An Honest and Open Letter to Facebook: You Are on Notice

Before I get started, I would like to affirm that these are my own thoughts and are in no way reflective of Distilled or any of its other employees opinions or beliefs. Viewer discretion is advised.

 

Dear World,

I have read a handful of articles in the last few weeks about why people are or are not quitting Facebook. I have been sitting on the fence now for the last week or so and have been dangerously close to pulling the trigger and ending what has been a rather tumultuous relationship. At the risk of sounding like a hipster, I genuinely do miss the old Facebook.

 

It’s not that I really mind if my father reads my status updates, or that a potential employer may find pictures of me holding a beer in a picture or twelve. I genuinely believe that for my generation (of 20somethings) there is a different attitude about these things. First, I think we’re smart enough to detag and protect our profile and images well enough that these images should be relatively difficult to find if it’s a concern. But secondly, if a Presidential candidate can admit trying cocaine and still get the job , I hardly think that it’s reasonable to rule me out of a less important job for imbibing from time to time.

Don’t Push Me, ‘Cause I’m Close to the Edge

Reason 1: Privacy

The first reason I nearly quit is that I, like so many others, have a genuine issue with Facebook’s privacy standards and carelessness with personal details. Again, this goes beyond my worrying about people finding pictures of me making a fool of myself, it’s much bigger issues.

For example, the fact that TechCrunch recently ran an article about how easily a user could read other users (even with whom they were not friends) personal conversations on Facebook chat is a clear indication of the types of dangerous loopholes that may still exist in the coding. For a site worth so many billion dollars, it hardly seems to be locked up very tight.

 

Reason 2: Nostalgia

The second reason I nearly quit is because I miss the old Facebook. I’m not trying to say that Facebook should have kept the doors closed to the general public. In fact, the openness of Facebook and the access it provides me to old friends and family long lost are one of the few reasons I’m staying.

However it is my opinion that every single update to the system has made the platform less user friendly. Whilst some of the features added along the way have been great (sharing photos, chat, embedded images and videos) they have been poorly executed. I used to enjoy interacting with people on Facebook, now I just rely on the newsfeed.

 

Reason 3: Greed

Facebook no longer really does anything for me. I get most of the quality/interesting articles I read from Reddit or Twitter. I find it difficult if not annoying to navigate thanks to recent changes. The “notifications” system has gotten worse (I don’t even check my emails from Facebook anymore and it stopped working on my smartphone) and it takes for granted the purpose “The Facebook” was designed to fulfil.

It was a great way to figure out who the cute girl in your class was during Undergrad, but it’s no longer an effective way for me to meaningfully engage with other users. I can hardly find my friend’s birthdays on the thing anymore and my head nearly explodes just by landing on the homepage. Facebook is no longer a manageable and useful social media platform for me anymore.

 

Reason 4: Vanity

The fourth reason I nearly quit is because Facebook has made me more self-centred. I am not trying to absolve myself of responsibility, in fact, I know I let it happen and I am to be blamed. Facebook went from a place where I would happily go see what my friends were up to at other schools or on their year abroad to a point where I was so overwhelmed by the constant flurry of activity that I could no longer be bothered.

I have a pretty sad confession to make and I doubt very much I’m alone here: if I’m not tagged in a photo, I usually don’t care. This obviously isn’t always the case, but when my newsfeed is filled with images of people I have spoken to since I was 13 years old and 50 new pictures of their babies, my A.D.D. kicks in and I end up browsing aimlessly before ending up back on my own homepage, usually forgetting why I signed on in the first place. And more often than not, if someone hasn’t posted something on my wall I don’t remember to check what they’re up to either.

This is, unfortunately, a part of growing up. You lose touch with people you care about, but I have a dreadful feeling that this process was made a lot quicker as a result of Facebook and the mindscramble I receive every time I log on.

 

Reason 5: Fear

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I find the advertising practises of Facebook to border on unethical. I know some may find this amusing (or even hypocritical) coming from an SEO, but it’s true. I’m not against marketing, and I’m not against people helping me find what I’m after- in fact it’s my job to ensure this. Paid advertising campaigns through Facebook that resort to tactics like “targeting people with misspellings in their profile” for alcoholic beverages is abhorrent.

The level of targeting that Facebook peddles to advertisers as the holy grail of advertising success provides some pretty obvious and despicable opportunities for the less honest amongst us to take advantage of people and manipulate them into buying things they neither need, nor want.

And as is the case in the above REAL example, this leaves a lot of room for advertisers to hurt the industry and society a great deal. And though they will claim it’s not their job to police these advertising schemes, it illuminates quite clearly the positive efforts Google has taken to combat some of these issues (such as penalising sites advertising steroids and other illegal substances).

 

So, Why on Earth am I Still on Facebook?

Reason 1: Forgiveness
I’m willing to give Facebook a chance to get their shit in order. At this point, it is not so much what they have done with their massive databases of information (that they own whilst your account is alive) it is what they reserve the right to do with it that scares me.

The moment I find out that a picture from my Facebook profile has been sold for stock images will be the moment I close the door on Facebook for good.

 

Reason 2: Reliance

Because there is not an equivalent, well populated site where I can easily share things with my friends and family. I live several timezones away from many of my nearest and dearest. I want to make a genuine effort to be better about keeping in touch, but there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to write them all as often as I’d like.

 

If and when there is a better/safer alternative (one that I hope Diaspora will provide) I will consider a move. The only problem will be convincing the most important of my 1,256 acquaintances (they can’t all be true “friends,” can they?) with me.

 

Reason 3: Responsibility

Because as Danny Sullivan points out in this article, the internet is my livelihood. As much as I may disagree with Facebook, I need to understand it to do my job effectively and it’s quite difficult to get involved and advise clients when I no longer use a product or service.

 

Reason 4: Openness

And, ultimately it’s less my privacy about which I’m concerned. I have plenty of skeletons in my closet, but I trust the people I care about enough to know that any truly damaging information would not be aired out on Facebook.

I am a bit of an open book and I am human and I make mistakes, we all do. However, I am fortunate enough to trust the security of my friendships and relationships enough that I don’t worry myself too much with Facebook’s questionable, at best, privacy policies.

Conclusion

To my close friends and family, please treat this as the most public apology I can offer (odds are you ignore my links and photos on Facebook as much as I do yours). I honestly will try harder to stay in touch even if it means picking up the phone, writing an email, or-heaven forbid- a letter or a postcard.

Finally, to you Facebook: you are on very thin ice, consider yourself warned.

Sincerely,

Sam Crocker

Facebook User 2004-?

 

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to include them below or find me on Twitter (a slightly less invasive social media platform).

The Distilled Crew in London was busy last week at conferences, A4uexpo and SMX Advanced London to be exact. But the US team was doing the same. I presented at Search Exchange in Charlotte, NC last week. I promised the attendees my slides and a bonus PDF, and so you guys get them too.

This presentation was on PPC Account Reviews and what to look for when things are going wrong. It covers the steps of an account review, the red flags, and suggestions of what to check and test. The bonus is the PDF that gives you a checklist of sorts. I would suggest downloading, printing, and laminating this for any beginning PPC person. I don’t cover everything, that’s impossible, but it should spur some ideas when thingsare going great.

Download the PPC Account Review PDF

A friend recently asked me about press releases versus a company blog. He was arguing that the company blog is a more trusted source of information about product releases and other company information. Please note that the idea was spurred by this blog post by Jeff Bullas.

I disagree, but want to check first. I am wrong when it comes to assumptions like this, a lot. It’s always best to ask. So I sent out a very quickly written survey to Facebook and Twitter. The results were interesting at first, and so I took the next step and sent the same survey to an email list of personal, non-Internet related friends and family. All responses were recorded in Survey Monkey. Below is the breakdown of where the responses came from and questions.

