I’ve always thought that judging a person’s ability to be successful in Social media by their Klout score was misleading at best. There are a lot of different perspectives to evaluate this. The crux of the issue is what is that Klout score tied to. You could potentially have one candidate who has developed social media strategies for Fortune 500 companies, and generated millions of dollars in revenue that has the same Klout score as the candidate who has spent the last few months tweeting from their parents’ basement.

“Well the resume would make it obvious that Candidate A is the better choice.”

So why even look at a Klout score? Would you say, sure maybe Candidate A is awesome but they’re too pricey, so I’m going to go with basement candidate to save some coin. Absolutely not. The very idea is insane.

What Does Klout Score Even Measure?

Network Influence: This measures how much you interact with your “audience” – this apparently takes into account, Twitter mentions, Twitter retweets, Facebook likes, Facebook comments and LinkedIn recommendations. So, I get more or the same points for carrying on pointless conversations and sharing viral content than the people that create it? Again, how does this demonstrate my ability to achieve business goals by keeping up my conversations with random people?

Amplification Probability: Could there be something easier to game? I have several Twitter accounts for legitimate reasons, my personal account, blogs etc. I can easily reach out and get every Tweet, retweeted at least 5 times… every single time.

Quite simply, if I see a resume that brags about a Klout score all that tells me is that person knows how to abuse a system.

Only one case for having a high Klout score was put in front of me – gaining potential customers. If you’re a social media consultant, potential clients who don’t understand social media, but know they need it will be looking for any clue to evaluate hiring someone to do something they don’t know.

My advice to those people – is look for consultants who drive a real number, beyond Klout score and even beyond driving follower count. Look for consultants who drive business goals, like they increased social media traffic and sales to clients’ estores, or increases leads, etc. The downside to that is that you have to take their word for it – but at least it proves they understand business strategy which seperates them from the barista-turned-social-media-guru types.

While you can equate Klout score as a “Social Media Grade” it’s a moot point if you don’t understand the curriculum. I can claim to get an A – but it doesn’t tell you whether I got an A in 3rd grade PE or in Advanced Physics at MIT.

Google is testing a look for their search engine results page that includes not only a new layout but also how it displays snippet and url information.

Click to view fullsize

What are you noticing?

*Update* I emailed this to Barry Schwartz over at Rusty Brick, and it turns out that Google announced this on their blog yesterday afternoon. We’re still seeing variations so this appears to be rolling out to some users, and based on feedback Google will decide which things stay and go. I for one, don’t care for the URL over the description – but thats just me.

I gave a talk about SEO for WordPress at WordCamp Columbus earlier today. I had a blast and learned a great deal about other topics in WordPress as well.

The goal of this talk was to help the great content creators that use the WordPress platform to understand the basics of SEO. I covered where to put your keywords, how to find the right keywords to talk about and some of the great plug-ins to use for SEO.

In the Q&A, we covered a few advanced topics, like Socials impact on PageRank and what to do when content theives steal your content. Well, if your a small site like me, the best option you have to start with is trying to contact the content thieves. I promosed the audience a few links – one, file a DMCA complaint with Google. Let’s be honest though, it might be hard to get Google to respond to your small blog. So there are some things you can do to prevent it, like blocking known site scrapper bots. But you can also try to beat them at their own game – try optimizing a page on your site for their name or brand so that when people search for them, they see they’re sleazy. Don’t take down that page until they remove your content from their site.

If you want to know what other SEO’s are talking about, there’s also the Webmaster World Google Forums.

Here’s a slide show of my presentation. Thanks for all those who attended.

Actually, this is a way to really track anything but for applications sake I’d like to chose something you can’t get without some customization.

Step 1: Read SEOmoz’s Steps to Setting up Social Media Segmentation in Google Analytics. Yep, that SEOmoz the one that I still own you guys a part 2 and 3 of SEOmoz SEO Tools.

Step 2: Google’s URL Builder allows you to pass refferer data. So set the refferer in the tool like show below:

Step 3: MEASURE!

Ok, so you can’t track open rates directly. But now you can segment your visitors to find out how well your email campaigns are after they get to the site.

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?

