Well top 10 lists seem to be even more in fashion than they usually are so it’s about time I did one I reckon. If you haven’t already heard about the SEO Meetup going down in Manchester on the 14th/15th September than you’re probably not an SEO geek. I, however, have heard about the meetup and I am an SEO geek. So there.

For more info on the meetup see here: SEO Circuit Manchester Meetup.

10 Reasons I’m attending

1. It’ll be cool to finally meet up with some SEO nerds. I mean Will and Duncan know all about SEO but they’re always on about business-this, and making-money-that. I take pleasure in simply ranking a site number one. While I may never see my name written in neon lights on broadway, getting sites ranked in Google is a close second.
2. It’s in Manchester and I’m in Leeds, it’d be rude not to frankly!
3. Distilled are paying
4. I might just be the youngest kid on the block (at a sprightly soon-to-be 24) and I wouldn’t want to miss a chance to show those old-timers how it’s done.
5. It’ll give me a chance to represent lolcats. LOLCATS4EVUR!!
6. Down at a paltry number 6 on the list: I might even learn something about SEO (STOP PRESS!). While the aim is to be a social event, I’m sure there’ll be a heady mix of SEO knowledge floating around the venue like a cloud of smoke just waiting for you to breathe it in.
7. Brainstorming. We’ve got plenty of ideas here at Distilled which have nothing to do with client work (and often have very little to do with reality!) and by throwing ideas around I’m sure I’ll come away full of crackpot schemes just waiting to be hatched.
8. We’re moving office soon (more on that later) and I seriously need to shift some business cards! Expect to be given more than one “for good measure” if you meet me!
9. Everyone tells me that conferences and events like this are the places you meet real friends rather than simply facebook friends.
10. Did I mention Distilled are paying?

I look forward to seeing everyone there, if you’re going then look out for my ugly mug which you can see here.

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Reputation Monitor has been live now for almost 6 months and while we’ve been toiling away making changes, updating the interface, improving the feed etc it’s been a while since we actually released a whole new upgrade. We were brainstorming in the office about the best way to take the tool to the next level and we decided that we’d let you guys decide!

Our Life Is In Your Hands

So check out our poll, vote for your favourite upgrades/updates and hopefully in the near (ish) future they’ll become real

The poll options explained:

Allow you to thumbs up/thumbs down a story (with reporting)

This would add into the feed a few small icons (probably looking a little like this: ,) which would allow you to’tag’ or ‘vote’ specific stories as ‘positive news’, ‘negative news’ or ‘not about me’. What’s the value in this? Well the point of this is that you would then be able to run reports on all stories which are positive news or negative news.

Provide a daily/weekly email digest option

NEWSFLASH: not everyone in the world uses RSS. Shame on them. I imagine the people reading this post and/or voting in this poll will probably be biased towards those who already use a feed reader but anyway - this option would provide a weekly or daily email which summarises all the stories in that specific monitor.

Flag up all the stories which link to your website

I mentioned this feature briefly when I discovered how useful Rep Monitor is for link building but it’s still not a feature available to everyone. Basically this would highlight or flag up all the stories which link back to your website. Personally, I’ve found this very helpful when performing link building for client projects.

Allow white-labelling

Are you interested in providing an online reputation monitoring service to your clients? Don’t want it to be tied to Distilled? Then this is the option for you. One thing we’re considering is providing a white-labelled version of Reputation Monitor hosted on a seperate domain which could be used by other agencies/companies.

Add an affiliate program

Think we’re missing a trick? Do you have friends/contacts who you think would like to hear about reputation monitor? Need some incentive to get off your lazy ass and tell them about it? How about an affiliate program, allowing you to earn real hard cash for promoting and driving sign-ups to reputation monitor.

Add Your Own

If there’s anything that you’d like to see reputation monitor do, which it doesn’t already do, then add it here or leave a suggestion in the comments. All ideas welcome!

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Yesterday I hit what appears to me to be a completely pointless and arbitrary limit on Google Analytics.

Whenever we create a website on behalf of a client I also create them a google analytics account (under my account). This adds value to all of our clients, who probably wouldn’t know to ask for analytics software, and also helps answer the inevitable questions of “how many hits do I get?”. In the spirit of brutal honesty, it also gives us evidence when we are looking at upselling our web design clients to our search engine optimisation offerings.

Up until a while ago I used to add a new Website Profile to a single global analytics account. To better describe what I meant is a screenshot.

You can add multiple website profiles to each analytics account. The account is the drop down on the right, and the profile is the drop down on the left.

Tying a Google Adwords account to a Google Analytics account

The problem with doing it this way is that you can only tie one Google Adwords account to one Google Analytics account. So if more than one website profile runs adwords you had better give them their own account. (This “feature” always seemed like a bug to me, and I haven’t investigated yet whether it is still the case.)

So in order to tie an adwords account to a website, the website needs its own Analytics account. No problem there, I’ll just make sure each new website I add gets its own account (click “create new account” at the bottom of the drop down menu on the right). If in the future that website wants to run adwords we don’t have to lose the (very important) analytics history we have built up (no you can’t migrate this - we asked).

So rather than taking up any more of your time, i’ll get to the point. You are only allowed to create 25 accounts using a single email address. So now that I have 25 websites, each with their own account I can’t add any more. The solution according to Google?

you can only create up to 25 accounts using a single email address. In case you would like to create more accounts, you can consider using an different email address.

That’s right, you have to create another username to hold another 25 accounts. So 6 months down the line I’ll have have 3 or 4 usernames each with 25 accounts in them. When I want to view the analytics data I have to either remember which username holds the website, or login to each account, have a look until I stumble upon the website in question.

I don’t understand the arbitrary limit. I’d love someone from Google to explain why there is this limit, and either allow adwords accounts to be tied to a website profile within an analytics account, or give me some way (even if I have to request it) of upping the arbitrary limit.

Have a missed something? Is there a better way of setting up my account bearing in mind that we want to be able to tie any website to an adwords account? Or is this just “the way it is”?

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Whilst browsing the web (read procrastinating) I came across this story about a new website designed to tie Wikipedia edits back to the company that made them.

The website created was created by Virgil Griffith who says he created WikiScanner “To create a cornucopia of minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike. “

The website tracks anonymous Wikipedia entries and links them back to an IP address. This means companies who are mis-treating their Wikipedia entries may have a “minor public relations disaster” on their hands.

Websites such as this, and this from wired are making it harder for companies to silently update any negative press about them.

Have you spotted anyone up to no good with wikipedia?

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On friday we sent out two formal job offers, one to a web developer and one to a graphic designer

Without wishing to tempt fate I thought I’d share how we went about recruiting them and a few of the stats we saw along the way.

From advert to job offers in 17 days

We decided that we wouldn’t use any recruitment agencies in order to keep complete control over all aspects of the process. This also meant we could do it to our own timescales which were incredibly short.

Our experience of hiring Emily taught us that despite making it very very clear that we wanted people to spend time writing a decent covering letter we still received around 50 applications via email with a one line “please find my CV attached”. Obviously Emily passed the first test (summed up as “reading the application”) by writing a good and interesting covering letter.

Our preferred way of hiring follows the following steps. This is designed to make it as easy as possible for the right person to apply, whilst making it hard for anyone who would just be wasting our time (and their time for that matter).

10 Steps to recruiting

1. Write a job specification
2. Write a set of questions to help narrow down your applicants. Tie these questions into the type of person you want to hire. If you want a techy, write techy questions, if you want someone who will fit in well write questions that will help work out what the person is like. - We based our questions on this excellent article by Matt over at SEOmoz - Interviewing Web Developers - 20 Good Questions to Ask
3. Create an online form for people to answer your questions. We used wufoo a fantastic site that removes all the hassle from creating forms such as these.
   1. Graphic Designer
   2. Web Developer
4. Post the adverts on relevant sites that will bring you the type of person you are looking for. We were recruiting for a graphic designer so the University of the Arts - London is a perfect choice. We also posted the advert on Gumtree
5. Sit back and watch the applications come flooding in. Actually that wasn’t quite the case - forcing people to think about the application and come up with answers to questions seemed to be doing the trick.
   1. Of the ~950 form views we received 48 applications (split fairly evenly across both jobs). So only around 1 in 20 of people who viewed the form actually submitted it.
   2. Personally I think this is a great result. It means that we have filtered out the people to lazy too fill in the form, and those that decided perhaps they weren’t quite up to the job. I’m sure it also filtered out some good people who for whatever reason didn’t fill in the form, but thats a price I’m willing to pay.
6. With the applications safely tucked away in wufoo it is easy to read the answers and narrow it down to those who sound like they will fit into your company.
7. Invite these people to interview. We emailed 7 people late on a Wednesday evening and first thing Thursday asking if they could make an interview that Friday. This wasn’t another test, we just wanted to move things quickly. To be honest I was quite shocked when all but one were available.
8. Write out a list of interview questions. Include a couple that you have already asked them to answer as this helps ensure they are consistent.
9. Run the interviews. Will and I have now run around 25 interviews and still don’t profess to be great at them. What we have found works well is for one person to be the question answerer (that’s me) and for one person to take notes. This worked a lot better than when we both tried to ask the questions and take notes, as you end up losing track and not really listening whilst your long hand catches up.
10. Work out your favourite and offer them the job!
11. Once you have official acceptance of the job, tell the other applicants that they were unsuccessful this time. We have said that we will contact those we have interviewed, but the wufoo form we created said we would only contact those people we wanted to interview.

Because of our situation we ended up doing steps 1 - 10 in 17 days. This would have been down to around 11 - 12 except one of the interviewees was on holiday!

Just one final thing to say is that the person we have offered the graphic design job to was stuck in a monster traffic jam travelling about 5 miles in 6 hours. We ended up rescheduling her 12:30 interview for 6:00 that evening (it was the only time we could do) and even so they only just made it. We are very glad they did.

So now its your turn, how can we make this process even better? What do you do differently? What works best for you? What are your experiences of Recruitment agencies (apart from being receiving more cold calls than from any other industry, except perhaps cleaners)?

Updated to fix a formatting issue with the list

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I’m really excited today to be quoted in a Sunday Times article called Don’t start up without research by Rachel Bridge, all about how to do market research (we contributed to the bits about how to do online market research) and I’m quoted as saying:

The internet has opened up amazing opportunities for small firms to get access to data and carry out market research that they simply would have not been able to do a few years ago.

And, as much of it is free, it means that small start-up businesses have as much of a chance as bigger competitors of finding the information they need.

The article also uses one of our clients, bizunlimited, as a case study.

This is my first experience of being mentioned in a national newspaper and I could get used to it - it’s good to see Distilled in print! If you’re in the UK, you can find us in the printed edition on page 10 of the business section.

All the things we’ve been up to recently

Since we’re blowing our own trumpet in this post, I thought it would be a good time to run through a quick list of other recent news:

• Reputation Monitor, our tool for monitoring what is said about your company online (with a month’s free trial) continues to gather subscribers and we are putting in place plans to roll out the next round of improvements (including some useful reports)
• Our ebook How to make PR work online is now available to buy online for £25 (and yes, it is a little ironic that we haven’t got a link from the Sunday Times article - we’ll have to have a word with them!)
• We are hoping to move into a bigger and better office soon (we have our eye on a fantastic one and are just trying to hash out the details with the agent)
• We really need to get the move sorted as we need the space - we are hiring for two positions and Duncan and I spent the entirety of Friday in interviews - watch this space

Please stay in touch - if you have arrived here from our very sporadic email newsletter, then the best way to hear all our news as it happens is to subscribe to the blog (see below).

Subscribe to the blog via RSS

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For public companies, the stock price is one facet of their reputation that is very easily tracked. Following on from a number of conversations I’ve had recently, I have become more and more interested in the effect off news (and gossip and buzz) on share prices.

At some point, I hope to be able to publish a case study on the effect of blog buzz on share price - I think this will be likely to come about only when we have happened to have been monitoring a public company’s reputation through a crisis or release of some great news. It is hard to reconstruct these kinds of effects after the fact.

A starting point, though is to look for correlations between a company’s share price movements and online news volumes. In order to find an interesting case study for this, I looked through the recent histories of a few shares and settled on the period in January this year when Apple (symbol: AAPL) released the iPhone. This is interesting because shortly after the release of information that exerted an upward pressure on the share price, Cisco sued over the name (which is identical to the trademarked name of one of their own products - the companies have since agreed to kiss and make up).

Google finance shows a good summary of the performance on NASDAQ of AAPL through the year and most of the data used in this analysis is sourced there.

News volumes in January 2007

The chart below shows online news volumes for major stories (along with associated sentiment) through January 2007 for Apple. It has been normalised so that the day of the greatest discussion shows as ‘1′.

