The Reddit world is all powerful, all consuming, inspiring fierce loyalty amongst its members, driving them to higher and higher levels of comment witticisms, each time walking the razor sharp edge of being voted up or down, and the consquences for their karma on the site.

For those members of the Reddit community who actually care about such things, and it appears they are legion, having a post that makes it to the first page of Reddit.com, with hundreds (maybe thousands) of upvotes, is more exciting than a promotion at work, winning free shit, the birth of your firstborn, or pretty much any other offline event.

So for the Reddit community to suggest a blackout, was effectively them agreeing to cut off their internet hookup for 24 hours – a major sacrifice, only lessened perhaps by the fact that they knew they weren’t going to miss out on anything while the site was blacked out.

A note re Reddit sharing …

A word to the wise, for those who are not die hard Redditors but unknowingly click the “share on Reddit” button on the bottom of blog posts, thinking Reddit is just another social platform to spread your content on.

Don’t.

Unless the content you are sharing is an incendiary critique of some kind, a completely new ‘meme’ about to take flight, an image that is spectacularly good or awful for some reason, a skilled parody with great (or really really bad) production values.  Just don’t.

Reddit is not a Digg substitute, just waiting to be gamed by random passers by for the purpose of SEOing links back to spam flavoured content.

Those who are successful Redditors succeed because they invest significant effort in crafting their witty, attention grabbing headlines and do their best to ensure the content they are linking to is original and of some benefit/interest to the wider Reddit community. They also regularly engage in comment threads, voting posts up and down, and consistently bring fresh content of value to the table.

Redditors are not people who happily link and retweet to any content that flashes through their Twitter feed.

Reddit is the place that pretty much every funny image, video, meme or parody your friends share on Facebook or Twitter comes from. Sometimes Redditors will have shared that content months before it gains enough viral traction to make it to your own circle of Facebook friends.

Oh and a link that makes it to the front page of Reddit? Can result in millions of hits, which is not for the fainthearted or those without a lot of bandwidth.

So if you’re up to the challenge, wearing your flame retardant knickers and are highly confident in what you have to share, by all means, take the plunge.

If not, can I suggest that you cease and desist … and all will be right in your world.

signed with caution,

Redditor’s wife

With the recent rapidfire launch of new online assets and functionality by uber-adserving-platform Google (no longer really simply a search engine giant), are we seeing an ‘end of days’ … not for life as we know it, but for old style search and what it means?

Evolution has been integral to the web since day one, and evolution in our ability to find stuff online has been dramatic over the years as well. Just a backwards glimpse towards Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves will remind you of that, in case you had forgotten.

Over the years we have seen various major algorithm shifts from Google – which are really only the sort of thing that SEOs obsess over as we try to guess the new rules of engagement.

But of course every one of those changes has been about two relatively simple things – providing better (read more relevant, more accurate, more timely) results for people searching for information, people, places and entertainment, and delivering outcomes to Google’s revenue stream – the advertisers who keep the whole empire ticking over.

We have seen the addition of personalised search, real time search, localised search, search segmented into different content types – images, video, blogs, news, maps, shopping, places, discussions, recipes … even patents.

And the addition of previews, snippets, review stars and the integration of various social media elements – not just Google + and +1, but also Facebook like integration through the social graph… and on and on.

Having worked in an SEO team, I always find it key to remember that any inconvenience we experience as Google (and other search engines) continue to innovate and evolve is really our problem. Google itself doesn’t exist to serve us, or even our organic traffic focused clients.

They don’t mind if we do some stuff, following their guidelines, to ensure good sites are not buried beneath the trivial, irrevelant and spammy. But otherwise, the SEO industry is actually just a by-product of the fact that search doesn’t always deliver what our clients would like it to.

Winds of change are blowing …

So my question remains – have we almost seen the end of standard search as we know it, and perhaps even of “organic vs paid” traffic as we know it?

My gut tells me yes. And you know? Perhaps that is not at all a bad thing. After all, we are (or should be) in the business of getting the right kind of traffic to our clients’ sites. Traffic that converts.

