Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

Google announced they’re expanding their search into old newspaper archives (via Reuters), and in a stunning coincidence today, United Airlines shares lost nearly all of their value.

How are these two things related, you ask?

Well, according to an article in today’s NYTimes called “United Shares Plunge on False Bankruptcy,” a false rumor started spreading this morning that United had declared bankruptcy. According to the Times, a Google search started the cascade of events…

“United said the rumor occurred when the Web site of The Sun-Sentinel, a Florida newspaper, posted a six-year-old article from The Chicago Tribune archives about United’s previous bankruptcy filing. The airline operated under bankruptcy protection from 2002 through 2006….

….The outdated article received wide attention when it appeared that it was posted on Bloomberg News by a reporter for Income Securities Advisors, an investment research firm in Miami that tracks information about distressed companies.

Richard Lehmann, the founder of Income Securities, said the company’s reporter discovered the article during a routine search on Google for information about bankruptcy filings in 2008. A link to the old Chicago Tribune article appeared as the first search item, bearing a current date, not its original date, Mr. Lehmann said.

When the reporter clicked on the link, it navigated to the United Airlines article on the front page of the Sun-Sentinel Web site, next to a radar map showing the location of Hurricane Ike, Mr. Lehmann said.”

The context for the Google search certainly looked like it was “ripped from today’s headlines.” And can you imagine the confusion for United employees, wondering why their shares were halted from the NY stock exchange today amidst bankruptcy rumors?

I applaud the notion of scanning newpaper archives (quite literally scanning, in this case) so there’s no possible confusion by well-meaning researchers as to the date(s) of their results.

Meanwhile, the coincidence of the two articles appearing within moments of each other in my RSS reader was not lost here.

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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…

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I keep getting phone calls from 312.458.9614. They call me every couple of days and never leave a message. I have missed them every time, and I’ve been getting irritated, wondering who it is. I finally decided to Google ‘area code 312′ and found quickly the calls are originating in Chicago. But the better news? The second result in my Google search offered a little hope:

It seems that 800Notes.com will allow you to type in that pesky number and reveal to you the originator, in my case, the Audi service follow up survey folks. Now I’m not irritated any more.

Although my car is currently parked in my garage, for fear of driving it until the service department opens on Monday morning… As we were driving home this morning from the market, it started clunking and making very scary noises, such that I thought we’d popped a tire. That would have been something I could manage.

As it is, I’ll choose not to answer that call until I can drive the thing fearlessly again.

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I’m signed up for Inverge 2008 on September 4 & 5; and have begun to scope out the speaker list for real. And there are some exciting new speakers covering media and content convergence, and the convergence of our virtual and physical worlds… but what makes me especially happy are the people I know who’ve been selected to speak.

Blasts from My Past

My list of familiar faces is pretty eclectic:

Michael Tchao - GM of Nike’s Techlab. Michael used to be my next door neighbor when I lived in the Pearl. Relocating from SFO, I was thrilled that the launch of his Nike+ product (connecting the iPod to running more closely) went so very well. He’ll be speaking on connecting the physical and digital communities. I’m there.

Erin Holland - GM and EVP of Edelman’s Portland office. I almost walked right by Erin the other day on my way to get coffee without recognizing her. Luckily she was with Terri Nopp, also of Edelman, whom I’ve seen more recently… sheesh. Erin and Terri and I met when they were launching the Edelman office here about six years ago. It’s great to see someone work so hard to succeed in building a thriving business here in PDX. We’ve got a rich PR community here, and Erin will be speaking on how PR is impacted by interactive convergence. It’s certainly not getting simpler as a result…

Scott Kveton - VP of Open Platforms at Vidoop and Chairman of the OpenID Foundation. Speaking to Scott is the equivalent of getting caffeinated. His “social everything, everywhere, all the time” topic should be extremely entertaining.

Richard Rosen - I’ve known Richard for the longest of all of these folks, having met him almost fifteen years ago when he was the direct marketing guru here in PDX at Rosen-Brown. I’m looking forward to hearing him speak on convergence in 2008. In 1994 he was talking convergence of brand and direct, which is what he’s known for. It’ll be fun to see how far he’s taking convergence now.

Steve Gehlen’s put together another impressive conference this year. I’m just glad I’m going to be able to reconnect with old friends to boot. BTW, 2 for 1 conference tickets are still available - up through August 31. Join me at the conference.

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As reported yesterday over on Techvibes, Marqui has a new set of owners, an investment group that includes SIL Enterprises, Kystal Financial Corporation, Abraxus Holdings, and Ogilvie Communications.

I found it interesting, in talking with Rob over at Techvibes, that he received three copies of the email notification from three Marqui customers within a couple hours of the morning announcement. The PR agency got around to sending their notice late in the afternoon. I’m sure that was intentional, but really. It just makes the agency look silly.

I think it’s time to admit: staging announcements simply doesn’t work any more. The more we try to orchestrate communication, the more we’re getting in our own way.

Meanwhile, I wish the new owners well. I hope they can take good care of the customers of Marqui, and continue to improve a product that used to make me extremely happy and proud.

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