Social Media Guide for the Big Brands – No Fear – No Rush!

Collection of useful tips for the big business brands out there, to lose fear for social media and put it to good use, be prepared to deal with the unique issues and manage the efforts properly, which includes throwing away the phone book with the number of your PR-Agency.

See the full article here.

It’s a long and detailed post aimed towards big brands to learn how to use social media for their benefits, loose the fear of it, but be prepared and ready as well, without rushing into an adventure that can have serious consequences for the company.

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The Ultimate Guide to Podcasting

A comprehensive guide for podcasters to setup their own podcast, submit it to iTunes and other directories and integrate it into their blog. Additional resources to audio editing, content, related conferences, books and tools that make things easier or save cost are also included.

This guide is for people who have a podcast or think about starting one and NOT for listeners to podcasts. There are good guides for podcast audience available, for example: The podcast listeners guide by Mathew Honan. You can also check out Apple iTunes, PodcastAlley.com, Digg Podcasts or any of the other podcast directories available on the internet.

Podcasting – once reserved for technical types or those with the financial backing to hire a podcasting specialist – has become mainstream and is no longer limited to geeks and early adopters. With this popularity and concurrent availability of tools, it has become easier to publish podcasts (although it is still not as easy as configuring a VCR).

Thanks to over 100 million iPods sold and the improvements to software and tools to make access and consumption of podcasts easier for regular people contribute to a steady growth of people who tune in to podcasts on a regular basis, which is soon reaching double digit percentages of the US population.

The increasing popularity of podcasting has fueled the number of available podcasts and the competition for audience share. Just having a podcast is no longer enough to attract listeners or engage subscribers.

Learn more about setting up your own podcast and promoting it on the internet and integrate it with your existing blog (if you don’t have one yet, create one, even if it is just for the podcast itself).

Check out the “The Ultimate Guide to Podcasting“

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Search Engine Optimization Article at Wikipedia Doesn’t Deserve Attention

Trying to make Wikipedia better, by working the system from the inside, as a trusted member and editor at Wikipedia, is itself not only honorable, but wise. It’s not a battle many would wish to fight. It’s an article about SEO worth it? Wikipedians are adversaries many prefer to simply ignore.

Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz is one of them. He also states what he things about how Wikipedia should work and does actually work.

Here’s how it should work:

• Read something about SEO on Wikipedia
• Think to yourself – huh, I wonder if that’s accurate
• Investigate the author a bit – are they reliable, generally honest, trustworthy, experienced?
• Investigate the subject matter – spend some time in the popular, well-regarded SEO blogs, forums and read some industry resources
• Come back and re-read
• If you still disagree, consider bringing it up in the discussion and be sure to mention that you’re not an industry expert, cite your sources and be respectful
• If you think you’ve got a real point, go ahead and make your edits

Here’s how it actually works:

• Read something about SEO on Wikipedia
• Note that it doesn’t match with your prejudiced, pre-conceived notions of SEO as spam
• Make a bunch of edits and deletions
• When pressed by industry experts, dismiss their sources as lacking credibility
• When pressed further, find Wikipedia rules that work in your favor – since you can’t argue from experience, use your powers of derision and dismissal combined with bureaucratic wordplay to frustrate and demoralize your opposition
• Find other inexperienced people with similar biases towards SEO and recruit them to your cause

Mhhh… True or Not True?

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Dude, what can I do to help?

When was the last time you gave something to someone? You have a talent. I don ’t know what it is. Maybe you are a great designer. Maybe you are a CSS guru or a PHP pundit. Maybe you are a marketing genius or have the gift of gab. Whatever it is, you have something to offer. When was the last time you offered it?

When was the last time you said …

 “Dude, what can I do to help? “

Nice post by SEO-SCOOP that reminds us that money is not everything and that giving for free and help somebody can make a change and also tends to come back to you in unexpected ways when you are the least prepared for it (in a good way). You don’t have to be a religious man to understand this principle.

You might think that this is all hogwash in this world where money reigns and power corrupts. Just try it once, just for the fun of it.

You might be in for a surprise.

Cheers!

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A List of Great Video “Shorties”

Little Gems in the new rich world of user generated content.
Those are my favorite short videos from all the hundreds of videos I have watched over the past months.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Controversial

Master Plan – About the power of Google
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zKXCQpUnMg

Ask A Ninja Special Delivery 4 “Net Neutrality” (funny with a serious background)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H69eCYcDcuQ

A YouTube Clip with Google Ads?! (nooo!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hgtSjwREqA

Educational

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

The Hubble Deep Field: The Most Important Image Ever Taken
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcBV-cXVWFw

The scale of things in the Universe
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3974466981713172831&sourceid=Himself

what is “Brand”? The Show with ZeFrank (funny, explicit)
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/08/082906.html

Video removed from YouTube as per Ze Frank’s request from 7/29/2007.

Visionary

Bumptop Prototype – Desktop of the Future?!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWe-TIy2Lbs

Random Notes On Blogging

A funny list (if you are a Blogger) of rules, facts, thoughts and opinions to blogging by Hugh Macleod at GapingVoid.com.

Lets check the first 5 of 41 items on that list.

1. The First Rule of Blogging: “Blogs don’t write themselves.” It’s the hardest and most frustrating part of professionally helping others to blog.

2. Most bloggers I have met I would describe as smart, decent, passionate people. This includes bloggers that I don’t particularly like on a personal level. I have yet to meet a blogger who I would describe as a “Thoroughbred Scumbag”.

3. Blogging is an art, same as any other method of self-expression. Some are better at it than others.

4. Stay as honest as you can, for as long as you can. Once you cross the line it’s hard to go back.

5. A lot of serious bloggers became so because frankly, they had too much time on their hands. And often there were good reasons for that.

hilarious!

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Trackback Spammer Exploits Security Hole at Stanford.edu

Carsten Cumbrowski over at SearchEngineJournal.com shows and explains in great detail how a clever spammer exploits a security hole at the plato.stanford.edu website to trick bloggers via trackback spam that is almost undetectable, even by human eyes.

The Spammer was so clever that at it is impossible to determine that it is spam at first glance. It looks so real.
The exploits were not fixed by the affected sites yet, but the sites were contacted and take action hopefully very soon.

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