Recent Entries
May 6, 2009 Social Media Marketing
Now that social media is the big thing that many companies are trying to roll out, those (often inexperienced) companies often just tell their employees to sign up for Twitter, or make a group at Facebook, and then go to town on it. But what if that employee defects from the company and takes those Twitter, Stumble, Digg, etc accounts with them when they go? You have suddenly lost all that work your employees did on company time.
So if you have employees building up their profiles during company time, have you considered what happens to those profiles when that employee leaves? What if that employee goes to work for a competitor? Or starts a competing business? The last thing you want is to not only have them taking an immense user base with them, but then having to start all over again from scratch at your own company, even though you effectively paid those former employees to create and promote all those accounts while on the clock.
And worse, those former employers could completely sabotage your social media efforts by talking a trash about you and your company, or telling all your social media success tactics to the audience made up of those who follow him or her because they were employed by you… and yes, that audience will not just include your clients and customers, but also your competitors too.
Employee contract
First, you want to make sure your employee hiring contract clearly states that any social media related accounts that any employee uses for company business remains with the company even if the employee leaves employment. This is the first safeguard, and prevents any issues coming up later where an employee might try and claim they didn’t know their accounts were owned by the company and not themselves personally. If it is included and signed by the employee, this position just became a lot harder for an employee to claim.
Create with company info
Make sure all accounts are initially created with the company’s email address and include the URL where applicable. If things go south, it is much easier to go back and try and regain control of accounts if they were originally set up using name@companyname.com rather than employeename@gmail.com, even if said employee switches it later to a personal email address.
Include the company name in the accounts
This might seem like a no brainer for some, but it time and again I see companies getting their employees to Twitter without using any kind of name branding. While obviously this won’t work in all cases, such as Stumble accounts you want to use to also Stumble your own company’s pages too. But on Twitter, for example, it makes much more sense for your employee Scott to use CompanyNameScott as a Twitter handle than ScottJones. This will also make it much easier to prove ownership.
Rules governing personal name use for business
Yes, some employees will legitimately use their personal social media accounts for the good of the company and many will never run into any problems with it. But you want to consider the potential impact of those employees gaining too large of a following based on their employment by your company. What if they get poached by the competition and start tweeting for their followers to start using the competition instead of you. Or what if you are forced to fire that employee and he or she starts to talk smack about your company with their personal accounts that many of your clients/customers follow?
Pseudonyms
So when you need a “human name” like Scott Jones rather than CompanyNameScott, definitely consider using pseudonyms that your company registers and then hands over to employees. You can even get individual employee’s input into their names, since you don’t want to inadvertently chose a name that is close to the same name as a childhood rival or an ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend’s name. Of course, also check the name in Google from a reputation standpoint. But most importantly, using pseudonyms can be invaluable because if the employee who originated the various profiles and accounts leaves the company, you can have someone else slide into the persona and continue on with the marketing efforts without having to rebuild. And using pseudonyms doesn’t have that potential grey area if employees use their real names.
As social media becomes more and more popular as a marketing tactic, I am sure there will be many cases where things like ownership of Twitter accounts and Facebook groups will end up in courts, and they are already being fought out in the support of various sites. So when you start creating your company’s next excursion into social media marketing, consider these points before you make a mistake that could result in you having to rebuild all those profiles from scratch when an employee walks away with all your hard work.
What have you done to protect yourself and your company? And yes, I have definitely heard horror stories of when employees go bad!
Don't miss a single post! 
Subscribe to my RSS feedPress my buttons!
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
May 4, 2009 Branding, Social Media Marketing
When you first thought to choose an avatar, you probably didn’t put much more thought into it than hitting the browse button until you saw one that looked half ways decent and you hit upload. But nowadays, your entire online identity can be tied into your avatar, and it can become an iconic representation of who you are, not to mention extremely useful for branding purposes. So when you decide it is time to choose a new avatar to use across the various social media sites, here are some things to think of before you start.
Look at me!
Choose a pic that is just a good pic of yourself. If you don’t have one, go trolling through Facebook or Flickr tagged photos of yourself to see if you can find one to use. All of the pics I have ever used were taken by other people at parties, events or just hanging our. Some people use professional headshots, but do be aware it can give you a kind of “corporate look” which may or may not be the kind of image you want to portray.
Look at me with a twist
Instead of standard headshots, why not change it up a bit. Make your expression funky, add a background, change the way the perspective of the photo is or add something to make your photo just not the usual photo you see of people online. Here are some great examples of avatars with a definite twist to them which makes them that much more memorable.
Go logo!
A touch more boring, but can help for accounts with corporate businesses, is to go the logo route. While this might not be as effective if you are not as well known, it can be effective for larger companies. But if you are a one person show, definitely consider going with something more personalized than your logo. Logos as avatars, especially on sites where your personality really needs to shine throughout to get the maximum value, can really hinder you. You really want to be identified with you and not simply your company name.
Go logo with a twist
You can chose something different than just your standard logo… why not show your company logo in a different way from how normally someone would see it, or closer to how someone might see the logo in real life. Here are some great examples of how to still use your company logo, but from a unique perspective.
