Archive for May, 2009

So your Direct Message inbox is full … I mean 2500 messages full, or just 250 messages full. You have likely turned off your DM notification to your cell phone because of all the DM spam and now you’ve missed some important DMs from real friends because of all the auto-DM spam from new followers/followees.

Of course if you listen to Social Media Edge radio you already know to stop the massive volume of auto-DMs and how to clean out your inbox without deleting every message. In fact I really enjoyed deleting DMs by keywords like “following”, “welcome” and “visit”.

Okay, I’ll stop teasing. It’s very simple. I’m going to give you the link in just a moment but first I want to say this is just as simple, in almost every browser, as dragging a link to your toolbar. You can practice by dragging this TwitterBits link to your tool bar. Just left click on it, drag it to your link bar – probably at the top of your page – and let go. If it did not “stick” up there (or down/over there) try it again. Once you have successfully done so then you’ll be able to use the DM Deleter, a.k.a. “DM Whacker”.

Once I give you the link you’ll go to that page and drag the DM Whacker link to your toolbar. Then to use the DM Whacker you will go to your Twitter DM page and click on the DM Whacker button in your tool bar. The side bar (right side of your Twitter page) will change and you will see the controls for using the DM Whacker to manage your DMs. Delete is probably a better word than manage!

Now that you have seen it in action go to this link and do what you have learned.

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Facebook Fishing Fiesta Fervently Flowing Freely?

Don’t be compromised.

Careful of some phishy business on Facebook – you may get a message saying something like “Check areps.at” or “Check bests.at” don’t mess with it. Tell the sender they have been hacked and need to change their password.

Clint Miller brought it up during a call in to my show, Social Media Edge, last week. Then our tech reporter, Mike Mueller, did a more indepth look at it for his tech tips today.

This will not stop all of the DM spam, according to Clint and Mike (and regular Jeremy Blanton), but it will stop up to 95% of it. Wow, does that mean I can turn my notifications back on again?

On Twitter follow @optmeout

Wait for them to follow you back

Send them a DM – it doesn’t matter what it says

Unfollow them

Since @optmeout belongs to TweetLater and TweetLater is “responsible” for most of the great volume of DM spam you will be eliminating most of the problem. My hopes is that Twitter handles this with developers using the DM function.

Hope this helps!

Oh, if you’re not listening to Social Media Edge you’re probably missing something! Check the ARCHIVES for fun.

Follow me on Twitter.

Here’s the mother of all Top Ten Lists. Well, sort of. It’s more an adoptive relationship but there are certainly more Top Ten Lists here than you can list in ten. Okay, I couldn’t resist!

We’ve played Top Ten my whole life and I’m nearly as old as the Top Ten List master himself, David Letterman – but that’s just a name drop and he has nothing to do with this site. Except, that is, most likely a good bit of influence.

At TopTenTopTen.com there are currently 5811 Top Ten Lists. Which, if my math is still good in this New Age, is 58,110 list items. Now that’s not just bathroom reading there.

Here are just a few, ahem, “interesting” samples:

America’s Most Visited Cities
Songs By Rod Stewart (which, oddly enough, includes “Twisting”)
Male Baby Names in West Virginia for 2005 (Uhm, Jed, Cletus, Merle … nope!)
America’s Best Teahouses

So enjoy TopTenTopTen.com and if you make a list, share it with us here, too!

Follow me on Twitter @thekencook

Just think of it, you tweet the link to your money maker and it shows up in the stream of every one of your followers. Google crawls those pages and suddenly you have 50, 500, 5000 or even more links back to your money maker. Genius!

Not. So. Fast.

rel=”nofollow”

Nofollow as an attribute to the link does not always mean the search spider does not follow. In fact the link may be followed by the search spider but the link not indexed.? Nofollow in the ROBOTS.txt file, however, would mean “do not follow any links from this page/site”.

Twitter adds the nofollow attribute to every link you place on Twitter – except your profile where they employ the rel=”me nofollow” where nofollow still stands as purposed and me indicates this is a profile link or a link to other pages about the same user.

So in essence while Twitter links are good for ramping up the visits to your site the value in strengthening your search engine ranking is more indirect than as a direct result of being on Twitter. While some search engines do not follow links from tweets others do and from those pages they will be able to juice up any links you have on that page. So make your second order links strong and point them to your money maker and THEN you can almost certainly begin to see some increase.

It’s all about the Eigenspace!

Follow me on Twitter @thekencook

And I didn’t even know they had been in a wreck. /end redneck humor

It seems big corporations who serve the same folks related services should not have board members who are on the board at both companies. Or at least says the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act. Google and Apple, it seems, should have been keeping the oranges and apples in separate crates instead of sharing heads.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, and Arthur Levinson, of Apple, are both on the Board of Directors at Google. Is this bad? Why is it bad?

Read more about it from this news report.

Searching for a sandwich shop by typing “sandwich shop” into my favorite search engines will likely not lead me to a sandwich shop down the street.? Likewise if I type brake shop, loan officer or dentist. This is why when most of us search we type “mortgage company in Georgia” or “hair salon in Marietta”.

True, if you are number one for your generic search terms you will generate a lot of traffic to your website but is it conversion ready or even conversion worthy traffic? I always get a chuckle at people who call me and say, “We can guarantee you front page placement on Google for only $35,000 per month.” Really – to what end?

Would you rather be number one at a huge cost for people who will never convert to use your business or would you prefer to have just a handful of visitors who are actually prospective clients? Now we’re talking about hyper local. On almost every search term important to my business I am highly placed on all search engines in my state and even higher in my local area. Currently I am doing just about as much business, personally, as I would have during the boom times. I do it by cross posting, keeping multiple blogs going, posting to comments on blogs with siilar subject matter and keeping fresh content on my “money maker” website.

Without going to far down the SEO trail it takes a coordinated effort of title, description, keywords, and linking to be number one in your market first then fan out from there.

Why don’t you join me and my co-host, Jason Crouch, every Tuesday at Noon Eastern for Social Media Edge Radio where we talk about the subject of Hyper Local and more. We are also joined every week by our tech report, Mike Mueller, with his tips, tricks, tweaks and tools. Join us at Blog Talk Radio for show schedule and details!

You can also telephone me directly at 678-946-0101 – we are available for consultation, training and social media support.

You know – some things are funny. Some things get funnier every time you watch them…

Free in this box! Step by step instructions to find and add friends.

One of the hottest topics among the Social Media Edge listeners and chat participants over the last several days has been an increase in the number of Friend Feed subscriptions.? I had noticed it in the last week of April and visited the site to find it completely redesigned and me lagging behind with my following of Friend Feed. Good thing I co-host a show about social media, eh? Well I can’t be all places at one time now can I?

Jason Crouch, co-host of Social Media Edge Radio asked during a telephone conversation if I had noticed an increase in the number of subscriptions from Friend Feed. Our resulting task was to find out “why” and it became one of the topics on Social Media Edge for Tuesday, May 5.

We really were not sure of the answer at the beginning of that broadcast but we did discover it during the show. Below is our step by step process of how to add friends to FF from the new friend finder. With pictures, too, just for @wsredneck

First log on to your FF account and look at the right sidebar. (If you don’t have a FF account start one, they are free.)

You will notice on this page you can see how many people you are subscribed to, how many are subscribes to you and how many comments you have in FF.

You will also be able to see all of your feeds from comments made directly in FF or imported from other social media outlets such as Twitter or Facebook.

Locate the link, the very small text link, at the bottom of the Friends panel labeled “Browse/edit friends” and click it. (Click image for larger version.)

Once you are on the next page you will see thumbnails and names of your current friends. You can mouseover any image and details about your friend (better stated as your subscription) will pop-up. You may interact with them directly from that pop-up if you wish. Wwe want to add new friends so find the link near the top of the page that says “Find/invite friends” and click on that. (Click on the image for a larger version.)

Once you are the invite page you can choose several different ways to import friends or find friends who are already on FriendFeed. You can find friends by email addres in the search function or who are also on your connections at Facebook, Twitter, GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo and so-on.

For this article I clicked on the Twitter button.

A pop-up layer asks for your Twitter user name but not your log in information. Very good for security consious people. My Twitter user name is “thekencook” even though you may be tempted to enter “@myusername”.

The next window will present you with any number of friends you have from Twitter who are also on FriendFeed. Mine says I have 900 Twitter friends who are also on FF and I don’t think I need to be adding all of them and duplicating efforts but there are some who I would like to be able to follow in the FF aggregator that I also follow in Twitter.

For our excercise I’m going to select my friend Reggie Nicolay.

When I select his “thumbnail” it takes me to Reggie’s FF page and you see the very evident “Subscribe to Reggie Nicolay” button prominately displayed beclow his name and avatar.

Well, go ahead and click on it!

Now you are presented with a choice of which group to which you would like to add this new subscription – and it can be multiple groups. You also have the option of creating a new group.

Once you have selected the group or group simply select the “Subscribe” button and you are done. I have now subscribed to Reggie’s FriendFeed and I can monitor a lot of his conversation from just one page instead of having to stalk, er – follow, him all over the internet.

FriendFeed – one of the best aggregators on the Web today. There are others but FF just took two giant steps forward.

So you’re following eleventy nine people and only nine of them regularly update. Perhaps it makes no difference to you unless you reach your peak number of people to follow then it can be a big deal. In case you are not familiar with the number of people you are allowed to follow it is capped at 2000 until you reach 2000 followers then it is limited to 2000 plus 10% of your number of followers.

If you are following 2000 and have only 1100 followers you are capped and cannot follow others. The only way to follow someone new and more interesting is to drop (unfollow) someone who is just taking up space. Meet UnTweeps which will help you find people you are following who have not updated for the last 30, 60 or 90 days. Best of all UnTweeps uses Oauth so you can securely connect to Twitter and unfollow all of the results from one page. You can even deselect people you still want to follow even though they may have not updated in that period.

This morning I used UnTweeps to unfollow 69 of 71 people who had not updated in the last 90 days. The two I kept are friends who are still trying to “get Twitter” so I deselected the checkbox and unfollowed the remainder.

UnTweeps is simple to use and even with around 5000 names to check only took about 1 minute to deliver results and a matter of seconds to unfollow. I like this tool.