'social media' Category

• Google, Transparency, Social Media and PR

  Google has a major strength and a major weakness, and they are the same. It is an engineering-lead business. That gives it some unique capabilities and some weaknesses. Before you make too many assumptions about me, let’s disabuse some of them: I used to be a Top Contributor in the AdWords Help Forum (that’s a [...]

  March 3rd, 2010

• iLab Presentation from 2010-02-25

  Click on the icon at lower right of the slide below, to get a full-screen view. Only 30 or so slides, not 280! These are the slides we used (well, uploaded to “280slides.com“, and slightly edited for that service) for the presentation last Thursday. The slides wouldn’t upload (from Keynote, via a PowerPoint export) to [...]

  March 2nd, 2010

• Duplicate Content, And Blog Spammers

  Around half the people I talk to, about Search Engine Optimisation, are terrified of duplicate content on their own websites. But 80% or more of the spam that I see, is massively duplicated. Why do real site owners, with valuable content but multiple paths to it, fear duplicate penalties from Google, but spammers who endlessly [...]

  February 28th, 2010

• Social Network results in Google Search Results

  Personalised Search – how personal is it? Well, Bill Slawski, author of the SEO by the Sea blog, is someone for whom I’ve a lot of respect. So he’s in my social network. And when I went looking for recent articles on the uses of Google’s Website Optimiser for SEO purposes, look what I found: [...]

  February 22nd, 2010

• Buzz spam – it’s started

  Yay! You knew it would happen…

  February 15th, 2010

• Google Buzz, Mac, Chrome, Apple Mail and iPad

  Like many Internet Marketeers that I know, I’m delighted to use a MacBook for the majority of my desktop and mobile usage. One of my problem areas for using Google’s technology stack is that Safari isn’t fully supported – not to the extent that FireFox and nominally Chrome are. One example being that Gears on [...]

  February 15th, 2010

• Discussion Forums and Customer Service

  The rise of free and open source software has seen a substantial increase in the number of discussion forums that provide technical support to users. It is such a standard part of the landscape, that when you start a new technical project, one of the first things to do is to find the places where [...]

  February 9th, 2010

• SEO: Remember relevance?

  Inspired by a great piece of spam this morning. This looks like a lengthy and individually crafted posting, offering a summary of what looks like the current situation on H1N1 in the USA. The problems? Well, it is targeting a US dentist, and the spam was contributed to an article about how Google has been [...]

  February 5th, 2010

• Google. Foot. Gun. Shoot.

  The AdWords Help Forum has degenerated over the last year or so, into a customer service forum. I intend to cover that in detail some other time. The common signatures of pain in the forum are: Complaints that “Google won’t accept my Credit Card“ Making promo vouchers work Suspension for various reasons, often involving guaranteed [...]

  February 4th, 2010

• PC World – Online Subscriptions

  There’s a classic FAIL in user handling on many eCommerce sites: forcing users to register details before you’ve explained the reason and value. People know that they need to hand over addresses for shipping, but requiring them to offer these details before you’ve verified that the items are in stock and available, or that you [...]

  February 3rd, 2010