According to Wikipedia

Well, I don’t normally use Wikipedia, but considering it’s made by users, I thought it would be a good start. They say:

“Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.”

Hmmm…well, that isn’t exactly accurate is it? NetaOnline defines spam (RTF) as:

“Spam is unsolicited e-mail on the Internet. From the sender’s point-of-view, it’s a form of bulk mail, often to a list culled from subscribers to a Usenet discussion group or obtained by companies that specialize in creating e-mail distribution lists”

Well, they’re not much help are they? I mean, spam has grown to become way more than just email, and what do they mean by unsolicited anyway? I mean, if I search for a term and get a bunch of spam in the results, I *technically* am asking for it. And if I sign up for a newsletter, am I *really* asking for all of them or just some of them? What about the company Christmas message? When I signed up, I didn’t say I want X of newsletters and the company Christmas drivel!

Peak10 says unsolicited means:

“Sent to a person who has not specifically requested to receive communications from the sender and with whom the sender does not have a prior business or personal relationship, or to a person who has previously requested not to receive communications from the sender (ie, has opted out).”

Well, we often interact with new people and businesses all the time, and I’d like to think that’s a good thing.

Spammers are EVERYWHERE!

We all complain about it. We all hate it. We all find it a huge pain in the butt. But, there’s a lot more people out there spamming than you think. This doesn’t mean they all spam in the same manner or using the same tactics, but many of them do it in one way or another. It could be spamming Twitter, dropping links everywhere, hitting the SERPs, or blogs.

So, in short, while it annoys the heck out of everyone, we still use it! One person who works online stated they made more spamming than they did fighting it. That’s definitely telling us something!

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Why Spammers Spam

Plain and simple: It works. People still click on the links, they still buy through it, and it still generates links and keeps sites at the top of the SERPs. Sucks doesn’t it? It’s no industry secret either. Heck, even Matt Cutts and the Spam Team know who sees the spam and who puts it there.

So, my question is this: if it’s working, people are buying through it, and Web peeps are still using it to market their sites, is it really spam?

In all honesty, as much as I hate fighting it off, I think too many of us have become overly familiar with the virtual world around us. Spam bothers us more because we’re dealing with it all day long whereas regular users see it no differently than any other advertisement out there.

Does this mean everyone should spam or that I’m recommending it as a marketing method? Absolutely not. Should we stop fighting it? Don’t be absurd. That would cause pure and utter chaos, but the current situation definitely makes me look at the current web a little differently.

I truly believe that, unless Google and the other SEs change their algos to something that’s content based rather than link based, we’ll continue to see the world of spam thrive and website owners continue to fill their pockets with the rewards.

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Diversification is important for more than just maintaining your sanity too. It stops you from making a huge mistake. Consider, for example, if Google outright ignored links from directories. Would your site’s rankings survive? What if Google said they no longer counted links from article marketing and press releases?

I’m not saying they are or aren’t counting them right now or how much weight these types of links carry. That, my friends, is a debate for a different day. My point is to get you to consider what your link profile looks like and whatsort of audience they’re reaching.

There are several different types of links to consider:

• Generic Link Building – These include the straight link generation with very little to no content involved. Directories and social profiles are a good example.
• Content Link Generation – This type of link building involves mass written content and often involves distribution. Article marketing, press releases, advertorials, blogs, and reviews, for example.
• Social Media Link Building – To be perfectly honest, I see these as being more about traffic than actual links, but I’ll included it here regardless. These involve social bookmarking sites, Twitter, Facebook, and other similar formats.
• Alternative Media Link Generation – This is the creation of videos, podcasts, widgets, and apps, all of which link back to your main website.
• Audience Generated Links – Online quizzes, contests, and link bait all fall into this category. These tactics encourage others to share your content and link back to you for various reasons.
• Content and Media Placement – Instead of buying thousands of dollars worth of links, this type of link building involves a much higher investment into the actual content. This content is then placed on authority sites in an effort to gain permanent, high quality links.
• Link Networking and Feeder Sites – Creating networks of different sites that all link back to your main site.

How you choose to use these methods and what ratios you choose are totally up to you and should depend specifically on your audience. After all, if you’re going to build links, you may as well generate some interest and traffic with it, right?

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Here is a collection of some more excellent hints, tips, and guides for quality link building:

Setting Up, Techniques and Tips

How to Set Up a Link Building Campaign for a Web Site or a Blog

Ask Kalena tells Excel fanatics how to track links using a series of worksheets. While this might not be the best for everyone, I think it gives us a great starting point and the system can be easily manipulated to match your particular tastes and needs.

Ask the Link Builder — SMX East 2009

Again, this content is a bit older, but I think the ideas and tips covered here are worth a read, even if you’ve already seen it. BruceClay also covered this topic, but has a slightly different version than Marketing Pilgrim you might find interesting. (I’m pretty sure there was an ‘Ask the Link Builder’ session at SMX 2010, but didn’t happen to see it online. If it is around somewhere, I’d be more than happy to add the link here, and would be interested to see it.)

