This crowdsourcing approach has promise and it will become clear where as the weeks and months pass.  But with such a simplified and accessible tool like this available for free, we may see organizations begin to use it for casual meeting organization, conferences, and who-knows-what.

So keep all of that in mind as you read my ideas for how to use Google Moderator in your business:

1. Organizing meeting agendas or committee meetings
   Why ramble about things nobody cares about? Let meeting attendees post their questions before the meeting and then rate their importance so the meeting agenda can be adjusted and made more efficient. But will those who are worse about babbling on take the time to use the tool or is it more about alpha personalities?  I love the idea of walking into a meeting and knowing that the questions that were most important to the participants will be up first.  There is no hiding from the reality of a vote like this.
2. Organizing conference sessions (duh!) or saving your ass in a presentation.
   Very similar to meetings, but for groups of people who may want to decide IF they want to attend a given session. By reviewing the session voting before choosing to attend, they can get a sense of the crowd and how the session might go. Conferences such as SXSW have been doing panel voting for a while, so this idea is well proven. If you find your presentation/agenda is going downhill, crowdsourcing “day 2″ etc. might save the day.
3. Organizing FAQs for a company, product, or service.
   Frequently asked questions about your company should truly answer questions people care about. Most FAQs are too well crafted and sound inauthentic, so Google Moderator may be a way to obtain a well sorted list to then transfer to your website later.  I think the organization may want to post the ’seed’ questions first, and let consumers add new ones in their own voice. The same can be said for creating relevant FAQs over time for products or services. The question remains if Google will put together an API that lets us embed such features into websites directly and avoiding opening a new tab, etc.
4. Deciding on product features/offerings, fleshing out concepts
   If you are considering starting up a business or creating a product, you can create a list of suggested questions and put them to the vote. “What’s more important to you…” or “When do you find yourself considering…” might be some great starter questions. While I believe one can do this with pay-per-click or other methods, this adds a new dimension to the equation. While this method has its problems, there may be something to the methodology.
5. Designing interviews or research projects
   If you have a plan to interview someone, you can pose a few suggested questions to your readership before the scheduled interview. You can then be relatively sure that you’ll hit the points that people care about while structuring the interview well. This has been done in other places before, but Google Moderator makes it pretty damn easy. If you have limited time or funds, you can use this tool to determine the questions you should answer in your outcomes (especially when you’re publicly funded or your audience reaction has a big influence on your work.)
6. Creation of how-to articles, email newsletters or videos.
   If you’ve put out a new product or service, you may not be sure which technical support or customer support questions are most important. We, as technologists often overlook the questions most important to the average user. We might think that getting the USB 2.0 interface at maximum speed matters, while the consumers just want to know where the switch is to turn off the damn sound.
7. Live Q&A for webcasts or other “distance learning” scenarios
   Google Moderator seems pretty fast, so if you’re interested in doing live Q&A for a webcast or possibly an online presentation, you can use it to gather and field questions DURING the session. The pace means very few votes will be cast for each question. I guess it remains to be seen if this will work well versus something simple like Twitter for voting. One must be careful that voting does not distract too much from the presentation as well.
8. Bonus Idea 1: Deciding on Email Newsletter Topics
   If you’re thinking of sending out a newsletter or other marketing communications to thousands of people, it might pay to let people show you what they care about before sending it, thus reducing opt-out rates and improving retention. Just make sure the target audience matches the ones who are voting.

Concerns and Other Thoughts

But how many participants and votes must you have before it is useful? Is it risky to use the tool with a

group of, say 50 people? 20? I have often wondered why systems such as LinkedIN and Yahoo Answers never allowed people to vote on questions (it would be a great idea to get rid of the riff-raff) but they must have their reasons. Tools like Amazon’s askville have voting on questions now.

Other posts on Google Moderator

Andy Beal - Google Moderator Launches, Raising the Question: “Are Google Engineers Bored With Search?”

