Adam Audette of Search Engine Land writes:

Be ready, because there’s a new wave coming: competitive sabotage through SEO due diligence and outing.

Competitive analysis will always be fundamental to search engine optimization. SEO, by nature, is a competitive pursuit: a site climbs the ranks on the backs of other sites, and there’s only room for one URL at the top. Because of the large amount of money at stake, and the dramatic increase in CTR a top position grants, every SEO professional worth their salt will undergo deep competitive analysis if they hope to compete. It is a cornerstone of the work.

And yet, some companies are tempted to push it even further and engage in risky strategies and competitive sabotage in order to get an advantage.

Matt Cutts tweet on Chrome spam report plugin

It is not a leap to say that Google has both created and enabled the popularity of this practice. I am not making judgements, simply stating fact.

For years, Google has pushed for its users to issue spam reports, and recently they’ve made submitting spam reports even easier while proactively requesting them at times.

Some outspoken opponents have denigrated this practice as Google policing the Web. While that certainly has an element of truth, the whole picture is not quite so tidy.

Rather than police the Web, Google would seek to police its index. The problem, it seems, is that Google’s index has become more or less synonymous with the Web.
Old Guards & SEO Outing

The old guard of SEO – some of the early professionals when the industry was still comparatively small a few years back – has always practiced according to a certain code. Outing competitors for shady practices was wrong, they said, it undermined the profession. It introduced a corrosive element to SEO as a marketing channel. Outing other SEOs deteriorated the perceived quality of the service and helped create a market for lemons.

Part of search marketing’s evolution has been the natural rise of SEO from webmasters, programmers, and affiliates, to a more corporate and business-like core. Sure, there are still lots of the old guard still practicing out there as well.

As SEO has grown and its constituents have become diversified, the closely held moral codes have begun dissolving. With this has been the play of upstarts such as Digital Due Diligence who bring high-profile SEO outing to the mainstream press. My prediction is that this practice will become more prevalent in the coming years.
Money & Morality

With a distinct moral component this issue can be quite polarizing, and most of the folks I talk to fall in one of two camps. They either feel it is flat-out wrong and against their principles, or they feel it is a legitimate competitive technique.

For me, outing another company’s SEO practices falls outside of the ethical and efficiency standards that I feel comfortable working in. Accordingly, my policy is to never engage in the practice.

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of good, bad, and downright ugly SEO. And yet I have never submitted a spam report on a competitor. I feel my time is best directed on giving our clients the best possible service and recommendations. While submitting a spam report takes relatively little time, it takes focus off the core of what we’re trying to do. It puts too much focus on competitors. Much like Facebook’s ugly attempted PR smear on Google, petty spam reports take your eye off the ball and are not time well spent, in my experience.

The Wild West of SEO

As for straight outing a competitor publicly, that is an abysmal practice that could over time contribute to a market for lemons effect in SEO. Additionally, it is disrespectful and insensitive to the realities professional SEOs face.

Playing devil’s advocate for a moment, unless an SEO technique is illegal, immoral, hurts the web, and/or harms users, it’s more or less valid.

While Google has to a large extent made their business interests a moral issue, SEO is not about morality. It’s about money. And SEOs are working hard out there to make companies (or themselves) money practicing tactics that work. It’s still early in the game (relatively speaking), and it’s still in some sense the Wild West.
Evolving SEO Accountability

However, I do feel a higher level of accountability is in order. As a whole, SEO has grown lazy. Its grown fat on links as a free pass to ranks. Its grown fat on domain authority as a free pass to ranks. There are exceptional SEO consultants and agencies doing great things, but they are rare. The bell curve largely features middle-of-the-road practitioners doing fairly rote work and cashing their checks, with little creativity. And worse, there are SEOs doing harmful things and putting companies at undue risk.

