I recently went to a Silicon Valley WebGuild event at Google on what I thought would be a discussion on SEO for Web 2.0. I thought I would hear discussions on optimizing Flex and AJAX and learning how we could make these Web 2.0 Technologies more search engine friendly. Instead, the discussion was more focused on how Web 2.0 companies were using SEO. Which is completely different, especially when you consider that the two Web 2.0 companies featured -LinkedIn and Engage - acknowledge their success to viral marketing as opposed to SEO.

However the panelist were great: Adam Lasnik, Google Search Evengalest (aka: MiniMatt) Andreas Mueller, President of Search Marketing Firm Bloofusion, David Hahn, the LinkedIn Director of Advertising and Joelle Gropper Kaufman, Engage’s Vice President of the Experience.

On to the discussion… The issue with user generated content is that you hand over the control to the community. Andreas advised that those of us working with Web 2.0 sites should harness the collective intelligence of the group by:

• Motivating contributors
• Offering guidelines
• Creating a relevant hierarchy
• Getting the community to focus on the keywords

While Web 2.0 sites deliver a rich user experience, the issue with Web 2.0 technology is that content can’t be indexed and search engines cannot get behind logins. Andreas advised that AJAX be used for non-essential, private or duplicate content.

Usually as SEOs we want to get as much info out there as possible to the search engines, but with Web 2.0 sites there are privacy issues, so some things must be kept from search engines. Joelle noted that “30% of all searches on Google are name searches” (Adam could not confirm this) therefore users of social networks “need control over their personal identities.” In the case of social networking dating site Engage, opening up too much content to the public is a matter of member safety (and online reputation management J ). LinkedIn, understands the need to not make all user information public because they “want to make sure that people are not open to all of the salesy types.”

However, to drive traffic to a site via Search Engines, Web 2.0 sites need to compromise between internal vs. public profiles. Search Engine Optimization can be used on content without “giving away the farm.” The Public Profiles vs. Private Profiles on LinkedIn is a great example of “slicing the data just right” to allow privacy while opening up content to the search engines. Joelle recommend the use of mashups as a way to share information with the public about a person without giving away too much information. For example, your playlists and your bookmarks tell the world a lot about you and help people get to know you.

Is your Web 2.0 SEO Simply Tactical or Holistic?

After giving a brief history of the “content to links” movement in SEO, Andreas wisely advises the audience to build link building into their mindset. He then asked each panel member if they have a specific linking strategy and what is the role of SEO in the Web 2.0 strategy. David of LinkedIn said that they didn’t have a specific linking strategy because they “had the luxury of having a high page rank before the public profiles.” While SEO was not an initial focus for LinkedIn, “optimization of the public profiles has brought more users,” though they rely more on viral marketing.

I love that Joelle from Engage told the crowd that they were in the process of developing a Linking Strategy. Not many new companies (or well established ones) think like that. I guess that stems from her previous experience at Reactivity. When Reactivity was redesigning their site they found an SEO company to help them reach users via search engines because they targeted a niche market. I especially appreciated that Joelle realizes that with Engage, “it is more important that you find the people as opposed to general keyword terms.” And thinks of general keywords such as “dating”, as being part of the head or tail of a long keyword search. This is exactly what Ammon Johns was talking about when he wrote about The New Model SEO Customer.

Finally they covered online competition for Web 2.0 companies. Is a Web 2.0 competitor different? What is their Strategy and are they spamming? Andreas brings up a screenshot of a spammy page from eHarmony (Scroll down to the links) and Joelle repeats it a few times to Adam so that maybe one of her competitors would be taken out and punished. (That was hilarious. I love her!) When someone from the audience asks if this SEO method works, Adreas replies “Only as long as the search engine doesn’t find the mistake.”

Well obviously Yahoo and MSN Live Search have not found out yet, since eHarmony ranks #7 in Yahoo and #3 in Msn Live Search for the search query: Florida Online Dating. And when you check other queries by state such as: [state] Online Dating, they rank in the top 10 for both Yahoo and MSN Live Search for many of these queries. I wish I had done this search that night to see where they ranked in Google at that time.