And organic search results through a traditional search engine are no longer the predominant way to make that happen. For example, optimising for local listings may mean that bam! your client is on the first page of results for their most important localised keyword. And it is driving traffic – web and mobile. Not too complex to get that right, as long as you can manage to write down a PIN when the Googlebot calls.

The silver lining to this possible death of organic traffic, from my perspective is, that this level of shift may well achieve what Google has been trying to deal to for such a long time … namely, deal to the spam meisters who create junk sites purely to generate revenue from Adsense placements.

If they can no longer rank, then surely they will no longer provide PPC revenue for their creators … and no revenue surely removes their reason for existing.

Well actually – I don’t think these unimaginative spammers will quite give up at that point, and we are already seeing the rise of social spam, and massive amounts of comment spam – all attempting to send traffic to their non-original websites – just to garner the occasional advertising click through.

What does all this mean for genuine content creators, and genuine businesses?

I am interested in your feedback as to what you think this evolution is going to lead to. I have thoughts of my own … basically from a business consultancy perspective, I think the key going forward is a world of specific search options.

Every site we go to – be it a “normal” website, an Amazon sized site, a social media platform, Wikipedia or YouTube – they all have their own, custom search engines.

Old style search results become a blunt instrument (of sorts) vs specific types of search and check in type results. YouTube is already the second most searched site after Google itself, while for many information based searches people go directly to Wikipedia.

People wanting recommendations – ideally from people they know and trust, will be turning to their various social networks to ask questions and give their own recommendations.

And far be it for me to predict what Google is evolving into, but my guess is, that effectively it is becoming a kind of search portal, segmenting your results page in a far more sophisticated way, pulling in data from all those different types of search and delivering it in one place. Already that is starting to happen, but I have a feeling that it will continue to head more and more in that direction, to the extent that we will no longer be able to recognise the traditional SERPs, or run keyword ranking reports that have any relevance whatsoever.

So from a business perspective, perhaps the most important thing you can do for yourself or your clients, is to sit down with them and work out what kind of search result your site is most likely to be a good fit for, then work towards optimising your presence for the various types of search that would be most likely to deliver your site as a result.

If you have a product or service that can be best represented by videos – perhaps a How To … or tourist related content, then put energy and resources into your Youtube channel.

If you have a tourism business, you need to optimise for TripAdvisor, Foursquare, Facebook Places and probably YouTube as well.

If you are in local retail, then definitely you need to be optimising for local Google search, places, Foursquare – or the other location/review based networks like Yelp if you have them locally.

If you have a food business, again you need to optimise for local Google results, as well as the food review sites, Facebook Places, Google Places and TripAdvisor as well.

You get the picture?

At the same time, I believe we will see a full on resurgence of display advertising delivering traffic, because in a funny way, straight up ads have a kind of honesty – we know they are ads before we click on them, we know companies are paying every time we click through. And done well, they work.

So you still need to ensure that any ads you are paying for are showing on pages that contain relevant content to your business … then ensure that those ads are delivering visitors to an optimised landing page. Everything from that point on should relate to the potential customer’s experience once they get to your site – so we are talking about user focused design, and conversion optimisation.

And that is a post for another day.

I would love your feedback about where you think traditional search has got to, and where it is going – feel free to leave your thoughts below.

Google have signalled all along they are integrating their assets together – and why wouldn’t they? the incorporation of elements like the +1 button has been around for a while, providing you are logged into a Google account of any kind. And personalised search is pretty much unavoidable – even when you turn off search history, you will still get personalised and localised results.

Social search has become more and more significant, as the Google algorithm has shifted from a huge emphasis on links, to taking more and more heed of social sharing and social media networks to establish relevancy in search results. Over the last two years “freshness” has also become a significant part of the algorithm, as they allow for the fact that people are searching for the most current information on anything highly topical.

