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Document Metadata, SERPs, and First Impressions: Check Your File Data for Improved Results

I’m sure you’ve found yourself in this situation before: you turn to search engines like Google or Bing to research a topic and come across rather obscure-looking titles or unhelpful descriptions embedded in the results pages. They could look something like this:

What is this stuff, and why is it in your results?

The Origins of Document Metadata

What you’re seeing is called “document metadata,” and it is automatically included in programs such as Microsoft Office. Metadata typically consists of the document’s author and a title. Unless you or your IT staff has customized your program’s settings, the values for these items are usually generated from your login name and the first line of text in your document.

You probably won’t notice document metadata if you pass files back-and-forth through e-mail, but it becomes both visible and vital if these files are posted to the web or internal, web-based collaboration tools within your organization.

Why should you pay attention to metadata?

The Importance of Document Metadata

Correct and valid document metadata can go to great lengths to:

Improve the user’s experience. The online content your organization publishes will be difficult for users to identify if it comes up with the title “Chapter1.doc” in the results. This goes for both the search engines themselves as well as your own website’s search engine.
Boost your visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). Adding relevant keywords to the title, author, and description of your documents can push these items up in SERP rankings.
Reduce the chances of releasing internal or sensitive data to the public. The default settings for your documents’ metadata could include non-public, potentially sensitive, or personally identifiable information such as user names, contact information, and server or network names, among other details. Errant metadata could violate legal disclosure agreements or give social engineers valuable clues into the nature of your internal network.

Microsoft has a helpful article that shows you how to find and update (or remove) metadata in your documents. Metadata is also passed along when you create PDFs from your office application, so you should take care of your data at the source.

Document Properties and First Impressions

Another tip that may help, especially when creating PDFs, is changing some of “initial view” settings in the document properties. These settings determine how the PDF will appear whenever the user opens the document in the browser or their desktop.

I personally prefer the following defaults in Adobe Acrobat:

These settings guarantee that the user sees most, if not all, of the first page in their screen instead of a part of a graphic, magnified text, or, worse, nothing at all … which can happen if the top half of your opening page is blank (for example, if you break print publications into article PDFs without cover pages). Showing the document title helps when the file is open on user’s desktop: if they have more than one window open, the title can help them distinguish between it and files in other open windows.

Key Elements for Measuring Your Social Media Campaigns

October 22, 2010 / brightmatrix / 2 Comments

Now that social media channels like Twitter and Facebook have matured into solid communications platforms, many individuals, organizations, corporations, and agencies have taken to these channels to reach their audiences. What hasn’t quite solidified, however, is how these campaigns are tracked and measured. There’s still a decent amount of confusion and differing opinions of what you should measure and how.

In this post, I’ll share several factors, methods, and steps that I’ve learned this year about how you can effectively and realistically measure your social media campaigns. This isn’t intended to be a complete or exhaustive list of what you could use, but it’s my hope that each topic will assist you in your endeavors.

Define Your Goals and What Constitutes Success

Before you pursue any coordinated effort in your social media channels, think very carefully about your goals and what constitutes success for you. Remember, you cannot measure success (or anything at all, for that matter) if you don’t have defined goals up front or have an unclear vision of what defines a successful venture.

Expectations: Set the expectations of the campaign early ~~and often~~. Make sure the goals and definitions of success can be precisely tracked, measured, and reported on. Build a communications strategy and make sure everyone who will be involved in the campaign has read and understood it completely. If you’re simply testing the waters of a specific social media channel or experimenting with a new approach, that’s perfectly fine, but make certain everyone understands that, especially those in charge.
Timeframe: Think about the timeframe of your efforts. What is the life expectancy of the campaign? Is it a short-term promotion, a webinar, conference, or event with specific dates, a brand awareness effort, or a marketing campaign to raise awareness of a cause or resource? Will you announce the effort ahead of time so users are prepared to take action, such as a “save the date” for events? How will you build interest and sustain momentum over the course of the campaign? What are your plans for retiring the campaign once it’s complete? Have you considered follow-up activities like a user satisfaction survey?
Transactions: Work out which transactions will define a successful campaign and stick with those decisions throughout the effort. How is the campaign intended to affect your transactions? Are you seeking to drive more traffic to a specific website, blog, or web-based application? Do you want a certain number of users to sign up for a promotion, event, or product trial? Do you want them to buy something? Think about “goal conversions”: the action(s) you want your users to make, and the end result(s) you want from them.
Return on Investment (ROI): ROI is a classic business metric, but it’s one that’s generated a lot of heated discussions when it relates to social media. Whenever you think of ROI, it should always boil down to money: hard dollars and cents (or euros, sterling, yen, etc.). Did your campaign generate enough revenue to justify its cost (marketing materials, agency fees, manufacturing costs, etc.)? Did you increase sales of a product or service? Did your transactions balance out the (estimated) hourly rate of the staff spent managing, tracking, and measuring the campaign? You don’t have to always sell something to determine ROI; in essence, you’re figuring out whether the campaign was worth the effort, but that worth has to be a financial measurement.

