Techpaulogy

Economic Downturn Boosts Reliance on Social Media Marketing Tactics

Marketing Sherpa just released the results of a survey they recorded, detailing Marketers' response to the current economic downturn:

SUMMARY: Every marketing tactic gets more scrutiny when budgets face the sting of a struggling economy. Here is a glance at how marketers expect to tailor their investments in digital tactics during a downturn.



...Not surprisingly, house email and Web 2.0 are getting high attention; both are relatively low-cost and the former, at least, has proven ROI. Web 2.0 is seen as having the same virtue, although it doesn’t have email’s well-documented ROI...

(Full article can be found on Marketing Sherpa here: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30925)

Is this how my fellow marketers are reacting to the downturn? We're certainly tightening up marketing budgets here, and focusing on our programs with the best lead gen results (tied back to pipeline and closed deals). Less $$$ allocated to branding/awareness initiatives in the broader sense. We're putting down the shotgun and getting out the rifle, digging in our beachhead more around live customer webcasts, search (paid and organic), and community building... the later 2 are deeply rooted in social media marketing. For example, online communities can have a big impact on organic search/SEO. We did a webcast with Anvil Media about it recently: Boost SEO with an Online Community

Connecting Online Communities to SEO Strategy

There's no question that Search Engine Optimization is BIG on marketers' minds these days -- it's a great way to engage potential customers in all stages of the sales cycle. Both researchers and decision-makers use search to make purchasing decisions for software, services, etc.

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about how online communities tie into search. I'll evolve this conversation as we go, but wanted to start putting it on the radar now so the general community can help move it forward. At a high level, how does a community fit into a company's SEO strategy? This slideshow demonstrates it:

SEO - Where Online Communities Fit In from Paul Biggs on Vimeo.

In short, the 80/20 rule applies here -- a Marketing team can focus on the 20% of core keywords that drive most search engine traffic from the likes of Google and Yahoo, and the community take care of the rest of the keywords. A company is, in essence, capturing the "long tail" of search by outsourcing niche SEO content to users, that the main site (run by Marketing) doesn't have the resources to cover.

I'll be doing some research in this vein, and present my findings in a webcast: http://www.jivesoftware.com/news/webcasts. There will also be more conversations over on Jive's social software best-practices community: http://www.jivesoftware.com/clearstep/

IBM Data Visualization Tool Turns Out to be Amazing for Keyword Research

Wow. IBM's Many Eyes, a shared data and discovery tool, turns out to be a powerful tool for keyword research for MarCom and Search Engine Marketing purposes (hat tip to Sam Lawrence for piquing my interest in Many Eyes). I was trying to figure out what keywords and messaging to use for an upcoming product launch and the associated online marketing campaigns, and wanted to see how marketers are framing the conversation around some niche topic areas.

I started by reading a ton of posts from a selection of popular marketing blogs, but quickly became overwhelmed by the immensity of the conversation (marketers tend to, you know, be ridiculously verbose). So, if you know me, I quickly turned to data tools. In this case, IBM Many Eyes offered a great way to analyze text patterns and keyword density. It has two different tools to leverage.

First, you can create tag clouds out of any text. So I started with the Forrester Research Marketing Blog, and copied the 20 latest blog posts into Many Eyes (minus the author bylines to parse out repetitive names and dates). I set the tag cloud to 1-word display. My goal was to see what words were being used repeatedly. Here's what I found:

It was pretty noisy, but gave a good idea of recurring words. Then, I wanted to dig a little deeper, so I switched to 2-word analysis. This showed some more long-tail frequency, perfect for SEO and PPC:

Now we're starting to see some interesting results! Here's what's in the forefront of some leading industry analysts' minds. So, we know "brand monitoring" is a popular topic. With my SEO/PPC cap on, I also want to know what variations of brand-related terms are being used. Next, I turn to Many Eyes' Word Tree tool, and enter "brand" as the root word. After sorting by Frequency Order for easier viewing, we end up with this:

This gives us a pretty deep dive into long-tail terms, as well as what's the hot topic in the space. It makes sense that "brand monitoring firms" are pretty high profile, as there are a slew of acquisitions going on (JD Power bought Umbria, etc). And, it's pretty related to our space, as we recently evaluated a number of vendors, as well as explored a few partnership ideas.

Next time around, I am going to throw a bunch more data into Many Eyes from a variety of sources (it can take up to 1MB of data at a time) and get a wider slice of the conversation. You can also upload 2 separate blogs, and compare the 2 side-by-side on a keyword basis. Let me know if you have some even better ideas to use this (or other tools) to dig into social media conversations.

