By now, I expect that you’ve heard about the viral video that has reinvigorated the Old Spice brand. I have to hand it to the ad agency Wieden & Kennedy for showing everyone that the adage “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” works. According to Mashable, they reformulated and re-released the original video (initially produced in February) and developed almost 200 unique video responses to the social media buzz. These personalized videos generated even more buzz and eventually drove video views through roof.

Beyond the social media campaign, the video had an impact on search. According to Google, recent search requests for Old Spice eclipsed requests for leading brands such as Neutrogena and Gillette (see image below).

These results also impacted the bottom line. According to SymphonIRI “sales in this three-month range have increased by 95 percent over last year and Old Spice gained 2 percent in overall market share.” While the numbers are again impressive, it should be noted that P&G used coupons (such as BOGO, or Buy One Get One Free) to entice consumers to buy Old Spice. It seems that the videos made Old Spice come to the top of consumers minds while the coupons encourage consumers to buy it/try it out.

But once the campaign buzz and incentives are removed, the real question remains: how good is the Old Spice product? If the answer is that competing offerings are hands down better, the money that P&G spent might as well have just gone down the drain. Let’s hope that’s not the case.

This past weekend, I attended the Atlanta WordCamp conference where we heard from local, regional and national folks about how to harness the power of WordPress for both blogging and web content management (see my WordCamp Atlanta recap for more detail). One of the speakers at WordCamp, Topher Kohan who handles SEO for CNN.com, brought up an important point (indirectly) about the SEO in the future:

Load speeds will impact page rankings on Google (Per Matt Cutt at PubCon, 2009; source)

This is pivotal point where power shifts back to web developers. Why?

If you consider the capabilities of WordPress, you quickly realize that it is one of the premier tools for business users such as social marketers or content strategists to write and publish content online without requiring any technical assistance. And the content that these users produce has value only if it has good page ranking. Otherwise, it has limited reach and that means limited eyeballs and that means failure.

So in one fast swoop, the engineers at Google have taken (some of) that power from the business user and put it back in the hands of the web developer. While the business user controls the content, the web developer thinks about things like limiting HTTP requests, CDN’s, and removing whitespace from JavaScript and CSS files when they think about optimizing a web site. These are only a few factors in web site optimization –  just look at Yahoo’s Best Practices on Optimizing a Website (source) to get a good idea on some additional techniques. Of course, they all require a savvy web developer to implement.

So if you want to ensure that your site ranks well, business users need to hire a modern web developer and treat them well because they (will help you) rule the world wide web.

Despite the icy roads and frigid temperatures, hundreds of people from the US southeast region came together at SCAD Atlanta on January 8th – 9th to attend the inagural WordCamp Atlanta, a conference where the WordPress (aka WP) community exchange tips and tricks about this widely popular blogging (and sometimes as a web content management) tool.

I had the pleasure to attend this event along with my colleague Kathlene Hestir. Below are the highlights from the various sessions. I’ve tried to link to the presentations on Slideshare whenever possible.

Friday Night, Janurary 8

WordPress & Journalism
Alejandro Leal and Thomas Wheatley (Creative Loafing Atlanta)

• Managing their blog using WordPress MU (which is the multi-user version of WordPress).
• Have a decent amount of data: 58 blogs, 906 users, 7977 Posts, 17556 Comments.
• Digital or online content is mostly separate from print content; very little sharing between the two.

WordPress & SEO (View on Slideshare)
Topher Kohan (CNN.com)

• Use basic SEO, such as good page title, content headline, 250 words, and ALT tags, on your website.
• You should use breadcrumbs b/c taxonomy is good for both search engines and the user).
• Rankings is going to become dependend on page load times (so hire a developer with strong server and page code optimization experience).
• Sculpt your webite with rel=”nofollow” attributes.
• Canonical URL’s are going to play a larger role in the future.

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Topher takes SEO very seriously — he did an amazing job getting everyone fired up about this topic. There are a ton of good plug-ins in the presentation so just check it out.

The AJC and WordPress
Cliff Barnett and Jason Gilstrap (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

• Rolled out WordPress to make this simple and consistent.
• WordPress is the central content repository for newsroom as content from system gets pushed both online and to the print system.
• Blogs responsible for 8% of traffic; posts on average get 700 comments.

Saturday, Janurary 9

KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: WordPress Resolutions: What to expect in 2010
Jane Wells (Automattic)

• Big Announcement: WP 3.0 is a producet of “The Merge” between WordPress and WordPress MU.
• Expect lots of goodies: a multi-site platform, new base theme, custom posts and canonical plug-ins (or de facto plug-ins for Twitter, Google Analytics, etc.).
• Enhanced media functionality is now pushed to WP 3.1 (maybe).
• WordPress.org is going to be undergoing a major redesign (with help from WP Ninja Mark Jaquith)

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Things like multi-site platform, custom “posts” (aka custom content types) and canonical plug-ins is HUGE news — this is where WP finally takes the baby step to become a true PHP-based web content management tool. Alternative solutions such as Drupal should take note!

