After years of hearing about how great Rackspace is as a hosting provider, we finally bucked up and paid the big guns the big dollars for their “Fanatical Support”.

I mean, let’s be honest, how many brands accurately reflect who they SAY they are?

So in the early phases, they truly were fanatical & we liked working with them, then BOOM a major outage. After this recent outage at Rackspace, I saw a link to this page that explained a the incident that caused outages. It is still linked from their homepage and outlined what was happening, what they were doing to fix it, and what steps they were putting in place to keep it from happening again.
That prompted this blog post…

These guys put “fanatical support” on everything with their name, and you know what? They lived up to it. While no service business can ever say that they will never have a problem, it is how they REACT to those problems that separates one company that says…”hey we’re great” from their competitor who also says ….guess what… “we’re great too.”

I only hope that this transparency leads to MORE customers for rackspace, not less. Because at least they don’t hide their wounds, they not doing some spin, they took the mistakes on the chin and are looking to improve.
Problems and friction between customer and client are where the rubber meets the road. I come across this every day in our industry. Picking an SEO company is difficult, why? Because we all sound the same, well not all…but most. It is a hard business to differentiate yourself with bullet points and powerpoint slides.

It got me thinking further…about the Jetblue fiasco and how David Needleman reacted sure, there may have been a PR person whispering in his ear a bit, but the company is one of openness in its culture so this response doesn’t surprise me.

So what does all this have to do with SEER? At the end of the day, I want SEER to always be a company that:

• treats each other, our clients, vendors, partners, and friends well
• values and recognizes the contributions everyone makes to our clients successes
• is “fanatical” about ensuring that the budgets invested in us make solid returns for our clients
• does everything we can to help our clients achieve their goals
• has an impact on our community
• attracts great talented people who want to kick ass and make a difference

To steal a line from Rackspace:

Fanatical Support can’t be captured with bullet points or summed up with a simple graphic.
For every customer, it’s an experience that impacts their work and lives in very different and powerful ways.
So we’ll let them speak for themselves and for Fanatical Support.

For those of you who are selecting SEO companies, stop looking for the bullet points!! We SEO types all have access to the same information, we all read the same blogs, yet what makes ones better than the other?? I’ll be discussing that topic in my next post, stay tuned.

BTW - check out how yahoo has responded to an outage on Cyber Monday for its Yahoo! stores, leaving many merchants unable to transact on the busiest day of the online shopping year. how does it compare to Rackspace? As of today 24 hours later, they are not responding on their own blog…does that sound fanatical to you?

An industry is in revolt, the unrest is festering and the small waves are being made. Rupert Murdoch is saying it.  Newspaper revenue is drying up (not for their web sites).
The same week that IBM came out with a VERY interesting study titled The end of advertising as we know it.

While starting with the fluffy metric of “greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next  5 years than in the previous 50.” They back it up.  Many of you that read this blog spend money on marketing or performing  marketing in some way, shape, or form.  Most of you also use the web for marketing (or what are you doing HERE?).

A little history lesson to start, Goto.com - pioneered successful pay per action advertising on the internet for search (which is where the big boom is coming from) this could be debated, but humor me, ok?

I think what has attracted such a QUICK influx of marketing dollars to the search industry (projected to be in the $8 Billion dollar range), which hardly existed 10 years ago, is simple…accountability and ease.  I think you all know that tracking clicks, impressions, conversions, down to such granular levels as geography, keyword, etc helps remove some of the guesswork / fuzzy math of so many marketing channels, which leads to spend where you don’t know what 50% is wasted. now you do know what 50% is wasted, down to the keyword level if you so chose.

While a recent article on SEER in the Business Journal  renewed my belief in PR a bit (even though we don’t have a PR firm), I still feel like a lot of that stuff is hard to place real value on.  What is the value of a media mention?  A billboard?  Heck, out of my window I am looking up at a Heineken draught keg ad on a billboard as I write this…I see it 5-10 times a day, what is the value of it? It just seems somewhat harder to track.

Some interesting facts coming from the IBM study:
To survive in this new reality, broadcasters must change their mass audience mindset to cater to niche consumer segments, and distributors need to deliver targeted, interactive advertising for a range of multimedia devices.

