The Guts to Say “Google Us”

In my last post I talked about how Amazon’s customer feedback section “works” for me and my husband (and you) because it allows us to make authentic – and sometimes even scatological – product and store reviews. It's is really a kind of social networking site.

I've often thought about how, for brands that sell their products on Amazon.com, getting through “negative” reviews is probably a stomach-churning event, even though marketers are well aware they can learn a lot from listening to complaints (and praises too!).

But I ain’t never heard of a company actually encouraging people to read its reviews.

Here’s a paraphrase of a ground-breaking new radio ad I just heard for Jordan's Furniture, a local furniture chain in southern New England (I searched in vain for the actual audio):

Jordan’s has the best quality mattresses and best customer service, but you don’t have to take our word for it. You don’t even have to drive out to one of our stores. Save gas and go online before you buy bedding. Google "Jordan's Furniture", and then Google our competitors. Read peoples’ blogs to see what other people say about our service and our "underprices."

Wow. You’ve got to be pretty dern comfortable with what your customers are saying to do that.

Web 2.0 is Exciting ...

Ever since my thaw I’ve been learning that customers have taken control of brand messages. Brand communications are no longer “sent” by brands, but happen all the time, sometimes originated by brands but more often originated by customers and people who are affected by the brand in some way.

Jordan’s gets it, and they are embracing it with open arms. Just hearing their radio ad “challenge” made me feel inclined to take them at their word, without even doing a Google search to find out how many customers actually like buying from them. I’m sure I’m not alone in that. They sounded quite confident in the satisfaction of their customers! The “Google us” challenge makes Jordan’s stand out from its local furniture store competitors.

More than that, Jordan’s is recognizing something important about the way people seek out info on the web – they rarely search for brands by name according to Media Rules! (and others). Rather, they search for product categories, or geographic convenience, or recommendations. So Jordan’s gutsy challenge to “Google them” motivates customers to do something special and decide to search for Jordan's by name.

If a customer actually does it, they are adding Jordan's to their evoked set of purchase options, at the very least. At most, they are reading "positive reviews" from a highly-trusted authority, other customers.

... And Scary Too

I get it. And, I got a clue from Cluetrain.

But I know how scary this is for most marketers to embrace. There are things I’m not looking forward to talking about it with my customers – limitations of our products and services they don’t really like. Ugh. It was a lot easier to win over editors of publications to run articles from positive news releases. But those days are long over. I know there are answers I probably won’t have, and I’ll have to admit that.

What a relief. This is going to be a lot more fun.

Borders, get a Clue!

I’ve written before about how Borders Books has stopped selling through Amazon.com’s e-commerce site and has launched a new e-commerce site. I’ve praised them for offering an awesome offline tie-in with their online store: the ability to reserve books at bricks-and-mortar stores.

I still believe that’s really cool.

But:

My husband had a bad experience with the Borders.com Customer review section, and it's making me question the viability of Borders' plan to leave Amazon.com's e-commerce platform and go on its own. Yes, Cave Husband read a book he liked, Devices and Desires by K.J. Parker, and wanted to write a review to encourage others to read it. Since his wife had nattered on about the new Borders.com e-commerce site, and how it was going to rival Amazon.com, he decided to write his book review there.

And that’s where the story goes south.

He opened the Customer Review form and wrote a thoughtful book review, re-reading and re-writing until the review was just right. Then he pressed submit … and the form timed-out.

His review was lost.

Frustrated, he wrote another review, and complained about the time-out limitation of the Borders’ review form, which he wasn't aware of before he began writing (or he would have composed his review in a word editor and just pasted it into the Borders submission form). He used the term “pissed off” to describe his feelings.

When he attempted to submit this second review, Borders’ form rejected it because of the foul language he used. As you can imagine, this only further frustrated and enraged my husband. (too bad Borders.com couldn’t hear the foul language in our living room!)

At that point, Cave Husband revised his review to say something like “Good book. Borders.com has a lot to learn from Amazon.com about managing customer reviews.”

