Web Ink Now

Do not delete your content because it should live forever

UPDATE - March 30, 2013 - Air New Zealand tweeted a clarification to us which I have saved as a screen shot pasted below.

++++++++++++++
As I was working on a writing project this week, I went to back to take a look at a YouTube video that I talked about on my blog in an August 2010 post titled Awesome Air New Zealand All Blacks rugby safety video. I've mentioned the Air New Zealand - Crazy About Rugby - Safety Video in one of my books and in talks around the world. Remarkably, this had been an airline safety video (you know, how to buckle your seatbelt) with over one million YouTube views!

Even more remarkably, it seems Air New Zealand has removed the video because it is now marked as private. What a lost opportunity for Air New Zealand.

Do not delete your content

Much of your web content should live forever. This video would have continued to rack up views, make people laugh, and serve to humanize Air New Zealand forever. But now it is gone. In reviewing the Air New Zealand YouTube channel, which was created on May 31, 2006 and has 24 million total views, it seems that all videos older than 3 years have been removed. Why in the world would they do that?

I frequently witness this silliness with conference organizers who have one URL for their annual conference and each year delete the prior year's content and replace it with new. Don't do this!

The media in your industry, speakers, bloggers, and exhibiters all link to the conference site and if the content is deleted as soon as the conference ends those links break.

A well-organized conference site is an important historical artifact that provides valuable information many years later. Who spoke that year? What panel discussions were held? What companies sponsored the event? People want to know that your conference has thrived for over a decade. Rather than use one conferenceURL why not make it conferenceURL/2013 and then next year make it conferenceURL/2014? The homepage can then point to the current year's conference.

The SEO benefit of many links

Your Search Engine Marketing benefits from multiple pages with many inbound links. Cultivate your content with care and it will serve as a marketing asset for years to come.

UPDATE: Here is what Air New Zealand said about the deleted video.

How to make your site mobile friendly

Apple reported more than five million iPhone 5 units were sold in the first three days that it was offered for sale. And it's not just Apple products. Mobile is now the preferred way many people get online.

With the huge popularity of smartphones and around the world, it is now essential that all organizations have a mobile-friendly site to make it easy for people to find you.

Check out your own site

For a long time I did not have a mobile strategy. It was always "on my list" but never got to the top until one day I realized I was delivering a horrible mobile experience for my buyers when I went to my own site on my iPhone. That got me to act. (Have you seen your site on a mobile device?)

So early this year, I worked with both Jim Stewart at Melbourne, Australia–based StewArt Media and Doug Eymer of Eymer Design to help me. Doug did the design work and Jim's team worked on the technology and all-important Search Engine Optimization components. Check out Jim's SEO blog and Doug’s Marketing and Design blog.

Why a mobile strategy is important

Fun (and important) fact: The Google Mobile search engine indexes differently than the main Google search engine. You need to optimize for both.

If you actually sell a product, a mobile can be a great way to generate new revenue.

"For many businesses mobile is now a new channel and not merely an extension of the web experience," Jim told me. "In Australia over 25% of PayPal users have made a purchase using a smartphone. If you use Google AdWords you can now target mobile users directly and place a clickable phone number in the ad so they simply call through to your business, bypassing your website entirely. We had a Car Dealership client that used this method and had an amazing result."

Read Jim's 4 Crucial Questions to Get Your Business Mobile-Ready.

A few things you can do right now

1. Make sure your site is mobile compliant. You need the pages to load properly in mobile devices.

2. Create a mobile sitemap so the search engines can index your pages for mobile browsers.

3. Use few words and small graphics. People don't read much on mobiles and they want the data to come quickly.

The challenge is to understand this new landscape so you can get your business into the mix at that precise moment of decision. I chose to work with experts and it was the right decision for me.

Don't miss out on opportunities to sell to the many people now accessing their sites from wireless devices.

Disclosure: I have worked with both Doug and Jim on many projects and I pay them when they help me. I mention them in this post because I want to recognize their good work. I am not compensated in any way for doing so.

You have been hacked

Last week while I was in Stockholm for a speaking gig, my friend Steve Johnson sent me an email with the subject line: "Have you been hacked?"

Oh crap!

In his email to me, Steve kindly shared a screen grab of a nasty message that popped up when he tried to visit my site. He also pointed me to a Google diagnostics tool that contained all sorts of very bad news.

Yikes!

It looked bad indeed.

But how the heck should I know if I've been hacked? I am clueless when it comes to what's going on under the hood of my site. I hardly know the difference between HTML and LOL. And I'm sitting in a hotel room in Stockholm.

But I do know how important it is to fix an issue like this. Can you imagine the hit on my credibility as a marketing guy if a nasty error message popped up when someone was looking at my site because they might want to hire me to speak? Not to mention what the search engines were doing to me because of the suspicious activity.

So I shot a Twitter DM to Jim Stewart, a Melbourne SEO expert who works with me to make sure that my site is optimized for search engines. Jim was about to go to sleep after a soak in his hot tub and a glass (or two) of McLaren Vale Shiraz but being the responsive guy that he is, Jim jumped to action in real time.

