Internet Marketing Blog

Who Are Bloggers?

As you, devoted reader, know, my mantra for some time has been "You may not be interested in social media, but social media is interested in you."

I often hear heads of organizations and/or decision makers dismiss bloggers with a wave of the hand as merely a bunch of inconsequential losers in  basements whining online. The other common attitude is, why should I think about bloggers? I don't read blogs. Nobody I know read blogs.

That's the wrong question. The question should be do my customers read blogs? In all likelihood, the answer is yes and in all likelihood, those customers are being influenced by what those blogs are saying.

Bloggers are opinionated people and as we all know, opinionated people like voice their opinions but more importantly, they are often sought out for their opinions. They are influencers and that's why they're important.

But who are they?

Research Brief has a post (via PRblog) detailing the demographics of bloggers according to recently released data from the BIGresearch simultaneous media survey that reveal some interesting stats. Particularly interesting is that there are a higher percentage of Hispanic and African American bloggers than among the general population.

The Ultimate Email Marketing Tool

Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough but I'm extremely frustrated that I cannot seem to find an email marketing tool or service that has all the features I want at a reasonable price.

I don't ask for much.

I've used Constant Contact quite a bit and I am generally pleased with it. It is perfectly suitable for most email marketing needs and when you consider all the features you get for the price, Constant Contact is certainly a bargain.

So, starting with all the features of Constant Contact, I'd like pre-set templates for various uses that are customizable. I'd like the ability to create separate mailing lists out of my master list. I'd like the ability to schedule emails. I want unsubscribe and bounce handling and spam checking, of course. And I want the analytics that show opens, aggregate click-throughs, individual click-throughs, and opt-outs.

Constant Contact also recently added integrated surveys as an additional service, so that'd also be a nice feature for my Ultimate Email Marketing Tool.

Constant Contact's features covers the bases for most people's email marketing needs.

But I'm not most people. I need more.

As a blogger, I want an email service that will read my RSS feed and send out a branded email newsletter based on my template with hyperlinked headlines and a text teaser for each post. I'd like to be able to schedule said email newsletters to be sent daily, weekly, and/or monthly.  The trick is for it to be smart enough to read the RSS feed, compile the posts and package them in email newsletters as today's posts , this week's posts, and/or this month's posts.

Zookoda was supposed to be that service but it just isn't ready for prime time. It doesn't quite format the individual blog posts properly and sometimes it just breaks down and forgets to send pre-scheduled emails.

Google's RSS service FeedBurner actually is positioned quite perfectly to be just the RSS/email marketing tool I want. For every RSS feed you burn, you can also offer an email update service for blog posts. The emails can be branded by uploading a logo that will appear at the top of each email, but aside from that, there is no customization. The emails themselves are very clean looking.

The problem is that you cannot schedule emails at all. You can set the time of day you want the email to go out--and even that function isn't ready for prime time--but you can specify if you want a daily, weekly, or monthly email.

The people at FeedBurner know there's a demand for just such a feature, but it doesn't seem to be a priority. If Google wanted, they could enter the email marketing market by putting some resources behind FeedBurner. Throw in Google's amazing analytics, and you'd have a hell of a good service.

iContact wants to be the Constant Contact/Zookoda/FeedBurner solution, but fails on the RSS side because it doesn't compile individual blog posts from an RSS feed.

Lastly, I want integrated A/B testing like MailChimp has. And I want all that for the Constant Contact/iContact/MailChimp price range.

Microblogging In Plain English

I am a huge fan of the microblogging service Twitter (which, by the way, explains why I was so upset when my estrategy Twitter account just up and stopped working and Twitter ignored my pleas for help. I'm still fairly bitter about it, but, you know, sometimes you just gotta move on. I have another Twitter account, so if you want to follow my Tweets, go to twitter.com/derickson.). I am also a huge fan of plain English. Anyone who has followed this blog for a while knows, therefore, that I'm also a huge fan of Common Craft's In Plain English series of videos. Their latest is about--tah dahhhh!--Twitter. Enjoy:

See also:

 
• Social Networking In Plain English
• Social Bookmarking In Plain English
• Wikis In Plain English
• RSS In Plain English
• GoogleDocs In Plain English

Marketing To Millennials Presentation

This is a presentation for a seminar Pat Lilja, my colleague at Tunheim Partners, and I conducted on Wednesday for some public health people who are interested in how to reach the Millennial generation. We will have video of the session soon.

