Jan. 19: Google Inc.’s fourth-quarter earnings report shows that the Internet search leader fetched less money per click on its ubiquitous online ads. That came as an unsettling surprise because investors had assumed a surge in online holiday shopping in the U.S. would enable Google Inc. to charge more for its ads. Instead, the average price decreased by 8 percent from the same time in 2010.

Microsoft Corp. reduces losses in its online services division, which includes the ad-supported Bing search engine. It lost $458 million in the latest quarter, down 18 percent from a loss of $559 million a year earlier. Revenue grew 10 percent to $784 million.

Jan. 24: Yahoo Inc. says that after subtracting advertising commissions, revenue totaled $1.17 billion. That was $20 million below analyst projections. It’s the 13th straight quarter that Yahoo’s net revenue has declined from the prior year. Yahoo predicted its net revenue in the first quarter will range from $1.02 billion to $1.1 billion. The mid-point of that target works out to $1.06 billion, unchanged from last year’s first quarter.

Meredith Corp., which owns women’s magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens and local television stations, says quarterly net income and revenue fell in late 2011 because of weaker political advertising.
Jan. 26: Time Warner Cable Inc. says advertising revenue fell 10 percent to $242 million in the latest quarter, primarily because of decreases in political advertising.

Monday: Gannett Co. says revenue in its publishing division fell 5 percent in the latest quarter. The company attributed that to lower advertising amid the economic softness in the U.S. and the U.K. Broadcasting revenue fell 14 percent, mainly from sharply lower political advertising than a year earlier.

By The Associated Press | Associated Press

The story starts with link generation tactics. SEOmoz has a great community who are very loyal. It makes immense sense for SEOmoz to use “I Love SEOMoz” badges as a part of its branding and we at Majestic SEO certainly see people using them. (In fact, all we need to do is to filter image links going to SEOmoz and we have most of them right there).

But what to do when you are competing with a tactic where you are behind? We could not simply replicate this with our own badge, because we are a technology, not a community, and whilst @MajesticSEO is now near 10,000 followers, we doubt that an “I Love Majestic SEO” badge would really add value or stack up. We had to innovate if we wanted a widget based way to expose our brand. This led to a discussion internally about what might be useful to website owners. We wanted a badge – but we had to have one that did something different. Something useful.

The idea of a badge that showed users where your website ranks in the world was born. What if we used all our immense crawl data to give website owners a new tool that they could use to demonstrate their place in the world? One that showed where they ranked in the eyes of all those other websites out there? What if we changed the badge motif so that links become a measure of reputation in their own right?

Such a badge would:

• Instil trust for people using a site with a badge
• Create a simple new way to see a website’s reach and importance
• Give website owners a badge that meant something
• Was something we were ready to give away for free

We hope it will be something that SEOmoz users and other webmasters alike might happily use alongside the SEOmoz badge and add something useful to the world wide web.

Now having an idea is one thing. Implementing it was quite another! What started out as a simple idea rapidly turned into a massive exercise – such is the way when you deal with data at scale. Do the maths on adding a single byte of data to each record in a 3.5 trillion record database. I can say you don’t have enough memory at home and for most of us not in the office either. We had not ranked the billions of websites that we have before. It was not just a case of doing a quick API call on the fly. We had to create a new data set to do this.

To keep it all running at lightening speed, and also to give the badge an air of exclusivity, we limited the list to the top 1 million websites. It is a goal that we can all strive to achieve, but it is not a badge without meaning. If you don’t have enough gravitas on the web, your site won’t get in to the list. You can go and check if your domain (or any one else’s) is in the list here.

Once we had the list, we could work on creating a simple widget that let you put a badge on your own site (if it qualified for the Majestic Million) and we have now created a simple widget that gives you the code to do so. Since the data is updated all the time, your rankings will go down as well as up, so the win for us is that we hope it will encourage users to check the numbers regularly.

But now we had found a way to build a badge widget that might actually be useful, we also found ourselves with a database of 1 million of the best websites, ranked in order. We found that this had other uses and before we launched the badge, we decided to build an entire interface to support the badge idea, so that the data had a commercial application too, allowing people to easily compare sites within a vertical and see how there backlinks profile is changing day by day – and with it their rankings. These Buzz Tables are like a stock market ticker for links.

