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Archive for March, 2009
Analytics for Twitter – Twitalyzer Review
Friday, March 20, 2009
There is hardly an hour much less a day that goes by without a mention of Twitter and it’s growing influence. Eric T. Petersen has watched the growth of Twitter and built a new set of terms to measure users against benchmarks. Twitter analytics is fairly new, so it makes sense new ways to define and benchmark would be needed.
We often get really powerful questions from clients wanting to know the simple things like, “Why would I Twitter?” or “Am I doing it right?” With Twitalyzer, you can see the measurement of key metrics and see how you are doing against others. You see the Twitalyzer 100 most influential people, or simply measure against your friends, colleagues or business competitors.
A couple of the great values to review are Influence and Signal-to-Noise ratio. Influence is measured not just by your popularity, but a set of calculations based on things like how often you are “retweeted” and your reach with updates and number of followers. Signal-to-noise ratio is a the number of messages with information sharing such as @ references, # hastags, links or retweets. Twitter is a great tool for Social Media, but its popularity is also ramping up some of the noise we are all bombarded with daily. Checking out how much you are contributing above the noise is a great metric. There are other metrics available including generosity, velocity and clout.
How do you become a good Twitterer? There is a dashboard to suggest ways to increase your influence and contribute to the community. Like most analytics tools, it can let you know if you are using a social media strategy successfully.
Finally, we really like the Search tool to find others with similar interests, keywords and get a quick glance at their influence to see if we should be following them.
Of course, we Twitter because we like it and not to chase numbers. Don’t get too caught up, in the super easy to read scores and charts. Remember to enjoy Twitter for the goodness (and sometimes distraction) it brings to your digital life.
Let us know how you like Twitalzyer.
Follow us on twitter.com/semblog or me personally at twitter.com/jonti
For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com
Google AdSense Ad (Self)Serving – Now You Are in Control
Friday, March 13, 2009
If you aren’t too familiar with Google AdSense let me first explain what that is then we’ll get into how you are now in control – somewhat.
Google AdSense Explained
Google AdSense is a partnership between Google and website/blog owners that allows site owner/admin’s to place Google’s pay-per-click(PPC) ads alongside their site’s content. Site owners can earn money by placing Google PPC ads on their site. If a visitor clicks on the ad you get a cut. For most ads the cut isn’t that much but if you blog about Law or Insurance your cut would be bigger. For instance, on another one of my blogs on poster design I have ads running to the right of the content. The content of these ads are based on keywords in the content of my blog. Change the content and the ad changes. This poster’s landing page has ads based on the keywords ‘Meridian and Houston.’ This poster’s landing page has ads based on the keyword ‘Chairlift.’ Neither of these pages ads really appeal to me. That is mostly my fault as I have very little text content for Google to find the correct ads to show here but thankfully I can take control, to an extent, of what Google will show me the site view NOT the site admin/owner.
Making Google AdSense More Interesting
Google calls this ‘Making ads more interesting’ making it easy to ‘connect people to the advertisers offering products, services and ideas that interest them.’ The concept seems pretty easy enough but as someone who spends a lot of time on the internet I’m not sure I spend that much time. And by that much time I mean that these ads are so frustrating to me that I am going to spend fruitful time catering ads that I barely see in my peripheral to be more relevant to me.
If you do spend a lot time looking at the AdSense ads and are frustrated with the ads that are shown to you head over to the Ad Preferences Manager and tell Google what you do and don’t like.
ONE THING THOUGH: This is based on cookie settings in your browser. If you use multiple browsers in multiple places(Work computer, Laptop and/or home computer) you will have to set up every browser in order for your settings to follow you.
WOW
For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com
Paid Blogging – The Dirty Little Internet Secret
Thursday, March 5, 2009
If you are a blogger or you are thinking about getting into blogging to increase your revenue from your site please take heed over recent blog posts concerning paying someone to blog for you or your company
A recent report from Forrester, as reported by Adage, states that marketers should pay bloggers to write about their experience. This type of thing is done a lot but it generally gets the blogging community up in arms when someone blogs for pay.
We have suggested to clients that they invite bloggers and photographers to their events to help generate traffic to the blogs and in turn to their sites but we don’t suggest you outright pay people to say nice things about you. Forrester is suggesting you do but Google, especially Matt Cutts tells you not to.
Here’s where it gets tricky.
If you are going to pay someone to blog about you and say good things Google doesn’t want to have anything to do with it and if they find out you never told them about it they will penalize your site/blog. Google requires that all blog posts have the ‘no follow’ tag applied to all posts.
“My bottom-line recommendation is simple: paid posts should not pass PageRank.”
What Matt is referring to with PageRank, if you are unfamiliar, is the system at which Google ranks pages in it’s algorithm based on keyword relevance. Google does not support paid links and having someone write a blog post for you is considered a paid link. Think Payola
Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t people to say how great you are you just can’t use it to push your sites ranking up. If you are going to pay someone to talk nice about you make sure you tag your posts with ‘no follow’
The Adage article quotes Forrester’s author Sean Corcoran who imparted this advice if you are to have someone blog for pay.
Forrester’s Paid Blogging Advice
- Be transparent and disclose all financial relationships
- Bloggers should speak in a genuine voice and be vocal even when they have something unflattering to say about the sponsor
- Be relevant — don’t try to push car tires on a beauty site
- Listen to the bloggers in the community
- And, of course, follow the "no follow" rule
For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com
