Info off of Search Engine Land:

The Google Webmaster Central blog announced the first new live chat event in over a year. This event is named the “Holiday Webmaster Webinar” and takes place a week from Friday, November 13th at 10:00 am, Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco). Again, this is the first one since October 2008.

This meeting is hosted by Senior Search Quality Engineer Greg Grothaus, and AdWords Evangelist Fred Vallaeys. They’ll be discussing a range of webmaster best practices and useful Google tools followed by a Q&A session to make sure you and your site are well primed for the holiday rush.

The meeting number is 574 659 815 and the password is webmaster. To access the event:

1. Go to https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/j.php?ED=133402392&UID=0&PW=db339c4e641e0f525412171e5646
2. Enter your name and email address.
3. Enter the meeting password: webmaster
4. Click “Join Now”.

To join the teleconference only call-in toll-free number (US/Canada): 866-469-3239 or call-in toll number (US/Canada): 1-650-429-3300.

Awesome! Now anyone using the Google Toolbar can leave comments for others to see about your webpages through Google Sidewiki.

Screenshot of Google Sidewiki

Luckily you can (through Google Webmaster Tools) create a webmaster entry that will appear on top, but this is a challenging new feature for anyone (like me) who is trying to get a handle on existing webpages that you know are not designed to their full effectiveness. Now users can comment on those type of issues.

This is also going to make it challenging to know the reason why your landing pages are not converting – is it because of the landing page itself, or the SideWiki text?

So much for the line between a website and a blog. Now even static content can have commenting going on whether or not you as a webmaster intended for that to happen.

I can’t find anything within the documentation that makes it easy for you as a webmaster to sign up for a feed of updates on SideWiki comments on pages you own – let me know if you figure out how that can happen. Otherwise I’m not sure (as a manager of multiple websites) how you stay on top of something like this…

Another tool to add to your keyword research tool belt. Google’s Insights for Search tool lets you:

• Look at a portion of keyword search results – by location, category, or Google vertical (news, images)

• a graph with the search volume, indicating interest over time (GMT) for your terms, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms (read more about how we scale and normalize the data)
• lists of the top searches and top rising searches

It only shows terms with a significant amount of search volume, and of course it’s only Google search data, but worth looking at as your expanding your keyword list. Check out Google’s newest beta tool.

Facebook announced a new feature that they are rolling out to pages that lets the administrator automatically publish the update to Twitter.

M+R Strategic Services just released a report outlining the strategies and best practices from the Obama new media campaign and how those practices should be applied to nonprofits and their online marketing and fundraising efforts. It’s a great read. Here’s the lead in paragraph:

The best news for nonprofits? The most successful new media strategies for the
campaign were all things that can – and should – be replicated by nonprofit
organizations. Build an email list. Send high-quality, engaging emails to those
constituents. Make them a part of the story. Run a program that is data-driven,
and use analytics to improve that program. Use authentic organizational content –
video, text and images – to tell a compelling story. Use email and phone calls to ask
online volunteers to participate in offline programs.

The report contained a few key concepts that I always impress upon my nonprofit clients, including:

1. Be disciplined to create a strategy, consistent message, and stay on message – sending certain messages to certain segments for a reason. Measure. Rinse. Tweak. Repeat.
2. Give your online marketing staff them the autonomy to make good decisions regardless of the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) in the room. Did you know that the Obama campaign had a 81-person new media team that grew to nearly 170 people by the end of the campaign?
3. Hire talented, trained staff (I would argue that this also means you actually need to pay for their talent. The number of nonprofit openings for online marketing staff with extremely low salaries I think demonstrates that many nonprofits don’t “get” that hiring talented online marketing staff is worth it.  From the report: Chief Technology Officer Michael Slaby had this piece of advice:

You need more new media people than you think you do, and they are worth more than you think they are.

4. Be authentic, and keep the focus on your supporters, let them interact with you. If your budget is supported by them, you won’t be able to do the work your organization works on without them.
5. Content is important. You won’t be able to build an online audience without good content.
6. Build your email list through website optimization and testing. (page 13-14 of the report). EVERY nonprofit needs to understand HOW important website optimization and testing is, and needs to make it an organizational priority.
7. Timing. “Timing is more important than perfection” – Arun Chaudhary, New Media Road Director. I could not agree more. This applies to email, launching an ad campaign, posting on social media sites, putting up a blog posts. Posting or sending during certain times of day will have a much higher success rate than others. I always cringe when I see nonprofits posting a blog post or sending a email at midnight on Thursday night just because that was when it was “done” instead of waiting for the best time window and scheduling it to go out the next day.

All in all, great stuff and every nonprofit marketer should thoroughly read the report and absorb it’s findings. You can download the full report here

Corporate Online Marketing Best Practices Applied to Nonprofit Challenges.

I think this also demonstrates what I’ve been saying to folks all along. Corporate best practices around online marketing should be applied to nonprofit challenges. The tactics are the same, the message is just different and nonprofits have an advantage in that their supporters can be used to spread the word about their mission in social media more effectively than Coca Cola fans ever will. If you look at where the staff for the Obama campaign came from – it was largely corporate online marketing experience.

If you are a nonprofit online marketer, you should follow the for-profit marketers that have the extra resources and capacity to really test new strategies in the online space and follow blogs like SearchEngineLand.com rather than non-profit only forums. You will be a better marketer for it.

Finally! A site that can help me with questions like:

Does he love me or not?
Should I ask him out?
Should I wear red or blue today?
Should I go back to school?

You think I’m kidding, but really these are the question the site says it handles.

In short, it helps users make decisions by guiding them through a series of questions on their chosen topic. Above, the topic is about choosing which island in Hawaii to visit. After answering a series of questions (all created and modified by Hunch users), Hunch provides a recommendation based on your answers, on what it knows about you from other activity on the site, and from the likes and dislikes of similar Hunch users.

Too funny: www.hunch.com

More info about the Microsoft/Yahoo news here. Looks like it won’t impact paid search ads, and there’s still some question if it will raise antitrust flags with the Department of Justice. Would certainly make life easier if you only need to pay attention to 2 search engines instead of three.

Fascinating and tied to the recent Wired article about the growth of the walled off Facebook network. Here’s the full article listing how total search queries grew in Facebook, but drop in Google.

I had a great time on a panel yesterday about social media organized by the DC Chapter of the American Marketing Association. I pulled together slides of useful online marketing tools and wanted to share them here. It was tons of fun getting folks excited about social media and web measurement.

Google has changed its policy on javascript & can now crawl javascript links.

Unveiled at SMX Advanced and explained by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, I felt it was important to share:

… Google’s new handling of JavaScript’s “onClick” function. To fully understand it, read Vanessa Fox’s in-depth report from last week, Google I/O: New Advances In The Searchability of JavaScript and Flash, But Is It Enough?…

Links in JavaScript that were invisible to Google before are now being read. And some people have used JavaScript as a way to deliver paid links in a way that don’t violate Google’s guidelines may not technically on the wrong side of the Google law. It’s been a long accepted practice that this was a “safe” way to deal with paid links, once that Google’s suggested itself.

The times they are a changin’…