In most industries, you’d be forgiven for asking whether there were any new ideas, themes, concepts of even products. With online marketing, the difficulty each year is in following the common strands that run through all marketing, because this industry pretty much sheds its skin every year. As a result, it’s more about understanding where you’re positioned, or should be positioned, in an ever-changing landscape, than worrying about whether an innovation or a competitor merger has caused a ripple or a rift in your environment!

To illustrate how much it changes, and how much the industry has left to learn from other places, I said to a few people at SES London 2011 how much I thought that everyone was stuck inside their own functional silos and yet everything I saw was simply a piece in a jigsaw called ‘marketing’ and that people would come to realise this as things matured.

Then, in 2012, the marketing word started to appear more prominently, but usually prefixed with some positioning word like ‘content’ or ‘social’, as if they were different forms of marketing. But I was still struck by the number of slightly geeky luminaries (genuinely smart people) who were presenting ‘new’ thinking, about which lots of people were getting excited but which, to an old marketing lag like me, sounded terribly familiar. Any of you who worked in consumer goods marketing 20+ years ago will have been all too familiar with the concepts of ‘audience engagement’, ‘content marketing’ (what’s a TV ad, after all), ‘segmenting audiences’, ‘cross-platform marketing’ (anyone remember on-pack promotions with press, point-of-sale and TV support?).

Now, in 2013, SES London was all about ‘marketing’, even if people still like to choose their own versions of it (I went to two excellent sessions on remarketing). To show how dynamic this industry is, and how it’s come in 2 short years, here’s a Tweet by Dan Barker, who analysed the Twitter biogs of everyone using the #seslon (SES London) hashtag during the 2011 and 2013 conferences (yes, he clearly has too much time on his hands!). In 2011, the dominant word in those biogs, of many words, was SEO. Now, it’s marketing.

Well, that gives you a flavour of the evolving nature of the event, but what made it the best SES London yet (yep, it was even better than my ‘first time’, despite having a heavy cold and no voice for most of it)?

• Any intensive, multi-day event relies in large part on the quality of the speakers and their material.  For 2013, they’d wisely rolled-out some of the perennial ‘big guns’, such as Lee Odden and Dax Hammam, but with bang-up-to-date thinking (it was my first real look at Programmatic Marketing Platforms and Facebook Exchange….. no, really!). The flip to this was that a bunch of great new speakers were included who had clearly worked hard on their content. Of note, and for quite different reasons, were the effervescent Marty Weintraub of AimClear and the fiercely optimised Phil Nottingham of Distilled.
• SES London was achingly ‘on the money’ as far as the current and near-future state of the industry is concerned. Despite the dramatic changes wrought by Google on search results, seo tactics, shopping feeds, etc. (even since Christmas) and the dramatic  pace of change in ‘big box’ ecommerce and technologies, the conference content had ‘priced this in’ and was focused on the tactics and activities that taking companies past these multiple watersheds. So we saw sessions on the convergence of social and search, future website architecture, multi-device marketing and lots of stuff on metrics, measurement and management of everything.
•  This year continued one of the most useful aspects of SES conferences, in that niche experts were generous in sharing their tools and techniques. It’s often this element alone that justifies the cost, as Resonant’s clients get to tap into expertise worth £000′s, whilst I’m able to provide a level of insight and performance that competing agencies struggle to match (not surprisingly, this isn’t stuff that appears on industry blogs).

So that’s it. Another year’s SES done and another year to use all the gems hidden in the notes that I’ve finally finished transposing, as I’m not one of the geeks who tries to take notes on their iPad in order to look good. A large notebook and a pen is still a formidable, human-centred, technology combo when it comes to writing quickly and accurately.

Finally, for those who were expecting a ‘giveaway’ in the third point above and were disappointed, here’s a reward for reading this far…. Google is far better at pulling search results out of Facebook than FB Graph search is (clue: use advanced search and the site: [domain][keywords] operators). This is great for community-building. And there’s more….. Marty Weintraub says Hootsuite Pro is still the best social media management tool out there, so if (like me) you use it but are always comparing it with the competition, stop worrying about the other tools and engage a bit more!

