Last week, a friend and client asked me to comment on the Search Engine Optimization Services being provided by a company that was pitching their wares to her company. The chart you see is that SEO company’s offering. I told her that this company was trying to rip her off.
Not a surprise, of course; SEO and Marketing Services are what we do at Answer Guy Central, and I’d rather you, my friend, and everyone else hire us than another SEO company. But take a look at that chart and I’ll bet you’ll see a few problems with the way this company was proposing to do my friend’s Search Engine Optimization work.
Here in The States, today is “Thanksgiving Eve”. It’s the day before a long holiday weekend. And many people are looking for a way to make that weekend just a little bit longer.
How about a Pot Luck Dinner at the office of a Lasek Eye Surgeon?
I received the above invitation by virtue of being on the mailing list of the Lasek Eye Surgeon Who Wants to Run a Non-Sexual Escort Service (you may remember that I turned down the opportunity to do this gentleman’s Search Engine Optimization earlier this year). And I gotta say: Bravo! This is the very definition of Long-Tail Marketing.
Almost two years ago, I told you that rather than bringing people closer together, social networking causes isolation and depression. Here at our little a-few-thousand-visitors-per-month outpost, that story attracts visitors, every day, even now (proving, again, that this research on the half-life of an Internet link is flawed).
If you can read the tiny second graphic above, you’ll see that the big three search engines rank that two-year-old piece pretty well for the phrases “social networking isolation” and “social networking depression“, despite it being the one and only time I’ve talked about the topic. That speaks, of course, to the way we do Search Engine Optimization at Answer Guy Central, and of course to the validity of our ideas about long-tail marketing.
Now here’s a new idea: Six Degrees of Separation? That’s so pre-social networking.
A new study shows that there aren’t six degrees of separation any longer. At least, there aren’t that many degrees on Facebook. At the world’s favorite social network, there are just 4.74 degrees separating a person chosen randomly from another random person.
If you read that article, you’ll see that there are some questions as to the methodology of the study, not the least of which is that it was conducted specifically on Facebook users. That’s called “using a self-selecting sample” and speaks to a point I’ve made several times here: statistics lie. But it also makes something clear: social networking in general and Facebook in particular are genuinely shrinking the world.
There’s good and bad in that. A genuinely smaller world is more likely to come up with solutions to problems like war and famine; the brighter the light shined on a problem, the better chance there is at solving it. But the bad side is that with so much information flying about between so many people and so much background noise as a result, it’s harder than ever to be heard—or found.
Do I need to say it again? Well, yes, sure I do, both because I want to be heard and because I want you to be:
Search Engine Optimization matters. Want to know how? Contact me, right now:
If you’ve never been to The Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York City, you’re missing something that can only be called “impressive”. Empty, this place is beautiful. Full of people, as it typically is even in the middle of the night (Apple keeps this store open 24 hours a day), it’s amazing. And loud. And a little intimidating.
And for the first time, I noticed last night, incredibly badly run. If Steve Jobs was still with us, he’d be appalled.
Last week, I received a connection request from someone I used to work with. This guy was a couple of levels above me during my stint at Verizon Communications, and frankly, we didn’t have a great relationship.
In fact, when I was offered a very big promotion elsewhere in the company, this guy went out of his way to squash it, effectively ending my short career at Big Red. Things have worked out just fine, but I’ve never thought very highly of this person.
And then last week, he asked to connect with me on LinkedIn. Call it what it is: I was shocked.
Once more, with gusto: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PRIVACY. Say it again: privacy, if there ever was such a thing, is dead. Facebook has killed it.
I’m not just picking on my least favorite social network. This morning, I logged on to Facebook and saw something I’d never seen before:
Yesterday, one of my Facebook friends read an article. At Yahoo! News. About Joe Paterno. And another read an article at the same place about the deals Wal-Mart will be offering on Black Friday.
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