So thank you SEOmoz for providing us with some competition. It may have been harder to produce than we initially envisaged when we decided to make it free – but that’s living proof that competition inspires innovation.

By Dixon May 19, 2011

The Bulk Backlink Checker is essential to find out the key backlink information from the broad range of websites you want to compare. This short video will explain how to use the Majestic Tool and how we can use this information in Excel to gain a greater understanding of link building strategies.

Speakers are recommended, but the essential learnings are also shown in text on the video.

I would assume that Majestic’s users are pretty much exclusively from the Internet Marketing community. There are also quite a lot of them these days. So it may be significant for a few geeks to see that Firefox 3.6 now has just over HALF of our user base market share.

People with less understanding of our industry might also be surprised at the small percentage of users using Internet Explorer these days. But without a great number of useful SEO plugins, that’s probably not totally surprising.

For me, though, the big surprise is the large percentage of Chrome take up within the SEO community. Majestic SEO took the decision a long time ago not to use Google Analytics or indeed any code or technology directly related to search engines. It’s a great product, but a proportion of our users, we felt, would prefer that we did should not give every minutiae of our user’s habits out to third parties.

Most people understand by now that links have a very real influence on rankings in search engines. How it works and in which ways a link can influence your ranking is often unclear though, resulting in many myths. This link building 101 tries to explain the basics of link building and to refute some of the myths around it.

How does a link help your site?

A link to your site “helps” in four ways:

It adds value to the “receiving page”, allowing it to improve its visibility in the search engines.

It adds value to the entire receiving domain, allowing each page on that domain to improve its rank ever so slightly.

The text of the link is an indication to the search engine of the topic of the website and more specifically the receiving page.

People click on links, resulting in so called “direct traffic”.

The value of a link for the receiving page is determined in part by the topic of the page the link is on. A link from a page that has the same topic as the receiving page is of far more value than a link from a page about an entirely different topic.

On top of that, a link from within an article is worth way more than a link from a sidebar or a footer. Furthermore the more links there are on a page, the less each individual link is worth.

So what makes a good link?

Imagine, you’re working on a link building campaign and you get to choose where to place a link and what page to point it at. You’ll have to consider the following questions:

How strong is the site / page that’s going to link out?

Which receiving pages on my site make most sense as far as topic is concerned?
Which page of this set of sensible pages would deliver the best ROI when it’s ranking?
Which page is most sensible for the visitor of the linking page, clicking on the link?

The last question is often the one best to ask of yourself: link building delivers, if done well, better rankings and more direct traffic. You have to keep in mind though that in most cases those visitors coming to you directly from the other site will behave differently from people coming from the search engines. Say you get a link from a site aimed at elderly women, these people will behave drastically different from the diverse public you’ll get from the search engine when the page starts ranking. In your design of the page, you’ll have to account for both.

How strong a site and/or a page is can be judged on several criteria, PageRank being one of them, though often not very accurate. MozRank is useful at times, but the most useful and sensible check often is the following: does the page that you want a link from, rank in the top 20, 30 or even 50 for terms related to the page you’d want it to link to? If the answer to that is yes, a link no that page is usually a good idea.

The anchor text

If you’ve decided which page you’re going to be linking to, the second question arises: which anchor text will you be using? The anchor text in itself influences two things:
The anchor text indicates to the search engine what the topic might be of the page the link points at and it can therefor help that receiving page rank for that term. If you want to rank for “WordPress SEO”, you’d want to have links to that page with anchor texts like “WordPress SEO”, “SEO for WordPress”, etc.
The anchor text also has an effect on how many people will be clicking on the link. While from the above bullet you might have gathered that “click here” is a horrible anchor text, as you probably don’t want to rank for it, it does tend to get clicked well and therefor gets you more visitors.

Of course, don’t overdo this. If all links, or a too large percentage of links to your site and / or page have the same anchor text, you’ll look like a spammer. So if you’re actively link building, vary your anchor text.

