Monthly Archives: December 2011

If you’re trying to make content that will be shared in social media, you could do worse than appealing to your audience’s emotions. Sure, sometimes it’s transparent, but tell that to Disney! Keep reading for a few ideas on how to reach your reader’s heart.

Speaking of Disney, they’re old hands at a variation that Jordan Kasteler calls “The Incredible Story.” It’s all about the dog who traveled cross country to get back to his family, or the three-year-old girl who saved her mother by calling 911, or the man who pulled a stranger from the railroad tracks just before an onrushing train. These human interest stories warm our hearts, reawaken our sense of wonder, and reaffirm our belief in people.

You can’t always predict when these kinds of stories will pop up. Kasteler mentions the “Force is with Katie” story as an example. It started as a mother writing about her first-grade daughter Katie getting bullied for bringing a Star Wars water bottle to school with her lunch, and reflecting on the nature of bullying. At least one popular blogger picked up the story, and Katie and her mother soon saw an outpouring of support from the Internet…to the point that Katie got enough comments to make into a book – something to read whenever she feels “too different” or thinks no one else understands.

If you can’t tug on the heartstrings, you can at least tickle the funny bone. There are a lot of ways to do this; Kasteler’s suggestions hint at short and surprising being the best approach. For example, when he’s discussing one type of content he calls “The Knee-Jerk Reaction,” he explains why the sneezing baby panda video has gotten so many millions of shares: “it’s short, simple, and straightforward: a baby panda sneezes, and it’s cute.” Well, the panda sneezes so hard and suddenly that his mother jumps, which also makes it very funny. If you want to use this technique, content based on this approach needs to be fast, fun, and easy to understand.

Now we go from the sublime at the start of this article to “The Ridiculous.” Kasteler puts the Old Spice man in this category. Make it bizarre, off-the-wall, over the top, and hilarious. It also needs to be original, or it probably won’t work. As Kasteler notes, “Content that catches your audience by surprise and then makes them laugh is some of the most successful viral content out there.” It can also be among the most challenging, but if you do it well you can expect to see a lot of people sharing it – and imitating it. I’d also put Nyan Cat in this category, and I can’t begin to tell you how many versions of that are out now.

That’s all I have room to talk about this time around. I’ll be writing one more part in this series, to cover some educational approaches to creating viral content. Don’t miss it!

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Facebook may not replace your website or other ways of getting the word out about your business, but it supplements them well. For some purposes, it works even better than e-mail. Why? It’s a matter of attitude – not yours so much, but the attitude of your customers.

I was reminded of this recently when getting together with my closest friends and family for Christmas this year. We don’t all celebrate the same holiday, so we’ve made a few compromises in our customs – latkes for brunch on the day before Christmas, watching a movie on the DVD player, and a (non-Chinese) dinner out. That last item presented a bit of a hurdle. We wanted a nice dinner, but what’s open for dinner on Christmas Eve?

Facebook came to the rescue. One of my nearest and dearest friends had friended a well-loved local restaurant. I hadn’t; while I enjoy the food, it’s too expensive for me to eat there every week – or even every month. As it turned out, though, it was open Christmas Eve for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; the owner sent out a message about it via Facebook, posting the status update either the previous day or that very morning. A special Christmas dinner at a favorite restaurant? Even if it’s a bit more than I would normally spend on a dinner out, count me in! I ended up eating some perfectly prepared venison just before going out with my dear ones to look at all the holiday lights.

What was good for me was also good for the local restaurant; they got some customers on a day we might not otherwise have gone. Had we not received the message, we might have assumed they were closed. While it is a favorite place for us to dine, as I noted, it’s a touch expensive (though definitely worth it), and enough off the beaten path that it might not have been the first place that occurred to us for Christmas Eve dinner. The posting on Facebook put it freshly into our minds, right when we were getting ready to make a decision.

