Orangejack LLC

I finished a great book earlier this week that I think you might benefit from. It’s from one of my favorite authors, marketers, and thinkers of our day, Seth Godin. The book has quite the title: Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync? I certainly had a few stares and curious looks as I carried it around.

But the book is great for anyone wanting to learn about Social Media and what new marketing looks like. Marketing changes and Seth’s premise is that the old style of marketing is like meatballs and new marketing is like the toppings on a sundae. Mix them and you have a horrible idea.

From the intro:

The meatballs are the basic staples, the things that people need, the stuff that used to be marketed quite effectively with TV ads and other mass-market techniques.

The topping is the New Marketing. MySpace, Web sites, YouTube, permission marketing, and viral techniques are all part of the magic that makes up the top of the sundae.

This is why I love web strategy. It comes out of my marketing background. I’ve spent years playing around with different websites and tools like these mostly to just see what they can do and where they fit. I come from the perspective that it’s about communicating and interacting with the audience you want to be a part of.

Seth gives many examples but I think this one speaks well of the change in a section called “The Magic of AdWords” (pg 160):

Overlooked in all the hoopla about Google is the simple power of its core revenue driver — AdWords. Those little blue boxes that show up next to each set of search results account for the bulk of the company’s revenue and growth.

Do a search on ‘Shelby Cobra’ and you’ll find several ads for companies that make replicas of the Shelby Cobra. Every day, thousands of people do this very search.

A traditional marketer buys Car and Driver ads because she’s an optimist. She believes that if a million people see her ad then maybe, just maybe, a buried desire to own a Cobra replica will come bubbling to the surface, and they’ll call her and buy a car.

The New Marketer, on the other hand, happily pays a hundred dollars for those clicks from Google. It’s a lot fewer people, of course. In fact, it’s about 0.005 percent as many. But the power of this medium isn’t ‘how many,’ it’s ‘who’. And the ‘who’ are people who have already demonstrated that right now, right this minute, they are focused on this car. And further, they’ve shown that they’re willing to click on an ad to find out more about it.

The book is small and short and so very easy to read. If you don’t have a great grasp on how marketing is shifting, you may want to pick up this book. As of this posting the book is about $16 on Amazon: Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?

Or feel free to contact me and we’ll talk more about it.

When my wife and I were thinking through a tag line for our small business, Orangejack LLC, we had several options that didn’t stick.  In case you weren’t aware, this is the tag line we are currently using:

• Improving your business online

A few that didn’t pass were:

• Improving your online business
• Helping you use the web well
• Web Strategy for small businesses
• Consulting & Training for Internet Strategy , Marketing, & Blogging

The last one actually is the title of the homepage as it’s a bit more descriptive than the others.  The first one is interesting because the order of the last two words changes everything.  The other two, though true, didn’t feel complete.

But the one that I’ve since thought about that I’m sure wouldn’t work well is:

• We do webby things

It’s funny enough, but I don’t think it fully communicates.  Or maybe it does.  What do you think?  Did we land on the right one?

Google is the most popular search engine on the Internet. But you probably didn’t need me to tell you that. According to April 2008 stats, Google is used by about 60% of US Internet searches (Yahoo is #2 around 20% and MSN around 10%, AOL and Ask are about 5% each). They maintain their huge lead because they return the most relevant results for a search. If they didn’t, we’d use a different search engine. So how does Google do it? How do they know what are the best sites to refer you to for your search?

A Cola Analogy

I grew up going to our neighborhood pool every summer. One of the things we’d always do is carry some change for ice cream and knock-off brand “Check Cola” during “Adult Swim” times. Winn-Dixie sold Check Cola and I loved it as a kid. Today you can get all kinds of generic cola, but when someone mentions “cola”, the two big brands usually come to mind: Coke and Pepsi.

We know what makes a cola drink, but we don’t know the specifics of what makes a cola a “Coke” or a “Pepsi”. Those are trade secrets. It’s the same with search engines — we know what makes a search engine, but we don’t know what makes a “Google” or a “Yahoo”. However, Google has told us how they separate themselves.

Keyword Matching

The most straight-forward variable in the Google formula for their search engine result page (SERP) is matching the word(s) you use for your search compared to the words on the web page. This of course makes sense. If you search for “college football”, you’d expect web pages to be listed that are about college football!

Google PageRank

The next part of the Google formula is something they call PageRank. Google explains PageRank:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

This is where the “secret formula” really kicks into complicated understanding. Every link going to a website counts as a vote but not all votes are equal. If site A has a link that says “a college football website” and the link goes to site B, then Google gives site B a slight bonus for searches on “college football”. If site A is already about college football, then site B gets an extra bonus. And if site A has a high PageRank, site B benefits from that also.

Google is trying to determine what websites are trusted and authoritative on particular subjects, keywords, and phrases then return those sites as relevant. But it doesn’t stop there. PageRank is actually just a part of something bigger…

Page Quality

In a recent blog post from the Official Google Blog, they reveal PageRank is part of determining the overall Page Quality:

PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system. Other parts include language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query models (it’s not just the language, it’s how people use it today), time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and personalized models (not all people want the same thing).

Ranking High in Google

So how do you go about getting all of this to work together? Part of it is having a web page that is about what a person is searching for. The other part is becoming an authority on that subject. A large part of any Internet Marketing campaign will include Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and there are a lot of things that go into it. Google tells us how to create a Google-friendly site, but the way I’ve described it for years is:

Design your website for people and the search engines will follow

One of the services Orangejack LLC offers is to not only help you with your search engine optimization, but also more broadly with Internet marketing and overall strategy. Please feel free to contact us if we can be of service.

The following is taken from an email I recently wrote and I liked it so much I wanted to share it with you too:

In basic economy, the role of marketing is to connect a service or product with a person who needs or wants that offering. Over time the way marketers share the offerings has changed.

The best example of this is with television commercials. In the 1940s and 50s the actors on the show would talk to the viewing audience to pitch a product. Soon marketers decided they’d rather control the message with more creative aspects. Today, TiVo has given the ability for viewers to completely skip the commercials. So how are marketers to respond to the changes in technology?

It takes a creative strategy to know how to reach your intended audience. Today people are connecting with each other online, creating social networks where they share their lives, thoughts, and opinions. So I believe the question is now about strategically creating a plan to reach them. They, in turn, will share with their networks. Internet technology has caught up in allowing people to return to word-of-mouth marketing.

I have six years of Internet marketing experience. Starting with traditional search engine optimization, I continued by moving down the social media path. I followed the principle of “go where your market is”. I learned by getting heavily involved in social networks such as Blogging, Facebook, LinkedIN, Flickr, and Twitter among others. Additionally I have created online communities for niche-oriented people. During this time I have traveled the world to train others about these opportunities.

I would love the opportunity to talk with you further about how the web has changed and the direction it is going. Leave a comment or feel free to connect with me.