Working with his team early the next morning, Jim quickly isolated the issue as being a hack affecting other sites hosted with GoDaddy like mine. Within hours they had solved the problem and I was back up and running safely.

Not only are Jim and his team genius, they are real-time genius.

If you want to learn about the specifics of the hack, how it was fixed, and the SEO implications of an issue like this, check out Jim's blog post Godaddy Malware – sokoloperkovuskeci.com

Do your suppliers jump out of bed for you?
Do you wake up early for your customers?

I found it interesting that more than 24 hours after my problems were solved, I got an email from GoDaddy support with the subject line "Important Information About Your Hosting Account". The email said that the GoDaddy “Information Security Team detected suspicious activity within my hosting account.” The email outlined what they discovered, how they helped, and actions I needed to take.

Too late, GoDaddy, Jim already solved the problem.

How quickly are you fixing customer issues? After all, we are living in a real-time world.

Google Plus now open to everyone

Google Plus (Google+ or just G+) is the fastest growing social network in history. It launched in late June as invitation only, in just two weeks had reached 10 million users. The G+ iPhone app has been the most popular in the iTunes store. I jumped on quickly and I really like it.

Now Google+ is open to everybody 18 years old and older.

The top left corner of Google is where G+ lives. If you are already signed into Google, you will now see a big arrow pointing to G+. (Who says Google doesn’t advertise on their homepage?).

If you're not signed into Google or you do not yet have a Google account, you will see +You in the top left. Push the button. Get started today.

For now, G+ is for personal profiles. But the business components will be added soon.

If for no other reason, you need a G+ account for search engine marketing.

This essential for personal branding. When someone enters your name into Google, your G+ profile will be among the top results.

Here are a few other posts I have done on G+ you might want to check out.

I really wanted to hate Google Plus

Add a Google Plus +1 button to your content right now

Shaq Googled Big House Outside of Boston

Last night the big man from the Boston Celtics, Shaquille O'Neal, was on David Letterman's talk show.

I live in Boston and it is amazing how quickly fans have embraced Shaq. I had a chance to watch him in action a few weeks ago from courtside. Amazing.

Anyway, Shaq told Letterman that he found his house on Google with the phrase: "Big house outside of Boston."

Some smart real-estate person scored big time with that one!

You'll hear the Google reference at about 2:25 in the video: "I live in a small town called Sudbury. I signed kind of late, so I really didn't have a chance to find a house, so I went on Google and put 'big house outside of Boston,' and I found this big 10-acre farmhouse..."

Direct link to video on YouTube.

Do you own the search results for your marketplace?

If not, can you create some great content to drive the natural search results so that when "the big one" searches for what you have to offer, you'll be the winner?

Photo by David Meerman Scott shot December 1, 2010 at the Boston Garden

Colin Warwick shows how a B2B company makes the first page on Google

Colin Warwick, Signal Integrity Product Manager in the EDA Design & Simulation Software division of Agilent Technologies, is responsible for marketing software to help engineers overcome limitations in high speed digital connections.

As he was working on his marketing plans, he came to the realization that traditional business-to-business marketing like tradeshows are expensive and increasingly ineffective. He also understands the importance of the search engines for his business.

"Everyone understands Google," Colin says. "Everybody can instantly see when you enter a phrase into Google if your competitors come up and you don’t or vice versa."

The most important search term for Colin's products is signal integrity, and Agilent product information was coming up on the fifth page of results, clearly not ideal. So Colin set out to make Agilent appear at the top of the search results.

But unlike many organizations that use SEO techniques to try to creep up a few spaces in the results, Colin started writing a signal integrity blog.

Everything from the name of the blog and the URL to the excellent content was designed to appeal to the buyer personas interested in this topic and to drive solid search engine rankings.

"There are only 50,000 signal integrity engineers in the entire world and our average sale is about $10,000 with a six-month sales cycle," Colin says. "While the competitors show their brochures, we have a valuable blog. It helps a great deal to have such valuable information, both for search engine results and in the selling process."

Colin says that executives at Agilent were very supportive of him starting the blog, but there were some guidelines that he had to work within. "The company said I could blog but that the IT department would not support it," he says. "So I needed to create the blog outside of the company domain. I was required to follow some very common sense rules: Don't mention the competition; link to the Agilent terms of service and privacy policy; and include a copyright notice. It has been a very good experience. Companies need to trust that employees will do the right thing and let people blog."

The results have been very encouraging. "Many customers say that they like the blog and our salespeople tell prospects about it," Colin says. "Having a blog allows me to be spontaneous. For example, I can put diagrams up very quickly and let people know valuable information. If we needed to put content on the corporate site, it would take 3 days. With the blog I can get into a conversation in just five minutes."

So what about the Google search results? On Google, for the phrase signal integrity Colin’s blog is now on the first page of results (number five position when I checked).

"Prior to starting my blog, the company products page was ranked number 44 on Google," Colin says. "That’s a huge improvement."

But there are many added benefits to having a blog that took Colin by surprise.

