The Growing Internet
Friday, October 12, 2007
Yesterday, a bylined article on the topic of our soon-to-be antiquated Internet infrastructure was published on CNET by Michael Keenan from UC San Diego. In it, Keenan stressed the significance of the fact that in the near future, the Web will no longer hold the demand that we are putting on it.
Michael explained that when the Internet was created, its size and use was undermined, but the limitations of the structure were not truly felt until recently. After all, it was not that long ago that we used the World Wide Web for just email. Now-a-days, we use it for pretty much everything. In Keenan's words, "[t]he Internet has gone from a complement to everyday living to a principal platform for business and personal activities."
While his article went down the path of discussing the sad state of broadband in the U.S., which, by the way, is in 15th place worldwide, behind countries like South Korea, I would like to go back to this notion of the Internet's importance in our role as influencers. I think this idea is hard for some to grasp because those Internet-free days or days of it being "a complement" are not too far gone. Yet, it is undeniable, we don't just use it to stay in touch with family and friends, but for essentially any information that we need. At which restaurant to eat; how to get there; and what to do afterwards. We decide all these things and more from the information we get online.
This is why it is crucial to have an optimized website. Meaning, your site needs to come up in search results that are initiated by words that are associated with your business. What am I talking about? For kicks, try typing "pr firm" into Google. In the first 2 pages of Google results, you will find 3 or 4 actual PR firms, one of them is Connors Communications. Is it such a leap to say that many businesses begin their search for a PR firm just this way?
In another article in MediaPost, Anand Subramanian writes about the concept of "The Long Tail" and its importance to advertising. He references eMarketer's 2006 report that found that "Internet users spent 61% of their time online outside of the top 20 domains, which includes most major social networking sites and web portals."
For advertising, it means that media buyers need to spend money outside of the top 20, and for public relations professionals, it means that we have to channel these niche markets with as much vigor, if not more, than those top 20.
But don't panic! This should come as a relief. Of those top 20, perhaps half are actual news sites like The New York Times and Google News. We all know the challenge in getting placements in this type of media. What these results indicate is that by compiling a list of relevant and attainable blogs and niche news sites, our PR campaigns can be even more effective than hitting the New York Times once or twice. Labels: Internet, new media, optimization, Public Relations, search, The Long Tail, Web 2.0
The Cobbler's Children DON'T Live at Connors
Saturday, April 28, 2007
OK, here's the remarkable thing to make my point about blogging, SEO and the long tail. This page is in the first page for the term "cobbler's children".
I was merely stating that the Connors Communications PR firm that created HitTail is NOT a victim of cobbler's children syndrome, because we do practice what we preach.
Did that earn us the first page of Google on this 2-word term, as if we were a Wikipedia entry? I don't think so, but hey, you be the judge. Comments welcome.Labels: Cobbler's Children, Connors Communications, HitTail, PR firm, PR firms, seo, The Long Tail
Lawrence Lessig and Chris Anderson an NYPL
Friday, September 29, 2006
So yesterday I had an opportunity to sit and listen to Wired magazine editor, Chris Anderson, and Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, talk at the New York Public Library. It was the now very familiar long tail subject matter, and I was hoping to hear more about the brewing DRM culture war that Lawrence as the creator of Creative Commons, is at the center of. In fact, there's a DRM protest demonstration being held at the Apple store this weekend. But alas, it was mostly about the long tail.
It's the first time I heard Lawrence speak, and this blog post is mostly about his style. Chris' long tail ideas evolved around a PowerPoint demo and charts and graphs, as he readily states, and when Lawrence got up to run his demo, you could see the glowing Apple logo on the top of his PowerBook, which led into a decidedly non-PowerPoint demo, which I recognized from the text transitions as Apple Keynote software. So, the Wired publisher had the charts and graphs, and the lawyer had the lively humorous videos.
