theMediaFlow » Speaking

ION Search 2013: Keyword Research Presentation

Nichola Stott — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 11:04:47 +0000

On Friday 18th April I spoke at ION Search on the Keyword Research panel, alongside James Murray of Experian/Hitwise, Stephen Emerson of The Scotsman and moderated by Kevin Gibbons of BlueGlass UK.

My short presentation looked at how one element of keyword research (looking at existing organic search visits by keyword) is becoming less and less meaningful, thanks to how much of that data is no longer provided. I presented some “hacky” solutions to extract some meaning from that data but on the whole my focus was around accepting that this data-source is no longer statistically viable and instead we should be looking more towards researching what our potential customers want to know in relation to our products; what problems are they seeking to solve – and by that token what keyword inform these requests for information.

My premise is that we need to move away from keyword research towards a rounded-content research process that identifies topics/keyword ideas that speak to all stages of your customers’ purchase-journey (through search.)

Not Provided? Get Over It! Moving from Keyword Research to Content Research from theMediaFlow

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Leveraging Assets, Tools and Process-Change to Create Business Stories

Nichola Stott — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:46:45 +0000

In my presentation at ION Search 2013 I spoke about how search marketers can use genuine business stories from which to create meaningful content for earned-link strategies. The main premise of my talk is that advice around “create engaging content” for linkbuilding might be well-intentioned, but it’s no magic bullet. In fact advice like this raises more questions than it answers; like “what makes content engaging?” “what do our potential customers want to know?” “what do we do with the ‘engaging content’”?

There’s so many ways to answer these questions and a sophisticated content strategy will encompass a range of approaches. Much of this is dependent on your business brand- image in terms of what kind of tactics and content-types are fitting. For example an irreverent and humorous social media campaign wouldn’t sit well with a business that manufacturers medical equipment. For reasons of time and brevity I focused on something that every business has in common; which are assets around people, products and policies.

Using Your Business Assets to Generate Stories from theMediaFlow

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On The Edge Manchester, 23rd May: Nichola Stott Speaking

Nichola Stott — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:58:32 +0000

I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be speaking at this years one-day digital marketing conference On The Edge, Manchester. The conference brings together hundreds of business professionals from the most influential brands to learn the secrets of digital marketing success. On The Edge, Manchester will be held on Thursday 23^rd May 2013 at the Renaissance Manchester City Centre Hotel and I’ll be speaking about Super-charging Your Organic Search Traffic – How Structured Data Can Make Your Search Result Stand Out from the Crowd

I’ll be helping you to understand that a quality organic search strategy is so much more than keywords and links. It’s about ensuring your whole presence and experience in search is enticing and straight-forward. In the session we’re going to look at how using structured data delivers attractive and enticing Rich Snippets for your search results, giving you the competitive edge.

Hope to see you there.

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Earning Links Using Business Assets. My Presentation from SearchLondon Meet-up

Nichola Stott — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:09:05 +0000

I was delighted to present to members of the Search London Meetup group at Google’s new Shoreditch Campus.

My topic was earning links by telling stories. In particular I focused on leveraging business assets to create those stories . The main point I stressed is that earning links is a three-stage process. First ideation, then content creation, then distribution. It’s not enough to create good-looking content, or good quality content. Without an idea behind it or a story to tell the content is one-dimensional and lacks the required value to earn links (or social shares for that matter). It’s not enough to create good content, from a great idea and then expect people to link to it. There still needs to be a distribution phase. We still need skilled people to identify the right online audience for our stories, we need to conduct outreach to the people that write the content for those online audiences to position our story to them or offer our story wholesale.

If we don’t have a story to tell through our content then it’s hard to earn those links. This presentation looks at the ideation stage of the link-earning cycle.

Earning Links Using Business Assets from theMediaFlow

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Think Visibility – 5th Birthday – Peter Handley talking about Rich Snippets

Peter Handley — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:55:39 +0000

I am pleased to be able to announce that I’ll be speaking at Think Visibility on its 5th Birthday on Saturday 2nd March 2013.

I’ve been fortunate to attend a number of events here before, and am looking forward to stepping up and giving a talk.

I’ll be speaking about Rich Snippets – reviewing the various ways that you can enhance your search listings, giving some easy ways to get this implemented on your own websites.

I’ll also be looking at the ways that they can play nicely together when you mix them up, and digging through the stats we’ve collected to illustrate what benefits these bring to your search marketing efforts.

If you can’t wait until Think Visibility, why not read my post from last year where I look at some of my adventures with rich snippets!

Hopefully see you there!

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SES London 2013 – Nichola Stott to Speak on Earned Link Strategies

Nichola Stott — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 12:35:05 +0000

I’m delighted to announce that I will be speaking at one of the search industry’s leading conferences this year, that being SES London. The event takes place over four days, kicking off with an on-site training academy on Monday 18th February until Thursday 21st February at the QEII conference centre in Westminster.