Something representative to your company
Think about something that could be used but that people familiar with the company would clearly recognize as being significant. Of course, you do need to remember that you will be left with some people going “Um, what?”. And for those of you not AdSense publishers, that is the new AdSense icon… it’s actually an ad unit if you look at it ;) The second example is probably a bit more self explanatory. Actually, many of the Google twitter accounts have avatars that are a spin on whichever program or app it is. And honorable mention goes to @majornelson who used to have an avatar showing himself holding a Gears of War Lancer.
Best of Both Worlds
If you are caught between wanting a photo of yourself plus a company logo, you can successfully do both. Here are some examples where it is done well.
Crazy gesturing
Some people are quite known for their wild and weird gesturing in their avatars, and will actually spawn copycats and clones when they pull it off successfully. Here is one example, and no I am not going to get into the debate of which one was the originator and which was the copycat, although I am sure the originator will pipe up 
Other unusual photos of yourself
Some people use images of themselves in situations that, well, are either just kind of too crazy to describe or so unique you wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself. And yes, that is DK in a headlock by Randy Couture…
Themes
Sometimes you notice that all of a sudden everyone on your Twitter feed has a theme going on, so feel free to do that. Examples include when many people used Santa hats or changed their avatars to have a pink tint for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Just do be aware that still wearing a Santa hat in your avatar in May looks kind of odd :) I was tempted to post some examples, but I will protect the guilty parties
Cartoony You
Then you can go the way of a personalized cartoon of yourself, although these aren’t nearly as hot as they were a year or so ago when it seemed everyone was jumping on board to get themselves cartooned up for blogs and avatars. Now you will see South Park versions of people, as well as Wii and XBox custom avatars used for people’s online avatars too.
Sex Appeal
Just how companies use “booth babes” in the expo halls to drive traffic to their booths, sex also sells when it comes to online avatars, and many companies will use the same approach for their Twitter & Facebook avatars too. And sorry to all the people who really thought that @rishil was a Jack Daniels loving chick!
Last Advice
If this is your current Twitter avatar, or you are using the default avatar on any social site, it should be noted that it is better to have a dancing pig in a tutu rather than the default avatar, because nothing quite screams newbie like the default avatar.
So when you are thinking about updating your avatar, think about all the different ways you can build your online identity through your avatar across a wide variety of social media platforms. While I was using Twitter for the example profiles (mainly because it shows both the avatar and the username together), you will find nearly all will use the same avatar across multiple social media sites, including Sphinn, StumbleUpon, Facebook, etc.
Try not to change your avatar too frequently or else people won’t immediately recognize it as being you, and try and make it unique so that people who see it at a glance know exactly who it is. The point is to build your profile with the same recognizable avatar everywhere, not change it once a week to keep people on their toes ;) Think of it as an extension of your personal brand.
Feel free to post your own favorite examples of social media avatars.
Digg this post here!
Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feedPress my buttons!
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
May 1, 2009 Social Media Marketing
Think about the last 10 things you Twittered? Was anything personal? Did you mention what you were having for dinner or what you are watching on TV? Or do you only twitter things that are strictly business? Now think about your blog. While all your blog posts can be about business, do they have personality injected into it that helps people get to know the person behind the blog? What about Facebook? Do you upload photos and tag yourself in others? Do you write back and forth on people’s walls about things unrelated to work?
What many people don’t realize is that social media isn’t just about the promotional aspect of it… a large part of social media is the engagement, and part of that is revealing information about yourself so that you become more than just a handle and an avatar on the various social media sites.
For example, people who read both JenSense.com and JenniferSlegg.com will know that I have an obsession with Starbucks, I love all things Disney (and even got to speak at Disneyland once), and I’m a hockey fan (specifically Vancouver Canucks – Go Canucks Go!) And those that follow my twitter feed will know even more about me, such as the fact I love to BBQ now that the weather is turning warmer, I love Lost (okay, it’s probably an obsession too, especially when we are all twittering with #LOST as we watch each episode) and have a dog that quite often looks guilty about something when she isn’t snoozing next to my desk while I work.
Now, think about yourself. What have you revealed about yourself in your blog posts and your twitter feeds that helps your readers and followers “know” you? Anything? Too many marketers leaping into the social media world tend to talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk when it comes to getting the personal engagement that goes beyond the business engagement.
Why is this? Because they are just so focused on the business aspect of it they forget that the personality end of it is just as important, especially when they are trying to build long-term relationships. Industry news twitter accounts are a dime a dozen, so if that’s all you do, why should someone follow you when they can get the identical thing from many other sources, some which are bound to be considered more authoritative than you? But if you are also throwing in personality, whether it is your personal DOH moments as it relates to your work that day, or chatting #LOST with fellow web marketers, it is that interaction that turns your handle and avatar into a real person.
