We apply it to marketing.


MozCon 2015 - 02 - How to Make Your Marketing Match Your Reality with Dana DiTomaso

So write down those core values.


I'm sure there exists somewhere, maybe in a dusty document drawer somewhere.


Let's start with that.


And imagine your company as a person.


Now marketing agencies, I want to say to you, you have to take the good and the bad.


So your persona is not Don Draper because you can't have the whiskey without the sexism.


It's very specific.


And I see a lot of agencies who are like, oh yeah, if our brand's a person, it's totally


Don Draper.


Peggy, I can get that.


Don Draper?


But think about how you would express your brand as a human being.


And humans are flawed.


No human is perfect.


There are things that make your brand good, and there are things that make your brand


bad.


And you have to be really honest about both of these things.


Don't just gloss over the bad attributes.


This is like therapy for your brand.


You're going to talk about it.


We're going to cry.


There's going to be some hugging.


And then we're going to move on.


And really, I think one of the most perfect expressions of brand as a person is Roger.


If I went around to this audience today and I asked 100 of you, tell me Moz's core values,


you would know there's a reason why you're here and you're excited for this.


And it's their core values, the tag fee code, the givingness that they have for the community,


right?


So if I went to your company and I asked 100 people what your company stood for, would


I get one answer or would I get 100 different answers?


That's a good sign that you need to start to build your brand strategy.


So we're going to go through step by step how to make this happen.


So step one is why did this fail before?


If you're at a sufficiently large company, somebody has tried to do this, and they failed,


and you want to know why so you can avoid the same fate.


Think of it like Indiana Jones and when he's looking for the Holy Grail.


And he goes into that room.


I'm sure most of you have seen this movie.


And he goes into the room with all the different cups, and he has to pick the Holy Grail, and


the old knight is there and says choose wisely, right?


And so he goes through the process and he picks.


But instead of picking a Holy Grail, wouldn't that be easy?


Here's our brand strategy.


Instead, you're going to be a forensic analyst and figure out why everyone else died.


And write it down and be really honest as to why it died.


Dust off those biz school books and do a SWOT analysis and figure out what is going to cause


havoc for this brand strategy.


And at this point, I strongly recommend getting the C-level on board.


There's a couple different tactics for that depending upon how big your company is.


If you're a very small company, then it may be very difficult because maybe the founder


is maybe a little too involved.


And you need to get them to step back.


So I have a cautionary tale that you can feel free to share.


Someone we know back home is a personal trainer.


And he's building a company.


But he has problems because he is the brand on social media.


And they get a lot of their business from social media.


And so everybody says, oh, I only want to work with that guy, the founder.


I don't want to work with anybody else.


And so they hire other personal trainers.


But it's almost impossible for people to come in via social and say, well, I know you on


social but I guess I'll work out with this guy.


They're not excited about it.


They don't stay.


And so he has to let go of his social media and hand it off.


But it's almost been too long now.


It's almost been to the point where it's going to be really difficult to step back as that


brand.


As a small business, until you have a brand strategy, until you have a brand voice, you,


whoever is the most prominent person at the company, will be that brand no matter what


you do.


So building that brand needs to be something that supersedes that person.


I think Moz went through the same thing here, actually, when they, one of the goals, I remember


Jen Lopez shared a slide and one of their goals in social media was to beat Rand on


Twitter with followers.


And that was a really important goal for them because Rand has such a strong voice.


And Moz had to be its own brand past that.


So that's one way for the C-level if you're a small company.


If you're a bigger company, tell them about how much money you're going to save by having


less angry customers.


You can take the same budget, don't say less because then they'll cut your budget.


You can take the same marketing budget and do more with it because you're going to be


building more brand advocates.


You're going to be building more happier customers.


And you're also going to be eliminating something that we like to call marketing debt.


If you don't stand for anything at all, if you're like, if I say to you, who's your target


market?


You say everybody.


Babies?


Really, your target market is babies?


No, it's not.


Then you say to them, we need to make sure that we stand for something because what's


happening is we're getting people who are tire kickers.


We're getting people who are inappropriate customers.


We're getting people who expect things that we are not comfortable delivering.


And we want to eliminate that marketing debt.


That is time your sales team or you, whoever handles new leads is wasting as a result of


inaccurately targeted marketing.


And building a brand strategy is going to make that happen.


It's a pretty powerful argument for the C level.


Do more with less.


Save time across the board.


They like that sort of thing.


So hopefully now you've got them on board.


Now you need to think about the brand is and what the brand is not.


I'm going to show you an example to illustrate this.


Erica from Moz has a great post on the Salesforce blog about building a brand voice and tone.


I'm sure someone will tweet that out for you so you have that.


But this is for a wedding invitation company.


So they have the brand is romantic and airy.


In the near future the brand may be elegant and elite.


The brand is not cheap or tacky.


So to get to this brand and the brand is not statements, I recommend a card sorting exercise.


And if you haven't done this before, you get a whole bunch of cards with things written


on them and then you lock someone in a room until they can sort down the cards to what


you need them to sort it down to.


And maybe don't feed them until they do it either.


And don't let them get away with any of this, oh I can't decide between these two things.


No.


You need two is, two in the future, and two is not.


That's it.


Two.


Not six, not three, not oh I can't decide.


And I also recommend a couple of things when you're setting up this exercise.


Write about 40 or so words down, but tailor them to your company.


If you make industrial, I don't know, pile driving machines, for example, you're not


going to write romantic in areas, two of your brand attributes.


I think.


If you do, you have a very specific segment, well done.


But make them specific to your organization, but try not to influence the process, especially


if you're an agency.


Because you do not work there, they work there, they know the brand better than you.


Your goal is to learn, draw it from them, and express it back to them.


That's what they're paying you for.


Not necessarily for you to say, well I like this, so unless you're their target market,


don't do that.


So write down these 40 or so words on cards.


Start with the brand is not.


It's a lot easier for people to say, oh I don't like that, or I don't like this, than


I do like this.


Think about when clients see design pieces, right?


They don't start with, oh I really like this, they're like, I don't like this color of blue.


That's the feedback.


It's not necessarily good feedback, it's frustrating feedback, but it's feedback.


So start with the brand is not.


Then work with the brand is, and then in the near future.


I also recommend, don't do it focus group style, where you have a bunch of people in


a room, because there's always going to be one loud person who's going to end up overruling


everybody else.


Try to do it one on one as much as possible, so that you are getting the real, unfiltered


feedback.


And as a result of this, you're going to get some really interesting answers, and you're


actually going to be able to see where the problem areas might be, once you push out


the brand strategy.


If 20 people say this, and then five people in this other department say something completely


different, you're going to have a bad time.


You know this now, so you can prepare for it, add it to your SWOT analysis.


And the next step is defining voice and tone.


And lots of people have talked about this in depth.


Lots of companies have their brand voice and tone out there.


MailChimp has a good one that's publicly available.


Buffer, who makes everything public, has it available out there.


I recommend reading those over.


But I also encourage you strongly, brand strategy is more than just voice.


And a lot of companies get to voice, and then they stop.


They say, okay, we're good.


Because voice is something tangible.


It's easy to grab onto and say, well, this is not what the brand would say, or this is


what the brand would say.


And what happens is that you have your marketing department speaking one way, because they're


all really excited about this brand voice.


And then you have the people answering the phone still going back to the old way of doing


things.


And it's an incomplete implementation.


And then they're like, ugh, this brand strategy stuff doesn't work.


Never mind, we're never doing that again.


And then you go and join the dusty skeletons in the room with all the holy grails.


Make sure that your brand strategy transcends just your brand voice.


All that being said, this is an example that we did for a client of ours.


They're called Industry Mailout.


They're based in Edmonton.


And they do email marketing, which, as you can imagine, is a very crowded field.


So they have some things that make them stand out.


And what we're working with them on is to help express those values.


And so in our brand voice document, we have write like this, not like this, and why.


This is real examples, a real screenshot from our document.


Please don't only include the bad examples in the document.


It can be really demoralizing.


Everything you do is bad, and I am here to fix it.


You're not the brand police.


You're a brand coach.


So encourage them to write different ways.


Show them why.


Explain it in depth.


Provide really good reasons for why you're asking them to change things.


Or if they did something good, reinforce the good things.


I included one of the examples where what they wrote was not like this.


But in our document, we do have examples where write like this, and then we had to come up


with something bad as an example of how not to write to balance it out.


And at this point, it's a really good idea to get human resources on board.


They're going to be a really good ally in this.


If you're a large enough organization that has a human resources person or department.


Because they make the hiring decisions that bring in the people who are going to be implementing


this brand strategy.


And one of the interesting things that a well-defined brand strategy does for your organization


is it defines culture fit.


If you interview someone and you say, hey, can you write a blog post about why accounting


is awesome?


300 words.


Don't worry about spelling or grammar.


We want to see a sample of your writing.


And you read this and you think, wow, this really aligns well with our brand?


That's a good hire.


You don't even necessarily need to provide them with the brand voice ahead of time.


In fact, sometimes you shouldn't just to see the kinds of information that they come back


to you with.


And also as you go through this process, you're going to have some people who are going to


say, this is dumb and I refuse to do it.


And you're going to need HR as an ally at that point to help you solve these things.


Because if you're at a big enough company, there's going to be some people who are not


going to want to make this happen.


I also encourage you to keep it really simple.


Your brand strategy is not a 50-page document.


It's a business card.


