marți, 6 septembrie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog


Big Brand SEO - Campaigns, Integration and Extended Brand Keywords

Posted: 06 Sep 2011 03:49 AM PDT

Posted by RichardShove

Throughout my six years as an SEO, there have been times when I've questioned the value of SEO for clients. The reasoning behind this was that popular non-brand phrases were unlikely to drive business or in some cases where markets were dominated by aggregator sites, where people require choice from the offering, rather than an individual brand. Data was often backed up by generic paid search generating negative return and eventually being switched off.  

There are always long tail phrases that will generate return but ultimately, that is not what this post is about. Brand terms are vital and in the majority of cases drive more revenue than high volume generic phrases, especially for big brands yet are often ignored on the basis that a site should rank for them. There are also opportunities that are not strictly related to the brand itself that are often ignored.

Working at OMD has exposed me to working with some of the biggest brands out there and my role is getting stuck in to the chunky pieces of work. Working with existing media clients, it would not make sense to not offer the service and it wouldn't wash to argue the toss for not doing SEO. For the same reason, integration with other digital and above the line channels is crucial too. Offline marketing types don't tend to understand digital and to be fair, there is likely a mutual misunderstanding but the two channels need to work together for the greater good and co-ordination is required between teams.

Campaign Based SEO Integration

One common failing of above the line work is that there is no measurability. There are ways in which to rectify this by the use of vanity URLs/domains and redirecting with campaign tracking codes but not everyone will remember the brand, let alone the URL. As much as TV advertisers will hate to admit it, people will often remember the advert but not the brand, unless the brand is drilled in to your head to the point of infuriation like the Go Compare and We Buy Any Car adverts here in the UK. If the branding is not strong however, there are other ways to get visitors to the site via other marketing channels and ensure the brand message is passed. Taking the first example to come to mind:

 

I remember watching this video and not being entirely sure what it was for immediately afterwards, so this is a perfect example of what I am talking about. In actual fact, the video is promoting Cadbury's Dairy Milk; however, even four years after the advert, there are related terms that are not brand related:

   gorilla-keywords   

I've deliberately excluded unrelated and brand terms, which add to the number of searches and while the volumes aren't ground breaking, the advert is four years old and is still receiving search volume. Searches for these phrases further extend the measurement of above the line activity and increase traffic and ensure the brand association is made online, if it was not clear to begin with. In this particular example, the brand (Cadbury's) appears eighth in the search results for the phrase, though visibility is poor due to the dominance of universal search:

drumming-gorilla-serp

None of the videos or images are from an official YouTube channel and the brand association is not clear on the titles which is certainly not ideal. Other, non-TV advertising can quite happily live on the site in harmony with regular content, particularly if it is humorous or emotive in some way. This could be in the form of advertising from newspapers, magazines, pub toilets or public transport. The same rules apply.  

My strategy for integrating campaigns in to search and to gain maximum exposure and offline tracking would look something like the following:  

1.       Ensure the client keeps you in the loop with any upcoming marketing activity

It is difficult to carry out campaign optimisation strategy without being forewarned. This is often the most difficult part so prepare to be reactive.

2.       If at all possible get a sneak peak of the campaign from the client or at the very least a brief

Again, a nice luxury if you can make it happen but seeing the campaign first hand will give a better understanding of what the campaign it is and allow you to properly brainstorm potential related keyword searches.

3.       Create official YouTube and Flickr accounts if they do not already exist

Fairly obvious point, however you’d be surprised by the amount of brands that don’t have a branded YouTube account.

4.       Prepare a paid search campaign covering brand and advert related terms, as well as any generic phrases that may apply, i.e. "drumming gorilla"

We all know that ensuring number one positions for every potential keyword is difficult so for maximum exposure and tie in to above the line, PPC will help assist and ensure maximum coverage.

5.       Ensure there is a section of the site for adverts and campaigns and use a tailored landing page for paid search, as well as SEO

Again, an obvious point but not all brands have spaces on their site for their advertising campaigns.

6.       Brief other digital teams to include relevant imagery for display and affiliate activity to amplify the campaign digitally

Display creatives should be altered on a regular basis and while I'm no expert on display, it would make sense for them to match any television advertising. The same creatives could be passed on to affiliate networks for affiliates to use on their own site, which should amplify the impact and engrave the advert on peoples’ minds.

7.       Prepare and optimise a landing page for the campaign in question, include imagery and a description of the campaign for the visually impaired

Not the same as point five, which suggests having a dedicated section of the site for advertising, my point here is to ensure a dedicated landing page for each advert and not all adverts on a single page.

