posted by Nicolette Beard @ 4:57 PM
Bing will soon be powering Yahoo! search results, leaving advertisers with just two search networks from which to drive traffic. The European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice, by eliminating one of the Internet’s biggest search competitors, have ignored the costs this decision will impose on businesses as they continue to acquire new customers online.
On one hand, I suppose this is good news for search optimizers because now we have only two search engines for which to optimize. While the vast majority of B2B marketers use Google, driving more advertisers into fewer networks increases the price of traffic acquisition. Bidding wars over finite inventory were a complaint in the early years of paid search. I suspect we’ll hear howling soon.
It’s consumers and businesses, small business especially, who really lose. Consumers lose a unique Yahoo! search brand and point of view and the cost to market online can only increase over time.
The days of 10-cent clicks are long gone. To compete effectively online requires not only the internal fortitude to embrace the new, but also an understanding of the underpinnings of the Internet.
Links = Relationships
The rise of social media underscores the importance of developing relationships online. It’s no surprise that Google and Yahoo! have started indexing content from Facebook and Twitter. Those links to and from followers, bloggers and websites represent millions of conversations. I don’t think people will stop using search engines any time soon, but I do believe that with the Microhoo deal, we’ll see search market share decline and with it profits. When you take away choice, consumers can be fickle.
People, through their desire for connection, have provided an avenue for businesses to reach out like never before. Will the day come when companies will reach out to online communities directly and bypass the search engines?
We may have come full circle in our sales and marketing efforts. Every business is now a door-to-door salesman: engaging prospects, building rapport and following up.
Is your website up to the challenge?
Source: SEO Theory
UPDATE: Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft, states at SMX West that Microsoft does *not* now intend to “kill off” Yahoo! Search – he further stated that within the deal agreement, Yahoo! may increase their search share via a wide number of initiatives.
Thanks to Chris Smith for the counter argument.
2.07.2010
posted by Robin Tooms @ 10:56 PM
Super Bowl Sunday is supposed to be one of the biggest pizza-consuming days of the year. Unless all of these advertisements have been lying to me, you’re supposed to eat pizza today. A lot of it. And for some reason, $10 is the sweet spot. Did you order pizza today and contribute to keeping this economy afloat?
So, how is Domino’s Pizza Turnaround campaign going? Well, it depends on who you ask. In the end, it looks like they’ll measure the success with the same store sales numbers. Boring. Personally, I would like to see them correlate the positive and negative mentions on their social media sites as well. It would be great to know if a certain “sentiment” ranking could be tied to the numbers.
This excerpt really sums it up:
Truly engaging in social media necessitates this kind of imperfect back-and-forth. It requires that companies hand over some control over their brands to their customers publicly. There are enormous benefits to doing so. Endorsement of a product by a large group of strangers, or, better yet, people whom you know, is arguably much more valuable than a one-sided advertisement. But with the advantages of social-media engagement come the downsides. For example, when a customer rants about what may be an isolated incident of lousy service on that company’s Facebook wall, everyone can see it. When a bunch of people don’t like a new product or policy, they can rise up against it together.
Part of Social Media 101 is that when you ask for comments, you will get some negative comments, but you can’t ignore these.
Sidenote: I actually did have pizza last week, but we ordered it through an iPhone app. Again, Domino’s where is your app? As one of my co-workers put it “lazy pizza lovers” like me are looking for this type of service.
1.27.2010
posted by Nicolette Beard @ 4:14 PM
As one blogger put it: “Who cares where they rank (sic), if the #1 rank is below the fold?”
With the advent of Universal Search and now Real-Time Search, we can look fondly back to the time when competing for a page one ranking seemed comparatively easy.
Every business is now competing with
- Paid listings
- New product listing ads
- News
- Organic results (1-4)
- Shopping sites via Google Merchant
- Video via YouTube
- Organic results (5-10)
The above list reinforces why it’s so important to know how to promote your site, products and services in all the areas included on a page one result. Traditional search engine optimization (SEO) has morphed into “search optimization.”
Although on-page optimization is still important for effective crawling and indexing of your most important Web pages, it’s no longer enough if you want to be competitive in today’s market.
As Google continues to acquire even more data from mining Social Data Sources, they will be increasing their knowledge about a business ten-fold over the next few years.
