As far as takeaways go, we’ve still got searching for stuff as being the second most common / popular / loved activity across all known age groups. Obviously a similar breakdown how people search would be fairly useful as well.

So, across the board, irrespective of age, the most common uses of the internet are as follows:

• Email
• Search engine use
• Seeking health information
• Getting news
• Buying products
• Making travel reservations or purchases
• Doing online banking
• Looking for religious information
• Rating products, services, or people
• Making online charitable donations
• Downloading podcasts

It’s interesting to not that out of all the various internet activities listed, the only one that’s seen a decrease is blogging. Now the main reason for this will be the splintering of traditional blogging activities that would constitute a post in the dim and distant post being usurped by other services / activities.

For example, the posting and sharing of basic links and informational snippets is now more suited to things like twitter, facebook, tumblr and various other social network sites. Blogs are now for adding context or original content.

And that’s just fine by me.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

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Does anyone else remember this show?

Since one of our readers emailed me today to heckle / question why we hadn’t posted in awhile, I thought it might be good to give everyone an update on what’s going on here in our little corner of the Ohio Valley with a housekeeping update:

• Generally, if we’re not blogging it’s because we’re swamped, and that’s the case again.  Which is beyond stupid for a variety of reasons that any business blogger would be able to recount off the top of her or his head.
• We’re hiring and looking for good folks who can help manage our clients’ accounts.  If you’re a PPC stud / studette or new and looking to get in the field, check it out.

• The new building is 95% complete.  The conference room video monitor is up now, so it’s a bunch of loose odds and ends, like:
  • Getting the pool table delivered.  (Yes, that’s serious – no one ever believes me when I say that.)
  • Installing our new phone system.
  • Getting the doors cleaned up.
  • Getting a new sign.  Although, I’m considering changing our tagline to Be Kind: Please Rewind.

  As soon as we’re a little closer, I’ll post some new pics. We’ll also announce a business community welcome party, tentatively slated for the end of July.

• Heavens to Murgatroid, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for our own site redesign.  We’ve settled on a WordPress theme and may even get something up before the end of the twenty-teens.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management and was named a 2012 Top 25 Most Influential Pay Per Click Expert by Hanapin. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

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For those of you not aware, I’ve been teaching internet marketing at West Liberty University, a local West Virginia university about 15 minutes north of Wheeling.  That’s the class where we did the Google Online Marketing Challenge, their group project.  Well they have one other project – each had to create, post to, and maintain a blog, using WordPress (the .com – not all students in class have a Web development background).

Honestly – and I shouldn’t say that because doesn’t that imply I’m not always honest? – I’ve been really impressed by a lot of the students.  Many have really taken to this and done some great things.  So, if you believe in education and the importance of understanding things like blogging and online reputation management by younger generations entering the workforce, please take the time to visit one or more of these blogs and leave encouraging feedback.  List after the jump.

There’s seriously some good stuff here – I’ve learned from them as well.  I’ve seen different styles of writing, new formatting techniques, uses of add-ons, and more just by watching them and following along.  Not to mention new subject matter for an old guy.  Without further ado, the list in alphabetical order:

Top 25 Student Blogs at West Liberty University

http://1minutephilosphy.wordpress.com

http://2010vehicles.wordpress.com/

http://andystech.wordpress.com

http://athomp3290.wordpress.com/

http://bmcgrawwlu.wordpress.com/

http://bottom5.wordpress.com

http://chaz540.wordpress.com

http://crummittandsonvaultcorp.wordpress.com

http://dailydoseofgoodquotes.wordpress.com/

http://drawingthings.wordpress.com

http://eddievargo.wordpress.com/

http://hatchetreview.wordpress.com/

http://holbsproductions.wordpress.com/

http://jriccadonna.wordpress.com

http://julie0831.wordpress.com

http://junebugbstby.wordpress.com

http://letsdocollege.wordpress.com

http://markledesign.wordpress.com

http://sahana5588.wordpress.com

http://sidcrosby87.wordpress.com

http://westlibkid83.wordpress.com

http://whitneyelyse.wordpress.com

http://www.flowstudios.net

http://zacksmusic.wordpress.com

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management and was named a 2012 Top 25 Most Influential Pay Per Click Expert by Hanapin. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

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Of course, you could always ring a locksmith, or you could kick back and utilize your downtime by searching for “naked supermodels” on the internet.

