Image by CarbonNYC via Flickr

I feel that one of the most important and often overlooked things is being observant. Developing the ability to see things happening or unfolding is challenging work. It’s challenging for all sorts of reasons (mostly having to do with, in my case at least, being pretty much focused on myself).

Because it’s important and because it’s hard to do, it’s good practice to identify others who are good at being observant and communicating what they observe in a useful way. Which brings me to this edition of Follow Friday.

Mike Ives, journalist

Journalists who know their craft make ideal observationalists. I had the exceptionally good fortune to meet Mike Ives early in his journalism career when he was working at the local Burlington Vermont paper SevenDays. During his time here I got to know him through our shared interests in music and cross-country skiing.

Equal parts thinker, athlete and adventurer Mike’s the kind of guy that always has an interesting story or insightful perspective. But, and this is important (especially in a world of ego-driven blogjournalism), Mike Ives isn’t a blowhard. He doesn’t embellish or cull his observations to service his agenda. To be honest, I have no clue what his agenda might be or if he has one. But I do know that his writing brings me to a closer understanding of the world that Mike Ives sees.

I recommend you follow Mike Ives for the following specific reasons:

• His journalism is global in reach, bringing valuable perspectives to specific issues.
• His journalism is general in nature; he doesn’t have a “beat” and as such he can help prevent intellectual myopia.
• Someday he’s going to win a lot of prestigious writing awards and you’ll be able to say “Yeah I been reading that guy for years.”

The best way to follow Mike Ives is through his journalism, which appears in a variety of publications. Here are a few to get you started:

• Mike Ives in Yale Environment 360
• Mike Ives in The New York Times
• Mike Ives’ blog
• And of course you can also follow him on Twitter.

Whether he’s writing about economics, politics and the Kyrgistan walnut crop or the future of pond hockey, his writing is engaging and insightful. He provides valuable observations about the world around him.

For a presentation to the Burlington Business Association I made a small study by pulling data from twelve different websites and looking only at traffic that originated in Chittenden County Vermont.

I wanted to explore actual web traffic dialed in to the local level. So this isn’t just parsing out some sort of national study or whatever. This is real data on real websites that shows how people from this corner of Vermont are using the web.

If you would like to sponsor a similar study in your county please contact Thoughtfaucet.

Google’s new algorithm change has an effect on more than 10% of search queries. My initial investigation into how the algorithm update has effected real estate searches has yielded a few surprising insights.

I’d like to do something a little more comprehensive.

A real estate search query census

In order to do a more in-depth comparison of the old algorithm and the new algorithm I’ll need to block out some time to do research. I’m not entirely sure how/if I’ll monetize the results but likely Kickstarter if I openfund it.

• Gather SERPs for the top 3 most populous DMAs in each state + state abbreviation + real estate. So an example might be: burlington vt real estate
• Index each search result in the top 10 for the following site factors: on-domain blog, on-domain MLS data
• Index each search result in the top 10 based on business model: Aggregator/Advertising, Agent/Broker, National Franchise
• Analysis on composition based on the site factors and business models
• Analysis on ranking based on site factors and business models

Thoughtfaucet is a good outfit to conduct this research for a couple reasons:

• Respected within the industry
• Not beholden to specific platforms or vendors
• Business domain knowledge in real estate
• Technical knowledge in search ranking factors
• Technical knowledge in code-related factors

In order to conduct this census I would need to release some of the resulting analysis and data to the public because releasing data to the public is good. Perhaps just at a high-level (US or regional data). Ideally some good-hearted soul would come forth and stroke me a check and say “Go do your thing and release all the data to the world.” But I’m guessing that the contributors to this project would like to have some sort of exclusive ownership of something.

Kickstarter is set up to offer benefits at different tiers of donation so I could scale things according to donation. This could have to do with access to the data or also requesting an additional town be added to the census. I’m open to suggestion here, but it has to be tied to a dollar amount.

