A Kickin' Blog

Over the years, we have all watched Google grow from a simple search engine, to the ultimate information broker.  These days, businesses and organizations live and die by their Google ranking, and average everyday citizens occasionally Google themselves just to see what is being said…Heck, I’ve used Google to find out information on friends, old classmates, and enemies of all sorts! Now, the big G is taking that kind of personalized search to a new level by adding information from what Google calls your “public social graph.”  This new development makes Google smarter than anyone you know…Smarter than Hawkins, Einstein, Obama, and maybe even smarter than your Mama! (ok… not your mom, we are sorry we said that!)

Big Brother – errr, I mean Google is building a database on you from several sources.  They are taking everything they know about you from your Google profile, determining your connections with people and websites from various social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc), and then producing personalized search results for participants.

Why the heck does anyone need, want, or have any use for all this minutia?  Have we become a world of busy-bodies?  Well, businesses are salivating at the idea because this will add a very personal slash to SEO, finally fully linking the social media monolith with marketing and money.

Let’s explain it in some really basic terms:  You are in Philadelphia and want to go out for a bite to eat.  Using social search, you can find out what your friends have to say about local restaurants. Social search will look at who you are connected to, find out their comments on Twitter and other sites, and give you those thoughts.  Instead of calling up Uncle Joe, social search will find his archived statements.  The idea is that you and your friends (social connections) have similar tastes – so who they like will be someone you will like…

Before you begin to jump up and down/panic, Google can’t access any of this information without you and your social network’s a-okay. If you don’t want people to be privy to all your thoughts, opinions, ideas, and musings – you don’t have to sign-up. To be seen in others’ social search results you will need a Google account and profile, and add actual connections within your Google Profile. The more links you add, the more exposure you might potentially receive, proving that being popular does pay-off.  By including the big three (FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter) and any personal sites, like your own website or blog, you will be diving into this big info-soup and making your opinion known to everyone! When adding these links, you are allowing Google to track your connections on the Web.  You are giving them access to your biz-ness – so don’t come crying later!

Most people have the notion that Google Social Search will allow advertisers a greater ability to reach their target audience.  If 9 out of your 10 tweets are about your love of ice cream, then that it’s fairly probable that you will be seeing some ads for Butter Brickle or Tutti Frutti (and hopefully, some ads for a few gyms too…) This happens a bit now with FaceBook advertising, but Google’s new scheme will undoubtedly unleash the whirlwind.

If Google integrates Social Search into the main search results, the number of online connections you have established will clearly impact any search results. The more connections you have, the more rich and potentially relevant the data you will be getting back. That’s why it is important right now for any person or business – who wants to be part of this information revolution – to build a strong social network profile. Make yourself the “Big Man on the Internet Campus” – find all your coworkers, classmates, cronies and codependents.

Google Social Search also encourages businesses and organizations to interact more with consumers via social media.  If your restaurant or retail operation has a solid and engaging presence in social media – it will only increase the discussion amongst your friends, fans and followers.  This will in turn bring the business higher up in search results, especially if it is connected with as many fans and followers as possible.

Your best prospects are the ones that find you because they are looking for the products or services that you offer. In order to capture these prospects you need to actively market to these people. Active marketing is making your website or your business available if someone is looking. Here are some examples of Active Marketing:

This guy is really active.

Search Engine Optimization: SEO is a great form of Active Marketing. By optimizing your site to rank high in the search engines for your chosen keyphrases you are pre-qualifying your site visitors and working to provide searchers the solutions or products for which they are looking.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): If you pay for placement (or clicks) on a search engine whenever someone types in a certain phrase, (or a phrase from a geographical location), this person is likely to convert on your site. They are obviously looking for you and an ad to them has a higher conversion rate than one directed at the general public, like traditional marketing channels do.