Colts.com Internet Marketing

I've been meaning to write about this for a month but since the Super Bowl is today, I figured it's now or never.

Early last month a got a call from Dwight Adams, a reporter for the Indianapolis Star, who wanted my opinion for a story he was working on about the online marketing efforts of the Indianapolis Colts in particular and the NFL in general. He called me because of a two posts I did on the redesign of NFL.com.

When a reporter calls asking me to talk about my two favorite subjects--Internet marketing and football--I'm definitely game.

After taking a look at the Colts' online presence, it became quite clear quite quickly that the team is ahead of the curve compared to a lot of other teams' online marketing efforts.

That didn't really surprise me, though, because Indy's online presence is overseen by the Colts' Executive Director of Digital Business, Pat Coyle. I've been following Pat's excellent Sports Marketing 2.0 blog for a while now; it is the only blog that I know of that gives you a perspective of the Internet marketing issues being faced by professional sports franchise.

The Colt's maintain three web sites: The team's web site at Colts.com and the social networking sites MyColts.net and MyIndianaFootball.com. MyColts.net caters to the team's fans while MyIndianaFootball.com associates the Colts' brand with high school football. (There's even a team page for the high school I attended.)

The Colts are embracing social and embeddable media in a big way. The site features a podcast, a widget you can add to your blog or MySpace or Facebook page:

And embeddable video:

At MyColts.net, fans can discuss any and all things Colts on the site's forums or they can read Head Coach Tony Dungy's blog where he actually does post. Having your head coach maintain a blog is way ahead of the curve. Kudos for the Dungy and the Colts for having the courage and the insight to launch it.

The team does not appear to have a presence at the most popular social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube & Flickr. That absence, I suspect, has a lot to do with the NFL's attitude toward those sites than anything else: The league routinely asks YouTube, for example, to delete game highlights that users have uploaded.

Nevertheless, the Colt's online presence points the way toward those social networking sites. I'm betting that before too long, the Colts model and outposts at YouTube, Facebook, et. al. will be standard operating procedure.

Corporate Blogging - The Team Approach

Though most people understand the concept, corporate blogging is still a relatively novel concept that encounters a significant amount of reluctance to employ as a marketing tactic. Often, one of those barriers is a perceived lack of resources. Who will be the blogger? How much time will it take?

Team blogging is often the answer.

Last November, the Marketing Voices podcast interviewed Southwest Airlines' PR Manager Paula Berg about their team approach:

• Southwest Airlines Blog

An Ode To Digg (And Its Supporting Online Campaign)

Kina Grannis loves to Digg.

  Two Weeks For Kina 
  Originally uploaded by kasuya

She loves to Digg so much, in fact, that she's written a very clever and catchy song about her Digg love. Clearly, Kina's not alone.

But she's taken it another step by entering her song, Gotta Digg, in the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl music video contest. The grand prize winner gets their music video aired during the Super Bowl and gets a recording contract with Interscope Records.

[UPDATE: Two kind readers have helpfully pointed out (see the comments below) that Grannis entered another song to the contest, not Gotta Digg.

I'm a bit disappointed because I really like Gotta Digg, but the fact that she composed that song for her online campaign only makes the campaign itself all the more brilliant!]

Kina's clearly got some marketing savvy in her corner because she's running a pretty sophisticated online campaign to solicit votes for her video.

In addition to asking for votes at her official web site (which is very professionally done, by the way), she has a separate web site for the contest itself: TwoWeeksForKina.com. It is this site that she promotes from her YouTube account and her MySpace page, where she has 2,820 friends and her Facebook page, where she has 850 friends.

She's hosting her contest campaign photos at her Flickr account , where, as of this writing, her 93 contest campaign photos have been viewed more than 900 times. Her only slip at Flickr is that she's wearing a Michael Vick jersey. Oops.

