Internet Marketing Blog

The Tactical Marketing Utility Of Social Networking Sites

The more I use social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and even Flickr and YouTube, the more impressed I become with their usefulness as tactical Internet marketing tools.

The ease with which you can find like-minded people with these sites is pretty breathtaking. The ability to precisely define a demographic target audience is particularly fine tuned with MySpace and Facebook's advanced search functions.

Understand The Community

These sites, of course, are particularly sensitive to their users getting spammed, as they should be. The thing is, the users of these sites are not averse to receiving commercial messages, they just need to get them on their terms. They are happy to be brand fanboys and promote their favorite brands on their pages and friends lists; you just need to give them a valid reason to do so.

That's why it is essential to become an active member of these communities. It is imperative that you understand the culture of a given social networking site. You do that by joining the conversation, listening to the community, and exploring how the community works. Add value to the community by being helpful or providing valuable information or content and in that way build up trust among the community members.

I've also seen many cases where the users of these sites have created their own communities around a brand without the company even being aware of it or before the company has established a presence in the social networking site.

Social Networking As A Media Relations Tool

I'm seeing more and more journalists, bloggers, and other online content creators using Facebook and LinkedIn as a tool for cultivating sources and maintaining relationships with them. This aspect of social networking is clearly mutually beneficial. It makes it very easy to communicate with journalists and bloggers on their terms.

Social Networking As A Business Development Tool

Of all the social networking sites, I am most impressed with LinkedIn, by far. Based on the notion of six degrees of separation, LinkedIn examines the details of your contacts and makes suggestions of people LinkedIn thinks you should know.

Nine times out of ten, those recommendations are exactly right. The people LinkedIn recommends may not always be people I know, but more often than not they are people I know of. And if I don't know who the recommendations are, they are at least in the right industry or there is some clear rationale behind the recommendation.

You never get those bizarre, from-left-field suggestions you sometimes get at Amazon.com. Like, why in the world would you think I wanted a book knitting for beginners?!?

LinkedIn's search function is just as impressive as Facebook and MySpace, except with LinkedIn, you're getting a list of people who are often among the most influential people within their organization. If that person sees that you know some of the same people, they are going to be more likely to trust you than they would otherwise.

As with Facebook, I'm seeing a lot of media people on LinkedIn. A search for "New York Times" returns 50 pages worth of results.

Online Branding In The 2008 Presidential Race

The 2008 presidential race has been called the YouTube election and that is certainly hard to dispute. There have been numerous examples of YouTube videos playing a significant role in the race for the White House.

In each instance, the YouTube videos attempted to brand a candidate one way or another and to varying degrees of success.

Pre-YouTube

The first instance of YouTube-like online branding of a politician in Minnesota, and, perhaps, nationally, occurred during Norm Coleman's 2002 campaign against the late Senator Paul Wellstone.

At the outset of Coleman's challenge against Wellstone, a couple of young Minnesotans launched the now defunct BushBoy.com that featured a hilarious Flash animation depicting Coleman as George W. Bush's lapdog and, literally, hand puppet. The animation used actual clips of Coleman speeches and played on Coleman's close relationship with the White House. I cannot, unfortunately, find the actual animation. The site was instantly popular. It worked so well because the piece exploited some essential truths of Coleman the politician: He was handpicked by Karl Rove to run against Wellstone and he had big monied supporters.

BushBoy.com was followed by JibJab during the 2004 presidential election with a Flash animation that lampooned both George W. Bush and John Kerry. Again, the satire was so effective because it absolutely nailed if not essential truths, then perceived truths of both candidates:

YouTube Politics

Prior to YouTube, you had to be pretty motivated and needed not just some technical expertise to create popular online political satire, but enough marketing savvy to build awareness. When YouTube launched in February 2005, it provided an easy way to publish satirical political videos and offered a centralized, ready-made audience for them.

Senator George Allen's Macaca Moment

What's more, YouTube ushered in the era of citizen generated media, offering a platform and an audience for raw video shot by individuals. During this presidential race, that fact played out most prominently when a worker for the James Webb senate campaign caught his opponent, Senator George Allen, using a racial slur when referring to the Webb volunteer.

