Marketing Hipster

Let me begin by stating upfront, I do NOT consider myself a Search Engine Optimization expert.  In a previous life, I worked for an SEO company and have done SEO for a number of years, but there are many folks who are far more knowledgeable than I am on this subject.  There are also a number of slimy, snake oil, unethical people who give used car salesman a bad name also working in the SEO industry.

What I would like to do is share with you my take on SEO.  I am going to start by not pretending that there is some kind of secret sauce, there isn’t.  No-one has a special algorithm, decoder ring or the phone number to Mr. Google.  Very simply put, this is my opinion on where to start and how to move forward to effectively compete on your most important keywords and phrases in the search engines.  Here are my three simple truths on search engine optimization.  I do want to warn you before you continue reading, you are not going to like what I have to say.  As long as we are clear, let’s continue.

1.  Google is all that matters

When I use the words ‘search engine(s)’ I am referring to Google.  Yes, there are other search engines out there, but they really don’t matter. 

“You are talking crazy there Cord!  This is one of the last employees left in the search department from Yahoo! and I take offense to your last remark.”

“Hello Mr. Cord, this is Steve Ballmer at Microsoft.  We have this great new search engine named Bing. How dare you say we don’t matter. Bing is even fun to say.  You try it, Bing, Bing, Bing….”

Sorry Steve and Last Yahoo, but it’s true and here’s why:

1. Newsflash:  There are more searches done on Google each day than all the other search engines combined.  They dominate the search market.
2. If you achieve strong visibility in Google’s natural search, you will absolutely be doing well in the other search engines.

I guess what I am trying to say is when that SEO firm you hired sends you a ranking report and calls out that one keyword moved from #25 to #5 in Alta Vista, you shouldn’t get that excited.  Is Alta Vista still around?

2.  Your website must technically work

If your website was developed incorrectly and does not allow search engine spiders or bots to easily index or read your website, you’re toast.  You could have the greatest website ever created, if the bots cannot index it, you will have no visibility in the search engines.

An easy way to confirm your website is being indexed as long as your site has been around for a little while is to go to google.com and do the following search:  site:yoururl.com

Make sure you replace yoururl.com with the domain of your website.  This search asks Google to show how many pages it has indexed within the domain you chose in your search.  I did a search using Marketing Hipster, site:marketinghipster.com. As you can see by the screen shot, it returned a result of 960 total pages in Google’s index.  If the number of pages in your search seems low or is at zero, you might have a problem.

Alright, you have done your search and your website is being indexed by Google, outstanding!  Now all we need to do is get your website competing on your most important and relevant keywords.  This is where some might suggest “optimizing” your website by focusing on things like meta-tags, alt tags, site map, page names, search engine friendly URL’s, etc. etc. etc.  Please don’t get me wrong, all these items have merit, but they are not going to have a great impact on effectively competing on your important and competitive keywords.

You have only so many hours a day to focus on SEO if you are lucky.  My recommendation would be to spend them working on things that will deliver you the best results possible. You want to compete on relevant terms in Google, in my humble opinion, there is only one thing you should focus on, drum roll please…….  CONTENT.

This is why I warned you.  I know this might be a bit of a letdown as there is nothing earth shattering about content.  I told you there is no secret sauce, you want to compete, you need to put all your available time and effort into developing well written content that your readers will find interesting and want to share.

3.  Content, Content and oh by the way, Content!

Two things determine your rankings and visibility in Google:  content and links.  You need well written, interesting content that includes the keywords and phrases that you want to compete on.  That’s it.  Write kick butt content with your keywords and you will get the visibility you are looking for.

“But wait Cord, what about the links? How do I get them?”

Right, well lets first make sure everyone is clear on what a link is. A link is when another website takes the time to link to a specific page on your website.  Google believes that if someone has taken the time to link to your website, you must be offering something of value and will reward you with better rankings and visibility.  There a number of ways to get links and there are some really strong folks who have written great articles on linkbait, but if you write well written, interesting content, people are going to want to share that content with others.  That sharing will deliver you links that Google loves and will reward you with better visibility.

I know I am making this seem simple when it is not.  Writing great content is a huge challenge, but that is my point.  My experience has been that people tend to focus on the other things like meta-tags because it is easier to do.  Though in my opinion, your valuable time should be spent on the research and development of great content giving your target audience something to talk about.

I have a number of friends who are true experts in this.  If you would like further help, contact me and I will be more than happy to make an introduction.