But by far the most noteworthy part of Lawrence's demo was how he slickly "framed" the rest of the discussion. The demo talked about the read-only culture (RO) of mass consumption, and the read-write (RW) culture of neo-creative's who remix popular culture into their own art. And the last slide was an entirely black screen with the words "RO vs RW" big and centered in a way that RO ended up over Chris' chair and RW ended up over Lawrences.' And it just sort of stayed there for the rest of the discussion.
It worked at a very subconscious level, and I was looking around to see if anyone else appreciated the irony. No one mentioned it throughout the rest of the talk, which lasted over an hour. The discussion could have gone in almost any direction, but you could just feel from the nature of the questions that the conversation was "framed" as the read-only long tail consuming culture of Amazon and iTunes users vs. the re-mixing, copyright violating consume-and-resume anti-commercial culture of YouTube.
They seemed to agree on many point, and searched out where their points of contention were in order to make the discussion most interesting. And while they varied on some small points, they agreed on most, like the future of microtransactions. They both felt it was generally community-poisoning bad thing, whereas I [gasp] agree with Jason Calcanis in that quality creativity and a time commitment should be able to be directly rewarded. In fact, I fell that "being creative" should be a viable alternative to state lotteries, able to turn the creators into overnight millionaires.
But aside from the actual subject-matter of the talk, the most interesting thing I came away with was the contrast between Lawrence and Chris, and the very slick presentation style Lawrence used to "frame" the discussion. It was evidence of the power of an emotive presentation style over figures and statistics.Labels: Amazon, blog, The Long Tail, Youtube
Long Tails and Wise Crowds: Some Pre-qualification Necessary
Sunday, July 16, 2006
So, I'm just getting into James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds. I know I'm a Johnny-come-lately to blogging about this book, but as I encounter the pre-qualifications of what makes a crowd smart, I keep coming running into similarities to what makes a market have a long tail. With The Long Tail, the qualifiers are increasingly simple means of production, distribution and filters, turning making the supply-side virtually infinite. Because online shopping is striving to become a mere 25% of all commerce, long tail markets are still the exception and not the rule. Admittedly, it will be becoming more so over time, because improving technology dictates improving supply-side capabilities. But today, the long tail is mostly an eBusiness phenomenon.
Similarly, the absolutely counterintuitive notions of the wise crowd are predicated on a diverse sampling of people. If the crowd is too homogeneous, such as everyone being smart, the crowd actually gets stupider, because cohesion and bias sets in. James refers to the bad decisions leading up to the Bay of Pigs invasion as an example. The same people who thought up the idea were the ones consulted on whether they thought it could work, and vital facts were left out of the decision making process had they used a larger sampling of people, such as the intelligence branch of the CIA or the Cuban desk of the State Department. So, just because you have a crowd and an independent voting mechanism doesn't mean you have superior predictive or decision making capabilities.
And that has been on my mind recently, thinking about Digg. Digg has many of the things going for it that one would think necessary to create a Wikipedia-like phenomenon. There was a debate recently of whether Digg was better than The New York Times, and could one day have a larger audience and influence. This brought me back to making Digg part of my daily read, least I get left out. I quickly took it off again, realizing the signal-to-noise ratio was excessive for the finite time I was willing to allocate. Linux stories, no matter how small, are considered front page material by the Digg audience, while actual newsworthy stories, even in technology, faced a difficult challenge in rising to the top.
It was with this perspective that I watched with interest as Jason Calacanis helped AOL launch the new Digg-like Netscape, but with Anchor picks. I thought, OK, here's where the wisdom of the crowd could be brought to bear on news, but without the anti-Microsoft Geek agenda bias. Not because of the Anchors, but rather because of the broader and more diverse sampling of audience a site like Netscape could bring to bear on the problem. It's too early to draw any conclusions, and I certainly wouldn't replace the Yahoo top-headline RSS news feed on my mobile phone with the Netscape feed yet. But the fact that technology news is getting mixed right in with politics and natural disasters is an interesting sign. Considering it's the Time Warner conglomerate behind this, I think they could have given the endeavor an even better chance by picking a more news-oriented domain from their portfolio, like Time.com. It may have less traffic (according to Alexa), but it's probably a better audience for this sort of experiment. Now, that would have made news, and really tested the viability of the new news dynamic.
