Yesterday on Search Engine Land, I scored the search presence of select Superbowl advertisers. Most had some presence, but not necessarily for what people were searching for, and in many cases, the search results display was abysmal.
Two big problems I saw were:
Below are some examples of what things looked like yesterday. This week, I’ll dive more into the details of some particular ads.
Microsites
Microsites caused several problems, notably confusion in the results (which site is right?) and lack of visibility for the query sparked by the ad.
Hyundai
In my Search Engine Land article, I listed all of the various sites I found for Hyundai. Based on Google Hot Trends data, people seemed particularly interested in the Hyundai Genesis Coupe. The domain Hyundai flashed for the coupe was edityourown.com. This caused a flurry of searches for [edit you own].
However, since edityourown.com redirects to hyundaigenesis.com/coupe, the domain is nowhere to be found for those searchers.
The words “edit your own” are on the hyundaigenesis.com site in Flash:
The page only seems to show up if you do a site restrict search for the query.
Sobe
Hyundai wasn’t the only brand having trouble with redirecting microsites. Sobe advertised their Lifeworks drink with the domain sobelieve.com. But again, when you search for that exact term? The site is nowhere to be found.
That’s because (you guessed it), sobelieve.com redirects to sobeworld.com. And searchers are left confused.
Results display
It’s also good practice to check not only how your brand ranks in search, but what that result looks like. And you definitely should give things a quick look before launching a huge awareness campaign like a Superbowl ad. Let’s take a look.
Sprint
Spring had some trouble, at least partially caused by Flash. Flash issues seemed to be recurring theme with display issues this year. In this case, the snippet is missing entirely.
And here, the text that compels searchers to click is from an Atlas tracking code.
Verizon
But Sprint wasn’t the only wireless provider with issues. Verizon didn’t provide a super compelling result either:
Miller Highlife
Miller has snippet issues, title issues, and multiple site confusion, but it does have great universal results with its YouTube videos! (If only Miller had uploaded themselves, they could have branded them with a URL in the descriptions and at the end of the videos.)
Monster.com
Monster.com is advertising “the best job in the NFL”, and they’ve got a great paid search result. Unfortunately, while they also have the number one organic spot, it’s a little, ahem, loud.
It’s not enough to rank well. Does the well-ranked result really compel searchers to click?
I noticed on Techmeme today that a chiropractor has sued an ex-patient for posting a negative review of his practice on Yelp. Much of the commentary has been around whether it’s risky for people online to post things that are negative. You might get sued if you’re not careful. Will this case set a precedent for amateur reviewers everywhere?
It’s a good concern, and certainly as we live our lives more online, we (and the law) will have to sort these things out. But I think the real story is this, buried in cnet’s rundown of events:
Biegel [the chiropractor who is suing], who was a “sponsored” advertiser on Yelp and encouraged customers to write reviews on the site, received about as many referrals per month from Yelp while the review was up as before, but fewer after the lawsuit was filed, Blacksburg said, citing Yelp documents.
So, this is a business that thought it understood how to engage with customers on the web, but hasn’t yet learned the core rule: you can’t control the message; you can only control your participation. The most visible company to have learned this lesson may have been Dell, when it issued a takedown request to Consumerist, only to later realize the takedown notice was causing them much more negative backlash than what they were trying to get taken down and later apologize on their blog.
As a brand, you can choose to participate in social media or not. But you can’t make the decision based on whether it’s important that you control what’s said about your brand. You can’t control it in either case. It’s quite likely that at some point someone won’t like you and will say so. You can either let it go or you can proactively address the situation, either by apologizing in response to the negative review that the person had a bad experience, or by explaining the circumstances (hopefully in a non-defensive way). (If you want to be proactive, you have lots of options for finding out what people are saying about you online.)
Lashing out and filing lawsuits in response to negative reviews is unlikely to help your business, even if you’re entirely in the right.
You don’t have to go any further than Tripadvisor to find examples of what works and what doesn’t. Being apologetic and intent on fixing issues might make potential customers feel as though you care and are appreciative for the feedback.
Being defensive just makes you sound like a jerk.
