06.18.07
Posted in E-marketing, Online PR, SEO/SEM at 8:49 pm by admin
Google Universal Search will change the SEO market landscape, and SEO activities has to be spread to variety of digital assets, as it is said by Lee Odden on Online Marketing Blog. I recommend to read the very detailed article about implications of Google Universal Search from Danny Sullivan.
In brief, depending on what users search for, the results page on Google Universal Search could feature sections with images, video, links to book content, maps or local business listings.
SEO implications for integrated search results were obvious before (this is not a new approach to the presentation of search results), but now, day-to-day activities of SEO people have to be spread with the optimization of other distribution channels (the sources of vertical searches, presented in integrated search results).
In other words, there has to be done a separate (and different) tasks for the optimization in news results, video results, local listings…
Integrated SEO approach and Marketing Operations Management (MOM)
Described new entrance of activities in SEO business process are also in collision with appropriate online PR activities (like a news placements, choosing different media format and places strategies, etc.). Increased number of SEO tasks, and its relations with adequate online PR tasks, has to be managed in a bigger perspective of complete (online) marketing operations in an organization.
In my opinion, companies which decide to implement integrated in-house approach of advance SEO activities (SEO 2.0), they can do very good job of integrating all online activities, from the point of relating business processes and the cooperation between different parts of marketing department, if they did not do the integration of (online) marketing activities before. It means that an appropriate marketing model* has to be set, to meet desirable outputs related to the goals of marketing department.
* Marketing model - In the context of (online) marketing, models simulate real-life marketing activities.
For outsourced SEO activities, the management problem is moved to the organization of SEO agency’s day-to-day activities.
SEO is not equal to online PRÂ
The reason why I emphasize the importance of good project management, related to integrated SEO approach, lies in the problems which can be seen in relatively new Search Engine Reputation Management activities of SEO professionals.
The people who are not adequately educated in online PR (SEO people are not online PR experts - see the briefing about the needs in online PR industry), take some actions (a creation of massive number of posts, for example) which can directly damage the reputation of target organization, due to increase need for hiding some other incriminated content on the Web.
With the new tasks like news placements (placements on the news aggregators), the work with video materials (how to optimize what video should be on youtube.com), and similar tasks, has to be done with the cooperation between SEO people and appropriate professionals in online PR, or with other persons in (online) marketing department.
Of course, there is another problem for middle and large business companies in the case of integrated SEO approach, such as digital assets management, or the problems related to lack of document management software systems.
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06.14.07
Posted in E-marketing at 9:41 pm by admin
Six years ago I created the Web Site Structure Management (WSSM) concept. In 2002 I published this concept within the broader perspective of On-Site Marketing Concept (soon, I will elaborate this concept on my blog), in my book in Serbian language “The Guide Through Internet Marketing’s Heaven and Hell”. In this post there is the explanation of new perspectives regarding WSSM concept in Web 2.0 environment.
Definition of Web Site Structure Management
In 2001 I defined WSSM as
…the way to organize Web site’s domains, directories, and navigation on different Web pages, according to customer needs, using content management software with implemented Web Site Structure Management solution.
The use of WSSM concept is particularly helpful for the complex Web sites with completely different user groups and with thousands (millions) of pages.
Why now?
According to latest presentation of Behavioral Advertising trends by Emarketer, as well as the issues related to visitor/customer online engagement (previous article on my blog), there is need to emphasize something very obvious - for the actual online marketing developments there is an urge for a knowledge (expertize). Within the very interesting observation of Matthew Haughey on his blog (related to attention economy issues), that contextual advertising has to be targeted to particular user groups on some Web site (new users Vs. regular ones), again it is said that online marketing is not that simple (nor any other job, if you want to do it professionally).
Web Site Structure Management can be the additional tool for the establishing and maintaining advanced online marketing strategies, related to on-site optimization activities (such as structure, content and CRM).
Web Site Structure Management 2.0
On the structure level, Web 2.0 concept introduced tagging and folksonomy (the special case of tagging, generated by “folks”), as the alternative ways to solve the problem of Web site structure (alternative Web site structures, or taxonomies).
On the level of SEO activities, there is a custom to create search engine friendly URLs, with a keywords (made by copywriter) or keyphrases (A combination of words on your Web site that matches the search term). With Blog CMS-es is is already easy to do it, as well as a lot of different CMS solutions have the implementation of SE friendly URLs.
On the Internet technology level, there is a great shift in better Web site user experience design. The creation of visitor/customer engagement devices (related to product/content online merchandising) with AJAX technology, can be paramount for an easy creation of different levels of navigation, related to part of the site or sub-site; related to visitors/customers group; related to actual Web page content; related to visitor’s behavior (the path of the visitor through a Web site)…
Social media and user generated content brings additional structuring trouble when they have to mixed with other Web site content…
In 2007 I can say that
Web Site Structure Management Concept represents the consulting and technical solution to establish and maintain organization of the Web site, that meets the different goals of Web site owners, and the expectations of different Web site user groups.
In the next posts about WSSM concept I will provide some examples to clarify the issues I am writing about. Some inputs (outputs) from you will be very helpful for my further posts on this subject.
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06.09.07
Posted in E-marketing at 9:52 pm by admin
I stumbled upon very interesting article from Dave Chaffey blog about Internet marketing trends in 2007 (very interesting Web sources about collecting data on Web trends, in this post). One of those trends to watch in 2007 is visitor engagement (VE).
I agree with Mr. Chaffey that the most appropriate definition of visitor engagement is:
“Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in a brand”
The most discussed part of the visitor engagement is the metrics of this trend. Very detailed observations about VE metrics can be found in five parts article of Eric T. Peterson’s WebAnalyticsDemistified blog (I, II, III, IV, V - very interesting visual perspective of visitor engagement).
