This evening Barack Obama is going to spend between four and five million dollars to air a thirty minute ad on three major networks nationwide. Not since Ross Perot in 1992 has a candidate spent so much money to reach so many people at the same time.

But, in fact, Barack Obama has reached the equivalent of ten times that many people over the last year, and his campaign has essentially done it for free. How? YouTube.

This wonderful post by Salon’s Cyrus Farivar ties together a number of threads about the influence YouTube had on the 2008 election cycle. Citing a number of different sources, he comes to the conclusion that the total number of hours of YouTube videos with pro-Obama political content was over fourteen MILLION HOURS.

To put that another way, YouTube gave Obama’s campaign the equivalent of fourteen hours of television viewing time for every person in Denver.

McCain was a distant second, with only the equivalent of about half a million hours of viewing. This massive deficit is striking for two reasons. First, it means that Obama supporters are posting a lot more videos. Secondly, and more importantly, a lot more people are watching them. If engagement is a measure of a brand, Obama’s brand is solidly in the lead on YouTube.

How much would this exposure be worth in terms of television? Well, using media buyer price points, Micah Sifry calculated that the value of the advertising would be around $46,893,000.

Taking one more step back, even though Obama’s campaign is currently taking in jaw-dropping amounts of campaign contributions, $46MM is more than the campaign received in eight of the last twelve months. To put it another way, Obama’s presence on YouTube was worth a month’s worth of fundraising.

These kind of social media multipliers are the kind of thing that internet marketing is supposed to promise, and Obama’s campaign has found a way to make it deliver. So, even though tonight’s message will potentially be seen by nearly a hundred million Americans, you can be sure that far more will end up watching it on YouTube–at not a penny of additional cost for Barack Obama’s campaign.

If you want a great combination of nuts-and-bolts advice, strategy, and perspectives on the industry, you can’t miss the following websites. Add them to your reader!

Search Engine Guide

Search Engine Watch

Forrester Research for Interactive Marketing Professionals

The Web Strategist

John Battell’s Blog

Seo Book

Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Aaron Shear wrote an excellent blog post on the expected changes to Google’s ranking algorithm. If I were to paraphrase the story, the essential take-home message is this:

The prevalence of Google Analytics allows them to measure value of a site based on actual user behavior, instead of second degree measures such as linking or traffic. We’re going to use those measures as much as possible to identify relevance and ranking.

There are endless questions about how exactly this will be measured (is it within a sector or across all sites? How about improvements? Do site facelifts get noticed easily? etc.), but at the end of the day Google is challenging websites to embrace the entire constellation of website fundamentals, not just links or words.

This is fine as far as we’re concerned; basically we as a company view internet marketing at a strategic level: we help companies develop internet marketing strategies whose core online face is targeted, visible websites that are useful for visitors. Why? Because sites like that work to grow business.

So we’re glad Google got here. They are basically arguing that a site’s relevance is a combination of market analysis, visibility strategies, and usability (and usability. AND some more usability. Really, usability is IMPORTANT).

What this change does do is change our emphasis. Historically we have recommended Usability as a way to optimize a site that is already getting a pretty healthy head of steam from traditional SEO strategies. Now, we may start at the end-user experience for sites that are already nominally visible in order to grow their traffic through links and user experience statistics.

One challenge here is that many SEO companies, committed to certain strategies, may draw the wrong conclusions. For example, Aaron asserts in this article that this new model means people should focus on Blogs, social bookmarking sites, and Facebook. Maybe. But aggressive link building to a site that doesn’t hold a viewer’s interest will not mean much in this new universe. The question is whether or not content is working for your site. Even Aaron’s recommendation that a site create traffic that is RSS-worthy is just another kind of link-building strategy that is content-agnostic.

Not all sites are going to need to generate daily content, however. Those sites should focus on a useful, usable experience that maximizes the enjoyment and value to the user. This will provide Google with lots of data to measure site “satisfaction”. For those sites that are lucky enough to be properly aligned with daily content, creating blog- or RSS-worthy content is a great strategy as well.

Regardless of what happens next, Pure Visibility’s emphasis on the fundamentals of a positive internet experience will be useful to anyone trying to keep up with the shifting tides of ranking algorithms.

Cone, inc. published a remarkable survey with some striking findings about social media. Many high points are touched on at Search Engine Watch, but the point that struck me as most telling was the high number of men who use Social Media. Specifically, “Men are twice as likely to interact with companies via social media than women. 33% will interact one or more times a week while only 17% of women will.”

There are some questions about how this survey uses “social media”, but if it relates to a company, it probably has to do with forums or blogs. The other question is what it means to “interact”. Is that someone reading a company’s blog? Posting an opinion?

I find these questions fascinating, because Social Media is often described as the “softer” side of online marketing. What might we learn about what Social Media means? Is it just a hyper-personal information tool, which often appeals to men more than women? Do men like the fact that they can dialogue through posted, uninterrupted entries, as in a blog post or a forum? How closely do men observe the activities and opinions of other men in these forums? The survey opens up a whole world of great questions.

My unscientific guess, supported by our local male-geek-expert Jessica, is that men are heavy users of forums and blog comment groups in order to gather information and learn about positions of other posters. The fairly confrontational nature of forums may lend itself to male dialogue patterns.

So. If a company wants to bring women into the fold through social media, what should it do? Are there formats in Social Media that encourage more female participation than male participation?

I’ll ponder these things as I check my ESPN rss feed.

As any sales person can tell you, just because it’s a lead doesn’t mean it will be a sale. The quality of that lead has a huge impact on what will happen at the end of the line. The problem is, of course, that for many high-value, complex products, the time lag between a lead and the ultimate sale can be so long that it is very difficult to identify what worked and what didn’t. By that measure a lead on a website is probably not a key performance indicator.

So what does a company do if it wants to use a website to increase qualified leads? We recommend going one step deeper and tracking the number of leads make the cut after qualified by an internal sales member. Salesforce, which is our CRM tool of choice, calls this step an opportunity, so we call it the opportunity conversion rate.

The reason that opportunity conversion rate is such a useful metric is that opportunities are a source of rich feedback for the sales process. Internal sales teams are the meeting point between sales leads and the external sales team. Their position as a negotiator between leads and sales staff creates a real understanding of what a lead is, and how either it or the sales process can be improved.

You can move the needle on opportunity conversion rate by either changing the nature of the leads you get, or changing how they fit in their sales force.

If you want to change the nature of the leads you get, this will probably require a change in the keyphrase markets you’re targeting and the content of the website. Leads of poor quality can give the marketing team insights into how to improve the website so that better qualified leads are brought in through that channel. The better qualified the lead, the higher the opportunity conversion rate will be.

Although this may seem like the easier path, the truth is that a good website reflects essential understandings of the market a company is trying to reach, and is a process that often takes a surprising amount of time. A more short-term solution can be to modify the sales process so that the vetting of leads from the website better reflects what those leads are.

For example, a sales team might be configured to manage well-qualified, late stage leads, perhaps from referrals or through specific government contract processes. In this case, the leads coming from the website might be far too early, because they came from technical buyers and researchers trying to identify options for their executive team to assemble budgets. In this case, the sales team might be trained to qualify these leads and send them material that will provide deep answers about the product and its capabilities, with a plan to do a follow-up in a month. These changes could reduce the number of unqualified, early-stage leads taken on by the sales force, which would in turn give them more time to hunt down and close more mature deals.

Ultimately the best metric is one that can be easily measured and is closely tied to the marrow of the business goal, so once the strategy for improving the sales process has been identified, the KPI can push into web-based metrics, which are fairly clear, easily collected, and closely tied to the outcome of marketing efforts.

It’s pretty common knowledge now that Adobe has started an initiative to provide automated flash indexing for the major search engines. (Google describes its involvement here). As exciting as the idea is, the consensus in the SEO community is that the ability to truly index Flash content isn’t here yet, and won’t be for a while.

These articles have great practical reasons (i.e., low rank results) for why Flash is bad for SEO. But what’s the big deal? All the content is now transparent; why can’t crawlers work through a Flash animation the same way a person does, identifying content and making it relevant?

The short answer is that search engine bots are pathfinders, and Flash movies don’t have good paths for them to follow or find. Pathfinding is the act of mapping out a defined space where a bunch of pages are linked to each other. Although there are some mathematical challenges to doing this efficiently, it doesn’t take a particularly smart agent to find all the paths on a website and how they interlink.

The structure of static websites lends itself to this approach. But Flash can, literally, create anything, from a website simulation to a computer game. Generally what flash developers do is something in between. How does a crawler know how to deal with a button that creates an “event”, such as the introduction of a sound, or perhaps a content snippet, in the scope of its hope to find paths across a network of pages?

It probably can’t. Maybe someday the crawlers will be smart enough to know that an event they “crawl” is really the jump button on a computer game, but in the meantime such information will just confuse and muddle things. Superficial attempts to address this issue–largely by providing “alternative” content to crawlers that mimic the content of a flash site–result in lower values by Google’s crawlers and create serious maintenance headaches, in the same way that managing multi-lingual sites doubles web team workloads.

So what do you tell your developers, who rightly love Flash for its versatility, portability, and relatively low programming effort? Three things:

• If you must use flash, use it to tell a visual story, not a content one, such as this animation on Saline Lectronics to crate high-impact events without affecting copy.
• Whatever you do, don’t use flash as the framework tool to build the site, and avoid embedding content in it. Use .css instead.
• Build your site with a pathfinder philosophy. A good site is a series of related ideas connected by paths, each one of which should be a road to some related or similar level of understanding.

Think about your site this way, and your visitors will reward you. The crawlers will too!

It’s strange that we’ve started discussing branding, because there’s been a sudden boost in arguments that search results have a brand impact. This article from Search Engine Watch, for example implies that the paid search advertising executed by John McCain, who is currently spending enough to get four times as many paid search impressions as Barack Obama, will have a positive brand effect.

These assertions are a mystery to me, because they seem to intentionally miss the distinction between something that creates brand awareness and something that results in an actual branding effect. The distinction is actually pretty simple:

Brand Awareness is an “I know about” indicator. It is something people know in their heads.

Branding is an “I feel about” indicator. It is something people know in their gut.

So what I want to know is: how exactly is a John McCain for President banner ad going to accomplish the latter?

It can’t. Awareness is not branding. The only effective measure of branding is whether or not a person CHANGES BRANDS. Exposure to new brands is only part of the effort.

It is strange as an analyst to be making this distinction, but I have seen it repeatedly even among my friends. Branding is incredibly powerful, subtle, and pervasive. People who will insist to their last breath that they are unaffected by brand will be heavily influenced by it (to the point of self-parody). Branding–not awareness–is the only real measure of loyalty or purchasing trends.

The reason I am taking this specific stand is because branding is still the consequence of excellent products that have some emotional impact on a user. Search engine results do not provide that. They provide the OPPORTUNITY for that to occur at a fraction of the historical cost, which a key, critical point. But I don’t want to oversell its value. For branding to truly work there still needs to be that traditional marketing and self-identification that is so very hard to replicate or create.

Stacy Williams wrote a very nice blog post about search engines and their influence on branding in a recent post that I wanted to share. I agree with almost everything the post says; I just think she’s using the word “brand” in a way that might not resonate with people who are actively involved in the creation of the things.

Here’s the essence of the article: search engines create two major effects for a company. First, they give validity to any company that ranks highly for that product category. Second, they level the playing field for other brands of the same type by giving search engine uses a chance to immediately and implicitly compare products in a result.

I’m not particularly impressed with first category of findings. But the second are very exciting. The most compelling finding in the post was this one:

People using search engines are more likely to consider multiple brands (77% did so) than Internet users that don’t use search engines (70%) or non-Internet users (46%). On average, searchers considered 2.5 brands before making a purchase (5).

Yow. That is a big, big, BIG deal.

Why does it matter? In product categories with low differentiation such as cleaning products, cereal foods, and other household items, brand preference is by the far the biggest determiner of purchasing decisions. Some studies suggest that people who have a brand preference choose that brand seventy percent of the time over other brands, more so by far than price, promotions, or comparable benefits. So, the opportunity to get them to even consider other brands is a chance to not only break that preference, but create a loyal consumer who is equally hard tempt away in the future.

Yet are the numbers Stacy describes really associated with branding? I would say they’re not; I would, instead, argue that what she describes is awareness, which is necessary step in branding, but really a very different beast at the end of the day.

A brand is organized around how people feel about a product–how its smell, shape, appearance, or image impacts on them emotionally. Right now, at least, a search engine doesn’t really impart those things to a user. Only the product itself, and the vivid image and marketing message around it, can do so. Without an appealing product whose impact resonates psychologically with a user, the only outcome of awareness will be consideration, then rejection.

A good example of this are studies showing that coupons used in isolation from other methods have almost no impact on long-term brand preference. Any spikes that occur through coupon use generally subside shortly thereafter into the previous brand preference patterns. They are a kind of “awareness”, but they don’t cause a change. It’s this reason that the only measure of advertising effectiveness in branding that has ever resonated with me is advertising’s ability to get someone to switch from another preferred brand.

So, a search engine doesn’t really change the core challenge of branding: getting people to switch. What a search engine does do, however, is create more opportunities to switch for companies with smaller budgets. With a search engine, marketers can introduce a new product to people to at price points that were unheard as compared to television, which remains the primary–and most expensive–medium for generating brand awareness in the United States.

THAT is exciting. THAT is new. THAT is worth all kinds of effort and investment.

Thanks for the article, Stacy! It sure got me thinking.

Seth Godin wrote a great article bemoaning the shortage in Search Engine Marketing of podiatrists–i.e., targeted, inexpensive, efficient specialists as opposed to dramatic and overly complex generalists (“Doctors” in his example). He observes that there are people who already know how to be “podiatrists”, but wonders if any of them are trying to market themselves as such. Funny he should mention that!

Firms with these skills exist in droves, but in our experience it’s hard to convince people to use them. We think it’s because Search Engine Marketing is still an unknown, and, for most people, an unproven practice, especially when the primary indicator of success–”Black Box” search engine algorithms–change monthly or even weekly.

So how is a consumer supposed to choose a good Search Engine Marketing company? Interview them! This is what we’d look for in a company. It should:

• be client and results focused. Fairly early in the discussion, a good Internet Marketing company should be able to describe how Internet Marketing will apply to your business model.
• place an emphasis on metrics. Internet Marketing is a moving target. Work with firms that emphasize how they will test assumptions and how they rely on published research to drive their processes. Read their blog to see how they think about this aspect of their work.
• show humility about their work. Work with firms that are willing to learn from their mistakes. There’s no such thing as a perfect Internet Marketing engagement.
• explain things simply. The fundamental concepts of internet marketing are simple; it’s the details that are hairy. An Internet Marketing firm that can simply describe its vision will be better at getting those details right in a way that works for you.
• enjoy client loyalty. Although not all engagements are long-term, successful Internet Marketing Companies have strong, long-term engagements with a large portion of the people in their portfolio because they know how to identify needs and execute. Ask the firm flat-out: for long-term engagements, how many companies decide to renew their contract with you?
• be certified either in an analytics tool or a Paid Search tool. Or both. Why? Because companies that can take the time to get their people certified are committed to training and professional development. Better trained people provide better service.

SEO consultant has some good questions to ask that can elicit this information. We like this overview as well, although it may be too in-depth and dependent on documentation, which isn’t a strong indication of effectiveness. Still, these questions are good start. Good luck!

Recently the New York Times published an article about Yahoo!’s attempt to bootstrap the next generation of search by opening their search platform to start-up partners. Yahoo!’s revenue gain from this approach, at least short-term, is probably not going to be significant. But it does suggest a potential threat to Google’s dominance. Why? Simply put, Yahoo! is trying commoditize Google’s secret weapon, “relevance”, which would open the way for the next innovation in search.

Relevance has been the key innovation in online search since about 2005, but it’s not the first innovation, and Yahoo! is banking on the reasonable assumption that it won’t be the last. The state of the art in search has moved through a series of innovations, each of which created a top competitor. These were, in rough order,

Directories like Galaxy, where content was managed and organized largely by humans,

Content-Rich Search engines like Alta Vista, which provided enormous amounts of information without the kind of rigorous relevance we expect today,

Portal-based search engines like Yahoo!, where the engine was part of a community, and

Relevance-based search engines, which has been the core of Google’s brand from its inception.

With each generation the previous innovation generally became a commoditized feature of a new product: something that people expected, rather than something that differentiated the product from other products.

So can Yahoo! commoditize relevance? It depends on whether or not relevance is truly ready to become a standard feature of search. If it’s not ready, then new services won’t satisfy a key need and won’t be used. Ask.com, for example, had an innovative interface that emphasized usability, but its searches lacked relevance. As a result people never adopted the engine, but opted to stay instead with Google and Yahoo!, both of which provide excellent relevance in searches.

Still, if Yahoo! can succeed in providing its relevance engine as a feeder for companies that are providing additional value ON TOP OF their relevance engine, they could create a new revolution in search by giving developers a demanded and key feature that will be added to some new search innovation.

That could, yet again, change everything.