Western Wall

The hardest thing about Tisha B’av, the day Jews most focus on tragedies, isn’t the hunger, the thirst, or the depressing (and often dull and deadening) prayer services. It’s the sense of purposelessness to the day, since Jewish law discourages activities that might distract Jews’ focus from mourning the destruction of Jerusalem.

I have 364 days a year to do great things but it requires one day where some mental activities are discouraged to remember that life requires a purpose and the energy and discipline to pursue it.

Today the larger focus is on the larger purposes of Judaism and Jerusalem, such as improving ourselves and our world, and connecting to each other and to the Eternal. On smaller scales, my purposes for today include pondering these issues and writing this blog post.

Purpose often gets lost at work, which is a shame. We need purpose. It can also help the business.

The top purpose should be bigger than the company. For Answers.com’s it’s answering people’s questions. This is the main level at which you want to be interacting with the larger community, and the people  in your company should be connected to this purpose too. Then there’s the company’s success — and the larger community may appreciate your company’s success if they connect to your company on some larger level.

One of the reasons I once left a job was comments the CEO made about how the company was going to take advantage of a different company. I wasn’t interested, and fortunately, I had alternatives. Especially in a time of social media and knowledge workers, you want your people feeling the company is part of some larger purpose.

Jewish tradition places the original sin of Tisha B’av as the Sin of the Spies, the Jews rejecting their destiny and instead requesting to return to being slaves. Being slaves doesn’t require going back to Egypt, it can simply involve getting lost in the day-to-day and ignoring or forgetting any larger or meaningful purpose or destiny. It’s important to frequently step back and make sure the day-to-day is part of something bigger.

Image courtesy of mockstar: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mockstar/233804025/

The 140 conference in Tel Aviv was great.

Best Lines:

• Bob Rosenschein: If you have a hot startup idea, let me know. But please don’t send me a business plan. Send me a 140 character pitch.
• Bob Rosenschein: Israel has such an advantage over the Americans. We wake up 7 hours earlier! [Australians have an even bigger advantage. But they have to live life upside down.]
• Benji Lovitt (Twitter comedy): Do Jewish mothers in the West Bank tell their daughters not to settle?
• Shalev Hulio: Got Tweet of guy trapped in store during Haiti earthquake. He was in liquor dept. Didn’t want 2 come out
• Nimrod Dweck: I learned my English from hip-hop so I can say things like “Yeah bitches” but big words are hard
• Lior Zoref: Food gets the most ReTweets. It’s emotional. (hat tip: @elyondekoven).
• Guy Zohar (TV newscaster): I’m going to talk about truth in the news. Don’t worry, it will be short.
• Guy Zohar: In the news, “truth” is anything that hasn’t been disproven yet. [Ouch]
• Adam Fisher: You can say so much more in 140 characters in Hebrew than in English.
• Jeff Pulver on what would have been his father’s 75 bday: Our Tweets are the time capsule we leave behind
• Jacob Ner David: Is that based on anything, or did you just make that stat up completely?
• Tal Yaniv: Talk positive and save characters on Tweets (hat tip: @RenaR)
• Charlie Kalech: For Twestival we’re in MidEast region. So we work with people from Dubai, Bethlehem, Amman … [Cool]
• Ronen Raz: We used to say “history is written by the winners.” From now on it may be analyzed by the winners. But it’s being written by all of us in real time

Best Exchanges:

• Tal Yaniv & Mel Rosenberg:
  • Tal: How many of you are parents, have children?
  • Mel: How many of your parents have children?
  • Tal: I’m sorry if I said it wrong. But Mel, you’re the only one who misunderstood.
• Comedians Benji Lovitt and Charley Warady:
  • Charlie: Try to explain Tweetups 2 non-Tweeters. I’m going to see ppl I’ve never seen b4 but are my good friends
  • Benji: Try 2 explain Tweetups 2 Tweeters. No, we’re meeting for real drinks. In person.

Best Stories:

• Jeff Pulver: During Haiti earthquake I retweeted USAirForce pls let Doctors w/o Borders land their plane. They replied to me saying “we’re on it.” Next thing I knew the Air Force was following me. What do you do when the Air Force is following you? Pretty soon I was DM’ing with the Pentagon. (hat tip: @eliesheva)
• Yoni Bloch (a top Israeli musician): I had a video get 200,000 hits on YouTube. My label, the biggest music label in Israel, told them to take it down. They said “We’ll show YouTube.” You know what YouTube said? “OK.” I had to explain to my manager that we wanted this on YouTube.
• Yosi Taguri: We have a friend who went to a restaurant taking pictures with his iPad. The owner was sure he was a food critic. He got his whole meal for free.
• Yosi Taguri: When we started we hoped people would send us free food. We found out there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But there are free dinners.
• Guy Zohar: There was a video of an accident in New York. Our competitors aired it. I first posted to Twitter. Was told it was a movie stunt. So I reported the full story.
• Guy Zohar: There was an ad in the paper recruiting women for the Women’s Flotilla. Others newscasters treated it as real. I called the number, was answering machine that didn’t return. Called the Secret Service, they said it wasn’t real. Posted to Facebook. A colleague said they placed it for a joke segment. Again, I got the story, just because I used Social Media network.
• Gali Ross: Recent vacation. We got in the car. Opened iPhone. Started driving. About 2 hours before wanting to stop we started looking up B2Bs or restaurants or whatever. 12 day trip, no planning whatsoever.

