PurposeDrivenPromotion Search Marketing Articles

American Cancer Society Launches New Video Community

2008-02-29T16:38:55Z

SharingHope.TV Provides a Place for People to Share Cancer Stories

Feb 28th, 2008 - The American Cancer Society is launching a new Web community that will help connect cancer survivors, their friends and family members through the sharing of user-generated videos, photos, music and artwork. SharingHope.tv allows users to create an account and upload video, audio, photos and artwork in order to tell their stories of cancer in ways that work best for them. Visitors to the site can view the content, share what they like with others, or find hope and inspiration for their own fight against cancer.

Cancer survivors and their loved ones are already avid users of online community Web sites, and with SharingHope.tv, the American Cancer Society hopes to engage new and existing users of online media. "Many people share their stories of cancer on Web sites like You Tube, Flickr, and personal blogs. Now they have a chance to come together in a single online community, with an organization and an audience that really cares about cancer," said David Neff, American Cancer Society High Plains Division director of web and interactive strategy.

The new video community is innovative for a non-profit organization because it relies almost completely on people outside of the organization to create its content. "This site is not about the American Cancer Society - it's about the people cancer affects. We are providing a forum for people to share their stories, their heartbreaks, their triumphs and joys," Neff said.

For individuals who have never uploaded a video, SharingHope.tv walks them through the steps with its own user-friendly instructional videos. The online community has other unique features, like free background music for videos, created by independent artists. "No one knows more about cancer than the people living with it. We want to make it easy and even fun for that knowledge to be shared." Neff said.

SharingHope.tv can be found at www.sharinghope.tv.

About the American Cancer Society

The American Cancer Society is dedicated to eliminating cancer as a major health problem by saving lives, diminishing suffering and preventing cancer through research, education, advocacy and service. The Society has 13 regional Divisions and local offices in 3,400 communities, involving millions of volunteers across the United States. For more information anytime, call toll free 1-800-ACS-2345 or visit www.cancer.org.

For more information on SharingHope.TV visit our news room at http://www.sharinghope.tv/newsroom

Yahoo Local Gets an Upgrade

2007-08-22T22:14:07Z

Yahoo Local Search recently re-launched with a host of new features, improved functionality and a new look. And while these new features add to an already functional local service one must wonder if these changes are "worth it"? After all, who uses local search anyways? Why do a local search when you can just do a regular search, hoping for local results? The truth is, local search is beginning to play a larger part in how we search. While we may not notice it, local search is slowly becoming integrated into the regular search results. As such we have to be aware of local search and its options. Therefore in this article we will review the new Yahoo local search. What's new with Yahoo Local Well, there are a couple notable changes. First, the search functionality is much better. Not only could you search for a French restaurant in Chicago, but now you can search for a romantic French restaurant and have it return results. And that ties into the second important change: Improved interaction with user input. In other words, people can contribute to the results, which helps make the search even better. Remember when I said you could get results for romantic French restaurant? Well part of that is because of users who have contributed to different restaurant listings and saying that they are romantic. That means that as more people use and contribute to the local search feature of Yahoo more types of these types of searches will yield better results. But that's not all. The new local search also has a feature showing you what's happening in your area on the weekend. Things like events, shows and movies (along with reviews and show times) all appear. Granted the weekender feature is limited to some larger urban areas, but we should see some improvements as time goes on - especially as the user base in an area expands. There's also a feature which shows you what the top local searches were in your area. "Local Buzz" displays a new search cloud and exposes the most recent reviews of businesses in your area to see what people are buzzing about. And there's an improved feature which allows you to store items for later review, among other things. And my rating is... 4 out 5 with some caveats. I have to say that I'm very impressed with the new Yahoo local search....As long as the city you want is in their database. For example, smaller urban areas do not have much coverage if at all, and if you are outside the United States, forget it. But, if you do live in a larger area you will find the new service most satisfying.]]>

Why You Should Not Rely Solely On Alexa For Your Competitive Intelligence

2007-08-22T19:01:12Z

I recently read an interesting article which compared YouTube (a popular video sharing site) traffic to Google. In it, YouTube was more popular than Google, at least according to web measurement firm Alexa.

And that struck a chord with me. I've dealt with Alexa before so I know it's shortcomings.

In this article we look at why Alexa data is flawed and how you need to be aware of that.