While the meat of optimizing AJAX and Web 2.0 technologies weren’t actually discussed until I asked during the Q&A, it was still a great event with a great discussion. However many people afterward told me that they were disappointed for the same reasons that I was.

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• SEMPO: Top Execs Paying More Attention to SEM. Too bad The President of SEMPO doesn’t “have time to keep up with all the various blogs and forums these days”, because if she did, she would realize that Nick Wilson (Still miss ya NickW) left ThreadWatch 1 year ago!
• Is the Meta Description Tag Worthwhile? – Umm…only if you care about your click-through.

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Checking the Con in PubCon
• WWSD? (What Would SEOs Do?) The Future of Search Engine Watch
• Beating Your Google Rap Sheet
• Young favor Internet over TV – via: Marketing VOX

The Too Cool: Goes to my new “Cheers”, Amber Bar. (Of course I’m linking to the Yelp page since Andreas optimized that site.) Finally, I have found a bar in San Francisco that meets my slighty dive-y, slighty hip (but not too much) standards. Cool bartenders, variety in patrons and good drinks. What more could I ask for? So I’m heading there tonight.

“We are young but getting old before our time / We’ll leave the T.V. and the radio behind / Don’t you wonder what we’ll find.” – Stepping Out – Joe Jackson

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

“As much as people want to connect through the Internet, the practice also can have the opposite effect: Social Networking Fatigue,” so says the article Social Sites Becoming Too Much of a Good Thing (via: SteinBlog). It’s been noted in Compete Inc’s paper on Social Commerce that marketers are facing the challenge of Social Saturation:

“While social networking sites continue to grow, online socialites are reaching the limit of how many online communities they want to participate in. The average online socialite currently frequents three social networking sites; when polled, these same socialites stated they would consider participation in up to four communities.”

I’ve often thought that it would be a great if people could port their digital persona from network to network; then the burnout rate would be lower. Wouldn’t you love to go over to a new social network and be able to have the basics of your digital identity and related network contacts added without much work on your end?

In a Knowledge at Wharton Podcast earlier this year, on the topic of portable reputation and identity across communities Julie Herendeen, vice president of Network Products at Yahoo, said:

“Openness is the direction that the web is moving. Identity does belong to the user and we really want to be as open as possible with identify while protecting users privacy. What can syndicate in identity? And what things remain unique to the site?”

But is openness the direction of Social Networks?

Ever since I blogged about ID+ last year - which would have reproduced inter-personal networks on digital accounts that were connected in an open peer-to-peer network, enabling new and more effective ways of working - I’ve been waiting with baited breath (well not quite “baited breath” but you get the point) for the day when an online persona could be taken across platforms. Alas, the ID+ site seems to have disappeared; and if Jay Stevens, vice president of sales and operations with MySpace, comments about Bebo, Facebook and MySpace being “unlikely to ever offer an open platform for users to integrate the services offered by these sites” at a recent Marketing conference are any indication, openness is not the direction that Social Networks are moving.

Yesterday I had a conversation with Alf Watt of iStumbler on the train ride home about the very topic of Social Network burnout. Alf, who also works at the Social Networking site imeem (which combines Social Networking with Instant messaging) burst my bubble on the whole idea by pointing out the privacy issues. I guess we can still dare to dream.

