IS THE HUMAN RIGHTS ACT IMPREGNATING THE ROYAL FAMILY?

and

ARE PAEDOPHILES MOLESTING DRIVERS?

While giggling away to myself and wondering just how many hours I was going to end up wasting on this gizmo, I realised that despite the utter ridiculousness of the headlines, I wanted to read them, and in my head was a voice reading them out with a sense of urgency, as if, unless I acted straight away, I too would be the victim of driver paedophilia!

And it dawned on me, the daily mail, for all their faults, do one thing better than most of us, they have the formula for the perfect headline. Whether you see it and want to start kicking anyone who isn’t you out of the country, or see it and want to lock up the stupid and ignorant (weirdly everyone who reads the daily mail immediately starts hating someone, daily mail readers read it and hate everyone who isn’t a daily mail reader. Everyone else reads it and starts hating daily mail readers. It’s quite amazing to watch) you know as soon as you see one of their headlines,  it’s time for a good fight!

So I’ve decided, from now on, wherever I can, I am going to ask myself

“Would this get published in the daily mail?”

You can expect some amazing hyperbole from here on in!

This weekend I was reminded of a family story about sharpening saws, and I think it nicely demonstrates what can happen when you don’t keep your own saw sharp, and stop and think about what you’re doing before you’re doing it (Please bare in mind this actually happened).

My Uncle P was working at a builders merchants. One of his jobs in this role was sharpening the industrial saws; these saws were about 5 feet long, with tiny teeth down the length. Each saw took 2 hours to sharpen, by hand, filing each tooth in turn.

After some weeks of doing this job Uncle P, being a little lazy and not enjoying the job, found a way to skive that he was sure the boss would never spot. Each time he got to the end of a saw blade, rather than replacing the saw, and sharpening 4 a day, he would go back to the beginning and sharpen the same saw over again, thus skiving out of 3 saws a day!

So next time you decide what you are doing for the day, please make sure you leave a little time to keep your saw sharp, and do try and sharpen a different saw each time!

So, while pondering the possibility HTC won’t pay up, and I end up phoneless, I pondered what I might want from a new mobile phone. The list is as follows :

- 4″ Touchscreen. This should be the entire top surface of the phone, more than 2mm border is too much and would make the phone too big.

- High quality resolution (480*800 or better)

- Windows Mobile 6.5 (i’d settle for webOS though)

- Snapdragon 1ghz+ processor

- MicroSD slot

-3.5mm headphone socket

- 5mp + camera *with flash*

- Quad band HSDPA

- GPS, Accelerometer,Bluetooth etc

- TV Out

Palm? HTC? Nokia? any of you up for it ?

Virtually everybody I know hates the monthly report time (yes, we have them client side too), but with a little effort these can become great documents for discussion. A graph that your client/board can understand will really help bring valuable input from people who might not understand search too well, but understand the business very well. You might even find this …dare I say it, fun (ok, well compared to usual ). It’s beyond the scope of this blog post to provide detailed excel instructions, I’ll provide some pointers but if you want further help you’d be best catching me on twitter ( @moxley ).

So, without further delay, here are some of the SEM related uses I managed to find for some of the more interested excel charts :

Bubble Chart

This has quickly become one of my favourite graph’s for it’s ability to highlight material/important information on the graph in such a simple way. A bubble chart is a variation of scatter chart, whereby the bubble size is represented by a 3rd value, usually measuring ’size’ in some shape or form.

This chart is naturally geared towards PPC campaigns. I have plotted cpc against conversion rate to show in detail which campaigns are too expensive, which aren’t converting well, and the relative importance. Here’s an example that might represent the sales from an Insurance comparison site :

The bubble size is represented by the amount of sales each campaign has delivered to give an idea of importance. The blue line represents the efficiency curve, whereby anything above the line is probably delivering an acceptable CPA, and anything below is not. We can see from this that the Home insurance campaign is clearly providing the bulk of profitability overall, while the other major campaign for Car insurance is borderline due to it’;s high cpc. Life and PPI campaigns are not performing well at all, for very different reasons – the former probably needs some work on Quality score, while the latter could be an issue with the offering. Pet insurance is doing very, and given it’s moderate size , shouldn’t be ignored. The big message here though, is that the focus has to be on getting the cpc down on car insurance.

Brief Instructions for excel 2007

1 ) Get data into Excel , with each campaign in a row, and then 3 columns for cpc,cpa and sales (or whatever metrics you choose)

2) Insert chart, choose bubble.

3) select a bubble, right click and go to ‘Select Data’. Delete what is there in the left column, and press ‘add’, add the relevant x,y and bubble size ranges.

4) You’ll then need to add data labels, and rename them manually.

Doughnut Chart
Probably not my favourite of all the charts, but  I still think it can be an improvement (space saving if nothing else) on using multiple pie charts. That’s basically what a doughnut chart is – multiple pie charts in one (for instance when comparing 1 year against the next). There are a million and one uses for this ; in my chosen example I chose illustrate the effect of the ‘Vince’ effect by showing the before/after breakdown of traffic driven by keywords based on the number of words in the phrase.