Link Building Techniques and Tips

Over on David Naylor’s blog, Paul Carpenter left a great post on link building, but I particularly like it’s focus on quality content (surprise, surprise ). These points aren’t deep secrets of professional link builders, but I think they’re vital for good link building and helping to build your site’s authority. Definitely a huge bonus! (David also has 10 Link Building Tips that are worth checking out while you’re there.)

Link Building With Content Ideas

In this post, Link Spiel’s Debra Mastaler gives a really good example of how to come up with content that should do well in terms of encouraging linking. It also gives some good ideas on how to promote and use that content for link generation. A lot can be taken out of this article for those who are willing to apply the lessons covered here.

Link Building — How To Build Quality Links For Free

This time, it’s the Wordstream Team with some interesting thoughts on link generation. And while I could care less about PageRank, it does a really good job of covering the basics as well as some great links on the topic of PageRank that are worth checking out.

A Big Bunch of Link Building Ideas

The link queen, Debra Mastaler, covered a number of Twitter tools and techniques you’ll be able to incorporate into your existing strategy and help you get the most bang for your buck. (Again, if you’re looking for more info on link building, her blog Link Spiel is definitely worth wandering through. Wiep Knol’s Wiep.net is another fantastic link building blog I find myself returning to rather frequently. My favorites are the ‘Link Building This Month’ posts because he usually finds some I’ve missed.)

Link Bait and Getting the Most Linking Power From Your Content

The Anatomy Of Linkbait

Jordan Kasteler takes a look at the finer points of link bait over at Website Magazine. This has some absolute ‘must’ do’s for good content and the social sphere. If you’re planning any sort of major link baiting strategies, you’ll definitely want to have a look.

21 Tips to Earn Links and Tweets to Your Blog Post

Rand composed a post outlining a bit of his link bait strategy in this SEOmoz post. While I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, nor is that all there is to it, I think it’s a great post for beginners and webmasters who aren’t super familiar with the concept.

Determining the Value Of Links

Link Worth — What’s Yours Worth

Tim Nash tackles the complex world of link worth, including a number of factors he feels determine the amount of power each one has. It will definitely get you thinking about your own link strategy and content placement programs.

A Guide To Qualifying Link Prospects For Relevance, Value, and Potentiality

Garrett French also looked at the value of links when visited Search Engine Land, but in a slightly different manner. He also has a link in this article to another link building worksheet you may find helpful.

Link Builder’s Guide to Historical Ranking Factors

While we’re on the topic of link quality, head over to David Harry’s blog and check out his guide to historical ranking factors. It may just inspire you to improve your linking strategy!

10 Factors That Determine the Value of Inbound Links

David Wallace took a stab at defining the value of various links over at SearchRank. Again, I’m not sure if I agree with everything he covered here, but I definitely think the ideas he brings up here are worth some consideration and thought. (David Snyder’s thoughts on link value can be found here at Search Engine Journal.)

Link Value Factors

Wiep spent some time chatting and questioning a number of the industry’s biggest and brightest on their link building beliefs. You’ll find the download link for the results of that research on the bottom of the page.

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Video Link Building and General Link Building Worksheets

12 ‘DoFollow’ Video Sharing Sites to Distribute Videos and Build Links

Ann Smarty put together a great list of video sharing sites over at Search Engine Journal. And while it was written over a year ago, I find it’s a really convenient page, particularly if you don’t normally focus on videos and video SEO. (By the way, if you’re interested in learning more about video SEO, you’ll want to sneak over to Reel SEO. I found them through Joseph Morin, and I’ve yet to be disappointed.)

Ontolo’s Downloads

These guys have a great collection of tools, worksheets, and research that will make you a much better link builder. This includes their Link Building Outreach Worksheets as well as their Link Qualification Worksheet.

SEO Content Inventory Worksheets — One of my favorite patent geeks, Bill Slawski released an excellent Excel sheet and article on content inventory. I loved it, and I think you will too.

Helpful Link Building Tools

Majestic SEO — Let you gather link data, backlink history, and have a bulk backlink checker, but they also have a neighborhood checker that’s pretty cool.

Raven SEO — They dark boys at Raven have put together a great set of tools that make it easy to watch and manage your website as well as identifying adjustments that need to be made to your current campaigns. Their collection includes a contact and competitor manager, keyword research and manager, design and quality analyzer, link manager, website directory, content management system and a whole heap of other stuff you’re going to love.

Bad Neighborhood Tool — Created by Michael VanDeMar, it…well…scans your site and flags possible issues.

Linkbait Generator — You give it a subject, and it comes up with link bait titles. Not really sure about this one. I’ve never actually used any of the titles it’s created, but I did find it worked well for coming up with ideas. Something to try if you’re stuck.

Backlink Watch — These guys let you get a good quick look at your backlinks. I like the additional information they provide here. Of course, there is the Back Link Analyzer software from SEOBook as well.

Debra Mastaler and Wiep Knol also created some great lists of link building tools you may find helpful.

There ya go! By the time you get through this list, you’ll be a link building master. What about you? Do you have any favorite links for link building?

Are you ready for it? Ok, here it is:

We’re no longer normal. We forget how to think like a user! A real customer!

