Small Biz Has An Attitude About Search

Those who follow the search industry and actively market their Internet presence in a variety of ways may be surprised to learn that a lot of their fellow entrepreneurs don’t do so.

That’s the determination Greg Sterling at Opus Research found in his study of current marketing trends among the SMB market. Of those respondents to the study’s survey, 59 percent do not do online marketing.

Roughly the same percentage of respondents claim over half their business comes from word of mouth or from referrals by other customers. Though businesses rate websites as importantly as they do local newspaper advertising, many aren’t making the same connection about online ads.

SMB spending has made the niche a highly desirable one for advertising companies. Sterling said the SMB market conservatively puts $30 billion in play for marketing and advertising services annually. They may want to consider more on the paid search and Internet advertising side.

“As a practical matter, Web sites without some other marketing element (e.g., SEM/SEO) aren

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can’t be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

The panel in charge of driving the branding vehicle were Rebecca Lieb, Editor-in-Chief for The ClickZ Network; Kelly Graziadei of Yahoo Search Marketing; Scott Linzer, Director of Search Marketing for Universal McCann; Robert Heyman, Chief Search Officer for MediaSmith; and Eric Picard of Microsoft.

In the description of the presentation, they talk about how SEM has been "roped into the direct response corral for too long. Search as a brand building device has received a lot of press, particularly with marketers receiving awards for excellence and innovation in this area."

They forgot Kentucky visionary writers that saw this coming.

The panel though, instead of looking out onto the horizon and guessing, says marketers should rely on measurement and research to test the branding reach and appeal of your ads, as well as the placement/environment in which they appear.

This jury’s still out as to the extent of the branding capabilities search provides but they agree that search does not act alone, e.g., the need to integrate with other promotional forms. Search is also the entry point, where the branding journey begins.

And though there may be research to support certain claims, keep in mind that, as they’ll tell you on weight-loss commercials, individual results may vary. Success may ultimately depend on the industry and how it is marketed, and not on numbers applied across the board.

Marketers should review their content strategy as well to make sure there is a specific target, a brand for that target, and an answer to the target’s needs. But before that, like good marketers, double check with focus groups, because nothing stupid ever comes out of a focus group.

That was a joke.

Where’s mobile’s place in this new world of integrated search marketing? Well, in the basement without stairs, in a filing cabinet guarded by a leopard. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, just difficult and it requires more specific search results and mobile friendly content.

Even small text ads take up a lot of space, so it’s best to keep it simple, keep it short.

Which may not have been what the billionaire intended.  “We are disappointed, as I imagine you are, that the details of our proposal and the discussion of the merits of a potential combination have become a matter of public debate,” he wrote to the Bancroft family (which owns Dow Jones).  Yet the letter was unfailingly courteous, and modesty ruled the day.

Murdoch did, however, hint at the ways in which News Corp. could help Dow Jones.  “Dow Jones is already a leader in content and digital media with three of the world’s leading paid-subscriber financial news sites,” he admitted, but, “We would enthusiastically build upon this success by leveraging the scale we have built in digital media.”

One almost wonders if Murdoch is thinking about MySpace; it and the Wall Street Journal probably don’t share many fans, and given MySpace News’s poor performance, there’s likely more potential there for harm than good.  Still, Murdoch seemed ever-mindful of not embarrassing the Bancroft family.

“Maintaining the heritage of independence and journalistic integrity of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones’ other publications would be of utmost importance to me and to News Corporation,” the billionaire stated.

Murdoch also addressed concerns about freedom of speech and China – though not at the same time – saying that he would “[i]ncrease funding and support for the Dow Jones Foundation to continue to promote journalism standards and press freedom around the world,” and “[e]xpand where appropriate Dow Jones’ editorial presence in emerging Asian markets, including India and China.”

Heh.  Google and Yahoo surely wish him luck with balancing those goals.

In any event, Murdoch’s “conversation” with the Bancroft family has been (to all appearances) completely one-sided.  But with a rumored $5 billion offer on the table, an acquisition doesn’t seem impossible.

At SES New York, Li Evans, who champions women in search and recently included me in her series on the Women of Internet Marketing took up the cause and arranged for another luncheon for women in search. Rebecca Leib wrote an insightful piece on the event that struck just the right notes. Rebecca opined that search is obviously no longer dominated by the classic stereotypical propeller-headed geeky guys, but now includes a generous measure of women. Danny Sullivan in a follow up post at his personal blog noted that there always has been a strong presence of women in search and at SES.

As a veteran in the industry, I would have to agree with both writers. The shift noted by Rebecca is real. Search is less geeky and more marketing than ever before. As search has moved to the C-level suite, it requires those who can speak to more than technical issues. C-level executives want marketing, many of the best and brightest in search are women marketers.

This being said I was quite taken aback by the comments to Danny’s post and a recent ClickZ column (read rant) by my long-time friend and colleague Shari Thurow; wherein, she inaccurately in my opinion noted:

“most of the women I shared lunch with were heavily involved in search engine advertising. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Search engine advertising is a rather challenging and detail-oriented niche. Kudos to my colleagues with the skills and patience to effectively compete in this arena.

Nevertheless, where were the women like me? Where were the techie women?”

Where were the techie women – the same place many men were – working for the women gathered at the luncheon? Those in attendance were not just “detail-oriented niche” players. They were agency heads, industry thought leaders, and search marketing pioneers. These are women who play large. Many have rich and varied experience bases and solid technical credentials.

Web marketing and in specific search marketing does require technical understanding. It is, as Shari contends, a left-brain/right-brain integrative discipline. Those of us who work in organic search must be able to understand and articulate the technical requirements of the discipline to be successful at what we do. I contend that we are architects of success, not just the carpenters.

I for one personally don’t ever intend to stand in front of the mirror and ask – “mirror, mirror on the wall, am I the geekiest women of them all?” I’ll leave that to others.

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Buy From Yahoo Search With PayPal

Merchants who participate in the Program will be able to offer PayPal’s Express Checkout as a payment process. PayPal touts this as their fastest checkout solution; its presence in Yahoo search result pages will let searchers quickly find PayPal merchants and make purchases directly from those SERPs.

Yahoo hinted that customers who buy from merchants offering the new Checkout Program will receive incentives to use both Yahoo Search and PayPal. On the Yahoo Search blog, Tim Mayer said: "There’s peace of mind knowing my credit card info isn’t being scattered across multiple merchants."

Rich Riley, senior VP for Yahoo Online Channel & Small Business Services, wrote more about the new partnership at the Yahoo Search Marketing blog:

As an advertiser, this is great news for you. The blue shopping cart icon that will appear next to your ad not only helps the ad stand out, it also lets customers know which merchants offer PayPal Express Checkout, from the brand known for security.

There is no cost for merchants to join the program, Riley noted. Merchants will have incentives to participate in the Checkout Program; PayPal Express Checkout process will be free through the end of 2007, and merchants will receive a $100 credit in a Yahoo Sponsored Search account (read all the fine print, folks.)

The deal gives PayPal an outlet to compete with Google Checkout, a payment processing program that’s also highlighted in Google’s SERPs with little blue shopping carts. PayPal has a much more established brand as an online payment processor, which could tip some customers over to Yahoo Search for shopping-related queries.

ZDNet blogger Donna Bogatin called the Yahoo announcement "Googley sounding" due to its similarity to the existing Google Checkout service. "Yahoo is even ‘flattering’ Google with its own mini checkout cart icon enhanced ‘Sponsor Results’," she wrote.

Eric Friedman at Marketing.fm wrote that Yahoo had to respond to Google’s service, with three options in play:

Looking at the options on the table they could have either A – built their own system and hoped for global adoption B – purchase a smaller checkout system with a user base or C – partner with the largest checkout system, over 130 million users. Option C seemed to be the best option pairing up with PayPal.

In March 2006, we suggested Yahoo may have an interest in acquiring a firm to handle payment processing in-house. Partnering with PayPal means Yahoo will give up some revenue, but Yahoo executives likely believe Checkout can be a driver for their new search advertising system, with better profit margins to offset the payment revenue loss.