Change YOUR MINDSET!!!  The scattergun approach to marketing has value, but you know what?  When large brands don’t rank well for what they do when people are typing in their exact terms in search engines, you can only imagine how much further we have to go as an industry.

Finding communities of people with like interests through blogs, forums, social networking, etc is going to be the hard work.

The billboard on the side of the road just doesn’t have the targeting or reporting that the web does, which means less accountability to REAL metrics. Putting a billboard up is easy, finding 100 small niche communities to get the word out is much harder especially when people are so fickle.  Identifying enthusiastic bloggers, facebookers, etc that can become brand advocates and spread the word is also NOT easy, some tools are helping to make this easier though.  The tool can identify the sites, but the value is in finding a way to approach these outlets in a way that doesn’t result in mass revolt. See how a PR effort backfired  for Microsoft?

All players must adapt to a world where advertising inventory is increasingly bought and sold in open exchanges vs. traditional channels.

This is very hard for some people to grasp, but letting the advertiser decide the price they find worth it for advertising is NOT how this industry works, if you are thinking…ebay or Google for advertising you got it!  Sure you can fight it…but how long will your clients wait?  For those of us on the web, buying paid search ads for years, we’re just used to it, but now this marketplace for advertising is creeping into online display advertising and TV as I showed above.  Will it be successful? I doubt it will be the first time.  But lets remember peapod and webvan those online grocers…while they didn’t succeed, ACME, Krogers, and many others are doing online.  It just took some years to work out the system, but accountable marketing is coming.

Advertisers are DEMANDING higher levels of accountability from their marketing partners, eyeballs are great, but what about conversions, new customers, web site engagement, etc? 

Advertisers and marketers are demanding more and more accountability, and while they don’t know HOW to get the numbers all the time, they know that SOMEONE can get them the data they need to make good decisions about advertising when on the web.  They want to make more data-driven decisions, with hard numbers to determine effect, and the Internet delivers that VERY well so far.  Are there gaps?  SURE there are, but there are a lot less revenue gaps between banners / search engines / online video than many other traditional mediums.
Impressions and eyeballs are bull when compared to impact metrics.
Let me ask you this…
If you gave someone $1,000 dollars to advertise for you, would you want a bunch of people to SEE an ad, possibly take NO ACTION and deplete your budget?  Or would you want to at least make sure that someone took SOME ACTION with the ad to deplete the budget?
Not every buy can be done like this, but when possible, you better believe that companies are moving in this direction with at least a PART of their budget.

If you still judge the success of your campaigns, by how many people SEE and AD, or just watch a video without tying that into some level of an ACCOUNTABLE metric, be VERY afraid, times are a changin’! and Thank GOD!!
According to the study
“Two-thirds of advertising experts surveyed by IBM expect 20% of advertising revenue to move from impression-based to impact-based formats within three years:”

This one is simple, the market will be shifting more dollars to efforts that can be tracked easily and are based on action and impact, not just eyeballs.
The last thing I read in the study which was huge:
Amateurs and semi-professionals are increasingly creating low-cost advertising content that threatens to bypass creative agencies, while publishers and broadcasters are broadening their own creative roles.

Have you heard of OpenAd.net?  If not go there.  Big ideas, don’t need to come from big agencies anymore.  Companies are putting the development of big ideas and big creative into a marketplace.  While we all thought that free-agents would change the world, and that e-lance and the like would change the world as we know it, it has NOT, but it has made a dent.  Openads has a shot to make a dent too, even big agencies could use openads to help develop additional pitches to clients for low cost.
So as marketers, do you feel the squeeze around you daily?  The accountability crunch?  If you are going to be held accountable to more and more real numbers, do you expect to shift your dollars to more channels where impact can be tracked?
What is your percentage of highly accountable marketing vs. Eyeballs marketing?  Have you been shifting more budget to the channels that provide more accountable metrics?
Would love to hear…

We recently had the pleasure of working on a seasonal site, in a hectic business! What a fast pace, and then after their peak season, BOOM all traffic falls off, I am still recovering from the mental anguish and long nights but it was a BLAST, now that I can dust myself off a bit, I’d like to share some things that I learned after an automated SEO tool was installed.

What was interesting is that for this client they had an automated SEO tool installed after we did regular SEO to the main e-commerce site with tens of thousands of pages. So I got to see just how these tools perform head to head.