And ask you get better known in the industry, you cross that line where the mundane actually is interesting to others. Think about how people buy People magazine and US Weekly to get their fix on the “real lives” of celebrities. Well, the same thing starts to happen as you get better known in the industry, and people want to learn more about the person behind the blog so they can get a better feel for the person. So unless everything you post is of the pretty mundane “I am eating a ham sandwich for lunch”, you don’t need to worry about interspersing some of the mundane with some of the business since that is about marketing you and your personality.
Don’t forget to show your emotional side. Every person has a wide range of emotions because we aren’t robots, although I know sometimes some of wish we were! But revealing your love and hates, how you are feeling about things, what is upsetting you or making you happy can reveal more about you. Just make sure that the majority of your tweets or blog posts reflect a negative attitude otherwise people will tire of it pretty fast. Don’t be a Debbie Downer 
Don’t forget that just as you want people to know you in social media, you have to know others too. This means interacting with others about their interests too. It can be something as simple a tweeting to some “@whoever I thought of you this morning when I saw ___” or asking someone about a non-work related interest. When you show that you know others, people are more likely to want to know you too. Think about people in your life that only talk about themselves and how old that gets. The same thing applies here too
Nearly all of my “absolutely must follow” people that I follow are all ones that don’t just talk shop, they talk about things far beyond work, whether it is random musings about life, about their trip to Disneyland/Disneyworld, latest Lost theories or how well their chosen hockey/basketball/football/soccer team is doing at the moment. Think about your own “absolutely must follow” list – most of them probably have a well balanced mesh of personal and work related tweets.
But how much information is Too Much Information (TMI)? Well, an occasional drunken tweet can be amusing, but keep in mind what you might find really amusing 8 martinis in might be anything but to the very sober followers reading it. Likewise, a well written rant on your blog can be pulled off well, but one shot off in the heat of the moment can actually damage your social media personality. So always keep in mind perceptions, unless you really don’t care how it could potentially impact your business. It wouldn’t be the first time someone has been fired or lost clients over tweets or blog entries. True, some might not regret it, but others definitely do.
So next time you tweet or blog, or are setting out to do it for a client, think about the personality aspect of it and how you can get some of it across to your followers and readers. Because someone with a personality and a story is a whole lot more interesting than a robot
Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feedPress my buttons!
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Apr 10, 2009 Writing Content
Sometimes the best articles or blog entries can be something you have written off the top of your head about a hot topic - something that is trending in your niche and about to hit that tipping point that turns it into a hot topic that everyone is suddenly talking about. However, you need to find these trending topics, because before you know it, a ton of other blogs would have beaten you to the punch and you will be too late to make an impact. And then you need to pull off a great article that makes people want to link to you over anyone else who has written (or will be writing) about the same thing.
Monitor your market
Pay attention to what people are tweeting in your niche. Watch a handful of the busiest forums in your market area to see what people are suddenly talking about. Set up Google alerts & twitter searches on specific topics. Have a contact form so people can easily contact you when they notice something. But the big thing is to pay attention, especially when everyone seems to be asking questions and you know you can supply the answer.
Fact check before you write
Yes, you might think you know the answer off the top of your head, but if you want to make sure you become the relevant source of information for everyone talking about the topic, double check and do your fact checking. Especially if it is a blog, commenters can tear you apart if you present yourself as an authority on the trending topic but make a complete fool of yourself by giving up the wrong information. But even if you are not totally familiar with the topic, some research can often give you the answers everyone is looking for, you just need to pull it together in one place.
Get quotes
When people have a hot topic, they are often in such a hurry to write about it, they don’t think about getting quotes. But quotes can be even more crucial in a hot topic because getting a quote from an authority on the subject, even if you are still trying to establish yourself as an expert, can go a long way in bringing credibility on what you have written about. But yourself in one of those potential reader’s shoes… if you have a quote from an authority on the subject, you can bet you will get the links, even if someone else writing on the topic is better known. So make sure you know who you can contact quickly for quotes or even just a “does this sound right to you?” check.
Answer the questions
If everyone is asking a question about the hot topic, make sure you answer it and provide people with insights and information that no one else has. If you are the first person to answer or to take that angle of a story, you are not only answering the exact questions people have, but people will link to it because you are answering them. If you simply write a lengthy essay on the topic in general, it being a hot topic won’t be enough to make your site be the place to be. But if you are answering the questions that the people have, if you write it, they will come.
Don’t build castle walls
Link out to the many places where the topic is trending from your own article. Many people don’t do this because they want to keep the comments “on their own site”. But the problem with building a wall around your content can have the impact of not only keeping people in but also keeping people out. First, people want proof when you claim “everyone is talking about” your given topic, and sometimes people just want to get a well rounded view of what every one’s opinions are (not that yours won’t be fabulous, of course!) And don’t forget people will be much more generous in promoting you when you are promoting them too, whether it is a link to a forum or to a few tweets to highlighted. Not to mention the fact your links can also help a trending topic hit the tipping point to become the hot topic you want it to be.
Double check before you publish
Treat any blog post, but especially one that has the potential to get huge traffic, as the one entry that could define your career. So check for typos, make sure your grammar is right, the formatting looks good, the links all work, and that it is as polished as you can make it.
