SEO Werkt!

Recently, I was on an in-house SEO panel at SMX with REI’s Jonathon Colman. Most of the audience’s questions centered around explaining and reporting relevant metrics to upper management. Turns out, while search has come a long way, many execs still use terms like “Google…



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

This week I was called to jury duty. The Honorable John Doran, Jr. presided. A jury selection is much like making a film or a commercial. There are a lot of stops, starts and waiting around while lawyers and judge side-bar conversations that you can’t hear but would so love to be invited to the party. Voir dire (questioning the jury panel to establish suitability) of the 50 member panel took over a day. Much like the beginning of a focus group, to help respondents develop a comfort level for future complex questions, the defense attorney asked what I thought was an interesting multiple choice question. How did we feel about our day in court? 1. Excited to be part of the process 2. Interested in the process 3. Anxious or apprehensive 4. Frustrated or perhaps a little resentful An ah ha moment. Each of these feelings could be held by people new to social media or even challenged with taking social media initiatives to the next level. The big realization .. we rarely stop to acknowledge and address these concerns before we plow into creating strategies and executing tactics. The results can be too many side-bar conversations that add time and dollars to our process. Several times Judge Duran offered explanations about the proceedings that brought context helping us not only understand the legal whys of the Court but the humanity of the judicial system. I suspect this was also his way of easing the boredom of the wait…

The Google+ live video chat function called Hangouts has been with us over a year now and I thought at the time it might be the best feature of Google+. However, it was the recent On Air addition, which allows you to broadcast and record your Hangout to your YouTube channel, that made me really take note.

The opportunity to create and record engaging video content just got a whole lot easier with this tool.

Whether you want to do a one on one interview or host an industry panel discussion featuring ten experts, Google+Hangouts On Air gives you a live streaming platform and automatic HD video capture.

I love the immediacy of a live broadcast, but you also have the option to edit the final version in YouTube to take out slower moments or edit out questions or to simply give it punch with an intro or images.

If you have someone monitoring the live YouTube stream you can even take text questions from the live audience. There is a screen sharing option so you can also present slides or share anything from a Google doc or spreadsheet.

I conducted a recent panel discussion with six participants. We had over 300 live viewers and the archive has been viewed several thousand times. The format, platform and ease of use has me hooked.

I could see some great uses for this:

• One on one interviews vcast style for a video blog
• Peer to peer industry discussions
• Pre conference or event showcases
• Opinion or current event discussions
• Survey data analysis and discussion
• Live customer case study or success profile
• Meet the author book club groups
• Product launches
• Educational seminars

The tool is very easy to use, but I thought I would share a couple tips

• When you create a Hangout you will have the option (in Advanced drop down box) of making it just a Hangout or adding the On Air feature. (You will be asked to confirm ownership of the YouTube channel you are linking to so you must be using a YouTube channel that is associated with the same email as your Google+ account)
• Privacy settings in Google+ make it so that you may not be able to add or invite someone to a Hangout unless they have you in a circle, so make sure all invitees take this step and be careful not to add Public or anyone will be able to join (Also make sure you click the option that restricts your guests from adding anyone unless you want to give them this option.)
• Remind your guests to log in to Google+ at show time and join the Hangout that will be listed on their page.
• Remind them further to have their video camera on, microphone chosen and earphones for listening. (They cannot play the Hangout through speakers or it will echo back through their mic)
• It’s a great idea to test everything ahead of time if you can so you make sure all plugins and such are up to date.
• Good, natural lighting is a real plus when it comes to video
• It is a good practice to share the URL for the YouTube channel so your guests can invite viewers, but remind them not to have the YouTube broadcast live in a browser tab as it is delayed a few seconds and can cause some real confusion
• When you launch the Hangout the On Air function is not live so you have some time to make sure everyone is on and has working tech. When you want to go live you push the On Air button and wait for the countdown plus add about 3 seconds of you smiling into the camera before you start to make sure you record everything
• When On Air Hangouts has the host featured in the video box with all the guests in small panes below the main box. It moves whoever is speaking to the main view so any noise can be interpreted by the tool as speaking – tell you guests to make sure they are in a private, noise free environment and that they are on camera at all times, so even the pecking of keys while they return email will move them to the main screen.
• Once you’ve finished with your event you turn the On Air feature off and have the ability to debrief with guests if you like.
• Go to your YouTube channel and make immediate modifications if you like such as choosing a thumbnail and adding rich description. You can also use the increasingly full set of editing tools to add more flair.
• You are suppose to be able to schedule Hangouts as Events in the future and have them show on your YouTube channel as coming soon, but I tried to use this feature and it did not work.

So, there you have it, yet another great way to create content. Use a tool like Speaker Text to create a transcript of your Hangout and you have content in several forms.

So, how have you used or viewed a Google+Hangout On Air?

Google Plus Hangouts On Air is a Killer App is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Because at this point everybody’s doing it, Box CEO Aaron Levie is going to be at Disrupt SF this September. Levie will be joining the other esteemed and as of yet unannounced speakers on our Enterprise panel.

Seeing as Enterprise is going through a revolution, a “consumerization” if you will, it promises to be a juicy discussion — sexy even.

Levie is best known for dropping out of USC to start his cloud storage company Box, which just raised a hefty $125 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. But he is also notable for providing much amusement and wisdom to anyone who follows him on Twitter, posting viral-ready tweets like “Linkedin beats earning estimates, saves the Internet” and imparting pithy startup wisdom like “Your goal should be to build a team so great that you’re unqualified to be on it.”

He is also, seriously, a bona fide magician!

Linkedin beats earning estimates, saves the Internet.—
Aaron Levie (@levie) August 02, 2012

Levie will join a full Disrupt lineup which already includes speakers like: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Brian Lee, Marc Benioff, Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Jessica Alba, Dave Morin, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Vinod Khosla and many others yet to be announced.

This year’s Disrupt SF is going to be the bomb. We’ve got kickass speakers, the entire TechCrunch team and real worthy Startup Battlefield finalists onstage, battling it out for the top prize of $50,000 and the coveted Disrupt cup.

So, yeah, tickets to Disrupt SF are on sale here. And if you are interested in becoming a sponsor, opportunities can be found here as always.

(Fight on Trojans!)

Aaron Levie
CEO and Co-founder, Box

Aaron Levie co-founded Box with friend and Box CFO Dylan Smith in 2005. The Box mission is to provide businesses and individuals with the simplest solution to share, access and manage their information. Aaron is the visionary behind Box’s product and platform strategy, which is focused on incorporating the best of traditional content management with an elegant, easy to use user experience suited to the way people collaborate and work today. Box is one of the fastest growing companies in enterprise software, used by more than 11 million individuals and 120,000 businesses worldwide.

Aaron is a tireless advocate of innovation and disruption in the technology industry, and he has spoken at numerous events, including Fortune Brainstorm Tech, Dreamforce, LeWeb, RSA, MobileBeat, GigaOm Structure, and DEMO. In addition, he has written several articles for major publications such as CNN, the BBC, Fast Company, Forbes, PandoDaily and TechCrunch.

Aaron studied business at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California before leaving to found Box.

Until now, every Facebook mobile ad had to be triggered by you or a friend’s activity, but today Facebook begins testing a new non-social ad unit that lets developers buy mobile news feed ads that open Android and iOS App Store purchase pages when clicked. They’re designed to help developers grow their business. The ads are cost per click, not cost per install-based, however Facebook tells me it hopes to let devs measure installs driven by their app ads in the future, and is now taking developer signups for the currently small private beta.

By opening up the mobile news feed to traditional, non-social ads, Facebook will have to be very careful about how often these promotions appear to make sure they don’t drown out organic content and cause us to stick our phones right back in our pockets.

Facebook mobile app ads appear in a “Try These Games” panel in between traditional stories on the mobile news feed. The panel shows the name, thumbnail image, and number of friends playing (if any) of a few app (three in the example we’ve received). Organic and paid entries into the panel can appear side-by-side, with ads marked “sponsored”. Clicking through opens an app’s native iOS App Store application or Google Play application on your phone or tablet.

Facebook mobile ad reach, clicks, frequency, and spend can be tracked through a dashboard, and the ads can take advantage of all of Facebook’s biographical, interest, and device targeting options. This makes them much more flexible than Sponsored Stories, which advertisers could only target to friends of people who had already mentioned their brand or used their app. That means developers won’t need an existing user base to advertise their apps, and they can be employed to promote game launches — currently a huge source of developer ad spend on Facebook’s website.

For example, ads for an new iOS-only girl’s fashion game could be targeted to iOS device-carrying females 16 to 45 years old, living in Los Angeles to maximize the relevance.

Wall Street should be pleased to see Facebook getting more aggressive about mobile monetization. But the fact that these are just straight-up ads, not stories about friends that businesses pay to appear more frequently, brings Facebook into murky waters on mobile. It’s previously relied on the idea that its social ads are content to justify their injection into the news feed.

That’s why it’s a little frightening that Facebook told me, “It’s hard to say if there’s going to be a frequency limit” to how often mobile app ads appear. Though it did say determining if a limit is needed is part of what its watching for in the beta and that “we don’t want to show too much sponsored content because that would be the wrong experience for news feed.” Facebook will be testing and we’ll be watching to make sure users don’t rebel because it’s diluting a feed originally for friends’ photos and status updates with paid ads for random games.

Twitter’s suspension of journalist Guy Adam’s account earlier this week should further discussions that have been bubbling over the past couple weeks about the need for a more open alternative to Twitter. Although Twitter reinstated Adams’ account, the company’s actions show why such an alternative is important. It’s not about giving developers more API tools to play with. It’s about building more resilient systems for free speech online.

As Dave Winer has pointed out, most of the pieces are there already. And as was pointed out during the indie web panel at OS Bridge, we’ve had them since the early days of blogging. If you had your own domain name and kept good backups you could move from host to host and even to entirely different blogging systems (though you might mess up your permalinks). E-mail can work the same way, if you use your own domain name instead of your host’s. These are what some people call “federated systems.”

I’m interested in plans to build federated versions of the internet, including “darknets” like Freenet, Crptosphere or wireless internet alternatives like Project Meshnet and the many many other project like it. But for those of us living in relatively free countries, just having an internet where everyone owns their own portable identity is good enough. Owning a domain name is a bit on the geeky side, but it’s not like asking people to learn to program or configure their own Linux servers. We can still rely on hosted services – as long as we can pack up and move out of them when the time comes.

What we need to build an open alternative to Twitter isn’t more standards. We already have Dave Winer’s microblog namespace for RSS, PubSubHubbub and Activity Streams. What we need is a self-hostable, single user Twitter clone that can publish these formats (and optionally push to Twitter and other social networks). That was the idea that Winer was seemingly getting at last week with his own post on a Twitter alternative, but he focused more on all the tools that are out there for building something like this, and didn’t come out and say what it is we actually need. And that’s something that power users can get up and running relatively quickly without having to write it themselves and with the least amount of server fiddling possible. A WordPress of microblogs.

Sure we have StatusNet and other clones already. But these are designed for groups who want a private Twitter. I’m talking about is giving every user control of their feed by attaching it to their own domain name. One such thing exists already: PageCookery, but the site is in Chinese. Another option is to just run StatusNet and be the sole user on your server. There are also some WordPress microblog themes, but that seems like a clunky solution. It might be nice to see something that isn’t in PHP, but hey – PHP gets the job done and it’s easy for non-developers to get PHP apps running on commodity web hosting.

If it’s individual, how do you make it social? By using the same standards blogs did. You can use pingbacks and trackbacks for notifications. As someone (I can’t remember who) said on the indie web panel, blogrolls were the original social networks. There’s even a microstandard for establishing social links in blogrolls.

But one of the most important tools for all of this will be a way to actually read all the activity streams generated by these tools. This part will be the Google Reader of microblog/activity stream feeds. There’s already Winer’s River2, but it would be great if this could actually be built into microblogging tools. I think one of the reasons that services like Live Journal, Twitter and Tumblr took off is that you have your social stream and your means of contributing to it all in one place. This will be one of the hardest things to get right.

If this took off we’d eventually see hosted versions, the equivalent of Blogspot or WordPress.com. Great – as long as you can pull in feeds hosted elsewhere, and use your own domain name for your identity.

Is it a pipe dream? Maybe. We’ve had open source, self-hostable tumblogs for years now but few have migrated to them from Tumblr or Posterous. And just being able to syndicate your personal microblog out to Twitter might not be enough – I like being able to post to Twitter from the same place that I read and reply to Twitter.

But I remember when the idea of everyone having their own web page seemed absurd. Now, as Ward Cunningham, inventor of the original wiki and a slick new federated wiki told me in an interview not too long ago, everyone on Facebook has their own web page. All I’m asking is that we take it a small step further. Before that we’ll need power user adoption. And developers committed to building the right tools.

A report on Taiwan component suppliers says Apple is reducing its iPad screen shipments from Samsung in favor of Sharp and LG, a move that appears to mirror other actions to reduce its dependance upon its increasingly hostile “frenemy” partners.

A video purporting to examine the front panel of the upcoming iPhone 5 in comparison with the existing iPhone 4S details new differences in specifications, yet remains consistent with previous reports of a larger, taller display and a centered FaceTime camera.

Social Media Examiner is accepting nominations for its second-annual “Top 10 Small Business Facebook Page” contest.

Do you have a favorite small business Facebook page? Keep reading to learn how you can nominate it.

The winners will be promoted in our 164,000-reader newsletter and announced here.

How to Nominate

Please make a single nomination by leaving a comment below and include why you like the page (only your first nomination counts).

Be sure to include a link to the Facebook page you’re nominating.

To make the cut, a Facebook page must be (1) owned by a small business and (2) receive at least two nominations.

How it Works

We track and score the nominations, and then our panel of judges awards the top 10 small business Facebook pages.

The Judges: Our panel of Facebook experts includes Amy Porterfield, Andrea Vahl and Phyllis Khare (co-authors of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies).

Winners will be selected based on the quality of their Facebook pages, the frequency and quality of their Timeline activities and fan engagement. Think part readers’ choice and part Oscars.

The winners will be announced here in early September and also in our newsletter. Make your nomination by August 20, 2012.

In addition to amazing exposure, each of the top 10 winners will also get free tickets to Facebook Success Summit 2012—the web’s largest online Facebook marketing conference.

Note that our panel of judges will make the winning selections. Their decisions are subjective and will be final.

Enter Now

Enter your nomination right now in the comment box below (scroll all the way to the bottom of this page) and be sure to let your friends know about this contest.