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However, whilst I often forget to reach for the word cloud as a natural instinct in my day-t0-day consulting work (unlike Commun.it, Raven and a host of other analytical tools), I’m often struck at conferences by just how powerful they can be in providing insight into a subject on a very immediate and visual level.

At the recent SES London Conference, several keynote speakers, including Twitter’s Oli Snoddy, used word clouds to illustrate points that would have involved extensive explanation otherwise.

If you’re not familiar with word clouds, they’re a mathematically-calculated visual representation of the relative importance of words within any ‘lump’ of text. The text could be a website, a book, a data feed, etc.

They look broadly like this:

I guess the key to effective word clouds is, like many marketing processes, to get the inputs and initial idea right. This avoids the all-too-frequent outcome of a ‘pretty’, and initially engaging visual, that says very little when you start to assimilate it.

To illustrate the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of wordclouds, I decided to take two very similar data sets to see if they could address the following:

• Provide any ‘big picture’ insights that might be hidden in the ‘raw’ text
• Discern any nuanced differences between the data sets that were actually interesting
• Detect any emphases within the data that might be unintended

To avoid any digital marketing geekspeak and focus on a subject that we can all appreciate, I took two similar RSS feeds from the No.10 website (essentially, the Prime Minister’s online communication operation) and fed them into Wordle. The two feeds were from David Cameron’s speeches and the other from his spokesperson’s press briefings.

I expected many of the same themes and specific words to dominate the word clouds of these two feeds, as they should clearly reflect the same day-to-day concerns and the same policy agendas.

Anyway, here they are, with the speeches on the right (click on them for full-size versions):

One of the most strikingly consistent aspects of these word clouds is the strength of ‘think’. Unfortunately, we’ve no idea from the visual whether the PM is doing a lot of thinking, is uncertain and needs to think, or is asking us all to think! Also, at first glance, there does seem to be an over-emphasis on the ‘personality’ element in both feeds – but I guess that they are the PM’s feeds, so we should expect a lot of ‘Prime’ and ‘Minister’. What’s slightly less fortunate is the dominance of ‘PMS’ in the press briefings…… I will make no further comment, funny or otherwise.

For me, the most interesting aspect are the differences that emerge once you start to look beyond the obvious. Within the ‘second-tier’ words there are clear differences in tone and positioning between David Cameron’s speeches and his spokespersons briefings, although this is probably not that surprising.

The PM’s speeches are liberally (that’s a small ‘L’, David) peppered with ‘organic’ words that create positions, rather than policy, such as good, people, question, make, need, together. This probably fits very well with the slightly conceptual notions of Big Society or Paternalistic Toryism. It’s a ‘broad brushstroke’ in terms of language.

This is in contrast to the briefings word cloud which, whilst commendably similar, has a more mechanistic focus, with an emphasis on naming Government departments and bodies, as well as on detail. This is evident in the way that there are very few words in the middle-layer between the few dominant ones and the plethora of minor words.

In hindsight,, that exercise wasn’t quite as engaging as I’d hoped, but maybe it will encourage you to have a go (maybe with competitors websites) and draw some insight from a digital toy (Wordle’s description of itself).

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And, after operating for quite a few years now, it’s still very successful and able to command top-dollar prices per seat (SES London 2013 costs over £1000 for the 3 day conference,before you’ve dealt with travel, hotels, etc.). However, I can’t be alone in wondering each year whether I’m getting value-for-money.

This is especially true in the current environment when talk of Search Marketing Integration, the declining role of organic search in driving traffic and the growth of ‘social signals’ seems to make any learning experience that focuses just on Search Engine Strategies seem a little narrow and out-moded.

And yet, even though I do a lot more besides SEO (think user experience, online branding, social marketing), I’ve still paid my money and, even with the current turmoil in the industry, I’m really looking forward to it. Why?