Would sending a mass e-mail have worked as well? I don’t think so. Perhaps those who grew up with e-mail will think differently, but when I think of e-mail I equate it in my head to postal mail. This means I expect to receive either private messages intended only for me, or bills, or junk mail. Even if it’s something I’ve signed up to receive, I tend to approach an e-mail that I know has been sent out in bulk with the mindset of “oh no, it’s another piece of junk” and look at it with my finger hovering near the delete key. I’m sure I’m not alone. An e-mail from a local restaurant mentioning that they’ll be open for business Christmas Eve might  easily get deleted after being mentally filed – and probably forgotten at the critical decision-making moment.

Facebook, on the other hand, does not work like private e-mail or postal mail (except for its internal messaging capability). That’s not its purpose. Each user’s wall features status updates of all of their friends. It works – and feels — much more like a public bulletin board. When users check their wall, they know that the messages they see are public; that’s what they expect, in fact. So a mass message from a business does not look out of place at all, especially when it’s from one they friended. As a result, when a user looks at updates on their wall, it’s with a sense of curiosity. They’re more open to business-related messages (within reason; it’s still spam if you send too many messages!).

My point is, users approach e-mail and social media with very different attitudes, and something that can be annoying in one context may be quite welcome in another. You’ll need to experiment to see what works best for you and your business, of course, but understanding and catering to that difference in mindsets can certainly improve your bottom line. Good luck! 

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We all want our site’s content to engage our visitors and become popular. With social media as big as it is, we can’t overlook the links to be won from readers sharing what we’ve written. Fortunately, you can tap into some things that are already popular, and tweak them to be relevant to your field.

I’ll be discussing three more ideas from the article Jordan Kasteler wrote for Search Engine Land. I highly recommend you read it, as it offers a treasure trove of approaches to creating viral content. If you look back on SEO Chat over the last two or three weeks, you’ll see I’ve covered a number of the topics he discussed there.

So how do you get popular by hitching your star to something that’s already popular? Say hello to “The Pop Culture Tie-in.” Memes come and go fast on the Internet, but you don’t need to tie your content to a simple meme. Look at current events, new hot movies, newly popular videos, trends…anything that people are currently talking about. Then tie it back into your field.

When Charlie Sheen was just starting to act crazy, a number of websites focused on SEO wrote articles using his name in the title. Even we did it here. But we didn’t just talk about Charlie Sheen being crazy; we talked about how his actions were attracting attention, and how you could attract attention to your website in similar ways without going a little nuts. The point is, we found a way to talk about something in which lots of searchers were interested, but tied it back to our own field. You can do the same thing – but make sure to use something truly current and not overworked as your inspiration. As Kasteler observed, “the world does not need another Charlie Sheen joke.”

A little star power often works to attract visitors. You don’t need to get Lady Gaga to write for your site (though it would be pretty awesome if you did) as there are plenty of “stars” out there that are hardly known outside their own fields. They’re called experts. Some of them, like Mark Zuckerberg or Warren Buffet, are so generally well-known that people who don’t actively follow social media or high finance take an interest in what they have to say.

Sometimes it’s relatively easy to get the viral power of “The Expert” approach working for you. You can do an interview with them. You can even get several experts together in one piece; send them emails with a list of questions and ask them to answer. Be very polite, as these are often busy people. If you’re running a website for would-be writers, do you think an article in which 15 published authors talk about writing will attract attention? Kasteler thinks so – and you’d better believe it will. It’s a win for the writers as well, as they may appreciate the exposure and link to the piece on their own websites.

I’ve saved the trickiest approach for last. It’s “The Viral Video,” and it’s probably what viral marketing is best known for. The Old Spice man is my favorite example of this (don’t judge), but there are plenty of others. The problem is, it’s nearly impossible to predict what will go viral and what will fall flat. Are you releasing a new product or service? Film a demonstration of it or a “trailer” for it, as you might for a movie. You can be dramatic, funny, or what have you. As Kasteler notes, though, “make it original or make it good – Internet users have no shame about stopping a boring video 15 seconds after it starts.”