Get your social on
These are the types of articles that can go nuts with a little bit of social media prodding. So make sure if you have a blog that you are using something like Sociable so that your readers can quickly and easily submit them to all the relevant social sites. You want to make it as easy for them as possible… people might not think twice to hit the Digg link on your page, but many won’t go to the effort to actually go to Digg and submit it if they have to do it that way.
The most important thing to remember when doing this is that you have to be on top of the trends, not behind them. So as long as you have your eyes and ears open to follow what people are talking about, that is half your battle there… the second half is getting the article done
Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feedPress my buttons!
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Mar 15, 2009 Blogging
Whether you have a old blog that has racked up hundreds of blog posts, or if you are just a newer yet prolific blogger, you probably have those killer oldie-but-goodie blog posts rarely see the light of day - not because they are bad, but simply because you published them months or years ago. And while sometimes there is the opportunity to link to them in your new blog entries, it can sometimes look like overkill when you do it on a too-frequent basis.
While one method is to include a “greatest hits” page or widget, another method is actually quite simple - include links to those older blog posts when you are answering or commenting back on someone’s comment on your blog.
If you have upgraded your WordPress, you have probably noticed that handy “Reply” link that shows up in your control panel beneath all the user comments. Now if you happen to use that frequently, definitely take advantage of any opportunity you have to include a link to your own older blog entries. Yes, they will be nofollowed, as standard on Wordpress, but it is the eyeballs that is most important.
You are also guiding people to your older yet related posts through a method other than the “related posts” style of plugin. Why is this important? Because as these types of plugins are becoming more popular, people will skip over the related posts part (think of banner blindness, but for related posts) so they can get to the meat of the discussion - your comments. And this is where sometimes engaging the reader doesn’t necessarily pay off, since your reader’s first response is to see what others thought about what you wrote, while the second response might be to see what you have written previously, whether through the related posts or through your category archives. However, if you include the links in your comments, you have increased the odds that they will view your older blog posts.
It also has the added bonus of engaging your readers, which also encourages others to comment as well as increases your overall page views, since readers are more likely to check back on your blog posts when there is an active ongoing discussion in a blog entry’s comments.
Don’t forget to use decent anchor text for your title, don’t just use the URL pasted into the reply field. Sometimes Wordpress URLs get long and gangly, but also it helps readers know specifically if that blog entry is so they know whether they want to read it or no. Not to mention many people skip over URLs if they can’t immediately tell what it is for.
Now, don’t include links just for the sake of including links, because even if you are a real person responding, it will come off as looking very much bot-like. Don’t do random “Hey, I think everyone should visit this blog entry I wrote two years ago.” But if someone asks a question that you can answer by also include a link to a previous blog post, definitely go for it. So only include links to older posts when it would be natural to do so.
Try to also stylize your replies differently, so readers can easily identify the comments you have made in your comment stream. Many people will pay closer attention to the author’s comments than they will to “Joe Surfer” who commented also. So make it easier for people to skim and read your comments, particularly if your blog tends to spawn a lot of comments on each entry.
Think older posts can’t gain traction and become popular after the fact? Think again. My Ten Steps to Creating a Killer 404 Page entry from February 2008 recently went big on StumbleUpon again and got significant traffic. And not only that, it was the second time it got huge referrals from StumbleUpon - it also had thousands of referrals in September 2008, again well after the original publish date. The same thing has happened on JenSense too. And yes, both have URLs with dates in them.
So next time you make a reply to a comment on your blog, think if there is a previous blog post that you could link to that fits within the response. You would likely be surprised at how many people read your comment and follow the link.
Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feedPress my buttons!
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Feb 24, 2009 Social Media Marketing
As Twitter has been gaining more popularity, there has been lots of talk about what Twitter should (and shouldn’t!) do to monetize their service. One, that seemed to be given a bit of credibility, was the idea of charging businesses for their Twitter accounts. But, as you can imagine, that opens a whole can of worms as to what exactly counts as a business. Does that mean @jenstar would be considered a business Twitter account because I also use it for networking? What about my @jensense or @jenniferslegg which are strictly for keeping people updated on my new blog posts. Or would it be reserved for the evangelists of companies, such as @Starbucks or @Comastcares? But then what about @MajorNelson or @MattCutts, because while they are personal Twitter accounts, they are certainly evangelists too.
So how else could Twitter make money? Give the users something they really want, and many would be willing to pay for it! Give the option for a premium or power user version of a Twitter account… I know I would pay for one and I am willing to bet plenty of others would too. But what should a Twitter Power User Account have?
Advanced Stats
Wouldn’t you like to know who is checking out your profile? Or know which of your followers are actually logging in regularly and read what you tweet? Or how many people view your twitter feed each day, and of those people, who is already following you, who decides to follow you, and who bounces. Now, before all the privacy advocates start jumping up and down, it could be an opt-in or opt-out, or it could also be in the form of a generic bar graph along the lines of 47% of your followers log in at least 5 times a week down to 2% of your followers haven’t logged in for the past month.
