“Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that’s one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.

Think about how Google works. When you type in a term, the search engine puts the site with the most links pointing toward it at the top of the list (simplistically speaking). That means bloggers and discussion boards are extremely powerful in influencing Google’s search results, because bloggers and discussion-board posters are promiscuous linkers, constantly pointing to things they love or hate. Google hoovers up those links and makes recommendations based on them.”

That was an excerpt from an exceptional article by Clive Thompson called “The See-Through CEO.” It was published in Wired Magazine over a year and a half ago, and what he writes rings true everyday.

Online is where reputations are made now, and image is everything. You can’t beat ‘em so you might as well join ‘em.

Penelope Trunk, a career expert, says, “Spend money on image when money is tight. Time magazine reports that Playboy—the grand arbiter of all image consulting—found that in a bear market, centerfolds of meatier women sold better. This makes sense: In a down market you naturally want to be around people who don’t seem to be suffering from the financial hardship.”

Expectations help to drive economic growth. How your publics believe your business will weather this economic storm has a tremendous impact on the reality of its performance. Positive publicity drives momentum and shapes perception. If you want to belong on a certain level you have to look like you know what you’re doing.

Today’s downward economy is not the time to cut marketing budgets because it is the best time to rise above your weaker competitors. When business is good, a strong message can be lost in the noise of all the other companies vying for consumers’ attention. Today is the time to rev up your marketing budget to steal market share and see actual results.

Rallying the marketing troops can be done without breaking the bank. Volunteering your time offline (schools, government agencies, non-profits) should be streamlined with press releases, link requests, and SEO efforts. Getting creative with blogs and link bait can do wonders for promoting products and services. These efforts can be inexpensive but still bring real measurable ROI and value to the table.

No one likes to hang out with losers.

Tiziana Casciaro, professor at Harvard Business School, which found that people would rather work with someone who is likable and incompetent than people who are obnoxious and competent. She says, “How we value competence changes depending on whether we like someone or not.”

Penelope Trunk, an American writer who examines the lines between work and life says, “Most of us have to work at being likeable. Fortunately, Casciaro’s research shows that the biggest impediment to likeability is not caring. So if you just decide you want to do better, you probably will. The people who are likeable actually care about other people and care about the connections they make.”

In our world where online often converges with offline, it is important to take these workplace principles to a binary perspective. While Trunk and Casciaro are talking about relationships and dialogue in the workplace, the same relationship principles apply to how your consumers relate with your brand online.

Social media and engagement are buzz words that may seem like something only large corporations need to worry about, but it is really something that small companies can easily manage.

If you aren’t a loser offline, you can apply the same principles to being likable online.

Online reputation management can be broken down into 3 segments: monitor, optimize, and engage.

Monitor

Monitor the online conversations around your brand, your industry, your products, and your key executives.

Monitor different types of conversation online such as: blogs, news search, tags, standard search results, and forums.

How to monitor your online reputation:

• Google Alerts – google.com/alerts
• Yahoo Alerts – alerts.yahoo.com
• RSS feed subscriptions to search results Technorati, Feedster, Yahoo & Google News, BlogPulse
• Social Media via tags: tagbulb.com, tagfetch.com, keotag.com

Optimize

Optimizing for specific search queries works best as a preventative measure. Displacing search results as a reactionary method does not put your brand in a position of control. Instead, beat others to the punch and cast a large net in terms of where you surface on the Internet. If your customers are talking about a problem they are having with your software, don’t leave it up to a forum discussion to get solved. Make sure you have an article about how to solve the problem on your Web site, and be the first one to answer the problem in the forums.

While optimizing doesn’t always put your brand in control, it is a great solution to treating the symptoms. Lee Odden explains this well:

“Companies that want to protect their brand visibility on the web would do well to make optimizing their brand content a best practice. Optimizing all digital communications including: PR, marketing, SEO, HR, investor relations and related electronic content that is publicly available on the web as well as social media: text, images, audio, video will produce more branded content in the SERPs. Doing so doesn’t necessarily put the brand in control, but it’s a much better situation than scrambling after the fact.”

Engage

Once your monitoring efforts have paid off, and you have identified a negative brand mention, what do you do?

• Research the situation and determine the facts
• If the implications are not correct, provide the facts and ask for a correction
• If the implications are correct, offer to discuss
• Respond with your own blog and streamline response with any other PR methods
• Be honest and transparent. Don’t just be on the defense, listen to the conversation.

Odden says, “Implementing a proactive monitoring campaign provides insight into the kinds of content interactions audiences are having with your brand. When identified and qualified, situations need to be addressed directly. At the same time, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, and companies need to implement holistic brand content optimization as a best practice. The more branded content in the search results, the more diluted any negative brand content will be.”

