I have found in my long career that high functioning creative teams have an essential trait: Their members have a high emotional quotient (EQ). They are able to give and take constructive criticism in style. They are able to state their views without digging in. They are able to see others’ perspectives and sacrifice their own for the good of the team. They pick their battles. They don’t get mired in their own turf. They don’t hold grudges or carry prejudices. They give their team mates the benefit of the doubt.

I can think of no better source of  the attitudes that lead to higher EQ than the Beatitudes. This might seem strange to you, especially if you are not Christian. But I am not writing this to evangelize. I think the Beatitudes have universal appeal regardless of your religion, or lack thereof. They transcend faith and reason, appealing to the way we respond to the challenges in life in our guts. To me, the Beatitudes are an approach to the visceral reactions that affect behavior more than we might want to admit.

There’s perhaps no better proving ground for them than in digital. Digital is ripe for emotional meltdowns that can scuttle a team or a project. I hope you find it as helpful as I do. If you’re interested, please read on.

Blessed are the humble*

This is perhaps the most important attitude to have in digital. We are all learning. Digital is so new, we can’t pretend to be gurus or experts. We have to humbly accept failure and keep trying, without feeling wounded or deflated. We also can’t be too attached to our successes because digital is changing so fast, expertise is fleeting. Accepting failures and faults and being willing to work on them is a necessary first step to success in digital.

Blessed are they who mourn

This is perhaps the most conceptually challenging Beatitude. Nobody likes grief, so how could that lead to being blessed? I don’t think it’s about wallowing in sadness. It’s about letting go. What is the point of mourning? Mourning is just a productive way of dealing with grief. It sure is more productive than stuffing grief  deep down and trying to ignore it. That just leads to blowing conflict out of proportion later.

Grief is a necessary part of the digital process. We all have our “babies”–digital artifacts that we are especially attached to. Perhaps we worked really hard on them. Perhaps we put our heart and soul into them. But if they don’t work, we have to be prepared to kill them. The faster we iterate, the more of our babies we will need to kill and the more grief we will deal with. If we can learn to mourn our babies and let them go, we can eliminate the emotional roller coaster that plagues creatives, especially in digital.

Blessed are the meek

When I was editor of ComputerUser, I often let my passion for the product get the better of me. I recall storming into the art director’s cube and saying such things as “It’s my name on the masthead!” That kind of stuff never worked. Slowly over time, I have learned to put on a more mild appearance, even as the storms rage inside me. My next challenge is calming the storms themselves. I still have a long ways to go. But those I admire most have a way of calmly and dispassionately stating their position. Their quiet confidence speaks louder than any of my rants.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness

To me, righteousness in digital just means doing things the right way. Since we only learn how to do things the right way by doing them, failing, and doing them better, we need to be hungry and thirsty for righteousness to continue to learn and grow. It’s not easy. You really have to want to do things the right way to keep from getting demoralized.

Blessed are the merciful

When a team makes so many mistakes despite their best efforts, the tendency is to blame each other.  Even if we determine that the whole project went into the ditch because of one person, blaming and shaming doesn’t help anyone. The only productive attitude is to forgive, hope that the person learns from it, and fix the problem in the next iteration.

Blessed are the clean of heart

This is the hardest attitude to adopt. Again, I personally have a long way to go. Still, it’s a worthy ideal to strive for.  Adopting the attitude of kindness and compassion towards all your teammates–regardless of history, personalities, or flaws of character–allows you to work as a team. It is the condition for all other Beatitudes.

Blessed are the peacemakers

Sometimes we find ourselves on the sidelines as two teammates get mired in an impasse. Unless we are able to mediate and break the impasse, the whole team grinds to a halt. Peacemakers are the quintessential team players.

Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness

Leadership consultant David O’Brien writes extensively about a caustic attitude common in all walks of business–the critic. These are people who resent success and do little but criticize people, projects and products. In online forums, we call them trolls. The curious thing is that trolls tend to gravitate towards the people who do things the right way, who have a history of success, or who have demonstrated strong leadership. The point is, if you are committed to doing things the right way, you will attract critics or trolls. After all my years, I consider their presence a sign that we are on the right track. Rather than letting critics derail you, consider them a cost of doing digital the right way.

The Beatitudes are not the only ways to salve the emotional wounds we suffer from in the digital creative process. Humor helps a lot. Personal connections–reinforced in social events outside of the pressure cooker of the virtual office–are critical. But the Beatitudes are ways individuals can learn to deal with the emotional toll digital projects require. They surely help me a lot.

*Bible scholars will cry foul already. The text reads “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” But I have been reflecting on this phrase for years and it seems to me what He means by poor in spirit  is humble. So allow me to make a creative translation.

Years down the road, Google might not even be the search leader. But search will be the preferred way to find information for a large and growing majority of users. Sooner than you might think, users will have a Watson in their pockets: A computer that has the best available answer for every question. As search engines approach the Watson ideal, and more users access the web through mobile devices, we think users will ever more prefer to search for information rather than browse or navigate.

Little did I know just how soon that would happen. Apple Acquired Siri, a program that would do just what I predicted in this quote, three months later, and incorporated it (her?) into the iPhone 4S (the S is for Siri) in November of 2011. I never dreamed that a product would come out within the same year of that prediction, which is a pretty good facsimile of what I predicted.

I was actually doubtful that Siri did what I had predicted until recently, when Apple released its Q4 results, including this quote:

The Company sold 17.07 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 21 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.

Apple stock took a hit when it released the iPhone 4S rather than something more ambitious. Little did investors know just how ambitious putting a Watson in users’ pockets would be. And little did investors know that having a Watson in your pocket is a killer app. Now they do. In less than two thirds of a quarter, Apple sold more iPhones than it had in the full quarter the year before. It will be interesting to see how many more people buy iPhones in Q1 2012 than Q1 2011. I’m predicting a huge increase.

