Best Online Campaign of the year?

Andrew Mabbott: Best online campaign of the year? Didn’t notice any. Good start.

Daniel Titterton: Nationwide social media shaming of those caught on camera looting, fighting,bullying and stealing during the London riots. Exposes how accessible social media has become in the way it was used to coordinate a riot with a collection of users who were not bright enough to understand the self incriminating evidence they were creating.

Sam Silverwood-Cope: Wikileaks – a coordinated effort between Julian Assange and the liberal-leaning newspapers of the world. I loved it. It was political gossip and intrigue at its finest, supplied in a beautifully searchable database on the Guardian, something no other British newspaper could’ve handled. I especially liked hearing about Sarkozy being a grumpy old so-and-so with his staff continually trying to avoid outbursts.

Jon Earnshaw: I haven’t got a favourite campaign so here’s my take on the worst. Not wishing to single any individual agencies out, as most of the larger ones are at it, but this year I have seen dozens of organic search campaigns built almost entirely upon the acquisition of barely relevant links pointing to poor quality content. With Google slowly beginning to realise that its organic results are increasingly being polluted with what are effectively ‘paid for’ positions; when it penalises the sites (not the agencies) and cleans up its results the only ones who will benefit are Google as people switch to PPC for position and the agencies who have their clients money in the bank. At least Dick Turpin wore a mask!

Andy Francos: Can I say one of my own? Intelligent Positioning have helped Commercial Acceptances to achieve an 80% increase in organic traffic from 2010 to 2011, a great achievement.

Best new website or redesign or the year?

AM: Can’t think of any new sites except one that we’ve built. Maybe 2011 wasn’t a year of innovation, or perhaps new sites just don’t happen the way they used to before the web became so dominated by the big players.

DT: BBC home page – in beta for most of the year and now fully live. It performs well from tablets to pc and provides fully accessible in- depth content. Very brave of the BBC to try something quite different, the reward is it’s a better interactive experience than all the competitors.

SSC: Rarely do I say “Wow” when I see a new big-corp broadcasting site. But the new BBC Radio 1 site – WOW. It’s phenomenal and miles better than the BBC homepage (Dan and Jon?). There is updated content going up on the main banner every few minutes, with huge amounts of links to social media, recent tunes and additional content based on what you just heard on the Radio. All sites will now strive to be as good as this. You must take a look.

JE: Can I say best update? In which case it’s the new BBC home

AF: In terms of style, I love the classical redesign of the BBC website. I also love the new Twitter interface and from an SEO perspective – it has to be www.seroundtable.com; but then that’s not really new in 2011 is it?!

Who’s winning Facebook or Google?

AM: Facebook is definitely winning in the area where Facebook and Google are actually competing. Google is throwing everything at creating a social network and it hasn’t worked. Facebook has 850 million people who think it’s their friend and Arab revolutionaries holding placards bearing its brand-name. But Google will win eventually – Google owns search (still the entry point to the web for most people) and plenty else we can’t live without, giving them the platform to keep pushing their ideas until something sticks.

DT: Google, way ahead. But risks doing too many things sub (it’s own high) standard. Facebook keeps it simple, but is still a linear media model.

SSC: In terms of trust, neither. In terms of arrogance, it’s a close race. Both companies infuriate, but continue to dominate. Both have fantastic, free, but hugely flawed analytics packages. Both launch new features continuously that put sites like Yahoo and Bing to shame. But you can pay either company £10,000s and still not get a salutary email from a human being. Which one would I leave first? Facebook, which has made more mistakes this year. I love Chrome so I will say Google wins by a nose. BTW, Bebo and Yahoo are not winning.

JE: I hate to say this but Google is losing out in terms of the quality of its results. Too little focus on its organic search roots and getting it’s algorithm right. Too much focus on building new things that are too complex, don’t work or there is no actual need for.

AF: At social sharing, interaction and dependence – Facebook, but for everything else Google. Both companies have mass privacy issues, something that was inevitable considering the personalisation route that we are heading towards. Google’s decision to launch its own social networking platform speaks volumes, along with the failed Google Buzz, as Page, Brin and Schmidt aim to tap in to the needs and requirements of the 2011 user. Although I am a Google Plus user, the platform is miles away from being a serious contender to Facebook in terms of key metrics and unique users. Yes, Google have attempted to integrate Google Plus within their navigation (and even pushed it so much to include a massive blue arrow pointing to the option) and you can now “+1” search results – but I can’t see users jumping the Facebook ship just yet.

