At the closing of Steve Jobs’ biography there is a quote from Jobs that reads:

“My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motiviation. Sulley flipped those prioriites to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.”

The truth of this quote is explained by what is called the Innovators Dilemma.

If you pay close attention to any industry driven by innovation, you’ll notice a distinct pattern: A founder has a problem that no good solution exists for. They develop an innovative product or service, and they start a company to sell it to others. Soon they want to maximize profits, so they hire managers to do two things: sell more and reduce costs.

Then an employee has a radical idea for a completely different type of solution. It’s not the solution customers are asking for, and it’s more expensive to produce than the current one, so the manager now has a dilemma. Do they approve the new solution, betting that this is the direction of the industry, or do they kill the project to protect profits?

Well, in companies who are profit focused, the answer is simple: they kill the project. You see, the manager was hired to hit certain profit targets. If they miss their targets they lose face with upper management, their reputation is damaged, their bonuses are denied, and often they will lose their job. To prevent these unpleasantries, every decision a manger makes is tied to profits. Who they hire, who they promote, what KPIs get measured and what projects they approve. Needless to say, a disruptive solution that customers are not asking for, which costs more to produce will almost always get cancelled.

Canning the project usually results in the employee leaving the company to spin off a startup selling the new solution. While they don’t have the resources or recognition of the larger company, the solution is so innovative that customers are happy to pay a premium. Soon enough the startup now dominates the market, the original company is out of business, and the new startup turned big corporation begins to focus on maximizing profits.

But that is what was different about Apple. Their core value was, “make great products” not “make higher profits”.  Jobs instilled those values into the people he worked with, and in the company culture. That has allowed Apple to overcome the innovators dilemma, innovating year after year, and banking billions in the process. We’ll see if that remains true after his passing.

Following in Facebook’s footsteps, Google is poised to release a new commenting system for websites called, Google Comments.

I’m not going to explain the differences between Google Commenting System, Facebook Commenting System, Disqus, LiveFyre or even Triberr Commenting System, although there are some noteworthy differences. What I would like to do is explain “why” Google released yet another commenting system, and I believe the answer lies in a recently submitted patent.

The patent is titled, “AgentRank”, and was submitted by Google on May 11th, 2011. The AgentRank concept isn’t new though. In fact,  I distinctly remember having a conversation in late 2009 with Hugo Guzman about whether or not PageRank would be replaced with AuthorRank (which is what we were calling it at the time).

The concept of AgentRank is that Google wants to know who you are, what you talk about and how credible you are on a topic. Think of it like a Klout score, except with a LOT more signals. To help clarify, I’ll use myself as an example…

If you look at my online footprint, you’ll see I’m most interested in two topics: SEO and Triberr. That can be deduced by looking at my blog, Twitter profile, guest posts, LinkedIn profile and blog comments.

Now if you were Google, you could also look at RSS feeds I’ve subscribed to, videos I’ve watched on YouTube, sites I’ve +1’d, links I’ve shared, pages I’ve visited, keywords I’ve searched on, events I’ve RSVP’d to and a slew of other breadcrumbs I’ve left online. As you might imagine, Google wants to use this data to improve search, but how?

Improving Search

Let’s assume that Google knows that I’m a credible source for info about SEO and Triberr. Now let’s also assume that I’ve recently written a guest blog post about “How to use Triberr for SEO” , but the blog is brand new.

Normally a new blog wouldn’t rank well for competitive terms, because it doesn’t have many backlinks. However, with AgentRank, Google can use the creditability of the author on a particular topic to determine trust, as opposed to only relying on backlinks to the domain the new post sits on.

So why Google Comments?

Like PageRank, AgentRank can be transferred. Let’s say that Rand Fishkin comments on a blog I wrote about SEO. Part of his AgentRank should pass to the author of the blog (meh), improving my AgentRank score. And of course I would use rel=author to tie my post to my Google+ account.

The trouble Google has had with calculating AgentRank is that it can be hard to actually verify if it was the “real” Rand Fishkin who left a comment. Wouldn’t it be much better (for Google) if they could just ask Rand to sign in to Google+ before leaving a comment. In fact, even better, what if Google had their own commenting system? One where they can always crawl the data, verify the commenters identity, track +1 and maybe even gauge sentiment.

There you have it

Google had created a new commenting system to that they can easily verify your identify and attribute that content to you. They attempted to do this with sidewiki back in the day, but that was a big fail. So this time they’re attempting to use Google+ as their ID system and social signal collection system, and website comments is a great way to calculate AgentRank. In that world, comments might be considered the new link, or at very least an important social signal.

One More Thing

Keep in mind that by commenting with Google’s commenting system, you’ve just created an implicit social circle in Google+ with the others who have commented on a particular post. It’s all part of Google’s plan to “help” people use Google+ whether they want to or not.

Managing an SEO team requires being very active throughout the hiring process. As the business grows or when a team member moves onto another opportunity headcount opens and the fun kicks into overdrive. Shockingly, most of the “fun” for potential candidates comes to a screeching halt the second they provide their resume. After reviewing dozens recently I thought providing some advice on crafting a successful SEO resume would be helpful for the community.

Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation Oh My!

It is critical you proofread your resume multiple times for spelling, grammar and punctuation errors. Then have a friend review it. I review my resume at least five times, and then seek my wife’s scrutiny before I send it to the hiring manager. This is hyper-critical for agency SEO positions. In an agency you will create deliverables for well-paying clients. Put some effort into your resume because it is incredibly irritating reading sumthing woth speling airs.

Here are just a few common mistakes:

FaceBook
facebook
Google anlytics
Youtube
HTML , PHP , and XML

Yes, Facebook is “Facebook.” YouTube is “YouTube.” If you are not 100% certain about a brand’s official name go to their website and look at the copyright notice. A proper notice will include their correct name. Also, LinkedIn is “LinkedIn” and not Linkedin. I know their nifty logo displays a capitalized L and a lowercase i, but trust me they are officially known as LinkedIn.

One of the last resumes I reviewed had twelve of these such errors. One error might be overlooked, but you better be a serious rock star otherwise there is no chance of landing an interview. An SEO resume with multiple errors has no shot.

Results, Results, Results

A resume should characterize your skills and competencies. A hiring manager wants to know that a candidate has on-page optimization, technical SEO, mobile SEO and/or keyword research experience. However, listing every element and task of an SEO campaign is not enough. A successful resume will also highlight results.

Stating you optimized 1,000 pages for a Fortune 500 website is dandy. Failing to mention the fruits of your labor creates a mystery about your work. Are you not mentioning the results because those 1,000 pages lost all keyword rankings and organic referral traffic plummeted? A resume detailing results will always standout over a resume without results.

Honesty is the Best Policy

Remember what type of job you are seeking my dear SEO colleagues. Your resume and interview with most likely be managed by an SEO. It is our nature and job to search. Expect whatever you put in your resume will be audited with an online inquiry. Further, the SEO community is quite close and everyone is connected to someone. If you state you worked at Company A and I have a close friend there I will ping that friend (unless it is your current position).

If there is definite overlap with my friend’s tenure and your claimed tenure and my connection has no clue who you are that will not bode well. Now my lawyer skills will come into play and I will cross-examine my friend. I want to make sure there are no remote offices or that the marketing team was not comprised of several hundreds. If that connection is part of a five person marketing team and there is no chance the candidate worked at that company then there is little chance that candidate is getting an interview.

Do not state you are adept at technical SEO in your resume unless you know technical SEO. If you are hired and then are given a site audit task you will be expected to deliver a site audit. It would be a shame if you did not know how to identify the <head> and <body> sections of a site. It would be terrible if you gave a thumbs up to a Flash built site with no down-level experience for the engines.

If you send your resume and notice an error later then send an updated resume immediately. That shows you at least care and can identify mistakes. Please take this advice to heart so you are not passed up for the dream opportunity. Great SEO positions are rare and you want to capitalize on your experience. Do not defeat your chances right out of the gate.

When Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft joined forces and endorsed the rel=canonical tag back in 2009 SEOs across the land jumped for joy. Rel canonical does fulfill a very useful purpose buying a site owner time to correct their content duplication issues. Unfortunately, many site owners and developers are beginning to use the rel canonical tag as a band-aid for just about every URL problem. This is a dangerous practice that could produce a devastating result.

First, let’s discuss what the rel canonical tag is and why it is needed. Search engines want a unique piece of content to reside on one URL on your website. That means the search engines do not want to find your wildly popular article about Kony2012 republished on your site at multiple URLs:

www.bestsocialmediaever.com/kony2012/
www.bestsocialmediaever.com/kony2012-article/
www.bestsocialmediaever.com/kony2012-social-media-impact/
www.bestsocialmediaever.com/kony-2012-video-project/

Having the exact or very similar content on multiple URLs will trigger a duplicate content penalty. The above example of URLs highlight the SPAMMY way of duplicating content. Often times duplicate content issues are caused by a CMS that is running amok. Below is an example of a CMS creating a new version of your URL each day by appending a paramater:

www.bestsocialmediaever.com/kony2012/
www.bestsocialmediaever.com/kony2012?=wednes2/
www.bestsocialmediaever.com/kony2012?=thurs3/
www.bestsocialmediaever.com/kony2012?=fri4/
www.bestsocialmediaever.com/kony2012?=sat5/
www.bestsocialmediaever.com/kony2012?=sun6/

Notice the nasty parameter code being added everyday? This is not an intentional act of the site owner trying to create multiple URLs for the Kony2012 article. Nevertheless, a duplicate content penalty will soon loom over this site. The best course of action is to slap a rel canonical tag in the <head> section of this page essentially informing the engines, “Yes, we do have duplicate content for this page. However, please treat the specified URL in our rel canonical tag as the sole location for this content.”

For our example the rel canonical tag would appear like this in the <head> section of the source code:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”www.bestsocialmediaever.com/kony2012/”/>

Every duplicate page would have this rel canonical tag in the source code so the engines would know the intent of the site owner is to assign that content to one URL. After you have added that tag your job is not complete. Now you must FIX YOUR CMS URL WRITTING PROBLEM. Think of rel canonical as a real band-aid.

You cut your arm and blood comes pouring out. You clean the wound and slap a band-aid on the gash. In a few days your body repairs the cut and you no longer need the band-aid. That is rel canonical. Site owner discovers CMS URL writing problem and uses the rel canonical tag. Then the site owner resolves the URL writing problem, gets rid of all the dupe URLs so only the original URL is present and then the site owner can remove the rel canonical tag.

Unfortunately, I am seeing the rel canonical tag “resolving” many more issues on a permanent level. The frequent and most common use is to resolve the problem above, but the site owner never fixes the CMS parameter URL issue.

A deceptive and diabolical use of the tag can be found with sites that use content provider partners. Site A publishes celebrity gossip and becomes insanely popular. Site A cannot keep up with the demand for creating content. They reach out to Site B and strike a content syndication deal where Site B will allow Site A to reuse content from Site B. The same articles on Site B will also reside on Site A at the same time. I have seen contracts where Site B requires Site A add a rel canonical tag on the Site A content pointing to the original URL on Site B. This ruins any and all search value of having Site B’s content on Site A. The content on Site A will not surface on the search engine results pages. Ensure your content syndication agreements do not require the use of a rel canonical tag.

That last example is a sneaky way to manipulate the rel canonical, but the worst use is substituting 301 redirects for rel canonical. When you change your URL structure or move your entire site to a new domain you will ALWAYS NEED TO UTILIZE 301 REDIRECTS.

I recently saw a high revenue website change their URL structure and then use rel canonical to point to the new URLs. So the legacy URLs are still live and the new URLs are live. The site owner did not use 301 redirects, but slapped a rel canonical on the legacy URLs pointing to the content on the new URLs. Do not do this. Rel canonical was never intended to supplant the redirect process. What would happen if the rel canonical tags were put on the new site pointing back to the legacy site? The new site would simply not exist in the eyes of the engines.

Do not mess around with rel canonical because if used improperly it can become a shriveled up, and foul smelling band-aid. You do not let your band-aids for cuts become that way, so do not let that happen to your website.

9 months ago, I started a company. The company’s core is tech service.

But our core business model has changed multiple times. We started as a computer service and IT company in 2011, only to quickly realize that the market was screaming our name to provide a different set of services. Services that would be in high demand for a long time. Services that people need everyday.

When people’s iPhones break, we fix them. When people need iPhone Apps built, we build them, and when the next hot devices hit the market, we’ll learn them too. And that new pivot that we’ve recently made changes everything. Web marketing, here I come. Let’s start with.

Local SEO And Social: First Thing’s First

My plan when we made the decision to start repairing broken screens on the iPhone, was to start locally, and work my way out. It was to dominate the local SEO landscape, and socially spread awareness massively like the outbreak of a killer virus. Here’s how it worked.

The link building starts. The strategy for link building was to to use blog contributing, blog commenting, directory submission, guest posting on authority blogs, creating undeniably entertaining content and immersing in the local blogging scene.

It was to leverage any power that local bloggers harnessed and to build tight bonds with locals who were influencers.
We rolled out powerful guest posts, like this one, with exact anchor text links to the local iPhone repair page, on SiteSketch101, Nick Cardot’s influential blog.

We took advantage of “blog contributor” programs on as many blogs as we could. We managed to get some great links, like this one, from an authority blog in the entrepreneurship landscape, The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. But links aren’t enough, if you want to reach actual human beings. That’s why you have to consider the notion of..

Follow, Reply, And Social Placement

We followed and replied to every person that said anything, about anything, locally on Twitter. We didn’t try to sell to them but rather, we used our Twitter bio info, and videos we rolled out about iPhone repair to raise awareness of the service. All we did was engage in social placement, which is the act of placing your brand in the consumers mind through social media interaction, so that when they need the service you provide, they know to go to you.

