Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

In early January the CDC and FDA warned of salmonella in peanut products from the Peanut Corporation of America, a peanut plant located in GA. One of my clients, the Academic Network, jumped into action once early indicators began to surface.

(They’re a Stericycle company, whose job it is to help manage recalled peanut and peanut paste products by getting them out of stores and destroying them.)

The Academic Network’s role is to provide health care professionals to help answer questions about product recalls, and provide the social media “listening” services necessary to help companies anticipate product recall issues.

I set up the listening systems for them, and help monitor them during crises like this, the largest food recall in history.

Anticipating Risks to Mitigate Them

We started monitoring the web (Twitter, Facebook, other social media sites) for conversations about peanuts, and the experience was quite amazing.

Some highlights:

• We were able to predict the spread of the recall from people to pet food - days before any announcement
• We predicted the spread of fear from peanut products to peanut butter in jars weeks before peanut butter jar sales dropped off by 25%
• We reached out to associations (like the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association and the American Peanut Council) to help them handle the huge job of getting the right information out to people online. No one listened.
• People talk about peanut butter online a lot (probably second only to bacon) and we watched the hysteria grow exponentially the day after the inauguration, when Tweets and posts like this appeared:

…and it really hasn’t stopped. Victims of the peanut recall are not only the poor unfortunate souls, families and pets who ate the tainted stuff; but the businesses who are losing millions in sales of perfectly good products.

Traditional Response Fell on Deaf Ears - While Hysteria Grew

As the fear of peanuts, peanut paste and peanut butter spread in that first few weeks, no one from the food industry proactively reached out to consumers online. If they did, I didn’t see it.

Oh, sure, there were press releases announcing that products were safe, but unless you were subscribing via RSS to certain key phrases, they were falling on relatively deaf ears - as evidenced by the falling sales of peanut butter products of all kinds.

Apparently the food industry (and those who represent them) are glacially slow in their platforms and processes; and were unable to react to the needs of consumers and deliver information in the right channels of communication.

Meanwhile, Online…  People Reached Out to Help

From the beginning, the confusion was mitigated slightly when news reporters, bloggers, Tweeters and others shared links to the FDA site where, (weeks later) they’ve finally added search capability to help navigate the growing list of tainted products.

In a highly unusual - and I’ll bet expensive - move, today you’ll see ads and coupons in papers across the country from companies like ConAgra and Smuckers attempting to tell consumers their products are safe. That’s one way to try to recoup confidence in products.

And I’m finally seeing Google ads from providers - not just trial lawyers - on peanut butter searches:

Learning Our Lessons - Stopping the Spread of Fear

What should we do next time? (And there will be a next time, just change the food source and product…)

• Association sponsorship of a social web site dedicated to quelling the myths around recalled products, staffed by nutritionists, nurses and doctors - why not? It takes no time to put one up - if you know what you’re doing. And you can answer questions in near-real time. Imagine the resource that would be to consumers.
• Point searchers to it using PPC advertisements - engage search behavior to spread the word
• Mobilize the millions of social media connectors to get the word out - give us good information, and we’re delighted to help out

One of the pictures (and I love pictures) I’m most proud of during this mess is this one, from Google Insights:

See the regional interest in the recall? The Portland-based team supporting the Academic Network’s efforts has been highly engaged - and it shows.

I just hope next time we’ll have some industry partners interested in hearing how they might leverage the knowledge we’ve gained from this terrible scare much earlier in the process.

I’m sure there would have been millions of dollars in savings, much less hysteria, and (perhaps even) lives saved as a result.

“Noobs” apparently like detailed examples, my friend Bridget told me this morning. Right after that, I got an email from someone wondering about some basic steps to improve search results. So here’s a little (very high level) primer on SEO and SEM. As always, I welcome comments and clarifications from my friends in the SEM business.

Basically, there are two parts to search engine success. SEO and SEM.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization - are on-site activities to make your web site completely friendly to search engines, including:

• having a site map
• optimizing your web copy, and headlines
• adding title tags
• updating your meta descriptions

… using the keywords and phrases for which you want to be found. It’s tricky to write for people and spiders, but it can be really fun.

Do this first. Once that’s up and running, you can add SEM activities.

SEM - Search Engine Marketing - are activities you take outside of your web site to improve your search engine rankings, including:

• Google, Yahoo! MSN ad campaigns
• Directory submissions
• Link sharing, etc.

Once you have optimized your site, then you can look at SEM activities like online Google ads  - sometimes referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) ads - to draw people to your site.

When you’re ready to start your PPC campaigns, you’ll need to have keyword-rich ads that point to keyword-rich landing pages (generally ‘hidden’ pages that have special offers, white papers, etc.) to motivate browsers to contact you.

