Written on June 22, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing, seo
Companies are realizing the value in “brands as publishers” and are making real commitments to the creation of content in their online marketing mix. It’s no longer enough to provide fundamental features and benefits information about products and services to succeed competitively online. Consumers and of course, business buyers, seek additional information, resources and others to connect with on the topics of interest to them. Some companies choose a pure creation strategy and find it to be a formidable undertaking, especially creating unique and valuable content over a long period of time.
Within the field of content marketing, curation is becoming a popular topic of discussion. Blending a mix of new content with the filtering and management of other useful information streams is a productive and manageable solution for providing prospective customers a steady stream of high quality and relevant content. Pure creation is demanding. Pure automation doesn’t engage. Content curation can provide the best of both.
As I am prone to do with topics of interest, I reached out to a few industry thought leaders to get their take on defining Content Curation and where it fits within the mix in an online marketing program:
Rebecca Lieb – @lieblink
Vice President, North America at Econsultancy and author of The Truth About Search Engine Optimization
As an editor, journalist and marketer….what a great question!
Content curation, which can be defined as a highly proactive and selective approach to finding, collecting, presenting and displaying digital content around predefined sets of criteria and subject matter, has become essential to marketing, branding, journalism, reporting and social media – often, to mash-ups of all these different and disparate channels.
Content curation can takes many forms: feeds, “channels” (such as on YouTube), it can appear on blogs, or even be the links you upload to social media sites such as Facebook. It can be an online newsroom, a collection of links, an assortment of RSS feeds, or a Twitter list. Whatever form content curation does take, it’s around a topic, or a subject, or even a sensibility that speaks to the knowledge, expertise, taste, refinement, brand message or persona of the person, brand or company that has created the particular channel or source of content.
Why bother? Tons of reasons. It’s a big web out there. More and more, people rely on trusted sources: friends, family, brands, companies, experts, you-name-it, to help keep them informed, educated and even amused. Need proof? Take bOINGbOING.net, one of the web’s most popular blogs whose traffic often exceeds that of NYTimes.com. This group blog is nothing more (or less), that curated content; items its contributors and often its readers find and share with others.
Channels of content can be as specific as bee keeping equipment, or as amorphous as “what’s cool.” But they all serve multiple purposes, ranging from informing to engaging to entertaining. In an era where marketing is supplanting advertising and storytelling is an ever-more essential part of the marketing message, carefully curated content – well presented – is an immense brand asset, be it to a humble, over-caffeinated individual blogger or a Fortune 100 company.
David Meerman Scott @dmscott
Author, New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave
I’ve been working with what I call syndication for 25 years. My first job when I got out of school was a bond trading desk and right after that started working with companies in the financial information space. I worked with Knight Ridder for 6 years and at a company at News Edge for 6 years as president of marketing. News Edge was the first, real serious aggregator of news in the corporate, financial and government spaces. So news syndication, news aggregation has been going on literally for decades.
What is Expedia, for example? It’s an aggregation of airline and hotel feeds that then get aggregated to create content. What’s Google? Google is an aggregation of a whole bunch of content.
I’m a fan of doing that but the challenge is how can you do it in a way that’s interesting. You have to make a decision: Do you let the machines do the aggregation and the selection or do you let humans do the selection. It’s a huge decision, humans or machines.
You also need to think about, how do you create the taxonomy and the folksonomy of how to turn that content into categories? That becomes a really big issue with content curation.
If you’re a big company and trying to do this, and you have a B2B section, a B2C section, 15 products in 25 markets, in 58 countries, what do we do? Do we have 58 feeds for each country, do we have 25 different things for each category? It really becomes a big issue.
I’m a huge fan of content syndication, great stuff. Been going on for decades. But the two challenges for people that want to embark on a strategy like that is A: Humans or Technology and B: What’s the taxonomy or folksonomy to put it together.
Brian Solis – @briansolis
President Future Works and Author of Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web & Co-Author of Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
Marketing in general, which can be content marketing, public relations, communications. We have a tendency to try and automate things, to the point of obscurity or mediocrity. There is a value in curation and a value in creation. But when you start to think of things in terms of automation, I think that we’re just feeding the system for the sake of feeding the system.
Now I think there’s value in both and I believe that in order to garner some thought leadership you have to become a thought leader. You can’t do that through aggregating the thoughts and words and ideas of others.
Obviously you (as a company) have something to contribute, something to say, something of value to offer which is mostly likely why you’re most likely in business. I need to hear about that. I need to understand why I should consider you as a partner or whatever it is you’ve created, something I can use, something I couldn’t do before I came into contact with you.
Now in terms of curation, where it gets really interesting is that those thoughts and words and ideas of others can be helpful to establish yourself as a value added resource, as a place or destination for information.
Ann Handley – @marketingprofs
Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs and Co-Author of the upcoming book, Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business
Defined as it applies to online publishing: Content curation is the act of continually identifying, selecting and sharing the best and most relevant online content and other online resources (and by that I mean articles, blog posts, videos, photos, tools, tweets, or whatever) on a specific subject to match the needs of a specific audience.
What role should it play:
All organizations are now publishers — meaning, the company with the most engaging and interesting content is the one who wins. Content curation isn’t necessarily anything new (finding the best stuff to share is what so many of us do on Twitter already, and what bloggers have long done, or what sites like Alltop or Digg have been doing). But recently, it’s getting a little more attention as an emerging field of its own.
It can fit into an organization’s content strategy nicely. How? It’s a way for organizations to further their role as a resource to their audience. Sifting through the mountain of web content and finding the tastiest, choicest bits for your readers is a great way to build trust and authority with them, and to become a valuable resource for them on any particular topic. What’s more, for organizations just getting into publishing online — for those just starting a blog, say, or a microsite — curated content can allow them to ramp up quickly, both from an SEO as well as content perspective.
That said, I have two cautionary pieces of advice:
1. Don’t rely exclusively on automated content curation services to feed your own belly (to fulfill your content needs). I see content services like HiveFire as providing an intelligent stream of curated stuff, but you still need a real, live human editor to pick and choose and order the best stuff for your own audience. Warm-blooded humans still required, in other words.
2. Mix curated content with original content, and don’t rely on the curated stuff alone. Content curating is a perfectly good way to extend the content of your own site, but only “in addition to” and not “instead of” your original content.
Joe Pulizzi – @juntajoe
Founder Junta42 and Content Marketing Institute, Co-Author of Get Content, Get Customers.
Content curation is editing on steroids. In actuality, content curation has been around since the dawn of the publishing industry. The job of the editor was to take the best information from around their industry and present that information in a manner that makes sense to readers.
The web’s first crack at this was content aggregation, or having computers pull the best links and information automatically to make the “reader’s” experience more fulfilling. But as we have learned, search is not perfect. Enter the content curation specialist.
As more content floods through all aspects of the web (as well as print and online), we’ll need more brands stepping up to make sense of what we really should be paying attention to. Content curation is as important in the content marketing toolbox as is creation. We need both…and curation doesn’t work without creation (much like Google trying to save the newspapers because they need great news to survive, but that is for another story). For some brands, curation may be enough. You can’t find the resources to develop the most valuable, most compelling content in your industry? Then just tap into your network that does, and package that content to present you as the trusted industry leader. It’s still a needed service, just a bit different from creation.
Where it will go, no one knows…but I’ve heard from smarter people than me that content curation is the future (even present) of media. I’d rather say curation and creation go together like Macaroni & Cheese…a splendid combination.
Paul Gillin – @pgillin
Consultant. Author of The New Influencers and Secrets of Social Media Marketing
I define content curation as the process of assembling, summarizing and categorizing and interpreting information from multiple sources in a context that is relevant to a particular audience. I think this discipline will be absolutely essential to content marketing in the future because of changes in the media landscape.
Just a few years ago, audiences were starved for information and the role of media was to create it. Today, we are drowning in information and the emerging role for media is to filter and organize it.
This is being handled accomplished on an ad hoc basis by social news sites like Digg and Sphinn; social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Reddit; news aggregators like Drudge Report; link blogs like Metafilter and Slashdot; friends networks like Twitter and Facebook; and even self-curated RSS aggregations. In fact, much of what goes on in social media is various forms of content curation.
Marketers can build trust with their constituencies by providing focused curation in areas that matter to their constituents. Original content will always have value, but curation is coming to have nearly equal value. The key is to stake out unique topic areas and to become the most trusted source in those areas. You don’t need a lot of money to do this. You just need to know the subject matter very well.
Erik Qualman, @equalman
Author of Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business and MBA Professor at the Hult International Business School
Today, everyone is a potential media outlet. A curator understands their audience and is able to package created content in a digestible manner for them.
Creators need to view curators as distribution points for their content rather than as pirates. Content creators and curators that will thrive in this new world understand the importance of this symbiotic relationship. But is it symbiotic? In the end, almost every person is a little of both (creator & curator). After all, there is no such thing as a new idea and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. These clichés symbolize the irony of the topic being discussed.
Valeria Maltoni – @conversationage
Director of Strategy, Powered, Inc., Conversation Agent
Content curation is one of the keystones in a content marketing strategy. It’s like museum curation — harvesting, researching, tagging, organizing, and sharing — only two-way, because of the digital medium. Thanks to technology it also includes in an out feeds, and moderation and escalation, where necessary.
To maximize its impact, you want to integrate curation within a canvas of brand generated content and promotions in a forum that also highlights the best brand-related content from your own community of fans. The curator monitors conversations for opportunities to align the voice of the brand with the voice of the customer, to engage outside content creators, to highlight the best third party content within the brand’s sharing strategy, and inspire action.
Pawan Deshpande – @TweetsFromPawan
CEO, HiveFire (TopRank Client)
Content curation is the cure for a broken content marketing strategy. Content marketing is about a brand producing valuable content, and prospects being educated with that content. It’s valuable, it works and it’s not going away.
But the only problem is that day by day, it’s less effective as everyone produces more and more content. Brands are increasingly competing to get their content noticed. At the same time, prospects are increasingly spending more time searching for relevant content.
Content curation has emerged as a new and powerful way for marketers to seamlessly sift through the flood of content available to prospects. Like the owner of a high-end art gallery, you have to sift through the information from across the web and “curate” it to ensure that it is relevant to the customer. You will be navigating your prospects through this sea of content by leading them to the most relevant important information.
It’s already happened in the consumer world: Sites like Digg (social curation) which have little or no original content have become key resources for information. Similarly we are seeing leading businesses take a similar approach to become the experts for their respective areas.
(Note: HiveFire makes a content curation product called Curata, that blends creation with curation automation.)
Marc Meyer – @marc_meyer
Dir.of Social Media and Search, Principal at DRMG
Content today is not your father’s content… Hell, it’s not even the content from 10 years ago. It’s so much more now. So much so, it should be its own country. Curation for us, is part art and part science. At its core, it has as much to do with maintaining and preserving what has been digitally “created”-as it does in making sure that it lasts longer than a cup of coffee. And that’s the challenge.
Loosely defined, the curation of content is a company’s ability to create and then manifest digital assets that drive and maintain at the least, awareness. Content Curation holistically speaking, refers to a person’s or company’s ability to stay in front of the digital curve by managing those assets across the board.
Its role in a content marketing strategy is primary and cannot be downgraded to a perfunctory responsibility. Curation feeds the beast and thus it contributes greatly to a company’s overall digital strategy.
Have you added a curation component to your content marketing mix? If so, are you doing it manually, automatically or somewhere in between?
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Tags: book ,content marketing ,digital ,editor ,financial ,information ,marketing ,media ,person ,professor ,search-engine ,seo ,voice
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Written on May 21, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing, seo
When it comes to marketing in the current economy, small businesses need all the help they can get. They don’t have the ad budgets, the personnel or the time that the bigger competition has. But none of those factors really matter to search engines, and SEO is a great way to both level the playing field and steal marketshare.
Here are a few tips that small businesses can use to improve their SEO and user experience.
1. Turn everything into content
Content is still King. Search engines still love unique content, and the more useful content there is on your website, the more opportunities you give searchers to find your products and services. Rob Snell gave a fabulous presentation at PUBCON South, and one of the main takeaways was how to turn everything on an e-commerce site into content. Here are some ways to “free” extra content on your site. Here were some of his tips:
- Record everything and transcribe it all into text. Interviews, conversations, product DVD’s, personal opinions, etc.
- Turn support emails into FAQ pages on your site
- Turn PDF’s into HTML pages (although PDF files can rank on their own)
- Start generating videos of everything
2. Make it personal
Small businesses have a major advantage that most bigger businesses don’t: A personal voice. By making your voice heard, you’re showcasing your authority in your market, and adding trust. Buyers love hearing recommendations or reviews, and are more influenced to buy from those vs. product feature and benefit pages. Consumers use search engines to research products, and other than the lowest price, they’re looking for recommendations. Give them some! If you have a catalog, make a buyers guide in addition to product listings. Show you’re an expert and turn your knowledge into personalized business. Teaching is a great way to make sales.
3. Optimize for local search
Odds are that your small business can take advantage of local search. 63% of consumers use search engines to research information about local companies. Start with Thomas’ excellent guide on local SEO tips that range from claiming your profile to adding media to submitting to content aggregators.
4. Improve your site’s speed
Small business sites can be notoriously slow. Site speed is usually one of the last things that small business owners care about. But now that Google has introduced speed into the ranking algorithm, it’s time to seriously start checking out how fast your site loads. But more importantly, when you improve your site’s speed, you’re also improving your customer’s experience. Don’t make users wait to buy your products! You can use tools like Web Page Analyzerand the Firefox extension YSlow! to see what’s taking your pages so long to load. If you’re using a blog or shopping cart software, search for caching plugins for your software.
5. Refine internal linking
Internal links can add value to your site considerably, but many small businesses don’t understand that you have to develop a linking mindset in order to really capitalize on it. It takes extra time to research old post links and include them in your articles, but the benefits are great. Sites like Copyblogger do an excellent job of referencing older posts in their articles. Not only does this strategy help with SEO, it also adds to the user experience, giving them more Think long and hard about your site’s linking architecture. Is your navigation schema getting to all of your content? Aside from adding sitemaps, related products and posts keep both visitors and search engines happy. Popular posts lists are also great for making sure your best content is getting seen and linked to.
6. Create content for people
If you’re generating content specifically for search engines, you’re missing a major chunk of your market. Humans don’t like to be bamboozled, and when they come to a page on your site that was obviously made for a search engine, they’ll leave in a hurry and never come back. Plus, only humans can link to your site. If you want to get more inbound links and retain customers, you need to write for customers. The goal to higher search results is still to get more people to your site. After all, search engines can’t buy anything from you.
7. Don’t fret about getting nofollow links
It’s easy to get carried away with only trying to get incoming links without the dreaded nofollow. But really, a link is still a link. If that link can bring in a potential customer, then you want it. If you’re only looking for specific types of incoming links, than odds are you’re missing lots of the low-hanging backlink fruit and worrying about the wrong things.
Who knows how long the nofollow link will be around? If you’re smart, you worry about what’s most important: creating great content. You can’t control how Google ranks things in the future. Focus on things you can control, like creating a killer experience for your customers. In the end, if you focus on giving your customers and visitors great content, many aspects of SEO will take care of itself. Great content attracts great links, especially when you promote it and leverage social SEO channels of distribution. If it’s good for your potential customers, odds are it’s good for SEO too.
© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
7 Essential SEO Tips for Small Businesses |
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Tags: a-great-way ,customers ,dvd ,firefox ,google ,marketing ,navigation ,online marketing ,search ,seo tips ,software ,time ,tips ,voice
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Written on April 22, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing, seo
While today’s online media are abuzz with the latest and greatest social media tactics and tools, for many of us that have been around a little while, it was blogging that started our social media careers.
It’s funny to think that in 2002 a type of site called “blog” came up on my radar as a possible marketing tool. At the time, many blogs were personal diaries posted anonymously or by people with a little tech savvy and plenty of opinion. Writing personal thoughts on a public web site was absolutely the last thing I would ever consider doing. However, it was a curious thing and I started a few blogs anonymously to see what it was like. Unfortunately, the excercise was so foreign, poorly executed and without feedback, that I deleted them.
In mid 2003 I began looking for online content outside of forums and started reading several SEO blogs including Search Engine Blog (Peter Da Vanzo), Search Blog (John Battelle) and Search Engine Lowdown (Andy Beal). Interestingly, only Search Blog remains what it was.
In December 2003 after using Blogger.com as a group blog software for a few collaboration projects I finally decided to start a blog under the blogspot.com domain for TopRank Online Marketing, which by then, had been in business about 2 years.
As you can see from my “Hello World” post in Dec 2003, I had humble goals to post news and information related to online marketing. We had a web site that pulled in a lot of search traffic, why would we need a blog? The reason was simply to see what blogging could do to get the word out about our expertise and to share information. Blogging was very new territory and there wasn’t anyone to demonstrate best practices, so I set out to find what those were while sharing links, news and resources.
I suspect there are a good number of companies that treat other social media services the same way, whether it’s Twitter, Foursquare or building a social mobile app. It’s new territory and they want to find out whether those applications or sites would make sense in their marketing mix. The problem with that perspective is that it’s about the most inefficient and unproductive way to go about finding the right online marketing channels for a business.
The biggest mistake I made 6 plus years ago when I started blogging was not creating a strategy. As a marketer, I knew better than to chase a tactic, but I had no idea at the time how much of an impact blogging would have on our business. In other words, despite a lack of strategy, we were able to use our marketing savvy, curiosity and interest in connecting with the online marketing community to achieve many of the goals we set out to reach in our business. It just took a lot longer without that strategic plan.
Companies starting down the path of becoming more social in their culture to better connect with customers and to realize the marketing, PR, and customer service benefits from social media participation don’t need to waste that time. Doing the homework of researching customers, setting goals and developing a strategy are essential steps towards a successful social media marketing experience.
Back to why I started blogging. The SEO community was a lot smaller in 2003 and 2004. Writing a post about anything to do with search engine optimization would be noticed and commented on by the small number of SEO bloggers. There were plenty of cross links and “hat tips” (whatever happened to those?) and openly shared opinions. Blogging even made a number of SEOs very popular, very quickly.
Blogging to get popular is the goal for some people and there certainly is some relationship between notoriety, awareness and credibility with the ability to attract sales. The key (for me at least) is that creating awareness of oneself is simply a proxy to gaining visibility for your business. It’s not a goal in itself. As a result, Ive been open about using visibility to help others and make connections.
The turning point for me in blogging was due in part to learning to liveblog at conferences. Steve Hall of AdRants provided my first opportunity to liveblog at a ad:tech event - an absolutely humbling experience for anyone that isn’t a natural writer. I met people like Frank Gruber and David Berkowitz at that event in 2004. I did some liveblogging for Barry Schwartz and Search Engine Roundtable after that which also provided great exposure and connections. Matt McGowan brought even more exposure opportunity by having Online Marketing Blog as a media sponsor for SES conferences. There’s a huge list of people that have been very helpful over the years, especially our longtime readers.
Since then we’ve published a lot of content and provided a lot of insight into holistic SEO and online marketing topics. During that time I think the most important thing I’ve learned is to find your voice and stick to it. Don’t try to be what you’re not. It simply doesn’t resonate with readers or with the goals you’ve likely set.
Whether it’s blogging or other types of content and networking, I think the real value from online publishing in a social context is of course, being social. Blogging has been a great experience in terms of developing relationships with people I would have never connected with otherwise. It has definitely served as a platform for making connections in the industry that have led directly and indirectly, to a lot of new business.
I started blogging personally as an experiment and found a process and strategy along the way that has helped grow our business and the online marketing/sales performance of many of our clients. Long time blogging provides ample opportunity to make and learn from mistakes. Blogging also allows us to continue to be a resource while sharing our expertise with potential customers, partners and employees.
We’ll be going through yet another evolution with Online Marketing Blog in the next month or two and I wonder about the experiences of our readers that also blog:
If you’re a blogger, why did you start? What’s your blogging story? Did you start as an experiment? Did you start with a strategy? What was your biggest mistake? What have you learned?
© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
How I Started Blogging. What’s Your Story? |
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Tags: a-curious-thing ,a-little-while ,a-media-sponsor ,a-social-mobile ,culture ,expertise ,goals ,marketing ,online marketing ,search ,search-engine ,seo ,social ,voice
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Written on April 8, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing
Google Voice has become a fan favorite for its ability to handle voicemail and have it follow you wherever you need it to. Very handy. You can receive and manage voicemails through Google voice from various numbers and have separate messages for certain callers etc etc etc. The one thing it has not provided, however, is an endpoint for calls so while a good tool, it has been limited.
In November 2009 Google purchased Gizmo5 and the rumor mill started humming about what Google had up its sleeve with regard to the use of their newly acquired VOIP tool box.
Since that purchase was all of 5 months ago that seems like several Internet lifetimes to not move the needle on that rumor. Well, TechCrunch is reporting that there is something to talk about.
Gizmo5 fills some of the holes in the Google Voice product, particularly providing an endpoint for calls. Currently Google Voice users must assign their Google Voice phone number to an actual phone to make and receive calls.
Google never commented on how they might use Gizmo5’s technology. But we’ve confirmed that they have now built a Google Voice desktop application to make and receive calls. From a user perspective, this will let Google Voice users take calls right from their desktop.
According to TechCrunch sources, this application is being tested by Google employees internally.
So if you are Skype, this news can’t be good. Of course, if you are Skype and you see Google making a move to become a player in yet another business there are options. In fact, you are likely to start revving up the law team of “Dewey, Screwyou, and How” to see how you can most effectively cry monopoly and get the feds involved. That’s just my theory but if this follows suit (pun intended) with other offerings Google has looked to roll out (AdMob) this will end up in a legal battle as much as it will a competitive one.
So if you are a Skype user does this make you think you may have another option or are you content with your Skype service? Let us know.
Excerpt from:
Google Testing Skype Challenger?
Tags: a-legal-battle ,battle-as-much ,business ,general ,legal ,move-the-needle ,news ,public ,receive-calls- ,theory ,voice ,will
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Written on March 2, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Object, book, marketing, searchengineguide
by Mike Moran
When my friend called me, there was a little panic in his voice. He owned a successful, customer-friendly small business, and was generally an easygoing person. But he didn’t know what to do. A long-time and loyal customer alerted him to a savage review of his business on an Internet Yellow Pages site. And so now he was turning to me to find out what he could do about it.
I asked him for the details and he ruefully related the story. When he read the review, he immediately knew who the unhappy client was, recognizing some details in the story. He told me that this client had been impossible, constantly changing her mind about what she wanted with no notice, and although he did his best to satisfy her, at the end he had to tell her that he had done all he could for what he had been paid.
He would have understood if she had honestly expressed her disappointment in him in the review (even though he felt she was expecting way too much), but what irked him no end was that her review attributed egregious bits of behavior to him that were completely made up from whole cloth. He had objective proof that some of her comments were lies.
This isn’t an isolated case. Although most reviews are factual, and some small businesses have it coming, there’s nothing stopping dissatisfied customers from responding in extreme ways. And the services that post such reviews, such as Yahoo! Yellow Pages and Yelp, don’t want to be in the position of having to discern who’s telling the truth, letting the “wisdom of crowds” sort things out.
So, what’s a small business to do? First, treat your customers well, remembering that they have more power than you think. Encourage your happy customers to post reviews online, so that the wisdom of your crowd is in evidence–that will dilute the power of any one negative review. (Yesterday, I posted some small business social media success stories that you can emulate.) When someone posts a bad review, consider engaging that person online to try to make amends.
Unfortunately, it might require that you develop a thicker skin, because the rudeness of some online reviews might be more than you can bear. One San Francisco bookstore owner was arrested for battery after responding to a Yelp reviewer.
But that’s no reason to accept outright lies. When it clearly goes beyond a difference of opinion, and you can prove you’ve been wronged, go to the review site and plead your case. Show them that it’s a lie and ask them to remove it.
That’s what my friend did, and Yahoo! Yellow Pages, to their credit, did remove the dishonest review. But my friend learned form the situation. Now, he solicits good reviews and he works harder to satisfy even the nut jobs. It’s a different world out there, so make sure you know how to make your way through it.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
Continued here:
What To Do When Reviewers Lie About You
Tags: a-little-panic ,book ,business ,client ,disappointment ,Object ,power ,search ,small-business ,spend ,spend-the-bulk ,spzmu ,voice ,world-out-there ,yellow-pages
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Written on February 28, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: searchengineguide
by Manoj Jasra
JESS3, a creative agency specializing in data visualization, has put together an amazing video which shows the current state of the Internet. We have highlighted some of the data below, but please also watch the video for yourself (it rivals the
Social Media Revolution).
Tags: a-little-panic ,data ,div-align ,facebook ,flickr ,jesse-thomas ,manoj-jasra ,media ,million ,Object ,search ,small-business ,spzmu ,users-worldwide ,voice
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Written on January 26, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing
Six months after Google said that Apple rejected a Google Voice app for the iPhone (Apple maintained that the app was merely under review, a process which usually takes about a week), Google has finally decided to circumvent the ban. VP of mobile apps engineering Vic Gundotra told the Crunchies Voice would get on the iPhone “one way or another.”
Here’s another: they’re going for a browser-based Google Voice (like the rest of us are using). This option was formerly less viable, but now Google has improved the mobile version of their site for iPhone and Palm Pre users.
The controversy, of course, is that Google Voice allows users to make calls and now send text messages without charge, and without using the minutes in their carrier’s plan.
The New York Times documents the improvements:
Of course, iPhone users were always able to point their mobile Web browser to m.google.com/voice to access their Google Voice accounts. But plenty of things didn’t work right. For example, making calls was a two-step process and the outbound caller ID feature didn’t work, meaning that whoever received the call couldn’t see who was calling, which is one of the more compelling features of Google Voice. [Senior product manager for Google Voice Vincent] Paquet said that all those problems have been solved, and that the new version of Google Voice also offers free text messaging.
Naturally, Google maintains that this isn’t a strike against mobile carriers, just a response to the high demand they’ve had from mobile users with browsers capable of interpreting HTML5.
What do you think? Is this a fourth volley this month in the budding Google/Apple war? How will Apple respond?
Here is the original post:
Google Goes for Browser-based Voice for iPhone
Tags: a-process-which ,apple ,crunchies ,google ,iphone ,like-the-rest ,local/mobile ,mobile-carriers ,product-manager ,strike-against ,voice
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Written on January 20, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, book, searchengineguide, seo
by Miriam Ellis
Tech reviewers are praising the Nexus One and tech reviewers are bashing the Nexus One. Predictable, of course, but I’d like to bring a different perspective to the rollout of Google’s headlining smart phone.
Are you a sophisticated tech reviewer? I’m sure not. In point of fact, buying the Nexus One yesterday represented my first-ever purchase of a cell phone. I can’t compare the Nexus One to anything else, and I can’t talk to you about Snapdragons and Sim Cards. It’s all new to me, and anyhow, it’s always been my habit to think of how people use technology rather than thinking very hard about how technology is created. If, like me, you are a late adopter of cell phone technology and are just now considering how a smart phone might benefit you and your business, I’m going to show you what I’ve learned to do in a single day with this remarkable device.
I Can Use The Web
This was the big deal for me as a website designer. Connecting to the web from the Nexus One is absolutely simple. We purchased the phone unlocked (meaning we didn’t buy it with the locked T-Mobile contract). However, we discovered that T-Mobile coverage is very strong in our corner of the world and so purchased an unlocked, unlimited T-Mobile service plan that will actually be less expensive than the locked plan over time. I can visit any site I want on the web and am already seeing how badly Mobile design standards are going to be needed as the whole world goes Mobile. I can send emails, visit blogs and forums and do all the stuff I normally do on my laptop. It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to navigate around easily, but I’ve got it down now and I’m really impressed! If being on the web is important to your business, I think the Nexus One will make it easy for you to stay connected to your business affairs no matter where you are.
I Can Use Google Maps
This was the big deal for me as a Local SEO. The Nexus One comes with a connection to Google Maps built right into the main set of icons. Now, I confess, I’m having a little harder time getting acquainted with using Maps as I’m so used to doing on my laptop. The navigation I’m familiar with doesn’t seem to be there, and only some locations can be viewed in StreetView. I need more time to play with this, but Local and Mobile are quickly becoming one and I’m sure I will get the hang of the whole Maps feature with a little more practice. The Nexus One also tracks my location as I’m driving about - really interesting. So far, it knew where I was about 70% of the time. Then, the little blue marker indicating my location seemed to get confused and was placing me and my car a street away from where I actually was. This feature definitely deserves further exploration, as does the phone’s ability to give me directions.
I Can Make Calls
It may seem obvious that a smart phone makes phone calls, but the Nexus One has so many capabilities, this function almost seems like a sideshow. The quality of the calls I have made has seemed remarkably clear to me, both on the sending and receiving ends. The phone has a device which mutes background noise and it appears to work very well. I’m used to cell phone calls that have tons of static and noise. This phone, with T-Mobile coverage, sounds marvelous in my area. I also absolutely love the fact that I can click a phone number on a website, in an ad or email and the phone automatically starts calling the designated party. Phenomenal! It was very easy to begin setting up a list of folks I frequently call and, so far, I’m favorably impressed with this aspect of the Nexus One.
I Can Type
The keyboard is very small, even for my dainty fingers. Turning the phone sideways helps a bit. One has to switch back and forth between keyboards with capital letters, lower case letters and numbers and symbols. After just one day, I’m already starting to feel comfortable with this, but I am typing very, very slowly after a day of use and this feels odd to me - a really fast typist. However, there is a feature of the keyboard that I discovered this morning that ameliorates some of the awkwardness. While you type, a little bar is constantly suggesting to you complete common words that you can click on rather than having to type whole words out, and this is pretty helpful. I also love that the keyboard has a special key for the phrase ‘.com’. Very useful.
I Can Talk To The Phone!
For me, this is the feature that makes the Nexus One like something from the fabled ’space age’ that has been predicted by humans for several generations. There is a little microphone icon that you can press and begin speaking into the phone and the words appear on the screen. Imagine that! However, there is a pretty serious problem with accuracy, and I did an experiment today, using the Voice function to dictate a blog post.
If you click my example, you will immediately see that I ended up with some pretty foolish gibberish. In a 102 word paragraph, the Nexus One misunderstood 12 words. When you add to this the fact that it had no idea how to punctuate what I was saying and was using numbers like ‘1′ instead of writing out the word ‘one’, you end up with text that is far from publication-ready. The meaning of what I was trying to say got totally lost, and while I suppose this might be okay in the world of Text Messaging, this is one spaceship that won’t fly when it comes to important business communications.
Nevertheless, it’s an amazing emergent technology, and I had a blast speaking in the names of local places and businesses, famous people and other phrases and then watching with amazed eyes as the phone brought up accurate results time and again. This technology is going somewhere and it’s thrilling to see the beginnings of it.
I Can Take Pictures
The Nexus One gets high marks from me for the ease of use of the camera which takes very clear pictures. Here’s an example of an un-touched, un-photoshopped image I took very quickly, on a dark grey afternoon while I was out grocery shopping today:
It took me about 2 minutes to figure out how to sort and and delete images in the gallery feature and how to email them to my computer. Super simple and fun! If your business runs a blog and you’ve got a roving reporter, this phone is going to make him a powerhouse when it comes to collecting on-the-spot images to enliven your content.
What Else Can I Do?
I can listen to music, and it sounds okay for coming out of such a tiny device, but to be honest, all I’ve done so far is delete all of the pre-set music out of the phone because it sounded like guys with adenoid trouble torturing washing machines. Google - what was with that music? I’ll find something lovelier to my ears soon. I can see the time, bookmark my favorite places, read news, get weather, and sign into a marketplace where I can download cool apps for the phone. I watched some YouTube videos and they looked astonishingly good. Wow!
I know I can also text message folks, but I haven’t even looked into it yet. Frankly, I have the distinct feeling that my first 24 hours with the Nexus One has just barely touched the tip of the technology iceberg of features present in this pint-sized gadget. Is the Nexus One the right phone for you? Budget, coverage and your location are going to determine the answer to that, and I highly recommend reading Mike Blumenthal’s fantastic guide to choosing a smart phone.
Most importantly, I’m suggesting that you consider the common scenarios of your daily personal and business life. For me, running my business, getting a smart phone is a smart thing to do. Would your business benefit if you were able to browse the web, make calls, send emails and text messages, take photos, find important places locally and turn spoken words into text, no matter where you are? And, don’t forget to ask yourself whether it will become important to your business in the next 5 years that your business’ website renders well on mobile devices. How about mobile-based advertising? That’s ramping up, too. What do you need to be doing to make sure your business is keeping apace with how people live and do business as we enter the second decade of the 21st century? I do believe that Google’s Nexus One is hinting at the answer.
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24 Hours With Google’s Nexus One
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