Futurists have long predicted a voice-activated computer, fueled in part by Star Trek. What gives Siri so much appeal is that voice is the preferred interface into a phone. Typing has always been challenging on smart phones. Also, screen real estate severely limits navigation and point-and-click UI. So it makes sense that the technology would appear first on the phone. I expect it to migrate to iPads and other tablet devices before taking hold in PCs as well. The appeal goes well beyond Internet search: The ability to find files, run programs, and execute common commands with your voice is a big time saver.

Of course, Google will not take this news lying down. It has been widely rumored that it will incorporate a similar feature into Android. Not only does it need a voice app to compete with Apple for its smart phone business, but Google needs voice-activated search. Most of the growth in search is in mobile search. Reading between the lines, this is at least a contributing factor in its aggressive strategy with Panda and semantic search, Google + and Search Plus Your World. They don’t want a Siri clone, they want something that beats Siri, by delivering better, more personalized mobile search results through a voice interface, exclusively on Android.

All this is good news for users, and a cautionary tale for SEOs and content strategists. We should be asking ourselves how our content works on mobile devices and in mobile use cases, particularly how it is accessible through a voice interface. We should be asking ourselves how our content sounds, not just how it looks. We should be asking ourselves how queries change when spoken rather than typed. We should be asking ourselves how our content is shareable (i.e. people will want to share it) when Twitter and Google + are the primary ways they do this.

These are huge questions that crack the very foundations of digital media, which, until now, was primarily about parsing text through visual interfaces. I won’t provide the answers in this post. Just know that I will begin exploring these questions in future posts. Stay tuned.

Amy is one of the most beloved and competent politicians in recent memory. She writes thoughtful legislation protecting families from lead in toys and unsafe imported foods. She’s taken on big lobby interests for the sake of middle class families, such as her recent battle with drug makers over the availability of low-cost generics. She’s very responsive to her constituents. As an example, when former Senator Coleman challenged Senator Al Franken’s 2008 recount victory, and it dragged on for months into 2009, Senator Klobochar was the lone senator from my state. Twice the normal volume did not deter her from responding to every citizen concern. I’m such a fan of her, she’s my pick for the first woman president of the United States.

Her responsiveness was evident yesterday, when she sent me the following email:

Dear James:

Thank you for contacting me about the Protect IP Act. I appreciate hearing from you and especially appreciate hearing the concerns you have raised.

On January 20th, 2012, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced an indefinite postponement of the scheduled Senate vote on the Protect IP Act.  As Congress continues to consider this issue, please know that I will work to make sure your concerns are addressed.

The internet has dramatically altered the manner in which we communicate, conduct business, seek entertainment and find information.  It is vital to ensure that online innovation and openness are preserved so the American people can continue to freely to express themselves and pursue personal and economic endeavors over the internet.

It is also important that foreign criminals not be allowed to steal the property of others without consequence.  The pirating of intellectual property is not a victimless crime.  Rather, it threatens the jobs and livelihoods of millions of middle class American workers and businesses.  However, we must seek ways to protect people from online piracy, particularly foreign piracy, without limiting web-based innovation or a free exchange of ideas.

Again, thank you for taking the time to contact me.  One of the most important parts of my job is listening to what the people of Minnesota have to say to me.  I am here in our nation’s capital to do the public’s business and to serve the people of our state.  I hope you will contact me again about matters of concern to you.

Sincerely,

Amy Klobuchar

United States Senator

So how do we secure the Internet from piracy without affecting the free flow of information? Surely not with unenforceable laws that restrict free speech. There are dozens of applications on the Internet that protect IP without legislating it. How does iTunes manage data? How does Getty Images do this? Every major company that relies on IP knows how to protect IP while enabling the free and open sharing of enough data to enable sales. Amazon’s Look Inside feature is another example. If the current state of technology is not strong enough to protect the IP of every media type, we’ll make more technology.

Every day, I find bootleg copies of our book. I’m sure those exist for every piece of IP on the Internet. That’s a cost of doing business on the Internet. On the other hand, 99 percent of our sales have come through Internet channels. If we create laws to ban the 1 percent of Internet users who post and share bootleg and gray-market IP, we restrict commerce and free speech for the 99 percent of Internet users who pay for the content and use it fairly. It seems to me that isn’t the intent of these laws. Rather, the major holders of media IP (Hollywood, the recording industry, and major book publishers) want to restrict fair use beyond the common usage on the Internet so that they can reduce piracy and increase margins.

If restricting fair use is the intent of the bills, it is self defeating. Like it or not, the Internet is a try-before-you-buy culture. It also relies heavily on the Internet’s version of word of mouth–social sharing and rating. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle. With all due respect to Amy, I highly doubt piracy prevents many people from finding work. I’m sure it limits sales to some degree, but the proposed laws would limit sales far more than the current state of piracy on the Internet. In short, I think the proposed laws would cost many more jobs than they would save.

By way of example, consider my Facebook page. Every Friday, I try to post a You Tube video of music that I’m particularly fond of. As a Bob Dylan fan, I have often tried to post a You Tube video of one of his songs. When I tried this for one of the tracks on his brilliant album Blood on the Tracks (which I own), it plays the Pachelbel Canon in D.