I say “something like” because this third review (mostly a complaint about Borders.com and not about the book), was never published. And look: no one else has written a review of the book either.

Yep, you can be “the first” to rate it.

Poor author, no customer has written any review of your book. You probably don’t know that anyone tried. Poor customers, you have no tip from a fellow customer about whether this book is worth your time. *sadness*

But it gets worse.Cave Husband then wrote a complaint to Borders.com via its Customer Care “Contact Us” e-mail submission form. He never received a reply (or an auto-confirmation of his e-mail). And it’s been two weeks.

Guess where I’m going to buy the new unauthorized Madonna biography? You betcha. Even without in-store pick-up, I’d rather buy from Amazon.com because I like the way they treat me as a customer and as a contributor to their e-commerce site.

Get a Clue from Cluetrain

Cluetrain is a web-based movement of people who believe that new media is bringing with it a new type of relationship between companies and customers – a relationship built on “human” conversation and transparency. There are 95 theses in the Cluetrain Manifesto, so I'll give you the "bumper sticker" version of what Cluetrain has to say to businesses and organizations: “You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures. Or you can join the conversation.”

Borders, despite the appearance of having an interactive web site, your site is actually getting in the way of customers-and-customers and customers-and-book-authors as they exchange thoughts and “tell each other the truth, in very human voices.” Your limitations on posting negative comments, and your technical “time-out” limitations may your “interactive” site is an obstacle to communications, not a way to communicate.

You’re trying to win customers by beating Amazon.com at its own game, but you have a lot to learn. Amazon, for instance, only sparingly uses an editor to moderate customer reviews. It will allow someone to write “pissed off.” And, Amazon has a discussion board devoted to discussing the good and bad of its Customer Reviews platform, including bugs, language, and much more. If you want to see where Amazon draws the line at appropriateness in a review (illegal, obscene, threatening), don’t spend your time reading its Conditions of Use – try using Amazon.com. You’ll quickly see how easy and valuable the free exchange of ideas is!

A few of the 95 Cluetrain theses for Borders to meditate upon:

34. To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.

35. But first, they must belong to a community.

36. Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.

37. If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.

38. Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about human concerns.

39. The community of discourse is the market.

40. Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.

Learnin' Section: What I think Borders Needs to learn

• Make sure your web site is built for people – people might take a long time to post the reviews you encourage, so make sure it doesn’t time-out on them.

• Let people make cranky comments, they will appreciate the forum. And they’ll return to make nice comments.

• Don’t ignore people who e-mail you with negative feedback. Acknowledge the problem, if there is one, and time the customer took to write. You wouldn’t (couldn’t) ignore the customer if they were in your bricks-and-mortar retail location. Same story online. And with the way your customers talk to each other about you online (ahem), you have even more reason to keep up your end of the relationship.

Oh my goosh!

Here I am, trying to learn about effective paid search marketing campaigns. Sticking ads on Google for the right people in the right places at the right time.

Then the kiddos (Stefan Grothkopp) come up with an ad-killer: goosh. It’s a “command-line shell for Google” that shows Google results in a simple text format without any ads or graphics. Apparently, it’s all the rage with the cool kid geeks over at slashdot, cnet, even the ever-popular mysqldatabaseadministration.blogspot.com. They love it because it’s “clutter and advertising free.” Hmm, I feel all the Google search marketers starting to get a bad kind of tingly feeling in their AdWords campaign. As much as I hate to see my paid search campaign foiled, there is something engaging about goosh -- it's fast, streamlined and *gasp* so simple to look at!

Why would anyone else want something like this?

Well, you can search faster. You don’t need to point-and-click your mouse around the page and into Google’s various search fields. And it’s fun.

Here’s how to goosh:

You just type your search term. Then you get your top 4 results. That's it, 4 pages. But, just type "more" or "m" (or even hit return without typing anything) and you get the next 4. Want more? You can change the number of results you receive, up to 100 results, by typing “settings results 20" (or any number up to 100).