AAPL stock price movements in January 2007

In order to do my best to remove effects from the wider market, I took the closing prices for AAPL stock through Januray 2007 and rebased them to a starting point of 100. I did the same for the value of the NASDAQ index over the same period. Subtracting the NASDAQ movements from the AAPL movements left those movements that can be genuinely attributed to Apple. The data you see plotted below is the movement of the stock price (so a positive number is an increase the price). In order to be able to compare it side-by-side with news volumes, this was also normalised so that the greatest movement in any given day shows as ‘1′.

News and stock price movements side by side

Plotting these two sources of data side by side is interesting:

As my stats professors would like to remind me (and as the freakonomics guys tell us) , correlation is not evidence of causality. I am not trying to say that online news sources caused the share price movements we see (the underlying story and offline media will obviously play a major role). It is interesting (and as it should be, in an efficient market) that practically all the major movements in the share price are accompanied with equivalent news.

I am looking forward to being able to do this analysis in real time with blog buzz volumes as there is some evidence that looking at intra-day movements, blog buzz can actually come before the share price movement.

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It’s been a while, but I am pleased to give you the next in the series of Reputation Wars, where we take two big brand names and compare their online reputation. I have changed the format from the last one, which was our comparison of McDonald’s and Burger King because this time we’re comparing two companies with generally better reputations.

Given the recent furore around the collaboration between British Airways and Virgin Atlantic in setting fuel charges I thought these two giants would make a good comparison.

Scoring a company’s online reputation.

To compare these brands we have looked at the first 20 results for a search for their name. I am comparing the results returned from Google.co.uk (since they are both British companies, and this is where the fine was handed out) and have taken screenshots so you can play along at home.

We looked at each of the results and put them into one of three categories. From a reputation perspective we think there are 3 types of results.

1. Those that the company in question owns
2. Those that the company doesn’t own but are either positive, neutral or not about the company
3. Those that the company doesn’t own but are negative.

Our favourite quote that we trot out on occasions such as these is:

7 out of 10 British consumers will not click through to a company’s website if search results contain negative comments about them. e-consultancy.com

From a reputation point of view what harms a brand is negative results in the search engines. When deciding whether a result is positive or negative we have used only the title and the snippet shown in the google results. This could mean that when you click through the page is negative but the result doesn’t show it that way.

From a pure reputation managment point of view, you should obviously care about negative results, but the idea of this analysis is just to look at the first impressions in the search results.

British Airways reputation

The results are as follows (click to enlarge)

1. www.britishairways.com - Owned
2. www.britishairways.com/travel/home/public/en_gb - Owned
3. www.baworldcargo.com - Owned
4. www.baworldcargo.com/tracking - Owned
5. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways - Positive
6. www.britishairwaysjobs.com - Owned
7. www.britishairways.no - Owned
8. www.baa.com - Positive
9. www.oneworld.com/ow/member-airlines/british-airways - Owned
10. www.baholidays.com/packages/ - Owned
11. www.foxnew.com/story/0,2933,291304,00.html - Negative
12. www.bavirtual.co.uk - Owned
13. ocaoimh.ie/tag/british-airways/ - Negative
14. www.bafc.co.uk - Owned
15. www.londoneye.com - Owned
16. www.britishairwaysrfc.co.uk - Owned
17. www.topix.net/com/bab - Positive
18. www.worldtracer.aero/filedsp/ba.htm - Positive
19. www.gbairways.com - Positive
20. www.flybmi.com/bmed - Positive

As you can see there are a couple of negative results here - but these have been pushed down to the second page. There are a couple of results on the first page that BA doesn’t control, but these are either not about them or they are positive.

To allow us to compare the two sets of results, we give them a score out of 50. This is based on the type of result (Positive, Negative, Owned) and how high up the results it appears (how influential (to the searcher) it is).

British Airways gets a fairly respectable score of 42 / 50.