Sony, the owner of that IP, is restricting the use of the music online, as is its right. But it is missing an opportunity in the process. If they allowed me to post a song to Facebook, it would be good word of mouth to my friends, which would lead to sales of the disks. If they restrict this kind of sharing, they actually lose free advertising in the form of social sharing. What SOPA and PIPA are proposing is much more draconian. They would make it illegal for me to post a sample of an album that I own on my Facebook page. Multiply the hundreds of Facebook friends who did not see the video by the millions of Facebook users, and you get a sense of the lost free advertising PIPA and SOPA would entail.

If you make it illegal for Internet users to share samples of their favorite IP, you will severely limit sales of that IP. Internet commerce depends on healthy fair use. The world economy would suffer greatly by the self-inflicted wound of restricted use. With crises in Europe and struggling economy in the US, the last thing we need is a self-inflicted wound to such a large and growing sector of the economy. On the other hand, if we focus on creating technology to prevent piracy, we can help to create a market for IP protection software, while enabling Internet commerce to take it’s natural course.

This post is solely the responsibility of James Mathewson. It does not reflect the views or opinions of the IBM Corporation.

In the course of the research for these two projects, I made a startling discovery: The Google Panda algorithm is a radical attempt to equate content quality with SEO, as much as an automated system can do so. I knew that Google said this about content quality when it released Panda, and I even wrote about it on this blog. But I didn’t understand the inner workings of how Google makes this happen. Plus, I didn’t really believe that you could develop an algorithm that truly favored content quality until I started researching the way Panda is built.

Savvy readers will notice I used the present tense in the previous paragraph–it was intentional. Google has developed Panda to be continually improved. Panda’s on version 2.6 since it’s initial release in March of 2011. It issued 30 new improvements in December alone. It’s called machine learning,–a method borrowed from artificial intelligence–which describes how to train a system for continual improvement. It’s similar to the method that IBM used to hone Watson’s Jeopardy!-playing skills.

Automation is necessary because of the sheer volume of content on the web. But the real key lies in the inputs Google gave to the algorithm–and the way it analyzed those inputs– before honing it through machine learning. The inputs were derived from perhaps hundreds of quality testers, who ranked thousands of pages for content quality. Google took this data and crunched the numbers to derive some rules. Then the machine-learning program honed the rules, and continues to hone them over time, getting ever more accurate. The end result is an algorithm that places a premium on content quality over the simplistic checklists and other tools common to traditional SEO.

SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin does the best job of explaining what this means for SEOs in the future.

Note: Content Quality is as much a function of the whole collection of pages and other assets as it is of a particular page. It won’t do to focus all your attention on the top-level portal and let the lower-level pages go. The quality of your whole corporate site stands or falls as a collection. Though individual pages can do better than others, poor-quality pages, duplicates, and other features common to poor content strategy pull the whole collection down. The antidote to poor content quality is good content strategy.

Since that talk, I am pleased to announce that The IBM Style Guide is in print and available from most  online book sellers. The book is chock full of content quality advice, especially for technical and computing-related content. For those in marketing, please see “Appendix A. Exceptions for Marketing Content,” which I wrote with the help of a committee of editors.

I’m pleased that my small contribution to this book reflects the overall effort by dozens of brilliant editors to unify style guidance across an enterprise of millions of assets serving every business and user goal. The authors and their colleagues in the IBM Style and Usage Council–which created and maintains the online version of the guide–have hundreds of years of corporate writing and editing experience between them. My relatively brief time on that council was some of the most rewarding work I’ve done, primarily because of how smart everyone on the council is.

This book is not just for IBM content producers. It is a model for similar large-enterprise content quality efforts. It is a must-have desk reference for anyone publishing technical subject matter.

Large companies tend to have a lot of pages about the same topics, which serve slightly different purposes (or not). So it is not uncommon for them to have paid search driving to one page with another page ranking highly in Google’s organic search engine results pages (SERPs). For example, a lot of advertising organizations build their own advertising landing pages as distinct entities from other digital marketing activities within companies. They do this to make sure the messaging and branding on the page matches the ads. For them, paid and organic are often distinct experiences.

Why is this a bad thing? Well, for branded terms, it’s not necessarily bad. You should own multiple slots on page 1 in Google for your brand pages. Obviously, your paid campaign will need to pick one of them if it doesn’t build its own. Excluding branded SEM, though, you should build experiences that drive both paid and organic efforts to the same pages for the following reasons:

• Multiple links and divergent creatives can be confusing to the user, and to Google
• Pages that rank higher in organic search tend to have higher Google quality scores, which elevate paid listings
• If paid and organic links point to  the same pages, b2b tech users are much more likely to click them

Rather than merely telling you these reasons, allow me to show you. Along the way, you can learn how to align paid and organic tactics into one effective strategy.

Better usability

Suppose someone queries cloud computing in Google, and sees different IBM links in the paid search results than the organic result on the same SERP. Which to click? If you click the paid link, presumably, you get the official IBM site for cloud. When you land on that page, you expect a portal that describes or explains the whole sweep of IBM’s offerings related to cloud computing. But if the page is primarily an advertising landing page, by definition, it presents a perspective of one facet of IBM’s cloud offerings. Ads tell stories–good ads do anyway. Stories focus on one facet or feature. Stories about everything are as compelling as stories about nothing.

As I said, users who click the paid ad will find a narrow vision of the full sweep of IBM’s offerings. And a large proportion of them will bounce as a result–a fact we will return to later. For the present, the reason they will bounce is because users who type generic queries (queries that name or describe general categories rather than specific products) have diverse interests when they do this. If you provide a narrow view that does not match a user’s understanding within the sweep of possible interpretations of the query, she will bounce. Advertising landing pages do just this for a large percentage of the audience for generic queries.

Not only is the scope of the advertising landing page too narrow, it is typically not in the language users expect to see when they type generic queries. These queries are expressions of an existing marketplace. When you use branded language that is unique to your corporate perspective on an advertising landing page (a common practice), a high percentage of users will get confused by this language and bounce.

On the other hand, pages that rank well organically for generic queries will tend to use the language of users who query those words. It really is the only way you can rank well for those words because generic queries tend to have a lot of competition. Also, organic pages for generic queries tend to serve as portals to a broader swath of a company’s offerings. For this reason, they get lower bounce rates and result in better user experiences. If your paid URL is the same as the one for which you rank highly in search, your users will engage much more readily with the content they find whether they click the paid listing or the organic one. In short, you’ll get what you pay for when you pay for that click. And the users will be happier with your brand.

Higher Google quality scores

I recently attended the Google Tech Council, a quarterly gathering of b2b tech companies that share many of the same challenges. We get together to share best practices and learn new ways to improve our search marketing efforts. I am IBM’s representative. In the course of the meeting, Google brought in their quality score leader–the advertising counterpart to Matt Cutts. As he explained, there are three main things that influence how ads rank in Google:

1. Click throughs. Ads that get clicked a lot move up on the page into higher positions, those that don’t get clicked move down. This is primarily a factor of how well written and relevant the “creative” is. Here creative is a technical term for the ad copy.

2. Bounce rates. Ads that lead to relatively high bounce rates will get lower scores over time.

3.  Landing page quality. Google also scores landing page quality according to a number of measures. For example, single-offer landing pages that don’t give users a way out are considered low-quality experiences. Also, if the page is not tightly relevant to the words, it’s lower in quality. And Google is getting more and more into editorial quality as well. So, for example, thin-content pages get low scores.

In the meeting, I asked what the consequences are for the Google quality score if your paid and organic listings are different. He was very clear that the paid side of the house and the organic side of the house are totally distinct. So he danced around the question and basically said this: Having a good organic rank has no direct influence on the paid quality score. Google needs to say this because it is part of its corporate mantra. What sets Google apart from competitors is the “separation of church and state.”

Still, two of the three factors that influence the quality score also influence organic ranking (coincidentally or not). High bounce rates will also push your organic snippet down. As our book explains in detail, landing page quality leads to better organic ranking. So if your paid ad links to the page that is ranking well for generic keywords, it will tend to climb the ranking for Google quality scores as well.

Better click throughs

In the ensuing discussion among the people around the table at the Google Tech Council, the consensus was that if you have both a paid listing and an organic listing on page 1 in Google, 1+1=3 in terms of the click throughs for the combination. In other words, the affect of having both on page 1 has a multiplying effect on the effectiveness of your SEM campaign. But this only works if both listings point to the same URL. If they point to different pages, 1+1<2.

Why is this? Google has been studying user search behavior for a long time. Two years in a row, they enlisted TechTarget to help them study the b2b tech audience. In the second study, they observed search user behavior that surprised most search marketers at the time. At least for our audience, the most prevalent behavior is to scan an entire page of results and click the results that seem most relevant. When users did this, having both a paid and an organic listing on the page led to an increase in click throughs by up to 30%. But this only seems to work if the users can correlate the two listings. If the listings do not align, it actually decreases the click through chances on one or the other.

(One note: I have a recording of the Google rep who first delivered that report to IBM and not everything she said ended up in the report. The report itself does not draw that conclusion explicitly, but the data makes it clear. Also, when she delivered the report, she drew sweeping conclusions about the positive branding of paid and organic alignment that are not as clearly stated in the report.)

I said that the report was surprising because it went against consensus. For a long time, the consensus among search marketers was that organic cannibalizes paid or vice versa (depending on whether you sit in advertising or lead gen). This led to programs like Always On, which emphasized buying words until you had an organic snippet to rank on page 1 for the word, and then turning off the paid campaign. The report showed that paid and organic only eat each others click throughs if the two listings point to different URLs. As I said in the open, the common thing when the consensus developed was to have different pages for advertising and organic. Again, if they point to the same URL, they have a multiplying effect.

Conclusion

The end result is very simple. If you rank well for a generic keyword, make sure you have a paid campaign that also points to that URL and aligns the creative to the organic snippet. This tactic will result in up to 30% more click throughs, lower bounce rates, higher engagement rates and better position on the SERP. It also has strong positive branding influence.

James Mathewson is the Global Search Strategy Lead for IBM and coauthor of Audience, Relevance and Search: Targeting Web Audiences with Relevant Content. Opinions are his own and not IBMs.

“I don’t understand your research.”

This came during a talk at the October Minneapolis Content Strategy Meetup. Now, Erin is one of the smartest people I know in the content strategy field, and author of a great little book: The Elements of Content Strategy. So when she doesn’t get it, we have a problem. Obviously, I have not done a good job of explaining my research. I thought I’d take this opportunity to explain it, not only in terms of what I’ve written both here and in our book, but in terms of what other people are writing about it.

This week I was pleased to come across three good resources that explain the basic principles of my research from different points of view. They don’t all refer to my work specifically, but they are essentially about the same thing: what I call outside-in marketing. Before getting into them, let me take another crack at explaining what I do.

Outside-in marketing is the method of learning the language of clients and prospects and using thier language to develop content that they can relate to on their own terms.

We learn the language of clients and prospects through keyword research and social media listening. We analyze the research to develop content strategies that will tend to attract and captivate that audience with digital experiences. We publish and iterate on those experiences to develop healthy relationships with that audience–relationships based on trust that will ultimately lead to stronger business results.

Outside-in marketing is a radical concept for some marketers, perhaps because they learned more traditional inside-out marketing. In inside-out marketing, we develop products to differentiate our brand from competitors. We build that brand by persistently pushing our messages into the market, primarily with advertising. Then we try to reuse the same messaging in our digital experiences.

