Social Media Lessons from ‘Waiting’

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This weekend I had occasion to revisit one of my favorite movies ‘Waiting’.  While ‘Waiting’ in my opinion is a great commentary on why you should eat at home more often – Mashable just posted a great article focused on three social media lessons taken from the Restaurant world. The lessons are as follows:

Play to your strengths. Companies like Chipotle and Pizza hut have introduced iPhone apps that let you order food on them. This enhances the core strength of fast food: it’s convenient. Should Ruth’s Chris put out this sort of app? No. but Ruth’s Chris, Pizza Hut, and Chipotle all understand their strengths, and they’re using social media to play to them.

Solve old problems. Food trucks are great. Just great. But often it’s hard to know where they’re going to post up next. A couple of food trucks have found a way around this: the Tweet their locations every day. It’s a simple, elegant way to solve a problem.

Answer the big question. Madden’s Casual Gourmet frequently rotates it’s menu, so they use an email list to keep regulars updated on what’s coming up. It builds loyalty and anticipation, and it’s complete free.

– John Veron


Google Removes PageRank in Webmaster Tools

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Google uses more than 200 signals, including their patented PageRank algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important and shown to a user first.  Many business owners have thus become aware of their own PageRank and some may incorrectly believe that PageRank is THE metric that must be improved when vying for higher organic listings.  In October, Google removed this PageRank from their Webmaster toolkit.

What is PageRank:

In Laymans/Googles Terms – PageRank reflected Google’s view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. PageRank also considered the importance of each page that casted a vote, as votes from some pages were considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value.

Google’s newly released position on page rank is: We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.

If you are so inclined, an in-depth mathematical computation for page rank can be found online.

What are Google Webmaster Tools:

Google Webmaster Tools provides webmasters with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google. GWT allow webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites through organic search.

PageRank is still shown within Google Toolbar, so you can still view this metric. Page Rank within Google Toolbar sends the URLs of pages that opted-in searchers visit to display the importance ranking that Google assigns to a page.

This goes to show that what you see in Google Toolbar and what Google actually uses are two different things when it comes to indexing your site.

Test for Success – Measure, Hypothesize, and Test Again

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Omniture recently sent out a rather interesting promotion for their products.  They made a game out of showing a series of two ads side by side and asking the user which ad they thought performed best in head-to-head competition.  The object of the game is of course to correctly guess which ads performed the best and then you are told whether you were correct or not.  You are also provided with just a bit of detail about the results and why the ad you chose was the winner or the loser.  Now, we are not given any real data to see by how much one ad performed better than the other or how long the test was run, etc., but we are given some idea as to why one ad worked better than another.

Which banner performed best

The game is an interesting exercise that helps to reinforce how even relatively small changes in your ads can impact performance.  And the information you think will perform best doesn’t always.  Using the above screenshot of the game as an example, it would be great to see how much difference was made by using the image of the product in action compared to the clock in the other ad.  The copy is also a bit different.  Perhaps the image change made a huge difference!  Experimenting and testing even relatively small changes can indeed make a difference in performance.  And if you see this game and think, “this doesn’t apply to me – I don’t run banner ads!”, then you sire, aren’t stepping out of the box.

How does this apply to me?

There are a lot of ways that this kind of thinking can impact you and your business in big ways.  Think about what images you are using on your site.  Do you have generic images (perhaps from a stock photo site) that don’t truly show the products or services that you offer?  Think about testing a new image that actually displays something highly relevant to what you offer.  What would happen if you gave your newsletter signup form a more prominent placing on the homepage?  Would improving visibility garner you more contact information?  And what if you split your content into more easily digestible bullet points instead of blocks of text?  These are all very easy things to test.

The opportunities for testing definitely do not stop there.  If you’re running paid search ads, you’re probably testing some of this already:  ad copy 1 vs ad copy 2, various calls-to-action, and even the page URLs that you are displaying.

And you better believe the fun doesn’t stop there.  What impact will color have?  Does a red button gain more attention than a green button?  The opportunities for testing are endless.

Woah, take it easy there!

Tests can provide extremely valuable data and results but you do have to give them enough time to run and hopefully provide you with actionable data.  So before you go test happy and create numerous versions of ad copy, images, layouts, calls-to-actions, etc., consider what it is that you want to get out of this testing.  Gather up a big ol’ bucket of patience, and go about it methodically to get the most clear results.

Happy testing!

Group Blocking: Tactical Negative Keywords for very Similar Ad Groups

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Professionals in any new industry are often confronted with a lack of words to describe their day-to-day actions. They basically don’t have a standardized industry vocabulary to say efficiently what they’d like to say. Often they derail a conversation to explain an idea. In short, the terms haven’t been adopted or created yet.

For instance, take the term “bounce.” Ten years ago the “bounce” was mostly used to describe something a ball did. Or perhaps the term was used by a hipster searching for a bigger, better party. In our industry the term “bounce” is now used to describe…x, y, z. And that’s my point. I don’t have to define the term “bounce” to members of our community because most of us already know the meaning of the term. “Bounce” has become such a popular term with the paid search community that the single term now takes the place a small paragraph, or a 5 minute conversation. If only we had an industry vernacular committee that put all our tribal knowledge into concise standardized terms for us.

Today we’d like to offer a suggested term to the Paid Search Vernacular Committee, or PSVC, to define a series of actions that we feel deserve a single term. While we use this method as a standard practice, we know our tactic is not an industry standard practice. We’ve seen a lot of success with the tactic which is why we offer it up for discussion here. Our term is “group blocking.”

“Group blocking” involves the practice of using negative keywords—usually phrase and exact—to steer traffic to the correct ad group. Some of you are saying, “Oh yeah, I do that.” Others are saying, “Whaaaa?” So I’ll be more specific. Let’s say you have a campaign with many ad groups that are somewhat related to each other. The keywords in each ad group are close to the keywords in the other ad groups, but they are different. And, you’d like your potential visitors to trigger the correct ad. You’ve tried other options but ultimately the only way you can insure that your potential visitors trigger ad copy that is highly related to their search is to break out new ad groups. This is where “group blocking” comes into play.

Here’s an example: let’s say your ad groups are “Brand O television,” “Brand O HDTV,” “Brand O Plasma Screens,” and “Brand O LCD’s.” Now you can imagine the keywords in each ad group are going to be highly related, but in the end potential visitors need to see the correct ad.

In this scenario we would “group block” each ad group with negative keywords. For the “Brand O HDTV” ad group we’d put the main keywords in the other ad groups as negatives for the “Brand O HDTV” ad group. The list of negatives would include LCD, LCDs, television, and plasma—but not HDTV. Now “group block” the other ad groups in the same manner. This helps steer traffic to the correct ad group.

As a seasoned paid search marketer you may already be engaged in this practice and you may have a term you use to define the idea. But since I don’t know it, I would suggest that you haven’t really marketed it very well. And unless you’ve already filled out a RFC2501-B Form correctly and filed it with the PSVC then I would suggest we all start saving some words and just start “group blocking.”

Where Do You Spend Your Time?

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A recently released report by comScore shows that users spent 3.9 billion hours on Microsoft this past year.  This equates to about 15% of all time spent online across the world.  The time people spent online although at Microsoft was dominated by Windows Live Messenger.  Many people use messenger for instant messaging and transferring files; in fact, here in the office we use an instant messaging system (Google Talk). I wouldn’t really consider the time I spend messaging my counterparts across the hall as ‘being’online though.  If we don’t include Messenger in the numbers the internet search giant Google would be in the lead with user time spent online. According to comScore, Messenger accounts for nearly 70% of Microsoft’s figures.

2.5 billion hours was Google’s take in comScores poll.  What this means is that if you don’t account for time spent in Messenger – Google had more hours that they could monetize users experiences online.  Not surprising considering the amount of revenue Google pulled in so far for 2009 according to latest estimates.  YouTube also is taken into account for Google numbers since it’s a Google Property and accounted for about 50% of the time users spent online.  Following Google you find Yahoo and Facebook for global time spent online.