]]> Alexa is an online measurement service owned by Amazon. They collect their data on website usage through a toolbar which is installed by users. This toolbar watches what sites you visit. It then sends the information back to Alexa for number crunching. Alexa then aggregates all the information provided by all the toolbar users and then it extrapolates that data into what it considers an accurate view of website usage. Now, this wouldn't be so bad if there were a representative portion of web users who have the toolbar installed. In other words, if there were a statistically accurate number of web users who were using the Alexa toolbar and surfing normally then I wouldn't have a problem with the data. The problem becomes that there isn't an accurate user base. When Alexa first began, it was very popular outside of North America, therefore most of its users were not from North America. This of course skewed the results you see quite dramatically. Soon, regular users figured out that they could influence Alexa rankings merely by having their friends and family visit the same sites over and over. And this is the core of the problem - that Alexa was so easily manipulated. Granted it is now harder to manipulate than before, but not impossible. Should you use Alexa? My feeling is that you can use Alexa, but you should not rely on just Alexa numbers. If you want to see how your site compares to others, fine take a look at Alexa, but don't be alarmed if the competitors appear to do better than you. Remember Alexa can be manipulated. Instead I suggest you refer to a couple sources to get a more accurate read on how the competition (or industry) is doing. In addition to Alexa, I'd suggest using another free online service called Compete to help round out your data. Compete collects data in a different way, allowing you to perhaps get a more rounded view of competition. If you want to dig even deeper into your competition, check out a service called SpyFu. It can provide competitive information such as some of the terms your competitors may be bidding on, as well as some rankings and even other sites it competes with. If the site(s) you wanted to look at aren't in SpyFu, don't worry they will add them. And if you create an account it will tell you when they are added. So while I don't think one should rely merely on Alexa for their competitive intelligence, I do think you can use it as one of many indicators of how well your site does in comparison to your competition.

Yahoo More Satisfying than Google? It Appears So

2007-08-21T22:02:27Z

A recent study published by The American Customer Satisfaction Index indicates that Yahoo is actually the most satisfying search engine in the US. The results follow a study which measures overall satisfaction in many industries based on consumer interviews. In addition to Yahoo being considered the most satisfying, Google dropped by almost 4%. But despite this drop, Google continues to be the most used search engine. So the question becomes: Why is Google the most used engine? If people are more satisfied with Yahoo shouldn't that translate into increased usage?]]> According to the ASCI website: "The American Customer Satisfaction Index uses customer interviews as input to a multi-equation econometric model developed at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. " They also use various indices to determine the final result including:

Customer Expectations
Perceived Quality
Perceived Value
Customer Complaints, and
Customer Loyalty

To determine the engine's overall satisfaction level. Ultimately the engine that receives the highest score in these areas is considered the most satisfactory. So let us take a look at these factors to see what, if any, ideas we can come up with as to why Yahoo is considered to be more satisfactory than Google. Customer Expectations - This could mean a lot of things but the website says that this is a "measure of the customer's anticipation of the quality of a company's products or services." So does that mean that people expect more out of Google and are ultimately more disappointed? Well I think it is actually a combination of having higher expectations from Google along with having lower expectations from Yahoo. Ultimately users are surprised at the value of information received by Yahoo (in my opinion). Perceived Quality - Perceived quality is basically a measurement which looks at how the engine did in meeting the expected quality level of the user. In other words, did the engine deliver the quality of results that the user expected? Again I think the results indicate that users were both slightly disappointed with Google results while slightly more surprised at the quality of Yahoo results. Personally I have to say that the Google of a couple years ago delivered results better for me than it does now. Granted there was a fair bit of spam in the engine, but I found the more specific the query, the better the results. Now specific results do not return near the quality of results in my opinion. Customer Complaints - The study measured how many complaints were registered as a percentage of all use for this metric. Here I think the engines probably came out pretty evenly. I'd have to say that in my experience with both Yahoo and Google, I'm unhappy with the results an equal number of times on both engines. Customer Loyalty - This refers to how likely the customer is to purchase or re-purchase from a service, based on the customer's own input. In terms of search I assume this refers to how likely the user is to re-use the engine. According to the study "Customer loyalty is the critical component of the model as it stands as a proxy for profitability." This is most likely where Yahoo won the challenge. You see, I've been hearing a lot of rumblings from non-SEO types about how disappointed they are with the Google results. And, a lot of the time, until you point out an alternative to them (such as Yahoo, or Ask or MSN) they will continue to use Google. They just assume there is nothing else out there. But once they try another engine they realize that there are alternatives. And this is why I think Yahoo beat Google here - because the average searcher is becoming disenfranchised with Google. While Google was the best engine, people are starting to realize that it is just one of many. But what does it all mean? Well there are a couple take-aways for Google here. For one, perhaps incremental updates without much fanfare are actually hurting them. Think about it. When is the last time you've seen a Google TV commercial? Now how about Yahoo, MSN or Ask? Perhaps Google does in fact have superior search technology, but if they don't toot their own horn, who's to say they do? After all MSN has made great increases in it's user base and I can almost guarantee that a lot has to do with their PR campaign. The other take-away for Google is that they cannot rest on their laurels. While their core is search they need to find more services they can build around it. And they have been doing that - Gmail and Google Docs are just 2 examples of the products which are built around search. But finding and signing up for these services has been tricky up until recently. With Yahoo and MSN, however, they have a host of services that aren't built around search but are services people want, and can easily find and sign up for. If I was Google I wouldn't shrug my shoulders at this study. Because I think it brings to light a larger issue - that switching engines is just as easy as changing channels on your TV. If they don't stem the flow, pretty soon Google will be the #2 engine.