As I was logging into Facebook to check out the redesign, I noticed this little checkbox to “set Facebook as your home page”.
I don’t recall seeing that before. I am impressed that it’s not selected by default.
Once they get all those default home pages, they just need to expand their partnership with Microsoft to offer Live Search as part of the Facebook home page experience. Does Microsoft need Yahoo’s users if they can grab Facebook’s instead? How many people do you think will make the default home page switch?
Email marketers know that people tend not to open marketing mail that gets sent on the weekend. We spend Saturdays and Sundays maximizing our time in the sun and the breeze by watching TV and bad movies on cable, erm, I mean rollerblading and picnicking in the park. People also don’t open mail on Monday because they are trying to catch up from that weekend of TNT marathons and they don’t open anything on Fridays because they are too busy trying to decide whether the coming weekend should feature disaster movies or quality films starring California’s governor.
That leaves Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for any serious email marketing effort. Some say Tuesday early afternoon is the best time for optimal open rates. People are ready to tackle the drudgery that is the inbox, and your mail is the first thing they see. Others say Wednesday, as perhaps people have conquered the worst of it and feel they deserve a reward such as idle email shopping. Choose either day, but make sure you send early afternoon.
Finally, testing and research have given us definitive answers for something and we never have to worry about it again. We now know not only the ideal days but the ideal time. Hooray!
Except I’ve found a potentially fatal flaw in this plan.
And that is that everyone is now sending marketing mail on Tuesday and Wednesday, early afternoon.
I don’t get much email marketing because I unsubscribe to just about everything as soon as the first piece of mail hits my inbox. Someone who declares email bankruptcy must become ruthless with incoming mail.
And yet there I was last Wednesday at around 1pm, and on came the mail. REI wanted me to know about their May events calendar. Alaska Airlines wanted to make sure I knew I could buy people flowers and earn miles at the same time. Microsoft Office Live Small Business thought I might want to know how to get my business online for free! Choice Hotels has my room ready! The mail just kept coming.
And I realized, all that research was going to have to start over with the addition of a new variable. Not only do marketers have to avoid sending mail when people are off for the weekend, they have to avoid sending mail at the same moment everyone else is sending mail. And so Thursday at 10am will become the new Tuesday at 1pm. At least until everyone adjusts their email schedule. And then it all will start over again.
Of course, rather than look at averages for “the” customer, you could look at the particulars of your customer. I was thinking about this last Wednesday at 1pm when my mail started filling up, but apparently I’m not the only one.
Last night on the plane, I was reading Fast Company and happened upon this article about how Barneys is personalizing mail based on individual behavior on the web site. Targeting mail seems like a much better approach than the old fashioned blast, although I’m not sure about their assertion this rosy new relationship with the customer means that people embrace getting up to five emails a week. They do say they’ve had a ten-fold rise in response rates, which totally makes sense. If you send a promo for hip new purses to your entire email list, you’re percentage of conversion is going to be lower than if you send the purse promo to teenage girls and the power tie promo to older men.
Although Barneys is getting better at segmentation, they seem to be hesitant to go the next step: stop sending mail to people who don’t respond. I have never shopped online at Barneys and haven’t been in a store in at least eight months. But that doesn’t stop them from sending me mail day in and day out. Mail, by the way, that I never open. (I finally opened one last week solely to click the unsubscribe button.) The incessant mail (10 messages during a 12 day period last month) actually made me less likely to shop at Barneys because I was so irritated that they continued to clog up my inbox.
Ryan Warren of Exact Target brought this up today at the eMetrics Industry Insights Day. He said that sometimes the best thing you can do is stop sending mail to people who don’t open it. Spend you energy on those who like getting your mail and take action on it.
His data supported Barneys’ direction. He said that only 11% of companies send targeted mail and only 7% leverage click stream data, but doing so can raise conversion rates from 1.1% to 3.9% (and can raise click through rates from 9.5% to 14%).