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We’re Barking Up the Wrong Tree

When I first got a computer after a substantial period without one, the online world had changed from the little chat room/Geocities/Yahoo world I had left a few years prior. The ‘me’ of today would have definitely been laughing at myself of yesteryear for sure.

I didn’t really use Google much, and when I did, I essentially knew nothing beyond how to type in the box and click ’search’. Paid ads and organic results didn’t look any different to me, and I didn’t use any of the fancy-pancy search functions like blog or news search. Most of the time, I found cool stuff by jumping from one site to another through links and ads. I didn’t use RSS, I didn’t use email and I definitely wasn’t using social networks.

It sounds odd, but it still happens way more than you think. My dear loving family, for example, doesn’t really use that ‘Google’ thing. This means, if they can’t type the address, it isn’t shared via email, or they don’t fall onto it through another site, they’ll never find it. They aren’t the exception to the rule either. Large portions of society don’t have or use the Internet daily. Shocking, I know!

Granted, this doesn’t hold true in every instance. If you’re working for a business that sells printers, routers, and other computer accessories, chances are your audience is going to be fairly good with computers and the Internet. If you’re working on a site for a local coffee shop, however, likely not. So, if you’re getting links and citations from directories, social networks, and other more technical means, you might want to reconsider your strategy.

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How To Give Local SEO That Extra Bit of Push

First, recognize that it’s easy to forget exactly how different we are from real people (ha!). I often don’t realize just how much I’ve learned and changed since I got sucked into this business, and I’m willing to bet you’re the same.

Find out how people in the real world are finding sites. Go to an Internet cafe or library and nonchalantly watch the less familiar users. Talk to friends and family about how they discover sites. Have the business owner talk to his customers. And for cripe sakes, use your imagination!

Talk to other local websites about posting some content, going together on some type of deal, and see about getting listed on other local business websites. Don’t be afraid to offer a little space and bandwidth to local charities or events as well. You can toss up a page for them quite easily in exchange for some link love and it reflects well on the business to boot. Connecting with the community has numerous benefits for the local business owner outside of just boosting traffic.

Let’s pretend, shall we?

We’re working on a site for a local bakery and lunch room. We’ve done Yelp and all the regular spots, but we’re needing an extra boost. So, here’s where I’d be looking for links and citations:

• Local hospital — they’re having a fundraiser, we spread the news, they offer up a link
• Grocery store — we drop a piece on planning birthday parties for diabetics
• Party planning store — we talk them into a citation/recommendation
• Tourist information booth — they love having tons of information on the local area, so we send them some! Like helping them put together a free ebook interested visitors can download. Of course links and information for the business will be inside.
• Radio station — we talk to the local biz owner and they agree to play the station in the store in exchange for a great link/ad
• Local Facebook pages
• Hotel /restaurant/lounge — They’ve got a little newsletter that’s going fairly decently, so we’ll help them put it together every month.
• Real customers — Make sure the business owner is promoting its website in store and offline as well as sites such as Yelp, Google Local Listings, and FourSquare. Promoting customer reviews is huge and even helps encourage customers to talk about the business elsewhere.
• Make pages and features local businesses would make use of: an interactive map filled with local info and hot spots, a list of upcoming events , interesting local information and odd stories collected from locals, track deals offered by area businesses. These ideas require you to do some work and give out some links, but others will happily link to them and send people directly to the site.

Many times, you don’t have to do more than just ask for a link or citation and you’ll get one. It’s often a matter of showing the other business owner they can benefit from working together. However, don’t be afraid to offer up a little something either. Being cheap isn’t going to get you anywhere.

What sorts of things do you do to get the most from your local SEO campaigns?

SEO Specialists

Ask any old school SEO and they’ll tell you exactly what the industry is all about. For them (generally speaking), there is a very fine line between SEO, IM, SMM, and the many other disciplines. SEOs worry about tags, structure, link building, anchor text, and all of the on and off page things that deal directly with boosting that’s site’s rankings.

And when you think about it, they do have a point. After all, generalists can only go so far and there are a large number of benefits to specializing in one area of another. I’m a generalist, but even I’ll admit that it’s impossible to hold a match to the many specialists I deal with on a daily basis. But is being a specialist in one area enough? Can you know enough as a generalist to be of any real use?

Enter Social Media and Universal Search

When you look at the SERPs today, you’ll see:

• Paid ads
• Videos
• Images
• Real Time Results
• News
• Related searches
• Maps
• Local listings

And this doesn’t include all the extra stuff like search wiki, blog searches, and the list goes on and on. ‘Being visible’ means a lot more than just getting your site into that coveted number one spot. In fact, I’ve started to wonder if just showing up on the first page is really enough. Of course, this depends on the industry you’re in, the keywords you’re targeting, and what the actual SERPs look like, but it’s worth some thought.

Personalization, Conversion, and You

Now that there’s more than ten websites on a given topic, just showing up in the search engine and getting traffic isn’t enough anymore. At least, not if you plan on actually making money with the site. You have to make things as easy as possible for web visitors while convincing them to buy from you.

