Omniture Seminar in Dallas Oct 14 – Free


Posted on
by

Our friends at Omniture are hosting a FREE seminar on Tuesay 14 October in Dallas. In the half-day seminar they will be covering both their SearchCenter and Test & Target tools. The event will be in Dallas on October 14th at the W- Dallas Victory Hotel. Here’s an overview of what they will present:

Automate Paid Search

Set up and manage campaigns across all search engines from a single interface
Create automated bid rules to improve return on ad spend without daily, manual intervention
Adapt keyword bids according to strategic success events beyond simple click-through rates
Correlate paid keywords with your internal on-site search to expand and refine keyword lists and optimize destination URLs
Improve unaided brand awareness through search engine marketing

Improve Relevance

Improve your conversion by using A/B and multivariate testing on your landing pages, banners, forms and any other Web site content
Geo-targeting– how to target content based on the location data you already have in your Web analytics tool
Segment targeting– how to create segments that make sense for your business
Email testing– improve the results of your email campaigns by determining which actually convert best in real-time

Space is limited so register today to reserve your seat. Here is the direct link to register with the schedule: http://events.omniture.com/register/seminars/us2008/index.html.

SMX East 2008 – Great show, great people, great content


Posted on
by

SMX East logo Great conferences don’t happen by accident. That said, the recent SMX East show rates as fabulous. Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman and the rest of the Third Door folks did an incredible job of putting together a first class show.

How they do it is an art form. First, they entice the best keynotes and speakers in the industry to come and openly share their knowledge. (Looking over the list of speakers, I feel privileged and humbled that I’m even allowed to participate.) Then Danny and Chris develop a killer agenda that has broad audience appeal yet is balanced enough to offer something for everyone from the novice marketer to the advanced expert.

Throw in sponsors and exhibitors to help finance the show and provide the attendees cool stuff like wireless connections (thanks Rand), tee shirts, and light-up promotional items that max out the geek meter.

Lastly, you need a hard working dedicated staff to run the lights, music, microphones, registration, and all the other behind-the-scenes things that make the show the A+ event it was. Kudos to Karen, Claire, Michelle, and everyone else involved.

The week leading up to the show was tough. Employee and friend Li Evans unexpectedly lost her father. Another employee had to be rushed to the Emergency Room and spent the week in the hospital undergoing breathing treatments. If that wasn’t enough trauma, during the week, a close family friend succumbed to cancer after a long arduous struggle. While that death wasn’t a total surprise, I found myself emotionally drained. The world felt a little smaller and colder.

Arriving in NYC after such a week meant I really wasn’t in the mood for parties. I was craving quieter smaller exchanges with close friends. One positive thing about conferences is that it brings old friends together. Conference friends have a special place. They may not physically live near us but because we share time and adventures in locales far from our homes where we are without our usual support networks, there is a special bonding and closeness that develops. I have conference friends who are like extended family to me. We take turns looking out for each other and we’ve cried on each other’s shoulders on more than one occasion.

This trip my dear friend Scottie Claiborne popped up to NYC to visit our group of friends and stayed with me. A few years ago Scottie had withdrawn from the conference limelight to focus more on kids and a balanced life. Within a few minutes of seeing Scottie my spirits were brighter. Scottie has that effect on me and most people she comes in contact with. It was great catching up with her.

Photo of Debra Mastaler and Christine ChurchillOne night during the conference a group of friends assembled in the hotel bar to celebrate Debra Mastaler’s birthday. It was comforting to be in the midst of friends and I was genuinely happy to see them. Debra is a popular lady in search and a dear long-time friend. Some of the many friends who stopped by to wish her well were Jill Whalen, Scottie Claiborne, Mike Grehan, Brad Neelan, Mona Eiesseily, Andrew Goodman, Stacy Williams, Li Evans, Kim Krause Berg and her charming husband Eric, Kevin Newcomb, Simon Heseltine, and many others.

I sat in on a number of sessions at the conference and was delighted with the content. It would be hard to choose which was my favorite this conference, so many were excellent. If I was forced to pick just one, I would have to say I enjoyed Gregory Markel’s presentation on video search engine optimization the best. I’ve known Gregory a long time and consider him a friend. I have also learned over the years that embedded in his enthusiastic presentations are really great marketing jewels. You can tell he loves what he does and Gregory is very willing to share his knowledge. If you missed his session at SMX, watch for him at another show. I’ve been in the search business for ten plus years, and I walked out of the session with a few new tricks. Thanks Greg.

That leads me to another topic. The search industry moves too fast to sit on your laurels. You have to actively grow and learn new skills….constantly. If you stand still the industry will pass you by. One of the easiest ways to stay up to date of new changes in the industry is to attend conferences. Books in our industry are outdated before they are printed. Attending conferences gives you more current information and is one of the best professional development practices you can do. Sure, it costs money to attend, but if you get a couple nuggets of new information and network with folks who can help you do your job better, it’s worth every cent.

My next conference, SMX London, is 4-5 November 2008. I’m already looking forward to it. Each conference has its own flavor and the London show is a great place to learn about all things search, but especially learn about international marketing techniques.

I’ll be speaking on two panels in London. Dear friend Tor Crockatt (who is not only drop dead beautiful, but is a first class marketer) and I will be paired up in a Keyword Research Bootcamp. I’ve spoken on panels with Tor many times and it’s always thrilling to share the podium with someone as knowledgeable and fun as Tor. There is good chemistry between us. Keeping us in line (or trying to) will be moderator and conference co-chair Chris Sherman. Good luck Chris, we outnumber you.

My other speaking session at SMX London is the Paid Search Checkup panel. Paid Search wizard Mel Carson and I will interactively review paid search campaigns and provide constructive advice to improve them. Live clinics are my favorite type sessions because you never know what will be thrown at you. They are also where you, as an advertiser, can get free advice from experienced marketers. If you are already an expert marketer, it’s nice to get a second opinion if you’re looking for new ideas on marketing. The cross fertilization of tips and experience in the clinic makes for a rich exchange where everyone benefits.

Well, I’ve managed to ramble on a number of topics and even cross the globe in a very short time. You have things to do, so I’ll close by saying I hope to see you at a conference soon. And please, do come up and say hello if you attend. I’m very approachable, human, and always open to make a new search friend.

Christine

Google Expands Details on VisualRank – PageRank for Pictures


Posted on
by

In April of this year (2008), at the 17th International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, China, Google researchers presented their findings on an experiment that they performed involving a new way of indexing images which relied to some degree on the actual content of the images instead of things such as text and meta data associated with those pictures.

Our First Look at VisualRank

The paper, PageRank for Product Image Search (pdf), details the results of a series of experiments involving the retrieval of images in for 2000 of the most popular queries that Google receives for products, such as the iPod and Xbox. The authors of the paper tell us that user satisfaction and relevancy of results were significantly improved in comparison to results seen from Google’s image search.

News of this “PageRank for Pictures” or VisualRank spread quickly across many blogs including TechCrunch and Google Operating System, as well as media sources such as the New York Times and The Register from the UK.

The authors of that paper tell us that it makes three contributions to the indexing of pictures:

  1. We introduce a novel, simple, algorithm to rank images based on their visual similarities.
  2. We introduce a system to re-rank current Google image search results. In particular, we demonstrate that for a large collection of queries, reliable similarity scores among images can be derived from a comparison of their local descriptors.
  3. The scale of our experiment is the largest among the published works for content-based-image ranking of which we are aware. Basing our evaluation on the most commonly searched for object categories, we significantly improve image search results for queries that are of the most interest to a large set of people.

The process behind ranking images based upon visual similarities between them takes into account small features within the images, while adjusting for such things as differences in scale, rotation, perspective and lighting. The paper shows an illustration of 1,000 pictures of the painting the Mona Lisa, with the two largest at the center of the illustration being the highest ranked images in a query for “mona lisa”

A Second Look at VisualRank

In the conclusion to PageRank for Product Image Search, the authors noted some areas that they needed to explore further, such as how effective their system might work in real world circumstances on the Web, where mislabeled spam images might appear, as well as many duplicate and near duplicate versions of images.

