It’s happened. With one blog post, the rollout of an algorithm, and a couple hours of processing, Penguin 2.0 has been unleashed. The Internet will never be the same. Matt Cutts published a brief post on the topic on May 22, 2013. Here are four key points that you should know about Penguin 2.0

1.  Penguin 2.0 affected 2.3% of all English-US queries. 

Lest 2.3% sound to you like a smallish number, keep in mind that there are an estimated 5 billion Google searches per day. 2.3% of 5 billion is a lot. A single small business commerce site may depend on 250 different queries for substantial traffic and revenue. The impact is bigger than a little decimal number may suggest.

By comparison, Penguin 1.0 affected 3.1% of all websites. Remember the catastrophic results of that?

2. Other language queries are also affected by Penguin 2.0

Although the vast majority of Google queries are conducted in English, there are hundreds of millions of queries conducted in other languages. Google’s algorithmic impact extends to these other languages, putting a bigger kibosh on webspam on a global level. Languages wither higher percentages of webspam will be affected more.

3. The algorithm has changed substantially.

It’s important to keep in mind that Google has completely changed the algorithm in Penguin 2.0. This is no mere data refresh, even though the “2.0″ naming scheme makes it sound that way. A new algorithm means that many of the old spammy tricks simply won’t work anymore.

Obviously, this isn’t the first time we’ve met Penguin. Here’s a bullet-point history of Penguin.

• April 24, 2013:  Penguin 1.  The first Penguin update came on April 24, 2012, and impacted more than 3% of queries.
• May 26, 2013:  Penguin update. A month later, Google refreshed the algorithm, which impacted a fraction of queries, around 01%
• October 5, 2013:  Penguin update. In the fall of 2012, Google updated the data again. This time around 0.3% of queries were affected.
• May 22, 2013:  Penguin 2.0 releases, affecting 2.3% of all queries.

As Cutts explained about 2.0, “It’s a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially only look at the home page of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper and has a really big impact in certain small areas.”

Webmasters affected by Penguin will feel the impact a lot harder, and it will probably also take a lot longer to recover. This algorithm goes deep, meaning that its impact trickles down to virtually every page in potential violation.

4.  There will be more Penguins.

We haven’t heard the last of Penguin. We expect additional adjustments of the algorithm, as Google has done with every single algorithmic change that they’ve ever performed. Algorithms evolve with the ever-changing web environment.

Matt Cutts mentioned, “We can adjust the impact but we wanted to start at one level and then we can modify things appropriately.” One commenter on his blog asked specifically about whether Google would be “denying value upstream for link spammers,” and Mr. Cutts replied, “that comes later.”

This suggests incremental tightening and, perhaps, for some a loosening, of the impact of Penguin 2.0 over the course of the next few months.

Many webmasters and SEOs have been understandably frustrated at the negative impact of algorithm changes on their otherwise healthy site. Some webmasters are situated in niches that are swimming in webspam. They have spent months or years creating solid content, building high-authority links, and crafting a legitimate site. Yet, with the release of a new algorithm, they experience penalties, too. One small-biz webmaster lamented,  ”Was it stupid of me to invest the last year into building an authority site?”

In consolation, Cutts wrote, “We have some things coming later this summer that should help with the type of sites you mention, so I think you made the right choice to work on building authority.”

Over time, the algorithm eventually catches up with webspam. There may still be some ways to game the system, but the games come to a screeching halt when a Panda or Penguin walk onto the ball-field. It’s always best to obey the rules of the game.

Are you affected by Penguin 2.0?

If you’re wondering whether Penguin 2.0 has affected you, you can perform your own analysis.

• Check your keyword rankings. If they have declined substantially beginning on May 22, there is a good chance that your site is affected.
• Analyze the pages that have received the most link building focus, for example your home page, conversion page, category page, or landing page. If traffic has declined drastically, this is sign of a Penguin 2.0 impact.
• Look for any possible ranking shifts of keyword groups rather than just specific keywords. For example, if you are wanting to rank for “windows vps,” than analyze keywords such as “windows vps hosting,” “get windows vps hosting,” and other similar keywords.
• Track your organic traffic deep and wide. Google analytics is your friend as you study your site, and then recover from any impact. Pay special attention to the percentage of organic traffic, and do so across all of your major site pages. For example, find out which pages had the highest amount of organic traffic during the month of April 21-May 21. Then, find out if these numbers dipped beginning May 22.

