Loved this on Twitter today from Outdoor_Girly:

Theory: successful people read best selling business books, wildly successful read random books (philosophy), normal people just don’t read

I was looking through our weekly bestsellers and found The Great Influenza: The Story of The Deadliest Pandemic in History by John Barry at #8. Given recent events, I was a little more than interested in what was happening with that title.

Meg tells me the order for that book was placed before H1N1 began making news, taking away all hope of some long winded essay about how hysteria is sweeping our nation and that books can provide wonderful context for current happenings.

Oh well.

Four Cornerstones of Distinction by Scott McKain

It all begins with a simple question:“How can our customers and prospects tell the difference between us and our competition?” Here’s what I find absolutely amazing — the most prevalent answer I hear from highly successful and sophisticated marketing leaders in a wide array of industries is: “I don’t know.”

Distinction is like a vaccine for your organization. If you don’t know what distinguishes you from your competitor — or, if the answer is “price” – then I believe that you are probably doomed, in the long run.

In one of my earlier books, I described the fortunate set of circumstances that enabled me to play the role of the villain in a highly-regarded German movie, “Stroszek” by the esteemed director, Werner Herzog. This marvelous event in my life later afforded me another unlikely opportunity — to become a film critic, with my commentaries syndicated across the U.S. and around the world.

Several years ago, I attended a reception in Hollywood, and had the occasion to meet the best in the business, Roger Ebert. To my delight and surprise, the famed critic remembered the terrific review he gave my solitary attempt at acting. Roger asked me to sit with him and his wife, and we began a warm and fascinating conversation.

Roger asked me, “Scott, how many movies are you normally seeing in any given week?” My answer was that the usual total was one – the film I would be reviewing for that week’s broadcast. He responded, “Many of the people in this profession are seeing one or two movies a day! The little off-beat, quirky, odd, foreign or independent film captures our attention because they are a bit different! When you are overwhelmed with such boring similarity, you begin to perceive that ‘different’ IS ‘better’!

The remarkable Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and critic taught me a great lesson I now call “The Ebert Effect”: When someone, from their perspective, is inundated with indistinguishable choices, they perceive a product, service, approach, or experience that possesses a specific point of differentiation to be superior.

Because this effect means that different is perceived to be better, we must realize that there are four steps — I call them the “Four Cornerstones of Distinction” — that create what every organization, and professional, needs in today’s volatile economy.

The first Cornerstone is Clarity. To grab attention and guarantee satisfaction, you have to be precise about who and what you are. You cannot differentiate what you cannot define.

The second Cornerstone is Creativity. Distinctive organizations find some unique twist, some original spin to put on the interaction that they have with customers.

The third of the Cornerstones is Communication. And, while we often hear about the importance of that topic, what our research clearly shows is that today’s customer wants to be engaged by a compelling narrative. Tell the story of your product, your company, and your service in a manner that involves customers and prospects.

The final Cornerstone is Customer-Experience Focus. This more than the old “focus on the customer” line we’ve heard for years. Today’s customer centers purchase decisions as much on feelings as facts and figures. In other words, how they feel about your marketing — and the experience and emotional connectivity they have with your organization and people — are the primary determinates of what they will buy and refer.

The easiest tactic for you is simply to continue what you are currently doing. Let me emphatically state my belief that this is also the most dangerous approach.

Because of the Three Destroyers of Differentiation discussed in the previous post, your job – organizationally and individually – is only going to continue to grow in difficulty. However, if you begin today to chart a fresh approach based upon the Four Cornerstones of Distinction, you can begin to enhance your organization — while you nurture and grow yourself.

Check out Collapse of Distinction: Stand Out and Move Up While Your Competition Fails by Scott McKain (Thomas Nelson, March 2009)

The Three Destroyers of Differentiation by Scott McKain

There was a time not too long ago when Chevy owners felt superior to those poor souls driving a Ford — and vice versa. A person gained identification through the goods that they purchased, the stores where they shopped, the institutions where they invested — no matter the level of price or sophistication of the product.

Now, however, over the past several years we have seen the homogenization of practically everything. The big store where I shop almost certainly appears and feels a lot like yours, no matter the logo on the door, no matter the community where it is located.

When customers perceive times are a bit tighter, they naturally want to spend their money where they sense they are receiving the highest degree of value. Certainly, they’ll become more price conscious than in better financial situations. However, if you differentiate your business and yourself, you will find that a downturn is tailor-made for grabbing market share from your competitors.

If you cannot find it within you to become emotional, committed, engaged, and…yes…FERVENT about differentiation, then you had better be prepared to take your place among that vast throng of the mediocre who are judged by their customers solely on the basis of price. It is the singularly worst place to be in all of business. If you aren’t willing to create distinction for yourself in your profession — and for your organization in the marketplace — then prepare to take your seat there in the back, with the substantial swarm of the similar, where tedium reigns supreme.

There is a trio of aspects — called in my book the Three Destroyers of Differentiation that created the “Collapse of Distinction.” Taken individually, each of these Destroyers creates a compelling challenge for you in the marketplace. When combined, they have a synergistic and destructive impact on your industry, your organization…and you!

The first Destroyer is: Copycat Competition. When my competitor creates a point of distinction, my natural inclination is to either:

a) Copy/imitate the improvement; or,

b) Attempt to incrementally improve upon their advancement

Notice the distinction problem with this paradigm: My efforts are based upon what my competitor is doing — NOT what my customers may truly desire! And, in most cases, both your advancements and mine have been evolutionary — NOT revolutionary. We have arrived at the point where most organizations focus more on the competition than their customers.

The second Destroyer is: New — and Better — Competition. If you are like most, your reaction to Destroyer Two — cultural, technological and societal change bringing new competitors to your doorstep — is to probably execute precisely the wrong strategy. You figure if most of your customers are going to McDonald’s, you try to “out-McDonald’s” them to restore your business. Unfortunately — and despite your best intentions — imitation gains you little traction in the marketplace.

