Competitive Intelligence – Social Media Tools and Tactics

Okay, so you didn’t think we’d leave Pubcon without getting a little sneaky, did you?

 

Don’t be ridiculous.

 

Earlier this afternoon Mat Siltala, Chris Winfield and Kristy Bolsinger sat down to share some insight on the tools and tactics they use for competitive intelligence. Pull up a chair.

 

Chris was up first and offered some of his favorite tools to help you get to know you’re enemy.

 

The three tools he absolutely couldn’t live without:

 

Rapportive: This changed how Chris finds information and the type of information he can find. It’s a Google extension and creates rich contact profiles right insight of Gmail. It will work with people you have established relationships with OR you can just dump an email into Gmail and Google will pull it in that way. I didn’t know that. That’s pretty cool.

 

Google: Google has more data about us than anyone else. You can search for email addresses, even if the person tries to mask it via address[at]domain[dot]com. Google will still find it because Google is smarter than you. He also recommends using the Related Searches that appear at the bottom, performing searches for [full name + company] and using advanced search operators.

 

Some other queries you can use to get dirt:

 

[Company +] :

• Funding
• Revenues
• Losses
• Reviews
• Lawsuits
• Awards
• Clients

<liCustomers

• Competitors
• Spam/Scam/Ripoff

 

Evernote: Chris likes Evernote because it ties everything else he does together. To make this work for you, Chris suggests creating a new notebook for each competitor and clipping everything relevant you see about them. You can also share your notebooks with colleagues so that they can add information, as well.

 

More Awesome Tools Chris Likes:

 

• Crunchbase
• WhoGotFunded.com
• SeekingAlpha.com
• CORI – contracts
• Copyright.gov
• ThomasNet.com – look up private product information
• DomainTools.com: He uses the monitor to look up all the domains a person owns. And every time they do something with a domain, he’s alerted
• Indeed: See what jobs competitors are hiring for and what type of people they’re trying to attract
• Ubersuggest.org
• SimilarSites.com: Good way to find niche-specific sites you didn’t know exist
• BoardReader.com: Search forums, as well as LinkedIn Groups
• Builtwith.com: Shows you how a site is put together.
• CompeteMonkey.com: Alerts you when someone starts using a new site
• Mostly Harmless: Extension for Reddit. Will tell you if something’s been submitted to Reddit.
• Mon.ki: Chrome extension. It connects people.

Mat Siltala was on hand to talk solely about Pinterest. There were lots of jokes that this was going to hurt Mat’s man cred. Which is ridiculous. Mat has no man cred. ;)

 

Mat is a big Pinterest fan because it’s filled with buyer intent. He shares some stats that showed StumbleUpon’s average time on site was 10 seconds. The average time on site for Pinterest is 10 minutes, with an average page visit of about 5 pages. That’s sort of sick.

 

Matt shared a list of powerful Pinterest Tools

 

Real-Time Alerts

 

PinAlerts: Offers real-time alerts whenever someone pins something on your website (or, you know, someone else’s website). Use it to find out what competitor content is being pinned, how many times its shared, what’s getting the most comments, who is doing the pinning, potential content ideas, etc. It’s essentially real-time spying.

 

Finding Pinterest Influencers

 

• PinReach
• PinPuff

 

Pinterest Analytics

 

• Pinerly: Find stuff about influencers and trends. Find popular categories to understand where you should be spending your time.
• Use Pinterest.com/source/yourwebsite.com

 

Matt also recommend this awesome Pinterest Bookmarklet which looks pretty slick: http://digitalhighrise.com/pinterest-tool-and-bookmarklet

 

Kristy finished up the panel by taking everything you thought you know about creating a social media framework and essentially beating it into submission.

 

Creating a framework offers a number of powerful benefits:

 

• Benchmarking: Helpful for context, expectations, and goal setting
• Illuminate Opportunities: Uncover new opportunities
• Reveal Customer Expectations: Collecting feedback provides valuable product or service insight
• Identify Competitive Objectives: What are your competitors paying attention to? What aren’t they paying attention to?
• Ideation: Steal like an artist. Don’t copy what other people are doing, but look for opportunities where folks are doing great things. Think aspirationally and look outside your industry.

 

The methodology for all this looks something like this:

 

Kickoff — > Frame — > Gather — > Curate — >Story Creation — > Final Readout

 

Luckily for us, Kristy broke it down further.

 

1. Kickoff

 

What are your goals here? You want to establish credibility for the project, create a common understanding of the project and the outcomes, explain participant roles and express their importance, and outline the parameters for the project. By doing this you’ll go a long way to not only making the client trust you, but you also set those expectations early on, which is super important.

 

1.5 Kick Off Part Duex

 

This is really about getting those project stakeholders on board. To assist in that it’s important that you explain your purpose and their role, establish WIIFM (What’s In It For Them), develop flexible questions (if you let someone talk, they will. Let them talk!), get them talking about themselves to identify their core interests, be empathic, and listen for pockets of interest.

 

2. Framing

 

This is going to include:

 

• Social Networks
• Listening & Data
• Industry Trends
• Website and maintenance
• Stakeholder Interviews

 

3. Listening

 

Most people have an idea about what “listening” really is. However, Kristy awesomely shows us that many of us are horribly wrong.

 

What listening REALLY IS: It is a point in time snapshot, conversation analytics, a look at sentiment drivers, and is about search and traffic data

 

What listening REALLY IS NOT: It is not a comprehensive dive of the entire brand’s history (that would be ridiculous) or meant to identify specific engagement opportunities.

 

4. Industry Research

 

Where to look:

 

• Trade Journals
• Industry reports
• Government
• Consumer Groups

 

What to look for: Trends

 

5. Gather & Curate

 

Build your story by showing off the how and documenting what you did, and then pull the thread together to surface the opportunities that are available.

 

Kristy walked everyone through a very comprehensive scorecard that she creates for each campaign that I wish I was about to get down. Putting that scorecard together really helps you to take a customer perspective to the data and see what a customer seems when they land on your page.

 

Leaving us with some final best practices Kristy recommended to maintain the client perspective, use the scorecard you create to found and defend findings, focus, and leverage the data to validate or invalidate your gut.

 

The tools Kristy relies on:

 

• SimplyMeasured
• Radian6
• Unmetric
• Prosodic
• Web analytics
• You brain and your keyboard

 

Morning Keynote with Doc Searls

Hey, hey, it’s the last day here at Pubcon, but that doesn’t mean we’re slowing down any. Not…even…a little.

 

This morning’s keynote featured Doc Searls and, as speakers often do, he started with a story. Today’s story centered on Mona Shaw, the woman who took a crack at Comcast. Literally With a hammer. If you’re not familiar with Mona’s tale, she was an older woman who, after repeatedly being jerked around by Comcast, came into their offices with a hammer and started breaking stuff. When she was done smashing keyboards and computers she asked, “have I gotten your attention now?” She certainly did. And though she was arrested for her efforts, there wasn’t a jury or judge that would convict her.

 

Mona represented two things for consumers – independence and engagement. We’ve been improving these areas for 30-40yrs, but we’re not done yet.

 

Doc talked about the early days of the IBM computer and the change that it represented. It allowed us to get more done inside the company. We had word processing and software and spreadsheets. We got a power that was corporate before that. It wasn’t going back because it was good for business.

 

Jump to 1995 and the Internet comes along. What that we suddenly have international, cost-free communication power. We were zero distance from anyone else in the world that was also connected. The phone comes didn’t give us this. Neither did the cable companies. The geeks provided it. It was good for business because we had power to communicate in ways we couldn’t before that. This movement for independence and engagement is a personal movement. It was unprecedented in human history.

 

In 2008, we got the smartphone. But progress isn’t done. The phone in our pocket isn’t truly our phone. It belongs to Apple or the phone company. This isn’t a general purpose device. In the days of IBM, no one would tell you what you could put on your phone. Today, we have things like the app store controlling us.

 

Docs says there are three beliefs holding businesses back:

 

1. Disservice
2. Surveillance
3. Gimmicks

Disservice

 

Google, Facebook and Twitter have become infrastructure for us. We live on them. But there’s an inherent problem here – the consumer and the customer are different populations. These services are accountable to their advertisers, not to their users. That’s contributing to MLOTT – money left on the table – as the sites cater to the wrong audience. This a problem that needs to be solved.

 

Surveillance

 

We are being followed, and it sucks. Companies believe that they can automate process to get to know us (by tracking our data) and that they’ll be able to get a complete picture of who we are. They think by collecting this data they’ll get to know us better than we know ourselves. They don’t actually want to get to know us; they just want to get a picture of who we are through the data they collect. This isn’t the same thing and it’s not fun.

 

And surveillance is only getting worse. The Wall Street Journal has been tracking online surveillance the past few years to help users follow what’s being collected and the impact it’s having.

 

There are also sites like Ghostery which now exist to monitor who is tracking you and let you turn it on or off.

 

Gimmicks

 

This is an infection that is a real problem. Doc mentioned the loyalty card craze and how it hockey stick’d in the mid-90s when the Internet came along. It was an attempt by brick and mortar businesses to hold onto their users. But it’s silly and it’s stupid. It inconveniences users and forces them to carry around lame loyalty cards. The overhead price with this is enormous. He mentions the reason so many people love Trader Joes is because they don’t do any marketing. They have one price and they never discount anything. They relate to their customers instead of gaming them. Doc wants to see more companies act like this. Markets aren’t just conversions, they’re relationships.

 

In 2012, your browser is like a shopping cart that gets skinned with whatever site it goes to. First you’re in REI, you’re in Walmart, you’re somewhere else. Why can’t there be one shopping cart for every site.

 

Doc talks about the idea of “confusopoly”, which is when a whole bunch of companies in the same business put up really complicated choices so you can’t make an informed decision. You get confused and just pick something. Phone plans are a great example of this. Now we have services like Ting appearing, where you only pay what you use. They’re the Trader Joes of the phone company world.

 

Trader Joes and Ting represent the ideal. It’s where supply and demand meet each other as equals. That’s what we’re moving toward.

 

Doc says the answer to all these issues is VRM – Vendor Relationship Management. It’s the customer side of CRM.

 

With VRM the customer drives. It’s about giving consumers tools to help them transform the marketplace. Consumers are able to manage their relationships, set who is able to use their data and how, set their own terms of experience, etc.

 

He encourages attendees to start working with VRM developers to make things happen.

 

If you want to learn more about VRM, I’d recommend checking out Doc’s blog. There’s a whole category of information there.

Google’s Author Tag: The Biggest Signal Since Links?

