What in the world does that mean, right? Of course if there are a gazillion people signing up for Twitter accounts and lawsuits being filed over impersonation accounts then it must be that all the world is atwitter with Twitter-itis, correct? HubSpot’s study shows that despite the top line growth in number of accounts the actual usage of Twitter may still rest with the technology crowd that claimed it as their own oh those many years ago (well actually around 3 years ago but in the Internet age that’s like a generation or two).

The most shocking difference year over year was that when HubSpot last conducted this study about 80% of those studied had created a bio in their profile. That number in less than a year has dropped to just 24%. What’s that say? Looks like people are signing up in droves but not using the service to its fullest (or even half fullest for that matter). Other data includes:

• 79.79% failed to provide a homepage URL
• 68.68% have not specified a location
• 55.50% are not following anyone
• 54.88% have never tweeted
• 52.71% have no followers

The graph below shows though that those who are tweeting are taking full advantage of that 140 character limit. Lucky for us since they have so much to say.

Other points to ponder include that the vast majority of tweets occur during business hours, many users are located in major metro areas and only 1.44% of tweets are re-tweets.

So speculation as to the real worth of Twitter to business can start now. While you’re at it make sure you spend some time wondering if the $500 million offered by Facebook was high or low or just right.

As for business applications, they are still there and can be very powerful. In some cases it could just be marketing by presence (better to be there than not) while others, like a Dell or Comcast, can do full on engagement of customers and prospects that falls to the bottom line in revenue or goodwill. None of that opportunity has gone away. What may have changed, however, is the speed of the hype freight train that Biz and the crew are engineering.

To put it in search terms it’s a classic case of traffic v. conversions. You can have all the traffic in the world but if it doesn’t turn into business then what have you really accomplished? With Twitter, you can all of the accounts in the world but if the vast majority is not really using the service then what is the real value? That’s why there are no cookie cutter solutions in the Internet space despite what agencies and service providers might say. It is not a “Tweet it and they will come” world, at least not yet.

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“The . . . tool will be used by first responders, county planners, and other officials to get detailed geographic views overlayed with critical information,” reports Frank Taylor on the Google Earth Blog.  “The department can use the tools to build 3D models of schools, bridges, and other critical structures; can model hazardous explosions and environmental factors; and can overlay this information with GIS information showing the location of fire hydrants, gas pipelines, and other important information to help emergency workers.”

It shouldn’t need to be said, but this implementation goes far beyond Google Earth’s original intended uses.  It’s also a bit of a step forward from what we’ve seen recently – mere responses to disasters like floods, fires, and oil spills (as opposed to this sort of planning and preparation).

So, in addition to Governor Riley and Alabama Homeland Security Director Jim Walker, Google Earth’s Chief Technology Officer, Michael T. Jones, was on hand at the release event.  Virtual Alabama is the sort of thing that we hope never needs to be used, but its launch was nonetheless an important moment for Google.

This new community-based browser add-on allows you to assess the trustworthiness of websites. The Web of Trust’s community’s new website, including free download, can be found at www.mywot.com.

The concept of the WOT is fairly simple: WOT community members exchange their knowledge about web sites by using a user interface. Membership is free and you don’t have to register. You can submit website ratings but it’s not required.

The Web of Trust has been in beta testing for over a year now, and the community has acquired reputation data on over 16 million sites. WOT uses four components to rate a website’s reputation: trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy, and child safety. They then enrich the data they get from the users with information from trusted sources such as listings of phishing sites.

The WOT system processes ratings and produces a reputation rating for each web site. Any attempts to manipulate the reputation data are effectively countered using algorithms. Once WOT has been downloaded, checking a site’s reputation is easy. A WOT reputation icon is displayed next to each link on search engine results pages. WOT supports Google and most other major search engines. According to Web of Trust, 99 percent of current users surveyed found WOT useful and 98 percent would recommend it to a friend.

Behind the community, there is a team developing the WOT service. Headed by Esa Suurio, Against Intuition Inc. focuses on developing and providing software and services for the WOT community, and promoting the community’s goals. Against Intuition was founded in Finland in 2006 by two visionary postgraduate students, Timo Ala-Kleemola and Sami Tolvanen, who are now engaged in further system development with a group of talented software developers, designers, and database administrators. It’s no coincidence that WOT comes from the country that repeatedly has been named one of world’s least corrupt countries.

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Our next post in that series is about micro blogging phenomenon, Twitter.

At first I balked at the idea of Twittering like many others but eventually signed up and have been tuned in ever since. Like blogging, there are many misperceptions about the productivity potential for Twitter. Those unfamiliar will often say, “What’s up with telling people: My flight is leaving. We landed. Getting in cab. Etc?”. Trust me, there is a method to the MicroMedia madness as both an individual and a commercial communications tool.

There’s both a social/play and a social/communicate aspect to Twitter that makes it productive as a promotional tool for pointing to interesting things you’ve found on the web as well as a tool for building credibility and influence. On their own, such updates can be blasé and uninteresting. However, followed over time, you can gain insight into people you may end up hiring, getting hired by, working for, partnering with or simply socializing with.

It’s true that some people do use Twitter as if they’re trying to copy the most boring blog on the web. However, many others are sharing links to timely resources or things they’ve found on the web that they’d like to share/promote immediately as well as tidbits of personal/business information.

A variety of commercial applications for Twitter have begun popping up including political candidates posting updates from the road as has happened with Barack Obama & John Edwards. Other commercial and marketing use examples of Twitter include JetBlue promoting special offers, the BBC posting news items, Apple posts it’s own news (bypassing the media – hmmm) and online retailer Woot posting deals throughout the day.

From a personal brand building and networking standpoint, the key is not to look at microblogging as individual posts, but think of the overall impressions and value that can be created over time. Each 140 character or less entry serves as a seed of an idea for an overall objective. It’s tempting to post something to get it off your chest as I did when a bike was stolen outside my office window and I pulled it out of the truck as the thieves drove away – all during a conference call. I felt I had to tell someone and I certainly couldn’t interrupt the guys from Intel, Ogilvy and iProspect I was on the call with.

Rather, consider an overall objective and keep that in mind as decisions are made about what kinds of personal info, links to useful resources and promotional items are posted. Over time, you’ll build a footprint and identify within the Twitter community. Building that footprint will be far more effective if you keep overall objectives in mind, rather than random information.  Unless of course, your objective is to build an identity as a scatterbox.

Now for the Twitter tips.

Biz Stone via the Twitter Email Newsletter:
Jott, has created a way to send a Twitter update by speaking into your phone–your voice gets converted to text and sent out to all your followers. This is a
much safer solution for people who insist on updating Twitter when their attention is required elsewhere–like driving!
Twitter by Voice and more Twitter Apps.

“Rhea” – Skim for links. They are often only used for passing news, as an action alert or resource grabber. It’s worth 5 seconds. Rhea Drysdale

“andybeal” – I tweeted that I was looking to hire a new blogger and found Janet – so I guess Twitter followers are a good job pool Andy Beal

“TDefren” – Mix it up: share news, pontifications, reaction, blog posts. Aid in others’ discovery & contribute to the conversation. Todd Defren

“SebastianX“ – Often Twitter sends folks to new stuff way faster than RSS, and it’s a persistent link, valuable despite the tinyurl/nofollow crap, as long as you promote your profile a little. Sebastian

“graywolf” – Use the twittertools plugin to automagically post new blog entries to Twitter. Michael Gray

“trishussey” – Connecting your blog feed to Twitter and posting events and breaking news. Twitter is a great way to announced time-sensitive events like radio shows, etc. Combine with Twitterbar for Firefox and you can post right from your address bar. Tris Hussey

“bhartzer” – Like a lot of other services, it’s important to add or follow other people first and then most likely they will reciprocate. Find your favorite twitter profile and view who they’re following…and follow them. Follow people and they’ll (hopefully) follow you. Also, when editing your profile on twitter, you can add more than one link in your profile. Turns out that http: link URLs are treated as links. Bill Hartzer

“PeterHimler” – Fun to follow thought-leaders and journalists who often tweet their forthcoming thoughts on the site. Peter Himler

Additional resources on using Twitter as a networking, PR and communications tool can be found at:

• Caroline Middlebrook: The Big Juicy Twitter Guide
• Jeremiah Owyang – What The Web Strategist Should Know About Twitter
• B.L. Ochman’s What’s Next Blog: How to Write Kickass Twitter Posts
• PR Squared: Using Twitter To Create & Inform Communities
• WebProNews: Microblogging What’s it Good For?
• University of Maryland, Baltimore County: Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities
• Red66 – Using Twitter as a Marketing Tool
• Eleven Marketing- Add Twitter to Your Internet Marketing Toolbox

Tools to make your “twittering” more productive:

• Twitter Groups – Allows you to tag your followers into different groups. Then you can send a message to those groups without needing to send the message to each person one at a time.
• TweetVolume – A frequency search tool to see how often a unique name (person, brand, etc) is mentioned on Twitter.
• Twitter Tools – A huge collection of Twitter tools by platform as well as plugins, web services and widgets.
• All Twitter Tools and Mashups in One Place – Maybe not all, but a very large list of desktop clients, mobile apps, mashups, plugins, tools and widgets.
• Twittown Unofficial Twitter Community which includes Twitter Forge, a listing of Twitter plugins, Ttools, mashups and services.

Thank you to everyone that contributed! Do you have a great Twitter use or marketing tip to share? Please share in the comments.

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However, getting there isn’t always that easy. The first steps though is ensuring you have social media links on your blog to make sharing that content easy. My favorite tool of the moment for this is ShareThis.

ShareThis use to be a plugin for Wordpres that injected social media icons, and an email this, link into your posts. It worked very well but was WordPress only until recently. It’s since been re-launched as a service that’ll work across any blogging platform or website.

Signing up for a ShareThis account is really easy. They just ask for your email address and a password. This information is then used to track the ShareThis button performance on your site. It’ll keep track of who’s clicking which options, your most popular content and other visitor information. However, the reports are not yet available for the public but should be by the end of the year.

Once you’re signed in, you can create your custom ShareThis button. Choose colors, social media buttons, icon and email feature. It’ll then output a piece of JavaScript to put on your site and start tracking right away.

The nice thing about ShareThis is it only takes up a small amount of screen space. Once the link is clicked on, the larger window with all the options shows.

Other social bookmark plugins have the same functionality but lack the tracking piece. It’ll be interesting to see how this works as it gets more users.

Another option that ShareThis has is the ability to incorporate a ShareThis button directly into your browser. Clicking on it will give you all the social media options and allow you to easily submit any page you navigate to to one of many social media sites. The button comes in the form of a Firefox Extension, Internet Explorer addon or even a bookmarklet for other browsers such as Safari and Opera.

Downsides to ShareThis is that you’re limited to the number of social services available. It has all the main ones but some users may want more. This is kind of a good thing though as to many options can be overwhelming for some visitors. You’ll also have to figure out where you want to add the code in your template. I’m not a huge fan of where I put mine, but I’ll test it out for a while. It didn’t work as well where I wanted it but that’s a design issue I have to work out. It does seem to take up more room that the old ShareThis button use to.

ShareThis looks to be a very useful addition to any blog, website or browser. It’ll help make your posts easier to promote in the social space and additional exposure is always good.

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Zorgloob posted screenshots from an internal Google tool that assigns scores and classifications to Google’s organic listings raising questions about the way the Google SERPs are determined.

Matt Cutts was quick to dispel rumors with the comments

Our organic search results have always been completely independent from our paid advertisements. We consider the objectivity of our search results to be paramount to our success and would never compromise that in any way.

The screenshot shows a tool that is not used by the search quality team in any way. It is a tool used by members of our AdWords sales team to help prioritize new customer acquisition. We are strongly committed to maintaining the integrity of our organic search results.

While I am *fairly* confident that that the tool is being used for reasons that Matt has outlined – what is google basing the calculations on?

RustyBricks over at SERoundtable muses:

How much is this potential customer worth (GG Score)? Do they already advertise in AdWords (ADV)? What vertical would we place them in (Vertical)? How many PageViews can we generate for this site’s advertisement (PVs)?

It’d be great to get our hands on such a tool to see the AdWords value of our sites in Google’s eyes -  if you get a call from the Google team about your AdWords value – let us know what they had to say though the comments.

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AdWords

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/internal-adwords-tool-raises-rumors-about-rankings-2007-11/feed 1 http://www.webpronews.com/asic-keyword-strategy-tips-2007-11 http://www.webpronews.com/asic-keyword-strategy-tips-2007-11#comments Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:02:45 +0000 Aaron Wall http://www.webpronews.com/?p=41575 Keyword Research Tips

Keyword Research Tips

• If you have an old site you should use analytics to track what keywords you are getting traffic for. For most webmasters it is easier to rank for more related keywords than it is to discover and dominate new areas.
• When you start a new site make sure you use keyword modifiers in your page titles, meta descriptions, and page copy. It is easier to rank for long tail terms than shorter search queries.
• You can find many keyword modifier types in this free XLS spreadsheet.
• When you start doing keyword research, you can start with a seed list of broad keywords to power a keyword tool and keep digging deeper. Then repeat the process with related keywords and other keyword tools. No tool is perfect. Think of them more as qualitative than quantitative. I like Wordtracker and my keyword tool.
• Organize your keywords into relevant baskets of keywords and modifiers that should be covered in different sections of your site and on different pages from your site.
• I listed many bonus keyword research ideas in a recent Wordtracker article.
• Some of my favorite follow up keyword tools to use when optimizing a page are
  • Quintura – shows a visual layout of related keywords
  • Google AdWords tool – shows you what keywords Google thinks a URL is relevant for and should be advertising on
  • Compete.com Search Analytics – shows keywords that competing sites rank for

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The automated YouTube video ID system looks at all video as it is uploaded and tries to match it with a database of visual abstractions of the copyrighted material that has been provided by content owners. If the system finds a match it will either block it, post it, or–depending upon the policy specified by the content owner–put ads on it, with the revenue being shared with the content owner.

You have to give Google credit for including the option to not delete the offending video, but instead monetize it for the copyright holder. That’s a smart way to at least try and maintain some of the revenue that YouTube will surely lose, with the reduction in SNL and Stephen Colbert clips.

Still, there are two concerns about the new system.

1. The copyright holder must provide Google with a complete library of videos they want policed. Copyright holders are going to find this somewhat inconvenient–especially if other video sites adopt this policy. Can you imagine having to provide hours of video to all of the different video services?
2. If a copyrighted video is uploaded, it may still publish on YouTube–albeit for just a few minutes–before being pulled down. You’d think Google would know better than most. Once any content hits the web, it’s there, forever! YouTube may pull the offending clip, but that doesn’t stop pirates from snagging it first. How hard would it be to write a program that sniffs for new videos that are titled “Stephen Colbert” and download them the moment they’re uploaded??

As well as these two concerns, there are other questions being asked.

1. The system doesn’t handle poor quality video too well. Could pirates start uploading images with deliberately lower bit rates? Low quality might be better than not getting it approved at all.
2. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is worried that video clips that contain “fair use” extracts of copyright content might get banned too.

No one said that this stuff was going to be easy. I have my doubts that this first iteration from YouTube is going to be perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction. And with a $1B+ copyright lawsuit hanging over their head, Google needed to take the step quickly.

PS. A new Google definition for you. “Very Soon” apparently means 8 months at the Googleplex.

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YouTube Finally Gains Anti-Piracy Tool

The beta version of YouTube Video Identification has been in the works at Google for some time. They announced its availability, and took a moment on the official Google blog to chastise their critics, too:

Like many of these other policies and tools, Video Identification goes above and beyond our legal responsibilities.

Google has long claimed compliance with the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act defined its responsibility for the uploading habits of YouTube’s users. Major studios have complained about Google’s reactive but legal approach, as it dumped the burden of identifying offending content back on the studios.

However, Google is holding out hope that studios will see the positive side of uploading, by taking advantage of the option to promote or even monetize these videos when they appear. Content owners also have a choice of blocking the content.

Considering the criticism and rhetoric coming out of Hollywood, blocking looks like the selection content owners will likely make on a routine basis.

"The best we can do is cooperate with copyright holders to identify videos that include their content and offer them choices about sharing that content," YouTube said of the new program.