1. If you invest your time heavily in social media the by product is that you spend a lot of your time being prevented from getting things done. It is the ultimate distractor.

2. When used effectively, social media provides fantastic support networks. However, rarely are the best networks open or public.

3. Social media is a weak substitute for real life relationships. However, it is effective in ice breaking and maintaining relationships.

4. Most of the debate in social media is futile; you will spend your time in round about arguments where not a lot can be clarified – I highly recommend staying away from any kind of debate on Twitter.

5. If you have a contentious point to make, reply less frequently to contentious replies – you’ll more than likely save time and energy.

6. Thanking people that did something good for you is always worth it. Don’t thank people who are looking for it.

7. For newcomers, social media is the best channel for being heard – SEO, TV, whatever media – I think social media wins because it can gain you traction with real people quicker than other methods.

8. Never start pursuing social media goals without something solid to say. Most often, what’s said is best outside social media.

9. Influence scoring is not as meaningless as it’s made out to be. Okay, what do the numbers really mean? But a number does give you something to improve on. In September last year, with no followers and no one knowing who I was, Klout score gave me some point of reference for how I was doing.

10. Ultimately forming networks will give you tremendous opportunity to exchange ideas and be given new opportunities. If you work in digital, investing your time in building networks is absolutely worth it.

Ten Simple Truths I Found in Social Media is a post from James Carson's Social Search

Slides 13-14, Everything’s Better With Fans, Rand Fishkin. Search Love 2011
Available to purchase at the Distilled Store.

Image available at http://minus.com/mxZ5HpLwm/1f

See also: http://yfrog.com/g0slip. A long post on SEO rebranding is available at: The Brand of SEO and the Trend of Inbound Marketing. I actually think SEO has an image problem, and Rand does a great job explaining that, but that’s neither here nor there at to whether we need to replace the term.

Author’s Note: I hope people can see that this is just a bit of fun; I have a lot of respect for Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah, Rand Fishkin and Seth Godin. Perhaps the first and last parts of the graphic seem cynical, and trivializes the thought put into the concept – I doubt Dharmesh and Brian ever did literally think like that – but I do want to entertain people as well as inform.

I was mainly considering new ways of presenting content, and was particularly drawn to the comics at The Oatmeal. But I didn’t really have a topic to do it justice, until I thought of my earlier post around rejecting Inbound Marketing. Here was a topic I’ve read a lot about and I new a range of points of view. Most of all, I thought I’d be able to do it in a humorous way. I was also slightly amazed by the reaction to infographics such as Hubspot’s History of Marketing, which is really rather biased. I like design, and haven’t done a graphic on this scale before, but thought I could do it justice.

I have read all the books mentioned in the post and watched many of Rand’s presentations (which while I don’t think are always correct, I have always found inspiring). I think inbound marketing is a useful book, but I’m not sure it’s a useful addition to the marketing lexicon. The big issue is explained in the graphic – it’s divisive, and its adoption will create a divide. I’ve had a few defensive reactions to earlier posts from Hub Spotters… (unfortunately in some cases it was patently obvious they didn’t read or understand the message of the post before leaving comments – just see this Google+ thread) but what they seem to want to do is talk about the apparent ‘proof’ that ‘inbound is clearly the better buy and its kicking the crap out of Outbound..’ I think this is a misinformed point of view.

I’m also very keen for people not just to believe whatever thought leaders say – while they are often convincing, there are always other ways of looking at it. Steve Harrison’s book is particularly interesting in this context.

Finally, I’ll also say that I’ve been working in SEO, social media and online content since my career started. These are entirely ‘inbound’ disciplines. I like it. But just because I like it doesn’t mean it’s better than something else. We have an obsession in the web to throw out the old and bring in the new. Like with all marketing, this way of thinking doesn’t add up to common sense.

