Someone sent me a story last week or so on a guy who was banned from google. I know, people get banned every day so this had better be good.
Well, it is.
This particular gentleman had a great use of Facebook applications to drive traffic to his site (and improve his SEO). Make an app (I think it was a horoscope) and have a link to his site (it was a dating site). People add the app, Google picks up all these links back with good key phrases “best dating for free” and whatnot. Pretty smart cookie.
Here is the banned part. He started expanding the message and changed the link to a second business of his. Goggle got upset that he wasn’t linking to the serving site and was just “advertising.” Thus,they banned him for link-farming.
Now, we all know what a Google ban does for you. It is like having yourself blacklisted from using your thumbs every day. You can still survive but a lot of things get a lot harder.
Even when this guy changed the link back, Google said no. He even moved his apps to a new link and it is moving slowly, but he is being careful because he is on double-secret-probation from Google.
I found it interesting as a study in something really smart getting on the bad side of Google for changing the equation a bit. I am glad Google is watching but this guy sounds like he made amends and after his (admitted) mistake tried to make things better. But the Google god is a vengeful one and smite him good.
Be careful with your one-off brilliant ideas on your already established site. You don’t want to lose your thumbs.
For the life of me I can’t find this story any more. I remember the details but my google-fu is weak today and I can not find the story. If you have it, please link to it in the comments.
More and more I am having conversations with people, usually agency managers on how they are thinking about ramping up social media. Sure, the agenngies do a fair amount of SEO (which has somehow now become part of the Web 2.0 experience?!?!) but, most companies haven’t taken a serious look at social media.
Even marketing groups, branding agencies haven’t made this leap. Most are still on”old web” and interactive. “Let us re-do your site” and “we can re-do your e-commerce.” As far as getting viral (the real kind, not the kind where you put something on Youtube and hope people find it) almost everyone is ignoring social media.
What I am hearing from agencies are two things. First, that they aren’t equipped for social media strategy. They don’t know Twitter from a hole and they don’t know what else there is besides “buy ads on myspace” (not a social strategy BTW).
Secondly, and this is most important, the agencies don’t think their clients are asking for it. This stuck me as odd because in my part of the world everyone is launching or asking to launch social something. It is seen as a minimal investment with big upside. Drop 40 grand, and if it doesn’t work, eh, not a huge deal, you got to say you did something cool. If it does work, you are the genius of the market department who found a new way to save the world.
I wasn’t sure if I was just talking to companies who had a leading edge bend to them, or if the market really was asking for more than agencies think they are.
The best way for me to tell what the online free market is doing is to look at the demand on Google. I spent some time playing with keyword estimators and traffic projections. What I found was consistent so I will only show one set of results. You can see what type of phrases I used.
As you can see, there isn’t incredible demand, but there is some key demand from people looking for social media ideas. I’ll point out in the cases where there is data, more people are searching than there are people advertising for it. Sure, the searching in just March was weak enough Google couldn’t put whatever ranking on it (not entirely sure what that threshold is) but within the year people have been searching for these phrases.
The two terms that surprise me most are “social media press release” and “social media agency.” These two terms are obviously client/company driven, looking for social media experts. They aren’t finding them in the person-to-person networking world so they are actually searching online for those social media strategy experts.
Based on this quick set of results, the companies probably still aren’t finding the social media specialists they are looking for. No one is advertising themselves (using adwords at least) as a social media agency.
Ladies and Gentleman, when companies are looking for an expertise and no one is offering that expertise you have a market opportunity. Right now you can get in a bit of a ground floor doing just social media interactive work, after you convince you know your game, and have a market more-or-less to yourself. I can’t say it is the “next big thing” but there is certainly a itch market. Focusing on Twitter, facebook application, profile development, social SEO, Open Social, etc… you have something.
Yes, there are lots of tools, and programmers who kind of dabble. There are houses who will take a shot, but not a lot of places advertising “this is what we do and all we do” when it comes to social media.
And yet, there are obviously companies, potential clients, looking for that expertise. Anyone want to open a shop? Recent layoffs and disgruntled workers in Milwaukee means I can have an entire department starting Monday. So, if you have a six figure slush fund laying around, lemme know (how is that for a pitch? Think it will work?)
I have been spending my freetime screwing around with facebook applications, including an application builder. Problem is in that time, the last week or so, I haven’t posted here at all.
I was quickly reminded of the first rule of blogging, content is king; consistency is queen. Going from one or two posts a day to non for a week made my visitors log look like a downhill ski slope.