•  There is simply no other European conference that gets close to the depth, breadth and quality of SES London. I’ve also attended some key US conferences in the past but, good though some of these are, the slight incremental benefit isn’t really worth the extra time and travel.
• Clients really appreciate the fact that we’re not relying on the often-contradictory industry blogs for our knowledge and that we’re prepared to share the ideas and opportunities that we pick up. Of course, it also sets Resonant apart from most of the people we might be competing against as, at best, they might schlep along to Internet World or the other lightweight freebies. This impacts on both our consultancy clients, as we get them ahead of the games, and anyone we train, as they’re getting the best-possible advice.
• Probably the most important reason for still going is that, on any level, Search Engines Strategies is now a really bad name for what this conference actually covers! Whilst it rightly binds all the content together into a strategically coherent whole, it delivers in spades tactically and operationally. In addition, it now covers way more thinking in the areas of social marketing, conversion & engagement, usability and non-search acquisition than it does Search Engines. Frankly, “The Very Best of Current Online Marketing Tools, Tactics and Trends” would be a more accurate, if dramatically less-compact, title!

To put this into context, I was looking through my notes from last year (yes, I keep the past 2 years of SES notes to hand as there are always gems that I’ve forgotten or haven’t needed before) and here’s just a flavour of what I caught in addition to SEO and link-building sessions:

• An HTML5 and microformats session from Google’s Maile Ohye, their Lead on Developer Programmes and one of the bubbliest characters in the industry.
• Sundeep Kapur’s expertise in generating high email conversion levels. Great guy!
• Advanced Google+ techniques for content publishers with, among others, even-louder-than-she-looks Angie Schottmuller.
• Information Architecture for New Websites

Now, if you work in online marketing and you don’t fancy revving-up the grey matter for 3 days, don’t worry. I, and the other people who attend, are grateful to you for leaving us in pole position when it comes to applying the latest and most effective techniques. In fact, I know senior types from some notable brands that have struggled to take away anything other than a few soundbites…..and a sense that they really have no way of knowing whether their agencies are doing a great job or not!

Anyway, roll on next Tuesday and let’s see what the circus has brought to town.

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Although the study broke down the websites into categories such as banking, food, retail and travel, the most striking differences were not category related – but between different types of online customer support.

For instance, when it comes to email support, 23% of companies could not be emailed. This was either because email addresses what hard to find or because email support was only available to existing customers.

The study used 10 basic customer queries against each customer service channel and company. When it comes to email, more than 60% of companies could not respond with an accurate answer and the average response time was nearly 3 days. By contrast, companies seem to be aligning themselves with social media at a rapid rate. However, whilst the role of social media in customer service is growing very rapidly, companies appear to be running ahead of themselves a little and ignoring the more common channels of telephone and email support.

One concern I have is that companies’ focus on social media is driven by the ability of customers to broadcast their complaint, more than a genuine desire to deal with the complaint on an individual basis. This results in customer service resources being prioritised for damage limitation. This is possibly one reason why the study made a clear distinction between companies adoption of social media for customer service purposes and their effectiveness, or lack of it, in integrating social media channels with existing customer service contact points.

Overall, the study highlighted one of the key challenges in responding to dramatic changes in technology and customer behaviour as, whilst most of these companies are investing heavily in their online systems and resources, the degree to which this is actually improving customer service experience is negligible.

Compared with the figures from 2011, the recent results show a very mixed picture with some sectors, and particularly some individual companies, demonstrating poorer performance whilst others, most notably fashion retailers, have made gains on top of previously strong performances.

The full study is available for download on the Eptica website.

Please note that Resonant has no relationship with Eptica, commercial or otherwise.

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Like many businesses, you probably weren’t aware that Google Places had bitten the dust. Perhaps, like most, you’d created a profile and then forgotten about it. Well, like most things that Google does, there was a bigger picture (and a future revenue stream).

In May 2012 Google began to absorb Google Places into their social networking platform, Google Plus. Google Plus Local was born. Essentially, as the name suggests, this has made Google Plus Local both a social and local platform which allows users to converse with local businesses, review their services and upload user generated content.

This merger has made Google Plus too important to ignore because Google Plus Local is so integrated in to Google’s other platforms such as Search and Google Maps. It’s not all good however, Google Plus Local is also suffering somewhat of an identity crisis by trying to do be so many different things to many different people.