This data will eventually be significant in how they rank Web pages not only in Local Search but in Organic Search as well. And we haven’t even factored in Mobile Search.
As detailed in a recent Webinar, the time to develop an holistic engagement strategy is now. Reputation management will be critical to the ongoing survival for any business.
What are the positive online signals your company is sending?
1.01.2010
posted by Robin Tooms @ 6:05 PM
We spoke about Domino’s Pizza a few months ago. Domino’s was under crisis – two employees had released some videos on YouTube that became viral. That time, it was a lesson on how a company should use social media as a PR tactic to help spread goodwill for the company and change public sentiment (and spread it fast – negative news travels like wildfire).
This time, Domino’s is addressing a crisis of a different kind. This crisis – one of their overall brand image – has been long in the making. As Domino’s discovered, many people didn’t like the taste of their pizza and had been quite vocal about it. In this era of social media, gauging customer feedback is easier, although it looks like Domino’s has done some market research of their own as well.
What’s different is how Domino’s has chosen to deal with it. Domino’s has chosen to face criticism very publicly and use that as part of a brand turnaround. Look at this site: http://www.pizzaturnaround.com/
It does take some “corporate bravery” to create a site like this. Not everything is scripted. The live Twitter feed they have on the page is not always positive. They are laying the results out there for the world to see. In a way, they are encouraging us to see for ourselves – to not only try the new pizza but to see what our peers think. This is a company that believes in openness, and I hope they are rewarded for it.
I haven’t tried the new Domino’s pizza yet (if you’re listening Domino’s, I would like a real iPhone app), but it has me interested enough to try it.
10.13.2009
posted by Robin Tooms @ 10:42 PM
That was one of the recent questions posed at the 2009 PR Day Conference, hosted by PRSA, in Houston this past week. It was refreshing to hear that even though many of the tools have changed, the idea that a solid PR foundation – knowing the basics – is still needed. Being compelling and telling a story well is as important now as ever with the proliferation of conversations and channels. If you want your story to be remembered and shared, it has to have a strong core and enough “threads” that tie it into other issues people care about.
Here are some high-level key points from the speakers that day:
- Our PR audience (who we are trying to reach) has changed
We need to think of our audience more as participants instead of thinking of them as readers. They are no longer just “consumers” of information, but potential publishers of information themselves. The era of social media has created an active set of “citizen journalists” who create blogs and more. - There’s a lot of Twitter talk (but is it justified?)
Never has a mere 140 characters been more powerful, right? One think everyone seemed to agree upon was that Twitter is just a tool – a microblog. Peter Shankman, the keynote speaker for the day put it best when he said that the act of “tweeting” is actually different from Twitter, the branded tool. The act will very likely survive even if the brand does not. - Good PR is, and always will be, about relationships
PR, like many professional services, is best when you have strong relationships with your media contacts. These days, it’s not longer just about nurturing traditional journalists, but online media and thought-leader blogger as well. While this sounds intuitive, in practice it may mean interacting with and approaching those contacts using different methods that you’ve used before.
There were so many great speakers, but I particularly enjoyed Gerald Baron’s presentation on “Social Media: The New Realities of Crisis and Emergency Response Communication” where he covered case studies on the L.A. Fire Department, the US Airways incident on the Hudson River and the issues surrounding student notifications after the Virginia Tech shooting. In this, Gerald also reminded us of the basic Crisis Communications formula, which works in both good times and bad:
TRUST = the RIGHT ACTIONs + COMMUNICATION
On Mashable yesterday, there was this article on “HOW TO: Use Social Media in Your PR Pitch Plan” posted that gives pointers on using social media to pitch stories. This is a useful article since the PR Day event reminds us that we do need to try new approaches that will help to get our stories and expertise out to our intended audience. Read through and see if there is a tactic here that you might want to incorporate into your practice.
Savage also got the chance to talk about the intersection between Branding and PR with our presentation, “He Stuck Cheese Up His Nose? The Brand Impact of Web 2.0 and Social Media.” Take a look!
PR professionals know the negative impact of social media. (Remember Domino’s rogue employee video or the “Motrin Moms?”) But don’t fear! When planned strategically and executed consistently as part of a company’s total approach to communications, companies in any industry can drive results and build positive online reputations. In this session, you’ll learn how to leverage your company and employees to yield better communications and search results and generate ideas for your social media strategy and monitoring practices.