5 steps to gaining site traffic through search engines

The secret to coming up first in Google’s search engine results pages is not as elusive as one may think. Not quite as simple as flipping “The Google Switch,” but if you work hard, have dedication, and use creativity your site can climb the rankings. Because of what it takes to be perfectly positioned, the process is very much like a competition. Beating the competition (being no. 1 in search results) is an ego booster. It feels good to see your company riding high above your competitors, but when done correctly, your SEO efforts will drive potential customers to your site who are looking for what you have to offer.

Step 1:
Know your Google goals
The process of search engine optimization, or SEO, begins with examining your goals for the project. Map out in a document your benchmarks for success. You should have short term goals and long term goals. These goals determine how to proceed with your keyword research.

• Sell more high-heels through your online store and increase your revenue by 30%.
• Add 200 subscribers to your blog.
• Increase the length of visit by 2 minutes from visits coming from a local keyword.

You must have site analytics to truly measure whether or not you’ve been successful.

Google Analytics will give you concrete numbers that measure your site’s visits, keyword referrals, search engine traffic, and much more. You must look at the before and after data to determine the success of your site’s SEO changes.

Step 2:
Successful keywords perform a balancing act
Once you have articulated your goals, you can then examine the best keywords for your campaign’s success. We use software to determine a keyword phrase’s competition (how many pages Google has indexed for that phrase), how often the phrase is searched, and how relevant it is to a company’s goals. Balancing these factors is key.

You can use Google’s Traffc Estimator for free, but it doesn’t provide all the information to make keyword phrase decisions.

Step 3:
Know your competition
Competitive intelligence is not only stealthy, but a great indicator as to what you need to improve. Examine the other sites standing in your way to high rankings. Look into their site structure, links, keyword phrases, domain age, and more to help determine which factors need improvement on your site.

Step 4:
Examine site structure and content
When a search engine produces search results it has not only examined the content on the page, but it also examines the site’s code. It’s important to know how to look under a site’s hood and determine if the proper tags have been utilized.

Step 5:
Report, examine, and repeat.
After the necessary changes have been made, be sure to report on what has improved or changed in the search engine results (relative to your goals). Examine data from your site (or have us help with site analytics) to determine what changes need to be made in order to complete a successful Internet marketing campaign.

***No one can guarantee to make your site number one in Google. We are just outlining the steps to success. Significant progress with significant ROI can be made with persistence, patience, and proficiency. Anyone that guarantees you the top spot for a Google search probably isn’t an ethical consultant. Be sure to do your research and ask questions in order to find the best SEO partner for you.

Last Wednesday I attended an Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association meeting entitled– Search Marketing: Finding the Value Beyond the Online Click to Conversion. Moderating the talk was John Cattarulla Director, Strategic Accounts, Yahoo! The panelists included:

• Ron Belanger, VP of Agency Development, Yahoo!
• Roku Coryne, Senior Metrics Consultant, Google
• Jason Fisher, Group Director, 360i

Ron Belanger from Yahoo! began by explaining that when employing search marketing we want to put products in the path of search behavior.

He did a great job of looking at Search in an nontraditional way. I was prepared to hear a little more about search engine optimization tips, but he talked more about using Search in a social media/public relations sort of way. I think this is a good indicator that the delineation of business, marketing, advertising and public relations is blurring more every day.

Belanger discussed the need for organizations providing its customers’ support online. He calls this a post-purchase opportunity to maintain a relationship with the customer. When your customer has a question about your product they will likely turn to the Internet to research the answer. You want your organization to be first with the answer. What a great way to convey your organization’s messages first and upfront.

He also discusses a case study from Hellmann’s Mayonnaise. They partnered with Yahoo! and used search in a campaign to change the perception of mayo. They wanted to banish the bad rap of mayonnaise (particularly Hellmann’s) and educate their public that mayo is in fact a “real food” with “real ingredients.” When one searches “real food” in Yahoo! Hellmann’s Yahoo Real Food Group appears at the top of the search results (paid and unpaid). It is a social network that allows users to trade recipes, discuss health topics, and view videos. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but overall it was a very successful campaign.

Raku Coryne’s presentation was very entertaining! She attributed many of her ideas to Avinash Kaushik, and likened bounce rate to scent. Scent in the way a bloodhound finds its prey. If a bounce rate is high it has no scent. It doesn’t have the stickiness factor to retain visitors, and then you have a problem.

She also said Kaushik likes to compare Web analytics to Angelina Jolie. “Web Analytics is like Angelina Jolie: It’s sexy, it kicks butt, and is a goodwill ambassador!”

Coryne said that she liked to compare Web analytics to Oprah. She said bounce rate is like Oprah because it can tell a good story.

She also explained the importance of two numbers: 4 and 25.

• 4 words= average number of words in a search engine query
• 25% of search in Google each day have never been searched before

From this she explained Chris Anderson’s Long Tail.

