I love the SMX search conferences. They’re fun, they’re informative, and I get to spend time with people that I really like.

Here’s what I’m most looking forward to:

You&A with Matt Cutts

5:00 – 6:00 PM Tuesday

The Matt Cutts / Danny Sullivan one on one is the most fun and informative session of the year. And they’ve added an extra 15 minutes to what used to be a 45 minute session.

“We don’t tell you what to do, you can do whatever you want to, it’s your site. But we can do whatever we want to on our site to best serve our users.” — Matt Cutts, SMX Advanced 2010 (paraphrased)

Danny: Do you still get that boost if you buy AdSense? Matt: Aargh!! — SMX Advanced 2010

Marty Madness

9:00 – 10:15 AM, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM Tuesday

Worried that jet lag or exhaustion will stop you from enjoying the first sessions? Fear not. Marty Weintraub is speaking in each of the first two time slots: Hardcore Social Tactics and Surviving Personalization.

“Use Facebook to target businesses. Raise your hand if you have a Facebook account. Raise your hand if you have a job. See …” — Marty Weintraub, SMX Israel 2012

Ask the SEOs

3:00 – 4:15 PM Wednesday

Ask the SEOs is always a fun session. The top SEOs let loose answering questions and bantering. The Wall Street Journal’s Alex Bennert recently joined the regulars: Vanessa Fox, Bruce Clay, Greg Boser, Rae Hoffman-Dolan and Todd Friesen. This is the session where you get the best interaction between the experts, and the best feel for what’s really true today.

“I can’t wait until my daughter is in college so I can get my hands on her edu account. We chose her college based on domain value.” — Greg Boser, Ask the SEOs, SMX Advanced 2009

“My biggest waste of time the past few years? Optimizing for Yahoo.” — Rae Hoffman-Dolan, Ask the SEOs, SMX East 2010

Historic tidbit: The Ask the SEOs session was introduced in 2009, replacing a “Give it up” session that some argued was too black hat.

Maile & Vanessa on Pagination & Canonical URLs

It started at the Vanessa Fox portion (advanced technical SEO) of last year’s SMX West with a smackdown between Maile Ohye from Google and Marshall Simmonds from About.com / New York Times. Marshall said it was OK to canonical all pages of an article back to the article’s main page. Maile said no. Punches were thrown (OK, maybe not). Maile: “Believe me, if the page isn’t a subset of the other, it’s a signal. You can believe him or you can believe me, who was talking to our indexing people the other day.” Marshall (whom Danny once called the poster child of SEO success) didn’t back down, implying that it worked for them.

A few months later at SMX East Maile announced a new Google feature, a pagination tag, to do what Marshall wanted.

Now Maile and Vanessa Fox return, with Adam Audette and Jeff Carpenter, to explain how it all works now.

Authority Building

1:45 – 3:00 PM Tuesday

SEO is increasingly about authority. And Eric Enge is a great speaker.

“We gave SEO training seminar to government webmasters, got lots of links from USA.gov. And they paid costs and speaking fee.” — Eric Enge, SMX Advanced 2011 (paraphrased)

“We contacted Boston.com and Washington Post, and asserted that we had authority. Sometimes we did, sometimes we didn’t. We got links or article placements.  – Eric Enge, SMX Advanced 2011 (paraphrased)

Authorship & Schema

10:45 AM – Noon Wednesday

An increasingly important area, especially as Google’s Knowledge Graph plays a larger role.

SEO & Social Power Tools

3:30 – 4:45 PM Tuesday

Michael King, Merry Morud, Rhea Drysdale. Can’t miss.

“When you interact with people on Twitter don’t use the same account that you use to Tweet SEO articles. That’s like trying to pick up a girl while holding a book called How to Be a Pickup Artist.” — Michael King, SMX Israel 2012

The Bing Keynote

9:00 – 10:00 AM Wednesday

Truth is, this session has been hit or miss. Usually miss. Usually just an annual reminder that last year when Microsoft said it got it’s act together regarding search it was wrong. In each of the six years of SMX Advanced, Microsoft has brought in a new search executive to give the keynote. They were MSN, then Live, and now Bing. They were the search engine that gave you cash back. Then they were a Decision Engine. They had a great keynote in 2010 with Yusuf Mehdi but now he’s off heading the XBox division. This year it’s Derrick Connell. Derrick was a C programmer on the London stock exchange before joining Microsoft in 92, leading MSN Europe, and later helping to launch Bing. Now he’s in charge of Bing. Let’s see what you got, Derrick.

“How many of you have used Bing?” (a lot of hands) “Oh, how many of you haven’t used Bing?” (about 5 hands) (To Bing’s Qi Lu: ) “OK, so you’re spending $80 billion to convince him.” — Danny Sullivan, SMX Advanced 2010

“My 8-year-old daughter wrote a list of all her friends using Bing, and all her friends using that other search engine. ” [He showed us the list; he has a copy framed at work.] “My daughter said to me “Daddy. We have a lot of work to do.” – Yusuf Mehdi, SMX Advanced 2010

@toddmintz: Playing Talking Heads “Road To Nowhere” before Microsoft keynote…incredible symbolism at play :) [hat tip: Lisa Barone]

There’s also a Monday evening meet & greet, a Tuesday night party at the aquarium, and a post-conference bowling party.

I hope to see you there.

Don’t have tickets? The show is sold out, but you still have the following options:

• SMX Workshop passes are still available. Attend in-depth workshops on June 7th – check them out here.
• Network passes are $99 for those who register online before June 4 ($150 on-site). Take a look at the pass benefits.

• Follow the conference on Twitter (#smx)
• Read our live blogging and Best of SMX Advanced (coming June 5th & 6th).

Related tidbits:

• The pre-conference Meet & Greet is on the 5th anniversary of the SMX conference series. Though one review of that conference wondered if that first SMX Advanced “damaged brand Danny” (in hindsight: no) most reviews were favorable. Karl Ribas wrote “Never before have I seen so many Googlers at one conference. Yahoo! and MSN also had a stronger presence than I’ve seen in the past. You really got the feeling that the search engines were interested in knowing what thoughts, ideas, suggestions, and opinions this group had bring to the table.” (Community tip: Starting the SMX conference series with an intimate gathering of advanced SEOs and search engine reps was a masterstroke.)
• The Seattle Mariners are out of town, which is OK, since I hear Ken Griffey Jr. retired. And my wonderful wife is taking me to ballgames in three other cities this trip.
• Seattle has a great Kosher vegan restaurant and SMX is excellent regarding special meal needs.

