Wikimedia’s strategy memo is interesting for what it has and for what it’s missing.

Wikimedia Strategic Planning

Key Concerns:

• Editing community has flattened out.
• Have been very successful in the “Global North” but it will be much harder to grow in the “Global South.”
• Technological and financial infrastructure have not kept pace with growth in readership.

They will:

• Invest in their infrastructure: technological, organizational, and financial
• Reduce friction for new contributors
• Remain “free of commercialism”

They won’t:

• Go to China.
• Invest in developing content partnerships
• Invest in direct editorial interventions to increase quality, e.g. paying people for developing content or policies.

Most of their strategy sounds good. They need to build the infrastructure that can handle their site’s activity. They need to make changes to their culture and to their site to encourage new contributors. They should stay out of China. And their mission and vision requires that they expand to parts of the world that need them more, but where progress will be much harder to achieve.

The biggest problem IMO is their plan to increase spending without developing a viable revenue model. The only parts of the strategy document that discuss finances discuss the money that they’ll spend and the income possibilities that they reject.

They discuss their revenue possibilities in a separate document and you can read the notes from their financing task meeting. Ideas include seeking government funding, selling user data, premium subscriptions, more aggressive fundraising, pursuing an endowment, and displaying advertising. The only mention their strategy memo makes of these ideas is to reject some of them. The ones that aren’t rejected may be either unrealistic or worse than the ones that were rejected.

I think Wikipedia does a lot of good. But I think the same of Microsoft and Google. And those companies’ revenues have been (or will be, I expect) used to contribute billions of dollars in taxes and charity. I wish Wikimedia luck in figuring out how to cover their expenses, and I hope their moral compass doesn’t lead them to try to finance through taxpayer money in order to live up to their values of “free of commercialism.”

In 1993, the New Yorker famously published a cartoon captioned “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The internet was where you lived your anonymous second life. How times have changed.

The excellent Doc Searls mocked the way sites treat your privacy by imagining it in the real world:

“The [privacy] policy tells you that, if you fill out this guy’s form, he will plant on your person a tracking device that will report your movements back to him. Collected data might include the type of car you drive, the routes you take, the names and addresses of the places you visit, and the times and dates for all this activity …At the bottom of the form, under a heading titled “Your Consent”, it says “In dealing with me, you consent to the terms of my Privacy Policy, my Terms and Conditions, and my processing of Personal Information for the purposes given above. If you do not agree to this Privacy Policy, please stop talking to me. If you continue talking to me, I reserve the right, at my discretion, to change, modify, add, or remove portions from this Privacy Policy at any time. Your continued conversation with me, after I put a new form like this in my back pocket, means means you accept these changes”.

“This is your ‘Privacy Policy’”? you say.

“Yes”.

“And your ‘Terms and Conditions’ are something else? ” …

– from Where Markets are Not Conversations, Doc Searls

And then Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that they were changing their privacy policies since privacy was “no longer a social norm.”

Naturally, there’s a lot of discomfort here. I keep flashing back to blockbuster movies with Will Smith and Shia Labeouf where the big bad military types get control of all of our information and use it to tyrannize the innocent. I understand the fear. But ultimately I think Zuckerberg’s point is very relevant and mostly good.

I’m reminded of the scene in Dharma & Greg where Larry is horrified that Dharma got a Social Security card. “Now you’re on the grid!” he says ominously.

I think this is progress. A generation ago people chose untraceable usernames and lived a second life online. Today we use our real names as Twitter handles and Facebook Connect into social applications. Our online presence is part of our total presence. Online man is born anonymous but surrenders his anonymity to society so that we can interact responsibly and with accountability as our true selves. We shed some of the lies and barriers and interact with greater openness than in the past.

This isn’t just an online thing. My parents and grandparents had many family secrets. Intimacies, squabbles, diseases, and struggles were covered up lest family members be shunned from future work or social relationships. People changed their names to hide their religious and ethnic identities.

People today are generally far more open and less prejudiced than they were years ago. As a result there are far fewer people living in their various closets. Billy Joel’s The Stranger keeps declining in relevance. We come closer to interacting publicly as our true selves.

This is not to argue the important details of privacy policies. But the general social shift that Zuckerberg notes is IMO a generally wonderful thing. May we continue to increase society’s openness online & off, and may it be a reflection of increased appreciation and respect for authenticity, individuality, and responsibility.

What do you think?

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/ / CC BY 2.0

Questions

Friends (if you’re reading this, that includes you), can you help me out with this? For my birthday, my wife bought me a consulting package from Beyond Blogging. Step 1 is “Finding your passion.” They write:

“It’s essential for long term success to find a topic that you’re passionate about. …

Here’s a quick test: If you could blog on any topic for the next five years, and be paid $100,000 to do it, what would you choose? …

Can you … work on this project ‘until your eyeballs bleed?’

[great bloggers have] a real passion about their topics and a desire to share their knowledge with the world.”

So where’s my passion? The best validation I’ve had for this blog are three particular friends who came up to me and told me how much they like reading my blog. Maybe they were just being polite, but I’m going to pursue this passion on the assumption that it’s more than that.

My passion is the search. The questions more than the answers, and the unknown more than the known. The perfect life for me is filled with awe and humility and constant searching and questioning. And my passion is to share that journey.

I don’t want a monologue, I want a conversation, with others who are moved by the same search.

The worlds of online search and Q&A will often be the concrete topics discussed. Also issues of leadership, quality content, and successful teams, communities and companies.

Which leads to another question. Should I move this blog from ManagingGreatness.com to GilReich.com? Or to somewhere else? The blog was originally going to be about management, but it’s been more about the search industry. I changed the tagline this morning to “searching and questioning, online and off”.

So I’m asking you for your thoughts. Does this blog need a more focused topic? Are you interested in carrying on a conversation on this blog? Does the theme of “searching and questioning, online and off” work? Is it time to move off of the current domain name? I appreciate your help.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

It's not about you

I got the following e-mail (names have been replaced):

Subject: Meeting with Joe – Discuss our award for Best SuperWidget

I wanted to share the news that AcmeWidget is the 2009 QTZ Award Winner for Best SuperWidget.  I’d like to schedule a call with you to review some of the successes we’ve had in 2009 and how these lessons might be applied to your business.

Let me suggest a rewrite:

Subject: Meeting to discuss how our award winning SuperWidget can help you

QTZ just named AcmeWidget the Best SuperWidget of 2009 because of how companies used it to grow their social networks. I’d like to schedule a call to discuss how AcmeWidget can help you grow your business.

The first rule of relationship building is to focus on your potential partner.

We actually met this company last year. They came to a meeting with a bizdev guy itching to do a deal and their founder who was itching to brag. Several of us sat in the room stunned as the founder hijacked the meeting to repeatedly tell us how awesome his company was. The meeting might have ended with us getting close to a deal. Instead it ended with us swearing that we would never get anywhere near this company again, partially because we didn’t trust them to be considerate of our interests, and partially because we never wanted to be stuck in a meeting with him again.

If you need to talk about yourself, get a therapist, or a dog, or a blog that you don’t care about. Don’t sabotage your business because you can’t control your ego.

What do you think?

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/ / CC BY 2.0

Counting down the top SEO smackdown of 2009 …

#1: Danny Sullivan v Derek Powazek: SEO = Spammers, Evildoers and Opportunists?

The provocation:

Derek Powazek

“Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.

… The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web.

… SEO cockroaches employ botnets, third-world labor, and zombie computers to blanket the web with link spam.

… SEO bastards are behind worms that attack blog services

… every link is a score for the SEO jerkwads and their disreputable clients.

… Worse than the hackers are the competent journalists and site creators that are making legitimate content online, but get seduced by the SEO dark side …”

– Derek Powazek, Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists

It gets worse in his comments section, from which he blocked most comments that disagreed with him:

“… I didn’t call SEO people “fucktards” because that wouldn’t be fair to actual retarded people.