Bumpin' SEO Tactics - Get Your Rank on Lock

A good portion of my job revolves around search engines, both paid and organic (with the trusty help of Anvil Media). I've often explained what "search engine optimization" or "lead generation funnels" are to my friends and family, but maybe I should have enlisted the help of Chuck, who puts it best:

See all his SEO beats over on YouTube. Yeah, there's a few...

Track Your Company and Competitors in Real-time: Persistent Search for Business Intelligence

A number of people have recently asked me how to setup real-time alerts for different things -- Jive, competitors, their own name (vanity?), etc. I've tested a number of ways to facilitate this "persistent search" functionality, whereby I am notified any time one of the many search engines out there (Google, Yahoo, Ask, Technorati, etc) finds a specific keyword. Let's use "Jive Software" as an example. Here is what I want to do:

• know any time a blog mentions the words "Jive Software"
• know any time a static website adds a page that contains "Jive Software"
• be notified ASAP so I can react

Now, to facilitate this, there are some process points:

• I want to avoid clogging my inbox, so this has to be done via RSS, not email (so Google Alerts won't fit the bill).
• I also want to over-subscribe, and build logic to filter the noise -- as opposed to only subscribe to one or two sources -- so I don't miss anything (which crosses-off the persistent search functions built into RSS readers like Attensa , where you could setup searches for both "Jive Software" and "Clearspace" and get two of every article that mentions both).

So, I turn to Yahoo Pipes. This tool is absolutely fantastic. A life-saver. And for you Perl ninjas out there, you can make it do even more than me. So here's what it does: takes in data (RSS/XML, JSON, whatever), allows you to mash it up (splice, sort, filter, rename, etc), and then spits it out in whatever fashion you want (RSS, JSON, email, text message).

Back to our "Jive Software" example. So, I want to setup a "pipe" to monitor this term (a free-standing tool that sucks in data, processes it, and spits it back out):

1. Log-in to your Yahoo account
2. Go to http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes
3. Go to my profile http://pipes.yahoo.com/techpaulogy
4. Hover over my pipe that says "Persistent Search – Jive"
5. Click on the "Clone" link in the upper-right of the gray highlighted area that pops up
6. Click on the "My Pipes" link in the top navbar
7. You should see a new pipe in your list of Pipes that is a copy of mine.
8. Click on the title of the copied pipe to go to it's management page. You'll see the current live results for "Jive Software" searches on Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Technorati , etc.
9. Click on the "Edit Source" link. Now for the magic (click the image -- it's 1600 px wide, might need to resize or download to see it best):

Here, you can see the guts of the pipe. It uses modules to fetch the source feeds, in one case re-maps some data fields to sync up with each other, combines all the sources, sorts them by date, filters out duplicates, and outputs the new feed. Voila! Play around. Now that it's been copied to your account, you can break it to your heart's content. Envision expanding this to also track searches for competitors, Jive product names, industry analysts, etc. (you'll see another pipe in my account called "Splice - Jive Feed" that combines this persistent search pipe with a shared OPML file of enterprise software blogs -- it's a work in progress).

Who else has played with this? Any Perl ninjas out there want to help me write logic (based on Regular Expressions) that can help standardize dates in all the various feeds to enable better sorting? Right now it's pretty hit or miss. Also, I'd love to explore publishing some shared "best-practice" OPML files (one for Competitor's blogs, one for Enterprise Software blogs, etc) that can be plugged in -- I was having trouble parsing the OPML file in the example "Splice" pipe.

SearchFest 2007 - Search Engine Marketing Conference

SearchFest '07 is fast approaching on Wednesday, March 7th! It's a full-day search engine marketing conference featuring multiple learning tracks, workshops, and expert panels to help you leverage search engine marketing (SEM) in your organization. Whether you are an SEM professional, work in an advertising agency, or are on an in-house marketing team, SearchFest '07 will connect you with the leading thinkers and practitioners in SEM today.

The conference is a collaboration of SEMpdx members, including Anvil Media (where I plug away at SEO, PPC, and web analytics). Panels will be headed up by representatives from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Looksmart, eFrontier, iCrossing, Portland Trailblazers, Snap Names, Feedia, ID Branding, Tektronix, and WebTrends, to name a few. Other luminaries of the industry will also be in attendance too -- for example the SEOmoz team (Rand and Rebecca).

Hope to see you there! Here is the agenda and the registration page.