Marketing Pilgrim Published: "Sony Decides to Commit Reputation Harikiri" plus 4 more |  |
- Sony Decides to Commit Reputation Harikiri
- 5 Free Tools to Measure Online Brand Awareness
- Future's Digital Profit Nearly Tops Print Decline
- In-House SEO: An Interview With Gordon Magee of Drs. Foster and Smith
- Earth Day and Royal Wedding Give Top Web Sites a Boost
| Sony Decides to Commit Reputation Harikiri Posted: 25 May 2011 06:47 AM PDT
After the embarrassing hacks of its Playstation Network, the electronics giant is once again facing a multitude of security breaches. This time, Sony appears to either not have an explanation or just figures it's lost all credibility so may as well shut up.
Oh yeah, silence. That's always a great tactic for preserving your reputation…not! Ask Dell how sticking its head in the sand worked out for the company! Sony may not have all the answers. It may feel embarrassed that it's once again letting down its stakeholders. It may prefer to face the corporate seppuku sword than face its angry customers, but now is not the time to remain quiet.
While Sony has already broken rule #3 of my Three Rules to Reputation Repair, thats doesn't mean it should now break rules #1 and #2. Keeping quiet is not the best way to preserve your $27B market value. Sure, you've lost much of your credibility and, yes, it's gonna take a George Harrison amount of "time" and "spending money" to "do it, to do it, to do it, right child" but that doesn't mean it's insurmountable. BP and Toyota didn't throw in the towel. Even Tiger Woods eventually spoke to the media. So Sony, you can keep apologizing, keep explaining your efforts, and, hope to someday achieve some consistent security, or I believe you may want to head over to eBay.
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| 5 Free Tools to Measure Online Brand Awareness Posted: 25 May 2011 05:15 AM PDT
The concept of brand awareness has changed a lot in the past 10 years. Who knows your brand, what do they think, are they loyal and who are they? For many marketers, this is valuable stuff. But, before the days of the direct attribution provided by online marketing, companies had to rely on brand awareness studies to help understand the efficacy of their brand marketing efforts.
Many large companies use expensive brand tracking studies to understand the impact of their brand marketing efforts toward building awareness and generating customers. Panels and surveys can be conducted for tens of thousands of dollars and provide detailed data on metrics like aided and unaided awareness, sentiment analysis, loyalty, and demographic data for who you're reaching, and who you're not. Many large businesses still regularly conduct this research—someone must care which razor brand I prefer (Gillette, if you care to know). But, who wants to spend thousands of dollars when you can get great data for free? Ok, these free sources can't compare with an exhaustive brand study, but they're almost as good, and for the price, they can't be beat. Most of these measure the effectiveness of all of your efforts of driving awareness and demand online. And most importantly these free tools provide raw values so you can record and measure performance over time. With several months' worth of data, you can learn a great deal of brand's current online awareness, buzz and traffic potential. (Since I work with SEOmoz I'll be using our brand as an example. Because we're committed to transparency, this is our actual data!) 1. Topsy – how many social mentions did my brand receive? Topsy, the excellent social search engine, provides excellent metrics for how many times a particular word or phrase is mentioned on the social web or in tweets. I'd suggest searching for your brand while excluding retweets and via mentions (by adding -rt -via to the search query):
The thing that makes Topsy invaluable to a marketer is that it provides raw counts for both social web mentions, and Twitter mentions: Web results – how many social mentions did my brand receive?
Tweet results – how many Twitter mentions did my brand receive?
These raw counts (I'd recommend last 7 days and last 30 days, collected weekly and monthly) are excellent indicators of the online buzz your brand receives. If you do indeed collect these counts regularly, you'll be able to begin drawing simple correlations with which your marketing activities are driving the most buzz. 2. Google Analytics – how much 'brand' traffic does my site generate? Besides being free, Google Analytics has several data points help determine how much your brand is driving traffic to your website. Branded Search Visits – how many people are searching for my brand and visiting my site? In Google Analytics: Traffic Sources > Keywords > Keywords containing "yourbrandname"
The number of visits your site receives from branded keywords can help you know how many people searched for your brand and clicked to your website (you own the #1 space for your brand name right?). Use the Keywords report (found under Traffic Sources) and restrict the keywords to those containing your keyword (using the Filter Keyword box at the bottom of the page):
Direct Traffic – How many people are aware of my brand and visiting my site? In Google Analytics: Traffic Sources > Direct Traffic
A simple concept, but the people who come directly to your website, either through typing in your domain name or from a bookmark are a useful indicator of how many people are aware of your brand and choosing to visit your website. New Visitors – How many new visitors is my site receiving (i.e. who is likely having their first meaningful engagement with my brand)? In Google Analytics: Visitors > New vs. Returning
This metric tells you how many people are were new visitors to your site, and it's a safe assumption that many of them are having their first meaningful engagement with your brand as a result of visiting your website—and this includes if they've come to your website through a paid marketing channel where they saw a display media banner and PPC text ad. Those paid placements may drop your name but they're no substitute for the experience of your website.
