BI Revolution

PageRank Matters
We love it when goofy stupid people say stupid things. But we hate it when friends who should know better say goofy stupid stuff. The other day at a lunch with SEOs and web marketing friends from around my Durham, NC home a friend who should know better said, "PageRank (PR) doesn't matter anymore". 

I pointed out that PR is one of the few FREE and universal metrics. I went on a bit of a rant about how any metric can be modeled into significance. The new PR is a valuable, universal (everyone is treated equally by Google more or less) and FREE metric capable of helping anyone's we marketing. 

This post discuses why PR is important and what THEIR (competitor) PR can teach you Google uses PR the way an instructor uses a pointer. They hold up and reward examples of what they want. If your competitor's have PR 2 to 4 points higher than you then emulate what they are doing.

Never stop at emulation. Once your site's "emulation" "cost of poker" feet are under it DISRUPT and reset your industry's deck. Emulation + disruption is one of the formulas teams I've managed made more than $30M in B2C commerce sales.

I paid for lunch to show my friend his momentary brain fart was okay (lol). M  

**** Added a correction from my friend Mark Traphagen. PR, at least what you can access with free tools, is DEAD. Mark recommends the paid tool we use (MOZ.com). Shouldn't be a huge surprise that FREE is gone. All great FREE things cost money now. We've used MOZ.com for customer work, but thought we could model with PRChecker too. Not so much as it turns out sadly. Appreciate Mark's note. M 

5 Cs of Great Web Analytics
* Combine.
* Comb.
* Copy.

* Crumble.
* Collaborate.

Combine
Web metrics never act alone so don't review them that way. Look at Traffic & Shares, Traffic & Money or Time On & Bounce. By combining metrics you see interrelationships better.

Comb
Inside of your metrics are secret fractals or patterns so meaningful they almost bite you. When I was a Director of Ecommerce we found the 80/20 rule existed in all data sets across all segments and no matter how small we cut the sample. This means a small % of any metric makes up the majority of the benefit and its your job to find those hidden fractals.

Copy
If a competitor has a great new metric copy it, steal it and improve on it. Share your improvements back out to the world so they too can be improve upon. No such thing as SECRETS anymore.

Crumble
Your website is in a constant ebb and flow. We like to say we build sand castles on the beach and the tide is always coming in. This means you can't get too connected to or in love with anything and that includes numbers and processes. You must exist in a constant state of creative destruction to win online so crumble any cherished notions and beloved processes in order to see what is happening NOW.

Collaborate
The more you share, collaborate and give the more you win online. Your CFO is going to complain about ROI and you should smile, nod and assure him or her you will work on it. The way you work on improving web marketing ROI is TO DO WEB MARKETING. Sounds circular and CATCH-22-like you say? Good you are beginning to get it :). M

Book by Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz about using data to build a better startup faster, part of the Lean Startup series with Eric Ries and Ash Maurya from O'Reilly

Marty Note
Reading Lean Analytics now and HIGHLY recommend it.

Klout, Context & Links
This post links to my G+ summary in prelude to my http://www.curatti.com blog post tonight. Here are some preliminary thoughts on the page of notes I took during Dixon Jones talk.

Links & The Real Value of Content
Dixon works at Majestic SEO (http://www.majesticseo.com/ ). Majestic is asking the right question - what is the value of a link. They've even created tools that help intelligently answer that question.

"Inbound links" as a measurement is clouded by "bot spam". In a great example of the power of the "flow" tool Dixon shared. Even more powerful was an example of Majestic SEO vs. two competitors. On a purely inbound link review Majestic doesn't win.

But are all of those links valuable? Value is contextual and any spammy ways of inflating inbound link numbers need to be discovered and factored out.

Once links are run through Majestic SEO's "trust flow" tool evaluating where links came from and the respective trustworthiness of sites sending links in Majestic wins the comparison.We finally have a tool to separate white and black hats.

Think of that for a second. If you were to simply use aggregate inbound links you would buy ads with Majestic's competition or, and this is worse, you might think the competition's inflated (probalby by spam) value is something you should buy.

Once the Majestic SEO tool separates wheat from chafe a more accurate and "influential" picture emerges. SEOs and Internet marketers know how to parse page spread, social following and inbound links to pierce the veil of most who spam, but, for an outsider, "most links" may translate into "most trusted".