Collector	# Responses
Facebook	13
Twitter	64
Email	54

For those that care, I have over 3000 followers on Twitter, over 600 Facebook friends, and sent the email to 111 people.

Survey/Overall Results

1. Do you subscribe to or regularly read any company corporate blogs?

• No (70%)
• Yes (30%)

2. Do you ever read Press Releases when researching new products?

• No (61%)
• Yes (39%)

3. Think about the different forms of communication a company might use online to push information out about itself or new products. Please rank them in terms of perceived trust with 1 being the most trustworthy, and 6 being the least trustworthy.

1. Third Party Review (2.11)
2. News Section of Website (3.27)
3. Company Blog (3.57)
4. Press Releases (3.8)
5. Twitter Stream (4.09)
6. Facebook Page Wall (4.35)

Who can spot the boo-boo in here? The red herring I placed of sorts? I’ll give you a minute to look …

Got it yet?

What’s typically in the news section of a company’s website? Press Releases. But it is different, some place third party mentions. So I had to throw that in there too. To be fair, some of them have been replaced by company blogs, and press releases are on the blog. So it’s all convoluted. This isn’t a scientific study, k?

 

 

 

When taking in all responses, the most trusted source of company information is: Third Party Review. Hold off on the “Well, Duh!” comments, there is more cool information coming.

So news from the company website outranks social media in this study. But the closeness of the top three made me think. So I broke everything out by response collector (Twitter, Email, Facebook).

 

 

 

Twitter

With this subset, which is largely more Internet focused influencers, the results changed substantially when it came to trust. The majority of responders still didn’t read Press Releases (~56%) or subscribe to company blogs (~66%) though, which I find fascinating.

In this subset, the following results were found about trust in corporate communication methods:

1. Third Party Review (1.98)
2. Company Blog (3.45)
3. Twitter Stream (3.63)
4. News Section of Website (3.67)
5. Facebook Page Wall (4.2)
6. Press Releases (4.45)

So Twitter based respondents (discounting the “Duh”-answer of 3rd Party) trust a company blog more and press releases the least. And of course Twitter was more trust worthy than Facebook. No surprise there.

Facebook

In the Facebook subset, there were fewer respondents, but still some interesting answers. Facebook was like both other sections in that they generally don’t read press releases (53.8%) or subscribe to company blogs (61.5), but this side is more likely to read press releases. This seems to be in line with the fact that Facebook users are more on the cutting edge, but lean more on the side of your “typical consumer.”

1. Third Party Review (2.15)
2. Company Blog (3.00)
3. Press Releases (3.38)
4. News Section of Website (3.46)
5. Twitter Stream (4.23)
6. Facebook Page Wall (4.38)

The interesting thing here is that they trust posts on a Facebook Wall the least!!! Wow. There are some trust issues there. But what I am more interested in is the fact that the blog still out ranks the press release, but still by a small margin. So the third group was selected of people that are not on the internet all day for the most part.

Email

The email user list, as mentioned before, are NOT internet people. They are my friends and family that have “normal” jobs and don’t obsess over metrics like these. They overwhelmingly do NOT subscribe to company blogs (88.9%), and with little wonder as most don’t know what RSS even is. They don’t generally read press releases (57.4%), but that is still average for the whole group. There is very little play there.

1. Third Party Review (2.26)
2. News Section of Website (2.76)
3. Press Releases (3.13)
4. Company Blog (3.85)
5. Facebook Page Wall (4.52)
6. Twitter Stream (4.61)

With this group, here is the highly fascinating thing, the “News Section” of a website ranks almost as high as the third party review. Fascinating! Remember though, the “news section” of a website is typically filled with press releases. But this was all based on perception, so they might not have made the connection.

What is more telling thought is that the third most trust worthy communication for these “everyday consumers” are press releases. At the bottom are blogs and social media.

