You might have seen this in the news lately and it’s really nothing new but FaceBook is under another attack where some group is phishing for passwords. You can read more about it here. When I say this is nothing new I mean that there is always something like this going on. Everyone always asks why anyone would do this but of course its money. I guess most people don’t realize that getting their hands on your FaceBook account might lead them to your bank account especially if you use the same password. There are a variety of other things that these types of attacks are generally after or in the case of computer viruses it’s typically to gain control of your computer.
What can you do about it?
Just play it safe. Don’t click on fishy looking links and never ever give your password to anyone.
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If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
Developers have tried a variety of different methods to not only increase usage of their application but also to encourage other people to join. Facebook and others suggest friends, you can find who you went to school with, or search by emails. LinkedIn uses a 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon approach to see who your friends’ friends are and Twitter uses the poison Kool-Aid approach by showing your cult followers. There’s a simple enough explanation as to why –ad revenues of course. But one can quickly see through this thin veil that it is. Now for most people social media isn’t really for making money. Instead it really is a way to stay in contact with friends or find friends you lost way back when. But for those of us trying to capitalize on the popularity of social media to increase traffic to our websites and blogs or just to increase our sphere of influence the number of followers or friends becomes important. Now don’t get me wrong, sheer numbers can be effective but probably not as effective as truly having a group of friends and acquaintances with whom you regularly engage in real conversation. But this is where so many get it wrong when it comes to social networking. They race to have the most friends and followers but quickly forget why these people were your friend to begin with. If you are not providing relevant information or at least something interesting to talk about then you are disengaging. You basically are weakening the structure of your SOI and you want a strong base not a weak one.
Look at two celebrity examples for a minute Ashton and Oprah. I could care less really about either of these people but there is a big difference in how they Twitter. Ashton really talks using Twitter. He talks about something relevant and it’s really him (or at least we think it’s him) talking. Oprah on the other hand just joined Twitter thanks to Ashton and she (or most likely her handlers) doesn’t get it. Look at this recent post over at Tech Crunch analyzing what Oprah has had to say since she joined Twitter. It’s not interesting. Its absolute junk. Sure she got a million people to follow her and probably got millions more to join Twitter but is she engaging her audience? Is she doing anything interesting? That’s a big fat no. If she actually joined in a conversation or even for a moment letpeople peek into her personal life she might be surprised at the number of followers who actually follow what she has to say!
This is all fine and dandy for celebrities but none of us are famous. We can’t have a one way conversation and make social networking work for us. It has to be a real conversation where we are talking to and engaging the people who follow us. If you dig through Facebook blindly each day trying to add hundreds of new people to be your friend they will never be your friend. They don’t even know you! They are just befriending you simply because it’s a mouse click. There is no energy expended. But you are wasting a lot of energy trying to make friends with people who could probably care less about you. Instead if you actually spent some time each day engaging in conversation you would be strengthening these relationships.
Still think it’s all about sheer numbers?
Ok enter from Twitter stage left Sockington the cat. Yes it’s a cat and it has more followers than any of us could imagine. It’s not a person. It’s probably not even a real cat and yet it has 500,000+ followers! Why? It just goes to show that following people on Twitter works exponentially. Once you break some imaginary barrier the numbers shoot through the roof. Now that’s great to have that many followers. I only have 60,000 people that even live in my city so that would be a big chunk of Wisconsin following me. But unless I could find some way of truly engaging all those people I might as well be a fake cat because it’s not going to get me more business and it’s not going to mean much other than maybe a story about me over at Tech Crunch.
If you can take anything away from the lesson of Sockington, Kutcher or Oprah it’s that of those 3 try to be like Ashton and at least provide something interesting to talk about. Don’t try to race to a million friends instead truly make some friends out there. You might find more meaning in one real friend versus a hundred so called friends.
As to why follower models don’t work? It’s simply plastic fantastic. (Fake)
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If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
If you are at all familiar with the concept of the long tail you can quickly see why blogging is such a powerful tool to drive traffic to your websites. People are searching for longer phrases on Google now more than ever and concentrated keywords completely fail when it comes to this. In fact with blogging you can almost throw out the concept of keyword research because the long tail is so much more effective. There is nothing to using the long tail, you just write naturally and be very descriptive rather than concise. It might not seem like an effective approach because after all the majority of people performing a real estate search use the phrase “your town real estate” or “your town homes for sale” But these words are so targeted by real estate websites that its simply impossible to get a blog post to rank well against these established sites. So that’s why not competing at all and going after niche markets is more effective. The same holds true with PPC advertising. So many people pay big bucks to go after the most highly competitive phrases thinking that will get more traffic. Instead you get a larger bill and maybe some additional traffic.
There was a great post here that shows how using the long tail in your PPC advertising is effective especially if you combine this with a well written landing page. Even a well written blog post could make the perfect landing page if you have a link to your website from the post. Catch their click, send them to a well designed blog post and hopefully they will click through to your website. It makes sense after all this is why landing pages are important; the person clicking on the link is expecting the link to follow through to the subject matter of what they clicked on. If these don’t match your bounce rate goes up (people leave).
Either way this once again proves the effectiveness of blogging especially when it comes to SEO. And just think a blog post won’t cost you a penny whereas a single click can cost you dollars!
