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The Varying Effectiveness of Social Proof - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 10 Jan 2013 06:06 PM PST

Whether is it's a tweet from a colleague or a face pile on a site, social proof can be a wildly effective form of marketing. But like all marketing, the effect can vary greatly for a number of reasons.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses different ways to approach your social proof and tactics to increase the potential conversion rate by increasing the specificity of your efforts.

What do you do to enhance your social proof? Has anything really worked great for you? Share and discuss in the comments below!

Video Transcription

"Howdy SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to talk a little bit about the power of social proof. Now social proof is a psychological, like behavioral psychology type of phenomenon whereby human beings are interested in what other human beings are doing, and by showing that other humans are interested in something or are taking some activity, you can actually encourage people to take that same activity.

It's not that we're all sheep or lemmings. It's just that we like each other. We tend to follow each other. We tend to be interested in and remember the behaviors of those around us.

This gets used all the time in inbound marketing and web marketing all over the place. You can see this, for example, in search results. Think when you perform a search on Google and you see all those star ratings, and it's been rated by this many people, and it's 4.5 out of 5 stars. Now they've got the Zagat ratings and local. They have product ratings. You can see the number of times that someone has +1'd something, so it will say, "This is
+1'd by 3000, 4000 people." There will be their profiles on the right-hand side. Google is clearly doing this.

You can see this in Yelp and Urbanspoon, places like that, that rate local restaurants. You can see this in all sorts of places that rate hardware, rate software, rate anything. You can see this on a lot of people's websites, where they've got the Facepile widget installed, and they show the faces of people like you who have subscribed. If you're logged into Facebook, they'll show you, "Oh well, Rand, your friends, Mike and Adam and Sally, they've all subscribed to this email newsletter." All right. Great. Or they've liked this brand on Facebook.

This sort of social proof stuff is used all over the place, and primarily the activity that you're trying to drive toward is some type of conversion. You're trying to get someone to engage in an activity like share something socially, like something, +1 something, click on something, or you're trying to actually get them to convert. But social proof has varying degrees of effectiveness, and that's what I wanted to talk about a little bit today.

There's been a lot of research into this area and a lot of interesting tests performed online. I might try and cite some of those in the link here or on the page here or maybe in the comments below. You can see this type of varying effectiveness. So saying something like, and you'll see this on the front of a lot of websites or on their landing pages, where they'll say, "40,000 small businesses use GetListed.org." Or you might see, what's a good example? Box.net has something where they say, "92% of Fortune 500s use Box. Why aren't you? You should give us a try." That kind of thing.

What's essentially being said here is, "Lots of other people use us. Therefore, this is a good data point to indicate that we're reliable and trustworthy and we're popular." Usually even better than this generic is when you get much more specific. There's been a lot of good research to this effect. So, "141 restaurants in Portland, Oregon use GetListed to manage their online listings and SEO." Oh, well, if I have entered my information and GetListed knows that I'm a restaurant in Portland, Oregon, wow. This essentially says to me that may not be nearly as many as the 40,000 number, but this says, "People like me. My peers, my equals are doing the same thing. They're using this product. Therefore, this must be a good product." In fact, this proves out to be, generally speaking, much more effective in converting than the generic ones, and the more specific you get, the better it gets.

We talked about the Facepile widget saying, "141 restaurants in Portland, Oregon, etc., and your friends." Then these are your friends that are logged in from Facebook or from LinkedIn or Google+, whatever it is. These people in your network, especially if you've already done an email connect of some kind, and you can show who those people are, now this is very, very effective. You might be saying, "Well, okay, but this is a pretty specific use case. You've got to have a lot of information about somebody before you would be able to say, even the specificity of this, although you can get pretty specific if you know who your target customer is." Including the Facepile or something like that gets much harder because you have to get someone to log in with a social network, provide those details. Facepile, obviously, if they're already logged in, you get it automatically, but this actually works tremendously well for social networking itself.

One of the things that we do here at Moz is we look at multi-touch attribution, and we look at where people have seen us and those types of things. We can actually see with some effectiveness that a lot of people, who eventually take a free trial of Moz or make a purchase or those kinds of things, have seen us, been exposed to us on a social network. In fact, they probably followed a link to us from a social network, often Twitter, at one point or another in their buying cycle, which by the way is usually about seven visits long.

In here, there's a lot of social proof in social networks themselves. If you've seen several people in your network mention a brand or a product or a place or a person, you are much more likely to think positively and to have a brand memory of that place. Seeing tweets like, "I just used GetListed to check my local listings," and you see that from two or three of your friends, and the funny thing that happens here is that people, who are exposed to just a few messages from close inside their network, often have a belief that a product is much more popular than people who see messages like this saying, "40,000 small businesses."

The fact that it's in my network, "oh well, if two people in my network mention it, it must be a huge product." As opposed to, "Well, it could just be that it's doing really well in your network." This isn't the psychological belief that we tend to have as people. So this can be very effective. Hence, social media as a branding tool becomes very effective for providing social proof.

Then perhaps not surprisingly, one of the really interesting ones to me, this is in offline use, but in person, if you are out with a group of folks, let's say you're at a conference or an event or a dinner or something like that and someone says, "Oh, have you heard about GetListed.org? They're a great site to do these local listings," and someone else at the event says, "Yeah, they're awesome." These people who have never heard of it before will actually have the most positive impression and the highest likelihood to have a positive brand memory because that in person social behavior is so incredibly powerful.

We have to assume that they're actually going to remember it and that they'll have a brand association from that memory. But this in person stuff is the most powerful one. This is, in fact, why you will see . . . I think there was some great research done. I can't remember exactly the book. I'll try and pull it up. There's some great research done about online auctions versus in person auctions and why Christie's and Sotheby's continue to do auctions, a lot of expensive places, charity auctions, continue to get people together in person. It's because our social behavior and the power of social proof in person, when we're standing together next to each other and hearing from each other, is so much more powerful, and that turns up the dial on what people are willing to spend, how high they're willing to bid, and therefore all the big art auctions and charity auctions and these kinds of things still do in person because the web is not yet providing the same power of social proof as a psychological behavioral modifier that you see in these other ones.

Still I think these can be tremendously effective for your marketing efforts. I would urge you to try these out, if you're not already, on your landing pages, in the search results that you're trying to get, in your social media efforts, in your email subscriptions. Social proof, a very, very powerful tactic.

All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We'll see you again next week. Take care."

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Semantic Web and Link Building without Links > The Future for SEO?

Posted: 10 Jan 2013 03:30 AM PST

Posted by simonpenson

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Rand’s recent WBF about co occurrence was a real wake up call for those still transfixed with link building practices of old. While anchor text based links may still have some effect there is little arguing the fact that the factor’s importance is dwindling. In its place are things like social signals, link age and most importantly a growing reliance on relevancy and how that is deciphered.

For those that haven’t read it yet, I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about what I felt recent Google penalties are really trying to solve. My view is that Google is really trying to clear up the link graph and with it valueless links so that it can clearly understand relevance and associations again.

It’s something that web ‘creator’ Tim Berners Lee first wrote about back in 2006 in this magazine article and Google has been talking about ever since, ploughing lots of cash into acquisitions to get it there.

So, why invest so much time, effort a resource into such a game-changing project? Quite simply because its existing keyword based info retrieval model is in danger of being bettered by semantic search engines.

To understand why this is the case we must first delve into semantics and why it changes the way search engines work.

Semantic Association

Put simply Google wants to better map the associations between content so it can deliver what it believes will be a more personalized and effective result.

The nirvana for the engineers working on the project is to map the associations between types of content with an understanding of the intent of the user when typing in a query.

So, let’s say I type in ‘what’s the weather today?’ At present Google might know where I am but would find it difficult to associate other content to that query. The reason I’m searching for it may well be because I want to know whether I can BBQ, or complete that landscaping project I’ve been researching online.

Google can improve its results by ‘knowing’ why I’m searching for the weather so it can also throw up food offers or home improvement guides.

It can only do this if its data set is clean, and right now there are far too many spammy links muddying the waters; hence why Penguin came in to begin addressing that issue.

Why is Relevance important?

It is quite clear to see why relevance is therefore important and why search engines may reward those helping them out or working to this new system.

How does Google Measure this?

Clearly we are still a long way from a purely semantic engine and Google may never get to that point. The important thing is that they are certainly motivated to make much more of relevance to diversify search results.