8.       Launch the campaign

By launch, this could be the first TV airing, date of coverage in newspaper, etc. The following post launch strategy should occur as soon as possible afterwards and should be fairly self explanatory:

  1. If video based content, upload the video to YouTube and link to the landing page in the video description with Analytics tracking
  2. If image based, it wouldn't hurt to upload to Flickr and watermark any images relating to the campaign for branding in universal search
  3. Optimise images for related terms in the filename and alt attributes, ensuring the latter are descriptive of the image in question
  4. Embed the campaign/video in to the pre-prepared landing page
  5. Put the paid search campaign live
  6. Amplify the launch by promoting through official social media channels and PR
  7. Do not remove the campaign page from the site

The last point is important; often brands will remove older adverts from their sites and YouTube channels, which is completely unnecessary. If the campaign is successful and memorable it can drive traffic for years to come. One further point I'd highlight is tracking content on third party sites using the Google Analytics URL builder where possible.

Search can be avoided altogether with the use of QR codes, however I'd argue that until QR code readers are native in modern smartphones, rather than requiring a third party app, the uptake is likely to be small and regardless, there will always be searches, so it is still worth covering all bases.

Extended Brand Terms

Campaigns are not the only brand related searches that get overlooked. There are many extended brand terms where a brand will not rank in first position. Often brands have parent or sister companies that will outrank them, even if they are less relevant and traffic is lost to these sites. This can be avoided by linking between the sites or if required, by link building targeting these terms.

In my experience there is one common brand related suffix that is usually outranked by third party sites and they relate to the brand and vouchers/discounts. Those pesky voucher code affiliates dominate these terms though this is often due to not having a relevant landing page on the site. If there is no brand presence, people will visit the affiliate sites for these terms anyway, so why not have a discount and voucher code landing page on the site? The offer doesn't have to be earth shattering, as long as it gets the traffic to the site and not your affiliates. This can be supported through paid search.

Other common brand variations include complaints, contact, prices etc. Make use of your Analytics data, internal search and Google suggest for common variations and see where you rank. I'd imagine you'd be surprised at what ranks for these terms. If you don't rank, it's likely that there is no relevant landing page.

Brand Products

Products are effectively brand terms. To use the example above, the main brand was Cadbury's; however the product was Dairy Milk, which is a brand in itself. Often the product can have greater search volume than the main brand. Again, ensuring a dedicated page for each brand assists with this, though in many cases, the product will have its own site. Of course, there are further terms relating to the product, Dairy Milk itself is a chocolate bar, a milk chocolate bar at that.

Vanity Searches

This leads nicely on to vanity searches, something which the largest brands seem to be adamant on ranking for, despite a likely poor ROI. The brand association is enough for them to want to rank. In the continued example, Cadbury's and Nestle may want to fight it out for "chocolate". Levis and G-Star may want to fight it out for "jeans". It would be poor show to not advise the client that ranking for these terms will take a lot of resource, time and effort for little return but for them, it is often necessary and as long as they have a reasonable budget, there is no reason not to chase it.

Related Terms

There are always less obvious related terms that can be taken advantage of, on top of the primary generic keywords. For food related terms, there are always nutritional searches. "Calories in chocolate", "fat in chocolate" are two examples following the same theme. Governments, particularly in the UK and the US, are placing a larger emphasis on health awareness and encourage brands to educate their consumers. It is good PR for brands associated with obesity to actively promote healthy eating and a balanced diet. Being upfront and offering honest advice can lead to good publicity and help capture more search traffic, though of course, people will be critical of the dealer preaching to the addicts approach.

Piggybacking

Finally, piggybacking on current affairs is a great way to increase search traffic assuming that it can be made relevant. This could be the form of linkbait or just simply an article/blog post discussing the topic. I'd advise that it is kept on topic and that caution is taken with the topics that you chose to jump on. Choosing a topic that is close to people's hearts can lead to negative attention and unless you're Ryanair who seem to thrive from trolling the public, bad publicity is not good publicity. One very recent example is a Dragon's Den funded popcorn brand that jumped on the riot bandwagon:

social-media-fail

This particular gem was blogged about by Andrew Burnett and the image is from his post.

The key here is to discuss events relevant to your site and brand, perhaps showing some thought leadership while avoiding potentially emotive topics.

