Archive for February, 2009

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Will Facebook’s Latest Social Networking Online Fiasco Change Anything?

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

If past experiences are any indication, the latest Facebook debacle will not hurt the social networking online company from their Internet dominance.

According to the Facebook founder CEO, the whole thing was just a big
misunderstanding: “Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with,” he said. “When people share information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with.”

But that’s not to say that Facebook users didn’t have a legitimate grievance against the social networking online giant. After all, Facebook has emerged as the leader in a highly-competitive new media industry. That likely means that the standards they set will be followed by other social networking online services. For users who want to protect ownership of their content, vigilance is necessary.

The whole controversy can be boiled down to two factors: 1.) there laws
regarding the using and sharing of content and information online, which are still hazy, and 2.) when lawyers and Web developers—two professions with highly-specialized jargon—get together to write a terms of service policy for a social networking online service, the resulting document won’t exactly read like a Hemingway story.

The latest news is that Facebook is currently revising their social networking online policy, a move that will hopefully tackle the above two problems. Hopefully the new policy will better serve users by being more clear about how their uploaded content will be used. And hopefully, you won’t have to be a lawyer to understand their new social networking online terms of service either.

So how much did you care about the latest Facebook debacle? Do you think
it will change people’s Facebook viewing and social networking online posting habits? I’d bet that new, clearer, service terms will be enough to reassure users and keep users using Facebook as much as they always have. A mass migration from the social networking online giant Facebook, just isn’t in the cards.

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The Future of Mobile Advertising and Buzz Marketing

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Online advertisers want to reach a highly-targeted audience, but will the mobile industry be able to compete? According to Adotas.com , mobile device users may encounter impediments when it comes to online advertising and buzz marketing trends.

The current wave of technology is becoming an immediate gratification for those who lack attention spans. Will more people catch onto the ADD technology? With more iPhones and mobile PCs being used every day and in every place once thought unimaginable, people are becoming more attached and personal with mobile technology. So what are the obstacles that mobile users are experiencing with buzz marketing and mobile advertising?

Users are feeling violated when buzz marketing gets a bad rap, such as the recent Facebook debacle. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently released a report revising the online behavioral targeting criteria. However, these changes have been met with much criticism from privacy groups countering that mobile users do not want a tracking system in place and feel like it’s an invasion of their privacy. While the changes have good intentions, they may face more negative feedback than originally intended.

There is hope for better advertising and buzz marketing for mobile device users. Buy a mobile phone that is well-targeted to your immediate business and personal marketing needs as well as applications that you will find most helpful for checking your buzz marketing stats and updates. More mobile phone companies are adding applications and services to their devices in addition to making them more affordable.

Tracking users and their online behavior is difficult since JavaScript and cookies are not compatible with mobile phones. Furthermore the FTC will have to develop simple, clear and measurable guidelines so that buzz marketing users won’t feel violated.

Have questions how you can incorporate buzz marketing with your company or promote products and/or services? Contact the experts in SEO buzz marketing at SearchCircus.com today!

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Improve Your Listing of Optimized News Releases with Google News

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

The News Online Operations Team at Google just published a great blog post, titled “Eight Ways to Help Google news Better Crawl Your Site”. As an SEO firm, we strongly believe that company news releases should be submitted online if not every month, at the very least, every 3-4 months each year. But, how does a business generate residual online traffic for all of their company news releases, even after the news distribution portal fizzles? In enters what is perhaps the most robust, ethically sound continuous traffic generator for each of your optimized press releases –  Google News. Google News is a site that aggregates news headlines from more than 5000 English news sources worldwide, then groups them together by similar subject matters and then displays them according to a reader’s customized interests.

According to Google News directly, “Traditionally, news readers first pick a publication and then look for headlines that interest them. We do things a little differently, with the goal of offering our readers more personalized options and a wider variety of perspectives from which to choose. On Google News we offer links to several articles on every story, so you can first decide what subject interests you and then select which publishers’ accounts of each story you’d like to read. Click on the headline that interests you and you’ll go directly to the site which published that story.

“Our articles are selected and ranked by computers that evaluate, among other things, how often and on what sites a story appears online. We also rank based on certain characteristics of news content such as freshness, location, relevance and diversity. As a result, stories are sorted without regard to political viewpoint or ideology and you can choose from a wide variety of perspectives on any given story.”

Some ways that you can help Google News crawl your new content more effectively is through the following strategies:
1) When writing a news release, keep the article title and body clean, easy to understand and easy to crawl, from a search engine vantage point.

2) Keep the URLs of each press release unique, permanent and keyword rich, ie. www.abcxyzurl/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.html . Also, be sure to identify each news release with a 3 or more digit number in the URL, that does not resemble any year, ie., 2005 or 1998.

3) In order to successfully crawl and index your article, be sure you use the right publication dates. Dates found between the article title, author and body can be written in normal format but for the sitemaps, double check they are in a language easily understood by the search engines, like W3C format, ie. 2009-01-10T08:30:00Z.

4) Format all images correctly. To help Google News identify your images and crawl them with your news releases, use large images with reasonable aspect ratios and descriptive captions. Make the images non-clickable., and in JPEG format.

Fore more Google News tips on how to properly submit and rank your optimized press releases, read the full blog post on the Google News Blog at Eight Ways to Help Google News Better Crawl Your Site.

To submit your optimized news releases to Google News, first check out their Help menu for recommendations and guidelines at Google News Help for Publishers.


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