I always advise getting your house in order and your on-site SEO done first. Here’s why - if you have a nicely optimized site with relevant keywords in your copy, the Google spiders will give you a better ‘relevancy’ and ‘quality’ score when you start to advertise. When your quality score is high, you pay less for your ads…

I’d be happy to dig into any portion of this for noobs and people who love them… just let me know.

I’ve been working with several clients recently who are just now setting up their company blogs. One of the first things we do is to create categories, also known as keywords, for their blogs, which serve two functions:

1. From a search engine marketing (SEM) perspective, categories and keywords should be phrases for which we want the blog to appear in search results.
   • Properly constructed, long tail (define) keywords can help refine a topic so much that your relevance in search results is more accurate. For example, I was searching the other day for best practices in commenting on blog posts. I typed in “commenting best-practices” and found nothing but developer information on how to properly comment code. When I changed the search to “commenting etiquette,” the results I was served were much more relevant. Defining as closely as possible how you want to be found is critical to how you write your blog. And thinking like your clients and prospects is key to creating categories and keywords that will ensure your success.
2. From a PR, or thought leadership perspective, what are the topics around which the blog will be built?
   • Every blogger and every blog should have a mission, and every post should support the mission in some way. So as you’re considering what you want to be known for in the blogosphere, think about the words you’d want your readers to know you by. In my blog, I think I’m known for discussing marketing technology - a broad category. In that category, I write about topics such as blogging, RSS, social media, collaboration tools, SEMPR - the combination of search engine marketing and PR, etc. These topics are all topics for which I’d like to be known, and (therefore) found in search.

At the same time, most of my categories are very broad, with the exception of SEMPR (on which few search, I would imagine, since I made it up).

I should practice what I preach, and refine my categories further.

For example, instead of simply using “RSS,” as a broad category, I generally write about “enterprise RSS” which is a much tighter definition, and likely to generate a more relevant result for those who are interested in how business use RSS, vs. RSS itself.

There are tools to help pick great keywords, but the very best one is sitting right between your ears and behind your eyes…

How might you refine your keywords and categories to better serve your blog, your prospects and your clients?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Public Relations (PR) professionals are logically linked by technology and human behavior, yet few companies are combining their knowledge of each to generate big results in today’s rapidly evolving communications landscape. A few smart PR agencies are exploring adding SEM capabilities to their teams.

At minimum, PR agencies should be training their employees to understand the basics of SEM. (I’ve done that with local agencies, and it’s been great fun. According to the participants, results have been strong so far.)  Here’s some background for the PR agency management team to consider…

The People Effect

It’s no new news that “new media” influencers are proliferating online – there are expert bloggers in every niche market and Technorati tracks more then 112.8 million blogs today. That’s up from 90 million in July, 2007 and 78 million in April of 2007.

In addition to sharing stories and opinions, people are sharing all sorts of media - known as user generated content (UGC) - in social networks like Facebook and LinkedIN; and in content portals like Flickr (photo sharing) YouTube (video sharing) and iTunes (audio sharing).

And every single piece of media that is uploaded online is categorized, or “tagged” by the author. Technorati currently tracks more than 250 million tags (July, 2007). There are plenty of tag sharing sites today, like stumbleupon, delicious and ma.gnolia. I’ve blogged about smart uses for tagging sites before.

Steven Johnson, author of Emergence, envisioned the results of this phenomenon in 2002:

“Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts…And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher-level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up.”

The Technology Effect

Enabling this huge public publishing push has been the availability of cheap, easy to use publishing technology. Blog software is free and extremely easy to use. Computers have built- in video cameras, and phones have built-in cameras and video. Anyone can be an online, multimedia publisher today.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is the ultimate consumption technology. RSS allows publishers to feed their content simply and easily from their web sites to their readers. When readers subscribe to their RSS feeds, they’re automatically delivered to email inboxes, to phones and PDAs - anytime information is updated. Information comes to you as it happens… I’ve blogged a ton about RSS here, so go explore.

Basically, you can subscribe to favorite sites or  you can set up persistent searches for categories (tags or phrases) you’re interested in, and anytime someone tags their content with your search phrase, you’ll have it delivered right to you immediately. RSS is built into blog software, to social networking applications and into web sites. All you have to do is turn it on, and you’ll notice RSS icons are cropping up everywhere online.

The Read/Write Web

Largely as a result of these forces, the profession of journalism has gone well beyond credentialed reporters and into the hands of bloggers.  New York University’s Jay Rosen on his PressThink blog wrote of the current state of journalism:

“1. The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most (not all) of today’s journalism comes out of the market economy.

2. Journalism had become the domain of professionals, and amateurs were sometimes welcomed into it—as with the op-ed page. Whereas the weblog is the domain of amateurs and professionals are the ones being welcomed to it.