He talked about sending mail not on Tuesday afternoon at 1pm but based on when the customer was interacting with the site. For instance, if you have a travel site and someone puts a trip on hold, send them an email to remind them the hold is about to expire. Or if they were checking out a vacation package, let them know when the price drops. Or better yet, if you know they’re in Seattle and they were browsing trips to Mexico, email them when you see that the Seattle weather forecast calls for rain. (Although now that I think about it, you might need to tweak that last one, or you may end up with the Barneys mail sent every day dilemma.)
On Tuesday, I gave a webinar on how businesses can use social networking to learn about their customers, deepen their relationships with customers, and provide more effective and responsive customer service.
You can view the archived version of the webinar for free. When you click that link, it looks like it’s for registration of the event that already happened, but if you step through the registration process, it’ll bring you to the archived video.
In the webinar, I talked about how your customers are likely already online talking about your brand and your industry. The web is full of all kinds of community-driven sites where you can listen to what your customers are saying and can get involved. I talked a bit about setting up a social media program in your company, and some things to consider as you get started, as well as getting engaged in the conversation, improving customer relationships, and benefiting from the feedback.
Monitoring the conversation
In the comments to the previous post, someone asked what tools I recommend for tracking conversations about you online. That really depends on your situation. If you have a large brand and time is more valuable than money, you might consider hiring an agency to track and aggregate the conversations for you. A service such as TruCast compiles conversations, scores them, and, and provides workflow management for responses.
You can set up various searches and alerts or use a product like Andy Beal’s new Trackur to aggregate those searches for you.
Aaron Wall recently wrote an article for Search Engine Land about reputation monitoring tools that provides more details about setting up alerts.
Below are some ideas for a free, low-tech way to get started if you want to try setting things up yourself. You can set up all kinds of searches about your brand, your competitors, your industry — just about anything you want to track. Here are some places you might get started.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts tracks web search, Google Groups, Google News, Google Video, and Google Blogsearch.
Unfortunately, Google Alerts can only be sent to your email, and aren’t available via RSS. If you have the alerts sent to a Gmail address and you assign those emails a label using filtering, you should be able to then subscribe to the RSS feed of that label using an RSS aggregator that supports authenticated RSS (using the feed format https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/labelname/), but I haven’t been able to get that to work.
You can also set up separate searches for each of these and with some of them, for instance, Google Blogsearch, you can set the search up as an RSS feed. For Google Blogsearch, just do the search, then click the Subscribe link you want on the left.
Google web search has some interesting advanced options. For instance, to get web search results for a topic that have appeared within the last 24 hours, you can choose Advanced Search from the Google home page, then expand the date options. Set up the parameters you want, then click the Advanced Search button.
Twitter
I normally suggest people track Twitter conversations with Terraminds, but it’s currently down and I’m not sure when it will be back up. You can set up tracking directly in Twitter, but Terraminds is nice because you can subscribe to the RSS feed of the searches and you don’t need a Twitter account. To track a search term on Twitter, simply sign up for Twitter, then send the message “track
Flickr and YouTube
As I mentioned in the webinar, there are photo pools for just about everything. When I spoke at SEMPdx in January, one of the attendees had a winery client and we talked about how she could find wine-related photo pools and post pictures of the vineyards, wine barrels, and even particularly interesting labels.
YouTube is definitely worth checking out, as 48% of internet users have been to a video sharing site in the last year. People discuss everything online, even on video sharing sites. In just a quick browse, I found discussions on hard drive recovery, home theater systems, and mascara.
Discussion Groups and Forums
You can get alerts for Google Groups as part of Google Alerts, but you may want to search Google Groups separately to find out what groups exist and what discussion has already happened. There are also lots of other similar groups out there that you may want to search, such as Yahoo! Groups and MSN Groups.
You can, of course, do some simple searches for forums that make be talking about you as well, such as with these examples:
honda discussion forum
server monitoring discussion forum
microsoft word message board
Don’t overlook places like Yahoo! Answers as well.
Vertical and Niche Sites
You can do searches for these sites, but you can also find prominent bloggers who are talking about your topic, and check their “about me” page to see what sites they have profiles on.
As I mentioned in the webinar, just about every topical site now has a social network element to it. Avvo, a legal search engine, and Zillow, a real estate search engine, are two examples of vertical sites with lots of discussion and opportunities.
