SEO Review

Anyone who spent time online the previous week could not have avoided being exposed to the horrific events of the Mumbai terrorist attack on Thursday.

Those plugged into social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook were privvy to a fascinating but terrible phenomenon. Online viewers the world over were inundated with live, up to the second footage and news items channeling the Mumbai carnage to their computer screens, literally as it unfolded.

I was logged into Twitter and glued to my laptop screen all day. Several bloggers residing in India’s financial capital were live-blogging events as they happened and many others who couldn’t get online were on the phone feeding updates to news agencies and social media sites.

To keep up to date, I relied on Twitter user @BreakingNewz, who was apparently in touch with several witnesses, hostages and even military personnel that were live at the scene. The updates I was seeing were minutes, and in some cases, hours ahead of news agencies such as CNN and Reuters.

In fact, the news was so instantaneous that Mumbai police had to step in and ask several live bloggers and Twitterers (including BreakingNewz) to stop the updates as they were undermining military operations underway to thwart the terrorists and rescue hostages. Apparently the terrorists were using the live Internet feeds to pinpoint the location of police determined to stop them.

Which brings up an interesting point: does the immediacy of social media have the ability to kill off traditional news agencies such as CNN and BBC?

According to Wikipedia, CNN airs to more than 1.5 billion people in over 212 countries and territories. Impressive, but the Internet has a wider reach and faster growth. So what about on-the-ground reporters? CNN is apparently second only to Britain’s BBC News in terms of the number of employed news journalists and worldwide news bureaus. To that I say big deal. There are undoubtedly more people blogging the news in better and faster ways than CNN journalists.

More and more people are ditching their newspaper subscription, switching off the TV and turning to the Internet for their daily news fix. And why wouldn’t they? It’s faster, cheaper and interactive. They can subscribe to the feeds of digital journalists and bloggers they like, they can search news by region, category or timeline and thanks to social networking, can be informed the very instant news happens in the world.

So could the advent of social media signal the end of traditional news journalism? Yes, I think it could. We’ve already seen how the Internet has impacted newspaper publishing .

Perhaps topical specialization is one answer to the digital vs paper journalism dilemma. Maki explains it well in his blog post The Future of Content in an Age of Information Overload:

"If newspapers can’t compete with blogs and online news sites in terms of speed and variety, perhaps they can trump them in terms of depth or trust. After all, feature-length content with solid, investigative reporting is not something you’ll often find on most blogs or personal sites on the web."

Then there’s the recent wave of spats between journalists and bloggers. Many of the articles I’ve read lately feature defensive posturing by some traditional journalists whining that bloggers are "ruining" the art of writing by flooding the Internet with poorly written micro content.

Perhaps some journalists are feeling threatened by the ability of bloggers to reach the masses before they do? Or is it because they can’t handle the fact that the art of writing is now in the grasp of anyone with a PC and an Internet connection?

To those journalists I say – get over yourself. Blogging is the ultimate equalizer. Just like brick and mortar businesses had to come to terms with e-commerce, writers need to adapt to the digital medium and morph their skills to suit, not throw tantrums and claim that the sky is falling.

Having spent much of my secondary and most of my tertiary education training as a journalist, I can understand the resistance they feel to the digital wave and their loyalty to the traditional craft. But the Internet is actually giving journalism a larger audience and providing ordinary people with a voice they never had before.

As Andrew Sullivan writes in his thesis-like post Why I Blog:

"…as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism."

The naked truth is that the cachet of being a journalist is no longer restricted to the tertiary-educated, long-suffering newspaper cadet. Global Internet uptake and the advent of Web 2.0 has ensured that news can be reported instantly anytime, anywhere, by anyone.

Social media sites provide the channels to reach a mass audience and blogs provide the content. Blogging – even on a micro scale like Twitter – unlocks the journalist inside everyone and that’s not a bad thing.

About The Author
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College – an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

The average person is exposed to an assault of stimuli each and every moment of our waking day. Some of this stimulus catches our attention, but much is filtered out as extraneous, useless, or unimportant. This filtering is our way of handling the constant barrage of information we endure. As marketers it is our job to cut through all the meaningless, random white noise of life and penetrate the consciousness of our targeted audience with our marketing messages.