The ultimate question isn’t “was I affected,” but “what do I do now that I am affected?”

If you’ve been affected by Penguin 2.0, here’s what you need to do:

How to Recover from Penguin 2.0

Step 1. Relax. It’s going to be alright.

Step 2. Identify and remove spammy or low-quality pages from your website. For every page on your site, ask yourself whether it truly provides value for users or whether it mostly just exists as search engine fodder. If the true answer if the latter, then you should either augment or remove it entirely from your site.

Step 3. Identify and remove spammy inbound links. To identify which links could be bringing down your rankings and causing you to be affected by Penguin 2.0, you’ll need to perform an inbound link profile audit (or have a professional do it for you). After you’ve identified which links need to be removed, attempt to remove them by emailing the webmasters and asking them politely to remove the link to your website. After you’ve completed your removal requests, be sure to disavow them as well, using Google’s Disavow Tool.

Step 4. Engage in a new inbound link building campaign. You need to prove to Google that your website is worthy of ranking at the top of search results. To do so, you’ll need some trustworthy votes of confidence from credible third parties. These votes come in the form of inbound links from other publishers that Google trusts. Figure out which publishers Google is ranking at the top of search results for your primary keywords and contact them about doing a guest blog post.

A solid SEO strategy going forward will refuse to accept or engage in black hat techniques. It will acknowledge and integrate the 3 pillars of SEO in a way that adds value for users and establishes trust, credibility, and authority. Focus on powerful content, and work only with reputable SEO agencies with a proven record of helping sites to succeed.

Analytics is running aground as the the buying methodologies of consumers get more and more complex. I recently spoke at event where I described how most people think about marketing and sales… and our reporting systems really haven’t wandered too far from these scenarios:

Most of these systems utilize methodologies of first and last touch:

• First Touch – what was the first occurence when the prospect was introduced to our brand, product or service that led them down the conversion funnel to become a customer?
• Last Touch – what was the last occurence when the prospect was introduced to our brand, product or service that led them down the conversion funnel to become a customer?

This simply doesn’t work anymore. The complexities of multi-devices, on and offline connections, and consumers and businesses researching via the web are changing the way that we convert customers.

Here’s a scenario. Your company sponsors a marketing event that your prospect attended and they connected with your sales team. A few months later, thanks to a great mobile-optimized email, they downloaded a whitepaper and a case study that described their industry and what they were trying to achieve. They asked around their social network about your product and service – then signed up for a demonstration. After the demonstration, they signed.

In that typical situation, where do you attribute your return on investment? Was it the event (first touch)? The sales person? The whitepaper? The case study? The social influence? Or was it the web demo (last touch)?

The answer was that it required all of these channels and events to drive that prospect to a conversion. Our basic analytics platforms aren’t sophisticated enough to provide the statistical analysis of the efforts we’ve implemented to come up with a predictive model that we can act from.

The answer, unfortunately, is that we can’t ignore any channel and we must acknowledge that each has a demonstrative impact on our overall marketing efforts. How much so? That’s something that the marketing decision maker is tasked with and must resolve.

And there may not be a set percentage that’s right for your company. Much of your success may depend on the resources at hand. Brand marketers may find that implementing many more strategic branding initiatives works well. Sales organizations may find that dialing more phone numbers produces better results.

I’m looking forward to the days that Analytics doesn’t just record the results of our labor, but actually takes into consideration the labor itself. If we could enter the campaigns and their costs, we may be able to see how the fruits of our labor are paying off. And we’d be able to determine what the impact would be when we increase or decrease one aspect of our multi-channel strategy.

A McKinsey iConsumer survey spotlights 5 key digital consumption trends in e-commerce, mobile, multichannel, social media, and big data.