Best new product in the market (hardware or software)?

AM: Majestic SEO for doing one thing and doing it better than everyone else. Also being there at the right time as Yahoo gave up on site explorer.

DT: Knight’s Corner one teraflops chip – one trillion calculations per second. Hello A.I.

SC: I’m not an Apple geek, but the updated Ipad2 has impacted upon the media industry like no other product. Then, as a knock-on from that, those media-types have created websites, apps and even whole pay models that are based on the hardware’s offerings, screen-size and usability. I even told my grandma to get one.

JE: Without question – iPad 2, closely followed by Kindle

AF: IPad 2 – can’t live without it.

Dead as a dodo?

AM: Flash. No matter how much Steve Jobs didn’t like Adobe, Flash’s incumbent status, platform neutrality and developer community allowed it to muddle on as the de facto language of the interactive web – until Adobe announced it would no longer produce a player for Mobile OSs. IE6 finally (pretty much) stopped being used outside China, Nokia killed Symbian by opting for Windows. Firefox started losing ground to Chrome (and has nothing to sustain it).

DT: Flash – Still great for my children’s maths games and Moshi Monsters, but even my children are getting frustrated that it does not work on the iPad.

SSC: Digg. Those nice people at Digg used to deliver millions of hits to major sites. Then they changed everything and their users obviously didn’t like change. Stumbleupon (with your new logo and branding) watch out. Second place Yahoo – with site explorer now gone, I doubt I will visit them ever again. Third place, and this may come back to bite me, Google+.

JE: Yahoo

AF: HMV’s online strategy. At the end of the 20th century it was the place to go for music, DVDs and the rest – now, it has fallen so far behind the likes of Amazon, Play and EBay – it looks like there is no way back. I’d also put Yahoo! in there as well.

Alive and kicking?

AM: Android continues to grab market share and the Ice Cream Sandwich release unifying the phone and tablet versions sets the stage for more growth next year.

DT: Email marketing – While Social Media claimed to pinch the email marketing domain, mobile devices and user set-ups are still built around email clients. This helped somewhat by Groupon reminding people why email marketing can be quite exciting.

SSC: The Blogosphere as a media outlet. You can get your product in front of the same amount of potential customers, more easily and cost effectively than the old fashioned media companies. We love bloggers.

JE: Apple, even with the sad loss of SJ

AF: Twitter. I love it and as a massive football enthusiast, it is great to see so many old school press journalists – who once looked down on digital – using Twitter for interaction, comment and promotion. I always thought that Google would make a move for Twitter, especially considering their philosophy on speed of results over the past few years.

Buzz word of the year?

AM: HTML5 – everyone’s talking about it, even if they don’t know what it is. Ditto Cloud Computing. Geolocation is everywhere. QR codes are mainstream. People talk a lot about privacy.

DT: Three letters. R.O.I. Things are going to get harder so R.O.I. will remain in the spotlight. If you don’t know what it means to you at the various levels then get reading and thinking.

SSC: Social Media / strategy/ campaign/ training/ events. I get more emails about social media than I do from fake Rolex sellers. It’s becoming a little spammy, but still hugely important, if explained appropriately. Second place “Content Strategy”.

JE: Connected Online Ecosystems – and we started that one!

AF: Surely, it HAS to be Google Panda?! ‘Panda proof your website’ became a common phrase in the SEO community, although I have to admit I was a little frustrated by some of the “advice” given out. There is no doubt that people are trying to help others but advice like “Just get rid of your low quality content” is simply like saying “just get more links” or “earn more money”. Obviously a company or individual doesn’t want to give free advice, but if it is worthless, why say it in the first place? It reminds me a bit of Matt Cutt’s comments on keyword rich domains and stating that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – all of which do not have keywords within their domains – gets a lot of traffic and you should try and build something like that. Thanks for that, glad you’re here.

Biggest mistake of 2011?

AM: Google’s Chromebook for futility. It’s a netbook with the browser as the Operating System – in other words it can do anything anyone can already do with Chrome on a PC, but it can’t do anything else. Who is it for? Secondly, the EU cookie law for fundamentally challenging the way we use the Web without proposing any viable alternative.

DT: Big brands consolidating agency services – in tough times businesses need niche experts, not margin accumulators.

SSC: Facebook for changing too much too quickly and not listening to concerns about privacy of their 800 million users. Facebook will continue to grow in the emerging markets, but the established, rich markets such as the US and Europe are beginning to switch off. Was 2011 the point of decline? Probably not as we wait to hear more about their $100 billion flotation.

