In consequence, Google presents a list of possible website link titles and adds a snippet of information on each. Google describes the snippet process as follows:

Google’s creation of sites’ titles and descriptions (or “snippets”) is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web.

We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the META tag for each page. Where this information isn’t available, we may use publicly available information from DMOZ. While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won’t impact your ranking within search results. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.

If your website is the one that prospect really should be finding, then both you and Google are hoping the snippet will encourage them to click on your link. The only information Google has on the prospect’s needs are what was put into the keyword query. If different prospects describe their identical need with different keywords, then the Google automatic snippet mechanism may create different snippets. To maximize your chances of getting those clicks (and thus the visitor website traffic), you must try to identify the most likely keyword query your prospects might use.

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool has recently had search data added to it and is particularly useful here. By checking the search data for possible keyword queries, one of the more popular can be selected. Writing the snippet is then an exercise in getting the essence into as short a body of text as can be used by Google. If the web page is a regular website page, then 155 characters and spaces are available. It is now Google practice for blog posts to use the date at the start of the snippet, so this reduces the available space to 138 characters and spaces for a blog post description.

Whatever text is used does not need to be in sentence format as the earlier Google reference mentions:

Include clearly tagged facts in the description.
The meta description doesn’t just have to be in sentence format; it’s also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information - price, age, manufacturer - scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together.

Although it has often been the practice to write sentences for descriptions, Google seems to be recommending putting in only the meat. That could certainly include Calls To Action or telephone numbers. Whether Google’s automatic snippet mechanism will use such information can only be confirmed by trial and error.

Related:
SEO Those Meta Descriptions For More Google Visitors 23 Mar 2008

Other Related Posts

• March 29, 2008 -- Google Snippet Rules Change For Blogs
• August 5, 2008 -- DMOZ Descriptions Do Not Work For Google
• July 24, 2008 -- Business Strategy Reality Check With Google Adwords Keyword Tool

There were many at its start who questioned the wisdom of such an online property. Richard Ball set out the counter arguments well in his post, Google Knol Signals the Apogee of Google’s Hegemony. Nevertheless Google has pressed ahead and we must all learn to live with the consequences. There are many weighty questions to consider such as that posed by Darren Rowse. Is Google’s Knol A Wikipedia Killer or a Blog Killer?. The implications for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are even more unclear.

The only ones who are clearly advantaged are the advertisers with more advertising vehicles to consider. Google’s competitors will clearly not take this lying down. Many new opportunities will likely arise other than Adwords. For example Performancing is putting an extra push behind its Targeted Blog Advertising.

We are certainly living through interesting times.

Other Related Posts

• July 29, 2008 -- Knols, Knols, Decisions, Decisions
• July 24, 2008 -- Business Strategy Reality Check With Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• November 5, 2007 -- Google Alienates More Of Its Stakeholders

I was struck by those words at the center of the ad:

CREATIVE ACCOUNTANTS should no longer be used to describe book cookers, liars, little men in little rooms helping rich crooks get richer, or downright cheaters.

It is true that The Society of Management Accountants of Canada has applied for a Canadian trademark. If granted they, and only they, will have the right to use the trademark above on products they sell and on a series of services covering the following:
SERVICES:

• Establishing and enforcing guidelines
• training and educating
• disseminating information
• promoting and representing the interest of management accountants

Their new website, CreativeAccountants.org, (unfortunately in Flash), is really only new packaging around their existing resource-full website for Certified Management Accountants of Canada.

So why bring in King Canute? Well perhaps he might have counseled the CMA to go for some other trademark. As he tried to tell his advisers, sometimes you cannot turn back the tide. Just look at what Wikipedia offers as a definition of creative accounting.

Creative accounting and earnings management are euphemisms referring to accounting practices that may or may not follow the letter of the rules of standard accounting practices, but certainly deviate from the spirit of those rules. They are characterized by excessive complication and the use of novel ways of characterizing income, assets, or liabilities. The terms “innovative” or “aggressive” are also sometimes used.

It would seem the battle has been lost already. An appropriate choice of domain name is always a first consideration in doing a website review. CreativeAccountants.org is certainly a bold initiative but would seem to carry too much baggage to be the right long-term choice.

Related: SWOT That Domain Name

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• May 9, 2008 -- Spirit Show
• October 20, 2006 -- For Wal-Mart, PR = Public Revelations
• February 19, 2005 -- The Canute Business Blogging Barometer

That evocative title, Spirit Show, came on my newsfeed radar screen this week. Even back in 2004, I was questioning whether Trade Shows Are Out? given that Internet marketing was becoming so powerful.

If you run your trade show activities now in 2004 exactly the same way as you ran them 7 years ago, then you have probably seen a major decline in ROI from this activity. Relying only on the direct selling benefit at the show is sub-optimal. You should probably seriously question your continuing trade show participation.

