Last week, I attended the eMetrics conference in Alexandria, VA. Yes, for once a local conference…meaning no flying time. This one was a little bit different for me, as it was totally focused on Analytics and Metrics, rather than search, but was still very worthwhile.

Unfortunately, due to a busy schedule here, I was only able to attend a few sessions, but those that I did attend were enjoyable and informative. If you’d like to read my write-ups on these sessions that I did over on Li Evans of Key Relevance‘s blog, here are the links:

• eMetrics – Navigating a University Website
• eMetrics – The View from the CMOs office

…and, if you were interested in the answer to the question of how many adult conference attendees you can fit in the back of a standard taxi…

Jim Sterne, Mike Grehan, Simon Heseltine & Andrea

Last week for Toastmasters, I gave an interpretive reading of a section of Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book.”  As I was preparing for this, I started thinking about how this applies to the work that we do at Serengeti Communications.  I came to the realization that this is exactly what our Analytics team does on a daily basis.

Let me explain further: With interpretive reading, you have to get inside the author’s head, understand the motivations of the various characters, and how external factors have affected them and continue to affect them throughout the reading.  You work to understand the flow of the plot, and identify those parts of the reading that you need to highlight through your messaging (tone, pauses, speech pattern, etc.) - in order to really sell the plot.

With analytics, it’s exactly the same.  Our team gets inside your site (you can imagine a matrix-like scene at this point if you’d like), and through the data…understands how your users get to your site, what they do once they get there, and what motivates them to place an order? What part of the process has a leakage issue?  Where should the selling point be?  How are the users responding to the current messaging?

As you can see, quite a lot of similarities.  So, if you’d like an interpretive reading on your site, you know where to go.

Actually I don’t, heck I don’t even drink coffee (a fact which has caused a few heads to be shaken in disbelief around the office), but someone does hate Starbucks enough create an “I Hate Starbucks” site and get it ranked 8th for the term “Starbucks”. To be honest, it’s not a very engaging site, and owner has some links on there that I’d say are not too relevant (unless you believe that Mesothelioma has something to do with coffee, in which case I’m even more thrilled that I don’t touch the stuff), which strikes me as being a little shady, but maybe that’s the only way the owner can fund the hosting fees for the site.

So why was I taking a look at Starbucks in the first place? Well, I read in a UK newspaper an expose about the Starbucks corporate wide practice of leaving a tap running all day long for ‘hygiene reasons’. Worldwide this meant that 23 million liters (or over 6 million gallons) of water were being wasted every day. That’s a staggering amount of wastage, especially for a company that has sells a product that’s supposed to work towards getting clean water for children around the world (as a side-note, Flash? Really, a site comprised solely of Flash, and slow loading Flash at that? Ugh).

So what happened? Well, by the next morning Starbucks had issued a statement that they were looking into alternatives, but they had yet to remove the edict (individual stores in the UK took it upon themselves to do so).

The fact that this issue was raised in the top selling newspaper in the UK meant that Starbucks were very quickly made aware of this issue (in fact, I’ve no doubt that a reporter from the Sun was on the phone to Starbucks UK looking for the follow up story before that issue hit the stands. But what if this issue had been raised on a small site such as “I Hate Starbucks”? Would anyone from Starbucks have noticed? Maybe they would have, since it is ranking for their name, but even so, it’s doubtful that there would have been a statement sent out the next morning. But what if a forum or three picked up the story, or maybe someone from TreeHugger.com saw it, and wrote about it, spreading the word near and far? Would they know then? Would they know when to act? Where to respond? Who to talk to?

If you have to think about these issues, it means that you likely don’t have a robust Buzz Monitoring solution in place. That’s something we can help you with, whether it’s doing an initial, historical scan, or whether it’s continual monitoring, we can show you what’s being said about your company, your brands, your products, your industry, and your people. Not everything said about you will be in a major newspaper, and you’ll need to know about any issues, good or bad, before you know how and where to respond.

Today, I’m off to SMX East, and will be presenting on the topic of Reputation Management. So, I thought I’d put together a quick 6 step guide to managing your reputation.