… There is no such thing as honest SEO …”

The response:

There were many excellent replies. Danny Sullivan’s calm and powerful replies proved again why he’s earned so much respect:

Danny Sullivan

“… my response come from my own 14 years of covering search engines. Of having answered feedback from hundreds of people. Of having talked with hundreds of people personally. Of understanding that the “you just build it; you just put it out there” approach to search engines, sadly, doesn’t always cut it.

… the stuff that you think isn’t rocket science — that anyone knows — is indeed a mystery to others. They want help, and sometimes they can’t find that web developer who also understands SEO issues. In the same way, you sometimes don’t find web developers who are also designers. Or designers who understand conversion issues. Or conversion experts who understand web development.

… There are bad SEOs out there, who give the entire industry a bad name — just as there are bad bloggers, bad designers, bad cops, you name it. There are also excellent SEOs who work inside of companies as well as through agencies for hire. Don’t tarnish an entire industry that actually helps many, many people in ways I’m sure you would agree with.”

– Danny Sullivan, An Open Letter to Derek Powazek on the Value of SEO

Danny proceeds to tell stories of people who care deeply about their websites but that really needed good SEO advice to reach their customers. He ended his post with links to the excellent posts he wrote replying to other rants on the same issue over the years.

Derek came back the next day with a nasty FAQ blasting SEOs. Danny came back with a stronger response.

“SEO is a profession. Companies from MTV to the New York Times to the Wall St. Journal to Yahoo, to name only a few, employ full-time people who are responsible for SEO (and they aren’t scumbags, either). These companies have some of the best content in the world. And yet, they can still have major issues in how their sites are built or written or constructed that prevent them from doing well in Google or other search engines.

These SEOs, by the way, struggle with web developers who “think” they know SEO but don’t. Web developers who think that despite what an SEO tells them, a 302 redirect is the way to go. And thus the International Herald Tribune loses thousands of links because who wants to trust the scummy in-house SEO, right? I’ve got story after story of web developers and designers who think they know SEO but don’t, who cause major problems for web sites, and yet NO ONE ever writes a blog post blasting them.”

– Danny Sullivan, SEO FAQ That’s Not from the Land of Unicorns

Derek came back a third time, a week later, with an apology so fake it made Lisa Barone’s apologies to Robert Scoble seem sincere. (It actually did. I reread Lisa’s apology and thought she really was trying to de-escalate, she just couldn’t resist the extra jab. But I digress). Derek said that the reaction to his posts were “the least fun thing ever” for him. But his “apology” is centered on the theme “the only reason to get defensive is if it’s true.” So what does his defensiveness against the people that called him an evil ignorant jerk prove?

Danny came back one more time with a post summarizing his years defending the SEO industry’s reputation. Every year, it’s somebody else, coming from the point of view that the natural order of the world is for readers and high quality and relevant content to naturally find each other, and that this would all work perfectly were it not for those evil SEOs. Here’s Danny’s final paragraph:

“I’m often asked why I don’t give up. The reason is that people do listen. You can have conversations and attitudes can change. Make more good SEO visible, and maybe the spam won’t be the main thing that seems to speak for the industry.”

I applaud Danny’s efforts. I have little doubt that we’ll be right back here in 2010 with SEO being scapegoated for all spam, incompetence, and other imperfections in of the web. And maybe next year’s argument will be more civil and more productive.

On a personal note, I started this smackdown series by letting my darkside loose and playing on our bloodlust for verbal venom. Then I realized I was bringing back all the anger that surrounded these smackdowns. I went back and edited the whole series, playing down the ugliness, and focusing more on the core issues they discussed. I appreciate Danny’s leadership on this smackdown. Danny’s immediate tweets captured his initial anger, but he toned it down and wrote posts that were calm, intelligent, and on point. I hope I can follow his lead. I’m wishing myself and all of us a 2010 where we can summon the better angels of our nature in fun, compelling, and meaningful ways.

Have a great year — and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The full countdown:

#5: Barone v Godin: Brandjacking?

#4: Arrington v Demand Media: End of Hand Crafted Content?

#3: Rand v Whalen: Is ‘Focus on Users, Not Engines’ Terrible Advice?

#2: Barone v Scoble: Is 2010 the Year SEO Becomes Less Important?

#1: Sullivan v Powazek: Is SEO Evil?

Powazek image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/gorriti/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Sullivan image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannysullivan/ / CC BY 2.0

… top SEO Smackdowns of 2009 … the countdown continues …

#2. Barone v Scoble: The year SEO isn’t important anymore?

The provocation:

Robert Scoble

“SEO is getting dramatically less important and that SEM should be renamed to “OM” for “Online Marketing” since small businesses need to take a much more holistic approach to marketing than just worrying about search results.” — Robert Scoble, 2010: The year SEO isn’t important anymore?

The counterattack:

Lisa Barone led the counterattack:

Lisa Barone

“As a small business owner, search engine optimization will remain important to your site until the days that people stop searching. And if Google has anything to say about it (and I think they own the world at this point, so, they get a say), the importance of search and optimizing that search will always take center stage.

Yeah, SEO now means incorporating a lot of marketing aspects. It’s about building a brand. It’s about building a community. It’s about showing up in blogs and articles and video (all stuff that can be, what’s the word, “optimized”, BTW). But that doesn’t cancel the rest of it out.”

– Lisa Barone, Ignore the Silly Man, SEO Still Matters for Small Businesses

Regarding the suggested name change to Online Marketing, Lisa writes “I guess the term ‘Internet marketing’ we’ve all been using for a gazillion years wasn’t encompassing enough.”

Getting Ugly:

IMO she went way overboard leading with a picture of an ugly half-naked man in a dunce cap along with the “Ignore the silly man” headline. And when Robert cried foul Lisa smacked him with

“I did not attack you. Let’s not make the post more about you than it really was.”

Then it got colder. Scoble lost his cool, and appeared to call one of her commenters an idiot (upon further review, that’s not what he was saying).

Lisa fanned the flames with some fake apologies like:

Apologies to Robert is he felt “attacked”, I really don’t feel as though it was that hard in the post, but, we all have different levels.

and

Again, apologies if you felt “attacked”

Ouch. If you want to calm things down Lisa, don’t use the words “if” or “felt” and don’t put the word “attacked” in quotes. And the “but we all have different levels.” Wow. Cold.

Several times Robert defended himself with

“my headline was a question, not a statement”

Sorry, but this is disingenuous since:

1. He repeats the central point that “SEO is getting dramatically less important” several times in the article
2. Wording a provocative charge as a headline doesn’t dilute the charge, as the headline authors presumably know. It just gives them a fig-leaf of deniability. If I posted headlines like “Heart attacks: a government conspiracy?” or “”Is [XYZ] a charlatan and a fraud?” and wrote articles mostly justifying those points, could I then turn around and say that I was just asking a question? Would anybody respect me or my writing afterwards? I had to use [XYZ] instead of a person’s name in that second question, since even in this context putting anybody’s name there would be inflammatory. How much more so if it’s a headline on a well read site, backed up by a long article?

A bit of background:

In a previous post Lisa Barone used “scoble” as a verb (I’ll let her define it, but it didn’t seem to be positive) and her blog has a tag scoble mocking which doesn’t even include this last post.

Robert Scoble for his part has been blasting SEOs for a while, for example in this video where he projects that Mahalo will defeat Google because Calacanis will keep those evil SEOs out.