Yellow Pages: Ok this is Active Marketing, in so much as if a prospect is looking for someone to fix their 1987 Pontiac, then they theoretically might open a phone book under “car repair” and find a big colorful picture and choose to then call the business with the biggest ad—but seriously people, the phone book?? Step into this millennia…

Hold/Voicemail Messages: Hold/voicemail messages are the most laid-back (read: cheap) ways to actively market you business. Think about it: If a prospect calls you, they are a pretty qualified prospect! This is an opportunity to tell them about other products/services, or differentiators or special promotions. That said, none of us like to be kept waiting. Keep the message short, interesting, even funny, to hold the interest of the caller.
So next time you are trying to figure out where to spend your marketing dollars, think about actively reaching out to your prospects and giving them what they are seeking.

Got any other recommendations about active marketing? Comment below and join the conversation.

Fred Sexton, of Mouse and Man, interviews Corey Creed, of Hippo Internet Marketing, about his internet marketing training classes. Corey is quite a remarkable internet marketer, successfully managing multiple different divisions of his current company including e-commerce sites, consulting, training, and now these 1-2 day classes about internet marketing.

In the interview we get into Corey’s classes, the competition out there, social media marketing, and Search Engine Marketing Association of Charlotte

Sit back and enjoy the first EVER Mouse & Man podcast.

more to come later

squeak, squeak

I just posted a video about WolframAlpha. It’s a new kind of engine. It’s not a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or MSN which displays lots of different results. Ideally, it displays the exact answer you are looking. So, what does it mean for me…and why should it matter? Those are good questions and again I don’t know the answer. However, I think you should at least be aware of some of these really incredible technologies out there.
Check it out below.

Also, no making fun of me because this is my first screen cast.

Being in the video mood, here’s a great video about Google Local Business Center. I think it’s very well put together.

So, what the heck happened with American Idol (AI)…and why does it matter, isn’t it just a TV show!?

The Background
The whole time that AI was running we’ve been running an office pool. The goal of the contest every week was to guess the singer who got voted off. A contestant gets voted off by having the fewest amount of votes from people who call in. Just because I’m a nerd I’ve been using as much information as possible to base my decision. And because I’m a SEO nerd I’ve been getting information from Google to help make my decision. Essentially the person with the fewest number of searches per week on the internet should have a positive correlation with the person being voted off each time, right? Well, using this strategy I’ve gotten about half of them right so far. Here’s a chart of 4 weeks before the finale.

The last week all the numbers were overwhelmingly saying Adam Lambert would win. And in case you live in a cave in the Afghanistan (by the way, hi Jerad) Adam lost! See the charts below, they aren’t even close. Based on these numbers, Adam should have won by a landslide.

And here’s the numbers for the greater San Diego area (where Adam is from).

So, what happened?

Apparently, from the chart it looks like that although California physically has much more people living there compared to Arkansas (Kris Allen’s home state who was the winner), Arkansas was much more vigilant in searching for their favorite. Apparently, they are more passionate about voting for him as well. Perhaps all the Californians were busy twittering their friends instead of voting? This is my prediction of what happened…that even though there was more overall interest for Adam that the Arkansasians were much more passionate about their home town favorite. Also, there were a lot of last second searches for Adam Lambert and his sexual preference (see below) that may have skewed the results.

So, I take back all my jokes about Arkansas and think they are definitely the smartest, most intelligent state by far!

So, why does it matter…and how does it apply to me?
You can use these tools for your own benefit. I know that I do these kinds of searches all time to see what people are searching for. This chart below is one of the main reasons that I’m concentrating in SEO more than web design.

I think it’s just good business strategy to deliver what your customers are asking for, right? These tools have never been around in the history of marketing, well at least not to this degree. So, use these tools to find out what your customers are searching for….or to predict the winner of next year’s American Idol!

Memorial Day Recognition
On another note, Happy Memorial Day Weekend to all our veterans. My Dad was in the army for like a jillion years. I’m not sure about why they do this but if you are in the military for long enough they actually force you to retire?! Also, one of my grandfathers flew B-52s in the eastern front in WW II and my other grandfather was a bridge engineer on the western front.