Mere Subliminal Exposure

One of the weapons, tools if you prefer, professional media producers use to create an impression and influence behavior is something called mere subliminal exposure, the process of communication without explicit notice. It is a process and effect that everyone uses every day without ever thinking about it, and it is a necessity in order to deal with, and make sense of, our over-stimulated lives.

The look your spouse gives you at a dinner party, the tone of a simple comment, or the change in body language communicates a message that says, ’stop what you’re doing before I get angry,’ or ‘let’s get the heck out of here before I die of boredom.’ But whatever the coded meaning, the communication is clear. We all have the ability to decode these kinds of minimal subliminal messages. In fact the inability of some to properly interpret these kinds of signals has lead to unfortunate consequences.

This process is not to be confused with the discredited work of James Vicary, who in 1957 faked the results of subliminal advertising in movie theaters. He claimed and later recanted that by flashing barely noticeable images of popcorn and soft drinks on the screen that it increased sales of the items by a significant amount. However, this abuse of the phenomenon does not negate the fact that people are sensitive to, learn from, and respond to a variety of subtle visual and auditory experiences that influence their behavior. The same can be said of other senses like smell and touch, but since our main concern is how to use this process on website presentations we will leave the more physical encounters to our offline marketing colleagues.

Audio Sound Design – The Art of Hidden Persuasion

The Signature Voice-over

One of the least used but most effective and economical marketing tools a website business has at its disposal is signature voice-over, or Sonic Personality. It establishes your identity and embeds your brand by giving your site a human voice.

It is the sound of the human voice that conveys all the subtlety and nuance of the message you have to deliver. Major advertisers use familiar sounding actors and actresses to deliver personality and impact. Even when an audience doesn’t recognize the voice being used, the positive attributes associated with that voice are transferred to the product or service being offered. It is not by random choice that Ford Motor Company chose Keifer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer sonic personae for the voice of their television spots or that Chili’s restaurants now employs John Corbett’s comfortable, friendly, ‘Sex and The City’ voice instead of the previously grating and irritable sound of comic Wanda Sikes.

Most website businesses cannot afford to hire Hollywood talent to pitch their products. What is important is that the voice you choose is a signature voice, a distinctive sound that delivers the script with character and style employing timber, cadence, and phrasing like only a professional voice actor can do. Of course, you must also give your voice talent the right words to say, which means you provide them with a professionally written script if you want to maximize the effectiveness of your signature voice-over.

When we think of voice-overs we usually think of commercial presentations, but here again most website businesses truly miss the boat when it comes to utilizing Sonic Personality. We all know that text on your website is important in order to attract search engine indexing, unfortunately from a marketing effectiveness point-of-view, text alone lacks impact.

People are impatient and generally do not want to read volumes of text information, and besides, most people find it difficult to read on a computer screen. Even if they do read your material, how much of it is retained, is it associated with your company, or does it just get confused with all the other stuff people see during their busy, business day?

As a solution why not turn all your website copy, including articles, into audio delivered by a professional signature voice, providing people the option of reading the text or sitting back and listening to your words of wisdom?

Of all the multimedia, marketing techniques available to you, a signature voice is the most economical option whether used as a stand-alone element or as part of a visual or video presentation.

Sound Cue Punctuation & Effects

Voice-over is not the only audio method available to the savvy website marketer. You wouldn’t write something without using punctuation: it’s what makes the words meaningful by providing the cadence necessary for maximizing the impact, but punctuation does not have to be limited to periods, exclamation marks and semicolons. Punctuation can be added in the form of sound cues and audio effects.

Professional audio engineers know what kind of sound to add to a presentation in order to draw people’s attention to certain key phrases, words, or points. In the same way a composer arranges the music score for a movie to enhance mood and build excitement, so too does the commercial audio producer turn a dry read into an authentic, memorable experience.

Sound punctuation and audio effects should not be taken lightly; audio sound design, when done properly, is one of the most complex and technical areas of multimedia, far more sophisticated than video and just as important if not more so. Where and how to use trumpet swells, rim shots, and volume variance is not just art, it’s science, and it has a profound psychological and emotional effect on the listener.

