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It’s fairly obvious that Google and other companies see a future in mobile advertising. I must confess for as big of a phone geek as I am, I still remain skeptical. But when Google starts selling a physical device directly, something it has never done before, you know they are heavily invested in it. They aren’t the only ones, as Apple just bought mobile advertiser, Quattro Wireless. As I noted last year, even Porsche had a big win with mobile advertising.

The spend is there, JPMorgan notes that mobile advertising spend is up $2.6 billion or 62% in 2009. That’s not a typo, billion with a B. So it’s pretty easy to see why Google wants to heavily invest in mobile phones, it’s the next big thing for a company that’s made its fortune on mobile advertising. How about it readers? Have you ever been persuaded by a mobile ad?

There are some really easy steps to improving search engine rankings that are often over looked. One of the big ones is actually putting keywords in your title. How often do you see a title that simply offers the brand name? Quite often! In fact, lets take the Pepsi challenge! Both Coke and Pepsi have their brand names as their homepage titles. However, Coke gets bonus points for using Cola because it can help them rank for more than their brand name. The simple truth is that Pepsi and Coke’s page titles could be anything they wanted to and they would still rank for their brand names. Why? Because the URL takes care of ranking for their brand name. As an added bonus, sites that link to Coke or Pepsi probably use the brand name as the anchor text. You will notice though, when you search for pop or soda neither Coke or Pepsi show up.

What does this have to do with toilet paper? Nothing and everything. Searching for ‘toilet paper’ brings up another one of those missed oppurtunites. There is one brand that ranks for the keyword toilet paper, Charmin. What’s in Charmin’s page title? You guessed it, toilet paper! Guess what, Charmin still ranks for ‘Charmin’ too. It’s good to protect your brand name, but if you’re looking to gain more traffic from search engines, consider placing the actual product or service in the title.

If you run a pay-per-click campaign you are probably very concerned with how much money you spend per click. It should be a goal to target to your audience instead of just putting in a few keywords and setting a budget. To help PPC managers achieve targeting most PPC programs allow for ‘negative keywords.’ That is, words that will not bring up your ad when searched for. Here is an example of why this should be done.

If you use Google reader you have seen the following style ads:

Served up by Google these ads are displayed based on the content of the blog post. It’s clear what is happening here. The PPC manager for Del Opticians is advertising on Google’s Content Network and probably trying to target the keyword ‘glasses.’ There is a slight problem here. The article talks about 3D glasses, not glasses to correct vision. From the consumer perspective, someone who is interested or search for 3D glasses probably isn’t interested in vision correcting glasses or contacts. Adding ‘3D’ as a negative keyword to their PPC campaign could help reduce costs without affecting conversion.

It’s about the conversation – not the number of friends or followers.

Social Media has become the buzz word of the day on the internet. Carrying websites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace and turning them to the glorious way for marketers to make money without spending money. It couldn’t be farther from the truth. For one, if you get everyone in your company to Twitter, you’re taking them away from their real jobs. To successfully work in Social Media you need to have a person who understands it and to continually monitoring and developing the plan.

Having a person dedicated to social media does not mean hiring a full time Twitter intern. Social Media is not simply creating Facebook profiles. Social Media is away for companies to open up dialog for consumers and to achieve granular details about the client like never before.

What really attracts people to Social Media is the fact that they can reach people they wouldn’t normally have access to. If you aren’t responding and actively engaging your customers through your social media initiatives then you’re paying someone a lot of money to screw around on the internet.
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This isn’t quite the minimalist’s mobile office, I could do without a few things but the goal was to travel light. Working full time, and being a student as well as keeping up with things on the go can require a lot of crap. Carrying a 15 inch laptop and a few text books around everyday gets old so I invested in the netbook phenomena.

The Netbook

I wanted to get something that offered a little but more build quality than some of the Acer/MSI machines that I saw at the local electronics store so I did some research and came up with the HP mini 2140. Like most netbooks it sports the 1.6ghz Atom processor and chipset. I ordered mine with 1gb of memory, the 160 HD, the HD Screen (1366×768) and 6-cell battery. This preconfigured model runs around $480 but your shipping and sales tax will probably add another $50 or so.

The screen is very bright and clear, and unlike some netbook screens where the resolution is 1024×600 or 1024×576, the high-res screen doesn’t cut back on any typical viewing problems. It is a glassy screen but it is also capable of being VERY bright so my outdoor useage hasn’t been incredibly hampered. While I like high-res screens some people might find the text to be too small. It does cut down to 800×600 without too much distortion if you find that 1366×768 is too much for you while still offering more horizontal resolution than it’s HP counterpart, the Mini 1000.
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I thought I was doing a good thing. I appeased the mighty Google god; I listened to Matt Cutts; I made W3C-compliant pages. But Google hates me for listening just as much as they would hate me if I disobeyed all the rules. Either way, what it amounts to is that I can’t try to make a great page or a horrible page.

While I’ve been away a long time, I have not been out of the loop — quite the contrary. I started a search marketing internship and have been learning quite a lot of information from my new bosses. One thing I have found out about the mysterious world of SEO is that I knew a lot more than I thought I did – but oh, do I have a lot to learn.

After diving into this position, eager to learn as much as I could one thing has become abundantly clear: I don’t get Google, and I think that’s their intention. For one thing, let’s start with a concept known as LinkJuice. I’m not sure where the term originates but every time I hear it I flash back to high school and hear Nelly’s “Pimp Juice.” Yeah, I both hate the term and laugh every time I hear it. LinkJuice basically is this weird value that Google and other search engines associate with links to and from other sites. If you have an incoming link from, say, Microsoft.com, the value is quite high and your search engine ranking supposedly improves. However, if you have a link from, say, buycheappills.com, there is no value coming in and it does nothing for you.

Where this becomes controversial is in the concept of paid links. Way back when SEO got started, bad SEOs, or “black hats,” tried to game the system and would exchange links for cash. Google realized this and quickly started to crack down on it. One of the ways this is combated is using “nofollow” which basically removes any of the aforementioned LinkJuice. So, to be a good guy, if you were given money for a link you were supposed to use “nofollow” so that a domain wouldn’t get any juice it tried to pay for. The idea is that it’s supposed to keep the Web honest.

Well great, but now you’re getting into some gray areas. Lisa Barone from Outspoken Media points out that if Apple were to send you a new Mac Book to blog about, that constitutes as a paid link. However, if Mom and Pop bakery is handing out free cupcakes and you tweet or blog about it, it isn’t a paid link. Obviously Mom and Pop don’t intend to get links (or at least for this argument they don’t), but they are giving you product just the same as Apple. So really what Google wants to go after is intent – but how do you measure intent? Moreover, at the Google I/O conference, Google handed out free G1s to attendees who went out and blogged about it or sold it on eBay. Isn’t the LinkJuice and publicity Google got from that paid? As far as I’ve read, there was no “please make every link ‘nofollow’” from Google.

As if to add further confusion about the way Google works, rumors have it that they are considering changing how they value “nofollow.” Currently, if you have three outgoing links on your Web page then each link gets 1/3 of the available LinkJuice. If you use “nofollow” on one, then the remaining two get 1/2 each, and so on. The fear and rumor is that Google is changing it so that no matter what you use “nofollow” on, the LinkJuice doesn’t redistribute. In other words, if you have three sites and one uses “no-follow,” then the two remaining sites would still get 1/3 each instead of getting 1/2. What’s the big deal? Well, if you’re going off the earlier example of paid vs. non-paid links, somebody is getting hosed.

If you go to mom and pop bakery, review their cupcakes and blog about it, they’ll be getting less of the normal share of LinkJuice and a portion of your LinkJuice goes into thin air. It effectively demerits the authority of your site. It’s confusing because it’s my understanding of “nofollow” that it was supposed to allow Webmasters to give the most applicable share to content generated sans fees or gain by the author, basically “honest content.”

The past few weeks of research and work combined with the few events that have or might take place have left me wondering exactly what the heck is the whole idea behind this game. It’s been said by Seth Godin that your content is your SEO, and that is certainly true. An SEO shouldn’t be trying to game Google and scam the system but Google does ask you to do a few things to provide clean honest content – and then ignores it and treats all SEOs like they are evil. Leading me to ask: What the Google?

