Seth Goldstein Online

Flash can now be tracked with Google Analytics – Case Study Sprout

Seth Goldstein — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:40:31 PDT

Adobe and Google along with their developers network have developed a way for Google Analytics to track Flash. Read more at Mashable and view the video below.

How do you think this will effect the Internet as a whole? Post your thoughts in the comments.

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Jason Calacanis on Robert Llewellyn’s podcast Carpool

Seth Goldstein — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:00:39 PDT

Robert Llewellyn, famous for his role as Kryton on the British Sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf, runs an awesome podcast called Carpool. He interviews interesting and well known (if not famous) people while driving them around. Brilliant idea. In this episode Jason Calacanis talks with Robert about his background and how he got where he is today.

Click here to view episode (full browser window)

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Mapping out your company’s social media plan

Seth Goldstein — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:22:38 PDT

Before you get started in social media to promote your company, you need to have a plan in place. Not only do you need to plan you need to know how to execute the plan and the tactic.

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Visualization is very important… if not as important as SEO as a whole

Seth Goldstein — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:10:34 PDT

Rand over at SEOMoz posted his weekly Whiteboard Friday video. This week… Visualization. Rand makes some great points about how visualization shouldn’t be forgotten when one is building their site and optimizing it. Often times the visuals are what make people come back and drive traffic to your site. Rand also talks about visualization in other online mediums like video. I have to admit I’m guilt of doing what he says might not be the wisest… I sit and talk to the camera. Though, this is a technique that I’ve found is useful for getting my point across, I think I may mix things up a bit with some visuals in the next video.

Check out the video here:

What do you think of the power of visualization? Is it always needed? Post your thoughts in the comments.

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Social Media isn’t just for Tech-centric Businesses

Seth Goldstein — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:45:02 PDT

People come up to me all the time and ask if I think their business would benefit from Social Media and Viral Marketing. I almost always say yes. There really isn’t any business that can’t benefit from more exposure to the masses. Below in the video, I talk some more about this and how we at Goldstein Media can help you and your company capitalize on Social Media and Viral Marketing.

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Let’s Blame EVERYTHING on Cancer – #blamedrewscancer

Seth Goldstein — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:36:48 PDT

@drew

Drew Olanoff, an avid Tweeter and social media maven has cancer. When he found out he needed a way to deal with it. Enter the hashtag #blamedrewscancer and the website BlameDrewsCancer.com. Drew a true-blue Philly-boy was on Fox 29 this morning talking about his social media phenomenon and how he’s not only helping raise money for cancer research but awareness to the disease(s) as well.

Drew’s useage of social media is a fantastic example of how new technology can be used to build a brand and take a stand on an imporant issue. Please check out his site. Donate if you can and participate in any manner possible.

Social Media Marketing. Are you really and expert? There is a
YouTube Tests Downloading of Videos – Free and to Purchase In the ong

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Bookmarks for July 2nd through July 8th

Seth Goldstein — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:00:23 PDT

These are my links for July 2nd through July 8th:

Official Gmail Blog: Gmail leaves beta, launches "Back to Beta" Labs feature – Google Gmail is out of Beta but if you're sad to see that beta sign go you can get it back in the labs! Haha very funny
Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS – Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.
Socialtext: Products & Services: Free 50 Offer – A free, hosted Socialtext account for up to 50 people from your company. It is private between co-workers. You and your colleagues get private, “Twitter‑like” micro‑blogging, social networking, and a shared wiki workspace. And you each get your own personal home page. If a collaboration network already exists for your company, you will be added to it. If not, one will be created.
Google Voice’s Secret Weapon: Number Portability – Today you are issued a new phone number when you sign up for Google Voice. But we’ve confirmed that a very small number of people have ported their existing numbers to Google (Google uses Level3 to handle phone numbers). In the U.S. it’s possible to port any phone number to another service provider – even a mobile number to a voip provider like Level3.
Google is only testing the service for now, but we’ve heard from a source inside Google that they plan to roll out number portability as a general feature later this year. Once that happens, users will be able to move the phone number they’ve had forever to Google, and avoid the switching costs.
Tweet Reel for iPhone: The TwitPic of Video? – Since the iPhone 3GS became available to people across the land, there has been no shortage of mobile video recording and sharing apps hitting the market. A week ago, Mashable (Mashable)’s Jennifer Van Grove highlighted three great ways to post video to Twitter from the iPhone 3GS. One interesting app that she mentioned was the Tweet Reel iPhone App.
Master List ‎(A Wiki of Social Media Marketing Examples)‎ –
In defense of web developers – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report – xHTML isn't bad, but some are trashing the standards-driven coding language because there is a new sheriff in town. Zeldman discusses the debate. Great comments too!
YouTube To Broadly Release Call-To-Action Overlays, Allow Linking Off-Site – Tomorrow, YouTube is going to release a very important addition to its suite of advertising products, and it has the potential to have a huge impact for politicians, brands, and charities alike. The funny thing is, you probably thought it was already out there.
FriendFeed Makes Its Search Results Real-Time Too – Ever since its redesign a few months ago, FriendFeed has been one of the standard-bearers of the real-time web. That’s because while a lot of sites claim to be real-time, FriendFeed is one of the few that actually updates continuously as data comes in. Starting today, any search you do will also get that same real-time treatment.
Change Feedburner Email Subject Lines – Website Magazine – Website Magazine – That changes today as some new capabilities have been brought to the Email Branding section of FeedBurner's Email Subscriptions feature.

Bookmarks for July 2nd through July 5th These are
Bookmarks for July 1st through July 2nd These are
Bookmarks for July 2nd through July 7th These are

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10 Stunning (and Interesting) Stats on Twitter

Seth Goldstein — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:39:03 PDT

Rohit Bhargava posted a fantastic and very useful post on Twitter on his Influential Marketing Blog. He recently did a study on how peple are using Twitter, the microblogging social media service. His findings are very interesting and informative. One concern I have is that Twitter, as it goes main stream will slowly die off because those who join up won’t become active participants in the online community. Right now it’s just a fear, but it’s possibly a valid one. Check out his findings below:

21% (One Fifth) of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders. These are the percentage of Twitter accounts that have never posted a single tweet. They may either be registered simply to hold a username for later use, or be experimental accounts started up but never used.

Nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers. In a finding perhaps consistent with the newness of the tool as well as the fact that many people may currently have an account simply to start experimenting with the tool, Sysomos found the vast majority of Twitter users have an extremely low followership.

March and April of 2009 were the tipping point for Twitter. During these months, Ashton Kutcher launched his quest to get to 1 million followers faster than CNN, Oprah started using Twitter, and the steady flow of new users to the site continued. For many, it offered a safer and easier way to get their feet wet with social media, 140 characters at a time.

150 followers is the magic number. In a particularly interesting data point from the survey, Sysomos found that Twitter users tended to “follow back” all their followers up until about 150 connections. Then the reciprocation rate fell off dramatically, which seems to indicate that this number may be the crossover point where people shift from using Twitter for more personal use to using it more for “lifecasting” their thoughts and actions to a community of people who they feel varying levels of connection to.

A small minority creates most of the activity. A steep curve of a small minority of actively engaged content creators generating most of the activity on a site is common among social networks, but it is steeper and more pronounced on Twitter. 5% of users account for 75% of all activity, and 10% of users account for 86%. This seems to suggest that the site has managed to engage a mass audience beyond those who typically engage with social media.

Half of all Twitter users are not “active.” If you take a general description of being “active” on Twitter to mean that you have posted a tweet at some point in the last 7 days (1 week), then the survey learned that 50.4% of all Twitter users fit this category. If you remove the 21% from point #1, this leaves about 30% of users who have an account and have tweeted before, but happen to be inactive now.

Tuesday is the most active Twitter day. One of the most useful data points from the report is that it clears up the common question of which day of the week is the best day to tweet something. Sysomos found that Tuesday stood out as the most popular day for tweets and retweets, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.

APIs have been the key to Twitter’s growth & utility. In terms of tools that people are using for Twitter, Sysomos found that more than half (55%) of all Twitter users use something other than Twitter.com to tweet, search and connect with others. This may, in part, be due to Twitter’s notorious reputation of failing/crashing, but also is a credit to all the third party applications that have been built on top of Twitter and do their fair share to bring new users to the service.

English still dominates Twitter. When exploring Russia as part of a class that I am teaching this summer at Georgetown, one of the barriers we learned about was the difficulty of fitting some Russian language words into just 140 characters. Twitter is, however, extremely English-friendly. As the Sysomos report found, the top four countries on Twitter are all English speaking (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Of these, US makes up 62% of all Twitter users, followed by UK with nearly 8% and Canada and Australia with 5.7% and 2.8% respectively. The largest non-English speaking country on Twitter? Brazil with 2%.

Twitter is being led by the social media geeks. This particular finding should likely come as no surprise, but 15% of Twitter users who follow more than 2000 people identify themselves as social media marketers. These individuals are more likely to post updates every day (sometimes more than once per day) and also use Twitter more actively for direct communication.

Bonus Geographical Stat/Quote: “The cities with the biggest Twitter populations are New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, and Boston. Los Angeles is the fastest growing city on the list.”

Download the full report from Sysomos at http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/

Putting Advertisements in Your Twitter Stream – Thoughts? I’ve
Guest Post: The Business of Twitter Twitter e
Social Media Marketing. Are you really and expert? There is a

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Bookmarks for July 2nd through July 7th

Seth Goldstein — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:00:23 PDT

These are my links for July 2nd through July 7th:

In defense of web developers – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report – xHTML isn't bad, but some are trashing the standards-driven coding language because there is a new sheriff in town. Zeldman discusses the debate. Great comments too!
YouTube To Broadly Release Call-To-Action Overlays, Allow Linking Off-Site – Tomorrow, YouTube is going to release a very important addition to its suite of advertising products, and it has the potential to have a huge impact for politicians, brands, and charities alike. The funny thing is, you probably thought it was already out there.
FriendFeed Makes Its Search Results Real-Time Too – Ever since its redesign a few months ago, FriendFeed has been one of the standard-bearers of the real-time web. That’s because while a lot of sites claim to be real-time, FriendFeed is one of the few that actually updates continuously as data comes in. Starting today, any search you do will also get that same real-time treatment.
Change Feedburner Email Subject Lines – Website Magazine – Website Magazine – That changes today as some new capabilities have been brought to the Email Branding section of FeedBurner's Email Subscriptions feature.
SEO Ultimate for WordPress (Plugin) – Website Magazine – Website Magazine – If there's one complaint about WordPress, it's the strictness of the platform when it comes to SEO. Sure, you can do quite a bit with the software right out of the box, but there's a lot more that 'could' be done. Fortunately, plugins such as the All-in-One SEO Pack have helped to fill the void, but others are fast entering the marketing including newly released SEO Ultimate), an "all-in-one" WP Plugin that is really very powerful.
Things You Need to Know About Twitter Security | WebProNews – There has been more than one story in the news recently about Twitter accounts being hijacked. The most recent examples of note include the accounts of Britney Spears and famed blogger/entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki. These issues have highlighted some potential dangers of using the service, or really social networks in general.

Bookmarks for July 2nd through July 5th These are
Bookmarks for July 1st through July 2nd These are
Bookmarks for July 2nd through July 8th These are

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Bookmarks for July 2nd through July 5th

Seth Goldstein — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:00:08 PDT

These are my links for July 2nd through July 5th:

YouTube To Broadly Release Call-To-Action Overlays, Allow Linking Off-Site – Tomorrow, YouTube is going to release a very important addition to its suite of advertising products, and it has the potential to have a huge impact for politicians, brands, and charities alike. The funny thing is, you probably thought it was already out there.
FriendFeed Makes Its Search Results Real-Time Too – Ever since its redesign a few months ago, FriendFeed has been one of the standard-bearers of the real-time web. That’s because while a lot of sites claim to be real-time, FriendFeed is one of the few that actually updates continuously as data comes in. Starting today, any search you do will also get that same real-time treatment.
Change Feedburner Email Subject Lines – Website Magazine – Website Magazine – That changes today as some new capabilities have been brought to the Email Branding section of FeedBurner's Email Subscriptions feature.
SEO Ultimate for WordPress (Plugin) – Website Magazine – Website Magazine – If there's one complaint about WordPress, it's the strictness of the platform when it comes to SEO. Sure, you can do quite a bit with the software right out of the box, but there's a lot more that 'could' be done. Fortunately, plugins such as the All-in-One SEO Pack have helped to fill the void, but others are fast entering the marketing including newly released SEO Ultimate), an "all-in-one" WP Plugin that is really very powerful.
Things You Need to Know About Twitter Security | WebProNews – There has been more than one story in the news recently about Twitter accounts being hijacked. The most recent examples of note include the accounts of Britney Spears and famed blogger/entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki. These issues have highlighted some potential dangers of using the service, or really social networks in general.

Bookmarks for July 2nd through July 7th These are
Bookmarks for July 1st through July 2nd These are
Bookmarks for July 2nd through July 8th These are

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Links for 2009-06-17 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Bing Keeps Growing: Has Microsoft Finally Cracked Search?
In its second week since launch, Microsoft’s new Bing search engine has continued its steady growth, according to comScore. Bing is up about 3 percentage points in both average daily penetration among US searchers and their total share of search results pages (which indicates the percentage of all actual searches, though is not an exact measure), compared to the week prior to launch. Bing now has 16.7% searcher penetration and a 12.1% share of search results pages among all US workday searches. Those numbers are also both up compared to its first week in the wild.
Adobe Labs - Adobe Flash Builder 4
Adobe's NEW Flash Builder 4 Beta! FREE DOWNLOAD - No Joke!
How It Works : Google News Forum Publisher FAQ - Google News (publishers) Help
Google Explains how to get your news on Google News

Links for 2009-06-16 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

State Department to Twitter: Keep Iranian tweets coming // Current
Senior officials say the State Department is working with Twitter and other social networking sites to ensure Iranians are able to continue to communicate to each other and the outside world.

Links for 2009-06-15 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Effective PPC Ad Copy 101, Part 1 - Search Engine Watch (SEW)
One of the most important factors of a successful PPC campaign is writing successful ad copy. You can spend a good deal of time on other aspects of your campaign but skimp on the ad copy and you might not get the results you're looking for. This two-part article will review several tips for crafting high performing ad copy and methods for testing its effectiveness.
The Mashable Lounge Launches: Live Twitter Chatroom
Later today we’re introducing a new, exclusive feature on Mashable – the Mashable Lounge. This live Twitter chatroom was created in partnership with Tinychat, and combines live video streaming with Sign-in via Twitter oAuth: in short, Twitter users can join the chatroom in one click with no password required.
Tinychat - Free Chat Room audio video conference
With TinyChat you can create your own chatroom and invite people through one simple link. You can also embed your chatroom on your blog, myspace, personal site and many other portals. And, you can invite people through simple mail notification and twitterings. Try it, you’ll like it.
Hulu - Labs: Hulu Desktop
hulu on your desktop

Links for 2009-06-12 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Making Millions via Twitter: @DellOutlet Surpasses $2 Million in Sales
@DellOutlet has been one of the biggest success stories amongst big companies using social media. For those unaware, @DellOutlet is a Twitter (Twitter reviews) account owned by Dell that tweets out major discounts for Dell computers and products. All of the deals on @DellOutlet are Twitter-exclusive.
Army Reverses Policy to Allow Troops to Use Social Networking Sites - Political News - FOXNews.com
American soldiers can now tweet, send friend requests and share photos and personal news just like the rest of the World Wide Web.
Technology Review: Social Networks Keep Privacy in the Closet
Social-networking sites lead a double life. On one hand, they encourage users to share as much personal information as possible, making it easy to post photos, videos, notes, and links. But at the same time, these sites have to safeguard that information and limit how it is shared between users and beyond their own walls. Users are often dismayed when their information reaches unintended recipients, such as bosses, relatives, or other companies.
Facebook to Begin Mediating Intractable Web Name Disputes - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
As has been widely noted in the blogosphere this week, Friday night Facebook will begin allowing users to register their own plain-language Facebook domain names, like facebook.com/bits.

Links for 2009-06-11 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Twitter on Pepsi Can: Entering Mainstream or Jumping the Shark?
Indeed, when a huge international corporation like PepsiCo recognizes you in such a way that it prints its Twitter address on a Pepsi Raw can (only in the UK, but still), you can no longer be cool or rad; you’re now part of the mainstream. Of course, those of us who are following Twitter (Twitter reviews) closely know this already, but if anyone ever needs a defining moment in which Twitter went from being that little microblogging service to an online powerhouse, this is it.
Google Openly Profiles SEOs As Criminals
Google does profile SEOs. They’re identified as “high risk” and so are all of their associated projects.

Links for 2009-06-10 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Video Search 101, Part 2 - Search Engine Watch (SEW)
More from Ron Jones at SearchEngineWatch on Video SEO