Author Archive

Hardly anyone goes past the first page of Google results, so you want your ads to show up on the first page, right? That’s why Google prominently displays the minimum first page bid in the AdWords interface, right?

Wrong.

One of the things we do here at Two Octobers is to audit PPC accounts to point out any major problems or opportunities. An issue I often run across is that keyword bids are all over the place. It would be one thing if these bids were set based on return on investment (ROI), but they’re not. A PPC manager has set bids based on the minimum first page bid that Google reports. Here’s why this is a bad idea:

Google (and Bing) sponsored search ads are sold on an auction-for-position basis. On the whole, traffic goes up the higher you bid, whether you move from position 12 to 10 or 2 to 1. To get the best results, it makes sense to inch bids up or down evenly until you’ve hit your budget target or other constraint. As an example, let’s imagine a campaign with three keywords (A, B and C) and a daily budget cap of $50. When you launch the campaign, you set keyword bids at $1.

This results in a total cost of $18 and 18 clicks. You notice that keyword A is not meeting the minimum first page bid, while B and C are. Since you are well below your budget cap, you increase the bid for keyword A to $2 to get on the first page.

Now you are spending exactly your budget of $50 and you’ve gone from 18 to 33 clicks. But what if instead you adjusted all bids equally, from $1 to $1.40?

Now you are spending a total of $49 for 35 clicks. Your ad for Keyword A is still not on page one, but voilá you are getting better results!

These numbers are made up, but the underlying principles are accurate. I’ve simplified things a bit since my goal is to show the fallacy of bidding to be on page one. In fact when I am creating a campaign I do usually vary bids based on my best guess as to conversion rate and average sale. For example, if I’m working on a campaign for a vacation rental in Breckenridge, I will bid the keyword “vacation rental breckenridge” higher than “rental breckenridge”, since the latter could refer to an apartment or rental equipment. I expect that more visits from “vacation rental breckenridge” will result in sales so those clicks are worth more. As I collect analytics data I further refine bids based on ROI.

And some of you out there may point out that traffic volume in relation to bid is a non-linear function (and not always a monotonic increasing function either), and that it can therefore make sense to have uneven bids even lacking ROI data. That is true, but it takes a whole lot of data and math to understand the relationship between bid price and traffic for any given keyword, and it is still not a good idea to set max CPC based on minimum first page bid.

If you would like us to have a look at your paid search campaigns, please give us a shout.

Viral marketing news and other viral happenings in Denver Metro, Boulder and beyond.

After too long a hiatus, Rocky Mountain Viral is back! My goal is to get these out monthly from now on. Here’s hoping.

Colorado Girls – one of the most tried-and-true ways to get YouTube traffic is to parody another very successful video. Anthropomorphize a cat or work in some South Park characters and you’ve got yourself a viral hit. Katy Perry’s wildly successful “California Gurlz” video has been this summer’s favorite target, keeping hundreds of parodists busy. At least 37 states have weighed in so far, but it turns out that Colorado girls are among the most popular, with this video garnering over 600,000 views on YouTube. The video was created by three friends in a couple of weeks with no budget. The lyrics are clever and it is well put together, but the real star of the video is our Front Range. The tourism board itself couldn’t have done a better job of stitching together all the quintessential details that make us, well, not California. See for yourself:

Cherry Creek Dance – In another story of native talent, I love this video featuring Emily Sasson of Cherry Creek Dance. The video is promoting her Wednesday night hip hop class, and has received over 4,600 views in just a few days. Sure, that doesn’t compare to Colorado Girls, but this is no parody and includes no South Park characters, just great dancing and great local business marketing.

And then there’s whiteboard girl – in a perfect case study of the is-it-real phenomenon,  ”Jenny” took the internet by storm early this month with her very public and scathing announcement that she was quitting her job. She emailed her coworkers photos of herself quitting with a whiteboard commentary on her boss and his Farmville habit. The photos were leaked to the website thechive.com:

We received the following photos last night from a person who works with this girl. Her name is Jenny (not confirmed) – we’re working our contact for Jenny’s last name…

It turns out that Jenny’s last name is Porterfield and her first name isn’t Jenny, it’s Elyse. Porterfield is a Glenwood Springs native and recent UNC graduate who did not quit her job, but is an aspiring actress who did a photoshoot for The Chive. She has a pretty face and was given a funny set of whiteboards and is now a hot commodity thanks to the hoax. Oh, and she’s a California girl now too. I think that’s fitting.

