BrandToBeDetermined

SEM Presentation from Barcamp Houston 2007

Met Steven Evatt today at Barcamp Houston. Steven does SEO with the Houston Chronicle. This is our presentation on search engine marketing at the HTC Houston Barcamp.

Mahalo Greenhouse - user generated search pages

For the search engine advertising folks in the house, put Mahalo on your radar. It is a manually created directory calling itself a search engine. They are now trying to be more inclusive as the top 10k search results really is a finite amount.

My take? Maybe mahalo will get DMOZ right as DMOZ has fallen into a group of non-responsive fiefdoms.

Viral Marketing Described as Link-Bait

While a few of our team attended Search Engine Strategies in San Jose this week, I did not. But I have been reading the newsletters that come out on the sessions.

On session that is worth review is from SEOmoz blog on a formula for creating compelling content by Randfish. Content so compelling that others link to it and therefore help your search engine rank. It is told from the perspective of the web yet it should work off line just as well from a PR perspective.

Here is the link-bait presentation with a summary below (go visit the presentation for the REAL content):

1. Researching a Sector's Link-Worthiness
2. Discovery of ‘Big' Players in Your Field - Technorati and Google Trends with your keywords
3. Targeting YDDS (Yahoo!, Digg, Del.icio.us, Slashdot.org) (maybe also netscape.com)
4. Targeting Offline Media - hire PR expert
5. Selecting a Content Focus
6. Melding Branding and Viral Elements
7. Targeting Keywords/Search Traffic
8. Look at Examples of ‘Brilliant Ideas'
9. The Value of a ‘Web 2.0' Look & Feel - "The  right "look and feel" will earn links"
10. Elements that Encourage Linking
11. Pre-Launch Public Relations
12. Managing Launch Traffic - do not respond negatively
13. Continuing to Get Value from Linkbait - "Update the content with timely information."

Squidoo and SEO Spam- please no

From this long tail post on Seth's blog, it looks like SEO black hat bait to post lenses on squidoo. Please tell me it isn't so? I have some friends headed to SES San Jose so I'll post what I learn when they get back. Sigh.

For the non-serious geeks, squidoo lets people build a list of sites to be searched as a group, by topic. So you can add 10 sites related to ferrets and search like google, but only within your select sites. And of course you can share it. Seth's blog post is pointing out that the lens itself is scoring well in other search engines, which creates an incentive for folks to cheat in the search engines using custom lenses. Just something to watch out for as I am sure google is already doing.

Perhaps there is a strategy application for this within public relations for the enlightened? But that is another post.

Microsoft AdCenter Gender Predictions for Demographic Marketing

The demos of demographic profiling of search on adlab site of adcenter search technology. The image to the left demonstrates the end result; you get gender approximations based on search term. These are estimated from the behavior of the user I am guessing from total search patterns.

So, hypothetically if a searcher is obsessed with someone perhaps this indicates a male behavior. That profile data is tied back to search terms and presented to the marketing team as such. Interesting.

All kidding aside, I do see real value in demographic data when formulating strategy for clients. This does matter. Note that Google only released google trends after it was obvious that technorati and blogpulse visual reporting was skyrocketing in use. Perhaps this will lead to a similar disclosure from adwords or overture in the future?

Privacy? That is another matter.

Cost-Per-Action Advertising for Survey Promotion?

I am reading a book on conducting surveys, so surveys are on the brain. Talking to Susan Saurage at the AAF conference last week may have contributed to my current mind set. So when I saw this post:

Google Launches ValueClick Killer
The Google AdSense team would like to invite you to test a feature that provides you with a new way to earn revenue from your website by hosting ads that are compensated based on a Cost-Per-Action [CPA] basis.

My first thought was - sure you could use that for affiliate marketing, but Cost-Per-Action would also be a great low cost way to drive completed surveys. I like the microwork concept from mturk but that is such a small subset of people. PPC for surveys is problematic because most people do NOT want to take a survey when seeking something. They want to find something at that point.
But I believe an image marketing type ad soliciting survey completion without any direct compensation to the respondent might produce a balanced result. File this under "to be tested."

