When is paying for software better than getting it free?
- The tool you need is unique and you have no other options;
or - You're also buying the resources and expertise of the company supplying the software.
One huge myth is that if you use Twitter or Facebook to link to your website from your status updates, you'll increase your Google PageRank (in other words, your website will get pushed to the top of search results), because Google famously "counts the number of links" to your website to determine how "relevant" your website is. Lots of links = great search engine optimization, right? But you can think of the major Internet companies as co-conspirators in a plot to determine "relevancy," because back in 2005 they all decided that whenever someone links to a website in the "user generated content" area of another website, they would start inserting an invisible "nofollow" tag. This means that ALL links in a Twitter feed have a hidden "nofollow" tag embedded in them (same with Facebook), and this makes them invisible to search engines. To be clear, this means that the target of the link doesn't look any more attractive in the eyes of Google, Yahoo or Bing.
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Google launched Buzz 13 days ago, and after spending some time getting to know it better, I wanted to write a quick introduction for people who are still wondering (a) how it works, (b) how it's different from other social media platforms and (c) why they might want to use it.
In everyone's favorite list format, here are the answers to those questions:Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Read more about Will Marlow here, or email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.
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Some people have a hard time understanding why Facebook is so valuable.
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Every so often, I do some quick keyword searches for my company, my clients, and my own name, to see how everyone is doing regarding search engine optimization.
Two things are notable. Number one, it looks like the black art of search engine optimization (SEO) is rapidly losing relevance, and it's being replaced by the much simpler art of social media optimization. Which means, essentially, that search engines will now be able to find you largely by your own social media conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and on your blog. You still need to make your content "search engine friendly" so that you don't make it hard for Google to find you, but the complicated voodoo is being replaced by activities that you do. Number two, much to my surprise, when I entered the same search criteria in both Google and Bing, Bing told me something useful that Google did not. Bing told me that someone had linked to my blog from Twitter without letting me know. I was happy to find out so that I could thank the person, but the point is, Google didn't tell me about this and Bing did. Now, it'll take A LOT more than this to win even 1% of my search loyalty, but I was surprised that given the same search criteria, Bing scored a point on Google on my scorecard. PS - If you ever find yourself in a conversation with someone who tells you that Twitter or Facebook is a fad that could disappear because they don't do anything useful, and you don't know what to say to them, remember that people still pay big money for "search engine optimization." Twitter and Facebook displace this costly marketing activity with a non-cash alternative. In other words, rather than paying for SEO, smart businesses are using social media. That's the opposite of useless.Comments [0]
I use Google Analytics (often) but on a regular basis I only use it for a few basic things.
If you feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data that Google Analytics presents you with, it can help for you to simply define what you want to know. For example, here are some things I like to know:1. How many people visit my web sites each day.Comments [0]
The beta tag is one of Google’s brilliant hallmarks.
The beta phase (it can actually last forever) solves one of the key challenges in software product development. The first challenge (unsolved by the beta phase) is to build software that solves a serious consumer or business problem, which is no small task. But the second challenge (once your software solve a serious customer problem) is that you can never figure out how human beings will actually use your software once they get their hands on it. That is, unless you have a strong beta program and you watch a large number of your users in action, and you learn from them.
Google is the master of using emergent data. Don’t design Gmail. Let your beta testers play with your new email system until the right patterns emerge, and let them design Gmail for you. Same with Twitter. Let the right features emerge, don't airdrop them in from corporate HQ.
Having a strong beta culture is all about knowing when to stop inserting your own preferences and opinions into things, and letting the end users tell you how the product should be designed. That’s when the software gets designed right.
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For the last 42 days, there has been a YouTube video of an awesome presentation about trends in high tech by my hero Geoffrey Moore (below). Over the last 42 days this video has been viewed a grand total of 617 times, according to the YouTube statistics. Anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of cloud-computing, and how consumer software is entering the enterprise world, would be interested in watching this.
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