It's something that I could explain to you in less than a minute.


It's something that you could tell me about that elevator speech, that 15-second elevator


speech to tell you to do when you start your own business.


That's how your brand strategy should be expressed.


Are there any German speakers here?


My German accent is apparently awful.


I went through Google and I tried to get it to think it.


I couldn't figure out how to say this.


But you would know what this is saying.


So pretend that I just said this in German.


I'm not going to.


It's seriously like half an hour at my house.


And then my wife said, no, stop.


You're so bad.


This is I'm Lovin' It from McDonald's.


And I'm Lovin' It, if you're not familiar with the campaign, I mean, you're familiar


with the campaign, but you may not be familiar with how it started, started as a German campaign


made by their German advertising agency.


And it was so good and so successful that they put it around the world.


It's been translated into tons of different languages.


And it has the same core message, regardless of where you are.


And they use I'm Lovin' It, which is arguably their most successful advertising campaign


ever.


It's been their longest running, even better than the Big Mac song.


They've been using it for years.


And they use it for hiring people.


You're going to love your job.


I'm Lovin' It.


They use it for people who are excited about their food.


And if you see the commercials and you hear the little ditty that they do, and you immediately


think, ugh, McDonald's, you're not their target market.


And that's OK.


Although sometimes they do sell, like, I drove past one yesterday, and they're like, salads.


I'm like, no.


That's not why people go to McDonald's.


Salads.


One thing that's been really interesting about the I'm Lovin' It campaign is that McDonald's


in North America are actually doing quite poorly.


McDonald's overseas are doing very, very well because of the different ways in which they


express the brand.


And so I would encourage you at this point, if you have international locations, take


that brand voice and take that brand strategy, translate it, get someone who actually speaks


the language to do this, not like Google Translate, and get international on board.


Read it to them.


And if it doesn't make sense in their language, if you're using words that don't translate


well, and this often happens when you're thinking of things that, like, translate from German


to English.


Usually you can figure out English into some other language.


But if it doesn't make sense to them, then you're going to have a difficult time selling


this brand strategy around the world.


Your brand strategy should be so simple where people see it and say, oh yeah, I get that.


We hope you do better.


Okay, I feel like that's a thing I can get behind.


I'm loving it, yes, that's a thing I can get behind.


International locations will help you get there.


And so now that you've got all this stuff together, you've got your brand voice, you're


starting to build what this means for your brand strategy, how do you sell it to everybody


else at the company?


I would encourage you to show the dream.


So this is a dream if you're a cell phone company.


We start with Jess, lockjessmonster on Twitter.


I don't know if that Twitter handle is available, but feel free to grab it if it isn't.


Asking her friend, Elle, do you like Breeze Mobile?


I'm thinking about switching to them.


And hopefully your social media department is monitoring non-at mentions of your brand.


There was a great study done that said that most brands completely missed those mentions.


Please don't.


Hopefully your brand communicated back to them and your social media team knew exactly


what to say because brand voice, like this, not like this.


They didn't spend time thinking about whether or not they should reply.


They didn't spend time thinking about what to say.


They knew what to say and they were able to say it.


And then she did some Googling.


She checked out the website.


Breeze.ca is not a real website.


Please don't go there.


We couldn't get it, unfortunately.


Your meta descriptions, your title tags are another great place to put in that brand.


Your PPC ads.


I can't even tell you how many PPC ads I see that say the same boring dreck as everybody


else.


And this is a massive opportunity to stand out with your brand.


When I was at Searchlove in Boston, I talked very deeply about PPC ads.


One of the examples I gave was car insurance companies.


And I said, here's three ads, TV ads from car insurance companies.


Everybody knows the Geico, Gecko.


Everybody knows Flow from Progressive.


On the East Coast they have a brand called Map Free or something like that and everybody


knew what their ads looked like.


Great.


Here's three PPC ads.


Match them up with a brand.


I think maybe one or two people got it, but it was kind of like they were guessing.


Because they all said the same thing.


Save money on car insurance.


My goodness, what a unique concept.


I've never heard of that in the industry before.


I think everybody says you can save money on car insurance.


What are you going to do to stand out?


So think about that in your marketing and how you express yourself.


Why does your brand get tossed aside when it comes to things like paid verticals?


It's okay if your click-through rate is a little bit lower.


This is a radical idea.


It's okay if your click-through rate is a little bit lower because the customers that


you get are going to be the ones that you want.


I care less about the click-through rate on an ad than I do about the conversion rate


on the landing page.


I care less about the conversion rate on the landing page than I do on the conversion rate


from the lead to the sale.


That's really the most important metric.


Don't waste your salespeople's time.


Get them just the leads that they want.


So Jess is now driving to the store.


Basically the social media people said, hey, where's your nearest store?


Great.


Greg is going to be there between 4 to 9 today.


Make sure to say hi to him when you get there.


This billboard matches all the other advertising that she's seen.


There's no weird differences.


There's no special that she didn't see on the website.


Maybe it's got a nice trackable phone number.


Maybe it's got a trackable URL.


The billboard matches.


Everything else is happening.


And now she's at the kiosk with her giant sack of money.


And is ready to switch.


And at this point, how was she greeted?


Do the in-store displays match everything else that has led her up to this point?


Is Greg behind the counter saying, oh, yeah, hey, yeah, I heard from our social media team


you're going to be coming in and you've got an iPhone 6.


And here's what we can do to switch you over to our service.


And here's how long it's going to take for your phone number and all that stuff.


That's not an impossible dream.


We have the technology.


We can build it.


It's not.


It's just something that doesn't necessarily happen.


And if that happens, people are going to think that's amazing.


It's not impossible.


It's just hard.


And I think that with a brand strategy, you can achieve these connections.


And then after she's so happy, she's switched over her phone, she actually ended up getting


a 6 Plus because she felt the 6 wasn't enough like a tablet to hold up to your face.


I have a Moto X, so I make fun of iPhones all the time.


Then she got her email afterwards, and the email also matched all of the brand touch


points that have happened up to this point.


It wasn't one of those, dear customer, we understand you've had a recent experience


with us at Breeze Mobile.


Please fill out the survey for a chance to win a gift card.


Do people actually win those gift cards?


Is it like Publishers Clearing House?


I always wondered, and I've filled them out.


I've been with my same cell phone provider for, I think, 18 years now, and I've always


filled them out.


I've never won a gift card.


I'm like, just come on, guys.


When I get to 20 years, maybe balloons will fall from the ceiling or something.


I'm hopeful.


But these emails also need to match.


That post-purchase experience is, I would argue, even more important than the pre-purchase


experience.


Customer loyalty is not just lip service.


And it's also a two-way street.


A lot of companies expect customers to be loyal to them, but they are not loyal to their


customers.


Cell phone companies aren't particularly bad at this.


There's always deals for new consumers, but not a deal if I've been with you for 18 years


and I'm renewing my cell phone.


Why should I stick with you?


You give me no reason to.


Customer loyalty has to go both ways.


So you bring all these pieces together, and you say, this is the kind of brand experience


that's going to make things less expensive for us.


It's going to increase customer retention.


It's going to increase positive word of mouth.


It's going to increase our net promoter score, all those great metrics that people on the


C-level like to see.


A properly executed brand strategy makes all this happen.


And at this point, you can say, OK, we're going to get service on board, because you're


able to show them how much better it is when people come in and they're not pissed off


all the time.


When people come in, they're like, yeah, your social media person was so nice.


I'm really excited to give you a whole bunch of money and help you meet your quota.


Right?


You have the less angry phone calls.


You have people dealing with stuff in a more proactive way.


Going back to WestJet, they've had a really difficult time lately on social media.


They're actually, I feel like they're providing a master class in crisis management on social


media, because five of their planes two weeks ago had bomb threats called in.


And every one of them had to be grounded.


No idea who's doing it.


The Mounties are on the case.


It's a very Canadian thing to say, isn't it?


I feel like a moose should come out now, right?


But they have been handling it on social media so well, and it's all in their brand voice.


And they haven't just, because their brand voice is helpful, their brand voice hasn't


just been like, hey, look, guy who just lost your luggage.


We're busy over here dealing with a bomb threat.


So we can't help you right now.


They've been helping everybody.


It's amazing.


I do recommend you check out their Twitter, scroll back a little bit, you'll see how proactive


and on they are.


And when Michaela told them about the sexist joke, they were really sorry.


And they do follow up.


They do fix things.


And that's what makes a difference.


If you screw up, you do have to apologize.


But getting service on board and saying like, look, you're going to know when you're doing


things right and you're doing things wrong.


You will have that consistency, not just with consumers, but within your own organization.


And then when you look back at this brand document again, now you can start to see how


all these things start to come together a little more clearly for you.


How you can figure out how your out of home affects your social network.


How your signage and your apps work together.


And what you can do to influence all of those things in your organization.


Go beyond a document.


Do not let your brand strategy languish as a 50 page PDF in your intranet.


It's a living, breathing document that is the true expression of your company out there


in the world.


And always be coaching.


Don't think, OK, I've coached everybody.


Why aren't you following the brand voice?


It's a constant ongoing process.


And remember, brand coach, not brand police.


You don't want to be the soup Nazi when it comes to the brand.


No brand for you, right?


You want to help people.


Because the only way you're going to get people excited about this, the only way you're going


to get cheerleaders is if you help them do better.


If you encourage them to be consistent with the brand voice.


If they start to feel it, this is cheesy, but feel it in their heart.


That's a good brand voice.


And if you do all these things and you bring your brand voice completely together, you


will feel that every decision that you make, whether it's marketing, whether it's sales,


whether it's service, everything will drive forward together with purpose.


And at Kick Point, our brand is called Lady KP.


You can imagine why.


And we ask ourselves, would Lady KP say this?


Would Lady KP tweet this?


I am actually quite terrible at writing as Lady KP.


And my business partner, Jen, we co- and kick point together, she is much better at it than


I am.


So I'll send her things and say, please teach me how to do this because I can't get Lady


KP's voice.


But I'm working on it.


And that coaching is really important.


And it's something that it's okay if you don't get it the first time.


It's something that you're going to work towards.


And if you do every brand interaction, thinking about that brand voice, thinking about that


brand strategy, thinking about the ultimate purpose of this, every decision that you make


will drive your company forward with purpose, not confusion.


Thank you.


Thank you, Dave.


So I was saying there, think about this, because we've all worked with companies and they seem


kind of valueless and you go in and you try to, you know, what is your value?


And you touch on this a little bit and they say, our value is to work hard and make money.


I hope that's most companies' values.


Right?


Like that's the surface of existing, continuing to exist as a corporation is working hard


and making money.


Otherwise, well, making money part maybe you're a charity.


They still have to make money.


So I think you have to, you know, kind of push past that.


And if they don't, and I mean, as an agency, it's really hard to say no to people, but


sometimes there are some lost causes.


And if you work at one, I'm sorry, that just like, it's, they're just not going to get


there.


You know, like even Comcast, bless their terrible service little hearts, they have service standards


that they try to achieve as terrible as they are.


You know, they do have something that they stand for other than making money.


But making money, that's awesome though.


That's fine.


Yeah.


Okay.


A couple of questions and you can submit these on the hashtag Moscon QA.


You talked about a process of putting things on cards.


Where do you get the 40 words to put on those cards?


There's a lot of, I can tweet out a link later, but there's a lot of good prompts for writers


actually when you're developing characters.


There's these great lists of words of different attributes that your character can have in


stories, novels.


And so you can go through that list.


There's like 200 or so words.


That's a good start.


I'll give out some examples as well, but that's a good way to start.


And if you ask people around the company too, before you start the card sorting process,


that can kind of seed where you're going to go with that.


Final question.


Evan Davis asks, why was Arby's so low on your chart?


They have the meats.


What's the digs on Arby's?


I personally love Arby's.


Often when we drive by an Arby's, I have to stop and my wife hates it.


She thinks it's disgusting.


So I just get my own little roast beef burger and have it in peace.


And there's like two Arby's left in Edmonton.


So I have to be very specific.


Oh, we're just going to go down this way.


So shortcut and drive past the Arby's.


Our art director made the brand Continuum and I saw where she put Arby's and I laughed


because she knows that I love Arby's and I just left it.


So that's why.


But you know, Arby's, roast beef, protein, protein world, you know, and I wouldn't say


too.


I imagine I wouldn't put the protein world necessarily as the low end of the Continuum


and Dove as the high end.


They're just different.


All right, let's give a hand for Dina DiTommaso, everyone.


Thank you.


#WhiteboardFriday: How to Create 10x SEO Reports

Okay, so we have 400 broken pages.


We rank number seven for best plumbers in Idaho.


Oh hey, SEOmoz fans.


I'm Cyrus Shepard.


Today I'm talking about SEO reports, specifically how to create 10x SEO reports.


I've got hundreds of SEO reports like this in my career and I've got to tell you, it's


useless.


No one is reading those.


And this is unfortunate because this is your direct way to communicate the value of what


you're doing, drive action, and essentially make more money with your job.


Now a good SEO report tries to accomplish three things.


You want to tie the report directly to your business metric.


You want to show the value of SEO, what you're doing, how SEO is delivering to those business


metrics.


And finally, you want to drive action.


When people read your SEO report, you want them to take action on specific things, fix


site issues, those sort of things, etc.


But people make a lot of mistakes.


Typically and if you've created SEO reports, if you've read SEO reports, you've seen these


mistakes over and over and over again.


Your SEO report, it's not a site audit.


It's not a list of every single thing that is wrong, every single traffic metric.


It's usually just the top things, the things that we want to focus people's attention on.


And your SEO report is not something that only delivers good news.


You see these time and time again, SEO reports, they paint a rosy picture, but people aren't


dumb.


They know that if their business is not improving and you're continually delivering good news,


you're not really tying SEO to the business.


So we want to create even reports.


Now over the years with the reports I've created, I find that there's generally five key things


that you want to include in every SEO report that helps you drive action and show the value


of SEO and ultimately help you make more money.


The first thing that you want to include in every SEO report are KPIs.


These are key performance indicators.


These tie directly to your business metrics.


And generally you want to include about two to four of these.


And you want to keep them top of mind.


Now generally in SEO these can be conversions, goals, e-commerce, how many things are you


selling.


It can be sign-ups for your email newsletter.


It can be downloads.


Generally anything having to do with money, your business metrics, your key performance


indicators, these are good things to include.


Now a good tip when reporting on your key performance indicator, organic traffic, the


SEO work that you do is often the last conversion channel that people will use.


So it's good to use assisted conversions.


This is often found in Google Analytics or whatever analytics program that you use.


And this will set a look back window and show how organic traffic, how your SEO efforts


contributed even if their last visit was direct.


So it's good researching that and understanding how you can use assisted conversions in your


reporting.


Another key performance indicator that is very common in SEO reports is traffic.


In fact some people like to lead with it.


I like to lead with the business metrics.


But it's inevitable that if you're doing an SEO report you're going to include traffic.


Now if you want to make that traffic report a little more valuable you need comparisons.


Generally month to month comparisons or more useful year over year comparisons.


And this helps avoid the problem of like traffic was down because of Christmas or a certain


holiday or regional events.


So when you compare year over year you can show actual performance that varies a little


more reasonably.


Second, and this is where a lot of people stumble, search visibility or share of voice,


SOV.


Now where people stumble is this is not a rankings report.


A lot of SEO reports include rankings.


And rankings I got to say really aren't the best thing to include in your reports.


Rankings fluctuate.


They are so personalized from country, device, individuals.


So including rankings for individual keywords really is not very informative.


Fortunately there are many great alternatives that you can include that are much superior


to rankings.


The first being search visibility.


Search visibility you'll find this in many SEO tools, Moz has it, different SEO tools


have it.


And it's basically an estimation of clicks for all your tracked keywords.


So if you're tracking hundreds or thousands of keywords search visibility can show you


an estimation of how much traffic you're actually getting from those keywords based on rank


and search volume and things like that.


Share of voice is very similar to that.


But it's not based on clicks, it's based on visibility and volume.


Your enterprise stat does an excellent job with share of voice.


And what's cool about share of voice is it tracks all of your keywords against all of


your competitors for those keywords.


So if you have 200 keywords ranking for best plumbers in Wisconsin it will show you where


all your competitors are and how much of that traffic you're actually gaining.


Whether it's 13% or 30% and that way you can track against your competitors it's a much


better metric than those individual keywords that don't tell you much.


And finally if you don't have access to the premium SEO tools you can do something which


is called a rank index.


AJ Cone has an excellent post on this.


It's a little older but still very relevant.


We'll link to it in the post below.


And rank index is basically grouping all of your keywords by type.


For example maybe they all have the word plumber in them.


And you track their rankings together as a group hundreds or thousands of keywords.


And you can see fluctuations.


That gives you a much better performance indicator than those individual keywords.


Third, site health.


This is your on page work, your technical SEO.


This again where most people stumble this is not an audit.


You don't want to list every issue on your site, all the 404s, all the 500s, things like


that because no one really wants to read those things that get very repetitive.


Instead you want to focus only on your most important issues.


Generally when I create an SEO report that's three to five issues.


If people want more information you can deliver it to them.


You can give them in-depth downloads, site stats, all that.


But for the report we only want to focus people's attention on three to five issues that they


can actually fix that you want them to work on.


So we're going to list the most important issues on there that we want them to take


action on.


Now something that I do, kind of a pro tip, when you're writing your site health report


use the word because.


When you use the word because it helps people take action.


For example, we have a lot of 404 pages on the site because we introduced some new broken


links.


That tells people that we have a problem, this is why and they want to take action.


Also if you've made any progress until the last time you showed the report, you fixed


those 404s, this is a good place to include it.


So one thing I like to include that often isn't is content performance.


This is your top content whether it's a blog or whatever content you produce by links,


shares and traffic.


Now the reason I like to point out to the site owners content performance is because


I want to show them what's performing well to encourage them to create more of it.


I want to drive action through recommendations.


This content, this blog post that Brittany wrote did very, very well.


We should have Brittany write another one on this and you can suggest topics, keywords,


authors, but by doing this you're helping your client or your boss or whatever help


you by creating that content that's going to do well.


Also if you want to highlight low performing content or content that has gone stale and


is going down, this is also a helpful place to do that just to help inform the decisions


of your content team.


And five, this is probably the most important one.


This is the crux of the SEO report, opportunities.


Opportunities is the key that you're trying to drive here.


And these are recommendations based on everything that we talked about here.


Either the four or five most important things that we can do right now to improve SEO next


month.


You want to prioritize.


This is the most important, this is the second.


We want to employ KISS.


If you're not familiar with KISS, it's an acronym, Keep It Simple Stupid.


