The last session of SES Chicago Day 3 proved to be one helluva entertaining discussion on black hat, white hat SEO.  However while listening to the panel, I couldn’t help thinking about the 5:30 PM Chicago traffic and the 4-5 inches of snow that was expected (and had started!).

My recaps will include some useful tidbits that I picked up during day 2 of SES Chicago.  Tweets were made from @marketwire as well as my personal handle @shinng using the hashtag #seschi and #rt2eat.  So what is the meaning of the latter hashtag?  Well, the creative marketing team @marketwire wanted to give back for the holiday season so we decided to take advantage of the Marketwire presence.  For every ReTweet of our tweets that include the hashtags #seschi #rt2eat, Marketwire will be donating $1.00 per RT for a max contribution of $500 to benefit the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

SES Chicago Session – Black Hat, White Hat: Does it Really Matter Anymore?

Moderator:  Frank Watson (Kangamurra Media)
Speakers:  Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz.org), David Naylor (Bronco), Matthew Bailey (SES Advisory Board, Site Logic Marketing), Todd Friesen (Position Technologies), Bruce Clay (Bruce Clay, Inc)

This session was truly a roundtable.  It wasn’t as organized as the other sessions where one person presented with a powerpoint followed by another.   This session was more like the every-man-for-himself mentality, but considering it was the last session, that was a good thing.

The most memorable quotes are outlined below.

What is black hat SEO?

• Black hat is what’s prohibited by guidelines.
• When it comes to black hat, the only tactic left is buying links.
• Amateur SEO is keyword stuffing.
• Black hat SEO is the risk and fear of risk model.
• Black hat is aggressive link building.

Regarding spam…

• Spam and black hat aren’t one and the same.  When you’re playing cards, there are professional card players and there are card cheats.
• The definition of spam is, “What would Matt Cutts think?”  If you’re on your laptop and Matt Cutts walks behind you and you immediately close your laptop, you’re a spammer.
• Google should be thanking the black hats for finding all their holes and closing it up.
• The fundamental problem is that people don’t know when stuff is wrong.  Google hasn’t defined all the things that are wrong.
• Example: search for “flights to Chicago” on Google.  The first couple map listings are black hat SEO tactics.  (Notice the web address and redirection)

Is Google assessing intent?

• They can’t!

Do you think the Google public DNS is going to have an affect on the web?

• It gives Google a lot more access to data traffic, but I’m not sure what it does for them.  Not sure if it will impact SEO.

Is it black hat to do stuff that will push Ripoff Report to the 2nd page?

• Although both Yahoo! and Bing banned Ripoff Report, the consensus was that it is not a black hat tactic.

Does Google AdWords spend affect your ranking?

• AdWords and rankings barely know each other even exists.  They don’t collaborate well between projects.
• It’s intentional that they don’t collaborate well.  It’s their culture.

Out of the three keynote speakers attending SES Chicago 2009, I was looking forward to Dan Siroker’s keynote the most.  Siroker is the former deputy new media director for the Obama presidential transition team and considering the location of Search Engine Strategies, I could only imagine the kind of information and footage that would be expected.

Simply put, I did not want Siroker’s keynote to end.  Great information and amazing footage from the Obama campaign.

This SES Chicago recap will cover the keynote address by Dan Siroker.

My recaps will include some useful tidbits that I picked up during day 1 of SES Chicago.  Tweets were made from @marketwire as well as my personal handle @shinng using the hashtag #seschi and #rt2eat.  So what is the meaning of the latter hashtag?  Well, the creative marketing team @marketwire wanted to give back for the holiday season so we decided to take advantage of the Marketwire presence.  For every ReTweet of our tweets that include the hashtags #seschi #rt2eat, Marketwire will be donating $1.00 per RT for a max contribution of $500 to benefit the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

Opening Keynote with Dan Siroker, former Deputy New Media Director, Obama Presidential Transition

The title of Siroker’s presentation is “How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election”

Dan Siroker started the keynote with his background and how he got involved with the Obama Transition Team.  Siroker previously worked at Google as a product manager for Google Chrome.  What inspired him to jump ship was when Obama visited Google in 2007.  A couple weeks after the visit to Mountain View, CA, Siroker took a leave to come to Chicago to help Obama in any way.  After going back to Google for a couple months, Siroker came back to Chicago to lead the analytics team.  This position eventually led to working on the presidential transition.

Below is the Obama organization chart.  Dan was part of the analytics team under the New Media division.

Next up, the stats.  We all remember how Obama whooped McCain in virtually every single category right?

• Popular vote
  • Obama=53%
  • McCain=46%
• Electoral vote
  • Obama=365
  • McCain=173
• Facebook friends
  • Obama=2.4 million friends
  • McCain=0.6 million friends
• YouTube views
  • Obama=just under 100 million views
  • McCain=20 million views
• Unique website visitors
  • Obama=just under 150 million unique visitors
  • McCain=30 million unique visitors
  • Obama had 2x the number of unique website visitors than people voted for McCain
• Money raised – money is easy to measure so this metric was used.  Also, most of the money was raised online.
  • Obama=$656 million
  • McCain=$201 million
  • The money Obama raised offline ($156 MM offline) was almost equivalent to the money McCain raised altogether ($201 MM)

