Shaving Occam - Tony Wright's Blog

Evolving in SEO Town – Search Engine Marketing Reputation Management Problem Part II

admin — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:27:37 +0000

In my last post, I outlined what I see as a definite problem for those of us involved in search engine optimization. Namely, snake oil salesmen, lack of transparency and overall shady-ness has caused SEO to become a bad word. I also outlined that I think one solution to this reputation management problem that the search engine marketing world finds itself in is through accountability. Specifically, a better business bureau type program for search engine marketing. Now, I’m going to outline how that might work.

But first, let’s talk about what WON’T work. I’ve been in this business long enough to know that one of the easiest things to do is criticize another SEO’s work. In fact, I’ve made quite a name for myself by picking apart the on-page attributes of various unsuspecting sites at the Dallas-Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association (DFWSEM). Client response time, overall marketing strategy and other items beyond an SEOs control have massive impacts on how effective (or non-effective) an SEO campaign is. If you give the best recommendations in the world, and the client doesn’t implement them, or let you implement them, then your campaign will fail. Bottom line. I don’t want a team of independent SEOs critiquing my work. Neither does any other SEO. Also, some practices that might be risky for one client might be perfectly necessary for another client. Buying links is taboo in Google’s eyes, but try to compete on a daily basis in some of the more competitive spaces without fudging on this at least a little bit. You probably wont’ succeed (did I really just say that out loud?).

Where the problem lies is in what is communicated to the client. If an SEO firm, an in-house SEO or anyone else, for that matter, is buying links or engaging in any behavior that may create a penalty with a major search engine, that agency or individual has an obligation to warn of the possible implications of said behavior. In other words, you really need to warn your clients if they could get in trouble for anything you are doing. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it,but you darn sure better make sure client knows what’s at risk. If you don’t, I consider you a snake oil salesman and a shady business person.

The issue is transperancy. Google, albeit in a draconian fashion, has done a much better job of defining the rules in the last few years. Very rarely do I run across an item that I consider in a gray area of whether or not I will be violating Google’s terms of service. But clients hire SEO experts to know the rules. They have to trust them that will do what is best – and if they take a risk (which most good SEOs do every day), the client needs to be aware of said risk.

In part 3, I’ll finally outline who should implement this SEO bureau (hint, its the only national SEO organization with any clout, or Klout) and exactly how it will work. And hopefully, I won’t be so long between posts this time.

Embracing Change – Evolving in SEO Town

tony — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 16:06:18 +0000

It was almost 8 years ago when I decided to move out of the cocoon of my big agency background and work at becoming a specialist in SEO. I feel that succeeded – but the cost, I realize now, may not have been worth the prize. I spend most of my days lately trying to disassociate myself from many of so-called SEOs who peddle snake oil. These snake-oil peddlers have been in SEO since the beginning – but lately they have really taken their toll on our industry. Business owners don’t know who to trust. SEO sales cycles are the longest I’ve ever seen. In fact, I’ve found if I mention all of the things we do for a Website and just refrain from using the word SEO – we close more business.

SEO has become a bad word. And that is a shame.

I’ve spent many nights lying awake trying to figure out how to fix our industry’s reputation. After all, I fix company’s and individual’s reputations every day. As much as I try to run away from the reputation management side of the business (the skittish clients, the late hours, the constant worry) my experience and skill in this arena keep the clients coming back. And I’m sucker for a sob story and an even bigger sucker when it comes to proving myself in a challenging situation.

While there are many ways to tackle the reputation of SEO, one scenario keeps coming to the forefront of my mind. Let’s set the scene:

Two years ago I attended the SEOmoz Mozzfest in Seattle. It was an amazing event, and even this old dog learned some new tricks. But it was Danny Sullivan, the godfather of search, that planted an idea in my head. I had been struggling with the industry’s reputation quite a bit that year. I had just lost a bid for a client because they just couldn’t get over their past experience with a non-reputable SEO, and instead of moving forward with our plan, decided to put their money into traditional advertising. I was frustrated. During the Q & A portion of the session, I asked Danny what he thought about certification for SEOs. At that time, my mind went straight to regulation of the industry. If we could keep the slimeball snake-oil peddlers out, we could start to regain our good name and help everyone involved.