See you there!

There were a lot of things I liked about being a full-time employee at the same startup for more than 12 years (yes, even after 12 years it still felt like a startup). Being a core part of the team. Having daily contact with great people. The monthly paycheck was nice.

One of the best things was that I didn’t need to prove myself every day. Not that I could slack off. Just that I had built up enough credibility that I could afford to frequently fail on the company dime. Good failures. Usually. The kind where you say “This was a good experiment to run, it failed, what’s next?” It’s much harder to utter those words when you have to follow them with “pay me anyway.” My employers knew that my successes over 12 years contributed more than enough value to compensate for the frequent failures without which valuable successes are improbable.

But now I’m a consultant, working with new clients. Which leaves a few options:

1. Do exactly the same things I’d do as an employee. Make clear to the clients that they’re paying for me swinging the bat, underpaying for successes and sometimes paying for failures.
2. Charge for value created. Don’t charge when I fail, but take a hefty percentage of the value I create when I succeed.
3. Charge a lot for my time and only bill the client when I succeed.
4. Don’t fail.

Each of these options has its place, and its problems.

Charging by the hour

I pay my accountant and my lawyer for their time, even if the result of that time is them coming back to me and saying “I thought I found a nice solution for you, but no, you’re screwed.” And yes I get annoyed, but I understand that it’s a reasonable system.

Charging by value

On lawsuits, lawyers sometimes take a percentage of the winnings. If they lose they only charge expenses.

In theory this is a great way to work if you can live with unsteady income. But in practice it usually makes things too complicated. Whenever I’m dealing with a very small client I want to say “I know you don’t have a lot of money to pay me, so I’ll accept a small percentage of your company.” But I think that would be too rude and aggressive.

Charging a percentage of value created can work well when you’re generating easily measurable short-term revenue, but it’s much trickier when you’re creating long-term value.

This can also work if you can separate a piece that you can own or co-own. We recently changed our relationship with a client, becoming his retailer instead of his consultant. Instead of charging him to build an internet distribution channel that he owned, we built our own and buy his product at his wholesale price and resell it with a markup. At that point, you’ve shifted from consulting to entrepreneurship.

Charge a lot, and don’t charge for the failures

This may be the best approach for high-end products and services. You can even explicitly offer a guarantee. This can be a nice approach if there’s sufficient trust. Prospective customers must trust you enough to agree to high prices. You have to trust yourself and your customers that you’ll deliver significant value and that the customer will acknowledge the success.

Don’t fail

Don’t fail is a good solution in some closed, objective, predictable systems. If you’re a house painter and success is defined by the walls becoming forest green. Don’t fail is nice when you can follow a repeatable process and all deviations from the norm are failures that you can and should avoid.

But Don’t fail can be a horrible approach in open, subjective systems filled with uncertainty. In such systems, failure is the norm. In these cases, success is a lot more complicated than following a rule book and adhering to the norms.

Succeeding vs not failing

I recently paid somebody else for a site review on one of our sites. I like getting other people’s opinions, and this was a well trusted industry insider who was performing audits at very reasonable prices.

I was disappointed by what I got back. Not surprised, but disappointed. It felt like they just took a template site audit, deleted the problems that didn’t apply to my site, did some search and replaces to get my site name in there, took some screen shots, added a few sentences, and were done.

There are two attitudes you can have when performing a site review, or almost any job. You can focus on covering all the items on the checklist, or you can try to imagine the website’s most likely paths to success.

A checklist is often a good place to start, and there’s a lot of evidence that those that deem themselves “creative types” too often miss the obvious things that a more disciplined checklist-approach would catch.

And maybe at that point the “website review” has been concluded and anything beyond that is a separate project.

A checklist-based project is great from a consultant’s point of view. You have a nice repeatable process and you can declare success simply by hitting all the points on the checklist.

But this approach only succeeds at spotting deviations from the norm and (at best) determining which of those are failures.

The wellness and positive psychology movements are based on the premise that we greatly limit ourselves when we focus on the presence and absence of diseases. Physical and mental health can be so much more than that. We have the same problem when we focus our site audits, and subsequent suggestions, only on how a site deviates from the norm.

The greatest value we provide is usually when we go beyond the repeatable process and try to imagine and create. Yes, that takes time, and doesn’t guarantee success. Even worse, most of our ideas are not good enough to implement. Analyzing each one takes time. It’s awfully hard to charge a client for researching a company and its environment, coming up with ideas, analyzing each one, and determining that none are worth the client diverting scare resources to. I generally find that I keep working until I have ideas that I’m happy with and then I bill for only a fraction of my time. Which is not a great way to work.

The best way to get paid for all your time is to focus on the areas where you can declare success by completing a repeatable process. But the best way to create value is to go wider and deeper; to imagine new possibilities and to soberly evaluate each one.

The best way to provide significant value is not a great way to guarantee payment.

I suspect much of this problem goes away after I build up a base of long-term clients, but that takes time.

What do you do?

Image courtesy of  Brian Hillegas

“I don’t think Mr. Page is sitting in a large chair in a dark tower, wearing a large pinkie ring and stroking a hairless cat while plotting world domination. (At least I hope he’s not.)

But as Google has grown, and the company sees the threat of others on the horizon, it seems that “do the right thing” may have been paused to prevent itself from fading like a Yahoo or an AOL.”

Nick Bilton, Growing Too Big for a Conscience, New York Times

“I don’t think Google was ever “not evil.” Nor do I think that Google was ever “not good.” I think, like any company, it’s not perfect. But unlike most companies, it created an entire “Don’t Be Evil” mantra for itself that it could have never lived up to.”

Danny Sullivan, On Google & Being Evil, Marketing Land

“For months, ‘Don’t be evil’ was like a secret handshake among Googlers. An idea would come up in a meeting with a whiff of anticompetitiveness to it, and someone would remark that it sounded … evil. End of idea.” …

“In his ‘Owner’s Manual to Google,’ Page put front and center the unofficial motto of Google, ‘Don’t be evil.” “We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place,” he wrote. “We believe strongly that in the long term we will be better served – as shareholders and in all other ways – by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short-term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and broadly shared within the company.”