When you try to reuse inside-out messages in digital, lots of undesirable things can happen. Typically, the only people who find and use these digital experiences are existing customers who are thoroughly entrenched in your branded nomenclature. It might rank well in search, but the words don’t have much demand outside of those who already know what you offer. If you want to attract new people who might not know what you offer, you need to use their language. If you try to slap their language on inside-out pages, it’s even worse. Either you rank well with very high bounce rates or you don’t rank at all. Since Google released Panda, the latter is more often the case.

Outside-in marketing is a tacit acknowledgement that most people use search to find content. Content helps them learn about product categories; use those product categories to solve their problems; compare and contrast products; and ultimately purchase products. Your goal is to create the content they’re looking for to do each of these activities on their terms. My research is about matching the grammar of search queries to the activities audiences want to participate in, and developing content strategies that will help them do those activities.

As I said, I was pleased to see some independent support for this approach. After the jump, I will give short descriptions of and links to that research.

1. Lou Rosenfeld recently presented at Web 2.0 what is the best presentation explaining how to use data to inform content strategy decisions. Even without speaker notes, the presentation is a treasure trove of outside-in marketing best practices. Here is a partial list:

• How you can discover what users want in their own words by using Site Search Analytics
• How you can architect a site based on query grammar
• How jargon (i.e. branded terms) is the enemy of usability
• How to segment the audience by their interests and develop content geared towards different audiences
• How search analytics can help you prioritize content and remove underperforming content

After viewing the presentation, I can think of no better site analytics tool than site search analytics. But, though Lou did a great job of focusing on how to use site search analytics, there is one thing missing from his presentation: It only covers the people who interact with your site. What about all the people with whom you want to develop a relationship but who haven’t found your site yet? The answer is, you can use the same methods he demonstrates for external Google.

2. The Content Marketing Institute just came out with a great guide to using content optimization tools for better writing. The only negative review I’ve read of our book was from a novice writer who wanted practical guidance for using our strategy to help with her writing. She found our book wanting for this. Well, this article can help point the way. It shows you how to focus on the words and phrases your target audience uses to build more compelling content experiences for them.

The authors did a study to compare writing by those who use content optimization tools and those who didn’t. The content optimization tool used by study participants is InboundWriter, which gives real-time search and social intelligence to writers as they compose. The tool plugs into WordPress and other authoring environments.  Using the tool increased traffic to some of the pages by up to 30 percent.

All that said, the authors of the study are also the developers of the tool. So they have a vested interest in promoting a tool that does this. I’m just pleased that there is a market for the kind of tool I’m helping to develop within IBM–one that will not only give writers guidance on word choice and usage, but will govern that usage across an enterprise.

3. Brafton published one of the best content and search infographics I’ve seen. It’s part of a great blog post about the importance of quality content. To quote the post:

The bottom line is that a positive search experience translates into users’ ability to find quality information that answers their queries. Top-notch content is what searchers want, and it’s what search engines want to prioritize in results.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. The post, and especially the infographic, will take you some time to consume. But they are well worth it.

As we said in the book, the winner of the search wars will ultimately provide the highest quality results for its users. When we wrote that, it was almost a joke because Google results were polluted with content farms. Bing gained market share because users found their results more relevant and higher quality. So Google responded with Panda, which has progressively favored higher quality results. This is great for users and white-hat SEOs, and bad for black-hat SEOs.

It also puts a premium on good content. There are no shortcuts to attracting and captivating an audience of willing participants. You need to learn their information preferences and develop content for them. If you’re in marketing, it’s called outside-in marketing.  Erin, if you’re out there, I hope this helps.

Information is the core of this modernization. When we systematically monitor our infrastructure, connect these systems together, and gather and analyze the data they produce, we can make more intelligent decisions, and ultimately overcome the world’s challenges. This is the optimism that Smarter Planet inspires in governments, NGOs and corporations around the world. The systems can be as small as an embedded sensor or as large as a mainframe. This is often called the Internet of Things.

As I helped develop the content around this concept for IBM, it often occurred to me that the very process we use to make better digital experiences for our audiences needs to become more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. We need to use the data we gather about our audience to better address their needs. We need to learn more about how these sites and their assets relate to one another so that our audience can make better sense of the whole collection of content–not just the individual pages in isolation. We need to develop systems that use this information to help us craft more relevant content with our limited resources.

Are we there yet? No. We have a lot of work to do to make our content smarter. Even though Smarter Planet content is smarter story by story and sprint by sprint, the rest of IBM content needs work. That is a long process. But we at least have a strategy or a set of directions for getting there. Let me share them with you.

1. Instrumented

There’s a whole chapter in our book on using web analytics to make better content decisions. One of my first blog posts on this site was on the topic. The basic metrics are ranking, referrals, bounces and engagements/conversions. As mundane as it might seem, you would be surprised at how few people actually do this in an end-to-end way. I have to train analysts inclined to just use visits/visitors and time on the page as their primary data points. Visitors is a decent stat, especially if you can segment it by new or repeat visitors. But visits and especially time on the page don’t tell me much about what I need to improve on the site. Does a longer than usual average time on page say users liked the content or they got lost?

To develop a decent set of action items, you need a sense of the audience you expect to attract, to what extent you are attracting them, and what they do when they come to your pages. That’s what we attempt to help you with in our book. It starts with keyword intelligence: What words and phrases do your target audience enter into search queries, (or use as hash tags)? Based on that data, you should know how many referrals you can expect if you build an optimal page for a keyword (or hashtag). If they don’t click, you need a better search snippet (or tweet). If they are referred but bounce at a high rate, you are not doing a good enough job of demonstrating the relevance of the page to the referring source. If they don’t bounce, you can get really particular about what clicks they took and how to improve their engagement.

