Category Archives: Uncategorized

The New SEO: Social Sharing and Sentiment Matter More Than Ever

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The New SEO: Social Sharing and Sentiment MatterBy now you’ve heard of Google+, right?

When Google announced its very own social platform earlier in 2011, the theories abounded: First, there was “It’s a competitor to Facebook and Twitter.”

Nope.

Then we heard “It’s for the geeks who use all of Google’s unique applications.”

Not quite, unless Google really wants to hang its future on all three of those folks.

Finally, “It’s a way to gather activity data that can be used to drive search.”

Now we’re talking. Google realized that SEO has changed severely because of social activity, and it happened while they were sitting around tweaking their obsolete code.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh. After all, Google’s algorithm includes user behavior data. The company pioneered true organic search technology, and is still the standard setter that every webmaster strives to please. Content-based SEO strategies have long been a thing of the past, thanks to Google.

But there’s no doubt that Google noticed that more and more web activity was based on social sharing, and the associated data was owned by others. Google had your IP address and pretty detailed click data, but Facebook had your name, favorite rock bands, activities, brands, and list of friends, among other items, much of it volunteered. The segmented advertising power this provides is staggering, and Google didn’t have any of it.

Can you say “Writing on the wall?”

In January 2011, Facebook was valued by investor Goldman Sachs at around $50B. Many wondered how the hell a startup with a bunch of pointless time-wasting apps led by a megalomaniac geek could be worth anything like that. For some of us in marketing, it was easy to understand. It was the data.

For the folks at Google, who know marketing better than just about anyone, it was a drop-dead cinch: Get Google+ out there, and quick.

So now here it is: The New SEO. You want inbound links? Social platforms give you an endless supply of them, should you be able to sway crowds to your cause. Which platforms should you use, you ask? How about “As many as humanly possible?”

Are you producing a ton of content on your website and blog but not getting it out there using social tools? Keywords alone won’t cut it anymore. You need activity, so use your content to create buzz.

Are you getting buzz, but it’s not all positive? Such is life, but you need to be online and ready with a social fire drill strategy. And you need to be thick-skinned but able to tread lightly in the social realm.

It’s the customer’s world, you just live in it.

Google will be the search engine of choice for some time to come, so we’re all settled in for a long winter’s night with their rules, but if you’re sitting around waiting for content keywords to work their magic, you’re old school.

We’re long past the “Why should my company get social?” discussion by now, anyway. If your dead-in-the-water SEO strategy isn’t impetus enough, nothing is.

The Tom Bishop Fan Club – Yes, I’m Serious!

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The Tom Bishop Fan Club on FacebookIf you really, and I mean really have nothing better to do today, please join The Tom Bishop Fan Club on Facebook! This is where I will share stuff about hiking with the kids, training for the marathon, and Team Playworks. You can post stuff there too. It’s the new home of fun!

Plus, sign up for the MyLeftOne Newsletter. The first edition is our Holiday Greeting!

Business is Not a Competition

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Business is not a competition“Let’s see who wins!”

That’s what I was asked recently. “Sounds great to me,” I answered. “Are we revving up our stock cars at the Brickyard? Are we pedaling up the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire? Are we heading toward Heartbreak Hill while running the Boston Marathon?”

No. We were in a business setting, discussing a PowerPoint template or something like that. We were in a place where competition doesn’t belong.

Did I just say that? There are places where competition doesn’t belong? Yes, I did.

Maybe it’s the business environment we live in today, where people are treated as if they are “starters” or “benchwarmers” on a football team. The posters on the wall read “Go For It” and “Make It Happen”. Everybody’s “stepping up to the plate” or “going the extra mile” to do something that ultimately will not matter to anyone, not even the competitors.

Let’s see who can send the quickest fax. Let’s see who can build that app using the least code. Let’s see who can make the most sales calls in the next four hours.

Seriously?

You hear this kind of crap all the time. The competitive spirit is alive and well in business today. The problem is, the people are not alive and well because of it. We’re sick. Not just in the twisted sort of way, but I think it’s bad for our overall psychology.

Maybe it’s all the reality shows we watch nowadays, where people compete to become models, business executives, hairdressers, or chefs. Chefs! You’ll notice it’s always more exciting to watch people get “kicked off the island” or “sent home” or even “fired” than it is to watch somebody win.

