Stemato.com - Stephen Tompkins’ Blog

There are many tactics to influencing the SERPs (search engine ranking pages) but you can still end up with listings on your search shelf-space that can damage your brand. Using defensive branding and reputation management measures can be the cornerstone to fortifying any good online marketing plan against negative entries. My colleague says keyword-buys, social-media and press releases are all good weapons to have in your arsenal but one less obvious tactic flies under the radar. That is buying negative domain names and linking them to a positive result.

I was reminded of the importance of fortifying your brand’s domain today, when I read an article in the Guardian, that showed the influence cybersquatters were having on the London Mayorial election between Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson. This site was particularly scathing in the way it portrayed Ken Livingstone as a freewheeling politician attempting to turn London into New York. And to make matters worse, they were using the domain kenlivingstone.org and showing up on the first page of Google results for the keywords “ken livingstone.” (Ken Livingstone’s real site is located at kenlivingstone.com.)

This is a prime example of the importance of making sure that you purchase the top results of your brand’s domain name and the negative results. Or risk someone else purchasing and deciding how you are portrayed online for you.

Yesterday I watched the Papal Mass on television and I started to wonder how much buzz the trip received. Here is a Blogpulse chart, comparing the Pope’s visit to the US, with American Recession.

Here is a link to the actual query.

I just wanted to say a few words about this past week and how I learned about strength. On Saturday morning, my mother called me to tell me my grandmother had fallen and was rushed to the hospital unconscious. At that point, we did not know anything other than she was in a coma and had a subdural hematoma (I had no idea what it was but its bleeding in the membrane of her brain).

Having spent many of my formative years living with my Grandmother, I did not hesitate to get on the first plane to come down to Savannah and see her. I talk on the phone about every two or three nights to her and could not imagine life without her. I left at 6 PM and arrived at 9:30 PM Saturday. The surgery was successful and removed all the clots in her brain. The doctor told us he could not give any information about how or if ever she would awake from her vegetative state.

The next day I went to the hospital to see her. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life. As I walked into the NICU, I could not imagine this person so close to me lay so helpless in her room. I broke down and started crying immediately.

Words can express many things but for me there are no words to express my feelings at that moment. I spoke to her briefly and said thank you for helping raise me to know the value of humility, humbleness and faith in your life. It took every bit of strength I had to tell her much I missed her and loved her and to keep fighting because I know she is stronger enough to come back. Tears in my eyes, I left the room thinking about her and life without her.

Today as I rode to the hospital, my sister called me to tell me that my grandmother had awaken from the coma. I could not fathom it at first but eventually it sunk in. It was the  best news we could have gotten.

When I arrived at the hospital, I walked to the NICU and my spirit was lifted. I saw her open her eyes and glance at my sister and then glance at me. She looked so happy and thrilled to see us. It immediately made me think about how strong she is to come so far in such a short period of time. I said to her, “Hi Nanny, I missed you.” And she looked at me while raising her hand to wave. It is truly nothing short of a miracle that she has awakened so soon.

Strength comes in all shapes and sizes, but my Grandmother, showed me the most amazing feat of strength I have ever seen.

With all the news about the trial and tribulations of the Olympics torch this week, I thought to run a chart and see the blogosphere’s reaction to the issues. It is interesting to see that the torch is driving much more buzz than the issues. I cannot help but wonder if the events have actually overshadowed the reasons leaving no one to gain.

Protest is patriotic but just make sure your ideas, do not get lost in your methods.

A recent report, from OfCom of the UK, about social-networking shows their prolific growth and deep saturation in the UK. I first read about it in a MSN UK story located here and I found its classification system to oversimplify these users. Surely, we can come up with a more profound classification than: Alpha Socialisers, Attention Seekers, Followers, Faithful and Functionals. It seems to only scratch the surface of what is a much more complex eco-system driven by many different types of users and scenarios.

Lets first take a look at scenarios that could evolve as a result of shifting user profiles and maturation of the space. As my company reported last month, Facebook’s numbers have slowed in recent months but its not endemic of the death of social-networking in the UK. The fact is the numbers were growing at a rate that could not have been endured much longer.

But, have they reached critical mass?

This is an interesting question, but with 23% penetration in a country that has only 30 million people total online, it would seem social-networking is still red-hot in the UK. Certainly with that kind of reach, users would fall into more than a handful of types and morph from one classification to another. In fact, I believe that user intentions on social networks are so varied and amorphous that any attempt to classify must be primarily organic.

Lets take deeper look at my organic classification system.

Instead of a linear zoological approach to classes, it should appear more as a hexagon with overlapping interest and a sliding scale. Something like this:

Using this hexagonal approach, you could then further define user personality traits based on aggregate sentiment analysis. What does this mean? If you could take a predefined number of UK social network users evenly dispersed across the three majors and parse out there profiles into text. Using that text you could then score the sentiment into different buckets (eg. dating, networking, spammer) based on keyword recognition.

Further refining your chart to something like this:

Building out these finite profiles, you get a clearer picture of social networking users and how they interact and relate to one another. The more data ascertained the better the profile. Time of day, age and other demographics can also enhance the map to show more in-depth details of how people engage.

In a very general sense OfCom gets it right, they just leave out a big part of the picture. User interactions and how they effect user profiles. My father said it best when he said “you cannot be, all things to all people.”

This interesting chart from Blogpulse, shows key people being buzzed about in the blogosphere. It culls the data from over 70 million blogs and outputs the chart daily with most citations at the top. You can also dive further into the actual citations or the amount of spots they climb or descend daily.

An interesting takeaway for me, is that Obama is in 20th place. Does that put some merit into Hillary (who ranks 1st) supposedly saying Obama cannot win? Anything seem alarming to you? Perhaps Dolly Parton’s high ranking? Or, Britney Spears still hanging around?

Yesterday eMarketer reported that online advertising spend is approaching 10% of all media spending and will be there by 2009. Considering the accountability, that digital commands and traffic quality it should come as no surprise that money is shifting to online at a quicker pace than other media. But what are some of the social media trends that this move will precipitate? Here are three that I think will be important part of my work here at Nielsen Online.

1 - Social Media become increasingly salient as connection hotspots - As trust continues to erode in traditional media, consumers will look increasingly to social media as a trusted opinion for all sorts of decisions, from which restaurant to eat at or what jeans to buy. Malcolm Gladwell describes, in his book The Tipping Point, “weak links” as influential to humans for making connections that make ideas tip. These individuals will become even more important as online migration triggers even more diverse and larger groups of connections who will exert overwhelming force over trends and ideas. (As I write this, I have over 100 twitter friends most I do not know but they shape many of my opinions on any number of things)

2- Brands continue to fortify their digital positions - With dollars shifting to the internet so quickly, brands will rush to keep up with the digital consumer migration. Brands will increasingly face the tough questions about social media and what they should do in this new platform based web. Corporate blogs are not for everyone but opening up the lines of communication can benefit brands. The question is, what is the best way to leverage social media, to empower your consumers and gain valuable insights.

3- Web trust factor becomes site currency - Inevitably, web sites will come that try to game the system and erode consumer trust in social media. From this, will arise a digital trust factor that will eventually become a web currency. It could come in an organized fashion or maybe it will just be semantic based - meaning you don’t travel far from home on the web. You have a few sites you visit and trust based on history, promotion and recommendations and only visit them frequently. This trend will hasten the move to platforms that portalize you to the web at large - Facebook applications are a good example of this in action.

As we see all media continue its move to digital, these three trends are one to watch. Any I missed?