by mtraphagen | Mar 8, 2010 | Social Media, Twitter
Since its inception people have found many creative uses for Twitter, but to my mind one of the most useful has been as the collective, real-time public notebook for conferences and special events. Smart conference organizers establish and publicize a hash tag for...
by mtraphagen | Feb 25, 2010 | Google, Social Media
Just when you thought you had your social media game plan (you do have one, right?) all nice and set, Buzz happens. It’s like the NFL suddenly announces a new team halfway through your fantasy league season. What is Buzz? In brief, it is a Google-developed...
by mtraphagen | Feb 22, 2010 | Facebook, Google, Social Media, Twitter
I’ve been an enthusiastic early adopter of Google Buzz since it appeared in my Gmail inbox the day after its unveiling. As a one-time huge fan of Friendfeed, the interface was immediately familiar (though lacking in some of Friendfeeds best features). I’d...
by mtraphagen | Feb 2, 2010 | Facebook
UPDATED 2/23/2010 because of changes to Facebook’s user interface. Most everyone agrees that automatic feed systems such as RSS (Wikipedia) were a great leap forward in the history of the World Wide Web. RSS allows web users to “subscribe” to any...
by mtraphagen | Jan 20, 2010 | Facebook
I’ve written before about several areas where Facebook’s Pages feature falls short of its potential value to marketers because of missing or limited features. Among the most egregious of these “fails” was the lack of any equivalent of...
by mtraphagen | Jan 18, 2010 | Paid Search
Among the most rudimentary, yet important, regular optimization tasks you should be doing for your pay-per-click advertising account is ad split testing. It is a fact that, in most cases, no two ads for the same keyword(s) will perform the same. It’s not enough...
by mtraphagen | Jan 18, 2010 | Paid Search
If you’re a beginner at Internet advertising, or just someone who knows “I ought to be promoting my site…”, Search Engine Land offers Five Most Frequently Asked Questions About Paid Search. It’s a concise article that explains some of...
by mtraphagen | Nov 3, 2009 | Paid Search
For those of us who have been immersed in the highly-complex world of Google’s AdWords for some time, it may be difficult to remember how overwhelming and confusing (and often irrational!) it seemed when we were starting out. It’s hard enough just to learn...
by mtraphagen | Nov 2, 2009 | SEO
KGen is an extension for Firefox web browsers that displays the strongest keywords on a particular web page. Words on the page repeated more than once are ranked by “weight” (a user-tunable algorithm based on html tags and page placement), number of...
by mtraphagen | Oct 29, 2009 | Google, Paid Search
If you’ve got some experience managing cost-per-click (Google’s term for pay-per-click) advertising using Google AdWords, you surely by now realize the high importance of optimizing for Quality Score. Either that, or you enjoy throwing away your or your...
by mtraphagen | Oct 23, 2009 | Facebook
Starting today (October 23) you should be seeing some important changes to your FB home page. You can now select between News Feed and Live Feed. Live Feed is what you’ve been used to seeing for the past year: Everything your friends are posting as it happens....
by mtraphagen | Oct 22, 2009 | Google, SEO, Social Media
On October 21 Google announced at Web 2.0 Expo the coming-soon implementation of real-time Social Search incorporated into the regular search results page.Results will appear at the bottom of the results page and will be culled from the searcher’s own social...
by mtraphagen | Oct 1, 2009 | Social Media
Overwhelmed by your News Feed? Too much to read? Facebook allows you to create groups of your friends so you can temporarily just see who you want to see in your News Feed. For example, you might create a group of “Relatives” or “College...
by mtraphagen | Oct 1, 2009 | Paid Search
From a search on Google for the keyword “ball cancer” (in the Sponsored Results column): Next time I’m looking to buy cancer balls, I’ll know where to go for the best deal! How does this happen? How could Google be showing me an ad for...
