How the Bootcamp Worked

Over the six weeks of the bootcamp, we met three times with the following agenda:

• An initial four hour Saturday session where participants were introduced to the technologies behind Web 2.0.
  • We provided illustrations of how these technologies were already affecting the business practices of early adopters like General Motors.
  • Participants then learned how to blog. They also learned how to use technorati and pubsub to track real-time industry news and mentions of their own sites.
  • Finally, participants were given their blogging assignment with the stated objective of achieving a strong search presence in the local cleaning and restoration industry for their team blog sites. Participants were to write a minimum of five posts per week for at least 30 posts by the end of the bootcamp.
• A follow-up one hour session one week later where we reviewed student blogging progress in terms of style and substance.
• A final four hour session at the end of Week 4. In the first two hours, we reviewed the web's current architecture and its implications for businesses including the role of search engines. In the second two hours, we reviewed student search performance relative to established industry players and discussed what they needed to do to better compete.

One issue with how we structured the bootcamp was that it only went on for six weeks, while achieving good search results typically takes much longer. Therefore, our feedback focused on encouraging practices that would, over time, lead to better search visibility. Two weeks into the bootcamp, two well-known blogging experts, Jeremy Wright of InsideBlogging and Susie Gardner of Buzz Marketing with Blogs were kind enough to provide detailed reviews of participant sites focusing on how well they were communicating, a first prerequisite for search visibility (link to Jeremy's reviews, link to Susie's reviews). To track how well the teams were connecting with their own and others' sites, another prerequisite for search visibility, we used pubsub and technorati to generate weekly summaries of the number links to and from bootcamp sites.

Our blogging platform was provided by The Port, a company specializing in developing small and large scale weblog communities. The platform allowed bootcamp participants to create both team and individual blogs. The team blog sites were:

• restoration-catastrophe
• restoration-commercial
• restoration-fire-smoke
• restoration-residential
• restoration-water

Instructors regularly interacted with bootcamp participants through this blog:

• highoctane

Competing for Web Visibility in Cleaning and Restoration

In addition to Coach's own web site, Coach's management provided us with a list of industry information web sites as well as those of competitors. The following table shows a list of these web sites with statistics up to date at the time of this post:

Examining this table, the cleaning and restoration industry does not have high search visibility. For this sample of sites, the higher numbers of inbound links hover in the low hundreds, and none of the sites has PageRank, an indication of how authoritative the search engine Google considers a site, over 6. The performance achieved by the industry as a whole is less than that of many personal weblogs.

Even with only six weeks to blog, bootcamp participants fare better on some of these measures than the established sites as shown in this table:

The bootcamp sites all beat Coach's and Clean Care Seminars on PageRank, suggesting that bootcamp sites would come out ahead of these two sites in searches where their content is equally relevant. Three out of five bootcamp sites managed to garner more inbound links than Coach's.

Search results

Summary measures of factors leading to search visibility give some idea concerning the bootcamp's success. The acid test is how well bootcamp team sites stacked up in searches that Coach's was competing for. Therefore, we decided to run keyword searches on four major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask Jeeves. For each search engine, we used three groups of keywords appearing on Coach's site coupled with Coach's hometown, Ypsilanti. Coach's is a local not a national chain, so search results tied to locality are what matter. The keywords are as follows:

• Group 1: catastrophe restoration, commercial restoration, smoke resoration, fire restoration, mold restoration; residential restoration.
• Group 2: smoke remediation, fire remediation, soot remediation; mold remediation.
• Group 3: catastrophe cleaning, commercial cleaning, smoke cleaning, residential cleaning, mold cleaning, soot cleaning.

Many of the keywords for Group 1 appeared in the domain names of the bootcamp team sites, so based on known search engine algorithms we would expect the bootcamp teams to have an advantage there. Keywords in Group 2 did not explicitly appear in either the bootcamp website URLs nor did they figure prominently in Coach's pages, so we would expect bootcamp sites and Coach's site to be on more even footing. Keywords in Group 3 figured prominently in the banner at the top of each page in Coach's site but generally not in the bootcamp sites, so we would expect Coach's to have an advantage with these.

Here are the results by group.

As we might have expected, bootcamp sites beat Coach's 15 out of 24 times, placed in the top 10 results 19 out of 24 times, and always placed in the top 30 results. The top 10 results are important because top 10 results appear on the first page of search results and are therefore much more likely to be seen. The top 30 results are important because searchers rarely go past the first three pages of results. Intriguingly, Coach's fails to place in the top 30 in a quarter of the searchers conducted with these keywords.

In the second group of keywords, Coach's beats bootcamp participants 10 out of 16 times and appears in the top ten 13 out of 16 times but fails to make the top 30 results 2 out of 16 times.

In the third group of keywords, Coach's beat the bootcamp participants 16 out of 24 times, appeared in the top ten 13 out of 24 times while failing to appear in the top 30 results 6 out of 24 times.

Looking at all three groups of results, a few highlights stand out. First, Coach's failed to place in the top three pages of search results 14 out of 64 times while bootcamp team sites only failed to reach the top 30 in six searches. Second, while Coach's beat the bootcamp sites in 35 of the searches, the bootcamp sites won a respectable 28 times. Finally, with the exception of the third group of keywords, bootcamp sites appeared on the first page of results as often as Coach's. With six weeks of blogging or about 30 blog posts, the bootcamp sites competed effectively with Coach's web site.

Implications and Next Steps

The bootcamp results demonstrate that with moderate but systematic effort bloggers can achieve search visibility that outperforms established local players for relevant searches. The typical bootcamp blog post took under an hour to write, so the total bootcamp blogging effort represents on the order of 150 hours of effort. This effort could easily be parceled out across an industry consortium of cooperative companies so that no one company was spending more than five hours per week.

The investment is justified by the following factors:

• Consumers tend to click on “natural” results like those produced by blogging eight times more often than they click on paid search results.
• Easily updated blogs allow companies to adapt to changing market conditions.
• Blogs allow opportunities for customer service and interaction that do not exist with static web sites.

This fall, we will repeat aspects of the MBA bootcamp with a group of Ross BBAs. Denali Flavors, developers of Moose Tracks ice cream, will be our client. We are currently under discussion with other universities and industry consortia to hold additional, customized bootcamps. Please feel free to contact me if you would like to learn more or follow up with comments.

Acknowledgements

We began planning the bootcamp in late March. Several people provided substantive suggestions that we incorporated into the bootcamp or affirmed some of our assumptions. Andy Seidl and Bill French, creators of Blogsite, provided advice on strategy and advertising support. Shel Holtz recommended that we focus on major search engine results in addition to our initial focus on technorati. Jason Calacanis was one of the first to recommend that we use outside judges like Susie Gardner and Jeremy Wright. Steve Shu provided a recent MBA's perspective on the value of the bootcamp, and Richard MacManus reinforced the need to bridge the gap between technical and business professionals. James Robertson offered his experiences developing Bottom Feeder. Several people, including Tantek Çelik, Mike McClatchey of Hass MS&L, and Mike Lombardi of NewsGator confirmed the soundness of specific bootcamp activities.