Do politicians just automatically count as viral? – wanting to get a jump on the competition, Time Magazine has already announced the best viral campaign ads of 2010. Among them is Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper trying to wash away negative campaign ads on his path to the governor’s office. I like his sentiment, but it seems like an ad should be viral to earn that distinction. With only 40,000 YouTube views for such a prominent campaign, I’m thinking Hick should hire the Colorado Girls crew to shoot his next video.

I was having lunch a few weeks ago with my friend Chandler who sells advertising at an online publisher and the topic of Twitter advertising came up. His personal viewpoint on Twitter is similar to one I’ve heard quite a bit recently: “I tried it out, but I didn’t get much out of it.” He said it tentatively, as if I might be offended, or exclaim some secret to extracting value from Twitter that had escaped him. But I have found myself questioning the value of Twitter recently as well. Our conversation evolved to this: there’s a lot of talking on Twitter and not much listening. As an advertising medium Twitter appears to have decent reach, but is reach meaningful if people aren’t really paying attention? Further, I have noticed that many of my recent followers look like this:

Notice the thousands of followers and the clear commercial agenda. What seems to be in vogue now is to follow thousands of people, then drop the ones that don’t follow back, then follow thousands more, and so on. Having lots of followers creates the impression that people give a crap, but it turns out that on Twitter, followers don’t equal influence.

My lunchtime conversation with Chandler concluded with the supposition that Twitter users must be getting more selective about who they actually listen to, if they are listening at all. An increase in advertising on Twitter will only heighten the need to filter out the signal from the noise, which means that advertisers will be putting a lot of effort in to marketing to the void.

I’ve been researching this topic and mulling it over since my conversation with Chandler, then got this email today from another friend:

It’s hard not to agree!
http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/raw/?p=3679
Hal

The link describes the story of Leo Laporte, a well-known technology journalist who stopped Tweeting for a few weeks only to find that nobody seemed to notice. In Leo’s words, “I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.”

Laporte has nicely phrased what Chandler and I were trying to articulate, but my intervening research tells me that we had it at least partially wrong. I didn’t find any data trending people’s propensity to listen. A few things I did find:

• Only 7% of Americans actively use Twitter, but those 7% are more affluent, more educated and tend to be early technology adopters in comparison to the online population as a whole. They also seek and give brand and product advice using Twitter. Source: Edison Research
• 300,000 new users are signing up for Twitter every day. Source: Huffington Post
• Globally, Twitter use has exploded.Worldwide traffic to Twitter.com has more than doubled in the past year. Source: Comscore

With that kind of growth, it is too soon to say what Twitter is or isn’t. The way people are using Twitter is bound to be evolving. And anecdotally I know several local businesses that are finding new customers through their Twitter accounts. I still believe that broadcast advertising will fail on Twitter, but I don’t think we can extrapolate from our own personal experiences to say that Twitter is not an effective marketing medium. It may take work to get people to pay attention, but the payoff is a fast-growing, affluent population. If you are an SMB with limited time and resources, you should gauge the effort versus the return. If your target market is well-to-do, educated early-adopters, it is probably worth it. If you are a plumber or a dry cleaner, you should give it an honest try and see if you enjoy tweeting. If you find it a chore, your time is better spent elsewhere. At least for now.

And if you are looking for more tweets to ignore, mine are as good as any  @nicobrx

This list is intended for someone who is creating a new paid search advertising campaign. Much of it still applies if you are looking to grow an existing campaign or researching keywords for organic search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, but not all steps will apply in those cases. To keep things simple, I am only going to talk about Google. I usually do most of my research and testing in Google, then copy keywords and campaigns over to Yahoo and Bing.

This process can be fun and instructive if you think of yourself as a psychologist trying to understand how and when your prospects search for what you have to offer. I enjoy constructing theories about what’s in the head of searchers – I’m sure I’m mostly wrong, but it makes it more entertaining.

Spaghetti Against the Wall
When I’m building keyword lists, I don’t worry about how much volume each keyword drives or how much it costs to be in a top position. There’s really no downside to having a lot of keywords, and sometimes your best performers will come from places you don’t expect. I call it the spaghetti-against-the-wall approach – throw a lot of keywords out there, and a few will stick. Those are the ones I spend time optimizing.

Match Types
It is very important that you understand how match types work if you are adding keywords to your account. For an explanation of match types, see the article How to Use Google AdWords Match Types.