Naturally, her video has been submitted to Digg five times and, as of this writing, has been Dugg 10,734 times.

As of this writing, since Grannis uploaded her Gotta Digg music video to her YouTube account on December 23, the video has been viewed 124,234 times, boasts four out of five stars from 1,438 raters, has been marked as a favorite video by 729 YouTube users, and received 462 comments.

Those numbers are not surprising because the video is number 3 on YouTube's Top Rated Video this week, is the 11th Most Viewed music video this week, and the 42nd Most Responded to video today.

As of this writing, Google Blog Search lists 267 blog posts citing "gotta digg," most of them posted within the past 24 hours. That's pretty remarkable, considering the time period is Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Technorati, meanwhile, lists only 18 posts within it's universe of registered blogs, but among those are highly influential blogs like TechCrunch,  Neatorama, and Buzz Machine. These posts are likely to inspire many more posts about the video down the long tail.

Kina Grannis is either one Internet savvy kid or she's got some very smart online marketers working on her behalf. Regardless, I would not be surprised at all to see her win the contest.

Oh, yeah; here's the video:

New Word Of Mouth Networks - Teens Talk Online

I haven't fully digested the new Pew Internet & American Life Teens & Social Media report, but the summary makes clear that teens' online behavior is creating new networks that will require online word of mouth marketing to be an increasingly crucial tactic within overall Internet marketing strategies.

The Pew study shows that they are prolific online content creators:

• Of the 93% that are online, 64% of them have created content online.
• 39% of online teens share their creations online.
• 33% create or work on others' blogs or web sites, be it for friends, groups they belong to, or classroom assignments.
• 28% have created their own blog.
• 27% have a personal web site.
• 26% create mashups.
• 55% have created a social networking profile at sites like Facebook and MySpace.
• 47% have uploaded photos.
• 14% have posted video online.

Teens share their online content and that sharing builds the foundation of their word of mouth networks because that content is a virtual conversation starter. The Pew study found:

• 89% of teens who upload photos say that people post comments about those photos at least sometimes.
• 72% of video posters say those videos elicit comments at least sometimes.
• 76% of teens who use social networks say they leave comments on other people's blog posts.

It seems clear that teen marketing for the short term, and, as these kids grow up, overall Internet marketing for the long term, will depend upon tapping into these online word of mouth networks.

Separate The Blog Wheat From The Chaff With Comments Heat Maps

How To Evolve Blog Commenting In Three Easy Steps

I've been thinking about social media a lot lately  and how people interact with Web 2.0 technologies and services themselves as well the other people who use those services.

In particular, I've been thinking about the comment function of blogs. And how to improve that function.

As a football nut and a die-hard Vikings fan who still reads everything about the team despite their abysmal record this year, I spend a lot of time on Vikings blogs, especially the Star Tribune's superb Access Vikings blog by their beat writers Judd Zulgad and Kevin Seifert. 

I'm sure it's one, if not the, most popular Strib blog. There is certainly a lot of participation by its  readers. A post from yesterday about Daunte Culpepper coming back to town boasts 162 comments.

I often read the comments because there's some very good stuff in there, but wading through the crap and the banter from one reader to another is usually a waste of time. Separating the conversational wheat from the chaff is a problem for all blogs with a lot of reader participation, not just Access Vikings.

Step One

I'd love to see some smart programmers at Six Apart or Blogger or some open source guru create a plugin for WordPress that would do this: Allow me (as a registered user of the blog in question) to annotate the blog post and apply highlighting and/or my own comments in the form of, say, a sticky note(s) that I can place anywhere on the page.

Step Two

It would also have a function like the fantastic ClickTale service that gives you a "recording" of each site visitor's behavior on the page by following mouse movements. I often, for instance, click and drag my mouse over text to highlight interesting text. I don't know why I do it, but I do. That behavior could be captured.

Step Three

Combining ClickTale recordings with the sticky notes data should give you enough aggregate data to create a heat map for that page.

