What Google Says Makes A Good Manager

The latest issue of Wired UK magazine has a great section on initiatives companies are taking to improve their workplace and culture.

Of note, there's a section on Google's approach to measuring the quality of it's managers.

In 2009 their HR team analysed who were the best and most successful managers and what particular traits they had.  This research led them to conclude that there are 8 behaviours that make a great manager and they measure their managers against these 8 behaviours.

The project was called "Project Oxygen" and they call these 8 traits the "Oxygen Eight"...

1. Be a good coach

2. Don't micromanage

3. Express interest in employees' well-being

4. Be productive and results orientated

5. Listen to your team

6. Help employees' career development

7. Have a clear vision

8. Have key technical skills

Spending one to one time with people and taking a genuine interest in their lives was the single most appreciated trait of a manager by their team.

Here's a report in more detail from the NY Times (2011)

How To Be Number One In Google

At last!  After 10 years of trying, I can now say I am number one in Google.

No, I am not some boiler-room SEO sales guy.   Yes, I do have an ego.

Search for "David Norris" and you get me as number one.  Well, you do if you are me, today, from the UK.  Who knows if this is a Google A/B test.

Joking aside, this is a clear sign that Google are taking on Facebook and building a social strategy.  What better incentive to get people to complete their Google profiles than to provoke their ego.  "Want to be number one in Google for your name search?  Get your profile up to date".

I noticed this because I was checking Google Analytics for the traffic to my Google blog (Blogger) and saw a spike in traffic yesterday.  I looked at the source and keywords used and saw a large number of searches for my name delivering traffic.

I did the name search and saw the screenshot above with my name number one with my Google profile with an "edit" button. (Of course! Because I have a Gmail account).   As I use Picasa and Google Contacts, my profile is starting to become very integrated.

It's clear, Google are in battle.  Let the games commence!

Local Business SEO - The Game Has Changed For 2011

Local businesses need to realise that for 2011, there is a step change in search engine marketing.

The old rules of SEO no longer apply. I'll explain why, then I'll suggest some key points that local businesses need to think about.

So - what's changed?

This morning I noticed that the traffic to one of my most visited pages on my blog had seriously dropped.  In early 2008 I wrote about "Raja-Fashions Tailor-Made Hong Kong Suits, Online Meets Offline". It was an experiment, to see just from copy writing using the right keywords I could achieve a good search ranking for "Raja Fashions". Just for kicks.  And it worked.  Number 2 in Google for "Raja Fashions" after the business itself.

In the last two weeks, traffic to this site has halved.  Looking at the reasons why made me realise that as far as Google is concerned, the game has changed.

What's happened now is that instead of being number 2 in the results, high up on the page, Google has massively increased the amount of screen space it uses for the relevant local business result.  Now the "place page" has taken centre stage.

Now as you can see, my blog isn't seen on the screen.  I can count already 17 links to the Raja Fashions site, 4 links to their place page and a two links to "more results from rajafashions.com".

(Now - I am stuffing this blog entry with lots of Raja Fashions keywords, but in this case I'm just doing to tell the story, I'm not doing it to try re-claim my ranking, that's for sure! Although, I can recommend having a high ranking page with lots of opinion on it to use as leverage when you're dealing with a Chinese salesman and you're negotiating on price - but that's another story...)

3 important implications for local businesses...

1. Claim your place page.

Local businesses need to claim their place page more than ever.  These pages will get more traffic, make sure the information is complete and accurate.

2. Design your website navigation with Google in mind. 

Local businesses need to make sure that their website navigation has key call to action and information categories on the menu so that these links are the links shown on the Google results page under the main result.  For example if you were a restaurant, you would want a "Book A Table" link on your primary navigation and a landing page for that purpose.  As well as having the booking interface on the homepage as well of course.

3. Bid on your own brand name

This will push all the aggregators even further down the page because you're claiming the top slot on the page. More real estate for you.

