There’s a fine line between agenda setting and straight up lying to your audience, and this clip from from The Colbert Report highlights just how ridiculous the coverage of the Norway terror attacks by select America news media was.

“Isn’t SEO just BS?” was a question someone posed to me over the July 4th weekend, after finding out what I do for a living. My immediate reaction was one defensive of my industry and livelihood.  But it did bring up some interesting ideas that I wanted to share. But first, let’s travel back in time.

The term “Eternal September” refers to a phenomenon first experienced by members of Usenet. Usenet was the precursor to internet forums that existed since the 1980s that allowed people to interact via message threads. There were established posting standards and implied rules of conduct. During Usenet’s existence, it would become flooded with new members every September, due to college freshmen who now had access to the internet and the service. These new members did not know the rules and made the entire Usenet environment bothersome to experienced and longtime posters.

In 1993, AOL began providing its users access to the service. As a result, Usenet was subject to an influx of many more members (the majority of whom had zero experience with the system). Whereas in previous years September would end and the new members would learn how to conform with the established standards of the site, this was no longer a feasible scenario. Longtime member Dave Fischer referred to the new Usenet as “the September that never ended,” or the Eternal September.

How does that anecdote relate to Search Engine Optimization?

Much like Usenet after AOL opened the floodgates, there are no true barriers to entry to get into the SEO industry. As far as I know, no respected universities offer an “SEO major” and most low level SEO jobs require no experience. Simply put, anybody with a website and internet access can claim to work in SEO and has a chance to enter the industry. In contrast, there are no amateur bankers or hobby biologists. And with good reason. Those jobs have proven real world implications. I’m not saying that SEO doesn’t, but it is at its core an industry where it’s hard to definitively measure ROI and where there is no centralized certification available to objectively QA individuals’ SEO abilities. The sad result of this is that there are many people who call themselves SEOs and many agencies who offer “SEO Services” who are (for lack of better terminology) just not that good. There are also people who practice SEO without a well-rounded knowledge of how the web works, and worse yet, people who deliberately try to manipulate search engine algorithm in a black hat manner. All these groups of people give SEO a bad name (just ask the New York Times).

Circling back to the original question I was asked a few weeks ago: Isn’t SEO just BS? Obviously, my answer was no. But I also made sure to respond that there are definitely people who call themselves SEOs who are full of it; and of course, that I am not one of them (nor is the company who employs me).

Do I feel I’m part of an Eternal September? A little bit. I envision the SEO field becoming more and more competitive with people finding out what it is, people realizing that they don’t need a college degree to learn about industry standards, and people whose only goal is to game the system for financial gain.

I also don’t see this changing until Google and other search engines recognize SEO as a real legitimate industry. The only way to do that is via official individual SEO certification tests. And that would require that Google finally admit that some SEO tactics are better than others, which I don’t see happening anytime soon.

Just watch this video from Matt Cutts:

“It’s going to be tough” indeed, Matt.

Now, this isn’t an entertainment blog, but I must comment on Dia Frampton on the reality television singing competition The Voice on NBC.

I’ve been a fan of Dia for about five years, ever since I randomly caught her band Meg & Dia on a random local TV show one night. I’ve seen them in concert four times, and met and spoken to Dia twice (yes, she is as marvelously awkward in person as she appears on the show).

But that’s neither here nor there. The tagline of this blog entry posits that Dia is a social media success. To fully understand why, let’s consider an abbreviated history of Dia Frampton’s music career.

Dia Frampton’s Musical Career
Raised in Draper, Utah, Dia and her sister Meg Frampton formed the eponymous band Meg & Dia. The arguable tipping point of their rise to fame came after they performed at Warped Tour 2006. The band entered a contest on MySpace to be selected to perform at the MySpace sponsored tent. After a stroke of bad luck, their account was disabled due to some user-submitted malware. But then Tom Anderson (yes, that “Tom”) reached out to the band himself to offer them the gig (to be honest, I gleaned a lot of this information from the Meg & Dia Wikipedia page, but then again to be fair, I wrote and edited a lot of that article).

From then and beyond, Meg & Dia grew their cult following, primarily through Internet promotion. Their on-site forum had thousands of members, who affectionately referred to themselves as “Boardies” and all this fandom eventually led to a record deal with Sire Records and Meg & Dia’s first major label release. The band was eventually dropped from the label, which is the reason why Dia was eligible for The Voice.

Dia Frampton performing with Meg & Dia at Webster Hall

Social Media and Reality Television
A little over a year ago, American Idol decided that its contestants would no longer be able to Tweet from their personal Twitter accounts. Many speculated it was because there was a very strong correlation between a contestant’s number of followers/mentions and the likelihood of him or her being voted through to the next round by fans. This was obviously a big deal for a television show that prided itself on nail-biting suspense.

