Zooming Vs. Scroll And Search: How Will It Effect SEO?
Monday, February 11, 2008
A fascinating article in Newsweek.com caught my eye, about how the future of online naviagation might be in zooming, not the scroll and search with which we are so familiar. This all apparently has to do with the way humans process information, being far more skilled at scanning and picking out information spatially than by navigating lists. This has been a situation that has bedeviled web-developers for years -- but now there is finally headway being done in the area of zooming navigation. Of course, we already have some examples of zoom in the form of Google Earth. But, Google Earth has pauses in its zoom to load up new images. The technology we are referring to in this article, however, involves seamless zooming, like increasing the power of a telescope. The Microsoft-owned Seadragon is a bold step in that direction, and with a sharply increased staff as of late, it is clear the software giant has a great belief in its potential to revolutionize both the Internet and they way we navigate our own desktops. So picture, if you will, a search where instead of lists of links you had a visual “map” of choices. You quickly scan with your eyes this map, lock in on the visual you want, and click a button to seamlessly zoom in on it. Repeat, drill-down, zoom in on result after result. I know what you might be thinking – this sort of navigation might work well on a nice big monitor, but what about a cell phone? Well, wouldn’t this method work better than a list of links? I mean, how many Google links can fit on a mobile device’s “screen?” Five? Of course, Microsoft is also working on its own version of zoom for mobile – Deepfish. But, the $250,000 question for us remains – how does zoom navigation impact SEO? Certainly, there will still be tags and keywords. And apparently a zoom search is more efficient than scroll, increasing the amount of information one can work with at one time, according to the Newsweek article, by perhaps even a thousand. However, I would think there would be certain logistics related to search results that would have to be adjusted. And, since zoom navigation might one day take over from scroll, we will have to anticipate these changes and adapt. Labels: blog, Google, Microsoft, seo
Will Google’s Vendetta Against Baidu Impact The Future Of Free Music Downloads?
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Google’s mission to oust the success of Baidu in China has been uphill, despite a move by the American search giant to larger offices in the country and increasing staff. Now Google hopes that offering free music downloads to the Chinese via a partnership with Top100.cn will turn the tide. By cornering the popular music search market – something Baidu has become quite popular in – Google hopes to make crucial inroads on Baidu’s supremacy and gain a foothold in the continent. Most intriguing in all this is the possibility that the precedents Google might set in China for free music downloads and music search, if successful, will spread to the rest of the world as well. Beyond the immediate questions of how this will affect the music industry, what impact might a legal music search/download system implemented by Google have on SEO? What sort of data might be generated by this new system of legal free downloads and the keywords used to find them? When I think of the online marketing matrix that might be created between Google, music search/free downloads, and the possibility of melding social networking with SEO, I marvel at the possibilities. For example, the music searches can be tagged in Google with keywords, particular searches bookmarked for other users to browse. Google could have a social network set up of just saved searches and playlists, a competition brewing between users as to who is the “top” searcher. Meanwhile, you have all this keyword data cropping up, including what I would think would be some great long tail results. So will Google do what Napster could not – popularize legal free music downloads? And how will this change the online marketing playing field? Stay tuned to find out…don’t touch that dial! Labels: Google, music downloads, new media, seo, social media, social networking
The SEO Firm & New York
Friday, January 18, 2008
Madison Avenue is the home of advertising agencies and PR has often times found itself at the heart of New York City. But SEO has yet to be pinned to one specific geographic location.
Having been in the SEO business for about 10 years, we seem to be dominating the SEO space here in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan. Perhaps our chic locale will start a trend.
In our increasingly interconnected world, however, we might soon find location to not be as relevant as it once was. After all, we are doing business with companies outside of our little neighborhood. We are even branching out internationally.
Being competitive and offering truly unique services is thus the top priority for companies dealing with the online space. In a recent ClickZ article, Mike Grehan warns SEO-ers that we need to step up our game in 2008. Years before, when search was more rudimentary, SEO was pretty straight forward. Streamline a company’s website and they are on solid ground for months.
With the evolution of our search habits, SEO is just not that simple anymore. We have to get beyond the basics and truly add creativity to our practice.
It’s a good thing that Connors recognized this years ago. We have always banked on the long tail concept, knowing that the majority of hits to a site originate from people searching on material that is only remotely related to it.
For example, let’s say you type “French restaurant NYC” into Google. You then see a French cookbook in the midst of your search results. You click on the book and, since you are craving French food, you buy it. So, even though you were not aiming to buy a French cookbook, you did anyway. It might go against the grain of your common sense, but that often happens with human behavior.Labels: 2008, Google, New York City, search, seo, Web 2.0
Our Brain and Google
Friday, December 14, 2007
Have you ever wished that you were as smart as Google, or that you at least thought with the same diligence? Well, it turns out, you do.
Scientists have discovered that the formula behind Google PageRank and how the search engine finds relevant information is very similar to the way we think, associate and remember.
It’s a truly remarkable discovery that makes a lot of sense once you think about it. Take the Google PageRank, for instance. Google determines a page’s rank or importance by the number of sites that link to it, as well as the importance of those sites and who links to them.
This means that if you have a website and 100 of your friends linked to your site from their sites, you might still have a somewhat low PageRank. This is because your friends are not really all that important in the larger scheme of the Internet. But, if you had a website and the New York Times and Newsweek linked to it, your PageRank would be pretty high, because those two sites are very important.
In this same way, our brains categorize information. Just think about all the nonsense you come across every day. Can’t? That’s because your brain has chosen to bury it in its depths; perhaps, on the 20th page of search results, for example.
Now try to recall what you were told on your last performance review. It’s all coming in crystal clear, isn’t it?
What’s most interesting to me about all of this is that we are learning about our brain function from formulas we (well not me, and probably not you… most likely someone much smarter) created for a search engine.
As an article in World Science pointed out through quoting this month’s issue of the research journal Psychological Science, the approach of the scientists who discovered this similarity “indicates how one can obtain novel models of human memory by studying the properties of successful information retrieval systems, such as Internet search engines.”
The article goes onto to say that, likewise, programmers developing new applications for search engines are “likely to find good solutions by studying the mind.”Labels: Google, Internet, seo
Google Phone
Friday, November 09, 2007
This week, Google revealed their plans for what they predict will be a revolution for mobile telecommunications. It’s called the Android and it’s about as sexy as you might expect an android to be.
Google, along with 33 telecommunication companies, has created the Open Handset Alliance. Their aim, according to the LA Times, is to “spur innovation by giving independent engineers the chance to write programs for phones, with no need for permission from mobile network operators or phone manufacturers.”
It’s a noble and hefty goal, especially when you take into consideration the current state of the mobile telecom industry in the States, which many deem to be a monopoly of sorts. The most recent news to hit this cord, of course, was that the iPhone can only be purchased if you have AT&T service. To put it lightly, we Verizon customers felt short changed.
The U.S. is one of the few, if not the only country to have this kind of set up. In other countries, cell phones are independent from service carriers and can be changed with a simple switch of a sim card.
Another issue Google aims to tackle through this endeavor is the inability for its ads to show up on many current smartphones. With Android, Google is creating a web browser for mobile phones that will show a website so that Google ads are visible and clickable. Google is then leaving it up to the companies in the Alliance to create the applications for their cell phones.
So, what can we, both the costumer and the marketer, expect? As a costumer, all phones with the Android technology will not look the same, so style and features will still highly depend on the manufacturer. However, we can all rest assured that surfing the web on the phone will become much easier and will resemble the experience we have on our computers much more.
As a marketer, it will mean the true beginning of mobile telecom marketing. Right now, we talk about it, but few truly consider it when developing a campaign. And for good reason, because for those of us without an iPhone, the Internet experience on a smartphone is frustrating, to say the least.
As the Android and its spawning cell phones develop, we marketers will be keeping a close watch. Overture (a former Connors client) and Yahoo may have brought us SEM, but it was Google that really made SEO popular. And now we also have Google to thank for the next step in MTM, mobile telecommunication marketing.Labels: Google, Marketing, new media
Google's Advertising Paradox
Friday, October 19, 2007
So here's an interesting notion: Google has built its empire on its Google ads yet Google itself, probably the most famous brand of our time, does not and has not ever invested significantly into its own advertising.
So in the olden days, before we "googled" everything, how did we find out about Google? Why did we use it instead of Yahoo or Alta Vista (remember them?!)? From what I can recall, it mostly started by word of mouth. I heard about Google from the mother of the children I used to baby sit. She told me that a silly little thing called "google.com" is the best search engine! "Google?" I asked. "Really? What a stupid name."
But the name stuck in my mind and when I came home that night, I gave Google a go. To my surprise, Google was fantastic. I told all my friends about it and we, along with the rest of the world, have been googling ever since.
I imagine that this was the experience most had and what lead to Google's sprint to the top of the search engine food chain. The AP's Michael Liedtke pointed out in an article on this topic that rather than throwing money into frivolous advertising, Google put its dollars directly to its actual business, which involved perfecting the art of search.
"This advertising aversion has freed up money for engineers, computing hardware and other resources that fuel Google's search engine while leaving plenty of profit to keep shareholders happy and lift the company's stock ever higher."
Google serves as an example for many aspects of business. Its unique approach to marketing, however, is worthy of exploration for any professional in this industry. The key lesson from this particular advertising model, or lack there of, is that quality will always overcome being bombarded with a company's message.
Back when I was baby sitting, literal word of mouth had much more longevity. Before I heard about Google, I would have to actually ask my friends' opinions of things in order to gain perspective on them. Now, all you have to do is go online and you can get the opinions of millions.
The bottom line is a company's main concern, in its beginning stages especially, needs to be the quality of its product or service. Once that is perfected, they can think about giving us a call. Labels: advertising, Adwords, Google, Internet, Marketing, Public Relations, search
It's Free!