Advanced Privacy
What about if you could change privacy settings more like Facebook? Like maybe you don’t want to have your updates protected, but you would like to have it so that people have to be logged in to view them? And while you’re at it, why not advanced search settings too… maybe you don’t want your tweets indexed? Or only allow your followers to search your previous tweets? That might be especially handy for those who like to tweet on controversial topics but don’t neccessarily want random people to search for their “strong opinion keywords” simply so they can come along and @reply you something nasty for whatever your stated opinion happened to be.
Suggested Users
Facebook recommends that I friend people because many of my other friends are friends of theirs too. Why not the same kind of idea, but based on who I follow. If half of the people I follow are following someone, chances are good I either know the person or know of him or her. There are still people I happen to run across on Twitter that have been tweeting for a month or more, but I had no idea they were there. Twitter does offer this for brand new users as they are signing up, albiet seemingly only listing those with “celebrity status” and who already have high follower counts (think in the neighborhood of 100,000 followers), but having this available to the entire community at all times would be good, especially if they listed those with a lot less followers. Have it as a “27 of the people you follow also follow @whoever. Would you like to follow @whoever too? Yes / No”.
Adding a @comment tab
Wouldn’t you love to know that someone happened to bring your @name up in a tweet somewhere? Well, right now, if it isn’t first in the box and showing up as an @reply in your home page, summize, RSS or some of the apps are the only way you are going to know unless someone points it out or you happen to be following them. Twitter itself doesn’t alert you.
Add a ReTweet button
Yes, the favorites and replies icons at the right side of every tweet is handy. Why not add a Re-tweet icon too, to make it easy for people to RT, and which automatically adds the RT (or whatever funky symbol is the consensus at the time, lets standardize it!) and the @name you are retweeting, along with the text. Yes, cut and paste is fairly quick, but Twitter should promote the retweet and make it amazingly simple for to do it. Because Twitter also has the advantage of the fact RT builds the community spirit when everyone is retweeting important things others have said.
Adding a ReTweet tab
Add a tab that lets me know I have been retweeted. Sure, if someone retweets a blog post of mine, it will show up in my Google Analytics (sometimes) but it would be far handier to make it easy for me to know, without doing the @jenstar summize search or RSS. I use Twitter on the web frequently (and I noticed plenty of people doing the same in sessions at SMX earlier this month) so it would be handy to have it all-in-one without having to go to an app, a different webpage or an RSS to find it.
Set power users apart
Give power users something that makes it obvious they have ponied up and paid for a power user subscription, whether it is a shiny gold star next to the twitter name or a badge of some sort in the sidebar. Because not only does it make those who have paid stand out a bit more, it also makes it obvious who hasn’t paid… and I am sure more than a few would pay up simply because they don’t want to be seen as the one who hasn’t gone the power route amongst their peers!
Shhhh button
We have all had it happen… someone just starts to really starts to annoy us. Perhaps someone is ranting on about something you couldn’t care less about at a rate of 8 tweets a minute, and there appears to be no end in sight. Or maybe someone is out for a night out with copious amounts of alcohol and their nonsensical tweets combined with bad humor are annoying. Or maybe they have just released a tool/app/ebook/blog and are spamming your Twitter feed about it (Note: if you think this might be you, read Ten Ways to Market Your Blog on Twitter Without Being a Spammer) You don’t neccessarily never want to see them tweet again, nor want them to know you secretly find them to be completely annoying by unfollowing them, but at the moment, you have had enough! It would be great to be able to temporarily ignore their tweets for 1 hour, 6 hours, 1 day or even 1 week, after which they will start appearing in my Twitter stream again. Tweetdeck does allow you to sort users, so you could avoid this, but it is still annoying no matter how you slice or dice it… especially if you happen to get that person’s tweets sent directly to your mobile!
Do the ones I follow follow me back?
I personally don’t care if I happen to follow people who don’t follow me back, but others I know will go and unfollow those who don’t follow them back on a regular basis. But it would be also handy to spot those people (who shall remain nameless!) who constantly follow people, then immediately unfollow, in hopes that you will follow them back (and yes, some of these people have followed then immediate;y unfollowed me multiple times. Not sure how people can tell this if they are being followed by someone? If you wanted to see if I am following you, go to my main Twitter page (ie. http://www.twitter.com/jenstar), look to see if there is a “message jenstar” option listed in your right sidebar under actions. If I am not following you, it will simply say “block jenstar”. And lacking in followers? Here is Why People You Follow on Twitter Don’t Follow You Back.
Block #whatever in my Twitter stream
Sure, a bunch of my friends are at whatever the latest conference, event, or gathering, so my entire Twitter updates list is filled with all the people I follow having a great time somewhere I am not. So I would like to be able to block anything with #keyword so I don’t have to spend my entire evening being envious. Or just use it so I don’t have to see things like the running #oscars commentary if I decide to spend the time working instead
Advanced and/or quicker support
If you have ever tried to send a support request to Twitter, you will know the 5-7 days they say it will take them to respond is such an underestimate. I sent in a report on a guy with a topless (and very young looking) girl in his background on his Twitter page, which is against the Twitter rules. I sent a request 25 days ago asking Twitter to look at it, and it is still languishing ”awaiting assignment to a help desk operator”. It would be nice if power users had the ability to get priority on their support requests… because 25 days is kind of rediculous for a support request that is actually to help keep Twitter clean.
