Search is evolving and you need to improve your Search Engine Marketing programs to keep up with competition and demand. Here are seven points that you should analyze about your SEM agency to be sure they can properly address your needs. Also, remember to always look beyond the sales pitch as many agencies have polished the sales pitch to reflect what you want to hear as opposed to what they truly offer.
1. Professional and speedy customer service.
Real-time communication is here. Make use of it.
2. Knowledge of the client’s target market.
I [the client] expect you to be knowledgeable in my market area. If you are not, then talk to me more often.
3. Being pro-active and flexible in your strategy.
Don’t wait for me [the client] to tell you that a keyword is flying off the handle and spending too much. Monitor the performance and come to me with ideas and data. Don’t just read reports to me. That’s boring and I don’t care about your super-duper targeting techniques. I would care more if you tell me whether we are reaching and surpassing our business objectives.
4. API connectivity.
There is just no way around it. I believe there is not business case that can support not having Google API connectivity for your app, is there?
5. Thought leadership.
I am hiring you to teach me and educate me so that we can have interesting conversations on how to use the channel more efficiently. Yes, I do realize that a lot of times I [the client] seem rather obsessive about minute things but the reason is that I am trying to learn and this is all new to me. I need you [the agency] to show me the way and to be a leader not only with my campaign but within the search engine marketing field.
In some cases, your client might be years behind the market leaders in terms of knowledge and experience, but if you apply resources, hard work and a well thought out strategy, your clients should be able to catch up pretty quickly to the market leaders.
6. Global presence.
An increasingly important point is to have true global knowledge and presence. Large companies are going to demand that you have a presence wherever they are. If your company is not lean and flexible enough to adapt to these demands quickly, you might see your client target pool shrinking.
7. Be creative.
If you want your company to be a great company, allow your people to be creative, to think out of the box and to stay ahead of the market so that you can beat competitors. Search Engine Marketing is a data-driven field and encouraging and practicing creativity can be challenging. However, you have the blessing of data which allows you to test your creativity and realize whether you are right or wrong very quickly. Although data is comforting, you need to make sure you are looking at the right data. Teach the rules and then break them.
That’s the beauty of SEM. It not only it levels the playing field, but if you apply a disciplined approach to innovation, a boost in performance will follow.
Posted in Search Engine Marketing.
Tagged with Search Engine Marketing, Search Marketing Agency, sem, seo.
By Antonio Altamirano
– June 15, 2009
Here is a quick overview of the sessions at CloudCamp in San Francisco. The sessions were lead by Dave Nielsen of PlatformD. This summary addresses the basics of cloud computing as well as the business value and the implications on current business assumptions. There are major implications to the business models of many industries.
From my point of view, Cloud computing will do for applications and websites what social networks are doing for people and brands. The social networking value, when applied to businesses via Cloud Computing, is exponential.
Business implications of Cloud Computing:
- Utility 2.0 (using cloud computing) is a huge departure from Utility 1.0 where you provision your own environment
- Virtualization is a big enabler of Cloud Computing
- Look for a big land-locked demand for a service and unleash it with Cloud Computing
- SaaS: Only an account sign up is required to use the service. Examples:Yahoo! Mail, ebay, flickr.
- PaaS: Platform as a Service: Making implementation for apps targeting similar platforms MUCH simpler. It targets niche markets making them very efficient and easy to deploy. The problem is that if you have existing code (C, C++) wil not work in PaaS. You might need to go IaaS. Examples of PaaS: AppEngine, Force.com
- IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service: You have your instance of OS that meets your requirements. No network latency. AWS, GoGrid, Mosso.
- Hadoop: Game changing for number crunchers and large web apps
- Cloud computing is a technology and operational leap
- IaaS: Mostly used by IT people
- PaaS: Mostly used by developers
- SaaS: Mostly by business users
Real life examples of Cloud Computing
- Use case: Building a Web App. Not serious about infrastructure and architecture yet at the beginning. At this stage the cloud is not for you
- If you only need one server, you shouldn’t be using the cloud (One blog can cost you a 700% idiot tax in the cloud)
- Cloud computing: Bridging the gap between super expensive service companies that set up data centers and the sole server setup. Addresses mid-tier market where people want to build scalable applications without the upfront cost of the past
- Michael from Microsoft: Web hosting model is a commodity competing in price while cloud computing is not. That’s the reason why cloud computing services are able to charge you the 700% idiot tax.
- Application use case: When the application gets enough traffic, then the needs are different and the cost of downtime or slow load times is bigger.
- Dynamic Data in Social networks in the cloud. All this information needs to be available instantly which creates a challenging scalability issue. How do Social Networks address the issues?
- MemCache for serving data. Makes it less costly to serve page.
- Two primary modes to storing data in the cloud.
- Consistent (Primary storage of data is one single primary store and DB always knows the latest information. Transactional). Fighting for access to a value that might be changing faster than it can be committed.