You remember 2004. Although Google was giving some website owners a hard time, most online e-commerce sites were doing just fine. The increased costs of travel, and the delays through heightened security were making tradeshows ever more difficult.

Now move forward to 2008. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is still very powerful, but the new trend is Social Media Marketing (SMM). Everyone is thinking communities and how to spread the word through viral marketing. Who isn’t trying to figure out how Facebook might help them? No wonder that Microsoft, at a loss for what to do next, is contemplating acquiring them. With the explosive increase in energy costs, what model of a trade show can hope to survive?

Well, perhaps the Spirit Show typifies that model.

The Spirit Show is an open trade show dedicated to the privately owned recognition product stores. The trade show serves as a showcase for approximately 80-100 exhibitors carrying Greek, Cheer, College, and Recognition products along with a wide variety of complimentary goods and services. The Spirit Show is unique in that the exhibitors are geared to sell directly to the smaller, privately owned stores.

The market, which its participants serve, is made up almost entirely of social media. Sororities and fraternities are some of the earliest examples of communities, and many of them have their online presence in Facebook. You might assume that Greek clothing or Greek gear would be traded entirely online.

Well, it’s always been true that people prefer to buy from people. Buying from an online box store carries with it that unspoken risk. Is this company one I can trust? Meeting face-to-face can set many of these fears to rest. A trade show like the Spirit Show has a very clear niche and its participants go there to buy and sell. The ROI on their activities is much more measurable than for a trade show, where networking is the sole objective. We wish the Spirit Show a long and happy future.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• April 11, 2006 -- Quit - They’re Injurious To Your Health
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1. Design the website
2. Do on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for the Web pages
3. Get links to the website from others.

That approach could certainly explain the following e-mail message I just received:

Since I offer a more holistic approach to making websites perform, I suggested a Google search might bring up names of people who could better meet their needs for this more limited service. I wondered at the time whether I could have offered some further advice to help the writer in his search. There are a lot of somewhat shady characters offering link creation services just as there similar individuals offering SEO services. Perhaps if I had been able to offer a simple 10 Commandments for Links, that might have been more helpful. A simple one page document with a list of things to avoid. Something like the Biblical 10 Commandments that gave unequivocal advice on what was not acceptable.

I looked around and thought perhaps The Ten Commandments of Link Building by Jai Nischal Verma might do the trick. However it’s not a list of things to avoid doing but rather some suggestions on possible ways of creating links.

1. Link Exchange
2. Social Bookmarking Websites
3. Link Baiting
4. Web Directory Submissions
5. Article Submissions
6. Press Releases
7. Blog Commenting
8. Forum Posts
9. Link Programs
10. Creating Contests

On further reading, I did not feel this was the solution I was looking for.

By chance I noticed a reference in Sphinn to a post on Defining Link Building Best Practices. The author’s nickname in the Sphinn discussion was LinkMoses. Surely he might have run across a suitable 10 Commandments if anyone has. The nickname is that of Eric Ward, who has been involved in Content Publicity & Link Building Strategies since 1994. Regrettably it seemed from his post that he was even reluctant to nominate Best Practices.

That’s hardly surprising. If everyone is made aware of Best Practices then everyone can use them and no one can stand out from the crowd. Perhaps defining 10 Commandments is easier. It’s a list of things to avoid doing, since they may almost guarantee failure. It’s a way of avoiding being grouped with the goats rather than the sheep. Perhaps just as for Moses, such a list is only available from on high.

As it happens, Google (Mountain View, CA) has almost developed this list for us. Just check out their Webmaster Guidelines. Most of the following are directly taken from those Guidelines with one or two additions. Some of these are more ‘evil’ than others.

Ten Commandments For Google Links

1. Avoid Me-too or irrelevant content that gives users no reason to visit your site.
2. Avoid broken links and incorrect HTML.
3. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)
4. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
5. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines.
6. Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
7. Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.
8. Avoid valueless links from unrelated websites
9. Avoid links from low PageRank pages with many outgoing links
10. Avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web.

Obeying these 10 Commandments should keep you out of trouble, although Google does add the following:

Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

This is only a personal interpretation of the 10 Commandments and could undoubtedly be improved. If you think the list should be amended in any way then your comments would be most appreciated. Please add them below. Based on such feedback a more polished version of the 10 Commandments will be produced.

Footnote: Thomas Schmitz (SOEinSeattle) has pointed out to me that Link Moses has produced his version of the Ten Commandments in a slightly less serious vein. Jim Boykin has also recounted how The Google Gods (in our heads) Speak to Us about Link Building. I did not find these when I searched. Apologies. Perhaps the best of these can be combined.