The Twitter herd debated platforms, has herds do when chosing to migrate.  Suddenly the story was Twitter vs. Jaiku and Jaiku team dealt with digesting a big chocolate Easter Bunny.

Let me provide some context first.  I was exposed to Jaiku at Aula in Helsinki last June.  From my notes:

Jyri Engeström and Mika Raento on social peripheral vision.  Phones are designed with the assumption that you know who you want to call before you do.  You need to process social signals before using the device.  Jaiku, their startup is looking to augment basic functions of a phone by pasting onto it what is happening on the internet.  If you can’t find anyone in your contact book, you can search a directory made of everyone’s contacts. Calendars let you share future events to let you plan together.  The demo shows very rich profiles based on phone usage (automatic data) and more social signals (more manual) — which provides a different form of Presence.  In usage, people still call regardless of presence, but when someone doesn’t answer, you leverage the presence to understand why. Integrated IM is more convenient than SMS, and includes group messaging.

Since then, Twittr came on the scene and Jakiu’s web interface got a major upgrade.  It’s important to understand the significant differences between the two services, their design thinking and strengths.  Joi Ito:

Looks like a bunch of people are trying out Jaiku after "tasting" co-presence with Twitter. To me, Jaiku, which existed before Twitter, is a bunch of Helsinki mobile jocks getting into the Web 2.0 of it all whereas Twitter is the Web 2.0 crowd "getting" co-presence…

Jaiku comes from a "presence" background allowing bluetooth proximity, phone idle time, ringer mode and other things to trigger state changes – the messaging came later. Twitter, on the other hand, is primarily messaging, which as we all know, is just a flexible and manual vector for presence information.

To understand where Jaiku is coming from, I encourage you to read this interview with co-founder Jyri Engeström and his post on social peripheral vision (the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your friends, family, and colleagues).

  Twitter on paper 
  Originally uploaded by jack dorsey.

In digging around for some of the thinking behind Twitter, I found Jack Dorsey’s napkin design for Twitter:

from a note circa Jan 2006.

casual awareness.
"what are you up to?"

multiple entry point to set status
- web
- email
- phone
- sms
- im

multiple ways to "subscribe" to status
- web
- email
- phone
- sms
- im

3 aspects
- set status
- timeline (collaborative)
- configuration

The interesting thing is that I found it on Jack’s Jaiku page where he had included his Flickr stream as part of his presence.  For a long time I’ve wanted the Xfire for social software, and today Jaiku provides this kind of persistent presence.

Jaiku lets you incorporate feeds from your blog, bookmarks, photos, location — and Twitter if that is where you prefer to post status.  Every post of any kind becomes an object for conversation, through comments.  This works easily in the web UI, but it also works in the Nokia mobile client because presence isn’t overwhelming. Presence is something you can glance at, not an SMS interruption. 

Unfortunately today this requires a Nokia phone, but they are working on a Java version that also specifically supports commenting (kind of like Radar.net, more on that later).  People coming from Twitter won’t expect the ability to add their attention breadcrumbs to their attention stream (developers will) and will probably expect something they can adopt on their mobile easily.  In the US, this is a significant barrier (Sidenote: fuck you Cingular.  Making me change calling plans to switch SIM cards from my Blackberry and claiming the handset wont work because you don’t sell it even though it runs the same software is an easy way to lose me as a customer, as if I had alternatives.).  Jaiku isn’t ready to Tip the Tuna until their next mobile client comes out. 

But until then I’d expect a lot of people to use the web version as an attention pool.  Posting to Jaiku via Twitter is a no-brainer and I’d hope you can do the opposite without loops and dupes soon.  Rafe asked the right question:           Is it possible Twitter and Jaiku will end up sharing users, instead of hoarding them like the IM services did early on? I responded: systems of record are being replaced by systems of discovery. 

In other words, in the first web I would worry about which service I would commit my social network, presence and persistence to.  But services are increasingly making data discoverable and discovering data from other services.  We used to worry about transporting our FOAF relationships, but then I think we realized that each tool is different and being able compose a different social network was a virtue (not just because of faceted identity, but that different tools need different filters and the social network is the filter).

