Monthly Archives: July 2009

Google Voice Apps pulled from the Apple Store

Posted on July 30, 2009 by ciaoenrico| Leave a comment

I’m fast becoming a bigger and bigger fan of Google Voice the more I use it. I’ve spoken to friends, and they feel the same way – easy access to a new phone number, and the ability to use services that your carrier would otherwise charge you for, is brilliant.

I myself opted out of getting an SMS package with my phone, since it was just more money for something I could replicate with Gmail – though I would have to teach all my friends how to text to me. Here, I can simply give them a new number and say, “just text THAT.” So that’s money I don’t have to give to T-Mobile!

Of course, that’s just the kind of thing that’s creating the mess going on now with Apple and GV. The Apple Store recently pulled all Google Voice applications from it’s store, including the official Google Voice app itself. Their reasoning was that these apps are duplicated by features found on the iPhone itself. Which seems like a poor reason to me – the iPhone also comes with it’s own calendar, and there is no shortage of calendar apps available at the store as well, aren’t there?

The real reason, of course, is that if you are using GV for texting like I am instead of what AT&T offers, you aren’t paying your money to AT&T. I have no doubt the apps have all been pulled not because iPhone is trying to keep Google off it’s handsets, but because AT&T pointed out some piece of the iPhone contract they have with Apple that says, “no programs that will reduce the amazing iPhone service payday.”

What wonderful irony, that the postal service felt the sting of electronic services being used instead of buying stamps, and now the electronic services are feeling the same sting from other applications. Given that SMS packages are usually around $5-10, I would think the easy solution would simply be to give texting to users as a bonus, and not care that they aren’t paying for it anymore. When you text you are in fact doing the carrier a favor, as it takes so much less bandwidth to send 90 or so characters than it does to call a person directly.

What we have hear is another one of those juicy cee changes, where the old is grumpy about being killed by the new. I have to wonder if all of the carriers will react as negatively as AT&T is. After all, historically, when an old technology is being replaced by a new one, the new one always wins. Being a grouch and trying to keep the service off your phones won’t change things a bit.

After all, if all of the carriers turn away from VoiP applications, how long will it be before someone starts manufacturing a true Google Phone, one that simply connects to a data line and only works calls from your free GV or similar service?

Something like that would be death to the current phone carriers. I would suggest they find a way to get on board with this kind of technology now, rather than waste their time and money on a losing battle to get rid of it.

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Posted in Mobile Marketing

Tagged google phone, google voice, iphone, voip services

Social Media Statistics – How well does it work for brands?

Posted on July 29, 2009 by ciaoenrico| Leave a comment

A study conducted by WorkPlace Media is out, showing the results of polls to find out how successful Social Media Marketing campaigns have been, and how users have responded to them.

The findings aren’t terribly pretty for Social Media Marketing, with the essentials boiled down to this:

Few people access social media sites at work.
Hardly anyone polled thinks less of a company for not having a social media presence.
Only 4% of respondants access their profiles all day.
Only 11% follow any company brand via social media.

I won’t quibble with these findings, though 753 does seem like a slightly small pool considering the vast number of people who use Facebook.

Instead I say yes, absolutely, I wholeheartedly believe these results, and I think they show the clearest reason people need to re-think how they approach social media marketing. They do not need to abandon it, mind you – because it is still where everyone is going when they are on line, and the best opportunity to find customers and brand champions. If you look at how few people care about a company’s brand or how little time they spend on social sites at work, and as a result throw up your hands in defeat, you aren’t getting it.

Social media is a new medium, and so the thinking about how to reach people on it must shift too. Think about television advertising. Here’s an add from the 1950s for Ford:

You can see where the makers of this commercial learned from their previous experience. The woman speaking about her family’s cars is the same scripting that would have been done for a radio commercial. The narator at the end speaks the same copy that would have been included in Ford’s print ad. The only difference are the moving pictures, which don’t really help the product. Think about it – when he talks about “colors galore,” we’re looking at a black and white image of a car. When he talks about the style and design of the cars, we’re still looking at the same 3/4 shot of each car, which all look the same. To say nothing of the fact that it runs a minute and a half, which would cost more for additional airtime.

The same problem confronts us today with social media marketing and advertising, because we are saddled with the training and expectations that come from banners, or press releases, or even television. The idea that if we put up the campaign we will get more customers does work for most other models, but this is a different beast and we have to actually change our way of thinking for it to work. The findings of this study do not surprise me, because the companies that engage in social media marketing still do not look at it as something new that they need to learn first.

For starters, look at the quote from the study, that word-of-mouth is still more effective a means of messaging than social media. I read that, and then read the stat that Facebook was the most popular site among respondants. Facebook users on average have some 120 friends, most all of whom are already friends and family members.

To me, that suggests that Facebook would be an invaluable tool for generating word of mouth, by contacting users directly, and sharing with them offers or news or any valuable information they could pass on to their own network.

But this is not how Facebook is levereged these days. Instead, companies build Facebook Pages, the Facebook answer to giving a company a user-like profile, and they collect visitors and fans like points in a video game: A source pride, but otherwise not very meaningful.

Getting people to talk about you because you’ve talked to them is not going to be easy – I readily admit that. But all of the success I’ve ever had with clients who used social media to promote themselves only saw real success by using it this way. If Facebook Pages are supposed to give companies the opportunity to exist on Facebook like real live users, then they should use those profiles in the exact same way. I don’t know anyone who goes on Facebook for the express purpose of gaining 10,000 followers just for the sake of doing so. (There are a ton of people who act that way on Twitter, but that’s another story.) So to act like a user, one must make friends with people who like you back. Rather than relying on their wall to show their friends what you are posting, direct message some of your followers and ask them about what they like about your product, or what they expect from you. Make it intimate and friendly, and eventually you will have those kinds of fans who WILL spread your message by word of mouth.

Social Media marketing isn’t in trouble by any stretch of the imagination – it just needs to mature.

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Posted in Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking

Tagged Facebook, social media statistics, workplace media

First look at Google Voice

Posted on July 29, 2009 by ciaoenrico| Leave a comment

I received my invite for Google Voice this week – this is Google’s attempt to get even further into the cell phone market, but providing G-mail like service for phone customers. You get a new phone number with the service, and you can link all of your other phone numbers into this single number. Plus there are scads of features.

Now, as I said, there are a lot of cool features that come with Google Voice – you can save voicemails on line, they can be transcribed to text, you can save and label and store them like you would e-mails… really great stuff that, frankly, you have to wonder why T-Mobile or Verizon didn’t think to do themselves.

You’ll also notice the “Balance” section at the bottom of the left rail. That is the money you can pay in for long distance calls. (National calls are free. Woo hoo!)

The tricky part will be getting people to give out their Google Voice number instead of their own phone number. I’m not likely to change my resume to reflect the new GV number just yet, but I’ll beta test it on my own by giving it out to friends and see how it feels.

Frankly, if this works out, I will definitely consider using this full time and cutting back my cell phone’s plan to the cheapest possible. After all, I have to pay the $30 data plan either way – if my minutes are free on Google but are charged for by T-Mobile, why wouldn’t I?

If you remember the fun of ten years ago as record companies learned how heartily they could get shelacked by on line music pirates, get ready for part two – only this time it will be about phones, and the ability to finally place a call for free over a broadband network.

In the meantime I will play with this a bit more and let you know how it works out.

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Posted in Mobile Marketing

Stop it with the auto-responder “thank you”s!

Posted on July 28, 2009 by ciaoenrico| Leave a comment

I want to register a complaint with my fellow Twitter users, because I don’t think I’m alone in this: Haven’t we all had enough of the, “Thanks for following me! Now go read my lame blog please!” messages?

It seems every 10th person I follow on Twitter sends me some version of this same message.

“Glad you’re following me! As a free gift, a link I need you to click!”
“Thanks for the friendship! I look forward to ignoring you completely! Come to my site and click on some ads, you fool!”
“Glad you followed me – I will now follow you back, for three days, then unfriend you so I can keep my following/follow ratio looking good.”

Oh, okay, I’m being a smart ass. Also, some of these messages are over 140 characters long – you caught me. Still, the sentiment is entirely there each time, even if they don’t out and say it: You are a droid placed on this Earth to help me get one user closer to finally making some money off this Adsense account I set up on my blog or page or whatever.

When people set these kinds of auto responses up on their Twitter page, they are broadcasting to all who can hear that they do not understand Twitter, how social networking works, and that they do not care. Each one of these impersonal, unfeeling “thank you” messages lets the recipient know the user on the other end doesn’t have time to know their own followers. Instead they set up a program to follow back anyone who follows them and send them a quick piece of spam – and make no mistake, a link sent to someone who didn’t ask for it is always spam.

I emplore you – if you send auto responses to people who friend you, stop. Twitter is about making real one-on-one connections with other people. If you are tweeting for your business, it is particularly important to make friends with those people who have taken the time to follow you. They are showing an express interest in what you do. You need to reach out to them directly and get to know them. Otherwise you are wasting the opportunity that Twitter really affords.

While Twitter does have a large number of users, and many of them are potential customers, the key to converting them is not ruining their day with blind messages and links.

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Posted in Social Networking

Is Facebook getting too big to succeed?

Posted on July 22, 2009 by ciaoenrico| 2 Comments

Facebook has been the flagship example of social networking for the last couple of years, based on the large number of people using it. Rather than simply being the domain of tech geeks and social media junkies who will, let’s be honest, use any social site, it has been adopted by Myspace dropouts. These people don’t use their computers for anything but the occasional Mapquest check, or some e-mail.

It’s so popular, you can bet if you have an account you are going to be friended by your friends, as well as your parents, your bosses, people you do business with… at which point, the fun of it drops away.

In an article in Newsweek this week, this problem is referred to as “content collapse,” perhaps the best description of the problem.

“That’s the term used to describe a series of awkward events like when your boss or parents friend you, or someone posts a picture of you that you don’t want your colleagues seeing, or when an elementary school bully from your past starts commenting on your status updates. As these activities cascade, social media research has shown that people begin to shy away from their on line persona and begin aggressively limiting the information that appears about themselves.”

People who crow about how users need to be more “open” in social networking, and need to share their real selves, will feel the bite of doing so and leave. Flame wars, or bosses finding pictures of drunken parties, or opinions that are contrary to what your company’s official position is, are easy examples of things that will drive people away.

Since so many people in one’s life are on Facebook, it becomes very hard to cover yourself so you can enjoy yourself AND keep out of trouble with the people you need to.

Personally, I used to keep two lists of friends on Facebook: “Real Friends” and “Not Real Friends.” The former was for people I am friends with off line, the latter for bosses, clients, business contacts, or just people I don’t normally socialize with. When I told people this, I received a lot of flack for not “getting it,” that social networking was about opening up one’s self completely. Obviously I disagree with this, and anyone who has been burned on line for being themselves would agree.

This trend is also what threatens Facebook. With so many people using it, the average user has some 120 friends on average. That’s a l0t of people to have to worry about tagging you in an inappropriate photo, or calling you a “n00b.” My solution was to unfriend those people who were in the “Not Real Friends” list, and keep them as contacts on Linkedin – a more appropriate network for people I work or do business with. This isn’t the same as abandoning Facebook – which I really can’t do, given the business I’m in – but many are walking away from the network, as they see the problems inherent in having information about them instantly available to everyone they know.

Do you think Facebook users should be able to create an “inner circle” and an “outer circle” of friends? Or do you think everything there should be open, and users take their chances?

Facebook grew largely through the drop in popularity of Myspace, which used to be the most enormous thing on line. We’re only a short time from the next big thing, which is probably already in existence and ready to steal away Facebook’s traffic. If Facebook doesn’t think hard on how to keep the people it now has, it’s going to end up being the next failed thing.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Padding your Twitter Followers isn’t Good for Buisness

Posted on July 21, 2009 by ciaoenrico| 2 Comments

I’ve been crowing this for a year now, but few appear to have listened to me. Now, however, an article appears at MSNBC.com that may help people get the message: High numbers of “followers” doth not a lot of money, make.

Services are always available to help a business shortcut the natural order of collecting leads – from e-mail lists to Twitter accounts, no one wants to invest time in something if that time can be shortened somehow. The result are thousands of social media profiles with thousands of followers, which they how will lead you to believe they are popular and relevant.

The problem remains that since no time was put into meeting all of these people, these followers aren’t of any value. What’s more, the more businesses there are that can brag of large followings, the less a “large following” is going to be worth. It’s like trying to brag that your company has “e-mail.” Well what company doesn’t have e-mail these days!?!

The article focuses more on how these businesses selling Twitter followers end up coming with more bad news than they are worth, and that’s true – with little money to actually be made on Twitter, they are going to be more concerned with their own longevity. That means using the Twitter accounts of their clients to promote themselves, one way or the other. (A good reason not to use padding services, but also not to give out your Twitter log-in to any service that requires it.)

If you are a business owner or marketing manager interested in leveradging Twitter, remember: The game here is not about collecting the most followers, but the best ones. If you have 20 followers, but they are unabashed fanboys of your company or product, then you can get these people to go out into the world as your evangels, singing your praises, promoting your offers by their own word of mouth to their own followers. If each one had, say 500 followers of their own, that’s 2000 followers you are messaging to.

That, my friends, is how Twitter can be made to work for business. People crow about their follow counts when they aren’t marketing savvy enough to know what is important. Following counts can produce large numbers, which can be impressive on paper. But using it correctly, to meet others, impress them, friend them, and getting them to turn on their friends to you, this will increase conversions and sales, if not directly.

In another article from MSNBC, Best Buy used Twitter to ask users what they thought the qualifications for their Marketing Manager should be. This is certainly a smart use of the technology, as it engages the public direclty. It listens to what others are saying about them, answering a question they posed.

So will this sell more Blue-Ray players in the long run? Will this keep Best Buy on the tips of more people’s tounges? Will they gain a respect they didn’t necessarily have with Twits up until now?

Yes. Because this is now social media works.

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Posted in Marketing, Social Networking

Tagged social media marketing, Twitter, twitter follow counts, twitter marketing

Apollo 11 Moon Landing a Hoax? (No, but don’t tell Google Trends!)

Posted on July 20, 2009 by ciaoenrico| Leave a comment

Appologies for taking so long in between posts these days – things have been crazy, between interviews, SEO work I’m doing for friends, and other writing committments. But when I saw that today the #1 search on Google Trends was “Apollo 11 Hoax,” I had to look into it.

You see, today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. While I personally would have thought that would have resulted in a number of searches for “Moon landing,” “Neil Armstrong,” or “Space Exploration,” the majority have to do with conspiracy theories about the landing.

The reason for this is simple: This is what people are interested in. If I had asked yesterday what I thought the greatest number of searches on Google would be for given today’s anniversary, the famous lunar hoax would not have been on the top of my list. This is the reason I always beg others not to guess as to what the most important keyword is for their SEO campaign, but to look at the traffic data for their site.

Assuming you’ve been keeping track of who visits your site and why – and if you haven’t, shame on you! – then you can easily look back at who is finding your site, using which keyword phrase, and when. Simply assuming you got a large bump in traffic because you had a sale or a commercial that went live really teaches you nothing. The keywords people used to get to you, however, show what the majority of people had on their minds. If there’s a cycle, then you know what to expect the next time. In this case, I’m confident that one year from now Google Trends will show the same kinds of interest in the hoax. After all, a good conspiracy theory is a lot more entertaining than watching NASA footage of mankind’s glorious acomplishments in space. Apparently.

Let me finish by saying that whether I believe the Apollo 11 landing happened or not is not important – that is because it actually happened. Independant of whether or not I have a weird conspiracy theory gene or not, we went to the moon, Neil Armstrong was first, and that’s all. When someone has better proof than pouring over the photographs of the landing with a magnifying glass, I’ll listen. But there won’t be, because it isn’t true. Ta da!

SEMs and conspiracy theorists alike always need to look to the data rather than simply wish for what they hope is true.

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Posted in Search

Tagged apollo landing, moon landing a hoax, SEM, seo

Writing Articles for SEO Links

Posted on July 15, 2009 by ciaoenrico| Leave a comment

There are a lot of ways to build quality links to your site – some more effective than others. For the average business’ website, however, article writing for SEO is one of the most immediately effective. These are born out of your own knowledge and experience, and their only cost is your time in writing them. While the article site itself may or may not pass on any valuable PageRank for you, these articles are repurposed by other blogs and websites, and can therefore publish your links as well. If your content is interesting and needed, it’s a great way to get links and exposure.

The process is fairly simple. First, write your article. Most sites will have word limits of roughly 1000, but unless you’re really long winded you won’t go anywhere near that. You definitely shouldn’t anyway, as most readers on line don’t spend that long reading anything, unless you’re giving them a tactical step-by-step on how to either get sex or money. So shoot for 400-500 words.

Then insert the keywords you want to rank for in the article. This is important – DO NOT put the phrases into the article as you are writing it, unless they natually fall into the page that way. If that happens on it’s own, great! But if not, you’ll end up writing gibberish just to work in a phrase you need, which will limit the number of people who read it all the way through, and possibly even keep people from republishing the article somewhere else.

Next you’ll have to find the article sites to place them on. There are a few good ones, though they change their policies often. You may find one site is very giving in the number of links you can insert, only to find the next month that it doesn’t allow any, or perhaps that they want you to pay a fee.

If you come across any site that either won’t let you leave a link or wants money from you, move on. The purpose of this is to get inbound links, not give a site free content. Sometimes a site will allow links in the author’s bio or resource box. I personally stay away from these as well, since blogs and websites aren’t in the habbit of including this information as well. If you find yourself hard up for places to post your work, however, you should experiment and see if you get a return for your effort.

Also you shouldn’t have to pay anyone to place an article, ever. If their site is quality, they can make money off of their traffic. If they need your money, no one is using the site. (There are likely exceptions to this, but it’s true enough to just stay away from anyone wanting your credit card number.)

Look at this article on used motorhomes – the author has writen a conscice piece on the subject, with a relevant link to his site at the bottom. The link is anchored with the phrase, which is what search engines look for when they’re counting a link’s vote for a site’s authority. The site it’s on, ezinearticles.com, only allows a single link after the first three paragraphs, so the author was limited in how many to insert. To get around this, several articles were written for several different keywords, each with their own link similarly placed at the bottom. This creates the opportunity for several links to the page, for several keywords, on a site that has quality traffic, (ie, it’s free,) and doesn’t scrape all links off of posted content.

The one thing this example does that I would object to is that the link, while properly anchored, simply refers back to the site’s main URL. Before writing articles for links, you should have a page on your site optimized for each phrase you are writing to. If the phrase is, “used motorhomes,” then the page being linked to should have that phrase in the page’s meta tags, the page title, and especially in the page content. Marking that phrase with an H1 tag is also very helpful in showing Google how serious this page is for the phrase in question. Be sure to include the phrase in the page’s URL as well, such as: http://www.exampleRVsite.com/used-motorhome.html. Many schools of through currently hold that the URL is one of the most important markers of SEO value for a page.

Another example is this article for client Cruise America. Here, an extra link is inserted, so it comes in just under ezinearticle’s limit. While the “rv inventories” link does not refer to an “rv inventories” page, the camping trailers link does.

Also the content is not specifically about camping trailers, but what people can do with one if they are interested in camping in Arizona – so it appeals to two possible segments, people interestedin camping trailers and people interested in Arizona camping options. The content has a more emotional appeal to the reader’s sense of fun, rather than technical information about a product, so either group is more likely to repost the content. The client this was written for did indeed see a dramatic increase in inbound links when this was initially posted.

Which is a final lesson on articles for building links: Remember that they do not last forever. While other sites will publish your content if they find it, they will also publish other content, pushing your own down the ladder. This means you should construct a content calendar and stick to it, one where you plan on which phrases you will generate articles for, and then submit them, preferably each month. Keep notes on the sites you submit to that are quality, add new ones as you find them, and trim others if they change their policies to the point they’re no longer useful.

You do not need to worry about similar content issues here, as the article site in question is not where you’re hoping to get your link juice from. (You might get some, but they aren’t the end game.) Instead you’re hoping to get your content – and links – in front of as many webmasters’ eyes as you can, and therefore it needs to be in as many places as possible.

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Posted in Search

United Airlines suffers from the Creative Youtube Complaint

Posted on July 10, 2009 by ciaoenrico| Leave a comment

United Airlines is suffering the bad press of a disgruntled passenger who knows how to make an entertaining complaint.

The story of Dave Carroll, the songwriter and musician who had his guitar broken on a United flight, is one in a growing number of disgruntled customers taking their revenge on companies who otherwise won’t listen. United is getting it a lot worse than most, though – the video has been up for four days and already has 1.5 million views and nearly 10,000 comments. Appearing on CNN didn’t hurt it any – and makes United Airlines’ headache even worse.

Obviously, this prompted response from United, and they’re doing all the damage control they can and attempting appeasement of Mr. Carroll in an attempt to stop looking so bad.

I think there’s a larger story here, though. The more this happens, the more companies are going to bend over backwards for customers like this, as we all now have the power to become very squeaky wheels, thanks to the viral nature of social media. There have been stories of a lot less than the video above prompting action from companies. People who simply Tweeted about being done wrong by a company got help that day, and were begging to remove the offending post.

What happens when we all realize that the ONLY way to get a company to care about us is to shoot a video on YouTube? When the company then responds to our demands, will it really make them look better? Or will it re-enforce the idea that the only people who get proper customer service are the ones who can create the biggest stink?

To combat this kind of press, companies need to do more than simply say in a press release, “we’re sorry for the inconvenience,” and give the person who made their complaint a year’s worth of free whatever-it-is they sell. Companies need to make correcting the problem part of their plea for forgiveness. They need to stop thinking about how to please this one person, and start thinking about how to let the world know that they won’t experience the same problem. All of these stories of complaint posts and videos becoming famous focus on one person getting satisfaction, but never on how the 900 other people who didn’t have Flip Video cameras got theirs.

In this case, United did nothing to help Mr. Carroll until he made his complaint famous. Now any apology they make will obviously not be heard. It is apparent they aren’t sorry for what happened, only sorry that their brand is being tarnished. You do what you have to do, but will anyone really believe that United is sorry and it will never happen again? This isn’t a case of a company getting a beating on YouTube, but of a company that has a problem with their product that they aren’t properly addressing. This is why they are getting their shellacking, and this is why their apology won’t work for them in the marketplace.

Apparently, only if you post something to YouTube with a catchy tune. Personally, I’m going to hedge my best and stay away from United until I start seeing videos from customers who fly them and talk about how great it was.

Impossible, you say? Well that’s what Southwest Airlines has been broadcasting for years, and they have the high opinion of travelers to prove it. They show that being a part of the social media landscape isn’t about being aware enough you can respond to people who now hate you. For them, it’s about taking part in the community the entire time, not just because they need to save face.

Also, they don’t tend to break people’s stuff when loading it into the plane.

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Posted in Public Relations, Social Media

Tagged southwest airlines, united airlines, united broke my guitar, viral video