On to the to-do list…

The To-Do List (& a PDF version of the list for printing)

1. Get your ad groups going - Ad groups should correspond to individual products and/or services you offer as well as product/service groupings. For example, if you sell a variety of hammers, you should have an ad group for hammers in general, and ad groups for each type of hammer. Use your judgement regarding how specific to go – people might search for “ball peen hammers”, but they are less likely to search for “ball peen hammers with red handles”. The former merits an ad group, the latter probably not.
   When you are first creating ad groups, you don’t need to come up with a big list of keywords for each. I usually create a bunch of ad groups at a time, and I don’t worry about researching keywords until I have them all live. For example, if I am creating an ad group for “ball peen hammers”, I’ll probably create it with the single keyword “ball peen hammers”. It’s more efficient to get ad groups going, then go back and add keywords using the following techniques.
   
2. Add more keywords with the Google Keyword Tool - In the AdWords interface, go to Opportunities > Keyword Tool
   The Keyword Tool is useful for coming up with variations on keywords, but it can also be slow and tedious to go through results. It doesn’t do a good job at all of sorting keyword suggestions by relevancy. I usually sort the results by the column “Local Monthly Searches” (by clicking on those words) to see what keywords get the most volume. “Local” here refers to the country in which you are searching.
   At this stage, I’m mostly looking for high-volume variations. The Keyword Tool comes up with a lot of junk, but I usually find a few worth adding. Since I have sorted by search volume, I go down the list until I hit some reasonable volume threshold, say at least 1,000 searches per month. It may be more or less than that, depending on the category of keyword. To add keywords to an ad group, select the ones you’d like to add and click Add Keywords. You will be prompted to select an ad group.
   
   It is very helpful that the Keyword Tool gives volume numbers, but take them with a grain of salt. It defaults to showing volume for broad match keywords, which can be deceptive. On the left-hand side there is an option to switch it to exact match, which will give you a better idea of how often each individual keyword is searched. The volume numbers are also pretty unreliable. It will often show that a search term gets very low volume when in fact it gets decent volume.
3. Add even more keywords with Google’s Add/Edit suggestions - In the AdWords interface, go to Campaigns > Ad Groups > [select an ad group] > Keywords > Add Keywords
   This functionality is similar to the Keyword Tool, but does a much better job of grouping and prioritizing keywords that are relevant to your ad group. Recently, I’ve been using this tool more than the Keyword Tool to build keyword lists. It works best after you’ve added some keywords to the ad group, so best to get things started with the Keyword Tool. Per above, I use the Keyword Tool to find high-volume keywords, then I use this tool to add more specific variations.
   
4. Spy on your competitors - There are several tools that show which keywords are driving traffic to competitor sites. Looking at what your competitors are bidding-on and optimizing-for can be a good way to discover new categories of keywords and unusual opportunities that the Google tools won’t spot. Several to try are SEMRush, KeywordSpy and SpyFu. I lean towards SEMRush right now, but there is not much difference between the three. Each offers additional capabilities for a subscription, but try out the free versions first.
5. Set initial bids - There are two ways to approach this. If you are on a tight budget, start by bidding low and collect some data before you start raising bids. The downside of this approach is that with low bids it may take a while to collect enough data to make a change. If you are not on a tight budget, bid keywords high enough to get a top 3 position and adjust bids up or down as you collect performance data. This approach will generate sales faster, but you will waste some budget on non-performers as you collect data. For more on setting bids based on ROI data, see this article: Paid Search Bidding Based on ROI

Using this process, I find I can get a typical campaign going in an hour or two. Over time, I’ll go back in and re-apply these techniques to expand ad groups that are performing particularly well, and to look for new opportunities. There are also a number of more advanced techniques people use. I’ll include a couple here as extra credit:

1. The Search-Based Keyword Tool - Go to Opportunities > More tools … > Search-based Keyword Tool
   I find this tool is very finicky, but useful if you can get it to work. It looks at your site and draws on Google Analytics data to come up with keywords relevant to your content. It also tells you which page each keyword is associated with, which can be very helpful for organizing keywords in to ad groups. Google won’t tell you this (as of this writing), but the tool only works if you are signed up for Google Analytics and have your Analytics and AdWords accounts linked. It also won’t work from an MCC login. If you don’t know what that means, you don’t need to worry about it.
2. The Webmaster Tools Keyword Report - Log in to Webmaster Tools  > [your domain] > Your Site on the Web > Search Queries
   This report shows which keywords are driving traffic to your site via Google’s unpaid listings. This can be very helpful for identifying SEO opportunities, but also useful for paid search. You should be bidding on any keywords that are relevant to your business but for which you do not rank in the top few positions. In particular, this tool will show you keywords for which you are getting traffic, but rank poorly in organic search. For example, if you rank in position 9 for a keyword that is one of the top drivers of traffic to your site, you should add it to your paid search campaign. If you are not familiar with Webmaster Tools, click here to learn more: Webmaster Tools

There are also some subscription-based research tools that help the process of managing and growing keyword lists, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery being two of the most well-known. I don’t believe these tools are worth it for an individual advertiser unless you find yourself spending many hours per month managing keywords.