So what are you still doing here?  Get writing!

Any feedback and/or disagreements are welcome in the comments below.

Over the last couple of weeks, I had the opportunity to speak to a college classroom, be interviewed by a young man who just graduated from my Alma mater and meet in person a couple Twitter friends who have just graduated. What they all had in common was they wanted me to share any thoughts and wisdom I might have as they begin their professional lives.

To be honest, I actually felt a little like an impostor. Yes, I am coming up on the big 4-0, but have I really figured anything out? I realized a long time ago the day you stop learning is the day you start dying.  Could that be considered some wisdom?  No?  Fine, be that way.

This weekend, as I laid in bed lying next to my snoring wife and dog.  The dog was the one who was snoring.  I began really thinking about what have I learned during the 39 years of my life and the 15+ years I have been in the workforce? What pearls of wisdom could I share that would actually be helpful? My brain started trucking at this point so I got up, headed to the computer and here is what I came up with.

Take as much time as you need to find your passion.

When I am passionate about what I am doing; I do it better, I do it smarter and I LOVE doing it no matter how long it takes.  When I accomplish something and I did a good job, I feel great!  All the money in the world cannot make you feel that way.  Don’t ever stop searching for what will drive you and make you feel alive.  You might need to do other things during your search to pay the bills, but never stop searching for the job that you were meant to do.

Start reading and writing and don’t ever stop.

Find the time to read and write.  Consume great writing and learn how to write well yourself.  It does not matter what kind of job you want, if you write well, you will have a leg up on so many people.  I have seen first hand my writing inefficiencies and I try to improve on them everyday.

Find a mentor

One of my first real jobs after school was with Grey Interactive in New York City.  I was hired as an HTML grunt.  At the time, Grey’s Executive Producer saw something in me and took me under her wing.  She was not only an incredibly nice and caring person, she was so smart and talented.  I learned so much from her and I have no doubt I would not of had the opportunities I have had in my career without her help.  I try to pay that forward by doing the same thing with people I work with and meet today.

Recognize your team

One of the first things I realized when people management was added to my responsibilities was something very simple, but it seems to be forgotten a great deal.  The only way I am going to be successful in my job is if the people who report to me are successful.  One of my top responsibilities has always been to do everything I can to ensure the people on my team can do their job the best they can.  I don’t care what kind of business you have, the single most important asset of your business are the employees, the human capital.  Many leaders tend to forget that.  I try very hard to recognize team members after they have done a job well done.  I am not doing my job if my team does not feel like I appreciate and care about them, which I do.

What do you think, is any of this valuable?  Drop some of your knowledge in the comments below.

If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen that I had acupuncture for the first time yesterday evening.  A bunch of folks have asked how it went so I decided I would turn this into a short blog post.

Question:  Why? or Why are you allowing someone to stick you with needles?

Why not?  I actually just finished a book that talked about acupuncture in great detail and it sounded really interesting.  I have been looking into ways that might help me relax and unwind and acupuncture has been shown to help with that.

Question:  So how did it go?

It actually went very well.  Let me set the stage for you.  I got to the place and they brought me into an exam room with the lights a little bit low and some nice new age music playing in the background.  I took off my pants and shirt and laid on my back on the exam table.  (I had shorts and a t-shirt on, seriously did you have to go there?)

The acupuncturist walked me through everything as she went and stuck about 30 needles in my body.  The needles were spread out between my legs, feet, hands, arms, top of head, face and ears.  The needles really did not hurt.  Although a couple of the needles in my ear did smart as she put them in, but nothing was that bad.

She then told me that she was going to turn the lights down and to relax on the table with the needles in me for the next 30 minutes.  What, what, what??  I did not realize that I was supposed to lay there with the needles in me and do nothing.  I was thinking about asking her to hand me my Blackberry, but I thought that might not be the best idea.

She told me to just relax.  I found that ironic as the reason I was there in the first place was I have trouble relaxing.  <– Irony!   Anyway, I laid there and tried some breathing and meditation techniques she instructed me on, but to be honest for the most part, I just laid there and thought about things.

After 30 minutes, she came back into the room and pulled all my needles out.  As I was getting up and getting dressed, I felt very much like how I feel after getting a real good message.  You know that loose, maybe a little sleepy feeling.

Overall, my initial foray into acupuncture was a success and I am going to try it once a week for the next four weeks and see if it provides any value.  I will keep you apprised as I go.

Last week, I worked with a number of fabulous folks from the Triangle AMA to put on a Social Media Boot Camp.  We had an amazing turnout with a talented lineup of speakers and a great group of eager participants.  My presentation focused on how to Protect Your Brand in the Conversation Age.  There was one section that I discussed that seemed to resonate with folks so I thought  I would go into more detail here.

One of the challenges when it comes to monitoring your company, products, people, brand and even yourself online is the incredible amount of information available.  I work with several clients that their company name alone is written or spoken about online more than 5,000 times a day.  Most companies don’t have the resources or the time to be able to go through all that noise.

One of the ways I get through all the clutter is to triage my mentions.  By triaging, I can quickly determine the discussions I need to spend more time and attention on and which ones I can kick to the curb immediately.  When I think of triage I always think of the old TV show MASH.  Remember that show with Alan Alda based in the Korean War?  When the helicopters and buses came in with wounded GI’s, they would go running out to meet them to determine which guys were hurt the worst.  The triage allowed the soldiers with the most serious injuries to go to the head of the line ahead of the less serious.

Social Media triage is the exact same thing.  We need to quickly look at what our monitoring has identified and determine what needs your time and attention and what does not.  There are a number of tools and technologies that say they can do this work for you.  To be honest, I have not found one that I am willing to make a financial investment in, so I have put together a rag-tag way to triage my online mentions without having to pay out any cash.  Here’s the Silverstein Social Media Triage process:

SearchStatus – My browser du jour is Firefox, if you happen to use Chrome, I am sure there are plugin’s like this one.  SearchStatus is a free Firefox plugin that embeds the Google Page Rank, Alexa ranking and Compete numbers right on the bottom of your browser.  Very quickly, I can go to a web page and get a good idea on what kind of visibility a specific webpage and website receives in Google as well as how much traffic it gets daily, weekly and monthly.

If you are not familiar with Google Page Rank, Google assigns every page within its index a ranking from 0-10.  This ranking determines how much visibility it receives in Google’s natural search results.  I think about the rankings this way:

• Page Rank 0-3 – MIA – Website/page is not competitive in Google
• Page Rank 4-6 – Visible – Competing on some of their keywords
• Page Rank 7-8 – Rock star – Top rankings and strong visibility
• Page Rank 9+ – Oprah – Owns it!

Please remember if you are on a blog page that just launched, the page might not have any page rank because it is too new.  My recommendation is to go to the blog’s home page and see what their page rank is there.

Next let’s look at our Compete numbers.  If you right click while your mouse hovers over the Compete graph, it will tell you the average monthly visitors the website receives.  If you would like, you can click over to compete.com and get more information.  Registration is required, but basic package is free.

In just a couple of minutes you can pull together the following information:

• What kind of visibility a webpage/website has within Google.
• How much traffic this website receives daily

With knowing these two items, you can make an informed decision on whether this mention deserves more of your time or not.  Though, I have one more item to add into your bag of tricks.  I believe one important characteristic of an “influencer” is he/she creates or develops conversations on their own website as well as on other websites.  I like to look at how many and what kind of comments does the original post have?  How active of a community does this website have? Are there other conversations taking place elsewhere that are linking back to this original post?

To see conversations on other websites linking back to one place, I like to use this cute little bookmarklet called Convotrack.  This is a tool that you add to your bookmarks toolbar and when on a web page, you click it and it shows you any and all conversations taking place on the web that are linking back to a specific page.

This quickly can show you how many folks are talking about the post and what kind of visibility is it receiving out on the interweb.

Everything that I just walked through should take you no more than a couple of minutes to complete once you have the tools setup.  Is this full proof?  Absolutely not.  All of these tools should not be taken as the gospel by any means.  I believe these tools and others like them will allow you to quickly triage your online monitoring to  help you spend more time on what is most important to you.

If you have your own tools or tips, please feel free to add them to comments below.

Have you seen the video of North Carolina Congressman Bob Etheridge getting in a physical confrontation with what looks to be a young student?  You can read all the details and see the video over at WRAL. I have also included the video below.

Wow, someone was having a bad day.  Rep. Etheridge cursing the invention of the video camera knew he had no choice and issued an apology.  WRAL has the whole story here and here is his apology:

“I have seen the video posted on several blogs.  I deeply and profoundly regret my reaction and I apologize to all involved.  Throughout my many years of service to the people of North Carolina, I have always tried to treat people from all viewpoints with respect. No matter how intrusive and partisan our politics can become, this does not justify a poor response.  I have and I will always work to promote a civil public discourse.” – Rep. Bob Etheridge (NC-02)

I am not writing this to call to arms all the trolls and hammer Etheridge for doing something dumb, I majored in dumb and continue to excel at it today.  I would like to discuss Etheridge’s apology statement that he released.  To the PR/Communications staffers in Rep. Etheridge’s office who wrote this, I have to ask one question.  What are you talking about???

“No matter how intrusive and partisan our politics can become, this does not justify a poor response.  I have and I will always work to promote a civil public discourse.”

What does partisan politics and public discourse have ANYTHING to do with this event.  You weren’t having a debate on the House floor Representative.  You were walking down a public street and two “students” (Maybe?  Rumors are this might of been a setup) asked you whether you supported the President of the United States agenda.  Not only are we allowed to do this, our constitution empowers us to question our elected representatives.

Can’t we get to a place where we as marketers and communication professionals effectively communicate to our target markets without throwing in a whole lot of double-talk and BS?  I am far from a PR person, but I would like to try rewriting this apology.  You have seen Rep. Etheridge’s response, now here is how I would of wrote it:

“There is absolutely nothing I can say other than I am deeply sorry.  My actions were inexcusable and no-one has the right to lay their hands on another person.  I want to sincerely apologize to the young man in the video and I also want to apologize to my constituents who deserve to have someone in office that represents them much better than I did today.”

Which version do you like better and why?

Been a very busy week and tomorrow it gets busier as we are putting on the Triangle AMA Social Media Boot Camp 2010.  We have an entire day of rock star speakers talking all about the in’s and outs of social media.  The event is sold out and I am real excited to speak as well as hear the other speakers.

A number of folks will be blogging and tweeting from the event live!  If you would like to keep track of it on Twitter, we will be using the hashtag #smbc2010.

You can keep track of all the action right here as well as on Capstrat’s blog.

My friend Karl Sakas for reasons beyond me wanted to interview me and talk about marketing, my history and the Grateful Dead.  Karl put out a summary of what we spoke about if you are interested.  What I enjoyed most was Karl and I getting together and having a great conversation.  How can you beat that?

An interesting discussion has been taking place in the Twitterverse and the web regarding a local bakery who tried to “garner attention to help us sell more tasty cupcakes“. Well they really got the attention part down, but I have a feeling if you asked owners of Just Crumb, they probably would like to have the last couple of days back. I am not going to go into the all the details of what happened, if you want the blow by blows, check out the following articles:  The Gloss, Jezebel, Fatshionista and Ignite.

To summarize quickly, Just Crumb bakery attempted to be hip and cutting edge and adopted the slogan, “So Good It Makes Fat People Cry”.  A woman took offense to that slogan and wrote the owners an email.  The owners responded insensitively and proceeded to ridicule this woman via Twitter up to and including calling her the dreaded “C” word.  This sparked a great deal of attention and right about this time I have a feeling the Crumb owners realized that they were not in Kansas anymore.

They proceeded to throw gasoline on the fire by tweeting, “Things we learned on Tuesday: Apparently we do not have private Twitter accounts anymore. Everything is business. Lesson learned.”  (I hear this in my best Lumbergh impression) Yea, unfortunately you did not learn any lessons because no-one cared whether your Twitter account was private or not, they cared about you ridiculing and demeaning another person for reasons unknown. Finally, Crumb posted an apology on their blog which proceeded to get 80 comments of people ripping them a new one before Crumb turned the comments off.

I am not writing this to pile on with everyone else.  To be honest, I feel sorry for the Just Crumb owners.  I have at times in my life said and written things that I wish I hadn’t.  People who are passionate about what they do at times allows that passion to get away from them and we sometimes communicate poorly.  I was actually looking at these events more as a case study in PR and social media.  I was wondering if I could speak to the owners of the bakery right now, what I would tell them and what could they do today, right now, to help themselves?  Here is what I came up with.

You reacted wrong.  You need to realize your initial Twitter post about private accounts, huge mistake.  You did something wrong, we all do, you needed to man up and admit that you were trying to be edgy and funny, but unfortunately it turned to something highly objectionable.

