Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “Choosing a basket for your Internet eggs.”

#5: WordPress Wins Open Source CMS Hall of Fame Award

Since the most important aspect of an effective inbound marketing strategy is remarkable, shareable, readable content, it therefore stands to reason that choosing the right basket (content management system) for your eggs (content)  is also going to be critical to success. I’m a huge fan of WordPress and the Open Source Awards agree.

Link: PacketPub

#4: iPad ‘newspaper’ created by Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch

Publishers are spreading their eggs in all kinds of baskets (print, open web, walled web, mobile, social media) in an attempt to figure out the best business model in a Web 2.0 economy. We now see the Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar of media by planning an iPad-only publication.

Link: The Guardian

#3: Ask the Wise Guy: Facebook Fan Page or Website?

Guy Kawasaki is nothing if not a “bottom line” kind of guy (rimshot). In this article, he does a great job of explaining why he put all of his eggs in the Facebook basket for his latest book, Enchantment. The bottom line is that if you’re trying to establish a web presence for something more ephemeral and less permanent, then skipping the website and going for a Fan page may very well be your best option.

Link: American Express Open Forum

#2: Facebook Introduces Anti-Email: Social Inbox, Seamless Messaging, Conversation History

Where are you going to put your e-communication eggs? Facebook is betting on the current trend of teens and twenty-somethings shunning email in favor of texting and instant messaging. But the central issue here may turn out not to be the technology, but the trust. Facebook hasn’t engendered a very high degree of trust lately, but we’ll see whether convenience and expediency win out over trust.

Link: Fast Company

#1: Long Live the Web

Tim Berners-Lee authored a sort of “State of Internet” article this week. Much of it discusses eggs and baskets, and the threats to both. He argues that net neutrality (lack thereof) threatens to crush certain eggs while failure to adhere to open standards threatens to diminish the quantity and diversity of baskets we have to choose from. It’s big thinking from a big brain about big issues.

Link: Scientific American

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “The Changing Face of Facebook,” but I’ve also included a bonus link from Chris Brogan.

#5: Federal Board Says Employees Shouldn’t Get Fired Over Facebook Posts

The National Labor Relations Board has filed suit against a Connecticut company for firing a worker who complained about her supervisor on Facebook. This will be an important case study to watch and will have implications for how wide or narrow employer social media policies can be.

Link: AllFacebook

#4: Livestream For Facebook Lets You DIY Live Stream Video On Fan Pages

More and more small businesses and sole proprietorships are using Facebook fan pages as free surrogates for a website. Depending on the business, they may or may not be able to get away with this. Either way, Facebook is continuing to chip away at the reasons why you can’t do this (see #3 below).

Link: TechCrunch

#3: Microsoft’s Docs Now Supports Facebook Groups

One of my web pet peeves is the lack of decent group collaboration tools available. Google Wave had promise, but was too complex and “weird” to catch on. With Ning euthanizing its free product, there is a rather large opening that Facebook seems to be moving toward. In addition to providing a means for communication and discussion, Facebook groups has now made it easier to share documents. Now all they need to do is add audio and/or video chat and they’ll really have something.

Link: AllFacebook

#2: Facebook’s Gmail Killer, Project Titan, Is Coming On Monday

This entire week has been abuzz with rumors that Facebook will be announcing its Gmail Killer on Monday. There have been lots of clues, leaks, reading between the lines, and it’s obvious some sort of email solution is on its way. But not everybody is on the same page about what they’ll be announcing (see #1 below).

Link: TechCrunch

#1: Why Facebook Probably Isn’t Launching an Email Service

This is a pretty thought-provoking article. It’s predominately a semantics argument about what exactly constitutes an “email” solution. The important aspect of this article is the discussion about the future of electronic communications. Many of us are aware of the fact that only about 11 percent of teenagers use email and many colleges have halted the practice of providing freshmen with “edu” email addresses. From my own anecdotal experience, I’ve watched my two teenage daughters shift much of their communication away from text messaging and toward Facebook instant messaging. My guess is that Facebook is grabbing onto that trend with both hands and rather than trying to kill Gmail, it’s looking to serve the users who aren’t using email at all.

Link: Fast Company

Bonus: Don’t Do This – Speaking

I think most speakers are guilty of this until they learn otherwise. But it’s still far too common, so I’m doing my part to wipe out this scourge by sharing this brilliantly simple doodle from Chris Brogan:

Don't Do This, from ChrisBrogan on Flickr

Link: Chris Brogan

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Advertising Age ran a story last week about “How This Author Got 674,716 Facebook Fans (Worth, Uh, $92 Million!).”  Justin Levey was a New York law student who applied for an internship with the Israeli consulate but ended up “in Jerusalem writing speeches for Ariel Sharon during one of the most turbulent times in Israeli history.” He accumulated more than 674,000 fans largely due to misinterpreting the book’s title for a new Facebook meme – Shut Up, I’m Talking. His fans were liking his page because they were making a statement, not necessarily identifying themselves with his book.

The article discussed the obvious questions this situation begs: How much is a follower worth? How much do people really pay attention in social networks? In Levey’s case, this situation has very little downside. However, if you’re a business or non-profit the wrong follower demographic can actually be doing you a disservice.

Negative Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of maximizing your web site’s visibility to search engines in order to obtain the highest possible organic search ranking. While there are lots of things you can do to have a positive impact on SEO, there are also plenty of actions that can hurt. One example is inadvertently emphasizing keywords that you don’t necessarily want associated with your site.

“Shut Up, I’m Talking” exemplifies a different type of negative optimization; guilt by association. Social search differs from web search because it relies on the demographics of your fan base to determine relevancy. In Levy’s case, his audience demographics don’t differ all that much from Justin Beiber’s. That particular audience probably isn’t heavily weighted by people interested in reading about Middle Eastern foreign policy.

Marketing Takeaway

Levey’s fan page is an extreme case and many could make a reasonable argument that it’s a good problem to have. However, the risk isn’t really that your fan page or website will have and abundance of the wrong kind of attention. The risk is that, on a smaller scale than this example, your website will optimize for the wrong keywords or your fan page will appeal to the wrong demographics and cost you traffic. Search engine optimization must be deliberate and involves examining every aspect of your presence, including the title of your Facebook fan page. You do have a Facebook fan page, right?

Like the Hippocratic Oath, the first rule in search optimization is “Do no harm.”

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week’s High Five theme is, “Social Media Grab Bag.”

#5: Government websites get the chop

As part of the UK government’s austerity measures to combat rising debt levels, it announced that it will be shuttering over 600 web sites.  But that’s not the interesting statistic. As Chris Rand puts it, “Sadly, like most public sector projects, the cost of running them is eye-watering.” He cites one example in which a UK government web site cost over $7M to build and received just under 400k visitors at a cost of over $15 per visitor.

Link: BMON

#4: Former Facebook Executive Adam D’Angelo Confirms New Google Social Networking Effort

There has been some Buzz (rimshot) about Google’s next move to combat Facebook’s growing threat in the social search space. This article suggests that Google drastically underestimated Facebook’s potential and never made social networking a company priority – until now.

Link: Inside Facebook

#3: How To Rank #1 In Facebook Search In 60 Seconds For Any Term

My reason for highlighting this article isn’t so much for people to learn how to accomplish this feat, but to understand the implications of the 21st Century Land Grab. Whether or not you intend or a ready to fully engage in social media marketing, it’s important to plant a flag to prevent someone else from claiming your territory.

Link: All Facebook

#2: How This Author Got 674,716 Facebook Fans (Worth, Uh, $92 Million!)

Like the previous article, the most important lessons of this story aren’t the most obvious. While the author and columnist question the true value of a Facebook fan, what struck me was the negative impact that such a throng of the wrong fans can have on your brand. Like accidentally optimizing for the wrong keyword, having a fan page populated by the wrong demographic can be just as damaging.

Link: Advertising Age

#1: Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

There are a trillion hours per year of “spare time” that are currently spent watching television. When you think about social media and wonder aloud, “Where do people find the time?” now you know. Shirky wants to start talking about how we should be using this cognitive surplus.

Link: TED: Ideas worth spreading

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week’s High Five is a grab bag of internet marketing topics.

#5: ACTA Draft: No Internet for Copyright Scofflaws

Regular readers of this blog will know that I often talk about net neutrality and copyright issues.  This article discusses efforts by the U.S. to convince other nations to develop protocols for copyright protection that would make it the responsibility of Internet Service Providers to police copyright infringements and immediately suspend internet connectivity  and terminate “in appropriate circumstances.”  In addition to raising costs for ISPs, this will almost certainly result in a “shoot first, ask questions later” policy in order to reduce their risk.

Link: Wired

#4: WSJ on iPad for $17.99 a month, magazines to be at or near newsstand prices?

It’s becoming clear that the print publishing industry is looking at the iPad as an opportunity to start with a clean slate <rimshot>.  The horse has already left the barn in terms of providing free content on the internet, and so it seems that they intend not to make that mistake again.  From the outset, several publications are intending to at least begin their subscriptions on the iPad at very near news stand pricing.  Given Apple’s strict control of the content application rules on their platforms, this should not encounter the technical hurdles publishers have faced on the internet.  This time, it’s personal.

Link: engadget

#3: 5 Quick Ways To Improve Your Facebook SEO

Lisa Barone writes one of the best internet marketing blogs on the internet, in my opinion.  She is a frequent guest writer on Small Business Trends and this article provides five simple, yet solid tips for improving the search engine optimization of your Facebook fan page.

Link: Small Business Trends

#2: Are Marketing Dollars Shifting? Exhibit Industry Down 12.5%

There’s not a whole lot to tell for this one.  While the decline of the exhibit industry isn’t shocking, I was a bit surprised at the steep drop from last year.  More evidence that marketing dollars continue to flow from traditional channels like trade shows to inbound marketing.

Link: Hubspot

#1: Facebook Foreshadows New Features With Privacy Policy Tweaks

It’s time for our monthly Facebook privacy policy fire drill!  They are proposing a couple of new (and potentially disturbing to some) tweaks that will be made to their privacy policy.  The first is the integration of automatic geolocation features.  Applications like foursquare provide a fun way to localize social media and meet new friends, but they also broadcast your activities to the world and provide criminals with a possible blueprint for tracking your whereabouts.  The second change is the implementation of the new Facebook Connect policy, which may automatically sign you into sites and share your public information simply based on the presence of a cookie on your computer.  Given the fact that many Facebook users still don’t fully understand the implications of the “Everyone” default sharing mode on their wall, this has the potential to get a little nasty.

Link: TechCrunch

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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