Live Search redesign adds programmed content
July 31st, 2008The fast-loading, simple start page is one of the core principles popularized by Google in the search market.
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Google Webmaster Video : Matt Cutts Reading SEJ on iPhone
July 31st, 2008The Google Webmaster Central Blog posted a YouTube Video of the day in the life of the Google Webmaster Support team. It’s a really cool account of the daily routine of the different members of the Google Webmaster Central team.
Just when I thought the video couldn’t get any cooler, Matt Cutts whips out his iPhone and shows the viewers how he was reading a Search Engine Journal post by Eric Lander on NoFollow and PageRank sculpting.
Very cool indeed! Check out all of the behind the scenes happenings at Google from this video and the blog post.
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Why Zappos is into Twitter - CEO Tony Hsieh speaks
July 31st, 2008I had the pleasure of interviewing via email Tony Hsieh, the CEO of online shoe retailer Zappos.com, for an article I wrote for the August issue of Multichannel Merchant. Zappos is a real innovator among online retailers in a lot of areas, not the least of which is social media. They have taken Twitter by storm, with 440 twittering employees - including their CEO (Tony) and their COO (Alfred). They even launched a microsite dedicated to their Twitter presence.
I thought it would be interesting to share the interview with you here. The final article is now online, so be sure to check that out too.
Stephan: Can you share a bit of background about you and Zappos, and how the company culture plays into your inclination to jump headfirst into new online marketing channels? What were your objectives in entering the Twitterverse? twitter.zappos.com from a social media standpoint is pretty impressive and in the corporate world a rather unheard of large-scale embracing of Twitter. What is the big picture idea behind this / how did this come about?
Tony: Background on the company is here. My bio is here. You can get a glimpse inside our company culture here.
Our #1 priority as a company is our company culture. We believe that if we get the culture right, most of the other stuff, including great customer service, will fall into place on its own. Long term, we want the Zappos brand to be about the very best customer service and the very best customer experience.
For Twitter, we don’t really view it as a marketing channel so much as a way to connect on a more personal level, whether it’s with our employees or our existing customers.
Initially, we started getting the entire company more involved with Twitter because we saw it as a great way to help build our company culture. But then we discovered it was also a great way to connect with
customers as well.
Stephan: Are you viewing this as an experiment to be evaluated over some trial period or are you committed to engaging with customers via Twitter over the long term?
Tony: We are committed to connecting with our customers on a personal level. The telephone is actually a really great way to do this, which is why we have our 1-800 number at the top of every page of our web site. We found that Twitter is another great way to do this, and if something else comes along in the future, then we would definitely explore that as well.
Stephan: How are Zappos employees using Twitter? Is there any competitive aspect amongst employees about follower acquisition? Is there an overarching theme to their tweets or are they just twittering about their cats? Do they twitter about Zappos products and blog posts? What’s the level of supervision of them in their twittering? e.g. any employee guidelines for twittering? and are they trained? How do they know not to pose as a random consumer and post pro-Zappos tweets while hiding their corporate employee status? What would an employee have to tweet to get fired? What’s the procedure for employees handling tweets directed directly at them from customers?
Tony: We do offer Twitter classes, but those are optional and are more for employees to learn how to sign up for Twitter and use various features and third party applications. We really don’t give any specific guidelines except to tell them to use their best judgement.
It’s up to employees what they want to Twitter about. As I mentioned earlier, the primary focus was to get employees to connect with each other, so the vast majority of the posts are about their personal lives.
In terms of what an employee would have to tweet in order to get fired, it would be if they did something that was not consistent with our core values, which are here.
But this is not twitter-specific: If an employee does anything that’s not consistent with our core values, whether through twitter, telephone, or in person, then we need to consider whether that employee is Zappos material for the long term.
We currently don’t have any standard procedures for responding to tweets from customers.
Stephan: What (if any) kind of ROI are you seeing by having your employees spend time being active on Twitter? What are your success metrics?