JE: Anyone putting PPC in front of a solid organic search strategy.

AF: Well – looking at it from an SEO point of view – I don’t think Google or Microsoft came off very well following the accusations that Microsoft were copying Google’s search results. ‘Bing sting’ as it was coined was an embarrassment for Microsoft as they’d spent a small fortune trying to position Bing as an alternative to Google, a decision engine. Commercials, Yahoo! integration – all trying to help Bing gain market share on Google.

What are we going to hear a lot about in 2012?

AM: IPv6 – 2012 is surely going to be the year we’ll finally have to face up to the fact that we’ve run out of IP addresses. SSL – more sites will follow Google and Facebook in pushing people toward encrypted browsing (with all the implications that brings for analytics). Maybe @font-face will finally go mainstream and we’ll see more sites using typefaces other than Arial next year. Plain old Web apps will make a comeback to displace platform-specific applications as people realise it’s cheaper to make one version of something than four. Mobile user experience will come under more scrutiny as platforms mature and conventions are established.

DT: Content strategies and content delivery. Those without relevant, engaging, timely content will be digging deep into pockets for old school media.

SSC: Obviously the Ipad3, Iphone5 etc. Facebook share price. Yahoo buy-out. Google messing with their search results. Firefox decline. Social Media.

JE: Google cleaning up its results with the search public finally realising the natural search results are not actually that natural but are in fact in many cases paid for indirectly through link acquisition.

AF: For me, I am going to keep a very close eye on Netflix and Google TV (due to my work with blinkbox) when launched in the UK. Netflix will no doubt a massive competitor in the movie streaming sector, so it will be a challenge – but a welcome one!

We want your thoughts…

Leave your comments below, we’d love to see what your response would be to the questions.

They were a company that had not spent any time on their SEO or even focused on their own website development. So we took them through our SEO tools and showed them the chart below.

Good Link Bait?

In this chart we see a sudden rise in positions in Google UK, for three of their main keywords including the very competitive term “Pensions” in and around December 2009.

So I asked “Did you do anything to your site around that time?” I was met with a bit of a blush, and a hushed comment. “We had company issues at that time.”

It transpired that during December of 2009 one of the Company Directors had hit both the local press and the industry press with some unsavoury news. However what that meant was the online publications and pension journals, in their droves, linked to the site. Furthermore, the website suddenly enjoyed increased traffic both from the linking and from the notoriety from the stories in the media.

This obviously had an effect on their positions in Google too. So if you are after Link Bait ideas, this may not be recommended on a moralistic viewpoint, but it is perfect link-bait for SEO.

The Internet is the new Catalogue

The catalogue offered more choice while offering the ability to browse at any time you wished in the comfort of your own home. This was closer to the online transactions we are capable of today thanks to Web 2.0. However, the catalogue was still a mass marketing tool that determined choice by shorting supply.

What the Internet does now is to make a customer’s choice broader and deeper. It has moved from push/pull marketing to dialogue and Long Tail choice. The Long Tail refers to the strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities along with selling fewer items in large quantities. This is never more evident than where Apple’s iTunes sell at least one of their two million plus tracks at least once. Additionally, Netflix calculated that ninety five percent of its 90,000 DVD’s rent out at least once a month. As Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired magazine, wrote “Increasingly, the mass market is turning into a mass of niches”.

Niches offering Mainstream Profitability

The old 80:20 rule that stated twenty percent of products produce 80 percent of the revenue, is no longer true in the internet. Thanks to the Long Tail, a company such as Amazon works on the basis that ninety eight percent of the products they sell produce eighty percent of the revenue.

In retailing terms, space costs money. However, if your space is free, as in iTunes’ case where songs are stored on a server, you can introduce niche products into your product mix and benefit from selling them infrequently. Amazon understood earlier than most, that the old retail model only worked on picking winning products where volume was paramount and choice was limited. Amazon embraced the old model and spliced the new one, of infinite choice, on to it. This model demonstrates that you can have your volume winners as well as the idiosyncratic products, that sell occasionally, sitting side-by-side in your product mix.

Aggregating the small numbers

What is of further interest is that aggregating small numbers to meet customer needs and profiting from it, can also apply to manufacturing. In the February 10th issue of The Economist, an article appeared under the title of “Print me a Stradivarius”. It stated that a new manufacturing technology will change the world. This new technology is three-dimensional printing that enables someone with a computer and a room to make a single item as cost-effectively as thousands of them: from bicycle frames, panels for cars, even aircraft parts.

