Internet Audience Development by Brian Provost

The Coming Wave of Spammy Facebook Usernames

Brian — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:54:48 +0000

Saw this on my Facebook wall a few minutes ago:

Soon you will be able to have a username. Starting on Friday, June 12th, at 11:01pm, you’ll be able to choose a username for your Facebook account to easily direct friends, family, and coworkers to your profile.

Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you’ll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that you administer by visiting www.facebook.com/username/.

Check out the Facebook Blog for more information or send yourself an email with the details.

Better hurry up and change your name to Buy Viagra, Bad Credit Mortgage, Free Government Grants, or Super Acai Berry. For those of you wearing hats of a slightly whiter shade, add this to your things to bill your Reputation Management clients for this month.

Nice Universal Search for Formula One Fans

Brian — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:13:03 +0000

I’m a huge Formula One guy and a big fan of most motorsports that don’t involve rednecks, a stadium, and turning left for four hours at a time. I was half asleep last night by the end of the F1 Bahrain race and wanted to remind myself of the results again when I was more coherent this moring. So I Googled [formula 1] to go to all the usual F1 news sites.

But I also got this at the top of the SERP:

Must be nice for Formula1.com to have the top 3 first page results. Also very cool that there is a reminder with the time for the next race.

As much as we all bang on Google as search practitioners or adversaries in information retrieval, as a consumer, we should give them a little credit when they do build things that make our lives easier or better.

Portfolio.com About To Suffer The Same Fate As Many Of Your Portfolios

Brian — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:34:21 +0000

Conde Nast has decided to shutter Portfolio magazine. Any of my readers have visibility into Conde Nast’s plans for that domain? I probably have a buyer for it they need to shore up their balance sheet.

Instant Reputation Management With Google Profiles

Brian — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 06:17:26 +0000

As those of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen me Tweet about this a little while ago, many (if not most) of you will be able to get 1st page SERP real estate for your name by completing a Google Profile. It was basically a real time result for me to get this:

This should immediately be inserted into your processes for those of you managing Reputation Management clients. Especially if they have popular names (eg, “John Smith”). Or, apparently, if your name is Todd Malicoat!…

Now, as cool as that is, the more interesting opportunity for the savvier spammers among us is the last line of that Profiles insertion. Wanna guess how much traffic and user registrations that drives to Myspace, Facebook, Classmates, and LinkedIn?

Using Social Media in Your B-to-B Marketing: The 5 Best Practices for Building Dialogue & Demand

Brian — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:11:19 +0000

For those of you in the B2B world, we (Tippit) are doing a webinar at the end of the month on how you can leverage social media in your demand generation:

“As the number of online conversations, through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, continue to skyrocket, social media IS giving companies a very low-cost communication channel to engage prospects and customers!

Join this FREE live & interactive web event to learn how social media CAN have an immediate and positive impact on your business. ”