You also need to keep in mind that your site is likely attracting a number of different visitors who are using your site for different reasons and are looking for different things. And they’re only going to put in so much effort before they go elsewhere. Are you analyzing your site to make sure each visit counts and that your conversion rate is as high as possible?

The question I’m posing is this:

Is offering ‘pure’ SEO doing clients a disservice in today’s searchscape? Should SEOs expand their skill sets or band together with other specialists to provide the combination of skills and requirements needed for a truly visible site?

Ford and Its Evil Car

These have been around a long time, but just so you know what I’m talking about:

I highly doubt I need to explain the problems with this campaign, but just in case, you might want to have a look at the second video (not for the squeamish or cat lovers):

Shockingly, the official word is that the first ad was approved while the second was not. I have my doubts, and so do a lot of others. It actually turned out like the PUMA fiasco, but you can be the judge.

Regardless of whether the reaction was intended or not, animal lovers or anyone who vaguely likes cats was horrified, the marketing world was horrified, and the backlash became so fierce Ogilvy & Mather released a statement assuring the public the commercials was computer generated.

Just for the record, Chrysler made the same mistake.

Burger King Has a Bad Chicken, Or Does It?

When Burger King launched its ‘Subservient Chicken’ Campaign, I don’t think they realized just how twisted the general public is. Well, that, or they did and were counting on it. Anyway, basically, it’s a guy in a chicken suit who’ll do whatever you ask. If you really like it, you can even make a chicken mask of your own!

Some people were completely horrified and the ad world seemed to be abuzz with the idea that a company would release something so evocative. I would like to argue that they were aiming for children with a mild rip-off of Simon Says, but using words like ’subservient’ really kills that idea.

Were These Link Bait / Viral Campaigns Successful?

Well, if you type ‘Ford Ka Cat’, ‘Ford Ka Bird’, or ‘Ford Ka Pigeon’, you’ll notice these campaign had no trouble generating links. In fact, many of the authority sites mentioned something about the videos and millions more shared them.

As for the odd Burger King content, Snopes.com and the Wall Street Journal report that only 20 people were told about the site and a few TV ad featured the address. However, the site had received an estimated 15-20 million hits. The Barbarian Group who worked on the project state it made the cover of Business Week and “sold a lot of freaking chicken sandwiches.” That’s not bad at all, considering the backlash created at the time.

How To Fix Negative Viral Content, Link Bait, and Badly Behaving PR Campaigns

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Before making a move to put out the fire, I think it’s important to weigh the seriousness and extent of the damage. BK’s attempt at serving up chicken your way wasn’t horrific. In fact, it seems to have accomplished everything it set out to do. So, worst case, they had to calm a few frazzled nerves and maybe give out a few coupons for free chicken. Was there much to fix? Well, no. Not really.

Ford’s mistake is a little different. (Keep in mind, these were released a number of years ago.) They made a number of people very angry and created a large amount of buzz. The other problem is that they couldn’t simply give away a few pieces of chicken to solve their problems (although, I would have been first in line to scream complaints if they were giving away a new car).

So, they had to endure the firestorm and do what they could to minimize the effects. They explained what they could and attempted to take responsibility for the rest.

But here’s the thing: Has everyone stopped buying Ford cars? They might have lost a few sales, but people are still buying cars just as much as they did before. In fact, I would venture to guess the recession hit them harder than the backlash from their campaign. Had it of been a small company dealing on a local basis, they may not have been so lucky.

For businesses like Kryptonite Bike Locks, negative content can be extremely hard on your business. The topic, in this instance, proved their products were essentially useless, and to make matters worse, the content circulated directly through the intended target audience. Not saying it killed the company or cut sales right off, but I’d be willing to say it slowed sales down considerably.

It’s also important to note, however, that Europeans are a little more…uh…open minded when it comes to advertising. While an ad like that may cause chaos in North American, it’s merely frowned upon and ignored elsewhere. This is not to say there’s more approval. The ad agency just isn’t roasted at the stake for it.

Immediate Reaction to Negative Content

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When you first realize link bait or viral content has gone pear-shaped, you want to deal with the damages and try to minimize its effects as much as possible. This is usually when a junior exec or external team member gets blamed for screwing up and apologies are made. Someone might even get fired to make it look good.

Don’t just stammer and make whatever excuses come to mind, however. Handle an angry member of the public the same way you would an angry client. With a bat Delicately!

Start by listening to the complaints. All of them, all the way to the end. It only makes people angrier when you interrupt. (If you’re dealing with them online, this likely won’t be too much of a problem. Oh, and hopefully you put some type of monitoring or alert system in place prior to launching the content. If you didn’t, use wine boxes from the liquor store to move your breakables because they have great cardboard inserts.)

Validate what that (those) individual(s) are saying, do your best to take responsibility, and make things right. Exactly how you go about this will depend on the exact situation, but so long as you let the audience guide you, you should be fine.

This doesn’t mean let them boss you around. But, by listening to the audience’s needs and concerns, you should be able to determine your first few moves (In the United Breaks Guitar situation, the airline would have walked away unscathed if they had just paid for the damage!).