This is the democratization of manufacturing and marketing combined. We are indeed in a brave new world of customer choice and the winners will be those with the most courage and imagination. Referring back to the instigators of the industrial revolution, some things never change.

Garry Titterton 11.2.2011

Already, there are over 400 million local searches every month and growing.

70% of these are searches looking for local products or services. This significant change in local search is underpinned by the fact that 67% of people search online instead of looking in Yellow Pages.

Local search is Yellow Pages on steroids.

If people need a local plumber, gardener, or electrician the benefits of viewing these services on a website far outstrip an earpiece ad or just a telephone number to help customers evaluate who to call.

Much is made of the increase in online purchasing of products and services. As yet, the majority of people still enjoy visiting a store. They visit the website and evaluate the quality, colour, style, and price of competing products but many still want to see the real thing, touch it, check out its craftsmanship, and general functionality and ease of use. They also still enjoy the social aspect of shopping.

Whether consumers search and then buy online or search and buy off-line, the starting point increasingly is local search. For the retailer, online and off-line work together as the yin and yang of shopping, providing balance and reflecting the continuous change inherent in product retailing.

There are three tools of search: pay-per-click, where businesses pay to have a listing on the top right hand of the page; organic which has the majority of listings on the left and centre of the page; and map directory listings which locates your business when people are searching on Google. These three complement each other for the local business. However, organic has the better ROI than pay-per-click for businesses, being responsible for over 90% of searches on the page. Over 85% of searches stop on page one.
This makes ensuring a local businesses website gets onto page one crucially important.  The best way to do this is through organic search engine optimisation.

The single biggest change that cloud computing and the ability to provide local mobile search will bring, is today we have one page one for any search term. Soon we will have thousands of page ones because search will be local.

If a person searches for a plumber you will only get plumbers in your local town. If you are having a night out and want to find an Indian restaurant and search on your mobile phone or I-Pad, you will get displayed three or more within your immediate vicinity. You can enter their websites, look at the menus, make a choice and ‘phone to book a table. Or you may be so close that you just walk in.

For local and global businesses local search will be both a opportunity and a challenge. You can be emailed by a store with a local promotion as you walk along the road towards it. This immediacy will be a new tool in the marketing armoury of both international conglomerates and local small to medium sized businesses.

At Intelligent Positioning we have anticipated this some time ago and are well prepared for this dynamic development.

Garry Titterton
CEO
Intelligent Positioning Limited

Today we are at the beginning of a new renaissance, exploring the ways in which customers are behaving in the new world of Web2.0. In the context of this media revolution, life will not be the same for you, or your customers again.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO said, “ The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”

This “experiment” as Schmidt referred to, is fundamentally about democratising information. Simply put, it moves the focus of communication from the media to you, the individual. It is not a one-way process anymore. It is an environment in which a dialogue takes place between the brand owner and the customer and between the customers themselves.

This will shift your marketing strategy and implementation in significant ways.

The one-way process

One of the most important objectives of marketing is how to gain the attention of relevant customers and where. These touch points traditionally have been through mainstream media such as television, radio, press, poster, and also through direct marketing. Behind this was a Push/ Pull Strategy, pushing a message onto the target audience, in the hope that they would like the message and Pull (buy) the product.

(Chart 1) This strategy created a process of decision taking that encompassed: awareness, familiarity, consideration, purchase, and loyalty.

The problem with this is that it is a one-way process. It is not a dialogue.

Creating a dialogue.

Mark Pedowitz, President, ABC Studios said, “Digital Media has levelled the playing field, opening doors to anyone to have immediate and unlimited access to an audience. But content must evolve with the platform”.

With the advent of technology and the use of the Internet, not only has a new media been created but also so has a new process of interaction with the customer.

We now have a dialogue that is both immediate and relevant. The content must be engaging and in many instances subtler than the previous broadcast media approach of pushing the message. As Ezra Pound the poet once said to an aspiring writer, “ Don’t describe the thing, describe the halo of the thing.” Pound knew that by describing the quality of something rather than its features, will engender greater intrigue and involvement. Describing “the thing” closes down the conversation, describing the “halo” opens it up.

This approach underpins sales and finds support in recent research by McKinsey. This study has revealed a new process of engagement and decision-making by the customer.