As for Twitter jumping up and down with utter ridiculousness – as was pointed out by Google, Twitter pulled out of their agreement to provide real time social search results last year – and now they protest? The example used by Twitter recently, of search results in Google for @WWE is also laughable. If anyone is searching for the Twitter conversations relating to WWE, surely they would be searching on Twitter?? If not, they could find their way there via the Google + results that were shown – if WWE has added their appropriate links to their business page About section.

I have been telling clients over the last few months that it is important for them to have a Google + business profile. A lot of them haven’t understood why, given there are less than 100 million members on Google +.

But I have been confident from the beginning that Google + results would show up quickly in search (which they did), and that ultimately Google will no doubt choose to rank results from its own social network higher than those of other networks – after all, why wouldn’t they?

The other reasons I have encouraged clients to get on this evolving network is because of the ability to use the video Hangouts for all manner of things, from sales launches and training, to communicating with clients or team members around the world and so much more. Plus there is the opportunity to effectively use Circles as a company intranet, especially for companies who don’t have the budget to set up a full on intranet of their own.

So it doesn’t concern me at all the direction Google is headed – it has been written on the subway walls for quite some time. My belief is that we are heading to a place where many of the old forms of search optimisation will become largely irrelevant, along with search rankings, and that drivers of traffic and conversion optimisation will become the key measuring stick.

What do you think?

1. Research takes time, and there isn’t always something tangible to show for it. When we scope something for a client project, it might take five hours just to work out that it can’t actually be done in the way the project was envisaged, or with the existing technology platform. Correction – it can’t be done cost-effectively – as they say in the business, anything can be done if you throw enough time and money at it.

2. That when we ask for feedback, information or content from them, the faster they respond with the information we require, the faster and more cost-effectively their project will get done. Dragging the chain in responding may mean you miss the window of time booked in for you, and when the person working on it comes back to it, they will require a bit of additional time to get into the swing of the work again. Allowing them to continue focusing on the project by responding quickly means everyone will be happier.

3. Understand that not everything has to be absolutely perfect to go live. This is not a print run of 5,000 copies that can’t be changed, this is the internet, which means many things can be updated quickly and easily. (Note: On the other side of this coin is the client is who incredibly vague about everything because they think they have forever to get it right … then when the project is finally nearly ready to go live, they sit down and seriously review it and request major functionality, design or structural changes that effectively are the equivalent of rebuilding the entire site.)

4. That we are not mind-readers. The clearer and more detailed a client’s brief, the more closely the outcome will match their expectations.

5. That saying they want their new site to look like Amazon.com or Zappos.com or Apple.com – but they have a budget of less than $20,000 … means we will never meet their expectations. If you really want your site to look like or have that level of functionality, ask us to give you an estimate of what it might have cost to design, build and populate – then decide what your budget is. We are not just making numbers up when we give you a quote, honestly.

6. That if they trust that we have their best interests at heart, we really will try and do the best job possible, within the realms of time and budget. And if we make additional recommendations or ask for variations on the contract, that’s because we think those things will more closely meet your expectations and objectives – not because we are cold-heartedly trying to extract more cash from you.

What do you think? Do these points ring true with you? If you are a client, does this help you understand what might help your project run more smoothly?

• Are all your social media icons up to date? Do you have all the necessary “follow us on” buttons, and do you also have all the up dated sharing tools on your blog posts. If not, you can add the individual buttons, or if you are running a blog, you may wish to update or find a new social media sharing plugin.
• If you run a hospitality business like a restaurant, cafe, bar or accommodation provider, you may wish to explore the new “save to foursquare” button, which enables people who like the sound of your place to add it to their To Do list on Foursquare. This also great for sites or blogs that regularly publish reviews or articles about locations and different establishments. Once the location has been added to a Foursquare To Do list, that person will get “buzzed” by Foursquare when they are in the neighbourhood, making it easy to keep track of all those places you were meaning to check out.
• Go through your site and ensure any relevant date references are updated and accurate. For example, if your About Us says your company has been in business for 12 years, update to 13 years, to keep it fresh and current.
• Review your whole site as objectively as you can – does it show all your current products and services, for example? And are there any pages that could do with some new images or a bit of a design overhaul?
• Have a look at your Google Analytics to determine the most popular pages and ensure the content on these is absolutely up to date, as well as being a good fit with your current business objectives.
• Do the same for your Social Media accounts – do you need to install a fresh Facebook landing page? Time for a new custom Twitter or YouTube Channel background? Time to customise your company LinkedIn profile perhaps if you haven’t already got that in place?
• Once you have reviewed, refreshed and updated your site and your other online channels, you are ready to face the year confident that your site and your content can be easily shared, helping to maintain and build your business reputation and supporting your marketing objectives.

