Likes, Tweets, and SEO for Business

Let's Talk Technorati

2012-02-20T11:00:00.002-08:00

by David Brown

Technorati, established in 2004, is the top resource for information on blogs, and applies a series of calculations to give ranking relevance to blogs (known as Technorati Authority). Their "top 100" lists of blogs are followed closely by many fans in the major categories of social media, technology, business, entertainment, and politics.

By reviewing the top rated blogs listed in Technorati, you will be seeing blogs that have been given the most "Technorati Authority" reflecting their influence within a specific category. The calculations for this authority include information on a particular blog site such as linking behavior over a six month period, topics in relation to the "blogosphere", all the other blogs in similar categories, and relevant content. The authority is on a scale of 0-1000 with 1000 being the highest. The rank of a blog is the position given among the authority of all sites with 1 being the highest. The authority and ranking will change over a short period of time as the process reflecting ongoing changes in calculations and stats that occur many times every day (and every hour).

The blogosphere has been growing exponentially every year. Here's a few stats from Technorati's 2011 State of the Blogosphere report to give you an idea of what happened in 2011. 60% of blogging in 2011 was from hobbyists who blog for fun, 18% are part or full time bloggers who are professionals that use blogging for partial income, 8% corporate bloggers who use blogging for various purposes including sharing their knowledge, increasing their reputation and attracting new clients. Entrpreneurs account for about 13% of the "blogosphere". They usually blog about their own company and the main focus is either business, sharing expertise, or attracting new clients.

The trends in blogging should see an increase of content-rich blogs as a result of the content-centric focus of Google for page ranking and relevance. I would expect that the percentages of entrepreneurs and corporate blogs will increase in 2012 in relation to the hobbyists and part-timers.

You can add your own blog to the Technorati directory and get a strong content-rich link back to your blog in the free listing. Technorati will need to verify that you are an author of the blog and provides you with a unique code to place inside your blog as a verification that you own the blog. The code must appear in the published blog post and it must also appear in your corresponding RSS feed once published. Once it is published, you need to use the "Verify Claim Token" button on Techorati to verify the claim token and have them do a final review.

I have found some of my favorite blogs and sources of excellent information from reviewing the top listed blogs such as Mashable, Huffington post,TechCrunch, Buzzfeed, and The Next Web to name a few.

Here's some links to several Technorati categories:
InfoTech
Business/Advertising
Social Media

This has been a brief review of one of the most fascinating web sites out there. The code shown below is for the blog claim process described above. Likes, Tweets and SEO is about to be listed in the Technorati directory. Let's get your blog listed next.

- David Brown
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Social by Design - The Hacker Way

2012-02-02T11:43:00.000-08:00

by David Brown

Facebook's recent IPO filing was a milestone for the internet for several main reasons:

First, it was eight years in the ,making and during that time we have witnessed not only the phenomenal growth of Facebook but also of the social media industry and level of participation. One billion users is also a milestone reached last year by Facebook. How long did it take MacDonald's to sell that many burgers?

Second, the vision of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, and the mission that drives their powerful share engine is explained in a recent letter to investors. The letter is reproduced in full below as it explains in detail why businesses will need to become more "social by design" and why the sharing aspect of Facebook through their social media platform will continue to innovate and move forward with more tools and development through "the hackers way" - an ongoing positive focus for change that meets the needs of our techno-culture (this seemed to be the protocol for Apple Computer and Steve Jobs with Ipad, Itunes and IPhone).

Third, the $ 5 billion initial filing for a public offering is just the tip of the iceburg. The value of this social network is estimated to be between $75 and $100 billion ! It could become one of the largest stock market offerings of all time. This is revolutionizing the financial markets view of social media and the potential for investors. (As I whisper in the ear of a major NY investment banker "It's not just a passing fad").

Questions will be asked for some time on how Facebook can manage it's growth, as well as its internal culture. Apple has done it and continues to maintain the momentum. Read the letter from Mark Zuckerberg, age 27, below, and watch what happens this year with Facebook and social media.

David Brown
Logion Web Design
web developer and marketer
______________________________

Letter to Investors, Shareholders, by Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products — ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction.

In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.

We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.

Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.

Our Mission and Our Business

As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works.

I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team.

Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.
_______________________________________________

The Best of 2011 Revisited

2012-01-01T05:26:00.000-08:00

by David Brown, webmaster, Logion Web - Click title for full blog
(pictured left: from Beethoven Revisited -a Facebook fan page)

Since our prior post, there have been new additions to the "best" lists, so I am adding a few here. The notable one mentioned before as nominees, now has a finalist list :

So, the best of the best lists in my opinion are the winners of Mashable's 5th Annual Awards Winners.
Social Media - Best Social Network: Facebook (no surprise)
Technology - Best Smartphone - Iphone 4S
Entertainment -

Game of the Year: WWE ’12
Viral Video of the Year: “Mr. Simple” by Super Junior
Best Music Service or App: Spotify
Best Online Video Streaming Service or App: YouTube
Most Social TV Show: MTV Roadies
Best Social Movie Campaign: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2

Business

Viral Campaign of the Year: NOH8 Campaign
Most Innovative Use of Social Media for Marketing: Coke
Must-Follow Brand on Social Media: WWE
Best Branded Mobile App: Domino’s Pizza
Best Social Good Cause Campaign: Be A Star

Full blog/story
Updated January 1 2012
Other 2011 best lists include:
Mashable‘s picks for the "unbest" - most notorious reversals by tech companies in 2011
Best Web Humor 2011
YouTube Best Videos 2011
Sports and Social Media: Favorites of 2011
Mashable's 10 biggest stories of 2011
The Best Free Stuff in 2011 (Apps)
10 Best Spoof Twitter Accounts of 2011
The Top 10 HDTV's of 2011
The Five Best 3D TV's of 2011
The Best Smart TV Platforms of 2011
The Best (and Worst) Celebrity Technology Moments
The Best of Google Maps and Google Earth (PC World)
Top Twitter Trends 2011
10-best-commercials-2011 - Adweek
Best You Tube Videos
more updates to follow .....any suggestions?

The Best of 2011

2011-12-02T10:05:00.000-08:00

by David Brown

Soon this year will fade like a sunset over the ocean.
What is the "best of 2011"? It's not the economy, for sure. However, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis and political upheavals in the Mideast, there have been some very strong changes going on in my favorite domain: the internet. The best of 2011 is how the internet is changing the way we live, communicate, keep updated on news, choose entertainment, stay mobile and connected, and share in the new social media world.

These rapid changes can be so dramatic that we may not see how powerful they are until we look back in retrospect. The article published today "Why 2011 will be Defined by Social Media Democracy" by Ekaterina Walter is a good example. This article shows the power of social media when used as a tool for democratic change (i.e. The Arab Spring, Egypt). "Besides bank defaults and credit downgrades, 2011 will be remembered for the rise of social media democracy in countries traditionally ruled by autocratic governments — most notably, the Arab Spring."

So the best of 2011 in general, in my opinion, are certain innovations and changes that happened and are continuing to happen with the internet. A prime example of this is the 2011 Mashable Awards representing the best of 2011 nominations lists in this highly rated blog with over 500,000 fans on Facebook. Not only are these nomination lists an easy view of some of the top movers and shakers in the social media and internet innovations sphere, but they also can provide you with new resources that you may not have known about until now. View the Mashable Awards 2011 home page with the categories and nominations for Tech, Business, Entertainment, and Social Media.

Another strong "best of" list that is not titled the same are the Top 100 blogs listed by Technorati, another aggregator site of news and internet resources. Technorati is the authority on the "blogosphere"- all blogs that are notable in all the major and minor news categories. The top 100 are determined by the Technorati Authority, a standard of metrics and measurements that determine a blog's ranking on their list based on influence, links, references by third parties, and other factors. View the Top 100 Blogs page .

If you do a Google search for the best of 2011 you will see a list - some more authoritative than others -
and can browse accordingly. An example is Time Magazine's Best websites of 2011.

Finally, click this link to see a graph published by Hootsuite showing the top ten Twitter trends of 2011.

We will see more "best of 2011" as we get closer to the New Year. I look forward to see who wins the Mashable awards, and may post these later. For now, best wishes for safe and happy holidays.
- David Brown
Blogger, owner, Logion Web Design
Publisher www.LikesTweetsandSEO.com

The Like Button Rocks

2011-11-22T07:07:00.000-08:00

The Like button lets a viewer of your content share it with friends on Facebook. When the site visitor clicks the Like button on your site, a story appears in the user's friends' News Feed with a link back to your website. Basically, in plain English, the Like button rocks in the social media world.