Lessons Learned

1. Define Success –>Define quantifiable success metrics
   • Defining success was getting Obama elected as president
   • (cost per click) –> website –> (sign up rate) –> email sign up ($ per recipient) –>raise money
   • Success can be broken down by CPC, sign up rate, dollar per recipient
   • Siroker noticed that they were doing a good job getting website visitors at a favorable cost, but a poor job of getting those visitors to sign up for email updates.  However, they were doing a good job of getting the email recipients to give money, so there was an opportunity to improve email sign ups.
2. Question Assumptions – this is where it got really interesting.  Siroker showed a multivariate splash landing page experiment where they tested the call to action button and the media to see which worked best.  They experimented with lots of attributes, buttons, content, and media on the page.
   • 
   • 
   • So which button and which media won?  Button winner=”learn more”.  Media winner=”family image”
   • They used Google Website Optimizer for the multivariate testing.  By using the winning combination, conversion went up from 8.2% to 11.6%.
   • 
   • 
3. Divide and Conquer – another multivariate test was done for the donation button.  Below is the chart for the test.  The actual results were scattered and none were 100% right.  So what was the point?  It all depends on where you came from and who you were.  It is all about the metrics.
   • 
4. Take Advantage of Circumstances
   • During a Clinton speech at the campaign headquarters in August 2008, Dan began updating their splash image to mention Clinton.
   • Another example was when Sarah Palin mocked community organizers.  The team sent an email to their list using the mocking as a way to raise money.  They asked for $100 donations to prove that community organizing is not something to be ashamed of; they raised over $10 million within 24 hours.
   • Below is an email sent within the organization to Siroker
   • 
5. Turn Your Customers into Evangelists – they did this everyday on blogs, forums, and videos.  The team focused on supporters, not the candidate.  This motivates others to get involved.
   • Siroker proceeded to show what he thought was the most effective video of the campaign.  I swear I heard some sniffles for those watching it for the first time.  The reason he showed this was not because it was so moving, but to show that users typically rally around a cause.  This motivates them to volunteer, donate, and vote for a specific campaign.
   • The idea of social media marketing as it relates to the Obama campaign was that users were connecting and rallying with each other, bringing other people to the cause, bringing in donations, volunteers, and getting them to vote for Obama.
   • Siroker compares social media marketing with affiliate marketing and proceeds to explain “social affiliate marketing”.  The model is to rally people to support a cause and give money based on that cause to a business.  It is a transparent relationship because the affiliate (or cause) gets money from the business and users interact with the cause.
   • 
   • 

Q&A

Q: How did you use analytics to integrate your marketing campaigns across channels?

A: They didn’t have time for it.  Siroker wishes they could have done better, but time was a factor.

Q: Did you do demographic segmentation?

A:  They never did experiments to segment.  To clarify, Siroker says that the challenge was to figure out what worked before they signed up, not after.  So in other words, they didn’t look at the information after the user donated.

Q: Obama had a lot of visitors.  Was the number of visitors directly proportional to the amount of fresh content provided?

A: No, Siroker does not think so.  He thinks that the difference was the persuasiveness of its content and that Obama’s policies attracted tech-savvy individuals.

Q: What was the most important factor in deciding what would appear on the campaign home page and landing pages?

A:  There wasn’t one.  That’s why defining goals is so important.  They asked themselves what were the things people cared about in a campaign.  Messaging was key.

This SES Chicago recap will cover the last two sessions of Day 2.  This recap includes “Igniting Viral Campaigns” and a sponsored session named “Social Media Strategy”.

My recaps will include some useful tidbits that I picked up during day 2 of SES Chicago.  Tweets were made from @marketwire as well as my personal handle @shinng using the hashtag #seschi and #rt2eat.  So what is the meaning of the latter hashtag?  Well, the creative marketing team @marketwire wanted to give back for the holiday season so we decided to take advantage of the Marketwire presence.  For every ReTweet of our tweets that include the hashtags #seschi #rt2eat, Marketwire will be donating $1.00 per RT for a max contribution of $500 to benefit the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

SES Chicago Session – Igniting Viral Campaigns

Moderator:  Tessa Wegert (Enlighten)
Speakers:  Greg Finn (10e20), Denise Chudy (Google/YouTube), Jennifer Evans Laycock (SiteLogic)

This session was about how to leverage web 2.0 technologies (such as YouTube) to give companies the opportunity to stand out.

• Identifying and maximizing viral content
  • Humor
  • Educational resources
  • Comprehensive lists – not your typical top 10 lists, but full blown lists /Nick Shin – An actual example of a “comprehensive list” was not given, but my example would be the AdAge 150 list.
  • Breaking information – exclusives, leaks, etc.
  • Infographics
• What to do
  • Ensure proper formatting of your content
  • Make sure the content is easy to consume
  • Be sure the content is very visual
  • Look for a social tone, i.e., be human
• Viral mediums – utilize popular destinations such as FunnyorDie, Break, Ebaum’s World, YouTube, Flickr
• Social news and networking
  • Largest source for igniting viral campaigns
  • Be as non corporate as possible
  • Corporate and brand promotion is not the only angle
  • Helping the community is better than helping yourself.  You want to make sure you are part of the community before participating.
  • Digg – not just for video games and gadgets
  • StumbleUpon – a possibility for all viral content; user proper/niche categories
  • Reddit – use subreddits for best relevancy
  • Facebook – don’t only send your users to your “wall”. Make new tabs, add new apps.
    • Example: Overstock.com, Best Buy, and Radio Shack’’s default facebook landing page is a holiday promotion, not their “wall”
    • Make sure you have approval on promotions
    • Make content easy to share
    • Spend money on facebook by sending traffic to your page using Facebook ads and Facebook events
  • Twitter
    • Make it easy to tweet your content
    • Allow for easy RTs
    • Promote during peak hours
  • Entice others to ignite your campaigns using the “original social media” through blogger outreach and forums
  • Fanning the viral fire
    • Stagger approaches for optimum visibility
    • Provide alternative ways to share on social networks.  A good one is to use buttons (tweetmeme, digg, Facebook share) because people are lazy.
    • Cross promote to maximize exposure
  • Leverage viral mentions to continue momentum
  • Repeat underperforming campaigns with fresh “coverage content” by pointing to other people’s coverage.
    • The “Google Chrome OS” example: initial coverage of the Google Chrome OS YouTube video was weak.  It only received 4 diggs.  However, after bloggers began covering the new OS, they began submitting their own links to digg with the embedded YouTube video.  That article ended up receiving over 400 diggs and caused the video to receive over 1 million views.
    • 