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Online Marketing Ranks Second to In-Person for B2B in 2008 - “Business to Business marketing, in order to be competitive in the Web 2.0 environment, has to be ahead of the trends. According to the Direct Marketing Association, says the report, by 2008 online marketing efforts will be the dominant media for business-to-business initiatives. Traditional direct mail, industry print, and events and promotions will take a back seat to more efficient and sophisticated online efforts.” (Download PDF). See also: Marketing 2.0 : Omniture to Unveil “Plug and Play” Online Marketing Technology
• Plugging In: Can E-Commerce Leverage Social Networks? (via: Media 2.0) “Across the rest of the Internet, meanwhile, including the Web 2.0 realm of social networking, eBay is extending its reach thanks to the work of some of its 1,000 third-party developers. The developers program, now in its sixth year, has created scores of plug-ins and other tools to help people sell, with 25 percent of all eBay listings now being generated through third-party tools.” See also: Can’t Find That Dress on the Rack? Retailers Are Pushing More Shoppers to the Web “Daniel Corsten, a former visiting professor at Wharton who now teaches at the London Business School, says he’s not convinced the new strategy of pushing in-store customers to the Internet will work. ‘What happens is the store turns an impulse buy into rational buying. You come into the store and you want to buy something, but it is not there. You realize you were intrigued about buying [the item], but now you have to rationalize it. This breaks the purchasing process. All of a sudden you think twice.’” While I would general argue that it is a great idea for retailers to push low-selling merchandise and special orders via the web, I can’t help but agree with the quote above.
• A Role for Time and Query Quality in Search Results – “I’ve had people ask me if it was worth keeping older articles and documents on their web sites, especially when information in those documents might become outdated. My response has been that as long as the pages clearly indicate what time periods they are relevant to, and that if the site owners include updated information, it’s easy for people to know that, and find that new information, it can be helpful to them to keep those pages.” Measuring the Quality of Queries, Adding Time to the Determination of Quality and Yahoo Temporal Relevance, oh my. It is posts like this that make Bill’s Blog a must read.

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Second-Life Makes the (Virtual) Travel Section of the New York Times. See also: Drawing Up a Virtual Marketing Plan (via: Managing the Gray)
• Yahoo! Search Crawler (Yahoo! Slurp) - Supporting wildcards in robots.txt
• SEO Salaries - How Much Should You Make
• Landing Pages for SEO

The Too Cool: goes to Timeline. The Ajax Widget for Visualizing Time-based Data. From the site, “Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information.” (via: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/11/timeline_ajax_w.html)

“I hope you’re eating something that will fill your soul and mind – I Know - Raphael Saadiq

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

As much as I would love to attend The SF New Tech November Meetup I am feeling beat, I have emails to respond to and ANTM to watch (ok, so I kid about needing to respond to emails…).

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• HP: Social networking not marketer friendly: “For Mary Bermel, Director Interactive, HP, the new pull paradigm means HP must create content of value to users so they want to engage with the brand and take the effort to ‘pull’ information from HP. Bermel is not convinced, however, that HP should be engaging in “pull” marketing at social networking properties such as MySpace and Facebook.” (Via Media 2.0) The interesting thing is that other than business with HP, the only “personal relationship” that I would even have with HP is via Social Media a’la: Erik Kintz’s (VP of Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for HP) Blog. So I do see the value in “being there”; as I consider the HP blogs a way of HP “being there” in social media. Update: I’m currently listening to the Web Seminar: Using New Media Tools for Marketing to IT Professionals: Blogs, Podcasts, Video, RSS and Social Networking – and Mary tells us that contrary to what she has been quoted as saying, HP is not afraid of social networks. See also: Social Media: A Splash of Cold Water and User-Generated Revolution
• How to Write a Social Media Press Release, Why, and What It All Means - “New technology and poor writing, still equal a bad press release. Social Media Press Releases do not replace traditional releases, they complement them - much in the same way that Social Media activities and campaigns work best in concert with traditional PR initiatives.” See also: The Ten-Bullet Objective for Social Media News Releases
• Optimizing PDFs for SEO: Ok Matt, I’m going to need you to create an RSS feed that I can automatically download to my brain, so I can just mindmeld your Blog posts. BTW: In regards to PDF optimization, I would also: Add relevant info to both the Document Properties and Document Metadata.