Facebook allows for an integration of your website content with the Facebook platform by the use of the Open Graph tags that can be placed into the header section of the code on your website. A best standards use of this is only for real world entities - things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants (Open Graph Types). Note that the Open Graph protocol is currently designed to support real-life objects. If your URL is a piece of content — such as a news article, photo, video, or similar — your developer should set the og:type to article. Pages of type "article" do not have publishing rights, and will not show up on user's profiles because they are not real world objects.If you your developer includes Open Graph (og) tags on your Web page, your page becomes more integrated with the Facebook platform as it takes on identifiers in the og code that allow the Facebook server to easily recognize key information about the website page.

The following are the og tags that are used :

og:title - The title of the entity.
og:type - The type of entity. Your developer must select a type from the list of Open Graph Types.
og:image - The URL to an image that represents the entity. Images must be at least 50 pixels by 50 pixels. Square images work best, but you are allowed to use images up to three times as wide as they are tall.
og:url - The canonical, permanent URL of the page representing the entity. When you use Open Graph tags, the Like button posts a link to the og:url instead of the URL in the Like button code.
og:site_name - A human-readable name for your site, e.g., "IMDb".
fb:admins or fb:app_id - A comma-separated list of either the Facebook IDs of page administrators or a Facebook Platform application ID. At a minimum, include only your own Facebook ID.

Integration of the og tags into your website empowers the use of the Like button to make a connection between your page and the user. All of the users friends will see that they liked your page. Your page will appear in the "Likes and Interests" section of the user's profile, and you have the ability to publish updates to the user. Your page may show up in same places that Facebook pages show up around the site (e.g. search), and you can target ads to people who like your content.

If you are a business owner and have a challenge just to keep up with running your business, and yet want to participate in Facebook marketing, the "like button" on your website is a good place to start. A business page and fan page is another step so that your business has representation on Facebook.

At this time 25 likes or new fans are needed to obtain a unique name attached to the Facebook domain, i.e.
for this blog, we have just started a page, so the url web address looks like this:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Likes-Tweets-and-SEO/271554152892124?sk=wall

If you visit the page link above and like it, then I will post new blogs on the wall and you can receive updates on marketing tips for Facebook and Twitter.

After you have 25 likes, you are eligible to set a name for your business page. This is another page that we have set up. www.Facebook.com/CreativeFanPageDeveloper

Just in case you are wondering how important Facebook should be in your marketing plan (at least the Like button) - here's some stats :

On average, people on Facebook install apps more than 20 million times every day
Every month, more than 500 million people use an app on Facebook or experience Facebook Platform on other websites
More than 7 million apps and websites are integrated with Facebook

I manage the website, blog, Facebook, and email account for a client. Recent stats on the new insights tab in Facebook show the following stats from the past 30 days:

· New Likes^?

41+173%

· Lifetime Likes^?

118

· Monthly Active Users^?

521+40%

FYI, the my dog in the picture with the rocks is named Shaman, and the photo was taken on the Oregon Coast near Otter Crest. Have a great Thanksgiving !
- David Brown
owner: Logion Web Design and Development LLC
web design solutions, e-commerce websites, internet and Facebook marketing

Facebook Fan Page Developer

2011-11-04T19:57:00.000-07:00

After attending the Facebook Developers conference in Seattle in October 2011, we are ramping up our Facebook developer services beyond our prior expectations. Staying on the cutting edge of changes and new developments in the industry. Now that is worth the idea of lighting up a cigar! Well, maybe :)

We launched a new Facebook page: Creative Fan Page Developer
and have a video promo ad to go with it :

Our comprehensive creative and technical Facebook marketing services are designed to give you the benefits, tools, and strategies that will engage, build and grow your audience, maximize your welcome message, and provide an ongoing system of targeted messages to your audience.

We help you to develop a unique voice in your industry. Why is this important? By adding some creative ideas for presenting your knowledge in a series of ongoing posts, blogs, or quick quotes, you can engage that same group of fans who clicked the Like button and wanted to receive updates from you in the same compelling, authentic and personal way in which they were first engaged.

Will you keep them as fans, referral sources and business clients? No guarantees, but an ongoing series of campaigns will provide a much better chance of keeping your fans. We have a case study to share with you about The Butcher's Blog.
Get started.

YES! Please contact me with more information about a free consultation:
Fan Page Developer page published by David Brown
Logion Web Design and Development LLC
503.302.2333 - Free Consultation - Email

Facebook Developers Conference

2011-10-27T06:49:00.000-07:00

by David Brown, Logion Web Design and Development
update below: - click on title for full story....
It's 6:49am in the lobby of the Westin Seattle and I have arrived early to do some work before the Facebook conference here. This conference is one of four being given around the country for developers to learn more about the Open Graph platform and the new Timeline features in Facebook. It is a follow up to the annual F8 conference that was held earlier this year to announce and launch new technologies involved with the Open Graph and Timeline. The roadshow event today will include "technical deep-dives", "office hours" - where Facebook engineers will be available for individual questions, and a Q&A session with the Facebook platform development team.

I am attending this conference to ramp up my development skills for Facebook pages for business and to mesh my own creative ideas for page presentation with the tech tools and programming to make it happen for my clients.

Update: 5:24pm
This was a very good conference.....about 200 developers there. The agenda included opening remarks, the Open Graph API, Mobile, Marketing API, Games, Q&A, and interaction with individual Facebook techs re: individual questions.

Notes: The web is reorganizing around people (being reorganized by people)
1^st 15 yrs of web - used to be people were anonymous online....now people are bringing their true identities and authenticity online....just like most events are shared with friends, etc. such as music, a good movie, etc. the implications for branding and having youor products/ services liked / used, suggested in a social media can provide transformative business opportunities….

Facebook photos do not have many fancy features, except it has the tag, where friends can tag a photo that they lilke and it instantly is viral-spread to all on their friends list when it shows up on the wasll. The stats with Facebook are amazing.....over 250 million photos are uploaded every day!
what does this mean at a platform level? the new timeline….the most important change to the Facebook platform…how to think about profile….how to express yourself…..tell the story of your lives in periods of months and years…..

It occurred to me but was not mentioned in the conference, that from a marketing perspective, besides all the other features and benefits of the timeline, it creates possibilities for developers to help their business clients market to any demographic, and especially those with the longer timelines -the older demographic. Baby boomers... (Just thought of a domain name..baby boomer timelines.com! lol)

The LIke button is fast becoming a feature that can be integrated into websites and blogs as well as the sharing on the Facebook wall. However it doesn't express the user's action in real time or provide more details.....with the development of action verbs being a definer of users sharing, apps can now open up a whole new way for us to share more about the way we live our lives. It will enable people to express themselves on Facebook with more options of sharing the way we would in person or on the phone or text...…paves the way for a new generation of applications of how people share themselves…..watch, read, listen, etc. (as search term?)
The potential for cross referencing is endless.....applications can track lifestyles……how the stories of lives are told…..

Translating all of these new technologies and apps into practical uses for business is what's happening now for myself and many other Facebook developers who see the potential and want to integrate marketing seamlessly into the user experience. The insights, based on stats, that Facebook has with the ads and sponsored stories (like advertorials) provides amazing feedback and fine tuning which saves money in advertising campaigns....the target audience can be narrowed down to not only age groups, but regions, preferences, likes, etc. There is a near real time feedback with stats that can allow a marketer to monitor the performance of a campaign.

If this seems to general or too much Geek-speak, etc. it should at least give you a glimpse into the fast moving and ongoing innovations in social media development that Facebook provides to developers. Yes, there are bugs and things to be worked out. However, for a company that just launched the Like button a year ago.....I think we can allow for a few tweaks along the way.

Stay tuned.

The purpose of this new blog: www.LikesTweetsandSEO.com for Business is to integrate and implement the tools and methods to produce the best results using these new technologies. Google is all about searching (mainly) and Facebook about sharing. Both searching and sharing are two ways of reaching potential customers and should be integrated in to a marketing plan for the best results.

Need your feedback: please visit our new
Logion Web Design and Development LLC - Facebook Welcome Page App

- David Brown

FEED ME

2011-10-18T05:11:00.000-07:00

On October 27th I will be attending the Facebook Developers Conference in Seattle. It is a full day event focusing on the Open Graph API and the new Timeline feature in Facebook.

It's 4:30am - a popular time for some developers to do research and development and maybe write a blog post :)

Hot Topics are always of interest to some, and here's a partial starting list of some Feeds that I use for either "hot" or trending popular topics . - David Brown, Logion Web Design and Development LLC

Mashable : My Favorite and 645,000 others :)
http://feeds.mashable.com/Mashable
This has all of their topics - if you want more specific categories and subcategories in Social Media, Tech, Business, Entertainment, US & World start at their home page:
http://www.mashable.com/

Twitter - Popular Tweets - Tweetmeme
http://rss.tweetmeme.com/

Google Webmaster Central Blog - for developers but interesting to browse for non-developers :)http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/amDG

Google Trends : What Keywords People are Searching for on a Daily Basis
Shows top ten hot searches and more (not a feed, but a research site)(Usually mainstream news topics) has "hotness rankings" allows to search
http://www.google.com/trends

Google Insights for Search - not a feed, but a research site / toolhttp://www.google.com/insights/search/#

All Facebook.com FEED - an "unofficial" site that has news and hot topics relating to Facebook
http://feeds.feedburner.com/allfacebook

If you like this post, please use the review icons below.

Content Marketing and Social Media

2011-10-10T06:10:00.000-07:00

by David Brown

Google started it way back when. They developed sophisticated un-hackable algorhythms to determine which websites have more relevance than others for certain keyword phrases. That has continued to be refined where Google bots most likely look at everything to determine ranking.

That’s what SEO (search engine optimization) developers continue to research, monitor, and deploy in getting the best results for their clients. The most important buzzword these days in the SEO world is content. Content is what drives the Googlebot scanning the page to absorb the page relevance in milliseconds.Follow @logionwebdesign The quality of the content, links embedded in the content, and now developing, the social media sharing of the content, can all have the effect of influencing Google’s page ranking of the content. But should content be written just to please Google? It used to be and still is. They even provide guideline and webmaster tools to help us do it. Let’s get back to basics and add something very important – an important goal - to this idea of “pleasing Google”. What should be your primary goal?

Your primary goal should be to provide high quality content that is written out of a commitment to serve your target audience with the most up to date, interesting and useful information that they will want to use and share. Share is the most important keyword in this idea. If your target readers are not engaged in what you have to say, respect your knowledge and authority in your field, and feel that the information is worth reading, then they may not share it. If they love the content, and they have an easy means to share it (social media links), then this may result in your secondary goal. Your secondary goals should be have your content – a blog, tip, tweet, or post shared by one person to others through word-of-mouth, likes, retweets, and/or reviewed and ranked (Yelp, Infopages, Google +1, etc. ).
The recent changes to Facebook Insights for business – the analytics of who responds and acts on your Facebook business page posts, includes seeing the number of friends that this person has, and giving weight to the fact that when they liked your post (link, blog, etc.) it was shared with their entire list of friends. It can be shared just be the timeline entry of “John just liked ABC Remodeling’s post about new flooring ideas”. It could also be shared with John posting a direct comment to his Facebook wall that he liked the post. John may even add a link to the page that he liked. This is where content quality meets social media marketing. Social media marketing is done by the social networks, not by you directly. Referrals of business by satisfied clients are always from them, not from you, even though it is all about you!

Steve Jobs - An Amazing Visionary and Leader by David Brown

2011-10-06T10:46:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs, an amazing visionary, leader, and founder of Apple Computers passed away yesterday October 5th 2011. He was a major contributor to innovation in computers and mobile devices. Ipad, IPhone, Itunes, and other Apple products were his brainchilds. Here are some links that provide comprehensive information on Steve Jobs.

Web: Google search results for Steve Jobs

News: Google News search results for Steve Jobs

Photos: Image search results for Steve Jobs

from Wired magazine home page today: eulogies for Steve Jobs

"The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come. For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it's been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely." — Bill Gates

"From the earliest days of Google, whenever Larry and I sought inspiration for vision and leadership, we needed to look no farther than Cupertino. Steve, your passion for excellence is felt by anyone who has ever touched an Apple product (including the macbook I am writing this on right now). And I have witnessed it in person the few times we have met. On behalf of all of us at Google and more broadly in technology, you will be missed very much. My condolences to family, friends, and colleagues at Apple."

— Sergey Brin

"I am very, very sad to hear the news about Steve. He was a great man with incredible achievements and amazing brilliance. He always seemed to be able to say in very few words what you actually should have been thinking before you thought it. His focus on the user experience above all else has always been an inspiration to me. He was very kind to reach out to me as I became CEO of Google and spend time offering his advice and knowledge even though he was not at all well. My thoughts are with his family and the whole Apple family." — Larry Page

"Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you."

— Mark Zuckerberg

"He was dubbed a megalomaniac, but Steve Jobs often gambled on young, largely inexperienced talent to take Apple forward; Jony Ive and his team prove that such faith was spot on."

— Sir James Dyson, innovator and entrepreneur

"I got one of the first Macs, and my relationship with computers fundamentally changed. In both of his incarnations at Apple, he was a visionary. He provided tools. His victories were based on imagination and courage." — Roger Ebert, Pulitzer-prize winning film critic

"No words can adequately express our sadness at Steve's death or our gratitude for the opportunity to work with him. We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much."

— Tim Cook, CEO of Apple

"Tonight our City -- a city that has always had such respect and admiration for creative genius -- joins with people around the planet in remembering a great man and keeping Laurene and the rest of the Jobs family in our thoughts and prayers."

— Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City

"Steve Jobs was an extraordinary visionary, our very dear friend and the guiding light of the Pixar family. He saw the potential of what Pixar could be before the rest of us, and beyond what anyone ever imagined. Steve took a chance on us and believed in our crazy dream of making computer animated films; the one thing he always said was to simply 'make it great.' He is why Pixar turned out the way we did and his strength, integrity and love of life has made us all better people. He will forever be a part of Pixar's DNA. Our hearts go out to his wife Laurene and their children during this incredibly difficult time."

— John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer, and Ed Catmull, President, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios

"The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve's success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented. Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to Steve's wife Laurene, his family, and all those who loved him."

— President Barack Obama

"Steve Jobs was an iconic entrepreneur and businessman whose impact on technology was felt beyond Silicon Valley. He will be remembered for the innovation he brought to market and the inspiration he brought to the world."

— Meg Whitman, President and CEO, HP

Follow This and Be Engaged

2011-10-04T12:15:00.000-07:00

Twitter's ability to measure insights - statistics and various data from millions of posts or tweets - gives them a distinct edge on the pulse of marketing potential and what works for advertisers.

Twitter recently announced that it has over 100 million "active users" worldwide, half of whom log in daily and 40 percent of whom have not tweeted in the last month. Twitter defines an "active user" as "anyone who logs into Twitter once a month".

The frequency of users may not be as impressive as the number of daily tweets or posts. Twitter pocesses 230 million tweets a day, a number that has increased 110 percent since the start of the year. Now that is impressive. With certain keywords that are trending in popularity of being read and retweeted, it gives some strong potential for both paid advertising (promoted tweets) and for the free posting of "tweets".

Twitter just launched a new blog titled Twitter Ads and their own separate Twitter ad page @TwitterAds that will target marketers with data and strategies for effective Twitter advertising results. They have nine tweets so far. (11:48am PST)

They will be sharing news, updates, insights, best practices, and more.

The first blog The Power of Engagement discusses the timely launch of this new advertising blog during New York's advertising week. This just happened to coincide with Facebook's announcement of new business page analytic tools.

Twitter has enough data to be able to fine tune it's services and offers with proven results that engage the consumer and the potential advertisier. They have grown from a small handful of advertising partners to over 1600 brands. Market tests and campaigns have used Twitter to build followers of their tweets, increase brand awareness, make announcements and use the response data to refine their campaigns. One recent study showed that the emotional tone of tweets were positive in the am, trended increasing less positive during the workday, and then increased to more positive after work. What times of the day would marketers expect to get the best results ?

Twitter's analysis of it's overall results from thousands of campaigns showed the importance of the social media buzzword "engagement". Their stats show that there has been an average of a 3-5% engagement rate for Promoted Tweets (paid ad tweets) in searches. This is a much higher response rate than many other forms of digital advertising.

For marketers the blog and Tweets of Twitter's ad group will be a valuable resource to include in their market research, strategic planning, and use of best practices for campaigns of engagement. Note :
you don;t have to be a paid advertiser to glean some useful information here about using normal free tweets to make effective tweets for your followers and to obtain new followers who "like" your tweets.

Like other recent announcements of Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook; Twitter, a major player in the social media business market, is flexing it's muscles to provide more exciting platforms and results for marketing managers.
- David Brown ,
Likes, Tweets, and SEO for Business blog
Logion Web Design and Development LLC

Viral Marketing on Steroids

2011-10-03T08:01:00.000-07:00

New Facebook SEO Insights for Business
by David Brown, Logion Web Design

In a best standards SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world, good quality content is what drives traffic, increases Google page rankings, and increases the credibility, authority, and reputation of a business in their industry.

Facebook, the social media giant, mainly known for it’s personal connections between friends, is taking another step towards providing some tools to measure the quality of content by the way page visitors respond to business pages – brands, media, products, and websites.

The latest news from Facebook includes a remodeling of its Insights analytics to measure popularity and reputation. “People Talking About” (a working title for this new analytics tool) was just launched and includes four stats including measuring the “Likes”. Beyond the likes will be measurements of almost anything that happens to your business page: comments, weekly total reach, friends of your fans, posts that have meaningful content, comments, and viral distribution (similar to Twitter’s retweets). Friends of fans doesn’t seem as important initially until you realize that everything that a page visitor does on your page is reported on their wall to all of their friends. Whether local, national or a global business or brand, this is viral marketing on steroids. Make every post count as Facebook will also list your last 500 posts for review in this new Insights development.

Launched and announced during the New York’s Advertising Week, the upgraded Facebook Insights development will add another API to help developers integrate the measuring tools into their business pages to more efficiently capture the page visitor data.

Opinion: Facebook represents the best available integration of viral marketing (Likes), a content platform for the social media part of your marketing plan, and once you have a large number of fans, an excellent built-in captive audience for market testing. If you are a business that is evaluating Facebook as a part of your marketing plan, here’s some links that will be valuable for your due diligence:

Facebook

FactSheet: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?factsheet

Statistics: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

Developers “Home Page” - http://developers.facebook.com/

David Brown
Logion Web Design
Likes, Tweets, and SEO for Business
www.logion.net

Amazon Flexes Muscles Against Google and Apple

2011-09-30T19:01:00.000-07:00

Amazon is getting amazing again. They are developing new competitive products and services that may give them an edge to position themselves for the new internet social-browser-ipad-mobile device market. Did you notice that their browser speed @ Amazon.com just got noticeably faster?

If we think we are barraged with overkill of apps and services now, the big boys are just getting started. It's a tech revolution and the internet is becoming a huge player in revised marketing plans and strategies.

Here's what Amazon is doing and this is all related to Tweets and Likes, and maybe even some SEO :)

- Amazon's answer to IPAD: why just limit Kindle to books? For $199 here's what you get:
The New Kindle

- Amazon just announced the release of Amazon Silk : a new browser concept that promises a better user experience. Watch the video: Amazon Silk - News Release / Blog

Is the Kindle Fire amazing? At $199 maybe yes! - it runs on the new mega-speed Amazon Silk browser:
with rich media content and increasing file sizes being the trend, speed is the key to the best user experience.

from Amazon:
"Modern websites are complex. A typical web page requires 80 files served from 13 different domains. This takes a regular browser hundreds of round trips, and adds seconds to page load times.

Amazon Silk is different in a radical new way. When you use Silk, without thinking about it or doing anything explicit, you’re calling on the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services cloud (AWS). We've refactored and rebuilt the browser software stack to push pieces of the computation into the AWS cloud. This lets Silk do more work, more quickly, and all at once. We call this “split browser” architecture.

Silk browser software resides both on Kindle Fire and on the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With each page request, Silk dynamically determines a division of labor between the mobile hardware and Amazon EC2 (i.e. which browser sub-components run where) that takes into consideration factors like network conditions, page complexity and the location of any cached content"

Shorter Transit Times
"Amazon EC2 is always connected to the backbone of the Internet where round-trip latency is 5 milliseconds or less to most web sites rather than the 100 milliseconds that’s typical over wireless connections. AWS also has peering relationships with major internet service providers, and many top sites are hosted on EC2. This means that many web requests will never leave the extended infrastructure of AWS, reducing transit times to only a few milliseconds."

I plan to buy one of these so that I can write more about it from a user experience ....and make presentations to clients on my web development services :) It may take a bit longer than a few milliseconds ...

David Brown
Logion Web Design and Development LLC
Salem, Oregon

Blogger Templates Hot for Likes

2011-09-28T18:14:00.000-07:00

Blogger.com (now owned by Google), is a free blog available in the free Google account that can be set up easily by anyone. They just added a new set of "dynamic" template layouts for setting up your blog, and by doing so have leveraged display and other features that takes this platform to a whole new level.

The new dynamic blogger templates are cool in many features, while challenging in others. The possibilities of linking various displays with images to create unique urls from the same blog opens ups a lot of creative opportunities. This new blog, Likes, Tweets, and SEO for Business is just getting started with this format for our own business as well as clients. We already have another project in the works. The bottom line is this : by using the integration of various social and other media tools for marketing, results will start to appear that can be monitored with analytical tools and stats. It's a whole new internet.

Consider these facts: By creating attractive and relevant quality content, people on Facebook are more likely to share it with others, giving more credibility to your brand. See my blog (actually posted after this one)
Viral Marketing on Steroids :)

(note: the 200 x 200px image used in this blog seems to be a good size for archived posts once a new one is published.) This new blog is still a process of development, including reconfiguring the CSS to place my logo in the header. Consider :

People on Facebook - There are more than 800 million active users!
More than 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
Average user has 130 friends
There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and event
More than 2 billion posts are liked and commented on per day
Onn average, more than 250 million photos are uploaded per day

Mobile -There are more than 350 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices

The New Blogger Dynamic Pages

2011-09-28T17:37:00.000-07:00

The new blogger.com dynamic templates have a social media tab below each post, in addition to allowing a faster load of code. Although you have a default view when saved, there are seven others shown above that can be used by the viewer: Classic, Flipcard, etc. This default view with the Magazine template opens with a popup page, that when closed then reverts to the main blog page. Try viewing this blog with the other tabs to see the effect. The bouquet image is a 345 x 378 px aligned right.Notice how some of the templates only show an image which may encourage embedded text with the image to identify a topic that can be clicked on to view. The editing does not seem easy to navigate to, but these new dynamic templates are still in the beta testing stage for my review before fully integrating them with other blogs that I have developed with blogger.com. Nice features though. Good job Google ! As content is becoming more important for page ranking and reputation management, I am looking forward Google's further development of these dynamic templates for these purposes. - David Brown , Logion Web Design

About Likes, Tweets, and SEO

2011-09-26T06:46:00.000-07:00

With the new Blogger dynamic pages, I decided not to retrofit all of prior blog posts to the new format, and started this new blog: Likes, Tweets, and SEO - Search Engine Optimization ( SEO). I have a thirty year background in marketing and sales, am the owner of Logion Web Design and Development LLC, and have been actively involved in web development, design, and SEO for eleven years. My programmer specializes in Adobe Cold Fusion, manages a hosting comapny, and is a domain registrar. Between us we have over twenty five years of diverse internet experience. I am fascinated by the amazing momentum and participation in Facebook, Twitter, and SEO. My particular focus is to follow the trends of how Facebook and Twitter can be used effectively for SEO.

I work with small business owners both in their website design and development and especially in the integration of SEO into their marketing plan. For an example of an integrated marketing plan I manage the website, write the monthly blog, manage an email campaign with 432 subscribers to date, and manage the Facebook page for one client. There is momentum, increased business, and a buzz just beginning to take off. They have been at the top of Google for their main keyword phrase for five years. My first major website, www.NeonDoc.com, set up in 2001, was an e-commerce and information site in Chicago, and it now used as an advertising site. It's still at the top of Google for Chicago Neon Signs without much SEO effort. I Love it :)

I offer a free consultation to find out more about your business or organization needs and to discuss my services in more detail. Thanks for visiting.

David Brown
webmaster
Logion Web Design and Development LLC
503-302-2333
info@logion.net