Blog Postings for 2010

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December 10, 2010: Add Twitter to Your Web Site: Okay, when I update my Official Page at Facebook, the text is sent to Twitter and LinkedIn. Great... but what about my blog? I wanted to update my blog as well. Here's how to do this.

1) Assuming you have a Twitter account (even my cat has a Twitter account), go to Twitter's Widget page (or just search for "twitter widgets").
2) Select Widget for My Website and select Profile. Yep, pretty ugly. You can change the colors. Play around with that and copy the code.
3) Paste the code in your website (use your HTML editor, your FTP upload tool, etc.)
4) Look at the results. If it looks like the widget at Twitter, then you are a lucky cat. Be sure to buy a lottery ticket.
5) If the text is tiny, you're an unlucky cat. Don't buy any lottery tickets. Here's how to to change the Twitter widget font size.
6) The Big Picture: you'll download the Twitter CSS, make a small change, save it as style-twitter.css, put it on your server, and then point the Twitter widget to the new CSS. Piece of cake, no?
7) The Details: First, let's get the Twitter widget CSS. Go to http://widgets.twimg.com/j/1/widget.css. Copy that and save it as style-twitter.css.
8) In that block of code, you'll change the font size. Search for .twtr-widget{position:relative;font-size:12px and change that to .twtr-widget{position:relative;font-size:16px.
9) In the widget code, add a line to point to the new style sheet. Where it start...

<script src="http://widgets.twimg.com/j/2/widget.js"></script>
<script>

Change that to:

<src="http://widgets.twimg.com/j/2/widget.js"></script>
<link href="https://www.andreas.com/style-twitter.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
<script>

This points the widget to the new style sheet. I could have used a relative link instead of an absolute link; I used an absolute link so you can see the path name. Do as you like.
10) Upload the new style-twitter.css to your server and your Twitter widget's text will change.

To sign up, add comments, or ask questions, visit my Facebook Official Page.

November 16, 2010: Follow me on Facebook: It's a lot of work to maintain blogs, newsletters, tweets, and Facebook. So I'm using my Official page at Facebook to post updates. Sign up and you'll get notification of updates. No ads, no marketing. Just useful info.

Monday, July 5, 2010: Facebook Code on andreas.com: I "facebookified" my website. I put Facebook code on all pages. Why? Bret Taylor, CTO of Facebook, explained the idea of Facebook Open Graph: "The basic idea was that if you were Green Day the band, it’s really inefficient for you to have GreenDay.com, and a Green Day account on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. Your internet identity is GreenDay.com" (Interview at InsideFacebook.com).

Instead of Laura going to various sites, Laura should be able to go to only one site (for example, GreenDay.com) and there, visit both the site's content and also participate in social media.

Facebook isn't trying to become the central site for the web; it's putting itself onto all sites. Facebook becomes part of all sites. FB Open Graph was announced in March 2010; within the first week, 50,000 sites added the FB code. Three months later, over one million sites are using FB's code. This is easily 50-100 million pages.

I added Facebook Comments at the bottom of all pages. I also added Recommendations on the category pages (for example, see Web Stuff). To add these tools to your site, visit Facebook's page for Plugins.

Thursday, April 01, 2010: Automated Bid Management (ABM) for Facebook. Four companies released ABM tools for Facebook ads. These companies use FB's ad platform API. Kenshoo's tool is similar to a Google Adwords Editor interface: bulk ad creation, duplication, etc. The companies include Kenshoo, Omniture, Clickable, and Marin Software. We'll test this on both Kenshoo and Omniture.


Wednesday, March 17, 2010: Hmmm... It turns out Facebook Official pages are RSS-enabled, which means I can use my andreas.com Official page as a blog. So now I'm wondering if I should continue my blog here or move over to that.


Sunday, March 14, 2010: Added a Facebook Group page. You can join that to get updates.

Still trying to get Google Analytics to track my Facebook Official page. If you've done this and it works, let me know how you did this. I'm writing documentation so everyone can do this.


Saturday, March 06, 2010: Another Google Social Media Fail?: Google is shutting down FTP access for Google Blogger. They claim only 0.5% of Blogger authors use FTP, but this 0.5% is also the most technical and the longtime users of Blogger.

You can read their comments to Google (Caution: Contains "language".) It's not pretty. Google annoyed yet another core audience. It got so bad that Google shut off the comments.

Blogging is one of the core tools of Social Media. Google desperately wants to become a social media company. So why infuriate their core users?

The alternative? Move to Wordpress. It's free, it has thousands of themes, and since it's hosted on your server, it can't be affected if the company shuts down. Over the next month, I'll look into this and move my blog.

What's next? A migration away from Gmail? Gmail has major design failures, such as the inability to sort email and (this is really weird) poor search capability. I'll wait for Titan and then see where to switch.


Friday, March 05, 2010: Facebook = The Web?: The large companies are setting up websites in Facebook. By using FBML (Facebook Markup Language, similar to HTML), they can build websites inside Facebook.

To see a collection of corporate pages at Facebook, visit CustomFacebook.com and FacebookShowcase.net (thanks to Matt McDougall at Digital Marketing Inner Circle for telling me about the first one).

Up to now, SEO was all about being findable in Google. But now there's Facebook. 400m registered members; 200m log in daily; they spent 55 minutes daily in Facebook. What is your SEO strategy in Facebook? There are no meta-tags, no link counts. How is a company with 100,000 products going to have those products be findable in Facebook? SEO in 2010 is going to be a whole new game.


Thursday, March 04, 2010: Google Talks about SEO: Google published their Google SEO Report Card. It's a review of the state of SEO for many Google products.

It's not a complete document. It only mentions a few generally-known items. Many SEO factors are not discussed at all, such as the off-page factors.

There are a few interesting items. It confirms (p. 9) that the meta-keyword tag isn't indexed. It also adds that the meta-description tag is not indexed. About half of the 49-page document discusses 301s and canonical URLs.

The report isn't useful for people who aren't expert in SEO. It doesn't explain much. It says nothing on overall strategy, the role of SEO in marketing, or deeper SEO issues.


Monday, March 01, 2010: Marketing 2010: What's Up? I'm speaking March 10 at DMA Palo Alto on the latest in Google, what's up with Facebook,etc. Lots of secret stuff about Google and Facebook. You'll see stuff that you didn't even know existed. Includes a 90-minute workshop. More at DMANC.org.


Tuesday, February 16, 2010: The webpages for Susan Hattie Steinsapir and Ylva Hagner


Monday, February 15, 2010: Facebook sends more traffic to portals than Google.

Compete found 13% of traffic to portals such as Yahoo, MSN, and AOL came from Facebook. eBay accounted for 7.61%. Google was third with 7%.

So... if you want traffic, use Facebook and eBay (13% + 7.61% = 20.61%) over Google (7%).


Sunday, February 14, 2010: Social Media 2010: First it was called Web 2.0, but that was all about tools, so it died.

Then it became Social Media (SM). All about talking with each other. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. SM is actually SMS: you send short update messages to your friends. Google has now joined the party about two years late by adding Wave and Buzz.

So we now have Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Wave, and Buzz: that's five ways to SMS your friends. Or, four too many. Which will die?

MySpace is dead.

Wave waved goodbye; the last Wave in my account is several weeks old.

Twitter's traffic peaked in July and has been dropping. My Twitter account is just an endless stream of press releases, and that's after I've unfollowed the worst offenders. Last month, Google gave up and added Twitter to the search results, but only for a few very-high traffic keywords and now, the lag is several hours. Google doesn't really want to promote Twitter.

Within 24 hours of the release of Google Buzz, there was already a backlash. It's pretty bad when the front page of Fox News joins the attack along with one very angry ex-wife. Google was forced to make a series of major changes within hours to reduce the anger. If you have a Google phone, it will constantly broadcast your exact position. Can't wait to turn off that one.

That leaves Facebook (FB). FB is #2 and will soon be #1 (and worse yet for Google, FB's search engine is powered by Bing). Can Google beat FB? Google is adding social media wherever it can. But it's not looking good. To win, Google would have to reposition itself as a social media site, not a search engine. But I doubt they'll do that.

Google spent two years to develop Buzz, so many at Google use it. That means it's very easy to find a Google engineer, see his list of contacts, and read their Buzz notes. Want to keep up? Just click Follow and you'll get a feed of their discussions. This is a massive security hole into Google. I expect most corporations will ban their staff from using Buzz.

Where's the next battle? Facebook is about to release Titan, their complete email tool. Just like Hotmail and GMail, you can use this for all of your email. FB has 400m users, so Titan will grow fast, which will cut into Google's GMail revenues.


Wednesday, January 27, 2010: Google now allows image ads in the search results. This is a major policy change at Google: for nearly ten years, they've refused to put image ads in the search results.

So far, the advertisers are major companies. They're allowed to put multiple ads on the page (another policy change...).


Wednesday, January 20, 2010: eCommerce in China: Online revenue in China in 2009 grew 30% (74.3bn yuan, $10.9bn). iResearch predicts 2010 online revenues in China from advertising, games, shopping, and other activities will grow 51% to 112.3bn yuan ($16.5bn). (Source: BBC News)

Is Google really going to abandon that?


Wednesday, January 06, 2010: Ever wonder why the keywords in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools didn't quite match? Okay, probably not :-) But when you do, here's an explanation.




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