Anyone have other suggestions for getting a keyword list put together quickly? I’d love to hear them if you do!

And if you’d like help with search marketing, please drop us a line or give us a call: Contact Us

Google AdWords allows you to specify a match type for each keyword you bid on. Yahoo and Bing do too, though there are some slight variations in how they work.  The three match types in Google are exact, phrase and broad.  The match type you choose tells the search engine when to match a user’s query to your keyword. Here’s how each match type works:

• Exact: your ad will be served when and only when a user enters the keyword you purchased. If you want to make a keyword exact match, you put square brackets around it when you enter it.
• Phrase: your ad will be served when a user enters a phrase that includes the keywords you purchased in the same order. For example, if you bid on “house music”, your ad will match the query “download house music”, but not the query “new orleans music house”. If you want to make a keyword phrase match, you put quotes around it when you enter it.
• Broad: your ad will be served when a user enters a phrase that includes the keywords you purchased, and not necessarily in the same order. Your ad will also be served when a user enters a phrase that Google deems equivalent to your keywords, such as misspellings, synonyms or pluralizations. For example, if you bid on “denver taxidermy”, your ad will likely match the following queries:
  • “taxidermy denver”
  • “denver taxidermists”
  • “a taxidermist near denver”

  Broad match is the default, so you don’t have to do anything to specify broad match.

Think of match types like funnels. Broad matching is like a big, wide funnel that catches lots of queries. Phrase matching is like a medium-sized funnel that catches more queries than exact, but fewer than broad. Exact matching is like a funnel that doesn’t get any wider at the top, which isn’t much good as a funnel.

Also, while they don’t behave quite like match types, you can add negative keywords to an ad group or campaign. A negative keyword tells Google not to serve an ad when that keyword is present in the query. For example, if you created an ad group with the broad match keyword “denver taxidermy” and the negative keyword “squirrel”, Google would not serve your ad if someone searched for “denver squirrel taxidermy”. If you want to add a negative keyword, you put a minus sign before the keyword with no space, e.g. “-squirrel”.

Here’s a crazy stat: people search 200 million keywords in Google that have never been searched before every single day*. That probably puts the total number of unique queries that have ever been done on Google somewhere in the hundreds of billions. Your goal is to get your ads to show for any of those queries that are relevant to the products or services you sell. The broad match type is the best way to do that, and is what I use most of the time. But broad matching can also result in irrelevant traffic, so it’s a good idea to keep an eye on what keywords are driving visits to your site and add negative keywords where necessary. Most web analytics tools have a report that shows referring keywords, and the Google AdWords Search Query Performance Report shows some of the search phrases that were matched to your ad.

One trick I sometimes do is to add both an exact match version and a broad match version of the same keyword to an ad group. This allows me to see the performance of the exact match version, which is often better than the broad match version. Over time, I will bid up the exact match version if it is getting better results. For more on keyword bidding based on performance, see our article Paid Search Bidding Based on ROI.

It’s also not a good idea to just trust broad matching and not bother creating ads with variations of keywords you know are relevant to your business. Broad matching is a good way to catch keywords you don’t expect, but you should include any you do know about in your campaign. Doing so will help you understand the performance of each variation, and you can achieve higher quality scores by ensuring that text ads and landing pages are well matched to each keyword. See our article To-do List: Building a Keyword List for more on building keyword lists.

Lastly, Google’s Explanations of Match Types and Negatives: What are keyword matching options? – Adwords Help

* This stat is derived from search query data in these two posts: This week in search 1/8/10 and By the Numbers: Twitter vs Facebook vs Google Buzz

Here is a paraphrase of conversations I’ve had with several local businesses recently:

Them: “How do I get on the first page of Google?”

Me: “Show up in the local business results.”

In each case, these businesses have no real hope of cracking the first page of Google’s web results. They are relatively small, local businesses that sell products that are also sold by large national or international companies. These large companies have a much better shot at ranking well in Google web results and likely have significant search engine optimization (SEO) budgets as well. But in each case, Google is also including local listings along with web results for queries relevant to the businesses I’m talking to. Below is an example of the results I get from Google when I search for “office furniture”. You can see that in this case local listings show up after the third web result. Google shows local listings when it thinks I may be interested in finding something locally, and uses my IP address and other indicators to determine what “local” means to me. Sometimes local listings show up at the top, and sometimes they show up further down the page. While Google has had local listings for a while, they have been putting more emphasis on these listings in the last couple of years, and this trend is likely to continue. This is fantastic news for local business. (And kudos to Google for supporting local businesses in this way.)