Best Lessons / Analyses:

• Benji Lovitt: Make ppl laugh, esp when they really need the relief, they’ll help promote u when u need
• Boaz Cohen: 20 years ago many people had illegal cable connections. Now most people have paid subscriptions. Same will happen with music. [Jeff Pulver disagreed: I think once things are free, people get used to it and there's no turning back.]
• Efrat Kotler: Diplomacy’s 1st phase: Govt 2 govt. 2nd: Ppl 2 ppl. 3rd: Gov & ppl working 2gether. [It's the same w/ companies.]
• Dror Ceder: [Implied lesson from blooper reel] when you’re doing a live broadcast, wear a belt (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrJptTZgRv4)
• Dror Ceder: We’re moving from the anonymous web to the identity web (hey, I said that: The Age of Anonymity has Ended)
• Jeff Pulver: If Facebook realized that they’re Facebook & stopped trying to be something else they’d be so much better

Best Sessions & Speakers:

• IDF New Media Desk head Lt. Aliza Landes and MediAnd co-founder Shalev Hulio were fantastic describing how people contacted the Israel Defense Forces through their Twitter account to help save people trapped during the earthquake in Haiti
• Yosi Taguri & Lior Zoref were very entertaining on both of their panels
• Nice magic show by Lior Manor
• Twitter comedy by Benji Lovitt and Charley Warady
• Dror Ceder from Wibiya was entertaining
• Social Media for Social Good: Excellent and touching session with Charlie Kalech, Liane Thompson, Paula Stern, Ronen Raz, and Yotam Troim

Best Interaction:

• Jacob Ner David: Everybody who agrees raise your hand [A few hands]. Everybody who disagrees raise your hand [A few hands]. Everybody who isn’t paying attention raise your hand.
• Dror Ceder (trying to wake people up): Everybody who is here, raise your hand. Most of you aren’t here. Let’s try again …
• Oded Sharon and audience member:
  • Oded: What game mechanics do you want see in life?
  • Answer from the audience: Offer a badge to anyone who will clean my apartment
  • Oded: There’s an app for that! [A chores app]

Best Logistics:

Yeah, the boring stuff that makes all the difference. Nicely done here:

• Lots of power outlets: Such a sweet sight when I’m trying to blog an all day conference
• Good wi-fi: A hundred of us Tweeting (and some people watching a live feed of the conference we were attending. I don’t know why). The WiFi held up pretty nicely
• Twitter names on the list of speakers. That’s usually my first challenge for live conference Tweeting & blogging, finding the speakers’ Twitter names. So nice to have it right there. The conference schedule was just a one pager, double-sided. And yet it had everything I needed.

Best Tweets:

• @elyondekoven: nice thing about a twitter conf is you are almost *expected* to be playing online during the lectures ;-)
• @mayaub: Girl Power session at #140conf was scheduled at the exact time mothers who have to pick up their kids need to leave: ironic!
• @eliesheva: hearing a lot about ‘tweeter’ today – twitter, you better watch out. [I spend my life embarrassing my kids with my foreign accent for Hebrew. Jokes about their accents make me feel better. Sorry.]

What have I missed? Tweet with #BestOf #140Conf or comment here.

If you’re mentioned in this post, and want it to be linked to your site, let me know the URL by comment or Tweet to @GilR.

Also in this series:

• Best of SMX Advanced 2010
• Best of SMX Advanced 2009
• Best of PubCon 2009
• Best of SMX Toronto 2010
• Best of SphinnCon 2010
• Best of BirdBrain 2010

I was privileged to spend an evening at Google Haifa with:

• Yossi Matias, Head of Google’s Israel R&D center
• Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Products and User Experience
• Noam Nisan, Google research scientist
• Some Googlers demonstrating some of their products (Sadly I didn’t catch their names — anybody who knows them, feel free to chime in)

The understated descriptions for Yossi, Marissa, and Noam are from Google’s page for this event, and remind me of Danny Sullivan joking that “Matt Cutts is a senior engineer at Google. Which is all you need to know about him.” Dr. Matias is a former air force pilot who published over 100 research papers and holds 20 patents. Dr. Nisan is an expert in algorithmic game theory. Marissa Mayer has led product management efforts on Google search products since 1999 and was the youngest woman to ever make Forbes’ list of most powerful women.

What most stood out to me was Google’s approach to product management.

• A Googler mentioned that Google has never been good at starting with a business plan and building the technology to address those needs.
• The same Googler mentioned that meetings are usually short at Google because Google’s product managers were all very smart & technical and understood the issues right away. He contrasted that to the other companies in which he worked where he said most product managers were idiots.
• There were 4 rooms where Google engineers were holding court, describing the products they were working on and answering questions. The passion and pride were impressive.
• Dr. Matias discussed how Google doesn’t have traditional product management. In addition to Google’s famed policy of letting engineers spend 20% of their time on pet projects, they have a large role in defining the features on which they spend the other 80% of their time.
• They don’t have any project managers. He said they don’t use Gantt charts, by which I think he meant they don’t use any scheduling tools. They do have deadlines, but the deadlines don’t seem to be driving the pace of development.
• Within engineering, the team leadership positions are fairly fluid. One person will lead one project, and then a different member will lead the next project.
• It’s largely geeks working together to design and develop products and features that they want to develop and use. Their passions, skills, and professionalism drive the pace.