The difficult part, of course, isn’t simply how companies utilize big data and how they market across channels, it’s calculating the impact of each marketing channel on the overall purchase. Large companies are utilizing predictive analytics that collect volumes of data and allow them to understand what an increase or decrease in one channel’s activity will have across the entire spectrum. Smaller companies are still left with first-touch, last-touch mechanisms which may not provide the insight and accuracy of the paths that complex consumer behaviors are now taking.

This infographic from CSS Chopper provides all the insight into the platform’s growth as well as why the ecommerce community is so enamored with the platform.

We’ve been testing a bunch of different systems for identifying and managing the businesses that are arriving at our site. We’re so excited about one such system that we whitelabeled it as DK+Stats and have implemented across 3 clients. A key issue we’ve been seeing with other systems is their inability to filter ISPs from actual businesses. As well, the supplemental information they provide is critical.

The dashboard has some key analytics data for your site – providing scores on it’s search and social health.

Jumping in, it’s Leads that we’re after, though. Through a daily email, instantaneous alerts set for the company, or by logging in, you can see the business information in its entirety – including the click-path the visitor took through your website. You can even add specific companies to a watchlist to filter down the results to the companies of interest.

Key people within the organization are listed via integrations with Data.com (previously Jigsaw) and NetProspex. There’s also a means of delivering the lead by email, or sending it directly to Salesforce. There’s even a small CRM within the application in the event you don’t have one.

We’re only providing this solution to companies that have a consulting engagement with us (monthly engagements start at $3k) so we’re not charging a licensing fee for the software. If you’re interested in getting assistance with your inbound marketing and could utilize a system like this, feel free to contact us.

Top 4 Digital Marketing Trends for 2013 lists the top priorities for marketers in 2013 and chalks out a road map for lead generation. Its visual representations shed light on market trends and projections for the next few years. Figures on mobile advertising revenue indicate that from $9.6 billion in 2012 the revenue is set to reach $24.5 billion by 2016.

A great reinforcement of some of the growth and strategies that your business should be deploying:

Most businesses upload videos to YouTube but don’t take advantage of optimizing their video nor adding annotations. With annotations you can layer text, links, and hotspots over your video. Annotations allow you to add information, interactivity and engagement. For businesses, this means you can overlay calls-to-action directly in the video – adding a link back to a demo, download or registration.

Annotations don’t just display on YouTube, they are also displayed in any of the embedded players. At minimum, you should add an annotation to request the viewers subscribe to your YouTube channel!

There are five different types of annotations to choose from:

• Speech bubble create pop-up speech bubbles with text.
• Spotlight – highlight areas in a video; when the user moves the mouse over these areas the text you enter will appear.
• Note – create pop-up boxes containing text.
• Title – create a text overlay to title your video.
• Label – create a label to call out and name a specific part of your video.

Notes, Speech Bubbles and Spotlights, can be linked to “content” such as other videos, same video, channel pages, playlists, search results. Similarly, they can also be linked to “calls to action” such as subscribe, compose message and upload video response. Check the “Link” box underneath the “Start” and “End” settings. You can choose whether you want the annotation to link to another video, your channel, or to an external link.

For some advanced tips on using YouTube annotations – visit their support page on the topic. To really leverage YouTube, check out the Creator Playbook they’ve developed!

PromoJam 2.0 is a Social Promotions Management Platform for small, medium and enterprise businesses. PromoJam is now offering complete customization capabilities to every customer plan including their Basic, Advanced and Enterprise levels at affordable prices. All customers are able to launch completely customized promotions for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Websites and mobile.

PromoJam Promotions Builder Features

• Turnkey Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest Social Apps / promotions builder
• Easily create Sweepstakes, Contests, Photo and Video Campaigns, Like Gates, Tweet-to-Unlock promotions, Quizzes, Engagement campaigns and more
• Visual design editor with completely customizable promotion templates for every pricing plan
• Easy-to-use drag and crop image editor
• Image gallery to store previously used images
• Ability to upload and manipulate custom background images
• Color Selection Tool with ability to add specific Hex Values
• Dynamic font editor
• Drag and drop form builder (for customer lead generation data collection like emails, etc.)
• No coding required

PromoJam is an advertiser of the Marketing Technology Blog. Basic pricing starts at $99 a month and includes 1 Facebook and 1 Twitter promotion. Advanced accounts are $499 and have all the bells and whistles with 2 promotions per month. Enterprise has unlimited promotions – contact PromoJam for details!