A new paper from the authors takes a deeper look at the algorithms behind VisualRank, and provides some answers to the problems of spam and duplicate images – VisualRank: Applying PageRank to Large-Scale Image Search (pdf).

The new VisualRank paper also expands upon the experimentation described in the first paper, which focused upon queries for images of products, to include queries for 80 common landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, and the Lincoln Memorial.

This VisualRank approach appears to still rely initially upon older methods of ranking images which look at things such as text and meta data (like alt text) associated with those images, to come up with a limited number of images to compare with each other. Once it receives those pictures in response to a query, a reranking of those images take place based upon shared features and similarities between the images.

Conclusion

Hopefully, if you have a website where you include images to help visitors experience what your pages are about in a visual manner, you’re now asking yourself how good a representation your picture is of what your page is about.

Being found for images on the web is another way that people can find your pages. And, the possibility that a search engine might include a picture from your page in search results next to your page title and description and URL is a very real one – Google has been doing it for News searches for a while.

Google (Finally) Sets Rules for Local Business Listings


Posted on
by

Google Maps has been dealing with spam in its business listings for well over a year now. The problem has gotten so bad that Google recently invited users to help report spam found inside the Google Maps business listings.

In many cases, the spam is obvious; when Company XYZ has listings with the same address and phone number showing up for every zip code in the U.S., there’s no doubt about the intent behind the company’s actions. But in other situations, it’s not as clear. Imagine a lawyer whose office is in Minneapolis, but who serves Minneapolis, St. Paul, and surrounding suburbs. Is it spam when that lawyer rents a mailbox address in nearby St. Paul so s/he can submit an extra listing to Google and be found for “St. Paul lawyer” searches?

Google has finally taken steps to help clear up what’s spam and what isn’t where Google Maps business listings are concerned. Today they published a set of Business Listing Quality Guidelines, and warned that ignoring these rules “could result in your business listings being permanently removed from Google Maps.”

Here’s what Google wants you to do when listing your business in Google Maps:

  1. Represent your business exactly as it appears in real life.
  2. List information that provides as direct a path to the business as you can.
  3. Only include listings for businesses that you represent.
  4. Don’t participate in any behavior with the intention or result of listing your business more times than it exists.
  5. Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing.

There’s some additional information on the guidelines page, including a specific warning to local service providers not to create listings for every city you serve.

The guidelines seem to me to be right on the money, and are a good first step in cleaning up a problem that’s gone on too long.

What are your thoughts on the new Google Maps business listing guidelines?

SES Search Engine Marketing Training in Dallas


Posted on
by

Looking to learn new job skills that are in high demand?

One of the fastest growing job markets is search engine marketing. If you’ve been on the bench thinking about learning it, here’s your opportunity to expand your knowledge and enhance your skill set.

Search Engine Strategies is offering a FULL day of intensive search marketing training here in Dallas on Friday 26 September. See here for full details.

Classes offered include:

Search Engine Optimization,
Landing Page Testing Hands On: Developing Your Action Plan,
SEO Toolbox Crash Course, and
Making Pay Per Click Pay – Best Practices in PPC Advertising.

Each of these sessions is taught by a nationally known expert who knows the ins and outs of search marketing. Students will walk away with enhanced skills and new ideas for online marketing. These are intensive workshops with small student-teacher ratios to ensure personalized in-depth training.

Who should attend:
• In house marketers who need to be trained in search marketing or want to take their knowledge base to the next level.
• Marketing Managers who need to understand online marketing options better.
• Small business owners and web site owners who wear a multitude of hats and want to harness the power of search marketing
• People looking to learn new job skills that are in high demand
Don’t wait. Class size is limited and is filling up now. Sign up today.

Special Discount for DFWSEM friends. Enter 10REY as the Priority Code to get a 10% Discount.

Key Relevance Review of Google Automatic Match – Measuring the Cost of Skipping Keyword Research


Posted on
by

by Jim Gilbert and Mike Churchill of Key Relevance

Automatic Match is Google’s new feature that allows AdWords managers to receive clicks in their PPC campaigns without the need to select specific keywords. According to Google:

 

Automatic matching

Automatic matching is an optional feature that helps your ads reach targeted traffic missed by your keyword lists. It works by analyzing the content of the landing pages, ads, and keywords in your ad group and shows your ads on search queries relevant to this information.

The automatic matching system continually monitors your ad performance and aims to show your ads only on queries that yield a comparable or better cost-per-click (CPC) than that of your current traffic. Automatic matching will only use your unspent budget and will never deliver more traffic than your budget allows for.

 

In two previous posts, Jim took a somewhat negative shot at Google’s “Automatic Match” feature, with little to go on but past experience with “new features”.

 

Well, we’re back and have the results of our real-life testing of this new feature.

After a fairly lengthy process of testing “Automatic Match”, we can now report these facts — Facts at the time of this writing, but Google can always change at any moment without warning or notice.

Facts:

  1. The following statement is still true, so be on the lookout for when Google rolls “Automatic Match” out to your account!
    Quote from an Official Google email dated 23May2008: “The feature will be enabled by default..” – see Automatic Match to be Default
  2. Automatic Match does not start spending immediately… once activated, it takes up to a couple weeks for it to learn what it thinks it should do. So, don’t get complacent if it does don’t start spending on Day One — KEEP TABS — it could take off like a rocket at any time.
  3. Google’s “Automatic Match” IS greedier than expanded broad match! See our original post at: More Greedy than Expanded Broad Match
  4. Still true (if you notice when it shows up): But there is GOOD news — you can OPT out!

    Look for this in your Campaign Settings:


  5. Automatic Match is especially invasive in adgroups that have relatively few keywords.
  6. You can “negate” bad impressions and clicks with negative keywords — if you keep very, very close tabs on them. We use the PPCProbe keyword tool to allow us real-time tracking of the search phrases.

NOW, some actual results:

The Scenario:
One adgroup with 1 PHRASE match keyword, residing in a campaign enabled for automatic match.

The Results:

  • Adgroup spend increased 600%! That’s right… 600%!

While the increase in spend in and of itself is not a bad thing (assuming that’s why we were using Automatic Match in the first place), there is a problem with ther results of our test: spending more money is a good thing only if it is bringing targeted traffic to the site. One of the shortcomings of using Automatic Match is that you don’t get to see the search terms that the searchers are using in the Campaign/AdGroups management screen. We used PPCProbe to allow us to gain the insight into the actual search terms that Automatic Match was matching to in real time.

  • 88% of all clicks were from “Automatic Match”. Only 12% were from the actual phrase match keyword. The CPC of the Automatic Match keywords was a little cheaper than the CPC of the actual phrase in the account, but…
  • The majority (4 out of 5) of “Automatic Match” clicks came from keywords I consider to be not relevant. As we shall see, this makes the Effective CPC much worse in our case.

We ran our test with a single phrase match term in the AdGroup: “wedding table decorations”. Of the clicks collected during our test, clicks for the phrases in the AdGroup broke down as follows:

 

Category Example Percentage of Clicks
Actual Phrase from AdGroup
(non-Auto Match – Very Relevant Hits)		 “wedding table decorations” 11.9%
Automatic Match (Relevant Hits) “weddiing table decor”
“decorations for wedding tables”
“wedding cake table decorations”
“wedding table ideas”		 7.5%
Automatic Match (Non-Relevant/Close Hits) “table settings”
“party table numbers”
“table numbers for weddings” 		9.0%
Automatic Match (Non-Relevant Hits) Chocolate “Hersheys”
“chocolate wedding favors”
“chocolate lollipops” 		10.4%
Automatic Match (Non-Relevant Hits) Flowers “wedding flowers”
“wedding florists”
“wedding lily flowers” 		47.8%
Automatic Match (Non-Relevant Hits) Wedding Gowns “discount wedding gowns”
“discount wedding dresses” 		3.0%
Other (Non-Relevant Hits)   10.4%

 

As result, if we consider the Actual Phrases, the Automatch Hits, and the Near Misses (to give the benefit of the doubt – it is just a computer making these KW decisions and we are being lazy by using Automatic Match in the first place), you can see that only 28.4% of the ad spend generated relevant traffic to the site. This effectively made the CPC of the KW buys in this AdGroup 3.5 times more expensive with Automatic Match turned on compared to manually selecting keywords because of the ad spend wasted on the mis-targeted Keyword clicks.

So, where are these mismatched keywords coming from? Are chocolates, flowers and wedding gowns featured on the landing page for the AdGroup? The short answer is “No”. The word “flower” is mentioned once in the plain text of the page, the words “hershey” and “chocolate” appear in the sidebar navigation that points to other pages of the site, and the words “gown” and “dress” are not on the page at all. None of these off-target keywords appeared in the AdWords Ad Copy or anywhere else in the AdGroup. A new AdGroup was created for this test, so no deleted words were previously in the AdGroup. From this we conclude that Automatic Match seems to be using a variation of the Expanded Broad Match algorithm.

Recommendations

  • Turn Automatic Matching off until you understand the ramifications of what it will do to your ad spend, traffic, and conversions.
  • If you should decide to use it, watch it closely, and track the actual phrases that are being used to drive traffic to the site.
  • Be prepared for nothing to happen on the Automatic Match lines of your AdGroups immediately – Automatic Match takes some time to “kick in”.
  • Compute an “effective CPC” [total $$ / (total clicks - off-target Automatch clicks)] for the AdGroup. Once you discount the off-target traffic you will be better able to determine the real cost of using Automatic Matching in your ad campaign.

Pay Per Click

Washington Post covers Corporate Blogging


Posted on
by

Wondering if a company blog is right for your company? Wondering if your company is ready for a company blog?

The Washington Post tackles the highs and lows of corporate blogging in an article this week, Marketing Moves to the Blogosphere. Writer Sarah Halzack pulls in several examples of how businesses big and small are blogging successfully:

  • A company called Honest Tea used its blog to address customer concerns after Coca-Cola bought a large stake in its business.
  • Marriott CEO Bill Marriott’s blog is such a success that the company is able to track reservations it generates: “Marriott has made more than $5 million in bookings from people who clicked through to the reservation page from Marriott’s blog.”
  • A web development company called Viget Labs uses its blogs as a tool for recruiting new employees.
  • Dolcezza, a small ice cream, uses its blog to bring people into its stores and spend money. “When his second store opened in Bethesda in July, Duncan used his blog to advertise an opening night ice cream giveaway. He ended up serving over 300 gallons of ice cream to more than 1,000 customers that night.”

The article also includes some tips on handling comments and other things to think about before starting a company blog. It’s a good read, especially if that’s the position you’re in today.

Google Announces AdWords Enhancements – Real Time Quality Score Calcs and No More Minimum Bid


Posted on
by

By Mike Churchill and Jim Gilbert

Google announced some upcoming AdWords changes that affect the way that they handle the Quality Score calculations. These changes have been made to improve the accuracy of the Quality Score calculations and to improve the usability of the AdWords accounts. They were announced on 21 August 2008, and will initially be rolled out to a few PPC customers for feedback, with the rollout to the full AdWords client base occurring over the next two months.

There are four enhancements announced:

Quality Score Timeliness

Google will now be calculating the Quality Score for your ad each time it matches a search query. In the past, the Quality Score was only recalculated periodically, which could cause some lag in the improvement to Quality Score once the problems were corrected. By calculating the Quality Score “on-the-fly” your ads will be more likely to display when relevant (and less likely to display when not).

“Minimum Bid” to be Retired (but not really)

The Minimum Bid calculation was added to Google AdWords about three years ago (July 2005), and has been the bane of many PPC advertisers. We believe that the Minimum Bid calculation was a work-saving measure that allowed Google to limit the number of phrases to be considered for a particular search query and provide better speed-of-service to the searcher. As a result, though, many phases would be turned off, and an inattentive PPC manager could be caught unawares. Users of the Google API and the offline AdWords Editor will still see the Minimum Bid field until these tools are updated, so while they no longer show in the Google GUI, they are still being calculated (based on the new Quality Score calculations).

As a part of the real-time Quality Score improvements, in the GUI, the Minimum Bid metric is being replaced with….
Continue reading →

SES San Jose: 12 Fast, Free and Easy Tools


Posted on
by

image of toolsKeyRelevance will be well represented next week at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose. Our company president, Christine Churchill will be speaking Wednesday on the “Keywords & Content: Search Marketing Foundations” and “Advanced Paid Search Techniques” panels, and on Friday is giving a four-hour training workshop, “Making Pay Per Click Pay – Best Practices in Pay Per Click Advertising.” Also Wednesday, Li Evans will be speaking on the “Successful Tactics for Social Media Optimization” panel.

It’s my turn on Thursday, when I’ll be giving a starter-level presentation on the “Fast, Free and Easy Tools to Get You Going” panel. This is part of the Just the Basics track, geared toward anyone who’s new to search engine marketing. While we’re all going to be advocating the use of tools to make your search marketing life easier, I’m reminding myself to emphasize that tools aren’t a replacement for individual analysis. Tools shouldn’t make the decisions for you; they should make it a little easier for you to make your own decisions.

If you can’t be there on Thursday, here’s a roundup of the tools I’ll be introducing in my presentation:

SEO Tools

Firefox web browser
SEO for Firefox plugin
Search Status plugin

When I think of SEO tools, Firefox is the first thing that comes to mind. There are so many terrific plugins that make site analysis and competitive research easier. I almost thought about doing my whole presentation on Firefox and its great SEO plugins, but ultimately decided to cover a wider variety of tools. Such as…

Keyword Research Tools

Keyword Discovery
SEO Book Keyword Research Tool

Keyword Discovery has been my keyword research tool of choice for a couple years now. The paid version offers some great features in an easy-to-use interface. The link above is to the free version, which has fewer features than a paid account, but is still a good tool to use for basic keyword research. And the SEO Book tool is a great complement that people should be aware of, too.

There are lots of other great keyword research tools, but my fellow panelists are planning to mention some of them, and we’ve agreed not to repeat one another.

Backlink Tools

Yahoo! Site Explorer
Link Diagnosis

The search engines are pretty stingy about revealing all the backlinks they’re aware of. Of the three main engines, Yahoo’s Site Explorer is considered the most comprehensive and reliable, so I’ll be mentioning that as an official source of checking for backlinks. Among the other tools, my favorite is Link Diagnosis. It shows backlinks, the anchor text of those backlinks, which pages on your site appear to have the most backlinks, and so forth. These tools can also be used to help local link building opportunities, but I’ll be mentioning tools for that purpose separately.

Link Building Tools

Hub Finder
Traffic Marks

The idea behind both of these tools is similar: They examine the backlinks of the highest-ranking sites for your keyword and reveal what sites are linking to those high-ranking sites. This helps you locate “hub” sites — sites that would make a great place to get a backlink to your site. If you’re interested in more background, I recently wrote a fairly detailed Traffic Marks review on Small Business Search Marketing.

PPC Tools

Local Keyword List Generator

I don’t do much PPC work, plus my fellow panelists are going to be discussing some of the more well-known PPC tools. So I’m going to share this one — it’s a favorite of mine. If you do geo-targeted PPC, this might be a real time saver. With this tool, you supply a zip code, radius, and your keywords and the tool spits out a list of keywords you can use in your PPC campaign. It takes the zip code and radius you supply, and locates all the city and town names in that geographic area, then concatenates them with the keywords you provided to create your keyword list. Pretty cool.

Domain Tools

Domain Tools

Yep, the name of the tool in the domain tools category is “Domain Tools.” Clever, eh? Anyway, it’s simply the best place I know of to research registered domains. It’ll tell you the WHOIS data, of course, but also a lot more about the domain, too: the Title tag of the home page, the meta description text, how many internal and external links are on the home page, whether the domain is listed in DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory, and so much more.

Spider Tools

SEO-Browser

This is one of a couple different tools that will show you how a search engine spider “sees” your web page. I’m including it in my presentation because it goes beyond that to also include some extra data like link counts, word count, page size and load speed, and things like that.

—–

So, that’s it. Twelve tools, 24 slides, and I have 10-12 minutes to fit it all in. No problem! It’s been fun working with fellow presenters Scott Allen and Joe Abraham. We’re making sure there are no repeats in our presentations, so the attendees should learn a lot of different options for their SEO and PPC needs.

If you’ll be at SES next week, please do say hello to Christine, Li, and/or myself — we’d be glad to meet you and say hello!

(photo courtesy batega, via Creative Commons)

Can Businesses Combat the Constant, Experienced Complainer?


Posted on
by

By Liana “Li” Evans

As a business, no doubt you will have your run in with an upset customer or two. But what happens when that customer turns into a troll? Or what happens when you are subjected to the “experienced complainer”?

Santa with the Reindeer ComplainerWhat’s an experienced complainer? Well those are the people who know how to “troll” the system. Knowing that if they complain enough, they’ll be placated with discounts, coupons, certificates, and special things all to “soothe” their complaints. They then figure out they can do this just about anywhere they go. All of a sudden, seemingly or magically they get free trips, special discounts, and the like, all because they threaten to write a letter of complaint. These days, even more damaging, they threaten to write a negative review on sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor or Epinions, or even possibly more damaging – write a blog post with a scathing review, with links to your website that are nofollowed.

As customers, I’m sure we’ve seen these types of people. Nothing ever makes them happy, not even free things (undoubtedly they’ll find something wrong with that, too). So what’s a company to do? How can they fight back? Can they takes steps to protect their good name and reputation from these types of complainers, scammers and trolls?

Seems helpless doesn’t it? Well take heart, people in these social communities are smart. Especially if you are making an honest effort to communicate with your audience and reaching out to them. They can smell a “troll” a mile away. They can peg a constant complainer usually within 2-5 posts on a forum or a blog, and they can certainly use their own voice to “out” them as the scammer they seem to be.

Is there anything else you can do? Well in this day and age of digital photos, videos and instant reviews by bloggers and review sites, you do need to do your do diligence before taking extreme actions against the constant complainers. Research and documentation into them is probably the best course of action, to proove that the complainer has a history of “never being happy”.

Take the case of Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and a couple from Cleveland. I wrote about them on SearchMarketingGurus. This couple has done nothing but complain for years and were “soothed” with discounts, special packages and percentages off – all because they were Diamond Club members. I did a little poking around in forums, and the wife seems to leave a wide path of complaints all over the place. The communities even call her a whiner.

Royal Caribbean seems to have done a bit of homework here, and felt they’d never be able to make this couple happy. Guess what they did? They banned the couple from taking cruises on their cruise line for life. Drastic? Perhaps, but it does alleviate the issue dealing with a customer who seems more out to take advantage of your business than anything else.

While banning customers from your business might not be the first option you want to take, it is there if you have the need to do so, but prepare for backlash, undoubtedly the customer will play the victim in the end. In the case of Royal Caribbean, the local news interviewed the wife about the distressing news RC banned them, and a website or two came to her defense, saying complaining to much got them banned. But looking at other sites, the wife has been outted as a “constant whiner” – so who’s right? I guess that’s up to Royal Caribbean’s customers and online community to make their decision with their wallets.

If you are active with your audience, talking to them, interacting with them in social media, believe it or not a lot of times your customers will take up your defense. So the lesson to be learned here is hold an honest conversation with your customers or audience, as they say, the best defense, is a great offense.