As a search marketer your first thought will undoubtedly be ‘how can I ensure I work in a way to take advantage of this change?’ The answer to that question begins with an understanding of some of the patents Google currently holds that may help it do this.

(Hat tip to Bill Slawski and Dan Thies on some of the below)

Topical PageRank

Google had a busy time of it back in 2003, bringing in Taher H. Haveliwala, the genius PHD student behind a new way of applying topical relevance to the company’s faltering PageRank model.

His research around applying greater relevance to links from topical pages as graded by their newly acquired Applied Semantics’ CIRCA Technology meant that they could start developing ways of measuring relevance.

Reasonable Surfer Model

This theory is then taken another step further by applying differing weights to different links on that same page based on their ‘likeliness to be clicked on’. The more likely it is they will be ‘used’ the more authority handed to them. Everything from font size to position and even colour are taken into account in this computation.

Phrase Based Indexing

To further complicate the picture Google then also looks at co-occurrence of words and phrases on a page to work out their ‘meaning’. If you take the phrase ‘hair of the dog’ for instance, Google needs a way to understand its meaning.

To do that it will look at other pages that mention that same phrase to see what else they mention. If they also mention things like ‘drink’ and ‘the morning after the night before’, for instance it will understand that it, and the page it is linking to is talking about a drink to offset the impact of a heavy night out it will assign more authority to that link as it is extremely relevant.

Had it talked about dog hair’ it would be less relevant and therefore a less valuable link.

This is a key development as it is most likely responsible for a lot of the penalties we are currently seeing as a result of spammy link building practices. To stop a page ranking Google can simply remove the connection between the page and any particular term in its index.

It also throws up some interesting opportunity and new ways of working for those looking at how to optimize sites, and we’ll come onto that a little later.

Metaweb Acquisition

While this wasn’t a direct algorithm patent or algo change Google’s purchase of Metaweb, an open source entity database of people, places, things, powered the development of ‘Knowledge Graph’ and fast-tracked its move to add more diversity and ‘user intent understanding’ to search results.

It’s addition allows Google to better understand associations between pages based on their real life connections, not just how they are linked to.

How can you develop a Semantic Strategy?

Knowing all of the above is useless with some actionable ‘next steps’ in terms of how it affects your own search marketing efforts.

So let’s look at some of the ways in which this kind of knowledge has helped me structure our own on and off page process at Zazzle.

Mapping Relevance

The first thing you must work on when considering your off page plan of attack to proactively improve your own relevance profile is to understand what is considered ‘relevant’ to you, and how, in a semantic world. Below is an example of related words to ‘content marketing’ and how they are connected:

Semantic relevance map

The good news is that there is no need to use guesswork here. Tools exist to take the hard work out of the process and a few of the best are listed below:

http://ctrl-search.com/blog/ - this is a great tool to enrich your on page content. Effectively semantically optimizing your own site. By pasting in snippets of your post the engine finds semantically associated images and other content for you to link out to and add.

http://lsikeywords.com/ - a few great blog posts have been created recently around the subject of LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing, including this one linked to on our own blog.

We wrote about it, as it’s a key part of our own outreach process now. For every piece of work we do we will use a tool like this to ensure we stay relevant.

LSI Keywords is one of a handful of tools that will present a list of semantically relevant keywords and phrases for you to widen your outreach approach.

http://bottlenose.com/ - is a tool I have mentioned before here and its great for a multitude of things, especially big data led content cu ration. One of its ‘tools’ however is great for understanding degrees of relevance separation. Once you type in a keyword you have the option to scroll through a number of different tools but the one that we want to use for this is the Sonar+. It visually maps real time semantic relationships between concepts based on Twittersphere sharing and other big data.

Google Semantic Operator – not a tool per se but a really useful operator to help define semantic keyword relationships. By adding the ~ Tilde symbol when searching Google for your key phrase (e.g.: ~travel) you will see other words that Google has mapped against that word, such as Hotels, Flights, Holiday, Tours.

http://ubersuggest.org/ although it is not officially a semantic tool ubersuggest is built on Google predictive search engine and so by default it delivers semantically relevant searches, which makes it great for building outreach keyword lists.

All of the above tools give the user the ability to create a keyword-based map of where to outreach to if links are your project aim.

Building the Outreach Plan

Once you have a view on where you want to outreach too then the next step is to construct a plan to do that.