Source: McKinsey

(Chart 2) It is a circular process with four primary phases: initial consideration; active evaluation, which is the process of researching potential purchases; closure, when customers buy brands; and post purchase, when customers experience them.

At the post purchase point customers are increasingly likely to
discuss their satisfaction or dissatisfaction online. This dialogue will trigger other customers’ future purchasing decisions. What is essential is to have a pro-active online reputation management system in place. We will discuss that in more detail and its effect on how the customer moves from initial interest to after sales satisfaction, or otherwise, later in this whitepaper.

Dialogue along the customer journey

Marketing professionals need to adjust to this new customer journey. It is a journey that is more complex. It is a journey where the marketer can win friends and just as easily lose friends. In many cases the marketing effort must change: from less focus on brand advertising at the initial consideration phase to developing internet properties that help customers gain a better understanding of the brand when they actively evaluate it.

This may mean that a process change is necessary from pushing a brand message onto customers, to providing information, support, and experience of the brand (even if just a virtual one) that engages the customer in a dialogue so that they can make their own decisions.

The importance of the Web 2.0

The Internet is crucial in this new process of dialogue. To exploit Web 2 .0’s benefits requires an open mindset on the part of the marketer, one that moves from media buying to developing properties that attract customers: this shift in mindset encompasses websites that discuss products and services; programmes that encourage customer engagement; and systems that tailor advertising by understanding the customer as an individual with unique tastes, rather than as a statistical grouping.

(Chart 3 ) It isn’t just the customer you need to engage in dialogue. There is a hierarchy of people who engage with the Web.
At the bottom of the involvement pyramid we have Watchers and Sharers. These are the people who are the most active in their involvement of watching on line, reading blogs, and downloading material.

Next are the Commentators who rate products and services, comment on a blog post as well as write in a discussion forum.
An example of this is the advent of Trip Advisor for the traveller, which has underpinned the power of customer opinion.

The Producers write blogs and upload videos while the Curators are special to the company in that they are the guardians of the experience, moderate forums and edit Wikis to ensure their accuracy.

The people at the bottom of the pyramid, the Watchers and Sharers are the most active by volume and the Commentators have a great influence on opinion and influencing purchase.

So why do people share? Well, recent research from Share This Survey concluded that 81% of people share online to help someone who will benefit. 42% said to give back something, such as photographs, jokes, information, and third was to inform others about products or services.

When I first came into advertising and marketing, the giant share of marketing spend was on television. It was megaphone marketing.

Our target audience for brands was not segmented by social groups or income or even psychographics. We had no engagement pyramid. The audience was defined as universe. In other words, everyone, because everyone watched television. In short, the old marketing had Van Gogh’s ear for dialogue.

Integrating the customer into the process.

The available media drove this crude perception of people and their potential motivations. It was pushing a brand statement.

It worked through expensive repetition of a message like rote learning in uninspired educational establishments. It was not inclusive because there was no opportunity to question or engage in feedback.

As Confucius said: I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

With the democratisation of media we are able to create a dialogue, shifting the emphasis of seeing the customer as a target to viewing the customer as a partner and collaborator in the marketing process. This is a necessary pre-requisite for sales success.

Take for example, Fiat.  When they launched the new Fiat 500 they created a website that that allowed potential customers to gather around their common interest, cars.

In the initial stages of the brand creation, Fiat embarked on creating applications and functions on the website that enabled the potential customer to create their own car, allowing them to customise different elements.

In addition, the potential customers were invited to join a creative laboratory where they could enter their own design contributions as well as create their own jingle for the website.

Mothers and Mothers-to-be were also invited to make their own contributions and were encouraged to share photographs of their family and newborn babies as well as enter a lottery to win one of the new cars.

By building a sense of involvement and personalisation into the website and the whole creative process, Fiat strengthened the potential customer’s sense of co-authorship among both males and females.

This underpinned making the Fiat 500 the customer’s brand.

Things are evolving…

Five years from now all media will either be completely digital or well on its way to becoming intangible.

Steve Rubel Ad Age December 2008

The Internets success is not just down to the immediacy of its information but also the relevance of that information.

Marketers need to help the customer with relevant information.

Take Comcast for example. If you have a cable problem in the US, Comcast use Twitter to ask customers “Can I help”. When customers respond, Comcast send out their Field Support Teams to solve the problem.

Through this process of finding customers to help, Comcast develops an image of pro-activity in customer support, reinforced through relevant interaction with customers.