Similarly, social media sites (a la Digg, but more specialized) exist for just about every topic.
Bloggers
Again, you can do a web search or blog search to find bloggers, but you can also check specific blog indexing sites, such as Technorati or Icerocket. Many of the RSS readers, like Bloglines, have search features as well (Bloglines even lets you subscribe to the search). Once you find bloggers who are talking about your topic, check their profiles for other sites they visit, and see who’s on their blogroll. By going from blogroll to blogroll and compiling a list of bloggers and places they frequent, you will likely end up with a pretty good place to start.
Social Bookmarking
Don’t forget social bookmarking sites. Not only can you find out what is popular for your topical area, but discussions happen on these sites as well.
“home theater” search on Delicious
Computer technology tags on Faves
Review Sites
With all the talk of user-generated content, just about every site now has reviews. This is another great place to check out the discussion. Certainly there are review-specific sites such as epinions and shopping sites like Amazon, but just about every local business directory site now has reviews as well, from Yelp to Google Local.
Social Networking Sites
Sites like Facebook and MySpace can be difficult to search. Certainly try searching them directly, but you might also do a site: search on a major search engine, like this one that searches Facebook for discussions about gardening.
Clearly, people are talking everywhere. Companies worry about negative discussion, but reality is that the discussion – good or bad — will happen whether you’re involved or not. The first step is to understand who your customers are, where they are, and to listen. Social networking isn’t a fad. It’s just evolution of what we’ve always done — talk to each other.
At 10am pacific (about 45 minutes from now!), I’ll be giving a webinar on how companies can start having conversations with their customers online to learn more about them, create stronger relationships, and improve both their product offerings and customer loyalty.
I’m pretty sure that link will also work once the webinar is archived so you can view it later. You probably won’t still be able to ask questions though. Although you can ask them in comments here for a slightly less-than-real time response. 
When monitoring what people are saying about you and your brand online, you have two main choices. You can use Google Alerts as well as search a variety of social media and social networking sites manually, or you can pay a reputation management firm to do expensive monitoring for you.
Now you have a third choice. Andy Beal, who specializes in online reputation management, has launched a site called Trackur that enables you to set up monitoring across a variety of sites on a set of keywords at a much lower price than reputation management firms generally charge.
A recent Pew Internet & American Life Project study looked at how Americans use libraries and how libraries can better serve the one-third of the US population with low Internet access. The study surveyed 2,796 Americans and focused on how people use the Internet, libraries, and government resources when they need to solve problems. Those with high-speed access were more likely to turn to the Internet for answers and were generally more satisfied with their ability to get answers and solve problems. The majority of people said that they were very satisfied with results they received from government agencies (65%), libraries (64%), and the Internet (63%). Overall, the study is positive news for public libraries. And there’s great opportunity for librarians to become more useful and relevant in the lives of those who need it the most.
I have been crazy busy with lots of things to write about but no time to write them.
In the meantime, check out this LA Times story on using the internet to broadcast details of our personal lives that we previously reserved for friends and family (specifically, using Twitter to document the Yahoo! layoff). Obviously, this topic hits close to home for me. I’ve been talking to people online for more than 10 years, I’ve blogged about my career changes, and I dug into the question of online identity at Gnomedex last year. I talked with the reporter about how we lose privacy but gain a sense of connecting with the world around us when we post online.
On a completely different topic related to the world continuing to move online, my latest article for Information Today magazine is up and focuses on the recent PEW Internet study that found that 77% of Americans are online and most turn to the internet for answers.
If you’re more into talking and listening than reading, head over to Search Marketing Expo West next week in Santa Clara! I’m moderating seven sessions: four on blended/ universal search, and three “wonder twins” sessions: blogging, social media marketing, and user-generated content. (Speaking of universal search, did you see the SEOmoz whiteboard Friday I did about it not too long ago?)
And if you’re more into listening and not traveling beyond your couch and laptop, check out the webinar I’m doing March 11th on how companies can successfully engage with customers using social networking.
Hope to see you all next week!