Number of keywords pre-post vince

Ok, here we can see that far less of our traffic is now being driven by keywords with 2 words in (my imaginary client just got knocked onto page 2 for ‘car insurance’. ouch ). The effect on our short tail has been quite dramatic, and , because my client is only a small player ,we don’t expect to be able to repair this anytime soon. The good news is that we’ve been trying really hard to boost the long tail , and keyphrases with 5+ words in are now driving more of our traffic – this is good since we know on-page relevance  counts more for these terms, where we are confident we are the best. Unfortunately, this chart doesn’t show totals, so this would need to have been covered already.

Brief Instructions for Excel 2007

1) Get the data into a table, with a row for each series (number of keywords ,in this case), and a column for each time period

2) Go to graphs, choose doughnut

3) add some data labels.

Area Chart

Ok, so this is the most complex of the charts , but it’s also very impressive if done right. It’s basically very good for showing the trend of a set of sub-components over time. You can go a lot further than I have here, but my example shows natural traffic broken down into categories over the year :

Categories of traffic broken down with an area chart

What this chart tells is exactly how our seo campaign has grown our client’s natural traffic. In this fictional example we’ve used Google analytics segments to separate out all our key types of traffic. Following last year’s board meeting with the client we’d agreed to put a huge effort into the social channel to help build the brand. This graph shows we have delivered well on this, radically improving the traffic to the Blog and, to a lesser extent the news. This extra traffic doesn’t seem to have cannibalised any other sections, and indeed, the Homepage traffic has improved also. If you have enough space, you’d probably use data labels on here for the traffic amounts by month, but it would have looked too squashed here.

Brief instructions for Excel 2007
1) Get data into excel with category names as rows, and time periods as columns

2) select area chart, in my example I use a stacked 2d area chart, but feel free to play about with the more impressive ones!

3) Add data labels

Radar Chart

Last but certainly not least comes the cool sounding radar chart. I love this chart – done properly it shows competitive strenth’s and weaknesses very well. All your categories here need to conform to a standard measurement scale (i.e 0 to 10) for this to make sense. Given that the guys at SEOmoz have found a great use for this graph, using likescape data , I will build on their example.

Linkscape data for our competitors in a radar chart

I really feel this chart can do a really good of explaining something complex. From this example we can see that oursite is a good all round site, doing well for most metrics, but being weak at the domain level. Competitor 1 is the exact opposite of us, and will probably enjoy better rankings for the long tail. We have absolute advantage over competitor 2 however, and need not worry about them. Competitor 3 looks very strong , and has a very good domain mozrank, but curiously doesn’t do well for Moztrust or Domain moztrust – maybe an investigation into their links is warranted.

When doing this chart you’ll almost certainly need to adjust the axis, or you’ll not be able to read the differences properly, especially if you have quite a few competitors!

Brief Instructions for Excel 2007

1) Get the data into excel, with your competitor names as rows, and the linkscape metrics as columns.

2) select radar graph

3) Adjust the axis. You also might want to increase the thickness of your own line for emphasis

So that’s it for now. I’m sure there’s 100’s of interesting ways to present seo data in charts, and I’d love to hear more examples in the comments. Has anybody yet found a use for the mindboggling surface chart? what about making 3d charts that actually make sense?

I’ve saved each of the 4 charts with thier raw data if anybody is interested – you know where to find me

If you are going to run a successful social media campaign, for a real life client, there are some things you are going to have to come to terms with. Depending on your current state of mind this may involve you growing a pair.

Firstly, the last thing you want to say to a client looking to do social media is yes. Really the very last thing you should ever say to them is yes. If you want to be a social media manager/guru/flunky you may as well strike that word from your vocabulary all together, shall we do it now…yes there doesn’t that feel better?

Now you need to figure out what you are going to say to them, do you have your big girl pants on, because you’re going to need them…You’re going to say NO! That’s right you’re going to be a big meanie and tell the client what they are going to do. Now what I’ve done to make this easier for you is put together some practice phrases. Stand in front of your mirror in your bed room and repeat the following until you can say it without crying, OK?

NO you don’t want a twitter account Mr client, your audience is made up of 21 year olds on low incomes, that is not a key twitter demographic

NO you don’t want a facebook page Mr client, your industry is not one people like to talk nicely about and opening a facebook page just gives them another chance to bash you.

NO Mr client no one wants to read a blog about rubber table leg ends

All done? Has the weeping stopped? Good, because you’re not done yet. Now step two is to tell them what is going to happen, did you see the key phrase there, Tell that’s right, you’re going to be in charge. So some more practice for you these ones you have to say until you sound like you really know what you’re talking about, off you go

You MUST have something interesting to say Mr Client

You MUST strike while the iron is hot and take advantage of today’s news, not last weeks news Mr Client

You MUST engage your audience how they want to be engaged with Mr Client, not just talk at them

Well done, you have now managed to get to the point where you should be allowed to start thinking about managing a social media campaign.  Whether you actually manage to keep the client for more then the next 2 hours, well that’s up to you.

