SEO adivce

Facebook Timelines In New Zealand with Guidance By Chosen Few

There is some buzz happening around the rollout of Facebook’s much bally-hooed Timeline feature. Of course, in fine Internet industry fashion it is being trumpeted in front of the whole world but is currently only available in the high population center of New Zealand.

Mashable’s editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff has graced us with his take on the service that has been “leaked” ahead of this move:

Mashable showed us all how to build our Timelines early, ahead of Facebook’s broader rollout schedule. As a result, I, and millions of others, have had the opportunity to build and play with our Timelines. The fact that we could do so is, I believe, no accident on Facebook’s part. Last month, Facebook executives told me they wanted to seed savvier users with the feature to help guide newbies. Essentially, to prepare them for this day when average people would be confronted with this simple choice. Once they opt into Timeline, their profile page will never be the same, and they will look to those who have been using Timeline for more than two months for help.

Well, if you are one of the commoners like I suspect I would be considered, you should feel blessed that there are more important Facebook users out there who can show you the light, huh? Geesh.

Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information.

Finally A Place Where Bing Rules Search!

From the “We’ll take it any way we can get it” category comes this application of the Bing search functionality in a place where is totally rules over Google. Yeah right, it’s from the new search function on the Xbox 360 but it is about voice search so it’s almost as cool as Apple’s Siri as well, right? Anyway, take a look if you would like or get Microsoft’s view from their blog go here.

Cup of Joe: Pep! Pep! Pep! Pep Talk?

Pep talks are awesome aren’t they? Heck, I watched the one above 6 times yesterday and I don’t even like football! A good pep talk can inspire people to do amazing things. We see them all the time in sports, political campaigns, marketing, and sometimes even in our churches!

I remember the first time I saw this one from the movie Braveheart, I wanted to die for Scotland! That’s the thing about pep talks though is they inspire quick dramatic action. Unfortunately, the hype is usually short lived. The inspiration dies off and most of us just end up moving to the next piece of content.

In fact, that’s the biggest problem I see with many marketing campaigns. The hype dies off and the public moves on. Until you show back up with another pep talk to get them motivated again! As a marketer it seems like a exhausting exercise, doesn’t it?

Wouldn’t it be cool to constantly inspire your customers and users with out pep talks? Doing so would create a base of evangelists and cut down on expensive marketing campaigns. How does one do that? They “bake” inspiration into the user experience. So then the simple act of using the product/service becomes the fuel for inspiration.

How does one integrate inspiration into the user experience? Well, if you are a shoe company try helping your customers find a local pizzeria if that’s what they want. If you are a mobile phone carrier offer a smart phone that even my mother can fall in love with. Optimize the user experience where users not only enjoy your products, but are inspired to tell others about them.

That’s the kind of marketing that lasts longer than pep talks, because at the end of the day, it isn’t marketing at all, it’s just good business.

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Step Up to the New Google Bar

Just got used to the black bar running across the top of your screen with all the Google services listed? Well, one should learn to never get too comfortable in today’s online world. Check out the video for the new Google bar. Oh the times they are a changin’. I wonder if Google is gearing up for a big push during a competitor’s impending IPO quiet period? Just thinking out loud ……

From the Official Google blog

So what do you think?

Online Video Ad Growth to Outpace All Other Formats

Online video is an advertising train that is starting to roll downhill. What does that mean? It means that in relation to all other formats available to advertisers in the online space, video is growing at the most rapid pace. Of course, with growth numbers you have to be careful when drawing conclusions. Just because an area like search isn’t growing at the same rate as video it doesn’t, by any means, indicate a slow down or issue with search as a viable advertising option.

In fact, before we look at growth numbers for video as predicted by eMarkter, let’s take a look at total ad spend numbers. As you can see, in the online space search will continue to be the king in overall spend.

Now taking a look at the growth numbers you see where video is predicted to outperform every other online option there is. Part of the reason that growth numbers are somewhat deceptive is that there needs to be room for more growth in order to put up the impressive numbers. More mature advertising options like search have experienced their hockey stick growth period. It’s just a caution to watch these numbers using the proper perspective.

All that being said, are you capitalizing on the growth in advertising in online video? Does your ad spend include reaching people who are mesmerized by online video? If they are going to be there shouldn’t you be as well?

Let us know where you see video in its current state and for the future as it relates to the way you spend your ad dollars for the maximum impact.

Cup of Joe: Today is Thanksgiving! And So Is Tomorrow!

Yay! Today is Thanksgiving! FEED ME TURKEY!

Ok so I know what you are thinking, Um Joe, Thanksgiving was two days ago! But, you are wrong, and in this post I am going to prove it to you. Your thanksgiving may have been two days ago, but mine is today. You see, in my family we all have different places to go on Thanksgiving which means that usually we end up celebrating together on the Saturday after. I know it sounds crazy, but if you have ever met any of my family, you would see that crazy works for us!

Oh, and tomorrow is Thanksgiving as well! YAY More turkey! And the day after that, more Thanksgiving! In fact I am not going to stop with Thanksgiving! I am not sure how long the turkey will last, but I guess I can always buy more.

If you haven’t already figured it out, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Of course the food is amazing but the best part of Thanksgiving is the reminder of how awesome my life is! I have an amazing family, an awesome business that I own, in an industry that is on the cutting edge of technology. Everyday I have the fortunate pleasure to learn new things and continue to grow as a human being. I am truly fortunate and extremely grateful for it all! Which is why I should be mindful and grateful all year long, not just on one day a year!

If you are reading this post it means that you too extremely fortunate! 7 out of 10 people in the world do not even have access to the internet. Almost a billion people in the world are undernourished. And another billion don’t even have access to clean water. When you consider all of that, it isn’t hard to see how fortunate all of us are!

Which is why I want to celebrate Thanksgiving everyday! Being thankful on a regular basis, for what you have is important. Being thankful helps keep your ego in check. Being thankful helps you keep moving forward. Being thankful will improve your disposition and make you more productive!

So you see, today is Thanksgiving, tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and the next day is Thanksgiving! If you want, you can keep celebrating as well! The choice is yours!

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Google+ TV Ad Runs But Will People Get It?

Google ran a TV ad on Thanksgiving during the early NFL game. I missed it live (which means I wasn’t paying close attention to the game, huh?).

My question is whether the regular Thanksgiving Day football viewer will understand an ad with the tagline “Sharing but like real life. That’s a plus.” Will they get what it does? I doubt it.

Here’s the ad. What’s your take?

Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information.

Google Continues to Slim Down by Dropping More Offerings

Google continues on its year round spring cleaning as it decides to shutter more products and services.

I guess much of this can be contributed to what some might say is the “20% bloat”. The famous “20% time” that Google allows its people to work on anything they want for 20 percent of their work time has spawned winners and losers. Makes one wonder just how valuable that time is. Wouldn’t it be cool if Google simply concentrated on perfecting the existing REALLY important things they have and do (search, Google+, Apps, Gmail, local, mobile etc etc) so we could see just how good the company could be rather than the disparate pieces it currently is that Larry Page is running around cleaning up after?

His work thus far as Google’s CEO seems to be of playing the role of frat house mother whose job is to clean up after the mess that the boys leave.

The latest victims? Here is the listing and the explanations from the Google blog

Google Bookmarks Lists—This is an experimental feature for sharing bookmarks and collaborating with friends, which we’re going to end on December 19, 2011. All bookmarks within Lists will be retained and labeled for easier identification, while the rest of Google Bookmarks will function as usual. As Lists was an English-only feature, non-English languages will be unaffected.

Google Friend Connect—Friend Connect allows webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a few snippets of code. We’re retiring the service for all non-Blogger sites on March 1, 2012. We encourage affected sites to create a Google+ page and place a Google+ badge on their site so they can bring their community of followers to Google+ and use new features like Circles and Hangouts to keep in touch.

Google Gears—In March we said goodbye to the Gears browser extension for creating offline web applications and stopped supporting new browsers. On December 1, 2011, Gears-based Gmail and Calendar offline will stop working across all browsers, and later in December Gears will no longer be available for download. This is part of our effort to help incorporate offline capabilities into HTML5, and we’ve made a lot of progress. For example, you can access Gmail, Calendar and Docs offline in Chrome.

Google Search Timeline—We’re removing this graph of historical results for a query. Users will be able to restrict any search to particular time periods using the refinement tools on the left-hand side of the search page. Additionally, users who wish to see graphs with historical trends for a web search can use google.com/trends or google.com/insights/search/ for data since 2004. For more historical data, the “ngram viewer” in Google Books offers similar information.

Google Wave—We announced that we’d stopped development on Google Wave over a year ago. But as of January 31, 2012, Wave will become read-only and you won’t be able to create new ones. On April 30 we will turn it off completely. You’ll be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. If you’d like to continue using this technology, there are a number of open-source projects, including Apache Wave and Walkaround.

Knol—We launched Knol in 2007 to help improve web content by enabling experts to collaborate on in-depth articles. In order to continue this work, we’ve been working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to create Annotum, an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress. Knol will work as usual until April 30, 2012, and you can download your knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible.

Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal—This initiative was developed as an effort to drive down the cost of renewable energy, with an REC engineering team focused on researching improvements to solar power technology. At this point, other institutions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level. So we’ve published our results to help others in the field continue to advance the state of power tower technology, and we’ve closed our efforts. We will continue our work to generate cleaner, more efficient energy—including our on-campus efforts, procuring renewable energy for our data centers, making our data centers even more efficient and investing more than $850 million in renewable energy technologies.

I’m sure there will be a few people sorry to see some of these go but if Google is to get better it is probably better served by continuing to follow Page’s lead to tidy up a bit a concentrate on the Google basics.

Agree or no?

The Financial Times Sees Success During These Mobile Times

One aspect of the current mobile revolution is that it costs money to be mobile and to be truly active on mobile devices. From the cost of the device to the cost of monthly data plans there are many people that will not have access to the mobile web much like the concerns that were in place regarding the Internet in general during its early years.

Of course, certain groups like high finance types have no problem here. It’s this kind of clientele, in fact, that has allowed one traditional publisher, The Financial Times, to see significant increase in mobile access of their content. They produced an infographic to make this point and it is a testament to the impact of mobile on those products where price is not an issue.

Cup of Joe: The Post In Which I Turn Into An Annoying Hipster.

When I first read about Siri I was instantly intrigued. Mainly because back in 2002 I wrote a similar piece of software called Sivle. Now of course Siri is much more sophisticated, but both applications rely on <a href="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/03/understanding-natural-language-processing-for-SEO.html”>natural language processing for their conversational interface. But Siri takes this a step further by leveraging the cloud to continually improve. As you can see, I am excited about Siri, which is where my current hipster angst is sprouting from.

You see, Siri is only on the Apple platform, which means to play with it I have to buy an Apple product. I have spent the last 10 years sneering at Apple fanboys! Disgusted at overpriced inferior technology that has an almost cult like following. Despite all of this I now want an Apple product to play with Siri all day long! Then a few days after reading about Siri I realized that maybe I don’t have the best diet. Which would explain why I had to buy some new pants before Pubcon last week! So this week I cut out most of my carbohydrates, and doubled up on my greens! Then yesterday I started teaching myself Ruby!

To recap: I am going to buy an Apple product, started to eat alfalfa sprouts, and I am now learning to program like a hippie! Oh my God! I am turning into a Grade-A d-bag! What the heck have I become!? A hipster! That’s what!

I am not sure how this happened, but at the same time I am not that surprised. In the last few years I haven’t been very dogmatic, in fact I am downright <a href="http://raventools.com/blog/postmodern-SEO-joe-hall/”>postmodern about most things. Which means I am open to opportunities that come my way. I haven’t always been this way though, it has taken time to learn to be flexible.

Being flexible with your ideas and life can be truly powerful. In business it can be the one deciding factor that pushes your company where it needs to be. Whats weird is that so many entrepreneurs seem to be unwilling to change. So many refuse to try something that deviates from their line of vision. Despite that fact that using an Apple product might be uncomfortable for me, I know I need to learn different technology. Even though I love pasta and hate alfalfa sprouts I know I need to eat better to keep myself healthy. And even though I am more comfortable with PHP and Python, I know I need to learn as many programming languages as I can.

Because at the end of the day, those who have done great things are the ones that put themselves in positions to grow as individuals. If you haven’t already, you need to start asking yourself, where do you need to position yourself to grow as an individual? And, remember there are a lot of successful hipsters in the world, are you going to be one too?

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