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Optimizing Paid Search Campaigns via Keyword Insertions, Keyword Expansion and Targeted URLs pays off for Advertising.com
• Optimizing Sitemaps Feeds for Yahoo (via Search Engine Watch)
• On, On To Social Marketing

“Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you / Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you” – Dream a Little Dream of Me – Louis Armstrong

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

I have so many notes from yesterday’s SF Tech Session on Social Bookmarking, that I’ll need more time to coordinate my thoughts. In the meantime, you can check out Daniel Riveong’s excellent recap: Social Bookmarking Talk at SF Tech Sessions as well Niall Kennedy’s Bookmarking and Social Sharing Trends (gosh I felt like a groupie meeting him, since I’ve been such a fan of his Blog).

BTW: Continuing my decent into Conference Junkiedom, tomorrow I’ll be attending The SF New Tech November Meetup (Also at CNET) featuring Bart Myers from the User Generated Content platform GUBA, Veronica Belmont from CNET TV, Jessica Hardwick of community-driven swapping site Swap Thing and Alf Watt of iStumbler the wireless discovery tool for Mac. Soon, I’ll be doing Online Marketing for conference passes - lol!

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Marketing Strategy Is the Foundation for Business Success: “But today, strategy is out, and execution is in. This emphasis on execution at the expense of strategy is on the rise in marketing organizations as well. They want the marketing team to simply go out and execute a marketing plan. However, attractive packaging, when combined with content that is not well thought out (or more importantly, not on target strategically), will fall flat on its pretty little face. Because a “pretty face” will only go so far, it’s extremely important to spend the upfront time to be sure that your marketing programs are built on a solid foundation, that you have nailed down the key elements of your marketing strategy, and your team can clearly articulate them—before going off to create those highly visible (and often highly expensive) marketing deliverables.” This could easily be about Search Engine Marketing! See also: The Paris Hilton Law of Visibility - “Which states that even the least attractive content can be the most visible with the right media attention.”
• The SBS Interview: Jon Glick of Become.com pt. 1 – I would love to pick just one quote, but the whole thing must be read. If I has to pick just one it would have to be: “You can please all the engines; look how well Wikipedia is doing. It’s all of the fundamentals: great content that attracts users, in-links and great anchor text in droves. The joke at SES was now that Google indexes Wikipedia they only have to figure out what the other nine results will be.” And, “I would advise sites to start by optimizing for Google, but follow on with specific steps designed to help with the other engines. For example, adding RSS for your site will get you more aggressive and frequent crawling by Slurp and title tag optimization will pay big dividends in MSN.” Ok, that was two. This is an excellent interview… really surprised there isn’t more linkage to it. Good work Matt.

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Search still most efficient by far at acquiring customers: “At an average cost per acquisition of $8.50, Internet search was shown to be more than twice as efficient as the next-best marketing channel in a study of five channels by Piper Jaffray & Co. The study, “The New eCommerce Decade: The Age of Micro Targeting,” which was released earlier this month, compared the customer acquisition costs of search, Yellow Pages, online display ads, e-mail and direct mail. Yellow Pages came in as the second-most efficient at $20 per customer acquisition, followed by online display ads, $50; e-mail, $60; and direct mail, $70.”
• The Predictive Power of Online Chatter– Heavy reading… will have to table till the weekend. (via Zero Influence)
• Disney’s Web Strategy: Build, Not Buy (via: I Want Media)

The Too Cool: Goes to the Strange Kiss Designer Toys and Art Prints (via: Factory City, a Blog I discovered after sitting next to Chris Messina yesterday). “Strangekiss is all about bringing the ART back into ART! We proudly represent many artists….In the near future, we will introduce the Street Art section showcasing the origins of Los Angeles and New York Street Art from the grand old Pan Pacific in Los Angeles to The Bronx and the electric culture that was developing there.” – How cool is that?! Just what I need, another cool site to blow my hard earned money on.

“You’ve got your life, you’ve got your health / So quit procrastinating and push it yourself” – In Due Time - OutKast

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

Ok, so I’m pretty excited about actually scheduling time to go to my first SF Tech Session. And this one is on Social Bookmarking. It takes place tonight from 7-9 p.m. at CNET in San Francisco. Hopefully I’ll get to meet a few of you there - and have no fear, I’ll be taking a note or two about what speakers such as Larry Halff of Ma.gnolia’s, David Galbraith of Wists and Manish Chandra of Kaboodle (what, no Stylehive?? - I’m disappointed.) have to say. If you’ll be attending or, if you have a question that you would like me to ask, drop me a note in the comments.

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• SEOs Going PPC: “I’ve gone on record as saying I believe more SEOs should read more marketing books than Apache Server manuals. As search marketing becomes more sophisticated, clients are going to expect something closer to demographic targeting out of organic listings, too. And that means understanding more about the clients’ overall marketing strategy, not just their Web site.” See also: Success of the Banner Ad: 249% Contextual Link Click-Thru Rate Improvement?
• Tactical vs Strategic SEO and Marketing: “Many SEO tactics work well at achieving a certain goal, but to be wildly profitable you usually needs more than tactics, you need love from the strategic front. Many people who are great tactical SEOs do not build much equity because tactics without strategy have little value.” Ya gotta have a strategy… says the girl who works in a strategic group. Truer word Aaron - which remind me of the Rudy Ray Moore quote below.

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• User Research Friday Redux. I’m so sad I missed this…. See also: A Brief, Very Brief, Introduction to Task Based Models
• No Blog Zone? See also: Can I Please Blog Your Private Meeting?
• Social Media Club on Blogger Ethics and Disclosure
• How To Spam Wikipedia See also: Examining Wikipedia’s Bias
• Flickr Interestingness Rankings Patents Released and for more heavy reading see: Research: Multiple Ranking Strategies for Opinion Retrieval in Blogs (Via: SEW Blog)

“Romance without finance is a damn nuisance” - Rudy Ray Moore

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

Thank God It’s Friday. And if you are going to the Blogger Happy Hour in San Francisco after User Research Friday, I’ll see ya then.

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Technology Enables Product Placement in CGM – New term alert: Plinking – “Plinking is the process of adding a product or service link to a visible object or image in a video. When deployed, it will have an interface for users to upload and tag video. Users will freeze a single frame and define an area where the product is located. It can be any product from an iPod to particular jacket or pair of jeans. Once tagged, the item will be clickable throughout the runtime of the video, and will link to an e-commerce page.”
• MySpace, ByeSpace – Registrations are slowing has critical mass been reached? Or have all the older people showing up slowed signups? Or is it that the spammers have been stopped. (Via: iMedia Connection) “There’s no question, however, that MySpace’s recent popularity has brought with it a proliferation of spam that has annoyed some users. Many advertisers take advantage of the “friend request” function and send out requests that are really just advertisements. And programs have cropped up that can automatically send mass friend requests to MySpace users — in short, a new generation of email spam.”
• An Introduction to Microformats (via: Micropersuasion) “Microformats are small and gentle syntactic touch-ups for your web pages. They have one major purpose: to make your data readable by both man and machine. They are the technical diplomats of the Web; allowing the same piece of data to be shared among many applications and people.” Ever since I first heard about Microformats on a Social Media Club podcast, I’ve been intrigued. This is one of those posts that I will have to print out and read over the weekend. A good example of a Microformat is the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) which I never realized this was a Microformat.
  
• Kickstarting RSS: How to Make the Right Decisions to Reach Your Target Market: “In this article, we look at five such issues that you should consider in planning your feed marketing communications.

1. Deliver Relevant Content By Identifying and Targeting Your Audience
2. Don’t Confuse Your Customer By Offering Too Many Feed Choices
3. Content Strategy Can Affect Subscription Levels and Loyalty
4. Know how often you will update your feed
5. Make Sure Your Website Visitors Find Your Feeds”

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Long List of Link Searches – Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, does it again – he has created yet another highly linkworthy piece on using Link Searches for Competitive Intelligence.
• Advertising Mix n’ Match: Examining the Coalescence of Branding and Search Engines Online “A survey conducted by The Dieringer Research Group found 45% of adults say their brand opinions have changed as a result of advertising and other product information found online.”
• Second Life Takes Off, Gains Interest of Older Generation
• Wiki Showdown at Web SIG

“Finally the weekend’s come and everything is goin’ down” – Thank God It’s Friday - R. Kelly

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

Last night I read Yet Another Press Release (YAPR) about a major brand’s launch into Second Life, and thought to myself, “Gosh, what’s the purpose at this point, especially if you aren’t offering anything to the community other than a virtual replication of your big corporate brand.” Then I read Sense.PSFK’s piece: There’s Gold In Them There Virtual Hills?. 

This is probably one of the best pieces I’ve read about the corporate Second Life land grab. It includes the author recounting a less than stellar encounter with some “virtual” employees of global ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (who had a We’re in Second Life Press release a short time ago).  As well as this choice observation:

“Both media and business need to understand the motivations of individuals within Second Life to glean any useful answers from it. Basically there are two lenses you can examine Second Life through, two viewpoints if you will: as an Immersionist, or as an Augmentationist. So far, mainstream reporting of Second Life has tended to blur the two to great confusion. The Immersionists want Second Life to be a world in itself that should be a complete escape from ‘Real Life’.The Augmentationists view Second Life as just another online interaction tool. Though, that isn’t to say that the two viewpoints can’t co-exist. It’s just that the subtleties of the two viewpoints are not explained to the reader. So is it any wonder some people just don’t GET Second Life?”

If you are interested in the virtual world marketing I recommend reading Iiya Vedrashko’s (80 page Thesis - PDF) Advertising in Computer Games.  And if any of you marketers out there are considering seeing what this whole “virtual world” thing is about, you may want to book a virtual tour guide for travel (What will they think of next) (via: ConversationBlog).
 

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Advertising in Second Life: My favorite rules on advertising in second life: 1.  Don’t think your cute little dorky guy that you have as a logo or mascot in RL is going to fit in the virtual world just because it’s cute and dorky. 7. Avoid having your employees look like these MOU dudes who look like they’re serving 5-10 upstate.  8. Don’t build a big-ass pretentious build and have a hugely hyped media event with a one-hit-wonder and then leave the build out to moulder on an empty sim for weeks later.  9. Every avatar has a t-shirt — some of them put it on and never take it off because it needs no washing! Make sure it’s your company’s logo!.  See also his response to The Second Life Optimization article: Do’s and Don’ts for Big Business Marketers
  
• I commented yesterday on ThreadWatch that as online marketers we should take a holistic view of online marketing.  If you are in the consumer electronics space - especially for high end goods – new research shows  this is all the more important.
  

From: Affluent Consumers Buy Electronics Online (via: WebProNews) 
 - 93% of US affluent consumers research upcoming consumer electronics purchases
 - 62% used both product Web sites and search engines to do so
 - 27.5% used e-mail newsletters as part of their research process.
more than half of US affluent consumers plan to make computer purchases online.

From: Online Research Drives Electronic Studies
 - 77% of consumer electronics purchases are influenced by internet research  
 - 45 percent of those who research online and purchase offline use a search engine during the information-gathering process.
 - ‘Searchers’ defined as those who use search to research CE goods, represent 47 percent of the offline and online purchasers surveyed…. are likely to advocate brands by word-of-mouth and are 114 percent more likely to consider internet display advertising in their research process.