Other Related Posts

• September 18, 2007 -- Emperor Google Has No Clothes
• June 21, 2007 -- Three Golden Rules For Writing “Three Golden Rules” Articles For SEO

Pierre Far, in a guest post on Techipedia today asks the question, Is Social Media the Final Frontier of Marketing? Given the popularity of such activities as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, it’s clearly a question that many marketers must be asking.

As confirmation of the topicality of the question, only three days ago Business Week had a long nine page article suggesting that Social Media Will Change Your Business. A few quotes will show how Business Week is seeing all this.

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they are simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they are going to shake up just about every business. … Given the changes barrelling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They are a prerequisite. And yes, that goes for us, too.

Still, blogs could end up providing the perfect response to mass media’s core concern: the splintering of its audience. Advertisers desperate to reach us need to tap niches (because we get together only once a year to watch the Super Bowl). By piggybacking on blogs, they can start working that vast blogocafé, table by table. Smart ones will get feedback, links to individuals-and their friends. That’s every marketer’s dream.

In a world chock-full of citizen publishers, we mainstream types control an ever-smaller chunk of human knowledge. Some of us will work to draw in more of what the bloggers know, vetting it, editing it, and packaging it into our closed productions. But here’s betting that we also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations.

Overall Business Week seems to suggest that the big mainstream companies will still be the ones in control. Perhaps they’re missing the real point about social media. Pierre Far sees it in a different light.

The point is that consumers now have a more potent aggregate power: someone with a problem can now reach others with the same problem faster, build a community around this shared problem easily, and mobilize lots of people behind the common cause more efficiently. That’s what’s new: a significant leap in efficiency. This gives consumers a loud voice that companies have to listen to.

This message has been around for some time. It started with the Clue Train Manifesto in 1999. As the authors said then, As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies. If Business Week does not fully understand even now, how long will it take for the mainstream companies to realize that others are now in charge?

Related:
Business Blogging Now
Riding The Internet Tidal Wave
Smart Advertising On Cell Phones

Other Related Posts

• January 25, 2008 -- I Twitter Therefore I Am
• March 18, 2007 -- To Twitter Or Not To Twitter
• March 9, 2007 -- Social Media - Bad News Travels Faster

Brian Solis has just published The Definitive Guide to Social Media Releases. It would appear that Social Media Releases are what Press Releases have morphed into in this new multimedia interconnected world. One quote brings out a key part of his message.

So again, we ask, what makes a Social Media Release Social?

Well, at the end of the day, if you’ve ever written a blog post, much of what I’m describing already exists. There’s nothing to say that you couldn’t do this right now simply by creating a customized blog that is an extension of your company’s online newsroom.

This marketer’s realization that blogs provide a powerful mechanism for communicating with the marketplace comes at an auspicious time. It would seem that Google also now strongly believes that blog posts often provide the most relevant information in keyword searches.

The speed at which Google is latching on to blog posts has been commented on very recently by a number of Internet marketing commentators, such as Search Engine Journal (Julie Kent), WebProNews (Doug Caverly) and Search Engine Roundtable (Tamar Weinberg). However a comment by Michael Martinez on the last item questions whether this is really new.

Indeed it is not new. It is just the latest step in a process that Marissa Mayer announced in May 2007 with a post on Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer. Universal search would provide the most relevant answers to keyword searches from all the search processes that Google did.

It has not been smooth and continuous improvement from that point onwards. Prior to that, Google had been indexing blog posts extremely well based on their RSS news feeds. It was rapid and it was relevant. Results could be accessed by using Google Blogsearch. By October inexplicably the results became somewhat chaotic, as we discussed in the Cre8asite Forums. By the end of November, curiouser and curiouser, blog posts were indexed better in the regular Web search than they were in the Blogsearch.

Since then the visibility of blog posts in the regular Web search has been even stronger. You can still find the Google Blogsearch if you look for it, but it clearly has lost star billing. The main choices on the regular Web search program are as follows:

If you click on that ‘more’ then you will see the menu shown on the right. It’s probably only a matter of time before the option to search Blogs disappears entirely. However Google has always been notoriously slow at firing processes that are no longer seen as useful.

So the message is clear. Blog posts are just regular web pages like those to be found in any website. Indeed given Google’s fixation on inlinks (or back links as they somewhat confusingly describe them), it is not surprising that blog posts tend to be more visible than regular web pages.

Once the marketers really smell the coffee, we can expect to see many more Social Media Releases coming out as blogs.

Other Related Posts

• November 27, 2007 -- Google BlogSearch Is Broken
• October 20, 2007 -- Google BlogSearch, The Neglected Orphan

I find Chris Anderson often has very thought-provoking ideas. He is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More”. That Long Tail concept helps explain why so many surprising Internet businesses work. He honed the ideas for many months before the book came out through his Long Tail blog.