It’s important to deal directly with the source of negative feedback. Many times, the person spreading the negative content isn’t the person who experienced the problem. If this is the case, simply explaining the situation and asking nicely is often enough to have them reconsider their position.

If they were the one wronged or offended, try to solve the problem and ask them nicely to spread the word. Yes, you made a mistake poor judgment call and were in the wrong, but you personally contacted them and fixed everything. It doesn’t hurt to go the extra mile here either, even if you weren’t wrong.

The worst things you can do include (as many companies have already experienced):

• Threaten to sue a bunch of bloggers. This just makes the story more popular and you end up looking like the bad guy.
• Argue with the masses. There’s one of you, and likely millions of people who have heard the story…you do the math.
• Pull down the link bait/viral content without providing any sort of an explanation or acknowledging what you’ve screwed up done poorly. You just look really guilty and lose any benefit you might have gained from the experience.
• Follow it up with the exact same content that got you into hot water in the first place. This makes a normal mistake into pure idiocy, and that’s never a positive trait for any company.

With any luck, other people will pick up the concept and make a bunch of parodies to help ease the tension and suffering (PDF). Yikes! Parodies? Oh noes!

Well, don’t panic. I don’t see these as necessarily being a bad thing. (There’s no such thing as bad press, remember?) Yes, this will likely spread some negativity about your company, but being able to laugh at yourself and your mistakes is an important trait.

The way I see it, these things have a way of making a horrific story that brings shame and shudders from a target audience into something they’ll chuckle about and pass along. In other words, it takes the edge off. Plus, you’ll likely get traffic and links.

Collateral Damage (and Clients)

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Chances are the evidence links to your failed link bait/viral content will be scattered across the Internet like seeds in a watermelon, and no matter how hard you try, you always find one popping up somewhere. So, when you can’t make it disappear, bury it!

Now, I really shouldn’t have to go into detail here since you all should have ideas as to how to do this, but I will anyway. Here’s a few ways to bury that content and help people forget about the incident (and yes, there are many more; you just need to get creative!):

For Brands/Businesses:

• Bury the bad by doing something good. In other words, give to the needy, solve world hunger, or save a whale and tell the world about it! With all the bad PR you’ve been getting, more people are watching you than ever. In fact, if you’re going to do something particularly risqué, consider having something you can release right after.
• Distraction can be a powerful tool, so drop another piece of link bait or viral content (NOT the same kind you just got in trouble for!) It’s sort of like a magician. If people watch what the left hand is doing, they soon forget about the right. Releasing a new product or service line can also help.
• Visibility. Show that you’re not going to hide from your mistake by putting yourself out there. Even using the situation as a learning tool for others isn’t a horrible idea. Just get out there and show others that your company or site has the same value it did prior to the catastrophe.
• Forget about it. It’s only a matter of time before everyone moves on to the next big thing. Get over it, get over yourself, and move on. You know the saying that goes ‘others don’t worry or think about you near as much as you do? Well, it’s really true.
• In the worst-case scenario, use the three Rs: Rebrand, Relaunch, Remarket. Keep in mind, however, that people still know who you are! So, if you’re hyper-local (ie. Do little to no business outside of your hometown.) this likely isn’t going to have any effect.

For SEO/SMO/Marketing/PR Firms:

• Panic! (Yes, I’m kidding!)
• Explain the above information to the client: while it’s not the reaction you’d hoped for, negative PR is not the end of the world. The clients are going to be hostile, they’re gonna be mad, but do your best to listen, acknowledge their feelings/opinions, and do what you can to rectify the situation. If you’ve been able to cover up your mistake move quickly enough, now would also be a good time to explain the steps you’ve already taken to control the situation.
• Blogging, article marketing, press releases, and content generation. Just try to stick to the safe subjects!
• General link building, and lots of it! By this, I mean directories, commenting, content programs, guest blogging, and all the usual systems you use to build a profile up quickly. I should mention here that you’ll need to be careful. Building too much, too quickly, and particularly all from the same source can be a big mistake.
• Use a variety of media. So many people get so hung up on written content they forget about videos, images, and other types of content that are still out there.
• Distribute free ebooks, white papers, reports, and other items. They generate links/buzz and help establish your client as the authority.
• Target the terms and long tails of the responses (“Ford Ka cat”, for example) can give regular keywords a boost and help offset the negative content as well. However, these are a lot more difficult and often require you to be a bit sneaky to pull off. This isn’t always an option, but I’m throwing it out there anyway.
• Do what you normally do, but do it with caution. Just don’t let those negative results stay at the top.

This brings me to the next question:

Should SEOs have a solid understanding of Social Media?

But that’s a great question for another post!

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Walmart and Its Introduction to Social Media

Now, I know we’re talking about link bait and viral content, but the story of Walmart’s experience with its virtual audience wouldn’t be complete (?) without getting a bit of background in here.

(Disclosure: I worked at Walmart for a few years. However, this post is not connected to that in any way. All things considered, I liked it there.)

The Story:

Walmart has been taking the heat for a number of years on various issues surrounding its business practices and the way it treats its work force. In fact, it has turned into a bit of a PR nightmare that just doesn’t seem to go away. So, to combat this, Walmart decided to go straight for the working population to fix it. It decided to use the power of the Internet.