• 30% of MySpace Users Create Most Content – Research from Kelvin Beecroft, head of Mashable Labs. “MySpace gets lots of criticism for flaunting the 100 million+ registered users they have. While that most likely is an accurate number of accounts, those generating the actual content on MySpace are likely far fewer.  I took it to task to find out just how many of those users are truly building MySpace with user-generated content. In applying the ranking formula we eliminated over two-thirds of those user accounts, leaving 362,824 user accounts in which to test for the presence of video links.  Thus we narrowed the sample down to 30.19% of the original sample by eliminating inactive and marginally active users. The interesting thing we discovered is that 84.22% of all the video links found in the original, larger sample was in this small group of active users.” Much like the comments in this post,  I’m confused too.  Guess it will all make sense when they publish the full study. See also: The oldie but goodie, Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg’s HomePage Content
  

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• ‘Swarm-Based’ Collaborative Filmmaking -  ”The first truly collaborative instance of indie filmmaking and online distribution using the Creative Commons copyright model, thus encouraging free download and fan ‘remixes’.”
• Tutorial: Automatic Sitemap in WordPress
• How-To: Earn Brand Loyalty in Social Networks 

“I never ran from adversity, instead I ran to it / Fear ain’t in the heart of me I learned just do it” – The Good Life – T.I.

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

Dear God, it’s me Natasha, please don’t let me start seeing articles calling Second Life Optimization, SLO in the near future. And please forgive the SEO in me who could not resist buying the domain names SecondLifeOptimization.com… ah hem and VirtualWorldOptimization.com. (FYI:  C.C. Chapman of Managing the Gray owns SecondLifeMarketing.com and VirtualWorldmarketing.com)

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Second Life Optimization – “Yet as with so much of emerging media, I’ve learned to stop questioning why people use it and to start embracing what can be done with it. …The universal principle of search engine marketing applies: You want to be there when they’re looking for you.” See also: Bridging Second Life and Amazon.com. Virtual World Optimization Shortlist:
• Title Tags should include a few important keywords
• Descriptions: Adding keywords to the description can help virtual stores come up for relevant searches
• Link Optimization: In Second Life, if marketers own multiple properties, they can include billboards for visitors to teleport around to each one.
• Advertising: An advertising network for Second Life, MetaAdverse, allows property owners to post billboards, and marketers can advertise on them and track the visitors.
• Moms Respond to Word of Mouth Marketing: “Most moms–67%–would rather get information from a peer than a celebrity mom. The best way to reach them is not through daytime TV–who’s got time to watch?–but through their friends; one study found 91 percent of mothers prefer easy-to-find brands that other moms recommend.”
• Video, social networks to surge in ‘07: “Social networks are estimated to attract $280 million in ad dollars this year, according to eMarketer. Online video-sharing sites are estimated to attract about $385 million. EMarketer estimates that $15.9 billion will be spent in online advertisements in the U.S. this year. That means social networks and video-sharing sites only attract about 1.8% to 2.5% of total online ad spending. Will the gap close?” (via: I Want Media) See also: Boost Mobile pushes it’s phone-based Mobile Social Network, Hookt

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Overlooked Link Building Opportunities – Discounts via Customer Service for web site mentions. What a great idea!
• Branding via Search Ads: “Now, some advertisers are taking a broader view of search, buying terms they want consumers to associate with their brands, even though the searchers clearly aren’t hunting for their products.” See also: Does anything come close to SEM for online customer acquisition?
• 68 million U.S. Internet users performed an Internet Yellow Page (IYP) search online in July “This represents a 46 percent increase versus year ago. Yahoo! Sites and Verizon SuperPages garnered the largest share, with 23.9 percent and 20.1 percent, respectively.”
• Social Bookmark Scripts & Widgets - Thanks for the code… now I just have to implement it
• Spy Fu Competitive Research Tool (Similar to GoogSpy)

The Too Cool: Goes to the YouTubers Video. It is a 9 minute short film about the YouTube community compiled from snippets from YouTube videos that is a video response to The Beauty of Being Human Video. It’s like watching a great documentary short on a sub-culture. I can only agree with Pete Blackshaw it is “captivating”. Of course the SEO in me, thinks Mick B, the creator should have also dropped a URL in the end of the video so I could find out more.