He now is following the same path for his next book which will be FREE. You can learn more about it in an ITConversation on FREE: The Economics of Abundance and the Price of Zero. Here is some of the introductory text:

From free scoops of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream to the business model where razors are given away to sell the blades, there’s a whole gift economy at work that competes with the commercial economy. We think of free as scary and radical but this economy has always existed. Previously not dignified as an economy, its currency is not money: It is reputation, attention, respect, fame, fun or money from a superior service after giving away something inferior for free.
…
You can build whole businesses around giving stuff away for free. He puts his money where his mouth is. He’s giving away the audio version of his upcoming book, “Free: the Economics of Giving Stuff Away”.

He homes in on an important piece of the puzzle in a recent post on The big lie about free. The key is towards the end:

In a recent post, we listed dozens of business model built on free. All of them are based on the notion that free stuff does have value and the way we measure that is in the time people spend with them. Do I actually need to remind Wall Street analysts that time is money?

Time is an important currency. If we give someone minutes of our time, we give them something of great value. We only have each minute once. If an advertiser tries to grab that minute, then we may well be offended. If on the other hand we are so intrigued by that advertiser’s YouTube video, that we watch from start to finish, then we freely give those minutes. The advertiser has earned those minutes and had a real opportunity to communicate with us. I think once more Chris Anderson is on to a winner.

Related: Time is Critical

Other Related Posts

• April 12, 2007 -- Why The Average Joe Doesn’t Blog
• January 19, 2007 -- Slogging For The Long Tail

René Descartes felt that the proof of his existence was that he thought from time to time. Quite a number of people, including Richard Ziade, Richard Buchanan, Charles Rhyne, Graham Chastney among many others, are now confirming their existence by twittering.

It’s been around for some time although some of us were initially reluctant to twitter. Not so for many professionals who apparently have been using twitter extensively for some time. Now over the past few weeks it seems to have entered an explosive growth phase like so many other social media such as Facebook and YouTube.

Twitter is disarmingly simple. You can tweat or receive tweats on your cell phone via instant messaging. 140 characters to tell whoever is listening whatever you feel like telling them. It can be almost like dropping pebbles down a very deep well. Sometimes you hear a splash. Sometimes you don’t. The Twitter FAQ gives a few more details but there is very little more to tell. It’s completely free and there are now a number of widgets (Apps) that simplify the process of twittering.

Twittering is now being used more extensively as an additional channel in Internet marketing. Lee Odden has provided a Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR, while Darren Rowse sets out some Tips for Bloggers. Clearly we’ve only seen the beginning of all this twittering activity.

So what will be the future of this new method of communication. Although it’s free it should not be difficult to monetize Twitter given the huge volume of traffic. The key concern must be whether this will become an increasingly noisy tower of Babel. Will the bandwidth be available to carry all the tweats? Twitter was overloaded apparently when Steve Jobs gave the keynote address at MacWorld 2008. It was again down this morning for a time. Twitter means instant communication. It can only work if instant always means instant.

Related:
35 Twitter Tips from 35 Twitter Users
26 Reasons Why I Love Twitter - Plus 27 More just in Case

Other Related Posts

• March 18, 2007 -- To Twitter Or Not To Twitter
• March 25, 2008 -- Do Google Snippets Work Better Than Twitter?
• February 22, 2008 -- Will Business Boldly Go Into The Social Media?

For avid Google Ad fans by clicking on either of these buttons you can have a veritable horizontal slide show of other Adsense ads. That gives Google and Adsense advertisers many more kicks at the can. It does not appear too often but presumably is used when there are many more advertisers than can appear in one ad block. It would seem to be a win/win/win proposition for all.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• May 23, 2007 -- wow patch 2.1.0 download
• April 25, 2006 -- New Google Search Button
• February 18, 2006 -- Human Nature Abhors A Vacuum

Back in 2004, Jakob Nielsen expressed concern that Search Engines were becoming Answer Engines. As a Pew Internet Report at the time confirmed, Internet users are very happy with their experiences searching the Internet, but many are naïve about how they search and the results they find. Nielsen was concerned that people would merely use the output from the search engines and not go back to the original sources of information.

Search Engines Or Selling Engines?

As we enter 2008, the world has moved on from the picture that Nielsen was seeing. You might almost feel that Search Engines have evolved to become Selling Engines. No longer does a search engine provide the most relevant information about products. By a series of small and not so small changes, the search engines have almost become like storefronts. The information provided to you will present the products on which they make money first in what they display.

If you doubt that, just check out the results you get if you are looking for say the Nokia 6131 cell phone. A search with MSN (or Live as they sometimes label it) shows the following:

First you have three sponsored ads. Then you see the results from MSN Shopping. Any other results are almost pushed off the bottom of the screen.