Fired. In the deepest, longest recession I can remember, we’re glorifying the firing of people who are trying to make a living. And we call ourselves adults.

Did junior high school end or is it still going on? Am I missing homeroom right now? Do I need a hall pass? If I make the coolest PowerPoint slide, will the cheerleader notice me?

To me, competition only has one purpose, to improve yourself. If the competition is meant to benefit only others, in the form of sales leads, ratings, viewers, t-shirt sales, or rankings in a school or business magazine, it is not the proper place for competition.

Competition is for lacing up your shoes and running faster, jumping higher, throwing further. And I don’t mean as a metaphor for crunching spreadsheets, but for actual running, jumping and throwing. Competition is not even meant to compare yourself to others, but to yourself. Can you run faster than you did yesterday? Can you climb higher than you did last week?

Competition should matter the most to you, and nobody else. You want to beat your previous performance because you just want to, not because there’s a paycheck, a trophy, or a bonus in it. If you’re looking for kudos from the boss or your viewers, you’re in it for the wrong reason. If you’re forced into a competitive situation where it doesn’t belong, you need to get out, for your own sanity.

Now how do you do that in today’s business culture, where it seems everyone acts like they’re still on the junior high school playground or the racquetball court? It’s easy; You have to say “No”. Probably to people who factor heavily in your ability to pay your rent.

It may take courage to scale high mountains, face raging rivers, or stare down treacherous cliffs, but it takes the most courage to say “I will not play your game.” Especially today, when everybody is force-fed reality shows and business leaders are hopped up on motivational books like major league ballplayers on steroids.

I say let’s keep the competition where it belongs, on the field, or track, pitch, or court. And let’s keep the office as a place of work.

How Do You Achieve Total Marketing Immersion (TMI)?

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Total Marketing Immersion goes beyond marketing.

PowerPoint, Flash, Whiteboards, Video, Podcasts, Banners,
Whitepapers, Webinars, eBooks, Newsletters, Surveys, Social Feeds, Blogs…

Anyone else sick of it all? Maybe I’m a little tired from playing with my children (admittedly something I put every ounce of energy into), but I feel like I’m starving for something. The products and tactics above have become unbearably dull to me.

Now let me offer this caveat; I’m lucky to be a marketer. After all, I don’t ever have to run into burning buildings or duck bullets. But then again, marketing is not all that important. I don’t teach children, perform surgeries or save lives. If I am successful, somebody buys products from me. If not, they buy elsewhere. And either way I go home to play with my kids.

Lately I’ve been wishing there was some other method besides the ones above for successfully engaging customers. I talk about engagement a lot. To me it’s a broader term than marketing and communications. It implies more than just a bi-directional exchange of content. It is about highly contextual discussion, focused on individuals, not segments, and multiplied by thousands.

Even with the software to automate this approach (which itself implies a cynical failure to grasp the concept of engagement), who has the energy for this kind of complex, multi-faceted behavior? I can barely keep up with one email inbox. As much as I talk about engagement, I have a very hard time practicing what I preach.

Yet I know people who seem to be everywhere I browse. They ask and answer questions on LinkedIn, they speak at trade shows, they exchange cards (with QR Codes) at cocktail parties, they fly somewhere every week, they tweet (and make direct replies) 75 times a day, they blog daily, and they’ve already mastered their Google+ accounts. These are people who also have jobs, kids, families, and presumably have hobbies and chores like taking out the trash.

These folks go beyond marketing. They are all about their craft. Marketing is not a job to them; it is a state of being. It is not something they do; it is what they are. And that doesn’t mean they are glad-handing automatons, these are decent people. But to me they are like another species from science fiction, where the aliens are always smarter and stronger. They experience Total Marketing Immersion.

What can be done by a person can also be done by a brand. If a marketer is constantly busy creating content, linking to it from various places, and following up with interested people, that’s immersive behavior. If a company does the same thing, a team of people who can write, create graphics, manage websites and maintain a social presence should be able to mimic what the truly immersive marketers can do.

Maybe. These are pretty amazing people. They work at the best companies (that they probably founded), and they are the go-to for speaking engagements, panels, interviews, and thought-leadership.

Copying some of their behavior ought to help an average marketer create marketing and communications programs that build and support a brand. Your industry has these people. Find out what they are doing, what platforms they are using, what events they attend and go there. Copy what they do. It still takes effort. I’ve found that even this kind of cynical behavioral copying is difficult to master.