Allen was considered a front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. The Webb campaign uploaded the video to YouTube and it soon became news, with television reports airing the video itself. The widespread exposure of that video branded Senator Allen as a racist. Subsequent reports of Allen using racial slurs and his awkward attempts at explaining the video simply solidified the perception that he was a racist. Allen lost his re-election bid and, as a result of the video, was no longer a viable presidential candidate.

Rudy Giuliani in Drag

It's an understatement to say that Rudolph Giuliani faced an uphill climb in securing the conservative base of his party during his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Conservatives saw no difference between him and a liberal Democrat. Though Guiliani failed for a variety of reasons, it certainly didn't help his cause when someone uploaded video of the former Mayor of New York in drag and flirting with Donald Trump. The video reinforced Giuliani's brand as a liberal:

Big Mother Hillary

The Obama campaign's mashup of the 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial was effective because for years Hillary Clinton has been pummeled (and branded) by her right wing critics as cold, distant, and a big government socialist:

This is the original Apple commercial:

Which, coming full circle, is based, of course, on George Orwell's novel about totalitarianism, 1984:

The Clinton's Soprano's Spoof

Riffing off the finale episode of the final season of the immensely popular HBO show The Sopranos, the Clinton campaign spoofed the finale with a lighthearted version of their own. This piece was fascinating because people tended to read into it what they wanted to see. Supporters of the Clintons saw it as a laudable attempt to show people Hillary's lighter side. Clinton critics, on the other hand, thought it entirely appropriate that the Bill and Hillary would compare themselves to a crime family. In this case, branding was in the eye of the beholder:

This is the original ending scene from The Sopranos:

Pretty Boy John

The Edwards campaign had to be mortified when a clip of the candidate appeared on YouTube that showed him obsessing over his hair, reinforcing the perception of John Edwards as a pretty boy:

The negative branding from that video was so successful that the campaign felt obliged to address it with a self-effacing video of their own for the YouTube debates:

Mitt's Many Faces

The rap against Mitt Romney has been that he never met a position he wouldn't change, if it were politically expedient to do so. And if you had any doubts, YouTube was there to remind you that Romney once held the polar opposite positions he now holds:

I Got A Crush On My Candidate

Barack Obama has been the biggest beneficiary to date of online branding through YouTube. When Barely Political launched the Obama Girl video, the branding of Obama as a sexy candidate easily took hold because he is a very charismatic man. The video has only been a positive for the campaign:

With the phenomenal success of I Got A Crush On Obama, Barely Political followed up with Obama Girl vs. Giuliani Girl:

Too Hot For Hillary

The Me Too videos followed shortly after the Obama Girl made such a big splash but not always to the benefit of the candidate. Taryn Southern, for example, released Hott 4 Hill, containing a rather obvious lesbian theme:

Huck Me

The Huckabee Girl video mocks Republican candidate Mike Huckabee's belief in Creationism:

Yes They Can

Finally, Barack Obama again benefits from independent online branding with the Yes We Can music video featuring musicians and Hollywood stars singing along to an Obama speech. The video brands Obama as an inspiring, lyrical, poetic speaker. Again, the branding is effective because it's true:

Who Needs Swift Boats?

Forget 527s, the new Swift Boat Veterans are going to be even more opaque than the shadowy groups of elections past. If you like anonymous, unaccountable attack ads, stay tuned to YouTube. We are entering a new era of political campaigns because now, with the ease of YouTube, digital cameras and editing software, one person with a clever idea and some skill now has the power to affect an election.

Search Engine Branding

The description text that accompanies the links within search engine results are often overlooked for their persuasion and branding potential.

The purpose of that text, first and foremost, must be to persuade the searcher to click on your link. That requires creative, search optimized copy that is informed by the search phrase that you are targeting.

But people don't always click. When people search, they are exposed to 10 to 20 messages that are associated with the links on the results page. Even if people don't click on your link, they can still be exposed to your message through the link text and the description text below the link. This is search engine branding.

The pages of your site should be optimized to produce a "micro message" through these search results that, even if the searcher doesn't click, helps to brand your organization.

The following is an example of a branding problem I had with e-strategy.com.

Taking Control Of Your Meta Description Text

As is often the case, your own work usually gets pushed down your list of priorities "until you have time."