Sure, I got a few random hits from the long-tail of whitegold.com and a couple other posts. Sure, some message boards gave old reffers, but realy traffic died.
There are three things I tell people when they start blogging and I broke all three.
1. Have a message.
Don’t just blog about anything, if it is a personal blog, keep it personal, if it is on ice cream don’t post randomly on shoes. Get a theme and keep it. If you really want a random blog, that is your theme, but you will still have one because even you have a theme, you just don’t know it yet.
2. Make a schedule, keep a schedule.
Just because you can’t blog every hour on the hour doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a blog. If you are weekly, then stay weekly (but never expect huge numbers unless you are really special). I check most of my blogs daily. I check them if they have been crappy for a while or if they don’t post. When they don’t post I get grumpy, like it is owed to me…. and I know better.
3. Warn me when you are going to do that.
If you are planning on not posting, tell people. I guess you can say why. If anyone cares, have a guest blogger. Guest blogging can give you huge traffic, and makes everyone happy.
Follow those three things and the rest will come. Your readers will appreciate the consistency and courtesy.
I touched on this a bit in my own post about “random” followers but, Seocracy.com has a good article on how one would properly spam twitter if one wanted to. Oh and if they were an unethical SOB. I do agree with him that even on the high end you aren’t talking OMG hit numbers (more on that in another post).
@zappos picked his winner (which BTW he is paying for personally so the Zappos lawyers don’t get persnickity) to go to Vegas. When I woke up this morning he had 1604 followers. Sorry I didn’t get the count when it was announced, I fell asleep early watching Good Eats.
This is, if you remember up from 200 or so on Friday morning. In a weekend @zappos got himself 1400 followers, which I might add he just cleverly used to pimp his company’s job openings.
Yesterday around noon I got a tweet from @MichelleBB that @Zappos was holding a content. At the end of the day @Zappos (Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh) was going to pick one person following him to win a free pair of shoes. A couple hours later he also said he’d give a free pair of shoes to upto 10 followers of that winner who are also following.
A pair of shoes for Zappos is no big deal for sure. So this was a goodwill investment for Tony. As soon as I got the announcement (and followed!) I saw that his following count was a little over 200.
Three hours later as the word filtered through the internet his followed counted over 400. By the time he gave the shoes away to @rotkapchen there were over 1000 followers.
This morning the followers were back down to 966 but Tony will show those early leavers. He just a couple minutes ago announced:
I want to meet more customers. On Monday, I will select a random @zappos follower for free trip for 2 to Vegas for office tour & lunch w/ me
I really think this this twitter strategy is brilliant. Sure the plane tickets are a cost but he could have done this shoes give away could have been once a week and he would have thousands of people following.
What that really means is thousands of technophiles, glued to their computers most of the day listening to any “commercial” he has about a new feature, or a sale or anything. His cost a few hundred dollars a week.
If you have a e-commerce site and can afford a hundred bucks a week you too can harness some Twitter power and get a, fairly-rabid following in this form of simple, easy contests. Free baseball cards, I am there. Travel voucher, there. Magazine subscription, there. Free books, there… you get the idea. I am willing to read a couple of “commercial” twitters a week from someone for the random win once a year. Costs me nothing.
Costs the “advertiser” almost nothing and gets new customers, branding and messaging in front of people who would have ignored you and all the extra benefits of the buzz. Ignore @zappos has already one-upped the stakes with a trip to Vegas, this will become the next big thing on Twitter. Someone grab twitterdeals.com
Plus, hey, I could use a trip to Vegas, I have a ten year anniversary coming up with my wife.
I don’t know if other parts of the US have this but in the midwest we get these odd spring rain storms. One minute sunny and nice the next just a monsoon on your lawn, five minutes later sunny again. No drizzle or warning just thick, fat rain to soak you to the bone or sunny happiness.
Today my wife decided to walk to school and pick up my youngest. Five minutes after she left there was one of those random rain storms, and I hope she missed it. Then sun for 10 minutes then rain again for five. I can imagine her running with a 4 year old in one arm and his scooter in the other during the walk home.
While I watched this from my office window I realized this is a lot like almost all social media programs. You tend to not have a lot of “sort of viral” or “kind of a big hit” it tends to be either feast or famine. Now of course there are levels of “viral” and what your goals are can still be met with lower levels, but when something fails it falls flat and when it succeeds you look like a champ and then some.