UPDATE: This post was written in haste before going out for Easter.  Jaiku released their API and developer site.  I forgot to highlight Marko Ahtisaari’s why I use Jaiku:

1. Silent sociality – checking up on what my friends are up to when convenient, and posting my own state knowing that I won’t be disturbing others (unless they have explicitly asked to be alerted).

2. Small-group sociality – Jaiku is not about celebrity. I’m interested in sharing state with a small group I’m nearly always in contact with, what Mimi Ito has called full-time intimate community.

3. Mobile sociality – Jaiku was designed with the mobile "living phonebook" interface in mind. SMS alerts crowding the inbox of one of the few working personal and functional communication channels is not my idea of improving communication. I use the SMS-in posting to Jaiku when I’m using my Nokia 8800 and with my N70 I use the Jaiku phonebook.

4. Background sociality – Jaiku allows me to integrate other online identities and feeds (including delicious, flickr and any RSS) into my single jaiku presence feed. This is done in a way that doesn’t confuse these background posts with my explicit state messages.

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Travelocity: 96% Of ROI From Branded SEM

Travelocity’s numbers focus on the real ROI of search marketing, and build a convincing case for branded keywords against non-branded keywords, which converted into a booking just 4 percent of the time.

While the numbers are convincing, Glueck has not addressed in sufficient detail the idea that non-branded keywords are used mostly in the research phase of the search experience.

The ROI on that presence during research may not be directly measurable, as Glueck would like, but it stands to reason that it is important to have your brand present wherever it matters.

But for good measure, we’ll consider Glueck’s stats, as presented at the IAB’s Performance Marketing Forum:

• 2% of paid-search conversions originated from a searcher clicking on a non-branded term and then a branded term later
• According to 360i, branded keywords account for just 5% of search marketers’ total spend, but account for 80% of profits from paid search
• 65% of Travelocity paid-search visitors arrived via one ad from one keyword
• 27% of Travelocity paid-search visitors clicked ads multiple times via the same keyword repeatedly
• 8% used a variety of keywords
• Geo-targeting works: local flight information offered in ads converted 6 to 7 times better than ad banners

Glueck told AdAge, which has more stats, that it was a "profound mistake by all of us to think we’ve figured out how to measure ROI on search. We’re in stage one." 

Know Thy Market: Beyond The Click-Through

So, when we talk about concepts like "presence," especially for online campaigns and search marketing, knowing where your presence is requested, even appreciated, is the fundamental first step.

Though that seems obvious, especially to those in the offline marketing biz, squeak about like a mouse at any search marketing discussion forum, and the concept of branding, or presence, is one that, when talked about at all, dissenting voices quaver with dismissal, asking in unison, "where’s the ROI?"

Click click click, what is clicked, how many times, and how often it results in a sale. That’s all they want to know. And yes, the bottom line is always important. But there are other things to consider if you want to be in this game a long time.

1.    Word’s gotten out. This online business thing is the real deal, paying real money. The tenuous pussyfooters, spooked by dotcom bubbles and skeptical about online business have noticed, just as suddenly as they realized their cousins and coworkers were serious about Internet romance, the shiny new cars sitting outside their too-young-to-have-that-much-money neighbor’s house. Competition is mounting online, swelling into a wave larger than any physical world could contain. And you have to set yourself apart.

2.    Therefore, do not go gently into that good night. You must know the market to whom you are selling, why they buy, when they buy, and especially, where they live and hangout. But when I say "do not go gently," it is without a connotation of bombardment – this isn’t about harassing the customer – it’s about being there throughout their buying journey, like a friendly billboard.

The journey begins with a spark of interest that can be ignited almost anywhere, from any source (the best source is a buddy), but no matter where the interest originates, it’s your responsibility as a marketer to be present along all paths during the research phase, where interest is fostered and encouraged. It goes without saying your product must be better than the swelling competition’s, and if you’ve done your job with "the sales pyramid," fostering interest with ubiquity, accessibility, and highlighting why your product is better, then closing should be a cinch. But whatever happens, you must be better than the competition, and everybody has to be believe it.