Yahoo! and Google have very similar layouts of information, but they are a little more subtle about it. The Yahoo! display looks like this:

Apart from the light blue color behind the first two items, you might almost think that all four items are responses to the search query. This effect has been heightened by Yahoo’s recent decision to no longer number the entries in its keyword search reports. As you might expect, the first two entries are sponsored ads. The third entry is a link to Yahoo! shopping. Only when you get to the fourth item are you getting outside of the Yahoo! space.

The Google display adopts a middle position between the MSN and Yahoo! versions.

In this case Google is showing two sponsored ads, which may or may not include the phone we are searching for. We then have a series of links to products in the Google Products Index. If this isn’t enough to entice you, they even give a link to products listed with Google Checkout. It’s only after you’ve passed through all of this Google (selling) space, that you can get to links from outsiders.

Searching or Shopping

If you were searching for information on the Nokia 6131 cell phone, you might be somewhat put out that these search engines are trying to sell you so hard. However some people like to shop. If you want to shop with Yahoo!, then shopping.yahoo.com shows you all that the Yahoo! store has to offer.

Equally if you want to shop with MSN, then shopping.msn.com brings you into the MSN store.

You can go shopping with Google at shopping.google.com, but surprisingly it still looks like a product search engine rather than a store.

It probably is only a matter of time before Google decides it should have a pleasing store front like the others. After all, if your mission is to sell products then you should do it the best way you can.

The Bottom Line for Suppliers

If you are trying to sell products on the Internet, what does this change mean for you. Search engines are widely used by prospects as they check out what is available. If the search engines are now behaving like storefronts, then you may need to pay their fees to get exposure on their “shelves”. It just means that organic or natural SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is now an even greater challenge than it ever was.

Related:
Google Changes “Products” Link to “Shopping” For Holidays
Google Shopping: Google Tries For Shoppers Once Again
Google launches Froogle/Products/Shopping
Christmas shopping for the Nintendo Wii with Google

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• August 21, 2008 -- Yahoo Buzz Is Quite Delicious
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• May 5, 2008 -- Microsoft should KISS more often

For Google, their much-touted slogan of “Don’t Be Evil” seems to do more harm than good. It so easily generates somewhat critical articles, like the Forbes item, More Evil Than Google?, or Joel Hruska’s article, Google struggles to see no evil, speak no evil. Hruska summarizes it thus:

As Google continues to grow rapidly and absorb more companies operating in a wider variety of areas, its operations and policies become, of necessity, more complex and murky, and the company’s informal motto of “Don’t Be Evil” becomes even harder to uphold in appearance and, perhaps, even in reality.

If the slogan does not do much outside the company and probably not much inside either, perhaps it’s time to look for a new one. Another major US entity was apparently looking for a slogan earlier in the year but abandoned the attempt. Some of the suggestions for a better slogan for NASA might at first glance be worthy of consideration:

• NASA: Giant steps for humankind.
• NASA: Above and beyond for humankind
• NASA: Pushing life further
• NASA: Forging the Future
• NASA: To Strive, To Seek, and Not To Yield

Such thoughts particularly come to mind with the latest venture from Google, which they dub Knols. Udi Manber, VP Engineering, believes these knols will encourage people to contribute knowledge. However outsiders have more reservations. Duncan Riley suggests that the Google Knol may be A Step Too Far. Michael Gray suggests that Google Knols give insights on Google’s Philosophy.

According to Google’s mission statement their objective is to organize the worlds information, however what they often leave out is they feel they should be stewards of that information as well. If taking control of your information fits into their mission statement, oh well the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. ..

While not necessarily agreeing with their philosophy, in a later item Gray satirically suggests it is better to take whatever opportunities you can from this initiative.

All this is pretty heady stuff. Google has publicly stated that Knols may never see the light of day and that raises a very important question. Google is a public corporation with stakeholders. That includes shareholders. Perhaps all of these NASA-like possibilities run counter to the clear objectives to improve shareholder values. Focus, Focus, Focus is still a good rule. A good slogan might help to let everyone know what that focus is.

“Don’t Be Evil” provides no direction whatsoever. It’s really no better than that Tom Peters’s slogan “We’re No Worse Than The Other Guy”. A better slogan for Google would simply provide direction both to outsiders and to insiders. That would be very much better than one that leads only to criticism or derision. If you feel you have one that would work better for Google, why not suggest it below.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• March 28, 2005 -- Cre8ting Links
• July 26, 2008 -- Google Cannot Do All Internet Advertising
• January 27, 2005 -- Competitive Intelligence and Business Blogging

This blog post is a follow-up to a recent article, Customer Service, New Marketing in the Internet Age. The article was addressed to business owners to remind them that the world has changed dramatically. Customers are now in control. The Internet gives customers new information and powers. This post is one place where you can exercise that power. You can add a comment if you found a company particularly poor on customer service. Equally if you found a company particularly good on customer service, then why not proclaim it to the world.