Launch your social promotion in 7 minutes on PromoJam!

So why haven’t you updated your email marketing templates to be mobile-friendly? No excuses folks, Email Monks now supplies a service where you can have your designer send over a Photoshop file and they’ll do a great job at building out a responsive email design that looks great on a mobile device. Still not convinced you need one? Here’s their infographic (click-through for an interactive version):

Shoutlet is a company that I’ve been wanting to write about for quite a while. Good friend Chuck Tobar stopped by our office last week and we had a lengthy discussion on enterprise social media marketing platforms and the skyrocketing growth and attention that Shoutlet is getting in the industry.

Recently, friend Scott Bleczinski joined the Shoutlet board – Scott is one of the best sales executives I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with so I’m sure we’ll all continue to see Shoutlet leading the industry.

Social Media Marketing platforms have focus in three general areas – social media publishing, social media promotions and social media analytics. Enterprise social media platforms add permissions, workflows and archival systems so that they can accomodate multi-site, multi-corporation and regulatory compliance. In other words, there’s a lot packed into these extensive platforms.

Basic Social Media Marketing Platform Features

• Publishing – create drafts and publish directly from a central interface to vast array of social media platforms, including the ability to publish images and video.
• Syndication – publish the same updates throughout multiple social media accounts through a single method.
• Moderation – moderate updates prior to publishing.
• Monitoring – real-time monitoring of social media feeds for brands, products, accounts, names and keywords. Typically with some type of sentiment analysis.
• Analytics – measure the impact of campaigns that have been distributed across social media mediums.

Advanced Social Media Marketing Platform Features

• Design – wysiwyg design interfaces for professional designers.
• Scheduling – plan social media updates via calendar.
• Customer Relationship Management – track visitors, identify them, and save the event once they register for promotions.
• Mobile Access – access your platform via mobile device and/or tablet.
• Templates – centrally design branded elements for re-use.
• Application Programming Interface – integrate via third-party applications and custom development.
• Multi-language – support for multiple languages for international corporations.

Enterprise Social Media Marketing Platform Features

• Multi-site support – manage multiple brands and sites through a single account.
• Workflows – ability to pre-define how updates and promotions are approved, with email alerts and internal commenting.
• Permissions – ability to deny or approve access to virtually every element in the system, including read, write, edit, delete.
• Security – hosted securely with data safely stored, monitored and backed up.
• Automation – the ability to design trigger-based social campaigns.
• Archives – audit trails of all activity within the system to comply with regulations in healthcare and finance industries.

Shoutlet is ranked as a leader by Forrester amongst its peers in the enterprise social media marketing platform industry. For a full view of the Enterprise Social Media Marketing Platform landscape, be sure to check out Forrester’s report, Take Control Of Your Social Marketing Program.

Wrapping both resources and a process around your content marketing strategy will help you build a successful program that measures and drives results. This infographic from Demand Metric provides a framework for doing just that.

To learn more about what content marketing is, how it can benefit your organization and how to get started using this technique to promote your company, check out the following A Guide to Marketing Genius: Content Marketing infographic:

WordPress, Joomla, K2, Drupal, TYPO3, Blogger, Tumblr… have you ever needed to migrate from one site to the other? We have and it’s often torturous and requires a ton of manual effort. Not only that, but even once you have the content transferred, it often doesn’t deal with users, category and tag taxonomies, URL slugs, comments or images. In short, it’s always been a lot of work… until now.

Alex Griffis, the CTO of MaxTradeIn (fantastic site for trading in your car), told me about CMS2CMS tonight. CMS2CMS has actually designed a bridge integration that easily migrates content from one standard installation of the above content management systems to another.

The price is beyond affordable at $29… with support (our affiliate link is included above). Just install a bridge file to manage the communication and you’re ready to go!

When I spoke in San Diego on Social Media Trolls, Crisis and Blunders, the most important aspect of the entire speech was the unnecessary fear that’s perpetuated through social media whenever a company slips up.