Either this is what Justin was up to yesterday afternoon or he’d noticed the term as a referral in our search logs.

You decide.

Anyway, if you do a SERPs check yourself you won’t see the terms appearing anywhere in Google or Yahoo!, but Bing is currently ranking “naked super models” at 6 and “naked supermodels” at 16 (or 6 depending on the way the wind’s blowing) for a tag URL:

http://www.directom.com/internet-marketing-blog/tag/naked-supermodels

Make it Work…

This URL isn’t a post or a page but an archive of one of the many user-generated tags we’ve thrown up on the blog for the sake of additional context.

Wikipedia explains blog tags thusly:

Many blog systems allow authors to add free-form tags to a post, along with (or instead of) placing the post into categories. For example, a post may display that it has been tagged with baseball and tickets. Each of those tags is usually a web link leading to an index page listing all of the posts associated with that tag. The blog may have a sidebar listing all the tags in use on that blog, with each tag leading to an index page. To reclassify a post, an author edits its list of tags. All connections between posts are automatically tracked and updated by the blog software; there is no need to relocate the page within a complex hierarchy of categories.

In other words, it’s a more flexible form of categorization for you blog content that is navigable.

So, Bing is ranking an archived tag page for a reasonably competitive – yet totally unrelated – term pertaining to supermodels in their birthday suits. By clicking on that link you’re only going to find a single post about the WVU eMBA scandal that never mentions naked supermodels or even contains a picture of a clothed one.

So, what if we look at the SERPs results for all the tags Justin originally associated with his post about the WVU eMba scandal:

Download the spreadsheet here.

What we see is Bing has the most tags appearing in searches when you type those exact terms into their search engine, Yahoo! has the second most, and Google the least. (And there’s been no linking to the tag pages other than internally from the bottom of the post.)

We also see other URLs to the one the tags were originally associated with; but that’s the same with all three of the main search engines.

But which set of SERPs from which engine would you prefer? While Bing may offer you more overall terms, Google and Yahoo! are the search engines trying to rank the tags and explicitly match them with the content – it’s more targeted. Bing is ranking the tag URLs irrespective of whether there is matching content.

If you look at the results from a certain SEO angle then it appears you’re getting more bites of the search cherry with Bing. But, as a user I’m getting closer to the information if I’m being sent straight to a relevant page rather than an archived tag page that I may have to spend some time scrolling through in order to get to the same relevant page.

But, what would you think had you come across this site and the above post if you were trawling around looking for naked supermodels?

EXACTLY!

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

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Far from it – we just get the lowest common denominator TV that we want, when we want it.

With PlayOn we have streaming Hulu to our TV via Xbox and with a UK VPN service we can get live UK TV plus as much catch-up as you’d want via any computer and streamed through our Xbox extender.

The only live American TV that ever gets an airing is that there American Idol.

It’s the wife, honest.

After Idol we normally have the pleasure of our weekly foray into the local frolicking fun that is Fox 8 News (Cleveland, that is). What’s beginning to astonish me isn’t the fact that local news actually accounts for 0.84% of the broadcast, but their insistence on running some bizarre Internet story every time I tune in – namely Wednesday or Thursday. They could run them every day of the week for all I know, but I can’t be bothered putting in that kind of phenomenological groundwork to make a point.

More often than not the story involves scaring everybody witless regarding Facebook. Still, far be it from me to channel my cynicism with Fox owner, Rupert Murdoch, also owning MySpace. I also can’t verify if similar stories are run through all local Fox networks around the country. And if they aren’t claiming Facebook will eat your children, they’re reporting tales of the Internet in such a way that would keep Spock with a permanently raised eyebrow – like he was on a Botox IV drip or something.

“Really, Captain.”

For example, this week we had the tale of some local Cleveland faith healer healing folks over the Internet on his laptop. For me, that wasn’t the weirdness in the story. Half the story revolved around him using Skype and how everybody involved in the online healing process emitted a unique hum (sound, not smell) through his laptop speakers. When contacted, Skype offered a rather sedate sound bite about its ability to send crystal clear audio and video calls over the Web.

Betwixt and between Fox 8’s Fortean Times / scare reporting on all things Internet, they had, of all things, an hour long Blogapalooza a couple of weeks ago in order to get folks to sign up and start using their new Website. The cameras were behind the scenes as all the local news dignitaries tapped merrily away writing blog posts and adding content to the site along with – hopefully – some local viewers.