Tony: We’re not really looking at short-term ROI in terms of sales. We’re looking to form life-long relationships with our customers, and we think Twitter helps us do this.
However, we’ve also found that Twitter has been great for recruiting because people can get a glimpse into what our culture is like just by observing how we interact with each other on Twitter.
Stephan: What’s the response from customers been? What was the response to your tweet asking for feedback to the idea of a zappos.org site that donates a percentage of the revenue to charity? Have you heard if any of your mentions of companies/products/restaurants resulted in an increase in sales for what you’ve endorsed?
Tony: The customers that are following @zappos on Twitter seem to really enjoy it because it allows them to interact with us on a much more personal level. I’ve heard anecdotally of people buying from us because of our Twitter presence, but as I mentioned earlier, we’re not really looking at the short term ROI.
Stephan: Has Zappos embraced or have plans to embrace any other social networks on such a large scale? Digg? Propeller? Etc?
Tony: Not at this time.
Stephan: Could you describe some of the contests you’ve been conducting over Twitter and how successful you feel they’ve been? Any big plans for upcoming Twitter contests?
Tony: We don’t have a formal contest plan or program.
Stephan: Have you considered Twitter as a customer service tool to crowd-source customer questions and set up an employee guru status where employees get points for answering customers’ questions effectively?
Tony: Not at this time.
Stephan: You seem very open in sharing what you’re doing and where you’re going at any given moment. Do you feel too exposed sometimes by being so open? Do you fear making some statements on Twitter that might come back to haunt you in some way?
Tony: Almost any statement that’s taken out of context can be interpreted negatively. But part of the beauty of Twitter is that you can see what we have all been doing over time and make your own judgement on what you think of Zappos based on the sum total of everything, not a single tweet.
Stephan: Do you randomly twitter stuff, or do you try to schedule entries consistently?
Tony: I think it’s important to be authentic, so I don’t have a schedule. I’ll tweet if I feel like it, and I won’t if I don’t.
Stephan: What would be your advice to other CEOs out there who would like to try twittering?
Tony: Just be real and use it as a way to connect more deeply with people. Don’t think of it as a marketing tool you have to leverage. And you actually have to be passionate about twittering or it’s not going to work. So if you’re not passionate about it, then don’t do it.
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Secrets of Successful CEO Bloggers
July 31st, 2008Being a CEO is a tough enough job without having to worry about blog traffic on top of it all (ask me how I know…) A corporate blog could be a tremendous publicity tool, though, if properly executed. On the other hand, it could end up being a PR disaster if you say something that harms your or your company’s reputation. I think maybe a combination of lack of time and fear of posting something dangerous is behind many a CEO’s apprehension toward company blogs. The reality of corporate blogging, though, is that it doesn’t take a lot of time, and the success stories far outnumber the horror stories.
Take Jonathan Schwartz, for instance. As the CEO of one of the IT industry’s intellectual blue chips, he’s attracted widespread attention for his corporate blog commentary on industry current events and company and product news. Originally he intended to foster a method of communicating with the IT marketplace — his customers, partners, competitors, and fans (yeah, even a behind-the-scenes company like Sun has fans in the computer technology world) as well as the more than 32,000 Sun employees as well. In one of the tech blogging world’s most innovative moves, Schwartz also offered a free $5000 Sun server to bloggers who wrote the most compelling reviews of the machine’s performance — positive or negative. At the time, the claim was that the Sun T2000 “Niagara” server was the fastest on earth, and certainly had the most performance per watt of electricity consumed. In order to get the word out about this new machine to as many people as possible, he didn’t spend millions on a traditional advertising campaign. Instead, Schwartz posted the offer on his blog, then had his salespeople send out free servers to tech bloggers and other interested potential customers for a free 30-day evaluation. If you didn’t want the machine at the end of the 30 days (and you didn’t win the monthly contest to be the blogger with the most compelling T2000 benchmarking blog post), all you had to do was box it up in its original packaging, and Sun would pay return shipping. In essence, if you wanted to play with the machine, you had nothing to lose. Schwartz rationalized on his blog that the cost of the free servers he gave out — even to people who didn’t win the contest and wouldn’t send the machines back to Sun — was negligible considering the value of the press and blog coverage he got as a result, and he reported on his blog a few weeks later that this effort was especially effective.