"Trade magazine journalists read the blog and they include links to it in their blog rolls and I am making great web connections," he says. "For example, I asked Paul Rako, an important journalist at EDN, to moderate a panel for me and he did because he knows me from the blog."

SEO and your crap filled site

Many people think that Search Engine Optimization involves some sort of magic formula.

Sadly, quite a few SEO firms perpetuate this myth by shrouding their work in secrecy and mythology, spouting ten-dollar words like "algorithm" when they talk to potential clients. They make it seem like their SEO work is similar to driving the space shuttle and mere mortals can never do it.

Note to regular readers: I have written about this subject several times, but it is worth a re-visit based on how many people ask me about it.

Almost inevitably, I find that the sites people want optimized (and that the SEO firms work on) are crap filled. They're poorly written. They ramble on and on in an egotistical way about what the companies' products do. They're filled with industry jargon and corporate gobbledygook.

I tell people that they need to understand their buyers and create great content that buyers will want to consume. That way, their pages will attain high rankings as the search engines gradually reward the great content.

Usually I get pushback. People say they just want an agency to "tweak our existing Web pages." And, of course, many SEO firms are happy to take their money to do this.

Sorry, this doesn't work. The only way to create high search engine results is to create great content that people want to link to.

Performing search engine optimization on a crap-filled site just makes it slightly less crappy.

I'm amazed by how a piece of interesting content (a blog post, an e-book, a Web page) can generate high rankings for a tiny company, rankings way above those of the big, famous organizations.

Your challenge: Go to Google and do a search for the important phrases that your buyers are using to find organizations like yours, and look at where you fall in the search results. Consider what great content you can publish to trigger a World Wide Rave that will get people linking to your content and send your site to the top of the search results.

An aside: There are many excellent SEO firms that understand content. I am not picking on the entire industry here. I am pointing out that there is no easy way to "get high rankings" that matter.

Image courtesy of Pulled Over

Google does a funny: This site may harm your computer

This morning Google kinda went haywire and all the results for my search had a message "This site may harm your computer."

For fun, I entered "Google" into the search bar and got the same results.

Note: Click on any of the screen images for a larger size.

Clicking the link led to a warning page.

A quick search on Twitter confirmed it wasn't just me.

Very quickly the hashtag #googmayharm started to be used so people could share stories and screenshots via Twitter and other social media sites.

Google does so many things so well, that it is sort of fun to catch them with a little hiccup. Just shows that we all have issues.

Yellow Pages anyone?

I have a small office in the Boston area. Ages ago when I lived in Tokyo I tried the home office thing and it just doesn't work for me — I need to separate work and home.

Yesterday, I heard thumping outside the office door and when I went out to investigate, there was a Yellow Book sitting there neatly packaged in a yellow plastic bag. Each office had one delivered.

As a wired sort of guy, I don’t recall having used the yellow pages in years. Google is my first place when I need to find something, so I put my copy of Yellow Book on the table in the office hallway expecting that maybe someone could use an extra.

I was amazed that this morning a pile of Yellow Books was now on the table. One larger office still had its two copies sitting forlornly in front of the door.

In my office building are several small law firms, an accountant, an architectural firm, several psychologists, and an executive recruiter. From the looks of the stack of Yellow Books, nobody wanted their copy!

What a waste of resources to print and distribute tens of millions of these things that go unused!

But worst of all, what a shame for the companies still paying to be listed in a directory that very few people use. The larger ads can cost several thousand dollars a month.

Why "do you use social media?" is the wrong question for marketers to ask

Have you noticed there are a bunch of polls and research reports that ask people questions such as "Do you read blogs?" or "Do you use social media?" or "Do you go to video sharing sites?" Often the resulting data show rather small use compared to those who, say, use search engines or email.

From the perspective of the value of social media in an organization's overall marketing and PR efforts, this data is misleading and dangerous. Why? Because the data is used by social-media-resistant executives to justify sticking exclusively to the methods that worked decades ago like image advertising, direct mail, and the yellow pages. I frequently hear CEOs, CFOs, and VPs of marketing say things like: "See, social media is not important, so we won't do it here. It is a waste of time." Other people say: "I don't read blogs, so how important are they?"

This data misses two tremendously important points for marketing and PR people to understand:

1) When asked "do you read blogs?" or "do you use social media?" many people answer "no". However, practically everyone uses Google and other search engines regularly and the search results frequently include blog posts or YouTube videos or other social media content high in the search results. So even though people may report "no" when asked if they use social media, nearly everyone has been to a blog or other social media content through search.

IMPORTANT: Many people who reach blogs via search don't even know they are on a blog!

2) When people who are not regular users of social media ask their network for advice, they often do it via email. Frequently the answer that comes back includes URLs to companies and products. And those links from friends, colleagues of family members often include blog posts. Frequently people ask their friends questions like: "What’s the best baby stroller to buy?" The answer may include a link to a blog post or a site with an embedded video. Again, the person asking for advice probably didn't even know they were on a blog or used a video-sharing site.

Use social media data with caution. Don't let your bosses diminish the hidden value of social media as search engine fodder and as a valuable type of information that people share with their network.