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Jan 26 2010

While Writing a Post About the iSlate… TechCrunch Goes Down with a BANG BOOM!

Category: social media,tech opinion,trust & reputation — jmacofearth @ 1:32 am

Updated 1-26-10 7:26 AM (CST) initially posted on The Apple iSlate Blog where I was writing… The story from from TechCrunch:)

The comments have gotten hilarious. Especially when Steve Jobs stopped by to issue his final warning:

Sure, the article's sources are cloudy (the author says he's heard it "multiple times second and third hand from completely independent sources," and unnamed "senior Apple execs and friends of Jobs are telling people that he’s about as excited as he’s ever been."), and technically we're still not even sure this thing exists. But it certainly builds buzz for most highly anticipated Apple product of the year, expected for release Wednesday. It's really something when the product is as fabled as what the CEO says about it!

>>Ooops! We interrupt this broadcast to show you from the war front, TechCruch has been hacked! <<

What were we talking about. Oh Jobs, iSlate, the second coming and all that…

That was fun! Heck, just click the link to TechCrunch.

@jmacofearth
permalink to The Apple iSlate Blog: http://bit.ly/jobs-hacked

But wait, there's more:

Hilarious piece about Ballmer #CES and me. The return of Jobzilla at CES: http://bit.ly/jobzilla London Times Writers score a big win!

A few more of the funny pics of TechCruch being pawned. By angry iSlate believers? Or just plain old malicious hackers?

Tags: 2010, apple islate blog, hacks, islate, islate blog, islate from the cube, islate photo, Jobzilla at CES, live photos islate, real islate photos, return of Jobzilla, screenshot of TechCrunch HACK Jan. 26, steve jobs, steve jobs comments, techcruch hack steve jobs, techcrunch, techcrunch breaks, techcrunch goes down, techcrunch hacked, techcrunch screenshots, that was fun, the second coming, this is gonna be huge

Comments (4)

Jan 25 2010

Of Quote Tweets and Deadbeats: How Do We Keep the Party Started?

Category: community building,social media,tech opinion — jmacofearth @ 10:42 pm

So… I make no bones about the things I don't like on Twitter.

Why? Well, we're all learning. We're all failing. And we're all getting back on the horse again. At least I hope we are.

Let me lend my perspective to the current state of the tweet.

The Twitter of Yesterday

In 2006 when I first joined Twitter during SXSWi, I was passionate and connected. I really DID want to know where my 10 followers were. I really DID care that they were going for coffee AFTER the Keynote but before the Frog Party. I really did. My company, Axiomfire, and my favorite team I'd ever been a part of, was over. Finite! Caput! Two of my followers and people I followed were members of that team, and to this day, still close friends.

By day 3 of SXSWi I had actually met one of my new Tweeple face-2-face and had lunch with them. We could not have been from further planets, but I still follow her to this day.

By day 4 of SXSWi the novelty of having my BB vibrate 3 – 6 times an hour was wearing thin. I mean I loved these people, but my goodness, so what if you are going to take a shower before heading out for more fun at XOXO bar. See the idea, back then, back in the day, was that Twitter would mainly be a phone app. (Ha ha!) Seems kinda funny now… Oh, wait. You said that 80% of all Tweets are from mobile devices. Oh… Nevermind.

The point I was aiming for was the same one I say to myself every single time Gowalla or 4square tells me "I am at…" about some one, I want to shout, "TURN OFF THE LOCATION UPDATES." If I want to find you using Gowalla or Dodgeball or MyPlanet or whatever else you're packin on that mobile computing device of yours, I'd a asked ya. Oh, I did ask you? Dang!

Let me put this another way. If I wanted to know you were going to the dry cleaners at 4th and Congress, don't you think I'd a checked the preference: [ ] please alert me for mundane updates 24/7?

The Reality of Twitter Today

So that brings up an idea for Twitter.com the Company to make some money. (We know they are still trying to figure that out.)

Give us powerusers, us sheep willing to pay for your service to kick ass, give us a power prefs setting. And here are my top opt-out prefs.

[ ] ignore all gowalla, 4sq, dodgeball, {insert new service name here} updates

[ ] ignore all autoDMs. Yep all of them! 100%.

[ ] ignore all quotes (if you didn't say it yourself, well… why tweet it?)

[ ] ignore all "using TwitCheck" type account validators (I unfollow these people anyway, but… please!)

[ ] ignore anything about "whitening" or "thousands of followers" or "sexy pics"

[ ] ignore any account without a bio or a bio link

[ ] ignore any account with < 2 tweets

[ ] ignore accounts without a geotag

[ ] ignore any account with 3x duplicate tweets (retweet offenders)

[ ] ignore any account with > 100 other people ignoring them

In a future post let's explore some "pounce" or "actionable" preferences that Twitter could implement.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/retweet-offender

More interesting Twitter philosphy under The Twitter Way tab.

Makes me think of a line of jokes we should start, "Back when I joined Twitter…"

"I only had 10 friends and AT&T didn't have any cool phones."

*/sloppy drum fill/*

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Comments (5)

Jan 25 2010

SEO and Search in a Social Media World: My Top 16 SEO Thoughts

Category: executive learnings,social media,tech opinion,tools,trust & reputation — jmacofearth @ 11:16 am

(Is search dead now that social media is king? I don't think they can live apart, but together they make a synergistic knockout punch.)

Here is my ten minute presentation on SEO, Search and Social Media.

Google PPC/Adwords
1. Use adwords dollars to understand your market and what terms have power
2. Adwords can inform your SEO work in a matter of days, rather than weeks

SEO
1. Content is king, but if you dilute the content to become search bait, keywords don't read all that well.
2. Create good content that people will forward.
3. A forward/share/digg all serve to up your backlinks or linklove in the eyes of Google search
4. Do your homework about SEO structures. (Did you know META is almost worthless? Google ignores 90% of META descriptions anyway. They do use META: "title" and META: summary. But your keywords in META only make it easier for your competition to scoop your SEO work.
5. Read your competitors code. If they use META KEYWORDS the are showing you their word matrix. Compare notes. Find the best 20 terms.
6. Make your content easy to index, easy to find, and refresh your pages requently.
7. Produce a lot of good content.
8. Aggregate the heck out of your content, make sure you are sharing it with as wide an audience as possible. (Note: if your content is SEO bait, your forwards, retweets and favorites will be low.)
9. Give away the secrets. If you provide insights and value to your readers they will read your content. They will forward and link to the good stuff. (Nobody forward boring content, unless they are paid to.)
10. Be social. Keep your comments open. When someone else comments, respond. Join other communities and join the conversation.
11. Don't push your content down the wrong channels. Or better yet don't push your content at all.
12. Make your site and content juicy for spiders.
13. Keep it clean and simple. Too many keywords, content that is written solely for the purpose of generating traffic is very unlikely to go viral.
14. Go viral. If what you have written is good, controversial, over the top, informative, really good, or funny, you have a chance of getting noticed. If it's boring, or marketing-speak, you don't. Simple as that.
15. If you're so smart, share your toolkit with the rest of us. We are all in this together. Everyone is trying to do it better, faster, cheaper. But we have to focus on the BETTER first and foremost. If you define a better way to do something share it. If you have a GTD secret that is kicking ass, share it. If you know something we don't share it.
16. Good content wants to be free. And by setting it free you enable the traffic and links to build without your efforts.

If you put your content behind a firewall, or plan to charge for it, be ready to a serious drop in traffic. Maybe you can make up for that by charging and entrance fee… But maybe not. I'm putting up a New York Times case study shortly where we can benchmark their performance as they go to a PPV 3.0 model again. PPV 3.0 (Pay-per-view 3.0 = social media, search and seo, how can we make social media PAY!?

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/seo-tip

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