Steven Levy, In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

The New York Times’ Nick Bilton wrote a strong piece arguing that a growing Google is struggling to live up to its founding values. Search industry expert Danny Sullivan argues that “Don’t be evil” was never attainable and somewhat misguided.

Without wading into the important points Nick and Danny raise, I want to take a moment to celebrate the young Google’s decision to take the “Don’t Be Evil” pledge, and to spend over a decade trying to live up to it.

Last year at South by Southwest I heard Senator Al Franken state that corporations are legally required to maximize revenues.

And yet Google clearly told potential investors that they were devoted to doing good, and that they should only buy the stock if they were comfortable with that. Google’s aspirations to morality were not just an empty motto. They affected their internal decisions, and they clearly told new investors that the company did not see maximizing returns as its only goal.

Danny Sullivan makes two specific points against “Don’t Be Evil”:

1. It’s shorthand for “don’t be like our evil competitors.”
2. It leads Googlers to simplistic views in dismissing critics’ claims. How can you say we’re not respecting your privacy, didn’t you see our motto?

Danny suggests not that Google drop its aspirations, but that it turn them more positive, into something like “Be good” or “Be good to our customers.” Danny provides quotes from Steven Levy’s In The Plex to show that some early Googlers felt the same way.

I suspect that “Don’t Be Evil” helped drive Google’s values for a decade in a way that “Be Good” would not have.

Absolute, negative phrasing has advantages that positive phrasings do not. The commandments “Don’t murder. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t steal. Don’t perjure” set absolute limits more effectively than positive statements like “Support life.” Granted, “Don’t be evil” is more vague, and is focused on not being rather than not doing.

But my only strong disagreement with Danny is his statement that “‘Don’t Be Evil’ was incredibly dumb.”

“The next time you hear about, or call someone, a hypocrite, remember that subjecting themselves to such labeling is a price people pay for being identified with standards higher than themselves.”

Dennis Prager, Think a Second Time

Yes, Google makes mistakes. Yes, Google probably overestimates its own virtues and its competitors’ vices. Yes, some business decisions may really be about more evil vs less evil. And yes, Google may misdirect its perceived morality into a misguided or evil crusade.

And still. Google has been a great company that has done great things. Google is a very powerful entity that should have internal values that restrain it.

The only consensus Western value is tolerance. People love to celebrate the moral failures of those who publicly aspire to any additional value. I congratulate Google for privately and then publicly declaring a commitment to not be evil, and to put that phrase on the cover of their IPO filing.

Yes, it’s a hell of a challenge living up to that value. But better to occasionally stumble in trying to maintain a high moral standard than to abandon the standard. Good luck, Google.

A friend asked me for advice before conducting her first post-mortem. Here’s what I should have told her.

All problems have the same root cause. When I state that cause, many of you will think I’m merely stating an obvious truism. But our inability to really accept this basic truth makes most problems much worse than they need to be.

The root cause of all problems in this world is that the world, by its very nature, is filled with tension, pain, conflicting goods, intractable problems and imperfect solutions. Our cowardice in accepting this truth greatly exacerbates the issue.

The first step in any post-mortem is to make sure people understand this truth and the problems caused by denying it.

You don’t start by asking “what caused the darkness?” You start by asking “why did we fail to create light?”

If you start a post-mortem by asking “what went wrong?” or “where did we fail?” you’re off to a bad start.

First, you’re starting from a premise that by nature you should have succeeded but someone or something intervened and created the failure. An incorrect premise is a bad place to start a discussion.

Second, even if you tell everybody the post-mortem isn’t about assigning the blame, when you start with the assumption that somebody caused the failure, you’re going to have a lot of defensive people around the table. And defensive people attack. Offensive people do too.

Third, by focusing on what caused the failure, you’re focusing on the negative.

It’s counter-intuitive, but those of us who view the world as flawed people trying to build greatness despite a foundation of chaos and darkness get to really appreciate success. Those who think the world is full of rainbows and unicorns are forever condemning the people who messed up the utopia.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, by focusing on the failure you increase the chances that you’ll come up with a solution that prevents this exact failure from recurring, but also prevents many other successes. Thomas Watson said that after the chaotic development processes that led up to the launch of the revolutionary IBM 360 they created processes to prevent that kind of chaos and waste from ever happening again. Sadly, Watson points out, those very processes also ensured that they would never again launch a revolutionary success.

This approach generally causes us to fight the last war. We sacrifice our chances of future success by attempting to guarantee we won’t repeat the same failure. We take our shoes off at the airport because somebody once almost killed people by hiding things in his shoes. France builds the Maginot Line to ensure that it will lose World War II differently than it lost World War I.

There is some benefit from comparing what actually happened to an idealized process. But be careful. Don’t assume that following the process would have led to success, and that any failure should be attributed to the deviations from that process.

“We compared successful companies with unsuccessful ones [at Web design]. The unsuccessful ones all told us “our problem is that we don’t have a good process.” But none of the successful companies used a process. The biggest problem for the unsuccessful companies was that they thought the right way to do this was through a formal process.”

Jared Spool, Best of SXSW

 So starting your post-mortem from the perspective of “where did we go wrong”:

1. Builds off of a false premise, that you were on a path to success but somebody screwed up. False premises rarely lead to accurate conclusions.
2. Leads to people assigning and avoiding blame.
3. Focuses on the negative.
4. Often does no more than prevent the recurrence of one specific failure. And that often comes at a much higher price.

Instead, start your post-mortem by focusing on successes. Why were we successful in other cases? What could we have done to achieve that same success here? What (if anything) can we do to increase our overall success rate?

An added benefit of this success-based perspective is that it helps you remember that a successful outcome to a post-mortem isn’t always a solution to the problem. Sometimes it’s an acceptance that fixing the imperfection that prompted the post-mortem is an unwise of use of your resources, or would unjustifiably reduce your odds of succeeding elsewhere.