3. In journalism since the mid-nineteenth century, barriers to entry have been high. With the weblog, barriers to entry are low: a computer, a Net connection, and a software program like Blogger or Movable Type gets you there. Most of the capital costs required for the weblog to “work” have been sunk into the Internet itself, the largest machine in the world (with the possible exception of the international phone system.)”

And with smart RSS platforms, people can now instantly read feeds from within their email, react to them by adding their comments or thoughts, and publish their reactions along with the original feed and their own relevant tags to their own blog, their company’s intranet site or Wiki.

In addition, my Search Engine Marketing-based Public Relations (SEMPR) approach is based on the following tenets:

1) People are increasingly going online first when looking for information about a product or service to purchase. (Source: WOMMA)

2) The Internet is the only medium in which trust is raising vs. television, newspapers, and other media outlets (Source: Forrester Research)

3) People trust word-of-mouth recommendations by 2:1 over other sources in their purchase decisions. (Source: McKinsey)

4) Journalists and analysts are not the key influencers even for Business to Business (B2B) purchases that they used to be; while new media influencers are growing in strength. (See sources below)

5) User generated content (UGC) have been effectively tagged by people with authority – their creators, viewers, detractors and admirers.

There are very compelling statistics that support these tenets and our different, SEMPR approach to building sustainable conversations:

- 76% of Americans don’t believe advertising – Yankelovich, 2005

- 92% of Americans rate WOM of friends, family, and others as the best source of ideas and information (up from 67% in 1997) – GfK NOP/Roper 2005

- WOM ranked as #1 driver of directly influencing technology or services purchase decisions – CNET Business Network

- 85% of U.S. marketing executives plan to incorporate WOM, customer evangelism and blogs into their marketing mix – CMO Magazine Survey 2007

- 74% of people hearing a personal, negative recommendation were influenced to buy another brand – Millward Brown, 2005

SEMPR, then, is about leveraging the activities of people searching, categorizing, tagging, sharing and talking with each other online. Who better to manage those activities (from a business perspective) than those responsible for positioning an organization, their products, their effects on markets, etc.

Why not SEMPR?

Any marketer living in the 21st century, and responsible for a web site, should know three fundamentals of optimizing a web site for search.  However, most marketers leave even the basics up to their internal or external web resources. That is an expensive, irresponsible practice.

The basics are just that - three fundamental rules every marketer should understand. So I’m going to spell them out here in the hope that marketers (and the people who serve them) will understand these concepts well enough to use them in making every day marketing decisions.

Decisions like:

• How do you decide on a new content management system (CMS) to help you maintain your site without knowing whether it’s built to fulfill the basics?
• Beyond that, whom should you ask to add content to your site without knowing the basics? (What skills do you look for? How do you vet candidates? Do you already have people capable of doing so on your team?)
• How do you evaluate your search engine marketing (SEM) vendor without knowing the basics? (As above, how do you judge a potential working relationship without knowing even the fundamental rules? Are they willing to share the basics with you?)
• How do you evaluate the effective integration of your marketing messages oline? What are your potential positioning challenges as they relate to this very important medium?

So here we go - commit these three basics to memory, and you’ll be a much better marketer for it.

Optimizing Your Site

1) Your “Title tag” is the most important optimization tool on the page. You are limited to 64 characters in a title tag, which is sometimes called a “Browser title” in a CMS system. You should have a title tag for each page of your site, as it’s the first signal of relevant content to search engines.

The title tag in this case is: ‘The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia’ which is 59 characters long. It provides contextual meaning for people and spiders as they assess content on a site. In this case, the keywords they’ve optimized for are the brand, “news,” and “multimedia.”

Your CMS system or your web designers should have the capacity of creating relevant title tags for every page on your site. Consider your keywords carefully, and use them craftily. Even 64 characters can be enough!

Hint: Consider putting your best writer (perhaps in your PR department) on the title tag case.

2) Once you have keywords selected for each page on your site, use them in your headlines and in the first paragraph of your body copy. Again, keywords provide context, and spiders (and people) look to headlines and will read the first paragraph (if you’re lucky) to see whether they’ve come to the right place.

This goes for regular pages on your site, as well as landing pages from your pay per click ad campaigns.

Hint: Your PR folks are great at writing headlines and killer first paragraphs. Perhaps you can have them look at your web site and help optimize it…

Optimizing for Search Result Actions:

3) Your “Meta description” is what people see when they get search results, and is limited to 160 characters (in Google, which has more than 60% of the search market, so you might as well use their limits):

 

In this case, the meta description is: “CNN.com delivers the latest breaking news and information on the latest top stories, weather, business, entertainment, politics and more.” which is 151 characters, and provides plenty of context for me to decide whether the site has relevant content for me there…

Most CMS programs will allow you to input a meta description for every page on your site. Use the tool to make your results meaningful - especially to people who have plenty of choices as they review search results.

Knowing just these three basics of search will improve your results immensely. And it’ll improve your confidence along the way…