Excellent article from ListHunt. Best advice: Chase engagement, not vanity metrics.
View at Medium.com
Read about examples of garbage posing as legitimate accounts that fill your analytics with false numbers
FOAP is a new way to get paid for your photos
Friend and colleague Bob Manley let me know about FOAP, a web service that is building a market for photographers to sell their local, real-live photos to companies looking for stock photography.
The idea seems interesting; take a photo, achieve a minimum score of community votes, then its eligible for sale in the marketplace. You get $5 out of the $10 selling price.
Their website also has a good summary of Commercial vs Editorial license rules concerning people’s faces.
Yahoo – asking the wrong questions about its future
From a comment by the new CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer:
Ms. Mayer may have the hardest time taking Yahoo into the mobile advertising arena, a market dominated by her former employer. Unlike Yahoo, Google and Apple dominate the mobile advertising space with hardware and software options.
And that’s where it runs headlong into its identity problem. “Yahoo is still mainly a media company. It doesn’t have an operating system. It doesn’t have the devices,” Mr. Hallerman, of eMarketer, said. “I don’t know if there’s room in the market for a fourth mobile platform.”
Asked whether she plans to run Yahoo as a media company or a technology company, Ms. Mayer said, “It’s not the right question. The most important thing is to give end users something valuable, inspiring and delightful that makes them want to come to Yahoo every day.”
Marissa Mayer is just 37 years old and has uncommon wisdom among the tech analysts and elite. Best of success to her!
What is Search Engine Optimization
Don’t know what search engine optimization is? Know someone who needs easy to understand overview of SEO? That’s what this video provides, in three minutes. It’s part of the many resources provided by Search Engine Land’s “What Is SEO” page http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo.
Gradually, then suddenly
The latest hot discussion on the internet is the author Larry Downes versus Best Buy.
To compete successfully against new online retailers, traditional retailers would also need to find ways to transform the expensive liabilities of physical locations with limited hours and high labor and inventory costs into assets that complemented rather than competed with the online experience.
There’s a great line from the column: From Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” novel, one character asks another how he went bankrupt. “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
Larry has a great summary of why Best Buy is dying slowly:
I’m not shilling for Amazon or any other successful online retailer here. My point is much more basic. Amazon neither invented nor appropriated its basic strategies from Best Buy or anyone else. It simply does what consumers want. Best Buy does what would be most convenient for the company for consumers to want but don’t, then crosses its fingers and prays. That’s not a strategy–or not a winning strategy, in any case, now that retail consumers aren’t stuck with the store closest to home.
Age groups using social media
Created by: MBA Online
TV Viewing Down, Advertising Rates Up
http://ti.me/ofhiRT
What is Remarketing
Remarketing allows you to show your ads to users who’ve previously visited your website — as they browse the Web and encounter Google’s ad network elsewhere.
From Google’s Forum:
Remarketing is a feature of interest-based advertising … Remarketing allows you to reach people who previously visited your website, and match the right people with the right message. You can show users these messages as they browse sites across the Google Display Network.
Here’s how it works: You add a piece of code (remarketing tag) to pages of your site that correspond to certain categories you want to promote. For example, adding a tag for “TV” on all of the pages where you sell TVs will let you later show relevant TV ads to everyone who visits those pages. Learn more about creating remarketing lists.
Search advertisers can use remarketing to create an integrated campaign strategy. After driving traffic to your site with search ads, you can then remarket to those users who reach your site by showing them tailored ads on sites throughout the Google Display Network.
Followup on Influencers
What makes a tweet influential? New HP Labs social media research may provide answers
http://bit.ly/jzmZLs
Today, Dr. Bernardo A. Huberman, the director of HP Labs’ Social Computing Lab, released research on the nature of user influence on social media networks such as Twitter. After analyzing 22 million tweets, Dr. Huberman and his co-authors calculated a novel measure of influence for individual users and developed a corresponding algorithm that automatically identifies particularly influential users.
PDG wrote about Twitter user influence scores here.
SEO Advice from a Pro
Understanding the SEO business.
Build a solid understanding of the SEO business with this interview of Jon Payne of Ephricon Web Marketing.
This post is a work in progress; more thoughts soon.
What not to do in SEM
The takeaway is simple: do not pay for inbound links to your site.
Why? These so-called “backlinks” are prohibited by Google’s guidelines.
The only time you can legitimately “pay” for links is via their own paid ad networks (AdWords and AdSense).
Read what the NYTimes discovered about the country’s 4 major flower sellers google-gaming efforts for Mother’s Day.