Another benefit of recognizing that chaos and darkness is the world’s natural state is that employees are less likely to blame each other for the company’s problems. It’s much easier to have productive discussions when each side recognizes that they’re arguing about the relative merits and risks of imperfect solutions.

Many people find the quest for the best imperfect solution to be uninteresting, even depressing. Sorry. Get over it. Or live your life as a tortured poet or songwriter.

Post-mortems are dangerous enough under the best of circumstances. Don’t make them worse by pretending that success is the norm, and then searching for the cause of the failure.

–

I think some people find these ideas depressing and others find them uplifting. What do you think?

Ah, SMX Israel. Marty Weintraub, Michael King and others flying to Israel to join Israel’s top SEOs. I get to go to a great conference without flying anywhere. And great Kosher food. This is the life. Here were the best lines:

Best Lines

Roman Zelvenschi: Nobody knows how to pronounce my last name, but that’s OK, I rank number 1 for it.

Eli Feldblum: Use schema. Do it now. Seriously. You have an internet-connected device with you.

Eli Feldblum: We’ve reached the point where “normal” blue text links get lost in the noise on a Google SERP.

Barry Schwartz: Google is recommending … Doesn’t mean you should do it … Just saying.

Shira Abel: Google owns you. Get used to it.

Marty Weintraub: Facebook owns you too.

Marty Weintraub: Use Facebook to target businesses. Raise your hand if you have a FB account. Raise your hand if you have a job. See …

Tomer Honen (from Google): We got better at Flash. Right about the time people stopped using it

Olivier Amar: When you’re in-house you pay a lot more attention to long term. Because you still want to be here.

Ofer Dascalu: Some people say “publishers and Google are partners.” My partners reply to my e-mails. They pick up the phone when I call.

Michael King: When you interact with people on Twitter don’t use the same account that you use to Tweet SEO articles. That’s like trying to pick up a girl while holding a book called How to Be a Pickup Artist.

Best conference coverage:

• Live Blogging SMX Israel with Kahena Digital
• SMX Israel: You’ve come a long way, baby
• SMX Israel: In Rhyme (interesting niche)

What did I miss? Let me know in the comments or by Tweeting to @GilR or with #BestOf #SMX.

Here are the best lines from other conferences:

• Best of PubCon 2011
• Best of BlogWorld 2011
• Best of SMX East 2011
• Best of WikiMania 2011
• Best of SMX Advanced London 2011
• Best of SMX Toronto 2011
• Best of SXSW 2011
• Best of SMX West 2011
• Best of SphinnCon 2011
• Best of SMX East 2o10
• Best of SMX Advanced 2010
• Best of SMX Toronto 2010
• Best of SphinnCon 2010
• Best of BirdBrain 2010
• Best of SMX Advanced 2009
• Best of PubCon 2009

I gave this presentation at SMX Israel. Rewritten after Google launched Search Plus Your World a few days before the conference.

“I’m so excited that our personalization works so well that people are creating dystopian fantasies about it.”

“How stupid would your friend think you are if he asked for the bus schedule and you gave him schedules for far-away cities? How annoyed would you be at your friend if he wasn’t paying attention to you so he answered your question without considering the previous parts of your conversation?”

Google Product Manager Jack Menzel, Best of SMX East

“Google Plus isn’t Google’s attempt to build a third or fourth social network. It’s the centerpiece of our attempt to understand our users better so we can better serve throughout the product line.”

Google Plus Product Manager Christian Oestlein, Best of SMX East

“Google is portrayed as Godzilla but sees itself as Snuffleupagus”

Jeff Jarvis, Best of SMX East

Yesterday’s release of Search Plus Your World was one more giant step for Google. We are living in the era of Google’s grand unifications.

Search, Social, and Serendipity

Every few months, even at search conferences, somebody gets up and declares the imminent demise of search or SEO. Sometimes they’re just looking for attention, sometimes they’re just idiots. But often the problem is they only understand half the story.

Yes, we often trust our friends more than we trust strangers. Yes, sometimes the thing you want can find you, without you looking for it. Yes, we want more than to type into a text box and see the same 10 blue links that everybody else sees.

But there was some mistaken impression that Google couldn’t or wouldn’t do these things. That Facebook or Apple would get there first. And that the end result would be that search, SEOs, and Google would cease to be involved in how people connect with what they want.

“It is easier to reliably detect social spam than link spam.”

Vanessa Fox, A Holistic Look at Panda

“I always tell people not to ask how does Google know. They just know.”

Vanessa Fox, Best of SMX East

Google is studying the social graph. They know who you are.  They know what you like, what sites you visited, and how long it took you to return to Google. They know how many people who visited those sites clicked +1 or bounced back quickly and hit “Block this site.”

We can argue about whether they’re Big Brother or your best friend. But they’re not a 1999 search engine that only knows about pages and links.

The Search Quality and Spam Groups

The gap between search and social isn’t the only key gap Google’s been filling.

Google decided years ago that the people should be represented by two separate yet equally important groups (as I wrote that, my Android phone made the Law & Order beeping sound that it makes for incoming messages. I think they’re watching me. I should stop using Chrome for writing blog posts). There’s the search quality team, led by Amit Singhal, who rewrote the Google search algorithm in 2001. Blindfolded. In Assembler. While drunk. And the search spam team led by Matt Cutts, who also serves as Google’s ambassador to the search community. [And of whom I do not make fun, because, well, he runs the search spam team, and is therefore probably more powerful than the president of France. Amit probably is too, but he doesn't know who I am.]

Anyway, this division of power worked well, but had some blind spots exposed.

“So we did Caffeine in late 2009.  Our index grew so quickly … we basically got a lot of good fresh content, and some not so good.”

Amit Singhal

“It was like, “What’s the bare minimum that I can do that’s not spam?”  It sort of fell between our respective groups.”

Matt Cutts

Google had a blind spot, a vulnerability. Sites could achieve trust, and then mass produce highly targeted pages with thin content. Amit’s algorithms couldn’t quite recognize quality at a page level well enough to know when Google was overvaluing a highly relevant (but useless) page that was mass-produced by a site they had trusted. Matt’s team couldn’t help, because there was no spam involved.

SEO professional: I have a few sites where I had already grown the content and the links, and I was just about to start pushing out the rest of the pages when this thing hit.