One of the highlights of Day 2 was the session the afternoon’s Google Author Tag session which featured an all-star panel of Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Jim Boykin, and Brian Clark. Jim Boykin joked that “authorship” has been the buzzword of Pubcon and the past few months and, well, he’s not wrong. I know it’s something we’ve been talking about a lot internally. With Google working harder to connect the dots between your online profile, building your AuthorRank is no longer just an option, it’s a serious Must Do. Google is adding context to content and it’s in your best interest to help them.

 

Brian Clark started off the session talking about the idea of authority. The days of spinning blog posts or outsourcing them to India is over. You have to start paying for content and find a way to make yourself an authority, to make a rockstar out of one of your writers, or suck it up and hire someone who already is a rockstar and get them to write for your site. In today’s Web economy, the actual writer matters for ranking and it matters for links. It comes down to great content and relationships. Just like in the offline world.

 

If AuthorRank is so important, how do you get set up? Stephan helped break it down.

 

1. With a verified email: If you have an email address on the same domain as your content, you can go to plus.google.com/authorship to verify it. Using the form on that page will add your email address to the Work section of your profile, which by default is viewable only by your circles. You can keep your email private if you wish. It will also add a public link to the domain of the email address to the Contributor to section of your profile.
2. Without a verified email: If can’t verify an email address on the same domain (say if you’re a contributor to the Huffington Post but don’t have a Huffington Post email address) you can still link your content to your Google+. In these circumstances, you’ll want to do it from your Author page on that site. Just link to your Google+ page in the bio area and Google will be able to pick that up. You can do it directly from the content, itself, but you don’t have to. You’ll also want to add the rel=me tag.

 

Stephan recommended using the Google Structured Data tool to make sure you’ve set it up correctly.

 

During his time, Eric Enge reinforced the importance of using this tool to make sure things are set up correctly and outlined a number of issues you could have if you’re not careful.

 

For example:

 

• Overtagging: If you tag your pages improperly (maybe using two rel=me tags) Google doesn’t know what to do with this.
• Conflicting author tags
• Wordpress issues

 

Eric mentioned that Wordpress’ default is to strip out rel=author pages if you try to embed them in your content. Google recommends using a plugin to remedy this, however, be careful. If you use this tag your authors can place ANY HTML in their bio…which could lead to less than desirable sites, so just something to keep in mind.

 

Eric also talk about the other signals Google is looking like, for example – as has been mentioned many times during the show – if you spend more than two minutes reading an article you find in the SERPs and then hit the back button, Google will prepopulate other articles by that author in the SERPs under the original listing. Their thinking is that if you read someone’s content for that long, you obviously like what they have to say.

 

At the same token, if you routinely ignore posts written by a certain author, you’ll start to see them less, as Google will assume you’re not interested in their opinion.

 

Jim Boykin rounded out the panel and spent his time stressing the importance of creating great content and investing in great writers and attracting attention from them. Google is using AuthorRank to fill in the blanks of your Web presence. They already know about content tied to your email address, your Twitter account, etc, now they’re looking for us to bring it all together for them. Similar to the way PageRank measured the authority of the page, AuthorRank now measures the authority of a piece of content. Some writers are 10s and others are 0s. Articles written by authors with high reputation scores will rank better than articles written by authors with lower scores.

 

As a result, blogging for the sake of blogging is not going to help you. You need an expert writing for you. As mentioned above, you either need to create an expert or hire an expert. Outsourcing your writing to someone who’s first language isn’t English, will hurt you. Google is evolving beyond links, and we have to, as well.

 

Jim sums things up nicely stating, “If you’re not going to write great content, don’t bother write at all. If you are going to write, get your content cited by trusted people.”

 

Amen.

Shakil Khan on Human Capital, Fearlessness

Day two of Pubcon opened with a powerful keynote from Shakil Khan. If you’re not familiar with Shak, hi, where have you been? Also, Shak is the director of special projects at Path and holds the same position at Spotify. He has been instrumental in growing both communities, as well as others, and is a long-time contributor to WebmasterWorld.com. He’s basically a pretty big deal.

 

Much of Shak’s conversation this morning centered on the idea of growing human capital. Not in a creepy way, but in the importance of building strong networks kind of way. Something that Spotify, Path and ALL companies have in common is they have a need to get shit done. And that means having access to an amazing network – Shaq has created that for himself and for the many companies that he works with or serves as an advisor for. Shaq brings the people and his network to whatever project he’s working on. That’s huge. It’s the difference between having a real network…and 40,000 fake Twitter followers. ;)

 

Path is really big in Asia, but no one from the management team had been there. Shaq went and spent four days seeing people on the ground, meeting the local media, and inserting himself into that environment. These are the actions really important to growth. He says he’s able to move a lot quicker than most people. It’s not because he’s an expert that any of this has happened, he says he’s just slightly less ignorant than everyone else. Really, I think it’s because he’s fearless. Shaq will enter situations that others would shy away from because of uncomfortableness.

 

Brett asked Shaq how you develop this fearlessness that he seems to have – is it a personality trait you’re born with, do you cultivate it?

 

Awesomely, Shaq shared a story about when he was a young boy. When Shaq was 9 and his brother was 15, his dad told his older brother he needed to get a job and that Shaq should go with him while he looks for one. But his brother was really shy. So when they came upon a factory that was hiring, Shaq went in, as a 9 year old boy, and asked for the supervisor on his brother’s behalf. Not only did his brother get the job, but they gave Shaq one, as well. They figured that a 9 year old who had the chutzpah to walk into a building and ask for the supervisor was someone they wanted to have around.