I breezed through that because I didn’t want to seem repetitive relative to the links two graphs above. If you’re confused, click those links, especially the blog post. If  this is old hat, it gets better. The model outlined in those links was developed almost 18 months ago. A lot has changed since then. The main thing is, we are creating one tooling platform where all these metrics can be viewed and interpreted together. I’ll highlight one kind of insight we hope to glean with this tooling in particular.

When you look at referral data, ever notice that the null referrer (direct load) is often proportional to search referrals? Here’s an example from the current site I work on:

2011 referral data for ibm.com/cloud

The first thing you’ll notice is a huge bump in referrals staring in April. Why? Well, we redesigned and relaunched the site on April 14th, optimizing the page for some very valuable keywords. That work resulted in a lot of search referrals. Less obvious is, as the search referrals (gray) increased, so did the direct load (yellow) referrals. Why is that? Our hypothesis involves this use case: People come to our site from search and realize there’s more on the page than they can consume in one visit. So they bookmark it for future reference. Most of the null referrers are people selecting the site from bookmarks.

How can we prove our hypothesis? This is where new and repeat visitors comes in. Suppose search referrals are typically counted as new visitors and bookmarked referrers are typically counted as repeat visitors. When you compare new visitors to repeat visitors, the graphs should match up within a certain margin of error. If they do, we prove our hypothesis. What would that mean? It would mean that our organic search efforts are even more effective than raw referral data suggest. Repeat visitors are even more valuable than new visitors because they are more likely to engage and ultimately convert.

I only bring up this example because it shows the power of combining data from a variety of sources to draw insights about what’s working and what isn’t on your site. In any event, the whole spectrum of web analytics data is essential to building a system of instrumented content. This includes data from outside your site (keyword and social data), referral data, click data, A/B testing data, and other more qualitative data sources such as user surveys and user experience testing. The more data you have, the better your content decisions, and the better your results.

2. Interconnected

Tim Berners-Lee called it the World Wide Web because the map of the information resembled a web. In an interconnected, hypertext world, the connections between pieces of content become as important as the individual pieces themselves. This is a principle we use in the book:

A piece of content is only valuable to the extent that it is connected to other relevant pieces of content.

Yet most content efforts I audit pay little or no attention to these connections. Almost all of the focus rests on the individual page or asset they are developing. Even on my team, I have to continually interject the bigger picture in our meetings because team members are inclined to focus just on the user experience of the page at hand. Perhaps it is a remnant of print publishing in which each publication is a self-contained unit. On the web, pages are utterly irrelevant if they are self-contained units. They are consumed only in reference to other relevant content.

Time and again, I see duplication, overlaps and gaps in content collections because teams only focus on the nodes of the web and not its fibers.  This is why I was inclined to start with Interconnected in my tour of the three I’s: It is a starting point for any effective content effort. In order to create good new content, you have to understand the landscape of existing content in your topic area. We spent three chapters on this in our book because it is so important.

How do you focus on the fibers of the web as well as the nodes? In a word, research. It starts with a content audit on your site. But it quickly evolves into an audit of the whole web (social and static) around the topic. What (or who) are the most influential nodes in the web for your topic? How are they interconnected? What does the cloud of search terms around your topic look like? Who is ranking for these words and why? Again, how are they interconnected?

We ask a whole host of such questions in our book. And we give the reader a roadmap to answering the questions. But it is a long and laborious job. Deadlines don’t often allow for the kind of extensive research we recommend in our book. How do we build intelligent systems to enable this research at the pace of content development efforts?

The tooling we are helping to build will automate this research so that development efforts can better focus on filling gaps and connecting them to relevant nodes in the common content collection known as the web. It will also help us do a better job of developing the right content given our audience and business priorities. We can’t fill every gap, nor should we. We also acknowledge that we have a unique perspective and our job is to influence our audience to come to a shared agenda, not merely to fill an information gap. This is how we stake a claim to our place in the landscape.

If we understand our place in the landscape, we can understand how to create new relevant connections (links, shares) and user acceptance patterns (likes, +1s) around our content efforts. This is how you boost the value of those efforts.

3. Intelligent

Intelligent content is just the combination of these two sources of information–web analytics and content research–as primary inputs into one content management system. I say “just,” but you know it is a bigger challenge than a simple flow chart suggests. We are talking about a massive and complex data set. The content strategist’s view is similar to the astronomer’s–constellations filled with every kind of thing in the universe. And like the universe, the web is ever expanding. There is really no point in encapsulating it all. What we need is a way to organize it. This is the point of the Semantic Web.

This data set is not only daunting because of its sheer size. It is also quite complex. Human languages are living, breathing ecosystems with multiple meanings for every word and phrase, multiple words for objects and concepts, sarcasm, irony, you name it. It is highly complex in a single language. At IBM, we publish in more than 40. How can we expect to model it in a way that helps us automate our content management decisions in near real time? Linguists and cognitive scientists have been trying to solve this problem for decades.

I believe Watson offers an opportunity to help us solve this problem. Watson is a system that not only parses the semantics of natural language, it helps understand the context of the language through the use of pragmatics as well. Semantics can only help us sort out ambiguities in the meaning of words. But it can’t help us understand all the nuances in how we use words in context. This is where pragmatics is necessary.

In the simplest terms, semantics is the science of meaning, pragmatics is the science of context. In the future, content strategists will depend on systems that understand both meaning and context.