Universal Search - Is Google The Best At It?

2007-08-21T19:07:52Z

Recently, Google announced a "groundbreaking" change to the way it serves search results. Essentially from this day forward, Google was going to serve results from all their properties which may match a search query, and not just results from it's search index. In other words, a search for a Canon digital camera may not only return results from the main search index, but also shopping results, news results, and video results (among others). In fact, Google has been doing this for some time, however they explain that the results will become more noticeable as time goes on. But Google isn't the only one jumping into the "Universal search" field. Ask has been doing this for some time, and recently Yahoo updated it's search results with similar universal results. So who is most effective at this new type of search? Google - a surprising lack of universal results. This search only returned regular organic results. However I did find a link under the third result to a map which displayed immediately below that result. A far cry, in my opinion from what Google said they would offer. I give this the fourth spot out of the four engines Yahoo - Probably the best result of the 4 engines tested. A search returned a map with links to not one but 3 Hilton hotels in San Fransisco above the regular organic results. Definitely #1 of the four. MSN - Not too bad. It did provide some links to three local results with addresses and phone numbers to 3 Hilton's. I rate this as the third of the four sites. Ask - Even though the Ask results were similar to MSN's I give this the second highest rating simply because the page offers more ability to refine your results. In addition to 3 local results above the regular organic results, Ask offers a link to local results in San Francisco, MO if you didn't mean CA results, as well as the ability to broaden or narrow your search with easily visible (and clickable) links on the right. For my next search, I decided to perform a product search. I searched for "Panasonic cordless phone" again without the quotes. I used this term because I wanted a product search and it was the first thing my eyes landed on - my cordless phone. Google - again disappointing results - no product specific results whatsoever. It used to be that almost every product query you used returned Froogle (now Google product search) results. At least with this product search I didn't get any product information, such as models, pricing or pictures. Google narrowly beats Yahoo for last place. Yahoo - when I heard of the new shortcuts Yahoo was adding to their search results, I assumed we'd see them for many more searches all at once, but perhaps that isn't the case. I found only one product listing in the Yahoo search, with no pictures or pricing. While it was a "Yahoo Shortcut" link, what was displayed was disappointing. Yahoo placed third out of four on this search. MSN - while MSN earned second for this search, it was only marginally better because like Yahoo it only offered links with no pictures. However it did offer 3 links, and give some useful information such as pricing and model numbers. As suggested, MSN gets second out of four. Ask - by far the best result in my opinion. Not only are there the "expand" or "narrow" links but Ask actually displayed not only models and pricing, but also pictures and reviews! Definitely the #1 result out of the four engines. For my final search I looked for a current movie. At the time of this writing "Rush Hour 3" had recently opened in theaters. So I searched for that phrase, again without quotes. Google - At least for this search it wasn't last. However I find it wasn't as appealing as the other engines. While it did give users the ability to find US show times by city or zip, and it did provide some news links, that was about it. No images or anything else visually appealing. Third out of four. Yahoo - Yahoo's results are very similar to Google's but I gave it a slight advantage because there were shortcuts to a trailer, reviews and the Yahoo Movies pages relating to the movie. It came in second out of four. MSN - I gave MSN the last spot because while the results were similar to Google's they didn't offer any way to find out where the movie was playing. Just regular links to news results and normal organic listings. Ask - Again number one out of four in my opinion because it offered more universal results than any of the other engines. While it didn't offer a way to find the show time in my area, it offered links to news and images and trailers right from the search results page. Conclusion I think it is clear that Ask is the current winner in the universal search battle. It offers the most options for some of the more typical types of searches I would think people turn to search engines for. Whether it is a product search, a local search or an entertainment search, Ask provided the best results in my opinion. Google was the worst despite the fact that they had a big press event a few weeks ago discussing universal search. Despite that, we should see some noticeable improvements by Google in this field in the coming months. Yahoo and MSN fell somewhere in between, but I give the edge to Yahoo, making it the #2 engine for universal results. It is the one engine that has actually delivered on its promise of enhanced listings (save for Ask which didn't really announce it, it just did it). And I think if you were to do a more in-depth review of just Yahoo and Ask I think Yahoo might just edge out Ask simply because it's shortcuts offer links to more information in the end. But for right now my simple little experiment, which was in no way scientific, I find Ask to be the current leader in universal search, with Yahoo following closely in second.]]>

CMS SEO - 3 Tips For Optimizing Movable Type

2007-08-20T18:13:32Z

As you may have noticed, this website has undergone some changes. And while it looks different than before, the biggest changes actually happened in the backend, where you can't see them.

