Biznology Blog: July 2006

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July 27, 2006

One and a half sigma

Most of you are familiar with the six sigma programs that have raised quality standards for products and processes around the world. Six sigma programs are important and they work—when used under proper circumstances. Unfortunately, when devotion to quality is taken to extreme levels under the wrong circumstances, it leads to undue caution and lack of experimentation. So, should your Internet marketing program be six sigma? I'm here to argue it should be maybe one and a half sigma.

OK, I thought one and half sigma was kind of a catchy title—I don't even understand the difference between six sigma and "one and a half" sigma mathematically. But I am throwing around "one and a half sigma" to make a point.

The point is that Internet marketing is about experimentation, not mindless devotion to quality. Making no mistakes in your marketing program is the wrong goal. Six sigma is an excellent way to deliver high quality with repeatable processes, such as manufacturing your product, but it is exactly the wrong goal in Internet marketing.

Here's why. You know exactly what your products need to look like to be perfect replicas of the design. You can test them and make sure they are uniform, consistent, reliable—all those great things that products should be. But those are not the goals of Internet marketing.

Your goal in marketing is to be fresh, new, impactful, and most of all, effective. And the only way to test effectiveness is to see how many people actually buy from you. Whether you sell online or offline, you can count how many visitors to your Web site perform conversions. And you can see whether that rate is improving with each Internet marketing campaign.

And to continuously improve, you must experiment. You must make mistakes. You must set out knowing that you don't know what a perfect campaign is and knowing that you'll have to keep changing what you are doing to optimize your results. In short, you must do it wrong quickly, and then fix it.

The worst thing you can do is to try to avoid making mistakes. You'll do something safe (which is also boring and ineffective). You'll reach group consensus and you'll test it and you'll prove that it isn't an enormously embarrassing error. You'll prove it is acceptable. But, in truth, it will be wrong, because no one ever gets these campaigns right the first time out. They optimize their results only through ongoing trial and error. You shouldn't be settling for acceptable.

So, instead, you need to experiment—to do it wrong quickly. You don't set out to do it wrong, but you need to accept the fact that your first shot will be wrong and you need feedback to gradually home in on the target. So I am using the cheeky name of "one and a half sigma" to get that across. Just try something. And make sure you have the measurements in place to see whether it worked. Then change it and try again. You may not win any quality awards, but you might start selling something.

Improving your results based on the feedback of measurements is what six sigma is all about anyway. Just make sure you do it the right way so that you encourage experimentation rather than playing it safe.

Posted by mikemoran at 10:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 22, 2006

Choosing a Search Marketing Firm

Are you looking for a firm to help with your search marketing? It's complicated, for sure. (That's why we wrote our book in the first place.) But there are steps that anyone can take to narrow down the firms available to help you.

The first thing you need to do is make a list of characteristics that you are looking for in a search marketing firm. Do you need help with organic search? Paid search? Both? Do your campaigns cover the US? Other countries? Do you need help with local search, contextual ads, or shopping search?

Think about exactly what you need, and set your priorities (which things are absolute musts and which ones are merely nice to have). Make sure you know what your high, medium, and low priorities are—that gives you your list of characteristics to assess each firm against.

But where do you get your list of firms to choose from? The best source is recommendations from others. If you have colleagues that can relate their experiences with several firms, use them to make your short list. But most of us don't have a long list of recommended firms. If you find yourself in that situation, you might check out the Marketing Sherpa guide, which gives a long list of firms along with ratings for each firm that help you narrow the list based on the criteria you chose for yourself.

You'll make trade-offs of one characteristic versus another as you make your decisions, firm by firm, because there's no one perfect search marketing firm. But your goal is to come up with a short list of firms to interview. Make sure that you ask questions about their credentials and that you get to talk to their existing customers. Find out exactly who will be your account team and talk to them, not just to the top consultant who won't be working with you day-to-day. Check to see that the account team has been working for the company for a while, because some firms experience lots of personnel turnover, which can disrupt their service to you.

If you have a large search marketing program in mind, you should be able to get a free analysis of your site with a plan for what you should be doing better. Looking over such plans from several firms can help you compare them in action.

Most of all, stay far away from the few firms that practice unethical spamming techniques. If you are being guaranteed high organic rankings (and promised results will happen quickly), you can bet that corners are being cut. Choosing these firms brings huge risk to your company's campaign and its overall reputation. (Look no further than the bad publicity and dismal results BMW received when it crossed this ethical line.) Note, however, that paid search can give you quick results as long as you are willing to pay the price.

Choosing a search marketing firm is a difficult decision, so take your time and get advice from others who have made good choices. To learn more about this decision, check out Chapter 8 of our book, Search Engine Marketing, Inc.

Posted by mikemoran at 7:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 14, 2006

Opt out of Open Directory titles

Over a year ago, both Google and MSN began experimenting with the titles that they showed on search results screen, often using the title of your site from the Open Directory rather than the title tag coded on your site's home page. That upset many search marketers stuck with lame (and hard-to-change) titles that hurt their organic search results. Now, MSN and Google have offered a way to opt out of Open Directory titles.

MSN Search introduced this opt-out technique back in May, but, like many things in search marketing, it only becomes big news when Google does it. (That's what happens when MSN Search handles 12% of all searches, while Google does over 40%.) And, happily, Google has decided to adopt the exact same technique pioneered by MSN Search, so you can do things just once and opt out in both search engines.

All you need to do is to add a tag to the <HEAD> section of the HTML on your page called NOODP (which stands for "NO Open Directory Project"). To suppress the Open Directory title in both MSN and Google, you code the tag as <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> but if you want to control just one of the search engines, you change the name from ROBOTS to say so (<META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="NOODP"> or <META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP">).

Once you've added the tag, the next time the MSN Search and Google spiders come to look at your page, they will update your page listing so that your page's title is shown instead of the Open Directory title. So, take back control and optimize your pages!

A good title can dramatically change search rankings, especially for keywords that are not very competitive. What's more, a good title also gets your page clicked because it is the most important part of your listing on the search results page. By ensuring that your title is under your control rather than Open Directory's, you give your self the best chance of getting traffic to your site.

UPDATE: Barry Schwartz is reporting that, at least for Google, this tag also lets you opt out of using Open Directory descriptions, which is even better. Once you've opted out, you can optimize the snippet that Google shows under your title on the results page to further improve the clickthrough rate on your listing.

Posted by mikemoran at 10:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 10, 2006

Fifth printing of Search Marketing, Inc.

I've been a bit slow to post this, but a few weeks ago our fifth printing of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. hit the streets. And, for each printing, we try to update the book to reflect the ever-changing events in search marketing, posting the changes on our Updates page. So, no matter when you have bought the book, you can scan that page to see what has changed since your copy was printed. We hope that this is a useful way to serve our readers on this fast-changing subject.

Posted by mikemoran at 1:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 6, 2006

A Conversation about Eurekster's Swicki

If you haven't heard about Eurekster, you should check out their Swicki search engine. Swicki provides a way of applying the wisdom of crowds to search engines. If you have a blog or Web site devoted to a subject, you can easily use Swicki to create a specialized, vertical search facility on that subject alone. What's more, you can allow your searchers to improve the search results because Eurekster automatically boosts results that people click on. Beyond that, Eurekster offers a wiki-style suggestion box where searchers request changes to search results for you to accept or reject. I spoke with Grant Ryan, Eurekster's Founder and Chief Scientist, to learn more.

Mike: How did you get the idea for Eurekster?

Grant: I saw the merging of search and social networking, so two years ago I formed Eurekster. We initially used friends (and friends of friends) and did a deal with Friendster. But we like what is going on in communities, so we flipped the idea of a search engine on its head by letting publishers change things any way you want. People are concerned about quality when you do that, but honestly, if you create rubbish, then no one will use it.

If you look at how any new media forms, you start with the big guys, such as TV networks, and then get more and more vertical, [such as cable or YouTube]. Think about the fact that businesses sell billions of dollars in ball bearings—suppose you had a search engine that did nothing but ball bearings?

Mike: What's your business model?

Grant: We want the publishers to have control over monetizing their searches—pay-per-click, banners, subscriptions, pay-per-call, whatever. Different publishers have different business models and we want to give them flexibility. If you have a search engine on patents, you might charge a subscription fee [whereas] a digital camera search engine might use pay-per-click. When you have a targeted audience, the value goes up to the advertiser—you already see that with travel search engines.

Mike: Do you work differently with larger publishers than smaller ones?

Grant: We hold your hand if you're a larger publisher and help you with the templates. For example, we think Fox Sports can extend their brand into search by creating a sports search engine. Some publishers get it right away—in the old days, many Web sites started as adjuncts to magazine publishers, for example, but they quickly became valuable in their own right. The same will happen if Playboy decides to do a search engine.

Mike: How does the technology work?

Grant: It's really all these experts against the mainstream search engines. The publisher starts by providing information to us—the more provided, the better our first version of their search is. Then we observe the searchers—if someone clicks on the #11 result, then we might move it up on the list [the next time]. We experiment with several different search filters and see which ones work better over time. We also have the concept of a wiki where anyone can edit or delete a search result and the moderator [who works for the publisher] can choose whether to accept the change. We love the wiki model for a search engine rather than the old centrally-planned model. We think that if you give searchers control, they'll do cool, great things.

Mike: I've played with Swicki at the Popular Mechanics site. Does this technology get used as a Web site search also or only as a subject-based search?

Grant: We don't really sell a site search engine—it's used to do a subject for a community, a vertical search for a lot of different sites. Searchers don't see what sites are searched (or change them) but very shortly we'll allow publishers to grant moderator authority to searchers and allow input into more than just the search results—the way filters are set up, for example.

Mike: Do you think of yourselves as the anti-Google?

Grant: Well, you are completely into it with your line of questioning. We've thought about that a lot but we don't want to promote ourselves as a destination in competition with our publishers. I also think that [community approaches] work better for our focused search than for generalized search—link analysis may work better for that.

We can solve the 10% of searches that can't be solved with mainstream search by creating a vertical knowledge base. One of the advantages is that when you are on a rugby Web site, you have your rugby hat on, even though you might be a parent, too. Mainstream search engines don't know what hat you are wearing [for every search].

Mike: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, Grant.

Posted by mikemoran at 9:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 3, 2006

Fear of the Unknown

Usually when we talk about "fear of the unknown," we are referring to that gnawing, scary feeling inside when we don't know what will happen. But there's a slightly different fear of the unknown—one that all Internet marketers need to shake to get to the next level of effectiveness. It's the fear that others will realize that you don't know something.

Years ago, when I worked for IBM Research, I became known as an expert on electronic publishing, which is what we called electronic books before Adobe swept the market with the PDF file. I began to be invited to deliver private briefings to customers by their IBM sales teams. Those teams found that bringing an IBM Research expert to see their customers gave them access to people they might not normally meet. Back in those days, IBM dealt mainly with the technology folks in the computer centers and not much with the business types.

So, when I came to see their customer, access to these new faces was important to the sales team, and they were determined that I not blow it. One time, I was told that the IBM sales team had been trying to meet a particular customer executive for months without success, but that he would be attending my briefing, so I had to (simply had to) come across as a bona fide expert in my field. "So, when our customers ask you questions," I was warned, "you better have good answers." I wasn't sure what they were planning to do to me if I was stumped, so I just smiled pleasantly and figured that whatever I had to say would have to be good enough.

Well, later that day, when I stood before the customer, I was indeed asked many questions about electronic publishing, and I did my best to answer them. But, wouldn't you know it, I was asked a question outside of my field (OK, not just outside of my field, but one from two towns over across the tracks). I had no idea what the answer was. So I gave the customer my level-best answer, "I'm sorry, but I don't know. I'll research that and get you an answer as soon as I can."

Well, the top dog from the IBM sales team was visibly displeased in the back of the room. No one could see his reaction but me, thankfully, but he shook his head back and forth several times, as if lamenting the transgression of a problem child. "When will these kids learn?" he seemed to be thinking. I knew that I'd hear about this when the briefing was over, so I steeled myself for a tongue-lashing.

After the last questions were answered, a few attendees lingered to ask me a few private questions—the last one being the very customer executive that the sales team was so concerned about. Top Dog waited behind him for his chance at me.

That customer executive asked a few questions and then said something to me that I could not have scripted any better, "You know, you gave us a lot of good information and you answered a lot of questions, but I have to say that when you answered 'I don't know' to that one crazy question, it gave me confidence that you were telling the truth about everything else." Then he thanked me and left.

Well, now it was Top Dog's turn. After seeing how happy the customer exec was, he waited until we were alone and said to me, "That "I don't know' thing is absolutely brilliant! I have to start using that myself!" The fact that it took me a while to even understand what he was thinking should let you know why I was never a salesman.

But it did make me realize something very important—many of us are extremely reluctant to admit that we don't know something, when in truth, we are unsure of ourselves at many points during each day. This reluctance is a serious fear of the unknown—a fear of people thinking we don't know something.

The truth is that we really don't know all that much when it comes to what our customers want on our Web sites, and we can either choose to admit that fact, and figure out what we are going to do about it, or we can continue to try to impress each either by claiming that we know it all. But we're not impressing our customers this way.

Instead, we should remember that we don't know what the best design is for that Web page. We don't know what the right ad copy is. We don't know what image to use. Or what words to use for our links. We won't know until we try several (maybe a lot more than several) alternatives. We won't know until we observe what our customers do when faced with these alternatives. Which one seemed to work the most? Can we improve even on that one? We need to remember to do it wrong quickly—and then fix it.

We can't take this approach when we act like know-it-alls. We need to use that "I don't know" thing.

Posted by mikemoran at 11:55 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Specialist Disease

Some of my favorite conference sessions to speak at are the "Site Clinics"—where the audience members shout the URLs of their own sites and the panel gives them suggestions about what to do. Recently, I was doing one of those sessions and when we brought up the site onscreen, it didn't take long before I knew what was wrong—Specialist Disease. That's the subject of July's Biznology newsletter.

Posted by mikemoran at 11:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack