Happy Birthday, Facebook: You turned 5!

February 7th, 2009

A birthday card to wish Facebook a Happy 5th Birthday:

Happy Birthday, Facebook!

You turned 5 years old February 4, 2009, and your influence on the world grows exponentially as your age grows linearly. You have received a lot of “Happy Birthday, Facebook” greetings, yet I couldn’t let the week pass without sending my own birthday wish to you.

Happy Birthday, Facebook

Facebook Happy Birthday Application

Facebook, you have had a tremendous impact on many people.  I didn’t really understand your magnetism at first. When you opened your doors to more than college students, masses flocked to network onto your social platform. Over 150 million people around the world share their lives on Facebook to date.

You offer a safe place for people to connect. New friendships are formed and strengthened and old friends and high school buddies are reconnected, thanks to you! You have many applications, even providing ways for people to wish each other “Happy” Birthday on Facebook.

Businesses, non-profit organizations, various causes and political campaigns are able to share their products, services and efforts with Facebook users. Millions of dollars in social media advertising are invested into your tightly-controlled ad system. Facebook “Causes” has made a difference to help people and campaigns that would have been impossible without this social utility.

My comprehension of the “power of Facebook” for search marketing has grown in the past year. You are an important factor for search engine optimization and social media marketing. I was surprised to see you with a booth at Affiliate Summit in Vegas in January, and that “Advertising on Facebook” was the topic of a HOT session. You may argue it was standing-room-only because Shoemoney was on the panel, but you were the royal guest of honor.

Thank you, Facebook, for providing a social network for us to engage in conversation in ways unavailable before your birthday 5 years ago.

You should be proud that you have fulfilled and continue to expand your mission:

“Facebook was founded in 2004 to give people the tools to engage and understand the world around them.”

I’m going to spend more time with you building relationships in the coming years and look forward to many more birthdays! It will be exciting to see how you mature.

Happy Birthday, Facebook!

Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments »

Do You Practice Safe Password Management?

February 6th, 2009

Managing passwords is like having an intimate relationship with your computer. Your online identity is at stake. Your passwords are the key to your online identify.

Do you practice Safe Password Management?

A course in “Safe Password Management” should be taught in all schools! Here are some tips that should be course material.

Yahoo! Security Center wins hands-down for the best metaphor about the importance of a secure password:

“A password is like a toothbrush:
Choose a good one and don’t share it.”

Everyone who is online needs to understand the dangers and risks of being lazy, sloppy, and reckless for using passwords that are not secure.

TIP: Just say “NO” to the following:

  • NO pet names
  • NO favorite birds
  • NO high school sweethearts
  • NO birthday or anniversary
  • NO “your name” plus one number
  • NO “your company name + two numbers
  • NOTHING under seven or eight characters in length
  • NO to the name of ANYTHING that can be found in the dictionary

Check out the Yahoo! Security Center once again for tips about what TO DO when choosing a strong, secure password.

TIP: Don’t make it guessable by a person or detectable by programs that use a dictionary attack. These programs simply try every word in the dictionary as a possible password.

Do you remember all your passwords?

You now understand what NOT to do and HOW to choose a strong password.

TIP: Do NOT use the same password for all your accounts!

You cannot use the same “toothbrush” for everything!

You need to be creative, safe and secure…over and over.

How are you going remember ALL passwords to ALL of your accounts?

Rembmer all your passwords?

Don’t let this stop you from getting involved in Social Media!

You access multiple accounts on a daily basis and often log in and out and back in again…

I’m going to show you how to practice Safe Password Management to access all your social networks, email, online calendar, and more.

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Posted in Internet Marketing Tools | 3 Comments »

Internet Marketing Geek Speak

January 29th, 2009

Online marketers have a code, culture and vocabulary that is a foreign language to people who don’t live and breath Internet marketing geek speak.

A search marketer’s daily lexicon includes words about tactics and actions for sharing and virally spreading messages, building brands and helping rank websites on the front pages of search engines. Geek speak represents daily life online, our Internet marketing jargon and lingo used while participating in online communities.

Internet Marketing Geek Speak

Geek Speak for Tactics

Geek Speak relating to methods, or tactics,  for marketing and positioning a company’s products and services include some of the following:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Blogging, User Generated Content (UGC), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Social Media Optimization (SMO), Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Social Networking, Reputation Management

Does online marketing have more acronyms than government work?

Translate and learn some of this lingo at MarketingTerms.com, an Internet marketing terms reference.

Geek Speak for Actions

Internet marketers, as well as customers and non-marketing types who surf the Web and/or buy products online, are all part of the process. Our actions become part of the marketing message. You may not know the word or term for what you are doing when you’re online, but when you are speaking about a product or service, your language becomes part of that company’s brand.

Geek speak for daily actions through which we share include:

Tweet, Stumble, Thumb, Sphinn, Digg, Post, Tag

  • Tweet - a message less than or equal to 140 characters posted on Twitter
  • Thumb - the act of giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to cast your vote on a website post, article, photo on StumbleUpon. People who look through StumbleUpon then Stumble upon sites for which others have voted.
  • Sphinn - voting approval or disapproval (desphinning) submissions made on Sphinn, the site where many in search marketing hang out to share stories
  • Digg - another “vote” of approval to say you like an article
  • Post - creating an article for a blog, a blog post
  • Tag - adding a keyword to posts or inserting words into a tweet or bookmarking a site with tags (Delicious)

These terms relate to participation on social networks, also known as “socnets.”

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Posted in Social Media | 9 Comments »

Pan for Gold in the #ASW09 Hashtag

January 16th, 2009

Affiliate Summit West, one of THE premier conferences on affiliate marketing, provided 3 days of rich, golden content. The hashtag and Twitter were premier online marketing tools used throughout the conference, making the information a gold mine for those who know where to search.

Are you interested in making money online? Pan for gold nuggets by sifting through the #ASWO9 hashtag. You’ll find tips, tricks, tools and insights into the lives of affiliate marketers.

Hashtag 101

A hashtag is a way of marking up a tag  with the pound sign, aka a “hash” – #. People who send messages via Twitter can use a common term (keyword or acronym) to ensure all messages related to the topic of the hashtag can be grouped together for reference.

Hashtag explained:

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

Hashtags were developed as a means to create “groupings” on Twitter.

#ASWO9 = Affiliate Summit West 2009

Attendees of Affiliate Summit West posted their notes, emotions, current happenings, and emotions by appending #ASW09 in their <=140-character tweets. These tweets into Twitter were sent through laptops and mobile phones. The #ASW09 hashtag grouped all these updates together for viewing in Twitter search for #ASW09.

ASW09 Hashtag - Affiliate Summit West

This screen shot was taken on Jan 15, 2 days after the conference. (Yes, the conversation continues after Affiliate Summit West ended.)

  • Twitter search was displayed on many projector screens throughout and during conference sessions. To say “the crowd was engaged” is an understatement!
  • Speakers received questions while moderators watched Twitter for #ASW09 during Q&A.
  • I panned for gold throughout the conference by checking my mobile phone and watching the stream of #ASW09 nuggets. (I was unable to take copious notes, because my laptop battery wouldn’t charge. The hashtag was my lifesaver.)

I posted a tweet to let others know about one excellent note-taker:

Read @VegasBill tweets for good ASW09 notes.

(I later met Bill and learned he is quite well known in Las Vegas and is a real estate agent and entrepreneur who keeps his followers informed about local Vegas news!)

The #ASW09 hashtag was also the method of letting others know about “after parties” and networking events.

Thanks to #ASW09, I knew where @rickgalan, one of my friends on Twitter and fellow winner of Copyblogger’s Gold Passes to Affiliate Summit, was during the conference. We met up a few times, thanks to this shiny Twitter hashtag.

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing | No Comments »

Fast Forward your SEO to Christmas 2009

December 31st, 2008

Christmas 2008 is behind us, and 2009 upon us. If you have an e-commerce site, one of your first tasks for the New Year should be to “fast forward” your SEO to Christmas 2009. Yes! It’s time to start counting down the days until the 2009 holiday shopping season as you plan your Christmas SEO efforts.

Christmas SEO Planning

NOW is the time to make a list, and check it twice! Keep on your SEO Santa hat. If you wait until the Fall of 2009 to put your Christmas content online, you’re too late. It takes a few months to rank a page well for chosen keywords. Christmas keywords are very competitive, so it takes even longer.

E-commerce store owners have to think much farther ahead in the calendar than brick-and-mortar retailers. Walk-in retail stores are currently planning for Spring. Online stores MUST…

Begin planning for Christmas immediately after Christmas!

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Posted in SEO | 3 Comments »

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