This is part of a larger battle. For the most part, the social media and SEO camps overlap. In fact, Lisa’s profession and expertise is probably more social than search. Search conferences generally include tracks on social media, which SEOs recognize as important. But for various reasons, some members of the social community, most prominently Scoble and Jason Calacanis, sometimes lash out at the SEOs. In Calacanis’ case, it appears to be part of a calculated pattern of picking fights to gain publicity and links. I don’t know about the others. From the SEOs, I’ve only seen the anger directed at the individuals who attack their profession. Please correct me if I’m missing things. But there’s a lot of anger the other way. Social gets all the love and attention, but the SEOs may deliver more traffic and revenue. As Lawrence Coburn says, Sharing is Caring but Google is King.

The calm reply:

A lot less fun, but short and to the point was Danny Sullivan, whose comment on Scoble’s blog was essentially:

1. SEO is not likely to get less important anytime soon
2. For the past decade SEO focus has been far broader than Scoble implies
3. “There’s always been online marketing, which is the umbrella term of marketing — well — online. It includes thing like social media marketing, link building, email marketing, virtual worlds marketing and yes, search marketing. Some online marketers can do all these thing. Many specialize, just as in the real world …”

The final blow:

Scoble’s post started with a video of 2 SEO’s, George Revutsky and Dustin Kittelson. The post implies that the conclusions reflect their views. But Revutsky cries foul on Scoble and sides with Lisa, Danny and the other critics:

“Hi Danny – we take no responsibility for that headline. I think Robert is (successfully) practicing linkbait here.

I want to be clear that in no part of this interview did we say that SEO is not going to be important, or is any less important than before.

Thank you (as always) for speaking up for the industry. Most of us would not be here without you.”

and

“Let me say this for the 27th time: our interview itself does not agree with Robert’s post – and neither do we.

The whole idea was to have a general talk about search and SMBs, and let folks know MyNextCustomer is coming soon. That’s it. Robert decided to be provocative all on his own.”

One last point: kudos to both Robert Scoble and Lisa Barone for leaving their comments section open for the whole thing, for engaging their users. Scoble really stands out in this area. There’s a reason Dave Winer has Scoble on his shortlist of Natural Born Bloggers. The man does his thinking out loud, in public, and with tremendous energy and enthusiasm.

Postscript: I don’t know if these posts are connected, but the same day there was a post 2010: The year marketing dies …. First I expected this to be a spoof of Scoble’s post, similar to Ari Ozick’s excellent spoof of Derek Powazek’s anti-SEO rant a few months ago. But no, it was an unrelated piece, with the same title as Scoble’s except the word “SEO” replaced with “marketing.” But the marketing post was subtitled “or at least marketing as we know it.” And its last line was “Marketing is dead. Long live marketing!” It was written by a marketer who was calling on his colleagues to understand how their field was changing. Scoble’s piece was about how his rivals’ industry was collapsing and getting subsumed into Scoble’s industry.

Previous: #3: Rand v Whalen

Next: #1: Sullivan v Powazek

… Top 2009 SEO Smackdowns … the countdown continues …

#3. Rand v. Whalen: Is ‘Focus on Users, Not Engines’ Terrible Advice?

Rand Fishkin

The provocation:

“the old adage ‘Do what’s right for users and engines will reward you with higher rankings‘ … [is] utterly false and tragically misleading.” — Rand Fishkin, Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines

The counterattack:

[Rand's article] “could potentially set SEO back at least a decade” — Jill Whalen, Is Choosing Search Engines Over Users a Fatal Flaw in SEO?

The above claims are exaggerated, but there’s a significant conflict brimming beneath it.

Getting past the linkbait and hyperbole, here’s the argument:

Rand: “SEO is a task that requires paying close attention to the needs of both users and engines.”

Jill: “… SEO tactics that Rand claims are for search engines are actually for users as well. And until people start thinking that way [that is, of "SEO tactics" solely from a user POV] they’ll continue to make bad SEO decisions for their websites.”

Jill gives examples such as how and why to do keyword research:

Jill Whalen

“make sure your website fits the searcher’s original search query (those pesky keyword phrases you researched) to a tee. After all, you’re not doingkeyword research for search engines as Rand suggests, but because you need to get into the mind of your target audience.”

