Word of mouth

They say the best form of advertising is word of mouth. That’s because a word of mouth “advertisement” is really just a social endorsement. Let’s say your friend loves her dentist. When you get a toothache, her enthusiastic endorsement of said dentist goes a long way. It’s relevant to your immediate needs and it came from a trusted source. A double-whammy.

It’s a matter of trust

Trust is what makes social endorsements different from paid endorsements like celebrity sponsorship or TV commercial testimonials? Trust. When your friend recommends you try her friendly, gentle, affordable, local dentist, you’re likely going to trust her. You assume she’s not being paid by the dentist for her recommendation, but is endorsing out of admiration & loyalty. By nature of being your friend, she’s trustworthy.

Lack of trust, is the same reason why you don’t rush out to buy whatever hair care product your cousin is hawking, despite how “AMAZING” and “Seriously. SOOO good!!” she may say it is on Facebook. You identify that her motives are business & profit, and immediately discount her endorsement. It just isn’t trustworthy.

Trust is about relating

Wikipedia says that trust is a “reasonable expectation (confidence) of the trustor that the trustee will behave in a way beneficial to the trustor.” Or, more simply, it’s the belief that “this is good for me.” Obviously, the “this is good” part is very important. But before that, conceptually speaking, comes the “for me” part. We have to be able to relate in a personal way to the trustee―the person or thing to be trusted.

This is why companies pay celebrities for endorsements. We form personal relationships with celebrities in our minds and we relate to them, projecting some of ourselves onto them. Most people have never met Tom Hanks, but they will tell you that he’s an honest, trustworthy man.

If a company put a stranger in front of you and the stranger said, “trust me!” your response would be, “Why? I don’t even know you!” So the company works very, very hard at casting actors who appear trustworthy and relatable.

Enter: Joe Everyman.

There’s something relatable about the little guy. We all see a glimpse of ourselves in the anonymous, hard-working, man or woman. Have you ever noticed how car commercials frequently feature average-looking, non-descript men and women? They’re nameless and sometimes even faceless. The viewer projects some of themselves onto those anonymous characters. It’s human nature. We can only see the world through our own eyes, after all.

Yelp is full of Joe & Jane Everypersons. So when Yelp tells you that 5 people you’ve never heard of have reviewed your local pizza place, something similar happens. You don’t know George P., Michael K., Thom H., Colin M., and John L. But that’s the point. They’re not special. They’re not celebrities. And they’re not your annoying cousin. They’re basically anonymous. And relatable.

Yelp users, if my theory is correct, project their own personalities onto previous reviewers. We trust their reviews, even though we’ve never met them. Somehow, what they say is worth listening to.

Trust is valuable

You can’t sell without trust. So if you’re trustworthy, you’re sales-worthy. And that is extremely valuable. It’s the reason Google is the web’s dominant search engine: when the search race was on, they provided the best results. They earned users’ trust. Google, Apple, Facebook…any of the biggest tech companies (and probably non-tech, too) have proven themselves as trustworthy.

Every company wants to be trusted. And Yelp is playing a bigger and bigger role in how people feel about local businesses and their products or services. A Yelp review can be a powerful thing. Yelp is becoming the unit of measurement―the standard to which businesses are held. And that puts Yelp in a very powerful position. They are trust currency.

But can trust be monetized?

It doesn’t seem likely. The difference between Google/Apple/Facebook and Yelp is that the former have concrete business models with revenue streams baked right in. Yelp doesn’t.

Yelp’s products are information and trust. The web has clearly demonstrated that it will not pay for information. The New York Times and BusinessWeek both wrote about Yelp’s business model, or apparent lack thereof.

Trust won’t pay the bills

Yelp has established itself as the authority on local business reviews and millions of people trust them. But trust doesn’t pay the bills.

I do have an idea on how Yelp could monetize its site. But if I described it in detail here, I wouldn’t make any money :) But it’s a pretty good idea. Trust me.

Related posts:

1. On Social Networking
2. Can Social Media Fires be Put Out?

The situation

I won’t get too specific, as it could reopen some healed wounds. But I will say this: I said a stupid thing on Twitter. It was personal. It was nasty. It was uncalled for. It was a mistake.

The recipient of my bone-headed tweet caught wind and promptly fired back. The trouble is: said recipient is in a powerful position and could do some real damage.

The predicament

My outcome: put out this fire asap. But how? If you know me, you know I’m happy to argue. I sometimes enjoy it. I’m fairly good at it. But in this case, it would have been a bad move. It would have fueled a fire that only needed putting out.