Mo Books, Mo Products: An Alternative View on Inbound Marketing is a post from James Carson's Social Search

The reason I’m writing this is to counter posts such as Why I don’t believe authors are the future (which I actually rather enjoyed as an alternative point of view) and variants on this theme. I think it’s fair enough to have an opinion about the subject, but here’s why debating online authors is a moot point, and something we should simply forget about:

Online Identity is Serious

Online identity is a serious topic and social services are becoming identity cards. More and more stuff is going to be favoured if it is properly identifiable. This is clearly expressed in Eric Schimdt’s views. My web experienced is greatly enhanced through online identification such as Facebook Connect. Not everyone thinks that way (and those people normally have big voices in the Twitter loving media) but over 1 billion people are on networks, and that number is growing. I don’t really believe people care as much as the media suggest about web privacy. Most people are totally passive about it. For an interesting counter view to online identity, here’s a great podcast with 4chan founder Chris Poole.

There’s Nothing Wrong with Easy

Authorship is so easy to set up. Who cares if it doesn’t have a major effect right away? You’re going to spend minimal development time (particularly on WordPress) setting it up.

It Already Exists

Authorship is a small enhancement to what should already exist on sites – author profiles. A lot of news sites have them without markup simply so readers can build a rapport with who is writing stuff. Adding social elements to these profiles can only build up social rapport. Also, Google patented the system 5 years ago…

Complete Overhype!

It’s getting ludicrously overhyped. I know we like to talk about slight changes in SEO as if the Russians are marching through Berlin, but the reality is the algorithmic changes of this simple markup are a long way off. I would consider 18 months for a noticeable effect – I could be wrong, but it’s taken 6 for Google to even recognise the markup – not to mention it’s changed the goalposts FIVE times! Adoption rates are not high, and as I considered in my second ever post, the rollout won’t be that easy. For starters, currently it assumes that all authors sign up to Google+, which is nonsensical. If this doesn’t change, it will take absolutely ages for it to have any effect – because adoption rates of Google+ aren’t that big compared to other services (20% of Facebook usage at best). It would take ages for Google+ to usurp Facebook. If it ever does.

It Only Effects Authored Pages… Or Does It?

People are inevitably (as Why I don’t believe authors are the future does) going to say that authorship won’t effect homepages, product pages etc. Okay – if you’re a tricycle selling website, it would be ludicrous to have your product pages to be written up by a prize winning journalist so your site can rank. Not to mention the whole scheme makes no sense – is the technology section of the Argos catalogue written by Charles Arthur? Nope. However, it’s not always about ‘who’ has written the content, rather who has endorsed that content. If you sold trikes and your product pages were endorsed by a journalist from askamum, that would probably have an effect.

Google is a Machine

Finally – Google is a machine, created by people. We are not quite at the days of Skynet, or iRobot or anything else. If you couldn’t beat a machine through some sort of loophole, I think we’d be in a weird place. Yes, you will inevitably be able to game author rank, I just don’t happen to think focusing on gaming things is ever a long term strategy.

Why I Believe Debating Authors is Totally Moot (Like Most SEO Debates) is a post from James Carson's Social Search

1. If we think about search rankings, they’re really quite anonymous. Before search plus your world, there aren’t really any people signals alongside rankings. While an SEO know why results are as they are, but it’s not so easy for users to find this out. In short, my housemate Tom doesn’t know where his rankings come from, and he doesn’t care.

2. What’s wrong with that? Well, because Google over relies on links in its PageRank algorithm, it’s been rather too easy to game the system. It’s all very possible for an SEO to buy links that enhance their ranking, but very difficult for Google to police. SEO as an industry has been playing a sort of cat and mouse game with Google ever since both existed.

3. There are new factors on the algorithm such as social shares that can enhance ranking, but as yet, they haven’t added all that much weight. Link building is far from dead, and pursuing social shares instead of links is like a rush for Fools Gold. But Google needs to do more to make its results of higher quality

4. The major step in 2011 was to add Google Panda, which knocked out sites of largely lower quality scores. The update took particular dislike to user generated content that filled up websites, and was effectively a reaction against the cult of the amateur that was often replacing quality journalism in search results. – particularly in the long tail.

5. The next natural step is to introduce the authority of particular authors. Google patented Agent Rank as early as 2007 – here’s patent blogger Bill Slawski talking about the effect this could have. Content creators could be given reputation scores, which could influence the rankings of page where their content appears, or which they endorse.