In the past people were sometimes reluctant to complain to a company, since problems were often not resolved by talking to the company. Now there is an alternative: you can talk to everyone out there. People do that in a variety of ways. For example on the recent opening of competition to the Canadian cell phone market both the Globe and Mail article, Cell phone giants lose stranglehold, (now behind a subscription wall) and the CTV article, Ottawa’s wireless auction could cut cell phone rates, each received scores of comments in very little time.

If you do a Google search for poor customer service, you can quickly confirm that customers are speaking out. Sometimes it’s in their own blogs and sometimes it’s via surveys. Here are some of the relevant links. Some of them are now some years old but they still timelessly signal someone’s discontent:

• Poor Customer Service Is Top Reason Consumers Switch Service Providers
• Whatever happened to customer service? Let your lawmakers know.
• The Customer Service Hall of Shame
• Poor Customer Service - online retailer (ThinkGeek)
• AOL Said, ‘If You Leave Me I’ll Do Something Crazy’
• Dell Customer Service
• Measuredup.com where connected, loyal and involved consumers share customer service and brand experiences
• Poor Customer Service is Top Reason Consumers Switch Service Providers
• Airlines attacked over ‘poor standards’

The rapid growth of social media such as Facebook means that the word is passed even faster now. It’s a customer revolution. If you’re not happy, or if you’re elated, then pass it on by adding a comment here.

Other Related Posts

• June 28, 2007 -- Customer Service From Telecommunications Companies
• April 28, 2007 -- Customer Service Needs Tough Love

That’s the beauty of BC Hydro’s Facebook initiative. They want to spread the word about energy conservation. In-your-face advertising never works very well, however good the cause. On the other hand accepting a gift from a friend is the most natural thing to do. So BC Hydro offers Green Gifts for you to give. Your friend enjoys receiving the gift and an important message comes with it. That’s the height of Permission Marketing.

Related: BC Hydro’s Green Gifts: Harnessing Facebook Gift-giving Energy for Conservation

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• April 25, 2006 -- New Google Search Button
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Google Rankings Drive Sales. That’s what a caller told me this morning. Let’s call him Chuck, from Massachusetts, to preserve his anonymity. A year ago his website was at #1 in Google for an important keyword in a somewhat competitive consumer market and now it’s dropped to #3. His sales during the same period had seen a 20% decline. He asked me whether I could help to correct this situation.

By coincidence, Sandra Niehaus has just published a related post entitled, Why Isn’t EVERYONE #1 on Google? She wrote it for all those SEO professionals who have been asked whether they can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. There’s some excellent advice there. It all relates to Setting Client Expectations for SEO and what it can achieve. Part of that included what might be called Reasonable Expectations

1. SEO is not an exact science.
2. Rankings are important, but not the whole story
3. SEO should be judged by bottom-line improvement, not arbitrary Google rankings

To be fair to my friend Chuck, from Massachusetts, he wasn’t asking for guarantees. He knew they couldn’t be given. However he wanted to understand how the competitors now sitting at #1 and #2 had managed to push him down to #3. He felt that if he could emulate them and recapture the #1 position then sales would rebound. As we talked, it was clear that he knew some aspects of the way Google operates. He did understand that different datacenters might deliver different rankings. He also understood that some people would be receiving personalized search results that could influence the rankings. Nevertheless for him the key parameter to optimize was the Google ranking. Get that right and sales would follow.

I pointed out that although there was an obvious positive correlation between the Google ranking and sales, the situation might be more complicated. Had the website traffic also dropped in line with the drop in sales? The answer on this was somewhat vague but he did not seem to have done any website analytics either for visitor traffic or conversions to sales. For him, the Google ranking was almost the sole critical measure.

He asked me again whether I could determine why the new #1 and #2 had managed to push him down to #3. Since I feared that Chuck’s Expectations of what SEO could do would be difficult to deliver on, I diplomatically parted company with him. It really is impressive how those Google rankings have grabbed the attention of some website owners, almost to the exclusion of other factors that influence sales.

If I’d felt that Chuck might be open to looking at a slightly bigger picture, I might have described some of those other factors:

• The Search Engine algorithms are based on over 100 factors, are complex and highly secret and are constantly being amended and improved. In highly competitive markets, it can be quite difficult to determine why at a given time the top 3 or 5 ranking websites are in the order they occur.
• Provided a website is featured in the top 3 or 5, then it will appear ‘above the fold’ and so will be visible in the initial screen view from the Google search. Which website gets the click, depends not only on the order but also on the snippet of text that appears. (As it happened, the snippet for Chuck’s website was invariably better than the two that appeared at #1 and #2).
• Usually a given keyword or keyword phrase will be only part of what the customer actually types into Google. Related searches will far outnumber those for the precise keyword. What counts is the total number of clicks that the web page gets, most of which come not from the precise keyword but from related phrases. This is the so-called ‘long tail phenomenon’.
• Whether a visitor to a web page will ‘convert’ and make the purchase depends on many other factors relating to the website. If you accept that it’s the bottom-line that counts, then you should be aware of all these factors and make sure you put the priority on the factors that will bring the most immediate returns.