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If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
I just read an interesting article about RSS feeds. If you don’t know what they are then you are too late to the party because they are dying a quick death thanks to Twitter and other similar applications. It used to be something that you desperately wanted people to subscribe to, after all if they liked what you wrote enough they might save it as a feed and then hopefully return to your site or blog or whatever it is that was feeding them information. But I can admit I never really liked RSS. While it was simple enough to use and convenient I guess I just preferred going to all the sites that I found interesting. To me it was like saving every site you stumble across as a favorite. Soon your favorites are cluttered and full and your actual favorites, the ones you return to on a regular basis are a tiny percentage of how many you actually have saved. Sure it’s nice to go through the list once in a while to see a site you might have forgotten about but how often do you find yourself doing this? I remember trying to desperately to save my favorites list from computer to computer because over the years I had found so many neat and obscure sites. But what I found interesting back then probably isn’t so interesting now, that is unless you still love all your base belong to us…
So I can see RSS dying. It just doesn’t have the feel of a Tweet. It doesn’t seem as fresh. It’s not as open. Well just read the article and see if you agree.
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If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
I believe yesterday Google rolled out a new feature that has a world of promise and yet seems so insignificant on the surface; Google Contacts. There has been this feature built into Gmail that lets you import your contacts from Outlook and well that’s about all it did. Now Google has decided to separate the two so that Contacts is its own entity.
This also has some other interesting social networking aspects or at least it will in the future. Your contact list will soon become your social circle as more and more people adopt Google services and applications. The goal here is of course total domination in everything we do and use on the internet which seems to be what Google always was going for. Evil plans aside it seems useful to me.
What else would be nice is a way to sync all your stuff together. Currently Google offers a way to sync your calendars between Outlook and Gmail but it also lets you two way sync your stuff between computers using Outlook which is what I use it for. I have been waiting for contacts sync for years because of Outlooks shortcomings in this area. Why on earth is it so hard to sync all your mail, contacts and calendars between two computers using outlook? (Let alone 3 computers in my situation!!!!) Well with the calendar sync I managed to kill a few birds but if they full integrate contact sync then I am almost set. But seriously Microsoft how freakin’ hard would it be to use an internet connection to sync this crap natively? Someday I won’t have 11,000 emails on my laptop because the ones I delete on my office PC will delete off my laptop. (Honestly that day may never come with how slow Microsoft is) But in my lifetime I would seriously like to see these 3 things seamlessly sync between computers. That’s the joy of using Gmail and Google products, while you need internet access (currently until Gears is more widespread), the applications act as a central location so any changes made there are made to the main account. How hard is that Microsoft?
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If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
Google has rolled out some new features for Gmail recently. I’m not sure if you have to be using their “labs” application in order to see these new features or if it’s a Gmail wide release. Sometimes they sort of beta test things for a while or a long while before they release it fully to the public and vice versa sometimes they release stuff to the public to beta test to all eternity like Gmail itself. ( DOH!!)
If you have something to say please leave a comment.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
There has been a lot of fuss about Google scanning every text known to mankind and trying to get them indexed. Good, bad or just plain ugly it doesn’t seem like there is going to be anything stopping Google from achieving its goals of indexing the world. (Yes I mean that literally)
In the meantime maybe we can take a look at its death rays for a moment errr I mean its scanner.
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If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
I don’t think I am ready for everyone in the world knowing where I am at any given moment. In fact I think that’s the last thing I would want. But everyone in the world knowing where they can get real estate services in Eau Claire Wisconsin is definitely something I want. So I guess location services such as Google Latitude might seem like the devil but might actually be something quite useful for getting your butt on the map so to speak. I keep telling people about this kind of stuff because I think somehow I can envision where the heck Google is going with all this stuff.
In the future (yes pull out your crystal balls) Google’s universal search will be truly universal and provide data from a million different sources. So if SEO is the game you like to play then getting your butt on all these different services is what you are going to have to do and do it quick. Not that time is running out but it’s like anything web related, the people who adopt it sooner will probably show up higher in results. It makes sense if you think about it after all you were there first; doesn’t that make your result more relevant? I think so and I think Google thinks so too. This is exactly how they treat seasoned domain names and your business location on Google maps and these other services probably won’t be much different.
So Google upped the ante when it comes to its Latitude service and now adds even more functionality. You can see it in action in my blog footer and you can see how to add it below.
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If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
It was only a matter of time before Facebook really started with SMS. I don’t know why there was a perception that somehow only Twitter could have this sort of functionality but really that’s short sighted. Of course Facebook can add this and of course they were going to. You might say they were late to the starting block but they certainly showed up for the race. In a way it could be the tortoise and the hair since Facebook has an enourmous lead on Twitter regardless of the Oprah effect.
Anyways Facebook is adding some SMS functions and it looks good. You can now send text messages as updates and also receive updates to your phone. I am sure that will be popular. If you combine that with “real time” searching Twitter may or may not end up in a world of hurt.
If you have something to say please leave a comment.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
A lot of people have made many comparisons to Twitter and Facebook but really the comparisons being made should be Friendfeed with everyone trying to copy what they do and trying to do it ASAP. Live searching is quickly becoming all the rave and everyone is trying to implement some variation of this. It’s simple really. Real time promises just that, real time. In this day and age seconds are like years and waiting for a slow clumsy search engine like Google to get around and index all the data, well simply put that *^#$ ain’t happenin’! People want to know what’s going on right this very moment whether it is info such as links sent from their friends or whatever it is they want it NOW. That’s why Twitter has become such a prevalent news source. Twitter is just quicker to the punch. It can deliver speed and some great quality in combination with pictures such as what Tweetpic delivers. Video? Twitter can do that!
That’s why it’s interesting to watch the big dogs, that is larger social networks try to incorporate some of these ideas. What might happen is that the more established networks, with even larger internet populations, sort of do an Amish shun on the likes of Twitter. Whether Facebook can actually knock out Twitter remains to be seen but when they do become closer in capabilities it very well might mean the death of someone or something.
If you have something to say please leave a comment.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