Me: So that’s what you do? You build the trust with good pages, wait a bit, then exploit it with tons of crap?”

SEO professional: Isn’t that what we all do?

Conversation between me and a top SEO at a bar outside SMX West, 2011

SEOs were exploiting this gap between Amit and Matt’s groups to establish Google’s trust and then exploit it. Larger sites like eHow, which were once high quality, had a compelling business interest to create large amounts of content but little interest in paying for high quality. [Yes, I continue to think that eHow was unfairly hit because interested parties raised a deafening roar that prompted Google to modify Panda to crush it. But that's another story].

Closing the Gap

So our heroes joined forces and created the Panda Update, which, unless you’re one of the sites affected, is more important for what it foretells than for what it has done.

First, Panda closes the gap between the two teams. They took some ideas from Amit’s bag of tricks. Panda is a ranking factor. It’s a computational intensive process run every few weeks, like Page Rank. They combined that with some of Matt’s tricks. Panda is a sitewide penalty implemented as ranking factor and updated like Page Rank.

Back in the old days penalties were applied by sledgehammer. -30. -50. -950. If Amit decided your page should rank #2 but Matt hit your site with a -950 penalty, you dropped to 952. And you know the difference between a -30 penalty and a -950 penalty?Right, 920. But in reality, nothing. Maybe in 1998 there was a tiny practical difference between being on page 4 or on page 96. But in 2012, neither will get you any traffic.

The Panda penalty is applied as a ranking factor and is far more subtle. If Google can’t find any pages that it likes better for a particular search, your page may still rank first, even if you’re being weighed down by the Panda. You can still find most eHow pages, for example, but you’ll often find them a few slots lower. Which was enough to do this to its stock price.

Panda’s Polluting Publishers Penalty

With Panda, Google decided to make publishers pay a price for putting out bad pages.

When you expose a page to Google, Google considers it a request to trust you to send you its user. If too many users return unhappy, Google responds as it would to someone who has betrayed its trust.

So your job is to stop that from happening. The two obvious pieces to this are:

• Satisfy the searchers Google sends you.
• Don’t ask Google to send you searchers that you can’t satisfy.

Calling All Data

Google’s biggest change in recent years is that they finally declared that they’re considering every signal they can get their hands on. Well – almost. It’s still presumed that they’re not taking data from publisher-side programs like Google Analytics and using it against you. But Google is considering behavioral signals from user activity on Google’s sites, applications, and toolbars.

“In May 2010 I said that we weren’t using Social Signals. Now we are.”

“What we ended up doing is taking multiple data sources and intersecting them, so if one data source had a false negative, the others wouldn’t.”

Matt Cutts, Google Webmaster Video, December 17, 2010

“I always tell people not to ask how does Google know. They just know.”

Vanessa Fox, Best of SMX East

Previously Matt repeatedly answered questions with statements like “we don’t use that signal, it’s too spammable.” Now he answers similar questions by saying that Google considers so much data that even if you fool it on one signal you’re unlikely to fool it on all the corroborating signals. Former black hat SEOs have responded by saying things like “it’s now easier to build a good page than to fake it.” With Panda, Google explicitly stated that they were using some behavioral signals as corroborating signals.

User-Friendly Role Model: The IRS

One way that Google makes sense of the boatload of data that they have is by comparing data sets to paradigmatic models of good and bad web sites. Panda is a Document Classifier, which means it looks at things and puts them in Pile A or Pile B.

“We actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side.”

Matt Cutts, Wired Magazine, The Panda That Hates Farms, March 3, 2011

So your site needs to emit the same signals as sites like the IRS, Wikipedia, and the New York Times. So try to be a blood-sucking anti-capitalist rag. Kidding. But when was the last time you heard the IRS named as a pillar of user friendliness? If more of my visitors wanted to kill themselves after visiting me would Panda like me more?

Seriously though, Google’s use of a document classifier is significant. Combine this with the general idea of using many spammable signals and suspecting sites that don’t conform to expected patterns.

“You know the best way to ensure your site has a ‘footprint that sites that focus on users have?’ Focus on users!”

Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land, Lessons Learned at SMX West, March 12, 2011

I partially agree with Vanessa’s point that if you focus on users you’ll look like you’re focusing on users. But it’s not always true. For example, Answers.com built a great site that spent millions of dollars annually licensing and aggregating quality content, much of it exclusively, from trusted publishers. The site focused on users. But it had the footprint of a scraper. We had some interesting internal arguments about showing Wikipedia content. It was the right thing to do for our users. But, even after we NoIndexed Wikipedia-only pages, it hurt our footprint at Google.

If search traffic is a big part of your business, you need to pay attention to whether you look more like the IRS or like eHow. Even if you think eHow is a better designed and more user-friendly site.

Google’s Timeless Problem, and Their Progress

“‘Junk results often wash out any results that a user is interested in …

The number of documents … has been increasing by many orders of magnitude. …

People are still only willing to look at the first few tens of results.”

Larry Page, The Anatomy of a Search Engine, 1998

Google’s core problem hasn’t changed: publishers keep creating a lot of junk, and users want the best page to jump to the top. In 1998 Larry Page complained that users were “still only willing to look at the first few tens of results.” Three peculiar words here. The word ”still” indicates that Page thought that search engines would keep falling further behind in their battle to highlight the best content. But you’d need to eliminate the words “tens of” to get to today’s reality, where it’s hard for us to even fathom that our ancestors would look at tens of results. Probably while they were walking 3 miles in the snow to school every day. Uphill. Both ways. And Google has been so successful that users keep raising the bar, and complaining if the best page isn’t the top result.

The Future

 ”The job of SEO has been upgraded from SEO to web strategist. Virtually everything you do on the Internet with your website can impact SEO today. That is especially true following Panda.”

Rand Fishkin, How Google’s Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever

“It’s too hard now to fake a natural footprint well enough to fool Google.”

“Human Engagement is the new Page Rank. Build engagement signals, get links from pages with good engagement signals.”

Greg Boser, Best of PubCon

When I started going to SEO conferences back in 2005 I got the feeling that I was witnessing the end of an era. SEO had been the Wild West, but the great frontier was finally being tamed.

