According to Forrester Research, User-generated content (UGC) is being created by approximately one-quarter of online consumers. Are you tapping into the massive power of 2.0 users?
Archive for January, 2007
Leveraging User-Generated Content
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007Tutorial on Setting Up A News-Voting Website With Pligg
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007I’ll be setting up a pligg site shortly and I’ll probably refer to this great article that takes you step by step though setting up your own news-voting website with Pligg. Pligg is a content-management system that supports social media news sites that allow users to submit stories and vote on the ones they find most interesting.
35 Tips To Promote Yourself In The Digg Community
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007It takes more then just good content to get noticed on Digg. Unless you’ve got the scoop on a very sensationalized story, it’s important to make connections and network if you want maximum exposure for your stories and participation. This article gives 35 tips to maximizing your use of the Digg community.
101 Web Marketing Ideas and Tips
Saturday, January 27th, 2007A comprehensive 101 list of website marketing tips , ideas and best practices (online and offline).
YouTube adds “Digg this” button!!!
Saturday, January 27th, 2007Digg’s brand and influence are increasing even more with YouTube adding “Digg this” buttons. YouTube released many new features including the ability to block certain users, improved search (plus YouTube videos being indexed on Google Video Search), fixed messaging, and more options for customizing channels.
Every Wikipedia Link is Now NOFOLLOW
Monday, January 22nd, 2007In an effort to combat spam, Wikipedia has changed all it’s links over to nofollow, meaning they will no longer pass pagerank and count as an “editorial vote” for that page. Wikipedia links use to be a great way to build pr and trust for people with excellent sites that were less commercial oriented, or at least had sections that were (Wikipedia is notorious for disallowing sites with commercial intent, although that is slowly changing and the links are becoming more main stream.) Even without passing page rank the value of a link from Wikipedia link is still great for driving quality traffic and I have a sneaking suspecion Google may eventually (or even right now) still give some extra “value” of some sort from links on popular Wikipedia pages, but that’s just a hunch. I mean heck, any spam links are removed within hours and every external link has to go through editorial review, it’s one of the better checks for the value of a site.
Officially Google, MSN, and Yahoo all teamed up to adopt the nofollow attribute, but the nofollow links still show up on link searches. Additionally Google still gives page rank to pages with “noindex” “noarchive” “nofollow” meta tags and ranks those pages for specific quieres (like the exact title search). MSN and Yahoo also still index and rank pages that are “suppose” to be purposely invisible. A good example of this will is individual de.licio.us user pages. They are in the cache, show up in the results (for very specific searches mind you), and can have page rank.
List of Potential Ways Google May be Reranking it’s Search Results
Monday, January 22nd, 2007A discussion of different possible ways in which Google may rerank it’s results after an initial search querey. This is a great article for anyone trying to understand the behavior of Google’s results and why different types of seraches bring up different kinds of websites. One example is a “commercial intent” filter, simliar to Yahoo Mindset, Google may rerank the results to favor or downgrade commercial results depending on what the query was.
[tags]search engine optimization, google rankings, SERPS[/tags]
PR Tips – Free Publicity Is Worth It’s Weight In Gold
Monday, January 22nd, 2007An in-depth 1700+ word article on how to get free publicity for your business. It’s authored by SS PR firm, which represents clients in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal among others – Good advice on how to get publicity without spending anything.
[tags]pr tips, publicity, public relations[/tags]
53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without
Friday, January 19th, 2007Excellent resource for css technqiues. The examples have great screenshots and are taken from well designed sites. I’ll be visiting this site again and I already know these techniques, but the implementation is just as good as the know-how and everyone could use a review.
[tags]css techniques, web design[/tags]
Anti-promotionalism in Social Media – Strong Feelings from Digg Comments
Friday, January 19th, 2007With all the emphasis latley in the SEO world on the benefit of social media sites (Like digg) for link building, traffic and general brand awareness, it makes sense that VERY strong anti-promotional sentiments are springing up in heated debates (or insult exchanges depending on the maturity of the commenter) on the ethics involved in authors submitting stories themselves from which they will in some way gain from the promotion.
For a GREAT example of this check out the comments on this article “187 Amazingly designed sites to see before you die.” The author made an ok very long list of all the sites he thought looked the best. He submitted this list and on other pages of his site he sells text links.
I didn’t digg the article and I say ok, because although most of the sites on the list are very pretty their usability is so terrible (meaning it’s difficult to tell how they are, what they do and navigate around) I consider most of them failures as anything more then GREAT eye candy and perharps valuable fodder for a viral marketing (or the new term link bait) campagin from people saying “Woah look at this.”
The article nevertheless recieved a lot of diggs and people in the comments blasted him, why? Because he submitted the site himself and he may / will financially gain for the exposure it recieves on digg. Other people came to his defense saying it didn’t matter if he makes money or not, it’s all about where the users like the content. I tend to agree with that atitude, but I expect to see even harsher examples of “anti promotionalism.” springing up as more and more people attempt to “abuse” the system.
What the future of social media and it’s effect on advertisers is still up for debate.
[tags]social media, digg, anti-promotionalism[/tags]