Writer's Block

OK, one more post just for the sake of HitTailing. This is an example of brainstorming and seeding an idea, because you know that it should lead people to your site. In this case, the concept is "writer's block". I have nothing to say about it, except that HitTail is a great way for bloggers who want to keep their posts up to deal with it. I got this quote from one of those aforementioned business women, named TawnyGirl. Thanks.

Not only is this a great way to focus your key word density to build your
long tail search results... but it's also a GREAT way to get ideas on what to
blog about. So many suffer from writer's block when it comes time to
blog... a quick look at the keywords suggested by this tool and you're all set
with topic matter to blog about.

How is this HitTailing? It's the strategic keyword selection process that you do to seed your site. The idea is that after this post has been out there for awhile, someone searching on this term will find the HitTail site (this post, in particular) sooner or later on a similar term, which I have probably failed to imagine. At that time, it will get issued as a suggestion, and I will know what term people plauged with writers block are REALLY searching on.

Add Traffic to Your Site

OK, so I'm going to shamelessly HitTail one more time. I don't have time today for a rambling high-value post, like this one that the BlogKing calls The Blogger's SEO Manifesto (thanks Michael). But instead I will give a precise example of how HitTail works. I'm doing this because such a perfect writing suggestion came in, that I can't wait for it to start adding traffic to this site.

It's a great example, because the visitor, whoever it was, surfed 5 pages into the results after searching on the phrase which is this post's headline, in Google Belgium. So, they were rather determined in their quest, and unwittingly handed us HitTail folks some competitive intelligence. It's also a great example, because to act upon this writing suggestion, I'm committing all of about 10 minutes to making this post. So merely by running HitTail, noticing a writing suggestion and taking 10 minutes to act on it, I'll be catapulting HitTail onto the first page of results on this term. Just you watch. It doesn't even need to be used in the body of the post anywhere other than the headline. Take that you keyword density people! Long tail search marketing rocks.

Finding Long Tail Keywords

Looking for long tail keywords? You found them. As our friend Jack Humphrey stated it well, keyword tools are useless for the long tail. Most analytics packages want to show you top-this or top-that. Well, once you're "top" there's really not much room for improvement, is there? Would you examine your top sports team performers to see where your team needed the most help? And if you sent out scouts, would you waste their time one every high school kid on the field? No, you need a logical method of zeroing in on just the most promising candidates.

Most important, you need to do it faster than your competitors, and hopefully in a fashion that your competitors can't breathe down your neck with access to the same data. If you're using any keyword suggestion tool or inventory tool that aggregates content from many sites, there are two things wrong from a competitive standpoint. First, everyone else has access to those same keyword suggestions. And second, these words are not specifically chosen for their ability to perform well fast on your particular site.

How well can an automated keyword talent scout work? Well, HitTail suggested that I write about finding long tail keywords. It's sort of dumbfounding that I didn't think to bring people into the HitTail site on that particular word combination. But I didn't. And HitTail pointed out that blunder. So now, I'm targeting it. How well did I do? Well, give it a couple of weeks, then search on the aforementioned term. I bet I'll be in the very first position in Google. If not, it'll be Jack, which is pretty much just as good.

Traffic Optimization Tool

With HitTail rising in popularity, and questions starting to fly about whether it's only for natural search, whether it works for paid search, and what types of results users might hope for, it's time to make this quick blog post reminding everyone about the data that one of our earliest and most avid HitTail users, Gary Beal, was kind enough to share.

Read this article carefully. It's an eye opener. Gary is basically saying that if you take your natural search results, and plow them into a PPC campaign, it's effectiveness and value increases many times. Combined with the way we at Connors prescribe using HitTail (making blog posts working the keywords into headlines), you are optimizing your traffic on both fronts.

Gary has been in the SEO business for 10 years, and was recently a speaker at the SES conference in London.

Getting Free Traffic is OK... Sort Of

SEO is a bad word. It's loaded with baggage and means many things to many people, unfortunately, some of which include charlatan, snake oil salesman, overpriced consultant, and the like. It can be no other way, because of reasons laid out in my previous post about SEO being a subset of public relations. Search results are a form of editorial content issued by Google and Yahoo. Attempts to influence and alter these results is a form of corruption.

I was one in the early days of SEO that actually advocated the term SEO as an accurate description of what we did. We were indeed optimizing the search engines to show the results we wanted them to show. We did it through manipulation of our own sites, but it was the search engines we were optimizing none-the-less. And the acronym did stick, and a great controversy broke out once GoTo, then Google added pay-per-click, and the field of SEM broke off. It was much easier for the advertising people to understand, because it was basically just media-buying, and the second half of online advertising was born (the first being banner-ads).

Today, Google is the undisputed heavyweight champion of paid online search marketing. Google adjusts its products to optimize profits. Yahoo adjusts its products to stay in the game.

So, the paid-side of online promotion will be continuously tweaked by media giants until it resembles something that will keep them in business far into the future. But the magical detente that exists between editorial content and advertising will force these same media giants to begrudgingly allow "natural" or "organic" search results to continue to exist. I touch on this peaceful co-existence in the original HitTail demo. This is why something like SEO will continue to exist. But because the term is ruined, and the very practices are constantly in flux, it will probably get wrapped into the field of public relations, if many other follow the same enlightened path as Connors Communications, who created HitTail.

Let's look at public relations for a moment. When PR mostly consisted of pitching stories to journalists, there was a lot of "push". Journalists needed only sit there to find "stories" because exuberant, and sometimes obnoxious, PR people pitched story after story to them them via the phone. But time on the phone was a bottleneck, and time was the finite resource. You could only receive N-pitches per day. Now, thanks to email where no such bottlenecks exist, some journalists are worn down and have to sharpen their skills of filtering out the white noise, or risk being overwhelmed. Baseball isn't the only industry with automatic pitching machines.

Contrast PR's pitching process with SEO's bait-and-wait process, where the business interest (or social interest) turns itself into the media, by way of blogging software. Google ensures distribution. But now, instead of merely journalists that are being "soft-pitched" in due course of them doing their research, also the entire consumer world is being pitched. But the pitch takes the form of getting in their way at the moment their interest turns to the topic, and they perform a Google search. The middle-man (being journalists and their publications) are potentially cut out of the picture, and a new middleman is inserted.

Yes, the world is a different place. As John Battelle infers, Google is a powerful company through arbitrage. They arbitrate which sites are found on which terms, and this is power. It's the oil of the information age. It determines who gets what business. They are the ultimate middleman, taking their cut. It's almost as good as the Credit Card business who gets their 3% on every transaction, then payments against interest. And it's quite a bit better than protection rackets.

To live in the world of SEO means getting one over on this middleman. But they need you to get one over on them. They just want to make sure that those doing it are not intentionally trying to do so, thereby gaming the system, and unintentionally insulting the power broker. If everyone can game the system, the system is ruined. Gaming the system is a matter of getting the right sort of visitor traffic (potentially qualified customers) without paying for it.

Therefore, if you wish to get your traffic for free, you must game the system without overtly doing so. You must be a good neighbor, respectful of the system, and willing to pay your dues once in awhile. You must help keep the system stable, and still win at the edges. No one will begrudge you staying in business through your own hard work, so long as that hard work doesn't cut into their interests. And if your hard work happens to result in getting more potentially qualified visitors to your website without paying for it, you win. If you produce truly quality content, that the power brokers actually NEED to keep the system stable, then everyone wins.

There is no product to let you live in this edgy moral high ground. No product, that is until HitTail. OK, this diatribe on the state of search instantly deteriorated into self-promotion. But people need to know that if you don't get your traffic for free, then you have to pay for it. And all the paths leading to getting your traffic for free are full of pitfalls laid by big media companies, designed to make you pay anyway. So, you either need a pre-existing reputation to leverage, or you have to reach escape velocity on your own. Reaching escape velocity can be an expensive proposition if you pay for the fuel (advertising). But you can also take the slow and steady tortoise route, and reach orbit through a relentless series of strong platforms (blog posts). Some of the blog post topics are chosen with HitTail. Others are chosen as a result of your own strategies.

But in the end, you reach where you want to go. You've built an effective long tail marketing strategy, with one post standing on the back of the next. It's turtles all the way down.

Sorry to the language purists. I never met a metaphor I wouldn't mix.

Political Bloggers and Phone Sex Industry Discover HitTail

It is endlessly interesting watching people comment on the funny search phrases that HitTail brings to their attention. And from a quick survey of these sites, it's heavy in marketing and real estate companies (which you can see just through Googling HitTail). I can almost track the path and industry verticals through which the HitTail meme is traveling. Unsurprisingly, the epicenter was the SEO industry, where I actively sought out old friends from my early days at SEF and whichever SEO online communities they went out to form on their own. The reception was better than I could have hoped for. I learned that equity built up nearly a decade ago can still be tapped. Amazing! But that's not the subject of this post.

Watching HitTail get discovered by "verticals" that need it is the interesting thing. What we in marketing call verticals, are simply like-minded people who know eachother and their field, but not necessarily much else (yeah, you won't find that definition many places). They have narrow, yet tall "silos" of interest, such as it were. It plays off of Geoffrey Moore's concept (of Crossing the Chasm) that markets are defined by a base of potential customers who have the ability to talk with eachother through industry associations, tradeshows and newsletters. Of course my copy of Chasm is from 1991, so today it includes communication through the Internet.

So, markets or verticals can spring up quite suddenly, based on rapid ad hoc associations that can be formed through social networking software. There can even be entire markets lurking beneath the surface of the Internet that you never know about, due to their websites and forums being by invitation only, membership, and behind password protection. I am increasingly discovering this hidden world of the Internet as they increasingly discover HitTail.

Political groups that organize prior to elections is one, and the phone sex operator (PSO) industry is another. To protect the identities involved, I'll leave out the specifics, but following links back from the Search Hits tab, I was able to discover them. In both cases, when I asked for a login, they gladly obliged, and I therefore was able to jump into their discussion and offer advice on the very same day the discussion was created.

Yes, real-time is important in being an effective member of the discussion. Learning about such links the next day (if you're lucky to get the whole URL and querystring) is not good enough.

You need to know almost as quickly as they link to you.

Anyway, I jumped into a delightful conversation with a number of businesswomen, fielded their questions, and watched as the appeal of HitTail snaked into an unexpected vertical market. And the same happened with politics. It's almost hard to imagine fiercely determined political bloggers not using HitTail to keep their voice from being drowned out. But how am I going to let them know?

In the typical "don't pitch" approach I've been taking, I seed HitTail with blog posts on the topic. You might call it "bait and wait" as an alternative to pitching a story, which is so common in the media. Then, I do nothing further, moving onto other areas in my long tail suggestions, which I think may pay off as well. But somewhere along the line, someone mentions something in a forum somewhere, and perchance links to us. I know immediately, because I check the Search Hits tab at least once a day. Then, I follow the link back to see the discussion.

If it's an open forum, you can read the post, register, and jump in. Often I wait until they've had a chance to discuss it, so I don't bias the discussion one way or the other. I like seeing the objective opinions of HitTail, and to see if others in the community "get it" from the advocate's first post. Sometimes the do, sometimes they don't. I register and jump in to answer questions. Everyone's flattered I'm there and care about them, and things are good.

But every once in awhile, the forum is password protected. And that's where it's really interesting. I discovered a few specialized marketing forums sharing power-tips. They all unilaterally let me in to discuss HitTail. But recently, the other two "markets" I mentioned also let me in. It's only then that I realize how universal HitTail is.

A tool to amplify your voice in the increasingly noisy Internet is a secret weapon that people have been waiting for. The ability to do it while "playing nice" (not using SEO spamming techniques) and in a way that the average blogger can do is nothing short of miraculous to many folks. And the final step is getting over that oh-so-polarizing concept of the long tail. People either just don't get it, or they can't believe anyone can't. So, what do political activists and phone sex operators have in common? The need to make their voice heard and get their message out. They have the need for HitTail in common.

And I can't wait to discover what verticals are the next to discover HitTail.

I Want My Long Tail News Feed

I read my news on my mobile phone through RSS feeds. Drilling down to the full articles in a web browser is still a problem, due to low-bandwidth and tiny-displays. So, it's a pleasure whenever I find a feed that puts the whole article into the RSS feed. But just about the only people who do this are opinion-heavy blogs. InfoWorld is an exception and a rare gem, where high quality editorial content can be fully delivered to your mobile phone for free. For technology, SlashDot and TechCrunch are pretty good, giving you the full idea of the article in the RSS feed, as are BoingBoing and EnGadget, which might go a long way to explaining the popularity of these blogs.

For the US-centric overview of news on the planet, I use a Yahoo news feed, which is mostly the associated press. I tried the BBC news to get a world-view, but that's the same stuff plus soccer, so I'm still looking for a good RSS feed with a balanced world-view. To feed my hunger for the meme-of-the-moment, I use Memeorandum for the political scene, and Techmeme for the tech scene. I have repeatedly tried adding Digg's RSS feed to my phone, but the phone has reported a corrupt data format every time, and I have since given up--which is especially good, since the RSS feed hardly contains any of the article, anyway.

So, this has left a hole, which has recently been filled by a much underrated service, the much-maligned "Where's The Fire" (WTF) RSS feed from Technorati. What's so special about it, and why does it fill in a void in my news-reading activity?

I'm a long tail guy, acknowledging that there's too much junk in the long tail to linger there (hence, me creating HitTail). So, I always seek a sort of HitTail for news. I get my mainstream fix from the Yahoo's and NYT's of the world. But when I venture into the tail, I want to be smart about it.

First, I want to get what others are finding interesting in the news long tail, hence Techmeme and Memeorandum. Then, I want to go off the beaten track of politics and technology, into the incredibly diverse world of everything. But I don't want to waste time, and I want to read it all on my phone, without drilling down to the respective websites. Hence, Technorati's WTF.

I haven't used it long enough to know if it's the big winner. But it is the first thing I've seen that has made a serious attempt to fill this void. It's mobile-friendly long tail news on diverse subject-matter. But they have to fight the spammers and win the battle to get people to know they exist (and get over the name).

If anyone else knows of any long tail news services that cover diverse subject-matter (not just tech and politics) please let me know. I'm especially interested if they have their full articles in the RSS feed. I'm ready to subscribe.

Real Real-time Search will be Socially Transforming

It seems my most popular blog posts are the ones that step outside HitTail's normal topics. For example, my Web 2.0 post about Sun's dream that "the network is the computer" has been quoted many times. My last post about the culture war is being copied and commented upon.

The current Internet buzz about HitTail shows that it's being viewed as a blog topic suggestion engine. That's fine. Nestled between the two familiar concepts of blogs and the long tail is the easiest way to introduce HitTail to the world. But satisfying that need to view log files and provide real-time analytics-like features is turning out to be so much more. Stephen Colbert called the USA Today the USA Yesterday, which made me think that's pretty much how Analytics works today. You post. You wait. You see a few interesting details about web traffic yesterday.

But in today's real-time world, where you have to see the opportunity and seize it, the next day may be too late. And it certainly doesn't satisfy the need for instant gratification. Bloggers live in the moment. Bloggers want to see the results of their good work within moments of their post. Waiting a day is too long. We in the search optimization business are increasingly aware that real-time search engines, such as Digg, Technorati, Sphere and anything that constructs on-the-fly newspapers from he state-of-the-Internet at the moment are a trend almost as important and influential as search engines themselves. This is causing change.

Why?

People using social news sites like Digg are living in the moment. They are flocking from story to story, and It is changing expectations. Google's default search results are feeling a little like the USA Today. The Web moves ideas so fast, that yesterday's news is passé to the newsorati. They derive their sense of eliteness from being tuned into the pulse--the Internet zeitgeist, as it were. I'm one of these geeks, getting picture-free news-stream through RSS feeds on my phone. So it's ironic that the home of the acknowledged zeitgeist is last week's news.

Imagine if you will performing a search in Google. You get the comforting top-10 list that you're used to. But under the "more" link, it offers you "real-time". If you answer yes, you could be taken to a color-coded relief map representing everything that's being published on that topic right at that moment. You would see the landscape change literally the way the Internet landscape itself is changing. If something new gets posted while you're reading, then something new appears here while you're watching.

Some day in the near future, this will take the form of a virtual world, but today while we're still in flatland, it's will appear as an ebb and flow of articles that are being published, right now at this moment on the topic. Literally, as fast as someone types the blog is as fast as it appears in the "results". In fact, for those who have keyworded their posts ahead of time, you may even be able to see them as they type, and ask to interject and perhaps do a few instant message exchanges to see if you can't check a fact for them or give them a more rounded view. In this way, real-time dynamics allows journalistic integrity and accountability to creep back into the public discussion. I fee that the time-delay of today's crawl-and-index model has actually contributed to some social problems, because bad information can "set in" like a stain.

Such a new system has problems, of course. But technologies like OpenID will tear away the veil of anonymity and unaccountability, where the most important blogs have genuine identities behind them. Mobile phones with full-fledged video cameras will help us all chip away at injustice. And real-time ability to see things being published and respond will raise the bar for fact-checking.

Today, with HitTail, someone with an opinion, fiercely determined to state it and get the word out, cannot rely on the real-time-ish blog search tools such as Google Blogsearch, Technorati or Sphere, because they have just not hit mainstream yet. When I say mainstream, I mean having the same reach as Google default search. Instead, they have to live with the time-delay.

But if you only knew what headline to start with to tap into all the search traffic that is already occurring on those terms... and if you could pick ones that are no so competitive that you shouldn't try, but can still reach your audience... well, that would be a different story.

Culture War == Keyword War???

It just hit me how real the culture war really is. I understand now that my upbringing did not prepare me to even be aware that this culture war existed, even as a potential. Or perhaps, it was not relevant enough to the life I was living to register as a "real" thing, the way you know that humans landed on the moon, but it was in such distant past, before my lifetime, that for all purposes it has the same mythical status as the building of the pyramids or the Bolshevik revolution. Yes, they happened, but I'm not one of the Egyptian slaves, and I'm not one of the proletariat revolutionists. No matter how much it actually did connect to me in a genetic lineage sense, it just didn't connect to me on an intellectual or spiritual sense—certainly not enough to cause worry.

But I understand now that it does. I understand the difference between individuals who were "programmed" in the public education system to believe in the scientific method and evolution as fact, versus those who were raised with religious faith, pulled out of the "evolving" mainstream system, and programmed differently. I just didn't understand the rift that had been developing between the two cultures, characterized by such anchors as Pat Buchanan on one side and Stephen Colbert on the other. I didn't understand that the news events I was reading about were shots being fired in this culture war, such as Pat's speech in the 92 RNC, and Colbert's appearance at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner. These two events, 14 years apart, were inextricably interconnected, as if by quantum entanglement.

I get it now.

Pretty inflammatory stuff for a HitTail post, huh? Nah, not really. I'm not taking sides. Rather, I'm enabling both sides with the next generation bully pulpit—the hyper-effective political blog site. Yep, that's right. On first glance, it feels like the Internet is the ultimate super-weapon on the liberal side of the culture war, planting the seeds of victory generations ahead, by virtue of allowing the free and unmitigated interchange of ideas—the enemy of the "faith" crowd. But observation of actual practice shows that it's just not true. The Internet has proven to be just as effective of a tool allowing the God-and-Country crowd to hold power for 8 years, the early dawn of the Internet itself. I used to think that net neutrality was merely about Verizon throttling BitTorrent, but now I completely understand the much deeper stakes, and why one side will soon feel that mesh networking must be squashed before it takes hold via the disruptive $100 laptop.

Heady stuff.

Suffice to say that HitTail is a very effective tool on either side. Political bloggers, wake up. Blogging alone isn't enough. Having superior ideas alone isn't enough. You need an edge that only early adoption of radically new and effective tools can provide. You need a megaphone that converts Google into your own personal free marketing campaign. You need to blog equipped with superior competitive intelligence and insight as to how Google is going to behave and why.

Let's try an analogy.

Have you ever played those games at the Ski-ball joints where you slide quarters into shaking, raked platforms, where if your quarter pushes other quarters over the edge, they fall out the bottom, and you get a net gain?

That's HitTail.

It's sort of like gambling, but you can make very educated decisions about where to drop your quarter, because you can see into the inner workings. You can tell where the built-up potential resides (untapped natural search potential), where with just a simple quarter-drop (blog post), you're going to get a significant return, greater than the investment and energy you put into it (incrementally more free traffic). It's gambling with skill, but with rules so simplified that anyone can participate. You don't have to count cards, like in Black Jack, and you don't have to play against very formidable house odds, like Roulette. You simply have to walk along the row of machines, looking for the ripest pile of quarters hanging most precariously over the edge, and drop a quarter in.

That's HitTail. It's that simple, and it works.

The "quarter-rake machines" are the data being collected in HitTail. The blog posts are the act of dropping quarters. The selection of which machine is most wise to start with are the keywords that appear under the suggestions-tab in the HitTail user interface. It's like HitTail is a legal card-counting machine that you can take into the Casino with you. Yet, it's 100% ethical and moral, because the decision-making process is derived from data that is 100% yours already. HitTail just examines your log files, and gives you expert advice. That's the brilliance of HitTail vs. the AdWords and Overture keyword suggestion tools that use other peoples' data. HitTail is truly a website optimization technology, rather than a "me-too" let's-all-be-sheep tool, so popular in the blogosphere.

I'd hop to it and give HitTail a try, while it's still not against the rules to use tools like this.

I guess the final point of this radically different post, is that instead of throwing my hat in the ring of the culture war, of which I just internalized and became excruciatingly aware, I will turn HitTail into a neutral-zone. It's a weapon-of-ideas, benefiting both sides equally. It facilitates the interchange of idea, and extends the reach of the "little guy" with the "little voice".

If you're feeling passionate about your subject-matter, and just feel like shouting louder than the state-of-the-tools can provide, you should jump on the HitTail bandwagon. Perhaps you don't have the equipment or panache to do a YouTube video. Maybe you're not a celebrity or a journalist, have no editorial background, no money, no high-profile friends who will link to you, no Google PageRank, and no established readership.

If that's the case, then you HAVE TO tap into the free and ubiquitous potential that is Google's natural search engine results. You have no choice. It's your ticket in the door.

And the line is a very long, long, long line indeed. And there are no cuts…

…no wait, there are cuts!

See you in the forum.

Of Sock Puppets and Public Relations

OK, I try to lead with ideas and not follow, and not flock from one meme to the next like the Web 2.0 sheep. So, excuse me while I chase the latest cool meme that I just discovered: sockpuppet. This is a post that might better live on Connors' blog, but HitTail is where my audience is right now, so on HitTail's blog it will go.

It seems like only yesterday, I encountered the term Astroturfing, which is the practice of disingenuous drive-by linking on blog comments and forums in order to link-drop to build Google PageRank and higher search engine positions. But now, the EU is considering making the practice of posing as a happy customer (a sock puppet) illegal. The practice is also sometimes called flogging (fake blogging).

Many companies are allegedly guilty of this. Some of the higher profile ones were Sony with the PSP, Wal-Mart with the RV road trip, and Juicy Fruit, with a tongue-in-cheek accounting of their "stuck together" customers who wouldn't let go.

In the case of Juicy Fruit, it was very obvious that it was a parody of their television ad campaign, and can't rightfully be called a flog. It was on Juicy Fruit's own website. But in the other cases, and hundreds more that are being perpetrated every day, the intent is to outright influence what people are learning during their pre-purchase research phase. When you think about it, every company in the world has motivation to set up fake blogs full of praise, if for no other reason than to proactively push-down the occasional negative posts on the same topic. This sometimes falls under the auspices of "PR blogging", which really pisses me off.

Time and time again, companies demonstrate that genuinely opening channels of communications with their customer base via blogs and the blog comments is a workable strategy, in all but the most inflammatory cases. And even when it's inflammatory, companies should just "take their medicine" and let the negative feedback accumulate up at least in a site that they control--instead of the scary alternative of dedicated anti-Company-X sites being created, domain names registered, and some serious customer rage funneled into learning SEO. Companies that let that sort of rage festered unanswered are really asking for it.

Take the Dell battery fiasco, for example. It festered for long enough that a genuine PR crisis ensued, that may have permanently broken long-standing customer trust forever. But Dell finally came around with a blog. It took awhile for them to get their legs, and the PR pundits who were already berating Dell played the "too-little-too-late" pile-on game. This discounts the considerable soul-searching and ultimate capitulation and "coming to the table" that Dell decided to do with their customers. Whether this will have a lasting effect, remains to be seen.

It's easy to be caught when you're Dell, Wal-Mart or Sony, because there's such scrutiny. But what about the small to medium sized business (SMB) who are relatively sure they can get away with it? Given a relatively intelligent employee or agent, and a sufficiently laundered Internet connection (home ISP), and a Blogger BlogSpot account, you can be completely anonymous and fill the Internet with crap that keeps genuine customer grievance posts from appearing on particular keywords (hopefully, the company's own name).

The answer is simple: don't flog. Don't make sock puppets. It's just much easier to open a genuine channel of communication on your own website. Invite the flack. Enable comments. Let a few accumulate. Post a win/win response, and truly engage in enlightened customer satisfaction campaigns. It can be your best marketing. I rarely see a negative blog post that can't easily be turned into a public relations win, by just doing what the customer asks (exchanging a laptop, expediting a repair, doing a full-out refund, etc.).

This prospect is scary for many companies, with the practice being only a hair different from dealing with terrorists. Once you give in for one situation, you have to give in for every situation. Well, classic strategy demonstrates, that's just not true. If the money of providing such world-class support is REALLY such an issue, then simply give oil to the squeaky wheel. Make sure every publicly opened tech support case is successfully closed. If this causes a flood of "me-too" posts, so be it. Take it as a form of performance art, spending a little extra resources to ensure that each of these public whistle-blowers attains as close to 100% satisfaction as you can make it. Reward a few to motivate many.

You thereby take the wind out of their sails, the fury out of their fists, and cause an otherwise ready-to-combust bomb fire into a fizzle.

World class customer service is a much more viable alternative to flogging. And if you want some miraculous free advice, take the successfully closed support cases, mark them up with "black-out" stripes to protect the identities involved, and publish them as successfully closed customer service cases. It will fill the search results on the same keywords, but every single one will be a mini-success-story. Yep, it works. Hooray!

Advice like this isn't going to come from a typical public relations firm, because they lack even the idea that valuable business assets like this exist inside of companies waiting to be leveraged. And forget about the technical expertise existing in the PR firm to actually make this happen, and the Kung Fu of overcoming the Tech-team's objections. Precious few can actually pull this off.

If a genuine blog with enabled comments and an open dialogue isn't your speed, and making successfully closed anonymous customer support cases also isn't your speed, the last line of defense might be a genuine resource blog that is actually run by the Company in question, but with a disclosed relationship to the site. In other words, if you run a chain of hotels, you might wish to offer advice to travelers, creating a valuable resource in itself. The connection to the parent company should not be hidden. In fact, you should take pride in the content going onto that site, and have someone who views their editorial responsibilities at such sites as a primary marketing objective. Therefore, the quality and frequency of heart-warmingly genuine posts will increase, and you will end up with a permanent, valuable asset for the new company.

With such a site, you both have become part of the very same media that PR people in your space are actually pitching-to. Yes, you may occasionally be pitched by your own competitors to get coverage on your site (we regularly are). You will also have a pulpit for the occasional self-promotional post. But suddenly, there's nothing wrong with that, because the connection to the parent company is fully disclosed. Further, the regular audience might actually appreciate that connection, giving them an RSS feed to subscribe to, in order to keep abreast of the latest promotions.

So, what about the occasions on which flames do flare up, and the open comment feature is abused? Simply, lock-down the comment feature with required approval, and let the dust settle. No one will begrudge you for keeping a flame war off your site, and it gives you time to compose your own response to the two or three negative posts THAT YOU LEAVE THERE! Don't go retroactively un-publishing posts (unless it's really damaging). There's no surer way to stir up more flamers. Turn the negative into a positive, and let the attempt at revenge turn into a remarkably satisfied, and won-back customer. It's possible almost every time.

HitTail Vs. Analytics Software - Are You Time-Challenged?

Recently, I've been struck by how different a crowd HitTail attracts than the analytics crowd. While it's still a broad cross-section, basically, there are a lot of online, yet time-challenged people using HitTail. They want the benefit immediately. They appreciate that they don't have to wait a day to see data collected. And they want to come to one website for one very focused objective: build more website traffic, naturally. With that in mind, I put together a comparison-list (hand-drawn again), which my people may turn into something more substantial for the website.

Why SEO is a Sub-set of Public Relations

So, the concept of SEO is pretty much all wrong. I believe that SEO is just another branch of public relations in its early stages.

And I'll explain why.

Public relations endeavors to get you publicity and media coverage at a lower cost than advertising. When you have a worthwhile story to tell, and it gets picked up as part of a magazine article, newspaper column or TV program, it's more compelling and trustworthy than the equivalent advertisement that runs alongside that same said content.

Better-yet, it echo's and re-amplifies itself as everyone starts picking up the meme, and the magic of word-of-mouth kicks in. Over time, if you keep up your end of the bargain with a positive customer experience, genuine long-lasting reputation ensues.

And it all started from not-advertising.

That's not to say that advertising isn't part of a nutritionally balanced marketing campaign. It is. Only that public relations campaigns can get you the same nutritional value at a much lower cost.

But there are no guarantees.

And therein lies the similarity between public relations and search engine optimization. They are both methods of reaching out to your audience through the formal editorial "meat" of the media, instead of the marginalized and often-edited-out advertisements and commercials. Both PR and SEO embed the message directly into the highly valued, repeated and trusted main content.

So, Google, Yahoo and MSN are just editors?

Yes. The search engine results are algorithmic, automated attempts to make what would otherwise be human reviews. When you influence search, you're influencing automated editors and journalists that are very analogous to human editors and journalists.

PR and SEO are the same thing.

The world just needs to catch up with that type of thinking, because it's only going to get more that way. The humans are not being replaced by robot editors. Rather, all the editorial content of the world is exploding at a rate that no organizational system can keep pace with. Therefore, the automatic editors (the search engines) play the role of the second editor. If you don't get the article or blog written in the first place, then you weren't successful with the first editor. If the newly published story, either on your own site or another site, doesn't get picked up by search and served back on the right keywords, then you were not successful with the second editor.

You need to be successful with both editors: human and robot.

And this is why the creators of HitTail at Connors Communications believe that the whole movement of SEO is simply going to be subordinated under our profession in a few years. The only thing keeping it from happening today is the level of technical expertise that can flourish within a public relations company. Generally speaking, it doesn't go past the company IT people, the PR people who can talk the talk, and perhaps a prolific pseudo-celebrity pundit or two who get hired just for that purpose.

But real, hard-hitting tech people in a PR company who can totally speak to why SEO is just a sub-set of PR is rare. It will, however, have to become more and more common, because the technical matters that fall under the domain of public relations are more every day--from how to get blogs to be influential, to how to pick the right subject-matter to write about, to the selection of publishing platforms. This is now all part of the realm of public relations, because they directly influence your ability to reach your audience, and they are not matters of advertising.

So, what does it all mean?

If you're stuck on the technical details of SEO, expand your thinking. It's not about merely tweaking title tags. It's about knowing what to do if title tags suddenly start getting ignored by Google (unimaginable--but distinctly possible, the way meta's became ignored years ago).

You don't need to worry about the micro-details of SEO if you just select the right Web publishing platform. And today, that means a small selection of blogging platforms that do everything right.

So, the most efficient use of your time goes into knowing the merits of the different publishing platforms, and the ramifications of making that selection over time. If you want to grow some serious technical chops in the area of PR and SEO, learn out to deal with the wrong decisions clients have made from an SEO-perspective, without asking them to scrap everything they've built, and start new. Everything can be salvaged, and everything can indeed be retro-fit to perform better than anyone had imagined. It's all just a matter of knowing everything that's important in the PR industry, and figuring out what that means from an online perspective.

In a few years, the public relations industry will be composed of two types of people: 1) The outreach people, who will apply their skills online just as they do today with print and TV media. They'll just be using better tools. And 2) The tech team, who will carry out special projects, knowing a great deal of depth about web publishing platforms, and how to re-spin and slice & dice the content in different ways for maximum exposure, and to keep pace with change.

Long Tail Marketing Secrets

So, someone just found us on the Internet on the term "long tail marketing secrets". Firstly, long tail marketing is a concept most aptly applied to Google and other Internet search sites, because seekers of products and services increasingly turn towards them for information. Long tail marketing strategies can be used to draw in prospective customers through both natural search results or paid search campaigns in these search sites.

Secondly, targeting these searchers using free natural search is ridiculously easy by way of making blog posts--once you have a reasonable idea of what it is they're searching for, that is. But the choice of potential terms to target in the long tail is so enormous, that you could waste all your time wading through keyword lists, using your gut to pick out which ones will work best for you. Chasing the long tail can be a big waste of time.

Thirdly, if you have a logical way to zero in on the most productive long tail terms in your space, you save this time. There are precious few tools to aid in long tail marketing tasks, with HitTail being one of them. HitTail has occasionally been referred to as a marketer's secret weapon, because it does the keyword analysis for you--for free.

All this freed-up time can then go into writing well. One of the most valuable skills in long tail marketing is the ability to genuinely write for your website, using the user-provided suggestions as the topic. While some think of this approach as pandering to search engines, it is actually rooted in a much older concept, known as total quality management, or simply TQM, pioneered by a business visionary named Edwards Demming. Demming helped rebuild Japan after WWII in a way that over time, gave them a reputation for quality.

The same can be said for using HitTail over time, because long tail marketing is greatly about taking the most effective hot spots in the tail, and systematically moving them into the head of the distribution curve. Over time, more and more of your topics that should TRULY be your features get premiered and moved into the head. Ideas that were quick to implement in blog posts can trickle into your overall website design.

The biggest secret of all is that over time, the long tail does indeed begin to wag the dog--but not in a way that is disingenuous or difficult to defend. Rather, it's part of the greater movement in business of listening to your customers, taking their feedback, and continually plowing what you learn back into building a better product. Once you do that, you will not only have long tail marketing on your side, but the even more formidable force of word-of-mouth advocacy.

Long Tail Strategy

The scuttlebutt on the Internet is increasingly about long tail strategy. Chris Anderson helped us identify the fact that "everything else" collectively is as big as the main event. You see that manifesting as things like CSI being the most watched show on television. Now, I know what CSI is, but it by no means is the phenomenon of Seinfeld of a decade ago, or even I Love Lucy of a generation ago. As technology allows us to chose products and media through intelligent search and filters, our need to adhere to the pop culture hits diminishes. This effect, while spectacularly clear in media, is present in all walks of business. Because you can connect a customer with an ultra-particular need with a supplier with an ultra-specific product, the customer gets what he/she needs, and the supplier can actually exist. In a slightly different world (pre-Internet), you would have relied on hearing about such a specialized supplier through word-of-mouth, because they are usually too small to afford advertising. But now, with Internet search, the same supplier has nearly unlimited access to all the specialized customers in the world at virtually no cost. Hence, the long tail strategy.

Now, the long tail strategy for a company that has massive amounts of products, such as GE or Proctor & Gamble, would be different from a specialized supplier, who say creates software for digital signage. The mission of GE or P&G would be to get as broad a base of customers to buy across as broad a base of products as possible. In database terms, these companies need a many-to-many relationship, and it makes their long tail strategies quite complex to imagine and implement.

The specialized supplier on the other hand has a single, very unique product that appeals to a single, very unique customer. Take for example, the Liter Robot, a very unique automatic liter box for people who are serious about reducing the chore. It's not cheap and it's not small. But it does the job like nothing else. But no body knows about it, outside a very small circle. For such a supplier, a long tail marketing strategy is both easy and effective. Just blog. Blog often and use HitTail's blog writing suggestions as they start to come in. Over time, your access to customers will go from somewhere that must be around 20% (just guessing) to closer to 60%. The idea is that everyone who doesn't pick up the first available competitor's device from their local PetCo is likely to Google the topic. And once they're Googling, you have to have cast a sufficiently wide and sufficiently tight-knit net to capture those customers. And constructing that net is what HitTail helps you do so well.

I know this, because I did it for Scala Multimedia, suppliers of digital signage software to companies needing to turn flat panel TVs and LCDs into rapidly-updatable animated signs. This was 1998 through 2001. No one knew what to call the industry, and through monitoring search hits on an already large site, I was able to divine what people thought the industry SHOULD be called. And it was diverse, with a few winners, such as "digital signage", but with a far larger set of one-hit wonders, such as "rapidly updatable electronic signs". Who knew what to target?

I did!

By taking those terms that "almost" worked, where only the most determined searchers found us, I was able to systematically tweak all those results onto the first page of Google. Over a period of about 2 years, I am quite confident that I confounded the competitors to no end. Since I left that company, their standings on some of the "big head" keywords has waned, but their collective traffic across the long tail words has continued to grow unabated. So, while the digital signage vendors are just waking up to the need to get search engine traffic, the leader is years ahead, ensuring that their access to potential customers has gone from say 20% (just guessing) to well over 60%.

Given enough determination and dedicated long tail strategy, I believe that suppliers of specialized products could increase their to 90% of all potential customers.

The Best Longtail Keyword Program

It is our intention to make the best longtail keyword program in the industry. If we are not living up to that goal, please drop us a note in the comments, the forum or at hittail at connors dot com. We listen to our users and endeavor to implement every reasonable suggestion.

Our premium paid service is around the corner, and we are sorting the premium features from the free. Many blog posts have been made that HitTail will not remain free. This is only partially true. The basic service, much like what you are experiencing during the beta, will remain free, and we hope, eventually used by every blogger in the world. It is every blogger's right to not only know the activity going on in their site, but for it to be presented to them in simple suggestion-box form, without the stress and trouble of a full analytics package.

In much the same way that blogging has redefined website publishing and content management, HitTail is redefining website feedback. We dare not even call what we do analytics, and therein lay one of our greatest strengths. Remember the portal-site wars of the late 90's, and what happened when the counter-intuitive Google exploded onto the scene? They took a big chance, bucked the common wisdom, and won big-time. We're trying to do much the same thing, and are curious how you think we're doing.

Happy HitTailing--and let us know what you think!

Time Zone Feature Added for International SEO

In another demonstration that the HitTail folks are listening to its users, we've implemented local time settings. In other words, you no longer have to look at your hits in Eastern Standard Time. While the HitTail endeavor itself further evidence of Silicon Valley's exclusive hold over high-tech startups is on the decline, we don't want to replace it with the equally obnoxious New York bias. Without further adieu, go to "My Account" and select your time zone. You will now see all your search hits in YOUR real-time.

Long Tail Keyword Marketing Works

Back in June of 2006, I decided to create a concrete example of HitTail's effectiveness in dominating long tail keyword searches. So, I made a post targeting "best pr firm in nyc" in order to give Connors Communications a little boost. Here we are 8 months later, and Connors is in the very first search position on that term across the board (Google, Yahoo and MSN). Go ahead and try.

I sometimes called this "across-the-board" keyword dominance. I developed this tactic back in 1999 where many from the SEO community will remember me as miklevin or Mike-Levin.com from the late Jim Wilson's Search Engine Forums (JimWorld). I would start with 3-word combo's, then work my way up to 2-words, and eventually to 1, and carry out the demonstration in a very public fashion, which got me some notoriety. With HitTail, I'm sharing that capability with the world.

Problem is, there are long 6-month-to-a-year waits involved. But here we are 8 months in, and it's a rather effective demonstration. Sure it's a 5-word combo, but it does occur. HitTail suggested that I write about it. Connors was buried several pages in search on that term. Now it's the top position in all three engines. And all that was used was blogging software (Blogger in particular) and a HitTail-provided topic.

There are so many topics I could talk about now, such as how to ensure that traffic to a blog landing-page turns into a multi-page-load visit, or why blogging software has this erie influence over search. But instead, I'll wrap it up there and let you ponder what would have happened had I been acting upon HitTail's writing suggestions on a day-in, day-out basis for Connors. Wow, we really are revolutionizing public relations. I've got to get my team on that.

Natural Search Inside the Tornado?

eMarketer just released today the results of an end-of-year study showing the effectiveness of online marketing strategies from 2005 to 2006 (these articles usually expire quickly, so click now). It's impossible not to notice that  paid search ads were top both years, with satisfaction going down by 3%. SEO was in position #3 both years (under email) with the satisfaction going up by 12%. It's not hard to extrapolate where this is going. The world of marketing needs a formulatized approach to natural search. I believe that HitTail is about to be inside the tornado.

Top PR Firm in NYC Created HitTail

HitTail is primarily a tool for bloggers because of how it defers the greater SEO question for later. But its roots are in a boutique public relations firm in NYC. Connors Communications, the company that helped launch Amazon, Priceline, is sometimes referred to as boutique because of how the competitor PR firms can be large and impersonal, often with thousands of employees. Connors, on the other hand, specializes only in technology, education, and the things that improve our lives. Hence, HitTail.

I often ask myself just how mainstream of a tool we are making with HitTail. It will never be as big as Google itself, for which everyone is a potential user. But it will be more popular than any single blogging platform, because it is a methodology that can be used across all blogging platforms, and in fact, even with website publishing and content management software. So, I hope some day it could become as big as Blogger.

Blogger is #12 in the top-100 Alexa websites. Its Google PageRank is 9. There are probably million of Blogger-created sites, of which every one is a potential HitTail user—plus all the SixApart blogging packages, such as TypePad and Movable Type. Social sites such as MySpace, Vox and Facebook are more difficult because of how they're made, but HitTail could perhaps pick these folks up as users as well.

Bottom line, needing to know what to write about to best improve your site has broad, mainstream appeal. HitTail too therefore has broad, mainstream appeal. And it's arguable that people visiting sites that use HitTail tracking code are also users of HitTail, since they are inadvertently offering up potential writing suggestions to the site owners. So in the end, nearly everyone who uses the Internet and Web search is a likely HitTail user.

In this scenario, HitTail becomes the invisible hands and expert advisor. That's right. HitTail is precisely analogous to the public relations industry. They both offer excellent paths to gain publicity for your company or cause, through high quality, consistent hard work that avoids the expense and glitz of advertising. So, it's no wonder that while the other PR firms try to advance the state of public relations technology by opening office in virtual worlds or hiring prolific PR bloggers, Connors Communications just sits down and did what it does best—thinks about what's required to change the game—then changes it.

UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html

Keyword Tool: PR Innovation of the Year Finalist

With the Yahoo/Overture Keyword Selection Tool on the glitz, it's interesting that PR Week selected HitTail, a new long tail keyword suggestion tool, as one of the finalists for the PR Innovation of the Year. We've got our fingers crossed. We hope to add this honor to being selected by Business Week as one of the best ideas of 2006.

UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html