…another in the continuing series of live blogging from the sessions at Search Engine Strategies – San Jose 2007…

This session (filled to capacity) deals with video optimization. Moderator Sapna Satagopan

Sherwood Stranieri was the first speaker

YouTube has more traffic than the other 64 video sites combined

Video is a compelling SEO channel.

Social can transfer value to your SEO efforts through video.

Digg >> blogs>> thousands of links

Those links result in a sugar rush of traffic (mostly untargeted)

Those links do contribute to your site’s rankings, putting you in front of your target audience.

Video for content providers

From bloggers to television networks

Teaser Strategy: upload a few select videos to portal, provide links back to your site to related videos (pulling them to your site)

Video SEO is now mainstream SEO thanks to blended search.

• Follow the buzz
• Showcase your hottest products
• Showcase anticipated uses
• the iPhone is the poster child for online informational video.

Just remember YouTube is not a trade show. – i.e. Blendtec

Sites like Digg, Slashdot, BoingBoing love weird and amusing products.

Make your video interesting i.e. Mentos & Diet Coke

Videos can become a permanent and prominent part of your brand equity.

The next speaker was Jeremy Clem

75% of US internet users watch an average of 158 minutes of online video in May 2007

They viewed more than 8.3 billion video streams

72% watched news video online

• Search is still very dependent on text from video’s corresponding web page.
• Lack of simple and consistent taxonomy for site producers to use
• Video technology is unfriendly to Search Engine Crawlers.

• Make sure to surround video with text… give the engines context.
• Include social bookmarking tools to facilitate easier distribution
• Make it easy for the crawlers to find the video content. Put them all in a folder off the root. Include video in the sitemap / RSS feeds. Put a link in the global footer. Tag your video files. Split your video into specific video scenes and tag each.
• Allow your videos to be imbeddable. Imprint your brand logo on the video.
• Bulk submission tools are available for Google, Yahoo and Blinx.
• Target generic video search term like “news video” to build online brand awareness.
• Train your editors to think like video searchers.
• encode for te right keywords
• One video per URL
• Add tagging

Next up Gregory Markel.

78% of men and 66% of women watch video online

AOL publishes a list of the top 21 videos on all major video search engines.

3 types of video optimization

• Video file meta data
• Upload optimization
• RSS optimization

Recommended tool for submission and tracking analytics – tubemogul - it’s currently free. One stop Universal upload to 9 video engines. View, comments, and ratings tracking and analytics reporting.

The last presenter was Stephen Baker. His tool creates transcripts of videos, which then gives content for the spiders to crawl, and provides a great deal of context for the crawlers. This improves both the customer experience and increases the long tail keywords available to be found on, as well as increasing the monetization possibilities.

Continuing my live coverage of Search Engine Strategies – San Jose 2007…

This morning I was asked to be the (un)official photographer of the keynote speech with Jim Lanzone of Ask.com, which meant that I was unable to blog the session. Given that there was no internet connection, and Jim spoke nineteen to the dozen, I’m glad that I had decided against it.

This session is on trademark and copyright issues as they pertain to Search Marketing. The moderator is Jeffrey Rohrs.

First speaker – Clark Walton. His topic is the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and take down notices. DMCA section 512 is the online copyright infringement section. How does it work? Copyright owner finds the infringement, files a takedown notice with the service provider. Service provider removes content. User (infringer) can respond. If no response the content stays offline (happens in most cases).

Copyright owners like this because it’s easy (2 pages), fast (less than 24 hours), cheap (no filing fee, and no litigation). Online service providers like it because it provides immunity for them.

Minimum requirements

• ID the copyrighted work
• ID the infringing material
• Copyright owner / Agent contact info
• Statement re: good faith belief of infringement
• Statement that filer is authorized
• Signature

Can be filed with hosting companies, Search Engines, or any User Generated Content site.

You can complain about copyright infringement for text, photo’s, videos, etc.

