EP:009 – The Cotton Club Podcast
Just wrapped up another episode of The Cotton Club Podcast tonight w/ guest hosts Brant Collins and Robert Blake. The topic for discussion for this evenings show was SEO, or search engine optimization. I have actually gotten a lot of requests from people to do a show on this topic so hopefully we did a good enough job explaining our viewpoints without confusing everyone.
On the show we discuss some popular misconceptions regarding SEO as well as some standard practices that we all put into our clients projects for SEO. We also discussed which search engines you should worry about, and what market share the big SE’s have at this time.
Brant and Robert also shared some findings from a few of their own personal analytics reports to help give us some insight as to what they are seeing and we also touched on what impact social media saturation can have on a websites traffic. We also discussed quality versus quantity in terms of traffic analytics. If you own a website and would like to maximize your search engine rankings, you should definitely check out this episode.
To wrap up the show we each talked about our favorite iPhone apps of the week. Robert mentioned a game he has been playing called Angry Birds, Brant mentioned an augmented reality browser app called Layar that sounds pretty interesting, and I shared an app called Wind Meter that uses your phone to measure wind speed.
As always, thanks for listening and if you have any questions or topics you would like to see us address on the show be sure to drop me a line at: cotton.rohrscheib@pleth.com and I will be happy to consider it.
EP:008 – The Cotton Club Podcast
![podcastartwork250itunes1_thumb[1]](http://www.cottonrohrscheib.com/blog/wp-content/2010/05/podcastartwork250itunes1_thumb1.jpg "podcastartwork250itunes1_thumb[1]")
This weeks show was sort of an experimentation in that we had four guests on at once via Skype as opposed to just Keith and I, I think the end result was pretty awesome, we only had one glitch in the middle of the show and it was minor.
This week my guests for The Cotton Club included Keith Crawford, Robert Blake, and Brant Collins. Some topics discussed were Geo-Location Social Applications (Gowalla, Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Lattitude). We also discussed the previous day’s Wall Street Fiasco involving Citigroup and Proctor & Gamble and how a case study could be made for the entire event. Another topic we covered was Net Neutrality and what role the FCC will play in regulation. We also briefly touch on Google and YouTube’s design changes. As usual we wrapped up the show w/ our iPhone apps of the week.
One of the things that has continued to amaze me about this podcast is how our subscription counts have continued to rise each week. We are now over 400 subscribers to the show. If you have topics that you would like to hear us discuss on The Cotton Club, please drop me a line or leave a comment below and we will be happy to consider them.
Quick Thoughts on Google Buzz
Okay so when Google started pushing Google Profiles the other day I knew that they were laying the foundation for something social, and it wasn’t going to be Orkut on steroids, insert sarcastic giggle here. I went ahead and setup my profile a few weeks ago, you can find my profile here…
Turns out my assumption was correct, Google launched Buzz this past week inside of Gmail, which I thought was a little odd of a way to launch at first, but after giving it some thought, it was probably a pretty stealth way to roll the product out. I know a few people that didn’t even notice the link on the sidebar until I showed them, and one person totally missed it and didn’t know about Buzz until they hit the internal landing page that slapped them in the face once they had logged into their Gmail account.
Turns out Google had all of their ducks in a row in one regard prior to releasing Buzz onto the mainstream, they even have a wireless version of Buzz that they are promoting. Setting up Buzz was pretty easy for the most part w/ one huge exception that might have only affected me, but it was annoying nonetheless…
The Problem Connecting Sites to My Buzz:
When I went in to setup my sites w/ my Google Buzz I first thought that surely they would just bring over the sites that were connected to my Google Profile page that I had created a while back, but that wasn’t the deal at all. I had a list of sites that I could connect initially, like my Blogspot, Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, Digg, and YouTube just to name a few. I set these accounts up, although I haven’t used Blogger in forever. Underneath these sites I had 5 or 6 more sites that I could “connect”, none of these sites were my blog? I found this odd and sat here scratching my head for a few minutes trying to figure out how they got the list of “suggested sites” that were my options. These websites were actually sites that I had built for clients, and I had them listed and verified inside of my Webmaster Tools account, where I record their sitemap links, etc.