Outing, in some sense, helps this. It pushes the field to improve and catch up, or fall behind. But it must be done right. While I absolutely do not agree with the recent outing of the flower industry to the New York Times, the company behind that story writes a compelling piece defending why due diligence is good for SEO. Any attempt to create information symmetry in the space is welcome, but not at the expense of SEO as a whole.
The Future Of SEO Is Shining White

Get ready for the next wave, because it’s coming. Can you imagine a time when your link profile is a competitive advantage, not only because of its obvious SEO value, but because it contains no paid links a competitor can out? Can you see the value in having a squeaky clean SEO footprint that no competitor could prey on? Be ready, because in the future competitors will not only report you to Google, they’ll report you publicly.

Every algorithmic change and evolution of the Web reinforces the value of white hat SEO. Every time. It is the only sustainable, long-term, and quality approach to SEO, if you care about those things.
How I Feel About Competitive Analysis & SEO Outing

My company, AudetteMedia, engages in due diligence on behalf of its clients. However, we follow an ethical standard as follows:

1. Respect the Work of Others. Above all else, we respect the work of other professional SEOs and know it was executed with the company’s best interest in mind. That point of view could change once research into a site has been undertaken. But it’s the point of departure.
2. Never Disclose Competitors Publicly.We are not interested in giving mainstream media fuel to create buzz and pageviews. We are not interested in creating buzz for ourselves by outing other companies.
3. Business is Business. Ultimately, SEO is about business. It’s not about morality. We don’t presume that our principles and ethics should apply to other search marketers.
4. Competitive Insight is Confidential. Beyond outing to the press or in public, competitive insight and analyses are not for outside eyes. It is confidential information to be used for SEO purposes.
5. Rare is the Perfect Site. Most sites have some sort of baggage to account for. Legacy paid links, media buys that appear to pass manipulative PageRank, thin or spammy content, there are many examples.

Conclusion

While I hope that this phase of SEO outing passes, I’m quite sure it won’t. We are embarking on yet another new chapter in SEO, and, combined with the Panda change, it will take many months to see how it ripples across the Web.

A discussion on Today’s Meet from Erin Olson’s English Class in Sioux Rapids, Iowa, about a poem called “To the Lady.”

Now, Erin Olson, an English teacher in Sioux Rapids, Iowa, is among a small but growing cadre of educators trying to exploit Twitter-like technology to enhance classroom discussion. Last Friday, as some of her 11th graders read aloud from a poem called “To the Lady,” which ponders why bystanders do not intervene to stop injustice, others kept up a running commentary on their laptops.

The poet “says that people cried out and tried but nothing was done,” one student typed, her words posted in cyberspace.

“She is giving raw proof,” another student offered, “that we are slaves to our society.”

Instead of being a distraction — an electronic version of note-passing — the chatter echoed and fed into the main discourse, said Mrs. Olson, who monitored the stream and tried to absorb it into the lesson. She and others say social media, once kept outside the school door, can entice students who rarely raise a hand to express themselves via a medium they find as natural as breathing.

“When we have class discussions, I don’t really feel the need to speak up or anything,” said one of her students, Justin Lansink, 17. “When you type something down, it’s a lot easier to say what I feel.”

With Twitter and other microblogging platforms, teachers from elementary schools to universities are setting up what is known as a “backchannel” in their classes. The real-time digital streams allow students to comment, pose questions (answered either by one another or the teacher) and shed inhibitions about voicing opinions. Perhaps most importantly, if they are texting on-task, they are less likely to be texting about something else.

Nicholas Provenzano, an English teacher at Grosse Pointe South High School, outside Detroit, said that in a class of 30, only about 12 usually carried the conversation, but that eight more might pipe up on a backchannel. “Another eight kids entering a discussion is huge,” he noted.

Skeptics — and at this stage they far outnumber enthusiasts — fear introducing backchannels into classrooms will distract students and teachers, and lead to off-topic, inappropriate or even bullying remarks. A national survey released last month found that 2 percent of college faculty members had used Twitter in class, and nearly half thought that doing so would negatively affect learning. When Derek Bruff, a math lecturer and assistant director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, suggests fellow professors try backchannels, “Most look at me like I’m coming from another planet,” he said.

“The word on the street about laptops in class,” Dr. Bruff added, is that students use them to tune out, checking e-mail or shopping. He said professors could reduce such activity by giving students something class-related to do on their mobile devices.

Besides Twitter, teachers have turned to other platforms for backchannels, some with more structure and privacy. Most are free on the Web and — so far — free of advertising. Google Moderator lets a class type questions and vote for the ones they would most like answered. Today’s Meet, used by Mrs. Olson, sets up a virtual “room.”

Purdue University, in Indiana, developed its own backchannel system, Hot Seat, two years ago, at a cost of $84,000. It lets students post comments and questions, which can be read on laptops or smartphones or projected on a large screen. Sugato Chakravarty, who lectures about personal finance, pauses to answer those that have been “voted up” by his audience.

Before Hot Seat, “I could never get people to speak up,” Professor Chakravarty said. “Everybody’s intimidated.”

“It’s clear to me,” he added, “that absent this kind of social media interaction, there are things students think about that normally they’d never say.”

But the technology has been slow to win over faculty. It was used in just 12 courses this spring. Sandra Sydnor-Bousso, a professor of hospitality and tourism management, said Hot Seat did not mesh well with her style of walking around class to encourage a dialogue. “The last thing I want to do is to give them yet another way to distract themselves.”

In high schools and elementary schools, teachers try to exercise tight control over backchannels, often reviewing a transcript after class for inappropriate remarks. Even schools that encourage students to use mobile devices prohibit gossip during class.

In Exira, Iowa, Kate Weber uses the technology for short periods almost daily with her fourth graders. “You’d think there’s a lot of distraction, but it’s actually the opposite,” she said. “Kids are much quicker at stuff than we are. They can really multitask. They have hypertext minds.”

A backchannel discussion about the death of Osama bin Laden.

During a reading lesson, she recalled, a story included the word “queue.” Using a school-issued Macbook, “one student asked, ‘What is a queue?’ ” Mrs. Weber said. “If they’d have read that individually they wouldn’t have been brave enough to raise their hands. They would have just read over it. But another student answered, ‘It’s a ponytail.’ The whole class on the backchannel had an a-ha moment.”

“I am in awe at how independent they’ve become using that as a means of comprehension,” she added.

The 11th graders in Mrs. Olson’s class said the backchannel had widened their appreciation of one another. “Everybody is heard in our class,” said Leah Postman, 17.

Janae Smith, also 17, said, “It’s made me see my peers as more intelligent, seeing their thought process and begin to understand them on a deeper level.”

On Friday, their teacher continued to develop a semester-long theme: how free the individual is in society. Students watched a YouTube video that compares how much humanitarian aid could be bought for the $150,000 cost of a slick music video.

Earlier in the week, students had staged a rally to support American troops in response to picketing they had seen on the news by the fringe Westboro Baptist Church of Kansas at a funeral for an Iowa soldier killed in Afghanistan.

Mrs. Olson asked her students to connect “the argument” of the poem they read and the video with their own rally. As the discussion swirled in class, one student typed on the backchannel: “We tend to have the attitude that someone else will do it. But what happens when everyone thinks the same as you?”

“It only takes one individual to change,” another typed. “If you want something to change you have to be willing to be that voice.”

“It really shows the impact one change can make,” a third student wrote.

“I agree with Katie!” someone added. “This class has given us a voice!”

1. Photos: The Root of Online Ego

I didn’t think Facebook was a big deal — that is, until photos became more prominent. Facebook photos became the outlet for the ego of a college student. “Look at this cool Halloween costume!” “No way, you were at that party too?” “OMG, I can’t believe you did THAT in the dining hall!”

I’ve gotten older, and so have my friends, but not much has changed. Fred Wilson recently called Facebook “a photo sharing site with some chat attached.” Photos — the most ego-expressive form of media — still dominate my personal usage of Facebook. And, besides social gaming (yes, your farm is an expression of your ego), no other feature has really caught on in the same way.

Perhaps we’re seeing the second turn of the photo-ego phenomenon with Instagram, Picplz, Pixable, Path and now Color. The human desire to share mementos of life with close friends (or, in Color’s case, complete strangers) is powerful and will always be the low hanging fruit for Internet products to pick.
2. Immediate and Unexpected Value

When was the last time you really got that “OMG, yes!” feeling from an Internet product? It doesn’t happen that often. Decent products do exactly what they promise they’ll do. Great products give you something you couldn’t otherwise anticipate.