The third Destroyer is: Familiarity Breeds Complacency. My Mom told me that, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” As much as I hate to dispute her advice, this isn’t true. When something, like a product or service is present so much that it becomes thoroughly familiar and is boundlessly available, we do not then begin to scorn it, hate it, or express disdain towards it. Instead, we begin to take it for granted. We become complacent and presume it will always be around.

What a combination! You may be:

1. Creating only incremental improvements, so there is nothing to distinguishes you from your competition
2. Encountering new competition that you didn’t even dream of a few years earlier — and they are tough, price-slashing competitors that can rapidly deliver either a similar (or even the very same) product or service to your customers
3. Taken for granted by the customers you have served for a period of time because they have been lulled into complacency through their total familiarity with your execution

The next segment will outline the Four Cornerstones of Distinction — and show you the process to create a compelling strategy to stand out and move up — while your competition fails!

Check out Collapse of Distinction: Stand Out and Move Up While Your Competition Fails by Scott McKain (Thomas Nelson, March 2009)

Michael Arrington’s Grok This: Forget The Business Books, Go Sci-Fi To Stoke Your Imagination post from two weeks ago garnered alot of attention. I just wanted share the additional recommendations from the genre that popped up in various places.

In the comment thread of Arrington’s post itself:

• Seth Wagoner recommends Charlie Stross and Ken MacLeod, pointing to Marc Andreessen’s post on top novelists from this decade.
• Ben says “I’d have to agree with everything on this list – although it’s a bit of a ‘beginners guide’ to sci-fi. Add in Peter F. Hamilton, the Cormac novels of Neal Asher etc. and you’re humming.”
• Tom recommends:
• Richard K. Morgan – Altered Carbon (all his stuff is great but AC is a good introduction)
• Neal Asher – The Skinner
• Alastair Reynolds – Revelation Space (Chasm city and the prefect are also awesome books)
• Charles Stross – Singularity Sky (Halting State is another stand out book)
• Mark suggests The Player of Games by Iain Banks
• And almost all the comments recommend the addition of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game.

On our own post, Seth Godin commented that “[E]very employee I’ve hired in the last ten years has been required to read Snow Crash [by Neal Stephenson].” He also highly recommends Cory Doctorow. In his latest book Tribes, he starts the acknowledgements with one to Doctorow and his book Eastern Standard Tribe.

Finally, Michael Fitzgerald at BNET writes:

[H]ere are three science fiction authors he should have on there and doesn’t: John Brunner (“Squares of the City” is the one I’ve read, though “Shockwave Rider” is probably more relevant), Vernor Vinge (“Rainbows End” is his most recent, and I posted on its vision for the Future of Business, but “True Names” would matter more to high-tech entrepreneurs), and William Gibson (“Neuromancer,” natch…).

Anyone else want to chime in?

Unsticking an Idea

by Chip Heath & Dan Heath,
Authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Since Made to Stick came out, many anxious people have asked us, “How do I unstick a sticky idea?” They want to unstick a rumor about their company or a false perception of a particular product. They want to unstick whispered mistruths about political candidates. Once, we were even asked, “How would you unstick Paris Hilton?”

Our answer on that last one was a bit slow in coming. We finally admitted, “You can’t.” There’s no Goo Gone for ideas. Sticky ideas stick. There are millions of people who’ve come to follow, willingly or unwillingly, the antics of a party-girl heiress. There’s no magic sticky incantation that will make us divert our attention to alternative energy, or some other worthy topic. Our best advice, on the Paris Hilton matter, was: Just wait it out. As we age, the memories will fade, and perhaps those neurons will die off entirely. (With any luck, they’ll go before the “dress ourselves” neurons.)

But the question — How do I unstick an idea? — nagged at us. So we dug into the relevant academic research. It was a long and frustrating search, because there’s not much research tackling this topic. But we did find one promising lead that was about sixty-five years old.

During World War II, social scientists had a keen patriotic interest in rumor control. About two-thirds of the rumors during were “wedge-drivers,” accusations that provoked anger at various social groups (blacks, Jews, the Brits). These rumors were false and socially destructive, so the government wanted to fight back aggressively. One tactic that seemed to work against wedge-drivers was to redirect the anger and make people mad at the rumormongers. For instance, the rumor-control people would put up posters of Nazi spies spreading rumors to gullible dupes. This primed listeners to react angrily when someone spread a rumor: You’re undermining the American war effort by spreading Nazi untruths!

At first, this work in wartime propaganda seemed pretty removed from the concerns of our readers, who want their ideas to stick in business or in school. But then it dawned on us: Trying to unstick an idea is a bad strategy. The World War II rumor-control people weren’t trying to unstick an idea. They were shifting the turf and propagating a different, competing idea. Instead of arguing that the rumors themselves were baseless, they argued: The Nazis are trying to trick you. Are you going to fall for that?

This suggests that we shouldn’t try to unstick ideas. We should fight sticky with stickier, meet Scotch tape with duct tape.

For decades, McDonald’s fought rumors that it used earthworms as filler in its burgers. At first, the company tried to unstick the idea. In 1978, McDonald’s officials had denounced the rumors as “completely unfounded and unsubstantiated.” (Quotes taken from Newsweek via Snopes.com, the mecca of urban-legend debunking.) Guess which idea was stickier: “earthworms in your meat patties” or “unfounded and unsubstantiated”?

By 1992, Ray Kroc, McDonald’s most famous CEO, had come up with a better approach. He said, “We couldn’t afford to grind worms into meat. Hamburger costs a dollar and a half a pound, and night crawlers cost six dollars!” That’s nice; Kroc is fighting sticky with sticky. Notice the elements of credibility (dollars per pound) and unexpectedness (We can’t afford to serve you earthworms). He might even have gone a step further and made a joke about it: “If someone ever tries to sell you a WormBurger, you should worry about them secretly filling it with beef.”