• When doing viral campaigns, know your goal.
• Viral goals include: building the brand, driving sales, driving traffic/links
• Rosen Velocity Scale (V1 to V10): V1=extreme brand/emotion and V10=extreme direct/SHAM WOW!
• 

• V1: extreme brand represents brand awareness and is not about the offer.  Example: Dove Evolution

• • Between V3 and V4: Medium brand awareness + offer example is the OfficeMax’ “Back to School for Pennies” campaign

• • V6: Brand awareness + emotion + sales= Innocent drinks’  The Big Knit campaign.  Buying a “knitted” Innocent drink smoothie donates money and the knitting sparks interest.
  • V8: Uniqueness + sales message = Blendtec’s Will it Blend campaign.  If you have never seen or heard of “Will it Blend”, please come out from under that rock.
  • V10: Pure purchase driven immediacy.  Buy now = Shoebuy.com. When finishing the checkout process, they give you an option to give a $10 coupon to friends via different methods including social media.
• Viral is as simple as enabling the share of your message.
• 

• Building the brand leads to slower sales.  The break even occurs later with a lower velocity.
• Building the sale leads to slow brand.  Raising the velocity brings profit much sooner.

Denise Chudy from YouTube was the last presenter and I’m particularly glad that she presented some nice stats along with the presentation.  The numbers certainly made it more interesting.

• Successful viral videos are: captivating, interesting, intriguing clever, exciting, creative, though provoking, compelling
• 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
• By the end of the panel, 1500 hours or 62.5 full days of video content will have been uploaded to YouTube
• Get good videos discovered
  • Making them findable – YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine with 3.6B searches/month; use SEO techniques for organic results
  • Use offline to seed
  • Leverage existing networks
  • Leverage recognizable people – original placements account for only 40% of total engagement on YouTube.   Example: Kobe jumping over Aston Martin.  Original video= 5MM vews, 8MM views including copies, and 14MM views including derivatives
  • Use advertising; market your video – homepage exposure generates a 4.7x lift in action
  • 

SES Chicago Sponsored Session – Social Media Strategy

Serengeti Communications Speakers:  Nathan Linnell, Nan Dawkins, Liana Evans

The Serengeti group provided some useful information.  Did I learn anything new?  No, but it was a great refresher.

Social Media Strategy

• Applying marketing tactics in the absence of strategy is like doing nothing at all.
• Start thinking about engagement, ways to make friends, and how to serve.  People create the content and the community.
• There are no “cookie cutter solutions” when jumping into social media.  Understand the why and how and what your end goal is.  Do your research first and understand where your audience is, who your audience is, and what your target audience is doing.
• 

• What you do is just as important as where you do it.
  1. Start by finding the conversations
  2. Understand the conversations
  3. Use your monitoring data to understand who you want to reach and engage

Social Media Measurement

• Impact can be observed internally via corporate website, company blogs, sponsored communities, external online via social media, and external offline.
• Sources of data: internal web analytics – what to measure
  • Direct traffic
  • Brand searches
  • Visits referred by key social media sites
  • Social media referred visits attributed to company social media efforts
  • Conversions (not necessarily a sale) generated from social media sites
  • Engagement metrics
  • Blogs and communities – subscribers (views/clicks), comments/posts, incoming links, ReTweets of posts (via Twitter), unique visitors, members

• Sources of data: external online – social sites
  • Facebook – fans/active fans, media consumption, total interactions (likes, comments, wall posts)
  • Twitter – followers (unique/quality followers), retweets, mentions, brand mentions
  • YouTube – channel (page views, subscribers, friends, comments), videos (views, ratings, comments, favorites, video responses)

• Sources of data: external online – monitoring tools
  • Aggravated view of buzz across the web – volume of mentions (brand, competitor, topic, share of voice), share by social media type, top sources/locations, sentiment, influencers

• Sources of data: external offline – research
  • Surveys and focus groups – brand awareness, purchase intent
  • Viral video campaign example
    • Target=caregivers, campaign site with coupon, goals=branding and sales
    • Measurement of video views, video mentions (buzz), video submissions, engagement (votes, comments), coupon redemption, buzz volume/brand, share of voice/brand
    • Sources of data include social media monitoring, web analytics, YouTube, and sales data
• Building a measurement framework – implement what you can measure
  • Financial impact = revenue generated, cost savings, cost avoidance
  • Non financial impact = brand awareness, purchase intent, willing to recommend
  • Define what constitutes success – branding goals? direct sales or lead generation? both?
  • Think through the buying process
  • Map metrics to goals – quality not quantity
  • Do I have the right tools?
  • 

Day 2 of SES Chicago proved to be a much slower day, but I think many of the attendees needed the “break”.  The biggest session by far was Tim Ash’s “Landing Page Optimization”.

This SES Chicago recap will cover my favorite session of Day 2, Tim Ash’s presentation on “Landing Page Optimization: The 7 Deadly Sins”.  My primary reason for attending this session was to listen to Tim Ash speak.  I was told that Ash was an engaging speaker and he did not disappoint.

My recaps will include some useful tidbits that I picked up during day 2 of SES Chicago.  Tweets were made from @marketwire as well as my personal handle @shinng using the hashtag #seschi and #rt2eat.  So what is the meaning of the latter hashtag?  Well, the creative marketing team @marketwire wanted to give back for the holiday season so we decided to take advantage of the Marketwire presence.  For every ReTweet of our tweets that include the hashtags #seschi #rt2eat, Marketwire will be donating $1.00 per RT for a max contribution of $500 to benefit the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

SES Chicago Session – Landing Page Optimization: The 7 Deadly Sins

Moderator:  Sage Lewis (SageRock)
Speakers:  Tim Ash (SiteTuners)

The effect of the miserable morning commute to downtown Chicago was quickly forgotten thanks to Tim Ash.  He immediately set the tone by asking which of the audience members had children.  A few dozen raised their hand.  Of those that had children, who thought their baby was ugly.  Of course, everyone immediately put their hands down.   Ash pointed out that everyone has seen an ugly baby.  So get to the point right?  Ash’s point: your baby is ugly.  Don’t be “ignorant and blind”.  As it relates to landing page optimization, if you ignore your landing page, you will make less money.

