Posts in February 2012

Boosting Personalised Search

February 22, 2012

While Google (and others) may guard their secrets very closely, expert SEOs follow how these secrets are evolving. Generally, search engines are inching away from matching keywords in documents (and examining how searchers interact with the results they’re given) towards considering searchers’ interests and motivations.

There is much to be learned from watching search engines, particularly if you’re interested in selling things online. Personalised search means the focus is shifting away from matching keywords to looking at user intent. Keyword matching hasn’t disappeared off the radar – it’s still important – but information gathered from searchers is another factor to watch.

GSPW

Enter Google Search Plus Your World, which has gotten a lot of attention lately, particularly considering recent privacy debates in the U.S.

If users are signed in to their accounts on GSPW, they can select and share information under different categories. Although officially it’s about sharing information, it’s also a quick and easy way of finding out what peoples’ interests are.

Boost Score

According to a patent entitled “Variable Personalization of Search Results in a Search Engine”, filed on behalf of Google engineers in 2010, Google is looking to deliver queries for logged-in users based on what it calls a boost score. Although initial results will be centred on more familiar relevancy and quality factors, more specific queries can be made according to a user’s personal interests.

Boost Score vs. SEO

Consider: Google builds a directory of websites categorised by human interests, for example, health. If a user selects health as an interest, any site listed in Google’s directory will have an associated boost score determined by relevancy. When the user’s query returns a site about health, that site’s boost score is multiplied by the level of personalisation applied – improving its ranking.

The score is calculated by seeding sites with high relevancy score in the directory, finding a list of sites that are “heavily linked” to by the seed sites, and then finding sites that are linked to by those sites. The weight is the boost score.

What’s important to note is that links are still an important ingredient in Google’s idea of relevancy. Although the boost score is multiplied by the level of personalisation applied to “boost” retrieval of information, it is old-fashioned relevancy and quality that kicks off the process to begin with.

As many of you know, it doesn’t matter whether users are signed into GSPW because “Google’s recent policy change allows them to transfer interests collected from Android,  G+, Chrome,  Gmail, YouTube and other services into a super profile used to personalize search.”

Google is certainly not underestimating the activity happening across social media. It is considering people and peoples’ associations as ranking signals, and using tweets, likes, comments, shares and upvotes to gauge value.

What do you think? Should everyone see the same results when searching for the same keyword or do you support the idea of having results tailored to your personal interests? Do you use GSPW? Let us know.

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Build Communities Not Campaigns – Hosted by Comufy Social On Media Week London 2012

February 17, 2012

This week, social media came into the spotlight with a series of events throughout London and major cities around the world. It has been a week of highlighting the impact, improvement and importance of social media within business and the emerging markets.  During the course of the last seven days, there have been several engaging and diverse events ranging from workshops to in-depth seminars and presentations; all with the aim of providing a platform for social media professionals (and enthusiasts) to discuss ideas, share success stories and of course network.

One of the events was Build Communities Not Campaigns hosted by Comufy. Organised in a lovely restaurant, in-between Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Circus, Build Communities Not Campaigns was a panel event which included top professional speakers from leading PR and social media agencies.  Taking centre stage was Ying Wong, Head of Digital at RLM Finsbury, Blaise Grim Viort, Head of Community & Social Media at EModeration, Neil Hallmark, Head of Digital at Kaizo and Rob Horsfield, Managing Partner at Brass Agency.

As the name suggests, the aim of the panel was to highlight the importance of brand communities over campaigns; how to build communities (with your brand advocates), and how to sustain engagement and interest within a community.  In the hour long event, each speaker took turns to share their social media wisdom and answer questions from the event mediator, as well as the audience. Below are some of the key points from each professional:

Ying Wong

• Part of the preparation is focusing on knowing who the influential people are – make them feel special and they will be your advocates when negative comments are posted
• Seed content and get people talking to one another – talking to community members offline will get them talking more online
• Getting a select number of people who comment and engage within the community is just as important as a million people who ‘like’ a page and bounce off
• Facebook ‘Likes’ don’t always mean a lot
• ROI is not that simple when measuring sentiment – look at share price and how much positive/ negative coverage over a period of time

Blaise Grim Viort

• Focus on people’s sense of belonging and influence, as well as monitoring if their needs are being met. From a community perspective,  engagement is essential, then you should look at engagement between members
• Keep things simple by asking communities for their feedback on products out now, not in the future
• Work with the 3 P’s – People talking about the brand – get a relationship going, make sure they are Passionate and then build a Process around them
• Make it clear to people that certain discussions will not be appropriate – alternatively, run a live social media crisis situation with fake social account, imagine a dispute and go through the steps of how to deal with the problem
• ROI depends on client objectives – is it to build and create engagement or is it to click through and buy

Neil Hallmark

• Communities are a group of people with shared influence (brand advocates) – the community will direct where the conversations go
• Within a community you can drive campaigns, but how can you start a community without a campaign
• Asked Unilever communities about the brands they love to give incentives e.g. designing packaging or giving a sneak peek of a new product – people love the fact that Unilever is listening to them
• Used Facebook for a Unilever campaign as this is where half the UK population is
• It’s all about content – what activities will you be doing with the community once you have them on board

Rob Horsfield

• Use campaigns to produce a readymade community – alternatively, use word of mouth (tell community members to ask their friends), mailing lists, customer database
• Set out expectations with terms and conditions to inform community members,  however, communities do tend to police themselves – don’t underestimate the power communities have to sniff out a disgruntled comment
• It’s not always about creating communities – there are lots of forums that already exist – it’s about finding them, accessing them and extracting the information you’re looking for
• How do we keep members interested – respect, good content and cash incentives
• If communication members fall out, find new member to replace them – sometimes people who join communities aren’t advocates

Key findings

The main conclusion to take away from the event was that the needs of the community members must always be met. Whatever the community, its members should always be respected, listened to and thought of first when planning, implementing and analysing community and campaign strategies. The other major point was that engagement is must successful through great content. For community members to participate and spread a brand name, engaging content has to be seeded to get people responding and talking to one another. This can be achieved by offering good incentives for communication such as sneak peeks, designing upcoming product packaging and cash prices.

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Happy Valentine’s Day

February 14, 2012

Valentine’s Day is a time to reach out and spread the love, so we decided to show off a bit. Here at Caliber we pride ourselves on a number of things, including our ability to communicate effectively in a number of different languages. This year we decided to let our talent do the talking with chat up lines from around the world, in a number of languages including: Albanian, French, German, Afrikaans, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Portuguese. We hope you enjoy!

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Tools for Writing Online

February 2, 2012

In the online world content is king, or at the very least it is quite princely. While print journalists are quick to lament the death of reading, we are actually consuming more content than ever before – largely through the internet. Excellent style and good punctuation are crucial for denizens of the online world, as, if readers dislike your prose they’ll quickly hop, click and jump onto another site. Here are a few handy tools which have helped us at Caliber keep our writing skills fine-tuned.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss was published in 2003, and it has become somewhat of a cultural touchstone, especially for grammar geeks (surprisingly, there are quite a few of us). The focus of the book is punctuation and readers are taken through the important points with a sure and steady hand – best of all, it is funny. How someone ever turned punctuation into a humorous subject remains thoroughly beyond me, yet this is what Truss has done (the answer to that may be panda jokes). My personal copy also comes with a collection of stickers shaped like commas, allowing me to correct untidy punctuation wherever I wish – I shouldn’t be given such power. (more…)

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