Another case of fighting sticky with sticky came during the late 1990s, when e-mailed rumors about nasty computer viruses circulated constantly. According to these rumors, if you clicked the wrong link, or opened the wrong e-mail, you’d destroy your computer. One day, a young systems operator, fed up with the dozens of bogus warnings he received every day, wrote a parody of the rumors:

Warning: if you receive an e-mail with “Goodtimes” in the subject line, DO NOT OPEN IT!!!!! Goodtimes will rewrite your hard drive. It will also scramble any disks that are even close to your computer. It will recalibrate your refrigerator’s coolness setting so all your ice cream goes melty. It will demagnetize the strips on your credit cards and use subspace field harmonics to scratch your CDs. It will give your ex your new phone number. It will mix Kool-Aid into your fish tank. It moves your car randomly around parking lots so you can’t find it.

The parody became a viral hit, as popular as the rumors it mocked. Bill Ellis, a folklorist at Penn State Hazleton, has documented that, as this parody spread, the apocalyptic virus warnings faded away. The parody cleverly provided people with a schema of an overhyped warning. Afterward, if you received more e-mails that fit the schema — full of overheated language and dire warnings — you knew to laugh rather than get worried. The young systems operator fought a sticky idea with a stickier idea.

But sometimes the best way to fight a sticky idea is not with a message at all, even a stickier one. Sometimes what you need is a sticky action. Consider the dawn of the automobile era. As described in Hayagreeva Rao’s book Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations, the gasoline-powered car was greeted, at first, with skepticism and outright fear. People called it a “devilish contraption.” It spawned rabid opposition. The Farmer’s Anti-Automobile Society of Pennsylvania, for example, demanded that cars traveling at night on country roads “must send up a rocket every mile, then wait ten minutes for the road to clear. If a driver sees a team of horses, he is to pull to one side of the road and cover his machine with a blanket or dust cover that has been painted to blend into the scenery.” One technologist of the time scoffed at the idea that gasoline engines would ever be widely adopted: “You can’t get people to sit on an explosion.”

That’s a sticky idea: simple, concrete, emotional. If you were an entrepreneurial automaker, how would you combat it? Well, the dumb thing to do would be to try to “unstick it” with a message: Go ahead, try telling potential customers, “Don’t worry, you’re actually sitting on a contained explosion.” Oh, and all the top automotive authorities say your fears are “unfounded and unsubstantiated.”

Auto enthusiasts chose to act. They created a series of “reliability races” in which automobile inventors would bring their autos together and have them compete on endurance, fuel economy, and hill-climbing ability. Reliability contests were one part product testing and one part festival. The first contest took place in 1895, and by 1912 they had been discontinued, because cars were an accepted social reality. What happened in between was that the automakers gave thousands of people the chance to see firsthand the promise of automobiles — to see that there was nothing to fear. (In fact, the acclaim Henry Ford received from his performance in the reliability contests enabled him to launch the Ford Motor Company in 1903.)

Note that the auto enthusiasts didn’t try to argue their way out of the fears; they acted their way out. They chose a demonstration that was Unexpected (Until today I thought cars were dangerous and unreliable); Concrete (Did you see it take that hill?); Emotional (I can see myself becoming one of those liberated drivers); and Credible (I saw it all with my own eyes!).

So how do you unstick an idea? First of all, be realistic. It took seventeen years for reliability races to establish public trust in the automobile. The rumor about earthworms in McDonald’s hamburgers still circulates in some places, despite Ray Kroc’s brilliant response. Sticky ideas endure, and, as we’ve seen in the book, that can be a great thing. It can also be a real nuisance if you’re working against a sticky idea that’s false.

Our advice is simple: Fight sticky ideas with stickier ideas. We hope we’ve given you some useful tools for making your ideas sticky. And if you want to unstick Paris Hilton, maybe you should be looking for another fame-hungry heiress to take her place? (We’re not sure heiress races will do the trick.)

The above is an excerpt from the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath. The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.

