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  • Looking for Contributing Authors
    By ben on January 28th, 2009 | No Comments Comments

    Hi All,
    I am seeking some poeple to help by contributing blog posts on a regular basis to www.socialdude.com , and my other new site www.iphonewatchers.com

    Writers who help on iPhonewatchers.com will get early and free access to iphone apps to review (we already have the relationships)

    If interested, please drop me a line

    • Following who Influencers Follow on Twitter
      By ben on January 2nd, 2009 | No Comments Comments

      Following who Influencers Follow to build a quality stream of Twitter food and a crowd you can influence

      So, I have been using Twitter for quite a while. My habits on following have been very “natural” up until a few days ago. Usually I would only follow someone if they emailed me and expressly asked me to follow them, it was on their business card or if I happened to run into it in a interesting post.

      I am a LinkedIn addict with business contacts, I FaceBook my friends and Family so I figured, OK time to experiment with Twitter again.

      When I started my experiment about 1 week ago, I had roughly 150 people I was following and 50 people following me, not bad considering most people on my list I knew personally and some were very influential people.

      Being that, in my social media research, I focus on influential discussions I figured I would experiment with adding influential Twitterees to my feed and seeing if I could beef up my followers with influencers as well.

      Here is what I did:

      1)  Opened a few highly influential peoples Twitter profiles (people that I know personally)
      2)  Averaged about 3 Tweets a day and made some Reply’s
      3)  Setup a Auto-Follow reply using SocialToo.com
      4)  Followed as many people as I could that they were following
      5)  After adding the influencers of influential poeple, I read through their Tweets and added some more influencers from who they were following
      6) Added a spiffy background to my Twitter page

      My assumption was that since quite a few people use the auto-follow type tools that I could net myself a decent number of followers that were in my target industry since they were influencers of my influencers. As a by-product I figured I would also get a great Twitter stream going on people whom I knew as acquaintances or from my blog reader.

      I was right. After 72 hours at about 1/3 ratio of following/followers (1999 following/640 Followers) and a spiffy Twitter Grade of 97.2. I also ended up generating a great stream of experts to feed my Twitter addiction.

      (1999 following/640 Followers)

      How do you go about building you influential network on Twitter?

      • Top 50 2008 Internet Marketer Twitter/Blogs Accounts You Should Follow
        By ben on January 1st, 2009 | 6 Comments6 Comments Comments

        If you are a small business owner, a marketing executive or have a  yearning to learn about Internet Marketing then here is a list of Internet marketing folks that you should be following on a regular basis.

        Below are the Top 50 Twitter and Blog RSS feeds of Internet Marketers for you to follow.

        More people to add to this list:

        The original list was compiled by Invesp Consulting. I am organizing the information for quick access.

        • Top 100 influential marketers of 2008
          By ben on January 1st, 2009 | No Comments Comments

          Well here we are, the first day of 2009. I have made a resolution to take the time to blog a bit more. This evening as the family and I were waiting for the ball to drop, I happened to be reading Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim blog and happened upon a recent post he made about Chris Hughes being the top marketer of 2008.

          As I was browsing the list of 2008 Internet marketing vets, I saw quite a few people that I know personally and that I read quite often. Shouts go out to Andy Beale at #23, Aaron Wall at #7, Rand Fishkin at #5 (you go Rand!), Guy Kawasaki at #2!, Neil Patel at #32, Matt Cutts at 28 and the list goes on.

          One impressive thing to note about the list is that virtually all of the top 100 named had a twitter account ( ok not that surprising, we are talking about marketers here ), but the author went to the trouble of linking to each one of the twitter accounts.

          So not only is this list a wonderful acknowledgment to the best and brightest in the Internet Marketing industry but it is also a great resource to help people continue to follow the winners into 2009.

          As a convenience to my fellow twits and RSS eaters I have compiled the names, Twitter addressesd and Blog Subscribe lists into one easy to use page. Top 50 Internet Marketing Vets Twitter and Blog Feeds you should suscribe to. Lets try and add to this list throughout 2009, please reply to this thread with whomever you would like to nominate to be on the list for 2009.

          Who else do you feel were some of the most influential marketers of 2008?

          • SEO In-Depth Link Analytics Services
            By ben on December 31st, 2008 | 1 Comment1 Comment Comments

            SEO Link Analytics Services

            Link Intelligence Reports for your domain and/or a competitors domain, this offer you the ability to generate a report of a certain URL, including inbound links to the URL of your choice, what anchor text distribution, domain and overall link metrics such as Rank and Trust. We provide a list of the most important specific links and sources.

            Download an example report in csv format or Excel Format

            Download an example report in PDF format

            Contact the Social Dude for more information

            Cost of a report: ($100.00) USD (Normally $500.00)

            The use of accurate, fresh link data—gives you the ability to understand the relative levels of link popularity for sites and pages, as well as how “trusted” those resources are. The information provided by this report lets you learn more about who links to any site or page on the web, which links are sending value and in what relative volume, as well as how links play a role in search engine rank and optimization. By using this critical data, you can:

            • Better understand the ordering of search results
            • Compare your sites links and pages against your competitors
            • Make better decisions about link acquisition targets
            • Determine which pages on a site are most important/linked-to
            • Observe differences between link popularity and trust (and uncover why such a difference could be occurring)
            • Identify potentially manipulative link behaviors
            • Uncover rankings that result from re-directed content/pages (via 301s/302s/Meta Refresh, etc.)
            • Contact the Social Dude for more information

            Where does SocialDude get his data?

            I use a variety of third party tools and sources that I have learned to trust over my 14+ years of SEO experience. The data comes from a variety of sources in an attempt to build the fullest and most accurate index possible. Some of the sources for this index may include:

            • Dotnetdotcom.org
            • Grub.org/Wikia
            • Page-Store.com
            • Amazon/Alexa’s crawl and internet archive resources
            • Exalead’s commercially available data
            • Gigablast’s commercially available data
            • Yahoo!’s BOSS API and other data sources
            • Microsoft’s Live API and other data sources
            • Google’s API and other data sources
            • Ask.com’s API and other data sources
            • Additional crawls from open source, commercial and academic projects

            Contact the Social Dude for more information

            Cost of a report: ($100.00) USD (Normally $500.00)

            • Can or should a blogger be sued?
              By ben on February 14th, 2007 | No Comments Comments

              An article on website host directory keyed me into this “little” happening

              “According to GreenZap Vice President Linda Murphy, attempts made by GreenZap to communicate with the bloggers were met with malicious attacks. GreenZap’s counsel sent several letters to Liquid Web, Inc. requesting it voluntarily shut down one of its hosted websites due to its harmful and libelous content, but to no avail. The registered owners of the website, Vodien, Inc., have a Singapore address and have ignored GreenZap in spite of the company’s attempts. In addition to the hosting company, GreenZap has been able to identify several individual bloggers responsible for many of the postings and intends to add them to the action.”

              Advertisement:

              New Software! BookmarkingDemon - Tagging With Social Bookmarking And Get Targeted Traffic And High Pr Backlinks Automatically -  Find Hundreds Of Themed Links!
              Basically, they are trying to hold the hosting company liable ,the website that has the blog and the bloggers.

              Now on the other hand In October 2006, a Florida jury awarded one Sue Scheff $11.3 million in an Internet defamation lawsuit. The article revealed that Scheff filed a lawsuit after a blogger called her a “crook,” “con artist” and a “fraud” on an Internet message board.

              So what do you think? Should a company be able to demand the removal of a website from a host? And if the host does not comply are they liable?

              With suing a blogger for sharing their thoughts that could really get out of hand.. Should you be afraid that if you publish your thoughts on a product or service that you can be sued?

              • “Shadow Blogging” is it Ethical in Reputation Management?
                By ben on January 25th, 2007 | 1 Comment1 Comment Comments

                I call the act of a company that hires a person or a company to blog on their behalf “Shadow Blogging”. A part of reputation management is damage control for sure, answering posts in a positive way or even posting to educate people about a new service. Where do we draw the line in ethics? That is a question that will need to be answered. 

                There has always been a controversy about the separation of content and advertising, yet in online advertising “advertorials” are very acceptable. Pay Per Post, which was a great way of building reputation, recently required their affiliate bloggers to adhere to a disclosure policy. And then there was the WalMart blog scandal.The question of ethics really comes in when you are posting positive comments about a company’s service in forums and blogs. With reputation management you look for positive comments, negative comments and no comments and then post accordingly.

                But, if you believe that the service provided by your customer is great, and then is it really unethical to let people know about it and get paid to do so?

                I would love to hear from other people that deal in Social Media? Comment away! 

                • FURL Revamps Design and Toolbar
                  By ben on January 18th, 2007 | No Comments Comments

                  According to a email I got today from FURL they have upgraded the usability a little bit ( heh about time )
                  •    Revamped Design
                  •    Made it easier to create and find topics
                  •    Updated browser buttons and toolbar
                  Anyone see anything really exciting in this update?

                  • Study on Mining Data from Social Networks like MySpace and MyBlogLog
                    By ben on January 11th, 2007 | No Comments Comments

                    A study conducted by Wharton uncovers the behavior of “network neighbors” within existing customer bases. Mining data from “social networks” — who talks to whom or who emails whom — could allow companies to pinpoint likely customers who otherwise would be overlooked.

                    Hill, Foster Provost of NYU’s Stern School and Chris Volinsky of AT&T Labs Research detail their findings in a paper titled, “Network-Based Marketing: Identifying Likely Adopters via Consumer Networks,” published in May 2006 in the Journal of Statistical Science. “One of the main concerns for any firm is when, how and to whom they should market their products,” the authors write. “We provide strong evidence that whether and how well a consumer is linked to existing customers is a powerful characteristic on which to base direct marketing decisions.

                    Our results indicate that a firm can benefit from the use of social networks to predict the likelihood of purchasing.”   While the paper is more targeted at how academic departments can take advantage of social media marketing, the study does prove quite a few things that businesses can use for a proof of concept when pitching Social Media Marketing to their companies. 

                     Read the Full Story at Wharton
                    The full paper, “Network-Based Marketing: Identifying Likely Adopters via Consumer Networks“  

                    • What is Reputation Management in the Social Sphere?
                      By ben on December 21st, 2006 | No Comments Comments

                      Reputation management is a fairly complicated task, yet is really of the utmost importance. Posts on blogs are coming online at a very rapid pace and consumers, customers; competitors are speaking their minds very freely. Blogs, forums, social media networking sites are generating buzz, positive and negative. These users may already be talking about your products and services, making good or bad claims. Left unchecked these statements can make or break your company. Part of Social Media Marketing is Reputation Management.

                      With a solid reputation management plan in place you can very effectively nudge the conversations in a positive way. Think of Reputation Management as a Interactive add-on to your existing PR strategy.  The step of any good reputation management campaign consists of the following:  

                      1. Researching where an what is currently being said about your company, your CEO, CTO and support or sales staff. Also discovering how you main competitors are being talked about isvery helpful.  

                      2. Create a strategy based upon your findings to create or enhance reputation through social networks and communication channels. Craft your online messaging and stick with it.  

                      3. Have a third party interact on a regular basis with your target social networks and anywhere your customers hang out online.  

                      4. Getting reviews, interviews, promote good will and cooperation  

                      5. Have a great Link Baiting campaign that ties into building Buzz, the stronger your reputation the more effective all you marketing and social marketing will be.  

                      6. Document all you actions and consistently follow up on them.

                      I would love to hear input from other professionals :)

                      Ben - aka SocialDude Â