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miercuri, 3 august 2011

Damn Cool Pics

First Look Fight Scenes from 'The Dark Knight Rises'
Unusual Tubo Hotel in Tepoztlan, Mexico
Hilarious Spoofs Of The 'Jaws' Movie Poster
Lithuainian Mayor Fights Illegal Parking With A Tank
The History of Hotels [Infographic]
A Girl With an iPad Head

First Look Fight Scenes from 'The Dark Knight Rises'

Posted: 03 Aug 2011 04:23 PM PDT

Getting down to business in the Steel City, Christian Bale joined up with Tom Hardy for the filming of "The Dark Knight Rises" in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh on Sunday morning (July 31). In full costume as their respective Batman and Bane characters, the co-stars engaged in an intense battle scene as cameras captured all of the action outside of the Mellon Institute building.

Unusual Tubo Hotel in Tepoztlan, Mexico

Posted: 03 Aug 2011 04:08 PM PDT

TuboHotel, one of the world's very unique hotels, is located in the mountains 45 minutes south of Mexico City on the outskirts of the remote village of Tepoztlan, Morelos the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl the Plumed Serpent and home of the 'Tepozteco Nation'.

TuboHotel is a one-of-a-kind structure specially designed from recycled concrete tubes scattered in pyramid formation.

Hilarious Spoofs Of The 'Jaws' Movie Poster

Posted: 03 Aug 2011 03:41 PM PDT

The Jaws poster stands as one of the most ingeniously designed pieces of movie marketing of all time. It exploits our fear of the sea and the potential threat that lies beneath us when we swim. We've seen many spoofs of the iconic 'Jaws' movie poster. Here are the best of them.

Sources: 1, 2, 3

Lithuainian Mayor Fights Illegal Parking With A Tank

Posted: 03 Aug 2011 03:23 PM PDT

The Mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania got sick of seeing rich people illegally parking their cars wherever they want on the streets of his city so he decided to take action. And that action he decided to take was to get a tank and start using it to crush illegally parked cars on the street as you'll see in this video.

The History of Hotels [Infographic]

Posted: 03 Aug 2011 03:18 PM PDT

Hotels have come a long way since their initial creation nearly 1,300 years ago. After all, can you imagine peoples' reactions if they were asked to bring a hammock with them to an American hotel? Just 235 years ago, that was the expectation at American seaport inns. Hotel and their amenities have improved dramatically over the years, and many have become notorious throughout the world for their high-class establishments and the famous people who stay there, such as The Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand and The Chelsea Hotel in New York, New York.

Click Image to Enlarge.

Source: creditdonkey

A Girl With an iPad Head

Posted: 02 Aug 2011 02:50 PM PDT

iPad Head Girl walks around Bryant Park in New York City.

Thinkmodo Studio created this clever clip to promote the new Cosmo For Guys iPad magazine, which is an interesting product since Cosmo for chicks seems to be aimed exclusively as man pleasing already.

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Whoa... Can Query Volume Directly Influence Rankings?

Posted: 02 Aug 2011 03:04 PM PDT

Posted by MOGmartin

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

I was lucky enough to recently speak at the MozCon conference in Seattle, and during my talk one of the points that I covered were some experiments that I’ve conducted with query volume in Google, and how this affects various parts of the algo.

Google have for a long time publicly said that query volume has no effect on website rankings, but SEOs the world over have been crying foul. I mean c’mon, it just makes sense right?

Google’s own auto-suggest for instance, that has always “felt” like it was driven purely by search volume right? And by getting good stuff into auto-suggest (or for that matter, removing those annoying negative ones like [brand scam] or [brand ripoff]) has a direct impact on search behavior, so why not results as well?

So, a few months back I began experimenting with search query volume in the results. My objective was fairly simple, and just involved trying to get “Martin Macdonald SEO” to be suggested when typing in “martin macd……”.

Granted, searches for my name are without doubt a low volume query, so it probably was going to be far more achievable than getting my name to appear after a search for “Poker”, but it threw up some interesting results.

