Twitter Sell Out
So Andrew Baron, of Rocketboom fame, has in a move of ingenuity decided to sell his Twitter account. Please note my sarcasm in the previous sentence. You can see the eBay auction here. Ridiculous.
Buying Andrew Baron’s Twitter account is like joining a fraternity in college - it’s a lot quicker and easier in the beginning to pay for your friends. Let’s just hope they throw great parties to make it worthwhile. Right now the bid is at $1,550.00 with 7 days left - with 1397 Twitter followers, this values you (if you are one of his followers) at $1.11. You’re worth every penny. Let’s see what they are worth in the end.
On a related note, I have an AOL Screenname from when I was 7. It hasn’t been used since I was 13, but had a few hundred friends. I’m willing to let it go for 10k or an awesome MySpace account. </sarcasm>
UPDATE: Mr. Baron has taken down the auction. I guess he came to his senses. When reached for a comment… uh nevermind.
The Value of Social Media For Your Brand
Social Media Optimization is a means of generating brand awareness, publicity and ultimately traffic and customers through the use of online communities and websites. Many of today’s web users interact in these networks everyday for social interaction. And parents, they are spending more hours on these sites a day then you may want to know. No wonder why Johnny failed his last math test.
I am not talking about advertising on these sites (although that does provide some very targeted traffic depending on the site - i.e. facebook), but interacting on their platforms utilizing their free services and networking capabilities.
Here are a few of the social networks, ClassicWines.com as an example, are a part of:
Twitter - Twitter is essentially a “micro-blogging” service that allows you to keep people updated about what you are up to through your cell phone, sms, im or through the web.
MySpace - You all know what MySpace is. For businesses it provides another landing page and outlet for social media interaction. With their features such as embedded video (we post videos through MySpace TV), groups, bulletins and more it provides a great way to link to a whole new community.
Facebook - Similar to MySpace, Facebook let’s businesses connect with a whole new demographic. With their suite of applications and networking capabilities, it is a simpler process to immediately connect with people with similar interests.
Video Sites - As there is a video componenet to ClassicWines.com with Classic Wines TV, distribution and interacting with the video community is very important. Aside from just posting on as many sites as possible, we try to get as much value out of the each community as possible - which involves also giving to the community. This is done through strategic video titling, descriptions and pro-actively communicating with each community - adding friends, commenting on videos, subscriptions, etc.
Some popular video sites we distribute to AND interact in: Blip.tv, YouTube, HowCast, metacafe, you get the point…
So what’s the point of all of this?
Why do I enjoy working in Internet Marketing?
A booming industry with limited competition. SEO can be fun when you rank not only number 1 for the search term, but in this case number 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5…. Next, let’s make a run for “wine”!
Tracking your results daily can be frustrating, but I highly recommend using Google Analytics to monitor your SEM performance and tracking trends to help you see over time how your daily linking strategies and content can help boost your rankings.
Yes, I know it’s not a highly competitive keyword, but it’s good for practice to test the waters and tactics for specific keywords to keep your skills sharp. Keep in mind the majority of what you read about SEO is probably not guaranteed true, and sometimes trial and error can be the best education when it comes to search engine optimization.
Google Releases a New Search (within Search)
I don’t know many web users (typical web users) who would goto a search engine and type in “red wine site:classicwines.com” to find red wine search results at ClassicWines.com. The reason web pages show up in Google, is because Google “indexes” those pages. This enables a site to have different pages show for different results in the search engine.
Just this past week Google has introduced a “search-within-search” featured to allow users to further hammer down results.
Many publishers are up in arms about how this can effect their bottom line, while some are open to this change. Many publishers and shopping sites what you to use our internal site search function for multiple reasons.
1. It gives you more contextually relevant results and display whether be recommendations or advertising.
2 More often than not you are getting real time results.
a. for example, every page on a site adding new products daily (i.e. ClassicWines.com) may not be entirely indexed by Google in real-time thereby throwing off your results. Results and inventory can change on a moments notice and you want your search to have the flexibility to reflect that to your visitors.
3. Google will be showing you ads from our competitors while you browse our search results (well, technically Google’s search results of our site). Anti-competitive measures please Google?
4. Publishers do not have full control over the accuracy of results in this scenario. While most sites optimize for Google, search features are usually customized and geared to be performed internally on the site. Discussing usability is a whole other topic.
5. Google has not “mastered” the content of all sites and many site search engines are “homemade” by publishers to deal with their unique data set.
