Profile Information

Display Name:
John Gimmick
Job Title:
Creative Director
Stunt & Gimmick's
Type of Work:
New York, NY
Favorite Thing About SEO:
The mix of creative and analytical
I wish I had a cool origin story. Unfortunately, I have to settle for "ne'er do well who was always too smart for his own good decided to put his love of beating people over the head with numbers to use as the head of a data-driven content firm". So much less exciting than getting super-powers from the light of our yellow sun.
Favorite Topics:
Content, Analytics, Marketing Psychology, Branding, Email Marketing
Blog Post: One Content Metric to Rule Them All

This isn't a terrible intermediate metric, but I guess my question is: why? I get the "at a glance metric" in theory, but is it really significantly easier to use than a well-formated analytics report?

More importantly, if you're basing the final score on an unweighed mean of the last two months, doesn't this number quickly become sort of useless, since a) the mean on which it is based can change fairly drastically, fairly rapidly, and b) this makes it a floating metric that can't be accurately compared to previous or following metrics, since the baseline moves between calculations?

Elaborating on that, let's say you put up one post a day. Week 1, Month 1 you have some amazing posts that do phenomenal and far exceed expectations. They slant the mean strongly to the high side of reasonable expectations. Week 4 Month 2, on the other hand, you have nothing but duds. Everything goes wrong, and you have a week of terrible scores. That would mean that even if you had a mediocre week Week 1 Month 3, the great weeks would be off the baseline, and the terrible week would be slanting it down, and so it would look like your content did really well, even though objectively, it might not have.

It seems to me that as described, this metric is fairly useless for anything other than extremely short-term comparisons as is. Even if you extend the baseline mean range indefinitely, the metric still suffers since it's then weighed too strongly to historical data that might not be remotely relevant anymore. 

I guess my point is, why would you do this instead of setting monthly performance goals across every KPI and measuring post performance against that?


Our agency handles a good bit of B2B work, and while it's hard to find, there are people out there who go crazy about B2B blogs. It's not nearly as large a field of potential links, but on the other hand, you also have a lot less competition. How many companies are there building industrial welding machines, for example? 

We've found that a great place to start is the employees. Find out where they are online and what they're doing. Talk to them and ask them what THEY would like to see written. Start at the bottom, because those are going to be the most socially active people online. Make it personal for them (to an extent, of course) and get them to contribute if you can. A great tactic we've used to good effect is a monthly or weekly "Meet the team" feature, where we will actually sit down with a team member and interview them and really build an interesting piece about who they are, what they do outside of work, and why they like what they do. With content like that, you can get their friends, family members, etc. to link to it. With a little bit of SEO coaching, you can get the profiled employee to hook up the links with the right anchor text, and all of a sudden, your network has grown. 

A good rule of thumb to remember, and something that I learned in publishing: names sell newspapers (or links in this case).

I think people are vastly over-rating the time comitment required to succesfully aplly this strategy. As an SEO, especially if you are an SEO that is in charge of content creation, you should already be following sources for whatever industry you're writing about. I allocate a period of an hour and a half 3 times a day to check into relevant industry blogs, twitter feeds, facebook pages, and other related forums (Quora, wikipedia, etc.). 4.5 hours, some of it on personal time. It's only an extra couple of minutes to take that time and throw up a useful comment or two. 

I also like keeping Twitterfall open in the background all day and add people who seem interesting/interested as well as periodically send out messages and retweets if something catches my eye. If you retweet enough things by a legitimate person, they'll notice, and the odds of you getting a retweet are much higher. Again, minimal time comitment up front. 

Blog Post: Everyone Should Hire 'Social Media Experts'

I am far from a "Social Media Expert", though I generally do add "high-proficiency in social media strategy and marketing integration" to my list of qualifications. I have known a number of Social Media Experts or Social Media Marketers, though. Shockingly, some are extremely professional and good at what they do, and some are posers hopping on board for the ride. I know, it came as quite a surprise to me too. That said, I would very much like to address some of the issues raised in the original article and in the comments:

1) Irony, thy name is Shankman: For someone who seems to put so much emphasis on good writing, I noticed his post was unclear, rambling, drawn-out, and generally written at a level just above forum troll and just below high school book report. Especially given his back-tracking that he was "only talking about a very specific type of 'social media experts'". You would think someone that seems to place so much value on good, clear writing would have been able to write a good, clear post that wasn't misunderstood and misinterpreted. Unless...

