This session was presented by Tina Schweiger, the President of Spoonbend, Inc. last Wednesday at SEM for SMB, a SEM conference in Austin for small-to-medium businesses.

As Tina and her assistants handed out several fun things including sheets of company logos, legal size paper, safety scissors and glue sticks, I knew that this was going to be a different kind of session. Our assignment was to cut out the logos we liked and paste them onto our sheet of blank paper. She later used examples of attendees’ logo sheets as a tool to help the attendee talk out what they want out of their brand’s identity.

Tina’s goal for this session was to show the small-to-medium business owners how their identity is at the core of your brand, especially online. When evaluating your company’s online identity, creative decisions should be made in relation to website design & increasing conversions.

This notion struck a chord with me as a search engine marketer. In SEO, we focus on optimizing websites, evaluating keywords and attracting qualified leads for our clients. However, while a site may have the best, optimal SEO campaign ever, it’s not going to provide the value it should when qualified leads come to a website with an archaic site design and an unattractive color scheme, causing the traffic to hit the back button while shielding their eyes.

What encompasses a brand identity?
• Logo – Tina called it the “visual nugget” that delivers your brand’s promise.
• Color Palette – The colors chosen to represent your brand can influence and sway your potential customers. Monochromatic color schemes are often viewed as more sophisticated, while colorful palettes can signify excitement and youthfulness. Tina also noted that some businesses need to be aware of cultural responses to color, as correlations do differ around the world.
• Typography – Font style can also visually indicate a level of sophistication.
• Voice/Tone – How content is written sets expectations with your audience.
• Design – The layout of your site needs to help your audience get to the information they need quickly.

Tina suggested re-branding about once every 10 years, which is when design trends seem to turn over. This also allows a business to utilize new technology while re-branding, such as using improved software and web design techniques to help develop an updated identity. Companies should also consider refreshing the brand’s color palette more often. This can be done by keeping the same core colors (if desired) and altering the hues or bringing in a new secondary set of color. Be aware of “micro-trends” when choosing a color palette – just because the patriotic red-white-blue scheme has been popular does not mean it’s the best choice for your brand.

Overall, I was glad I attended a session a little outside the realm of SEM from the others offered because it focused more on branding design, which is a key part of online business success along with SEM. Tina presented her creative process in an accessible, common sense style and left everyone thinking about how their online brand identity influences their site’s visitors.

Google introduced a new tool on June 24th called Ad Planner. Ad Planner is marketed as a research and media planning tool that will give advertisers another method of measuring their media audience and ROI. It seems to be targeted to reach the long-tail or niche consumers. Currently, Ad Planner is in a beta version and is available for use by invitation only. The service will be free and available to all after the initial trial period.

Ad Planner offers several, interesting features. It allows companies to search for attractive Web sites to place their ads on using specific, demographic, and usage criteria. Ad Planner can also provide keywords that can be used as search terms.

In addition, companies are able to determine what other Web sites their target audience visits. Business product manager of Google, Wayne Lin, cited the example of ESPN.com, showing that visitors to this site also tend to visit cnnsi.com and Cubs.com.

There are, however; some concerns with Google Ad Planner. For instance, the service is not equipped with costs or a brokerage system in order to enable buying. Subsequently, companies will need to seek out vendors or professional media buyers. Also, Ad Planner must be used in conjunction with other, often costly services. The service should be seen as a starting point and used in addition to other research tools.

Although Google Ad Planner may be a useful tool, it should be used with carefulness and caution. Google claims to use outside data as well as their own, but they do not disclose any specific sources. Users should also be concerned about the conflicts of interest since Google sells advertising space.

The tool has some potential, but it lacks services that are necessary to media planning.

The use of trademarks within search marketing has, of course, been a hot topic for a number of years now. Unfortunately, the actual case law on this topic is limited and inconsistent. Google’s stance is that one can advertise using trademarked terms as part of one’s key phrase, but cannot use them in the copy of the advertisement itself.

Language software firm Rosetta Stone wants to push things to the next level by suing competitors for using “Rosetta Stone” as part of their keywords. Their choice of defendant is unusual as most plaintiffs have gone after Google and their deep pockets. Perhaps Rosetta Stone realized that by instead naming their competitors in the lawsuit they would not have to face Google’s army of lawyers.