There have been a lot of social media efforts I’ve seen latley that just don’t cut it. It’s a really obvious problem that gets neglected when social media outlets become buzz words on the evening news. Usually it starts out something like this:

Boss: Hey! I heard about this Tweety or Twitter or something like that on the news last night, are we on that?
Marketing Head: Ummm no.
Boss: Well we should be, get us an account ASAP!

First of all, before I get negative, it’s great that companies are trying to stay current with marketing trends. Ugh, I hate that word, trends. That’s really the wrong word for this. Marketing Fashion is a more appropriate term, or maybe marketing fads. If there is one thing to remember about the internet, it’s that it is constantly changing. While Twitter is vogue right now, the shelf life in indeterminate. We can sit and debate how long Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, etc. have to last or we can approach everything with the same question: How can we use this to leverage our company?

Are you ready for some internet marketing blasphemy? Some companies don’t and/or shouldn’t have Twitter. The reality of Twitter, and social media outlets is that it’s addictive. We might go out there as internet marketers to post a new ad, or to tweet about a cool new company product… but then you get sucked into the vortex of poking that attractive person you met at the networking event last week or retweeting that hilarious YouTube video. Which is a really quick way to get fired because internet marketers have a lot of legitimate work. So you think, I know… hire some college kid to do some tweeting for the company. Ok, great, but now you have someone else doing the exact same thing and wasting a whole lot of time and money.

If you can’t answer the question, how can we use this to leverage our company? Don’t do it! Better yet, look at ways you can actually use things to leverage for the company! Traditional marketing, or what I like to call “dumb marketing” like a dumb bomb is a lot of “drop from a plane and hope it hits its target.” Dumb Marketing is the same approach, the flashy ads, the billboards, the TV commercials, etc. Create a big enough presence and eventually that translates to sales. And look, it’s proven, it has worked for eons and that’s great. There’s a big problem with that, it’s costly and it the actual sales generated isn’t all that great considering how many people see an ad.

So, again, how can we use social media to leverage our company. If you’re a traditional marketer your probably think of this word as “incentive” but internet marketers call it engagement. You need to create incentive, or engagement with your social media efforts. If you don’t give your followers something to tweet about then fire the college intern you hired to tweet because you’re wasting time and money. Besides, interns are supposed to learn something and teaching someone how to twitter takes 30 seconds. As marketing differs between industries I will leave you with the same question: How can we use social media to leverage our company? Stop thinking about following the fashion and try to think about why social media is such a buzzword. I’ll give you two big hints, it’s the data and the interaction.

Time Warner just doesn’t get it. Recently, the cable and internet provider announced it’s tiered data plans. The base price on which bandwidth you want. For $15 you get a 1GB bandwidth. If stream more than 3 hours of video a month, you will quickly reach that limit. Ultimately, you will be paying $150 a month to get “unlimited” use of the internet. Ridiculous, right? You’re not alone, even the government is scratching its head.

Thankfully, the government is starting to take notice. New York Rep. Eric Massa is attacking Time Warner’s tiered data plan calling it ‘AIG-style Greed.’ Massa points out that they can’t justify this cascading plans on the grounds that it is needed to remain profitable, it shows in their SEC filings. To me there are only a few reasons in my mind to consider regulating an industry, and one of them is a monopoly. Time Warner’s business model is still profitable for them, and the decreasing cost in providing internet connections means that it is under no danger. As Wired points out, Time Warner’s costs are going down by 12% this year, and subscribers are up 10%. What this is, is pure unfettered greed on Time Warners part. These tactics are nothing short of stupid. It’s another example of how big media corporations fail on developing innovative solutions to a changing market.

If you’re thinking about switching internet service providers, more power to you. However, it might not be an option for a lot of consumers in out lying areas who only get high speed service through Time Warner. Even if you have the option think about what it means for business. If you stream video, you essentially pay for it with ad revenue. That is, ABC, NBC, CBS, etc are making money off of you by justifying higher price ads. This is not uncommon to how regular TV ads work. The more viewers of a show, the more money it is to buy an ad.