Apply heat maps to the blog comments and, voila, as a blog reader I've got a quick visual representation of the relative "interestingness" of blog comments. And as a blogger, I'd get extremely valuable data on how people were interacting with my blog.

Perhaps someone could come up with a semantic solution that analyzes the text of blog comments and the frequency with which blog comments refer to other comments or commenters to determine "interestingness."

However it's arrived at, we sorely need a solution and it seems to me that the technology is probably already in place to create it.

Google Buys Jaiku - Is Jaiku Now A Twitter Killer?

Mashable reported yesterday that Google had acquired the microblog service Jaiku and asked the obvious: Why not Twitter? (Robert Scoble says Google's going to couple Jaiku with their social networking service, Orkut).

Microblogging services such as Jaiku, Twitter, and Pownce combine the publishing technology of blogs  with the ability to update your microblog via a standard web interface, through your Instant Messaging client, or from your phone using text messaging. Each post is limited to 140 characters--the size limit of text messages; thus the term microblogging.

Mashable said: "This is somewhat surprising news considering the perceived dominance of Twitter in the so-called “lifestreaming” space. Additionally, Twitter is co-founded by Evan Williams, who was the creator of Blogger, which was previously acquired by Google. In a world where price is no object for Google, it’s interesting that they would opt for Jaiku and not Twitter."

One reason may simply be feature sets: Pownce allows you to share files and events through your Pownce blog while Jaiku lets your plug in your own RSS feeds so you can automatically update your Jaiku blog with other online content and the service allows you to create communities of interest. Twitter offers none of these features.

I wonder, though, if Google's preference for Jaiku over Twitter points to something fundamentally fatal about Twitter itself.

I love Twitter and I use it all the time but the service has had some well-documented scaling problems. Anyone who has used Twitter for a moderate amount of time has run into the cat or bird error notice when trying to perform some routine function.

I myself am a victim of Twitter's technical snafus. I haven't been able to post to my Twitter account for about three months and my pleas to Twitter about it have been either ignored or unheard.

You'd think that scaling issues wouldn't be obstacle to overcome, considering the resources Google could bring to bear to fix any technical problems. But then when you look back at how long Twitter has been having these problems, you gotta wonder if their technical problems are so deep that Google trying to fix them wasn't worth the effort.

Regardless, with the resources that Google will no doubt invest in Jaiku, Twitter has got to be worried.

AOL News Beta Integrates Social & Conversational Media

My daily contact with AOL is the start page that launches when I open the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) program. I scan that page as well as Yahoo! Instant Messenger's start page to see what headlines teens and young adults are seeing.

Last week, an intriguing headline on the AIM start page  caught my interest enough to click: Mom Finds Osama Video Before Release. It was not, however, the fascinating story of a mom outwitting terrorists online that intrigued me after I'd clicked; it was what AOL was doing with their beta AOL News site.

The AOL News beta combines a news aggregator function with blogging, tagging, and embedding features to enable conversational media. The news, photos, and video are served up by content partners, primarily the Associated Press.

The left-hand sidebar features a "blog chatter" tag cloud with links to related content within blog posts powered by the blog search engine Sphere:

Also on the left-hand sidebar, the "blog chatter" tag cloud, are links to the most popular stories, most commented on stories, and the most recent comments:

This is where AOL begins to really enable conversational media as an integrated extension of modern journalism. One aspect of this is providing embeddable content that users can share at their own online homes such as their blogs or MySpace pages. AOL News is giving users embeddable video from the AP and other sources:

Here's the actual video:

In addition to sharing video, the AOL News beta site features links to top user-submitted news from Propeller, Netscape's digg-like social editing clone, tools for sharing stories on social bookmarking, a link to AOL forums to discuss stories, and, finally and most importantly, the blog commenting function for each story.

I think this must be the type of model traditional media must take if they are to survive in this environment. In order to maintain an audience large enough to sustain an advertising supported model, traditional media will need to use their content to enable conversations around that content and build themselves into the central gathering point for people to discuss learn about and discuss the events of the day.

From a PR and Internet marketing perspective, this conversational media is another opportunity for earned media and the a chance to engage targeted audiences with your client's story.