They were trying to recruit developers, so they may have been playing up the sides that sound like developer heaven, and perhaps showing off their happiest and most passionate developers. It did all sound great, but it’s important to understand some of the harder things that make this work:

• Test-driven development. They had papers put up in the bathroom educating about test-driven development’s importance and best practices.
• Multivariate testing environment exporting boatloads of data.
• Data-driven decision making.

In this sense Google is the ultimate engineering organization. Their product development process seems built on the metaphor of the compiler. Developers are given more say to develop what they think will work because ultimately their creations have to pass this super-compiler, which checks not just for syntax errors but also whether or not the code breaks some other functionality or harms some business metric.

As a product manager, I’ve been repeatedly humbled by our own data-driven systems. It’s our nature to assume we’re usually right. Maybe you are. Testing has proven to me that I’m not.

Google’s Udi Manber told Business Week that they ran 5,000 experiments last year, and probably have 10 experiments for every successful launch.

On a perhaps related note, at SMX Advanced Bing’s Yusuf Mehdi pointed out that Bing’s mission was to help people accomplish their tasks, while Google’s mission was to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Bing focused on people, Google focused on data. One quick data point: Googling “Google’s mission” got me directly to what I was looking for. Binging “Bing’s mission” got me nothing, so I’m quoting Mehdi from memory. Focusing on people sounds like a great idea, but focusing on the information may actually be a better way to give people what they want.

Peter Drucker spoke of “management by objectives and self control.” Google takes this a step further by giving testing and data a central role in management. I wonder if most engineers would rather be managed by a compiler or by a person. It’s nice that Google has icons like Marissa Mayer to put a human face to it all. Google’s system is admirable, IMO, and probably quite efficient. Still, it may be best that Google’s product managers are generally engineers by training. This approach may be best suited for us tin men.

More about Google and its competitive environment:

• Google & The Facebook Fantasy
• Microsoft, Mehdi, and Matt Cutts
• The Google Definition Link and Answers.com

Kanban Board

Medical ethics begins with the principle primum non nocere, Do No Harm. It’s the first rule of management too. Not because harm caused may or may not be worse than harm not prevented. But because it is so common for managers to do more harm than good.

A recent study by Nielsen Co. found that

“Companies with less senior-management involvement in the new-product process generate 80% more revenue from new products than those with the highest levels of senior-management involvement …

“While we don’t dispute senior management’s strengths and good intentions, they are often too quick to get involved in the creative process, especially when things are not going well and their mere presence can stifle free thinking …

“When senior managers do get involved, he said, there’s a ‘tendency to hip shoot. They come in, throw a grenade, and it slows things down.’”

(hat tip: Larry Kramer).

Management, like government, is a tricky job. It’s necessary, and yet it frequently harms more than it helps.

I just came back from a vacation, walked into a Kanban meeting, and was amazed by how my team was functioning. I know they function like that all the time, but the vacation let me see it with fresh eyes.

But such a scene always leads to some introspection. There’s always that self-doubt and pain in the ego when seeing your people functioning perfectly without you. And I have too much dissonance here to see this objectively, so I’ll state my claim and let you decide.

Managers first job is to not interfere with their team. Be ready to step in when needed, and provide help when called on. Have other critical tasks that you can do so you don’t feel the need to interfere or save the day. But when in doubt, step aside and let your people do their jobs. Make sure they get the credit they deserve. Don’t sap their enthusiasm or step on their toes. Give them the control and authority they need to enjoy their jobs and to succeed at them. Help, guide, encourage, support. Take pride in how successful they are without you. But first: do no harm.

Image courtesy of alq666

Bing's Yusuf Mehdi

It seems that every search conference I attend Microsoft has a new guy representing them. And except when they sent Ballmer they’ve generally failed. Last year’s PubCon ended with a smackdown between the search engines, and Google’s Matt Cutts looked like he was sitting in his living room entertaining his guests while the Bing rep looked like a lost and uninvited guest. Sure, it helped that Google is dominating search, but it also helped that Matt is a regular with this crowd and Bing had no equivalent.

So it was a pleasant surprise when Bing’s Yusuf Mehdi’s spoke at SMX Advanced, especially compared to last year’s failed Bing keynote. He was funny, engaging, and informative. Just as importantly, he spoke convincingly of Bing’s approach towards engaging the SEO community. The release of improved Bing Webmaster Tools added credibility.

The search engines have always had 2 choices in how to deal with SEOs. Most seem to have taken the “security through obscurity” approach of sharing as little information as possible. Google’s relationship, while somewhat rocky at times (see for example Google openly profiles SEOs as criminals) has generally been one of engagement and respect.

Here are some of the benefits Google gets from Matt having established himself within the SEO & Webmaster communities:

• Goodwill towards Google. People often underestimate goodwill, even as they’re religiously buying or boycotting iPads and iPods because they love or hate Steve Jobs, and having religious wars over programming languages and operating systems. This is even more important with Google always having one eye on the Justice Department. Google’s tweaks can have large effects on companies, and Google would probably be in greater danger if the community had the same antipathy to Google as people had towards other near-monopolies like AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft. [I'm getting this vision of near-monopolies through the ages at a conference together, and the Justice Department having its own Matt Cutts type figure answering questions. And Google's Matt asks the JD's Matt questions like "we thought it would be great for our customers and our industry if we did this Google Knol thing ... you wouldn't destroy us for that, right?" But I digress.] Many Web publishers and SEOs are extremely vulnerable to Google, but they’re not leading a revolt of any kind. In fact, they’re generally Google users who also embrace other Google products. Matt’s one of the reasons for that.
• Giving information. Matt’s able to push Google’s message to people. Sure SEO Stephan Spencer joked “there’s a bar game, but it also works on Matt Cutts. If his eyes move up and to the left while answering, he’s telling the truth …” But Matt gets Google’s messages across.
• Receiving information. Matt gets significant feedback from the community, by listening at the conferences and by getting questions.