DMCA drawbacks

• US Geographic limitations
• PPC Trademark is a different issue
• Won’t help with domain names
• Won’t help with defamation
• No penalty to infringer, they can infringe over and over again. Note: Repeat offenders are usually terminated by the service provider

Make sure you own the copyright, and it is an infringement, not fair use, otherwise you could be responsible for legal costs for the alleged infringer.

Next up was Eve Chaurand-Fraser, who represents Ask and is the person there that gets the takedown notices. She showed the different policies that Ask has on copyright infringement, counterfeit goods, and Trademark infringement up on their site.

What not to do when filing a DMCA takedown request

• Be vague
• Be argumentative
• Be threatening – Search engines don’t like to be sent Cease and Desist letters

What to do when filing a DMCA takedown request:

• What search term
• URL of the original content
• URL of the infringing content
• Who Is lookup information for the infringing domain
• Use screenshots

Ask allows you to purchase a trademarked term for PPC, but you are not allowed to use the trademark in the ad copy.

1/3 of requests are copyright, 1/3 are trademark, 1/3 are frivolous requests.

Mary Berk is the next speaker and will be talking about trademark policy at Microsoft AdCenter. Microsoft is currently updating the trademark policy, effective September 10th (Late August – early September, account managers will contact trademark owners with details of the change). In MS advertisers may not bid on a trademarked term, nor may they use that term in the ad copy. Once a claim has been submitted to MS, they will then put a watch on that term to catch future infringements.

Once a concern has been submitted to MS, they will review the claim, and flag infringements.

Why are they changing their practices?

• It’s difficult to enforce an agreement that they’re not a party to
• It’s frustrating to pre-verify trademark owners before ads go live
• Additional advertiser provides more relevant results
• Aligns MS with industry practices.

Benefits

• Faster process through editorial review
• Clear-cut rules for advertisers
• Added relevance for end users

Challenges

• Identifying direct competitors in countless industries

DMCA violations can be sent to MS through web form, email or snail mail. They prefer the web form, as the data will be formatted how they want, which will ensure that they have the data that they need, therefore they should be able to process and investigate the issue faster.

Screenshots should be taken as MS will serve different ads based on demographic targeting. If you give plenty of data to them, they should be able to reproduce the ad though.

Debra Wilcox is the next speaker on this topic. When does outside council need to be involved with IP issues?

• When the problem first arises.
• When the problem persists.
• When the problem is severe

Identify the real parties involved:

• Competitors: companies and officers
• Search engines
• Other Distributors

Make sure your IP rights are in order:

• Do you own your trademark / copyright / domain names?
• Register trademarks and copyrights – USPTO.gov & copyright.gov

Determine the harm that’s being caused to the business. Be specific, what damage is the infringement causing?

If everything else fails, there’s still the option of a lawsuit, and you can ask for a temporary restraining order. A preliminary injunction can also be used to stop the infringement.

What to seek through litigation

• Profit details
• Details on the scope of the problem
• Promise to cease infringing
• Corrective advertising
• Recall
• Judgement “on the books”

Is there the possibility of Monetary recovery due to an infringement?

• Attorney’ fees
• Infringers profits
• Damages
• Statutory damages

The last speaker is Eric Goldman. Every company is both a consumer and producer of intellectual property. So you need to think from both sides of the argument. He has no powerpoint slides, and only 2 points…

Point #1 – Don’t be duplicitous. If you infringe, don’t send out takedown notices for your IP. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Point #2 – Invest your dollars in IP protection and enforcement wisely. Don’t freak out when you first find a potential infringement. Take some time, research the issue before you start sending out takedown notices. Examine the opportunity cost of your expenditure. Is the money spent on infringement enforcement better spent on marketing? Sending bogus DMCA notices may result in you being sued yourself…

Remember a Creative Commons license gives everyone the license to use your work…

Continuing my live coverage of Search Engine Strategies – San Jose 2007…

This panel is on the topic of the emerging market of China, and the opportunities for Search marketing. The moderator for the session is Mike Grehan.