Look for Active Responses

Among the most valuable success metrics are direct responses from your audience. These can include mentions and direct messages on Twitter and wall posts and comments on Facebook. Be sure to check these regularly, especially if you intend to respond to comments or engage with your audience to keep up the momentum of your campaign.

If one of your transactions is new fans or followers, you may want to activate e-mail notifications to have “hard copies” of these actions. New follower notifications from Twitter, for example, not only show you basic information about the new follower, but also which platform or browser they used, the date and time of their activity, and the size of their audience.

Check How and How Often Users Are Sharing

To track how far your message has reached, look for evidence of sharing within your audience.

On Twitter, keep track of retweets, both the old- and new-style versions. “Old-style” retweets have the prefix “RT” before the original tweet along with the handle of the originating account. Users may choose to add their own comments in the retweet, and may edit or winnow down the original text to fit their comments. “New-style” retweets are simply a reposting of the original tweet in the user’s timeline; they can’t make any changes to the original text. Depending on which tool you’re using to measure retweets, you may need to look in different views. For example, Hootsuite will not show new-style retweets in a “Mentions” view; you need to track them in the “Your Tweets, Retweeted” view.

On Facebook, look for both “likes” and “shares”. Whenever a user likes a post, it increments a “thumbs up” value associated with the post; all fans of the page see this value. If the user chooses to share your post, the original post will appear in the user’s timeline. They can also choose to add a comment to prefix the shared post.

Likes and new-style retweets are what I consider “lazy successes”. It takes a user only one click to perform these actions, so it may not indicate that they read the complete post or whether that post was informative, helpful, or useful to them. Facebook comments and shares, along with old-style Twitter retweets with additional text, are more valuable for quantitative feedback.

Use Query Variables or URL Shorteners

Whether you’re sending out links in your tweets and Facebook posts, including website URLs in direct mailings, or displaying QR codes in your promotional materials, go the extra mile to insure that you can properly measure user activity.

Several URL shortening services, such as bit.ly or Hootsuite’s ow.ly, have back-end reporting tools you can use to track and analyze click-throughs. Hootsuite can also overlay tweet click-throughs with your Google Analytics reports to show possible relationships between your posts and website traffic.

Query variables, which are additional pieces of information you can include in a website URL, can provide you with richer metrics. Web analytics applications and services such as WebTrends, Google Analytics, and Radian6 can collect information from query variables whenever a user visits the URL. What’s nice about these variables is that you define them: add whatever information you’d like to collect, such as the campaign’s name, a specific marketing code, or which channel you’re sending the URL out to. You can then work within your chosen analytics platform to track, monitor, and report on the variables.

Never Rely on a Single Metric

When it comes time to gather, analyze, and report on the results of your campaign, never base your success or failure on a single metric, such as followers or fans. Always use multiple measurements and track trends in their activity over time. This allows you to form the complete picture of your campaign, and makes you better informed about what contributed to the results.

Crossing the Finish Line

Building realistic expectations, setting your timeframe, defining your transactions, and understanding how ROI will relate to your campaign will all help immensely when it comes time to measure your efforts. Be diligent in checking (and responding to) active responses from your audience and how they’re spreading the word about your campaign. Give your measurements a boost by considering URL shorteners and query variables to supply additional information about your users. And, finally, don’t hang the success (or failure) of your efforts on a single value or metric.

