Central Perk

joi, 31 martie 2011

Gas Prices

Good afternoon,

Surprised at how much it cost last time you filled up your gas tank? You're not alone. Millions of families and businesses across the country are feeling the pinch of rising gas prices.

Here's the thing: as long as our economy relies on oil and as demand in countries like China and India continues to grow, we'll be subject to these kinds of spikes in gas prices.

We've been down this road before -- just three years ago, gas prices rose to their highest level ever. There was no quick fix to lower prices then, just as there isn't one now.

For decades, politicians here in Washington have talked a lot about the dangers of our dependence on foreign oil, but this talk hasn't always been met with action. And today, Americans pay a price for that inaction every time they fill up their tanks.

Yesterday, we unveiled a Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future that sets a goal of reducing our imports of foreign oil. By 2025 -- a little more than a decade from now -- we will have cut that reliance by one-third.

Learn more about the Blueprint and watch President Obama's speech on energy security:

In his speech yesterday, President Obama outlined his plan to secure our energy future by developing and securing America's energy resources, bringing energy costs down for consumers, and innovating our way to a clean energy future.

Increase domestic energy production. Last year, American oil production reached its highest level since 2003. And, because we can't just drill our way out of this crisis, we're reducing our dependence on oil by increasing fuel efficiency and increasing our production of natural gas and biofuels.
Reduce demand for oil. Transportation is responsible for 70 percent of our petroleum consumption, so one of the quickest and easiest ways to reduce our dependence on foreign oil is to make transportation more efficient. That's why, in April of last year, the Obama Administration established a groundbreaking national fuel efficiency standard for cars and trucks that will save us 1.8 billion barrels of oil and save consumers thousands of dollars. We're also making investments in electric vehicles and the advanced batteries that power them to ensure that high-quality, fuel-efficient cars and trucks are built right here in America.
Increase production of clean energy. In his State of the Union address, President Obama set a goal that by 2035, 80 percent of our electricity should come from clean energy sources including renewables like wind and solar, nuclear energy, efficient natural gas, and clean coal.

The concepts are straightforward, but the execution will be challenging. In order to make this happen, Republicans and Democrats in Congress must find common ground for a responsible and effective energy policy.

But no matter your views on this issue, I think we can all agree that the United States simply can't afford to leave this challenge for future generations to solve.

Sincerely,

David Plouffe
Senior Advisor to the President

P.S. Check out our new Advise the Advisor video featuring Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and give us your feedback on how we can meet the President's goal of reducing imports of oil by one-third in a little over a decade:

http://www.WhiteHouse.gov/Advise

This email was sent to e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com.
Unsubscribe e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com | Privacy Policy
Please do not reply to this email. Contact the White House

The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111

Advise the Advisor: Secretary Chu on Energy Policy

Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, March 31, 2011

Advise the Advisor: Secretary Chu on Energy Policy

In the latest installment of Advise the Advisor, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu asks for your feedback on meeting President Obama’s goal of reducing our oil imports by one-third in a little over a decade.

Tell us what you think.

Facebook vs Twitter: Which is More Valuable? Graywolf's SEO Blog

Facebook vs Twitter: Which is More Valuable?

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 07:42 AM PDT

Recently there has been a lot of talk about Facebook versus Twitter and which is more valuable to web publishers. If you’re looking for the short answer, IMHO it’s Facebook; but, to understand why, you need to have deeper understanding of how each system works.

One of the key aspects of Twitter’s meteoric rise was a very low barrier to entry: basically all you needed was a working email address. This is also one of Twitter’s drawbacks, making it extremely easy for one person to create and manage more than one Twitter account. If you’ve ever gotten a robo-tweet from an egg account after mentioning the word “iPad”, “iPhone” or the word “dating,” you known what I mean.

The second issue with Twitter lies with how it’s used by the power users and social media experts. The Twitter maven drank the kook-aid about being Malcom Gladwell style connectors and mavens. Their misguided belief that their style of curation and expertise was some how unique–enough to be a value add–shows how truly delusional they are. If you’re unfamiliar with the term “connector” and “maven”, I strongly suggest reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book the Tipping Point. It contains essential lessons every marketer should know.

Next we need to look at Facebook. While the barrier to entry is still low (requiring just an email), there is an element of social proof built into it. It’s not hard to get 50 people to friend/follow you on Twitter. It’s a lot harder to get 50 people to be your friend on Facebook. There will always be friend whores in Facebook, but there are a lot less of them (percentage wise) compared to Twitter.

Another key difference is that a large part of the Twitter population, especially the darlings of the media, is nothing more than a marketer or social media guru looking for a retweet or click. They are not looking for a quality lead or conversion. Social media for many people is still about traffic and eyeballs, not sales and conversions. If you’re trying to build a follower base, these type of users are practically useless. They may retweet your message, but only to other digital con men. They simply are never going to fill out your lead gen form or pull out a credit card. To be honest, when you’re looking for followers who are going to turn into prospects or customers, traditional social media metrics like klout are useless. You should be much more interested in the person with a 12 klout score with 50 friends and followers who’s generally (or genuinely!) interested in your product, service, or area of operation. One person who is interested in what you’re selling is much more valuable than 500 people who will simply retweet your message to 500 other social media parrots.

However, it’s important to note that, like nature, spam will adapt and find a way in. Since Facebook consolidated its social equity into the “like button“, it has become an attractive target for marketers, so much so that it’s even got a name: “like -gate“. Basically the “like” action is being corrupted and incentivized the same way links were on Google. Some companies are even having a bit of fun being irreverent in acknowledging the insincerity of the like action (screen shot credit MarketingPilgrim)

Mio Advertisement

As a marketer, what should you do? Right now Facebook isn’t prepared to deal with the incentivized likes, so it’s in your best interest to take advantage of that before the gap is closed. I’m not saying go out and buy as may likes as you can, I’m saying buy as many qualified likes as you can while it’s still cheap and easy. Remember Facebook traffic and Twitter traffic have different values and should be treated differently and given different priorities and resources within your overall marketing plan.

Blackhat Method for Increasing Your Twitter Followers When I started my new website ViralConversations.com, I also started...
New Twitter Account @graywolfseo Now that twitter lists have taken off and are being...
Twitter Contests and Incentives – Do they Work A few weeks ago I made the mistake of wondering...
Don’t Put All Your Eggs in the Facebook Basket While Facebook may be a hot marketing tool right now,...
How Small and Local Businesses Can Use Facebook If there’s one aspect of social media that mainstream press...

Advertisers:

Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.
BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet's oldest directory.
Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
Directory Journal - Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
Glass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
Link Building- Backlink Build offers 45 PR5+ Backlinks for $295
KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.
What Motivates You - what makes you want to get up and be successful

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Facebook vs Twitter: Which is More Valuable?

SEOptimise

Improve Your Client Reporting with APIs

Posted: 30 Mar 2011 03:00 AM PDT

Search marketing agencies need to report to clients regularly and keep them up to date with what is happening with their site. There are already tools out there that will automate your reporting, but each client has individual needs for their reporting. Different metrics are important for different clients. Your reporting software won’t always have the option to track your clearly defined KPIs. Some tools do allow a high level of customisation with your reports, such as Raven tools, but often the only way to produce the right result for your client will be with bespoke reports.

So Build A Custom Report For Each Client?

Although this may seem as though it will take a long time, it is important to get your reports right. Remember, for many employees in your client's companies this may the only communication they see from your agency, so it needs to be done right.

So you've decided what your client's needs are, but how are you going to collect the relevant data? You could collect the data manually, running rank checkers, pulling the data from Google Analytics web interface etc. But we all know our time could be better spent.

What's the alternative to this? Automation!

So How Can We Automate?

Lots of the tools you use manually may have an API available to extract the data, which means you can write a script to pull all the data you need automatically, rather than wasting a whole morning collecting the data. One of the most useful APIs you'll come across is the Google Analytics API, which is free to use and gives you access to a large quantity of useful data that you may want to include in your report. But other tools provide API that may prove useful, such as Raven ranking API to get your keyword rankings, or the SEOmoz API to obtain metrics such as page authority and domain authority. There are others available too, but which ones you use will be defined by your client's needs.

So once you've identified which APIs you'll need, you will need to get the hard bit: the coding. Some people like coding, but most people don't. So choose someone in the office with a little experience in coding if possible, otherwise it may be a bit daunting for a first timer. However, if you haven't any previous experience, don't be completely put off – you have to start somewhere!

Now that you've chosen your victim, here's an example of how the API could be used to track a particular metric and how it will help save you time.

Example: Tracking Rankings and Non-brand Search Visits

So let's say for an imaginary client, two of the most important metrics for them are ranking and visits to the site from search queries that don't include the brand name.

The first of these metrics can be taken from Raven tools if your agency uses it. An explanation of how to use the API is available on the Raven site.

For the search visits, this data is available from Google Analytics with an advanced segment. You can set up an advanced segment easily in the web interface and then you can use this when making use of the Google Analytics Data Export API, which luckily is free to use.

The analytics API is available through a number of client libraries, so choose your language of choice and have a look through the examples that Google provides.

Personally I quite like PHP, so I tend to opt for a third party PHP library called GAPI, which makes calling the API very easy.

Once you've got a script set up to pull your numbers out, then you want to present these in a readable way for your client. One way to do this is with the Google Chart API, which allows you create a range of static graphs and charts with your data.

Once I have all the figures and charts that I need for my report, I like to make use of a couple of other useful PHP libraries, namely PHPExcel and PHPWord. This allows me to save my data in a nicely formatted Excel or Word document that I can send across to the client. So for this example, I could create a Word document with a table of the keyword rankings and a chart showing the non-brand search queries visits over the last month, all in a nicely branded document with space to add some human analysis on the data collected.

So if you combine all this into a script that can be run every time a report is due, you will be saving yourself a lot of time. But why wait for the script to run? Set up a cron job to run at scheduled times, such as every week/month, and you can have that document ready for you when you reach the office in the morning!

Why Not Take It A Step Further?

Keeping a client up to date on how their site is performing is important, so why should they have to wait until reporting day to see how their metrics are faring? If the client wants to check on their metrics more often, then these APIs could be used to create a dashboard with the latest figures. A useful tool for this may be the Google Visualisation API, which allows you to create impressive looking charts and graphs which are both aesthetically pleasing and an efficient way of showing data. Having a dashboard like this will also help you as an agency, as it provides an easy way for you to keep track of what's happening and avoid unpleasant surprises on reporting day.

However, don't let these replace your reports. Your input as an SEO to explain the figures is very important to avoid them being misinterpreted, and that can't be replaced with an API!

Seth's Blog : Compared to perfect: the price/value mismatch in content

Compared to perfect: the price/value mismatch in content

"How's the wine?"

You really can't answer that question out of context. Compared to what? Compared to a hundred dollar bottle? Not so good. Compared to any other $12 bottle... great!

"How was the hotel?"

"How's the service at the post office?"

In just about all the decisions we make, we consider the price. A shipper doesn't expect the same level of service quality from a first class letter delivery than it does from an overnight international courier service. Of course not.

And yet...

A quick analysis of the top 100 titles on Amazon (movies, books, music, doesn't matter what) shows zero correlation between the price and the reviews. (I didn't do the math, but you're welcome to... might be a good science fair entry). Try to imagine a similar disconnect if the subject was cars or clothing...

For any other good or service, the value of a free alternative that was any good would be infinite--free airplane tickets, free dinners at the cafe... When it comes to content, though, we rarely compare the experience other content at a similar price. We compare it to perfect.

People walking out of the afternoon bargain matinee at the movies don't cut the film any slack because it was half price. Critics piling on to a music video on YouTube never mention the fact that HEY IT WAS FREE. There is no thrift store for content. Sure, we can get an old movie for ninety-nine cents, but if we hate it, it doesn't matter how cheap it was. If we're going to spend time, apparently, it better be perfect, the best there ever was, regardless of price.

This isn't true for cars, potato chips, air travel, worker's comp insurance...

Consider people walking out of a concert where tickets might be being scalped for as much as $1,000. That's $40 or more for each song played--are they considering the price when they're evaluating the experience? There's a lot of nuance here... I'm certainly not arguing that expensive is always better.

In fact, I do think it's probably true that a low price increases the negative feedback. That's because a low price exposes the work to individuals that might not be raving fans.

Free is a valid marketing strategy. In fact it's almost impossible for an idea to have mass impact without some sort of free (TV, radio, webpages, online videos... they're all free). At the same time, it's not clear to me that cheaper content outperforms expensive in many areas. As the marginal cost of delivering content drops to zero (all digital content meets this definition), I think there are valid marketing reasons to do the opposite of what economists expect.

Free gets you mass. Free, though, isn't always the price that will help you achieve your goals.

Price is often a signalling mechanism, and perhaps nowhere more than in the area of content. Free enables your idea to spread, price, on the other hand, signals individuals and often ends up putting your idea in the right place. Mass shouldn't always be the goal. Impact may matter more.