The first speaker is Stephen Noton, who is a speaker at SES China, and his company became the first AdWord qualified company in Asia. He is a replacement for the original main speaker who was unable to make it to the conference.

12 of the top 100 websites in china have completely numerical URLs. 27 of the top 100 contain numbers. Chinese keyboards have 13,500 characters, so it’s easier for people to understand numbers rather than having to translate across different dialects.

He talked about Google branding itself GuGe (Valley of the Song) in China, and showed the video they launched with. The Google suggest product is a default option in China because of the number of characters (this is a standard on all search engines in China). Google also has a ‘Popular Searches’ page, which has no search box, but has links to SERPs. They also have a directory system in China, based on topics, psp themes and services. It is algorithmically based, not static.

Next up, Bill Hunt. The Chinese market is growing like crazy. It is tough to be a foreigner in China. Budgets are small from local companies. Some large companies in China are more sophisticated than their corporate HQ. Clients are very particular about their contacts in your company, they prefer to have contacts with Western experience, rather than all local people. You should allow clients or interactive agencies to save face.

Relationships are critical to success, with clients, search engines, and influencers. Your employees can make or break a deal in the long run. Much of the advertising is still branded and less lead generation or sales focused. Be flexible and do business the Chinese way. Keep an open mind.

Attendance at SES China went from 600 to 1000 in the space of a year. The audience is becoming more sophisticated and asking deeper questions. 10x increase in requests for China projects. Lots of testing of paid and mobile search. Traffic to search blogs in China has increased significantly. There has been an increase in Chinese centric blogs and content. 10-15 of the top agencies stand out, but there are unfortunately lots of SEM scammers in China. SEO tends to be simple meta tag optimization or black hat. They are integrating more advanced techniques, including Social Media Optimization.

Employee turnover in China is high. Incentives for employee loyalty are critical. Build your relationships with engines and organizations. If partnering with a Chinese firm, do your research.

93% of people in China are there to get news, compared to 67% in the US. only 69% use it to get email, compared to 91% in the US. 96.3% use desktops. 21.1% use laptops. 27.3% use mobile search. Mobile search has been growing over 100% for the last few years. By 2010 the number of mobile searchers are estimate to be 220 million in China alone.

Baidu is the most popular search engine for lifestyle searches (ring tones, music, horoscope, etc). Top 30 are generally paid ads. Baidu has greatest reach with young lifestyle centric searchers. CPM advertising is the most popular on Baidu.

New travel opportunities for Chinese have resulted in significant traffic to country related information sites. Make sure that you market to the Chinese on their terms and on their comfort level. A big growth area is in access to information about China and the Olympics.

Continuing my live session postings from SES SJ…

This session is moderated by Chris Sherman, and is on the topic of Personalized Search.

First up is Gord Hotchkiss talking about what will drive personalization and how it will affect seo. The eye tracking study showed that when personalized search results were added into the 3rd 4th & 5th results, the eyes went down to those results. When the results weren’t personalized, they didn’t…

Does personalization work too well? If the natural results are so good, will anyone want to click on the paid ads? Images in the organic results pull the eye there first. Eye scanning is therefore spread more around the page, rather than being concentrated on the top of the page.

In the pre-personalization world, we looked at keywords, on page factors, and links. Now with personalization it’s a much more user centered idea. Optimization will happen around themes rather than keywords. Long tail optimization. Optimization across content buckets. Understanding user behavior will be vital. User centric development will take hold. Emerging “Buzz sites” will be an SEO tactic.

You need to move up the funnel. From purchase to negotiation to research to awareness. More mashups, widgets, etc.

The circle of importance are sites that will emerge for each ‘theme’.

User Intelligence is going to be vitally important. Need to understand user intent.

The next presenter was Richard Zwicky. He’s going to be addressing regionalization of results as they pertain to personalization

Page clicks 1 – Organic – 83.62%, PPC – 96.26%. So if you’re not on page 1, you’re not going to get much traffic.