Excerpted from Made to Stick by Chip Heath & Dan Heath Copyright © 2007 by Chip Heath & Dan Heath. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Green-to-Gold Plays
by Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston, authors of Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage
An Eco-Advantage Mindset, supported by the right tracking tools, a focus on redesign, and a culture of environmental stewardship, is the foundation for turning green to gold. But the real action lies in the strategies that create value, the Green-to-Gold Plays.
Like any other business strategy, our Green-to-Gold Plays aim to reduce the downsides a business faces (cost and risk) or increase the upsides (revenue and intangible value). Unlike many others, though, these plays don’t sacrifice responsibility in the pursuit of profit — or profit in the pursuit of responsibility. Our WaveRider companies offer proof every day that doing good and doing well can be symbiotic.
We’ve mapped the eight Green-to-Gold Plays drawn from our study of WaveRiders onto the two-by-two strategy framework we outlined earlier. Not surprisingly, most green business efforts to date have focused on the lower left box. Cost reduction is extremely low risk, easy to sell internally, and often pays back quickly. It can yield competitive advantage. But our research suggests that, by focusing solely on the cost side, many companies are missing chances to generate broader Eco-Advantage. Most companies have not yet executed all of the plays — they’re leaving money on the table.
1. Eco-Efficiency
Cutting pollution and waste makes good business sense. Even highly efficient companies have been shocked to discover savings they had previously overlooked. Over three decades, 3M continues to find new ways to pare costs through its 3P program, Pollution Prevention Pays. Many changes can be very simple. STMicroelectronics, for example, put in larger air-conditioner ducts, which allowed its air-circulating fan to run more slowly. The fan now uses 85 percent less energy. In just one year, with $40 million invested in changes like these, the company saved $173 million.
Sometimes the search for eco-efficiency can leapfrog past reduction to outright elimination of a process or resource. Rohner Textil once produced its dyed, woven fibers in the same manner as everyone else in the industry. To make the fibers strong enough to weave, it would coat the yarn with chemicals, which had to be washed off later, creating wastewater problems. While searching for a way to reduce chemical use, Rohner realized that humidity makes the fiber stronger. So the company now skips the chemical coating and simply doesn’t dry the yarn quite as much, leaving moisture in the fiber. Rohner cut out one step, shortened another, eliminated the chemicals, reduced energy use, and cut costs. A pretty good day at the eco-efficiency office.
Rohner’s efficiency improvements have driven per worker productivity up 300 percent over the past 20 years. During a vicious downturn in its industry, Rohner, unlike many other companies, remained profitable.
2. Eco-Expense Reduction
Efforts to lower direct environmental costs such as landfill fees or regulatory paperwork can also return big dividends. DuPont has saved billions on pollution control, and that’s only the measurable cost of waste. In one case, the company cut rejects from the Lycra production line from 25 percent of volume to less than 10 percent. That focus on reducing waste saved material, lowered landfill costs, and freed up $140 million in saleable product. It also meant the company could delay building another plant, saving many millions more in capital expense. The ripples from cutting waste and eco-expense can overflow and save money in many ways.
3. Value Chain Eco-Efficiency
Companies that look broadly for environmental gains and use tools like Life Cycle Assessment often find ways to reduce costs throughout their value chains. The play here is to try and capture that value, which can be a difficult task. In Chapter 4, we talked about one area in which companies are quite effective — distribution. IKEA and others stuff their trucks through smart package and product design, and save money.
4. Eco-Risk Control
With the rise of transparency, the risks to a business and its brand can come from anywhere. A substantial amount of goodwill is tied to corporate reputation. If a distant supplier dumps waste in a river or employs children, the major customer, with an international brand, may well be the one to pay the price.
WaveRiders identify potential risks and act on them as early as possible. When McDonald’s pushes back on its supply chain to lower antibiotic use in chickens, or asks for documentation that ensures that cattle do not have mad cow disease, it’s lowering the risk of contaminating its brand. Intel spends millions to ship its hazardous waste from some developing countries to the United States so it can be disposed of properly. Why? Intel doesn’t trust the waste-handling system in some countries where it operates. And company officials know they’ll be blamed if something goes wrong.
WaveRiders get ahead of regulations before they get tighter. BP began its Clean Cities program and sold cleaner-burning, lower-sulfur fuels in part to get out in front of more stringent air quality laws. “The driver was that sulfur regulations would come,” BP’s Chris Mottershead told us. “Rather than deliver on a regulated schedule, we decided to go early and try for a market benefit.”
Anticipating regulations can put a company in a position to meet requirements at a lower cost than its competitors. Some companies have even obtained a competitive edge by lobbying for tighter controls. Remember, it’s often the relative regulatory burden that matters.
5. Eco-Design
Redesigning processes and products to cut waste and pollution is a big part of Eco-Advantage. Keep in mind, too, that a great deal of potential gain might lie outside the factory gates or your own facilities’ doors. Helping customers reduce their environmental problems can strengthen customer loyalty and attract new sales. Reducing a product’s energy use or toxicity also can add to customer value. Like Johnson Controls, which sells entire energy management systems, companies that find ways to lower customer burden can profit.
6. Eco-Sales and Marketing
Marketing the green qualities of products can drive sales. When Wausau Paper launched a new brand extension of “away from home” products — paper towels, toilet paper, and the like — it first certified the product line with Green Seal, an NGO specializing in environmental product labels. The company then rebranded the product EcoSoft Green Seal, putting the certification right in the name. In an industry growing only 2 to 3 percent per year, Wausau’s sales in this market leapt 44 percent in the first two years.
In fact, Wausau took an unusual route by focusing its marketing pitch squarely on the environmental message. Products that scream “green” to the exclusion of other qualities often die on the shelves. As Shell learned with its Pura gasoline, a product often needs to stand on other attributes first before selling the environmental story. Green, we’ve found, is often best used as the “third button.”
7. Eco-Defined New Market Space
Environmental Vision can create new market space and value innovation. Toyota set out to redefine the twenty-first-century car and has come pretty close. Many customers now seek a hybrid, not a midsized car, and they’ll pay a substantial premium or wait months for a Prius in particular. For these consumers, there is no substitute.
Looking for environmentally defined market space can seem to lead companies far afield. Take John Deere’s recent foray into renewable energy. The tractor maker started up a business unit to help farmers harvest wind energy. Deere will offer financial backing and consulting. This may seem an odd fit, but we see it as an interesting play. A company known for providing farmers with the tools they need is offering to help them survive and find new revenue streams. That’s value innovation!
8. Intangible Value
Most companies are worth more than their hard assets, and in some cases much more. Brand value — or corporate reputation, more generally — can be worth many billions of dollars. Any threat to that value has to be taken seriously. From BP to GE to Wal-Mart, a growing number of companies have launched campaigns to build a green element into their brand.
Copyright (c) 2009 Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston
Author Bios
Daniel C. Esty, co-author of Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, is the Hillhouse Professor at Yale University and Director of the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale (www.yale.edu/CBEY). Author and editor of nine books and dozens of articles, Dan is one of the world’s leading corporate environmental strategy experts with twenty years of experience working with companies of all sizes and across many industries worldwide. He served as senior official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1990s and is presently Chairman of Esty Environmental Partners (www.EstyEP.com).
Andrew S. Winston, co-author of Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, advises some of the world’s leading companies on how to profit from environmental thinking. He is also a highly respected and dynamic speaker, exploring the business benefits of going green with audiences around the world. Andrew’s earlier career included corporate strategy at Boston Consulting Group and management positions in marketing and business development at Time Warner and MTV. See www.andrewwinston.com for more information.

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The following excerpt is taken from Chapter 16 of 2nd Ed. of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt.
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Chapter 16
Explore New Media and Social Media

Microblogging
Just as blogging has started to become well known, you knew it would be time to introduce a new form with yet another name no one understands. So, that’s why we need microblogging. Although it shares some characteristics of blogging, in that it’s a way to communicate from one person to many people, the short format of microblogging makes it more akin to a public instant messaging system.

The most popular microblogging platform, Twitter (http://twitter.com), asks users to use no more than 140 characters to answer a simple question, “What are you doing?” Now, if your first response to that question is something like, “None of your #%@$ business,” then microblogging might not be for you. If, instead, you are excited at the idea that you could pass along tidbits about your day–where you are going, what you are reading, what you are working on, or that new blog post you just wrote–then you are getting the idea.