Search Traffic Convinces NY Times To Adopt Pure Ad Revenue Model

The New York Times announced yesterday that they would discontinue their TimesSelect online subscription program and open up nearly all of their content to the online world for free.

For $49.95 a year, subscribers had access to the paper's columnists' articles and the archives. There will be fees "for some [archive] material from the period 1923 to 1986."

Though TimesSelect had 227,000 paying subscribers from a base of  787,000 users, and earned the paper about $10 million a year in revenue, the volume of abandoned visitors from the search engines convinced the Times that they would make more money through online advertising than they would through web site subscription fees.

NYTimes.com gets 13 million unique visitors a month and figure they can use that volume coupled with registered user demographics and visitor behavior statistics to offer advertisers the ability to buy behaviorally-targeted advertising.

I've got to think that the decision to optimize the site for search engine marketing coupled with the buying of search engine keyword ads for breaking news helped drive traffic to the site. When they looked at their bounce rate--the percentage of users who abandoned the site when they bumped up against the paid content wall--they realized the pure advertising revenue model might just work.

I would not be surprised if the Times' next step would be to make more of their content embeddable and shareable online to drive traffic from blogs and online bookmark services and to add a commenting feature to articles to encourage visitors to stay at the site longer.

ESPN Does Viral Video

ESPN has gone embeddable. Their ESPN Video Beta section provides users with YouTube like functionality, particularly the ability to embed video clips of their programming:

See also:

• MTV's Online Music Video Marketing Strategy
• NFL.com Redesign - Web 1.5
• NBC's Botched Response To Natalie Portman Online Video

MTV's Online Music Video Marketing Strategy

I was browsing SPIKE (formerly known as iFILM) and came across the video for Billy Joel's song We Didn't Start The Fire. It's a pretty good song but a really good video and the quality is fairly good for a video sharing site:

Upon closer inspection, I noticed that it had been uploaded by mtvmusicvideos. So I click on the MTV Music profile and I get a page featuring the latest Jason Fox video, Aunt Jackie, which I can't embed.

I've ranted about content provider's refusal to allow embedding before, so I won't belabor the point except to say that MTV is trying to have it both ways. I also found a bunch of Eurythmics videos that are embeddable:

So it appears that MTV's online music video marketing strategy is to restrict current artists and recent releases while allowing embedding for past hits.

Isn't the point of music videos to promote new artists or new songs? Doesn't the refusal to allow fans to embed those music videos into their blogs and MySpace pages defeat that purpose?

Is Viacom worried that allowing embedding would discourage sales of music and/or music videos? It's a reasonable worry but not a very realistic one.

It seems to me that the opposite is more likely true; that allowing embedding would drive more sales.

And so it goes...

Micromarketing Strategy - 3 Words

Fred Smoot Tackles Steve Smith
Originally uploaded by bpatton

A friend of mine told me yesterday that Washington Redskins' and former Minnesota Vikings' cornerback Fred Smoot had been cut.  I was skeptical. As a football nut, I follow NFL news quite closely, so had Smoot been cut it would have caught my eye and I surely would've known about it.

Turns out Smoot wasn't cut, at least not during this round of roster moves. But he had been cut previously and that is why my friend thought Smoot was out on the street. He'd read a headline from a blog aggregator that had not been updated in some time. The headline was an old one and the headline was all that my friend had read of the story; it read "Fred Smoot Cut."

Three words.

My friend got the message; it's just that it was wrong. His mistake is understandable. It happens to me all the time. I read only the headline of a vast amount of content because there's far too much for me to consume. Even if the headline is current and accurate, I've got absolutely no context or depth to the story that goes with it.

I constantly preach that you must be able to boil your message down to three words.

As information distribution channels proliferate through RSS and as more and more people consume information through an increasing array of mediums and devices such as RSS readers and smart phones, the importance of developing a micromarketing strategy only increases.

The reason your message must be boiled down to three words is that it has to fit in an email subject line if you're doing an email marketing campaign, it must be easily scannable when read on a smart phone if you're doing a mobile marketing campaign, and it must be easy to digest when read in a list such as a in a blog reader or when you're doing online PR when using an Internet wire service.

