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6 Ways to Use Fresh Links & Mentions to Improve Your Marketing Efforts – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

This week, we announced the release of our newest tool, Fresh Web Explorer. We’re so excited to give marketers incredibly recent data in a tool to keep track of their mentions and links in a scalable way.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand walks us through improving our marketing through fresh links and mentions, and he explains how you can use Fresh Web Explorer to achieve the best results. 

Excited about Fresh Web Explorer? Have questions you’d like answered? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!



Video Transcription

“Howdy SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, as you may know, we’ve been very excited to release Fresh Web Explorer. It’s one of our latest tools. We’ve been working on it for a long time. A lot of work and effort goes into that project. Huge congrats and thank you to Dan Lecocq and Tamara Hubble and to the entire team who has been working on that project. Kelsey and Carin and everyone.

So I wanted to take some time and talk through the value that marketers can get from Fresh Web Explorer and not just from Fresh Web Explorer, because I realize it’s one in a set of tools, but also from things like doing regular Google 24 hour searches to look for brand mentions and links, using other tools like Radian6 or an uberVU, which is inside empowering, Raven Tools fresh links and fresh mentions section. You can do a lot of these things with any of those tools.

I’m going to focus on Fresh Web Explorer for this part, but you can extrapolate out some ways to use this stuff in other tools too.

So number one, one of the most obvious ones is trying to find opportunities for your brand, for your site to get coverage and press, and that often will lead to links that can help with SEO, lead to co-occurrence citations of your brand name next to industry terms, which can help with SEO, could help with local for those of you who are doing local and have local businesses mentioned. It certainly can help with branding and brand growth, and a lot of times helps with direct traffic too.

So, when I perform a search inside Fresh Web Explorer, I’m getting a list of the URLs and the domains that they’re on, along with a feed authority score, and I can see then that I can get all sorts of information. I can plug in my competitors and see links, who’s pointing to my competitor’s sites. Perhaps those are opportunities for me to get a press mention or a link. I can see links to industry sites. So, for example, it may not be a competitor, but anyone who’s doing coverage in my space is probably interesting for me to potentially reach out to build a relationship with.

Mentions of industry terms. If I find, you know whatever it is, print magazines that are on the web, or blogs, or forums, or news sites, feeds that are coming from places that are indicative of, wow, they’re talking about a lot of things that are relevant to my industry, relevant to my brand and to what our company’s doing, that’s probably an opportunity for a potential press mention.

Mentions of competitors brands. If a press outlet is covering, or a blog or whoever, is covering one of your competitors, chances are good that you have an opportunity to get coverage from that source as well, particularly if they try to be editorially balanced.

Mentions of industry brands. It could be that you’re in an industry that, and you’re not necessarily competitive with someone, but you want to find those people who are relevant to your brand. So for example, for us this could include things like a brand like Gnip or a brand like HubSpot. We’re not competitive with these brands, SEOmoz is not. But they are industry brands and places who cover Gnip and HubSpot may indeed cover Moz as well.

Number two, I can find some content opportunities, opportunities to create content based on what I’m discovering from Fresh Web Explorer. So I plugged in “HTC One,” the new phone from HTC, and I’m looking at maybe I can curate and aggregate some of the best of the content that’s been produced around the HTC One. I can aggregate reviews, get really interesting information about what’s coming out about the phone. I might even be able to discover information to share with my audience.

So, for example, we focus on SEO topics and on local topics. If we expect the HTC One to be big and we want to cover several different phones and how that’s affecting the mobile search space, we can look at their default search providers, what sorts of things they do in terms of voice search versus web search, whether they have special contracts and deals with any providers to be tracking that data and who that might be going to, all those kinds of things, and we can relate it back to what we’re doing in our industry.

You can also Fresh Web Explorer to find the best time to share this type of information. So, for example, the HTC One comes out and maybe you’re working for a mobile review site and you’re like, “Oh, you know what? This has already been covered to death. Let’s do something else this week, or let’s cover some other stuff. Maybe we’ll hit up the HTC One.” Or, “Boy, you know what? This is just starting to get hot. Now is a great time to share. We can get on Techmeme and get the link from there. We can be mentioned in some of the other press coverages. We still have a chance, a shot to cover this new technology, new trend early on in its life cycle.”