The next stage is to create a time-based project plan to detail each and every step of the process. This is extremely important when carrying out outreach, as it can be very easy to get distracted and pulled sideways and out of your defined semantically relevant zone.

We use a simple excel table to plan this and below you can see an example based on a two week outreach campaign for a fitness brand.

outreach plan

As you can see we have planned time days on specific areas to ensure we cover off as much semantically relevant opportunity as possible. Into this plan we would then add outreach contacts and note what communication we have had with each.

How to outreach well has been covered in detail by posts like this, this and this and this post is already far too long to delve into this right now but one tip that must be followed is to be as exhaustive as possible in exploring each avenue. Think Face to Face, Phone, Twitter and finally email in terms of contact medium hierarchy as the further you get down the list the lower the conversion to placement will be.

Where things get VERY interesting in a semantically driven project, certainly in terms of off page activity, is when you begin to consider what the real value of that work is; the metrics you’ll be monitoring as your KPIs for the campaign.

Posting without links

Posting content without the need to obtain a link may seem like an insane proposition, especially if you are measuring success by ranking and search engine visibility metrics, but that may not be the case.

Real marketing is not about links. It’s about connecting your brand or business to people with similar interests and beliefs. Links are simply a mechanism that drives Google visibility to get you in front of more of those people more often.

Google understands that while its entire business is built on links it really needs to get away from that model and motivate us to act like above-the-line marketers. And that is where Lexical co-occurrence comes in.

For those really interested in this, both Bill Slawski and Joshua Giardino wrote great technical pieces on what it is and how it works.

In simple terms however it is a way of ranking websites and pages not on inbound links but by how many times they are MENTIONED in close proximity to key phrases.

That’s game changing.

If Google can work out what you are relevant for not by looking at dumb anchor text but what people write about you and what other phrases you regularly appear close to it changes the way you outreach and market your content.

Imagine being able to outreach awesome content without having to look for links. Simply make people aware of what you are doing and get them to talk about you. It’s how it should be and it would have a profound effect on the type of content you might produce and brand-marketing activity you might pursue. Expect PR stunts galore!

On Page Semantic Optimisation

Another key element of semantic ‘link building’ is to build out your relevance to widen the scope of what you are ‘about’. If Google is looking to diversify results then the more words and phrases you can associate yourself with the better.

This means expanding your repertoire. Writing more about those peripheral semantic phrases that are still on brand but may help you rank for a greater number of related searches.

In many ways this is not dissimilar to how any good content strategy should be constructed anyway but below are a few simple reminders and additional points to consider when designing content for a semantic engine:

Proximity > keyword mentions, as we know are useful for helping keyword-based retrieval engines like Google work out what you are about. To improve this further augments the phrase with synonyms, as these are strong semantic signals that you are relevant for a cluster of phrases. Try and then align URL, H1, bold and italic text etc. to ensure continuity, as you normally would to strengthen the page. How close keywords are to key modifiers, and to other links, and the higher up in the code they are the better.
Relevant Shingles and Keyword Co-Occurrence > Use the aforementioned tools and ensure you are adding in those co-occurred phrases within the copy of the page.
Synonym keyword linking > Ensure you link from semantically relevant keywords back to key landing pages for bigger terms to create a strong semantic theme. So link internally using ‘holiday’, ‘hotels’ and other terms back to a key ‘travel’ landing page.
Linking out > again this is not new but by choosing ‘Authority’ or ‘Expert’ documents within the niche, as described by the Hilltop Algorithm. This means looking for high authority sites already ranking for the term you want to be relevant for.

Takeaways

We have covered a lot of ground in this lengthy piece. My hope is that it gives a solid overview of where Google, and other key search engines, are heading. More importantly is gives some actionable tips and suggestions for you to begin implementing now to ensure your site benefits from these forthcoming changes.

Simon Penson is founder and MD of Zazzle Media, a UK digital content marketing and SEO agency. Catch him on Twitter.

West Wing Week: "The Interests of Our Country"

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, January 11, 2013

West Wing Week: "The Interests of Our Country"

Welcome to the West Wing Week, your guide to everything that's happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. This week, the President nominated a bipartisan slate of leaders to key administration jobs, and the Vice President met with a wide array of organizations to talk about efforts to reduce gun violence.

Watch this week's West Wing Week.

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