The hate of ads
We all hate ads for their interruption, attention grabbing and disturbance.
Even worse: the blatant lies – the portraying of fake life styles – for selling them something they don’t want have made people hate ads even more.
We even have developed an ad-adverse attitude due to this, which has brought us to filter out the ads or to click them away or even to leave the website instantly.

The luring SEO
However when we get lured by SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to visit a website that was not our intention, we don’t care.
We seem to find it normal that the links provided by the search engines can sometimes end up on a less interesting site. This happens to us all several times a day.

Still irrelevant search results suck as we probably waste at least as much time visiting the wrong websites as with ads, but we seem to perceive this differently.

Probably because ads are intrusive, whereas clicking links in a search engine result page (SERP) is upon our own decision as we have a need for this type of information or information related to these links.

The perception differences of ads and SEO
Ads are intrusive – SEO is part of the canvas of the Internet: invisible.
Ads are aimed at a large audience or the ‘average’ potential buyer, whereas SEO is almost personal as it matches your personal search.

Put time, effort and money into SEO instead of spending it on ads as you will gain in appreciation or even popularity.

Do you hate ads and don’t care if you get lured by SEO ?

We have 2 websites that are promoting both our web services:
LEADSExplorer: Caller-ID for your website
popupbooster: presenting relevant content visitors: video, ads, affiliate ads, forms, surveys and opt-in.

The first website is more than 2 years older than the second one which should have impact on the visit sources and findability. It also receives about 8 to 9 times more traffic (Alexa #287,000).

We use Google Analytics to have an overview of the traffic, sources and content.
For lead generation we use our own LEADSExplorer which gives visitors data by company.

LEADSExplorer:
	Traffic sources    Although this website is quite longer on the Internet and many links have been created over the years the main source is Google search. The many links have been created by article and presentation publishing, comments on blog posts, press releases and a few blogs writing about the service. No advertising whatsoever since 6 months.
	Web analytics    The bounce rate is high: 77%. This is mainly due to: - The very different content on the website: people end up on web pages not immediately looking for such a solution. - The blog which receives 26% of the visitors. Only 10% will click to the website = 2.6%. The high percentage of new visitors is related to this as well as the short time spend on the website. This partially explains why people only visit 1.97 pages.
	Conversion    The conversion rate to sign-up for free is about 1.6% - Even with the blog stealing 26% of the traffic and only sending 10% of it to the website - Only indicative pricing on the website available.
popupbooster:
	Traffic sources    Although this website is just 6 months on the Internet and much less links has been created the traffic from referring websites is higher. This is mainly due to the high volume of traffic it gets from a free Wordpress plug-in: 18% The links are mainly from comments on blog, presentation publishing and one press release. No advertising at all.
	Web stats The bounce rate is significantly lesser and the time on the website is quite high: 3min 15 The mini blog only gets 2% of the traffic which is not significant. On average people visit 2.92 pages per visit, which is whole page more.
	Conversion rate The conversion rate to sign-up for free is about 1.1% which is lower than the website with the high bounce rate and the popular blog. There is a full pricing page on the site available: so people know the pricing.

We still aim to improve: more visitors and a higher conversion. How well is your website performing ?

Is Facebook redefining the way people go about obtaining information and news?

Facebook provides every member with a social stream containing the events and news of their friends. Effortlessly the stream comes to them.

Information is becoming less of a destination that people seek online.
The social stream of information comes to the people instead of them reaching out to a search engine to find news or information.

Social stream versus search engines

For a start people no longer seek. They expect the information or news to come to them in a social stream.
This is probably due to their laziness as:
- a stream is convenient and is automatic,
whereas
- search using search engines require some inspiration for keywords and the effort of narrowing down the result by multiple searches.

The Recommender model of trusted parties

In a social stream all their friends are trusted parties, because they belong to their network.
The friends have evaluated the web page or content and recommend it to their friends.

In search the search engines are certainly not trusted parties as they are sponsored by advertising and can have higher goals (like Google). The top links are not always the better or higher value links. It is not because many people have previously clicked upon certain good looking links that the information or content on those high ranking pages are the best.

