Marketing the praxis of a Scenius thoughtfully: How can we use dynamism and triangulation to play tunes that make the spiders dance?

Teri Lussier paid me a very high compliment today in email, although I’m sure that’s wasn’t her intent. I expect she was just being matter-of-fact. Here’s what she said:

You don’t do anything without a purpose.

She was asking why I phrase so many headlines in the form of a question, assuming correctly that I do so for marketing reasons. Questions are a pretty common arrow in the copywriter’s quiver. Properly constructed, they are inherently interesting and instantly involving. I’m not as good at this as I plan to be, but one of things I’m looking for in a good question is something that incites at least as much curiosity as it satisfies. I give you the headline of this post as an example.

But Teri’s off-hand remark — “You don’t do anything without a purpose” — means everything to me, because it’s a completely true statement about everything I do — and everything I’ve ever wanted to be. I can’t promise you that I always know what I’m doing, but I always know with perfect certainty what it is I intend to be doing — what objective I hope to achieve by my efforts.

So we’ve been playing this scenius game since Thanksgiving, really since Swallow Hill Road, and it’s fun to explore how much we understand of what we’re doing, and, fun, too, to understand how much there is that we’ve never thought to explore.

Both Cheryl Johnson and I have been rebuilding our “Current Listings” content as Scenius scenes. Why? Because a content management system like a weblog is the perfect way of organizing frequently-edited copy — provide that you have some way of delivering the content in a form you can stand, once you’ve edited it. This is what Scenius — the software praxis, not the social process — is all about.

Stop.

A scenius — lower case — is a metaphor for a kind of communal genius. The word comes from “scene” plus “genius”, and the best example of a scenius that I can offer is the birth of Bebop jazz. When you put smart, well-informed, passionate people together, the synergy of their interaction can throw off so many new ideas so fast that everything seems to flow with an unimaginable ease and perfection. This is what we’ve been doing in private for a month now, and what we plan to do in much larger numbers at Unchained in Phoenix.

Scenius — capital S — is a software praxis we built during the Thanksgiving Day scenius. The Scenius software paradigm is to echo ultra-minimal weblogs within other weblogs and web pages. So, as I discussed the other day, the Scenius scene for “Our Current Listings” is echoing in a variety of different visual formats on dozens of pages:

If you go to our Phoenix real estate listings page, you will see “Our Current Listings” running on a WordPress.org Page. In the sidebar of every post and Page of that weblog, you’ll find “Our Current Listings” echoed again, only this time at a much narrower width. And if you go to the About page for our single-property website for 56 West Willetta Street, you’ll find “Our Current Listings” echoed again, this time at a much wider width. Every echo you are seeing is the same one Scenius blog, and it is echoing simultaneously on dozens of pages on many, many domains, inheriting the local CSS appearance everywhere it appears. I can promote “Our Current Listings” anywhere I want from one Scenius blog — and the content is always up-to-date.

Cheryl had remarked on some marketing copy I have in that scene, and I realized that I have never discussed the ideas that motivate our approach to promoting our listings on our own web sites.

As Teri says, I never do anything without a purpose, but it had never occurred to me to document my purposes in our way of building our listings page. We’re all of us stuck somewhere between ignorance and brilliance, and Richard Riccelli got me thinking about one idea that we will strive to implement more perfectly going forward: Since every listed home links to the single-property web site for that home, we should be closing on the click-through. It’s a minor enough thing, but each close in the sales process leads to the next close, and I can’t use the single-property web site to close on a showing appointment if I haven’t successfully motivated the click-through to the web site. That’s marketing thoughtfully — with a purpose in mind.

Cheryl was remarking on the copy I have at the end of the “Our Current Listings” scene, which promotes us as listers. Buyers want houses, to be sure, but my belief is that many people look at pages named “Our Listings” or “Featured Listings” as a way of judging Realtors as listing agents. If that is so, I want to sell that exact idea to that exact prospect. That again is marketing thoughtfully — in a manner that is a reflection of having thought about what objective I might hope to achieve.

We have a second listings scene called “Some of our favorite past listings” — a compendium of houses that are representative of the kinds of houses we like to list. This is something we’ve done since we’ve been BloodhoundRealty.com, before we were our own brokerage, but I had never thought to mention it until Cheryl and I started to talk about the idea of marketing on a listings page.

I do hope you’ve read this far, because this is an important idea: Your listing praxis should not be the hostage of whatever listings you happen to have right now. It could be you’re listing a couple of dumps, for free, as a favor to a friend, but if sellers see nothing but those dumps on your “Featured Listings” page, you could end up listing nothing but dumps forever. A record of past listings that best represent you as a listing agent is your equivalent of a resume. People shopping for houses will look at your current inventory or they’ll just move on. People shopping for a listing agent will look at everything. It seems obvious to me that you should show them your best — the work from your past that best represents the work you want to do in the future.

This is marketing thoughtfully — thinking about what it is that you hope to have achieved, then constructing your marketing praxis to support those objectives.

Stop again: What’s a praxis? A praxis is a perfectible practice. The things that you do in your marketing, you will do over and over again. If you choose, you can do them the same way over and over again, never thinking about what you’re doing, never measuring your results, never getting any better. This I would qualify as thoughtless marketing, and, while you may lack in success, you will never lack for friends. Mediocrity loves company.

The alternative is to approach your marketing — and everything you do — as something that can be perfected, iteratively, through time. Any particular marketing effort might fall short of perfection, but if you make an effort to discover where you went wrong, and if you apply yourself to doing better the next time, your praxis will become more perfect over time.

Perfection is unattainable? Perhaps. But an infinite series converges. If you are constantly straining toward perfection, the distance between it and you may come to be vanishingly small. And this I would very very proud to qualify as thoughtful marketing. You know what your objectives are, and you evaluate your marketing by how well it supports those objectives.

So let’s get dynamic. Go to BloodhoundRealty.com, our home real estate weblog. I won’t tell you all about how I’m such a great residential real estate weblogger — because I’m not. I’m much better here, and, in general, I’m a lot better at coming up with ideas than I am at plodding my way through the follow-through on them. It pays to know who you are. But here’s what I want you to do: Refresh that page. Do it again. Keep doing it until you say, “Hey, wait a minute…”

The pictures change, every time you refresh. Not one of a set of three or five stock banner images, but three unique photographs from our own real estate practice. There are 594 of them right now. They’re dealt like a deck of cards, one shuffle per refresh, so you will never see the same photo beside itself.

There’s more. From Microsoft Explorer, hover over each picture. Hover over the Bloodhound logo and the tagline at the top. Each one of those five images is linked to one of my Arizona Republic real estate columns, with the headline of the column being used as the “alt” tag for the photo.

Now refresh again. Three new photos at random. And five new Arizona Republic columns at random. As I write this, there are 165 columns, with a new one being added every week. That means there are 98,010 possible permutations per photo, plus another 165 each for the two static images. The total number of unique permutations of just that one section of BloodhoundRealty.com is 98,010^3 x 165 x165, I think, an astronomically huge number — that goes up by a lot with every new newspaper column.

Now at first glance, we’re just talking gee whiz computer technology. Greg likes to play with PHP, and the WordPress header file is a fun little playground. But recall what we’re talking about: Marketing thoughtfully.

So if I am not just horsing around with software, what am I doing?

I’m playing with the idea of dynamic content. I use a variation of the BloodhoundRealty.com theme as the engenu skin for every web site and single-property web site we build for our clients. Every version of that theme behaves the way we’ve just seen, with 3 random photos selected from the set of 594 and five sets of random links selected from 165 or more Republic columns, all producing a hugely unpredictable header experience.

I’m doing this in pursuit of what marketing objective?

Search engines love weblogs. We tell ourselves this all the time. But I believe that search engines love weblogs as a side-effect of the way that weblogs behave. To a search engine spider, HTML is HTML, and that’s all the spider can see. But weblogs are — or should be — updated frequently. And weblogs link a lot. My thinking is that search engines spiders will love my pages — even my static engenu pages — more if they change a lot, and if they link a lot.

Everybody’s always looking for a magic SEO bullet, so don’t run off half cocked. There is no substitute for inbound links. None. But by being outrageously dynamic, my pages look updated to spiders every time they are visited, even if nothing but the header has changed. The fact is that our header looks really cool and works very effectively to sell us as experienced Realtors — to real, living, breathing people. But I’m also creating pages that look to spiders like they are constantly being updated, and, with the links in those five images, I am reinforcing the link relevance of both the page being spidered and the pages being linked to.