• For every $83 spent on drive to a website and acquisition, $1 is spent on landing page.
• CPA (cost per acquisition)=CPC (cost per click) / CR (conversion rate)
• “The camel” analogy
  • Often times, there is a struggle about which department should design the website.  The analogy used by Ash was “the camel” as in, “a horse designed by committee”.  When multiple departments end up having input into the design, the end result is not a good one.
  • So the question was posed, who should design your website?  Answer choices:  agency, boss, webmaster, marketing, IT
  • Correct answer:  Your visitors should design your website which means you need to look at your landing page analytics.
• Optimizing a landing page is improving conversion.
• Landing page testing is not optional.  Fix your money pages.
• Never let the BPU (business prevention unit=IT) make the decisions
• Eliminate the HIPPO (highest paid person’s opinion)

Top 7 mistakes to avoid in optimizing your landing page

1. Unclear call to action
   • The visitor should not be asking, “what am I supposed to do?”
   • The landing page should answer the question, “what do you expect me to do”
   • The obvious standard: if the call to action on a landing page is not obvious, then it is costing you a lot of money.  In other words, if it’s not obvious, it’s not happening.
   • Get rid of splash and flash landing pages to avoid distraction
2. Too many choices
3. Asking for too much information
   • Example: if I’m downloading a white paper, why do I need to input my name?  All that’s required should be an email address.  /Nick Shin – I have to disagree.  All landing pages should include a name and email address field at a minimum.  In the white paper example, you are capturing the user’s information because they become a lead, which means you will want to contact them in the future. Right?
4. Too much text
   • The “Charlie Brown-wahwahwah” analogy – too much text is like Charlie Brown saying, “wahwahwah”
   • Strike out all adjectives and all unsubstantiated claims
5. Not keeping your promises
   • One of the worst things you can do is deceive and/or confuse your visitors.  Make it straightforward.
   • Example: The Consumer Reports “bait-and-switch” – In one of Consumer Reports’ PPC ads for reviews, the ad’s call to action is to click the button to read reviews.  When you click on the ad, the user is directed to a landing page that you must “join now”.  The user is expecting to read the review, but instead the user is asked to join in order to read the review.  Not good.
6. Visual distractions
   • Keep the content clean and don’t do entry popups.
   • Leave the creativity at home when creating landing pages.
   • If you emphasize everything, nothing will be important.
   • Example: take a look at newyorkbarbells.com.
7. Lack of trust
   • Move trust symbols up.
   • Example (unfortunately I don’t remember the company): On one company’s website, instead of having the widely accepted method of putting a company logo in the top left hand corner, this one company placed their “trust” logo and centered their company logo.  The “trust” logo was one of those SSL/secure logos that is widely recognizable.

At the end, Tim provided a list of websites that will help you optimize your landing page for improved conversions.

• AttentionWizard.com by Tim Ash’s SiteTuners – attention heatmap
• Crazy Egg – build heatmaps and track clicks
• ClickTale - web analytics
• Google Website Optimizer
• UserTesting.com – usability testing
• userfly – usability testing
• Litmus – compatibility testing
• FeedbackArmy – usability testing
• Cross Browser – compatibility testing

This SES Chicago recap will cover Bryan Eisenberg’s “21 Secrets of Top Converting Websites”.  Also included are 5 steps to great conversion rates next week.

My recaps will include some useful tidbits that I picked up during day 1 of SES Chicago.  Tweets were made from @marketwire as well as my personal handle @shinng using the hashtag #seschi and #rt2eat.  So what is the meaning of the latter hashtag?  Well, the creative marketing team @marketwire wanted to give back for the holiday season so we decided to take advantage of the Marketwire presence.  For every ReTweet of our tweets that include the hashtags #seschi #rt2eat, Marketwire will be donating $1.00 per RT for a max contribution of $500 to benefit the Greater Chicago Food Depository. 

SES Chicago Session – 21 Secrets of Top Converting Websites

Moderator: Anne Kennedy (SES Advisory Board, Joblr.com, Beyond Ink)
Speakers:  Bryan Eisenberg (SES Advisory Board, NYT best selling author)

This was my favorite session from Day 1 of SES Chicago 2009 because it was jam packed with information.  This was probably the reason why I was so exhausted afterwards.

Bryan Eisenberg was an engaging speaker and an even better presenter of providing information with real life examples.  Before listing the tips provided during session “information overload”, below are some other notable quotes.

• Optimization is more than a single page, it’s the whole journey.
• IT = BPU (Business Prevention Unit) /Nick Shin – having heard this the first time, this one will stick.  Best quote of SES Chicago 2009.
  

The 21 secrets to top converting sites:

1. They communicate UVPs (unique value proposition) and UCPs (unique campaign proposition).
   • Examples of websites that do this well: Vitacost, Mailchimp, Gotomeeting
2. Makes persuasive and relevant offers
   • But make sure the offer doesn’t disappear at checkout.  The offer should appear throughout the entire buying process.
3. Reinforces offers
4. Maintains scent
   • Example: Victoria’s Secret – In their banner ads and subsequent landing pages, they maintain the same branding and idential images and colors
     
5. Makes strong first impressions
6. Appeals to multiple personas/segments
   • Example: Mint.com
   • Personas build predictive models – simple and robust
7. They don’t do slice and dice optimization.
   • 4 types of web visitors – spontaneous, humanistics, methodical, competitive
   • Test for impact not variations
     
8. They leverage social commerce – user generated content drives natural search
9. They use it for navigation.
   • Example – Golfsmith’s “sort by” function
   • By adding the “sort by” option, Golfsmith’s conversion went up by 160%
10. They use it for promotions – user generated content drives promotion
    
11. They use it for credibility.
12. They use it for feedback and research.
13. They use persuasion principles by using the following:
    • Scarcity
    • Authenticity
    • Consistency
    • Consensus
    • Liking
14. They even make forms interesting by putting images.
    • Average cart abandonment=72%
    • When a visitor is ready to check out after putting items in a cart and the website requires to create an account, be sure the coupon code is inserted appropriately to prevent visitor from leaving the page and eventually the website.
15. They provide a point of action assurance, i.e., response time matters.
    
