PR Trying to Head in the Area of Social Media?
In doing a little PR for Ignite, I typically use free, basic services like PR.com and PRLeap. For the most part, these are pretty decent for getting a traditional release “out there” easily and affordably. It has also led to Google News inclusion, which has led to boosted SEO of our site.
CPM Rate Contraction on the Way?
Carl Fremont of Digitas thinks their might be online CPM rate contraction in 2008.
MyBlogLog Looks for Higher Level of “Truthiness”
Today, MyBlogLog added a new feature to the online blog communities… to put it simply, a validation process to verify that you are the owner of the website and have authority over the community.
Zuckerberg to Keynote SXSW Interactive Festival
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will keynote the fifteenth annual SXSW Interactive Festival, also known as South by Southwest.
Absolute and Relative URLs
I have this ongoing discussion with the development team of one of my clients. They insist on using relative URLs on their numerous development servers. Naturally, I tell them that those can lead to trouble when the pages go live and, of course, they do. What is the difference between an absolute URL and a relative URL? For newbies out there, a relative URL points to links on a server in a local manner like this – a href="contact.html" – where you just point to the page link like you are right there working on the server.
Embrace All Methods of Learning About Customers
Glenn Gow brought to my attention a post he wrote a few weeks back that should get us all thinking. In it, he summarizes a recent MITSloan Management Review piece that upbraids most marketers for doing the easiest kind of market research: Listening to our existing customers.
How to Make Money off of Accidental Rankings
Since Google largely tends to favor ranking informational websites over commercial websites, some authoritative blogs tend to rank for valuable queries based on posts they make in passing. Even if you had no intent to monetize a post, it just became easier to monetize accidental rankings. If you use analytics to track your stats and notice that you start ranking for some good keywords you can use Triggit to embed links to merchant products directly in the text of your blog post.
Facebook’s Scrabulous Isn’t Fabulous To Toy Makers
Another day, another Facebook controversy. At this point, as long as Facebook’s not directly responsible or in legal harm’s way, it’s just good publicity. Hasbro and Mattel have a beef with a Facebook application called Scrabulous, an online application knockoff of the classic game Scrabble.And they want it taken down.Of course, Facebookers are plenty upset about that, and are rallying behind the game.
YouTube Talks About Kenyan Violence
We’ve often teased YouTube; at times, it seems like the site’s only purpose is to showcase musical losers and kicks to the crotch. The crisis in Kenya has caused people to use YouTube for some much more serious reasons, though, and the site’s leaders have acknowledged its role.
When Squatters Attack
Richard MacManus, founder and editor of the blog ReadWriteWeb, had a disturbing correspondence with a (seemingly) Russian "brand squatter," a person MacManus describes as one trying to piggyback on his blog brand name for financial game.