The Marketing Technology Blog

I haven’t ever done a ‘head to head’ comparison of a blog post written with a date and one without a displayed date. Over at DoshDosh, I noticed that they have dates on comments, but the date is no where to be found in the post itself. I believe this is a better approach than my blog, where I have the date very evident in both the URL and with a date graphic. I just can’t turn the clock back now without doing a lot of work!

Business and technology moves at such a rapid speed that a blog post that is one year old may no longer be applicable today. If I see a few blog posts on a topic, I’ll often select the freshest date in the pack and ignore the others.

Page Freshness and Search Engines

Surely there are many others that are doing this as well, which I believe is evidenced in search results. Search Google Blogsearch and the results are sorted in reverse chronological order. Even within Google, I often notice that newer articles are nearer the top of the results. I’ve also noticed other bloggers who often ‘republish’ content - 2 articles almost exactly the same but one published recently. Although the content is nearly identical, the newer article appears near the top!

Page Freshness due to Commenting

I can not believe it’s a coincidence that my most popular posts on my blog are ones that have a consistent chain of comments. User generated content, like comments, ‘refresh’ a blog post by causing a content change that the search engines then reindex. In short, comments keep your content ‘fresh’ to both readers and to the search engines.

Commenting Services kill your Freshness

There’s quite a buzz on the few commenting services out on the market that are making quite an impact. Understanding these technologies is important, though!

Notice that when a User makes a request for your page (B), the user’s browser makes a request for the page content and then an additional request for the comment content. It’s pretty seamless. In fact, if you’ve got a large conversation, it’s quite nice since the comments load after the page via JavaScript (aka client-side). The browser puts the pieces together!

The problem is that a Search Bot, the programmatic engines of the search engines, is not a browser! The Search Bot will make the request (D) for your page and that’s where it stops. Regardless of how much great content or fresh content is being added via the comments, the Search Engine is oblivious since it never requests that information. Your page is stale and forgotten.

There is Hope!

These services are incredibly robust and fun to use, so I’m not knocking them altogether. Personally, I simply don’t believe that the features of these systems outweigh the benefits of user-generated content and search engine optimization. The fix is to develop server-side Application Programming Interfaces for these services (F). This way, my web server can still display the comments for a user OR search engine and my site will benefit from it.

With a handful of these services on the market already, you have to ask yourself:

how do you control and manage the ton of your content that they own?

If they go out of business, how do you recover that information? If you decide to leave their service how do you recover that content? It could get ugly!

I’m a Software as a Service professional, so I do believe in the benefits of third party applications like this for managing processes more efficiently. In this case, I want to ensure that I benefit fully from comments made on my blog, though! If they go server-side, I may give switching over some thought, but until then I’m steering clear.

Some folks don’t realize it, but Wordpress has integrated the ability to publish other feeds with some out of the box features. I’ve written in the past on how to publish a blog’s feed to give a boost to a site’s keyword density for improved search engine optimization - but this is how to do it right within Wordpress.

Wordpress has embedded Magpie and RSS Caching within its available functions:

• fetch_rss — retrieve an RSS feed from a URL with automatic caching (included in rss_functions.php)
• wp_rss — retrieve and display an RSS feed as an unordered list (included in rss_functions.php)
• get_rss — retrieve and display an RSS feed as a list (ordering optional) (included in rss_functions.php)

IMO, the first method is the most useful because of the automatic caching. If you’d like to, for example, add a

<h2><?php _e(‘Social Media Events’); ?></h2>
<?php // Get RSS Feed(s)
include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . ‘/rss.php’);
$rss = fetch_rss(‘http://eventful.com/rss/events/?q=%22social%20media%22&location_type=&location_id=&l=Worldwide’);
$maxitems = 5;
$items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, $maxitems);
?>

<ul>
<?php if (empty($items)) echo ‘<li>No items</li>’;
else
foreach ( $items as $item ) : ?>
<li><a href=’<?php echo $item['link']; ?>‘ 
title=’<?php echo $item['title']; ?>‘>
<?php echo $item['title']; ?>
</a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

Edit your Wordpress template (Design > Theme Editor) and place the code above in your sidebar or on an events page. That’s it - now you have a live feed of events in your sidebar that you never have to update! This can really come in handy. I’ve done just that at I Choose Indy!, where I’ve published the Event feed from Smaller Indiana.

For more advanced users, you can put this in your single page theme and, perhaps, enter a search term as a Custom Field to add other bloggers’ posts on the same topics.

Three companies that I’m closely aligned with have been nominated as finalists for Indiana’s Mira Awards:

• ExactTarget - no doubt with it’s growth and fantastic leadership that this company will be a a worthy recipient of the award. There are pieces of ExactTarget’s system that simply defy the laws of physics on how quickly they can produce and send emails. I loved the 2 and a half years I worked for ExactTarget!

