This post is about Twitter, so for the benefit of those are not yet addicted - here’s a brief overview of the service.

Although Twitter has been around for years, and has been growing steadily over that time, one feature they never really implemented was Search. If you wanted to find out who had mentioned a particular term recently, you had the choice of using a creative Google query, or one of a number of external sites that used Twitter’s comprehensive API.

That changed last week, when Twitter bought Summize - amongst the most popular search tools for the site, and rebranded it Twitter Search. (Naturally, many people asked why Twitter needed to buy Summize, and didn’t spend the $15 million on developing their own kick-ass search tool; discussion of that could fill another blog post.)

Back on the topic of this post: maybe because Twitter has reached a size where companies care what is said by its users, or maybe it’s because the Summize acquisition put their Search function in to the limelight, but there have been a number of companies/organisations using Twitter Search in creative ways recently.

Who’s talkin’ ’bout your reputation?

Since I spend a great proportion of my time looking after Reputation Monitoring for clients, it’s great that it’s now so easy to stick in their brand or product names, and see what people are saying about them.

Some companies are taking a proactive approach to dealing with the results they find. I noticed this last week, when a Twitter contact knew about a design competition site, but couldn’t remember the URL. I replied with details of the site, and then received a ‘thankyou’ message from the company.

Intrigued, I had a look at their feed, and it seems that they are not only replying to everyone who mentions the company name, but to anyone who mentions ‘web design’ , ‘logo’ or a number of other terms. Very clever, very easy, and I’d love to know if they’ve seen a good response and conversion rate from this.

This method of interaction is really well suited to a company which solves a problem that people are likely to complain about publicly - I could imagine a national cable internet provider monitoring for tweets that include terms like “slow broadband” or “lame internet” etc.

Equally, it could probably be cool for someone who can answer a specific question. If someone mentions that they were “wondering what DVD to rent tonight” - then Blockbuster should be down on them like a shot with a suggestion of a good movie and a link to the store locator.

The News in Brief

At the end of last week, I discovered a further example that’s on display. When I mentioned that I was working on a new Twitter tool, I noticed a reply from the Tw* Tool Tracker account. The account gave my tool a few mentions (which is great - they have 600 followers) but they do very well out of it too. As a niche news site, they have two million people all potentially generating leads for stories, or even scoops, that they can follow up.

For instance, traffic & travel services often differentiate themselves on the speed that they can pick up on and report hold ups. A quick look on Twitter Search gives an indication of any trouble that people are reporting.

Likewise, if you’re looking for attendees at an event or eyewitnesses to a breaking news story, you could find people on Twitter.

Of course, the power of extracting content from the site can be used for evil as well as good. LessAccounting have created an entire site that bashes their competitor using nothing but people’s Twitter updates.

As more people join Twitter (I’m certain this will happen) and more companies realise the potential for interaction (I expect this will happen) we should see some more creative uses for the search tool - maybe through crowdsourcing their news gathering, by identifying customers (existing and potential) to deal with, or in ways that we’ve not seen yet.

Do you know anyone else who’s doing clever things at the moment? Can you think or any companies that are missing a trick by not being involved?

There’s little that’s more exciting online at the moment than the viral hype surrounding The Dark Knight. It was pure luck that when Emily stuck a post-it on my desk today that said ‘working??’ as I watched the trailer for it, that I could (this time- ahem), reply with something along the lines of:

Beautiful. Except that’s not really what this post’s turned out to be (although there are similar elements). Instead, I’ve looked at the effectiveness of viral marketing for films such as The Dark Knight, and considered how this could be transferred to businesses operating online.

Engagment:

The Dark Knight is engaging its future audience on a whole new level. Other films, most notably Cloverfield, laid the groundwork for this process. A friend of mine was tuned into the Cloverfield phenomenon from the off, and blogged about how much more he got from the film because of the “little nods and winks to the internet frenzy throughout”. It’s more than feeling like you’re in the ‘in-crowd’ and superior to other viewers; it’s about feeling like you’re actually part of the conversation.

As demonstrated by Dell’s Ideastorm, this kind of engagment with the consumer from an actual, believable business perspective, really works.

Another example (that fits extraordinarily well) is Domino’s attempt to cash in on The Dark Knight’s online success. The idea was that fans had to have ordered a pizza online within the last 48 hours to be able to view the latest trailer. Engagement at its finest. And it would have been genius if only you couldn’t also watch the clip on YouTube.

Viral:

Above and beyond this ‘customer engagement’ however, what’s particularly clever about viral marketing for films is that it is, by definition, something that spreads infectiously. In terms of cost, it’s negligible compared to traditional forms of marketing and has the potential to bring in a huge, dedicated audience. The Dark Knight has all the ingredients to appeal to an online audience, and that includes me. Believe me when I say however, that my twin sister (the ‘control’ in this little experiment, if you will), is not part of that online audience. But when I started raving to her about The Dark Knight and its viral presence, not only did she get excited, she’d actually heard of it!

Is this a sign of things to come? Of our beloved niche social media finally spreading its wings and launching itself into the mainstream?

And what effect does it have for businesses online? It means that they can start appealing to social media sites for custom rather than just links. The recent live Honda ad is a perfect example of how well this could work. The skydiving advert appealed to traditional audiences by appearing on television first, but was also perfectly designed to grab the attention of online fans- YouTube alone amassed hundreds of thousands of views. And, just as with true online viral marketing, the cost involved (a reputed £500,000 including sandwiches for the crew) is nothing compared to “the PR column inches alone hyping the one-off event”. And then some. I wonder if any of those thousands of viewers will henceforth favour the Honda as a result.

Loyalty:

With The Dark Knight, fans who were loyal enough to spot the addresses, visit the bakery and eat the cake were rewarded with an almost godlike status within The Dark Knight buzz. Why is this technique so effective at generating attention online?

It’s a completely natural feeling to enjoy working for something in order to achieve a certain right or privilege. The idea of customer loyalty for businesses has been around offline for ages. For example, shop loyalty cards are ever more popular and, while the cost benefits they offer us are nothing compared to the value of the data they collect for the company’s market research team, there’s something very addictive about them. However, simply moving this online would not be the same as the idea of loyalty expressed above.

I think the secret lies in combining all three of these features- engagement, virality and loyalty.

I’m obviously not the first person to point out that online marketing has massive potential to build brand, attract new customers and improve relations with existing ones (particularly within the tech world, for obvious reasons). But there’s also the opportunity to make some money directly from these sites. Imagine if, for example, a chain such as Starbucks had a really really cool game online that was carefully designed to appeal to social media audiences and had discount coffees as a prize:

1. Engagement? Tick. Customers could be involved in any stage of the development, launch or participation of the game.
2. Viral? Tick. Fabulous content always has the potential to spread fabulously.
3. Loyalty? Tick. Your customers use their skill to earn a discount. They’ll/I’d love it.

The dangers:

There is, however, a fairly serious risk of alienating your online audience should your social media efforts fail. Like this.

Digg users, as a generic example, are notoriously fickle and have both the ability and the nature to destroy an online presence, particularly if there’s money involved. Is this a risk worth taking for your business? Absolutely.

I don’t normally get annoyed enough that I actually feel compelled into putting pen to paper, or fingers to keys to write about my experience, however Dabs have annoyed me so much over the last week that I simply have to rant.

I’m sure we will talk more about it over the coming weeks but on Monday we had someone new join Distilled. The previous Wednesday I placed an order with Dabs for a computer, extra graphics card and two monitors, paying via Google checkout. This was ordered with next day delivery.

Not long after I received an email asking me to send details verifying my address details (we have just moved office, again). I replied to the email and received a Dabs auto reply confirming they had my email.

The following day, no computer. To cut a very long (and I’ll admit, not particularly interesting) story short, I’ll skip the next couple of days where the only replies I got to email were stock answers saying they hadn’t received the information they asked for. I never did get a reply to the email where I forwarded my previous reply, along with the confirmation they sent me.. Funny that.

So fast forward to Monday, still no computer. I went to the dabs site and finally found the dabs live chat via the website (you have to click on one of the stock questions before you get a link).

I chatted with Derek 1017 for a while. He gave me a couple of stock answer basically saying he couldn’t help with any of my questions.

I pointed out no-one had replied to my email since Thursday, which lead to this interesting response:

They have advised us this morning that they are currently responding to emails from Thursday 3/7/08.

Nothing odd in that except that the website states the average email response time for the last 24 hours was 6 hours 11 minutes. Lies, lies, lies….

I’m happy to announce I cancelled the order, and there will have to be a very good reason for me to ever trust Dabs again. I can honestly say that was the worst customer service I have ever experienced. I don’t normally mind email only customer services, but 4 days to reply to email.. You are having a laugh.

I was recently contacted by Björn Wigeman who is head of international development at Veosearch - a charity search engine that has just launched in the UK. They are trying to encourage people to use them as their regular search engine in order to give some money to charity as they search.

Since I wasn’t familiar with them, I had a quick chat with Björn and put together the following interview to give everyone a little background.

Just to prove that it does work, the picture below shows Guillaume and Arthur on the left and right (founders of Veosearch - see below) giving a cheque to the head of direct marketing at WWF in France:

Without further ado, into the questions:

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Tell me a bit about what inspired Veosearch

Guillaume and Arthur started VeoSearch just about a year ago because they wanted to help the voluntary sector especially within Sustainable Development. Their goal was to create a benefit for charities and NGOs through people’s everyday activities whilst being free and open to everyone.

Where does the money go - what proportion do you manage to give to charities and how are those charities chosen?

In the UK, we are currently working with around 50 charities (British Red Cross, SOS Children’s Villages, Care International, Fairtrade Foundation and many more). Every user chooses itself which charity or charities he/she wants to support. For each search he then makes, 50 % of the revenues goes to that or those charities.

Which search engine powers your results by default? Which do users use the most?

We have recently gone into an exclusive deal with Yahoo. They understand our values and the deal really benefits us and our partner charities. The results our users get from searching on our site is the best there is.

How much do you think about optimising your site for the other search engines - e.g. for people searching for ‘charity search engine’ at Google or Yahoo!? Note that I haven’t done detailed keyword research, but on the assumption that charity search engine is a good phrase, that was the anchor text I chose for Veosearch’s link above

As we are a start-up still, we can’t afford such luxury yet. By letting our partner charities post information on us and cross-link to their websites, we hope to drive more trafic both to them and to us.

What other marketing do you do - do you run PPC advertising? Across which countries? Is there anything else you can tell us about this?

On our site, we use the same sponsored links as Yahoo, but other than that we don’t drive any online marketing at the moment. We want this to spread organically and are working close to the media.

What growth have you experienced and what are your ambitions for what happens next? How big do you think your search engine could become?

In France we have become market leaders within 5 months. For our launch in the UK, we expect to grow even faster. Other search engines working for charitable causes in the UK are powered by weaker search engines and people seem to leave them to return to their usual search engine after a while. If we keep on growing as we’ve had so far, the sky is really the limit.

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It’s going to be interesting to see where Veosearch goes - we’ll have to watch out for them in our analytics and the analytics of our clients. I wish them all the best and look forward to hearing an update later in the year.

For people working in the Online Reputation Management industry, this month has been quite politically focussed - and the same is true for the ORM team here at Distilled, having just launched Online Reputation Management for Politicians.

In America, with the Presidential race stumbling into action, character assassination is a likely tactic over the next few months. Barak Obama’s team have already announced a new unit to tackle any any inappropriate rumours against him online. Earlier in the month he showed an understanding of the way the internet was being used against him, discussing dedicated blogs and viral emails that make various outrageous claims about his past and his campaign. The new team will be monitoring for and responding to problems as they arise. The Times quoted a spokeswoman, Jen Psaki:

The only way to run a campaign is to respond immediately when inaccurate information is put out.

An early part of their strategy has been the launch of Fight the Smears, which Wired.com referred to as ‘his own personal Snopes.’

By contrast, John McCain’s PR team were successfully deployed in the 1990s to manage negative stories, but in the new millennium they have struggled to recognize the damage that could be done by stories and slander being shared online.

Although it might seem incredible to readers of this and other blogs, it is an understandable position to have ended up in. Although many older people - as I’m broadly assuming those in Team McCain are - use the internet, they’re likely to be less inclined to stray from the bigger news sites, shops and portals into the sometimes confusing and even scary worlds of social media and blogging.

Sadly, even the best PR teams can overlook the new media - not long ago, whilst discussing Reputation Management with an established UK PR agency, we were surprised to hear from them, that “no one cares about the internet. It doesn’t matter what people say there.“

Wow. I know more than a few people who might disagree, and I’m sure you do too.

New Services for Politicians

Distilled’s political week began with the launch of our Political Reputation Management services. This package of services combines our reputation management and search engine optimisation skills with our experience in a niche that we know a fair bit about. The aim is to help politicians gain visibility online, and to monitor for and combat any unfairly negative or slanderous stories.

The anonymity offered by blogging, or simply commenting on others’ websites, sometimes leads people to write without the same thought that they’d put into an offline letter or article. This leads to a potentially dangerous situation where people are happy to create and repeat rumours, that can quickly become conventional wisdom.

A chain-email about Barak Obama is a case in point - after gaining ground online, the story ended up on TV news before it was debunked.

Will - regular readers will know him as a director at Distilled - had the chance to discuss some of the work that we do for politicians in an article in new magazine Total Politics this week. Will has previously discussed why online reputation management can be so difficult for politicians in particular, and in the new article had a chance to expand on a number of topics. Firstly, they asked him more about online activity in the recent London Mayoral elections.

“The first name to come up in a natural search for ‘the Mayor of London’ was Boris Johnson rather than then incumbent mayor Ken Livingstone. Boris had a powerful campaign team but as an incumbent you expected to find Ken at the top of any search.”

In a discussion about Wikipedia (the online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit), Will covered the potential circular nature of the internet and print media relying on each other for research:

“Wikipedia can become authoritative, giving ‘right’ answers, in fact journalists have been known to use this to check facts, and when it appears in papers people say ‘well it’s definitely true it was in the papers’.”

If you’d like to improve your online reputation, but don’t need us to step in and help just yet, you may be interested in some tips that Will shares on SEOMoz.

We’ll continue to be busy for the foreseeable future with work in this new, and interesting, niche of ORM - though unfortunately we won’t be able to share any of the juicy inside stories with you. In the meantime, keep an eye online to see which is the next big political story to break online, or who the next MP to join Twitter is.

So it’s been a bit quiet recently which is a shame. We’ll try and rectify that with some lolcats insightful posts soon.

But what have we been up to while it’s been quiet? That’s a good question, glad you asked!

Firstly, Will and I went to Seattle to SMX Advanced which was an awful lot of fun. We both picked up some great tips so thanks to the organisers and speakers for putting on a fantastic show. While we were there we managed to hang out with SEOmoz which. Needless to say that was fun

One of the hot topics of the conference was cloaking, whether it’s allowed, not allowed, recommended, not recommended etc etc. Matt Cutts announced that Google had changed their official guidelines for cloaking so Will put up a response on SEOmoz basically saying that their guidelines suck if you do any geo-location based IP delivery. Fun reading!

One of the best sessions at Advanced was the Give It Up session where some of the top names in the industry shared some of their favourite secret tips. There’s a 30 day embargo on anyone reporting what was said but needless to say some of them were AMAZING. Back at the ‘moz offices there was a collection of SEOs so we decided to shoot our very own version of give it up which features both Will and I. It was an awful lot of fun! Needless to say, some of the tips are blackhat and shouldn’t be tried at home folks :-p

Stuck back here in rainy England Duncan decided it was about time he weighed in on the whole geo-location stuff so put up a post exploring how Apple ranks internationally and how they miss out on some UK traffic. Quite technical but insightful nonetheless.

Hi all

Many thanks to everyone who entered our Big PPC Competition for the Myanmar Cyclone Appeal with World Vision.

The competition is now closed and we’ll keep you updated on our progress. At the moment, we are arranging the ad campaign with World Vision and should have it running fairly soon. Once set up, we should have a much better idea of how long our (kindly supplemented) budget will last and therefore a better idea of the results date!

In the meantime, check out the new prizes in the original blog post.

Thanks again to all who entered.

(Jeremy, if you send us some contact details we should be able to enter you into the competition.)

So, as promised, over the last couple of weeks we have been running a Crazy Egg test on the Distilled site. You may have noticed quite a dramatic change to the home page: we have brought our four main focuses of work out of the main menu into bold call-to-action buttons. This helps people to see more clearly our main areas of expertise without having to read the much smaller text in the menu. We used the Crazy Egg test to monitor 1000 visitors on the Distilled home page, for two separate designs.

The first design (our old home page). The majority of clicks were on the ‘Contact Us’ and ‘Company’ links. A spattering of clicks were evenly distributed between our four main areas of expertise, both within the menu bar and the reputation management feature on the right hand side. Hardly any one clicked on the Distilled logo.

The new design with bold call-to-actions was launched on 20/05/08. It is clear that the call-to-action buttons have been a success. The main body of clicks now seems to be divided between the call-to-actions and the top navigational menu. However, as more users get used to the new design I wonder if the ratio of clicks between the main menu and the call-to-actions will verge more towards the call-to-actions.

It would be useful to monitor whether the number of people who clicked on any of the links increased. This would indicate that a higher percentage of people understood the options available to them. People tend not to spend long on a page so it is imperative that at a glance your users know what their options are. Hopefully the call-to-action buttons will help that. If this is true, we should see a decrease in the bounce rate of people landing on the homepage and immediately leaving it. This will be difficult to gauge in this instance as, during our second test, we had our team building day. The buzz surrounding this caused our click through rate for that day (and a few of the following) to greatly increase above normal figures. The team building day may also mean that people tended to click links that they may not normally have done.