As you see, these are not trivial decisions, ones you have to make on a site by site and page by page basis. You don’t always have the luxury of controlling anchor text and to be honest, that’s a good thing; way too much sites out there would have a far over optimized “link profile” if they had such a level of control. Because you have to make these decisions on a site by sate basis, buying a “backlink package”, something still far too common these days, is often a wrong decision.

Are there any rules about links?

There are two kinds of rules that influence SEO and thus link building. First of all, there are the rules of the search engines, with Google having said most about links. Then there’s the law about advertising, these laws differ per country but especially within the EU they tend to have the same “ring”.

What Google says about links and link building

In their article on link schemes Google gives some examples of links that can influence your ranking negatively. This deals with both links to and from your site (f.i.: don’t link to spam sites). They’re most clear about paid links though: they’re a violation of their guidelines and can lead to a ban of your website.

This isn’t to say that such links would have an immediate negative effect. In fact, in the short term they might even boost your rankings, as quite often Google has to take manual action to discount those links, as not in all cases Google see whether a link has been paid for or not. But, especially keeping in mind the recent debacles with JC Penney and Overstock.com, both of whom have been penalized by Google and publicly scolded for their behavior by the press, this tactic is seldom worth while.

Google recently published an article on quality links on the Google Webmaster Blog, it’s worth reading to get their perspective.

The law about links

I’ve talked about the Dutch specifics in an article on Marketingfacts recently, which in trun goes back to an article on eConsultancy: if something is an ad, it has to be visibly (for the visitor) marked as such. A paid link could under these new rules be called an ad and would therefor have to be disclosed. I don’t see a court case just yet, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind.

Want to read more about link building?

Outside of this link building 101 a lot is being written about the topic and a large part of it is, excusez le mot, crap. Because of that I’d like to point you at some sources that I do consider worth while:
Wiep.net – The blog of my fellw countryman Wiep Knol, an amicable guy and great link builder.
Eric Ward aka LinkMoses – When I went to my first class in high school in ’94, this guy was already doing link building. His insights are therefor based on a treasure trove of experience.
LinkSpiel by Debra Mastaler – She has more of a wider marketing approach to link building and is therefor very usable for each and everyone.

I’ve received a series of inbound requests for comments based on a report from Gartner, an IT analyst firm, that estimates as many as 70-percent of social media campaigns will fail in 2011. There are a series of discussions hitting the blogosphere and the Twitterverse exploring this very topic, some elementary and others on the right path. I contacted Gartner earlier this week and the problem is, that this data isn’t new at all. In fact, these discussions are fueled by information originally published in 2008 and in early 2010. Yet another example of the importance of fact-checking in the era of real-time reporting yes, but, when I paused for a moment, I appreciated the timelessness of this discussion.

Are many of the social media programs in play yielding tangible results? No…

Are they designed to impact the bottom line or are they tied to meaningful business outcomes? No…

The truth is that you can’t fail in anything if success is never defined.

eMarketer recently published a report, “Social Media in the Marketing Mix: Budgeting for 2011,” that documents the increase in social media spend we knew was imminent. However, in addition to showing us that companies are actively investing in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social platforms and campaigns, eMarketer’s Debra Aho Williamson says that businesses are spending more money for all the wrong reasons.

Indeed, business are moving from experimentation or ready, aim, fire approaches to deeper phases of implementation.

Williamson shares a perspective long cautioned against here and in Engage, “many companies are expanding budgets for social media marketing not because they have been successful at it, but because they are relying on gut instinct—the feeling that ‘this is something important so I’m going to do it even if I don’t know why.’ Or worse, they have watched their competitors earn accolades in the press for their work in social media, and they are afraid of losing any more ground.”
#FAIL

Failing to plan is planning to fail and this is a lesson that strategists and practitioners will learn as they progress. If transparency and authenticity were prevailing maxims over the last several years, accountability, metrics, and outcomes serve as the foundation for social media success in the immediate years ahead. An effective social media plan must address business dynamics and it takes much more than a Facebook and Twitter presence. To keep things simple, social media are transformative…but essentially they’re channels, services, and networks used for intelligence, communication, and visibility. If we introduced email to the organization today, would it focus solely on marketing or customer service? Of course not. Email is not owned by any one department. It extends the reach, voice, and capabilities of every person from the inside out and the outside in.

