After a long hiatus owing to a few personal commitments which has kept me busy for a while, I have come back to continue my infrequent updating on the blog. It’s ironical that in the age of Social Media Marketing, actively pursued by individuals and corporates alike, Longhop has such long gaps between posts. Strangely, the current post focuses on highlighting how Social Media can contribute to the success of a business. Obviously, the inspiration to post on Social Media surges from the recent Online Marketing & Media event I attended at the Business Design Centre in Islington.

We have had many opportunities in the past to attend marketing events, but owing to resources we have only managed to attend a few. Each event is a great experience and offers great insightful learning from businesses who share their experiences in such events. One such learning comes from arguably one of the biggest ecommerce businesses in the World, Dell. Internet, as with many online organizations is a part of Dell’s infrastructure. Dell has fully embraced the participatory phase of Social Media Marketing by being actively involved as a listening company. It has firmly believed that messages need to be dynamic and co-created rather than the company being the mouthpiece for all its products. Part of Dell’s initiatives comes from its previous experience of dealing with customers. Jeff Jarvis, a disgruntled Dell Customer and an American journalist launched a crusade against Dell terming his experience as “Dell Hell” and extensively chronicled his communication on his blog Buzzmachine here. Jeff’s outbursts resulted in spreading the negative word about Dell’s customer service and impacting its overall corporate reputation. True, there were hundreds of peevish customers who had experienced Dell Hell before, but it took one influencer like Jeff Jarvis to coalesce into a crowd. The collaborative influence of bloggers in denting Dell’s stronghold launched the company into frenzy and Dell responded by identifying the shift in power and began listening to customers.

So what exactly has Dell been doing? Head to Dell’s Community Website here, which provides a glimpse of Dell’s pursuits in the social marketing arena. It is evident that the company actively engages in an ongoing conversation with customers to learn their perceptions, and to ingrain those perceptions into Dell’s outreach.

• IdeaStorm: Dell launched IdeaStorm in 2007 to engage with customers and to understand their needs and preferences to develop products. It is an incredible market research initiative with an added personal touch. Users are invited to share their ideas and collaborate with each other. This gives a clear idea to Dell about what their potential customers seek and to share these ideas throughout the organization to gain further thoughts to translate these ideas into products. In essence, Dell has converted its customers, non-customers and potential customers into a massive product development team.

“The name is a take-off on the word “brainstorm” and it is our way of building an online community that brings all of us closer to the creative side of technology by allowing you to share ideas and collaborate with one another. The goal is for you, the customer, to tell Dell what new products or services you’d like to see Dell develop. We hope this site fosters a candid and robust conversation about your ideas

Our commitment is to listen to your input and ideas to improve our products and services, and the way we do business. We will do our best to keep you posted on how Dell brings customer ideas to life.”

• Direct2Dell: Direct2Dell is Dell’s corporate blog; it’s a wire service about Dell to the world.
• Dell Forums: As the name suggests, it’s the community forum where users share their thoughts and
• experiences with others.
• Studio Dell: Dell uses videos and podcasts to educate users on various emerging technologies and also offers tips, tricks and support to get the best out of a Dell product. Studio Dell is an interactive communication tool, which also encourages users to post videos of them using Dell products.
• Smart Business 360: A resource center for small businesses offering product support and advice
• ReGeneration & Dell Earth: Websites on sustainable living to emphasize Dell’s environmental commitment, identified as a key strategy to future growth.

These are some of the prominent community initiatives at Dell. The company participates in other popular social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, etc., etc. Customers are no longer interested in a company’s business structure. They seek experiences. They want to be a part of the business, they want to be heard, understanding which can benefit the business itself. Through Dell’s Community Networking initiatives, the company responds positively to customer needs fomenting strong relationships.