Twitter is the biggest name in microblogging, but other services such as Jaiku (www.jaiku.com) and Pownce (http://pownce.com) have also developed substantial communities. Social networks MySpace and FaceBook have also introduced a microblogging-like feature called status updates.

Twitter has spawned its own search engines so people can find tweets, the short messages posted by themselves or others, but microblogging messages rarely are found in mainstream search engines today. People looking for tweets can use Tweet Scan (www.tweetscan.com), where the newest results are shown first, rather than being ranked by relevance.

Unlike blogging, microblogging is more ephemeral, again like instant messages. So don’t expect your activities on Twitter to suddenly show up as the #3 result in Google. But just as your blog attracts subscribers who pay attention to each of your blog posts, Twitter and its brethren allow you to attract followers who have subscribed to your tweets.

Marketers can use microblogging to pass along your short pearls of wisdom to your audience, pointing them to your blog posts or larger nuggets of content on your Web site. Some use Twitter to make product announcements, publicize deals, and announce other newsworthy information. Others break news to their followers before releasing it in other channels.

If you have the skills to write a blog, you probably can master microblogging, too. Microblogging is a great way to draw more attention to your blog.

Wikis
If blogs are documents that draw feedback, what would you call a document that can be changed by anyone at any time? A wiki, that’s what. Derived from the Hawaiian word wiki-wiki, meaning “quick,” wikis can be likened to a group word processor whose documents are always available for viewing and updating.

The most famous wiki is Wikipedia, an encyclopedia created and maintained by the public. Proponents laud the wiki’s wealth of information, all drawn from the wisdom of crowds. Some question the accuracy of information compiled in this way, but others say wikis are self-policing, with erroneous material quickly corrected.

The truth undoubtedly lies in the middle. Wikipedia has more information than a printed paper encyclopedia, and has more than 30,000 contributors, but just two full-time employees. That’s a lot of information without a lot of author costs.

You can use wikis for marketing, too, as shown in Figure 16-2. Wikis can be used to discuss product plans, to solve support problems, to generate ideas for the company’s direction–and so much more. Wikis are limited only by your imagination and your comfort in discussing the information in public. Sometimes you might want to use wikis for more private discussions; you can limit access (to your most loyal customers, for example) when needed.

A wiki can provide you a vehicle for expanding the content on your Web site. You seed the wiki with content and invite your customers to improve it. Executive Travel magazine created city guides and other information on its Web site, with a big button that says “You can contribute to this site.” The result? More engaged customers and better information. Oh, and better search results.

You see, when the magazine’s readers began providing their tips for visiting various cities, you can bet that they added numerous pages containing new search keywords. Every page titled “Best Italian Restaurant in Boston” has a shot at being found for searches that would never have located the Executive Travel site in the past.

Wikis are just one example of a Web 2.0 way of encouraging your customers to contribute fresh content that attracts searchers. Read on for more.

Ratings and Reviews
If you’ve ever shopped at Amazon.com, you’ve seen product ratings and reviews, and might even have been influenced yourself by that book that received five stars from a reader. (Ratings and reviews are the most influential factors in a purchase for nearly 40 percent of buyers.) If you’re an Internet retailer, you probably already show ratings and reviews on your site–70 percent of top retailers do.

But most Web sites are not Internet retailers, and they don’t allow customers to post ratings and reviews of products, due to fear of negative reviews. David Seifert, Director of Direct Marketing Operations for outdoors retailer Bass Pro Shops, sums it up: “You never want to say anything bad about something you sell.” But the fear is overblown–”Only seven to eight percent are negative reviews,” according to David.

The negative reviews are a small price to pay for some impressive results. Customers want to see negative reviews; it makes all the other reviews more credible. And that credibility means your Web site becomes more persuasive, which translates into higher sales. The Senior Director of e-commerce for CompUSA, Al Hurlebaus, notes that after the U.S. technology retailer added product reviews to its site, “Every single [product] category improved its conversion rate.”

Customer reviews and ratings are moving beyond products into services. U.S. telephone company AT&T has launched reviews on YELLOWPAGES.COM, allowing consumers to rate any business, from a local plumber to a global retailer.

You might be growing convinced that offering reviews is a good idea for product retailers and service directories. After all, if one listing gets bad reviews, maybe customers will buy something else from you. But if a manufacturer posts reviews, might negative ratings send customers to your biggest competitor?

Sun Microsystems says no. The manufacturer of computer servers has put product ratings and reviews for all of Sun’s products on www.sun.com–a sign of supreme confidence in what it sells. Sun Vice President Curt Sasaki found that for every bad review the company gets, it gets several good ones. Curt approached the project believing that “the more folks that did reviews, the more it would balance out–it’s self-correcting.”

Product ratings and reviews are proven to lead to higher conversions, but they also boost your search marketing efforts. David from Bass Pro notes that, “Those reviews are so relevant to the product. When [a customer is searching], that copy ranks extremely high.”

Message Boards
Okay, so if blogs are documents with feedback, and wikis are living documents with many authors, and reviews provide feedback itself, then what do you call a conversation among many people at once? Variously known as newsgroups, forums, message boards, and other names, customers start threads (conversations) about a particular topic–perhaps by posting a question or an opinion–and others join in to elaborate, explain, encourage, debate…you get the idea. It’s a conversation.

Whether it’s a message board, product reviews, wikis, or comments on your blogs, they all serve the same search marketing purpose–free content for your Web site that you did not have to write. If you’re struggling to provide fresh content that covers all the different words that people might search for, then let those customers do the work for you. You’ll find that customers will use words that you might not have thought of, and those words will be search keywords for others, also.

You might wonder if expecting customers to contribute content to your Web site is realistic, but studies show what’s happening. Over one-third of all Americans created Web content by the end of 2005 (and this trend is growing worldwide also). Moreover, these opinionated customers spend more than the quieter ones.

Perhaps more important is that the rest of your customers, the ones who don’t create content, are reading the content and being influenced by it. Three-fourths of online shoppers rely on product reviews and ratings, according to
one Jupiter Research report, whereas another reveals that 90 percent of companies believe customer recommendations influence purchase decisions.