As for the things Rand says he wouldn’t do at all if he were solely focused on users, Jill simply says don’t do them:

“On the other hand, XML sitemaps and the use of Webmaster tools or nofollowing internal links for PR sculpting are indeed things that one would do just for a search engine, and offer no value to a human visitor. But guess what? They aren’t, in my opinion, any value to SEO either (other than as diagnostic tools).”

As usual, Danny Sullivan’s comments to Rand bring things together pretty nicely:

“I think you forgot about the more typical webmaster out there …  the very last thing you want to do with that group of people is introduce them to SEO by talking about XML sitemaps. Or worse, quadrangular link buidling. Or zebra pages.

Telling them to do things that they think will please humans is EXCELLENT advice for the confused novice. …

Where the user advocates go wrong is overstressing this as a good, fundamental piece of advice and being all hardline that you never act as if there are search engines. Of course there are, and of course you do things specifically for them as well.”

I’ll go with that. Jill makes strong points. ‘Focus on the user’ is an excellent starting point. But I think Rand’s right that it’s often naive to stop there. Speaking personally, whenever we consider a change to the site that might affect SEO I double check with our SEO Expert. And often enough he either talks me out of it, or tells me a way to do it that won’t hurt (or that will even help) our SEO.

Ultimately BTW I’m guessing this is part of  a larger worldview issue. If you believe in KISS, and that doing what seems like the right thing will lead to success, you’ll probably side with Jill. Those of us who believe that chaos and complexity rule the world are probably closer to Rand.

For more on this issue, including a case study from Answers.com, see Rand v Whalen: Focus on Engines or Users?

The Top 2009 SEO Smackdowns:

#5: Barone v Godin

#4: Arrington v Demand Media

#3: Rand v Whalen

#2: Barone v Scoble

#1: Coming December 31

… continuing the countdown of the top SEO smackdowns of 2009 …

#4. Arrington vs Demand Media

The provocation:

Michael Arrington

“… you have Demand Media and companies like it. See Wired’s “Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model.” The company is paying bottom dollar to create “4,000 videos and articles” a day, based only on what’s hot on search engines. They push SEO juice to this content, which is made as quickly and cheaply as possible, and pray for traffic. …

These models create a race to the bottom situation, where anyone who spends time and effort on their content is pushed out of business.

We’re not there yet, but I see it coming. And just as old media is complaining about us, look for us to start complaining about the new jerks.

… get ready for it, because you’ll be reading McDonalds five times a day in the near future.

… Hand crafted content is dead. Long live fast food content, it’s here to stay.”

– Michael Arrington, The End of Hand-Crafted Content

The response:

Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt went to enemy territory to reply:

To the low quality charge:

Demand Media

“We have significant editorial processes. Let me explain. How do we do this? We hire qualified professional writers, film-makers and copyeditors. Set clear editorial objectives and style guidelines for every piece. Require external sources with every submission. Copy edit what’s been turned in. Fact-check it. Check it for plagiarism. Rate each piece so that writers get feedback. Provide education to improve the team members. Perform quality audits and take down content that doesn’t meet current standards (thousands per month). Weed out content creators who aren’t performing well or improving fast enough (we let go more than 100 creators per month).”

To the “content farm” charge:

“What’s more like a sweatshop: someone’s living room working their own hours or a typical newsroom?”

Of course if by “Fast Food” Arrington meant predictably meeting user demand, then perhaps Demand is guilty.

Credit Jay Rosen with giving Rosenblatt a fair interview.

The Arrington article generated a slew of other pieces trying to stir emotions against Demand Media.

ReadWriteWeb, which back in August wrote:

“As long as search engines like Google continue to rank niche, topical content highly – and we see absolutely no reason why they wouldn’t – then Demand Media will continue to pump out thousands of articles a day to feed that page view generating machine.” (Bolding is mine)

Changed sides and declared that:

“Google is being infiltrated on a vast scale by content farms.”