Their goal was 200 and they got somewhere near; and boy, were they loving the Internet that night.

You have to give them some serious props for embracing their viewers in this way, apart from the fact they spend the rest of the time pointing out how the rest of the Interwebs is some circus sideshow tearing asunder the very fabric of society.

All very passive / aggressive.

But, this love / hate relationship with the Web is easily fostered in anybody. Just sit in front of an average Twitter stream for ten minutes and you’ll soon know what I’m talking about. But, these head slapping moments tend to always come with context – you can follow links, search, and participate in the wider conversation surrounding any given story.

Fox 8 still did a great thing trying to kick some life into their new site by getting viewers to set up blogs and contribute other content. You see, they’re a local news station for local people, and to have whoever from Mayfield Heights, or ‘disgruntled’ from Avon write about their local areas can work wonders in terms of long tail local keywords – [keyword] + location.

And this is something any local business can do. Incorporate a business blog that not only talks about your core services or products but also with a local slant. As wonderfully ego-fluffing it might be to claim you rank on the first page for whatever term in Ghana, there’s nothing quite like somebody from within walking distance getting in touch or popping in actually spending a dollar or three.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

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I never got round to filling you in as to what went down at SES Chicago, did I?

Not that you remember nor care I suppose.

Well it went alright if truth be told. I even enjoyed the slight distraction mid-presentation of somebody clearing the garbage bins then opening the roller shutter door.

Not since Oscar the Grouch had a lady grouch round has so much clattering and banging gone on unabated.

Oscar the Grouch

Although I doubt we’ll see a repeat of that at SES New York seeming the Blogging for Business session is being held in the Grand Ballroom of the New York Hilton – unless I get Steve Wozniak to help explain my presentation via the medium of interpretive dance:

Bless

Anyway, the line-up has been expanded this time:

• Jennifer Evans Laycock, Director of Social Media, SiteLogic

• Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Service

• Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing

• Paul Woodhouse, Director of Organic Web Strategies, Direct Online Marketing

Should be fun.

UPDATE:
And whilst we’re at it I might as well direct you to our Internet Marketing Speakers page if you’re interested in either Justin or myself speaking at your event.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

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By hook or by crook I’ve always managed to avoid public speaking engagements. Whether it’s a case of getting lost in London during rush hour, or just being on the wrong side of the pond at any particular invite, my air of international blogger of mystery has remained fairly intact.

You see, I never thought that writing a business blog about a small sheet metal shop in the backend of nowhere would cause such a fuss. I neither expected nor particularly wanted to appear in newspapers or have to explain The Tinbasher as a business blogging case study to an all-knowing throng at SES Chicago on December 10th. But, such is the indirect effect of blogging.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s flattering and I’m extremely grateful to Jennifer Laycock, Editor-in-Chief at Search Engine Guide, for thinking me worthy of filling the spot, but I’m thinking they must’ve been short or something.

But I can’t imagine it’ll be any tougher than the time I came from behind my drums to a room of 500 to sing “I Wanna Be Your Dog” only to see 200 still there by the time I’d finished. Nor will they avert their gaze and cover their faces when I get up to speak as used to happen during my English teacher training to a group of Muslim women in Blackburn. And unless you’ve given a best man’s speech in Budapest to a room consisting of 80% Hungarians and 20% English speakers with a translator who kept asking you what your punchlines meant, you aren’t worthy of speaking in public. Although, the English contingent did make fools of themselves when the bride’s father announced something in Hungarian and we all started clapping assuming it was a moving tribute to the bride and groom only to be told that he’d asked everybody if they could move the tables and chairs to clear the dance floor.

Anyway, I have to confess to feeling a tingle of excitement about this, as the Search Engine Strategy Conferences are big events that take place throughout the calendar across the globe. There are also plenty of sessions I’m looking forward to attending and people I’d like to rub shoulders with. With any luck I’ll come back chock-full of additional knowledge with a few new twitter buddies to boot.

So, if you have any presentation or speaking tips seeming I’m at the novice end of the speaking spectrum and it isn’t one of the key elements we’re taught during high school in the UK, I’m listening.

Although, telling me to change my accent isn’t going to fly.

Oh, and if you fancy a trip up to Chicago for the SES Conference I can get you 20% off the price of a pass if you’re interested.