Number three, we can track fresh brand and link growth versus our competitors. So a lot of the time one of the things that marketers are asking themselves, especially in the inbound field is, “How am I doing against my competition?” So I might be Fitbit, which is a Foundry cousin of ours. They’re also funded by Foundry Group. They compete with the Nike FuelBand, and they might be curious about who’s getting more press this week. We released a new version of the Fitbit, or we’re about to, or whatever it is, and let’s see how we’re doing against the Nike FuelBand. Then when we have our press release, our launch, let’s see how that compares to the coverage we’re getting. Where are they getting covered that we are not getting covered? Where are we getting coverage where they are not?

We can then use things like the CSV Export feature, which is in the top right-hand corner of the Fresh Web Explorer, and we can look at CSV Export to do things like, “Oh, I want to filter out these types of sites. Or I only want a report on the high feed authority sites versus the low feed authority one. So I want to see only the places where my coverage is high.”

A note on feed authority though. Be very careful here because remember that a great page on a great site might be discovered through a low quality feed. It could be that a relatively junky feed is linking to some high quality stuff. We’ll discover it and report on the feed authority of the source where we discovered it. So you may want to try using metrics like page authority and domain authority to figure out where are you being mentioned and is that a high quality site, not just feed authority.

All right. Number four. Find fresh sources that link to or mention two or more of your competitors, but don’t mention you. Now, this has been a classic tool. We’ve had a tool in our library at Moz, which is similar to SEO Book’s HubFinder. Ours is called the Link Intersect tool, and what you can do here is you can plug in something like some ice cream brands and see how it writes. So “Full Tilt” and “Molly Moons” ice cream, and I actually want to put quotes around those brand names so that I can get mentions every time someone mentions the Moon and the name Molly that would pop in there, that wouldn’t be ideal, minus D’Ambrosio, which is the best Seattle ice cream shop obviously. It’s a gelateria. It’s fantastic. Side note, it’s possible that maybe owned by my cousin-in-law, but shh, let’s not tell anybody.

Okay, and then if I’m Marco over at D’Ambrosio Gelato, I can see where are Full Tilt and Molly Moons getting mentioned that aren’t mentioning me. If it’s, “Hey, there was an article in The Stranger about ice cream and they didn’t cover us.” And, “Hey the Capitol Hill blog didn’t cover us.” Maybe they don’t know that we also have a Capitol Hill location. We should get in there and talk to those folks. We should mention, maybe leave a comment, maybe just tweet at the author of the post, whatever it is and tell them, “Hey, next time you cover ice cream, you should also write about us.”

Number five. Compare sources coverage. So this is actually a bit of a teaser, and I apologize for that. So the operator site colon will not be available at lunch. So when you’re watching this video, you probably can’t use the site colon operator to see different sources and to run a search like the CRO site colon SEOmoz. However, it will be coming soon.

When it is, you’ll be able to compare, hey is SEOmoz or is HubSpot more active in covering the CRO topic? Are there different sources out there that maybe don’t have coverage of a topic and I could go and pitch them for a guest post? I could find those content opportunities. I could know if a topic is saturated or if it hasn’t been covered enough. Maybe I find sites or blogs that might be interested in covering a topic that I would like them to write about. I can see who’s covered and who hasn’t using this site colon operator to figure out the source and the level of coverage that they might have or not.

The last one, number six, is really about reporting. Fresh Web Explorer is going to show you these great sort of trends about how is a particular term or phrase or link doing, links to a site, mentions of a brand name, mentions of a phrase or an industry term, whatever it is. So I can plug in things like my brand, SD, which is our link operator for just seeing links to anything on the sub-domain. I can plug in my sub-domain, and then I can see, here’s how that’s gone over the past 7 days or 30 days. I can screen shot that and put it in a report. I can download using the export functionality. I can download the CSV and then filter or scrub.

A lot of times, for example, PR companies, companies that help you with your press will do this type of work. They’ll assemble this kind of reporting. In fact, at Moz we use a firm called Barokas here in Seattle. Every week they send us a report of here are all the places that you were mentioned, and here are places that mentioned industry terms and that kind of stuff, which is really nice, but you’re oftentimes paying a lot of money to get that reporting. You can actually do that yourself if you don’t have a PR company that you’re already using for this type of work. Of course, if you are a PR company, this might be an option for you to do that type of reporting.