 

What all these experiences have taught him is that the worst thing someone can say to you is “no”. Once you can handle that “no”, life becomes so much easier. Most people go through life not wanting to get out of their comfort zone. At this point I’m not sure whether I want to go hug Shaq or just start crying from my seat.

 

Another big theme from Shaq’s talk was about diversifying your traffic and using common sense. Shaq admits that he made his money on the Internet by selling Viagra. They’d get all this search traffic, but it would only convert at certain times. He says you have to overlay data with common sense. Sure, guys were searching for Viagra for laughs with their friends at 2pm, but they weren’t going to purchase it then. They were going to sneak back online at 2am and complete the purchase.

 

The last big point I took from Shaq’s talk was the importance of building a brand. You can no longer run an Internet company without factoring in brand. Right now Shaq works at Spotify, it’s an amazing product but his biggest challenge is taking the product and getting it out to the right people. When they were launching in the US they were careful to give beta invites to the people who could spread the word and who would be passionate about a product like theirs. Marketing is about what happens after the initial spike.

 

Overall, a killer talk from Shaq this morning. I think everyone’s wandering around the expo halls a little more inspired right now. ;)

Google Announces New & Improved Disavow Link Tool

Matt Cutts was on hand at Pubcon to issue the annual State of the Index address, sharing insight on what Google’s done this year, what webmasters should know, and, this time, to also announce a new tool for webmasters. Look alive!

 

First, a recap of the past year. SEO in 2011: Low Quality Sites (Panda) and Communication

 

2011 was all about identifying low quality sites for Google. They wanted to clean up the Web, while also working to improve communication between Google and webmasters. He thinks they were able to do a good job with that, which allowed them to move back to focusing on webspam in 2012.

 

Last year in detail:

 

• Algo update to address sites with too many ads above the fold (aka MFA sites)
• Penguin: You’re probably already familiar with this one. It got a little bit of coverage. ;)
• Spammy link network crackdown: Google recently got its first spam report from the US Senate. One of the sites highlighted in that report was a site they had not only found via Penguin but with a spammy link crackdown, as well. It made Matt feel warm and fuzzy that they caught the site algorithmically and manually.
• Continued refinements on Panda: Matt says there continues to be data refreshes once a month
• Exact-match domains

 

As a webmaster, you may not be so excited about the stuff on that top list. So, for you, Matt shared some Google changes that took place over the past year that everyone can get excited about.

 

• Googlebot got smarter about AJAX/JS
• 90 days of queries, 2000 top queries –> 98 sites have full coverage for all queries that lead to clicks
• autocompletetype: better form filling. If you lower the barrier to entry to filling out forms, you’ll get higher conversion rates.
• Responsive Web design suggestions
• Better multilingual support
• Webmaster Academy
• Recommendations for smartphone optimized websites
• Better crawl/site error reporting
• Emails for critical issues
• Better user permissions in console
• Sending messages for pretty much every manual action that they do that will directly impact the ranking of your site.
• Blog posts of algorithm changes: Helps you to see what topics they’re trying to tackle
• Video of quality launch meeting –> released 8 minutes of a weekly minute to help you look over Google’s shoulder and see how they evaluate sites
• Updated Webmaster Guidelines with examples
• Message for unnatural links

 

With the 2012 recap out of the way, Matt had something to announce – A New & Improved Disavow Link Tool

 

Before Matt shared the URL for the tool, he had a few words of warning for everyone in the room.

 

Ready?

 

Do not use this tool unless you know what you are doing and you are sure that you need it. Do not be the guy (or gal) who accidentally disavows every link going to your website. If you are that guy, you should not use this tool.

 

Matt stressed the importance of still trying to remove all the links from the Web manually that you can before you use this tool. Other search engines are also looking at your link profile – so are competitors – you don’t want them to think you like spammy links either.

 

Okay with that out of the way, the good stuff.

 

This is the URL for the new Google Disavow Link Tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1

 

Once you log into your Webmaster Console, you’ll see the link to disavow links. The process, itself, is pretty easy. Create a text file, one URL per line. You can also disavow links by domain: to ignore ALL domain links. For the time being, Google is going to use this as a strong suggestion. All things being equal, Google will ignore the links that you specify, but if they see something going wrong, they reserve the right to ignore you. Matt says that most sites should NOT use this tool.

 

When inside Webmaster Tools, you’ll be able to upload your text file of links for Google to ignore. There will be lots of warnings to remind you that you only want to do this if you know what you’re doing. Once you’ve chosen the file, hit the submit button and Google will tell you it has been processed.

 

This will not take effect immediately If you submit your links on Monday, don’t expect Google to have discounted them by Monday night. The way it works is that when Google crawls the Web, they will see the links you’ve mentioned and they’ll get annotated. It could take a few weeks. This is done on purpose so that webmasters don’t try to turn links on and off in real-time. Google is onto your games.

 

Webmasters will have the ability to download their text file via CSV or Google Docs so it can be re-edited and uploaded. If you delete the file, it will be like you never submitted it.

 

So is the disavow link tool the same as adding a nofollow? It’s about 99 percent the same. With nofollow, Google will drop that link out of their analysis. It’s pretty much a guaranteed thin, but here they’re being a little more cautious so people don’t accidentally disavow all links from themselves.

 

If you’re in the process of filing a reconsideration request – take care of your links first. Then wait a little bit before submitting the reconsideration request and let Google know that you’ve used this tool so they know to look for it.

 

Danny Sullivan was present during Matt’s talk and somewhat-frustrated says it sucks that Google has to give us this tool at all. In the past they’ve always said that links pointing to our site can’t hurt us, but now they seem to be going against that. If you know links are bad, why not just NOT count them?

 

Matt counters that the disavow tool isn’t just for bad links, it can also be for negative SEO. Instead of wasting your time worrying about that, webmasters can now use the tool and go back to getting links from reputable domains. This tool is also for those occasions when you can’t get someone to remove a link to your website that you want pulled because they’re either ignoring your email or you just can’t get a hold of them.

 

Didn’t exactly answer Danny’s question but…there’s always tomorrow. ;)

Robert Cialdini & Principles of Persuasion

Hey, hey! Pubcon is off and running. Giving us a push this morning was Robert Cialdini, author of Influencer: Proven Science for Business Success. As marketing tactics continue to move more toward understanding human behavior and psychology, the information Robert presented on is absolutely the information we all need to be integrating into our marketing campaigns.

 

During his hour-long talk, Robert talk about the Psychology of Persuasion aka the ability to move people in our direction without changing the merits of what we have to offer, only the way we’re presenting them. Robert gave us six principles of persuasion that we can take advantage of to increase our chances of success.

 

1. Reciprocation

 

Basic manners obligate us to give back the behavior that has first been shown to use. If you get me a birthday present (June 28), then I am obliged to get you a birthday gift when yours comes around. If I do you a favor, you feel inclined to repay that and do me one, as well. Use this in your marketing.

 

You may choose to send your customers birthday gifts, but give them something first. Maybe it’s a good deal or free information (bloggers, what!) or a small token of gratitude – give them something they weren’t expecting.

 

Robert cites a study done by restaurants in NYC where they experimented with this idea. If the waiter presented a mint with the bill, tips increased 3.3 percent. If they offered two mints, tips went up 14.1 percent.

 

Give something, get something.

 

2. Liking

 

It’s not rocket science – people will say yes more often to people they know and like. To get a better reaction from folks you want to work to uncover similarities that exist between you and your audience. Robert said it was difficult to uncover information about your audience online so to instead focus on revealing information about YOURSELF that your audience will then relate to. Tell them who you are so they can see the similarities in themselves. I think that’s valuable advice, however, I’d argue it’s not that difficult to learn about your audience so you, too, can see the similarities that exist. Seth Godin said that marketing is telling your audience a story they want to hear – to do that, you need to know them.

 

To back up his theory, Robert shares that negotiators were able to reduce situations of deadlocked conversations from 30 percent to 6 percent simply by exchanging information about themselves like interests, where they went to college, where they sat in their family structure, etc.

 

As marketers we want to us this to get across features of who we are, not just professionally but personally. Do it in your About Us section. Share your top three driveway songs (the songs you listen to when you’re parked in your driveway and the car’s still running). This is what connects you to your audience.

 

3. Commitment/Consistency

 

We want to be consistent with what we have already said or done, especially in public. Otherwise people say mean things about us and may call us a liar. Robert encourages marketers to find ways to get your audience to make a vocal commitment.

 

As an example he mentions a restaurant that was able to drop reservation no-shows from 32 percent to 10 percent simply by changing messaging from “please call if you have to change your reservation” to asking “will you please call if you have to change or call your reservation?” By making someone say yes and make that public commitment, they are more likely to make good on it.

 

Consequences of being uncertain in decisions…

 

When your consumers are forced to make a decision they’re insecure about, they’ll do three things:

 

1. Freezing: Reluctance to make a choice.
2. Loss Aversion: Prefer choices designed to prevent losses over those designed to obtain gains
3. Heuristic Choices: When choices are made, they are based on a single, relevant factor rather than the total set of relevant factors.

 

The next three persuasion techniques are designed specifically to combat these.

 

4. Scarcity

 

We want what we can’t have. Those people who wait in line for days to get the new iPhone? The crazies who trample other people in Walmart around Christmas time. Scarcity is why. If you want to increase the attractiveness of what you’re offering without changing any of the features, make it seem scarce.

 

As marketers, you have unique or uncommon features in what you offer. This is what you need to raise to the surface in the eyes of your market – what is it about your product or service that is unique?

 

Very often it won’t be one thing. It will be a suite of things that in combination only you can offer. Present what you have to offer that is unique and dwindling in availability, because people listen differently to the merits of what you have to say. By isolating what you have to offer, you change the dynamic of the conversation.

 

However, you can’t just tell people what they will gain if they move in your direction. People are more mobilized to act by the idea of losing those unique benefits and features than gaining them. Tell people honestly what they will miss if they fail to move in the direction that you are recommending. Use loss language.

 

5. Authority

 

More stuff you already know – people defer to individuals who are experts on a topic, especially when they’re not sure themselves.

 

As proof, Robert mentioned how Boise was able to increase sales by 60 percent simply by adding expert testimonials to product pages. Pointing to comments of legitimate authorities that align in your position produces a significant jump in your direction.

 

Robert spent a good amount of time talking about the idea of The Credible Communicator. This is the person who has knowledge and trustworthiness. If you become a credible source of information not one of your competitors can beat you all other things equal.

 

6. Consensus

 

When people are unsure, they look outside, not inside, for answers. One place they look is to authorities, the other place they look is peers – comparable others. Those around them who are like them. What have they done/said? If you can present information about a consensus for what it is you’re recommending from those around them and like them you reduce their uncertainty and get them off the fence and into the game. 98 percent of online purchasers read the reviews of prior customers. That’s kind of epic.

 

The Consensus Principle is at the core of social media. Potential buyers are now able to access the consumers’ responses of friendship and peer groups.

 

Those were the six principles broken out by Robert. Agree? Disagree?

Advanced Linkbuilding with Todd Malicoat

If you missed Todd Malicoat’s Advanced Linkbuilding session earlier today, you should rightfully be kicking yourself right now. It was 200 slides of walking attendees step-by-step through a successful linkbuilding campaign. Oh, and fishing. There were lots and lots of mentions of fishing. Did you know Todd fished? Because he does. A lot. You should have been there.

 

Here’s a brief version of what you missed.

 

Todd started off the session polling the audience to find out where people worked (agency/in-house) and getting a sense of what industry they fall into. This is also how we learned we had two gentlemen in the room competing in the bean bag business. See, you don’t know until you ask? ;)

 

Two years ago off-page factors accounted for 70 percent of search factors. In 2011, we were still between 40 and 50 percent. You simply can’t over-emphasize the value of links to your overall SEO strategy. And that’s not going away because of social – social is merely augmenting it. It’s adding more accountability.

 

Before you launch a link building campaign, know what the battlefield looks like. Look at where you’re at and where your competitors are at. Even if you’re not working with a new site – do an audit of your link profile. You may find you have to give penance for some of those bad links you went after when you weren’t so smart (or before Google cracked down harder).

 

Things to consider:

 

• How many links to you need to be competitive in your space?
• How much are you willing to pay (even if you’re just paying in time) to get a link? Know what links are worth $10, $100, $1,000, $10,000 to your business.
• How you’re able to pay for links – money, creativity (linkbaiting ala The Oatmeal), development

 

Shocking to no one who knows him, Todd compares linkbuilding to fishing. [Michael Gray was in the audience and suggested we all drink each time Todd mentions fishing but…we would all be dead. So I hope you weren’t doing that at home.]

 

• You have to understand the weather and the climate

 

• You need reliable bait and good hooks: You can’t go out and ask for a link anymore. You need great assets.

 

• A great team catches together: You’re not going to catch fish or get links unless you’re working together. Everyone say, “aw!”

 

• If you want quality, it’s going to take time and practice.
• Experience is the best teacher: When you’re learning to fish you spend a lot of boring hours on the water. When you’re learning link building, you spend a lot of boring hours on the computer.
• Strategy evolves with experience

 

From here, the conversation turned to strategy. Todd did an incredible job flipping through slides about tools, process methods, and actual templates for attendees to use.

 

Creating Your Process

 

You have to start somewhere internally. He mentions the iAcquire Link Building Process graph that they recently shared on their site:

 

 

Whatever you create, it has to be something that everyone on your team will be able to use. There has to be a vetting process to help team members find the people, the sites, and the combination of both to go after for your link building efforts.

 

• Find your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or two. This is your hook.
• Understand your vertical and competition: Establish the BEST competitors list, start by getting 50 percent of your competitors links. Target specific keywords by page using KOB
• Populate a CRM: This will help you keep track of targets. Consistency is key for key, tracking is necessary, improvement is mandatory, and you need quality control. He recommends Raven Tools and BuzzStream
• Develop a discovery process: After you have your CRM populated, where do you go to start looking for links? What influencers are going to be important? What are the best/easiest sites? You only need a single link from a single website. The best guest posting strategy is to hit every site once.
• Create an outreach strategy: Who is going to do your outreach? What are they going to offer? When will they launch? Where are the prospects they’ll target?
• Keep learning and innovating

 

Equity Education

 

SEO isn’t black magic, but you do need to understand how to measure off-site equity. As previously mentioned, know how much a link is worth to you and how much you’re willing to pay for it.

 

Sites/People Prospecting Strategies

 

There are a lot of tools out there to help you identify both people and sites for link prospecting. Todd outlined a number for both:

 

People Prospecting:

 

• Followerwonk
• WeFollow
• HARO
• Blogger LinkUp
• My Blog Guest
• SocialBro
• Rapportive

 

Note: Don’t just let your link builders loose on the top influencers you find via these sites. You don’t want to immediately attack the people who are the most influential bloggers. You need to develop a repartee first. Reach out to them slowly over time.

 

Link Prospecting:

 

• Link Prospector
• Ontolo
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Raven
• MultiLinks

 

Note: All links aren’t created equal. You need to know the difference and you need to be able to communicate that through your organization.

 

To get links, you need content. Types to focus on: Web tools, national days and events, sponsor contests & clubs, badges, plugins, drupal themes, widgets, petitions, finding malware, printable resources, 404 reclamation, review something new, etc.

 

Todd says that the most important link prospective tool is the ability to search creatively, which includes using advanced operators to find new opportunities. Use queries like [keyword + intitle “write for us”] and focus on out-of-the-box keywords like:

 

• Marketing defining keywords
• Customer defining keywords
• Product/category keywords
• Industry thought leader keywords
• Competing company keywords

 

Armed with creativity, it’s all about creating those relationships and establishing trust when reaching out for the link. You can’t just ask for a link – you have to earn it through interaction. This one was chock-filled. You might want to bribe Todd for his slides. ;)

Greg Boser: The Future of Google+ Authorship

Greg Boser is up as the kickoff speaker. Brett and Greg banter a bit trying to figure out how long Greg’s been appearing at Pubcon. Basically it’s a long time. Greg is old. ;)

 

Greg appears on stage and says this is the earliest he’s ever been on stage in his life. I giggle because I know it’s true. Greg was tasked with talking about about hot topics and where things are going. The topic he’s personally been spending a lot of time looking at is authorship markup. So that’s what he’s going to talk about now.

 

The Evolution of Google+ Authorship

 

We’ve been talking about authorship non-stop, how did it all start? Greg breaks it down:

 

March 2004: Researchers from Stanford and Yahoo author a paper entitled “Combating Web spam with TrustRank”

 

“We first select a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once we manually identify the reputable seed pages, we use the link structure of the Web to discover other pages that are likely to be good.”

 

The idea here was that by finding sites known to be of quality, Google could use the inter-connectivity of the Web to find more good sites because good sites link to other good sites. If you can come up with that initial list, you can crawl out of it and rank other sites by how far they site from the trusted site.

 

August 2005: Agent Rank Patent (Filed by Google)

 

The idea: Google can rank your content better by you showing them what you’ve already written.

 

From the patent:

 

The techniques include receiving multiple content items from a corpus of content items; receiving digital signatures each made by one of the multiple agents, each digital signature associating one of the agents with one or more of the content items, and assigning a score to a first agent of the multiple agents, wherein the score is based upon the content items associated with the first agency by the digital signature.”

 

March 2006: TrustRank Patent

 

The real name was Search Results Ranking Based On Trust. It was another venture into the idea that humans can label content.

 

September 2009: SideWiki

 

Don’t laugh! Greg asks if people remember the debacle that was SideWiki. Greg awesomely calls it the worst thing Google ever rolled out. It actually allows users to deface other people’s websites. Google eventually abandoned the project because it didn’t work out but it was a major step in the direction of getting people involved with ranking content.

 

June 2011: Google+ gets rolled out

 

When Google+ was first launched there was a lot of discussion about how Google had failed compared to Facebook. Because what they didn’t understand was that it wasn’t the number of people (or lack thereof) on Google+ that mattered. What mattered was that Google had established the ability to have authentication of identity. That was huge.

 

August 2011: rel=author was being pushed really strongly.

 

Google began talking about its desire to use rel=author as an eventual ranking system. From that point, rel=author became something everyone started talking about. Even if Facebook has more users, the type of people on Google+ tend to be very strong in writing content. So getting people to connect was a big win. They got a lot of big publishing sites like New York Times and CNN to get involved with it.

 

The original benefits of Google+ were:

 

• Author photos in the search results
• Relatively low adoption meant your content stood out from the crowd
• CTR for SERP listings with author photo soared 30-50 percent.

 

The drawbacks

 

• +1 annotations in SERPs often killed CTR
• Author jacking and general chaos: He started doing a lot of little stuff to “toy” with authorship and see its flaws and limitations.

 

The audience was treated to some stories of Greg “experimenting” with author-jacking to test Google’s ability to identify the real author of content. He would wait for his company BlueGlass to publish something, and then Greg would scrape the content and post it on GregBoser.com, claiming ownership. In the early days, he found that Google was unable to identify the real author and would give him ownership. We all try to ignore the little twinkle in Greg’s eye as he states this. ;)

 

However, Google has since figured it out. This is important because one of the key issues with rel=author was portability. Sites wanted to make sure they wouldn’t lose authority if one of their big writers changed jobs and took their content with them. As long as the publisher site keeps pointing to the content, they won’t lose authority. The system would kind of fall apart if they did.

 

New Things They Are Doing

 

Greg mentions something I hadn’t heard before, which is Google showing more content from authors when a user has shown an interest.

 

For example, if I come across an article from Matt McGee in the SERPs and spend time reading it, if I hit the back button Google will automatically update the SERP page to show more content from the same author under the initial listing. Google is going way beyond the simple connection. They’re crawling pages and making those connections.

 

Where Things Are Going?

 

Greg shared a lot of great insight and anecdotes during his talk, but where is this all headed? What do we have to know?

 

It’s headed toward Human Pagerank. Greg talks about new language that was added to a recent filing by Google. It reads:

 

“…if the signer has a large reputational score due to the agent having an established reputation for provided accurate reviews, the rank of the referenced content can be raised accordingly.”

 

This means that links on the Web will be weighted more by WHO the link comes from rather than WHERE the link comes from. A link from Mashable is great…but it now matters who wrote the piece. Putting it into search times, Greg says that a link from Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land is going to be worth more than a link from Barry Schwartz because Danny has a greater circle.

 

Greg lists off two great tools to help you identify important influencers so you know whom to go after – AuthorCrawler and FindPeopleOn Plus – because more than ever it’s important who is linking to you, not just where that link is coming from.

Speaker’s Blog Kickoff – Guide to Attending PubCon Like a Pro

Attending a search conference can be terrifying. I know. Because I’ve been there.

 

I’ve been the conference newbie hiding in my hotel room too scared to go down to the bar. I’ve held up the wall at networking events instead of introducing myself. I’ve eaten M&Ms for dinner because I never made dinner plans. If you (or your company) are investing the time, money and resources to attend PubCon and to take time away from your day job and your family, you need to make sure you’re getting the most out of your conference experience. And that means taking advantage of every opportunity that comes your way, while also creating a few of your own.

 

Whether you’ve never attended a PubCon event or you’re not sure you’ve living up to your full conference potential, below are some tips to help you, er, optimize your conference experience.

 

Step 1: Create a Plan Before Attending

 

My guess is your boss isn’t going walk into your office on some random Monday and announce that you’re being flown to PubCon later that day. More likely you’re going to know a month or two in advance, so there’s no reason you should be showing up unprepared. Instead, arrive to PubCon with a plan for domination.

• Know your team’s most pressing marketing concerns and the few things you’d like to try and resolve while at the show.
• Go through the conference agenda and circle the sessions that will address your company’s top concerns. [Pro Tip: Ask conference veterans their opinion on speakers, as it’s their quality that will truly make or break a session. Liveblogging sessions for 5+ years, I can tell you who will rock it and who, well, won’t.]
• Create a list of speakers, vendors, and colleagues that you want to grab face time with while you’re in town.
• Prioritize said list.

Once your list is created, this is your game plan. It’s your mission for the entire time you’re at the show. Creating this plan ahead of time will help you to attend PubCon with a purpose so that you use your time to make connections instead of bad choices at the black jack table. It also increases the odds your boss will send you again next year.

 

Step 2: Do Attend the Opening Mixer

 

Every conference kicks off with an opening networking reception or event. Attend this. These opening mixers are great for newbies because it’s generally easy to find first-timers just as nervous and anxious to meet new people as you. Show up with a big smile, a great introduction and your business card, and start opening those doors. This is your chance to make some friends and connections before the show even starts. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll even meet someone to attend the next day’s keynote with.

 

If you’re in town with other people in your office, do not cling to them as a safety net. It’s fine to arrive with them, but be good about doing the rounds and meeting as many people as you can. Keep an eye out for the people you talk to on Twitter, the author of your favorite blog, and new faces who could become potential allies down the road. Do NOT just sit in the corner snacking on free cheese and sucking up drink tickets. You could have done that from your couch at home for a lot less money.

 

Step 3: Hit the Best Sessions

 

Don’t tell Brett I told you this but you don’t actually need to attend every session at PubCon. Sure, he puts his blood, sweat and tears into building an amazing agenda, but you only need to attend the sessions that sound interesting or that will help you serve a business purpose. The rest of your time should be spent grabbing meals with interesting people, checking out the vendors and doing things that will help your company. And thanks to people like me, you can find full internet marketing liveblog coverage mere seconds after a session gets out so you don’t have to worry about missing a couple. You go hunt down that contact and I’ll hand deliver you what happened when you get back. It’s the closest you’ll get to being two places at once.

 

Step 4: Use Social Media To Find The Action

 

Fifteen minutes after the last session of the day ends the conference hall becomes crickets. Everyone is off to dinner, a networking event or grabbing a drink at a nearby bar. As a newbie, however, you may find yourself stranded without dinner plans or any clue what’s happening after-hours that night. If so, use social media to your advantage. DO NOT STALK PEOPLE but use services like Twitter and FourSquare to quietly figure out where people are and what they’re up to.

 

For example:

• If you see a bunch of people are checked into the hotel bar, there’s probably a meetup going on. Head down.
• If you follow the conference hashtag and someone’s trying to organize a group for dinner, see if you can get an invite.
• If you see PubCon tweet the location of the night’s party, get your butt there.

You can use these tools to your advantage without coming off like a creeper. If you get really desperate, come find me (Twitter/ Facebook or anyone else from Outspoken Media. If it’s a PubCon, we’re sure to be there and we’d love to get to know you.

 

Step 5: Have a Conversation In

 

Once you get to an event, you need to be able to hold your own when you’re talking to people. This is a lot easier when you have something to say or you’ve done your research on the people you plan to meet. The moment someone approaches you with “So, what do you do?”, should not be the first time you’re reciting your answer. Come prepared with an elevator pitch – not one that sells, but one that introduces you to people and tells them who YOU are, not your company. If there are people you’re particularly interested in meeting, know what you’d like to talk to them about or how you can find an in. For example, if you’re interested in meeting Outspoken Media’s CEO Rhea Drysdale, maybe do your homework and known she’s passionate about SEO trademarks and that she’s a comic book nerd. This will give you something to bring up when you walk up to her in a crowded room. If you’re looking to talk to me, know that I just moved or that I love really awful teenybopper music. Having that first line makes conversations a lot easier to slide into.

 

Step 6: Follow Up

 

If you’ve done your job, you should be returning home with a full brain, a pocket full of business cards, and a To Do list that will take you five years to actually implement. That’s fantastic… but you’re not done. Follow up with any potential contacts, send out your “nice meeting you’s” and keep those relationships fresh. No sense meeting new people if you’re not going to find a way to add them to your online Rolodex.

 

Attending a premiere search conference like PubCon can be a daunting experience, but it doesn’t have to be. Not when there are so many great people to meet, sessions to attend, and ways for you to come away like a superstar.

 

- Lisa Barone

 

Lisa Barone is the co-founder and chief branding officer at Troy, New York-based Outspoken Media, Inc., and for many years has been a prolific and popular live-blogger at PubCon conferences.