Mashable (Stan Schroeder)

Crowd photo by James Cridland

Web MD Most Popular Stories

1. 41 Ways to Flatten Your Belly
2. 6 Sex Mistakes Men Make
3. 9 Tips for Flat Abs
4. Sex Myths vs. the Facts
5. 11 Supplements to Boost Your Libido
6. Signs of Sun-Damaged Skin
7. 7 Slimming Tips From the Skinniest State
8. 5 Weight Gain Shockers
9. 25 Questions to Ask Before Getting Married
10. Salmonella Outbreak: Tomatoes Safe to Eat

As you can see the content that wins is ‘tabular’ in nature. That is, it tabulates in the form of a list or in a list of comparisons, etc.

My new friend and fellow Yahoo! Store Developer Rob Snell was invited by a director at Yahoo! Small Business to testify in front of Congress at a hearing of the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Small Business about Online Advertising. His preperation and written testimony was easy-to-read and Rob published it here at Search Engine Land. You should definitely read that first.

Now that’ he’s back and rested, with a fresh .gov link in his pocket, I thought I’d ask him a few short questions about how it went, what it was like as an experience, and what he thought it meant for search marketing’s future.

Scott: We had lunch at SMX Advanced and know you’ve been on the road pretty much since then. I want to thank you for carving out a few minutes with me.

Rob: Not a problem!

Scott: The public has had a difficult time understanding search marketing. Did you feel that the assembled panel truly understood the industry?

Rob: Yep. Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, especially. He understands the overall concepts from top to bottom. Was asking good questions about the specific applications. Lynn Westmoreland, too. I think the DUMMIES material helped, but these guys were sharp.

Scott: Did you stick to your written testimony? If not, what areas did you expand on?

Rob: Written testimony was 5 minutes. Q&A ran almost 2 hours. You can watch highlights on Youtube.

Scott: What other types of testimonies did you hear on the panel?

Rob: It was a good panel. I was able to talk about Gun Dog Supply, our family’s web store. There was a content guy who runs Adsense, Askthebuilder.com’s Tim Carter, who really has his act together. The Retailer of the group was SkyFacet.com, and their CEO and Founder Paul Sanar (23 years old) does 5x the volume we do, which speaks volumes. Randall Rothenberg was there as head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and represents Web publishers and advertisers and was very, very knowledgeable. Lastly, Richard Lent, CEO of AgencyNet NYC brought extremely well-rounded knowledge, mostly from working with upper end clients. They were all well-prepared.

Questions Asked To Rob

• How do retailers deal with all these keywords?
• Would I sell my keyword lists?
• How can small firms get into buying paid search ads?
• How easy is it to get online? And launch paid search ads?
• Are you afraid of Google’s domination in the search engines?
• What are the differences in free search and paid search?
• What did we think Congress should do? What should Congress NOT do?
• For more… click on Rob’s wrapup

Scott: Coming out of it, how did the SEM industry fare in the minds of the audience?

Rob: Great! It was more SEM in general and paid search than SEO. The panel was ONLINE ADVERTISING and SEO was a small part of that. Personally, I was afraid that the “SEO is snake oil” problem would rear its head, and the only negative I heard was the “I paid an SEO $35,000 and I got banned from Google” horror story, but IMHO dude should have done his homework before paying that kind of cash to an SEO.

Scott: What do you think the SEM industry could learn from what you heard?

Rob: Google needs to be careful. Congress can step in at any moment and regulate our industry if they think they need to do so. Kinda scary!

Scott: Cool Rob, I’ll look forward to your wrap up later. Get some rest!

Rob: Thanks!

For more… click on Rob’s wrapup

Last week we went to Eastern Kentucky to pick up our daughters who were attending an equestrian sleep-away camp. When we arrived, we noticed the other kids were calling our daughters by camp nicknames. For camp it was fun. One of my kids liked their name, while the other one didn’t care for it.