The half-life of a social media meltdown is directly related to how quickly the next company slips up.

And that’s happening every few minutes now. All the buzz this week is the post on Amy’s Baking Company in Scottsdale, Az. Now… before you go and read that post, just read through this post before moving on.

I was lucky enough (or unlucky enough) to work on the tech side of the restaurant industry a few years ago. Margins were tight, employee turnover was ridiculous, customers were rude, and the hours and pressures on restauranteurs were beyond reproach. I won’t ever open my own food-related company… ever. I have friends in the industry today and it’s truly a business that you have to love because there’s not too many other benefits.

So, imagine you’ve finally started your dream and built your bistro. Imagine now that you’re struggling to keep your restaurant afloat and an opportunity comes by to get some public attention through a reality television show.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well… since the reality television show is a multi-million dollar enterprise in an of itself, there’s quite a bit. The job of Gordon Ramsey isn’t to take a restaurant and fine-tune it on his show. Viewers have come to appreciate the fact that he’s both rude and arrogant… that’s entertainment. And the purpose of the show is to ensure the restaurant is depicted in the worst possible light so that Mr. Ramsey can walk away looking like a champion.

It’s called Kitchen Nightmares, folks. And dare I say they’re loving the implosion… there’s a video of the episode on their home page.

That’s not an absolute criticism of Mr. Ramsey. I watch the show and, when he nails it, he nails it. But he’s still an entertainer/chef/businessman. The owners should have known what they were getting into. In this case, the show didn’t have a happy ending, Ramsey walked away from the restaurant, and the world responded through social media by attacking owners Samy and Amy Bouzaglo via Facebook.

UPDATE: For a great show on how reality television works, watch this incredible Charlie Brooker show:

And Amy Boozaglo responded (now read the Buzzfeed). It wasn’t pretty. In fact, it’s downright ugly.

That said, it’s not unwarranted. Amy’s Bakery Company isn’t a national chain, it’s a struggling bistro in Scottsdale, Arizona. The people attacking Amy’s Bakery Company haven’t eaten there, weren’t going to eat there, and would have never even known it existed until the episode on television.

Let the Fear-Mongering Begin

The next phase of a social media meltdown, of course, is for the social media pundits to all open their blogs and begin tap, tap, tapping away at how they would have rescued this company from pure demise and how terrible the owners were for defending themselves on social media the way they did. Sure… they didn’t do it well. But I can’t blame them. Imagine you were in their shoes, your life’s work was depicted as a nightmare on national television, and you were left with the legions of trolls on Reddit, Yelp and Facebook defacing your company.

I’d be pissed too. And I’d respond as well.

So What Did We Learn

The restaurant netted national attention, about 50k+ followers on Facebook, and – I can’t confirm this – but I’m sure they’re dining room is now full. Their website is so busy that it’s crashed. And of all the folks making reservations in Scottsdale to eat at ‘that place on Kitchen Nightmares’, I’m pretty sure that some of them are going to go home and say… ‘Wow, that was pretty good’!

And so goes the half-life of the social media meltdown. Far from the howls and screams of the social media pundits, you’ll find that the episode was nothing more than a fart in the wind. Sure, it smelled bad for a few minutes, but it will be okay soon.

Don’t believe the social media hype, folks. Every company can recover. And my prediction is that Amy’s Baking Company will rebound quite nicely.

We’ve been working the last few months on getting some video equipment for DK New Media. While we have incredible video companies that we have do the hefty lifting, from time to time, we’re finding that we want to record and mix video as well – and we want it to look professional. Our graphic designer is also well-versed at mixing video and audio so we went to work on finding some basic equipment to start.

Keep in mind that we’re not starting a professional video agency, we’re just learning and don’t want to break the bank in starting up. We want great equipment, but don’t need the best. We also don’t want crappy equipment. We also consulted with the video team at ExactTarget, who release video on a regular basis.

The basic video equipment list consists of the DSLR camera, lavalier microphones, a multi-track recorder and lighting. You could add a green screen if you’d like, but we’re not planning to do any green screen. Here’s a video from DSLRHD that provides some insight into selecting the right microphones and recorder – a key to recording great video.

