I’m watching a Twitter conversation unfold between PR people, writers, journalists and bloggers. The forum is a hash-tag group called #SocialChat. According to co-host @SocialMichelleR,
we are a weekly chat centered on social media and social media marketing -6:03 PM May 30th, 2011
The other co-host is Digital Always Media business partner Alan K’necht. #SocialChat is a group that meets each Monday night at 9PM eastern. Twitter, for those who aren’t Twetters, gives users the ability to create instant interest groups using the #hash-tag character.
Tonight’s topic (loosely) is, “Do we need Journalists in the age of Social Media” The title pulls me like a barroom brawler is drawn to a drunken fight in an alleyway. Tonight’s special guest is reporter turned blogger turned Tweeter, @NicWirtz. It’s a fairly free-form discussion forum.
To sum it up:
I think any industry that loses as much of its workforce as journalism has, is in trouble. -7:02 PM May 30th, 2011
The entire #SocialChat for this week can be found below this fold.
Topics for coming weeks can be found at
Air Date: May 26, 2011
We wrap up our two-part edition of Webcology with a lively discussion of SEO ethics and industry regulation.
With two hot-button issues like this, you know our highly opinionated panel of Alan Bleiweiss, Ben Cook, Steve Gerenscer, David Harry, Anthony Verre and Terry Van Horn won’t be pulling any punches!
Air Date: May 26, 2011
This two-part edition of Webcology kicks off with SEO panelists Alan Bleiweiss, Ben Cook, Steve Gerenscer, David Harry, Anthony Verre and Terry Van Horn debating the merits of reporting black hat practices to Google and the mainstream media. Does outing make the web a better place or is it just the SEO version of tattling?
Air Date: May 19, 2011
Jim and Dave discuss Linkbuilding, the debut of the LinkedIn IPO; Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog Closing May 31; The Google Search Team (Finally) Gets its Own Blog and How Facebook Is Changing Online Business.
Show Notes and Links:
Google opens large facility in Kitchener Waterloo
Proximity of University of Waterloo, RIM cited as factors in Google’s placement of new campus. – Mobile and Social
Source:
Linked-In IPO – Opened at $45, closed near $100
(Tulips, Ostriches and Linked-in “OH MYâ€)
Is this an indicator of great market conditions for social media IPOs or is it the indicator of another bubble about to burst?
2010 profit: $3.4million on Revenues of $243million. Where is the value here? Was valued at about $4billion yesterday. Today is valued between $9 and $10billion!
source: NPR:
Birthdays
Kathy O’Reilly and Monte Baumgartner
US Secret Service Tweets Dislike of Fox News
“had to monitor Fox for a story. Can’t. Deal. With. The. Blathering. “ via Twitter for iPad
Will the Last one’s out please turn off the lights?
Yahoo Search Marketing Blog closing down May 31. Will 301 to Yahoo Advertising Blog
source:
Google Opens Search Blog
Likeonomics: How Facebook Is Changing Online Business – Brian Carter (search engine journal)
We didn’t actually get to talk about this before running out of time but it’s a good article and worth the read.
source:
May 11
16
Content is Bank for Creators
Google’s behaviour drives the practices of the search engine optimization industry. Two years of rapid change in the way Google displays and ranks various types of web documents has put a renewed focus on quality content creation.
It is a good time to be a content creator in the search marketing industry. In a world of grazing Pandas, the organic content creator can prosper.
It is also a more difficult time to be a search marketer and advertiser. Feeding a world of grazing Pandas, especially ones which enjoy organic content is likely to become expensive. Website owners are going to have to focus funding and personal energy on creating search ready content.
Earning top 10 search rankings at Google and Bing for competitive keywords and phrases is now only slightly more complicated than the process of writing, publishing and marketing a book.
The Internet is populated by hundreds of billions of documents. A world’s worth of news, entertainment and personal content is added and archived daily. Search engines are by necessity instant arbiters of taste and sincerity.
Where a well targeted link building campaign was once enough to propel mediocre sites to higher rankings, Google and Bing want to become more discerning in their choices. Amongst those hundreds of billions of documents are millions of pages of extremely useful content. Google appears to be trying to find that useful content by degrading what it sees as less-than-useful content in its index.
In a crux, that’s what the hullabaloo is over the series of recent updates commonly known as Panda.
Today, web content has to be thought of in terms of segments as well as in terms of file-type. Different types of audiences view the web at different venues. Though targeted at unique crowds, commercial content messages have to compliment each other. A new product page at the client’s website is promoted with a shared note at Facebook, a series of scheduled Tweets and an article or two distributed through the usual social media aggregators. Each Facebook and article link will use anchor text relevant to both the target page and the page the link originated from. Everything from the Facebook posts and tweets to the anchor text used to phrase are all types of search and indexable content. Google is now finding signals in virtually every form of content.
These changes have been a long time coming.
Two years ago Google began ranking a number of different types of results sets on its first page. Google appeared to be experimenting live-time with how to best display combinations of video, news, local, shopping, paid and organic search results. Though the standard organic results had been effectively downgraded, Google had opened a number of new content based channels for search marketers.
About eighteen months ago, search engines finally started getting a handle on outright manipulation of links. Businesses built to deliver incoming links were moved to begin looking towards content creation as a part of their link-building strategies. Though the engines have a lot of work remaining combating link manipulation, these moves shifted focus towards content creation.
This was a good thing in one sense as it was the start of a solution for a critical problem but it created another problem to plague search engines. Aut0-generated content began polluting the web as a tool primarily for driving bot-traffic to target landing pages.
This year Google is working to crack down on bad content such as scraped reprints, auto-generated made-for-adwords pages, inarticulate page fodder from article factories and the like. It’s a process of removing generally useless web clutter.
With unique localized and increasingly personalized result sets being generated and displayed for individual users, creative content is again the most powerful tool in the SEO toolbox.
Air Date: May 12, 2011
Jim talks with Brasco about news leaking that Facebook hired a large PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, to attack Google. Jim also weighs in on Microsoft buying Skype, the impending release of Google’s Chromebook and Google I/O.
May 11
11
Skyprosoft – Microsoft Buys Skype
announced on Tuesday it had acquired the VoIP service for $8.5 billion in cash. Skype is the world’s leading Internet based phone and video-phone client. It was used by over 170 people in 2010 to facilitate over 207 billion minutes in voice and video conversations.
The deal is one of the largest buy-outs in recent tech history and by far Microsoft’s highest priced acquisition ever. The company is staking a lot of capital and reputation on the outcomes.
Skype is best known for offering users (mostly) free voice and video options. One of its paid options allows subscribers to use their computers to make calls to phones. Virtually everyone in the search marketing world uses Skype as a means of communicating with each other and with clients. records shows and conducts interviews primarily using Skype. Connecting long-distance lovers and cross-continental collaborative business, Skype has evolved into an incredible and indispensable service for business and home computer users.
There are fears Microsoft’s purchase of Skype could very much change it from the service we know now. The firm has plenty of reasons not to change Skype but it also has a history of tinkering its way out of sure-things.
Microsoft is racing to add voice and video options to all applicable products it makes. Microsoft wants to enable conversation between Xbox gamers, facilitate video conferencing for businesses, and enable a grandmother to watch a grandchild reenact its own first steps. It wants to be known as the company that can do this for everyone in all applications super cheaply and super easily. Microsoft needs this as much as it needs to integrate it into Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Microsoft needs to distribute connectivity.
The future is in mobile and other micro-sized computing devices. Microsoft is frantic in its bid to catch up to mobile-market leaders Google and Apple, both of which have enormous leads in a sector Microsoft has dramatically underperformed in. Fortunately for Microsoft, many Google Android and Apple iPhone users are also users of Skype’s mobile phone apps. By buying Skype, Microsoft gets to form a direct and 99.999% working relationship with its rival’s clients. The deal also means Google and Facebook, the two other likely purchasers, don’t get to establish those relationships. One win multiplied by two losses equals three wins in Redmond’s world.
Perhaps Microsoft won’t mess it up. As it proved with Bing, when the wizards of Redmond really want to get something accomplished, they are capable of moving hilltops to compete with the Googlites in Mountain View. Skype gives Microsoft a huge amount of clout in the local search world. It can now easily connect mobile searchers with businesses on virtually every platform, regardless of who makes the operating systems.
Communication is the driving force behind the Internet and a VoIP client that uses distributed resources to create an ever scalable network is a brilliant buy for Microsoft, provided they can resist the temptation to destroy Skype by rebuilding it in whatever Microsoft thinks its image is this year. Here’s to hoping. We’ve known for some time that someone was going to buy Skype. Hopefully Microsoft is the suitor whose intentions best suits Skype users.
Air Date: May 5, 2011
Google is reportedly looking into voice-activated search that can be integrated into the Google.com search engine once the experiment is complete. Jim welcomes his Digital Always Media colleague Alan K’necht.
Air Date: April 28, 2011
Jim joins us from SMX Toronto 2011, and speaks with Dave on the newest daily deal competition for Groupon, Facebook Deals.
Air Date: April 21, 2011
Jim and Dave are joined by Dr. Horst Joepen, CEO of Searchmetrics to discuss UK winners and losers in the recent Google Algorithm updates.
Air Date: April 14, 2011
Jim and Dave interview the brilliant Laura Thieme. Laura will talk about Integrated SEO & PPC Tactics, Top 5 Things You Should Know about Google Adwords to Save Money & Increase ROI, The Importance of Trend Analysis, PANDA and much more.
Air Date: April 7, 2011
Jim and Dave ponder these topics: Does Google have moles in other large Tech firms? Panda update promoting big brand sites, Better ads in Gmail, Search 3.0 and Epsilons Security Breach Exposes Troubling Trend.
Air Date: March 31, 2011
Google announces its own rival against the Facebook Like buttons, the +1 button. It launches as part of Google’s search engine, allowing you to “+1″ the search results and ads that you like. And in a few months, it’ll be arriving at a web site near you.
Air Date: March 18, 2011
Jim and Dave talk with Michael Mire, Co-Founder of Get Me Listed, a local marketing analytics platform for Business and SEO Professionals. They also talk to Peter Prestipino editor in chief of Website Magazine, and his new book Web 360: The Fundamentals of Web Success.
Air Date: March 11, 2011
Jim and Dave uncover new Information From Google coming out of SMX West 2011, plus Christian Wilson introduces us to asocialsearch, which lays a directory of companies which include Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube, Meetup, Blogs and 4square pages.