Conversation Search Optimization

What a fascinating post over on Backbone Media.

I had never really given much though to SEO on blogs - or should that read "how to stay on the front page of Technorati".

It seems obvious, to those in the game, that there is a clear difference between relevancy search engines and RSS-based conversation search engines.

Yet this difference is perhaps just as invisible to the normal client as the reason why Search Engine Optimization is so important to any online presence.

In John's post, he points out that in order to stay on the front page in your particular field, all you have to do is post more often than the time the last article on the page was listed.

In his example, the last post under "Business blogging" was posted 2 days ago, meaning that to maintain a ranking on the first page a blogger would have to write at least every 2 days. For subjects way, way down the long tail, like "synthetic transparency", that frequency diminished considerably, allowing bloggers to stay on the top page writing just one article per year.

In the IT world, this becomes a little more difficult as the frequency for internationally-known brand is much higher. In Acer's case, at time of writing, the last article on the first page was published under an hour ago making it almost impossible to stay on the first page for conversations alone. Dell has a much harder time with posts required every 16 minutes...

I am, like many others, still climbing the steep learning curve of blog effectiveness but conversation search optimization is certainly a concept I'll be keeping an eye on.

Alexa turns up the geek-value of its charts

Am I the only one to be a little confused over Alexa’s recent changes in the way they present their site view results?

At face value there’s no real difference.

Old

New

What has changed is the y axis.

No longer does is say “Daily Page Views (per million)" but "Daily Page Views (percent)".

This confused the hell out of me at first but I think I understand why they did it. Isn’t it easy to assume, looking at the first, that this graph shows an average of 12 million page views per day?

You certainly couldn’t make that mistake with the new parameter. The problem is, this number, while extremely accurate, makes any kind of presentation particularly taxing on client attention.

"Michael, Just what is this number a percent of and why...?"

Looking at them now you can’t go wrong (and I know I have in the past). It’s just that when showing a client relative values, it helps to have a competitor (or five) to compare them against.

Otherwise you might as well save yourself the trouble.

Bring on the changes

There are moments when you look up, notice the time and make some quick realizations.

I’m not talking about life-changing inspirational realizations but that sudden computation that triggers your brain into realizing that you haven’t eaten lunch and it’s nearly dinner time.

I guess that’s what happens when you’re out of the groove. Or at least it certainly appears to be that way for those of us trying to get out of theirs.

Free time becomes time spent planning, creating, writing, re-writing and, occasionally, eating.

I have listened to Rich Schefren tell me that I have to get out of my own way but unfortunately, when you’re at the beginning of whatever enterprise you’re trying to build, the plain and simple truth is that you are very much in charge of everything.

That doesn’t mean you should give up, but excuses are easy to find as you’ve got a million things to do and quite literally an excuse for each of them.

I just knuckled down and got on with it. I planned, I wrote and re-wrote and after six months (yes that long) had no fewer than 3 presentations ready to propose yesterday.

Like most “creatives” the fun lies in pondering over the details and the really, dirty, grubby part comes when you have to “sell” your phantasmagorical idea to someone with less than 1% of your super-human “vision”.

That moment for me came yesterday and was, effectively, the first day of the rest of my career. Dirty, exhausting and most definitely uphill but well worth the effort.

Blog diplomacy masters

Mr. Rollins leaves and my opposite number my friend from Dell gets into serious "tough love" spats.

If you want to see how diplomacy sometimes treads a very, very fine line, check out the restraint expressed here.

Easier done than said

Now that I've managed to reinstall everything after McAfee took down my registry, it's all systems go with the page rank remapping project.

It's a pretty complex issue mapping out page rank over hundreds of links and regional sites but it's certainly worth the challenge. The problem I think is more to do with the PowerPoint presentation I'm trying to prepare to explain all this. What's the rule? Maximum 5 slides..? Yeah right.

Page rank madness

We got page rank.

No not me, my client. They got a PR8 home page, and PR0 product pages.

Thank God people like Leslie Rohde exist, that make this all insanely easy to figure out. And no, that's not an affiliate link.

We got problems with session IDs. I'm a bit thin on programming knowledge but have enough to figure out that if you're a $11+bn company, you need page rank on your product page.

So it's back to the drawing board for a really massive overhaul. Two weeks to get a presentation ready..

A busy month

This has been an eventful month.

First Edelman woke everyone up with a carefully/badly planned media campaign for Vista and shortly afterwards word got out that my client's operating systems were compromised by a badly-coded ActiveX application.

It was fascinating to watch. A single post was quickly picked up by The Inquirer and from there the story literally exploded. By the end of the day it was on the front page of Slashdot and The Washington Post.

I lined all the cases up over on Alexa, and the sum totals of average daily page views of these sites exceeded one billion (TWP accountd for more than half).