Up until now, Purposedrivenpromotion.com has been hosted on the open source CMS Mambo. We chose it because it was relatively easy to set up (and of course free to use :) ).

But Mambo is one of those systems that, unless you have a lot of resources to manage it, it can become unruly.

That is what we found when using it - because we are a smaller company, we don't have the time or resources to expend on a large CMS. We found Mambo just too big for us.

That's why, after just over a year, we changed to a much smaller, more familiar CMS. One that you may not immediately consider using for website content management.

]]> Why use a blog publishing platform as a CMS? You are probably wondering why we would go through the hassle of analyzing CMS systems only to chose a blog publishing platform? The answer is simple: First, a blog platform is very functional - it satisfied our requirements for a CMS. It is small enough to be easily managed, and it is flexible enough to suit our needs. Plus, we are familiar with the system we chose - Movable Type. When we first installed Movable Type, it was version 3.2. That was just a couple weeks ago. In addition to this version (it was the currently available version) we also installed a few "plugins." Plugins are little bits of code which are generally freely available (some is also sold commercially) to add functionality to your site. Below are some of the plugins we chose to help with the search engine optimization of our site: Optimization Tip #1 - CustomFields We started with the CustomFields plugin. CustomFields does as it suggests. It allows you to add custom fields to your Movable Type installation. With custom fields we are able to add fields for optimizing our site - namely a custom title tag, as well as meta description and meta keywords tags. We added these 3 fields to help control the optimization of our site. In addition to adding links throughout the text to other important pages, we also want to ensure that we can control or influence the search results pages which display our information. If you are familiar with Movable Type or any other blog platform, then you know that the software generally defaults to displaying a page's title, as you set it when you publish the page. While this may be fine for a blog article, we felt it limited us for the main site. For example, we do not want our about us page to simply display "about us" in the search results pages. We want to be able to give more information. Hence the need for a custom title tag. Similarly, we could have used other fields for the meta data but felt it would be better to include these new fields. Plus, should the need arise in the future, we can add more custom fields to our site. Optimization Tip #2 - OptimizeHTML While not essential, we wanted to ensure that our code was as clean as it could be. That is where OptimizeHTML comes in. It allows us to add comments to our templates, along with any other bits of code we need to ensure that critical parts of our templates are not changed. But when the page is published it removes these comments, along with extraneous carriage returns and anything else which normally bloats a website's code. In fact if you view the source on this, or any page on our site, you will see that we have very few lines of code. Much less than if we did not use this plugin. While it is not essential that you optimize your HTML in this way it is something we consider a "best practice." Optimization Tip #3 - Enhanced Entry Editing Also a non-essential plugin we found EnhancedEntryEditing extremely handy especially when it came to editing our main site pages. This is because we like to dress them up with graphics, larger fonts and so on, and if you are not an HTML person (or just to lazy to look it up) such a plugin enables you to "cheat." What it does is provide you with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor so that you can format your entry the way you want it to display on the page. We consider this an optimization tip because in the end it is a time saving plugin for not only creating entries, but also for dressing them up. In the End After we had Movable Type 3.2 set up the way we wanted it (and functioning quite nicely I might add) Sixapart, the company that produces MT, released a major upgrade. And since we like to stay on top of things, we upgraded to Movable Type 4 over the weekend. And while the upgrade went on without a hitch (we were upgraded within about 15 minutes) we did find out that we needed to disable a single plugin in order to log in to the upgraded version of MT. That's right - the current install of Custom Fields did not play nicely with MT4, so we had to disable it. A little research and we soon found that this was a common problem with MT. However we found a "hack" on the Custom Fields forums which allowed us to install the latest working beta version of Custom Fields in Movable Type 4. This allowed us to have our custom fields back, however we had to recreate the data which was there. While this was not a huge deal for us, I can see where it may be for someone who has hundreds or thousands of pages. Therefore I would recommend that if you are running MT 3.2 and want to upgrade to 4 by all means do so, but back up everything first, in case you run into problems such as we did. And if you do happen to use custom fields, then I would suggest waiting until all the bugs are ironed out.

Claiming the blog through Technorati

2007-08-19T18:46:22Z

Technorati Profile