This is marketing thoughtfully — and it’s nothing, just a secondary consequence, a throwaway. I needed a header. I wanted it to be dynamic and imagic because these ideas would sell us as experienced Realtors to real people. But since I’m doing that much anyway, I can do just a little bit more and lay down a tune that makes search engine spiders dance themselves to exhaustion.

Stop for a moment, if you would. The BloodhoundRealty.com theme has been in that form for almost a year. I link to that site or to other sites using the same header style all the time. Who noticed what was going on? I heard from three people — Teri Lussier, Cheryl Johnson and Sean Purcell. If you saw what I was doing, you didn’t see enough to pique your curiosity. If you had, it would have driven you nuts, as it did with those three.

Now stop a moment longer: That’s just one dynamic element on that site. There are more down the sidebar. There are more on this sidebar, and on the sidebars of every site I control. Dynamic content will not get my sites higher rankings, and there is never, ever any substitute for inbound links. But dynamic content makes pages look as though they’ve been updated, even when, in every critical respect, they have not.

Now lets add the element of triangulation. Let me give a highly-relevant real estate link to Eric Blackwell. And let him give a highly-relevant real estate link to Teri Lussier. And let her give a highly-relevant real estate link back to me. That’s triangulation in its simplest form. My guess is that it’s much more effective that a simple two-way link, since it establishes a web of relevance for search engine spiders.

But let’s go it one better: Let me link to both Teri and Eric. Let him link to both me and to Teri. And let Teri link to both Eric and to me. Now we’ve got the spider traversing our triangle in both directions. Is that double the relevance? Quadruple? I truly don’t know.

But try this: Let’s do that same double triangle of links — on our sidebars. Now Eric and Teri are getting around 6,500 links from me, since we have a lot of pages. Teri and I are getting maybe 3,000 links from Eric, since he has fewer pages. And Eric and I are getting only around 1,000 links from Teri, since she has fewer still. Even so, there is a vast network of links between our three sites, and spiders will tend to travel a huge number of the link connections in that network.

And now let’s put highly-dynamic content into each one of the sidebars of our three weblogs. Now, from the point of view of a search engine spider, each page on each blog is in a constant state of being updated, since none of those pages is ever identical to its last spidering. I don’t know for certain that this is how search engine spiders work, but it’s how I would build them, using a checksum or something like that to gauge relative variability from one spidering to the next. If I’m right about this, then my sites are infinitely variable by that measure. We’re never the same place twice.

And this is a piece of the thinking that underlies the Scenius software idea. In fact, the best benefit of a Scenius scene is social: You get to honor weblogging you like by featuring it. You get to share that writing with your readers and with other webloggers. They get to share your scene with their readers. And your having produced the scene leads both the featured writers and all the readers back to you. A Scenius scene is a brand new form of social media.

But as a secondary consequence of the way they are built, Scenius scenes also achieve the kinds of dynamic content and search engine triangulation I’ve been talking about here.

Take note: I am not an SEO and I don’t want to be one. In writing about this at all, I would seem to be inviting all sorts of arcane disputes from bespectacled experts. I will engage none of these debates. I think most of what people say about SEO is FUD, and I simply don’t care. I know from my own testing that the things I am talking about work. If they don’t fit some grand theory of SEO, that’s fine with me.

What I am talking about — all I am talking about — is a coincidence between the way that echoed Scenius scenes interact and the way that search engine spiders behave — for now. Search engine algorithms can be changed at any time, but — going by the way things work right now — a broadly echoed Scenius scene will give a very strong short-term SEO boost to the weblog posts it summarizes. And over the long run, the combined effects of dynamic content and link triangulation will tend to cause the sites upon which the scene is echoed to be spidered frequently and exhaustively.

This is get-by-giving at its best. As the host of a scene, you’re going to get that irreplaceable inbound link. But you’ll be giving out tons of link juice to the sites you link to, even as you’re playing a tune on your Ocarina that makes the search engine spiders dance and spin. And remember: Every bit of this is a secondary consequence.

This is thoughtful marketing. This is what happens when you think carefully about the objectives you hope to achieve and what specific steps you have to take in order to achieve them. And this is what happens when you let your mind run wild with the right crowd.

If you want to learn how we think, come to Unchained. If you want to make friends and influence people — and teach the search engine spiders how to dance your way — get your own Scenius scene going.

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