Please give me your input so I can make the best possible project outline. Include dollar amounts you would contribute to go along with your suggestions.

Thoughts?

Image via Wikipedia

I want to start by clearly stating that I have no idea about the inner workings of the new Google “Farmer” algorithm update. This post is meant to provide some observation ideas and specific examples that might be useful for businesses, such as real estate, which rely on search marketing but have so far not been as exciting for the press to write about as, say Demand Media or AOL.

Last night Google began pushing out their latest search ranking algorithm, which is being dubbed the “Farmer” algorithm update. This doesn’t signal a new agricultural focus for Google, it’s about decreasing results of what they consider to be low-quality content.

Anything that Google or any search engine does to increase the relevance and quality of results is good. It’s good for people who search. It’s good for people who make content online. It’s obviously good for Google because then more people use their site and they sell more ads.

This latest algorithm change is important for a few reasons:

• Results for more than 10% of search queries are effected–this will be a noticeable update.
• The stated update objectives make it clear that Google is using some method to determine content quality.

Real estate provides a useful non-advertising business model to look at how the change in the algorithm effects online strategy, I’m going to use that industry as an example. But you can probably use these questions to plan your website adjustments even if you aren’t in real estate.

Things to observe about the “Farmer” algorithm update

Let’s start with what we know about this Google update. Matt Cutts, the spam blocking team leader at Google, says that the purpose of this update is to lower rankings for “sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

Is your site low-value add?

Many websites, not just real estate websites, could potentially be considered “low-value add.” It’s hard to recognize this yourself because you probably think your site is very high value (especially if you paid to have it created). Take a serious look at all the competition for your search term and see how much overlap in terms of content there is.

For example, most real estate sites have a site architecture outline that looks like this:

• home page
• information for buyers
• information for sellers
• search the MLS (for houses to buy)
• contact a Realtor or Agent.

This makes sense because these are primary business tasks of real estate–buying, selling, searching. If you’re in a different business, perhaps your industry has similarly well-defined business tasks.

The problem of low-value add comes in when you dive into the content on these pages. Especially when looking at the “information for buyers” and “information for sellers” it can be difficult to differentiate which site has the best content. These kinds of basic pages get short shrift in any industry.

If your “information for buyers” and “information for sellers” isn’t miles above the rest–remember the algorithm is just a piece of math and not a human, then you might be in trouble.

Over the next few weeks, watch the performance of pages that are part of your core business–not just your home page or total traffic.

Does your site copy content from other websites?

Copying content is more nuanced than it might seem at first glance. Obviously, stealing someone’s content isn’t right. What about syndication? Or what about standard product databases?

In real estate, the MLS database is like a product database for all the houses in an area. If you are a retailer and market the same products as other retailers, your product database would be like the MLS.

However, the rules for displaying information from the MLS are typically more complicated than any other kind of product database. According to policy, the data that is displayed in most MLS searches can’t be modified.

The end result is a large mass of content on websites that is essentially the same–the age old “duplicate content issue.” If you go to any real estate website which displays property from an MLS, they will have the same description, photos and so on as any other real estate website in the same MLS.

This is really more like syndication than copying–the whole purpose of the MLS is to have everyone showing the same data. However, to a machine it might look like there are five pages of original content on the site and 287,309 pages of duplicate content on the site. You can see how this could pose a problem, right?

Even if the non-search portions of a real estate site are completely unique and obviously high-value, the number of pages in those sections will be dwarfed by the number of pages generated by an MLS search. The percentage of pages on the site which are essentially duplicate content will be high.

In the past, duplicate content was simply hidden–there was no real rankings problem, just your content wouldn’t show at all. Will the new “Farmer” Google algorithm initiate an actual “duplicate content” penalty? Who knows.

I need to be sure to state clearly: I have no idea how having MLS listings on a site will impact search ranking in the “Farmer” algo update. But it’s something I will be watching closely for my clients I and would encourage you to do the same.

Is your site just not very useful?

