Tech Dependence

Last week I tried to bring up an important email on my phone only to find that I couldn’t log into my email. My G-mail account had been hacked recently, forcing me to change my password quickly and without putting much thought into it. I had been using my old password for almost nine years now, a terrible habit, but I had grown comfortable with its familiarity. Now I stood outside my meeting, unable to access this important email, because I was unable to remember my new password.

Sure, I had written it down, but the sticky note on the bottom of my desk was no good to me, as I stood outside the conference, furiously typing in possible combinations of numbers and letters in a desperate attempt to break into my own account. I ended up going into the meeting without the numbers I wanted off my phone, and surprisingly enough the world didn’t end. The situation did get me thinking, however, about how dependent I had become on my computer and phone remembering things for me. I can’t even imagine the kind of wreck I would be if I were to lose my phone or computer and the data on them for good.

As the conveniences of modern technology have grown, my powers as a mental storage machine have begun to regress. Back in middle school, I had many phone numbers of friends and family memorized. Now I sometimes stumble when reciting my own phone number. Why waste brainpower remembering anything these days? Our cellphones save hundreds of contacts and our computers can automatically fill out our log-ins and passwords for us. This system of entering all my information at once and then forgetting about it has been very convenient up until now.

Last week's email debacle opened my eyes to just how easy it would be for me to lose years of collected data. With all the advancements in collecting, storing, and sharing information, how much of this data is going into our long-term memory and not just a bookmark folder on our desktop?

For me, it appears that most of what I think I know is reliant on a fully functioning phone or computer. Often, I find myself saving online news articles to read at a later date, only to delete them the next time I clean out my bookmark folder, the articles still unread. Technology has made it so easy to find and store information that I fear we spend more time searching than we do absorbing what we find.

Everyday we are bombarded with emails, text messages, conversations, commercials, television shows, new acquaintances, and news stories. All this information is coming at us in a constant torrent throughout the day, and we are expected to take it all, process it, store what we find important, and quickly move on to the next item of business. We have become so greedy by the stimulation of new information that we now even create and horde daily happenings on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. It is no wonder I can’t remember a password I made up with only a day ago; it is buried under a pile of never ending information. I have grown too accustomed to having all this information and technology saved for me, data that I can lose with a simple hard drive crash or stolen phone. How easy it would be for me to lose all my music, emails, contacts, bookmarks, and passwords in an instant. Yes, I have everything saved on a back up drive, and cloud sharing systems are making this less of an issue, but just the thought of all the reliance I have put into technology is a little frightening. My inability to access my email, it seems, has shaken me awake from this digital dream, opened my eyes to just how much I could lose if something happened to my computer or phone.

Our ability to find and share information will only continue to improve in the years to come. Unfortunately, the unaltered human system cannot hope to contain all the data that we are able to access. It's important for us to develop ways to filter the constant stream of garbage that is thrown at us each and every day, storing it not only in our electronic devices, but also in our memory. I am not saying down with the machines, throw down your web-enabled devices, and go back to living in the woods; I just think it is a good idea for us all to slow down once in a while from our constant hording of information and actually absorb some knowledge.

By: Embra King

Charlotte Reputation Defense

What is reputation defense?

Reputation defense is the monitoring, control, and improvement of a person, professional, brand, or company’s name on the internet through the eyes of their prospective customers.

Reputation defense involves monitoring social media accounts for the company. It also means monitoring the search terms that are often referring customers to the company on social media and search engines.

A large part of the modern local search involves monitoring review sites on your behalf. Sites like Yelp, Google, Yellowpages.com, YP, Superpages.com, and Yahoo all provide reviews with very little protection for the business owner.

A bad review on here will be highly visible and can damage your business without you knowing it exists. Business owners are at risk of bad press without a chance to respond in many cases. This is why we watch all avenues and make sure a response and a resolution or removal happens fast every time.

Examples of Reputation Defense:

For a local restaurant we would monitor the review sites, monitor sites like city-data, city based search sites, food review blogs and websites, tripadvisor.com, and mentions of the restaurant by name in newspapers and blog searches. We would monitor social media for customers commenting on the quality, cleanliness, or service, as well as anything with your name or market mentioned.

In the case of bad reviews, comments about staff or service, or other issues, we would reply to the comments, report the bad press to the site owners and put higher positioned good comments and reviews above them to drown them out for a quick fix.

We could also use the company’s loyal customers on Facebook and twitter as a tool by encouraging them with social posts to go to that page and share their good experiences to drown out the bad.

If your company has a newsletter, we could call on that to drive traffic to the review website and provide dozens of great reviews in a matter of days.

Reputation defense has become a mainstream industry, and in professional fields it is even more prominent, where bad publicity can hurt for years if someone is spiteful or has a billing issue and decides to rant about it online. Doctors, lawyers, and high-end professionals cannot risk the professional reputation they spent years achieving.

A public page can last for years; it is important to address it quickly and either get it resolved or get it removed.

Negative posts on a lot of social or public sites can go to page one very fast on sites like yahoo answers, review sites, BBB, complaint report sites, and other sites that rank very well and update very quickly. This is the reason having constant monitoring is important.

A business owner can go months without seeing the bad publicity and in that time could lose hundreds of customers due to the angry comments of one bad experience online.

One other way we lessen this bad news, if or when it happens, is through defensive search marketing.

by: Todd Kron

Spring Cleaning

In case you didn't realize, Mother Nature has decided to skip winter this year and jump right into spring. While I begin to put my sweaters up and take out my shorts from where I buried them months ago, it is time to start thinking about some spring-cleaning. Sure you can clean out the house, garage, or your closet, but it might also be time for your website to have a good cleaning as well.  Out with the old, in with the new, and all that jazz. Below is a quick list of some things you can do this spring to give your website a boost. 

Simple is Usually Better

The days of slamming as much content, images, and gifs onto one page as possible are dead (and should never have occurred). When a webpage is too cluttered with small text and moving images you burden your viewers with an information overload. This won’t lead to a better spread of information but will increase the likelihood that viewers of your site will miss what it is you are actually trying to get across. So go check out your website. If you are still using gifs, huge blocks of small text, or if you are still using a black background and white text, it might be time to give your website a good cleaning.

Embrace Social Media

The best way to reach potential clients or customers now lies in the ability to spread your message via social media outlets. Yes, your site might currently take advantage of Facebook and Twitter (and if not I highly recommend you change this), but there are now so many more options that you can use to draw people to your website.  Flikr, Tumblr, Google+, Pinterest, Yelp, Foursquare, and LinkedIn all have advantages in drawing attention to both your website and product you are offering. If you do not take advantage of social media, you are going to be left behind, if you haven’t been already.

Content is Important

No matter how pretty your site is, or how important the information is that you are offering, if no one can find your site, all of that information is just sitting there, collecting theoretical internet dust.  Making sure your copy is Search Engine Optimized is a must if you want people to be able to find you on Google. The trick is to start local. You are not going to be able to capture the Google search “Pizza”, not after a couple months, not after a couple years. It is better to first try to capture searches such as “Denver Pizza” or “Asian Style Deep Dish Pizza”. Once you start to build up rank on more specific key words, then you can start to go bold and go for more targeted keywords.

So it is time to freshen up your website for the long spring ahead of us, and if you need help, give us a call, we would love to help. (Sorry, CGR Creative only does website and advertising work; we won't come clean up your garage).  

Facebook Swallows Another Company Whole

By Embra King

This week Facebook has announced the purchase of the location-based company Gowalla for an undisclosed amount. This comes right around the time that Foursquare (The largest LBA provider) announced that they have just recently exceeded a user base of fifteen million.

Location-based apps are only a year or so old and are growing thanks to the explosion of smart phone owners. With the purchase of the Texas based company, it appears that Facebook has big plans for what these types of apps can bring to networking, marketing and social reviews.

Facebook's biggest challenge is to increase the usage of these apps. While Foursquare boasted about their fifteen million subscribers, triple that of what they had at this time last year, a recent study has found that only about 2% of the subscribers actually use the product at least once a week.

It will be interesting to see if this most recent purchase is more of an acquisition of Gowalla's talent, or if they have plans for integrating this new app into Facebook’s already large social networking toolbox.

The Power of Community

Last week AT&T released a new commercial entitled “Responsibilities”, a thirty second piece that plays on the idea that everyone in a typical office uses their smart phone for everything but actual work. It has received an explosion of views, about 700,000 YouTube views in just the first four days of being online. Now while this commercial is funny, its popularity doesn’t stem from its humor, or the quality of the product it is selling, but rather it is all the attention it has received on Reddit.com.

Nate Dern was making his commercial debut after three years of auditioning and decided to share his success with the community of Reddit. He posted his video on the site last Monday and to his surprise gained an explosion of views over the course of that first day as hundreds of people “up voted” the video promoting it the front page for all to see. People seem to have fallen in love with the idea that one of their own, a fellow Redditor, had made it into a TV spot, and all he says is a simple “Huh?” As this blog post was being written, Nate Dern’s commercial debut has 2882 total “up votes” on Reddit and was at one point the number one link on the websites front page.

What this phenomena is demonstrating is the marketing power that third party post sites are capable of producing. The AT&T commercial is not the first company to benefit from being posted on Reddit, however.

The spread of Chuck Testa’s taxidermy commercial and the video of Judge Williams beating his daughter exploded into the homes of millions, thanks to the community voting system of Reddit. The site has become a powerful tool for spreading news, images, videos, and complaints about companies or services. According to businessinsider.com, Reddit had 1.8 billion viewers in the month of October alone. With this kind of viewership, companies would love for their products or services to get some percentage of this attention.

One reason that Reddit is a powerful tool for spreading information in such a rapid manner is the fact that it does not create exclusive social circles like Facebook or Twitter, but instead lets anyone post and everyone view these posts. Once something is posted, anyone can view it, and those who have created a free account can vote for or against the post. The more positive votes a link receives, the closer the post will move towards the front page.

The problem with all of this, however, is that the products in the commercials are not the ones benefiting from all the publicity; it is the actors themselves. Sure, thousands of people have viewed the commercial, but at the end of it, are people thinking I want that phone, or “Man, well executed, huh?" The millions of views that Chuck Testa’s first commercial received has not translated into increased sales. It has, however, spawned many spin-off videos and started a small demand for Chuck Testa t-shirts. The brand loyalty in this case is to the Mr. Testa and Mr. Dern, not the product they are selling. People online are pushing for Dern to be featured in a second commercial with AT&T and maybe this time with a couple more lines.

What advertisers need to learn is how to harness the communal benefits of sites such as Reddit or Digg, to create attention around a product much like it has for people. The static advertising word that Don Draper lived in is dying, and we are move into a marketing world run by the consumer. It is becoming apparent that companies need to figure out the best way to harness this communal power. It has shown its ability to create an almost cult following for people such as Nate Dern and Chuck Testa, but its potential for creating such a buzz around a product is yet to be tapped.

Why You Can’t Game Google and Bing with +1s and Likes

By: Chris Crum

Social is more important to search rankings than ever. There’s no doubt about that.
Should +1s and Facebook “likes” be used as significant ranking signals by search engines? Share your thoughts here.

In a recent article, we asked if Google’s +1 button is the new PageRank. As Google uses the data from the button as a ranking signal, +1′s will no doubt be coveted more and more by any site owner looking for increased search visibility and traffic.

As discussed in that article, just as you’ve seen plenty trying to boost their PageRank through black hat tactics, it seems highly likely that these same people will try to exploit the +1 button. Google’s main weapon against this appears to be tying the +1s to your actual identity, by using a strict profile naming policy.

Google wants to know who is doing this +1ing, which should help cut down on abuse.

Bing’s Duane Forrester wrote a blog post this week talking about a similar topic in the realm of abusing the social signals that search engines use to try and determine what results to show users. Forrester’s focus was on the concept of the “like” farm – basically the social equivalent of the link farm.

"Amazingly, though, people think this approach works,” says Forrester. ”The rationale being that social signals matter to search, they can ramp up the volume of the ‘like’ signal in Facebook, causing a related boost in rankings. The logic may seem fine, but when you recall that we can see sudden explosions of links as spammy, it’s easy to understand how we can see sudden explosions of likes as spammy as well. To be fair, there’s more to it than that.”

“Anyone could suddenly ‘go viral’ and accumulate a lot of likes very quickly, so we look beyond just like/time to find patterns,” he explains. “And if there is one thing a search engine is good at, it’s seeing patterns online. Like farms tend to be built around a core network of accounts. You pay someone to like your site, content or whatever, and they go out across their network and like you. It’s artificial and we know it. Organic likes rarely follow obvious patterns. In fact, if there’s a pattern to organic liking, it’s one built around chaos. Like farms, however, no matter their size, end up looking obvious by comparison. In the image below, you can see what an accumulation of likes look like to us when graphed.”

He shares the following graph depicting like activity with the red dots representing a like’s origin and the blue dots representing friends liking the same item. He says the differences between like farm activity and organic activity are “very obvious”.

“In most cases, if we spot like farm activity, we simply ignore the signal,” says Forrester. “Again, you may have paid for a service which is bringing you no value in boosting your search results. This also points out why it is so important that you manage your social media program. At the very least, if you are outsourcing the management of your social program, you need to keep an eye on things. Short cuts can add up eroding any value you were trying to achieve.”

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that it is impossible to game the search engines using social media. Black hatters will always look for (and probably find) new ways to exploit the system for their gain, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.

Interestingly, a report out from BrightEdge finds that about half of the largest 10,000 sites on the web don’t even display any kind of social sharing link or buttons at all. This is very surprising. As one WebProNews reader commented, “I find that unbelievable! The search engines have flat out admitted that social signals are a ranking factors. Why would a site owner not want to include social share buttons? Let your readers do some of the heavy lifting and get your content promoted in their social networks!”

I would strongly advise making the buttons accessible. Just have the content to give users a reason to click them. Then maybe you won’t have to worry about trying to game the system.

Do you think Google and Bing can keep social button abuse at bay? Tell us what you think.

5 Reasons Google+ Is Not A Facebook Killer by Dave Davies

For the past couple weeks, a select gathering of us (likely including many Search Engine Watch readers) have been playing with Google+. It's an interesting social media experiment by Google, but it is likely to remain that. Another "almost ran" in the social media game; another Google property that just won't quite make it. Here are five reasons why.

1. Usability

A huge problem Google will face here is that we all know how we use our social media tools and why.

Let's look back to May 2010, when Facebook had the "audacity" to force a layout change on its users – a change that garnered 1.7 million protests and many more complaints (including one from yours truly). If people are this opposed to simply adjusting how they use a single social media site (and let's be honest, the changes really weren't that significant; no manual required), who's going to want to learn an entirely new layout and way to communicate to do... the same things you can do on Facebook.

The overall layout of Google+ is similar to that of Facebook (coincidence?) but the subtle differences are going to be problematic in a world where you have the user's attention for a whopping five seconds. If they can't find what they're looking for, they're gone.

2. Verbiage

Let's say I tell you I "beige" something... what does that mean to you? Not a whole lot I'd imagine, because you don't have a base of reference for the word "beige" as a vote of support or opposition. 

Now let's say I tell you I "like" something... what does that mean to you? Fortunately, we've all gone through our lives "liking" things so we have an easy reference.

I'm pretty sure by now you all see where this is going. None of us has a pre-exposed reference to "+1" as any type of support point. I've never listened to a band in a pub and shouted to the guy next to me, "I really plus one this song... it's awesome!"

People like what they know and from the outset, the idea of +1 as a rating of support has been a point of head scratching and mild snickering. This additional lack of intuitive use is another point against Google in the battle for users' hearts and minds.

3. Usefulness

Google+ has some awesome features. My personal favorite is Circles.  That one may want to share something publicly but differently is a concept well grasped by Google.

The friends I went to the pub with and listened to the song I completely "plus one" are different than my co-workers. And goodness knows my SEO friends are different than anyone else I know.

Google created Circles to allow the easy filtering of messages by grouping friends and the easy sharing of images, status updates, etc. to and from these same groups. It's a great idea.

Unfortunately, my dad doesn't have this problem, nor does my sister, nor does my grandmother; in fact, about 80 percent of the people I know are OK with one level of sharing. And if it is a bit of a bother to them, it's less of a bother to put on the personal filter every now and then than to try to adopt yet another communications medium.

Sure, we geeks love new toys and we like to try new things, so we were happy to create a new account, figure out how to use it, play around in the settings, upload our photos again, etc. But how many of your relatives would?

4. Purpose

Sometimes the simple question needs to be asked (and every 2-year-old knows it): Why?

We know why Google wants the project to be successful. If Google+ became even half as successful as Facebook, the information on relationships they could collect and what that could mean to them as far as feeding advertising in our direction more accurately would be incredible. But we're not Google.

Oh sure, we'll play around with Google+, but if your non-tech friends and family don't adopt it, it'll likely become that thing you check every blue moon when you remember it's there.

The problem Google is up against is that Facebook really isn't bad. Plus, it's already got virtually everyone you likely know signed up, connected, profiles built, comments, and history. Why would anyone give that up when there isn't a problem? So you can drop people in Circles as you attempt to rebuild your full friends list and convince your parents to join Google+?

And for those of you thinking, why not use both, I would ask ... why? Do we really want to waste more time updating our statuses – now on multiple websites? Tagging photos, chatting with friends, etc.? I think not.

5. Convenience

I touched on it before, but it's a core issue with Google+ that's worth discussing on its own. Using Google+ is not convenient.

I, like many, am busy. The number of draws on my time increases almost daily, many of these draws from the online world. I've got Facebook, Twitter, Skype, AIM, MSN, forums, a blog, email, the phone and (here comes the shocker) live human interaction. Why on Earth would I want another?

The single biggest problem that Google may be up against right now is that they're fighting a battle from behind. While I anticipate very solid growth early on, once users realize that many of their friends haven't moved over, rather than have to access yet another social media resource to communicate, they'll slowly move back to just the one. The one where all their friends and contacts already are, where they can communicate in one location: Facebook.

Conclusion:

Will Google+ die? Maybe not. It's possible the folks at Google will adapt and focus it more against LinkedIn than Facebook; that battle they could win, as it's the same audience.

But Google+ is not set to become the Facebook killer it's hyped to be. It just doesn't solve any problems worth solving for the majority of people.

And now, back to check my Facebook messages – and maybe Google+, if there's time.