The video, which was shot at the filming of a Gillette commercial shoot in Switzerland, features Federer serving a tennis ball and knocking a can off the head of one of the production crew members – twice in a row

As trulydeeply.com.au points out the "is it fake or is it real debate?" adds to the viral effect. A lot effort probably went into making this look so simple. I like it.

David Armano has a great set of visuals on his flickr stream which he invites you to use. Head over to his L+E Visual Thinking Archive on flickr. There's going to be several visuals where you'll say "exactly what I've been looking for".

Conversion rate optmization - the practice of improving the quantity of visitors who take a desired action on your site - has been a hot topic this year. There's both an art and a science to the process of turning browsers into buyers and drive-by readers into email subscribers, Facebook fans and Twitter followers. In my opinion, no marketer should be engaging in this work without having read Robert Cialdini's seminal work - Influence: Science & Practice.  I agree wholeheartedly with Guy Kawasaki's assessment on the subject:

The problem is, not every marketer will read the book, and that leaves a lot of head-shaped holes in a lot of walls. Thus, this post is here to help do the next best thing - explain, through illustrations and descriptions, the broad concepts of persuasion. The book covers six major "weapons of influence." For each, I'm going to illustrate the concept then give tips (and some examples) on how you can apply them to marketing and conversion on the web.

#1 - Reciprocation

Hold open a door and you receive a "thank you" and a smile. Send a birthday present to a friend and you're almost certain to get one in return. Pay for a co-worker's coffee and she'll pick up the next one. As Cialdini painstakinly details in the book, there is no culture on Earth without this unspoken, yet powerful rule of reciprocation.

The power of reciprocation relies on several conventions. The request must be "in-kind," which is to say, commensurate with the initial offering. The power is increased if the give-and-take happens in a short time frame. Reciprocity's influence increases with closer relationships, too - it's much harder to resist/refuse to reciprocate a favor to a friend who's down the street than to an anonymous site on the web.

Leveraging reciprocity through web marketing:

• Give away free data and analysis through tools, but ask for permission to send an email marketing message in exchange
• Tweet or blog about a prominent person or business in a positive fashion, then email them asking if they'd help spread the message
• Email a site owner about a problem on their site and offer a solution/fix; they'll often follow up by asking how they can return the favor
• Provide exemplary answers to questions posted in online forums with a signature or final note asking that if they found your answer valuable, to consider visiting your site and sharing it with friends
• Share great information on your blog and ask your readers to subscribe to your feed (see what I did there? :-) Pretty meta, eh?)

#2 - Commitment & Consistency

As humans, we have an insatiable desire for consistency in our behavior. It's why we abhor hypocrisy and embrace leaders, politicians and beliefs that "stick to their guns," sometimes to the point of foolishness. This consistency can be observed through the effectiveness of political tactics like push polling, wherein a paid "surveyer" will call numbers and ask voters whether they'd cast a ballot for "a man who refused to say the pledge of allegiance," thus getting a response and commitment verbally that will transfer into votes come election day after the follow-on ad campaign alludes to precisely that inaction from an opposition candidate.

A case study from the book illustrates this principle quite elegantly. Researchers on a New York City beach staged thefts to see if onlookers would risk personal harm to stop the "criminal." A research accomplice would listen to music on a blanket near their "test subjects" and after several minutes, stand up and stroll away, leaving a personal radio on the blanket. A "thief" would then approach, grab the radio, and attempt to hurry away with it. On average, only 4 in 20 bystanders would intervene.

However, when the experiment was changed slightly, the results altered dramatically. In this second scenario, before strolling away, the research accomplice would ask the test subject to "watch my things." Now, under the influence of consistency and commitment, 19 of 20 subjects became "virtual vigilantes, running after and stopping the thief, demanding an explanation, often restraining the thief physically or snatching the radio away."

Commitment and consistency can't happen without that initial action of a reponse or promise. Cialdini notes that this power increases tremendously if the agreement is written, rather than merely verbal. E.g. last week, you told us you wanted XYZ... Guess what? Here it is!

Leveraging commitment and consistency through web marketing:

• Asking users to answer online questions about their habits/preferences, then marketing to them based on the answers they've given
• Getting visitors to a site to sign an online pledge to take a certain action and then email/message them at a specified day/time (example - the "Quit Facebook Day" movement)
• Asking your users/members/fans to commit to taking an action if a certain event occurs (like a charity pledge for a marathon runner). For example, you could say that your startup is up for an award and if you win it, you'd like them to commit to emailing a friend about their service. If/when you do win, send members who commited an email requesting the action.
• Using a landing page / funnel process that asks a question where users must choose to define themself in a set number of ways, then crafting sales messaging that speaks to how your product/service is the right choice for people like them.

#3 - Social Proof

If you're walking along a street and see a crowd gathered around watching something, it's nearly impossible to resist the urge to go over and investigate yourself. If you're at a party and everyone is drinking, the pressure to have a drink yourself rises dramatically. We all hate the horrifyingly over-the-top laugh tracks on TV sitcoms, but TV producers know that the social signal of laughter makes us laugh along, too.

This same phenomenon applies when we judge exceptionally important life decisions - who should we date or marry, where should we go to school, where should we work. The influence of our peers is a powerful influencer and one that can't be overlooked in the sphere of marketing.

Social proof becomes more powerful when the numbers increase and when the action-takers become more relevant and, especially more like the target. In other words, if you're selling games to rebelling teenagers, don't show testimonials from middle-aged parents who loved it, show other teens.

Leveraging social proof in web marketing:

• Services like MyBlogLog that display the picture and username of recent visitors to the site
• Facebook-leveraging visit tracking software that shows recent friends of yours who've engaged with the site you're visiting (even more relevant and social proofy)
• Testimonials on landing pages and in sales copy. Those that feature photos, have titles and full names and relate to the visitor work best
• Network-effect services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn touting their fast-growing and far-reaching memberships and usage

#4 - Liking

We've heard the phrase a thousand times - "People do business with people they know, like and trust." It turns out, there's quite a bit of science to support this. Research confirms that things like physical attractiveness (we like good-looking people), familiarity (we trust people we know), similarity (we like people like us) and compliments (we like people who say nice things about us) all factor into to the principle of "liking."

It's hard to argue with the power "liking" has on us as consumers. When Will Critchlow (whom I like a lot, despite constantly losing presentation-off battles to him) recommends that I read a book or try a service, it's practically a guarantee I'll do it (note to Will: please don't abuse this power). Similarly, movie executives realize that asking Tom Hanks to go on the late-night circuit is a great way to drive viewership of a film, while sending Tom Cruise on a similar mission may have the opposite result.

Leveraging liking in web marketing:

• Start a blog, twitter account or email list and share your thoughts in a personable, personal and friendly way.
• Employ the power of celebrity, in microcosms. If Seth Godin wrote a blog post saying that SEOmoz was a valuable resource, that would likely drive many people who like Seth to take commensurate actions.
• Join in conversations on the web (on forums, in blog comments, on Twitter, via other social services) in ways that engender you positively to those community members. Follow up personally with community leaders and organizers to help spread the liking effect in a more scalable way.

#5 - Authority

A story from the book illustrates this principle so well, I couldn't resist sharing:

Professors of pharmacy Michael Cohen and Neil Davis attribute much of the problem to the mindless deference given to the "boss" of a patient's case: the attending physician. According to Cohen, "in case after case, patients, nurses, pharmacists, and other physicians do not question the prescription." Take, for example, the strange case of the "rectal earache" reported by Cohen and Davis. A physician ordered ear drops to be administered to the right ear of a patient suffering pain and infection there. Instead of writing out completely the location "Right ear" on the prescription, the doctor abbreviated it so that the instructions read "place in R ear." Upon receiving the prescription, the duty nurse promptly put the required number of ear drops into the patient's anus.

Obviously, rectal treatment of an earache made no sense, but neither the patient nor the nurse questioned it. The important lesson of this story is that in many situations in which a legitimate authority has spoken, what would otherwise make sense is irrelevant. In these instances, we don't consider the situation as a whole but attend and respond to only one aspect of it.

The power of authority can come from a variety of sources - clothes (think of the movie "Catch Me if You Can" in which Leonardo DiCaprio becomes a doctor or pilot simply through attire), titles and prefix/suffixes (Dr., Senator, President, C-level executive), and context (the famous Milgram study in which ordinary people commit horrifying acts simply because they are told to do so).

Authority only influences when the target believes in the power and authenticity of that authority. The stronger the authority association, the more powerful the impact, but not all authorities work on all people.  

Leveraging authority in web marketing:

• Has a well respected individual or organization endorsed your product/company? Make that a prominent feature when you request an action from your visitors.
• In a product or software service that provides information users rely upon, the product itself can influence actions by recommending them and showing the data to back it up.
• Experts in your field can make for great testimonials and endorsements. They need not be recognizable or even speak to social proof elements if they carry credentials and weight that will make your target audience respond.

#6 - Scarcity

Ever notice that some shops seem to be perpetually running "going out of business" sales? It's no mistake - the power of potential loss is a remarkable influencer. The Rolling Stones' "last ever" tour, the final can of Crystal Pepsi, the limited edition collectors keepsake (only 70 ever released!). All are examples of scarcity principles at work.

As Cialdini notes:

The feeling of being in competition for scarce resources has powerful motivating properties. The ardor of an indifferent lover surges with the appearance of often for reasons of strategy, therefore, that romantic partners reveal (or invent) the attentions of a new admirer. Salespeople are taught to play the same game with indecisive customers. For example, a realtor who is trying to sell a house to a "fencesitting" prospect sometimes will call the prospect with news of another potential buyer who has seen the house, liked it, and is scheduled to return the following day to talk about terms. When wholly fabricated, the new bidder is commonly described as an outsider with plenty of money: "an out-of-state investor buying for tax purposes" and "a physician and his wife moving into town" are favorites. The tactic, called in some circles "goosing 'em off the fence," can work devastatingly well. The thought of losing out to a rival frequently turns a buyer from hesitant to zealous.

 

Scarcity becomes more powerful when it's clear that the resource is finite (houses are great for this reason) and when immediacy is added to the scarcity (as in the case of another buyer on the horizon). Auction sites like eBay combine the powers of these persuasion tactics with remarkable results.

Leveraging scarcity in web marketing:

• Offer a special version of your product for a limited time in limited quantities
• Feature messages like Expedia's - "only 2 tickets left at this price" - or Zappos' - "only 3 pairs left in this size" - next to results/products to help encourage timely conversion
• Create an incentive for the first X visitors who take an action; you'll likely get many more
• Show the number of people viewing an item right on the product page (e.g. "6 others currently on this page") to help create excitement and a feeling of immediacy (particularly for one-of-a-kind or limited quantity products)

Individually, these are powerful instruments of persuasion. Together, they're a marketing force to be reckoned with. Let's try an experiment and see if I can effectively employ the six principles as they related to SEOmoz (please note, I'm not normally this self-promotional, and this is meant somewhat tongue-in-cheek):

1. This blog post is the result of many hours of studying, writing and illustrating. If it's helped your business in some way, we hope you'll say thanks by sharing it through tweets, links or an email to someone you think would appreciate the reference.
2. Are you the kind of SEO who bases their decisions on data or gut feeling? Close your eyes for a minute and think. If you said "data," I'd urge you to check out the new Keyword Difficulty tool. It will help make decisions about where and how to compete from a much more data driven perspective.
3. 2,426 search marketers on Facebook have become fans of SEOmoz. Won't you join them?
4. Danny Dover is impossible not to like. Make Danny happy by following him on Twitter.
5. The Search & Social Awards named SEOmoz the best SEO Blog, top SEO community and favorite SEO tool suite this year.
6. This summer we're launching a new software suite and SEOmoz PRO prices are going up to $100, $500 and $2,000 per month (respectively). There's less than 60 days to get PRO at the current rates.

The next time you make a landing page or try to drive actions on the web, think about how you might leverage these principles of influence to improve your conversion rate.

As always, looking forward to your thoughts in the comments - I'd particularly love to see examples of the principles in action at on the web. It's something I wanted to do when authoring this post, but simply ran out of time.

From seomoz.org

 

There's no shortage of posts and tutorials built around setting up a monitoring dashboard. Everyone has a favorite. Mine is from Marty Wientraub from Aim Clear (see How to Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard). There are new services that spring up every few months about monitoring like Scout Labs and Trackur, a lot of which are very good products. However in some cases those products are like driving a Ferrari to the supermarket to pick up a quart of milk: it's just overkill and too much power for the job. Sometimes you just need a quick, easy solution for the task at hand. Here's how I do it.

If you're an account manager for a large firm, or "the guy" in a one man operation, you should always be on the lookout for tools that you can use to automate the low level and receptive work. Google Alerts is one of those tools. There are some smart ways you can get Google Alerts to work for you.

 

When you set up Google Alerts, if you choose the "email" delivery option and choose "once a day," you should know that the first alert will come about 24 hours later. It will repeat every day at about the same time. So if you want your alerts to come at 9 am every morning, set them up just before 9 am and you're all set. The one problem with this is that, if you adjust an alert, the time resets to the last time you adjusted it. It would be nice if Google gave us the ability to specify a delivery time, but that's not the case. If you choose "as it happens," you'll get email alerts at random times during the day. There are some cases where you want this, and we'll get into that below, but in most cases I recommend once per day.

 

 

The second thing you need to know is that Google recently changed the filtering methodology in an attempt to show/send fewer alerts. When you set up an alert, you can specify the maximum number of results, either 20 or 50. This setting also seems to correspond to how sensitive the filter is. Set it to 50 and you'll get deeper, less trusted sites showing up; set it to 20 and the results will show only the more trusted results. The truth is you need both (again, we'll get into that below). It would be nice if Google gave us the option to choose trusted/all results independent of the number, but that's not the case.

 

Lastly I recommend setting up an alias email address specifically for Google Alerts. When you go on vacation or will be out of the office for a few days, you don't want the emails piling up in your inbox. You might want them to forward to someone else or temporarily get deleted. In a perfect world you would have two aliases: one for the priority alerts, another for the standard ones. Again, more on that below.