Danny’s response was spot-on. He said Certification in our industry will never work. There are too many “right” ways to do SEO, and sometimes even the correct tactics don’t garner optimal tactics. There are sites where riskier tactics are necessary. There are those who would never reveal their tactics to others in the industry. Certification wouldn’t work – but accountability might. Picture a better business bureau for SEOs. That might work.

Danny’s off-the-cuff comment planted a seed in my brain, and ever since then, I’ve been trying figure out a plan that would work to help restore the reputation of SEOs everywhere. The big question is, who would administer an SEO accountability program, and what would it look like? We’ll take a look out how an accountability plan could work in the next post.

Mayday! The problem with chasing too much tail.

tony — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:35:13 +0000

For those of you not into the everyday happening of the search engine optimization world, let me tell you a little secret. Google changes things. And they change things often. This one of the reasons why I love my job – my ADD doesn’t handle status quo that well. And I’m a natural information junkie(heck I was listening to talk radio at the age of 8 waiting for the news to come on). And while the only true constant in the Google algorithm is change, most of the time the changes are subtle. We have time to figure out what is going on and react accordingly. However, sometimes, Google pulls the rug out from under us and watches as our client’s businesses spill red ink all over the floor. As quickly as we can, we break ourselves from the vice-grips of our client’s stranglehold (my clients don’t really choke me when their rankings drop, but if my neck wasn’t so big, I wouldn’t put it past a couple of them.) and work to figure out what is going on and pick up the pieces.

So to the subject at hand. Recently, Google implemented what has been dubbed by the folks over at Webmaster World, the Mayday Update. There’s a ton of information out there about this update, and it didn’t affect everyone. But those it did affect were hit hard. Mayday is an appropriate description of these Webmasters state of mind.

Basically, the Mayday update affects what is commonly referred to as the “long tail” keywords. These are keywords that, by themselves, don’t get to many searches. However, in aggregate, these keywords can provide quite a return. In order to better understand the long tail, let’s take a quick look at one of my clients who was affected by the update. We’ve been consulting with Umovefree.com, one of the largest apartment locating services in the nation, for almost 2 years now. We don’t provide turnkey SEO for Umovefree as they have an incredible in-house staff and the most detail oriented CEO I’ve ever met. They can do the work themselves. Basically, they use us to provide strategic guidance for their initiatives. The relationship seems to work well for both sides and we’re proud to call them a client. The work they do makes us look good.

Umovefree.com receives a significant amount of traffic from long-tail keywords. For instance, there may only be a couple of searches a month for a term like [3 bedroom apartment near train station in Richardson Texas with a balcony]. That’s a really long keyword phrase. We don’t track the rankings of those types of phrases, so it’s impossible to know what kind of hit the site took from the update. And the fact that this query, as well as a significant number of all queries made to the search engines, is entirely unique. Why would you track a query that only happens once?

When Nick Barber, CEO of Umovefree.com called me and another consultant (who used to work with me at another company) in to talk about how the site had been affected, it was just after the first of May. I began doing some research, seeing how the site had been affected and seeing what others were saying. I quickly came to the conclusion that this was an algorithmic change, not a penalty or even a display change. My assertion was eventually confirmed by Google’s Matt Cutts.

I like Matt Cutts. But I think Matt’s advice in the video is somewhat condescending, and frankly useless. If you don’t want to watch the video, basically he says that you need to make your site better, but with no specific examples. I feel like he handed me a pair of blunt-nosed scissors, the kind you use in Kindergarten, and asked me to cut out elaborate paper dolls (ok, that may be a weird reference, even for me).

There have been other articles since Cutts confirmed an algorithm change (I don’t know why we had to have confirmation. Anyone who’s been at this since the Florida update in 2003 should recognize a major algorithm shift like this. But I guess not everyone’s an old fart like me). Many of the articles are just explanations of Mayday. Others are somewhat snarky and smug from Webmasters who weren’t affected. These Webmasters are assuming that since their long tail keywords weren’t affected, they have “higher quality” sites.