Friday, September 21, 2007
To no one’s surprise, the New York Times announced Monday that its TimesSelect service will now be available to all readers for free. It took them two years to realize that even though they were generating money with people signing up for the service, they were losing tons of advertising money by not having the content available for free. So how is it that now, thanks to the Internet, companies are able to make more money by offering things for free than by having people pay for them? The answer is simple: search. People visiting the NY Times website would be frustrated that they couldn’t access the TimesSelect material. But these folks only made up a small percentage of the advertising money that was being lost. The overwhelming amount was coming from those who were searching for specific topics and were being routed to material from this paid section. So, let’s say I wanted to learn more about France (which happens to be where I just went for my Honeymoon). I would Google “France” and towards the top of the 1st results page, I would find a great article from the New York Times. Because I know the Times to be a reputable source, I would be eager to see what it had to say about France. However, when I would try to open the article, I would find that I didn’t have access because I was not a paid subscriber. You can only imagine the millions of people who had the same dilemma. Simple as it may seem, there is a very important PR lesson to be learned here. People are no longer putting their faith into their trusted news services. Now-a-days, the collective majority Googles whatever it is they want to know about. Sure we might still be more likely to go to the Times than to some random blog, but (as we PR people well know), the Times does not and will not write about most things. What it means for us is that the days of traditional media being the gatekeepers to influencing the public are slowly fading. That role is now shifting to the Internet. With this change, we must pay more attention to not only the press we get online, but the kind of persona our clients have online. What is their voice? Do they even have a voice? Because as I was Googling France, I didn’t find very many helpful websites ending in .fr that were in English, which I am sure isn’t terribly helpful to the French tourist industry. Yet, literally and metaphorically, France is on the map. But for those companies that aren’t, having a solid presence on the Web is starting to make all the difference. Labels: Google, media, new media, Public Relations, seo, Web 2.0
Google Newswire
Monday, September 03, 2007
There was a lot of news made last month out of nothing. The fact that nothing happened 12 months after Google made an ominous deal with the AP was, in fact, quite newsworthy. Many speculated that the agreement was just a payment to allow Google News to avoid royalties and continuing to run as intended (...the kind of agreement that YouTube would love). Turns out that the timetable for unveiling something was 13 months instead. That something was the minor footnote that Google is now hosting AP news on its own servers... as well as articles from the AFP, CP, and PA. An example here shows the story being reported on by the Canadian Press, but delivered by Google.com. This partnership as it stands now is not particularly innovative. Yahoo has been delivering articles from these newswires on its website for years. Newspapers, TV stations, and many other media sites do the same thing. For publishers, however, that is just the problem. They may not readily admit it, but newspapers need newswires. For over a century, they have allowed regional media to cost-effectively deliver national and international news. Yahoo News adopted this model long ago. That was never too surprising given its history as a content-centric destination (and the most visited site on the Internet). Google, on the other hand, rose to prominence as a middle man. Tell them what you're looking for... and be on your way. Later, they started showing ads alongside search results like GoTo / Overture had pioneered. That seemed like a fair deal to get a free, quality search engine. Then they started showing ads on other people's websites with AdSense and providing bloggers with free tools to let people publish their own websites. That was another good idea, even if it led to quite a bit of spam. Meanwhile, Yahoo's Publisher Network hasn't gained the same amount of traction, and their web content has always been focused on keeping people on Yahoo's servers (Geocities, 360, etc.) so the two models have peacefully coexisted.
Now Google is dipping its feet further into content hosting with Google News 2.0 and other initiatives like Google Base or Book Search. Google becoming a publisher instead of just a content locator or aggregator is one of the most dramatic underlying changes taking place on the Internet today. Media outlets better be taking notes. The advertising networks running on those sites better be paying attention. If Google becomes a destination instead of a middle man, then you both lose. It sounds like good business for Google, but they're still not hedging their bets. They're still happy to send people elsewhere as long as AdSense or DoubleClick ads are shown.
The question is: does the partnership makes sense for the newswires? Certainly the future of news is online, and the AP/AFP/CP/PA would all be blind to ignore the 800 pound gorilla. However, there are thousands of media outlets paying for newswire subscriptions worldwide. They provide countless articles everyday to fill up print issues and websites around which publishers sell advertising. If Google begins to pervasively deliver news from their server while showing only their advertising, that cuts out a lot of revenue for many different companies. Of course, your local newspaper is still going to subscribe to newswires even though they made a deal with Google. I just wonder how much longer they are going to be able to afford the fees when their ad revenue declines thanks to Google News, iGoogle, and Google OneBox results. Labels: advertising, Google, media, newswires, Yahoo
Blogging in China
Friday, August 24, 2007
The evolution of Web 2.0 is interesting to track in the West, but it is sometimes even more fascinating to learn about how countries like China, which does not support free speech, fine-tune advancements to align with their censorship. During the past couple of days, stories have surfaced on blogging in China. Obviously, the anonymity available to bloggers is a threat to communist societies and so the Chinese government has "recommended" that bloggers not only refrain from posting "bad" material, but also register under their legal names with providers of blogging technology. Among these providers are companies like Yahoo and Microsoft, who have agreed to the stipulations. Of course, these "recommendations" are nothing short of laws, and are probably enough to deter most bloggers from posting ill thoughts on their government. But this censorship is nothing new. The information exchange on the Internet in China is not only limited through blog content, but also through blocking specific sites. For example, if you type "Tiananmen Square" into Google in China, you will not see any links associated with the 1989 protests. Instead, you will find tourist information and neutral historical references. Though this is outrageous from our American perspective, this technological feat is impressive. After all, in terms of population, China is the largest country in the world and the second largest, after the U.S., for Internet users. Some condemn Google and the like for cooperating with Chinese officials to accomplish this task. However, one has to consider what it would mean if Google would refuse. Would it lead the Chinese government to reconsider its policies? Perhaps. But most likely, it would lead them to find other companies willing to perform the task, making for poorer access to all the unrestricted information online. Labels: blog, Google, Internet, Web 2.0
A Voice through Google News
Friday, August 10, 2007
Just when we thought we could foresee where the world of PR was headed, Google throws us a curve ball with its revamped Google News. Yesterday, word came out about Google featuring a truly unique option on their news site that would allow people and companies to respond to articles in which they are mentioned. The feature is currently in an experimental stage, but if it is to succeed, which with Google's track record is highly likely, it holds incredible implications and possibilities for the PR profession. You're probably wondering how Google will be able to determine whether the comments submitted are truly from the company or person mentioned in an article. According to Google, a new division will act as the gate keepers to qualify sources submitting comments by validating email addresses and/or calling the sources directly to confirm identities. While their methods do not sound exactly scientific or efficient in terms of time, I have faith that Google is not approaching this endeavor blindly. An example of what we might expect is up on the news site. The scenario involves an article on a study that found children prefer to eat food from McDonalds that comes in visually appealing packaging to food that does not look kid-friendly. Following is a lengthy response from the Corporate Communications office of McDonalds and a much shorter response from a professor of pediatrics in the University of New Mexico. Even from this 1st example, PR professionals should be taking notes. Who seems to be the party with something to hide? Might it be the one with the convoluted 550+ word statement? I vote yes! McDonalds clearly doesn't appreciate the fine art of brevity. Also, it doesn't help that their "statement" is simply regurgitated marketing material. A simple, "Of course children like food that has cartoon characters on it! But we also have cartoon characters on our apple slice containers, so the choice in our establishments is based on food, not on packaging." would have been sufficient and effective. We in the PR world know that few issues are black and white, and so it often becomes our job to simplify matters in favor of the companies we represent. Yet sometimes the problem with an article isn't that it was swayed in favor of the opposing viewpoint, but that a company was simply misquoted. As Calcanis, co-founder of Weblogs, Inc, pointed out in an Information Week article on this topic, "Journalists have misquoted people for so long," and it is high time technology offered a way for meaningful corrections to be made. Labels: Google, new media, pr, Public Relations
Google’s Public Voice
Friday, June 22, 2007
This week, Google launched a public policy blog on which Andrew McLaughlin, Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs, shares his thoughts. And for this blog, Google is facilitating a conversation by permitting comments. McLaughlin blogged: Yes, we're a multinational corporation that argues for our positions before officials, legislators, and opinion leaders. At the same time, we want our users to be part of the effort, to know what we're saying and why, and to help us refine and improve our policy positions and advocacy strategies. Looking at this from the PR point of view, one has to wonder how much of this dialogue is driven by the negative press Google has received lately on issues of privacy. Whether or not I feel Google is truly a culprit, comments on blogs are an excellent PR tool and I commend Google’s efforts. The blog itself also creates a great buffer zone for allegations by providing Google with a distinct voice that can comment almost instantly. Only time will tell if Google is truly proactive in its crisis communications; yet, something tells me that we will not be disappointed. I predict a chapter on Google in PR 101 text books of the future, if there is not one already. From the other PR perspective - that being the emergence of new media - it doesn’t take a fortuneteller to foresee that if Andrew keeps up with relevant news and posts with a consistent frequency, this blog has the potential to become a true authority on public policy matters. So this could very well be the birth of actual media being generated by Google. For example, news could be broken right on this blog. So the outcome of this blog clearly holds vast possibilities for us PR folks. In the meantime, we’ll be keeping tabs, taking notes and offering insight as this experiment unfolds. Labels: blog, crisis communications, Google, Internet, Marketing, media, new media
YouTube Embedded Video Forces a Site Visit
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Something just changed at YouTube, and let me explain how significant it is. When you embed video using THEIR video embedding techniques, or if you use a Widget, then you're giving up a lot of control over your page, and perhaps even your entire site.
Just yesterday, I was explaining to a friend, and creator of ChangingThePresent.org how Widgets, the type that get embedded into Web pages, are incredibly powerful. No one would do it, but technically the person controlling the Widget (the publisher of the Widget) has the power to do anything they want with the entire page, including stealing data from other Widgets, or even blanking the whole page and replacing it with another.
It's with this coincidental timing of me just explaining this that YouTube decides to go and make its move. Now HitTail, like so many others was leaching off of YouTube's bandwidth to show our own demo. As of today, they started running Previous/Next arrows to step through (seemingly) related video. Also, they're showing a row of postage-stamp video icons that zoom up at you as you mouseover, much like the Macintosh launch pad.
Now I won't describe every nuance I noticed, but the system is rigged to make you end up on the YouTube site, where a little bit of banner advertising is being run. What YouTube has avoided was embedding advertisements INTO the videostream itself--something that could have resulted in users screaming bloody murder. As it turns out, YouTube has experimentally struck a delicate balance between "evil" behavior that pulls you back into their site to show advertising, and leaving the embedded videos intact in a way that the individual site publishers will not pull YouTube video off their sites. The new features arguably enhance the embedded video experience.
One annoying nuance is that even if an embedded video is running, if you click the next arrows repeatedly, it will pop open a new window of the YouTube site, playing the same video. And what you have then is the same video playing twice in two different windows, with the double narration track and all--very disconcerting. But I'm sure YouTube will work out these problems.
They're finally making their move, and thankfully for all of us, it didn't involve embedding ads into the video stream. But still, it makes you wonder what's next.Labels: advertising, Google, video, Widgets, Youtube
The Irony of Advertising
Thursday, May 10, 2007
I find it ironic that the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) of all organizations is trying to challenge comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings on metrics when they themselves don't even distinguish paid search from the rest of online marketing. Can we even tell if industry forecasts for online marketing include search engine optimization? Not very often. Yet, to us, SEO clearly falls under the realm of public relations. Our work influences the free editorial listings, the same way as we pitch news to newspaper and magazine editors. Honestly we'd be happy if the IAB ignored SEO altogether, but I don't forsee PRWeek or the PRSA picking up the slack. Unfortunately unless more people demand clarification, Google will shape the discussion in its own light by claiming their A/B ad testing tool is optimization… despite 10 years of history that has shown optimization to be clearly about influencing the natural unpaid results. Paid search was pioneered by GoTo.com (a former Connors client, now Yahoo Search Marketing) and it made search engines immensely profitable. Ad agencies and their clients seem to know no bounds in their budgets. However, just as viewers watch TV for their favorite shows and not commercials, people go to search engines for the credible, organic results and not the advertising. There's little doubt that the long term benefits belong to SEO. After all, the web-savvy children who are growing up as Google loyalists often don't even notice the ads. Perhaps the greatest irony of all would be if future generations all used Google and not a single one clicked a text ad. You can bet that is one reason they acquired DoubleClick. Labels: advertising, Google, pr, seo, Yahoo
Powerset: The New Quaero
Sunday, May 06, 2007
As another month goes by, we are treated to yet another juicy tidbit about supposed Google-killer Powerset. Don't get me wrong, I love to see new innovation in the search engine space. Unfortunately, the only transparent thing we have seen from Powerset is vaporware and some in the media continue to eat it up. Until we, the public, have something to try for ourselves, there are lots of other companies more worthy of interest. Ask, Vivisimo, hakia, Snap. Honestly, I am still wondering what happened to Kartoo. Powerset should really fan the flames, because even if they finally release something, it can no longer live up to the hype. There is a point at which perception needs to be backed up by at least a sliver of reality. Remember how big of a disappointment The Next Big Thing (TM) turned out to be? The Segway. Lacking any gyroscopes, I'm sad to say that right now it looks like Powerset is heading down the path of Quaero. Labels: Google, hype, Powerset, Quaero, search
Yahoo: PageRank 10
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Finally, Google's algorithm has recognized what the rest of the world has known all along: that Yahoo is one of the most important websites in the world. Today it appears that Yahoo has established itself alongside Keio University in becoming a PageRank 10 website. 
Alexa, as imperfect as it may be, has kept a track record for the past five years. Although I'm not entirely sure what happened about this time last year. 
Labels: Alexa, Google, search, Yahoo
Windows Vs. The Web (and Linux, OSX, Java and Apollo Too)
Monday, April 09, 2007
One of my online heroes, Paul Graham, is getting a lot of attention this week by predicting the death of Microsoft. It was a grandstanding headline, and Paul does reposition the story to making Microsoft simply less dangerous, the way IBM is less dangerous today than it was up to and through the 80's. He says Google is the one to look out for.
And right on cue, BusinessWeek's story is about Google-noia. And Google releases their own 1-800-GOOG-411 service, as if to state "yeah, we're testing the Starship Enterprise voice recognition user interface, predicted by Google engineer, Craig Silverman at Search Engine Strategies of years past (before he was predicting smart yeast). In addition to an advertising-offset delivery platform (the Google phone or GooglePod), voice recognition is what makes Google truly ubiquitous.
But instead of a Google rant, I think I want to linger on the death of the desktop question for a moment. Of course, Microsoft is not dead. I had earlier made this article about Sun's vision of the network being the computer finally arriving. But the point is repeatedly made around the Internet that until Web software works as well as desktop software, the desktop is still king. But then Adobe came out with Apollo. And it's no longer a matter of capability. It's a matter of consolidating an anti-Microsoft camp with sufficient momentum to make a difference.
And as an XP user at the office, and Vista AND OSX user at home, and occasional tester of Linux distributions on VMWare, I've got a pretty good perspective on OSes. Not to mention I was a Mac user since Drexel University was the first school ever to require computers, and have been an Amiga user since 1987. I KNOW what a cool platform feels like.
And the Web ain't it... yet.
Software running in an API closely coupled with the capabilities of the hardware is always the coolest feeling software. And so far in my experience, software written in languages like C++ are by far the snappiest and most fun to use. That's what PhotoShop was, and Amiga software like Deluxe Paint. Java, even with the Swing UI, doesn't even come close. That's that feeling you get in LimeWire and Azureus, where things just don't feel right. That's why Adobe's demo of PhotoShop running on Apollo was such a big deal. Web-based AJAX apps like Yahoo Mail run a distant third.
And it's the Geoffrey Moore technology adoption curve that dictates that until things become significantly better, and acquire enough un-fragmented users in the early mainstream, the desktop as we know it has A LOT of like left in it.
It would take something VERY disruptive to change that.
Like Nick Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative brought to the masses.
Or a tablet PC delivered to everyone's door by Google.
Or Cable companies adopting a REAL program platform for their set top boxes.
It would have to be deployed in a massive way, disrupting all the financial incentives to keep things working the way they are. Making the move off the desktop will have to be easier AND cheaper than a home PC upgrade.
Because despite the obvious dominance of the Web, people love their home PCs. And they hardly know the difference between running a Web app and a desktop app anymore. Desktop Widgets and Gadgets are further blurring the line. And PCs are still just vastly cheaper than Macs. And as a daily user of OSX and Vista, OSX really isn't as much better as all the Mac people say. It's downright flakey when it comes to multi-tasking. Us old Amiga folks know what real multi-tasking is, and today's PC is it. Macs just sort of stick.
So think about what happens when Microsoft makes all the same clever decisions as Google, to release their own uber-cheap advertising-subsidized ubiquitous voice-recognition tablet PC that connects on-the-fly to keyboards and printers, offers coupons, and lets you rent software for whatever ails you, protecting your documents for a lifetime and beyond, using Web Services.
Microsoft is still on much more equal footing that some people think. While yes, PCs are starting to feel a bit like your Grannie's PC, like Paul Graham says, all those baby boomers are about to become Grannies.Labels: Adobe Apollo, Google, Java, Linux, Microsoft, OSX, Paul Graham, Sun, Web 2.0
Building Brands Online: The Power of the Internet
Friday, March 16, 2007
The Viacom lawsuit against Google's YouTube will perhaps bring us closer to identifying the influencing role the Internet plays in our lives today. With Viacom's main concern being that its clips are generating an obscene amount of advertising revenue for Google, it seems that Viacom is naively wondering: What is this "internet"? Surely, when the case begins to get under way, an examination into the benefits of these MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon clips (reported in the New York Times to be seen an estimated 1.5 billion times) will reveal that this exposure is actually increasing these channels' viewership. Furthermore, in a recent Online Media Daily article, Gavin O'Malley quotes Eileen Naughton, Google's New York regional sales director, commenting on YouTube's revenue. Naughton explains that "the ad effect has not even begun to be felt. There is no well-built-out [business] model for YouTube right now." Perhaps the real issue being put to the test here is the power of persuasion over the Internet. The media is only recently getting the message. USA Today revamping its website to allow users to comment on articles is a clear indication that this thing called the "internet" is forcing all forms of business to do an about face. So is Viacom just scared of change and is this lawsuit a last attempt to shoo this big bad Internet away? Maybe. But maybe this is Viacom's attempt to get a good deal out of Google. Their way of haggling, if you will. Because, even the Viacom executives, who might not scout YouTube on a regular basis, have to understand that having their material absent from YouTube will only reduce their viewership as our generation has entertainment options that extend far beyond MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon. Labels: Google, Internet, media, Viacom, Youtube
HitTail.com: PageRank of 5 in 4 Months
Friday, October 13, 2006
So, the HitTail.com was registered on June 6, 2006 and we're only at mid-October. In one third of a year, the PR firm of Connors Communications brought a site from a Google PageRank of 0 to a PageRank of 5. Not that PageRank is all that important in long tail optimization, but with all else being equal, if two sites target the same keywords, the one with the higher PageRank will win. So, it's nice to see it go so high so quickly.
This is also a testament to the marketing approach of saying to heck with link building. Just put out a superior product that everyone loves, and make some portion or version of it free. We have no affiliate programs. We haven't asked to trade links. People are just spontaneously linking to HitTail.com throughout the blogosphere. This is yet another reason why search engine optimization is really just a subset of the public relations industry. It's just that no one in PR or SEO really accept this fact yet.
Sure, one can argue that HitTail has been such a success organically because it appeals to the online-savvy crowd predisposed to linking. But that is only particularly true of HitTail because we are so early in the evolution of the new online media of citizen publishing. Give it a few more years, and the "superior product gets rewarded" strategy will work in just about every industry as those audiences go online. And link-building campaigns will be so last-century.
So the message here is that Connors practices what it preaches. We bring our own sites from brand-new unregistered domains to PageRank of 5 and search engine results out the wazoo in under 1/4 of a year, without even asking for a single link. Often, companies are guilty of the "cobbler's children have no shoes" effect. I'm here to tell you that my PR and SEO teams at Connors are as effective in garnering publicity for its own internally incubated technology as they are the handful of emerging technology companies that we take on as clients. And that will serve as one impressive modern PR case study.Labels: blog, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, pr, seo
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posted by Mike Levin |
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Stumble Upon Channel Surfing
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Recently, I've been able to add Stumble Upon to my Internet Explorer 7 beta. I think when I started using Stumble Upon, it was FireFox only, which was a major boon to FireFox, but probably quite a large detriment to Stumble Upon, for limiting its reach. But now that Stumble Upon is available for Explorer, I find that it plus Google Bookmarks is about the ultimate combo for channel-surfing and favoriting goodness.
The irony here is that with broadband access, the modern equivalent of channel surfing has become fun, fast, addictive and visual on the Web. And simultaneously, it has become slow, boring and totally text-based on TV. This is another case of mainstream media just not getting it. Where did channel surfing go?
I made a post about this awhile back on my personal blog, but this is more of a Connors media topic. I made the observation that the only people I've seen cognizant of this problem is ATi, which is now purchased by and part of AMD. The ATi HDTV Wonder card, which is essentially a $100 over-the-air HDTV tuner/PVR card, was going to scan all the HDTV channels and make a thumnail preview of what's on now available in their channel guide. This would have appealed to visual learners, as opposed to the classic TV Guide grid (interactive program guides), which frankly is more auditory in nature than visual. One may argue that text is a visual way of absorbing information, but for most, pictures are much more instantaneous, and text must often be sub-vocalized and funneled through the voice box or bronchial tubes--quite literally a bottleneck.
I mentioned in my previous post, the days of rapid-fire channel surfing ala Toy Story 2, where the pig is looking for the toy store commercial, passes it, and has to go around the dial again because it's faster. That perfectly epitomized the days of analog cable, and taps into a part of the human brain discussed in Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink. Well, those days are over (for now), replaced by more cerebral channel guide, that makes you sit back and intellectually pursue what's on before making your choice. Any attempt to channel surf is met by really long, annoying time-delays that makes going around a 500-channel dial completely unrealistic. I could easily blink my way through 500 channels... if the technology (which is supposed to be following Moore's Law) could keep up.
So, it is ironic that Stumble Upon has come onto the scene, literally adding the channel surfing model to the Web--in an even purer sense than surfing links, because no thought is necessary. A thoughtless, click, click, click to see what's interesting has come to the Web, but it has been removed from digital television! How ironic. The TV broadcast industry just can't afford to let nails be so thoughtlessly driven into the coffin. They should be jealously defending the characteristics of old-school broadcast television that people loved.
Whose at fault? The MPAA for creating digital channel formats that are processor-intensive and only have full picture data every 10-or-so frames? The set-top box people, like Motorola and Scientific Atlanta who leave out circuitry for instant channel-changing (a THIRD tuner)? Is it the component manufactures that make the decoder chips used by the set-top boxes, such as Broadcom? Somewhere in this chain, engineers forgot that people like to channel surf, and by forgetting, thereby shifted away a major usability advantage that was previously held by traditional media, towards the new media competition.
I notice that YouTube is sensitive to this issue, and added a "Next" link in the lower-right of their video. Watch out, television media. Even YouTube is getting it. I guess the big saving grace is that Stumble Upon is still a well kept secret, and is not a default feature in Web browsers (yet). But for those who are not exposed to Stumble Upon, it's like taking the Yahoo Cool Site of the Day from ages ago, combining it with an inexhaustible set of cool pages, adding social aspects that make the coolest things come up most frequently, and taking away all navigation except for a browser button that says "Stumble!" Brilliant.Labels: Firefox, Google, Stumbleupon, Yahoo, Youtube
The Buzz About PR 2.0 Firms & Technology
Sunday, July 23, 2006
It seems that PR companies "getting it" either consists of partaking in online dialogues via blogging, optimizing press releases, or word-of-mouth buzz. I went to a conference recently, and any time I would introduce myself as being from a PR firm, people immediately thought I was going to talk about the "buzz thing". Some of our peers out there that have done a very effective job of positioning PR as word-of-mouth bumble bees, real-time bloggers or press release optimizers.
While we believe in and partake in these practices, the PR industry has been so successful in getting these messages out, that it makes the challenge even more difficult for PR agencies that are technological innovators. Its one thing to be experts at using online tools, such as blog software or newswires, but it's an entirely different thing to have the insight and capacity to invent wholly new technologies and marketing methodologies.
And PR agencies such as Connors are doing exactly that with applications such as HitTail. And now that we have defined a new category of software, tools to help you write for the long tail of search, we have to get over the hurdle that we're branded as buzzers and bloggers and blasters... oh my!
HitTail fosters a decidedly softer sell that's more aligned to the true mission of PR--to get you publicity that you could never have paid for at any price--usually in the form of editorial coverage. You generally pay less for PR than large advertising campaigns, but the pay-off can be much greater. The favorite saying is what is a mention in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal worth? Today, the equivalent is saying what's a top position in Google, Yahoo or MSN worth? PR and SEO are the same. And brilliant editorial coverage is what happens when the client's prospects FIND THEM in the due course of their research, vendor selection process, or the like. In other words, that taboo acronym: SEO, but made palatable to the mainstream marketers of the world.
So, the question is how does a PR agency formulatize the process of SEO? It needs the intimidating luggage that goes with that horrible acronym removed. And it needs to be executed in a reliable, confidence-building fashion, similarly to how the traditional process may involve positioning & messaging, SWOT analysis, pitching news to journalists, and staging newsworthy events.
PR's answer to online marketing is not merely making those same press releases more effective through search, though that helps. PR's answer is not just in opening a corporate blog and entering the online discussion, though that helps. And PR's answer is not merely in chatting it up online or off, though that helps. The answer is in incrementally and systematically dominating an entire conceptual area on the Internet. And since some conceptual areas are so difficult to penetrate in natural search, the answer is in finding the right starting point, carving out a niche, and continuing digging out from the niche in concentric circles until it grows into a crevice, then a cavern, then a canyon. This is not theory. It actually works. You can control a lot of quality traffic in your space this way.
HitTailing works because there's easy pickings out there in the long tail of natural search. If you pick a phrase that's at all off the beaten track and write about it in blogging software, you're almost assured a strong position in the search results. And it may pay off. The difficulty is in knowing where to begin and improving your odds. And a PR agency has the answer. A PR firm has such a deep strategic understanding of natural search that they were able to break out just a tiny piece of the SEO offerings that they offer to their clients, with that alone, potentially move the entire state of online marketing a large step forward.
The technology is necessary, filling a major missing hole in online marketing tools. Why? Because, if you begin in the wrong part of the long tail of keywords, you're going to be doing a whole lot of writing for nothing. But if you start in the right place, then you're going to start growing traffic and improve the accuracy in your decisions of where to go next in that endless long tail of potentially lucrative, but mostly time-wasting long tail of search. This technology is 50% automation, and 50% hard work, because you can't automate the craft of writing original content.
But I find myself constantly having to knock down the buzzing and the blogging and the news blasting hurdles, which were the first PR attempts to master online media. It has actually given the some SEM firm counterparts a lot of ammunition to discount PR agencies as limited in technical capabilities. As practitioners of warm & fuzzy relationship building, there's no way we can consult about search on a strategic level, some say. In fact, they plan on making the search discussion so technologically intimidating, that they scare away traditional agencies, and reduce the competition in the new media agency space.
Connors has actually made the deliberate decision to deliver paid-search through partners, and to focus instead itself on genuine editorial search coverage. This is the proper domain for PR, and is ever more widely acknowledged by industry observers as the most valuable company asset. Those who master natural search--especially ACROSS engines--are not beholden to anyone. As engines come and go, their asset and very strong posture will remain. With properly executed public relations, a strong presence in search is not the result of an advertising campaign that only lasts as long as you're buying the media. Instead, it persists, just as with the genuine reputation that comes from repeated exposure from trusted sources.
Connors has developed technology to do exactly that. It's different from the type of software you'll find in the SEM world, such as bid management tools, because it's not a media buy. It's a media seize--but in very small, smart increments. Results will be completely measurable, and over time, you can grab bigger and bigger pieces of the editorial media. Eventually, such small grabs will build enough critical mass within your site that making the big keyword grabs becomes possible.
What do I mean by that? Well for example, search for PR firm in any major search engine. Connors was not able to achieve the first page position across all major engines over night, even though it's the subject matter of the main homepage. We first had to start with smaller concepts. We used HitTailing to build up the content of our website and our blog. And over time, the concept of PR firms kept coming up, and natural links started to occur to us from people discovering our site, and they would reliably refer to us as a PR firm, without any prodding on our part. It's a 100% organic process that led from obscure HitTailing to spot-on cross-engine top positions on a paydirt primary keyword that PR firms much larger than us would kill for.Labels: blog, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, MSN, outreach, pr, SEM, seo, Yahoo
Putting Your AdWords into Stealth Mode
Thursday, July 06, 2006
With the recent Yahoo settlement of the click fraud case, the flurry of follow-up news is coming out, including a study just announced by Outsell, Inc. Their survey states that 37 percent of marketers reduced their click-based advertising, and that the money paid in fraudulent clicks is about $800 million... compared to the $7 billion size of the industry, that's a sizable percentage if it is to be believed.
Are you planning to cut back your paid search spending? Perhaps we can recommend an alternative. If you want to get high-quality click through and conversion, advertise on keywords other than the obvious "benchmark terms" known by you and your competitors, then switch from broad matching to narrow matching. In this way, you keep running your PPC campaigns, but they go into "stealth mode" in the long tail of search.
But how do you choose such keywords? Well, Connors just happened to develop a tool for natural search engine optimization which is proving to be an invaluable asset in improving AdWords campaigns when you import the natural search keyword list. How is this possible? Your cost per click is driven down in Google as your relevancy is deemed to be improved. This is why you have to remove terms that are underperforming in order to "fine tune" your campaigns. We have HitTail users reporting campaign improvements doubling, from 3% to 6% click-through. Using your long tail keywords in your paid campaign appears to trigger off some sort of "relevancy" magic that both improves performance and drives down campaign cost.