At that point it hit mainstream media and country managers started asking for official responses.

It was a tough test of our PR skills as my client has no official blog and therefore very little way of reacting. It was also 11pm.

However, we got a press release up (fortunately they had a patch ready) the following day and got it noticed on the sites doing the most chatting and let nature take its course.

And the problem died.

It reminded me of an event in Scoble and Israel's Naked Conversations when a bug surfaced on the blogosphere (if I'm not mistaken) during the development stage of XP. Scoble picked it up, they repaired it and silenced it within 9 hours.

We weren't that fast but then, like I said, my client doesn't have a blog. Yet.

The weight of my words has changed

So it’s 2007 and this copywriter’s back with an identity crisis.

The title of this blog is quite apt at the moment as I appear to be transforming into a strategist. Words are no longer the end of a means but a means to an end.

I see them as part of a bigger strategy now, combining the dynamism and appeal of past media with a strategic function within the new.

Let me clarify this thought. In a recent post, Shel describes the opening chapter of his new book under the premise “…that human nature stays the same even as technology makes worlds bigger”.

I guess that’s progress. When you’re on the receiving end, your core opinions remain the same, yet those in charge of producing content that arrives to your door/inbox whatever have an underlying responsibility to their clients/employers to adapt to the needs and expectations of new media.

Recently over on Eric Klintz’s Marketing Excellence blog, he fired a warning shot over his online competitors’ bows to see what would happen. Under the title of The Corporate Blogging War Has Officially Started, Eric said that this was “the first time that all three of us – Dell, IBM and HP – have engaged in a competitive dialogue through blogs. Corporate blogging is clearly taking on a new dimension in 07. Companies are watching what their competitors are doing and commenting on blogs”.

Personally – and I need no disclaimer here – I think Eric pulled a fast one. I think he had a jab at Dell as Dell’s blog is on a roll and Klintz wanted a piece of it. Robert Scoble-Wan Kenobi thinks Dell are corporate superstars at the moment and when you’re at the top, you’re easy to knock.

There is unsurprisingly very little “conversation” going on in any of the leading IT companies’ blogs. Apart from replies, constructive criticism and so on, the content is never “startling”.

But just how on earth could this be otherwise?

Blogs by definition deliver fresh web content.

That’s why the search engines love them and why blog flames shine like a strip of burning magnesium. They’re hot! hot! hot!

What’s hot about a corporation going about its 9-5?

OK Dell had their fair share of heat over the battery disaster but short of that, there’s precious little worth fighting over, let alone full scale blogging warfare.

What they’re doing right, is adapting the conversation, identifying it with their chosen Blogmaster (Lionel rules!) and making it relevant and personal.

By its very nature a corporation talking to independent bloggers is going to be a little unnatural, but Dell’s careful use of their own blog as a way of drip-feeding the world with their thoughts, progress and, why not, apologies, is truly remarkable.

I have read many a PR company harp on about how corporate blogs should be free and independent but I think this is a major misjudgment on their part. A corporate blog needs to be a place where conversations relay the underlying values of the company at its heart. They need to be dependable, constant and coherent year in year out.

Blogging superstars, influencers and sneezers will always exist and it’s these guys and girls who shoulder the responsibility of continuing the debate, not the corporations.

Time flies but then a LOT happens...

You ever get the idea that time flies straight past you?

That more or less has been the outcome of these last few weeks. Christmas is right there and I almost didn't see it coming.

Before I go any further, I'd like to publicly thank the tech guys at Dell. My Workstation was well and truly KO. No safe-mode Windows trickery or system restore could pull it out of its frozen-screen hole.

After poking around for a few days, desperately trying to back up what I could (everything as it turns out), I made the call.

Actuall I made three. Each one took me to the next stagewith a level of professionalism and calmness that really struck me. Not because it was Dell, because it was so beyond what I'm used to from anyone it really stuck out.

So what do you think my opinion of Dell the company, it products and support services is after that? Hats off to them I say.

Right, with that off my chest it's all-systems-go for some first hand SEO stuff this Christmas. First off TheAcerGuy is getting its own site. As much from the need for more space than a blog as to expeiment some SEO theories.

Then, my client's own site. I had to force SEO on her as she knows someone high up in Google who assured her that the only way to stay at the top was to pay, heavily.

Sorry but that really irked me. I understand the need for Google to support its profitable business model but did they really have to go so far as to just plain lie??

So the challenge is on. First to prove to myself that it isn't true (I already know that), and secondly to prove to my "boss" that her leg had been pulled so hard it should have hurt.

The other thing I have to do is set up an outline for an important corporate blog. It's happening at last. First things forst, Wordpress or Moveable Type?