Structure social for customers not departments

It's a trap that many companies fall into and is a killer for customer experience. 

Customers need a centralised concierge who can respond and provide useful information in an engaging way. 

What happens behind the scenes is not your customer's concern and it is up to the social team to develop processes for making information management seamless. 

Customer's shouldn't be able to see your organisational chart by looking at how your social accounts are set up. 

Your social account architecture shouldn't be the same as your organisational chart if you want to deliver true customer service. 

 

 

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The SEO death march? Matt Cutts warning on Google Penguin

I wrote the other day about how changes to the Google search engine 'Penguin' will change you SEO and content marketing strategy. 

Further comments from Google's head of search spam Matt Cutts should have the entire SEO industry and online marketers on high alert:

"You don't want the next Penguin update". 

Barry Schwartz summarised his murmurings from a conference yesterday:

"He even added the next few updates will be "jarring and jolting" for webmasters and SEOs.

"I've never seen a warning like this before from Google. It makes it sound like the Penguin update will be felt by many many more SEOs. Our initial poll said about 65% of SEOs were hurt by Penguin - why so many more than Panda which was 40%? Well, this is aim more at SEO techniques despite what Google wants to say otherwise."

Matt Cutts is known for openly dismissing any efforts to 'game' Google search and any warnings should be taken seriously. 

Is this the end of SEO as we know it?

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Journalism at the speed of bytes: Australian newspapers in the 21st century

SpeedofBytes.pdf Download this file

Research via http://www.walkleys.com/

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Resourcing for big data marketing

The Guardian is doing a lot of work on 'data journalism' to drive traffic and clicks to site. 

Most companies have a lot of raw data and some have software that can group and benchmark (Media Monitors, Google analytics, Radian6), but raw data sets aren't very helpful. 

Have a look at some of the work that they've done for the Olympics and think about the resourcing requirement you need to publish this kind of content. 

From a functional perspective, you'll need a data analyst, a journalist or editor and a graphic designer. 

You'll need a data analyst to receive the brief from the journalist about the story they're trying to tell e.g. "I want to see the top 12 things the data is showing us from the Olympics."

The analyst can then pull the data and decide with the journalist the best way of presenting the information e.g. infographic. 

The analyst and journalist can then brief a graphic designer to produce the infographic or charts in time for the deadline-you need to make sure the information is timely for the news event. 

Once the final visual is agreed, then the journalist can write the story around the data and publish to site. Online and social teams can push out the story and drive conversations and traffic across company channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Google +. 

What does your company do with its data and how do you tell the stories around it to add value to customers? 

 

 

 

 

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How Google Penguin may change the way you distribute press releases

Changes to the Google algorithm "Penguin" mean you may need to change the way you distribute press releases. 

Google is always coming up with new ways to improve search and prevent people gaming search rankings with keywords and link stuffing. 

So if you (or your PR/SEO) agency are sending out press releases with links back to your site that fill spammy directory type sites, you are actually damaging your site's page rank. 

Many agencies have big email lists of supposed "newswire directories" that they are sending SEO optimised copy to such as press releases of infographics. They'll tell you "we sent your press release to 50 business wires". 

Maybe they did but if they are sending to sites like this, it will actually damage your rank. 

Get the lists off your agency now and check the quality of the content and anywhere else you have referral links. 

If they look spammy, kill the link backs and stop sending to them. One proposed solution is here. 

SEO experts have blosomed in the last few years so keep an eye on them and question their tactics. PR agencies often don't keep abreast of changes and will be advising you on old strategy. 

Find out more on the offical Google blog. 

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Is Google+ a ghost town?

 

Add me on Google+

http://gplus.to/courtneylambert 

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The Dynamic Nature of Mobile Search in Asia-Pacific

I always find it difficult looking at Asia Pacific media research data. 

While the countries group neatly geographically, from a behavioural point of view they often don't share a lot of commonalities. For example:

"In South Korea, Google trails two homegrown search engines, Naver and Daum®, and holds PC search market share in the low single digits."

Never heard of either of them. But I guess the thing it does highlight is that acquisition programs need to be maximised for local country behaviour. Sounds like a no brainer but we do tend to forget this in the cloud era and assume everyone is googling on an iPhone.

Another key theme is that the relationship between device penetration and default search engine is going to get increasingly important. Google and Microsoft are investing heavily in both areas and can switch behavior with competitive handset offers. 

Other key ideas from the report:

• Mobile search drives more traffic than PC search in every region around the world
• In all regions search is consistently driving about 30% of all mobile visits
• Google leadership in referred search is not correlated to Android penetration
• Acquisition programs need to be maximised for mobile

 

13926.apac_mobile_report_q22012_IE.pdf Download this file

 

 

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