By Liana “Li” Evans

So yet another controversy when it comes to social media. I woke up to a plether of IM’s, Private Tweets and emails, to find out I’m a “Goody2Shoes”. I guess I could be upset, but I’m not. It’s par for the course in the world of Search these days. I could lash out at SEOMoz, because as many have pointed out, they let a post go to their own blog that attacks competitors (It has now been edited, but point being they originally let it out with the rather rude attacks on Matt Cutts, Lisa Barone and myself). I’ll let all those comments on the post speak for themselves. I’m sad that SEOMoz chose the path of inciting drama and discourse, but in the end that’s Rand’s business decision where to take his business, not mine. The drama gets the site links, and traffic, and I guess that trumps everything.

As for what Marty wrote about both Lisa Barone and myself and choosing to post it on SEMoz rather than taking ownership for it on his own blog, I can only guess he really needed the larger audience for the message he wanted to convey. I read Marty’s apology, “Lii and Lisa are pillars in this community…”, while I’d like to think it’s genuine, I was on the panel in Toronto, where I heard his example of vanity baiting in his presentation, I can’t help to think and question that this might another example of it.

As for my stance, I also guess when you take a position that fake profiles on StumbleUpon, and adding lots “fake” friends to make yourself look more popular, is not a sound strategy for entering the social media space, undoubtedly you’ll get flack, from those who find no flaws with this strategy. It happens, we all have different moral compasses, we all have different things that drive us to be what we perceive as a “great marketer”.

When I was taken aback by the tactics my co-panelists in Toronto presented and posted about it, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t off base. I asked a few people who just use social media without any knowledge of search or marketing what they thought of these tactics. The first person I asked as a 14 year old son of a friend who is an avid MySpace user. I asked him what he thought about adding all these famous people as friends, his reply was just one word “Lame“. I asked a friend I hang out at karaoke with the same question, her reply was “that’s just stupid, why would you friend them unless you liked them?”

Next I asked a few people who I know use StumbleUpon for pure enjoyment, they have no marketing background, what they thought about people building fake “avatars”, or “fictitious profiles” on the service (btw, that’s a blatant violation of StumbleUpon’s TOS). My one friend from the EU said, “isn’t that illegal here?” (only illegal in the UK, sorry to say), another said “people do that? why in the world do they do that, that’s just crazy, and wrong, can’t they be honest?”

Now if everyday people (not marketers) are saying this about these strategies, why would I advise my clients to implement those strategies? I wouldn’t and I wouldn’t promote doing this in a session at a major online marketing conference. I don’t see how creating fake profiles (or avatars) gains anyone any kind of ground in the end, when you are found out to be a fraud, all trust is lost.

What’s wrong with being honest? Really now, what’s wrong with starting a conversation, and honest one with real brand representatives, not one greeted immediately by fake/automated avatars that want to be my friend?

The only reason I can understand why SEO’s seem so fascinated with “gaming” social media by creating fake avatars and adding all these “non-friends” is for power and links. That’s really not what social media is about, not to the people inside the communities – only to SEO’s does this seem to matter.

If advocating that in social media, marketers be real, engage honestly in conversations with an audience or their customer, is deemed as “Goody 2 Shoes”, well I’ll gladly, and proudly wear that badge.

*****

Now, I don’t know about you, but all this reference to Goody 2 Shoes, I really can’t get Adam Ant’s 80’s tune out of my head.

Photo/Comic Credit: ebbourg

By Liana “Li” Evans

There is a definite difference in how men and women utilize, share, communicate and move around in social media. It’s actually fascinating to watch once you become aware of the differences. I started to notice the difference months ago, by studying the audiences in all the different social media mediums and how the people within the communities speak and communicate with one another.

My thoughts on this were further intrigued after reading two different pieces.

The first piece was Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. I read this looking at the different demographics involved with the different types of social media channels. I was utterly fascinated with how social news and social bookmarking sites skewed highly male, and forums and networking skewed highly female.

