Archive for May, 2009
Nice to meet you Chandler Bing ‘BING!’, Great apartment Chandler Bing ‘BING!’
It seems like every time he we talk he wants to say my name, so that when he gets to my last name he can exaggerate the bing. BING!” - Chandler Bing on Friends
It’s not like Microsoft didn’t know what was coming. Choosing a name like Bing for their new search engine was bound to attract all sorts of reaction. It’s a source of curiosity and quickly became fodder for jokes and references.
The first thing that came to my mind is Chandler Bing, arguably one of the most charming yet sarcastic characters in US sitcom history. Played by Matthew Perry, Chandler Bing was one of the six Friends on the hit TV show that helped define Thursday nights as a “Must See TV” night. On the show, both his first and last names were the sources of many a tease, but he took it all in stride, something Microsoft appears to be doing as well.
Another famous Bing is a crooner and classic movie star who went by the last name Crosby. Most famous for his hit musical White Christmas, Crosby’s smooth vocals grace our ears every December. Crosby was a true triple threat. He could sing, dance, and act with the best of them. Microsoft is taking the multi-faceted approach as well, by tackling various niches from travel to shopping to health.
Then there are the plays on the word Bing as well as colloquialisms and acronyms. Ba da bing ba da boom is a phrase that, according to Urban Dictionary, means something that is done quickly and easily. “Bing It On” is a take on the phrase “Bring It On,” while many speculated that Bing stood for “Boy, It’s Not Google.”
When I asked Whitney Burk of the Bing Team why the name was chosen, she said the word “sounded like the moment of discovery.” But Bing is more than a sound. Burk said the word is simple, easy to remember and globally appropriate.
Oh yeah, and Burk said that Bing does NOT stand for “Boy It’s Not Google.” It’s not an acronym.
The ultimate question when it comes to branding and naming is, “Does it pass the verb test?” Xerox, FedEx, Google and Twitter have all seen their names turned into verbs. “Can you Xerox this for me?” and “I need to FedEx the gift in time for Christmas” are phrases you’ve probably heard before.
Will we now hear people say things like “I Binged chocolate chip cookies and found a great recipe” or “I’m going to Bing his name and see what comes up?”
I’m not so sure. It’s not that a brand has to have a name that turns into a verb. You don’t put on your running shoes and say, “I’m going Nike-ing.” But when it comes to search, people have come to expect it. You hear it when people talk about using Google, even in the movies or on TV.
What happens with the Bing brand remains to be seen. The search engine launches to the public next week and after that, much of it is out of Microsoft’s hands. Then, the people will decide if Bing is set to join Chandler, Crosby and the colloquialisms as one of the most famous Bings in history.
Microsoft Teams Up with Tech Partners for Social Networking Enterprise Solution
Microsoft has teamed up with Telligent and speakTECH to form the Social Enterprise Alliance. Via the Alliance comes an enterprise social networking solution for manufacturing and consumer goods sectors companies.
The Social Enterprise Solution is designed to be a robust solution, integrated with a company’s site instead of than simply copying and pasting code from Google’s Friend Connect or Facebook Connect (which leaves a site co-branded with Google or Facebook).
“The Social Enterprise Alliance with Telligent and speakTECH demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to recognizing partners that collaborate to offer a higher level of solutions and services offerings that are more relevant to customer needs,” said Greg Urquhart, general manager, U.S. ISV and National System Integrators, U.S. Partners Group at Microsoft. “By integrating Telligent’s Community Server platform with speakTECH’s integration and services expertise — all of which leverage the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server platform — companies have a better solution to connect with their customers, partners, suppliers and investors.”
Ultimately, the Social Enterprise Solution is designed to define and develop communities based around a company.
“Manufacturing and consumer goods companies have a unique opportunity to put the power of social computing to work across all aspects of their business, improving engagement and collaboration of employees, partners, distributors and customers,” said Rob Howard, founder and CTO of Telligent. “Holistic social computing solutions enable the agile and innovative enterprise.”
As social media continues to grow at a rapid-fire pace, a deep integration of social networking technologies is becoming a necessity for many brands.
“Companies are finding the return on investment for social media campaigns to be aggressively outpacing traditional marketing strategies,” said Aaron Sloman, CEO of speakTECH. “It’s driving a transformation where traditional marketing departments need to re-tool as interactive marketing agencies.”
7 Reasons Why You Might Not Be Making Money As An SEO
Posted by JoelJonathan
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
I feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony because I just don’t even know where to start with this one. Let’s just go for broke and see what happens:
- You Can’t Manage People – Even if you think you can “out-SEO” Rand, Aaron Wall, and Wikipedia to boot while riding a scooter down a hill with one brain tied behind your back as you make fun of Matt Cutts’ momma to his face, then guess what? You still need some skill managing people if you ever want to scale your income up dramatically. After all, even multi-millionaire, 1 hour a day worker Markus Friend pays people to do all of the tedious tasks that he needs done for his mega popular and mega profitable dating website.
- You Aren’t Organized – You can only let your list of link partners’ contact info that you should have kept up to date go stale for so long or forget to pay your copywriter for so long or spend too much time trying to find the password for your client’s site for so long, etc. etc. before you begin to see a serious increase in stress and a serious decrease in your productivity and ultimately your money making potential.