Because Watson was designed to solve the unique challenges of Jeopardy!, it can understand both the semantics and the pragmatics of natural language. The game requires the player to have the information needed to answer questions plus the ability to understand cryptic clues. These two cognitive abilities are needed for a system that inputs listening, keyword research and analytics data and outputs content recommendations. Like Jeopardy! clues, social and keyword data is fragmentary, vague and often ambiguous. It requires Watson’s contextual intelligence to understand the questions audiences need answers to. Answering the questions in a way that makes sense to the audience requires Watson’s natural language semantic intelligence.

A Watson-like system by itself is not enough to create an intelligent content system. That would help us understand the language we should use to better communicate with our audiences. You also need intelligent content governance to eliminate duplicates and fill gaps. Google says there are nearly 8,000 keywords IBM should care about. Ideally, we would have one asset per keyword and user task. If you count both pre-sales and post-sales content tasks, there might be 10 user tasks per keyword. So an ideal state might be 80,000 assets. Suffice it to say we have a lot more assets than this already. And we are nowhere near filling all the gaps. How do we move towards the ideal state while we’re creating new content all the time?

We are working on the business rules that minimize conflicts between content owners. But we will need some kind of board or council to break all ties. We will also need people to implement all the recommendations. Our tooling can help us automate some of that process as well. But automation doesn’t replace humans, it helps them do their jobs better, faster and more efficiently.

The whole point of smarter content is to free content strategists up to think about ways to create better content, rather than bogging them down in manual minutia. I’m an IBMer and that’s what I’m working on.

James Mathewson is search strategy lead for IBM.

The book shelf at Confab 2011, showing four books featured on this site.

In a refreshing way, Jones doesn’t merely tell the reader how to use content to influence the web visitor. She shows the reader why it’s important by grounding the discussion in rhetoric and psychology. But in case you might be intimidated by the theoretical parts of the book, she uses plain language to explain concepts that have challenged scholars for centuries. For my taste, she is a bit too shy on “heavy” topics. But it is clear that she wants to make the book accessible to novice content strategists while contributing to the literature for experienced content strategists.

As an effective way to bridge that gap, the book uses fresh examples, some of which come from Jones’ storied career, to add flesh to the theoretical bones. These I found the most engaging aspects of the book and well worth the price on their own. But as much as I like and respect Jones, I can’t give her a free pass on everything. Not that I disagree with much of what she writes. But in the course of reading the book, I found several missed opportunities to add depth to the topics she focused on. By teasing these out, my hope for this review is to spark some discussion around these topics and build on the foundational work in her book. If you’re interested, please read on.

1. On SEO snake oil

SEO is a dirty word for a lot of people because of the way it has been practiced. What I call black-hat SEO is what Jones calls SEO snake oil. It is the practice of using SEO to attract high volumes of people to your site without regards to their needs or interests. As Jones puts it:

SEO snake oil, however, leads people to spend money on being found at the expense of making their websites worth finding. If your website is mired in meaningless articles “for SEO purposes,” you’re not going to get results. (p 6)

Obviously, I agree with this position. My issue is with the depth of her explanation. She doesn’t really explain SEO snake oil much. She spends a half a page on what it is and refers to it throughout the book. But unless it is clearly distinguished from white-hat SEO–the kind we advocate in our book–I worry that some readers will think all SEO is snake oil.

Later she says, “Many online marketers try to push people to a website instead of attracting and influencing people who already have some interest” (p 21). This seems like the seed of the distinction I longed for in the book and never got. SEO snake oil fits into the category of pushy tactics she rightly criticizes. White-hat SEO fits into the description of attracting and (perhaps) influencing people who already have some interest.

Most users use search to find what they are interested in. By typing in queries in search engines, they indicate that they are already interested in those topics and tasks. White-hat SEO is about using keyword research to find out what the target audience needs and giving them what they need when they need it. This is how you build trust with them so that you can eventually influence them. Though she does reference good work that emphasizes white-hat SEO (including our book ), some explanation of the distinction between SEO snake oil and legitimate SEO within her book would be helpful.

2. On learning the audience

I loved that she spent an entire chapter on how to use principles from classical rhetoric in content strategy. But I wish she had gone a bit farther and used some of rhetoric’s most important contributions to understanding communication– audience analysis. The three main modes of classical rhetoric–logos, ethos and pathos–are all understood in terms of the relationship between the speaker and her audience. If you don’t know your audience well, you don’t know what logic works for them, to what extent your audience trusts you, or how to tug at their emotions. So learning the audience is a vital part of using rhetoric to influence.

The web offers an unprecedented view of the audience for text-based media. Some discussion of using web technologies to learn the audience and feeding this back into ones’ use of logos, ethos and pathos would be helpful. To learn the audience with web technologies,we advocate keyword research and social media listening for the whole audience (whether they are customers yet or not). We advocate many web metrics tools, surveys and user experience testing for existing users. Instead, Jones recommends the books Mental Models by Indi Young and Strategic Market Research by Anne Beall. Both are valuable resources for traditional marketers. But they don’t help that much for content strategists, who need to learn their audience’s particular needs in real time.

3. On web analytics

Jones spends three chapters on evaluating web content and adjusting it accordingly. Regular readers will know how important I think this aspect of web publishing is. You can do a lot of research up front to learn audience needs and plan to fill them. But this is at best a guess of what you think your audience will need. The only way to really know is to start gathering data and analyzing it in ways that lead to tangible site improvements.

My main complaint in this part of the book is not as much about the content but the way it is presented. She starts this section, in Chapter 8, on the limitations of web data, cautioning readers to carefully interpret and evaluate data. One of her strongest claims in this section is that data should not be used to drive content decisions but merely to inform them–as though the data can only recommend optional actions. This I disagree with. Done right, data is the driver of post-publishing adjustments.

