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Will Scott Speaks on Google Places and Maps Optimization at Pubcon 2012

Your Google Place page and Maps location are flagship representations of your business, and often the first information potential customers will see. Our CEO Will Scott will contribute to a panel on optimizing these crucial pages at Pubcon 2012, and you can get a preview of the action below! Will has previously spoken at several Pubcons, and he’s honored to be included in the lineup again — be sure to check out the video after the jump.

Transcription (edited):

Arnie: Hi. I’m Arnie Kuenn, President of Vertical Measures. We’re a search, social and content marketing agency in Phoenix, Arizona and I’d like to introduce you to Will Scott. He’s the President of Search Influence in New Orleans. How are you doing today, Will?

Will: Doing great, Arnie. Thanks for having me.

Arnie: Super. So, I look forward to seeing you in Vegas. I think I only get to see you about once, maybe twice a year at different conferences and almost always at Pubcon. This year, you’re presenting on a panel called “Google Places and Maps Optimization”. I know that with what everything Google’s doing this year, it’s a big, fast-moving topic, and I wonder if maybe you could tell our viewers a little bit about what you’re going to cover and we’ll go from there.

Will: There’s going to be three of us on the panel. I’ve presented before a bunch of times with Mary Bowling. The third guy, whose name is escaping me right at this second, has done this panel that I’ve seen before at Pubcon. So, I think there’s going be some really good knowledge up on the panel.

What I want to focus mostly on is how you can start to integrate some of the social updates and what you can do to get your reviewer’s to get their shining faces to show up on your Google Plus Places page.

It’s funny, but recently in New Orleans, where Search Influence is located, we were contacted by a Google Places community manager. So, people don’t know this but Google Plus Places, they call themselves, are now deploying community managers the same way Yelp has been for the last couple of years.

So, of course, this being New Orleans, we brought her over and gave her a couple of drinks and tried to ply her for information. But, hopefully, I’ll have more from her by the time we actually get out to Pubcon.

Arnie: You had mentioned a tip that you might want to offer everybody who’s watching regarding their new Google Plus Places pages. That’s a tongue twister.

Will: Say it three times fast. Well, there is one critical thing – and this is something that we have just learned by experience. The critical thing is to get your reviewers to sign up for Google Plus. Because if your reviewers sign up for Google Plus, rather than just having anonymous reviewers out there, their faces show up much like the Facebook face box that you see on people’s websites.

Their faces will show up right there in your Google Plus Places page. The impact of having people’s faces there as opposed to just the little blue headed Google user can be pretty significant when you’re trying to get people to come into your business.

Arnie: Yeah. I suppose Google has a way in their algorithm, or it will soon, to be able to track anyone who has registered through Google Plus to know if they’re an authority or not.

Will: Yeah. You would think so. I mean, there’s a lot of discussion about the idea of author rank and whether or not Google knows that you’re an authoritative user. But I think as one starts interacting more and more with Google Plus, it’s going to have a big impact on the relative ranking of reviewers within that whole Google Plus local system.

Of course, just today, there was another announcement of Google buying a TripAdvisor-like company. So, now it’s not just going to be restaurant reviews. It’s going to be places and venues. So, you can see that Google is throwing a pretty big stake in the ground on this one.

Arnie: Yep, super. I actually have not seen that yet, today. But you know how it is. It all comes at you awfully fast.

Will: It’s a Monday. If you leave the twitters for a minute, they go by too fast.

Arnie: Right, exactly. Well, listen. That is all the time we have. I hope everybody tries to make it out to Las Vegas in October and the day suddenly escaped me. I think it’s the 15th through the 17th.

But, anyway, you can go to pubcon.com, and you’ll find the schedule for Las Vegas and look for Will. He always gives a great session and I want to thank you for your time, Will. I really appreciate it and we’ll see you in just a couple of months from the time we’re recording this.

Will: Arnie thanks so much for doing this with me. I really look forward to seeing you personally in Vegas.

Arnie: All right, thanks Will.

About Arnie Kuenn:
Arnie Kuenn is the president of Vertical Measures, a search, social & content marketing company helping their clients get more traffic, more leads, and more business. Arnie has held executive positions in the world of new technologies and marketing for more than 20 years. He is a frequent speaker and author of content marketing book Accelerate! Moving Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing available on Amazon. You can find Arnie on Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn

About PubCon:
Pubcon is the premier search and social media conference and expo and Will be taking place in Las Vegas from October 16^th -18^th, 2012. Pubcon Las Vegas 2012, supported by the industry’s leading businesses, speakers, exhibitors, and sponsors involved in social media, Internet marketing, search engines, and online advertising, Will offer a week-long look at the future of technology presented by many of the world’s top speakers. Check out conference updates on Twitter (@PubCon).

August 24, 2012
5 For Friday – Links, Stories, & Posts For Your Weekend

I’ve actually been working at Search Influence for almost 3 years now and in that time I have never done a Five for Friday. Supposedly they should be about search engine optimization “news stories, blogs and recommendations from across the web!” So I recalled anything I read this week that had even the vaguest connection to innertube marquetry and came up with what I am calling…

• Dogshaming Goes Social – Huffington Post

Finally someone has decided to make berating your dog into an enjoyable and public sport. Gone are the days of being upset over pilfered panties and tussled trash. Now we can regale the world with the bad habits of our best friends as we make witty captions and snap photos for strangers on Tumblr. I personally can’t wait until we start doing this with old people and toddlers – that is going to be SO FUNNY!

• FAKEGRIMLOCK. BECAUSE AWESOME! – Copyblogger

Do you like Dinobots? Do you like content marketing strategies? Then this is the article for you! In an undeniably hilarious look at the content marketing, FAKEGRIMLOCK points how “Me Grimlock no bozo! Me CONTENT KING!” and other insightful Transformer tidbits.

• Don’t Leave Your Child Alone with the Hamburglar – NY Times

Hey parents! McDonald’s is collecting your child’s email to advertise McGangbangs (LOOK IT UP) to them! That’s not completely true, but according to NY Times, some stay-at-home moms are pissed that some kid-friendly websites are encouraging pre-teens to give up their email addresses in-exchange for terrible Flash games. This breaks some act that no one without children really cares about, but my real question is where was these kids’ mammies at in the first place? Also, WHY do these children have email addresses?!

• My Whole Entire (Google+) Circle is Dangerous – SEOMoz

Turns out not only can Yelp reviewers ruin your dreams of financial success, the five people on Google+ can as well. In this (admittedly “ridiculous”) article, we learn how Google+ users can wreak havoc on your former Google Local reviews. This knowledge is “Most Helpful” indeed.

• Ain’t Nobody Got Time for Landing Pages – SEM Booty Blog

We were all taught as young SEOs that if you want to convert traffic, you create a focused landing page. It turns out having a website with good user experience, regardless of entrance source, can do the same thing. Who knew? The point you should take from this article is using a random SES San Fran attendee’s tweet gives every thing you blog about +∞ validity.

And so you have the first (and possibly last) Fantastic Five for Friday! Now get outta here, you’re bothering me.

August 24, 2012
Out of Site, Out of Mind? The Benefits of Remarketing Campaigns

In advertising, the Rule of Seven states that a potential consumer must see or hear your ad at least seven times before taking action and actually purchasing your product. While this rule is not set in stone, it establishes that you cannot simply engage your target market a single time and expect to stick in their minds. With the sheer volume of ads we see daily, people have adapted to an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality with products and brands. In order for you to obtain optimal results, the Rule of Seven asserts that your marketing campaign must include continual efforts towards staying in the forefront of people’s minds.

To best apply the Rule of Seven to Internet advertising, I recommend a remarketing campaign. Whether your goal is to drive sales, promote brand awareness, or increase the number of leads you receive (phone calls or forms filled out on your site), remarketing—if done correctly—offers an innovative way to convince those fair-weather consumers to return to your site.

According to Google, “Remarketing is a feature that lets you reach people who have previously visited your site and show them relevant ads when they visit other sites on the Google Display Network.” By implementing remarketing code on specific pages of your website, all visitors to these pages are given a specific cookie ID which is added to your remarketing lists. Once you receive 50 cookie’d users per a given page, you can stay in touch with these visitors by showing them ads across the Google Display Network, which includes any sites that run Google ads.

