A game created to add “freshness” to generic holiday print and e-cards, the NVI Xmas Rankerizer tests your web marketing skills through fast action plays, requiring quick reflexes,  precise hand/eye coordination and attention to detail. In true Social spirit, the Xmas Rankerizer is the perfect way heat up and unwind before the holidays begin.

Inspired by the classic county fair game, “whac-a-mole”, the NVI Xmas Rankerizer is an updated virtual game where the most trending search and social media icons, such as the Facebook Like, the Twitter bird, YouTube, Google’s +1, LinkedIn and the Google Panda, replace traditional media, err… moles.

Web marketers, bloggers and all you social media buffs out there… get ready to rev your game ranking engines! The player with the most points wins!

Don’t forget to publish your results on your social networks so that the competition gets fierce! Nothing like a little showboating right?

The game is compatible with mobile and iPad as well. Visit the NVI Xmas Rankerizer for more information and loads of fun!

Happy Holidays to all!

The NVI team

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

The theme of the seminar was to present key LinkedIn marketing solutions to help businesses get the most out of LinkedIn. Up until recently, LinkedIn has been a service used by business professionals to put up their CVs, recruit people, and network.

Over the last year, it has expanded its services to organizations as well. LinkedIn is (finally) harnessing the power of its high-profile network to become a key B2B marketing tool that offers companies a valuable way to advertise, manage their professional identity, build strong business relationships and ultimately, get leads, revenue and conversions.

Why LinkedIn Makes Sense
1. #1 resource for career-minded professionals
2. Over 120 million members
3. Precise targeting by seniority, industry, job function and geography

If you’re kind of new to the concept of LinkedIn as a marketing tool let’s delve right into the 4 things you should do to maximize your LinkedIn marketing efforts.

1. Optimize your Company Page: utilize all of LinkedIn’s new Company page features to strengthen your presence on LinkedIn and online.
2. Get Recommendations: build a highly targeted network of followers and increase number of brand evangelists
3. Amplify your message: through “paid media” (LinkedIn Recommendation Ads for example) you can scale your message to boost your social capabilities
4. Analyze and Refine: Track progress and message strength using LinkedIn Analytics Tool

1. Optimize Your Company Page

Your Company Page is where LinkedIn members can discover more about your company and engage with your brand. From new job postings, products and services, new hires, recent Tweets, new blog posts, to user recommendations, this is where members can learn who you are, what you’re up to and “Recommend” you to others in their network. Recommendations are akin to “authority” Likes that can help drive traffic to your LinkedIn page, your website and increase engagement and buzz surrounding your brand, from highly targeted prospects in the LinkedIn network.

Products & Services Tab

The products and service tab gives you the opportunity to highlight all of your best products and services. You can add comprehensive descriptions for each p/s with relevant links back to product pages on your website. As LinkedIn already gets top rankings on the SERP it can be a great way to pass on page rank to your site.

Display Banners

You can create up to 3 different display banners for your products and services page with links in them. Since you are targeting business networks specifically, it’s an opportunity to get creative with your banner ads. For example, providing stats on the company’s performance, incentives to “Become a fan on Facebook” or
better yet, “Follow Us on LinkedIn”.

Video

Video can do a lot to enhance user experience on your products and services homepage. You can embed videos from YouTube, advertise services, show video tutorials, host contests, announce special offers (LinkedIn highly recommends providing special offers to members) and more.

Get Recommendations

LinkedIn’s recommendation engine is probably the most valuable new feature of its service update. Once you’ve set up your services page, LinkedIn sends you the coding to add a LinkedIn “Recommend” button on your business website.

Many companies have been seeing significant results by using the Recommendation Ads paid service. Recommendation ads help gain a critical mass of recommendations more quickly. You can define your target audiences and customize your message so it displays relevant content for up to 5 different audience segments.

LinkedIn says you should actively seek recommendations as part of all your customer communications.Through LinkedIn’s “request Recommendations” module, you can invite members to recommend products and services straight from your products and services tab.

Since recommendations are the most trusted form of marketing, getting recommendations from trusted peers is an active way of strengthening your brands reputation, and increasing your brand and products’ potential to spread virally throughout LinkedIn’s broad network of company pages and professionals ones.

Members will see what someone in their network said about you, and these badges of approval then appear on your LinkedIn company page, helping empower your brand’s authority and presence on the most widely-used business network.

Amplify Your Message

Case study: Hewlett-Packard
HP was looking to expand its social capabilities and reach to get both commercial clients and customers engaging about HP products and endorsing the brand. Utilizing LinkedIn’s company page module and running a paid campaign through Recommendation Ads the company saw unprecedented results in only 2 weeks.

The ads encouraged LinkedIn members to visit the HP Company Page on LinkedIn, recommend HP products and services, and share those recommendations with their network.

Results:
• 2,000 product recommendations in two weeks
• 20,000 new followers on HP Company Page
• 500,000 viral updates about HP products and services.

Read full case study here: HP Case Study

Analyze and Refine

The LinkedIn Analytics tab is only viewable to admins and shows you who is visiting your company page, what pages they viewed most, and how you fare in comparison to others in your industry. You can also refine your analysis to learn which industries, functions and companies make up your group of followers.

