Thunder Booms! Search and Social Favorites for August 5, 2011
Tips from Last Year's North Park Music Thing --Social Media & Music!
Trust in your internet service provider? Careful, they could be hijacking your search queries.
Confused about creating quality content? Duane Forrester drops some knowledge!
Looking for ways to jazz up your Facebook fan page? Check out custom tab options and get creative!
Perhaps the recent changes to Google Places really do help the user! Local Search expert Mike Blumenthal explains.
I found this little gem of a video yesterday when it was posted on San Diego Music Thing's Facebook page. Formerly known as North Park Music Thing, San Diego Music Thing is a music conference/music fest that takes place in late summer in the North Park area of San Diego. I was an attendee last year for it, and I remember going to this panel. Panelists included representatives from Epitaph Records, the Viper Room, Taylor Guitars, and Front Gate Tickets to name a few. They basically go over all of the ways that bands, recording artists, and saxophone enthusiasts can leverage different social media platforms to help with their fan outreach. I didn't even realize that they were filming this last year but I'm glad they did because there are alot of wonderful tips and suggestions here. Take the time to watch it. It'll be worth your while.
According to this article on NewScientist, internet service providers are hijacking search queries and directing certain brand names directly to the brand website for a fee. As an SEO and frequent searcher I find this absolutely outrageous (not to mention illegal). We work so hard to get our clients ranking, so finding that an ISP is just stealing potential search traffic for money makes me want to scream. I hope this practice ends soon, and the middle-men marketing companies that are creating the software to hijack the SERPs get prosecuted or at least shut-down.
It seems like almost every week my fellow account managers at Thunder are preaching the benefits of quality content to our clients. But really, when it comes down to it, WHAT is quality content? How do you create it? How do you measure quality? Well this post by Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager at Bing, does a great job breaking down what qualifies content as quality and steps on how to produce it. This post is a great read for not just business owners, but also search marketers, because it effectively details the characteristics of quality content in a way that can be understood by almost anyone. If you've got clients who just can't quite get the concept of quality content or you're a business owner who's trying to get up to speed, check out this article and let the quality content start flowing!
We've been working on lots of sweepstakes for our clients lately, and I've seen some pretty sweet welcome tabs on FB. However, this post gives some really cool ideas about different things you can do with custom tabs to make your message soar. Making it interactive, adding video, and remembering to include that arrow that encourages a "like" are some of the ideas covered, but check out the post for more details!
In light of the many accusations that the recent change to Google Places is G's attempt to mimic Yelp and push Google +, while also thwarting the influence of non-Google review sites, Mike Blumenthal makes the insightful observation that perhaps what's driving the changes is really "a conscious design effort to make Places more interactive, more current and more social and more transactional." Blumenthal makes a side comment at his own surprise in using "design" and "Google" in the same sentence, but he supports his observation with a slideshow of tens of shots of Places pages on both a typical computer screen and iPhone. In addition, for those of us who have forgotten the timeline of changes to Google Places, he's included a link to Optilocal's post that has a quick summary of the most recent change.