    • Average lead loses 6 times the effectiveness every hour the lead is made to wait
16. They keep you in the process.
    • An example was shown of a popup where 2 buttons were present.   Make sure that the clickable buttons are not of equal weight.  You want to make an emphasis on the button that you want the visitor to click.
17. They consider email preview.
18. They budget for experience.
    • They focus on continuous improvement.
    • They align customers and business objectives.
    • Interesting fact:  At any given point, Amazon is conducting 200 tests.
19. They utilize a system for prioritizing.
20. They make data driven decisions.
    • To do web analytics and optimization correctly, you have to make a to-do list regularly.
    • Ask yourself: what marketing efforts or parts of your website have challenges?
21. They know how to execute rapidly.
    • Move past top 10 “to-do’s”
    • Focus on trends – what’s spiking up/down
    • Stop out-of-control keywords and save your budget
    • Capitalize on hot campaigns quickly to boost profits

5 steps to great conversation rates next week

1. Identify the problems, review analytics, check for high exit pages, check for high bounce rates for key landing pages
2. Create a to-do list of what you would like to improve
3. Document hypothesis for thinking on how to fix it
4. Prioritize your to-do list by resources and impact
5. Start testing

This SES Chicago recap will cover the Google sponsored lunch session along with two additional sessions that I attended from Day 1.  This recap includes “What’s New and Exciting with Google Analytics?”, “Online PR: Where to Next?”, and “What’s the Link Between Search and Social?”.

My recaps will include some useful tidbits that I picked up during day 1 of SES Chicago.  Tweets were made from @marketwire as well as my personal handle @shinng using the hashtag #seschi and #rt2eat.  So what is the meaning of the latter hashtag?  Well, the creative marketing team @marketwire wanted to give back for the holiday season so we decided to take advantage of the Marketwire presence.  For every ReTweet of our tweets that include the hashtags #seschi #rt2eat, Marketwire will be donating $1.00 per RT for a max contribution of $500 to benefit the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

SES Chicago Lunch Sponsored Session – What’s New and Exciting with Google Analytics

Speakers: Phil Mui (Google Analytics)

I was able to catch the major announcements made by Mui through all the chatter and utensils hitting plates.   I’m sure 75% of those at this session were too focused on the surprisingly delicious conference food.

The emphasis of this session was on segmentation.  “Context is the queen of analytics; segmentation is the king.”

So what is exactly was “new and exciting with Google Analytics”?

• Segmentable custom variables – segmenting your website traffic can now be accomplished using advanced segmentation.  Ahhh, the beauty of utilizing feedback to offer convenience.
• Ability to add notes to data and share with other account users – you can make these notes public or private and you can also favorite notes.
• New tracking code wizard to allow for easier, accurate, and customizable tracking
• Enhanced API including the support for advanced segments among others.  More details to be announced.

SES Chicago Session – Online PR: Where to Next?

Moderator: Sally Falkow (PRESSfeed)
Speakers:  Beth Harte (MarketingProfs), Duncan Alney (Firebelly Marketing), Marty Weintraub (aim Clear), Andy Beal (Trackur)

The Online PR session was a great refresher, but I wish I had attended another session during this time slot.

• What is public relations? – 2 way mutually beneficial relationship between company and public
  • Media relations
  • Advertising
  • Press agentry
  • Public affairs (government)
  • Public affairs (community)
  • Issues management
  • Lobbying
  • Investor relations
• Why should you care about PR? (key points)
  • The past
  • Listening works
  • Being found works
  • Communicating works
  • Partnering
  • Telling your story works
  • People talking works
• Social media tools will change.  People being social won’t change.
• Online video: used more than all major network stations
• Video is not democratic – the best content doesn’t always win.
• Video=power
  • Video can be found easily via blogs, text, tags, links, tweets
  • Good video pulls journalists
  • Video is shared
• Predictions
  • Video – ability to capture and upload from any device
  • Integration will matter most (video+search+social+PR)
  • Strategy and execution is hyper critical
  • Experience will be the differentiation
  • Tools – allows one to stay in the flow, remain relevant and access info

Andy Beal of Trackur went into press releases to end the session.  Lots of good tips.

• What to look for when analyzing your press release effectiveness
  • Where’s your press release landing
  • Which countries (unless, of course, you use a service like Marketwire and can pick and choose so you know exactly where your press release is going)?
  • Which search terms?
  • Compare press release headlines
• Find the experts to send your pitch
  • Identify the influencers
  • Check google rankings
  • Check blog links
  • Who gets quoted?
  • Compete.com data
• Advanced technology helps your monitoring
  • Industry trends
  • Competitors’ keywords
  • Track reach
  • Identify allies
  • Google alerts
• Take a closer look at your analytics
  • What keywords bring ROI?
  • Look for single source increases
  • Are there changes in the top entry pages?
• URL sharing
  • Make it easy to share links
  • Track clicks, shares, RTs (on Twitter)
  • Bit.ly (url shortener)
  • Build your own with awe.sm
• Don’t hold on too tight with your content / This was one of my favorite parts of Beal’s presentation because there are too many companies that are too close minded.
  • RSS
  • Videos on YouTube
  • Images on Flickr
  • Delicious link page
  • Presentations on slideshare

• The future – Andy Beal talked about his “want list” of press releases in the future
  • Dynamic press release – ability to test different headlines, ability to change keywords in links, automatically fix typos, automatically update content
  • Link tracking across platforms
  • Performance based press release writing/distribution as opposed to the flat fee – example: Beal stated that he would rather pay $1000 for getting ‘x’ coverage than pay $200 for press release distribution and hope to get that ‘x’ coverage

SES Chicago Session – What’s the Link Between Search and Social?

