’re searching, they want to find your information – in one of the top organic results. Why would you want to compete with anyone when you’re building an SMPR (especially yourself)? Your site has the brand equity of, for most corporations, a decade; build on it, don’t dilute it.

Secondly, using a newswire that’s enabled social sharing is a great idea as a supplement to sharing your content or news, but nothing beats one-to-one interaction, as the study further reinforces. There is no substitute for getting to know the community you are a part of. In addition, as multiple studies over the years have shown, when it comes to domain and branding strategy, simple and contextual is key to recall. Making sure your social content is part of your overall website and marketing strategy is crucial to maximizing visibility and interaction.

In the end, it ultimately comes back to being “findable” and “relevant” on a topic in the long term. Let’s also keep in mind that as much as an SMPR is a valuable tactic within social media, there is nothing inherently “social” about a “share this” button. The sociability comes in the interaction and the conversation over multiple channels and platforms.

And part of interaction, conversations, and what drives it all, context, is being accessible. Which leads us into universal search.

Universal search is a hot topic, and with it the reality that content is findable across a wide spectrum of properties using a single search term (a search for “Hyatt” could yield video, images, podcasts, as well as the corporate website and blog, etc.). Google, for example, is all about building a relevant experience for their users. If they know (because their algorithms look for patterns and context) that not only is the Hyatt video on YouTube hot, but it’s also embedded and linked to from the Hyatt Press Room that has historical and brand credibility, that contextually confirmed video will appear in the top results in most cases.

And that’s where the SMPR plays a valuable role: in your Media Centre/ Press Room, properly optimized for search.

The whole report really has some meaty stats and questions in terms of journalists views on the state of their industry, and how they work & bloggers take on their place in the eco-sphere – it’s worth a thorough read.

h/t on PRWeek report @dannysullivan via Twitter

[photo credit: monicutza80 via Flickr]

As part of my presentation at Search Engine Strategies NY this week, I talked about how social bookmarking services can help company’s gain a deeper understanding of how their customers (or prospects) view and interact with their brand. Social bookmarking isn’t incredibly sexy, but it is a powerful component of the social media mix.

Part of the beauty of social bookmarking is how individual, yet universal it is due to its non-hierarchical folksonomy. When people save pages to their delicious account for example, they are using tags that are not only universal (and part of the common lexicon), but can also choose words and phrases that are relevant to themselves as individuals. As an example, someone tagging the page www.bluefly.com would use keywords like “shopping” and “clothing”, but as is shown in the screenshot below in the “recent history” section, someone also thinks of the BlueFly site as providing “design inspiration”. Drilling into the types of tags people are using for not only your company or brand, but also for your competitors, can yield valuable, and sometimes surprising results that can help inform other aspects of your marketing and communication efforts, including SEM and SEO.

Another valuable use of social bookmarking is to gain insight into how your brand is perceived by the users saving and tagging your (or your competitors) website or content. Using Dell as an example and digging into the “user notes” section you see not only references you’d expect, such as:

Create a custom computer configuration and then purchase it online. Includes and extensive download library of utilities and drivers for each Dell.

But also not so favourable comments, that even though they are negative provides valuable customer, product, customer service, and brand insight.

Fast fading as leading PC host. Due to bad quality of products and reluctance of tech support to actually support…

Exploring and using social bookmarking is relatively easy, and along with many other terrific uses that I’ll explore in subsequent posts, can provide another window into perceptions and sentiments about your brand.

[photo credit: One on Flickr]

Just back from a rewarding trip to SES Chicago – thanks to Kevin Ryan and crew for a fantastic conference once again – and although I had a truly great speaking session and audience Q&A with Jennifer, Todd, Steven and Adam, the main benefit for me personally, was the consolidation of my thinking that happened from Seth Godin and the folks on my panel: Actionable Social Media (along with many others, but these two relate directly to this topic).

What started it off for me was reading the Q&A with Seth in the conference magazine on Monday, where in answer to the question:

Most search marketers don’t think of you as a search marketing guru. Some mistakenly think you’re anti-SEO. Yet through Squidoo, you’ve helped people understand search engine traffic, its value to marketers, the Google Dance, and how to succeed in search marketing.

Seth said:

… search traffic is vital to just about everyone building something on the web. So the question becomes, how do you get more out of it?

Many organizations, addicted to control, and addicted to spending money instead of time and talent, have resorted to hiring SEO people….

As a tactic, it’s not bad. But as a strategy, it’s a problem. It’s a problem because of competition, and it’s a problem because the search engines could change their rules at any moment. So, my proposal is to skip most of that and realize that you have a clear strategy. Not easy, but effective: make stuff people want to see, talk about, and link to! That’s what the search engines are looking for, and if you build it…

In my mind (and I believe to those on my panel) this is bang on and where social media, online public relations, and content creation come into play. It’s no longer enough to just "do" SEO. Sure, file and url structure, keyword rich content, title, image, description, etc. tags are all important (and will remain so), but what’s more important is a long term strategy for content creation and direct engagement that is beneficial to your audience. Stuff that people want to talk about, that they find useful, that helps add value. Which is where social media and interactive strategies come into play; reputation building, community engagement, expertise sharing, the gamut – but only those that are appropriate to your site or brand. Otherwise it’s just whipcream piled on top of meatballs.

