As a young university graduate I faced the same dilemma youth everywhere face, what do you want to do when you grow up. Destiny often plays a significant role, and it did in my case. I soon found myself working on an indexing and retrieval system, what today would be referred to as an enterprise search system, for a museum in California. Part of my responsibilities included presales support which introduced me to the world of professional conferences. In just a day or two at the best conferences, industry leaders and novices shared ideas, experiences and contacts through formal presentations and informal chats. Imbued with new insights and enthusiasm, I would return to work having reaffirmed my existing practices or determined to implement better ones.
SMX, The Search & Social Marketing Conference, is coming to Milan!
Clients expect PR firms to be on top of SEO
Many companies face a delicate challenge in keeping their passionate users happy while insuring the company is profitable enough to pay the bills and invest in the future, objectives which often enter it conflict with one another. It isn’t rare that this conflict becomes a significant PR issue, as Facebook, through its management of Instagram, is experiencing first hand.
Google Image search results for Bobby Kotick, suggesting he’s evil and the devil
A New York Times article which appeared front and center on the first page of last Sunday’s business section illustrated clearly how clients expect their PR firms to actively manage search engine reputation issues as well:
“Think about what it’s like for my dating life when the first picture that comes up is me as the Devil,” says Mr. Kotick [...] “You see all this chatter and you realize that they game the search results. These super-sophisticated 19-year-olds are smarter than our expensive P.R. firm.” (His publicist, Steven Rubenstein, shrugs sheepishly.)
IKEA Italy: what not to do when facing a social media crisis
Figure 1: IKEA Italy has run from its change manifesto site “it takes little to change”, now taken down
Get the popcorn out, the IKEA Italy social media crisis is getting even more interesting, although unfortunately not to IKEA’s credit. IKEA Italy has taken their change manifesto site offline and replaced it with the following message (translated from the Italian):
This site has been attacked by computer hackers.
We are therefore forced to take down these pages to protect the privacy of all the people who had left their ideas about change.
Thanks to all the contributors.
IKEA Italy
So IKEA Italy has finally acknowledged that they have a social media crisis underway, better late than never. Last Saturday IKEA also posted about their labor dispute on their Facebook page.
IKEA Italy has a social media problem: could they better address it?
Most large companies that have learned to embrace social media as a communications tool know by now that the path to success offers lots of bumps along the way. IKEA Italy is in the midst of experiencing this first hand as immigrant workers involved in a labor dispute, together with their supporters, take to social media to air their case. There’s an unbecoming Facebook Page, clashes with police on YouTube and, perhaps most awkward, unflattering comments on an IKEA website which ironically bills itself as a movement for change, using the tagline it takes little to change (change thanks to IKEA furniture, naturally).
IKEA – it takes little to change
Can Google Be Beat On Competitive Web Intelligence Data?
Happy days: statistics for almost any website from DoubleClick Ad Planner
One of the great promises of digital marketing is a presumed availability of quality statistics on website usage and users. Web intelligence data can be used to benchmark the competition, to evaluate potential new markets and to answer many interesting questions along the way. Many companies are active in this area, most notably Nielsen, comScore, Experian Hitwise, Compete and Quantcast, One supplier stands out for its ability to offer statistics on websites across most of the world at an unbeatable price: Google.
Suppliers of website market research data are generally very good at issuing authoritative sounding press releases and providing reports with pretty graphics, yet an appearance of authority sometimes masks an ugly reality: the vendor has a very limited sample of data to work from. As an example, Nielsen’s June 2012 panel size in the Italian market, as reported by Audiweb, was 41,256 people, i.e. less than 1 tenth of a percent of the entire potential internet population in that market. If this data sample isn’t representative of a site’s visitors and usage patterns there is an all too real risk of making business decisions based on dubious data.
Worried that Google may know too much if you use Google Analytics? Relax. Google already has great data.
![By Lotusblak (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://s.antezeta.com/i/320px-Eye_Spy.jpg)
I spy with my little eye…
When Google Trends for Websites launched, Google Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik noted it (and Google Ad Planner) might have a searcher’s bias. If one accepts that this might have been the case in 2008, it is highly unlikely to be the case today, when one considers the multiple ways Google can track internet usage. The list which follows aims to illustrate this point. I put it together as a response to clients who were hesitant to use Google Analytics as for whatever reason, they were reluctant to let Google to know everything about the use of their websites.
The reality is that resistance is futile: through services like Google Search, the Google Tool Bar and the Google Public DNS, Google already knows a lot about most websites.
Digital Native: Show Trenitalia Ticket On Computer Display – And Be Fined For Traveling Without A Ticket.
Ceci n’est pas une billet – with apologies to Magritte.
There’s a not so small detail which appears at the bottom of Trenitalia regional tickets sold online: if you don’t show a printed copy of the electronic ticket, you’re considered to be traveling without a ticket and subject to paying the ticket price plus an onboard purchase fee and a €50 fine or regional fine amount, whatever that might be.
While I travel a lot using Gruppo FS trains, more than 20,000 km in the last 18 months, I rarely buy regional tickets online. Regional tickets are valid 2 months (even longer if you buy the km based tickets) when bought in a station, but the same tickets bought online expire hours after purchase. The disincentive is very clear; the only discernible benefit is to perhaps avoid a line in the station.
Good news: Trenitalia Cartafreccia Loyalty cards CAN be read by Ticket Vending Machines
In an earlier article about a day long open house with the Italian National Railways, Gruppo FS / Trenitalia, I noted frustration in having to manually enter my loyalty card number every time I buy a ticket from a Trenitalia ticket vending machine. The newer machines are equipped with both smart chip and RFID readers. I had tried the RFID reader in the past without success and wrongly assumed the cards only included the visible smartcard chip. At the #meetFS event I questioned then why the POS chip reader wouldn’t recognize the Cartafreccia cards.
Is there a place on social media for companies in the midst of a turn around?
Figure 1: no right to reply: patently false and deceptive claims from the 1930′s
In the good old days commercial communication was easy. A company or organization developed their messaging then worked to deliver it, via earned and paid media. There was a certain comfort in knowing that if you repeated a message often enough, people would absorb it. You didn’t have to worry about detractors, the best they could muster was a letter to the editor in a newspaper, a letter probably wrote with such a shrill style most reasonable people would brush the person off as a crackpot. Ah, those were the days indeed.
A few good things to know about Google’s knowledge graph
Tiziano Ferro Knowledge Graph Search Result including event rich snippet and Google+ data! Click to enlarge.
I just finished documenting Google’s new display of fact boxes in selected search results, enabled through Google’s use of what it calls a knowledge graph, as preparation for the next edition of my SEO Course (June 13 & 14). I thought I’d share a few of the salient points communicators probably should know:
- Google fact boxes, created from their knowledge graph, are limited to selected searches conducted in English on Google.com. I put in English in italics as query terms are often ambiguous. The term marketing, along with variants like web marketing have entered many languages, including my adopted Italian. Other terms, such as names, e.g. Tiziano Ferro, do not explicitly indicate the user’s search language.
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