Future Trending: The Mobility Of Content And The Need To Track Its Impact
Thursday, February 07, 2008
The blog Buzz Marketing For Technology pointed out a trend for the future of online marketing: the distribution of content and the need to formulate methods for tracking the impact of that content (in terms of views, keywords, and general efficacy in achieving its objectives).
For example, in tradition Web 2.0 marketing techniques, one has a blog or website and content is generated for that particular venue. Then the impact of each post/article is tracked in terms of how many hits it generated, how viral it is, how many consumer referrals were made as a result of it, what keywords were used to find it, etc.
But, the trend is now more and more about distributing that content to other sites – whether it be communal blogs, syndicated content, content carried by widgets that can be installed on other people’s blogs or social networking pages, etc.
This trend seems to me to be part of larger one in business in which the focus is less and less about one's "homebase" -- whether it be a blog or a company headquarters -- and more about mobility. The mobile office: more people conduct their workday partially in their pajamas or dashing down Main Street. The mobile company: companies outsource their help to places halfway across the globe. Even the mobile rock and roll band: individual members of the band will record their sections individually from different areas in the world.
Back to the example of online marketing and analytics. In the (not too distant) future, content will need to be mobile in order to compete and reach its intended audiences, and there has to be something in place to measure the effectiveness of the content in those multiple locations.
Hence, the need for firms who can develop the measuring systems and methods of data tracking to keep abreast of the many streams of content and analyze their effectiveness.
And in this equation let us not forget the seemingly countless streams of social networking tools: Facebook pages, Twitters, social bookmarking, etc. Taking this into consideration, plus the rather “conversational” nature of many blog exchanges, I would recommend a management system that combines both necessary algorithms and spreadsheets plus a personal, organic understanding of Web 2.0 and natural SEO.Labels: conversational marketing, Marketing, search, seo, social media, social networking, Web 2.0
posted by Valerie D'Orazio
0 comments
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
posted by Gina Bolotinsky
0 comments
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
posted by Gina Bolotinsky
1 comments
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
posted by Gina Bolotinsky
0 comments
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
posted by Adam Edwards
2 comments
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
posted by Adam Edwards
0 comments
Silverlight Video Search
Monday, April 30, 2007
Will Microsoft be able to make an impact with their Silverlight multimedia offering? Hopefully it has more substance than its current promotional video. Of course Microsoft is guaranteed a small audience for the technology through its own devices. No doubt the Xbox 360 and Zune players will support the plugin in short order. Yet can they seriously challenge Flash? Microsoft has shown before in its bastardization of Java that not every platform it creates is always accepted by the industry. Flash is a product with over a decade of backing in the multimedia industry, and the primary reason Adobe bought Macromedia for $3.4 billion. It's the product that enabled YouTube to be sold for $1.4 billion. Millions upon millions of people have the Flash plugin installed. So most people are probably not going to care what kind of video that Silverlight delivers because Flash has already delivered quality through a codec by On2 Technologies (a former Connors client). The one weakness in Flash is search. Google and its brethren will continue to have difficulty indexing Flash for the foreseeable future. Even if search engines can figure out how to find the text in the animation, what frame do you lead users to? If Silverlight can solve this problem and intelligently incorporate text so search engines can actually find this content without relying on user-submitted tags, then the battle will get exciting. Labels: Adobe, flash, Microsoft, search, silverlight, video
posted by Adam Edwards
0 comments
Pharmaceutical Companies, Public Relations & Search
Saturday, August 19, 2006
One major feature driving the growing popularity of public relations for marketing is its ability to live within limitations and restrictions set by law. The rules governing pharmaceutical industries come to mind. Everybody has noticed change in drug commercial TV-spots resulting from the FDA's truth in advertising laws. But when your publicity is being driven through word-of-mouth and matter-of-fact editorial coverage, you don't have such restrictions. Editorial gets a "get out of jail free" card when it comes to garnering publicity. It's exposure in mainstream media, but it's just not advertising.
Public relations is made to order for drug companies. In addition to developing strategies to get your message out, public relations is uniquely suited to deal with damaging news stories, preferably diffusing the story before it even hits the press. And with today's real-time blogging, sometime it is even beneficial to monitor the mention of drug names online in real time. The danger is that un-tended, just about any blogger with a horror story and axe to grind has a decent ability grab that first page of search results on the drug's name. The ability of single individuals to impact the viability of entire product lines is constantly on the rise. PR firms know how to manage this. Managing your Web and "search engine presence" is now firmly in the realm of public relations, so you can get a complete and very strategic alternative marketing campaign from a single company.Labels: blog, pr, search
posted by Mike Levin
0 comments
Search engine use shoots up in the past year and edges towards email as the primary internet application.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
From PEW Internet & American Life Project... Search engines have become an increasingly important part of the online experience of American internet users. The most recent findings from Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys and consumer behavior trends from the comScore Media Metrix consumer panel show that about 60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day. These results from September 2005 represent a sharp increase from mid-2004. Pew Internet Project data from June 2004 show that use of search engines on a typical day has risen from 30% to 41% of the internet-using population, which itself has grown in the past year. This means that the number of those using search engines on an average day jumped from roughly 38 million in June 2004 to about 59 million in September 2005 – an increase of about 55%. comScore data, which are derived from a different methodology, show that from September 2004 to September 2005 the average daily use of search engines jumped from 49.3 million users to 60.7 million users – an increase of 23%. This means that the use of search engines is edging up on email as a primary internet activity on any given day. The Pew Internet Project data show that on a typical day, email use is still the top internet activity. On any given day, about 52% of American internet users are sending and receiving email, up from 45% in June of 2004.
