Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it.” This sage advice comes to us from the wise and prescient Ferris Bueller. In a world where strategic business planning is typically measured in years, the pace of change in the world of search is placing constant stress on internet marketing plans.

Google’s “Panda” update earlier this year is the latest example of search game-changers. What’s a company to do? This video from the search experts at SEOmoz explain the reason for and implications of this algorithm change. Before you watch this important video, here are a couple of important takeaways:

Search Engine Gaming Is Getting Harder

There were lots of automated, black-hat techniques that were effective at generating inbound links, boosting your page rank and improving organic search ranking. While inbound links are still important, other more social factors are getting involved in the algorithm that are harder to game. At the end of the day, the formula for success is still the same: Create remarkable content that people want to consume and share with others.

Ignore Social Media at Your Own Peril

The search algorithms are increasingly incorporating more and more data from social media APIs. This means that by not participating in social media, you are potentially hurting your organic search engine results. In other words, you may not generate lots of leads from social media activities like Twitter but alone that isn’t a reason for not participating.

Dump Metrics, Adopt Analytics

The Grand Pooh-bah of web analytics, Avinash Kaushik, warns against confusing metrics with analytics. “When people say, ‘web analytics,’ they really mean web metrics. Your boss rarely asks for analysis; she asks for ‘data’ (metrics) or ‘reports’ (KPIs)… If you remember nothing else, remember this: life is about taking action, and if your work is not driving action, you need to stop and reboot.” Old metrics like page views and inbound links used to tell most of the story. But now that’s no longer the case. Search optimization requires diving much deeper and finding answers like, “Why is the bounce rate on this page so high?” or “How can we increase the conversion rate of this page?”

It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Setting proper expectations for search optimization is critical. As the system becomes harder to game and increasingly requires social validation, the results will take longer and longer. The reason is that you need to build an audience, which takes time. There are exceptions, of course, when you can catch lightning in a bottle go viral but those are infrequent scenarios and unreliable. Remember, hope is not a strategy.

UPDATE: Less than two hours after publishing this article, Search Engine Land published an article about “The Bleak Future of Commoditized, Outsourced SEO.” It explains in detail why the shortcuts are disappearing.

How Google’s Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever

Without further delay, here is a great video from SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday series.

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week’s High Five is about Internet advertising and metrics.

#5: Is 2010 the Year Digital Will Eclipse Print Ad Spending?

A recent Outsell study predicts that advertisers will be spending 32.5 percent in digital media versus 30.3 percent in print.  The silver lining for print is that it predicts advertising expenditures to increase slightly.  For some time, this has been a question of when and not if, and so while it comes as little surprise, it is no less momentous.

Link: Wired

#4: Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love

While print advertising is taking a beating these days, it’s not all moonlight and roses for digital advertising either.  Ars Technica decided to conduct an interesting experiment on their own site to block their content from visitors who were using ad blockers, since this was detrimental to their revenue stream.  After all, everybody needs to put food on the table.  While the experiment was a technical success, it was a social failure.  They determined that the backlash from this was far worse than the lost revenue, but more importantly they discovered that they had made a false assumption.  Their visitors, as it turns out, were not blocking the ads out of malevolence.  The simply hadn’t considered the ramifications of doing so and the vast majority were more than happy to whitelist the site.  The takeaway here is <drumroll> communication works!

Link: Ars Technica

#3: Chart of the Week: Marketing Budgets Shifting to Digital Tactics

Another marketing survey, this one from Econsultancy and ExactTarget, confirms a shift not only away from print but radio and television as well.  In all, 66 percent of companies surveyed are increasing their investments in digital marketing.

Link: Hubspot

#2: 35 Crucial SEO, Twitter & Social Media Statistics for Business People

Given the mass exodus from traditional marketing into Internet and social media, it’s important to have data to determine which which digital channel is appropriate for a given campaign.  This article posts a long list of recently gathered statistics that are helpful in that regard.

Link: SEOptimize

#1: Odds Are, It’s Wrong (Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics)

Fair warning – this article is fairly dense with mathematics and statistics.  However, the bottom line and the reason it’s included here is that with all of these statistics and metrics, it’s important to maintain some healthy skepticism.  Almost every week, I see a marketing company either make faulty logical assumptions (here’s a bonus link: 7 Common Logical Mistakes People Make), rely on poor sampling, or flat out use the wrong statistical calculation.

Link: ScienceNews

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous spam,
Or to take arms against a sea of multi-level marketers
And, by opposing, unfollow them.