He performed searches in Vancouver, Seattle, and San Jose. The organic results were different in each location for the same search.

Language regionalization is also a factor. Wherever you are in the country there may be a different term for the same item. i.e. Soda v Pop.

How to find out what works. Geotarget your PPC campaigns, let the paid keywords do your research. For in-house SEO’s, he advises pulling in consultants as search becomes more diverse and more specialized.

SEO campaigns now have to become more sophisticated, better research tools and reports are needed.

The next presenter was Dave Davies. He is presenting on 4 Google patents related to personalization.

User Behavior. Engines watch user behavior to assess the value of web pages. Click through, time to return to engine (clicking the back button / leaving your site and going to the search engine), and the type of query are the 3 behaviors watched by the engines.

Personal pagerank: Is the idea that Google will assign a value to an individual searcher. This will be used to grade your activities on websites. More trusted searchers wil affect the results to a greater degree than those who are not trusted.

Group data: Grouping together users based on common factors i/e/ membership in common communities (Facebook, etc). Common bookmarks, and common search behavior.

Influencing engines: Rankings vary form region to region, and from person to person. Some factors have little to do with typical SEO. Personlization only affects those signed into a service (i.e. gmail, blogger, etc). People need to localize, getting your regional phrase associated with a location through link relationships. Link out by associating yourself with authorities an send your visitors out to them, rather than back to the engines. Attract high personal pagerank visitors. Design for stickiness an page views, monitor stats and tweak for phrases with low visitor experience levels.

Next up was Jonathan Mendez. He made sure to ensure that people realized that we’ve had personalized search for a long while… it’s called PPC.

Nothing performs better than targeting to the intentions of users.

He then examined the parameters in a Google URL – host language, safe search, browser, results language, query, etc. Each of these can be used for personalization, and for examining personalization trends.

He then discussed various types of segmentation

1. Behavioral – types of search
2. Source – Organic, Paid, etc
3. Temporal – time scale
4. Environmental – geo, etc

He showed a case study which showed that serving a personalized page based on the language parameter from Google led to a 47% increase in conversions.

Differences in the type of search are interesting. Based on a case study – when a particular phrase was searched using exact search the conversion rate was 2.63%. Using broad match, the conversion rate was 4.36%. Using Phrase match, the conversion rate was a staggering 15.16%.

Geotargeting is the big hitter of personalization and relevance. Keywords are the window to the intent of the user.

Sepandar of Google and Tim of Yahoo then briefly spoke on the panel.

Sepandar talked about how personalization work best with 1 or 2 word queries. iGoogle was created to answer the question “What should I be searching for?”. He then gave an example of tarot.com, that created a horoscope gadget for iGoogle. They get 37 million page views of that widget every week…

Tim recommended that you should become the known expert, and you should be unique offering something fresh. Having fresh content, which can spread virally is a great way to get your content noticed by the engines. Make use of Social Media sites, they can really make a difference.

Continuing the series of live blogging from the Search Engine Strategies – San Jose 2007 conference…

Having covered the topic of Universal Search on this blog, this session is going to be interesting, as there should be a lot of insight from many different people (it looks like there are 6 different speakers for this session). Conference co-chair Chris Sherman is the moderator.

Greg Jarboe is up first. 70% of what he used to know is obsolete. He’s demonstrating Universal Search by the use of a search for iPhone on Google, which displays news, video & images. A search for Rupert Murdoch shows News results in first, a news archive at the bottom of the page, and images. Make sure to manage your images for senior staff, you don’t want a reputation management issue with images… Blog results now showing up, this can impact investor relations… Searching for Hillary Clinton showed news and images, youtube, blog results, and 3 unflattering photos.

Universal search now changes what appears in the “golden triangle” (eye tracking studies done by Enquiro).

Search remains the #1 way journalists obtain additional story information.

