Credit: flickr / Trevor Coultart

I signed up for Groupon (disclaimer: personalized link) and within the week came across this article on Posies cafe. Basically, the Groupon promotion they ran nearly shut them down and they had to raid their savings just to make payroll.

That made me a little wary, and when a restaurant I like came up I deliberately didn’t buy it because I was worried it would damage their business too (Ottawa is obviously smaller, and I asked when I went in, they said the promotion was good for them).

I unsubscribed from Ottawa and subscribed to Kitchener instead shortly before I moved. The only time I tried to buy one it was for a spa package, the week prior to my move when I was completely strung out and feeling a little insane. It wouldn’t accept my British credit card – grr – and so I didn’t get it.

I thought I wasn’t buying the Ottawa ones because I was moving, but I’m not buying the KW ones either. Some observations:

• I don’t tend to impulse buy. So even when I see something that I might want, I leave it to come back to it later. Usually, I don’t.
• I’m picky. Things like a hairdresser come up, but I have a recommendation for a hairdresser and I’m nervous about trying a different one – especially since that guy bleached the hell out of my hair.
• Convenience is important to me. There was a Groupon for personal training. One of the things that I sorted out my first week here, was a trainer. But when I know I can get a trainer at the gym and that will be easier (in terms of routine) I don’t really want to try a trainer elsewhere.
• Restrictions are annoying. Restaurants often have restrictions, which is another mental overhead – do I want to buy the weekend deal, or the weekday one? Yeah I go to this place, but not normally in the week and if they only have a weekday coupon, is it worth it?
• Stuff I don’t want is spam. A recent deal of the day is Winemaking. I rarely even drink wine, and no desire to make it. Even if they were giving it away free, I wouldn’t register for one, and yet – it arrives in my inbox.
• I’m not inclined to buy something because I might want it “at some point”. The biggest thing that stops me buying the Groupons I might well use, is not being able to see myself using it in the next week. I don’t want a trip to that restaurant, or a gift for someone from that shop to become yet another item on my todo list.
• I can’t commit to an unknown, and don’t want a hard sell. I’m reluctant to buy service products because I’m concerned that they’ll try and push you into a follow up (where they’ll make the money the Groupon cost them back). I’m reluctant to buy something for a shop I haven’t been to, or bought something from before.

Really, what it comes down to is that for me, Groupon does not reflect the way I shop, or choose new restaurants.

For restaurants – plan then deal. I have dinner plans on Thursday. Brunch plans on Sunday. Knowing that, a service can make a recommendation and I’ll be inclined to try it (and it doesn’t have to be as great a deal). But the other way around feels like a bigger decision. I might be more inclined to do that if I had a boyfriend – because in a sense the plan to do something/spend time with someone would already exist.

Shopping. For me, there are two kinds of shopping:

1. In search of something specific – i.e. to Clinique, or the Apple store for product X (that I’ve run out of). I rarely buy anything additional to what I went in search of. Clinique are good at capitalizing on this, for example, I try to time my trips with their gift, and sometimes I’ll buy a lipgloss or eyeshadow extra in order to have bought enough to get it. Note – the gift won’t get me into the store, that’s a (perceived) need on my part. But it will get me an extra product.
2. A theme. I.e. I’m looking for clothes for work, or I’m looking for gym clothes. I go into stores that support my theme (i.e. I don’t go to the sports store when my theme is work clothes) and I buy a lot of stuff in one go. A coupon or a discount might get me into an on-theme store, but it’s likely to be saved for later if the store is off-theme (only to be abandoned when I decided I need to get home for tea).

There’s so much more that can be done with shopping, especially if we add social and learn about people’s behaviour. I still don’t know where to shop in Canada, but if a service could look at my shopping habits on foursquare or on my credit card bill, and tell me where I should be going based on other people who shop like me?

That would be really helpful. And a discount would just be a bonus.

Credit: flickr / OiD-W

Given that my current project is all about engagement, it’s probably not surprising that I’m more focused on engagement with my website than number of hits. Here’s my SEO strategy: write content, post regularly, give pages different names, insert images properly. That’s it.

However the bounce rate is more interesting – that’s the number of people who come, look at just one page, and leave. Another nice measure is average time on site (mine is a little over 3 minutes). Recently , I made some simple changes that reduced my bounce rate from around 70% to 50%.

• Adding related posts (I think this is the biggest change).
• Changing my theme and clearing up navigation. I really liked my previous theme, but the categories along the top weren’t working well. My new theme gives me two side bars, so I have more space there to list categories. I also added a link back to my main site.
• Changing the comments to Disqus.
• Adding a custom Twitter landing page where I mention that I don’t promote my blog on Twitter (so grab the RSS).
• Scheduling posts so they go out at 8am EST, every morning (except for Monday’s, which archives my Twitter feed and goes out a little earlier).
• Going through the navigation in Google Analytics and checking that all pages had the script that registers them (0% clickthrough is a giveaway).

Finally, did you know that in WordPress each category has it’s own RSS feed? Potentially handy if you blog on diverse topics, or in different languages.

Anything else I could be doing to improve engagement? Tell me what you want to see, in the comments or via Twitter.

Dominating the first 3 pages for my name was pretty easy because I have an uncommon one. But social media is a big part of it. A lot of my results are from Twitter (and applications built on it that automatically index you), and also from LinkedIn. Kiva also ranks highly. Everything I do is linked to my website, so that is up at the top of the first page, too.

Take the test, and if you’re not happy with the results, start building your online presence. It doesn’t take long! A year ago I don’t think I dominated the first page, even. If you’re approaching graduation especially, building your online presence could be a great goal for 2010. Let me know if I can help!

How Web 2.0 is Changing the Way we Communicate

This is what I’ve been finding in my research – what do you think? Anything missing?

These tactics have something familiar about them – they’re similar to the kind of things that are used by dodgy SEO companies. It’s like the proprietors that post glowing reviews of their own hotel, or restaurant. Like the person on Twitter that automatically follows and unfollows people to get the maximum follower count.

The web is a popularity contest. We want it to be a meritocracy – where the best content wins – but the sad fact of it is that sometimes, maybe often, the most popular content wins. The most popular content will hopefully be the best content, but when people are gaming the system – we can’t be sure.

For instance, I just searched “evolution vs creation” and top hit is from allaboutcreation.org. I’m not a biologist, but I am fairly confident that this isn’t the best resource available on the web. Extract below:

Evolution vs. Creation is indeed the Great Debate of our scientific times. In any scientific debate, the theories must be tested according to the evidence. We propose that the burden of evidence should be upon the Evolutionists, since Creation has been the historic and inherent default throughout virtually all cultures and religions until roughly the last 200 years.

There’s more here. I took this search from Google’s suggested searches after typing in evolution; sadly it’s possible to be confident that although the science in support of evolution is solid there are enough people who vocally disagree that I thought something like this would rank highly – number 1 was a surprise though! However it illustrates the point I’m trying to make – Wikipedia (number 3, I promoted it for my results though) is likely a better resource. And yet it’s not number 1 – probably because the other one is more popular.

SEO, and apparently PR firms make a living trying to game the system, artificially inflate the popularity of their clients. The example above is irritating, but is at least organically popular. And it’s a shame, because popularity is often a fantastic indication of what’s better. But when it’s not – how do we tell? If it’s something we know about, then maybe we can make a good guess. But say I’m trying to find the best place to buy ski boots in Ottawa, or the best sushi restaurant downtown – I’m relying on popularity to help me make that decision, and I want it to be real, not fake.

This is why Personal Recommendations will be so important, I guess. I’m reading the Social Network Business Plan at the moment, and whilst I don’t agree with everything he says, I guess on this – he has a point.

Related: Good to see – highly ranking when you search for “Search Engine Optimization” is advice from Google – listing aspects of SEO that are useful and suggesting you make sure you know what you SEO is doing, with some examples of dodgy practices. bMighty has an article on How to Hire An SEO Company. And, in support of Why (I think) SEO is a Load of Crap, a lawsuit for an SEO company that made infeasible promises from the Seattle Times.

Edit: article on engagement – 11 Things More Valuable Besides Clicks and Conversions.

Blogging is all about creating content, it’s one of the many reasons having a “company blog” is so good. It provides an easy way of regularly updating your site, which determines how regularly Google crawls it. Even if you accept a niche for SEO, would it apply well to blogging? Do you try and optimize every post? Or just your homepage? How do you divide your time? Should you be spending as much time optimizing your post for search as you do writing? It doesn’t really make sense to me. I don’t think that blogging great content will necessarily get people to your site, but I’m pretty confident that blogging mediocre content but spending a lot of time ensuring it still ranks well in search won’t get you a lot of people subscribing to your RSS feed. Are you supposed to measure your worth in hits, or the number of people who engage with your content, comment, respond to stuff you’ve written, pass it along to their friends?

So one way to do “SEO” is to go around commenting on things related to what you’re doing and include a link to your site. This has a dual goal – one of getting people to click on the link (more hits) but from the SEO perspective each link out there is a “vote” for your site, and the more votes you have the better your search ranking. There’s a spammer equivalent of this, which writing a bot to post all over the place (WordPress does an excellent job of stopping that kind of thing). And there’s a smart way to do it, which is to join in the conversation on a few things and prove you’ve got something worthwhile to say. Then the fact that a lot of sites use a nofollow tag won’t matter as people will be looking at your site to see who the person with the insightful comments is, and perhaps linking to you in a future post. Twitter uses the nofollow tag, so including the URL of my blog in my profile makes no difference to my page rank. But it’s still a good idea to include it – I’m taking part in the conversation, and if people want to find out who I am or what I do – they can.

My degree is in Computer Science and I took a course on how search engines work. I don’t pretend to be an expert, but I know enough that when I hear people talking about SEO it’s often apparent that they don’t know how search engines work. No-one outside of Google knows exactly how their search engine works, but there are a couple of things we do know – first is that content IS important, because the ranking is a combination of popularity and content. Having people link to you is good, but reciprocal links are ignored. The more popular something that links to you is, the more that boosts your ranking, etc.

Ultimately, I think SEO is not and cannot be a long term strategy. Firstly, because people find ways to make SEO tactics less effective – the no follow tag is an example of this, and a long time ago Google stopped considering “keywords”, and some time in between invisible text got left out too. And secondly because every year the search experience gets better and the current movement is to make it more personalized, but there’s also a lot of data about how everyone is using the web. So there are a lot of improvements we can reasonably expect to see, and soon.

I know! It’s harder! It’s a longer term strategy. And ohhh you went to so much effort to make your website. So what! Doesn’t mean you deserve a top ranking in Google right away. Looking at SEO this way, it’s apparent that SEO means trying to approximate the way people get a well respected site (with a good page rank), cheaply and quickly.

And, by the way, the only person I know who makes any money from Google works for them. Those ads about making money using Google? They’re a load of nonsense too. Great article on that here.

Finally, and most importantly, I think SEO misses the point of having a website. You don’t create one to interact with Google – you create one to interact with customers, potential customers, potential employees, partners, potential partners. So even if you can get these people to your site by artificially inflating your ranking, your content determines whether they’ll come back. There’s some new and cool ways to measure “engagement” with a site, such as seeing what people have highlighted, cut and paste etc. So as those kind of metrics become more mainstream the old metric of “hits” will seem like the blunt tool it is.

So here’s where I see SEO ending. I think that sometime soon Google’s algorithm will be smart enough to tell the difference between people trying to simulate respected content and people having respected content. And sometime around then, the effort people go to to simulate respected content will exceed the effort needed to have respected content. And after SEO, will come something that I’m describing “Web Strategizing”. This will mean thinking about the entirety of your presence on the web, what social media is appropriate and can best represent your brand. You probably should be blogging, but what should you be blogging about? How do you engage your community? Who is your community, anyway?

Here’s why I think “Web Strategy” is the way – it’s because when I talk to people, they might say they want to rank higher in Google but that’s not their only goal. And they have other questions about how the web works, too, that SEO doesn’t answer. There are a few conversations I’ve had relatively recently, and I’ll talk about them below.

• Talking to a consultant  about Facebook. A company he advises is thinking about their Facebook strategy, and how best to use the platform to promote themselves. He asked my opinion, and amongst other things I talked about Privacy concerns on Facebook. Why? I don’t talk about Privacy concerns to everyone who asks me this, but because given the business model of the company concerned Privacy is a crucial thing to address.
• Small business owner, also on Facebook. Wants to use it as a marketing tool. Has some good ideas, some distinctly half baked. I told him – Facebook complements your online strategy, it doesn’t replace it.
• Small business owner, on his website in general. He’s fired a web designer because they were being flaky, but anyway isn’t convinced they were doing what he wanted. He’s computer literate, but not that technical and wants to be able to update it himself. Blogging is an obvious part of the solution here, but Twitter is also going to be part of the strategy – I’ll keep you posted.
• Analyst asked me to look at a site for specialized search. The usability was really appalling. If you’re going to out-Google Google, you’re going to need to bring something new and more impressive to the table.
• Conversation with director of a small multi-national. They’ve hired someone to do a much needed redesign of their website and also to improve their Google ranking. I talked to him about some of the more spam-like SEO strategies and what doesn’t actually work and he was keen to make sure that none of those tactics were used. Also, they’re not so interested in their search rank, it’s more about leveraging the contacts they have – so having more of a presence on LinkedIn would be a good thing for them.

Conclusion – none of these tools are magic. But they’re incredibly powerful, if you understand them. Being “on the internet” is not a business plan. What do you want to portray in your web presence? What do you hope to get from it? How do you plan to monetize that, and if you don’t plan to – how can you measure the value that you get? Facebook is the fourth largest site in the world, but isn’t profitable. Why? Because they didn’t start with a business model, although perhaps that’s part of the reason why they’ve been so successful. What they do have, is content which will eventually be incredibly valuable – once they work out how to monetize it without annoying their users too much. And they’re being patient.

The only site I saw making money out of SEO was one that charged $10 and redirected you to OpenOffice. But when I tried to find it just now, I couldn’t. Go figure! So SEO? Not a long term strategy.