Google Places becomes a part of Google Plus

In May of this year Google Places was absorbed by Google Plus, putting Google Plus at the forefront of local search. This move by Google has essentially made it impossible for business owners to ignore Google Plus. Even if business owners are still not willing to actively engage with Google Plus, it would be very ignorant not to setup and moderate it as a means of reputation management.

Even if business owners are still not willing to actively engage with Google Plus, it would be very ignorant not to setup and moderate it as a means of reputation management

Google Plus’ Business Pages are now packed with features. Google Plus Business pages allow users to view Zagat ratings for businesses (where applicable), rate and review businesses, upload images for public viewing and open discussion similar to a Facebook wall. Google wouldn’t be Google without stepping on a few toes and this latest move has definitely bothered Facebook and Tripadvisor.

So, how do these changes benefit Google and small businesses?

[checklist]

• Google have effectively made their social network integral to local search, an environment in which they have a lot of power.
• Google Plus Pages are indexed and, true to Google’s form, favoured over other local listings, directories and review sites.
• Joining Google Plus has become a necessity for business owners who wish to have control over this important piece of web real estate.
• The integration of Zagat scores, Google Plus user reviews and local search has made Google Plus a powerful source of reviews and, potentially, a powerful source of user generated content.

[/checklist]

Identity Crisis

Even though Google’s recent bolstering of Google Plus has made their social media platform more necessary, it is still not a real threat to Facebook. Users are more likely to use the site to rate and review a business, in a Tripadvisor-esque fashion, rather than engage with the brand on a conversational level.

With these changes Google have made users and local business owners to take notice of their social platform. However, it is suffering something of an identity crisis. It’s trying to be all things at once, and because of this it still doesn’t beat out Facebook or Tripadvisor at what their own respective games.

What Should Local Businesses Do Now?

Businesses who have Google Places accounts, take control, optimize them and manage them as freequently as you can afford to. There’s a good chance that a Google Places account could already exist for a business, even without the owners permission. If this happens take control and verify it.

Many local businesses do at least a bit online marketing, whether they intend to or not.  Local businesses today tend to have some sort of an online presence, whether that be in the form of a website, Facebook page, Twitter account, or even just an online directory listing.  Hardly ever, except in the online marketing world, is Google Plus really mentioned.

Despite its shortcomings, and pretty confusing identity crisis, Google Plus Local is only going to become more of a powerful online marketing tool. For businesses who have ignored Google Plus in the past, now it is time to take notice.

To find out how you can improve your online presence in search, get in touch for a discussion.

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What it hopefully achieves is to give you a very up-to-date picture of what Resonant is doing for clients right now, what we offer and how we’re staying ahead of the game in a rapidly-evolving digital environment.

It’s a business-to-business website and like all good B2B sites, it does the following:

• Tells you who we are
• Tells you just enough about what we do
• Tells you about some of our clients and projects
• Tells you where we are (that’s changed)
• Tells you how to contact us (that’s changed a bit)
• Gets across the idea that we know what we’re doing
• Gets us on your ‘worth a conversation’ list!

Of course, the site will grow over time (good ones do that), as we add more up-to-date commentary on digital marketing and give more background to our work.

We’ll keep it interesting….promise.

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1. Well-researched on-page SEO is the most effective way of telling search engines exactly what you want to say (and which terms you want the page to rank for)
2. Off-site SEO (backlinking and content-building) is the most effective way of gaining page one search engine rankings (once you’ve done the on-page work)
3. A well-maintained news or blog section on your website is a proven means of getting more attention from Google and keeping your site content fresh
4. Any webpage that you want to have ranked in search engines should have an unique page title, meta description and content. Any significant duplication will noticeably reduce a website’s performance in search engines. For large ecommerce sites, this might mean several thousand pages!
5. As Google dominates the UK search market, it’s important to utilise Google Webmaster Tools and XML Sitemaps to maximise your leverage with Google
6. SEO is part-science (website structures and technology) and part-art (content), but it should always be planned.
7. SEO’s visible role on a website should always be in support of the key marketing or selling messages and not a as a dominant or obvious feature. Search engines might like that but customers certainly won’t
8. Be careful when using affiliate marketing and listings on price comparison sites as many of them using ‘scraping’ techniques to display information from your website. This becomes duplicate content and Google may choose their webpage instead of yours
9. Most social networks and many blog sites have links from them set to ‘no follow’. This means that users can follow them, but search engines won’t and the result is that the link has little SEO value. There are simple browser tools that can alert you to this on any site.
10. SEO can’t be used to force rankings up too quickly without the search engines spotting it. It takes time. SEO is also a long-term activity because the ‘top dog’ competitors in any search market will be constantly building links and content.

