Nick Garner's Blog

SEOMoz have produced this excellent slideshare on SEO. It covers just about everything SEO at a high level – great read.

the original post

Search over the years

This is an excellent collection of infographics, and IMHO the most interesting of which is this (see thumbnail) :

Marketing Pilgrim post

The infographic on search engines:

Cracked Iphone 4 screen

A buddy of mine just got an iPhone 4 about 3 days ago. So he went out, had a drink pulled out his phone to show his friend, phone slipped and BANG!
Apparently he didn’t drop the phone hard, it just kind of…. slipped out of his hand.

This design flaw where the phone will self destruct if its dropped, is serious.

I got wood!

All it means is that you cannot use the iPhone 4 without a case. And that is going to mess up the Apple iPhone brand, because instead of an object of beauty, it becomes ‘the case you use on the phone‘.

So let this be a warning tale to you iPhone 4 users without cases.

My show and tell of the iPhone 4 cracked screen.

BEWARE!!!! if you are the sensitive type DO NOT WATCH THIS?
iPhone 4 being dropped and screen shattered in a random drop test. It’s a painful watch.

It’s such a bad problem, there is even a teardown video showing you how to replace your screen!

My image gallery. These thumbnails go to a hi res image (about 1.3mb) giving you some really nice detail on how the screen has been cracked and how it even carried on working.
(by the way, these pics were taken using an android nexus one – my personal phone)

SEO is changing and its now moving away from gaming the flaws of the search algo and moving towards creating a ‘social’ footprint to sugggest the importance of a site. This doesn’t mean banging out a succession of twitter posts, but it does mean being in the places which are prominent in search engines and where users care most about a given subject.

So with that in mind I’ve thought up a very rough reputation management framework that can double up as a process for getting ranked on the terms that bring in the money.

Its more than an SEO trick

The broad model here is to get

• Feedback on what a business is doing to make iterative changes to the products or services from the feedback cycle
• Manage reputation, both positive and negative
• Use the online ‘ecosystem’ to spread the good word about a product or service.
• Keep clear of trouble from regulatory authorities who can affect you

The Preparation

Agree messaging for Professional / trade / consumer

Define online hotspots of interest and commercial intent:

• What keywords should the product or service be found on
• What kind of site / blogger / thought leader should be associated with this and how can their positive comments be given prominence around
• Most relevant searched phrases
• Brand terms for the client

Create the right environmental conditions to ignite consumer demand.

• Build a ‘tribe’ of followers, who you support and in turn will evangelise on your behalf. This is where you have a two way ‘conversation’ with your community of customers.? This was famously done with the Obama online campaign or with Lady Ga Ga and her ‘little monsters’
• Manage reputation very carefully.
• Be seen as transparent, honest, serving the user/customer as best as possible on value and service standards.

The Actions

Monitor sentiment towards the brand online using online monitoring tools like Google alerts and http://www.trackur.com/

If there is prominent negative sentiment:

• Respond to it immediately and be transparent and honest
• If its something where the brand has done wrong and can’t / won’t rectify, then abondon the client! or bury it by up-ranking other content above it (the resource calibrated by the reputation damage caused)
• If there is positive sentiment towards the brand, but the content is not prominent, then use SEO to get it up-ranked for critical phrases like brand phrases and get it referenced in other big conversation hotspots

Reach out to thought leaders who can evangelise the service or product

• As with Offline, if you can make it easy for these people, they will find it easier to write about you. Give them the ingredients from which they can make up their own minds about the product or service.
• In online there is a massive long tail of writers and thought leaders. In accumulation they are very valuable. Have online press packs and all the ingredients from which they can write up their own informed views
• Give your tribe the resources to feel included and tools they need to talk about you
• Have a contributing presence wherever there is an important and prominent conversation about you or where there could be an important conversation i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Chat Groups, Linked in
• Your comment / feedback points on your site or 3rd party sites

Give prominence to the positive feedback on the product or service

• Have these reviews rank on search engines on keywords users would naturally search for when thinking of the product/service
• If possible, gather reviews and testimonials from users and re-publicise them.

Structure feedback into:

• Reviews with ‘useful? yes/no’ and ask for ratings. Ratings out of 5 stars (standard rating formula online) so you can get a positive rating for the company / service that you can disseminate to 3rd party sites
• If its a product then encourage existing customers to write about your products on 3rd party sites i.e. reviewcentre.com Amazon.com

Support/Education:

• Have a comprehensive help section online
• Online Press pack (giving evangelists the information they need to propagate the service)
• Forum with knowledgeable staff at hand to answer specific questions
• A staffer out online engaging with users who are asking questions. This person would also engage in important conversations that ‘can be found easily’

As I was saying earlier, this is only an outline, but hopefully it will give you a sense of the scope of activities that can be undertaken.

More reading on the subject:
http://www.sempo.org/learning_center/articles/ElixirSystemsOnlineRepMgmt.pdf
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/03/online-reputation-monitoring-beginners.html
http://www.radicallytransparent.com/
http://mashable.com/2010/04/25/word-of-mouth-marketing-stats/

I’ve been on two diets recently and both have been a success:

• My 2000 calorie diet in preparation for the kayak marathon World Championships in September, where I’m racing doubles in the masters class.
• Going on a Bing Diet…

Yes, I thought it was time to give Bing a go and I found it worked! You can try the? search engine blind tase test and see for yourself! (popout)

(FYI as of July 2009 the overall results were:? Google: 41%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 28%)

The main difference between Google and everybody else is that they pad out their brand so we become too inert to move somewhere else for our search results. There is a high chance you use one or more of these? services? (wikipedia/popout) and every time you do, you probably love Google a little more for giving you some great service for free.

But if you are tired of the slow erosion of the search results with real time search, video search, news search, then maybe like me you might try a simpler easy engine like Bing.

And it seems I’m not the only one. According to Hitwise who published some interesting stats recently, it’ s all go for Bing!.

(Since this is a quick post, I’ve copied and pasted from Search Engine Roundtable:

Microsoft relaunched their search engine Bing on June 1, 2009, just over a year ago.

On June 1, 2009 Bing’s market share, according to Hitwise was 5.25%. A year later, according to Hitwise it is 9.85% share. If you do the math, that is about 88% growth year-over-year, not too far under double growth!

Here are some of the latest stats from Hitwise:

Of course, growing share from 5% to 10% is nice, but it still shadows Google’s share. In June 2009, Google had a share of 74.04%, June 2010 Google’s share is 71.65, so that is a 3% decline.

Google really doesn't listen!

A friend of mine who manages a BIG PPC account with Google told me the other day (over a beer) that when he sends an enquiry to Google about some random account management issue, if he telephones, there will be a 30% chance? they will actually pick up the phone. It takes on average 5 different conversations to resolve the problem.

So thats? about 15 ‘no contact’ calls to fix an issue.

If he emails, he gets a response between 3 and 12 days. These responses are generally generic, so he usually has to email back and query Google’s response between 2 and 4 times,? which takes another 3 to 12 days to get a reply on per query.

So thats at least 15 days for a useful answer.

BUT… if Google have an outstanding invoice with my buddy, they chase every day and often twice a day. When he responds to the Googler chasing the money, 4 out of 5 times he doesn’t get a reply from his contact. So the other month, he was put on final reminder!

Conslusion: Google have? really bad customer service. But we know that of course.??

BTW – Bing do care and believe it or not they do have attentive and helpful customer service staff, I just hope they win more market share!