Facebook Letting Third Party Advertisers Use Posted Pictures
Facebook has agreed to let third party advertisers use your posted pictures without your permission. If you are not happy about this, you can turn off ability for this to happen.
To turn off this setting…
Click on “Settings” at the top where you see the “Logout” link. Select “Privacy”. Then select “News Feed and Wall”. Next, select the tab that reads “Facebook Ads”. In the drop down box, select “No One”. Then save your changes.
Make this your Facebook status if you want to spread the word.
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Make Money Via Local Google Search
This is just one of the many ways to make money with the Internet. It might take some time to learn and master, but it is very easy to do as long as you are willing to put the time into it. I guess we can say that about anything.
Local search engine results is something many look past because of the global reach the Internet brings. It is much easier to think nationwide or global rather than local. If you’re like me, you have used Google to find restaurants or local stores in your area. I have searched for Hauppauge Chinese restaurant or Italian or whatever. For that phrase there are about 20,000 results. A good number to stick with for a niche term is under 40k. You can use any method to build pages that will get ranked, (social networking will work just fine) you can easily get on the first page of Google for that three word phrase. There are many ways to accomplish that.
If the search results were over 40K, it would be tougher… but on the other hand, if there are 5,000 results then you will probably achieve all 10 results on the first page. Ok, now what? For your local cities, pick a phrase and take control of the first page of Google. Then promote a fake Chinese restaurant. Where the name of the restaurant would go, you call it “Your-Company-Name Chinese Restaurant.” You can also setup links to restaurant guides to help with linking. You should also link to your website where you describe your services.
Next, you contact all the local restaurants. The best way is to go down in person and show them what you have done and what you can do for them. Explain how their revenue can easily increase (look up facts on these numbers) by being on the first page of Google. 60% will not look past the first page of Google is very important.
You can also take this one step further and not charge anything until you can get them on the first page of Google. What can you charge for this type of service? You can charge a one-time fee, but I like to build monthly clients. I always felt that is the smarter way to go. But of course that is up to you. $97/mo I feel is a great place to start and even offer a better deal for paying 6 or 12 months in advance.
You can also go another route and allow a pizza restaurant to get the Chinese food listing. This can easily drive the price of your service up with the additional competition.
There are roughly 20,000 cities in the US alone and there are many categories (Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Irish, Sushi, Buffets, etc.) That’s over 200,000 potentials. Then of course you can go after stereo shops, fitness centers, dentists, you get the picture.
Again, this is just one of hundreds of ways to make money utilizing the Internet. It all starts with understanding basic Internet marketing and learning how to get high rankings. It is very easy to get high rankings for niche markets. I have gained the top spot on Google in minutes using certain techniques. But, in this case, going after niche markets… everyday marketing techniques will work. It just comes down to you being creative in the service you will provide.
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Wine Industry’s First Social Media Director
Networking through social media web sites like Facebook and Twitter could help your career. This has changed the direction of my career as well. I jumped on social networking about two years ago and really tried to understand how to make money from it. The first dollar I made was from putting videos on Youtube and could not believe how easy it was. Companies are always searching for that competitive edge, trying to stay one step ahead of the competition.
For Rick Bakas, these new communication tools helped him land his dream job.
Rick Bakas, a food and wine critic, was applying for a job at the Murphy Goode Winery. Bakas submitted a video to apply for a $10,000 a month job at the winery. The winery was looking for someone to blog, tweet and use social media to promote their wine.
Bakas’ entry for the Murphy Goode job gave him enough publicity to attract other wineries, and someone else hired him first.
Bakas leaves for Napa Valley with his wife next month to become the wine industry’s first social media director for St. Supery Vineyards and Winery, and he already is completely prepared for his job duties.
“If they send me a message on Facebook or Twitter and they say that they’re coming I’ll take them out maybe to the vineyard and we’ll have a BBQ and we’ll tweet about it while we’re drinking good wine.”
Bakas will continue hosting a weekly tastecasting on Twitter where his 25,000 followers can all taste the same wine at once and send their comments.
“There were over 715 tweets about this online tasting last night within an hour,” Bakas says.
Bakas also has an equally impressive number of Facebook followers and a huge presence on other social media sites.
“More people use social media as a form of communication than email so you can actually reach more people using Twitter or Facebook.”
Bakas says he’s happy with the job he has accepted because it’s a permanent position. The other position he was applying for with the Murphy Goode Winery lasted only six months, and only if he won the contest.
The way business is conducted has changed drastically over the past 10 years. There are many companies that never made the change, Tower Records is an example. They never imagined the Internet would change the music industry the way it did. For any business today, it is imperative to become an expert of these new communication tools. They can easily make or break any company.
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Social Networking and the Wine Industry
A Napa firm is sharing with the wine trade a comprehensive study billed as the first thorough analysis of the Internet’s social impact on the wine industry.
VinTank, in partnership with wine industry consultant Derek Bromley, has released a white paper profiling the impact of today’s social media companies on the wine industry. It has been offered as a valuable resource for wineries wading into Web 2.0. Researched and written with the intent of helping wineries make sense of a vast and confusing medium, the paper looks at the largest social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) as well as the almost 30 wine social networks jockeying for the attention of online wine consumers, ending with an overview of the wine blogosphere, Paul Mabray, VinTank co-founder, noted.
The free white paper is available for download here.
The study allows the wine trade “to understand the Internet better,” Mabray added. He said the purpose of the analysis was to inform those working in wine of the far-reaching aspects of cyberspace. The examination of the Internet (through blogs and such) “shows it’s the perfect medium for the industry,” Mabray concluded.
“Consumer embrace of social media literally turns the tables on marketers,” said Tom Wark, publisher of the Fermentation daily wine blog and partner in Wark Communications. “With millions of consumers, particularly those of the Millennial generation, now frequently using social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace, brands are being built and defined as much by consumers and communities as they are by marketers and suppliers. The degree of change this represents can’t be underestimated.”
Mabray and his associates estimate that social media are generating twice the online content of traditional media, and wineries have been struggling with how to engage their current and potential customers in this medium.
Cruvee.com — a VinTank portfolio company and contributor to the white paper — estimates that each day in April 2009 there were 153 blog posts, 1,420 forum posts, and 7,896 microblog (Twitter) posts on the topic of wine. VinTank’s white paper offers some practical tactics, recommendations and best practices on how wineries can begin to engage in those conversations.
Key findings laid out in the white paper include:
• According to Compete.com, the top 20 wine bloggers in aggregate represent a larger audience than the Wine Spectator online, and are growing at a faster rate. However, the wine blogosphere is highly fragmented and difficult for wineries to navigate.
• Wine social network memberships number in the hundreds of thousands, although it is nearly impossible to determine how much overlap exists across networks.
• The two top-rated wine social networks, CellarTracker and VinCellar, started as wine cellar management tools that over time have added social networking functionality. This deeper level of value has paid huge dividends in terms of customer loyalty.
• A key challenge for all wine social networks that have achieved any kind of scale is data quality. Duplicate and incorrect data affect all of these sites to varying degrees.
• Online advertising models for the wine industry have more challenges than other verticals because of outdated alcohol regulations.
Co-founded by Mabray and Eric Hsu, VinTank is the first digital think tank for the wine industry, providing expertise and analysis where technology and the wine industry intersect. With these tools, VinTank provides strategic consulting and business development for companies looking to add wine to their offerings and for wine companies looking to succeed online.
Consultant Derek Bromley has spent his career innovating in and around the wine industry. A former sommelier, co-founder of “Web 1.0” e-business, BevAccess, and winery sales/marketing executive, he advises a select group of wine industry clients on strategy, branding, marketing, sales, channel management and online tools including web, e-mail and social media.
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Review of the Application Present.ly
What is Present.ly and what can it be used for? In short, it is Twitter for companies.
Present.ly is a communication tool that benefits any company that wants their internal communications to be efficient, easy to use and private. Security is important for any business. If a company allows their employees to use Twitter to discuss private information, it will not be secure.
One of the major benefits of Present.ly is its ability to allow employees to communicate, while sharing work related updates, helping each other and giving organization wide broadcasts. A great deal of functionality that Present.ly swanks is taken directly from Twitter. Although, Present.ly is similar to Twitter in both use and functionality, it is more refined for the use of communication within organizations.
With a secure and private platform, a user can share private as well as group updates, short messages or media with any other user without any fear of the messages being viewable to the outside world. Present.ly gives a unique opportunity to its users to share knowledge.
With its public stream broadcast, users can gain knowledge from co-workers that normally would take hours. Users can ask questions, get organization wide updates, read urgent messages and see system broadcasts.
The interface allows a user to share a wide range of media with ease. The platform allows a user to share images, documents, videos and audio clips. Present.ly can be accessed through Blackberry, iPhone and Windows mobile compatible devices for on the move access to important communication.
What are the differences to other applications?
Present.ly comes from a growing range of web based applications that cater to business needs. Like micro-communication platforms, Yammer and twitter, Present.ly makes it possible for people to communicate with short texts. While Yammer is a direct competitor, the only difference between Twitter and Present.ly is the focus on business needs.
What does it cost to use the application?
Present.ly offers services that are both, free and paid. There are various plans available in Present.ly to cater to the individual needs of organizations. Although, Present.ly has a free plan with capability of 5 users, this is not enough for many organizations. The paid plans are available in 4 categories namely, Basic, Plus, Premium and Enterprise. Apart from the Enterprise plan, all other paid plans are limited by the number of users and do not have internal deployment, Enterprise integration and phone support.
Who would you recommend the application to?
Although, Present.ly is made by keeping the corporate audience in mind, it can be used by anyone who wants to communicate. In business, with its ease of use, private conversation features and good explanation of procedures, Present.ly can easily be used by any employee.
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How are Businesses Using Twitter?
Twitter has certainly stirred things up lately. The site came out of nowhere and has really changed the way people are communicating lately. Yes, we know Facebook and Myspace changed things already, but Twitter has taken it to the next level. The level of being more distant if you ask me. We are certainly becoming more disconnected from each other, but that is another conversation.
One way Twitter has changed things is how we have been able to get so close to celebrities. It is amazing that I can find out what Ashton Kutcher is doing right now, plus there are websites that provide a full list of celebs like Celebrity Tweet. Just in case you wanted to know what they were eating for breakfast or what they think about the current events.
But how about businesses? I have been asked plenty of times, how can I use social networking to get more business. Now it is, how can I use Twitter to get more business. How can we all put ourselves in front of potential customers.
Here are four ways that businesses are using Twitter:
Direct — Companies are using Twitter as a marketing or public relations channel
Many companies have established Twitter identities as part of their corporate communications strategies, much like corporate blogs. They Tweet about corporate accomplishments, distributing links to press releases or promotional Web sites, and respond to comments about the brand. This approach should be used with caution because uninteresting or self-serving Tweets could hinder the brand image as much as it could help. Responding to comments can be particularly risky, as the anonymous nature of Twitter can easily descend into a negative spiral. Companies should register Twitter IDs for their major brand names to prevent others claiming them and using them inappropriately.
Indirect — The company’s employees use Twitter to enhance and extend their personal reputations, thereby enhancing the company’s reputation
Good Twitterers enhance their personal reputation by saying clever, interesting things, attracting many followers who go on to read their blogs. As people enhance their personal brands, some of this inevitably rubs off on their employers. Twitter provides a way of raising the profile of both individuals and the organizations they work for, which elevates these companies that want to be seen to employ influential leaders.
Internal — Employees use the platform to communicate about what they are doing, projects they are working on and ideas that occur to them
Problem with this is there is no guarantee of security. It is crucial that employees understand the limitations of the platform and never discuss confidential matters, because as a seemingly innocuous Tweet about going to see a particular client can tip off a competitor. Other providers, such as Yammer and Present.ly, provide Twitter-like functions targeted at enterprise microblogging with more security and corporate control.
Inbound Signaling
Twitter streams provide a rich source of information about what customers, competitors and others are saying about a company. Search tools like search.twitter.com or the twhirl application can scan for references to particular company or product names. Savvy companies use these signals to get early warnings of problems and collect feedback about product issues and new product ideas.
10 Basic SEO Strategies to Implement
Below are 10 basic SEO strategies that you can implement. You can also check out Web CEO, which is a free SEO tool that can really take out a lot of the guess work.
1. Identify the main competitive keywords (4 or 5 for organic, 200 to 400 for PPC). These can be found via Wordtracker, which offers one day worth of detailed keyword information for $8. You can look at keywords from log files.
2. Create a website title that grabs attention. Most successful titles use important keywords and should be descriptive and provocative.
3. Add in a description of the website before the company name in the Page Title Syntax.
4. Include H1, H2 heading tags. Search engines often look for clues in headings and subheads, plus you can use keywords as well in those tags. You can also put keywords in the “alt” tags in images as well.
5. Remove frames from websites because search engines cannot see them. Also, flash and javascript can hurt you as well. You can use SSIs for menus instead.
6. Start to employ the use of links. Google has started to weigh the use of links heavily when determining rank. Link your site from industry hubs, and others that have a high page rank. Request reciprocal links from other websites.
7. Get listed in directories. dmoz.com and others are free while Yahoo charges $299/year but it could be worth it to get faster results.
8. Start to build links submitting article and press releases, blogging, build an online forum, submit videos… basically anything that can build back links.
9. Setup an A/B testing service so that changes to your website can be tested to see if the conversion rate goes up or down depending on the specific changes. Several companies offer this for $20/month.
10. Put more time into building back links than anything else. SocialMarker.com will make your life a lot easier.
Top Free SEO Tools
Automated free tools always make life easier. It doesn’t matter if you are an expert at SEO or a newbie. By successfully using the tools below, you’ll be able to concentrate on what you do best, instead of wasting time with the tedious work. Below are some great tools that I recommend.
Basic SEO Health Check and Analysis:
1. Website Grader by Hubspot – Website.Grader.com is a free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness potential of a website. It provides a score that incorporates elements such as website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
2. Content Duplication finder by Virante – Virante’s content duplication tool can diagnose common causes and effects of duplicate content penalties such as server headers, Google index issues and more.
3. Builtwith by Gary Brewer – BuiltWith.com is a website analysis tool, providing technical analysis and SEO optimization information to assist in your website’s SEO effectiveness.
4. Quarkbase – Quarkbase.com is the great way to find website information including social bookmarking stats, Alexa ranking, related sites and domain information.
Basic Back Link Analysis:
5. Yahoo Site Explorer is a fantastic tool for basic back link information, to view the most popular pages from any site and to dive into a comprehensive site map.
6. Google Browser by Touchgraph – TG Google Browser is a free Java application which you can use to explore the connections between related websites.
Basic On-Page Analysis:
7. SEO Browser by Anduro Marketing and McAnerin International Inc – SEO-Browser.com is a free tool which lets you see your website like a search engine sees it. Useful to find image with no alt text, to ensure drop downs are crawlable and much more.
8. Image Analyzer by Juicy Studio – Image Analyzer will highlight images without alt text, long image names and much more. Because image optimization is essential for successful SEO, image analyzers are an absolute must.
9. Server Header Checker by SEO Consultants – Server Header Checker allows you to analyze your non www homepage version and other pages to check that the server header is returning a 301 redirect response, 200 OK response etc.
10. Popuri by Xavier Larrea – Popuri.us allows you to quickly check your link popularity across social bookmarking sites, Google Page Rank and much more.
Introduction to Web 3.0
It is amazing how any advancement on the Internet usually has about a five year life span. Web 2.0, which is still fairly new to some people… is now being pushed aside by the talk of Web 3.0. It is still in its infancy stage, but as we know… six months is a long time for technology.
So what could Web 3.0 do for us? Lets say you want to go out on a date and want to do the traditional dinner and a movie. So you decide for an action flick and maybe some Italian food. So you go to your computer (Mac for me) and decide to search for the movie times and a great Italian restaurant (because you want to impress your date).
What is your next step? Well, you need to find a movie, the theatre, the time and maybe watch some trailers and read reviews… plus you may want to read some reviews on restaurants as well. You may visit Fandango, Movie.com, Zagat.com, Yellowpage.com… probably four to six websites.
Experts believe Web 3.0 will make these tasks faster and easier. Instead of searching on multiple sites, you might be able to ask a question like “I want to see an action movie and eat at an Italian restaurant”. The Web 3.0 browser will search the Internet for all possible answers and provide the search results.
Many experts also believe the Web 3.0 browser could act like that personal assistant we would all love to have. The “intelligent” browser could learn your likes and dislikes… kind of reminds me of the movie “I, Robot”. The more data you gather, the more it learns about you. You could even one day ask “what movie should I watch?”, and you will see a list that fits you. For me, it would probably spit out an action movie. It could even tell you when your favorite actors new movie is coming out.
The Internet has changed drastically over the past 10 years and it will only change faster now. I know I will look back in 20 years and say, wow… look at where we are now.
Yes, I Was Called a Genius… Once
Thinking outside the box is one thing I have always been really good at. When I owned a web hosting company, I personally came up with new services and ideas that actually changed the way even some of the largest web hosting companies do business.
I am not here to pat myself on the back, well maybe a little… I want to explain how important thinking outside of the box is and how it helped me become successful when I joined Faclconstor Software.
I joined Falconstor in 2005 after I sold my web hosting company to start up a software-as-a-service division. The idea was to take their one-time software sales and turn them into ongoing monthly sales. Why make money on something once, when you can make money on it forever, right?
We built a data center and a hosted platform to provide the software as a service. My idea was not to sell the service to the end-user, but build partnerships with cable providers, hosting companies, managed service providers, data centers, etc… The service we were providing was data backup and recovery services.
I always believe in putting together a deal that works for both sides. Falconstor had the software, but did not have the customer base and did not want to build a huge data center to support the service. So the partnership offering I came up with was to provide the software for free to the partner, lets say Comcast, and then Comcast would market the service to their customer base. Since Falconstor would provide the software upfront at no cost, there would be a revenue share on the back-end. Now that we had everything squared away and the partnership offering in place, how do you contact companies the size of Dell, HP, IBM, Comcast, Cox, etc…
I was sitting at my desk one day and knew I had to work from the top down dealing with the potential partners. There is a big difference when your boss calls you up and says, talk to this person… compared to someone beneath you in the almighty corporate world telling you about a “great idea”. I always got further faster working down from the CEO or as high as you can get.
So how do I contact the CEO of Comcast or even Apple? How I accomplished this is what caused the CEO of Falconstor to call me a genius. The first thing I did was search on the company website to find out who the executive team was and then I saw each persons name and what their position was. I thought to myself, since there is no contact information on the site, how do I reach out these people.
The good thing about corporate America is they like to keep things organized, like how they provide email accounts to their employees. It could be first.lastname@company.com or firstname@company.com or firstinitial.lastname@company.com… you understand. So I was thinking, if I could figure out the email structure, I could email all the executives and hopefully one of them thinks the partnership offering is a great idea and points me in the right direction.
I am pretty sure the first company I tried was Cox or Comast, the one with a woman as a CEO. I figured let me try one email to her first . The good part was if I was wrong with the email I would get a bounce back almost instantly. So I tried, but do not remember if I got it right the first time. So as I sat there and sent out the email, I just sat back and waited to see what would happen. Went out to lunch and came back and call me crazy but it worked. I got an email back from the CEO telling one of the VP’s to contact me. I was blown away and I even got an email within minutes from the VP. Love that whole top down approach, huh?
So this started an email blasting campaign targeting every single company I could think of working my way right into the office of all the executives. It worked well because I had company after company lined up to talk about the partnership offering. Of course my ideas with Falconstor and the service offering and partnership offerings I put together were good enough to get a response from these companies. If you have a bad idea, you probably won’t get much of a response.
The moral of the story is, think outside the box… I know it isn’t something everyone can do, but just remember… there is always a way.
Oh yeah, one of the highlights of this email blasting campaign I put together was when I emailed Steve Jobs of Apple. I literally got an email back from him in two minutes saying, “not interested”. I knew Apple would be a long-shot, but had to try… but it was fun getting a response back so fast. I wondered if it was a secretary or someone else, but because of how fast the email came back, it had to be him to make a decision.
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