Moderator: Aaron Goldman (Connectual)
Speakers:  Marshall Clark (Organic, Inc.), Tobias Peggs (OneRiot), Brian Boland (Facebook), Bryan Simkins (FedEx)

Unfortunately by the last session, I was too exhausted to listen attentively.  However, I managed to jot down a handful of notes and capture a few screenshots.  The content and images were provided by Tobias Peggs (OneRiot)

• The core of Facebook is identity, connections, and sharing
• Facebook becomes powerful because of the trusted source of information
• In regards to Google’s clickstream, Facebook is #1 for clicks in both upstream and downstream click analysis
• Social sharing replaces SEO in the realtime web
  • Optimize your pages for indexing –> Create compelling content
  • Solicit inbound links to your content –> Make it easy for people to share your content
  • Get to the top of the search results page –> Get to the to of the search results page
• SEM needs to work in realtime on the realtime web
  • Buy positions that deliver predictable traffic flow –> Hot topics are bursty, interest moves on quickly
  • Show your company next to brand-sensitive content –> Buzzy content is frequently not brand-sensitive
  • Know with certainty where content is being viewed –> Users engage with various modes of consumption
• 

Day 1 of SES Chicago 2009 was all about search, analytics, and conversion.  I posted a recap of the Jeff Jarvis keynote.

This SES Chicago recap will cover 2 of the 5 sessions from Day 1.  The 1st two sessions include “Search Analytics” and “Search: Where to Next?”.

My recaps will include some useful tidbits that I picked up during day 1 of SES Chicago.  Tweets were made from @marketwire as well as my personal handle @shinng using the hashtag #seschi and #rt2eat.  So what is the meaning of the latter hashtag?  Well, the creative marketing team @marketwire wanted to give back for the holiday season so we decided to take advantage of the Marketwire presence.  For every ReTweet of our tweets that include the hashtags #seschi #rt2eat, Marketwire will be donating $1.00 per RT for a max contribution of $500 to benefit the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

SES Chicago Session – Search Analytics

Moderator: Richard Zwicky (Enquisite)
Speakers: Jim Sterne (Web Analytics Association), Matthew Bailey (SES Advisory Board, Site Logic Marketing), Dennis Mortensen (Yahoo!)

The panel started off the session with a simple question, but it set the tone for the rest of the session.

Question: When it comes to analytics, what should you use?
Answer: Behavior

• The goal is to optimize process.  Focus on single process and optimize it.
• 4 Big Optimization Metrics – presentation, content, and images provided by Jim Sterne (Chairman, Web Analytics Association)
  • Behavior – what do they do
    
  • Attitude – how do they feel
    
  • Competition – how do you compare
    
  • Outcomes – what are the results
  • 
    
• How to prioritize analytics
  • Revenue is at risk
  • Boss asks for it
  • Does not overwhelm
  • Requires an analyst rather than being self serving
• Not all visitors are the same.  The key is segmentation – what did the user want and expect.
• 7 segments for search success – Presentation, images, and content provided by Matt Bailey (SES Advisory Board, SiteLogic)
  
  • Keyword buckets – “segments”; Sub-buckets – brand name, other terms
  • Segment acquisition
  • 
    
  • Segment bounce rates
  • Segment behavior
  • 
    
  • Segment content into persuasive pages, entry pages, time on page, and search
  • 
    
  • Segment entry points
  • Action – do something
• Keep analysis in context.  User behavior is different depending on the page they came from.

SES Chicago Session – Search: Where to Next?

Moderator: Simon Heseltine (AOL)
Speakers:  Eli Goodman (comScore), Justin Merickel (Efficient Frontier), Ronald Burr (WebVisible), Douglas McMillen (Microsoft Advertising)

• The session started off talking about the changing SERPs (search engine results page).  The point?  Advertisers need to think about the new multimedia SERP that displays products because information is adding more depth into the search page.
• The “bottled water” example
  • Image results dominate the search results
  • Concern raised regarding the user experience put out by Google, but it also shows how important it is to leverage the multimedia search results page
• Look at local business, product extensions, and comparisons.  The benefits:
  • Creating long tail automation
  • Enabling creatives to be more specific
  • Automates significant manual efforts
  • End result: greater coverage in search results
• The Zappos “Asics running shoes” example specifically regarding above-the-fold in Google
  
  • #2 in paid search results and 6 individual images from Zappos above the fold in Google
    
  • The Google user experience is questioned because who wants to see image results from the same company repeatedly?  On the flip side, it goes to show that leveraging this changing SERP is important.

• Creative management is:
  • Developing feeds
  • Mapping feeds to creative template
  • Generating ad variations from creative template
  • Assigning/matching to ad groups based on feed data
  • Pushing to search engines via API
• Is display now search like?  There are 2 big trends driving display towards search like performance
  1. Rapid expansion of auction based access to inventory
  2. Access to targeting data decoupled from media
• When exposed to both PPC and display ads, consumers were found to be 2 times more likely to complete a transaction.
• To get search like content, you have to retarget and use 3rd party data to do it effectively.
  

The speaker I was most looking forward to hear speak, Eli Goodman from comScore, ended the session.  His 3 talking points: Branding, In-Text Search, and Social Search

• Branding - you always want to be on the short list for the consumer
  
  • Stat: $118 billion for branding vs $68 billion for direct response
  • As organic searches become richer, sponsored results must keep up.  Expect innovations.
  • Don’t just think about the obvious terms, but related concepts and terms, i.e. “assistive terms”
    
  • Think of search as the traffic driver to the brand mechanism.
  • The GE “ecoimagination” and “clean energy” example – none of their pages rank highly for the latter term in the SERPs.  Very few people actually search for the term “ecoimagination”.
    
  • The point: Focus on what people are searching and related terms.  GE can focus on “clean energy”, “energy saving”, “energy saving tips”
• In-Text Search – search results that show up when you mouse-over content.  When hovering over a link, a pop over appears with a relevant link.
  