So in reality, this is also my Twitter power user wish list. Yes, I do know there are a variety of tools that do some of the above, but there isn’t an “all-in-one” tool that saves a user for going to different sites or apps to do it. I would quite happily pay to have it as an all in one option, and support Twitter financially in the process, and I know many others would too - so long as it was priced right. And this would also avoid the whole issue of whether or not Twitter should add advertising to the site.
Besides, I know I would love to have all these shiny new options to play with on Twitter
Follow me at @jenstar on Twitter.
Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feedPress my buttons!
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Feb 20, 2009 Pay Per Click
For whatever reason, you might decide you don’t want your competitors from seeing your AdWords ads. The reason can be as simple as suspecting your competitor might be clicking on your ads or perhaps a competitor keeps stealing your ad copy. Or you could just want your competitor to be searching for the golden keywords and not see any of your ads in sight, giving them the false sense of security that you must have pulled all your AdWords ads. And, of course, there are more nefarious reasons why one might want to do this
By preventing your competitors from seeing your ads, it can also help preventing bidding wars for your best converting keywords. If Ad Ranks are equal between you and your competitor, top dollar wins. And if your competitors sit at their desks, checking their best keyword phrase and see themselves firmly planted at the top, they won’t bid higher and displace you from the top… even when the rest of the world clearly sees you at the top. It wouldn’t be the first time an advertiser sees their positioning data in AdWords and assume it must be some kind of glitch, or something to do with quality score, because when they search they can’t see anyone else’s ad above their own. And if they can’t see you are above them, they won’t start trying to outbid you, which means not only are you preventing your competitors from seeing your ads, you are also saving money by doing so.
So if you are wanting to block your competitors from seeing your AdWords ads, here are a couple of methods that will allow you to do this.
Geo-targeting against your competitors
Do you know were your competitors are located? Ideally, they are located in a less populated area where you can block a specific location or region from displaying your ads, or show your ads to other states only. However, if it is in a larger metropolitan area, such as New York City or Los Angeles, you have to take into account that you could be blocking a big chunk of potential traffic too.
There are two ways you can do this - by setting up campaigns for specific regions, or the far easier one of targeting all geographic locations, such as the entire United States, and then exclude specific regions. To exclude specific regions, you need to edit on a campaign level:
- On the Campaign Summary page, click the checkbox next to each campaign you wish to edit.
- Click Edit Settings.
- Click Edit next to Locations to change your campaign’s target locations.
- Once you’ve selected locations to target, click ‘Exclude areas within selected locations.’
- Browse the list of available areas and select those you’d like to exclude.
- Click Done excluding.
- Click Finished.
- Click Save Changes.
Don’t forget to take into account if your competitor has two partners located in completely different areas of the country, it is much more common than you think. If you aren’t sure, check whois data and “about us” pages. And if they have open profiles on LinkedIn or Facebook, many often list their locations, or if they are on Twitter, check and see if they have listed a location or have twittered something about their location recently. Or just ask others, someone is bound to know!
Do be aware there is the Ad Preview Tool which can work around your settings, as it allows advertisers to see ads in various countries and regions. But most advertisers tend to check regular Google results, and only use the Ad Preview Tool when making sure their own geo-targeting is working correctly.
IP Exclusion
You can exclude IPs two ways - by excluding a specific IP or my excluding an IP range. The first option is simple, just find out the IP of the person or company (many companies will share a single IP) and block that IP in each campaign. The option is somewhat hidden in your AdWords account if you don’t know where to look for it, but here is how to do it when you’ve signed into your AdWords account:
- Click Tools at the top of your Campaign Summary page.
- Click IP Exclusion under ‘Optimize Your Ads.’
- Select a campaign, and click Go.
- Enter the list of IP addresses to be excluded.
- Click Exclude IP Addresses.
The second option gives you the ability to block a larger group of IPs, since you Google only allows you to exclude 20 IP addresses per campaign. But of course, be careful that you don’t block an IP range that happens to cover half of your country, like this advertiser did ;) So use the IP range option with caution.
If you don’t know your competitor’s IP address, go back and check your email in case they have ever emailed you about something (especially handy if you have ever spoken on a conference panel with any of them). If not, you can use an old trick advertisers used when trying to determine if a competitor was the one engaging in click fraud on ads - have someone send an email to the company asking something, and see what IP is on the response. But whatever you do, don’t send the email from your own (or your company’s) IP address, because you never know, they might know your IP is actually you :)
You could also try sending an email with an embedded image and see what IP address(es) pull the image, but you will need a server not connected to your business to host the image and that also gives you access to the raw longs so you know the IPs that grab the image. But taking into account the number of email programs that automatically block all images, it isn’t that effective anymore.
