Jay of ripfilms sent me the following movie – it's a collabo between nalts, mgm, zipster08, askcarrielee and atomicus5000. The “actors” are asking for video reviews, so it's time for your favorite pet (or future meal) to star YouTube:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM1djLc0FIg[/youtube] Read more
Yesterday I talked about some twitter marketing ideas at digitalks. In my presentation I referred to the page howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com. All it shows is a big fat “Don't” and I highly doubted this thesis. Luckily my namesake Richard Pyrker aka @cycus has done a fantastic pundit-kitchen-digitalks-xsara-photoshop mash-up:
As social media services grow, they become more and more interesting for advertisers. Magpie, a brand-new “twitter advertising network” (and in no way affiliated with the RSS-parser library bearing the same name) is offering tweepers money to embed spam ads in their timeline. This sure was unavoidable, but at first glance, the European-based network is doing a pretty nice job.
Since I'm an online entrepreneur, I'm naturally very interested in new ways of monetizing my social media activities – but I would never recommend any service which I'm not a fan of, which ultimately leads to the one requirement that any ad network *must* take serious:
Psychologically, Magpie is doing quite a great job: new twitterers are encouraged to enter their username, based on which Magpie displays the amount which “could be earned” – I guess that this is a pretty rough and very optimistic approximation, since the systems tells me that I could make nearly 2.000 Euros a month. The tutorial video explains how the exchange of attentions actually works:
The sign-up process is really simple – advertisers need to apply for a dedicated log-in, twitterers have to deal with the ol' trust problem: Magpie requires them to enter their passwords; I hope that an authentication-token is on twitter's top priority list.
That's pretty much all there is – and since the publisher's terms and conditions do not require you sell your soul to any kind of devil, I became curious and signed up, as it is possible to pause one's account at any time. I'm really curious if Magpie will be able to turn tweets into bling-bling or if users will rejects ads at all. This is what the dashboard looks like:
You have to be aware though that Magpie is discussed quite controversially: While Marshall Kirkpatrick senses dark-side qualities and Dave Fleet feels abused, Studio Rizzn explains the truth about “evil Apple”.
Magpie is using PayPal, you have to earn at least 50 bucks to qualify for your first virtual paycheck. Besides from intercultural gaps (European users tend to be a lot pickier about commercial tweets and US citizens), I guess that Magpie's success will largely depend on the advertiser pool: if they offer enough interesting contents and manage to successfully pitch their system to the right advertisers, this could be huge. I'll try Magpie for the next two weeks and keep you updated, or you might want to start your own experiment: Sign up for Magpie
The Easter bunny had a great present in store for me this year: a couple of days ago, I was about 100 followers short of 5k. So I announced that my 5.000th follower would receive a free review of a site of his choice – but instead of a text review I am going to show you some pictures, and I'm honored to announce that the said person is not a human being, but a famous internet dog. Welcome Archie! And Archie does not run a blog himself, but he stars in a large number of great pictures, so I decided to post a selection of my favorite Archie photos. All shots have been taken by Phreak 2.0, the other end of Archie's leash.
Let's face the facts that make feeble-minded webmasters cry: diverting online services from their intended use is a vital part of any effective link-building strategy. But while almost any self-employed SEO-consultant runs a couple of social network pages, curriculum-vitae site are usually left out. But that's a big mistake! There are, to be more specific, at least two online curriculum-vitae services where registration pays off if you're looking for a job, but for some juicy backlinks.
Of course these sites try to satisfy their targeted clientele, which means that the actual process of assembling your curriculum-vitae is really simple and fast, and both services are free. Also, this is not a fire-and-forget action: you can log in any time later to expand your curriculum-vitae by adding new paragraphs (and links). In other words: these are two juicy add-ons for your backlink-portfolio.
Domain Pagerank: 6
Example: socialmarketing.emurse.com
“Create, share and store your resume online for free” – and spread your link-love. Emurse is the first choice as every user gets to chose his own subdomain. There are no limits to your copy-writing skills. The editor uses a special kind of link syntax, which is explained in the help section. Of course there's no nofollow-attribute inserted and there is no limit to the number of links (and images) you can include. (But you might want to limit yourself, too many outgoing links will decrease the flow of the backlink juice :mrgreen:) And who says that you can only have one curriculum-vitae?
Domain Pagerank: 6
Example: www.visualcv.com/socialmarketing
The second candidate also knows how to make a backlink-builder happy. Assembling the profile is as easy as one-two-three, the comfortable editor even lets you chose title tags for your backlinks. All you have to do is some keyword research and some writing and you're good to go. Don't forget to switch the privacy setting to “public” thought.
ResumeSocial has more categories than online CVs plus a Pagerank zero. Resumebucket gets a wee bit more G-love, but the ghost inside the machine is crippling every backlink – even the one to your own blog – with a nofollow-attribute.
Addendum: Both pages list the “latest CVs” on their homepages, but it's still a good idea to set up some backlinks pointing to the new subpages. After all, this is not a short-term measure.
If you have any interesting backlink building secrets to share, I'd be glad to hear about it. And if you're need a huge bag of nofollow-free backlinks, try Fast Blog Finder.
Of all twitter add-on services, Mr. Tweet has surprised me most during the last week. That basic aim of the service is to let you find folks in whose tweets you might be interested in. Since twitter is still growing so rapidly, topic-specific selection becomes more and more inevitable. Yet while I'm quite sure that in the long run the retweet-rate will act as twitter's “backlink factor”, Mr. Tweet introduces a well thought-through recommendation system.
Basically, Mr. Tweet is one of those services you have to trust enough to hand over your twitter account data – that's the one thing I don't quite like about it, yet still the surplus value is great. On each twitter users profile page a number of statistical data presents an overview of the type of twitter who's at work here: Updates per day, percentage of conversations, posted links plus additional notes (like “usually follows back”) give a better impression about the realness/spammyness of any account:
And there's more: the service regularly provides very interesting twitter tutorials as well as suggestions for new follows – and these work really well in comparison to what Twitter itself has to offer:
Twitter's suggestions for me include a grocery store, the microblog of an online shoe store CEO and a mommy blogger. On the other hand, Mr. Tweet has actually recommended people I have met or at least know professionally.
The founders of the company refer to their service as a personal networking agent, yet while this label sounds a bit exaggerated, some truly juicy candy is hidden inside the recommendation system: Mr. Tweet encourages its users to ask for recommendations by other users and to issue these to their own favorites users. Such recommendations are tweets which look like this:
#MrTweet I recommend @username because [insert reason here]
Not only do these messages raise awareness for ones account, their overall number is also used by Mr. Tweet's follower algorithm which determines the follow-suggestions. Besides, you get to know some nice bits and pieces about other tweepers – so in other words: please go to Mr. Tweet and recommend me! :mrgreen:
Since I really like the service and the idea, I'll recommend one of my favorite twitter friends each day for the next two weeks. Using Tweetlater, that's a breeze – even the scheduling option of the free version are great, but to harness the full power of pre-tweeting, I highly recommend the pro version, which enables you to schedule replies and direct messages.
Want some recommendation love? Since I'm a big fan of reciprocal network building, of course I'll gladly return to favor if you write a recommendation for me!
Comedian Jon Stewart has his popular character “Old Man Stewart” explain our favorite Microblogging Service. Why is everybody at congress going crazy about 140 chars, especially congress? And why is everybody on Grunter these days? This is just hilarious! Read more
Vimeo really sends out a lot of e-mails, but once you start reading the daily recommendations, you just can't stop – there's always at least one clip which really captures my imagination. Like this music video: Erik West set the visual scene for Codebreaker feat. Kathy diamonds track “Fire” (Jimmy Edgar Remix), and he did a fantastic job: it's all plain footage and post production: Read more
Dan aka @MountainDan aka The next Stephen Spielberg uploaded his video about Twestival Wien to Vimeo – expect some pure HD Goodness! Very smooth job – and I'm not just saying that because Dan interviews me as well :mrgreen: I cannot help the feeling that we just recently became aware of the tip of the iceberg called micro-blogging. And the fact that it's possible to organize such an event in a couple of days and to raise almost 500 Euros demonstrates that – as opposed to what culture critics don't get tired of repeating since the age of print media – the power of media can be used for good! Read more
Yesterday, Vienna's first twestival took place at WerkzeugH. In more than 120 cities, twitterers joined forces to have a good time and raise some money for clean water projects in Africa. Dan, who organised the Viennese event, raffled off a Nintendo Wii and a Logitech Squeezebox, and we managed to collect almost 500 Euros.
The event was streamed live on the official Twestival Page. And indeed: we tweeted, we met and we gave. I hope that we can recruit some more people next time, but considering the impromptu approach and the short time span, I think it was quite a nice result. Thanks a lot to Manfred of WerkzeugH, DJ Smartula and fatfoogoo for sponsoring the Wii.
I'm not too big a fan of mixing personal twitter accounts with automated postings, so I set up a dedicated twitter account for this task. If you prefer to receive datadirt postings via tweet, just follow @datadirtrss. Of course I'll continue to use my personal acccount @datadirt for manual updates, while the frog-bot will send out automated updates via the new account.
Of course I set the profile to auto-follow – by the way, let me remind you of the twitter auto-follow accounts list, which keeps growing and gives you some instant followers (which is especially useful if you're starting a new twitter account and want to “polish” the numbers a bit: it's a psychological issue, as most users won't follow an account which has less than 10 followers).
If you run a WordPress blog and want to set up your own posting-bot, this is what you have to do:
So good luck with all your twitter endeavours – seems like building an additional traffic stream always pays off!
PS – Note to twitter-spammers: I realized that many accounts follow fellow tweeters who have their account on auto-follow. After waiting till they receive the follow-back love, they quickly unfollow. I regularly (about twice a month) go through my “following” list anyways – I simply used to kick out the bottom-feeders, but since many are trying more than once, I've started blocking everyone who unfollows me quickly after the follow. And I urge you to do the same if you want to keep your account clean.
