Powncing Yourself to Death

Twitter is notorious for having their servers go down and for having a limited feature set. So how in the world did they outlast Pownce and drive them to their extinction?

Pownce had everything going for it. It had a slicker UI, an AIR app, and better uptime than Twitter. It was also a collaboration that involved Kevin Rose of Digg and it was supposed to be the Twitter-killer that nobody saw coming. However, due to numerous internal conflicts and marketing mistakes, Pownce never took off and it ultimately shut down on December 15, 2008.

Conflict

Alleged infighting with a major influencer, Kevin Rose, worked against Pownce. It spilled out publicly and ultimately led Kevin to promote the competing service (Twitter). In fact, today Kevin Rose has one of the highest number of followers on Twitter.

Branding

Twitter is a brilliant brand. Twitter is slang for chatter and tweeting is the act of chatting. It's something that people can immediately identify with. Whereas Pownce, is well, Pownce. It's difficult to relate to and really has nothing to do with the service. Not to mention, it sounds violent.

Features

Pownce was betting that their expanded feature set would steal people away from Twitter. Twitter can only send 140 characters of text, period! Whereas Pownce had ratings, events, files and more. To any sensible business-person or marketer it would seem that Twitter didn't have a chance.

However, in the paradox that is sometimes the Internet, Pownce made a fatal flaw. They cut off the ability for developers to innovate, market and create buzz around the service. Sure, they had an API, but it would only allow people to tap into the data, not innovate the service.

Twitter on the other hand, possibly by accident or simply because they were distracted by server failures, sat by and did nothing. Instead, they pushed their API and allowed third party developers to create whatever they wanted. That resulted in incredible user supported tools like TweetDeck, TwitPic and TweetStalk. Twitter's lack of interference (and lack of innovation) actually propelled its popularity.

Too Late

Sometimes you really can be too late to a party. In spite of Twitter's service outages, their users continued to be loyal to the service and hold out hope for its improvement (it was inevitable really, just a matter of time.) While Pownce, with its lame branding, public conflict and over-developed features, wasn't enough to dethrone Twitter. The end result was a promising competitor that ultimately pownced itself to death.

What Is SEO ROI?

Return on Investment (ROI) is what every client wants from a search marketing agency. It's an easy thing to calculate if you're doing Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. If your revenue is higher than your spend, PPC management fees and cost of goods, then your client is getting a return on their investment. Although it's simple to figure out ROI for PPC, the same cannot be said for search engine optimization (SEO).

Search marketing agencies that provide SEO services have traditionally reported ROI in a variety of ways. The most common approach to SEO ROI has been search engine ranking. If a company can get a client to perform well in organic SERPs, often times focusing on a handful of short-tail keywords, then they've done their job. Unfortunately, that's not exactly SEO ROI. Instead, it's a trophy that may not be worth anything at all.

The fallacy of short-tail search terms is the assumption that it provides a return on investment. For example, if a company is spending $5,000/mo to an SEO agency to build up and maintain short-tail keyword phrases, that agency may report those SERPs as SEO ROI. Agencies have been training their clients to believe that highly ranked short-tail SERPs is ROI, when that couldn't be further from the truth.

More often than not, clients already have some short-tail keyword phrases that perform very well in SERPs. They covet their short-tail SERPs and believe that by simply being number one or number three, their website will somehow magically profit from it. However, looking deeper into their analytics can sometimes reveal a much different story. Short-tail SERPs can suffer from being too broad. For example, a site may perform well for "blue widget" but it doesn't necessarily mean that people who want to buy the widget will search with that short-tail term. Instead, qualified and targeted traffic may search for "best price on blue widget" more often than simply typing "blue widget" in their search query. If that's the case, and if the website doesn't perform well on those targeted long-tail keywords, the short-tail SERP becomes useless.

The same concept applies to referral traffic. A successful link building campaign may get a lot of high quality inbound links to the client's site and may improve their short-tail SERPs. However, if those referrals aren't driving targeted traffic and if they're only propping up poor performing short-tail keywords, then is there really any ROI to report? The answer is probably not.

The Anatomy of True SEO ROI

True SEO ROI involves driving targeted traffic from SERPs, regardless of how long or short the keyword tail is. It also includes targeted referral traffic. Targeted traffic means traffic that accomplishes the purpose and goals of the website. That could be any of the following:

• Subscriptions
• Repeat Traffic
• Community Involvement
• Registrations
• Newsletter Signups
• Purchases

What's tricky about reporting SEO ROI is that you have to connect the links that have been built with referral traffic from websites and search engines, and then connect that data with conversion results. Although Google Analytics and Omniture can help connect the dots, it's still difficult to sync, analyze and report on that data. This is something that Raven has spent a great deal of time on — creating a relationship between Link Manager data, Analytics and our conversion tracking code. The result is what we call true SEO ROI.

True SEO ROI can show you the effectiveness of any SEO campaign. For example, if a campaign is focused on building links in forums that link to widgets on the client's online store, then an SEO ROI report would show the success of that campaign. That report might include a list of inbound links that resulted in purchases, including details from related organic search engine traffic (matching or similar keywords used in the anchor text or within the context of the pages the links were built on) that resulted in purchases.

Each SEO ROI report should focus on and report the following key elements:

• Conversions related to the campaign
• Overall increase in conversions over time
• Conversions related to search engine traffic
• Overall increase in search engine traffic
• Overall increase in unique users and traffic

SEO Daily Reading - Issue 142

• 9 Reasons You Need Social Media Marketing in 2009 — Social Marketing is the New SEO
  
  
• How do you Define Scope of SEO? — Be Familiar with the Process
  
  
• Google's Search Quality Team Says They Don't... — A Response from Google JohnMu
  
  
• Taking Advantage of .TV Domains — Does They Really Benefit Your SEO and Reputation Management Campaigns?
  
  
• Do Social Media Links Translate In Organic Rankings? — The Investment in Social Media as a Link Building Tactic
  
  

Marketing On Twitter

Using Twitter — and I mean really using Twitter — the past few months has been an eye-opening experience. I started to appreciate it the most when I saw how powerful Twitter could be at conferences. Both the leads and true friendships I've gained through Twitter have been amazing, and I've been wanting to write about the marketing opportunities on Twitter for several weeks now.

Thanks to a suggestion from Taylor Pratt, I recently created a new (wiki-based) resource called the SEO Guide, which is going to be a repository of howto articles on SEO and related techniques. It will also loosely tie in elements of Raven's SEO tools when appropriate. Although the guide is in its infancy, I had the opportunity to write its first article on Twitter Marketing. In the article I highlight:

• Getting Started With Twitter
• Finding Friends to Follow
• Participating In and Starting Conversations
• Using Keywords and Hashtags
• Using 3rd Party Apps to Manage Your Twitter Account
• Additional Resources

All of the articles on the SEO Guide will be organic in nature thanks to the wiki architecture. I'm looking forward to continually updating the Twitter Marketing page — keeping it fresh with relevant content — along with adding and updating all of the other content I have planned for the online guide.

SEO Daily Reading - Issue 141

• 10 Ways to Give Your Corporate Blog a Sense of Purpose — Does Yours Have a Raison d'étre
  
  
• Small Business Link Building Ideas — Consolidate Your Time and Money
  
  
• Multivariate Testing in Online Marketing — Test, Test, Test
  
  
• Building Relationships More Important than Building Links — Community and Quality, Not Quantity
  
  
• Search Analytics — Life After Ranking