So, use HitTail for a few weeks, and export the natural optimization keyword lists using HitTail's new export tool. Plow them into your AdWords campaigns. Switch from broad to narrow matching, and watch your PPC campaign go into stealth mode, and confound your competition who probably doesn't have the time or resources to monitor on more than a fixed list of well known benchmark terms.
This of course has the secondary advantage of helping you start to fix your state of natural search results. The same terms that will fine-tune an AdWords campaign are often excellent subject matter for new blog posts, which will in turn improve your natural search results and further reduce your exposure to click fraud risk by simply making a larger portion of your clicks into the free variety. It's a form of hedging your bets.
And this answers the two notions that have been nagging at the back of the minds of online marketers for some time: is click fraud happening on my site? And isn't doing well in natural search a better online initiative? If you answer Yes to both of these questions, then the time is perfect for you to check out the new HitTail tool that is advancing the state of online marketing.Labels: Adwords, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, Yahoo
Getting Your Site Indexed in One Month
So, the HitTail domain was registered only 1 month ago. Yet, it is already at the top of Google on some limited keywords, such as longtail marketing. Sure, it's obscure, but obscure keywords that actually are searched-on and convert are exactly the point of HitTailing. But maybe more significant is the fact that today is July 6th, and the HitTail domain only became active on June 6th. And yet, we're included, and indeed at the top of results, on many Google searches already. This flies in the face of conventional SEO wisdom, that you should expect up to a 6-month waiting period, especially on brand new domain names. What's going on here?
I'm particularly interested, because a story got pushed to the front page of Digg yesterday about getting your site indexed before you launch. The Digg crowd immediately lambasted the poster for putting up common sense information, being self-promotional, and generally spamming Digg. This is in marked contrast to the over 700 diggs the story received by the time I read it. There seems to be some disparity between the information that general Diggers value, vs. those who take the time to post comments. Because they're at a "democratic" news site (not really), they seem to already be interested in new ways of propagating news. Yet any story even touching on alternative online marketing methods, especially SEO, results in the geek game of pile-on the spammer. It appears that spam is only permissible if your agenda is the furthering of the Linux cause, in which case no story is too small (I got Debian running on my wristwatch, etc.)
One particularly unenlightened commenter had this to say:
"Hmmm. Maybe the highly intelligent person responsible for this article needs to find out about the Google Age-Delay feature. This prevents any new domain name being indexed and listed with any authority in the first 6 months of going live. This is to prevent domain spammers from using multiple domains to span a single site, or to create so many links between "fake" domains that the google PageRank is spammed into providing BS rankings. So - no - this doesn't work with Google unless your domain is already 6 months old - by which time it will be well and truly indexed. Kinda stupid really.
It's like these SEO companies that charge $70,000 to do a job which takes one guy about 2 days work, and none of it technical. [Deleted] useless. And the people who hire them: [deleted]." This commenter's notions are so incorrect, I don't know where to start. First off, brand new domains can receive top Google rankings in under 1 month. We've proven and documented that. Whatever "age delay" feature there may be in Google is merely a dampening effect to slow down the influence of suddenly appearing sites. It follows the same "crawl-to-crawl" iterative process documented in their patent applications from last year, meaning that brand new sites are diluted in their influence merely by virtue of not having built up any momentum.
There was some fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) introduced based on the large number of chances wrought by the updates nicknamed Jagger, then BigDaddy. But the core principles of BackRub are still as intact today as they were during the earliest days of Google behind the walls of Stanford. We know that through constant monitoring. The commenter's opinions are some speculative notions that were espoused around the time of these updates to explain why so many people were having difficulty getting new domains indexed. We had the same issue, and overcame it in the 6-month period the user stated. But the 6-month delay rule can not be used as a generalization.
A website's inclusion and positive standings in the results can be jump-started by sudden worldwide organic linking to a site in a way that is impossible to fake, such as happened with HitTail. I'm sure this is Google's way of not excluding sites that become significant suddenly in a very short timeframe. Were Google to not include such sites, it would itself appear not relevant. The Google default search is in itself a news source driven by the wisdom of crowds. And the crowd can accelerate relevancy and natural inclusion.
The point the commenter makes about 2-days of work for one person to do non-technical work... well, I'd like to see the commenter fix such a site with 10,000+ pages run by enterprise content management systems that never had search friendliness as a criteria in the first place. This is often the case. In fact, in addition to the sites being hopelessly broken from a search perspective, the organizations themselves are often riddled with politics--particularly between the marketing and the IT people. SEO is highly technical, sometimes requiring coding and implementing completely new "presentation layers" in existing systems, and sometimes requiring rapid and intelligent tagging of thousands of resources. On top of the technical projects, there is an equal amount of finesse in building consensus among all the stakeholders, so that the projects actually can get done.
Domains can be registered and brought to the top of Google results in under a month. It's easiest to do this when the website itself is graced with sudden worldwide popularity, and the inevitable globally dispersed organic linking that accompanies such popularity. It is also easiest to accomplish when the targeted keywords are not of the most competitive sort, but rather are long tail keywords, such as those recommended by HitTail. If you're looking for the edge in online marketing, ignore the conventional wisdom, especially if it's coming from Digg commenters. And that's a generalization you can count on.Labels: digg, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, seo
PR Firm Makes it to Museum of Modern Betas
Monday, July 03, 2006
That's right, a product created by a NYC PR firm has reached Saurier Duval's clever and popular Museum of Modern Betas site... twice! Thank you, Saurier for recognizing the value of re-listing us since our name change. It will help us a lot in getting established.
For a variety of reasons, we changed our name from MyLongTail to HitTail. And in doing so, lost some initial momentum. The MyLongTail beta site was becoming linked-to at an increasingly rapid rate. The domain acquired a Google PR of 2 within days of the beta announcement--rare for a brand-new domain. So it was with this sense of urgency that we wanted to get the renaming over with as quick as possible.
Thankfully, we are rapidly regaining our momentum, and just about everyone who blogged about us during our beta release in June has made follow-up posts with our new name. It's in this spirit of gratitude that I'm making this post, to acknowledge the important role that Saurier and site's like his play in giving new beta sites their fair chance in the new Darwinian landscape of Web 2.0... whoops, Web Infinitiy Plus One, betas. Now, if we could just show up in O'Someone's Radar and Michael Arrington's blog. All in due time, I suppose.
Incubating HitTail inside of a New York public relations firm has been an interesting experience, balancing the needs of clients against the desire to extract and abstract a tiny piece of the secret recipe that gives us our edge--then, altruistically giving it away to the world. We're doing this in great part because it is going to be a big public relations win, in and of itself. But we're also doing it with great care, so we do not upset either our Clients, to whom we provide a far greater superset of services, or the search engines themselves, for whom we wish to make their jobs easier and not harder.
The process has also been an exercise in intellectual acrobatics. The connection between PR and SEO was absolutely clear in my mind when I joined Connors. But the way to turn it into a universally appealing product that was not too techie, and which could also scale to meet the potentially massive worldwide demand was not. That took some thought. But we're there now.
Almost everything about HitTail is innovative and counter-intuitive. It hearkens back to the days when Google first started making the rounds outside Stanford. Remember your first reaction? It was probably "so what". It definitively took a few open-minded tries to understand why this stripped-down, seemingly rehash site was indeed something special. It was a culmination of simplicity, relevance and performance at a time that AltaVista and others left an opening so big you could drive a GooglePlex through.
And so it is with HitTail. But instead of the opening being made by anti-search Portal-centrism, the opening is made in the broad divide between the disciplines of natural search engine optimization (intimidating even just to say) and pay-per-click search engine marketing. In other words, the gap between SEO and SEM.
This gap is colossally larger than the chatter on the Internet would lead you to believe. One field is full of technical and editorial projects with built-in inertial resistance. The other field is becoming more like media-buying every day, as analytics increasingly tie back into the campaign / bid management software in order to auto-optimize campaigns, thereby removing the once-technical barriers; in other words, easy!
Are you following? SEO, the free and natural part, remains difficult and rife with politics and inertial resistance. SEM on the other hand, the $7 billion industry part, is becoming easier and more automated due to the financial incentives to make it so. In between lies the void. Atmospheric pressures collide, and there, inside the tornado, lies HitTail.
It is with this level of strategic thinking that we created the HitTail product. It is with the desire to fill this void that we named it with a noun, a verb, and a present participle. You use the HitTail site, therefore, you HitTail. This makes you a HitTailer engaged in the practice of HitTailing. And it is neither the intimidating uncertainties of SEO, nor directly paying homage at the alter of G/Y/M.
And because HitTail is solid, delivering on exactly what it promises, and is adding features with the same cautions "stay close to core" approach as Google, we're not getting shoved into the crowded analytics space (the "portals" of today). Also, similar to Google, our service is so radically different, without seeming so at first glance, due to something very analogous to PageRank that lurks behind the scenes--something that makes our writing suggestions super-charged for natural search effectiveness.
We are effectively taking a practice that many of the most advanced, top-of-their-field SEOs have long engaged in, and making the average marketing Joe able to do the same thing. But this is the nature of all technologies. They are arcane and difficult-seeming at first, but then someone comes along and cost reduces, improves ergonomics and markets it for the masses: like Henry Ford. Or like Prometheus bringing fire to the people. It's a recurring theme, and is inevitable.
But we are not simply making a high-end SEO method as it existed available to everyone. We are adding our own special formula. Just as Larry Page realized that hyperlinking was the equivalent of academic citations, and was a key indicator of relevance in what was to become PageRank, so have we come to understand the key indicators of what is bound to work in terms of natural search.
And THAT is what makes the HitTail data so special, and using HitTail such a source of competitive advantage.
So, on this note, we'll end this blog post that started as a simple thanks to Saurier Duval and the Museum of Modern Betas. It's a real sign of the times when a PR firm in New York City can incubate one of these puppies itself, from idea to execution, instead of waiting for it to come in as a Client.Labels: blog, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, pr, seo, The Long Tail
PR Isn't Adapting, It's Leading
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Where does Public Relations' ability to embrace new technologies and business models come from, where traditional advertising channels are struggling to hold onto their piece of the global marketing budget pie? I think the ability to adapt and jump on unorthodox approaches to generating publicity is just part of the DNA of public relations. Let me explain.