Media relations should be focused on the top Google News Sources (Newsknife and Google News report show the top optimizing news sources).

Journalists say visuals are important, and 41% say it dictates content. 90% say that visuals are somewhat or very important to them.

Video could soon make its way to Google news, to give their users access to all the perspectives on a news story.

Use social mapping tools to identify the most influential bloggers.

You cannot ignore Universal Search.

The next speaker up was Sherwood Stanieri.

Firm with multimedia assets or a PR/news presence have a leg up on the competition.

Video has been a viral experience in the past, but now that it’s in the search mix, the ranking factors for videos need to be explored. Are they view based or comment based, or are they ranked based on standard factors such as links, etc.

Case study: A&E television. Many high ranking videos in Google Universal Search. Why were they ranking, and how did they have that ranking? Data was collected for page 1 videos, and listings for page 1 & 2. Looking at “Criss Angel” Youtube videos 3rd & 4th, metacafe in 8th & 9th. PR & link counts were all over the map. All videos were more or less labeled with the target keyphrase. Looking at the views, it corresponded fairly well to the positioning, same for the comments. Pulling the page rank and view & comments data shows that all 3 seem to be the ranking factors for the videos, when you blend them together. It looks like videos with PR of 0 will slip in between listings with PR of 2.5 to 2 provided they have enough views & comments.

Google must also be including timing as a factor in the ranking for video, otherwise the listings would be filled with old viral listings that would be hard to dislodge.

Google custom tunes its indexing process for each and every portal. Which explains why only a few portals are in Google Universal Search. This makes it very likely that the video factors above are being read into the equation.

Next up, Bill Slawski. He started by talking about the similarity and differences in the display of te results across the engines. Bill talked about a patent filed by Google in 2003, which showed a Google SERP with different sections dedicated to types of results. This is now similar to how ASK shows their results with the Ask 3D interface. Google also inherited some patents from Inforseek, such as their 1995 Blended Search patent. Vertical Creep led to the OneBox, which led to Universal search.

Universal Search rankings may depend on previous search behavior.

How is data normalized? The format of the HTML matters, the search engines look at key/value pairs. Google Janitors clean up by normalizing data.

Next up were representatives of the search engines – David Bailey of Google (the technical lead of the Google Universal Search team) spoke first. Google’s aim is to make the search box the search box of first resort, rather than forcing them to a bunch of different vertical search engines. An example he used was a search for “origami crane”. He talked about the challenges being that of ranking apples against oranges, and of keeping the UI simple and scannable. He said that for SEO it’s still business as usual. Web results will still dominate the page, so the usual strategies still apply, and expect similar SEO guidelines to apply to these other forms of media now showing up in the SERPs.

Tim Mayer of Yahoo was up next. He talked about the transition from the static experience. Yahoo has 3 phases. Phase 1 was to optimize the content selection, on ranking, comprehensiveness, freshness, and presentation. Phase 2, was the understanding of user intent and context. Phase 3 is the blending of content, similar to Google Universal Search, understanding the verticals that the users are seeking based on their query, and how those results should display.

Yahoo has launched a Music Artist Shortcut, which shows lyrics, video, websites, etc for a musical artist. Similarly they’ve launched Movie shortcuts. They’ve also launched inline shortcuts (i.e. Wynn Vegas for the Wynn Las Vegas hotel), these results show up in the middle of search results with an arrow to expand. Consumer Electronics shortcut gives narrowing / filtering options for all different phases of the buying cycle.

Erik Collier of Ask was the last presenter. He talked about the launch of Ask3D and the reason for blending the search results, which was the same reason given earlier by David of Google – to improve the user experience, and to get them to make that search box their default location. 3D has shown a large jump in user satisfaction. 30% drop in users clicking to the second page. 15% drop in user sessions with more than one query. Shows that blended search is giving people more of what they want. An Ask eye tracking study shows an extended golden triangle. He says that he expects to see more blended results in the SERPs, with fewer web results and User location playing a larger role. Blogs, Images and videos will take online reputation into account when ranking.