Microsoft and Yahoo! never got this kind of feedback from the community. They generally seemed to take the attitude of “we’re building our secret algorithms, and you’re trying to beat us, so why should we talk to you?”

I’m hoping that Yusuf becomes a regular at search conferences. It would change the dynamic of these conferences. Yes, Bing is still much less relevant for most Web publishers & SEOs. But a good Bing-rep could provide a lot of help & perspective. Microsoft & Bing would get some goodwill, some good feedback, and better opportunities to express its messages.

Nice keynote Yusuf. Hope to see you around.

SMX Advanced was fantastic! Here’s the best of the best:

Best Lessons:

• Matt Cutts:
  • To the best of my knowledge Bounce Rate is not used in WebRankings
  • Google tries to break up words in a domain name, even when there are no hyphens.
• Regarding MayDay update:
  • Matt Cutts: MayDay is largely Google knocking out pages that don’t pass a quality threshold. In addition to banning spam, they’re also kicking out low quality pages.
  • Vanessa Fox, Rae Hoffman, Greg Boser, and Stephan Spencer all later argued that the key to MayDay is that link value isn’t trickling as far within a site. So sites that have pages that are too many links from an external link are dropping out. Greg and Todd Friesen say you can be 2 clicks away from an external link. No further.
• Microsoft: 65% of commercial mobile searches result in a purchase within an hour [Really? I'm skeptical]

Best Anecdotes:

• Yusuf Mehdi‘s 8-year-old daughter wrote a list of all her friends using Bing, and all her friends using that other search engine. Yusuf showed the list, has a copy framed at work. His daughter says to him “Daddy. We have a lot of work to do.”
• Danny Sullivan bought the @mattcutts Twitter account as part of a joke. Danny Tweeted from it as a FakeMattCutts. Then he gave it to Matt.
• Arnie Kuenn discussing personal pleas for links. Wanted a link from a pirate site. Asked in pirate. Was turned down. Wrote a thanks anyway note in pirate, promising rum if they changed their mind. They changed their mind. No rum was exchanged. Or so Arnie says (Matt, there may be a rum for links black market, check it out).

Best Lines:

• Danny Sullivan:
  • So an important SEO tip? Be Wikipedia.
  • I know you can’t speak for Yahoo!, Sasi (bing rep), but Matt (Cutts), you can.
  • Matt Cutts is a senior engineer at Google. Which is all you need to know about him.
• John LeBaron [Using an example of how to kill a vampire]: So whenever we have something this important, we turn to Craigslist. “Insecure High School loner seeking vampire who sparkles.” (hat tip: @RyanJones)
• Branko Rihtman: Announces that Ethanol (commonly found in beer) is the secret ingredient of SEO, and if you buy him a beer he’ll help you with SEO.

Best Exchange:

• Rand Fishkin‘s data shows that Bing is getting more Googly. Matt points out that Rand’s data set only considers the search head. Implied and unsaid: Google’s key strength has always been the long tail, which is why Google’s significance to many content sites is way beyond their (impressive) total market
• Danny: Do you still get that boost if you buy AdSense? Matt: Aargh!!

Scariest Suggestion:

• Dennis Yu:  You can get so specific with Facebook ad targeting that you can essentially target individuals. Really freak them out.

Best Shameless Plug:

• John Shehata: Calls on people to follow him on Twitter while discussing Twitter ranking factors

Best Releases

• Google launches Caffeine during Matt’s keynote
• Bing launches Social during Yusuf Mehdi’s keynote

Best Session

• The You&A with Matt Cutts is always amazing. They’re hysterical together, and informative.
• Honorable mention to Bing’s Yusuf Mehdi. Such a change from Microsoft’s keynote last year. I hope this guy sticks around and does the conference circuit, joining Matt.
• The SEO Vets session was great, as always. The most interesting thing this time was that they basically agreed on everything. Usually it seems like a bunch of black hats teasing Vanessa, but here even @oilman (Todd Friessen) was talking about focusing on the user. Perhaps the Wild West days of SEO are behind us and the world the white hats always claimed we lived in is finally here?

Best Speakers:

• Marty Weintraub, Jordan LeBaron, Rand Fishkin, Christine Churchill, Danny Sullivan, Bill Parkes, Dennis Yu, Addie Conner, Branko Rihtman, Stew Langille, John Shehata, Chris Silver Smith, Chris Bennett, Arnie Kuenn, Debra Mastaler, Roger Montti, Tony Adam, Brent Csutoras, Rachel Pasqua, Michael Behrens

Best Tweets:

• @AlanBleiweiss: bathroom check water on hand check cigarette smoked half way check doc open check – I have this liveblogging down to a science!
• @spryd: Link building isn’t emailing a bunch of web masters asking for links. Look for key partnerships. It takes time & a lot of work @oilman #smx [Followed by ...]
• @elliottng: @oilman Dear @oilman, I really like your Site…my Link would look good on it. Please. That is all. #smx

Also in this series:

• Best of SMX Advanced 2009
• Best of PubCon 2009
• Best of SMX Toronto 2010
• Best of SphinnCon 2010
• Best of BirdBrain 2010

What did I miss?