3.    Search marketers seem prone to focus on the closing, the click-through, and not so much on the relationship with the customer. Think of it this way: in the cartoons of old, two characters are stranded on a small desert island. It doesn’t take long until one sees the other as a pork chop, and the pork chop doesn’t appreciate it one bit. If customers become dollar signs in your hungry approach to them, they’ll sense it, and avoid you the best they can. It’s important to eat, everyone knows, and click-throughs and bottom lines are what make the whole endeavor worth it. But there’s an art to seduction, and if achieved, loyalty results – closing one sale one time has little bearing on long-term success. Success, ultimately, takes closing many sales many times over.

So, with all that high-minded philosophical motivational stuff in mind, let’s consider this idea of presence as it exists online. Branding is presence. Michelob spends a lot of money making sure its brand is in bars and other places where people buy beer. Online, it’s the same idea. Where is the target market? Take your message there. This goes beyond search and tedious keyword lists. This is presence on the right blogs, the right publications, on MySpace, on Wikipedia, on Digg.com, on YouTube. You must be known, and you must be known in the correct places.

In a recent report on lead generation released by Rain Today, two very key tips emerged:

 ·  Brand matters: 65% of well known companies report being good or excellent at lead generation whereas only 44% of not well known companies report being good or excellent. If you are well known whatever lead generation tactics you employ are likely to work better.

·  Know your target market: Targeting and segmentation are the first steps to any lead generation or marketing effort. Of those companies that rated themselves as excellent at lead generation, 51% know the actual names of the decision makers there are trying to reach (compared to meek 13% of companies that rated themselves as poor at lead generation).        

LeeAnn Prescott‘s analysis of the marketing approaches of Microsoft and Apple, and then I’ll let you go.

Apple didn’t spend much on the initial promotion of iPhone. Steve Jobs showed it at a conference, bloggers took over, the viral effect took hold just like it’s supposed to. Searches for iPhone took off like a deadbeat dad, rising to number 55 on Search’s most wanted list. Jobs knows his market: young, Internet savvy early adopters.

Microsoft, on the contrary, spent a ton of money to promote Vista, online and off. This is because the market was older, more inclined to stick with what they know already, reluctant to learn new things, and needed a lot of encouragement to upgrade. Vista didn’t have the type of viral, swollen hysteria iPhone did, but searches rose significantly nonetheless, because the right people were interested.

"Both companies understand their audience and their challenges," writes Prescott. "Apple inspires a cult-like following, while Microsoft gets little love, despite its OS market dominance. The gulf between the appropriate tactics to reach these different audiences is ever widening, and thus reinforces the importance of understanding who your customers are and how they seek out and consume information."

That doesn’t stop the especially enterprising from trying to figure it out before the traditional advertising companies do, though. As far as the SEM community goes, they may soon claim YouTube optimization (or video optimization if you prefer) as their inherent turf.

The thought behind this is that search engine marketers already have the experience with "relevance-driven cost-per-action models," and with bringing content to the forefront. Critics say this will give online marketers a leg-up on Madison Avenue.

"Let’s face it," writes Otto Digital‘s Jonathan Mendez, "traditional agencies, the IAB, et al, have not figured out what to do with video ads over the past few years."

If you follow Mendez’ line of thought, another hurdle for traditional agencies will be transition of mindset when it comes to video. Television ads are thought to be passive branding vehicles where messages are watched, and if lucky, catalogued for later action.

It is the assumption that this passivity will translate to online video that could keep the larger industry from fully capitalizing on a meme.

[I]t’s likely if the user has time to watch a video they have time to do something else immediately afterwards that would be of interest to them. So while the act is passive there is a forward driving goal-based event that precedes it and some user action that will occur after it.

If so, then conversion rates go up, and SEMs are in a prime position to make something of video ads. So how exactly, especially at a time when YouTube search stinks, can this burgeoning market be tested? The answer, for now, may be in tagging.

Mendez continues his thoughts a few weeks later with some advice about how to optimize tags for YouTube. And seeing as how an H&R Block YouTube video is the most linked-to video in the site’s history with about 1.2 million links and 1.7 million views, it might be something to think about.