By tracking analytics and progress, you have the ability to learn which products are most popular, which don’t get enough traction, who your followers are and how you can improve your message to target new communities.

It will be interesting to see the evolution of LinkedIn’s B2B marketing services as more companies jump on the bandwagon. Since there are little to no other competitors doing what Linkedin is doing right now,  the recommendations engine could prove to be a highly useful tool for raising brand awareness, reputation, trust and loyalty. Applying LinkedIn as part of an integrated campaign seems like it has the potential to yield some pretty outstanding results.

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

Fast-forward to today and Groupon is 44 million users strong, services 500 cities in 46 countries across the globe and is on pace to make their first billion dollars faster than any other company in history.

For those of you unfamiliar with Groupon and how it works here’s a quick rundown: Groupon offers one daily coupon to every market they serve. These coupons offer a deal by local business’ within each market. Every deal has a minimum purchase requirement for the deal to come into effect but once met, the deal becomes 100% valid and can be redeemed. Groupon sends out daily coupon deal emails to all 44 million of its users which brings the visibility to every deal.

Groupon’s system has a lot going for it. First, it’s free for everyone. There is no registration or membership fees for buyers and more importantly there are absolutely no fees for businesses who want to advertise their deals. Groupon makes 50% of the advertised deal price and the retailer walks away with a large quantity of new business. There’s no risk for Groupon, retailers or buyers. Everyone wins and this is a huge reason Groupon has grown the way it has over the last 3 years.

But as much as the Groupon deal-a-day concept has going for it, there are some limitations. “…we have to pass on seven out of eight merchants that contact us.” - Adam Mason on the amount of requests coming in. That’s really an amazing figure. That means a vast majority of businesses that want to get on the Groupon train get stuck at the station. With Groupon throwing away a majority of the business coming its way, it leaves a lot of business open for competitors to pick up. And there’s no end to the competitors lining up.

There are larger players like Living Social and Google Offers that have surfaced as head-to-head competitors but there are now thousands operating on more local levels showing up every day.

The Decline of Groupon

I’m expecting some flak from some of the opinions I’m going to express but there are some solid reasons for me to suspect Groupon will soon be in trouble.

I think just about everyone I know personally in the online marketing world either is running or thinking of running a deal-a-day website. Some of which are experiencing success but all have ideas to trump Groupon. This is a much bigger problem for Groupon than most are considering.

Smaller, more local and niche deal-a-day sites are the competition that Groupon has a real reason to be worried about.

Groupon is currently estimated to employ 7500 people across the world. The growth of the company has truly been amazing but this is the very reason it will soon find itself needing to scale back. In a company as large as this, quick on-the-fly adjustments are difficult and have far reaching impacts. This is where smaller deal-a-day sites will out-manoeuvre Groupon. Currently Groupon takes a 50% cut from retailers and this figure is pretty standard across the board on most deal-a-day websites. But there’s nothing stopping a strong local site to decide a 25% cut is good enough for them. Or less. This is already happening in the Montreal and surrounding areas where I’m regularly seeing smaller sites undercutting Groupon and its competitors.

Groupon has had a hard time entering the Montreal market with opponents like Tuango, MontrealontheCheap and RedFlag Deals all establishing a strong foothold in the market and there’s no reason to suspect the fierce competition won’t grow outwards.

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

Recently, I observed a LinkedIn ad placed by aimClear Consulting Services. All it said was:

Good calls to action give a concise value proposition, and use strong language with an attention-grabbing sense of urgency to earn a click. AimClear’s ad… doesn’t have a call to action.

Log into your LinkedIn account and look at the ads you are shown. Refresh a dozen times. How many don’t have a call to action? In all likelihood, none of them. So what’s going on here? Is this the worst ad ever?

Multipurpose

Quite the contrary. Let’s set aside clicks for a moment, and this of what this ad communicates. In 74 characters, aimClear:

- Establishes that they were present at SMX
- Indicates a deep familiarity with and connection to advanced Facebook marketing
- Offer a post-event, gratitude-oriented relationship with attendees
- Creates an intriguing ad that gets me talking about it here

And they can accomplish this without a single click. If this was a CPM display ad, then the cost would have been what it was. There’s actually no way to tell as a user, since pay-per-click and display ads are mixed. But what if it was a PPC ad?

On the Cheap

LinkedIn ads are relatively new, but they do already have a reputation for providing weak click-through rates and high cost per click rates. Instead of trying to fight through poor ad placement and scrounge for expensive clicks, what if - and this is speculative - aimClear aimed to brand, chose a PPC and, and have potentially the least click-worthy ad of all, meaning the least possible costs?

Yeah, they probably got some clicks, so their costs weren’t nil. But by framing it as a display ad with little click incentive, they could have saved a whack of money.

It Ain’t AdWords

The reason why this strategy doesn’t work in a platform like AdWords is because of an old grouchy friend we call quality score. If your pay-per-click does not perform, which in the case of pay-per-click ads means attracting clicks, then the advertising platform makes less money. That punishment translates into higher costs per click for poor performing advertisers to recoup the poor performance losses. Quality score incorporates numerous factors, but CTR is a big one.

But it isn’t clear that there is any direct equivalent to a quality score on LinkedIn DirectAds. No quality score means no punishment in costs. The publishment a person does get slapped with is lower impressions. But first of all, low impressions can be expected anyway in LinkedIn ads, so you might be able to get away with it for a while, and second of all, the advertising is still nearly free, apart from the $5 startup cost.

The Future

As the LinkedIn DirectAds system gets more advanced and explicit about their advancements, we may start to hear about a quality score equivalent. Or at least, some clear mechanism to address cases like this which essentially make them little money. Depending on how strict their performance measure, the results of this kind of scheme can be few enough impressions to be worth the time. Still, free advertising is free advertising, and if an ad can be like aimClear’s and communicate a lot without requiring a click, it may be a strategy worth considering, especially in a case like aimClear’s where a big campaign isn’t necessary anyway, given that it was a conference followup and necessarily temporary.

Time to test! We’ll share results when we have them.

edit: Made some tweaks! The first version worked within the knowledge that the overwhelming majority of LinkedIn ads are PPC, but didn’t acknowledge that display ads do exist on LinkedIn. The post is about turning PPC ads into display ads, but the fact that display ads do exist, however rarely used, should have been mentioned.

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

Most bad experiences with search marketing firms can be avoided by being a good SEO client. Here are 5 tips to managing your SEO relationships so that you not only protect your investment and rankings, but also maximize them.

1. Educate Your SEO Agency

The first step you should take when involving any third-party in any one of your marketing initiatives is making sure that they understand (1) your business model and (2) your business goals.

Your business model might seem like a “given” or a “no brainer” to you, but that’s because you live, eat, and breath it. SEO agencies live, eat, and breathe SEO. So make sure you take the time to educate them on your revenue model and why you’ve chosen the strategy that you did. This will help them help you tap into the most targeted sources of organic traffic.

Similarly, make sure that they understand your business goals.There’s a huge difference between “dominating your niche” and “cornering your market”, and these are nuances that your SEO agency needs to be aware of so that they can build and pursue an SEO strategy that makes sense for your business.

For example, McDonald’s and the diner on the corner both sell cheap, greasy hamburgers, but their respective business models and goals are very different. So the kind of marketing (online and off) that they pursue will be very different.

You may also want to take the time to understand the SEO strategy that your agency pursues. There is often a “method to their madness,” and understanding that method will help you better challenge and support them.

2. Define Your SEO KPIs

Once your SEO firm understands your business model, you’ll need to work with them to define SEO KPIs that makes sense for your business goals. There are a lot of ways to evaluate SEO campaigns (rankings, traffic, conversions, etc.), and you’ll want to make sure that both you and your agency agree in advance on what blend of KPIs to work toward.

First, this will help your SEO firm devise a strategy geared toward your expectations. But it will also put you in a position to evaluate the quality of their work and measure the return on your investment with them.

3. Appoint an SEO Gatekeeper

With firm KPIs in place, it’s time to appoint an SEO gatekeeper. This person will serve two key roles.

First, they will avoid bottlenecks. By having one person responsible for all SEO initiatives, it will be easier to establish the status of any project. Basically, you’ll have one person monitoring all progress and pushing projects through on a consistent basis.

Secondly, by serving as a main point of contact for your SEO agency, they will lend campaigns cohesion. Essentially, if all SEO inquiries are directed through a single gatekeeper, both you and your SEO firm can ensure that the proverbial left hand always knows what the right hand is doing. This way, you’ll be able to establish some SEO symbiosis between projects, and get the most out of them because they’ll be support each other.

4. Identify SEO Stakeholders

Once you have an SEO gatekeeper in place, one of their first tasks should be to identify all the relevant SEO stakeholders in your business. After all, they’re the ones responsible for making sure that all business strategy and decisions are clearly communicated to your agency. So they need to be aware of any internal events that might impact any projects that your SEO agency is working on.

Execs & Upper Management: It’s at this level of your business that you find key decision-makers. These are the people guiding overall business strategy are responsible for the outcome of any marketing initiative –including SEO. So co-opting these stakeholders will be essential for holding other stakeholders account for keeping SEO projects on track and keeping things moving forward.

Sales, Marketing, & PR:The sales and marketing team(s) need the leads generated by SEO, and organic search should be their number one online acquisition channel. Similarly, the initiatives undertaken by your PR team (such as press releases) should support SEO efforts by begin keyword sensitive and linking back to key pages.

Design/Usability: This part of your company will be integral to creating users experiences and information architectures that are optimized for search. Consequently, your SEO gatekeeper should be in close contact with them at all times.

IT/Dev: Depending on how technology driven your business is, this layer of your organization will be essentially in ensuring that every release of every site respects SEO best practices. So your SEO gatekeeper should be in close contact with IT/Dev and aware of how any new releases might affect SEO.

Editorial/Content: One of the many reasons “content is king” is because of its impact on SEO. Just like PR communications need to be SEO sensitive, so does your other content production. Your content strategy should be adapted, for instance, to search trends/volumes, and ensure that you’re producing keyword sensitive content at a consistent rate across all your properties.

Legal: This is one place where many SEO (and other) initiative can be lost in limbo, so your SEO gatekeeper must ensure that the legal department does not become an roadblock. Your legal department is important for developing a global policy on SEO (i.e., whether you pursue certain practices). For instance, if every piece of onsite or offsite content gets caught up in legal vetting, it’s going to kill your SEO momentum. So your gatekeeper needs to work out clear processes with them in advance.

5. Maintain SEO Momentum

Like many marketing initiatives, SEO is something that requires building and maintaining momentum. You can’t just put things on hold for a couple months and expect to pick up where you left off. Rankings change, and while your SEO is idle, your competitors will gain rankings and displace you in the SERPs.

This is where you SEO gatekeeper becomes an integral part of your marketing team. Not only are they monitoring KPIs and avoiding internal bottlenecks (from legal, IT, etc.), but they must also devise procedures to deal with unforeseen variables. For example, if a key decision maker or IT resource leaves your company, your SEO gatekeeper should have a policy/procedure in place to address the potential bottleneck.

Similarly, if you choose to change SEO agencies, it should be a measured transition where (1) the decision to change is made, (2) the new SEO firm is selected, and then (3) your SEO gatekeeper begins the transition from one agency to the next. At no point should your agency choose to terminate an SEO relationship without there being an alternative in place. Doing so can cost you months (or even years) in SEO progress.

Managing Your Rankings and Bottom Line

All relationships are a two way street, and it’s important that you take complete responsibility for the factors in a relationship that you can control. It’s tempting to think “for what I’m paying them, they better have a magic wand that they can wave and fix everything with,” but it’s irresponsible and reckless to put that thinking into practice.

You have certain business goals, and priorities always change. Many of those goals and change are directly relevant to your SEO firm (and any other agency you work with), so it’s important that they are kept in the loop. Doing so will help you get the most out your relationship and investment with them.

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

A benefit of this is that there’s an opportunity here in terms of economies of scope: the more the two work together, the more efficiencies you should experience both in rankings and “sociability” — e.g. what is shared ranks, and what ranks is shared.

Social Signals & SEO

Okay, so there are a number of so-called “social signals” that can affect your search rankings. Let’s take a quick look at some of them:

• Most recently, Google fully rolled out their Google +1 button, allowing users to effectively vote pages up in the search results.
• Both Google and Bing seem to be factoring in Shares, Likes, and Tweets into their search rankings
• and social news sites such as Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon can all boost rankings

This, of course, begs the questions: so how do you get your content Shared, Liked, and Tweeted on these social networks?

6 Types of Sharable Content

If you’re going to get your content Shared, Liked, and Tweeted, you’re going to need to do more than throw sharing buttons up all over the place, throw some traffic at it, and hope for the best. You’ll also need to understand what motivates users to share content. Users usually share content because it’s either:

• Useful/Informative,
• Interesting,
• Unique/Original,
• Inspirational,
• Funny/Entertaining,
• and/or Surprising/Shocking

Now, depending on the kind of content you’re trying to rank, you can probably appeal to at least one of these motivations. If you can’t, you’re probably doing something very wrong and should probably go back to the drawing board and reconsider your entire marketing strategy. After all, if your target marketing doesn’t find your products at least useful or unique, you’re going to have a helluva time trying to convert them.

5 Elements Worth Sharing

Digital content is inherently multi-media, and to that extent, every page offers more than one opportunity to share content. Just think of all the different elements on a page that can fill any one of the above criteria. For instance, you have:

• Product/Services
• Product Descriptions
• Product Reviews (by users)
• Images/Video
• and even Pricing

So there should be something somewhere on the pages you’re trying to rank that should appeal to the kind of users you’re targeting.

For instance, when it comes to everyday products or services, you might explore ways to write creative product descriptions or include engaging photos that users will be more likely to share through their profiles. Similarly, you might consider opening things up to user generated reviews: not only will this mean more frequently updated content on your pages (which is a staple of SEO), but you can integrate social media APIs that allow users to auto-share the review they submit.

Alternatively, you might have some novelty items in your inventory that you can induce users to Tweet, Share, Like or Digg. Even if these aren’t your bigger sellers or highest priority items, the more social signals they generate around your site, the more authority that your overall site will enjoy with search engines.

A Socially Sharable Content Strategy

Of course, generating enough social signal to actually impact your rankings is a bit more complex than making your existing content more engaging (in one of the 6 above mentioned ways) and waiting for users to share it. Rather, you actually have to drive targeted, social users who are likely to share content to your site, and this requires a bit of a content strategy.

Specifically, you need to give those users something before you expect them do something for you you, and this involves producing content that they find useful, interesting, unique, entertaining, etc., but doesn’t try to sell them anything. This means developing content for the sake of the users, seeding it across social networks, and building a rapport with users. As you do this, they’ll be more likely to discover and share the sales/product-related content that you are trying to rank for.

This is particularly pertinent for seeding content on social news sites such as Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Such site have so much potential because every share/vote you get from one of these sites counts as an actual traditional link, which has even more SEO value than a Tweet or a Like. As our own CEO, Guillaume Bouchard once put it:

When you submit a piece of content to one of these sites, users can vote it up or down. Every time a user votes for your content, you get a link on their profile. Score. If enough people vote for your content, it appears on the homepage of Digg or Reddit – both PageRank 8 pages. Super Score.

So by developing content that isn’t geared toward your products or brand but, rather, is designed to give something back to online communities, you can build considerable SEO equity. Not only will users be likely to Tweet and Like your content, but every share you get through social content sites will results in a traditional backlink that will help build the overall authority of your domain and its ability to rank other pages in general.

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

Mobile and Other Devices

Apple iPhone & iPads Homescreen icon (Blavatar)

On Apple’s iOS devices, iPhones, iPod Touch and iPads, you can bookmark a site and add it to the home screen of your device. Normally this takes a snapshot of your site, and makes an icon out of it. This isnt the prettiest way of having your website represented among the sea of beautifully glossy Apple App icons. Luckily you can add your sites icon instead of a snapshot by inserting a simple line of code to your sites header.

Create a png of your site’s icon as a square 64px x 64px image and save as “apple-touch-icon.png”. Place this image in your sites images directory and add the following line of code to your site’s header.

<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”http://www.example.com/images/apple-touch-icon.png” />

This blavatar will also be the main icon for many RSS reader apps and will be used to represent your site.

Mobile Devices (iPhone/Android/Windows Phone 7)

For most cases, your site will be to heavy and javascript feature rich to give smartphone users a usable experience. With WordPress, its easy to adapt your blog or site to mobile devices with the WPTouch plugin from Brave New Code, that will translate your pages and posts to a cut down, fast downloading mobile friendly version. This is a very simple plugin and in most cases more than adequate for most blogs, but if you want more advanced features, check out the Pro paid version.

iPad and Tablets

If you really want to go an extra step and give your users an immersive experience on their tablets that takes advantage of touch interfaces and the accelerometer, you may want to try the Onwsipe plugin. Though still in its development early stages, and can conflict with other javascript heavy themes and plugins, if configured correctly, can give a very fun and interactive way of presenting your content to those on tablets. The plugin at the moment only works for iPad users, but Onswipe is looking in to updating the plugin for Android and other tablet platforms to come.

Brave New Code also offers iPad and broader tablet compatibility with their Pro version of WPTouch. WPTouchPro will give you an iPad friendly version of your site with rich social features and customized tempting features that allow you to customize your look and feel easily.

One thing to take in to account with any of these plugins, is other plugin conflicts. These plugins will not work if you are using multi-language translation plugins such as WPML, and Onswipe will need some testing for plugin and theme compatibility.

Facebook & the Open Graph

Facebook Like/Send

Facebook has become imperative for social syndication of your content, and it’s very important to have a way for the readers of your blog to share and like your content. The problem is that Facebook can publish your user’s activity with the wrong images and descriptions if your site is not set to tell it what it needs to know. First off, you need to know how your content is syndicated on Facebook to see if your good to go or not. Facebook provides an excellent tool, called URL Linter, that gives you feedback on your url and shows you the content it grabs.

By entering your url there, Facebook gives you information on what the title, description, and image that it will use for the profile post when a reader clicks the like button. If things dont look right, then you can update your WordPress header.php to add the following code to make sure that all the Facebook OpenGraph tags are available to help Facebook grab the right content to display on the Newsfeed and Profile.

Place the following code anywhere between the <head></head> tags.

*** note: If using a third party theme that handles a posts default image through custom tags, you may have to modify the above script accordingly to get the correct thumbnail image.

Facebook Insights

Facebook now provides analytics and stats on your reader’s interactions with your content, providing you with some insight on the impressions a liked item gets, and a high level overview of your sites engagement.

Facebook Insights also lets you tie your website with its corresponding Facebook Fan Page. This makes it easier for Facebook to relate the website content shared on the Fan Page, and aggregate the interactions with the links that are shared, liked and commented on.

If you are the admin of your Fan Page and your website, all you need to do is go to the Facebook Insights Dashboard and add your domain. You will be asked to choose which profile, page or Facebook app you would like to associate the domain name with. If it’s your personal site, link it to both yourself and your page if you have one. If you represent a company, link it to the Fan Page, as this will give all Admins of the Fan Page access to the analytics.

Once the linking is done, Facebook will present you with a line of meta data code to add to your website header.

<meta property="fb:admins" content="user_id" />
<meta property="fb:page_id" content="your_page_id" />
<meta property="fb:app_id" content="your_app_id" />

To get your content across all mediums, devices and social networks take a little bit of work, but it all pays off in the end to make sure that the visibility of your site is top notch. Your readers will appreciate the fine and subtle details and will definitely increase the engagement of your site.

If you have any additional tips on how to better improve your site for social media and smartphone devices, We’d love to see your feedback in the comment section.

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

May 2, 2011. Monday morning. I arrive at the office, turn on my computer, and my co-worker Jason sends me this via Messenger:

“What!? Osama is dead???”

I share these two personal anecdotes with you not to reveal how out of the loop I felt when not hearing about these breaking news stories sooner, but rather how I heard about them. In both cases it was through someone I knew.

But in 2001, news of the World Trade Center attacks was being disseminated mainly through television and newspapers. Ten years later, the Internetz, and I do specify Internetz as “the amalgamation of all net-based media” was unfolding the demise of America’s Public Enemy No. 1 way before the mainstream media even had any concrete details to report.

Not, only that. I didn’t find out Osama was dead through Twitter or Facebook, like so many of my fellow social medialites did. I found out through a freaking meme! (And a pretty fantastic one at that.)

Where were you when you heard about these events?

In this post, I will break down how the death of Osama bin Laden unfolded on social media sites. From a Tweeter in Abbottabad leaking news about the Bin Laden raid unknowingly, to people using Foursquare to Check-In to places in a post-Osamalyptic world, here’s a look at the progression of tweets, check-ins, memes and how the overall Internet frenzy took off at the onset of Osama’s death.

How People Found Out About Osama Bin Laden’s Death:

Twitter strikes again! With over 6k of votes, people used Twitter more than Facebook to share information on the Osama raid.

How Osama’s Demise Unfolded on Twitter

With over 12.4 million tweets per hour, the news of Osama bin Laden’s death set a new record for Twitter: “The highest sustained rate of Tweets ever”. The popular microblogging site announced that from 10:45pm – 2:20am ET, there was an average of 3,000 tweets per second. Here is a timeline of Osama-related tweets before President Obama announced his death.

May 1. 15:58 PM ET. Sohaib Athar a.k.a. @ReallyVirtual unknowingly live-tweets the raid targeting Osama bin Laden
Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant living in Abbottabad , inadvertently tweeted details of the US-led operation to bring down terrorist Osama bin Laden as it happened. He quickly became Pakistan’s first Twitter user to surpass 100,000 followers. [CNET]

9:47 PM ET. Dan Pfeiffer Communications director for the White House, tweets an announcement about President Obama’s national address scheduled at 10:30 pm.

10:24 PM ET. Dwayne Johnson “The Rock” tweets “Just got word that will shock the world”

Yup. Wrestler/Fast Five movie star “The Rock” knew before any major network that Osama bin Laden was toast. Thanks to his cousin who is a Navy SEAL.

10:25 PM ET. Keith Urbahn (not the country singer) first to tweet Osama is Dead

Keith Urbahn, the 27-year-old Chief of Staff for Donald Rumsfeld was the first to claim Osama was dead. He wrote later, “My source was a connected network TV news producer”. This was said in defense to the role and power of mainstream media, diffusing claims that Twitter is the end all of news. CBS news producer Jill Scott then confirmed the rumor shortly afterward in a tweet that said, “House Intelligence committee aide confirms that Osama Bin Laden is dead. U.S. has the body.”

11:35 p.m. ET. The White House confirms, virtually, that Osama is dead

The White House tweeted that the US conducted an operation that killed Osama Bin Laden. This was shortly after President Obama spoke the words during a live statement.

Media Obama/Osama Mix-ups

In the rush to be the first to report Osama’s death, mainstream media outlets like CNN, Fox and MSNBC were all guilty of confusing the name of the United States president with that of the country’s nemesis.

Thanks to video sharing sites like YouTube these major gaffes were caught and made widely accessible for the whole world to see.

CNN: “Inside Obama’s Compound”

Fox: “President Obama is in fact dead”

Oh Fox, you’ve really done it this time…

MSNBC: Norah O’Donnell tweets “Obama shot and killed”

For more lulz, please refer to this news bloopers mash-up of all the news outlets that accidentally reported the death of “Obama” again and again…

Facebook page goes viral: Osama Bin Laden is Dead

A Facebook Page titled “Osama Bin Laden is DEAD” got over 150,000 Likes within two hours after the Obama administration confirmed he was dead. The page has actually been up  since 2001, the year the page’s admin claims Osama really died.

Celebrating Osama’s Death with Foursquare Check-Ins

By the Monday following Osama’s death Foursquare users started checking in to a world free of the Al Qaeda founder. Foursquare users were checking in to venues like the “Osama bin gonathon”, “Osamapacolypse” and the “OSAMA BIN LADEN IS DEAD VICTORY PARTY”.

Google Earth Used to Pinpoint the Whereabouts of Casa Abbottabad

After news broke out of Osama’s death, people started trawling Google Earth to find the location of his Abbottabad mansion.

I Meme Mine, I Meme Mine, I Meme Mine

No big event is a wrap until some clever troll finds a way to make a meme out of it.  Meme-makers from all ends of the net were tweaking iconic images of President Barack Obama (the victor) and poking fun at bin Laden, the bad guy that dies.

Here are just a few of my favourites.

Osama Bin Voldermort

Detective Trump

I’m The Man

Hide & Seek Chanmpion

Found You!

Obama Warrior On His Charlie Unicorm

The Situation Room

This photo had 600k views in the first hour. (13,000 views per minute)

The Super Situation Room

The Situation Room Starring: Every Meme Ever

The lead-up to bin Laden’s capture and death has been one of the most defining chapters of our decade. And now, the Osama bin Laden era is over.

But something Michael Moore wrote about regarding the bin Laden finale for Huffington Post struck me. He says,”I remember my parents telling me how, on the day it was announced that Hitler was dead, there was no rejoicing in the streets, just private relief and satisfaction.” While Moore is commenting on the disregardful nature of the frat-parties that went on “celebrating [Osama's] death at the site where the remains of his victims are still occasionally found”, it got me thinking about the wild and uncontrolled nature of the Internet.

Social media pushes our threshold for what we can tolerate seeing, reading, even laughing at. I bet you all those keggers probably rallied up on Facebook first to arrange the meeting spot. If “the medium is the message” then the Internet is certainly a medium by which messages are transmitted that can shape our perceptions of events.

I found out about Osama bin Laden’s death from an Internet meme. Does that explain this post?

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

The trendy swell was of people promoting their own first forays into the web with their first sites. The Internet was free and open, and this meant a new place for your and your business. Now the pressure is to get people to connect to a Facebook page, since that’s where so many people are, and where so many people share. Sure, you can try to get them to comment on your site, or you can get them to engage with you through Facebook and share their experience with their contacts. But a presence on an open web compared to a(n extemely closed) corporation’s platform is a totally different animal.

We have never dealt with this before, really. People would find businesses with the paper Yellow Pages, but no business would plaster “Check us out in the Yellow Pages!”, even if millions of people use the Yellow Pages, because they don’t use it socially, and because there’s no additional functionality. That said, Facebook pages themselves offer appallingly little for functionality, but the sharing is enough. If you do want the functionality, though, you have the option to tap into Facebook using Facebook Connect, where people can log in to your site and all it offers using their Facebook account. What a relinquishing! I can certainly understand and in many ways agree with an older fashioned business mentality that doesn’t want to share attention.

Facebook is an ever-growing juggernaut. The bottom line is that it can be a great tool as a content sharing and discussing platform. But how much is the brand message cut by having it paired with Facebook? That’s someone else’s logo, someone else’s site. And not just any, but a site that is under constant scrutiny for the misuse of personal data. You can play apologist and blame the person who shares their life willingly, but it’s like the con man who says “I didn’t take his money - he gave it to me.” A person is smart - people are stupid. That doesn’t mean you should exploit stupidity, or partner with someone who does.

Kay forgot one thing in the video above; people are lazy, too. If enough people around them do something, they’ll just go along with it and assume it must be safe. Facebook has, after all, banked on popularity to muscle through ethical toe-lining from its very beginnings.

Even if you are certain that a few sharing buttons here and there are a clear net positive, you think your brand is completely intact, and you have no concern for the multi-billion dollar unchecked information leech in the age of identity theft and wiretaps, you have to acknowledge that there are limits.

As an example of a site that no perception whatsoever of these limits, let’s take the Huffington Post. I followed a Digg link to an article there, and my experience there actually spawned this whole post. Forgive the image size, but have a look below, and see the highlighted yellow as parts relating to Facebook, red for Twitter thrown in for good measure. Click on this shrunken version below to expand.

Am I crazy, or is this not ridiculous? 20 Facebook logos on this page. It’s like someone wearing a Twilight hat, shirt, shoes, necklace, and bracelet. Like I said, some branding issues here, but also a tacky lack of class. I suspect someone’s mandate at the Huffington Post is to get them more presence on Facebook, no matter what. And I suspect someone else at the Huffington Post hates the garbage look they were stuck with.

People can still share on Facebook without these buttons, and they will, if the content’s strong enough. Is the thinking still that it’s worth it to shove Facebook down their throats to maximize the chances, regardless of the consequences? I believe that businesses choosing to forego the Facebook presence will suffer much the same consequences as a regular human being doing the same. They will get by just fine, with less, but more meaningful connections.

We are now comfortable essentially sharing our member base, relying on the whims of a multibilion dollar site to form the backbone of our members area. But what happens when the overwhelming masses can’t be bothered to maintain multiple accounts, and genuinely won’t join sites if they can’t do it with the speed and ease that Facebook offers? Even if many users would still join, if the bottom line result will be more members, business and website owners will often be seduced.

Let’s say you want to promote a video of yours. Sure, you can host it yourself, but for most people, the combination of free hosting bandwidth with the fact that there are so many people makes YouTube an obvious choice for the destination of your upload. Those with a commitment to either SEO or control of their advertising might still go it alone, but they are going against the grain, and it cannot be denied that there is loss in not taking advantage or the collected, social, sharing mass. But if your content is excellent, you might not need YouTube. Look at The Escapist’s massively and consistently popular Zero Punctuation, watched on the site, shared around the web. They had the guts to not rely on YouTube, to focus on their own site, have their banners and in-video advertising.

You don’t need reach around to Facebook if you are willing to invest in quality. Making Facebook a big part of your content plan means you will become both empowered and disempowered, in a manner not unlike selling your soul to the devil. Ride the perks, suffer the consequences. Go where the people are, and feed them your traffic. Sell them while you sell you. Perpetuate their dominance with your compliance. Give impressions to their banners. But maybe you could have made it without the deal with the devil?

Funnily enough, one of the few general areas of the web not affected by Zuckerization is the adult word. Facebook, like most mainstream large corporations, won’t touch porn with a ten foot pole (unlike Google, which links to porn more than any site in the history of the Internet). This means that despite adult’s consistently remarkable and innovative sharing techniques that have typically left the mainstream web in the dust, adult sites don’t and won’t ever have the fastest-growing and most well-known sharing method on the web. Why? Because Facebook doesn’t want to be associated with porn. Bit ironic, since everyone else wants to be associated with the most dubious personal data collecting and selling entity ever known.

Many businesses have benefitted greatly from Facebook use, and I’m not going to flat out claim it’s always a bad idea to create a Facebook page or even to implement Facebook Connect. I just think that the decision isn’t obvious, that there are pros and cons to weigh, questions worth asking. Should you be investing your time and money elsewhere, into your own site, good enough to be shared on Facebook anyway? How many references to Facebook on your website would be a good idea, if any? Is the message of your brand dampened or damaged by having to promoting it alongside Facebook’s? Does Facebook’s behaviour matter to you, as far as data-related ethics are concerned?

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

First, That Basic Introduction to Match Types

Exact match represents bid for the exact phrase you want to bid on, your ad only triggering if the Google user searched specifically exactly those words in exactly that order. These keywords are typically represented in square brackets. So, you might bid on [womens leather jackets], and your ad would only be shown if that exact entire term was searched.

Phrase match gives you some exact control over the core of the keywords you want to bid for, but allows you to account for variations on the phrase that users may search. You specify a set of keywords you want to keep in their exact order, but are willing to have your add triggered even if extra words are included in the search before or after your chosen set. These phrase match keywords you bid on are typically represented in quotation marks. So, if you bid on “leather jackets”, your ad could be triggered for searches for leather jackets, womens leather jackets, mens leather jackets, leather jackets for purple ponies, and so on.

The third match type is more broad than the first two, and as such is called, as you might expect… broad match! This is used when you want Google to show your ad as long as there is a connection to at least one of the terms in your phrase. Word order is irrelevant, and you are giving Google the freedom to make much looser connections. Broad match keywords don’t use additional formatting to identify (like the square brackets or quotation marks of the other match types). So, bidding on leather jackets can show ads for searches for mens leather jackets, jacket for pony, leather coat, leather on the weekends, and any other loose connection for plural/singular distinctions and related terms.

As of last year, there is a way you can get more control of your broad match terms, using modified broad match. This allows a lot of the reaching flexibility of broad match, while allowing you to specify keywords that must be in the search query. To bid on a broad phrase but insist on a particular keyword’s inclusion, simply add a + before the keyword. So, bidding on leather +jackets will return the results that bidding on leather jackets would bring, but only for queries containing the word jackets.

Here is a table that Google provided on their AdWords blog to summarize what I’ve written above (click to see full size):

The broader the search term, the greater the chance of you bidding on terms that are irrelevant to you. You can specify that you don’t want your ads shown for and queries containing terms you indicate as negative keywords. You specify negative keywords in exact, phrase, and broad terms, to control how you want the exclusion to play out.

The table below, also provided on the AdWords blog, will serve better than any written explanation:

Now, Which to Pick?

Now that we’re all on the same page, here are strategic concerns and considerations to help you actually decide which of these to pick. These are general guidelines that may have cases where you would consider acting differently, but should help with some issues.

JUST STARTING OUT WITH ONLY BROAD MATCH?

Don’t make the mistake of only using broad match, just because you’re not prepared to put the time into telling Google exactly what you want. Broad match has lower conversion rates, and needs to be supplemented with some specificity. Also, while broad match can be useful for higher traffic with a wider reach, you must be willing to put the time in to run query reports to identify keywords that have absolutely no business being there, and add words to your negative keywords list. Broad without negatives means burning money.

ANY HELP FOR NEGATIVE KEYWORDS?

The search query report will definitely highlight problem areas, but if you’re looking to highlight problem terms before you start, use the Google keyword tool and search for broad terms. You will, in most cases, find negative keywords in the suggested list.

LOOKING FOR A GENERAL STRATEGY FOR WHICH MATCH TYPE TO USE?

Use them all! Each match type has strengths in different ways, which may not be entirely apparent when you start. Try them all out, and see what performs and what doesn’t. Cut what doesn’t. Just make sure you don’t sacrifice too much of your budget on broad terms that are less relevant than your exact match terms which are much more likely to convert. Don’t be afraid to bid a bit more on exact terms to give a greater chance your money is spent there.

Exact match represents the bigger stones you put in the jar first that make sure you convert. Phrase match are the pebbles you use to fill out a bit more with a reasonable mass of performance. Broad match is the sand you use to fill the rest of the budget jar. The idea is that you don’t want to put too much sand in before you have your stones taken care of.

Note, you don’t need broad, phrase, and exact versions of every term in your list, but do make sure the highest volume key terms at least start at all three match types.

ONLY HAVE A SMALL BUDGET?

Don’t use it on broad match. Use it on the exact terms that are more likely to convert. Even if you spend more per click, the results will, in most cases, make the extra spend per click worth it.

MORE INTERESTED IN VOLUME AND BRANDING THAN CONVERSIONS?

That’s what broad match is really for. Rather than potentially spend more on exact terms, let broad match do what it’s meant to do, and just keep on top of your negative keywords to make sure you’re still bidding within reason.

IS PHRASE MATCH THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS?

Sometimes yes, but often it’s the worst of both worlds. You might end up spending more because you are reaching a wide audience, but converting less because your terms end up not specific enough. By all means, try it out, but keep a close eye on it.

SHOULD I BID ON MY BRAND? IF SO, HOW?

Bid on your brand or any key product with an exact match keyword.

Any other strategic questions regarding match types? Put them in the comments, and I’ll help!

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.