Viewed this way, we see that a social media strategy must gain attention from the very top of the organization and see its integration across relevant business teams. Activating processes and engagement in business units is not tied to one switch either. It takes time to learn, to visualize new processes and systems, to open doors between departments. But, doing so sets the foundation for the social business, for an adaptive business. Switches will get introduced as their needs are defined and the electricity is tied to each one in order to perform specific actions.

The lens in which businesses must view social media is that through an integration aperture. Social extends and empowers every business facet that is affected by online activity. That includes marketing, communications, sales, CRM/sCRM, product development/R&D, HR, finance, legal, et al.

According to eMarketer’s report, integration is strongest in marketing and weakest in critical business functions. To envision the future of social media, we would see each of the grey bars slide from left to right, initially led by an internal team or business strategist to help with a change in culture, process, and overall goaling.
#WIN

Everything starts with defining the mission and purpose at the top so that respective business units can perform according to goals and tasks. By focusing only on one or two aspects of social media, we narrow an important view of the 3F’s (friends, fans and followers) and what the real needs and opportunities are the lie before us. The answers you seek are not limited to catch blog posts that promise “The Top 10 Ways to Master Social Media.” Your answers require research…not just listening.

Approach the search box of social networks or monitoring and research tools such as ReSearch.ly, Radian6, Spiral16, etc. as a blank slate. Fill in the blanks to enliven the 5W’s +H.E.

Who
What
When
Where
Why
How
To what extent

Then categorize the information you discover to make the case for each of the affected groups within your company. Success here requires more than one community manager or one team leading the social effort. It’s not an easy process. But then whoever said social media was easy…is wrong. Unearthing the intelligence that exists when we read between the lines, we become the experts in which we initially sought guidance and we open up individual career paths beyond the social media “help desk.”

We are not simply competing for the moment, we are competing for relevance now and in the future. The future of business is indeed social, but more importantly, it’s adaptive.

Originally published on briansolis.com

Content Quality Critical for User Trust and Industry Growth

Sometimes sites like Demand Studios, Yahoo’s Associated Content, AOL’s Seed.com, and Suite101 are called names like “content farms” or “content mills”. You can call them whatever you like, but the fact of the matter is that they’re attracting a lot of writers and producing a lot of content, which is appearing in a lot of search results for better or worse. WebProNews had a conversation with Suite101 CEO Peter Berger (who has said Suite101 is not a content farm, by the way) about this industry, how people are interacting with content in different markets, search vs. social media, and more.

“Search might never be flawless, but it is the superior angle to access the web’s best content for any question a consumer or information seeker has at a given point in time,” Berger tells us.

Sites like Suite101, and those from the others mentioned are largely about “evergreen content” – content that doesn’t lose its usefulness over time. This content tends to cater more to search than to social media, because it often sets out to solve problems users are actively looking to solve, which isn’t necessarily going to be the kind of content they want all their friends to see. Still, social has its place for this kind of content in addition to the more share-friendly stuff.

“The ongoing development of social media is certainly one of the most significant developments we are seeing on the web right now: the social web is creating incremental opportunities beyond purely search- or destination-centric ways to navigate content,” says Berger. “This varies of course by the individual content piece: while a story about the latest soccer match between Madrid and Barcelona may spread like wildfire socially, another, more timeless article on giving childbirth might prosper over longer time horizons as friends tell their friends about it when they need it. And a great manual on how to repair a punctured bicycle tire might never get any social attention, but will help a lot of people searching for immediate help.”

Evergreen content is only as useful as its ability to be trusted, however. That means these sites have to consistently produce quality content that users can trust enough at least to click on and read before establishing a real opinion about it.

Look at Wikipedia

“Wikipedia was probably the first content site that became a search-driven utility the general public is aware of: most web users today possess a concept of what they can and cannot do with Wikipedia definitions in their search results,” explains Berger. “New content models like Suite101…and some of our competitors will soon have built a reach that will foster a similar kind of public brand building where users judge web sites purely based on how well and trustworthy past search results helped them achieve their goals.”