Custom Composed Music

If voice-over is the most under-utilized Web-marketing tool we have, then music is probably the most abused. No doubt music like sound design is an enormously powerful method of enhancing mood, and drawing attention to specific points and images. Unfortunately slapping on an over-used royalty-free sound loop that’s been used on everything from breakfast cereals to incontinence products is not the answer.

For music to be effective it should be unique enough to be associated with your company and arranged in such a way that it increases the presentation’s memorability and enhances its experience. In the silent movie era music was the only method of creating this kind of emotional impact, and despite today’s full range of visual presentation techniques and special effects, music scoring is still one of the most crucial elements of memorable movie-making.

When it comes to music, you are dealing with the full arsenal of psychological presentation techniques and failure to use it properly may be counter-productive.

Signature Sound Logos

One of the first things people do when they start a business is to have a logo designed. Even novice entrepreneurs recognize that a company needs some kind of visual identity, a short-form tag that conveys the brand image that can be recognized in an instant.

The advent of visual media like television and commercial TV spots did not obscure the importance of the radio-style jingle and what has become known as the sound logo or audio signature. The Maxwell House coffee percolator beat, Kellogs Rice Krispies’ ‘Snap, Crackle, Pop,’ and Tony The Tiger’s ‘Grrrrrrrrreat!’ are all classic examples of audio signature. Today we have the familiar sound of Intel’s sound logo, the powerful swell of the THX movie sound tag, and Vonage’s original goofy signature audio branding.

In today’s multimedia Web environment, your sound logo is every bit as important as your visual identity.

It’s Theater of the Mind

Radio has often been referred to as ‘theater of the mind’ because the combination of voice, sound cues, effects, music, and audio logos helped paint powerful and memorable mental images for the listener. For those old enough to remember radio dramas, the ringing of ‘Johnny Dollar’s’ telephone or the sound of ‘Inner Sanctum’s’ creaking door are forever permanently etched in the minds to anyone whoever heard them.

In a Web environment populated by millions of websites all competing for audience attention, failure to use every marketing tool at your disposal is simply foolish. If you want to be heard, it’s time to say what you have to say out-loud.

About The Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, www.136words.com and www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.

1. Limited Screen Real Estate

Computer screens have increased in size over the years but website designers still have to deal with the problem of how to get all a client’s information presented ‘above the fold’ so visitors don’t have to scroll too much.

It’s hard enough to get prospects to read anything, let alone copy that drones on. This problem isn’t being helped by SEO tacticians promoting inflated text presentations often amounting to exercises in key-phrase diarrhea.

If you have a lot to say, turn some of it into audio, so prospects can sit back, listen and absorb what you have to say, rather than hunt desperately for the information they’re looking for. The single most important thing that effects a user’s Web-experience is how fast they find what they came to learn and what could be easier and faster than pressing an audio button.

2. Computer Screen Readability

We have all been raised with the eight and half by eleven format permanently implanted in our heads. Unfortunately computer monitors’ four by three aspect ratio is horizontal and the new breed wide-screen monitors use a sixteen by nine format – great for timeline editing and spread sheets, not so great for reading.

Computer monitors have nevër been all that easy on the eyes and the new flat screen LCDs are brighter and display more contrast which is great for graphics but again not so great for reading. So instead of giving your potential clients eyestrain and a headache, deliver the information using audio, a much more user-friendly experience.

3. Skip, Scan and Skim Searching

We have learned from usability studies that seventy percent of Web-users scan and skip Web-copy paying attention only to captions and bulleted points. If your information is the least bit complicated or sophisticated, your Web-visitors are probably not getting a complete or accurate story. Ignoring the fact that prospects misread your copy and scan for highlights can be a costly mistake in miscommunication.

Burying your message in reams of text leads to confusion and misunderstandings that will ultimately cost you monëy in lost salës and disgruntled clients. If your web-logs show a lot of visitors are opting out of your site shortly after entering, it is probably because they can’t find what they’re looking for, buried in your SEO-friendly jungle of text. If you’ve invested a significant amount of monëy attracting visitors to your site, you owe it to yourself to deliver the information they came to find.

