Posts tagged Don’t
Top 4 Reasons Businesses Don’t Get Backlinks – MarketingProfs.com (subscription)
Mar 30th
 PR Web (press release) |
Top 4 Reasons Businesses Don't Get Backlinks
MarketingProfs.com (subscription) by Chris Sheehy Website links that point to your business website are one of the most important search engine optimization (SEO) factors that influence the online visibility and search engine ranking of your business. Those backlinks signal to search … Updated Tool for Web Visibility—SEO Recon 2012 Edition Released |
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Facebook Warns: Don’t Share Passwords With Employers
Mar 26th
Following public outcry over reports that companies have been asking employees to hand over login credentials in order to scan their profiles, Facebook has advised against handing password information to current or prospective employers.
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No Corporate Website? You Don’t Need One. Welcome to the Post-Web era.
Mar 23rd
For those of you who have procrastinated about getting your corporate website together, I have some good news for you: you can pat yourselves on the back because you have just saved a bunch of money. For many smaller businesses, you don’t really one anymore. Welcome to the post-Web era.
Now, this doesn’t mean that the Web is dead. Far from it, as you might expect from someone who writes for this publication. But the stand-alone website, in all of its pixilated glory, is becoming obsolete. Yes, you do need something for potential customers to bring up in their browsers when they type in companynamedotcom. But you also don’t need to put a lot of effort into its creation. Here is why.
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The days of building community are happening outside of your own dot com. It used to be that you created brand awareness and a destination for your customers by having your own site. No longer. Now, there are plenty of others who will do it for you, and often they will do so without you having to pay them. Remember the phrase OPM? It used to mean other people’s money. Today it means Other People’s Marketing. Let me give you a few examples.
My wife is an interior designer and supervises a small staff. Some of her business is coming from the communities that she participates in with HGTV.com and Houzz.com, two places that people go to look at pretty rooms and get ideas for their own decorating. By writing comments on these and other discussion forums, she is sharing her knowledge with the people most likely to hire her. It doesn’t cost her anything to participate in these forums, other than her time, and she is reaching a ready-made audience of thousands of women (let’s face it, we guys generally don’t concern ourselves with design) who are hungry for this kind of information.
Yes, she does have her own business website. She does need it to give her business a sense of legitimacy and purpose. But that site gets dozens of visitors a week, rather than the hundreds or thousands that the other sites do. She is using OPM.
Here is another situation. All of us writers at ReadWriteWeb participate in varying degrees on Twitter too. We post and repost links to our stories and that of our colleagues, and many people follow us as a result. All well and good. But wouldn’t it be better if someone else posts a link to our stories on their Twitter account? Doesn’t that link carry more weight than just our own flogging of our content? Yes. Remember, OPM! I was covering a conference not too long ago: one of the participants of the conference liked one of my stories, and Tweeted about it. That was far more effective than my own Tweet. I was being validated by someone else’s point of view.
The same can be said about Pinterest. Again, why should I try to post photographs of my work (if I am a visual artist) when I can do the same on a site where millions of people are clicking and recommending what they see to others? Certainly I can spend the time and create some very nice HTML that showcases my art on my own dot com. But if I am trying to reach a wider audience? OPM has already built a pretty nice way to distribute this information.
Now, I don’t think we are going to just forgo our websites entirely, but certainly we should place less effort into making them the sprawling digital places of c.1999. No need. A friend of mine, Bruce Fryer calls this the “Cheap Bastard Startup” method of IT. He even owns the dot com. Just make it good enough to get by, and count on OPM to push you further along.
Yes, OPM does have some drawbacks: Like Blanche DuBois, you do have to rely on the kindness of strangers. Particularly when it comes to online discussions, there are trolls and others who don’t hesitate to take people apart verbally. You do have to develop a thicker skin, and try not to take these folks too seriously. And you have to constantly feed your discussions and other sites with content, with recommendations, and spend time to make sure that you are part of the ongoing conversations online. It certainly is easier to just put up a piece of content on your own website, press publish, and walk away. But it is more satisfying once you get your OPM network working for you.
Welcome to the post-Web era. And if you are looking for some window treatments, I can point you in the right direction.
N.B. If you liked this article, it is part of a series on SAY Media’s “This Week In Venn” here.
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What Online Dating Sites Don’t Understand
Mar 20th
Enter an online dating site. The focus is on appearance and personality type and maybe even zodiac signs. It’s the kind of information that you’d check off on your list of your ideal mate. These might be aspects of yourself that you’d like to cultivate, should you imagine your idealized other as some mirror reflection of yourself. Yet these types of questions often lead to overanalyzing, imagining your ideal person instead of trying to become a real-life ideal of that person. And then there you are at the end of a long workday, sitting in front of a screen, clicking from profile to profile, looking for love on the Internet.
A story on the Wall Street Journal looked at a study of online dating sites, breaking it down to the fundamental issues that these algorithmically inclined spaces lead to. “Because the people who use these websites have never met, they can’t assess the variables that are most predictive of long relationships, such as conversational habits and problem-solving tendencies,” writes the Wall Street Journal. And then, in parenthesis, just ‘cuz: “(The scientists note that these variables still require people to interact in the flesh; no online quiz can measure them.)”
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I grew up gay on the Internet. At age 15, I cruised PlanetOut.com looking for other teenage girls who might be interested in hanging out. I got my mom to drive me to some far off northern suburb 45 minutes away to meet a “friend.” I remember our car ride, long stretches of highway and open land. “How do you know, um, Rachael?” my mom asked me. I pretended not to hear her. We arrived at Rachael’s suburban two-story home, and I jumped out of the car. “See you later tonight! Thanks for the ride!” My mom didn’t ask questions. Years later we discussed why she drove me miles away to meet with my “friend,” and I told her that Rachael and I met through the gay Internet dating site PlanetOut.com. Mom didn’t inquire further. It was my teenage Internet world, after all. That adolescent relationship lasted three very intense weeks.
Perhaps because of those awkward gay teenage memories, I just can’t bring myself to try the online thing again. And besides, I’m not a teenager just trying to find gay love, or really anything at all, on the Internet. Today the Internet is a world to wander through, a place to discover, stumble upon, socialize, search… but to find love? That seems more like a person-to-person thing. Says the Wall Street Journal:
“True love is hard to find. As a result people have traditionally sought help from matchmakers, friends and family. Arranged marriages and blind dates, church socials and dinner parties all rely on real-world social networks. We depend on the connections of others.”
Yet in the same story, WSJ mentions that nearly 20% of all relationships begin online, and EHarmony.com claims responsibility for about 5% of American marriages.
The Good Old Days: First Attempts at Computerized Dating
A New Yorker story outlined one of the earlier attempts at computerized dating named TACT, or Technical Automated Compatibility Testing. It was New York City’s very first computer-dating service. Much like the online dating sites of today, users paid $5 and submitted answers to multiple-choice questions. They were also asked to rank images. Answers were fed into an I.B.M 1400 Series computer which created cards of the user’s ideal matches.
In an interesting twist of fate, a lady reporter for local radio station 101 WINS named Patricia Lahrmer came by the TACT office to interview one of the company’s founders. He was unavailable that day, so the interview fell to I.B.M. programmer Robert Ross. Lahrmer arrived at the office for the interview. And then the batteries of her tape recorder died. The two made a date for later in the week. The date turned into dinner, and two years later the couple married. TACT helped Ross meet someone, but not in the computerized way he would have otherwise thought.
New Internet Dating Sites, Same Old Tricks
Yet Internet dating site enthusiasts carry on. Not long ago, San Francisco-based coder Justin Krause launched Circl.es, a site that asks users to sign-up with their Facebook accounts. It then goes through the task of filtering out that user’s Facebook friends; too often, people discover their friends, ex’s or other folks they already know in real-life on Internet dating sites. It also adds a gender option for “genderqueer,” in addition to the standard male and female options. If a user does find someone they’re interested in through Circl.es, they can quickly check that person’s public Facebook profile and send a message – if the person leaves their message option open.
“At the end of the day, if there is a cute guy across the street who goes to different bars and keeps different hours, there is no way I’d ever meet him,” Krause tells ReadWriteWeb. “I could see people who meet her say ‘oh we met on FB,’ and once you click that you’re interested, it sends it to Facebook.”
Video chat gaming studio Gickup.com wants to “connect the world through video chat games.” They have created a dating game – play or watch people play. Naturally, the company is based in Burbank, California. The Blind Video Dating Game works off the 1960s television dating game, The Dating Game.
“If we were to be married, what type of an unusual wedding would we have?” Depending on how well or how poorly the bachelor answers the question, the girl goes out with the guy – the gameshow awards them a chunk of change. So imagine this horrifyingly male-focused scenario with three girls and one guy, except it’s all taking place on Facebook and email. Welcome to your very own television dating show circa 1960s – except it’s taking place live, right now, at your computer.
Like OKCupid, Match.com and eHarmony.com, this sounds like a fun game to play. It’s another way to cruise through potential mates, selecting people based on superficial qualities. For the online dater, there’s perhaps no better way to turn life into a game you play. When it comes to actually meeting someone, this sort of win or lose, comment or like formula doesn’t work.
Image via Gickup.com’s YouTube video of The Dating Game.
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[GRAPHIC] Don’t Call The Mobile Healthcare Revolution A Revolution – Yet
Mar 14th
Earlier this week, Float Mobile Learning released an info graphic making a promise that we’ve heard before: that the market for mobile health care is about to “explode.”
And why shouldn’t it? See the bottom of this post for the full infographic, but some of the highlights include the fact that 80% of doctors already use smartphones, tablets and mobile apps and 40% believe the apps can reduce office visits. Before we declared yet another cancer-curing victory for mobile tech, however, we decided to check in with some third-party sources.
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Everybody we spoke with was in agreement that mobile health care apps, from pedometers to track whether patients are getting enough exercise to more sophisticated apps that will allow a doctor in New York to make a diagnosis on an MRI taken in Africa, will revolutionize the way we get (and stay) healthy. But it could take longer than we’re being led to believe.
“Doctors will be slow to change, not due to the devices and apps, but because of the radical shift from traditional medical practices and the potential for malpractice based on the accuracy of the information provided and available,” said Ritch Blasi, who runs MediaRitch LLC, a consulting business with clients in both the health care and mobile industries. “Most importantly, there is a need for education throughout the healthcare ecosystem, including doctors and patients.”
Blasi sees other problems, including inadequate bandwidth to consistently handle the image-rich data that physicians rely on. Insurance companies have yet to figure out how to handle mobile treatments
“mHealth adoption will take some time, due to a number of reasons…I’m not talking about the health and fitness apps that are ‘nice’ to have, but the ones that physicians will need to make a proper diagnosis,” Blasi said.
Robert B. McCray, president and CEO of Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance, likens the coming changes in mobile healthcare to transformation in other sectors, including digital music, Internet commerce and mobile data.
“Like the creation of other major convergence sectors wireless/mobile/connected health is a slow moving ‘revolution, if you want to attach that term (which I do not recommend).,” he said in an email. “Consider digital music, Internet commerce and mobile data. These major transformations of established sectors did not happen quickly, though we tend to remember the headlines when the popular press noticed and investors piled on.”
mHealth Will Grow. It’s Just A Matter Of When
This is not, however, to say that mHealth is dead on arrival. On the contrary, there are some existing factors that could speed adoption and growth. Doctors, for example, are 250% more likely to own tablets. A recent survey by Aruba Healthcare found that that 85% of hospital IT departments allow doctors and staff to use personal devices at work.
Overall, 72% of healthcare professionals have smartphones, which is above the overall U.S. rate of less than half, according to Jose Cornejo, vice president of healthcare at Hipcricket, which makes mobile health products.
“In our opinion the mHealth revolution is well underway,” Cornejo said. “We are seeing the commitment of large healthcare companies to extend these tools and resources to both practicing physicians and patients.”
Current projections show this as one of those mid-recession feel-good stories where several sectors benefit. By 2017, the mHealth market for device makers is expected to grow to $6.6 billion globally. For content and application providers, the market is expected to grow to $2.6 billion, and it will reach $2.4 billion for healthcare providers by 2017. Of those totals, the U.S. market will account for $5.9 billion, according to a recent report by GSMA.
“Doctors and patients will not decide when the revolution takes place – it will be consumers and any source that they determine to be a trusted source for information and assistance,” McCray said. “We do not have enough physicians in this country to handle demand and the rest of the world’s billions of residents are in need of help in environments that will never have anywhere near our resources.”
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For Advertisers And Investors, Social Network User Numbers Often Don’t Add Up
Mar 12th
When does 845 million not equal 845 million?
When it’s the number of active users Facebook claims in its initial public offering filing. Last week the social networking giant amended that filing and conceded it may not be so giant. While still massive, Facebook said as many as 6% of those accounts may be fakes and another 5% may be from people who downloaded Facebook’s mobile app and have it running in the background of their device even though they no longer use the site.
“Anyone who has logged in within a month is considered an ‘active user’ depending on who you’re talking to,” said Ed Zitron of TriplePoint PR in New York. “People use Quantcast and Compete to judge these scores, but those can be inaccurate.”
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The self-reported nature of social network statistics is presenting problems for advertisers who are looking for places to spend their online ad budget and investors who want to know the true value of Facebook before they purchase shares in the IPO. While every major social network and search engine is looking for ways to better target ads and increase click-through rates, sheer size may be a factor for companies looking to run an initial advertising campaign.
“The only number an advertiser cares about is the number of prospective customers it can reach — and what it takes to get them to buy whatever it is the advertiser is selling,” said Marty Levine, executive vice president of product development at Prosyna Inc.
Advertisers are finding it hard to figure out the exact number of those prospective customers on social media. Facebook said 463 million, or more than half, of its users check the site everyday. And, at first glance, that seems about right if you spend any amount of time hanging out with people under 30 who often use it in place of email and traditional chat clients. But the numbers were drawing increased scrutiny from Wall Street analysts trying to price Facebook’s IPO, which prompted last week’s clarification.
Facebook is not, however, the only social network that may — or may not — be exaggerating its claims:
- Google+ reportedly has 54 million daily users, but Forbes was quick to note that number is most likely based on comments by CEO Larry Page that were misinterpreted by the tech press.
- Pinterest claims 9 million monthly active users, but we’ve been noticing that a lot of people are jumping on the site and either getting addicted or giving up a few days or weeks after signing up. In other words, it appears to be too soon to tell if Pinterest’s growth is sustainable.
- Last fall Twitter bragged that it had 50 million daily users. But keep in mind Twitter doesn’t verify an account holder’s identity the way Facebook and Google do, meaning people can have duplicate or even automated Twitter accounts.
“Measuring user interaction is a finicky business at the best of times, but exactly how you’d police such a problematic area is tricky at the best of times,” said Lance Paterson, a brand designer and consultant. “For example, Twitter claims 175 million users: however, 56 million of those do not follow a single other account. In fact, some studies claim that only 5% of accounts are responsible for 95% of all tweets. So is there any value in the process at all?”
The individual idiosyncrasies of each site also play a role. Is Google counting me as an active user of Google+ when I click on search results that got pushed to the top because people I am connected to on Google+ found the same link useful? Do I get counted as an active Facebook user if I “like” an article in the Boston Globe every few days but never log into Facebook? Does Twitter count me as an active user if I use a third-party client to post tweets, but never go on Twitter’s own site where I would potentially see promoted tweets and ads?
“Unless you’re Pepsi or possibly Budweiser you need to understand the potential response from the subset you really care about: your target customers who may or may not be active on a particular social network,” Levine said. “And you need to care more about the factors you can control, including the timing that will find them most active and the content that will attract them.”
None of this is to suggest that social networks are deliberately trying to mislead advertisers and investors. The simple fact is that it’s difficult – and getting even more difficult – to track who is doing what on your social network. As users have become more privacy conscious, many have adopted anti-tracking software, which also throw off the numbers. Add in privacy laws, like the new European Union online privacy laws, and it gets even harder for social networks to at least publicly disclose how many people are using the site.
You can thank Facebook’s IPO for all the sudden scrutiny of active users. People who advertise on social networks get fairly detailed analytics and, at the very least, they can tell whether or not an ad is working and whether or not they should continue using a platform. Wall Street investors, however, don’t have access to those analytics and need to rely on the raw numbers – raw numbers that they often have to trust the companies to give them.
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Netflix: No, We Don’t Advertise with Rush Limbaugh
Mar 6th
Rush Limbaugh’s statements against Sandra Fluke are causing Limbaugh no end of controversy and producing some blow-back for advertisers as well. There’s just one problem: Some of the companies being fingered as supporters aren’t signed on as sponsors for his show. Case in point, Netflix.
The problem is like the old saying: A lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on. Look on Twitter, and you can see plenty of people taking Netflix to task without actually researching to see if the company does support Limbaugh.
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Netflix is a company that’s had its share of PR problems in the last year. To some extent, I’ve felt that the company was getting saddled with some unfair criticism, but I admit – I was ready to cancel my subscription as well when I read that Netflix was advertising with Limbaugh’s show.
But before I pulled the plug, I decided to check in with Netflix to verify that the company really is a sponsor. Turns out, not so much.
Netflix’s vice president of corporate communications, Steve Swasey, shot me a statement from the company less than an hour after I touched base with the company:
Netflix has not and does not purchase advertising on the Rush Limbaugh show. We do buy network radio advertising and have confirmed that two Netflix spots were picked up in error around the Rush Limbaugh show. We have instructed our advertising agency to make sure that this error will not happen again.
How does this happen? A lot of things come into play with radio advertising. I’m not sure of the actual chain of events in this case, but it’s pretty easy for ads to run during a show that the advertiser doesn’t specifically support. Some ads are to be run at any time, other times ads are run to fill time. (Though this is probably less an issue during Limbaugh’s show.)
Sometimes ads simply get put into the wrong slot by the traffic folks or there’s an error by the person running the board for the show.
Whatever the case, Netflix is pretty emphatic about not advertising with Limbaugh’s show. So if you were planning on modifying your Netflix subscription based on that, you can act accordingly.
This is also a cautionary tale for users and companies alike. The folks who’ve been organizing the advertiser boycott for Limbaugh have been going on what ads are broadcast during the show – which may not always be an accurate indicator that the company actually supports Limbaugh’s show. Unless someone’s actually contacted the company in question, there’s a chance they’ve been lumped in through circumstances outside their control.
For companies, it pays to be quick to respond and to choose advertisers carefully. While Netflix isn’t one of the show’s supporters, other tech companies like Carbonite have taken some unwanted heat this week.
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Don’t Bet On Social Media Picking Super Tuesday Winners
Mar 5th
We’ve been skeptical of social media’s ability to predict election results, but that hasn’t stopped a slew of social media experts spending the eve of Super Tuesday from rolling out predictions for Republican presidential primaries in nine states tomorrow.
The reason we’re skeptical is simple: social media is often echoing poll results, and in some cases amplifying those poll results. When social media has “predicted” the results of a primary with some accuracy, it has almost always been in line with what more scientific polls were predicting. In other words, social media hasn’t predicted any major upsets the polls hadn’t already seen and, in most of the primaries so far, the polls have been more accurate that the analysis of social media sentiment.
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The best visualization of this comes from TweetReach, which has put together a Republican primary tracker. Using a slider, you can follow the number of Twitter mentions on a day-by-day basis from the start of the year through Sunday.
What you start to notice is that Ron Paul supporters tweet about the candidate a lot and allow him to stay prominent on social media while becomeing an also-ran in the race. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, has held steady while building on his status as front runner. Rick Santorum and New Gingrich, meanwhile have seen Twitter mentions spike after key victories, but they have yet to sustain any momentum on social media.
And what we need to take away from that is Twitter mentions do not make a president.
Above: TweetReach’s Republican candidate tracker showing Twitter mentions of candidates on January 16, when the Republican candidates debate in South Carolina.
Fizziology, meanwhile, released a report trying to dig a little deeper than social media mentions. The company uses social media sentiment analysis and also empliys some real people to check samples of tweets to look for misspellings and sarcasm that computers may not pick up.
That’s great, but so far, Fizziology has struggled. In Florida, according to Mashable, the company said its social media sentiment analysis was showing “a much closer battle between Romeny and Gingrich” than polls were suggesting heading into the contest.
Romney, as we now know, trounced Gingrich by nearly 15 percentage points: hardly the squeaker social media experts had predicted.
That does not, of course, allow us to simply dismiss social media sentiment. All of the reports we read today, for example, show the number of candidate mentions going down as Romney comes closer to securing a nomination. And, as it does with picking stocks, social media helps us better understand polls and should be part of any predictive model this election year. Not to mention social media — and all the studies of what it is and isn’t telling us — is full of great information.
It’s also fun, in a wonky sort of way.
For example, we loved this infographic from socialbakers, not because it gave us any real insight into what will happen Tuesday in Alaska, Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Vermont and Virginia, but because of the words clouds about halfway down.
They are quite telling about what the candidates are thinking about when they post status updates on Facebook:
- Romney is fixated on the words President, America and, to a lesser extent, Obama.
- Santorum is fixated on Romney.
- Paul seems to do a lot of posting in the present tense: the most common word in his posts is “today.”
- Like Romney, Gingrich is most likely to use “President” and “Obama” in his posts, but his favorite verb is “get. ” He also likes the word “like.”
Above: Word clouds by socialbakers showing most frequently used words by Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum in Facebook status updates.
Discuss
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YouTube Captions Expands Features & Capabilities – You Don’t Have An Excuse … – ReelSEO Online Video News
Mar 2nd
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
YouTube Captions Expands Features & Capabilities – You Don't Have An Excuse …
ReelSEO Online Video News That's… pretty pathetic, considering the huge boost for video SEO that captions can bring (I've ranted about the under-use of captions before). Considering the vast number of videos on the site, 1.6 million is barely a blip on the radar. |
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Don’t Panic! A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Surviving SEO Changes – Business Insider
Feb 28th
 Search Engine Roundtable |
Don't Panic! A Hitchhiker's Guide to Surviving SEO Changes
Business Insider We're going to talk about how to survive SEO changes. Or how not to get hit by a car. It's really the same thing when you think about it. Up on stage we have Kerry Dean, Michael Martinez, Mark Munroe, and Marshall Simmonds all ready to enlighten us. Google Image Search Optimization Now More Important To SEO Google Announces Changes Including New Panda Google Confirms Panda 3.3 Update, Plus Changes To How It Evaluates Links … |
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