It may take some time for people to acknowledge the new reality. And surely there are still some pockets of rogue activity, especially in the big money spaces like pharmaceuticals and gambling.

But search marketing is increasingly about applying the fundamental principles of marketing to the particular environment of search. And the key strategies are the same.

Specifically:

• Build your reputation.
• Build your relationships.
• Learn what your potential customers want, and how they’re trying to find it.
• Build pages that satisfy their needs and generate positive attention.
• Look like a good business. Make sure you’re giving off the same positive vibes as the places that people trust.

As Google closes the gap between search and social, these fundamentals become increasingly important. For all but a few rogue geniuses who manage to stay one step ahead, SEO is increasingly about reputation and relationships. Earn  people’s friendship and trust. Understand what they want. And only signal Google that you can deliver what their users are looking for when you really can.

Good luck.

This post is a bit off topic, but as the President invokes Theodore Roosevelt, I’d like to take some quotes from my favorite TR speech, which somehow hasn’t lost any resonance in a hundred years.

Teddy Roosevelt

In the Arena

Teddy’s speech at the Sorbonne in Paris is most recognized for the much cited In the Arena paragraph:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

But that paragraph was just part of the speech’s greatness.

On Critics

President Roosevelt preceded the In The Arena sentences with this:

“The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism …  There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty … A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize … all these are marks, not … of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men … who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier …”

Mocking the French Military?

I loved this:

“The brilliant gallantry of the French soldier has for many centuries been proverbial.”

It was part of a serious point, not a cheap shot, and it was an overall very respectful speech. But I’d advise President Obama not to repeat that line.

On Character

“There is need of a sound body, and even more of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character – the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man’s force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor.”

“Education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self restraint, self mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution – these are the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside. I pay all homage to intellect and to elaborate and specialized training of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of all of you present when I add that more important still are the commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues.”

I do like how Roosevelt makes the point about how character is more important than knowledge WITHOUT condemning the intellectual elite.

On Pacifism

“There are well-meaning philosophers who declaim against the unrighteousness of war. They are right only if they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteousness. War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is a crime against humanity. But it is such a crime because it is unjust, not because it is a war. … Every honorable effort should always be made to avoid war, just as every honorable effort should always be made by the individual in private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep out of trouble; but no self-respecting individual, no self-respecting nation, can or ought to submit to wrong.”

On Europe’s Demographic Problem

Roosevelt’s comments on France’s birthrate issue seems far more relevant today:

“The first essential in any civilization is that the man and women shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. … If the failure is due to the deliberate and willful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thralldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues the greatest is the race’s power to perpetuate the race.“

On Property Rights

“In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property.”

On Idealism

“No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize. The impractical visionary is far less often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcoming, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things. Woe to the empty phrase-maker, to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the ground for the man of action, turns against him when he appears and hampers him when he does work!“

On Inequality

“There should, so far as possible, be equal of opportunity to render service; but just so long as there is inequality of service there should and must be inequality of reward.

We may be sorry for the general, the painter, the artists, the worker in any profession or of any kind, whose misfortune rather than whose fault it is that he does his work ill.

But the reward must go to the man who does his work well; for any other course is to create a new kind of privilege, the privilege of folly and weakness; and special privilege is injustice, whatever form it takes. To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable, ought to have the reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable, and upright, is to say what is not true and cannot be true.

Let us try to level up, but let us beware of the evil of leveling down. If a man stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every one of us needs a helping hand now and then. But if a man lies down, it is a waste of time to try and carry him; and it is a very bad thing for every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those who shirk their work and those who do it.“

On Class Warfare

“Class hatred is bad in just the same way, and without regard to the individual who, at a given time, substitutes loyalty to a class for loyalty to a nation, of substitutes hatred of men because they happen to come in a certain social category, for judgment awarded them according to their conduct. Remember always that the same measure of condemnation should be extended to the arrogance which would look down upon or crush any man because he is poor and to envy and hatred which would destroy a man because he is wealthy.

The overbearing brutality of the man of wealth or power, and the envious and hateful malice directed against wealth or power, are really at root merely different manifestations of the same quality, merely two sides of the same shield. The man who, if born to wealth and power, exploits and ruins his less fortunate brethren is at heart the same as the greedy and violent demagogue who excites those who have not property to plunder those who have.

The gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted by that man, whatever his station, who seeks to make his countrymen divide primarily in the line that separates class from class, occupation from occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth, instead of remembering that the only safe standard is that which judges each man on his worth as a man, whether he be rich or whether he be poor, without regard to his profession or to his station in life. Such is the only true democratic test, the only test that can with propriety be applied in a republic.”

On Corrupt Politicians

“If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that he will do something wrong in your interest, you can be absolutely certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something wrong against your interest.”

“If you will steal for me then you will steal from me.”

On Patriotism

“A man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only possible way of being, a good citizen of the world. Experience teaches us that the average man who protests that his international feeling swamps his national feeling, that he does not care for his country because he cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe of mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of any one country, because he is the citizen of the world, is in fact usually and exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the world he happens at the moment to be in. … if a man can view his own country and all others countries from the same level with tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust him, just as it is wise to distrust the man who can take the same dispassionate view of his wife and mother. However broad and deep a man’s sympathies, however intense his activities, he need have no fear that they will be cramped by love of his native land.”

It’s easy to understand why President Obama wants to challenge the first President Roosevelt. Much like Senator Obama in 2008, Roosevelt did a great job showing an appreciation of the values held dear by most Americans. Roosevelt praised intelligence while declaring character more essential. Roosevelt combined progressive themes with conservative ones.

On the one hand, Roosevelt called for courage and action. On the other hand, Roosevelt’s definition of character began with a focus on self-restraint.

I’ll close this post with the scariest and most powerful part of Roosevelt’s speech.

“There have been many republics in the past, both in what we call antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and the prime factor in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to divide along the wealth that separates wealth from poverty. It made no difference which side was successful; it made no difference whether the republic fell under the rule of oligarchy or the rule of a mob. In either case, when once loyalty to a class had been substituted for loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was at hand. There is no greater need to-day than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel with, the lines of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position. In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious or antireligious, democratic or antidemocratic, it itself but a manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in the downfall of so many, many nations. Of one man in especial, beyond anyone else, the citizens of a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to religious or antireligious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own interest. The very last thing an intelligent and self-respecting member of a democratic community should do is to reward any public man because that public man says that he will get the private citizen something to which this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought not to possess.”

