Central Perk: SEOptimise

marți, 13 decembrie 2011

SEOptimise

Can Meeting Your Followers Face-to-Face Increase Loyalty?

Posted: 13 Dec 2011 04:35 AM PST

A few days ago I was looking through my mentions on Twitter and I noticed a rough correlation between the strength of relationship I have with a person and the frequency/consistency of their interaction with me. I also noticed that strength of relationship was in rough correlation to the medium(s) that I've communicated with them on. In other words, the followers who I'd only spoke to over e-mail or Twitter weren't interacting with me as often as those who I'd met in real life.

It got me thinking: if the depth of a relationship impacts frequency of interaction online, and the medium in which I communicate with people on impacts the depth of relationship, is it possible to increase the loyalty of your followers by meeting them face-to-face?

How real are you to your Twitter followers? Image Credit: Aristocrats-hat

Meeting Face-to-Face Increases the Likelihood of Social Interaction, IF You Have Shared Interests.

When you meet someone face-to-face, you become more likely to then interact with them online, providing that you have shared interests and consider them to add value to your newsfeed. Having met someone in real life is a 'filter' that some people (subconsciously) use to prioritise who they interact with socially.

I decided to ask my followers what they thought about whether meeting someone in real life improves the likelihood of engaging with them on Twitter afterwards. The general consensus was that most people found meeting someone face-to-face does have a positive impact on interaction on Twitter.

Can Skype Increase the Loyalty of Your Audience?

Nowadays, the process of meeting someone has become more of a spectrum than a binary choice, as you can virtually meet people through video calls, instant messaging and audio technology.

Research has proven that the use of voice and video communications helps when building relationships. What this means is that hypothetically if you were to Skype someone, they'd be more likely to interact with you in the future than if you were to have solely had correspondence over e-mail or Twitter.

I personally love Skype and use it regularly as a way of getting to know new people whose blogs I find interesting or tweets I enjoy. I find that it adds so much more context to the relationship I end up building with that person, as quite often I will end up finding something I have in common with that person or learning about the interesting things that they're up to.

Skyping with one person a week will increase your followers’ loyalty
I strongly recommend Skype as a means of getting to know your followers. Deepening your relationships with your followers will not only allow you to get to know your audience, but it will also increase the interaction you have with your followers and they have with you. I recommend trying to put aside a little bit of time each week to having a Skype call with your followers, even if it's just one call a week.

Final Thoughts – How Many of Your Most Loyal Followers Have You Met?

I ran some data on my Twitter followers and found out that I've met 80% of my ten most loyal Twitter followers (those who retweet me the most) in real life. I asked around the office and on Twitter and the general consensus was that most people had met between 60 – 90% of their most loyal Twitter followers (the average being 76%). Although based on a small sample size, I think it's fair to assume that for most of us, the people who interact with us the most are those who we meet in person. Which, if you turn it around, makes a lot of sense – those who we share the most interests with (and thus interact with online) are the people we're most likely to meet and develop relationships with in person.

A big thanks to Stuart Duff, Richard Fergie, James Carson, Eloi Casali, Gavin Llewelyn, Bas Van Den Beld, Ruben Martinez, and the SEOptimise team for inputting into this post!

Agent Rank: Google’s Internal Klout Score

Posted: 09 Dec 2011 04:18 AM PST

Recently I've written about Klout score optimisation. Since then I and others who outed themselves as actively using Klout have been attacked by self proclaimed SEO stars and other people who seemingly "hate Klout". Can you hate a metric? Obviously people get very emotional when it comes to Klout.

Klout measures the social media influence of people. While it fails at determining your real life influence, it's quite accurate for measuring how active and influential you are on social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.

That's why some people hate Klout: they are only influential within a small closed group, while they have never shared enough with the general public on social media to get appreciation from the masses.

What did I say when people ridiculed me for using Klout to determine people's influence? I said that I am quite sure that Google internally has a similar system of finding out who exerts influence on the social web and who does not. It wasn't a very daring prediction, it was just an extrapolation based on the steps Google has undertaken in the past. Google has already been focusing on authorship, real names and the social graph for a while.

