credit: Nina Matthews Photography

After Barcamp Seattle and the Privacy Identity Innovation Conference (pii) I am struck by one painful truth about business and technology: All economic incentives favor inefficiency.

I gave a rant-style presentation at Barcamp titled “Your Product Sucks.” The central premise of the talk was that you have a single value to any given customer; either you fulfill it, or you suck. No matter how you strive you will not fulfill every customer need. The customer doesn’t care if you fail; they only care if you fail them.

pii focused on how we protect, legislate, and value personally identifiable information. There was an ongoing current of how people self-report and transport personal information through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The introduction of Facebook Places has created an interesting problem: in order to differentiate from the existing self-report location services, Facebook has introduced other-report location.

During a screaming match passionate discussion I realized that Facebook Places is the continuation of a regular cycle. There are countless businesses that hemorrhage value. Every missing feature means money, every loose piece of data means money, and every support system means visibility.

“Broken” products and services create secondary and tertiary economies that become sustaining for the cycle and the starting product.  Think of tracking programs, cell-phone cases, and demographic data.

Two of the major secondary economies online are the protection of personal data and the reclamation of reputation space.  PayPal and Google Checkout both provide “security protection” by creating an intermediary between your bank instruments and online sellers. This comes at the expense of your credit data and personal data being centralized, the intermediary charges you for the transaction, and they keep a log of your transactions.

Think about that. Logging is a cost. The frightening truth is that there are very few laws about your information. Once people have the information there are few ways that they can’t use it. People can’t charge things to your credit card, but they can sell your e-mail address, home address, and what you like to purchase.

Every time you see information about who buys what, who uses a specific service, or any other identification of a demographic, is in an indication that information has been sold.

Facebook is a prime example of a business that takes advantage of the broken cycle they offer a clear function, connecting your online presence with your friends, but at the cost of sucking at privacy and security. They leave companies like Reputation Defender to clean up after the mess that Facebook “privacy settings” leave in their wake.

Read this infographic to see more data on how Facebook, Google and Apple use your data.

I strongly suggest that you visit the privacy settings at your free products and remember that your personal data is part of what these companies make money from.

This is an excerpt taken from Making the Most of Twitter: Search, Tools and Analytics. Visit our download page to buy the whole 25-page article.

This post covers in-depth how to use the search function to monitor Twitter. This will help you to find the people that you want to talk to and to understand the fast moving torrent of information and thought that Twitter provides.

One of your primary opportunities for leveraging Twitter is their own site search (search.twitter.com). Once you are familiar with this feature you will have better understanding of what third party tools are working with, why there are limitations and a clearer sense of what Twitter is building toward.

Twitter Search works very much like the search engines you are used to (Google, Bing, etc.); it employs 16 operators, or additives that affect the search’s meaning.

Operator	Meaning
No Operator –> user driven	Containing both “user” AND “driven”
Quotation Marks –> “user driven“	Containing the exact phrase “user driven”.
OR –> user OR driven	Containing either “user” or “driven” (or both).
Minus –> user -driven	Containing “user” but not “driven”.
Hash –> #measure	Containing the hashtag “meaure”.
From: –> from:UserDriven	Sent from username “UserDriven”.
To: –> to:UserDriven	Sent to username “UserDriven”.
@ –> @UserDriven	Containing the username “UserDriven”
Near: –> Sale near:seattle	Containing “sale” and was sent near “Seattle”.
Within: –> near:98122 within:2.5km	Sent with in “2.5 km” of “98122”.
Since: –> sale since:2009-10-04	Containing “sale” and sent since the date “2009-10-04”.
Until: –> sale until:2009-10-04	Containing “sale” and sent up till the date “2009-10-04”.
–> delivery	Containing “delivery” and positive sentiment.
–> delivery	Containing “delivery” and negative sentiment.
? –> sale ?	Containing “sale” and a question.
Filter:links –> funny filter:links	Containing “funny” and includes a link.
Source: –> funny source:tweetdeck	Containing “funny” and entered via “TweetDeck”.

Several of the operators are old favorites Quotation Marks, OR, and Minus are available in most popular search engines. The new tools are the user, location, temporality (time) and sentiment (feeling).

User and Hashtags

To: and From: are most powerful once you have identified key influencers for your customer group. From: will allow you to section out all of the tweets sent by the specific user and can be paired with search terms to identify the specific issues that you need to address. To: is used to identify who is speaking to, or dialoguing with, a specific account. The to: operator returns all tweets that start with the selected username.

Example:

@userdriven where is the meet up?

This will show up for to:userdriven.

I am going to the meetup @userdriven is sponsoring.

This will not show up for to:userdriven

If you want to return all mentions of a username then you use “@username” so @userdriven will return all tweets to the account and all uses of the username in tweets.

The hashtag # is used to tie together tweets on the same subject. One of the best examples of hashtag use is #journchat. Journchat has a large group of participants and a regular time each week when they hold a discussion, and everyone who wishes to participate can employ the hashtag to take part and follow the action. The hash is what allows Twitter to accomplish limited multi-person dialogue.

User and hashtags are the only operators that function as stand alone queries.

Location

Near: and within: will allow you to find out what people are saying in the vicinity of a specific location. For near: you can use a large area like City (Seattle), a smaller area like a Zip Code (98122), or extremely specific Longitudinal/Latitudinal values (47.625193,-122.3574).

Within: requires the near: operator and works best when paired with kilometers (km). Currently the dropdown that is found under the map on Twitter Search is in kilometers so you will do better to maintain consistency. Also, open Google Maps to verify that Twitter is correctly assessing your near: operator in the way you expect.

If you have both online and brick and mortar locations leveraging near: and within: will be especially valuable to you. Consider running vicinity searches around real world locations in tandem with online campaigns to drive awareness of your physical location and to expedite customer service resolution.

Temporality

Knowing when people react to your account, brand or product can be very useful. Unfortunately, Twitter has very finite server capacity. The result is that it does not hold data for very long. For the operators since: and until: Twitter only returns results going back 72-hours. This means that if it takes you more than three days to recognize that Twitter has spiked you won’t be able find the issue directly through Twitter Search. This means that even though you can use these operators to segment a single day (sale since:2009-10-04 until:2009-10-04) you have to do it very close to that date. The technical limit for the operator is seven days, but most phrases are purged more frequently than that.

For example:

If today is October 6, 2009 then you can use since: and until: for October 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th and 6^th.

This means that Monday is extremely important for your Twitter campaigns. This is the only day that you can assess the run into a weekend spike.

Sentiment

One of the major concerns of social media marketing and brand PR is sentiment–how people feel about your product, service or company. Twitter addresses this with  and . These operators, signified by a smile and a frown emoticon, pull back tweets with positive or negative buzzwords (or the actual emoticon).

While great in concept the execution of these searches can be spotty. Both operators will return a set of emoticons that are essentially neutral, causing overlap in the returned search. Also, you will see a variety of results where you are not the subject of the sentiment. The sentiment operators are a good way to take a snapshot of the Twitter’s feelings.

The last operator that relates to sentiment is ? . It doesn’t actually affect sentiment, but it does allow you to find actionable issues. Appending ? to your queries allows you to see tweets that ask a question. So if you pair it with or you are more likely to find a tweet that has a clear solution you can bring to the author.

Special note: sentiment modifiers can disrupt location modifiers.

Source and Filter:links

Source: returns all tweets that were delivered through a specific channel–like Tweetie, UberTwitter or the main site. This is useful for charting the value of advertising in third-party tools or web portals.

Filter:links return all tweets with links in them. At this time I am not aware of other valid filters, but Twitter does plan to add retweets and home timeline segmentation to the search function, which will likely be other filters.

The real power of these operators is in combining them together to find opportunities for visibility or service of your customers. Combining Location and Sentiment can help you overcome a localized issue. Combining Location ? can help you find a business opportunity (e.g. lunch near:98122 within:1km ?) like finding people looking for lunch in your neighborhood.

Now that you know how to construct your complicated advanced search let’s cover some methods for saving you some time retrieving the results.

If you use the search box in the right navigation of your profile page you will find a “Save this search” button under the “update” button of your profile.

This is a good way to respond to searches quickly. You have your update field available, but the interface is a little confusing. Be sure you aren’t typing your new searches into your updated field when you use this method.

The second tool Twitter offers for leveraging search in a persistent way is a search widget. You can find this widget in the Goodies section of Twitter. It will allow you to set up a widget with any search that you want and define how you want it to display. We have set up a simple reputation portal that lets you enter a query to see positive, negative, tweets with questions, tweets employing the #fail hashtag, tweets with links and retweets using via. You can download the page here: http://www.userdrivenchange.com/twitrep.php

To get the full 25-page PDF visit our downloads page

Branding.