Advanced Google Analytics Integration with WordPress (View on Google Docs)
Rusty Tanton (WebMD)

• Current plug-ins for Google Analytics are weak — they only feed you the basic info.
• Using custom variable and advanced segmentation one can REALLY analyze what’s happening on your blog

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Rusty code examples in his presentation so I suggest that you check it out.

Complex Content Management with the Pods CMS Framework Plugin
Scott Kingsley

• Ability to create custom content types in WordPress using Pods (Pods Plug-in).
• Data for pods maintained in separate tables.

ADDITIONAL NOTES: An interesting conversation started up between Scoot and Mike Schinkel over the viability of Pods since Jane announced that custom post types were coming (see tweet).

WordPress Security: Protectin your WP from Inside Out (View on Slideshare)
Syed Balkhi (WP Beginner)

• Do the obvious: keep WP updated, rename “wp-admin” folder and use strong passwords (10 chars or more).
• Use advanced techniques like, moving wp-config.php out of webroot, reassign admin rights to another user and delete admin account, get rid of error message on login screen, and limit access via IP whitelist to wp-admin folder and change DB tables prefix (don’t use wp_)
• Tons of good plug-ins for security so don’t be lazy!

PHP and WordPress – Converging Communities
Aaron Brazell

• Core is still written in PHP4 (some parts are using PHP5) so it is time to update core!

Final Thoughts

First of all, the event was a great success — kudos to Tessa and Brandon for pulling it off. I can’t imagine someone walking out of this event thinking that they didn’t learn a ton. And in case you missed it, plan to attend next year’s WordCamp Atlanta Conference, which will be held February 11-12 2011.

Last week, Google rolled out a new service called Google Dashboard. The service was designed to help users better understand what information Google collects about them:

The dashboard is a welcomed service for two reasons:

It is an initial privacy control mechanism. While Google remains heavily dependent on search, Google continues to expand their services offering. In reviewing these services, it has become clear that Google controls every medium of communication with the exception of fax and snail mail:

NOTE: Google has Gmail (Email), Google Chrome (Web Browser), Google Wave and Google Talk (Chat/IM/Video), and Android and Google Voice (Mobile, Phone).

If Google decides to continue their acquisition streak, Google may find themselves in the eyesight of privacy advocates that are worried about Google owning too much information about you. If Google sits on the sidelines, Google may be forced eventually to disclose personal information to their end users or to limit the information that they can collect. The Google Dashboard gives Google leverage over privacy advocates in that they give you control over your information.

It prepares users for Google Chrome OS. A few months ago, Google announced the development of an OS for netbooks (source). Additionally, Google is known for their exceptional user experience. It seems that the Google Dashboard makes an initial attempt at consolidating account preferences into a single view, a feature that one would expect when Google releases their OS.

While the Google Dashboard is by no means perfect, it is a fine start.

Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal released an iPhone app called the iPhone Mobile Reader. The iPhone application allowed users to access premium content that was only available to paid print and digital subscribers for free (source). But as of October 24, 2009, content is no longer free.

I spoke with the online circulation desk and learned that WSJ.com digital subscribers now have to pay $1 per week or $52 a year to access the content via the iPhone Mobile Reader. Print subscribers can access the content for free while non-subscribers have to pay $4 a week.

It should come as no surprise that the Wall Street Journal has decided to charge for their content. A report this week by the Audit Bureau of Circulations showed that newspaper sales have dropped by more than 10% in the past 6 months in comparison to the same period last year (source). There are two other major factors that are making matters worse:

• Newspapers are seeing a slide in advertising sales (Gannett recently reported a 28% drop in advertising).
• Subscribers are accessing their news content online. They are also expecting to access that content for free, like they currently do with video content from the major television networks.

As a fan of The Wall Street Journal, I can understand the newspaper’s desire to squeeze a few more dollars out of their shrinking pool of subscribers. However, I’m disappointed that they have decided to tack on a “convenience” charge to access their content via the iPhone, especially if you’re already a digital subscriber. Why can’t they simply use my WSJ.com credentials to authenticate me and give me access to the content that I’ve already paid for? While I can use my current credentials and mobile Safari browser to visit the WSJ.com website, the experience is just not user friendly. I think that it is absurd to pay a premium twice to access the same content.

I’m hoping that this experiment will follow the way of NBC’s futile attempt to improve the bottom line by having Jay Leno at the 10 PM timeslot.