You can also go through your logs and pull out any IPs that appear repeatedly over weeks, that always click your AdWords ad to get to the site. Even at one click a day, after a month that can really add up… and you can pretty much bet that it is a competitor (or someone that doesn’t like you!) who is doing the clicking. Regular traffic through AdWords will rarely show up to your site on such a regular basis, always using the ads to gain entrance to the site.
Some people suggest you block the IP the domain is not (ie. if I was a competitor, you would block the IP that jenniferslegg.com is on). However, this isn’t always very effective because in the broader scheme of things, just because my site sits on a particular IP doesn’t mean that it is the same IP I use to surf the net. It does work for some larger corporations depending on how their server and server access is set up.
Don’t forget that if competitors think you are being sneaky about your ads, there are always ways that they can discover what you are doing, although they might not realize you are doing it deliberately. If you have blocked by IP address, the IP could change, or perhaps they start working from home. It could even be something as simple as working from a coffee shop one day that means they will be using an unblocked IP, or working in a hotel room across the country. And with the 20 IP addresses limit, it would be nearly impossible to find all those IPs they are using.
Blocking on the server level
An old school solution was to block competitors on the server level by blocking their IP address. However, this will do nothing to actually prevent competitors from seeing your ad, and even if they click the ad but don’t actually end up on your landing page because you have blocked them at your server level, you will still get charged for the click. You could still use it if you are trying to prevent a competitor from swiping a landing page, but don’t forget that your cache copy in Google will still reveal it.
The bottom line is that if any competitor suspects you (or anyone else targeting the same keywords) are up to something and is determined to see your AdWords ads, they will. However, the hope is that they won’t know you’re up to something and happily continue running their ads - preferably below yours, because they won’t realize someone is actually bumping them out of the top spot (especially if you are also using Position Preference to secure your top spot) - and be none the wiser that you are in the actually right there in the game with them.
Click here for more of my PPC articles
Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feedPress my buttons!
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Feb 18, 2009 Advertising, Pay Per Click
I was on a conference call today and I had said how many people misunderstand what click fraud actually is, and some mistakenly believe that just because a click doesn’t convert that it has to be click fraud. But in many cases, it had zero to do with the quality of the click, but instead has everything to do with the quality of the landing page.
So when was the last time you took a look at your landing pages, especially if you work in a company where you might handle the PPC but someone else handles actual on-page content and issues? I am willing to bet that many people would probably be surprised to learn that their ROI is so low because what they are presenting their visitors is, well, lacking.
A few days ago, I noticed @rogerdooley who twittered the following:
Clicked on an Infiniti Adwords ad, got a redirect msg telling me the Infiniti site had moved & 2 update my bookmark. Nice.
So, I did what probably a few people did… I went and Googled “Infiniti”. But since I am in Canada, I was geotargeted (and rightly so) to the Canadian Infiniti site. However, what the Canadian Infiniti site was just as bad, if not worse. Consider the fact that Infiniti has just paid for me to go to their website, since I clicked an AdWords ad. It is in their best interest to give me the most bang for their buck, so they can squeeze every bit of ROI out of me as possible. So what do I get instead of the Infiniti homepage? Or even a specific page about Infiniti? I got this:
Um, okay. And that was it, nothing in the background, that was the entire page, Now, I don’t know how much they paid for my click, but this is not the kind of user experience you want to present to your paid visitor. But I am willing to bet that whoever does their PPC ad campaign manager has no idea that this is the page that visitors are getting when they click an AdWords ad. And its probably because the web design team decided they wanted feedback on the site, without thinking about how it could impact other aspects of their online presence and promotion. And obviously the team wasn’t thinking about usability, only how to get as many people to fill out that survey as possible.
Usually, this is the kind of thing you display after someone has visited at least one page (or preferably 5!) on the site - whether I am a paid visitor or not - because you know what this makes most visitors want to do? You got it, click the back button. And I won’t get started about the fact it is a five minute survey… I suspect the % of visitors who actually go to the trouble of filling it out are pretty low.
It is worth noting that they must be tracking the results of their advertising, as the URLs include the ?gclid parameter. But their results must be pretty poor compared to what it was before they started giving everyone the survey page as the initial entry page to the site.
So, I wondered what exactly it was that @rogerdooley saw, because it couldn’t be worse than my user experience.
So here is the ad:
A pretty standard automobile AdWords ad. Nothing fancy, and note the InfinitiUSA.com display URL.
And this is what he got when he clicked:
But at least in his case, the website was showing in the background, albiet quite delayed. Now, this isn’t a very good user experience either, especially for a paid click. But, and here is the kicker, the actual ad clicked was already going to the correct destination URL, InfinitiUSA.com, so it wasn’t a case of a visitor being redirected, everyone was getting it regardless of whether came into the site via an outdated bookmark or not (which is a whole new level of poor usability!)
So, of course, I had to go to the original Infiniti.com site and got the same pop-up, but since they use cookies, I had to use a second browser to see it (the same happened with the Infinity.ca site too). So, since the assumption is that anyone who is working on the Infiniti PPC and web design visits the site frequently, they are probably not aware that the pop-up is hitting every single person who visits the landing page, regardless of their original URL or whether it was an AdWords click or not.
So the moral of the story, make sure you always know what the web dev team is doing on your site that could impact your PPC conversion rates, because that team has certainly dropped down their PPC ROI significantly. Or better yet, have a dedicated landing page that the dev team has strict instuctions to not touch or mess with in any way without clearing it with you first. Because with a little conversation between the two teams (and yes, I know it is often easier said than done, especially if one or both is outsourced), you can prevent this kind of problem from happening.
It also makes the case that you might want to periodically click on your AdWords ad in the serps from a virgin computer that has never visited your website, just so you can see what happens from a user experience standpoint, and make sure there aren’t any of the mistakes plaguing the various Infiniti sites on your own or client sites.
And Infiniti, if you need a new PPC or usability specialist, let me know
Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feedPress my buttons!
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Feb 14, 2009 Google
Like most people, I do tend to type quickly enough that I can occassionally transpose characters or make a small typo. And since my Dell keyboard’s characters have almost completely worn off the keys, I sometimes end up shifting my typing left or right by a key. But on the whole, I am an extremely accurate typist.
And yes, I have always been a fan of Google’s “Did you mean” service where they will add an extra line above the search engine results, alerting me to the fact that I possibly mis-typed whatever it was I wrote. I have even sometimes been lazy, and knowing I made a spelling mistake still hit enter, knowing Google was pretty likely to know exactly what it is I meant…. that is until recently…
Now, when you do a search for something that Google thinks you mis-spelled, it includes the handy “Did you mean: keyword phrase” so you can click and get the correct results. But now it also goes a step further and instead of giving you the results of whatever it is you entered into the search box, it now drops those results down, and inserts the top two search results listing for whatever Google thinks you must have actually meant, instead of what you typed.
Here is an example screenshot below, using @netmeg’s example of her username, that is returning the annoying 2 search results for nutmeg before showing any results for what was typed in - netmeg.
Now, if you actually made a mistake with what you had searched on, say I had actually meant to type netmeg, it’s pretty convenient. But multiple times today, I ended up on pages for what Google decided I must have meant, instead of what I actually entered into my search. And if you know you spelled something right, and ignore the “Did you mean:” suggestion that is often given in that first two lines, it is pretty easy to hit one of the top two listings. I did it multiple times this evening, when whatever I searched for and whatever Google wanted me to see were similar (common with mis-spellings).
In multiple cases, I was searching for people’s names. And most annoyingly, it even does it when I search for a specific person’s name in quotes, to get the most exact match. And Google was batting zero, because not one of the suggestions was correct, what I had typed was correct and what I wanted. But they were determined to lead me into one of their “chosen” corrections instead, by displaying those above what I had actually asked Google for.
Thoroughly annoyed, I went off into the Google search preferences, but nada. Then I checked toolbar settings, and one of the settings looked promising, but it was only to make suggestions for mis-typed domain names, not search queries. Then @henkvaness suggested it was the “Query Suggestions” under the Google.com search preferences, but that only removed any search suggestions from appearing in the search box itself, nothing to do with eliminating the top two “did you mean” search results from appearing at the top of the search results.
What I find amazing in the netmeg case is that there are over 5 million results for netmeg, so it isn’t as if I stumbled on a keyword that might only have five hundred, or even five thousand results. If there were zero results for whatever I typed, feel free to give me something I might have meant instead. But honestly, Google, can 5 million pages all really mean nutmeg and not netmeg? (As a side note, when I searched for nutmeg to see what came up, it gave me three listings for nutmeg, then three listings below that for “nutmeg high”. Hmmm….)
But what if you were a company, especially one that might sound similar to a different company name, as often companies in specific industries are. How happy would you be to learn that not only is Google suggesting an alternative spelling of your company name, since it thinks the potential customer typed it into the search box wrong, and then displayed ANOTHER company’s site first, before your own… EVEN when the customer styped your business name correctly. Google is essentially sending your competititor traffic for free, all because of this new feature.
Ironically, someone asked Matt Cutts about it this week at SMX West on the Ask the Search Engines Panel, and he said that if enough people are searching on something, it would get corrected pretty quickly. However, I wish someone had asked about the auto-corrected results showing up before the results of what was actually searched for!
If I had the option, I would love to turn this feature off, and then those who make plenty of typos could leave it turned on if they found it pretty handy. But just how annoying do I find this feature? I am so aggravated and annoyed enough that I just turned back on my Yahoo toolbar after months (years?) of having it disabled, this coming hot on the heels of the fact the new version of the Google Toolbar also removed my most-loved feature ever. @netmeg will be pleased to know that while Yahoo suggests nutmeg, she is still appearing #1 in the search results at Yahoo.
Anyone else having major issues from this? Anyone having their company name being corrected with a competitor’s website showing up first? Judging from my Twitter feed, others are just as annoyed.
Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feedPress my buttons!
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Latest Entry
