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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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