What is the moral of the story? It would seem that both Google and perhaps the SEO industry have oversold the importance of that #1 ranking. #1 does not give a licence to print money. It’s what comes up when you click that “I’m feeling lucky” button, but that alone will not guarantee successful sales growth. There’s a lot more to sales than that.

Other Related Posts

• May 24, 2008 -- Someone is wrong on the Internet
• May 15, 2008 -- Keyword Selection Strategy
• March 9, 2008 -- Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Customer referrals have always been a powerful way of generating and closing sales. Way before the Internet existed, the effective Sales Representative would be trying to generate good customer testimonials to help convince prospects. Particularly when selling complex products or services, a satisfied customer can quickly give assurance that what is on offer will deliver satisfaction.

An interview that Andy Sernovitz had with Gary Spangler of DuPont brought this important factor home to me.

The key point being made in the interview is that B2B and B2C contacts are becoming increasingly similar and that word-of-mouth (WOM) works equally well for both. Even B2B business is done between two individuals, who are individuals first and members of their companies second.

A more fundamental reminder for me was that the Internet is all about making connections. Customer referrals can be establishing a connection between prospects and satisfied customers. Gary Spangler said that over the last year he had seen much more interest among business buyers in customer referrals. I would suggest that this is not that their interest is heightened but rather that they are becoming aware that the Internet facilitates such exchanges. Certainly any effective seller will ensure that the buyer’s appetite for WOM contact is satisfied.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• April 29, 2004 -- … The Devil Made Me Do It!
• November 1, 2005 -- Google The Advertising Giant
• February 11, 2005 -- How To Map The Blogosphere

In public relations, spin is a usually pejorative term signifying a heavily biased portrayal in one’s own favor of an event or situation that is designed to bring about the most positive result possible.

Since Sphinn is a new social media website launched by the very well-respected SEM guru Danny Sullivan, clearly the above is all a bit over-the-top. However my mind did wander that way when reading another post from my friend Kim Krause Berg entitled SEO with Usability: What The People Want. If anything I would go even farther than Kim. Websites are built to achieve certain goals. For commercial websites that usually means making sales. To do that well, websites must be

• suitably visible on the web,
• instinctively attractive when visited,
• easy to navigate and
• persuasive in closing the sale.

SEO plays an important part in that but it’s by no means the most important part.

Kim took issue with Sphinn when it appeared since there was no mention of Usability. That has been corrected but it’s instructive to see how it’s been done. This should not be seen as criticism since each of us has our own perspective on the online world. Sphinn clearly is about search engines and the associated marketing implications.

As illustration, the key navigation menu on the Sphinn Home Page includes the following topics in this order:
Google / Yahoo / Microsoft / Search Marketing / Social Media / Online Marketing / Searching / Other
Up front are the major search engines and Online Marketing is towards the end of the parade.

If you then explore the Online Marketing tab, you find the following subjects in this order:
Web Analytics / Contextual Ads / Affiliate Marketing / Display Advertising / Usability / Domaining / Other Online Marketing
Usability tags along after all the ways of making and spending money through advertising.

Perhaps one shouldn’t read too much into this. However unfortunately it so often reflects how much attention is paid to Usability in the website design process. Perhaps if those of us who care keep mentioning it at every opportunity, eventually more people will smell the coffee.

Related: Bell Canada Website Usability

Other Related Posts

• May 20, 2008 -- Evaluating Website Design Alternatives - A Counter-Intuitive Approach
• May 15, 2008 -- Keyword Selection Strategy
• March 9, 2008 -- Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

The Internet Explorer browser causes dilemmas for many people. Let me count the ways.

Which browser should I use?

The biggest group with an Internet Explorer dilemma are the Internet surfers. They’ve mostly used Internet Explorer but now Microsoft is suggesting that they upgrade to version 7. Some accept Microsoft’s advice with reluctance and in this case some commentators have expressed concerns with version 7. So the take-up rate has been slow.

Often techy friends may be recommending some other browser to avoid security issues with Internet Explorer. Often that other browser is Mozilla Firefox. So it’s not surprising to see a headline such as Firefox now a serious threat to IE in Europe. Anyone in North America will be somewhat surprised to see the figures:

A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that FF had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe, IE had 66.5%, with other browsers including Safari and Opera making up the remaining 5.7%. The July market share represents a massive 3.7% rise since a similar survey in March.

A particularly worrying sign for Microsoft is that in some key European markets FF is threatening to overtake IE as the market leading browser. In Slovenia (47.9%) and Finland (45.4%) FF usage has reached parity with IE, while in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia and Ireland, FF has either reached or is nearly at 40% market share.