That’s where I have a beef. The crux of this comes from an article that I don’t want to link to, even with a no-follow tag. Basically, the article, from a well-known search marketer, said that his site did well during Mayday because he treats every single one of his pages like a PPC campaign. What? So you think of it like a landing page? You think you have better quality because your mindset is stuck in paid search mode? Nope, that’s not the case. In fact, as I looked, I think that the person who wrote this column actually didn’t see any traffic drops because what they were referring to as the tail was not accurate. Perhaps in the loosest definition of the word,but not the type of traffic we’ve seen leave Umovefree.com.

I know this is getting long, but if you’ve stuck it out this far, induldge me a few more paragraphs. This is actually the meat…

I know that Cutts et al have decided that this shift is good for users and will make things more relevant. I disagree. From what I can tell, the crux of the update is just a re-weighting of links – internal links have less influence than external links. A site with a good internal linking structure used to be able to rank pretty well for tail terms with nothing more than on-the-page optimization. Not so much anymore. If you own a link brokerage or participate in the sale of links, you should absolutely be doing cartwheels right now. Imagine, every e-commerce site, deep information site or any site that depends upon long-tail keywords is now going to need deep links with relevant anchor text. Page authority is now the ultimate conduit to success with long tail keywords. And this is not necessarily a good thing. Relevancy for tail terms should NOT be determined by the number of links you can get to your interior pages. I believe that Google is providing a relevancy disservice. The simple fact is that deep interior pages will, naturally, not gather links like main category pages. Therefore, by limiting the amount of influence passed from the “fatter” pages, the majority of sites deeper pages, you limit the authority these deeper pages will have without artificially increasing links. While I would love to live in a land with unicorns, pixie dust and people who willing link to your deep pages just because they find them interesting, I don’t. So how will most site owners cope with this once they realize the problem? You got it. More paid links.

I could (and probably will) go on a rant about the link economy that Google has created and then ignored like a bastard born 9 months after prom. But this post isn’t about that.

This post is a mourn for the loss of Google relevancy based upon domain authority. It’s a resistance to the fact that building deep links is so hard that the purchase of links will become even more acceptable than it already is, forcing webmasters to choose between results (and money) or violating Google’s terms of service. I’ve written a short poem:

I for one, don’t like Mayday.
But if it must stay,
Rankings for tail terms is no longer the way
To keep your white hat on all of the day.

Hope you like it. Now, go over to Umovefree and check out some deals. I particularly like the one at Ashton Apartments Dallas, Texas. Heck of deal over there, and a free move to boot. (If I’m giving him this link in exchange for letting me talk abut his site, and he does pay me because he’s my client, is that a paid link? Hmmm…)

Must Have Tools for SEOs – Advanced Web Ranking & Advanced Link Manager

minhnguyen — Fri, 07 May 2010 15:17:09 +0000

It’s important for any SEO or online marketer to establish a benchmark and monitor their online marketing efforts. Many use a variety of software to track conversions and traffic, such as Google Analytics. But, do you keep track of your web rankings and links? Caphyon’s Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager do just that. The software is easy to install and use. It is also supported on Windows, Mac OSX and even Linux!

Advanced Web Ranking 7.2 – Monitor Your Search Engine Rankings

Advanced Web Ranking is a search engine ranking tool that comes packed with a set of features that save you time and increase your productivity. Not only does it track your website rankings for a particular keyword, it also provides insight to your competition, keyword analysis and much more. The software comes in four flavors: Standard, Professional, Enterprise and Server. Discover the differences between each edition yourself with Advanced Web Ranking’s free 30 day trial. There are no limitations, as far as I can tell – you even get to choose which version you want evaluate when you start the program each time.

Three Favorite Advanced Web Ranking Features

Reports and Scheduling
Competitive Analysis
Keyword Research Tool

Advanced Web Ranking – “Out of the Box”

When first installing Advanced Web Rankings, it may seem a little intimidating for some people. Rest assured the layout is intuitive and extremely easy to navigate. The software contains many different contextual help menus. In addition, when starting out you are provided a Step-by-Step Tutorial that walks you through the process of getting setup. Finally, if you still need assistance Caphyon offers online support through their website. They have a variety of options to choose from either through their support desk, forum, telephone and/or online chat. As of this writing, Advanced Web Ranking allows you to track over 2,109 search engines, including Google, Yahoo and Bing. For most users and obvious reasons (performance being a big one), I recommend keeping this below 5, by default Bing, Google and Yahoo are already selected.

Reports and Scheduling

This is my favorite feature in Advanced Web Rankings. Advanced Web Rankings comes with a six default report templates that should be suitable for most website owners. However, if you’re a marketing agency or need to provide a customized look for your clients, Advanced Web Ranking allows you to easily generate custom reports that can be exported in a PDF, Excel, HTML, CSV, Text or XML. Throughout the entire process a contextual help menu is conveniently placed on the left to assist you. What makes this even more powerful is the scheduling feature. You can easily setup Advanced Web Ranking to update one or more projects and generate any of reports. This can be set daily, weekly, monthly or just one time. Caphyon’s Advanced Web Rankings is easy to setup, increases your productivity and saves you time. There are no other product out there that can compare.

Competitive Analysis

Although not explicitly stated, Advanced Web Rankings is a great tool to also monitor your competition. It also allows you to compare your site with your competitors to discover what they are doing on their pages. It will give you side-by-side comparisons with you and your competitor’s site of their entire text, title, links, ALT tags, meta data and headings. From this it will tell you the number of occurrences, density and prominence of the word and phrases used on the page.

Advanced Link Manager 7.2 – Know who is linking to you.

Building a good link profile takes time. Many beginning SEOs and online marketers do not adequately track their link building efforts and have no idea what their link profile looks like. There are many tools out there that can give you a general idea, such as Yahoo’s site explorer or SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer. However these tools only find what they crawl and they do not crawl on a consistent basis to give you a better picture of what links you have obtained. Advanced Link Manager bridges that gap and offers a proper link management system that also checks your link popularity. Try the best link manager tool in the market with no limitations!

Three Favorite Advanced Web Ranking Features

Find link partners – keep track of email requests.
Reports and Scheduling
Tools: Webpage Analyzer/Crawler/Google Maps

Advanced Link Manager – “Out of the Box”

Advanced Link Manager finds who is linking to your site – Simple as that. Ok, not really. Advanced Link Manager is much more than that. It offers domain information, anchor text distribution, track reciprocal linking, reporting, analysis tools and much more within each edition. I love using this tool to see the success of how well my link-baiting campaigns went. I can easily track and see how many links a particular campaign accumulated. From there assess if the campaign was a success. As most link builders know – it takes time and money to build quality links. Especially if you hire a copywriter or video production team to build quality content for your site. With Advanced Link Manager an SEO can easily determine if that content had generated enough links to outweigh the costs. I use my own formula for assessing the value of a link – a topic of discussion for some other time, but to put it simply we all know links have value. If our campaign generated over 100 quality/relevant links and the only cost assigned to doing so was paying a copywriter/blogger $2,500 to write a piece – on a basic level that’s $25 a link. By using Advanced Link Manager to help you evaluate your efforts, you will save time. Not to mention let you know what is effective in your link building efforts.

Finding Link Partners

Advanced Link Manager can help you discover and manage link partners. It comes packed with an email composer so that you can email within Advanced Link Manager. It also allows you to set the status of the email so you can easily track which link partners are responding or not.

Reports and Scheduling

Like Advanced Web Ranking, Advanced Link Manager comes with its own set of reports that you can customize, save and email. I personally use this feature the most on both tools and the best thing about is, once you learn one tool, it is really easy to dive into the other, as the interface and design are very similar to each other and contain supporting contextual help menus.