I will be speaking on day 2 of the full conference (Wednesday 20th February) on the topic of Earned Link Strategies, which is a subject close to my heart and has been ever since founding theMediaFlow in 2009. It’s always surprised and mystified me as to why agencies would spend time and money paying to place links on poor quality websites that have absolutely no reason to be there. Why not invest that budget on creating content that attracts relevant links that bring quality traffic? I’ve been writing about this topic for a number of years now and come SES, will be sharing our asset audit and creative approach to devising an earned link strategy for your organic search campaign.

In the meantime here’s a few articles I’ve written for SearchEngineWatch to give you a flavour of what you’ll find out, including future-proofing your strategy and defining a good link.

Bises!

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Nichola Stott to Speak at UK Search Conference – January 23rd 2013

Nichola Stott — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 11:36:09 +0000

Team ‘MediaFlow were delighted to attend this years’ UK Search Awards back in November, though as I was on the judging panel we were excluded from entering this year. The standard of entries in 2012 were very high and selecting the award winning agencies and campaigns took an experienced panel some time!

Unfortunately not the droid I was looking for.

On January 23rd, the second UK Search Conference will take place at the Commonwealth Centre, in London. This conference will feature presentations and panels from the judges and most interestingly, showcase presentations from all the award-winners; detailing how they approached their award-winning campaigns to generate client success.

I will be speaking about linkbuilding in 2013, coming from the perspective of the best links are those that are earned, which has always been the core of our linkbuilding philosophy at theMediaFlow. Tickets are only £95 which is extremely good value for a packed agenda and the chance to hear how industry-leading, award-winning search marketers deliver real results for their clients.

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Brighton SEO 2012 Presentation: Serendipitous Search Imagined

Nichola Stott — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:33:36 +0000

I had the pleasure of speaking at one of the SEO-industry top conferences on Friday, the fantastic Brighton SEO. I was asked to accept the challenge of a “pecha kucha” style 20:20 presentation, which means you have twenty slides, which auto-forward every twenty seconds, if you are ready or not! I chose to talk about what I believe to be the future of search on mobile, which Google describe as a “serendipity engine”, using a users total context to present search results before the user has even thought to look.

Here’s my slides and explanatory notes:

Brighton SEO 2012: Serendipitous Web Search on Mobile

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1. Mobile Serendipity: How Google Plan to Send Users Search Results Before We Have Even Thought to Look!

2. Serendipitous search, or the concept of a “serendipity engine” is something that Google spokespeople Marissa Mayer and Eric Schmidt have spoken about frequently in interviews and at conferences in the past few years.

A product in development Serendipitous search is under Marissa Mayer’s remit, and has been referenced often since her move to VP Geo/Local. Before looking at these references it’s interesting to remind ourselves that Mayer’s’ background is AI – that being her major at Stanford.

3. Of course, it’s difficult for an outsider to “predict” the future when imagining what Google may have in development and the required product and data points to facilitate this; however we can combine information freely shared, with known developments in existing product, combined with general evolutions in tech to hone our intuition. So what do we know thus far?

4. As far back as 2009 Mayer and Schmidt were speaking about development plans for “serendipity”. A mobile “opt-in” service. Combining a users total context to get a picture of what might be useful and relevant to them in the moment. I first became aware of the concept in a Telegraph interview in 2009, which is from where the quote in slide four is taken from.

Required data/intelligence points for serendipitous search:

5. History – To model the future we first need to know about the past. I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess as to how much history would be required to found behavioural inferences, however according to Hitwise there were 2.2 BN searches in February 2012, but for this to be behavioural, it must be personal.

6. History of all searches is of course collected and can be viewed as a log by all logged in users as a default. Though you can remove your web history don’t think that this data then stops being collected as outlined in the Google Privacy Policy, “Google maintains a separate logs system for auditing purposes and to help us improve the quality of our services for users.”

7. Proclivity – Proclivity is inclination, likelihood – defined as a tendency to choose or do something regularly. It’s therefore behavioural, related to preferences that might be shaped by past experience, cultural-social influences. The slide reference here is to caffeine, and the most significant development we’ve seen publicly for me as it might facilitate serendipity is with Instant.

8. How Instant Facilitates Proclivity Modelling

The Feedback-on-the-fly facilitated by instant allows for far more sophisticated proclivity modelling. Prior to instant feedback is more limited to interaction post query-completion, whereas now when presented with choices and the ability to edit or select on the fly, there’s a much more detailed data feedback delivered in almost realtime.

9. Community – As mentioned proclivity is behavioural and our behaviour is shaped by past experiences and influenced by culture, hence community is also important to behavioural modelling. I’m unsure as to the legal ins and outs of data-modelling in social groups, though technically if our identity and that of our social contacts exhibits behavioural tendencies significantly anomalous to other norms wouldn’t that be useful data?

