Tom recently posted on SEOmoz about the nature of online communities and we got in touch with Richard Millington at Feverbee to find out a bit more about the subject. Rich is an expert in building online communities and is currently working with Seth Godin in New York.

Before we get stuck in, a big thank you to Rich, who answered our questions very thoughtfully and thoroughly. There’s some really useful stuff here; read on to find out Rich’s thoughts on how to become an irresistible expenditure to clients, the importance of online communities for SEO and how to come up with ideas that work.

At 15, I became addicted to an online computer game called Counter-Strike. At the time all the online communities about Counter-Strike were exactly that, communities about Counter-Strike. They talked about the new guns in version 1.3, showed screenshots of the new levels in design. None discussed what mattered most, the people playing games.

Myself and a few began starting communities talking about the top teams and players. We talked about the rivalries. If a top player decided to change teams, that was a big scoop. Before a major event we would create previews of how they thought they would do, we reported on their preparations and highlights the key fixtures. We did play by play analyses of the top-games. We even had commentators for the bigger events.

It fostered an amazing spirit of community. In the summer of 2002, about 800 gamers stayed up until 4am to watch the top UK team compete live (over the internet) in the quarter-finals of the world championships. That’s community!

Today all the big gaming sites do this. If you ever need inspiration about building online communities, I would start at places like Gotfrag and SK-Gaming.

I went on to work for several online gaming communities and a few magazines. I would have stayed on as a community manager had my careers advisor predicted there wasn’t a future doing it.

More recently I drifted back through PR, marketing and social media to building online communities. I’m happy here, I’m doing something I always want to be better at. That’s a good place to be.

There are four key things here. The first, the most successful communities have been more about the members than the products. That’s not a golden rule, but it helps if your community develops a 70/30 focus between members and the product.

The second is to forget technology and figure out what will make people talk to each other. Do they need to talk with people to achieve something? Do they need to exchange information to improve their lives? Are they looking to enjoy the experience of talking to people? Find that raw emotional drive, and work harder to develop it.

Thirdly, you really need to develop the structure that takes the work load off you. You don’t want to have to invite every member to join your community. So plan ahead, what’s going to cause people to invite their friends, and them invite their friends? How can you make it worth their time.

If you’re vague here, you’re going to fail. If your plan is to “generate buzz that will get people to join” that’s way too vague. Be specific, precise and meticulous in your planning. Why and how will Mark invite his friends? Is he recruiting his friends to defend his point of view? Or for a reward? Does the top recruiter get invited to meet the CEO?

Finally, relax. Tell your boss to relax too. You didn’t hear about Facebook or Google until years after that launched. You don’t need as many members as you think you do. You just need people engaging at a decent level and the community will continually grow from there. Measure the stuff that matters, forget what doesn’t. Don’t compare yourself to anyone.

Seth’s my hero. He thinks on a different level and with a unique clarity. As for practising what he preaches? Of course. He’s too high profile to say one thing and do another. He’d be found out in a heartbeat.

Working with Seth Godin is an experience I wish everyone could have. He provides me with the platform and the resources to act like an entrepreneur. It’s the ultimate test of any employee I think. Give them the resources and let them loose upon the world. No excuses, no lifelines and no-one to coast along with.

I hope everyone gets to work with their hero. I hope you all have a hero!

I Want To Work With Seth Godin is an old blog which had one objective, get Seth’s attention. It worked. It wasn’t so much a blog about Seth, as it was about using this approach to get your dream job. It worked for my friend Jed Hallam at Wolfstar and Matthew Watson at Rainier. Focus on the jobs you want, then build up your own marketing campaign to get them.

Over time it became more of a broader riff on careers, and I really enjoyed writing it. I want to launch another career blog in the near future. I think there’s a lot to talk about. This massive change from salaried employment to picking up talent for one project at a time.

Without meaning to go all Sarah Palin on you, I want to answer a different question. What happens when you get rejected?

If you come to someone with an idea for an online community, they’ll probably say no. There’s no budget for it. It’s too risky. Or “What do you mean we can’t advertise or sell to our own community”?