How to Create Volume:

There are plenty of ways of trying to get lots of people to carry out searches that you want them to. For many companies, offline advertising spend can be used to create huge volume, these days you often see on TV adverts things like “search used cars Seattle to find us” or even “search for Samsung TV’s”. Both of these examples are aimed specifically at moderating search behavior and getting people to perform fairly specific searches.

Most of us however do not have access to TV levels of budget, and even if we did convincing the marketing director to allow you, as an SEO, to have a say in the direct response messaging of the spot is a bit tough.

Luckily there are other ways of achieving it, Rand has experimented for some time with driving tweets to google results pages, and his followers (currently running at over 35,000) regularly click through to the google results, and then click on the one that he intended. While I don’t think he has ever said that this was to play with both CTR and search volume, it’s a perfect potential methodology.

Another really easy way to generate searches is by using your newsletter mailing list. If you have, say 100,000 people in your email list, try a few emails where you are sending them to a search result where you know you rank well rather than direct to your site.

This behavior can now even be tracked through google webmaster tools to see the uplift in CTR, and I’d be willing to bet good money that it forms part of the overall website authority metric in google.

I mean, it’s a great signal right? Users on a wide variety of queries always seem to click through to the results of one website; that’s got to represent a trusted site right?

So What Happened?

Well, as I was saying at the top of this post, I created some search volume for the term “Martin Macdonald SEO”. This was part of an overall campaign to get my new personal site to rank well for my name (other people sharing my exact name have a Wikipedia page, are D-list television celebrities in the UK, or own the exact match .com variant of my name, so it wasn’t going to be straightforward).

As you can see from Google insights for search, the volume for my name grew a lot over the period that I have been running this test:

(click to enlarge image)

I also experimented with lots of variations on the theme just for fun as you can see from this screenshot of my webmaster tools:

Martin Macdonald query volume

What were the results?

Now as you can see by checking google.co.uk the exact term I was targeting is #1 in the autosuggest window, thereby giving that term the maximum exposure possible. When people type in my name, the number one auto-suggest appends “SEO” onto the search term, thereby influencing more volume onto it.

Furthermore, and this is what really interested me, when you now type in just “Martin Macdonald” onto the search box, my site, with the page title “Martin Macdonald SEO” ranks in P1 with very little in the way of links and history.

Now, this is far from a perfect test, for instance it’s a test group of one – not exactly scientifically significant! That said, it was a behavior that I simply was not expecting to see – I’m unsure as to whether the query volume, alongside the signal that this was indeed the site that people were looking for was at play, but it does bear some logic right?

Lots of people search for “Martin Macdonald SEO”
There is a site with the EXACT title: “Martin Macdonald SEO”
It doesn’t rank, so the people don’t click through on anything.

Google learn this behavior, and then stick the site that it thinks should have been ranking in P1 to see if people click through?

Another interesting experiment that I will play about with over the next few months is trying some search query paths, so for instance someone searches for “SEO”, then they search for “SEO Consultant”, and finally search for “SEO Martin Macdonald” (just an off the wall example) it might be a likely signal that “Martin Macdonald” should follow the word(s) SEO, or SEO Consultant when typed in, as a higher than average number of people go down that funnel. If that does work, imagine the creative marketing you could try with high volume generic keywords that relate to your industry!

Certainly bears some logic for me…. And is worth further investigation!

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How to Automate a Twitter Feed with Hootsuite and Bufferapp Graywolf's SEO Blog

How to Automate a Twitter Feed with Hootsuite and Bufferapp

Posted: 03 Aug 2011 10:13 AM PDT

The following is part of a series on automation. In this post we will be looking at using two tools, Hootsuite and Bufferapp to complement each other. If you haven’t read my Hootsuite review and Bufferapp review already, it’s probably a good idea to read them first because I will be building on those two posts. It’s also probably a good idea if you read how to use the Hootsuite bulk scheduling tool as well.

One of the hallmarks of creating a good Twitter feed is being a good content curator. It’s not just about pushing out your content or having social media conversations, but it’s about pushing out good content/links that are interesting to your audience and relevant to your niche. If you are a running a BBQ blog and Twitter account, you probably don’t want to be tweeting about PETA and vegan information–unless, of course, you want to have a non engaged account.

My first recommendation is to build up a list of “classic” evergreen content in your space. For the best results, try to get 100-200 different tweets and links (you should constantly be growing and adding to this list). Depending on how active your audience is you can tweet out 1-3 curated links per day. If you have 200 of them and you tweet out 3 per day, you will go at least two months before you repeat. I like to keep these in a spreadsheet and use the Hootsuite bulk scheduler to make sure I have at least 2-3 tweets per day.

Next, hopefully you are keeping on top of what’s going on in your sector from a current events perspective. When you come across something newsworthy, send it to bufferapp. It will auto schedule through bufferapp and fill up your tweet queue. By using these two products in conjunction with each other, you take advantage of their strengths, make sure you are tweeting regularly, and keep your tweet stream fresh and up to date.

You will have to take some care in making sure your scheduled tweets don’t bunch up with your bufferapp tweets. If you are using archived tweets (see How to Tweet From Your Archives), that’s another variable in the mix that you have to work with. Lastly, you will need to take care and make sure your new posts don’t bunch up or step on any of the others posts. If you are having a conversation or Twitter rant, burst tweeting works. For content promotion, especially evergreen content, spread your tweets out over the day for maximum effectiveness. It sounds complicated but it’s really not. A sheet of paper and pen should do the trick. Mix up the evergreen, news, and new content posts. Look at your analytics to see which gets you the most response and test and adapt.

Content promotion is a cornerstone aspect of social media. As long as you aren’t pushing only your content, people respond to you much more positively. I would go so far as to say keep the self serving tweets to 20-30 % of your total activity. If people see you posting good stuff from others regularly and once a week you promote yourself and ask nicely for a retweet, you will get a better response.

Some people take offense to this approach, thinking that automated or semi-automated publishing is bad. They believe that Twitter should be just about real time conversations and engagement. Conversations are important, but they are time investments without much ROI, so look at them carefully. Are you on Twitter to connect with real friends or are you on Twitter to ultimately do business? Problem solving and customer service tweets are your most effective ROI. Chances are you can come up with 20-50 common questions/problems people have. Set up a text document or spreadsheet for these cases with pre-programmed answers. Using saved searches or rss searches, look for questions or issues. See if you have a standard answer or one that can be easily adapted. Sometimes you aren’t the best source for the answer; in that case, refer them to a government or educational resource. Sometimes a competing or complimentary business is a better source, and that’s ok. Your main concern should be to solve the problem for the consumer. People remember you for being helpful. The last thing you want to do is come across as self serving social media guru who only links to themselves and talks about themselves. It’s a sure fire way to guarantee you’ll come off as a stuck-up, ego centric jerk. Trust me. If you are a huge brand and deal only in information, you might be able to get away with being broadcast only but, for most, a semi-automated solution with scripted responses to common problems works much better.

Unless you have a large company and customer service plays a big role, having one or more people working solely on Twitter/Facebook etc. is a waste of time. During the day, 20-30 minutes / 2-3 times a day should be enough. When you have big push, yes, you will need to spend more time, but by and large it’s overkill. Not to take dig at the purely social media consultants, but they spend all day promoting themselves on Twitter. In an attention-based economy, they are trying to get more clients and billable hours, but that probably isn’t your goal. Your goal is to extract as much profit and sales with the smallest investment of time and resources. The only reasonable way to do that is with some form of automation.

So what are the takeaways from this posts:

Automated or semi automated tweet streams aren’t evil. If a human wrote them and scheduled it, there nothing deceptive about it. Scraping and robo-tweeting without any human input is much more problematic.
Use the tools to their strengths. Plugins that auto-publish blog posts free you from being tied to your blog.
Build a body of work of ever expanding evergreen tweets. Use a schedule tool with them, trying to not repeat individual posts too often.
Use auto scheduling tools for news and current events.
Mix in archive tweets from your evergreen posts. Try to not overwhelm people with self serving content.
Be on the lookout for big players in your space to retweet. Nothing gets someone as excited as a natural unsolicited tweet from a friend, colleague, or similar service.
Conversations and customer service are a necessary evil in social media. Look for ways to minimize the time you spend there with a library of answers to common questions. Customer service is hard. Your people need to know when to color outside the lines. Give them the authority to solve problems on the spot. Letting customer problems fester is hardly ever the best solution.
The key is finding a balance between human interaction and automation is knowing that sometimes you need to adapt. At the end of the day, social media is about being social. The key is finding tools and workflows that minimize your time investment without losing that human touch.

photo credit: Photospin

Bufferapp Review The following is part of a series on the Bufferapp...
How to Use the Hootsuite Bulk Scheduling Tool The following is part of a series on using the...
HootSuite Review Late last year, the solution I was using to post...
How to Be Involved on Twitter in Less Than an Hour a Day The following is part of a series on Hootsuite Social...
How to use Hootsuite to Publish to Your Facebook Page The following is part of a series on using the...

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How to Automate a Twitter Feed with Hootsuite and Bufferapp

Behind the Scenes: Photos from the Debt Negotiations

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Behind the Scenes: Photos from the Debt Negotiations

After a long and heated debate, President Barack Obama signed into law a compromise that will reduce the deficit and avert a default on our obligations that would have devastated our economy.

Official White House photographer Pete Souza chronicled the process over the last month, snapping photos at various stages of the negotiations. Yesterday, we released a set of 20 of his behind the scenes photos.

View the gallery and check out one of the photos below:

President Barack Obama meets with Speaker of the House John Boehner on the patio near the Oval Office, Sunday, July 3, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.

Rural Veterans and the Tyranny of Distance
For about 3.3 million Vets, or 41 percent of the total enrolled in VA’s health care system, distance is more than a challenge. Distance can mean rural Veterans don’t have access to the care and services they’ve earned.

Office Hours 8/2/11 or "The American People Won In This #Compromise": Jason Furman Answers Your Questions on Twitter
Principal Deputy Director Jason Furman answers your questions about the impact of the debt agreement, and what steps will be taken for the long term health of our economy during another session of White House Office Hours.

President Obama: FAA Shutdown a “Washington-Inflicted Wound on America”
A stalemate over the FAA budget is keeping 70,000 workers away from jobs at airports across the country and has cost $250 million in tax revenue

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

10:35 AM: The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing

12:00 PM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney

2:00 PM: The President holds a Cabinet meeting

3:15 PM: The President meets with Secretary of State Clinton

3:45 PM: The President meets with Attorney General Eric Holder

5:00 PM: The President departs the South Lawn en route Joint Base Andrews

5:15 PM: The President departs Joint Base Andrews en route Chicago, Illinois

7:00 PM: The President arrives in Chicago, Illinois

8:00 PM: The President participates in a DNC video teleconference

8:15 PM: The President delivers remarks at a DNC event

9:25 PM: The President delivers remarks at a DNC event

11:05 PM: The President departs Chicago, Illinois en route to Joint Base Andrews

Indicates events that will be live streamed on WhiteHouse.Gov/Live

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Seth's Blog : Delivering on never

Delivering on never

I will never miss a deadline

I will never leave a typo

I will never fail to warn you about a possible pitfall

I will never charge you more than the competition

I will never violate a confidence

I will never let you down

I will never be late for a meeting

There are lots of sorts of never you can deliver to a customer. You can't deliver all of them, of course. Picking your never and sticking with it is a fabulous way to position yourself.

• Email to a friend •

miercuri, 3 august 2011

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

How to Automate a Twitter Feed with Hootsuite and Bufferapp Graywolf's SEO Blog

How to Automate a Twitter Feed with Hootsuite and Bufferapp Graywolf's SEO Blog

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Behind the Scenes: Photos from the Debt Negotiations

Seth's Blog : Delivering on never

Delivering on never

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miercuri, 3 august 2011

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