Google labs is testing a very interesting new feature within the Google search results which lists and ranks content from people that have connections to your own social networks, websites, blogs, etc.   It’s called Google Social Circle and I think this approach has a lot of potential…

More to come  at Technology Report

As a self-proclaimed social media expert  (hey, cuz I have a MASTERS DEGREE in Social Science!), I like to think I understand what is driving the latest wave of online enthusiasm.    But I’m increasingly convinced nobody understands it.  Rather, like evolution, we work away from failure and wind up with applications and websites that have *survived* and adapted far more than were “brilliantly planned and executed” according to some online success formula.

Of course predicting Google’s success was easy – they’d cracked the nut of “really good search” and even as others caught up to their quality they’d established our habit of “googling” when we needed good info fast and have reaped the enormous advertising revenue rewards from that early success.     I had more trouble understanding why Facebook was so appealing yet it has thrived as the key friend and family connector in an increasingly social media world.

I remain skeptical that Facebook can drive advertising revenue to the extent needed to ever compete against Google for online dominance, but we’re still *very* early in the big online game and clearly Facebook is rocking in terms of online influence.

As for many, Twitter didn’t impress me initially but after following a lot of people and capturing a lot of followers I started to understand how important Twitter would be to the online social experience.     This was borne out very strongly at CES Las Vegas watching how quickly businesses – even including non-tech businesses like the hotels and attractions in Las Vegas – were using Twitter as a key news, customer contact, and customer relations tool.    As mom and pop businesses and “regular folks” begin to understand how active engagement with Twitter can revolutionize the way we do business communication I think we’ll see a second explosion in use and Twitter will rival Facebook in terms of importance.

The latest in the pantheon of  very popular “social media” applications is called “FourSquare”.     The idea is to know the location of your friends and share your location as well as offer tips about everything from dining to attractions.    The basic idea is appealing and intuitive and the service appears to be exploding in popularity, though I’m finding it hard to use I think in part because I’m a rural dweller and things like this are more useful in urban centers where there are a lot more participants.   Still, it seems to me this only enhances Twitter somewhat, and is not really a major improvement over what we’d expect from more active use of Twitter, which I see as playing (eventually) the a role as an application that manages how people are relating to other people on an hour by hour basis.     Although it’s mostly early adopters who use Twitter in this way now, the fact that tweets are easier than a phone call means to me that eventually we’ll shift from calling to some form of text messaging, the most powerful of which is …. tweeting!

In summary I’m thinking that Google search will continue to thrive and dominate with Facebook and Twitter becoming the key tools for social interaction – Facebook more between friends and family and Twitter between businesses and celebrities and customers / fans.       That doesn’t leave much room for Foursquare to become huge, but the online social space has become so large that even a supporting role can be an auspicious one.

The website for the Talent Oregon Coffee Shop called the Whistle Stop Coffee Shop is currently listed far too low by  Google’s search algorithm, below two of my posts about  the Whistle Stop Coffee Shop Talent Oregon.    Hopefully this post plus some changes to titles in an earlier blog post (which had Title “Whistle Stop Coffee Shop Talent Oregon”,  plus some linkage action will fix this problem, but we’ll see.     The Whistle Stop’s website is using a Godaddy hosting template now and Google may be downranking for that or fretting over the Godaddy banner at the top which may diminish the content score (I’m just speculating here).

Blog content continues to factor very importantly into search rankings, especially (I speculate) because of the freshness and as a source of relevant links in to other content.      Confounding all SEO analyses is the fact that Google appears to treat things somewhat inconsistently to reduce the effects of really aggressive optimization tactics.    For example there are tricks that can be used that may lead to a short term big boost in rankings, only to leave a site penalized for months or even years for “manipulation of the algorithm”, which in the eyes of Google is a crime worthy of the harshest punishment.

One of the interesting challenges in search engine optimization is, as the excellent Mr. Matt Cutts at Google likes to say, that  ”Googlebot is stupid”   that might be paraphrasing but I think it’s a direct quote. He was talking about the fact that good site structure will “help” Google figure out the natural and relevant relationships between links, content, and websites.     Matt likes to point out – sometimes to some fairly hostile SEO folks at conferences – that good SEO is mostly just applying a lot of common sense “best practices” rules for websites, aka “building for the user not the search engines”.      I often give that good advice to people who ask me how to rank well even though they are usually disappointed (and skeptical) when I don’t give them hints from the bag of  secret tricks they think you learn at search conferences.     For the record it used to be a lot easier to manipulate ranks and it was a common practice, but now most quality SEO folks will advise you to avoid deception or manipulations and spend your time and money seeking legitimate incoming links and building great websites.    That does NOT always work – especially for new sites – but it’s good general advice.

So let’s see if Google can get this one right quickly.   The most relevant site for the query “Whistle Stop Coffee Shop Talent Oregon” is …

Comment loudly and aggressively, but stay on topic!  NO  POLITICAL COMMENTS on non-political posts!

My two key points here (saving you valuable blog reading time at NO extra charge!).

1. Branding is overrated and usually naively accepted as something that works for small business when generally it does NOT work.

2. Success has no recipe, rather it’s simply survival of the best of many,  mostly failed experiments.   Predicting which will survive is very hard to do, and successful business models evolve from movements aways from troubles as much as “towards” success or using some recipe for success.

A open bet I have that is the extension of point 2 comes to mind:

I’ll wager $1,000 (or more if you like) against *anybody*  who says they can predict the movement of any publicly traded stock or index 2 days in a row.  ie  you’d have FOUR options “up or down” each for day one and day two.    Note:   This is a bad bet for you – you’ll lose it about 3/4 of the time.  Yes, YOU will!

———–  the rest of the story ————

As I age gracefully within the business world I see/meet/study  a lot of “success stories” as well as failures.    Contrary to the fairy tale notions of success, I would not say that successful people seem to be all that much a result of “hard work” or “brilliancy” or “following a path to success”.    I’m not saying there’s zero relationship between smart people or hard workers and success – there does indeed seem to be correlation and I’d guess causation.   However the best way to understand success is to look at the paths away from failures rather than to try to apply a bunch of “success rules” that are mostly just talk-fodder for marketeers and motivational speakers.    In fact many mega-success stories are notable more for how they defied rules than how they applied them.

In the  ”special” report from American Express I just got in the mail they have noted  ”Six Branding Strategies that can help Differentiate Your Business” .   The advice is generally fine for those who believe in branding as the key strategic concern in small business marketing.  I’m a marketing heretic in this respect and remain very skeptical of the whole branding concept with the probably exception of the huge companies that sell national or international products,  are marketing to pretty much “everybody”, and have a fairly high potential profit margin on your products  (e.g. Coke, ATT, SONY).

Brand may matter at a national level to some extent but even for the big ticket companies I think the ad campaigns are as much about making money for marketing firms as all this “top of mind” stuff that in my view is questionably supported by a lot of self-serving research.     Seems to me that  most of the global brands are more a product of the company’s early efforts than the campaigns that followed those efforts.   It’s hard to tell the primacy of the branding chicken from her egg over time, but clearly  Google is an example of  a huge global brand which was well known well before any expensive advertising campaigns came along to spread and reinforce the message.    Are they the exception or the branding rule?

Branding or not, the American Express advice in a nutshell is OK for the brandy dancers* out there.  The recommendations are:

* Perform Background Research
* Define Your Brand
* Ensure Consistency
* Tap Social Networking Tools
* Track Your Performance
* Stay Top of Mind

Well, OK, but I’d recommend to most small businesses that they focus on only two of these nuggets – Social Networking and tracking performance, and most importantly that they be sure to work away  from failure.    If an ad campaign is not returning positive ROI then dump it  - NOW – and find things that do return a positive ROI.    Social networking is essentially free.   To some extent time is money, but generally this is a great way to apply yourself as the key player in your business and to adjust things at low cost with potential high return.   *Every* business should have a website and a Twitter account.   NO exceptions to this unless you are a clandestine operative for the CIA or something like that.  I suppose Twitter isn’t a great idea in that case.   “Clandestine CIA Operative for Hire - Please twitter @SecretsoftheCIA“.   From a small restaurant to a mega-corporation, you need to have a path from you to customers and from them to you.   Twitter is hard to beat for that purpose.

Based on my travel sector experiences I would argue that local and regional branding is very much overrated as a concept, mostly by the entities (marketing folks) who profit from the misperception that you can usually attain positive ROI on branding campaigns.

Incredibly much of the research in this area is by entities that …. drum roll please …. wait for it …. make their living promoting the idea that branding works.    It’s no surprise that a firm hired by agencies to “determine” whether they are effective at  something … winds up finding out that …. they are effective at doing something!     As with evolution, you don’t survive long if your research tends to conclude your client isn’t doing their job very well.
“I’m sorry Mr. Honest Marketing Research Firm who concluded we waste our money, we’ve concluded we need a new research firm”.

Happy holidays!

* Brandy Dancers are branding enthusiasts and are not to be confused with the Gandy Dancers who use to lay rail in the USA in the 1800s.

Disclaimer:  As a Techdirt Insight Community writer I am sometimes paid for American Express project writing over at InsightCommunity.com This post has nothing to do with that and no compensation is expected or implied, and reflects only my views and the views of those who agree with me.  You know who you are, and I thank you for reading so far into this disclaimer.   For more about potential conflicts of interest as well as a treatise on the notion that transparency and disclosure are more important than the usual pretense of ” I am unbiased!”, see our dislosure policy over at Technology Report.   This ends the disclosure disclaimer portion of our program, thank you and good night.

I’m firing up an Adwords campaign to support our  CES 2010 Coverage over at Technology Report and … ummm… I am NOT enjoying revisiting the frustration of working with the world’s most sophisticated advertising monopoly.

I really would NOT complain that much if Google’s silly “ad diagnosis tool” said something like this:

“Dear Joe, we noticed you wanted to run some advertising on our blank results pages.    Although we realize your content is very relevant to users and there is low competition for the space we are going to gouge you on pricing … why Joe?  BECAUSE WE CAN YOU SUCKER!”

I really would chuckle and appreciate the honesty.    In my view Google does not have an obligation to me with respect to pricing ads.   They can do as they please and let the market decide.

BUT … they do have an obligation to be more honest than they are with Adwords comments and as usual the recommendations take the ridiculous forms as they do wth organic search problems where Google is often vague or non-responsive.     Why am I saying they aren’t being honest?    Although it’s true that there appear to be ways to increase your chances of appearing without paying more, the notion that the quality of the keywords and what you pay are unrelated is preposterous.  In fact it clearly defies the claim of “user centric” so often heard from Google.

What can I do?
There are several ways to improve the quality of your keywords, thus decreasing your advertising costs. Learn how to build a more effective keyword list, and take advantage of our campaign optimization tips. You can also raise your bid. See the ‘Quality Score’ tab for recommendations.

So yes Google I will pay more to show up, but it would be nice if you’d at least make it clear that the reason irrelevant ads are trumping others is that they *make more for Google*, not because they are better for users.

What, you wanted an example of pay to play clear irrelevancy?    Here’s ONE among what I’d estimate are millions of inferior ads running at Google at higher rates than more relevant ads:

Consumer Electronics Show
Consumer Electronics Show Online.

Free Shipping on 100,000+ Products!
www.Target.com

Disclaimer:   Hey, on other websites I make money from Google Adwords via Adsense.  I am thus one of the *beneficiaries of this process.  So, why am I biting the hand that feeds me?    Because ya gotta calls ‘em like ya sees ‘em.

This is a cross posting of an article I wrote over at Technology Report about internet marketing:

One of the cornerstones of good internet marketing is knowing your statistics, and you’d think with all the elaborate, inexpensive and free measurement and analytical tools everybody would have a great sense of how their sites stack up to the competition.

But you’d  be wrong.

In fact even many large companies are struggling with high quality analysis even as the tools get better and the measures s-l-o-w-l-y are reaching some level of standardization.     For most small companies metrics are, literally, more misses than “hits”. Webmasters routinely report or misinterpret or misrepresent website “hits” as viable traffic when hits often are simply a measure of the number of total files downloaded from the site.    Graphics or data intensive websites can see hundreds of hits from a single web visitor.

Even when the analysis is good the reporting is often opportunistic or manipulative, and it’s often done by the same team that is accountable for the results.     This is a common problem throughout the business metrics field.  Executives are well advised to have independent auditing of results by unbiased parties for any business critical measurements.

Consider learning and using analysis packages like Google Analytics – a brilliantly robust and free tool provided by Google to anyone.

A while back Peter Norvig, one of the top search experts over at Google (also a leading world authority on Artificial Intelligence), published a little study indicating how unreliable the Alexa Metrics were with regard to website traffic.  (Thanks to Matt Cutts for pointing out the Peter paper.

The results here demonstrates that Alexa is off by a factor of 50x (ie an error of five thousand percent!) when comparing Matt Cutts’ and Peter’s site traffic.

Although this is just an anecdotal snapshot indicating the problem, and perhaps Alexa is better now, I’d also noted many problems with comparisons of Alexa to sites where I knew the real traffic.   50x seems to be a spectacular level of error for sites read mostly by technology sector folks.   It even suggests that Alexa may be a questionable comparison tool unless there is abundant other data to support the comparison, in which case you probably don’t need Alexa anyway.

Of course the very expensive statistics services don’t fare all that well either. A larger, and excellent comparison study by Rand Fishkin over at SEOMOZ collected data from several prominent sites in technology, including Matt Cutts’ blog, and concluded that no metrics were reasonably in line with the actual log files. Rand notes that he examined only about 25 blogs so the sample was somewhat small and targeted, but he concludes:

Based on the evidence we’ve gathered here, it’s safe to say that no external metric, traffic prediction service or ranking system available on the web today provides any accuracy when compared with real numbers.

It’s interesting how problematic it’s been to accurately compare what is arguably the most important aspect of internet traffic – simple site visits and pageviews. Hopefully as data becomes more widely circulated and more studies like these are done we may be able to create some tools that allow quick comparisons.  Google Analytics is coming into widespread use but Fishkin told me at a conference that even that “internal metrics” tool seemed to have several problems when compared with the log files he reviewed.  My own experience with Analytics have not been extensive but the data seems to line up with my log stats and I’d continue to recommend this excellent analytics package.

Stumbled on this great collage of videos from French lighthouses during storms.

I think one of them is La Jument,  which is where the most famous of all lighthouse wave pictures was taken some years ago showing the keeper standing outside of the doorway as a huge wave was about to engulf him.    I just learned that the reason he opened the door was that he thought the chopper that took his picture was a rescue chopper enroute to pick him up.    He did survive that wave.     Click here for La Jument Pictures

My buddies over the Whistle Stop Coffee shop have a new website  and this is a post to help them get indexed more quickly at Google.  It’s a work in progress for them.    Small business sites can take some time to get indexed partly because Google, IMHO, is not doing a very good job with  the indexing of very fresh content.   This is partly because spammers are overwhelming the internet with fake websites and junky content which mean Google waits for incoming links and other signs of authenticity before indexing new stuff.

However, for businesses like the Whistle Stop, it can some time to get incoming links.    Hopefully this post will get them juiced up a bit since Google indexes this blog often and will follow the links out and “find” the new site.

Also important is to “claim” your business via Google’s small business service called “Google Local”.  Instructions are here

It’s also a good idea, though a bit of a hassle,  to create a sitemap for new websites – a list of pages that should be indexed.   This can be done online at now cost via search for “free sitemap” services and then submit to Google at no charge via the webmaster console.

Hoping to start some discussion here about the role (if any!) for anonymity in online environments, especially when people are pitching sales or services.     I’m starting to think I’m pretty much opposed to anonymous stuff in almost all circumstances because it fosters so many of the bad things in the online world, and helps in so few cases.

At Twitter on prominent guy was pitching for $50,000 in startup funding, then appeared to be retweeting his pitch via … at least one fake profile though I can’t be certain it was fake.    However there’s enough deception now at Twitter that it requires almost as much skepticism as we have for bogus email scams.    Skepticism is healthy and good but we need to *reduce it whenever possible* to create more effecient and safe business environments online.     There is *FAR, FAR* too much tolerance of scammers in their various and sundry forms even as search engines work very hard to eliminate those who seek to manipulate their search rankings.

Tangential point here:  Google – I’d argue very evil-y and non-Googley – worries far more about certain SEO tweaks that have little impact  on users than they do about lying and cheating scammers who deceptively advertise using adwords.     In fact we could not even resolve an issue a few years ago where our India Travel website was hacked and payments made to somebody else for adsense advertising.   Google is a lot more interested in protecting their advertisers [cough Cash Cow cough]  than protecting their publishers or their users.    This point is so rock solid I’d like to debate it sometime with a Google person, for although I have a lot of respect for them in some areas I’m pretty much tired to death of the idea they don’t value advertising dollars above pretty much all else.  There are now *thousands* of example of this.    That kind of hubris very deservedly hurt Microsoft’s reputation and it’s starting to hurt Google’s too, though in fairness they are unlikely to *ever* reach the level of opportunism we saw with Microsoft products and services.   In my book Google remains on balance “good guys” and are likely to stay that way – perhaps even as the competition from Bing.com and search upstarts heats up.

More on this Anonymity topic  after the feedback here I’m hoping for…