Since its inception people have found many creative uses for Twitter, but to my mind one of the most useful has been as the collective, real-time public notebook for conferences and special events. Smart conference organizers establish and publicize a hash tag for conference tweets, enabling participants to converse about what’s happening and for non-attenders [...]
Author Archives: Mark Traphagen
Should Your Business Be on Buzz?
February 25, 2010 – 2:17 pm
Just when you thought you had your social media game plan (you do have one, right?) all nice and set, Buzz happens. It’s like the NFL suddenly announces a new team halfway through your fantasy league season.
What is Buzz? In brief, it is a Google-developed social web platform that is tightly integrated with other Google [...]
My New Social Web Flow: Buzz to Twitter to Facebook
February 22, 2010 – 2:18 pm
I’ve been an enthusiastic early adopter of Google Buzz since it appeared in my Gmail inbox the day after its unveiling. As a one time huge fan of Friendfeed, the interface was immediately familiar (though lacking in some of Friendfeeds best features). I’d often been frustrated by how awful Twitter is for carrying on any [...]
How to Use Facebook as Your News Reader
February 2, 2010 – 3:12 pm
UPDATED 2/23/2010 because of changes to Facebook’s user interface.
Most everyone agrees that automatic feed systems such as RSS (Wikipedia) were a great leap forward in the history of the World Wide Web. RSS allows web users to “subscribe” to any blog or website that implements the code. When combined with a feed reader (such as [...]
New Facebook Share Via a Boon for Marketers
January 20, 2010 – 8:35 am
I’ve written before about several areas where Facebook’s Pages feature falls short of its potential value to marketers because of missing or limited features. Among the most egregious of these “fails” was the lack of any equivalent of Twitter’s retweet, which automatically gives an attribution back to the source of the content being shared. Until [...]
Why Do Paid Search Advertising?
January 18, 2010 – 7:47 am
If you’re a beginner at Internet advertising, or just someone who knows “I ought to be promoting my site…”, Search Engine Land offers Five Most Frequently Asked Questions About Paid Search. It’s a concise article that explains some of those acronyms tossed around so easily (SEO, PPC, etc.), and then gets down to why anyone [...]
Top 5 Tips for Getting Started with Adwords
November 3, 2009 – 7:39 am
For those of us who have been immersed in the highly-complex world of Google’s AdWords for some time, it may be difficult to remember how overwhelming and confusing (and often irrational!) it seemed when we were starting out. It’s hard enough just to learn the mechanics of using the interface along with all the new [...]
KGen Firefox Extension Shows Pages’ Potential Keywords
November 2, 2009 – 9:37 am
KGen is an extension for Firefox web browsers that displays the strongest keywords on a particular web page. Words on the page repeated more than once are ranked by “weight” (a user-tunable algorithm based on html tags and page placement), number of repetitions on the page, and “position” (which appears to be how far down [...]
AdWords Quality Score: Don’t Just Look at the Number
October 29, 2009 – 6:52 am
If you’ve got some experience managing cost-per-click (Google’s term for pay-per-click) advertising using Google AdWords, you surely by now realize the high importance of optimizing for Quality Score. Either that, or you enjoy throwing away your or your clients’ money.
According to Google, Quality Score (QS) is “the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of [...]