So my hat is off to those who are able to not just do marketing, but to live it.

Malcolm Gladwell is Right

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Malcolm Gladwell is right. When the famous pop psych theorist posits the theory that social media (and by extension the Internet) are not necessary for movement-building and revolution, he is right. Revolutions have occurred in the past, without the aid of iPhones, Twitter, Wikipedia, WordPress, or Facebook.

Gladwell rightly points out that Mao, East Germans, and French peasants did not have such tools, and yet were able to bring about radical and profound change in their societies using other means of communication.

But Gladwell is also wrong. He misses the primary point being made by those who repeat the conventional wisdom – that revolutions like the one in Egypt and the 2009 protests in Iran are different from revolutions in the past because of social media. Today, social media is doing for political activists what passwords, secret handshakes and flyers did for revolutionaries in the past – providing a way to communicate that gets around the machine.

Just like oppressive regimes that have banned writing, or refuse certain classes the right to vote, Egypt’s leadership took the pains to shut down Internet access for the entire country. The revolutionaries were forced to communicate among themselves and to the world by other means, including mobile text and Twitter. For this, Twitter comes under fire from those who align with success and leadership, like Gladwell, an author of motivational books read by business and government leaders and a journalist for a corporate-owned mainstream magazine.

Similarly, non-social Internet media such as Wikileaks is threatened with retaliation by governments and corporations, primarily because it is another means of communicating ideas that the leaders consider verboten.

So the revolution may not be tweeted, but social media will continue to be treated the way flyers were hundreds of years ago, as a tool used to communicate and build movements by the downtrodden, and bashed by those who do the trodding. Twitter and Facebook will be a major driver of revolution in both politics and business.

And remember, the success of those flyers is why we in the US have freedom of the press.

Google Instant places new emphasis on shorter keywords

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Google Instant ArticleNow that Google Instant has been launched (To see it in action, just go to google.com) it’s easy to understand how it will affect organic search for users. In short, it will speed things up, because it will help you refine searches on the fly instead of running several keyword tests to get a relevant set of results. Google pretty much says so too.

But because I’m in marketing, I’m more interested in how it will affect SEO and PPC. This excellent article on Google Instant at the Guardian covers the topic well, but my own thoughts boil down to this:

This re-emphasizes the short keyword.

We’ve all been focused on long-tail keywords lately, like “cheap hotels that aren’t ridden with roaches” (by “keyword” I mean the entire phrase) to get highly relevant search results that reach the right customers. The idea is that anybody who searches on our specific terms is our best friend, while everyone else is a tire-kicker. But with Google Instant, that person doesn’t need to type so much anymore. By the time they finish typing “cheap h”, they have results. Typing “Cheap ho” and “cheap hot” make the terms even more relevant for them.

I realize these terms may bring up different results for you! :)

Now, with Google Instant, it is likely that SEO professionals need to think more about the best short, front-loaded keywords that put them in the search results. This is because users can quit typing after a few letters if the results start to look relevant enough. No more finishing the keywords.

The one-letter keywords are taken, so what one- or two-word keyword gets people to your site? It’s time to start thinking about it.

The Google Instant Alphabet

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Note: Results may depend on your search history and location.

Google Instant Alphabet

A: Amazon
B: Boston
C: Craigslist
D: Dictionary
E: eBay
F:Facebook
G: gMail
H: Hotmail
I: Ikea
J: Jetblue
K: Kohl’s
L: Lowe’s
M: Mapquest
N: Netflix
O: Orbitz
P: Pandora
Q: Quotes
R: Red Sox
S: Sears
T: Target
U: UPS
V: Verizon
W: Weather
X: xBox
Y: Yahoo
Z: Zillow

Marketing Spin: How Far is Too Far?

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Marketing Spin: How Far is Too Far?Try #1:

While trying to start my car the other day, I heard that terrible clicking sound that you hear when the key doesn’t do what it is supposed to. I also felt that instant of internal disappointment, knowing that something I trusted had suddenly let me down. A few more times turning the key didn’t change things; the battery was dead. (The next sound I heard was the clinking of money ringing in my ears). I was going to have to find another way to get to work.

Then it hit me: the dead battery was a lot like some email marketing campaigns I’ve seen. You know when you see a brilliant subject line from a trusted sender, you open the email, and are disappointed by the content? It turns out not to be the insightful and enjoyable read you thought you were getting, but instead just another lame pitch. Don’t be the dead battery in your reader’s inbox.

