Having just returned from vacation, (hence the break from blogging) I had the distinct pleasure of keynoting Silicon Valley AMA last night at Cisco’s Telepresence suites in Santa Clara. In my opening keynote, I had a specific message to marketing leaders in the valley to think holistic about social. I outlined some of the major impacts to other departments beyond marketing.

Companies Must Plan Holistically For Social –Beyond Marketing

PR and Communication: The first business unit to be impacted by social, these organizations realized and have adopted the rise of blogs as early as 2005, and in response, many have launched their own blogs, or are sophisticated in blogger outreach. Additionally, AR professionals are just starting to recognize the impacts of social as analysts are able to bypass traditional gatekeepers and talk directly to product teams using these tools.

Marketing: Whether it be corporate or field marketing, the impacts are far reaching to marketing. Marketing has had to become an enabler as anyone who participates in the company with social is now acting on behalf of the company. There’s been several instances of support mishaps that have become the domain of marketing.

Events: Whether it’s virtual or physical, events need to develop a strategy around social. Event teams need a pre, during, and post strategy, and need to join communities where they exist. I’ve outlined how events need to harness social into their strategy in this informative post.

Sales and Field: Sales teams have always been social, now these tools amplify their relationships and communications. Marketing must be a resource and educate sales teams how to appropriately use these teams, including teaching them how to listen, engage, and act professionally as they would in real life.

Sales Operations: Systems that organize customer data need to quickly ramp up and include social data. Information found in LinkedIn, and other social networks can be aggregated into customer databases such as CRM systems.

Partners and Channel Marketing: The opportunity to allow your customer and partner channel to learn from each other, syndicate your product content, or to quickly educate them is at hand. See how channel marketing can benefit from social.

Human Resources: Now, with websites like Glassdoor.com employees can rate their experience at an employer, and even gauge the quality of leadership. HR professionals know they must build internal communities to allow and encourage employees to connect to each other. They also should extend existing behavior guidelines or disclosure policies to include the social domain before a crisis emerges. Recruiters have been using social tools to find candidates such as LinkedIn, Google Searches, and scanning blogs.

Product Development: Engineering, R&D, and other product or service creation teams recognize that customers are talking about their products and making suggestions in websites such as UserVoice, or Linkedin or Yahoo answers and need to envelope customer feedback and factor into the product lifecycle.

Support: Client service teams must reach customers where they are (like BestBuy or Comcast in Twitter) to support customers, as well as use social tools within their own companies to provide an opportunity for customers to self-support each other, or develop a collaborative knowledge base that can be shared between customers and support teams. Support teams should fix their existing support issues –not just respond in Twitter as it teaches customers bad habits.

Executives: Often the job of great leaders is to listen and communicate. These tools amplify each of these behaviors and can be used to listen to employee and market insight, as well as communicate back to them. John Chambers, Cisco’s CEO has an internal blog in which he communicates to employees on a regular basis.

I certainly didn’t get every department and look to you to fill in the gaps for the opportunities and risks for those that I listed above or those I missed. A few years ago, I created this diagram of how social can impact the product lifecycle, it’s finally become relevant.

Leave a comment below of some departments that I missed, and the opportunities and risks to each.

For major sites one of the most important features is a good search facility. Customers, especially non-savvy ones, use the search feature a lot and it’s vital that it offers a good user experience.

Since a lot of users type quite strange keywords into search engines it’s not really enough to rely on simple text matching any more for a search engine, you almost need to be trying to replicate Google technology combined with your product catalogue.

One of the trends this year has been rich autocomplete which is demonstrated nicely on the Apple site. Product images are pulled in dynamically as the user types a query in the search box.

If you’re a developer then there are a lot of autocomplete scripts freely available to integrate into your site.

On this blog we improved the Wordpress search by ordering the results by relevance rather than the strange way Wordpress orders by date and adding features such as keyword highlighting and “did you mean” suggestions but it’s still miles away from where an ecommerce search engine needs to be.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that internal search results on major sites are just matched from the database by the keyword – ecommerce sites are able to utilise products such as Omniture SiteSearch which uses a rules based approach to adjust search results so that high profit products are given a boost.

Omniture SiteSearch connects site visitors with the information, products and services they seek—quickly and easily. SiteSearch enables marketers to better target search results to visitors, manage relevance and ranking and use visitor behavior to automatically boost results based on criteria such as conversion, popularity and more.

• Analytics-driven Search Results
• Create ranking rules to influence site search results
• Choose metrics from any SiteCatalyst report suite to influence search results
• Weight different metrics to influence results rankings
• Target ranking rules to different visitor segments
• Preview analytics-driven ranking results
• Compare relevancy and analytics-driven ranking scores
• Specify time periods for data aggregation of analytics metrics used to drive search ranking business rules
• Combine offline data with analytics-based metrics to influence search ranking business rules

A final important aspect is to have some kind of internal site search analytics solution to understand your customers and see what they are searching for. If a particular product is being searched for a lot then move it to your homepage or highlight it in your navigation menu.

In the good old days, people dutifully used site navigation at the left, right, or top of a website. But, two websites have fundamentally altered how we navigate the web: Amazon, because the site is so big, sells so many things, and is so complicated that many of us go directly to the site search box on arrival. And Google, which has trained us to show up, type what we want, and hit the search button.

Now when people show up at a website, many of them ignore our lovingly crafted navigational elements and jump to the site search box. The increased use of site search as a core navigation method makes it very important to understand the data that site search generates.

What’s your favourite internal search engine?

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Improving Site Search With Rules, Analytics & Rich Auto Complete

Hiring the right SEO team is tough for even the most experienced SEO’s. You’ve had a lot of success getting high rankings, growing your traffic and nurturing the bottom line, but when it comes to growing your own SEO team, do you have an expert’s toolkit?

SEO is attitude and aptitude over experience

That statement might not be true if you’re looking out for a big hitting SEO Manager to drive your strategy forward, but it definitely applies when you’re recruiting your “front line” team.  Link builders, researchers, analysts and content authors can all be trained provided that you’re prepared to put in the time to sort out their all important skills and knowledge. Let’s imagine you’re bringing in a few new recruits, and you’re happy to start from a reasonably basic level to get them up to speed. What characteristics are you looking out for, and how can you make finding the right people a more productive experience?

The group interview

One of the most time consuming problems with team selection is the primary interview stage. Each candidate gets an hour of your time, and you could need to speak to as many as 8 to 10 people to find 2 or 3 great people. How do you feel about freeing up 25% of your available working week? Consider running a group interview to free up your diary. While you’re designing your group interview, set group tasks appropriately to identify the character profiles and team interactivity you need. Setting group tasks and presentations in this environment can really help your best potential people shine, in a way a one to one interview rarely does.

Filter those CV’s

What are you looking out for? Work through all of your CV’s and find the top 8. In your hunt, you don’t always need to see a direct background in SEO. Instead, look out for exposure to the digital environment, an analytical / statistical maths qualification, a strong sporting or musical qualification background or anything that screams commitment, competitiveness, perseverance and intelligence. You could find skills that can lead to your next great SEO, say, in a writer with a blog who casually mentions they’ve built their Wordpress layout and own CSS during the interview.

Selection

After you’ve run your group interviews, continue to the usual second stage full interviews knowing that you’ve already got a list of candidates with the right qualities and skills needed to learn SEO. Following the simple rule of attitude and aptitude over experience can really streamline your selection process and will always end with a brighter, keener SEO team.

Photo credit: Lukaskula

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Great SEO Starts with the Right People

Guest Post by David Godot.
All bloggers secretly wish that their readers would just tell them what to write about. But selecting new topics is seldom so easy. Well, what if I told you that Google has devised a system that allows you to tap into your readers’ psyche and magically predict which topics will interest them the most?

In fact, nothing is better for Google than for you to produce the type of content that people want to read. Every time you do, their search results get a little better. So they have really worked hard to provide tools which help you understand what topics are the most sought-after within your niche. Below are three free tools from Google along with tips for using them to improve your site:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides a great starting point for generating new content, because it can tell you what people already like about your site. As you look through the keywords that people have used to find your site in the search, pay close attention to the ones you have never really written about. If someone searched for this piece of information and the best they could find was an article that didn’t really answer their question, then you have just found a question worth answering on your site!

Search Based Keyword Tool

The next step is to look at the Google Search-Based Keyword Tool. If you have an Adwords campaign promoting your site, you can get keyword suggestions based directly on the content of your site. But this tool is still extremely useful if you don’t use Adwords.

What you’ll do is simply take the keywords that you identified from Google Analytics as being good topics for new articles, and plug them into the Google Keyword Tool. Google will show you related terms that people are searching for. This can help you understand what questions people need answered the most, so that you can make your new article as useful as possible.

Google Insights

Another great way to find related keywords is through Google Insights. This tool works a little differently than the search-based keyword tool in that it shows you recent search trends related to your topic. This is a great way to see which areas of your topic are becoming more popular with searchers. Being the first blogger to answer an important question can give your readership a tremendous boost in organic traffic as well as RSS subscriptions.

Google Is Your New Best Friend

If you follow this process you will be able to attract more traffic naturally, because you will be creating articles that accurately reflect the needs of internet searchers. Google will be happy to send the traffic to you, because your new articles will answer the questions that people are looking to them for the answers to. They look good because you look good.

David Godot is the founder of Chicago Psychology, a networking site offering group blogs and free web marketing tools for psychology professionals. You can also write a guest article and share your favorite tools and services.

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Original article: 3 Ways Google Can Show What Your Readers Want
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