- Eventually consistent. Multiple DB that store information. One stores updates but never used for reads and it pushes copies to read-only databases. Not ideal but cost efficient
- Number crunching: The most efficient way to crunch is not to do it ins single database instance but to take your code and push it into the data and let it crunch the data. Hadoop manages most of this process. At the core, Hadoop maps the set of data into small pieces and reduces the computing time. Once al the pieces are computed then it maps it back to the original state.
- The issue is how to get the data into the Cloud.
- Google is traveling with the data across the country to transfer it because it is cheaper.
- Real issue is not in the computing power but in the hard-drive performance
How do you get redundancy?
- Achieving 5 nines is difficult (requires geographic separation)
- At this point you can count in 3-nines for SLA
- Most products are still on beta
- 5-nines = downtime of 5 minutes a year
- Even though a cloud vendor might not be SLA of 5-nines, you can code your app to creat 5-nines for yourself
- Games: Copy files to go-grid. Store pointers to those files in the DB and if one fails then you flip a switch and start serving files from the other cloud vendor.
- Access to HW very quickly.
- Automated procedure to replication on top of “disposable” HW
- Benefits of redundancy: Scale instantly across the world. If one goes down then you can redirect traffic to other locations
How do you manage your procedure without face-to-face meetings?
- VLC and VNC
- Create a secure whiteboard and standing meetings
- Skype: 20% is text 80% is body language and it is very helpful
- One CTO would fly twice a month to check in with outsourced team
Posted in Technology.
Tagged with Cloud Computing, cloudcamp.
By Antonio Altamirano
– June 1, 2009
Here are some points that I thought are relevant and useful to the state of corporate marketing and the folks that are driving the innovation behind it. The Geek 2.0 and its Marketer 2.0 equivalent. Dressed in an informal business attire, internet and business savvy, plugged into the community, relevant, influential and interacting in a two-way conversation with the client. Tim and Tara did a fantastic job at highlighting the trends that will dominate life and marketing now and in the future.
- Slinkset: Create your own social news site in seconds
- Tucker Max
- Passion beats polling and focus groups.
- The critical minority is the laudest – so stick to your guns and don’t pay too much attention to the nai sayers.
Tara Hunt:
- The Whuffie Factor Great resource for learning about social media
- Get out of the boardroom and join the community. You can’t build community if you don’t know it first hand
- Trying to “control the message”. You need to balance liability and old habits (push-only marketing) with the new two-way engagement marketing
- “we need a twitter campaign” – that’s total crap. corporations need to learn why is this working and why to use it.
- Why would they [customers] give a damn? – seemingly infinite choice.
- You need to be remarkable.
- Design for the communities you are serving not from the corporate boardroom
- Automagically make things happen (Examples of automagical websites: lilgrams, tripit)
- Akoha encouraging people to do nice things for each other. Pay it forward.
Posted in Technology.
Tagged with events, wordcamp, wordcampsf, wordpress.
By Antonio Altamirano
– May 30, 2009
Now try convincing a human that you are number 1 or the right person for the job. That’s slightly more difficult, depending on the person of course. That’s why social media represents a harder challenge than search. Here are some considerations and key differences between building a corporate or personal presence without a strong social component.
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In social media you can’t pay your way to the top.
- At least not for long. In search, if you are a well-funded business you can pay your way to the top eliminating the human filter completely.
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A search engine is for the most part “dumb”.
With the adequate (white hat) pieces you can put together the puzzle and feed the ensemble to the search engine. Since most websites do it wrong, you have a good chance at getting some of those highly coveted top positions
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Social media is powered by humans.
Human passion drives leaders and spammers. That is then used as a filter and as a powerful influencing channel that can be a curse or a blessing for a brand.
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SEO can be done in isolation.
Collaboration with the subject matter expert (SME) is key but the SEO steps can be implemented by the SEO guru who maintains a set of static assumptions and answers (meta information) that are then fed through an equation to the search engine. Thus the SME need not to be involved any longer
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Social media presence needs to be represented by the SME directly
If not directly, then the involvement and collaboration with the Social Media expert needs to be constant and inmediate. To be successful the communication needs to be clear, constant and the knowledge always improving.
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Having a website without a real-time social component is like having a bakery with the “out to lunch” sign on all the time.
Your business needs to interact with your customers in any way possible in order to satisfy their expectations.
Posted in Search Engine Marketing, Social Media.
By Antonio Altamirano
– May 28, 2009
Jeremiah again with a great blog post about Digital Natives a presentation that Dr. Urs Gasser [website and twitter account] from Harvard’s Berkman Center delivered on Digital Natives. Makes me think and analyze the impact in companies of all sizes and across all markets. I’ve extracted some of the points he makes and added my point of view and how it affects companies.