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Frankly, Schema.org sounds a bit ‘heavy’ for the uninitiated, but it’s also something that is becoming a necessary step towards a more intelligent and useful Semantic Web. At the beginning of June last year, Google, Bing and Yahoo announced that they were all adopting the new standard and already we are starting to see it have a profound impact on the relative search performance of many websites who have adopted it.

It’s the repository of an emerging ‘standard’ for website page construction – and ‘standards’ tend to have a significant game-changing influence upon the web. Schema.org is becoming more and more integral to the structure of websites, allowing content to be more easily identified in search results.

What is Schema.org?

Well, to start with, let’s set a context for schema.org:

The easiest comparison to get our heads around is probably sitemaps.org, a universally-accepted format for submitting an xml file to the search engines that lists the pages in a site, their relative importance and the last time each page was edited. All sites should have a properly-constructed xml sitemap (quite a few don’t) as, compared to the competition, a site with a good sitemap will get indexed more often and more fully by the search engines and often achieve higher rankings.

Essentially, an XML sitemap is a shorthand for the search engines that makes their job a lot easier.

With schema.org, things get a bit more complicated but, potentially, more interesting. To date, lots of information that appears in a webpage gets drawn from a database and, once it’s read within a webpage by a search engine, much of the contextual information that describes that data gets lost, leaving mostly just html tags. Putting that information back in (and more) is where schema.org comes in. Hopefully, you can already start to see that better-described data has the potential to make webpages more effective in search engines.

You may have seen results like this appearing in search results:

As you can see it differs from standard search results, Google is displaying what is called a Rich Snippet. The implementation of schema.org has given my listing more prominence on the first page for “improve your business online”. It features a thumbnail of the author (me), plus the name and a link back to an author page of your choice – in this case my Google Plus profile page. This “upgraded” search result has been achieved simply through the addition of the Rel=Author schema.org tag.

At the beginning of June last year, Google, Bing and Yahoo announced that they were all adopting the new standard and already we are starting to see it have a profound impact on the relative search performance of many websites who have adopted it

Let’s look at another example:

If you have just referred to a book on a webpage with a specific title, such as “Brighton Rock”, Google doesn’t have much to get its teeth into, especially if you haven’t used the word ‘book’. Now, imagine if you were able to add a tag that told the search engines that you were about to write about a ‘thing’. In schema.org speak, that would be a opening microformat tag called ‘itemscope’. You can then go even further and tag the section as itemtype and then tag it as Book.

This would change the section of the page from:

Brighton Rock

Author: Graham Greene

English Fiction

to:

itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Book”

Brighton Rock

Author: Graham Greene

English Fiction

For an interesting and useful live example of microformats  in action, check out Google Recipes which relies on the hRecipe microformat tag and other tags which indicate to Google what ingredients are need to put together certain dishes. Google can then ascertain what meals you can put together with the ingredients you have at hand.

This might seem all rather long-winded but, like HTML tags, it will become standard practice over time. However, it’s inevitable that, in the short to medium term, it plays into the hands of developers and SEO’s that know their stuff and the clients with the resources to make substantial changes to their website.

On this basis, it’s likely to widen the ‘digital divide’ between the ‘knows’ and ‘don’t knows’ and ‘have’ and ‘have nots’ amongst clients. This is simply because it’s almost inconceivable that a system that improves a search engine’s ability to understand a webpage won’t improve the rankings and visibility of those that maximise their use of it.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you are wondering how the integration of schema.org can benefit your business. As part of a targeted SEO campaign it can elevate your business above the competition in the rankings.