2) Trolling is never good form. It's one thing to write provocative content and challenge generally held assumptions, it is quite another thing to write a post with the sole intent of stirring up trouble. Especially when you happen to be held in fairly high esteem in your field and your post potentially ends up jeopardizing the careers of many, many well-meaning and unrelated people. Thanks to Pete, I am now going to have to work even harder to overcome the reluctance so many people have towards social media, despite that it can be (note: "can be", not always) a huge driver of revenue. So thanks, Pete. Thanks a lot. You have essentially sold out your field solely for the purpose of self-promotion.

3)His bulleted list: Ok, I see some relevant and valid points in there. How does this invalidate the position of "Social Media Expert"? Can those same points not be carried across to say "SEO"s are useless? After all, SEO is just one facet of marketing, and all marketers should be fluent in SEO. In fact, you can plug in any digital marketing job title into that headline and it will make just as much sense:

I Will Never Hire a “web analytics expert,” and Neither Should You;

I Will Never Hire an “e-mail marketing expert,” and Neither Should You;

I Will Never Hire a “digital video marketing expert,” and Neither Should You;

I Will Never Hire a “digital copy-writing expert,” and Neither Should You;

My point with #3 is that he backs up his bold assertion with a small handful of generic, trite, and completely unhelpful generalities that could really be applied to just about any facet of what everyone here does.

And now for the comments:

Yes, we all know the annoying little brat who's parents pay their rent while they go around claiming to be a social media expert. Yes, they're annoying. Yes, they give the field of social marketing a bad name. They are few, far between, and generally don't last very long. Moreover, they are found in EVERY field. Especially in marketing, where the only real qualification is adding "marketer" after your name. All of those people put together make hardly as much of a negative impact on our field as this article. When I am pitching a client, and they tell me "so and so has done our facebook page for us, but it didn't work and we don't want to do it anymore," I can always pull up some case studies and client referrals to demonstrate that social done right works. Now, though, people can point to this article by a *gasp* self-styled social media expert with prominence and I have an uphill battle to climb in convincing clients I know what I'm doing. Ask yourselves: "Is taking some upstart social media expert down a notch worth tarnishing the reputation of the whole field?" If you answered yes, you should probably not be working in the field to begin with, since clearly we annoy you too much.

As for the job titles, can we please get over it and move on? One of the single smartest individual I know works in research for Google. His official job title? "Defender of the Universe". If a company like Google, known for employing brilliant people who get things done, and get things done well, allows employees to come up with their own job titles, and doesn't care what people chose to call themselves, why should we care if someone calls themselves a guru, rockstar, ninja, superhero, or whatever? Can they get the job done? Do they have demonstrable results they can point to? Do they know what they're talking about? Good. Let people have fun with their jobs. I would much rather hire someone who enjoys what they do and can have a little fun with it than yet another "Analyst, level 2" who is only doing it because it's nice, quiet, steady work, and lives for 5 pm. In fact, I would rather hire someone who is enthusiastic for their job EVEN IF THEY AREN'T AS PROFICIENT IN IT. You can train someone to be a great marketer. You can't train someone to be out-going and love what they do.


And, I apologize for the wall of text. Got a little carried away.

Blog Post: 5 Suggestions for Google Suggest

Certainly don't mean to point fingers at you or anyone specific here, Rhea. There are a couple of firms I am thinking about specifically, and I use the term firms very loosely here. 

That said, thanks for the reply. I just don't see that this is necessarilly a problem. Do innocent companies get hurt sometimes? Of course. But approaches like simply leaving out [Company Name is a Scam] would seem, to me at least, to lead towards an environment where businessess have an edge on consumers. To me, this is the exact opposite of how the internet should work. Things like the auto complete results should be one of those places where enough disperate voices from the consumer side SHOULD be able to drown out a business, no matter how much money they pump into ORM or SEO. 

