Category: Social Media

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Bing Teamed With Twitter in BingTweets – Very Cool!

I have to say that even I think that this is very cool, Bing has created a Twitter Bing interface called BingTweets. You can visit it at www.BingTweets.com. I don’t know who’s brainchild this was at Microsoft, but let me tell you Microsoft appears to “get Twitter”.

Personally I thought it was a very cool application and a neat way to check out what is being said online about you or your company. Just put your name in the Bing search box and any tweets that have mentioned you will appear in the Twitter scroller ticker on the right. Even if it is a novelty, it show that something has changed at Microsoft with the introduction on Bing.

In fact Microsoft has done something so big with Bing that their search engine has moved from a 2% market share to now about an 8% market share as of just last week. It doesn’t hurt that Bing has received excellent press from the mainstream professional webmaster world as well as the New York Times, and the fact that it is not Google. But will Bing has the power to supplant Yahoo in market share and really become a contender to threaten Google? If they keep on doing cool things like BingTweet they may.

I for one am watching Bing very carefully. I love the look, the clean interface, and now this new savvy merging of a hot property (Twitter) with a neat application. The millions spent on advertising don’t hurt either. To cement the move I would say to Microsoft now’s the time to move on Yahoo and try to integrate what they have into a mega empire. Then they would have a very real threat to Google, but Microsoft likes to do things slowly and their way, so I am just watching.

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Online Reputation Remediation Tips

I have been toying with creating a new service for reputation remediation but have decided not to pursue this as a service for my firm mainly because the vetting process would be so difficult. How do you really know who has been a victim and who really warrants the bad PR about themselves online? Typically I feel like I am a pretty good judge of character, but I have been fooled. I simply do not want to use my expertise to remediate someone’s online identity so they can hurt people again.

As I will not be rolling out the service, I have done enough research to know that for people who really need help and who may have been targeted without justification that this may be a very workable approach for them to take themselves.

1. Social Media Account Set Up 
In an effort to push down bad search results we recommend that you set up accounts on these selected social networking and social media sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed, Plaxo, Naymz, Tagged, and Xing. The more information you enter the more complete your online presence and more legitimate it will be .

Additionally if you have pictures of your family, pets, and a recent vacation we recommend you load them. Make yourself a real person one who is approachable.

2. Do 10 Days of Status Updates on Your Social Media Accounts
Update the status on each of the accounts you set up twice a day for 10 business days. You  want the search engines to believe that these are new active social networking accounts to allow them to be included in their search indexes.  

3. BlogSpot Blog Set Up 
In an effort to additionally remediate your reputation online we recommend that you blog set up a Blogspot.  Make sure to register your blog with Google and the other search engines.

4. Create and Publish 12 Blog Posts
In an effort to provide additional positive content about you, we recommend that you write twelve blog posts over a four week period posting on a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule. Each blog post should speak positively about you and your services. Highlight different positive things about yourself such as non-profit participation, church activities, family events, things you are working on that will benefit your community or business environment. Link to your website and your social networking profiles.

At the end of four to six weeks take a look on the various search engines to see what has happened. I would love to hear feedback from you if you try this program to tell me if our recommendations worked to help drop down the bad search results on your name or business name. Typically Google will update their index the fastest. You may see an improvement in search results under your name in as little as 7 days. Yahoo and Bing update their index on about a three to six week cycle so results will appear on those two engines much more slowly.

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Bing is Testing Out Indexing Twitter Posts

Bing is testing out indexing Twitter posts – not just the Twitter profile page as Google does, but actual Twitter posts, or tweets, as they are known. This is important news and just one more really important reason why Twitter is so important to add to a web presence arsenal in today’s business environment.

Tweets can point to information on your website, outside articles you have written, or industry links and videos. If Bing does roll out massive tweet indexing it will be a real boon for search engine marketeers and spin Twitter use into the stratosphere. Right now Bing appears to be testing the indexing of tweet for only specific Twitter accounts.  

If there has ever been a reason for you to embrace Twitter this is a big one! I have long expected that the interest in Twitter would continue to grow, not only for marketing, but for search engine optimization. I still feel that eventually Google will try to gobble up Twitter this year, but Twitter may end up standing on its own as Facebook has.

As an early embracer of the Twitter medium, I totally “get it” when it comes to Twitter. I really love the application, post frequently during the work week, and love to share, connect, link, and interact with others online on Twitter. I have been able to connect directly with giants in my industry using Twitter, and on top of that, I consider it huge fun.

One of the real values of Twitter is the ability to “know fast”. I knew Michael Jackson and Farrah had died before it was on any of the mainstream news medias. All because of Twitter. I can follow topics and events from around the world. I have experienced the “push” that Twitter can bring for viral marketing myself – picking up 100 new followers on a mini white paper that I did that was then tweeted and retweeted widely in the Twitterverse.

If Bing and then Google decide to roll out indexing tweets, watch out! For all hot new things that are just appearing to be ready to crest, it is best to get involved early and get involved before the curve hits. Twitter is just that appearing to be ready to crest. If you are not on Twitter it is time to think again.

If you really don’t know where to start we do offer a Twitter set up program and ghost twittering program, but really with a little research and time investment you can do it on your own. Just do a search on our blog and website for Twitter and you will find a wealth of information on how you can get started with Twitter and the great applications that help you use Twitter effectively.

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Best Practice for Posting Twitter to Facebook

I’ve been doing some testing on the best practices for feeding your Twitter posts to your Facebook status, and I have some new recommendations for you.

First, I post much more frequently on Twitter than anywhere else. Twitter followers are used to this and conversations there are a stream of consciousness back and forth. The Facebook and LinkedIn worlds are different. You can easily lose followers by feeding your Twitter status directly to Facebook and be confused by friends as spamming them with status updates. It is just too much information for Facebook, but the interaction is what grows your network on Twitter.

This is what I do, first I stopped feeding my Twitter status through Facebook with the Twitter application I had installed before. Now I use two applications and select when I update Facebook and LinkedIn. I use TweetDeck and choose to send my status to Facebook about once or twice a day tops. Then I use Ping.fm to send a status update one more time to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and FriendFeed. By turning off the Facebook Twitter application, now only when I want to my status moves to Facebook using TweetDeck – a much more user friendly plan to not alienate Facebook users with the volume of posts that an active Twitter user will typically generate.

Ping.fm is an excellent tool if you want to feed your status to LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter all at the same time. I am finding that typically I will have both TweetDeck open and Ping.fm open throughout the day. Now if Ping.fm will just allow me to schedule posts.  You can create posting groups, but I have not figured out if Ping.fm will schedule posts yet.