10. Even pre-Google+ connectivity data is/was already available to Google for many users thanks to the social graph.

11. Our identities and connections are already well known to Google. Social circle results already favour documents shared by those in our “circle” – why wouldn’t a broader algorithm use this data?

12. Users with a detailed Google+ profile are already providing this connectivity data to Google knowingly or otherwise. Xfn rel attributes and other structured data offer interpersonal entity detail e.g. hCard, hReview “describe” properties. In this slide example I’m telling Google that the entity “Nichola Stott” on Twitter is the same “Nichola Stott” on G+ etc etc.

13. So we have History, Proclivity, Community and of course Location would be required to offer relevant search results. Products like latitude already allow us to make our location known and trackable and track that of our friends… As a mobile opt-in product I’d expect location=on to be a default requirement for Serendipitous search to be possible.

14. With all of this data, permission would be required to deliver such a product, plus consideration to privacy – which oh, of course, had a significant change across the whole of Google properties quite recently; not just in terms of the significant change to privacy policy, but also the change to https handling of query referring for logged in users.

15. I can not predict exactly what Schmidt means by this – though we might interpret this as the goal of providing machine-discovered layers of data to augment our physical behaviour. It was at this event that Schmidt (talking about the serendipity engine) singled out personal context – with permission. However given the recent Google Glasses product I’m glad I chose to mock this up using a kind of augmented reality search interface.

16. So how might serendipitous search look? I’m away from home – on business. Google know this because I use latitude and I’m opted into serendipitous search push notifications. I love coffee. Google know this because I search for coffee shops often when I’m mobile. Wouldn’t it be logical to imagine a serendipitous search prompt to find a coffee shop when I’m out at 8.00 am in a strange place?

17. Wouldn’t it also be possible for Google to notify me as to the whereabouts of contacts that I may interact with regularly that might share similar history, proclivity, community and location? And if they opt-into push notifications or “friend alerts” notify me of serendipitous happenings? But how real is this product?

18. Whilst of course my mock-up was purely for entertainment and illustrative purposes only; at the last time we heard anything publicly about the product, which was in an interview between Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch and Marissa Mayer in May 2011, Mayer revealed she expected the product to be available “inside of a two year horizon”. But what can we take from this?

19. My star take-aways for mobile even regardless of the serendipitous search product remain the same. Ensure your site is marked up correctly using schema reviews and localbusiness itemtypes and that your social media strategy is integrated and dovetailed technically as well as strategically with your owned and operated properties, so that if this product does become a reality your ahead of the game. Even if not – or even if it’s wildly different to my imaginings this is still the immediate-future direction of search in my opinion.

20. I want to give the final word to Eric Schmidt.

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Online Reputation Management & Owning the Message: My Presentation from SMX Israel 2012

Nichola Stott — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:19:35 +0000

I recently spoke at the 2012 SMX Israel search marketing conference, which took place at the Inbal Hotel, Jerusalem. I wanted to expand on my presentation here, as although the slides are on slideshare, I tend to put most of the content in the narrative.

Introduction

As this was part of a panel (with Shira Abel of Hunter and Bard, Jon Sumroy of National Positions and our fearless moderater Sam Michelson of Five Blocks) I wanted to focus quite specifically on reputation in the search results; rather than the social media sphere in order to prevent too much overlap.

My perspective on ORM in the search results (and therefore the wider content/reputation messages these results point to) is not about trying to “control” search results, but more about a strategic approach to message-management; with content-strategy, message position and communication tools being the essential stages to managing a campaign.

Online Reputation Management: Owning the Message

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Slide 1 – The “anti-hero”.

When starting an ORM project it is critical to understand and define the qualitative descriptions, feelings and associations that may be attached to the person, product or brand you are managing. After this, such qualitative descriptions need to be classified into some form of taxonomy which categorises positive, negative and neutral sentiment. Whilst there are some sentiment analysis tools out there, such as SocialMention there is a layer of intelligence, understanding and subjectivity attached to “message position” that as of yet, I’ve not found a tool to understand this completely.

As an example if I’m managing an independent stockbroker terms such as “bolshy” and “aggressive”, may be the perfect positive associations for that reputation. On the other hand, if I am working for a pop star, whose primary audience is seven year old girls, these terms would indicate an undesirable sentiment.

Slide 2 – Cultivating Bad-Ass Publicity

Managing reputation can also mean cultivating notoriety or associations that might be generally viewed as renegade or controversial. Managing reputation is not about painting a whiter than white reputation, but about promoting the position that will be business-driving for the brand or individual, regardless of what that position may be.

Slide 3 – Ryanair

As an example the low-cost airline Ryanair often communicate stories that are controversial or may be generally considered bad taste. Whilst this would not be a suitable positioning for almost all other airlines, in this case Ryanair’ positon in the marketplace is very clear. Customers know what to expect, and the volume of publicity such examples generate seeks to amplify their brand to extraordinary levels.