Go for it!!

So we are a week into the new year, 2012.

And what have you done? Did you make a resolution to lose weight, go to the gym daily, quit smoking, cut back on the alcohol or change some other damaging vice or bad habit?

Do you believe in making – and trying to keep, New Year’s resolutions? Or have you ‘been there, done that’ so many times without results that you just don’t bother any more?

I’m pretty much in the latter camp, but just recently I had a little ‘aha’ moment that I think could really help in achieving the things we would really like to change or improve in our lives in the year ahead.

Inspired by a comment on Goddess Leonie’s Facebook page, from one of her subscribers who was thinking of setting herself another group of mid-year resolutions, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps one of the reasons those great intentions we set for ourselves tend to fail, is because we give ourselves a WHOLE YEAR to achieve them

From personal experience, I am sure we all know that the tighter the deadline, the more likely we are to get stuff done. Hell, if the deadline is urgent enough we can achieve almost anything.

When you give this a little thought, I am sure you know this is true.

As the old adage goes, when you want something done, you give it to a busy person.

When we have an endless amount of time ahead of us to do whatever we want, we spend most of that time doing nothing … until we get very close to when that thing absolutely has to be done, and then we do it.

So how do we apply this insight to establish resolutions we can actually keep for 2012?

1. Write down your list of what you would like to achieve this year in all areas of your life – work, home, social, spiritual, physical
2. Put them into order of importance, with the highest priorities at the top of the list
3. Now think about timeframes – you might want to group your items into things that are a one off, that simply need to be done so you can tick them off (like new experiences you want to try, stuff you want to get done at home or work etc) and things that are a longer term process, like reaching a goal weight, or seeing noticeable change in certain behaviours or habits. we all recognise that those things (unfortunately) don’t happen overnight.
4. How many of the things on your list could you ACTUALLY do straight away? But maybe feel a bit silly doing right now, because after all you have a whole year, so what’s the rush?
5. Now this might sound a bit radical, but if you have some stuff you could actually do right now … how about you step away from the computer, and go do at least one of them, right now?! don’t over think it, just make it happen. Now.

A wee musical interlude while you’re gone …

Ok, so you’re back? How was that? Did you get a buzz from doing something and being able to tick it off your list?

What next?

Well my suggestion is that you grab a calendar, or use one your Microsoft Outlook Calendar, or the Gmail calendar, depending on what you use most often to set reminders for yourself.

1. Go through  the first four weeks, and set yourself four things to cross off your list. they will be a mix of the one offs, plus some steps towards the longer term goals/resolutions.
2. Set reminders to pop up and hassle you, and if you are feeling really brave, set some up in a public forum like Facebook as events and invite people so they will ask you what you are doing and remind you to get it done.
3. Make the last reminder of the month one to sit down, review the year’s resolution list and set yourself weekly tasks for the next four weeks.
4. To really get yourself motivated and moving into change, invite a few supportive friends to do this with you. Set a monthly date to get together over wine or coffee and help each other establish four new tasks for the month.

Two techniques for success I learned years ago from the fabulous Barbara Sher, is that we achieve things when we have a) accountability to a team of cheerleaders who you really know have your back and b) structure to develop the steps involved in making something happen.

So write your list, involve friends, make yourself accountable – then let me know how it goes! I would love to hear what you think of this idea and how it works for you!

1)      Number of followers and followed

2)      Level of influence

3)      Speed of response to queries, on Twitter and Facebook

4)      Empowerment of SM managers to resolve issues for customers and demonstrate that resolution via SM

5)      How big their social media team is

6)      Times of day they actively respond to queries and issues

7)      Information value of tweets (timeliness, relevance etc)

8)      Degree of engagement in conversations on Twitter outside of their own content or customer queries

9)      Integration of social media into their web presence – sharing icons as well as ‘follow us’ buttons

10)   Integration of social media with marketing campaigns – do they set up special campaign accounts to support product launches for example?

11)   Creativity in social media content and interaction

12)   Demonstrating sense of humour

13)   Sharing compelling content – their own and pointing to others that is worth reading

Would you also like to see responses from businesses/brands to a questionnaire about the basis of their Social Media policy and how effectively it is working to meet their objectives?

Please use the comments to add anything else that would be of value to you in helping to make the case for Social Media inside your organisation, or to satisfy your curiosity for any other reason.

If we proceed with this as a project, the results and any articles or white papers will be made freely available to those who participate – and the wider world, no doubt.

You may think I am crazy – how could something so ‘obviously’ good, be our undoing?

Let’s think about it for a moment or two.

What drives efficiency?

Generally a push to be more productive, to streamline and standardise environments, processes and workflows to ensure they can be done more quickly, at lower financial cost to the accountants, business owners and shareholders who hold the purse strings and benefit from the profit margins.

But what really is the cost of greater efficiency for the sake of increased profit?

1. Monocultures. Hybridising and genetically modifying to find the highest producing plants and then planting them in massive amounts, in single crop farms or forests so that they can be easily managed and harvested. The risks? Vulnerability to diseases that can wipe out whole industries – we have seen it with grape vines, kiwifruit vines, and now the banana growing industry – just to name a few. And perhaps some of the issues with bee colony collapse can also be laid at the door of massive areas of monoculture crops. Without bees, food production the world over is at risk. Other risks are that as consumers of food crops we are not receiving the necessary range of essential nutrients we need for strong immune systems and good health.

2. Institutionalisation. Turning the processes involved in work, caring, educating, recreating, eating and drinking, and consuming into institutionalised hive behaviour that is tailored to fit the needs of the institution and those who run it rather than the needs of human beings as individuals. The risks? Losing our ability to think, feel and make choices as individuals. Losing our ability to be creative – to simply sit and think, to put disparate ideas together and come up with something brilliant. To actually meet the needs of our customers instead of trying to push a “one size fits all” model on them, whether they like it or not. The development of human dis-ease that is driven and created by repetitive, high stress work. The creation of a world largely run by soul-less multinationals with no accountability who no longer have “first do no harm” as their underlying value, but instead have “first, make as much money as possible” as their mantra. The pushing of our young and our elderly into managed environments where they can no longer express themselves, receive the attention they need or feel useful.

3. War. The god of efficiency decrees that no resource should be left unused, so we “create work” for our unemployed masses by justifying wars that are not justifiable. The truism that industry thrives in war time is a self-generating fact … the war is initiated, the machinery of producing the weapons and resources used in war swings into action. That machine has a vested interest in the war continuing – peace is not efficient, if it means factories must close and profits disappear.

4. Empty Seas. Fishing industries around the world focus largely on fishing their quota of specific species – in some cases till near or total extinction. Eliminating various species from the food chain has far reaching effects, for example the rampant and careless overfishing of squid, including taking catches when the squid are trying to breed, is having an impact on whale populations around the world. As the whales are starving, they are beaching themselves.

5. Factory farmed food. Driven largely by the evolution of the fast food industry, and by the kinds of food standards monitored by the European Union, we have food producers the world over being forced to produce foodstuffs that conform to a narrow set of parameters – because it is more efficient for the factories that process them, the factories that turn them into the food items we recognise, the packing houses that pack them into identically sized crates and containers, and the supermarkets that like to line them up on shelves. The risks? Massive wastage of food that doesn’t conform. Throwing out of food that is a few days old because it no longer looks ‘perfect’, outbreaks of deadly food poisoning from e.coli because of factory farming methods that are not natural, safe or hygienic – but are “efficient”.