So what happens when people stop watching streaming video? They go back to cable, where Time Warner gets a better share of profits by being able to up-sell you on DVR’s and cable packages, not to mention make profit from the networks. So if you’re a network executive you should be really ticked off that Time Warner is going to start killing off your internet viewers. Whether or not you realize it, TV’s future is on the internet. Networks are able to control the entire channel, there’s no distribution costs to providers like Time Warner.

You can see where this is going. Time Warner can’t make a profit off streaming video as its business model is. So like print media it has decided to pass the cost to the consumer instead of trying to innovate to match the times. The difference is that given how needed the internet is, and the ubiquitous-ness of it, Time Warner knows it has the consumer by the short hairs.

This just echos everything we have seen from big business over at least the past decade. Companies need to understand that consumers control the market. It is no longer the case of “you buy what we make.” Give the consumer what they want! With social media, web analytics and the plethora of data available companies hsould have a much better idea of what will work than they ever have. Just in case they don’t get it, start with this simple rule: Pushing the cost to the consumer to make obscene profits doesn’t work! It might work in the short-term, but in the long-term you are doomed. If you don’t believe me ask: AIG, Chrysler, GM, OPEC, and about 75% of Wall Street. Truly innovative solutions are enormously successful. Capping bandwidth isn’t innovative, it’s an archaic reworking of the AOL-model of charging by the hour for internet use.

Read : Wired – Congressman Wants to Ban Download Caps

This is a repost of material I have written from other blogs, but I pass it along again to reach a new audience and pass along information

Ok, I’ll admit it. I’m not a professional photographer, but I’m going to blog like one one the internet. Or at least make an honest attempt. F-Stop, sometimes called relative aperture, adjusts your depth of field in a photograph. Your depth of field is what is in focus in your photograph. Let me explain a little more. You’re at a family gathering and they decide they want a portrait taken. You take a the photo of them against a wall. Both the wall is in focus and the family. There really isn’t alot of distance separating the family from the wall, the depth of the picture is relatively shallow. Now they want some pictures taken outside. You set up a shot of them in a field, behind them off in the distance is a line of trees. It’s about 1200 yards out or so. You take a picture and this time the family still comes out sharp, but the background is all fuzzy. Your depth of field between hasn’t been changed on the camera, and it’s still relatively short.

Part of what controls your depth of field is your f-stop. It’s an adjustment usually found on most new digital cameras. The camera that I am using, is a Canon Rebel XT. This camera is a digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex), it has interchangeable lens. The lens I am using has the one that comes with the kit for this camera. It is a 18-55mm lens, and has an f-stop of 3.5 to 5.6. F stop numbers tell you the ratio of the amount the aperture is open in comparison with the length of the lens. It’s semi-confusing to understand but bare with me. The larger the F-number, the smaller the opening in the aperture of your lens. Likewise, the smaller the number, the greater the opening.

Let me break out the visuals on this. I set my f-stop to 3.5 and took this picture.

See how the background is relatively fuzzy?
I took this picture at my max f-stop (5.6) and adjusted my shutter speed slightly, or the photo wold have come out too bright, more on that later.

See how the background is a little sharper? It’s really hard to see at this small of a photo, and the range of my lens. I zoomed in on the image and isolated a chunk of the fuzzy photo, or the 3.5 f-stop, in the sharper 5.6 f-stop photo.

Again, click on the image so that you can get a better idea. You see the difference? If you have a lens with a greater f-stop range, you can make the change even more dramatic. It makes for a more interesting photo in some cases. There is more than one way to adjust depth of field. Theres more than one way get a lot of effects, but at least this gives you a better idea of what’s what.

The Colonel has dropped the chicken and hit the pavement. KFC is paying for the repairs in exchange for a chalk stamping with the KFC logo and the phrase “re-freshed by KFC.” Now, I don’t put KFC and refreshing in the same sentence, but this ad campaign is pretty interesting.

The idea comes Cone, a Boston-based cause branding and corporate responsibility firm. The idea is to generate some goodwill among corporations in the current economic situation. Whatever it is, filling potholes is a good thing!

[Read] AdAge – Need a Pothole Filled in Your City? Call KFC.