Michael Schwartz: Before we kick off the first interview in this "Get to Know your VM employee" interview series, I must point out that James is drinking from a pink cup. James, what is it about pink cups that attracts you so much?

 

James Constable: The key thing I look for with any cup is its ability to hold water. This cup hands down holds more water than any of my alternatives in the cupboard, and I wasn’t going to discriminate against it based on its colour.

 

Michael Schwartz: The reasoning is solid, but I still don’t know how you can’t just go with the Sparkletts water bottle (Editor’s note: the preceding sentence was not an endorsement for or against Sparkletts). Call me old school. Anyway, let’s get right into it. Tell the good people about where you went to school.

 

James Constable: I went to The University of Birmingham in England to study my degree in Business Studies, but partway through my second year I was offered an international placement at Arizona State for a year, which is what brings me here today.

 

Michael Schwartz: You went to ASU, so does that mean they didn’t teach you to read in England?

 

James Constable: It was actually because of the stellar reputation of the W.P. Carey School of Business that the University of Birmingham decided to allow me to study abroad. However, if I was to be brutally honest about my own motivation, I chose the school based on its beautiful weather – I’d had enough of rainy days back home. What was it that made you decide to leave the Valley of the Suns(.com) and study in Mexico?

 

Michael Schwartz: I went to U of A to cover basketball for the Arizona Daily Wildcat, and that’s what I did, although I expected them to at least make one Final Four while I was there. Still, can’t complain about covering a program that has made 25 straight NCAA Tournaments (for now….). I got my journalism degree and some real world experience covering the strange saga of Lute Olson’s leave of absence. Overall I had the best time of my life at U of A.

 

Now let me get to the chase. Tell the people the real reason why you ended up in Arizona after graduation. We know it wasn’t just to work at Vertical Measures (although I’m sure that’s a nice side benefit)!

 

James Constable: Whilst I was at ASU, I met a wonderful young lady (which I was actually annoyed about because I was just looking to be a wild man while I was abroad), but we ended up staying together after I left the country, and now we are married and I have moved back here so that we can actually be together, which is always a bonus in a relationship.

 

Michael Schwartz: Cough cough, whipped!

 

James Constable: Tell us a little more about your sports journalism passion and how it has brought you to Vertical Measures. I know that you just wrote a great post on how the two are intertwined

 

Michael Schwartz: Thank you for that James, you are too kind. I’ve been doing sports journalism since I was a junior in high school. My highlights are covering the 2007 Diamondbacks and 2008 Dodgers for MLB.com (only reporter to recover the NL West champs two years in a row, baby!) as well as UA basketball and baseball for the Daily Wildcat. In October 2008 I founded the ESPN-affiliated Phoenix Suns blog ValleyoftheSuns.com. We are credentialed to all home games and are regularly featured on ESPN.com and ESPN chats. I see blogs like ValleyoftheSuns as the future of sports journalism, and we’re trying to do all we can to become the change that revolutionizes the industry.

 

James Constable: Now I understand congratulations are in order for winning Employee of the Month. Would you care to share with us the work that you have been doing to be recognised in this way.

 

Michael Schwartz: You know, I have to give all the credit to my teammates. Couldn’t have done it without you James, my co-Employee of the Month! Haha, but yeah, you would have to talk to the people who voted on this award to know for sure, but I feel I got this for helping to train some of our newer staff members on link building and for speaking at the Associated College Press journalism conference as well as the News 21 Spring Training session at ASU. I really enjoyed both of the speaking engagements on the topic of SEO and journalism and look forward to doing more in the future. The real question is why do YOU feel you were recognized (note American spelling) in this way?

 

James Constable: I think that we both really stepped up this month when we needed to, got a lot done and were really efficient this past month. Like you mention, we had some new members of the staff join us, and it was a case of all hands on deck, and after a rousing speech from Elise/Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday, we all got it together – as a team!

 

I understand that as well as being an active sports writer, you also play basketball with a team you have master planned from the ground up. Could you let us know how you are doing so far this season?

 

Michael Schwartz: Yeah, we went 0-12 last season and a lot of the blame for our struggles went to the GM (yours truly). I was real aggressive in the offseason, signed a couple guys who can actually play and we started 3-1 (no comment on our four-game losing streak since). We’re still looking for a big man, and on that subject, aren’t you 6-5 James?

 

James Constable: I am indeed 6-5, but like Shawn Bradley that doesn’t fully qualify you for the game of basketball, and growing up in England, I don’t have that much experience playing. If you’re still willing to take that gamble then I may get involved next season to lead you to glory.

 

Michael Schwartz: I will put in a call to your agent. Before we run out of time, let’s get to the important stuff, so I’m packing this with two questions. 1. What does it mean to you to get the Vertical Measures Employee of the Month Top Dawg trophy? 2. What’s the greatest white elephant gift you’ve ever received at a Vertical Measures holiday party?

 

James Constable: It means a lot to be awarded with the Top Dawg, but having to share these honours with yourself really grinds my gears. Deep down in my heart, every other day when I have to hand the trophy back to you, I know that I am not the only Top Dawg in this office. But I’m going to use that energy to put in the training time necessary to come back stronger and win it outright next time!

 

The greatest white elephant gift I have ever received at a Vertical Measures holiday party is a close one, but it would have to go to the only gift I have ever received, which is $20 of pennies from yourself. I thought it would be funny to pick the one that you had clearly brought because everyone else had neatly wrapped their gifts and yours was just a cardboard box in a grocery bag. That one backfired.

 

What are you planning on doing with your time with the Top Dawg trophy?

 

Michael Schwartz: It’s hard to say. I could take it on a long walk on the beach, but we don’t have any beaches in Arizona, so that’s probably out. Maybe I could take it to a Spring Training game on a warm Saturday afternoon. There are just so many options, it’s hard to pick just one.

 

OK James, I think it’s time to get back to work so we can stay in the running for next month’s Employee of the Month voting. Thanks for taking the time to get to know us, we’ll be here all month!

Search and journalism share a symbiotic relationship.

Journalism needs search so writers’ articles get found, and search needs journalism to provide some of the freshest content in the SERPs.

But some journalists feel that search represents an inherent contradiction to their job of serving the public good by disseminating timely, accurate and interesting information. It doesn’t feel natural to deliberately try to appease Google and Bing, with some journalists feeling it borders on being unethical.

That was the response that Vertical Measures President Arnie Kuenn and I got from college journalists and professors when we spoke at the Associated College Press National College Journalism Convention in Phoenix as well as the News21 Spring Training at ASU a couple weeks ago.

As we explained the basics of SEO and started to talk about optimizing headlines at the News21 conference, we got a question about the “elephant in the room” from a veteran journalist who explained that there’s some “dismay” in journalism around focusing on keywords for the purpose of ranking in Google.

This is a very valid question, a debate that will continue to rage as search becomes more and more important in the world of journalism.

My opinion goes back to the main point of Arnie’s presentation: when people are searching for your keyword they will either find you or they will find your competitor.

It goes without saying that you want to do everything you can to ensure that they find you, and I don’t feel like you’re doing anything unethical so long as your headlines are not misleading like the sensationalized heds popularized in the days of yellow journalism. So long as your headline still encompasses the core meaning of your story, it’s just smart to optimize that headline by throwing in a keyword as close to the beginning of the title as possible.

In my other life as the chief blogger for the ESPN-affiliated Phoenix Suns blog ValleyoftheSuns.com, I recently did an experiment trying to optimize my site for Amare Stoudemire-related keywords in the weeks leading up to the Feb. 18 trade deadline, as the Phoenix Suns star forward’s name swirled in many rumors about a potential trade.

This strategy involved pumping out lots of quality content and then optimizing for long tail keywords such as “Amare Stoudemire trade rumors,” “Amare Stoudemire trade rumors 2010,” “Amare Stoudemire trade to Cleveland,” and you get the picture.

The results? After getting 12.3 percent of my traffic from search in my site’s previous history, I got a whopping 31 percent of my traffic from search during this time. In just over three weeks, I got about 86K pageviews and 58K uniques. In an average month I generally get about 40K pageviews and 30K uniques, so the increased traffic from search certainly made a major difference.

So hooray for me, now how can you replicate that?

First, use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to see what people are searching in your vertical, looking for keywords with a good ratio of how much they are searched to competition. Google Trends can also help you find highly-searched keywords in your vertical, and both of these tools are a big part of the research stage of content development.

Also, think ahead and optimize long tail keywords that you know will be hot for a specific period of time ahead of time, like I did with keywords such as “Amare Stoudemire trade rumors 2010″ that would be dormant for most of the year but provided a lot of easy traffic during those three weeks.

Next, write content around what people are searching for, and here’s where it gets tricky. I have a journalism degree, so I know the goal of an ethical journalist (as I strive to be) is to report the news and nothing but the news.

By looking at my analytics and seeing that Amare Stoudemire-related stories were so hot during the weeks leading up to the trade deadline, I feel I was merely following the laws of supply and demand by supplying the kind of content my readership demanded. There’s nothing unethical about creating quality, timely content on topics people want to read.

A big part of the optimization process involves the headline, as touched on earlier. Optimizing for a public figure’s name that gets a lot of searches is often a smart strategy for news stories. You may notice some major newspapers such as the LA Times write different headlines for their print and online editions, often spelling out a public figure’s full name online for search purposes.

Since my site is a part of Google News, my articles often got top billing above the top natural results in a “News” section at the top of the SERP. With so many people searching for articles on this particular topic, there’s no question that this was a source of many of my clicks. 

There once was a time when journalists worried only about the print edition, with the online edition being just another way to display their regular product.

But with pageviews and uniques becoming everything in the online world of journalism, it’s just one more thing that has to change in the ever-changing industry of journalism.

Every journalist must decide for themselves where they draw their ethical line when it comes to optimizing content, but I see no issue with rearranging a couple words in a title of an article that you would write anyway to make your article easier to find than the one written by your competitor.

 

Pepsi commercials have become as much a part of Super Bowl lore as overblown halftime shows and players thanking the Lord for throwing that game-winning touchdown.

 

For 23 straight years the popular soda brand showed an advertisement, which is such a long time that John Elway was a young hotshot quarterback playing in his first championship game when a Pepsi Super Bowl commercial first aired.

 

Citing TNS Intelligence, ESPN reported that Pepsi spent $142.8 million on Super Bowl ads between 1999-2008, second only to popular Super Bowl advertiser Anheuser-Busch.

 

Pepsi’s about-face has nothing to do with Peyton Manning and Drew Brees; this is about a brand understanding that the future of marketing is on the Internet and spending those dollars accordingly.

 

In place of its annual Super Bowl ad, Pepsi initiated the Pepsi Refresh Project, which asks the American people to post ideas that will have a "positive impact" in communities around the nation. Pepsi is awarding grants of different sizes, ranging from $5K to $250K.

 

The project involves people submitting ideas, people voting on these ideas, and then Pepsi making a charitable contribution via the crowdsourcing project. The leading $5K idea at this moment has to do with shipping Girl Scout cookies to soldiers overseas and the top $250K project involves providing healing, hope and possibility to survivors of violence and abuse via the Joyful Heart Foundation.

 

This idea is pure genius on the part of Pepsi, a company that apparently really gets what it means to advertise in 2010.

 

First off, the biggest thing you want from a Super Bowl commercial is buzz. I doubt anybody even remembers Coke’s commercial, whereas everybody is talking about this.

 

According to a recent Nielsen survey, Pepsi received about 21 percent of the online buzz and media coverage around Super Bowl advertising, 10 times as much as Coke.

 

We also know this because the project has accumulated over 500K Facebook fans and has a Twitter presence on the official Pepsi Twitter account that’s pushing the #PepsiRefresh hashtag.

 

Plus, instead of just throwing a couple million down the drain, Pepsi is actually doing something to help real-life communities.

 

That’s not even to say anything about what this means in terms of link building. How many links do you think Coke got from its clever but not exactly earth shattering Simpson’s commercial? By comparison, many people online are talking about "the shock" around Pepsi deciding not to advertise in the big game and doing this instead, and that means links.

 

From a pure natural link building standpoint, Pepsi is already squeezing much more value out of this campaign than a couple 30-second spots in front of the country ever could yield.

 

Pepsi clearly gets this new age of marketing, which involves interacting with the people and injecting yourself into the conversation. Throwing in a charitable contribution doesn’t hurt either, and all that for about $10 million less than it usually spends on Super Bowl ads.

 

Who says you can’t measure a return on investment with social media?

 

 

As Pepsi turned to the power of the Internet, Google ventured into the Super Bowl ad space for the first time, showing "Parisian Love" (embedded below) in the third quarter of Sunday’s game.

 

The ad may have seemed familiar to you Google fanatics because it has run on YouTube for over three months.

 

Writing in the official Google blog, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, "We didn’t set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search. Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it’s had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience."

 

By sharing it with a wider audience, Schmidt means that the ad wasn’t for people like you and me who use Google every day and understand its power; it’s for your grandmother who doesn’t know what a Google is and doesn’t realize the numerous positive benefits of search, Google in particular.

 

Google already owns the market share for "us," this commercial was all about making an impression with the casual Internet users who don’t yet realize all the things Google can do for them.

Instead it’s a big deal because it could be the first step for the popular Google-owned video sharing site to eventually adopt mainstream fare into its already robust menu of wedding dancing and baby biting videos.

 

The biggest question surrounding YouTube for years, not unlike Twitter, is when will it stop being a bandwidth hog and start justifying the $1.65 billion price Google paid to acquire it three years ago?

 

There is only so much money that can be made from Google ads, so YouTube protruding into the rentals market could be significant.

 

According to The Huffington Post, analyst Douglas Anmuch projects YouTube to produce about $700 million in revenue this year, which would be a 55 percent increase from 2009 in large part because advertisers will be more willing to put ads next to professional content than amateur and potentially offensive material.

 

No doubt we’re still months away from YouTube becoming Netflix, if that ever indeed does happen; this is just a trial for certain.

 

It’s not going to be easy for YouTube to negotiate with major motion picture agencies, but this is another step in the paradigm shift in how we watch movies.

 

Why would anybody go to Blockbuster again when they could watch movies on demand on Netflix or YouTube?

 

Beyond the rental charge, I wonder what kind of monetary opportunities such a shift would mean for YouTube.

 

Could they get advertisers to sponsor the video page with a relevant ad that would be showing on the webpage during the viewing? That would certainly cost a pretty penny for sponsors.

 

For link builders, this could be most noteworthy because the popular "Related Videos" tab remains intact for the Sundance videos.

 

A company that offers video marketing services such as Vertical Measures could create a video with the aim to go viral and optimize it with keywords related to the major motion picture. If the general public agrees that the video is as entertaining as you think it is, its hits would likely explode.

 

Of course, this would not be as good as getting direct traffic to your actual site, but it could drum up buzz and at least a nice bit of traffic from the link to your site in the description of the video.

 

If YouTube becomes a giant in the movie rental industry as it could be poised to become in the coming years, you will definitely want to ride its coattails for your own benefit.