TrueTwit Pre-Validate's Your Twitter Followers

If you're trying to do marketing on Twitter the "hard but right" way (i.e., actively engaging with and listening to followers instead of just link spamming), one of the most pain-in-the-but burdens you take on is deciding who is worth following back. There was a time early in Twitter's history when I used to auto-follow back, but as Twitter has gained in popularity and thus become a prime spambot target, I now make all follow decisions "by hand" as it were.

If you're getting dozens (or hundreds!) of follow requests a day, that becomes a burdensome--or perhaps near impossible--task. Enter TrueTwit (http://truetwit.com/truetwit/signUp/index). TrueTwit has created what amounts to a Captcha for Twitter. Once you've registered your Twitter account with TrueTwit (using Twitter's secure OAuth authorization), TrueTwit sends anyone who follows you an email asking them to reply to validate that they are a real person. You then receive email notifications from TrueTwit only for those followers who have completed the validation process. (After registering with TrueTwit, you should turn off the "email me when someone follows me" option in Twitter's notification settings.)

You'll still have to evaluate new followers on a case-by-case basis to see if they are worth following, but like a good front-office receptionist, TrueTwit gets rid of the riff-raff to make that task much more manageable.

Originally posted via Google Sidewiki in reference to: TrueTwit Sign Up (view on Google Sidewiki)

New Facebook feature a help to spreading your message...sort of

I wrote a couple of months ago about some elements of fail in Facebook's Pages feature from a marketing standpoint. A recent new feature at Facebook solves the main gripe in that post...sort of.

Facebook now allows users to "tag" other users or Pages by name in a wall post or status message. Similar to Twitter, the feature uses an @username nomenclature. A very nice addition is that once you enter @ and start typing a name, a dropdown appears suggesting all possible matches among your friends. Any post or status you tag will appear in the notifications of the friend or Page thus tagged. This is similar to the tagging already allowed in Facebook for pictures, videos, and Notes.

This goes some way toward addressing one of my major gripes with Facebook as a means of spreading your message and brand: if someone clicks "share" on something you posted, it shows up in their Wall and their friends' newsfeeds, but with no link or attribution back to the original. At least now you can encourage visitors to your page to provide a direct link, but they will still have to do this manually by typing in your @Pagename. You might want to include a line in your posts something like "If you share this, please add credit and link back to our Page by adding "@AcmeWidgets. Thanks!" (Of course, subbing your Page name for "AcmeWidgets."

I'll really sit up and pay attention the day that Facebook makes such linking automatic.

Business Blogger Beware

Bloggeris a great, easy to use site for creating a personal blog. However, if you are planning to build a blog for business purposes, it is probably not your best choice, even to start out on. I just learned that Google does not allow Blogger sites to 301 redirect. What this means is that if you are successful in building up good page rank and back links to your Blogger site, and then later decide to move it to another domain, you will lose all of the SEO "juice" you had built up on the Blogger site.

For this reason and others, we're planning to move http://virante.blogspot.com off of Blogger very soon, before we've put any more effort into building it up.
in reference to: Blogger: Dashboard (view on Google Sidewiki)

Google's Sidewiki: The Only Thing to Fear Is...Not Much?

Proving once again that it is the Santa Claus of the Internet, Google last week announced yet another free toy: Google Sidewiki. Sidewiki is an addition to the Google Toolbar (so far only for Firefox and Internet Explorer) that allows anyone to leave comments and links on any web page anywhere on the Internet. The comments appear in a left-hand slide out that can be opened and shut either from the toolbar or by a small handle icon that appears on pages when you have the toolbar active. This video shows it in action:

This morning Sean Carton of ClikZ ruminated over the possibilities and pitfalls of Sidewiki for businesses and marketers. On the fear side, Carton asserts that this is one more giant leap toward complete loss of control by marketers over their message. That has certainly been true for some time now; do something that pisses off consumers and it will be all over social media, blogs, forums, and product review sites. Sidewiki significantly ups the ante, however, in that now those comments can appear right on your own web site, and there is nothing you can do to stop or block them. (Actually, that's not completely true. One commentor on Carton's post said that he had successfully used an SSL certificate to block Sidewiki. This has some backfire potential, however, as a Sidewiki user visiting a site so blocked may have suspicions about what the site is trying to hide.)

Two things occur to me that are not brought up in Carton's post:

1. It is not yet clear how widespread Sidewiki usage will be. How many people will actually bother to install it (and have to take on the Google Toolbar if they don't already have it)? And among those who do install it, how many will form the habit of using it and checking it regularly? I'm a Google toy addict who installed Sidewiki the moment I heard about it, but even I forget about it most of the time I'm surfing.
2. Marketers who have already gotten over the fact that you can't hide anymore--and better yet have embraced the idea--should welcome whatever community does end up using Sidewiki with open arms, viewing this as one more channel for valuable listening and interaction. Google has put in place some safeguards to try to minimize spamming and abuse (comments can be voted up and down, and there is an easy link to report abuse), but it remains to be seen how effective they will be.

Finally, here's an example of a Sidewiki post I just did. Recently my family enjoyed a wonderful weekend on Bald Head Island off the coast of North Carolina. While there I capture a number of videos of the island's gorgeous sights with my iPhone and uploaded them to YouTube. I was able to embed one of these YouTube videos (of pelicans flying over the surf) as a Sidewiki at the home page of BaldHeadIsland.com, the web site of the island's prime vacation home developer. If you have Sidewiki installed, go to BaldHeadIsland.com and view my brief video.