“One does not have to go back to the debates around Wikipedia’s content creation model several years ago to predict that content quality will be decisive for our space to win the user trust needed to keep growing to large scale utility status,” he says. “We think that the high-touch, editorial model of Suite101, enabling only high quality writers to publish content, is one of the key ingredients to success as our industry matures.”

While sites like these (particularly Demand Media’s offerings) have seen a great deal of criticism over quality, it is for the reasons Berger is talking about that it is in these sites’ best interest to maintain a level of quality so people will not be afraid to click the results in search engines even if they do rank well.

Regardless of how any of these sites are perceived (and there is a pretty broad spectrum of perception), they’re certainly attracting the interest of writers looking for money and experts (or those striving to be thought of as experts) looking to build their credibility and brand reputations.

“Every week, several thousand people apply to become Suite101 writers,” Berger tells us. “While we only accept a portion of applicants based on our non-negotiable quality standards, we do have many successful writers on our site who do not consider themselves ‘writers’.

“We see it as Suite101′s mission to enable people – anyone who can write well and with deep understanding of a subject – to achieve their goals,” he says. “These might be earning money, addressing large audiences, building up a personal professional brand, or simply enjoying creative freedom in a nurturing, peer-oriented environment.”

Content Interaction in Different Markets

Suite101 has expanded into several foreign markets, and Berger had some interesting things to say on how people in these markets interact with the site’s content. “After launching versions of Suite101 in German, Spanish and French, with specialized teams and physical offices on the ground, we have learned a great deal about language- and market-specific differences,” Berger tells us. “Social signals, for example, gain ground rapidly in all major markets as a factor influencing content usage, and non-English markets prove to be quite receptive.”

“Case in point: our French and Spanish language sites receive a three times greater traffic share from Facebook pages than our English and German sites,” he adds. “Third-party referral traffic, on the other hand, is particularly substantial for our German content.”

“But so far we find that the similarities to our North American home market by far outweigh any differences,” Berger notes.

Monetization

“The best option to monetize most online content is (and will be for some time) advertising,” says Berger. “Advertisers today have sophisticated options to ensure their ads generate impact, which means that monetization varies strongly between subject areas, geographies and sites. At Suite101, we help writers who want to generate significant incomes understand how they can focus their articles on attractive niche opportunities.”

“With the launch of our Spanish site last year, we entered all Latin American advertising markets – all of which currently lag a few years behind the US or German markets, for example, in terms of maturity and general level of monetization,” he says. “As e-commerce penetration and advertiser sophistication improve in those markets, Suite101 and its local writers will directly and increasingly benefit from the traffic reach we are creating today.”

Currently, Suite101 is claiming 28 million unique visitors per month.

Chances are you don’t have a site that matches the size of what Microsoft has, but in the age of real-time user-generated content, there is a whole lot of content going up on the web. Wheeler (and ultimately Microsoft’s) strategy deals with “mega” sites.

“It’s a large complicated website where the content is generated by multiple business units in many different countries in many different languages, and you’re trying to get things done within a complex, large organization, where there’s just a lot of dependencies – a lot of stakeholders – a lot of different interests,” explains Wheeler.

“A lot of people talk about ‘content is king. content is king,’ says Wheeler. “With ‘mega SEO,’ structure is king because without structure, your content won’t even be discovered.”

I’d still recommend producing great content, but when you’re talking about a site the size of Microsoft.com, Wheeler has a point.

“Some of the situations with our site, Microsoft.com…we’ll have one million pages of navigation to get to fourteen thousand pages of content, and the way that you get to that content determines the URL of the final landing page, so every final landing page of content will have however many different ways there are of getting to it duplicated, so you know, you’ve got like twenty million URLs just for fourteen thousand pages,” he says. “So a lot of mega SEO is about crawl efficiency – making your site more efficient for crawling and indexing.”

“One of the things that we deal with are the crawler efficiencies – things like large scale duplicate content or just junk content – outdated content – content that’s been up for like five years, but the person that managed it left the company and no one took over so there’s just content sitting out there that engines have to index,” he continues. “We don’t want that stuff surfacing. We want our new stuff, so getting rid of legacy content, trying to fix things at the platform level, so you don’t continue to make the same mistakes over and over and over or just build on the issues that you have with your existing content management system.”

