Search Engine Strategies

Interview: CNN's Sr. Director Dermot Waters on Real Time Storytelling

July 28, 2010 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

One session definitely worth attending at next month’s SES in San Francisco is Real-Time Storytelling where panelists will discuss how mainstream media must embrace social media and take on the critical role of curator of the conversation in order to survive. I was able to catch up with Dermot Waters, Senior Director of Product Development, CNN.com, who will be participating on the panel. Read our chat below:

[Manoj]: What is CNN’s approach to real time and how important is it as foundational strategy of spreading the news?

[Dermot Waters]: At its core, CNN was founded on the concept of real-time storytelling. At the time, that mainly centered around spreading the news around the world as soon as it become available. That has of course evolved as the world has become more social. Now in addition to spreading the news, we’re focused on encouraging and curating the conversation to ensure that what is being spread is both personally relevant and compelling for our users.

[Manoj]: What are some ways your team filters out the noise to get to the meat of the conversation?

[Dermot Waters]: CNN is constantly looking for mechanisms to help highlight the most pertinent parts of any conversation. From a newsgathering perspective, we are monitoring trends in the social world and coupling that with our traditional sources of newsgathering to deliver the best story. We use a variety of methods ranging from manually monitoring social feeds to some automated platforms that can identify and analyze trends and viewpoints that are at the heart of what our audience is looking for.

[Manoj]: How has Twitter changed the way CNN does business online?

[Dermot Waters]: Even prior to Twitter, we noticed a trend that people wanted to not just consume the news but be a part of the news. They wanted to offer their opinions and viewpoints, share their stories, pictures, and videos. This participatory style of journalism was the driver behind us creating iReport in 2006 and then launched more broadly in 2008 with iReport.com.

The evolution of user-generated content and social networks, including Twitter, has given CNN more tools and resources for not just broadcasting the story, but sourcing it as well. We use a variety of tools to monitor all the social networks as a compliment to our existing newsgathering practices. CNN’s goal is to get the full story – the real story – that our users care about.

And now with iReport, Twitter, Facebook and the rest of the social web, we can also reach out to our users for opinions, feedback, and as a source for our stories.

[Manoj]: Isn’t it really difficult to produce quality content at such an incredible pace?

[Dermot Waters]: The entire CNN organization is set up to produce top notch content in a real-time manner, across TV, the web, mobile and any other platforms. It is certainly a challenge, but one we embrace everyday with our newsgathering, iReport, and the use of the social web.

[Manoj]: Where do we go from here – how does the game change from real time?

[Dermot Waters]: From a philosophical standpoint, we are focused on making CNN more social. Part of that is rebuffing terms like “social media”, “new media”, or “traditional media”. To us, it is all media and our goal is to make that media more social, plain and simple. Going forward, social interactions and participatory journalism will continue to play a role in how we deliver news.

Filed Under: real time, Search Engine Strategies, Twitter

5 Min with Andrew Chang of LinkedIn – SES San Francisco Preview

July 23, 2010 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Search Engine Strategies is less then a month away and this year it’s taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Earlier this week I had the opportunity to catch up with Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, to get some insight into his session on PPC and SEO best practices—specific to B2B. Read our conversation below:

[Manoj]: Your session at SES is related to SEO/PPC strategies with regards to B2B, how does LinkedIn become part of equation?

[Andrew Chang]: Millions of people visit LinkedIn each day to connect and re-connect with colleagues and business associates. Our members come from all walks of life – accountants, financial advisors, attorneys, web developers – and they are well-connected and active professionals that many B2B marketers are trying to reach. For this reason, we built and launched our own self-service PPC advertising offering called LinkedIn DirectAds (http://www.linkedin.com/directads) that allows anyone with a LinkedIn account to place text ads on prominent pages and target those ads to only people you’re trying to reach.

A quick example of how this works: One of our most successful customers is an e-learning company that’s trying to attract the attention of primary school teachers to sign up for a Master’s degree program in Education. Over 214,000 LinkedIn members have identified themselves (in their LinkedIn profiles) as being in the “Primary/Secondary Education” industry. Within a few minutes, the e-learning company created a text ad and start displaying the ad only to those 214,000 members when they visited LinkedIn. Teachers click on those ads to learn more about the Master’s programs and the e-learning company pays for those clicks.

[Manoj]: How has the game of lead generation changed in 2010?

[Andrew Chang]: Two ways: Social media and mobile. The increased use of social media services like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter is forcing businesses to rethink how they spend their time and budgets. On LinkedIn, thousands of LinkedIn Groups have sprouted up and liked-minded professionals are engaging in conversations that span the buying cycle. Businesses should be thinking about how they might engage with prospective customers within these groups, encouraging their employees to participate in these conversations. Increased mobile internet access worldwide requires that businesses take a second look at how people experience their website, emails, and other marketing assets from mobile devices.