It reminds me of one of the rules for costume presentation at science fiction conventions: short is better than long; funny is better than serious; short and funny is best. Never forget that you’re trying to entertain as well as inform. An entertained visitor will remember your content and want to share it with friends, and that’s exactly what you’re trying to achieve with viral content. Good luck!

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With stories of Yahoo’s next possible move emerging almost weekly, it’s hard to know what to take seriously. The latest news states that the beleaguered search company is thinking about selling its interests in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.

The New York Times offers the most complete coverage of this story. As currently being considered, it would not be an outright sale. The complicated deal would net Yahoo about $17 billion in cash and allow it and its partners to avoid having to pay taxes on it.

According to the Times, the terms of the deal involve Alibaba and Softbank (the major stakeholder in Yahoo Japan) setting up new subsidiaries consisting of both cash and operating assets which Yahoo wants to run. “Yahoo would swap out most of its stake in Alibaba and all of its stake in Yahoo Japan for these subsidiaries, effectively selling the holdings,” the Times explained. It’s called a “tax-free cash-rich split,” and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service considers it to be an asset swap rather than an actual sale.

The deal would value Yahoo shares at around $14 each – and when rumors about it started circulating, the company’s shares shot up to nearly $16 each. Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal notes that this “is ironic because over the past 4 years it has always seemed that its Asian and Arabic interests would be the future foundation of Yahoo in these emerging markets.”

To say that Yahoo’s been having a shaky year is an understatement. The company seems to have been wandering for several years, uncertain of its own identity;  heavy competition from Google and Facebook have only made matters worse. With the ousting of its CEO earlier this year and the emergence of several groups of investors eager to purchase Yahoo, it’s been just about anyone’s guess as to what Yahoo would do next and what it would look like in the months to come.

If this deal actually does go through, it would give Yahoo a huge infusion of cash it could use to restructure and reinvent itself. But what would it become? That’s a tough question – one even Yahoo’s own board can’t easily answer, if the unnamed sources quoted by the Times can be believed.

The answer might become clearer once Yahoo finds a new permanent CEO. Some analysts have already pointed to several possible candidates. These include Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson, and online advertising entrepreneur Brian McAdams. Should Yahoo find its dream CEO, one can expect that the Asian deal will go forward, and the company will decide not to sell itself to the suitors it has collected in the weeks since the board fired CEO Carol Bartz. But Yahoo faces a tremendous challenge to find the right candidate with the right skill set. Kara Swisher at AllThingD describes it as being akin to looking for “one unicorn to work magic against increasingly troublesome dragons. Ability to sparkle a plus.” Good luck with that.

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The likelihood of the United States government investigating Google for anti-trust violations increased today as senators Herb Kohl and Mike Lee called on the Federal Trade Commission to look into certain alleged practices. Specifically, they believe that Google favors its own services in its search results.

To get a better understanding of where this is coming from, we need to go back in time to September. At that time, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt testified in person in front of the United States Senate’s antitrust subcommittee. You can read a summary of the three-hour hearing from Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land. The subcommittee meeting was attended by both Herman Kohl (a Democrat, and the chairman of the subcommittee) and Mike Lee (a Republican). The latter went after Schmidt “like a cross-examining lawyer at a trial,” according to Sterling.

So what is Lee’s problem with Google? Lee noticed, and showed on a pie chart, that Google’s shopping/product search results usually appear in the same position on Google’s search results page, but their competitors’ positions fluctuate. Lee seems to believe that this is a sign that Google is using one algorithm for third party content and a different one for their own content. As Sterling put it, “Lee argued that Google didn’t hold it’s own content to the same standards or rules, which was inherently unfair in Lee’s line of reasoning.”

Schmidt conducted himself well, but the second panel that day really grabbed attention. It included Thomas Barnett, an attorney for parties in the anti-Google FairSearch coalition; Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman; Nextag CEO Jeff Katz; and Google lawyer Susan Creighton. Sterling noted that Stoppelman delivered devastating testimony. While his company and Google started out as partners, after that ended, “Google…began including Yelp reviews in Places (a competitive product) without permission. Yelp…asked that those reviews be removed, which Google declined to do without removing Yelp from the index entirely,” Sterling explained. Google did comply eventually…after an FTC investigation was announced.

Fast forward now to early November. Eric Schmidt sends a long written statement to the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee, following up on his September testimony as required. In his statement, he is trying to make the point that Google doesn’t actually have “separate products and services” that they can favor over competitors’ listings. Matt McGee, writing for Search Engine Land, quotes from Schmidt’s statement: “…the question of whether we ‘favor’ our ‘products and services’ is based on an inaccurate premise. These universal search results are our search service – they are not some separate ‘Google content’ that can be ‘favored.’” If you’re interested in reading Schmidt’s full statement, you can see it here, but be prepared to spend some time with it — it runs to 67 pages and deals with a number of potentially anti-competitive issues.

The reasoning seems to go like this: you’re accusing us of favoring our own products and services in our search results. But we don’t have any products or services of our own other than our universal search service. If we don’t have any other products, we can’t possibly be favoring our own “products and services” in the search results, so you can’t accuse us of anti-competitive practices. In short, as McGee correctly notes, Google is trying to make a semantic argument to wiggle out of this.

Next: Not Buying the Argument
 

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If you’re trying to get visitors to engage with your site’s content and share it, it helps to create the kind of content with which they’ll want to interact. That’s not easy, but if you start with the right idea, and put yourself in your readers’ shoes, you’ll be surprised as how popular your site could become.

It’s hard to resist something that encourages you to interact with it, or that seems to be interacting with you. That’s why video games are so much fun. And when we’re having fun with something, we naturally want to share it with others. The content ideas I’m going to give you today, mostly from Jordan Kasteler’s recent guest post on Search Engine Land, will help get your readers involved and interacting with your content and your website.

The first one that comes to mind as a type of content that can engage your readers is “The Quiz.” Casteler notes that quizzes are popular for several reasons: “they’re interactive, they’re fun, and they’re user-focused.” And anyone who takes a quiz will naturally want to pass it on to his friends, so they see what results they each got. So there’s a built-in spur to discussion.

Casteler notes that there are three main types of quizzes. The first kind is user-focused. These can be whimsical (“Which Superhero Are You?”) or quite serious (“Are You Saving Enough For Retirement?”). You can build either kind around the product or service you offer. You might even be able to disguise a serious quiz as a whimsical one. I haven’t seen anyone do this yet, but imagine an investment company offering a 10-question quiz that asks what you would do if you suddenly won increasing amounts of money (say $100, $1,000, $10,000, $50,000, etc). From your answers, they could get a sense for what kind of investor you are. Obviously, serious investments with them will rely on more than just a quiz, but it would make a nice icebreaker, wouldn’t it?

The second type of quiz tests your knowledge. There’s one out there that challenges you to name all 50 United States capitals in 10 minutes. I’m really bad at geography, so the quiz that asks you to name all the 50 states in the United States in 10 minutes is more my speed (I got 46 the last time I tried). This quiz boasts a particularly nice interface; as you enter each name into a box, if it’s correct, the name sails down from the text box onto the correct state on a blank map of the US that shows all the state borders. There’s a count down clock, and if you press the “Give up?” button before your time is up, it fills in the names of the blank states in red (the state names you guess successfully show up in black). You don’t need a fancy interface to make this work, but it does add to the fun.

Speaking of fun, the third kind of quiz is just for fun. You can even make it kind of silly; Casteler points to the one that asks you to guess whether you’re seeing the name of a rapper or McDonald’s menu item. In a sense, it’s a subset of the “test your knowledge” kind of quiz. Keep it quick, make it fun, and visitors are more likely to share it.

Next: More Interactive Content Ideas
 

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