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Although the website includes an outline of the website migration project for BeanBagBazaar, you probably won’t be aware that we operate across a number of areas for Bazaar Group, from strategy development to training to SEO. However, over the past 6 months, the business has been moving towards replacement of both its back-office and webfront systems – a major undertaking that has been necessitated by growth and the ever-evolving nature of online marketing.

From the outset, we’ve been involved in areas that you might expect, such as planning the migration of the websites from an SEO perspective and working on user experience and conversion optimisation. However, you might not imagine that Resonant would lead the front-end vendor selection process or project-manage significant parts of the development process, in addition to managing page speed testing, server load testing and the redevelopment of secondary blog sites. But we did, and mostly on an ‘on-demand’ basis as the project grew in complexity beyond the competencies of the existing teams.

One of the key objectives for the project was to rationalise the number of transactional websites operated by the business, as a number were not getting the marketing attention they deserved and were often duplicating products from the ‘main’ sites.  In conjunction with the inhouse marketing team, a structure was developed that has resulted in 2 main transactional websites, beanbagbazaar.co.uk and purelydogbeds.co.uk, whilst the latent ‘authority’ and linking value of 3 other sites has been harnessed by turning them into low-cost information-only websites that focus on specific niches in the beanbag market and link back into the transactional sites.

The overriding objectives, and the ones that justify the very substantial investment, won’t surprise you. Increased conversion, better engagement and user experience, multi-device performance and a more robust platform for future development. The websites only go live today and tomorrow, yet we’re already planning the move onto stage 2 developments in a couple of months. If you want to see a simple but effective ecommerce deployment that has lots of  ’under-the-bonnet’ clever stuff, even before the tidying-up has been done, you could do worse than BeanBagBazaar.

One of the other ‘live’ projects that I’m personally spending quite a bit of time on is a systems and marketing transformation process for a Government agency that handles large amounts of money for hundreds of thousands of UK residents and has a consequently substantial customer service overhead and IT infrastructure. In an environment where an ever-increasing number of ‘customers’ traditionally means ever-increasing numbers of customer-facing staff, the importance of pursuing the public sector ‘digital by default’ agenda becomes far from conceptual in its application.

Essentially, the organisation itself is determined to move from a transactions-focused, big IT-centric business model (with a lot of telephone-based support) to a customer-focused, agile IT business model. Achieving this within a short time-scale would be challenging in a private sector organisation that is measured on financial performance, but it hits new levels of ‘stretch’ in an organisation that has the added complication of meeting policy objectives.

Where do we fit in?

Well, not comfortably, if one thinks of the traditional model of an organisation specifying a need and then bringing in expertise to achieve a desired outcome.

On this project, we’ve spent quite a lot of time  helping senior managers to understand the salient issues around their objectives, as many of the issues are essentially marketing and digital delivery-related and not centric to their core skills of systems management and operational management. This process included the hosting of a ’round table’ event that brought together directors from the Government agency with senior figures from tech organisations and companies from across the North East, with the express objective of exploring external resources and alternative work methodologies.

The second area of engagement has been in scoping and finding organisational solutions that can establish digital marketing competencies that are additive, not subtractive, to the existing culture and competencies. This includes a pending assessment and recommendation process for their first foray into distinct Agile delivery – a customer-facing business process web app.

A number of other conversations are taking place with the agency and I’m sure that some purists would characterise this as a rather ill-defined ‘suck it and see’ approach. Unfortunately for them, I’ve always been a great advocate of ‘contingent’ approaches (blame Fiedler’s work on leadership for that) and, as long as the overriding objectives are kept clearly in view, it seems madness to deal with issues in a prescriptive manner. The danger in this is that, as often happens, the process starts to determine the outcomes, rather than the process being simply an effective methodology for how the work should be undertaken.

Hopefully, that provides you with a little more insight into the kind of work we get involved with, and might even encourage you to give Resonant a call. As for the things we’re better known for, like SEO, we’re still very good at it – which is probably why we don’t have to go ‘marketing’ ourselves too much.

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