Month: July 2009

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The URL Shortener Contest

Which URL shortener are you using on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn? Do you even care? Well you should! URL shorteners are not all created equal. In fact one of my colleagues reamed me out for using www.TinyURL.com just the other day.

If you use any social networking platforms then you know you have a limited amount of space in which to say what you want to say. Well, what if you want to link to something on your website or online? Here’s where a URL shortener is necessary. You can take a big URL like:

http://searchengineland.com/analysis-which-url-shortening-service-should-you-use-17204

and turn it into a itty bitty URL like this:

http://bit.ly/ZuUw

Big difference right? In fact if you click either of the links above you will go to a nice article reviewing the different URL shorteners that are popular. Search Engine Land even lays it out graphically so you can see what you think is important in one glance. Personally I use www.Bit.ly as my shortener when I have a choice. Some social networking services do not give you a choice and some use www.TinyURL.com as their default, but there are some nice reasons why you should evaluate which one you use and then stick with it.

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Bing Teamed With Twitter in BingTweets – Very Cool!

I have to say that even I think that this is very cool, Bing has created a Twitter Bing interface called BingTweets. You can visit it at www.BingTweets.com. I don’t know who’s brainchild this was at Microsoft, but let me tell you Microsoft appears to “get Twitter”.

Personally I thought it was a very cool application and a neat way to check out what is being said online about you or your company. Just put your name in the Bing search box and any tweets that have mentioned you will appear in the Twitter scroller ticker on the right. Even if it is a novelty, it show that something has changed at Microsoft with the introduction on Bing.

In fact Microsoft has done something so big with Bing that their search engine has moved from a 2% market share to now about an 8% market share as of just last week. It doesn’t hurt that Bing has received excellent press from the mainstream professional webmaster world as well as the New York Times, and the fact that it is not Google. But will Bing has the power to supplant Yahoo in market share and really become a contender to threaten Google? If they keep on doing cool things like BingTweet they may.

I for one am watching Bing very carefully. I love the look, the clean interface, and now this new savvy merging of a hot property (Twitter) with a neat application. The millions spent on advertising don’t hurt either. To cement the move I would say to Microsoft now’s the time to move on Yahoo and try to integrate what they have into a mega empire. Then they would have a very real threat to Google, but Microsoft likes to do things slowly and their way, so I am just watching.

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Online Reputation Remediation Tips

I have been toying with creating a new service for reputation remediation but have decided not to pursue this as a service for my firm mainly because the vetting process would be so difficult. How do you really know who has been a victim and who really warrants the bad PR about themselves online? Typically I feel like I am a pretty good judge of character, but I have been fooled. I simply do not want to use my expertise to remediate someone’s online identity so they can hurt people again.

As I will not be rolling out the service, I have done enough research to know that for people who really need help and who may have been targeted without justification that this may be a very workable approach for them to take themselves.

1. Social Media Account Set Up 
In an effort to push down bad search results we recommend that you set up accounts on these selected social networking and social media sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed, Plaxo, Naymz, Tagged, and Xing. The more information you enter the more complete your online presence and more legitimate it will be .

Additionally if you have pictures of your family, pets, and a recent vacation we recommend you load them. Make yourself a real person one who is approachable.

2. Do 10 Days of Status Updates on Your Social Media Accounts
Update the status on each of the accounts you set up twice a day for 10 business days. You  want the search engines to believe that these are new active social networking accounts to allow them to be included in their search indexes.  

3. BlogSpot Blog Set Up 
In an effort to additionally remediate your reputation online we recommend that you blog set up a Blogspot.  Make sure to register your blog with Google and the other search engines.

4. Create and Publish 12 Blog Posts
In an effort to provide additional positive content about you, we recommend that you write twelve blog posts over a four week period posting on a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule. Each blog post should speak positively about you and your services. Highlight different positive things about yourself such as non-profit participation, church activities, family events, things you are working on that will benefit your community or business environment. Link to your website and your social networking profiles.

At the end of four to six weeks take a look on the various search engines to see what has happened. I would love to hear feedback from you if you try this program to tell me if our recommendations worked to help drop down the bad search results on your name or business name. Typically Google will update their index the fastest. You may see an improvement in search results under your name in as little as 7 days. Yahoo and Bing update their index on about a three to six week cycle so results will appear on those two engines much more slowly.

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Songs Stuck On Your iPod? Here’s the Solution

My son had his computer hard drive crash and all of his songs in iTunes disappeared. He thought he was saved as he had them all on his iPod, but when he tried to download them to his formatted new hard disk using iTunes he could not.

iTunes will not download music from an iPod back to a PC. Man, he was bummed.  Tons and tons of songs all gone except in his car where he connects his iPod. No more listening to his music at home from his PC.

I checked online for a solution to help him out and found a great one. It is called Pod to PC. On top of a cool application that solved the problem, it is free!

The solution in his case was to install the PodtoPC software on his computer, connect his iPod and the software imported all of his songs found on his iPod down to his PC with one click. The program will even synch songs and can be used to load songs to your iPod. There is even a version for Macs called  Pod To Mac.  The program works within iTunes so you don’t need to have another music archiving system. Why Apple didn’t do this in the first place I don’t know, but the solution, when you need it is elegant – easy to use and free.