3. Facebook Insights – how many people is my brand reaching on Facebook? Facebook Insights is a treasure trove of valuable data for marketers. It's free, but it requires a Facebook Page for your brand. I'm only covering two of the metrics available in Facebook Insights, but it's worth your time to become familiar with all of the data; be sure to check out the valuable demographic data, and consider setting up Insights for Your Domain. Interactions: Post Views – how many people are seeing the content I share on Facebook? In Facebook Insights: Page Insights > Interactions > Post Views Interactions: Post Feedback – how many people are engaging with the content I share on Facebook?
These two metrics help you understand how many people are seeing your Facebook posts, and you'll quickly discover it is a number far greater than the people who "Like" your brand on Facebook. 4. Twitter – how many people are following my brand? This suggestion is so obvious and basic you might be typing "facepalm" into the comment box, but this is also a metric I've seen plenty of companies not tracking week over week. Knowing your current Twitter follower count is one thing, but how quickly is your account growing? You'll only know this if you capture your Twitter follower count each and every week.
Collect the Followers count on the same day each week, and you'll be able to easily calculate week over week growth. You can even create beautiful line charts in your favorite spreadsheet program. 5. LinkedIn – how many people are interested in working with my company? LinkedIn has valuable metrics accessible to your Company Page admins. Because LinkedIn is a business networking tool, you'll be able to see how many people are investigating your company on the business network, likely because they a salesperson, interested in working for you, or god forbid, trying to recruit away your team! Being the interest of salespeople, potential employees, and recruiters can be a good thing—it means people want to work with your company. To view the metrics, visits your companies page on LinkedIn (usually http://www.linkedin.com/company/yourcompany) and click Analytics. Page Views – how many page views is my company page receiving on LinkedIn? Companies > Your Company > Analytics Unique Visitors – how many people are viewing my company page on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn Analytics also provide data on who has chosen to follow your company:
Unfortunately, the LinkedIn data is only provided monthly, making weekly comparisons difficult, but it's interesting data nonetheless. Create an online brand metrics worksheet For all of these free data sources to be useful you really need to be measure and collect them weekly. To this end, I'd suggest creating a simple spreadsheet where you can enter the metrics on the same day each week (I prefer Monday as it's Facebook reports its weeks as ending on Sunday's). This might look something like this:
What metrics do you like to measure for your brand? I've shared a few my favorite sources of online brand awareness data, but there are plenty more. Which are your favorites? Let me know comments or via Twitter @jamies. Happy brand measurement!
Jamie Steven As the Vice President of Marketing at the Seattle SEO software company, SEOmoz, Jamie Steven brings 15 years of experience in marketing at startups and enterprises such as Rhapsody, BestBuy.com, Speakeasy and Microsoft. He is a frequent speaker at marketing conferences such as PubCon, SMX, MarketingSherpa, MozCon and DreamForce. Starting in Winter 2011, he'll be an instructor at the University of Washington's Advanced Interactive Marketing program. Jamie lives in Seattle, WA and holds an MBA from the University of Washington.
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| Future's Digital Profit Nearly Tops Print Decline Posted: 24 May 2011 11:21 AM PDT
Future Publishing does have a leg-up since their reader base is already tech savvy. They're the publishers of Mac Life, Xbox Magazine, T3, TechRadar and other music, movie and tech magazines. However, it's Guitar World's "Lick of the Day" app that is making a big splash for Future. This is a simple, but useful app that is the perfect add on for the magazine's print subscribers. By driving them to their smartphones, Future is giving their audience a taste of the digital life and from there it's an easy hop to the tablet and paying for a digital magazine subscription. Though moving into the digital world wasn't cheap, execs at Future believe it was the only choice.
Right now, says PaidContent, Future is simply taking their existing magazines and making them available for tablets. Going forward, they'll be creating magazines strictly for that environment and with that sales are expected to grow. That means more opportunities to advertise your products in an interactive environment that can include video, audio, targeted opportunities and more. Remember how cool banner ads were when we first saw them? Well, the future of tablet advertising is going to make banner ads look like a guy on the corner with a sandwich board. I'm excited. Aren't you?