So, now you know the basics of Web 2.0. The old idea of a Web site created and maintained by a single company is giving way to a new gathering place for communities that contribute content that modifies that site in new ways. Companies don’t control the message as much as offer a framework around which their customers speak with as strong a voice as the company itself.

But that’s not the only trend that search marketers must be aware of. The text-only nature of the Web is beginning to give way to all sorts of multimedia. If you want to hang on to your place in the search results, you need to explore this new media for yourself.

New Media
Time was that search marketing was all text, all the time. And although text will always be critically important to any search engine, we’re gradually seeing rich media become more important to search marketing success.

It stands to reason that searchers want to find this new media with search engines. After all, by the end of 2007, Internet users were watching 10 billion videos a month. Just think about how many images they must have seen!

As faster computers and faster networks become more common, people stop limiting their Web usage to plain old test pages, instead using richer media than before. Gradually, search engines are responding, by including those new media types in the main search results.

As you might expect, with multiple search engines out there, we can never talk about “the” new results page; these changes are being seen in various degrees with each search engine’s results pages. So what’s happening?

From time immemorial (uh, around 1998), the main results page for each search engine has contained a list of ten organic links to Web pages–period. Each showed paid search ads around those organic links, but those organic results pointed to pages on vanilla Web sites. If searchers wanted images or videos or news, they needed to use more specific searches devoted to those kinds of content.

A few years ago, Google began offering its OneBox capability (such as showing movie times and weather forecasts at the top of its results pages). But that was a small step compared to what the search engines are doing now. The new search results pages break the content type ¬barrier.

Google now offers Universal Search, where all these content types are blended together on the page. The top search result might be a video or an image, or even a news story, rather than a standard Web page. Yahoo! and Microsoft have followed suit. Similarly, Ask.com has unveiled Ask3D, which stacks the search results so that different content types are shown in separate areas on the same results page. Try typing “darth vader” into each of the engines to see what blended search is like.

These newfangled search results pages have been much ballyhooed, but so far, relatively few keywords get the Darth Vader treatment. Search marketers should expect that these blended and stacked results will affect more and more keywords over time, however, for two reasons:

* The search results are better. Google and friends believe that their new approaches serve more searchers than their plain Web results predecessors. It does make sense that searchers are looking for more than just Web pages.

* Search engines sell more advertising. Some search engines don’t like to talk about their monetary motives for new search results pages, but Tim Mayer of Yahoo! has been refreshingly open about his company’s goal: to keep searchers on the Yahoo! results pages for as long as possible.

Similarly, these new search result pages often highlight Web properties owned by their parent company. Google shows its YouTube videos, Yahoo! shows its Flickr photos, Ask.com shows its CitySearch results, each of which shows more of its advertising.

As a search marketer, you can’t control which results the search engines decide to display, but you can provide the kinds of content that the engines are looking for, and you can optimize that content to make it easy to find. As these new search results pages begin to be seen for more and more searches, search marketers should

* Use what you have. You might feel as though you don’t have any of these new content types. But you have press releases that could show up in news searches. You might have TV commercials and other videos that you can post on YouTube and on your own Web site. Don’t overlook the existing content assets you can start with.

* Create new content. If Google wants new kinds of content, then feed the beast. Start a blog. Take photos of your products, your customers, your employees–whatever you think people want to see–and post them on Flickr and on your Web site. Put some interviews on video or tape live product demonstrations. Provide opportunities for customers to create content for you, such as message boards, product reviews, and wikis. All this content is the new fodder for search engines.

* Optimize your content. For the content that you create, continue using your target-keywords in titles and elsewhere, just as you always have for old-fashioned Web pages. For nontext content, such as photos and videos, titles and descriptions are especially important. Submit your content to as many aggregators as you have time for, not just YouTube and Flickr, for example. Claim your blog in Technorati (and in other blog search engines and directories). And place social bookmarking buttons on your pages for Digg, del.icio.us, and other sites, so your readers can bookmark your content for other social bookmarking users to see.

Although designing your content with interesting titles, descriptions, and filenames is timeworn advice, it still works. Applying this technique to new content types, such as blog posts and videos, is a great way to start.

And lastly, remember that the content itself must be compelling. Your Web pages have always needed to be interesting to attract the links critical for high search rankings. These new content types are no different. Moreover, some experts believe that search engines are looking beyond links to other indicators of intriguing content.

No one knows exactly what search engines consider in their ranking algorithms, but speculation abounds that relevance ranking for blogs is based partially on subscriber counts. Videos may get a boost based on how many times they’ve been viewed on YouTube or on the number of viewer comments posted. Expect search engines to continue to use whatever data is available to determine the popularity of each new kind of content; it’s not just inbound links anymore.

What’s most striking is that marketers who’ve created the most interesting content are beginning to be rewarded for it by the search engines. For those search marketers who were optimizing only Web pages because that’s all the search engines rewarded, they’re getting left in the dust by those marketers who have provided the new content types their customers are looking for.

Don’t let that happen to you. Check out the four most important new media types–images, podcasts, videos, and widgets–to see what you can be doing today.
Images

Most search engines offer a vertical search purely devoted to images. If you’re selling prints of famous paintings, maybe you care about image search, but most Web businesses don’t get much advantage from that. Having your image displayed on the standard search results page is what you are aiming for. As blended search begins to affect more keywords, you want your product images to be shown.

Eye tracking studies show that images attract more attention than text. On a search results page, searchers might fixate on an image for the #3 result even before looking at the #1 result that consists of text with no image. It’

s to your advantage to try to get your image on that page. Think about how much more eye-catching that press release will be if you add a picture or two that might appear on the search results page.

In Chapter 12, we explained the importance of alternate text, coded on the “alt” attribute of the <img> HTML tag, but you can do even more to highlight your images to the search engine:

* Keyword-rich filenames. Name your image files to show the search engine what they are about. If it is a photo of a product, name the file after the product, such as SnapShot-SLR.jpg. Don’t drone on with keyword after keyword in the name; keep it short, with just a couple of keywords.