Again, it’s hard for most people to evaluate their own site. Take the time to figure this out. After reviewing the previous items you’ll probably have a good sense from a structural perspective.

You may want to actively spend time to get more “voice of customer” data as well. Survey tools (like the 4q survey you may have been asked to fill out on this site) or just plain asking people is a way to figure out if your site is useful or not.

Another way to observe the usefulness of your site is to look at visitor behavior metrics in your site analytics: do people stick around awhile? do people look at a lot of different pages? do they accomplish goal tasks?

The problem is, that we don’t know what Google’s algorithm update calculates as “useful.” Google says the algorithm is not driven by social signals (such as their site blocking Chrome extension) so it is likely built into the algo somehow. I also believe them when they say it isn’t driven by social signals–it’s how they tend to operate.

Be sure to monitor how useful your site is.

Bonus: Will your real estate blog save me from the “Farmer” algorithm update?

If you have a blog attached to your website, www.realestatewebsite.com/my-city-real-estate-blog for example, then this may help you with the new search algorithm. Having a blog could help, but only if:

• Your blog content is original and not copied or syndicated from somewhere else.
• Your blog content is high-value add (see item above).
• Your blog content is useful (see item above).

The more blog posts you have that meet those criteria, the more your blog should help. Remember, Google is just trying to get more relevant content in front of searchers. If your blog is relevant, then it will help.

For those of you who are primarily curating content–finding other stuff online and bringing it to the attention of your audience–there may be issues with the new Google algorithm.

If you are reposting, verbatim, content from other websites–even if you’re doing this by hand and not through a web scraper–I think you may run afoul of the new algorithm.

If, on the other hand, you are posting your own assessment of content on other sites and providing a short quote and link to the original content, you will probably be alright.

Curators: be sure to pay attention to your search rankings in the coming weeks.

The timing of the “Farmer” algorithm update, impact on real estate

March sees a ramp-up time in real estate related online searching in much of the United States. This will continue for the next couple months until people start driving around more in the summer. One acute challenge for the real estate industry is that this update is happening right in the middle of this upswing in search traffic.

If your site is obviously high-value then this will be great for your business. Otherwise, you will need to begin reacting quickly. Typically search engine optimization takes several months to gain traction. There’s a bit of a time crunch here.

If you find that your site is slipping in the search rankings and you feel it’s related to this new algorithm update there are a few things to consider doing:

1. Become aware of how much search does or does not impact your bottom line. How important is search to your business? You won’t find an answer to this in a blog post. You will find an answer to this in your site analytics and in conversations with your sales staff. If search is important then continue on to the other items in this list.
2. Rectify any issues identified by going through the three questions of value-add, duplication and usefulness. This may not have an impact for you until later this summer, however.
3. If you need search traffic earlier than this summer, begin implementing a more aggressive search advertising effort.
4. If you need to make up the traffic generally and don’t care if it’s from search, begin implementing social initiatives more aggressively.

Google algorithm change’s impact on the broader real estate and technology marketplace

This article has been focused primarily on the potential impact of the Google “Farmer” algorithm update on local business–agent and broker sites in real estate. There are likely implications for the larger search aggregators like Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com as well. And likely other aspects of real estate search as well. I’ll raise some of those questions in next Tuesday’s Inman column.

Feel free to put your thoughts/comments/concerns about this update into the comments. I’ll try to answer every question as best I can.

The “Google removing Real Estate from the Map” has already happened. The audio and a written transcript is posted at Google Maps and Real Estate.

Today Google announced that they’ll be pulling real estate off of the Google Map. A number of things all sort of start to coincide with this–googlebase API disappearing, their CEO switching out, and so on. I figured I’d see if some of my friends wouldn’t mind having a live conversation about this topic.

Google takes real estate off the map

Date: Thursday, January 27, 2011
Time: 1:00 PM – 1:45 PM EST
Cost: Free

Yesterday Google announced that they’re ending real estate on maps.

What does this mean for real estate technology?

A quasi-moderated conversation on the topic featuring:

• Rich Bailey of Wolf Net
• Gahlord Dewald of Thoughtfaucet
• Dustin Luther of 4Realz Consulting
• Mike Simonsen of Altos Research

What’s great about this crew of panelists is that everyone has some deep experience in a variety of aspects of real estate, data, marketing and technology. So we should be able to really poke at the issues around Google getting out of mapping real estate from a variety of angles.

We’ll talk for a bit and about what meaning this has, if any and maybe take a few questions. Gahlord will try to moderate.

Further reading re: Google removing real estate from the map.

Also, I’ll try to keep a listing of posts that discuss this issue here:

Google announces they are ending real estate on maps

Vendor Alley breaks the news and gives a simple two-point list.

Search Engine Land has a little writeup as well.

Joel Burslem discusses the hidden nugget in the Google announcement: discontinuing the GoogleBase API.

TechSavvyAgent asks a few good questions.

Inman News starts getting some quotes, including me.

It’s a real challenge to find clear distinctions between observations and commentary in online media. The web is littered with blog posts that are opinions, repackaged opinions, and responses to repackaged opinions. Now don’t get me wrong, I love good analysis and commentary. But it’s always good to get the full and complete source along with it.

My “Follow Friday” this week is a guy who always does a great job of this.

Why follow Eric Bryn?

In the whole Observe/Orient/Decide/Act (aka OODA Loop) strategic method, being clear on what’s an observation and what is someone’s analysis or commentary is critically important. For those who can find meaning in original research, finding original research and data is critical for making meaning and informing better decisions.

I first started paying attention to Eric Bryn after meeting him at an Inman Connect in San Francisco a number of years back. We were at a vendor party, the place was packed and loud. But we quickly got into talking about web analytics and how traffic data can be put to work in the real estate industry.

Eric was one of those guys who not only got this stuff, but was already doing it and thinking it. Later during the conference I saw him on a panel discussing A/B testing and ways to optimize a home page in a sort of live “real estate site makeover” kind of thing. His comments during that session were spot on.

But what ultimately makes Eric a great person to follow is his ability to find original research online, tease out a few worthwhile insights and then provide a link to the original research. For those of us who are tired of getting pre-chewed opinions on the usual suspects of research and white papers, Eric’s ability to find solid research and willingness to share is a goldmine.

There are, of course, a lot of ways to follow Eric Bryn. I recommend, first and foremost his blog (it’s one of very very few that get directly emailed to me whenever there’s an update), Real Estate Relativity. Given that Eric’s blog is filled with references to research papers, the blog should be of value to those in industries that aren’t real estate.

Other ways to follow Eric Bryn:

• Meet him in person at a conference, I’ve seen him at Inman Connect and several other tech/real estate events.
• Eric Bryn on Twitter
• Eric Bryn on LinkedIn

Dale Chumbley is a real estate agent in Vancouver, WA. But, since I’m not looking to buy or sell near Portland, that’s not why I follow him. And even though I do a lot of web strategy work in the real estate industry Dale isn’t a client (in fact, I should probably pay him consulting fees) so I don’t follow him for that either.

I follow Dale because he’s an awesome example of endurance and perseverance in social marketing. In any web marketing tactic that requires continued or repeated activity, Dale is there doing it to the fullest and he just doesn’t stop.

Remember those cool daily mugshot things people were trying out? Remember how people couldn’t keep doing them and gave up? Or how they just changed their clothes and background and shot them all in one day? Dale Chumbley is, as of this writing, on his 652nd mugshot. That’s tenacity.

Another example of his tenacity, is his approach to the  “365 Things to Do” meme. You’ve probably seen these pages pop up on Facebook “365 Things to Do in YourTownHere.” Lesser town curators abandon them after the fifth day or so. Dale is, as of this writing, on day 86 on his Things to Do in Vancouver WA project and I’m sure he’ll make it all the way through. Oh yeah, and he incorporates video into that as well. Once he starts stuff like this he just keeps going.