The problem with the “Recommender model“, using friends as trusted sources, is the biased and limited information that will be generated.
A lot of information will be missed due to the friends only receiving a small part of the information available on the Internet. The friends will be filtering and gathering only this limited amount information.

What will be retained is not necessarily the most important news, but is likely to be the most sensational news.

On the other hand a lot of not relevant or not interesting information will be filtered out by the friends thus saving time for the person using the stream.

An additional benefit is that all the friends get the same information which gives again a basis to be part of the group and to discuss about events and news they are all aware off.

Social stream beating up the search engines

Is Social stream becoming competition or a challenger for search engines?
Probably this has already happened.

Can the conquest of Social stream on the Internet go fast?
Anything can happen fast on the Internet especially as there are already so many people using it: Facebook.
This type of Social stream is not limited to Facebook: LinkedIn and others provide it too.

The search engines have a serious issue with Social stream as:
- It will decrease their advertising revenue significantly over a short period of time.
- They cannot deliver a social stream due to the fact they don’t have members with friends.
Hence the end of the hegemony of the search engines is near.

Of course for searches on specific information or news, search engines are the specialists.

The Social stream becomes a marketing challenge

The repercussions of this “Recommender model” od Social stream on marketing can be important as the commercial messages need to get into the stream of the trusted friends.
How to get advertising into recommendations and messages of friends ?

Thus instead of getting a high SERP (Search Engine Results Page / Position) by SEO, SEM, link building and all the black hat SEO tricks available, the fact of getting included in the Social stream of friends becomes important.

This is whole different game as this model of Social stream nears the Word of Mouth model.
However it is still different as Social stream is emitted by only one person to influence many.
The Word of Mouth repeats itself by communication from one person to another to another.

Should we forget about search engines, links and SERP?
No – as recommenders still need to find the original information, news or event.
Should we find methods to get inserted into social streams ?
Yes – as their importance is rising due to the convenience and the adoption.

The new game and rules of the Social stream are a problem for marketing to be solved.

If you know the answer or solution please let us know.

Video

Video as search engine
YouTube has become the #2 search engine: after Google and before Yahoo.
Dailymotion (#112) and Vimeo (#232) have high rankings of popularity too.

Search:
Search means getting found on the Internet.
Highly used search engine means: important enough to have a presence.

Search engines:
Search engines index the video websites fast as these do fall in the social media category and sensational news events get uploaded quickly on YouTube.

Read vs view:
People hardly or even don’t read anymore.
Even clicking though a presentation has become too much effort.
The last resort is video as people prefer to click once and watch the story or information to unfold: effortlessly.

What content?

Many subjects or items you can be presented in a video.
- Not necessarily an interview with your CEO (as he might not be interesting at all or present not well in a video).
- Even a short video blog (vlog) by one of your employees with a challenging subject is sufficient.
- Just a demo of your application or solution using a screen capture like CamStudio is already good enough in order to have a presence with a video on the Internet. if you require more functions and features: look here.
- In case you have no inspiration or guts to make a video, then convert your (Power) presentations into a video clip:

Requirements

Whatever you present in your video make sure:
- The content is interesting
- The duration is short (60 seconds to 180 seconds)
- The message is clear: just one main selling point
- The quality is good enough for YouTube but it hasn’t to be outstanding
- The title needs to be shocking or generate interest
- The title, description, keywords and tags are well chosen
- Keep within your budget as video shoots and editing can become expensive quickly

Entertainment marketing

Video marketing is content marketing that has become entertainment marketing.
If you present a boring video, it is less likely your video will be rated and praised. As people want to be entertained your video needs to entertain them too as there is so much competition competing for interest online.

Quality of video

If the goal is just to be found and create links for SEO purposes, the video don’t need to be of high quality and include sound or music.
However if the video needs to convert potential customers into leads, high quality and sound (music) is a requirement.

Multiple websites

Facebook: upload video too
At the same time you are uploading the video to YouTube, take a Facebook account to create your company page and upload the video there too! getting found and getting exposure are the main goals.