- You Spend All Day on Forums/Blogs – If the majority of your time is spent reading about SEO instead of doing SEO, then your income will never be what it could be. Of course, I am not saying that reading and learning about SEO is not important, and in fact it is extremely important to always be learning, but you and I both know that it can be easy to justify what is really just mindless browsing as “SEO training”.
- You Have No Process – The value of your time decreases if you have to keep repeating and trying to remember steps that you should already have documented. Call it an SEO cheat sheet, call it a list of steps for researching a new niche, call it whatever you want to call it, but write it down and document what your plan of action is so you don’t waste valuable time thinking about what to do instead of thinking about how to best do what you need to do.
- You Don’t Take Risks – Whether this means striking out on your own to start your own firm to do SEO work for clients ($ potential if you are good but also some risk) or whether it means getting serious about spending some time and money to do in house SEO for your own website(s) ($$$ potential if you are really good but of course some risk as well), you have to take some risks in order to really maximize your SEO earning potential.
- You Are a Cheap Son of a Gun – If you don’t believe in yourself enough to invest in tools that will make you a better SEO, then good luck because that is all you have – luck. Think of yourself and your SEO education as an investment. Pretend you are putting yourself through “SEO School” and spend some money all the while realizing that this investment in yourself will pay off in with a higher future earning potential.
- You Treat SEO as a Hobby – I’m going to tell you something that you may not enjoy reading… SEO is work. There, I said it and now I feel better. SEO has fantastic opportunities to make a great deal of money if you are smart, willing to learn, and you work hard. However, the same principles for offline business success hold true online in the SEO realm as well. There is no magic elixir that shoots through your cable modem into your PC and right through your mouse into your fingers that makes any halfhearted lazy SEO effort you might muster up instantly fill up your bank account. Work smarter AND harder and SEO can make you a lot of money. Treat SEO as a hobby at your own risk if your goal is to make money and not just have fun.
I run a domain name tools website and I see a lot of awesome risk takers that work long hours and research domain names until they are blue in the face, and then they pounce on great domain names that will likely make them quite a nice sum of money in the future. On the other hand, there are some who maybe don’t put in the necessary research and just snap up what-ever.info piece of junk domain name they come across that strikes their fancy, hoping that their domain name “lottery ticket” will pay off big in the future.
Be someone who is dedicated to working hard and making a lot of money as an SEO. Hopefully these 7 reasons are a help to you as you strive to be the best SEO you can possibly be and make the most money possible.
 
BONUS REASON: “7 Reasons” just sounds better than “8 Reasons,” but maybe even the #1 thing that can hold back your long term SEO money making potential is a Short Term Focus. A long term focus wants to provide loads of quality content and offer an enjoyable user experience while a short term focus is concerned only with “gaming” the search engines or exploiting flaws in the system with no regard for long term user loyalty. Concentrate exclusively on the short term to your own money making detriment.
DISCLAIMER: I love SEO and think that SEO is a lot of fun. Money is, of course, not everything, and there is nothing wrong with doing SEO purely for enjoyment or as a hobby. That being said, making a lot of money doing SEO is also a lot of fun.
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Omniture Launches Facebook Analytics Solution
Omniture has created a new tool designed to measure the success of Facebook applications. Dubbed App Measurement for Facebook, it utilizes the reporting capabilities of the company’s online analytics solution SiteCatalyst.
With App Measurement for Facebook, marketers can view users by how many members they have, see which parts of the app are most popular, monitor video sharing, and observe which users invited their friends to the app.
Check out more screenshots of the tool at Omniture’s Flickr stream.
Facebook apps are an increasingly popular way for companies to leverage social media in their online marketing campaigns.
“With more than 200 million active users, marketers are intrigued by the potential of Facebook to help them connect with consumers in personalized and meaningful ways,” said Brett Error, CTO and executive vice president, products at Omniture.
But unlike SEO and SEM, social media has been notoriously difficult to measure. App Measurement for Facebook attempts to fill this void.
“The relatively young phenomenon of social media has forced marketers to rely on experimentation to tap into that potential,” said Error. “The App Measurement for Facebook solution will deliver actionable insight concerning Facebook applications and help marketers develop data-driven social media marketing strategies that support and positively affect efforts across other online channels.”
The tool is now available for SiteCatalyst customers and is part of the Omniture Online Marketing Suite.
Google Book Settlement Raises Eyebrows in Europe
Google’s book settlement in the US is not sitting well with some in Europe. As a result, the EU is commissioning a study on the affects of the settlement on European authors. The deal that Google made with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) includes European authors who have been published in the States. However, they are allowed to opt-out of the deal if they so choose.
The EU, of course, isn’t the only one scrutinizing the agreement. Last month, the Department of Justice here in the States launched an antitrust investigation into the settlement, despite the deal’s nonexclusive clauses.
Additionally, the settlement must be approved by a court. The hearing is scheduled for October 7, 2009.
The settlement came after two years of disputes and negotiations between Google and the AAP. It involves Google shelling out $125 million to establish the Book Rights Registry, which would kill the existing class action lawsuit against Google for its book search.
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