Now, unless you know what to type, the goosh cursor will just sit there blinking at you. But if you *do* know what to type, (because you’re a geek or a wannabe) well, that's what's so nice about goosh. It's just Google, without having to poke your cursor into the text box before typing.

Faster Image, News, and Blog Search

Try this on goosh: type "images" before a keyword term, and it will use Google image search and deliver 4 images to you. Same with "news". And you never had to leave the page or use your mouse, unlike the Google Images and Google News search forms.

Fun, huh?

Uh-Oh, Time to Worry About Basic SEO!
If you're a web marketer, that's probably what you've been thinking! The goosh interface may or may not ever catch on in the mainstream, but it’s default return of the “first 4 results” - and total lack of ads - are a reminder to keep our eyes on our sites’ natural search results.

A few weeks ago I imagined how to optimize a paid search campaign for my Unfrozen Cave Girl barbecue sauce. I gave lots of thought to how to capture all the most qualified search phrases. Too bad none of that will help me make sure my web site appears in goosh search. ;-(

To get my site to appear in goosh’s top 4 (or more) search results, I need to examine whether my site is optimized for search engines. I’ll be attending an online seminar on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) next week, so I’ll have some SEO tips (basic tips that my unfrozen brain can make sense of) for you then.

In the mean time, here’s something to chew on:

Are all the pages on your site being indexed? Hopefully?
Try this “Site Search” on Google (or goosh!) and see which pages on your site appear:

On the Google address bar, type: “site:” followed by your domain name. Note: don’t type a space between the colon and your domain name!

My blog is doing OK. How about your site? Were all your pages found? If not, there is something keeping Google’s robot from crawling through your site. It is probably a technical something, and you should talk to someone who knows what they are doing right away! (wish I could help ...)

Are your targeted keywords appearing on pages in your site?
Once you know your pages are indexed, it's time to think about how valuable the pages are. Just as you need to strategically develop a list of keywords to sponsor in paid search, you need to include these same target keywords into the code of your site and also in the human-readable copy of your pages. To check how well you’re doing so far, try this:

Type “site:” followed by your domain name, followed by a space, followed by your target keyword or keyword phrase. I tried searching goosh for the domain of this blog for the keyword “ad.” Here are the results, with words containing “ad” in bold:

Do your results pages contain your keywords? If not, you might need to work on optimizing your site, including each individual page on your site, for thsse key words and phrases you targeted.

The basic SEO content development advice is:

• Create page content using text, not text graphics (search engines can’t read text in a graphic, even though humans can. Ha! We’re still da best!)
• When you write page copy, use keywords in the first sentence or headline of a page (the lower the keyword appears on a page, the less relevant to keyword search it may appear to a web crawler)
• Expand the keywords in your copy where possible. Don’t reduce the impact of your page by shortening a sentence to: “best-tasting sauce,” when you could get more relevant visits if your copy read “best-tasting St. Louis style barbecue sauce.” We’re always looking for the most qualified visitors, and we will get them when page content is a closer match for search terms.

• Get other sites to link to you! Search for your targeted keywords on a search engine and observe the sites that rank well. If any of them are non-competitors, contact them to ask if they will link to you (you might offer something in return, like a small fee or a few bottles of your dee-licious barbecue sauce!)

The basic SEO advice for HTML code is:

• Put target keywords into the HTML <> tag of each page
• Type a page description in the meta description tag: < name ="description" content="">

• Place simple HTML links on pages of your site that link to other pages within your site. Not only does this help direct web crawlers from search engines, it helps human visitors. Don’t just rely on site navigation to get visitors around! Place some text hyperlinks at the bottom of your pages to lead visitors to related pages.

OK, I’m sure many of y’all have your own SEO secrets for success. I’d love to hear them! While we discuss and check all our sites for SEO basics, I’ll try to learn me some more about SEO to share with you after my seminar next week.

Source: Sullivan, Danny. (October 26, 2001). Checking Your Listing in Search Engines. SearchEngineWatch.com. Retrieved July 16, 2008 from http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167861