The New Media Disconnect

My point in this study was not only to show what people “trust” more, blogs or press releases, but also show the disconnect. What we think as new media purveyors is not always accurate. We live and breathe this world, but not everyone does. Always keep in mind the Browsers Video (below), regular people don’t think like we do.

The marketing choices we make cannot be centered around our own choices, but those of our customers. If your customer is a heavy Twitter user, then yes, using a survey asked of Twitter followers is fine. But the answers change when you get offline. Always know who your customer is, and how to best communicate with them. Don’t let the “feelings” of a social media consultant (yes I am included in that) force your hand in a way that isn’t best for your business.

Somehow, Yandex, the well known Russian search engine has launched in the UK with very little fanfare. Please forgive me for getting this post up quickly. There is a lot of research I’d like to do before I make to many conclusions, but since when has research got in the way of a good story!

If you like your search engine to have a minimalist homepage, then you’ll love Yandex.

After a very brief play I’m incredibly impressed at the relative lack of spam and the quality of the results that are being returned. Not to mention the fact that there aren’t any ads.

Take for instance a search for “buy viagra online”, a hotbed of all that is bad on the internet. At the time of writing 3 of the top 5 results Google returns are from hacked .edu domains. It’s hard to look at viagra SERPS and not think spam, but Yandex returns the cleanest set of results I’ve seen for such a search. Buy Viagra Online.

My 5 seconds look at “car insurance”, a pretty common example of sites that have bought they way up the listings returns a completely different set of results from the ones you might be used to at Google. I’ve not had a chance to dig very deep but a first glance at the results would seem to suggest they are either taking a more aggressive approach to finding and banning paid links that Google is or they are better at removing spam from their index.. Either way, its good news for us whiter than white search agencies.

Check out the results for the following searches.. I guarantee you’ll be impressed.

• Viagra
• SEO
• Compare credit cards
• Poker

So far I’m incredibly impressed. Impressed enough that I’m going to make Yandex my default search engine for a while. Impressed enough that if I were at Bing HQ I’d be worried, hell, I’m impressed enough that if I were Google I’d start paying attention to what was going on.

It’s about time Google had a decent competitor, and whilst Yandex have a incredibly long journey ahead of them I for one am hoping they start reducing the dominance of Google.

This is the director’s cut of my SMX presentation on the new UK laws governing social media campaigns.

If you weren’t at SMX, the slides are pretty self-explanatory, and if you were there, skip to the middle, where you can find all the slides THE MAN DIDN’T WANT YOU TO SEE!

SMX Presentation

Here’s my second presentation from the awesome A4uexpo Munich. The conference is really good, phenomenally well run and really good fun. Everyone’s a little bit worse for wear on the morning of the second day but here’s my slides from Data Feed SEO & Advanced Information Architecture. There’s loads of good tips in here. I’ve also pimped Mozenda which Sam pimped in his SMX presentation. If anyone is interested in trying out Mozenda they gave us a special discount code:

Use code “SMXL25″ to get a 25% off voucher/code on all pay-as-you-go purchases at Mozenda.

Data Feed SEO & Information Architecture by Tom Critchlow – A4uexpo Munich 2010

It’s late, so without too much commentary, here is my slide deck from SMX Advanced 2010 in London [some of the formatting went a bit screwy - I'm trying to fix that]:

Top 10 Analytics Reports

If you like this kind of thing, it’s not too late to sign up for my FREE conference call entitled enterprise analytics on Thursday 20th (join the email list even if you can’t make it on the call to get access to the recording afterwards).

Following hot on the heels of Sam’s most excellent keyphrase research presentation at SMX London I present here my slides on Universal Search from Munich! The slides are jam packed with links and additional resources so download and research at your leisure.

Universal Search by Tom Critchlow – A4uexpo Munich 2010

If you’re at A4uexpo in Munich then please come find me and say hi or catch me on twitter here

NOTE: The folks over at Mozenda are offering a 25% off voucher code for all pay-as-you-go purchases just use “SMXL25″ on all purchases before May 26th.