It struck me that nicknames given to you by your camp-mates are much like how public perception treat brands in the age of consumer participation. Kids that are popular or well liked proudly answer to “Braveheart” or “Gypsy Queen” while unpopular kids suffer the week as “Birdlegs” or “Pigpen.” They might like to change their name, or the name might be unfair, but as soon as more than one person talks about it, it sticks. Even with a huge effort, sometimes it cannot be corrected (e.g. giving other camp mates $40 to not call you that name for the rest of the week perhaps.) It would have been much easier to befriend the leaders of the group earlier, as good interaction skills can often make up for, well, bird-legs.

The first person likely talk about you in public circles holds amazing power if they are an influencer. If you hear the name early you might prevent the nickname spreading through some reputation management. Let things get out of hand and they will tell others your name… the problem is exponential… not much you can do about the name or perception.

What nickname would your customers give you?

photo by Katherine and used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

• She found the first animals besides humans to use tools.
• She discovered that chimpanzees have wars, and that they adopt unrelated children.
• She discovered they ate meat.
• She forced us to reconsider what “man” means.

Goodall didn’t force her way into the group. She spent months sitting in a spot she called “the peak” learning by watching with her binoculars. From this distance, she noted patterns, such as the hierarchy of the community and slowly earned the trust of the skittish Gombe chimps.

One day a male chimp approached the camp, leaping, screaming, and running in circles. It was terrifying, and most of us would have either ran or taken a defensive posture. But Goodall had learned enough to see through the dramatic display and stayed calm. After a few tense moments, it became clear why it was there. The male chimp only wanted a banana that had been hanging in the camp. Goodall gave it to him, and history was made.

The rest of the community saw what the first chimp had done, and that Goodall had not harmed them, and the trust spread. Over the following years, she became the only known person to be fully accepted into a Chimpanzee community. If she and her team had been assertive, insensitive or clumsy, the community would have sounded a warning cry and a very tall wall of defense would have been erected.

The “Goodall Effect” allowed integration into the social fabric of the Gombe community, and could be a good metaphor for educating traditional brand managers about integrating into the fabric of social networks.

Listen first, learn, offer something of value, learn the culture, and never ever betray the trust.

Photo taken by user:Jeek in w:Hong Kong University, Hong Kong on 24 October 2004.

My feelings are that the number of visits (and votes) you obtain from a strong social media presence have long-term benefits that transcend the spikes and that these deserve a discussion.

Authority Influences Search Influences Increasingly Targeted Traffic Over Time.

People use search to find what they’re after 85% of the time and top search results are obtained through authority and trust. Google ranks things based on its best guess of trust and authority, as does Yahoo!, Live.com, Technorati, and del.icio.us. We want links and votes from important groups of people for their click-traffic, but also so that we rank better in the search engines.

Social media opens doors that other forms of marketing cannot.

Godin may not be considering that this unfocused traffic is just the frothy, chaotic front of a wave after which important, difficult-to-acquire links follow. To use Godin’s terminology, it’s then the “sneezers” who use social media’s ability to sift out important stuff using crowd wisdom (votes in this case.) If you have remarkable stuff, social media can float you through “the dip” of today’s river of news in a way you’d never achieve otherwise.

In Purple Cow, Godin wrote:

• Sell what people are buying
• Focus on the early adopters and sneezers
• Make it remarkable enough for them to pay attention
• Make it easy for them to spread
• Let it work its own way to the mass market.

Sneezers have established trust in their community online - at varying levels - in sort of a steep tail. They resist marketing efforts to influence their words and protect their reputations. Words and Links from these people usually cannot be bought at any price, and they’ve probably forgotten what a press release looks like. They have earned, through authority granted by others, a place in the search engines’ hearts.

So take a fictional moderately popular Digg post that brings traffic to your site…

• Short term Digg Visits: 5000
• Short Term Exit Rate: 90%
• Short term Conversions: 0 (dry those tears, it gets better)
• Rank for your favored keyword on Google before: 40
• Short term Influencer Visits: 200
• Influencer links: 5
• Subsequent sub-influencer links: 50
• Visits (over time) via the influencer links: 5000 targeted visitors.
• Visits (over time) via increased search rank: 5000 somewhat targeted visitors.
• Digg who?