Only time will tell as to whether this new feature will permanently increase our click through rate and indeed consequently boost new custom.

Right folks- it’s competition time!

Premise: we want to do something to mark the launch of our brand spanking new suite of PPC tools. We also want to do our bit to help out with the Myanmar (Burma) cyclone appeal, and thought the best way we could do this would be to play to one of our strengths. We’re referring, of course, to the exciting world of PPC advertising.

The genius solution? Read on…

First up: the competition.

You guys compete to write the best PPC ad for charity. That’s the short version…

You (yes, you) write a blog post about the competition and include your ad in the copy- you should link to it in our comments so we know you want to enter. The purpose of your post is to spread the word about the Myanmar (Burma) cyclone appeal- there’s no need to link to our blog (unless you really really want to!). To reiterate: over and above the actual ad campaign, your blog will help raise awareness.

We’ll put all the ad entries into a campaign with the Myanmar (Burma) cyclone donation page on World Vision as the landing page- deadline is Friday 13th June.

We’re putting up the budget to run the PPC campaign for a limited time. Obviously the longer we can run the campaign the better as it will lead to more donations (and more statistical significance for the adverts!). So if anyone is interested in contributing to the PPC budget please get in touch.

The ad that performs the best and drives the most amount of traffic wins.

Secondly: the prize.

Not to blow our own trumpet or anything, but this is a pretty cool prize. If your ad performs the best, you will win this rather wonderful collection of goodies:

• A year signed up to our Reputation Monitor tool, pro level.
• 3 months premium membership with the one and only SEOmoz. This prize was kindly donated by SEOmoz (which means we can spend more on the ad campaign!)
• A copy of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day By Avinash Kaushik
• A Distilled hoody (limited edition)
• 3 months free access to Acquisio Search and an Acquisio t-shirt from the nice guys at Acquisio
• 3 months license to Ranksense from Hamlet Batista
• A signed copy of Radically Transparent from Andy Beal
• 2 year subscription to GoStat Pro from Richard at GoStats.com
• We’ll do a follow up post on you and your ad, explaining why we think it got to the top.

Of course, you’ll also be winning in the sense that any efforts you make should be helping to increase the amount of aid going to the cyclone victims in Myanmar (Burma).

Next up: details.

We’re going to foot the bill for the PPC campaign for a short while.

World Vision are a client of ours and we have arranged this one-off PPC campaign with them as a product of our team building day. All ads submitted will have to be run past them first. Using your common sense should be enough to make sure your ad passes muster. Once approved, your ad will be run from either Distilled or World Vision’s Google Ads account.

Ads need to follow the Google Ads format: 25 characters headline (1st line), 35 characters 2nd line, 35 characters 3rd line.

You can submit up to three ads. However, we may have to limit the number depending on the take-up, so make sure you rank your submissions.

The landing page you’ll be sending traffic to is http://www.worldvision.org.uk/.

We’ve decided to just bid on one keyphrase: ‘Myanmar cyclone appeal’

The deadline for submissions is two weeks this Friday- that’s the 13th June.

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That’s it folks. Don’t forget to leave a comment with a link to your post and the adverts you want to compete with.

Update

Great feedback from everyone already for this competition, the following people contributed to the ad budget:

• $100 added to the ad budget from David Mihm
• $200 added to the ad budget from Hamlet Batista
• $100 added to the ad budget from Dylan at Brilliant Prints

And the following people have chipped in extra prizes (which I’m inserted into the list above as well):

• 3 months free access to Acquisio Search, as well as a t-shirt form the nice guys at Acquisio
• 3 month license of RankSense Professional from Hamlet Batista.
• Andy Beal has thrown in a signed copy of his book Radically Transparent. Signed! Cool.
• Richard from GoStats.com has given a 2 year Pro subscription.

Awesome!! Thanks very much to everyone who’s donated so far and thanks to all the guys who’ve blogged about it

Here’s a short video of exactly what we got up to in our team-build-2.0 lunch break last Thursday. Will was the cameraman and Leonie put it all together.

Feat. Duncan (aka The Lunger), Emily (’so, um, what are our aims for this afternoon?’) and Will (’PPC tools!!’). Keep your eyes peeled for the guest appearance (the man next door who quite obviously wishes he worked for Distilled).

For a refresher on what happened last Thursday, check out our Team Building Mission Accomplished post.