Jeffrey A. Haines' Blog

I’ve always been interested in SEO, but I think a lot of people look at it from the wrong end.

There is a lot you can do when designing, organizing, and first setting up your brand’s online hub or website, but after you’ve given the search engine spiders time to crawl and done your initial open-for-business press outreach, how do you best measure your marketing success and decide how to tackle an improvement process?

Most organizations determine marketing success and areas for improvement by looking at site analytics statistics. If traffic is hitting the front page and immediately bouncing, the wrong visitors are being lured.

Dispatching landing pages and looking at traffic sources in analytics individually are traditional ways of getting to the root of where your marketing plan is failing or succeeding, but new tools are making it easier to drill deeper to actually survey, quantify, and categorize instances and occurrences of your brand in social media and across the web.

Until now, I’ve been using Google and social media specific searches, such as Twitter’s search function, to survey a brand’s penetration. My method takes too much time, and doesn’t really yield quantifiable results, or results that comprise a complete tangible share of a medium.

I’m currently trying out a web application called Axonize that purports to scour the web for all instances of mentions of your brand’s keywords and terms and links to your brand’s site and web presences. Axonize calls each instance a “conversation,” and does a decent job of categorizing each conversation by medium (such as Blog or Digg) or genre (such as Technology or Education).

Axonize’s power resides it’s ability to catalog conversations, and to do the same searches and categorizations for your competitors’ brands and campaigns.

I’ve only been using Axonize briefly and I’m excited to see how the application picks up on new conversations over time. I’m also interested to see how well Axonize performs when a new marketing campaign is launched–how well its list of new conversations matches or augments those that have been specifically arranged.

The next step, I believe, is looking at each conversation and determining if any action can be taken to:

1. Augment a conversation’s specificity to a brand–By adding an comment to blog entry conversation that will help better direct readers to more information about our brand or generate interest in it
2. Redirect a positive conversation about a competing brand so that readers consider my company’s brand as an alternative
3. Reverse a negative conversation about my company’s brand–By presenting a positive example in an @ tweet in response to a negative Twitter post

I’m sure there are other solutions out there that look as deeply as Axonize, and probably some that even do a better job. Axonize is a new product, and I have already noticed some bugs and deficiencies (as far as I can tell, Wordpress and Twitter are not being scoured at this point), but we’ll have to see how the development team moves forward.