As I mentioned at the start of this post, I don’t consider the thoughts I’ve gathered here as the “be-all-and-end-all” compendium of social media measurements. If there are specific methods or insights that have worked well for you, please feel free to share them in the comments.

I want to thank the good folks at Marketwire and the #smmeasure chats for helping to inspire this post. Their weekly social media measurement Twitter chats have been quite valuable in my own social media efforts, especially since metrics in this space are still not clearly defined or universal. The #smmeasure chats take place each Thursday at 12 noon Eastern Standard Time. Follow the @smmeasure Twitter account or the #smmeasure hashtag to participate.

The Gentleman’s Guide to Shedding Twitter Complainers

July 29, 2010 / brightmatrix / 2 Comments

I came across an excellent tweet by Jeremiah Owyang last week that gives a very simple tip to shedding folks on Twitter who complain about your posts. Basically, you block, then unblock them. It’s quite a “gentleman’s way” of pushing folks out of your circle: you set Jane Complainer free but don’t shun them by blocking them. It severs the connection, nice and neat.

I realized, however, there is a small trick to this method. If you use Twitter’s native interface, selecting “Block USERNAME” gives you an “undo” option by default. Clicking “undo” merely restores the user as one of your followers; it doesn’t “unblock” them.

Here’s the solution. Go to your list of followers, then open the account page for the follower you want to block/unblock in a new browser tab or window. From the first tab/window, select “Block USERNAME” from the list of actions (see first screenshot below). The user will be blocked, and you will see the “undo” action. Do nothing else here.

Switch to the tab with the user’s account, then refresh the page (use Control + F5 to fetch the freshest version). You’ll notice that a gray box appears with an “unblock” option (see left side of screenshot below). Click the “unblock” link to complete the process.

Now, what you don’t want is the “undo” option; this is what you’ll see if you block the user directly from their account page (see right side of screenshot below). As mentioned above, the “undo” link will just make them a follower again.

Third-party Twitter clients may give you similar options. I’m most familiar with Hootsuite; you can block users from their “Contacts” pane, but you can’t unblock them there. You’d need to take the extra step of opening up the user’s account in your browser and unblocking them as shown above.

I hope you’ll find this extra elaboration of Jeremiah’s idea helpful. I’ve also used this technique to shed accounts following me due to an unrelated keyword match or spammers.

Update (7-29-10): Shortly after publishing this article, I received feedback on Twitter that questioned the use of this technique in lieu of engagement and conversation. A few thoughts on this:

First, I personally advocate engagement first and foremost vs. bluntly shutting out detractors or those who disagree with you. However, some folks just want to gripe instead of talk; that’s human nature.
Also, your network is your territory: you have the freedom to do whatever you want. If blocking out users without dialog is your thing, that’s up to you.
Lastly, I certainly wouldn’t advise organizations or corporations to do something like this unless they’re concerned about the nature of certain followers (and whatever reputational implications that one-sided relationship carries). In that case, that’s up them and/or their management. At face value, pushing out followers limits the voice of your business and doesn’t appear very customer friendly.

A topic for a future post, perhaps …?

Want to Build Your Personal Brand? Be Yourself and Use Common Sense

July 28, 2010 / brightmatrix / 3 Comments

I’ve read several articles recently that talk about a “personal brand” and how folks should mind their social stores. Everyone has advice or their opinions, but, honestly, I think people’s social faces are going to be as different as their physical ones.

From my perspective, the bottom line with social media and “personal brands” is this: as in life, you’re pretty much free to do whatever you want. Whether you want to be chatty, observational, opinionated, reclusive, or just listen in, it’s up to you. Your followers, friends, etc. will be shaped by your actions (or lack thereof). There’s no true “right way” to manage your personal brand in the social web; stick with how you manage your day-to-day affairs and you should turn out fine.

I’ve been thinking of social media as your personal TV channel with its own unique programming, but I don’t think that’s quite accurate. A better analogy would be a street performer. You have a talent to show off, knowledge to share, a skill to demonstrate, or something to talk about. People who notice you, whether it’s by happenstance or referral, become your audience. If they like what they see, hear, or learn, they stick around. If not, they move on. Your voice and your performance space are only limited by the audience you attract.