Dale does a lot of this social media marketing stuff without over-strategizing. I asked him once how long he spent planning out his 365 project, making an editorial calendar and so on. He said “I didn’t. I heard about it on a Monday and I started doing it on a Tuesday.”

What makes a lot of his stuff successful is that he knows his own work habits and is able to incorporate his social media marketing into his daily routine. For example, he does all the video for his 365 project on site, including uploading and posting. He shoots it with his iPhone, edits it with ReelDirector while sitting in his car, and then goes on with his day. Learning how Dale Chumbley does all this is the main reason I follow him.

Here’s the checklist of a few reasons you might want to follow Dale Chumbley as well:

• See an example of someone pursuing social media marketing over the long haul.
• See an example of someone integrating their marketing practices into the flow of their life/work.
• Learn about the Vancouver that isn’t in Canada.

Follow Dale Chumbley on:

• Twitter
• Clark County Real Estate Guide (including 365 Things To Do in Vancouver, WA)
• Flickr
• His mugshot

Everyone who takes part in the information economy should have a librarian or six among their watch-list. Librarians have been dealing with issues of taxonomy, location, storage, usability, findability, distribution and audience segmentation since sometime around the 3rd century B.C.

Being focused on the nature of information itself, librarians sit in an interesting quasi-neutral place for figuring out what to do with all the data that washes down the internet every minute. There are a ton of super active, highly digital, info-junkie librarians out there to expand your mind. I’ll suggest one for this Follow Friday.

Sarah Faye Cohen, Social Media Librarian

I first encountered Sarah Faye Cohen when she gave a presentation on social media to a bunch of lawyers at the Vermont Bar Social Media Summit. She gave an excellent, practical and engaging talk on how social media tools work and how they might be relevant to the audience.

If you’re looking for a solid intro to social media tools you would do yourself a favor to catch Cohen’s presentation. Other than that, you’re left with the usual options of follow.

Here’s how I recommend following:

1. See her in person if you can.
2. Read Sarah Cohen’s blog, The Sheck Spot.
3. She’s got a solid collection of presentations on Slideshare.
4. And, of course, Twitter serves up the short form and pointers to other great content.

For those of you who have reviewed my slide presentation on using web analytics with social media, you’ll notice that I have a minor addition to the usual Reach-Acquisition-Conversion consumer behavior model. That addition is Satisfaction. With social media, the customer’s ability to express satisfaction is significantly increased and also removed from the control of the producer or company. Customers have just as big of a printing press as companies do. Sometimes bigger.

On a practical note, if we’re going to measure satisfaction, what exactly will we be counting? Here’s an outline a few of the possiblities available on Twitter.

• Favorite button
• Retweeting
• Spontaneous mention
• Adding an individual to a list

It’s simple enough to figure out when you or your content has been the subject of any of these actions on Twitter. Usually a search for your name will catch the vast majority of these actions. From there, how you keep records is whatever way works best for you. A spreadsheet is helpful.

Let’s look at all four of these potential satisfaction indicators one-by-one.

The Twitter Favorite Button

Probably the easiest thing for a person to do, when they see something they like on Twitter is to click the little star next to the tweet. This adds the twitter post to the person’s “favorites.” One side effect of people “favoriting” your tweets, is that they don’t disappear into the Twitter memory-hole. You can find those tweets which have been favorited beyond the usual one or two weeks back.

Gathering data on Twitter favorites

To gather data on which of your tweets are being favorited and by whom, use Favstar. You might want to gather quantitative data on how many tweets get favorited, how many different individuals favorite your tweets, which individuals favorite the most tweets, etc. You might want to gather qualitative data on the topics of tweets that tend to get favorited (either by a wide variety of people, or by your target audience, etc).

