Eggblogg

Why not spam?

This is a short piece from my newsletter eTips, written about two and a half years ago. The reason I've dug it up is because Cathy Watson was asking me on Twitter about the legalities of email marketing, and it seemed like a good moment to bring up an example. (It's not a comprehensive overview of the rules as they apply to the UK, but that can be found at the Information Commissioner's website.)

Resisting the temptation to spam

Over at the Email Marketers' Club recently a member posted a question which resulted in 38 heated replies. The question was, is it OK to send a one-off email to people who have bought something from you but who have opted not to receive marketing emails?

The person who asked the question said that out of 700,000 customers, only 200,000 had checked the box which said 'I am happy to receive marketing emails from you' (or words to that effect). So that meant they were sitting on half a million email addresses and it 'seemed a waste' not to market to them. He was thinking of sending them an email (just the one!), perhaps offering a free gift by way of appeasement. It was just too tempting. Surely worth a try?

There then followed a great deal of debate and opinion, ranging roughly from 'if you do so you will be a spammer' to 'you COULD try it, but it may reflect badly on you if people complain.'

The rules about what is and isn't permissible in email marketing, in the UK at least, are not straightforward. The Information Commissioner's website has detailed guidelines on the subject.

Nevertheless, in the above case I couldn't see any 'grey' area. Those 500,000 people had the chance to check the box and give their permission, and they did not. That means they don't want to get emails from this company, even 'one-offs'.

My feeling is: rather than risk losing the trust and loyalty of customers, not to mention your company's reputation, why not focus on those 200,000 people who have actually given their permission? They are the real goldmine, after all. Use your loyal customer base to up-sell, cross-sell and refer their friends.

And don't give into temptation.

Image credit: http://www.toonpool.com/

Key takeaways from Brighton SEO Conference 23-7-10

I'm so glad I made it to the second Brighton SEO conference on Friday organised by Kelvin Newman of Site Visibility. With well over a hundred SEO peeps crammed into a room on the fifth floor of Community Base, with cans of Coke and bottles of water provided and the sound of seagulls cawing and cackling outside, this was no typical conference.

For a start, it was free to attend. That's right: gratis. There were no handouts, no promotional banners and no suits - just a crowd of enthusiastic people hungry for knowledge and buzzing with the expectation that can only come from knowing you're in the right place at the right time, at the coalface of an industry so new and changeable it takes your breath away.

There were many of us tweeting during the afternoon, and I was asked by Clive Walker if I would summarise the key takeaways. Glad to. Although this summary is going to be selective and probably not all that brief, nevertheless I'm happy to share what I noted during the eight 15-minute presentations. (Was that really all there was?)

Kevin Gibbons, Director of Search, SEOptimise: 20 Wordpress plugins to supercharge your blog

What a great start to the afternoon. There were plenty of plugins here that were new to me and sounded well worth investigating, from SEO Friendly Images (adds tags automatically when you forget to) to a Broken Links Checker, from an A/B Theme Testing Plugin to Yet Another Related Post.

Cedric Wooding, Digital Producer at Jollywise Media: A Practical Guide to Managing a Facebook Advertising Campaign

This was a nice walk-through of how to get the best out of a Facebook ad. Cedric used examples from his agency's work for the WTA to demonstrate how choosing the right creative execution and with wise targeting they were able to increase the WTA's 'Likes' from 7k to 225k, with a click-through rate he described as 'massive' - 0.18% - (apparently average CTRs for Facebook campaigns are 0.04%).

Annabel Hodges - Head of Search & Analytics at ...? (between jobs, apparently - about to take up a position with OMD) - When is an SEO campaign not an SEO campaign?

Annabel showed how in an agency setting when you work for the SEO team you're often called in quite late in the day, and not only that but sometimes what's required isn't SEO at all but something more akin to social media.

Her first example was a series of educational microsites for Channel 4 which they needed to promote to teachers rather than just pupils, and the second was a campaign for New Look which resulted in the creation of 'New Look TV', a YouTube channel which ended up putting New Look into the SERPS in competition with the fashion media rather than cannabalising its own ecommerce results, thereby reaching a far wider audience. 

Mark Cook, Director of Search Marketing, Further - Making Accurate Traffic Predictions

This was the point when I started thinking 'I may as well give up now' - the sheer comprehensiveness of the operations he was describing, whereby his agency monitors SERPS on behalf of clients, was awe-inspiring. Let's just say the live event feed was turned off at this point, in respect for the amount of detail being revealed! Mark's starting point was that the Google Adwords keyword tool was completely unreliable. His advice was to use Google Insights, not its Traffic Estimator. What then followed I could tell you, but if I understood half of it they'd probably have to kill me.

Nikki Rae, Head of Analytics & Insight at Fresh Egg - Custom Variables in Google Analytics

I was hoping Nikki would do one of her 'let's get some people up here and demonstrate it' acts and I wasn't disappointed. By way of explaining how to use custom variables she described them as 'sticky notes' that you can add to people, either for the duration of their session visit or for their whole lifetime (actually there was a third but I can't remember it!). We then had people up, representing different pages on a site, and actual sticky notes being applied to a visitor. The thankyou page and the checkout page got a bit muddled up at one point ... but hey, that's websites for you.

Sam Crocker, Lead SEO at Distilled - Using Competitions in SEO

As part of the 'link building' thread, Sam showed us an example of an equipment hire firm running a photography competition as a way of not only building community but of getting valuable links from mainstream and niche publications. A great tip he mentioned (if you're going to ask for links) is to always 'pre-heat the oven' - build a relationship before asking for a link, don't go in cold.

Sam also emphasised that you need to be clear why you're running a competition - for links, for engagement or for exposure? Each have different indicators for success and outreach. If you use Twitter to promote your competition, be sure to use the standard hashtags like #comp #competition etc. If all else fails a brand can always sponsor a competition. He also mentioned standard competition listings sites as not great quality but 'no brainers' in the style of good old directory sites. One of the questions for Sam was 'what kinds of things make the best prizes - apart from the obvious, like 'win an iPad'?' His reply was 'one that encourages people to return to the site after the competition has ended.'

Simon Dance, SEO Manager (UK) at Cheapflights - Linkbuilding & CM

As one of only 2 clients (as opposed to agency types) in the room, Simon gave us a particularly interesting talk, sharing a fair bit about how Cheapflights runs its SEO activities (although he carefully made the point that all views expressed here are my own and not the company's). Some of the tools he mentioned were Highrise, a useful contact management tool when keeping track of bloggers, Backpack (also for managing tasks) and Buzzstream, all tools for "building links in less time". Simon also reminded us of the need to get on the phone and have a contact and follow up strategy (actually it may have been Sam who said this as it's not clear from my notes!).

Rishi Lakhani, Search Marketing Consultant - Actually Making SEO Happen

This was one of the talks in the 'Eye Openers' strand, and it was certainly that. Rishi began by asking if anyone in the room had clients who spent 100k or more a month on SEO. One hand went up. "Porn, gambling..?" "No, travel." The point of the talk was that there are companies that need to spend big money on SEO if they are to successfully dominate their market, but most do not. Rishi's opening slide was of an expensive car with a bumper held together by sticky tape, saying that this is too often what happens to SEO - low priority, bare minumum, seat of pants stuff. He then went on to tell us that he's not a great SEO himself, but his job is to persuade companies to find the damn money. "It's no use complaining that your clients won't or can't pay for SEO," he told us,"Because that's your fault." Basically the decision makers in business only care about one thing - the bottom line - and the only way to sell SEO is not to bang on about SERPS or keywords but to tell them very clearly what the difference will be in terms of profit. Sam Crocker was sitting next me and while Rishi was talking he murmured 'Smart guy.' Need I say more.

Zach Colbert, Social Media Manager at White Hat Media - Lev Manovich's theory of linking and association

In Zach's presentation we were treated to a theoretical talk about whether hypertext is making us more stupid. My understanding of the argument was that hyperlinking limits and prescribes the associations we make in such a way that free association (something the brain does so well) is suppressed. Although I was interested in this, and wanted to ask a question (such as how has the theory evolved since 2000 or so when it was written), I sensed that the room was becoming tired and this was probably a theory too far for many people. I think Zach picked up on this as he fluctuated between obvious delight in his subject and a 'whatever' kind of insouciance.

Nichola Stott - Owner at theMediaflow - Challenging the conventional wisdom of anchor text

She admitted she had a tough gig - last on, everyone ready for the pub - but Nichola did a great job. She showed us the results of some work she'd done on measuring the correlation between keywords-in-anchor-text links and SERPS. Basically, sites that came top of the SERPS for a particular search phrase were found to have far fewer inbound anchor text links than those further down the results, leading her to suggest that you can have too many inbound links using keywords in the anchor text and that this may be classified by Google as a form of spam. Further research had revealed the sites doing better did have brand names appear more often in anchor text. It was an interesting study, and food for thought.

If you're interested to see the tweetstream from this event it's at #brightonSEO... many thanks again to Kelvin Newman for organising, this was a really brilliant afternoon.

(I may add some images/tweets to this post when I get back to the office, but for now I wanted to get it up and published.)

10 ways I plan to become a better Twitter user

I confess! I've been moonlighting over at Social Media Today.

Here's the post I wrote there yesterday, about how I plan to become better at Twitter - it didn't start off as a '10 things ...' type post but it ended up that way. If you've seen it already I apologise for double posting. If not, here's the link ... as always, I would welcome your comments, many thanks.

Forget followers for once. Enjoy the flowers

 

At the weekend I visited three 'open gardens' in Brighton - all created by enthusiastic amateur gardeners, one of whom is Steve Bustin a Twitter buddy of mine and who by day is a freelance PR/journalist.

Sitting and enjoying the beauty of a garden on a summer's day, quite a few thoughts went through my head...

... about how tending a garden must be a bit like tending a business, part knowledge, part physical hard work, part luck, with patience, problem-solving and positive thinking required in equal measure

... about how clever someone must be to 'harness' nature in this way, and just how much of what constitutes 'beauty' in this world is not man-made

... about how someone in my marketing seminar for budding entrepreneurs last week went off on a rant against technology and media, ending up by announcing that she 'just wanted to go and work on an allotment'

So if you're like me and work at a computer, or at a desk, bogged down with systems, technology, or analysing your Twitter followers, make a promise to yourself to get out into a garden this summer. Or even an allotment.

Who is influential on Twitter?

It's a good question, and one that clients are desperate to know the answer to. Everyone wants to harness the power of 'influencers'.

So come on, who are they? Celebrities?

By their very nature, celebrities have fans, so Twitter is an ideal channel for slebs to talk about themselves and for fans to listen in. Aston Kutcher has 5 million followers - does that make him influential? Yes, but not as influential as the 0.01% that he follows back. Possibly.

All I'm saying is that influence isn't necessarily just to do with the number of followers. They could all be spambots and inactives. So what is it to do with then?

Tons of real followers? But maybe they're busy listening to other people, not you.

Tons of tweets? They could all be self-promotional, repetitive, auto-generated ... or all three

Lots of interaction with tweeps? Great, but maybe it's just day to day chit chat with a dozen or so buddies.

Lots of re-tweets? Again, that's community-spirited, but are they all the obvious tweets from @mashable that everyone has seen anyway?

Is it to do with how many followers a person's followers have? Now we're getting closer to it. A person with 2,000 followers of which 40% are inactive or bots, 40% tweeters with fewer than 100 followers and 20% friends, family and colleagues probably has a much smaller reach than say someone with 200 followers of which 50% have themselves more than 2,000 followers. You only have to start drawing a diagram of this to see how it works.

One reason why I like the tool Twinfluence is because it looks at not only the size of a Tweeter's network (1st and 2nd degree contacts) but also takes into account factors such as centralisation - the relative dependency of the network on just a few nodes to maintain the connectivity. For example, if you have the Twitter ear of Aston Kutcher and he retweets you, it doesn't matter if you only have a dozen followers (although you won't for long!), you are connected to a huge network.

There are quite a few tools now which reputedly measure Twitter influence, such as Klout (which I have used but find the results a bit erratic) and TwitterAnalyser. They all present a plethora of stats - reach, connectivity, amplification, velocity, frequency, retweets, subjects tweeted about ... but of course the data needs interpretation and my feeling is it's worth consulting a number of sources to get an all round picture. Plus, much of it is theoretical - for example, I happen to be one of the 3% of @stephenfry's followers who he follows back, but since he has never sent me an @ reply, let alone retweeted me (boohoo!), having him in my network makes no difference to my actual influence level. (By the way, a good tool for finding out if a particular person follows you is DoesFollow.)

I'll leave you with a final thought - a great point made by @mediaczar at the recent Social Media Marketing Conference in London - influencers are contextual. They are not set in stone. Their actual influence depends on a range of ever-shifting circumstances. So finding and harnessing the power of 'key influencers' is really like hitting a moving target.