These six, they are only scratching the surface of what you can do with Fresh Web Explorer, and I don’t doubt that I haven’t thought of hundreds of uses yet for the data that’s inside Fresh Web Explorer. I really look forward to seeing some cool creative uses from you guys out there, and I hope that you are enjoying the product. If you would like, please give us feedback. I know the team would love to hear from you on this, and they’re constantly working and iterating and updating and adding in things like the site colon operator. So very cool.

Thank you very much, and we will join you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.”

 

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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The Google AdWords Landscape (Infographic)

Posted by Dr. Pete

We tend to think of AdWords as the domain of PPC specialists, but it’s becoming clearer and clearer that Google’s SERP advertising has a huge impact on the position and effectiveness of organic results. So, I wanted to ask a simple question – what does the AdWords “landscape” actually look like in 2013? In other words, where are the ads, how many are there, what combinations occur in the “wild”, and how often do they show up? I’ll dive into some details below, but the answer looks something like this (click the image for a full-sized view)…

The Google AdWords Landscape

Embed this image:

The Methodology

We collected data from 10,000 page-one Google SERPs via Google.com on a weekday during normal business hours. Personalization was turned off, and the crawler emulated a logged-out Chrome browser. We parsed the major ad blocks (which have consistent DOM markers) and the links within those blocks. Keywords and categories were pulled from AdWords’ keyword tools, with 500 keywords coming from each of 20 categories.

A Few Caveats

Naturally, keywords pulled from the AdWords’ research tools are more likely to have commercial intent than the “average” keyword (if such a thing exists), so these percentages may not be indicative of the entire world of search queries. We did run these numbers at other time periods and on other days, and the results were fairly consistent.

These statistics were computed by unique queries, not by query volume. The results seem to be very similar, though. For example, we found ads on 85.2% of the queries crawled – if we weight those queries by Google’s “global” volume, we get ad penetration of 84.5%. The correlation between the presence of ads and query volume was virtually non-existent (r=-0.018). The correlation between the presence of ads and Google’s competition metric was high (r=0.874). This is probably not surprising, since “competition” is essentially defined by how many advertisers are vying for any given query.

The Changing Landscape

This is only a snapshot of a rapidly changing picture. For example, paid shopping results are still relatively new, but we discovered them on almost 20% of the queries we crawled. Unlike the traditional AdWords blocks, paid shopping can appear in multiple positions and forms, including the larger, upper-right format previously reserved for Knowledge Graph.

Even traditional top ads are evolving, with ads showing extensions, expanded site-links, lead generation forms, etc.  Expect Google to experiment with new formats on the top and right, and to blend advertising into the Knowledge Graph area to increase CTR. This changing landscape will impact the efforts of people in both paid and organic search, so keep your eyes open, and don’t assume that this is something only the PPC team has to worry about.

I just wanted to thank Dawn Shepard for all her help putting together the infographic. I know it was probably a bit painful to hear “Make it kind of boring!”


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Announcing Fresh Web Explorer

Posted by Matthew Brown

Have you ever wished you had an easy way to track all of your links, social mentions, and web citations in one place? If so, you’re going to like the latest addition to your SEOmoz PRO account. Today, we are releasing a new beta product to our PRO subscribers: Fresh Web Explorer.
 

Try Fresh Web Explorer

Why did we build Fresh Web Explorer?

One of the most challenging tasks as an online marketer is keeping track of all the latest blogs, forums, and news sites on the web that mention your brand or site. Many of the tools out there can be frustrating to use and don’t have the metrics, scalability, or features that I need to effectively keep track of important links and mentions. Google Alerts can be hit or miss. Topsy is terrific, but it only covers social mentions. Trackur, Ubervu, Buzzstream, and SocialMention all offer a unique set of features, but I frequently rely on a number of different tools to provide me with an instant look into mentions of the sites and brands I track.

We built Fresh Web Explorer to provide an easier way to give you a fast, comprehensive look at the latest mentions of and links to your content across the web.
 
 
 

What’s different about Fresh Web Explorer?

Fresh Web Explorer (FWE) functions a lot like Open Site Explorer, so the interface will be familiar to OSE users. However, the data is extremely recent, and rather than just show you links, we grab full text content of articles, blog posts, forum threads, user comments, and other web content. FWE doesn’t just show you links, but all term, brand, or phrase mentions as well. 
 
FWE is powered by our Freshscape Index, which is a 30 day index of 4.3 million feeds (and counting). There’s a new Freshscape index every eight hours, sortable by one week, two weeks, or 30 days of mentions. You can also sort your data by Feed Authority, our new metric created specifically for Fresh Web Explorer:
 
 
Feed Authority directly measures the importance of any feed on a scale of 1-100. It is a machine learning model that predicts the number of subscribers for a given feed and distinguishes among the many different feeds on any site. For example, it wil assign a lower score to a comment feed associated with a six-month-old blog post than the main feed associated with the blog. In this way, it is analogous to Page Authority, but applied to feeds. We currently use features extracted from crawling the feed (number of posts, post frequency, etc.) as well as Mozscape metrics to compute the score. Our data scientists are working to improve this metric, so expect to see some of the scores change as they refine the algorithm and introduce additional features.
 
Warning: We’re going to get even more nerdy about Feed Authority for a quick second. The chart below shows the distribution of Feed Authority across the Freshscape index:
Feed Authority Histogram
Approximately 25% of the index has a Feed Authority less than 2.0, with the other 75% having higher values. The feeds with low scores are mostly stale (no longer updated), have very few or no links, or have malformed XML. A similar graph for all feeds on the internet would have the opposite shape, with 75%+ of feeds having Feed Authority less than 2.0 (we confirmed this with a random sample of feeds from our Mozscape index). We minimized the number of low-quality feeds in our index by carefully building it from a set of high-quality blog directories and a curated list of feeds.
 

Smooth Operator

Bringing it back to using FWE, there are a number of operators you can use to customize your search:
 
 
In particular, you may find yourself making extensive use of the ‘Match phrase exactly’ operator, by using double quotes around your search term or phrase. This cues Fresh Web Explorer to only return results where your phrase of terms appears on a page exactly as you searched for them in FWE, rather than returning results where the terms may appear anywhere on the page and in any order. When searching on non-branded or very popular terms, using this operator may surface a more precise set of results from FWE.
 

Export FWE data to customize your reports

If you’re inclined to mix and match this data with other sources, FWE provides you with the ability to export up to 10,000 mentions in the Freshscape index, in .csv format:
 
Fresh Web Explorer Export capture
 
This export allows you to sort a large number of mentions by date found, Feed Authority, domain, HTML title, and URL. One of the additional fields available in the export that’s not in the FWE web interface: the feed source where FWE found the page containing the mention. This can provide useful insight into why a Feed Authority score might be low, even though the page mentioning your search is located on a strong domain.
 
We’ve put together a video walkthrough and a detailed FAQ to get you started as well as answer additional questions.
 

Getting agile with FWE

Fresh link and mention data have become critically important to online marketers. If you’re engaged in link building and outreach, having the ability to quickly sort recent mentions by source and date can make a world of difference in quick outreach to build audience for your content or brand. If you’re in the SEO trenches, you’re probably all too familiar with how freshness plays a role in Google and Bing search results. If you’ve watched the meteoric rise of sites like Buzzfeed, Business Insider, or Huffington Post, the formula to their success is pretty clear: Match content to the most recent user intent you can surface, then build links and social mentions to that content like crazy.
 
To get started, you can use FWE to engage in several high-ROI activities:
  • Find recent mentions in FWE where you aren’t being linked to – On news publications and high-volume blogs, the quicker you ask the writer for a link, the better chance you have of actually getting it. It’s much harder to convince them it’s worth the effort a month later. An effective technique that increases your chances even more is to add something new to the content that increases its value or changes the narrative of the story. 
  • Competitor analysis –  Where are your competitors being mentioned? Are there feeds that highlight their content frequently? FWE is a good tool to build up your outreach list.
  • Content Strategy – FWE allows you to check on or keep track of a set of terms over time, and helps you get a sense for what type of content gets a lot of mentions, shares, and links. For instance, a term like “World Cup 2014”  is already drawing significant interest as we get closer to the 2014 event in Brazil. Sites like Bleacher Report and Goal are already starting to stake out their claim in the SERPs.

FWE can help you make strategic decisions on how to create and focus both new and legacy content on this type of quickly evolving user search intent. Our engineers have put in a lot of work to make the Freshscape index, and we will be using it to power additional features in the near future.

Ready to give it a spin?

Try Fresh Web Explorer

Just like you, we’re just getting started with Fresh Web Explorer as a new tool in our marketing workflow. It’s a beta release, so we’re making improvements and squashing bugs quickly. You can flag suspicious results within the application, and we will use that feedback to make adjustments to the index.
 
Please send us over any questions or comments you have, and be sure to check out the Help video and FAQ.
 
We can’t wait to hear how you’re using it.

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The Evolution of Roger

Posted by derric

Hello, Moz community! My name is Derric Wise and I am the Art Director here at Moz. After three years here,, I have often been asked the same two questions:

  1. How do you pronounce SEOmoz? (It’s not SEEmoz or SUMOZE; it’s simply pronounced “S-E-Omoz.” You can find out more background on the company’s name in one of Rand’s blog posts here.)
  2. What’s the story behind your mascot, Roger?

The second question is attached to a longer of an answer, which is what this post is all about. Let me introduce you to Matthew Heilman who, as Creative Director in 2010, hatched the idea that eventually led to the creation of our beloved Roger.

Without further adieu, let’s hear it from the man himself…
 
 
 
Q: Who are you? Let us know where you hail from and what you do.
 
 
My name is Matthew Heilman (insert shameless plug) and I currently reside in the perpetually damp city of Seattle (go Sonics!). I’m currently the lead UX designer for the mobile properties over at Nordstrom, which is actually a few blocks north of where the main Moz office is. My number one goal at Nordstrom is to make our customers happy by providing them with intuitive and relevant features, with a sprinkling of fun. I guess if you really want to simplify it, you could say that I make it easy for people to buy nice pants while they’re on the move. Prior to being at Nordstrom, I was the Creative Director at the SEOmoz and was the mad scientist behind the creation of Roger. 
 
Q: What inspired you to create Roger?
 
I remember when I first came to SEOmoz; there was only a handful of people in comparison to the cornucopia of folks there now! With that said, the brand and design were also in their beginning stages. Matt Inman had created a great start and established a consistent design language for the company at the time, which was awesome because I didn’t inherit total craziness. One thing I personally thought that Moz didn’t have at the time was a visual voice or champion for the brand. We did have two things going for us, though: a recognizable logo, and a CEO who was a figurehead in the community.
 
I had sketched up some random ideas prior to creating Roger, one of which was taking Rand and turning him into a cartoon character. I ditched that direction because I felt that, as a brand, we should create a voice that wasn’t anchored by a real human and had more of a 3rd party role. When thinking of a mascot, I wanted to create something that was a little more fun and approachable. With Roger, I really wanted to create was something that would almost make you feel bad when you thought about leaving; kind of like the feeling you get when you try to leaving your house and your puppy is crying. (But seriously, don’t leave SEOmoz because if you do, then you make puppies cry.) Really what came about was a lovable-looking robot that really made you feel good about the decision you made to be a part of the SEOmoz community.
 
Q: Where did you get the name Roger?
 
Honestly, I would love to tell you that it came to me in a dream while I was on a long trek across Tibet, but that one was all Scott Willoughby. Scott was SEOmoz’s Director of Conversion and Retention Marketing during the time that I was working on Roger. He was integral about backing the idea of having a cartoon robot play a role in the brand, and he also had some really stellar ideas about what we could do. I remember brainstorming ideas at the time, and Scott’s suggestion of Roger just seemed to make sense. It really fit the whole lovable robot idea perfectly, in my opinion.
 
Q: Why a robot and not a camelopard (Google it!)?
 
Because a camelopard only has +10 stealth and is susceptible to magic attacks, and everyone knows a robot is impervious to magic attacks. Actually, a camelopard sounds pretty sweet. Maybe you guys can add a little antagonist into the mix and make it a camelopard?
 
In all reality, during the time I was kicking around ideas, the robot just seemed like a good fit with the industry. Something mechanical and a little more sci-fi was more of a natural fit. 
 
Q: What problems were you trying to solve by adding a mascot to the brand?
 
At the time, there really weren’t too many problems with brand identity that I was trying to address with Roger. My main goal was to steer SEOmoz away from what the rest of the industry was doing, which was having real life spokespeople be the identity behind the brand. At the time, we had Rand who was a figurehead in the industry, but it just seemed too familiar in comparison to what other people were doing with brand recognition. We had a real opportunity as a younger company to try something different and outside of the box.
 
I think you run into situations with real life spokespeople that are hard to get out of. Perceptions can change on a dime with real life mascots, and it’s sometimes hard to change direction, especially when the spokesperson is your CEO. With Roger, we could always pull back and try something different if it was a massive fail. I also go back to what I previously said about creating a mascot that has these lovable qualities — qualities that appeal to a broad range of people. 
 
Q: In your experience, has the mascot helped the SEOmoz brand? 
 
Most definitely. Having Roger has helped establish SEOmoz into its own sort of brand niche. The fact that we created momentum and recognition with Roger was great; we made a decision as a company to lead in the industry when it came to mascots and visual recognition. It’s tough to set yourself apart from the competition these days, whether with technology innovation or brand innovation. It’s really about seeing what the competition is doing and going into a different direction that is still relevant.
 
However, I wish it was just as easy as creating a mascot and, wah-lah, you have a recognizable brand. You almost have to tread a fine invisible line with mascots, because you can really get into a situation where you overexpose the mascot and dilute the true focus, which should be that of product innovation and customer service. I think the mascot is really secondary, or even tertiary, to good product design when it comes to visual hierarchy in the brand. A good user experience and useful features is really where the focus needs to be when it comes to the brand of the company; this is really what keeps people coming back.
 
It’s really easy for people to create a mascot and put it on everything imaginable, but you can get to a point where people just don’t want to see it anymore and it loses its impact. I would almost compare that scenario to an overplayed song like “The Macarena.” I really think SEOmoz has done a great job of not over exposing its users to Roger. Moz has really used Roger as the sort of loveable hook to get people in, but has also focused on the priority of creating great features and providing outstanding customer service.
 

Thanks, Matt! And there you have it, folks. That’s the backstory of Roger. Let’s all marvel at his work for a second: 

 
However, the story does not end there. Matt and I go way back. I mean WAAAY back — like all the way to second grade back. As you can see, we have always been hard at work creating things together.
 
 
When I started at SEOmoz, my first project was to expand the Roger character. I have a background in illustration, so I broke out my trusty pencil and started animating Roger in alternate poses, adding different costumes and situations, the works. To this day, I literally have piles of hand drawn Roger images and assets that we then scan and rebuild in Adobe Illustrator. Currently, we are developing new landscape scenes for Roger to live in, which we call the “Land of Moz” around the office. Ultimately, this expansion to Roger’s lifestyle helped redefine Roger to become the robot we all know and love today.
 
 
The changes made to Roger are both minute and drastic at the same time. Rather than list out each difference, I will just show you. After all, I am a visual type of person. Check it out! 
 
 
 
Wondering why we chose to remodel Roger? It’s rather simple, really. Roger had become such an important part of our brand identity that he had to have some elements added to enable his scalability as we grew as a company. Roger’s darting eyes and non-emotional facial features were making it easy for some folks (sadly) to make fun of him. I noticed that sometimes when we were having technical issues, comments would be made such as “Oh no, Roger broke this,” which caused me to feel that we had an empathy problem with Roger that needed to be addressed to make sure that he did not go the way of Clippy.
 
Part of this included a reevaluation how we use Roger in our branding. Roger is a representation of our TAGFEE Code, with an emphasis on “fun.” Using Roger to reject faulty credit card numbers or inform users of a problem with a tool directly contrasts with positive emotional engagement. Therefore, we now use Roger sparingly and strategically to ensure his longevity. 
 
Roger has also recently achieved a healthy dose of anthropomorphism by adding a super simple phoneme chart so he can express emotion more effectively. For you non-designy people out there, a phoneme chart is a fancy name for a list of mouth expressions. We have really seen a difference in the reactions towards Roger after his recent redesign, as minimal as they may seem to be. Roger was huggable before, but now he is irresistible. 
 
 
Mascots like Roger help with emotional engagement with customers, and they also add authenticity and help users connect with a website on a personal level. If you can empathize with customers and keep users interested, you have created a powerful win for your brand. The fact of the matter is that SEOmoz is filled with lovable robots (which we call “employees&rdquo doing their best to provide an optimal user experience every day. This is what Matt strived to illustrate with Roger back in 2010, and what I am continuing to work towards in 2013.
 

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The Evolution of Roger

Posted by derric

Hello, Moz community! My name is Derric Wise and I am the Art Director here at Moz. After three years here,, I have often been asked the same two questions:

  1. How do you pronounce SEOmoz? (It’s not SEEmoz or SUMOZE; it’s simply pronounced “S-E-Omoz.” You can find out more background on the company’s name in one of Rand’s blog posts here.)
  2. What’s the story behind your mascot, Roger?

The second question is attached to a longer of an answer, which is what this post is all about. Let me introduce you to Matthew Heilman who, as Creative Director in 2010, hatched the idea that eventually led to the creation of our beloved Roger.

Without further adieu, let’s hear it from the man himself…
 
 
 
Q: Who are you? Let us know where you hail from and what you do.
 
 
My name is Matthew Heilman (insert shameless plug) and I currently reside in the perpetually damp city of Seattle (go Sonics!). I’m currently the lead UX designer for the mobile properties over at Nordstrom, which is actually a few blocks north of where the main Moz office is. My number one goal at Nordstrom is to make our customers happy by providing them with intuitive and relevant features, with a sprinkling of fun. I guess if you really want to simplify it, you could say that I make it easy for people to buy nice pants while they’re on the move. Prior to being at Nordstrom, I was the Creative Director at the SEOmoz and was the mad scientist behind the creation of Roger. 
 
Q: What inspired you to create Roger?
 
I remember when I first came to SEOmoz; there was only a handful of people in comparison to the cornucopia of folks there now! With that said, the brand and design were also in their beginning stages. Matt Inman had created a great start and established a consistent design language for the company at the time, which was awesome because I didn’t inherit total craziness. One thing I personally thought that Moz didn’t have at the time was a visual voice or champion for the brand. We did have two things going for us, though: a recognizable logo, and a CEO who was a figurehead in the community.
 
I had sketched up some random ideas prior to creating Roger, one of which was taking Rand and turning him into a cartoon character. I ditched that direction because I felt that, as a brand, we should create a voice that wasn’t anchored by a real human and had more of a 3rd party role. When thinking of a mascot, I wanted to create something that was a little more fun and approachable. With Roger, I really wanted to create was something that would almost make you feel bad when you thought about leaving; kind of like the feeling you get when you try to leaving your house and your puppy is crying. (But seriously, don’t leave SEOmoz because if you do, then you make puppies cry.) Really what came about was a lovable-looking robot that really made you feel good about the decision you made to be a part of the SEOmoz community.
 
Q: Where did you get the name Roger?
 
Honestly, I would love to tell you that it came to me in a dream while I was on a long trek across Tibet, but that one was all Scott Willoughby. Scott was SEOmoz’s Director of Conversion and Retention Marketing during the time that I was working on Roger. He was integral about backing the idea of having a cartoon robot play a role in the brand, and he also had some really stellar ideas about what we could do. I remember brainstorming ideas at the time, and Scott’s suggestion of Roger just seemed to make sense. It really fit the whole lovable robot idea perfectly, in my opinion.
 
Q: Why a robot and not a camelopard (Google it!)?
 
Because a camelopard only has +10 stealth and is susceptible to magic attacks, and everyone knows a robot is impervious to magic attacks. Actually, a camelopard sounds pretty sweet. Maybe you guys can add a little antagonist into the mix and make it a camelopard?
 
In all reality, during the time I was kicking around ideas, the robot just seemed like a good fit with the industry. Something mechanical and a little more sci-fi was more of a natural fit. 
 
Q: What problems were you trying to solve by adding a mascot to the brand?
 
At the time, there really weren’t too many problems with brand identity that I was trying to address with Roger. My main goal was to steer SEOmoz away from what the rest of the industry was doing, which was having real life spokespeople be the identity behind the brand. At the time, we had Rand who was a figurehead in the industry, but it just seemed too familiar in comparison to what other people were doing with brand recognition. We had a real opportunity as a younger company to try something different and outside of the box.
 
I think you run into situations with real life spokespeople that are hard to get out of. Perceptions can change on a dime with real life mascots, and it’s sometimes hard to change direction, especially when the spokesperson is your CEO. With Roger, we could always pull back and try something different if it was a massive fail. I also go back to what I previously said about creating a mascot that has these lovable qualities — qualities that appeal to a broad range of people. 
 
Q: In your experience, has the mascot helped the SEOmoz brand? 
 
Most definitely. Having Roger has helped establish SEOmoz into its own sort of brand niche. The fact that we created momentum and recognition with Roger was great; we made a decision as a company to lead in the industry when it came to mascots and visual recognition. It’s tough to set yourself apart from the competition these days, whether with technology innovation or brand innovation. It’s really about seeing what the competition is doing and going into a different direction that is still relevant.
 
However, I wish it was just as easy as creating a mascot and, wah-lah, you have a recognizable brand. You almost have to tread a fine invisible line with mascots, because you can really get into a situation where you overexpose the mascot and dilute the true focus, which should be that of product innovation and customer service. I think the mascot is really secondary, or even tertiary, to good product design when it comes to visual hierarchy in the brand. A good user experience and useful features is really where the focus needs to be when it comes to the brand of the company; this is really what keeps people coming back.
 
It’s really easy for people to create a mascot and put it on everything imaginable, but you can get to a point where people just don’t want to see it anymore and it loses its impact. I would almost compare that scenario to an overplayed song like “The Macarena.” I really think SEOmoz has done a great job of not over exposing its users to Roger. Moz has really used Roger as the sort of loveable hook to get people in, but has also focused on the priority of creating great features and providing outstanding customer service.
 

Thanks, Matt! And there you have it, folks. That’s the backstory of Roger. Let’s all marvel at his work for a second: 

 
However, the story does not end there. Matt and I go way back. I mean WAAAY back — like all the way to second grade back. As you can see, we have always been hard at work creating things together.
 
 
When I started at SEOmoz, my first project was to expand the Roger character. I have a background in illustration, so I broke out my trusty pencil and started animating Roger in alternate poses, adding different costumes and situations, the works. To this day, I literally have piles of hand drawn Roger images and assets that we then scan and rebuild in Adobe Illustrator. Currently, we are developing new landscape scenes for Roger to live in, which we call the “Land of Moz” around the office. Ultimately, this expansion to Roger’s lifestyle helped redefine Roger to become the robot we all know and love today.
 
 
The changes made to Roger are both minute and drastic at the same time. Rather than list out each difference, I will just show you. After all, I am a visual type of person. Check it out! 
 
 
 
Wondering why we chose to remodel Roger? It’s rather simple, really. Roger had become such an important part of our brand identity that he had to have some elements added to enable his scalability as we grew as a company. Roger’s darting eyes and non-emotional facial features were making it easy for some folks (sadly) to make fun of him. I noticed that sometimes when we were having technical issues, comments would be made such as “Oh no, Roger broke this,” which caused me to feel that we had an empathy problem with Roger that needed to be addressed to make sure that he did not go the way of Clippy.
 
Part of this included a reevaluation how we use Roger in our branding. Roger is a representation of our TAGFEE Code, with an emphasis on “fun.” Using Roger to reject faulty credit card numbers or inform users of a problem with a tool directly contrasts with positive emotional engagement. Therefore, we now use Roger sparingly and strategically to ensure his longevity. 
 
Roger has also recently achieved a healthy dose of anthropomorphism by adding a super simple phoneme chart so he can express emotion more effectively. For you non-designy people out there, a phoneme chart is a fancy name for a list of mouth expressions. We have really seen a difference in the reactions towards Roger after his recent redesign, as minimal as they may seem to be. Roger was huggable before, but now he is irresistible. 
 
 
Mascots like Roger help with emotional engagement with customers, and they also add authenticity and help users connect with a website on a personal level. If you can empathize with customers and keep users interested, you have created a powerful win for your brand. The fact of the matter is that SEOmoz is filled with lovable robots (which we call “employees&rdquo doing their best to provide an optimal user experience every day. This is what Matt strived to illustrate with Roger back in 2010, and what I am continuing to work towards in 2013.
 

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