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:

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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