Take Quora as an example. I answered the question, “As a co-founder and CEO of a startup, should I hedge my position? If so, how?” Almost instantly, I had 25 up-votes and four comments. The engagement itself wasn’t unexpected, but its immediacy was. The fervent, yet qualified pace of information curation on Quora was like nothing I’d ever experienced. It made the process of answering questions addictive, as I knew a good answer would become visible quickly.

This kind of added value works in ecommerce as well. While I’ll personally never know the joys of RentTheRunway, I know many women “get it” when they realize they can order multiple dress sizes send back whatever doesn’t fit, all with free shipping both ways. In the early days of Zipcar, I remember moving to a new apartment and “magically” finding that there was a car in the parking lot next door via their online map tool. Very cool.
3. Familiarity Fosters Engagement

An old biblical phrase also rings true for technology: “There is nothing new under the sun.” The Internet of the 1990s attempted to bring the physical world online, and mostly failed, in my opinion. The 2000s focused on making Internet products easy to use for everyone, not just early adopters and “digital natives.” The 2010s will continue to improve those products by making them social, mobile and location-aware.

The essence of what these products do, however, will remain similar to their predecessors. And that’s OK. Novelty is great for early adopters, but the masses want familiarity. They want to find something they already know in a product.

The best example of a new product with undeniable familiarity is the iPad. In the iPad’s original TV campaign, Apple coined a brilliant marketing line: “You already know how to use it.”

Dropbox is another great example. It’s a folder that sits on your desktop and acts like every other folder you already know how to use. Never once mentioned is the word “cloud” or any other jargon used by the tech in-crowd.

You can usually find a hint of ego, serendipity and familiarity if you dig around a bit in the primordial ooze of a compelling Internet product. True success requires hundreds of other things to go right, but at least you’re on your way!

Disclosure: The author is an investor in Pixable and RentTheRunway.

DETROIT (Reuters) — Toyota Motor Corp. will pay to fix about 650,000 Prius models worldwide for a coolant pump glitch that could cause the top-selling hybrid to overheat and lose power, the automaker said.

The repair campaign covers Prius cars for the model years 2004 to 2007. The bulk of the cars, or 378,000 units, are in the United States.

The Japanese automaker said it had not received any reports of accidents or injuries from problems with the pump, which circulates coolant for the hybrid system.

Major automakers, including Toyota, often conduct repair campaigns that are separate from safety recalls filed with U.S. regulators in cases where they determine that a defect does not present a safety risk.

Toyota said the design of the electric water pump let air bubbles enter the system, slowing coolant circulation and allowing the hybrid’s components to heat up.

The heating up of the components could trigger a warning light. If left unattended, the Prius could overheat and drop into a “fail-safe” mode where engine power would be reduced, Toyota said.

Toyota said it would begin notifying owners of the Prius repair campaign in the United States in early December.

The automaker has used a different pump design on the Prius hybrid since that time and uses a different type of pump for other hybrids, Toyota spokesman John Hanson said.

Toyota will cover the cost of the repairs, including more than $100 in labor for each Prius fixed at a U.S. dealership.

The repair campaign on one of the best-known Toyota vehicles comes at the end of a year in which the top global automaker has struggled to distance itself from a damaging series of recalls and concerns about its quality management.

Since last November, Toyota has recalled 15.4 million vehicles worldwide, including about 11 million in the United States.

Read more: http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20101129/OEM/101129886/1290#ixzz16nRKgd00

Carmakers and suppliers are looking to Asia and other fast-growing regions for growth to offset stagnating demand in Europe where scrapping schemes designed to boost car sales have nearly all expired. Jacques Aschenbroich, CEO of French car parts maker Valeo SA, told the summit he could not rule out hiking the group’s mid-term targets as business picked up again faster than expected.

While industry experts predicted a wave of crisis-sparked consolidation among carmakers and their suppliers as they sought to eliminate costs when the downturn was in full swing, relatively little M&A activity has so far taken place. Support for suppliers from governments and carmakers explains the lack of deals so far among smaller players, said Meyrick Cox from the investment bank Moelis & Co., adding that larger suppliers were already well consolidated.