[Manoj]: I’ve always thought that the importance of SEO never weakened over the years, what do you think?

[Andrew Chang]: Even though I work in online advertising, I always recommend to business and website owners that their websites and web content is optimized for both search engines and social media. I’ve noticed that in recent years this has become easier to say but more and more complex to do. Just take a look at the Google’s Webmaster Central Blog and you’ll see that it’s not just about having the right content on your pages and getting high quality websites to point to your content. With YouTube videos, tweets, and other online assets now crawled and indexed in search engines, you need to think about SEO for more than just your website content.

People don’t realize that your presence on LinkedIn can be optimized for search as well. At a personal level, your own LinkedIn profile often appears in search results when people search for you by name. To make a great first impression, you should make sure that your LinkedIn profile is current and complete. Here’s a link to our learning center where you can learn more: http://learn.linkedin.com/profiles/overview/

Companies also can have their own pages on LinkedIn and you may be surprised by how many people click over to your company’s profile after visiting your personal profile. Anyone at at company can edit the company’s profile on LinkedIn. To learn more, check this out: http://learn.linkedin.com/company-pages/

Filed Under: Search Engine Strategies, SES

Interview of Google's Maile Ohye – SES Toronto Preview

May 25, 2010 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Last week I caught up with Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer at Google (on the Webmaster Tools team). Maile will be keynoting SES Toronto in a couple of weeks with a presentation titled: Inside Google Webmaster Central. I was able to get a sneak peak on some of the topics from that upcoming session in my chat with Maile – read more about it below:

[Manoj]: Can you talk a little bit about the benefits of the latest features, such as DNS record update and clicks/avg. position?

[Maile Ohye]: Sure, Manoj, thanks for asking. The schedule for our Webmaster Tools team includes a new release about every two months. Exciting! For site owners, this means new features for you every few months for the past 4+ years.

In each release, you’ve probably noticed that we aim to improve an existing feature (or our backend infrastructure), as well as release an entirely new feature. With DNS verification we helped webmasters more easily verify ownership of subdomains in Webmaster Tools. Rather than individually verify www.example.com, blog.example.com, and shopping.example.com, you can add one line to you DNS record and all associated sites/subdomains are verified at once.

We expect this feature to be most helpful to webmasters of larger sites.

In our improved Search queries feature, we aimed to help all site owners with access to impression and click data. Regardless of whether you’re a webmaster of a large ecommerce site, a cooking blogger, a large AdWords customer, or you’ve never heard of AdWords, every verified site owner has the capability to see data about their current potential visitors (impressions) and their actual visitors (clickthrough).

In terms of how to act on this data, one method is to find the queries where you’re receiving impressions but not getting clickthrough. Run those queries yourself from a searchbox and investigate why you’re not receiving visitors. How does your title and snippet look? Can you make your content more competitive?

With Search queries, you can view data from not just web search, but also from other properties like images, mobile, and smartphone queries. And you can tailor the information to originate from various countries, like the United Kingdom or Japan.

Features like Search queries’ average position were developed to provide you a quick-glance understanding of the performance of a given keyword. Additionally, if you only want to quickly track a certain set of keywords, go ahead and “star” them for a more simplified display (like you’d see in gmail).

[Manoj]: How has real time search been incorporated?

[Maile Ohye]: Real Time results are triggered in Universal Search from the following:

Threshold queries based on volume and delta: This includes triggering queries like [Lost] to show Real Time results on premier/finale night. We algorithmically notice a large delta for this query compared to perhaps yesterday, or earlier in the week. When [lost] reaches a certain threshold, we understand that Real Time results may be most relevant for the user.
Common queries for Real Time results: This includes political queries and the like — things that are constantly talked about and where freshness and/or a variety of sources may be helpful to the user.

Real Time information on Google is even better searchable. For certain queries, you can actually replay the conversation about a topic. I think this may be the only searchable, replay-able, public archive of tweets.

[Manoj]: What feature of Webmaster tools is your favorite?

[Maile Ohye]: Picking a favorite feature is pretty difficult for me. It’s like picking my favorite niece (I love them all!). One feature I definitely feel goes under-recognized, though, is HTML suggestions. HTML suggestions tells you what pages have duplicate HTML titles and meta descriptions (which are often used in your snippet).

This is actionable data. In getting a handle on whether your site has duplicate content, I’d first run a few site: queries, like [site:googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com microformats], to see if Google had serve-time filtered duplicate results. Next, I’d go straight to HTML suggestions. Pages with duplicate titles and snippets are likely complete duplicate content.