She also said Web analytics were useful in eliminating the HIPPO. The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. She said the HIPPO often makes decisions based on his/her opinion, and that Web analytics eliminated this. One cannot argue with the information and statistics gathered from Web analytics. If the HIPPO likes one landing page, but users liked the other (tracked with Web analytics) the right answer is obviously the landing page that actually worked.

I found it very useful to think about search in a creative way. You must have a general idea for how it works if you are using it in a campaign, but it has many applications other than just “being number one.” I also like how Coryne presented metrics as non-intimidating. It really helps to know that the simplest metrics can be the most telling and actionable.

For more information and pictures, check out Dan Greenfield’s post about the meeting. I came upon it after doing a SEARCH on the meeting’s topic– how appropriate!

How often do you use Google (the search engine and its products) during your day? For me, the number is pretty ridiculous.

Will Google execute its master plan and take over the world continue to dominate search forever? Reports liken search and Google to advertising and television. Before cable TV there were a couple major networks that dominated the advertising dollars. Then cable created niche networks and gave viewers more choices. Advertisers loved it because they could focus their campaigns and viewers loved it because they had a choice.

Not to say searchers don’t currently have alternative search methods, but as search is expanded and refined I think the little guys can collectively chip away at Google’s market share.

Speaking of refined, alternative search methods, here is a list of engines I’m keeping an eye on:

Results Displayed Visually

Quintura

This search engine allows you to visually refine your search. I like that you can narrow your search down then glance at the narrowed results, and then if you don’t like what you see you can just move the mouse, and your original results reappear. In other words you don’t have to navigate away from the results page to refine your search results.

Kartoo

Kartoo also allows your to visually refine your search, but it shows screen shots of the sites as you rollover a result. The results are visually displayed as a map that is linked together by the terms that refine them. Their mascot also “surfs the web” as your results are being generated.

Searchme

Searchme also displays your results visually, and allows you to refine by vertical search category (images, movies, web). The results are displayed in a “stack” and if you like the stack you can save it to peruse later.

Viewzi

Viewzi allows you to choose how to display your results. They have several views to choose from. The site information view provides a lot of useful site information about the site you query, but I’m not sure how accurate some of the data is. Nonetheless it is an interesting approach to search.

Niche Search Engines:

Truila– Real Estate

Healthline– Healthcare

Like.com– Shopping

Globalspec– For engineering, industrial and technical communities

Spock– People Search

Blinkx– Rich media search engine. From their website, “Unlike other multimedia search engines that attempt to re-purpose technology built for the Text Web, blinkx uses a unique combination of patented conceptual search, speech recognition and video analysis software to efficiently, automatically and accurately find and qualify online video. Today, blinkx is the world’s largest single index of rich media content on the Web, delivering more content from a broader range of sources than either Google or Yahoo!”

Community Search/Human Edited-Search:

Del.ici.ous

The idea is for you to search other people’s bookmarks. You are basically searching others’ favorite results of the query.

Squidoo

Members create a “lens” about something they are an expert on. You can search the database for entries that match your query.

Wikipedia

Anyone can add, edit, or contribute to the encyclopedia’s entries.

Sproose

From their website, “How Sproose works…Machine Calculated Results => Sproose Users Vote Websites => User Improved Results”

Mahalo

Mahalo actually builds search results pages themselves. From their website, “Search results built internally by our full time staff are checked by other Full Time Guides and our editors. We also have a place on every page where you, the public, can report problems or errors with our pages. Our Guides then check these errors and correct them. Additionally, we have a dead link checker which helps us remove links that are no longer functioning and a full time team watching the news to make sure that every hot search term or news item is updated quickly.”

ChaCha

I personally use this service a lot. There are a couple of ways to use it.

• Dial 1-800-2ChaCha
• Ask a question after the beep
• Receive a text message with the answer. (It is human-powered, so someone is actually looking up the answer for you)

• Go to ChaCha.com
• Type your question in their graphic mobile phone
• Add your phone number
• They will text you the answer (again, human powered)

I don’t have an iphone so I love using this service. I’m sure they will have to think of ways to adapt as more and more people have their internet on their cell phones, but I think it is a very useful service while I have my simple cell phone.

All of my friends previously called Auburn’s Foy Student Center where they will answer any question you may have, any question. But I think ChaCha is a great alternative to bothering the folks at Auburn.

—–I don’t think there will be any new search engine (any time soon) that could really threaten Google, but collectively I think there is a chance to take away some of Google’s dominance. On the other hand, if any search engine begins to pull away from the pack they may just get Google-gobbled up. Obviously Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion, but they also have acquired smaller search engine types.

Google bought Israeli Search Engine Orion.

Google bought Kaltix, a three-month-old, three-man Stanford startup that’s working on personalized and context-sensitive search.

Google acquired a key player in face and image recognition biometrics, Neven Vision. ]]> http://kellycolleenjones.com/niche-search-engine/feed/ 1