The persuasion theory behind celebrity endorsements is the same theory behind Google’s new social media search.

It’s called Balance Theory, and when you understand the essence of it, you start to understand why Google is putting so much stock into Google+. And how Google+ can enhance your own search experience.

Balance Theory and Celebrity Endorsements

Without getting into all the scientific language we used when I was in graduate school, balance theory basically says this:

• I like Celebrity A.
• Celebrity A likes Product B.
• That means I should like (and buy) Product B as well.

(Fellow philosophy majors will also recognize this as the 2 premises/1 conclusion logical construction.)

In other words, I like Eminem. Eminem likes Chrysler. Therefore, I should also like Chrysler. (The danger is that if I don’t like Celebrity A, I’ll purposely not like Product B just to restore that balance. It’s why a lot of sponsors drop celebrities who get into trouble.)

This is what marketers are counting on when they put a celebrity’s name and face on a product or company. It’s why Eminem is schlepping Chrysler on the Super Bowl. It’s why Reebok is clamoring for contracts with the NFL. It’s why Nike puts famous basketball players on its shoes.

This is the same basic idea that goes into Google’s personalized “My World” search results. If you’ve used Google lately, you’ve noticed that a lot of your friends are appearing in those results. That’s because Google is relying on Balance Theory to help improve your search results. (Maybe not intentionally, but that’s what’s at play here.)

Here’s what they’re doing with it:

• I like Douglas Karr.
• Douglas Karr has talked about corporate blogging.
• That means I should check out what Douglas has said about corporate blogging.

And if I like what Google has shown me, I’ll continue to use Google.

These are the PERSONAL results for "corporate blogging." But that is not really Jason Falls in the 2nd picture from the left.

How Can You Use Balance Theory in Search Engine Optimization?

If you’re building your personal brand, or you’re doing social media marketing for your company, the best way to use Balance Theory for your search engine optimization is to use Google+, and develop relationships with key decision makers at the companies you want to do business with.

• Connect with the decision makers at the companies you’re trying to reach.
• Write blog posts about the key areas and problems they’re dealing with at their company. You can find that out just by paying attention to their conversations on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.
• Continue to share important articles with them related to those same areas and problems. (This is all part of that “be a valuable resource” stuff we’ve talked about before.)

Then, as these people search for those particular keywords, your blog posts and your articles will rise to the top of their search engine results page. End result? “Hmm, this person seems to know an awful lot about this topic. I wonder what else they can help me with?”

However, this is not a reason to connect with everyone you can find on Google+ or to spam the bejeezus out of them with all kinds of articles and blog posts. You do that, and you’ll most certainly be blocked and ignored by everyone you’re trying to reach. Just write about what you want to write about at an acceptable pace, and connect with a reasonable number of people on a level that doesn’t seem creepy, desperate, or spammy.

With a little effort and just by following some common sense, you can use the Balance Theory — something usually only used by marketers with millions to spend — to start winning higher search engine rankings on your chosen keywords.

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Google is changing the web again. This time, they are asking webmasters to begin identifying authors in a way that allows:

• Google to track who is the author of content
• Google to track about the author pages (called profiles by Google).
• Authors to authenticate their profiles (author pages) on multiple websites.

If you are an author, this is fantastic… and if you are a content publisher, it’s even better because Google is now starting to look at who writes, not just the cold math behind an article.

To acknowledge an author, you use the HTML5  rel attribute in a link pointing to an “about the author” page on the same website like this:

Article written by <a rel="author" href="../authors/mikeseidle">Mike Seidle</a>

Because most authors have profile (about the author pages) on multiple websites, Google has a way to link them together. The first step is to put a link to the author’s website on the profile with a rel=”me” attribute like this:

<a rel="me" href="http://mikeseidle.com/about">Read more about Mike</a>

On the page mikeseidle.com/about, we have to insert a recriprocal link back to the above about the author page (profile)  with the rel=”me” attribute:

<a rel="me" href="http://problogservice.com/authors/mikeseidle">How To Help Google Identify Authors of Content on Your Site</a>

Before all you search engine optimization experts get your hair on fire about reciprocal links causing bad things to happen to your page rank, here’s the link on Google’s Webmaster Tools that shows that it is required by Google to do a reciprocal link.

As of the time this post was written, most blogging software does not support the new author tagging features yet, so you’ll either have to write a plug in or embed your own links. I would expect to see support for author and profile tagging to be included in future versions of WordPress soon.

Mike Seidle

Mike Seidle is currently the CTO of Virtual Payment Systems, Inc, and is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service. Mike currently serves on Professional Blog Service’s board of directors.

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Everyone is so worried about getting their Facebook contacts into Google+. That’s the wrong way to go about Google+.

Given that most of us who are on Google+ are social media power users, chances are we’re looking for another social networking tool that will benefit us professionally. And while we may be Facebook friends with our professional contacts, LinkedIn is the real professional social network. LinkedIn also keeps any contact information like cell phones and websites, so this is going to be valuable anyway.

So, why not instead import your LinkedIn contacts into your Google+ contacts? Here’s an easy way to do it.

1. Most importantly, you should have a Gmail account. If you don’t, get one. Google+ will delve into your Gmail contacts to see who you interact with the most, and suggest those people for your Circles.


Export your LinkedIn Connections as a .csv file to import into your Gmail Contacts.

2. Log in to your LinkedIn account, go to your Connections page, and Export your connections.
3. Choose any format you’d like, but the .csv (comma separated value) is your best bet. Save this file to your desktop.
4. Go to your Gmail Contacts window, and select Import from the More Actions menu. Locate your .csv file, and import it.
5. Google will merge any contacts that already match, saving you some duplicated matches. However, Google isn’t perfect, so you will need to go through and find/merge a lot of your contacts by hand. It may be tedious, but it will be worth it in the end.
6. As an added bonus, export your Gmail contacts and reimport them into your LinkedIn account. This will then sync up your two networks. And since Gmail is the one email program that most social networks use to “find your friends who are on this network,” having your professional LinkedIn contacts can help you build any new networks you join quickly and without all the fluff and unnecessary crap that Facebook brings with it, like your Farmville and Pirate Clan friends.
7. Jump back over to Google+ and start adding people to your circles. Start with the ones that Google+ recommends, and then begin searching for the people you want to add to your Circles.

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I recently heard on the Marketing Over Coffee podcast that Google is starting to pay a lot more attention to who you’re connected to socially, and letting that influence your search results.

For example, if you’re connected to me, and I write frequently about ghost blogging, and you do a search for “ghost blogging” on Google, results to my page will show up higher on your search results than if you’re not connected to me.

As a marketer, if you want to promote your particular product or service, it makes sense to start connecting to people who are likely to look for that product/service on Google. Not so you can spam them — we are not, nor will we ever, advocate spamming — but so you can continue to provide them with valuable information. Then, if and when they ever have a question about your particular niche, your solution will be more likely to show up on their search results page.

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• 

I’m tired of people who predict the failure of some new tool before it ever even gets off the ground. They’re cowards, doomsayers, and nattering nabobs of negativity. They don’t actually provide any real value, or anything I can use. They’re like the petulant child who automatically says “Nope. Won’t do it. Don’t wanna” to anything her family suggests.

It’s not hard to predict failure. It doesn’t take any courage, special intelligence, industry expertise, or a crystal ball. You’re not going out on a limb by predicting something will fail. You’re not offering an opinion that runs counter to 99% of your industry. Given the number of attempts at anything that fail, and you’re going to be right more often than you’re wrong. That’s why it’s such a cheap win.

Oh sure, you get to look like you knew what you were talking about when it happens. But the odds are in your favor, as with any startup. It’s like predicting the hitting success of any major league ball player. If you predict an out every time he comes up to bat, roughly 7 – 8 times out of 10, you’ll be right. But it doesn’t take a baseball genius to know that a batter is going to miss 75% of the time.

It takes a pessimistic jerk to say, “he’ll fail this time. And this time. And this time too. And — oops, I was wrong about that one. But I got the other 6 times right.”

The real courage doesn’t lie in predicting failure, it lies in showing success. Talk about what this new tool can do, how it can help people, and where you can see using it. Saying where it fails doesn’t take any creativity.

I’ve seen this lately with all of the Google+ users who whine and mewl that it’s going to fail, or that it doesn’t do certain things, or that it isn’t Facebook, or that Google’s past forays into social media have failed.

Blah blah blah.

There’s no courage in finding fault or criticizing. There’s nothing valuable in predicting that something will fail, and then reciting the same tired litany of faults that you read on some other blog post, or drawing the same tired comparisons to Facebook. They complain but they don’t offer solutions.

You want to do something cool? Tell me what’s awesome about it. Tell me the things this does or has the potential to do. Chris Brogan impressed a hell of a lot of people with The Google+50, which became his most trafficked blog post ever. I may not read Chris Brogan that often, but when I do, it’s because he’s telling me something useful, not why something will/should fail.

I think people who spend most of their time criticizing and finding fault aren’t actually contributing anything of value. They aren’t doing anything useful. They’re the failed restaurant chef who became a food critic. The failed musician who became an agent. The failed teacher who became an administrator.

If you want to be useful, if you want to be valuable, contribute to the success of something, don’t complain. Show why something is cool. Better yet, create something cool. But do something that’s worthy of you and your time. I already think you’re awesome, so show me.

Photo credit: ougenweiden (Flickr)

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Google’s latest changes, thanks to the JCPenney/Searchdex debacle, has a lot of search engine optimization people scratching their heads, worrying about what it will do to their search rankings. Google has also declared war on content farms, going after the black hat backlink builders that build crappy sites who try to game search engines by filling websites and blogs with lots and lots of useless, poorly written content.

Don’t ask me how they’re doing it. Google’s remaining mum on the situation, saying only:

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on [emphasis added — Erik].

It’s this last statement that has me intrigued about how Google is going to recognize some of this. How will they know whether sites have original content, do their own research, or provide thoughtful analysis?

I think the answer lies in the foundation of semantic search.

Semantic search, says Wikipedia, “…seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results.”

In other words, semantic search tries to figure out what you mean, not what you said.

For example, if you’re doing a search for “bark” and “dog,” a regular search engine may give you results not only about dogs, but about the bark of a dogwood tree. But semantic search will know that you’re inquiring about a dog, and return only those results that meet your requirements.

Right now, Google is looking at content farms as a group and dropping them — as a group — from their search index. And that’s fine. For the most part, it shouldn’t hurt anyone who is writing original, thoughtful content.

But what happens when Google decides to take a look at some previously ignored places where people are writing bad content trying to game the system? What happens when they look at WordPress.com and Blogger.com, two favorite targets of the search spammers, who dump crappy article after crappy article into throwaway blogs? Google isn’t going to dump their own blog platform (Blogger) from their index, and they won’t do it to WordPress.com without hundreds of thousands of people crying foul. So how will they do it?

My prediction is that Google will be able to figure out what’s good and what’s bad by using the semantic search technology. They’ll determine what’s well-written and what sucks, what’s original and what was barfed out of an article spinner.

We’ve seen some examples of this technology already. Anyone who has ever run the grammar checker on Microsoft Word (which was apparently written by my 7th grade English teacher) has seen how this works. It checks the grammar and usage in your documents to see if there are any serious errors. It’s not great, and often delivers inaccurate or outdated grammar errors, but it can at least find some problems.

So why can’t Google do this? By using semantics, a good grammar checker, and a thesaurus, Google could determine what is original content and what is crap. By examining the language used, Google may be able to determine the intent of the content writer, and whether they’re truly creating original, thoughtful content, or just trying to game the system again. They could raise up some content while flagging or penalizing others.

The best part is this strategy would encourage people to create valuable content, rather than just trying to stand on the shoulders of others and steal theirs or spin it as a way to game the system. It means your stuff has to be well-written. You need a decent grasp of the English language, and the ability to string more than two sentences together.

(Of course, this could have a detrimental effect on people who just can’t write, don’t speak English as a first language, and teenagers who insist on writing in text speak, but that’s a post for another day.)

What do you think? Will a semantic indexing system help bloggers who are trying to do the right thing, or will it hurt the industry as a whole? Do you think people will mistakenly be caught up in a new semantic system? How would you avoid it, either from Google’s view or the writer’s?

Photo credit: arbyreed (Flickr)

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Search engine results can be rather misleading, especially to online marketing newbies. There is no one search engine central clearinghouse. They don’t all share results. What ranks high in one search engine may be lower on the list for another.

We were asked about search engine results several weeks ago by a potential client. He thought his company’s website was doing great because they were 4th on Bing, but couldn’t understand why he was on page 7 on Google.

So what are the major search engines for online marketers? Should you focus all your search engine optimization attention on Google, or split your efforts up equally among all the search engines you can find? And why do the Big Three — Google, Bing, and Yahoo — all give different results?

To start with, the Big Three is now the Big Two. That’s because Bing has been providing their results to Yahoo, which means there are really only two sets of results that people are finding. But Yahoo and Bing each have their own identity and own market share. More on that later.

Do a quick search on any topic, and you’ll see some markedly different results between Google and Yahoo/Bing.

Google search results for Erik Deckers

Bing search results for Erik Deckers

The results from the two search engines — Google and Yahoo/Bing — shows some serious differences.

• In the 7 results on Bing, only 4 out of the 7 are me. The other 3 are guys from Belgium and Holland. On Google, those guys don’t show up until about page 6.
• Google shows my blog, my work blog, and my Twitter account. My results on Bing are 2 listings on LinkedIn (the same LinkedIn account, mind you), and 2 listings from an old website (the same website) I haven’t updated in nearly 4 years.
• Google provides the most up-to-date and most accurate results, Yahoo/Bing is giving out of date information and repeating itself.
• Google is more likely to satisfy my insatiable craving to be the center of attention; Yahoo/Bing has failed me.

So where should you focus your search engine attention?

Google. Far and away, Google.

Yes, Bing is picking up in popularity. Yes, Yahoo and Bing have teamed up to reach two separate audiences, but when you look at the total market share of the Big Three Two, that’s like Vermont and New Hampshire joining forces and saying they can beat the crap out of the Midwest.

According to a Hitwise, Google owns over 70% of the entire search market. Of course, there’s a significant change between the end of November and the end of August.

Does that mean you should forsake Yahoo/Bing now and forever? No, of course not; that’s silly. But until they become a bigger player in the search engine market, focus most of your attention on Google.

Of course, now that Bing has teamed up with Facebook, that is going to be more of a certainty, not a pipe dream. The change from August to November is fairly significant, so Internet marketers may want to keep an eye on Yahoo/Bing’s market share and adjust their search engine optimization efforts accordingly.

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Do you know how search engines can help your business?

Are you hearing new terms like “search engine marketing” and “online marketing,” and wondering if it’s even important? Or do you think that people in your industry aren’t using search engines to find your company, because most of your sales come from offline results?

If you think so, you’d be wrong. Just because you aren’t getting sales through your website doesn’t mean no one in your industry is getting sales that way. It just means you’re missing an important revenue stream.

How big is search engine marketing?

According to a February 2010 SearchEngineLand blog post, Google reports 34,000 searches per second. That works out to 2 million searches per minute, 121 million per hour, 3 billion per day, 88 billion per month.

So if you think that “no one searches for us,” or “our customers don’t Google us,” how do you know? What stats have you looked at to tell you that no one is Googling your site? And if they’re not Googling your site, is it because no one in your industry uses the Internet, or is it because your website lives on page 6 and no one goes that deep into the results? (Hint: It’s the latter.)

To paraphrase Gary Vaynerchuk,

“If you’re not using (Google) because you’re in the camp that thinks it’s stupid, you’re going to lose. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s stupid. It’s free communication, and there’s a crapload of users.”

While Gary was originally talking about Twitter, the idea is still the same. People use Google, and they’re looking for you. The problem is you’ll never know it, because they’re finding your competitors instead.

Want to see? Go to Compete.com and type in your URL and the URLs of your biggest competitors and see where you rank on web traffic. If you haven’t done much on search engines, you’ll see your competitors pulling down bigger traffic results than you.

Those traffic results equal sales. Even if your competition is only closing 1% of their web traffic, that’s a lot more than you’re closing.

But my site appears higher on Bing than it does Google. Shouldn’t I focus on Bing?

While Bing may be great in some things, and they have cool TV ads, Google is still by far the dominant search engine. They control 71.59% of the total search engine market. Yahoo and Bing own 14.28% and 9.87% respectively.

Bing is even starting to partner with Facebook, and will provide some of their search results over there. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to crush Google. It only means they’re going to eat away at some of their market share.

For marketers, this means you should focus most of your attention on Google right now, because that’s where most of your traffic is going to come from. If you can win some Yahoo/Bing searches, that’s great, but Google is where you should be focusing your attention at the moment. (And if Yahoo/Bing/Facebook ever gives Google a run for their money, you’ll be able to optimize for Bing as well, when the time comes.)

So what does improved SEO mean to me?

Here are a few reasons you need to focus on search engine marketing as part of your marketing efforts:

• Increased web traffic means increased sales. The more qualified traffic you bring in, the more money you can make.
• Search engine traffic is easier and more cost effective than traditional marketing. You don’t have to spend as much money on Internet marketing as you do on traditional marketing. The average month’s Internet marketing spend can be a fraction of your marketing spend on radio & TV spots, billboards, print advertising, or trade shows. A basic Internet marketing campaign can cost as little as $2,000 per month. (When I was in the poultry business, our minimum budget for a trade show was $2,000 for a 10×10 booth at a three day event in another state.)
• You can track Internet marketing through packages like Google Analytics. You can’t track the effectiveness of billboards, broadcast or print ads. Sure, you can count how many calls you get, but do you know how many people saw or heard those ads? What’s the actual percentage of people who called you? With Internet marketing, you can see the who, what, when, where, and how of each customer. You can see which strategies succeed, and focus more energy on those, while dumping those that don’t perform.

What is a search engine marketing campaign worth to you?

Let’s say your biggest competitor gets 5,000 leads per month on their website, and they do a rather poor job of search engine optimization themselves, which means they’re ripe for the picking.

And let’s say some basic SEO and blogging could siphon off just 10% of their traffic. That’s 500 more leads to your site per month.

And let’s say 10% of those leads — 50 people — are truly qualified. They’re not gawkers, not people out for a stroll, but are actual potential buyers and decision makers. You set up a process where people who match your ideal customer are funneled into your system, and the non-qualified customers are funneled out. So your web traffic is up, and you’re getting 50 new actual, solid leads per month.

You’re good at your job, so you close 10% — just 5 people — of those qualified leads. Remember, if they’re qualified, it means they’re very interested in what you sell. You don’t have to convince them to buy what you’ve got, you just have to show them you’re the best.

Let’s say you’ve got a high dollar item, and make $10,000 on a single sale. Closing five of those sales just added $50,000 to your bottom line.

A single sale would have paid for the $2,000 per month investment you just made, and netted you $8,000. But we now have an ROI of 2,500%, which not only paid for the $2,000 per month fee, but got you enough money to hire someone to handle the new workload (and you just earned it in a single month).

Admittedly, these are some hypothetical numbers, but you see my point. If you want to get an idea of what search engine marketing can do for you, do some basic research:

1. Find out who the leader in your industry is.
2. Use Compete.com to figure out your web traffic versus theirs.
3. Then figure out how it would improve your bottom line if you could take just 10% of their traffic, and close 10% of those new leads.

Once you know this, don’t worry about how much an Internet marketing program will cost. Worry about how much it’s costing you by not doing it. If you were our hypothetical business, the old school methods are costing you $50,000 per month.

And one day, they’re going to cost you a lot more, because one day, your competitor is going to figure out how to do this stuff for themselves.

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I’m at Barcamp Nashvile right now with Keith Gilchrist of Johnson City, TN and Andre Natta of Birmingham, AL. We were discussing the new Google Car, and the fact that it can drive for you.

While we’re not sure what the Google Car will do for you yet (they’re not even sure if or when it will be available for retail sales), there are a few ways we can see Google integrating its search engine features into its car:

• Use Google Maps to plot your most commonly visited sites — home, office, favorite coffee shop — and the routes you take to get there.
• Monitor traffic on Google Maps, and not only help you avoid traffic jams, but even relieve congestion by redirecting traffic from heavily congest areas.
• Keep track of where your friends and family live, thanks to Google’s social media efforts, and plot out the best routes to get there.
• Let you search for a new restaurant while you’re on the road — voice activated, of course — listen to the user reviews, call them on your Google Voice phone, and then make a reservation.
• Check you in on Foursquare or Gowalla when you arrive at the restaurant.
• And the really cool thing, personalize your billboards. Think of all those video billboards you can see right now, the ones that work like giant TVs. What if they could replace the old-school static billboards with green screen, like they use in TV studios. Whenever your Google Car drives past a billboard, it pops up a personal ad that only you can see from your car, thanks to the new transparent TV screen that functions as a high-impact windshield too. It’s pay-per-click at 70 miles-per-hour.

Special thanks to Andre and Keith for helping me work out some of these ideas (the commonly visited locations and friends and family maps are Andre’s idea).

——
My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, who I also helped write Twitter Marketing For Dummies (another affiliate link).

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Niall Harbison from TheNextWeb.com gave seven social media predictions for 2011 (man, and I thought Christmas was coming earlier and earlier), one of which made me first think he was full of crap and then made me realize he’s got a great point.

I don’t care how many people Google hire or companies they buy they are always going to struggle in the social media space. They don’t have it in their DNA as a company to be social as far as I can see and Facebook just keep pushing further and further ahead anyway. Google have had big launches with Wave and Buzz over the last year and even though they are giving Google Me a bigger push and dedicating more resources to it than ever I just don’t see it being a big success. Where I do see them having success is in the social games sector because I think their portal for this along with some of their acquisitions have been very shrewd. Expect another disappointing year for Google in the world of social media.

The whole Google vs. Facebook / Google-as-social-media debate is growing in frequency, and I think that Niall has hit closer to the mark than anyone else (i.e. as compared to the “expert” who thought Google would be gone in five years, replaced wholly by Facebook search.)

Google recently bought SocialDeck, an iPhone game developer, invested in Zynga (Farmville, Mafia Wars).

This makes sense a revenue generator: Google doesn’t have to develop anything new, and keeps the designers and coders in place, so they can guarantee the same level of quality in the games.

However, I can’t see Google succeeding in the social media space unless they come up with something easier to use and a game changer. I could never wrap my brain around Google Wave (mostly because I used Google Docs to collaborate). I’m not a fan of Google Buzz because it’s just one more lifestream app, and I quit paying attention to those long ago. (Plus, tying my Buzz profile into my Google profile and not letting me delete Buzz without deleting my whole Google Profile? Talk to Microsoft. They have some experience with that sort of thing, and know the names of some good anti-trust defense lawyers.)

It’s going to take something so radically new and different that it’s better than Twitter, better than Facebook, to actually become part of people’s daily social media habit. But until then, this “Me Too” stuff has got to stop. Come up with something no one else is doing, not something that only a few people are using.

What I would truly love to see is Google focus on syncing my information. Look at the different people in my different networks and show me who I’m missing, or haven’t added. Give me the option of adding my LinkedIn Network to my Twitter account. Or adding my Twitter followers to my Facebook friends.

I know there are ways I can do this right now (i.e. back up my LinkedIn Contacts to Google Contacts, then cleaning up the duplicates, and importing them into other networks), but I don’t want to. That’s what I want Google to do in this space: help me sync all of my networks with each other. I don’t want to have to spend time doing that every month just to make sure I’ve got everyone in the same networks.

So until then, I’m always going to proceed warily with any social media stuff Google is going to do, although I’m always willing to check it out. I just don’t think this is going to be Google’s strong suit. They should stick with straight ahead search, and leave the friends and fans to the other social networks.

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