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July 02, 2009
12:32
Facebook Rolling Out New Privacy Settings
» ‎ Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Last week, we saw that Facebook was taking status updates public for selected test users (a la Twitter). Those selected users were ones that had already set their profiles to a high level of sharing—everyone could see their profiles already.

Now Facebook will make it so that all users will have a very granular control over exactly what gets shared with whom.

These settings can be applied on a message-by-message basis, but there will also be changes to the full privacy settings for every member. As paidContent points out this will eliminate the need to view at least six pages of privacy settings.

And now Facebook announces that they’ll be rolling out this change to the full site very shortly:

To make it easy for users to set their profiles’ level of “openness,” Facebook will be using a transition tool. Here’s the first step:

While some argue that Facebook is forcing us to be more public, these settings are too complex and the publisher settings should list “custom” first, overall, I think simplifying privacy settings and making them easier to set will help. The transition tool will force users who normally don’t change the default privacy settings to think about how much they want to share, at least once.

The full presentation (via David Berkowitz):

Facebook Privacy Enhancements View more presentations from guest5f7bf4.
What do you think? Is this a step forward or backward for privacy on (and off) Facebook?

11:56
The Right Domain Name
» ‎ Retired Pay World
by Daniel Waser
Domain names are as important to websites as attractive covers are to books. A catchy domain name is imperative to compete successfully in the online environment. If you think that putting all your innovativeness into the domain name will make it better, you are mistaken.

What is the secret? Without the kind of keywords search engines will want to index your site, it is not going to figure in the search engine listings. In other words, your domain name must be appealing as well as crafted for the search engines. This article tells you how you can achieve both these things.

Start by researching for a search engine optimized keyword that can be a part of your domain name. You can find immense help with a keyword analyzer to achieve this. One place to get them is through the search engines. Think of some keyword that summarizes your website in short and enter it into this tool. You will get many options from the analyzer for the keyword you have used.

From the returned options pick particular domain name that better serves the meaning of your website. You’re site is better search engine optimized if you use a long tail keyword because there will be fewer webmasters who will choose them.

After this, you can begin looking for the domain name you will keep. The company that provides domain names will let you know if a particular domain name is available. You will get other suggestions for the domain name if your chosen one is not available. The most ideal way to benefit from this tool is to enter your chosen keyword first.

You will get other recommendations if this particular keyword is not available to use as the domain name. If a particular suggestion has your keyword in it and terminates with a .com, it will be good for you. If not, use your creativity.

Craft a domain name that contains your keyword in some way by using some filler words or numbers. Most people use ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’ for such filtering purposes in their domain names. You get a good domain name, and you also get it indexed because the search engines will simply ignore such buffer words. Use numbers at the end of the phrase.

Craft a domain name that contains your keyword in some way by using some filler words or numbers. Most people use ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’ for such filtering purposes in their domain names. You get a good domain name, and you also get it indexed because the search engines will simply ignore such buffer words. Use numbers at the end of the phrase.

It is not complicated to have a domain name that serves well for your visitors as well as for the search engines. The keyword tool will influence 90% of the success of your domain name; the rest will depend on how innovative and creative you are. When you find nothing helps you in getting the domain name of your choice, changing the extension always works.
About the Author: Finding the best information about keyword research, getting the right domain name or how to build an online business can be overwhelming at times. Dominating Niches and Commission Ritual are great sites to get straight facts. Copyright © 2009 Retired Pay World. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is likely guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@retiredpay.com so we can take legal action immediately.
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11:30
Using Wordpress
» ‎ Retired Pay World
by Alberto Tett
If you are ready to build a website and a bit confused as to the perfect format which should be chosen for the site considering there are so may variants, then Wordpress could be the right choice for you. It is highly probable that you have heard about it as a popular blogging platform, but there are some amazing things for which you could use it. One can use Wordpress to create a website or CMS (Content Management System), which has several intrinsic advantages:

Having fantastico in the domain control panel would add to the convenience of setting up Wordpress and it is just a matter of a few clicks and your website is ready and functional. Even if there is no fantastico, setting up can be done manually and it is a simple process where you just have to follow instructions. If you are not at ease with any of the options, then delegate the job to someone else. It would not take any time if the person handling it is experienced, and the charges are also not too high.

Upgrading an conventional website built by some one else can be pricey as you have to pay the designer and then wait till he gets back and then wait again till the job is through. Using a system like Wordpress is much more user-friendly and easier to learn. You can be updating your own site in no time and changes are instant – you don’t have to wait for a designer to have time to do the edits for you!

One more advantage of using Wordpress is that outsourcing website updates and changes can be done very conveniently. Just set up a virtual assistant and allocate a username and password which she uses to log on and work on your site. You can cease to feel stressed whether your latest version of the site is up on the net or whether you are overwriting work completed by some other person.

The Categories and Archives section of Wordpress is a built-in feature which adds to the convenience of use. Sites which are regularly upgraded are favorites of search engines. Because of the nature of blogs and Wordpress you’ll likely be updating very frequently and this is good news for your search engine rankings. You site picks up as soon as the blog search engines start to hook you.

When you use Wordpress to build a site, you are automatically entitled to RSS Feed subscription. Every time you add new content to your site, your visitors get to know as they can subscribe to your RSS feed. This is a wonderful way to keep your site ‘ticking’ with growing number of people coming to know more. This should enlighten you on the use of Wordpress to construct a successful and easy website which not only draws traffic but also lets you live peacefully.
About the Author: The gurus hate it when their personal secrets about Using Wordpress Properly get exposed! Now they’re fuming mad about this site Using Wordpress Properly and trying to shut it down. Copyright © 2009 Retired Pay World. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is likely guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@retiredpay.com so we can take legal action immediately.
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9:54
FeedBurner Adds Custom Email Subject Lines
» ‎ Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

FeedBurner, an RSS management utility that was purchased by Google a few years ago, has long offered an RSS-to-email service. One of its major drawbacks, however, was that as an RSS publisher you could only set one subject line. So every email from your feed (generated and sent daily) had the same subject line.

The lowly likes of us regular bloggers complaining in the support forums didn’t have much of an effect. The only solution offered until now was logging in every day and manually changing the subject line to match your post—not fun.

But after Darren Rowse’s open letter to FeedBurner two weeks ago on ProBlogger, things are finally changing. Today, the Google AdSense for Feeds blogs announces that “Happiness is more subject in your subject line.” And it’s true!

Now the interface under Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email Branding offers this “hot tip”:

Note the checkbox at the bottom: if you regularly have more than one post a day, the checkbox opens another menu with even more customization:

This subject line is only used if you have more than one item in your feed that day; otherwise, it reverts to the primary custom subject line.

What do you think? How fast will you be logging in to customize your subject line?

via
7:07
Web Advertisers Try to Avert the Government’s Eyes Somewhere Else
» ‎ Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim
An important element (read: selling point) of Internet marketing is the ability to know more about consumers and their behaviors. Everything can be tracked on the Internet, for the most part, and there is obvious value to marketers and their efforts. The flip side of this ability to track people is the privacy issue and lately the US government has been raising it’s regulatory eyebrows at the online world. In the past this may not have been such big news but with the current administration’s bend toward a ‘name it and claim it’ government style, web advertisers are looking to self police before they draw any more attention from the feds.

Yahoo Tech reports on the efforts of a group of advertising associations that have come together to build a set of rules and regulations that the industry can use to give the consumer the privacy they expect and let marketers keep the freedoms that government intervention would likely hinder.

The centerpiece of these guidelines are the provision of transparency in tracking practices and easier opt-out for consumers. While it is certainly a big question as to how well these guidelines will actually work the hope is that the industry will be less of a focus of the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and Congress.

These guidelines are coming from trade associations that represent 5,000 companies. The consortium comprises the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Association of National Advertisers, Direct Marketing Association, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Better Business Bureau. Their members are some of the nation’s largest companies, including Google Inc., General Electric Co., Microsoft Corp., Coca-Cola Co. and Procter & Gamble Co.

These guidelines include recommendations that companies
1. Tell consumers more clearly when they’re being tracked
2. Educate consumers on how Web tracking works
3. Give consumers an easy way to opt out of being followed
4. Provide “reasonable” security for the data they collect
5. Limit how much data they retain
6. Get consumer approval before making material changes that would erode privacy protections with specific areas such as children’s personal information, financial data and medical records getting more protection.
Anyone caught by this new group will be reported to the federal government. This plan should go into effect in 2010. Sounds reasonable enough but of course there are those who feel that this will not be enough.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said the online ad industry’s promise to regulate itself through the new guidelines is designed to undercut the federal government’s increased interest in overseeing online behavioral advertising.

He fears that the guidelines don’t go far enough and that there needs to be fair rules passed by Congress that ‘online marketing can thrive but consumers have greater control on how the information collected is being used.’

I am sure that the views of Pilgrim readers regarding government intervention in business are all over the map so we’ll ask you the question: Should the industry police itself or should the federal government be involved? What are the pros and cons of both options? Here’s your chance to form your own policy for people to see and show off your position on government’s role in business. Sounds like a fun and light topic to consider while enjoying the holiday weekend, right?
5:58
Early Returns for US Search Traffic are In. Bing!
» ‎ Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

What would be the best way for a research firm to get some notice in a market that has two or three dominant players that most turn to? Well, get the first numbers into the market place around how well Bing has performed for Microsoft. Reuters reports that StatCounter, a Dublin based research firm has done just that.

The company is based in Dublin and has published results that are based on 4 billion pageloads per month monitored through a network of websites. Drumroll please?

Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter.

Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 percent from 78.72 percent before Bing. Yahoo Inc, the perennial No. 2 in the market, rose to 11.04 percent from 10.99 percent.

Cymbal crash! In a nice piece of headline sensationalism, Reuters titled the article “Microsoft’s Bing Search Wins Share from Google”. Good stuff to make you read further but the numbers, at least from StatCounter, don’t really bear out the ‘win’.

In fact, one might say that even though there was an uptick in Microsoft search traffic (as well as a slight one for Yahoo) the change of ½ a percent is negligible at best and could be accounted for in normal error ranges as nothing positive at all. Now factor in the $100 or so million that Microsoft has assigned to the rollout of Bing and the frequency of the ads seen for the new decision engine it may be fair to say these numbers are a huge disappointment rather than any form of hope. If Bing doesn’t get traction early it may just be a true blip and a non-issue for Google moving forward.

StatCounter though, really wants to create some sort of competition here.

“At first sight, a 1 percent increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive,” StatCounter Chief Executive Adohan Cullen said in a statement.

Underlying trend? After one month? That’s almost as bad as basing company performance on short term (quarterly) results and we all know where that leads. Look, I think Google could really use a strong competitor. It would help the consumer and it would be likely to make Google even stronger by being pushed a bit. These numbers, however, will not make anyone at Google even hiccup. In fact, the re-branding efforts of Yahoo are likely to cause more consternation for the Google because at least Yahoo is realistic about its search prospects. Oh and by the way, Yahoo is still #2 despite the Bing rollout.

If Bing can overtake Yahoo for 2nd place then that might be news. Nearly one month into this race, though, this kind of result is hard to get excited about and certainly not worthy of the proclamation that Google is losing ground.
5:53
Twitter Twademarking Tweets
» ‎ Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Twitter is attempting to gain some kind of control of the use of "Twitter" and "Tweet" in a way that reminds me of Google’s attempt back in 2006.

TechCrunch got its hand on an email that was sent out to one Twitter app developer:

Hi,

Twitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own. How can we go about having you change your UI to better differentiate your offering from our own?

Thanks,

That prompted an official response from Twitter’s chief of damage control Biz Stone. The use of "Twitter" appears to be pretty much off limits, but his comments about using "Tweet" have me puzzled:

We have applied to trademark Tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective but we have no intention of "going after" the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter. In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet. However, if we come across a confusing or damaging project, the recourse to act responsibly to protect both users and our brand is important.

I’m not a trademark attorney–if you are, correct me if I am wrong–but if you register a trademark, aren’t you obliged to police it? I was under the impression that if you didn’t prevent others from using your trademark, you risked losing the protections granted by its registration.

If that is the case, maybe third-party application developers should be worried after all.

In addition, the above sentiment is how Twitter feels about the situation today, but what about in five years from now? What if it’s acquired by Google or News Corp–and they have a more stringent policy on the use of their trademarks?

One blog post does not make a legal exemption. I’d be careful of your use of Twitter or Tweet if your product can in any way be confused as an official company offering.
5:33
Bing Announces Twitter Integration, But Don’t Get Too Excited
» ‎ Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

All of us that have called for more “real-time” search results or better Twitter integration, should have done a better job of spelling out our needs.

Apparently Bing misread the memo.

In a move that appears to have more bark than bite, Bing has announced the integration of Twitter with its search results. Before you leap for joy, the announcement is a non-starter.

What we get is a few thousand Twitter profiles added to the Bing index. Search for “Andy Beal Twitter” or “@andybeal” and you’ll get a box at the top of your results that looks like this:

What you don’t get is Bing tapping into those tweets for its actual search results. Let’s take the text from the second tweet listed above and “Bing” it:

Meh.

With just a few thousand high profile Twitter users included, and no honest-to-goodness real-time search, I feel kind of robbed. The next time Bing declares it’s “Bringing a Bit of Twitter to Bing,” I hope it bites off a larger chunk!

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