SearchInfluence

Don’t make me angry.

At a recent event I found myself ranting – yes, really, ranting and I understand there’s video – about what I think is a very big deal for SMBs and those who market for them. The topic at hand was call tracking and local search.

Over the course of my interaction with a few of our attendees I discovered that at least a couple of them were using call tracking to demonstrate ROI for their customers in a potentially harmful way. Call tracking in local SEO, if done poorly, is one of the most irresponsible things an online marketing company can do.

First a caveat, I am not a psychologist, but we’ve all felt the urge to ask the question “Why Is Everyone on the Internet So Angry?” The article linked here addresses the cultural pressures on the individual that may result in the bombastic tirades we often see on message boards or in comment sections. But, what if the connection goes deeper than a desire to exploit anonymity or a mimicry of pundits. Then the question is why do people act mean on the Internet, or more broadly, why would ordinary people act so belligerently? Thus we arrive at the Stanford prison experiments. Now if you’ve never heard of it, the long and short basically reveals the extreme nature of people to psychologically adapt to the roles a situation places them in, ie. prisoners and guards. Here’s the funny part. This experiment was a big step in the world of Attribution Theory, something directly applicable to the world of … wait for it… Marketing.

On Friday, I received an email from Facebook regarding their Page Insights. My initial reactions were “Great! They’ve finally realized how horrible their reporting system is and are making changes!” Boy, was I wrong. The email in its entirety is below, but the man gist is that they have been incorrectly reporting on the number of total, organic, and paid impressions and reach as reported through their Page Insights. Supposedly, the Ad Insights and Billing Data reporting tools are not affected, not that those are great anyway.

They promise that these issues will be fixed by today and “moving forward, your impressions and reach numbers in Page Insights will reflect these updates.”

Deep thoughts by bigtime lawyers...

Nearly everyone in the technology sector, especially those focused on the Internet, have een talking about the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Act. We’re not here to debate the finer points of combatting intellectual property theft on the internet — the “SOPA Blackout” has done a fine one-sided job of that. (If you’re interested in a very in-depth look at the whole saga, try Forbes’s information dump.) This “Blackout” has all the right components of a perfect case study of SEO, technical site architecture, viral marketing, and the nature of the internet.

I am a man of simple pleasures. I love Internet marketing, terribly bad action films, and stunt queens. So when I learned of Anik Singal’s Lethal Commission I knew I had to watch it.

What is Lethal Commission? From its trailer it is dubbed as the world’s first full-length Internet marketing movie. In actuality it is the most meta-tastic and downright embarrassing way to sell a product I’ve ever seen. To save myself some keystrokes, let’s just bypass the incoherent plot (involving a portly Indian spy stopping some sort of third-world Paypal thievery) and get into the meat and potatoes of what Singal is selling this time around.

Jeez, it’s been practically seven minutes since I checked for new notifications on Facebook. Refresh, nothing. Ohhh, there’s a picture of a kid I vaguely knew from high school and now he’s linking his tweets into the Facebook feed, let me click over there. Do I follow Kim Kardashian or just Khloe? Any new tweets from the Biebs?

When it comes to the world of SEO and general web technology, some of us are so jaded we think we’ve heard of everything. Phones we talk to? Check. Virtual reality? Won’t be long until we’re standing on the holodeck. And as far as SEO, everyone and their mom is on deck calling themselves “social media experts” and promising they can make your business blast to the top of the search results.

Thursday, Google acquired Carnegie-Mellon University spinoff project PittPatt, which specialized in facial recognition software for businesses like GE. We’ll be a bit naïve here and take Google at their word when they claim they won’t implement full facial recognition software without “strong privacy protections” and intentionally excluded the feature from Google Goggles. It seems clear that Google will use the technology to enhance video quality and would otherwise be caught in crass doublespeak during a time to play it straight.

It is striking that Google seems utterly unfazed by two government commissions investigating it for its aggressive vertical integration into niche search and social media.

Not too long ago, I was completely ignorant of any tracking on the internet. I thought, like many, that the things I did online were solely known to me and wouldn’t affect anything. I thought that “Private Browsing” really meant that, and that no one else would know or care that I played a bunch of flash games and that I worked in whatever field I did.

New Google Keyword Tool vs. the Old Google Keyword Tool – that is the question, or at least it was before the legacy tool, that I kept bookmarked ever since Google started encouraging SEOs to use the “new” tool, suddenly disappeared this past Friday.  We knew the day would come. We knew we wouldn’t like it, but now we’re forced to use it.

...