One of the perennial debates in the ongoing marketing world is how does a company leverage commercial benefits by participating in social media marketing and how can such campaigns be measured? Dell employs about 40 individuals working on the community network, which includes hundreds of interactions with customers through blogging, forum posting, Yahoo answers, twittering, facebook etc. Is it really worthwhile? How does it benefit the company? Isn’t social media marketing hard to quantify? Firstly, Dell argues that it doesn’t put a cost on social media. Secondly, Dell has gained significant confidence with regard to customer service and customer satisfaction. Here’s a metric then. Dell claims half a million of sales came from Twitter participation last year. That’s just a spoonful in a bucket of water, but it counts nevertheless. Furthermore, traditional metrics such as traffic, click through rates and conversion rates give a skewed image of social media marketing. The best metrics are often those which show how many people are talking about the company positively in the blogosphere, the number of people who subscribe to the site’s content, the number of positive reviews of the companies products or services etc. The best metrics derive on how social media evolves and what companies seek from it. In traditional marketing sense you could call this brand building.

So should all businesses participate in social media? While participation is essential particularly for online businesses, it entirely depends on the organizational objectives as well. If sales and not brand is the driving factor, then social media marketing can be time consuming and resource heavy. This is particularly true for smaller organizations. It’s more like a long term vs. short term strategy. Social media is clearly long term as it helps in creating an everlasting brand awareness which is extremely important to the success and longevity of a business. However, there is a note of caution. Social media is here to stay and it is essential for businesses, small or large, to realign their marketing initiatives to create the fine balance to leverage success.

It’s finally here! A few years after trialling in the US, Google has extended the controversial trademark bidding by opening up the auctioning process to all entities in the sponsored links space. While Google reaps the benefits of a new open space bidding process, this move could fundamentally shift the Search Marketing landscape.

Previously advertisers and brand owners had some sort of insulation to protect and limit their brand related keywords from being auctioned. However, since May 5th 2008, Google has radically changed its trademark policies to encourage competitors to bid on the keywords. The new policy, mirroring the Google’s trademark policy in the US, is certain to rake in plenty of moolah to the world’s biggest search engine.

However, it is the businesses which will suffer owing to inflated CPC prices for their own brand terms. Also, businesses which had previously kept away from internet marketing will be forced to allocate a budget to ensure that their customers aren’t wooed away by the competitors. At the same time, they also have to ensure that the competitors do not take complete liberty of promoting themselves at the cost of their business.

In the UK, some of the larger online businesses like Lastminute, Teletext etc., have already taken up the cause by filing a suit against Google. A few of the smaller companies which are benefiting from Google’s new policies are being bulldozed by their larger counter parts with legal threats.

It’s quite interesting to see how the search marketing industry pans out in the next few weeks.

Recently we have noticed quite a few websites and blogs using fresh flower images from the Arena Flowers site without permission. While we feel privileged to see our flowers on multiple mediums, particularly blogs as they seldom benefit commercially by using our flower images, it is the systematic disregard of commercial websites which is worrying. Controlling the use of content and images of an online medium has been problematic for their owners as an average blogger or a web publisher has little or no idea of copyright laws.

The advent of Web 2.0 has spawned a new generation of public domain websites, where users are encouraged to post their views on a variety of online channels including blogging and social networking. The distribution of product images on these channels by content publishers does help in building the brand awareness for Arena Flowers, but only when explicit references are made to the source of our fresh flower images. Nevertheless, as long as our images are not being used for commercial gains we have no objections, although we would be happy if publishers source the images to our site as a polite gesture for copying. However, we disapprove publishers from benefiting commercially by using our content and images, unless they have a prior permission to do so.

Since the launch of Arena Flowers website, we have seen a couple of sites offering flower delivery services clone our web layouts. However, in the recent past, we were slightly put off by a publisher when he started passing our images as his own to woo customers to his business. When we contacted him to advise him of the potential consequences, he started playing the hardball by arguing that he copied the images as he believed that he was not in violating by taking it from a website which allowed him to save the images on his computer. Of course imitation is a compliment, but copying is not. Either people have a rudimentary knowledge of copyright and trademarks or they they turn a blind eye. For small businesses, when information and digital content is widely available, it is a great temptation to choose the easy path of passing others images as their own to gain access to customers. But they seldom realise the costs of such ignorance.

Firstly, the Intellectual Property Organisation in the UK, clearly states that ownership of content is an automatic right and there’s no need to register for Copyright in the United Kingdom (We are registered trademark owners of our Brand Name and related assoications). Secondly, All of our pages are clearly marked with the Copyright symbol. Finally, for violation of Copyright for commercial gains, criminal charges can be brought resulting in severe fines, compensation and jail for violators. We have initiated the process for further action on the publisher.