ReadWriteWeb had it right the first time. There’s no reason to believe that Demand Media’s quality level changed between the two RWW posts. RWW simply changed their mind and decided to help rally the incumbents against their challengers.

The smackdown proved Arrington’s piece wrong on two key points:

• Hand crafted content is dead? Not anytime soon. Arrington’s piece (which I assume he crafted by hand) generated lots of attention and received many incoming links. It will do just fine in the search engines. So will any content that people want to link to. Companies like Demand Media will get the vast majority of their traffic and revenue on the long tail of content where there’s little competition. They’ll generally be outranked where they compete with content of higher quality, especially if that content is from brand name publishers. If anything, Google overranks hand crafted low quality linkbait over content that’s more useful and relevant but less provocative and linkworthy.
• “We’re not there yet …  just as old media is complaining about us, look for us to start complaining about the new jerks.” We’re there, Michael. We’re there.

More of my thoughts on this issue here: Quality is Still King.

Previous: #5: Barone v Godin: Brandjacking?

Next #3: Rand v Whalen: Is “Focus on Users, Not Engines” Terrible Advice?

Michael Arrington image courtesy of Robert Scoble

Tis the season to let other people deal with peace on earth and goodwill towards man. I’ll stick to what interests me: conflicts & sarcasm. Counting down the top SEO smackdowns of 2009:

#5. Barone v Godin: Brandjacking?

The provocation:

Lisa Barone v Seth Godin

“Squidoo has built several hundred pages, each one about a major brand. More are on the way. We’ll keep going until we have thousands of important brands, each on its own page … If your brand wants to be in charge of developing this page, it will cost you $400 a month.” — Seth Godin, Launching Brands in Public

The reply:

Many came out against Godin’s initiative, none more powerfully than Lisa Barone:

“[Seth] has sent his team of goblins out to register your Brands in Public company page for you, fill it with scraped content (blog posts, tweets, Google News, Trends, etc) and then lock it down so that you have absolutely no way to touch or control it. Unless you pay him.

Four hundred dollars. A month.

Wow. I’d personally like to welcome Seth Godin to the world of brandjacking and hostage taking. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

– Lisa Barone, Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking

I’m including this as an SEO smackdown because that might have been the key issue here. People Googling your brand name were often going to find the pages that Godin put together. Godin was going to show these Googlers all the nasty things being said about you on the internet — unless you gave him $400 a month.

This whole thing would likely have received very different coverage had there been a clear and friendly free opt-out from the beginning.

The final irony was that Godin has arguably been the leading proponent of interacting with your tribe, and his sales pitch for this product included:

“You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff.”

And yet in some critical ways the man who talks that talk better than anyone doesn’t walk the walk. Had Godin allowed comments on his own blog he’d  have had a fighting chance of influencing the conversation the conversation that followed. Or if he used Twitter the way everybody else does, for a 2-way conversation engaging his tribe. But Seth uses blogs and Twitter to broadcast, not to interact. The conversation took place on Lisa Barone’s blog, where she and her tribe — which includes key members of the SEO industry — crushed him.

More of my thoughts on this issue here: The Barone – Godin Smackdown: Is the Torch Being Passed?

Next: #4 Arrington vs Demand Media

Some Kings Live Forever

Recent reports of quality content’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The importance of quality content is going to increase, not decrease. If Answers.com (where I work) and Demand Media succeed, it will be because we succeeded in following Wikipedia’s model and creating high quality content that matches what users are looking for. What content does well in search engines? Content that generates incoming links, and that addresses the questions that users want answered.

The importance of becoming an authority site was my top conclusion from PubCon. Google values sites that other trusted sites link to. Google’s moves into personalized and social search are going to increase the social cues Google uses in determining what content users value.

The quality eulogies were kicked off by Michael Arrington, whose The End of Hand Crafted Content provocatively claimed that “Hand crafted content is dead. Long live fast food content.”