Tools: Webpage Analyzer/Crawler/Google Maps

The Webpage Analyzer tool provides information on various URLs to assist you in your link building efforts. It contains Page Rank information, HTTP response, Title tag, outbound links and much more. The Website Crawler tool is another favorite tool offered by Advanced Link Manager that allows you to crawl an entire website and generate an XML sitemap! Finally, the Google Maps Webpages Importer tool allows you to find who is ranking in the maps for a particular phrase. I can’t think of any tool that does this better than Advanced Link Manager.

Bottom Line

Most SEO tools today charge a monthly fee and are rather limited. Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager are extremely powerful tools that offer flexibility and full control over your data. The reports generated from these tools alone make these software a must have in any online marketer’s arsenal.

WrightIMC awarded “Most Effective Search Marketing Campaign” at the Excellence in Interactive Marketing Awards: Dallas SEO Company and Internet Marketing Consultancy takes top honors at Dallas/Fort Worth Interactive Marketing Event

tony — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:28:49 +0000

Just wanted to share the happy news with all of my blog readers before this hits the wire tomorrow morning. Congratulations to the entire WrightIMC team!

Plano Texas, April 27, 2010 – WrightIMC, a premier Dallas based SEO and Interactive Marketing Consultancy, was awarded the “Most Effective Search Marketing Campaign” at the Excellence in Interactive Marketing Awards for its work with the Houston based Johnson Law Group.

The Excellence in Interactive Marketing Awards, sponsored by the Dallas/Fort Worth Interactive Marketing Association (DFWIMA), are one of the most respected regional awards in the United States. WrightIMC was one of three finalists selected amongst a large crop of entries. The other finalists included Firehouse for their work with Interstate Batteries and Range Online Media for their work with Radio Shack. WrightIMC walked away with the top honors in the category.

“It’s always nice to have peer recognition of our work,” said Tony Wright, CEO of WrightIMC. “The results of the Johnson Law Group campaign speak for themselves, but this award shows that those in the broad interactive marketing community recognize the value of our consultancy approach to business and the incredible opportunities this approach brings to clients.”

WrightIMC’s Johnson Law Group campaign included a comprehensive Pay-Per-Click search campaign that was optimized to bring the cost-per-case to a level never before experienced by the firm. The campaign also included the construction of a 400+ page website that was highly optimized for the major search engines. The search engine optimization portion of the campaign increased the site’s traffic by more than 1000% and helped the site rank in Google for some of the most competitive terms on the Internet.

About WrightIMC
Based in Plano, Texas, a suburb of the Dallas Metroplex, WrightIMC is a full-service interactive marketing consultancy founded in 2007. The firm specializes in search engine optimization, pay-per-click management, online and offline crisis communication, social media marketing, viral video production and optimization and Website design. From finding the perfect person to embed in your company as a social media strategist, helping you discover why that one keyword just won’t rank in Google or bringing in one of the world’s most well known creative directors to conceptualize your viral video – yea, we do that, and a lot more. So we’re part consultancy, part turn-key solution provider, part staffing agency and full-time results producer. That’s what makes us unique.

About DFWIMA
The DFW Interactive Marketing Association is a forum for interactive professionals, businesses and educators in the Metroplex dedicated to sharing ideas, information and best practices that will help define and develop the growing interactive marketing industry and its disciplines.

10 tips for proactive online reputation management – Preparation for Pubcon South

tony — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 04:43:44 +0000

Next week I’ll be doing a “Spotlight Session” at Pubcon South in my home town of Dallas, Texas. This means, that if you don’t have the privilege of hearing me speak for 45 minutes straight on normal days (like my wife or my employees), you can do that. And it’s included in the price of your admission to the show…

But as I’m making out my presentation (yep, haven’t done it yet…so I like to cut things close) I thought it would be fun to brainstorm my outline in the form of this blog post. You’ll have to attend the session to get the full “meat” of what I’m talking about – but this should give you the flavor and hopefully I’ll see you in the audience.