Such was the case with the search engine listings for e-strategy.com. The rankings for the site were fine, but the search engine branding of the site's rankings were not being displayed as I wanted them.

The problem was in the Yahoo! rankings for the site, specifically for the snippet text beneath the link of my listings. Search engines will usually gather text on a given web page to be used in the text snippet below the link for their search engine results pages. But if your site is listed in the Yahoo! Directory or the Open Source Directory Project, search engines may use text from the description of the site in the directory.

That is precisely what was happening with e-strategy. com. Unfortunately, the text I provided for the description of the site when I first submitted it to the Yahoo! Directory has long since become outdated.  This is what the listing looked like with snippet text drawn from the Yahoo! Directory (Click on the graphic to see a larger version):

I didn't want the text to say "catering to the small business and nonprofit markets" anymore, so I needed to change this. If I cared enough, I'd pay the $300 and resubmit the site to Yahoo with an updated description but I just don't think the costs justifies the little traffic I'd likely get from directory listings.  Fortunately, there's a less expensive way to address this.

The three major search engines, Google, Yahoo! and MSN all support the NOODP robots meta tag that tells search engines not to use description text from the Open Directory Project. The code is to be placed within the <HEAD></HEAD> tag set of your page: <meta name="robots" content="noodp" />.

Unfortunately, only Yahoo! supports the NOYDIR robots meta tag that tells search engines not to use the description text from the Yahoo! Directory: <meta name="robots" content="noydir" />. Fortunately, my only problem is with Yahoo! anyway, so that suits me just fine. Here's what my listings look like after implementing these tags (Click on the graphic to see a larger version):

You'll see from the third listing, that the snippet text now reads "e-strategy.com is a search engine and Internet marketing firm based in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota."

That's more like it.

And because search engines first look to the Meta Description tag for snippet text, you have far more control over how that text looks by prohibiting directory descriptions.

Battling Brands: Cable TV vs. The NFL

The issue has been percolating relatively quietly for months but became a topic of media coverage again last Thursday with the NFL Network airing it's first exclusive football game between the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys.

The marquee matchup between two teams who had thus far lost only a game each was the first time an NFL game was the first time an NFL game was broadcast exclusively on the league's own television network, leaving many fans who did not get the NFL Network at the mercy of friends or their local bars that did.

At issue is whether the NFL Network should be a part of the basic cable package just like ESPN is (the NFL's position) or whether the network should be a part of a for-fee sports "tier" of channels offered by cable companies to keep people who don't necessarily want the league's network from paying for it(the cable companies' position).

Both the NFL and the cable companies have been running a blame game advertising campaign hoping to pressure the other side to cry uncle:

This is an interesting case of brand dynamics, if you will, and how they play out online.

Let's start with the strength of the brands themselves.

I don't think there's much of an argument that the NFL has a much stronger brand than cable companies. People who love football almost inherently love the NFL because it provides them with the best of what they love. Cable companies, on the other hand, are rarely loved. For most people, they are a forced buy, the rates keep getting jacked up for no apparent reason, and it's a major hassle to switch providers so you just have to grin and bear it.  For this reason, the NFL starts with a huge advantage.

Now let's look at how people interact with these two brands online.

Football lovers interact with the NFL brand all the time online. By simply reading stories about their local team in their local newspaper or at team blogs, they are interacting with the NFL brand. When they visit the football sections of sports web sites like Yahoo! Sports or SI.com or ESPN.com, they are interacting with the NFL brand. When fans watch football highlights that have been uploaded to YouTube, or photos that have been posted to Flickr, they're interacting with the NFL brand.

And, as much as I've been critical of the site, the recently redesigned NFL.com delivers a ton of great content to football fans, including video highlights of all the games and historical data about former players. It's a playground for NFL fans.

All of these online interactions with the NFL are positive and pleasant experiences for fans.

Consumer interaction with their cable company's brand online is the polar opposite. Remembering that most people already have a negative feeling about their cable company, they come to the online interaction with a bad attitude already.

The interaction with cable company brands are one of three ways 1) when shopping for a cable company, 2) when paying your cable bill or looking at a statement, or 3) through their Internet portal.

One of the primary considerations for most people who are shopping for a cable company is price. And since the cable companies offer tiered pricing rather than a la cart--which is what most people prefer--they see that they'll have to pay for channels they don't want and will never watch. That's a reminder of how expensive cable is.

When they are interacting with a cable company brand through their e-payment process, people have a negative experience as they watch their bank accounts get that much poorer.

People who get Internet access through their cable company often have that cable companies' portal as their home page, so every time they go online, they interact with the cable brand. This is obviously a much more pleasant experience that the previous two, but it is still a reminder of your cable company, which may just make you think about how much you're paying, again.

Interacting with NFL content online carries no such risk.

It remains to be seen who wins as this battle continues to play out for the rest of the season, but my bet will be on the NFL.

And bar owners.

All Roads Lead To Rome...Online

Colosseo
Originally uploaded by sebatl

Just as all roads led to Rome during the Roman Empire, all online roads must lead back to your client and their message, if you are to have a successful comprehensive Internet marketing strategy.

Think of your client, your product, or whatever it is you are marketing as the city of Rome. You must make it as easy as possible for people to find you and travel to your city. The map must be clear and the roads easy to travel.

One of the primary reasons for the construction of Roman roads was to move the empire's armies quickly for their many military campaigns. Likewise, you too must build your online roads for your Internet marketing campaigns.

Multi Channel Marketing

The use of the word "channel" in the subheadline is deliberate, evoking, as it does a television metaphor and its content channels. Especially cable channels with their narrowly focused content; ESPN for sports, Comedy Central, the History Channel, and so on.

Internet channels define content as well: The Daily Kos for left-wing politics, ProFootballTalk.com for NFL football gossip, and engadget for consumer technology news. But Internet channels also define types of content: Technorati has blog posts; YouTube has videos; Flickr has photos, and Twitter has text messages.

Internet audiences are fragmenting because of hugely popular, deeply engaging sites like MySpace and YouTube. People are no longer spending a majority of their time at search engines, using them as portal to their final destinations. Now many people are going directly to their favorite online communities and spending a lot of time there. The word "community" is the operative word here because the most important thing most of these sites have in common are some sort of social networking feature.

All of these channels boast large, self-defined audiences: sports or history lovers; online video or photo enthusiasts. They give us the ability to reach the people who are most likely to want what we've got.

We know a lot about the audience already by the mere fact of them being there. MySpace users probably want to hook up with one another for whatever reason and because of the large presence of musicians and bands there, MySpace users are more likely than not music fans. YouTube users want to watch video; Flickr users want to share and look at photos; Technorati users want to read blog posts.

If you want to reach your audience online most efficiently, it is essential that you establish a presence at the online channels where your target audiences hang.

When In Rome

But, because of the social networking/media aspects of these channels, merely establishing a presence at these channels is likely not enough.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

The lingua franca of YouTube is video; for Flickr it is photos; for MySpace it is "friending" and comments. Take a look at what content you own and/or produce and match it to the medium. If you produce audio, upload it to Odeo. If you blog, make sure you feed your posts to Technorati. If you establish a YouTube account but don't upload and share your video, what's the point?

It is not just content type but also the tone of your content that matters.

Formal, Corpspeak on MySpace pages and comments just sounds weird. It's not in tune with the MySpace culture. Your blog posts that proclaim rather than discuss, announce rather than engage will fail; it's just not how the blogosphere works.

The Search Engine Glue - It's All In The Metadata

While, as I said above, people are spending more time at centers of online gravity, search remains a central function that serves as the glue that holds your comprehensive Internet marketing strategy together.

People don't abandon searching once they leave their favorite search engine; more often than not, they continue searching at the destination site. Search is, in fact, the primary and most efficient way of finding content at YouTube and Flickr and Technorati.

In order to reach the self-selected audience that search provides, you shouldn't forget to search optimize the content you provide these centers of gravity sites.

Finally, as I discussed in a previous post about blended search results, the content from the YouTubes and Flickrs and MySpaces of the world often rank well in Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live.

If you're skilled and a bit lucky, many of the links will lead to Rome.

Yahoo Upgrades Search Engine, Blends Search Results

Yahoo! has just unveiled upgrades to their search results after Microsoft had done the same late last month for their search engine, Live.com.

One of the primary upgrades is Yahoo!'s Search Assist function that tries to anticipate what you want as you type your search query by offering related alternative search phrases in a similar but more comprehensive way than Google's preceding service, Google Suggest.