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| In-House SEO: An Interview With Gordon Magee of Drs. Foster and Smith Posted: 24 May 2011 10:01 AM PDT
DFS has reported in the past total revenues between online and catalog sales of $250M annually with $155M of that coming online. As part of our desire to bring you information about the world of search from many perspectives, I was afforded the pleasure of interviewing Gordon Magee who heads up the online efforts for this very large and successful site. Gordon is what I call an SEO academic. He studies and looks for information that is beyond the realm of conventional wisdom. Considering the success they are having in SEO (even post Panda update) he may be on to something. Here's may conversation with him. Frank: How long have you been at this search marketing game? Gordon: I have been with Drs. Foster and Smith for 8 years now. I started as an analyst then was asked to head the department a year later. Since we wear many hats as an inside team my job also entails PR which dovetails with social media and our overall media work which has included a national TV show and print production. We stay busy. Frank: You were a catalog company that made the successful transition to a mix of print and online. What is the balance in that area? Gordon: We currently run between 62 to 65% online and that is increasing. But catalogs are a huge driver of our online business however and integral to what we do online.
Frank: What has been the biggest change in the SEO industry since you started? Gordon: The most significant change is that the knowledge which was once the province of SEO firms is now commonplace. It's not necessary to have an SEO firm in many cases. Of course, execution of that knowledge is the real key. Frank: Do you have a percentage of your search budget that is dedicated to paid search? How much is it?
Frank: How much do paid and organic efforts "play together" in your situation? Gordon: Paid search allows you to be positioned well for words and phrases that are harder to optimize for either due to competition or due to the scale of all the things a company wants to rank for. When I read articles that couch things as "either/or" they make me wonder if the person writing them has ever had P&L responsibility or been part of a strategy team to help a company grow. There's no such thing as needing one but not the other in my view just from a bottom-line simple analysis standpoint. Additionally, having well optimized pages helps with an overall quality score that matters in Paid Search as a key factor in where an ad will show up and what you will pay for it. So there is no separating organic from paid and anyone who is thinking they can is making a big mistake. In other words, if a company thinks, "We'll just do paid search and not worry about SEO" their pages will be poorly optimized resulting in poor relevance scores/quality scores, thus costing them both paid search money and positioning. You can't do paid search well without good SEO, and you most likely can't be SEO'd for all search engine results in everything you want to be…so you need paid search too. Frank: When you are looking at search do you intentionally consider Bing and Yahoo? Gordon: In terms of optimization principles, zero. Bing and Yahoo are always playing catch up and tweaking their algorithm to try to do what Google has already done. In the old days these other engines used algorithms that weren't as good as Google's. SALSA, HITS etc. There were and are dozens of iterations. Google factored in more variants and still does I'd say, and as such has always had better results. Until someone comes up with a better mousetrap, Google is going to be king. It will happen eventually, but it isn't on the horizon yet.
Gordon: More fragmentation and more complexity, but in a good sense. Competition will drive Google and Bing and Yahoo to keep getting better and better. We'll all benefit from that. What will be different, and is different already, is what is found in the organic search results: e.g. images, video, news items, Facebook and Twitter posts from those on your contact list and more. It used to be that there were only simple search results listed. That world is gone forever. Personalization from several years ago has changed things too. It matters whether you are logged in or not. And in some cases it doesn't matter, depending on the cookies on your computer and whether you have deleted them or not. If you don't delete your cookies, some personalization will happen without being logged in, it seems. But even that is several years old. Frank: Do you use any agency help? How has your thinking changed over the years? Gordon: We have in the past, but feel that, for the most part, we can develop the expertise in-house ourselves by hard work and critical thinking. One way that we would consider using an agency is to do an audit on occasion to have an outside set of eyes look at the site. Of course, we would need to be on our toes because agencies survive through contracted clients so inviting an audit is inviting a sales attempt. Honestly, we can obtain the knowledge through a variety of ways that are much cheaper and give us more control. Some of those are: Google itself, meaning publicly published information, annual conferences like SES, Internet Retailer, and eTail, Online news/blog articles related to search like Marketing Pilgrim, and books like "Google Page Rank and Beyond". Frank: Back to social. How is it influencing search? Gordon: I think that is just beginning in some ways for example with Google's +1 feature. Bing's use of Facebook is something to keep an eye on as well. Of course, blogs have been around for a long time and are being used as part of the measure of relevance for sites. Facebook and Twitter and location based services like Gowalla and Foursquare will play a role in some cases too, over time. But integrating them into algorithms will not be easy. Let's face it, everything online influences everything else but exactly how that happens is something that we will need to see evolve over time.