Of course, running a subset of your life on the web doesn’t mean you’re free of cause and consequence. Don’t want to make enemies? Stay away from lies, aggression, and inflammatory comments. Don’t want to get fired? Don’t disparage your coworkers, employer, their line of business, or yourself (by making ribald jests, posting incriminating photos, etc.). Don’t want to reveal too much about yourself? Tell social networks only what you want them to know.

Be yourself. Use common sense. Authenticity tempered with good judgment will do wonders for your brand.

Using Hashtags to Win Friends and Influence Others

July 13, 2010 / brightmatrix / 2 Comments

One of the most useful aspects of Twitter are hashtags. Effective and clever use of hashtags can really make Twitter’s role as an information aggregator shine, and can also be used to spread your messages to a larger audience. While simple in concept, hashtags can often stump relatively new users or clients seeking to use Twitter for business purposes.

What’s a Hashtag?

A hashtag is a way to join common topics together in Twitter. You enter the hash mark (#) before a word or phrase to create the keyword; omit spaces or replace them with underscores to grab the entire phrase. The hashtag then becomes “clickable”: Twitter users who click on a hashtag will see a real-time stream of everyone who’s used it in their posts.

Hashtags are commonly used for events and online discussions or chats. Whoever organizes the event or chat will assign a hashtag in advance for use by the participants. This insures that anyone who wants to join in will be heard in the ongoing conversation (for some recent, good examples, look up #twtrcon or #uiewamt). You’ll often notice that your followers will increase after participating in these types of chats (just don’t post for that purpose alone; be informative, helpful, and polite).

Hashtags are also useful for joining together communities of interest. If you tweet something about user experience, for example, your messages will only reach your followers (unless they decide to retweet you, of course). But adding the hashtag “#ux” will carry your message to anyone tuning into that discussion, which can often be a much broader audience. In addition, by following community of interest discussions yourself, you’re likely to come across helpful and valuable sources of information. It’s also a great way to make new connections with folks who share your passions.

How Do I Use a Hashtag?

The most effective way to use a hashtag is to find one that’s already in use; that way, you’re confident that your messages will find their way into existing conversations. Go to Twitter’s search page and enter a sample term to see whether it turns up any results. There may be more than one term for a specific topic (such as “#ff” and “#followfriday”). If you’re at an event, check with the coordinators to see whether an official hashtag has been assigned.

If you’re thinking of creating a new hashtag for a business purpose, make certain it will have common, consistent, and frequent use by any accounts managed by your organization. It’s important to check whether your chosen hashtag is already in use to avoid confusion.

Some users will make up their own hashtags for a whimsical or clever purpose. Foes of the font Comic Sans (myself included) will occasionally post using the hashtag “#deathtocomicsans”. Social media luminary and frequent traveler Olivier Blanchard (also known as The Brand Builder) uses “#WhereisTBB” to let his audience know his location when on the road. These may be less practical, but they’re often a lot of fun.

Best Practices for Using Hashtags

When using hashtags, be mindful of some etiquette rules that have been established:

Choose wisely: Don’t use more than three of four hashtags in one post; not only is this a technique of spammers, it also reduces the length of your message (make clever use of all 140 of those characters!).
Stay on topic: Don’t use hashtags for unrelated posts. During the Iran election protests last year, the hashtag “#iranelection” was used, where it resided as one of the top 10 trending topics for several months. An intern at a British furniture store capitalized on this hashtag’s popularity by using it in their Twitter promotions, and they were promptly slammed for this tactic.
Don’t overshare. It’s one thing to be a chatterbox in your own feed, but when you join a hashtag conversation, you’re adding your voice to others who don’t normally follow you. Don’t irritate your new neighbors by posting too frequently. If you’re not sure how much is too much, see how often others are posting and use that as a guide.

Keeping Your Private Life Private: Social Networks Only Know What You Tell Them

April 25, 2010 / brightmatrix / 0 Comments

Between Google Buzz and Facebook, discussions centered on privacy and the implications of using social networks having been hot topics so far this year. The issue certainly isn’t new, but it’s reaching critical mass now because of the players involved. With over 500 million unique users, Facebook is sitting on an exceedingly rich vein of personal information and usage data, and Google, of course, pretty much knows everything you’d ever need to learn. Both have advertisers chomping at the bit to know as much about you as possible to make that next sale. What’s their only barrier? Your privacy.