You're not stupid, you're just going to keep it simple.


You want to make your recommendations as simple and easy to follow as possible.


One, two, three, four, that's it.


We're not going to include everything.


A lot of SEO reports want to list dozens of things.


We want to hold those back.


If you have dozens of fixes that you need fixed on the site, it's probably not a great


thing to put them in there because you're going to overwhelm your clients and bosses


and people taking action.


Again, four to five a month or whatever sort of cadence you're on, weekly, monthly, and


how many things you think your client can reasonably tackle.


Next month, you'll give them four to five more.


You'll stay employed and you'll continually have a new list of things to work on.


And you want to make sure they're tied to the KPIs.


We want to fix these because they directly influence these.


And in fact, I want to shake things up a little bit.


I know we listed number five as opportunities.


Don't end your report with that.


Make opportunities the number one thing in your report.


Turn it up, here are the opportunities, and then here are KPI, search visibility, etc.,


etc., etc.


So they know exactly what they should be working on.


We just released a new guide on SEO reporting.


You should check it out.


We released a new functionality in Moz Pro 2 if you're into that sort of thing.


If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below.


And if you like this, please share.


Featured Snippets: What to Know & How to Target - Whiteboard Friday

Hey Moz fans, welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're talking


about all things featured snippets. So what are they? What sort of research have


we discovered about them recently? And what can you take back to the office to


target them and effectively basically steal them, right, in search results?


So to be clear, what is a featured snippet? If you were to do a search for


are crocs edible, you would see a featured snippet like this. And


essentially it's giving you information about your search and citing a website.


And this isn't to be confused with an answer box where it's just an answer and


there's no citation. So if you were to search how many days are in February,


Google will probably just tell you, you know, 28 and there's no citation, right? So


that's an answer box as opposed to a featured snippet. Now what have we


recently discovered about featured snippets? Well we know that they're on


23% of all search result pages. That's wild, right? This is up over a hundred


sixty-five percent since 2016. So we know that they're growing. We know that Google


continues to provide more and more in different spaces. And we also know that


there's five general types of featured snippets. The most common that we see is


the paragraph and the list. And the list can come in numerical format or bullets.


But we also see tables and then video. And the video is interesting because it'll


just show a specific section of a video that it thinks you need to consume in


order to get your answer, which is always interesting. And lately we have started


noticing accordions. And we're not sure if they're testing this or if it might


be rolled out, but there are a lot like people also ask boxes in that they


expand and almost show you additional featured snippets, which is fascinating.


Another important thing to take away is that, so we know paragraph and lists are


the most common and we can see that here, fifty percent of all featured snippet


results are paragraphs. Thirty-seven percent are lists. It's a ton. And then it kind of


whittles down from there. Nine percent are tables. And then just under two percent are video.


And under two percent are accordion. Kind of good to know, right? Interestingly, half of


all featured snippets are part of a carousel. And what we mean by a carousel


is when you see these sort of circular options within a featured snippet at the


bottom. So if you were to search for, I think this is comfortable shoes, you have


options for women is a circular carousel button, for work, stylish. And what happens


when you click these is it recalibrates that featured snippet and changes it


into what you clicked. And so it starts to get very very niche. So you might have


started with this very general search and Google is basically begging you to


refine what it is that you're looking for. It's very very interesting and something to


keep in mind. We also know that people also ask boxes are on ninety-three point


eight percent of featured snippet SERPs. Meaning they're almost always present


when there's a featured snippet, which is fascinating. And I think there's a lot of


good data we can get from these people also ask questions to kind of seed your


keyword research and better understand what it is people are looking for. Are


crocs supposed to be worn with socks? It's a very important question, right? You have to


understand this stuff. Informational sites are winning, right? We see that the


sites that are providing finance information and educational information


doing extremely well in the featured snippet space. So again something to sort


of keep in mind. Be a detective and test. You should always be exploring these


snippets that you might want to rank for. Where is it grabbing from the page? What


sort of markup is it? Start sort of being a detective and looking at all those


things. So now to kind of the good stuff where what is it that you can


specifically do to potentially win a featured snippet? And so these are sort


of the four boiled down steps I've come up with to help you with that. So number


one is to know which featured snippet keywords your site already ranks for. And


it's really easy to do in Keyword Explorer at Moz. So if you search by root


domain, you just put in your website into Moz Keyword Explorer, it will show you


all of the ranking keywords for that specific domain. And from there you can


filter by ranking or by range from 1 to 10. So what are those keywords that you


currently rank 1 to 10 on, right? And then you add those keywords to a list and


once they populate in your list, you can filter by a featured snippet. And this is


sort of the good stuff. This is your playground. This is where your


opportunities are. And it gets really fun from here. So number two is to know your


searchers intent. So if one of your keywords was Halloween costume DIY and


the search result page was all video and images and content that was very visual,


you have to provide visual content to compete with an intent like that, right?


There's obviously an intent behind the search where people want to see what it


is and help in that process, right? So it's a big part of crafting content to


rank in search results but also featured snippets. Know the intent. Number three,


provide succinct answers and content. Omit needless words. We see Google


providing short, concise information especially for voice results. We know


that that's sort of the way to go. So highly suggest doing that. Number four,


monitor those featured snippet targets. Whether you're actively trying to target


them or you currently have them, Stat provides really, really great alerts. So


you can actually get an email notification if you lose or win a


featured snippet. And it's one of the easiest ways I've discovered to keep


track of all of these things. A pro tip is to add a too long didn't read


summary to your most popular pages, right? You already know the content that most


people come to your site for or maybe, you know, the content that does the best


in your conversions, whatever that might be. If you can provide summarized content


about that page, just key takeaways or whatever that might be at the top or the


bottom, you could potentially rank for all sorts of featured snippets. So really,


really cool, easy stuff to kind of play around with and test. And lastly, for more


tips and tricks, you should totally sign up for the featured snippet webinar that


we're doing. I'm hosting it in a couple weeks and I know spots are limited but


we'll be sharing all of the research that we've discovered and even more


takeaways and tricks. So hopefully you enjoyed that and I appreciate you


watching this Whiteboard Friday. Keep me posted on any of your featured snippet


battles or what you're trying to get or any struggles down below in the comments


and I look forward to seeing you all again soon. Thank you so much for joining


MozCon 2015 - 07 - Tracking Beyond the Pageview with Adrian Vender

All right. Hello, wonderful people of Moscon. I'm so excited to be here. As she mentioned,


I'm the director of analytics at IMI. It's a San Diego-based agency, but I'm personally


living out of Phoenix, Arizona. Any Arizona people here? Kind of awkward. All right. I


freaking love Moscon. There's so many reasons. Yeah, exactly. So many reasons why I love


Moscon, and one of the big reasons is all the awesome people here. The reason why I


just think that we're all so cool and awesome is because we're passionate about what we


do. We care about the marketing that we put out there, and we care about everything that


we produce, including content. We love awesome content. Uh-oh. If I think it, it'll actually


work, because I see a green light. Shazam. We might have to improvise a little bit, so


while I'm going to guess that they might ‑‑ oh, there we go. All right. The content. The


awesome content thing, because we actually care about ‑‑ thank you. What we put out


there. We all have a part in creating content. Either we design it, we do all the marketing,


kind of push it out there, and we all have a part to play in awesome content, or content


we think is awesome. You see, not all content is going to work out. Very complicated process.


That's why we charge people to do it. There's a lot of variability, a lot of people to kind


of work with, and there's just a lot of room for error. So some content is going to be


great. Some content is not going to be so great. So how do we know when content works


and when it doesn't work? Data. Web analytics. In fact, web analytics should tell us how


people get to and through our content. And you know, you have to look at it that way,


because there's a lot of things going on with content. It's not about the content piece


itself. It's about the acquisition. It's about the follow‑through. It's about the conversion


that might occur later on. There's a large story to measure and to try to tell inside


our reporting. The problem is that we're often pretty poor at measuring content success.


We just kind of put the basic analytics tracking code on the site and kind of look at some


standardized reports like this. So we see page views. That's one important piece of


the puzzle, of course. We have average time on site and bounce rate. Those metrics at


times just flat out lie to you. I'll talk about that in a little bit. We have page value


up there. I'm not even going to talk about that. Let's just ignore that for now.


If we're just relying on that basic tracking code and the standardized reports, we're not


telling the story about our content like we should be. We're just doing a very bad job


about that. But I'm not saying that in a way that's kind of supposed to bash you or anything,


because honestly, I see it as actually a very difficult thing. We're kind of set up for


failure a little bit. One reason is that we're not really tracking content interaction. We


just put that basic tracking code on the site. It says tracking page views. What about people


reading it? In this case, we're looking at the Moz beginner's guide to SEO. There's a


lot of kind of content interactions you can do here. There's scrolling and reading, downloading


the PDF button. There's a nifty little chapter navigation box. There's even clicking around


on the social share buttons. Now, how do you think ‑‑ are people actually interacting


with the page in that way? I don't know. More importantly, Moz doesn't know. And I checked


their site code so I know they're not tracking those things. And again, it's not ‑‑ again,


to bash them. I'm not here to make enemies or anything. It's not tracking these things


natively. We're just tracking page views right there. The other challenge is that analysis


is hard. It's hard to know where ‑‑ how do I even find the performance of my content?