My interested was further piqued after reading a survey conducted by Rapleaf (hat tip to Dianne Aull of BootstrapSEO for turning me on to this). In this smaller study, by smaller I mean the number of social media sites looked at, it showed overwhelmingly that women dominated sites like Facebook Friendster and Myspace. In this survey it showed that LinkedIn skewed highly male.

So why the difference? Why such lopsided numbers in demographics?

If you understand anything about how men and women react to one another, in general (and understand I do realize not all women and not all men fall into these categories, but a majority do), women converse and share more. Women want to talk about their experience, they want to express their feelings whether they are raving about a product, pissed of about the service they recieved or gushing about a book they just read, women love to share. Networking sites like MySpace and forums are places that not only facilitate this, but encourage it.

Men on the other hand are less expressive. It’s rare you see a man gushing about the brand new suit he picked up at Men’s Wharehouse, or ranting about how the lawn care guy didn’t really cut his grass the way he liked. Men tend to voice their opinion in the quickest and fastest ways they can, to get back to the tasks in front of them. This is why sites like Digg, LinkedIn and Delicious skew highly male. It’s simple, you write a review, you answer a question, you vote a story up, you bookmark a page. Simple, there’s not much “sharing” going on there.

I even find it fascinating with my friends across all the different networks. The most active friends I have on the Social News Sites – 95% are men. They are the ones sending me “shout outs” to come vote up their submissions – without any explanations, just the email. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, but as a woman, I tend to want a bit more (see I’m looking for expression). Men think really nothing of this, because it’s sort of like, I vote you up, you vote me up when it’s time.

Women, on the other hand generally approach it as, “Hey do you want to read this? If you like it, feel free to vote it up”, and send me a link to the actual article/post, rather than to the social site. I’m not saying one way is right over the other, I’m just pointing out, how men and women communicate differently.

For men, its seems interacting in social networks is more like a transaction, I’ll do this for you now, you’ll help me out down the line. For women in social networks it is more about sharing their feelings, and experiences on these networks. Even these networks and companies providing applications to these networks are becoming more and more attuned to it. Look at RockYou and Slide, the designs are very geared towards women with those “glittery” options right there at that top of both.

So how does this affect marketers? By knowing your demographic, it can help you to know where to start a conversation with your potential audience at. Where you can appeal to them more, basically on their own turf, where they feel most comfortable. If you are technology company, maybe you put together a knowledge base of articles on tech topics and start working with Digg, SlashDot and Delicious. If you’re a scrapbooking company, start groups on Facebook, upload photos on Flickr and join those scrapbooking forums. Knowing where your audience is is a big part of your strategy in social media, understanding how men and women differ in social media use can also go a long way in reaching the right audiences too.

by Matt McGee

People are talking online. They’re talking about your company, your products, or perhaps your industry. And what they’re saying has a big impact on your chances of converting that next lead or closing that next sale.

Last month, Li made an impassioned case for conversations being the focus and goal of social media. Social media, she said, is an “opportunity for the general public to voice their opinions about brands, products, companies and their opinion of what is really relevant.”

The latest evidence proves that’s exactly what a lot of people are doing online. According to a survey done by the Opinion Research Corporation, reviews are a major influence on consumer decision-making. This isn’t new information, either; consumer reviews have been cited for years as a growing trend in determining who wins and loses online.

Here are some of the stats from the ORC survey:

• 83% of respondents said online reviews had at least some influence on their purchasing decisions.
• 70% said they look for reviews and information about particular types of products and services, with travel/recreation/leisure topping the list of most researched niches, and electronics right behind in 2nd
• 61% look for online reviews before purchasing a new product or service

There’s no hiding from the power of consumer opinion online. If you’re a business owner, the time is now to make sure you know what’s being said about you, your products or services, and your industry as a whole.

You can download the ORC news release (24k PDF) for more background on the survey.

By Bill Slawski

A newly granted patent from Yahoo describes how information collected from usage log files from toolbars, ISPs, and web servers can be used to rank web pages, discover new pages, move a page into a higher tier in a multi-tier search engine, increase the weight of links and the relevance of anchor text for pages based upon those weights, and determine when the last time a page has been changed or updated.

When you perform a search at a search engine, and enter a query term to search with, there are a number of steps that a search engine will take before displaying a set of results to you.