Remarketing most benefits Ecommerce retailers because advertisers can market individuals who may have gotten as far as adding products to their shopping cart before abandoning the sales funnel. Ecommerce sites can also direct special offers and promotions straight to their remarketing lists as well.

Keep in mind that remarketing campaigns are not meant to initiate sales, but they are fantastic for closing them. For the most effective campaign, advertisers should combine a display campaign dedicated to branding with a remarketing campaign. A strong display campaign will drive new traffic to your site based on their keyword searches. Once these individuals are introduced to your brand and added to your remarketing list, you will appear to them across the Display Network. Your ads will serve to remind your visitors that, at some point, they were interested in a product on your site, thus eventually leading them back to the site to complete the sale.
By analyzing your remarketing lists, you can better deconstruct the demographics of your target audience. These demographics can later be used for other marketing campaigns. Specifically for Internet marketing, demographic research can influence the style of ads, the placements for your display campaigns, and the keyword research you conduct. You can also attribute your demographic research to Facebook campaigns,

So now, even when your viewers are out of site, you can keep your brand on their minds!

August 23, 2012
Write it Like You Own It: Defining Online Content Authority

Better do what he says, honey. He's got a badge.

As a writer, one of the first and most integral choices you have to make before you put one single word onto the page is disarmingly simple, and yet deceivingly complex: what authority, if any, do I have?

The answer to this one simple question will define the tone of whatever it is you are writing. It doesn’t matter if you are delicately constructing a poem, building a larger narrative one matchstick at a time, or sitting down to crank out 250 words for a roofing company’s website as a freelancer, you have to know where you stand, especially if you are using content to build online authority.

Own Your Online Content

Are you the absolute authority and source of definitive knowledge on this subject? Are you satirizing something? Do you want to expose the faults in an argument? Are you lacing your content with subtle humor? Do you just have to tell the reader when this business opens and what services they provide in the most direct way possible?

All of these questions can be answered by determining where you, as the content creator, exist in relation to what you are producing. Sound simple? Well, there are a whole bunch of ways you can screw this up.

I’ve been writing online content for a few years now, and I can tell you one of the most fundamental ways to mess up website copy is to write it in the third person. That can confuse and otherwise turn off a potential customer pretty quickly, and it is difficult to create the kind of authoritative content you need when you don’t know where you as the author stand.

High Quality Content

So there’s been a big storm, and you wake up with a tree limb speared straight through the roof of your guest bedroom. You stand there, scratching your head, wondering how you are going to find a roofer that will come out and patch your roof before it starts raining again.

Suddenly, you remember something… the internet! You reach into the pocket of your Star Wars pajamas (I can’t be the only one to still wear these to bed every night, right?) grab your cell phone, tap the app that brings you to Google, and type in “24 hour roofer.”

The very first site on the list looks great. The name of the business is actually “24 Hour Roofer.” Perfect, right? So you click on the link, wait for it to load, because AT&T, and then when you finally get the site open, you are greeted with this:

“24 Hour Roofer is a great place for roofing. They can come help you right away. They have been doing this for a while now, and they can replace your roof quickly. You should call them.”

Admit it. You're jealous.

Now, it’s important to note that you aren’t looking at Yelp reviews. You are looking at the actual site. Who is telling you this? Is it someone who works there? If so, why are they not saying “we?” Is this some sort of testimonial? If so, who is testifying?

Why are people staring at me? Are they just jealous of my sweet PJ’s? What is going on? Ahhhhh!

See how this can quickly lead to an existential dilemma? You know what can prevent it? Good, clean copy written in an authoritative voice.

In other words, write it like you own it, even if you’ve never even heard of the business:

“Roof problems? Come to 24 Hour Roofing. With over 40 years of experience, we can patch, repair, or replace your roof, no matter how damaged or worn out it is. As a locally owned and operated business, you can trust us to be there when you need us. Call today!”

Problem solved! These guys sound awesome. Whoever wrote that content knows what I am looking for, and they are clearly telling me how to get it. That’s exactly what I needed! Now back inside! Froot Loops for everyone!