Another interesting CEO blogger success story is Steve Spangler. As the founder and CEO of educational toy cataloger Steve Spangler Science, Steve expanded his business though non-traditional marketing methods. His online science experiment videos and blog posts about teaching science to kids has elevated his fame to new heights. Gradually, Spangler found himself on local, then national television talk shows and news programs such as the Ellen Show, teaching people to see the world through an adventurous scientific lens. He even got chosen as one of only 204 nominees for Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” of 2007. Steve credits his blog for a lot of this online buzz and media attention. Aside from having a lot of fun, what do you suppose all of this has done for sales at SteveSpanglerScience.com? Let’s put it this way: Steve’s blog accounts for 12% of online sales!
Still not convinced? Here are some of my own reasons for having a CEO blog:
- Search engines — Google in particular — love blogs. So anything you have to say or sell in your blog will rank better in the search engines, all else being equal.
- If you have a good blog, you can get readers hooked and coming back for more. What better way to burn your brand into the minds of potential customers, thus increasing the likelihood of repeat purchases?
- Having a blog helps get you links. If you are a blogger, then other bloggers think of you as “one of them.” As such, they will be more likely to link to you and to give you favorable coverage on their blogs. It is also more likely that you will be on their radar because bloggers are more apt to follow your company’s movements by subscribing to your blog’s RSS feed than by subscribing to your email newsletter or periodically visiting your site.
- Having a blog helps get you press from the mainstream media. Journalists read blogs, and are more apt to solicit interviews from you if you have a popular and/or interesting blog.
- A blog builds your credibility and can position you as a “thought leader” in your niche. For example, a blog about stamp collecting (with interesting trends, news tidbits, insightful commentary, etc.) would position an e-commerce shop selling collectible stamps as a credible, trusted expert source for stamps.
- A blog can help you get invited to speak at conferences and to author articles. Speaking engagements, even when they’re not paid, are a huge opportunity for networking and publicity.
So what are you waiting for? If you want to get started with a corporate blog, get your IT department to look into WordPress, b2evolution, Compendium, Movable Type, Drupal or whatever blogging software looks interesting to you. If you’re on a shoestring budget or don’t want to make a significant investment into corporate blogging, you could look into a free or cheap hosted service like Blogger.com, TypePad, or Wordpress.com. Be aware that you should own the domain name that the blog is published on, however. If you don’t you’re wedded to that URL and blog platform forever — or at least until you decide to pull the plug and start over from scratch with a new URL and ZERO link popularity (since with these hosted platforms you won’t have the luxury of installing a 301 redirect to your new URL).
Good luck and good blogging!
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From FooCamp to Ypulse to BlogHer in 8 days
July 31st, 2008I went off the radar for a few weeks. Apologies for that. I have a lot going on in my life right now - not all of it good - that is taking up a lot of my time and headspace at the moment. Plus I’ve been traveling a lot. I just got back from a 10 day trip to the Bay area for 3 conferences — FooCamp, Ypulse, and BlogHer.
