PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

Over the past week, both Mike and Hugh have raised their collective eyebrows at the practical applications of social media - mostly from a perspective of limited time. Even as one of the agency’s experts on social media, I’ve got to say I agree with them - to a point.

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If you’re anything like me, full to bursting with tasks, projects, deadlines, sidelines, errands, meetings, presentations, or to quote Jennifer Saunders of AbFab as she sulked before a judge, “trying to get from A to B, do a little shopping,” you’ll understand how delighted I was to discover, via my colleague Mike O’Toole, that even Nicholas Carr, prognosticator on giant social workplace and IT trends, had issued a white flag on Web 2.0, to wit:

“I just don’t have time to use all of these amazing apps, and I’m guessing you might not too. I’m a fairly typical web citizen. I’m 28, married, make a reasonable wage, own a house and I have a few close friends. You’d think I’d be a web app company’s dream, but I’m not. How come? I’d love to add friends to my Flickr account, add my links to del.icio.us, browse digg for the latest big stories, customise the content of my Netvibes home page and build a MySpace page. But you know what? I don’t have time and you don’t either.” (more…)

Last year we redesigned the PJA web site. The primary driver was to update the site to reflect our more recent work. Another high priority reason to redesign the site was to improve our search rankings. Our site was contained entirely within Flash and none of its content was visible to the search engines. Back then a search for “PJA” would have a user believe that we didn’t exist.

We decided that one requirement for the site was to improve the visibility of our content at a number of levels. 1) Content: Move the text-based content out of flash and into HTML. 2) Infrastructure: Use search-engine friendly coding best-practices. and 3) Linking: Monitor and improve the quality of our inbound links. We also launched a modest Google AdWords campaign to supplement our search visibility while the organic search results improved.

It’s been about 10 months since we launched the redesigned site and a Google search on “PJA” puts us on the first page of the organic search results. A number of additional factors contributed to the improved search ranking. Links from the Complex Brands blog and the BtoB agency of the year award seemed to really help us. Surprisingly, links from LinkedIn appear to factor into the improvements as well.

One of the lessons we’ve learned over the years is that a top-ten search ranking is the result of ongoing efforts that takes place on many fronts. The primary front is content - analyzing our stats suggests that a combination of timeliness, quality, and focus drive a lot of the traffic that improves a site’s search rankings. It’s something to remember as 2007 gets going and marketers try to decide where to put their efforts.

Incidentally we’re getting ready to relaunch an improved version of our site. We use Flash throughout the site, but all our content continues to be visible to the search engines.

This from Ryan Carson, as quoted in Nicholas Carr’s (talk about contrarian voices) blog:

“I’m a fairly typical Web citizen. I’m 28, married, make a reasonable wage, own a house and I have a few close friends. you’d think I’d be a web app company’s dream, but I’m not. How come? I’d love to add friends to my Flickr account, add my links to del.icio.us, browse digg for the latest stories, costomize the content of my Netvibes home page, and build a MySpace page. But you know what? I don’t have time and you don’t either.”

Thank you, Ryan Carson for airing our dirty little secret.
It is easy enough to believe, in the warm cocoon of the marketing profession, that the world has been upended. That people have reorganized their lives around Web 2.0. But it isn’t true for us as consumers, nor is it true for our BtoB clients. For most of the world (think of the consumers of our clients’ products and services), Flickr, Frapper, and Folksonomies exist–barely–as words they feel guilty for not knowing more about.

I don’t want to overstate the point. The fundamental promises of Web 2.0–the internet-enabled conversation, the democratization of culture and media (Stanford Law Professor and Creative Commons Chair Lawrence Lessig calls it the advent of read/write culture, which I love)–are real. And my agency is committed to delivering marketing innovation to brands that are defined by innovation, so I have no interest in standing on the sidelines.

The principle is to be where your audience is, and most of them are right with Ryan Carson. Which is to say, paying attention to these trends, sampling some of the tools and channels, even committing to a few of the most useful. LinkedIn (as Ryan notes) is a great example of a social media tool that has tipped from cool to core. It was an early (launched in 2003) Web 2.0 mover, and has had the time to build trust and scale. I for one ignored LinkedIn invitations for years, skeptical (like Grouch Marx) of any club that would have someone like me as a member. Today, there are over 8 million LinkedIn members, more than enough nodes to make it a useful network for any business person.

Bottom line? Social media channels should be seen as an important extension to an integrated communications strategy, not as a replacement for that strategy.

Bloggers need to get out more. That’s my theory, anyway.

This whole movement of “social media” has truly taken hold, but as I look around (at the airport, in public settings, and even at myself) I see an overdependence on the keyboard. The completely mobile nature of our electronic devices, coupled with technology and software that is more user-friendly than ever, is colluding to make us - ironically - more isolated from human contact than ever.

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