Nonetheless, such issues highlight the importance of responsible blogging and publishing in the online world. It is exceedingly important for website publishers to take notice of copyright issues while posting content and media on to their webpages. From our experience during the last few days, we have realised that it is necessary to identify best practice measures for website publishing to avoid unwanted complications.

• Never copy anything from other websites, particularly commercial sites even if it doesn’t have a Copyright symbol. In the UK as with many other countries, authors have an automatic right to the content they create. If you are compelled to use an image or content from a commercial website for non-commercial reasons, always provide a link back to the main website from where the image was obtained.
• If your post needs a picture to convey the message, your best bet is to get the graphic from one of the royalty free image sites like Foto Search. Also, support the Creative Commons by opting to use images rated under the project. Although, Creative Commons is not the legal entity, it is a non-profit organisation working towards creating a universal copyright license.
• It is a great practice to use public domain news websites, Governmental and authority websites for your posts. If you find an interesting post or an article on another website, and wish to comment upon it on your site or blog, use a short quote and provide a link to that source before adding your thoughts and views for refining the point.

By adapting these simple measures, you not only assure your legal rights but it will also help in protecting your own works.

The sudden drop in PR for Arena Flowers from 5 to 3 has been really frustrating and disappointing. Over the last few months quality links has been the buzzword and to that effect, we have been trying to squeeze out editorially vouched links for the site from related domains. At Arena Flowers, we are really proud of our SEO activities. But the anomalistic (it is indeed) drop in PR has got us racking our brains trying to point the drop to a certain differentiator. What’s more annoying is the drop in all the internal pages. We have about 100, 000 pages indexed in Google of which at least 25 % of them had decent PR and none of them have green liquid anymore. The real disappointment is to see our blog have no PR. Flowers…Uncut is widely followed and we have got so much of appreciation for our site through the blog. We also have hundreds of quality incoming links to the blog. To see the blog have no PR value is a bit disconcerting.

We have scoured the Internet and scouted all the SEO blogs and forums and even had an opinion from a global expert in the industry, without success. SEO experts argue that PR is in no way related to SERPs and traffic and makes little sense to websites, unless the sites are based on selling links. But we see PR as an indicator of our SEO performance apart from the other variables like ranking high on SERPs, traffic etc. Post PR drop, traffic is unaffected and SERPs for competitive keywords have not had any impact. However, the little green bar though irritating, does offer some satisfaction when it is a bit longer than it was previously.

It will be a real bonus if we get to the bottom of our mysterious PR drop on the home page as well as the internal pages. I contemplated posting a query on Matt Cutt’s blog, but decided against it as I feel it would be futile. There are millions of websites and even if 10 % of these websites start querying their site problems with Matt, then he would have to quit his regular job at Google.

It’s all back to square one…wonder how long it takes to be back again!

A couple of days back, I got an email from a friend of my colleague at work enquiring if I was interested in buying a link for from their site. The site in question is an old domain (about 9 years) and has a good PageRank on the homepage and even ranks well for some of the keywords in their area and has good consistent traffic. Moreover, it is a directory providing information on an area not particularly related to ours, although there are some similarities. The good people behind the site have put in some great effort in the recent days to redesign and to develop the site to make it more search friendly and appealing to the user. For a monthly payment, we will get a link back from a page which is two clicks away from the homepage and easily navigable for the user and it looks like we will be the first ones (and probably the only one) to get a link back from that page. Although the page has a PR0, I am aware of a previous page which had a good PR and it has been 301ed to redirect to this page. I am tempted to discuss our link with them and will do so in the next couple of days. However, the issue of buying a link, especially when Google has penalised link buyers and link sellers raises a thought.

Time and again Google has come down hard against paid linking which a majority of websites rely on to improve the quality of incoming links. Undoubtedly, organic links are more valuable to websites than paid links, but it is often difficult to get a quality organic link as Google discounts many of the proven tactics in sourcing such links. For example, reciprocal linking which used to be quite a huge hit among webmasters a few years ago is no longer a dependable strategy to build a quality backlink profile. The same applies to three way linking and many such techniques which were invented to circumvent Google’s crackdown. In fact, subsequent to the recent update, link exchange pages on many websites have been hit and they no longer have a good PageRank which used to be an indicator to the quality of links you could probably trade for.

