Shake The Tree

So some big news this morning – my company, Conductor, Inc., announced it’s $10 Million Series B financing.

If you’re not aware – I’m employed at Conductor - where I work with some amazingly clever folks to help large organizations bring science and metrics to their natural search efforts.

I recently finished up the second edition of our study on Fortune500 organic search visibility, really the first study to take a methodical and metrics-first approach audit of the seo effectiveness of some of the largest US public companies.

Some key takeaways of the study

• The Fortune 500 as a group spent millions of dollars a day on 88,792 keywords – yet only 20.82% of these keywords rank in the top 100 natural search results.
• Large brand visibility is improving throughout natural search results, but even high performers struggle with inconsistent execution across brands.
• Only 1.41% of the domains (not companies) surveyed showed a significant number of their terms in the top results. In all cases these companies had domains with significant visibility issues that offset their overall score.
• 46.76% of Fortune 500 companies have very low or non-existent visibility for their most advertised keywords.
• Fortune 500 natural search visibility dropped 5.8% when search queries increased to 5 or more words.

If you’d like to take a look at the whole study – head on over to the Conductor Research Section:

I’m particularly guilty of a bad habit of holding off sending a project off into the world until it is ‘just so.’

One manifestation of this is the ridiculous amount of time it took me to launch the ‘hello world’ post to this very blog.  Somewhere deep in my (BRAIN PART) there’s a series of synapse connections that screams  “If you’re not going to say something brilliant, shut the f**k up.”

Another example?  I am pretty much dissatisfied with even the most successful projects that cross my plate, primarily because I can look back and figure out what I/we should have done to make it more effective.

There are some positives to this mindset – I’m not going to pass along something that’s garbage.  You can consume that way too easily on your own.    I don’t think too much of the talking heads that spout unoriginal drivel into the world without providing any original insight or tangible use to the reader.   I fear for the re-tweet generation.  Because of the ridiculously low barrier to syndication on the net there are more and more individuals channeling repeats, and way too few networks investing in original content.

But it has real drawbacks.  To extend the 80/20 rule, the amount of effort required to move a project from 98% done to 99% is more than moving from 80% to 90%.  There are other projects that suffer, and you might get a lot more from a second project that’s ‘only’ highly effective.

So here are the rules that I use to try and kick those mostly done projects out the door.

1. Commit to  a deadline
2. Tell someone else about the deadline, preferably your boss or significant other, and make sure that they’re going to call you on it.
3. Run through a ‘dress rehearsal’ release – where you run through all the actions of delivering the project, and then do a ‘pre-release-post-mortem’.
4. Surround yourself with people that think differently.  Not idiots, but people who jump in feet first.  You will be driven nuts by your perception of their lack of attention to detail, but simply having them be wrong will move the process along.

What works for you?

I’m staring at Inbox Three.

“Getting Things Almost Done Except for Those Things You Can’t Process” ≠ “GTD”

I think I don’t trust my system.

Usually it’s along the lines of – “I can’t understand why anyone would want to (tweet / post on facebook / join a linkedin grou).   What a waste of time.

I hear this a lot – and I can’t say as I blame the people who are saying it – from the outside these social media networks look like a colossal time sink, with very little ROI.   There are an awful lot of unsubstantiated fad marketing tactics, and you’d be crazy to not be skeptical.  My response is usually something along these lines:

“It may be asinine to ‘tweet’ that you’re heading to the bathroom.  But if you’re Charmin, it’s a great opportunity to interact with your brand.”

I got this full force while I was doing some research for marketing automation providers.  This is an amazingly complex undertaking – with suprisingly few areas where you can compare vendors.  In any case, I happened to post on my twitter account that “Evaluating Marketing Automation solutions at 11:15 on a Friday night. WTF is wrong with me? ”    My boss reads my twitter account. 

Next Monday – I got three calls from marketing automation vendors.

If you’re skeptical about social marketing working for your organization, do the following:

1. Head over to search.twitter.com
2. Type in your brand
3. Add the Feed to your favorite RSS reader.
4. Repeat a couple of times for keywords of interest for your product.

If you watch these feeds over a couple of days, and aren’t convinced you need to be interacting in social media, call me.

I came to a realization recently while I was working on a project for Conductor on the natural search visibility of the Fortune 500 – All marketers should learn and use mySQL.

Ok, not all of them.   There are a certainly marketers who don’t regularly deal with lots of data – whether that’s leads, or research, or a need to do some data analysis that is beyond Excel’s capabilities – but I can’t think of a lot of scenarios that wouldn’t benefit from some serious data manipulation.

I do sympathisze with those who rely on others to do their analysis – but et me make the following arguments on why it’s critical that a good marketer can roll up their sleevs and dig into the a pile of csvs or premade databases.

1. If you’re outsourcing your data analysis to an IT department, they’re going to give you what you ask for.  And not a lot more.  And probably not very quickly.
2. It’s hard to know what you’re looking for – and even harder to be inspired on what to look for – if you can’t take a look at the way the data is structured, you may be missing some intesting and valuable insights.
3. The very process of creating your own databases, and mining valuable business information from them expands your horizons on what’s possible.  Trust me – you will aim higher.

Now I’m not making an argument that all marketers need to be database experts.  You really shouldn’t be worried about performance, reliability, or redundancy.  If you’re worrying about these things – call in your IT department.  But next time you’re thinking about picking up the phone and asking an analyst for some info – try it yourself.

Getting started:

The easiest way to jump right into it is to download mySQL and run it on your machine.  (A development machine if you have one).  It’s free, and supported by the open source community.   There are two pieces – the mySQL engine itself, and the Query browser – the GUI that you’ll use to load, manipulate, and yes, query the data.

mySQL download
W3Schools mySQL tutorial

And as a final piece – you get major street cred from the ‘real’ developers once you start throwing ORDER BY arguments when you’re talking at the water cooler.