T-Mobile G1

The Weather Channel: Waiting for summer is brutal. The Weather Channel app lets you check weather in multiple locations so, since it’s 30 degrees and snowing here, I can at least pretend I’m in Hawaii. The application also loads radar maps so you can prepare for the snow and rain. A frequent worry if you’re in Ohio this time of year.

SnapPhoto: The G1 camera is…. horrid. If it isn’t a bright sunny day, it usually isn’t worth trying to take a picture, until SnapPhoto. SnapPhoto offers a plethora of customization and filters. The biggest helper for non-fuzzy photo taking is the stabilization feature. It uses the G1′s accelerometer to judge when the most stable time to take the picture is.

GPS Status: Nothings more frustrating than watching the GPS satellite icon blink… and blink… and blink. THe GPS Status program shows you how many satellites you’re connected to, the speed you’re moving, latitude and longitude and more. Quite a handy application.

Shop Savvy: We’ve all been there, tempted to buy this or that but wondering if you could get it somewhere else cheaper. Shop Savvy lets you scan items using the camera and bar code, searches local stores and the web for the product and even gives you reviews. Never over pay again. The only catch is that most smaller products aren’t really in there.

There’s a few reasons why you want people to follow you on Twitter. The first and most vain reason is that it gives you the impression people care about you. That may or may not be true, but there are genuinely valid reasons. Among them is increasing brand awareness, either the company you work for or the “you” brand. Sometimes it can be tricky to get people to follow you but there are some things that you can do to increase the odds.

1. Follow those who follow you. Nobody likes to give and not receive. If someone takes the time to follow you, follow them back. For the simple reason that it increase the chance they will stick with you and not drop you a few days later.

2. Follow Others With a Larger Following. There’s a really quick way to gain at least 5 followers in one day. On Twitter, go to Find People, then Suggested Users and follow all of those people. You don’t have to keep following these people, but you will be surprised how many people you might gain.

3. Post often on a wide range of topics. I did a little experiment the other day and posted at least every 15-30 minutes for 6 hours. This combined with No. 2 netted me 20 extra followers in 1 day. Remember though, quality counts. Sharing links, quotes, and videos are all better than “just refreshing my Twitter feed because I’m bored.” Although shaking things up a bit good, nobody wants to know boring details.

4. Email/Facebook/LinkedIn/Blog etc. Adding your twitter feed to your email signature, integrating it with your Facebook status or profile and LinkedIn profile are all ways of exposing your feed to new viewers. Integrating your blog to update your Twitter status keeps new (and possibly original) content of your

5. Comment, ReTweet, Reply. Every time I get a reply from Guy Kawasaki I swear at least one other person follows me. The catch is, to get Guy to reply, I have to comment on something he does. It helps to actually mean what you say, if it’s obvious you’re just trolling the waters of someone else’s twit success then they probably won’t reply. Don’t forget, the reason these people are followed is because they have something of value to give and provide interesting content. You should provide value if you expect people you don’t know to follow you.

For as long as I can remember I was told to design for 800×600 resolution monitors. As time went on it generally seemed to move up to 1024×768. Now two things have come a long that could make change back to good old 800×600: Netbooks and Smartphones. Smartphones have come along way, now with phones like the Apple iPhone and T-Mobile G1 there is full Internet browsing but with smaller resolutions than even 800×600. Netbooks have been extremely popular lately but also focus on small resolutions like 1024×600. With screens sticking around the 9-10″ range they aren’t exactly easy reading. The key point with both these devices is that they are supposed to be mobile. Why is that a big point? Because of navigation. Users don’t want to have to pan significantly to have to read even a small amount of text. Although it is a lot easier with touchscreen devices, trackpad navigation has never been ergonomic. It’s just clumsy.

Fine, you think, we have mobile sites that fit this problem. You’d be right, but there is a catch to that as well. Consider the rapid development of both netbooks and smartphones. Where will these devices been in 6 months? A year? It’s not inconceivable that both will see a moderate gain in resolution putting them much closer to their larger counterparts. Which begs the question, with a line so blurred, why maintain two sites? Start shrinking larger web pages a bit and just maintain one. In other words, go back to 800×600.