Whilst the talk of the day (and most of the jokes) yesterday at SMX London definitely seemed to be focused around the Ash Cloud and all the canceled flights, there were also definitely some good presentations to be heard on the first day. Obviously, being based in London has its advantages (beyond it being an amazing city) and the Distilled team were out in force yesterday- providing a wonderful support team/safety net for me.

As my first presentation as an SEO it was really incredible and humbling to receive such wonderful feedback yesterday and I can’t say “thank you” enough to all the people who made me feel so good about my presentation, my career choice, and my choice for working at Distilled. Without the Distilled team and the support of people like Will and Tom I never would have thrown my hat in the ring to speak at the event.

The experience was absolutely amazing and I look forward to any future opportunities to speak!

I hope this deck speaks for itself for the most part. The links to all of the tools I used will be on the last slide and I’m happy to try to answer any questions in the comments section below. If you are at the event and have any questions you’d like to ask in person please just grab me today! Or send me a message on Twitter and I will try to get back to you as soon as possible.

Crocker, Samuel, Keyphrase Research Beyond the Ordinary [Final]

As a word of warning (which I did provide to the attendees at SMX yesterday): I am not a lawyer. My aim with this presentation was not to suggest what you should be doing, but rather to illustrate the power of the tools included herein and as with all SEO tools it’s up to you to use the power for good. The tips I actually had time to focus on were all created using Mozenda though the point here is in the 12 minutes allotted I was only really able to scratch the surface. If you have a chance please try out some of these tools and let us know what you think!

*I know a lot of people were particularly interested in the Google Suggest API. As I said in the presentation, it’s a bit of a hack (i.e. the portal is through a blog rather than the Google site), but I’m sure if you poke around long enough you can find the API through Google, or you can manipulate the query string once you’ve landed on the Google page.

It’s easy to create linkbait. You pick a topic that people will be interested in, research it using google.com or google.co.uk and write it out or design it or whatever.

Of course, it only works that easily if you speak the same language as your audience.

So what happens if a client comes to you, wanting linkbait that will grab attention in its neck of the woods, and its neck of the woods is, say, Eastern Europe? What then, huh?

Well, luckily for you (and some of my clients), I have a way of figuring out what to do.

To demonstrate how to create linkbait for other cultures, I am going to arbitrarily say we’re dealing with an international restaurant review website that wants to get lots of traffic from Eastern Europe.

Now, we need to create linkbait that is relevant to our client’s target audience, so let’s go for ‘food’, as that is what most restaurants serve and our client ought to be an expert in that area.

Research the area

If you are targeting a particular area, like Eastern Europe, you need to find out which countries have the most internet activity.

If we search ‘internet usage in eastern europe’, limited by Published in the Past Year, we find this internet usage in Europe stat.

This super-useful stat show Poland has 8th largest number of internet users in Europe (around 20 million) and the largest number in Eastern Europe, so let’s target the Polish audience.

Then you should research (that is, read the Wikipedia page for) the country, so you can be a tiny bit familiar with the basic facts – population, geography, history, that sort of thing. It might not play a direct part in the creation of linkbait, but knowing a bit about the people you are talking to will only help you figure out your content, presentation and tone.

Research the topic

First we need to translate ‘food’, since we’ll be doing a country-specific search.

Type ‘food’ into Google Translate, and we can see that ‘food’ in Polish = żywność.

Now we do a Google search for the target term, which results in this:

 

Now we right click on the results to use the Google Global Firefox extension (which you can download here):

 

Make sure it’s searching blogs.

This is pretty simple, since most languages have adopted the word ‘blog’. Just click the triangle, and then select the word that looks like ‘blog’.

 

Go through all the top results with Google Translate.

I always have to copy the URL and paste it into Translate in another tab because it doesn’t give you the ‘Translate this page option’, but it still works.

 

Try to categorise the posts by topic, style of post, tone, etc. to find what will work for your client.