1. Find out whether people are talking about your company, your product, your executives, etc.

Alerts and RSS feeds will give you an insight into what’s going on now.  But, you need to go back into the past in order to understand what’s been said before and to create a baseline.

2. Find out where they’re talking.

Don’t just assume that Google and Yahoo will give you every discussion on every site…they won’t.  There are many instances where a site or a forum discussion won’t be indexed, either intentionally (closed forums, noindex, blocked through robots.txt, etc), unintentionally, or because the search engines just don’t dig deep enough into the site.

3. Identify the influencers.

Which channels are the customers engaged on?  Which sites contain the greatest degree of conversations?   Which sites get the most eyeballs?

4. Determine the sentiment.

Are the discussions predominantly positive or negative?  Are there certain locations which sway one way or another?

5. Plan and implement your participation in the discussion.

Maybe you want to reward the positives, talk to the negatives to understand their concerns, and maybe move them to the neutral or positive column.  Or maybe, it’s just that you want to be part of the conversation, showing that you are listening.

6. Identify gaps in the conversation.

If you find that there’s an audience out there, but no central location for them, then, maybe there’s the potential for your company to create their own site for the audience to use.  And, if you can get them there, and they stay, it’s going to be so much easier for you to monitor the conversations.

Or alternatively, you could just send an email to Nan at serengeticommunications.com and let us figure it all out for you.

Hi,

I am basically interested for business reasons. I had written to you about the offer a few days back. Perhaps, you never got the mail in the first place. Anyhow, here is the deal. I found your sitehttp://endlessplain.com/ really enchanting and would like to buy a number of text-links on your site. Let me know if you would like to hear more of this.

Best regards, Tom

This was an email that I received last week. ‘Tom’ wanted to buy text-links on this site.  Yet, despite him finding the site to be ‘really enchanting,’ he couldn’t be bothered to add in the name of one person that works here to target it to. Based on his note and the fact that he didn’t send an earlier one, despite claiming to, this looks just like a typical form letter sent out to hundreds of site owners at a time.  There’s nothing to make me want to check out his offer, even if we did sell text links on this, which we absolutely do not.

This wasn’t the first email last week to give me cause to shake my head in disbelief, and it most assuredly won’t be the last. In fact, last week we received an email to the info@ account that had us all shaking our heads.

xxx is a well established search marketing firm seeking a partner for a strategic alliance or merger opportunity. Our firm is headquartered in xxx and is organized into two operating units.

Our Internet marketing services group offers advanced search marketing solutions for sophisticated Internet marketers. Our world class IMS team includes nationally recognized experts in the field. We have an international client base with spend rates well into six figures.

The second operating unit is a national yellow pages advertising agency with a stable, and geographically diverse, client base which includes a number of major national and global advertisers. The team offers both print and Internet yellow pages services for major advertisers with spend rates into seven figures.

We are open to discussing an alliance or merger with either or both operating units to attain immediate, and significant, revenue growth. Should you be interested in learning more about this opportunity, please contact me to discuss the matter further via email or my personal cell phone number.

xxx CEO

Really, you want to merge with us? And the best way to do this is via a blind email? Given that it’d take you 2 seconds to go over to the team page and find out that Nan is the person that you needed to talk to?

Maybe, just maybe, if you’re wanting to talk about something as sensitive as a corporate merger, you’d at least call first to get her personal email address? After all, who’s to say that the email won’t instead go to someone else that’ll do something like write about it on the company blog?

Again, this comes off like a form letter.  There’s no talk about what would work with what we offer, what benefits each could generate from a merger or alliance, nothing.  Just a statement as to what they do.

Anyway Mr. CEO, if you’d like…I can put you in touch with Tom, he’d like to buy some text link ads on your site, and who knows, maybe he’d want a merger?

Last Friday, I received a copy of CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World by Tom Watson, (Wiley, Nov 10,2008). Given that we’ve been talking a lot on this blog lately about social networks, but not so much about nonprofits and cause marketing (at least I haven’t been), I was interested to pop open the covers and take a look inside.

