Starting the blog later today. Here are notes from afternoon sessions:
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3/9 3:30 pm – Content Boundaries, a 12-Step Program
Heather Armstrong, Margaret Mason (both bloggers)
- Mason: Mighty Girl, “No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog”
- Armstrong: Dooce
Step 1: Admit that you are completely powerless over your users
Example: Digg received DMCA takedown notice over a decryption key being posted for HD-DVDs on their site, so they removed it. The rest of the community revolted and created huge quantities of pages with that number posted so that their entire home page contained it. They were faced with the choice of alienating their users by censoring that content.
Step 2: Get fat and frazzled on your own terms
Boundaries are internal limits you set on what is acceptable for your site. Use those boundaries to neutralize those who wish to disrupt your path.
Example: PostSecret (site were people share their personal secrets)
Benefit:
- Attract the audience that you want, and keep trolls at bay.
- Protect your ego or brand
- Keep small problems from ballooning
- Help you maintain your interest in your site
Step 3: Know thyself
- Top-down or bottom-up?
Top-down sites could exist in a vaccuum – they don’t need feedback or participation from users. Bottom-up sites exist only because of their reader feedback (ex: Threadless, Metafilter)
- What’s your comfort level?
If you’re top-down, how vulnerable are you willing to be?
- Are you engaging?
Using comments, supplying an email address, writing directly to users on your site
Step 4: Get what you give
- Direct how you want people to respond to you (i.e. if you put out something negative, you get it back amplified as more negative; if you spend a lot of time on something, generally you’ll get stronger response, etc.)
- Readers respond to the level of commitment you put into something.
Step 5: Be transparent
- Don’t be a robot – make it easy for people to understand where you’re coming from.
- Explain yourself.
- Avoid jargon (talk about things the way you’d actually talk to them in person)
- Be as human as possible. (example: eBay uses three different tones – friendly, witty, professional – that they use differently for different purposes)
Step 6: Find the sweet spot
- Set goals and make them explicit. Why are you doing this site? What does it need to do?
- As you obtain success, goals can shift so it’s good to refer to original success metrics.
Step 7: Hone your editorial process
Editorial checklist (ask yourself before you publish):
- Is this 100% accurate?
- Could I make this point another way?
- Will this be an unpleasant surprise?
- Could this potentially damage a relationship?
- Do I have the resources to deal with any problems that might arise?
- Will this anger animal-rights advocates, or other fill-in-the-blank advocates?
Step 8: Learn to apologize.
- Sometimes a REAL apology is needed, not a defensive answer with excuses for why something happened.
The best way to apologize:
- I made a mistake.
- I am sorry. (actually say the words)
- This won’t happen again.
- Rinse. Repeat. (Maybe let some time go by on something that raises strong reactions.)
- Then let emotions cool.
Step 9: Don’t feed the animals
- Don’t engage or react to negative comments publicly
- “Climb to the heavens on your enemies’ corpses”
- People talking about you, even negatively, makes you more relevant
Step 10: Let yourself evolve
Allow yourself the freedom to learn, grow, change.
Step 11: Publish for readers you want, not the ones you have
- Don’t worry about whether all people will GET what you offer – direct your content for those people you’re trying to reach.
- You don’t have to reach the whole world – just the part of your world you’re trying to reach.
Step 12: Follow the fun
- Go after what you enjoy, because lack of authenticity shines through on the web like no other medium
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3/9 5:00 pm – SEO 3.0: Optimizing Search & Social for 2008 and Beyond
Bill Leake (Apogee-Search)
- It’s a Google world. As a search platform, there is very little to challenge Google as the leader for the next five years. There are, however, headways in destination sites (Facebook, etc).
- In order for Google to lose at this point, not only does something else have to be better, but they will have to face-plant.
- Online marketing trends:
– Remember that all online marketing is just a PIECE of overall marketing
– Integrated usually works best (Facebook/LinkedIn ads, plus search)
– Word of mouth/referral marketing is still best, and well-done PR is next. Search is third.
The funnel of measurement for web: Impressions => clicks => leads/sales => Offline sales
Pay-Per-Click Trends:
- Cost per action drivers on everything
- Bid management on the most competitive phrases
- Not necessary in all cases
- Great and growing selection of “off-the-shelf” tools for bid
- Think about turning campaigns on and off based on the times your users are engaged
- Site targeting (allows users who are on other sites to know about your site, even if they’re not searching for your site or keywords)
** A lot of keywords that might have once worked for finding your site in search results, may not once the big bucks hit those keywords.
- Think of Google as a supermarket – only so much shelf space available. So how do you dominate, how do you have an unfair share of that shelfspace?
SEO Trends:
- CONTENT IS KING (good content is the most important thing)
- Google ranks sites largely according to how many links there are to sites -> High school yearbook analogy (more people that signed your yearbook, thus validating you, the more popular you became). But not all links are equal – what are the links in to your site saying about you? Google is now doing a lot of contextual analysis around the links that are out there for your site.
- Too much time in SEO is spent on writing optimized text for sites that can’t be used because it’s so heavy
- 80% of your Google ranking is what the rest of the universe is saying about you – 20% is what you say on your site about yourself. And the key in that your title tag. FOCUS on your title tag – use the keyword that you want to be found on in your title tag. For instance, “Keyword here, brought to you by Company Name”
- CONTENT DRIVES LINKS (good content)
- Don’t let SEO write content – many are not qualified to do so about your business. You need to write your content, or hire good writers.
- Link baiting (hooks: funny, news, resource, controversial, flame)
- Press releases can be EXCELLENT SEO fodder (your content, somebody else’s site, linking back to you)
- How to use releases: Frequent, keyword-embedded, use internet wires, retrain writers that it’s ok if a release wasn’t a print article
- Online reputation management: what people can and can’t do with your copyrighted material
-Google Local (maps) – put company information on Google Maps with the best info
- More and more in the next couple of years, search results are going to be blended (text results, maps, videos, photos, etc.)
- More hype than real in 2008: Virtual Worlds, Mobile, Pay Per Call
-What’s real in 2008: Video, social media optimization, more convergence and cross-channel marketing
