SEO Werkt!

Social benchmarking startup Unmetric just expanded its tools to include YouTube, giving brands a new way to measure the effectiveness of their video campaigns.

Of course, companies can already see plenty of stats about their videos — views, likes, and more. But Unmetric tries to synthesize all that data into a single score, and then shows how that score stacks up against competitors.

The company was already providing scores for Facebook pages and Twitter handles. On YouTube, Unmetric says it looks at 24 different metrics, including tags, views, comments, favorites, and ratings, then gives a channel a score between 0 and 100. Customers can also drill down on individual videos or on specific factors to see what they could be doing better. For example, Chevrolet (Unmetric score for May: 60) has uploaded 66 videos adding up to more than three hours of content, while Ford (Unmetric score: 43) has only uploaded four videos/six minutes, and Dodge (34) and Chrysler (35) only have four minutes between the two of them.

The company’s other YouTube features include the ability to compare the length of videos to see whether long or short videos lead to more videos and combining tags into a word cloud to see the types of content that seem to work.

Unmetric says it has already scored the YouTube channels of more than 1,750 brands. You can explore the results for here.

Every time I think TC Disrupt’s Startup Alley can’t get any better, it does. TC Europe Editor Mike Butcher and I ventured into the chaos, accosted at every turn by startups from across the world. We even had a startup, iLiftOff, fly all the way in from Mumbai on a 21-hour flight.

It’s almost a shame that we can’t have all the Startup Alley companies in the Battlefield, but at the same time, the beauty of the alley is that we can talk to them for far longer than six minutes. And we often do.

In this particular video, we checked out LocalBonus, LiveAll, Jaxx, ScreachTV, iLiftOff, ColourDNA, Snoozy, and Speaktoit. You can view all of our Startup Alley companies right here.

What’s your maximum NPH? How many notifications are you exposed to every hour? Let’s take a second to think critically about these constant requests for your attention: What do they mean? Who is making them? Why are they there? Before I wrote the Information Diet, I audited myself and found I was receiving upwards of 10 notifications per hour: one every six minutes. More »

Google is really a fascinating company, so when you step back and look at how they evolved, it is both fun and education. Being that I’ve written about most of these changes over the years, again, looking back at a timeline and a video from the key players on Google on why they made these changes is very useful.

Yesterday, Ben Gomes, one of the key Googlers, posted on the Google blog a post named The evolution of search in six minutes.

Here is the video:

Here is the timeline they published, click on it for a larger version:

I don’t have much to add outside of, it is nice to look back to see the direction and where Google may go in the future.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google released a short video today highlighting some of its key milestones in search over the past decade. It’s both a fun blast from the past and a worthwhile reminder of how much things have changed over the years. The video is also a nice follow-on to the look under the hood of search…



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

For many of us, the Xperia Play just wasn’t quite tempting enough to throw out your PSP or 3DS, but there’s no doubt that mobile gaming is on its way to the big leagues. The dedicated D-Pad was an excellent idea, but there simply weren’t enough games supported to make it a worthwhile investment. But what if you could slap a game controller onto your phone and play to your hearts’ desire, only to remove the controller when it’s time to make a call or head out of the house? That would be lovely wouldn’t it?

Meet Fluctel’s Gametel Gaming Controller — a bluetooth controller that latches on to any Android phone that runs Android 2.1 or higher. Oh, and did I mention that it’ll support over 50 games straight out of the box, including Cordy, Asphalt 5 HD, Reckless Getaway, Guns’n’Glory, MotoX Mayhem, Happy Vikings and Zenonia.

According to PocketGamer, the Gametel Gaming Controller offers about nine hours of battery life and automatically shuts down after six minutes of inactivity. The controller connects to the phone via Bluetooth, which means that you can also disconnect the controller and play from afar. A handful of powerful Android devices sport kickstands these days so that’s an option, but if your phone supports HDMI out then you’re in for a real treat. No console, no expensive games — just you, your phone, and the gaming controller duking it out on the big screen.

The controller sports spring-loaded clamps and rubberized grips to lock your phone into place, but that surely can’t protect against gamer rage, so no throwing this controller across the room, OK?

The truth is, no matter how excellent your phone’s graphics are or how fast your processor is, some games are just annoying using on-screen controls. That’s why the Xperia Play was such a brilliant idea, and why the Gametel Gaming Controller is an even better one.

The controller isn’t available yet, but the company has an email notification sign-up on its website. The controller will retail for around £49.95 (US $67), and should show its D-Padded face in December.

I had the supreme pleasure of sitting down with one of the world’s foremost experts on sales and leadership, Harvey Mackay. We talked about his new book, The Mackay MBA of Selling in the Real World (amazon affiliate link), which took us all over the place. This interview, which I’d intended to last about six minutes, was just too fun to keep short. Harvey Mackay is a master at making you feel important and an expert in all the things he talks about. I was very fortunate to get the chance to be his first ever Skype video interview, and because of that, we both just cut loose a bit. Please enjoy this interview, as it speaks to a lot of interesting points about sales, about women’s shifting dominance in the business world, and much much more:

Can’t see the video? Click here.

And please consider picking up Harvey’s new book. It’s a winner:

Google has announced the ability for advertisers to bid for phone calls, in addition to bidding for clicks, for Google search ads on computers and tablets. Currently, only advertisers maximum CPC bid for phone calls factor into ad rank. With bid-for-calls, these bids can also factor into ad rank as well. Higher ranked ads surface higher in search results, and can therefore generate more phone calls (and clicks, too).

For background, click-to-call ads works in AdWords by assigning and placing a toll-free forwarding number next to an advertisers ad text on Google search pages. When a user sees an ad and calls the number, AdWords registers the call and forwards it to your business. When a user calls the number in your ad, the call is automatically routed to your business, and AdWords notes that this call took place. Then, when you look at your AdWords reports, you’ll see the number of calls generated by each campaign, call duration, and in the near future, caller area code.

Users will also access detailed call reporting right in AdWords, which includes summaries of completed calls, phone-through rate, and phone call costs. You can also see details for each call, including call time, duration, caller area code, and more.

For now, bid-per-call is available only in the US and UK. Click-to-call ads are a growing ad format for Google. In fact, Click-to-Call ads are now driving millions of calls per week. Calls generated from mobile and desktop search ads using call metrics last, on average, six-minutes. And Google has now connected over 12 million calls for thousands of businesses.

The sites that succeed are those that get a lot of traffic. To sustain such traffic levels, some publications publish fresh content every six minutes#. Some media sites have established the role that…



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