While I’m certainly not a lawyer, I believe that Rosetta Stone faces a tough road with this suit. To prevail, they will have to prove that users were likely to be mislead or confused by the advertisement. This seems like a high bar for them to get over.

I suspect the real goal is to simply get the competitors to cease advertising on keywords with Rosetta Stone’s trademarks in them. Their hope may be that their competitors quickly fold in the face of a lawsuit. It’s quite unlikely that we get any useful case law out of this.

Facebook has released a cute new application called Lexicon which calculates the bigram (two-word) frequency of potential keywords based on Facebook wall posts since January and pushes out a trend graph based on the data they have. This could be a valuable tool for clients who are interested in marketing to the Facebook demographic.

It’s also got a handful of other interesting ramifications. For instance, you really get a feel for how seasonal things can be by entering queries such as “vacation”, “swimsuit”, “bikini”, where we see growing trends to the summer—likewise for “heat wave”. News events cause interesting word correlations. For instance, note the spike in frequency for “suicide” and the spike for “Heath Ledger” coincide—apparently wall posts were a big rumor mill during Heath Ledger’s death.

This tool definitely has promising ramifications for the future of paid advertisement on Facebook. Advertisers can use the wall post data to gauge the interest of Facebook users in specific keywords or topics and use the trend data to make important decisions on their campaign. A downward trend in wall posts may herald less likelihood of the appearance of the paid advertisement. Also, the reduction in buzz may indicate less leads derived from targeting this keyword in the future. This is a good example of the utility of domain-specific data to further inform keyword-related decisions both within the domain and without—Facebook users use search engines, too, and we can extrapolate these trends out to show the interest of a specific demographic and how it impacts search volume for any given keyword.

Once the bane of all who wanted to mix form and function on the internet, Adobe has created a system to make Flash-based websites crawlable by search engines.

“Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of [Rich Internet Applications] and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player.”- Adobe.com

Previously, search engine bots could “see” Flash objects, but could not delve into them and read information like a human user could. This led to SEO best practices shunning websites with all-Flash navigation elements, or questionable SEO tactics like cloaking, where the search engine bots are shown a different website than the user. Websites would have to be created in a Flash and HTML version, thereby vastly increasing the workload involved with site maintenance and penalizing Flash-specific programs and projects, like online games and videos.

Google made an announcement on their official blog about the news, and it seems a bit cloudy yet as to whose technology is to credit here-

“Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.”

As you can see, Google’s already on board. Yahoo’s still working out some of the kinks, but it’s coming. This is a huge break for SEO and Apogee is excited to help our clients use this new technology to their best advantage!

A new study reported on Slashdot suggests that the amount of value in business associated with the “long-tail”—that is, dealing primarily in smaller quantities for niche markets—is less a wonderful thing for businesses than recently assumed. In short, greed and fear play a big role here just like it does in everything economic. People love the idea of being involved in a windfall and are afraid of picking the wrong niche and not getting enough demand, so they all try to follow the next big craze or compete on harder turfs.

What this means for SEO is that companies aren’t going to want extremely specific keywords with low competition; they want to go head-to-head with established brands. This means that rather than spending time being creative in keyword generation, search engine optimizers have to spend a lot more time paying close attention to the little tweaks which were at one point the icing on the cake to just picking the right landing page. In essence, they really have to shift their efforts to be much more detail-oriented, and extremely disciplined in our algorithm-related SEO knowledge. This will be a definite area for competition among SEO firms, especially if the trend does start going towards popular terms rather than long-tail ones.

Moderator:
Mike Grehan, Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media
Speakers:
Mitch Joel, President, Twist Image
Dustin Rideout, Account Director, Digital Strategist, Wunderman
Andy Renieris, Head of Search, Yahoo! Canada Search

Ostensibly, this session was part of the Advanced Track at SES Toronto, but it unfortunately focused primarily on what blended search is, and why you should be doing it. Given that blended search has been around for a year, and a major part of SEO for at least six months, I was hoping for a bit more in depth information. Still, there were occasional nuggets of interest.