I read columnists from the right and the left and I think their biggest disagreement right now is not about ideology; it’s about which side is trying to fix problems and which side is focused on assigning blame for failure. I think most of the swing vote in America today agrees with Roosevelt that our biggest problem is not that one (or both) sides is wrong, but that one (or both) sides is mostly interested in rent-seeking and finger pointing. And I think both sides are therefore going to spend the next eleven months trying to convince America that their opponents are only interested in assigning blame.

[This post is part of a 4 part series on the key tensions in growing a high quality community-generated content site. It was presented at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2011.]

Growing a community is like rocket science

Growing a community is like rocket science. It takes an enormous amount of energy per mile to get off the ground and to break through Earth’s atmosphere. It takes far, far less energy per mile after that. (Full disclosure: I’m not a rocket scientist.)

Don’t worry about using scalable practices to get off the ground. Very simple example in the blog world is 8 friends who agreed to interact with and promote each other’s content. Does it scale? Not really. But it’s a great way to start.

You have to get off the ground in a high quality fashion. It’s an investment. Don’t expect to break even yet. Ask your friends and family to help. Hire people. Don’t worry that it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t have to yet.

Growing a community is not like rocket science

I lied, it’s not like rocket science. One key difference is that if you’re sending a rocket to the moon you better have all the launch details exactly right. You can’t just say “well, let’s see if we can break through the atmosphere, and then we’ll figure out where we want to go next.”

With a community site you need to make sure you’re pushing it in the right direction. But you’re just kidding yourself if you try to plan too precisely. Try to get the site live quickly, and then listen to your users and respond to their needs. Don’t delay launch because you’re trying to get it exactly right.

Starting & Scaling

When a community site starts, you want to try to use every user contribution. It’s worth putting effort into fixing low quality contributions. When the site gets bigger, the value of each mediocre contribution is lower, but the cost of fixing it hasn’t changed, and you may decide to be more aggressive about just deleting contributions that aren’t good enough for the site. You always have to ask “Is this worth it now?” So when you’re starting, don’t say “we shouldn’t do this, it won’t scale when we get big.” If it’s worth it now, do it. And then when you grow, don’t say “but we grew the site by spending a lot of time fixing low quality contributions.” OK, that’s how you got here. But now that the site scaled, is it worth it now?

Does it Scale?

There’s another way the “Does it scale” question can trip you up. You may have a model that scales, let’s say one paid editor per 10,000 community members. Then as the community grows, you panic. “If we get to 5 million users we’ll need 50 paid editors!” OK, great! If you did the math that the value created by X members more than covers the expense of a paid moderator, then you should be thrilled. Of course you need to check and make sure the model is still working. But don’t drop the model because you’re afraid that if you have a billion members you’re going to need ten thousand moderators.

Summary

Getting off the ground requires significant investment. Don’t worry that your initial strategies don’t scale. On the other side, when you get big, don’t say “we should continue doing this because we used to do this.” Do what’s right for the stage that your community is at. Yes, you need a business model that scales. But at your initial stages be prepared to do things that don’t scale, that use your friends and family, and that lose money. Don’t limit yourself by only looking for techniques that scale.

Also in this series:

• In Search of UGC Excellence
• UGC: Social Context & Market Context
• UGC: Tribal Elders & Noobs

Probably the biggest advantage of speaking at conferences is that it helps you establish stronger relationships with the other speakers. A side benefit this time was that Roger Dooley handed me his new book Brainfluence: 100 ways to persuade and convince consumers with neuromarketing.

Some of the highlights:

• Time “wants” vs. “shoulds.” When most of us think of the future we see ourselves as people who exercise, eat right, and act responsibly. However today most of us want chocolate and to watch TV. So if you’re selling vitamins or gym memberships, promotions should focus on great long term deals which sell to the person we want to be. Big discounts when buying a six month supply of vitamins, or a 12 month gym membership. When you’re selling impulse items focus on how quickly you can get the item to the user. This is why supermarkets start you out at fruits and vegetables and sell you candy bars, soft drinks, and gossip magazines at the counter.
• Free beats almost free. Amazon’s free shipping deal led to a large jump in sales. Except in France. Turns out the French site had altered the program to offer ‘One Franc’ shipping (about 20 cents). When they dropped it to free they saw the same benefit as the other countries. [I think there’s a larger point. There’s a huge difference between being something and being almost something. Many of us consider ourselves rationalists and moderate. But the human brain often seems to react to three compartments: ALL, SOME, and NONE. And even a penny puts you in the SOME category]. Dooley gives one exception where you should go with almost free: when you’re trying to dissuade the people who don’t need the service (and who are of little value to you) from participating in the deal.
• Serving hot beverages makes you seem warm. Cold beverages don’t. [Speaking for the minority that don’t drink coffee, offering me hot chocolate would definitely warm me up].
• Tell people they can trust you. Just adding “you can trust us to do the job for you” to the bottom of an ad caused people to rate the firm higher in every category: fair price (7%), caring (11%), fair treatment (20%), quality (30%) and competency (33%).
• Don’t price in round numbers. When we hear a price of $500 we wonder if it should really be $400. $499 is a better price not because it starts with a 4, but because we instinctively perceive it as a more exact value of the object. [I’ve been pricing in round numbers. I’m going to stop doing that.]
• On a website, the first 50-milliseconds are crucial. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink was right about some things. We reach extremely quick first impressions and then filter all subsequent information through a confirmation bias. [BTW, Google recently announced that they’ll be releasing algorithm updates that take into account what a user sees in the first 50 milliseconds.]
• Credibility before claims. First convince people that you’re credible, then make your claims.
• Women (and pictures of women) affect men. Who knew? But Dooley gets specific:
  • Short term thinking: Viewing an image of an attractive woman makes a man more short-term oriented. In a controlled experiment a bank found that putting a picture of a pretty woman on their mailing significantly increased the number of men who took out loans. “The education levels and income of the customers did not affect the performance of the psychological features.” In other words, successful and educated men are just as dumb as the rest of us.
  • Sexy images hurt brand recognition: Sexy images generally reduce men’s ability to remember the brand. It seems their minds are elsewhere (or unavailable) [Though I think some companies like GoDaddy found ways to counter this.]
  • Romantic priming: Romantically primed men show off by buying visible things. Romantically primed women show off through visible altruism.
  • Peacock Effect: When around women, men instinctively feel a need to demonstrate power and competence.
  • It’s in the eyes: Men rated pictures of women as more attractive if their pupils were dilated. Dooley refers to this as a sign of arousal, but Daniel Kahneman refers to this more generally as a sign of engagement.