Strategically, here's how I read the situation...

Google has always struggled to sell to local businesses.  They've not got a sales force, unlike yellow page companies or Groupon.  So - they need an automated touch point.  By pushing the place page they do two things.  They drive more traffic to place pages so that local business owners start to take notice.  In parallel, aggregators have to pay to be seen because if you're aggregating local businesses, you're not going to get the same returns that you used to on SEO as there's less and less first page screen real estate to be seen on - so better PPC revenues.  Then, they develop their own automated promotions engine on the platform, coupons, vouchers etc.  Groupon, watch out.

Getting Insight From Google Insights

Whenever Google launches a new tool or service there’s much chatter and blogging. What I’ve found though is that many bloggers just give you the news and don’t really discuss the implications.

One interesting tool that was launched earlier this month was Google Insights For Search.

You can type in a search phrase or a number of phrases and then see the trends of usage of this term over time.

Some fun examples; You can see how the phrase ’Beijing Olympics’ has massively ramped up in August (well, no surprise there then). Or how about the decline in interest for ’Tony Blair’ over the last year?

I think there are more interesting applications for an e-commerce business to consider.

Here’s 3 suggestions to get you started.

1. Competitor Analysis

There’s usually a positive relationship between a company’s brand recognition and the number of searches it gets on it’s own “brand” terms. You can use this to your advantage by comparing the volume of searches your own company brand is getting compared to your competitors.

For example, compare the following 4 flight/rail companies for UK searches over the last 4 years: British Airways, Eurostar, Ryanair and Easyjet. You can see the search spike relating to the launch of the new Eurostar terminal in November 2007, but much more obvious is the share of interest that BA has lost to Easyjet and Ryanair over the years.

2. Regional Demand

If you are entering a new market it’s useful to see where in that country your potential customer base exists. In which cities will you find your new customers?

For example, in the online restaurant reservations business, if you were to search for ‘restaurants’ by French region you’d see (as expected) that Paris is a top location. Which city would you have guessed as next most important? Of the other major cities it’s not Bordeaux, Nantes or Lyon where there are most diners online, it’s Toulouse and Nice. If you cross reference this data with population data, you get a good market research tool.

3. Seasonal Trends

Many businesses are seasonal in nature. If you a a growing business (and I hope you are), determining what parts of your monthly figures can be attributed to growth and what are caused by an underlying seasonal trend is difficult to gauge. Say we did well in August. Is that because more people are in the market for our product generally in August (compared to July) - or did we actually take a bigger share of the market?

For example, if you are a retailer selling gifts, what sort of trend do you see for gifts? A little spike in February (Valentine's Day), a big spike in November (Christmas). No surprises there then. If you are unsure of your seasonal demand trends, this is quite a quick and easy way to take the pulse of your consumer base.


So - there you are, a couple of different ways to use this great new tool. I'm sure there are many more. Please feel free to leave a comment if you've gained insights in other ways.

Why Can't I Find You On Google?

Yes, we've all done, it, Googling our name.

I'm as guilty as the rest of them, but I have the challenge of competing with a footballer, a sculptor and a senator for getting a ranking. David Norris - it's hardly a unique name.

More and more "name searches" are taking hold as we "Google" our future employers, our future employees, dates, friends and celebs.

Can you be found if you Google your name? If so, what do you get? If you're in business, your professional repuation will increasingly depend on what people read about you online.

A new start up has just launched that aims to help us all get found. The site is still in Beta, so if you get in there now, you might get a listing for free before they start charging.

It's called lookuppage.com.

Here's how it worked for me:
1. Sign up
2. Create a simple profile
3. I received a call the same day enquiring about how I heard of the service and they explained more about their plans
4. The next day I found my page at www.davidnorris1.com through Google - it was listed in the paid ads! (I didn't pay for the ad - they did)



Interesting business model here. They buy me a domain, pay for PPC, it won't cost them much. I tell all my friends, they sign up, and soon their user base expands fast virally. When they get enough critical mass, they start charging for premuim services and work with corporate accounts. If this works, sales focussed companies and small businesses with low web presence will be eager to get a quick low cost visibility for their key people.