6. With this step, we enter a phase where there are additional factors in the algorithm (thanks to Simon Penson for this slide). It goes by the name Agent, Trust or Author rank, but it’s all largely the same. Who wrote it (and what their history of) + traditional PageRank + who shared it (each with their own score) is a simplification of how things might be in the future.

7. So how does Google measure this? A Google profile effectively works as your online ID card. A HTML5 snippet informs Google that an author has written a particular post via the Google profile. This profile then links back to the homepage of the site and Google possibly acknowledges the PageRank of the post + your face might show up on the SERPs.

8. Implementing is dead easy. On single author WordPress sites you can just link your author name to your Google+ profile. Just include ?rel=author and add a + to the anchor. You can edit the theme editor index.php and single.php files to switch out with a HTML link. You then link back to your blog from Google Plus. Test it out with the rich snipper tool.

9. For sites with multiple authors Google says the best way is to verify by email on every page. I don’t really want my journalists getting hustled, so I copied Search Engine Land’s implementation. This links the rel=”author” to an author profile on a site, then this links through to Google+ using rel=”me” markup.

10. Grazia Daily gets a good amount of traffic and I wanted to see if having an author’s pic on a search result would make any difference. Basically, it’s really difficult to tell at this stage. The best article I found had a really lame data set. It’s probably a good thing – Tom Anthony has built a tool called SERP Turkey if you want to test it out, but I just use my intuition.

11. But that’s not all. There could be an author ID to every action an author takes – they could author an article, interview someone in a video, take pictures and write comments. All of these things could be given particular weight, and they could all gain more weight if shared or linked to. For instance, I reckon we’ll soon see a Google comment system with plus one integration.

12. The technology to measure author rank effectively already exists. Chartbeat and Parse.ly Dash are tools that can rank authors according to metrics such as pageviews and social shares. Tom Antony (again) has also built an author ranking tool. All of this contributes to measuring journalism – and authorship gets rather more competitive.

13. Basically authors will create value through the system. If you had the ghost of Joseph Pullitzer writing for you (and he had a Google+ profile), you’d probably get a higher authority score than Katie Price’s forays into journalism. Authors build their own authority, and this means they create value for themselves and become transferable.

14. Authors will become more authoritative at the verticals that they are specialists in. For instance, if you wrote for Grazia, you’d hopefully become more authoritative in fashion, not football. What’s important is that it’s hard to build up authority, but easy to lose. If you start giving irrelevant endorsements outside your vertical, you’ll likely lose it.

15. Could you game the system? Possibly. Using ‘personas’ you could use fake profiles to build up authority in certain niches, but it’s my reckoning that if they became anywhere near popular you’d get found out. There’s a fair amount of authentication involved in this system, and it’s possible that content strategy will need to move inhouse.

16. On the second part of the ‘don’t be evil’ school of thinking, the new system could also mean that piracy won’t be quite as virulent as it currently is. An author might be seen as the creator of a piece of content, and once recorded it becomes incredibly difficult to rip. SOPA clearly wasn’t such a great idea – but this is.

17. It’s a hard time to be a journalist, but thankfully due to Google Panda (yes, I said that) and authorship, perhaps the tides are turning and the Demand Media’s and Mahalo’s of the world need to think about recruiting top notch journalists rather than amateurs. If you’re getting knock off copy to spin articles, it might be time to reconsider.

18. To have a serious effect, I’d expect this to take around 18 months. Authorship markup is less than a year old, and it’s not that widely adopted. Additionally, Google has only just levelled the playing field and allowed everyone’s snippets to show up. It’ll take a while for Google to properly understand the authority – and there’s even a chance it will ditch it!

19. But why not do it now? It’s easy to implement. I’ve done it across four sites. Same brief every time, and generally content management systems can make the changes fairly easily. If you’re using WordPress, I’d imagine turnaround time to be half an hour. The biggest pain will be in your writing staff or client setting up Google+ profiles (I’ve found!)

20. And I think you should do it because search results already look like this on Google.com, and it’ll be coming to a SERP near you soon. Google+ (and hopefully other social networks) will begin to influence search results and make them really rather unfamiliar to the SERPs we know. This means your social, search and content strategies need to work together – it’s an integrated future.