There is not a lot of post on Technorati about a visitor engagement (1.700+).
The importance of visitor engagement lays in the fact that often conversion is conceived as a single conversion rate implying a single site visit, but this is rarely the case. A conversion as a single site visit can be seen as one dimension look, because the process of turning visitors to customers is very different to particularly all Web sites, even very similar ones. There are several questions which gives the answer how particular visitor become customer:
- Why visitor came to the Web site?
- Where he/she landed on the Web site?
- What is the “persuasion rate” of the Web site, to initiate visitor to repeat the visit?
- How many repeat visits is needed for the visitors to be converted to customer?
- What is the particular content and the “killer app.” that will persuade the visitor to become customer?
The answers to these questions shows that Web metrics by themselves cannot give the accurate results (they can give only the clues, or indications). Metrics, with the combination of Persona Scenarios, and very detailed clickstream analysis (the analysis of various paths through the Web site), can be the answer to the question how to enhance the visitor engagement.
In addition, the importance of visitor engagement is very high in Web 2.0 environment, due to “architecture of participation” issue, which is one of the measures of visitor engagement.
Visitor engagement as the base for some online business and revenue models
In my opinion, the most interesting example of online business models based on visitor engagement is flickr.com. More visitor engagement of this Web site produce more pictures in the free account, and if the visitor engagement high enough, soon visitor will become customer, when he/she reaches the limit for the free pictures storage. More activities (engagement), more revenue…
It is interesting that practically all subscription based online business models are related to visitor engagement.
Visitor engagement Vs. customer engagement
There is much less problems with the measurement of visitor engagement if there is more particular data about the visitor. When it is talked about customer engagement, if the customer databases are used to improve customer engagement, the results can be seen in the examples of Amazon.com, or imdb.com.
The repeated problems with visitor and customer engagement can be seen on the Web sites that are not paying attention of different needs of different kind of site users (e.g. visitors Vs. customers). For example, there are a lot of bank Web sites that do not have the link of its online banking at the Home Page. In last ten years of my online business practice I had to mention more than hundred of times that Web designer, or project manager has to thing about repeated visitors, and their needs.
Mr. Chaffey use interesting phrase “visitor engagement devices”, for the visual parts of the Web page, where links to the appropriate content is situated for a different Web site users, to enhance visitor engagement.
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06.04.07
Posted in Online PR at 12:17 pm by admin
In last year or so, there were intensified Anti-Astroturfing campaigns related to online environment. The term Astroturfing originates from the artificial grass brand AstroTurf, and it refers to fake grassroots campaigns related to political and marketing/PR issues.
Here are some Astroturfing examples and case studies.
Recent issues related to Astroturfing activities can be found in US automobile industry (Led by Detroit’s Big Three and Toyota Motor Corp., the industry is launching print and radio ads, warning consumers that fuel regulations under consideration by the U.S. Senate would lead to higher vehicle prices and smaller and less safe vehicles).
False identities could face criminal prosecution under new rules in Europe
From 2008, in UK and then in the rest of EU, there will be a place for the legal action against ‘parties’ who are acting against the consumer interests. “As part of an overhaul of its consumer laws, the European Union will make it a crime to falsely represent oneself as a consumer on blogs or other online forums, come the beginning of next year”, it is said on the Washington Post blog. The original article is from Times of London, and it refers to a Directive on Unfair Commercial Practices from Council of the European Union.
A Directive is in general devoted to these issues:
- Including in an advertisement a direct exhortation to children to buy advertised products or to persuade their parents or other adults to buy advertised products for them;
- Claiming that a product has been approved, endorsed or authorized by a public or private body when it has not;
- Falsely stating that the product will only be available for a very limited time, or that it will only be available on particular terms for a very limited time, in order to elicit an immediate decision and deprive consumers of sufficient opportunity or time to make an informed choice;
- Promoting a product similar to a product made by a particular manufacturer in such a manner as deliberately to mislead the consumer into believing that the product is made by that same manufacturer when it is not;
- Falsely claiming or creating the impression that the trader is not acting for purposes relating to his trade, business, craft or profession, or falsely representing oneself as a consumer;
- Creating the false impression that after-sales service in relation to the product is available in a Member State other than the one in which the product is sold;
- Requiring a consumer who wishes to claim on an insurance policy to produce documents which could not reasonably be considered relevant as to whether the claim was valid, or systematically failing to reply to related correspondence;
- Creating the false impression that the consumer has won, is to win or will on doing a particular act win a prize, when in fact either there is no prize or taking any action in relation to claiming the prize is subject to the consumer paying money or incurring a cost;
How to identify fake activism and and false identities on the Web
- The attack on a Social Media “influencers”
To take the legal actions against the fake blogs; online consumer reviews posted by hotels, restaurants, online shops themselves(…); there is need for a vast of Web evaluation knowledge, specially when there are an activities which glorify those “PR tactics”. In addition, the mechanisms how to identify who is faking what and where, should be very precisely defined, and placed in very transparent procedures.
The main issue regarding the establishment of adequate legal actions against of unfair commercial practice, is in focus of actual and future Reputation Systems. For example, it would be very difficult to explicitly determine what is a real book review in Amazon.com, or objective experience in some hotel through TripAdvisor.com.
It would be interesting to see how to describe the activities relating to Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM), or is it legal to put down negative search results below the first 10 or 20 search results, about the target organization. It is obvious that SERM activities relays upon the mass postings on the Web sites/blogs with good Google PR, to achieve good ratings on specific keyphrases on Google.
The issues represented above have to create an urge for the creation of quality Reputation Systems, because there is a lot of space for the improvements in this field.
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