It's great too because I get a legitimate link to this blog from the new page, every link helps!

So - you've nothing to lose, go get your page now before they start charging.

Portabilty Of The Social Graph: Google's new Social Graph API

One of the trends to look out for this year online is the "portability" of the Social Graph.

The Social Graph is a term used to describe the mapping of relationships between people. Many of us have relationships on well known social networking sites such as Facebook and Linkedin, as well as more obsure forums and specialised communities.

In terms of usefulness, to be able access these relationships is a great starting point for all sorts of website applications.

What's really needed though is a way to be able to get a "meta" view of all of these relationships so that you don't need to declare them all everytime you land on a new site. I don't really want to maintain 20 different "friends" lists when I only really have one set of friends. (OK, some contacts aren't friends, and some friends are not in contact online, but the point is that mapping out these relationships time and time again can be tedious).

Wouldn't it be useful if a website already knew about my contacts and suggested relevant useful topics according to my contacts and interests? What if say, website X knew that I was already "friends" with my friend on website Y and suggested that we connect on website Y as well? I might not know that my friend also uses website Y, and so with a simple prompt we could find each other.

It all sounds a bit big brother right?

Well, our masters of the universe, Google, are having a go at solving this problem in the form of the Google Social Graph API.

How does it work?

Quite simply it gives developers tools that can analyse the links to and from the from any public "profile" page of a website and start to infer from the links who is connected to which networks.

For those of you who know your HTML, there is an anchor tag attribute "rel" which can be used by social sites and blogs to clarify further the type of relationship.

For example if I were to link to this blog from one of my sites I would write [a href="http://www.david.norris.co.uk" rel="me"]. The rel="me" attribute says that the site I'm linking to is one of my sites.

This is just one way that Google can read the link patterns to identify relationships.

Trying it out

Google offer a couple of example applications that show how the API can be used.

One of these is called My Connections. Here I entered 3 of my sites in the input box; this blog, my linkedin profile and my Gooruze profile.

On clicking "My Connnections", the script analysed the links between those sites.

Here's the link: http://socialgraph-resources.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/findyours.html?q=www.david-norris.co.uk%2Bwww.linkedin.com%2Fin%2Fdavidnorris%2Bwww.gooruze.com%2Fmembers%2Fdcnorris.

It can tell which of the my "claimed" sites can be reached from each url.

Interestingly it found out that I had put in livebookings.net as one of "my sites" on Linkedin. This is the website for the company for which I work. It then identified a possible connection of another site that links to one of mine "claiming" to be me. This was www.linkedin.com/in/hultberg, which also links to livebookings.net.

This is because www.linkedin.com/in/hultberg is a linkedin page from a colleague at livebookings who also put livebookings.net as his company site on linkedin.

Will it catch on?

For Google, more accurate mapping of the Social Graph will require that websites enable the code in their links from profile pages to contain the REL attribute or other methods of categorising links out.

If anyone can encourage the uptake of new coding habits, Google can.

The question is
- will we reach critical mass of enough sites using these attributes so that relationships can be correctly inferred from the links?

We'll see. In the meantime, this is clearly a strategic effort by Google to have some control over how the Social Graph is made portable. Whoever cracks this nut is going to have significant advantage in the next phase of the internet's growth.

50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Web Site

Steve Johnston has just published an ebook called 50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Web Site. It is a great SEO read for webmasters.

Who is Steve Johnston? He's a Google Consultant, he specialises in getting under the skin of your website and making sure that you know what you need to do to get your site ranked in Google and to do it in a way that it above board with no hidden tricks. I've employed Steve on a project and was pleased with his professionalism, work ethic and advice.