The reaction was great – it seems like people certainly enjoyed it:

After party was insane. I’m so hungover (still)

I Believe that Authors are the Future – BrightonSEO Presentation is a post from James Carson's Social Search

Ideally I’m looking for hungry 2nd or 3rd jobbers who are looking for a role with great independence and flexibility, to work on some of the most widely respected publishing brands in the world. We’re not looking for a super star who has done it all before. We want people who are ambitious, but can grow into a role.

Here are the job specs:

• SEO Executive
• Digital-Analyst

Projected salaries for the roles are £25-35k dependent on experience. We just want good people, with the ability to get things done. We are based Covent Garden in London.

Please tweet me @mrjamescarson or send me a mail to james.carson@bauermedia.co.uk.

NO RECRUITMENT AGENCIES – PLEASE DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME

Bauer Lifestyle are recruiting an SEO Executive and Web Analyst – let me know if interested! is a post from James Carson's Social Search

Not only has it remained, but established media continues to grow – not diminish! Last year the UK watched a record average of 28 hours a week. It is true that print has been fighting decline since the growth of ‘Web 2.0’ (another buzzword that has been replaced by ‘Social Media’), but broadcast is thriving. How on earth can what funds the majority of TV viewing in Britain – interruptive advertising – be dead as Godin has written on numerous occasions?

Seth Godin is a Very Rich Man

It quickly dawned on me that Seth Godin was made a very rich man via the Internet. Yahoo! Paid $30million for his company YoYodyne and he became VP of Direct Marketing at one of the web’s biggest companies. His form of Permission Marketing made him wealthy, and in marketing circles, famous. He is likely to support an agenda that made him rich, because it worked for him, and now his agenda makes him even wealthier as people continue to buy his books. I’m quite a big fan of Seth’s – without reading four of his books, I don’t think I’d have quite so much belief in trying to change things – but stating ‘old marketing is dead’ is simply flawed. As Steve Harrison notes in his excellent How to do Better Creative Work, Godin mistook a broken discipline for bad execution. ‘Interruptive advertising’, as Godin puts it, relies on good ideas. Godin never makes this point – he just says it’s a wasteful media buy.

HubSpot is Carrying the Inbound Fire

The people carrying Godin’s fire are many, but the people I come across the most are the founders of HubSpot – Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan. This is mostly because their overview of Inbound Marketing is regularly quoted by Rand Fishkin (indeed I first the term first from him), and I’ve followed him since I started in the game.

Note: Inbound Marketing has a quote by Seth Godin on the cover, and he’s second on an acknowledgements list that includes a host of people who have similar mantras.

Fundamentally, Inbound Marketing is a fairly basic book. It touches on a broad subject range and can’t do all the disciplines mentioned that much justice. Most of its concepts (they’re not ideas, although grouping them is) are easily found elsewhere (read The One to One Future or The Cluetrain Manifesto for deeper thoughts into how the web can work). Unlike Godin, they don’t make the point that established media is dead. However, much in the same vein, their entire first chapter is devoted to ‘outbound’ tactics (those paid ones) being expensively wasteful against ‘inbound’ ones. They pretty much say outbound is dead without saying it directly.

Rand Fishkin and SeoMoz Killed it for Me (The Irony)

To be honest, I really enjoyed the overall message of Inbound Marketing and couldn’t recommend it more for small business owners. However, I’ve realised that the ‘outbound’ rejection is flawed, and that ‘inbound’ actually is not the path of integration that I think digital marketing needs to follow. Unfortunately Rand Fishkin nailed this on the head for me on two occasions:

• 1 Everything’s Easier with Fans

The first was at his ‘Everything’s Easier with Fans’ at last year’s Search Love conference – while typically well delivered, it’s fundamental rejection of ‘outbound’ media, in favour of building communities doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for everyone. For the first time, I really didn’t believe in Rand’s argument. What if you sell toothpaste? Or kitchen supplies? Sure you could build a community around those products, but my guess it would be a pretty small one. Books like Groundswell point out a range of online communities that have worked, but no one pointed out the thousands of attempts that have failed. The web is littered with spam filled graveyards, born out of dreams for communities.