“But one of our challenges is we have multiple content management systems,” he adds. “We’ve got one primary for one section, another section of the site might have two or three that they use. I mean it’s basically all over the board.”

“I can’t just go in and fix the CMS and have everything magically fixed. We have to go in and prioritize what CMS we want to try to work with,” he adds.

How do you deal with that? Turn to the IT guys of course.

“MSIT was involved with that – our IT department,” says Wheeler. “They can tell when the content that hadn’t been updated in a certain amount of time and then they reached out to who were listed as the owners of that section and they contacted them and asked them if they still needed that content, and if there was no response in a certain amount of time, they would just remove it. And if they did respond then they would work out whether or not this content was still valid, and if it wasn’t then they all agreed that it would be removed.”

“It was a lot of email chains that I was on,” he adds. “Hundreds of emails back and fourth to get all this accomplished, and I think they removed probably a million, two million URLs from the site just by that one exercise.”

Penalties? For Microsoft?

“A lot of these pages of content weren’t getting any traffic,” Wheeler notes. “That was another way that we could tell that they were not really useful….We didn’t go in and manually map them to any other section of the site.”

You might think search engines would penalize you for having 2 million URLs that go nowhere, but when you’re Microsoft, that’s not something you really need to worry about (and it’s not like Google would treat the competition unfairly).

“I don’t think an engine is going to dock us for having pages of content that were really old and not updated and removing them from our website, and the proper response for a page that no longer exists is the 404,” says Wheeler. “I don’t think that they would penalize us for that. I’m pretty sure of it.”

“We could’ve gone in probably and found some that were valuable and redirected them somewhere, but in general, our site has a lot of authority just because when we launch something, we get a ton of links,” he says. “You know, people – bloggers are always talking about Microsoft and all the stuff that we’re doing. Our site in general has a lot of authority, so it wasn’t a big priority for us at the time.”

For “mega” sites, this is probably the case a lot of times.

Small Strides For a Big Impact

When you’re talking about a site the size of Microsoft.com, there are other things besides irrelevant content that are likely to come into play. “That’s just one aspect of mega SEO,” says Wheeler. “The other would be the international piece – it’s huge for us, because we have close to a hundred different countries and many different languages, and there’s 23 countries that we really focus a lot on, but our content – the way we publish it basically…for Australia, their content can be in a lot of different places scattered all over our website, and it’s hard for them to manage their SEO when their content’s spread all over the place.”

“So one of the things we’ve tried to do is come up with a standard international URL policy, because without that, it’s hard for a country to even manage their own content,” he says. “Event that’s been a battle because some of the content management systems that we publish on can’t conform to that structure so it’s just a constant….with mega SEO it’s about making small strides over time that [when] grouped together they have a really big impact.”

Who’s in Charge of the Whole Site? It’s Just Ballmer.

“There’s so many different business groups and our website Microsoft.com doesn’t roll up to a single person until it gets to Steve Ballmer,” says Wheeler. “As soon as you break off of Steve Ballmer, you’ve got someone else that’s responsible for MSDN TechNet. There’s another business group that’s responsible for the support site…so we don’t have a centralized authority that manages the entire Microsoft.com domain. So it’s very difficult because some businesses will make decisions on what’s in their best interest, and it might not really be what’s in the best interest of our site as a single domain name.”

“The first thing I did was really try to draw an image (because I’m very visual) of what are all the pieces involved in order to optimize the site,” says Wheeler of his approach. “And for us…there’s four levels of where the SEO occurs on the site, and to support those four levels, there’s a lot of what we’ll call workstreams or initiatives or focus areas that support those four levels.”

SEO by Level

“The first level is the site-wide SEO,” explains Wheeler. “That’s the crawl efficiency stuff we talked about. The next level is subsidiary level SEO, which is the international piece and working with them.”