Try #2:

While eating ice cream one hot afternoon with the kids, I found it hard to keep the ice cream from melting down the cone and all over my hands. They never give you enough napkins at the ice cream shop window, so you’re forced to deal with about a quart of vanilla nut crunch dripping all over the car and trying to mop it up with a single-ply tissue the size of a business card.

My first thought was about how this was exactly like dealing with email deliverability issues. Every time you think you have it licked, the spammers find another loophole and force the ISPs to make changes that catch your legitimate emails in the dragnet. Your email service provider’s compliance department is already catching up to current best practices, and now they, like the tiny napkin, are hopelessly outpaced and saturated with hot fudge and jimmies.

Try #3:

While crossing the street downtown, I stood by the crosswalk for a good fifteen minutes waiting for the cars to stop. Stopping for walkers is the law in my state, but motorists see that as more of a suggestion than a moving violation. Finally, somebody stopped; a nice, little old lady in a 1984 Buick (in mint condition, of course). I waved and stepped out, cars honked, hand gestures were offered, vulgarities were issued, and then I was nearly run down by cars going in the other direction.

“This is exactly like email compliance,” I realized. One good email marketer sends their perfectly compliant, well-messaged, highly-engaging, double opt-in email, while all the other messages in the inbox are like the other drivers on the road, honking, gesturing, screaming for attention. The legitimate email marketer is in a tough bind; how to get read while surrounded by so much nonsense?

@myleftone: So marketers: How far can you stretch the spin? #marketingspin

From: sales@company.com (aka DELETE ME)

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Readers delete impersonal emails

What is the best email address to use for your email marketing messages?

If you’re struggling with this question for your own campaigns, congrats! You’re thinking pretty deeply about optimizing engagement and interactivity with your readers. There are basically two schools of thought: 1) Your readers want a ‘personal’ approach and will respond to an email from their friendly sales executive named Joe instead of an impersonal, faceless corporation, or; 2) Your readers understand your brand and will welcome news and updates from your company, but will feel ‘tricked’ by your attempt to use a personal name.

Notice, in both cases, I assume you have an opt-in relationship with your readers.

When you want to purge your own inbox, where do you start? Do you line up all the emails from “Company ” and delete the group (like I do)? Do you then go after the “Joe ” or “Company ” emails? If you’re like me, maybe you save the ones from “Joe ” for last. Unless I’ve heard of the company, it’s gone. If I haven’t heard of the person, it gets read, but boy will I be ticked if it’s junk. Maybe enough to hit the spam button.

So what do you do? I hate to say this, but it depends. It depends on who you are, what your company does, what your readers want, how they found you, and which way the wind was blowing that day. Since you can’t segment based on the whimsical nature of reader expectations, you can at least play the percentages, so here are a few tips to help choose which approach is right for you:

Use the “news@” (or “sales@”, “updates@”, “stuff@”, etc.) approach if:

  • Your brand is well-known to your customer base. If your readers and their grandmothers know your company but couldn’t pick the CEO out of a lineup (like almost any restaurant chain), you should use your company name to send the email.
  • Your brand has a personal approach to messaging. If you position your company as more like a friend than a business (airlines come to mind), you should maintain that friendship without complicating things.
  • Your brand scores well for quality, reliability, service or other measures of trust. If you just plain make the best. Period. And your readers know it, you’re in brand nirvana. Use your brand as the foundation for your campaigns.

Use the “Joe@” approach if:

  • Your business is built on personal relationships. If the first impression your company makes with most of its followers is through a sales executive at a conference or a regional sales agent, that person should be the name sending the email.
  • Your business is centered around a celebrity or personality. If your CEO is a well-known visionary who overshadows the technology and even the company, make your emails a personal communique from the CEO (Really, do you want an email from Martha, or from Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia?).
  • Your business has a rich, personal engagement approach. If your company is built on superior service, or technical know-how, put one of your technical people in front of your readers with tips, updates and best practices to form a solid relationship. Some companies even make up a person (think car insurance) and use that character’s name for campaigns. But ideally, authenticity counts.

If your business is large enough to need different approaches with different segments, you’ve got a lot of work ahead. If not, and you have a pretty good evaluation of your brand, the tips above should help you decide whether you are “Updates@company.com” or just “Joe”.