Monthly Archives: August 2009

Can Bing really compete with Google?

Posted on August 31, 2009 | 2 Comments

I’ve been giving Bing a lot of second looks lately, largely because it’s still the biggest story in SEO circles. The cynical way to look at Bing is that they will succeed if Microsoft pays out enough in advertising for the site – and in my experience, cynical opinions are usually right. My other cynical opinion on this is that SEO firms will immediately push their Bing-optimizing services, even though the jury’s still out on whether you need to worry, and there’s still so little information on what Bing looks for in a web site.

But so what? We can at least assume Bing will be with us for a few years to come, between Microsoft’s deep pockets and their acquisition of Yahoo!’s search platform. But Ask.com has been around for years and years, and they can hardly be called, “competitive” with Google just for that. If Bing is going to become something you need to worry about for your SEO campaign, Google is going to need to screw up badly first.

Consider how people perform searches on engines that aren’t Google. These happen in three ways:

1. People are getting their e-mail or checking news on a competitor’s site, and perform a search from that page.

In other words, Google is almost always people’s first choice for search. Even if Bing puts together their 25% block of the search market through their deal with Yahoo!, a lot of that 25% of users will still be Google users first. Granted, Yahoo! is still the most popular web mail service, so there will still be a lot of first-run Bing searchers coming from there. But Gmail is the second most widely used, and Yahoo! is in mid-tailspin as a company, or they wouldn’t have ever made this deal with Microsoft. So it is in Bing’s best interest that Yahoo! Mail not fall apart the way the rest of Yahoo! is. If it does, and people leave it in droves, they’ll go to Gmail, and that will shrink that 25% of searchers further.

2. People aren’t happy with the results they get on Google, so they try a competitor.

Of course, people by and large aren’t unhappy with Google results. Bing does find results differently from Google – they appear to be more interested in the exact search phrase entered, rather than finding sites that seem relevant to the query. (In other words, it gives you what you say you want to find, rather than assume what you want to find.) If people come to find this more relevant to what they wanted than the Google method, they could pull ahead. Still, this will take a level of sensitivity from search engine users they aren’t normally credited with. The average searcher doesn’t actively compare results, they just keep looking until they’ve found what they’re looking for. With Google as the predominant first choice, it is still their game to lose.

3. People are curious about some new “development” they’ve read about, and give the competitor a try.

While Bing is still talking a lot about being a “decision engine,” no one is seeing any proof of this – whatever it may mean. Bing had a huge spike in traffic during it’s launch, which you’d expect from all the press that generated. That has leveled off, however, suggesting people aren’t sticking with Bing because it isn’t better. If they were, they would still be increasing in unique visitors – the people who now use them exclusively, and the people still visiting them for the first time because of the press. If Bing was really magnificently better than Google, the launch would have been the time to prove it.

Bing is simply going to have to do more than improve their search algorithm if they want to compete with Google. Proving their results are “better” won’t work, since results from both are strikingly similar. If you want to give it a shot, go to BlindSearch and try your luck. This site gives you results from Google, Bing and Yahoo, without telling you which is which. Then it asks you which source you think had the best results. Only then do you find out which you thought was best. So far, the results show Google leads, but only by a little – proving my own point, that they’re all close enough no one can really spot the difference.

Search results would have to be pretty bad – as in, MSN bad – for the average user to notice a difference. Bing does not bring drastic enough a difference to search for it to become a breakout hit with users. This is exactly why Google was a breakout hit: More relevant results delivered faster than what was available at the time.

If there is a Google-killer on the horizon – and certainly there will be one – it will come from someone who has developed a radically different and better way of finding information on the web.

That isn’t Bing, and that’s why it will remain second in search. (Unless, as I say, Google manages to really screw things up.)

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Posted in Search

Ciaoenrico’s Internet Marketing Slow Jam

Posted on August 28, 2009 | 2 Comments

Friday’s are crap days to post to a blog. The weekend’s coming up, plans are being made, work is getting ignored as fast as it can be so everyone can get out of the office… it’s the worst time to try and impart kernels of wisdom.

So I’m going to take a moment to be totally self-involved. If Andy Rooney can make it work – which is questionable, I know – then I can too. So here’s just a few things I want to get off my chest. Play the music first…

Astrud Gilberto – Goodbye Sadness (Tristeza)

Remember, Internet marketing is supposed to be fun. If you’re not having fun, you’re no fun to hear from.

Social media’s a lot more fun if you don’t think of it as being like high school.

Link marketing can be fun too. If you play your cards right, and you get 20 super high quality inbound links in a month, it’s a bigger high than finishing Grand Theft Auto will ever be – and a lot more productive.

Don’t spend every waking hour bookmarking articles, tweeting, blogging and podcasting. Go outside, go for a bike ride, play with your dog, make love to your significant other… if you don’t recharge the batteries, you won’t have any personality to share with anyone.

Oh, and when you do go outside, leave your Flip Video camera where it is. Sometimes it’s better if life isn’t always captured. You’ll thank me later.

Stop trying to get everyone you meet to join your favorite online website. It’s a drag.

Ditto on starting Linkedin Groups to pad out your resume. Weaksauce.

People weren’t put on this Earth to buy products from you. Sometimes they will, and sometimes they’ll put it off. If someone abandons their shopping cart, maybe ask once, but then leave them alone.

Always try to give people some kind of benefit for coming to your site. They’ll appreciate good advice or a swanky download a lot more than a landing page full of copy.

Stop working on an iPhone app just to score some cash. It’s a get-rich-quick scheme, and it looks douchey.

If the marketing strategy you’re using isn’t cutting it, stop what you’re doing and try something else. Maybe it does look bad to jump ship on an idea you thought was good – but it looks worse when you stay the course and drive the ship over a waterfall.

Avoid metaphors involving water craft.

I still maintain, people do not want you Tweeting positive self-help-like truisms about how to have a happy life. One or two are fine, but if you do it all the time people will ignore you. It’s just motivational speaking spam.

Write someone  a letter, on paper, with a pencil. Stick a stamp on it and mail it to someone. E-mails are handy, but letters are still the ultimate personal touch.

And remember, Internet marketing is supposed to be fun.

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Posted in Advertising, Blogging, Facebook, Interactive Marketing, Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Search, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Uncategorized, Viral Content

Tagged

Link Marketing Tactic: Q&A Sites

Posted on August 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

When building SEO links for a site, a particular favorite tactic for me is the Q&A site – or “Answers” sites. Yahoo! Answers is probably the most recognizable example of this, though Linkedin Answers is also rather popular these days. These are sites where a user asks a question of the community, and anyone who has a relevant answer can chime in to help. From these a best answer is chosen – either by the person who asked, or by the rest of the community.

Answering questions may require you to cite the source for your answer, which could include a blog post on your own site. Perhaps you’ve addressed the issue in the past, or you created a post as a result of reading this question. Either way, you can use this as an opportunity to site yourself – both giving yourself a quality link, and also establishing yourself as an expert on the type of question that was asked. The link is good to have – but the added respect of being “in the know” on a subject, particularly one related to your business, is almost as good itself.

Let’s say you sell nutritional cleansing products – people may not be asking about “nutritional cleansing products” themselves, but may be asking things like, “I work out – is there a food supplement that will help me burn fat?” or “I feel sleepy all the time, but I sleep all the time. What’s happening?” Either question relates to a problem the nutritional supplements you sell could solve. If you provide answers to these users explaining how they need a specific supplement, you have an opportunity to sell your product’s benefits. What’s more, you aren’t just spewing ad copy to someone who wasn’t asking for it. By definition, this person is asking for your input.

What’s more, since the question and all of its answers will live on the site indefinitely, people who have the same question or problem can find this question, and your answer, indefinitely. If the page is indexed by a search engine, someone can do a search for, “work out food supplement burn fat” and potentially find their way to that first question. If the person asking decided your answer was the most constructive, then what you write will now be of benefit to the person who did the search too.

So answering questions will not only get you a link, but attract a variety of potential customers, all looking for help one way or the other.

There are two things you need to keep in mind when you are going to employ a Q&A link marketing tactic:

Make sure the Q&A site’s links are SEO friendly. This is really only important if you’re in it to increase your web site’s search presence. If you only care about finding relevant questions and building your authority on a subject, there is a wealth of sites you can peruse for questions.

However, if you are in this for links, you need to be sure the ones you create don’t have “nofollow” or “noindex” attributes. Webmasters will often put these on links to keep out spammers, or to retain their own site’s PageRank.

Below are the Q&A sites I’ve found that allow for SEO friendly links:

Unique Visitors External SEO links Clickable links
http://wiki.answers.com 19,219,385 Yes Yes
http://yedda.com/ * 867,564 Yes Yes
http://www.allexperts.com/ 232,622 Yes Yes
http://www.minti.com/questions-and-answers 92,431 Yes Yes

*Fair warning – I have had problems getting this page to work in the past.

Choose sites with a high amount of traffic. Yahoo! Answers made this kind of on line interaction very popular a few years ago, and at that time several more sites cropped up to get some of that Y! Answers magic to rub off on them. The fad has died down quite a bit since then, so while a few sites still have a good number of people asking questions, a lot more have been largely abandoned. Even if you do manage to find a relevant question on one of these sites, it’s likely no one will ever see it. (Though at least you know you have a good chance of giving the best answer – if only because there probably won’t be any other answers to choose from.)

Below are the top 5 Q&A sites for traffic:

Unique Visitors External SEO links Clickable links
http://answers.yahoo.com/ 36,098,872 No Yes
http://wiki.answers.com/ 19,219,385 Yes Yes
http://www.linkedin.com/answers 13,129,746 No Yes
http://www.answers.com/ 10,211,273 No No
http://www.mahalo.com/answers/ 3,994,889 No Yes

Make sure you are able to post a link. This is important – and I leave it for last so I can go off on it. If you are smart someone on a Q&A page, but you cannot in any way link back to your site, you haven’t done anything to further your marketing goals. It is good to be able to help someone, but even the reputation you could build on another site for knowing what you’re talking about won’t help you in any way if they can’t find their way to your blog or website and learn more.

Therefore, I suggest you steer clear of these three sites:

http://www.answers.com/

http://www.askmehelpdesk.com/

http://able2know.org/

Granted, www.answers.com gets a lot of traffic, but when you try to put a URL into an answer it only shows up as text. This won’t be followed by a search spider, and a user is far less likely to copy and paste it into their browser to visit your page. You can leave a link in your profile, but that link is also a nofollow, and users aren’t likely to leave the intended experience of the site – namely, browsing through questions and answers – in order to view your profile. Even if you become the de facto expert in your field, your profile link isn’t very noticeable on this site.

There are a number of other Q&A sites out there, mind you – I didn’t want to put out the entire list of the ones I researched, because frankly a lot of them aren’t worth your time. However, if you come across a new one, test it to see if it would be good to include in your Q&A campaign. Here’s what you do:

1)      Search the questions with, “best website for.” There should be a few questions with this phrase in it, and it demands an answer with a URL in it. If the ones you find can’t be clicked, you won’t be able to leave any real links either.

2)      If the answer you found in step one contains a clickable link, look at the source code to see if the link is “noindex, nofollow” or not.

3)      Check the site on Compete.com for traffic information.

I hope this helps you to get started on answering people’s questions while helping yourself to a great source of inbound links. Unlike a lot of other link marketing techniques which are a little disgusting in their spaminess, this is one that, if done right, will benefit other users as well.

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Posted in Search

Iterasi’s PositivePress – Simple Media Reporting

Posted on August 25, 2009 | 1 Comment

Today I got an e-mail from bookmarking site Iterasi asking me to give their PositivePress a trial run. PositivePress is a reporting suite that pulls pages containing the keywords you want to monitor – not unlike Google Alerts or Radian6, two reporting mechanisms that are extremely different. While Google Alerts tends to offer up a scant number of mentions, Radian6 can choke you to death with information.

The short version here is that so far I love PositivePress. If you are keeping tabs on what others are saying about your company or brand, this is an easy, low-cost solution with great reporting features. It doesn’t just check social media sites, but anything with a feed where someone can be talking about you.

If you’re not monitoring for your brand or company, however, you really are playing with a loaded gun. I’ll go forward with this assuming you the reader understand the reasons for keeping up on what people are saying about you in news, forums, blogs and micro-blogs, and that anyone else lacks a sense of self-preservation.

Reporting

The first reason I like PositivePress so much (and this comes in no particular order) is that it can generate reports for me, rather than giving me a pile of raw data to sift through so I can create one myself, (Radian6,) or tease me each day with four or five mentions that give me an all-too incomplete picture of what was actually said about the brand I’m monitoring. (Google Alerts.)

The reports can be branded by the company or agency using it, which is standard fare for these kinds of products. If you do end up using it for your company or agency, this will save you a LOT of time. Since hacking through reams and reams of mentions and producing a report can take several of your month’s billable hours, it’s a good consideration to keep in mind.

What’s more – and I think this is the really cool part – instead of getting thousands of lines representing these mentions, you get a copy of the actual page that PositivePress found. You can save these for later viewing, and include them in reports you send. This means you can call out exceptionally good or exceptionally bad mentions. It’s the kind of thing you would want for daily monitoring of  a brand, since you could not only spot the fire early, you could get your organization to act on it quickly.

Iterasi PositivePress

Multiple Sources

Another nice thing about this reporting suite is that you create the sources you are checking from. (Remember, I’m going out of order here.) There are several built in feeds you can use to check for your brand’s mention: Digg, Twitter, Yahoo News, Google News, Techcrunch, Technorati, etc. You can also add in specific feeds.

For my testing, I checked for mentions of MindTouch, a software development company known for it’s open source collaboration software Deki. So if I want to find mentions of their brand, I need to keep abreast of mentions on more niche sites. I can easily add in the RSS feeds from Slashdot or ZDNet and see what they are saying about them. If Technorati or Bing don’t pick up on these threads, I know I will still get the mentions. It means you need to be up on these smaller sites that relate to the company you’re working with, but frankly, if you can’t be bothered to find those, you really have bigger problems.

Readability

PositivePress doesn’t have a team of people combing through your results for you, like a Spiral16 would. (It would be nice, but frankly that’s why Spiral16 costs what it does.) So like any other reporting solution, you need to read through the findings yourself to determine if it’s good, bad, indifferent, or wrong. The way the pages are saved, however, means you don’t need to jump from page to page within your browser – which is a minor irritant, but a major waste of time. You can convert the pages to straight text as well, so you can quickly find the mention, make a judgement call, and move on.

Usability

Something else to love about this system is it’s ease of use. The heftier reporting suites often have a steep learning curve – this means you have one or two people in your company who know how to use them well, and many other people simply dependent on them to put the information together. PositivePress sets up in about ten minutes, and finding what you need is clearly laid out for you – reports, feeds, statistics, etc.

And OHHHHH I like that! It is vaguely insulting to me that so many of these programs do great things, but require so much investigation and even classes to use them right. This is because engineers were given the keys to the design studio, and created something engineers could easily navigate – unlike everyone else. If only a few people are able to use the program, you’re at the mercy of those few people. Their perceptions of what is important to the brand, the company or it’s market may not be as good as their ability to learn an arcane and indifferent program interface.

In short, this is a pretty easy to use, utilitarian, well-designed buzz reporting tool. The lowest cost plan is $99 a month, but you can get a free month to test it out first. I suggest you give it a shot – you could put together a lot of this information yourself, but the ease of use and reporting features are worth it.

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Posted in Public Relations, Social Media

Responding to Negative Blog Posts

Posted on August 23, 2009 | 2 Comments

I have a secret to let you in on: I am not very charming.

I’m cynical, which to some sounds pessimistic – though to me it’s just critical thinking at work. At times it comes out sounding harsher than it should, which often bothers me, because I have such distaste for people who slag others and then defend themselves with a weak, “I’m just telling it like it is.” So when I get feedback about posts that come from this, I take it fairly seriously.

Last week I wrote a review of 12seconds.tv, a site that, I feel, has great potential, but has not realized it yet. I laid out some of my observations about why I felt the site was not as big as it could be – and most of those observations were negative.

I received responses from two of the people at 12seconds, and I think they exemplify how one should react to a negative post when it is about their company. If you find that someone is talking about your product or company in a similar manner, you could learn a lot from how they reacted.

The short version: Listen to what others are saying about you, respond to negative press quickly and personably, and be open to hearing from anyone who might read it later on. This is what 12seconds did, and I applaud them for it.

First, they found the post about themselves. This is a great example of the power of listening to social media. Anyone at any time of day could be talking about your company. How would you find out about it? Would you wait until someone told you their kid, who’s big on all this Internet stuff, found an article about you saying you rip people off, or make faulty products, or worse?

That could be weeks too late. In the meantime thousands of people could have come across that post and made permanent decisions about you. For example, I am a huge fan of the Fresh and Easy stores. I told my Mother about them, but she had read a negative review about them and decided to stay away. With her help I found the review, and it was a blog post that was three years old, and actually about their British parent company, Tesco. Despite all of the other positive press they may have gotten in that time, this one post made her mind up for her.

Second, getting back to 12seconds, neither response was an angry retort. Instead they were eager to share with me their differing opinions, and more importantly correct me where I was wrong. (Where I had said it wasn’t possible to embed their video, it turned out it simply didn’t work well with WordPress.) As a result I did append the post.

If someone blogged about your company and said something that wasn’t just negative but wrong, do you think you would get the same response by posting an angry comment on their blog? In most cases venting on the author will only make matters worse. They could keep your comment from getting posted at all, or worse, they could get their cockles up and just spew back at you. Then you’d be in a flame war with someone who’s only important because they created a blog account.

Also it leaves a far worse impression of your company to slam people than it does to calmly correct them when they misstep, and respectfully disagree with their differing opinions. Remember, when you print something on the Internet, it can last a good long time. While it may feel satisfying to lash out at a critic, doing so could follow you and your company indefinitely.

Finally, both responses posted an e-mail address where I – or anyone who reads the post – can get in touch with them directly. Rather than simply offer their side of the story, they went that further step to offer their time to anyone with similar comments or complaints.

Certainly responding to negative blog comments is important to show your side of the story. Asking people to contact you directly shows you are equally interested in helping people have the best experience possible with your product. The people at 12seconds did not need to offer this to me or the people who found (and will find) that post. I definitely commend them for their openness.

So always listen for mentions of your brand, and be ready to react when you find something negative or incorrect.

When you do, remember that you are not going to battle. Your job is not to change the author’s mind, but to get your side of the story out. Most bloggers are reasonable people and will be more than willing to let you respond to their readers. Posts like that can be turned into opportunities for you, if you play it right.

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Posted in Blogging, Public Relations

Tagged , , , ,

SMAZ 2009

Posted on August 20, 2009 | 2 Comments

Today was the Social Media Arizona event in Tempe, the first of what is planned to be an annual meeting of social media marketers. It was great to hear from so many people with so much expertise in the burgeoning field of SMM – and I’m not going to lie to you, it was even better to hear people say things I’ve been telling people for the last couple of years. No need for me to go into that, that’s just my own, private smile fodder.

But I really want to thank Fred von Graf for putting on this whole show. Looking beyond things like providing a space, lunch, and the minutae that go into an event like this, Fred pulled together a wide variety of speakers who can be called, “social media experts” without having to feel embarrassed about it. And coming from me, that’s something. Usually whenever I hear someone refer to themselves as “social media experts,” I go looking for my rifle. So I was definitely, unquestionably impressed with the variety of expertise displayed on the two stages at the Madcap Theaters.

Perhaps the most useful information I got – though frankly, there was a lot I didn’t know – had to do with analytics for social media. That conversation about ROI always comes up, and there’s just no way I can ever tell a client, “it’s a revolution you have to be part of, but there’s no way to track how much money is in it for you. Sorry!” That’s the baleful consensus among many of the so-called “experts,” and it’s flat out goofy.

Jason Baer’s presentation had the brilliant piece of wisdom that there are many different kinds of returns one can get from social media – but you have to decide which two or three will be the most important for the campaign. You decide what outcome is the most desirable, pick those points to follow and measure, then build a strategy around making that happen. Then, and only then, does one start looking at the tools to use to make that strategy work. I wanted to squeak with glee, but I’m a very manly looking man, so that would have looked very weird.

You see, the number of marketing managers who believe every brand should be on Twitter and Facebook – for no other good reason than everyone’s on Twitter and Facebook – is staggering.

Another eye-opening moment came from Elizabeth Hannan’s presentation on, “Growing Online Communities and Measuring Success.” In it, she refered to reporting solutions you build in your garage. (I know I have the wording on her metaphor wrong, but my phone died early and I couldn’t tweet it to myself.) In other words, creating reporting for a campaign based on several sources, rather than relying on a single reporting mechanism like Radian6. Radian6 can provide a great deal of information, but I know from working with it how rigid its reports can be. Instead, using a mix of Twitter Search, Google Reader, Square Space, customized RSS feeds, etc, one can get a clear picture of what one needs to see, not what a single reporting mechanism is able to show you.

Finally I have to mention Pam Slim, who is probably one of the best presenters I have ever seen. She has confidence in what she is saying and her ability to say it. This translates into a relaxed and enjoyable presentation that made me want to hear more. Having seen more than a few of these kinds of presentations, I know how rare that is.

Beyond that, she had great advice on personalizing a brand, something many companies seem incapable of doing, and in some cases have no interest in doing. I have often ranted about marketers who go to social networks posting nothing but, “buy my product now!” four times a day. Sometimes they don’t even change the text from one post to the next. This obviously doesn’t work.

Instead, allowing individuals to be individuals garners trust with the people reading these posts. Her advice was to add “spice” to social media posts, the kind that comes from each individual. Some might have a dry sense of humor, some might have harrowing stories to share. Whatever that “spice” is, it makes these communications more real, more human.

I only left SMAZ a short while ago, so frankly my head is still swimming with everything I learnede. I will definitely plan on attending next year’s event. I will also update this post with slide presentations and videos once they are available.

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Posted in Social Media, Social Networking, Uncategorized

Twitter is Pointless – Millions get Pissed

Posted on August 19, 2009 | Leave a comment

The Pear Research study on Twitter will be remembered as the, “Pointless Babble” controversy.

The story was making the rounds all day yesterday: The research firm conducted a poll of Twitter posts during specific times, then qualified each post. They determined that 40% of what is posted is, “useless babble,” among other findings. (Read their white paper here.) Today, the news reports on this story are talking about the backlash of blog posts and Tweets from angry Twitter users, and how Pear Research doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Here are a couple of things to consider in all of this:

No one ever heard of Pear Research until this story. I have no doubt the study is gaining all of this attention because this recently unknown research company put out a report with language designed to enflame readers. At least I hope so – because the alternative is that this research company put out a report on a major social media player, and had utterly no idea how the social media community would react to it. The former suggests a cunning media savvy, the latter suggests a head buried firmly in a patch of sand. Pear Research, if the latter is the one that’s true, lie about it.

A lot of Tweets are “Useless Babble.” If they call it at 40%, fine – but we’ve all known for years that Twitter was a place for people to share anything quickly, so it stands to reason that a lot of it is going to be of little consequence. And why shouldn’t it be? This isn’t a Guttenburg press we’re tinkering around with, it’s a free service that allows us to post 140 characters of whatever we want. In fact…

A lot of Social Media is “Useless Babble.” I put it to you that all of social networking has this level of nonsense going on. Certainly I’ve never heard great kernals of knowledge coming from Myspace or Facebook profiles. That’s because all of these sites represent us, in the act of living. In the same way, our phone conversations and e-mails and letters (for those of us who still know how to send those,) are all chocked full of nonsense that are only important to the writer, and sometimes the intended reader.

It’s just social media, folks – it’s not love.

There’s nothing wrong wtih, “Useless Babble.” I would have been more concerned if 40% of tweets were, “useless gibberish” than “useless babble.” Reading that someone I’m following is, “making a sandwich” is certainly more engaging than, “nicto barflafla nord floon!” So count your blessings.

Furthermore, why should every post be manna handed down from the Gods, spoken from the lips of the Oracle at Delphi? With 6 million unique monthly visitors, nobody has anything important enough to say that would constitute “useful wisdom.” Frankly, we’ve had access to that kind of information on numerous web sites for years now. If that kind of access to information had been cutting it for everyone, we would never have taken to social media the way we have. We all wanted something else.

I put it to you, Pear – may I call you Pear? – that Twitter is indeed a bastion of useless babble, and that it is supposed to be. That you do not grasp the value of just blowing off steam in text form is not a problem for me, but does make me wonder if you similarly do not see the value of other pointless pursuits, like naps, reading fluff magazines, or eating chocolate. None of these things have motivated value or should be the center of anyone’s life. But they’re fun, and that makes them good. The same is true of some – or even a lot – of useless babble.

All of social media is whatever you make of it, and whatever you bring to it. Just as I defend the useless moments of Twitter, I also feel it has a great deal of use in exchanging important information, or keeping communication lines open with friends, colleagues, clients…  and I’m glad you caught on to that kind of use as well, Pear. If you say the useless part is 40%, fine.

However, if you also feel that, as you put it, “Twitter is still loaded with lots of babbling that not many of have time for,” (your syntax error, BTW – second to last sentence,) then I fear you just don’t understand what the social networking revolution is, and frankly I wouldn’t be bragging about that quite so loudly.

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Posted in Social Media, Twitter

5 Reasons 12seconds.tv Isn’t Popular

Posted on August 18, 2009 | 6 Comments

I’ve been using the site 12seconds.tv a bit these days, now that I have a webcam on my computer. It’s funny, the site has a great hook: Leave bite-sized posts, like you do on Twitter only with video instead of text, and you’re done.

Sounds like a natural, doesn’t it? People like video, hate reading, and it’s short, like Twitter and Facebook wall posts. What’s not to love here? Why isn’t this place just blowing up with people? It certainly got a lot of press back when it was launched. It just never took off. And I think I know why.

1. People are self-conscious. I think the main reason 12seconds.tv hasn’t taken off the way it should have is most people don’t like the way they look on camera. And the way a desktop cam makes anyone look, I don’t blame them. I myself am incredibly attractive – but you wouldn’t know it by viewing one of my 12seconds.tv posts. Here let me show you.

Oh, wait…

2. I can’t show you my 12seconds.tv posts.

Update: I have been contacted by people at 12seconds.tv, as you can read in the comments below. As I figured, there was a bit more to their embedding code than simply copying and pasting it in – you must select the, “Switch to non iFrame embed for MySpace” link above the embedding code. While neither code given works for me on WordPress or Livejournal, the two platforms I use most, it does work on Tumblr and Blogger. In short, their embedding code does work, unless it doesn’t.

12erator: What I Looked Like As a Baby on 12seconds.tv

12erator: What I Looked Like As a Baby on 12seconds.tv

This is how WordPress views both versions of code. Unfortunately, either way, it does not post. As I mentioned in the earlier version of this, I am sure there is a way to make this work – but if it doesn’t work easily and the first time out, people won’t bother. This goes back to my initial point: If this can’t be easily done with 12seconds, but can with other video services, people will use those other services instead.

3. I can only post 12 seconds worth of video. I know this is the site’s whole reason for being, but it really is annoying to only get 12 seconds with which to share something. To help users get around the problem of finding something to say, 12seconds offers random questions for users to answer. I’ll admit, this isn’t a bad idea, it does help. And certainly it’s something Twitter doesn’t do: Give you ideas for posting something. Then again, Twitter doesn’t need to give users ideas for posts.

The time limit becomes really annoying if you do find something worth sharing. There are many videos on the site recorded with someone’s iPhone where the clip cuts off in the middle. So even if you do manage to find something good to share, it had better not run an epic length of 13 seconds.

4. Follower Syncing with Twitter. This is something you can shut off in the settings, but I’m going to bitch about it anyway. When you connect your Twitter account to 12seconds so you can cross post videos once you’ve recorded them, 12seconds will also offer to check your Twitter contacts to see who else is on the site. Fair enough, that’s pretty standard stuff these days.

A few days later, I noticed that a lot of the people I was connected to on 12seconds were almost all inactive on the site – some had never even posted a first video. (This is what led me to this post, by the way. A lot of my Tweets are pretty hip cats, and if this was something worth doing, they really would have been doing it by now.) So I unfollow all of them. And wouldn’t you know it, I’m following them all again the next day. Why would 12seconds want to auto sync all of my followers? I understand checking once, but doing it constantly is a further reminder that Twitter has an active community (because they know I keep gaining friends there) and 12seconds has next to none. (Or else they wouldn’t need to keep checking.)

5. None of us are that interesting. Loren Feldman of 1938 Media is about the funniest “Internet Celebrity” out there, and his videos with puppets are hysterical. If blogging, Mob Wars, RSS feeds or Shel Israel actually were mainstream, he would be working for Saturday Night Live right now. He is the only person I can think of who could regularly post anything I would want to see.

After him there’s the rest of us, and we aren’t very funny. Or interesting. Less so since roughly 90% of us post from these God-awful webcams. Not that the other 10% posting from their iPhones are sharing anything of much value either.

To be fair, the problem of not being terribly interesting or entertaining goes beyond 12seconds. YouTube currently warehouses thousands of terabytes of stupid. There are one or two things on there worth catching, but each one sits upon a large pile of unwatchable footage. Without any popularity, 12seconds doesn’t have any community, no mass of people trying and failing, only to finally post something really good and worth sharing.

So, despite having solid technology and a good premise, I don’t know that anything can be done to make this site more interesting to the average “life streamer.” I honestly congratulate them for openly appealing to the short attention span in all of us, but somehow the 140 character limitation of text posting doesn’t work the same way with video.

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Posted in Social Media, Viral Content

The truth about meta tags and SEO

Posted on August 17, 2009 | 4 Comments

There are a lot of myths about what optimizations will help your page rank well in search. One of the more widespread ones is that your page should be chocked full of a specific keyword. If you are selling “golf bags,” then “golf bags” should be included ad nauseum in your page content, your URL, the anchor text of your inbound links, and the meta tags of your page.

There’s something to be said for most of this, except for that last one – meta tags.

Including keywords in the meta tags of your page does not work. This was called “keyword stuffing” back in the day. This was when you overloaded your meta tags or your page content with the same keyword in order to prove to a search spider you were really all about that phrase.

It is also the reason Google came along and said the quality of the inbound links would determine placement, not keywords on the page. The reason is easy to see: Changing the number of occurrences of a keyword in a page is easy. Anyone can do it. Therefore, it can’t be that valuable a measure of a page’s worth. If I only need to repeat “golf bags” over and over in the meta data to get top placement in Google, why wouldn’t I?

Having your keyword in your meta title isn’t a bad thing, but it isn’t going to turn the tide for you. Granted, many sites with top rankings for keywords do have that keyword in their title. Try a search for golf bags, for instance, and you’ll find most of the pages have that in their title. However, these businesses also have golf bags in the name of their company, or their URL itself. As such, most of the links they have coming to them use the phrase golf bags. If a number of golf sites link to “Todd’s Emporium of Golf Bags,” which has the URL http://www.toddsgolfbags.com, everything about that link says that site is all about golf bags. The anchor text likely has the business name in it. Also, if the keyword is in the URL, it shows that business doesn’t dabble in golf bags – it is ALL ABOUT golf bags.

Strangely, the number one result for golf bags as I run that search is for ogio.com – a site built in Flash, which is usually search engine poison. If you look at the number of inbound links they receive, however, you’ll see why they’re #1. While they do include meta keywords, I’m willing to bet the +27000 inbound links the site receives are what does the heavy lifting.

Meta descriptions are another matter. They do not help your rankings any more than the meta titles, but they are often used by Google to describe the page in their listings. As such, you can rewrite these periodically to promote an upcoming sale, event, or simply new content. The fact that you are updating them will even help for search, as it shows the content is not stagnant.

Finally, meta keywords, which I mentioned earlier, are a complete waste of time. Seriously. You should not waste time finding the right six or seven keywords to include in pages, especially if that keyword doesn’t show up anywhere on your page.

Go back to golf bags. If you stuff, “golf bags,” “golf gear,” “golf clubs,” and “golf apparel” onto your page, and only “golf bags shows up anywhere in the content of the page, you could have your rankings suffer for the other three phrases. The meta descriptions are there to help search spiders understand what your page is about going in – if you have included phrases that aren’t in the content, they know you are actively trying to mislead them. Conversely, if you only include phrases that are in your content, you won’t rank better. Only the content itself and, of course, the links you get from other sources, will help you there.

So why do sites still include this information if it’s of no value? It’s hard to say. Some might not know that the gig is up for this tactic. Others may need to justify the amount of time it takes them to do their SEO work. After all, the O does stand for “optimization.” If they can’t point to some real optimizations for a web page, they must not be doing their jobs.

Don’t get me wrong, if you want to rank for “golf bags,” that phrase should turn up on the page itself – the thing is, it will. “Golf bags” is going to be in the content of a page about golf bags. If it turns up in the page’s URL, even better. (“www.golfsmith.com/ps/browse/golfbags-travel” is the third ranking phrase on Google for the phrase.) Juggling minutiae about meta keyword placement or the number of times the page should turn up in every 100 words of copy just isn’t worth the effort that goes into it.

When you optimize your site, or hire someone else to do it for you, be sure that the majority of your time is not spent on updating these elements that have little value to search engines. Instead try to spend more time on building relationships with other sites so they link back to you, or optimizing press releases, or in generating content that will catch the eye of interested readers, who will build their own links to your site.

Then you will get your rankings, your traffic, and your money.

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Posted in Search

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For Social Networks, Usability Trumps Marketing

Posted on August 13, 2009 | 3 Comments

Did you ever notice there are a few social media sites that are HUGE, and a bunch of others that aren’t? Even if the bunch of not-huge sites have a great idea, they only seem to catch on with the technically advanced or complete social media geeks. Why is that?

It would certainly be nice if some of the lesser known sites really were huge. Ustream.tv would be a great place for people to video conference with friends, or create their own Internet shows, if only there were a lot more people on there viewing. That’s what people use YouTube for, but since Ustream.tv is, by definition, a streaming site, you can communicate immediately with your audience, while you can’t on YouTube. But in this example, YouTube wins because they have the largest user base, even if they don’t have the best technology or idea.

I think at least part of the problem is that these social media sites are vetted by us social media geeks and insiders. We know what we like, and we may even have a grasp on what the average non-tech geek user might like. However we also have experience enough to figure our way through a bad interface if we have to.

The aforementioned Ustream.tv interface, frankly, sucks. Badly. I can negotiate it, and you may be able to as well, but my parents can’t; my sister can’t; my girlfriend can’t. None of these people are “techies,” they simply go with what is easiest to use.

This is exactly why the big sites all have the easiest interfaces:

None of these sites take more than a couple of minutes to set up and post to, and the learning curve is non-existent. My non-technical background family can easily jump on any one of these sites and get posting, which means these sites have huge numbers of users – not because they have great marketing campaigns, but because anyone who tries them out will continue to use them, since there’s nothing to scare them off.

For sites like Twitter, where the functionality is pretty straightforward, there are a lot of competing sites that can do the same thing. Twitter is the leader only because they were first, so it is what the most people use. It’s competitors have found their own fans, however, so the simple, easy-to-use clones will still be popular with their own dedicated fans.

Other sites are destined to be smaller, but the niche attraction they have means smaller is probably better. Dopplr is a travel-focused site, and since people travel less often than they have something to tweet, the average number of posts is going to be smaller.

Last.fm is a network for sharing and listening to music, which people do more often than travel, but less often than, again, they have minutiae to share. However, their interface is confusing to the newcomer, so again the casual user will either turn away or not use it very often.

And the number of sites that are just confusing and difficult to use are legion. I won’t bother listing all of them, but if you go hunting for new sites on Wakoopa, I’m sure you’ll find a few on your own. There are literally hundreds of new social networks popping up all over the place these days, and I don’t think they will last long because they did not take this into account. They are pretty sites, but they aren’t easily accessed, and you need to read the “about us” to figure out why you’re there.

The moral of the story here is that a great marketing campaign for your social network isn’t what will make or break you. If it is easy to grasp why people should be doing what they are doing, and it is easy for them to do it, then you can gain a following.

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Posted in Marketing, Social Networking

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