In this case, we had:

• Food in the news:
  • Discussing govt policies for preventing Polish food being sold into the black market
  • Announcing charity food drive for Caritas (didn’t make sense)
  • Discussing Michelle Obama’s move to defeat childhood obesity in the States
  • Link to an article about fast food in America
• Just about food
  • Talked about an organic store
  • Vegan blog
  • Discussing popcorn as a healthy snack
• Food-related other
  • Dog blog talking about dog food
• A broken link

 

Do some digging if anything you don’t understand pops up.

For example, the post announcing the charity food drive for Caritas didn’t make sense in Google Translate’s English.

Because 1) I had never heard of Caritas; 2) Caritas was the same word in the original and in the translation; and 3) Caritas is clearly a proper noun, I did a quick English-lanuguage search for ‘Caritas’. The home page of the charity states that it does food drives to help feed impoverished people.

A further search for ‘pead polish’ (a search for ‘pead’ was too generic) reveals the PEAD plan supplies “food from intervention stocks for the benefit of the most deprived people” in Poland.

So this obviously is a charitable food drive organised by Caritas for the PEAD programme.

This won’t ultimately play a part in the linkbait, but we learned something, and learning is its own reward, right?

Writing the post

We can see that the top blogs which talk exclusively about food are related to health: organic shops, vegan diets and healthy snacks are all covered.

The articles also take care to explain what the different diets are, suggesting people are only just now starting to get into these types of lifestyles.

That means there are probably plenty of people in Poland who are interested in healthier diets, but they don’t know how to get started. And in a consumerist society, the place to get started is wherever you can buy stuff, like shops and restaurants.

So we should find some health-related retailers and restaurants in Poland. But let’s narrow it down further. Generally speaking, city dwellers adopt trends more quickly than their country-dwelling counterparts do. And bigger cities provide bigger target markets.

So we should target the biggest city in Poland. Which, thanks to our previous research into the country, we know is Warsaw – it is both the capital and the most populous city in Poland.

Now we want to create a list of health shops and restaurants in Warsaw.

Assuming the client is happy for us to write the post, we simply search for related topics like ‘vegetarian restaurants warsaw’, or even ‘ekologicznych sklepów w warszawie’. This is a non-exhaustive list of what I found:

• Restaurants
  • Biosfeera, a restaurant recommended for its vegetarian offerings
  • Vega, a strictly vegetarian restaurant
• Shopping
  • Organic Market in Galeria Mokotów, an organic food and herbal medicine shop in a Warsaw mall
  • Eko Drogeria, which specialises in organic cosmetics and bath products

All these sites can be translated into English, and then all you have to do is read their descriptions, try to find some reviews and write a short paragraph about what they sell. You can also do an advanced image search for images of the places, labelled for reuse under the Creative Commons license, obviously.

Finally, make sure to finish it in time for it to be translated, if needs be. Try to give as thorough a brief as possible to the translator. They will need to know if you want a word-for-word translation, which would be fine for an information-dense piece, or if you are trying to convey a particular tone.

After all, jokes, idioms and proverbs might not make sense when translated verbatim.

So that’s how I create linkbait for cultures that are not familiar to me. I’m by no means the master of this type of thing, though, so if you have any tips or tricks, I’d love to hear them!

 

UPDATE: I didn’t add photo credits! My apologies to the owners of the photos.

Woman with massive sandwich by Randy Son of Robert on Flickr

Confused monkey by Michael Keen on Flickr

On graph: Black market by People of Africa on Picasa

On graph: Caritas logo by Caritas

On graph: Chubby child by Rrrrred on Flickr

On graph: Fries by freefoto.com on Flickr

On graph: Organic label by Leo Reynolds on Flickr

On graph: Hemp milk by size8jeans on Flickr

On graph: Popcorn by *Micky on Flickr

On graph: Dog food by MShades on Flickr

Women shopping by maalie on Flickr

Gratuitous shot of Warsaw by Pawel Kabanski on Flickr

Hooptie of awesomeness by an0nym0n0us on Flickr