Who says we don’t give value for money round here.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

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The bottom line is that blog has always been a fairly meaningless and misleading term in some respects. As with all forms of social media, blogs allow for interaction; in this case between writer and reader. They’re open-ended conversations which can become entirely different beasts once people have expanded upon or debunked your original thoughts in the comments box or elsewhere on the Web.

Open source ideas.

It’s this concept of blogging that has me disagreeing a little with this particular opening gambit in this post:

Blogging has become so pervasive and influential that the lines between blogging and the mainstream media have disappeared.

I agree wholeheartedly that blogging has become pervasive and influential, but – and I’m well aware that the writer may not have meant it in such a way – I don’t believe there isn’t a distinction between blogging and the mainstream media. You see, in many ways blogging is the nemesis of mainstream media. One is Linux and the other Microsoft. One is open source and the other is proprietary. Blogging checks facts with an open agenda from the outset while the mainstream media is agenda driven with its facts checked by legal teams prior to publishing.

Further on, the article provides a quote from one of the bigwigs at Technorati:

“Blogs are now mainstream media,” said Richard Jalichandra, CEO of Technorati, in an interview with eMarketer. “We’ve certainly seen that with the number of professional, semiprofessional and passion/enthusiast bloggers who are creating real media experiences. At the same time, you’re also seeing mainstream media come the other direction to add blog content.”

But this can get dragged out by better media commentators (Andrew Sullivan has an excellent piece as to why he blogs here) than me, and the point is that we all now recognize blogs and interact with them on a regular basis. Or at least sites that contain some form of blog functionality.

Blogging as an amorphous group (otherwise known as the blogosphere) is posting ever increasing and more impressive numbers, though:

comScore Media Metrix found that blogs had 77 million unique visitors in the US in August 2008, compared with 75.1 million unique visitors to MySpace and 41 million to Facebook.

So it’s essentially true that blogs are becoming ever more main stream in the consciousness of those that use the Internet. You’re more inclined to compliment your news intake with opinion from blogs; and you’re more inclined to trust a company that speaks candidly and openly about itself and its products via its own company blog.

But it’s false to assert that it’s all one big happy melting pot where the mainstream media and corporate agendas have overtaken and swallowed up new media. It’s similarly false to counter the opposite.

However, I do know which I’d prefer to influence the other more.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

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Just when I thought I had said all I could say about the WVU eMBA scandal from an online reputation management perspective, I was sent a link to this article:

Interim WVU president has big goals — but don’t count on him blogging

Big thank you to Jason Keeling for sending out this article from the Charleston Daily Mail via twitter.  Oh and if you’re into that sort of thing, feel free to follow me on twitter.  We can discuss hopes and dreams 140 characters at a time.

The title’s a bit misleading, but good editors will sometimes do that to draw eyeballs.  That’s why this post was almost named “Naked Supermodels Bomb Panda Bear Orphanage.”

Here’s the money part to the article, emphasis mine:

Interim West Virginia University President C. Peter Magrath said he plans to focus heavily on [three items].

But don’t expect him to blog.Magrath’s predecessor, Mike Garrison, was the first WVU president to type out his thoughts about the university on a blog — jargon for “Web log.” The venture eventually ended up being a sounding board for his critics over the Heather Bresch scandal.

“I don’t believe in blogs,” said Magrath. “You get a lot of crap. A lot of stuff in the blogs really bothers me because it’s one of the things that’s hurting traditional mainstream journalism is that unqualified, untrained people suddenly start reporting on stuff and it starts getting legs and running.”

[Hits head off desk three times, takes advil, bangs head again.]

For a quick recap of the Heather Bresch scandal strictly from an online reputation management perspective, please see the following:

• Extreme Online Reputation Management: WVU, Mylan, & Governor’s Office Edition
• Update – WVU President Mike Garrison Emails Employees
• Governor Manchin Emails State RE: Daughter’s WVU MBA Scandal
  

Let’s do a quick recap with everything wrong here.  These are the comments I left on the article on the Daily Mail Web site along with some extra info since I’m not bound by a 1000 character limit here:

A couple common misconceptions in this article by both Mr. Anderson and President Magrath that are very, very common:

1. “The venture eventually ended up being a sounding board for his critics….”

   While technically accurate, this statement is misleading. People also defended President Garrison on his blog. He had an excellent opportunity to address his critics there, but waited too long to respond to the crisis and never responding to any commenters. He had people creating a conversation on his turf, but no involved parties were willing to making it a real conversation.  It’s sad to say, but I have had WVU officials agree with me that this will probably be a text book case on how not to respond to a crisis in today’s Web 2.0 world.