A lot of those interactions I was talking about in the previous slide, we can do that


through event tracking, which I'll talk about in a little bit. Event tracking reporting


is weird. You can get all the data in there and it's actually very unstructured and you


can kind of easily get lost. So you don't know what to do with it. At times it's hard


to connect when people interact with their content and actually lead a conversion. We


kind of don't know what report to look at. In general, it's actually very hard to know


what reports you should be looking at to find the answers that you're looking for. I have


one kind of brand new client who's very eager to get into the analytics, which is awesome,


and they admit they're a total noob at it. And they're like, Adrian, I'm trying to analyze


that people are going through the site and everything and I was looking at this behavior


flow report and it's so confusing. And I was like, yeah, it is. Slow your roll a little


bit. Let's find something easier so you know how to find success in your reporting. So


we have those two sides of things. We have the tracking side. We have to track the right


things. And then we have to know how to find the data. I'm going to talk a little bit about


both, a little more emphasis on the technical side at the moment. So be warned, I'm not


going to go way too technical, just a little bit to get dangerous because we have to talk


about it. So all that advanced content tracking that I talked about, all you have to do to


kind of get all that extra data is to put some JavaScript code on the site. Just slap


some code on the site. You know, some MozCon alumni might cringe at the whole, just do


this, just do that, because I think we had Will Reynolds at previous times say you can't


just do things because it kind of diminishes the overall effort it takes to do these things.


And there is effort to kind of do this kind of event tracking. You have people that have


to know code, they kind of know how it works with the HTML on the site. You have to kind


of get your objectives in line. And it's a complicated process. And even another part


of that complicated process is even after you put all the code together and you've tested


it out and everything, you have to give the code to IT to put it on the website, which


that's fun, right? Yeah. They've got enough critical issues that they deal with, like


just keeping the website up all the time. They don't want to be dealing with all these


various GA tracking code requests over and over and over again. They're going to get


sick of you. Be like, hey, can you put this, you know, quickly put this GA event tracking


code so we can track these social share clicks and do it today? No. They're going to be like


manana. Yeah. We'll take care of that later. So there's one thing that can kind of help


eliminate some of these hurdles. And that's Google Tag Manager. I freaking love Google


Tag Manager. In fact, I love any kind of tag manager usage in general. So if it's Google


Tag Manager or, you know, Signal Tag or anything else, who here uses Tag Manager? Any kind


of tag manager. Okay. Good. I love you all. Everybody else, I still love you too. Don't


worry. It's just that you're kind of like my good friend where I just tell you about


a favorite band and you don't know about it and it's like I must share this awesomeness


with you kind of thing. You must embrace Google Tag Manager. It's free, it's powerful, it's


flexible, it's awesome. And even though there are a couple of Googlers in the audience,


I'm not being paid for this kind of endorsement. Although Adam, wherever you are, I don't mind


that at all. So with Google Tag Manager, you have one container code to put on your site.


So you still need some IT involvement. You know, buy them a beer, just be nice to them


and you kind of take care of that part of it. And you've got that container code in


place. And through that interface, you have this centralized way to kind of manage all


the different extra tracking strips and tags you want to put on your site as opposed to


just, you know, hacking them into the website code and kind of creating a Frankenstein of


a website. That's messy. It's dirty. Google Tag Manager makes it very efficient to manage


all of that. Now, there's no way that we can kind of go over a whole course of Google Tag


Manager in this setting. And I'm not going to try to oversimplify things way too much.


It is a tool that needs some expertise behind it. So I'm going to share some learning resources


later on. But I want to at least share enough of how powerful it is and what the opportunity


is, so that even if you're not the person that's going to manage within Google Tag Manager,


you at least know what it can do and tell people back in your organization, hey, we


need to use this because this is what it can do. Now, some important objects that you kind


of deal with inside Google Tag Manager, there are tags. This is what's going to fire. Then


there's triggers. This is basically the rules of when a tag is going to fire. And then you


have variables. These are the various values that are used within the tags and triggers.


So there's an interrelationship between all these different objects. And I'm going to


go through a quick setup process here. So step one, you just choose a tag. So you can


choose a Google Analytics tag and various other tags too, like AdWords conversion scripts


or things like that. A couple of things I want to point out is that some people say,


hey, Adrian, we don't need Google Tag Manager. We already have Analytics implemented on the


site. That's cool. Leave that there. But you can use Google Tag Manager to add the extra


event tracking much easier. And then the other thing is that people always associate Google


Tag Manager as only relevant for Google Analytics. It's great for GA, but it's actually great


for any kind of tracking that you want to use. So definitely embrace it. Triggers, the


idea of when do I want it to fire on certain pages, on certain clicks, on certain form


submissions. This is where you can kind of configure those simple rules right there.


The idea of setting up a trigger is saying, hey, I want to fire something when somebody


clicks on an element, an HTML element that has an ID of example in this case. And there


you go. Some people are like, well, how do I find that information? And a quick tip is


that you can use the Chrome dev tools. You can kind of right click on an element and


inspect element and you kind of get that HTML view. And you get all these different attributes


that are tied to that HTML element. And it's all those attributes that are potential kind


of trigger points to say, okay, when an ID has this kind of value, this is where I want


event tracking to occur. So there's a lot of opportunities with that. And again, I don't


want to oversimplify it. There's a lot to learn about Google Tag Manager. So one way


to kind of learn more about it is that Analytics Academy, the kind of educational resource


that Google put out, just recently released a Google Tag Manager fundamentals course.


Definitely go through it. It will give you a very good comprehensive view of how to use


the tool and really just kind of get more knowledgeable of it. And then for anybody


in this room that's like, I'm technicalator and I can figure this stuff out, this guy,


Simo Ahava, he's like wicked sick smart on Google Tag Manager. It's awesome. He knows


so many things. So if you want to learn more about the technical side of Google Tag Manager,


follow this guy. What I'm going to do now is actually show some different scenarios


of, hey, what are the things I can track within Google Tag Manager very easily? And just so


you know, I have a link at the end of the slide and you can of course download the deck


and everything to a blog post where I basically put all the links I reference and some extra


items in there so you have a better idea of where to get these instructions. Now tracking


content scrolling. This is helpful so that you know for a piece of content, in addition


to getting the page view metrics, we want to know when people start reading it or when


they reach the bottom of the content or even reach the bottom of the page, the whole HTML


file. You can get those numbers and kind of see the readability of your different pieces


of content so we know which ones have a higher share of scrolling to page views than others


and kind of know which content is working or not. Then you have the ability to track


outbound links. Maybe you have certain pages, certain content where you're meant to kind


of link out to other resources and you want to know are people even clicking those links?


Yeah, you should track those and instead of manually doing it inside your website code,


there are very simple instructions to automatically track any kind of outbound links on your website


and send it as events into Google Analytics. Videos. I love this one because if you have


videos on your site that of course people are supposed to engage in and you're not currently


tracking them, this is currently a big void in that whole page view and are they really


doing anything after that kind of scenario. So we've got instructions here for both YouTube


tracking and Vimeo tracking automatically done via the instructions in Google Tag Manager.


Then sometimes, even though I'm talking about beyond the page view, sometimes the page view


we have to worry about. A lot of us are building these dynamically driven websites that load


new content via Ajax and that basic tracking code already ran once and it's probably not


going to run again. So here's some instructions here to actually work with an Ajax site so


that when the history state changes, you have a trigger based on that to fire new page view


every single time that occurs. So these are just some examples. Again, I don't have way


too much time and the link I will have on my blog will actually have these resources


plus other items like tracking file downloads, even like SoundCloud embeddable widget tracking.


There's even, oddly enough, there was already a Konami code reference earlier today. There's


even a link to add the Konami code through GTM so that when somebody does it on your


website, you can make it do something. It's up to you what you want it to do. So more


Konami code references. So you're like, okay, Adrian, we're tracking all this information.


I'm tracking the video events. I'm tracking the scrolling events and I'm sending all this


data into Google Analytics and it's like, great. I don't know what you're doing with


it. And again, that kind of brings us back to that second challenge of the fact that


analysis is hard. We collect a lot of data. It sits there and we kind of don't know what


to do with it. The biggest thing I can emphasize is that we have to be better analysts here.


The web analytics tools that we use were not just built for web analysts. They were built


for digital marketers. Because if we want to be successful in our marketing campaigns,


we have to know how to analyze the data because we have all the context of why we push


content out a certain way and why we design it. So we have to embrace the idea of being


analysts. And again, that's like a whole other course to kind of learn about. But I'm


going to talk about a few quick tips about how to do so. I'll talk about event tracking,


that it can be a little obscure. As you learn a little bit about event tracking through


the search engine watch link that we have right there, you at least understand a little


bit about where to go inside GA to look at event reporting and start to get some understanding


of the flexible hierarchy. You have category, action, labels, and you can kind of drill


into it different ways to kind of get your perfect report. The other thing about kind


of configuring is that the key to using an analytics tool is to know how to drill through,


set up your primary dimensions, secondary dimensions, all your perfect metrics and everything.


You say, okay, this is the perfect report. And then you go back the next day and you


try to retrace the steps and it just adds more time. Let's not reinvent the wheel. Whenever


you configure your perfect report, create a shortcut. It saves that exact same configuration


that you worked with, you give it a name, and now it's a link inside your left-hand


navigation menu. And then even beyond that, once you kind of have your perfect specific


reports, you can add them to a dashboard so you have this one end-all be-all place where


you go to see your specific reports, the ones with information you're exactly looking for.