Contact me via Twitter @GilR or by commenting on this post if:

• You have a great moment that I missed.
• You’re mentioned here, and would like me to turn your mention into a link. Just let me know the URL.
• If you’re recognized here and would like an Award Widget.

Thanks for your help.

This is the presentation I’m giving at SMX Advanced 2010. With 2 of the livebloggers that were scheduled to cover this presentation out sick (feel better Lisa and Virginia), I figured I’d cover it myself. Don’t worry, I’ll be objective :-)

Recognizing myself

The presentation’s goal: that in 10 minutes the listeners will have thought up some good ideas for getting other people to put your message and links on their site.

Strategy 1: Make “your” message “This guy rocks!”

Badge

Flattery will get you pretty far. If you can bestow authority upon another person, he or she may be willing to put “your” message, and link, on their site. Here’s an example of a WikiAnswers contributor. He proved himself an expert on our site, we offered him a badge acknowledging his expertise, and he agreed to put it on his site.

Best of SMX Advanced

This slide does double duty. First, when I was accepted to speak at SMX Advanced they offered me a badge, which linked back to them. I put it on my site immediately because I was proud, and I thought it gave me more credibility.

Also this post, Best of SMX Advanced, is an example of getting what you want by talking about how great other people are. I came last year and thought I’d blog the sessions, and then I saw that people like Lisa Barone, Barry Schwartz, and Virginia Nussey were already doing a better job than I could do. So instead I focused on the best moments of the conference. Now I also link to all the people I’m honoring, and I’m now offering them badges to put on their sites. We’ll see. When you do link to people, click on each link, to make sure they work, and to make sure you show up in their referrer logs. It’s a good way to build relationships.

Testimonials

Similarly, offer testimonials for good products. Again, a great way to build a relationship and get a link by saying “You’re awesome.”

The Colbert Award

Last point in this section is to have some chutzpah. Who was I to start giving awards for SMX Advanced? Who cares? I did it, I made some people happy, I got some appreciation back, all was good. My favorite offline example of this is Stephen Colbert, whose book won the Stephen Colbert Award for Literary Excellence. You probably shouldn’t go that far, but you’d be amazed what you can get away with just by asserting authority.

For example, I heard of a CEO who likes to prove his points by quoting his own blog. Works for him.

This strategy of bestowing authority is great for generating some goodwill, building relationships, and getting a link — all good things — but you didn’t really get your message across. The next strategy is focused on getting your message out.

Strategy 2: Write on sites that want good content and can deliver an audience

KeyMan Collectibles is a baseball memorabilia site that has made great use of WikiAnswers.

Mariners signed baseball value

The guy who runs the site has answered literally thousands of questions on WikiAnswers. Good answers, linking back to his own site.

With Q&A sites, potential benefits include getting your message to:

• The person who asked this question
• Other users of this site
• Googlers

Google SERP: Mariners signed baseball

This guy’s site ranks #1 for Mariners team signed baseball, above the Shopping, above the Mariners, on a monetized, competitive search, and he pulls this off for many queries for many different teams and products. As far as I can tell he has no other external links to this page.

Here’s a different example, a site called Best Buy Metals that went to Yahoo! Answers and answered questions like Where can I buy Corrugated metal siding panels?

His answer is useful, and it links to his own site both as an answer to the question, and as the source of information.

In this case his site didn’t rank in Google, but his self-serving answer on Yahoo! Answers did.

He analyzed his efforts on Yahoo! Answers.  53 answers, 7 minutes per answer, $16 per hour to create the answers, and he found that his Cost per Conversion on Yahoo! Answers was about 30% less than his Cost per Conversion on his successful PPC campaigns. And that number should keep getting better, because unlike his PPC campaigns, the answers he already generated keep getting impressions and conversions without ongoing costs.

On most of these sites the links are NoFollow, but even NoFollow links send you traffic. Some SEO experts say they help balance out your link profile and help you look legit.

You can get Follow links on WikiAnswers, if you earn the community’s trust. Feel free to reach out to me if you need more information on that. I haven’t found other Q&A sites where you can get Follow links.

When writing on community sites it’s important to note that the rules have changed over the last few years. We had this era of anonymity, where you were encouraged to live your second life on the internet and choose some strange username that couldn’t get linked back to the real you. Then Wikipedia came around, and we had a nice increase in quality, but they’re ideologically opposed to any kind of self-interest. Most Q&A sites today are run according to social media norms, which encourage enlightened self-interest, and being yourself. As long as you serve the community, you can also serve yourself. I know this is true, because I read it on my blog.

Strategy 3: Join the Community

Find the community you want to be part of and get involved.

1: Join the Conversation

First, join the conversation, through Twitter, blog comments, conferences, and any other way you can make contact.

A few months ago a respected SEO named Rishi Lakhani wrote an article that I thought was one-sided. I respectfully commented on his blog, had some back & forth with him, and suggested that he supplement his post with some links arguing the other side, including a link to my site.

He agreed. This started for me as a reputation management issue, but eventually also got me 2 good links and a good relationship.