So, my summer reading list also includes Inside the Tornado and The Tipping Point, two books which I know are all about pre-qualification. Not every company finds themselves inside the tornado having to deal with hypergrowth. And since the bust, it's even fewer. But still, it does happen, such as with MySpace. And Connors may have such a case in HitTail--only time will tell. But I'm VERY interested in those pre-qualifications that the Tornado book deals with.
Similarly with The Tipping Point, not every industry undergoes rapid change analogous to the outbreak of an epidemic. It's only when such-and-such conditions are met (the pre-qualifications) that you reach a point of no return. It may take overcoming much initial resistance before a process is set irrevocably in motion. I revert back to the Google example. Google taking over the world was not inevitable in its early days as seems intuitively obvious today. DogPile and Mamma seemed MUCH better than Google to the casual observer in those early days. A lot of people had to be convinced to look closer before dismissing this minimalist colorform-esque site. What exactly were the pre-qualifying factors that ALLOWED Google to overcome and reach the tipping point? I need to know.
So my final point is that these generalizations about disruptions to the shape of business, culture and our lives always seem to require pre-qualification, which has something of a dampening effect. If every new business concept were as transforming as the hype accompanying the launch and the book's success, then society would be getting transformed and re-transformed at a more rapid pace. In the face of books like The Long Tail, The Tipping Point, Crossing the Chasm and others of that ilk, I'm constantly in conflict over how much I buy into the pontifications of business guru, and recently deceased, Peter Drucker. I REALLY believe most of what Drucker has to say about the underlying tenants of business, success and change. And in the end, I think Peter Drucker was right about most things: you might say about the first 20% of things that make 80% of the difference. And you'll really appreciate the irony of that statement if you're a longtailer.Labels: blog, digg, The Long Tail
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
Friday, June 30, 2006
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
I HitTail, You HitTail
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
We chose a wonderful name for the new Connors Web 2.0 killer app, and the positive quotes being left all over the Internet are telling the story. And that's all while we're in the first few weeks of a very quiet beta soft launch. I only just announced the service at a few forums specializing in "search engine optimization" and registrations have been almost doubling every week ever since. We've got our scaling plan all worked out, and we expect to make a very big splash in the worlds of public relations and marketing.
Our name implies that we are a noun, verb and present participle. Visit the HitTail site where you can HitTail. You will be HitTailing, and that makes you a HitTailer.
Another major accomplishment was taking some very obtuse concepts and making them understandable to the world. Chris Anderson is doing a big favor for us by mainstreaming the Long Tail concept, which is one of the principles at work behind the HitTailing process. But also, we have been able to take our original PowerPoint demo and Flash-ify it for a much livelier, more engaging experience. At the end, you're like "oh, of course!" And THAT is a huge accomplishment for something that one could hardly wrap ones' mind around a few months back.
So in a few months, I expect a lot more folks will be joining us as HitTailers, looking at search hits that occurred on their sites as unique events to be learned from as assuredly as if someone slipped a note into a suggestion box. In a very real way, it is like W. Edward Deming's principles of total quality management (TQM) applied to website content. Who knows what keywords to target better than your most determined Website visitors who actually worked hard to find you?
Take their advice, and make it easier for everyone the next time.Labels: Connors Communications, HitTail, HitTail Plus, The Long Tail
Best PR Firm in NYC
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Please excuse this VERY SHORT post. I'm making a point about PR 2.0, search engine optimization, and Connors Communications' new product "HitTail" (previously MyLongTail). I will link to an explantion of the point of this post in the comments section in a few weeks.Labels: Connors Communications, HitTail, HitTail Plus, pr, The Long Tail
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
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