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What Are Your Facebook Likes Revealing About You? (Hint: It’s a lot)

Apr
05
2013

Is it possible that you are unwittingly outing yourself – as gay, as a conservative, as Muslim, or as a pot smoker – by simply liking stuff on Facebook?

Sure, you could easily do this by liking the “Gay Men’s Alliance for Rolling Joints #420? page (I don’t think this really exists, just an example). But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about people being able to accurately predict your lifestyle choices and personality traits by simply analyzing the combination of things you like on Facebook.

And by doing that, bring to light things that you may have purposefully tried to keep hidden.

You may not think that liking a page like “that’s going in my status when I get home” would allow people to infer that you’re a teetotaler, or that liking the Weight Watchers page tips off that you’re in a relationship, but new research suggests that your likes (even the ones you may find innocuous) are much more telling than you may think.

Baby, you like that?

The study comes to us from the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge and was just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal (PNAS). Researchers looked at over 58,000 Facebook users and found that they were able to accurately predict “a range of highly sensitive personal attributes,” including things like ethnicity, religious affiliations, sexual orientation, intelligence, drug use, political views, and more, by simply analyzing the subject’s likes on the site.

For instance, using Facebook likes, the researchers were able to correctly categorize white vs. black 95% of the time and male vs. female 93% of the time. They were correct in their predictions about a users’ sexual orientation over 80% of the time, and could distinguish between Christianity vs. Islam in 82% of the circumstances.

And as you may expect, the researchers were more accurate with their predictions when they had more likes to work with.

“[E]ven knowing a single random Like for a given user can result in nonnegligible prediction accuracy. Knowing further likes increases the accuracy but with diminishing returns from each additional piece of information.”

So simply knowing one thing that you like on Facebook could help someone determine a fact about you, like your age, gender, or sexual orientation. And the more likes that are available, the more likely someone is going to be able to predict many of your attributes (up to a certain point).

Succinctly put, “individual traits and attributes can be predicted to a high degree of accuracy based on records of users’ likes.”

What’s interesting is how the researchers made their inferences. “Few users were associated with Likes explicitly revealing their attributes,” according to the study. That means that the likes that tipped off the analysts weren’t blatant declarations of personality and lifestyle traits. For example, less the 5% of users that the analysts predicted to be gay liked specifically gay groups like “Being Gay” or “I love being gay.” The analyst’s predictions were based on much more subtle indicators such as liking pages for “Britney Spears” or “Desperate Housewives.”

In other words, your likes betray you, good ladies and sirs.

The researchers outline their nightmare scenario as such:

On the other hand, the predictability of individual attributes from digital records of behavior may have considerable negative implications, because it can easily be applied to large numbers of people without obtaining their individual consent and without them noticing. Commercial companies, governmental institutions, or even one’s Facebook friends could use software to infer attributes such as intelligence, sexual orientation, or political views that an individual may not have intended to share.

One can imagine situations in which such predictions, even if incorrect, could pose a threat to an individual’s well-being, freedom, or even life. Importantly, given the ever-increasing amount of digital traces people leave behind, it becomes dif?cult for individuals to control which of their attributes are being revealed. For example, merely avoiding explicitly homosexual content may be insuf?cient to prevent others from discovering one’s sexual orientation

Of course, it’s important to note that this is in no way exclusive to Facebook likes.

“Similarity between Facebook Likes and other widespread kinds of digital records, such as browsing histories, search queries, or purchase histories suggests that the potential to reveal users’ attributes is unlikely to be limited to likes,” they say.

But likes are unique in that, most of the time, the information in much more available to the public than a browsing history, for example. Facebook has over a billion monthly active users, and a good number of them like hundreds and even thousands of individual items of content on the site. It’s interesting (and probably unnerving to many people) that analysts were able to determine many personality traits with such accuracy simply by combing through a users’ liking habits.

An outing on Facebook

Likes aren’t the only kind of Facebook action that can “out” someone, exposing information that they wanted to keep private to the wrong people.

Last October, we talked about a privacy flaw inside Facebook’s Groups that led to two gay college students being outed to their families.

As the story goes, the two University of Texas students were added to a Facebook group called “Queer Chorus” by the group’s creator. As you’re probably aware, Facebook allows friends to add other friends to groups that they create.

When the two students were added, Facebook generated a story about the event, which was published on their parents’ news feeds. Although both students had customized privacy settings that disallowed their parents from seeing certain posts, this story that they had been added to the “Queer Chorus” group somehow made it to their parents eyes.

How?

Simple. There are three types of groups that users can create on Facebook: Open, Closed, and Secret. And Facebook allows for friends to see that you’ve been added to Open and Closed groups.

“Similar to being tagged in a photo, you can only be added to a group by one of your friends. When a friend adds you to a group, a story in the group (and in news feed for Open or Closed groups) will indicate that your friend has added you to a group,” says Facebook.

“When a friend adds you to a group, you’ll get a notification right away, [and] you can leave a group anytime. To do so, just go to the group page and click “Leave Group” in the right-hand column. Once you leave a group, you can’t be added by anyone else unless you explicitly request to be re-added.”

So, you can leave the group if you want. But there’s nothing to stop people from seeing that you were added to it (assuming it’s an open or closed group).

There’s also a bit of misinformation when it comes to the notifications users receive when they’re added to a group. The notifications can make it seem like the user was only invited, when in fact they can appear in friends’ news feeds as having been “added.”

Sounds a bit anecdotal, I know. But it’s just another example of how non-direct, contextual info derived from Facebook actions can be used to infer certain things about a user – often at a heavy price to that user.

Likes, and privacy by obscurity

As you probably know (although there’s a chance you haven’t received it yet), Facebook unveiled their new Graph Search product in January. With Graph Search Facebook is looking to index all of the data on their massive graph and make it easily searchable and cross-reference-able.

With the unveiling of any new product, especially one involving search, Facebook is going to come under fire from those concerned with privacy. Facebook has made a point to reassure users that Graph Search will in no way affect their privacy. And in a way, Facebook is being completely genuine here. Basically, if a random person could find the info before Graph Search, they’ll be able to find it with Graph Search. If they couldn’t find it before, Graph Search won’t just suddenly throw it out in the open.

Facebook is not changing any of the privacy details on any of your posts, photos, or likes. You can trust them on that.

But there is something to the privacy concerns revolving around Graph Search. First, Facebook removed the ability for users to opt out of being featured in search results. This happened back in December, well before Facebook announced Graph Search.

“Everyone used to have a setting called ‘Who can look up my timeline by name,’ which controlled if someone could be found when other people typed their name into the Facebook search bar. The setting was very limited in scope, and didn’t prevent people from finding others in many other ways across the site,” said Facebook at the time.

Because of this “limited scope,” Facebook retired the setting. Now, everyone can be found with Facebook search. And since Graph Search is powered by “likes,” that means that Graph Search has made it easier for people to find information about you and your likes.

Here’s how I explained the concept of privacy by obscurity then:

It’s not that any of your information is any more public than it already was. Once again, Facebook isn’t lying about that. You’ll probably be found more often simply because Graph Search is a better search tool that makes it easier to find stuff.

Previously, Facebook users could rest on the principle of security through obscurity (or privacy by obscurity, for our purposes). That line of thinking goes something like this:

“Sure, I have some public information out there. But unless someone is specifically looking for it or for me, it’s kind of hard to find.”

And that line of thinking is true, for most circumstances. If I wanted to find you, I would have to be actively looking for you. There was no real, reliable way to simply stumble upon your Facebook profile (with consistency), and definitely no way to find you based on your likes, photos, and interests.

Now there is, of course. If I search “people from Hoboken that like Bon Jovi,” your name may pop up. I don’t know you, and I never would have organically searched for you. But Graph Search has led me to you, and your adorable puppy photos, and information on your penchant for fine wines and spirits. I basically know you now.

So, what can you do about it? Luckily for you, Facebook provides a way to prevent other users from determining things about you based on your likes. All you have to do edit the visibility of your likes. Just go to your settings, access you likes, and you’ll find that each like group has an option to make itself private. This process can be tedious, but if you want to stop people from knowing everything that you like and making inferences from it, this is pretty much the only way. Other than quitting Facebook.

Final Thoughts

Of course, the big issue of the study is that this information was inferred from likes, not just any information available on Facebook. Even if you choose to leave the “religion” or “interested in” sections of your About page blank, there’s a chance that those things could be discovered simply by looking at public info on your likes.

If you’re concerned about your likes giving you away, one simple but somewhat tedious solution involves changing the visibility of your likes – something that more people may be thinking about anyway thanks to Facebook’s new Graph Search. Another solution could be to simply be more careful with what you like. If you don’t want people to know/think that you’re a strict Christian, maybe you should stay away from liking pages that you think would tip it off.

But the bottom line is that likes are one of the vertebrae in the backbone of Facebook. Likes make the world go round. And it’s nearly impossible to have a real Facebook experience without liking things. You can fine tune your privacy all you want (and that’s strongly suggested), but in the end, this is Facebook’s bread and butter. Being surprised that Facebook likes could possibly be telling of your personality is like being surprised that someone could infer your team allegiance from your Green Bay Packers jersey and that giant block of cheese on your head.

About Josh Wolford: Josh Wolford is a Writer for WebProNews. He likes beer, Sriracha and movies that make him feel weird afterward. Mostly beer. Follow him on Twitter: @joshgwolf Google+: Joshua Wolford StumbleUpon: joshgwolf

Posted in Facebook, Social Media | Comments Off

The Gap Between Social Media and Business Impact

Apr
04
2013

In business, social media is becoming a lot like email. Every company has it. In an Altimeter Group survey of 700 executives and social strategists fielded in late 2012, we found that 100 percent of participating enterprise organizations run to varying extents an active social media strategy. But unlike email, organizations haven’t mastered how to effectively communicate through the likes of Facebook or the tweets of Twitter.

Over the last several years, businesses have increased the pace of adopting social media strategies for use in marketing, service and other related capacities. What’s becoming very clear however is that adopting social media and understanding its impact on customer and employee relationships and also the bottom line are not always linked. This disconnect between social media strategies and business value is forcing many executives to rethink their overall approach and the infrastructure they built to support it. The result of this reflective process is motivating organizations to transform everyday social media initiatives into deeper social business strategies.

Charlene Li and I spent the better of the last year studying how organizations approach social media and how planning, processes, and outcomes mature over time. Our findings are significant and are included in our newly released report, “The Evolution of Social Business Six Stages of Social Media Transformation.”

The results of our work were surprising to say the least. We uncovered a notable gap between organizations that executive social media programs and campaigns and those that specifically invest in social business strategies. Altimeter defines the evolution to a Social Business as the deep integration of social media and social methodologies into the organization to drive business impact.

On one side the chasm, there are businesses (or departments) that are actively investing in social media without intentions or outcomes being tied to business goals. On the other side are organizations that are deeply integrating social media and social methodologies throughout the company to drive tangible business impact.

In fact, we found that only 34% of businesses felt that their social strategy was connected to business outcomes and just 28% felt that they had a holistic approach to social media, where lines of business and business functions work together under a common vision. A mere 12% were confident they had a plan that looked beyond the next year. And, perhaps most astonishing was that only one half of companies surveyed said that top executives were “informed, engaged and aligned with their companies’ social strategy.”

But there’s hope. Charlene and I learned that the two most important criteria for a successful social business strategy are that it is 1) clearly aligned with strategic business goals of an organization, and 2) has organizational alignment and support that enables execution of that strategy. What separates them are six distinct stages that we believe most organizations have or will traverse as they mature.

The Evolution of Social Business

The six stages are as follows:

Stage 1: Planning – “Listen to Learn”

The goal of this first stage is to ensure that there is a strong foundation for strategy development, organizational alignment, resource development, and execution. Key tenets of this stage include listening to customers to learn about their social behavior; using pilot projects to prioritize social efforts; and using audits to assess internal readiness.

Stage 2: Presence – “Stake Our Claim”

Staking a claim represents a natural evolution from planning to action. As you move along the journey, your experience establishes a formal and informed presence in social media. Key tenets of this stage include leveraging social content to amplify existing marketing efforts, providing information to support post-transaction issues; and aligning metrics with departmental or functional business objectives.

Stage 3: Engagement – “Dialog Deepens Relationships”

When organizations move into this stage, they make a commitment where social media is no longer a “nice to “have” but instead, is seen as a critical element in relationship building. Key tenets of this stage include participating in conversations to build communities; using engagement and influence to speed path to purchase efficiently; providing support through direct engagement, as well as between people; establishing a risk management and training discipline to shift mindsets; and fostering employee engagement through enterprise social networks.

Stage 4: Formalized – “Organize for Scale”

The risk of uncoordinated social initiatives is the main driver moving organizations into Stage 4, where a formalized approach focuses on three key activities: establishing an executive sponsor; creating a hub, a.k.a. a Center of Excellence (CoE); and establishing organization-wide governance. Organizations should plan for a potential CoE pitfall, however, as creating one may lead to scaling problems in the long-term.

Stage 5: Strategic – “Becoming a Social Business”

As organizations migrate along the maturity model, the social media initiatives gain greater visibility as they begin to have real business impact. This captures the attention of C-level executives and department heads who see the potential of social. Key tenets of this stage include integrating social into all areas of the business; garnering executive engagement; forming a steering committee; and pushing social operations out to business units.

Stage 6: Converged – “Business is Social”

As a result of the cross-functional and executive support, social business strategies start to weave into the fabric of an evolving organization. To move into this stage, organizations need to make a commitment to a single business strategy process; merging social with digital; creating holistic customer experiences with converged media; and developing a holistic social culture.

About Brian Solis: Brian Solis is principal at FutureWorks PR, an award-winning PR and Social Media agency founded in 1999. FW PR bridges the communications gap between companies and their customers, and between products and their specific benefits for their target markets. Solis blogs at PR2.0, http://www.briansolis.com, and regularly contributes to many industry trades. He is also frequently quoted in articles relating to technology trends and Marketing/PR strategies.

Posted in Social Media | Comments Off

The Importance of PCI Compliance

Apr
04
2013

It’s remarkable how few people have heard of PCI compliance. It doesn’t make the news, the press don’t mention it and if you talk to your bank manager or accountant they probably won’t know what you mean. But if you are involved in taking card payments via ecommerce and or traditional retail you need to know what it is and why it is very important you understand it.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard to give it its full title is a set of guidelines handed down by the payment card industry, the banks and credit card companies, to ensure that customer’s card information is protected and secure. As the PCI Security Council website states,

“In security terms, it means that your business adheres to the PCI DSS requirements for security management, policies, procedures, network architecture, software design and other critical protective measures. In operational terms, it means that you are playing your role to make sure your customers’ payment card data is being kept safe throughout every transaction, and that they – and you – can have confidence that they’re protected against the pain and cost of data breaches.”

Isn’t that nice, retailers can play a role in ensuring customer data is secure; something I am sure we all want. The website www.pcisecuritystandards.org lists a range of benefits to merchants from PCI and there is no doubt that compliance is a good thing.

However there is a major sting in the tail for those who fail to meet the standards. Listed consequences for non-compliance include: Lawsuits, Insurance claims, Cancelled accounts, Payment card issuer fines and government fines.

If you think that sounds bad it gets worse. Fines can be per terminal for the company, so an ecommerce shop, linked to a bricks and motor retail operation with three stores, each store having three card machines means your fines being ten-fold. And your liability to fraud does not stop at the fraudulent transaction on your payment terminal but potentially on all fraud on the card used. Take a moment to consider the implications of that!

So if you take card payments you need to be taking PCI compliance seriously, because if you haven’t been affected yet, you will be and the consequences for burying your head could be disastrous.

About The Author: Nigel Wilkinson is the Managing Director of WNW Design Ltd. In addition to his business interests, Nigel is married to Movement teacher Michelle, the father of teenage twins, an avid Networker, a Social Media commentator, a keen golfer and football supporter. He is also an active member of Exmouth Chamber of Commerce, being Chairman from 2009 – 2011.You can follow him on Twitter @nigelwnw, or telephone on 01395 542 569. You can also find WNW Design on Facebook here.

Posted in Blogs By Nigel W., Business Development, Sales & Marketing, WNW Staff Blogs | Comments Off

Pinterest Jumps into the Numbers Game with Web Analytics

Apr
03
2013

Pinterest recently announced a feature that has long been missing from its image-based social bookmarking platform: Web analytics. The social network has been notoriously slow on the monetization game; Pinterest only launched business accounts a few months ago, and there still exists no paid advertising on the site.

This is great news for businesses who, until now, have only had a foggy idea of the ROI of Pinterest — either using one of the third-party analytics platforms, peeking in with Source (here’s Source for SiteProNews replace the end of the URL to check your own domain), or just keeping an eye on their newsfeed.

See It In Action

The Web analytics feature is already available. If you haven’t already done so, choose “switch to the new look” in the menu, then businesses and any user with a verified website can access analytics in the same place. Once there, you will find a number of useful metrics about pins and pinners, repins and repinners, impressions and reach and clicks and visitors. The information is presented in an appealingly simple format that matches the rest of Pinterest’s site, and different parts of the graphs can be switched on and off as needed. If you don’t have a verified website, you can instead watch the walkthrough video to learn about the new features.

In addition to the hard data, Pinterest’s new analytics tools will show you the 100 most recent pins, and “a selection” of your most repinned and most clicked pins. Other features let you see the types of images that people pinning and repinning your images tend to pin. All of these features are designed to tell you what content is the most popular. Using this information, you can learn what your visitors prefer to pin and repin, and adjust your use of images accordingly.

On top of that, the dates displayed are customizable to suit your needs in one-day, seven-day, and 14-day time periods, and different tabs let you move between the metrics and the feeds. An export feature makes it easy to package the data up to sort through and play around with elsewhere. It’s no Google Analytics, but it’s definitely a start.

Is This the Death of Third Party Applications?

It remains to be seen how the new, freely available Web analytics tools will affect third-party tools like Curalate, Reachli, Pinfluencer, and others. In the not-so-distant past we’ve seen a number of third-party platforms facing devastation at Twitter’s hands and Facebook cutting off applications’ access to your friends list; these actions are understandable but can shatter applications built around these capabilities. Is the same likely to happen to third-party Pinterest tools? Some of the separate platforms offer additional features not (yet?) found among Pinterest’s analytics, but it may be only a matter of time before Pinterest starts taking issue with separate tools offering these services.

One possible solution on some people’s minds is the advent of a fee-based API. A public Pinterest API has been slow to make its way into developers’ hands, and nothing has officially been said to confirm its development, though interested persons can sign up for notification if it does become available.

Pinterest has seen an unprecedented amount of popularity in the recent past, blooming far beyond expectations. This popularity has allowed it to thrive in spite of the lack of a business model to start, and the late advent of business tools and analytics. But will not having an API ultimately hurt Pinterest? Only time will tell.

What do you think is in Pinterest’s future — an all-access API or analytics that exist solely in the Pinterest ecosystem? Share your thoughts in the comments.

About the author: Adrienne Erin is a social media marketing savvy freelance writer for several online schools who loves to write about Pinterest.

Posted in Social Media | Comments Off

Prepare for Successful PPC Campaigns Before You Pay for a Single Click

Apr
02
2013

As a PPC management company, we are often called upon to “fix” PPC campaigns that are not performing at an acceptable level (or are not performing, period). What we often discover is these campaigns cannot be “tweaked” into success, because they were not built on a solid foundation from the outset. Without taking the time to craft a clear PPC strategy before you even log in to Google AdWords or Bing for the first time, you are putting yourself at a severe disadvantage.

Below are some important initial considerations that are often missing from PPC campaigns.

 What is your Point-of-Action (POA)?

This seems simple enough. What is it that you want people to do when they arrive at your site or your dedicated landing pages?  Do you want them to fill out a contact form or would you prefer they pick up the phone and call your business?  Do you have an online demo that you’d like people to try? POAs can take many forms, and there can be more than one desirable action that people can take once you have their attention. But which is the most desirable? Which is the most likely to lead to a sale?

A recent client of ours was sending PPC traffic to their website hoping to increase business, but the most prominent POA on the client’s website steered visitors to sign up for their newsletter. Upon investigation, we discovered this was actually only the fourth most desirable action — less important than persuading visitors to complete a contact form, call the business and download product specifications. Addressing these simple changes had a huge positive impact on the client’s PPC campaigns; however, thousands of dollars were wasted in the meantime.

 Know Your Acceptable Cost-Per-Action (CPA)

A PPC management company is often asked to “rescue” PPC campaigns that have not established an acceptable cost-per-action. This is extremely difficult to do, except in the most basic “branding”-style campaigns.  People are often deterred from coming up with an acceptable cost-per-action because the formula to determine it can be so complex and requires a great deal of data. What is the average sale?  What is the internal sales conversion rate? What is the internal cost of the product or service?  What is the desired profit margin?

However, it doesn’t have to be so complicated. If these numbers are not readily available, a quality PPC management company can help you come up with reasonable approximations that should give you a starting point.  At this point, you can begin to collect the actual data required for a sophisticated analysis while knowing that your cost-per-action will not go through the roof.  As the data begins to pour in, the cost-per-action figure can be honed according to the realities of the campaign, and you will save a great deal of money in the process.

 Know Your Differentiators

Any quality PPC management company makes it a point to ask every new client this question prior to working on their campaigns: If you don’t know why people should choose your company, how will they know why they should choose your company?  Whether you are sending people to your website or (often preferably) designated landing pages, you have a very short window of opportunity to explain to people why they should do business with you and not your competitors, who are only a few clicks away.

And when you are considering your differentiators, it’s important to consider what actually resonates with your clients, not what you assume should resonate with them.  Our company recently held a discovery meeting with a new client, and we noted that the primary differentiator emphasized on the client’s landing pages and website was the fact that they had been in business for more than 25 years. When we asked if this was what really “sold” the company to potential clients, our client sat back and said, “You know, come to think of it — I don’t think our clients care about that at all. What really sells them is the ease of integration with our product.” Again, a few simple changes in approach paid huge dividends in our client’s PPC campaigns.

 Establish Your Budget

This tip seems like a no-brainer, but a good PPC management company will always ask you whether your goal is to get as many people to take the point-of-action using a fixed budget or if the budget is flexible as long as you are achieving a specific cost-per-action. The importance of this question cannot be overstated, because it calls for two distinct approaches in managing your PPC campaigns.

For instance, Client A may have a fixed budget of $10,000 per month, and this budget will not change in the foreseeable future.  In this case, our company will try to get as many prospects as possible to take the POA at an increasingly lower cost for each — in other words, to “squeeze” as much out of that budget as possible. On the other hand, Client B may have a starting budget of $10,000 per month, but is willing to increase that budget substantially, as long as they are achieving their acceptable cost-per-action. The approach to these types of PPC campaigns is decidedly different — we are trying to dramatically increase the volume of prospects while maintaining an acceptable cost-per-action for each.

The common thread with each of the discussion points above is that they should all be considered and resolved before your company spends a single dime on its PPC campaigns.  They will fundamentally shape your campaign and set it on a solid foundation geared for long-term success. This approach may take a bit longer to get the ball rolling, but when it starts rolling, it will almost certainly be in the right direction.

About the author: Scott Buresh is the founder and CEO of Medium Blue, a search engine optimization company, which was awarded a prestigious American Marketing Association award in both 2008 and 2010. Buresh has been featured in respected publications such as Entrepreneur, Success, Direct Marketing News, Business to Business, Search Marketing Standard, Public Relations Tactics and the Atlanta Business Chronicle. His articles have appeared in numerous online publications, including ZDNet, WebProNews, MarketingProfs, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. He was also a contributor to How to Build Your Own Web Site with Little or No Money: The Complete Guide for Business and Personal Use (Brown, 2010), The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Atlantic, 2008) and Building Your Business with Google for Dummies (Wiley, 2004). Medium Blue is an Atlanta search engine optimization company with local and international clients.

Posted in SEO | Comments Off

Understanding the Mechanics of Effective Article Marketing and Article Syndication

Mar
29
2013

Visit several marketing blogs or marketing forums, and you will find dozens of people proclaiming the death of article marketing as an effective marketing tool.

Before we start agreeing with them, consider this…

Some Food For Thought

It is human nature to lay the blame for failure on some external force, rather than to take responsibility for our own failures.

For example, I know several people who lost their fortunes in real estate, when the real estate market crashed in 2008.

If you ask them the reason they failed, they will say that fault was “the market.” If you ask them if you should get into real estate now, they will tell you, “absolutely not!”

Yet, I have other friends who are making a fortune in today’s real estate market.

What is the difference between the two groups?

Simple. The difference is belief and experience. The second group of people believes they can make money in today’s real estate market, and they have the experience to know how to be successful in the current real estate market.

So, I have got to ask… from which of these two groups would you want to receive advice about how to make money in real estate?

Dead, Dead, Dead…

If you listen to some folks, they will tell you: “Article marketing is dead, dead, dead. And, anyone telling you differently is wrong, wrong, wrong.”

They say: “Anyone telling you that article marketing works is a con, con, con.”

Again I ask you, do you want to take advice from the people who have failed, or do you want to collect your advice from those who understand how to be successful?

Belief and Experience…

I am one of those folks who believe there is still lots of money to be made with article marketing and article syndication.

I believe I can because I have more than a dozen years experience doing article marketing and making money from the process. And, for the last 10 years, I have been teaching others how they could duplicate what I have done.

Article Marketing Is Not About SEO

The truth is, if you believe article marketing is about SEO, then you are bound to make a number of critical mistakes.

1. You will mistakenly assume the quality of your content does not matter.

2. You will assume that all that is important is getting your article placed on a few dozen websites.

3. You will assume that success is measured in the number of links you gain through the process of article syndication and your ranking in Google.

The common belief since 2005 has been that your article is nothing more than the anchor needed to get a link on a third-party website — a link-building tool to help you influence your Google rankings.

The common misconception has been that the content of your article does not matter, so long as you are able to get a link to your website.

Those who were heavily invested in the idea of using articles to build links to influence Google’s search results were dealt a serious blow in the February 2011 Google Farmer Update. If you want to see how Google slapped the major article directories, you should read this article at SEOmoz.

This update was a major blow to thousands of webmasters, who believed  the only role for the article was to create one more link to their website, and for those who believed that posting their articles in article directories was the road to the Google promised land.

Successful Article Marketers Tell a Story That People Want to Read

This article does not look like an SEO article, does it?

My reward for writing the article is still the link and call-to-action in my author’s resource box, but I did not write this article to improve my search rankings in Google.

Instead, I wrote this article to find a large audience of people, who might be interested in buying those things I sell.

If I had written a SEO article, no one would have wanted to read it.

But, because I am telling a story you wanted to read, you are reading my article right now.

Do you see how that works?

To be successful as an article marketer, you need to accomplish a few key goals:

1. Identify who is most likely to buy what you are selling;

2. Determine what you need to write, to be able to reach your target audience;

3. Tell a story people in your target audience want to read;

4. Provide enough value to your readers, for other publishers to want to share your content with their audiences;

5. Give enough value to your readers, so they will want to share your article with their friends and associates via social media;

6. Convince your readers by example that they will continue to receive real value from you if they click the link in our author’s resource box;

7. Provide an effective call-to-action in your author’s resource box to get more people to visit your websites and consider your offers.

Syndicating Your Articles

Some people want to believe article syndication is dead. They argue publishers want only original content — content that has never been published elsewhere, because Google penalizes duplicate content.

To help dispel this common myth, I found a PLR article titled, ‘How To Make Your Content Go Viral.’ Inside that article, I found a specific sentence that I did not believe would be used in another article. The search phrase used was “one video that went viral featured a science professor showing how to light a candle” within quotes. To see what I found, use this Let Me Google That For You shortcut.

As of this writing, that particular search query returns 87 results. Google is literally finding dozens of copies of the same article in 2013 and showing those results in a search query.

There are two types of online publishers. The first relies on Google to deliver its audience. The second type of publisher already has its own audience, and he or she is focused on giving his or her audience the kind of content that will keep readers happy and coming back for more awesome content.

When I create articles for syndication, I do not worry about showing my article to publishers who are waiting for Google to maybe deliver an audience some day. Instead, I focus on creating content for publishers who already have a large audience, now.

That means I must deliver awesome value to the reader within my articles so the publisher can deliver awesome value to its audience.

When I do this part well, I am always successful with article marketing.

Article Directories Are Simply a Means to an End

When I syndicate my articles, I have a strategy in place that I always follow.

1. Submit my article to article directories and article distribution mailing lists;

2. After a couple weeks, I check Google and my server logs to discover who may have republished my article;

3. I contact publishers who have published my articles, and I ask them if it would be OK with them if I e-mailed them directly when I have new articles available;

4. If publishers agree to let me mail my articles to them, I ask them to tell me exactly what kinds of content they want to receive from me;

5. I record their e-mail address in a private database (you can substitute a Word document). I also make a note of what kind of content they want from me.

When my next article is ready for syndication, I submit it to article directories, article distribution mailing lists and the publishers who have requested for me to send them the type of content I have just created.

The only thing stopping you from doing exactly what I do is a little bit of extra effort on your part.

Article Marketing Is Dead Only to Those Who Are Clueless How to Use It

A dozen years after I began to use article marketing as a promotion tool for my websites, it still delivers the cheapest, most cost-effective, long-term and targeted traffic that I can bring to my websites. Some of my articles are still delivering traffic 10 years after I wrote them.

Is article marketing really dead? It depends entirely upon whose advice you heed…
About the author: At WritingPuzzle.com you will find more training materials for article marketers. If you are more interested in marketing your books online, then you may find ProfessionalBookMarketing.com to be your perfect cup of tea. Bill Platt has been teaching other writers how to create content that gets the reader’s attention and how to promote themselves online, since early 2001.

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Still Trying to Fool Google With Your SEO Practices?

Mar
28
2013

Impatience can prove expensive. Impatience, combined with unethical behavior, can prove very expensive. Rushing to reach page one in Google, Yahoo and Bing rankings may put more than your search engine ranking at risk. It will make a direct hit on your creditworthiness.

As any website owner penalized by Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms knows, taking shortcuts to high search engine rankings can severely hurt your revenue stream. But what you may not know is that shady SEO practices can harm your finances in another way: they could scare off lenders and investors.

Before you apply for a business loan, launch a crowd-funding campaign or try to raise investment capital, take a hard look at what your website analytics say about your company. Does an analysis reveal that your company has used best practices to achieve its ranking and traffic reports? Do you have earned links from relevant sites or paid links from a spammy blog network? Do you think a lender won’t notice? Think again.

Alexa and Application Reviews

Lenders and investors are flooded with applications from business owners who need money to purchase equipment, buy buildings, increase inventory, launch products or bring their ideas to market. Reviewing a company’s financial statements, interviewing accountants, meeting with chief financial officers and visiting a company’s warehouse take a lot of time. Credible lenders will not spend that much energy on a prospect’s application unless it’s worth their effort.

Many applicants will be rejected after a single visit to Alexa. And it might not be low traffic that dooms you — many successful companies don’t rely on massive traffic — but the type of traffic and the way it was obtained.

$10-Million Link Mistakes

A well-established Florida real estate developer who used his website as a marketing tool — all of his business was conducted offline — couldn’t get a loan because of his Alexa report.

Why? Because the company website, located in Jacksonville, ranked higher in India than it did in the United States. And the only U.S.-based sites linking to the company came from paid links and content mills.

The developer would have been better off with zero links than the 252 links he had. The developer blamed his SEO provider, but shifting responsibility didn’t help him get the $10 million he sought. He was turned down for the loan, despite the fact that he had the necessary collateral, a stellar credit rating, more than 20 years of experience and a solid business proposal to support his application.

The $40,000 Link

The company’s questionable SEO practices raised questions about its ethics. If the company was underhanded in its link-building practices, in what other ways was it acting irresponsibly? Was it hiding financial information? Bribing inspection officials? Building unsafe condos?

In the big picture, the disreputable links may have meant nothing. The company’s ethics may have been completely aboveboard. But it didn’t matter. The bank had other loan applications to review and the single red flag raised by the Alexa report was enough.

The developer probably thought he was getting an incredible bargain when an offshore developer promised him page one rankings in Google for a few thousand dollars. But each of his 252 links cost him $39,683 in loan money he needed for a new condo project.

The developer’s SEO practices damaged his reputation. Don’t let this happen to you.

How to Make Your Online Reputation Sparkle

As any financial advisor will tell you, you should clean up your credit report before applying for a car or house loan. But you should also put your company’s online reputation to the white glove test before approaching business lenders or investors.

Here are four ways to check for “dust” in your SEO practices and take any necessary scrubbing action:

1. Review Your Alexa Report.

Make certain you know where all of your site’s backlinks are coming from — and the reputation of each of those sites.

Ask your SEO provider for the metrics of all the sites that link to yours. Or check them yourself using tools such as PR Checker or Webmaster Peak.

If a site ranks poorly, find out why. A new site with great content may not rank well because of its newness. This may be fine — your reputation can grow along with that of the other site. But if a poor-ranking site is obviously shoddy — its home page is littered with ads, for example — take steps to get the backlink removed.

Your site is judged by the company it keeps. A site’s overall reputation is important but so is its relevancy to your business. If you sell medical waste carts and you have links from a jewelry store and a candy company, Google might wonder about those links even if the jeweler and confectioner have outstanding reputations.

2. Study Your SEO Reports

Your SEO provider likely sends you monthly — or more frequent — reports. But how often do you read them? If you’re only looking at your current rankings, you’re missing a lot of information that could impact your website’s reputation — and your potential for raising or borrowing capital.

Find out where your links came from — and how they were obtained. If any of your links were purchased, they will hurt your credibility. Exceptions to this rule include links from business directories. Links in exchange for products are also dangerous. If, for example, you’re sending freebies to mommy bloggers to compensate them for linking to your site, the practice could prove costly.

The definition of “product” under Google’s Panda and Penguin remains undefined, but SEO expert Richard Oldale says that if you’re writing guest posts strictly for links, “Don’t be surprised to find this practice penalized when the algorithm is next updated and the net is cast once more.”

3. Examine Your Website

If you or your SEO provider optimized your website, find out how much optimization took place. Duplicate content — even if you wrote it yourself for another website and then posted it to your own — can hurt you. So can hidden links, sneaky footer links buried so far down the page no one would naturally read them, overused and irrelevant keywords and cloaking.

Remove — or ask your SEO provider to remove — any keywords or links on your site that don’t belong. And keep in mind that, if your name or company name is on the website, the responsibility for web content rests with you.

4. Learn from the Best

In early March, when the Ethisphere Institute released its seventh annual list of the world’s most ethical companies, it noted that 23 companies had made the list every year. The exceptionally ethical companies included America Express, Starbucks, General Electric and Fluor.

You might argue that the perennial winners are large companies whose CEOS can afford to be ethical, that companies such as Starbucks don’t face the type of online competition or budgetary constraints that your business does.

But every company started out small. And every company owner can choose to act ethically, online and off.

Patience Pays

The opportunities to make money online continue to grow. E-commerce became a trillion-dollar industry in 2012 and online sales are expected to reach $1.3 trillion this year, according to emarket.com.

This means that there are a lot of investors who want to help your company grow, to help you (and themselves) to a piece of the ever-growing Internet pie.

Don’t give them a reason to pass over your proposal or application. Make certain that all areas of your business — including your SEO practices — are squeaky clean.

About the author: Geoff Lee is a Vancouver mortgage broker with over 22 years’ experience helping individuals and businesses get the right financing for their needs. He is also a founder of the Imani Orphan Care Foundation that supports orphaned children in Kenya.

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Demystifying Facebook’s New Features for Marketers

Mar
27
2013

No one ever accuses Facebook of being a static site – the plethora of major EdgeRank changes in the last twelve months is ample evidence. Recent updates have incited a cacophonous chorus of frustration, as many marketers report lower-than-average reach with the current tools and trends. As a result, businesses feel the social media giant has devalued the audience they worked so hard to build and maintain, and that advertising on Facebook is no longer such a windfall. The truth of the matter? Things are better than ever for marketers using Facebook – one simply has to be informed of the new tools available to them. Facebook has not lessened the impact of the audience you’ve built; they’ve simply provided some new ways of leveraging your reach. Their fatal flaw in the recent rollouts is simply a matter of communication, as marketers aren’t aware of all their new power.

Until now.

Most of us currently know about the ability to promote posts on Facebook. Promoted posts give business owners and users the power to feature their content to their fans, and their fans’ friends, for a set cost. This can give a nice extra boost to the value of your content. The real homerun, however, is the new ability to amplify your content. Because content amplification helps you target a highly relevant audience outside of your current fan base, it offers the biggest bang for your marketing buck.

What is a Promoted Post?

Promoted posts are, in many respects, no-brainers for savvy marketers. With a few selected demographic filters, business owners can target fans and their friends. This highlights selected posts to a filtered, targeted audience, displaying selected ads near their feeds. It’s a straightforward process with obvious benefits.

Here’s an example of how this is broken down. Say you run a business that sells vitamins, and you’ve got a current daily deal promotion involving multivitamins for adult women. A promoted post campaign might use the following targets:

* United States residents
* Women
* Ages 35-65
* Interested in: #vitamins, #health, #energy, #preventative medicine

Promoted posts would then place your ad in front of all your fans (and their friends) that fit the above criteria. On average, a promoted post reaches between 6-15% of your audience (depending on their level of engagement.)

Why Content Amplification Rules

There are many reasons content amplification is the new go-to for marketers looking to grow their audience. For starters, unlike promoted posts, amplified content is seen by relevant users who are not currently fans of your brand or page. Furthermore, this strategy lands posts in the user’s actual news feed, rather than the ad space sidebar to the right – a huge factor, especially for mobile users. News feeds are far more prominent than ad space, receive volumes more click-throughs, and are statistically proven to engage more users.

Setting up successful content amplification campaigns requires a few key considerations. As with all online advertising, diversity is imperative – you’ll want to try a few variants to see what targeting set yields you the best results. Top filters for breaking out content amplification include location, age, gender and any other metrics relevant to your product or business. In a perfect world, your demographic breakdowns should mirror the components you use in Google Adwords. Using the vitamin business as an example, a content amplification checklist could work as follows:

* Topic interest sets: #Your Vitamin Company, #vitamins, #multivitamins, #health
* Competitor interest sets: #GNC, #Centrum, #Herbalife
* Wider interest sets: #holistic medicine, #alternative health, #preventative health

The key here is not to limit your content to a single target audience. Each target set should be carefully monitored to determine broadest reach and highest engagement.

Why Isn’t Everyone Using Content Amplification?

Content amplification is a best kept secret simply because Facebook has been unsuccessful in communicating its existence and benefits. People just aren’t aware of their options, partly because the recent changes seemingly devalued their audience, rather than leveraging it all the more. Folks are apt to focus on the negative, and are currently missing the boat on the goldmine Facebook has offered. Because there’s been a rash of post-IPO updates, it’s quite challenging to keep up.

In addition to the little promotion content amplification has received, Facebook has also hidden the functionality within the API. Promoted posts have received far more attention, but because they don’t land in the user’s actual news feed, they just don’t hold a candle to amplification. Facebook would do well to bring this feature to a more prominent position in the API, rather than hide it in the Power Editor. In time, this will likely occur – but you have a leg up on your competitors by being in-the-know.

Deciding Who You Should Target

So you’re in love with the concept of content amplification, but now you need to decide who to target. Although deciding who to target is a bit trickier with content amplification, it really comes down to your actual campaign objectives. The best approach is a data-led focus, rather than the scatter gun method employed by Facebook’s recommended pages. You’ll want to identify new fans with interest profiles that match your content. Consider using insight tools and social data to help you zero in on the right targets. This will reduce your cost per engagement and increase the effectiveness of your content too. Some marketers are reporting a 30% engagement increase through savvy amplification usage. Not bad for a tool so few are even aware of!

How to Get Started and What to Budget

There’s yet another added bonus to content amplification – the cost. At just $20 per variation, you can afford to have several variants to find your sweet spot. Keeping in mind the multiple tests you’ll no doubt want to employ, be sure to stay on top of results and guarantee you are not wasting time and money on useless variations.

Deciding when to start this process is also easy – now is good. Because of the increased engagement, inexpensive cost and news feed prominence, there’s no reason to wait any longer. Take a hard look at your current campaign objectives and start to map out who you want to target. Make sure you bid and optimize your content amplification intelligently (a common mistake is bidding too high on a CPC basis), and be prepared to test different copy and image combinations. There’s no need to abandon promoted posts all together, but utilizing content amplification is the new must-do in online marketing.

About the author: Producer, game designer and freelance writer, Tina Courtney-Brown has been a bona fide web fiend since she discovered Poetry.com in 1994. Tina’s fortés include all aspects of online business, social media, marketing trends, alternative health, digital production and many more. She’s a passionate truth-teller, a sincere advocate for the environment, and an obsessive dessert creator. Learn more at her personal website, or find her on Facebook.

Posted in Facebook, Social Media | Comments Off

Do You Know How to Use Twitter Chat to Increase Your Followers?

Mar
26
2013

Businesses and individuals are always looking for new ways to increase their number of followers on Twitter. Most ways involve nothing more than paying a fee to have an extra 1,000 followers added on. That’s OK, if all you’re interested in is having a higher number. But if what you really want is a greater number of quality followers, then you are going to have to put a little bit of extra effort into it.

This is where using a tool like Twitter Chat is valuable. While that means you have to work a little to earn more followers, it is also an enjoyable way to do it, so don’t be discouraged. It is an organic way to grow your following by interacting with people who share your interests.

What is a Twitter Chat?

A Twitter Chat is essentially a group discussion via Twitter at a set time centered around a specific topic. Select a topic that most people are ready to discuss. This could be about a current event, like the Oscars, or an interview with an industry professional who agrees to answer questions and share his or her knowledge.

If you’ve never participated in a Twitter Chat, you can join a few before setting up one of your own to get an idea of how it works. You can find listings of upcoming chats on Google Docs or search with hashtags on your Tweetdeck or Hootsuite app.

What does it have to do with business?

Hosting or sponsoring a Tweet Chat will generate a lot of interest in your account. As a sponsor, you can post one or two promotional tweets during the discussion, which participants may retweet as a courtesy.

The more chats you have, the more people will start to identify your brand as it relates to certain topics.

Why use Twitter Chat?

When you take part in a chat as a representative of your brand or as a sponsor, you will see more people following you who have an actual interest in your niche. You can get more mentions when you invite influencers from Twitter to join your chat and strengthen your connections with them.

How to participate?

Decide on a time and date to hold your chat. Choose the hashtag that is related to your chat.
Spread the word about your upcoming chat to as many people as you can and ask them to share it with others.
A moderator may be assigned to ask questions, welcome participants and help maintain the flow of the chat.
Use the hashtag when asking a question or giving a response.

Do not use a Twitter Chat as an opportunity to plug your products and services.

Growing your Twitter following can help you become an authority in your niche. When you have quality followers who share your tweets and engage with you, you will see higher numbers for your brand as well.

You can connect with industry leaders and other influencers when you participate in and start up chats centered around relevant topics. Using Twitter Chat to grow your brand can be a fun and valuable way to grow your reputation and find more followers for your business.

Have you participated in Twitter Chats? How have they helped your brand?

About he author: Dawn Pigoni of Be Social Worldwide is a certified social marketing specialist and a social media virtual assistant. Dawn offers superb social networking, social marketing and social bookmarking to WAHMs, small business owners, Internet marketers, affiliate marketers, and coaches who desire to bring stunning Internet presence through social networking to their businesses. Get Dawn’s free report, Social Networking today and see how she can assist you with being social worldwide.

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Responsive Web Design, SEO and Google

Mar
25
2013

The Great Debate between Responsive HTML and Native Applications

By now, you’ve likely heard scads about responsive web design, one of the more important and trendy technologies currently on the scene. Responsive HTML is programming that simply responds to the user’s device, delivering an experience appropriate for the screen they are using to view the content. For developers, this means the days of painstakingly building sites for specific screens is potentially over, as responsive design lets webmasters create one cohesive site that works on desktops, tablets, smartphones and everything in between.

At first glance, it would seem responsive HTML must be the new obvious choice for all development, as it enables you to reach every screen with one batch of code. Depending on your audience, product and site, however, it may still make more sense to tackle each screen separately.

The big question though centers around the ever-present SEO factor: Is responsive web design good or bad for SEO? The answer: both. It all depends on you.

Responsive Web Design in Detail

There are essentially three key pieces of technology woven into well-written responsive HTML.

1) CSS3 Media Queries – These are the elements that identify the actual screen size and device a visitor uses to access your site. They test conditions on each device including minimum and maximum height, resolution, orientation and aspect ratio. These media queries allow you to determine which CSS style should be displayed for any given device; a critical step to achieving responsive design.

2) Fluid Grid Layout – These parts of the code are the magic that allow the page to expand or shrink dimensions so that it stays within the viewable area, without the need to scroll. Fixed-pixel sizing is rendered obsolete with this method, allowing the design to freely adjust itself by percentages and dynamically change position without breaking any other area of the site.

3) Fluid Image Scaling – Just as above, but for images. When images are sized using CSS in this fashion, the pictures work in conjunction with the fluid grid layout to achieve maximum design flexibility.

The Advantages of Responsive HTML

Besides the obvious flexibility, responsive design can save significant dollars by allowing developers to create one site only, rather than multiple sites and apps to cater to all manner of screens. While there are certainly reasons to create a native app, you need to first consider what your audience is looking for. If you offer services that users need on the go – like a restaurant, book store, salon or hotel – a responsive experience eliminates the need to download a mobile app, and will likely land you far more customers because of the ease and speed. Since mobile browsing is surpassing desktop usage across the globe, this is a major windfall.

It used to be SEO experts touted the responsive method as a superior choice because of the complexity of multiple URLs, but in recent months, Google has changed the game. Up until recently, Google was not able to consolidate multiple site URLs for mobile and desktop experiences and equate it to the same business. That, however, has now changed. If you have one URL for your desktop site and another for mobile, switchboard tags now allow Google to understand which site should appear when, and your URL structure matters not. One URL may still feel like a simpler tactic for your business, but Google will find you either way.

When Responsive Design Is Not the Best Choice

Last June, Google did declare that responsive HTML was their development preference, but they clearly stated they will still support dynamic serving and mobile URLs. Many wrongly assumed that because responsive is Google’s “preference,” it’s the only way to go. Google themselves still develop native apps for tablets, mobile devices and desktops, so that’s your first clue that there are still other factors to consider.

One of the biggest drawbacks to responsive design right now is speed. Because this kind of programming generally requires more code, responsive sites often take longer to load. Speed is a key SEO ranking factor, as Google gives preference to all aspects that create the best possible user experience. Slower load times could also negatively affect your site’s bounce rate and conversions. There’s a lot of research that shows mobile users are an impatient bunch, so make sure your responsive site still falls in reasonable load time parameters, and watch that you don’t lose customers because of speed.

Likewise, if your audience primarily uses one screen only – maybe your site revolves almost entirely around a mobile app, like FourSquare – then using responsive design for multiple screens wouldn’t make sense. Choosing the responsive route could also prove damaging to your SEO results if you only consider keywords and categories that desktop visitors will use, and not cater to mobile as well. True, this is more an issue with content than the code itself, but it’s easy to leave one audience out when you’re consolidating your efforts.

Your Key Considerations

The biggest factor in determining if responsive design is right for your business: your audience. If your customers are primarily smartphone users, they have very specific needs that would likely only be met through a mobile-centric experience.

On the other hand, if your demographic will access your site through screens of all sizes, and you are looking for a faster, easier and less expensive development process, responsive HTML is just the ticket.

No matter what you choose, you will obviously need to give heavy consideration to the unique SEO factors inherent with each solution. Responsive HTML isn’t intrinsically good or bad for SEO, especially now that Google consolidates link equity for equivalent mobile URLs. Again, it’s about your customers. If you find keywords and categories are similar across screen sizes, by all means, consolidate and enjoy responsive benefits. But if you need to consider your demo on a screen by screen basis, you may save time and money with responsive design, but the SEO and individual product losses could be catastrophic.

Yes, the current hype around responsive web design is certainly warranted. It’s a fantastic technology that is making life better for developers and users alike. But just as with any technology, it’s certainly not one-size-fits-all.

About the author: Producer, game designer and freelance writer, Tina Courtney-Brown has been a bona fide web fiend since she discovered Poetry.com in 1994. Tina’s fortés include all aspects of online business, social media, marketing trends, alternative health, digital production and many more. She’s a passionate truth-teller, a sincere advocate for the environment, and an obsessive dessert creator. Learn more at her personal website                                                              , or find her on Facebook.

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