My suggestion is just to do it anyway. If you want to build an online community for someone, anyone, just go ahead and do it. They can’t stop you. You don’t even have to be directly involved, just enthuse a few great customers with the idea and support them whenever they need it.

If you come to someone a few months later with a community of 3,000 people are they going to turn you (and their loyal customers) away? Are they going to pass up on the free-advertising and WOM for life? Are they going to turn down the free market research? I bet they wont. In fact, I suspect they’re willing to pay a good price to keep you and your community right where it is.

As an aside, recently I’ve dabbled with the idea of hijacking Dell’s Digital Nomads campaign. The blog is too dry and it’s not becoming the hub for nomads like it should. What would happen if we created a thriving online community of Digital Nomads and then approached Dell for support?

Would they turn us away?

Once you get past the basic internal stuff, SEO is about the external relationships you build. Who’s linking to you? What’s the anchor text? How important are they?

Whatever your client sells, you want to rank highly for it. If your client sells cheap flight tickets, creating a budget travel community makes a lot of sense. If your client sells upmarket sofas, then an interior designer or home-living community might be a great idea.

Specifically, the content generated by the community increases its search engine authority. It’s updated frequently, it has lots of different members and becomes a great resource looking for people to find cheap flight tickets.

Second, everyone links to communities they think will help. “Oh I saw this discussion about where to find cheap flight tickets taking place”. That helps, it helps a lot.

Third, Communities tend to attract the people with the most authority. The people whos links do matter. You can do so much with your community. Especially the best ones. You can give members a badge they can display on their Facebook page, or blog, which links to your site.

Finally, you hit all the bizarre search terms. I believe something like 40% of Google’s search results have been been search for before. When someone searches for “tickets under $100 to fly from romania to barcelona” - they might find a conversation that took place on your forum many moons ago.

An online community is an offline community that realises the internet makes participating easier.

People forget that.

I get upset when the top community builders talk about technology. Pretty much every great idea community developers have been using for centuries, can be adapted for the internet. At the very core of building an online community isn’t technology, it’s people. What motivates people to take actions? If you figure that out, you’ve figured out how to build an online community.

First, there is this great big business blogosphere of ours. We’re all pretty engrossed in this community, made more so by the joy that no company owns it. All these blogs, all these thoughts and all these ideas are without a real strategic objective. It’s brilliant.

I spend time on Brazen Careerist, in two Facebook groups and Seth’s Tribes network.

I’m also a member of an online community for people with a stutter. This is a really interesting one, because members, ideally, want to get out of this community. It’s amazing that even here, where people go for advice about overcoming or dealing with their stutter (self-interest community), you get the same problems. There is a divide in the moment about whether people like me, with a light stutter, should be allowed to participate in the same forums as those with a more deep stutter.

Think about that. Those who suffer most from the problem, are the insiders. The elites. The rest of us are the outsiders, the less important members. I think that’s a good thing. I think the extra wall lets them get far more out of the community than they otherwise might.

I hope speech therapists and book authors discover the right way to interact with these groups.

I steal my best ideas. I steal them from books, from blogs, from the news, on the subway and from hotels. I go back to whatever i’ve done that’s worked, and used that. At the core of every blog post is at least one raw motivation.

I also try to be specific with ideas. It’s better to have an idea that’s wrong but can be adapted and improved, than a vague abstract thought. You probably read hundreds of blog posts a week, but remember less than 5? I’m betting it’s the 5 that were simple, specific and useful.

As for writing the posts. I use Windows Live Writer and have about 30 potential posts in draft form. When an idea crops into my head, I enter it into the headline of a draft post and come back to it later. I delete about half the thoughts and try to write out the rest. Of these, about half will become blog posts, the other half either ramble or don’t add enough value.

Before posting, I rewrite every blog entry to remove as many words as possible. The hardest thing is to delete a paragraph you’re proud to have written, but doesn’t absolutely have to be there. I try to keep mine under 200 words. I’m a stronger believer that what you don’t say is as important as what you do.

Thanks again Rich. And to those of you that enjoyed the interview, please feel free to build our community by commenting below!

Thanks to Ciaran for pointing out a micro-site from FT.com about how to beat the feeling of impending financial doom pervading the world at the moment.

The answer, according to research by McKinsey showed that:

The companies who increased their spend in a recession were the only ones whose profits rose substantially when the economy recovered.

McGraw-Hill found (when analysing the aftermath of the early ’80s) found:

The sales of companies who had kept advertising during the 81-82 recession had risen 256% over those who had not.

As Ciaran points out, this makes a compelling case for investing in PPC just now. I also think there is a strong argument for working hard at your natural SEO at times like these as well. When your competitors pull back, you get more chance to shine - and this can become a self-reinforcing authority phenomenon which stays with you into the good times.

Now, it’s unsurprising that the FT (and indeed, Ciaran and I) think that people should keep spending on marketing their businesses, but the wealth of independent research that the FT has gathered (and their own behaviour - they are continuing to invest heavily in promoting their own business) is pretty compelling in my opinion.

One of the most basic elements of online reputation work is to ensure that your business ranks in the major search engines for its own name. Over the last couple of days, I spent a bit of time digging into why one particular website wasn’t (possibly contributing to my unfortunate situation at 4pm yesterday).

They are not a client and unfortunately I was digging into this purely out of curiosity rather than commercial interest.

A while back, I wrote about the UK charity search engine everyclick and how they didn’t rank for a search for their name. They are still nowhere to be seen in the natural results (though buying branded PPC).

The first bit of digging I did showed that they were down at #61 - a clear penalty as they remained indexed, but search results #61-65 were clearly the results that should have been 1-5.

I have now spent a bit of time digging through their on-site behaviour, inbound links and anything else I can think of and can find nothing to justify a penalty.

My last post explored some of the things I thought they could do differently (and some of these still apply) - such as avoiding duplicate content issues with the pages charities create for them on the charities’ own domains, having a bit more indexable content and less duplication on their own site etc. but they have cleared up a lot of the problems I identified back then and I can no longer support my initial conclusion that they were suffering through duplicate content filtering. Previously there were very strong pages on charity websites with the same title as their homepage. They have now changed their site significantly and that is no longer true - yet they rank badly for the search for their exact title tag.

I found a few new things that aren’t great - such as a 302 redirect from www.everyclickschools.com into the site, and a lot of widgets that link back with identical anchor text (but in my opinion this is not in any way misleading - and these widgets are genuinely useful and placed editorially on powerful charity websites).

In short, I can see no reason why Google would wish to penalise this site.

Except 1.

That it’s a search engine.

Now, it’s small, but the charity concept is pretty powerful and they have some evangelical fans (and it’s powered by Ask who are at least in the search engine race still!).

I’m not an expert on anti-trust / monopoly law, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a company with a truly dominant market share treating its competitors differently to everyone else didn’t break the rules. I think this would be like Microsoft selling Vista with a browser that redirected apple.com to microsoft.com (and I reckon they’d be slapped pretty hard for that).

When I wrote about this before, I thought it highlighted some technical problems for everyclick.com. Now, I think it’s more sinister than that and indicates potential future problems for Google.

I could be wrong about this - maybe they’re up to something nefarious that I haven’t spotted. If you think that’s the case, let me know in the comments, via twitter or by email - I’m pretty easy to contact and I’ll update the post.

Sometimes being able to see things in fine detail is unpleasant- particularly when it comes in the form of a sudden revelation.

Every now and then you get that kind of shock in PPC data, when the serene progress of an account has to be re-evaluated in an instant because of a new discovery. This is exactly what happened to me when I took a look at the affect of Google’s new Adwords transparency on some of our PPC campaigns.

As you’re probably aware, Google places ads in three places- its own results page, the results page of its search partners (Google Product Search, Google Groups, Earthlink, compuserve, shopping.com, AT&T Worldnet, and search sites such as AOL and Ask.com) and on its content network. Previously, Google bundled together its own results page with the other search sites like Ask.com, allowing you to separate out the data from the content network if you wanted to. The new tool allows you to fully break down the data from the three places Google places your ads.

I don’t often run content network campaigns so I hadn’t felt the need to delve too much into this new breakdown. I assumed that the results from Google and its search partners would be very similar– same adverts, same keywords, same delivery system and surely then similar CTR and conversion rate. This would mean that the best approach for me would be to use the summary view of my accounts.

However, when I did try separating them out the result was very surprising. The figures were astonishingly different; clickthrough was often a fraction of Google’s, conversion rates were much lower and although cost per click was less, cost per conversion was way up. Here’s some data that I think highlights the problem pretty well:

This campaign has been running on Google’s conversion optimiser with CPA set at £12 and yet it has chosen to spend a rather large amount on the Search partners’ share of the clicks when the CPA is way above the required level. At this point I am still unsure as to why there should be such a big difference. Do the lower quality search engines fail to distribute correctly by location? This could explain some high traffic volumes but low rates. Whatever the reason, judging by the clickthrough and conversion rates, the search partners produce traffic that is poorly targeted.

We can’t choose to target certain parts of the partners network, nor can we create ‘partners only’ campaigns which we could then refine the traffic from, bid in accordance with the cost per conversion and maybe use to our advantage. Even if we could separate out ‘partner’ campaigns we can’t drill down to see which of the search partners is more effective. If Google gave these options we could quickly duplicate our campaigns, distribute them to each area of the ‘partners network’ and find out if they could be improved to come into line with the other campaigns.

As it is, I am switching many of my campaigns to Google only and, unless greater data and control becomes available for the search partners, I can’t imagine returning to this area anytime soon.

Hopefully, this post will prompt someone else to take a look at their figures and maybe, with this one change in Adwords, improve their CTR and conversion rate in a stroke. To take a look at your own figures in Adwords, go to your Campaign Summary page and choose ‘Split: Google Search/search partners/content network’. I can assure you that it’s well worth your time and may make a significant difference to your campaign.

Google have announced that they are relaxing their ban on gambling advertising in England, Scotland & Wales from tomorrow. Companies that are registered with the Gambling Commision or within the European Economic Area can now advertise to UK users, allowing a number of non-UK companies such as those based in Gibraltar and Malta the chance to get involved.

This is massive news for anyone working in the PPC industry as there are sure to be some ferociously contested markets in the coming months. With poker sites, casinos, spread betting firms (or spread firms as they’re known in the industry), exchanges, fixed odds firms, comparison sites, tipsters and other niche gaming sites out there, it is going to be an almighty scramble for some prime positions.

As ever Distilled are ahead of the curve, as our Paid Search Marketer worked in online gaming for 7 years before joining us. One of Paid Search’s biggest problems is that, although your marketer may understand the technical side of the job, running Adwords day to day, they will take time to get to know the marketplace that they are advertising in. Having someone who has worked in the industry, almost from the birth of online gaming in this country, is a big bonus to getting ahead of the competition. So if there are any gaming companies out there looking for a paid search gambling expert then we have the man for the job - you should get in touch!

I have actually started the long-overdue update post to cover all the stuff that has been going on here at Distilled (including growing to 13 of us in the now-slightly-crowded office). Before I finish that off and get back to the main task of writing about search engines and things, some more timely news - we’re in The Telegraph this morning!

Over the last 10 days or so, I have been helping out a guy called Matthew Rushton who runs Mediator Magazine and Mediator Directory after being introduced by Richard Tyler, Enterprise Editor of The Telegraph. The time we have all spent thinking about the online problems facing small businesses in particular have now resulted in a great piece in the business section of The Telegraph (split into 3 on their website):

• Small firms switch on to search engine optimisation
• Distilled’s top 10 tips for DIY SME SEO (acronym central) - with some links to us, SEOmoz and our clients, Sofa.com
• Matthew telling his story: Search engine optimisation: what’s it worth?

Now, if you are here for the first time because you have read the Telegraph story, welcome…

Many of my tips are in the article, but feel free to get in touch if you have any specific questions and we’ll do our best to help you out. Happy SEOing