Tips for Proactive Reputation Management

1. Have an enforceable Employee Social Media Policy that even-handed, enforceable, and written by the marketing team. Editing can be done by the Legal team. Disputes are settled by the CEO. Or you can hire my firm to do it for you (we even have Lawyers and HR people who work with us on this.)

2. Provide training and education to everyone from the CEO to the Janitor on the importance of online reviews. Reviews are getting even more important with their inclusion in Google local, and if your janitor spit in the wastebasket in front of a kid at your restaurant – bet it will be on Yelp in 3 hours. Google in 6 hours.

3. Don’t freak out about negative reviews. Deal with them offline where possible, but make sure that they are dealt with in a way that shows concern to the thousands of “lurkers” out there. Strive for at least a 70/30 ratio of positive to negative reviews. If you have 10 reviews and all are completely positive either you are Jesus Christ’s company or someone faked all your reviews. Which do you think consumers will believe?

4. Make sure you have the resources to mount a social media campaign before you do. The only thing worse than a non-responsive 1-800 number is a dead Twitter account.

5. Never hire anyone who calls themself a “guru” or a “social media ninja”. If other people call them that – they can’t help that. But self-promotion via those terms is grounds for instant credibility loss.

6. Make it easy for your good customers to leave positive reviews. First step – Ask them. If you can ask for an internal survey, you can ask for a Google Local review.

7. If you have any negative press, blogs posts etc (you are monitoring your web presence, right?), make sure you monitor the search engine results pages. Nothing than getting suprised by a negative listing under your name in Google when you could have headed it off on page 5.

8. Know the influencers in your space and create relationships with them. If you are friends with the guy who talks about your space and has a million twitter followers, it’s easy to call him during a crisis and tell him your side of the story. And many times much more efficient than even getting mainstream media to carry your side of the story.

9. Don’t just monitor the outside world, monitor what your employees are saying (don’t be big brother – see item #1), as well as what is coming in through your Web Analytics. A little introspection can be enlightening.

10. Create your crisis plan. I’ve spoken on this in the past, and I seem to remember some yawns in the audience. Ok, it’s not that interesting, but if your company doesn’t have one, you’ll have to pay a company like mine a TON of money to create one DURING a crisis. It’s cheaper if we do it before the crisis. And as someone who I don’t remember once said “Doing PR during a crisis is like eating healthy during a heart attack.”. Very true words, dude I can’t remember who you are.

So there you have it. Hope you enjoyed it. And I’ll see you at Pubcon South.

Being Certifiable – Verified SEO, SEMPO and Realtors…What???

tony — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:23:28 +0000

Over the last few hours, I’ve become aware of the Verified SEO. In the past, I’ve written about SEO Certification in the past, albeit not very well. So, let’s try this again.

For more than two years I’ve been privately (well, at least not very loudly) advocating for a standards designation for search engine marketers. I don’t want regulations. I don’t want someone telling me I can’t do a certain tactic. But I do want to have a way to show that I’m not like the SEO who spams you three times weeks with guarantees of tremendous rankings or the “guru” who can teach you how to do search engine marketing over the weekend so you can make your first million.

The topic of SEO Certification certainly seems to bring out the most vile protests from the SEO community. I get it. We’re all rebels. We don’t want authority to bring us down. We want to grow our hair long and rock and roll all night….

But here is the bottom line – to most people you are seen in the same Spam boat as the Gurus and the Spammers. There has to be a compromise – something so that we can legitimately claim that we know our stuff – yet aren’t limited when we do “occasionally” recommend an off-color tactic for a client that really needs a boost (with the client having complete knowledge of the risks, no doubt).

Let’s think about the Real Estate industry. I don’t have to be a Realtor to sell real estate. I can sell my own house if I want to. Some people are adamant that using a Realtor doesn’t help at all. I’m not going to argue that – but what I will argue that the Realtor distinction has LEGITIMATE VALUE for it’s practitioners. There are many who wouldn’t consider selling real estate without a Realtor. Realtors are required to have continuing education – and if a Realtor really screws up, there are real ramifications and they can lose their Realtor status. Doesn’t mean they can’t continue to sell Real Estate, they just aren’t a Realtor anymore.