Okay, you can beat up my numbers but the point I want to make is that this traffic is a means to an end, not the end itself. By the time you’re seeing the effects of your work on social media, you have long fallen off of the front page of Digg, and your Stumbleupon traffic may be in the dumpster. The beat goes on.

To sum up…A popular Digg/Stumble/Reddit post has these effects:

• A often dramatic spike in traffic - with a high bounce rate. Noisy.
• Attention granted by influencers who use Digg/Stumble votes as a filter on what’s important.
• Improved search rank due to persistent authority linkages from relevant conversations elsewhere.
• A sustained increase in relevant, high quality traffic through the direct-click traffic of the new links found in the long-tail of referrals from influencers.
• A slow increase in trust for your site as an authority by the influencers (they may look more closely at your next post / product / idea. Darren Rowse calls this a “Digging Culture”
• Increased attention via RSS and newsletter subscriptions.

Anytime someone mentions “Digg” and “Conversions” in the same paragraph, I get nervous. So let me know what you think about this explanation.

So Seth, from a big fan, I say to you that silly traffic might not be that silly after all.

Illustration by geishaboy500 used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

Ok, it’s the middle of the night and I’m sitting in a rock hard airport chair, but my mind is on the takeaways that I have from the SMX Social Media conference. Much of this I knew, but it was heavily re-enforced.

The bigest benefit, as with most of these small shows, is the contacts and friendships I have started or continued. I think the best in the world were at the show, and for clients who seek out these people, huge success awaits.

While I think the overall presentation quality was high, my favorites were Randy Woods‘ well-grounded discussion and Rob Key’s insightful discussion about tribal culture and Second Life. I was also impressed by Brent Csutoras’ discussion about link building.

But the client-marketer relationship was the one thing that bugged me most. Nobody seemed keen on sharing information about this essential element of the SMM profession, yet I could definitely sense lots of folks were seeking it. I often wonder if conference organizers should think more about the harsh, real-world realities of getting programs like these in place. Or perhaps there’s just no way to wrap that up into a single presentation.

20 Take-Aways:

1. Social Media Marketing (SMM) is terrific for link building, not for conversions. This is a major change for many marketers to internalize and incorporate into their offering.
2. It takes a special kind of client/consultant relationship to make SMM work. It’s closer to organic SEO work than any other web marketing in the “grind-it-out” nature.
3. SMM cannot be sold as a one-off service or “by the campaign.” Too many external variables mean you have to execute many campaigns over time to hedge your bets. To sell as a one-off service is to invite failure and client ill-will.
4. SMM requires incredible organization on the part of the marketer. Both to keep track of a campaign and to make sure not to break out of acceptable tribal ‘participation.’
5. SMM link building requires a keen eye for linkbait that relates to your marketing goals and finesse to make sure it’s not overtly sales-like in presentation.
6. Vertical social networks should be an important part of any campaign. Smaller numbers of highly enthusiastic players are using these sites.
7. Explaining SMM to clients is going to be very, very difficult. But those who have an inherent curiosity and willingness to participate will earn a strong competitive advantage.
8. Having a strong network of friends is essential to SMM, and that network requires daily nurturing.
9. Wikipedia makes Digg look like a baby traffic wise, and there are opportunities…but…
10. Wikipedia sessions feel a lot like COBOL classes. Even if the people are smart, that whole thing requires a really strong level of patience and persistence. But 5m+ page views daily makes marketers salivate.
11. People need to create policies to outline who owns SMM profiles, what happens when there is a change of hands.
12. To succeed in social network marketing, plugged-in individuals who know the “tribe’s habits” will win. 20-year PR veterans need not apply if they are still in the mindset of the press release or are unwilling to spend time participating before promoting. Plenty of people have got in trouble.
13. There are a lot of really smart people in SMM. Compared to other forms of marketing, the growth and opportunity aligns with trends towards authenticity, word-of-mouth, and making up for short consumer attention spans.
14. One of my greatest worries is that clients will write off SMM while their competition runs with it. I worry because catch-up is a tough game to play in SMM and you can’t rush it.
15. Even one SPAM slip-up in a social network can ruin an entire branding or SMM effort. Social networks have zero tolerance for screw-ups. Re-building a profile can take 6 months or more of hard work.
16. SMM is risky if your brand is fragile or an easy target - putting your brand out in the public eye requires awareness of the cost-benefits. Almost always it’s worth it - that is if you sell a decent product, but you will need to weather the storm of negatives that will come your way with skill.
17. Advertising agencies don’t get it, for the most part.
18. SEO/SMM are joined at the hip for many things and a link building effort can stack up dozens if not hundreds of authority links…but direct-click traffic itself, independent of the SEO/link advantages, can be significant.
19. Participation in social networks - real participation - is a requirement, and is very time consuming. I left wondering who will pay for this time.
20. Red-eyes suck.