• 2 SEO Has an Image Problem

The second death knell to my faith in inbound came from Rand two weeks ago in his blog The Brand of SEO and the Trend of Inbound Marketing. The post clearly drummed up a lot of debate – and it became apparent that a lot of people in SEO want to reject the mantra of ‘inbound’ for a number of reasons (read the comments for the onslaught). For instance:

• Inbound is just ‘digital marketing’ – it’s another buzzword that will confuse people.
• I’m tired of this holistic view of SEO – my clients pay for rankings.
• We’ve lost our identity!

I doubt many people who reject the term have read the book, but I have begun to feel the sentiment. Those who define themselves as ‘SEO’ have a right to feel cheesed off by thought leaders redefining their role for them, when it might not be how they want to play the game with clients.

I’ve got to say, I agree with Rand’s sentiment on the post – what he puts forth is difficult to argue with in this context. SEO has an image problem.

If you were an alien visiting from space and read enough blogs, you could make the conclusion that SEO is a spam riddled mess of low quality link farms created by snake oil salesman.

That’s hyperbole from within our own industry talking.

But Rand went on Twitter to defend himself and I had to put it to him that outbound methods can contribute to inbound. While Brian Halligan later contributed that he felt this was possible, Rand remained sceptical.

So I rejected inbound for the summarised reasons below:

Five Reasons Why I’ve Rejected Inbound:

• It is largely based around the utopian sentiment similar to The Cluetrain Manifesto and Permission Marketing. Both of these make hyperbole filled rejections of so called ‘traditional’ methods to promote a new agenda.
• Its promoters aim at rejecting paid for ‘interruption marketing’ – indeed Rand bundled interruptive media with spam in this diagram. That just doesn’t ring true.
• ‘Inbound marketing’ does not do a good job in considering markets. It works in selling software to digital natives for Halligan, Shah and Fishkin –‘it worked for me so it’ll work for you.’ It won’t have quite the same effect on my non digital dad.
• The term is a marketing vehicle in itself for HubSpot. Its continued adoption leads to greater fame for a commercial company.
• It does not account for the economies of scale involved in mass media. If there is a good idea executed on multiple sources of paid media, sales often sky rocket.

The Key One: Inbound’s Hyperbole Will Lead to Integration Failure

Most unfortunately, Inbound fails to comprehend the required merging of online and offline into data driven integrated marketing departments, or the integration of media sources. In many companies digital continues to exist as a separate entity to established (outbound, offline, traditional, whatever) marketing and operates in a silo. Inbound does nothing to consolidate the two. I thought it did, and have even created a model that felt could lead to proper integration. However, I think it is a mistake to carry on this mantra since Inbound fundamentally rejects paid media, and thus integration.

Oh Dear… SEO has an Image Problem and Inbound Doesn’t Work

I now leave myself with an identity crisis. I can’t call myself an SEO because that’s not the crux of what I do. I think people who work in SEO can still call themselves SEOs if they wish to – that’s fine – but I don’t think it’ll ever shake the image problem. I can’t call myself an Inbound Marketer because the mantra rejects paid media, which I need to integrate into for my message to be more effective. So what am I?

Well I’m a marketer. I feel pretty integrated already. It’s that simple.

Further Reading

• How and Why SEOs Need to Change – State of Search @paddymoogan
• Inbound Marketing and SEO – Seize Opportunity or Resist Change - Search Engine Watch @andybetts1
• Future of SEO: Change Convergence Collaboration - Search Engine Watch @andybetts1
• Everything’s Easier with Fans – summary of @randfish presentation
• The Brand of SEO and the Trend of Inbound Marketing – SeoMoz @randfish

Thought Leaders and Failures of Digital Integration: Why I’m Rejecting Inbound Marketing is a post from James Carson's Social Search

• More male Pinterest users in UK than female: infographic (Econsultancy)
• Pinterest: US vs. UK users (we are social)
• Pinterest Plays To Different Audiences In The U.S. And UK [Infographic]

What surprises me is the unquestioning tone of the blogs. Rather than check the data vs. other sources, the source is not even quoted. You have to scroll to the end of the graphic to see that it was sourced from Google Ad Planner by Visual.ly. I wouldn’t use Ad Planner myself for doing an accurate audience profile. Instead I’d choose Nielsen, which is currently the UKOM standard for advertisers. The most conflicting stat is that the dominant gender using the service is indeed women, being 70% of the audience during December 2011.