* Surrounding context. Don’t stop at the filename. Make sure that the text that surrounds the image on your HTML page reinforces the same keywords you chose for your filename (and for your alt text).

But don’t stop there. Optimizing the images on your Web site is great, but you can improve your results even more when you submit your images to photo sharing sites, such as Flickr (www.flickr.com) from Yahoo!. All you have to do is to upload your image, and give it a title and a description. It’s that easy, and it’s free.

Obviously, you should ensure that your title and description contain the appropriate keywords to improve your picture’s findability; use an <h1> tag for your title if the site allows it. Some sites permit a link back to your Web site, which also can improve your Web site’s search results. Just as with images posted to your own site, you should use keyword-rich filenames.
Some of the most important things you do happen after you post your image:

* Tag your photo. Flickr and many of the other photo sharing sites allow you to provide keywords as labels for your pictures.

* Share your photo within the site. Mark you photo as “public” so anyone can see it. Most sites offer groups that you can share your photo with.

* Publicize your photo outside the site. If your photo is noteworthy, submit it to social bookmarking sites, e-mail people who would be interested, and link to it from your blog or another Web page.

Images are becoming more important with each passing year. Don’t settle for optimizing your text when you can get traffic from your pictures, too.

Podcasts
Everyone’s talking about podcasts, those audio files downloaded from the Web and played on demand using an Apple iPod or any MP3 media player. Many podcasts are just for fun, but marketers are discovering this new way of delivering their marketing message.

In a sense, there’s no difference in what you can do with a podcast than with radio air time: you can record a speech, an interview, a commercial, or any other audio. But podcasts are used differently than radio because of their immediacy, their low cost, and their flexible time duration.

First, podcasts can cover the most unusual subjects. If you want to target a few hundred people, it’s cheap enough to do with a podcast, whereas a radio broadcast or a mailed CD would be unaffordable. Go ahead and do a podcast interview with a famous photographer about digital cameras. Mention your company a few times as the sponsor; maybe you’ll sell a few digital cameras to serious photographers.

With a podcast, you can reach the seemingly unreachable. It’s tough to target a message to someone walking to school or riding the subway. Those customers are beyond the reach of most advertising media, but they listen to podcasts. Podcasts are also favored by people under 30 years old, who are becoming harder to reach through traditional print and broadcast advertising.

Podcasts also provide long-form messages that were formerly possible only with infomercials or public relations opportunities. And you can do them fast. Record it today, post it on your Web site, and your message is out there. For these and many other reasons, podcasts are the cool new way to deliver your marketing message.

By now you may be asking, “What does all this have to do with search marketing?” Sure, podcasts get out your message, reach market segments that are tough to reach, help your company seem trendy, and keep your teeth flossed and pearly white, but they don’t help your search marketing, right? Wrong.

Podcasts are a great way to get links to your site, and search engines just love links. As we discussed in Chapter 13, they especially love one-way links–links to your pages from Web sites that you don’t link back to. Those links seem to be the most unbiased votes for the quality of your content, telling the search engines to rank those linked pages highly for searches that match the pages’ words.

To get those precious one-way links, you need to offer content that causes other sites to voluntarily link to yours. Podcasts are a great way to do that. Audio is naturally more engaging than text, and your podcast can contain up-to-the-minute, fresh information from experts with a strong point of view. Done well, podcasts are link magnets for your site. To maximize their drawing power, make sure you place each podcast on a separate page so that you can optimize its title and body text for that one specific podcast. If you lump together many podcasts on the same page, you dilute the subject, reducing its drawing power. You can certainly have a directory page that lists all your podcasts with links to each one’s individual page.

You can also use podcasts to give yourself a link. If you submit your podcasts to specialized directories, such as Podcast.net, you automatically get a link back to your Web site. Every little link adds up to help your search ranking.

Podcasts attract links, as we’ve seen, but they are more useful than that. Podcasts are full-fledged members of the content community, so why can’t searchers find your podcast and discover your site that way? After all, you create Web pages to attract links, yes, but search engines can also directly find those pages. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t really “see” your podcasts–yet.

For Google and the mainstream search engines, searching for podcasts is much like searching for images. Google can find a searcher’s keywords on the Web page that describes a podcast but can’t find podcasts that contain those same words in the spoken audio. That means that a searcher can find your podcast from words in the title or the description that you place on your landing page but not from any other words that were said inside the podcast audio file.

Some search engines look for keywords within the metadata that you can encode inside the actual podcast file, using an audio editor such as Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net). The ID3 standard (www.id3.org) for metatags was designed for music files, but it’s the most popular tagging format for podcasts, too. You can use the title and album tags to store the name of your series and the name of your episode, the artist tag to store the name of your podcast’s host, and the year tag for, well, you can probably figure that one out. ID3 also offers a free-form comment field to store a transcript or a URL for more information.

Some podcast search facilities, such as Podcast.net, allow you to provide a title and description to their directory. Similarly, Odeo (http://odeo.com) allows you to claim your podcast and provide a description. No matter the mechanism, make sure you provide the right search keywords so that search engines find the landing page for your podcast. You do that the same way you’d choose the words to use when optimizing any Web page–by choosing the most popular relevant keywords and ensuring they appear.

You might suspect that trying to find 15–20-minute podcasts using only the words in their titles and descriptions leaves a lot to be desired. You’re best served by adding a full text transcript of your podcast to that title an

d description, but for many people, that’s more work than they have time to do.

Wouldn’t it be great if search engines didn’t need that transcript because they understand the spoken words? It’s starting to happen, as a few search engines are expanding their bag of tricks to look for the actual words spoken in the podcast audio. To do that, they translate those spoken words into text.

Nexidia (www.nexidia.com) believes that the best way to make speech searchable is to convert it to phonemes, the speech sounds that correspond to each syllable spoken. Although experts agree that the phonemic approach can be useful for proper names, many believe that true speech recognition–converting audio speech into the actual textual words–provides far better searchability. For example, searching for the name “Stern” might match the phonemes for the words “best earnings” because those words contain the sound “stern” by combining the end of “best” and the beginning of “earnings.” Speech recognition techniques avoid this kind of error by matching the audio to the words “best” and “earnings.” No technique is ever 100 percent accurate, but useful audio search engines based on speech recognition technology are beginning to appear.