These figures may well presage the growth that Firefox usage will show in North America.

Which browser should I design for?

More competent web designers have been designing Web pages to give a satisfactory user experience with all the common browsers for some time. Others took the view that since Internet Explorer is by far the majority choice for browser, then this was the only one to check. Within the last 12 months there has been a significant change in website traffic. Although Internet Explorer version 6 is still most often the majority browser used, Internet Explorer version 7 and Firefox taken together will probably deliver more traffic. The dilemma here is that web pages that display well in version 6 may not do so in version 7.

The recommended approach is to design based on Web standards and such web pages will display well in IE version 7 and Firefox. Such a web page may or may not display well in IE version 6. However there is an increasing literature on the ways of getting around the typical problems. One practical problem is that it may be difficult to have two versions of Internet Explorer (version 6 and version 7) running on the same computer. A small help is given by IE NetRenderer. This allows you to check how a web page is rendered by Internet Explorer 7, 6 or 5.5, as seen from a high-speed datacenter located in Germany. (Tip of the hat to Henry.) It only shows the webpage “above the fold” but this will alert the designer to any major problems.

What should we do now?

This of course is the dilemma that faces Microsoft. It has accepted the legacy commitments imposed by websites designed for prior versions of Internet Explorer. The ideal would be to bite the bullet and help the world to move as quickly as possible to IE version 7. However the legacy of all those IE version 6 web pages is an onerous burden. There are no easy answers.

Related:
Trial by Firefox
Standards Lose Their Star Rating

Other Related Posts

• October 29, 2006 -- Favicons - How To Make Them Work For You
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Wal-mart Sees The Light.

Wal-mart has changed its mindset. Andy Sernovitz sees it as a landmark moment for consumer empowerment and word of mouth. Whichever way you look at it, something very dramatic has happened.

A Mindset can put blinkers on how you see the world. The Internet is having such a disruptive effect on societies, economies and markets that it is important to be aware of all the implications. To be highly effective now it is important to have an Internet Mindset. That involves many factors but one of the most important is to realize that power has shifted from entities like agencies and companies to individuals.

Many will remember that Wal-mart clearly showed its pre-Internet mindset when its PR consultant, Edelman, encouraged the use of blogs that appeared to be created by members of the general public. These were supposed to show Wal-mart in a good light and attempt to reverse some of the adverse publicity that Wal-mart gets from time to time. When the truth came out that these were in fact Wal-mart blogs, Edelman had to do some fast back-pedalling but the damage was done.

Now it would appear that Wal-mart has seen the light. The blinkers have been removed. It is demonstrating that, in the places that matter, an Internet Mindset prevails. Wal-mart has opened up a new website, walmart.com, that actively encourages true dialogue with consumers. After all, you can either be the object of discussion or take part in the discussion. Wal-mart is now providing the infrastructure to support the discussion.

Hopefully when other entities see that even the mightiest acknowledge the new order of things with the Internet, they too will abandon coercive power plays. They are becoming less and less effective and may even blow up in the faces of the perpetrators. The message is clear: Go with the (Internet) Flow!

Related:
For Wal-Mart, PR = Public Revelations
Do You Have An Internet Mindset?

Other Related Posts

• November 1, 2007 -- Is Google Now The Big Ugly?

Is Usability Part Of The New SEO? That’s a question being discussed in the Cre8asite Forums.

It all stems from the launch of a new website, Sphinn, by Danny Sullivan. According to Rand Fishkin, Sphinn is the Social News Site Every Search Marketer Should Be Using. Kim Krause Berg was not so sure since she felt that Search Engine Marketing is Bogus for Sites That Simply Don’t Function. After some friendly discussion, it now appears that Usability will be added to Sphinn, as will Web Analytics.

So after all this, what exactly does Sphinn cover? I can almost see all the interminable debates starting up again. Is it SEO, or SEM, or perhaps Internet Marketing? Should it include Usability? In some ways I see Usability and SEM as equal team members in getting websites to perform. Then again there is all the fine work done by Stanford on persuasiveness or Captology as they describe it. Should that be included too?

Perhaps it’s time to stand well back and look at the big picture. SEO is the most widely known term by website owners in general, so perhaps we should be using that as our key acronym. All we must do is attach a more appropriate meaning to the acronym.

The more reputable SEO consultants understand that it is not just getting to #1 in Google. They are already encouraging their clients to maximize sales from their websites. So as I suggested back in 2003, SEO should be Selling Effectiveness Optimization. Perhaps with the passage of time, the suggestion will now be seen to have more merit.

Other Related Posts

• May 15, 2008 -- Keyword Selection Strategy
• March 9, 2008 -- Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots
• December 6, 2007 -- When I’m Not Doing SEO