How do you put out a fire that’s burning on Twitter & other social media outlets?

The answer

Keeping in mind that there is no perfect answer, the first solution to explore is simply: apologize.

Fighting back only grows the problem. Ignoring it or covering your tracks can let it smolder. Calling for backup adds new complexity.

I apologized immediately. I realized what I said was stupid―and unwarranted―and that I should never have said it. I threw in some self-deprecation, just for good measure.

The conclusion

Social media fires might be the hardest kind to put out. People speak and act so quickly in this world that it’s almost impossible to keep up. Obviously, it’s best to avoid these fires if possible. But when they break out, act quickly and sincerely.

I made a mistake. I owned up to it. I apologized and held myself accountable. It wasn’t easy, but it was what needed to be done.

Feedback

Have you ever ignited a social media fire, accidentally or otherwise? How did/would you handle it? Let me know in the comments or tweet at me.

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1. On the Social (network) Scene
2. On Social Networking
3. Twitter’s SEO Mistake

Why, Facebook? Why!

Why would Facebook take away suggesting? The power of suggestion is very strong. And the power of social suggestion—recommendations made by your friends—is even stronger. Much of Facebook’s “viral” nature is derived from its users’ ability to share, and yes, suggest things to each other.

One possible reason to take away suggesting is to promote liking and sharing—two of Facebook’s most essential features. Some said the change was made to motivate companies to buy ads rather than use free, word-of-Facebook-mouth promotion. But that doesn’t make much sense, because not everyone lost their suggesting ability…

Admins can still suggest. Sort of.

Page Admins still have the option to suggest a page to their friends. Except the suggest function appears to be broken.

But the fact that the option is still listed is encouraging. It tells us that Facebook doesn’t want to eliminate suggesting entirely. If it exists for some users, there’s still some hope that it could exist for all.

Suggesting is broken.

Hitting the “Suggest to Friends” button on one of my pages brings up this—a collapsed box, with nothing inside it.

But this too is actually encouraging. Facebook doesn’t often leave broken features untended. Seeing unavailable functionality like this, seemingly unintentionally crippled, would—ahem—suggest that Facebook is currently making changes to the function. Limiting its availability to admins is a good way to test changes on a minority of users.

Will we ever suggest again?

So now the question becomes, if admins—the potential advertisers—can suggest, why can’t we, the target-market consumers? Is it becoming a privilege, accessible only to Facebook’s social influencers?

Or is Facebook just patching up a few things before suggesting returns to all users? Maybe too many “how to suggest to all friends” tutorials popped up and Zuck wants that “bug” fixed (or officially supported?).

Or perhaps—and I think this is most likely—suggesting was taken away temporarily while Facebook redesigns pages. They just finished rolling out new profiles, and there has been lots of talk of eliminating tabs on pages too. Perhaps this is just part of that rework.

I hope so. I like the suggest function. Sure, it gets over-used sometimes. But I think it’s a great piece of Facebook’s platform.

Feedback

What about you? Do you miss your “Suggest to Friends” button? Did you even notice it missing? What are your conspiracy theories about its disappearance? Let me know in the comments or tweet at me. Thanks!

Update: No, we will never suggest again. At least, not the way we used to.

Related posts:

1. On the Social (network) Scene
2. Soon You’ll Manage Your Stocks on Facebook
3. Facebook doesn't own my digital lifestream.

Facebook will go public in 2012

Multiple sources are reporting that Facebook’s IPO will come in 2012. Their recent arrangement with Goldman Sachs will likely get vetoed by the SEC. When that happens, they will be forced to go public before May 1st, 2012.

When Facebook’s IPO comes out, thousands of people will rush to invest in it. Most of those people are probably already Facebook users.

Taking aim at Google, et al.

Facebook has clearly demonstrated their competitive approach to Google. They are vying with the search giant for internet dominance. Google’s strategy has been to enter every possible market and force the existing players to sink or swim. I believe Facebook will do the same.

They’ve added “features” to the site at a feverish pace: photos, videos, marketplace, locations, games. The list goes on. These features compete with Flickr/Webshots, YouTube/Vimeo, Foursquare/Gowalla, and Yahoo!, et al. respectively.

I believe the addition of a stock market feature into Facebook profiles is right around the corner, designed to compete with Google and Yahoo! Finance and to put things like E*Trade on the run. I’ve dubbed it “Facebook Investments.”

Perfect harmony

What better way for Facebook to create new revenue? First, get willing investors to throw millions at them by way of an IPO. Second, integrate stocks into people’s profiles. Now you can invest IN Facebook while investing THROUGH Facebook. And, of course, they’ll take a small cut of each trade.

Sites like E*Trade and ScotTrade take $7-10 per trade. Facebook could take $0.10 and make a killing, given the vast number of users in their database. How will E*Trade and ScotTrade compete with that?

Here’s the concept

I created a demo of Facebook Investments, based on some of Facebook’s existing products.

Agree? Disagree?

What do you think? Will Facebook integrate “Investments” into user profiles? Would you buy stocks in or with Facebook? Let me know in the comments or tweet at me.

Related posts:

1. Google vs. Facebook vs. Microsoft vs. MySpace
2. Facebook doesn't own my digital lifestream.
3. Facebook Removed “Suggest to Friends”

Visit custom Twitter archive

Using WordPress to archive tweets

1. Install WordPress.
2. Install Twitter Tools & connect your Twitter account.
3. Set “Create a blog post from each of your tweets?” to “Yes.”

This will pull your future tweets into WordPress, making them browsable & searchable.

What about past tweets?

1. Visit TweetBackup.com & connect your Twitter account (using OAuth).
2. Wait a minute for TweetBackup to finish grabbing your tweets (limited to 3,200 tweets).
3. Export your archive in RSS format & save to your computer.
4. Use WordPress’ RSS importer to import the TweetBackup file from your computer.

That’s it! This will import all your old tweets to WordPress, creating single posts for each tweet.

Bonus

1. TweetBackup prefaces each tweet with your username. Use Search Regex to remove it.
2. Past tweets from TweetBackup won’t have linked URLs. Use Autolink URI to add them.
3. WordPress’ native search kinda sucks. Use Search Everything to improve it.

Related posts:

1. Google vs. Twitter
2. My Favorite WordPress Plugins
3. Using Twitter for Smart Shopping

The Weird Thing Is

The part that surprises me is that I’ve never seen a political group, in this case the “Citizens for Strength and Security” place local-government political ads on popular, non-political websites. Of course the presidential campaign ads were everywhere. But even those were typically reserved for more general areas. A social media web magazine seems like an unlikely place for a political ad.

Other Examples?

Where else have you seen political ads that you didn’t expect them? Are they all over Pets.com and Golf Pro Weekly or something? Got any hot leads?

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2. Trying out Storify
3. Can Social Media Fires be Put Out?

Chase Bank and Facebook have teamed up to raise & donate $5,000,000 to several non-profit organizations. Close to my heart are the participating Drum Corps International competing corps. These groups deserve all the support in the world.

You Get 5 Votes

From the rule page: “Voting begins January 15 through January 22. You will have 5 votes, but only 1 per charity! … Five charities will get $100,000 each, and one charity will receive $1MM! Also, the Chase Community Giving Advisory Board will select additional nominated charities from either round to share another $1 million.”

Groups in the Running

• Carolina Crown
• The Cavaliers
• The Colts
• Phantom Regiment
• Push America (not drum corps-related, but a great cause!)

Conclusion

I think I found all the drum corps. Please let me know if I forgot any. For more on the program, check out Chase Community Giving’s official rules.

Related posts:

1. New Website: Spartans Drum Corps
2. New Website: Corps Connect
3. On Charitable Giving

Now, I might just be the last to notice this feature. But it seems pretty big to me. Facebook has been positioning itself to compete with Twitter for months now. Why would they link to them from their News Feed?

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1. Soon You’ll Manage Your Stocks on Facebook
2. Using Twitter for Smart Shopping
3. Facebook doesn't own my digital lifestream.

But what about the other side? What about Joe Everyman? Can’t Twitter be useful for him? Can’t he extract more value from Twitter than simply being shown marketing materials?

Yes. For the average consumer, Twitter has tremendous untapped potential in the way of product research and smart shopping.

The Back-Story

The other day, I began being followed by @autoglassguy. I’m a blogger and website designer. Why would I care about “auto glass guy?” Just another company trying to reach potential new customers, I thought. But when I visited @autoglassguy’s Twitter profile, his status interested me immediately. It said, “looking for a web site design guru to spice up my ‘google’ looking home page.”

“Hmm. Convenient,” I thought.

I checked out who he follows (as of this writing, that’s 1,800 people) and I was surprised by what I saw. Of the first 20 Twitter users listed on @autoglassguy’s “Following” page, 18 of them are SEO people. In fact, the first 4 pages of @autoglassguy’s Follows are SEOs. Pages 5-9 are web designers and developers.

This might be is definitely the most effective use of Twitter I’ve seen yet.

The new Twitter model

You’re a smart shopper; a savvy consumer. You want the best deal. Here’s how to get it:

1. Connect with the Twitter users who claim to offer what you want
2. Express your interest in their product
3. Watch them fight over you.

Ever hear that LendingTree tagline, “when banks compete, you win?” The same principle applies here. This is a brilliant use of Twitter and one that I plan to employ next time I need something.

Thanks, @autoglassguy.

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3. Build a Custom Twitter Archive with WordPress

Curious, I plugged in my website’s URL. What I got was a page reciting several lines of one of Dickens’ works, and a link containing that same prose.

“I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies!”
From Bleak House

http://dickensurl.com/2784/I_only_ask_to_be_free._The_butterflies_are_free._Mankind_will_surely_not_deny_to_Harold_Skimpole_what_it_concedes_to_the_butterflies!

Finally. A way for us to identify our URLs with classic, timeless, adjective-ridden (albeit irrelevant) novel excerpts.

In DickensURL’s own words, “Inspired by a comment from reddit, this service has been created to convert long URLs into wonderful works by Charles Dickens. The fear of cryptic URLs, long or short, is now no longer a problem. Enter an ugly URL above and hit convert button. Soon you will be faced with beautiful words of Charles Dickens. Forget tinyurl.com, now you have dickensurl.com!”

Pure genius.

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“MySpace and Microsoft announced today that the MySpace website will be available for Windows Mobile this summer. In addition, they announced that MySpace would be supporting Microsoft’s Silverlight platform (a rival to the popular Adobe Flash), especially for the creation of applications on its developer platform.”

A few things are interesting about this:

1. Microsoft already has a partnership with Facebook
2. MySpace already has a partnership with Google
3. It puts pressure on Google to patch things up with Facebook

Mashable contributor Ben Parr put together a great article about the latest round of tech-giant pattycake. He writes, “It’s a lot of partnerships and technology integration to announce all at once. It is also a very interesting move for both companies. This announcement adds a new dynamic to the rivalry between Google and Microsoft…”

I agree with Mr. Parr, but I think the Google/Facebook issue is even bigger. Google vs. Microsoft is old news, but Facebook is still a big deal. With rumors circulating that Facebook is tight on cash, it’s not out of the question to think that the fabled buy-out offer from Google might show its face again. Would Facebook accept? No, probably not. But a new “partnership” like this latest one might be in the works.

Anyone remember last summer’s Microsoft + Yahoo ordeal? Is Gates’ crew just grabbing at still-relevant web companies, hoping to stay afloat? I can’t say I’m shocked, but I wonder what they’ll think of next…

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Twitter is the next big thing in SEO techniques.

It’s actually very simple. Twitter is becoming a huge player on the web, and as such, it’s gaining more power and better ranking on SERPs. Anyone on Twitter can count on that to improve their own visibility.

Title Tags

With a relatively small change they made a few weeks ago, Twitter all but proved that they’re diving into the SEO game. Just a few weeks ago, Twitter’s <title> tags changed. Using my username as an example, the tags went from “Twitter / tjkelly” to “TJ Kelly Web Design (tjkelly) on Twitter.” Placing my “real name” and username first in the title scores big bonus points for my SEO efforts.

Analytics Evidence

I’ve already started to see evidence of this Twitter-victory (twitctory?) in my analytics. In the past few weeks, Twitter has jumped from near the bottom of my “Traffic Sources” list to the #4 spot (after “none”, behind Google and Facebook, interestingly enough) with about 10% of my visits coming in through Twitter.

A pretty substantial change, and it happened FAST. There could be any number of factors involved in this, but one of them is definitely Twitter’s search ranking success.

So what?

Users, businesses, organizations… whomever wants to capitalize on the Twitter-SEO opportunity, should take a few steps to improve their ‘Twitter-to-homepage’ conversion rates.

1) Include keywords in your “real name.”
I added “Web Design” after “TJ Kelly” so my keywords will appear with my name in the <title> tag. It also immediately tells visitors what your Twitter stream is likely to be about.

2) Make a “badge” or some other descriptive background for your Twitter profile.
Twitter won’t let you add CSS or HTML to your profile, but that doesn’t mean it can’t say anything about you. The one drawback: no clickable links. But, if your URL is listed along with some compelling info about you, the “Web” URL listed on your profile ought be just fine.

3) Add keywords to your “Bio.”
These probably won’t help searchers looking for “website design” find my Twitter profile. But it will tell visitors to my profile figure out what I do.

4) This one’s extra. Remove the “www” from your “More info URL” in Twitter’s “Settings” page.
Now visitors to my Twitter profile will see “http://tjkwebdesi…” Compare that to the alternative, “http://www.tjkweb…” For my money, the “www” is unnecessary anyway and removing it reveals more of my URL to the visitor. (Side note: I tried removing the “http://” too, but Twitter added it back in.)

Afterthoughts

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, was recently fined by the NBA for using Twitter to criticize referees. In a response to the fine, Cuban twittered, “can’t say no one makes money from twitter now. the nba does.”

Twitter is awash in capital from a healthy pool of investors, to the tune of $20 million, according to Wired Magazine. Soon enough, they’ll storm the market with an ambitious business model and the user-base to support it.

* Not actually trademarked

Related posts:

1. Twitter’s SEO Mistake
2. Is DiggBar an SEO-killer?
3. Using Twitter for Smart Shopping

For a few weeks now, there’s been widespread discussion of Twitter incorporating search functionality into their site. Many believe it will spell trouble for Google. Twitter’s search can provide real-time results, something Google lacks. But, as Jonathan Mendez tells it, Google still has the advantage.

Twitter has the users. They have the tweets. They have the answers. But Google has this whole “search thing” down. They know a thing or two about indexing and filtering results (not to mention their own recent changes, rolling out semantic search capabilities). So while it is true that Twitter will provide the answers to users’ questions, we might find that Google is still the preferred method of finding those answers.

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It’s these common-theme social networks that I think make the biggest impact on users and on the web. Obviously, they don’t boast the user base that Facebook and MySpace enjoy, but that’s part of their charm. They focus in on what users care about, and they provide compelling, relevant media. Even more professionally-minded social networks like LinkedIn enjoy some of this niche goodness. In their case, the niche is that of career-driven professionals. The topics of conversation are often related to industry conventions or “new opportunities.”

And Facebook, et al. aren’t letting this “competition” bother them. Rather, they see these niche sites as a compliment to their broad appeal. If a user has a Facebook profile and a Last.fm profile, why not combine the two in some way? Show their Last.fm activity on their Facebook profile. It keeps users engaged in both networks. It’s a brilliant move on the part of Facebook, et al., and it’s better for the social web in the long run.

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2. Facebook Removed “Suggest to Friends”
3. Facebook doesn't own my digital lifestream.

Sociologists have begun to question the effect of all this exhibitionism on young people. Can they form durable
identities off-camera, or are they so used to producing their images for outside consumption that images have replaced their essences? Will a generation for whom all secrets are fair game and every private moment can become public trust each other and form intimate relationships? – Jennie Yabroff, Newsweek

What I find most interesting about this is how it relates to human interaction. In the
critical media world, there is a concept known as
“parasocial relationship.” The term refers to a situation
in which one party feels that they are sharing a sincere, intimate relationship with a second party, however the second party has no knowledge of the presumed “relationship.” The sitcom Friends spoofed the parasocial relationship when Joey played a character on a soap opera, Dr. Drake Remoray. Joey goes on a date with a beautiful woman, who believes that she is dating Drake, refusing to acknowledge that Drake is a fictional character portrayed by Joey (play within a play, anyone?). We’ll call this Parasocial Level 1.

A logical extension of this definition of parasocial relations is the concept of being friends with a fictional character. It takes the aforementioned definition into account, where the second party has no knowledge of the “friendship,” in this case because the second party doesn’t actually exist. In this case, if I thought Bart Simpson was my best friend and we hung every night around 7:30pm, I would be enguaging in this second type of parasocial relationship. We’ll call this Parasocial Level 2.

How does this all relate? Well, it’s my assertion that the “documentation generation” is moving in the direction of
Joey/Drake’s beautiful date. This is true in several ways: First, the “doc gens” are losing self identity in the name
of performance and acting, impairing their ability to function as healthy, balanced individuals, and maybe impairing their ability to recognize the difference between reality and “reality tv.” Second, doc gens put so much stock in their performances and those of their peers, that their friends are only constructed representations of themselves. Therefore, they are actually creating and relying upon friendships with scripted characters. Voila, an example of Parasocial Level 2.

Interesting implications for the future of American society… I hope it doesn’t become to severe a problem.

Note: It’s worth pointing out that yes, I do realize the irony in writing a blog post about this issue… READ MY BLOG AND THEN WE CAN PRETEND WE’RE FRIENDS!

Check out the full Newsweek article. It’s really an excellent article.

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