In the Internet business, astroturfing mostly refers to posting fake comments, “I LOVE Brand X! – Joe Schmoe.” I’ve dealt with a few marketers who wanted to try it and I consistently tell them not too. There are many reasons, but the main one is, you will get caught. While your marketer is working for a paycheck, many forum moderators are doing it for the love, and thus will spend more hours trying to catch you than you can trying to evade.

Now there is another new reason. It’s against the law and you can be fined thanks to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. $300,000 for a few false comments is not chump change. I think the fines and anything else that discourages the practice is good for consumers and Internet businesses.

Google announced a new feature today that let’s you share a page of public information about yourself across Google sites: Google Profile. It’s a very cool features, especially if you want to affect how you appear in Google searches. However, it does raise issues of safely and easily people divide their public and personal information. I wrote a post about this when I first branched this blog from my personal one.

My policy now is that anything associated with my name should be written as if it were going to show on my resume. This means Facebook is only good for viewing other people’s posts. Anything personal, I post to a blog using a pseudo name. However, I stick by the overarching policy, anything that you don’t want the world to know, don’t post it on the Internet. Period. I think Google could do a lot of good teaching people that with their default feature sets and instructions.

For some, the Internet is not easy. For others, it is not easy to make it easy. Especially over the phone.

I think a lot of projects like that fail for a reason that can be described in this metaphor: The tech people make water, beef, and tomatoes in a pot. And if you ask them what they make, they say, “water, beef, and tomatoes in a pot.” The business people want stew.

You need to make sure that everyone on the team knows that you are making stew and that someone is responsible for ensuring that happens. Unfortunately, that person has to be tri-lingual, speaking marketing, tech, and English.

I probably forgot a lot of obvious tips, so c’mon people, show me up in the comments.

10 Tips for Your Small Consumer Web Site: SEO, Buzz, and More
(in no particular order)

1.) Validate your HTML & CSS: Mostly good is good enough.
2.) Create good Meta tags: http://www.webspresso.com/metatag.htm Good <title> tags too.
3.) Start a blog on the site. Many hosting providers have a one-click way to install it at yoursite.com/blog. Link it to it from all pages. Write one or two articles a week about how things are going. Write posts about how cufflinks would be great for St. Pat’s Day. Ask customers to email their photos and stories and post those. I recommend WordPress with the Akismet plugin for comment spam.
4.) Add http://google.com/analytics code to all your pages so you can see how your efforts are doing.
5.) Host all the customer pictures and site pictures on Flickr. Add lots of tags. Link back to the site in the descriptions.
6.) Post your product on eBay every week with the Buy Now option. Link back the site in the eBay description.
7.) Join every social network you can as the site, create groups, get everyone you know to friend you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
8.) Get anyone you know with a site to link to your site. Here you go: An awesome gift idea, cufflinks with your kids fingerprints! FingerPrintCufflinks.com!
9.) Investigate an Amazon Store: the Individual account is transactional, while the professional is $39.99 a month. You could test for one month to see if it covers itself.
10.) Don’t astroturf (put fake comments on other sites) or send out form emails. Personalized emails to editors of shopping and gift blogs may get you a write up, though.

After all these are done and you’re selling lots of cuff links, consider Search Engine Marketing. You need to have good books and accounts. If you can determine your average profit per sale, you can use the Google interface to manage your spend to an Effective CPA for the percent return on investment you want. Jewelery, gifts, and kids are all rather pricey keywords, but you might be able to generate some traffic with some more long tail terms like “memento” or “french cuff.” You know, I think we should all get a beer to discuss SEM in person.

I’ve been playing with Zend v. 6 and found this interesting comparison chart of some other web development IDE options by Davey Shafik.

The biggest problem I have with IDE and frameworks is not the overhead they call create. It’s how to get five different programmers to all buy into the same platform, with out beating them with a stick or owing them beers for the next dozen Fridays.

Jon goes on to posit that Agile development, with the dependence on verbal communication rather than arduous specification, can scratch the social itch.

While my team is not always using strict Agile methodology, we do have frequent “scrum-like” project and design meetings. As a very social beast myself, I love collaborative meetings, as long as their aren’t too many cooks in the room and it’s ultimately productive.

Another problem I’ve had to conquer is how to share my photos once they are at Flickr. I’d rather have them integrated with my personal site than send visitors to Flickr. For $25 a year, I feel I have the right to distribute my own photos. The Flickr license supports this, as long as there is a link to the original on Flickr.

To solve these problem and as part of my Sisyphean task to create the ideal and effortless, yet easy, way to share photos, I’ve dusted off my programming fingers and started banging out some code. I’ve got two efforts working:

1.) I’m trying to contribute to the Drupal Flickr Module. Drupal is an open source CMS that I use to publish my personal site. I’ve tweaked their Flickr module to easily publish individual or photo sets from Flickr to my site. I’ve offered my code to that team, so I hope it’s soon easy for all Drupal users to do the same. A WordPress module would also be easy to create.

2.) I just started a project at http://code.google.com called FlickrOCD. Currently, I’m only at the “Hello World” phase with Python, but I had switched a New Year’s resolution to learn Spanish to learn a new computer language instead. That should free up some time.

Whether or not I can complete these projects, I’m enjoying learning more about the Drupal CMS ,the Google App Engine, MVC, and GQL. It helps me manage developer teams when I am familiar with multiple technologies so that I can steer the team to the architecture most appropriate for our goals.

Someday, when a friend or relative asks, “How should I manage my photos?” I hope to send them to a complete guide here at STC.com.