SearchInfluence

Last week, a small ripple went through the Dangerous Minds blog, crying out “I WANT MY FRIENDS BACK!” Letting out a screed of massive proportions, the piece has made its rounds on the very social network it lambasts, even having some of the 59,502 fans replace their profile pictures with the header image. But like most widely-circulated rants, the post is largely sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Facebook celebrity George Takei had been complaining about this “problem” enough to hit the Wall Street Journal this past June. And while earlier this month Facebook extended their Promoted Posts to individual users, Pages have had the option since late May, and the feature’s older cousin Sponsored Stories have been around since January of 2011. Even more striking is that as ...

I’ve been actively creating and managing Google AdWords campaigns for over five years. In that time, I’ve made a lot of mistakes with everything from keyword selection to match type to ad content. It happens — if no one ever made a mistake on AdWords, we would all be PPC success stories, and that’s certainly not the case. So when I typically see mistakes with sponsored ads, I take a screenshot, write a short heads-up email to the advertiser explaining their mistake, and keep it rollin’. However, over the weekend I came across what could possibly be the worst targeting and most confusing landing page I’ve ever seen on AdWords.

While I was searching for “delaware county oh plastic surgery” (before you start reading too much into this, no, I was not looking for a plastic surgeon. I am quite comfortable with my stout lil’ man-child body), I came across this gem of an ad…

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Why I Dislike Facebook Insights

As I was checking up on the performance of a few fanpage campaigns today, I was hit with the revelation that Facebook Insights is a terrible web metric tool.

What is Facebook Insights you may ask?

Here’s the abridged FB definittion: “Facebook Insights provides Facebook Page owners and Platform application developers with metrics around their content.

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Yahoo Fails At Search, Tries Its Hand At Being A “Pretty Woman”

It is a sad day when search engines are reduced to stalking celebrities to keep themselves relevant.

That is the thought I had when I saw the latest Yahoo TV commercial. Since their merger with Microsoft was announced, Yahoo has been trying to carve out a niche for itself as a entertainment news site (seriously how many E!s, TMZs, OhNoTheyDidnts, and Superficials must we have! How are all the celebrity bloggers going to eat and stay in white MSpaint to draw on photos?). They are even going as far as to declared themselves THE NUMBER ONE visited site for such frivolous news  – when in all honesty, they are including Yahoo Search,Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Games (noticed I didn’t include the “!” because there just isn’t anything exciting about Yahoo anymore) into this data.

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“Google Gears – Improving Your Web Browser”

That is Google’s tagline for their open source project that stores data locally for web applications and runs Javascripts in the background. But as anyone who has used Gears will tell you, it’s buggy, especially when being used with Google applications.

For instance, Google Chrome comes pre-installed with Google Gears, however out of all the browsers that currently support Gears, it crashes the most. I’ve used Firefox and Internet Explorer with Gears and even though I still experience time-outs when downloading web app data and frequent Javascript slow downs, with Chrome I just get the “Aw, Snap! Something went wrong…” message practically every time I do anything Gears related.

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