  • This mixes content consumption with search possibilities.
  • Value of in-text offers a way to be informative, useful,  and entertaining.
  • The most useful content increases user engagement.
  • As functionality increases, so does CTR (click through rate).
  • The Hellman’s Recipes example – when hovering over related key terms, a pop over appears with recipe ideas and ingredient lists.
• Social Search
  • Alternative search properties such as Facebook show strong year-over-year search growth from September 2008.  The exception is MySpace.
  • Social search is the next frontier, thus social search results need to be more relevant.
  • Food for thought: think about how you trust your friends for one thing, while you trust other friends for different things.
  • Optimize content for social networks.  This presents a tremendous opportunity for marketers.
• The guy from Microsoft Advertising specifically Bing, was too sales-y so I went in-and-out mentally.  The few tidbits that I did jot down include:
  
  • Bing’s upcoming mobile search will be similar to the online search user experience.
  • Stat: Mobile broadband users will reach 30% penetration in 2010
  • Now is the time to start testing and learning because mobile inventory is much cheaper for broad terms and mobile search is seeing 2-3 times higher click-through-rates.
    
  • Stat: In 2008, 5.2 million mobile search users, by 2013, the number will jump to 56.2 million
    

If you haven’t had the opportunity to attend Search Engine Strategies, consider it.  While some sessions went very quickly with tons of information being thrown at you, other sessions presented a great refresher.  The only negative is having to choose which session to attend out of the 5 being offered simultaneously.  A big shout out to all SES attendees who were tweeting live from the event.

This SES Chicago recap will cover the keynote address by Jeff Jarvis.

My recaps will include some useful tidbits that I picked up during day 1 of SES Chicago.  Tweets were made from @marketwire as well as my personal handle @shinng using the hashtag #seschi and #rt2eat.  So what is the meaning of the latter hashtag?  Well, the creative marketing team @marketwire wanted to give back for the holiday season so we decided to take advantage of the Marketwire presence.  For every ReTweet of our tweets that include the hashtags #seschi #rt2eat, Marketwire will be donating $1.00 per RT for a max contribution of $500 to benefit the Greater Chicago Food Depository.  So far the UNOFFICIAL count is 169 at the end of Day 1.  Mind you, that number includes a lot of tweets from @shinng, @marketwire, and Garry Przyklenk, who was also there representing Marketwire.  I’ll report the official count over at the Marketwire Blog.

Opening Keynote with Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?

As with any conference the keynote address is usually the highlight and I certainly didn’t expect any less from a leading event like SES.

• Although I did jot down some notes, for some reason, the couple times that Jarvis used the word “shit” were the quotes that were the most memorable for me.  On a site note, I certainly was in a shitty mood when I arrived at the keynote 20 minutes late because the front desk couldn’t figure out my press pass registration.  Anyway, the two “shitty” nuggets that I remember:
  • It’s not about the homepages.  Homepages are bullshit. /Nick Shin – Yes, too much emphasis is placed on the homepage and yes, as Jarvis stated, most organic searches do not land on the homepage.  However, the homepage is the gateway to the rest of your site.  I don’t know about any of you, but when I land on a website I’ve never visited before, I read the landing page/post, and then click on “home” to see what the website is all about.  If the homepage is done half-assed and doesn’t tell me the objective of the site or hard to navigate, I’m out for good.  Aesthetically speaking and from an SEO perspective, homepages should set the stage for the rest of the site.  Consistency is key.  Start with the homepage and make sure it tells the reader your objective and is easy to navigate. Then you focus on optimizing key landing pages/posts.  Homepage is the gateway to the rest of your site.
  • Google gives you value for free; they don’t owe you shit. /Nick Shin - I love this quote.
• Distributed vs Centralized
  • “If the news is important, it will find me.” – College student to researcher, NY Times, 2008
  • The audience becomes the distributor
  • The embeddable newspaper
  • The API as distribution
• New Architecture
  • Link changes everything
• New Publicness
  • If you’re not searchable, you won’t be found
  • Everybody needs a little SEO
  • Life is public, so is business
  • Your customers are your ad agency
• New Economy
  • Small is the new big
  • Manage abundance (not scarcity)
  • Join the open source, gift economy
  • Mass market is not dead – long live the mass of niches
  • Google commodifies everything
• New Ethic
  • Make mistakes well
  • Life is a beta
  • Be honest
  • Be transparent
  • Collaborate
  • Don’t be evil
• Great keynote recaps can be found at PPC-Advice and Bruce Clay.

More Day 1 recaps from SES Chicago 2009 coming soon including the 5 sessions I attended:

1. Search Analytics
2. Search: Where to Next?
3. Online PR: Where to Next?
4. 20 Secrets of Top Converting Websites – easily the best session of the day.  Tremendous speaker, even better information.
5. What’s the Link Between Search and Social – unfortunately, I started to fade at this session, but from what I did hear, it was interesting.  It wasn’t the speakers that caused me to start crashing, it was me and the exhausting day.

#pr20chat is a weekly Twitter chat held every Wednesday from 8-9 EST about social media and PR engagement.  We discuss how social media is changing how PR professionals engage with the entire public (not just the media and bloggers).  #pr20chat is moderated by Beth Harte (@BethHarte) of Marketing Profs and weekly recaps will be sporadically provided by yours truly (@shinng).

Recent topics with transcript is below.  A recap is also included with key takeaways.

To participate in this weekly chat, I highly recommend you use Tweet Chat.  The hashtag (#pr20chat) is automatically inserted into every tweet.  I regularly use TweetDeck and HootSuite in daily conversations, but I have found Twitter clients to be slow and lagging when it comes to chat.