The book contains 10 nicely segmented chapters, all dealing with different aspects of the impact of the wired / wireless world on philanthropy – touching on topics from Katrina response, to political movements, to micro-lending.

If you’re in the nonprofit world and haven’t yet taken advantage of the online space, then this book is full of great ammunition for you to take to your executives to persuade them that it’s the right thing to do. i.e…

Charities seeking to raise money through direct mail are known to pay a premium for each dollar raised from a brand new donor; the cost may be $1.30 or $1.50 to acquire each new dollar. While the money raised on Causes {a fundraising applicaion on Facebook – Simon} is small so far, the acquisition cost per public supporter is almost zero.

…and how about this quote discussing figures released by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement in 2006 talking about millenials (young Americans born after 1980)

30% told researchers they have boycotted a product in the last year “because of the conditions under which it was made or the values of the company that made it.”

When you consider other numbers and discussions in this book about the online connectivity of these millenials, it looks like a great opportunity for causes that can capture the imagination of these millenials.  On the other hand, it’s also an area of great concern for companies that have working practices that these millenials may deem questionable or worse.

One of the biggest changes that the online world has brought to philanthropy has been the increasing level of openness. In the past, you would send your money in to a charity, and that would be the last you’d hear of it (well, until the next request for cash came in).  These days, people can read about the actual people that benefit from their $25 micro-loan.  They can read about where their donations are actually being applied…following the story of the people or villages that benefit.

More than 58% of high net-worth individuals say they would give more to charity if they could determine their gift’s impact… But new markets are offering that opportunity to smaller donors as well… micro-philanthropists should be as respected as large-scale philanthropists.

Now, the book does make the point that $ ROI is relatively low for many of the causes discussed.  But, Watson does talk about the fact that engagement in this social media world is about much more than just dollars.  It’s also about getting people behind a cause in other ways, whether it’s to call their elected representatives or demonstrate in one way or another. I’ll leave the last word for the author, but please note that there’s a lot more in this book beyond what I’ve covered.

Will online social activism unleash a golden age for causes – for philanthropy, for activism, for citizen engagement? Perhaps… the CausedWired movement is also changing lives and inspiring new a new generation of wired social entrepreneurs to reach for something better.

On October 6th, I’ll be speaking at SMX-East on the topic of Buzz Monitoring in the “Search and Reputation Management” session, 3:45 – 5pm in New York City. If you’d like to attend (there are 30 or so other sessions besides mine) and you’ve not booked your ticket for this conference yet, then you can use the discount code smxspeak when registering to save $150 off the cost of a new registration.

On October 28th, in San Jose, CA, there’ll be a new event called BlogWell.  We won’t be speaking at this.  But, that’s because the 8 speakers are all senior people in charge of social media at large corporation, such as Cisco, Graco, The Home Depot, Intel, Kaiser Permanente, UPS, Walmart, and Wells Fargo. So, for the minimal price of $200, you get to hear case studies, how to get started, how to keep the ball rolling, and best practices.

Moving on to December, both Joy and I will be speaking at the Specialized Information Publishers Association’s (SIPA) annual online marketing conference. I’ll be talking about all aspects of Reputation Management, and Joy will be covering Analytics. I’ve actually been on the planning committee for this conference, so to see it grow from the first meeting to now being a fully scheduled event – with great speakers from major companies (AOL, Cisco, Marketing Sherpa, Forrester Research, etc) – is absolutely fantastic.

So, if you’d like to attend this show, we’ll be in Las Vegas from December 8-10, with a really good hotel rate of only $119 per night at the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

That’s a fairly common expression that’s fairly true. How many times has your company bought pizza for the staff, only to find out that you have to sit through a presentation by the CEO, or it is used as an excuse to let you know that you’ll have to work much later for the next 3 weeks?

The same can also be said in the online world. When someone offers you something for free, you have to question why that is. It could be:

• a loss leader for branding purposes
• a tool for upselling purposes
• a way to generate links
• something insidious

Hmm? Insidious? How can that be? Well, let’s take the example of WordPress Themes. Doing a search on “Free WordPress Themes” pulls up quite a few sites. Now, I’m not going to target one in particular.  But, let’s just say that I did click through to a few of the first page results and witnessed the same behavior.