Mitch Joel reports that during an event at the Googleplex, Google stated that 20% of all searches done every day are brand new to Google. That’s quite a bit higher than I thought it would be.

Andy Renieris announced the public release of Yahoo SearchMonkey. This is a development environment that allows a site to control the look of it’s listings in Yahoo’s natural search, blending in other media types. It does not impact a site’s placement within the rankings, just it’s look.

I wondered why there was a guy walking around the show in a monkey suit. Now I know.

In any case, users have to turn SearchMonkey on to see the results. Essentially, it is a widget. While this is not earth shattering at this time, if Yahoo integrates these changes more widely into the SERPs, it could have major impact in the future.

The final interesting comment came from Mike Grehan, who stated that blended search causes the “golden triangle” of eye tracking heat maps to go away. The eye is drawn all over the page to the new media types.

I would have hoped for more advanced information, but there were a few good pieces in this session.

“Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards.”
- Court transcript, November 2004

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”
- USA Today, April 2007

“We will make our products work out of the box.”
- Source and date unknown, but does it really matter?

“There will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.”
- Washington Post, June 2008

Ballmer may be a brilliant executive, but he leaves a lot to be desired as a prognosticator. But then, so do most who attempt to predict the future (ask me sometime about my string of incorrect predictions regarding the Democratic Primary).

That said, Ballmer’s predictions regarding the death of print are especially inane. Print was predicted to die after the creation of both radio and television. It’s still here.

Certainly, circulation has dropped for many print vehicles. And the movement of classified ads to services like Craigslist and Monster have removed some juicy revenue streams from the newspapers. But print is not going away. At least not within the next decade.

Newspapers, in particular, still have very attractive business models. Many have profit margins that online publications would love to have. And they have significant numbers of feet on the street, something the online-only publications are not likely to be able to field any time soon. Yes, they need to adjust, but those that take a long term approach are likely to do so.

And while computer screens have improved greatly, they still cause considerable eye strain with continual use. Especially the screens on smaller, mobile devices. As much as I love technology, I’d still rather sit out on the back porch with a print magazine, not a computer.

Lastly, with the number of boomers retiring in the next decade, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the demand for print media may actually increase, not decrease in the next decade.

On April 24, 2008 a sizable army of Apogeeans – the Apogee Army of Altruism –set off for the southern most tip of Austin to volunteer at the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas (CAFB).

The eighteen or so of us arrived at CAFB and made our way to the holding area to sign in and place name tags on our chests. With that difficult part of the volunteering experience out of the way our guide and host Xavier gave an overview of CAFB’s operations. Brief overview: the Food Bank is, in essence, a distribution center. Food is not handed out on-site, but rather local charities and non-profit groups place food orders, drive to CAFB in trucks, cars and trailers, pick up their orders and then provide the direct service of feeding Central Texans from their charity or non-profit organization.

It’s time to head to the Product Recovery Room. We walk through two sets of doors and into a 60,000 square foot warehouse. The ceilings live way up in the sky. It holds approximately 1.5 million pounds of food – the CAFB ships around 2.5 million pounds per month. Finally, we reach two massive swinging doors that lead to the chilly Product Recovery. We’re ushered to the back corner of the recovery room. Look up. There’s a large instruction guide hanging from the wall. It contains all of the dos and don’ts – clean all cans and pass them down the conveyor belt, check adult and baby formula for specific date guidelines, et cetera – feel free to sing along with the radio blaring in the other corner.

After a bit of a rocky start, everyone got the hang of it and we soon started cleaning, categorizing, caching the food into boxes and stacking for delivery at The Flash speed. By the time Xavier told us students to put our pencil down, we had managed to process 10,276 pounds of food that equals 8,220 meals. Hopefully, we’ll surpass that benchmark on our next trip to the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas!

First Microsoft gives Yahoo a deadline of this weekend to begin negotiations or face a hostile tackover, then reveals that maybe they don’t want Yahoo anyways.

This is beginning to look like one of my high school dating relationships.

Suffice it to say that Yahoo beating its projected numbers this week throws a new wrinkle in things. All the sudden, “nothing happens” is looking like a viable outcome.