Jonathan provides seven guidelines for optimizing video tags. In a nutshell, they are:

1. Relevant keywords (from the user side, not submitter’s)

2. As many tags as will fit

3. Change them up for each video

4. Use adjectives

5. Category descriptor tags

6. Match title and descriptor tags

7. No natural language (i.e., get rid of "and" and "to")

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The article starts off with a quick ‘n dirty definition of presence as “the technology that allows you to see when other people are online.” That’s actually selling the vision short. The engineers and designers working on grandiose plans for embedded presence in business applications see this as a way to get much more complete status information about your contact circle than simply whether a person is online.

In the technologists’ dream future, people will be able to set their status in a constantly changing flow to let others know whether and how to get in touch with them. You could set peer level groupings (such as family members, doctors, professional services people you are expecting to hear from, business colleagues, and strangers or unidentified callers). Then you could set your status level to indicate that you are open to receiving communications or in a do-not-disturb mode. If reachable, you could direct the person to the most appropriate channel… Cell phone, office phone, home phone, instant messenger, email, and so on.

The technological ability to implement this kind of functionality is the easy part (any technical implementation is easy for the person who doesn’t have to do it). The business/economic model that would support interest in promoting the capabilities seems evident as well. Think of what LinkedIn could do if they established themselves as the central repository of contact information tying in to contact peer groups and communication levels for business people. It’s a potential gold mine.

The really hard part of the equation to solve is the practical aspects of getting a large number of people to micromanage their status levels and constantly shifting preferences. My mind conjures up the obnoxious character that Tony Roberts played in Woody Allen’s “Play It Again, Sam.” He was constantly interrupting his social and work flow to call his answering service to let them know where he was and how he could be reached. Ah, the glorious days of 1972 when we had answering services and manual call forwarding to local business numbers or pay phones!

All the above is just preamble to my main point, however. The Line56 article emphasizes the use of presence in facilitating ad-hoc collaboration. This is rightly used in most articles, presentations, and discussions as the obvious business example when people want to play up the benefits of integrated presence. But it got me thinking… Is there a place for presence in the world of formally scheduled webinars (such as educational or marketing broadcasts to a large audience)?

There is, and some webinar technology vendors are just starting to experiment with ways to leverage it. Of course we can start with the classic audience list, visible to presenters on their consoles. This is very basic presence and says who has joined the conference in listening mode. You can add to that status indicators such as mood indicators, “hand raising”, or other flags that audience members can change. Most of the big name vendors have some form of audience presence like this.

The next level of presence is a bit sneakier. It uses automatic status indicators that the audience doesn’t know they are generating. Several vendors have implemented feedback indicators that show whether a pushed slide or document has been received by audience members. This helps an attentive presenter pace his or her presentation to account for latency delays. Citrix’s GoToWebinar product takes this one step further by also indicating whether audience members are keeping focus on the presentation window and whether they are interacting with the console.

Brainshark deals exclusively with recorded webinars served up on demand to requesters. They made sure to build in an option for the webinar host to display a presence indicator so that an interested viewer has a way to interact with a live sales or support representative while watching the recorded content.

One area I haven’t seen presence well implemented is in assisting audience members during registration or login to an event. This is usually handled by a piece of small print included at the end of a lot of text in an invitation email or landing page information. “If you experience problems, please call or email us at .” People having difficulty with an interactive process have a hard time remembering where in the instruction set they might have seen such a note, and it completely pulls them out of their process.

This could be implemented in a much more sophisticated way if the technology vendor gave their clients the ability to establish an interactive presence indicator integrated right into the registration or login process. “Having trouble? Click here to speak with a live support rep. Or let us call you on your phone.” And so on. The indication of presence from the hosting company is comforting and valuable to the audience.

Ad hoc collaborative web meetings are not the only type of interactivity that can benefit from new applications of presence technology. Conferencing vendors would be well served by offering it as an option in scheduled one-to-many online seminars.

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With a background in software development and marketing, Ken has been producing and delivering business webinars since 1999. His background in public speaking, radio, stage acting, and training has given him a unique perspective on what it takes to create a compelling and effective presentation. Currently Ken offers consulting services through his company Webinar Success (www.wsuccess.com).