“oh as I can’t do any work right now I’ll just check on that eBay auction. Oops can’t the internet’s down, OK I’ll check my email…”

and on and on it goes, until you remember that your PC has solitaire.

Well that’s how I have felt all afternoon with twitter being down, “Oh I’m just going to tweet about how annoying it is that twitter is down” “Oh I should tweet that Mashable article about twitter being down due to a DDoS attack”

Someone please tell me I’m not alone in this madness!

(And yes I am just posting here due to sever Twitter withdrawal and an insane need for social media interaction)

1.Take the macro view.

I love thinking about my actions on a macro level “what if everyone did what I’m doing now”. It’s a great way to keep myself honest, but sometimes it leads to putting effort into something that may not seem to have any impact. If everyone on twitter started blocking all of their spam followers, the spammers would have no reach, and what’s the point of spamming if you don’t have at least a slim chance of reaching someone gullible enough to buy whatever crap you’re peddling. So for the good of humanity people, you have to block those spammers.

2. This is your group and you are their leader

Our Industrious Leader

Your followers are your group, your team, your, well your followers. That makes you their leader and leaders have responsibility for keeping their group safe. By allowing spam followers in your group, you are showing that you don’t really care who you associate with, as long as they’re shouting your name. Now I don’t know about you, but I would be happy to gather all of my followers in a room together for a chat…I’d rather have just 10 people there, then 10,000 trouble makers

3. You’re putting words in their mouth

Spammers repeat what comes up in their timeline, just by being there you are giving them content to add their spam urls to. Do you really think they are going out there and looking for people, why bother when thousands have given you permission to watch what they say and copy it verbatim.

4. Judge your sphere of influence

When I tweet something, I know just how many people it’s going to reach, I know that my followers are genuinely interested in what I’m saying. Don’t think that just because you have 10,000 followers, that 10,000 people are actually listening, they’re not, many of them are actually looking for a way to exploit what you’re saying (see 3).

5. Pageoneresults does it so it must be cool

Right, that’s right isn’t it? no? oh well, I’m still gonna do it.

6. It feels good

Really good, it’s like spring cleaning out that cupboard that you daren’t open. You might not want to do it to begin with, you will procrastinate over it for months, even years, but when it’s done you know you have got rid of the rubbish and have made room for the things you really want.

7. Bring on the conversation

Twitter is about conversing, not talking. How many spammers have engaged you in conversation? none, oh, so you enjoy talking into dead air then, that’s OK, no really that’s fine, you and your psychiatrist (yeah you know that real person you talk to) can tackle that another day, ‘k.

8. Disalusioned sexy girls

I feel really sorry for all of the lonely sexy girls that follow me, but I don’t want to get their hopes up, when I let them keep following me, I’m leading them on that I might actually give them £5000 to come to the UK and marry me. As much as I would love to, I’m a happily married woman, the kindest thing is not to get their hopes up and block them straight away.

9. They breed like Tribbles

I have noticed that the more spammers I block the fewer try and follow me. This has led me to the inevitable conclusion that once you let them in they start to breed, and you end up over-run by them. I wouldn’t mind but spammers are never as cute as Tribbles.

10. You wouldn’t keep their crap in your inbox

Or add them to your safe senders list, so why keep them on your follow list? We spend so much time clicking block on our email, is it really that  much harder to do it on twitter?

11. You can stop whining

No more follow/no-follow. Think about it, when they follow you the first time, block them, they can’t unfollow you, and they can’t follow you again. Simples!

12. You’re loved, I promise

You don’t need 10,000 followers to affirm that people really love you. It doesn’t make you any cooler, or more popular. Yes I know you really wanted to be part of that cool crowd at school and it gives you a really warm feeling when you look at the cool kids twitter account and they only have 10 followers, and you get that gloaty feeling, but really your friends were better then theirs anyway, and you probably earn more money than they do, and your kids don’t have ASBO’s…do you really need more?

13. Your handing them your other followers

They’re looking at your followers and who you’re following, you’re giving them those peoples names, and doing nothing to stop it. If you really want to annoy everyone you know it’s much easier to just open the next Trojan horse that lands in your inbox, then you can annoy all of your non-tweeting friends too.

14. If only blocking worked everywhere

If I had the power I would block most of these people from the face of the earth, never mind from Twitter. I’m pretty sure most of you would join me in that, but as blocking them from twitter is as close as any of us will ever get, we may as well keep at it don’t you think?

15. It keeps you looking

Every time I go through my follower list to block people, I notice someone real who is following me, often I go and nosey round their tweets, and every now and again it strikes me that there is someone following me that I would really like to follow. That alone makes it worth the effort to keep my followers list tidy.

So next time you see a spammer in your followers list, block them, go one, just one, try it and see how it feels. You can’t get hooked of just one, honest.