Setting those client expectations, that each social program, each marketing idea, just because and especially if it looks like the last big success, is key. I could give you two failed programs for each good one you mention, and those failed ones might have been better but something was wrong.
A few tips on keeping those client expectations clear:
Remind them that there are failures
Show them some, say “do you remember…” no of course not, it failed, someone spent a fair amunt of money and it crashed. Every time they bring up that such and such went gold with almost no budget have a reminder they are the exception more than the rule (especially for no budget).
Take their examples of wins and tell them why it worked
Sometimes this can be a bit critical of what they are doing. Their example may have been funny, or had a huge PR campaign you didn’t see, or was the first on the block, or was edited well. A $10,000 campaign budget isn’t generally going to perform like one that was $100,000. Keeping these ROI expectations when they are focused on the far end of the bell curve is very important.
Set high and low goals
You need to set the expectation of “here is worst case” so they know you were thinking of it as this campaign was created. “we might only get 5,000 people to go to the site in 3 months… it might not catch on.” While optimism is fine, ignorance that everything you touch is first-rate just doesn’t work in social media. On the high side, be realistic, that way you can still exceed expectations.
Remind of the long-tail
Not everything is an overnight success. Just like when you show up to see a hot video on youtube you are already the 108,238th person to see it. That video has probably been up for months and until some morning show in Houston mentioned it it was sitting on 10,000 views and a couple mentions on Digg. That is the nature of viral, it can sit around and then blow up huge to be in everyone’s inbox by noon. Unless you have a huge initial push budget don’t expect a big gig day one. Sure, you can bump day one but it might not sustain. Obviously this gets into getting something viral into the hands of the right people but that is a different post.
Have an exit strategy
If you are three months and 60% of your budget in, how are you going to cut bait? You can still save the brand by putting the money into something more secure. Just like a falling stock can be bought out and put into a CD you know has less upside but isn’t going anywhere. Before you start the campaign you should have dropdead metrics and dates in mind.
Let the client know that if things fail they won’t blow their entire budget on a loser, there is still a plan C.
Know how to tweak
Any good social plan has tweak points. If it is a blog, posting more or less or using different language or attitude. Know your tweak points, know the cost to tweak and DO tweak. People are not commenting, figure out why and encourage it.
The client knowing this is going to happen is like knowing your baby sitter will check in on the kids after they are asleep and not just watch cable.
Plan on deconstructing
Did it work or not? Either way it was probably a fine detail that made the difference either way. A catch phrase, wasn’t funny, was funny but to the wrong audience, whatever. Because you are going to need to talk about it, you have to watch it. You know it, they know it, it helps.
Report and expand regularly
Sometimes campaigns start strong and fall off. Others they start slow but show signs of life. Report these, predict, and say why. “downloads are slow now but in the reffer logs we just got a hit from a major blogger, so hopefully that picks things up.” or “we really fell off after that first email newsletter, it didn’t seem to get passed on and we need to watch when to call it dead.”
Most importantly, setting expectations up front is the most important part of any social media campaign. We all know the upside of a real winner, we need to remember that not everyone bats 1.000 (heard from jib-jab lately?), anticipate big upside, don’t let the client expect it.
A couple weeks ago someone sent me a youtube video declaring it “either the best or worst band, ever.” The video was While Gold singing One Gallon Axe. I noticed quickly that I had never heard of this band (not odd at all) it was, while silly, well made (a little odd) and had a lot of hits (not too out of the water).
The video is indeed silly, and pure self-aware sarcasm of metal/rock. Plus it has the line “rock the world’s face” which is classic.
Today I found whitegold.com the official website for the band. And it is cool. THe pre-loader is even great, goes up to 11 and makes the static louder. Then you have interactive videos, while the video goes on (and it does take forever to load) you can pick up move and click on things and stuff happens. It allows you to unlock other videos.
The site and music is really entertaining and cool.
Here is the best part, it is all an ad campaign. California dairy board (obvious now after you know it) created this persona and campaign. I love that you have no idea except for a small copyright in the corner and if you are paying attention.
I love how daring it is that they spent all this money for a campaign, and never even put a tagline or logo at the youtube released video, they don’t splash it around or even present it in the site. They took a “this better work or go bust” approach to the viral nature of the ads.
Good afternoon,
I attached this camera to the bench so you could take pictures. Seriously. So have fun. I’ll be back later this evening to pick it up.