These are important facts and figures to keep in mind as more and more of the world moves online.  If we just want to take into account time spent online within North America, Yahoo came in first, followed by Google with Microsoft third, according to comScore.

Twitter Best Practices

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Twitter Best Practices
Sync your networks. Facebook and Twitter statuses can be linked to make updates easier. Make your
company attitude consistent in all social media networks, including company blogs. Getting a desktop
client like twhirl or tweetdeck is often helpful to organize networks. Speak with the same voice in all
networks.
Choose a consistent tone. The tone of your Twitter voice is crucial to determining who will follow you,
and in determining the perception of your company in general. Having a lighthearted Twitter page
representing a more formal organization won’t match. All social networks should have an integrated
message representing a well-thought-out USP.
Keep personal voices separate from your corporate voice. While there is generally one person manning
the Twitter for your company, make sure that their voice remains in step with your company philosophy.
For a smaller company there is a want to connect yourself to your business- however, by doing this your
message gets garbled unless you are upfront in your bio that YOU are doing the tweeting as a
representative of the brand.
Don’t just self-promote. It’s important to tweet about your industry, but on the same token, it is
important to tweet about other topics to include a diverse following. No spamming, no gimmicks. It’s
great to start contests, this way you get your followers engaged and active with your company.
Link, monitor @ replies and DMs, and RT often. Linking and ReTweeting is the best way to share what
your company is doing, what you’re interested in, and what you want your followers to see. Also, showing
interest in your followers continues the conversation. Keep up with @replies- this is the real way for
people to acknowledge you on Twitter and for you to show that you are listening.
Track your links. To understand your followers’ interests, monitor your clicks by converting the link into
a tracking device. When you know what people seem to click the most, you can tailor more messages to
fit that area. Also, keep an eye on conversations on Twitter using the “#” for specific topics.
Don’t over-tweet and become a nuisance to your followers. There is no appropriate amount of tweets,
however, make each tweet special and unique. “Filler” tweets can change your company’s reputation
from informative to overbearing very quickly.
Make tweets valuable. Take your followers behind the scenes of your company, share pictures, the
happenings around the office and what is going on with clients. Don’t be afraid to go outside the realm of
your particular industry. If you find something interesting to say, say it!
Make your username both searchable and relevant. You want people who search you to find you, and
those that are searching your industry to follow your company based solely on that.
Have an interesting and inviting bio. An option is to include your company’s mission in the short bio.
Many people will search industry bios to find new members to follow. Invite people to follow you. The
point of social networking is to immerse your company in the online discussion.
Personalize your background. Those that are already using Twitter as a means for networking
understand the value of a personalized background. The standard Twitter-supplied background shows
that your organization may not be taking it’s Twitter presence seriously. There are ways to create unique
backgrounds using Adobe Photoshop or even Microsoft Power Point.
Twitter Best Practices
A few weeks ago we discussed reasons why your business should be on Twitter. For those that weren’t sure they should be on Twitter we expanded on the many reasons why you should be on Twitter a few weeks later.  Hopefully we have you convinced and now we would like to share a  few best practices for Twittering.
Sync your networks.
Facebook and Twitter statuses can be linked to make updates easier. Make your company attitude consistent in all social media networks, including company blogs. Getting a desktop client like twhirl or tweetdeck is often helpful to organize networks.
Speak with the same voice in all networks.
Choose a consistent tone. The tone of your Twitter voice is crucial to determining who will follow you, and in determining the perception of your company in general. Having a lighthearted Twitter page representing a more formal organization won’t match. All social networks should have an integrated message representing a well-thought-out USP.
Keep personal voices separate from your corporate voice.
While there is generally one person manning the Twitter for your company, make sure that their voice remains in step with your company philosophy.
For a smaller company there is a want to connect yourself to your business- however, by doing this your message gets garbled unless you are upfront in your bio that YOU are doing the tweeting as a representative of the brand.
Don’t just self-promote.
It’s important to tweet about your industry, but on the same token, it is important to tweet about other topics to include a diverse following. No spamming, no gimmicks. It’s great to start contests, this way you get your followers engaged and active with your company.
Next week we will discuss a few more best practices of Tweeting.
– Jessica Leyh