Although Antony Mayfield (blog) works for Spannerworks, a Search Engine Marketing agency as Head of Content & Media (interesting job title for an SEO agency...), he has a traditional PR background, which is valuable since understanding the principles of effective PR is essential to SEO success.

He quoted Clive Thompson writing for Wired.com as a good way of looking at the key to modern SEO success:

“Google is not a search engine”

                    but

"It’s a reputation management engine".

Clive Thompson goes onto say in US journo style:

"Which illustrates an interesting aspect of the Internet age: Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that's one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before".

Understanding the digital marketplace

Antony highlighted the importance of understanding your companies digital space not as a nebulous cloud which is often featured in network diagrams, but a place, albeit virtual with a physical representation.

It was good to hear this since I have long advocated that, as part of creating an online campaign, or e-marketing strategy it is important to do an e-marketplace analysis since there will be new intermediaries to reach your audience and you need to understand who they are. Your customer profiles may also vary.

He likened the marketplace analysis approach to an expedition in cartography and anthropology. So partly understanding where you fit – producing an online map of your near network neighbours.

You need to understand what members of the community like, what they value, how they think, which topics they are interested – for example topics posted per week.

So, Anthony considers that success in SEO is not simply down to understanding the ranking factors and the “trick of the week”, but what generates reputation, and in a nutshell, he said this is:

    “Being useful”

        Earning reputation, not buying reputation.

 i.e. you are competing within your online marketplace to be useful and you need to ask how useful your content is.

Depending on your view of traditional PR, this is precisely the same as traditional PR, where for example you ultimately need to help journalists and their editors sell more magazines or papers by providing useful content.

Differences between online PR and traditional PR

Antony also had a useful summary for thinking through the differences between E-PR and traditional PR which need to be managed:

1. Speed

The speed at which buzz travels online is well known. Particularly for negative product stories like faulty iPod screens, faulty Kryptonite bike locks opened by pens or more recently, contaminants in petrol. All of these problems started in forums and blogs.

But news of an effective product or campaign also spreads fast - for example the Sony Bravia campaign.

2. Scale

The scale of the web is also well known – Google currently has around 16 billion pages in its index. Anthony’s point was that this makes monitoring influence more difficult, but at the same time, it offers more options to gain favourable mentions in blogs.

3. Geography

An obvious one, but are your main influencers global, local or glocal?

4. Interaction

The facility to add comments to blogs helps engage further and keeps users involved in a conversation. He gave the classic example of Dell's Ideastorm, which he said had help partially ressurrect the brand. See Dell commentary on ideas.

5. Complexity

Really back to the second point on scale of managing, but also alludes to issue mentioned in first presentation from Onalytica where measuring online influence was discussed - assessing buzz and influence should be:

•    not based simply on link popularity

•    should be based on citations

•    based on overall net promoter score

•    but need to weight by role of influencers – a major media owner with more citations is more relevant.

User-generated content

He talked a lot about user generated content, but rather than trotting out the usual statistics about number of blogs, he gave the killer stat that,

IDC estimate that by 2010,  

If that stat doesn’t indicate to web managers that they need a social media strategy to help manage your online brand visibility and reputation, then I don’t know what will!

More UGC will inevitably mean that Internet users are spending less time with branded content and destination site originated content.