But it's not just the logistics of where your message will be displayed and how to make it fit that you have to think about. As the aforementioned Fred Smoot story illustrates, you have to think about what knowledge your three-word message will convey to the recipient now and in the future.

NFL.com Redesign - Web 1.5

I was a bit critical in my last post about the NFL.com website redesign, and the failure to account for existing incoming links to the site from pro football bloggers and elsewhere.

Pat Coyle, the Digital Business Director for the Indianapolis Colts, points out at his Sports Marketing 2.0 blog, "how hard it is to relaunch a site for one nfl team. I can only imagine how hard it was to get this league site back up off the ground!!"

It's a point very well taken and something I should have mentioned previously. The depth of content that the NFL has to deal with for their site is simply astounding. NFL.com is not just a site for news stories of all things National Football League, it is a trove of data on individual games, teams, players--and now historical data on all of the above--as well as video and photographs. The list goes on.

The programming and logistics of bringing all of that together into a coherent and usable whole is pretty staggering when you think about it.

So, yes, I second Pat's sentiments, however belatedly.

But I do write about Internet marketing and after further review of the site, I've found something else lacking from an Internet marketing point of view.

NFL.com's New Features

The graphic design and layout of the new NFL.com is great. You can see at a glance where to find the different types of information, and that's no easy feat for a site as rich in content as this one is:

I won't go into great detail about NFL.com's new features (for that see BizOfFootball.com and Rotanation.com via Pat Coyle and DigiSpo). I will, however, share a few of my favorites.

• NFL Video: The site has a ton of video, including player highlights, game previews and recaps, and NFL Network programming.
• NFL Photos: Complete photo galleries for each game and more.
• NFL Statistics: In addition to all statistics you'd expect from a professional sports site, the new site offers splits, and, best of all, historical data that is even game-specific. As an Old Skooler, I can look at how Vikings Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton performed for each game of the 1974 season right up to Super Bowl IX, when the Vikings lost to the Steelers.

It's all very cool and there is a lot of content to make football fans happy.

Content Is King...And Embeddable

If you want to market online, content is definitely king these days. As I've said before, content needs to be embeddable because, as Steve Rubel points out, traffic happens elsewhere.

This is especially true for professional sports. I'd be willing to bet that there is a far higher proportion of sports and political bloggers than there is for any other content category. Both love to talk about their passion online. And people like to read them.

I love to blog about sports and I'd love to be able to cut and paste some video highlights of the last Vikings game, for example, to highlight my points without requiring my readers to go offsite. But doing an iffy proposition because clips of NFL games on YouTube are constantly being taken down, so, instead of broken links, I'd have broken videos on my site.

Professional sports teams are notorious for clamping down on their content and there used to be good reasons for that. But now I think their just swimming upstream and failing to exploit an opportunity at the same time.

The new NFL.com site goes right up to the door of the sharing Web but refuses to cross the threshold.

The site is completely RSS-enabled; I can subscribe to a feed of just Vikings news or videos, so I am alerted when there's new content. I can email and link to but not embed Vikings game highlights. I can only email photos, and even then not to specific ones but to photo sets.

All of the "sharing" features are designed to drive traffic to the site rather than marketing to people where they are at.

It would be simple to include a pre-roll ad in the embedded videos. You could allow people to only embed small photos and require a link back to the high quality, large photos at NFL.com.

Sports bloggers wouldn't mind that. In fact they'd love it, reasoning that it's the price they pay for the content. Bloggers are trying to build an audience, too, by creating their own quality content, so they're not inclined to send their readers elsewhere when they don't have to.

But they're perfectly happy to share their audience, on site, and even host advertising without charging for it, as long as they can embed the content they want to embed.

Embedable content is, indeed, a win-win situation for both the content provider and those who are embedding their content. But sadly for both parties, pro sports seem loath to fully embrace the spirit of Web 2.0.