It was my first FooCamp (I’m so psyched that I got an invite!). For those of you unfamiliar with Foo Camp, it is the predecessor to BarCamp with the word “Foo” an acronym for “Friends of O’Reilly.” Besides being a huge fan of O’Reilly since about 1994, I’m co-authoring an O’Reilly book with Rand Fishkin and Jessie Stricchiola called The Art of SEO and I’ve spoken twice at O’Reilly/CMP’s “Web 2.0 Expo” conference. So yes I’m an unabashed “Foo”. FooCamp is invitation-only and limited to several hundred people. It’s an “unconference” — where the program is developed and presented by the attendees. The more proactive you are at Foo Camp (in terms of sharing/participating), the more you’ll get out of it (and the more likely you’ll be invited back again). It’s completely free - free to attend, free food, free drinks, free “lodging” on the grounds - just bring your own tent. And yep, a lot of folks brought tents and camped out on the lawn. Some folks slept in the office buildings on the floor in sleeping bags. I’m not into “roughing it”, so I stayed at a nearby Holiday Inn Express. My older two daughters got to hang out at the Holiday Inn while I went to the conference, which was pretty boring — so they told me… about a MILLION times! Arrgh. Gotta love teenagers. Speaking of my teenagers, the middle one (who is 15) drew this flattering illustration (on the left) of me wearing a Foo Camp t-shirt. She finds it quite hilarious that I wear a T-shirt in public that says “Foo Camp.” Of course I live to embarrass her (or so she thinks!).
Foo Camp attendees run the gamut - entrepreneurs to authors to venture capitalists - but they can all be described as leading thinkers and innovators. It was a real treat. I got to meet a lot of amazing people. Way too many to list. But here’s an example: the founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert. Dries blogged about his Foo Camp experience. Nobody has a bad time at Foo Camp.
After the Foo Camp weekend came Ypulse, a youth marketing conference. It was excellent. If you market to kids, tweens or teens, you should have been at this conference (so go to the next one!). My oldest Chloe was a speaker on the “Totally Wired Superstars” panel with other teen entrepreneurs. I really enjoyed the conference, but Chloe was in heaven — she met directors (Chloe wants to be a director), journalists, folks from Disney, Seventeen.com, MTV, and her hero, Ashley Qualls, the teenage “MySpace millionaire”.
Then a couple days later came the BlogHer conference, a conference focused on the women blogger community — a powerful and diverse voice in the blogosphere that includes “mommy bloggers”, foodies, political bloggers, techies, etc. It was my second BlogHer conference. I went last year too, when Chloe spoke. This time we just attended. Chloe did manage to get on the local (Bay area) news (see the video here) - she was interviewed as an attendee.
BlogHer was great. I did sometimes feel like the “token male” in the audience, because women so outnumbered men (I never felt unwelcome though, just to clarify!). Instead of feeling out of place, a male could look at it as an opportunity. For instance, I remember a guy telling me at last year’s BlogHer how he loved coming to their conferences because “it was like shooting fish in a barrel”. Ha ha! I presume he was single, but I probably shouldn’t assume that. 
Now I’m back and it’s back to the grindstone. I have articles to write, the book to work on, conference presentations to prepare for, a ton of emails to respond to, and personal crises to deal with. *deep sigh*
Rock on.
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Social Media! Web 2.0! Twitter! Some other random buzzword!
July 31st, 2008I realized while writing my last post about press releases optimized for social media and SEO that “social media” may not mean anything to some readers and to others (particularly the early adopter types) it may mean the world. Some folks even react to the term with religious fervor.
But you know what, “social media” isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread. Nor is Web 2.0. Nor is Twitter.
I know it’s what everyone in the blogosphere keeps buzzing about, and when you hear it enough it makes you want to get in on the action. But guess what? Most people in your target market I bet don’t have a clue what such buzz words mean, nor how to use them even if they did. The fact of the matter is, not every new thing will be right for your business.
So what I’m saying is: Don’t just get involved in something because everyone else is. If everyone else was jumping off a bridge, does that mean you should too? (with the exception of bungee jumping, of course! ) If you are going to get involved with a new technology, don’t just jump head first without taking the time to understand what you are about to get into.
For example… a lot, and I mean A LOT, of social media sites will start ranking for your name if you use them heavily and garner several links pointing to your profile pages. Because of this, it they can be used as great reputation management tools and push down some bad press. But at the same time you can inadvertently misuse them and end up putting a face of your business forward that you don’t want the public to see.
