Okay, your ex just friended you on Facebook. Or your boss. Or your friend whose political views stream forth as constantly as the water from that broken fire hydrant when you were a kid. Oh brother.

How can you be nice about it? Hide them!

Facebook knows you’ll have friends like these, so they’ve given you two ways to tune them out.

METHOD 1:

1. Go to your Facebook homepage.

2. At the top of the page, select “Most Recent” if it’s not already selected.

3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Edit Options.”

4. Enter the name of your “friend” in the “Hide” field.

5. Click “Save.”

METHOD 2:

1. Go to your Facebook homepage.
2. In the news feed, find a post by the offending friend.
3. Place your cursor over your friend’s post, and an “x” appears in the upper right corner of the post.
4. Click that “x”!
5. You’ll be given the option to hide your friend (or report the post as spam or chicken out and click Cancel and continue to read your friend’s fascinating posts).

“But wait! I’ve change my mind!”

HOW TO UNHIDE FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK:

1. This time, at the top of the homepage click “Top News.”

2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Edit Options.”

3. Click the “Add To News Feed” button next to your rekindled friend’s name.

4. Click “Close.”

Enjoy the friendship!

Just got off the iPhone with my friendly AT&T customer service rep. When the new iPhone 4 was announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, I had to know if I was eligible for the upgrade. The new iPhone 4 comes in two configuration, 16 gig and 32 gig, and is available for $199 and $299, respectively, for those who are eligible.

Here’s the deal. AT&T says that typically you would have to be at least 21 months into your current 2-year contract to purchase the new iPhone for the prices listed above. However, they’ll also consider your monthly recurring charges; if they’re high enough, you can upgrade sooner than the 21 months.  When you upgrade, you’ll begin a new 2-year agreement.

Your plan and plan charges will stay the same. But here’s an important little piece of information: If you’re lucky enough to have an unlimited data plan, hang on to it. If you ever decide to downgrade to AT&T’s 2 gig or 200 MB plan, you’ll never be able to go back to an unlimited plan. AT&T no longer offers one. Subscribers lamentably attest that AT&T wireless network can at times be excruciating slow, so AT&T is taking measures to reduce activity. (Hopefully they’re also taking measure to increase capacity.) If you have an unlimited data plan, consider yourself lucky. With the new FaceTime video phone and multitasking features, you’re going to want that bandwidth.

There is a one-time $18 upgrade fee, and AT&T offers new insurance plan called Mobile Protect for $13.99 per month. You can purchase this insurance within thirty days of your iPhone 4 purchase, and it covers you if your iPhone 4 is stolen, lost, flushed down the toilet or left at a Silicon Valley bar.

Check out Apple’s infomercial for the iPhone 4:

In April, Twitter bought Tweetie and tweaked it. Now they’re releasing it as simply Twitter, the only official Twitter application in the app store. And they dropped the price from $2.99 USD to free. Tweetie fans are already calling it Tweetie 3. Yesterday, Tweetie 2 was removed from the app store, raising speculation that the new version could be released sometime very soon. There are reports the app is currently available on the New Zealand App Store. TechTree.com was lucky enough to get several screen shots.

Facebook recently unveiled several changes to its service that give users more sharing options, but in the process the company demonstrated what many have come to believe is its intentional disregard for user privacy.

This mistake feels a lot like Facebook’s February 2009 debacle when the company changed its user agreement in an “all take, no give” arrangement that gave the company the right to use, in perpetuity, all information shared by its users on the site. Users rebelled and Facebook backed down immediately.

But this one’s different. With these recent updates, Facebook has given users two important things: Easier ways to share and participate among communities of interest within the network and more privacy and protection settings to accommodate this new structure.

Facebook’s mistake is two-fold. First, the default privacy settings for the new Facebook are not Friends, Friends of Friends, or all of Facebook, but the entire Internet. This Facebook Privacy info graphic by Matt McKeon shows the evolution of Facebook’s default settings. Second, Facebook has provided no easy road map for just how to navigate to the 50 privacy settings in order to choose from among the more than 170 privacy options.

Users’ confusion over the default settings and how to change them, along with lackluster explanations of the benefits of the new changes, has created the usual uproar we’ve come to expect each time Facebook tweaks our home away from home.

Unfortunately for Facebook, this update has also created what analysts suspect is an increase in the number of users wanting to delete their Facebook accounts. The number of searches for “how do i delete my facebook account [sic]” have increased dramatically since the changes were announced, and a mass exodus from Facebook has been scheduled for May 31.

Nothing On the Web Is Free

Facebook has over 400 million users, and after the mass exodus, the site will have over 400 million users.

The changes Facebook has made are part of Facebook’s inevitable monetizing strategy. And that’s the point. Nothing about Facebook is free. Facebook has never been in the game not to make money. And it’s finally doing so. This year the company is expected to have revenues of between $1.2 and $2 billion. And yes, some of that will be profit.

Facebook will ultimately strike the necessary balance between its bottom line and its users. They always do. But what users have to realize is that one fact will remain: Facebook will make money off of the information users share on its site.

To those for whom this is a bad thing, Facebook is not the place to be. Profile information is the most valuable information for marketers on the Web, and no single Web service has more of this type of information than Facebook. Facebook will continue along its path to use this information to make money in order to stay in business and to continue to give users the services they sign up for in droves.

The critics are right: Facebook wants to make mountains of cash. But they can only do it if its users are happy.

The Wild Wild Web

A lot of the information you share on Facebook – your email address, phone number, physical address – is already public on the web and would remain so if Facebook went away tomorrow. This information was there before Facebook and exists online independently of Facebook.

Take a look at Pipl.com. Type in your name or the name of your best friend, or your worst enemy, and see what pops up. A recent search on this writer’s name produced the following information:

• Contact details from Whitepages.com, Spokeo.com, and two others
• Background reports from Intelius.com
• Personal profiles from MySpace, Spokeo, LinkedIn, Members-Base, Bebo and Flickr
• Email addresses from Inelius that are so old I caught myself wanting to say they pre-date the Web
• Public records including birth records from BirthDetails.com and Intelius
• Videos from YouTube
• Web pages
• Blog posts
• Documents

Many sites like this have emerged over the years. Pipl, Spokeo and Zillow.com, to name a few, all publish information many users feel is private. But in fact, it’s not. It’s quite public, and sites like these aggregate this information from public sources.

Which leads to a not-so-recent trend in social media, but one that is about to see the roof blow off because of yet another new initiative by Facebook.

The trend is social media aggregation, where information from different social media sites is pulled together in one location so that it can be more easily digested. Many aggregation services, like Gist, FriendFeed and NetVibes, offer tools and widgets that let users combine messages, search multiple social media sites at once, track friends, and even access their profile data all from one place, all in an attempt to simplify an individual’s social media participation.

With the recent introduction of Open Graph, Facebook will attempt to take social aggregation into the stratosphere. In fact, Facebook wants to turn the entire Web into your personal aggregator.

Currently, different social media sites contribute to some part of the social graph. Yelp is mapping out the part of the graph that connects people to local businesses. Pandora is mapping out the part related to music. With Open Graph, Facebook plans to bring these graphs together.

“If we can take these separate maps of the graph and pull them all together,” says Zuckerberg, as reported by CNET.com, “then we can create a Web that’s smarter, more social, more personalized, and more semantically aware.”

He goes on to say, “These connections aren’t just happening on Facebook, they’re happening all over the Web, and today with the Open Graph we’re bringing all these things together.”

If you use Facebook, you might be surprised to find you’re already participating in its new social graph. Go to Account > Privacy Settings and click on Applications and Websites. There you’ll see, as of this writing, Instant Personalization Pilot Program. Click on it to see the beginnings of a monumental change on the Web.

Good Rules of Thumb

Just consider that anything you say on Facebook is public, and don’t say anything that you would have to whisper to anyone whom you’re dining with at an outdoor cafe.

Each time you allow a Facebook app to access your profile information, read the Terms and Conditions for that app. Apps are bound by neither Facebook’s Privacy Policy nor its Terms and Conditions. They are third-party relationships, and when you share your Facebook information with them you do so independently of Facebook. Apps are how a lot of profile info leaks out of Facebook. Facebook should be clearer about this and should be more concerned for users’ privacy when it comes to third-party apps, and it wouldn’t be surprising if their approach to apps changes sometime soon.

Sites offering FacebookConnect are safe. FacebookConnect is a service that lets users enjoy their Facebook relationships on other websites. Users can sign in with their Facebook username and password and discover what their friends find interesting on a particular site. The third-party website does not have access to your Facebook profile information.

For more on Facebook Privacy Settings and how to change them, check out these resources:

Tips to Maximize Your Facebook Security (NY Daily News)

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options (New York Times)

Facebook’s “Posts By Everyone” Feature (SearchEngineLand.com)

Facebook has announced some changes that are sure to cause more than a little annoyance among its more than 400 million active users. But based on what we’ve read, it’s a dose of what most users having been asking for. This is how the Associated Press reported it:

Facebook is revamping users’ profiles to emphasize the pages for bands, books and businesses that millions have become fans of on the world’s largest online social network.

Currently, users can list their activities, interests, favorite music and TV shows as part of their profiles. But links to Facebook “pages” for wine, your local library or the Lakers basketball team would appear in a separate section lower down.

Beginning Monday, Facebook will start prompting users to essentially combine the two. So if you listed Johnny Cash in the “favorite music” section of your profile, Facebook will now ask you to join his page, if you haven’t become a fan of it already.

You’ll be able to hide this connection on your profile, but your name will still be listed on the Johnny Cash page as one of the 1.2 million “people who like this” — what Facebook used to term “fans.” The same goes for users’ home towns, education and work places.

But there are more to Facebook pages than brands and bands.

People like pickles, they like sleeping in and 641,653 people even like the Norwegian Olympic curling team’s pants. So for such things, Facebook is rolling out “community pages.”

In many cases this page will include the Wikipedia entry on the topic, along with Facebook posts from friends and others discussing it. The page collects and displays posts by Facebook users mentioning cooking. Users will see posts from their friends and from strangers who haven’t restricted public access to their updates.

But for now, there is no option for users to interact with the cooking page, for example, by posting a message directly on its “wall.” Facebook said it will be asking people “who are passionate about any of these topics” to sign up as a contributor, though the company did not say when this would begin.

Facebook is also adding some privacy controls so that users’ friends can’t see the list of other friends they have. Under a new section called “friends, tags and connections,” users will be able to limit who can see what on their profile. Facebook had taken away this option with its overhaul of privacy settings in December, but users and privacy advocates have been asking for it back.

So what do you think? More communities, and more privacy from them. Give us your thoughts, and please tweet.

Favorite on-screen moments of the Governator include one in the 1977 documentary “Pumping Iron” where the master employs a little psychology on a young Lou Ferrigno by telling Ferrigno’s coach, who happens to be Ferrigno’s father, that the amateur shouldn’t make so much noise as they work out together in preparation for a competition. Others include just about any scene from the original “Conan the Barbarian” – what a hoot – and of course the Terminator series. And now this moment. In this short clip, Arnold thanks the people of Col-i-forn-ee-a for their tweets on how to deal with the state budget crisis.

There has been some discussion among the ranks about Twitter and how to best use it. Of course, there is no consensus. Twitter is a micro-blog with a feature set that gets richer by the day, so it becomes increasingly difficult to place in the same cubicle any two people who are using Twitter the same way. But we’ve been able to pin down a few facts that inform our own tweeting.

First, it simply isn’t true, categorically, that size doesn’t matter. While the number of people following you does often represent a vanity measurement, if those followers are targeted and if you keep them engaged, then size matters a lot. In his piece “The Science of ReTweets,” social media and viral marketing scientist Dan Zarella points out that it only makes sense that the more followers you have the more retweets you’ll get. Number of retweets is an important metric in determining Twitter influence and clout. Zarella does point out, however, that the correlation between number of followers and retweets is weak, but it is still a positive one.

Various ranking services list number of followers as their first measurement. Twitalyzer.com presents “Impact” as its first of several key metrics, and listed first under this metric is number of followers. And on Grader.com’s “Algorithm Factors,” the first measurement is, yep, number of followers.

So size matters. But not in a vacuum. To borrow from Twitalyzer, engagement, referenced citations, influence, generosity, clout, and velocity all contribute to overall Twitter rank, and more importantly to achieving your objectives with your Twitter campaigns. Here is a simple set of steps to remember:

• Target the people you follow. Look at bio information to see with whom you may easily engage, and search on terms and hash tags of interest to you or your organization.
• Unfollow anyone who hasn’t followed you back in three days (unless of course you simply love their tweets).
• Make your tweets engaging, and use keywords and links.

Another part of the discussion among the ranks deals with actually being able to read all of the tweets of the individuals you follow. What you see is less than what you get. Let’s face it, once you follow more than 50 people, and if you’re tweeting for your company or organization hopefully your sites are set much higher than that, you’ll never see all their tweets on your home page. This is why our friends at Twitter created lists, which allow us to categorize and group together those individuals we wish to keep up with by carving them out of Twitter’s rushing stream.

Okay, okay. Size isn’t everything. What matters is that you get from Twitter that which you enjoy. And that could come from a single follower.

Oh, please retweet this!

One thing Twitter isn’t is unpopular. It grew over 1400% from June of 2008 through June of 2009, one of the fastest growing services of all time on the web. And an expanding feature set is attracting even more users to this micro-blogging oddity. Twitter is a lot of things to a lot of people. So many, in fact, reluctant adopters are often left asking, “What is Twitter?”

Twitter Isn’t a Little Black Book
Once you have over 50 followers, and depending on how generous some of them are with the minutiae of their lives, you can’t read all of their tweets. This is the first lesson of Twitter. So it doesn’t matter how many people you follow, or how few. Twitter is different for everyone, but the number of people you follow doesn’t have to be constrained necessarily to the number of people you can realistically follow. I follow people whose tweets interest me those whose bios contain information indicating they may be useful to me in some way. Do they share my interests? Are they near me? Are they in my industry? Potential clients?

Follow to be reminded, search to read. If I’m interested in a person’s tweets, I follow them. They’ll appear in my list of followers and when I peruse that list I’ll be reminded to visit their Twitter page from time to time. If I’m interested in what people are saying about a particular topic, I search on that topic.

But forget about trying to read every tweet that comes in on your main feed.

Twitter Isn’t Slow
Twitter, with its shortened URLs and users with huge follower lists, is the perfect medium for responding to information and disseminating information quickly to a large number of people. It can come in handy when you want to quickly get in on a conversation in social media. This is why it’s important to have targeted followers and followers who are influencers, and as many of these types of followers as possible. If they like your tweet, they might retweet, helping you to spread your message quickly.

When a tweet is retweeted often, it’s important to a particular group. A tweet that goes viral is recent, and the social signals it generates are now. If that tweet is about you or your organization, it’s good to be able to respond quickly, particularly if it happens to be a complaint.

Twitter Isn’t a Newspaper, a Book or a Magazine
Twitter is a micro-blog. It spits out tweets 140 characters at a time that contain useful words and phrases that are easy to search and that give a good indication of what’s on people’s minds. Lots of people, not just a handful who sit on an editorial board.

Twitter Isn’t Feckless
By midday on January 12, 2010, the top ten Twitter topics were related to Haiti or earthquake relief. On June 17, 2009, the State Department asked Twitter to hold off on scheduled maintenance to its servers to avoid disruptions in what had become a useful source of information coming out of Iran during its election. Twitter pushes social signals into the mainstream and helps make much of what’s important to us a little more transparent.

Twitter Isn’t a Technology That’s Going Away
The Twitter syntax is so simple and effective Facebook has adopted parts of it. Type the @ symbol followed by a letter in Facebook and you’ll see friends’ names appear. And it’s search capabilities are so strong Google began including live Twitter rolls on its search pages for timely topical searches.

Historically, search engines have determined the importance of web pages and delivered to us the most relevant ones based on our search terms. But it takes time to determine the relevancy of a web page. What about recent results? This is where Twitter soars. It gives us recent results, many of which are relevant. We’re beginning to see content authority changing, and Twitter is at the root of this change. Today, for instance, Google launched Google Buzz, a set of Twitter-like social networking features within Gmail.

Twitter is building up a feature set that has for many become indispensable. Whether Twitter the company will be around for long is to be seen, but the company is valued at around $1 billion at the time of this post, and its technology will most like be around whenever you read this.

Every search includes the “what,” but a large number of searches also include the “where.” Local search occurs whenever keywords related to “where” appear in the search string, like “Seattle pizza,” “Flagstaff charter planes” or “antiques Vermont.” These geographic modifiers restrict the search to more relevant data from the search engines.

Local search can also occur when the search is for a product or service that’s typically purchased or consumed locally, even if no geographic modifier is used, for instance “restaurants,” “horseback riding” and “chiropractor.”

Search Engines Big and Small
Local search happens on the large search engines as well as on a variety of local search engines, like Yahoo! Local, Google Maps, Bing Maps, AskCity, AOL Local, and many others, including online Yellow Pages. These local search engines provide databases of local business listings, many of which are submitted by the business owners themselves, others of which are aggregated by each search engine.

Local Search Advertising
Local search engines give local businesses a less competitive paid advertising alternative to the larger search engines for targeting local traffic. A business can be listed on most local search engines for free, and paid advertising on these sites can cost as little as $10 per month.

On the Map
Map locations are increasingly working their way into local search results. In fact, Google folded Google Local into Google Maps, offering business search results, links to websites and location maps all in a single local search. Even its main search engine provides a list of “Local business results” complete with a map dotted with clickable pushpins. The techniques used by the different search engines vary, as do their sources of information, so the results vary as well.

Doing It
First, geo-optimize your website. Include geographic modifiers in the title and meta data for geographically sensitive areas of your website, and then create specific landing pages if necessary. Submit your business listing and website address to local search engines and conduct local pay-per-click campaigns on both local and large search engines.

If you operate locally, optimizing for local search is pretty much a no-brainer. But even if you don’t, local search still has its advantages. Optimizing parts of your site for specific locations gives you more opportunity in areas that show a particular concentration of interest in whatever it is you’re offering.

Check this out for more on Local Search and how to do it effectively.

If you’re ever asked in an email from Twitter to change your password, think first and then do this. Do not click on any links in the email. Go to your web browser and sign in to Twitter as you normally would. Click on Settings in the upper right, then click on Password. This is the only safe way to change your password.

Should you change your password if you receive this email from Twitter? I would say yes, even if you think the email is not from Twitter. Password protection is the weakest point of entry on the Web, so strong passwords that are changed frequently are the best way to protect your goods online.

The Twitter API has allowed developers to create thousands of Twitter tools and applications that help us make even better use of Twitter, and these tools require that you log in to your Twitter account off site. In these cases, your username and password are protected.

But because we can sign in so easily from other places, Twitter users are easy targets for phishing attacks. And quite a few have accompanied Twitter’s rapid growth in the last 18 months. If Twitter were to ask you to change your password, most likely they would tell you the same thing: go to your Twitter account and do it there.

Can you offer any warnings on Twitter attacks you’ve encountered?

It’s important to remember that the goals of nonprofits are typically fundraising, advocacy efforts and recruiting vounteers. List building is an objective toward achieving these goals. Facebook is not the best tool for adding email opt-ins. But if you have several hundred fans on your nonprofit Facebook page, there’s your list! Use that list to help raise donations.

The idea behind social media is to go where your audience is and not to drag them to where you are. Once there, you interact with them through conversations they’re already having. Many audiences are on Facebook and Twitter.

Both are essentially micro-blogs. I know many complain about the seemingly constant changes the Facebook team implements. But these changes make it so much easier to achieve what you want to achieve. For instance, a year or so ago Facebook’s little status update — your name followed by the word “is” — became the central thread that holds together all of our interactions on the site. This status update is nothing more than a micro-blog that you publish and Facebook distributes, just like Twitter.

Just like Twitter. The rise of Twitter is what inspired Facebook to make that change. Facebook has even adopted some of the Twitter syntax. Try this: when you update Facebook, use the @ symbol and begin typing the name of one of your friends or fans. It auto-fills. That’s straight from Twitter.

Micro-blogging is all about recency (the real word is “recentness”). Your updates should be frequent in order to remain recent. But monitor the threshold with your fans. Make sure 1) you’re not annoying them with updates that are too frequent, 2) you’re contributing to conversations they’re already engaged in or initiate conversations they want to participate in, 3) the focus is on them and not you, 4) your call to action exists at the intersection of their interests and yours.

A friend expressed to me recently his confusion over free. “How is anything free?” he mused. “Nothing can be really free.” But what about Facebook? Gmail? What about the notion in Chris Anderson’s “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business” (Wired Magazine: 16.03) that the Web is all about scale and if the costs can be spread over a large enough audience, something of value can essentially be had for free?

The New York Times announced today that it intends to charge frequent readers for access to its website starting in 2011. A number of weeks ago, Rupert Murdoch announced that many of News Corp’s online media properties would soon begin charging visitors, a reality that all online publishers are faced with in the post-dawn of the ad revenue model.

But let’s face it. Facebook and Gmail are not free. Anderson reminds us of what Stewart Brand said in 1984: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive … That tension will not go away.” Facebook and Google, Gmail’s parent company, each in its own way have monetized that tension.

Google knows a shocking amount about your computer and where it goes: every keyword search you conduct, every website you visit, your IP address, where you’re physically located, and even more if you use services like Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, etc., ad infinitum. Your use of Google is not free. You give Google a lot of useful information.

Facebook knows the real you. If you’re one of over 350 million who use Facebook, you’ve voluntarily shared with Facebook the most valuable information on the Web: your profile information. Facebook knows your name, who your friends are, that you like to hike and bike, that you read Ayn Rand and Anne Rice, that your political views are complicated, and what your status is. So Facebook isn’t free either.

These are two distinct classes of information on the Web, and they drive most marketing that occurs online. Profile information, tucked relatively safely away in username and password-protected environments like Facebook, allows for ads to be served to you based on your specific interests. It’s called behavioral targeting. Search engine information, tucked away in its own protected etherworld, allows search engines to deliver to you the most relevant ads based on search behavior, yours and others.

So why does the New York Times have to charge its subscribers? Because they’re giving away their content for nothing in return. As the New York Times decides exactly how and what they’ll charge its users, they should also consider the value of profile information and site search information. They should supplement their site with a social media component and give every user the option signing up with the same kind of information that is shared on sites like Facebook. These users will be given more free access to the site and will be served highly targeted ads based on their profile information and on their page view history on the site. Users who opt not to sign up will have to pay to read.

NYTimes.com has never been free. It’s been paying the price for us, and soon we’re going to have to give them something in return to make this relationship work.

I’ll let them say it: “Technorati was founded to help bloggers succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the global online conversation. Founded as the first blog search engine, Technorati has expanded to a full service media company providing services to the blogs and social media sites and connecting them with advertisers who want to join the conversation, and whose online properties introduce blog content to millions of consumers.”

An injured child in Port-au-Prince receives medical treatment. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

On January 12, Haiti’s capital was devastated by a series of earthquakes ranging from 6.3 to 7.5. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and was still recovering from the devastation of hurricanes in 2008. Our help is important. There are many ways to give. Below is a list of links to donation pages of leading charities and relief organizations. You can find other charities you can trust by visiting CharityNavigator.org.

Oxfam »
“Oxfam has over three decades of experience in Haiti, and we have rushed in teams from around the region to respond to the situation where our assistance is most needed. We are providing clean water, shelter and sanitation and helping people recover – your donation will go immediately to the most critical needs in Haiti, and we will ensure that every penny is used wisely.”

The International Rescue Committee »
“The IRC is responding to the major earthquake that devastated Haiti’s capital on January 12. Your donation will help the IRC work with partners on the ground in Haiti to rescue lives.”

American Red Cross »
“Your gift to the American Red Cross will support emergency relief and recovery efforts to help those people affected by the earthquake in Haiti. Assistance provided by the American Red Cross may include deploying personnel, sending relief supplies, and providing financial resources.”

CARE »
“We’re particularly worried about the children, said CARE’s country director in Haiti Sophie Perez. “So many schools seem to have collapsed. In Haiti, children go to school in the afternoon. Children were still in school when the earthquake hit, so there are many children trapped. It’s horrifying.”

UNICEF »
“Children are always the most vulnerable population in any natural disaster, and UNICEF is there for them. The U.S. Fund for UNICEF is absorbing all associated administrative costs so that 100% of every dollar you give to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF will support UNICEF’s relief efforts for children in Haiti.”

Doctors Without Border (Medecins Sans Frontieres) »
“MSF has been working in Haiti for 19 years, most recently operating three emergency hospitals in Port-au-Prince, and is mobilizing a large emergency response to this disaster. Our immediate response in the first hours following the disaster in Haiti was only possible because of private unrestricted donations from around the world received before the earthquake struck. We are currently reinforcing our teams on the ground in order to respond to the immediate medical needs and to assess the humanitarian needs that MSF will be addressing in the months ahead.”

Catholic Relief Services »
“Please help the people of Haiti with your support of CRS as we respond in the aftermath of a massive earthquake that struck near the capital of Port-au-Prince. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and was still recovering from deadly 2008 hurricanes when the quake struck.”

Concern Worlwide »
“Please give whatever you can afford to help victims of the earthquake in Haiti. Your donation will be used to provide water, food and shelter to those who have lost everything. Thank You!”

Direct Relief International »
“Because of the intense attention and the outpouring of generosity we have seen in response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti, we believe it is important to note that 100% of every dollar that is designated for the Haiti earthquake will be used only to pay programmatic expenses related to assisting people in Haiti.”

Partners In Health »
“Please donate now to help Partners In Health’s efforts in Haiti.”

MercyCorps »
“Our crisis-tested emergency response team is on the ground in the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating earthquake.”

World Vision »
“Your gift now will help distribute life-saving relief supplies — including food, clean water, blankets, and tents — to children and families devastated by the earthquake and aftershocks in Haiti.”

Food For the Poor »
“On January 12th a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Devastating aftershocks followed. The current number of dead and missing is estimated to be between 100,000 and 500,000. The entire capital of Port-au-Prince appears damaged or destroyed. Your help is urgently needed to bring immediate emergency relief to those affected. Please donate now.”

Pay-per-click advertising campaigns produce ads that appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) when a specific keyword or phrase is searched for. PPC campaigns can also generate contextual ads that appear on third-party websites and blogs related to the webpage’s content, as well as in newsletters and emails.

Strong PPC ad campaigns begin with good keyword research. Start by researching your organization and industry, and then conduct a competitive analysis to determine the best-targeted keywords for your PPC campaigns based on your goals.

Your ads should be carefully crafted and should contain the keywords and phrases that trigger the ad. There should be multiple versions of an ad in any given campaign and these should be tested against each other. Replace the lesser performing ads with new variations of the better performing ones. Create a landing page specific to each campaign. You can create multiple landing pages, each with a different layout or call to action. Perform A/B tests on these pages to compare layouts and designs to determine which ones elicit the best responses when someone clicks through from the ad.

By studying the analytics data from your site, look for trends, large and small, within a specific time period. Determine how visitors find your site, how they navigate once they’re on it, and where, when and why they take action. Or why they don’t. Use this information to improve your online results and ROI.

What services would make your PPC advertising easier?

More on Pay Per Click

Some of the Weejee Media Pages Indexed by Google

The Google footprint for a business can be determined the same way we determine a footprint for an individual: simply type the business name into the search bar. But if the business has a website, there are even more ways to measure its footprint.

The search engines offer advanced operators to help you refine and improve your search and help you research how your site is doing. And they’re easy.

Which Pages of My Site Are Being Indexed?
It’s always good to know which pages of your site the search engines are indexing, or more importantly, which ones they’re not. After all, if a page is not being indexed, it will not come up in any search results. To find out which pages of your site are being indexed, use the “site:” operator.

In a Google search field (not the address bar), type “site:YOURSITE.com” without the quotes and with no spaces, and no “www.” Then press enter/return. You’ll see at the top the total number of pages that have been indexed by Google, and most of those pages will be listed in the results.

Who’s Linking to My Website?
One of the most important factors search engines consider when calculating the relevance of a page is how many other websites link to it. How many websites link to pages on your site? Again, it’s easy to find out.

Go to Yahoo! (not Google), and in the search field, not the address bar, type this:

link:http://www.YOURSITE.com

The results will include pages from elsewhere on the Web that link to pages on your site. The more links you have from reputable sites, particularly sites that are related to yours in some way, the higher the search engines will rank your site.

Website Navigation
If you see that the search engines do not index a lot of your pages, there’s a good chance they’ve never seen them. Good site navigation is not only important to users, it’s important to the search engines as well. Make sure links to all the pages on your site are no more than two clicks away. If possible, create a sitemap and link to it from the footer of each page. Your visitor will love it, and so will the search engines.

How do you measure your footprint online?

Social Media Trip: Coca-Cola's Expedition 206

On November 17, 2009, Advertising Age reported about Coca-Cola’s Expedition 206, the company’s biggest ever push with social media. Three individuals in their twenties will visit 206 countries and territories where Coke, along with a smile, has been part of community long before community moved online. The three will be equipped with whatever gadgets necessary to document for us their “search for happiness.”

The biggest story here will come from inside the Coca-Cola offices. Much will be learned from the collaboration between the communications, public relations and marketing teams; the development and refinement of social media policy as the unknowns become known; and the grip and release of message “control” as community builds and dialog increases. And because it will all play out where we go the most – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and more – we’ll all get to watch the brand of all brands “expand the brand.”

Blogs are a way of exporting your site’s content and message to an audience beyond traditional search.

If by “blog” you mean a platform to syndicate crisp headlines and meaningful messages across the landscape of online media, then blogging is so now. In fact, social media are breathing even more life into it.

Using Blog Technology to Help Your Site

Blogs are a way of exporting your site’s content and message to an audience beyond traditional search. Creating a quick blog post and clicking Publish can instantly update several of your social media accounts while at the same time adding new content to your site, which keeps the search engines happy.

Since a blog uses syndication technology, it’s the perfect vehicle for disseminating your message. And since social media sites easily accept this technology (Facebook, Twitter, et al.), the opportunity exists to feed certain social media sites with content containing catchy headlines and links back to the original site, your site.

Remember, the purpose of social media optimization is to drive traffic from sources other than search engines. The creative use of blog technology allows just that.

“What could I possibly write about?”   >>

Social Media Shapes and Sizes

Social media is person-to-person, person-to-many and many-to-many, with technology where all those hyphens are. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, Yahoo! Answers and Second Life all fall under the heading of social media, but each falls into a different category.

1. Communication
Social networking sites, blogs and micro-blogs. Sites like Facebook, Twitter and your friend’s blog about vintage gas caps communicate ideas and inspire comments.

2. Collaboration
Social bookmarking, social news and wikis. Sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Wikipedia let people build upon the ideas of others. Sometimes arguments break out. Collaboration isn’t always easy.

3. Multimedia
Video sharing, photo sharing and audio sharing sites. YouTube and Flickr help fill this creek. Swim around. It’s deep and wide.

4. Reviews and Opinions
Question & Answer and product review sites. Yahoo! Answers, WkiAnswers and epinions have large, and vocal, followings. Very useful for getting or giving the skinny about something.

5. Entertainment
Virtual worlds and game sharing. Second Life and Kongregate are two of its leaders. Careful. Some people never come back.

How are you using Social Media?   >>

If Social Media were easy to use and made your organization money, would you use them for business?   >>

Meet the Press?

Recently as I researched for a piece I was writing on behavioral targeting,  I went on Facebook and saw that the three ads served to me in the right column were directly related to the first three activities I listed in my Facebook profie: writing, cycling, fitness. The ads were for a literary agent, a bike tour in France, and and an online fitness program. It’s behavioral targeting 101. Behavioral targeting allows advertisers to use personal information to target specific individuals based on their interests, location and anything else they choose to share in a username and password protected environment like Facebook.

Today I saw one of the best: a convergence of paid advertising, behavioral targeting and social conversation. After all, social media is all about participation and engagement. Advertisers are learning how to get in on the fun, and in this case they did not annoy me. And the ad had an interesting twist.

Facebook knows I sometimes watch Meet The Press, so a media buyer paid Facebook to serve me the ad you see here. What I like most is that it’s not the kind of ad we’ve been pummeled with for the last several decades. Look at it. Sure, there’s ad info there: Rachel Maddow is scheduled to appear on the show presumably this Sunday, which obviously means something to some people. But intrigue is invoked by presenting the possibility she won’t show. And the “Oh, my” factor is not addressed until you click through. And when you do…

It’s not an ad for the show. The ad was not placed by NBC News. The ad was bought by the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians who have a beef with with NBC over some union issue. You can see the ad here. Now I know. Good job, NABET or whatever you call yourself. You win this week’s – and our first – Weejee Weekly Ad Award.

Why is behavioral targeting not a bad thing?   >>
Google vs. Facebook   >>