Here's a screencast of Yahoo!'s Search Assist in action:

Search Dominance With Blended Results

Search Engine Land provides a good rundown of Yahoo!'s new search features but for our purposes, the one I'm most interested in is that they've added blended search results. That means they are including within the search results page links to  audio, video and photos as well as web pages. For video, they are actually including an in-line player, so you can watch the video directly on the search results page.

Google, of course, has been doing just that for some time. The following screenshot shows Google's in-line video player for the search results for "joe mauer batting tips." (Click on the graphic for more detail):

That same search, "joe mauer batting tips," is going to help me demonstrate the importance of not just search engine optimizing your own web sites, but also uploading and optimizing your own content to other online centers of gravity where large audiences congregate and share such as YouTube and Flickr.

We uploaded and optimized a 14 minute training video that comes with the Mauer's Quickswing batting training product at many of the popular video sharing sites such as YouTube, Google Video and iFILM. We also opened a Flickr account and uploaded and optimized photos of the Mauer's Quickswing. We did this long before Google rolled out their blended search results feature.

But when they did, the result of that work was that the preponderance of the links on the first page of results for "joe mauer batting tips" lead to content that we provided, either through optimized web sites or optimized content on other sites.

Now that the other two major search engines offer blended search, the same dominance of the search results holds true for both Microsoft's Live.com for "joe mauer batting tips":

...as well as at Yahoo! for "joe mauer batting tips":

The happy end result was that the vast majority of the links went to either the client's site directly, or to essentially product placements, with either photographic or video demonstrations of the Quickswing product.

That's search saturation.

Persona Marketing - Marketing Characters Online

Yesterday I discussed the importance of preemptive marketing as a reputation management tactic.

Today, let me address another reputation management tactic that should be considered for within an overall brand marketing strategy: Persona Marketing.

There are several types of personas:

• Celebrities are their own personas and brands
• Consumer products and services that use a character for branding
• Creative intellectual property that contain characters such as novels, movies, and video games

With the exception of celebrities, whose being and persona and brand are one and the same, personas are not actual human beings.

If you, your business, product, or service depends at least in part on a character or persona for brand marketing, you need to consider how to use that persona online.

Celebrity Personas

lindsay lohan
Originally uploaded by elsabet

If you're a celebrity, "your people" should be registering accounts to all the various Web 2.0 social sites if only for preemptive marketing purposes.

Someone, for example, has created a Lindsay Lohan Twitter account and is using it to make fun of Lindsay Lohan's penchant for getting into trouble.

On the other hand, a Steven Wright fan has created a NotStevenWright Twitter account and is using the microblog for posting Wright's one-liners. It's too bad Wright himself hadn't done the same because, with it's 140 character limit, Twitter is the perfect format for promoting the comedian because his jokes are generally within that size limit: "I replaced the headlights on my car with strobe lights. Now it looks like I'm the only one moving."

There are countless personas for consumer products or services but I could find few who were putting those characters to work online in a strategic manner.

Consumer Product/Services Personas

Frito-Lay's Chester Cheetah Cheetos character, for instance, is a natural for a MySpace page. He's a sunglass-wearing cool cat: "It's not easy, being cheesey."

Chester Cheetah could show off his commercials on the videos page; photos on the pics page; and he could blog there as well. If he adopted the MySpace culture, built up his friends list, commented on his friends MySpace pages, shared music, etc., the page could be a powerful platform from which to extend the brand.

But there is no official Chester Cheetah MySpace page. Search for Chester The Cheetah MySpace at Google, and the first link is to a video clip from Family Guy that portrays Chester Cheetah as a bandana-wearing, Rush fan getting his fix.

There is one MySpace user who has adopted Chester Cheetah as his MySpace persona and there is a Chester Cheetah fan group with 162 people.

Chester Cheetah is being appropriated at MySpace but there is no official alternative for people to find or friend.

Last year I wrote in depth about Comcast's online marketing of their spokesturtle personas, Bill and Karolyn Slowsky, that included a YouTube channel for the TV ads, an official web site, and a blog where Bill and Karolyn talked about all things slow.

It's a great example of effective persona marketing online.

