Go Blogwild Series 002 – Search Engines and Findability (v0.9)
This is a transcript of a call on January 17, 2006 and is sponsored by Blogwild! A Guide for Small Business Blogging. Transcript and an archived audio recording of this call are available at http://andywibbels.com/post/961/. This transcript has been edited and may differ slightly from the audio recording. This transcript is released under the Creative Commons By-Nc-Nd 2.5 license.
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Andy Wibbels: Tonight I’m very super excited to have Dave Taylor from Intuitive.com. That must mean you’ve got that domain pretty early.
Dave Taylor: In the very dawn of the internet age.
Andy: Because to get a word like that. That’s like if you have AA, IBM or a 2 letter domain.
Dave: I’ve tried to get IBM.com but there were some legal complications.
Andy: Oh man! Dave’s been on the internet since 1980 and he is the author of books on Unix, Mac OS X, a book called Creating Cool Websites, he’s a photographer, and his most recent book is The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Growing Your Business with Google which you can find over at http://www.findability.info/. And he also has a blog at http://www.askadavetaylor.com. I bought a Mac a couple of months ago and every time I have to learn something on a Mac, I type it on Google and Dave’s blog always pops up.
Dave: I have to say this that search engines do like what I write about.
Andy: It’s uncanny. So let's get started. What’s the overlooked thing about Google, blogs, and search engines?
Dave: Well I think the big issue, let me just say sort of start by flying a hundred thousand feet. And say that I think that the future of business is to be found on line. What I mean by that when you look at the statistic, even people purchase offline goods like mountain bikes, skis, and even clothes over 50% of the people that are purchasing off line start by doing research on line. And I think that is pretty profound and very important for businesses because what it means is that if someone is searching for your product or service they must find you, if they don’t find you they can’t know that you exist and they can’t buy your product. So the way I phrased that is if you can’t be found online your business is already dead you just haven’t noticed it yet.
Andy: I like that. And how do people react when you tell them this?
Dave: Well you know, some contingent reacts with a sense of horror and disbelief. But a lot of people shake their head and they know because they themselves are using sites like Google, MSN, and Yahoo to do their own research and classic examples is if you want to buy a DVD player. Well, there are a lot of companies that makes DVD players. I was actually at the Consumer’s Electronics’ Show at the beginning of the year and you can spin a cat around and you’ll hit at least 10 DVD vendors. So how do you differentiate between them? Well one way is you can ask your friend who’s the video expert but a lot of people don’t have a friend that has that level of expertise, although, they might have friends who think that they have that kind of expertise. And so what you do instead is you go online and you’ll do Google search for something like – best DVD player or DVD reviews or Best DVD for family movies, or cheap DVD whatever. There’s a bunch of different ways you might look for but you can imagine if sell DVD players and no one ever finds you – you have a real problem.
Dave: There’s a secondary problem here too because if you are reporter for a consumer magazine or a newspaper and your boss comes to you and says, you need to write a round up of the best DVD players out there. Well how do you think reporters do research now? They all go online. And so there’s a real fundamental challenge there because even if you have a really great consumer product these reporters might very well not think to say – Oh yeah, I forgot that there is this new Korean company that has this great DVD player because every time I do a search, every time I read what everyone writings about, no one is writing about this company. So they are not findable. That’s why I had a book at www.finability.info. I think that is a real key concept.
Dave: And so now going all the way around to what you’ve asked me at very beginning Andy, you said “well what are blogs have to do with search engines?” I think that, hopefully isn’t too controversial to say that search engines and search engine findability is very important. And so that if we look at what search engines are looking for. There are lots and lots of little bits and pieces. But fundamentally what they want is original content that is fresh. And everything else being equal if you are producing good content and you are producing it with frequently the search engines are going to get into a love embrace with you and you are going to get very good results. And you see that in so many spaces where you do searches on a search engine like MSN and half the top 20 search results are actually blog entries from people. Not articles, entries or static web pages written 2 years ago from some vendor.
Andy: That is quite a profound statement. It’s not profound like spiritually but profound strategically. That’s frequent, fresh, relevant content and people can spend a lot of money on a lot of ebooks that slice and dice that statement but really when it comes down to it, at the end of the day, that’s what it is.
Dave: I couldn’t agree more. That’s exactly why I think your book is very timely. You know - Blogwild! – I mean maybe not the wild part you still have to be professional but wild within the context of being professional. How about that? And it’s really a smart idea for people even entrepreneurs of company size 1, or even people moonlighting blogging can really be a significant step towards gaining visibility on your market and gaining revenue and being able to say no to the man and suddenly being your own boss. And if you already have a multi-person company well there’s always someone in your company that’s somewhat of an evangelist, someone who’s an enthusiast, someone who really just want to talk about stuff. Someone who just wants to share with your potential customers, why your stuff, your service, your product is so fabulous. And ideally you wanted to do that yourself. There are definitely some people that are a little shy, a little bit hesitant to get out in the public eye. You can find people to do that on your behalf and you’d still get all the benefits. There are a lot of really big companies that – for example Cisco. There’s no one person who is famously the head of Cisco. And even if you looked at someone like Bill Gates and his relationship to Microsoft. There is sort of this myth about Bill Gates but in fact Microsoft operates as a collection of hundreds of really brilliant managers running thousands of really smart people. It’s not Bill Gates going into every single meeting and say “No I think that should be blue and while you’re at it then let’s make sure that interface is with the other program those guys down on the street are building.” Bill Gates is not that involved even though maybe people would like to think so.
Andy: That also points to another part of blogging ethos. It’s getting rid of this monolithic myth or brand that a company can hide behind and really exposing the passion of the employees to customers.
Dave: And obviously that has to be tempered. And I’m sure you’ve talked about that in your book too. You don’t want just tell out your employee – Go wild! and then you found out 3 weeks later that you have 1 employee who actually really wasn’t very happy at the company. Within the constraints of professional decorum and communications that is beneficial both to the customer and the company. I think it can be tremendously successful. And I just think about the idea of going into retail store and really looking for this specific product and having them say – well you know, we don’t really sell that exact thing, we have some alternatives but if that’s what exactly you were looking for, the store on the other side of the mall really has that. And on the surface you’d think – oh, well they’ve just lost a sale. But on the other they’ve gained so much credibility and I think that is really applicable to the blog world too. Because however broad your company is, however wide your service line is, it’s still the case that you can’t be everything to everybody. And now we’re going into the issue of credibility which is one of the big buzz word upon the platform upon which blogging is built. Right Andy?
Andy: People always asked me how do I know if the source is credible. Or how do I gauge if what I’m reading is true? That’s why I talked about stuff like inbound links, ranking on different services.
Andy: For you what are the tenets of judging online credibility?
Dave: The first thing is that I really looked at the writing style. If someone just has fabulously positive things to say about the particular product and or service they are talking about then that sets off my skepticism meters. It’s not - here’s another product that does this but here’s the most amazing, fabulous thing! You can’t believe how good it is. And right now if you click on this link you’ll find out that there's too much bold, too much color, too big of type face, too many exclamation marks. There are a lot of things. We’ve also learned by weeding all through the stupid spam that we get on our email. We’ve learned to have very sensitive filters about what is and what isn’t legitimate, actual marketing copy if you will. I don’t think that companies need to completely avoid writing about their own product and services ultimately your business and you need to be doing things for business benefit. But I think it’s important to find that balance and so for me, one of the big issues with credibility or one of the ways I ascertain credibility is I just look what this persons is saying about and what their writing about. And whether I believe that there are other perspectives that aren’t being covered or whether they are glossing over problems, so on and so forth. And another one that I think is really important is whether or not they allow comments. And if they allow comments - going through the comments and seeing what other people say. And this is akin to when you go on to Amazon and you’d look at a book and you see the reviews of the books and some people are [positive] and other people nit-pick particular perspectives or particular style of writing or particular references the person used. It’s a lot of credibility for all of those reviews collectively, because you know that it's not well published the really good ones that will help with sales and will delete all the negative comments.
Andy: I think that’s a lot of times when bloggers are first starting and they’re getting negative comments. There’s a real panic about that.
Dave: I think that there’s also a balance to strike, because I do delete comments on my web blog. And part of that is because I get comments that are just completely unrelated, and often comments that are making suggestions about either myself or my mother, which I certainly don’t appreciate. But I also delete comments that I don’t think are contributing to the discussion. I don’t mind if people disagree with what I am saying. But I have a real problem if they disagree with me as a person or they decide if there’s no difference between what I’m saying and who I am. I really strongly believe that companies, particularly I’m talking about business blogs... I think if it’s something that you are paying a price tag for, if it’s something that you are underwriting as business marketing, public relation, or customer service effort, then you absolutely have the right and indeed the obligation to make sure that the discussion stays at the level that is reflecting your company value and reasonably, truthfully, reflecting what your products are about. If 25 people read Andy’s book, and say it’s just the worst thing ever printed and that really that paper’s only good for bird’s cage lining. I don’t think it would be unreasonable for Andy to say, you know what I don’t know that I need to have them here. I’m not saying that you can’t write these comments, but maybe it’s should be something that you put on your web blog rather than my web blog. By the way, while you’re at it why don’t you say what I could have done better so you can actually have some value in your comment. I will now rush back and say I that can’t imagine anyone would say about Andy’s book, but then again it’s not published yet, so there’s always the future.
Andy: I can’t wait to see what happens. Let’s go ahead and open the line for questions. We’ve talked about credibility, reputation and defined findability. What’s the action plan? If you want to focus on newbie bloggers or experienced bloggers. How do you start to get this findability going?
Dave: The first thing is write about what your customers care about. And that’s a real big one. You see a lot of industries where people and companies really don’t do that. For example in the music industry, they’ll release music that they think should be successful and then the CD falls flat on its face, doesn’t have sales at all. Or even with movies, they have movies where they test market the movies. They have test screenings and no one ever actually goes and pays for the ticket to go to see the movie and it lasts twenty five minutes in the theater. It’s really important to write about what your customers really care about and one of the ways you could do that is you can pay attention to what they are writing about. For example I’m a big of things like Technorati and Bloglines and newsreaders have the ability to let you search what bloggers are writing about. And go to one of these sites or even Google has that beta releases something called blog search system at blogsearch.google.com. And go and just start writing, you just start searching for the key phrases that are relevant for your industry or your service or your product. And the key ways that your customers or potential customers talk about things, and just read what people are actually reading about. For example, a cellphone manufacturer might think that the most important thing is whether the display can show television whereas everyone is blogging about the phone might be complaining about its battery life. So if you get that disconnect and to be findable you need to write about what people want to search for. Does that make sense?
Andy: And you have to do it the language that they are using. Not in any stilted, techie, or PR talk that your company may have.
Dave: Right, in fact anyone who is used to writing press releases, you should keep them far away from your blog. Because a web blog that has press releases on it is one that will actually have zero credibility and would actually, frankly, be boring. As someone that has been in the media for 25 years and read zillions of press releases, I’ll tell I can’t think of a single press release that I’ve read where I said – uh, this is good, I really want to read it through the end. They might have been about interesting products which I would then read through. But press release format itself tends to be very dry and boring, you know that’s death to a blogger. I’d rather see someone have some sloppiness and be a little controversial. But be interesting? Then they have to be someone who is so boring that everyone’s happy including all the lawyers and all the marketing representatives and all the people over public relations and yes, your mother is okay with it too and the CEO double checked what you’ve wrote and everything looks good and they’ve taken out everything and it’s perfectly politically correct and it’s so dreadfully boring that no one cares.
Andy: I think those are all so keyed because you’ll see blogs that people just posting press releases or just posting sales letters. And they wonder – I don’t know why my blog’s not working. And I’m thinking well, it’s because you're just posting sales and sterile boring press releases that make my teeth hurt.
Dave: Right. It’s been interesting because when I went to the Consumer’s Electronic Show I signed up as press. And to show how different the world is, I signed up as press and pointed them to my web blog, and that was okay with the people running the show. So I then got, I’d say, literally over 500 press releases from different companies wanting me to go and visit their vendor or visit their booth and find out their new product. And almost without exemption, it was just the same dreadfully boring, dull things that you know some expensive PR agency has generated. And very few of them offered any value or did any positive service for the company they represented. Frankly, none of them made me say – I need to go and check this out in person. Out all of the hundreds that were sent and I’m sure literally the hundred of thousands of dollars spent. And instead if I would have one executive send an email saying I’m not going to send you a press release I’m just going to tell you that we’ve got this phenomenally cool thing and we really think you’d really like it and we’ve love to you to visit and if you do, then we’ll make sure you can take one with you and check it out for a few weeks. Then I would say yes! That’s the kind of communication I want to get. One of the key things for bloggers, I think, is to be passionate and enthused. And that’s just the opposite, direct opposite of the boring, dry, tedious writing that you can find in press releases and such. Marketing doesn’t have to be that way. PR doesn’t have to be that way there are certainly some very funny ads on TV. And there have been very good ad campaigns and magazines. But if you are going to be going into the blogging world, when you certainly should be, then I will highly encourage you to go and look at other blogs every single day and keep asking yourself the question – as a customer or as a potential customer do I even care what this person is saying? Is it even vaguely interesting? Am I motivated enough to say, yes! I want to subscribe so I can read future things from this person.
Andy: Right, so along with showing the passion, knowing the needs and talking in the language of your customers. How do you physically do that with your blog? Do you make it your category title? Do you make that your post title? Your blog title? What are the technical parts of how you start to get this generated?
Dave: I think the main thing is that your writing style needs to be enthused. Good titles are important but good titles, I think, are more making sure that you use the right key word or key phrases that will make you findable. I like to say that there’s an entire industry out there of people trying to make sure someone can get to your website. And this of course the search engine optimization or search engine marketing. So there’s an entire industry, hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars changing hands to make sure you’re number 1, number 2 or number 3 for a given search. But none of them ever say – oh, by the way when they get to your site you need something sufficiently interesting that they’ll stay around and take the behavior you want them to take - whether to click to buy, subscriber to your newsletter or whether to coming to your restaurant to try the new martinis that you are advertising. Whatever the case may be one of the things that I think is critically important for success is to have interesting and engaging writing. And again, that’s where passion comes out of this. Even with a lot of the kids that are blogging, you know you go and read some angst written 17 year old girl’s blog and for all it might be shocking in some regards, the language might be terrible, or the spelling might be really bizarre because they are drowning in the world of SMS on their cellphone. They’re really passionate about what they are writing about and they talk about their friend who had a bad dating experience or something. That will be something that will be very riveting and real. And you compare that to a lot of people that are doing business blog and it is just so terribly boring. And I think that is just a key to success. I know this is why Andy that your whole book is called Blogwild!, exclamation mark, and not doing nice business blog and make your boss proud.
Andy: So definitely people need to caffeinate your content. It wakes people up when you’re passionate like what you’re saying riveting about different topics and different problems.
Dave: I couldn’t agree more. And doing that with a level of professionalism, what I mean by that is you don’t need to be obsessively politically correct, but clearly anytime you going to come down against the minority, or against a religion or aggressively promoting a particular political perspective or something that you are going to alienate a subset of your audience. There are some companies for example that in their catalogs they will include bible quotes which works really well for a subset of their audience. But there’s also another subset of their potential audience that would see the bible quotes and say – I’m not comfortable doing business with a company that has this overt religious belief going through all their print and collateral. Every company gets to make the choice you could clearly have a company that says we will only do business with white people. But it would be pretty stupid in my opinion and you have to have extremely passionate beliefs that would override A-commonsense and B – would override the idea that maybe my business needs to be successful for everybody.
Andy: And definitely people can always have a personal blog to communicate that content that they have in their mind somewhere. And have that separate from their professional or business presence.
Dave: That is actually a great point. That is why I have 3, well depending on how you count it, or 4 or 5 different web blogs. I have for example the one from my Google book at findability.info just talks about those topics. It talks about the book, what people are saying about the book and it talks about news from the world of Google and the world of search engines. Completely separate from that, I have a parenting web blog, where it talks about the challenges of being a parent, and the kind of world that our children are growing up in now, for those of us who have kids on line versus the world that we grew up in and the world our parents grew up in. And the different values and now I see something like 30% of kids under 5 have a television in their bedroom for example.
Andy: What’s the URL for your parenting blog?
Dave: Parenting blog is APparenting.com. And so what I’m saying is that it’s really good reason why you might have more than one web blog. And I also want to hasten to say that people can put the dots together. So if can have a company that profess certain values and then have a personal blog that is quite against those values, then someone’s going to put it together and it’s going to come across as being un-genuine, I’m not sure what the opposite of genuine is. Very fake and very much impacting your credibility.
Andy: So are there any questions from our studio audience out there? Ideas people had have hearing this idea about findability that basically you’re screwed unless you’ll look and you can find yourself online. That you really have to have this frequent fresh content going to be part of your web presence?
Dave: I think those are the key ideas actually. I’m not actually necessarily an evangelist for blogging. I just think it’s really convenient tool for letting you create a website that has a very findable characteristic of good content and updated frequently.
Andy: My story was always that – I have this guy from Amazon that I bought books from that screwed me over. So I wrote this ranty post about him and within 48 hours, I had 8 other comments – saying yeah, he screwed me too! And it just blew me away that just under 48 hours I was findable for that particular person’s name.
Dave: I’ve seen it where because the blogs live in their own search engine. I’ve literally had log entries and even had people add comments to blog entries within 2 to 3 hours had someone from impacted company comes and respond. For example if you go to my Intuitive.com blog, you’ll see one of the things that I wrote about recently is about Plaxo which is shared business card service. And how their people using Plaxo to spam you, so I wrote that and then I got a long response from someone who is one of the executives at the company. And then some couple of days later someone else posted a response that was just about a paragraph long saying they had similar experience and literally within 90 minutes the person from Plaxo had come back and responded to this person again. It’s amazing I see this again and again. There are a small number of companies that are really smart and they’re really paying attention to what people are saying about them. And they just jump on them and they respond and they feel whatever crisis that may be brewing. And they don’t ignore things and they don’t say – oh, it’s just don’t cranky bloggers and I can easily not worry about that.
Andy: Is there any final advice you want to sent people off with as they go back to their blogs and say – how do start to apply what we’ve talked about tonight.
Dave: Sure, the two things I’ll leave people with – number 1: there’s no time like yesterday to get started; and number 2: even if you don’t want to blog and even if you think it’s for you, go and spend some time on some of the blog’s search engines and really think about what it is you find when you look for you name, your company name, your product name, the names of popular products in your market place and then really think about how you can apply that. You know this big buzz word of this or something like business intelligent, competitive intelligence, data mining or all of these things we can now do for free, which is quite remarkable because I remember even when I was starting in business, you know spend $5,000 a month for just news clipping service. So there’s a lot of information out there and it is absolutely the case that if you are not taking advantage of it your competitors are. And if they’re not, then new competitors that would actually be more successful are already starting taking advantage of that. So you don’t have to blog to get involved in the world of blogging, but you do need to pay attention.
Andy: So, often a company approaches me not on having a blog but in monitoring and tracking them and knowing what is being said about them.
Dave: Thank you so much Andy this has been a real pleasure. I’m absolutely looking forward to your book. And I am confident that it will magically show up on my office doorstep.
Andy: It should be there soon. Everybody, Dave Taylor at www.intuitive.com and www.findability.info. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Everybody else thank you so much for calling in.
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