Now Bill Slawski has written an article on the reputation systems Google uses, might use or will use in the future. There are three mentioned in the post. The most interesting one is the Agent Rank. Not only does the name sound familiar and self-explanatory to some extent, but it's also a patent Google has filed. It most probably gets or will be used for Google +1 votes.

The Agent Rank patent does not describe in detail how such Agent Rank might rank people, but the other papers mentioned above suggest a few ways to determine trust on a collaborative social site. At Wikipedia for example:

"Users gain reputation when they make edits that are preserved by subsequent authors, and lose reputation when their work is partially or wholly undone."

What does this mean? Opportunism and mainstream opinions pay off.

This is similar to early Web 2.0 sites such as Digg or Hacker News, where a few dominant users gained reputation by submitting content from sites everybody likes and agrees on. Back then it was TechCrunch, for example. I have seen this phenomenon on my first generation social sites.

The more "one size fits all" and "smallest common denominator" a page was, the more likely it succeed.

With it the submitter succeeded as well. Thus people were always in a race to submit TechCrunch articles. The ones who submitted the most TechCrunch articles were the most reputable.

I've seen a similar phenomenon on the newer social sites you couldn't game as easily, people submitting all stories by the

NYT
Mashable
Search Engine Land
SEOmoz

or whatever the main authority in your field is. Most automated accounts do it. They gain authority by simply feeding RSS feeds of popular sites to Twitter, even though nobody clicks the links.

I can see because I see the stats from my blogs that get retweeted by these bots, the bit.ly stats for the URLs and the reputation metrics of these bot accounts. Many of them were able to game Topsy algorithm. Topsy is not as exact as Klout: they just have three different kinds of user not influential ones, influential ones and highly influential ones.

Google will measure trust with more complexity than Klout

I guess but elements from all the measurement system above will be among the likely factors. We're still in a very early phase of this, but it's already clear that Google does not want to trust websites anymore but authors instead.

The insistence on real names and the many incentives to verify your identity on Google services all point in the same direction: Google will focus more on people than on websites in the future. Thus an author publishing a completely new website will be able to push it quickly to the top or at least the article they transfer their reputation to.

Also, the more reputable documents and pieces of content you support, the more reputable you get. As on Klout, it will be most likely the sheer activity that will make you more trustworthy. Google's Agent Rank won't be able to compute your reputation just based on one or two articles and a few votes.

The more you participate and the more content you create, the more you will become an authority. In the long run, Google will have to focus more and more on real authority that is not the sheer number of votes. In the beginning the search giant has no choice. It has to reward sheer activity as it doesn't have enough users, votes and other social signals yet.

You may have noticed that I use terms such as

reputation
trust
authority
influence

quite interchangeably in this article. As of yet, there is no clear standard on the web for measuring the worth or value of one's contributions. We already know that neither model is perfect yet but that the importance of measuring people and not websites is growing.

You don't have to be a prophet to extrapolate the most likely ranking signals for people Google will have to use. Consider these:

Activity – as noted above, you can't measure something where there is nothing – without activity there is not enough to measure. On the other hand there will be some limits to that. We know that having a million followers on Twitter does not necessarily mean that you are more important. Also, sending 50 automated messages a day may be too much.

Altruism – nobody, either on social media or in real life, likes constant self-promotion. Many marketers still get that wrong. You get what you give. Science has proven that only through altruism can the whole species survive. Algorithms can't rely on egoists to offer the best advice, as there would be no popularity at all: everybody would just promote their own works. So it has to count the other people who share content, with whom they have no direct connection.

Authority – one of the reasons why Google succeeded in becoming the biggest search engine in the world is its reliance on authority. The more experts consider something to be a good resource, the better. It worked for a while with websites, as the original PageRank formula reflected the reputation model of the traditional scientific community. The more a document got cited, the better. We know that it's no longer enough, ever since Google has been the leading search engine. PageRank could be gamed quite easily with paid links. You can't bribe thousands of people as easily as you can pay for a few links though.