It may not be Walmart’s first attempt at Social Media, but their Facebook page was definitely one that should be included in SM textbooks in the future. You see, instead of using it to launch a complementary marketing strategy or share information, someone at the company thought it would be wise to let people share their stories about the company.

Well, I’d love to show you the results of this little experiment, but Walmart got rid of it pretty quickly. However, I can tell you it had attracted a number of people who were less than happy about several questionable business practices. Can you say ‘whoops’?

Not long before that, Walmart got caught creating a number of blogs filled with fake stories and content. Well, to be fair, they hired the PR firm Edelman to do it. Anyway, this wasn’t just any old content and information on how it’s cleaning up its act. Nope.

One of them, for example, (and this is going to sound familiar to Tim Horton’s fans) followed an imaginary couple as they crossed the country in their RV and ventured from Walmart to Walmart. Others were fake stories by imaginary staff members and other ‘family’ members about all of the wonderful things Walmart had been doing.

The Problem:

Um, they lied, and for a retailer and a company who has worked to make its company part of daily life for the working public (or a part of their family, depending on which way you look at it), this was pure suicide.

In the case of their Facebook page, they failed to recognize the true power of the general public and exactly what they would do if left to their own devices. The only real upside to the whole thing at this point was the fact that their reputation was already pretty tarnished, so this wasn’t a big shocker to anyone.

Possible Solutions:

When it was discovered that things when horribly wrong, the evidence simply disappeared. There was little to no conversation about the topic on the official side, and no real statement made by the offenders either. Well, an Edelman senior account manager blamed a junior, so someone lost his job. In vain, I might add. The whole situation smells funny and it’s even worse if you know a little history on Edelman. They may as well have not bothered.

Making up a bunch of BS posts about how wonderful Walmart is and all of the great things it does for everyone should have been the last thing they considered. Why not take the time to talk to some of the people who work and shop there? It wouldn’t have taken that long, and if they’d  have done it right and offered a reward or prize for each person who submitted a feel-good story, they would have been able to repair their image from the inside out. They could certainly afford it!

Once they got busted for fake content, they should have come clean. They should have admitted to the screw up, but they also should have followed it up with a collection of really awesome genuine stories. The more grass roots, the better. Videos or podcasts would have been even better.

(Source)

The next step would have been giving back to the public in some way. Giving away something on those fake blogs would have been ideal, particularly if the coupon or post about the giveaway was sent through the RSS feed only.

At the same time, Walmart and Edelman both generated a number of links, and most people forgot about the whole situation. Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all? Maybe they decided to try it anyway? Neither company had much to lose. Remember, their reputations were already pretty dark.

The Facebook page demonstrated nothing but pure stupidity, really. I mean, before soliciting for testimonials and revealing them to the public, you should make sure you want everyone else to know what they say.

Had they moderated the comments published to the page in some way, they would have been fine, but they didn’t. In fact, they could have just forgotten about the fake blogs and just posted some of the real stories on their Facebook page.

You know what would have made some really great viral material for a place like Walmart? Posts like ‘Odd situations/occurrences in your local Walmart’, ‘Weird Shoplifting Incidents’, or even ‘If you could change one thing about your local Walmart that would have you returning several times per week, what would it be’.

We’ll look at a few more examples of negative viral content/link bait, but I’d love to hear your ideas on this first.

(Credit)

I guess that’s what’s interesting about this type of content. Even though we know why it’s created, we often can’t resist sharing it with someone, discussing it, linking back, and giving the writer exactly what he or she wanted.

Others have a serious dislike for link bait and viral content, and honestly, I can’t see why. The only time I have a problem with link bait or viral content is when it doesn’t fulfill the promise made in the title.

Well, I shouldn’t say that. Some get irritated when they fall for it (also known as the ‘why didn’t I think of that’ syndrome), but it doesn’t generally affect the reader in a negative way. If anything, it should irritate you and make you think about the topic.

That being said, there is a dark side to viral content and link bait.

Viral Content Gone Wrong

Viral content can be priceless when it attracts the right crowd and drives the buzz in the right direction, but what happens when it goes wrong? While this often happens with controversial issues, sometimes even innocent viral content can have unexpected negative effects.

Say, for example, that you create an innocent blog post promoting a contest for a local charity. It goes well at the start and begins to generate a number of donations and a fair bit of excitement around the cause.

Now, imagine for a moment that a member from a particular religion, country, sex, or ethnic group reads the piece and gets offended by a particular angle to the contest, the subject matter, or maybe something to do with the charity itself. The next thing you know, a little bit of viral content becomes a PR nightmare for your company. After all, this type of reputation glitch doesn’t disappear easily or quickly.

While this will certainly increase the buzz surrounding the contest and the charity, it might not work to your advantage. And unless you’re quick thinking and have the resources to fight it, things could get pretty nasty and someone (likely you) is going to get into trouble.