You’ve been warned.
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Optimize Your Press Releases for SEO and for Social Media
July 31st, 2008The press release is an often overlooked factor for online marketing success. Press releases not only promote your company/brand and raise your online profile, they can also increase targeted traffic by helping with your SEO. Specifically, the release can - in its own right - gain visibility in the web search results and the news search results (e.g. Google News and Yahoo News). And the release can boost your own site’s rankings by building quality backlinks.
If you aren’t writing press releases, you should be. Or if you are but you aren’t optimizing them for search engines and for social media, you should be.
A standard, run-of-the-mill, un-optimized press release about a new hire or a promotion within the company won’t do much for you on its own. Booorrring! I think I speak for all journalists when I say that I do not seek out press releases nor do I have any patience for pitches that are merely press releases. As a freelance journo who writes for Multichannel Merchant and MarketingProfs and various other pubs - and as a blogger - I get plenty of press release pitches and they only serve to annoy me. Even clever tactics to get the journalist’s/blogger’s attention like mentioning him/her in a blog post may not work anymore as we all have gotten a lot more jaded because of the ever lowering signal to noise ratio.
This means you have to be smart about the press releases you churn out.
If the news releases aren’t terribly interesting, or if they aren’t written with search engines in mind (and therefore are keyword-rich), or if they aren’t syndicated to the right outlets, or if they aren’t “optimized” to include key elements like text links and multimedia calls-to-action, then they won’t be terribly successful at driving traffic to your website.
Here are some of the outlets you could syndicate your press release out to:
All of the above sites offer various packages/levels of optimization and social media plays. For example, PR Newswire allows for embedded keyword-rich links which will help improve the search ranking of the linked page for the targeted key phrase. Note that other sites that pick up your press release from PR Newswire probably won’t retain the links that you’ve embedded into the body of the release. So you’re really only “buying” a link from PRNewswire.com when you pay the extra fee for the embedded links; but it’s still probably worth doing. In addition to working text links into the copy, write the press release’s title and body copy as you would any other search engine optimized copy. Do your keyword research using some of the available tools and include the important keywords prominently in the title and body.
Beyond the search engine optimization aspects, there’s also the social media optimization that will help your release get syndicated into the social media realm. There’s an excellent social media press release template you can use as a starting point, which will remind you to include such key things as:
- a link to your “News Releases” RSS feed
- multimedia call-to-action (e.g. “download white paper”)
- photos (product pictures, executive’s headshot)
- podcast feed and/or MP3 file links
- Skype and IM addresses
- link and RSS feed to a del.icio.us page containing relevant historical, trend, market, product and competitive content sources (which you should keep up-to-date so it continues to be a resource to journos who subscribe to this content source)
One last thing I’ll mention about press releases… you should try to keep your frequency up too, just like with blog posts. A single press release per year isn’t going to do much for you. Plan to push out press releases throughout the year.
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Kids are exasperating
July 31st, 2008Being a parent, sometimes the going gets rough. Particularly when you’re dealing with teenagers. Ya know what I’m talking about? Parenting experts don’t call it the White Water Rafting Years for nothing. Last week was one of those weeks from Hell. *sigh* Hopefully it isn’t anything that a little “tough love” won’t fix though. Of course she is grounded. But a new and very warranted punishment was I confiscated her cell phone — permanently. If she wants a cell phone, she’ll have to buy one herself, and sign up for service herself, in her own name. She went ballistic on that one.
Anyways, I thought you’d enjoy seeing a couple of funny signs about children…
A sign spotted in China
A sign spotted in Madison, WI
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Marketing on a Shoestring Budget - Steve Spangler Interviewed
July 31st, 2008You gotta check out this WebProNews video interview at ACCM 08 of Steve Spangler - the science teacher turned catalog company CEO/Emmy award winner/keynote speaker/toy inventor:
In the video, Steve talks about how his Mentos + Diet Coke experiment turned into a YouTube sensation and how he was able to leverage it for his own marketing purposes. Steve is a client of ours and he even mentions Netconcepts (thank you Steve!!) as his experts behind the scenes helping him, which was really cool to hear. 