All of these sites give you the option to look through their portfolio and pick out a theme to use for free – even giving you the instructions as to how to load it onto your site. It’s only after you load it that you notice (if you’re observant enough) that there are some links in the footer of every page.

Ok – links to the company that designed it and gave it away for free – that’s one thing (which is why I list that separately above), but links to spammy MP3 download sites, and so on, that’s just bad.

And, don’t think that the authors don’t realize that.  If you try to look through the code for those links, it’s not there… how can that be? Well, what they tend to do is encrypt the links in the footer so that you can’t find them there.  And of course, that makes it harder to take them out.

Some developers have taken to hijacking the 404 page of ‘free’ themes with redirects, which then transfers page equity over to the developer’s site. Very sneaky, and not something that you’ll necessarily notice unless you go looking for it.

Now, on the other hand, there are plenty of free things that are worthwhile, with anything open source being a great example of communities banding together to create content and tools for each other.

So, what I’m saying here, is be careful.  Make sure to look at what you’re getting to make sure there are no surprises, after all…

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

I was going to start this post by quoting some lyrics, but seeing that the theme tune from “The Golden Girls” started running through my head, I figured that I’d leave it at the Queen lyrics in the title.

Sorry girls, you’re not in this post

So, friends. What are they? People that you grew up with, people who share your interests, people you can tell things to that you wouldn’t tell others, people who stand by you even when they know you’re in the wrong, people who you respect and trust to tell you when you’re in the wrong, and so on.

But, what about in a social media world? Are friends the same? Are your friends on Facebook people that you’ve met? People that you’ve talked to online? People that you’ve even heard of? I know some of mine aren’t – so, why have I added them as friends?

It’s not because I want to have a massive friends list so that I can brag about how I have more friends than anyone else (that is a motivation for some people). It’s generally because they at least show an interest in the same topics that I’m interested in, and we do share a number of friends.  A friend of a friend is a potential friend.

On Twitter, a site that allows you to see 140 character messages from all your friends, I currently have 145 people that I’m following - people who either say things that interest or entertain me.  As for people following me, I’m closing in on 100. Again, I’m not allowing absolutely anyone to follow me (heck, in most cases, they’re spam accounts that’ll get removed by Twitter anyway). Whenever anyone requests to follow me (my account is protected so only friends can see my postings), I go and review their account. If they seem to be someone that I want to follow me, I allow them to do so, otherwise I reject them.

To me, 150 seems like a good number of people to keep track of.  Obviously, it’s going to depend on the frequency of their posts, and the amount of time I want to dedicate to keeping track of what’s going on. But, how can someone legitimately say that they can truly follow over 21,000 people?

The answer is fairly easy – they can’t! Now, there are other ways to keep up-to-date with Twitter than just reading your friend’s posts, but that’s a topic for another day. So, is there any benefit to being added as a friend by one of these ‘friend to everyone’ types?

I guess the only benefit I can really think of is that you can send them a direct (private) message, should you have the need to do so.  That’ll lift you out of the clutter.  Apart from that, there’s nothing beyond the +1 to your follower’s count.

Last week, Facebook started allowing search engines in to crawl any public areas of the site. Now, groups and wall posts are starting to show up in the search results (i.e. “I Hate Comcast”). Is this a bad thing or a good thing?

I think it’s both. It’s a bad thing in that this content now goes out there to the search engines, so that anyone that searches on the specific phrases could now potentially see that. It’s possible that people were under the impression that ‘what happens on Facebook stays on Facebook,’ so users may be surprised to see this out there (In fact, I saw several open groups that had non-disclosure items in their rules. They can’t really be applied with the data now out in the non-Facebook world as well).

So, what’s the positive side? Well, it’s now so much more easier for a company to find out what’s being said about them on Facebook. All they have to do is set up an alert on – site:facebook.com mycompany – and away they go. So much easier than having to monitor different groups individually, or use the quirky search functionality in Facebook.