Unfortunately, developing compelling content and sticking to a long term strategic vision takes time, effort, and authenticity, and with too many folks promising oodles of traffic via Digg or saying you ‘must be on Facebook’ too many brands try to take the easy way out and end up wasting valuable time and money on the quick fix without the lasting benefits. There is no immediate direct ROI, and that’s not a bad thing. The long tail / term benefits will far outweigh the quick fix in the long run.

[photo credit: 2-Dog-Farm via Flickr]

In less than a week thousands of marketers will gather in the Windy City for what should be a fantastic week of search, social media and marketing tips. Following up on his keynote from SES Toronto, Seth Godin will open Day 2 of the event. Along with hearing the maestro speak, I look forward to getting my hands on an advance copy of Meatball Sundae!

Yours truly, will also be on hand speaking at the "Actionable Social Media" session, along with Todd Parsons from BuzzLogic, Adam Lavalle from iCrossing, Jennifer Laycock with Search Engine Guide, and Steve Marder from Eurekster. The session will be moderated by Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink. I’m truly looking forward to participating and the insights from the stellar group of folks on the panel.

The session abstract:

Community-built web sites, the popular Wikipedia and new sites allowing content being shared through "tagging" can be a great way to tap into links and search-driven traffic. This session looks at some social media services and strategies to tap into them in an appropriate manner.

If any readers of (3i) are planning to attend, drop me a line and let me know!

Google Maps now allows users to edit and move the marker location of their home or business with a registered account. There are a few restrictions (you can’t move a government building, hospital, or claimed business within the Local Business Center), but for the most part, if your house is listed on the wrong side of the street or the wrong corner within Google Maps, you, the user, can change it. The change also pertains to Street View.

In my view, this is another great example of Google trying to make their results as relevant as possible and "organize the world’s information". It’s been a long road with all map services over the years and anything that can be turned over to the people with the most amount of knowledge about the issue is a great thing in my opinion.

Google, being Google, have put safeguards in place to prevent abuse, such as adding a "show original location" link and sending any change of over 200 meters to human review. It may not be the perfect solution, but it’s a good start.

[photo credit: WhirlingPhoenix via Flickr]

Taglines have always played an important role in distilling a brand’s essence into a short and memorable phrase that hopefully resonates with consumers. The tagline is utilized across all mediums – print, TV, radio, OOH, website, etc. to provide cross-channel reinforcement. As search engines become the norm for distilling information online and social media use becomes more widely adopted, brands would do well to revisit how effectively they are maximizing the reach of their ‘essence’ on the web.

The following tactics will help consumers find your content in ways that are intuitive to them (i.e. not all people remember the brand; many will only remember the tagline or key phrase and conduct a search using that terminology), as well as continuing to reinforce your brand message across a wider platform.

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1. Your website

When looking at your website keep in mind the potential ways you can ensure that all the offline advertising dollars spent on establishing the tag in the consumers mind aren’t wasted by neglecting to continue that reinforcement, not just for the front-end user of your site (the consumer), but with the back-end user as well (the search engine crawler).

A few easy ways to ensure your tagline is integrated:

- Ensure your tagline is readable by the search engines: don’t embed it in a graphic or header without using an image alt tag and description.

- If your tag is an important part of your brand ID (ala: Just Do It^TM) use it within your title tags – this is both front-end branding and back-end context for the engines.

- Don’t stray in your copy from your brand essence. If you are claiming to be extraordinary, make sure your website reads like it. When possible, and when contextually relevant, integrate your tagline within your website copy.

- Incorporate it into your footer information in text format (e.g. © Widget Co.: Make it happen).

2. Social media tagging and optimization

- If you have a blogging, forum, photo-sharing, video-sharing, podcasting, social tagging, or similar social media strategy incorporated into your communications mix, it’s a good idea to decide on a list of terms you’re going to be using regularly as tags for consistency and add your tagline to the folksonomy as appropriate.

- Use it in your RSS feed title if relevant to the content.

3. Search engine marketing

- If search engine marketing is part of your advertising mix, you may want to consider bidding on your own tagline if it is too generic to optimize fully organically. Oftentimes the ROI on this type of bidding can be well worth it. A non-profit client of Wildfire’s used this tactic to successfully drive long-tail conversions for a campaign where the cost to optimize would far out-weigh the benefits.

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Companies who neglect to incorporate their tagline into their search engine optimization, social media optimization and search engine marketing efforts are potentially wasting valuable market equity and failing to maximize the full spectrum of their marketing communications budget, when with a well-developed strategy the tagline can build further resonance and extensibility in the digital space.

Do you have any additional tips for keeping a tagline top-of-mind online? Leave a comment!

[photo credit: dontaylor on Flickr]