One of them is to sort the results to be shown to you in an order based upon a combination of relevance and importance, or popularity.

Over the past few years, that “popularity” may have been determined by a search engine in a few different ways. One might be based upon whether or not a page is frequently selected from search results in response to a particular query.

Another might be based upon a count by a search engine crawling program of the number of links that point to a page, so that the more incoming links to a page, the more popular the page might be considered. Incoming links might even be treated differently, so that a link from a more popular page may count more than a link from a less popular page.

Problems with Click and Link Popularity

Those measures of the popularity of a page, based upon clicks in search results and links pointing to that page, are somewhat limited. It’s still possible for a page to be very popular and still be assigned a low popularity weight from a search engine.

Example

A web page is created, and doesn’t have many links pointing to it from other sites. People find the site interesting, and send emails to people they know about the site. The site gets a lot of visitors, but few links. It becomes popular, but the search engines don’t know that, based upon a low number of links to the site, and little or no clicks in search results to the page. A search engine may continue to consider the page to be one of little popularity.

Using Network Traffic Logs to Enhance Popularity Weights

Instead of just looking at those links and clicks, what if a search engine started paying attention to actual traffic to pages, measured by looking at traffic information from web browser plugins, web server logs, traffic server logs, and log files from other sources such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs)?

A good question, and it’s possible that at least one search engine has been using such information for a few years.

Yahoo was granted a patent today, originally filed in 2002, that describes how search traffic information could be used to create popularity weights for pages, and rerank search results based upon actual traffic to those pages, and be used in a number of other ways.

Here are some of them:

• The rank of a URL in search results might be influenced by the number of times the URL shows up in network traffic logs as a measure of popularity;
• New URLs can be discovered by a search engine when they appear in network traffic logs;
• More popular URLs can be placed into higher level tiers of a search index, based upon the number of times the URL appears in the network traffic logs;
• Weights can be assigned to links, where the link weights are used to determine popularity and the indexing of pages, based upon the number of times a URL is present in network traffic logs; and,
• Whether a page has been modified since the last time a search engine index was updated can be determined by looking at the traffic logs for a last modified date or an HTTP expiration date.

The patent granted to Yahoo is:

Using network traffic logs for search enhancement
Invented by Arkady Borkovsky, Douglas M. Cook, Jean-Marc Langlois, Tomi Poutanen, and Hongyuan Zha
Assigned to Yahoo
US Patent 7,398,271
Granted July 8, 2008
Filed April 16, 2002

Abstract

A method and apparatus for using network traffic logs for search enhancement is disclosed. According to one embodiment, network usage is tracked by generating log files. These log files among other things indicate the frequency web pages are referenced and modified. These log files or information from these log files can then be used to improve document ranking, improve web crawling, determine tiers in a multi-tiered index, determine where to insert a document in a multi-tiered index, determine link weights, and update a search engine index.

Network Usage Logs Improve Ranking Accuracy

The information contained in network usage logs can indicate how a network is actually being used, with popular web pages shown as being viewed more frequently than other web pages.

This popularity count could be used by itself to rank a page, or it could be combined with an older measure that uses such things as links pointing to the page, and clicks in search results.

Instead of looking at all traffic information for a page, visits over a fixed period of time may be counted, or new page views may be considered to be worth more than old page views.

Better Web Crawling

Usually a search engine crawling program discovers new pages to index by finding links to pages on the pages that they crawl. The crawling program may not easily find sites that don’t have many links pointing to them.

But, pages that show up in log files from ISPs or toolbars could be added to the queue of pages to be crawled by a search engine spider

Pages that don’t have many links to them, but show up frequently in log information may even be promoted for faster processing by a search crawler.

Multi-Tiered Search Indexes

It’s not unusual for a search engine to have more than one tier of indexes, with a relatively small first-tier index which includes the most popular documents. Lower tiers get relatively larger, and have relatively less popular documents included within them.

A search query would normally be run against the top level tier first, and if not enough results for a query are found in the first tier, the search engine might run the query against the next level of tiers of the index.