EveryZing (www.everyzing.com) is a search engine that uses the BBN speech recognition technology to find the words inside the podcast audio. AOL Search, through technology originally developed by Singingfish and Truveo, employs speech recognition techniques to find words spoken in audio and video files, including podcasts. Blinkx (www.blinkx.com) is another speech recognition search engine that uses technology from Autonomy. Despite this array of interesting technology, however, none of these search capabilities draw many searchers.

What are the mainstream search engines doing? Yahoo! Podcasts is a beta offering that searches explicitly for podcasts but offers no speech recognition capability yet. Reports are rampant that both Google and Yahoo! are hiring speech recognition experts, so stay tuned. Before long, the major search engines may be finding the words inside your podcasts just as they find the words on your Web pages. When they do, expect your podcasts to require the same attention to search optimization that you provide your Web pages today.

So get ahead of the game now. Perform keyword research before you podcast so that you use titles and descriptions on your search landing page that reflect what searchers are looking for. Moreover, carefully choose the vocabulary of the podcast to also reflect searchers’ keywords. That way, you’ll be ready for the speech recognition techniques from audio search engines as they become mainstream.

Videos
Videos provide the richest way to send a message to your customers, and they might cost less than you expect. We saw how the low costs of podcasts can be targeted at far smaller audiences than radio commercials or mailed CDs. Like podcasts, online video is especially important to marketers targeting younger audiences: 42 percent of individuals between the age of 18 and 34 watch video online at least once a week.

Web video is far cheaper than buying a TV ad or shipping around DVDs. The cost of distributing your video is essentially free, which makes more videos affordable than ever before.

Despite the low cost of Web videos, you can’t expect to reach people as easily as you would with a TV commercial. With TV, you merely choose the show that matches your target market, plunk down your cash, and your commercial runs. On the Web, customers usually find your video through search, so search marketing is crucial to getting your message seen.
Just as with image and podcast files, optimizing videos depends on the words you use–the keywords you place in the filename itself, and in the title and description text that surrounds your video on the page. (And, the same advice applies as for podcasts: Place your videos on separate pages, rather than lumping several on the same page.) There’s more that you can do with videos, however, to set yours apart from the rest:

* Optimize your metadata. You can encode your videos with metadata keywords within the “properties” of the video file itself, by using tools such as Autodesk Cleaner (www.autodesk.com). Video search engines frequently rely on this information when deciding which videos to show in the search results (and in what order).
* Get your videos indexed. Some search sites crawl videos along with all other Web content, so placing all your videos in the same directory (as close to the root directory as possible) can help those spiders find everything you’ve got. If you are constantly adding videos, consider setting up a Web feed for videos and ping the search engines each time you add a new one. You can also use a Video Sitemap (www.sitemaps.org) to get the same treatment for your videos that you get for your Web pages. (See Chapter 10 for an in-depth treatment of how a Web feed and a Sitemap help your content get indexed.)

* Submit your videos. Video sharing sites, such as Google’s YouTube (www.youtube.com), allow you to post your videos right on their site. But don’t stop with YouTube. Use TubeMogul (www.tubemogul.com) to submit your clips to over a dozen sites simultaneously (and to track their viewership).

Optimizing your videos for search is not enough, however. Just as getting a #1 ranking for a Web page does not get that page clicked, your video must be watched, not just found. Ensure that videos posted, especially to social networking sites, are marked “public” rather than private. Some video sharing sites allow you some control over the image selected as its thumbnail image–the picture shown before the video is played. Selecting an attractive thumbnail causes more people to watch.

Widgets
Images and videos have been around for decades, and podcasts are nothing more than a special form of audio. But you should expect new forms of media to emerge on the Web. The first important new media to come along are widgets, small pieces of software that you embed on Web pages to perform a function. You can almost think of a widget as a mini-Web site. And just like every Web site can have a different purpose, so can any widget.

Perhaps widgets are easiest to understand through examples. iLike (www.ilike.com) is a special kind of social network that helps members discover new music. Members can embed an iLike widget on their Web sites that plays the most recent songs they’ve listened to on their iPods. As more and more people display this widget, iLike gets more exposure, leading to more ¬members.

More examples abound. Amazon offers widgets that show off the information about any book, allowing the viewer to buy the book with a couple of clicks. Cafepress.com, a personalized publisher, offers a similar widget that displays any of the T-shirts, bumper stickers, and other items for sale, again allowing a quick purchase. Widgets are commonplace on blogs, social networks, and almost any kind of Web site; marketers ought not to overlook this new kind of media.

Search marketers, especially, want to consider the power of widgets. As you see in Figure 16-3 (refer to the book), Google (which insists on calling its widgets “Google Gadgets”) is beginning to show widgets as part of its search results. Others are following suit, including Yahoo!, which is experimenting with something it calls “Search Monkey” that allows site owners to expand their listings with additional content to the searchers who “opt in” for that site’s information.

Widget usage has blossomed in recent years as one of the most passed-around content forms. In the next section, we talk about what you can do to take advantage of social media marketing by persuading your custo

mers to be your brand ambassadors.

Social Media
Social media marketing is not exactly part of search marketing, but most people schooled in search marketing find social media marketing to be a natural extension of what they already do. So much of social media depends on assigning word labels to content items that those skilled in keyword analysis catch on quickly. Here, we look at what social media marketing is, what you can do about it, and how search marketing itself might be affected by it.

Social media marketing is a new name for something old. People tell other people about your products, and social media is simply the newest way they do so. Just like other marketing tactics, word of mouth marketing has moved to the Web. Eighty percent of companies rely on customers to evangelize other customers, and more and more of those interactions happen online–and with a new online name.

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This excerpt is from the new 2nd Ed. of Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site, authored by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt, published by IBM Press, ISBN 0136068685, Copyright 2009 by International Business Machines Corporation. All rights reserved. For more info, and podcasts with Mike and Bill, please visit: www.ibmpressbooks.com/marketing