Then the other thing is segmentation, slicing and dicing your data. This is like analytics


jiu-jitsu that all of us should embrace here because segmentation is the way to kind of


let us see the very specific scenarios broken down on a website, especially when it comes


to content performance. Maybe I want to look at sessions where people viewed a video that


they convert. Or maybe I can do user-based segmentation and say, okay, did a person that


landed on this key piece of content, did they eventually convert? Maybe multiple visits


later on. All these kinds of conditional items that you want to look at is available with


segmentation. It's one of the most absolutely powerful features you should use in Google


Analytics. And again, this is all relying on the fact that we're tracking the data.


It's important to get our tracking right. It's important to know how to analyze. And


I know those things sound obvious, but we may not be doing that well enough. And the


challenge I have for you all is to kind of embrace the different resources that I linked


out to and just the education of Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics in general so


that you make sure your tracking infrastructure is correct and that the business and the strategy


that you want to build off of it will come through from that because you know how to


analyze. Again, just some resources on the blog post that I have right there, including


what I already referenced. There's some more GTM tracking tips, a custom GA dashboard that


just kind of quickly captures some of those things, and even a Google Tag Manager container


preloaded with some of the cool GTM tricks I talked about so you can just kind of import


it into Google Tag Manager. And that's all I have today.


I love how you say that that's all I have today. Everyone is like furiously taking notes.


So here's the thing. There are a lot of questions. People are like, how do I do this? And what


tool do I use? And what about this? And what about that? So we're not going to be able


to get to all of them. So you can stalk him after. The other thing what we might be able


to do is if we're finding that there are just a ton of questions, we will maybe work on


getting a blog post that digs in a little deeper or webinar or something like that that


we can dig in a little deeper, right? Because everyone was like, what? That is awesome.


One of the questions that came up, actually multiple people have asked about different


tools. So whether it's a tool like Chartbeat or tools like what were the other ones mentioned,


seriously I'm scrolling because everybody just has so many questions.


And these are probably about what tools? Crazy Egg, Wixia for video, right? So there


are all these other tools that do similar types of things for similar to other things.


So what's your recommendation? Is it easier to use those other things? What about Site


Catalyst? What about Omniture? Anyway, you have 30 seconds. Just kidding.


Different types of tools involved right here. So when we talk about something like Crazy


Egg or just kind of like these extra tracking type things, they're just meant to send


data to some other service. It's similar to Google Analytics where it's just another


analytics collection tool. So something like Crazy Egg, there are some instructions out


there to implement Google Tag Manager efficiently and it's very doable. There are some tools


that don't play well with any kind of tag manager, specifically the CRO type tools like


optimizing things like that. You could technically force it to happen, but it's not recommended


because the way that those CRO tools want you to load the code, they want you to load


it extremely early so that people don't see that visible flicker if you're trying


to do an A-B test with them. And just the Google Tag Manager placement does not meet


that exact same speed of trying to reduce that flicker. So that's usually one recommendation


to not do. And then again, just like I was saying with Crazy Egg, there's lots and


lots of tags that usually say, yeah, that can go to GTM, that can go to GTM. Adobe,


slightly different. It's just more recommended that you're using the Adobe Tag Manager


system because it's just more catered to that platform.


All right. So honestly, I'm not going to dig into any of these other questions because


I think they're a lot more in depth than we can do in the minute that we have left.


But I would highly recommend that you chase him down. Sorry. He's like, great. Hopefully


you'll be out at the Moz Crawl tonight and then you can get even more questions. And


we'll dig a little deeper.


You can buy me free beers at the sponsor events.


Buy him some beers. Anyway, thank you so much, Adrian. Can we get a big round of applause


for Adrian?


MozCon 2014 - 17 - Jeremy Bloom - Dare to Fail

So when I was 10 years old, I sat my parents down.


I said, I want to talk to you about the future, like most 10-year-olds.


I said, I have a declaration to make.


I'm going to ski in the Olympics, and I'm going to play in the National Football League.


And I'm going to need your support.


True story.


That was weird.


And although my dad is a social psychologist, both of my parents have this unique perspective


that the impossible is inherently possible.


And they looked at me and they said, Jeremy, you can accomplish these two things.


If you put your mind to it and you attack your dreams.


And it clicked.


The use of the word attack clicked to me.


I couldn't just dream about it.


I had to attack it.


I had to wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and I had to go climb a mountain.


Or I had to wake up at 1 a.m. and go run wind sprints.


Because I knew that my competitors were sleeping and they were dreaming.


I felt like if I could just get one inch better than them at that time, I would get that much


closer to my goal.


And if you read my bio, you might incorrectly assume that I've been good at everything that


I've tried.


But my story, my narrative is the complete opposite.


I've failed thousands of times.


I've fallen flat on my face and climbing these two mountains between going to the NFL and


skiing in the Olympics encountered all kinds of barriers that tested my resolve.


And at the risk of sounding grandiose, I believe that the number one skill that we can all


work on, not only to become successful in life, but also to be happy, is the ability


to leverage failure and defeat and use it constructively to create a road map on how


to succeed.


And I'm going to unpack that thought a little bit more later.


But my father is what was my first ski instructor?


He was my first football coach.


He's my hero in life.


He's the first person I go to for advice.


And growing up in a small town in Colorado, when the Olympics were on, you couldn't talk


to us.


Because we were, you know, three feet in front of our little 20-inch television, just going


crazy in the household, driving my mom insane, watching athletes as they'd come from behind,


like U.S. athletes, and they'd win Olympic gold medals, and we would be just cheering


so loud inside of our living room.


And my dad's a real emotional guy.


He wears his heart on his sleeve.


He loves the United States.


He loves athletics.


And quite often when a U.S. athlete would win an Olympic gold medal, I'd look over at


him, and he'd be, like, wiping the tears from his face.


And there's nothing more that I wanted in my life than to win an Olympic gold medal.


And not only for myself, but also for the thought of standing on top of that podium


and watching the flag, our flag being raised, and listening to the national anthem, and


thinking about my dad crying tears of joy and all those types of things.


And after failing to win an Olympic gold medal in Salt Lake City, my first Olympics, I came


to Torino, Italy, four years later on a mission.


I was skiing better than I'd ever skied in my entire life.


The year before the Olympics, I won more consecutive World Cup gold medals than anybody in the


history of the sport.


And as the flame was lit in Torino, I was ready.


There's the young Americans in a 21st century sport.


And the young Americans in a 21st century sport.


Where competition ignites the flames of passion, a city of succulent style and stylish speed.


Where greatness is born of fearless visions and unconditional devotions.


The world comes to Italy's alpine heights.


Tonight, the world comes to hear stories, old and new.


The stories of Torino.


I felt great.


I wasn't nervous.


I was prepared.


As I pulled into the start gate and looked down the 230 meters of that mobile course,


I thought about all the years that I spent training for this one moment.


I thought about the blood, the sweat, the tears.


I thought about my dad watching.


I thought about my mom in the grandstands below.


I thought about all my friends, all my family.


I had worked my entire life for this one split moment in time.


I had 22 seconds to make a 23-year-old dream come true.


And this was my final run.


He's a two-sport athlete.


But right now, Trace, there's only one thing left for him to do, and that is go for Olympic


gold.


He has 22 seconds to earn Olympic gold.


He told us his dream is to win Olympic gold and then win a Super Bowl ring.


Following that, see if he can get the first of two right now.


He spoke to his mother, Shar, earlier today.


She told us that Jeremy does not have football on his mind at all right now.


She said he's 1,000 percent Olympic to go in for gold.


720 on the top crossed up.


Bloom has seen everybody else go down.


He knows what it takes.


He gets a little bit back right there on the top.


Let's see if he can make up for that mistake.


Small mistake on the top.


Great D spin on the bottom.


Bloom comes through the finish.


Not the best run I've ever seen out of Jeremy Bloom.


22.79 seconds.


Tight and clean, but a small bobble on the top air as he entered the middle section of


this course that's 740 feet long.


We saw him have trouble in virtually the same place this morning at qualifiers.


An explosive top air.


A 720 crossed up.


Look at the air on that.


Lands on the 27 degree slope, but here's what all goes wrong.


He doesn't maintain good rhythm.


He gets thrown in the back seat, and with this elite field, it doesn't take but a small


mistake to knock you out of medal contention.


Gets it back together because Bloom has so much strength, but the judges will catch that


mistake at the top.


Pretty much pack your bags.


Pretty big impact on that bottom air.


Again, not the best overall run from Bloom.


And here are the scores, and he knew it.


There will be no medals of any color for Jeremy Bloom.


And Steve, for all intents and purposes, that was the last competitive mogul run we'll see


out of Jeremy Bloom.


An incredible career.


One inch.


One inch was the difference that day for me to accomplish that goal and not.


And I exited that gate and kind of kept it together.


I saw my mom.


She gave me a great big hug, and of course she said how proud she was of me.


And I went back to my hotel and just lost it.


And a common thread that weaves all of us together here today is that we've all been


there.


Maybe not at the Olympics, maybe not even in sports, but in life.


Where we find ourselves hitting rock bottom.


But the interesting question is why do some people bounce while other people splat?


Why is it that when Steve Jobs got fired from the very company that he started, why didn't


he take all his fortunes and dig a hole and fade into oblivion?


Why did he go start Next?


Why did he go start Pixar, became the largest animation company in the United States?


And through being around great, great athletes and great, great entrepreneurs and going through


my journey, I've come up with some things that I think might help you the next time


that you encounter something like this in your life.