Expertise – authority can't be measured without measuring expertise as well. You can get very popular despite being dead wrong. So an Agent Rank will have to measure whether a given author gets supported by thousands or even millions of people who have no clue or whether they get supported by a few experts who are really knowledgeable in a given area of expertise.

Impartiality – just consider a Google +1 user who constantly votes up Fox News. Can Google count on this person to be an expert on news? Well, most probably the algorithm will consider such a user just an expert on US conservative views. In contrast, consider a user who gives +1 to all kinds of resources, including CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera etc. Will this user be more of an impartial expert?

Popularity – you may be right, but as long as you don't tell the world or convince more than a bunch of bookworms who do nothing else than deal with the issue all day, it won't be sign of influence. You have to be able to appeal to the masses. Google already favours Wikipedia in its results not because it's always the best results, but because most people can get that. Whether you search for SEO, film or God, Wikipedia will show up on top. You will surely agree that there are bigger authorities or better results for all three examples.

Quality – the aforementioned factor; mass appeal can be easily gamed though. We have seen content farms embrace the shallow but popular approach over the years until Google has to curb it. Quality will have to be measured as well. How can quality be determined? This is very difficult, I could write a huge post about this. The on-going Google high quality update, aka Panda, has been about it in 2011. The quality of published and voted for texts by authors will have to be determined by a complex mix of signals itself.

Reputation – someone can have mass appeal, be considered an expert by other experts, even be considered an authority. The reputation of this person can still be a nightmare. Just think about people like Jason Calacanis, Derek Powazek or Steve Rubel who declared SEO dead or rubbish. They are not even famous – they are infamous. People know them because they shout louder than others. So their reputation is awful no matter how much they can game other simpler social media metrics.

Topicality – as you see above these "experts" who indeed have enormous mass appeal, gained great success from their anti-SEO rants when measured by sheer reach and attention. Most of their other contributions haven’t been about SEO at all. So an Agent Rank will have to measure whether you are an expert on SEO, gardening or homeopathy. For example, Klout assumes I'm an expert on homeopathy because I've been involved in many online arguments with people who never tried it but attempt to convince me that it cannot work.

Trust – trust is not influence and not reputation either. Trust is about telling the truth, being reliable and not tricking people in order to gain something. How on earth do you measure that? You can be trustworthy without being influential or without having a reputation. You don't need to be an expert or have mass appeal to be trustworthy either. It's a very important but easy to grasp concept. Nonetheless you need it to survive, and Google will have to measure it as well. Can a person be trusted not to favour their own clients, colleagues or advertisers? Most people will have a bias. The less bias the better to determine a good resource or author. So Google will have to measure the trust other people ascribe to you.

Velocity – news that spreads fast is in many cases more important than news that spreads slowly. Of course this signal is not enough in most cases. Is the royal wedding or Osama Bin Laden's death really the most important news? It depends on many other factors. The speed with which articles by a particular author or social media user spread is one metric that has to included among the above as well. Some ideas need a decade or a century to spread; they aren't less important, they just need more time, but in many cases there’s a reason viral ideas spread like wildfire. Google will have to measure velocity, as it already does with breaking news.

It's a huge task to measure these abstract concepts, but at the end of the day they determine how important a person, a source or a document is.

Some old school SEOs who are envious of the social media influence of more active users frantically try to outpace the competition by making their employees vote them up on social sites or by bragging that they work for big brands and only accept the highest quality.

Telling people is not enough these days; you have to show or rather offer this quality while sharing your know-how free of charge, otherwise others will do it. Most people will look at the measurable social proof and not the clandestine contracts you have with a large corporation. Google will likewise care more for what other people say about you than what you say yourself or make your employees tell the world.

Already there are tendencies such as selling employee attention to the highest bidder as Walmart does with its more than one million underpaid workers. Google will have to determine quickly whether there are voting patterns between a particular group of people.

Still I'm quite optimistic, overall; authors will be judged by what they give to the world, not what they sell to a chosen few. That's a great way to find out what's important. I believe that 99% of the people know better than just the top 1%.

Let’s just hope that Google doesn’t mistake mob mentality for democracy.