The Comcast example demonstrates the effectiveness of pro-active engagement by seeking out the customer and ensuring that the brand blends into the context of the website or social media forum. It provides relevance and integrity.

A further example is Hyatt Hotels’ mobile reservation and check-in. Microsoft’s Bing powers Verizon Wireless mobile search. When consumers search for Hyatt and click on the result, they get redirected to Hyatt’s mobile website.

Through Verizon, Hyatt can reach 86 million subscribers and by taking advantage of this subscriber base, Hyatt can get customers to book rooms, check in and out, get travel tips, and access general information whilst on the go using Verizon’s Mobile Web service.

The synergy between search and mobile display resulted in a 350% increase in ad recall and 125% increase in brand recall through the inclusion of mobile search ads.

In this new engagement world, brands need to be mobilised to provide and deliver greater customer involvement through greater immediacy, anticipation of customer needs, quality of product and service, relevance, context, and value.

We are social.

People are social creatures. We, as individuals enjoy discussion, sharing information. We love to share our experiences and not just about the brands we buy or the car we drive or the Hotel we stay at. We also enjoy publishing our thoughts as can be experienced through Facebook, Twitter, and lots more social media sites. Those private thoughts made public can then be seen around the world not just on the social media website but through the long tail of media recognition of what you have to say.

So, Social Media is fast becoming a significant part of the fabric of society. The way to make it work for your brand is to have something meaningful to say and something relevant to offer. People go to a website for a reason not by accident. It is an envelope with an address on it. This can be a great advantage to the marketer. It can also be a nightmare if you fail to create a dialogue with your target audience and are unable to convince your customer and prospect through poor attitude, inadequate product, and poor service.

Social Media Chart Source: Intelligent Positioning Ltd
An example of pro-activity in this are is RS Hotel in New York. The Roger Smith Hotel may be the most media savvy hotel in New York, if not the world: there’s a blog; a Facebook fan page; a You Tube Channel; over 3,000 Twitter followers; a Flickr photostream.

The two young guys behind this family run independent hotel have turned it into a digital force to be reckoned with. They have made sure that the staff are tuned in to new media opportunities that can provide a dialogue with current guests and prospects with the objective of providing a great environment and service.

One example of their pro-activity was when they saw a blog on the Internet from an out of town blogger and responded to his question: “Where do people stay in New York?”

Because the hotel staff was active in the blogosphere they were rewarded with a sale. This connectedness rewarded the Hotel in not just the sale of the hotel room but with further blogs that recounted the experience and promoted the pro-active nature of RS Hotel’s mindset and prompt service.

Social Media Maintenance

Source: Marketing Professionals

(Chart 4) To keep your social media activity current and relevant, like the RS Hotel, you need to have a thorough maintenance programme. If we look at the chart we see how such a programme encompasses monitoring and renewing content across the relevant social media. Done competently, this will help to keep you ahead of your competition.

Whatever your brand is, whether it is a Hotel, a cable service provider, or a car, it is wise to remember that the brand is not yours. It is your customer’s.

A good social media maintenance programme linked to good online reputation management will help to strengthen that bond between the customer and the brand. Online reputation management combines marketing, public relations, and search.
The first objective is to gain visibility for your brand. Research shows that rarely do customers go beyond page two on the search engine rankings. The second objective is to create a positive interactive experience that will lead to sustainable engagement and sales.

To be effective, reputation management should not be passive to the discussions online but to be involved, constantly fuelling positive engagement. Good reputation management seeks to analyse, monitor, and influence your brand’s online presence, always seeking to be a relevant and stimulating part of your customers’ decision-making journey. As a marketer if you don’t like what is happening to your brand online, do something about it. And do it without delay. It is not enough to have proactive reputation management and a well maintained, attractive, website where there is a relevant dialogue and where the key evaluation element of the new decision making process takes place. The challenge is to be seen.

So what are the tools that will enable you to get your site onto page one, as well as tell you where your competitors are on the search engine hierarchy? It is highly likely that your prospects are using search and social media to evaluate potential vendors. The key question that you have to ask yourselves is, “Are we doing enough in those channels to demonstrate our expertise?”

How to generate clicks on your site.

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly a significant element in search by expertly examining customers’ online patterns to predict their tastes, desires, and future needs.

Broadly there are two types of search: Organic and Pay Per Click.

Simply put, PPC is bought traffic based on key word auctions: the concept is that marketers bid for their ads to appear on certain keywords, the higher the bid and more relevant your content, the better the chance of getting the top position. This can be expensive.