After all this, I still believe there are companies that will not see a significant return from search. My experience has told me however, that there are always ways to increase traffic, even if you are concentrating solely on integration with campaign based marketing and brand terms. The extra traction from SEO and search as a whole is 100% worthwhile, if you can get the integration part right.


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10 Ugly SEO Tools that Actually Rock

Posted: 05 Sep 2011 02:05 PM PDT

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

SEO is easy. Graphic Design is hard.

At SEOmoz we take pride in making SEO tools that shine with beauty, often with great success. To be fair, we haven't always hit the mark. You can’t judge a book by its cover. Some of the best SEO tools ever invented exist on a geek's homemade Google Docs spreadsheet pulling in raw API data.

We love ugly SEO tools. They’re practical and more often than not, made by a single developer. Let's spread the love by appreciating those under-designed tools that are actually awesome.

1. Shared Count

Why it Rocks - Introduced to us by Tom Critchlow, Shared Count has a permanent place on my bookmarks bar. Not only does it track the social sharing statistics of any page you desire, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and raw Twitter counts. In addition, Shared Count has an open API, so you can build your own tools on top of it.

Shared Count

Why it’s Ugly - It’s hard to pick on a tool with absolutely no design whatsoever. Sort of like kicking a dog when it’s down.

2. IETester

Why it Rocks - Whenever you check cross browser compatibility, 9 times out of 10 Internet Explorer throws you for a loop. IETester is a free, downloadable web browser that allows you to render different versions of IE in side-by-side windows and check for errors. There’s also a cool debugging option to root out tough-to-find problems.

Why it’s Ugly - Nothing looks good in IE6, not even IE6.

3. Blogscape

Why it Rocks - The hidden gem of the SEOmoz toolset, Blogscape allows you to monitor the popularity of any keyword, brand or url on a daily basis. Simply enter a term or domain and see a list of all mentions of that phrase taken from a list of 1000s of RSS feeds and more.

In addition, advanced query operators allow you to track only posts containing a link to a specific domain – great for tracking new link discovery. We use it in-house at SEOmoz weekly to help measure the success of our SEO efforts.

Blogscape SEO Tools

Why it’s Ugly
The above screenshot doesn't look bad, but every time the neon green wolf logo loads in a browser, Roger MozBot blows a circuit. (This is a PRO tool. If you’re not a PRO member, the login page is even uglier.)

4. URI Valet

Why It Rocks - URI Valet combines over 10 structural tools in one to perform technical audits, site reviews and more. You can see behind the scenes of any web page by checking server headers, text to HTML ratio, download speed, object details and quick links to W3C Validators. One of my favorite features not only lists all the internal and external links on a page, but validates them as well.

URI Valet

Why It’s Ugly - Who says you need a graphic designer to make a web-based tool? Or a color pallet, for that matter.

5-6. Robots.txt Checkers

http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml
http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check 

Why They Rock - I couldn’t decide which of these tools I liked more - it’s good to bookmark them both. When I worked on the help team at SEOmoz, these tools were essential for finding hidden problems with robots.txt files, even when no error was visible. They even account for hidden code in your files that can trip up your average search spider. I guarantee at least 1 out of 5 readers will discover robots.txt errors they never knew existed.

Robots.txt

Why They’re Ugly - We know robots.txt files are boring (exceptions excluded) but does your user interface have to be too?

7. Wayback Machine

Why it Rocks - The Wayback Machine has a giant archive of website pages going back 15 years. If you want to research older links that may have disappeared or track website modifications that resulted in traffic changes, the Wayback machine lets you peer into the past, sometimes with dramatic results. It’s hard to believe this is what SEOmoz looked like just 2 years ago.

Some grey hat SEOs buy expired domains, then reconstruct the previously existing website page-by-page from the Machine’s archives. By doing so they hope to preserve the allusion of continuity to Google. (In my opinion, the jury’s still out.)

Wayback Machine

Why it’s Ugly - It’s cool to see what your favorite website looked like in 1996, but what's up with that 1996 logo? Still in Beta... seriously?

8. SEO Browser

Why it Rocks - Quickly see all of a webpage’s important SEO structure in one view, starting with the title tag and working your way down. Does the page have a robots.txt file? How about analytics installed? Often I use the SEO Toolbar for a quick look at page structure information, but the SEO Browser is an old favorite and great when I want to see the entire text copy laid out on a single, readable page.

SEO Browser

Why it’s Ugly - Their tagline is “See your website like a Search Engine sees it.” Unfortunately, most search engines have the design aesthetics of a color-blind CSV file.