“The next is what we call site-specific so there might be an individual site on Microsoft.com – they want to do SEO…well we have three levels and they can do it themselves and we provide guidance, they can do a little bit with an agency (just have the agency do the keyword research, do some training…), or they can do a full service agency program,” he continues. “And then there’s the people who say, ‘I want to optimize this page for this keyword’. Well, we’ll give them some generic advice like, ‘you should use that word on your page and you should actually think [about] more than just that page and on board to one of our site-specific programs.’”

How Do You Measure All of This?

“And then in support of that we have a standard measurement framework, because when I got there, there was a lot of different ways that people were measuring SEO,” he says. “In fact, our site in general…half the site uses one web analytics application, the other half uses another, and some of them are tagged with both.”

“Just getting all the metrics is a challenge,” Wheeler adds. “And then we also have search technology that needs to scale for all four levels. We’ve got our own set of web crawlers set up to crawl our site to look for those big issues, and we can also crawl individual sites and tell them where their SEO problems are.”

Gathering the Masses

“We work with agencies, vendors…anything we can to help us scale this out,” says Wheeler. “We had a two-day Microsoft-only SEO Summit called XMS (which is SMX backwards), but stands for cross-Microsoft. We had over 560 attendees that were all Microsoft people. We had all Microsoft speakers, which I thought was incredible that one company could have 560 attendees to an internal SEO event, and the entire event cost seventeen thousand dollars for 560 people. Now if we sent them all to a conference like [PubCon], that would be like 560 thousand dollars plus travel.”

“And it was Microsoft-specific…all of the content was targeted towards Microsoft websites and out of that, we found a lot of internal ‘SEO rock stars’ that I can start building relationships with, and they’re great evangelists across the company.”

As you can see, “mega SEO” is no minor feat. How would you like to have Wheeler’s job? We also talked with Bill Hunt of Back Azimuth Consulting at PubCon about the challenges of big company SEO. These companies may get a lot of links and rankings, but it’s not exactly easy.

And this year is no different. I’ve been glued to each game. And, despite the Vikes 2-5 start, I continue to hope there’s a chance they could run the table or go 7-2 and close out the year 9-7, secure a play-off berth and make a run to the Super Bowl in Big D.

And then came the drama that has been the last week in Minnesota.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve watched the Vikes make blunder after blunder–on the field and off. But, since this isn’t a Vikings blog, let’s stick to the PR lessons we can learn from what happened off the field this week. The Vikes made a few mistakes this week–no question. What can we take away from the situation and learn from? Quite a bit, it turns out:

• Communicate quickly and effectively with key audiences–from the inside out. Coach Childress actually had the right idea here–he just didn’t hit all the internal audiences (allegedly). In this case, the counselor in me would have encouraged Coach Childress to sit down with management first. Then, the team. Then, the media. Maybe even single out a few players that he knew Moss meant a lot to (Percy Harvin, for one). Bottom line: Make sure you’re communicating key information in a timely fashion with the right people–in the right order.
• Build consensus before making key decisions. Local MinnPost columnist, David Brauer, had a great tweet the other night: “Say what you will about Chili cutting Moss, but the move was gangsta.” Sure, cutting a player without informing much of anyone (again, allegedly) is pretty bad-ass, I’ll agree. But, if you’re planning to cut a player with the talent and fan adulation of Randy Moss, you better make sure you’re standing shoulder to shoulder with management and the director of player personnel before pulling the trigger. A little consensus building would have went a long ways here.
• Erase all opportunities for speculation. This is probably one of my biggest beefs with Coach Childress’ approach to date. OK, so you cut Moss unilaterally and don’t inform too many people. Not ideal, but I can live with it. But, you cut him and you don’t explain why? Not to the team (allegedly). Not to the public. Not to anyone, as far as I can tell. Why is that a problem? Because it opens up the opportunity for *massive* speculation, which is what’s happening now. If Coach Childress comes out hard Tuesday talking about exactly what happened and why, and starts focusing squarely on the game this Sunday, this is all swept under the rug fairly quickly. As it stands, this probably won’t go away until after the game Sunday (and if they lose, it may extend in the news cycle for another week).
• Admit your mistakes (when possible). Coach Childress did say that trading Moss for a third-round draft pick was a “poor decision.” He did own up. And, look at the result: People seem to be dropping that piece of the story. Why? Because it leaves nowhere for reporters and the public to go. He admitted he was wrong–end of story (on that piece, at least). Just not much to report or talk about. Plus, I always argue, admitting fault isn’t a sign of weakness–it’s a sign that you’re human. And, keep in mind, people (fans, coaches, organizations, etc.) will forgive you for your mistakes. Sports figures and coaches have proven that to be true over and over again.