Use it only for good

What to do with this information? Well, you can just view it as a Defense Against the Dark Arts course, and try to be more aware of how people may be using your instincts against you. I appreciate that Dooley instructs readers to use this power only for good, though of course he can’t actually enforce that. It can be a thin line between manipulating someone and satisfying their psychological needs. But ignorance of neurological principles is probably not better for us than knowledge of what makes us and others tick.

The book is presented as 100 2-3 page lessons like “Simple marketing for complex products” (give buyers a simple reason to buy your complex product). He takes some of the best ideas from authors and researchers (I think 5 lessons are from Dan Ariely) and puts them into engaging and informative action items. It was a fun read that gave me some good takeaways.

[This post is part of a 4 part series on the key tensions in growing a high quality community-generated content site. It was presented at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2011.]

“Given that you have worked on this tool … I believe you should recuse yourself of any discussion of this feature.”

Wikipedia user suggesting WikiMedia product designers should have no say in the future of the features they design http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Article_feedback#Please_stop_4386

When you’re running a community you desperately want to give your members a strong sense of ownership, the feeling that this is their community. But that can go too far. There’s a great video from The Onion of Star Trek fans hating the latest Star Trek movie because it was “fun, watchable.” Fans complained that because the Klingon dialogue had subtitles you could enjoy the movie even without having learned the imaginary language.

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So on the one hand you want your community members to feel a strong sense of ownership, on the other hand you have to remember that your most committed members’ instincts and interests aren’t always the same as your company’s.

Here are some of the natural desires of the most committed and admired members of a group:

• Maintain their status within the community (and prevent others from matching or challenging that status).
• Have others “pay their dues,” go through the same initiation that they went through.
• Protect the community from bad changes.
• Maintain what makes the community so great (for them).

None of those desires are bad, but you have to be aware of them, work with them, and make sure they’re working for the entire community.

This is a classic leadership problem. You need to give people ownership, and at the same time you need it to be clear that the community has certain values and goals that you have the authority and responsibility to uphold and to pursue. And that includes doing things that welcome newcomers, and that help you grow the community without diluting the brand.

One spot on some community sites that can be hostile to newcomers is your points system, if you have one. Randy Farmer gives an example of The Sims Online, where some veteran players actually formed a mafia to shake down newer players. In less dramatic examples a site displays a leaderboard, which can be a great incentive for the few top contributors, but signal newcomers that until they do a million contributions they can’t earn respect or recognition.

If you want to have a leaderboard, consider having a Hall of Fame or something to recognize lifetime achievements, but then have your normal leaderboard refresh monthly.
Another issue with newcomers is to make sure you’re guiding them to proper behavior. Wikipedia has a bot called “Huggle” which makes it easy to send semi-automated messages to people who make bad contributions. But they’re really trying to get their senior members to give personal, constructive feedback to new users.

I went to StackOverflow, a Q&A site for programmers, and I asked “what kind of computer should I use for programming, a Mac or a PC.” OK, not a great question, I was just trying to explore their site. But my question got quickly closed as “Blatantly offensive.” Blatantly offensive, really? I mean that’s like coming into a store, asking for a tangentially related product, and having them push you out and slam the door in your face.

Some people think “just get the vandals out of the system quickly, don’t waste time and effort on them.” But Wikipedia found that of their current dedicated editors, 30% had their first edits reverted. And perhaps others had mediocre first edits that managed to slide through. So don’t assume that if a user is imperfect in his first interaction with your system that he’s a loser and that your system is better off without him. You want your existing community to personally engage the new members and help them join the community.
When you’re trying to encourage new users, you really want to focus on that first engagement. Get the user to do something. Ideally you’re looking for some kind of pubic commitment that makes the user feel she’s declared herself part of the community.

In his talk on Tuesday Tim Ash mentioned a classic experiment. The experimenters knocked on doors asking people to put a big traffic safety sign on their front lawn. 92% said no. Then they went to a different group, and asked them to sign a petition to “Keep America Beautiful.” Later they went back to the people who signed the petition, and more than half agreed to put the big sign on their lawn. So you want to get people to take that first, small, public action that makes them part of the community.

Wikipedia tried to lower the bar to entry by adding ratings boxes at the bottom of their pages. They used the Pringles metaphor to explain this. “Can’t stop at just one” is true for potato chips and for contributions to a site.

But the discussion pages on this feature are interesting. Some community veterans don’t like the feature and they demand it be removed. My favorite is the guy who tells one of the feature’s designers that he should recuse himself from the discussion because he worked on the feature. That’s where we’ve come to, some community members feel so empowered that they demand not only to be heard, but that no other groups be heard.

I don’t want to say “the inmates are running the asylum” because you can’t think that way. If you think “us” and “them” you’re on the wrong path. Some people think you should encourage your more experienced users to retire, to make room for the new generation. I disagree. You want your veterans to nurture the newbies. There should be enough room in a growing community for them all.

Last thing related to Wikipedia’s effort. Gizmodo had an article that said that ratings would ruin Wikipedia. These kinds of ratings are not going to ruin Wikipedia. But the article highlights another threat to quality content. Does your system encourage quick and sensationalist posts or thoughtful and nuanced posts. This isn’t just a UGC issue, or just a web issue. The term “yellow journalism” is more than a century old.
To sum up, you need to make sure that you and your senior community members are working towards the same goals, which should usually include welcoming and nurturing newcomers. Give your veterans lots of ownership, but make sure they’re helping, not hindering, your community’s growth and improvement.

Also in this series:

• In Search of UGC Excellence
• UGC: Social Context & Market Context
• UGC: Starting & Scaling