A few other places to get SMX social-media related information. Add more to comments and I’ll add to this list with ‘follow’

Coverage of the Jason Calacanis and Jimmy Wales panel
More coverage of the Social Search: The Human Challengers
Social Media Marketing Essentials
Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking

Even though many people I follow on twitter will be at the same events as me, there are always lots of folks who will be at conferences and meet ups I don’t know. I have found that Summize’s new Twitter search is a great way to get those folks into my Twitter stream - or at least follow them during (or after) the event using my mobile - provided they’ve tweeted at least once about the show or plans to attend.

The process couldn’t be easier.

1. Hit Summize.com and click on the “Twitter Search” link.

2. Add keywords related to your event. For SMX Social Media I added “SMX” because it was a nice short acronym I felt would capture most action related to this event. If anyone were tweeting about it, they’d include this. If you didn’t have such a convenient one, you may need to include the venue name, etc. (curious that there is no SMX Social twitter user we could all follow and send @’s to “where’s the party at?”. this would at least make backchatter more fun.)

3. After you search Summize, click on the upper-right side link for “Feed for this Query” link. For SMX Social Media I used this.

4. Drop that into your favorite mobile feedreader, such as google reader or newsgator go.

5. When you see people tweeting about the event, but haven’t yet met them, you can head over to twitter and follow them. This serves to get you into their Twitter stream and to let them know that you’re interested in meeting them.

Now, as event-related stuff happens, you’ll be in the loop and it’ll make socializing that much easier.

]]> http://www.sitecreations.com/blog/2008/04/use-summize-and-twitter-to-meet-friends-at-events.html/feed http://www.sitecreations.com/blog/2008/03/broad-match-keyword-insertion.html http://www.sitecreations.com/blog/2008/03/broad-match-keyword-insertion.html#comments Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:05:31 +0000 Scott Clark http://www.sitecreations.com/blog/2008/03/broad-match-keyword-insertion.html Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) is the process by which you can carry the search phrase into your ads on Google. You’ve probably seen the silly ads by companies like Ebay who end up with ridiculous ads such as “Buy Nuclear Waste on Ebay” for a search about Nuclear Waste. It’s no wonder eBay pulled these ads from Google last year… they were probably wasting huge money.

Sloppy PPC

Broad match PPC ads with DKI are sloppy. Such automated ads rarely improve the search experience.  A few more advanced PPC managers create morphing landing pages that account for this…but most advertisers are winging it.

Luckily for searchers - the syntax is hard for newbies and scares away many amateur advertisers. But there are plenty of fire-and-forget adwords buyers who are using it.

The only way I can see DKI being useful for those who care about the performance of their campaigns is through their use with exact match and highly researched keyphrases on the search network only. Here, you can insert text into the ad and guide the user into a relevant, thematic adgroup that funnels people into a landing page for the purpose. If the phrase doesn’t appear in the list you’ve defined, your ad does not display.

Will Quality Score Take Care of the Problem?

