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The Web is Atwitter Over Twitter

Twitter is in the news and if you have not tried it, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Twitter is a new social networking site. If you click my post title, you will go to my Twitter home page and there you can see what I am doing and who I am following.

I think Twitter is easy to use and fun. Once I have gotten over the novelty and deleted people who were posting every five minutes drivel on their daily lives, I have actually picked up a few interesting tips and applications that others in my industry are checking out or watching. I have found out about Fire Eagle, Twitter Map, Twitter Feeds, just to name a few.

Although I have now gotten tired of seeing what someone posted for lunch, I am watching Twitter to see what others are watching and looking for. I am also using it to point to interesting articles and also as a platform for my blog. So once you get past the initial thrill, you can put Twitter to work for you as a social media tool.

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Don’t Use Blogger Custom FTP

We used to implement Blogger custom FTP for clients, but now are no longer recommending its use. Blogger custom FTP is where your blogger account is set up to allow your blog posts to be archived back on your own domain server using FTP for search engine benefits.

The problem with Blogger custom FTP is that it is easily crashed, sometimes can take hours for the FTP part to send the posts to your server, and if you have a custom template can be fraught with problems.

If you want the search engine benefits that a blog affords, I strongly recommend that you use WordPress back on your own server. Upload and posting time is very snappy and you won’t end up at the mercy of Blogger when they do updates. We migrated several customers several months ago when Blogger had a reported bug for custom FTP clients as it took two days to publish blogs.

Another issue with Blogger custom FTP is label bloat. If you end of with many labels on your blog, get ready to spend hours deleting them as your publishing time will move to hours from seconds. The best option if you simply cannot use WordPress is to use Blogspot with a custom domain setting. We have found out that you really do not take a hit with the search engines when you are not using custom FTP blogging.

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The Value of A Google AdWords Account Manager – Preventing Fraud

I had a client on let me know on Sunday night that they would be bringing their Google AdWords account management in-house. I disabled my access to their account Monday morning. On Wednesday, they let me know that they could not log into their account.

It appears that in three days their account was hijacked and someone installed two campaigns on their account and ran up a bill of over $9,956.00 in clicks. Some of the clicks were over $28 each. I contacted Google for them today as soon as I was told they could not login and got Google working on a click fraud and account hijack issue. I reported to the client to advise his credit card company to put a fraud alert on his account. I can still not get into their AdWords account, but have access to Google Analytics and can see that new campaigns were set up and nearly $10,000 spent in just two or three days.

I have to say as I am on my Google AdWords accounts daily through My Client Center, that it would probably not have happened on my watch!

This is just one of the values of an account manager, identifying strange behavior that could be fraudulent, finding new campaigns or keywords, and catching a spike in activity. If you are not monitoring your Google AdWords account on a regular basis, you really should start. I never thought that this would ever happen to anyone I knew but yet here it is. Fraud happens!

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WordPress 2.5.1 Get Ready For Big Changes

If you are using WordPress for your blog, you will not even recognize the newest version of WordPress as a WordPress application.

The interface is slick and loaded with AJAX, but is slicker better? Well we’ve seen bugs in the spell checker and image up loader already. I know that WordPress has some fixes for this already in place, but what a pain.

There is some new power with the new application, but I was so comfortable with the old set up, it is hard to get used to the new interface. If you are currently using the older version of WordPress, you may want to wait several months to upgrade until some of these bugs are worked out.