In fact, I love Bald Head Island and its scenic beauty so much, I'll even share my video with you if you don't want to install Sidewiki. Here you go:

Google AdWords: Exact Isn't Always....Well...Exact

If you've been using Google's AdWords and/or Analytics products for any length of time, you must be aware that the numbers don't always add up. In fact, they don't add up at a sometimes alarming frequency. That is to say, the reported numbers either don't match up to what you know must be reality, or they are not consistent. Needless to say, this realization can be a little disconcerting, considering the amount and level of detail Google provides.

I ran across yet another curious example of this the other day. One of the features in the new AdWords interface about which I was most excited was the in-line "see search terms" button in the keywords tab of ad groups. The button pops up a quick report that promises to show you the most frequent search entries that actually resulted in displays of your ads for selected keyword(s) or the entire group. This information was available before, but only by going several keystrokes and screens away into a formal report. The ability to pop this information up while still in my keywords list--and even add any newly-discovered keywords right from the list--seemed to me revolutionary.

My thinking was that this listing would be most valuable in discovering exact match keywords I should be bidding on. For example, let's say I have a phrase match keyword "rugby shirts" that my keywords tab shows as performing at a low but reasonable CTR. The "see search terms" report reveals that this keyword has generated lots of impressions for all kinds of related phrases ("izod rugby shirts," "boy's rugby shirts" etc.). But most interestingly, it seems to reveal that the keyword "rugby shirts" as an exact match (i.e., the person searching entered the words "rugby shirts" and only those words) generates a hugely higher CTR than the average for the phrase keyword over all. It seems to be a no-brainer that I should create an exact match for that keyword, and bid it higher as it is more productive (in terms of CTR, but not actual click-quantity, of course).

This I've been doing for over a month now, but my new-found joy was tarnished a bit recently by a couple of discoveries. First, I noticed that in some cases, the newly-created exact match didn't perform anywhere near as well as might be predicted from the "see search terms" report. I chalked this up to the occasional anomaly, and kept in mind that "past performance does not guarantee future results." But then came the second blow. Yesterday I happened to run the "see search terms" report with one of my recently-created exact matches as the only selection, just out of curiosity. In the ad group keyword list, it showed 2 clicks with 16 impressions (a CTR of 12.50%). But when I went into the "see search terms" report, the exact match row for this keyword showed 2 clicks with 3 impressions, a CTR of 66.67%! Then in the standard "other search terms" row below that, it showed 0 clicks with 13 impressions. Now together those add up to the the 2/16 numbers shown in the ad group keyword list.

OK, but here's the question: Why would the report relegate a significant percentage of the impressions for the exact match to the "other search terms" row? There is no other search term for an exact match. I put that question to an AdWords rep in a chat, and he told me he'd need to talk to someone in "technical" and get back to me. Today he responded. Seems that the report is "unreliable" for exact matches. He assured me that all of the 16 impressions were legitimately for display of the exact match, yet could not explain why the search terms report dumps 13 of them into "other search terms."

This would all be academic, were it not for the discouraging implication: the "see search terms" report can't be relied upon to consistently point out high-performing exact matches. The CTR it reports for exact matches is often (always?) going to be inflated, because a significant number of the impressions have been inexplicably peeled off into the "other search terms" row. I'm still going to use the tool for exact match discovery (many of the ones I have tried have performed very well, if not up to the level of the report), but with a much more jaundiced eye.

The more important--and jarring--lesson is that Google's reports and stats probably have far more squirmy-wormy room in them than those of us who depend upon them to do our jobs well would like to believe.

In Which I Go Negative on AdWords (in a Good Way)

(Reading hint: If you're already familiar with the value of negative keywords in PPC advertising, skip to my last paragraph for my new suggestion.)
Your mother and your favorite motivational coach will both tell you: negativity is a bad thing. However, when it comes to pay-per-click advertising, going negative can be a very good thing.

I'm speaking, of course, of so-called "negative keywords," keywords that you don't want your pay-per-click ad to show for. Negative keywords are perhaps one of the most overlooked--and yet most useful--ways of improving the performance of your ad campaigns. Why would you not want your ad to show? Isn't any exposure good exposure?

In the "old days," maximizing exposure was certainly the highest goal. When you're advertising in print or broadcast media (TV, radio), you're throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping some will stick. You can't micro-target your audience in those media, so your best hope is to expose your message as many times as possible, counting on the likelihood that some of those times potential customers will see it.

But one of the great advantages search-based advertising gives us (arguably its greatest advantage) is the micro-targeting that older forms could not offer. With finely-tuned keywords and ad text, an advertiser can have real hope to get his message in front of actual potential customers nearly each and every time it shows. Conversely, a PPC advertiser will want to have his/her ad not show to potential clickers she/he doesn't want or need.

This is where negative keywords come into play. Say that you are marketing iPhone apps, but all the apps you're marketing are pay apps. You should include the negative keyword "-free" in your ad campaigns because it is highly unlikely that anyone actively searching for "free iPhone apps" will convert on your pay-only app site.

Now here's my suggestion to the folks at Google AdWords: Create a report in the new AdWords interface that displays the potential top negative keywords for any ad group. This shouldn't be hard to do. The new interface already has an awesome report that displays the top actual search phrases that triggered a group's keywords (very useful for discovering valuable phrase and exact matches you should be targeting). The only bad thing about that report is that it only displays phrases that actually resulted in clicks. Now that can still be a good source of potential negatives. But what would also be useful to know are the phrases that are generating lots of impressions for a keyword but no clicks. Those are CTR and Quality Score killers. So basically, the report I'm proposing would display the phrases that generated the most impressions with zero clicks, in descending order of impressions. That seems to me like a gold mine for some very positive negatives.