SEO Werkt!

It’s back. And it’s bigger than ever. I’m talking about Google’s monthly announcement of search quality/algorithm changes — an announcement that the company skipped in July, making the one that they posted late Friday afternoon the biggest ever, with a reported 86…



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Hey Minneapolis. We’re coming. It’s this week! We can’t wait. In fact, I’ll be there tomorrow getting ready for Thursday and Friday’s Explore Minneapolis.

I know some of you haven’t registered yet. I’ve got a pretty good idea you’re going to enjoy the event. And I need you to register by end of day tomorrow so I can order the right about of food (and drinks … including cocktails) for everyone. So, if you’re on the fence or you just have put it off until now, I really need you to register!

And I also need you to tell your friends, colleagues, co-workers, vendor partners, clients and customers. In fact, if they register and use your name in the “Who referred you?” question in the registration process, your name is entered to win a Kindle Fire. We appreciate the pass-along and want to reward you for doing so.

Why come? Here’s some reasons:

• Jay Baer will unveil a brand new presentation called, “Youtility.” His talks are awesome. This will be no different
• Friday afternoon I’ll have an intellectual sparring match with The Ad Contrarian, Bob Hoffman. He’s been mightily critical of social media marketing in the past. We’re going to arm wrestle a bit about it, which is sure to be fun.
• You want measurement, analytics and research? Chuck Hemann, Nichole Kelly, Jeff Rohrs and Tom Webster are speaking.
• You want smarts for your internal and strategic use of social and digital? Jennifer Kane, Tamsen McMahon, Jolina Pettice, Nick Westergaard and others have you covered.
• You want mobile brilliance? Tim Hayden is there.
• You want email marketing ideas? DJ Waldow will deliver.
• You want brand-side expertise, not just consultants or agencies talking? Scott Gulbransen (H&R Block), Kevin Hunt (General Mills), Adam Kmiec (Campbell’s Soup), Greg Gerik (3M), Jamie Kennedy (O2 Media), Bridget Jewell (Mall of America) and more are all there.
• Our awesome sponsors are buying you drinks Thursday evening with our Sponsor Cocktail Reception from 4:30-6.
• You’ll be invited into our private Yammer community for ongoing learning, resources and networking.
• It’s the place to be this week.

So here’s the registration form. Fill it out. Get fired up and come get your learn on Thursday and Friday. We kick things off Thursday afternoon at the DoubleTree by Hilton Park Place. See you there!

Explore is a five-city conference event series from Social Media Explorer and presented by Expion and Raven Internet Marketing Tools. Learn more and sign up for email updates for the city nearest you at GoToExplore.co.

RIM is about to lay off more employees in an ongoing effort to cut $1 billion by 2013. According to one report, as many as 3,000 RIM staffers could get the boot as soon as next week. However, RIM has not officially confirmed this as of yet.

RIM’s Global Corporate Communications Manager spoke to TechCrunch this afternoon and confirmed there are more layoffs on the horizon. She went on to explain that the company is “moving quickly for the impacted employees.” As RIM communicated earlier, the company plans to eliminate 5,000 positions within the current financial quarter. While RIM hasn’t pointed out affected departments and regions, it seems those working on BlackBerry 10 are safe — well, at least for now.

RIM is seemingly betting it all BlackBerry 10. RIM’s spokesperson indicated today several times that BB10 employees are safe from layoffs. The company already delayed its next-gen mobile platform from later this year to early 2013. The project likely needs all the help it can get.

Prior to cutting 2,000 people in July, RIM employed around 16,000 people worldwide. But now, after concluding this next round of layoffs, RIM will have just around 9,000 — a rather humble amount consider RIM once employed around 20,000 people.

As for IBM buying RIM’s enterprise division, a separate RIM spokesperson indicated that RIM will not comment on rumors and speculation.

As you surely know by now, a gunman entered a Sikh temple Sunday morning in Wisconsin and opened fire, killing six people and wounding three others, including a police officer.

Later Sunday afternoon, two Sikh entrepreneurs, Savneet Singh and Jesse Pujji, started a campaign on the crowd-sourced funding site indiegogo to raise money for the victims.

The response has been overwhelming.

The campaign, which cracked six figures in its first 48 hours, now has $112,466 from 1,218 donors (at the time of publication). Pujji says donors have given as little as $5 and as much as $5,000. The campaign has reached the top of indiegogo’s Community page.

“The whole thing is a tribute to good people and social networks,” Pujji says, downplaying Singh and his role in the campaign.

Pujji says they will evenly divide the funds between the victims and send checks to their families once the campaign ends at the end of August.

“We anticipate that the Milwaukee Sikh community will require substantial financial support as they heal from this senseless tragedy, and therefore graciously seek donations to offer support to the victims of the shooting, the injured police officer, and their families,” the campaign page reads.

On Tuesday afternoon, the courtroom battle between Google and Oracle took yet another unexpected turn.  U.S. District Judge William Alsup indicated that he is “concerned” the technology giants or their lawyers may have compensated reporters, bloggers, and journalists to influence what was published by the press. Even though the trial is currently winding down, the [...]

If you’ve tried taking naps in the afternoon and found yourself feeling groggy after waking—if you manage to force yourself back out of bed—you may just be going about them all wrong. Even if you don’t work in a job where napping is acceptable, there’s a very clear reason why the best naps are the ones that are usually around the half-hour mark. Here’s why. More »

Since yesterday afternoon my Google Reader has been flooded with articles about Apple dropping the YouTube app from iOS 6.  I’ve read seventeen different posts on the matter, from CNET to the Google Operating System blog and even The Washington Post.  Say goodbye to YouTube in iOS 6!  Apple’s giving YouTube the boot!  We get it.  Now can we please stop talking about it?
continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Apple on Monday afternoon released the 4th beta of iOS 6 to developers ahead of its formal release planned for early September.

“The one positive thing that this week has so far thrown light on is that there is a widespread recognition that things cannot stay the same.” — Keith Teare

Oh ye of little faith: For the many of us who BELIEVE in Consumer Internet, it’s so painful to watch the Facebook/Groupon/Zynga stock trainwreck continue, with Facebook shares slipping to below $20.00 today, the lowest they’ve ever been.

Shares slipped so much this afternoon that even our head-over-heels-in-love with-Facebook guy offered the former startup some monetization advice earlier, and if I were Facebook I would take it.

The concerns about Facebook’s viability as a company have been hashed and rehashed by people barely if at all qualified to do so. At this point, we underqualified tech writers know them by heart: It basically boils down to mobile insecurity, a 1/58 price-to-earnings ratio and whatever “I don’t trust Zuck” means, which makes old fogies my parents conservative investors nervous.

But, the moment I figure out how, I still want to buy some Facebook stock at $20.00 because are you kidding me, that company is absolutely still growing despite almost no one seeing its potential value.

Imagine if every friend that you, or I, or anyone on Facebook had, were a red-hot opportunity to turn well-wishing into revenue. That’s the promise made by Karma, Facebook’s recently acquired physical gifting startup.

Facebook, you have the social graph. You have the users. You have the world. Now, all you need to do is give us an easy way to say “Happy Birthday.” With our wallets.

The very top mock-up is indicative of the potential that being able to monetize online social interaction/goodwill represents. While we have no idea what Karma’s revenue or profit was pre-acquisition, rumor has it that the startup was raking in a cut of between 20% – 40% per purchase before it got scooped up.

And now it has almost a billion users as a target market … if only some industrious engineer would build that very simple above link, and yes, figure out mobile.

If Facebook continues to make these kinds of strategic acquisitions — i.e. buys Fab next — it will win. And, if it can leverage the physical goods loophole on iOS, it can become the social shopping platform.

So buh bye lame “Social stories” and buh bye Amazon (which currently has a $100b market cap, around twice that of Facebook). Can someone please teach me how to buy Facebook stock now please? Because I believe in the future and you should too.

Disclosure: I pretty much think I only own Aol stock at the moment, but would like to buy Facebook stock, see above.

Also, there are exactly ten tickets left for our Facebook Ecosystem conference. Have at it. 

Following the roaring success of my Jubilee inspired fact-based blog (well I learnt a few facts at least..!), this afternoon I felt inspired to forage for some energy based facts about the topic du jour; the Olympics.

Apart from EDF’s rather cool real-time energy usage graphs, and a collection of blogs on the Games’ sustainability credentials (here’s a rather good one that will be wishing they had Chris on tap for witty blog titles!), this actually proved harder than I anticipated. You probably already know that London’s Olympic Park houses the world’s first recyclable stadium, and you may have seen Timeout’s infographic of facts, but did you know that all athletes competed in the nude at the ancient Olympics? Thought not. Entertaining to know, but not exactly relevant to the E+I blog content! Here are a few other (kind of energy related) facts you might not have come across:

• In the ancient Olympic Games, the Olympic flame was ignited by the sun and then kept burning until the close of the Games. The flame fist appeared in the modern Olympics in 1928 in Amsterdam, with the Olympic Torch relay starting in 1936. According to this blog, the entire Olympic Torch relay in 2012 consumed the equivalent of 4,966 kilowatts, which is the same as a 40KW bulb burning for 124,158 hours, or just over 14 years.

• 200 kilometres of electrical cables – enough to stretch from London to Nottingham – were laid in two six kilometre tunnels built under the park, allowing 52 overhead pylons to be removed.

• 265km of utilities networks were installed across Olympic Park.

• The Olympic Park’s wind turbine will produce enough power for 1,000 homes.

• Over 4,000 trees, 74,000 plants, 60,000 bulbs and 350,000 wetlands plants were planted in the Olympic Park – the largest planting project ever undertaken in the UK.

• 20% of the Olympic site’s energy is from renewable sources.

• Michael Phelp’s energy consumption was said to comprise of 12,000 calories a day to get him to the Gold in 2008’s Beijing Olympics. Typically, the strength/power sports athletes (like weight lifting and shot put) eat the most, intaking between 2,800 and 6,000 calories a day, whilst gymnasts and divers need a mere 2-2,500. In ancient Greece apparently the athletes mostly ate cheese.

• At the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, silver medals were awarded to the winners and bronze to those coming in second. This isn’t an energy fact, but it is an industrial fact and therefore still highly relevant to E+I!

• Great Britain is the only nation to have won at least one gold medal at every Summer Games. Not an energy or industrial fact but I’m feeling patriotic. Please can we have one this year too?!