(Credit)

Viral Misfires

If you’ve created controversial link bait, the backlash from your ‘target’ should be fully expected. But what happens when content attracts the wrong crowd all together? Now, the ‘link is a link’ crowd isn’t going to care. Much. But what happens when it just happens to grab a lot of scraper links when the site really needs a few good authority links? What happens if it just generates some crappy links and barely any traffic at all?

Failed Viral Content or Link Bait

Any SEO who has been pushing to get a client site going understands the pure frustration of this, particularly if they’ve put a fair bit of time into the creation and planning of the content. Clients often don’t understand that audiences are very fickle.

Sometimes, articles you expect to take off and spend a lot of time on start to collect dust almost the instant you click publish. Then, the client is phoning and breathing down your neck because they’re not getting traffic or links and they spent a fair bit of money to create the content.

The next time, you publish something you scraped together in a hurry and it goes crazy. Suddenly, you’re dealing with comments and maintenance on a day when you hadn’t planned on it and really don’t have time. Did I mention the client is calling and freaking out because they’re getting traffic they weren’t expecting? (Believe me, it happens!)

(Credit)

Pushing All the Right Buttons

Viral content and link bait is very much like a puppet show in text. The writer (the puppet master) knows just how to pull the strings to make the puppets (the targeted readers) to do what he wants. While this is generally harmless and often is nothing negative in the least, someone who is very good at it almost makes the situation eerie. I mean, when you think about it, it’s really no different than some of the greatest speakers in the world. The amount of power they have over others is almost scary.

Now, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has witnessed or experienced content strategies go bad. Have you had viral content or link bait go horribly wrong?

(Tracy)

Now, as a copywriter, these results were almost as good as sending me a bouquet of flowers. Almost. I love mysteries, I switch between UK, US, Canadian, and Australian spellings frequently, and combining them with search just made the phenomenon that much more fun.

So, after a pretty heavy-duty chat with some smart people and a bit of digging, I’ve come up with some interesting explanations. (It’s my understanding that Google has changed its mind on some of these, but I thought it was worth a look regardless.)

Optimizing for Optimisation

The initial word pair to cause a ruckus was ‘search engine optimisation‘, which brings up ‘search engine optimization‘ results. Hmmm! Knowing full well that Google is moving towards producing more relevant and local results, this was completely puzzling.

I initially thought the switch was due to Adwords revenue. I mean, there’s bound to be more people including ‘optimization’ in their PPC campaigns than ‘optimisation’ right? And more competition means the CPC would be higher right?

Well, after a short discussion with a few SEOs including David Harry, I took off the tin foil and discovered it was pretty easy to see why. Google Trends and Insights both show Britons are searching for ‘optimization’ more frequently and UK SEOs are targeting the ‘z’ when optimizing their sites, so Google is giving people what they want.

Don’t Forget About the User

Malcolm Coles dug up a number of other good examples. He noticed that, when searching for ‘whether’, ‘weather’ results were shown with the definition of ‘whether’ in #1 and BBC weather being second. I don’t know about you, but this looks right to me as a user, an SEO, and as a writer. Here’s why:

If I were searching for ‘whether’ without any additional words in the query, chances are I would be looking for what part of speech it is, what synonyms are available, how it’s used and other word mechanics. Otherwise, what would the intent be?

In Malcolm’s screen cap, you can clearly see the first result (Dictionary.com’s definition) would satisfy this need nicely. If I wasn’t looking for the word’s mechanics and had meant to look for ‘weather’, this need is satisfied with the BBC weather result in second place. I have the same opinion of ’stationary vs stationery’ and ‘license vs. licence’ and think the spelling causes confusion among regular users more than some people think.

Could A Combination of Signals Trigger Different Results?

(Alexbrn)

The results Malcolm got for ‘colouring vs coloring’ were quite fascinating. Google Insights and Google Trends both show UK users search for ‘colouring’ more than ‘coloring’, but they also show the u-less form is gaining slightly in popularity while the ‘u’ form of the word is decreasing.

When I did a search for ‘colouring’ and ‘coloring’ through .co.uk, I noticed only the ‘u’ page was affected, and in fact, 6/10 results were optimized for the ‘u’ form or both. I’m sure this will vary for everyone, but still, we can see the results are mixed.

This leaves me with user data. I know my son is a huge fan of Disney, Pixar, and other popular cartoon-like movies, so I can’t see UK children being much different. I wonder if a higher number of clicks on some of that content have something to do with it? I’d say so.

Lastly, we know Google is starting to recognize relative terms. After all, some pages I’ve optimized for ‘copywriting’ on my site rank better for ‘copywriter’ and vice versa. In the end, if I were searching for ‘coloring’, or ‘colouring’ for that matter, what exactly would I be looking for? And don’t the results satisfy that request? Not saying the big G is perfect, but it doesn’t seem to be as horrible as some would like to think.

What Does This Mean?

After looking at the various SERPs, I can’t help but think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this very soon. And, if SEOs want to compete, they may want to include these ideas in the planning of their future optimization projects. I also think SEOs will need to spend more time considering the user and what they might be doing rather than focusing on numbers alone (this is not to say that some don’t already do so).

As much as I will likely get roasted for this, I have to say that I think these changes are a good thing for the user and will force webmasters and SEOs to put a lot more thought into the sites they work on. That’s never a bad thing.