By not selling, but by being mainly entertaining, and a bit informational, we were able to spread a boatload of awareness locally around the fact that we repair iPhones. Here’s one of the latest:

The combination of our prolific use of social media, launching press releases for stuff we did, and a lot of local business networking and influencer interaction landed us some pretty huge press coverage in a super popular Pennsylvania Business Journal.

To put the cherry on top, not all things are free (or should be). We purchased an ad spot on a highly trafficked, super authoritative local blog which also came with a detailed shout out article on our company and it’s services.

4 months after the start date, a 9 month old domain name and a whole lot of hustling later, we landed in spot 1 in Google for our major keywords. The phone calls began pouring in! Mission accomplished. But now what? Do I just want the company to be local? The service of fixing iPhones is a worldwide need right? Well, let’s start with America, and get into..

The Strategic Nationwide Attack

To expand our iPhone repair services, I’ve decided to target the entire tri-state area, and most of central America. Once progress is gained, we’ll extend our services out to every state in America. As of right now, we cover the entire East coast, and central America, down to Florida and over to Chicago and surrounding states.

We’ve rolled out pages for iPhone repair in New Jersey, Philadelphia, New York City and more. And so the nationwide search and social initiatives begin. We’re responding like maniacs to anyone talking about anything that has to do with the iPhone, on Twitter.

We’re using the hashtag #teamiphonerepair to signify that we’re the premiere company serving all iPhone users nationwide. We’re slowly but surely building awareness in everyone’s mind around the country, that has an iPhone, and we’re doing it without selling them a single thing. When they talk about iPhones, we respond. We agree, disagree, throw in our input and chat with as many people as possible, daily, throwing in the #teamiphonerepair hashtag.

We’re rolling out a series of guest posts, targeting some of the specific city name keyword searches, like New Jersey (linked above) and of course all surrounding states.

We’re continuing to roll out new videos about all things iPhone, everyday and I’ll be doing everything in my power to get that content seen by as many people as humanly possible. And it’s only just begun. I’ve realized, over and over, that you simply have to be doing..

What The Consumer Wants

For our services specifically, and for many other products/services out there, the consumer wants to see you. They want to be entertained, talked to rather than talked at, and they want to be a part of something fun.

We all have an opportunity like never before to bind like glue to the trust receptors of the people in our target markets. We can turn potential customers into raving fans. We can turn Twitter engagements into real life leads, and we can use a firestorm of content, link building and down and dirty interaction with people in the trenches to build equity both with the search engines, and with real life people out there in the world.

Because now a days, to win big in web marketing, you have to simply give the consumer what they want. And you have to hustle your face off!

• What’s your hustle?

Pin It

I was asked to give a keynote address on the subject of creating a community of fanatics. At the same time, Danny Iny asked me to write a guest chapter for his then upcoming book, Engagement From Scratch.

The book includes chapters by the likes of Guy Kawasaki, Mark W. Schaefer, Mitch Joel, and many others. It’s a great read, I highly recommend it.

So here it is, unabridged and uncensored, the chapter from Engagement From Scratch entitled How To Create a Community of Fanatics.

Wheels Before the Car

This topic feels very alive and in-the-moment for me, simple because I’m in the midst of trying to manage a community of fanatics and I feel very much like a driver of a car with one missing wheel, speeding down the highway at 100 miles per hour.

But it didn’t start that way.

The community of fanatics wasn’t supposed to be a community at all. But it turned into one…how?

Looking back, there are few fundamental principles that anyone could apply to their product, cause, brand, personality, etc. that if the right conditions are met, you just might end up with a community of fanatics.

Why would you want to? 

Why would you want to create a community of fanatics in the first place?  Here’s why.

• Those fanatically engaged members of your community are the ones that will market for you while you sleep.
• They will field technical questions from other members.
• They will fulfill your help-desk tickets.
• They will recruit other’s to do the same.
• They will…they will do all this for free.

It’s easy to stop there and see the benefit of getting others to do your work for free, but let’s follow this concept to its logical conclusion.

If someone is evangelizing on your behalf for free, that means they are not doing it for money. And if they are not doing it for money, they WHY are they doing it?

The answer is, they are doing it because they are passionate about you, your product, brand, cause, etc.

And when someone talks about you passionately and with enthusiasm, that enthusiasm acts as a cotangent and it infects everyone within an earshot.

This kind of enthusiasm CAN NOT be bought with money.

But if you follow the fundamental principles laid out before you, you just might get it for free.

1. Intention

It all starts with intention.  It all starts with your intention, but not the intention to create a community.

You can’t spark a community by wanting to spark a community no more than you could start a fire by wanting to start a fire.

When Dan Cristo and I started Triberr -which turned into an amazing community of bloggers and is the reason Danny asked me to contribute to his book- we didn’t start Triberr because we wanted to start a community.

Community simply emerged.

What we did do, is we set out to solve the biggest problem 99% of bloggers have.

How do I get more eyeballs on my content?

That was the intention behind Triberr. No more, no less.

Currently recommended methods are bullshit.

• SEO takes too long by which time most bloggers have given up.
• Guest posting is a thankless, slave-like endeavor with no immediate payoff and requires prolonged and concentrated effort to yield minimal results.

Triberr works immediately and almost effortlessly.

Not only that, but it is the engine which allows you to cement your core inner-group of allies whilst building an audience of your own.

New bloggers who have had no traffic will jump to thousands of hits per post immediately after joining Triberr.

Since Triberr has opened its doors in March of 2011, we have sent 1 million blog posts, written by 10s of thousands of bloggers, and shared them via 10 million tweets, that were seen by billions of targeted eyeballs.

So, the first lesson in building a community of fanatics is to create a new, effective, unique and original solution that solves a real pain-point for your target demographic.

Which brings me to the second recommendation, and that is…

2. Know your audience 

I’m a blogger solving my own problem.

There is an old marketing exercise where the goal is to create a customer avatar. This avatar is assigned gender, age, race, socio-economic status, locale, even name.

The point of this is to get into the mind of the customer in order to understand his/ her pain points, desires, passions, fears, etc.

When I conceived of Triberr, I also conceived of the ideal Triberr customer. Me.

Triberr is a free service, so, “customer” is the wrong word to use  when describing Triberr community, but we’ll use it as a catch-all phrase. Moving on…

The avatar I created for Triberr is named Dino Dogan.

• He is a blogger.
• He is a good blogger who has had a hard time getting his content disseminated far and wide.
• I understand Dino’s fears.
• His frustrations.
• His pain-points.
• His passion.
• His desires.

And we’ve made Triberr to solve Dino’s problems.

Turns out, there are a lot of Dinos out there.

When we implement features for Triberr, we are simply solving our own problems. Both Dan and I are bloggers and we understand the blogger’s mind.

Which leads me to the next point, and that is…

3. Be a human 

No one wants to interact with a brand, a logo, a picture of your dog, a cartoon, or worse.

Communities are people. And people want to interact with other people.

So, let’s cover some basics.

• Use your own picture (face, not a distant shot of you skydiving)
• Use your real name.

Also, check your intentions.

Whenever communicating with anyone at any time, this is a good thing to do.

• Why are you saying what you’re saying?
• To sound cool?
• To cover up your mistake?
• To tell someone how much they suck and how right you are?

These are all bad intentions.

But if you’re intention is to be helpful with no expectation of outcome then those are some good intentions, my friend.

In short, a community will expect a certain level of service from a real human. Be that human.

Which brings me to the Customer Service part of the equation.

4. Customer Service 

First, I have to thank the airline industry, telephone industry, and banking industry, for taking the customer service expectations down to a virtual zero.

Because of them, you get points just for showing up and being human (see point number 3).

I discovered a funny thing about customer service while working on Triberr.

• People don’t want to be lectured at.
• They don’t want to be told what they could/ should have done.
• They don’t want to be treated like a task on your list.

What they do want is this.

• They want to be acknowledged immediately. You don’t have to solve their issue right away, but they do want to know you’ve received their email and are working on it.
• They want to be treated like a human being, and not like a number.
• They want their issue fixed. That’s the bottom line. And the only thing that will fix their issue is if the issue goes away and everything goes back to being right.

This means you’ll be doing a lot of work. Which brings me to point number 5.

5. Have Fun 

There is a lot of hidden meaning in that phrase, “have fun”.

First, it means that community building will be a lot of work. And work is –by definition- NOT fun.

The only thing that makes work fun is if it gives us some meaning beyond the daily grind. And meaning is a hard thing to come by, especially if you’re doing work for someone else.

If you’re working for someone else, you are carrying out someone else’s mission. For this, you will receive compensation.

You get compensated because you are giving up a mission of your own.

You should find this mission and let it come out. Only then will work have meaning and it just might become fun as well.

Also, this applies to the community members.

Your community should have fun participating in that community. Why should it be a grind?

To accomplish this, Triberr uses many principles taken from game mechanics and psychology. For example.

Every member has a Tribal Stream which shows posts published by everyone in your tribal network. You can vote (thumbs up/down) on posts in this stream and if you do, you just might win a Bone. (this feature is no longer available but many like it are)

What kind of game mechanics is this?

Well, first, since the Tribal Stream is ephemeral (posts come and go) this gives an incentive for users to come back and check their stream several times a day.

This is one of the reasons why Triberr has catapulted itself to number 1,509 most visited US websites in few short months and climbing (based on Alexa info).

The voting system uses the same gambling mechanics as a slot machine. You don’t win a Bone every time you vote. That would become boring and monotonous and not fun very quickly.

Instead, you may win a Bone or two for every 5-15 votes you give. It’s randomized using a fancy algorithm and the voting has become a game all in itself as soon as we deployed it.

Being a member of community should be fun for all, otherwise, it’s work, and work sucks.

6. Positioning 

Positioning is shorthand. It’s an easy and quick way for me to figure out what you are or are not.

Think 7-Up’s marketing campaign when they used the slogan “7-Up. The Un-Cola”.  You immediately know what 7-Up isn’t, which helps you figure out what 7-Up is.

David and Goliath is a very popular and powerful positioning strategy. Even now as you’re reading this, you probably pictured David (the small guy) fighting Goliath (the big guy) in your mind.

In fact, even though I wrote “David AND Goliath”, you probably didn’t picture David walking hand-in-hand with his best friend, Goliath.  Instead, you pictured a conflict between David and Goliath.

That’s how powerful that small-guy vs. big-guy positioning is.

Speaking of Bible (David and Goliath is a story from the Old Testament), the entire God vs. Devil, the good vs. evil, is a story of Positioning.

The positioning story of Triberr?

1% of superstar bloggers receive 99% of the attention.

And attention = traffic. Attention = book deals. Attention = speaking engagements. Attention = business opportunities. Attention = money.

Superstar bloggers however, are not producing superstar content. Their content is safe, it’s boring, it’s rehashed, it’s stale and regurgitated.

Meanwhile, there are amazing small bloggers producing incredible content and no one is reading it.

Triberr’s mission is to bring eyeballs to that content.

I don’t think superstar bloggers and Goliath-sized media channels deserve the amount of attention they get.

Small bloggers are infinitely more creative and interesting.

That is the Positioning story of Triberr.

What Internet has done to democratize information, Triberr is doing to democratize attention.

Missing Ingredient

I left out one enormously important component from this list. What is it?

I was talking to a colleague the other day, and she mentioned that a social media company was advising our shared client not to bother with Google+, “Because it doesn’t look like it’s going to take off.” I responded with, “They are a fool, and they don’t get it”. What don’t they get, you ask?

Here is a secret… Google doesn’t care of Google+ dethrones Facebook. That’s not why they built it. They built it because they want to apply the, “Network Effect” to search.

What is the Network Effect?

The network effect is an economic principle that states that the value of a product increases when more people use it. For example, if you were the only person in the world with a telephone, it would be a pretty useless piece of technology. The minute a second person owns a phone, all of a sudden that product becomes pretty useful. The more people who own phones, the more valuable it becomes for everyone.

A second example is Facebook. Facebook wouldn’t be useful if you were the only person on the site. But the more friends that join, the more useful a tool like Facebook becomes. That is why it is so hard for new social networks to enter the space. Even if you hate Facebook, you’re not going to leave it for another network unless your friends are on there already. Could you drag some friends over with you, sure, but it’s probably not worth the effort for everyone to setup brand new accounts. The switching costs are too high. That is the power of the network effect.

Search has been Google’s core product since it was a startup. They stole marketshare from dinosaurs like Altavista and Lycos by using better algorithms, having faster loading results and delivering faster innovation. Throughout the years they’ve planted hooks in us by giving us free tools like analytics, maps, Android, etc. We’re at the point where most Google account holders would never cancel their account completely, but there’s not much to keep us from trying out other search engines like Bing, Blekko or DuckDuckGo. What Google is missing in search is the network effect.

Imagine if your search experience was primarily powered by your friends and contacts. Let’s also assume that this social graph powered search experience was something that you wanted, and was hands down a better experience than the traditional link graph approach. If this were the case, then the more friends you had in your graph, or the more connections you established, the better your search experience would become. In order to get the same experience on a different search engine, you would need to bring your social graph with you. It is essentially the network effect applied to search.

This scenario is exactly what Google is shooting for. They could care less if you spend hours sharing pictures of kittens on Google+. All they need you to do is setup a profile and place your contacts into the appropriate circles. Once Google knows who you are and who you are connected to, it can start connecting all the information they know about you and your friends to deliver heavily personalized results. Data from:

• Browsing history
• Phone (geo, contacts, music, apps, pictures, videos, text, wallet)
• Maps
• YouTube
• Checkout
• Email
• IM
• Blog posts
• Blog comments
• etc.

Don’t be a fool

We all know that Google+ isn’t as engaging as Facebook. That is a given. But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that Google+ is going the path of Buzz and Wave. With over 100,000,000 users in 6 months, I wouldn’t poo poo the fastest growing social network in the world just yet.

Remember… With Google, search is everything.

Part of our internal training here at Catalyst Search Marketing is a monthly webinar I host called, “Patent Watch”.

Last month we looked a Google patent called  ”Social Search“, and yesterday we dug into another Google patent about, “Personalized Search”.

Patent Details:

• Filed: March 9th, 2010
• Pub. Date: July 1st, 2010
• Pub. No: US 2010/0169297 A1
• Assignee: Google Inc.
• Link to patent: here

 Overview:

Search engines are pretty good at returning relevant results for a query, but they aren’t very good at tailoring those results to reflect the searchers interests. This patent explains how Google might solve this.

Patent Breakdown:

First we need to tell Google what topics we are interested in. This would be done through Google+ these days, but back in 2010, before G+ was public, the patent showed a “directory” like category drop-down where users could select which categories match their interest. Behold:

Now:

Let’s say a user searches for [stanford] without an personalization on place. Their results may look like this:

Let’s see what happens

Now I’m going to move the slider half way between min-personalization and max-personalization. Because I had earlier chosen the category of, “Computers” as one of my interests (2 images above) results like “The Register” are now making their way into my top 10.

Now why did “The Register” start to move up? It’s because, “The Register” is a page that is listed in Google’s internal directory as being related to “Computers”. Just as if, “The Register”  was listed in DMOZ under the computers category.

Now What Happens

What happens when we move the slider all the way to max-personalization?

Now, “The Register” has moved all the way to the top? How did this happen?

Boost Scores

Imagine that Google has an private version of DMOZ where it categorizes the most authoritative websites. Each website has a score from 1-10 for the category. So for example, “The Register” may have a boost score of 8 in the category of “Computers”.

Now when I do a search for “Stanford”, Google orders my results based on an Information Retrival (IR) score. That score is based on the standard relevancy and link algorithms Google uses for it’s rankings. Now if I enable personalization, if one of the sites in my initial results is also listed in the same category within Google’s directory as one of my interests, the boost score of that site is multiplied times the initial IR score to create a new ranking order – personalized results!

How to calculate the Boost Score

The boost score is calculated much like PageRank. Google starts with an initial seed list of websites that it knows is very relevant to the category. For example, the NIH.gov would be listed in the Health category. From that initial seed list, Google looks at websites that those seeds link to most. That second set of sites receives a score based on that link popularity. Now Google does another pass, and looks at that 2nd seed list to see what sites they link to most often. That 3rd set of sites receives a score based on those inbound links. That score for the 3rd set is the boost score for that site relating to the category.

So again, if one of the sites in the initial results is bucketed in a category that matches the searchers interest, the boost score for that site is multiplied times the initial IR score to reorder the results. Max personalization uses the full boost score as a multiplier, while partial personalization uses a fraction of the boost score.

Take Aways

• Links from seed sites will give your site a higher boost score which improves personalized results
• Follows and shares from influential people within Google+ may act in the same was as seed links
• Google+ will store your interests
• Google uses 70+ personalization signals for non-logged in searchers
• You don’t need to be logged in to Google for personalization to take affect. Your interests can be saved in cookies

Want to attend the next Patent Watch?

We’re considering opening this webinar series up to SEOs outside of Catalyst. If you would like to attend next month’s webinar, leave a comment below. If there is enough interest, we’ll open it up and I’ll send you an invite. Note: You’ll only get an invite if you leave a comment, because that’s the contact info I’ll use to let you know the date/time.

I’ve been carefully watching a new startup called Wahooly.

The idea behind Wahooly is for startups to give a % of equity to early members, which Wahooly would facilitate. So for example, say you launched a new startup and wanted to quickly get a few thousand people using your site. Well, you’d go to Wahooly and you’d say, “I’ll give the first 5,000 members that you send me 5% share in his new startup”. Wahooly would email it’s member base and would say, “hey, first 5,000 members to join this new startup gets a portion of the 5%”. So that’s the idea.

I signed up for Wahooly’s pre-launch email list months ago. Since then they send me emails every few weeks updating me of when they will launch (I think they wanted to have like 200 startups ready go by launch). Well, launch for Wahooly happened a few days ago, and since then they’ve been experiencing some pretty serious technical problems. People can’t login, others can’t use the core service.

Today I get an apology email from them stating that they rushed things, rolling out a less than read site. They are planning on freezing site activity until they can make things more stable. Here’s the email: http://eepurl.com/iZNeP

Takeaway

I can’t blame Wahooly for the failure to launch. Launching a startup is hard. There are issues of scalability, security, weird bugs, weird users… things you just can’t fully anticipate without people actually using the site. Wahooly would have been much better off if they implemented a Lean Startup approach.

What is lean startup?

Learn startups is a methodology taken from the Japanese system of lean manufacturing. The idea is to launch your core product as quickly as possible, get users to start using the system in day one, and iterate based on those early users feedback. We launched Triberr this way, and I couldn’t imagine doing it any other way.

The downside of the lean startup is that things are usually pretty ugly at first. Here is some proof. This is the earliest video of Triberr’s interface I could find. It’s 10 months old, which is about two months after the site launched:

Pretty ugly huh? It’s ok. There’s no denying that it was. However, we have come a long way. Check out the site’s current design:

Much better, right?

The point is that we could have held off on releasing Triberr for 6 months or a year to get all the bugs out, give it a pretty design and launch a completed version of the site. But if we had done that, it wouldn’t have incorporated any feedback or features from our members. We may have spend a year building something that nobody wanted to use. Or we may have launched, and then had to un-launch because we weren’t battle tested, like Wahooly.

My Advice

If you’re considering starting a company, project or app, consider shipping your product as soon as possible. You may not have sites like Mashable and Techcrunch building buzz for your big launch day like Wahooly, but that might actually be a good thing. Your first year as a startup is usually a pretty ugly and difficult time. Why would you want a public spotlight on you work your way though fumbles and glitches.

Launch early and iterate often. Keep expectations low, and get users on the product as quickly as possible. Start monetizing the site as early as possible, and focus on building relationships with your early users. You’ll make a lot of mistakes that first year so you’ll be asking for a lot of forgiveness. Members are much more likely to stick with you when they’ve seen your platform grow over time, as opposed to an email list with high expectations on an anticipated launch.

I wish the guys over at Wahooly the best luck. I’m sure they’ll get things figured out soon, and when they do I’ll be first in line to register on some of these new startups.

Most Startups Fail

They fail because they exist in an environment of extreme uncertainty. They seek to bring innovation – a brand new way of doing something – into a market. And because they bring something “new” and “different” they’re never sure whether people will respond positively or negatively.

It’s a risk startups must take, because it’s the only way you can enter an existing market. You have to provide a “better’ way of doing something, else why would people switch from their current product to use your product? It’s that innovation that makes startups small businesses, and it’s that innovation that continues to attract customers to product a medium sized business. Repeat that cycle until you’re Google.

Investors Hate Uncertainty

The problem with large companies is that investors don’t like operating in an uncertain, high risk environment. They need to focus on making money, and in order to do that they need to accurately project how the company will perform in the future. A company with steady growth will attract investors, which gives the company resources needed to expand market share. The focus changes from product innovation to steady growth, which means innovation usually takes a backseat. Why?

The nature of innovation is uncertainty. How many times did Edison fail to create a working lightbulb? Why do we have WD-40 or Formula 409? Truly innovative ideas fail 70% of the time, and that’s the kind of uncertainty that investors would rather avoid.

The Delima

So now you have a delima… Innovation is required for companies to attract customers. Customers are required for companies to attract investors. Investors are required for companies to support operations. The problem of course is that investors are adverse to uncertainty, and uncertainty is inherent to innovation.

What To Do

There are a few ways for companies to remain innovative without taking on startup-like risk.

1. Acquire innovative companies – Last year Google acquired 26 companies. That’s one every 10 business days. Could you imagine your company acquiring another company every 10 days?
2. Hire entrepreneurs.  Google rarely acquires companies for their technology. They buy them to hire the people who created them.
3. Steal ideas – Kidding. No I’m not. Apple stole  the graphical interface from Xerox. Microsoft stole it from Apple. Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from the Winklevoss twins. Ideas are worthless. It’s what you do with them that count.
4. Breed Innovation Yourself

Breeding innovation. This is the idea that I’m most excited about – how to foster and grow innovation from within your organization. Here’s an idea that I’d like to see the company I work for implement.

Hackatons

I’m proposing a company sponsored hackathon. Pit you and your co-workers against teams from other companies in your industry to see who can create the most disruptive technology in 24 hours.  Set some rules, send the invites, rent a co-working space, snag some judges, buy some trophies and set aside a few days of company sponsored, uninterrupted team hacking. Any ideas or technologies that your team creates belongs to the company. Hold these types of events once or twice a year to help your organization breath the sweet air of innovation without introducing massive uncertainty to shareholders.

What Say You?

What sort of things have you done that led to innovation in your company?