This model could work for the SEO world – not so much in-house SEO, but those of that sell search marketing to clients. But a certified (verified, legit, practiced, whatever you want to call it) SEO would be required to have a basic knowledge of current SEO tactics. Continuing education would be required. There would be a governing body that provides mediation between SEOs and disgruntled clients.

And right now, the best organization to do this is SEMPO.

I have respect for SEMPO, but I think that what they are doing now, with creating meetups internationally and putting out research that nobody of importance reads, is not in-line with truly helping the SEO community. From what I hear (completely unsolicited) most people who aren’t involved with SEMPO agree with me. I think that SEMPO has a real opportunity to legitimize SEM and SEO with a designation like the Real Estate folks have.

I’m sure I’ll hear other thoughts on this – but I hope I can at least bring up a discussion.

Too fat to fly – Kevin Smith Vs. Southwestair – Solutions Inside…

tony — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:50:37 +0000

I’ve been following the online “blogfight” of director Kevin Smith and my friends at Southwest Airlines with more than a little interest. It’s a sad situation for me. You see, I’m a big fan of both Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines. I love Kevin’s movies, and without Southwest carting me to Lubbock for two years every weekend, I probably wouldn’t be married and have the great life I do. Also, I have great respect for the reputation that Southwest Airlines has create. I have met Linda Rutherford many times through events at her alma mater (and mine) Texas Tech University. I even attended her admission to the Mass Communications Hall of Fame this last October. I’m also scheduled to speak on a panel with Christi Day, Alice Wilson and Ginger Hardage – three of Southwest’s leading social media folks (one of which was directly involved with the Kevin Smith brouhaha)- on March 25.

And I am a “Customer of Size”.

My first incident with being a customer of size happened on a trip to Las Vegas for Pubcon in 2007. I had just started my company and was traveling with my business partner. We were running late and when we boarded the plane, there weren’t many seats left. I sat down and the flight attendant came over and very rudely told me if I ever wanted to fly Southwest Airlines again I would need to buy two seats (in front of the entire plane). She then told me she wanted my name so she could “flag” me in the system. I just told her she didn’t need to do that and chalked it up to bad day for the flight attendant – but she was right. I needed two seats. And I have purchased two seats on every (13 now) Southwest flight I have been on since.

I’m a big guy. I always have been. In recent years I’ve put even more weight. It’s something I’ve struggled with and I know the shame that accompanies being obese.In fact, not to get too personal, but I’m scheduled to have weight loss surgery in the near future.

I don’t have a problem with the policy. I understand that Southwest’s seats are smaller and they need this policy. I also understand airline crisis communication better than most, having spent years in the PR trenches of American Airlines (via Weber Shandwick).

I’m not going to be a Monday morning quarterback on the social media strategy implemented by Southwest. I won’t comment on what Kevin Smith has said. I reserve the right to put those in a later post. But I do have a problem with how those who buy two seats on Southwest are treated. And in this post, I want to provide a roadmap to at least fix that system.

So here we go.

Problem: When I buy two tickets online at SWA, it’s very simple. But the simpleness stops once you reach the airport. I can’t do self-check in. I have to go to the desk. This can be very inconvenient, and downright embarrassing when traveling with companions (hence the reason I try to travel alone most of the time).

Solution: Allow self check-in of Customer of Size. This shouldn’t be a hard fix for your system at all.

Problem: When I do get to the counter, the people there inevitably have no clue how to “merge” my tickets. I don’t know what this means, but I’ll bet over the last couple of years I’ve spent almost 13 hours at the customer desk waiting for someone who knew how to work the system. Last time this happened, the nice woman behind the counter gave me (and I didn’t ask for it) the number for customer service and told me to complain about this because it was ridiculous. I never called. I’m still ashamed of being fat.

Solution: Fix the system to be more friendly (see the first solution) and train your people on how to check-in customers of size.

Problem: There doesn’t seem to be a way to get Rapid Rewards credits for both tickets. I pay for two full fairs, and I should get credit for both. This is wrong.