Also in the video Steve shows off his cool flaming wallet, and how he is privileged to receive “special treatment” at airport security because of it. Um, yeah, that’s not the kind of attention that you want, Steve
What you don’t see in the video is that Steve also has a flaming business card holder. It’s hilarious when he whips out one of his business cards and he has to put the fire out on the flaming card before he hands it to you. I’d LOVE to have one of those card holders and then troll the trade show floor and then hand over a flaming card to overaggressive, hard-selling vendors - but WITHOUT putting the fire out! hehe 
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The Danger of Overusing Social Media Guerrilla Tactics
July 31st, 2008I’d like to add some additional context to my last post on Social Media Power User “Hacks”. In that post I provided some power user tips for social media marketing and optimization. These power user tips are meant to augment or supplement the necessary prerequisites of creating great content, being a valuable member of the social site/community, and being authentic your interactions (rather than deceitful or dishonest). Guerrilla tactics aren’t a replacement for adding real value.
There are some ethical must-haves (underpinnings) of social media interaction such as engaging in meaningful conversation, instilling trust, being authentic, etc. Entering the social space without an internal moral compass is a recipe for disaster. Although such ethical must-haves wasn’t part of my preso (you’re rarely allocated more than 10 minutes to speak on an SES or SMX panel), don’t think it’s not important. It’s THE most important thing.
Put another way, social media marketing isn’t just a bunch of tricks and shortcuts, it’s mostly about being adding value in an honest way, with the tricks and shortcuts added on to give you that little edge over your competition.
And when applying those aforementioned guerrilla tactics to gain the edge, you must exercise restraint and use good judgment. Don’t just go hog wild and use every “trick in the book” and do it to excess.
Now consider this example of moderation versus excess… Sending a good friend a site with the StumbleUpon toolbar is totally acceptable. But compare that with sending an army of “friends” that you don’t know a truckload of URLs to sift through. The latter is spammy, unethical, and reckless; you’d be foolish to engage in such behavior. You’d torch your account, burn relationships and ruin your reputation.
In line with that thought, you certainly don’t need to employ the whole kit and caboodle of guerrilla tactics. For example, that tip for friending bands in MySpace may be totally unnecessary. Hopefully you can get to a critical mass of friends on MySpace without adding low-value friends (low value as in not likely to have meaningful interactions with you and not in your target market) such as all the bands and musicians that you like. But if you are at only a handful of friends and can’t seem to get over the hump, it’s nice to know that there’s something you can do besides just sit and wait for people to friend you; you can proactively friend bands that you like. Granted an artist like Weird Al Yankovic isn’t going to be terribly interactive with you, so at some point in the future you’re likely to remove that friend from your ranks. Incidentally, that particular tip of friending bands came from a jewelry retailer I interviewed for the Marketing on MySpace article I wrote for MarketingProfs last year. Here’s the quote:
…when starting off, you need to get Friends. It’s kind of a bragging right on MySpace. If you have too few friends, it’ll be tough to get the good ones—the ones who will end up buying from you. So, before you go after those, get a few hundred “bad” friends—bands are the easiest. They’ll give you a respectable number on your Friends list, and will leave comments on your page—giving a little realism boost to your profile—making the addition of friends of the “good” type that much easier.
Finally, your focus in your social media marketing shouldn’t be solely on gaining links. The links are mainly a byproduct of being a good social citizen. Of course they’re still an essential byproduct nonetheless if you are an SEO. But it shouldn’t be your main driver for participating in social media. Taking such a self-centered and short-sighted view will backfire. People will see through it. Operate by the principle of “pay it forward”. Karma, in other words.
Live long and prosper.
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