At SES New York a few months ago, I gave a more in-depth presentation on duplicate content, multiple sites, and how to address the issues. I’ll try to film that presentation in mid-June (when I’m back from the SES Toronto keynote), and I’ll write a related post on our Webmaster Central Blog just in case people find the information useful.

[Manoj]: For a brand new site, would a site owner see quicker indexation of their site with an XML sitemap vs. without?

[Maile Ohye]: An XML Sitemap is a great way to maximize your site’s exposure to our crawlers. Once crawled, your site can be indexed. Once indexed, your site can be returned to users in search results. So yes, submit a Sitemap if you can.

Furthermore, when you submit a Sitemap, Webmaster Tools then displays the number of URLs from your Sitemap that are indexed. Win-win.

[Manoj]: What types of improvements are you guys hard at work at?

[Maile Ohye]: As for improvements, Webmaster Tools Message Center is only going to get better. If you’re a verified site owner, I’d recommend setting up email forwarding of our messages. We currently notify site owners of certain violations of our webmaster guidelines, or when we crawl infinite spaces, or information about malware on their site.

Having a communication channel between us at Google and the opted-in, verified owner of a site has truly huge potential. Excitement mounts… music quickens… stay tuned!

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Strategies

SES New York 2010 – Converting Websites with Bryan Eisenberg

March 12, 2010 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Search Engine Strategies New York is right around the corner and is filled with a great lineup of speakers. Earlier this week, I had a chance to speak with SES veteren Bryan Eisenberg about his sessions at the upcoming conference. Bryan Eisenberg is a UX master and a NYTimes Bestselling Author, check out our conversation below.

[Manoj]: Your sessions at SES New York are heavily focused on ‘Conversions’, please give us some background on what you will be discussing.

[Bryan Eisenberg]:I’ll be sharing my 21 Secrets of Top Converting Websites. I spent over a decade helping websites improve their conversion rate and have distilled all that knowledge, experience and research into this one presentation. You see the average website has a conversion rate around 3%, but there are plenty of sites that convert at 10% or higher. By the way when we started out we told everyone 10% was what they should target; some paid attention but most didn’t yet. There will be examples from retail sites, B2B sites, publishers and everything in between. I guarantee that the audience will never be able to look at a website the same way again.

[Manoj]:What are some blatantly obvious things that website owners can do to help improve their conversions?

[Bryan Eisenberg]:I like to break it down to what I call the conversion trinity. The first part is to focus on understanding the intent of your visitor and delivering them the most relevant content for their needs. The second part is making sure they understand the value of purchasing from you. The final part is making sure they know what action they should take next and that they feel comfortable taking that action.

[Manoj]: Are there any online tools you enjoy using during your conversion optimization process?

[Bryan Eisenberg]:I am a tool junkie; I love tools. In fact, I put together a post on my blog of 69 free and low cost tools to improve your website {http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/2009/09/free-tools-to-improve-your-website/} . This is probably a good place for most people to start.

[Manoj]:vAnalytics is a critical component to measuring and improving conversions, how should website owners go beyond a basic analytics implementation?

[Bryan Eisenberg]:The key to being successful with analytics is move beyond reporting and analysis to making data driven decisions and taking action based on the analytics. What I recommend most people do is to create an action plan or to-do list. This list can be daily, weekly or monthly depending on your corporate metabolism and resources. Every time you create this list you should come up with the top places on your website that need improvement, a list of other things you may want to improve or test, what marketing efforts you should do more of and which ones you should do less of and then just execute and get the list done.

[Manoj]: You’ve been helping improve conversions for many years, what things have changed from the last couple of years to 2010?

[Bryan Eisenberg]: In the last 10 years a lot of things have changed in the conversion optimization space, from greater adoption of web analytics tools, to wider awareness of the importance of conversion rate. In the last couple of years, the increasing breadth and depth of tools for enabling conversion rate optimization has been increasing at an astronomical rate. It seems every week I get several requests to check out the latest and greatest offering. However, I still fear to many people are not taking on the challenge of working on improving their website every month since it requires hard work. It is kind of like trying to lose weight; it takes a daily commitment of making smart choices, working hard and eating well. I should know, I’ve lost over 80 pounds since SES NY last year.