2: Use Common Events

Get into the middle of a community’s common events. Go to conferences, blog about them, and use the events to build relationships.

3: Use Common Enemies

A community is also defined by its common enemies. I’m not proud of it, but I’m happiest and most creative when I’m at my most sarcastic. Without getting into ethical questions, if you need to blast somebody once in a while, make sure it’s somebody the community has marked as a common enemy. I wrote a somewhat negative piece about Jason Calacanis last year, and I was about to bury it as an unpublishable rant when I decided he’d earned it, and that this attack on somebody most of the community despises was more likely to help than hurt.

A few months later I noticed a Twitter conversation where Aaron Wall and Jason were having it out, I @ replied Aaron with a link to my article, and next thing I knew I had one of my most valuable links in terms of direct traffic.

I’ll provide 2 quotes here:

• At SMX Toronto, Dawn Wentzell mentioned that “Worst of” posts generally do better than “Best of” posts.
• And a guy named Derek Powazek wrote that “Anger is like gasoline. You can use it to blow stuff up, or you can use it to move yourself forward.”

I made good relationships and got some good links by replying to Derek’s attacks on the SEO community.

I’d advise not to use this strategy too frequently. It can backfire, it makes you seem like a negative person, and it’s probably not where you want to go too often.

Final thoughts

Help people. My wife runs ThePetWiki. She added a widget to the charity of the woman who runs one of the key sites in the industry. It helped her get her link. It’s not the only reason she put the charity widget up, but it helped.

A word about reciprocity. Some people think that since Google doesn’t want you to buy links you’re left with 2 options:

1. Buy them anyway but try to get away with it
2. Hope that if your content is good enough random strangers will voluntary link to it

I’m exaggerating the options, but IMO just because you’re not buying links doesn’t mean you should ignore the power of reciprocity. You just have to get into the softer world of indirect reciprocity and relationships. Goodwill gestures that you’re happy to do, and that may or may not get reciprocated.

Also, this morning Matt Cutts advised “don’t chase the engines, chase the user experience. Because that’s where the engines are trying to go.” For link building I’d take that statement a step further, and say “chase the community.” The search engines want to know if the community likes and trusts you and your content. So focus on getting the community to like and trust you.

Finally, make it easy to link to your site. We made a WordPress plug-in called AnswerLinks that makes it easy for sites add reference links to their posts.

AnswerLinks Word Press Plug-in

Summary

To summarize:

• Make “your” message “This guy rocks!”
• Write on sites that want good content
• Be part of the community

If you missed anything, it’s all on my blog post, which was recently recognized as The Best Pre-Live Blogging of SMX Advanced 2010. I finally found a niche in conference blogging where I have an edge over Lisa, Susan and Virginia: pre-live blogging of my own sessions.

Thanks for listening.

Jim Joyce had just joined Denkinger, Bartman, Buckner, and Merkle in that special place in hell reserved for men whose momentary blunders denied others their historic baseball achievements. Armando Galarraga had suddenly and shockingly lost his spot as the 21st pitcher in Major League history to throw a perfect game.

Armando Galarraga

And then less than 24 hours later it was all reversed. No, better than reversed. The two gentlemen had suddenly become the center of the feel good story that touched the most cynical sports fans.

Galarraga started the turnaround by doing what almost nobody else would do after he seemed to complete the perfect game only to see the umpire blow the final call. He smiled. Then he went and retired the 28th hitter to get the last out.

Joyce was next. He apologized publicly and privately, walking up to Galarraga after the game. Players and umpires came out with statements saying nice things about Joyce.

And then the next day, the Tigers, their fans, Joyce, and Galarraga finished it off.

First GM played a part by delivering a little red Corvette to the Detroit pitcher on the field before the game, in recognition of his accomplishment and his sportsmanship.

Then, though offered the day off by baseball’s commissioner, Joyce showed up, and walked right into what could have been a Tigers’ den of fans booing him hysterically. Instead they cheered him. Galarraga walked the lineup card out to Joyce.

I’d like to say that this was my happiest moment as a sports fan but that would have to go to either the 2008 Super Bowl or the ’86 World Series. I’m not that evolved. But this sportsmanship moment involving teams I don’t care about and people I never heard of was up there.

To sum up the actions taken:

• Galarraga somehow reacting on the spot with grace and a smile, and returning to the mound to finish the game.
• Joyce issuing the perfect apologies, with no excuses. Immediate, emotional, in person, and in public.
• Players and umpires coming out of nowhere to express what a gentleman and a professional Joyce was in this long umpiring career.
• The Tigers manager and fans reacting with tremendous grace in accepting the apology and embracing the umpire.
• GM capitalizing on the moment to both generate and earn goodwill.

It was a Disney moment, but better. The pitcher didn’t get his perfect game, but something more. He’ll be remembered more than most of the guys who did throw perfect games.

Most of the press started out trying to fan the flames. But Joyce, Galarraga, and the fans provided them a better story in its place.

It was perfect reputation management, a perfect recovery. A perfect moment of humanity, of people acknowledging their fallibility and moving on. It was what sports is supposed to be. Thank you to all involved. You’ve earned your reputations.

[Reminder / Disclosure: I work at Answers.com, which is in some ways a competitor]

Congrats to Joel Spolsky on getting funding from an all star team of investment bankers. Having this combination of great entrepreneurs and great VCs certainly increases this companies’ chances. But the company’s current plan seems to based on two (long shot?) assumptions both coming in:

Stack Exchange

1. Stack Overflow’s success in building great content and community will be replicated to many other areas, even though so far their efforts here have failed.
2. The expert content and community will one day bring significant revenue, even though so far their efforts here have failed.

