Irreverent Thinking

I recently published a post on how you could start to use trusted third-party organisations such as the BBC to help your natural search results. There is another step forwards you can take to help this process. If you recall from my post the most important thing about your network of feeds is the quality of them as measured by Google, Yahoo etc.

You need to look at creating independent bodies of information that are uniquely and directly accessible on the net. A good example of this would be the creation of a forum for your customers to talk about your products and services - this independent source would start to build a quality rating on the internet and the fact that it (frequently) links back to your site means that this quality is bestowed upon your site.

Add a blog from an industry leader who works for your organisation, add several (or hundreds) of blogs by customers, suppliers and partners and you are starting to build you own network. The great thing about this is that any of the sites within your network can now attract feeds from other sites so the affect of this is to greatly widen your net (no pun intended) and generate a snowball effect.

It doesn’t need to stop here, Wikipedia is another example of a high rank site and the great thing about Wiki is that you can add, edit and change the entries in there yourself. So, do you have a page on Wiki? Try searching yourself. Is there any pages on Wiki that you or one of your staff could contribute to?

And what about Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, MySpace, Bebo, Piczo? The list keeps growing …

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 Page Rank 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.

It that so unusual? It’s probably rather dependent on whether I go in there a lot, which I don’t. He does, however, know quite a lot about me and stores it away in his memory. From what he said to me he knows:-

1. My favourite drink is Guinness and that’s pretty much all I drink

2. He knows I go on the train to London a lot as I will pop in for a pint on my walk back from the train station

3. He knows I smoke as I have to go outside and will leave my money on the bar whilst he’s pouring my Guinness

4. He knows I am male

Ok, so why the irreverent twitter about my local pub? Well, I was thinking that my company builds websites that learn about its visitors by their behaviour and was this a violation of privacy? The answer is “no”. The local barman sees me coming though the door and sometimes has a pint on the go, he says “hello” and if I’m in a suit and it’s around the time that the London train gets in he will ask if I had a good day in London. What he is doing is improving my experience, he’s treating me personally even though he doesn’t know my name - in fact sharing my name would seem wrong and too personal.

So why aren’t more websites like that? They should learn what I like and slant the content towards my interests. YouTube doesn’t do it; it only shows the most popular and latest videos of the day, which I hardly ever watch, so why waste my time downloading the content on that page - take a leaf out of Google’s book and just show the search bar.

More sites will certainly start to work this way and our new VITES platform certainly lets companies do that - it’s just a matter of time before it becomes the standard way to operate.

I frequently see organisations, large and small, using Google’s Analytics (GA) as their method to measure RoI or whatever else they think they need to establish and I wonder what drove them to that decision. I know it’s free and I know that Google is all cuddly but there are a couple of issues that I am torn on:

1. Google’s role as an advertiser and a reporting agent are in direct conflict. I am sure that one does not directly affect the other but they will gather market data and the temptation to mine this for commercial gain must be huge. Avoiding using GA would remove this all together. Have a read of “Google minding your own business” from Donna Bogatin to see an expansion of this topic

2. Session-based analytics are pretty useless in the grand scheme of things. Knowing that 1000 people visited your site today and 10% of them converted from the search term “blue widgets” might, on the face of it, tell you a lot but misses out so much important information such as “which people are the 10%” and “how much did these 10% go onto spend over x months”. These are real e-business questions that Google Analytics fails to answer.

3. GA works by running a script on the page, this script has a size over 5k - doesn’t sound a lot but the Google search page is just 12k. A good target size for your landing pages are 25k so this is a 20% increase in size = 20% longer to load the page.

4. There are some legitimate privacy concerns as Google is acquiring information about private individuals such as their IP address and their buying and browsing history. Now you could argue that this is not personal information but I think if you look at it from a moral standpoint it is, in many ways, far more personal than, say, my date of birth or maybe even my name. Tracking me via my IP address is far more reliable and finds every place I go - tracking me by name only works where I use my name so I can choose whether I can be found. You don’t have the option to switch off your IP address.

5. If GA is so good then why does Google not use it themselves?

So much these days is made of your trust rating on the web that there is an argument saying that those with rarer names are easier to find and therefore easier to trust. So if you’re called John Smith then it is highly likely you will be lost in a deluge of other John Smiths or, worse still, mistaken for someone else. The growth of the social networking has seen an explosion in name searching is now one of the commonest activities, whether it’s inside Facebook of directly on Google.