I couldn’t be happier to know that my Dads gave so much for the freedoms that I take for granted every day. As I sit in the back of the car next to my sleeping 13 month old little girl and lovely wife (thanks for driving honey ) it’s so nice to know that I am safe and to know my family helped in part for this feeling.

So, how do you market/spin the current hot news story, Swine Flu. First off, some may question the ethicalness of doing so… but any news is good news, isn’t it?

Well, if you were a company that offers a (free) way for people to connect for meetings over the internet, perhaps you would view this as an opportunity. This is what Mikogo did.

So, let’s evaluate what they are doing and how it could perhaps be improved.

Mikogo just released a blog post and accompanying press release.
As well they are tweeting about what they do…but not really about this swine flu opportunity.

But what if people are searching for what they can personally do to prevent the spread of the virus. Well, ideally anyone who does a google search on swine flu prevention, the mikogo site would come up. To do this, they would need to employ a better SEO strategy. For instance, the <title tag> for their blog post does have the keywords ‘Swine Flu’ in it. But they have the word infection and not keywords related to ‘prevention’ (which I believe it what they really want). And keywords are at the end of the title tag. Ideally your keywords should be at the beginning of the title tag. Also, with the PR they did use the keywords “Swine Flu Prevention” but again the keywords are at the end and only one result comes up when you Google News search for them.

So, yes they could do a better job with onsite SEO, however they’ve really not done anything to build external links to their site/post.  I’d recommend getting backlinks to their this specific post from other blogs. They currently don’t have any inbound links regarding swine flu. Here are a couple places that I’d look at for getting backlinks:

• Tecnorati search for swine flu prevention
• Blog search for swine flu prevention
• Blog search for swine flu prevention
• Blog search for swine flu prevention
• Delicious search for swine flu prevention

Also, I’d recommend a Twitter Search for people tweeting about swine flu prevention. You can even setup a RSS feed for this specific search and automatically get notified when someone tweets about this keyword. To even take it to the next level, you can setup a program to auto-tweet anyone who tweets about your targeted keyword.

On a personal level, I love using Mikogo and use it almost daily. I wonder how they stay in business though…does not look they make any money. Anyone have insight into this?

Just looking over the executive summary of the latest Ecommerce Benchmark Report from www.marketingsherpa.com. Great stuff here. This reports summarizes the findings and information from 1,481 ecommerce marketers.

Some interesting statistics were as follows:

• Q4 2007 – 46% of respondents said total orders rose by more than 20%
• Q4 2008 – Only 9% of respondents said total orders rose by more than 20%
• Compared with 2007 numbers (which had 0% of total orders decreasing) 2008 had 35% of total orders decreasing

I really liked this chart they created as well. Looks like SEO is still king (yeah for me).

SEO Still King

I wonder if they are categorizing paid search in with SEO? Surprising to see that Email Marketing still was ranking so well. So, conclusion that I took from this is that social media marketing is on the radar but the farmer hasn’t really started harvesting yet. I am predicting though that social will have better numbers in the next survey.

Looks like 3rd best category was Partner Links. Friendly reminder to continue to request links from your friends and build your link infrastructure. Speaking of, is your site linking to mine?

Social Media Tactics

Here is a nice chart of the social media strategies by category. Looks like Viral Video would have the highest return. However, creating the video is one thing and getting it viral is a completely different ballgame. Interesting to see Twitter on there…but where’s the rest of the circle? Funny that Twitter is the lowest in time required (that’s because they didn’t input my data correctly).

Interesting to see the descrepancy between House Email in the first chart and RSS Feeds in this chart. I thought there would be atleast some correlation between them because they essentially do the same thing. So, looks like RSS feeds really aren’t catching on in the mainstream. I wonder where RSS was in effectiveness on this chart the last time the report was published.

Profiles on Social Sites was surprising to see with a better response rating than House Blogs. So, reminder to everyone to always link out from your social media profiles. I’d recommend linking to your website, blog, and twitter account (but this will probably change next week).