Here’s a breakdown of the list of equipment and approximate prices:

• Camera – Canon EOS Rebel T3 12.2 MP CMOS Digital SLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS II Zoom Lens & EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III Telephoto Zoom Lens + 10pc Bundle 16GB Deluxe Accessory Kit. The telephoto zoom was recommended so that you can get some very good depth in your picture with a lot of focus on the person and faded background. You can buy more expensive cameras that have far more features… but this is the basic kit we needed to start. Cost is about $550.
• Microphones – Sennheiser EW 112P G3-A omni-directional EW system. By far, this was where most of the attention was with our videographers and they warned us not to skimp. The Sennheisers are durable – very necessary as they’re unpackaged, put on people and removed from people every time you’re recording. As well, the general consensus was that they’re amazingly resilient to background feedback and noise. Cost for each is $630! Ouch.
• Recorder – Zoom H2n Handy Handheld Digital Multitrack Recorder Bundle. This also has a very good set of built-in stereo microphones in the event you need them. Cost is $200.
• Lighting – CowboyStudio 2275 Watt Digital Video Continuous Softbox Lighting Kit/Boom Set. While LED lighting provide much more granularity and don’t take up as much space, they’re incredibly expensive (about $1,600). This cowboy studio kit has to be well-taken care of but will provide the lighting you need to get good videos off the ground. You may want to watch some videos on placement! Cost is $220

Please keep in mind that I’m not writing this as a professional videographer. We may upgrade our equipment later… the LED lighting is probably the first upgrade and, as our designer masters the DSLR… probably the camera. Once again, our goal here isn’t to buy the best… it’s to buy starter equipment that can help us produce professional videos without breaking the bank. This entire setup is about $1,600 (not including taxes and shipping). BTW: All the links here use our Amazon affiliate links.

I’m sure this post will have plenty of opinions! What’s yours?

As a digital agency in business since 1996, we’ve had the opportunity to create hundreds of corporate and non-profit websites. We’ve learned plenty along the way and have gotten our process down to a well-oiled machine.

Our process starts with a website blueprint, which allows us to do some initial prep work and hammer out details with the client before we get too far down the road of quoting and designing.

Despite the fact that this process works really really well, we still encounter the dreaded RFP from time to time. Does anyone love RFPs? I didn’t think so. Yet they continue to be the norm for organizations looking for a starting point when they need a website project executed.

Here’s a secret: Website RFPs don’t work. They are not good for the client and they are not good for the agency.

Here’s a story that illustrates what I’m talking about. An organization recently came to us looking for help with their website. They had an RFP put together than outlined a standard set of features, some unique requests, and the usual wish list items (including the good old standard: “we want our new website to be easy to navigate”).

So far, so good. However, we explained that our process starts with a website blueprint, which is designed to give us a little bit of consulting, planning, and site mapping time before we commit to a price. They agreed to temporarily put the RFP to the side and start with a blueprint and we got things kicked off.

During our first blueprint meeting, we dug into some specific goals, asked questions, and discussed marketing scenarios. During our discussion, it became clear that some of the items in the RFP were no longer necessary once we answered some of their questions and offered our advice based on years of experience.

We also uncovered some new considerations not even included in the RFP. Our client was extremely pleased that we were able to “optimize” their requirements and make sure we were all on the same page regarding what the plan was.

Additionally, we ended up saving the client money. Had we quoted a price based on the RFP, we would have based it on requirements that were not actually right for the organization. Instead, we consulted with them to provide alternatives that were both a better fit and more cost-effective.

We see this scenario over and over, which is why we are so committed to the blueprint process and why we don’t believe in website RFPs.

Here is the fundamental problem with RFPs – they are written by the organization requesting help, yet they try to preemptively predict the right solutions. How do you know you need a product configuration wizard? Are you sure you want to include a members-only area? Why did you choose this feature over that feature? It’s the equivalent of going to the doctor to get a diagnosis and treatment, but asking for specific medication before you even visit his office.

So if you are planning a new website project, please try to break the RFP habit. Start with conversations and planning with your agency (or potential agency) and take a more agile approach to your website project. Most of the time you will find that you’ll get a better outcome and you might even save some money!