As I have pointed out before, one of the best things about marketing on the internet is the ability to watch the results of ads and to see what is working and what isn’t. However, as Andy Atherton at Advertising Age has pointed out, that’s really not the big selling point anymore. It’s not very surprising that the biggest selling point to market on the web is that it reaches the most customers. Yet companies still spend 95% of branding money in offline channels. It seems really odd that companies fail to act on web advertising with more capital. Now, there are those that notice it. Certainly, if you noticed CNN or the NY Times homepage this Monday were covered with a banner ad at the top half for Apple, and we have discussed how Porsche capitalized on mobile advertising.

As Atherton notes, the internet advertising industry has grown faster than any other medium before it. It still has ways to go. Is it the uncharted territory of high dollar web campaigns that have companies sticking to traditional but declining mediums like radio and print? Possibly, but I believe that is also that the people with the know how and chutzpah aren’t out there yet. In a medium that is just barley 15 years old it means that at most, online marketers have probably a decade of experience under their belts. Which might seem like a lot but, given how fast the industry and medium has developed it really isn’t.

Online marketers are continually struggling to find out what works because they have so many options. We now know pop-up ads are a quick way to irritate the customer, but how long did it take to find out something thats so obvious? It isn’t like TV had been, your option was a commercial or sponsor a show, the end. Banner ads, text ads, flash ads, viral video, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. The list can go on, and just because it works for company A, doesn’t mean it will work for Company B.

Online marketers are now faced with the largest demographic of any medium, and they don’t know how to handle it. You are now starting to see colleges offering degrees in eMarketing and eCommerce and even still these degrees can change frequently. You will start to see companies advertise online more but not because they are figureing it out, but because print and radio and to a lesser extent TV aren’t working as well as they should.

Advertising Age: Digital Marketing: Is it time to forget Measurement?

After having my trusty Blackberry 8830 for two years, the trusty-ness was starting to deteriorate and I started looking to upgrade. Let me just preface this by saying that I am well aware that comparing a two year old device to a brand new device isn’t entirely fair. On the other hand, Android is a new operating system so it isn’t as polished as the Blackberry OS, and for the most part the Blackberry operating system hasn’t changed much in two years to begin with.

T-Mobile G1 and Verizon Blackberry 8830

Hardware

Blackberry 8830 and T-Mobile G1

The Blackberry 8830 taken from the T-Mobile G1

T-Mobile G1 Keyboard

Screen
Obviously the G1 wins this hands down. A physically larger screen, more resolution and it’s a touch screen. To be fair, the 8830 Screen isn’t bad. It’s certainly up to the task for the device. The G1′s screen is 480×320, or iPhone size, but it is physically a bit smaller. The Blackberry sports 320×240 which is quickly becoming sub-par for Smartphones.

T-Mobile G1 Screen shopping the Android Market

Android fails miserably at copy-and-paste. It’s really a half baked joke. You can only copy and paste from certain fields, but if you want to copy and paste from an email forget it. It’s particularly aggravating if you’re trying to add a 64 character WPA key for a network in. Because there is no computer interface you have to manually enter it, and if you get it wrong you go back to start. It’s a painful process. However, that is really the only aggravating aspect I found. The interface is snappy and responsive the drop-down “notification” bar links you to incoming messages and alerts so you don’t have to hunt for the correct icon like you do on the Blackberry.

T-Mobile G1

Both the G1 and the 8830 have voice dialing. The G1′s voice dialing is just as bad as it’s copy-and-paste, while the 8830′s has been dead on. It is really odd because I recently got updated to the RC33 firmware which includes voice search for Google which works excellently.

Battery
The 8830 is the clear winner here. Lasting the better part of a 3 days even with the original battery it trumps the G1. When I first received the G1 I killed the battery in 6 hours, but the battery life has continued to grow. So the jury is still out on what lasts longer. The 8830 has a 700mAh, while the G1 is at 1150 mah. THe hope among the Android community is that further firmware updates (IE “Cupcake”) will increase battery life. Right now, average use gets me the course of the waking day, ~6am to midnight. While I have enough to get me through the morning, throwing it on the charger at night is easier than remembering the charger for work.

T-Mobile G1