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In the little over a year that I’ve been working here at Vertical Measures I must admit that I’ve been very lucky to meet and speak with some of the most interesting and influential people in the interactive space. I thought that it was about time to start sharing the fantastic information that I am able to derive from these interactions with the Vertical Measures blog readers.
Recently, I was able to interview Lawrence Coburn, an original founder of RateItAll, who has been obsessing about social media combined with consumer ratings since the 90’s. He is a frequent public speaker on topics related to user generated content, SEO, and social media distribution. He sat on a panel at the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego with our president, Arnie Kuenn, a couple of weeks ago, and his insight into content strategy in my opinion is invaluable. In this interview, Lawrence discusses content strategy, viral content curation and his organization RateitAll.
Elise Redlin-Cook: Let’s start with a general question. We have always heard that content is king, but content strategy and development are truly gaining traction now. What do you see happening over the next 2 or 3 years with respect to content strategies?
Lawrence Coburn: For years now, we’ve been hearing that traditional organic search as provided by Google would be displaced by something. Social search, social media, QA sites…. but it still hasn’t happened. And from where I’m sitting, it’s showing no signs of happening – Google referrals seem as strong as ever.
So in my mind, 
making sure your content strategy is aligned first and foremost with Google remains the top priority. A lot of the classic content development strategies are as relevant today as they were a few years ago. Creating compelling content around themes that are timely, frequently searched for, and/or unusually monetizable still seems like good strategy to me.
Over the next years, the format of that content is going to matter quite a bit. For example, mobile internet browsing is skyrocketing – making sure your content is deliverable in a smaller footprint seems like a real basic thing every site is going to have to figure out soon, if they haven’t already.
Elise: What are some of the best ways to maximize content curation and engagement with the audience? (voting/commenting/etc)
Lawrence: This is a topic near and dear to my heart. The biggest engagement win we’ve ever had on RateItAll is turning off the registration requirement on "liking" content. We saw a 20x increase in engagement. And as simple a "like" vote is, it’s critical to the UGC ecosystem. Most people post on the internet because they like getting a reaction. A "like" vote is a reaction, and one that can be packaged up in a digest or email alert which can bring folks back to the site.
Elise: Is there an applicable methodology to creating viral content, or does it just happen?
Lawrence: If only I knew. I think there are definitely some principles that seem to work more than others. Put all the content on one page and make sure people don’t have to click around to get the full impact. Call out the most important sharing buttons: email, Facebook, and Twitter, in that order, and bury the hundreds of other sharing buttons. Use lots of photos and/or video. Don’t be afraid to use the Top Ten format, and check out the copy writing of celebrity and teen magazines for examples. Oh yeah, have a syndicate of friends on places like Digg and StumbleUpon. Beyond that it’s pretty much a crapshoot.
Elise: Facebook seems to be growing to be almost as large or important as Google. Is there a recommended content strategy for Facebook?
Lawrence: Facebook Connect! It’s fantastic – it gives you distribution via the Facebook newsfeed, lowers the sign up hurdle for new users, and gives you real ID on posts. There is no reason for any site not to offer FB connect as a sign up option. One thing I like is when sites try and get both – real email and name, and then a synch with Facebook. This gives you ownership of the user AND the distribution might of FB.
Elise: Is there such a thing as a “social media expert/guru?” If so, would they better be described as “content strategist” since Content is what often drives Social Media?
Lawrence: Haha, I love gurus. I can’t get enough of them. I think I have something like 400 gurus following me on Twitter, and it makes me feel great. My advice to you if you are a guru is not to use the word "guru" anywhere near your bio. The term has become a parody of itself. Content is certainly big, but so is the distribution piece. You need both to have success in this industry.
Elise: Since we are an SEO agency focused on building great links for clients, what have you found to be the most successful content strategy for gaining backlinks? Why?
Elise: Who are the three people (or companies, organizations, etc.) that everyone should be following?
Lawrence: My two favorite blogs are AVC and CDixon.org – oddly, both are New Yorkers and I’m in SF. I guess it’s NOT an East Coast West Coast thing. In terms of following on Twitter, I think David Weekly, founder of PB Works is really smart and funny. I’m also a proud Rand fanboy – I think he’s brought a lot of credibility to the SEO space. In terms of SEO posts, dig around Stuntdubl.com – Todd has some meaty posts in there.
Elise: What would you tell a senior in college who will be graduating this spring with a degree in journalism and really had their heart set on writing for a newspaper someday?
Lawrence: I would say, "Nice call! Seriously!" The ability to write is way underrated. I find myself writing about 40 percent of my time at work, which is a staggering amount when you think about it. Between blogging, representing my company on social media, sales approach letters, etc. – I find writing to be an absolutely crucial, and unusual skill. And there are media companies that are growing – HuffPo is killing it I understand, as are a number of the big tech blogs. I would definitely advise them to start building their personal brand as soon as possible… they will get hired based not only on their skills, but on their reach.
Elise: What inspired you to start RateItAll?
Lawrence: Haha, that’s a good and easy question. I put that site online in 1999 with some friends from school. We saw how Amazon was allowing real people to write reviews of books and movies, and we wondered, over pitchers of beer at 3:30 a.m., why we couldn’t do that for everything. So there you have it.
Elise: So, Lawrence it seems that you always have an exciting project in the works… what are you working on right now?
Lawrence: I’m glad you asked! My company RateItAll, a consumer reviews site, is just wrapping up a project in an area that I think is the single most exciting thing on the Internet right now – geolocation, specifically, the universe of new business opportunities that exist when you know the physical location of the end user. I think this has implications for virtually all aspects of online business, from SEM, to Ecommerce to advertising.
Our project is an iPhone App called DoubleDutch – it’s kind of a cross between Foursquare and Yelp and lets you "check in" to stay connected with your friends, and read and write reviews of the places around you. The coolest thing about this app is that we are white labeling it, so any community around a geographic location can have their own social check-in app. We think this could be huge for universities, conferences, hotels, and so forth. It’s a very exciting time for us – if you have an iPhone, please try it out!
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Recently Elise and I presented on a webinar that discussed how you can utilize targeted social media campaigns that work best for search engine optimization. Many of the questions we received after the webinar were about our resources, infographics, tools, and also specific niche social media sites. What better way to answer all those questions, and more, than with a blog post?
If you want to watch the webinar in its entirety find it on our
free SEO webinars page. We really wanted to focus on explaining how social media and SEO can combine to create a great targeted campaign. A targeted social media campaign is one in which a small number of social media platforms are utilized to market to your prospective consumer. Finding the right niche social media platform, weighing your options, strategizing, and planning out your messaging is important to the success of your targeted social media campaign.
Strategy
Integrating SEO
Next up, one must integrate SEO into your social media campaign. An infographic from DailyBloggr.com,
"The CMO’s Guide to The Social Media Landscape", provides you with a great guide to picking and choosing targeted social media sites applicable to your needs. You’ll notice this handy infographic also shows you the benefits each site provides for SEO.
Niche Social Media Sites
Measuring Results
What can you measure in social media? You can use tools like
SocialMention.com to check brand mentions, but don’t forget about measuring traffic with click through rates (use short URLs like
bit.ly), and Google Analytics. Did you know that you can use Google Analytics for Facebook Pages? "
Google Analytics for Facebook Fan Pages" will show you how. Use this in addition to Facebook’s internal insights.
Optimizing Social Media Pages
There are many ways you can perform SMO: using keywords whenever possible, building up the PR of your profile sites: point some links back to your profile pages through badges on your site, comments on blogs, and directories as applicable, in addition to importing your blog, and filling out everything on your profile page.
Additional Tools
Hootsuite- Management tool for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Wordpress and Foursquare. Great iPhone app, and very user friendly.
Tweetdeck- Management tool for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites. Not as user friendly as Hootsuite, but an option.
Smart Brief- Receive e-mail newsletters 5 days per week in the industry of your choice. Smart Brief will put together a list of blog posts, news articles, and videos from the day (or week) in your industry.
Buzzom.com- Twitter management tool to help you easily search your followers, get rid of followers who aren’t following you back, and much more.
Feel free to add to the comments below any questions or resources you have regarding targeted social media campaigns.
Do bands want to be known for their music or their videos? Well, for the group OK Go, they really have no choice. In 2006 the infamous “treadmill video”, for the song “Here It Goes Again,” debuted on YouTube (which was still wet behind the ears), and became extremely popular. Shot at a relative’s house on a shoestring budget, the video won them the 2006 Most Creative Video at the YouTube Video Awards, and the 2007 Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video. The video is credited with bringing large audiences to OK Go’s concerts on five continents.
One reason this video became so popular is because many websites and blogs embedded the video, so users weren’t just viewing the video on YouTube, they were viewing it all over the Internet. Another reason for the success of the treadmill video is that it has a “homemade” look and feel to it that appeals to people, maybe in the same way that reality TV does. MTV is considered the birthplace of music videos, but they were very selective. For a video to be aired, it had to be flashy, glamorous, technical and expensive. Then along came YouTube.
At some point, OK Go’s record company decided to disable the embedding feature for the treadmill video. Views dropped 90 percent after the restriction was imposed. This did not sit well with lead singer Damian Kulash, as he explains in an article in The New York Times, “WhoseTube.” Record companies realized that videos on YouTube could be a source of revenue, so they got YouTube to agree to pay them a meager amount of royalties for each stream. But, of course, the stream had to be through YouTube’s site. On Tuesday, OK Go announced in a video, featuring two executively dressed dogs, that they are leaving EMI and creating their own label.
OK Go released their newest album, Of the Blue Color of the Sky, in January of this year. They hooked up with the Notre Dame marching band on a field in Indiana and created another unique video to the song “This Too Shall Pass.” What’s so special about this video is the fact that it’s being recorded live, what you see is what you hear. In other words, the song, originally played by the band’s four musicians, had to be arranged for 200 band members. So, this really isn’t the “official” video for the song. That came a little later, on March 1, with the help of Syyn Labs and the good neighbors at State Farm.
The band had always planned on making a video involving a Rube Goldberg Machine (a machine that does a simple task in a very complex way that involves a series of chain reactions), and the time finally came. Six months of planning, a month and a half of setup, 60 people (including NASA engineers), a 10,000 sq. ft. warehouse, numerous flea market finds, 25 very sensitive mousetraps, no computer magic, the band, precise timing, and a whole lot of patience is what this video is made of. A bit of funding from State Farm also helped a bit. The video begins with a State Farm truck starting the machine and ends with a thanks from OK Go for making the video possible. State Farm paid an undisclosed amount to be a part of the creative team, and to ensure that viewers can embed the video on other sites.
OK Go has been very successful with the viral video phenomenon. At the time of this writing, the treadmill video has had tens of millions of views and the RGM version of the “This Too Shall Pass” video has close to seven million views. With the popularity of “homemade” type videos, video marketing can help a band, or a website, gain recognition quickly. A brainstorming session is great for coming up with ideas of what users will find unique, helpful and intriguing. The video concepts should be something that viewers will get excited about and want to share. Utilize the power of video marketing and promote like a rock star.
Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of interviews to get to know Vertical Measures employees. It features a conversation between VM link builders Michael Schwartz and James Constable after they shared Employee of the Month honors for this month.
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 th
at 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.
See below, for Michael and Arnie’s full presentation for News 21.
Vertical Measures Internet Marketing from News21 on Vimeo.
Unless you know your strategy you can’t get started finding the right site for your social media campaign. Below are a few social media experts/blogs we follow and subscribe to that help us here at Vertical Measures in determining our client’s social media strategy:
