Phil Bucklet at 1918.me

How Competition Makes You Better, and Your Team Can Make You Great

February 20, 2010 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

Bill Russell played 13 seasons for the Boston Celtics. Many of the season he had to match up against a Goliath of the NBA – Wilt Chamberlain.

Chamberlain was 7’1″ 275 pounds. Russell was 6’9″ 215 pounds. Russell’s greatest adversary, entered the NBA and joined the Philadelphia Warriors for the 1959-60 season, setting up a decade-long rivalry. The debate over who was the greater player lasts to this day. Chamberlain put up incredible numbers during the period in which the two went head to head, but Russell helped the Celtics hang nine NBA championship flags in the Garden in his first 10 seasons.

Boston Celtic Championship Banners
Photo by: Paul Keleher

Chamberlain dominated the records book when he finally left. Most games with 50+ points, 118; Most consecutive games with 40+ points, 14; Most consecutive games with 30+ points: 65; Most consecutive games with 20+ points: 126; Highest rookie scoring average: 37.6 ppg; Highest field goal percentage in a season: .727.

There’s no question that competition like that makes you try harder, makes you push yourself a little further than you thought you could go. Just as important is a team that can make you want to compete at that high level.

Bill Russell boxing out Wilt Chamberlain

Bill Russell later wrote: “To me, one of the most beautiful things to see is a group of men coordinating their efforts toward a common goal, alternately subordinating and asserting themselves to achieve real teamwork in action. I tried to do that, we all tried to do that, on the Celtics. I think we succeeded.”

In everyday life, sometimes it’s easy to look at competition as a bad thing. You may ask yourself, “Why is Joe gunning for my job?” or even more common, you find yourself thinking why a co-worker is working so hard, because it means you have to pick up the pace.

I’m fairly sure that Motorola didn’t see the introduction of Apple’s iPhone as a good thing. I can’t imagine that IBM was planning parties when Microsoft released Windows. Greg Norman couldn’t have looked forward to the arrival of Tiger Woods. I know for a fact that the newspaper industry wishes the Internet never came along.

Human nature is a funny thing. When we look back it’s usually clear that the science teacher that drove us crazy in 7th grade helped us the most because he expected more from us. There’s no question that Wilt Chamberlain made Bill Russell greater than he would have been without that level of competition. Motorola’s phones are better today because of the competition from Apple.

What would happen if you started viewing competition as an opportunity to excel? What if you viewed you team the same way Bill Russell viewed his? What if you decided to try to one-up your competitors everyday, even if it was just in very small ways?

You may not redefine the way team defense is played in the NBA, or set scoring records, but you can start changing the way you play the game.

What’s the thing that you can do that would make the biggest difference for you?

Why The Raleigh SEO Meetup Is So Popular

February 14, 2010 by Phil Buckley 8 Comments

In December of 2008 I had become the defacto search engineer for McClatchy Interactive. I wanted to meet other people who had more experience than me and hopefully had better ideas and perspectives. I quickly found Ashley Berman Hale’s Raleigh SEO meetup. I didn’t have any idea what to expect as I walked into the offices of Triangle Direct Media for the groups’ 7th meetup.

Ashley greeted me and welcomed everyone warmly. Within a few minutes she had us all telling who we were and why we came. It was a great ice breaker. Then out came the handouts. Chuck full of useful bullet points and links to more information. Ashley then talked for about 30 minutes about whatever was the subject that night, stopping to answer questions that popped up, and finally finishing up by taking more questions at the end.

I hung around a little while after and talked to someone else that I knew there, and noticed that a lot of other people also hung around after. It was already a pretty tight group that feed off Ashley’s energy and warmth. I knew I’d be back the next month.

The meetups continued to be rock-solid and eventually my chatty ways made Ashley ask me if I wanted to be her assistant organizer. I tried to side-step it, but she suckered me in with tales of great meetup fame and fortune that awaited (ok, not really).

Once I started helping Ashley, I realized that she put a lot of time into her meetup preparation. Each month required about 6-10 hours of prep time. She’s driven to help small business owners who just needed the straight story, no crazy black-hat stuff or learn more by paying. She answers questions from members between meetings and even still finds time to be a Top Contributor with the Google Webmaster Forums. She is a breath of fresh air.

Every month the people who were there the previous month tell a couple of friends or co-workers about it and it grows. Last month we had to cap the number of people at 80 because the room we had booked at the 101 Lounge downtown turned out to be too small.

This month we have space at Issac Hunter’s Tavern which can hold 200. That seemed like overkill when we decided on it, but as of tonight we have 111 people who have confirmed they’re coming and 17 more listed as “maybe”.

So let’s get back to why the meetup is so popular.

I think there’s two main reasons. The first, is it’s founder. Ashley Berman Hale is a phenomenal speaker and leader. She puts everyone at ease while being so clearly in-charge that everything just seems to flow.

The second reason is the high quality of the people who attend. Every week the questions get better and better because the group becomes more diverse and feeds off itself.

There is also a third reason, but it’s a secondary reason. The group has become a social gathering as well. People who have to leave right after the formal talk ends are missing out on a great secondary discussion that goes on sometimes for hours. I remember after one meetup at the Cameron Village library a group of us standing outside and talking until about 10:30 (the library kicked us out at 9).

If you haven’t check out the meetup, there’s one on Tuesday the 16th at 6:30 in downtown Raleigh. What have you got to lose?

If you’ve attended the meetup, tell me how you feel.

URL Rewriting Using .htaccess

February 9, 2010 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

I was talking to my friend Steve at Carrot-Top Industries this afternoon about rewriting url’s because of a hosting move. He is a savvy web marketer but was unfamiliar with the power of using an .htaccess file to fix 404 errors.

According the the Apache documentation an .htaccess file (or “distributed configuration file”) provides a way to make configuration changes on a per-directory basis. A file, containing one or more configuration directives, is placed in a particular document directory, and the directives apply to that directory, and all subdirectories thereof.

What that means in layman terms is, the .htaccess file allows you to override the server-wide apache directives for just your stuff.

In Steve’s case, he wanted to do some simple redirections from old url’s that no longer exist to existing pages. Here’s how to do that.

Create a new file in your root directory named .htaccess (yes, the file name starts with a dot).
Make sure the redirects are wrapped within a <IfModule mod_rewrite.c></IfModule> tag. That allows other directives to sit in that file without impacting the rewrites.
Understand that the file is read from top to bottom, so putting things in the wrong order can make very strange things happen.
Understand the flags you can use to impact processing, like [L] for last and [R=301] for a permanent redirect.
Try learning regular expressions if you dare – it makes redirecting via patterns much easier
Save the file and test every change right away. As soon as the file is saved, the redirections will be live, there is no lag.

Let’s look at some examples to make this easier.

You want to change the “About Us” page from /about.html to now be /about-us.php without breaking links that may be pointing at the old url.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
Redirect /about.html about-us.php [R=301]
</IfModule>

The redirect above is about as simple as it gets, the addition of the [R=301] flag indicates that it’s a permanent redirect, and thus, Google will continue to flow PageRank to the “new” page. Without the 301 redirect, requests that come in get a 302 redirect which means Google still thinks the “old” page should be getting any PageRank.

You can also use the following syntax:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
Redirect permanent /about.html about-us.php
</IfModule>

Both versions do the same thing, one just seems a little easier to read.

Here’s one that I had to use recently when I stripped the dates out of the url’s on this blog. Although I am doing this one using the Redirection Plugin for WordPress I’ll still explain it as if it was in the .htaccess file.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RedirectMatch 301 /(d*)/(d*)/(.*) /$3
</IfModule>

So the one above only does it’s redirect if it matches the first part. The first part is a regular expression that is looking for the following pattern: a slash, followed by a pattern starting with a digit, followed by a slash, followed by another pattern starting with a digit, followed by another slash, and finally anything. In this case it was /year/month/title-of-post and I needed to strip out the date part.

So using regular expressions means I can pick and choose what I want, in the above redirect I use 3 parenthesis. so the redirection says take whatever gets caught in the third one, and use that as the new url.

There’s a lot more you can do with .htaccess, and more complicated rewrites, but these two will handle the majority of the rewrites you’ll need.

I’ll stress 3 things: “test, test, test”. It’s easy to break stuff and completely bring down your site, so always test every new rewrite. If you break it, just go back to the previous version and replace it. You did back up the file right?

One final word about .htacess if your using WordPress. WordPress writes it’s own .htacess file, don’t write inside the wordpress specific rewrites, because your changes will get overwritten. Here’s what mine looks like:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress
RewriteEngine On
more yada yada yada

WordPress looks for the #BEGIN and #END tags, just put your stuff under theirs.

Raleigh Media Leaders Inaugural Networking Event

January 28, 2010 by Phil Buckley 39 Comments

On January 27, 2010 Raleigh, North Carolina proved itself as a major social networking hub. Again!

About 3 weeks ago, I saw a link on my Twitter stream about a nationwide networking event called MediaLeaders. I sent an email to Josh Ochs in Los Angeles to see if I could shoehorn Raleigh in at the last-minute. Josh liked the idea and basically told me to grab some people and get going.

I had not planned anything of any real significance before, so I knew I would need a lot of help. I had originally bounced the idea off Sarah Burris, and she helped me get excited about it, so I knew I had to bring her in right away. Sarah spends her days doing PR for Carolina Advanced Digital so I knew she’d be a huge help. She handled everything flawlessly.

I also reached out to the sharpest marketing mind I know, Brian McDonald. Brian was the taskmaster that we needed to stay focused on making the event something different, something that people would look forward to attending. There’s no doubt we wouldn’t have had the reach we did without Brian McDonald on the team.

One of my best friends also happens to be a serious social media workhorse at the MediaTwo Interactive Ad Agency. Morgan Siem has quickly become my go-to girl for all things social. She always had a simple way to fix our complicated hurdles.

I had only really known Dan London a few months, but in that time he had really impressed me with his big-picture understanding of marketing, search and social. Dan was there all along the way helping us sharpen the ideas that ultimately led to the big night. Of course Dan did have a weird need to hang around his house after work, something about a wife who was due to have a baby girl the day before the event!

We all got used to Google Wave by the end of week one, and by the night before the event we were old pros. I was unsure of its value until that point, but as a collaborative tool, it worked great.

Once the team was in place, we had to choose a venue. It wasn’t an easy choice. I love the guys at The Pit, but I wasn’t sure it was the perfect type of venue. I had just met the guys that run Issac Hunter’s Oak City Tavern downtown, and it’s a fantastic place, but we would have had to figure out how to bring in some food and we were short on time. The Raleigh Times was also in the mix, but I thought it might be a tight squeeze. That meant that our best choice was going the The Busy Bee Cafe. It had everything we were looking for.

Now we were down to about 2 weeks to see if we could actually get some buzz about it. We were all really excited at the chance to host an event that the awesome Triangle community could enjoy.

Step 1 was figuring out what we would do for 3 hours. We tossed around a bunch of ideas, but we kept coming back to wanting to offer something different from Chuck Hester’s LinkedIn Live events, or the Triangle Social Media Club‘s events or random tweetups and meetups. We wanted to put something together that would offer a benefit for C-Level executives as well as more junior people who can benefit from meeting and connecting with them.

The MediaLeaders networking concept is on creating a cutting edge junction of leaders in PR, media, marketing, advertising and tech while discussing current events and new ideas. We figured that meant trying to create a relaxed social atmosphere where everyone could schmooze and also make new contacts. We would keep the music low, the interruptions to a minimum and the overall value high. We also decided to have one prize to give away, but not something you could wrap-up. We decided to reach out to 3 of the most influential and smartest people in this orbit and ask them to give up some of their valuable time to have lunch with 3 lucky winners. Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim fame, Patty Briguglio, President of MMI Public Relations and Barrett Joyner the Development Director of The Healing Place of Wake County.

We arrived and started setting up about 6pm. Sarah had grabbed some adhesive name tags so that as people came in, they could be easily recognized, and also brought about 70 sharpies in every color possible. We set up a small table by the door to handle what we figured would be a manageable crowd of about 75.

When Chris Moody from Bandwidth showed up with their giant old-school telephone booth, we knew we were almost ready. Chris has been an awesome force on the Raleigh scene and the photos with their phonebooth has been a huge success due mostly to the beautiful photography of Sledge.

A half hour in we had a line down the stairs waiting to get in! It was getting busy, and fast. At 7:40 we took a minute to thank everyone for coming but you could hardly hear us over the PA system because we had already let over 100 people through the door. Thankfully Lisa Sullivan, Leslie Wilkinson, Mandy Steinhardt, Tucker Peterson and Karl Sakas volunteered to help us out. Karl and Tucker estimated later that at least 150 people showed up for the Raleigh Media Leaders event!

Everyone seemed to be having a pretty good time, I didn’t notice people starting to trickle out until about 9pm. There was still about 50 people hanging around at 10pm when the event was officially over. By the time Brian and I were lugging laptops, projectors and cables down the stairs at 11pm, there was only a handful of friends keeping us company.

We saw lots of Tweets from people saying the had a good time, which is always nice. My favorite Media Leaders tweet came from Colleen Bradley who attended the Boston Media Leaders event:

That’s what networking is all about. Building a network that can help you when you need help, and offering help when you can offer help.

I watched the tweets from the other Media Leaders cities, and they couldn’t hold a candle to Raleigh. When Wayne Sutton talked about the 19 reasons the Triangle is better than Silicon Valley, here is #20.

I had a blast helping organize the Raleigh Media Leaders networking event. I hope everyone who attended got something out of it, even if it was just some of the awesome hummus that The Busy Bee provided.

We’re already thinking about the next one, but would love to get some feedback about what worked and what didn’t.

Thank you to the entire Triangle community for a great night!

You can see a bunch of photos from the event on Flickr tagged with Raleigh and MediaLeaders

Study says: Facebook beats Twitter?

January 21, 2010 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

This post is by Alison Campbell who runs the Social Media empire at Out There Media. If you’re not following her @outtheremedia Twitter stream, you’re missing out on her balance of outrageous enthusiasm and crazy ideas with solid numbers, results, and experience to back them up.

Several recent studies have highlighted the staggering amount of information that we take in each day. It came as no shock to me, as I have a habit of reading thousands of headlines each day in my RSS feed and hundreds of blog posts and articles. One headline I ran across was a shock to me, and I had an immediate, visceral reaction to it: ‘New Study Reveals Facebook Better Than Twitter for Marketers’. And that reaction was, “WRONG! That cannot possibly be true.”

I think of Facebook as a social nesting site, rather than social networking. On my personal profile, my friends are people I know and have interacted with in real life, unlike Twitter, where I feel much more compelled to follow and listen to people, professionals and brands that I may not have met in person (yet). Yes, I’m a little biased against Facebook, and have seen my fair share of marketers try and fail with half-baked Facebook campaigns that quickly became stale and useless. Personally, I don’t believe I’ve ever taken a second look after joining a fan page. On Twitter, I’ve seen some great responsiveness and actual interaction between brands and consumers, and I think that savvy marketers could do far better concentrating on the opportunities Twitter offers.

The link from the post took me to a study for sale on MarketingProfs.com. Although I could readily access a sample, it didn’t really address the headline’s claim, and I wasn’t willing to shell out the $599.00 to buy the report. So I had to refer back to the post, and the charts and information they pulled from the report to support the premise. Although the research methodology was explained, my gut was still telling me that the headline couldn’t possibly be the golden nugget mined from this study.
Although MySpace, LinkedIn and other sites were mentioned, this Facebook v. Twitter battle was what I wanted to get to. The facts highlighted to support that headline were:

1. The average minutes per visitor on Facebook in 2009 was 182.8 versus only 25.6 on Twitter.

2. About half of all marketers report that their employers or clients actively maintain a corporate Facebook account, while 42.8% reported their employers or clients maintain a Twitter site.

Of course people spend more time on Facebook. They’re looking at friends’ pictures of their new baby or trip to Mexico. Or perhaps stalking an ex. Don’t flatter your company by thinking that they’re reading every word on your fan page. Plus, Twitter’s format lends itself as more of a bridge to outside information-leading most consumers out to a company’s website, rather than duplicating relevant information within the Facebook format.

As for that second fact, about half means, “Eh, well, somewhere around 50%”, right? And 42.8% is somewhere around 50%, too, right? Heck, depending on the variance (not reported anywhere I saw), those numbers are very comparable.

And they brought this up, which seemed to discredit Facebook’s dominance, and the headline’s premise:

3. The report did not touch on the number of fans on corporate Facebook fan pages (why not?), but it did report on corporate Facebook accounts and the number of friends associated with them. Only 6% have been able to reach the 2,000 friends mark, with most falling well below that.
If the study showed that Facebook was better for marketers, wouldn’t fan pages need to be included?

Plus, in a survey of tactics, Twitter seemed to be pretty darn effective when you tried it:

–Monitoring Twitter for PR problems in real time? While only 50.8% actually tried it, 74.8% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”

–Inviting Twitter users with positive brand tweets to do something? 33.2% tried it, 72.1% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”

–Contacting Twitter users tweeting negatively about the brand? 22.4% tried it, 72.3% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”

–Creating an in-person event using only Twitter invites? 13.5% tried it, 71.8% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”

Those are the things that I love about Twitter, both as a marketer and as a consumer. What’s more valuable to a company that the real-time opinions of their consumer? Isn’t that the Holy Grail? As a marketer, are you more likely to be able to monitor and tweet daily or to update Facebook daily? (Study says: Twitter.) Plus, as a consumer, would you be more likely to express your brand thoughts on Twitter or on a Facebook page? It thrills me when Zappos.com asks if they can help me with an order when I tweet about them.

The bottom line is that the study, weighing in at a hefty 242 pages with over 190 charts, likely provides stats, numbers and factoids to support just about any social media viewpoint, depending on which you choose. There’s no one social media tactic or solution that beats the others hands down across the board because the customers, brands, companies, behaviors and goals are all different-we can even take the same stats and interpret them differently. Being social as a marketer can take many different forms, and following the herd is silly when there are solutions that would better suit your needs and meet your goals.

(Also, go Twitter!)

Online Reputation Monitoring

January 17, 2010 by Phil Buckley 8 Comments

This post is by my friend Morgan Siem who is the mastermind of all things social at MediaTwo in Raleigh. You can catch her regularly posting at MediaTwoPointOH! or watch her real time insights via her @mediatwo_social Twitter stream.

I highly recommend monitoring your online reputation, whether you are a person or a company and whether you actively build an online presence or try to avoid the internet. You don’t have to infuse yourself into the online environment to have an online reputation to manage. Anyone aware of your brand can talk about it online. Enough people doing that, with enough of a following, can sometimes have a powerful impact on your bottom line. Therefore, be aware of what’s being said. Once you’re aware, you have the power to:

Thank those who give you good mentions
Provide corrections and accurate details when someone has his/her facts wrong
Try to solve a problem that a customer is having with your product
Apologize for your mess ups

There are a number of tools that you can use to monitor your reputation. There are free tools as well as paid tools, so the ones you decide to go with may depend on both your budget and the size of your brand.

Free tools:

Google Alerts: will ping you when there is a mention of your brand name. This is helpful because it scours the net for your and lets you know when something comes up, which saves you the effort of doing regular searches. The downsides are that it misses a lot of mentions and doesn’t allow you to fine-tune your search terms.
Twitter Search: allows you to track brand mentions in real time. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the mentions to help you keep track of them.
Social Mention: This tool provides a few bonuses over other free monitoring tools, the primary bonus being that it scans a variety of social networks instead of just twitter (search.twitter.com) or just blogs (technorati.com). It also generates a sentiment score, although I wouldn’t trust it. And, like Google Alerts, it gives you the option to sign up for alerts.

Paid tools:

Radian6: Probably the most talked-about monitoring tool is Radian6, which allows you to track brand, competitor and industry mentions across a variety of online sources. Some of the cool widgets offered are a conversation cloud, a river of news, a topic trend analysis graph and a list of key influencers.
FiltrBox: This tool is gaining ground in the monitoring industry, but its prices are rising in fast pursuit. This tool also allows you to track conversations across several sources and provides a river of news and a list of top influencers. A benefit of this tool is that it will send you a daily digest of new mentions, and it will allow you to create as many new profiles as you’d like (unlike Radian6, which charges you for each new profile). However, it is not as robust as Radian6. There are fewer options for tagging posts and the conversation cloud has very limited functionality.

There are many other tools out there and many more being created every day. Which ones have you tried? What did you like or not like and why?

Goodbye McClatchy

January 13, 2010 by Phil Buckley 28 Comments

McClatchy Interactive building — McClatchy Interactive

I will be leaving my position at McClatchy Interactive in a few days. It will mean a big shift for me, but one that I’m really excited about.

I’ve worked with some great people, but in the end, I feel that I have to move on. Working in an industry that is constantly contracting isn’t good for my mental state. Being the guy swimming against the tide eventually exhausts you. I finally realized it wasn’t a dip, but a cul-de-sac.

I have an opportunity to do exactly what I’ve been advocating for while at McClatchy, and that’s one of the biggest reasons I’ve made this choice. I’m looking forward to doing search marketing, brand management and social media leveraging as my main tasks everyday.

I’ll still be blogging and tweeting, now all I need is for you guys to keep reading.

Why You Should Attend The Raleigh Media Leaders Networking Event

January 9, 2010 by Phil Buckley 8 Comments

A week or so ago, I ran across a link pointing to the Media Leaders site. I noticed that they were working on a nationwide event on January 26th, but Raleigh wasn’t included. Los Angeles, Boston, Austin, New York City and San Francisco are big cities, with lots of social media electricity coursing through them, but there’s no doubt that Raleigh needed to be included in that top echelon.

Raleigh has a collection of some of the brightest minds in advertising, social media, new media professionals, online producers, tech entrepreneurs and brands interested in high-tech content integrations and promotional opportunities. Do you fit into any of those categories? If not, do you wish you did?

This is one of those events that can help you start working on building your network. If you think you can reach your full potential by staying home and watching re-runs of What Not To Wear, it’s time for you to start getting out. This is the year to put as much effort into your network and your career as you put into that fantasy football league.

Go look at the list of people already attending the Raleigh Media Leaders event, it’s a who’s who of people who are making Raleigh one of the hottest spots in the United States for new media of all flavors.

When we opened up the event, the first 100 tickets were free, and were also gone in a few hours. The remaining tickets are $12 each, which means that it is within reach of anyone who is serious about networking in this community.

We’re lucky that they Busy Bee Cafe has agreed to host the Raleigh Media Leaders event. They offer a fantastic venue for us to eat, drink and schmooze.

Lastly, we have lined up a nice collection of sponsors that will be offering all sorts of goodies and prizes for the attendees. More on that in the upcoming days.

I’ll be there, will you?

Love In The Workplace

December 31, 2009 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

A couple months ago I read Tim Sander’s Love is the Killer App. It’s not a new book, it’s from 2002, but it’s core message really struck a cord with me. You can do more work, with more people, at a higher level when you have a deep and meaningful relationship with them. The reason it’s important is, you give your friends the benefit of the doubt, you give your friends a chance to correct mistakes.

Too often, in life and at work, when you really need some compassion, some understanding and dare I say it, love – you get exactly the opposite.

Let me ask you managers a question. When a subordinate is going through a crisis in their life, are you there for them? Do you do everything in your power to be a positive force for them? Are you helping to diffuse the fear that accompanies their crisis or are you cracking the whip because they seem suddenly scattered and unable to concentrate like they did before?

Think about the times in your life when you were in crisis. The people who reached out, how do you remember them? How about the people that pushed you to “get over it” and “grow up”, how do you remember them?

When you treat people without compassion, it has wider implications. Other employees who may be closer to the person in crisis, will also form an opinion of both the situation, and how you handle it. Can you afford to have your entire department dislike you?

If you can love your employees, understand that they may be at 80% for a while, when they come out the other end, they’ll love you back. At some point in the future you may need someone to work late and finish something, you’ll have a volunteer. Beyond the work aspects, you’ll have made someone’s life better.

What would happen if the next time you felt like yelling at someone, you took them out to lunch and asked them what you could do to help them. Listen to them, listen as you would if it was a family member.

Ready for the last step? Let them know you appreciate them, then… hug them. Let the power of the hug build your tribe into a force to be reckoned with.

What do you have to lose, is the way you’re doing it now working as well as you would like?

Watch the short clip below, then try to deny the power of the hug.

Well, do you have the guts to put yourself out there?

Who Are Your Personal Rock Stars?

December 22, 2009 by Phil Buckley 5 Comments

Last night I was minding my own business when I saw my friend Ryan tweet that he was heading over to The Pit for dinner. I had just tried the warm chocolate cake with ice cream there a couple days ago, so I replied that he should try it. A minute later I saw the reason Ryan was heading over there, it was to meet Chris Brogan who was in the area.

It was about 7:30 and I was happily on my couch with my wife and 2-year-old. I turned and told my wife that it was cool that Chris was hanging at The Pit. She then asked, “are you going?” – I thought about it for a long second and decided, no, I wouldn’t.

I’m a really big fan of Chris Brogan, also a big fan of The Pit, and friends with most of the guys who were hanging out there. Here’s the calculation I did in my head: Should I go someplace I wasn’t exactly invited to meet someone I admire. I’ve chatted with Chris in comments and via email a few times, and he’s always been super nice and responsive, so running out away from my family to be one of 50 didn’t make sense to me.

I’ve asked my family to put up with me being out and about a lot over the past year, and because Chris Brogan is so accessible I couldn’t bring myself to jump off my couch, drive 30 minutes, find parking, muscle my way in, and introduce myself, then hang around, there wasn’t enough value for me.

That made me start thinking about who I would have jumped up for. I have a short list of people I only know via the Internet, that I would run for:

These 5 people are my personal rock stars. I can’t think of many days that I don’t bookmark or share something from at least on of them. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to have a normal 5 minute conversation with them, so I would go that extra mile to meet them IRL.

By the way, if any of my personal rock stars ever make it to Raleigh, dinner at The Pit is on me!

I know you have a list like this. Who is on your list?

Is Foursquare Worth The Trouble?

December 21, 2009 by Phil Buckley 26 Comments

I recently had an interesting talk with Dan London, who one of the smartest search marketers I’ve met. He sees a real problem with most of the geo-locating social media tools, as a consumer you’re often left asking, “what’s in it for me?” As a business owner, you may look at a tool like Foursquare and say. “Why would I use something like that?”

It’s a circle of uncertainty that feeds on itself. Here’s my pitch to both consumers and businesses.

How do I use Foursquare to promote my business?

Here’s how I feel businesses could benefit from an active and sustained use one of the geo-enabled tools: Foursquare/Gowalla/Tri-Out/Loopt.

Bars and Restaurants: This is an easy one for me because I’ve written an entire post about how The Pit BBQ in Raleigh is doing it right. They were on Twitter, and actually listening to what people were saying about them. When they saw people checking in using Foursquare, they jumped on the bandwagon and were the first place I know of in the area to offer a “Special Offer” when “The Mayor” comes in.

In case you’re not a Foursquare user, you can become “The Mayor” of a venue by checking in there more than anyone else. That is the base functionality of Foursquare, but what you do with that functionality is up to you. So what The Pit is really doing is rewarding one of their best customers for always broadcasting to his friends that he’s eating at The Pit. Smart.

The cost for The Pit is a freebie every so often, but the return is a super targeted advertisement sent out by a happy patron to all of his friends who are already more likely to listen to that message than a radio or television ad.

I think any restaurant that isn’t using the geo-tagging services is falling behind more than the other types of businesses. A bar or restaurant need a buzz to stay filled, if I know my friends are always eating or drinking someplace, I’m more likely to go there to.

Realtor: I haven’t seen this yet, but I think a smart realtor will start doing this and gain a large following. If I am either buying or selling my house, I would love to see what else my realtor is showing. A tweet like, “Showing a 3BR 2bath colonial – $249k – twitpic” might get some people who are also selling the house for 249 to see what the competition is. People looking to buy in that range will want to see the picture of the house. Having it geo-tagged also lets everyone know what neighborhood it’s in.

Realtors are everywhere, what else can they do to set themselves apart?

Home Security System and Cable Guys: I thought of this one after talking with my cousin who is a sales/installation tech. How awesome if I was on the schedule for an appointment and I could see that 20 minutes ago my tech checking out from his previous appointment 10 miles away.

All of these examples are just jumping off points. For example when the cable guy leaves one appointment, the customer service guy could call and check in to make sure everything went well.

Why should I bother using Foursquare?

This side of the equation can more complicated. Whereas I think all businesses can see some benefit from using one of these tools, I think a consumer can go either way. I’ll explain the benefit I see from using them.

1. Feeling Special: Last night I decided to go out to dinner with my wife. We decided that we would head to The Pit. At 5:15 I sent out the tweet below.

the-pit-reservation — My lame attempt at making a reservation

We arrived for dinner about 6 and were seated for dinner. First, the waiter remembered me from a Tweetup there a few weeks ago, then the manager came over to say hello. Both of those small actions go a long way in making anyone feel special. If that was the end of it, it would have been fine, but after dinner, I saw this:

The Pit was keeping an eye out for me — The Pit keeping an eye out for me

That was pretty cool. It’s extra work for them to keep an eye out for me, then when they saw me and my wife arrive, to take a minute to send out that tweet.

Let me be honest that I’ve gone out of my way to help build my relationship with the guys at The Pit, but they’ve done the same, and not just with me, but with a large group of social networkers in the area.

Besides real tangible value, I also get some satisfaction from becoming “The Mayor” of places, especially when I can oust someone else. It’s a bragging rights thing.

Another nice side effect is getting the chance to run into friends while I’m out. By broadcasting my location to my friends, it allows them to come by and join up if they want.

I think in the end, it’s all about using tools that help you. I find value from these tools, so I’ll continue to use them.

D0 you use any of these tools? Why (or why not)?

Who Taught Me The Most In 2009

December 18, 2009 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

This was an awesome year. I set out last December to expand my network, mainly so that when my job was eliminated I would have some contacts.

The good news is that my job didn’t get eliminated, but the better news is the people who I met have enriched my life in ways I never envisioned a year ago.

Ashley Berman Hale

Ashley’s SEO Meetup was my first baby step. I was doing more and more SEO work and wanted to connect with others to compare ideas and get some new tips. The meetup is far and away the best one I’ve ever attended. Ashley has found the sweet spot in connecting with small business people, techies, marketing people, novices and advanced search marketers. I now compare all other meetups to this one, and none have even come close, here’s why:

Fantastic subject matter – Ashley has a knack for picking really smart sessions to appeal to a wide audience
Feels casual because it has an expected structure – people are encouraged to participate, share, brag and question. The less lecturing the better her meetups get. She’s a true rock star.
Handouts. Ashley goes the extra mile and always has handouts and other take-aways that let you work on your specific checklist.
Expert – Ashley has made her bones in organic search and is now a Top Contributor and Bionic Poster at Google Webmaster Forums, which requires Google reaching down and picking you out as super helpful and knowledgeable about search.
Fun – I’ve always had fun at the meetups, which is why Ashley has been able to attract over 300 people to join the meetup.

If you need a starting point for your SEO journey, Ashley’s site audits are the best in the industry.

Seth Godin

I know a bunch of people learn from Seth. I remember running across a video of his Tribes presentation posted at Mixergy and being so moved, I started writing this blog in earnest. What struck me were just a few catch phrases that gave me the courage to keep moving forward in an environment that doesn’t always value straight-forward honesty and sticking to your guns.

Tim Sanders

I hadn’t heard of Tim Sanders before running across his name while reading something. I was intrigued by the name of his book, Love is the Killer App. I grabbed the book from my local library and it really helped me refocus on the importance of actually being there for the people around me. Although I sometimes get weird looks followed by, “really?”, I try to let people know how much I appreciate them, it’s a nice feeling.

Morgan Siem

I’ve written about Morgan already this year, but that’s why she’s in this list. The impact of Morgan is her presence. She has the ability to walk in anywhere and be confident, charming and memorable. It’s so rare to see, I had almost forgot that such people existed. Meeting and getting to know Morgan has made me remind myself to put forth a little more effort at being memorable when meeting people.

Jeremy Smith

I ran into Jeremy at an impromptu Tweetup at The Pit BBQ in downtown Raleigh over the summer. We hit it off right away as a couple of smart-asses. I later found out he runs Twine Interactive downtown. Jeremy has offered me guidance and suggestions ever since. I can always count on him to give it to me straight, and he can count on the same from me in return. I value that, it’s not often you find someone who will point out your warts.

Brian McDonald

Brian and I had passed each other a bunch of times over the year, but finally became friends at the end of the summer. Brian has more marketing knowledge in his head than any other dozen VP’s of Marketing combined. He has the lethal combination of old-fashioned core marketing know-how, new 2.0 marketing savvy, tech skills and people skills. He is simply “the shit” when it comes to getting it done, and it doesn’t much matter what “it” is. I’ve snuck into his pack to get a better angle to observe him from and every week he does something that I label as brilliant (and then write down in my notebook).

Twitter

I know, I know, Twitter’s not a person. So what, just keep reading. Using Twitter has allowed me to talk to and meet people who in the old 1.0 world never would have had time for me. It’s allowed me to look in on the people who I want to learn from, and see what they’re doing with their time, what they’re reading, what they’re interested in. Anyone who doesn’t see value in that is missing the best part of Twitter.

Who did you learn from this year?

2010 Prediction for SEO & Social Media

December 13, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

2009 was a really exciting year for people involved in search and social media. A lot of the search excitement came from the launch of Bing, the Caffeine update, Sidewiki and Real-Time search results. Social Media was finally leaving the “shiny object” stage and becoming a real force in driving traffic (online and off).

So what about next year?

I believe next year will be the mainstream rise of mobile optimization, mobile search, and geo-enabled everything. I think it will force three major components to come together – search,social media, development.

If I’m standing downtown wondering where to eat lunch, I’ll need you to have worked with all three departments to have a chance to grab me.

Is your business on Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, Tri-Out, BrightKite? Are their recommendations for you at those sites? Is the information about your business correct? Can I get your street address so I can map my way to you? If I see your business and click the link on my phone, is your site optimized for me?

I think the days of stand-alone SEO are now way behind us, it’s now an integrated science. Web development without a comprehensive plan for mobile is short-sighted at best, reckless at worst. If you have a premium product or service and don’t have a dedicated smartphone apps, you’re falling behind.

The winners in 2010 will be similar to the winners in 2009, the quick, the nimble, the confident, the risk takers and those not afraid of failure.

The losers will be the companies immobilized by the disruptions in their sector. If your boss is saying things like, “we can ride this out if we just hunker down”, you may be hunkered down so deep, you can no longer see that the parade has already passed by.

If you had to predict one thing for 2010, what would it be?

How Google’s Real-Time Search Will Change Twitter and Facebook

December 8, 2009 by Phil Buckley 11 Comments

December 7th, 2009 – a date which will live in infamy. The World Wide Web was suddenly and deliberately indexed, in real time, by the robots from the Empire of Google.

So how will Google’s latest update change the rules? I immediately thought of one thing specifically – keyword tweeting.

Since Real Time Search (RTS) means that a LOT of twitter updates will flow, if you’re tweeting professionally, you need to step up your game.

No more tweets like “at @peiwei – I love this stuff”, now you’ll start seeing much more targeted tweets like “I’m at @peiwei for lunch – I love the Pei Wei Spicy Chicken #good #value #hungry”.

Facebook will probably also see a move in that direction, especially on Fan pages.

During the press conference, Amit Singhal, a Google fellow who heads Google’s ranking systems and oversaw the development of the new real-time search system, announced that they would be pulling RTS from a number of sources including:

Tweets from Twitter
Content from Google News
Content from Google Blog Search
Newly created web pages
Freshly updated web pages
FriendFeed update
Jaiku updates
Identi.ca updates
TwitArmy updates

In the future, content from Facebook and MySpace will also be included. One thing I missed, but Danny Sullivan caught was, “Google also noted that it is expanding shortened URLs. You’ll still see the shortened version listed (say if it is from bit.ly or another URL shortener), but then you’ll also see the final destination URL. Content from that destination page is spidered.”

Danny has an awesome post that goes into a lot of the nooks and crannies of RTS, you should take the time to read his post at Search Engine Land.

So what does this mean to content producers? If you were half-assing it up until now, you will now be quarter-assing it, and probably be out of a job soon. If you write crappy headlines, it’s time to stop.

If you are Tweeting with a purpose, take note of what words you’re using.

One side effect of this may be that the automated tools that try to figure out sentiment may have an easier time if people start becoming more aware of how their updates are seen.

How is RTS going to effect your business?

Simple Reputation Management

December 2, 2009 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

At the next Raleigh SEO Meetup, we’re covering Your Brand Presence & Managing It Online. Ashley had this one queued up for at least 3 months, but over the last week or so, some of my favorite blogs have decided to also write about it.

Lisa Barone over at Outspoken Media wrote about Protecting Your Brand From Online Attacks. She sums it up nicely with her 4 bullet points:

Work on claiming your SERP
Ramp up your customer service
Build your listening station
Learn when to duck and when to punch

Don’t over look #4, not every attack or slight needs a response. When you get in an argument with a crazy person, nobody can tell that only one of you is crazy.

Then Chris Brogan gets into a discussion of Timberland and his bad experience with them and then pulls back when he realizes that his powerful blog can do real damage to a company’s online presence. It was a really smart move on his part to pull back and recalculate.

If you or your brand are known by more than a handful of people, you have an online reputation. The more connected you are, the easier it is to see what that reputation is.

Let’s take a quiz, shall we? I’ll say a brand name, you shout out the first word you think of that relates to it, ready?

Toyota Prius

Fox News

Michael Moore

Oprah

AT&T

NY Yankees

Sarah Palin

Well, how did that go? Did you have an opinion on those brands?

Those brands have people dedicated to monitoring and defending their brand, even so, I probably found at least one that you don’t have a positive opinion of . So with that in mind, how is your online reputation?

The other day I was in the Wake County Courthouse watching as the kids that broke into my house last summer and stole 2 laptops went in front of a judge in juvenile court. A couple friends had asked for updates, so I tweeted out some updates.

Now, if you do a search on Google for Derice Utley(who pleaded guilty to felony breaking and entering) this is what you see:

That’s a classic online reputation problem. So what can he do to fix this, I mean besides stop breaking the law?

Well, step 1 would be what Lisa Barone suggests. Get control of your brand on the search result page. If your only footprint on the web is what other people have said about you, it will eventually be something bad. People will rarely write a post about how awesome you are, they are much more likely to write a long rant about how much you suck.

I try to regularly Google my name to see what is showing up. I share a name with a comedian so we share most of page 1, but more importantly I control all of the sources of information that show up on that page about me. Twitter, this site, LinkedIn and my Google profile page are all places I have the opportunity to put my best forward. Any brand can, and should be doing the same thing. If you wait until Defcon4 before starting, it’s too late, start right now. If you’re not a big business, you can do some personal branding to inoculate yourself against future screw ups.

If you are a business, you can do something that can head off a nasty rant, you can stop sucking. I know that even the best companies sometimes have customers that can’t ever be satisfied, but more often, that’s not the case. For example, my wife sprained her ankle really bad this morning so we spent a chunk of the day on the phone with doctor offices and in x-ray offices. In almost every exchange, on the phone or in person, the treatment we received ranged from below average to really bad.

So what happens when you see someone trashing your brand, or your company or even you personally? First decide if it’s worth engaging at all. Sometimes, it’s just not worth the effort, but other times you have to. First, take a breath and realize they are pissed off about something. Is the complaint actually warranted? If you could have done better, say so. Apologize to the person and move the conversation from “I hate you guys” to “how can we fix the problem”.

If the problem is someone who is misguided, enter gently and explain why they might be looking at things differently than you. Personally, I still think an apology doesn’t hurt in this case either.

Sometimes you will just get a situation where someone doesn’t want reconciliation, they want vengeance. This is harder. If a former employee calls you out on Twitter as a liar or says you did something illegal, how do you react? In this case, you have to make a judgment about the other person and if you think there is any way to salvage the relationship. If there isn’t, don’t respond directly where everyone else can see a running transcript of the craziness. In a situation like this, you may want to ask your network of friends to offer up a defense for you. That way, it makes the disgruntled ex-employee just look like a disgruntled ex-employee.

If you want to find out about some of the really cool tools available to you so that you can listen in to what’s being said about you, join us on the 15th, or check back here next week for part 2.

Social Media Case Study: How The Pit Uses Twitter and Foursquare

November 22, 2009 by Phil Buckley 30 Comments

I’ll admit it, I’m totally biased and a fanboy of The Pit BBQ in downtown Raleigh, there, that’s out of the way.

I first tried The Pit when Michael Hubbard took me to lunch there last September. Michael runs one of Raleigh’s small advertising firms, which just happens to be exactly a 90 second walk away. We were having a good discussion that day, so I wasn’t really focused on the food, but my pulled pork sandwich was good, and the place was certainly a step (or 10) up from the normal BBQ place.

Later that month, I was back there for a Tweetup where someone from The Pit came out and chatted with us for a second and thanked us for all the Twitter chatter. I took note, it was the first time I saw a restaurant actually reaching out like that.
[Read more…]

How Writing Bad Headlines Can Cost You Money

November 22, 2009 by Phil Buckley 1 Comment

Sometimes I wonder what some of the people in my own company are thinking. I’m not talking about huge corporate decisions, I’m talking about a tiny little decision that impacts the usefulness of one website.

Not to long ago, the News & Observer’s web team redesigned the newsobserver.com site. The response was good from most people. The problem is that no matter how nice a redesign is, if you don’t enable your site to help people find news, it will ultimately fail.

Saturday was Raleigh’s 65th Annual Christmas Parade put on by the Greater Raleigh Merchants Association. My family wanted to attend, but I wasn’t sure of the start time, so I Googled it.

I was glad to see that I could find the information pretty easily, but then I wondered where the News & Observer’s story was? Surely they had at least a snippet about an annual event that is attended by thousands of people.

I searched Google News but still found nothing.

Finally I decided to act like a normal web user and not use my employee super powers.

It took a little while but I finally found the story they had published because of a map that showed up in the news results during an additional search.

The image showed the route the parade would take down Hillsborough Street, turning at the Capitol and then proceeding down Fayetteville Street.

There is a big fat title on the image that says “Raleigh 2009 Christmas Parade”. There is also an explanation on the graphic again saying “It’s time for the Raleigh Christmas Parade.”

The funny part is that the graphic has all of the information I was looking for.

So why couldn’t I find the story when I searched for it?

It’s a classic case of someone thinking with their print brain instead of their web brain.

The McClatchy CMS allows you to have different headlines, one for print, one for the web, and even a couple others. In this case, only one was used, and it was about as bad a headline as I could have thought up for people looking for information about the Raleigh Christmas Parade –Yule procession at 9:30 a.m. in Raleigh.

Really News & Observer? Yule Procession?

So then I decided to dig a little bit to see what type of numbers there was for choosing “Yule Procession” over “Christmas Parade”

So it appears that no one is actually search for the phrase “Yule Procession”, but the phrase “Christmas Parade” is rising over the last few days in the Raleigh-Durham area.

I can’t say what the actual dollar amount we lost with such a silly headline, but the since our advertising model is based mostly on page impressions, this was a missed opportunity.

Sitemap Best Practices

November 17, 2009 by Phil Buckley 1 Comment

There are two types of sitemaps, and both are important for optimizing your site for search.

Matt Cutt’s from Google explains which one Google likes better.

HTML Sitemaps

The first type of sitemap is a standard HMTL sitemap. It is sometimes a standalone page, or stuck down in the footer of a page, it is totally visible to the users and offers another way for both humans and search robots to access sections of your site.

On a large site, an HTML sitemap will not have a link to every page, but will highlight the most important sections as shortcuts to the good stuff.

Google suggests that your site make an HTML sitemap available. You don’t really want your sitemap indexed by the search engines, so adding a <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”> will take care of that.

XML Sitemaps

The second type of sitemap is an XML sitemap. XML sitemaps are not intended for human consumption, they are strictly for the search engines. There are a few different types that you can use.

You can give specific information in your XML sitemap that can help the SE’s understand what pages are important. The most basic type of xml sitemap is available for all of the pages on your site. It follows this format:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

The only required tag is <loc>, which is the location of the file. The other fields allow you a way to supply more information. <lastmod> is the last time the file was modified, <changefreq> is how often the file changes (usually you use either lastmod or changefreq, not both), and priority is how important the page is for your site on a scale from 0.0 to 1.0 – So for example your homepage might be 1.0, major sections a 0.9, important sections 0.8, run of the mill pages 0.5 and so on.

When building out your xml sitemap, you can include every single page of your site, but you don’t have to. The search engines will use your sitemap as a guide, and may stop processing urls at some point if the SE feels it’s no longer getting quality results – so order it from most important to least important if possible.

Googler John Mueller responded to a question about timing with the following:

The Sitemaps processing pipeline can be delayed depending on its overall load at any given time. The pipeline prioritizes Sitemaps to be processed based on the best use of Googles resources, dependent on multiple factors. For example sites hosted on servers with slow response times or sites that do not meet the Webmaster Guidelines may experience delays. It generally shouldn’t cause you great alarm.

Google also reminds you, “Please note that submitting a Sitemap doesn’t guarantee that all pages of your site will be crawled or included in our search results.”

News Specific Sitemaps

Google allows you to submit your freshest news to their spiders via a news sitemap. Recently Google updated the information you can have in your news sitemap to make it even better!

A News Sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, with additional News-specific tags as defined below. Here is an example of a News Sitemap entry using News-specific tags:

Google allows you to submit your freshest news to their spiders via a news sitemap. Recently Google updated the information you can have in your news sitemap to make it even better!

A News Sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, with additional News-specific tags as defined below. Here is an example of a News Sitemap entry using News-specific tags:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:n=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.org/business/article55.html</loc>
<n:news>
<n:publication>
<n:name>The Example Times</n:name>
<n:language>en</n:language>
</n:publication>
<n:access>subscription</n:access>
<n:genres>pressrelease, blog</n:genres>
<n:publication_date>2008-12-23</n:publication_date>
<n:title>Companies A, B in Merger Talks</n:title>
<n:keywords>business, merger, acquisition, A, B</n:keywords>
<n:stock_tickers>NASDAQ:A, NASDAQ:B</n:stock_tickers>
</n:news>
</url>
</urlset>

A News Sitemap lists only news articles which have been published on your site within the past two days. You shouldn’t include older articles. You can remove articles older than two days from the News sitemap, but they will remain in the News index for the regular 30 day period.

A News Sitemap must contain a publication date for each article, which refers to the date that the article first appears on your site. Please make sure not to set this to the “current” time. There are a lot of errors that can happen, they’re explained in more detail in Google’s Webmaster Help Forum.

Video Sitemaps

Google can crawl the following video file types: .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv. All files must be accessible via HTTP. Metafiles that require a download of the source via streaming protocols are not supported at this time.

Below is an example video sitemap entry:

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:video=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.site.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc allow_embed=”yes”>http://www.site.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>Grilling steaks for summer</video:title>
<video:description>Get perfectly done steaks every time</video:description>
<video:rating>4.2</video:rating>
<video:view_count>12345</video:view_count>
<video:publication_date>2007-11-05T19:20:30+08:00.</video:publication_date>
<video:expiration_date>2009-11-05T19:20:30+08:00.</video:expiration_date>
<video:tag>steak</video:tag>
<video:tag>meat</video:tag>
<video:tag>summer</video:tag>
<video:category>Grilling</video:category>
<video:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly>
<video:expiration_date>2009-11-05T19:20:30+08:00</video:expiration_date>
<video:duration>600</video:duration>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>

Internet Summit 2009 Wrap Up

November 16, 2009 by Phil Buckley 4 Comments

A couple months ago I told my company about the Internet Summit. Although we are the interactive arm for the nation’s 3rd largest newspaper company, no one was aware that Raleigh (our fair city) was the home for the 2009 conference. A month or so passed, and finally corporate decided to pay the way for a few people. I was really excited, until I found out I wasn’t one of them. I would be on my own if I wanted to attend.

I attended the social event the evening before, which was really just a lot of networking and meeting new people. I walked over with my friend Jeremy Smith from Twine Interactive and we met up with Wayne Sutton, Jeffrey L Cohen, Jennifer Griffin, Jamie Tharp, Tucker Peterson and Gregory Ng all hanging around outside the Starbucks and checking in on Foursquare waiting for the pre-convention-pre-party Tweetup to start.

Internet Summit 2009 Conference Opening Reception

Eventually we all make our way down to the new Raleigh Convention Center. The interior is really nice and there is lots of food and drink to be had inside.

There are lots of familiar faces in the crowd. Michael Hubbard from Raleigh’s best interactive ad agency, Media Two, checks in right after me. Rachel Healy, web editor for the Garner Citizen shows up late, but is excited about the conference. My friend Ellen Lynch has decided it was worth the high price to expand her skill set.

At 6:30 the next morning, I picked up Ashley Berman Hale and set off for the real event. We ate the so-so baked goods (they should have used Crumb bakery for awesome yumminess) and hustle to grab a front row seat for the morning keynote addresses.

I found John Kosner, Senior Vice President and General Manager, ESPN Digital Media to be entertaining and knowledgeable. Especially interesting is how ESPN has decided they don’t care how people get content whether its on the web, print, tv, mobile, etc. As long as you check out ESPN’s content, they don’t care how you do it. That’s especially important because it allows you to be everywhere. Companies that ultimately wall themselves off and limit how you get content or products are going to stifle their growth because customers want freedom to choose how they receive it.

Some points I had written down…

Younger viewers expect video EVERYWHERE! Mobile is huge, and still growing. They make money off their podcasts.
They plan to keep rolling out more and more local sites.
They try to “Super Serve” their fans.
Their iPhone app has been downloaded over 3 million times. It uses your location to pull in local scores for you.
“It’s an app world we’re heading into.”
“The iPhone has really improved my life.”
When talking about the redesign, he stressed that “the experience is crucial”. The focus groups had been complaining about clutter. That was their main aim, to clean out the clutter.
Revenue from the homepage went up 35% after the redesign with less ad space but better ad treatment. (yes you read that correctly)
350 people work on ESPN.com 1/3 editorial, 1/3 technologists…
The local sites, require more local people.

Richard Jalichandra is the prez + CEO of Technorati. He had some interesting data, but was a pretty lame presenter.

More people than ever are reading blogs.
Blogs ARE media. In 2008, 46% of bloggers self-described themselves as “professional bloggers”.
That peaked enough interest for them to follow-up in 2009 and get more specific.
In 2009, 28% of bloggers are professional bloggers who are making money.
Bloggers are not just crackpots in their pajamas.
40% of professional bloggers have worked or are working in the mainstream media (less than 1% of the US labor force was employed as journalist in 2008).
73% of bloggers use Twitter, as opposed to only 14% of general population. They use it to promote their blog(73%), share links(67%), understand buzz(63%) and interact with readers(60%).
Roughly 30% of professional bloggers spend more than 10 hours a week blogging.
The Technorati top 500 “authority” blogs generate 300 times more posts than the average blogger. The top 5000 generate 100 times more content.

I headed into to listen to the Search Marketing Panel.

This panel was a bit scattered, but Cliff Reeves from Microsoft said Bing is trying to change the search experience by focusing on user experience and pulling in non-native content.
There was a lot of agreement that if your site architecture is fundamentally flawed, seo is magnitudes more difficult.
Also talk about real-time search and how “authority” seems to be getting more weight in search results.

I then decided to listen to the Morning Spotlight Speakers – Rick Klau and Seth Sternberg

First up was Rick Klau, Business Product Manager, Blogger/Google

10 million people a month use Blogger, and 220-230 million people each month visit a blogger site.
1/2 the people on the web, visit a blog every month, although surveys show that number lower since some people don’t know they are actually at a blog.
Blogger is considered a pro-am type of space, where you eventually step up to WordPress or Typepad.
There are about 292,000 words/minute being entered at Blogger!
Blogger is the #3 Google product behind only search and YouTube.
He spent the 2nd half of his time talking about how conversions are fragmenting – blog comments vs. facebook comments vs twitter comments vs Sidewiki.
He suggest NOT trying to force the conversation to take place in one place, engage where your customers are.

Next up was Seth Sternberg, CEO and co-founder of Meebo, the web’s real-time communication platform providing instant messaging and group chat to over 40 million people. Seth had some interesting data on what gets shared, and how that sharing is happening.

Facebook is now the #1 referrer to CNN.com. Facebook is in the top 5 referrers for most big popular sites now.
Meebo has allowed over 5 billion conversations on their platform last year, that includes 75 million links being passed. What were those links?
- #1 was YouTube links
- #2 links to photos – and interestingly, the majority of them were to photobucket
Seth said you should bias towards shareable video links, photo links and finally text links. To have your stuff shared more write about things from the following perspective:
- social pressure
- help me
- learn about me
- curiosity
Success is getting 1% of your visitors sharing daily.

The Lunch/Panel Session I chose was Social Media: Engage

This was the one panel I wasn’t sitting in the front row for, and it made a huge difference. It was hard to hear, hard to focus and multi-tasking with my chips and sandwich only distracted me more.

Biggest take away for me of the whole day came from Matt Van Horn, Business Development Manager at Digg, who said, “Facebook Connect is one of the most awesome things we’ve done”. 40% of all registrations on Digg are now coming through FB connect.

They also talked about all the buzz in Silicon Valley about Foursquare, Groupon and Boxee.

After lunch I ran into the tiny meeting room to listen to Design and Usability.

A simple zip code question caused 50+% abandonment rates, people thought it was to intrusive. They added a brief one line explanation, abandonment fell way back, and conversions doubled.
WRAL used a rotator, but it was hard for people to get all the info, when they added static headlines below, much better traffic numbers.
“we read IRL, we scan on the web” – Page Sands
iPhone users walk up to kiosks and try to do gestures on the screen
Above the fold is on its way out; people have bigger screens and less concern about missing info.
You are now optimizing an experience.
“people who are half asleep or heavily medicated can still use your site” -Dr John Morkes
Usability tip:”Microchunk” content into easy-to-find, quick-to-consume, remixable pieces/parts
A more usable site should be able to charge more for remaing ad positions.

The best speakers in my opinion were the afternoon spotlight speakers.

Gian Fulgoni from ComScore was up first, and he rocked the data!

Surprising stat: 85% of all music for sale on the web last year was never purchased even once.
Online classified revenue is down 32% over last year.
“It’s inescapable that internet advertising is picking up market share.”
US Media Spend: $118B on branding (63%) and $68B on direct response (37%)
Internet Spend: $6B on branding (23%) and $20B on direct response (77%)
8% of all internet users account for 85% of all ads clicked, and many of them are new users.
In 7/2007 32% of people had clicked on an ad, by 3/2009 it was down to 16%

He actually had so much data I couldn’t keep up, it was impressive.

Matt Van Horn from Digg talked next about what’s happening at Digg and what they are seeing in the future.

Pictures are being shared most.
You should focus on what’s key to you when adding sharing options, you don’t need 100, most only need a handful.
CollegeHumor uses referrers to highlight a specific share button.
New Digg API allows “Most Digg’d” functionality. Time and UK Telegraph use it with great success.
Savvy content producers keep an eye to social media to see what’s hot.
Talked about new ad service where users can vote ads up or down, and ad rate goes with the votes.

The last panel I attended was the Twitter/Real Time Panel

This was a panel of mostly sposts related guys.
The Phoneix Suns engage Twitter users with special deals.
re: Monetization: “everything’s a transaction; who cares you had a grilled cheese sandwich? maybe, Kraft” – Don Brown (Twitpay)
David Eckoff: “It’s not just about content, you have to establish CONTEXT”
Notion of authority becoming important on Twitter
Next Big thing on twitter…filtering tools to allow you to select the content you want.

Final keynotes from Pandora president Joe Kennedy and Lending Tree CEO Doug Lebda.

Both of these guys gave really great speeches. Kennedy spoke about the importance of “disruptive innovation” (I was a little worried at first) in entrepreneurship and drew a phenomenal extended metaphor to the birth of modern film with The Great Train Robbery. Furthermore, he provided some really interesting facts about Pandora’s business, including the stat they have 20,000 new iPhone app registrations every day! What can you see that others are blind to?

“it’s a REALLY bad time to release a crappy product” – Joe Kennedy, Pandora’s CEO
Pandora gets 20,000 new registered users every day from iPhone app with no addtl marketing.
“Just taking the internet and making it mobile = big mistake”
Marketing needs to be more conversational, less one-way messaging
Over $10M mobile ad run rate / year currently for Pandora
mobile is not JUST making the internet mobile, main advantage is that its “with you” – location changes everything
“1:1 web chgs everything (personalization) .. 2-way brings emergent collaboration (cocreation)”
38 million users, 5 billion songs played to date. $45M 2009 revenue

Doug Lebda from Tree.com was one of the most engaging speakers I’ve ever seen. Period. He did an unusual format for his keynote and structured it as a Q & A with the CEO of Peak10. He was incredibly honest and interesting, and the majority of his answers were centered around his entrepreneurial journey, his failures, how his company has evolved, and what he’s learned.

“Raise a bunch of capital, then pretend you don’t have any.”
“You have to be willing to change everything, while staying true to your core beliefs.”

So the take away for me from the entire day was: iPhone, location-aware, mass-personalization, love your customers, mobile and just try it.

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