I thought to myself for a moment that if maybe there was some way to delete these suggested sites that I would eventually work my way through the list of 800+ sites that I have in Webmaster tools until I got to my blog and I could do it that way. Well, that wouldn’t work because I wasn’t able to do anything but add a site, couldn’t remove it from the “suggested” group of sites.
I went into my Webmaster tools account and went ahead and verified my blog (surprised I hadn’t done this a long time ago). Once I did the verification process I went back into Google Buzz and clicked on selected sites again and noticed that my site was now in the list so I added it that way.
What a headache! I think it would have been much more efficient if users Buzz feed was originated by the sites that are connected to their Google profiles. I am sure that Google had a reason for doing this but for the life of me I can’t think of why they would do it that way.
Now, here’s another dilemma I encountered. While I was able to add Friendfeed as one of my connected sites, I got to thinking, if I connect all of these other sites to my Buzz, why would I need FriendFeed connected to my Buzz? Wouldn’t that be overlap and duplicate content in my feed? I opted to disconnect my FriendFeed from Buzz. I still haven’t been able to get my Delicious links connected to my Buzz either. Kind of makes me wonder if Google even wants third parties involved w/ their Buzz stream… Has anyone else encountered the same issues that I have? What am I missing??
Do We Need Another Social Network? And from Google??
It’s no secret that Google has attempted to get into the social networking business before, their Orkut product never really got wings for some reason, and I honestly think Google has known this for a while, which is why they never gave it a big push. If you are unfamiliar w/ Orkut, here’s my profile you can checkout…
While Google Buzz is being labeled a Social Network, I don’t really see it as a “social network” like Facebook or Twitter. In fact, I see it being more of an aggregator, sort of like what FriendFeed is. I think eventually Google wants to be the place where you can plug in all of our “social properties” and content feeds. If I was Google, that’s exactly the direction I would be looking as well, but I think they are going to have to package it a lot differently.
One component of Google Buzz that I did notice was that you can add friends more or less by “Following” people. This component gives it the “social networkish-ness” but that’s honestly about all I have seen in that regard. Friends can comment on other friends posts, etc. I guess it’s sort of like Facebook w/out all of the Farmtown…
In Conclusion…
I don’t want to sound like I am down on Google Buzz, because as I mentioned earlier, I think that they have the right idea. I just found the initial setup phase of joining to be somewhat frustrating and still don’t have my account setup w/ all of the sites that I want to connect but will live with things the way they are for now.
The bottom line, I think eventually if Google is persistent, they can grow Buzz into something cool that will rob other networks like Facebook and Twitter of face time, but it’s going to take some work. I am advising my clients if they have the time to get their profiles setup and to start adding their sites to Buzz but not pushing it as something they need to do urgently…
Stay Tuned…
I think that the next edition of The Cotton Club might include some discussion regarding Google Buzz so be sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes so you don’t miss it.
In case you are unfamiliar w/ Google Buzz, here’s some info I found on the Google Blog:
We’ve blogged before about our thoughts on the social web, steps we’ve taken to add social features to our products, and efforts like OpenSocial that propose common tools for building social apps. With more and more communication happening online, the social web has exploded as the primary way to share interesting stuff, tell the world what you’re up to in real-time and stay more connected to more people. In today’s world of status messages, tweets and update streams, it’s increasingly tough to sort through it all, much less engage in meaningful conversations.
Our belief is that organizing the social information on the web — finding relevance in the noise — has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google’s experience in organizing information can help solve. We’ve recently launched innovations like real-time search and Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step with the introduction of a new product, Google Buzz.
Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.We’re rolling out Buzz to all Gmail accounts over the next few days, so if you don’t see it in your account yet, check back soon. We also plan to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within organizations.