Another way of sourcing one way links was through directory submissions. But the quality of links from directories has always been questionable as many of these directory sites link to spammy/low quality neighborhoods. Little wonder that Google penalised a good number of general directories due to low quality of filters for a website to be listed along with many other attributes including a bad backlink profile for the directory itself. However, there are a few recommended high quality directories which rank well with search engines. But the lists of these quality directories are few and the category pages where you can have your listing from don’t necessarily have a good PageRank. True, for quality directories, the PageRank of the home page funnels some power to the category pages, but the numbers of links on these pages mean you get a tiny benefit of such listings. Moreover, listing in such high quality directories are often paid (BOTW, About, Business etc) or the time frames for listing are extremely high (DMOZ).

Of course, there are many other ways to build links naturally by adding quality content to your site, blogging regularly, using articles as a link bait, press release, building cool tools related to your site, building applications and generating content for the Social Media, creating and distributing templates for blogs, directories etc. The number of opportunities the Web 2.0 (user generated web medium or social media as it is referred to) offers is infinite and deserves a post on its own (I will surely blog this in the coming weeks). But it definitely involves a certain level of creativity and persistence to generate high quality of links.

In many ways, the Search industry has evolved to adopt better ways to source that golden link which adds value to the website’s link profile. While building natural links is dominant strategy, acquiring quality paid links remains a focus for SEO Marketers. From link farms and paid directory listings to link brokers, every SEO marketer has explored one or all of these options to gather backlinks. However, are these paid links always valuable? How do you determine how much benefit a link adds to your search marketing efforts? Although in the beginning, I would rate anything with a good PageRank as a good backlink, over the last few weeks I have learnt to judge what page offers a better value for a website. Based on my experience, I have a defined five point criteria for link buying which am sure works for many industries.

1. The quality and authority of the domain.

• The age of the domain (Whois lookup) and the traffic it generates (Alexa, Compete or from the site administrators).
• The Authority for the domain among Search Engines. (I have always found Google’s Sitelinks to be useful in judging this)

2. The Quality of Backlinks to the Domain and the page

• Using link:www.domain.com and link:www.domain.com/backlinkpage on Yahoo Site Explorer and Google
• Although Google lists the links randomly with no particular order, Yahoo seems to show Quality/new links higher

3. Does the site and the page have information for users and is it related to your industry?

• Do users benefit from the content? If they are looking for something in particular will they seek information from the pages?

4. Are there any other links on the Page? If there are, what is the quality of these links?

• If there are far too many links on the page, it is unlikely that it will appeal to users and this is true in case of Search Engines too. Also, the quality of the outgoing links also matter to a great deal as too many spammy sites can turn off the users as well as Search Engines.

5. Will we benefit in terms of traffic generation from the page?

• If a link doesn’t direct traffic to a website, then it’s probably a low quality page similar to those thousands of directories developed mainly for SEO purposes. I personally feel that a quality link always has a potential to generate and direct traffic.

My personal opinion is that if the linking page and domain satisfies these qualities, then it is definitely worth a link back and merits a small payment to leverage benefits. Although Google discounts paid links, if a link qualifies the aforementioned criteria, it is sure to escape the Google scanner.

Please feel free to post comments.

Internet is a perceptual paradigm of constant change. Although the origins of internet dates back to the late 1950s, it is the last two decades that this medium has gathered momentum. Since the public acceptance in early 1990s, internet has grown imperiously to be a part of every day life. Not only has it depreciated the need for complex channels of information, entertainment and communication, it has also created a new knowledge economy in many nations. It has helped companies acquire vast knowledge and wealth while gaining a dominating lead in many markets. One such market is the search engines.