For those of you who are going up against a competitor with an automated SEO tool here’s how to kick that things’ ass, we did it, and will share with you too:

1 – INVEST in re-developing your site to be SEO friendly, any good SEO company will be able to help here. Some basic things to consider in the re-programming of your e-commerce site from an SEO perspective:

The SEO company working on your e-commerce site needs to understand how to find the fine line between what terms need REAL day to day love and which ones can be done with the right template. This is done by evaluating the competitiveness of individual terms (short and long tail) to understand which can be hit with template-based, scalable SEO best practices. Developing the right site hierarchy is critical here!

Leave space for copy in your templates.

Give yourself control over page titles, meta descriptions, and section headers, so you can overwrite automated copy here if you need to because of competitiveness.

Create search engine friendly URLs (use Mod re-write or ASAPI).

BEWARE: This is the hardest part, I have seen re-developments run in the low 6 figures for highly customized old carts. If you can NOT do this, then call up an automated SEO company to help, but expect that your competitors will eventually make these investments and will likely beat your tail (and I do mean the long tail).

Do not fall for the “do you want to change you programming to keep up with the algorithms” sales pitch. Any good SEO company, with experience in e-commerce SEO, will help you develop a search engine friendly architecture that should stand the test of time.

If you have the resources to re-develop your site, or if it is already SEO friendly according to the few basic requirements above proceed to step 2.

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Here at SEER, we are driven to help others (when we’re not conquering the SEO industry). Combining two things I love to do, I’ve outlined some simple and useful tactics any non-profit can use to boost online efforts.

- Have you created an online donation page?

Besides the firm dedication a non-profit needs to function, all non-profits know that funding keeps an organization thriving. Every non-profit should have an online donation page which is secure and easy to use. There are many creative avenues to request funding from your supporters. For example, an Online Volunteer for UNICEF can design a personal donation page with information about their chosen cause, set a fundraising goal and then invite everyone they know to visit their page and donate to UNICEF. Volunteers can also form teams and recruit others to help spread the word.

You don’t have to be an international and well established organization to do this. JustGiving.com is a site that allows charities to create donation pages for free (but charges a small transaction fee on donations). Another site, FirstGiving.com offers the same service but provides you with additional web tools such as a fundraising widget that you can include on social media sites.

Change.org is a free service that allows non-profits to add their group to general causes such as Ending Poverty or Universal Health Care. Visitors can then donate to your specific organization or donate evenly to all groups within one cause.

-Have you applied for a Google AdWords Grant?

Under the Google Grants Program, non-profits can receive up to $10,000 worth of clicks in the AdWords program. Any non-profit organization without political or religious affiliation and a 501(c)(3) status may apply. The application seems to be competitive based on the high number of applicants but having someone on your team with AdWords experience may better your chances of being approved. Also, seeking out a specialist in the PPC field to help manage the campaign is highly recommended. Ten grand a month can have a large impact if used strategically.

-Are you requesting links from supporters?

In SEO, we have this little thing called “link juice.” Actually, it’s a big thing! The number of sites that link to yours influences the site’s importance in the search engines. Requesting that visitors link to your site from their personal websites and blogs can increase your prominence in search results and drive traffic.

End Poverty International has partnered with several sponsors who have pledged to donate a certain amount for every person who links to Endpovertyinternational.org from their .edu page. I’ve never seen this done before and it doesn’t seem to be encouraging a lot of .edu links but I like the idea! The benefit is two fold—link juice and money!

-Are you socializing?

More likely than not, there are tons of people surfing the web who would love to support your cause. But if you don’t have at least an active MySpace or Facebook account, how will you find them? Using social media sites is an excellent way to stay communicated with your supporters and keeps them up-to-date on your organization’s news and events. It is much more interactive than a static website and people won’t have to remember to visit your site—they’ll just log into their MySpace or Facebook accounts. And best of all, it’s free!

For example, this is the official MySpace page for the Susan G. Koman Organization. Friends can read the stories of others as well as share their own personal stories. You can also create a MySpace group like this one which discusses homelessness and creates awareness. Even enhance your page with features such as a fundraising widget from ChipIn.

I’m amazed at the amount of resources out there for non-profits. I would love to hear from non-profits who have used SEO and SEM tactics that have been successful.