Stop hiding! You haven’t posted a blog post since Tuesday and you haven’t tweeted since Wednesday.  This is the time that you need to be out there communicating with everyone!  You need to turn the burner to high.  You are going to take some hits, stand up and take them.  It is much easier for people to yell and scream at people they do not know or can’t see.  It is much harder for folks to yell and scream when you are willing to pull up a seat at the table and engage with them.  You might not be able to change everyone’s opinions, but you will receive props for showing up.

Put a face to this issue. I know you just want to crawl away and hide until this is over, but you can’t.  Other than the small amount of local folks who know you, no-one knows what you look like.  Your website, blog and Twitter accounts don’t have any pictures of either of you.  If it was me, I would record a video and post it on YouTube and your blog.  Put a face to your names and show your humanity.  Show that your real folks just like the people who are angry with you right now.  Show in your faces and what you say that you realize you made a mistake and want to sincerely apologize for it.  Once again, you are human and we make mistakes.  People will forgive if you ask for forgiveness.

The web never forgets. You are waiting for this to blow over and it will.  Unfortunately, Google has become the memory of the web.  All these blog posts, all the tweets, they will all be indexed by Google and will come up when people do searches for your company as well as your own names for years to come.  Knowing this, don’t you want people to see that you reacted the right way to this crisis?

What do you think? What did I forgot, what did I miss?  Thoughts?

Dear Blackberry,

I write this letter with a heavy heart.  We have been together for a long time.  Come to think of it, you are the longest relationship I have ever had.  There has been a Blackberry attached to my waist pretty much everyday for quite a long time.  I remember the first time we met.  You were a brick of a phone with your cute little antenna and you had me at qwerty.  It’s been a relationship where we have both grown and have become successful in our fields.  Unfortunately BB, I think we have grown apart.  Once upon a time, I believed you genuinely cared about me and what I thought, but now not so much.

For the longest time, I have been a true Blackberry customer evangelist.  I was one of those guys who sung your praises, recommended you to anyone who asked and was always an early adopter when you came out with new devices. But now as I cradle you in my hand, all I feel is disappointment in what you have become.  I doubt you have any inclination to listen to me or anyone else for that matter, but I feel like I need to share with you the reasons why we must go our separate ways.

1. Your OS is poor to say the least.  While Apple, Google and even Microsoft have constantly and consistently improved and grown their operating systems, yours is woefully behind and to be honest a bit embarrassing.
2. Speaking of embarrassing, you should be ashamed of your browser.  It is almost impossible to read a web page with your browser.  There have been many a time that I could put my BB down, shave and come back just as the page loads.
3. Your app store is an absolute failure.  This probably has something to do with your crappy OS. The top application developers are putting their time and money in developing for the iPhone and Android.
4. As a marketer, I think your marketing has been criminal and you have truly lost your voice.  Apple’s marketing talks about “there is an app for that“, Android promotes their extensive capabilities and what are you doing?  You have a bunch of people dancing while the Beatles or Black Eyed Peas play in the background.  Fail.

I think the final straw in our relationship was the Blackberry Storm.  I am an early adopter so I expect to run into a bug or two when I purchase new technology, but seriously, you should go door to door and apologize for releasing the original Blackberry Storm.  Very simply put, it did NOT work.  The OS was buggy as hell and the touch screen was a mess.  You pushed a product out before it was ready and in my opinion, you jumped the shark as a company. You put profits over your customers and once you lose our trust, it is very hard to get it back.

I hope I am effectively expressing my disappointment in this post BB.  I had a real emotional attachment to you.  I actually wrote an email to your CEO, VP of Marketing and your PR agency to thank Blackberry for playing a role in my wife and I getting married. I am not making this up (copy of email here).  My wife and I worked together and our relationship began by us IM’ing each other through Blackberry Messenger.  I believe Blackberry Messenger allowed us a way to communicate that we would not of been able to do without our Blackberry’s.  By the way, I never got a response back from anyone. Shocking…

One last thing before I end this diatribe.  As a marketing professional, I have been amazed with how much your company talks online, but you never take the time to listen. You are making an incredible amount of noise on your blogs, Twitter and Facebook, but its all a one-way conversation.  This is not what these tools are for.  Look at your blog for example, the amount of comments you receive is a fraction compared to the information you post.  If I could offer one piece of advice; stop, take a breath and start listening to the people you should care about most, your customers.

Blackberry, we had a good run, but with any relationship, it takes work to keep it fresh and fruitful.  I don’t think you care like you once did and to be honest, I believe I along with all your other customers deserve better.