   Let me also be clear – having a blog was a good decision by Garrison, one he should be proud of.  It was the execution that was lacking.

2. “‘I don’t believe in blogs,’ said Magrath. ‘You get a lot of crap.’”

   I’m not going to be that guy that says, “What do you mean you don’t believe in blogs?  Do unicorns write them?”  A. I don’t want to demean President Magrath.  By all accounts he’s a really good pick by the WVU Board of Governors and I wish him all the success in the world.  B. That would be silly; unicorns would need gigantic keyboards to be able to type out a blog.

   The folks who attended the Next Generation Marketing series should already be light miming the words I’m about to type.  “Blogs” could be replaced in that sentence by any # of words. How many columnists, movies, songs…are truly good let alone great?  90% of everything is – in President Magrath’s words – “crap.”  Apologies to the fine folks over at firejoemorgan for stealing they’re analogy.  (Fair warning: don’t click that last link if profanity or sabremetrics offend you.)

3. “‘A lot of stuff in the blogs really bothers me because it’s…hurting traditional mainstream journalism is that unqualified, untrained people suddenly start reporting on stuff and it starts getting legs and running.”

   MSM has its place and is very valuable. And some blogging is done very dangerously and suffers from not having checks and balances. But on the whole, it has added to the discourse of our society.  Many important stories have only reached the public because of blogging.  Plus the traditional press has given light to many stories that should have stayed locked in a basement.

   Also, can we please put an end to this main stream media vs. blogging.  It’s just silly.  That’s like debating spaghetti vs. tacos.  They’re both awesome sometimes.  And sometimes really bad.

Here’s the main point I want to make, my flag in the ground if you will, which was also my flag in the ground at the Next Generation Marketing conference series this past spring:

The real question isn’t whether blogging is good or bad – it’s neither.  The conversation will happen.  The question is whether or not you want to join the conversation. It’s going to happen somewhere – why not take part and have your voice heard?

I sincerely wish President Magrath and everyone at WVU the best of luck in moving forward and representing our state proudly.

Frankly I’m not sure he should do a blog since he’s an interim president and has a lot of other work that needs to be fulfilled.  I just hope the next President will take President Garrison’s lead and bring the blog back to the office.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management and was named a 2012 Top 25 Most Influential Pay Per Click Expert by Hanapin. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

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If you go and take a look at the new archives page I’ve thrown up, you’ll notice (in descending order) a search form, monthly archives, archives by category with their own RSS feed, a latest posts section, and a TAG CLOUD. This just allows you to scavenge through our past piffle in a manner you may find suitable.

It’s all too easy for us to assume you know what we’re prattling about, but I can assure you that I wouldn’t have the first idea about the jargon associated with the inner sanctum of any industry. And nor would most people unless they’d spent a bit of time working in it. I wouldn’t have the first nor faintest idea of even burger flipping [or insert other stereotypical menial career smackdown here] lingo were it the first I’d ever clapped ears on it.

Because we have these little chats on the blog quite often and because we think you care enough to listen, we have it in our minds you’ve taken most of this on board.

But that probably isn’t the case, is it? You haven’t exactly memorized our Internet Marketing Terms Glossary, have you?

So, today I’m going to quickly explain what a TAG CLOUD is and why it’s useful from an SEO and usability perspective.

If you trot over to the archives page itself and scroll towards the bottom of the page, you’ll come across a whole heap of words jumbled-up in various fonts sizes. The reason why some of these words (or tags) are bigger than others is due to the numbers of times they’ve been used at the bottom top of one of our blog posts.

So, the bigger the tag, the more times it’s been used and you can safely deduce that that’s what a blog’s content waffles about the most.

A tag is much more like a specific keyword that you associate with a post and provides more of a detailed description about a post than a more generic category does. For example, if you click on one of the tags at the bottom top of this post (underneath the title), you’ll be taken to a separate page that contains this posts and any other posts that have been similarly tagged along the way.

These useful little tagged keyword snippets are then picked up by blog search engines. Users can search and find recent and not so recent posts that have been tagged with that particular keyword.

They also provide an extra semantic meta layer of context to the meaning of a post.

Has that cleared that up – like a prescription ointment? Or was it something you’d never thought about and now hate me for having made you done so?

Please feel free to add anything you think I may have missed or to ask any related questions in the comments below.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

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