Filed Under: Search Engine Strategies, SES

SES San Jose 2009 – Quick Day 3 Recap

August 14, 2009 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Today was the final day of SES San Jose (in terms of sessions) and we had another pretty full day. Over the last 3 days we posted over 70 tweets which you can check out here. Here is a recap:

Charlene Li, Co-Author, Groundswell started the day with an excellent keynote in which she discussed the future of search including many social media elements. Charlene explained that in the future, social networks will be like the air, in that they will be seamless and our networks will follow us everywhere we go. Another cool concept she mentioned was the idea of targeting via social graphics whereby marketers can target users based on their behaviours and relationships with others.
Discussion with Local.com – We met with the Local.com team to chat about what’s happening in their organization. One of the main strategic services was their Local Connect platform by which they provide their media partners a white labelled version of their local directory. Local.com’s traffic is up 57% from last year or 63 million visitors per month.
Follow the Carrot: Cool Mobile Apps is what we attended after lunch, which was a session dedicated to successful mobile apps and mobile app strategies. The panel mentioned 5 characteristics of Cool Apps: Unique, Viral, Useful, Interactive, Fun/Novel and 3 major factors when developing mobile apps – Distribution , Discoverability and Stickiness.
Discussion: Omniture’s SearchCenter with the VP of Search Sales, Chris Zaharias. Chris mentioned SearchCenter has released version 3.3 which included some significant infrastructure and backend updates – mainly to handle the load of over 150 million keywords. SearchCenter has approximately 600-700 clients of which 15% use it as a standalone application. Omniture is looking to become a platform for agencies and businesses rather than a suite of tools.
Up Close and Personal with Yelp! – which featured Jeremy Stoppleman, CEO of Yelp! Jeremy discussed that Yelp! has increased their visitors to 25 million per month which includes 7 million reviews. Yelp’s strategy is to launch one city at a time and to do it right rather than growing too quickly. With the help of Yelp, small businesses will be encouraged to provide the highest level of service or face negative reviews.
Extreme Makeover Live! Why Am I Not Making Enough Sales? – The audience submitted 5 or 6 sites and the expert panelists provided insightful feedback to help the businesses increase their bottom line or number of leads. Most of the sample sites required obvious changes which could lead to some quick wins for the site owners.

Filed Under: Search Engine Strategies, SEM Conferences

SES San Jose 2009 – Quick Day 2 Recap

August 13, 2009 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Day 2 of SES San Jose flew by, below are some of the things we were checking out on the 2nd day.

Session 1 – Igniting Viral Campaigns: Leveraging Consumer-Generated Content, featured 5 panelists including Cisco’s Brian Ellefritz whose team came up with a video contest dubbed the Heaven and Hell contest. Users were given the opportunity to submit their most positive/negative stories regarding their home entertainment system via 3 min YouTube video. The winner would receive a $10,000 prize. The conclusion was a highly engaging campaign which included 50+ video submissions and thousands of ratings/comments.
Demo – ClearSaleing – Co-Founder Adam Goldberg walked me through ClearSaleing highly intelligent analytics program which provided rich insight on referral attribution down to the Net ROI. This is completely different than many other tools which provide last click attribution and Gross ROI.
Bill Hunt of SEMPO – We sat down with Bill Hunt who gave us an overview of all the current undertakings by SEMPO which included their emerging technologies group preparing for a whitepaper on mobile and potentially the Yahoo/Bing deal. SEMPO is aiming to keep members engaged with the industry without being biased towards any tool or service.
Session 2 – Google AdWords, Google Analytics and Website Optimizer: Secrets Revealed! I couldn’t stay for the entirety of this one but the room was absolutely packed. Afterwards we were allowed to ask some of the Google Engineers about issues or problems related to search and their tools/services.

Filed Under: Search Engine Strategies, SES

SES San Jose: Day 1 – Quick Recap

August 12, 2009 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Search Engine Strategies kicked off with conference day 1 today and our day was pretty full – we attended 4 sessions in addition to a product demo. Our Tweets can be found here: http://twitter.com/waworld#/waworld. Here’s a mini recap our day at SES SJ:

Session 1 – How to Optimize for ‘Search & Engage the Community’ featuring insight from Greg Jarboe. Gret outlined a 9 step process in which he effectively tied together Search and Social Media for one his clients. Greg also discussed the importance of having an opinion leader to really push the social communication part of the community strategy.
Session 2 – The panel, which included individual with a tonne of background in video optimization, provided some data on the topic of video as well as reasons to leverage video in your social media strategy. Gregory Markel of Infuse Creative started it off by discussing metrics that go into YouTube’s ranking algorithm and David Burch of TubeMogul concluded by discussing engagement statistics.
Session 3 – ‘Online Video Advertising Made Easy With Google & YouTube.’ Erin Bouchier of YouTube provided excellent insight into how to leverage the sponsored features of YouTube in addition to Google’s TV network.
Session 4 – Ethan Griffin and Bryan Eisenberg lead a session on ‘Extreme Makeover: Conversion Edition’ where they discussed usability issues on sites that members of the audience had submitted before hand.
Demo: WordStream. The WordStream team showed us how their latest product sits between analytics/keyword analysis and bid management in order to add some much need organization to ad campaigns.