Network usage logs could be used to determine which tier of a multi-tier index should hold a particular page. For instance, a page in the second-tier index could be moved up to the first-tier index if its URL shows up with a high frequency in usage logs. More factors than frequency of a URL in a usage log could be used to determine which tier to assign a document.

Usage Logs for Link Weights

One use search engines have for link information is to determine the popularity of a document,

The number of incoming links to a page may be used to determine the popularity of that page.

A weight may also be assigned based upon the relationship between words used in a link and the documents being linked to with that link. If there is a strong logical tie between a page and a word, then the relationship between the word and the page is given a relatively higher weight than if there wasn’t. This is known as a “correlation weight.” The word “zebra” used in the anchor text of a link would have a high correlation weight if the article it points to is about zebras. If the article is about automobiles, it would have a much lower correlation weight.

Links could aso be assigned weights (”link weights”) based on looking at usage logs to see which links were selected to request a page. As the patent’s authors tell us:

Thus, those links that are frequently selected may be given a higher link weight than those links that are less frequently selected even when the links are to the same document.

In other words, pages pointed to by frequently followed links could be assigned higher popularity values than pages with more incoming links that are rarely followed.

Link weights Used to Determine the Relevance of Pages for Anchor Text

If a word pointing to a page is in a link (as anchor text), and the link is one that is frequently followed, then the relevance of that page for the word in the anchor text may be increased in the search engine’s index.

For example, assume that a link to a document has the word “zebra”, and another link to the same document has the word “engine”. If the “zebra” link is rarely followed, then the fact that “zebra” is in a link to the document should not significantly increase the correlation weight between the word and the document. On the other hand, if the “engine” link is frequently followed, the fact that the word “engine” is in a frequently followed link to the document may be used to significantly increase the correlation weight between the word “engine” and the document.

Conclusion

This patent was originally filed back in 2002, and some of the processes it covers are also discussed in more recent patent filings and papers from the search engines, such as popularity information being used to determine which tier a page might be on in a multi-tier search engines.

Some of the processes it describes have been assumed by many to be processes that a search engine uses, such as discovering new pages from information gathered by search engine toolbars.

A few of the processes described haven’t been discussed much, if at all, such as the weight of a link (and the relevance of anchor text in that link) being increased if it is a frequently used link, and decreased if it isn’t used often.

It’s possible that some of the processes described in this patent haven’t been used by a search engine, but it does appear that search engines are paying more and more attention to user information that they do collect from places like toolbars and log files from different sources. This patent is one of the earliest from a major search engine that describes how such user data could be used in a fair amount of detail.

Another patent from Yahoo was also granted this week on How Anchor Text can be used to determine the relevancy of a page for specific words. I’ve written about that over on SEO by the Sea, in Yahoo Patents Anchor Text Relevance in Search Indexing

By Liana Evans

As much as social media is about starting conversations, its equally as much about building relationships. Once you start getting involved with social media, it becomes very apparent that it takes time and resources to build those relationships within your community that creates the brand loyalists and promoters, not to mention converting the skeptics.

It certainly doesn’t happen over night, or with one Social News site submission. Rather, it takes dedicated resources, as in real human beings, that represent your company or your brand to communicate one on one with individuals who are active in the social circles within your industry space. Shortcuts are few and far between, and in the end, only manage to “cheapen” or even destroy the trust you’ve built up in a relationship.

Take for example, outsourcing a blogger outreach program. A lot of companies out there will spout out how many emails they can send out to bloggers pitching your product, service or brand. If they do that, you should stop, pack up your things and walk out the door. That’s not how you are going to build relationships with bloggers, that’s only going to get them pissed off at you.

So what’s a company to do? Well here’s some simple tips to get your started on building relationships in the social media space.

• Dedicate Resources
  Building relationships in social media requires resources, both time and bodies. You need to have a dedicated person or team that fields the responsibility of communicating on a one on one level with your audience. That means that this team of people needs to read blogs, manage friend lists, write comments, join groups, upload photos, participate in forums, be active on sites like Twitter or Plurk, write blogs posts for your blog and so on. Depending on your industry, you might need to even dedicate an expert to your team that can field questions with the right answers.