Slide 4 – Bad-Ass Links

In addition strategies that deliberately involve controversial communications may also act as extremely successful linkbait.

Slide 5 – Shamone!

In terms of pushing brand awareness, such tactics can be highly successful for generating interest and in fact Ryanair beat “Michael Jackson” for search volume in 2011.

Slide 6 – Poor Message Management

Of course tactics that deliberately court notoriety can backfire, as can any reputation strategy that is poorly managed from a message perspective.

Slide – 7 – No Such Thing…

That said, I generally believe that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Many seemingly disastrous situations can be turned into a positive as long as the response is timely, well-handled and widely communicated.

Slide 8 Weinergate

Take the example of former Congressman Anthony Weiner. Not the first or last public figure to be caught in a situation that suggests (ahem) indiscretion. Weiner tweeted a picture of his “manifesto” to all of his followers, presumably instead of a Direct Message to a private individual.

Whilst this isn’t the worst example of a public figure implicated in a moral transgression, I’d argue that Weiner sealed his own fate by first denying any fault, and then on a live TV interview blaming “the hackers”. Puh…lease…

People have very short memories, and if handled differently a “cheat” is not a huge spin away from a “lovable rogue”.

Slide 9 – Tools

Once you have your messaging strategy clear there are still tools of the trade that are essential for communicating. I wanted to detail just a couple of mine.

Slide 10 – Spindoctors

Apologies to PR professional friends who dislike this nickname, however there is a good reason that PR professionals are often referred to as “spin doctors”; and that is because it is these professionals and their grasp on message positioning, brand impact, wider implications, the art of communication, leveraging relationships, understanding human motive and more – who are best placed to help you define the original message; or mould a response that emphasises the desired points.

I would strongly recommend that if you do not already work alongside experienced PR professionals in ORM campaigns, then it’s a great idea to establish working partnerships with specialist PR agencies and freelancers. Their skills will help you immensely.

Slide 11 – Online News Distribution Services

Services like PR Newswire (as shown in the example slide) and BusinessWire both offer news distribution services that include online circuits, either as part of a general newswire service, or targeting online media only. In the example shown a PR Newswire service is used to great effect by the Rainbow Sash Movement, in response to a comment from Cardinal Francis George, who referenced the Chigaco gay Pride March as having common rhetoric to the Ku Klux Klan. As news of the heinous analogy spreads, the SERP results for “chicago gay pride” and similar, of course contained many references and reports of that interview. In response The Rainbow Sash Movement, quickly issues a statement via PR Newswire, calling for a demonstration and apology.

As of today, there are 670 results in Google.com for that exact statement alone, discount any additional media re-writing and reporting of the original statement.

A couple of days after the statement and mounting media pressure, an apology was issued from Cardinal George.

Slide 12 – MyNewsDesk

Another useful tool, MyNewsdesk allows communicators to create their own social news hub. Acting as a kind of central repository for any type of message “from” the organisation; the service has both push and pull mechanisms for getting [your content] to media; plus is an authoritative content-hub, and additional brand result that often features well within the first pages for brand-related queries.

Slide 13, & 14

To summarise the presentation:

1. Quantify the issue – is there a genuine reputation-risk in your client SERP, or is this actually an opportunity that can be used to our advantage?

2. Call in the wider teams. If you don’t have dedicated ORM and PR specialists in-house, then develop third-party partners to assist in message-positioning.

3. Define and own your message.

4. Use the tools available to online communicators to assist with fast and broad response.

Fellow Panellists Perspectives

Shira Abel of Hunter and Bard, shares her thoughts on the panel and her presentation. If I can track down presentations from Sam and Jon, I’ll link to them here in future.

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Digital Surrey April: Try PechaKucha!

Nichola Stott — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 12:51:53 +0000

I can hardly believe it’s over five months since we relocated from London to Alton in Hampshire, on the Surrey borders. It’s been fantastic to get a little closer to the online marketing thought- leaders outside of London for a change, and we recently took a trip to the seaside, when Nichola spoke at BrightonSEO. Our next trip out is even closer to home and is the Digital Surrey April event.

I was aware of the Digital Surrey community, and on a recent trip to leading Surrey Online PR Agency, thebluedoor to deliver some advanced SEO training via SEO PR Training; was invited to attend the next event by the team there, who are instrumental in supporting and organising the Digital Surrey events.

The event on April 20th promises to be something extra special, as the format will consist of what is known as Pecha Kucha style, which restricts each speaker to a very strict 6:40 slot.

Although tickets for Digital Surrey April have already “sold” out (it’s free, but you know what I mean) you can register your interest should space become available!

http://digitalsurreyapril.eventbrite.com/

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