How many people should you follow on Twitter?  And should you automatically follow any one who follows you?  If not, how do you decide?  I’ve been asked these questions many times and so it is finally time to write a post about this topic.

How Many Is Enough?

This is not a simple question and there are several schools of thought.  In one corner, we have the “less is more” camp who believe that a smaller group of higher quality connections works better.  Seth Godin recently endorsed this approach in his blog post “Bullhorns are overrated.”  And in the other corner, we have the “strength in numbers” camp who believe that if 100 followers is good, then 100,000 followers is, well, a thousand times better.  Chris Brogan spoke about what he calls his “serendipity engine” in his post, “Depends How You Define Value.”

Personally, I come down more on the serendipity side of the fence.  I will follow back just about anyone who is a real person and seems to be using Twitter in a genuine manner.

Is There Any Risk?

There is no overt risk in following someone.  It’s not the equivalent of granting them access to your computer in any way.  However, it does give them the ability to send you a Direct Message (DM), which could conceivably contain a link to a malicious web site.  I never click on a link in a DM from someone I don’t know.  And in most cases, I will immediately un-follow anyone who sends me an unsolicited DM with a link to a web site.

How Do I Decide?

I have a two-layer system for deciding whether or not I will follow someone back.  In the first test is to analyze a few metrics directly from the email notification.

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1. The name is obviously the first thing to look at.  If it is something like “Porn Galore” then it’s a pretty quick decision.  Conversely, it could be a company or brand you don’t necessarily have an issue with, but neither are you particularly interested in what they may have to say.
2. I look at their follower ratio (number of followers versus number they are following).  In this example, there are no particular warning signs, as people with new accounts will frequently start by following a bunch of people.  If this ratio is more like 4 (followers) to 800 (following), this is a warning flag to me because it suggests this person is trying to quickly accumulate followers (and likely is using a computer program) and not looking to form connections.
3. The second metric is the number of tweets compared to the number of followers.  The idea here is that I am looking for people who have built a following over time, not over night.  In this case, there’s no particular warning flag either.

If none of these three metrics presents any show-stoppers, then I will click on the person’s profile and take a look a little more deeply.  Keep in mind that between the time when you received the follow message and then visit the profile, those metrics in the email could have changed dramatically so I will take a second look at those first.

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1. Case in point – notice that now the follower ratio has changed to 12/625.  This is now screaming, “Spammer!”
2. The next thing I look for is real profile information, like a bio and web page.  Taking the time to fill out this information is an indication that the person is genuine.  If a web page is there, it can be another warning flag if it looks suspicious.
3. Last, but not least, I will examine their Twitter updates to see what they are saying.  In this example, we have an obvious spammer who is trying to con people into signing up for programs that may or may not be legitimate.  Many of these scams will hijack your Twitter account and send out spam messages.

If you have any other tips or tricks, please leave them in the comments for everyone’s benefit!

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In a recent discussion with ISA leaders regarding how to lessen the number of emails it sends members, the topic of Facebook fan pages came up.  The context of this discussion was focused on how ISA could be at least as effective at marketing its publications while reducing the number of emails it sends.  I was asked to explain specifically how a fan page compares with email marketing, and I came up with seven advantages:

1) “Opting In” vs. “Not Opting Out”
People must take an affirmative action to “become a fan,” which says a lot more than “I choose not to opt out.”  From a marketer’s perspective, these become your top shelf, number one, gold plated prospects.  And you treat them that way.

2)  Marketing Upside
When someone becomes a fan, all of their friends see it. This has tremendous marketing “up side.”  When someone doesn’t opt out of emails, nobody knows and there is zero additional up side.

3) Build a Community
Fans can interact with one another on the fan page, providing book reviews, answering questions, talking about their favorites, etc.  This is the very essence of Web 2.0.

4) Analytics
Facebook provides detailed statistics with regard to interactions that occur on fan pages.  This makes is very easy to quantify the value of the page over time.  Typical email marketing solutions provide counts of the number of times a message is read or a link is clicked.  However, Facebook has additional metrics that can measure interactivity and “buzz.”

5) Reach
Fan pages are open to everyone on Facebook (that’s 325 million users) – not just your email database.

6) Demographics
The fastest growing age demographic on Facebook is 35 to 45 year olds.  This is a critical demographic for many organizations.

7) Cost
Fan pages are FREE.  Enough said.

Let me know if I missed something.

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