And there are more. Please add your own thoughts to the comments below – what are the dangers of worshipping efficiency at the expense of all else that you have observed or experienced for yourself?

We run a massive risk of worldwide catastrophe – massive crop failure leading to food shortages; bankrupt economies thanks to the bills of war; devastated cultures and countries wiped out by efficient ‘smart bombs’. Now is the time for change, to stand up against the dangers and mediocrity delivered by worshipping this false god.

How can we avert this end of the world? This is not a stray comet, or an ancient prediction – the power is in our hands, we are the only ones who can do something about it.

Both these factors are self evident throughout history – in fact most of the world’s most spectacular buildings have one or both of these motivators behind their creation. Cathedrals that were ostensibly built for the glory of god, were perhaps more often initiated by church leaders with an eye to their own immortality through architectural magnificence.

Towering office buildings are almost without exception commercially driven, while also often aspiring to be the tallest, most innovative, most spectacular – and of course, with the name of an individual like Trump or Murdoch attached, or the opportunity to sell those treasured naming rights to a corporation that wants to be seen as being “on top of the world”.

In a city that needs to be rebuilt by visionaries who have far more in mind than simply empire building or profiteering, I can only hope that we have the right people in position to lead us, and enough people who care able to continue to have their voices heard.

The last thing we need are more towers when we have a population who don’t wish to work more than one or two levels above ground. Where will the workers come from to fill such towers? Perhaps they will be the new citizens of Christchurch in ten years time, people who have not lived through thousands of after shocks, seen others killed by collapsing buildings, or had their homes literally heaving and cracking under their feet.

The drive to build tall buildings serves only the architects wanting to make their name for spectacular, grandiose structures … the property developers attempting to maximise their return from a small piece of central city real estate, and the landlords who invest in such properties in the hope they will continue to profit for many years to come.

We have been told already that to financially justify the additional cost of making a building truly earthquake proof, commercial properties will need to be more than six storeys high. For a workforce, and potential employees whose first question of a potential employer is “where is your office and what floor are you on?” being tempted above ground level will not be easy, no matter what the engineers have to say.

Reality is that we trusted engineers who told us buildings were safe to go back into, and then people died on February 22nd. We are not so ready to trust those who tell us buildings are safe anymore.

I have a friend who was told her house was safe by the insurance company’s engineer. Despite the fact her home is on Mt Pleasant, which was badly impacted by the November and February quakes, this engineer disagreed with the original report which recommended all the summerhill stone on her home be replaced, and said only those bricks which fell off in November needed to be replaced. A few days later, on Feb 22, the rest of the bricks fell off, and could have seriously injured my friend or her 4 year old daughter who liked to sit in front of the bricks in the sun.

Trust is a hard thing to regain when so many of us have been so close to losing so much, and so many have already lost everything.

I only hope those who might consider allowing their egos or their greed to have anything to do with this rebuild, to think again and approach with humility instead.

Can I just say – along with many others – bad, bad, bad idea EQC.

Telling the public that it is not appropriate for your marketing team to respond to questions because they don’t have access to specific case files is simply not good enough.

From what my friends and colleagues are telling me, even your processing staff don’t have access to the files they should have.

How many paper files flew out the broken windows on February 22nd? I have heard many completed files were lost that day.

Social media is one of the few avenues where the people of Christchurch feel at least they can be heard and seen, and they may have a chance of not disappearing completely into the liquefied swamp that appears to be EQC’s processes.

So guys, we have been paying our dues to you since Napier, surely it is time to be treated with respect.

Get your case file people hooked up with your Facebook account – if you need advice on how to manage it, there are plenty of social media consultants happy to help. It’s called a social media contact centre – google it.

Whatever you do, treat the people trying to talk to you with respect – they are at their wit’s end and they could do with a break or two.

Thanks.