It is ironical that I never had the belief myself about the phenomenal potential search engines had to change people’s lives. I still remember back in 2001 when I we were busy setting up a small business process outsourcing company in Bangalore, we never had access to internet for almost 2 years and we still had a fully functional company. We would venture out to check emails once a day to communicate with clients. One of our neighbours, who is not as computer literate as a group of individuals trying to run a company remarked about how we managed without having access to Google. He believed that without access to update information, our knowledge in the industry was shunted. He was much ahead than us in adapting technology…

Many things have changed since then. The most important of all is Google’s rise to significance, which has also spawned the growth of many online businesses. These businesses are dependent on Google to achieve growth and profitability. The dependence of these entities on Google is two dimensional. While paid search forms the first dimension, the other dimension focuses on organic search. Online businesses are heavily reliant on adapting and fine tuning both these dimensions to stay profitable. Although, paid search stimulates the economic benefits of a business, it is the organic search which is the cynosure of SEO marketers, as generating organic traffic is as complex as running a successful paid search campaign.

I realise there is a repository of information available on how we could organise SEO activities. But being in the industry for the last six months with no prior experience, I have picked up a few useful lessons myself through experience which I wish to archive here for future references. You never know, you might discover a few new tips!

Watch this space for a week on week (Well…hopefully!) SEO update!

Google seems to be dancing these days. There has been plenty of talk on the SEO front by webmasters who are reporting significant fluctuations in SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) over the last few weeks. Being a forum user, I have noticed that some of the digital pointers (A Forum for Webmasters) are being penalised either by a drop in SERPs or by Google’s Houdini Act where the websites don’t rank for their own keywords. A good example are some prominent Web Directories which offer Paid Link Services such as Alive, Aviva etc. Is it the end of road for Directories?

For years, Digital Point has been a great resource for Webmasters, where they have exchanged news, views and expertise and benefited from each other in fine tuning SEO skills. The Administrators have done a commendable job by bringing together hundreds of webmasters with a shared vision. So it comes as no surprise that any changes in the Google World is first highlighted and discussed on Digital Point. Digital Point has been offering good insights into Google’s efforts in optimising the quality of the results, while also conveying the webmaster’s concerns.

Off late, a few webmasters at Digital Point have been hit with Google penalty. We have had official words from Google on how hard they have been trying to deliver quality results to the user. This is clearly reflected in the new message centre webmaster tools, which Google uses to communicate with the webmasters.

After months of effort on search optimisation at Arena Flowers, where we explored every possible avenue of driving in more traffic to Google, we seemed to be breaking into the league of appearing higher on the SERPs for some competitive keywords. Some time mid September, due to Google’s generous tweaking of the results pages, we ranked fairly high for a few of our targeted keywords. But we lasted only a couple of weeks and now we are lost somewhere in the results pages, which has affected our traffic and our conversion rates. As I write this, there have been further changes to the results pages. Our blog used to rank higher than our homepage on the result pages after the mid September changes. Now our homepage appears higher. These changes are giving us a few jitters and raising a few thoughts:

1. Are we being penalised?
2. Did our competitors get more competitive?
3. All’s well, its just Google’s algorithm updation which should happen soon and we’ll be back to normal.

I would love to believe its No. 3. We have always adhered to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. We surely can’t be a victim of Google’s latest tirade on Paid Links. Of course, we have paid for advertising our business on flower related online media. In terms of SEO, we have submitted our site to a few hundred free web directories, while we have exchanged links with flower and gift related sites. But definitely not to inflate our traffic artificially. PageRank doesn’t matter to us. We are not Link Sellers to benefit from a higher PageRank. We are only bothered about ranking well for prominent keywords in the flower business, to make it easier for our customers to reach us. Reciprocal linking and directory submission does not give any quality traffic which could translate into sales. We seek customers who convert well on our marketing spend. I hope Google’s new algorithm helps us achieve this!

A couple of weeks ago, my good old friend Sadath sent me an invite to join Spock, a new people search engine which collects information about individuals in a similar way as Google collects information about websites by indexing their pages in its central database. It is one of the many social networking requests which each one of us get every week. Just yesterday, I was sent an invite from another website called WAYN, an acronym for Where are you now?

The Web 2.0 has certainly taken over our lives. We seem to be connecting well now. I have discovered long last friends like the one in the picture who I never thought I would meet again. I have also discovered some new virtual friends, who I have never met or probably never will. It is this aspect of virtual communication that adds a bit of excitement to my life.

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