Large European auto suppliers, including France’s Valeo and Faurecia SA as well as Germany’s Continental AG and Robert Bosch GmbH, are already well consolidated, Cox added

He thought much more consolidation among Tier 1 suppliers was unlikely, but Tier 1 players might start to look at their smaller, often more profitable, Tier 2 suppliers as potential targets.

“There’s been a lot of invisible support provided to the suppliers through the course of the last couple of years. Some of the big manufacturers had teams in place analyzing the financial security of their suppliers,” Cox told the summit.

“There is a raft of small suppliers who have been supported considerably by the OEMs and I cannot see the OEMs being comfortable in the longer term with that.”

Frost & Sullivan senior consultant Nicolas Meilhan said he thought the rise of new emissions reduction technologies including electric vehicles and hybrids, would spark consolidation among suppliers.

“I think what’s going to be important is that the car is going to change over the years. Today, vehicle manufacturers are mostly assembling parts, designing and manufacturing the engine and gearbox, but most of the parts are done by suppliers,” Meilhan said, adding that consolidation would take place as suppliers sought paths in to new areas.

“We’re definitely going to have some consolidation. Some people, if they are not able to develop it internally, are going to be willing to acquire some expertise on batteries, electronic components or chargers.”

Valeo CEO Jacques Aschenbroich thinks the supply base is stronger than it was before the crisis.

Cox said he thought the spur for consolidation was simpler: “It’s just commercial reality, times are tough and if you can get together with someone else and drive costs out that way, you’re going to do that.”

In October, French ministers warned that local authorities should be prepared to help struggling suppliers, as the industry faced a bleak outlook.

Valeo’s Aschenbroich said he had not seen any problems with his own suppliers.

“We have tried to help our main suppliers go through the crisis. It doesn’t mean that some of them didn’t disappear. But I think we have today a stronger supply base of suppliers than we had before the crisis.”

He added: “Do we, as Valeo, have some suppliers back in trouble? We don’t see that for the time being.”

Last year was an “exceptional” year with a lot of public intervention, he added.

Dealers had been promised two Leafs each. Instead, they will now receive only one in a bid to free up more cars for sales, Nissan Division Vice President Al Castignetti said.

The sacrifice could mean as many as 1,000 extra Leafs going to consumers when the car goes on sale next month.

Nissan has marketed the Leaf through an Internet program in which consumers were asked to make a reservation for the car and make a $99 refundable deposit.

Because of high demand, Nissan’s sales limit for the car was reached three months early, prompting the company to stop taking reservations.

Nissan will only receive 20,000 Leafs for U.S. sales in the first year. Production volume is limited by a new Japanese assembly line, and a new plant that is supplying the Leaf’s lithium-ion battery.

Castignetti said the company is proceeding cautiously as the battery plant ramps up.

“We are being very cautious about over-promising anything,” he said, speaking privately during the Los Angeles Auto Show.

He said that the Leaf’s December sales launch remains on schedule.

Nissan is simultaneously investing $1.6 billion to construct another lithium-ion battery plant in Smyrna, Tenn., where it will also assemble the Leaf. But that supply will not come on line until late in 2012.

That project will produce 150,000 Leafs and 200,000 battery packs annually.

Read more: http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20101118/OEM04/101119810/1114#ixzz15ev1fRBw

General Motors said Friday that 3,900 auto dealers who sell GM’s Certified Used Cars will list their entire inventories on eBay Motors, according to industry publication Automotive News.

The listings will be free for dealers, the report said, and could radically alter the used-car business.

Mark Matthews, GM’s director of used-vehicle activities, told Automotive News that the certified used-vehicle inventory of dealers who sell GM Certified-brand vehicles will be listed on the third-party classified site starting in the second quarter.

GM’s brands include used Buick, Chevrolet, GMC, Pontiac and Oldsmobile vehicles. Cadillac, Hummer, Saab and Saturn have separate certified used-vehicle programs, but their certified-used inventories will be listed on the site, too, Matthews told the publication.