So here’s the graphic:

One particularly interesting facet of the data from Ad Planner is that ‘Sites also visited’ include:

• Distilled.net
• Stateofsearch.com
• Socialmediaexaminer.com

Evidently, digital marketers are loving the site. They probably are all signed into Google at the same time.

I’d rather go with the UKOM data though – if those are the sites also visited, then Google must be running off a pretty poor sample.

So, all those posts that stated that more users of Pinterest in the UK are sadly mistaken. It’s evidence that even the most ‘authoritative’ of sites and even social media agencies can be duped by quick data as long as it looks nice.

I guess the lesson learned here is: don’t believe the hype, particularly when it’s in an infographic!

Lies, Damned Lies & Pinterest #2: Infographic Claims Pinterest Has Higher UK Male Audience Demographic through Using Google Ad Planner Data is a post from James Carson's Social Search

I tweeted it was fantasy because if Pinterest really had become the top traffic driver over Facebook and Twitter (combined in some instances, according to the post), then the social media teams at said magazines must have been doing something severely wrong.

Other than the huge audiences of Facebook and Twitter, I didn’t really have any data to back up my claims. While researching another article (which isn’t yet published) I discovered that my suppositions were almost certainly correct. Indeed the claims that Pinterest drives more traffic to marthastewartsweddings.com, mathastewart.com than Twitter and Facebook combined are incredibly unlikely, especially when you consider the total reach of Martha Stewart on those two networks:

• Martha Stewart Living on Facebook – 360,000 Likes
• Martha Stewart Wedding on Facebook – 26,000 Likes
• Martha Stewart on Twitter – 2,472,000 Followers
• Martha Stewart Living on Twitter – 28,000 Followers
• Martha Stewart Weddings on Twitter – 51,000 Followers

That gives the Martha Stewart brand a total reach on the two largest social networks at 2,937,000. On Pinterest, there are three profiles that can be identified as similar to the ones above:

• Martha Stewart on Pinterest – 22,000 followers.
• Martha Stewart Living on Pinterest – 12,000 followers.
• Martha Stewart Weddings on Pinterest – 8,000 followers.

A grand total of 42,000. If Pinterest really was driving more traffic than Facebook and Twitter, there is something going seriously wrong with Martha Stewart’s ability to drive traffic from the two most popular social networks. For a start, Martha Stewart on Twitter could probably drive 50,000 referrals to her website in just a couple of links. Alas, Mashable also don’t disclose where they found their data.

Of course, Pinterest traffic isn’t only driven through official profiles; it’s also driven by the community through other people pinning images and repining. However, even then it would be a struggle to surpass Facebook and Twitter for traffic referral – the scale just isn’t really there. If you’re really referring more people from Pinterest than you are from Facebook, then I’d seriously recommend you rethink your social strategy.

I guess the lesson to learn here is: don’t believe the hype, particularly when it’s on Mashable and they don’t disclose their data!

Lies, Damned Lies and Pinterest #1: How Mashable Got Their Pinterest Referral Traffic Stats All Wrong is a post from James Carson's Social Search

I considered that Think Visibilty was fairly different from normal conferences – quite a few people were largely there to have fun rather than learn too much, so I wanted to do something different as well. People saying stuff is dead gets on my nerves, but it’s a topic that there’s little opposition to, so I thought I’d do that. The main thing I wanted to get right was to balance the level of humour with substance, so as well as plenty of jokes (at the expense of the audience, Steve Jobs and Rand Fishkin) I put in plenty of data and insight. It wasn’t exactly the most actionable talk you could see, but I think it served its purpose in entertaining and informing, and it was hugely enjoyable to deliver when you get laughs from the crowd. Hopefully, the audience would have gained some insight into how to consider ‘is dead thinking’ and how to integrate SEO into a marketing strategy.