In Chapter 9, she goes into some detail about evaluating content with the right methods. This chapter is good, albeit a bit shy on tooling and techniques and long on methods. But coming after a chapter in which she encouraged data skepticism and discouraged the reader from using data to drive content decisions, I wonder how many novice readers will take the methods that seriously. If she had just reversed the two chapters, it would have been fine. As it is, chapter order effectively buries the lead–the importance and appropriate use of web analytics for content decisions.

4. On branding and lead generation

Jones is quite right to emphasize gearing ones content plan to business goals: content as a copyright asset, content to aid with branding, content to help establish relationships, etc. My only wish is that she had spent less space on branding and more space on lead generation. The kind of influencing we primarily focus on at IBM consists of bringing new customers into the site and converting them to warm leads. My executives consistently fund content activities that influence users in these ways. Branding is great, and you certainly don’t want to do anything to harm your brand reputation on the web. But it only pays the bills for web content if you can show that the positive branding you are doing results in more leads for the sales force to contact.

If there is a second edition of Clout, I would hope for more on white-hat SEO, audience analysis, web analytics and lead generation. I’d especially love to see the definitive guide on influencing new prospects to become warm leads on the web. As it is, Clout is a very useful book. If it provided these elements, it would become a must read in my book.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#predictions

In December of 2010 Danny Sullivan wrote an interesting post for Search Engine Land titled “What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?  In his article both Bing and Google admit that Twitter references play a part in their algorithms.

Question: If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?

Bing: We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.

Google: Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article.

As we can see from Danny’s article Google already uses data from social media sites like Twitter as factors that influence its ranking results. Taking this a step further we can assume that Google will also use the number of +1s a page receives and Google Plus shares as additional social ranking factors. Link building and on-page optimization have long been the tactics used by marketers to improve ranking in Google and its competitors. Now, however, we need to take into account social factors as well. Social media will also increase the buzz factor for a particular site or page, which will help it rank. Social media and SEO now work hand in hand.  While links will always be the currency of SEO that ensures top rankings social networking is becoming the relationship side of SEO that seems to be the future of the web.  Social connections are highly valued now, especially by Google.

I’ve summarized below Gareth Owen’s Top 13 Social Media Ranking Factors.

1. Number of Followers (Twitter) – The more followers you have, the more authoritative your Twitter persona and the more value will be associated with your URL.

2. Quality of Followers (Twitter) – The more high value people who follow you, and retweet your stuff, the better.

3. Relevance of Followers (Twitter) – It’s important to get retweets from accounts that are specific to your industry.

4. Number of Retweets (Twitter) – The more your content is reproduced by others the more authoritative it is.

5. Number of Fans (Facebook) – if you decide to engage with customers and potential customers on Facebook, the total number of likes your page receives will add value to your URL.

6. Number of Comments (Facebook) – Successful Facebook pages include a lot of content written by other people.

7. Number of Views (YouTube) – Any content you upload to YouTube should link to your site in the description, and the more times it is viewed, the more value will be attributed to your video.

8. User Comments (YouTube) – The more you comment, the more link juice is passed back to your profile.

9. References From Independent Profiles (YouTube) – If your link from your video passes some value, imagine how much more value would be passed if you could get other people to parody your work and include links to you from their profiles.

10. Title of Video (YouTube) – Any references to your target keywords in the title of the video will help ensure that any authority passed will be relevant to a specific theme.

11. Percent of Likes vs. Dislikes (YouTube) – The more liked your content is, the more authoritative it is.

12. Positive vs. Negative Brand Mentions (All Social Media) – Google has already made investment in this area in 2011, so it’s well worth monitoring.

13. Number of Social Mentions (All Potential Media) – Total visibility across all social media shows that your content is important to all people and not just a result of a large special offer for Facebook/Twitter users.

It’s important that we leverage social media by implementing the following tactics and enable the crowd to improve your websites visibility in search:

1. Create a social media strategy focusing on as many relevant social venues as possible. Know the audience you are targeting, write the content to please them and spread it socially to that audience. Choose the right social media sites for your audience and market. Start following your customers, subject matter experts and brand advocates and share their content when appropriate. They will likely reciprocate. Remember to use all the functionality available in the networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook groups and Facebook pages to share your content. Twitter lists and Google+ Circles are also other great ways to attract  interest and share content with a relevant, segmented audience.

2. Create links to your business website from all of your social media presences. This will drive more qualified traffic to your site and provide the serendipitous benefit of causing your content to go viral, potentially garnering more backlinks, shares, likes and retweets etc.

3. Link from your business website to your social media presences. This will inform customers where you are active and provide the opportunity for a more engaging, informal experience. Participate actively in these networks sharing relevant helpful content and forming relationships. By creating relationships you will likely acquire more influential, qualified visitors providing an opportunity to create advocates who will share and recommend your content within their own networks.

4. Your content should also be fresh with the capability to be easily shared on other social media sites. It’s paramount that you implement social sharing buttons and components like the tweet, like and Google +1 buttons etc.

5. We know that search engines also index social elements such as tweets and LinkedIn profiles so don’t forget to do your keyword research and include those words in your profiles and posts.

6. Remember to promote different types of content such as videos, blog posts, podcasts, images etc. in social venues and link back from these assets to your main website or a relevant landing page.

7. Use social bookmarking sites like Delicious to share your content and tag it with keywords.

Not only can optimized social media presences and posts help with webpage ranking they can also improve a brand’s search engine shelf space ownership. The definition of search engine shelf space ownership is how much of the search engine results (SERP) first page your brand’s content objects occupy. Social profiles and posts, like a webpage, are considered content objects and many are indexed by search engines. Therefore, they provide an additional opportunity for brand visibility and content promotion.