Lorna Li | Green Marketing 2.0

6 Steps for Creating a Social Media Marketing Roadmap & Plan

lorna — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 06:42:51 +0000

Recently, Britta Meyer of Eurekster, which makes an embeddable custom social search portal called a “Swicki”, posed a question on LinkedIn about how one would go about defining a social media marketing roadmap, and how you would prioritize each social media channel.

There is no cookie cutter approach to social media marketing. Your strategy will depend on:

1) Your goals - SEO, PR, traffic ( to drive awareness? advertising click-thus? conversions?)
2) Your audience - where does your target demo hang out?
3) Your resources - you, you plus an intern, internal team, agency?

Here are 6 steps to help you design your social media marketing roadmap.

Step 1: Understand What Social Media Is

The best way to look at social media is to view it as one of many Internet marketing channels, one that has the amazing power to go viral. In the very least, it has the awesome ability to engage your audience in meaningful conversations about your product, issue areas, company, and brand.

The social media marketing umbrella includes sites that are both Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 - basically you want to be anywhere that enables discussions, sharing, and user-generated content (UGC), such as:

Blogs and Forums / Discussion Boards
Consumer Review Sites
Social Networks / Online Communities
Social Bookmarking Sites
Social News Sites
Social Music Sites
Video and Photo Sharing Sites
Wikis

Step 2: Understand What Social Media Can & Can’t Do

Social media can engage your audience, encourage online conversations that are user-generated, increase your web presence, expand brand awareness, generate publicity (both good & bad) and provide SEO benefits. It doesn’t convert.

For most marketers, social media has no ROI but is great for:

Brand building
Relationship management
Product development
Reputation management
Customer interaction
Customer feedback
Customer support
Community building
Defensive SEO - Yes! Bury your bad press with positive UGC

In some cases, social media can convert - usually if you own the community, and have the power to strategically capture leads. But that’s like being the D&D Dungeon Master.

Step 3: Determine Where Conversations are Happening

You will need to respond to conversations that are already happening. To determine where conversations are happening about your brand, you will need to have some kind of buzz monitoring or online reputation management system in place.

Prioritize these discussions, then hop in.

Step 4: Divide…

Next, you want to expand into unchartered territory.

Before venturing out into the vast unknown, create your social media road map - a map of the social web as it pertains to your business. Gather all the sites that would be most interested in what you have to say and segment them by type (blogs, social networks, social news sites, forums, etc) and by target audience / topical interest.

Once you’ve done that, it will be more clear to you what your campaign specific marketing strategies and tactics ought to be.

Step 5: …and Conquer

Now comes the tactical deployment. Here are some examples of different kinds of social media engagements.

Blogger outreach & engagement - this is a top down, bottom up approach. To demonstrate a significant impact, this is best handled by a team. You will need to identify the A-List blogs, cultivate a positive relationship with as many as possible, persuade them to blog about your issue, or guest blog for them. You will need a team of conversation agents to fan out into the blogosphere and engage in MEANINGFUL conversations wherever conversations about your topic is happening.

If you have a call to action, relevant product, or web resource you are trying to drive traffic to, drop html links with target anchor text for an additional SEO lift (a % of the sites you will be hitting will be do-follow)

Disclose your identity, be courteous, informed about the subject, or you will be flamed, and that will live forever on the web.

Social networking - only hit the communities relevant to your issue, product, company, topic or you will get poor quality traffic, if any.

Are you infiltrating tight-knit interest-specific online communities? If so, you will need to ingratiate yourself into the pack.

Are you starting your own community on a hosted platform, like a Ning? You can drive conversation and awareness, your revenue options are limited (ad revenue sharing).

Do you own the community? Great - you can drive targeted conversations and include strategically placed calls-to-action, promos, ads, anywhere. If you’ve designed your site with SEO in mind, your users will create the content, and you will had an advantage in the SERPS, especially for long-tail keywords.

Social news marketing - thru social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Newsvine. These sites also have a unique culture and will work for you if your news item relates topics favored by the community. Digg, for example, veers towards the geeky. Write for maximum click thrus - think “linkbait”. Popular stories here can get picked up by bloggers, which will also give you an SEO boost. Traffic can be huge and fickle like a tsunami. Don’t expect it to convert. Avoid marketing here - you will be buried.

Step 6: Trust in the Force

Finally, trust is a huge factor in social engagement. Understand that social media marketing is most effective when users in the community know you. The only way for the community to know you is if you spend a lot of time online and invest managing your social web presence across communities.

Social media builds awareness and drives conversation. It’s a powerful way enable communication between the company & customer. Always remember, selling is a secondary or tertiary benefit of social media.

Technorati Tags: social media, social media marketing, seo, social networks, blogging, roi, lorna li

SEO Analytics With Google Analytics

lorna — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:21:56 +0000

This is a great video y Ian Lurie of Conversation Marketing on how to use Google Analytics to interpret data from your search engine marketing campaigns. The three most important pieces of information you will want to understand from your traffic statistics are:

Keyword data: Which keywords are driving the most traffic to your site?
Keyword value: Which keywords account for the most engagement in your site? Which keywords drive the most conversions?
Page context: Which pages receive the most search traffic? What keywords are associated with those pages?

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, keywords, sem, analytics, google analytics, seo analytics, search marketing analytics, lorna li

8 Google Advanced Search Operators for SEO

lorna — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 01:23:47 +0000

Google advance search operators are useful search queries that can help you determine your competitive environment and assess the level and degree of work that an SEO campaign requires. Here are the Google search operators most commonly used by SEOs:

1. site:

Site:www.website.com will show you the number of pages in your website that are indexed by Google.

If you find a large discrepancy (> 20%) between the number of web pages indexed and the number of pages you have published, you will need to identify and resolve the technical issues that may be blocking web crawlers.

2. allinurl

For a quick way to see if a specific page is indexed, you can use the allinurl:www.webpage.com query. Google will return the page in its results page if it is indexed or show no results if it isn’t.

3. link:

Link:www.webpage.com will display all sites linking to this particular webpage. Since link popularity is an important search engine ranking factor, it’s important to determine how many links you have, and how many you need. You should definitely use this search query on your competitors.

It’s important to note that Google link operator has taken a huge beating from the SEO community for its lack of accuracy. Many SEOs use Yahoo Site Explorer for more accurate link analysis.

4. allinanchor:

Allinanchor:keyword returns all the pages/sites that have links from other pages that contain those specific keywords in link anchor text.

5 allintitle:

Allintitle:keyword returns a list of websites that contain the keyword in its title tag.

6. allintext:

Allintext:keyword tells Google to display webpages that contain that particular keyword in the body of the page.

It tends to give prominence to documents that contain the keyword at the beginning of the body text.

7. cache:

Cache:www.webpage.com will show you the last time the Google crawled your web page and what version of the page it has in its cache.

Cache:www.webpage.com keyword will show you the keyword or key phrases highlighted within the cached content.

8. info:

Info:www.webpage.com shows a variety of data about that web page, such as the latest cache date, other similar web pages, web pages that link to your site, web pages within your site and web pages containing the your domain name.

You can use Google advanced search operators them to keep track of your SEO efforts and keep an eye on your competition. However, understand that the data these operators really just provide a ball-park estimation.

According to Michael Martinez, using Google’s advanced search query operators has its pros and cons:
From www.seo-theory.com:

Search engine results analysis has to focus on the most important factors for optimization. You need to know:

1. Which pages in your site are indexed
2. How often your page data is recached
3. How many of your pages pass value through their links
4. How many of your pages are receiving value from other pages

In some cases you can (and should) combine query operators to refine your analysis. If rank-checks and backlink profiles are all you’re doing, you’re running slower than the leaders in the field and they are way out ahead of you. You can’t understand a Web site’s performance simply by looking at a handful of targeted queries and running backlink reports on Yahoo!

The search engines look at hundreds of signals to determine how to crawl, index, and rank sites. You should be looking at hundreds of signals, too.

SEO Best Practices for Coding Your Website

lorna — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:59:34 +0000

What’s Code Got to Do With It?

Face it, while linklove is sexy, in SEO, code ain’t no second hand emotion.

SEO is a multi-faceted discipline, where keyword research, SEO copy-writing, linkbuilding, and code optimization work as a team in an attempt to address a variety of search engine ranking factors. Programming your website in a way that allows engine spiders to access, categorize, and index the content on your site so will ensure your other SEO tactics go the full mile. As an SEO best practice, you will want to make sure your code is as error-free as possible, from a W3C validation standpoint, and that you follow guidelines for semantically correct markup. Testing shows that good, clean, semantically correct code not only allows your site to load faster in major browsers, but also allows for faster indexing by the search engines.

W3C Compliance and SEO

There is a great deal of debate as to whether W3C compliancy will enhance search engine rankings. According to Michael Gray:
From www.wolf-howl.com:

From my experience having a site that is 100% code compliant doesn’t give you any SEO benefit. That said throwing up a page with complete disregard for valid code is looking for trouble. If you put your page into a validator and it comes back with hundreds of errors you may be looking for trouble. Depending on what your errors are you may have made it harder for a bot to crawl your website. However if you can get it down to handful of errors, it might not be worth the time obsessing over those last few details.

Even if you can’t enforce strict compliance, be familiar with Google Webmaster guidelines and search engine bot indexing behavior, and code your site accordingly.

Understanding Semantic XHTML Markup

Semantic markup (or Semantic coding) is the art of programming your website so that the code used is descriptive and representative of the information it contains…and more meaningful to search engine bots. Standardized markup tags define the content on a page better than generic elements like <div> or <span> tags.

For example, if you were creating a page heading, use this code:

<h1>SEO & the Importance of Semantic Markup</h1>

Instead of this code:

<div id=”page-title”>SEO & the Importance of Semantic Markup </div>

Semantic Coding Guidelines

Here are some great semantic coding guidelines, courtesy of Barry Wise:

<h1> tags should only be used once on a page, to define the title and/or purpose of the page. It should be very close in meaning to the <title> tag of your page.
<h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> header tags should be used for subheadings, in order of descending importance. Try not to skip.
Don’t use <br> to separate list items. Instead use the <ol> tag with <li> elements for ordered lists, and <ul> and <li> should be used for unordered lists.
For bold or emphasized text, use <strong> or <em>, instead of the less descriptive <b> and <i> tags.
Wrap paragraphs in <p> tags, and never use <p> or <br> tags just for spacing. Use the margin and/or padding attributes of the <p> tag in your CSS code to add visual spacing.

List of Semantic Code Elements

ABBR and ACRONYM: For Abbreviations and Acronyms. They have an accompanying title tag which you can use to describe the actual meaning of the abbreviated word or acronym.
CITE: Citation, used to cite a source of information.
CODE: Computer or Programming code.
DEL: Deleted word or phrase.
DFN: Definition.
DL: Definition List. Similar to UL and OL, but uses DT (Definition term) and DD (definition description) to show terms and definitions.
EM: Emphasis, displayed as italicized text.
INS: Insert, used to display text you have inserted due to an edit at a later date.
KBD: Keyboard instructions.
OL: Ordered List.
SAMP: Sample output, used to show sample output from programming code.
STRONG: Strong, or bold, emphasis on a word or phrase.
UL: Unordered List.
VAR: Variable, used to represent a variable in programming code.

Semantic Web Markup for Blogs

Unbelievably, nearly every WordPress, MovableType, or TypePad theme fails a simple test for truly semantic XHTML markup. One of the most common errors is that the blog title / logo is served within <H1> tags. Serving your post titles in <h1> tags is far better.

For a great info on how to correct your blog XHTML, visit master WordPress developer Cris Pearson’s blog post The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs.
For non-code related tactics on blogging SEO, check out my summary of the Blogger’s Guide to SEO meetup, hosted by Aaron and Giovanna Wall.

Freedom from Code Bloat

Code bloat occurs when the amount of code on a page greatly exceeds the amount of text on the page. Excessive code can get in the way of search engine spiders indexing your content, especially if your content is placed deep within your code structure. It’s harder for search engine spiders to crawl the content of the page and determine its relevancy of the page if there’s extraneous code in the way. Furthermore, code bloat can create longer than normal download time, which can impact how search engines rank your site, and cause visitors to navigate away from your webpage.

There are four types of code bloat to be aware of:

On-page styling
On-page JavaScripts
Excessive table usage
Poor HTML formatting

According to technical SEO consultants HiRank, you can reduce code bloat by moving as much javascript and CSS to external files. This enables your users to cache those files on first load, that way, search engines don’t have to download these files all the time. To fix these four common types of code bloat, visit Stoney deGeyter’s post on how to fix the Javascript and CSS that is jacking up your SEO.

Good web development involves minimizing code bloat and programming your website with a low code to text ratio in mind. While there is no agreement on an ideal code to text ratio, the lower the ratio, the faster the load time, and the easier for search engine spiders to determine the relevancy of your content.

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, blogging, blog seo, xhtml, semantic markup, code to text, w3c compliance, code bloat

Hitler Goes to Burning Man

lorna — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:12:55 +0000

This video seriously cracked my shit up!

Technorati Tags: hitler, burning man, bman

Google’s Top Search Engine Ranking Factors

lorna — Mon, 12 May 2008 06:50:14 +0000

There’s a lot of resources that list all the on-page and off-page ranking factors that are important to search engine optimization. There’s only one list out there that is worth paying attention to: SEOmoz’s Search Ranking Factors V2.

Google’s ranking algorithm takes into account approximately 200+ attributes when determining the position of websites in search engine results pages (SERPs). In April 2007, SEOmoz published Search Ranking Factors V2, a survey of 37 leaders in organic search engine optimization on the most important factors in Google rankings. Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz CEO maintains that 90-95% of what you need to know about the Google algorithm is contained in the study. While a year old, most of this information is still valid.

Search Ranking Factors evaluates both positive and negative search engine ranking attributes on a scale of 1-5 (5 is “Exceptional Importance), and also indicates the degree of consensus between SEO respondents. Comments from the respondents also yield nuggets of juicy information that can help you refine your SEO and help you avoid landing in Google’s supplemental hell (index).

If you have a limited amount of time for SEO, be sure to focus on the factors that are given the greatest weight by Google’s algorithm. Below is a summary of the top 10 factors that influence Google search engine rankings:

Google’s Top 10 Search Engine Ranking Factors

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag (4.9)
Exceptional Importance and High Consensus

Placing the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page’s HTML header.

If you only have time one SEO action on your site, make sure to create a good, description title tag that starts with your target keyword.

2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link (4.4)
Exceptional Importance and High Consensus

Inbound links that contain your target keyword in the anchor text will give you a strong boost in ranking for that keyword. While keyword rich anchor text is hugely important, the text adjacent to the link plays a role, as well. A wide array of naturally occurring inbound anchor text is the best scenario - inbound links that are close to identical could invite penalties. So if you’re dropping links…be sure to mix up your anchor text a little!

3. Global Link Popularity of Site (4.4)
Exceptional Importance and Average Agreement

This refers to the overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web (both link quality and quantity). I like Lucas Ng’s description, because it refers to Amazon tribes!

“Think of a web page as a town. If a city has freeways, airports, train stations, bus shelters and a port, that’s a good indicator that it is an important hub. That orphaned web page with no links pointing to it? It may as well be a hidden tribe of Amazons that no one has discovered.”

4. Age of Site (4.1)
Exceptional Importance and Average Agreement

Age refers to the date indexable content was first seen by the search engines (note that this can change if a domain switches ownership), NOT the date of original registration of the domain.

Age is a huge factor, which is the reason why a lot of crappy, old, barely relevant sites are hard to knock out of SERPs. According to Todd Malicoat, “The older the berry the sweeter the link juice.”

5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure (4)
Exceptional Importance and Average Agreement

Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page. While somewhat masturbatory, internal link juice is a strongly weighted factor and, most importantly, one that you can control, especially with regards to the choice of anchor text.

According to Scott Smith, a.k.a Caveman, “Factors considered by Google include: Number of inbound links, importance (placement) of the inbound links within the linking pages, anchor text patterns, nav versus text links, and the content of linking pages.”

6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site (3.9)
High Importance and Average Agreement

This refers to the subject-specific relationship between the sites/pages linking to the target page and the target keyword. Highly relevant links, from trusted, topically related sites carry more weight.

7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community (3.9)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Refers to link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world. Link love from the popular kids in the hood helps. A few links from authority sites can help a niche site rank above the authorities for niche-related keywords.

8. Keyword Use in Body Text (3.7)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page.

Target keywords in the title need to be included in the page, especially in starting and ending paragraphs. Focus more on semantic variations than keyword density - repeating the same keywords over and over again, can result in ranking suppression.

9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site (3.6)
High Importance, But Highly Disputed

In general, a links from popular sites are better, but it’s hard to get an accurate read on how valuable this is.

10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page (3.5)
High Importance and Average Agreement

While all links help, links from topically related sites help more, though it’s hard to measure exactly by how much.

Other Important Search Engine Ranking Factors

11. Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages (3.5)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Do links on the page point to high quality, topically-related pages? According to Aaron Wall http://seobook.com, “Your outbound links help define what community your site belongs in.”

Benefit can be derived through anchor text tunneling, that is, when Site A links to site B with the keyword “widgets”, and site B links to site C the keyword “widgets”.

12. Age of Document (3.4)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Older pages may be perceived as more authoritative while newer pages may be more temporally relevant. An older document on an older, more trusted site will rank better than one on a newer site.

Says Aaron Wall, “Older documents may be trusted more, especially if they are well cited and do not have many broken links in them. For blogs and news sites new documents may tend to have high PageRank values due to internal site structure. New documents may also be given a freshness boost.”

13. Keyword Use in H1 Tag (3.3)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Creating an H1 tag with the targeted search term/phrase

14. Amount of Indexable Text Content (3.2)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Refers to the literal quantity of visible HTML text on a page. Sheer volume of content isn’t that important, but it is good to have some indexable content as opposed to all flash and images. Chris Boggs http://chrisboggs.blogspot.com thinks that content of 75-100 words can be effective in scoring points with Google. However, absence of indexable content can be mitigated by other factors, such as quality inbound links, quality outbound links, and intelligent keyword deployment across title, meta, hx, etc.

15. Age of In-Bound Link (3.2)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Age matters

16. Topical Relationship of Linking Site (3.1)
High Importance and Average Agreement

It helps

17. Relevance of Site’s Primary Subject Matter to Query (3.1)
High Importance, But Highly Disputed

The topical relationships between the full content of a website and a user’s given query. References to the Google’s neutering of the Google bomb effect, caused by complaints from miserable failures in high places, indicate a belief that this factor is more important now than before. However, the dominance of Wikipedia in SERPs is a powerful counter-example.

18. Keyword Use in Domain Name (3)
Moderate Importance and Average Agreement

Including the targeted term/phrase in the registered domain name, i.e. keyword.com. Having your keyword in your domain name has little bearing on its own. The benefit comes from its propensity to attract inbound links with your keyword in the anchor text. You can use hyphens to separate works, but your url will look yucky, and it kills your branding.

Technorati Tags: search engine ranking factors, google, seo, search engine optimization, search marketing, serp, lorna li

Flock Eco-Edition - Social Web Browser Goes Green for Earth Day 2008

lorna — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:27:57 +0000

Lately I’ve taken to using Flock, the Social Web Browser, because it consolidates and simplifies my social web lifestyle. Today, Flock just got better.

For Earth Day 2008, Flock launched the Eco-Edition of the Flock browser that delivers the latest environmental and sustainable living content to eco-minded social media and web users. The Eco-Edition comes prepopulated with the best news, photos, videos, and feeds from leading eco-content partners on the Web,delivering fresh content from Grist, GroovyGreen, Treehugger, PlanetGreen, Sprig, Current and other top eco brands daily. Furthermore, Flock will donate 10% of the proceeds of the Eco-Edition browser at the end of 2008, and as a recognition of the power of community to create change, will allow users of the Eco-Edition to select the recipient of this donation.

The Flock Eco-Edition Browser, is available as a free software download for Mac, PC and Linux at www.flock.com/eco.

Why Use Flock?

If you are a social media news hound, blogger, Twitterer, are active on multiple social networks, and depend heavily social bookmarking to manage your favorite links, Flock will help you consolidate all your social web activities into a single dashboard.

You can see updates from friend on Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter in the Flock people sidebar
You can simultaneously favorite your urls to the Flock browser and to del.icio.us.
You can post to multiple blogs from the same interface
It does Technorati tags for you
You can drag and drop Flickr images & YouTube videos into your blog
Manage your favorite news feeds

Technorati Tags: flock eco-edition, flock social web browser, social media, web 2.0, blogging, microblogging, social bookmarking, lorna li

Blogged with the Flock Browser

YouTube for Nonprofits: How to Use YouTube to Save the World…And Raise Money

lorna — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:41:35 +0000

Last week’s Net Tuesday in San Francisco featured Maryrose Dunton, the Head of User Experience at YouTube,, who spoke about YouTube’s Nonprofit Program.The YouTube Nonprofit Program, is an in-kind donation by YouTube to the nonprofit sector that’s worth about $20 million. Currently available to established 501(c)(3)s, YouTube offers participating nonprofits:

A premium branded channel - some environmental nonprofits that have done a good job with this include Friends of the Earth and Defenders of Wildlife. The ability to upload videos of any length. Currently the limit on video length is 10 minutes.

Rotation into the “Promoted Videos” section on YouTube’s homepage.
Listing in the Nonprofit Channels and Nonprofit Video areas
The ability to collect donations using Google Checkout (with no processing fee).
The option to participate in the user partner program, which allows you to show partner ads on video - and share the ad revenue. However, there is currently no way to filter ads, which may not work for some organizations.

YouTube has 30 million visitors daily and over 100 million videos are viewed each day. By connecting nonprofits to the world’s largest online video community, the YouTube Nonprofit program will allow these organizations tap into a significant pool of potential small donors. While large nonprofits are able to receive 10-15% of donations from online fundraising, smaller organizations have the most difficulty establishing a web presence. By offering a dedicated channel on YouTube, YouTube’s Nonprofit Program hopes to empower smaller organizations to significantly expand their reach. Now its just the matter of these, often, short-staffed nonprofits finding the manpower to manage their YouTube presence.

YouTube Best Practices for Nonprofits

Maryrose recommended these tips to help nonprofits engage successfully with the YouTube community:

1. Keep it fresh, keep it short. Best not longer than 10 minutes

2. Be genuine, no public service announcements (PSAs)

3. Engage and interact with the community - have a dialogue, allow people to post video comments, be sure to respond to comments
4. Create a call to action

5. Invest in your channel - update content, make sure links and videos work

7. Do not fear comments, ratings, related videos - while you can moderate user engagement, do not disable the commenting or rating features as this tends to upset the community

New Plans for Nonprofits on YouTube

New developments coming down the pipeline include:

1. Extending the program to include international nonprofits.

2. Incorporating more calls to action that are important to nonprofits, petitions, signup forms.

3. Improving nonprofit discovery on YouTube’s website.

Technorati Tags: maryrose dunton, net tuesday, net2, youtube nonprofit program, youtube nonprofit channel, lorna li

Search Marketing Salon “Wear Your Favorite Hat” Pictures

lorna — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 06:30:39 +0000

by Lorna Li

Search engine marketers, bloggers, and social media fanatics wore their favorite hats at Search Marketing Salon’s “Wear Your Favorite Hat” Launch party at the chic and intimate Otis Lounge in San Francisco. Tips were swapped, secrets were traded, and product ideas were bounced around that would take search marketing to the next level.

Forest Kolb, Sharon Lin, and Julie Blaustein.

“We need a Google Adwords Editor that also includes Yahoo and MSN on a single UI,” stated Clay Schulenburg, Interactive Marketing Manager for Healthline. “This will take search to a whole new level.”

F*ck the Yahoo bulk upload, is what I say to that!

Hear that, web entrepreneurs? That’s big bucks for you!

Jacob Morgan, Search Marketing Alchemist and Nicolette Toussaint

Search-obsessed bloggers that dropped by included Michael Brito, who writes a fantastic blog about Social Media & Conversation Marketing, Lisa Whelan social media queen on Vox, Jim Yu on how to be a Search Marketing and SEO Maven, and Andy Kaufman, the real estate blogger and Twitter king.

William Gauthier, Alicia Lin, Damon White, and Lorna Li.

e-Storm’s William Gauthier, Lisa McGuire, and Daniel Riveong

Leon Krishayana and lovely lady in black beret

Leon Krishnayana of iSpionage, offers a technology platform that helps search engine marketers track competitors’ PPC ads on Google, Yahoo, and MSN ads daily. It allows you to see the ad copy, keywords, and average rank on the major search engines side by side. Very handy indeed.

Vera Belenky and Alex Gamburg

Other attendees included Mark Fiske, Senior Online Marketing Manager at Gap, Pete Park of web advertising agency Vectorhaus, Yan Rozovsky VP of LeadClick Media, Jason Hart of the search-focused Online Marketing agency Domain Methods, Jeff Rohrs, VP of search marketing agency ExactTarget, Leo Haryono, Head of Natural Search of Shopping.com, Josh Pierry and Clay Shulenburg of Healthline, Biren Talati, of Sandalstore.com, Peter Koontz, Founder and CTO of Sprenzy, Vera Belenky of Walmart.com, Alex Gamburg Search Marketing Director of Trulia, specializing in real estate search, Gabriel Carrejo, the original sinner, Forest Kolb of BizzFlip who has cracked the secret of the Digg first page, Sharon Lin, Online Marketer for Web 2.0 companies, Irina Greenman, and Danny Cheung, who is about to revolutionize the world of WordPress publishing the Good Magazine way.

More pictures can be viewed on the Search Marketing Salon Flickr album.

Join Search Marketing Salon on Facebook!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: searchmarketing salon, e-Storm, iSpionage, Domain Methods, Good Magazine, Sandalstore.com, Michael Brito, Andy Kaufman, Jim Yu, Lisa Whelan, Sharon Lin, Josh Pierry, Clay Shulenburg, Peter Koontz, Jeff Rohrs, Biren Talati, Jason Hart, Gabriel Carrejo, Pete Park, Mark Fiske, Yan Rozovsky, Leo Haryono, Leon Krishnayana, Vera Belenky, Nicolette Toussaint, Lorna Li, Jacob Morgan

Starbucks Green Idea - Consumers Vote to Make Starbucks More Environmentally-Friendly

lorna — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 07:41:16 +0000

Starbucks Ideas has been live for about 2 weeks and already customers have had plenty to say about what they expect from the world’s largest chain of coffee shops.

The move to launch a website that allows anyone to post ideas about how Starbucks can improve its service offering is part of an increasing trend by companies to use social networking applications to better improve communication with their customers. This move may be the best way for the struggling coffee maker to quickly turn its business around.

Starbucks Ideas is not a true social network play, rather is an an interactive forum where people can vet their best ideas in a manner much like Digg. Starbucks Ideas is powered by Salesforce.com and is the same social platform that powers Dell’s Ideastorm which won PR Innovation of the Year 2008.

Already, Starbucks has moved to implement the top two customer requests: free coffee for frequent buyers and universal free wi-fi, which is finally (woot, woot!) coming soon in Spring 2008. The thought that a multinational global corporation like Starbucks would be so responsive to the voice of its customers is encouraging indeed.

Can Customers Make Starbucks Become More Environmentally Responsible?

As I surfed through several pages of Starbucks Ideas I was struck by the number of requests for a Greener Starbucks. Below is a list of suggestions and comments that would Starbucks make a better environmental citizen, all of which I voted on:

Stop Trashing Empty Cards

We don’t need any more plastic in the trash. Rather than suggesting trashing an empty starbucks card, give people a 25 cent credit…for refilling it. To make it affordable, how about….

Re-fill your card…at $20 level…get $20.25 on the card.

Re fill at the $50 level…get $51.00 on the card.

Re fill at the $100 level…get $103.oo on the card, or get the $100…and your current single drink order free.

More on the plastic…less plastic in the trash.

Sell Reusable Sleeves

I have recently had customers who come in with their own rubber sleeves for their cups. They tell me they purchased them from Bed Bath and Beyond. They prefer to use them as the grip is more secure and they are helping preserve the trees. Starbucks should have these manufatured with the company logo and sell them for a really reasonable price point so we could also help save the trees etc

Recycle!

Recycle! Become greener!

Recycle In Stores

It concerns me that we do not have recycle bins in our stores. In Seattle, and in most large cities the opportunity to help the environment by recycling is readily available in our homes and many business. I would like to see Starbucks stores embrace this as well by providing Glass, plastice and compost waste in containers in all stores.

Recycle the Waste in the Back of Your Stores

I don’t think Starbucks has shown a real connection between environmental health and human health. Here is why: My local Starbucks produces a tremendous amount of garbage everyday and nearly none of it is recycled. Nearly all the store waste is thrown out and put in the garbage and taken to the landfill. Recycle the waste in the back end of ALL your stores. It goes beyond the polish of the front end and sales. Make it a real effort to connect environmental health and human health. Thank you.

Reusable Cups

I use my Starbucks reusable travel mug almost every time I order and this is what I often see:

- 99% of the time I don’t get the mug discount,

- some baristas have no real clue what to do with it,

- they stick a disposable cup inside it to take down the order and then throw the disposable cup away (I’ve seen stickers but they seem to be out of them a lot).

We need more people to use the mugs and reduce the number of disposable cups used. Push the sale of them (make them cheaper - why not just $5?) and then train staff on how to handle the cups!

Locally sourced (organic) baked goods

Offer locally sourced (organic or not) high quality baked goods similar to some of the baked goods Whole Foods offers, instead of the nationally consistent scones, cookies, pastries, cakes, and breads offered now. This sacrifices some of the national consistency now in place (though there is some variance already) but brings better quality, better tasting food to Starbucks, supports the local community, and elevates Starbucks above other coffee outlets (national outlets now also serving coffee) by cranking up the quality level and local community/local business tie ins. As a result, Starbucks will feel more like a local coffee store again rather than some big national chain.

Biodegradable drink and food containers - Yeah!

Replace plastic containers for cold drinks, straws, salads etc. with those made of biodegradable polylactic acid or polylactide (PLA). These are readily available and currently in use by forward-thinking entities like Paul Newman’s “Newman’s Own” products.

Fair Trade Coffee

I think that Starbucks should switch to only selling and brewing coffee, lattes … with only fair trade coffee. Fair trade coffee costs the consumer no more than regular coffee and still gives the coffee grower a fair price for their coffee. In return these coffee growers use organic means to grow their coffee making it environmentally friendly. That is why I would like to see Starbucks switch to only selling fair trade coffee.

Real Fruit Smoothies

real fruit smoothies

Porcelain Cups

When I first started going to Starbucks, they used to ask here or to go, and if “here” you’d get a porcelain mug of various sizes. Would that be cheaper than buying all those paper cups. Too much washing dishes?

Corporate Social Responsibility at Starbucks

I’ve seen Starbucks come a long way. Since 1999, when it was assailed by numerous activist groups upset with the company’s fair-trade policies, labor relations, and environmental impact during the WTO talks in Seattle, Starbucks has evolved with a commendable corporate social responsibility program.

The mission of Starbucks’ CSR program is to work daily with partners (employees), suppliers and farmers to help create a more sustainable approach to high-quality coffee production, to help build stronger local communities, to minimize their environmental footprint and to be responsive to customers health and wellness needs.

In 2005, Starbucks received The World Environment Center’s 21st Annual Gold Medal for International Corporate Achievement in Sustainable Development, where it was recognized for its leadership in sustainable development within the specialty coffee industry.
From www.greenbiz.com:

In particular, WEC commends the company’s development of Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices, a set of environmentally, socially and economically responsible coffee buying guidelines created in conjunction with Conservation International that are designed to contribute positively to the livelihoods of coffee farmers while placing an emphasis on environmental conservation and supply chain transparency.

According to Calvert Funds’ December 2007 edition of Socially Responsible Investing News, in “Calvert’s view, Starbucks Corp. remains an industry leader with significant and progressive programs on renewable energy and the environment as well as workplace diversity and safety.”

While many love to hate Starbucks, I would point out that, over the past decade, Starbucks has proved to be more socially responsible than many other multinational corporations of equal reach and caliber. My Starbucks Idea is simply another way in which the company has demonstrated a willingness to address public opinion, even if its primary motivation is maintaining competitive advantage.

The power of social media for social innovation is evident. If consumers are vocal enough about Starbucks’ environmental impact, Starbucks Ideas may indeed be the catalyst to a Greener, more earth-friendly Starbucks.

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