Ok, here’s the gig, one day a mate comes along as asks me, “You mind Googling Twitter?” and I told him to mind his manners as I didn’t go for that kind of thing. Anyway, obliging him, the mighty Google was consulted and from what I could see, the oracle of the ‘Plex was behaving as normal.

Upon pressing for details as to what exactly he is seeing he sends me this;

As you can see the top results are for an Anti-virus website… NOT for Twitter

Being the curious type, I inquired with a few other folks to see what they were seeing. Sure enough, we were all seeing the proper set of results. Fair enough, it sounds like the hull has been compromised and he’s taking on water.

As we backtracked it seems there was a search result that had a peculiar behavior earlier that day. Upon clicking the top result in Google his AV software had done the jig, (although it may have been the Trojan mimicking to gain access).  I went over to the website in question – and nothing.

I then searched the website in Google and clicked on the listing – voila! Sure enough you we’re redirected and a pop-up prompted to do a ‘security scan’ cough cough. This behavior ONLY happened when accessing the site via Google.

The HTACCESS Gremlins

What could this be one wondered. Certainly the mighty Goog’ has not fallen pray to wrong doers have they? After all they say they’ve done it before;

Naw, that couldn’t be it.

Initial suspicions leaned towards the site being hacked, but the site administrator was as confused as a link baiter on truth serum, no hacks could be found. To be on the safe side, a few of those in the know, information retrievers, were consulted and one specializing in rarefied AIR (adversarial information retrieval) had the answer. Check the HTACCESS file; which was an enlightening journey.

You see kind reader, they had gone in and were redirecting ONLY the traffic from Google which then prompted and had caused the computer to be infected. Then, on subsequent searches they were intercepting it and sending back their own (modified) Google results. The sneaky little buggars.

Make it a part of your site audits

You can just imagine the reputation problems that could come from this not to mention its potential for sabotage. While this may not seem like the domain of the SEO, having low search engagement and possibly infecting visitors is sure to have negative effects ultimately. No matter how you look at it, from hacking to put nasty (outbound links) on competitor sites to redirecting incoming SERP requests, this is something SEOs need be aware of.

In the modern world of SEO, close ties with the security and system administrators is key. Everyone needs to be aware of the potential for such attacks and be vigilant. A lot of time and money (into search campaigns) could easily be washed away and replaced with a reputation management problem.

What to watch for - This type of attack is often found when you are using a CMS or WordPress type installation that requires the htaccess to be writable (such as SEF URL creation). To guard against it, be sure to chmod your hataccess so the at it’s not writable until you need to publish something new – then make it writable, create pages and then set it back again.

…. Something to consider…

Google traffic estimator sandbox – a tool that gives estimated traffic clicks and cost for given terms on Google Adwords. This is another handy metric to have when doing KW research.

Adwords Keyword calculator – Google’s adwords estimator tool. Also handy… but still, more PPC data for cross referencing.

Google Search based KW tool – this one generates keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website. In doing so, the tool helps you identify additional advertising opportunities that aren’t currently being used in your AdWords ad campaigns.

But there’s one more…

Enter Google Insights for Search

These are all great for getting some keyword / phrase ideas and even some general search traffic numbers; but what about trends? Sure you could use Google Trends – but it is a bit lacking in this author’s opinion… 

And so you check out – Google Insights for Search tool – much like Google trends for looking at search data. It is seriously great for KW research purposes. Now this isn’t really a NEW tool, but it is one I have been turning to more and more of late with my SEO programs…

What can you do with it?

1. Historical term popularity
2. Geographic usage
3. Suggests other top terms
4. Compare multiple terms
5. See up and coming ‘Hot searches’
6. Use empty search box to see general trends

New videos bring business intelligence

As I was saying, this tool has been around for a while; it is simply more recently that I have included Google Insights into the main stream of my keyword research tools. In truth there is a great deal of business intelligence to be gleaned from this bad boy.

Last week Google put out a few interesting videos which are well worth watching to get an idea of the various types of BI available to you… have a watch won’t you?

Google Insights for Search: Creating Advertising Messages

Learn how to use Google Insights for Search to capitalize on search trends to create relevant advertising messages.

Google Insights for Search: Evaluating Brands

Learn how to use Google Insights for Search to help you identify brands competing with your product to see how your brand stacks up.

Google Insights for Search: Measuring Campaign Impact

Learn how to use Google Insights for Search to analyze the impact of your marketing activities on people’s ability to recall and search for your brand

As you can see, this particular tool has legs, now we just need to test it some more to see how accurate the data is. For that, I’d play around with some products, terms and query spaces that you’re familiar with. Does the data play out? Even most of the time? So far it’s been pretty good… so you tell me..

Until next time…

More reading;

Google Keyword Tool Offers Insight for Search Marketers – ClickZ
New Google Insights: Fact or Fiction? You Tell Me – Marketing Pilgrim

Google Insight for Search Tool for SEO Enthusiast – Top SEO
Google SEO research tools -  We SEO
Insight within Google Insight – Contact Dubai