Stack Exchange Sites

“Over the course of the 6 months we have found a lot of successful sites have gotten created, my favorite is mathoverflow.net for PhD level mathematicians. …  It’s a really awesome site, get’s a lot of traffic … It’s an incredible resource for mathematicians that basically erupted on the StackExchange platform in about 2 months, that it went from 0 to pretty much all the mathematicians on the internet are on there right now.”

– Joel Spolsky, Mixergy: Why Didn’t Stack Exchange Work?

OK, getting all the mathematicians on the internet is pretty cool. Here are the numbers from Alexa:

Stack Exchange Sites

MathOveflow.net is that blue line there at the bottom, sometimes peaking above the level of 100,000th top site in the world.

Assuming Alexa’s numbers are roughly accurate here (I’d use Quantcast, but MathOverflow.net doesn’t rank high enough to get a listing there right now) then at least one (and possibly both) of the following are true:

1. Spolsky’s a little off in his estimate that they have all the mathematicians on the internet.
2. “All the mathematicians on the internet” is a very, very small market.

Not very encouraging that this is the one site he points to as their biggest success in all the interviews and posts I saw from him on this subject.

ServerFault and SuperUser have had more success, but they’re almost spinoff sites to Stack Overflow, going after neighboring markets that overflowed from SO’s natural user base.

Key Factors Behind StackOverflow’s Success with Programmers

“The hardest thing about making a new Q&A site is not the programming—it’s the community. You need a large audience of great developers so you have the critical mass it takes to get started. Without critical mass, questions go unanswered and the site becomes a ghost town. I thought the combination of my audience (#15 on Bloglines) and Jeff’s (#89) would bring enough great developers into the site to reach critical mass on day one. So Jeff and I decided to go in together on this.” — Joel Spolsky, Stack Overflow Launches

A number of key factors helped Stack succeed with programmers:

1. Spolsky and Jeff Atwood had very large tribes of programmers who followed them here. Generally speaking, these community members:
   1. Were committed enough to the art of programming that they read the industry’s top blogs
   2. Had been reading Spolsky and Atwood’s great posts, and were now getting a chance to both give back and show off their knowledge to their mentors and their community
   3. Already felt like a community, and already acknowledged these two site owners as their leaders.
2. Programmers generally:
   1. Do their job by typing on their computers, usually while on the internet.
   2. Are comfortable learning new sites and programs, and using the Web to share information. Many programmers I know prefer to get their information from virtual friends on the internet than from the guy in the next office.
3. Programming questions are generally of little interest to anybody who isn’t a professional programmer. Therefore programmers generally:
   1. Don’t make a living by charging for their advice (like most lawyers, for example)
   2. Don’t get hounded for professional advice while out with friends (doctor, I’ve been having this pain …)
   3. Can run a Q&A site where a very high percentage of the people are their peers, asking and answering each others’ questions. By contrast, Spolsky discussed building a site for professional gardeners. It would be very hard to stop that site from being filled with people like me asking stupid questions about my plants.

Take another example Spolsky suggested, Home Improvement:

• Instead of Spolsky and Atwood you could start with Bob Villa and Tim the Tool Man Taylor (the Buzz Light Year of Home Improvement). Or whoever the equivalent bloggers are in that industry (if such people exist). You may need to give them significant equity in this new site so that they’d bring their large online communities in, and you’d need them to hang around and mingle for a while .
• Most home improvement professionals aren’t typing on the computer while doing their job. They’d generally need to answer these questions at night from home.
• Most questions would come from non-professionals. And eventually, probably most answers as well. Experts would more often visit the site looking for clients than expecting to spend quality time with their professional peers.

If you tried to do an SEO Q&A site (as has been suggested) you’d at least be starting with people who are online. Then you could try to get people like Rand Fishkin, Aaron Wall, Danny Sullivan, and Michael Gray to bring their communities on to your Q&A site. Right, because that’s why they built these communities, so they could give them to you. And then they’d have to hang around and help lead your community. And even if you could pull that off, the SEO industry is filled with consultants who get paid to share their information, and who build web sites for a living. Good luck getting their readers to volunteer their time to building your enterprise.

Last example I’ll give is VCs. Fred Wilson, Chris Dixon and the other Stack Overflow angels already have an interest in the company. Maybe they’ll commit themselves to making AngelOverflow work. But I’m guessing that VCs’ audiences fit the pattern of most audiences on the web. Most of Fred Wilson’s readers are probably NOT fellow Angels, but rather entrepreneurs who find Angels and their information fascinating and potentially useful. The programming world is a fairly rare exception, because only programmers care about most programming questions. On AngelOverflow, I’d be asking the questions, and I’d love to see how long Chris Dixon sticks around to answer my questions. It’s not a symmetric community. It’s an expert / celebrity and his audience / fans.

Happy to hear what subject areas you think are going to work. I haven’t heard any that I think have a good shot, other than the awesome MathOverflow site that “gets lot of traffic” and has “pretty much all the mathematicians on the internet.”

Stack Exchange Revenue

Well, it’s 1999 again. Stack is going to accumulate eyeballs and assume there’s going to be a way to monetize them.