“And you may ask yourself / Where does that highway go? And you may ask yourself / Am I right? Am I wrong?” - Once in a Lifetime - Talking Heads

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

After having a conversation with a brand marketing manager this weekend about how she and the other marketing managers at her company interact on campaigns I’ve come to the following conclusion: “Integrated Marketing is like Communism. It sounds great on paper, but doesn’t work in reality.” (Update: Unless you you are JoinRed.com)

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Putting the Fun in Functional - Using Game Mechanics for Social Software – An excellent presentation on how successful social media sites like MySpace are like a game (via: Web Strategy by Jeremiah):
• Collecting: Impressive collections = bragging Rights
• Points: Redeemable points drives Loyalty & Social Points expree svalues of the “game”
• Feedback: Draws attention through movement & change and accelerates mastery
• Exchanges: Are structured social interactions
• Customization: Increases Investment and creates barriers to exit
• 6 Minds on Why Blogging Matters: Including - Peter Blackshaw of Consumer Generated Media: “Advocates for Blogs, myself included, talk a mean and persuasive game of customer intimacy, community, engagement and so-called “participation.” The problem is that that vision is often at extreme odds with the company or brand’s existing listening infrastructure: consumer affairs (call center, feedback forms, online surveys).” Eric Kintz of Marketing Excellence: “Marketers have become fixated on big influencers in the second part of the twentieth century: national newspapers, broadcast TV networks and star radio personalities. Now the pendulum is swinging back and marketers should start paying attention to Bloggers-influencers. Marketers will need to identify first the new key Blogger-influencers in their space… and treat them more and more like some of the other influencing constituencies such as analysts or journalists.” Also included are: Dan Greenfield of Bernaisesource, Will Waugh of Marketing Maestros, David Churbuck of Churbuck and David Armano of Logic + Emotion
• Advertising & Social networks: Bakespace, Classmates and Dates, oh my. Finally an article that explains the different advertising options in social networks (without me having to search). See also: The Score: Social Networking Sites
• Viral Seeding of Video Clips Beats Video Banner Advertising – I just came across this post about a Benchmark test from Universal McCann stating that ,“viral seeding drove 14 times more views than video banners.” While the view of the writer is obviously skewed toward Viral (it is from a Viral company), it would be good to see the actual study.

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Hidden Market Research on Ebay, Amazon, and Others (via: Media 2.0)
• University Study Reveals Rich Data on Bloglines Feeds
• Quantcast Open Ratings Service
• How to dominate image searches

The Too Cool: Goes to IBM’s use of In Banner Video Chat: You can video chat with sales reps via the banner ad. LiveBanner, is from AVivocom.

“Liberty you’re so free / Why don’t you come for me / Take me away from the Rat Race” – Liberty Jones – The Shakes

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

I was going to post this yesterday.  But after downloading IE7 and realizing that my last template looked horrible in that browser, I spent the better part of last night trying to fix the style sheet.  You can see by the new template, that this is still a work in progress ;).  I guess I’m not alone in the “My site looks horrible in IE7” category today, huh?! 

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Avinash Kauhik’s Emetrics Summit Review:  I love when people post presentations from conferences especially when I am unable to attend. In this round-up post, Avinash gives the Who, What, Where and Why of why these three presentations are worth a read: Quantifying the Corporate Value of the Website (PDF), Web Analytics: The World Bank Experience(PDF), Click Fraud Myths and Truths (PDF)
• And since we are on the topic of Analytics check out: Statistics Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie-Mellon University Aka: Statistics for Analysts - the course you keep meaning to take. Via: Luna Metrics Blog
• Building a Website for Analytics: “Many companies don’t think about measurement when building a site, and they get stuck trying to retrofit it later”.

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Almost All Affluent Working Women Turning to the Internet
• How to Get Into News Search Engines
• Oilman’s SEO Toolbox
• Adotas’ Young Men Survey

“Every time I thought I’d got it made / It seemed the taste was not so sweet” – Changes – David Bowie

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson