| LED Digest 1853: Cultivating the Human Touch |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................ August 10, 2004 Issue #1853 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== Cultivating the Human Touch ==-- ~ Paul Magee "Is the time right to start re-focusing on these issues or is the market still recovering...?" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== The Future of SEO ==-- ~ Mike Jacobs "The future of search is clearly moving us toward more localized and personalized search." ~ Charles Bennett "Even the larger PPC engines are still having a problem. Or making more money." ~ Keesjan Deelstra "My conclusions: SEO is alive!" ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Shopping Directories - Worth a Listing? ==-- ~ Richard Stubbings ======= NEW ====================================== From: Paul Magee Subject: Cultivating the human touch - feedback please Dear LED readers, after some time away, I'm investigating a return to working in the online arena and I'm looking for some honest feedback. Does anyone remember the Cluetrain Manifesto? www.cluetrain.com If you do, then you may well remember some of the 95 points that got so many people talking a few years ago. If you never read it, here are just a few to whet your appetite... 1. Markets are conversations. 2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors. 3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice. 4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived. 5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice. 6. Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman. These beliefs are as good a way as any of illustrating what I still believe to be true and want to help other companies realise through their websites. It wasn't long after the popularity of thinking like the cluetrain manifesto started to take hold that everything went pear shaped in the online world. The focus shifted to survival, budgets were cut, you know what happened.... The question is, has the market stabilised enough for us to start focusing on the 'people' again. Thriving not just surviving? To me, the internet was always about the people, it's growth was a natural organic thing. People looking to connect with other people. Sharing their thoughts, their loves and their lives through conversations, arguments and personal websites. I believe the natural honest expression you find in real, enthusiastic homepages, is the very formula necessary to build trust in the commercial world. I'm not into absolutes. Technology is important, aesthetics are important, branding is important, but if there is an area that has been neglected, I believe that it is compensating for the limits of what is essentially a remote medium - the human touch. The market isn't full of people any more. In the beginning you did business with the farmer, you could look into his eyes, chat, banter and test his wares. Then there was the store, the intermediary who didn't have first hand knowledge of the product and only vaguely cared (sometimes), the brand started to become more important, something to place your trust in. Now there is the screen, the technological transaction, not a human in sight and even the brand isn't enough. And not enough of us are compensating. We've become used to the 'brand is king' motto, to the extent that we are petrified to reveal who we are, to let our customers look into our eyes for fear that we, or our employees won't live up to the purity of our invented brands. At amazon.com the brand and the personalisation technology is undoubtably important, but to me but the real key is the conversations it allows between human beings. Real people rating each product, and even more real people rating how useful the ratings are! When the farmers business gets too big for him to see all his customers, but he empowers his customers to talk with each other, I don't need to see his eyes, I know I can trust him! So, what is it that I want to do? In a sentence, I want to 'help people give their website a human voice' because quite simply it creates more trust and leads to more business. This isn't the place for specifics about how to acheive that, but the first step is to build a team who are more turned on when expressing the needs of human beings and starting conversations than the average web design company. The team I'm looking to build is less likely to contain techies and graphic designers but rather communications experts, journalists and photographers. People who can go in and work *with* an existing design team to add that human voice. Now, in the theory, the services I can offer are not in conflict with traditional web design teams, they are complimentary. But I suspect that selling this slightly less tangible service to those existing internal and external guardians of the corporate website will be my biggest challenge. What do you think? Is the time right to start re-focusing on these issues or is the market still recovering and dealing with what it perceives to be 'the basics'? Any feedback welcome. Paul Magee Manchester, UK paulmagee.co.uk me, paulmagee.co.uk ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Mike Jacobs Subject: Future of SEO > ... with the cost of acquiring new prospects likely to escalate, > and the limited long-term effectiveness of techniques such as > SEO, investigate economical alternatives such as paid-inclusion. - David Yancey, LED 1851 David Yancey's article was a good one, but I think he leaves out a *big* point that might render it all moot. LOCAL, LOCAL, and LOCAL. The future of search is clearly moving us toward more and more localized and personalized search. In that scenario, the volume is simply spread out between even more terms. In that light, much of David's worries about oligopolies by top SEOs / companies on the "top" terms is a bit misguided... There will simply be less concentration of "value" in the top searches. We can debate on what the exact consequences are, but the value of being #1 on a specific search will be lessened as there are more and more searches... And SEO efforts will be spread over larger numbers of "keywords" (or other factors driving relevance in the personalization age). Mike Jacobs, VP of Search Marketing iMarketing, LtD. www.imarketingltd.com mike, imarketingltd.com ------- new post - same topic --------- From: Charles Bennett Subject: Future of SEO > PPC fraud has been going on for quite a while now > and is nothing new. From what I've seen it's rampant > on the smaller PPC systems, and active, but more > professionally done on the larger providers. - Chris Nielsen, LED 1852 Even the larger PPC engines are still having a problem. Or making more money. From a very large PPC company, my April 2004 stats were in excess of 16,000 click throughs. As a small one man business, I can't afford it at 30 cents a click. July was under 500 clicks. July sales were up $3,000 over April. Bandwidth usage was up July over April. That is a loss of more than 500 surfers a day. Allegedly. I would notice that. The only difference was my credit card was pulled from PPC. Charles Bennett ------- new post - same topic --------- From: Keesjan Deelstra Subject: Future of SEO I think the vision of David Yancey as mentioned in his post about the future of SEO is a little pessimistic. In addition to the post of Salem Kashou who stated [issue 1852]: > Internet users are getting smarter. Users will learn how > to page-down, or find a new engine that better finds what > they're looking for (just like the way Google used to). I want to add the following: searchers tend to modify their own search strategy along with good or bad search results. As several surveys from comScore, Nielsen Netrating and others say, more and more people use 2, 3, 4 and even up to 7 word search phrases to search. Over time people tend to use longer search phrases. This broadens the amount of top positions to compete for. So in 2008 we have far more top positions to compete for with more click thru rates from potential costumers. My conclusions: SEO is alive! Sincerly, Keesjan Deelstra http://www.optimizekit.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Richard Stubbings Subject: Shopping Portals I have a website that sells collectable action figures. It has a wide range of items and thus a potentially huge number of keywords. Equally unfortunately the straightforward key words action figures is too wide, by far, to properly qualify visitors. Thus we get a poor conversion rate from the visitors (although we get lots of visitors). So SEO is working for me, but is a too blunt instrument. I have noticed a number of my competitors have got links and are linked on some of these shopping directory lists. Whilst when I do searches I hate these directories, I am beginning to consider them. Does anyone here have good or bad feedback regarding these directories. Is it worth getting listed on them, even at the expense of giving them a return link? Richard Stubbings Kulture Shock http://www.kultureshock.co.uk ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled." - Paul Eldridge |