It’s been the big buzzword whether you are talking about branding through social media or traditional media.  Your image is who you are right?  We ALL thought that about Tiger, and it turns out we thought wrong.  But that’s the power of branding. (I’m not slighting him, just using his image and branding as an example.)  But what does branding do for your company?  Or for yourself (if you are a public entity)?

In many ways branding is who you or who your company is.  For instance, Microsoft might be the more successful company, but Apple’s brand sentiment is stronger, especially in the social arena: (article).  Nike relies on its branding of the world’s most recognizable athletes wearing its shoes to dominate the saturated shoe market.  Geico uses about 18 different marketing campaigns to build their brand yet somehow, they are one of the most recognizable insurance companies.  So, branding builds a perception of what you think about a company.  For the longest time, traditional media was the only way to brand and build your perception.

In 2009 we saw corporations such as Gatorade, Radio Shack and Kentucky Fried Chicken continue to utilize traditional media to incorporate their new branding scheme. 

Gatorade failed miserably early on during the NFL playoffs when it began running commercials stating, “What’s G?”.  While the commercial was engaging and the viewer wanted to know, it failed to convey the message that G was the new Gatorade name.  Further, it took weeks for them to post search links to their site explaining the meaning behind “What’s G?”  Thus when a viewer Googled this question, the answer wasn’t  there.  A week after the first airing, finally someone had written a blog explaining his theory on it and it turns out his theory was right.  It wasn’t until about 2 weeks after the commercials started to air that Gatorade finally showed up in search results for “What’s G commercial”.  So while they attempted a great viral campaign they failed to deliver on the feasibility of delivering the customer into an actionable answer. (read more about this fiasco)

Radio Shack just flat out aired commercials stating that they were now to be called The Shack.  Easy breezy right?  Except for the fact that Shaquille O’Neal might have something to say about who is, “The Shack”.  He is of course @THE_REAL_SHAQ on Twitter.  Surprisingly, to my knowledge, he never did anything with it.  (too bad for both of them, could have been a fun little sparring campaign)  It’s not surprising that Radio Shack is changing their name, since radio is an outdated technology and implies that you can only get things for radio at said store.  The fact is Radio Shack today does a decent amount of business with wireless phones and other electronics.  Unfortunately for Radio Shack, both pieces of their name have a negative connotation.  We’ve discussed why radio is bad, but a shack is not really a place I want to go to buy electronics.  I want to go to a store.  Now all I can do is go to “The Shack” if I want to buy some crappy electronics that are overpriced (IMO).  I’m actually surprised Radio Shack has weathered the storm; they seem like one of those companies that should have faded out after 2000 or at least during the economic downturn of 2008/09.

Finally, there’s Kentucky Fried Chicken, or as they are trying to be known, Kentucky Grilled Chicken, ok technically they are still just KFC but they’ve definitely made a great attempt at rebranding who they are and what they sell.  I ask you, who seriously ever went to KFC because they wanted healthy food?  Not me.  So why the change?  Probably their numbers were dropping so they opted to go with the healthy fast food craze of the last few years (Subway, McDonalds, etc have all overly marketed fresh, healthy food recently).  I’ll admit, I’m on the bandwagon of healthy food.  If I go to a fast food place I look at the calorie chart and my decision is influenced by how many calories the Double Bacon Cheeseburger has.    The difference between a Subway/McDonald’s and KFC is that they have not had to change their name to convey their healthy connotation.  Subway found Jared and McDonald’s just bombarded us with their advertising.  I have to ask though, if companies continue to do this “healthy branding” trend, what’s a company like Burger King gonna do?  They’re screwed name wise.

On the flip side in 2009 we saw other corporations grasp at social media outlets to work on their brand (not necessarily trying to change their brand but to gain some market share and / or build their brand).

Skittles tried to grasp at social media branding when the term was young and hot in late spring early summer with their Twitter and Facebook page takeover of their site. The problem was that the Twitter takeover for Skittles backfired as the community started lots of negative tweets about Skittles.  Quickly Skittles changed the takeover to a Facebook takeover which eased the negativity.  Still the site was barely interactive and really didn’t do a whole lot to improve the Skittles brand.  Jack in the Box did a good job of utilizing traditional media to garner attention to their attempt at a social media brand.  Again though the site was fairly lame and didn’t do much to build their brand… seriously, a “dying CEO” campaign?  Might have been one of Jack’s worst ideas last year.

In contrast, Target used social media to increase brand awareness about their giving / donations and actually used social media to let their fans choose who to donate to (Bullseye Gives campaign).  As gruesome and morbid as this might be, Michael Jackson’s death might have turned out the biggest social media win of the year for TMZ and maybe for MJ himself.  TMZ earned a new reputation as “the first to break the story” and MJ’s legacy soared through Twitter, Blip.fm, imeem, Facebook, etc.  MJ was the top tweeted person of the year and his popularity possibly doubled through his death and resulting buzz.   Interestingly, Tiger made the list at #8, though his name probably popped up on Twitter during any of the major tournaments during the year and well before his “accident”.

Finally, and this stems into 2010, Pepsi announced that they would NOT air Superbowl Commercials during this year’s Superbowl.  Pepsi will instead utilize the money for its Project Refresh online cause marketing campaign. (article)  This is a huge coup for online / social media since the Superbowl has been the main stage for traditional media for the last 15-20 years.  As far as branding goes, it will be very interesting.  Pepsi has been one of the key participants in Superbowl ads so there will be buzz when their commercials are missed.  Hopefully they prep for this and utilize search links to their cause campaign and explain why they are devoted to this campaign over Superbowl ads.  They could become known as the company who changed how we advertise and brand ourselves. 

Social media has proven that it can definitely help or hurt your brand awareness, so use it wisely.  Traditional media is still the main outlet for getting viewership, but is definitely losing traction.  So whether you are building your personal brand or whether you are building your company’s brand, you will have to choose which outlet is more effective for you.  My best advice is that if you think your idea is “cute” you might want to rethink it.  Traditional media allows for cute since it’s much harder to have backlash against it (though not as hard as it used to be).  “Cute” will get you killed in social media if not done properly.  If you are building your brand, decide what you want to bring to the forefront.  Is it your causes; is it your workers; is it your product; are you better than your competition at something?  Figure it out, flesh it out, test it on a small group, re-do it, test again, perfect it, then go for it!

credit: eschipul

You may have a Twitter account, but you may not know how to leverage it for your business and personal branding. Given that social media continues to explode and become an important part of all marketing in any industry, as well as impacting how customers are learning about companies and researching purchases, now is the time for you to learn some of the tools at your disposal to understand what is happening on Twitter and measure your success in social media.

This white paper gives you a brief introduction to the essentials of Twitter; discusses Twitter search then jumps into advanced query modification; discusses some key Client applications for intermediate and advanced use of Twitter; defines some metrics that you can use to determine whether your efforts were successful or not; and finally wraps everything together with an implementation plan.

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This paper is a quick read (25-pages) and includes access to a simple to use portal for monitoring your reputation or gauging sentiment on Twitter. Download today to improve your Twitter campaigns.

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credit: knittingturnip

Thanks for reading our blog!

Jeff and I have been toiling away on a white paper on leveraging Twitter that will be available in the near future.

We cover:

1. Advanced Search Modifiers
2. Leveraging Third Party Tools
3. Performance Indicators for Social Media

We also created a simple reputation portal that leverages Twitter Search to accompany the white paper to help you understand the concepts that we cover.

Until then I am providing a download of the first chapter of User Driven Change: Give Them What They Want.

credit: Hamama Hareb [ DaDooDa ]

There is a major group of on the web that has very strong opinions, unrestrained passion, and the willingness to plaster the web & your company headquarters with their disapproval.Who is this powerhouse of web savvy movers? New moms.

In November Motrin put out a video implying that baby-wearing is fashionable. The worlds moms were not amused. Try searching Twitter for #motrinmoms. Twitter, YouTube, and blogs galore blasted Motrin; calling them callous for portraying a mom who wants to carry her baby but gets back pain.

In December Facebook decided that breasts are breasts, even if they have a baby attached. And the moms went to the streets. Over 78,000 breastfeeds have joined a Facebook group to petition against Facebook’s no breast rules. The moms feel that there should be an exception to the terms of service on the web to consider breastfeeding to be different than other breast-baring activities.

I think the coverage of these issues has missed something very important point of these issues: Who you are sending the message to vs. Who you are writing your message about.

Motrin’s advertising is about anyone who will buy Motrin, in this case women, and is about women who want to be fashionable. Their choice of baby carrying because it is a more noble fashion choice than stiletto heels. But, no one wants to abide implications that a baby is a self-serving decision. These moms responded by filling the Internet with #motrinmoms,  #motingate, and numorous blogs etc. that took a brand that many people have low recognition with a put it in front of millions of eyes that probably found the advertisement more funny than offensive. The moms also filled the Internet with endorsements and reviews of baby carriers. Many of you are probably unaware that the makers of Motrin (Johnson & Johnson) were sued over possible side-effects of Childrens Motrin. Search Motrin Baby now. You probably won’t find the lawsuit. Creating a huge buzz and appologizing about a far less dire issue concerning babies has greatly deflated a former reputation issue while getting their brand out to a lot of people. Even though Motrin has offended the people their ad was about they have made a major accomplishiment in the column of general brand visibility.

When it comes to breastfeeding the it is not the big brand that is pushing a message, it is the niche community. Facebook is huge on the web; there are 1000′s of searches a day, and the news search for the last week is topped by breastfeeding. While the community is sending a message about Facebook they are sending a message to moms. Every article I have seen stresses the World Health Organization findings and recommendations about breastfeeding. For at least the near future the number of people exposed to breastfeeding are multiplied many-fold. Facebook, like most social media providers, is not obligated to police their content, but are well within their terms to ban and censor in anyway they see fit. They are not sending a message by enforcing their terms; still one group has turn a rather small act of a virtual breastfeed-in into a major social media win for their cause.

I urge you to think about who you are talking about and who you are talking to — relize one may be at the expense of the other. Also, don’t make mom jokes.

: peasap

Last week there was a rather large dispute created by a post contributed to SEOmoz by Marty Weintraub (aimclear). The fallout is an interesting observation of reputation management:

Tiers of Transparency: The Ethical Brand Ambassador — This post started it all, the current version has been edited to be less sarcastic/critical. Marty takes a biting and sarcastic look at the use of social media identities and transparency in brand ambassadors. You should read 3 Types of Social Media for some context on identity in social media – it is short.. Marty is discussing whether it is ethical for someone to participate in a community both as a brand ambassador (alias media) and as their self (identity media). In the process Marty used some unfortunate turns of phrase:

Referring to Matt Cutts:

Whilst the always-affable Mr. Cutts politely indicated that he did not consider the technique “spam,” he categorized it as “social engineering,” a phrase that harkens back to Hitler by some interpretations. Ok then… when I was subtly embellishing my Yahoo! Personals profile to get a date, I didn’t realize I was going down the road towards becoming a next-gen social media Nazi.

Referring to Rahaf Harfoush:

Tree hugger social media aficionados preach that all social media participation should be fully transparent with complete personal disclosure. In many cases I agree and recommend that clients create press secretary avatars. However, social media mirrors physical life, and in the real world people bring all combinations of transparency, intent, and participatory models to the table. The same holds true online, and to expect anything different is somewhere between negligent and Pollyanna.

Referring to Li Evans:

As candy ass social media goody 2 shoes Twittered in righteous indignation, I offered the following: “The problem is not fake social media avatars. The problem is fake social media avatars who are not authentic.”

Definitely Marty called Li a Candy-Ass Social Media Goody2Shoes and Rahaf a Tree-hugger (whatever that means on the Internet); but he didn’t call Matt a Nazi. Regardless, Marty made many people angry.

Some of the responses to Tiers of Transparency:

“Candy Ass Social Media Goody 2 Shoes”?

I was gobsmacked to find Marty Weintraub prefacing his disagreement with Li Evans on social media tactics by (playfully?) calling her a “candy ass social media goody 2 shoes.”

Slagbait

Obviously for me it affects how I view the seomoz brand, calling what I do “outright fraud” is a little rich from a blog advocating sock puppet marketing.

It is important to note that Lyndoman blames SEOmoz for Marty’s writing.

Unsubscribing to seomoz for a bit

The above link was posted by Matt Cutts, and then publicized.

Is this the end for Matt Cutts

Sorry Rand I know it’s no great loss, I think personally you have a great Team and I like you a lot but I don’t want that crap in my RSS.

Rand is held responsible for the content. And SEOmoz loses a subscriber.

The Buck Stops Here

First – to issue an apology to Lisa Barone, Li Evans, Matt Cutts and Marty…

Second – to explain the course of events that lead to this happening…

Third – We are taking steps to prevent this from happening in the future.

Rand officially apologizes to all involved and those who found the post offensive.

What does this all mean?

What you can learn from this string of events is how things play out when you have a reputation stumble. Where does the blame lay for offensive content? Should authors bear the blame for their ill-phrased works; or do publishers take the blame for distribution and censorship choices?

In this case a lightening rod approach occurred. SEOmoz was largely blamed for presenting the content. They took several tiers of mea culpa in editing, redistributing, moving, and openly apologizing about the content.

Why was Rand blamed? Some people directed their criticism at Rand, he is the CEO and the most visible identity from the organization. But, he is not the one that makes the day to day decisions about the blog, Rand clearly states that the choices made for YouMoz belongs to Rebecca — and that he backs her decisions. As the vision-keeper/lightening-rod/etc. that is his task.

What about Marty? Marty offered a much less comprehensive several shorter apologies in different places. The damage done to Marty Wientraub — and his avatar (AimClear) — are likely more insidious. While he has suffered less direct attack/attention he will likely find that his future comments are taken as more critical or hostile.

Open reputation issues, the ones that SEOmoz and Rand have suffered over this (and a few other dust ups recently), are easy to react to. Covert reputation souring is more difficult to address. When your “personality” from the web is based on your most recent, or most visible, content you lose control of your tone. People will begin to see your content tainted by the tone of previous statements, for both positive and negative.

Don’t mistake being low profile for being unscathed. Surmounting the ill-thoughts of people that are silent is much more difficult than getting past open opposition. When you are involved in a debacle you should take responsibility for your part in the issue. It is important to address future conflicts before they have time to fester.

Checking my links today I discovered two strange looking links. Apparently someone republished my review of Zappos (note: I they actually took the internal linking post) as theirs, which was subsequently scraped and attributed to the first person.

This left me confused and a bit derailed from my original blog idea, I forget what I was going to blog today. So I have decided to share with you an imagined interview with Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report.

Stephen should have me on for real. I haven’t written a book yet, but I’m sure that he would enjoy me. Plus he needs more brown friends, even if he is color blind.

Stephen COLBERT: Speaking of thinking alike, you were a member, or are a member of the Sexiest Men In Search, correct?

CARLOS del Rio: I am.

COLBERT: Were or am?

CARLOS: Were and am.

COLBERT: How’s that Sexy coming?

CARLOS: Well I could probably go to the gym more often.

COLBERT: How’s the new business going? Looks good to me, right?

CARLOS: I think it is going well.

COLBERT: Really?

CARLOS: Yeah, we are working on some interesting new things that should be coming out in March through June.

COLBERT: Come on, that’s terrific, right?

CARLOS: Well, I think we’re doing ok.

COLBERT: You, Rummy, Wolfowitz, Cheney, all you guys, right?

CARLOS: Well, Casey Hall, Gabriella Cook, me and another person that hasn’t officially joined. But I guess I could talk to Wolfowitz’s daughter, Sara.

COLBERT: You know Sara Wolfowitz?

CARLOS: We both went to Reed College.

COLBERT: Exactly.

COLBERT: A lot of people are bailing on this whole SEO Standards idea. But you’re not, right?

CARLOS: Correct.

COLBERT: You’re still onboard?

CARLOS: I am onboard.

COLBERT: The grand experiment?

CARLOS: No, it’s not a grand experiment.

COLBERT: It’s not? It’s a little experiment?

CARLOS: No, it’s an unfortunate necessity that you cannot allow fraudster to kill your reputation and you cannot allow spammers to threaten the Internet.

COLBERT: Which spammer do we take down next?

CARLOS: I think that we should probably focus on building better sites first.

COLBERT: Wait a second, we cannot allow fraudsters to kill your reputation. That’s a very simple statement sir, which I support wholeheartedly. Back it up!

CARLOS: I’m with you.

COLBERT: Who do we go after next? Iran? Come on!

CARLOS: Um… I guess if Iran is spamming. But I think that this is probably more a US issue.

COLBERT: Let’s get some boots on the ground, sir!

CARLOS: Do you really think violence is the answer?

COLBERT: Is the military option on the table in Iran?

CARLOS: It’s not really fair to answer a question with a question. Plus I don’t think that Iran has anything to do with this.

COLBERT: Ok. How about the nuclear option in Iran?

CARLOS: I think the Internet would be more susceptible to a big magnetic pulse.

COLBERT: Come on!

CARLOS: Maybe we could get rid of the porn. That would take a lot of the money out of the Internet.

COLBERT: I don’t like that idea

CARLOS: Somehow I knew you wouldn’t.

COLBERT: I’m a neo-neocon. Girls don’t really like me.

CARLOS: Maybe you should wear a sweater-vest.

Because of my interest in the lovely and talented Vanessa Fox, and her blog Vanessa Fox Nude I have become entwined in the reputation of both Vanessa del Rio, to whom I am not related, and Vanessa Hudgens, who I have never met. All from a comment “The beautiful and talented Vanessa Fox, who I would gladly drinkbait” I made in an earlier post about seo visibility.

That post was published on September 12th, ever since then I have had a growing number of visitors that I assume are dissatisfied. They come primarily from two searches Vanessa del Rio, who I have met, and Vanessa Hundred. So I have decided to investigate.

Vanessa del Rio – A 55 year old porn star who has made over 200 films and is famous for numerous things that I am not interested in having my blog rank for — needless to say she is well know for being naked. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and seems to own a French Bulldog. In the late-80′s my father and I met her in a mall in Las Vegas; ever since then Dad and I have, at times, claimed relation to her for a laugh. Usually the result is awkward silence. In reality Vanessa and I are not related. As of today I am result 130 on Google.

Vanessa Hundred – This one took a hot minute to figure out. I searched for a bit and figured it must be a pop culture reference. Turns out that Vanessa Hundred is a mispronunciation of Vanessa Hudgens. I am result 7 on Google.

Vanessa Hudgens – An 18 year old singer/actress from several Disney properties including High School Musical — currently dating Zac Efron. Okay… that seems reasonable a bunch of kids (I hope) are searching Vanessa Hundred because they want to find out about Vanessa Hudgens. A little more searching uncovered the truth. A bunch of kids (I hope) are searching for nude pictures of Vanessa Hudgens that were leaked on to the Internet on September 6th. Not in the Top 100 on Google.

Some interesting coincidences:

• Vanessa Hudgens’ middle name is Anne, Vanessa del Rio’s real name is Ana.
• Vanessa Fox is the only one of the Vanessas that doesn’t have nude photos on the Internet.
• I have met both Vanessa Fox and Vanessa del Rio. But not Vanessa Hudgens.
• I am not related to any of the Vanessas

 

So to put it all together what does this have to do with Internet marketing?

One this is a fun and strange exhibition of the long tail. The concept of long tail SEO is that you can capture a high volume of visitors by adding up all of the low volume searches that happen in a month. With the exception of September 2007 the search volume on Vanessa Hudgens, Venessa Del Rio, and Vanessa Hundred total approximately 42000 times per month. I had about 360 visits in the past 30 days. Almost 1.2% of the total searches have resulted in a visit for me, hundred dollar SEO. Which I guess means there are some very tenacious people out there looking for “Vanessa,” or there is a large quantity of searchers that are so unsatisfied with Google’s results that they make it all the way to me.

Two if you are not a famous person, or prone to homophones, you may be well obscured by chance interactions of intentional and unintentional content. I get as much traffic from people looking form nude Vanessas as I get from my own name because there are more ways to pair Nude, Vanessa, Hundred , del, and Rio than there are to reassemble Carlos del Rio.

My apologies to Vanessa Fox if I clutter your results — I’ll buy you a drink to make up for it.

While searching the Internet today I found a blog post about the SEOmoz Community that I wish I had seen back in March.

As excited as I was to find such a glowing comment it gave me a moment of pause. Why didn’t I see this 5 months ago? I primarily use my username for doing query string tests, so I search inflatemouse 3-5 times per week — but I never saw this particular article. So I started looking for it, it was on page 3 of the results. I am appalled that I wasn’t searching that deep. I started playing with the query, excluding powerful sites that I have a presence on, and it still only made it to page two.

I went on to check a few more engines including Technorati, Serph, and a new site I have learned about Wink.

So this offers an interesting lesson in how deep you have to go to, more or less, hide information on the Internet. For many people, especially the average searcher, page 3 might as well not exist.

Another find was the huge amount of replication that was allowed in Google’s results. Eight unique domains in the top ten, twelve unique domains in the top twenty. In fact four of the top twenty are RSS feeds of content from a site in the top ten. It seems an industrious person could bury content by finding highly spammed blogs.