Virgin Atlantic reputation

The Virgin results are as follows ( click thumnails to enlarge )

1. www.virgin-atlantic.com - Owned
2. www.virgin.com - Owned
3. virgin.com/uk/default.asp - Owned
4. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Atlantic_Airways - Positive
5. www.virginatlanticglobalflyer.com - Owned
6. www.flyingwithoutfear.info - Owned
7. www.v-flyer.com - Owned
8. www.virginatlanticflights.com - Owned
9. gs19.globalsuccessor.com/fe/tpl_virgin01.aps?newms=hm - Owned
10. www.airlinequality.com/Forum/vir_atl.htm - Positive
11. www.cheapflights.co.uk/airlines/virgin-atlantic.html - Positive
12. www.forbes.com/forbeslife…etc - Positive
13. www.forbes.com/forbeslife…etc - Positive
14. www.virginatlanticglobalflyer.com/MissionControl/Tracking/ - Owned
15. farechase.yahoo.com/airlines/virgin_atlantic-214281 - Positive
16. www.engaget.com/2007/01/17…etc - Positive
17. www.virginmobile.co.za/…etc - Owned
18. www.cheapflights.com/airlines/virginatlantic.html - Positive
19. www.fastcompany.com/…etc - Positive
20. www.usatoday.com/…etc - Negative

Virgin continue the trend we saw above by owning most of the first page of results. On to the second page there is a slightly different story. Virgin owns less of the second page results but you have to go all the way to the 20th result before the first negative result is found.

Our calculation gives Virgin a score of 44 / 50

Comparing the online reputation with the actual reputation

To make things a bit more fair, we are also interested in the actual reputation of the companies we are looking at. This is to ensure that a company that has hidden any negative press is still found out. It is interesting to us to find companies with bad reputations that have been covered up with some good reputation management.

To give a very rough score for how well a company is liked we compare the number of results for “I love brand name” with “I hate brand name”. We converted this ratio into a score out of 50.

The results

“I love British Airways” - 436 results “I hate British Airways” - 172 results

Which gives British Airways a score of 36 / 50

“I love Virgin Atlantic” - 597 results “I hate Virgin Atlantic” - 3 results

Virgin Atlantic end up with a fantastic (49.75 rounded up to) 50 / 50

The Reputation Wars winner is…

Winning in both our tests Virgin Atlantic has a better online reputation than British Airways, and takes this competition with a final score of:

British Airways comes (a not particularly close) second with a final score of:

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We’ve been writing quite a lot about other topics recently and I thought it was time for a return to our core topic of reputation monitoring and management.

Much of reputation management is (or should be) a pre-emptive process - the best results are attainable if you start the process before the firestorm - but by necessity, the monitoring is an ongoing process because you need to be constantly aware of what is being said about your company and brand. We are strong advocates of monitoring everything, because one thing blogs are proving again and again is that stories can blow up remarkably quickly from small starting points.

This makes it important, in our opinion, to monitor everything said about you and at least glance over it to determine whether to take any action. In the vast majority of cases, the answer will be ‘no’, you can safely let it lie if you have more important things to do (though we have had great success with having clients engage with anyone who writes anything positive about them - even if you only do this for a short period of time, you can build a great groundswell of positive support - support that helps in your general marketing efforts and should help you if you ever find yourself in the middle of a reputation nightmare).

Hopefully, you have a policy of monitoring everything and analysing certain stories for the need to take further action. We would suggest having policies for all these things in place during your planning phase - the time for policy creation is not when the story is breaking all around you. It’s hard sometimes, though, to decide where to engage - especially with a limited budget in the face of a lot of discussion.

Enter your analytics software.

Most analytics software allows you to set up a report to be emailed to you regularly. I wrote recently about the reports you should make sure Google Analytics sends you. By making sure you get a report of new referring sites, you will get a very good idea of where the most buzz is happening. If you can only engage in some places, making sure you have at least analysed the highest-traffic places makes sense.

In Google Analytics, the report you want to set up is ‘Referring Sites’ under the ‘Traffic Sources’ menu. Have this emailed to you every day or every week depending on your priorities and scan it quickly for new sources of traffic (any less frequently than this and not only will you be too slow for any breaking stories, but also you will find it hard to spot new sources of traffic). If you spot something that you haven’t picked up any other way, you can log in and drill down further through the report and find the exact page that is sending you the visitors. Go and visit that site and check out what is being said - hopefully you will have picked this up and assessed it through your regular monitoring, but this provides you with a great fallback and also focusses your attention on the higher-traffic areas.

Although we created (and therefore use) Reputation Monitor, a tool for monitoring blogs, we are always on the look-out for new ways to improve our monitoring. If you have any tips, please get in touch!

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I have just upgraded the blog to the latest version of Wordpress

It all appears to be working, but if you spot any funny business, please let us know.

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