Allowing visitors to clíck an audio button to receive your core marketing message in sixty seconds of professionally delivered voice-over will do more to turn prospect into customers than a thousand words of boring, hard to read text.

4. Consistency of Message Delivery

Anyone who has run a salës department knows that different people deliver the same message differently. Some sales people have a greater grasp of your marketing message, and others are just going through the motions ‘taking orders’ rather than ’selling.’

Even good salës people often find that key information gets left out or ignored because the client asks questíons, gets interrupted, or just plain isn’t concentrating. When clients are left on their own to browse your website, you nevër know how much of your copy they actually read and how much of that they really understand. It’s called ‘browsing’ for a reason – not ’studying.’

By presenting information in audio, you deliver a consistent, error-free message without anything left out. The human voice cuts through the concentration barrier and leaves an indelible impression of who you are and why prospects should be customers. When you deliver your reason-for-buying in audio, everyone hears the same message, in the same way. If content is king, consistency is the kingmaker.

5. Multitasking

Today’s modern work environment is hectic. It would be nice if we could all act like doctors and lawyers with secretaries to screen our calls and organize our days so we can concentrate on what we are doing. Unfortunately, that’s a pipedream for most modern day business people, especially the entrepreneur.

Most of us are answering the telephone, writing emails, surfing the Web and dealing with colleagues and clients in an ever-dizzying whirl of activity. Asking a multitasking businessperson to stop and concentrate on your beautiful prose is not exactly realistic. People want it short, quick, and precise. If TV advertisers can deliver their marketing messages in fifteen- and thirty-second spots, imagine what you can deliver in sixty seconds of finely crafted audio delivered by a professional announcer who knows how to grab your prospects attention and make an impression.

6. Memory Retention

Years ago commercials were sixty seconds, kids played board games for hours; life was simpler. Today commercials are fifteen seconds, kids play video games with incessant audio and visual stimulation, and we are perpetually on-call with our cell phones and Blackberrys. Our ability to retain information is severely compromised by a new world order of constant contact. Instant messaging has even created a whole new short-form language that brings sophisticated communication down to a new low – where is John Simon when you need him.

If you want to be heard, there is no better way than with the sound of the human voice. The human voice penetrates the clutter and embeds itself in your prospect’s consciousness.

7. Branding – Creating a Corporate Personality

Successful businesses all have personalities and there is no better way to transmit that personality to your prospective clients than with audio. You spend thousands of dollars on how logos, print material, emails ads, and websites look and so you should, but giving your business a personality is more than deciding that everything on your website should be blue.

Differentiating your company from the competition is about creating a memorable business persona. One of the best illustrations of this is the J. Peterman story. Anyone who watched the Seinfeld show remembers John O’Hurley’s J. Peterman character. O’Hurley’s interpretation of Peterman was so strong, so memorable, and powerful that when the real J. Peterman company went under, it was the actor, John O’Hurley, who was able to get it back in business based on his fictional presentation of the real J. Peterman. That is the power of voice and it’s ability to create personality.

8. Persuasive, Provocative, Compelling

Competition is fierce and getting noticed in a crowded marketplace is difficult. We cannot afford to let any opportunity to communicate effectively with prospects get by. You are not the only one with a website, blog, or product that meets your prospects needs, You must do more than just state your offering or even provide some me-too promotion, you must be persuasive, provocative, compelling, and concise.

It only takes 136 words to write sixty seconds of audio. With the right 136 well-written words, delivered by a carefully chosen, professional voice-over artist, you can deliver more than just a pitch: you can deliver your entire marketing message, corporate personality, and brand image.

9. Cost Effectiveness

Many business people are scared-off by an assumption that multimedia solutions like audio are expensive – but that is just not the case. Audio is far more cost-effective than video, animations, and other labor intense rich media creative. If you hire the right people who know what they are doing, you can have an audio presentation professionally produced and incorporated into your website for a budget within the reach of any serious marketer.
About The Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a Thornhill, Ontario based website design firm that specializes in delivering their North American clients’ marketing messages using the latest audio, video, and interactive Flash presentation techniques to create compelling, informative and memorable Web-experiences that enhance brand personality and increase salës and profíts. Visit MRPwebmedia.com, 136Words.com, SonicPersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.