When the networks merge, the combined total should probably be about 20-25% of the AdWords total. Now that’s of a size to start getting properly interested in optimisation, and one can justify some management time to organising and sorting it out.

Because we’re anticipating increasing client spend on the enlarged network, we’re looking at what techniques we can use to optimise. That’s what we do… optimise stuff, after digging into it. So I wanted to comment on something that I thought would be useful to do, in the larger network. I went to the Microsoft adCenter user discussion forum to contribute. And I got this, when I tried to submit a comment:

Microsoft adCenter discussion forum requires MSIE, through non-display of CAPTCHA on non-MSIE browsers.

Microsoft is making use of their advertising platform pretty difficult. Firstly, I don’t like this whole “you must use MSIE to get the experience”. That’s so 1997. These days, there are browsers that offer very usable interfaces. Oh look, I’m using three of them now – Chrome, FireFox and Safari. It’s not as if Microsoft even said “MSIE9 is so far ahead that we’re making that the standard” (because that’d be a pretty stupid thing to say, anyway), because MSIE8 *can* be used – and that’s certainly no more advanced than any of the other major browsers.

Nope, Microsoft have made de-facto that to effectively use their web interface for their advertising system, you have to run their operating system and their browser. It’s so… retro non-chic. It’s a marketing approach out of some 1970′s vendor lockin agenda.

Anyway, the point of frustration was passed today, when I realised that not only do I have to use a Windows system to interact with the advertising platform, I also have to use a Windows system to interact with the community forum. It didn’t use to be that way. A year or so ago, I could post message. Now, though, I have to complete a CAPTCHA – which, regrettably, is not visible on Chrome, Safari or Firefox, and has no recommendation as to the plugin I need to adopt. Nope, if I use a non-Windows system with a non-MS browser, they just don’t care to hear from me.

With no CAPTCHA form visible, how do I submit the form with a CAPTCHA? That’s just a design and test fail.

And there’s another thing…

If I’ve just typed a comment to your blogging platform, couldn’t you had the courtesy to let me know that I needed to be running MSIE *before* I start writing? I mean you do *know* that your “community” now requires MSIE to be used before a comment can be added? In my case, that means usurping a Windows machine used for compatibility testing and adCenter operations, so I can contribute to a discussion. I don’t feel that generous to Microsoft. I have better things to do with my time than switch machines, in order to post a comment in a discussion thread.

But that’s not even the serious thing…

If I’ve just spent five minutes typing in a reply on the forum, Microsoft knows quite a bit about me. Potential details include stuff like the pacing of characters, the previous activity of the Microsoft authentication service by that ID, the IP address, possibly backtracking the IP address, and details of the packets to indicate the type of operating system I’m using, all those browser header details, and various other clues that I’m probably a human. So if you can’t tell from my logging in and all that typing, that I’m human – how the hell are you going to tell from a single click that my advert clicking is or is not fraudulent?

How about it Microsoft? Can you actually detect bad clicks at all, or do you just guess that some percentage are bad? The amount of spend we’ve done on behalf of clients, and the ROI, has never meant that it is worth checking the adCenter fraud detection system. I think I’m getting interested now.

And why can’t Microsoft make its discussion and feedback systems accessible to other browsers, like any other competent technical organisation? What makes Microsoft so technologically incapable that a *discussion* forum requires a technology limitation on the platform used for access? This is just so primitive. I am *so* glad that I decided my organisation would not be using Windows as a standard operating platform. This level of lockin is just tedious obstructivism. At least have the courtesy to tell me when I log in that “some features of this discussion, such as replying to comments, are not possible unless you use Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 or 9″? Then I won’t waste my time trying to engage.

Microsoft has not convinced me of the Windows Advantage. It has convinced me that they are technologically primitive, and that using Windows systems would be a technological backwater. That’s the complete reverse of what they probably thought they were doing when they made this design decision. The signal I get is “if you use Microsoft products, you’re locked in, unable to choose what is best for your business, and we don’t care at all”. That’s not a good message to people who aren’t using Windows now. It is not going to convince us that using WIndows is a good idea. Forcing users to do something is weaker for branding, than exciting them.

Material disclosure: Bedford College is a client; we do not gain any financial benefit from helping them promote this event.

The talk:

Thanks to Sue Brandreth, Computing Higher Education Course Manager at Bedford College, for organising the meeting.

AdWords Is An Auction

Basically, AdWords is an auction for space, on each keyword. The more money your advert returns to Google, the more highly the advert will be ranked. If your advert is sufficiently disappointing to users, or misleading, or violates one of a bunch of rules, no amount of money will keep the advert in play. What you pay is determined by the value of the advert below you. If your competitors aren’t willing to pay a lot, you don’t pay a lot. If your advert is outrageously good, then you may end up paying less per click to beat your competitors (you’re renting the space, not each advert).

One of the basic rules of auctions, especially an auction where your payment is determined by the bidders below you, is that the more bidders there are, the higher the value of the auction to the auctioneer. So, Broad Match, the default choice for AdWords, allows Google to recruit as many advertisers to the auction as will reasonably be satisfied. And Google effectively runs an auction for each space on the screen – so increasing the pool of bidders has a large impact on the whole page of results for a keyword.

Another key element for Google and advertisers is satisfaction. If advertisers get dragged into auctions for searches that they don’t want their advert to be shown on, they’ll get some clicks, and those’ll probably be low quality clicks – poor conversions. On the other hand, users mis-key, so a certain amount of Broad Matching activity is useful – it helps you find miskeyed stuff and search queries that you hadn’t considered. But, overall, if the quality of Broad Match is bad, then you’re likely to bid lower on Broad Match, or switch to an Exact Match strategy. So there’s a pressure on Google to keep Broad Match to some reasonable matches, rather than just anything, all the time (that doesn’t mean that a few wild excursions are impossible, just less likely).

A Beautiful Mind versus Broad Match

AdWords can control the use of Exact Match to evade using Broad Match, to some extent, by telling you that search volumes are too small to match your keyword. That’s kind of true – there is a computational cost to managing a huge number of exact matches with a low likelihood of being searched for. So there’s a way to make sure that some quantity of Broad Match stays in play, without everyone heading for Exact Match. The ratio is probably determined using something derived from the Nash Equilibrium – you’ve seen that film “A Beautiful Mind”? That’s the John Nash I’m talking about.

OK, so what’s match types and search queries and auctions got to do with the Google accreditation and Agencies? I think they are intimately bound together, but through an unexpected connection… small advertisers.

Small Advertisers – Welcome To Frustration City

Small advertisers tend to have low budgets. They can’t take part in all auctions for all relevant keywords. The smartest ones use exact match, and geotargeting and the other tools – but you need to have invested time and effort to learn those, which often has a significant cost for small businesses. There’s a lot of users that just don’t understand AdWords, and don’t have the time to invest in learning.

Looking at examples I’ve handled in the AdWords Help Forum… They bid globally for a business with a 20 mile service radius. Their adverts are rubbish – describing their place of business or their name, but not what they do. Their landing pages fail to have a call to action. These advertisers tend to have a bad time with AdWords. They may abandon accounts and start again – causing Google to suspend the account because it looks like a scammer. These small advertisers complain, in numbers. They do so on the AdWords Help Forum, in their thousands.

Abandoned AdWords Users

So far, Google hasn’t really addressed the needs for these users. There was an attempt to create a Starter Edition, but as a cure, it was worse than the disease, and pushed users in directions that were less likely to lead to success, not more. The Starter Edition is gone. It didn’t solve the problem. But there’s still lots of dissatisfied users, asking for help in public.

Marketeers will recognise a classic problem here. Small advertisers, low budgets, can’t afford the services of a big agency. Larger agencies like to have clients who spend upwards of $1000/month – it’s just not cost effective for either party (agency or client) to really consider the $100/month budget client. But these smaller advertisers are present in vast numbers.

AdWords Auctions and the Small Business

What do we know about the auction? The yield of the auction depends on the count of bidders, to a substantial degree. If we can find a way to prevent small advertisers from defecting, then their low value contribution should yield a higher value contribution from larger advertisers. By taking part in a fraction of the auctions (to fit the budget) this mass of small advertisers pushes up the Average Cost Per Click. It’s in Google’s interests to make sure these small advertisers participate, and get some value.

But they’re expensive to create, these small accounts, and low yield for an agency. The Google accredited AdWords consultants and agencies out there, well, they could service these guys, but one and two person agencies tend not be supported by software – effective AdWords management software is pretty expensive. So the very small advertiser tends to be unaddressed, and tends to be dissatisfied – but Google needs them, in order to maximise returns from the largest advertisers.

AdWords – Fixing The Small Advertiser Problem

We can square this circle and resolve the conundrum, I think. What about if Google creates a support team, in a low labour cost country? You pay a little more to have the account set up, and Google uses its’ massive automation to provide a moderately successful AdWords account (statistically, some will be rubbish and some will be awesome, but on the whole, they will barely return a profit for Google). This mass of small advertisers will create a pressure on the auction, pushing up the major advertisers a few cents – on billions of clicks. That’s where the value lies.

By providing more support for small advertisers, and reducing defection, Google makes only a small amount of profit. Google can point to this near-philanthropic effort and everyone will feel good about the multi-billion behemoth doing good. But it’s more clever than that. The support for the small advertisers creates an uplift in the auction, delivering millions of dollars to billions of dollars per year, from larger businesses.

AdWords Agency Impact

But if there’s a low cost way to get your account set up and managed, what happens to the small AdWords agency? Gradually deprived of small businesses with problems to solve, these guys will be pushed out of the market – squeezed between Google below, and larger agencies above.

The new Google Marketplace appears optimised to allow the largest agencies to appear highly ranked – so there’s a force for consolidation amongst small and large agencies.

And that would solve another problem. The deceptive agencies that phone up and say they have a special arrangement with Google that lets them place companies on page 1 of search results. The staff who make these calls have no idea whether they are selling SEO or PPC – they just know there’s a special relationship and you can buy your way to the top.

That’s a brand problem from Google. It causes a number of small businesses to believe that Google’s organic results are affected by payments – which is neither obviously true (indirectly it is true – but the money paid doesn’t go to Google) nor helpful (Google benefits from appearing to be uninfluenced by third party money – a fair and impartial judge). By and large, these less-than-entirely-ethical agencies will also be squeezed. That helps Google, and in turn, encourages more advertisers and discourages spend on SEO link building (much of which is wasted after about six weeks, anyway – and the cross contamination means that on informational searches, where there is no commercial intent, Google can start to deliver better informational and less commercial content).

When will this consolidation happen? I have no idea. I’m not well plugged in to Google AdWords insiders these days. If I were, I probably couldn’t write about this, as it’d probably be part of an NDA. But I used to be well connected, and I can guess from observing recruitment (I’ve seen Google advertising for people with knowledge of the Nash Equilibrium, for example), and from thinking about auctions, and marketing… I could be wrong, of course. I’m not always right, but then so few people are. :)

AdWords Agency Consolidation

I’ll guess it’ll happen in the next year. Recessions are a good time to think about and come up with new services to extract more money. We’ve already seen experiments in some countries where Google offered to set up small accounts – in the UK, for example.

It takes a large business, like Google, time to take on and train the staff, once they’ve done the test marketing… So, I’d expect something within the next eighteen months. That’s about enough time to hire an army of third world workers, train them, and develop the supporting websites and collateral, including a physical mail, TV and phone campaign… If you aren’t already planning how to grow or merge your small AdWords agency, this may be a good time to put that consideration back into play.

This would also be a strong play to counter the consolidation of Bing and Yahoo search results, due to come on the agenda, shortly…

I’ve not considered FaceBook advertising; it’s sufficiently similar to standard demographic and content targeted advertising that I don’t think this type of review would benefit from considering it. Doesn’t mean that I won’t consider writing about it!

I’ve also not considered how the organisations *could* engage with audiences – this is a review of how they *are or are not* engaging with the FaceBook audience, and overlaps with reputation management.

We looked at Amazon, John Lewis (for American readers, John Lewis is an employee-owned department store that offers the price promise “never knowingly undersold”), Dixons (a largely European group of high street stores), Tesco (major supermarket, with increasing global presence, with online store and electronics goods sold in store) and Comet (another high street electronic goods retailer). I should point out that we have a client (Car Phone Warehouse) in this space, but this work was not done for them. I have omitted them from results, however.

FaceBook

As one of the first generation of large scale social media platforms, I’m pretty sure that FaceBook in its current form will come to be regarded as primitive. I’m not going to focus on FaceBook itself, but on the ways that current businesses are using what’s present, and the likely near-term future – the next six to twelve months. Barring, of course, some emergent and disruptive event!

Something that I’m becoming aware of is that I increasingly find people, outside the business sphere, who do not use email. They message almost entirely within FaceBook and mobile phones. Emails sent to this group are unread, unless they are sent a reminder in a format they do use – text or phone! They are largely younger – teen’s and 20′s – and often have no personal use of a computer in the workplace. Nonetheless these are buyers, potential customers. Ignoring their preferred communication methods should be a mistake that needs to be addressed – if not now, then soon, as that audience seems set to increase.

Amazon and FaceBook

Amazon had no FaceBook fan page

Well, that was easy… No fan page. Why not? Guesses, of course, but Amazon is reasonably well represented in shopping presence on FaceBook through its’ affiliate marketers, and on-site customer feedback is a legendary strength of the brand. User reviews have been a central part of Amazon’s offering and early differentiation, and they have had a pretty relentless drive for customer satisfaction matched with on-site feedback, and post-delivery feedback.

For example, I fairly recently bought a £2.50 HDMI connector from Amazon, and have been sent two emails soliciting feedback on the purchase experience. The email solicits a response, just as with the purchase experience, on the Amazon site. This is a characteristic model that dominates current approaches; the expectation that the user will go to the web site to transact and interact. I expect that this pattern will change for many businesses, especially smaller ones, over the next few years.

My expectation is that the increasing use of social media by internet users will see a substantial shift in the way in which people purchase. Having become familiar with interfaces like FaceBook, and spending a large fraction of their time there, users will tend to find other user interface designs less familiar and more awkward. I’m expecting that purchasing through FaceBook applications will start to feel more natural, and that FaceBook will be a place where increasingly large numbers of users will look for purchase, feedback and service.

Amazon are no fools, and I’m expecting that we’ll see more attention focused on presenting offers and purchasing within FaceBook – and that the customer service experience may need to be presented on FaceBook, too. That’ll mean an official Fan page, I suspect, will appear, when Amazon has worked out how to make it count, and reconciled themselves to a reduced footfall on the Amazon site. That’ll be interesting, and I suspect will need significant messaging to industry analysts to warn that sales will continue despite falling in-store presence. In other words, I don’t expect a fast transition for Amazon, because they’ve done such a fantastic job using their own site, and there will be significant resistance to changing a working model.

FaceBook and John Lewis

Tolerably rich mix of interaction, generally positive.

John Lewis, with physical store presence, can and probably should have several FaceBook fan pages, because the online presence is substantially different in nature from that of Amazon. The relationship with the customer is also substantially different – many customers will have experienced in-store customer service and the well trained staff, who have a vested interest in seeing satisfied customers. I must admit that when I started this review, I was expecting John Lewis to make a strong showing, and probably show the best customer experience for a “clicks and mortar” store, possibly even beating Amazon.

The rich commentary in this FaceBook snapshot conveys positive customer interaction well, I think. The messages largely show happy fans, and an in-store promotion. The volume of traffic isn’t large, though. That short screen snapshot represents about six to eight weeks of activity, and misses out any announcements about the store’s usual annual sale period and doesn’t specifically mention any further special events. This looks like early efforts to engage and to develop an understanding of what people want from a FaceBook fan page, and interaction with what appears to be a good brand relationship with customers.

Contrast this slow messaging with some of the hyperactive viral games on FaceBook and their persistent invitations to join someone’s farm or gangster family. John Lewis is taking a very restrained and low key approach to messaging – but I suspect that this isn’t a considered strategy, more a matter of accident as to who is involved and how.

The fan page itself isn’t especially well developed – brand image of the store logo, but a single location shown, and the image could be more supportive of the brand. There are other things that can be done to and for a fan page, and this is not an outstanding example of how to use the space that FaceBook offers.

Having a single fan page is probably not the right approach for this chain. John Lewis has specific stores in high footfall locations. Long distance travel to the stores is unlikely, so a national fan page is probably useful as a central point for the group, but individual stores probably need their own presence, with their own special in-store events and interactions, supporting the more personal shopping experience.

Dixons and FaceBook

When the customer controls the message and the brand fails to respond, you get this.

The contrast between Amazon, John Lewis and Dixons presence is fascinating. Amazon has focused on online customer service, and handles it on their site. John Lewis has a high reputation for service, and shows some customer interaction on FaceBook. Dixons appears to be ignoring their online presence on FaceBook. The short screen snapshot shows fairly frequent annoyed customer postings, with no corporate response. This doesn’t show the brand in a positive way. When angry customers control the content of the FaceBook page, you probably have a pretty serious online reputation problem. I’ll be looking for supporting signs of that elsewhere, in other online aspects in other articles, to indicate where this brand is failing to engage, and what damage that might be causing.

Comet, Tesco and FaceBook

Comet had no discernable presence on FaceBook – given the nascent level of understanding about how to use FaceBook to interact with customers, that’d probably understandable. The lack of an easily identifiable fan page means that the negative perceptions developed by Dixons, aren’t present – but neither is there any opportunity to create a positive impact.

Tesco’s fan page is branded, a handful of reviews and a strange selection of photos. Presence, some fandom, but not a managed reputation resource for the business.

Summary

None of those reviewed appears to have really taken FaceBook on as a way to interact with their client base. Amazon probably has some strategic decisions to take, and a lot of tactical considerations about how to handle emerging social media. John Lewis, with their usual customer service focus, is leading the clicks and mortar group, but is still not well focused on the large number of FaceBook users.

Fan pages are not well developed in this sector, if present. Customer service connections appear to be weak, and even the best presented clicks and mortar stores are not creating store-specific experiences.

While some promotions are presented, there appears to be little engagement with what is physically happening in stores, and with off-line or even on-line advertising. None of this group, in the sample period, appeared to be offering any kind of competition or game to attract attention.

Here’s what happens to a large brand that hasn’t taken control of their brand presence.

Contrast that with, erm, someone else…

So there’s apparently unknown and ignored discussion about the brand, visible when the brand’s web site is visited. The potential audience for usage of the Sidewiki is possibly on the same order as the volume that uses FaceBook. Google hasn’t pushed it hard. It could be integrated with Buzz, I think.

See a risk? See some potential? If you aren’t managing Sidewiki, especially as a major brand, go claim control by logging in to your Google Webmaster Console and creating your branding message. Then monitor and contribute, just like any other social medium… but that’s an article for another day!

Any guesses as to why Apple might have missed this trick? I suspect that it may be because the Google Toolbar is available for MSIE and FireFox, and the plugin is available for Chrome… But Safari has no way to surface this content. If a technologically sophisticated brand with good media management skills has missed the opportunity to engage with the audience, care to guess how many other brands have managed to engage?

Here’s Google’s promotional video from last year:

Oh, and time from publication to seeing a Google alert for this article? Five minutes. It took Google five whole minutes to spot the article.

These are the slides we used (well, uploaded to “280slides.com“, and slightly edited for that service) for the presentation last Thursday. The slides wouldn’t upload (from Keynote, via a PowerPoint export) to Google Apps – no idea why not. But 280Slides is a nicer UI than Google Apps for presentation, in my opinion!

See “Boosting Web Presence: Review Sites“, as well.

I think the reason is that site owners who “invest” in spammy paid link purchasing rarely deeply understand what they are buying. And link spammers don’t really care whether what they do is effective, so long as there are people prepared to buy, and so long as Google and Bing mistake the links as being valid in the early days. Businesses usually evaluate the impact of an activity fairly early – so if they are told that the search engine impact will be most visible a few weeks or months after starting, then that’s when they’ll measure. A spammy link buyer will keep buying for years, because the impact is positive at the time of the measurement – the value declines with time as Google and Bing detect the patterns of spamming.

The very worst link spammers will submit your site to places that are already known to the search engines as places for low quality links, and already offering no value. So the most value that you get from the service, is a list of places that won’t have any impact… Useful if you need to go back and clean up the spammy links, later.

Take, for example, this piece of spam, submitted to this blog:

It looks appropriate. It’s about H1N1 and it has been submitted as a comment to an article about H1N1. But the URL given is for a product, even though the name offered is not a keyword. Is there any way to tell that it is spam? We could search for a key piece of text that seems unlikely to be in other comments. And here’s the traces that this is a piece of spam:

We can see the same author ID, with the same comment in many blogs – 314 blogs identified as carrying that precise piece of text, presumably with the same link to the “Fish Oil FAQ”. It is definitely spam.

In what way are Google and Bing so stupid that they can’t detect the same piece of writing in comments, when they can tell that a site has two or three paths that lead to the same product, wrapped in a templated page? It doesn’t add up that Google and Bing would penalise a site owner for multiple paths to a product that customers buy, but don’t penalise spammy links. So, do the search engine penalise spam?

Why are pages containing spam reported in search results, if the content is treated as spam?

Search engines are looking at the overall quality of the site and its’ pages. Some spammy comments to a blog or a discussion forum won’t kill the pages’ value. If users are finding the whole page is useful, then the whole page isn’t deranked – unless the web spam teams decide that the only reason for the page is to host, or be target of, spammy links. So you can find spammy postings on pages that have weight. A few spammy links on an otherwise useful page, won’t kill the page. That’s why we can still find spammy comments – they are a part of a page that is valuable.

That doesn’t mean that the reverse is true – spammy comments can be found, but it doesn’t mean that the links in the spam carry any weight. If they did carry weight, then we should find at least 314 sites are offering weight to the Fish Oil FAQ. So… where’s the site in the listings?

Interestingly, you can’t find the site named in the spammy posting. Yup. All that spamming and link dropping has had no useful effect at all – just try the search for links for fishoilfaq.com. Which just goes to show that the technique is pointless – it doesn’t work.

Back To Duplicate Content

Google and Bing are tolerant of genuine duplication within a web site. The large search engines even have a mechanism to help webmasters to signal that they are aware of duplication in their sites, and have a preferred path to that resource – the canonical link ref. A signal agreed to and used by the major search engines. It’s been so successful that search engines are now respecting the canonical link reference tag across domains (with some limitations).

But, identical postings, across a range of blogs and discussion forums, with keyword laden author names? Somehow that pretty obvious technique is supposed to defeat the search engines with wicked cleverness? It does, for a while. Then the web spam teams notice, zero weight the spam, and decreases their trust in your business. And that’s why duplicated postings in user generated content don’t work – blog spamming is an ultimately sterile exercise. If you’re going to comment, comment because you are a part of the discussion. Be interesting enough, and people will write about you and what you’ve written, in their articles – just as I’ve written about Danny Sullivan, below.

This decay in the value of blog spam (and other types of undeclared paid links) is why we hear the repeated refrain from businesses that:

“we hired an SEO agency for link building, it made an impact at first, but since we terminated the contract there’s been no impact on our business”.

Spammy link building has a positive effect on visitor volumes in the first few months or even years. But after a while, the search engines downgrade it, and decrease trust in the sites that gave you links (because those sites host undeclared paid links) and in your site (as a business that buys undeclared paid links). The activities have less and less impact with increasing time, and it is harder for your business to make headway once the search engines suspect that you are focusing on spamming as a link building strategy. You can even find that an entire chunk of your website is not being given any credibility for inbound links.

Blog spam has an unpleasant impact on the blogs it is dumped on, too. Read Danny Sullivan’s article about the way that blog spam affected a nascent site that may been useful to a specific online segment. The site did have some spam defences in place, but doesn’t it seem just a tad nightmareish that a site offering some long lasting value is taken out of action through activities that ultimately have no or little value. The economic equation is imbalanced. When that happens, as Danny implies, there is time and space for ethics and morality to play a part. Law? I don’t hold out a lot of hope for that – all that a US based law would do is to drive the targets offshore, or to use anonymising proxies, etc. (See our ancient article about tracking the steps in a spamming effort, apparently by some Ukranians).

Summary

Spend less time worrying about duplication on your own site – use the canonical link reference to help yourself and the search engines. Read Google’s official description about the canonical link reference, and how they have coordinated with Bing and Yahoo to understand the tag.

Spend more time worrying about what your linking strategy is telling Google and Bing – are you telling the search engines that your business will lie and deceive? Here’s Bings statement about spam and what they do in response to detecting spammy links. You really want those outcomes? You really want to pay people to cause work for other site owners, that has no long term benefit and may have disastrous repercussions on your own site? And when you find that the search engines no longer trust you, then you’re going to face a higher bill to remove links – there’s automated link placement, but the technologies for link removal are largely manual, and hence more expensive.

It’s pretty easy to establish the practices that lead to long lasting, higher ranking web sites. Start engaging with your prospects and clients, or find another way to engage with an online audience – at this point in the search engine optimisation game, they don’t have to be the audience that you sell to!

Follow this on Buzz.

Rant mode engaged…

PC World is using an analagous “grab everything early” model for it’s online forums. Instead of the relaxed model used by Google, where you can add increasingly large amounts of personal data to your online persona, PC World *requires* a form to be completed, and users to identify what email newsletters they’ll receive, in order to drop a comment on an article.

Making this even worse, is that the form user interface has a particularly stupid problem. When filling in details, you must provide email address, country of residence and… a US Zip Code. I live in the UK. Strangely, I don’t have a US Zip code for my UK address.

Annoyingly, every time I tried a new way to pass this obstacle, it would keep re-checking the “please bombard me with offers for stuff I don’t want” box. If I uncheck the box, have the courtesy to leave it unchecked. This forced re-checking may well increase sign up rates, but it doesn’t make PC World more loved and needed.

I poked, quickly, around the PC World site looking for a way to provide feedback, and couldn’t find an obvious way to suggest that the registration process was both onerous and broken. So that’s why i’m posting here… PC World has made it clear that the audience is US-only and Foreigners can fuck off aren’t important. And PC World don’t want to hear from me unless they can try and sell me something. I’m not interested in engaging with that kind of business. So, I won’t be part of PC World forums, even for a single comment.

Lessons

If you want to offer social media, it has to be, like a good sales process, easier to be engaged than not. Good marketing and purchase systems make you feel welcome and make the process so easy that it is almost easier to buy than walk away (and that *doesn’t* mean making walking away harder with mousetrapping and other technological tricks). Look at Twitter and FaceBook – easy to sign up and you get invited to be involved, not pressured.

Undoubtedly PC World would see the newsletter sign up rate decline if they changed their registration process. And the deliberate discarding of my preference to avoid unwanted email is just insulting. What, my preference to avoid newsletters I won’t read, is not important to you?

I know PC World wants money, and they want to act a gateway to valuable information. But guys, you aren’t the sole source of information. You need to (re-)read Clay Shirky on Paywalls. What you’re doing with onerous registration forms for commenters, is creating a soft paywall around interaction. That’s not a good idea, long term, IMO. Competitors who make it easier to engage, will probably start beating you – as there’ll be more comments from people less engaged tightly… and those people could fall into your influence if you handle them well.

PCWorld guys, stop thinking like an offline paper with an online presence. Start thinking about how to properly engage with an audience.

Rant over.

Summary

There’s lessons about handling user interactions here.

Users don’t mind engaging with you.

They don’t like being “sold at”.

They don’t like you requiring lots of data before they engage lightly.

Can I avoid PC World? Absolutely. It wouldn’t break my heart if I never saw another PC World article. If they do cover things that interest me, and I think either the author or a commenter has missed the point, I might comment. But now, I’d rather Twitter it than do so on the PC World site. And that makes Twitter richer and PC World poorer.

Think about “friction”.

How hard is it for your users to engage with you? How easily can they point out problems that might help you? Yes, they’ll post other stuff too, but you know what? I got serious, private, answers about the best way to use GitHub public and private repositories from Tekkub. Imagine how I feel about Tekkub and GitHub now. Compare that with how I feel about PC World. Losing GitHub would be a major problem for me. I already pay GitHub for a private Repository. I’d pay them more, to make sure they kept running. PC World? I genuinely don’t care.

Brands have to engage with and be useful to their clients, to be well regarded over long periods. I think PC World set up short sighted performance measurements surrounding registration and sign up, and lost the plot. Make sure you don’t do the same for your business.

• Google Local – reviewed businesses typically rank higher
• Google Product Search – good reviews help more prominence in listings
• Prospects like reviews – next closest thing to word of mouth recommendation
• Reviews can be listed when people search for products and the business name

Unsatisfied buyers are typically around five times more likely to tell someone of a bad experience than satisfied buyers are to tell someone of a good experience.

As with anything, if you ask, you might get – don’t ask and you probably won’t get… Another great reason to communicate frequently and easily with your customers.

Review Sites

These sites are known to be sites that Google uses for reviews – it is not an exhaustive list:

• Qype UK UK places – pubs, restaurants, shops, businesses
• Reseller Ratings
• Yahoo! Merchant Reviews
• ShopZilla
• ViewPoints
• Epinions
• Google Checkout – part of the merchant interface for the Google payment service
• PriceGrabber (UK and US sites)
• DoYoo
• Ciao