It can take a bit of work to show up in the local listings. Depending on the search term and other variables, Google presents local listings in groupings of one, three, seven or ten. Assuming you are not the only business of your type in your area, the tasks below will help your listing to be among those top results.

Before getting to the list, there is one dynamic you should understand about Google local business listings. With local business listings, Google seeks to establish external verification of the content that appears on a business listing page (also known as a “Place Page”). Google uses public records of business data for verification, as well as business listings on yellow pages and other local sites. This verification process helps to prevent non-local or questionable businesses from showing up in the results, but it also means that you should be consistent in how you represent your name, address and other information about your business. For example, if your business name is ACME Plumbing, but you write it as “ACME Plumbing and Free Beer” in Google Place Pages, Google may not be able to verify your business name elsewhere, which could hurt your ranking.

I have organized the work in to a to-do list format, with explanations pertaining to each to-do list item. I also created a simple PDF to-do list for printing, without all of the explanations.

1. Claim your listing: if your business has been around for a while, Google probably already has a listing with basic information. If your business is relatively new, they may not. In either case, you need to claim your listing to be able to edit most of the elements described here. Here is a post I did a few months back describing the basics of claiming a listing: Adding a Google Local Business Center Listing
2. Enter Your Business Information
   1. Pick an Address – you may not have much choice about this, but you will be better off if you can specify an address in the largest town or city in your area. Google favors listings that are in the city a user searches, versus towns and cities nearby. This factor is so important that it may be worth considering opening an office or somehow establishing a central address if you are near-to but not in a big city. But don’t be deceptive, Google is on the lookout for businesses that falsify locations with P.O. boxes and such. It is also important that the address you specify is reinforced by mentions of your business on other sites. For more on this, see Citations below. Google also allows you specify service areas for your business, but at the time of this writing doing so is more likely to cause harm than good.
   2. Pick Categories – the categorization of your business listing is very important. Google uses categories to associate product and service search terms with your listing, even if those keywords don’t occur in your description or elsewhere. Google allows you to come up with your own custom categories, but it’s best to stick with standard categories as much as possible. As you are typing in category keywords, Google will suggest categories that relate to the keywords. These are the categories Google recognizes, and are likely to match to a wide variety of search terms. If you do feel that your business merits its own category, only do so if the category you create is a phrase people are likely to search. And don’t choose or create categories that are not directly relevant to your business. If the categories you choose do not relate to your web site or descriptions of your business on other sites, Google may penalize your listing.
   3. Pick a Business Name – you should stick with your registered business name or a registered DBA, but keywords here do matter. For example, if you offer physical therapy but your business name is just “John Smith”, you could consider getting a DBA of “John Smith Physical Therapy” and specifying that as your business name.
   4. Write a Description – the description can have a lot to do with whether or not your business gets a visit or a phone call, so above all else it should describe what you do in an accurate and compelling way. Try to introduce relevant keywords that are not in your business name or category selections, and avoid repeating category keywords unnecessarily.
   5. Pick a Phone Number – it is better to have a local phone number than a 1-800 number in your listing. And it helps if the number you specify is consistent with your business listing on other sites. It is also good if the number is unique to your business, so if you operate more than one business get more than one phone number.
   6. Add a Website Link – it is best if the link you specify points to a page that includes your business address. A “contact us” page is often a good choice, or if you have multiple locations you should create landing pages for each location and point to those with the corresponding Place Pages for those locations.
   7. Add Additional Details – Google allows you to add “additional details” to your listing such as brands carried or specific services. This is a great place to add lists of services offered or products carried, but don’t use this feature to repeat keywords you’ve already used in your categories or description.
3. Add photos: the completeness of a listing has an impact on ranking, and photos are an important part of being complete. As far as the ranking algorithm goes, the photos don’t have to be particularly good or interesting, but your goal is not just to rank, it is to have people visit or contact you. Many business owners upload poorly composed photos taken with a phone or similar low-fi device. It is worth making a little effort to get photographs that stand out. Google Place Pages are not very attractive on their own; good photos can help your listing convert visitors in to customers.
4. Add a Coupon: adding a coupon won’t do a lot for your ranking (it will do a little), but it gives visitors to your page a reason to take action, and helps turn comparison shoppers in to buyers.
5. Check for Completeness: as mentioned above, one of the metrics Google looks at when ranking listings is overall completeness. Make sure that you have filled out all of the information fields that are relevant to your business, and added additional content where possible.
6. Ask Your Friends to Review Your Listing: Google’s Place Pages UI feels like it is designed by robots and for robots. It is easy to get caught up in their drab world and forget that your goal is to share the excitement of your business with prospects. Have your friends look over your listing to make sure you are capturing what makes your business great.
7. Enjoy a Cold Drink and Wait for Our Next Checklist!