The first session of SES San Jose that I’m attending is “Public Relations Train Wrecks in the Interactive Biz”. I’m looking forward to the presentations, as I’ve given a couple of speeches on this topic myself. The speakers for this session are Rebecca Lieb and Brad Berens, with the incoming Global Content Director of SES, Kevin Ryan moderating.

9am… The start of the session has been delayed by 5 minutes to allow those who arrived late to registration to pick up their passes…

This session will be a completely powerpoint free, interactive session…

First up is Dr. Brad Berens of iMedia communications. He says that we are all in the story telling business, and the difference between PR and Journalism is how the story should be told. His list of issues with Public Relations firms:

1. Boilerplate PR Spamming – When releases are sent without any real understanding of the aims of the firm that they’re pitching to.
2. The “Bazooka approach to his masthead” – Multiple people from the same PR firm contacting multiple people in the organization that they’re pitching to, and having the same meetings with these different people.
3. Set Up a Briefing – PR firms tend not to do this, but it would allow them to understand the audience.
4. CEO’s that won’t break from their sales pitch mode, and won’t engage in a real conversation.
5. Pick up the phone, don’t just assume that an email will get the story read.
6. Your CEO sneezing is not a news story. A real news story is something that actually makes a change within your organization.
7. Know your customers, and who they read. If you don’t know, ask them. That’s who you should be pitching your stories to.
8. Don’t exaggerate or lie. You will be found out, and you will then no longer be a trusted source.

Rebecca’s list:

1. PR firms do not understand that Search Engine Watch (SEW) runs news stories, they do not run press releases.PR firms do not always realize that when PR firms put out press releases they are in fact breaking their own news. If they instead want to do a better job they should talk to a site like SEW rather than push is out themselves. News companies do not get their news from the wire…
2. The concept of the ‘Exclusive’ appears to have vanished. Exclusives will get pushed more by sites like SEW.
3. Embargoes are great, it gives them time to research and prepare a great story. Which doesn’t mean sending out an embargoed release at 7pm the night before it’s to be released…
4. Make executives and PR people available for comment, don’t expect a story to be published if the release is the only source material.
5. Copying a news story into a press release is a copyright violation
6. Subject lines such as “Please post this to your site”, don’t get a story written.
7. Don’t always focus all efforts on one editor, people aren’t always at work, you may lose a story if the one person you have a good relationship with is out.
8. Look for the right person to pitch to, don’t just pitch to the top person (i.e. Rebecca) treating them as a receptionist / traffic cop.
9. If you pass on stories about other firms rather than just pitch about your company, you’re going to be viewed as more of a trusted resource.
10. Don’t hide from the news people. Understand that journalists will look at both sides of a story.
11. Understand that ClickZ & SEW style organizations are looked on by the print as trusted sources. They may be asked to provide context on your story, rather than you. Make sure you keep them as informed as you can, so that the facts that you want out there have more of a chance of getting out there.
12. A rumor is not a news item.
13. Understand who the industry experts are.

The best business blogs are those that aren’t trying to sell you all the time.

Brad had a person working on a story for 6 weeks, the day before the story was to be released, the company put out a release. The story was pulled from the schedule and did not run.

If there’s a chart or graph, make sure that the chart is sourced, and the methodology behind the data is clearly stated. Context counts, make sure any data you have is statistically valid, especially if you’re basing a primary argument on that data.

Remember that bloggers as a whole aren’t editorially reviewed, fully researching journalists. Bloggers will not replace news outlets, just as TV didn’t replace radio. They will coexist though, and the shape of news has and will change. Blogging is a different context for the news.

WSJ was doing a profile of a company, a meeting was scheduled with the CEO and the WSJ. The executive didn’t want to prep for the meeting, and just decided to ‘feel’ out the reporter. The reporter was looking for the story… This was setting the company up for failure. Preparation is important, talking points need to be known and understood.