Within a few days of Stack’s announcement that the paid Stack Exchange 1.0 failed and they were going to pivot to a free model:

• Community site Ning announced that it was abandoning its free model, going to a pay model, and firing 40% of its staff.

• Ask.com’s parent IAC announced that they were shutting down FiLife, the free Financial Q&A site they had been running with Dow Jones.

It was interesting that at the same time top angels took the leap of faith that Stack Exchange would be able to turn eyeballs into money.

Thanks to Jeff and Joel for documenting their monetization attempts, and to William Shields for gathering these in his excellent post about Stack’s failed efforts at monetization:

• Responsible Advertising: Feed a Programmer
• Our Amazon Advertising Experiment
• Summary of Amazon Remnant Ad Experiment.

My favorite is Jeff’s comment “well, we have earned $1.16 so far. I think I will go buy a twix, and we can share it.”

But, we’re going to party like it’s 1999. I hope this one ends better.

What Comes First, Quality or Quantity?

Six months ago Joel had a soul searching moment when he asked if slow growth = slow death, discussing Ingres’ battle with Oracle.

“Executives at Ingres meant well. According to [Geoffrey] Moore, they felt that the company “simply cannot grow any faster than 50 percent and still adequately serve our customers. No one can. Look at Oracle. They are promising anything and everything and shipping little or nothing. Everybody knows it. Their customers hate them. They are going to hit the wall.” Of course, Oracle overcame those concerns and eclipsed its rival. And this got me worried. Were we Ingres?” — Joel Spolsky, Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

This story may be part of what drove Spolsky to raise venture capital to grow Stack Overflow more quickly. And it may have changed some policies regarding his other company, Fog Creek. But he remains smugly confident that he’ll conquer the Q&A market one niche at a time, while focusing on high quality at moderate quantity. He mocks sites that are taking the Oracle approach of trying to grow very quickly and then scampering to get the quality to catch up to the quantity.

Other Issues

Stack is also betting that verticals will be more successful than horizontals in the Q&A market. That’s what most of the smart people thought about search too. But building these individual communities almost from scratch is going to be a tremendous challenge.

Stack is betting that their model of democratically choosing which sites to build next will result in the creation of the sites that will succeed in terms of community and revenue.

Closing Thought

Joel is leading a great team of entrepreneurs, angels, and software developers. If anybody can make this model work, it’s them. But IMO that’s a very big if.

Am I missing the boat here? Please let me know your thoughts.

I just found an interesting reason why some people want to believe that Facebook will replace Google. With Google you have to decide what you’re looking for, and with Facebook interesting things come to you. There’s a fantasy that technology will free us from having to think, and decide, to be disciplined.

“Most of the technologies and platforms we use these days require our action. In order to achieve anything, we have to acknowledge the need, make a decision, and then follow through.

Example: You need a new swimsuit for the summer and you decide to find one that best matches your search criteria: Color, style, size, etc. …   This simple task requires a bit of thought and effort on your part.

What if you could skip this process and let technology offer you the perfect swimsuit once the summer season arrives, without asking you to take any action?”

– Yuli Ziv, 5 Reasons Google and Search Won’t Dominate the Next Decade in Mashable

A nice thing about reading penetrating writers like Yuli Ziv is that they put their key premises right out there to accept or critique. I’ll choose the latter on this one.

The key part of the Facebook Fantasy here isn’t social; it’s serendipity. Disciplined goal-oriented determined activity will be a thing of the past. We can just do what comes naturally and everything we want will come to us. We can be our ADD selves, and the good things will come to us, while we just flow.

Then I realized that this was hitting a nerve because I was still reacting badly to Lisa Barone’s How to Write a Blog Post. I like just writing. Lisa actually has a 7-step process, which includes things like “decide on your goal,” “find your hook,” and read it out loud a few times and keep improving it.

But while commenting on her post that her system would make this take so much longer, I wondered if that kind of discipline would actually shorten the process, in addition to improving the end result.

By nature, I’m way on Yuli’s side on this one. I’m an extreme ADD, who loves jumping around to different topics and finding complementary and contradictory ideas from different voices and subject areas. This post is the result of just such an example, seeing from Yuli’s post why I was bothered by Lisa’s.

So yes, serendipity is great.

But part of the reason we value it so much is that it justifies things like watching TV while writing this post. I can just invite more stimulations and go with the flow. And when I get stuck trying to figure out the next sentence, I can just switch over to Twitter and see if anything interesting is happening there. My ADD brain hurts and freezes up when I try to force it to focus on the goals I set out for myself. So yeah, I like serendipity.

But the serendipity that we get from sites like Facebook really doesn’t liberate us from our needs for impulse control and self-discipline. In fact, it increases our need for those traits, and for finding the discipline to plan and execute complex activities in a goal-oriented fashion.

Yuli opened with “In order to achieve anything, we have to acknowledge the need, make a decision, and then follow through.” She writes that as though the need to make conscious decisions is a bad thing from which we will be liberated by cool technology. Sorry. We’ll always need to make hard choices, follow through, and do grunt work. Facebook is cool, but it doesn’t free us from the need for self-discipline.

And now that I’ve shared that thought, I’ll move on to the most annoying steps of quality blogging: editing and re-editing. And then maybe I’ll do what I was supposed to do this morning. Often I’d prefer if we lived in a world where serendipity and flow replace proactive thought and determined action. But we don’t. Get used to it.