Irreverent Thinking

I’m really very fortunate to work with some of the most forward-thinking companies in the UK, but sometimes they just plain don’t understand this Net thing.

This week I had a meeting with a large client who has spent over £10m on his web strategy since 2005. Big money, big ideas and huge amounts of success. Ace.

As part of the (large) strategy is a very successful forum, it’s the only one in their space and it stands large and dominating. They rarely have to moderate it and have a great community of about 6,000 registered users and around 50,000 lurkers every year reading 20,000 posts. It cost less than £5,000 to setup in 2003 - what a bargain!

It’s a great opportunity to communicate to their ‘family’, their customers, their messengers. It could be the most influential element of their brand. In the world of semantic trust, social networking, link-sharing and search engines it offers a unique (in their marketplace) opportunity.

Last year they spent less than £500 and 1hr a week looking after it. Not surprisingly it’s dying. That is dysfunctional marketing.

Put simply, they just don’t get it. What a waste.

I do love the way the web is moving - I’m now a full-time convert to Mahalo, why not add me if you sign up to the social bit of it (you can find me here). It does nicely show how the world is moving on and our measurement of trust is changing. I wrote back in September about trusting your Pod, or group of “knowns” (you can read my original post here) and with the emergence of social bookmarking we can see that take another step. I recently joined Diigo, which offers a way to not only bookmark pages but also annotate those pages both for yourself and for anyone who trusts you.

You can see my profile easily and see what I have saved and tagged, or at least the public version of what I have tagged. Diigo call it social annotation which is an interesting concept as it opens the world, and specifically the corporate world, to semantic trust. I keep harping on about e-PR but I wonder if KFC know that I have commented on their “dietary guide” in a less than positive way? The reality of this open (trust) network is that the large corporate animals either better be on their best behaviour or better keep their eyes wide open.

(Thanks to Dan Otterburn for putting me onto Diigo)

I was in a meeting last week and the conversation swung to SEO. I was told that it’s a technical science and needs all sorts of specialist skills to be able to carry it out properly. On further discussion it became clear that there are a number of technical “must do’s” in terms of web build but these are pretty well documented and understood and talking afterwards to our web build team it was clear that we were doing these things already.

So what is SEO? Is it a standalone service/skill that companies provide or is it integrated within a web build? This got me thinking about the aims of SEO which are, quite simply, to drive high quality traffic to the website via natural search listings.

One of the fundamental cornerstones of getting good listings is understanding PageRank which was created by one of the Google founders, Larry Page, whilst at Stanford University. This is a complex algorithm but not complicated at a philosophical level and revolves on the basis that better (i.e. more useful) sites have more references on the web and that those references are of a higher quality than worse (less useful) sites. Makes perfect sense and outside of some immoral activity such as Google Jacking it seems to be a really open, clear and fair method for rating sites.

So what has all this to do with e-PR?

If your aim is to increase the number of high-quality inbound links then you need to talk to high quality (high PageRank scoring) sites and get a link from them to you. A good example is the BBC site which is PR9 so an inbound link from here will help your site enormously. To get it, you need to form a relationship with this organisation, and others, and make sure they are both happy to link back to your site and know the right URL. This is a modern-day equivalent of a Public Relations type exercise, hence the term “e-PR”.

In part, SEO now involves building real relationships with real, high-quality organisations and providing them with useful content that they can link to. It’s no secret that the internet is a great place to find useful information so all you need to do is target certain sections and pages on your site to the world’s media and they will, after a while, find you. You can accelerate the process by forming direct relationships with them by, for example, becoming one of the expert companies that the BBC will consult with on a given subject.

There is more to it than this though. You can create your own network of e-PR.

I’m been keeping online diaries for years, long before it became known as Blogging and I was an early adopter in paying TypePad for a professional blog platform (2004). Up to now I have written just for me, but I’m starting to get comments and so I’m becoming a bit more serious about it. I’ve just come across a post from a Canadian Blogger called Eric about How NOT to be a successful blogger. It made me chuckle and is one of the best posts I’ve seen this year - definitely worth a read.

See if you can count how many mistakes I have made. I got to 9 and gave up. Oh, well, I’m learning and will get better hopefully

The business version of Facebook? Probably not as it won’t get as cluttered or generate as much social drama with it’s pure for business approach. I like it so far and you can find me here - I’m still new though - and I can recommend the expert section where you can ask questions and get (mainly) good answers.

The New Media world finally shows that it has lost the plot by the great and mighty Nielsen deciding somewhat belatedly that page views are now not the way to measure sites and the way to measure them is by time spent on the site. What is going on?

I think, aside from the obvious mistakes that time-based measurement causes we need to realise that the web is used for different things by different people. Comparing Google’s page-view/time connected metric against, say, Facebook is just plain wrong - it’s like comparing time spent in your car versus time spent in the office - it is completely unrelated.

What it did make me think about was the (sort of) obvious next step of putting a Google search onto Facebook. No ones really goes to Google with the aim of staying there, it is a transit place and in fact the better the answer means the quicker the journey starts (so a huge poke in the eye to Nielsen!).

Many of us now certain forums, communities and other such places as regular drop-in centres and it would be so convenient to integrate these together. I know some people would argue that the Google toolbar means you don’t need to do this but it would be a great chance for Facebook (and Google) to start to tailor the results to the search request based on what they (jointly?) know.

I’m just starting a project with a well known UK medical company around the popular topic of “user generated content”. Aside from intensively disliking the word “user”, I wonder sometimes how big corporate Britain is going to survive the next stage of e-growth.

We have have blog, forums, social networking and now so much activity that exists outside of the sphere of corporate influence. Old marketing is dead - we all pretty know that by now - and is being replaced with what customers think they want. They cannot have been made clearer when a post on said company’s forum from a new visitor asks an opinion on a particular surgeon. Great, an opportunity for the board admin to help out and she does this by posting a link to the main web-site showing what the marketers had written about this surgeon. The original poster summarily dismissed the comment, really quite off-hand actually and asks for REAL opinions from real people. Wow.

If this person, who subsequently got great comments about their surgeon and went ahead with the procedure, didn’t believe the corporate bull-shit but would listen to the idle ramblings of Joe Average then that says a great deal about the role of the corporate site.

This episode has somewhat accelerated my drive in this project. Which, ironically, is struggling to get proper funding as we are unable to illustrate a measurable RoI for it!