Solution: Allow customers of size to get Rapid Rewards credits for both tickets without having to call in and make a stink, which I DO NOT want to do.

Problem: As a Customer of Size, I am expected to pre-board with all the people in wheelchairs, invalids and others. This may sound callous, but this is embarrassing. I can walk. My weight does not require me to pre-board. I know the reason for this – so the big guy can sit down first and put my card out so no one sits next to me and I don’t get stuck in a middle isle.

Solution: Putting Customers of Size automatically in the “A” boarding group will save us embarrassment. And not having employees get angry with us (this happened to me) when we try to board with the A group instead to save embarrassment for Customers of Size traveling with other travel companions.

Problem: Having to constantly ask for a seatbelt extender

Solution: This isn’t a problem on every flight, but it has happened pretty often. I am seated, and I have to remind the flight attendent to bring a seatbelt extender many times. This is a common problem on other airlines (where I don’t buy two seats) as well. But, if I’m paying for two seats, tell the flight attendants I’m there and have an extender ready. Better yet, don’t make me ask for it. Just bring it to me. You can see that I need it.

Most of the people that work for Southwest are very compassionate, and I’ve only run into a few “fatty haters” in my flying on the airline. But when you do run into those folks, you want to crawl away and fly with the baggage (Hey, that would be cheaper, bags fly FREE!). But the bottom line is that most of the time it’s still cheaper for me to fly Southwest with two tickets than to buy one ticket on another airline. So I do it and put up with the problems.

Hopefully someone at SWA will read this and we can get a couple of these items fixed.

And to Kevin Smith – man, Clerks was so genius it made me want to write movies until I realized that I don’t have the talent – so I went into marketing and advertising instead. I’m just a fan…And I admire your fight for us fatties. I do wish you would make it less about the fact that you fit in the seat and more about the injustice of the policy…but that’s for another post.

Have you missed me?

tony — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 02:03:06 +0000

Life gets in the way, isn’t that what they say?

WrightIMC recently moved to our new, improved digs in Plano – much more room for the team. We’re hiring, so hit me up if you have what it takes. We’re looking for reputation management specialists, SEOs, Copywriters (mostly freelance on that one), PPC specialists, you name it. We’re growing really fast.

Oh, and I’ll be speaking at the 4A’s show in Dallas, SMX East and Pubcon Vegas…Not to mention a very special show in March with more details to come on that one (I’ll just say, Wreck ‘Em.). Be back soon.

And now, for something completely different, yet the same.

tony — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:05:09 +0000

I’ve been a very bad blogger. I haven’t updated this space in months. I still keep it on my business cards, and in theory, I would like to be updating every day. I won’t commit to that going forward like I have so many times in the past, but I am going to start updating this blog again. I have too much to say about what is going on in the interactive marketing world not to use this outlet.

Just to let you know what’s been going on with me. WrightIMC had it’s best month ever in April. We are on track to surpass that in May. We just hired a new salesperson and are hopefully going to be hiring some additional help soon. I am truly trying to shift to a CEO, and not just a CEO with a title who actually does all of the work.

My wife delivered our second child, Preston Tyler Wright, on April 9, 2009. I’ve been pretty busy with the new baby and the 3.5 year-old Nathan at home. That coupled with the exploding business, well, lets just say I ‘ve been busy.

I am starting to speak again after about a 5 month hiatus. My first two speaking gigs will be local. I will be speaking at the Dallas SEO Interactive Marketing meetup at the Big in Japan offices at the Infomart on May 12. I will be talking about reputation management and all of the great work we’ve been doing in that field. I will also be speaking on May 13 at the Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association at the Rennaissance Hotel in Richardson Texas. At DFWSEM I will also talk about Reputation Management, but I’ll take a bit of a different spin than the night before.

I am also exploring some additional writing opportunities. I would love to start writing a weekly column again for a respected publication.

So, I know I’ve promised to keep this blog up in the past and failed. Hopefully this time, I’ll actuall deliver.