On your phone, Google Buzz is much more than just a small screen version of the desktop experience. Mobile devices add an important component to sharing: location. Posts tagged with geographical information have an extra dimension of context — the answer to the question "where were you when you shared this?" can communicate so much. And when viewed in aggregate, the posts about a particular location can paint an extremely rich picture of that place. Check out the Mobile Blog for more info about all of the ways to use Buzz on your phone, from a new mobile web app to a Buzz layer in Google Maps for mobile.We’ve relied on other services’ openness in order to build Buzz (you can connect Flickr and Twitter from Buzz in Gmail), and Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system. Our goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. We’re building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API, and we invite developers to join us on Google Code to see what is available today and to learn more about how to participate.
We really hope you enjoy the experiences we’ve built within Gmail and for mobile phones. If you want to learn more, visit buzz.google.com. We look forward to continuing to evolve and improve Google Buzz based on your feedback.
If you are already using Google Buzz, I would love to hear your comments about the product.
I have only had 48hrs with the product and I will admit that there might be a lot about the product that I am totally missing.
Feedburner Socialize Service (Push RSS to Twitter)
Lately I have had a lot of frustrations regarding Feedburner regarding the way they randomly drop my subscription counts. On any given day my subscription counts can drop from somewhere in the 900’s to the 300’s for no apparent reason.
Most of the lost subscriptions can usually be tracked back to FriendFeed but after going back and forth w/ Google (Feedburner) about this issue, I am confident the problem itself doesn’t lie w/ FriendFeed, instead I think it’s something Feedburner has an issue with. Also, I am not alone w/ this issue, I have had several people contact me stating the exact same thing. Hopefully one day soon Feedburner will get this worked out.
Now that I have bashed Feedburner, I am going to go ahead and go on record and give them credit for doing something pretty cool. They have a new service for Feedburner users called Socialize that allows you to input your burned feeds into Twitter. Previously if you wanted to do this you had a wide variety of plugins to chose from, some of which like Twitme are somewhat problematic (especially since wordpress 2.9 was released).
With the Socialize service inside of Feedburner, you can configure your settings to push your RSS feed onto Twitter, which eliminates the need for additional plugins. Here’s some more information about the settings you can control w/ Socialize if you are interested:
Select Account (Handles Multiple Accounts)
At this time, the Socialize service only supports Twitter. You may have one or several Twitter accounts associated with your Google account (which is shared by FeedBurner and other Google products), but each feed may only post to one Twitter account at a time. If for some reason you need the same feed to post to multiple Twitter accounts, you may create a copy of your feed and have that version post to a separate Twitter account.
Formatting OptionsYou may format your feed for Twitter with a number of options. In all cases, the formatting must fit within the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter. If the options you choose create messages longer than 140 characters, FeedBurner will automatically truncate your messages into 140 character tweets.
Post Content Options for Your Tweets
You may post the feed title, title and body, or just the body as the tweet. If you choose to include a link to the feed item, your feed item permalinks will be rewritten as a shortened URL by Google on the goo.gl domain. These links redirect to your normal FeedBurner URLs so that analytics tracking will not be affected. If you select "Leave room for retweets" we will truncate the message to leave room for rewteeting using the many Twitter clients that support this function.
Hash Tags for Your Tweets
Hash tags are the way that Twitter supports tagging or labeling tweets so that they can easily be grouped by Twitter clients that allow sorting and filtering by these tags. By default, the Socialize service does not add any hash tags to your tweets, however if you select "Create hash tags from item categories" we will automatically create hash tags in the tweet according to any <category> elements attached to the feed item. These categories may be added by your blogging platform or CMS publishing system. In Blogger, these are called "Labels" so if you label your posts in Blogger, these labels will get added as hash tags in Twitter.
Additional Text for Your Tweets
You may choose to add a custom message preceding or following the message that is created from your feed item to add more context. As an example you may choose to prepend "From my blog:" to the beginning of the tweet so that Twitter followers can see which messages you are tweeting directly versus posting links from your long form blog.
Item Selection / Item Limits for Updates
As your feed updates throughout the day, FeedBurner picks up your feed and looks for new items. The Socialize service will detect these new items and post up to 5 of them to twitter at a time. Note that the speed with which feed updates can get to FeedBurner will affect this service. To ensure your feed updates in near real time, make sure you ping us immediately after your feed updates and that your blog platform is configured to use PubSubHubub. If none of these options are used for making your feed near real time, the Socialize service will look for and update with any new feed items every 30 minutes.
Keyword Filters for Your Tweets
You may choose to only send certain feed items to Twitter, filtered either by the Category, or text in the title, body, or the entire item. To enable this filter enter text, with terms separated by commas, and then choose where you would like Socialize to look for these keywords. If this service is enabled, an item will only be tweeted if one of the filtered terms is found.
Preview Your Tweets
Preview lets you see how your tweets will look in your feed as you change Socialize options. If your feed content is not available, the preview uses its own sample text. Note that Preview uses the existing items in the feed, but only new feed items published after the service is activated will actually get posted to Twitter.
How Bing Will Rank Your Tweets
I blogged a few days ago about Microsoft Bing and Google’s announcement that they were both going to start incorporating our Tweets into their search results. There has been a lot of speculation as to how these Tweets are gong to show up in their search results. I have been following all of this pretty closely as it is going to directly impact our industry. I blogged earlier today about how Google’s new Social Search is going to work but I think Bing might be a slightly different animal…
Apparently Bing is going to weigh tweets according to follower counts. For instance, if you and I both tweet similar things, and I have 1000+ followers and you have 300 followers, my tweet is going to have a higher ranking. Granted, this is not the best method imaginable, but for the time being I think that is how it’s going to be. Of course, these search algorithm’s get tweaked a lot and all of this is subject to change before you even realize it, but that’s the word that I am getting right now.
I think that all of us are anxious to see how Bing and Google both are able to weigh what’s good content versus what’s bad content using only 140 characters…
How Google’s Social Search Works
Google announced their new Social Search product this week on their blog. Google Social Search is still in the experimental phase but it looks promising. Once you factor in Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, and a Blog, most of us publish a lot of content. Some of this information can be useful to others, and even though they are connected to you socially (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and subscribe to your blog, they currently aren’t able to pull up this information very quickly. In the case of a web search, it’s highly unlikely your posts are going to show up on the first page for whatever topic they are looking for, but this is where Google Social Search is going to come in handy.
Here’s a scenario where this could be pretty helpful. Let’s say I have dinner at a great Mexican Restaurant in Little Rock and I post a note to Twitter raving about the food. Let’s also say that a few of the people who follow me on Twitter reply to me with favorable reviews of their own. Follow me so far? Okay, let’s also say that 2 months later one of my friends is thinking about trying this restaurant but hasn’t talked to anyone who has been. He does a quick Google Search for the Restaurant to see some reviews and my Tweet shows up in his search results! Since he knows me as a trusted source, knowing first hand that I have excellent taste when it comes to food, a good review from me is going to trump any review website that he would have ordinarily based his decision on…
Here’s a better description from the Google Blog as to how the social search feature is going to come in handy:
Your friends and contacts are a key part of your life online. Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person. Unfortunately, that information isn’t always very easy to find in one simple place. That’s why today we’re rolling out a new experiment on Google Labs called Google Social Search that helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle. It should be available for everyone to try by the end of the day, so be sure to check back.
A lot of people write about New York, so if I do a search for [new york] on Google, my best friend’s New York blog probably isn’t going to show up on the first page of my results. Probably what I’ll find are some well-known and official sites. We’ve taken steps to improve the relevance of our search results with personalization, but today’s launch takes that one step further. With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend’s blog on the results page under the heading "Results from people in your social circle for New York." I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking "Show options" on the results page and clicking "Social." Here’s a good video demonstration of Google’s Social Search:
All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web — you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we’ve done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant. The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specific to you, so you need to be signed in to your Google Account to use Social Search. If you use Gmail, we’ll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader, we’ll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.
To learn more about how Social Search works behind the scenes, including the choices and control you have over the content you see and share, read our help center article or watch this video:
This feature is an experiment, but we’ve been using it at Google and the results have been exciting. We’d love to hear your feedback. Oh, and don’t forget to create a public Google profile to expand your social circle and more easily find the information you’re looking for (including that New York blog).
If you are interested in testing the Google Social Search Experiment, click here.
Official Google Blog: Introducing Google Social Search: I finally found my friend’s New York blog!
Be Careful What You Say on Facebook & Twitter
In case you haven’t heard this already, Google and Microsoft (Bing) both announced that they will be displaying tweets from Twitter and status messages from Facebook in their search results. Now for the most part I know that most of us already exercise caution in what we put out there, but I honestly believe that there are going to be a few “less cautious” people that are going to be caught off guard when all of this comes to fruition. You probably know exactly what I am talking about too, it’s not just the expletives and profanity, but I think that element is going to be the most fun to watch and read about.
For as long as I have been working in this industry, I have always worked under the assumption that anything I put out there is going to live forever. I also try to keep in mind that there could come a day where my clients or my mom might actually read my tweets or blog posts. I think that a lot of us in this business long enough already know this, but I am concerned as to whether everyone has come to this realization yet…
Your Social Brand Reputation is More Important than Ever!!
Honestly though, I think that the biggest result that we will see from the search engines incorporating these “social nuggets” into their search results is going to be even more emphasis placed on social media by corporations. Especially in the realm of customer service and dispute resolutions. I think that companies will realize quickly that their customers bad experiences are showing up in Google and Bing (CEO’s and Marketing / PR People are always googling themselves and their companies in their spare time, after all the perception falls broadly on their shoulders).
One recent situation came up with a friend of mine who had his luggage lost by one of the major airlines and it took a few days for him to get the airlines to work with him. This all played out on Twitter, and for the most part I think all of Central Arkansas heard about it (and rightfully so, good for him! I even retweeted him a few times myself). Granted, the airlines that I am referring to already has a Twitter account, but I think they could have jumped on this opportunity and handled it better and more efficiently than they did. Well, take this into consideration, not only is this bad experience going to live forever inside of Twitter, but now it’s also going to be archived w/ two of the most widely used search engines in the world.
In case you missed what I was trying to say through all of this, here it is in the nutshell; Your brand’s social reputation was already important, but now it’s a lot more important than you can imagine!! I recently did a presentation related to this topic, you can find that here along w/ my slides…
How’s All of This Going to Be Rolled Out?
Honestly I don’t have all of the details. I do know that each of the search engines are probably going to have their own policies for including peoples social content. I suspect it will be some sort of opt-in model, but that’s probably still up in the air right now. I also envision the social networks themselves adding another layer to this equation, probably an opt-in model in this case as well. You will likely see a checkbox in Facebook and Twitter that will say something like, “include my status updates in search engines” or something along those lines.
My Prediction for Facebook and Twitter
I honestly don’t think Twitter is going to have near as many concerns going into this model that Facebook is going to see. For the most part I don’t think that Twitter users look at Twitter with the same concerns that they do Facebook. I think Facebook users think that they have a lot more invested in Facebook (20 year old school yearbook photos, baby pictures, vacation photos, relationship statuses, etc.). All of this to say that I think Facebook users are going to be a lot more guarded on this issue once they figure out what’s going on. You just thought the Facebook terms of service issue was a biggie, wait until someone’s inappropriate status update shows up in Google underneath their employer’s listing… Whew!!
My Predictions for Google and Microsoft (Bing)
I think that both of these search engines are going to see some positives for adding this content to their search results. I am anxious to see how it is presented, I have some ideas as to how they could do this if anyone from either of these companies wants to give me a shout…
I also think that by doing this that search engines in general are become even more useful and relevant than they were before. Unless of course, you are looking for Kanye West’s concert dates, they are going to located on page 100 or so, tucked neatly behind all of the “you suck” tweets he got after the VMA’s.
There has been a lot of coverage since these announcements were made but there are a couple that I recommend checking out, Dan Zarella actually saw this in his crystal ball, and PC World did a nice piece on this story here. I also like Web Worker Daily, they covered this story here…
What Are Your Thoughts?
I would be interested as to what some of you are thinking on this topic, hit me back or leave me a comment and let me know…
Great Blog Content –vs- SEO
A while back I did a post on Social Saturation and Search Engine Optimization, in that post I emphasized how important it is to get your content onto the social networks. I was reading a post today by Dawn Foster at Web Worker Daily and she brought up some points that I also agree with and I wanted to share it w/ you.
In her post she mentioned a discussion panel that she was a part of where there were 2 content people and 2 seo people that do seo full time. She hit a home run in the first few sentences on this post and I could not agree with her more:
This weekend I was on an “SEO Smackdown” panel at our local WordCamp Portland. Two of us were from the content side, while the other two panelists were SEO experts. My take on SEO is that writing compelling, interesting blog content that people will want to talk about and link to will get you around 95 percent of the way to good search engine rankings. If you don’t have great content, SEO is not going to be very useful for you. You might be able to do some SEO trickery to get people to your web site, but if they aren’t impressed by the content when they arrive, they won’t stick around long enough to have any impact.
Now, I want to emphasize that I am not advocating abandoning SEO, there are some basic principles that you should adhere to, you can find some of my thoughts on SEO in a post I did a while back, that’s not what this post is about though. You should pay attention to key things such as page titles, descriptions, etc., but you should do that on everything you publish to the web. Much more than that though, you need to focus on your content. Here are some valid points that Dawn brought out in her article…
Write Great Titles
Keep in mind that you are writing titles for human beings, so your title should be catchy and convey the meaning of the post as a first priority. While you write the title, you should also be thinking about the keywords that people might want to use to find your content and make sure that you have included a keyword or two in the title. I’ll illustrate this with a couple of examples of good and bad titles.
- Bad: Dawn’s Thoughts for March
- Better: Analysis of Facebook and Twitter Demographics in March
- Bad: Day 1 of LinuxCon
- Better: Mobile Linux and Open Standards on Day 1 of LinuxCon
Write New and Interesting Content
Write content that people will want to link to and discuss. If you are rehashing the same stories as every other blogger, people are much less likely to read and respond to your content. Write posts that are new, fresh and unique with analysis and insight from your unique background and perspective. You can talk about a news story that other people are blogging about, but spend some time writing about your experiences and ideas that offer a different perspective than the rest of the crowd. Use research in new ways, interview interesting people, and talk about your experiences. By offering something new, people are much more likely to read your blog post and link to it, which is where the real SEO magic is found.
Include Personal Anecdotes
Nothing makes a post unique quite like personal anecdotes based on your experiences. I saw this first-hand when I started writing for WebWorkerDaily. I wrote what I thought was a brilliant post on using Yahoo Pipes and then I wrote a short, quick post about how I dread answering the question, “So, What Do You Do?” during the holidays when talking to non-technical family and friends. The “brilliant” post got a few comments and some traffic, but nothing like the short, personal story about how to answer that difficult question. Human beings read our blog posts, and personal stories resonate with people in a way that technical facts and figures never will.
I just thought that this was very good information and thought that I would share it w/ my readers. Of course, if you work in this industry you well know that getting clients to write content is a lot like pulling teeth, but the ones that do put forth the effort usually see the results from it.
Work From Home Scams Exploiting Twitter and Google
Since I have worked in this industry for a long time people often reach out to me with their web-related business ventures and ideas to more or less bounce them off of me. One of the most common questions I get these days are related to the home based business scams using the name and even logos of Twitter and/or Google.
These things are scams as best that I can tell. Especially in the case of Twitter, they haven’t figured out a profitable business model yet, so how are they going to pay you to sit at home and send out tweets??
Here is a little more information about these scams that was on MSNBC: (thanks to ShoeMoney for pointing out this article…)
Here’s something to tweet about: Con artists are now piggybacking on the popularity of Twitter and Google to pitch their phony work-at-home schemes.
Stealing the good name and familiar logo of these well-known companies is an easy way to grab attention and look legitimate to potential victims.
“They prey on people who are desperate,” says Ohio truck driver Robert Anderson, who fell for a home-based job opportunity that appeared to be from Google. “They make money by lying to people, promising them the world and giving them a guarantee they have no intention of honoring.”
The ads promise you can make thousands of dollars a week for very little work. Bogus blogs and fake testimonials back up these ridiculous income claims. And a deviously clever marketing trick makes these get rich quick offers appear to be risk-free.
“Unlike other work-at-home schemes that ask for lots of money up front, these Google and Twitter versions start with a small payment and then whittle away at your bank account,” warns Allison Southwick with the Council of Better Business Bureaus.
All they want is a couple of dollars — billed to your credit or debit card — to send you “free” information about their money-making machine. Armed with your account information they can charge you for services or products you didn’t order.
In retrospect, the offer was "obviously" a scam, says Barbara Simonie of Henderson, Nev. She responded to a pop-up ad for the “Google Home Business Kit.”
Simonie agreed to pay $2.95 for the “free” information but never received it. She did find a recurring charge of $59.90 on her credit card statement from a company called Pacific WebWorks in Las Vegas. The company, which has a failing “F” rating with the BBB, also does business as “Easy Google Cash.”
Simonie called the company and was told the $59.50 was her monthly membership fee for the Google kit — a fee she never knowingly authorized. The customer service agent promised a refund. That was back in July. Simonie is still waiting for her $182 credit.
Pacific WebWorks CEO Ken Bell told me in an e-mail that his company’s Google offers “clearly explain the terms and conditions of the customer’s purchase before any purchase is made.” As an example, Bell sent a pop-up ad in which the monthly charge is disclosed, but only for users who click on a tiny "Terms and Conditions" link at the bottom.
Google Money Tree
The Google Money Tree, recently shut down by a federal judge, operated in a similar manner. The online ads for this scheme were simple and direct. “Learn how to make $107,389 in six months just filling out forms and doing searches on Google and Yahoo," they said.
Karen Hobbs, a lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission, says hundreds of thousands of people fell for the pitch and had the $2 to $4 handling charge billed to their debit or credit cards.
“We have discovered no one who was able to use the information on the CD in order to make money,” Hobbs says.
But there’s a bigger problem. Those who took the bait and requested the CD were automatically enrolled in a membership program. If they did not cancel within seven days, and in many cases they did not even get their promised information in that time, they were charged a monthly fee of $72.71. The FTC sued Infusion Media, the Utah-based company that ran Google Money Tree, and got its Web site shut down. A federal judge also froze the firm’s assets, which means if the FTC wins this case, victims could get some of their money back.
Twitter now the Hot “Opportunity”
The bad guys, always looking for something new, have added Twitter to their bogus money-making offers. A recent e-mail picked up by the Better Business Bureau reads: “Twitter Workers Needed ASAP, You’re Hired! Make Extra Cash with Twitter."
The e-mail links to EasyTweetsProfits.com, a company located in Surrey, England. The Web site claims you can make $250 to $873 a day working at home. The company offers a seven-day free trial of its instructional CD for just $1.99.
That seven-day window starts the day you order the CD, not when you receive it. That important piece of information is disclosed in the lengthy terms and conditions page. If you don’t cancel in time, you’ll be charged $47 a month.
Walter Moline of Yakima, Wash., saw an ad on Facebook for Twitter Profit House of Glendale, Calif. Same pitch: $1.99 for a free informational CD. Moline paid with his debit card and waited for the CD to arrive. Seven days later, he noticed the company had charged him $99.
Moline says he missed the fine print about the seven-day cancellation period. “I had no idea I was signing up for a membership,” Moline tells me. “I feel I was taken.”
Moline was lucky. He complained to the Better Business Bureau, which helped him get the money back. The BBB of Los Angeles, which is handling the Twitter Profit House complaints, gives the company an “F” rating.” I wanted to talk to someone from Twitter Profit House and Google Money Tree, but no one responded to my requests for a comment.
The Bottom Line
Work-at-home scams are everywhere. They’re advertised online, in print and on TV. They often make bold promises, have numerous testimonials, and may use the names and logos of trusted companies, including news organizations. It’s all marketing hype designed to get you to let down your guard.
How do you protect yourself? It’s really very simple. Never pay for a job or information about employment opportunities. And be skeptical.
Google spokesman Jason Morrison tells me the company does not send out e-mail, use pop-ups or have infomercials that offer ways to make money with Google. “We do not pay people thousands of dollars to fill out forms or post links or click on things,” he warns. “If you see something promises a huge reward with very little investment or work or knowledge required, be wary.”
I should also state for the record that I am not a fan of home based businesses, pyramid schemes, or multi-level marketing. It’s just not my thing, it might be great for others, but for me personally, it’s not where it’s at. It’s almost impossible to instill a complete vision in others for the growth of your company, sure you can train them and instill a lot into them, but when these companies cloud the “vision” with promises of getting rich by just recruiting people to be under you, I think a lot gets lost.
For more information on these scams, you can checkout the Better Business Bureau’s recent post or this one from the FTC. If you don’t have an original idea of your own and want to pursue a home based business, I have no specific recommendations, but do your homework. I am sure that you have someone in your contact database that participates in a few of these programs, lean on them to get their take on them as well. I am probably not the guy to talk to.
Hope this helps…
Another Reason Social Saturation is Important
The report that shows the rise in usage posted on Yahoo didn’t surprise me too much this week when my good friend Brant Collins (another authority on social media) tweeted this link the other day. Social Networking is here and has been for a while now. It is for this very reason that my partners and I consult our clients to not only maintain an effective web presence but also plan for a certain level of social saturation as well.
On a recent personal project that my partners and I invested a lot of time and effort into, we were able to quickly achieve great organic search engine positioning but analyzing our statistics quickly showed us that our traffic wasn’t coming from Google so much as it was coming from RSS Feeds that we had tied into social outlets like Facebook & Twitter.
If you are behind the curve, it’s never too late to insert your company into the social landscape, in fact if you jump in now, you can probably beat a lot of your competitors to the punch.
If you thought you wasted a lot of time on Facebook last year, this year things have gotten out of hand, according to a study by Nielsen Online. Time spent last year reading our friends’ Facebook Updates and sharing "25 Random Things About Me" questionnaires totaled 1.7 billion minutes compared to this year’s total of 13.9 billion. That’s a 700 percent increase in time spent virtually loafing around, according to Nielsen Online that just loves to tell us how we waste our time. (First, television. Now, Twitter.)
Speaking of which, that chirpy social network, Twitter, has come onto the scene like a new kid on the block that drives a Mercedes. Everybody wants to be Twitter’s friend – including Microsoft. Twitter saw a 3712 percent year-over-year increase between last and this year, with users clocking in nearly 300,000 total minutes for that site in April ‘09.
And for all you MySpace holdouts: That site can still claim top audience for social network video streams. Users spent 384 million minutes viewing video on MySpace in April versus only 113.5 minutes for video on Facebook.
Nielsen Online also recently released a report (PDF) that says we like blogs and social networks better than our personal email. Facebook holds our attention for longer than any other top site. And time spent on social networking and blogging sites has grown at 3 times the rate of overall Internet growth.
"The staggering increase in the amount of time people are spending on these sites … has ramifications for how people behave, share and interact within their normal daily lives," according to Nielsen’s "Global Faces and Networked Places" report (PDF).
Gulp. That’s quite the charge.
But don’t you go shaking your head and muttering, "Kids, these days," under your breath. It’s the youngsters who might actually be taking a back seat at the family desktop, and their embarrassing parents who are increasingly wooed by friend requests from their long-lost college classmates, and quizzes about what literary heroine they are.
The greatest growth for Facebook has come from the 35- to 49-year-old crowd, and has added twice as many 50- to 64-year-old members than it did of the under-18 group.
There are, after all, way more people to network with after you’ve been around for 50 years than there are when you’re just starting out as a social being.
Time Spent on Social Networks Doubles in a Year by PC World: Yahoo! Tech