Will Quality Score slaps get rid of this problem on their own?  I’m not sure.  My tests have not shown any impact on costs of ‘poor’ ads using DKI that I’ve seen from clients.  The silly ads just keep running.  Google has said before that they use only exact matches to do the calculation, and they will disable poor quality keywords… but it still gets confusing about exactly what happens in the broad match + DKI situation.  I guess it depends on the landing pages.

Trademark Troubles

The trouble starts when people begin to enter trademarked terms. Now, the ad-buying company is posting ads generated by the search activity that might include trademarked phrases. This negligence appears to be gaining some legal footing as a justifiable lawsuit, where earlier it was a bit fuzzy and things were happening on both sides. Only if you post negative keyphrases of all trademarked terms in your industry can you prevent it.

Exact match DKI - What would this do?

Exact match DKI prevents the problem, improves the ads, and puts the responsibility for legal keyword use in ads squarely on the advertiser. If the ad showed the keyword in ad copy, there is no question the phrase is in the advertisers’ keyword list somewhere.  Google can disable poor quality keywords straightaway from the keyword list rather than through some mysterious invisible system.

What are your thoughts? Should Google block DKI on broad match? What are some good uses of this you’ve found? Does quality score, which is determined through exact match vesion of keyphrase only

I recently went to get my hair cut at one of the most Mayberry-like barber shops you’ve ever seen. It’s the Facebook of the 1950s, stuck in time, the chairs are original. The smiles are authentic. Conversations filled the air. It was a pretty day, and the place was busy.

A person I know well was there with her child, and was talking about how she recently bought a lighting fixture . Once it was up, she didn’t like it. It just didn’t look right when they held it up in it’s proposed location. She it back to the store in original condition. That’s when the trouble started.

The store proceeded to charge her a restocking charge of 20%. They fought with her, for 20 minutes, over approximately $40. She put up a fight and eventually the store gave in. The store’s manager told her “We’re doing it this time, but next time we can’t.” I hate to break it to him, but there will not be a next time.

But it gets worse, Mr. Manager. Much much worse.

I can see the manager’s thought process as he does quick single-customer break-even analysis: “It’s going to cost us $xx.xx to take this back and resell it. We need to get that money out of this person before they leave the room or we end up losing money.” Lifetime value probably didn’t cross their mind. Emotional impact of the argument didn’t, nor did effects of pissing off a social butterfly.

But that’s exactly what happened. You see, I’ve been to this customer’s house. It’s lovingly restored and she takes great pride in it. She host get-togethers all the time in the form of bridge games to book clubs to dinner parties where conversations often end in the request of a tour of her 1920s house. The new lighting fixture would have entered those conversations - to the 20+ people who would have seen it in her home, as well as the 8 or so listening in at the barber shop. Her authentic voice carries well.

If she was a habitual buy-and-try customer, the store might have to put their foot down. But she was a first-timer with lots of friends. The lighting store blew it.

Bottom line: the $40 restocking fee fight probably cost that company $1000+ in lifetime value and $10000 or more in PR damage.

What they should have done:

“Mrs. Smith, we’re sorry that this didn’t work out - I will be giving you 110% of your purchase price to help cover some of the trouble. All I ask is that you consider our store for your next purchase (hand her a fresh catalog) and that perhaps you tell a few friends about our company. Would you like to go through some alternatives to the fixture that didn’t work out? Why don’t you tell me a little bit about your house.”

That would have exceeded her expectations , emotionally engaged her, and been remarkable.

Enter Rejuvenation Lighting. This store (and blog) is not in the light fixture business. They sell emotions and they realize it. The “Rejuvenation Community” connects people with a reproduction lighting “otaku.” They don’t have the opportunity that the local store had to engage in person, which would have been a huge competitive advantage, because they screwed up so badly.

Rejuvenation ’s return policy offers peace of mind.

We understand the unpredictable nature of the restoration, remodeling, and building process. With few exceptions, as listed below, we offer a full refund of your purchase on items returned to us within 30 days of the shipping date. … If the error is ours, we will pay all shipping costs.

Now that’s seeing things in a whole new light.

photo credit: ishanz