There is the web's biggest rub. Since the web is an interconnected system discovering if real people who have real value are passionate about a site tool, or brand with metrics such as high inbound links or big pagespread (pages in Google) is the only way to make an informed decision UNTIL Majestic wrestled context and content to the ground.

Curagmai & Majestic
The reason our Startup Factory funded startup Curagami and Majestic fit together like Lego blocks is relationships between a site and its 1% Contributors, 9% Supporters and 90% readers. Curagami helps FIND the Contributors, Supporters and Readers and Majestic helps define each of member of those "tribes" by their CONTEXTUAL influence. I may not have high Klout and be irrelevant for a conversation about women's fashion, but be perfect to help discuss cycling (since I rode a bicycle across America in the summer of 2010). .

If the first job is to FIND Contributors, Supporters and Readers and the second is to ask them to JOIN with Contributors and Supporters high on the Ambassadors list then the 3rd job is to contextually empower advocates in each group. We know the future is about community and real people not bots are the building blocks of online community.

What Dixon shared today and Majestic SEO has been working hard on is helping marketers know what kind of ASK will work best for Jill, John and Bob. Jill might know women's fashion, pets and be a car mechanic in her spare time. John may know email marketing, gourmet cooking and wines. Bob may know finance and cycling.

Curagami helps find 'em & Majestic helps define 'em in order to create an ASK that works. Powerful and very cool tool since the future is about building community and not every Contributor, Supporter and Reader who visits your site is the same. As we begin to create "rich personas" thanks to tools such as Majestic and Curagami our content relevance will go up, and up and UP.

If you are thinking more content relevance = more LOVE and MONEY we agree :). M

You Are What You Measure
The old cliché is true - in content markeitng you are what you measure. This morning my friend Phil Buckley (@1918) shared a nice compliment on G+:

"I'm always impressed by the different ways +Martin W. Smith slices and dices his data to find the actionable nuggets."

Appreciate the compliment and thought I would share a view into how my content marketing brain works (scary I know LOL). This ScentTrail Marketing Post does two things. First it shares how I created the post Phil was referring to: Content Mentions Social Mentions Study (http://martinmartysmith.com/content-marketing-social-mentions-study/ ).

AND

The post shares 5 New Key Performance Indicators I use to watch our content marketing at Atlantic BT (and my personal brand content under the @ScentTrail label).

5 New Content Marketing KPIs
* Daily Mentions.
* Content Type.
* Tools.
* Top 10.
* Link Efficiency Index (LE().

Use these 5 new content marketing KPIs to know if, what kinds and what tools matter to your content marketing.

What about you? Do you have cool new content marketing metrics? Share them and I will curate in and share across my social net.

Thanks and happy Friday to my Scoop.it tribe :). M

Web Analytics for non Quants demystifies web metrics with simple questions, easy to understand ideas & proven lessons. Want to understand web metrics?

Marty Note
Driving home from Columbus today thought I would return to this post in a Khan Academy-like way.

Bad links can kill your website's hard-won authority, reputation & traffic. Use Google's disavow tool to protect your site's traffic from SEO bandits.

5 Ways To Avoid The Online Competition Trap
Never ceases to amaze me. Team +Curagami sees the Hatfields and McCoys squared off and fighting tooth and nail over nothing all the time. Here are 5 ways to avoid the Online Competition Trap (be sure to Read Mark Traphagen's excellent note in comments on the attached too):

* Use Google Adwords to discover REAL DEMAND for keywords (use exact an broad match too and if you really want to get depressed use "exact match" to see how few people are actually searching for that new widget you just created).
* Create something like our Curagami Keyword Efficiency Index (cKEI) to calculate where #blueoceans live (keywords or phrases with less competition but healthy search volume and YES these are getting harder and harder to find). Use "long tail" analysis to find these.
* Understand your "poker table stakes" keywords - words you have to have content for but won't win in this lifetime.
* Know what they are spending (use +SpyFu) and then SPEND DRAMATICALLY LESS because you've out thought them. One way to do that is look for a #contentmarketing "fighter pilot" in your space and toss them into your ecosystem (I did this with +Red Bull during my keynote to a group of #smbs at +FedEx conference and they found it eye opening to say the least). 
* Think about using new tools such as Curagami, tools that help create #community so you do LESS but win MORE hearts and minds. Would classify +Paper.li +Scoop.it and +Optimizely in this category of get more spend or do less tools.

Even Top Websites Have Strengths and Weaknesses
As a Marketing Director for Atlantic BT I always want to know the same things when a new customer is…