The Marlboro Man is not a good fit for MySpace or any other space that is known as an online teen hangout, but I could see him having a blog. He could just talk about the cowboy life and man's men things. He would not even have to mention cigarettes.

Book/Movie/Video Game Personas

Characters from creative works are potentially a very rich source for persona marketing that can help extend the brand online.

I don't know if it is a deliberate, official campaign, but it looks like it could be: Someone has created MySpace pages for all of the major Lord Of The Rings characters. And they are all one another's friends, of course.

The Frodo MySpace page includes this description from the About Me section:

I am Frodo Baggins. Im am a hobbit from the Shire. My best friend is Sam. I am the Ringbearer of the one ring. I had to travled to get to mordor to destroy the one ring. Sam and i must destroy the ring before its to late. Finally we get to mordor and destroy the ring of power. Now everyone can get back to normal. Me and Sam were heros.

Frodo would like to meet "people from Middle Earth" and he has 1004 friends; foremost among them are Bilbo Baggins, Samwise the Brave, Gandalf and the rest.

If this is a case of citizen branding, the citizens have done a great job and have treated the brand well. But citizens will not always be so kind; better to be proactive than reactive.

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.

Internet Branding With Icons

Some time ago I was scrolling through my Twitter friends list on my smart phone and the importance of icons suddenly became obvious.

I was frustrated because I was trying to find a particular friend but his Twitter account had the default logo; he hadn't yet customized it. I couldn't find him at a glance. I had to click on each of the people in my friends list who had default icons until I found the friend for whom I was looking.

Time is the one thing everyone has the least of, so when yours is wasted, you tend to get annoyed. It's worse on mobile devices because they generally have slower Internet connections. Because the screen is so small, there is less information available to you at a glance and you therefore have to wade through more of it until you find what you are looking for.

Customized icons are a usability issue and a branding tool. A customized icon allows your audience to identify your content at a glance and with ease. I may love your content and want to consume it but scanning text for it takes much longer than recognizing your graphical icon.

If you're using a tabbed browser, look up at the open tab and you'll see my icon: a gold letter e on a white background with a thin gold border. Look at your browser's address bar and you'll see that very same icon to the left of the http:// part of this blog's URL.

The following is a screenshot of my personal twitter page with my friends list on the right. See how long it takes you to find the e-strategy.com "e" icon among my friends:

Blog Branding With Favicons

For all intents and purposes, favicons are no different from the icons I've been talking about.  (Wikipedia provides a full explanation of favicons.)

It is particularly important to use favicons with your blog because it helps brand your content offsite through RSS distribution.  In Minnesota, we have a local blog aggregator hosted by the MNSpeaks site. The MNSpeak aggregator recognizes when you update your blog and then includes a summary of and a link to your blog post among it's recently updated blogs list. The following graphic shows a portion of that aggregator with a listing from this blog. The orange icons are the default icon for Google's Blogger platform.

Many people subscribe to their favorite blogs through custom start pages such as MyYahoo. This is an example of how a subscription to e-strategy.com's Internet Marketing Blog looks on MyYahoo.

Popular feed readers like Bloglines use icons to identify source blogs:

Finally, the icon can help identify your content on the primary tool people use every time they go online, the browser. If someone bookmarks your site, the icon will display next to your listing in their bookmarks:

Tabbed browsing is now a standard feature of all browsers. The icon will display on tabs, as well, so it is a great tool for helping your visitor quickly identify your content amongst the pages she has open. The following screenshot shows a browser with many tabs open. The orange icons are blogs that use the default Blogger favicon; the blue and white icons are the default favicon for TypePad blogs; this blog is located on the tab furthest to the left:

So How Do I Do It?

I've convinced you of the importance of using icons, you probably want to know how to do it.  thesitewizard.com provides an excellent tutorial about how to create and implement a favicon.

The favicon works for your blog or web site, but you'll need to create a .jpg or .gif graphic to use with services such as Twitter and other web services like MySpace and Flickr and Technorati. The graphic's dimensions vary with each service and they will usually tell you at the upload step the dimensions they require. If not, check their documentation. A stretched out graphic can look pretty bad, so you'll want to comply with their size requirements.

Finally, if you use the Feedburner RSS service, be sure to optimize your feed with your graphic because that's where services like MyYahoo and Bloglines find your icon.