Monthly Archives: August 2009

Open Letter to Twitter: Stop it with that API

Posted on August 13, 2009 | Leave a comment

Dear Twitter,

How have you been? I wanted to take some time out to write to you, and tell you what a huge fan I’ve been of your site. There are a lot of other pretenders to your throne, but we all know you’re the king of the microblogs.

Which is kind of why I needed to get in touch with you. There comes a time in everyone’s life when they need a bit of tough love, and this is, unfortunately, one of those times.

For a while now, I’ve been seeing a number of posts in my Twitter river that look like this:

Twitter API

It’s that “from API” bit that I need to talk to you about. Now, I know you created the Twitter API with the best of intentions. It’s actually quite brilliant of you to have done this for developers, so Twitter can interact with other websites and applications.

But some serious jerks have gotten a hold of it, and the result is posts like the one above. A lot of posts like the one above. People who signed up for affiliate marketing programs, like, five minutes ago are now blasting you with hundreds of messages about “getting 1000s of Twitter followers now!” or “Get 1000s of backlinks now!” These people are spamming you about as hard as they can, all day and all night. They don’t take part in any conversations, and they don’t offer any benefit. They simply let some website somewhere else have access to their accounts.

I know part of the issue is deciding just what is a pernicious use of an auto-posting program. After all, you can’t read all of them – no one can. Actually, no one does, which really makes me wonder why all these jokers bother in the first place, but that’s neither here nor there.

I think I have a solution, and I am really hoping that you will either go with these, or think up some better ones to keep these horrible, horrible people from further ruining you.

  1. Site Banning I know this sounds drastic, but certainly if enough people report sites that are constantly the ammunition of so many spam offensives, you can create a list of sites for which links cannot be sent to. I don’t believe it would take a great deal of coding to examine a link before it gets posted, see if it ends up at one of these banned sites, then refuse to complete the post. Of course, it would mean you would have to follow and verify links, which would take more time to get something posted, so maybe that’s not the way to go. Here’s another:
  2. API Posting Limitations So you can’t examine every post before it goes live. However, you can monitor profiles to see how many of these posts are created by something other than a user. Lets say someone isn’t auto-posting because they’re members of the anti-Christ’s affiliate program, but is simply cross-posting from their Friendfeed account. If you had an established limit of, say, five auto-posts per day, that would make these blasts of uselessness ineffective. Or maybe you could make a rule that every fifth post can be from an outside source, but the rest have to be from a trusted one.  (Brightkite, Twidroid, Tweetdeck, or anything else that doesn’t automatically post from a feed.) I know, there’s another problem here – anyone could write their own evil program that you don’t know about to slam you with crap. (Though you have to admit, it would certainly cut down on it.) So if that isn’t any good either, here’s my last suggestion:
  3. Ban Users Now here’s where the gloves come off! If someone reports a user for Tweeting nothing but garbage and links to get them money for their affiliate programs, you cut them loose. Digg has no problem with that, and look how well they’re doing! Sure, you’ll have a lot of people coming right back to do it again, but they’ll just get reported too. Maybe you can create an investigation spider that, when someone is reported, can crawl their account to verify that they keep linking to the same spammy landing page over and over and over, in which case BLAM! (Or POOF! if you prefer. I like thinking of these people’s cretinous heads being removed by a shotgun, but then I’m really not good with anger.)

I’m sure there are other ways this could be dealt with. Hey, remember a few months ago when you limited people’s following number to 2000? I was all for that – after you made allowances for people who themselves have more than 2000 people following back, of course. But you see how well that turned out? You made a rule to better the community, you made an exception for the part you didn’t think of at first, and now most everyone is happy – except for the aforementioned jerks who spam.

Well, those jerks have found a new way to ruin the fun for all of us, and unless something’s done about it, it’s going to kill the whole thing. So I implore you – fix it so auto-postings are limited, or prevent the known spam from being usable in a post. You aren’t benefiting any from this kind of traffic, and neither are we users.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep an eye out for any posts with the “from API” bit at the end, and unfollow whomever is responsible if it is for yet another advertisement for something I don’t want or need.

Take care, and say hi to the wife and kids for me,

Ciaoenrico

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Posted in Social Media, Social Networking

Revisiting traditional SEO

Posted on August 12, 2009 | 2 Comments

Three years ago, Mike Grehan wrote a great, short piece for Clickz entitled, “Does textbook SEO still work anymore?” where he ponders the validity of some of the traditional SEO tactics then employed. His observations at the time were that inbound links and quality content were still the important factor in a site ranking well, which is almost a cliche today.

Today, of course, web sites themselves have changed dramatically, owing to the way users access web sites. Blogs, for one, are now commonplace. I’ve noticed how much easier it is for a site to achieve rankings for a keyword if there is a blog present, with occasional posts that use that phrase. For example, for my previous employer I created a post targeting, “phoenix business blogs,” and built links to that post with that phrase as the anchor text. By the following afternoon, we were on the first page of results for the phrase. Three hours after that, we were in first place.

I had never had that kind of luck with simply a content page before then – which at the time we thought was the best way to “own” a keyword phrase. Today I see many of the posts I wrote targeting keywords still get my old blog high rankings, while the content pages I worked on are nowhere to be seen. This is because Google understands that blog content is “fresh.” Since they are in the business of providing their users with quality content, they know the quality is more likely to be found in something that’s updated often, not a static page that has been on the server for two or three years without any updates.

Also blog posts tend to get more inbound links than content pages. Again, this goes back to how people use the Internet. People – not link farms, but people – will share a post if it is of interest, and/or backs up what they are writing about themselves. A content page, on the other hand, is a naked attempt to get a search ranking, and usually doesn’t have anything to it but a sales pitch. These are the pages that have the bad reputation of repeating a phrase ad nauseum:

“When you’re looking for [search phrase], you want a [search phrase] that’s more [search phrase] than your competitor’s [search phrase]s. Don’t fall for [search phrase] promises about how [search phrase]s from them are better than our [search phrase]. Come see what makes our [search phrase]s the best!”

Lame, right? Google thinks so too. That’s why when they go looking for sites to rank well for a phrase, they go off of less off the repetition of the phrase and more off of inbound links. The presumption being that if someone really thinks your page is all about [search phrase], other people will think so and “vote” for it.

Even that feels a little dated these days, however. With the advent of social media, there are more and more people talking about companies and sharing pages, but they aren’t doing it as much by creating links on websites. Instead, they are on Twitter or Facebook, and sharing links without anchors – in fact, they are more likely to use link shorteners like BudURL or is.gd. What’s more, most social media sites are “nofollow” links, meaning Google (supposedly) isn’t using them to determine page rankings.

Personally, I don’t think Google would ignore this source of information when determining rankings, specifically because now there are so many more places people can cast that vote for a site. If Google is using this data to determine rankings, of course, they’re going to be tight-lipped about it. They aren’t known for showing their hand like that.

So search is still all about quality content, that is fresh, and inbound links to it from other websites with anchor text. Maybe. As Google rolls out “Caffeine” I expect they will take more of this new user activity into account. Looking at the differences in results, the pages that do come up have more results from pages with their own social media presences. If so, having a strong social media campaign will become a lot more important than including meta titles and tags, or repetition of a phrase in content. More important than it already is, certainly.

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Posted in Marketing, Search, Social Media

Facebook purchases FriendFeed – and I Mourn the loss

Posted on August 10, 2009 | Leave a comment

The big news today is that Facebook has purchased Friendfeed – a brilliant social media aggregator. Writing about this feels like writing the site’s obituary. I’ve never made any bones about my dislike (read as: bottomless hate) for Facebook, and watching a site I really do like get swallowed up by the latest Internet behemoth is like watching Austria get swallowed up by Germany circa 1938.

Unless you’re one of us (now) many social media geeks, you aren’t that familiar with FriendFeed. Certainly you know Facebook – a place where you can do and post just about anything, share it with your friends, and maintain relationships that don’t require much in the way open conversation. It’s all about your immediate friends, and perhaps some of their friends, but the level of discovery is comfortably low.

Friendfeed, however, has always been about sharing anything, anywhere, with anyone. I’ve found a number of interesting videos, photos, and news stories (including the one above, which, for the record, is NOT an example of irony,) on FF from people I did not otherwise know. All one needs to do is look at the information one takes in in a month on Facebook, and the amount one takes in on FF, and you can see how vastly the latter outstrips the former.

All the reasons I dislike Facebook are all the reasons it is popular: Closed garden environment, people jockeying to have high “friend” counts, silly Flash games and silly stories shared far and wide with little purpose or benefit to anyone. It’s like a high school yearbook come to life. Of course, people like their high school yearbooks. Why wouldn’t such a thing be popular?

Facebook also stole liberally from FriendFeed’s better social networking ideas. That “like” option for people’s posts? That’s straight from FriendFeed. The scrolling layout on wall posts is FriendFeed’s as well.

FriendFeed itself changed it’s layout earlier in the year to look suspiciously like Facebook. The changes weren’t improvements, though, as the old version allowed you to easily see where the information shared was coming from – Twitter, YouTube, the author’s blog, a Disqus comment, etc. At the time I thought these were done to try and compete with Facebook. Now it looks as though they were done to entice a suitor.

The reason Facebook is purchasing FriendFeed can’t be for it’s traffic, after all. Facebook is now, officially, bigger than God, and if God has a problem with that he will have to have his lawyers contact Mark Zuckerberg – or smite Facebook the way he did MySpace before it.

No, Facebook is going after what FriendFeed does best: Information sharing between users. Rather than continue to lift what FF does best, they are simply paying for it up front. What I fear most is how Facebook will monitor how FriendFeed information is shared, censor that which does not come from Facebook servers, (share a Facebook video on FF, but don’t bother sharing a YouTube one,) or even collecting user data even if they aren’t on Facebook while on line. If you know Facebook’s history with how it collects – and shares – its user data with others, maybe you can see why I chose the Anschluss metaphor at the beginning of this post.

But that’s all conspiracy theory stuff. What’s more likely is that Facebook will simply suck the marrow of the good ideas that made FriendFeed so good, implement it in its own Pages and Profiles, then announce one day that FriendFeed will be closed for business.

“But don’t worry! We’ve got everything about it in our new FaceFriendbookFeed!”

FriendFeed was simply too smart to survive, and the ones who understood this best, the lowest common denominator Facebook, knew it. Good for them, bad for us.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Twitter Denial of Service Attacks – Another Use for Social

Posted on August 8, 2009 | 2 Comments

This week, hackers in Russia and Georgia blocked up Twitter and Facebook with a denial of service attack in order to prevent a Georgian Professor’s blog, detailing the history of the recent border skirmish between the two aforementioned countries. (Read the article here.)

Now that, my friends, is social networking at work! Rather than sending out tweets or creating Facebook Pages to get others to back a cause, these hackers found a way to use social sites (and yes, e-mail, the traditional ammunition of a DOS,) to create a forced boycott. If the pages won’t load, no one can read them.

This isn’t a defence of what they did, but they certainly outlined the power at the hands of people with drive and technical ability. Denial of service attacks were a big problem 10 years ago, but most IT professionals haven’t worried about them in some time. Today, a server is usually able to block out overloads of messages and traffic to stop just this sort of thing.

The hackers at work this week obviously found a way around it. Between this and other hacks of social sites this year, we should all get used to the idea that these things are not secure. Giving away passwords, your physical address, phone number – anything that should be considered private – could be open game for a hacker. Since we’ve all become so easy-going with giving sites we’d never heard of our Twitter passwords, or access to our Facebook accounts, there aren’t too many firewalls preventing strangers from finding out more about ourselves than we’d want. Despite my great love of sites like Brightkite, I’m a little surprised we haven’t heard more stories of burglaries happening because a Brightkiter posts about being out of town.

While having our Twitter access cut off for a day is a minor inconvenience, I hope people come away from it with a respect for how insecure sites like this actually are, and that we all need to be careful when sharing our information on them.

Maybe that’s how Twitter will finally get people to pay for it’s service? “If you want a truely secure environment, that will be $20 per month, please.”

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Posted in Social Networking

Viral Video Advertising: FedEx Infomercial Spoof

Posted on August 6, 2009 | Leave a comment

[Update: As you can see, the video I wrote about has since been pulled off of YouTube. I have no idea why, but it can still be found on Funny or Die. Still, even if it isn't on YouTube, it's a fine example of what you need to do to make an online video people will actually watch.]

If you’re planning on doing some viral video advertising on YouTube, this is the way it should be done:

It’s funny, it’s creative, and it isn’t pandering to the viewer. It also gets the product message out by being part of the joke, without being the joke itself, rather like putting Aspirin in applesauce and feeding it to a child.

So what’s the secret? Again, to produce something entertaining and funny, you need to have actual talent, or hire it. This video isn’t funny because someone told you it was funny, it’s actually funny. When you have a funny idea for a viral video campaign, share it with a few people to be sure it actually is funny. Better yet, hire on some people who have a track record of producing comedy. You may not be able to get Fred Willard, but the idea’s still the same.

Also, they kept it relatively short, too – not TV commercial short, but sketch comedy short. Three minutes is all you need to get the job done.

Producing these things doesn’t have to be expensive, though I’m sure this one cost a bit more than the average small business is willing to spend. If that’s you, you can certainly produce something on a budget if what you make is entertaining.

Remember that, if nothing else: Just having a video on YouTube isn’t enough to get hundreds of thousands of views – it has to be something you would watch yourself, whether it was a commercial or not.

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Posted in Viral Content

The Truth About Twitter Follow Counts

Posted on August 5, 2009 | Leave a comment

Everyone using Social Media these days seems hung up on the number of friends they have – nowhere more so than on Twitter. Followers and following seem to be the only metric people understand, and a whole new industry has cropped up to help you, “increase your Twitter follow count by 1000s!” Which all sounds about as believable as the SEO ads that promised, “we’ll submit you to 100s of search engines!”

Why? Because a Twitter follow count is the only thing that makes sense to some. People tend to think of their follow counts as if it were high school – if you have the most friends, you’re popular. That’s the way it seemed to the kids wtihout friends, anyway. And with everyone still sure they need a social media marketing plan, but unable to explain why, pointing to a metric like “whole lotta followers” feels as good as anything.

The thing is, the kids who were popular understood selectivity. They were friends with other people who were themselves worthy of having as friends. Think about it – the captain of the cheer team and the quarterback didn’t hang around with just anyone.

The same with the computer nerds. The same with the theater geeks. The same with the goths and the student council and the stoners… each networked with just those people who were good to have as friends. With Twitter, the lesson still applies. You don’t want to be friends with everyone – you want to be friends with people who will:

  • Write you back when you write to them,
  • Create posts that are interesting, valuable, entertaining, intelligent, etcetera,

and possibly, if you’re a marketer,

  • Have interests that fall in line with what you are selling.

The twits who do not feel like this usually are easy to spot.

twitter follow 1

twitter follow #1

This is a screenshot of a profile of a new user. You know this person’s new because they haven’t posted very much, but have put a lot of effort into following other people. This stands to reason, since there isn’t a lot to do on Twitter when you’re new except look for others who post things you might want to read.

Given the amount of following to posting this person does, I’d say they’ll get bored with it in very short order.

Twitter Follow #2

Twitter Follow #2

Here’s another profile, showing someone who isn’t even bothering to hide that they’re here to collect followers – not write posts. With only 6 posts ever, they have managed to collect 706 people willing to follow them. This person never posts anything, valuable or not. They simply fish for users who will follow them back. There are slightly more following than followers, showing they are fishing for new users to follow them back a bit at a time.

Twitter Follow #3

Twitter Follow #3

Ultimately, this user becomes (or hopes to become) like this one – very few posts, but look at all of those Twitter follows! The even number of following to followers shows that this person will follow you if you return the favor, and is always out looking for more people to do just that.

So the first user doesn’t have many fans, and that’s fine, as it doesn’t seem they’ve been “bitten” by the Twitter bug yet. The second one definitely sees Twitter as a sort of ponzi scheme, where they could eventually have a massive following like #3.

And that is all it takes to have a large Twitter following.

But understand, having a large Twitter following does not mean you are popular. People make that mistake when they see people who are popular… and as such have a large Twitter following. For instance, here is the follow count for the dramatically sized ego of Ashton Kutcher:

Twitter Follow #4

Twitter Follow #4

Holy crap, look at the size of that thing! Over 3,000,000 followers? Those 3024 posts must be absolute gold!

Well, no, not really. His follow count comes from the fame he earned, and the hardcore lobbying stunt he pulled in the name of the “Twitterverse” earlier this year.

The mini lesson is that unless you’re already famous, a large twitter following – or Facebook, or Myspace, or whatever comes next – isn’t that important. The buzz from a large following in that circumstance flows one way. It does give credence to putting your Twitter address on your television commercial, if nothing else.

If you are going to put in the time to create any social media account to promote, or even just to do business, don’t stress about having “enough” people following you. Concentrate rather on the “right” people following you. I suggest sites like Twellow to comb through Twitter users by interest or geography, then start writing posts directly to those people. Answer questions they are asking, or engage them in conversations based on what they are talking about. Show how you are a real person, with real opinions of your own, or information to share. Become an asset.

If you do that, you will attract more than your share of Twitter followers, and you will be actively involved with just the right kinds of friends you need.

And for further information on the politics of high school friends, go see “The Breakfast Club.” It was all covered so well there already, I shouldn’t bother digging any further into it.

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Posted in Social Media, Social Networking

Yahoo Bows out of Search – Bing Becomes the New Number 2

Posted on August 2, 2009 | 3 Comments

As you probably read last week, Yahoo! has given up on chasing Google in the search engine market. Microsoft’s Bing will now supply Yahoo’s search results, and Adcenter will replace Panama in PPC delivery.

Well, we could all sort of see that coming though, couldn’t we? Between bid offers for Y! and talk about the number of balls they’d dropped over the years, it was only a matter of time.

But so what? The real question for everyone else is, “how will this effect me going forward with my SEM campaigns?

1. You now have to know how to optimize for Bing. Last month I was still telling people, “don’t worry about Bing. It’s just another Microsoft search property that will be changed out for something else completely new in two years, without ever gaining any traction.” Microsoft Network, MSN, Windows Live… there was no reason to believe Bing would be any more important.

With this deal, however, their market share in search jumps from a paulty 13% and fading slowly to 33%. Google still has more eyeballs of course, but Microsoft’s reach has just jumped dramatically.

2. Get used to Adcenter. This is actually a minor Godsend, as Yahoo’s Panama was always something of a pain. I’ve been a fan of the simple yet utilitarian Adcenter for a while, and now, again, it’s worth doing. If Microsoft can manage to squeeze more convertability out of the traffic analytics they just inherited from Yahoo!, you may end up spending more of your PPC budget there.

So what happens if Micorsoft makes their PPC traffic profitable?

3. Expect Google to Retaliate. Not in a sinister way, but in a competitive way, Google will answer the challenge that Microsoft presents. They have the most eyeballs, but to continue to make their millions they need to continue to be thought of as the best place to spend a PPC budget.

As for natural search, I don’t think people will be bailing on Google for Bing anytime soon. Whether they do or do not, however, Google is always updating their product, so you need to stay on top of what they like. The best way to do that is read the findings of other SEO professionals. Webmaster World is a good source of information I recommend – either for learning how to optimize for Bing or Google.

4. Go to the next Search Conference you can. In most any other year, these things are a waste of time. Speakers in a slow news year will talk about a lot of different things that may be useful, but hardly ever necessary. This year, however, it will be necessary for you to learn about what people are doing about Bing. You can also make good contacts there with other marketers and exchange information over time as you both come home and implement your changes.

5. You won’t have to pay for Yahoo! Search products anymore. It goes without saying this, but I’m just happy to be able to. This used to be de rigueur advice for doing well on Yahoo!. For example, the cost for being included in the Yahoo! Directory is $299, and while it did help rank better, it always made me feel dirty. No one should ever charge to be in a directory – if a directory has any quality, they don’t need to. They make their money from all the great traffic they bring in. A cash-strapped Yahoo!, obviously, didn’t mind. Now that they aren’t providing results, you don’t need to worry about it anymore. The directory itself delivers very little quality traffic – few do anymore. Don’t waste your money on it.

While I think it’s sad that search’s Big 3 is no more, it’s really only bad for end users – people searching for something now have one less venue open to them. There again, if there was any room for competition in search, surely by now some new search property would have come out to challenge Google, or Yahoo! or MSN. Since it has only been these three for so long shows there hasn’t been much innovation in a long time. If some new search engine can move into the vacuum left by Yahoo! it will. That one hasn’t in all this time may be a clue that none can.

In the meantime, the good news coming from this is all for us marketers. We now have one less property to worry about optimizing for or spending PPC budget on, while still reaching roughly the same number of people.

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Posted in Search

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