Tone Makes all the Difference

If you are writing something for yourself, your tone and sense of authority can come naturally, but it becomes much trickier if you are creating content as a freelancer who has never actually used the business and who really didn’t know it even existed half an hour ago.

Your job is to write like you own the place. A clear sense of ownership really comes through the writing and can create a sense of trust and reliability that may seem intangible but can really go a long way with a potential client.

Like anything else, this is an acquired skill. The more content you create that clearly lays out the who, what, where, why, and how in a direct way, the better you will be at making your eventual reader believe you are an authority on this topic, no matter what kind of “childish” pajamas you wear.

Have you ever had an experience with bad or poorly written content on a site that scared you away?

August 22, 2012
Twitter Medium Launch: The Next Big Social Network?

Last Tuesday, Twitter founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Obvious Co., unveiled a new web platform, Medium, a publishing tool where people can submit photos and text. But this ambitious new publishing tool is still a bit of mystery. Medium is still in its preview stage, and it’s unclear as to what will set it apart from all other web platforms.

The dynamic duo, Williams and Stone, collectively created Blogger in 1999 and then later the ever-popular Twitter in 2006. Social networks and the way people use them has evolved dramatically since the launch of the pair’s first web platform, Blogger. Williams and Stone have seen much room for improvement in the social networking/blogging world. Stone states in his blog, “We felt compelled to build a content network for the technology age we’re living in now, and we have a vision for what publishing should be.”

The two have used what they have learned over past 13 years in an attempt to create an “evolutionary leap” in the publishing world. Creating Medium “from scratch,” Obvious Corporation has taken on this ambitious project to better connect people to media as well as prompt people to become more creative with the content they are posting.

Now, what actually is Medium? What can it do?

This is where some of the mystery comes into play. Medium has been described as a cross between Pinterest and Reddit and even called a “Frankensteinish PinTumblReddit.” With Medium, people can share content under different categories that show up in visual grid much similar to Pinterest. Williams describes in his blog that Medium allows users to choose their level of involvement, publishing content to “collections;” people can click to indicate if they like something as well as give feedback. Over time, many users will add content to one collection creating an array of different people’s ideas and experiences.

Okay, so besides the way this new platform is organized, Medium sounds very similar to existing social networking sites. Is Medium really as innovative as Williams and Stone describe in their blog? It’s hard to say, because the platform is still in its beginning stages. Obvious Corp. has launched what they have built so far and seek to learn and make adjustments as they observe users, describing what was launched as only a “sliver of what it could be.” Currently, anyone with a Twitter account can log in and give feedback, but posting content is limited to a small number of people.

What are your thoughts on Medium? Have Williams and Stone successfully created the “evolutionary leap” they were attempting, or will this new publishing tool fall short of the founders’ expectations?

August 21, 2012
How To Set Up WordPress Social Metadata

We couldn’t be prouder to announce that our own Doug Thomas’s video has won the SEOMoz Youtube Contest! Social metadata, the hidden content that displays your content in a correct and attractive way on social media sites, is one of the most overlooked aspects of posting a blog or article, and this tutorial provides a concise and thorough explanation of how to utilize it. Metadata lets Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ know what title, description, and image to show in the preview on the site. To implement Facebook OpenGraph, Twitter Cards and Google+ Authorship, you now just need one <link> tag rather than the more complicated three-link monte from earlier. In this tutorial, we use built-in WordPress functions to edit the theme of your site to create a semi-automated, scalable way to correctly generate this metadata.

Which Would You Rather Your Sharers See?
When we set this up, we use two sections of WordPress to push the data to the blog post. For the Twitter Cards and Authorship, you use unused fields in your User Profile like AIM and URL to house the information. For OpenGraph, the data is either pulled from Custom Fields or the post itself. If you can’t see Custom Fields under your post, go to Screen Options at the top of the Edit Post screen and check Custom Fields. By using what’s already existing in WordPress instead of a plugin, you avoid bloat in your database, reduce the risk of plugin conflicts, and make your code portable to other WordPress sites without having to install anything new.

Here’s the video, which will show you the code to set this up and a cute ferret. Enjoy!

Can’t Read the Code?

 <meta property="og:site_name" content="<?php bloginfo('name');?>" /> <meta property="og:type" content="<?php if(is_single()) {echo 'article';} else {echo 'website';} ?>" /> <meta property="og:locale" content="en_US" /> <meta property="og:title" content="<?php $viral_title=get_post_meta($post->ID,'viral_title',true); if(!empty($viral_title)){echo $viral_title;} else{wp_title();} ?>" /> <meta property="og:description" content="<?php $viral_desc=get_post_meta($post->ID,'viral_desc',true); if(!empty($viral_desc)){echo $viral_desc;} else{while (have_posts()):the_post(); echo substr(strip_tags(get_the_content(),0,197));echo '...';endwhile;} ?>" /> <meta property="og:image" content="<?php $og_image=get_post_meta($post->ID,'og_image',true); if(!empty($og_image)){echo $og_image;} else{bloginfo('template_directory');echo '/og.jpg';} ?>" />  <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" /> <meta name="twitter:site" content="@terrafalsa" /> <meta name="twitter:creator" content="@<?php the_author_meta(aim,$posts[0]->post_author); ?>" />  <link rel="author" href="<?php the_author_meta(url,$posts[0]->post_author); ?>" />

August 21, 2012
5 For Friday – Links, Stories, & Posts For Your Weekend

We’re back with another 5 for Friday, a collection of the freshest and tastiest SEO news stories, blogs and recommendations from across the web!

Brace Yourself: The Next Penguin Update Will Be Big — SEO Round Table

Matt Cutts didn’t just hint at the Search Engine Strategies San Francisco conference, he outright warned “You don’t want the next Penguin update.” More importantly, he gave insight into how the black-and-white creatures update. Panda is now a regular and quiet update, more like a ranking factor than an “update,” while Penguin still has some iterations before it will settle into the same kind of rolling boil. All this means for your online marketing is to be aware of the ever-changing search engine rank and to weather storms with sharable and linkable content.

Saudi Arabia thinks .anything is .offensive — CNN

Saudi Arabia and other countries are objecting to a variety of the new TLDs released for sale by ICANN. While Saudi concerns center around prurient and religious topics, other countries such as Australia are running into existing laws that prohibit certain terms in advertising. The ICANN has a detailed process to handle these concerns, but the simplest solution for this issue is something that many liberal democracies and net privacy folks might balk at: nationalized domain and TLD blocking.

Consumer Watchdog asks the FTC to Support Google’s competitors by blocking Frommer’s acquisition — The Inquirer

A decades-old consumer advocacy nonprofit is lobbying the FTC to block Google’s acquisition of travel guide publisher Frommer’s, echoing a statement from the Google competitors’ group Fairsearch.org. Consumer Watchdog cites the recent Cookiegate, which ended in the largest FTC punishment to any company ($22.5 million) to Google, as an example that the company “has repeated [sic] demonstrated it does not honor its promises.” Consumer Watchdog had no comment on the great value to Google that a combination of Frommer’s and Zagat would have, saying “What’s important is that it’s blocked.”

Google Plus Ghost Town? — UMPF

PR and social media agency UMPF posted an infographic comparing Google+ shares per user to other social networks. Per 100 million users, Twitter reigns supreme with nearly 200 shares; followed by Facebook and LinkedIn before Google’s 6 shares per 100 million. Yet, anyone on these social networks might smell a rat: . Marketing Land’s post on the subject brings up a variety of issues with the studies, but the most striking is that 100 posts is hardly enough to judge this kind of interaction. Interesting too is that “likes” and “+1s” aren’t shares, while Twitter only has a “share” feature through retweets and simple posting.

Guys! Bing Has Human Raters Too! — Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land reports that Bing’s quality judges are not too far off from their counterparts at Google. These contracted workers use a rubric based on relevancy to search intent as the main way to evaluate search results. Bing’s judges also should take “freshness” into account, echoing Google’s QDF status on certain search phrases. While the substance isn’t particularly different than Google’s evaluations, the subtleties show what a business can do to ensure high evaluations in the major search engines.

Got a killer link from this week? Let us know in the comments!

August 17, 2012
One Link To Rule Them All: The Canonical URL and You

“I will take the Link,” [Frodo] said, “though I do not know the way.”

When the Internet was a wild frontier in the ’90s, URLs appeared to me magical glyphs that television advertisers and producers revealed only to the worthy. What secrets would be revealed if I, a ten year-old, borrowed my aunt’s computer to type in “trojan condoms” as the commercial on MTV requested? What hidden jokes would I learn if that same “net surf sesh” eventually took me to “http://comcentral.com/“, the URL appearing in the end credits of Dr. Katz?

Luckily, my youthful precociousness was maintained as I never visited the former, but for a time, the latter URL stuck out in my mind as an oddity. Where was the www in that URL? Did I need to type in the http:// portion? Shouldn’t their website be at http://www.comedycentral.com/ since it’s, you know, the channel’s name? Also, why the heck are two websites I’m visiting the same thing?

To this day, visiting http://comcentral.com/ will redirect you to the logical URL for their branding. In terms germane to our company, http://www.comedycentral.com/ is the canonical URL for Comedy Central, or the TRUE URL that Comedy Central wants you to access their site by.

Multiple benefits exist for canonizing a URL, especially in relation to Google’s Analytics and Webmaster Tools. A preferred domain can be set, and data will be formatted to represent the canonical URL. If an accessed subdomain on a site (For example, http://www.xyz.com) presents the exact same content as the domain alone (http://xyz.com/), but each URL exists on its own without redirects, it’s important to canonize one of the two by setting up 301 redirects.

In relation to the Google tools mentioned above, you might miss out on potential data related to traffic unless you set a preferred domain and ensure that it’s the exact URL served up to site visitors. If a Webmaster Tools account is setup for http://www.xyz.com/ but not http://xyz.com, incoming links for http://xyz.com/ will not be tracked in Webmaster Tools. This is because the www version is treated as a subdomain, and is therefore a different site in the same way that http://mail.google.com/ differs from http://www.google.com/. As the horse says above, setting a preferred domain in Webmaster Tools and setting up a 301 redirect will allow incoming links for either version of the site to appear.

Another problem averted by setting a canonical URL popped up in a task I received recently. Google Analytics has a neat “In-Page Analytics” feature that provides some interesting metrics on user behavior directly on your site. My task was to determine why this wasn’t working for the client. The error message provided basically asked me to verify that the tracking code was installed on the page, and I found that it was. Digging further, I found that setting the “Website URL” in Analytics to the proper canonical URL (which didn’t have the “www” in it as was set in Analytics) cleared up that issue, and we could see the compiled user data on the In-Page Analytics viewer.

In general, consistency in the presentation of a website is good practice, be it in a site’s graphical layout, or, as this blog post dances around, in sitewide URL structure. It’s commonly known, but setting your URLs up in a clean, uniformed fashion may result in a smile of good fortune from Old Man Google for your humble homestead in this cyber frontier.

August 16, 2012
When Did The Chicken Cross The Road? Chick-Fil-A, Facebook Foul Ups and Web 2.0

It’s January 1st, 1999.

The Euro is established. A month later, the U.S. Senate acquits Bill Clinton of impeachment charges. Then Star Wars Episode I, Napster, Columbine. And in an article entitled “Fragmented Future,” Darcy DiNucci states that, “The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear…” That was thirteen years ago, and I don’t remember anything called Web 2.0. What I do remember are static web browsers, a screeching dial up modem, fights with my sister, and AIM chat rooms — certainly not the Post-Internet proposed by DiNucci.

So what was she seeing that I wasn’t? When she said “The web we know now… is only an embryo of the Web to come,” did anybody stop to ask her what she meant?

Is the Internet of today even knit from the same quilt as that of 1999? Perhaps. It takes benchmarks to notice the change. Here was my wakeup call: Chick-Fil-A.

Blasted by liberal groups for being opposed to gay marriage, the conservative corporation now finds itself in hot water for allegedly creating a fake Facebook profile (of a teenage girl), then using it to defend the company’s actions and promote blatant falsehoods. The non-existent girl, Abby Farle, even quotes the Bible, ending her post with “…John 3:16,” and “derrr,” which is appropriate because nobody says “derrr” anymore.

The wakeup call is not that corporations lie: it’s how saddeningly fickle this whole story is. More concerning than the fact that Chick-fil-A, a quick-service chicken restaurant, is opposed to gay marriage, is the fact that we care that a quick-service chicken restaurant is opposed to gay marriage.

What causes a billion dollar corporation to resort to such childish techniques? To actually embody a child to plead their case? Why can’t you just be you, chicken company? Do fake people defend better than real people?

Even the article “Did Chick-fil-A Pretend to Be a Teenage Girl on Facebook?” published by Gizmodo.com that “broke” the story seems strangely suspect. The story’s screenshot of Chick-fil-A’s Facebook page depicts the conversation, where would-be Chick-Fil-A savior Abby Farle is exposed for being non-existent just two hours after telling one of the belligerents, Chris, to “check his info…” Yet the odd part is that whoever took the screenshot only has one friend on chat. Who has only one friend, right?

If social media has come to serve as the hammer and anvil of democracy (see Wikileaks, Tahrir Square, Syria) and if our own voices are to be the liberalizing agent, what’s to be done when a conservative voice, like Chick-Fil-A CEO S. Truett Cathy, starts chirping “We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit.”

To me, this is the high water mark of social media: when an asshole can’t be an asshole in peace.

When a four billion dollar (and growing) corporation cares about public opinion enough to create a fake consumer to defend the owner’s socio-religious beliefs, something is very, very wrong. It’s not Chick-Fil-A. It’s us.

Take 400 years of rabid capitalistic mentality, add a dash of recession-inspired fear, introduce social media and you’ve got the current “debacle.” If Web 1.0 took our bodies, 2.0 has edged toward our souls. Is this what Darcy DiNucci was talking about?

The unprecedented access and information Web 2.0 provides to marketers (via social media platforms) allows businesses endless opportunities, if they only knew how to take advantage. Don’t overestimate the importance of assenting voices on Facebook, as Chick-Fil-A has. It’s at least reassuring to know that in our world of expressive freedom, backfires do still exist; genuine goodwill is the strongest form of PR a company has (and it’s free, too!), and faking it just won’t cut it. Moreover, the astroturfing of social media platforms, when discovered, inevitably leads to enormous backlash.

So to the people who post pictures of all their meals on Facebook, I say, “Just eat it,” and to Chick-Fil-A, I say nothing.

(P.S. I just found out Gore Vidal is dead. Welcome to Web 2.0.)

August 14, 2012
5 for Fridays — Links, Stories, & Posts for Your Weekend

1. How to Get a Video to Rank on YouTube — SEOMoz

With a little help, your video can rank higher for competitive terms on YouTube. The team at SEOmoz went to the whiteboard to give us all a lesson on uploading more effective content on the web’s biggest video resource. Use this advice to increase your views and improve your campaign.

2. London 2012 – A Very Social Olympic Games — Media Bistro

The 2012 games might be remembered as the first truly social Olympics. Facebook and Twitter have hosted an unprecedented amount of social interaction about the events, the athletes, and the coverage. This SEO.com infographic takes a look at why 2012 became the year of the Socialympics.

3. Think Twice Before You Jump on the Guest Blogging Bandwagon — Blind 5-Year-Old

Getting links is not as easy as it used to be before the Penguin update. This has convinced some SEOs to turn to guest blogging when they want more exposure. The author of this post thinks you should avoid the temptation to trade your original ideas for a link and a temporary spotlight. See if you agree with his take on guest blogging.

4. Capturing Unrealized Revenue Through Keyword Order Analysis — Search Engine Watch

The author of this post ran an experiment comparing the performance of primary keyword phrases and reordered secondary phrases. Starting with the hypothesis that targeting some reordered combinations could uncover unrealized profits, the testing revealed some interesting insights that could help search engine marketers expand their campaigns.

5. Study: YP Delivers “Better Value” Than Google AdWords — Search Engine Land

A recent study found that advertisers enjoy a significantly lower “cost per call” when using YP.com versus Google AdWords. The extensive survey covered 62 businesses in 20 different categories across 18 US cities. Is heavy competition driving up prices in Google AdWords, or is this study just bunk?

August 10, 2012