Local results on Page 1 of Web search

There are a variety of great resources that discuss on-site considerations when it comes to optimizing for local search.  TopRank has a nice blog posting on optimizing for local search and running a query for optimizing AND “local search” will show you a number of other results (on a side note if a search marketer has figured out how to get their content at the top of Google for queries like optimizing AND “local search” then it’s probably worth reading the article).

I want to focus more on some external considerations for how to build online equity once you have your on-page ducks in a row.

Getting a seat at the table

To begin playing, you first need a seat at the table.  To show up in local search results, your site need to be recognized by the engines as being associated with a business in a given locale.  Google, Yahoo! and Bing all have processes in place to help businesses get get included in the local listings and associated with a given locale.  If you’re validated with Google and use Google Webmaster tools, you can also associated your site with a given location.

There are some who recommend submitting your business information to Acxiom or InfoUSA because a lot of the local engines and directories license data from these providers although I’m not entirely sold on whether there is much value in going through these middle-men.  For one, they will actually sell your information to marketers so you can expect your aggravation level to increase as you get more cold calls and direct mail.  For two, if you need to make changes to your business information you should know that the best way to make sure those updates are propagated on the search engines and directories is to to go directly to the source.

The other side of this is that Acxiom and InfoUSA will apparently get you onto more sites however after Google, Yahoo! and Bing I feel like you quickly get to the point of diminishing returns.

Raising the stakes

Once your site has been associated with a given locale, a lot of work needs to be done on-site.  As mentioned, there are a number of resources out there.  Basically, you should make sure to have local signals on your site so the engines realize that your site is more than just a little focused on the location you want to target.

From an external perspective, you need to start thinking about how to create authority in a localized fashion.  Here are some tactics to consider:

Localize your news release – (Disclaimer – I work for Vocus, product manage PRWeb, and will be more professionally and financially successful if you send out news releases with PRWeb) – Consider using local identifiers in your news release.  Instead of writing a headline like “Boutique Offers Tips for Spring,” make sure to include a local indicator: “Washington, DC Boutique Offers Tips for Spring.”  The local indicator will make it more likely that local audiences will see your release in localized alerts and queries in both the Web and News search engines.  The local indicators will also increase the likelihood that local third party publishers will pick-up your story and link back to your site.

Engage local mainstream influencers – It’s pretty important to find out who the local influencers are in your community – the journalists who create stories and have audiences.  Most people have a good sense for who the mainstream local influencers are – reaching them is the challenge.  However these days, most of them are active on Twitter and/or Facebook.  It’s not a bad idea to be diplomatic and engage them in these mediums as a way to ease your way into a relationship with them.

Engage local online influencers – Mainstream influencers shouldn’t be the sole focus of your efforts.  For example, I live in DC and our local food guy is Tom Sietsema.  Everyone in the restaurant business in DC is preoccupied with Sietsema but at the end of the day he is going to write what he is going to write with little regard for your business.  Often times, online influencers are going to be much easier to develop and maintain relationships with and you can be sure that you are going to get link value from the articles they write about your business.  Find out who the local bloggers are that are relevant to your business and embrace them, comp them, do whatever it takes to create a relationship because collectively, they can shoot you to the top.

Use localized ad tools – These days, you can microtarget your advertising efforts via Facebook.  These are good ways to get more mileage out of link building campaigns actually because you can not only localize your audience but you can also focus on keywords that are likely to hit influencers.  For example, there are 1,180 people in the DC area who list ‘blogging’ as one of their interests.  How is that for targeted advertising?

1,180 blogging aficionados in DC

Have some fun – It’s one thing to chat with influencers and ask them to write about you.  It’s a completely different thing to hold an event,  invite them out and make them your guests of honor.  A few years back, a local area promoter Laura Carlson invited me out to an event with a bunch of local bloggers and journalists at a club downtown.  Guess what?  We all wrote about the event and venue beforehand, to invite our “tribes” to come, and then of course afterward as well.  Not only was the club able to reach new audiences through us but there was also a windfall of links that came from the event.

Over the next week I’ll be sharing various pieces of the presentation.

The first piece is a brief deck that shows how CNN.com feature story has evolved over the years and in it’s current incarnation, is almost completely dominated by multimedia.

]]> http://www.newinfluencer.com/the-increasing-presence-of-multimedia-in-the-newsphere/feed/ 0 http://www.newinfluencer.com/special-discounts-for-newcomm-forum-2010/ http://www.newinfluencer.com/special-discounts-for-newcomm-forum-2010/#comments Fri, 02 Apr 2010 12:47:34 +0000 Jiyan http://www.newinfluencer.com/?p=377 Every year there is one conference that I will go to regardless of whether or not I’m speaking or presenting there and that is the Newcomm Forum.

Simply put, the event draws in some of the most forward-thinking professionals and academics in communications for several days of presentations, discussions and social events.

It’s sort of like my annual social media pilgrimage to the Valley and I always come away feeling refreshed and full of ideas on how we should implement social media into our program.

This year, they are throwing out a few special offers that I wanted to share and for $395, people can visit for just one of the days to see experts and practitioners from leading companies speak in a variety of topics.  Here is a sampling of sessions that will take place at the event:

• Social CRM
• Markets are Conversations: From Theory to Practice
• Understanding the New Media Landscape
• NewComm Essentials

Keynoters include:

• Jackie Huba, online marketing expert and author
• Dave Carroll, singer/songwriter, “United Breaks Guitars”
• Scott Monty, Ford
• Jack Holt, US Dept. of Defense
• Tim Westergren, Pandora
• Neville Hobson, WeissComm

For more details, visit http://www.newcommforum.com/Social-Media-Workshops.

If you use discount code NCFW100 you can save $100 on a pre-conference workshop or you can receive a 1/2-day session for $195.

Or, if you want to register for the full conference at www.newcommforum.com you can use discount code NCF500 to save $500 off the full conference fee.

Recently it has come to our attention that a Web site called Hao-Odnla has been scraping our content and syndicating it while removing attribution to PRWeb as well as customer hyperlinks.  What makes the situation even more suspect is that they have blocked our IP range so the only way we know about it is through our customers.

I’m just posting this to let all customers know that Hao-Odnla is not a trusted site and is most certainly not a PRWeb partner.  We will be looking into how we can get our content removed from their site but in the mean time, I would highly recommend that everyone who might be thinking about signing up for Hao-Odnla to not do so.

Let me start out by stating the motivation for this post: I am interested in knowing more about how people think about activity in Twitter and the thought process they go through when they see a Tweet that is relevant to them for some reason.  There is an assumption of a direct correlation between perceived influence and consideration.  For example, if I see someone with two followers complaining about my product I probably won’t care as much as if I saw someone who was a well respected industry voice with thousands of followers complaining about me.

I think this is a pretty safe assumption to make but there may be differing perspectives on this.

The Web Ecology Project

At any rate, let’s dive in and first examine some of the work done by the Web Ecology Project, an “interdisciplinary research group” in Boston who do a lot of data mining.

They have come up with a great research article, Analyzing Influence on Twitter (PDF).  The Project define influence in Twitter as “the potential of an action of a user to initiate a further action by another user.”  Using this definition, they then perform comparative analysis of 12 prominent Twitter users for 10 days, who fall into three broad classifications (celebrities, news outlets and social media analysts).  The research paid particular attention to the outcomes associated with original tweets.

Based on their formative definition of influence, the study concludes,

That social media analysts receive minimal reward for the effort they exert in maintaining a conversation with their followers.  For those users that succeed, most news outlets were more successful at having their content pushed to other users.  Celebrities, on the other hand, appear to inspire conversational responses with their followers, yet with more success than the analysts.

So basically celebrities inspire conversations with their followers, news outlets compel people to share information, and  social media analysts are loudmouths who people generally ignore.  Nothing surprising about these findings.

The real value for me is in the initial categorization scheme.  From a user perspective, it probably is interesting to note what type of influencer is tweeting about you because that is likely to inform your consequent action.

Twinfluence – Influence Analysis Light

Moving on, Twinfluence is an online application that ranks users in Twitter according to three categories:

• Reach – the number of followers a Twitterer has (first-order followers) in addition to all of their followers (second-order followers).
• Velocity – An average of the number of first and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer established their account.
• Social Capital – An estimation of how influential (how many followers) a Twitterer’s followers have.

Twinfluence offers some basic indexes based on these variables but it doesn’t seem actionable (to me).  The one takeaway for me here is their observation that there is semantic value in examining the influence of a Twitter user’s audience.  The search engine analogue for me is Google’s observation that a page’s backlinks tell only one side of the story, the authority of the pages linking to the page in question are also important variables to be considered.

Klout – Influence Analysis Heavy

Finally, I took a quick look at Klout, a venture-backed Silicon Valley start-up that “measures influence on topics across the social web to find the people the world listens to.”  Like the Web Ecology project, they define influence as “the ability to drive people to action.”

They provide a score based on 25+ variables that is a “numerical representation of the size and strength of a person’s sphere of influence on Twitter.”

Major categories of variables include:

• True Reach – a variable that filters spam bots and inactive accounts as well as dormant or non-interested followers.
• Amplification Ability – The likelihood that a message will generate retweets or spark a conversation.
• Network Score – A measure of how influential a person’s network is.

I was a little skeptical initially based on the breadth of variables they examine but a quick search for my own profile revealed some pretty good information that seemed fairly usable.  These prompted me to sign-up and take a look around.   I like the basic Klout score as a top-line metric to use however there does seem to be a bit of a learning curve because Klout has created an entirely new language to talk about influence that needs to be learned before it can be used.

My Own Fairly Non-Influential Perspective

I’m a little curious if we even need a new set of variables to analyze influencers.  When I look through my own stream of tweets, the first thing I do is see if anything sticks out as being an extreme response.  In other words, I’m not looking for non-intrusive observations but for exclamations about my product.  From there, I’ll generally think about whether to interact or not – but in general I don’t care that much if the person is influential.  In fact, I rarely look at their followers even as a top-line reference before interacting – I just look at their message. That being said, I don’t believe we have the type of chatter that major brands are going to have so some type of categorization is going to be necessary for them.   I’m just not sure how sophisticated it needs to be.

Curious to get some other perspectives on this. . .