Don’t forget to upload to Dailymotion and Vimeo too.

Embed the video also on your website by using the provided code on YouTube.

A business without a video is a business lagging behind.

Where is the video of your company ?

Google uses bots

Google uses bots to crawl the Internet in order to find new content.
Once found the content gets indexed by linking and keyword tagging. However there is no interpretation or summary of the content. There is no enhancement.

Twitter uses humans

Twitter uses humans to crawl the Internet in order to shift through the content.
If a human finds interesting content he will Tweet an interpretation or a summary of the content with a link. There is value in this enhancement.

Real-time

Google uses bots.
Twitter uses unpaid “Mechanical Turcs” (but not literally the Amazon variety).

Google is competing with the millions of humans on Twitter that enhance the information by their interpretation and subjectivity making the Tweets biased due to the human nature.
Will Google be able to remain in the lead and keep the quality ?

Google favors recent content as part of their algorithm.
However outdated and totally irrelevant content can still be on top of the search results if it has received many of links in the past.
Google even keeps track of ancient content that hasn’t been changed in years.

The Twitter content is fresh: real-time.
Depending on the number of people you follow, you could be missing a large part of the new content.
Finding tweets posted a few weeks ago are hard to find.

Best search

The best source of information can be both Google and Twitter depending on what you are looking for.
Still the freshness (real-time search) and the interpretation of the Twitter information draws more and more people to Twitter.

To make the comparison even more complex; Google has also its’ own competitor in house: YouTube as it has passed Yahoo into 2nd position.

Where do you look when you need to find information – depending on the type of information ?

The era of interruption marketing

In a world not so long ago, there were about six ways to get noticed or to get attention from the public or companies:
- Cold call using a huge staff of people
- Buy advertising: print, broadcast or online
- Beg journalists to write about your products or solutions
- Bribe journalists to write about your products or solutions
- Issue a press release containing interesting information or original content to get attention from journalists
- Getting into the news due to an event or hazard related to your business or products (even car crashes)
- Presenting on conferences

Observations:
- Cold calling, buying advertising and presenting on conferences only last as long the money supply lasts.
- PR agencies are good at begging journalists due to their contacts.
- Once you have bribed a journalist, you cannot beg them to write for free.
- Writing an interesting press release requires creativity and distributing was still not free.
– Hoping on an event or hazard to get press coverage is like hoping to win the lottery.
- Presenting on conferences needs: presentation skills, content and a room with an audience

This was the era of interruption marketing where coercion was not far as products and solutions could almost be imposed by the mass media to the public.

Content marketing benefits and challenges

Since the Internet became the default source of information for both consumers and companies, you can get noticed by publishing interesting or valuable or original content on the Internet.
Moreover content that has been published can be found long afterward: the long lasting effect of the free content on the Internet that your buyers want to consume.

All kinds of organizations (public, private, non-profit, individual) are becoming content publishers.

One of the problems related is the Internet noise all this content marketing makes as there is so much content available and published almost every second that even the search engines have problems keeping up to date.

Even if people find your content on the Internet through search or links, you need to grab, catch and keep their attention.
This can only be achieved by serving:
- Highly interesting or unique content
- Shocking content.
- Content generating emotions.
- Entertaining content.
or both.

Almost in all cases it needs to be entertaining.
The emotional content is entertaining.
Even the shocking content is a form of entertainment: shudder or shiver your audience.

Eventually in marketing we all will become entertainers bringing entertainment adjusted for each specific market segment.

That’s all folks !

Search
You use search engines and go to the information.

Social
The information is presented to you by your network.

Search

Since many years we use search engines to find information on the Internet.
This gives you the power to find information at the cost of taking time to search the Internet.
You use the search engine to filter out the most likely links and then manually visit and evaluate in order to find the interesting of matching content.
The investment is made when you need it.

Social media

Social networks present you the interesting information through your social network.
Your contacts in the social network will filter out the information and that is being offered to you at no effort. Your contacts are your search agents: selecting and filtering out data.
The effort and investment is in the build up of your social network – long before your need or can use the information.

Content marketing

Content marketing can be used in both cases:
The information available on the Internet – including on your website – can get found and filtered by both the search engines and the people in social networks.
The difference is the ranking and the chances of getting presented.

For search engines:
Content marketing is aimed at getting found by search engines: hence the need for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), keywords and Meta tags.

For social networks:
Content marketing is aimed at people as social networks are powered by people:
Hence the need to be remarkable, bring original content or valuable information.

Attracting search engines or people is quite different.
For example: the visual appealing content will attract and be remembered better by people than by search engines, especially if emotion is involved.

The end result should be the same:
Getting found and noticed by a possible buyer looking for valuable information in the content published.

Who is on your side? The search engines or the people in social networks?
Invitation:
Would you be interested in www.popupbooster.com Beta? For dynamic websites presenting relevant content – behavioral targeting.
Sign-up here

The presence on the Internet presents a challenge for all: from large corporations over companies to sole-traders.
During different discussions with professionals who are helping us with our business, the subject of Internet presence was mentioned.
As we have experienced many different methods, options and alternatives for social media marketing, we have acquired a certain knowledge about it.

Hence we decided to write down our knwoledge in order to help people out, by writing and publishing: “Getting and improving your Internet presence” – a starters’ guide to social media marketing.

Getting Found on the Internet Like a Pro

Use it for your own purpose.
Distribute it to your friends and colleagues.

Was this document useful ?

One week ago we issued the press release “Web Analytics Are for the Webmaster, Whereas LEADSExplorer Is for Businessmen” using a handful of free press release distribution websites (find the list here).

Nothing special in our opinion as we previously have issued several press releases both using free and paid press release distributions.

However we were wrong: the press release went viral
At one moment of time (Sunday January 24th, 2010) Google (www.google.us) had 99,500 links as the press release has been republished by many:
- News websites
- News feeds
- Industry websites
- Blogs
- People on Twitter
- And other social media.

People and professionals found it interesting as all these links cannot be generated by bots because our previous press releases typically got up to 500-700 links.

The afterburner is:
- More hits on the website
- The increase of number of sign-ups for free trial
- Inquiries for partnership/reselling
- Brand awareness

This press release proves that interesting content can spread on the Internet almost virally:
- For a B2B press release
- Using free press release distribution

In order to succeed you need to:
- Catch the attention by using popular keywords
- Generate interest by controversy or challenging in the subject
- No need for paying for distribution

The challenge now is to prove we can do it again using a free press release distribution.

Update:
On Jan 26 2010 – The search on Google (www.google.us) had 192,000 links !

When Oprah Winfrey showed on her TV show how to use Twitter to the world in April 2009, she probably didn’t realize she was actually killing her own businesses:
- The interruption-advertising (the commercial breaks)
- The product placement advertising (Kindle from Amazon)
- The TV-personality-referrer advertising (She advices you to buy)

Internet search for experience / reviews
Increasingly people search on the Internet for information, reviews, advices and remarks on products and services before they buy.
This information resides on company websites, review websites, forums, blogs, and other social media.

Oprah stimulated the use of Twitter by showing it to the world using the conventional mass broadcast media.
Due to the real-time search war that Twitter, Google and Bing have started, mainly in order to compete with Twitter, the social real-time search has become even more important.
People can find instantly up-to-date information, evaluations and experiences about products and services thanks to the real-time search capabilities and capacities of the search engines.

The change from TV to social media
Oprah stimulated the use of Twitter like no-one did before by pushing the Internet into real-time information.
At the same time she initiated the demise of her own business that is based on interruption-advertising, product placement advertising and the TV-personality-referrer advertising as people are now more influenced by the Internet.
Her website is not part of the social media and is clearly promoting products too obviously to be trust worthy on the Internet.

Oprah probably didn’t realize the changes that are happening in the marketing and advertising space when she showed Twitter to the (consumer) world.
She was killing her own business.

How is your business and marketing being affected or influenced by search engines and social media ?