Extra Credit

1. Create a Video: while video belongs as part of a complete listing, I put it under Extra Credit because video takes effort to produce and plenty of listings do very well without video. Having video does not have a big impact on ranking, but video content can make your listing much more personal and it may be easier to create than you think. Production values are much less important than sincerity in a context like this. Below is an example of a small business video that has been wildly successful, with over 200,000 views. It is a bit over the top, but I also think there is a good lesson to be learned. Let your passion show and people will respond. You probably don’t need to swear as much as the man in the video, but he does make me believe he loves printing and I would give him my business if he was in my area.
2. Get Citations: It will also have a big impact if you get more listings and mentions of your business online. Being listed on the major directory sites and local sites such as Chambers of Commerce and local guides will help your Google Place Page ranking. If you have not done so already, create listings on the sites included in our article Top 10 Free Places to List Your Business. Also have a look at the David Mihm, Dave Cosper and Rand Fishkin articles below for more ideas on how to get mentions of your business.
3. Get Reviews: When you ask customers for feedback about your business, point them to an online review site such as Yelp or Superpages.com or your Google Place Page and ask them to provide feedback there. Google crawls many sources for reviews, so reviews almost anywhere can benefit your Place Page ranking. Some businesses are nervous about online reviews because a bad review can just sit out there forever-and-ever. If you are one of those, get over it. By encouraging your customers to review your business, the sum of feedback will provide a fair portrayal of how you are doing and you will appeal to a new generation of shopper that values reviews above all else. For more on soliciting reviews, see our article Unhappy Customer: Judge, Jury and Executioner?.

Click Here for the Printer-Friendly PDF To-Do List

Additional Resources:

• Local Search Ranking Factors – Various Contributors
• 8 Steps to Building an Optimized Local Business Listing – Dev Basu
  This is the 3rd article in a series of three. The first two are worth reading as well and linked-to from the top of this article.
• One Dead Simple Tactic for Better Rankings In Google Local – Rand Fishkin
• Local vs Traditional SEO: Why Citation Is the New Link – David Mihm
• Optimizing Your Business Listing for Local Search Supremacy – Dave Cosper

I generally write here about topics related to online marketing with the goal of being useful to local businesses. This is a bit different, apologies in advance for my transgression.

One of my favorite authors is Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian writer who was also for a time the Director of the National Public Library of Argentina. He mostly wrote short stories, and his stories were often explorations of the quest for knowledge in the face of overwhelming quantities of information. That he wrote about this subject before the advent of computers and digitized information gives him a unique perspective on an area that I struggle with constantly.

One story in particular has been on my mind quite a bit recently, “Funes the Memorious.” The story describes a boy who fell from a horse and acquired a perfect memory, the ability to remember every sensory detail of everything he had ever experienced. The story is written from the point of view of Borges, who ends up spending a night in conversation with Funes. At the beginning of the conversation the reader feels awe and even envy at the boy’s talents. He learned Latin in a matter of days, and said of his life before the fall that he “looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything, almost everything.”

Of late I feel like I am capsized in a whitewater of media. I find myself wanting to comb through it all, to find fragments of knowledge and moments of human contact. Twitter epitomizes this for me. In Facebook I am mostly connected to people I already know. I use it to keep in touch, and to engage in casual interaction. In Twitter I am struck by the stark contrast between the torrents of repeated chatter and the occasional bit of insight making its way downstream. I learn new things and make new friends, but I also find myself wishing I were more like Funes. Where I find myself dragged under by the turbulence, Funes would find it as calm as a reflecting pool. Funes could follow a thousand twitterers and give every one due attention, even a thousand thousand.

But to be Funes is not a thing to wish for. Borges describes his plight:

It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to turn one’s mind from the world; Funes, lying on his back on his cot in the shadows, could imagine every crevice and every molding in the shaply defined houses surrounding him. (I repeat that the least important of his memories was more minute and more vivid than our perception of physical pleasure or physical torment.)

Borges further explains that “to think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.” Another way of looking at it is that ideas are given meaning by the spaces in between. If we think of everything that is called a “dog” as an individual entity without generalizing, it becomes difficult to tell where dogs end and jackals or wolves begin. This is the problem I have with media today. It affords me no spaces in which to build archetypes or even to let one individual stand out from the next. Sometimes I find it difficult to sleep, difficult to turn my mind from the stream.

I like to solve problems, but I can’t say as I’ve made much progress with this one. I think we are all suffering the plight of Funes to some extent. Some solve it by shutting off all of the streams, but that is not the right solution for me. I like meeting new people and learning new things, and to shut myself off from media would be to exclude myself from the prevailing currents of culture. Borges saw the coming challenges of an information society but he did not turn away from them, he faced them head on. We will find ways to bridge differences and make abstractions that allow us to be infinitely connected and yet sleep peacefully. In my own small way I hope to be part of that.

“Reputation management” is a term that is used to describe a variety of activities related to monitoring and management of online presence and reputation. Reputation management is important for organic ranking in search engines, because it helps generate more links to your site. It is also important because most people research purchasing decisions online before visiting a store. How visible you are and how you are being talked about will have a direct impact on your sales.

From a local business standpoint, reputation management activities include:

• Review monitoring and negative review mitigation
• Monitoring of brand name mentions on other sites
• Management of business listing information on directories and local search sites

Some of the tools below help with all of these activities, and others are specialized to just one. The tools listed here were selected out of several dozen that we reviewed. To make the final cut, a tool had to be useful, easy-to-use and free. If you have a favorite that we didn’t include, please comment below.

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Quickly search social media for mentions of your brand or related keywords with SocialMention

SocialMention searches a variety of social media sources to provide a comprehensive view of how you are being talked about in social media. The interface makes it very easy to drill down into specific channels such as blogs, Twitter, photo sharing sites, etc. You can also set up alerts to notify you of new mentions. One drawback is that it is not locally-focused at all, so it may not work as well for you if your business name is used elsewhere on the web. I did get quite a few false positives when trying various local business names. By “false positive” I mean a mention of your business name that is not actually referring to your business. This is a common setback of monitoring tools, particularly if your business name is not particularly unique. SocialMention is also a great tool for monitoring keywords that are topically relevant to your business.

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Grow your online network with HootSuite

Hootsuite is for general-purpose social media management versus reputation management specifically, but it is remarkably feature-rich for a free tool. And monitoring is only useful if you can add people to your network and engage in conversations, which is what HootSuite is all about.  You can use the tool to monitor wall posts in Facebook, @replies in Twitter and various other social network activities. You can also post and schedule updates in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and several other networks. And if you have a blog, you can have Hootsuite automatically push new blog post notifications to your networks via RSS integration. You can also set up HootSuite to monitor for keyword mentions in Twitter.

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Make sure you are showing up with GetListed.org

GetListed.org is a simple, easy-to-use tool for checking to see if you are listed in major local directory sites. It shows whether your business is listed in Google, Yelp, Bing, Yahoo and Best of Web and indicates whether the listing has been claimed. It has links to get signed up, and tips for how to optimize your listings.

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Get a dashboard view of your online business presence with Marchex Reputation Management

This one may not be free for long, but it is right now. Of the tools listed here, Marchex is perhaps the most powerful from a local business standpoint, though Yext Rep is pretty comparable. The tool provides a dashboard view of reviews of your business, mentions of your business and listings in several major directories. To find mentions, they have indexed a great number of locally-oriented sites, and show fewer false positives than any of the other tools I tried. I also like the clean, intuitive user interface, and their help section has great tips for local businesses.

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Manage conversations and monitor your listings with Yext Rep

Yext Rep and Marchex Reputation Management are similar in many respects, so you will probably want to choose one or the other. Yext Rep is brand new, but given how powerful it is now, it could quickly lead the pack if Yext continues to add features. In comparison to Marchex, Yext Rep monitors more directory sites for listings, but fewer local media publishers for mentions. And while Marchex provides an analytical view of your business presence, Yext Rep provides a more conversational view. Mentions show up very much like the status stream in Facebook and Twitter, and you can reply to some networks directly from the Yext Rep interface. I recommend giving both a try and seeing which you prefer.

