Posted April 20, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click Yes, you read that headline right. It does sound kind of “backwards” to me, as well. But, anyhow, Leapfish , a search engine that I have written about before , is turning to social media to give away up to $100,000 cash. Leapfish is calling this the “ $100,000 Cash Dash Viral Bonanza “. Leapfish is giving away $100,000 in gadgets, prizes and cash to Internet users who participate in leveraging their search engine in unique ways. If you want your share of the $100,000 cash from Leapfish, you can use your online social media and social networking presence to earn points towards prizes and cash drawings. By doing this, you will help LeapFish’s goal of 1 million homepages set in 2010. You can earch cash and prizes by blogging, Tweeting, creating a LeapFish Homepage, searching, referring friends, or other ways ways that promote the Leapfish search engine. I guess that just by blogging about Leapfish already I may be in the running, especially since my previous blog post about Leapfish ranks well in the Google search engine for “fastest search engine”. I’ve been a fan of Leapfish for a while now, even though I am still not seeing a whole lot of search traffic from the Leapfish search engine directly. However, using the social media and social networks to promote Leapfish, that may change this year. LeapFish is an evolved search engine that captures the traditional, multi-media and real-time Web through a single, connected platform for both searching and sharing content. LeapFish is a privately held corporation headquartered out of CARR America Corporate Center in Pleasanton, California. Comments
Tags: contest, google engine, google search engine, internet users, LeapFish, media presence, multi media, Review and Story, running, search engine, search traffic, Social Networks
Posted April 14, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click Remember when Bing launched its recipe results? Now Google has launched a similar feature with recipe rich snippets. “For example, if you were searching for an easy to make thai mango salad, you can now see user ratings, preparation time, and a picture of the dish directly in search result snippets,” explains Google. It may not be incredibly far-fetched to suggest that maybe Bing’s offering nudged such a feature into development, whether or not Google would admit this. This story isn’t about recipes though. It’s about the major search engines’ quest for gaining or keeping you as a user. It feels like Bing has been around quite a while know, but in reality, it hasn’t even been out for a year. Right out of the box, Bing seemed to make Google want to improve . Google is even in the process of testing redesigned search results pages that borrow some design characteristics from Bing. Where are You Getting the More Relevant Results? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends… . Both Google and Bing still have their relevancy issues. We recently looked at an example of a query for “matt cutts” on Google (though we compared them to Yahoo rather than Bing, as Yahoo mentioned the same query in a blog post). Frankly, Google’s results left a bit to be desired. It wasn’t that that they were bad exactly, but personalized results pushed the more relevant results further down the page , and Matt’s Facebook profile was MIA, despite Facebook being one of the most popular sites on the web, a good result for a search on a person’s name (It was in the first few on Yahoo’s results). Microsoft may like consumers to think that Bing gives all the right answers. Those commercials would certainly seem to suggest they have a leg up over the competition in that regard, but they’ve got their own relevance issues. For example, for an article I was writing recently, I was looking for that site Bing has that showed all of the latest features they’ve released. I couldn’t remember the name of it, so I searched (on Bing) for “latest bing features”. Given Bing’s philosophy of wanting to provide answers, I would expect to easily find what I was looking for through such a query, but instead the first organic result is an article called “The Latest News from Bing” from November of 2009. Search Diversifying In the latest search market reports , Google has lost a little bit of market share. Bing is gaining (and has the potential to gain a lot more for reasons discussed here ). Another thing Bing has going for it, or Google has working against it rather, is that search itself is becoming much more diversified as a result of mobile , social media , and geo-location . People are simply using more ways to find the information they’re looking for. It’s not that they’re not using Google anymore. It’s that they’re maybe using it less for certain types of queries. For example, where someone may have once used Google to search for a movie showtime, maybe they now have an app for that on their phone. Is a Bingized Yahoo Good for Yahoo Search? At some point in the near future, Bing’s results will be taking over Yahoo’s results to some extent. While most will agree that the Microsoft-Yahoo deal will be good for search advertising . Another question would be is it good for people who use Yahoo to search? Are Bing’s search results better than Yahoo’s? I’m not so sure, looking at the “matt cutts” example. For the “latest bing features” example, however, I can’t say that Yahoo’s results are really any better than Bing’s. I realize that just looking at a couple of examples is kind of grasping at straws and are hardly representative of all queries in general, but it’s still a question worth pondering. Are Bing’s results better than Yahoo’s? Does it even matter? Will the average Yahoo user even notice a difference? Google’s Edge in Innovation Google still seems to have the edge in getting out new and interesting features. Take real-time search. Microsoft and Google both announced deals with Twitter around the same time. Microsoft even had one with Facebook too. While Bing had a separate destination relatively quickly, where users could search Twitter with Bing, they didn’t integrate real-time Twitter results into Bing results themselves. Google did this after a little while with not only Twitter, but many other sources to make up its real-time search results. Just this week, Bing announced that it is starting to include such results , and only from Twitter, and only to a small subset of users in the U.S. That’s not to say that Bing doesn’t do some things first (like the recipes for example), but Bing has a lot more to prove (and in all fairness, they do regularly release new features ). Google is already established. Bing is still trying to win people over. Google is frequently making acquisitions to better its search technologies. Just this week, Google acquired Pink , to better its Google Goggles product , which lets people search with their phones by simply pointing their cameras toward an object. They recently acquired Aardvark , a social Q&A search service (a space that is growing rapidly – see AnswerBag/MerchantCircle news for one of the latest examples). Wrapping Up With regards to relevance, you’re going to find better results on Google, Yahoo, and Bing on a query-by-query basis. In reality, none of them deliver perfect results all the time, and that is why the diversifying of how people search is likely to continue, and for the better. The search engines can work to personalize results all they want, but in the end, it’s the user that personalizes how they search, and right now, it’s not
Tags: Bing, commercials, consumers, design characteristics, Matt Cutts, Microsoft, phone, preparation time, recipes, Relevance, search engine, Search Engines, search result
Posted April 1, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click It used to be you spent five minutes registering for an event, and then showed up on the big day, went to a few workshops, drank two free Coronas, and went home. Social media changes all of that, enabling events and their planners to have long-term, nuanced, shifting interactions with attendees. I gave a speech last week in suburban Cincinnati to the Mid-American chapter of Meeting Planners International , titled “7 Ways to Use Social Media to Create Buzz-Worthy Events”. My recommendations are based on my work with MarketingProfs and ExactTarget to add social frosting to their already fabulous events, and my experiences speaking at several dozen conferences annually. There’s a total of 39 specific suggestions in the slides, but here are the highlights. 7 Ways To Use Social Media To Create Buzz Worthy Events View more presentations from Jay Baer . 1. Engage Get your potential attendees interacting with you early on by enabling some measure of feedback or crowd sourcing on the conference programming. South by Southwest has always led in this area, with its “panel picker” process that turns over 30% of the programming selection to potential attendees. An easier way to do this would be to utilize something like Crowd Campaign , which gives participants a way to suggest content, and for others to vote on it. Or, you could go even simpler, and use Tweetpoll or PollDaddy (As I did when I asked you for feedback on potential new designs for this blog). 2. Intrigue Almost all events have an official Web site. But very few (except for the geek events) take full advantage of all the free event listing and event management opportunities. At a minimum, you should create event pages on: – Facebook Events – Eventbrite (where you can also sell tickets, if you’re so inclined) – Upcoming – Linkedin (if it’s a business event) Sure, its a bit of a hassle to oversee all of these event pages, but your attendees swim in different ponds. Plus, every conference has the same MVP attendee: some guy named Google. Why would you pass up a chance to double, triple, quadruple your search engine listings? 3. Invigorate As the event draws closer, you have to pull potential attendees off of the fence with content hors d’ouerves Start a Twitter contest. Online Marketing Summit does this well, awarding free registration to the conference for people that can correctly answer marketing trivia via their Twitter feed. Get your speakers to produce teaser content. A simple video would be ideal. However, some speakers (either full of attitude or devoid of tech savvy) can’t handle the video creation process. In that case, set up a blog on Tumblr (for free, in about 10 minutes) and have your speakers call the toll-free number and leave a voicemail. It will be automatically transcribed, and posted to the official event blog. Speaking of blogs, consider setting up a Netvibes.com page for the event, and creating a centralized repository for all blog posts by speakers. Netvibes.com is free, and all you need to do is pick a layout, and then subscribe to the RSS feeds of each speaker’s blog. Use Pitchengine to create multi-media enabled press releases, and send the URL for the release to any and all “maybes” on your list. Gather social information from all registrants. Create a Twitter list of all attendees, and update it each time a new person registers. 4. Integrate Now we’re talking about the on-site experience, which is where social media can really add impact and get people talking. Pick a hash tag for your event, so attendees and remote watchers can monitor on Twitter. Shorter the better, please. Then, start your conference with an unofficial Tweet-up. It gets your likely content creators motivated and excited. I’m not a big fan of the geek conference staple of having a live, streaming Twitter wall behind speakers while they speak. Too distracting. But, I love having a big Twitter wall in a central conference location. This requires very little effort now, using something like Tweetwally . Create an event within the event by running contests on Twitter during the conference. My friend Dawn DeVirgilio at ExactTarget is great at this, with multiple small prizes per day. In this one, she hid gift cards around the conference, and took pictures of the locations. Whomever found it first, won. Here, she drove people to the Expo Hall, and awarding an unexpected, memorable prize – an upgrade to a hotel suite. 5. Inform I’m a big fan of voting via text message, and I’d like to see more events more toward session evaluations through that same interface. Do we really need to be killing trees for written speaker evaluation forms, not to mention the environmental impact of hundreds of golf pencils. I also believe QR codes have huge potential at events, and SXSW put them on every name tag this year. Alas, until standards are adopted and the software is built in to smartphones, we won’t see widespread adoption. But, it will happen by 2012 for certain. 6. Propagate Create your own media during the event. Via Ustream (and its amazing iphone app) you can stream live video of your event for free. Why wouldn’t you? Set up an official Flickr gallery for the event, and encourage attendees to take photos and upload them. Give prizes for Photo of the Day. Make a daily post-show podcast, interviewing speakers, sponsors, and attendees. Or, atomize that audio even more, and create tweets with sound using Twaud.io 7. Aggregate Take the conference content and spread it as widely as possible. Your goal is to get the doubters that didn’t come this year to view that content and decide to go the next year. Take every conference presentation, and instead of just putting them on your Web site or emailing links to attendees, release them on SlideShare (one per day for maximum impact) Provide Twitter transcripts to attendees, and also post it to your various event pages. Backupify has a super cool new, free service called Session Tweets where you can automatically make a PDF of all tweets using your event hashtag. Reward good content. MarketingProfs’ Ann Handley staged a contest last year for their B2B Forum where attendees that created blog posts, video posts, photo galleries, etc and submitted them to the MarketingProfs blog were entered to win a prize – a free registration to next year’s event. Why couldn’t you do that? Why can’t you do all of this? Comments
Tags: Conference, conferences, event, events, Facebook, flickr, marketing, online marketing, photo, search engine, Twitter
Posted March 31, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click What’s the next big thing in social media? Is it Google Buzz? Is it Chat Roulette? Is it Foursquare? Is it Gowalla? Is it something you won’t hear about until tomorrow, next week, or next year? While it is certainly a good idea to be aware of trends, it’s also important for businesses not to get to fixated on them, and go rushing into things that may or may not make sense for them. Shiny Object Syndrome As 10e20 President Chris Winfield discussed with us at Search Engine Strategies last week, a lot of people get caught up in “shiny object syndrome”. This is essentially where businesses get caught up in the hype surrounding the latest service, trend, or fad, and feel like they have to be involved to stay relevant, and jump in because of that. This is not the best way to go about things. “You should never get involved in something, just because you think you have to,” he said. Winfield made a great point: think about if you had put a large amount of time and money into a Friendster strategy or an Orkut strategy, only to find that these networks would never offer you the benefits you could’ve received from using these resources on a Facebook strategy. It’s important to consider your goals and think about what you need to measure in your social media efforts, from a business standpoint. “Not all companies should be measuring the same exact things,” notes Winfield. Portability Perhaps the best approach you can take is to have a relatively portable social media strategy. In other words, look for ways to engage with customers that don’t limit you to a particular service. That way, if they flock to a new one in the future, you can go along with minimal hassle. Maintain consistency in your brand’s persona and how you deal with customers, and you’ll probably find that this can be transported from one channel to another, despite technological adjustments that may need to be made to the strategy. One good thing that businesses likely have to look forward to is a more open web, which will allow users of separate services to communicate with one another. Just yesterday, Cliqset and Status.net claimed to have implemented the first live example of the Salmon protocol , and for the first time ever, the users of two independent, public web entities are able to communicate with each other, without being on the same service as the person they are communicating with. “This is a great demonstration of Cliqset’s larger vision of social networks being siteless, and we think it’s going to be the future of how all services interact and, more importantly, how users of these services interact,” Cliqset tells WebPronews. Major social media players are already heavily involved in similar initiatives.
Tags: business standpoint, chris winfield, Cliqset, Facebook, flock, future, goals, media strategy, president chris, search engine, shiny object