The first one is set a time variance for how much time you're going to focus on it.


For this, I call it my 48-hour rule.


And I will take 48 hours.


I will obsess about every single thing that happened.


I will dissect and boil down everything that happened at the 2000 Olympics, and I did that.


And I took all of it.


My family couldn't talk to me.


Nobody could be around me.


I was so far in my head trying to understand every single lesson that was part of that.


And then literally when that 48-hour window hit, I was moving on.


I was not looking back.


I was taking the things that I learned, but I was not looking back, and I was moving 100


miles an hour forward.


And in our everyday lives, we're going to lose a client.


And by the way, we're going to lose a client and then have to go into an all-hands meeting


ten minutes later and inspire somebody.


So the time variance can differ.


Sometimes it can be 30 minutes, five minutes, 24 hours.


The first is a set of time variance.


The second is to take a step back from it and disassociate yourself with the outcome.


It's very often that when we encounter adversity, we allow it to define ourselves, which can


kill our confidence.


But if you take a step back and you observe it, and of course we have our hands on the


levers, and yes, we can control the outcome of that, we don't associate ourselves with


it as much, and it's easier to balance.


It was next for me after the Torino Olympics I boarded a plane to Indianapolis the next


morning for the NFL combine where I met with 32 teams.


I ran a 440 100-yard dash there.


And one month after the NFL combine, I'm sitting in my living room in Fort Collins, Colorado,


with a bunch of family around, and it's the 2006 NFL draft.


And my phone rings, and I'm like, I don't know this area code.


And I get a phone call from Andy Reed in the Philadelphia Eagles.


And NFL Films is there to capture this moment.


Good, man, how are you?


Yeah.


Hey, our German is like to talk to you, right?


Okay.


German, how you doing?


Doing real well.


How are you?


All right, doing good.


Do you want to be an eagle?


You know I do.


All right, man.


Get some big power, turn forward, and play a little receiver.


I love you, man.


All right, well, we're going to take you right here.


Oh, man, thank you so much.


All right, man, we look forward to it.


All right.


Coach Reed wants to talk to you.


How you doing?


Hey, Coach Reed.


Thank you so much for the opportunity.


Yeah, no, absolutely.


You did a nice job for us, man.


I can't wait.


Can't look excited?


I'm so excited.


Good.


Thank you so much.


All right, man.


I'm going to pass the phone on here to Jason Light.


Okay.


Can you believe this?


Oh, man.


Go to your hometown, Tyler.


Oh, my God.


Wow.


Congratulations.


I'm so happy.


You're going to come to film?


All the time.


I'm fully open to go to Denver Rock.


Isn't that weird?


I can't believe it.


The Eagles.


I told you my dad's a crier.


He's always wiping tears back.


I had a blast playing in the National Football League, sharing the locker room with guys


like Donovan McNabb and Brian Dawkins and Brian Westbrook and learning from Andy Reid


and then going to the Pittsburgh Steelers and sharing a locker room with Heinz Ward


and Ben Roethlisberger and head coach Mike Tomlin, who is the single best leader I have


ever met in my entire life.


But as it turns out, in my journey in the NFL, off the field had more of an impact on


my life than being on the field.


And the NFL has this amazing continuing education program where you can take NBA classes at


Kellogg, Harvard, Stanford, or Wharton.


And because Wharton was in my backyard, I took classes at Wharton.


And a couple of my professors were seed investors in Internet companies.


This was back in 2007.


And I became obsessed with the idea of starting a tech company to the point that while I was


playing, I found myself writing business plans and thinking how I could do these types of


things around midnight instead of studying the playbook.


And after I left the NFL, I joined a startup called MD Info.


And I entered into your world as a naive professional athlete who knew nothing about marketing other


than the companies I endorsed in skiing.


And naturally, I was picked to run customer acquisition, because that makes sense.


And, you know, I didn't know too much about marketing, you know, at the time.


I learned a lot.


It was a great crash course into the space.


And I ran into some issues and challenges that probably a lot of you face today or certainly


your marketing departments face today.


And it frustrated me that there wasn't a better solution for it.


And, basically, our marketing department was just a bunch of duct tape and paper clips


and things trying to glue together.


There was really very little cohesion there.


And because you're all technical marketers, I can get really nerdy for a second and be


more specific with the problem that when a cookie ID converted into a known ID or a lead,


one, there was no good way for us to clean that data.


So we had a bunch of crap data going into our systems.


And two, there was no way to directly inject into our business intelligence system.


So our CRM or marketing automation, whatever.


So I had to hire a marketing operations team to pull all the data from media or maybe our


landing pages or our home pages, wherever the cookie ID was converting, and put it into


an Excel spreadsheet, wouldn't clean it, and then kind of put it into our systems.


And there was this huge delay and lag between getting that interested prospect data into


the systems and trying to nurture those leads along.


And it also became very expensive because the more we would spend in paid advertising


and the more scale that we achieved, the more people I had to hire.


So it's counterintuitive, the idea of decreasing your cost to scale an organization.


So I set out to solve this really easy problem four years ago and realized it's not that


easy.


And although we haven't solved it today, we've made a lot of progress in connecting these


worlds for marketers.


And so the first thing that we do at Integrate is we sit down with the marketing department


and we blueprint.


We blueprint the systems.


We blueprint the customer journey, the data, and also the processes, which is really interesting


because we have Fortune 100 customers, big-time marketers, sophisticated marketers who have


never blueprinted their systems before.


And it's a really good exercise I would encourage all of you to do, no matter if this makes


sense or not.


It's just a great exercise to blueprint your current systems and how that customer data


flows and understand where the potential slowdowns are.


We're four years into this.


We've been a very fast-growing company.


We're maybe one of the fastest-growing or biggest companies you've never heard of.


I don't know.


But we've generated over $100 million of revenue in four years, which is pretty amazing.


We have a team of 85 people.


We have tier 1 investors.


We've raised a lot of money.


We have great clients, two of which are based here in Seattle, Microsoft and Zulily.


And what interests me is trying to solve this really big problem, this disconnected data


problem that actually inspires me.


It inspires me as much as, funny to say, maybe you won't believe it, but it's true, as I


was in football and skiing, of building this company and solving this issue and contributing


to help an industry that's so big.


And so my journey in life has taken me from an individual sport of skiing up through the


Olympics to a team sport of football with a lot of team dynamics and coaches that I


respect and I pulled from, and then now a venture-backed startup for four years, building


a culture, building a product, overcoming all kinds of barriers in every single day.


And what I've tried to do is I've boiled it down to five themes that I've learned and


I've pulled from athletics that I've learned in business that I think could help you become


more successful, no matter if you're a CEO, no matter if you're an individual contributor


or a manager.


And the first one was really foreign to me.


In 2004, I read this book called The Power of Intention by Wayne Dyer.


And I got to this chapter and the chapter said, give up your need to win.


I was like, fuck that.


That's what my life's built on.


Who is this guy?


And but the more I thought about it, the more interesting I got into the topic, like, give


up your need to win.


What does that mean and how can I apply it to my professional athletic career to make


that work?


And what I found is there's two sources of motivation.


There's intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.


And most people that are born in our country and subjected to mainstream media and celebrity,


most of us are drawn toward extrinsic motivating factors, whether we like it or whether we


don't.


And somebody who's motivated by extrinsic factors or motivated by attention and money


and fame and all the things that you associate with celebrityism, I guess, that was very


much that person.


And intrinsically motivated people, unless you were born in some small village in Tibet


in a Buddhist society, you're probably not 100% intrinsically motivated or born that


way.


You're really motivated on personal growth, on learning and giving back, all things that


you can control.


So I started applying this.


I was like, whoa, that's kind of cool.


It's liberating.


And so I would do like weird things in skiing.


I would go up to my biggest competitors.


People I really couldn't stand that much.


And I would be like, hey, be careful, because the second mogul before the top jump, it's


a little icy.


Take it high left and you'll get a good lane.


And it was like really liberating.


I was like helping these people that I was like, you know, really competing with.


And in 2004, that next year, I won more World Cups.


I actually won more because I focused on this less.


And I think how it applies to businesses sometimes in an organization, in an executive team,


can't get out of their own way.


Because there are so many egos at the table, we all like our own opinions.


But we just need to take a step back and like check our ego at the door, forget about the


idea of winning and be more collaborative and be more intrinsically motivated.


Something that's really helped me.


We go through different periods in our life where our mental toughness is stronger than


other times.


It's my opinion that mental toughness is a direct correlation to our current circumstance.


So if we're battling with a lot of different adversity or things that we're going through


in our life, we're kind of like thrown in the water, sink or swim, and so we're actually


working on becoming mentally tough to get us through those periods in our life.


And then when we become comfortable or successful or make money, inherently our mental toughness


goes down.


And I think it's really important at those times, most importantly, that we work on becoming


mentally strong.


Because I think life is all about our perception and how we perceive it.


And if we're mentally strong, we can get through smaller situations that bother us on a daily


basis much easier.


And if you ask people, hey, are you mentally strong?


They're like, yeah, I think so.


Maybe.


There's not an SAT for it.


But there's something that's very easy that you can do in your own life to, one, figure


out if you're mentally strong and, two, work on this.


And it's pretty simple.


Give up something that you love for 30 days.


Now, I'm a pretty healthy guy, breakfast, lunch and dinner.


But I have a huge sweet tooth.


