Wisdom 2.0 - sure wish I had gone here

Reading through my Twitter for news items, I stumbled across tweets from a range of delighted and peaceful attendees of the Wisdom 2.0 Conference. Check out the speakers, and the agenda. You can watch live if you are in synch; but I think I missed it.

Anyway, seems to be a Silicon Valley SF Bay Area assembly of high powered software executives, yoga instructors, and people in between. For 3 days, talking about work-life balance, being at peace with rampant technology, and what is real connection in the age of social media.

As our communication and connections become more rapid, global, and superficial, we struggle continually. The pendulum has swung to reactivity, rather than the proactive days of deliberate appointments and letter writing. The ancient ritual of Sabbath days can be a pause to past times, but those traditions are harder than ever to keep. Would have been nice to sit outside with a cup of Java and a biscotti with other nerds stretching to yoga and pondering the implications.

Already thinking about booking for next year...

Search Engine Optimization -- feeling the impact

Often I am asked by clients I consult with how to improve their search engine optimization. This is a great question, since data shows that:

* Organic searchers are expressing intent and are highly engaged after landing on the website

* More search clickers find the organic listings than the paid listings

* Google is roughly 90% of search engine traffic and is of particular interest.

* It does not require any additional paid media spend

Put it all together, and organic search is a terrific ongoing strategy to enable acquisition for CRM programs.

There are best practices for SEO, and they apply whatever the size of your website.

Consider this Blog you are reading now. As a small time, twice a week technical blogger, I need to get my blog website traffic from where ever I can. Sure I have a few long standing referrals, like Gower Publishing and The CementBloc. Those contribute some traffic. Lately my order of magnitude of visits has doubled, knock on wood. I see this on my Google Analytics reports. The reason is organic search, one of the most high quality sources of traffic you can have.

How did the organic search to this Blog here grow so much, especially on Google? That is a lesson for all website developers in Search Engine Optimization.

Just try running the Google search of "IMS acquires SDI."
Good grief with all the news wires out there, how did this mid-frequency blog of Healthcare Relationship Marketing get to be a top 5 result (and top 5 gets over 70% of the visits) on such a major news story of an industry? This was not planned, I can assure you, but every day, traffic comes here from organic Google keyword searches on that topic.

* Become search-able. Include textual content on highly searched areas: such as tablets, digital trends, health industry and social media, often. Avoid Flash embedding of key text areas.

* Use relevant meta tags. I think my titles and labels really help here.

* Try to become "authoritative" and have valid factual sources on particular areas.

* Multichannel promotion of the website. -- as I update my website, I Tweet, Email, Linked in, and Facebook others so they can have a path to come back here.

* Get your website pointed to by highly respected and trafficked sources. For this blog, things really took off once I got pointed to from highly Followed Tweeters like Relationship Marketing update by Bruce Brown and Salesforce Daily from Paul M and technical blogger J. Polonetsky. Getting pointed to by industry websites by Kyp and adPharm were tremendous helps in not only referral traffic but in establishing credibility for organic search. a big help

Want to dive into SEO traffic for your organization? Feel welcome to contact me at The Bloc.

Also, there is a website from SEOmoz that can give a tutorial and a blog community called SEOMoz where diehard practitioners of search engine optimization best practices for years have been congregating and sharing best practices.

Twitter, my second business news channel

A Twitter account can serve multiple purposes, but it is best not to mix them. Some people view Twitter as a way to keep track of the latest whereabouts and activities of friends. Others, including myself, find it a terrific, focused continual news source.

I am fairly selective on who I follow on Twitter, and on what I tweet about. I keep it to business and professional interests. If you would like to see who I follow on Twitter, check it out.

The categories include Analytics areas like:
BI Analytics News

Analytic Bridge, by Vincent Granville

KDNuggets, by Gregory Piatetsky Shapiro

and Health Topics like:

Dr. Jenny K

New York Times Health

and advertising news such as AdTech, Ad Age, and Agency Spy
There are also a few pharmaceutical companies that tweet, and I follow some, and try to keep pace.

Finally, there are like minded professionals I respect for passing along good news.

Why is this my second favorite professional news source, after The Wall St Journal? Because the social network is sending my way filtered content rapidly; like a marketplace of filtering. My network of colleagues and sources has interests that overlap mine, but do not exactly duplicate. They re-tweet breaking topics that I find fascinating, and I try to reciprocate when I can. So I am exposed to news items and trends that are aligned with my interests.

I suppose RSS Feeds can accomplish the same thing, but Twitter also enables the multi-way, networked interaction. I do not check Twitter often, maybe once every other day. But that's enough for me to keep track of the industry and professional trends I care about.

Moms on Social Media -- Behavior Segments

I've worked on a variety of consumer social media monitoring analyses across therapeutic categories. When analyzing the source of consumer posts, there is one commonality: mothers networks. Conversations on allergy, immunization, nutrition, diapers, cosmetics, and a host of other health topics are being talked about on major Moms' social networks. After Facebook and Twitter, the next leading source is often from Moms.
There are plenty of communities, have been for years, and they keep growing. Here is one search result which leads to indexes of Mom social sites.

Thus, it was fascinating to find this recent article in the latest print edition of Quirk's Marketing Research Review, a great synethsis of practical research results. (see the online portal).

The article summarized the BabyCenter 2010 Mom Social Influencer Report. Definitely worth a read if you are marketing in a health category where mothers are a core segement.

The emphasis is on influence, and breakouts are by segment. Take a read, and learn about:

Influencers are:

* Field Experts: Young, stay at home, 8% of Moms, 33% of influence

* Lifecasters: Lifecasters, tell everything online, 8% of Moms, 34% of influence

* Pros: Gen-X Moms, sharing expertise and advice, just 2% of Moms, but a high index at 11% influence

The influenced are:

* Butterflies: Young professionals, self-confident, online to socialize; 16% of Moms, 7% of influence

* The Audience: online to listen, 66% of Moms.

Essentially the splits are based on generation, educator vs listener, and how much social media is within your life's fabric. Field Experts and Lifecasters are large and disproportionately influential, in sharing their experience, and also recommending brands they favor. Pareto's 80/20 rule also holds: according to the segmentation and analysis: "18% of social moms wield 78% of the overall influence." Most are learning from the hard core bloggers, posters, and stay at home enthusiastis.

Benoit Mandelbrot RIP, an ode to modeling complexity

An intellectual giant has passed, and his life and research can be inspiring to all of us, whether a young theoretical mathematician (as I once was in college), or a data-driven marketer (where I have ended up so far). The news came to me rapidly . via Twitter from Analytics Bridge as well as several techy blogs.

Benoit Mandelbrot (see the NY Times Obituary) was famous for developing fractals, that are mathematical models of the complexity of nature, especially growth patterns. These models are of infinite complexity, and usually beautiful to render, like the image shown on this blog post. Read one of his biographies about how Mandelbrot got started thinking about fractals as he investigated a question on "how long is the coast of Britain?" and realized "it depends on how closely you look."

This brings me to the point of online digital metrics, which can be simplified with shallow views like visits, page views, or friend counts. Or, one can embrace the complexity and do full path analyses, understand behaviors, see the patterns in the viral spreading of social networks. The insights of going in deep can lead to brainstorming that turns around a business. Even to beautiful graphics like Mandelbrot fractals.

Twitter Usage and Measurement - Promise and Caution

Two recent studies about Twitter point to its potential promise as a measurement tool, yet point out the limited audience it measures.

The recent Twitter Usage in America Study, 2010, by Edison Research has revealed that awareness of Twitter has exploded from 5% of Americans 12 years and older in 2008 to 87% in 2010 (by comparison, Facebook's awareness is 88%). However, utilization is a different story. Despite equal awareness, Twitter trails Facebook significantly in usage: 7% of Americans (17 million persons) actively use Twitter, while 41% maintain a profile page on Facebook. And what does "usage" mean when the study finds that the majority of Twitter users are “lurkers,” passively following and reading the updates of others without contributing updates of their own.


The study also shows results on frequency and channel of Tweeting: 63% of tweeters do so at least once a week, and nearly two-thirds of active Twitter users access social networking sites using a mobile phone. (I access via both mobile and laptop myself). The age range biases young, not surprisingly: 29% of Tweeters are 12 to 24 years, and 33% are 25 to 34. (Thus I am in the older third...)


Meanwhile, a Carnegie Mellon data mining analysis has analyzed sentiments expressed in a billion Twitter messages during 2008-2009 related to yielded measures of consumer confidence and of presidential job approval. The sentiment results were found to be similar to those of well-established public opinion polls. Although the CMU researchers did acknolwedge the results were quite "noisy."

These study findings will be presented May 25 at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Washington, D.C.

What are the implications of these two studies together? They show at the same time the promise of monitoring Twitter as a rapid, cost effective research tool, and yet the cautionary reality that those being measured are a limited, self-selecting subset of the population.

The same considerations hold for those planning to use Twitter as a relationship marketing vehicle for awareness or acquisition. The reach and demographic of your Tweets will be limited, so please understand that Twitter should be just one component of a well thought media plan.