Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium (Part 8)

SM: Their starting prices are $1,000 or $2,000 a month.

FD: That’s pretty common in that space, and certainly with a company like Marketo or Eloqua, you’re looking at a mid-market enterprise level tool. If I were going to look for something like that, to unify that a little bit, I’m probably going to look at a company like Pardot. I tend to do better with smaller players.

SM: What’s the name of the company?

FD: It’s called Pardot. HubSpot tends to shine in the small-business vertical.

SM: HubSpot is one of the companies we would consider if we were to move systems.

FD: I know they’re putting a strong emphasis on building out lead nurturing, punctuality, a lot of the things you talked about. In fact, HubSpot purchased a company last year called Performable. It’s a strong small business. So, that’s one to look at. I hate to keep coming back to content, but if you’re looking for a space to watch that is one of the hot spaces in marketing right now to watch.

SM: OK. Talk to me about what your assessment is about search engine optimization. Content marketing, search engine optimization is one of the big checklist items. How do you view that? What’s your guidance on that?

FD: We talked about it a little bit already. The key here is that the search engines are looking for ways to proxy what is useful for a human because ultimately, that’s what gets you to come back to them. That’s how they’re going to make their money. So, step one is to be good at marketing. Go back to the things that great marketers have always done. The things that great marketers have done historically are I need to understand my audience; what are their concerns? What are their issues? How do I address those concerns? And here’s the key, here’s what will lead you to create content that’s useful and will perform well in searches and social media. What are the questions that they typically have along the way? What’s that buying process? Whether I’m purchasing a car, and I’m a consumer or I’m buying software for my company, and I’m a business owner, what are the things that I think about? What are the issues that they’re not aware of that they should be aware of? How can I educate and inform them? If I’m really good, I’m entertaining, but let’s start with educating and informing.

So, if you start from that vantage point and begin to work backwards and look at how to receive information, you’re going to automatically become good at search engine optimization over time and certainly at social media. You’ll create content that solves problems for other people and they’re novel and interesting, which means it’s original – it can’t be something that you copied or just curated 89% of the piece – that’s going to be shared. That’s also going to help you out in search. One of the reasons people started their own social networks, among other things, is that they wanted access to that data. Humans are a great algorithm. It is hard, in a scalable way, to gain social media. That’s what makes something like Facebook so valuable that a company like Bing … you see the commercials. Bing is pushing social search because that’s another way to add, in an algorithmic way, more data to the request that you’re making to provide the answer that you want.

SM: What is your understanding of how these algorithms work? Do the social search algorithms take into account how many people are actually engaging with the social media content? Or is the fact that it’s already being exchanged in social media already start getting it points?

FD: That’s a good question. It’s going to depend on the engine. Let’s start with Google. Keep in mind, Google will update its algorithm 500 times a year. You’re talking a minimum of one time a day. So, it’s changing constantly, which is why I put the emphasis back on create content for people, not technology. But having said that, if you’re looking at the signal that they’re trying to use, one of the reasons they love Google + is they’re looking for things. They’re looking for pluses that someone plus oned this piece of content. Are they sharing it? Are they even interacting with the content?

One of the things that the company is trying to build out is Microsoft. In your reference group, what are they sharing? That’s another way for me to insert information that’s useful to you. It’s one thing for me to start aggregating statistical data and looking at click-through rates to say, OK, if the query is Greek food, and I happen to live in Indianapolis, and most people are clicking on this result, that’s the result that I need to start serving up. It’s even better to have that but then to factor in who else I know and what they like.

The assumption is if the people that I know and trust really like this specific Greek restaurant, that’s a result that’s going to be a better result for me. If I find that that engine keeps delivering results that are tailored to me, when I don’t understand how they’re doing it, I’m going to come back. That’s one of the reasons that they’re starting to look at that. What they really want to get into is what we would call your personal graph. You can get that data. You can look at some of the data, as to who Google thinks you’re related to. Facebook is sharing a lot of that data with Bing. So, they’re going to look at who is sharing that data.

If I’m a content producer, I certainly want to pay attention to those social signals and creating things that were shared, whether through Facebook or Twitter or Google + or even LinkedIn. More important are the specific audiences that are more likely to share. It’s the over-used idea of the long tail. What we’re looking at now is there’s a long tail of social media that actually matters. If you go to the history of marketing, your neighbor or family recommending something was always more credible than someone you didn’t know. Back in the Wild West or any of those days, the town doctor was the most authoritative, so I would try to get that person to proclaim that my product was the best. The problem was that that’s not a scalable solution for most businesses that want to grow. So, the policy was always we’ll get a doctor or a doctor-like person on television or a celebrity endorsement like Michael Jordan because the hope was that I would find that person credible.

So, doctors persisted with that for a long time. Today, they don’t have to do that because I can, in a fairly scalable way, get to the mother three doors down from who takes her child to a class at Gymboree. Search engines know that. So, they’re mining that. They know that that person is credible because you told them that you have a relationship with her online. They look at who you respond to, what you’re tweeting, what types of links you click on. With a social network, they know who’s in your network. Bing is mining Facebook data for that. Facebook does that with its own algorithms to try to decide what you should see in your Facebook stream. The same thing with Hoop.la. Look at the network relationships. Who’s particularly responding to things and on what topics? There’s a lot of evidence that Google is trying to figure out who is authoritative on certain topics.

This segment is part 8 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium
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