As a business, it’s great to get out there and engage with customers. It’s great to use a variety of social media channels to open up communication and spread your marketing message, but what a lot of business decision makers might not realize is that it can be the combination of tactics that work much better than any one strategy.

Social media marketing can be broken down into three categories: earned media, paid media, and owned media. This is how Maggie Fox, CEO of Social Media Group presents it. Social Media Group, by the way, counts brands like SAP, Ford, Yamaha, ING Direct, CNN, and Thomson Reuters (to name a few) among its clients.

“In the simplest possible words, earned media is when someone says something about you rather than you saying it yourself,” Fox tells WebProNews. “Paid media is when you then pay to place your content on a third-party channel, and then owned media would be your own channel, so when we’re talking about social, there are social components to all of these things, that would be something like Twitter or Facebook, or you know, your own social website.”

“You can take earned media, for example, it’s very expensive to generate, particularly when we’re talking social, it doesn’t have a huge reach,” she says. “If you do, say, a blogger outreach program, you know, perhaps you might reach a couple hundred thousand people. They might consume your content, and realistically for a big brand, that’s not enough to move the needle. You need hundreds of millions of impressions, but you’re just not going to get it through earned social, so then what you can do is take it and amplify it through paid, so there are paid opportunities on places like Digg, Outbrain, StumbleUpon…things like that, where you can actually amplify that content to a much larger audience and get the benefit of it.”

“And then you can also syndicate it through your own channels, so there are…most companies have multiple channels, so you might have something on Facebook, you might have Twitter, you might have YouTube, you might have Flickr,” she continues. “You have all these different places you can publish content and work them together in a very concerted, sort of orchestrated fashion to get a lot of people consuming content that’s very favorable to you. So it’s really about orchestration. How do they all work together?”

Orchestration That Increases Clickthroughs and Conversions

Finding the right mix of these three types of media may just net you a significant increase in conversions. The way Fox describes it, it almost seems like it should be automatic.

“We certainly see with paid social that we typically will see a clickthrough or conversion rate of about half a percent against…a program we recently did for a large publishing company…we saw a conversion rate of .55%, so when you compare that to typical display, which is (being very generous) often around .09%, the results are obvious,” she says. “There’s an obvious reason why you would choose to leverage some of these platforms, so what we often see people doing is rather than using marketing materials and these paid places again…you take that earned media and take people saying good things about you, as opposed to you saying good things about yourself, and get it to a broader audience.”

Still, a lot of businesses don’t seem to be latching onto the three-prong approach Fox describes. Many are just after the earned media, which can be great, but it’s not necessarily going to maximize a campaign’s effectiveness.

“I think there are a couple of reasons. I think the primary reason is that they’re unaware of it,” says Fox. “That’s changing though, because we certainly see large advertising networks establishing groups to kind of crack the nuts of emerging paid platforms. They recognize that the effectiveness of existing platforms largely is starting to diminish…that advertisers are demanding more results, and so there are emerging places and ways to get the .55% instead of the .09%, so they’ve gotta figure it out.”

“In terms of the ways people aren’t using it, it’s largely that knowledge,” she adds. “It’s the knowledge of ‘how do I do this? What do I do?’ and then the other part of it is, interestingly, services. We see the ratio of media to services to do this properly – to get those results – actually being quite high compared to what you would see from traditional creative, but the results are so much better, so for example, just to…give some data points, we recently did a project for a client where we saw four and a half times the clickthrough rates of what you would see from a display campaign using the same amount of media in the same time frame.”

On using social media in general, Fox says, “At the end of the day, it all comes back to a simple thing, and that’s fishing where the fish are. The primary business reason is 70% of people who are online spend time on social platforms, so go where they are.”

There’s an interesting study making the rounds, looking at when Facebook users are most active. It may also help to go where they are, when they are there.