9. Rank Checker

Why it Rocks - Sometimes you want to check a bunch of rankings…. fast. The Rank Checker from SEObook runs on your browser so you don’t have to wait for a third party to check your rankings for you. Beware, because it runs on your browser it’s much harder to control for the effects of localization and other mitigating factors, but it’s still handy when speed is more important than absolute accuracy.

SEOBook's Rank Checker

Why it’s Ugly - It’s not that ugly. But it is quick and dirty.

10. Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Why it Rocks - While Screaming Frog is winning over the hearts and minds of many SEOs, Xenu’s Link Sleuth takes the award as the original ugly SEO tool that rocks. Most think of it as a link checker that runs on your desktop, but its dead simple interface and easy-to-understand reporting makes it a must have when running quick site audits. It’s also brilliant when mining for link opportunities.

Xenu

Why it’s Ugly - After performing a Google search for Xenu, the first thing you do is hit the "back" button to double check your results. Quite possibly the worst landing page in the history of SEO tools, you swear you've arrived on a broken site from 1992. Trust us, it's okay.

The alien has landed.


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Is a High Bounce Rate Bad? Graywolf's SEO Blog

Is a High Bounce Rate Bad? Graywolf's SEO Blog


Is a High Bounce Rate Bad?

Posted: 06 Sep 2011 10:12 AM PDT

Post image for Is a High Bounce Rate Bad?

Is having a high bounce rate bad? It depends. In this post, we will be looking at bounce rate in association with other factors to help you spot a bad high bounce rate from a high bounce rate you don’t need to be worried about.

One of the positive impacts of Google’s Panda Update has been that more people are taking a look at the overall quality of content in their website and removing low quality, low engagement, low value pages. This is something I’ve been advocating for quite a while with a yearly content audit.

You need to take a holistic look at the page and the larger role it plays on your website, not just its bounce rate, before you determine quality… 
First, let’s take a look at the problem from a theoretical standpoint: Is a high bounce rate bad? When is a high bounce rate something you don’t need to worry about? While each algorithm package has a slightly different technical definition of bounce rate, a bounce means that a person came to the website, viewed one page, and left. However, assuming this is always a “bad thing” is a bit naive. Sometimes the page answers a person’s question, solves their problem, or gives them the information they wanted. It does such a good job that users don’t need to do anything else. Want an example? I run some travel websites. As we know, airlines and government websites often have horrible SEO and architecture. So I often take the top questions people are searching for and create a collected FAQ page for these queries. One of my pages has a high bounce rate of over 85%. However, by using a service like crazyegg, I can track clicks on the print button. Over 45% of the people who visit the page print it. It’s pretty hard to say that page isn’t doing its job.

Now let’s look at some actual numbers. Here are some stats from my analytics about pages with a high bounce rate.

High Bounce Rate With High Page Time

You can see the bounce rate is very high. If you were concerned only with bounce rate, you might kick those pages into the “low quality” bucket and schedule them for a rewrite or deletion. However, what you really need to do is look at time on page as well. You can see that people are spending a lot of time on those pages.  Because they are reading them, the pages do have some value.

Let’s look at another set of pages.

High Bounce Rate With Low Page Time

We can see these pages have a high bounce rate as well. But if we look at the time on site for these pages, we see a very different story. People are only on these pages for a short time. From a search engine perspective, that’s probably a bad signal, so those pages are candidates for updating, rewriting, or deleting.

Some other factors you might want to look at as well are adsense revenue or affiliate commissions. Its possible that a page with a high bounce rate might occur because people are clicking the ads (making you money) or clicking an affiliate link (also hopefully making you money). You need to take a holistic look at the page and the larger role it plays on your website, not just its bounce rate, before you determine quality and decide if it needs to be updated or removed.

You may also want to read is Is Having a High Exit Rate Bad.

What are the takeaways from this post:

  • Regularly perform a content audit on your website. Identify pages with high bounce rates.
  • Look at other factors for the page, such as time on site, advertising revenue, affiliate income, social bookmarking, printing, etc.
  • Try to rewrite, update, enhance, or promote these pages first. It’s often a better choice in the long run.
  • Only eliminate pages that don’t earn their keep, are outdated, and can’t be saved.
  • In some cases you may want to put these pages in a non spider-able archive. This makes sense when they have value to users on site but little to none from a search engine perspective. Examples include old newsletters or outdated PDF files.

photo credit: Photospin

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Is a High Bounce Rate Bad?

