Now that twitter lists have taken off and are being utilized, and in some cases are replacing RSS readers, I’m going to try to take advantage by experimenting with a new account @graywolfseo.Some of the common complaints I get are that I am chatty, meander about, post too many cooking, disney, or other non SEO related tweets. If that describes your feelings  then go ahead and follow @graywolfseo. The plan is to use it to post things from this blog and other interesting marketing, search engine, or social media links without being conversational. Lot’s of people think social media without the conversations is a social media fail, but I disagree, I think you can make it work.

So which account should you follow @graywolf or @graywolfseo? It’s up to you, follow both and if you find one annoying unsubscribe from it, my feelings won’t be hurt … much . There will be some cross posting but I will keep it to a minimum, there will be more links there that aren’t in the main account. Give it a week and let me know what you think.
photo credit: Katie@!

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New Twitter Account @graywolfseo

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Now that twitter lists have been rolled out just about everyone, I’m going to actually agree with Robert Scoble and say twitter lists are teh awesome.

To be clear I haven’t gone as far as stopping to use my feed reader … but in the next few weeks I will be looking to move what I can out of google reader and into twitter lists. It’s not that RSS is bad, but RSS is too complicated for anyone but geeks to use, in fact I share Guy Kawasaki’s belief that if you can take the tech out of RSS and blogging it’s going to be better for everyone (shocking I agreed with Scoble and Guy Kawasaki in the same post, someone check for pods in the basement). It’s a matter of how simple it is to integrate into your life and workflow, twitter is a simple steak knife, an RSS reader is a complicated swiss army knife.

RSS is integrated into most blogging and a lot of publishing systems, it will still have uses, and will never die out. However if you are looking for social engagement not having a twitter account is probably a liability, especially when there are so many tools that make it easy to integrate the two.

That said twitter lists aren’t manna from heaven, and they aren’t without their problems, for example let’s look at the clueless Todd Ziegler. Todd showed his academic ivory tower mentality, with his post last week “using twitter lists to judge influence“, sorry Todd do not pass go, do not collect $200. Don’t feel bad you aren’t the only one who doesn’t grasp real world economics. Anytime there is something of value, and there is way to use it gain money, power, influence or sex from it, a black market economy will spring up around it. First people will create silly lists, then others will experiment to see if they rank in Google. Once that’s done, people will start trading favors to be on lists, systems will spring up making adding yourself to lists more efficient and scalable, and ultimately people will start selling placement on lists. Put it this way, once you are on 5,000 lists people will think you are important, and start adding you to other lists. It doesn’t matter that the first 4,950 of those lists where fake spam lists, once you have the 5,000 you are a self referencing authority and you are grandfathered in by your legacy status.

The really clever people will realize that twitter lists are also a powerful reputation management tool, used for good or evil. Because twitter is a pagerank blackhole, all you need to do is work the system to get enough high powered internal links, and you’re good to go. The problem is of course most people aren’t ready for this kind of power, it’s like giving a flame thrower to a 13 year old, no good will come of it. With great power comes great responsibility, and marketers have history of no self restraint and have elevated self-destruction to an art form. To put a fine point on it most of you don’t know when to STFU, destroying your own online communities in short lived blaze of glory, in an effort to gain a link or a bit of exposure.
photo credit: G. Rivas Valderrama

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While I may have some level of notoriety within the SEO community and internet marketing space, once you step out of that area, I’m a nobody as writer Paul Carr so eloquently pointed out last week. Robert Scoble the original poster boy of blogging, is known far and wide by the tech community, but who gets more traffic, me or him?

Below is a screen shot from Compete.com of my traffic compared to Rober Scoble’s.

For the past four months he’s been on a steady drop in traffic, while I’ve been on an increase. The last two months according to compete I’ve gotten more traffic than he has. Should I get a publicist for the inevitable bit of web celebrity which is probably on my doorstep right now … hardly.

The problem with a lot of the services like compete and hitwise is they estimate traffic, while they are good with trends over a long term they really aren’t an accurate measurement of traffic. How can I say that, here my actual monthly stats from Google analytics for the past year.

So compete estimates I’m getting between 100,000 and 165,000 unique visitors, my analytics tells me I’m getting between 30,000 and 50,000. All analytics packages involve a bit of estimating and guesswork, but one that’s on the site is always going to be more accurate than one that’s off the site, in this case compete is over estimating my traffic by a factor of three or more. However what compete got right is that my traffic has been increasing the past few month. So they got the real numbers wrong but the trend is correct.

Truthfully I have no idea how much traffic scoble is getting to know if he is getting more than I am, but I would be willing to bet his traffic has been declining over the past few months. What makes me say that, his obsession with social media networks like friendfeed. He’s made a conscious decision to drive his traffic to a website he doesn’t own. As he doesn’t make money directly from his website, it’s not that crucial, but what about you?

• If you’re involved in any sort of social media activities, are you using to drive traffic to your website?
• Do you know why Digg’s decision to frame every website is important?
• If you’re spending the time building a power twitter account can you drive traffic where and when you want?

Traffic is only one metric in social media but it’s an important one.

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Rule Number one of operating a web 2.0 user generated content website, if you don’t have someone involved in your development process who thinks about how to abuse the system, and put steps in place to prevent it, someone else will publish a handy step by step guide on how to abuse your system …In case you missed the news yesterday Digg announced the new URL shortner/digg bar. What the tool does is frame your website, notice the diggbar at the top in the screen shot below:

In case you weren’t able to figure it out or are a web 2.0 weenie, this was done to artifically inflate user metrics. By framing everyone elses website you never leave digg, so the length of their user visits goes up, and it looks like their site is improving, and they con more clueless VC’s that Digg is actually a valuable website, they want to keep wasting money investing in. However because Gen Y managers seem to feel it’s more important to coddle happy stimulated workers, as opposed to working with people who have a clue what they are doing, there are plenty of holes around for you to abuse and profit from. Here’s a step by step guide on how to do it …

• Set yourself up with a nice spammy lander page and submit it to digg, like this (http://digg.com/d1kRNK)
• It doesn’t matter if it get voted, up, down, sideways, or even gets buried
• Go get yourself some links, beg, borrow, steal, do whatever it takes
• Buy links, lots of links, quality is irrelevant, you want massive quantities (you do know that paid crappy links work differently when pointed at trusted sites right?).
• Sit back and wait for rankings to come, and collect your affiliate checks

Since the digg bar is so small, most people will click what’s in the bottom frame if it’s what they are searching for. But maybe you want to be extra sure … no problem here’s where it gets really cool, put up some frame buster javascript code, this way when someone does hit the page your frame busts out. Want to see it in action check this url out:

http://digg.com/http://searchengineland.com/george-w-bush-a-failure-once-again-according-to-google-10933

So what’s the deal? Why am I publishing a blueprint on how to abuse digg … It’s quite simple really, I hate Kevin Rose, in fact very few things in life would make me happier than to see Digg die in fiery crash and meltdown, with nothing salvageable emerging from the wreckage and ashes. My cranky cynical old heart bursts with joy at the mere thought of Kevin Rose working the drive through window of McDonald’s asking people if they “want fries with that”. In fact I’m full prepared to strip down to a loincloth, dance and chant around a fire, and ritualistically sacrifice a live chicken if I honestly felt it would help … and believe me I’m not the only one.

Coming back to reality, the lesson here is if you are building, designing, developing or deploying websites that rely in any meaningful way on user generated content, you damn well better have a someone on payroll to play fox in the henhouse. It took me 10 minutes last night to find this hole and to come up with a way to abuse it, and while I may be clever, I’m not especially malicious, but there are lots of folks who are cleverer than I am and aren’t afraid to completely abuse a system.

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A few weeks ago I made the mistake of wondering aloud when someone would start offering cash prizes for twitter followers. I had seen people offering physical prizes before, but never cash. A few random people decided to have some fun with me and start saying I was offering cash, so I just decided to run with it.Since this wasn’t a planned event I don’t have the exact numbers but you can see from the graph below I gained about 300 followers

I offered a $100 prize, and gained about 300 followers which is about $0.30 per acquisition. Right now social media gurus and web 2.0 weenies are tearing the temple robes since I’m referring to twitter followers in a commodity sense, but hey deal with it. I did have some drop off after the contest, but nothing significant, and you can see the slope of  line adding new followers remained fairly consistent, after the event.

I know some people believe this was all some evil plan that I executed to look like an “accident” but really it wasn’t. I opened my mouth said what I was thinking, the opportunity presented itself and I ran with it. I know there are some people who won’t ever believe me, and that’s cool. However if I had thought about this before hand I would have executed it a little better, here are some of the ways I would have improved it:

• By offering cash I attracted everyone, I would have been better offering something more targeted to my community like a BOTW listing, or SEO Book Membership, or pro SEO Moz account.
• I would have started the offer earlier in the day and on a day when I could devote my time to pimping it. Sure I could just robo-tweet but scheduled tweets are almost always inferior to live tweets
• I would have put up a short message and required people to retweet my name to be entered
• I would have taken out some PPC ads for popular twitter terms and software.
• I would have scheduled some guest posts on popular social media blogs for that day allowing me to saturate the twitterverse with my presence and the contest

Are twitter contests a viable way of gaining followers … absolutely. However you do have to be aware that many social media purists dislike the concept, so it’s not all unicorns and rainbows, be prepared for criticism. If you take the time to plan beforehand and execute a little better chances are you’ll have even better results than I did.

Lastly less someone think this was just a game and I never gave away the prize, here’s a link to the winner @SteveGarfield, who did the right thing and turned the money around and donated it to charity

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This weekend I watched an amazing video from Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs at a Ted Conference, and what really hit home is how many people struggle to be new media douchebags in a web 2.0 world. If you’re the kind of person who wants to have 50,000 twitter friends, be a power Digg user, make the front page of  Techmeme, get mentioned on Techcrunch, avoid getting mentioned in Valleywag, and it isn’t filling your wallet, then you are a Web 2.0 Weenie Living on Bullshit Social Media Economics.

Last week the reality cops showed up at the web 2.0 frat party and started shutting things down. Exactly what happened, Robert Scoble got fired. Sure the PR folks and spin misters will say he left to go on to new endeavors and challenges, but in the real world if your sponsor cancels their ads, and your boss says we don’t need you to show up on monday, you got fired. This isn’t meant to be mean or hurtful, but listen Robert you were the poster boy for web 2.0 weenies riding that wave of pseudo celebrity for so long, now it’s time to pay the piper.

Social media can be very productive and profitable, case and point Aaron Chronister (aka the Mad Hat) used it as tool to turn bacon and sausage into a book deal. Dell uses twitter as a 1 million dollar sales channel, and JetBlue uses it to auction off airline tickets. Social media can and does work, when it’s used as a tool to help you get work done, not when it’s used as an excuse to get out of work, or not do work at all.

Social media should make you more productive, more efficient, and more profitable, by allowing you to extend your reach and message to the people who are in your target market and are interested in what you have to say. Social media should not be used to waste time and money on awareness and branding exercises broadcasting messages that are unremarkable to the uninterested masses.

Social media is filled with false gods and idols, who try to sell you their own “secret sauce” in get rich quick schemes, and hundreds are duped in by the lure of easy money. The truth is if you approach social media with a cookie cutter plan from one of these guru’s it wont work for you. I can’t tell you the secret of making money, I can only tell you what works for me, and chances are since you don’t think and approach problems the way I do, they won’t work for you. The best I can do, is give a you some basic pointers and tell you where the cliffs are so you don’t walk off, after that you’ll have to get off you butt, work at it and fail more than once, if you want to make some money.

I’m turning off comments, because the last thing I want, is a bunch of “way to go”, “atta boy”, and “I agree” comments, or the pointless debates that follow. If you’ve ever talked with me in depth, you know I’ve got that high school teacher pay it forward mentality, and I don’t write these posts for you to agree with me and pat me on the back. Want to show me you appreciate this post and got the message … stop wasting time on social media … and start finding ways to ues it help add to the size of your wallet or pocket book not make it smaller.
photo credit: TheBusyBrain

PS: This post is aimed at the marketing community, and not at the general population, if you want to use social media tools on your time to communicate and connect, that’s fine, just don’t do it on your boss’s dime, and call it work.

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In case you missed it, the official skittles website located at Skittles.com last night redirected their entire homepage to a twitter search for the term [skittles]. I applaud their effort to embrace bold new ideas but their execution leaves a lot to be desired. I thought I’d run through some of them in hopes some of you might learn something:

• Use a NSFW filter to keep porn, racial slurs, or just plain rude and  obnoxious comments of the stream. Twitter has one and used it during the presidential debates.
• Add a leet speak filter again they need to filter out more more NSFW terms. Additionally use regular expression to filter out use of periods, spaces and dashes for NSFW terms.
• Use a competition filter, don’t publish mentions of snickers, Mike & Ikes, or any other candy.
• Filter out link drops, the potential for links to Goatcx, tubgirl or lemon party is too much (looks them up on your own if you don’t know what they are, be warned NSFW).
• Filter out any scripting or HTML just to be safe.
• Limit the number of times someone gets posted to once every 30 to 60 minutes. This will cut down on the likelyhood someone will fins a hole that lets bad info get through.
• Don’t replace your product pages with wikipedia pages, pages that anyone can edit are too much of a target for people to mess with.
• Keep as much of your existing web structure in place, don’t 301 or 404 it, having a massive sitewide shift like that isn’t a signal of quality to the search engines.
• Leave some content on the pages for the search engines and don’t use an H1 tag with over 50 words in ok?
• Grab all of your trademarked names and play with the community. I personally grabbed @skittlescandy for them so a bad person didn’t (hey skittles reach out I’ll get that over to you).

Lastly I’m going to take the position and call this is a WIN for skittles. Like Motrin did in the Motrin Moms “scandal” they will take hit and look like weenies in the eyes of the techno elite for some critical and 100% preventable mistakes. However in a few days they will be bathing in the mostly positive after glow of trying something different, getting a ton of attention, and a ton of links … so I say WAY TO GO SKITTLES!

For other viewpoint see

Skittles: Tweet the rainbow (or racial slurs)

Skittles Site Receives an Extreme Social Makeover

The New Skittles Website Is A Twitter Search For “Skittles”

Social Media Zeitgeist Takes Over Skittles.com

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One of the common themes I see recurring in blog/websites articles are “How to use your blog to drive traffic”, “how to use twitter to engage your community”, and “how to use stumbeupon to bring you new RSS subscribers”. In some cases these posts do actually contain some useful nuggets of information,  however as is more often the case, I see optimizers with no real experience doing little more than writing click enticing titles, without any real substance behind them.Recent books like Outliers have shown that it takes about 10,000 hours to develop a real expertise in an area, some studies have shown it takes about 10 years. In newer and emerging fields the time frame is less, but you still have to pay your dues. So when I read a post titles like “9 Ways your can explode your number of twitter followers” and I look at the persons profile, and see 320 followers, half of which are people like robert scoble auto follow bots, I wonder if they have any clue what they are talking about, or are just really good at building a network of reciprocating blind voting friend networks. That said there is some social media skill that’s required to build that type network, but as Sarah Lacy recently pointed out social media skills dont always translate into cash.

I understand shameless promotion is part of the gig, and I engage in it myself, but I do wonder how many people who claim to be social media experts, have any clue what they are doing. I recently wrote a post about Halo Media and Social Media at Webmaster World (subscribers only), and have to say it’s pretty big field. Just because you’re good a writing blog posts, and getting your stories lots of bookmarks, doesn’t mean you understand how to deploy widgets that build links (without violating search engine guidelines). You can read all the posts, from the biggest and most recognized experts in the field, but until you start to do it, stumble or fail and learn something, it’s pretty hard to claim any sort of expertise, outside of the purely theorhetical.

Lastly I’d like to address the topic of people who write, come up with, or suggest that there are “social media rules”, that should never be violated. To those people I’d like to say sorry, but the expertise you are spouting is just a bunch of hogwash. Are there best practices, sure for example I recently poste about how running a professional twitter profile is different from a personal one, but those are recomendations not rules. As long as you understand what happens when you “go against the grain” and it aligns with your long term goal, feel free to follow that route. Style is not what you do right but what you do wrong.

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When I started my new website ViralConversations.com, I also started a new twitter profile. Since this was a brand new profile I was able to observe changes easily. As you can see from the screenshot below I am following 42 people but have 43 followers. The extra person who is following me as a person I’d like to talk about.

When you create a new profile on twitter, and the account is banned, twitter’s system does not remove it from the following count of others. So if you were to create thousands of fake profiles, and follow people could artificially inflate their follower counts without having to go through the trouble of finding real friends.

So why would you want to profile the thousands of fake friends … to get real friends that’s why…

When people getting a new follower email alert they look several things, here are some of the most popular:

• Do I know the person or company?
• Does this person talked to people I know or like?
• Does this person talk about information or subject matters that I’m interested in?
• How many other people are following this person?

It’s the last one that you’re hoping to take advantage of. News bots on twitter have huge followings, and the ability to drive massive amounts of traffic. If you are creating a news bot and you wanted people to follow or feel was a trustworthy profile, having a profile with thousands of followers would be a good first step.

Twitter and lots of other social media sites simply aren’t prepared for adversarial usage. Spammers were used to dealing with services like Google have very sophisticated techniques, and grow more sophisticated every year. For new social media sites that aren’t prepared for adversarial users, this is a problem. In fact I’ve written about this before (see Spammers Google’s Defensive Line).

Twitter needs to take a more active role in managing and supervising their community. They need to understand that the social space is going to have all the social problems that plague forums, message boards, and social bookmarking sites. Trolls, spammers and malcontent personalities always go where the traffic is. They need to devote time and resources to these problems, if they hope to keep a vibrant and growing community that isn’t overrun if they hope to survive for the long term.

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My friends over at Disney came up with this video that has the answer Danny Sullivan Naughty or Nice for Christmas

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