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How many ideas can we come up with using a symbol? As an SEOer I’ve always said NO to FLASH. But now with Social Media and people demanding stickiness, I see a new use for FLASH using Augmented Reality. This video will remain in my favorites forever because it shows how a symbol can create a reality! Thank you Matt Dickman!

Great and lengthy presentation on social media. It’s obvious we need social media just to filter through the volume of information on the internet. If you are looking to do your own presentation, check out this blog post with more social media stats

I’ve been telling my clients for years that WordPress is one of the best SEO blogging software available today. I’ve been challenged many times and I’m really glad Matt Cutts has stated this fact in the below video. Matt also discusses Google’s PageRank and he makes it simple! Thanks @ThatAmy

I was checking out Wayne Sutton’s website and twitter stream today. He mentioned a presentation on SlideShare. The presentation is interesting and brings up some thoughts I’ve been having on “how much we share” in social media and the effects. I think social media will help people live richer more fulfilling lives. People will begin doing more with their lives because of influences. I started training for a triathlon this summer because someone I follow was training for a triathlon. You could build the case that social media could help with the U.S. over weight epidemic, because let’s face it, no one who is over weight or obese wants their picture on the internet.

And just as soon as I feel good about the impact of social media on people’s lives I become creeped out; have I shared too much? Time will tell how all this shakes out. What do you think will happen?

I’m in the market for a new phone. I’m finally off my 2 year contract with Sprint and now I can finally shop around for a new phone and/or network. I search Google and Twitter for the latest and greatest on information about the best phones. I don’t want to be locked into anything when I choose my next phone. But these are facts I must deal with when making my ultimate decision. I like this video it makes me think of the Palm Pre….

On June 15th, The FIRST murder mystery will launch using Twitter and various other social media tools as the delivery vehicles. This interesting experiment reminds me of Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick. But don’t be fooled, this is no board game. It’s an interesting way to entertain tweeple using Twitter.

This week I was able to share a few emails back and forth with Jenn Bailey from The SocialLites to get the scoop on this new Twitter experiment. Following is the interview and don’t forget to use tmod hashtag to see the thread.

What is Tweet Mystery of Death?

Tweet Mystery of Death is a Murder Mystery we’re writing on Twitter, 140 characters at a time. It isn’t a novel. It’s more like a play. A play that will last for 6 weeks. I personally see it as kind of an old-time radio show or one of those B-reel serials they’d show at the movies before the Main Feature. We’re doing that, but on Twitter.

Who are the master minds behind the Tweet Mystery of Death campaign?

Greg Fishbone is the big master mind. The idea is his. The rest of us are other writers who thought his idea was fun and we wanted to participate. Although we’ve created this together we’ve never met. We’ve worked out the plot arcs and story concept through email, a wiki and a Ning. So, besides Greg , your other Authors are:
Jenn Bailey, Sue Ford, Lisha Cauthen, Colleen Cook, Mary Pierce, Jan Kozlowski, Dawn Metcalf, and Rhonda Stapleton

Follow the authors and characters of Tweet Mystery of Death:

Follow Greg R. Fishbone author from Boston, MA and plays Dirk Rockwell the actor.

Follow Sue Ford author from Olathe, KS and plays Carissa Ainsley the model.

Follow Dawn Metcalf author from Connecticut and plays Lilli LeMue the artist.

Follow Rhonda Stapleton author from North Olmsted, OH and plays Pheonix MacAllister the rival.

Follow Colleen Ryckert Cook Cook author from Lenexa, KS and plays Sam Marlowe the reporter.

Follow Lisha Cauthen author from Kansas City, MO and plays Coffee Boy the gopher.

Follow Jan Kozlowski author from Southington, CT and plays Hanna Bleckter the stalker.

Follow Mary Pierce author from Rhode Island and plays Alex Berkley the agent.

Follow Jenn Bailey author from Overland Park, KS and plays Miss Plupp the assistant.

What was it like coming up with the characters?

More fun than you can imagine. We’ve spent hours giggling and building in back story. At times we got rather carried away, but that’s what happens when you throw together a bunch of dangerously creative people. Each author was responsible for their own character but we definitely collaborated. There are no Prima Donnas here.

How will tweeple/peeps interact with the characters?

Tweeple won’t be interacting with the characters so much as following along and interacting with each other as an audience. This experiment is a lot like a play. Everyone can follow the characters on Twitter but we’ve also set up a Ning were the audience can ask the authors questions or share “Who Done It” theories with each other. If we let people talk directly to the characters, there would be too much noise and followers might lose the plot points in all the chatter.

If people are late following the campaign, how are you going to get them up to speed?

We will have Daily and Weekly briefs that followers can subscribe to on the Ning . There will be no problem “catching up” if someone missed a day or joined us during the play.

You can also follow the Tweet Mystery of Death with hashtag tmod

How are you using twitter and other social media tools to promote Tweet Mystery of Death?

The story will take place entirely on Twitter. We’ll be using twitpic, blip.fm and perhaps some audioboo to enhance our messages. Besides the character accounts on Twitter, we have a @tweet_mystery account for any news, links, etc that we want to share with the readership. Our Ning is where the Daily Doses and Weekly Die-gests occur as well a place where fans can chat amongst themselves or talk to the authors. We’ve got RSS feeds so readers don’t have to “follow” all 9 characters (unless they want to) and we are building a facebook page. Lovely people like yourself are blogging for us. An early fan has already designed a T-shirt too so, who knows? We may be taking that to the Threadless community.

How can people get involved and help your efforts?

Join the Ning! Subscribe to the RSS feed. Follow the characters. There is going to be a contest too, so take the quiz and earn a prize. We authors are having fun and we want our readership to have fun too. The great thing about Social Media is, if we’ve missed a way to connect to our audience, our audience will create that way and lead us to it. We just hope folks give us a look-see.

Follow the Tweet Mystery of Death Cast

Dirk Rockwell recently divorced from Carissa Ainsley with an up and coming acting career. Look for a cat fight between Dirk’s ex-wife and new girlfriend, Lilli.

Carissa Ainsley While her modeling career is the place, she spends most of her time battling internal demons after the bitter divorce from Dirk Rockwell. I think a suicide would be good for this character.

Lilli LeMue she the typical artist type and apparently she’s a hot topic when it comes to the rumor scene. You can be guaranteed drama with this twitter follow.

Sam Marlowe the reporter in the group. I’m guessing there will be lots of reports about Lilli.

Hanna Bleckter the stalker in the cast. What mystery story using twitter wouldn’t have a stalker in the group?

Pheonix MacAllister He wants all things Dirk; he wants Dirk’s girlfriend Lilli and his movie start career! The rivals must have confrontations over twitter!

Miss Plupp loves marine life, but her true passion is being Dirk Rockwell’s assistant. I’m guessing she’s the quiet one in the group.

Alex Berkley is an agent in Hollyweird (too funny) and his newest client is Dirk Rockwell.

I was on Matt Dickman’s website today and on his home page is the following video on Augmented Reality. These are digital holograms that bridge the gap between the real world and the digital world using FLASH. As a search marketer I don’t promote using FLASH to build an “entire” website, but FLASH definitely has a place in marketing. It will be interesting to see new ways companies use this technology in future campaigns.

I’m getting ready to moderate a Roundtable at the Chicks Who Click in Kansas City on Friday, May 15 to Saturday, May 16. I’m pulling some information out of the search results about Twitter. First let’s talk about Twitter history you can find everything you want to know about the who and what of Twitter by checking 140characters.com

I’ve been writing manuals for clients on how to use Twitter and more importantly I’ve been looking for case studies on the successes of Twitter’s impact on our everyday lives. This video of Evan Williams gives all the Twitter case studies you will ever need to prove it’s impact! Enjoy

By: Anne Haynes

The last two weeks I’ve been testing the BuzzStream offsite search engine optimization (SEO) link building management application that is currently in private beta. I feel very privileged to have this opportunity because I know first and second hand how painful link building outreach programs can be when implementing offsite SEO campaigns.

This blog post is designed to educate website owners and agency management how labor intensive SEO outreach programs can be and why using the BuzzStream application will cut cost dramatically. I implement offsite SEO as a website owner and an internet marketing manager at a hosting company, so I have a unique perspective for both readers. In my professional opinion, BuzzStream is becoming the CRM solution for the SEO industry.

Understand that I’m skeptical about finding the easy button to link building and I know how labor intensive link building can be when you obey the White Hat rules of SEO. Many SEO firms created in-house proprietary applications to manage offsite SEO campaigns, but BuzzStream has the ability to plug into any SEO firm, agency or in-house operation.

Six months ago I was researching ranking report software and link management software. I asked the Linkedin SEO group for some help and while I received a ton of answers for ranking report software, there was nothing for link management software. For those people implementing offsite SEO campaigns, you understand my pain. But for those of you that don’t know the interworkings of offsite outreach programs let me spell it out:

First, you have to find websites that compliment your website by querying the search engines with [“list * keyword sites ”] here is a list of search engine queries for link building.

Once you locate a website that looks good you need to make sure the website lives in a good neighborhood; no porn, no excessive advertising, no gambling etc. Each URL you find is entered into the bad neighborhood link building tool and if the site passes the test, it can be added to the offsite optimization spreadsheet. Understand that you could spend anywhere from 20-30 minutes trying to locate “1” good link. But when you find one you feel pretty good the URL made it to the spreadsheet.

This is not your average spreadsheet; following are a few example column headings:
1. Site URL – Easy find cut and paste into spreadsheet and make sure it’s a hyperlink
2. Site Page Rank – You need a toolbar or a web-based tool to gather PR info
3. Site Alexa/Compete Ranking – Enter URL into Alexa.com and cut and past the score into spreadsheet
4. Submission Location – Surf the website to find proper page for the website to be listed
5. Site Owner Name – It could be on the site or you have to go to Whois to find this information if it’s public
6. Site Owner Email – Same as #5
7. Site Owner Phone – same as #5
8. Contact Us URL – Locate this on the site or #5-#7 work instead
9. Date Submitted – This is the date you actually email your request
10. Keyword Meta Variation – Select a different keyword link variation depending on SEO campaign
11. Date Live – You need to check and recheck
12. Date Last Checked – You need to recheck and then check again

As a SEO Specialist working at an agency you’re responsible to collect all the information about the site needed to contact the website owner or webmaster and request a link to the website being optimized. Understand that even if you email a webmaster or owner, there are no guarantee the webmaster will make time for you and add your website. Moreover you’re luck y if you even receive an email back. In my professional opinion a combination of email and phone works best. But again there are no guarantees.

While Google has updated their algorithm to look more at quality links and not quantity, sites that rank really well still have thousands of inbound links. Yes thousands! Now repeat this process over and over, check and recheck to make sure your links have gone live and pray it doesn’t go down without you knowing.

Now let’s say you own a website and you’ve hired an agency to conduct your onsite SEO and offsite SEO. You’re happy with the results, but you’ve decided to bring the SEO in-house, so you request your list of links from the agency. Ok, I’ve worked at agencies and managed search marketing departments; we rarely gave clients the list we built. Many times I’ve seen instructions on how to find your links through emails. Bottom-line, if you search on Google or use Yahoo! Site Explorer you will find your offsite optimization activities. Clients “don’t know what they don’t know” and are pointed to marketleap.com and the search engines to find their offsite SEO activities.

Imagine all of the information above not being given to you. It’s more common than not, so if you outsource your offsite SEO work to an agency make sure you have it “in your contract” that you own the link building “contact” data.

I’m going to continue on this agency theme for a minute. Now let’s say that you manage a search marketing team and you have 40 clients’ offsite optimization strategies distributed among 4 SEO Specialist. One day you come into the office and one of your employees gives two weeks notice. You check over his/her offsite optimization spreadsheet and there is no contact information. You request the information be updated. The employee has to go through his/her email inbox to collect all the information and itemize contact information on a per URL level. With a spreadsheet running at over a thousand rows it will take more than two weeks just to populate the information correctly.

The employee leaves a mess and you assign a seasoned SEO Specialist to take over the work. You ask IT to forward the emails to the new SEO Specialist in charge of the account. The new specialist on the account receives emails from site owners with no context because they didn’t start the relationship in the beginning. The SEO Specialist explains the situation and the cycle starts all over again! Now apply $75 – $125 an hour to that time and put this in your overhead.

For those of you that don’t know this, offsite optimization is one of the most important aspects when ranking in the search engines. Now imagine how many hours this process takes to implement and track. There are many early adopter SEO firms that built in-house applications to improve offsite SEO efficiencies, but BuzzStream is the first application I’ve seen to cover both agency and in-house offsite SEO markets.

I’m grateful to Paul May and the BuzzStream team for building a system to manage these relationships and remove the spreadsheet hell out of offsite optimization. I’ve been using the software for a few weeks and as of today I feel BuzzStream has the ability to be a CRM for offsite SEO.

If you’re insterested in getting you hands on BuzzStream, Follow me on Twitter shout at me to follow and I’ll DM you with a private beta link.