The eBay Motors Web site has 11 million unique users and the agreement with GM allows dealers who sell GM brands to show their certified-used inventory to them. The program will become even more attractive to dealers and consumers if other manufacturers post their certified-used inventory on the site, too, Matthews told Automotive News.

GM is still working with eBay Motors to finish the site, according to the report, which also noted that GM’s certified-used vehicle inventory is already listed on more than 300 Web sites.

If Farley is right, millions of hits for Ford Motor Co. on social media Web sites will dwarf the impact of ads broadcast during the National Football League’s February championship game — high-profile space selling for $3 million for 30 seconds.

“Customers are spending as much time with the mobile smart phone or online as they are watching TV now, so our advertising dollars have to flow to where the people are,” Farley said in an interview.

Under Farley, 48, who joined Ford from Toyota Motor Corp. in 2007, the No. 2 U.S. automaker has bet bigger on the emerging category of digital advertising — including Web sites social media — than any of its rivals.

Farley has taken the approach credited with the early success of the youth-oriented Scion brand he launched at Toyota and applied it to the makeover of an established auto brand.

He is betting Ford can use Facebook and Twitter to accelerate the word-of-mouth recommendations long familiar to the auto industry and help the blue-oval brand connect with younger and richer people.

Farley said he learned at Scion that the only way to push past consumer skepticism is “to break into their world.”

“You have to shove your way in there. The way we do that is to break down myths. The great thing about Americans is they are always hungry for something new,” he said.

Ford’s U.S. sales are up 19 percent so far this year, almost twice the growth rate of the industry overall.

Farley’s term at Ford has coincided with a sharp turnaround in its image. ALG, a firm that tracks consumer perceptions, said in a report issued on Monday that Ford cars and trucks lead all brands in gains in perceived quality since 2008.

Facebook friend

Farley, who is seen as a potential successor to Ford CEO Alan Mulally, called the Super Bowl, “a fantastic advertising opportunity” — for unknown brands.

“If you are a company that wants to launch a new product that no one has ever seen before, it’s a great venue.”

Under Farley, Ford has spent 25 percent of its advertising budget on digital media in 2010, the same proportion as in 2009. That ratio is twice what J.D. Power and Associates says will be the average digital media spend in 2012.

Farley would not disclose the dollar amount of that spending.

One of the first experiments in Ford’s new approach was its 2009 move to recruit Web-based “agents” who would help promote its launch of the Fiesta subcompact. In a follow-up, Ford used Facebook to reveal key aspects of the Explorer SUV rather than wait for an established auto show.

Now, Ford is seeking “bloggers, social media mavens and Facebook friends” to submit video applications to be one of 100 who will drive the 2012 Focus around southern France or Spain early next year, ahead of the car’s launch.

The effort, called “Ford Focus Global Test Drive” seeks to create buzz ahead of the launch of a vehicle central to Mulally’s vision for a streamlined product lineup.

Farley said that the Fiesta campaign had boosted consumer awareness of the Ford subcompact over direct competitors like the Honda Fit or the Toyota Yaris. At the same time, Ford only spent one tenth of what it would have through traditional media, including television, he said.

Contrast with GM

Farley’s moves mark something of a contrast with the approach by cross-town rival General Motors Co.

Under its new marketing chief Joel Ewanick, GM is pushing back into advertising at the kinds of high-profile, high-cost events like the Super Bowl that it had abandoned in its slide toward bankruptcy.

In one example, last week GM rolled out a campaign for Chevrolet that plays to its base — patriotic Americans with memories of the days when Chevy dominated.

By contrast, Ford is playing up the new elements in its product line-up, both new vehicles and new technology like the MyFord Touch system for navigation, entertainment and communications in campaigns that include videos for Google’s YouTube.

Charlie Vogelheim, executive editor of Intellichoice, a consumer auto consultant, said Ford had pushed beyond its rivals in the way that it is building online buzz.

Said Vogelheim: “Everyone is involved in digital marketing. The extent that Ford is doing it, wrapping it around events and utilizing the media with its launches, that is where Ford is taking leadership.”