Be Relevant, and forge Relationships. It is a heavy relationship business.

In 45 minutes SES-SJ officially begins. Registration started at 7.30 am, and I’m currently the only person sitting in Room B of the convention center. There have already been some minor changes to the convention. The old gray bags are gone, replaced with slightly snazzier black bags, with pockets! Unfortunately, it looks like that change consumed the t-shirt budget, so no official conference wear this time. Curiously, no pens in the bag either, unless you happened to swipe an Incisive Media pen from the registration area…

The conference manual has also been updated with a new look, which involves absolutely no presentations or slides, they must all be downloaded from the website now (if they’re there). Unfortunately, it also has a type on the URL to download presentations, the URL in the book gives you a 404 error. I told an incisive staffer who pulled up the default presentation, to discover that the URL was incorrect in a different way on the screen (we’re not in London!). I did manage to find the right URL, but there aren’t many presentations up on the web, so it looks like SES I’m really going to have to take a lot of notes. Speaking of which, I’m going to attempt to do some blogging on the sessions that I’ll be attending, to try and spread any pertinent information to the RBDRodeo readers, although that plan may depend on how often I can find a wall outlet before my laptop battery dies.

The above image is something that I noticed when perusing my Netflix account the other day, and it got me thinking about relevancy and search results. Netflix felt that I should rent Wallace and Gromit from them based on my prior rental history. I can understand how Monty Python and the Holy Grail may be relevant, given that it’s another English comedy, with animations in part. Dr. Strangelove… well it’s a dark comedy starring an Englishman (Peter Sellars), but apart from that… As for 1954’s Seven Samurai, the harrowing Japanese tale of seven samurai trying to save a group of farmers from a group of bandits… that has absolutely nothing to do with an English claymation children’s show.

So how did Netflix come up with the recommendation? Well, they did it based on the ratings that other people have entered into their system. Which means that people who like those movies, typically also like Wallace and Gromit. So while at first glance the relevancy seems to be completely askew, it is actually correct. As more and more people add their ratings into the Netflix system, they are more and more able to predict and recommend movies that someone should like.

Ok, so how is this relevant to Search Marketing? Search engines live and die by the relevancy of their results. If Google were to suddenly become less relevant than other engines, people would, most likely, eventually drift away to the more relevant sites. After all, if you frequently can’t find what you’re looking for on one site, but you can on another, you’ll eventually stop looking on the first. This is Google’s big fear, and why the continue to work on and improve the relevancy of their search results, by such methods as Universal Search.

What about incorporating user feedback into search results a la Netflix? Well, Google does indeed do that already in a few ways. Firstly, when calculating positioning for paid ads (PPC), they factor the click through rate (CTR) into their quality score algorithm, a site with a higher CTR may find themselves above a site that’s paying more, as it’s obviously more relevant. On the organic side they do track the clicks and factor them into their ranking algorithms, after all if a site in the 3rd position receives more clicks than a site in the first 2 positions, then the chances are that the site in 3rd is more relevant and therefore should rank higher.

There is also the concept of Google personalized search, where searches that you perform, and sites that you click on can alter the the rankings on search results pages, just for you. It could be that as more people use personalized search, and Google is able to parse and aggregate that data, that they could do a very similar job to Netflix. i.e. Since you searched for ‘russian news’ and clicked on bbc.co.uk, you searched on ‘Paris Hilton’ and clicked on cnn.com, etc that your results for your search for ‘Disneyland’ should be ordered in a similar fashion to the personalized searches of other people who have previously done the same search…

We’ve taken on a new cause at RedBoots. The Exceeding Expectations Foundation, founded by Ironman triathlon legend Cherie Gruenfeld, encourages at-risk kids to move their lives in a positive direction, using the sport of triathlon as a vehicle.