President Obama: "We Celebrate our Nation's Workers"

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
 

President Obama: "We Celebrate our Nation's Workers"

President Obama traveled to Detroit, Michigan where he spoke at a Labor Day picnic with workers at a GM plant. During his remarks, the President spoke of the important role the labor unions have played in establishing the “cornerstones of middle-class security:”

That’s the bedrock this country is built on. Hard work. Responsibility. Sacrifice. Looking out for one another. Giving everybody a shot, everybody a chance to share in America’s prosperity, from the factory floor to the boardroom. That’s what unions are all about.

Watch the President's speech and see photos from the event.

A man grasps President Barack Obama's hand as he greets people in the crowd after addressing the Labor Day celebration in Detroit, Mich., Sept. 5, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.

Working Together to Create World-Class Schools
As students across America return to their classrooms, Arne Duncan looks at what we need to do to educate our children to compete in the knowledge economy.

Tweetup Briefing: Ask @PressSec Your Questions at the White House
The day after President Obama’s speech to a Joint Session of Congress, some lucky tweeple will have the chance to come to the White House and ask Press Secretary Jay Carney their questions.

White House Internship: Memories that Motivate
Naima Green, a former White House intern, describes her experiences. The deadline to submit Spring 2012 White House Internship Program applications is September 11.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

9:15 AM: The Vice President swears in David Petraeus as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency

9:45 AM: The President and the Vice President receive the Presidential Daily Briefing

10:15 AM: The President meets with senior advisors

12:30 PM: The President and the Vice President meet for lunch

3:00 PM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney WhiteHouse.gov/live

WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates events that will be live streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live

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International SEO Strategy – Domains, Subdomains or Subfolders?

Posted: 05 Sep 2011 09:49 AM PDT

A bit of an old one, but a common question I get asked by clients is about their international SEO strategy. Which option is best? A new domain, subdomains or subfolders?

I wrote a post on international domain strategy back in 2008, but a lot has changed since then – so it’s probably time for an update.

International SEO is still one of those topics where there is no clear right or wrong answer – but there are different strategies which may be more or less successful depending on given factors and scenarios. So here’s my thought process behind selecting the best international SEO strategy to suit your website or brand.

1) When to use local TLDs (top-level domains)?
In my opinion, having a local TLD is still the number one way of showing Google that a website is intended for a specific geographical target. And I can’t see that changing either, despite huge improvements in Google Webmaster Tools over geo-targeting settings.

So if you want to setup a French website, for example, you’re likely to find it quicker/easier to get this indexed and ranking in Google if it’s located on a .fr domain. Also, when thinking of the website as a brand, a local domain is likely to be more recognisable to that countries audience. So you may see an increase in clickthrough rate from searchers and possibly an impact to conversion rate too! So those are additional considerations beyond achieving rankings.

A good example of a brand who use a country-specific domain is Amazon, who split UK and US content between Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. This is of course meant primarily for users, making it easier for them to differientiate between the two sites – but it has also worked very successfully from an SEO perspective.

Amazon UK

 

2) When to use subfolders?

In my opinion this depends on a couple of major factors. Firstly, how big is your brand? For example, if you’re Amazon.com and want to launch in the UK – then Amazon.co.uk is a sensible option. In terms of attention and online visibility expected, you can quickly build the new local domain into a strong website, without as many concerns of this being a new, unestablished domain in Google. Link reputation can be built more quickly, so the long-term gain in having a unique, country-specific identity is likely to outweigh the risk of any short-term ranking in issues in Google UK (or any other local search engine).

However, if you’re not a strong brand and you have a modest link profile – then in my opinion it can be a much longer process of trying to get a brand new, local domain ranking in Google. Obviously not everyone is an Amazon – and that’s clearly an extreme example – but if you’re in a niche where links are difficult to come by, then instead of spreading your international content across several domains, I would seriously consider consolidating this into a single domain strategy. This means all link reputation would be merged into a single website and domain – ensuring that any authority built is collected and shared across all country websites within the same domain.

An example of a website which does this well is Apple. With their UK site located at www.apple.com/uk/ – in order to implement this successfully you would need to individually geo-target the subfolders in Google Webmaster Tools towards the relevant geographical locations. My preference here would be to organise these into concise two character country codes, e.g. /uk, /fr, /es, /de etc…

Here’s what it would look like if we were to setup a US country-specific site on seoptimise.com/us/:

Google Webmaster Tools

If you choose this option it’s also important to ensure that you have a globally recognisable domain, so .com, .net or .org ideally – if you have local content on a country-specific domain you will only be able to geo-target that single country. For example, you won’t be able to geo-target www.domain.co.uk/fr/ towards France. Perhaps that sounds obvious, but I’ve seen it done before!