Right now, the primary difference between Facebook and Google is the basic structure of their networks. Google, for the most part, is an open network: various and sundry details about you and your browsing habits are collected and retained as you go about your business on the web, but these remain generally anonymous. Buzz started off on the wrong foot by trying to mix this anonymous, open data set with the more closed network of Gmail. Facebook, on the other hand, started off as a more closed network, where your information stayed relatively safe within the confines of your personal network. Their privacy settings, however, have evolved towards making much of your profile public by default, often with little fanfare or notice. The shifting walls of security in both Buzz and Facebook have given their users and privacy advocates plenty of heartburn. It’s good to see a constant hum of awareness about what is truly private and public, as a lot of folks don’t seem to be aware of what’s happening to their data, but there’s one key observation that I see missing from these discussions: social networks only know what you tell them. If you don’t want your personal details to be shared under any means or circumstances, then don’t share them in the first place. You’ll cease to be concerned about your privacy if you don’t sacrifice it. Facebook is not magical; it won’t tell CNN what shows you watch and suggest articles without your intervention.

Of course, I understand that one of the main points of social networks is the sharing of information. You obviously can’t and shouldn’t be fearful of sharing, but you can be aware of how much you do share. The very nature of these networks will make people who follow you seem eerily clairvoyant about your comings and goings, but if you keep your details to a relatively general and innocuous nature, there’s neither harm nor foul. To that end, I’ve collected a few thoughts I hope will get you thinking more about your social privacy.

Always assume you’re talking in a room where you can be overheard. Closed networks like Facebook can be penetrated by those willing to be patient and creative, so don’t share things that would make you embarrassed, get you kicked out of your preferred religious place of worship, fired, or cause you to be incarcerated if it were suddenly made public to everyone. Stick to the facts. Don’t overshare. Be very mindful about broadcasting your location on tools like Fourquare. Folks running on the right side of the law are not the only ones being creative with these networks.

Never settle for the default settings. If you’re just joining a social network, check your surroundings carefully before you reveal anything significant about yourself. Is the network open or closed by default? Is there an all-or-nothing set of options, or can you customize? A great quote I read on Twitter this week made the analogy that leaving your default settings unchanged was “like streaking in public”.

Stay informed about your network. If there’s an option to receive e-mails whenever the network makes a change, sign up for it. Follow resources like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Help Net Security to learn about changes in privacy policies or security incidents that you may need to worry about. It never hurts to review your account preferences on a regular basis to confirm that you’re sharing (or hiding) exactly what you want.

Avoid revealing “security questions”. Banking and financial websites like to ask you “security questions” they feel “only you can answer” should you forget your user name or password. They’re usually along the lines of “what was your first pet’s name?” or “what is your mother’s maiden name?”, and are intended to decrease the likelihood of someone getting access to your account. People tend to be nice and chatty on social networks, and it’s become much easier for scammers to learn more about you. Social engineers look at what you post, what you like, who you talk to and follow, and use these details to fill in the blanks. Avoid talking about the subjects of your security questions or pick ones that are more obscure. The same goes for passwords: find something memorable but ephemeral: What song has been in your head recently? Was state does last week’s Powerball winner live in? What’s your cat’s least favorite toy? You get the idea.

Keep an eye on your friends. In networks like Facebook, where you can be tagged to photos or videos taken of you, with or without your knowledge, it’s important to stay aware of what your friends and colleagues are doing with your data, and, to a larger extent, your reputation. Make sure your account notifications are set up so that you’re sent an e-mail or text whenever someone associates anything in their profile with you. Don’t be afraid to tell people you don’t want anything posted without your permission; it is you, after all. Also, don’t “friend” people who you think will be less than trustworthy with your personal information. Check to see how much they make public, and then imagine how much of your profile would end up there if they start tagging your posts.

The struggles with your public presence and what you choose to keep private will continue to change as social networks progress in their evolution, but you can stay ahead of the game with a dose of skepticism and some healthy common sense.

Bright Matrices

Writings & musings of Mike Zavarello (a.k.a. brightmatrix), a "red mage" web developer.

Category: How-to

Document Metadata, SERPs, and First Impressions: Check Your File Data for Improved Results

The Origins of Document Metadata

The Importance of Document Metadata

Document Properties and First Impressions

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