The notion that a company can announce its own activities as newsworthy is in itself a radical and relatively new notion. It brings up church and state issues in journalism. None-the-less, there is no denying that the activities of companies impact society, current events, and even our personal wealth with how more people are invested in stocks. And where high-tech is concerned, it is all the more so, because it reflects upon the overall human condition. The constant flow of nanotube news comes to mind, and how we're inching ever-towards manufacturing on the molecular level. Pure science and industry have never been so closely coupled.
And it is this technology itself that is disrupting traditional media businesses. As data flows more freely, and distribution barriers fall, special interest channels rise, and reaching your audience becomes simultaneously cheaper and more challenging. It's cheaper, because your information is just bits that fly over the ether at virtually no cost. It's more challenging, because anyone can do this, and audiences are organizing and reorganizing themselves into ever-shifting ad hoc communities. Targeting them is more like programming an intelligent missile rather than aiming an arrow.
It is in this environment that public relations shines, and the "old formulas" of press releases and pitching transform into new formulas of blogging, email and social networking. The three big networks of ABC, CBS and NBC are forced to co-exist with countless cable networks, and now even user contributed content over sites like YouTube. Print has undergone similar fragmentation, and additionally has to compete with free RSS feeds that are readable now on the average mobile phone. There is no equivalent today of the ABC, CBC and NBC... well, almost no equivalent.
Search has elevated itself into a mainstream media, and today's giants are Yahoo, Google and MSN, constituting an eerily similar "big 3" resemblance to TV networks. In the runners up, you've even got the media mavens of QVC fame in Barry Diller of Interactive Corp and Ask, and Rupert Murdoch of Fox and MySpace. While you can't achieve similar saturation with a simple media buy as you could on the big TV networks 15 years ago, you can be sure that virtually your entire audience will be visiting Yahoo, Google or MSN some time soon. And you can "rig" the system to deliver your message at exactly the right moment... when... they... search!
It's like today's equivalent of the big-3 networks have an ultra-efficient method of delivering advertising, where you the advertiser never has to pay until the moment you know your intended audience is actually interested and predisposed to your message. And this form of media is competing for the same global marketing budget as TV and print. It is more like a redistribution of these fixed marketing dollars than it is growing or shrinking of advertising budgets. And public relations is uniquely suited to deal with these shifts.
While public relations does have a "formula" per se, involving press releases and pitching, it has always had a more versatile word-of-mouth and publicity aspect that revels in unorthodoxy. It is the unexpected or the extreme that can make a grab for the "free" editorial space that exists in all media. On TV, it's the equivalent of news spots and guest appearances. In print, it's usually the subject-matter of the main articles. And on the Internet, it is both the viral word-of-mouth thing, AND the "natural" results in search.
This is contrary to much of the message that the "inner circles" of the public relations industry are repeating these days. Much of the talk centers around how the traditional formula involving press releases is changing, or how blogging is such a powerful method of engaging in the public dialogue. While I wholeheartedly agree with these notions, I also think that they are missing the big picture by such a broad mark that I had to develop a product by way of responding.
And the HitTail product is Connors Communications way of throwing its hat into the ring. The field of public relations is not merely adapting to these media changes; it is leading. Public relations is not merely keeping itself relevant, it is educating the rest of the world on what it means to be relevant in the new media landscape. Public relations is not merely struggling to reproduce the big viral marketing wins of years past, it is creating brand new methods of virally disseminating a message.
Indeed, HitTailing is like solving simultaneous equations in a way that produces results already described by detractors as "too good to be true." It provides your corporate blogging strategy and your free search hit strategy in one master stroke. "Too good to be true" is quickly becoming the strongest argument among HitTailing naysayers. Think about that. The only things standing between us moving forward the entire state of Marketing are keeping pace with demand, and convincing users that "too good to be true" sometimes IS true.
This is an admirable accomplishment indeed, both for Connors Communications and the field of public relations as a whole. The very companies that stood by and watched as new businesses incubated from operations like Idealab are now able to become their own incubators, their own Angels, and their own Venture Capitalists. For Connors, it was the culmination of about two years of providing these services as a public relations value-add, realizing they had something that could only achieve its fullest potential if let lose in the Web 2.0 ecosystem, and so it has.
So, where multimillion dollar media buys can still allow you to achieve saturation of a sort on today's equivalent of the big-3 networks (PPC campaigns on Yahoo, Google and MSN), the equivalent of getting onto the Ed Sullivan Show or American Idol is HitTailing. It costs you nothing more than the work of putting yourself in the right place at the right time to be discovered, doing it by piecing together the minute clues left for you by your past website visitors.
This unorthodox thinking is something that has always been characteristic of the public relations industry. Sometimes it has taken the form of glitzy stunts that capture the news cameras. Other times, it takes the form of stunning acts of generosity and altruism by PR clients. Very often, it takes no form at all, merely being an invisible influence over what companies and stories are favorably covered. When PR is at its finest, you don't know it is there at all. And so it is that the free and practical alternative to paying for search hits was born in the offices of a New York PR firm, and is now suitable for use by every marketing department in every company in the world.Labels: blog, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, MSN, Myspace, pr, Yahoo, Youtube
NextNY Google Event
Friday, June 30, 2006
Yesterday (technically, 2 days ago now) I went to a Google / nextNY sponsored powwow in the Google offices at 40th & Broadway here in New York. There was a limited 100 open slots for this tech talk, and I was lucky enough to get one of them. Ambar Shrivastava, a co-worker of mine was notified by his friend, Rishi Khanna, about the event. I was lucky enough to get spot 88 that opened up. I hadn't met Rishi before, but I ended up waiting in line next to him. He asked what were the chances, and I realized way too late that the answer was 1 in 50.
Anyway, Google made us all sign the standard non-disclosure then proceeded to put us through a public relations event to promote the New York Google operation consisting of 500 people and that we should feel free to talk and blog about the whole event. So here I am doing just that. They just bought a huge facility in Chelsea right next to where I live, which they did not talk about at all, but I get the idea that the whole Broadway office will be moving. They explicitly said that they are hiring advertising sales people in their large market segments including automotive and a couple of others. So, if you're in sales and want to work for Google in NYC, get hopping. Or is that hoping? Either way.
Representatives from Sales, Engineering and Product Management spoke. Marcus Mitchell gave an intro, followed by Dominic Preuss, Tom Thai, David Eun and Dennis Crowley. Tom Thai's presentation consisted of a long tail diagram showing the profile of their ad clients. A few very large clients existed at the head, namely Sony. There was a fairly big middle, then a textbook case of the long tail. I'm feeling like Chris Anderson, seeing long tails everywhere, but Google's sales of AdWords to the tiny marketers of the world must truly be one of the best long tale examples I can think of. The product is digital and inexhaustible.
Of the presenters, all of which were interesting to varying degrees, Dennis Crowley's ending presentation was the best. It's just such a great story where he was a dot-com'er who went back to school for a business degree, and as his senior thesis project did a project called Dodgeball. It was/is social networking software that you email from your cellphone to tell it where you are. It then proceeds to let your entire "real life" social network know where each other are, so you can all gather after work, or whatever. But the point is that him and his partner had little need or motivation to monetize it, and through serendipity, ended up talking with Google folks who got excited about it, and acquired his 2-person company, and he's now a Google employee. He was a really personable guy who could have gone the entrepreneurial route, and chose Google. It's a mixed bag. He's got the awesome resources of Google to tap, still gets to live in NYC (he was an NYU'er), but now has to compete for those resources with everyone else's 20/10 projects.
Ahhh, the now commonly known Google 70/20/10 rule states that 70% of your time goes to the "core" job, consisting mainly of search and AdWords. 20% of your time goes to things related to your main job, and 10% can go to just about anything interesting. This turns Google into a part-time incubator. It reminds me a lot of Motorola where competing GMs compete to turn different technologies and product lines into nearly autonomous companies. It is a strategy of keeping that special edge that Larry and Sergey brought to the picture as young guys. It's tough to preserve that edge as your company gets large and established, and more and more is taken for granted.
I talked with a delightful woman in the pharmaceutical field there about how companies like Google had to be on constant guard for the business equivalent of geological sudden catastrophic liquefaction wherein your entire foundations suddenly disappear beneath you, swallowing up an entire city before you know anything was wrong. What if Apple didn't make the Mac, and subsequently the iPod? Steve Jobs is a person who totally understands sudden obsolescence is moments away for any high tech enterprise. 70/20/10 is Google's attempt to inoculate against that disease. Not everything needs to be a revenue generator, but it does need to keep the users coming back!
Another aspect of 70/20/10 that I later realized is how it breaks up over a business week. If you assume a 5 day work week (not always true, I know), then 5 into 100 is 20. So each workday is 20%. So one day out of 5 can go into anything you want that's related to your main job, but is not your priority. And a half-day can go into anything at all, no matter how off the wall. And in a culture of super-geeks that have a day-and-a-half discretionary time, it creates interesting super-geek-politics, lobbying at lunch for your engineer buddies to work on your 20% project instead of the next guy or gal's. It creates something like a Darwinian idea farm, which I'm sure has emergent behaviors. Certain ideas create excitement or boredom. I heard rumors that Google never cracked the music nut because Sergey just wasn't that into music, and the 20% projects along those lines never got the resources, leaving Yahoo an awesome opening… but who knows.
Anyway, even though it had the tinge of a recruitment effort, it was still a great event to attend. We all went drinking afterwards at Stitch bar on 37th Street, and went a little too late into the night. I ended up taking the next day working from home, finishing up the video. It shifted my wake/sleep cycle a little too late, as this 4:50AM post probably shows. Good night.Labels: Apple, blog, Google
HitTail - A Practical Alternative To Paying For Search Hits
Welcome to HitTail, a practical alternative to paying for search hits--and a free service to all low-to-medium traffic sites.
Connors Communications, the company bringing it to you is the PR firm that launched Amazon.com and Priceline. We worked with GoTo.com in the early days, helping to establish the pay-per-click industry. And now, we're doing it again... but this time through the long tail of natural search.