Fast forward to The Voice (which is more often than not referred to on-screen as #TheVoice, another response to the social media age). Much like the current trend with cable news networks, The Voice relied on the social media timeline for user-generated content, going so far as to have a dedicated backstage “social media room.”

I personally have never seen any other television show embrace social media as much as The Voice has. Anyone who’s watched even a single episode can tell you that it seemed as if every commercial break was preceded by a Twitter update; Trending Topics were the holy grail, with no instance of a contestant/performance trending going unnoticed.

At the time of the finale aired, these were the contestant’s Twitter follower counts:
-Beverly McClellan: 31,400
-Vicci Martinez: 43,566
-Javier Colon: 68,344

And lastly was Dia Frampton, who blew all the other contestants out of the water with her 85,905 followers (a significant percentage were from before it was even announced that she would be on the show, another example of Meg & Dia’s loyal following).

So what happened on tonight’s episode? Unfortunately, Dia was the first runner-up. She may not have won, but the trend that American Idol feared a year ago returned to The Voice. The two members with the highest number of Twitter followers were the top 2 vote-getters. I can’t say it was unexpected, but it was still surprising how much a single show could embrace Twitter.

Does it take the surprise out of reality television shows? Probably. But does it even matter? Not necessarily. Social media is all about community building, and you can’t ignore or censor someone’s popularity in this digital age.

Did The Voice do it right? The answer to that one is probably “no” as well, but it’s a good start and perhaps other programs will follow suit. Engaging your audience and making them invested in your programming is almost never a bad thing.

Meeting Dia Frampton at Webster Hall (Nov 2010)

Update: Oops! I didn’t realize that The Voice only aired “Live” on the East Coast and inadvertently ruined it for a friend by Tweeting about it (and this article). But that definitely brings to mind another great point about the power of Trending Topics and communities. The show was able to generate so many Trending Topics from just a fraction of the US population! But again, sorry if I spoiled anything!

Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil”; Google wants its search engine to help people. On the other side of the battle are those working in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Knowledge itself is morally neutral. But as is the case with almost everything in this world, people’s intentions determine the social constructs of good and evil. In the SEO world, we have white hat SEOs and black hat SEOs. In short, the difference is that black hat SEOs take advantage of what they know about how Google’s search algorithm works in order to influence results for specific search queries no matter how accurate or relevant it is for users.

Now, despite what you may read on the Internet, Search Engine Optimization is a valued skill and a viable profession (just ask the folks over at SEOmoz). SEO is a service in which the majority of digitally savvy companies will invest money because they can see the long-term value of what will eventually pay for itself as “free traffic.”

I’m not going to jump to the conclusion that money is the root of all evil… at least not yet. But let’s put it this way: if Google had its way, anytime anyone searched for anything, its algorithm would provide the perfect result in the first position of the first page. Still with me so far? Good. Now let’s say there’s a small mom and pop store that sells toy trains online (and is a legitimate, well-intentioned business). Within Google’s search engine results page (SERP), that store’s website would have to compete with big box stores like Walmart, Target, etc. that may not have as good of a selection as a small store dedicated to the product. Now, is that the best thing for users?

Matt Cutts and the Google team would probably respond to this notion that SEO tactics and best practices are widely known and made public, so they are technically fully accessible by all. But let’s face it- for a lot of people, SEO is not all that intuitive and pragmatic. So to realistically level the playing field, the small mom and pop toy train shop needs to spend as much as Target to achieve the same level of optimization expertise. The logical extreme is that the more money you have, the more optimized your site will be (ceteris paribus).

Based on this simple assumption, is SEO evil? I’ll let you all mull over that for a bit. My answer to this question is forthcoming.

This past week, NPR’s On The Media dedicated the latter half of their show talking about Search Engine Optimization. There’s some good basic stuff in there, putting all of the recent bombshells and ramifications into lay terms. Available in audio form and transcripts.

The segments:

How to Cheat Google
David Segal, the author of the NYT article outing JCPenney, explains some of the problems with the algorithm and how Google punished JCP and other sites.

Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Web Spam Team
Interview with Matt Cutts about how Google engineers operate and how they respond to user questions, etc. Pretty standard stuff from Cutts.

How Search Engines are Changing Journalism
How online news outlets are using SEO to their advantage, including the HuffPo model.

Steven Rosenbaum and the Curation Nation
Interview with the CEO of Magnify.net who says that user recommendations may become more important than search engines when it comes to sharing content.

The Formula for a Most-Emailed Story
Professors looked at months’ worth of NYT articles and came up with some factors that correlate to high levels of sharing (including the quantification of “awe”).

Link to stream/download the full 02.25.11 Episode of On The Media.