Labels: media, search
posted by Mike Levin
0 comments
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
posted by Jessica Ek
0 comments
Filling the Gaps: SEO Copywriting Strategy
Thursday, October 06, 2005
What do you write about when what you do write about doesn't matter?
I saw this article today. It's another piece on how to make SEO copywriting effective. Being a copywriter myself, I'm very interested in these articles and, as they come out, I jump to see if they have any insights into SEO writing that I may have missed.
http://www.mediasyndicate.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1931
However, they all seem to be more or less the same. The title is the most important part, as well as any other short pieces of writing that stand out from the main text, such as bulleted points, the first sentence in each paragraph and any photo captions. Why? The internet is drowning in text and much of it will only be scanned and never read. I've seen plenty of advice on how to optimize the few, crucial phrases that are most likely to be read, but what about the rest? Is it merely an exercise in filling the digital page?
While the advice offered is worthwhile, I think the main text does not get nearly the attention it deserves. I would like to argue that this text is actually very important. Yes, most text gets skimmed, but some will certainly be read. Think how much you read online everyday. And even if it doesn't, this text is still important for search engines. Writing about a subject is bound to bring up more related words and these words will in turn bring in more searchers on varied phrases that you may not have thought to target. So every single word you write can become a piece of valuable market research on what your consumers are looking for. Filler text is so much more than an alternative to lorem ipsum copy. It's a chance to be relevant and interesting and experimental. Hone your craft.
Yes, we all need to have intriguing and keyword-rich titles, but there's more to it than that. After all, if all you're doing is writing to fill space between the introduction and conclusion, why would anyone take the time to read it?Labels: media, search, seo
posted by Jessica Ek
1 comments
How do you start a corporate blog?
Monday, October 03, 2005
It's time to let down your hair a bit and talk about the company. Talk about ideas, opinions, thoughts and goals. But what is the company voice and how does it become informal enough to blog? How do you take the connection that blogs have formed on the internet and use it to give your company its own representation online beyond just the formal website? How do you really let people into your head and, in a company with many people and lots of idea, whose head do you offer? I've been invited to blog here and as I begin contributing, I've been pondering these issues.
The first point to tackle would be the purpose of the blog. Some are like live journals, others are merely posting interesting news from other sites and still more are more like personal editorial columns. After blogging for a while, I've come to think that the best blogs are a mix of all three. And once you start it's even easier to add more as it comes up. Don't worry about organization, a blog is chronological and that's really all the order it really needs. So just write.
What does a company have to say at this level that is not specifically sent out in press releases and interviews? Well, muse a bit on your place in the industry. Think about where you think the industry is headed in the future. You know it better than most people do. What's going on presently in the industry? While you may be tracking this carefully, other people will not have as much insight on this specific area of current events. This opens up a wide range of interesting topics and you suddenly have more to talk about than you originally thought.
Although, a blog is also part editorial and this poses an interesting quandary. While individual opinions may be along the same lines as the company, they may not necessarily be exactly the same on every point. So to what degree do you match the company and to what degree do you right your own thoughts on the subject matter? Newspaper editorials could once be taken as the view of the newspaper's owners. But now whose view is it? The board members? The editors? With so many different opinions in the mix, today's editorials most closely reflect the individual writer's view. In blogging, this might also be the case. Blogging on interesting subjects and heartfelt opinions will nearly always be more valuable than restating company mission statements. Because what, after all, is a company if not the conglomeration of many people with many opinions. So the more people you have blogging individually about what matters to them within the business, the better a representation you will have and the more interesting a blog you will create. And blogging in the company's interest as well as blogging about your own insights are certainly not incompatible.
Finally, the most important lesson I've learned while blogging is that if it interests you, people will want to read it. Write about what you care about and it will be interesting. Put some of yourself into it and it will be intriguing. Putting a personal face on your company means that you need to be engaged with the subject matter and the audience whether or not they're talking back. Not to be cheesy, but if you write it, they will come, truly. You're here, aren't you?Labels: blog, search
posted by Jessica Ek
0 comments
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
posted by Connors Communications
0 comments
 |