By far, one of the most important aspects of this generation is the cultural shift. The rise of different racial groups on the internet (marked by the quick increase particularly of the young latino population) mixed with increasing acceptance that digital natives have a strong voice online will reshape the way marketing is tailored and delivered. We are beyond a push-only methodology. The walls are coming down.
Here is an excerpt from Jeremiah’s post to give you an idea of the behavior of a Digital Native.
- The number of hours that digital natives spend will spend online by age 20 is 20,000. This generation breaths digital. That is double the number of hours Malcolm Gladwell cites in his book Outliers.
- They interact with the peers across the globe: This
impacts employers, brands, teachers, parents, as this first generation
enters the workforce.
- Multiple identities, personal and social, shared online and offline
(blurring): Online representation is the same as physical
representation: what your clothes, friends, vehicles say about you.
- Extensive disclosure of personal data: 35% of girls in US are
writing a blog vs 20% boys. Opportunity for HR departments to learn
more about their employees, but guess what? They Google you too.
- Culture of sharing: The default behavior is information sharing, not
only do they have the right to speak, but to be heard. Risk: breach of
confidentiality is hip, digital natives are fans of wikileaks.
- Creators, no longer passive users: This generation creates their own
content and shares their opinion online, see the Forrester’s social
Technographics to learn about the data.
- Peer collaboration, online activism: They often experience work with
community builders, and are responsive to intrinsic motivations.
Posted in Social Media.
By Antonio Altamirano
– May 14, 2009
Jeremiah Owyang posted an entry about more advanced brands that are asking the right questions about Twitter. It seemed too long for a comment on his blog, so I decided to answer it here as I believe the questions are interesting and valid. For more questions follow me on @antoniocapo
I have direct insight on this as I started and managed a Twitter account for a Top 4 consulting company. Now that brand is one of the Top 100 talked about brands on Twitter according to BrandRepublic.
Jeremiah’s questions:
Context:
This by no means represents all brands, but just some brands, perhaps those that are a bit more sophisticated.
Last Friday I had a conversation with a manufacturing firm that had some relatively sophisticated questions about how they will prepare their plan around Twitter. This was a nice break from the “why does Twitter matter” questions I usually get, as they were thinking through a plan.
Here’s some of the excellent questions this organization, and a handful of others brands are starting to ask:
1. Should we create multiple accounts for different divisions? How should we name them? How should the content be different?
- The approach you take depends on the type of company and service it provides. Depends on the type of clients that are served and depends on the purpose of the account.
- For simplification sake a company can start by defining the role that the corporate account would play. Is a simple non-interactive push of information or is it an effort to give the company a more human face? Which ties into the next question.
- The creation of accounts comes with responsibility. Don’t create them if you don’t have the resources to staff them. Twitter takes a lot of time if you are just getting started and figuring everything all out.
- Protect your accounts. Create accounts that tie directly to your brand and park them with a pointer to your main account if you don’t have the resources to staff it.
2. Is it OK to just tweet out news on our main corporate account? Or should we be conversational?
The question is fair but it addresses the core of Twitter as a service. Twitter is conversational by nature. Because of that nature, a corporate account that only tweets news would not have as much success as an account that has a conversational aspect to it. I’ve experienced both and the conversational approach outperforms the publishing of news by a large margin.
If you are worried that your Twitter corporate account would start getting polluted with too many replies, then that’s the time to think about a second official account through which you can respond to your replies without having to “pollute” the main Twitter stream of worthy news.
3. How do we get our corporate reps (sales, product teams) to use this tool, and be conversational?
It really depends on the purpose that you’ve set up to accomplish with Twitter.
- Customer support — Get them individual accounts and set up an on going session to get them familiar with Twitter
- Thought leadership — Crowdsource internally via Yammer or other corporate microblogging tools.
- Sales support — Look at Zappos for a great example.
4. Should we follow folks? If so, what’s the protocol? Should we only follow folks that follow us? We don’t want to appear like ‘big brother’
- Follow people and brands you care about either as a partnership or competitive
- Remember that Twitter s a one-way friendship system. Don’t feel you need to follow back immediately. Don’t feel people only need to follow you.
- Follow backs need to be vetted
5. What are the tools to use to manage multiple authors/tweeters?
6. How can we find other examples of B2B twitter examples?
7. How should we brand our Twitter backgrounds images?
- Follow corporate brand practices so that you will be on brand but be flexible as the Twitter background is neither a landing page nor a photo.
- Use the left hand side to be more creative
- If needed place a disclaimer that would save you and your brand legal troubles.
What questions are you hearing from brands that are approacing Twitter? I gauge the level of sophitication of a brand by which of these five questions they’re trying to answer, just change out ’social media’ to ‘twitter’ to gauge.
Are you at an agency or at a brand? What questions are you hearing about Twitter?
UPDATE: SocialSquared’s Jess Sloss and Sampad’s Indian Perspective cover Jeremiah’s 7 questions as well. Check them out!
Posted in Marketing Tools.
By Antonio Altamirano
– May 13, 2009
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