  On Monday, I had the pleasure of stopping by and chatting with Scott Dorsey, President of ExactTarget, and it was as if I had never left. He was energized, optimistic, and always smiling. That he took the time out to see me is such a testament to how good a friend and mentor he’s become.

  With my new position at Patronpath, I still get to work with ExactTarget quite a bit. Once we’re fully up with one of our clients, we’ll have ExactTarget’s largest Enterprise account up and running. For that account, ExactTarget developed a custom report for us so we could send emails on behalf of territory representatives and provide the representatives with a report of what their client’s interests were based on their click-throughs.

  It’s great having old team mates at ExactTarget as well, since they’re receptive to my feedback. Having been a product manager there and then moving back to the role of customer is a pretty valuable commodity. (I wish I was able to purchase my options before I lost them!)

  We also have an Agency account with ExactTarget and have a powerful, automated integration for restaurants. On a nightly basis, with no interaction from the restaurant we send out any one of ten or so campaigns - birthday, anniversary, no interaction for X days, purchases in excess of X dollars, etc. It’s a fantastic retention mechanism for restaurants.

  And, working with the 2012 Super Bowl Committee, I’m developing a Wordpress plugin for automated subscriptions from a Wordpress blog through ExactTarget. It’s about 80% complete right now - I’m just working on trying to automate the cron work.

• Compendium Blogware - When Chris Baggott was still at ExactTarget, we started to see an opportunity for blogging applications to really harness content and provide a much better targeting for Search Engine Optimization.

  With my son starting at IUPUI, I couldn’t risk jumping on board Compendium when Chris asked. It may have been one of my biggest blunders. With much angst and even a little jealousy, I had to sit and watch Chris and Ali Sales take Compendium to market! Note: Ali Sales was also instrumental in ExactTarget and ChaCha’s startup histories… ChaCha is also nominated!

  I’m really proud to have been in those very first Saturday Starbucks meetings where we developed the business case, though!

  Here’s an early interview of Chris speaking about Compendium:
  

  Compendium is doing a second round of funding now and is growing very rapidly. The combination of Search Engines and the efficiency of developing a process for corporations to implement blogging is hot right now and Compendium is at the forefront. I stopped by with Chris a few weeks ago and threw him a couple more ideas for his product.

  Chris has been a great mentor to me and Ali has been an inspirational President… they have implemented my own Agency version that I’ll be launching soon. If you’re interested in Compendium, please connect with me directly and I can let you know, “Why not just use [Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, etc.]. Or you can sign up for Compendium’s Newsletter (but be sure to put me in the reference!) and win a free iPod Touch.

• Patronpath - Marketing and Ecommerce for the Restaurant Industry - last but not least is my current employer. Patronpath is experiencing triple-digit growth right now. As restaurants need to squeeze their wallets due to increased prices and reduced dine-out numbers, the only way to grow their business is to get a robust take-out or delivery business.

  Online Ordering has grown some of our customers directly out of the red and into the black. Though our core, we pay a lot of attention to ensuring our clients utilize good search engine optimization and great site development. It’s not enough to have online ordering, you have to find the online ordering - a point that most of our competition has missed.

  In the last 8 months we’ve integrated 4 different POS systems, a robust callcenter integration, redesigned our interface to reduce abandonment rates and implemented a turnkey national email newsletter for one of our partners (mentioned above in our ExactTarget Enterprise implementation). In one show of our muscle, a major chain requested a feature of our system that we implemented over a single weekend. That same feature had taken the competition months to develop. We’ve got a lot more in development right now and we’re moving into 2008 with barrels blazing!

  Patronpath is aggressively growing and I’m aggressively pushing automation and (will soon be) leveraging a state of the art virtualized environment in Bluelock to keep up. We’ve got an ace development partner who has implemented some of the largest ecommerce companies on the globe (internationally) and I’m confident that by 2009, we’ll be a major force in the industry. The fact is that we know how marketing works, how ecommerce works, and how restaurants work - and the competition doesn’t.

  We’ve also recently added Marty Bird to the mix. I think Marty pulled 60% of my workload off of me the day he walked in the door and it’s been an incredible pleasure to work with him. His continuous drive for improvement and strategy is exactly what we need at this point in Patronpath!

  Note: Ignore the Patronpath site - we’ve got a new one coming this month!

I have to add that I’m not the only connection between these three companies. You’ll notice that each company has exceptional branding - thanks to Kristian Andersen and team. Kristian is an amazing guy and runs a fantastic company that is able to execute like no other agency or consultancy I’ve ever worked with. Kristian helps small companies get big, and he’s assembled an incredible team here locally to do it. He’s a good friend as well.

Click through for the following video:

Perhaps the best part of this video is that the advice is fantastic - both detailed and accurate!

I found a few more videos at Contract Worker, and there are even more videos at Chuck’s YouTube channel. As well, check out Chuck’s blog!