What is The Long Tail? It's a notion popularized by Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief, Chris Anderson, implying that less popular items collectively account for large amounts of business. Here, the items in green outnumber the most popular items in red.
Initially, this concept was great for online music stores with no physical inventory, so their library was impossibly large, compared to their retail counterparts. But soon, the concept was equally embraced by pay-per-click firms, managing massive keyword campaigns.
But a dirty little secret is that long tail strategy is even better when applied to natural search than PPC... where all the less popular search terms already account for the largest amounts of traffic. We just take it to the next level.
What's natural search? It's the portion of the search results that people come to the search engines for... shown here in green. It's the equivalent of editorial content... while sponsored pay-per-click results are the equivalent of advertisements. This advertising / editorial mix is characteristic of most media, maintains trust, and we expected to continue.
And as a PR firm, we believe that natural search is better... because it's the equivalent of real world reputation. Securing a listing HERE is the best deal in marketing, with the lowest possible cost of customer acquisition--even lower than PPC. It's like landing free editorial coverage in mainstream media. Every visitor is partially pre-qualified and in is in a receptive state.
The mission of our new HitTail service is to lower your reliance on paid ads while increasing your qualified visitor traffic from natural search... in a sustainable, long-term, cross-engine fashion.
The problem was that until now, no product has been able to deliver this without incurring some sort of penalty... keeping it out of the world of mainstream marketing. HitTailing changes all that. By knowing what’s “almost working” for you, you can grow the mouth of your opportunity funnel while respecting the search engines, and being good net citizen.
The technique has already been used to help many Connors' clients create "super-niches". For any journalists listening, we may be able to get them to talk.
So, whose a candidate to become a HitTailer?
• Anyone who wants to stop paying to acquire visitors
• Anyone who currently has a pay-per-click ad campaign
• Basically, the marketing departments of every company in every country of the world
It's an easy value prop: Use HitTail to quickly identify lucrative new topics, and apply all that saved energy to actually WRITING about the topic. You thereby help increase sales and lower marketing costs. This “formulatized” approach is safer and more long-lived than other methods. It's blogging with insight.
How is this accomplished? HitTail tells you WHAT to write about for growing an effective long tail of natural search...
Watch in real-time as the search hits come in... and get addicted to the black river of keywords that occurs in any healthy site. Learn which keywords HitTail suggests that you write about.
The HitTail site actually shows you the growing long tail of your site. Far into the tail, and for reasons that are not obvious, is the best and most often overlooked data. Connors has developed a unique way to identify these words and turn them into short, actionable lists! Using HitTail is like us doing all the mining dirty work, and handing you the gems.
By optimizing on these gems, you take results found many pages in and bringing them to the top--exposing much more of your site overall. Determined searchers are thereby cluing you into where you should locate yourself for each future iteration.
Each HitTail tab lets you quickly review and pair-down lists, until you have an editorial checklist of topics that will drive traffic.
The first three tabs are only there for their good looks. It's in the Suggestions tab that the HitTailing magic resides. Evaluate new words that appear under this tab, and choose to write about them... or not. Move only the good ones to the To Do tab, which simply works as an editorial checklist. Check them off this list once you've actually used them as the title topic of a blog post or other content on your site, such as FAQs or press releases.
It's that simple. That's HitTailing. It works.
Keeping this up over time results in the snowball effect. A site that snowballs in size and quality over time is rewarded by nearly all search engines. HitTailing helps this happen at a faster rate than with blogging alone. Seeing the results takes much longer with Yahoo than with Google and MSN, but your patience will pays off. Overall, this strategy takes longer than PPC. But PPC is like paying rent, while at the end of HitTailing, you own the house.
How does HitTail know what terms are "almost" working on your site? Just like analytics software, we provide a snippet of code to be inserted into your template. The moment the tracking code is in place, you will see your search hits occurring. Notice the real-time black river of keywords.
This alone has driven many a HitTail user to detox.
So, how do you get started down this alluring trail?
Simply, go to www.hittail.com, click the login link and register. Put the snippet of code in your template, and volia!
It's important to remember that HitTail is NOT analytics software. We are not tracking individual users or conversions. We just do suggestions... bluntly stating: "If you write it, they will come" This deceptively simple process is off-putting to some who love pouring over analytics. That's fine. They're in the best position to see the results of HitTailing, as opposed to being the practitioners.
But for those who see the magic, we've provided what we think is the fastest way for you to feel the love. The sooner you get started, the better it works.
So, what's your next step?
You can give it a try by clicking the login in link and signing up as a beta tester.
You can spread the word... or keep it as your SEO secret weapon. You decide.
Thanks for listening, and we hope to see you join us soon.Labels: Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, MSN, pr, seo, The Long Tail, Yahoo
Natural-Organic Search Result Quiz
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Here’s a quick SEO quiz:
The best way to get into Google is through excessive meta-tagging.
a. True
b. False
Factors that search engines take into consideration include all but the following:
a. Build a strong linking infrastructure
b. Continually add new content to keep the site fresh
c. Upgrade the site so that it’s all in flash graphics
d. Make sure URLs for the site include a relevant keyword
What kind of search results do I want my company to rank highly in?
a. natural
b. organic
Okay, so the answers to this quick SEO quiz are b, c, and the last one was a trick question. What is the difference between natural and organic search? Nothing. Both these terms refer to the main search results, separated from the sponsored links. Using different terms can be a bit confusing, but no matter what you call the main results that a search engine displays, this is where you want your website to be.
Try it. Pick some of what you think are your most important keywords. Where are you in the search? Where you want to be? Okay, now what about some less obvious keywords. Try some longer keyword phrases. Where are you now? This is actually where most of your qualified traffic is going to be coming from. These are the natural or organic search results that make up what is being referred to as the long tail. And no paid ad-word campaign is going to give you the same kind of traffic as ranking highly on these kinds of searches.Labels: Google, seo
Click Fraud Settlement
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Google recently agreed to a $90 million settlement concerning click through fraud. Such a large settlement seems to indicate that Google does recognize this as a problem. Will settlements from Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN adCenter, and Ask Sponsored Listings follow? It would make sense. If you’re paying per click, competitors have the opportunity to add to the rate of your click-throughs without adding any sales. It's hard for any Google, let alone end users to track while it can skew your data and ending up costing you an unknown amount for bogus clicks.
This is a flaw of pay per click ads. And this on top of the difficulties of trying to run a real-time, comprehensive paid search campaign can make increasing search traffic a difficult and expensive proposition. Is the traffic from paid search even worth it? Search engine algorithms consistently go through changes and refinement, yet one thing doesn’t change. Natural search has advantages over paid search results. It gets your site into the most credible area of search results, on the main page of search, not buried among random advertising from eBay or NexTag, and also comes without the per click price tag.
Paid search has become big business. Yet it is more vulnerable than regular search results because you can have issues such as click fraud and the results disappear as soon as you stop paying for them. The safest bet in search is still bolstering organic search results, naturally avoiding any click-through fraud. And by settling this lawsuit and admitting this flaw in their system, Google seems to agree.Labels: Google, MSN, SEM, Yahoo
Is the MIT $100 Laptop GooglePod?
Friday, November 18, 2005
Well, I think the biggest news of the past couple of days has been the $100 laptop from MIT. Sure, it's not a reality today, but 2006/2007 is not a long way off. The price of a Windows license is almost as much as the entire hardware, so of course this thing will be Linux-based. They even passed over Mac OS for it. Such a laptop used in developing nations will result in entire generations of computer-literate low-cost members of the global workforce, which will result in more contributors to open source projects, and so on. Add the rumored solar-powered/wind-powered Internet nodes that could provide virtually free WiFi for these virtually free laptops, and you start to get the picture. And if you look close at the funders of the MIT $100 PC project, you will see none other than... Google! Could this be the ubiquitous GooglePod next generation Yellow Pages? Just crank it up. There's not a lot of room for premium OS pricing. And this announcement just happened to coincide with Microsoft rumors of a completely ad-based free version of Windows. Times, they are a'changin. And that's music to the ears of this old Amiga fan. Labels: Apple, Google, Microsoft
Advertising Credibility
How many Google AdWords do you need? What ad placement can get you the most results? Or should you scrap your advertising efforts entirely?
Advertising is continually growing, especially in the online space. And for good reason. Advertising can be very effective when done well. And in advertising, you get the exact amount of exposure that you pay for and you know where and when it will run. But this is not the only approach and, in fact, may not be the most credible source for consumers.
Ads can say whatever you want them to. But the audience isn't necessarily going to believe it. Consumers have become very skeptical of advertising and while it can be very effective, it can also have more than a few pitfalls. PR, on the other hand, creates messages that come from an outside source. It is considerably less promotional and the results are always a bit uncertain, precisely because of this. However, articles are trusted more and they cost a whole lot less for the same exposure. This is also true for SEO, where the top 10 search results are so vital and the paid keywords so often passed over.
This isn't to condemn advertising. However, I contend that the best and most complete marketing campaign takes the limits of advertising credibility into consideration and augments these ads with solid PR and SEO efforts that can add validity to the messaging. Your campaign will be the better for it.Labels: Adwords, Google, pr, seo
Strange Searches and their Amusing Results
Friday, November 11, 2005
Todd Barrish is part of the team here at Connors and is the "largest todd in the world," according to a recent MSN search. He's not that big, really. I'm fairly certain that the person who came to the Connors website during this search did not find what he/she was looking for. However, this begs the question, what the heck were they looking for, anyway?
Hello world! I'm Jessica Ek and part of my job here at Connors is to monitor what keywords are generating traffic. I look at trends in searching and what phrases are important to bring qualified traffic into clients' sites as well as our own. While looking at the results and sorting the wheat from the chaff, I find great entertainment in some of the phrases that people are putting into the search engines.
As a colleague of mine once said, "Search engines don't speak English." While they search words in English, they don't understand what those words mean individually or in context. Google can't read your mind and you can't ask it a question. You can only provide search parameters and it will supply you with the results of this query. And once in a while, this clash between the human search request and the search engine program leads to strange websites.