So, here is the slide deck:

Response

Response to the talk was by far the best I’ve had so far, and it would seem that the relatively long hours tackling a fairly difficult topic and practicing the lines paid off:

Good times. Thanks to Dom Hodges for giving me the opportunity – it was a brilliant event and a brilliant weekend.

Saying Stuff is Dead is Dead: My Think Visibility Presentation is a post from James Carson's Social Search

This model was created in 2008, and I’ve used it for a long time to consider the SEO process. However, I think it is now somewhat out of date. Inbound Marketing was coined in 2009, and things have changed significantly since then. Additionally, I feel there are three key flaws in the SEO Pyramid:

• It fragments departments such as social media and link building, which are now really one of the same thing.
• The pyramid only explains that the next step up is dependent on the one below. It does not visualise importance of the step or cost.
• Analytics is not present, even though it is crucial in SEO & Inbound Marketing.

Enter the Inbound Model

With that in mind, I created a new model called the Inbound Model which better comprehends the demands of inbound marketing on the digital marketer.

Outside of agencies, digital marketers are in a time famine as they ‘battle’ for resource against traditional departments (PR, Marketing etc). This is time poorly spent. Instead, they should look towards integrating. What the inbound model proposes is integration so time is more effectively spent, and various departments become the SEO process. In this approach, the role of the SEO is simply to oversee that the process is working smoothly. Technically, they will have to do very little of the execution.

The model comprises of four key ‘departments’, stacked on top of each other as follows:

If the departments were simple blocks stacked on top of each other, then this would suggest that you can take blocks out and the model wouldn’t suffer. However, this is not the case – the upward arrows show the dependencies of different departments.

The Importance of Analytics

Every department is reliant on analysis for efficiency. Without analysis, you cannot improve. Development requires analysis to ensure their changes have created better user behaviour, content requires analysis to see if anyone is engaging with the content and outreach needs analysis to measure the effectiveness of outward communication and link building.

Content is reliant on development for efficiency. Without development, a CMS system may become inefficient or be rendered obsolete. Content workers may also be reliant on certain technical skills to create web content such as apps.

Outreach is reliant on content, because you effectively can’t do outreach without content. If you have no content, what can you outreach?

Disciplines within Departments

Within each department, there are a number of ‘disciplines’ which should work in unison rather than being separated. These are explained below:

Exterior Department Integration

We can then consider which departments could possibly be effected by those outside of a central team or SEO remit, and how they could be integrated into the model to contribute. Once these are identified, these ‘exterior’ departments can be trained to become integrated. This drives central digital costs down, and creates a more joined up strategy. Below are some examples of job roles that can be integrated – development requires specialist skills, so it is usually not a candidate for ‘exterior’ integration.

Cost of Departments

Working out the cost of departments is the next step. You can work out the comparative spend on each department, and then visualise this through the size of the block. You could also do this through staff headcount in each department.

If there is weak spend in one department compared to one above it, the likelihood is your strategy will fall over. So it is imperative to measure comparative cost and effectiveness of each department.

Strong SEO Architecture Model

Imagine that you have completed the basic development phase of an SEO project. You have paid for contractors to come in and redeveloped the site and the job is complete. You will now want to lose some of the contractors, but scale up in content and outreach. The below is an example of a site with strong architecture that is in a content ‘phase’ – cutting costs on development but spending much more on content:

A Simpler and More Advanced Alternative

This is both a simplification and advance on the traditional SEO Pyramid.

A digital marketer’s activity should become more simplified if they think in departments covered, and they can get people from the wider business involved rather than SEO ‘specialists’ – although SEOs are well positioned to managed the process. If departments don’t score well in terms of cost/headcount, there is a business case for investment.

It is an advancement on the traditional model, because it more accurately outlines the dependencies that departments have, and also visualises cost.

I’ve also used it effectively to make investment cases in my own business – so it does have practical uses. Let me know what you think.

Understanding the Inbound Model: An Alternative to the Traditional SEO Pyramid is a post from James Carson's Social Search