Gordon: While I know this may sound a bit contrarian, we aren't currently using any tools. We have in the past and I personally believe there is great value in the right tools but we are at the point that we have to decide what is it that we can actually take action on due to resource allocation. We feel that our basic understanding of the SEO world and knowing what is working makes us focus on what we have to do rather than be more concerned about what the competition is doing. We are very cautious about having too much information which is another contrarian position, I know. Now that you have brought it up though, we may take a look around!
Frank: What advice would you offer to those who are just getting started or are looking to seriously improve themselves in the SEO space? Gordon: Maybe hire an agency for a year or two, so you start things right from the beginning. Then during that time, study your brains out.
One of the other things I started digging on after reading that book was the AIRWEB conferences: Adversarial Information Retrieval on the WEB, now WICOW: International Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web. What you learn by reading these complex papers, is what you already knew: that the science of search engines is extraordinarily complicated, and you learn what NOT to do on the other hand. As a company that only wants to do things correctly, it is helpful to see behind the veil at what is viewed with a jaundiced eye by the brains behind search engines. Frank: So the agency model is best suited for training to ultimately become an in-house effort? Gordon: If you are a complete novice then yes because that can move your company's success faster along while you acquire the knowledge and how that knowledge applies specifically to your vertical. There is no substitute for knowing this yourself. Complete dependence on an agency for all your SEO needs is a mistake in my opinion. Frank: Last question. What is the biggest mistake that you see the industry making as it relates to SEO and success? What is the biggest piece of 'misinformation' you see about SEO?
My point is that things like proper meta tags and meta descriptions matter. Not spammy ones, but proper ones. I don't mean that they are some major factor. That's not my point. My point is that everything matters. So do it all well. Then when Google or Bing changes what their algorithm is, you'll always be properly positioned using good search engine recommended practices. Like most things in life, when you do the basics well you can survive the rest of it. In our case, when Google's Panda update happened in February an SEO company, who shall remain nameless, sent us a report, showing from their analysis the 10 companies that gained the most and the 10 that were hurt the most. We were in the top 10 who gained the most in their study. Now there are lots of studies, so I don't mean that as the final measure of what happened, but it was a nice sized study and we were glad we were on the right side of that list, in that we have always tried to do things right with no shortcuts or odd techniques of any kind. We would like to thank Gordon because considering all he has to do, there isn't a lot of extra time. Here at Marketing Pilgrim we are interested in talking to in-house SEO's and agency side influencers as well to give our readers insight as to what is happening in the world of SEO, paid search, social media and more. If you have a suggestion for someone to interview let us know with an email to: editor AT marketingpilgrim DOT com. Pilgrim's Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz! | ||
| Earth Day and Royal Wedding Give Top Web Sites a Boost Posted: 24 May 2011 09:23 AM PDT Environmentally conscience websites got a boost in April thanks to Earth Day and our ever increasing interest in all things green. According to comScore's Media Metrix report for April 2011, "green" websites were up 32%, more than three times the change of any other category. Shine Green had the most visitors with Planet Green and Care2 scooping up several million visitors each. Even the government's EPA website visits rose 10%.
Entertainment sites got a boost thanks the the Royal Wedding giving them a record high of 100 million. It's a bit frightening to see that TMZ came in second with 15 million visitors while People had 12.8 and E! Online handled 8.3. Top Properties Yahoo! Sites came in number one in April with 187.4 million visitors, followed by Microsoft Sites and Google. Despite rumors of their imminent demise, Demand Media came in 12th, but much of that was probably poor writers checking in to see if there was any work. Linkedin landed at 31 with Yelp at 34. CBS, NBC, Fox and Disney all made the top 50 and Netflix jumped up 6 spots proving we do love our entertainment. As for sites with the most gains, MLB.com and ShopatHome.com both had impressive gains of around 50% and Keywordblocks.com (unknown to me) had a 70% increase in traffic. What's that all about? Ad Networks Google Ad Network got the top spot with 196,400 visitors which equals a reach of 91.6%. Yahoo's reach is 87.4% and AOL advertising has 83.6%. Facebook comes in 11th with 71.8% reach. If you'd like more details and more charts, you can download the free report from comScore. Just click here.
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It appears Sony has bought a one-way ticket to reputation-implosionville, and 
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