Search engines are defining how we look for things and what we find. Here are some stranger phrases that have brought searchers to our website:
Zombie background (this was right before Halloween)
Fallout boy
Tiger population
Connors footwear
Drawings of Gwen Stefani
European casual clothes
What do they all have in common? They led to the website of a mid-sized public relations firm in New York City. Sometimes I just shake my head and laugh. It's always interesting to see what people will be looking for next.Labels: Connors Communications, Google, MSN, search
The Long Tail of Search
Monday, October 24, 2005
Once again, Google posts an incredible quarter, surpassing Wall Street expectations. Go, Google! My thoughts keep going to the long tail of search, a term credited to Wired magazine, circa October, 2004. This is where, according to Wired co-founder, and author of the new book, The Search, things get interesting, and indeed profitable, with search. Towards the left of the long-tail graph, search terms get increasingly more volume over a narrower diversity of words. This is where you find terms such as Britney Spears and Pokemon. But as you travel to the right of the graph, search volume over particular word combinations, and therefore competition for the traffic, also goes down. This is where you find terms connected to particular industries and markets, where there is plenty of money to be made, but which frankly is not part of the public consciousness, or zeitgeist.
And this is where search engine marketing makes the most sense. Why would you pay for all the unqualified traffic on a search term like Pokemon if you were not selling anything having to do with it? On the other hand, if you were in the relatively small and fiercely contested space of digital signage software, every sales lead is worth its weight in gold. Why? Because in addition to winning the lead for yourself, if you respond quickly and thoroughly, you just may keep the sales prospect from continuing their Web research, thereby preventing a competitor from ever getting the lead. And the common wisdom is to just run an AdSense pay-per-click campaign. And this common wisdom has now constituted a mainstream market for search terms, and is what's driving Google to the unexpected levels of profitability. It's not only desirable for a company to come up on its keywords. You might even say it's the duty of a company to do everything it ethically can to come up on the keywords associated with its company, product and markets.
But once again, I'm taking the position that the common wisdom is wrong—at least, in part. AdSense campaigns are a must in certain situations. But would you invest in a marketing campaign at the expense of the long-term infrastructure of your company? And natural search results should be viewed as part of your company infrastructure and assets, for when a paid keyword campaigns stop, the genuine editorial results continue. The problem is that it's difficult to the point of infuriating for the average company to work their way to the top of the search results on their most important keywords. And to make matters worse, they don't necessarily even know what keywords they should be targeting for maximum return. Before you know it, you have an unwieldy marketing campaign consisting of thousands of keywords, and an unhealthy reliance on a marketing campaign for traffic that could be yours through the modern day equivalent of positive word-of-mouth and reputation.
For the secret is that the further into the long tail of search that you travel, the harder it becomes to wage an effective PPC campaign, and the easier it becomes to get the search for free. As more words that are put into the search, the more precise the search criteria become, and the less important factors like PageRank become. In some of the most lucrative industries on the planet, there may perhaps be a small market of thousands of sales prospects. And you never precisely know where on the planet they are going to come from or what terms they are going to search on. So, a company is best served by writing prolifically, and with a genuine voice on their subject-matter. This has a two-fold benefit. First, it provides a corporate blogging strategy. Second, it appeases one of the most important criteria in search optimization—the continuous release of new, relevant content. A strategy of writing and optimizing over time increases the overall footprint of your website, and casts an ever-larger net for uniquely well pre-qualified and self-directed sales prospects, who are looking for you right now.Labels: Google, seo, The Long Tail
Google is the Matrix?
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Just like in the movie that was oh so big a few years ago, before the rest of the trilogy came along and ruined it, the world is full of supercomputers creating our current reality.
Okay….maybe not. But if our world itself isn't comprised of millions of lines of data, our Internet most certainly is. And every minute of every day, people from all over the world are flocking to search engines. Their ideas and interests are visible in a stream of searches leading to sites all across the Web. The Internet is a constant flicker of activity as people jump from page to page. Think of all the hits to your website, scrolling past in a constant march of glowing green data made famous in the movie. It's a digital representation of us and our search matrix, if you will.
In fact, don't just think about it; take a look. We welcome you to the Connors Search Engine Matrix. Relax, wait a minute, and watch the page come to life with search activity and history. A steady influx of visitors leaves their mark, adding to results. Look at what has brought people here. We have harnessed the flow of information that is filtered through Google, Yahoo! and MSN and is then siphoned off to our site. And this insight drives our SEO endeavors to create more search activity in a self-feeding cycle.
Perhaps Google is not the matrix. However, it is the compilation of thoughts, wishes, queries, hobbies, interests and quandaries of a society. And it scrolls past in glowing green text.Labels: Connors Communications, Google, seo, Yahoo
Emerging Technology
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
There is a level of excitement that is exuded from our bustling, loft office here at Connors. This energy is especially apparent when a new client walks in the door with an emerging technology that is simply electrifying in its potential.
Most of all, it's the knowledge that we can really make a difference in the future of a company that drives us forward. With the whole Connors team combined, we have amassed a whole lot of experience in tech companies and their PR campaigns. We have the media contacts and know the process for introducing a new technology to analysts. We know the possible friction of getting the new innovations accepted by the general public and how to position a message that can overcome this obstacle. We have, after all, been at the cutting edge for a long time now.
Back at the dawn of retail Internet, Connors was integral in launching such companies as Amazon.com and Priceline.com. We worked with their business models, potential markets and target audiences at the ground level. Through close ties to Idealab, we helped some of the most innovative companies get off the ground, such as GoTo.com/Overture Services and Picasa. These companies were later purchased by Yahoo! and Google, respectively. Breakthroughs like these have given us a name for being right there, when it happens, as soon as it happens. This has brought us industry-leading clientele with hot new products such as Vonage, SLOOH, Cablevision and Evolution Robotics. We continue to work on media relations for the newest of the new.
Each client poses new challenges and unique opportunities. We research the industry thoroughly and take this knowledge to craft a tailored plan for each client. It's exciting to have the know-how and depth of expertise that can help make a difference. We know we can succeed; we've done it before.
That's one of the main reasons Connors attracted me in the first place. It's a company that always has something new going on, specializing in helping emerging technologies recognize their potential through public relations. A client comes in with high expectations and we help them achieve these goals. That's something worth getting excited about. It's a lot of fun to know you're on the cusp of something important and it's rewarding to see a client succeeding due in part to your efforts. I think that may be why a lot of us are here.Labels: Connors Communications, Google, pr, Yahoo
Search Engine Optimization is For You
Thursday, September 29, 2005
One of the huge benefits of team blogging is that we can play off of each other and make the interplay that usually takes place in email take place on the corporate blog, and use that demonstrate our smartness, and create new opportunities by attracting search traffic on the subject-matter. Case-in-point: every day, we send out a flurry of emails on developments in the Search and SEO space. There's news like Google making the WiFi download available, and opening the huge facility right around the corner from our office here in New York. But there's also controversial articles 7 Ways To Know That Search Engine Optimization Isn’t For You where we could counter every point. Together with the iProspect and MarketingExperiments report, it's almost enough to make one paranoid that there is some attempt to knock SEO going on.
Now I know that the type of work that goes into SEO and SEM is dramatically different. But they are different specialties and different segments under the marketing umbrella. There's room for both. I somehow get the vibe that people who run pay-per-click campaigns are not entirely comfortable with the emerging industry of SEO growing up, adding accountability, metrics, ROI and precise tracking that is as good (or in our case, better) than the tracking URLs within the AdWord world. If you take the time to maintain a website, then you should be receiving all the natural search engine traffic that is your right, based on the quality and reputation of your company, products and services. While we believe that PPC is a valuable part of the marketing mix, we feel that turning a blind eye to SEO is leaving money on the table. No matter your situation, search engine optimization is for you. Talk to us to find out why.
Oh yeah, the point here is that you should blog the news here instead of email, becuse Blogger will send the entire body of the blog post in email to the entire SEO team anyway—links and all.Labels: Adwords, Google, search, SEM, seo
PR and SEO
Friday, August 26, 2005
Greetings Connors Blogging Team and the world. This is our first post onto the Connors Blog Site, and I'm using it by way of introduction, and challenging the team to jump in and participate in blogging here. We have dozens of interesting and engaging discussions here at Connors Communications every week, which would be much better unleashed onto the Internet, and leveraged to achieve some level of blogging celebrity. We talk about very leading edge issues, as we are determined to associate the emerging field of search engine optimization (SEO) as a natural extension of the Public Relations industry. We use better-than-best practices, because when it comes to the build-vs.-buy question, we often build, enabling us to accomplish feats that are unimaginable with Analytics packages alone. So why are PR and SEO connected?
Public Relations deals with getting publicity where paid advertising cannot, usually at a lower cost, and almost always where the defenses of media-savvy consumers are lowest. When you think about it, good PR gets you editorial coverage in the media channel's main attraction. On TV, it's the television programs and not the commercials. In print, it's the articles, and not the advertisements. Effective PR is about enhancing a company's pure reputation through effective word-of-mouth, influencing those who influence many. So it should be no surprise that Connors views the emerging field of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a part of the growing field of Public Relations.
In other words, Public Relations is to Advertising what SEO is to Search Engine Marketing (namely Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing, collectively known as SEM). With paid advertising, your ad runs only as long as you run the campaign. When you stop paying for the coverage, the effect goes away. It is a clear deal, for your marketing dollar, and comes with certain guarantees. PR on the other hand doesn't give such guarantees. Reporters may or may not pick up your story.
I believe that a well executed SEO campaign can be more effective than the equivalent SEM campaign, and is money better spent. There are dozens of reasons, but the most poignant is that the effect of SEO is permanent, and benefits compound over time. As paid keyword campaigns become more competitive and expensive over time, the reason behind the organic approach will become more and more clear. We encourage you to follow our Blog to see how it develops.
Team? By the way, one of the most effective ways of incorporating blogging into your day-to-day procedure is incorporating blogging into Microsoft Word with Blogger for Word. That's how I published this first post, link and all.Labels: Adwords, blog, Connors Communications, Google, pr, seo, Yahoo
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