No more Bing headlines, I swear! (at lest until Microsoft does something stupid again—so likely next week!)
This week we have a new GA site design, the geometry of social media, twitter user statistics, tyhe FTC monitoring blogs, and of course Firefox 3.5rc2.
Internet Marketing and SEO
- Starting off this week, Twisted Image observes that half of your twitter efforts are wasted, but the problem is they can’t say which half. Actually, the statistics noted seem misleading. If 52% of people on Twitter have no followers, then they aren’t your audience. There seems to be this push to count overall numbers in social media, which makes about as much sense as counting every registered voter—including the 52,000 Micky Mouses, or the Donald Ducks, or what have you. I also love their comment that “70% of the people on Twitter won’t tell you who they are, where they are located or how to connect to them.” Noooooooooo… not quite. 70% of people don’t list it became a lot of people simply don’t have homepages. Anyways, you can also get the original report here
- Next we have a blog that is new to the roundup: Indirect Manipulation. They have a somewhat college essay like post on the geometry of social media. Its a good post, but I simply can not forgive their use of em dashes with spaces around them.
- Adage again this week, this time talking about their adventures at Blog Potomac and how Twitter and Facebook are ultimately virtual ballrooms. What caught me though was their second paragraph, and the comment that we need to “top obsessing on what comes after Twitter and focus instead on how best to connect to, communicate with and relate to our clients, colleagues and consumers”.Exactly.
As soon as we get caught up in trying to be on the break of some emerging wave we forget that, well, social media marketing (and marketing itself) isn’t surfing. As long as we’re looking at waves instead of the sea of people, we’re missing why we’re here. Missing the water for the waves, perhaps?
Technology
- I read on Macworld this morning that Firefox 3.5rc2 has been released. Make sure to grab it here
Web Analytics
- If you haven’t heard, GA has gotten a site redesigna site redesign.
- Google has also demonstrated how to import your Google analytics goals into adwords.
Web Usability
- Lets face it: eye tracking is neat. Here are a bunch of findings from The Poynter Institutes EyetrackIII study: The Best of Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes. I’m not sure how directly applicable a lot of this is (since people tend to look at a lot of stuff subconsciously) but its still pretty cool.
Miscellaneous links of the week:
- You’ve probably read this elsewhere, but apparently there are more HD-DVD players out there than BlueRay. Odd for the “loser” of the HD Format wars. Then again, its not like there can actually be a winner in the HD format wars…
- Yahoo’s reporting that the FTC is planning to monitor blogs for claims and payments. Wont anyone think of the poor poor affiliate marketers?