NFL.com Redesign & Search Engine Marketing Blunder

Darren Sharper Tackles Cedric Benson 
Originally uploaded by NicelySighted

The fundamentals in football are how to block, how to tackle, how to catch and how to pass. One of the fundamentals of redesigning a web site is to preserve, or at least account for, existing inbound links to the site.

So it was odd to discover after the redesign of NFL.com was unveiled amid much fanfare, that they changed the URL structure of the pages of individual football player's profiles but failed to account for all the links that pointed to the old player profiles.

Pro Football Bloggers' Links To NFL.com

According to Google, there are 22,800 inbound links to the root NFL.com domain. As of this writing, Technorati lists more than 67,000 blog posts linking to NFL.com. That's a lot of links representing a lot of traffic and a major marketing blunder.

As someone who blogs quite a bit about pro football, the league's failure to account for existing links to their site is especially annoying because all of the links I have to player profiles prior to the redesign are now broken.  This is obviously lost traffic to NFL.com, but, more importantly to me, the broken links create a horrible user experience for the readers of my blog posts. They get is an error page rather than the player profile they were expecting.

The extremely frustrating thing for me is that long ago I made it policy to link to a player's NFL profile under the reasonable assumption that the links wouldn't change. The problem of linking to team profiles is that players change teams though trades, free agency, and cuts and that results in broken links. It's reasonable to assume that many other football bloggers came to the same conclusion.

Perhaps I should only link to Wikipedia player bios from now on.

But it is not just links from blogs that have been broken, the links from the search engines are broken, too, and that's a user experience and branding problem for the NFL.

NFL.com's Search Engine Optimization

I'll use Minnesota Vikings safety Darren Sharper to illustrate NFL.com's previous URL structure for player profiles. The URL for Sharper's profile on NFL.com was http://www.nfl.com/players/4249.htm. The new URL is http://www.nfl.com/players/darrensharper/profile?id=SHA500479. Note that they've included the player's name in the URL itself, while the old URL only used an ID number.

As of this writing, this is what the Google search results look like for "Darren Sharper":

You'll notice from the screenshot above that the link for Sharper's old profile reads "NFL.com #42 Darren Sharper." That text is taken from the HTML TITLE Tag of the page. The new player profile pages use only the player's name in the TITLE Tag. Couple that with the inclusion of the player's name in the URL and it becomes obvious that the redesigned site is intended to be search optimized in order to boost the page's rankings on the search engine results pages.

If the NFL knew enough to optimize the redesigned site for search engines, wouldn't they know enough to account for existing inbound links? Apparently not.

When you click on the link to Sharper's profile from the search results, you get an error page. That creates a frustrating user experience for NFL.com and that frustration hurts the NFL brand.

Site Redesign Fundamentals

The fundamentals for dealing with an issue that many site's must deal with are well known and relatively painless: 1) permanent 301 redirects to seamlessly point an old page to a new one in a "search engine friendly" manner so that you do not lose your search ranking, and 2) using an XML sitemap to tell the search engines about your new pages. NFL.com does neither.

The NFL certainly doesn't need search engines to drive traffic to NFL.com. They've got television to do that. But the fact remains that NFL.com is listed in the search engines and accounting for broken links should have been done with the redesign. It's obvious the NFL has a pretty sizable Internet marketing budget, so you'd think their Internet marketing team would have planned for that.

Blogger Liaisons

Any organization with mass popular appeal that is likely to have a lot of people blogging about them--which is especially applicable to professional sports leagues--should think seriously of creating a blogger liaison. This person would have a blog themselves and reach out to bloggers, solicit their feedback, inform them of issues that may affect them and answer questions, etc.

An obvious example that will immediately spring to mind for those in the search marketing industry, is Matt Cutts who performs that very function for Google's relations with the search engine marketing community.

If the NFL had a blogger liaison and informed pro football bloggers about an upcoming site redesign, I'm absolutely certain those bloggers would have worried about broken links and the NFL would have become aware of the issue prior to the launch of their redesigned site.

Music Marketing Through Blogs, or How I Tuned Out & Discovered New Bands

05.26.06 @ The Wiltern, Los Angeles CA
Originally uploaded by voxtrot

I was trolling