Whereas, Organic Search is a tool, if expertly used, that will help you to get your site onto page one and keep you there, through site analysis, key word relevance, and content refreshment. Traffic, unlike PPC is free.

(Chart 5) Two types of search: Organic and Pay Per Click.

There is a definite preference exhibited by users for organic results over PPC.  Of the two types of listing it is organic listings that currently generate the most traffic as you can see from Google’s Golden Triangle (Chart 6) but that does not mean that PPC has no place in a well rounded search engine marketing strategy.

PPC can provide a tactical boost to the more strategic organic search. The two are very effective if used together.

It is also worth mentioning that Organic has the additional benefit of producing a better return on investment.

How to measure social media effect.

“The tools we use to create digital content are increasingly powerful but decreasingly expensive. And we can show our work to a potential global audience. There is no analogue in human history for this development.” This is a quote from Dan Gillmor’s book, We the Media.

It points to the cost effectiveness of Web2.0 and the social media model. But the return on investment is only high if the tools and the message are executed correctly.

Measuring and managing Customer Lifetime Value is the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the market place.

First you must determine what to measure:

There are three basic elements to measure:

1. Output objectives:

How many people read your blog?

How many people comment?

How many people download your whitepaper?

What is the quality of your discussion?

2. Out-take objectives:

How does the social mediasphere position your brand and people?

What is the perception of your organization?

3. Outcome objectives:

Financial. Traffic. Relationships.
These will lead you to a lifetime value calculation of your customers.

To effect this, it is necessary to invest in software to enable customer data gathering. This data will provide you with the information that will assist you in managing and growing customer value.

Source: Marketing Professionals

(Chart 7) Lifetime Valuation of your customer can be defined simply as : transactional value plus network value. That gives customer value less customer acquisition and retention costs. These values form the basis of the Customer Lifetime Value Equation.

The benefit of retaining and growing customer value over their lifetime is one of the most efficient ways of growing your business.
Remember that happy customers tell others about products and services that they like. Then your company’s potential for greater profit from Lifetime Customer Value is brought into play.

Conclusion.

In conclusion, we are moving towards an age of media democratisation. We have no history of this to help us. The Web’s history is in the future. But what we do know is that we as marketers need to understand the new rules of engagement:
involve the customer as an individual and as a partner in the process of brand development and sustainability.

This will generate greater profit and customer loyalty for your company.

I will leave you with three thoughts from Albert Einstein:

1. Out of clutter, find simplicity.

2. From discord, find harmony.

3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

For further information about maximizing your customer contact email Garry Titterton on: garry@creative-mindset.com or click onto www.ip-seo.com or www.creative-mindset.com

The X-Robots-Tag Header

The idea behind X-Robots-Tag is that it allows robots directives normally found in a meta element to be sent as part of the server’s HTTP response headers. In other words the instructions are sent with the file rather than within the file, with the main advantage that this can be used with any type of content. So an HTTP response might look like this (using the Live HTTP Headers plugin for Firefox):

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:21:23 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html
X-Robots-Tag: noindex


A ‘noindex’ for Images

As an example consider the case of a webmaster wishing to prevent images being indexed and appearing in search results. One approach might be to add the entire ‘images’ directory to the robots.txt file (i.e. Disallow: /images). The problem with this is that the robots.txt file provides crawling directives rather than indexing directives – that is, the search engine is instructed not to visit the ‘images’ directory when crawling your site, but could still end up at one of your images if it is embedded in someone else’s site. Furthermore, what if we only want to block crawlers from certain images – the robots.txt file would quickly become large and unmanageable.

X-Robots-Tag in Apache (htaccess)

A combination of ‘Header set’ and the FilesMatch directive allows us to add the robots tag in Apache. Here’s a couple of examples which could be in Apache’s httpd.conf or .htaccess files.

Add ‘noindex’ header to all image files:

<FilesMatch "\.(gif|jpe?g|png)$">
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
</FilesMatch>

Add noindex to image files matching a particular pattern – in this case those with ‘thumbnail’ in the filename (i.e. /images/product41-thumbnail.jpg would be served with a noindex header while /images/product41-large.jpg would not):

<FilesMatch "images/.+-thumbnail\.jpg$">
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
</FilesMatch>

X-Robots-Tag in PHP

PHP’s header function allows us to send any HTTP header, as follows:

header('X-Robots-Tag: noindex,nofollow');

This supports more complex scenarios than using Apache alone. Rather than applying the same rule to all images, we could use some custom logic such as a database lookup to determine whether to add the X-Robots-Tag header. The first step would be to route requests for images to a php script using Apache’s .htaccess file (e.g. requests for jpeg files within the images directory will be handled by ‘image-handler.php’).