In the next few months, RedBoots will provide pro bono support to Exceeding Expectations in a number of ways: Building a new Web site, conducting online marketing campaigns, sponsoring races, and encouraging RedBoots employees (and clients!) to raise money by participating in endurance athletic events. (We will donate $5 per mile to clients and employee who participates in triathlons of any distance, marathons, or other endurance sporting events! Our own Simon Heseltine will kick off with the Marine Corps Marathon this fall.)

Why Exceeding Expectations?

First, triathlon is the greatest sport on the planet (IMHO). No other sport can match the drama of triathlon. If you’ve never seen someone crawl across an Ironman triathlon finish line, stop reading now and watch Julie Moss in 1982 . Or take a moment to meet the father/son team of Dick and Ricky Hoyt. Rick is a paraplegic; with his Dad’s help he has crossed over 1000 triathlon and marathon finish lines, including several Hawaii Ironman races. There are thousands of stories like this in the sport of triathlon.

Second, triathlon provides one-of-a-kind lessons in life and achievement: Strength from adversity; don’t fear that mountain in the distance; one mile at a time; you can do more – a lot more –than you believe you are capable of (I could ramble on for hours). Using it to help at risk kids make better lives for themselves just makes sense. I love the concept.

Finally, we deal with a lot of clients in the nonprofit space who have “made it”. Their programs are running strong and they are raising astonishing amounts of money online each year.  Don’t get me wrong: We love those clients (they built our business)! However, Exceeding Expectations is a wonderful opportunity to work with an organization that is building from scratch. We expect to learn as much as we teach on this one (perhaps more).

We will post updates on our progress as we move along in this project. In the meantime, please consider donating to Exceeding Expectations and be sure to watch Cherie Gruenfeld attempt her seventh age-group win at the 2007 Hawaii Ironman championship on October 13^th.

Wikipedia is a nonprofit, user-generated encyclopedia, which has all of its content created, edited, and fact-checked by community members. Founded in 2001, it has become a major source of consumer generated media, and is currently one of the top 10 most viewed websites on the Internet.

While any individual can create a username and establish themself as a reliable and accurate editor, this is not required to make edits, however the ip address of anyone making edits is logged, so as to provide some means of tracking. Any single person looking to make edits to a page may do so, (with few exceptions), and publish it for immediate public consumption.

Wikipedia is highly visible in search engines, especially in popular searches, broad keywords and company names, where Wikipedia will frequently display in the top 3 results returned (especially on Google). Wikipedia is a useful component of a social media marketing strategy because it can be a source of traffic, and is considered to be a good source of credibility. Having an established Wikipedia entry requires some notability, otherwise it can be removed, but most nonprofit organizations would not struggle with this requirement. A full-length Wikipedia article on your mission, history, achievements, prominent supporters, and press can easily rank in the search engines for your brand name and possibly even related keywords.

Wikipedia can be one facet of an ongoing positive reputation management campaign that can help spread your footprint. Creating content (that you have the power to edit) on a highly visible social media site can help you take up shelf space in your search results and defend yourself against negative results that may creep into page one (in other words, you can use it to effectively de-optimize already ranking rogue listings).

Recently Wikipedia implemented the ‘no-follow’ tag on all links from the site, while this has decreased the direct effectiveness of the site in regard to passing link authority to a site (although as Wikipedia pages are available for use under the GNU free documentation license, any other sites that take the information may not implement ‘no-follow’), it has no effect on the traffic potential from Wikipedia.

Other social aspects of Wikipedia include the Discussion page that corresponds to each article, and the Talk page of each editor. You can encourage user edits by asking questions and offering suggestions in the discussion section, and engage someone already editing your content in their talk page, as Wikipedia does frown on companies starting or editing their own pages. The reason for this being that they don’t want the data to read like a sales brochure, or be overly biased one way or another. Doing so, and being caught doing so can raise the ire of the community, which may lead to non-complimentary text being added to your pages, or your account being banned. Therefore using the discussion section, or having third parties edit your pages is the best way to go to effectively use Wikipedia as part of your social media strategy.