The picture? That has nothing to do with this post. It is just the most ridiculous advertising I have seen lately. And a terrible brand name; how can you differentiate "nutrition on sale"? Uuuugh. Maybe they need some cost per action advertising. <grin>

HitTail - Web Analytics from a PR Firm?

Via Marketing Shift a PR agency has created an SEO "long tail" optimization tool. From the Marketing Shift post:

A free program organizes "long tail" data about how people found your site through natural search and suggests keywords to use for search engine optimization.

and

PR Firm Connors Communications, which wrote the MyLongTail software (now located at HitTail.com), is also touting the merits of blogging and public relations to create content that is effective in garnering natural search instead of over paying for paid search.

The HitTail site has an 8 minute demo (sorry, 8 minutes is a LOOOONG TIME!). From viewing the demo, it looks like Google Analytics with a clear visualization of more than your top 25 inbound search words.

UPDATE: Please see the comments section on the latest from HitTail!

Voter Fatigue Skews Search Engine Results for the Aristrocracy

Voter fatigue, in political science parlance, refers to people literally getting tired of voting. Of if they vote, perhaps they vote the major ticket but block vote the rest because who the heck knows there the 2nd District Court is anyway, right?

David Berkowitz in today's SearchInsider argues this phenomenon is coming to search. From the MediaInsider article "The Aristrocracy of Relevance" (reg required unfortunately)

the search engines and their hundreds of millions of users will soon find themselves subjugating to a new ruling class: the Aristocracy of Relevance. The whole search engine marketing business was much easier when the search engines were the arbiters of relevance.

and it continues

Now, we have tagging. With the engines' new services, anyone can label a search result as he or she sees fit, and the search engine recognizes the categorization (within reason). The old model might be viewed as a benevolent dictatorship or even as enlightened absolutism; the new model is a democracy--power to the people. Yet most people won't take advantage of this power.

Google and Accoona for "Perception of Public Relations" - Accoona no match!

I received an email that made me curious about the difference between Accoona (which I had not heard of) and Google (ya, someone told me about google once) on understanding the context of a search. From the Accoona site:

Accoona Artificial Intelligence is a Search Technology that understands the meaning of search queries beyond the conventional method of matching keywords.

and

Accoona’s Artificial Intelligence uses the meaning of words to get you better searches.

The email was from a PR agency so of course I searched on "perception of public relations" in both search engines.

Everyone loves an underdog, particularly an underdog victory. But alas, such is not the case with Accoona. Google pretty much trounced them in my very unscientific comparison. This is one search, one test, yada yada and I look forward to checking back with Accoona.

One thing Accoona can do immediately to improve results is kill all of the advertising at the top. Obviously the ad engine is not as advanced as the search engine part. As a user advertising at the top IS search results. Right hand ads are extra stuff to me. But note that even without the top 3 ad served results, google still produced more of what I was specifically looking for.

Perhaps pay some turkers to evaluate a larger quantity of results, hopefully in a double blind test? But I don't think PR alone, perception or not, is going to raise Accoona above Google in my perception any time soon.

Houston Interactive Marketing Group Kickoff Event

Houston has launched the Houston Interactive Marketing Group.  The organization has been primarily coordinated by Steve Latham of Spur Digital.  The HiMA kickoff event is coming up this Thursday the 26th and we will have several people attending from our team.

<snip from the site>Please join us for our New Year Kick-Off event, January 26, from 7:30 to 9:30 am at the Houston Technology Center. Geoffrey Ramsey, founder and CEO of eMarketer will be the keynote speaker.</snip>

The following are the founding members of the Houston Interactive Marketing Association (HiMA). BMC Software Fogarty Klein Monroe Gulf Publishing Halliburton Houston Chronicle Houston Technology Center Human Kind Inc. Idea Integration InfoVine Interactive Lopez Negrete Money Management International One Real World PennWell Publishing Pierpont Communications Questia Media, Inc. Schipul - The Web Marketing Company Sam Houston Area Council Six Foot Studios Spur Digital Texas Children's Hospital Zephyr Salvo Studios