Time to change your name, maybe?

And no, I’m not talking about funky coffee machines or Apple’s venerable portable juke-box I’m talking about the collection of sites, communities, blogs and forums that I derive the vast majority of my information from. I’ve coined/nicked the term from it’s common use to define a social group of cetaceans (whales, porpoises, dolphins, etc.). As we trust traditional marketing less and less we are turning not just to anywhere on the web but places that we trust. So “who do you trust?” becomes the question and for me that’s an odd mix of well-known places (Wikipedia, sort of. Google, comprehensive. BBC, news…..etc). I recently changed my mobile phone (Sony Ericsson K800) and wanted something more featured and useful for work so I was heading down the PDA route and decided to ask on the Internet and where did I ask….a Lotus forum of all places! They are pretty geeky and gadget-focussed on there and only have a high percentage of computer people so it seemed to me to be the natural place to ask. I also knew them and many of them I trust so why not ask there? I could have gone to a mobile phone forum but I would have had to learn about the people, the politics and the background and this decision was, put simply, not such a big deal. If I was going to have Laser Eye Surgery then I would spend ages getting to know the forums and researching but a phone is a phone is a phone.

So this got me to thinking about the places I go and I called *it* my pod - my home - my buddies. It’s the place I go first when I want to find something out. I like my pod and I’m eager to spread the word about it, I make recommendations to friends about stuff I learn in it and it also fulfils a certain community need. If I had to write down what i wanted in my pod then I would find the following:

1. Somewhere to the learn stuff about my interests, the things I am an expert in
2. A place to go to ask my idiot questions
3. An authoritative information repository
4. A place to rant, rave and generally let off steam
5. A safe place for my work ideas, separate from the places above
6. Where I prefer to buy stuff

No doubt there are many others but if I looked at the vast majority of my web activity using the Pareto principle then I would find a remarkably small number of web-sites and people. My real pod is actually quite small.

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.

The web is getting really cluttered, messy and difficult to use properly and the very out of date method of going to websites is crap. Lots of sites have tried to help with this, bookmarking stuff and various other ideas but what we really need is myweb whereby the experience is designed around what I want to see. For example, on most days the whether is not really that important to me, I will generally walk to work in the snow if required as I really can’t be starting my car/bike to travel 1.1 miles and claim to love the environment at the same time. But, I dabble in racing cars occasionally and the weather at race meetings makes a world of difference so in the 2-5 days before I race I watch the weather diligently. Saturday and Sunday look really nice at Donington with 19-20 degrees and mainly cloudy - perfect. But every time I need to know this I have to go looking and in an ideal world I would get told this, automatically, on the run-up to race days.

So, the answer could be to build composite pages, composites of the information I need and when I need it. It would usefully have a Google search box as well as a Wiki box and would also show me the last few posts that Seth Godin has made and probably show me my eBay watch list. Wouldn’t that be great and even better if it highlighted what has changed.

Years ago I worked in the City of London for a company that produced composite pages, they were composites of different news and financial feeds (Reuters, Telerate, Bloomberg etc…) and showed the information that dealers needed on a single screen. In 1987 it was radical, brilliant and un-licenseable due to protectionism by the traditional video feed suppliers but it certainly was a giant step forward.

Google is pretty innovative, actually it is very innovative and despite having some obscene amounts of money to throw at projects a lot of good comes out of what they are doing. The latest Google “toy” that I am playing with is Google Suggestion Labs the idea is simple…..you are now too thick to search properly so we will make suggestions as to what you search for. You start typing and Google guesses what you are looking for and (usefully) tells how many matches it is likely to find. Very clever.

Except. It could “serve” you preferred answers from such sources as (gasp) commercial partners and advertisers. I noticed when I searched for Playstation 3 the first real prompt was in fact “Play.com” a well-known e-boutique selling, amongst other things, Playstation bits. Play.com had only 1 match but the entry beneath had (the word Play by itself) had 196 million matches. Ah, I here you say - it’s clever and showing the one with the least matches as that (quite rightly) would produce a better match should you stop typing there…..except that when I continued to type “Playst” it then gave me Playstation 3 (15m matches) above Playstation Portable (4m matches).

I am sure that true to form Google will also keep this algorithm secret and periodically update it so that once the SEO spammer brigade has sussed it out (ruining it for everyone) they can change it again and hurt hard-working regular sites that stay within the guidelines.