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^images/.*.jpg$ image-handler.php

Then in image-handler.php, we can perform our custom logic (defined in the allowImageIndexing() function) and set the appropriate header:

$filename = basename($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); // extract image filename 
header('Content-Type: image/jpg');             // set content type (otherwise it 
                                               // will be the dafault text/html)
if (!allowImageIndexing($filename)) {          // perform lookup
    header('X-Robots-Tag: noindex');           // set the x-robots-tag accordingly
}
readfile('images/' . $filename);               // stream image file in response

X-Robots-Tag Search Engine Support

Fortunately the three major search engines all now support the X-Robots-Tag

• Google – supports any value which can be used in the robots <meta> tag
• Yahoo – supports noindex, noarchive, nofollow, nosnippet
• Bing – as Yahoo plus noodp

The answer is quite simple, it’s got to be millions of times a day. Hasn’t it?

There was a time when Google would visit even the biggest sites once a week, once a month or only 6 times a year. Now Google visits certain sites such as www.bbc.co.uk, www.sky.com and www.guardian.co.uk every 15 mins.

Test Google Crawl speed

Try it now. Take a very recent headline from the Guardian news page, then search for it. If it doesn’t appear, wait five minutes, then search again. Bingo – it’ll be in the top 5 searches (depending on how many words you used).

Now copy a handful of words from the article and paste them into google search. Again the result will be the new page.

Millions of Keywords and amendments

Think about how many keywords have therefore changed in the last five minutes and how this has therefore effected 1000s of SERPS results with ten of thousands of derivatives of keywords and permutations on the results. (Read the first blog post and I will be back to tell you how quickly the article was crawled.)

SERPS are therefore changing all the time. As one result goes to the top of the Google SERPS, others are slipping down. And as the new article gets less credit or another usurps it, then that too will slip down, thus changing the SERPS again.

This IP-SEO URL tracker tool shows just that.

Buy toys online

This is a chart for “Buy Toys Online” on google, over the Christmas period and beyond – a big search at a busy time. The SERPS are changing every day throughout the top 100 results.

This Chart (one of our SEO tools) also only takes a snap-shot of a daily search, not one done every 15 mins or half an hour.

To find out more give us a bell or drop a line below with your comments.

So why is Live search still returning an illegal movie website at the top of their rankings for a popular keyword term?

www.watch-movies.net was apparently closed down and reopened under another domain – which is a different argument altogether – and still returns on page one in Live.com for the search term ‘Download Movies Online‘, so why is this? Why does a search engine that wants to compete with Google still returns a broken link to an apparent illegal website within their SERP’s? There are many legitimate Movies available online – so why is a perfectly normal search query returning poor results?

Take a look at the screenshot below:

This is appearing in your search results today for a highly competitive keyword term. So why is it still there? Does Live continue to reward the huge volumes of backlinks pointing to the website? For some reason the webmaster didn’t place a 301 redirect on the website – which of course would have passed over page value and history to the new domain.

Take a look at the performance of the website within Google, Yahoo! and Live over the past five months:

So Yahoo! didn’t even rank the website highly in the first place, Google did but immediately the ranking dropped once the content was removed (even though there were a vast number of backlinks pointing to the website) and then there is Live, which continues to rank a website highly (amidst some fluctuations it has to be said) that hasn’t be live for over four months……and people wonder why Google has such a stronghold online.

Sir Stuart Rose, chairman of Marks & Spencer Group, said, “While the outlook remains uncertain, we’re confident that we’re doing the right things for our customers and for our business.

“Online sales were up 20% with further growth in market share as we continue to broaden the product offer,” he added.

SEO Recommendations

There is so much that can be done for the M & S website, and for a company that craves consistency and continued growth it is surprising they don’t seem to look at it.
Until then good luck with continued online growth.

Due to the nature of Bartz’s background, some cynics have questioned the motives of appointing her in such a role.  Many believe that her appointment could rekindle the interest of Microsoft, however the software giants have stated they aren’t interested in an outright acquisition anymore.

Bartz has an uphill task on her hands with kickstarting the World’s second favourite search engine fortunes as Google continues to grow.