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Honorable mention: Google Alerts

Google Alerts is not quite as easy-to-use as the other tools mentioned here, but it is a very powerful tool for monitoring of brand or other keyword mentions. Here is a post I did a couple of months ago describing how to use Google Alerts for monitoring: Reputation Management: 1% Perspiration, 99% Google Alerts

A few other related blog posts:

• Unhappy Customer: Judge, Jury and Executioner
• Top 10 Free Places to List Your Business

This post is part of a series of posts describing the ingredients that cause media to go viral: Viral Marketing Ingredients

Virtuosity describes when a story or video captures sheer, remarkable talent. From a viral standpoint, it also helps if the talent is coming from someone we have never heard of. For example, we all know Eric Clapton can play the guitar, but have you ever heard of Funtwo? I hadn’t either, but a video of him playing Vivaldi is one of the most-watched on YouTube. And the words “I learned to play guitar with GuitarMasterPro.net!” that accompany the video have driven many aspiring Funtwo’s to the guitar instruction site/service. The low-fi clip was produced by GuitarMasterPro, and markets their services as well as Clapton ever could.

While the GuitarMasterPro video captures what the site is offering, this one is about as subtle as advertising gets. Can you tell who produced this video?

Watch for it … watch for it …

Ok, did you notice the Gatorade bottle sitting next to her chair right at the end? Unfortunately, the clip is a fake and no matter how much Gatorade you drink you won’t be able to defy gravity. The ball girl was a stuntwoman assisted by wires. But for a while people passed the clip around, wondering at her achievement.

This last one is not marketing any business or product, but the Evolution of Dance has to be included for the fact that it launched the talented but otherwise unknown Justin Laipply in to viral stardom. This video is one of the most watched ever on YouTube.

As a marketing technique, virtuosity works best when it is relevant to the nature of your business. Does your product or service enable people to do remarkable things? If so, think about capturing some of your customers doing what they do on video. Not only does this showcase what you offer, it is a way to celebrate your customers.

Two Octobers helps businesses in Colorado’s Front Range with low- and no-cost marketing. For more information on our services, click here.

Google released an algorithm change early this month that has been dubbed “Mayday”. The name references the timing of the release, but it also describes the panic expressed by many SEO consultants who have invested much time and effort into optimizing sites according to their theories of how Google’s crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms work.

SEO forums such as WebmasterWorld are abuzz with the prattling-on of search engine optimizers who are debating how to take advantage of this latest update. I can’t respond to this chatter any better than the excellent advice of Vanessa Fox on Search Engine Land:

Focus on what Google is trying to accomplish as it refines things (the most relevant, useful results possible for searchers) and you’ll generally avoid too much turbulence in your organic search traffic.

On the heels of this update I have had various conversations with local businesses who hope to achieve top ranking for competitive keywords. To those businesses I have two pieces of advice:

1. Play to your strength – focus on local optimization.
2. Invest in content, not SEO.

Play To Your Strength

Google and other search engines are getting increasingly better at recognizing local intent in user’s queries. For example, if I do the query “industrial supply”, I get Google local results after the first two listings. I was talking to a client recently who has a small business selling industrial supplies and hoped to show up on the first page of results. Maybe it would be possible for a small business to show up on the first page of organic results, but not without a considerable investment in link-builing and content development. On the other hand, the competition for local results is not that strong.

Many SEO consultants will take your money and do their best to improve your ranking in the organic results, but the return on investment is likely to be much better for local optimization, and you are less vulnerable to the whims of the next Google update. Look for a marketing consultant who has experience with local optimization, or read up on Mike Blumenthal and Matt McGee and work on it yourself.

Invest In Content, Not SEO

Or, at least, invest more in content than SEO. The goal of a search engine is to deliver the page that best matches a user’s query. There are a number of best practices that help ensure that a search engine can crawl your content, and that you are getting credit for the good content you offer. But pick any one of those and I can find an example of a page with good content that doesn’t comply and still shows up in the top results. It is possible to game search engine algorithms and rank well with poor content, but the safer and better long term investment is to provide content that is useful to searchers.

I was responsible for SEO for the social/local community Guidespot.com (my involvement ended about a year and a half ago), and we did incredibly well in organic search. But my job was easy, because we were investing a lot in fostering good content. If you are striving to achieve a top ranking, you should ask yourself if your content is more comprehensive, funnier, more informative, more engaging or in some way better than all of the other content on the web. If not, you are polishing a turd, as the expression goes.

I don’t think it is possible to give an exact ratio, but if your SEO budget is more than 1/10th of what you spend on content, you are probably spending too much.

In summary, you should not care about any given algorithm update if you are a small, local business. Focus on showing up well in local search before trying to compete with large, national businesses in the organic search engine results, and invest in good content on your web site if you want to attract visitors.