• Be Real
  Building relationships in social media requires trust. That means, be real – be who you are. Let your employees be who they are, representatives of your brand. Building fake profiles, writing fake reviews, concocting fake blogs, lying about who you really are will all eventually bite you in the ass, so don’t even bother. Don’t ever underestimate the audience’s intelligence, they can smell a fake a mile away and will crucify you when you are found out.




• Communicate Early & Often
  Whether its through newsletters, blogs or even forum posts, get out there and communicate! By communicating “early” you have the opportunity to head off those “storms” that can arise, but not only that, you can also get a jump start on topics that are hot in your industry and respond to them a lot earlier than your competition. Communicating often helps to build that relationship with your audience that they can trust you will be there, informing them of the valuable information they are looking for or need.




• Get Involved
  Don’t just post links to your blog posts, or press releases in Twitter or Plurk, or posts on forums. That’s just going to make people ignore you, because it’s not a two way conversation. Actually get involved with your community. If people are looking for assistance, point them in the right direction, even if its not to your site, that’ll gain you much more respect rather than slapping a link to your product that isn’t related to what they asked.

  One of the best examples of this “getting involved” point I’m making is Tim Jackson the Brand Manager of Masi Bicycles. This man is deeply involved in the Plurk community and it’s benefiting Masi by leaps and bounds. Why? Because Tim’s done the first 3 bullet points here and has also gotten involved.




• Reward Your Audience
  One thing to always keep in mind, as much as you are involved in building relationships in social media, so is everyone in your community. It’s not just you spending the time and effort, but your audience is as well. They take the time to post reviews, type up comments, write blog posts, do research to answer questions, test out new products or services. Make sure you remember to reward your community for the efforts, time and resources they are putting in. Last but not least, always remember to personally thank those community members who put forth the extra effort.




• Remember to Listen
  Building a relationship requires that you listen more and talk less. That means, as much as your PR department wants you to be promoting, promoting and promoting, that’s the last thing you should be doing in social media. Social media offers a unique opportunity for you to get real reactions, learn about real issues or problems as well as successes straight from your customers’ perspectives. All of this is not hindered by the stigma of a focus group, where people might think then need to “give the right answers”. It’s amazing the things you can learn just by listening to what your customers or your audience is saying, take the time to read their posts in forums, comments to your blog posts, their tweets or plurks and even what they say in reviews. It can be well worth its weight in gold.

By Li Evans

We’ve got some exciting news here at the SEMClubhouse. Another great SEO mind has joined not just the clubhouse, but the KeyRelevance staff as well.

Matt McGee of the Small Business Search Marketing Blog, joined our team yesterday!

With companies needing to stretch their marketing dollars, adding Matt McGee, who specializes in working with clients to maximize the return on their online marketing investment, was a great expansion to the KeyRelevance team.

“Google’s Universal Search changed the rules of online marketing,” said Christine Churchill, President and CEO of KeyRelevance. “Search engine optimization still rules, but now it’s the tip of the iceberg of what we need to provide to clients. Online marketing now encompasses not only SEO and Pay Per Click, but blog and video optimization, local and mobile search, social media marketing, and much more. Matt’s specialized knowledge in these areas makes him a valuable addition to our already robust team.”

KeyRelevance’s online team includes well-known SEOs Bill Slawski (SEO By The Sea), Li Evans (Search Marketing Gurus), Jim Gilbert, and now Matt McGee.

“In addition to being a first class SEO, Matt is one of the most positive people I’ve ever known,” added Churchill. “He infuses the element of fun into the workplace.”

A seasoned marketer, Matt has been online since 1994. Matt is a regular speaker at major search industry conferences including Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo, and Small Business Marketing Unleashed. He is also a columnist at Search Engine Land. In his spare time, Matt runs the Small Business Search Marketing blog and one of the oldest and largest independent U2 sites on the Internet at @U2.com.

“KeyRelevance is one of the most respected companies in the search marketing industry, and it’s an honor to join a team with such impeccable credentials. I’ve known Christine, Li, and Bill for years as friends and peers. I’m excited to join them and the rest of the KeyRelevance crew,” says McGee.