Retweeting

Probably the second-most easiest way someone can express satisfaction is by hitting the Retweet button on Twitter. This simply reposts something you posted into the persons Twitter stream. It’s sort of like a “ditto” or other sign of agreement. Sometimes people put additional comments on as well which can qualify the retweet, adding more insight into the nature of their reason for passing along your tweet to their followers.

Gathering data on Retweets

To gather data on people retweeting you, do a Twitter search for your Twitter handle and the letters “RT.” You might want to gather quantitative data on how many tweets get retweeted, how many different individuals retweet your tweets, which individuals retweet the most tweets, etc–just like with favorites. You might want to gather qualitative data on the topics of tweets that tend to get favorited (either by a wide variety of people, or by your target audience, etc) and also if there is any commentary that goes along with the retweets.

Spontaneous Mentions

Sometimes someone will, out of the blue, say something about you on Twitter. If you’re speaking at a conference or maybe they just found something you made that they liked that isn’t on Twitter, for example. This requires more effort on the part of the Twitter user: it takes more than pushing a button to do this.

To gather data on mentions of you on Twitter, make use of the Twitter search again. This time, search for your Twitter handle and also do one for your name (sometimes people will be saying nice things about you without knowing that you’re on Twitter). The same suggestions for qualitative data and quantitative data for retweets is probably effective here as well. Though there’d be even more focus on the qualitative messages being passed along.

Adding to Twitter lists

This is another one that is done with a click of a button–add to list. What’s useful about a Twitter list is that entire lists can be followed. So if a lot of people are following a list you’re on, then your reach is increased significantly. It also lets you know how others are categorizing your use of Twitter.

To gather data on Twitter lists, look at at your Twitter profile and click the “lists” link. There you will see all of the public lists you’re a part of. You might want to gather quantitative data on the number of lists you’re on, the number of public lists you’re on, and the number of followers you have that are via lists. As for qualititative data, the titles of each list should give you a sense of how your audience is valuing your Twitter contributions.

This is all just data

All of this observation is just that, observation. It’s the first step in using the OODA Loop strategically in your Twitter practice. Just gathering this data probably won’t lead to any insights (though if you discover massive dis-satisfaction then you’ll probably get right to fixing it). Once you have some satisfaction data you can start to put it in context and from there move on to make decisions and take action based on data. I hope this is helpful.

A perfect example of a cross-channel communicator is Karthik Srinivasan. I first came across his writing when I was logging in to LinkedIn to quit a social media group that had become a little too spammy for me. I navigated to the group to turn it off and noticed a headline that wasn’t spam. It was an honest request for information that also gave some great insights into a social media and communication issue. Intrigued, I went to his blog and found an entire pile of great content.

Karthik is the Head of Digital Strategy (India) for Edelman and writes from an Indian perspective. As a result his examples are fresh to those of us steeped in the US-based case studies.

Getting this additional global perspective helps to identify which social media traits and habits are more inherently human vs those which are based on a specific culture–sort of a nature vs nurture thing maybe. Anyway, I find his perspective valuable for cross-checking any assumptions or insights I might gather in my work.

In addition, Karthik is incredibly easy to read. His thinking is clear and direct. He has a sense of humor in his writing that doesn’t get in the way of the point he’s making. His deep and tangible understanding of branding mixed with his experience in technology is potent.

He’s tackling the problems that all of us in web strategy are facing each day, but from his specific market background and perspective. For example, his post today on using Facebook URLs in advertising is relevant to a number of the projects I’m working on at the moment–how much control will organizations hand over to Facebook anyway?

I also like that he’s a connoisseur of Indian pop music. His personal blog is a collection of plagiarism in Indian music. This is super geeky and since I’m involved in music and also very interested in intellectual property stuff, I get a kick out of his blog. Your mileage may vary.

How to get the most out of Karthik Srinivasan

I get the most out of reading his blog, focused on communications and social media from an Indian perspective: Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal

His personal blog, focused on plagiarism in Indian music is: ITwoFS

And, of course, you could follow him on Twitter.