-November 18 – 3 questions – Full transcript here

To start off the chat, Beth presented a challenging question that spurred some debate.  Question 1: Are your external marketing efforts typically siloed or integrated and how does that affect how people interpret your efforts.  There was some initial confusion on what external marketing was.  To put it simply, external marketing=customer/public through various means of marketing such as online marketing including your website, direct mail, print advertising, PR etc.  Internal marketing=your own staff and colleagues usually through an intranet site.  Going back to the question on hand, many of the contributors felt that integration is key, but some agreed that the silo effect does happen.  The consensus: Integration is best practice.  Here are a few takeaways:

• I’m seeing silos and stressing integration but spending an inordinate amount of time on value – @Marc_Meyer
• Feel strongly that biz goals; strategy must be guide for comms.  And integration is best practice – @JohnMallen
• Typically with a siloed approach external mktg isn’t cohesive which leaves receivers to piece together messages, branding, etc – @BethHarte
• Extremely important for consistent msg across all IMC channels.  You do not want customers to get mixed signals – @shinng

The next question dug a little deeper into the impact of engagement for siloed departments.  Question 2:  How does PR 2.0 fit in with integrated marcom?  What if PR is siloed from marketing?  How does that affect engagement? The overwhelming consensus to this question was that PR 2.0 is vital to integrated marketing efforts.  One word that summed up this question was “glue”.

• Done correctly, PR 2.0 can be the glue that holds integrated marketing efforts together. – @smrus
• Why make SM a separate discipline from PR, IR, ad, etc?  In the buying cycle, it’s needed throughout. – @mktdouchebag
• Silos, tho comfortable= counterintuitive 2 what trying 2 accomplish. IMO, they are also inefficient and less successful than IMC – @smrus
• SM has helped remind PR that it was never supposed to be Press Relations.  The press was a convenient channel. – @mktdouchebag
• (My personal favorite in regards to Geico’s marketing campaigns) @shinng I have a bet going w/friends that it’s a multiple agency issue. Gecko! No! Caveman! No! Voice Overs! No! 50’s Flashback! – @BethHarte

The last question of the night touched upon PR and marketing.  Question 3: How many folks work only in PR?  How do you handle IMC from that position? Say vs. being in Marketing.  What’s different/same?

• IMC reminds us that all have 1 goal.  Our customer. - @TobyDiva
• PR is not only about press & SM is a great way 4 PR/Mkting/CRM 2 integrate efforts and “sail” in one direction. – @OlenaKoval
• Social Media brings to life that we all matter: customers, company, brand & even the media.  It’s a messy world & IMC can help w/it. – @TobyDiva

Thanks to everyone who participated in pr20chat and provided such thought-provoking contributions.  Thanks to @BethHarte for moderating.  Be sure to join in on this weekly Twitter chat every Wednesday from 8-9 EST.  #pr20chat.

These are the notable quotes from 140 Twitter Conference Day 2.

From Tony Robbins

• “If you agree, say I” X 75 times
• “Leaders see it better than it is.  Bring something that’s inspiring.”
• “The state and intent of what you deliver is more important that what you actually say.”
• “If you succeed and you’re still unhappy, you’re screwed!”
• “There are no rules on Twitter. Just add more value, that’s it.”
• Stats show that the #1 fear is becoming a quadrapelegic.  The #1 dream is winning the lotto, but who is happiest at the end of the day?  Neither, adding value is key.
• “Twitter is a tool, but it’s really a community”
• “The quality of your life is the quality of your relationships.  Twitter is all about relationships.”
• “Real relationships come from giving, not taking.  Give what people need and you’ll succeed.”
• “Fall in love with your customer, not your product.  Give them what they need, not what they want.”
• 3 Ways to grow your business: 1. Increase clients, 2. Increase average transaction value, 3. Increase frequency of purchase
• “I look at Twitter as an intelligent browser.”
• “The secret to life – you got a problem?  Find somebody else with a problem and help them.”
• “3 decisions to make: what should I focus on, what does it mean, what should I do”
• 6 human needs are certainty, variety, significance, love, growth, and contribution
• “Happy people don’t write emails or tweets to try to tear other people down.”
• Tony Robbins quoting Nelson Mandela, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”

From Social CRM Panel featuring Brian Solis

• In regards to whether the appropriate term is “CRM 2.0” or “Social CRM”, Brian Solis states that Social CRM is the appropriate term because, “we are injecting that conversation, relationship, and collaboration into the process.  It’s the human element that we’re bringing into it.”
• “CRM was focusing on customers, what social media is doing is that it’s making customers influential.” – Brian Solis
• “I define influence as the ability to inspire action and measure it.” – Brian Solis
• “It’s not about the tweets you see, but about the tweets you don’t see. “ – Brian Solis
• In regards to what Whole Foods Market does when training the individual stores going on Twitter, “We put a lot of trust in our stores.  The people who represent us on Twitter, represent us in the stores every day.  If we’re trusting them to put their faces in front of our customers in real life, why not online.”

From Followership Panel

• “On the topic of followers, it’s not about how many; it’s about who they are.  “
• “My voice is now my most important asset and if someone else is tweeting for me, it just ruins it.”
• In regards to gaining followers, “farming, not hunting”

From The Future of Twitter Panel featuring Peter Shankman

• The panel of 4 was asked, “If Twitter was a stock; buy, sell, or hold?”  Everyone on the panel said “buy” except Peter Shankman.  Shankman said he would hold, but a brilliant rebuttal for why one of the panelists would buy is because, “If you took all of the social networking messaging services combined (facebook, myspace, etc), it’s less than 1/10 of 1% of the global SMS messaging industry.  So there is a huge industry to disintermediate.”
• On a discussion on why Google hasn’t brought out Twitter yet, Peter Shankman replies, “I wonder what they’re (Google) waiting for, there’s something there, there’s something they’re waiting for” – Peter Shankman
• “There are big rewards for very quick moments in time.”
• “You have to be very aware of making things private versus public.  You have to maintain the sense of who you are.”
• Laura Fitton made a comment about how phone companies are charging for every text message and needs to realize the power of SMS to which she says that they “need to get their heads out of their SMS”

Check out the Notable Quotes from the 140 Twitter Conference Day 1.

Check out the Summary of Day 1 and the Summary of Day 2.