3) When to use subdomains?
I’m not sure there is a great argument here. Although Google have changed how subdomains are treated (with them no longer being viewed as a separate site), traditionally subfolders have been the preferred option over subdomains – and I would continue to stick with that practice.

The only real argument I can think of here (other than perhaps making content management easier) is geo-targeting. If you use subdomains, you have the ability to host these on different servers to the main www site. Then Google will pick up on the fact that this subdomain is hosted in a specific country.

In summary…

Overall, I think it depends on the website in question.

What works best for your target keywords? For example, if you search for “shoes” in Google.com.au – you’ll find that all of the top 10 listings are .com.au domains – so it’s likely that a country-specific domain strategy will be more successful here:

Shoes - Australia

Also, if you have already setup international sites on geo-specific domains, perhaps it’s a good idea to stick with it and build them up – as opposed to switching to a single domain strategy. But if you’re starting afresh, personally I think the main decision lies in how effectively you think your link building efforts can be spread across multiple websites and countries in order to build up those domains individual reputations in the search engines. Link building across a wider number of domains is likely to require more significant investment. Of course, this also depends on the competitiveness of your market – if you only need a handful of links on each to outrank your competitors, it’s clearly going to be much easier than if you’re looking at tens of thousands of links.

Obviously if you are considering launching international sites there are other SEO considerations to make too. Such as ensuring your content is unique. If you have multi-lingual content, then obviously you need to make sure that firstly this is well-translated. But also well-optimised for your target audience, so make sure you don’t ignore keyword research, as people from different countries will search for different search terms.

Plus if you are launching international content across multiple countries, but using the same language (e.g. English in the UK, US, Australia and Ireland) – then I would recommend putting effort into ensuring that this content is unique and targeted towards that specific region. You want to ensure that when searchers are visiting via Google UK they are directed towards your UK site, not the duplicate global or US version of the same page.

So which methods have you found to be most successful? I’d be interested in hearing the types of challenges and considerations you bear in mind when making international SEO strategy decisions.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. International SEO Strategy – Domains, Subdomains or Subfolders?

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Seth's Blog : Talent and vendors

Talent and vendors

You may be purchasing services from people with magical talents (artists) and it's a mistake to confuse them with vendors.

As we get more and more service oriented, it's an easy mistake to make. You're busy buying cleaning services or consulting or design, and sometimes the person you're working with is a vendor, and sometimes they're not--they're an artist, "the talent."

A vendor is someone who exists to sell you something. It doesn't always matter to the vendor what's being sold, as long as it's being sold and paid for.

The quality of what's being delivered is rarely impacted by the method of transaction. The turnips will still show up, the house will still get painted. You can send an RFP to a vendor, bid it out, get the lowest price, sign the contract and if you write the contract properly, will get what you ordered.

The quality of the work you get from the talent changes based on how you work with her.

That's the key economic argument for the distinction: if you treat an artist like a vendor, you'll often get mediocre results in return. On the other hand, if you treat a vendor like an artist, you'll waste time and money.

Vendors happily sit in the anonymous cubes at Walmart's headquarters, waiting for the buyer to show up and dicker with them. They willingly fill out the paperwork and spend hours discussing terms and conditions. The vendor is agnostic about what's being sold, and is focused on volume, or at least consistency.

While the talent is also getting paid (to be in your movie, to do consulting, to coach you), she is not a vendor. She's not playing by the same rules and is not motivated in the same way.

A key element of the distinction is that in addition to the varying output potential, vendors are easier to replace than talent is.

Target understood this when they reached out to Michael Graves to design a line of goods that sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of items. When I interviewed Michael a few years ago, he had nothing but great things to say about the way Target invited him in and gave him the ability to do his work. Threadless embraces this when they treat the designers of their t-shirts in a non-corporate way. Etsy is built on this single truth.

Most industry is built on vendor relationships, and vendors expect (and sometimes value) the impersonal nature of their relationships. This scales... until you lump in the talent.

Should you treat vendors with respect? No doubt about it. Human beings do their best work when they're treated fairly and with enthusiasm. But when the provider is also digging deep to put something on the table that you can't possibly write a spec for, you're going to have to respond in kind.

 

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