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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.
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.
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!
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…)
SEO Predictions 2012 – Caliber White Paper
January 17, 2012
2012 is here and there’s a lot in store for SEO, partly because the internet is as busy as ever. There’s Pinterest, SOPA, micro formats and HTML5. There’s Google’s new Search Plus and Danny Sullivan’s insightful response. Caliber Interactive is adding to the conversation in the form of our new white paper – Communities and Conversations: SEO Predictions for 2012.
The white paper includes insights from our leadership team – Tony Samios, Michael Briggs and Jonny Scott – as well as input from Scott McLay, Danny Denhard, Karine Nasciemento and Ian Humphreys. Touching on social media, content, online PR as well as the brass tacks of SEO, it represents what we expect to see in the coming year.
Here are some of the key insights from the report:
• SEO as an industry needs to grow up and become transparent about what it does and does not do for clients.
• Social had an impact last year, this year it will have a much larger part to play. Social noise will have to be replaced by authoritative signals from trusted social networks.
• To succeed, agencies need to develop on-brand, topical, innovative and visually appealing content. This means moving away from the traditional scrollable infographic towards a whole menu of options including, but not limited to, white papers, blog posts, videos, UGC, games and interactive infographics.
Have questions about the report? Let us know in the comments section and we’ll do our best to answer.
The report was compiled by myself with artistic prettifying courtesy of Jaimie Bell.
Simplifying Community Management – Social Media Tool Battle (Part 2)
December 30, 2011
Continuing in the Social Media Tool Battle Series, now that I have shared my top 3 favourite tools for Managing your Twitter Community, I would like to continue talking about efficient Twitter tools, this time using a more analytical approach.
Analysing and Improving Your Account
Measuring and analysing statistics and data from your account can be a key element in the decision making process of your strategy.
As much as you can make your community grow by managing your friends and followers, in order to keep them interested and engaged, you have to take into consideration their expectations of you and the content that you share. To help you do that, I recommend using tools that will analyse your Twitter activity and enhance what is working best (or not working so well) for your community.
Here are some of my favourites. (more…)
Is the #NewNewTwitter Redesign A Step Forward or Back?
December 23, 2011
In the past month or so there have been big changes in the social world in terms of website layouts and functionality. Several big fish including YouTube, StumbleUpon and Delicious have all revamped their designs. However, the site that is getting the most attention is Twitter – yes, we were kind of shocked too. The welcome changes come as Twitter tries to increase their usability and relevancy with the year coming to a close and the first quarter of 2012 set to commence.
On December 8th, the über popular microblogging site released their first redesign in a staggering five years with 21 global companies. Dubbed the ‘new new Twitter’, the changes were made with the intention of making the social platform more user friendly and a ‘compelling destination’ for brands – an attempt to try and tackle Facebook’s Pages. The changes brought in a new tabbed style layout where all the Twitter functions were spilt into separate island boxes to make everything easily accessible. (more…)
Facebook’s Timeline from A Business Perspective
December 21, 2011
In a few short weeks, something will happen and it will impact the lives of over 800 million people worldwide. The event in question will be the worldwide roll-out of Facebook’s new interactive Timeline. To the general public, Facebook Timeline will be a cool feature which will transport them through time, allowing them to see all their memorable events, status updates, uploaded/tagged photos and friend lists from when they first joined Facebook. Timeline will also provide a host of commercial benefits that will bring a smile to the faces of marketers and business folk everywhere. (more…)
Simplifying Community Management – Social Media Tool Battle (Part 1)
December 14, 2011
If you are a Social Media Community Manager (like me) you’ll already know that there are hundreds of add-on tools available to help us manage our Twitter accounts more efficiently. However, with new tools and apps being launched every week, it can often be difficult to stay up-to-date with the tools that enable you to get the most out of your account.
The objective of this series of posts is to share some of my favourite Twitter tools; the ones I use on a daily basis and that really make a difference when I need to track and analyse account activity, measure sentiment and manage friends and followers to help improve Social Media strategies.
Oh, and the good news is that these are completely free tools – although most offer upgraded plans if you wish to use advanced features. Why not experiment with all of them to decide which you like best and which are most helpful for you and your community management team? (more…)
A Kloutless Guide to Social Influence
December 6, 2011
You may remember my blog about Klout and social influence metrics from a few weeks back. One of my primary talking points was how the way these metrics work can fly in the face of good social media behaviour to the degree that users are actively dissuaded from interacting with anyone besides influencers and are penalised for high levels of engagement.
In my view as a consequence of this these tools don’t always get it right when it comes to how truly influential a social media account actually is. Even though your social influence score can be important, what’s most important is engaging with your audience in a meaningful way. Achieve this and you’ll be on your way to being a top social media influencer in no time, even if your Klout score doesn’t say so.
With that in mind, here are the six main behaviours I think that a true influencer displays: (more…)
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