Is it frustrating? Yeah, of course. A company I worked for actually recently had an AdWords campaign knocked out of comission for months because a competitor meticulously flagged their ads as "selling counterfeit goods" (despite the fact that it was a service company that sold nothing), and no one at Google would tell us what was going on or how to resolve the issue. We didn't even know the campaign had been disabled until we did our daily check and saw 0 impressions. So yes, it's frustrating, and I have felt the futility of butting heads with the great, white whale of Goog. On the other hand, that frustrating immutability is also I think why so many people trust Google so much. We have all come to realize that Google doesn't care if you run a tiny blog with 5 monthly visiotrs, or if you spend hundreds of thousands monthly on adwords, everyone is treated mostly the same. There is a feeling that if a result is showing up in autocomplete, it's because a lot of people are searching for it. If a lot of people are searching for [Company Name is a Scam], then clearly something is out there that is causing people to think that Company Name is a Scam. Instead of blaming Autocomplete, or suing Google as happened in Italy, isn't it a better option to seriously examine WHY people are searching for that? If it ends up being a malicious "consumer advocacy" site, Google already provides a mechanism to report spam pages, and you also have grounds to press for legal action. In this case, Google is not the problem, and they have absolutely no responsibility for making sure your business does well on the web. 

Ultimately, I think we've all become a little too reliant on the idea that Google IS the internet. It isn't. It's a free service that they provide, and I just don't feel they have any obligations, social, moral, legal, or financial to make sure no ones online brand is hurt in any way. 

Looking forward to hearing you speak at the meetup on thursday, by the way. 

I'm always a little leary when I hear arguments along this line. Having done reputation management before, and moving into that direction again, I've run into more than my share of stories of the poor, embattled businessman who is hunted online by a vengefull ex-partner/-wife/-customer/etc. I would say in about 8 cases out of 10 I ended up dropping them as a client because it turned out the reputation was well-earned and I would rather not work with people like that. It takes a good little bit, in my experience, for [company name is a scam] to show up regularly in the predictive algorithm, and at that point you really have to wonder just how much truth there is to the reputation. 

I know I'm painting with a broad brush here, and I don't want to call anyone out, but I know there are SEOs and Reputation Managers out there that will look the other way and try to undo this sort of thing so long as the client is signing the checks and they don't bounce. I also know that these people and their clients are usually the loudest voices when it comes to this topic, just like content farms like eHow are the loudest voices complaining about Panda.

In short, while Google hardly gets a free pass on some results, there is really no practical way for them to deal with this issue. Think about it, any of the methods a legitimate business would use to help themselves would be completely abused by ACTUAL scammers and spammers to remove negative reviews and people trying to honestly warn others. Sure, some businessess suffer as a result, but I would rather have 2 legitimate businessess out of 10 have to deal with an undeserved reputation if it means that the other 8 scammers are called out for what they are.

Blog Post: Google Analytics Now Tracks Page Load Speed

I'm a little curious as to why google decided to require a seperate function call with this as opposed to implementing it universally through the initial Analytics call. I would think it would have been faster and more efficient, and really, who wouldn't want to see this in their standard reports?

That said, it's nice of google to finally put this in, since it's been a ranking factor for a while.

Blog Post: Google Told You So.

I'm not sure how anyone could have not seen this coming, let alone the entire SEO community. Now, granted, I am new to the community, but I've been doing web content and design for a long, long time, and this update has been obvious from a decade back. I think the only thing those of us on the content side have been wondering is when Google would feel comfortable enough with their new algorithm to sort the semantic web mechanically. 

But really, this has always been part of Google's guidelines. From the begining they told webmasters to build good, quality content aimed at people. Anyone who didn't see this coming has either not been paying attention or wilfuly ignoring the warnings.


Oh the horror stories I could tell.

I'm an online marketer for a cluster of electronics repair shops in Manhattan, and we've been doing battle with The Goog here since I started in December. I've actually come to dread coming in to work on Thursdays, since it seems Google likes to push major rearangements of their code on Wednesday nights, just to make the last two days of my work week interesting. At least i can be thanful it's not on Fridays, right?

Our major issue is that we have 5 separate divisions working out of either the same office or the same floor. Since each division is technically it's own business unit, with a unique phone number and focus, each one needs a Places page to be competitive (Oh, did I mention roughly half of our customer base comes from Google?). So what does Google do? Endlessly shuffles the listings around, merging and unmerging them without rhyme and reason. 

And the worst thing is there is nothing we can really do. All the listings are claimed. All are under different google accounts. All contain different content, different information, different media, etc. The only thing in common is the address.

The standard approach of verifying NAP has been taken to absurd lengths (I currently have a spread sheet open with over 200 local portals and directories, almost all of which have been slowly and painstaikingly checked, verified, claimed, and color-coded from red to green.) We've followed every single one of Google's policies to the letter, not even venturing so much as a toe over the line. 

It's frustrating painstainkingly following the rules and seeing your work come crashing down on a weekly basis. Google needs to get their stuff together on local.