 

Ok let's get down to business. The following tactic is built upon one that was first talked about by Patrick Aloft a few years ago (see How to Use Google Alerts to Find Out if Your Site Gets Hacked). What we are trying to do is trap for certain conditions that we need to know about. I divide my alerts into two blocks: things I need to know about as soon as possible and things that I need to know about that aren't time sensitive. These are the three Google Alerts I set up for every site I run and every client site I work on.

 

viagra OR cialis OR levitra OR Phentermine OR Xanax site:wolf-howl.com

poker OR casino OR hold-em OR holdem site:wolf-howl.com

nude OR naked OR sex OR porn site:wolf-howl.com

 

When I set up these alerts I want to know ASAP when it happens, because it means someone has hacked the server, or some content was published or approved that probably shouldn't have been. I also want all the results, whether trusted or not. I can deal with a few false positives, but not getting an alert I wanted would be bad. Recently, Rand linked to a post by Richard Baxter showing that spam keywords that were nofollowed in the comment section had an effect on rankings, so you want to watch out for this stuff. I split/grouped the terms to make it easy to maintain. You could use one big long query joined with "OR" statements, but you run the risk of things "breaking" much more easily. As a result, I like to keep it manageable and under 4 or 5 terms.

 

The next set of terms I set up only come once a day and don't have to be as extensive, so I limit it to 20 results. Here are the terms I use:

 

wolf-howl.com {site:facebook.com OR site:digg.com OR site:delicious.com OR site:stumbleupon.com OR site:mixx.com OR site:reddit.com}

site: wolf-howl.com

wolf-howl.com site:twitter.com

 

Depending on the total number of alerts you're getting, you can bulk them all together.  Adjusting the setup times or getting the alerts in batches throughout the day is up to you.

 

One last tip. In addition to using the "OR" phrase as in the examples above, you can also use negative phrases. Here's an example of one that that I use for a vanity search for my name:

 

"michael gray" -dj -uk -football -police

 

There is a famous DJ who share my name and -dj eliminates most of his results. There is a UK soccer/football player who shares my name as well. Since I have a fairly common name it's becoming more frequent that Google comes across arrest records from newspapers with people who share my name; the "-police" takes care of most of that. The way I figure, if I did get arrested, hopefully I'd know about it before Google does. :-)

 

Michael Gray has over 10 years experience in website development and internet marketing. He has helped companies with internal search engine optimization strategies for both ecommerce and informational websites. He publishes controversial industry thoughts and observations on his blog at www.wolf-howl.com.

Some good tips here.

S.Q.: Speaking of industry buzzwords, you warn readers rather sternly that "connectedness" and "engagement" should never be confused. Care to elaborate?

M.J.: A lot of people feel they have a right to shill, promote, and push their wares just because they are "connected." In a day and age where following, friending, or subscribing to anyone about anything is nothing more than a simple click away, there needs to be some time, effort, and thought put against the idea that being connected is basic and primal, but actually creating any level of engagement with an audience, community, or whatever you want to call whomever has agreed to follow or friend you, is a whole other ballgame. People make the assumption that just because they're following you, they're engaged with you...and that's a misnomer. Think about Twitter: you may have 12,000 followers but if you're posting and the majority of your followers happen to not be connected on Twitter at that specific moment in time, your real engagement level with that community is probably a very small percentage of the actual whole number. People like to say they have X amount of friends and X amount of followers, but how many of those friends and followers are really engaged with them? Those are two totally different worlds as far as I can see.

 Read the full interview here.

Twitter appears to be preparing to roll out a feature that would automatically translate posts into your preferred native language, according to a Twitter page I saw today.

Last October, Twitter's Biz Stone authored a blog post that indicated that Twitter would soon be arriving languages beyond Twitter's native English and Japanese, including French, Italian, German, and Spanish. But that post, I believe, was designed to announce translations to the Web site (including words like "following,") rather than translating the posts themselves.

The results page (from one of Wednesday's trending topics, "Bloodbuzz Ohio") allows a user to filter a tweet by language, from Arabic to Icelandic to Thai. But just above that appeared a clickable option to translate the tweets on the page to my preferred language, English.

That may be because one of the tweets that appeared on the page was posted in Dutch. Unfortunately, clicking the "Translate" link didn't work this morning, but by this afternoon it had, with the translation supplied by Google, as you can see in the graphic below. There was also an option to expand the short link to the full URL, without actually being forced to click through.

There are several Greasemonkey scripts that perform auto-translation of Twitter tweets, but this is the first time I've seen a native Twitter auto-translation function. If Twitter begins to overhaul its search results with the auto-translation, URL-expansion, and the new popularity priorities, the Twitter experience may radically changed over the next few months.

Originally posted to AppScout.

Ah, those were the days...