Alex Hochberger

If you aren’t in an urban area, are slightly older, and white, you probably think that Twitter is the most over-hyped thing on the Internet. You may know some people that use it, but it seems silly and pointless. You use your phone to call/text people, Facebook is still the leading social media engine where you swap pictures of your kids with old classmates, etc.

But Twitter has had tremendous growth amongst the non-white population. According to Pew Research, “Twitter Update 2011“, while only 9% of White Internet users use Twitter, 25% of Black Internet users and 19% of Hispanic Internet users use TWitter, and half of all Twitter users use Twitter on their phone.

If your product/service needs to reach minority Internet users or young Internet users, you need to have a Twitter strategy.

South and Central America are home to large and growing populations, close proximity to the United States and Canada, and often generous or free trade pacts with the United States, bringing business interaction as well as increased immigation. With a growing Spanish speaking population in America, you would think that there would be massive growth in the Spanish language web. According to Wikipedia, Spanish Language in the United States,” 35.5 Million Americans over the age of 5 speak Spanish as their primary language, roughly half of whom speak English “very well.”

So a little over 5% of the American population speaks Spanish and very little English, and a little over 5% of the American population speaks Spanish natively.

When Apple was < 5% of the market, people worried about losing 5% market share by not accommodating them. By not offering your website in Spanish, you are losing 5% of the potential market that doesn't speak English well AND 5% of the potential market that speaks Spanish better. As a result of neglect, the keywords are substantially less competitive in both paid and free search, yet they are still neglected.

What are you doing to accommodate this portion of America?

So Facebook’s push for Open Graph integration, where the “Like Button” replaces the direct link, creates new opportunities for businesses to focus on Facebook’s search mechanism.  Some initial tests indicated that it is possible to now optimize for Facebook search, i.e. bringing SEO to Facebook.

Facebook Open Graph allows one to connect their site to Facebook without full integration, simply using new Facebook Meta Tags and the Like Button (a snipped of Javascript code).  Facebook is tracking these likes and building a “graph” of the Internet based upon the recommendations of your social network, and now they are including relevant results when you search Facebook for something.

This creates an opportunity for companies that are bringing their brand to Facebook to get additional exposure through Open Graph, which creates an incentive to use the technology.  This is exciting, as the move to the “walled garden” of social media threatened to disrupt the open world of search.  In the past, users could recommend a page on their blog, creating a “link graph” for the search engines to use, but now it’s easier to just click “share” and send the link out to your friends that way.  Without this part of the link graph, the search engines are missing out on the recommendations that they build their systems upon.

Open Graph brings out the ability to restore this, even if Facebook is the only company taking advantage of it for now.

Playboy, once seen as a risque adult magazine, but now a relatively tame magazine, is now launching a new website that is work safe.  The persistent joke about reading Playboy for the articles has ignored the fact that it actually was a well written magazine, albeit one best known for the Centerfold.  Playboy has launched a landing page with a signup on their new site, TheSmokingJacket.com, a nod to the fact that the company is as well known for it’s Smoking Jacket clad founder as for the bunnies and the naked spreads.

The idea of a non-pornographic gentleman’s lifestyle magazine being promoted by Playboy is intriguing, and definitely capitalizes on an extremely well known brand.  In recent years, Playboy’s iconic magazine has been a money loser, with the value from the brand in royalties and merchandising, plus the pay per view movie channels being the dominant areas of growth.  With the collapse of well known magazines in recent years, it will be interesting in Playboy can extend their brand to the non-adult fare.

In middle school, our science teacher brought in an interview conducted by Playboy, which was an extremely good interview, with much amusement from the class about the source.  She told us she sent her poor embarrassed husband in to purchase the magazine for her to run off copies of the article for us to read.

While I’m certain that the school district had a copyrighted materials policy, I’m pretty sure that a purchase order for 50 – 100 copies of Playboy magazine would have raised red flags, even if they were able to cut out the pages of the interview without the “dirty bits.”

Whenever the topic of SEO comes up, I always still get questions about how to “hide text” and get good performance.  I’m always amazed that people neglect the basics and focus heavily on tricks.  The overwhelming bulk of SEO is about:

1. Site Structure
2. Links
3. Content

In the early days, the Yahoo Directory was the most useful source of traffic on the Web.  The small, editor managed directory (originally a static site by the Founders) was the “Who’s Who” of the Internet.  As Google surpassed Altavista, bringing relevant search results, the interest in directories died off.  While Hubs and Authorities never quite had the direct impact that was expected, being listed near other relevant results has a huge impact.  You wouldn’t build a car before figuring out an engine, and you shouldn’t build a website without building your core.  Your site structure helps spiders and users understand your site, content makes your site relevant if found, but links are the core of the site.

Submitting to primary and secondary directories will not create traffic over night, but it can create some of the core links that can help engines make sense of your site.  Getting listing in the major directories will give you solid links to help define your site, and additional listings in industry specific directories helps further define yourself.  All the SEO tricks in the world won’t give you quality traffic unless you build a solid Foundation first.

With Dunhill Vacations, we have a collection of directories that will catalog our articles as well, and when we do an industry write-up, we submit it to those directories.  Over time, we are steadily building up quality in bound links, much more effectively than link swaps or other dubious link building strategies.  Quality content with quality links pointing to it, it may not be sexy, but it’s still effective.

So again I open my email to an article about the creepy way of finding Jews to market to on Facebook, this time entitled, Kosher Ham’s Jewdar Tell-All.  A while back, I commented on how I would identify people by ethnicity on Facebook, Ethnic Targeting on Facebook, and I was amused to see an article almost half a year later laying out the things that popped into my head in 10 minutes.  However, there were two things that bothered me in this article:

1. Actually targetting Jews with an advertisement for a “Kosher Ham” business seems really bottom of the barrel, a proud Christian or Muslim wouldn’t target their fellow members of faith with an anti-Christian or anti-Muslim business, would they?
2. They outrageously list the social groups they target, listing a few historically Jewish fraternities and leave out AEPi (Alpha Epsilon Pi), the Jewish fraternity.

In all seriousness, the point they make is that when targeting a group, you aren’t looking for 100% accuracy, just decent accuracy.  The US Jewish population is about 2%, targeting everyone looking for Jewish customers is pointless.  However, online we can develop sub groups with decent Jewish accuracy, and similar options exist for other populations.

For example, approximately 12% of New York City is Jewish, if you target people in New York City, you’ll get more non-Jews than Jews, but you are reaching 6 times more Jews than reaching just the United States.  Further, looking for keywords associated with secular Jewish culture (obviously a business making fun of Jewish dietary law as part of its snark isn’t looking for religious affiliation), you can start to reach a targeted segment.

Now, many, perhaps most Jews on Facebook won’t have ANY interests related to Jewishness on their profile, and if your goal is to reach all Jews, this will fail.  If you were running a political campaign and targeting Jews with a message, only reaching 40%-60% of the Jews on Facebook might not be enough.  However, for running a CPC campaign, it doesn’t matter what percentage of the Jews on Facebook I reach, what matters is what percentage of the people that I reach are Jewish.  Running an online small business doesn’t require “market share,” it requires reaching profitable customers.

If you only target people affiliated with ethnically aligned groups, you might find some segments that are 80% – 95% your target demographic, which means that you’ll get higher click through rates and waste fewer clicks.  People affiliated with those aligned groups, even if not of that ethnicity, might be useful to target anyway.  Someone that frequented Hillel events, even though not Jewish, is probably either a prime target for Jewish-themed T-shirts, either for themselves or as a gift, making your targeting even better.  National ad campaigns are difficult, finding potential customers for a business is much easier.

Every year, more and more of retail takes place online.  The recession is pushing toward more direct response advertising, causing an uptick in online advertising between 3% and 5% in an otherwise down year.  Search is expected to perform similarly, and 2010 is predicting an increase in online advertising dollars between 10% and 15%.  For online publishers and advertisers, this means that despite sluggish growth overall, the Internet continues to grow at several times the overall economy.  Although search engine consolidation has caused bid prices to increases, the prevalence of content networks and alternative search networks creates new opportunities for online advertisers to reach customers in a cost effective manner.

Social Media appears to be one of the interesting potential story, as a source of advertising dollars and business, search continues to grow, display ads are relatively stagnant, and alternative campaigns in new medias inches upward.  Despite it’s status as media darling, Twitter remains a small niche play, with popular Facebook game FarmVille having more users than Twitter.  Email newsletters remain big business, but the movement from getting content pushed into your inbox toward networks and feeds continues, creating new opportunities for online advertisement.  2009 looks to have finished as a slight positive in a down economy, and 2010 looks quite promising.

Bing and Google announced deals with Twitter to access and utilize their data, and Search Insider is discussing the first impacts of this.  What’s most interesting is that this might be the first major change since “FreshBot” was added to Google (and later became the primary crawler).  Old hand SEOs remember the crazy update schedules of the early engines, but Google’s monthly “Google Dance” as their crawler finished and about a week later the PageRank was computed and the new index went up across their data centers.  Google started crawling and updating with “fresh” data (tagged with the data) with a guestimated PageRank for placement, and as they got faster at computing changes across the Internet, these Fresh results were no longer being inserted, they were the results.

Twitter has a disproportionate presence in media circles and other influential areas.  Twitter data, including trends, what people are talking about, etc., provides a view into what is new and what is going on.  While news feeds capture the mainstream coverage, Twitter will know what is news to the Internet.  This powerful medium helps determine if you are dealing with a “Google Bomb” or a bona fide story.  While Google originally assumed if people linked to you, like a citation in Academia, that made you authoritative, but only a select subset of the population had websites.  Blogs were more common than a full site, but Twitter is even more available to anyone.  Link and information trading on Twitter happens faster than someone writing a blog post, let along researching a news story, so Twitter gives a view into what is happening now.

This is an exciting time in search.  Twitter data will make it even more exciting.

Not a shocked to anyone that knows anything about search, but it’s nice to see it confirmed by Google, both on the official blog and on Matt Cutt’s blog.  I don’t think I’ve included Meta Keywords on a site in almost 6 years, but from time to time I hear people explain to me that they don’t need an SEO expert, they are doing keywords and descriptions… and I just wish them well.

In what might be huge news, Google is opening the DoubleClick Ad Exchange as an open marketplace.  The Internet has destroyed middlemen and process where ever it has moved, devastating travel agencies, newspapers, recruiters, and in some markets, realtors.  It has been market-by-market, but the value of exclusive information has been destroyed as information has become publicly available.

One exception, media buying.  For reasons that will perhaps never be clear, purchasing banner ads on websites doesn’t follow the open marketplace of the rest of the web, but the rather strange world of media buyers and sellers, with their high commission rates and huge selling costs.  I understand why $10 million ad campaigns might require some sales finesse and price breaks, I don’t understand why I can’t buy 30 second spots on a local independent station in the middle of the night without knowing a salesman and creating an account.  I really don’t know why buying banner ads also seems so convoluted.

When I have done business hosting ads and buying them, I’ve found the results pretty decent if you are targeted.  I believe that they are much cheaper than Text Ads for business reasons… a marketer with a credit card can buy Text Ads, it seems like you need to spend time talking to a salesman to do banners.  Given how many independent marketers are moonlighting on the web, it’s insane to have a medium only available from 9 AM EST to 5 PM PST, when the search engines will let me buy spots at 4 AM.