Great linkbait, made all the greater by how far off it is. Here are some points:

High Quality = High User Value

The best of the recent articles is Martin Bryant’s Audiences aren’t stupid, Quality’s not dead, which ends with this point:

“There’s an uncomfortable truth that ‘quality’ content producers need to bear in mind too. Sometimes content farms with their hyper-targeted approach provide exactly what an audience needs. Even if it’s cheap and rushed, an article telling you “How to make a breakfast nook out of a church pew” (for example) answers a specific question – one that people most quality outlets wouldn’t bother to answer in isolation.

Sometimes it’s the ‘low-quality’ content that fulfills an audience’s need. In that case, is it really low quality?”

Bryant’s point also answers the Forbes editor who warned students about Demand Media:

“They’re paying seasoned journalists five cents a word for their stories. They’re paying very skilled video photographers $2 per video. You’re not going to learn anything about a secret drone attack in Afghanistan on this site. You’re going to find stories like: What’s the best way to donate a coat in Saratoga Springs?

Forbes is a business & financial magazine. Are most of their stories about “a secret drone attack in Afghanistan?” And if readers are more interested in “What’s the best way to donate a coat in Saratoga Springs?” then which story provides more value to the user? It seems like Demand Media is doing exactly what Forbes is trying to do, provide quality content of interest to a commercial audience. But Demand Media may be doing it better.

At PubCon Google’s Matt Cutts encouraged web publishers to do keyword research to see what users are looking for, so that the publishers  can meet the demand. This is a good thing.

Quality: The Wikipedia Model

User generated content sites’ long term success is dependent on becoming a trusted authority. Back in 2004 I was asked to add Wikipedia’s content into Answers.com (then GuruNet). I resisted because Wikipedia was lower quality than the professionally published sources we were licensing. Studies now show Wikipedia quality to be on par with Britannica. When Chris Whitten approached us to purchase WikiAnswers I had a similar hesitation, because it was often lower quality than our licensed content. But like Wikipedia (though a few years behind), WikiAnswers quality improves every year. I’ll put a stake in the ground and say that within 12 months it will be considered the authority site for answers.

Quality Unique Voices Will Find Audiences

Ross Dawson and Doc Searls have also provided clarity in this debate.

Searls writes:

“I’ve been hand-crafting (actually just typing) my “content” for about twenty years now, and I haven’t been destroyed by a damn thing. I kinda don’t think Fast Food Content is going to shut down serious writers (no matter where and how they write) any more than McDonald’s killed the market for serious chefs.”

Searls later writes “what matters most is what each of us does better than anybody or anything else.”

Dawson expects “the rise of effective content reputation systems, that allow you to assess the likely quality of articles before you read them or even find them.” One way or another, I’m sure Google will figure something out here.

Quality and LinkBait

The Arrington post was classic linkbait, content that’s hand-crafted to maximize reaction and incoming links. While writing that post Arrington couldn’t possibly have believed the article’s premise, that hand crafted content is dead. The piece was a masterstroke of hand crafted content. BTW, it currently ranks 3rd (of 21 million) in Google for “hand crafted,” showing what good hand crafted content can do for you.

Linkbait has similar problems as TV news shows that interview extremists from both sides because that makes better television than interviewing moderates as they explain nuanced views.

A second theme ran through Arrington’s piece, that writers need to figure out a new disruptive way to win. Arrington wrote that daring innovators will thrive, and that we need to learn to deal with the changing models. But a thorough and intelligent exposition of that idea wouldn’t have generated much passion in the blogosphere. So Arrington went with the linkbait theme of “The End of Hand Crafted Content.”

If one were really worried about ways that people try to game the system to get poor quality content to rank, he’d focus more on this kind of Linkbait and less on Demand Media.

Conclusion: Quality Remains King

Quality content is more critical than ever to a content web site’s long term success, and the sites that want to be here for the long run are going to be paying more and more attention to it. They’ll become high quality, or die trying.