Like I mean, I literally like fucking dream about a hot apple pie and ice cream.


And we'll wake up with saliva coming out of my mouth.


I love sugar.


I love sweets.


And oftentimes in my life, I'll go through a period where 30 days, no dessert, no sugar,


for no other reason than I'm like, God, I feel like I'm getting mentally weak and my


mind can't control my body and my decisions.


I've even at one point I was like, we're really mentally weak.


I've given up sex for 30 days.


I felt like dying.


If you want to be mentally strong, give up sex for 30 days.


That's a bit of an extreme.


But whatever is important to you in your life, I think it's really healthy exercise to give


something up for 30 days just to train your mind to be mentally strong.


I experienced two very different management styles playing in the National Football League,


one very top down, like to the definition, and one very bottom up.


The Philadelphia Eagles was one of the most top down organizations in the National Football


League.


And our coach Andy Reid, oftentimes if you played for the Eagles, you'd come in to a


meeting and you would hear this every day.


If you don't do this, you're gone.


Every day.


We'll be replaceable.


We'll get somebody else in here that can.


So what is a fear-based motivational tactic?


What does that lead to?


Well, it leads to a bunch of individuals.


And so our locker room, although really talented, maybe the most talented locker room in the


NFL, we never went past the second round of the playoffs because nobody could lock arms.


And we were all a bunch of individuals on our own islands looking around like, oh, who's


going to be next?


And I went to the Steelers and the owners, the Rooney's, very family oriented guys.


They've owned the team forever.


And it was very bottoms up.


And even though we all knew that the NFL stands for not for long, we still could lock arms.


We still felt like a family.


So I think the narrative here and the lesson here is don't motivate by fear.


If you're in a management position, there's so many other ways.


Be very clear.


Mark Tomlin was so good at sitting you down and saying you're not doing well and here's


why.


And here's what you need to do to improve.


Be transparent.


But fear-based motivational tactics won't give you a great culture.


It's my opinion that you could be the best leader, the best manager, the best CEO in


the world and still have a really bad culture if your organization is filled with victims


or even a handful of them.


And the way that I would define a victim is somebody who's always pointing blame at somebody


else.


So they're not succeeding or they encounter a challenge or a barrier.


And they're the finger pointers.


Oh, well, in football, well, our offensive coordinator is terrible or a head coach is


terrible.


In business, it's oh, our CEO is a moron or whatever.


Leaders encounter a challenge, an issue, and they either individually or collectively just


figure out how to overcome it.


These are the doers.


These are the people in organizations that they just get it.


We all have been victims at one point in our life or another.


It's natural.


It's normal.


And it's not like you're either born a victim or a leader.


We can all work on it.


But be cognizant in your own organizations.


And if you see somebody being a victim consistently, sit down and have a conversation with them.


Because I have seen one victim destroy an entire organization, an entire culture.


It starts with the people.


How many people own their own business?


Quite a few.


How many people think at some point in their life they're going to own a business, start


a company?


So here's some advice for those thinking about if you're going to start a company.


And the people that already have them, I'm sure you will relate to this.


My advice to you is it matters much less what you know and matters much more what your psychology


is like.


David Horowitz in his book, The Hard Things About the Hard Things, says the biggest challenge


of a CEO is managing your own psychology.


If you're the type of person that can wake up at 7 a.m. and go get a great workout in


and go to the office, like, you're going to take over the world and you're going to change


an industry and then you're going to sit down at your desk and send a couple emails and


get a couple phone calls and then right around lunchtime you're going to hang up that phone


and you're going to say, shit, I don't know if I'm going to be able to make payroll.


I don't know if we're going to be around.


If you can't handle the emotional swings, I don't think starting a company is for you.


If you are in this role, my advice to you and things that have helped me are, one, don't


be reactive.


We all know reactive people, fight or flight, oh, shoot, gather the information, sit down


and talk about it, digest it, come up with a plan and move forward.


And in closing, you know, my life has just been kind of a series of ups and downs, wins


and losses, constant barriers and obstacles.


And one of my favorite pictures or slides that have been created that lives kind of


on my phone all the time is this slide, because success is never linear.


It's never up and to the right.


It's always this constant up and down and ebb and flow and pull and tug.


And if we can understand what failure is, what adversity is, and appreciate the education,


the force-fed education that it can give to all of us and not allow it to ruin our confidence


or change our ultimate trajectory, looking out of a windshield, not a microscope, I think


it helps us all become more successful and enjoy our lives a little bit more and be happy.


So thank you for the opportunity to speak to all of you today.


I really appreciate it.


I'm sure I wasn't the only one when they showed that shot of your dad, and I think


I needed to wipe my eye when he was wiping his eye.


We don't have any time for questions.


I want to thank you for your story.


The company is Integrate.


We're going to keep an eye on it.


And Jeremy Blume.


And piece of advice, I'm going to talk to my wife about these 30-day challenges, but


no promises.


Writing with Markdown for Better Content & HTML: Why & How To - Whiteboard Friday

Music


Hey Moz fans. My name is Ian Lurie. I'm the CEO and founder of Portent Inc.


I'm also the chief content badger there.


I'm here today to talk to you about Markdown and how you can use Markdown to avoid all sorts of content and HTML tragedies.


So first thing, you've got to understand, the one great tragedy of content creation is HTML.


If you're a writer, a producer, someone like that and you're creating content, you always run into the problem of trying to get that blog post live or trying to get that page live or whatever else.


And you end up with one of four possibilities.


You get really bad HTML because you're trying to write it yourself and you don't know how.


I'm one of those people, at least I was until recently.


You have no HTML at all because you can't do it and there's no one else to do it so you end up pasting plain text directly into your word processor.


You get really slow HTML because it takes you a long time to punch in all of those tags or you can find a producer but it can take a long time to find that producer.


You get really bad HTML because you write in a word processor like Word or Open Text or something like that and you save as HTML which delivers something that would make any decent HTML programmer pretty much weep tears of blood because it looks so horrible.


It adds all this extra stuff. It doesn't render correctly in most browsers so you don't want to do that either.


So the problem is how do you create HTML as a writer without having it interfere with your writing process?


You don't want to be typing stuff in and all of a sudden you have to stop to write in tags without slowing things down because you don't want to have to go back and add all the HTML either.


How do you do that? Well, yay for us there's this thing called Markdown.


Markdown was created by a developer who runs a blog called Daring Fireball and I will link to the Markdown syntax guide on that site so you can very easily look at it and see it.


It is designed to be a really simple way to write in plain text and with a few simple characters tag it so that it will turn into really clean, really good HTML.


The great thing about Markdown, first of all you do write in plain text so any text editor, you can use one on your phone, you can use one on your laptop, it can be text edit, notepad, anything.


I'm going to name a specific text editor in a minute that I think is the best one for you to use but it can be anything and you can edit it in anything.


It's fully portable. That means it's really fast, right? Text editors don't bog down with updates generally.


They don't run into those kinds of problems so they run really, really fast.


Text is future proof. When the day comes that we're no longer reading stuff in text and opening text files, we'll all be communicating directly head to head and we won't worry about all this stuff anyway because you won't need HTML.


I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself but it is future proof because 50 years from now you will still be able to open a plain text file.


It's relatively crash free. I've always said I've never had a text editor crash. It's true I've never had one but as soon as I say that everybody starts raising their hands and says,


I have my text editor crash. Maybe it's because you're on Windows. I don't know. I shouldn't say that but it's relatively crash free.


All right, so it's much more stable than using a word processor. So you've got all these big advantages.


You've still got the problem of how are you going to turn it into what you want it to be. Well, markdown converts to just about anything.


If you're willing to go out and study the tools and learn more advanced things like Pandoc, which I'm not going to really talk about today, you can convert markdown into Word documents.


You can convert them into HTML. You can convert them into slides. I've turned them directly into PDFs.


You can even do this really fancy type setting with a piece of software called Latex. So there is nothing you can't do with markdown.


How do you do it? Well, the first thing is you need certain tools to fit a process. Like almost any writing process, you write, you preview, and then you convert.


If you do that in Microsoft Word, use Microsoft Word to do your writing, use Word to do your preview, and then you convert by either saving the file and giving it to someone else or converting it to PDF or, and please don't do this, converting it to HTML.


If you're doing markdown, you do your writing in any text editor. I will strongly recommend Adam.io and you'll see why in a minute.


And I'll include a link in the text. But just understand Adam.io has many, many advantages. It's really lightweight. It's fast. It's built to handle markdown, so everything you need is built into it.


There's tons of advantages. Then you preview it. Well, you can use a website called Dillinger.io. You can use a piece of software on the Mac called Markt2.


But the best way is to just use Adam.io because it has preview built into it. And then you convert it to HTML. And again, you can use Adam.io.


I should point out, just five to seven days ago, I talked about using a tool called Sublime Text. Sublime Text is excellent for this. I hadn't fully tested Adam.io yet. I have now and I'm actually switching.


I've been using Sublime Text for probably five years now. I'm actually, I'm very sorry, Sublime folks, but I'm actually switching to Adam.io because as a primarily markdown writer and a very basic text writer, it's very good for me.


So now it's time to actually get to work. Right? So you need to go and download Adam.io. Install it. It's free, by the way. It costs nothing. Did I mention free? Like zero dollars.


You start writing. Usually as soon as I start writing, I save my file and then I save it a lot. And again, because it's a text editor, saving only takes a couple seconds. So it's much, much easier.