Love, Jay / The Plug
He posted the resulting photos on his site. Great idea and an even better reminder that social media doesn’t have to be online. This could be a huge idea for a brand (especially with a digital camera and a watermark) though I am guessing you need a uhhh editor if it is in a bar or something.
You are out, having a good time, grab the camera on the wall, point, click take Tommy’s photo and remember the URL. Next day (or so) go check it out. Send it to friends, branded, talked about, passed on.
I probably get two or three invites, notifications, etc a day to new sites or tools that manage to make it past SPAM. That’s cool, I like new toys but, I don’t have time for them all. Who does? Unless you spend your days obsessively going to go2web20 and clicking on every new toy for 45 minutes chances are you do the confused dog tilt a couple times a day when you get a new invite.
Yesterday I got invites to Evernote, Supercook and Linoit. All fine little apps once I learn them.
What occurred to me is that this was a perfect set for the three types of usability/understandability I come across every day. You see, I spend a fair amount of time just trying new things, “keeping up” as it is, and so on. And I certainly don’t have time to check out, log in, test drive and use every ajax-laden widget and website I see. I know I am certainly not paying for anything unless I get blown away.
As I see it there are three major issues with usability you see in web 2.0 Apps, specifically their home page. Face it every one of these is fighting for time, the web currency, and if you don’t get it right the user is confused and gone.
What does it do? Why do I care?
This was the Evernote site for me. I got an invite and the email sort of said keep things for life, but as I happen to get it in my gmail, I already have things for life. I still went to the site and still thought, “ok, rounded corners, spiffy logos… so what?” Their tag lines and explanation is too thin. I had no idea what I needed to do so I could use this thing, or why I would, or how hard it is.
Also, they are showing iPhones and macs everywhere and I am on a PC, so I am thinking this isn’t even for me. Luckily, they did but a great little narrated video to solve the “what does it do, why do I care?” After this little video, the application really is pretty bad ass, and I will probably start using it. It is kind of a “the parts of a site you want to remember” like a temp folder on the web or del.icio.us for parts of page. There is also some awesome image reading technology. It’s in beta, if you want to play shoot me an email or twitter and I’ll invite you.
Fault: Not saying in clear words what this tool does.
But this one goes to 11
When I hit Linoit, I instantly knew what it did, keep notes online for me. What I didn’t understand, and still don’t is why I care. I guess I can share with my friends that I need milk and razor blades. I guess I can keep a note of an address or a photo I took. The problem is, I can already do that. I commonly take a phone photo of something and then forward it to my gmail (now evernote) . I cal already text myself a grocceyr list, email it to myself and tag it, whatever…. what does this do I don’t already have?
Sure this go to 11, but why don’t I just make 10 louder? They never explain the advantage (and the soundless video where you watch someone use it doesn’t help). Plus, to really do anything you need to create a login. Yeah, I don’t have enough of those. Searching for confirmation emails brings up well over 100 in my gmail this year alone. I’m not signing up for something to find out I was right it isn’t really useful. Not without a recommendation from a key friend (but that is another post).
Fault: Not telling me why I care or why it is better than anything else.
blah blah Ginger blah blah blah
When I was sent supercook I was pretty happy. Came from a good recommendation, I didn’t have to login to use it, it was clear what I did and it was a good idea to boot. Since I like cooking, and need to go to the store (with text message grocery list) I decided to try this little tool out.
Under the ingredients you have I put in:
pickles (no recipes found?)
garlic (2000 recipes found)
chicken thighs (2000 recipes; can make one now)
mushrooms (2000 recipes; can make 2 now)
The site does a good job of recommending next ingredients, telling you what you can make 100% now, etc. It is really spiffy. What threw me off was the 2000 recipes. What if I am one ingredient away from something, do I need to scroll them? Which crockpot chicken should I make there are dozens? I don’t want to read them all.
Really, the results were too good, the database too populated and what I got was this:
What am I supposed to do with these results? Should I go to the store? How do I know someone didn’t put something that tastes like fried butt and I make it anyway.
There was no sense of authority or next steps or recommendation. They could be so awesome letting you view (mail yourself) a recipe, keep it in a (non logged in!) box and then come back to rate/review so things filter up. Also the whole “one ingredient away” would be tremendous. I’d probably use the site every day.
Fault: Confusing results make me want to give up and not come back.
Well, there are my top three usability issues in a nutshell. You can certainly get into lesser categories like fancy names for simple menu items or “ahhhh my eyes hurt turn off the flash” but those I consider secondary. If you have ideas on other majors, lemme know, always like to talk about it.
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