2010 Reviewed – Dirty Hotel Bedspreads & Coke As a Toilet Cleaner
So here’s to 2010…
As we progress through the year 2010, I want to thank all of you for your educational e-mails over the past year. I am totally screwed up now and have little chance of recovery.
- I no longer open a bathroom door without using a paper towel, or have the waitress put lemon slices in my ice water without worrying about the bacteria on the lemon peel.
- I can’t sit down on the hotel bedspread because I can only imagine what has happened on it, since it’s never washed.
- I have trouble shaking hands with someone who has been driving because the number one pastime while driving alone is picking ones nose.
- Eating a little snack sends me on a guilt trip because I can only imagine how many gallons of trans fats I have consumed over the years.
- I can’t touch any woman’s purse for fear she has placed it on the floor of a public restroom.
- I MUST SEND MY SPECIAL THANKS to whoever sent me the one about rat poop in the glue on envelopes because I now have to use a wet sponge with every envelope that needs sealing.
- ALSO, now I have to scrub the top of every can I own for the same reason.
- I no longer have any savings because I sent it all to the sick girl (Penny Brown) who is about to die for the 1,387,258th time.
- I no longer have ANY money, but that will change once I receive the $15,000 that Bill Gates/Microsoft and AOL are sending me for participating in their special e-mail program.
- I no longer worry about my soul because I have 363,214 angels looking out for me, and St. Theresa’s Novena has granted my every wish.
- I can’t have a drink in a bar because I’ll wake up in a bathtub full of ice with my kidneys gone.
- I can’t eat at KFC because their chickens are actually horrible mutant freaks with no eyes, feet or feathers.
- I can’t use cancer-causing deodorants even though I smell like a water buffalo on a hot day.
- THANKS TO YOU I have learned that my prayers only get answered if I forward an e-mail to seven of my friends and make a wish within five minutes.
- BECAUSE OF YOUR CONCERN, I no longer drink Coca Cola because it can remove toilet stains.
- I no longer buy gas without taking someone along to watch the car so a serial killer doesn’t crawl in my back seat while I’m filling up.
- I no longer use Cling Wrap in the microwave because it causes seven different types of cancer.
- AND THANKS FOR LETTING ME KNOW I can’t boil a cup of water in the microwave anymore because it will blow up in my face, disfiguring me for life.
- I no longer go to shopping malls because someone will drug me with a perfume sample and rob me.
- And I no longer answer the phone because someone will ask me to dial a number for which I will get a phone bill with calls to Jamaica , Uganda , Singapore , and Uzbekistan …
- I no longer buy cookies from Woolies since I now have their recipe.
- THANKS TO YOU I can’t use anyone’s toilet but mine because a big black snake could be lurking under the seat and cause me instant death when it bites my butt.
- AND THANKS TO YOUR GREAT ADVICE I can’t ever pick up a coin dropped in the parking lot because it probably was placed there by a sex molester waiting to grab me as I bend over.
- I can’t do any gardening because I’m afraid I’ll get bitten by the Violin Spider and my hand will fall off.
- If you don’t send this e-mail to at least 144,000 people in the next 70 minutes, a large dove with diarrhea will land on your head at 5:00 p.m. tomorrow afternoon, and the fleas from 120 camels will infest your back, causing you to grow a hairy hump. I know this will occur because it actually happened to a friend of my next door neighbor’s ex-mother-in-law’s second husband’s cousin’s best friend’s beautician . .
- P. S.: I now keep my toothbrush in the living room, because I was told by e-mail that water splashes over 6 ft. out of the toilet.
Stats on Facebook Users Any Marketer Would Love to Have
Filed under: Facebook, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Success
Because there are so many people all over the world who use Facebook on a daily basis, there are certain patterns that users tend to follow; makes sense right? If you’re a marketer, these patterns can help you considerably when it comes to knowing who to market to and when.
What Facebook did is look at the use of certain words in status updates as well as how people responded to those updates.
What’s interesting about this study is that Facebook found that the younger a person, the more they swear and refer to themselves more often such as I, me, and my. They also tend to talk about school more often (which is no surprise really).
Older people tend to talk more about their families, use more prepositions and articles and refer to others more frequently.
What I found most interesting is that people tend to be more positive in the morning hours and tend to get more negative as the day goes on.
Additionally, those status updates that are more positive in nature receive more “likes” than do those that are negative.
The take-away from all of this, as a marketer, is to study how people are using their status updates, what words they’re using, and to take a cue from “likes” as to how people respond to the updates themselves.
You can read the entire study at Facebook along with additional graphs and explanations.
Google & Bing DO Count Facebook & Twitter Links
In a recent Google Webmaster Help video (see below), Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam Team answers one of the most popular questions that many websites have and that is “Does Google use Twitter and Facebook Links as a ranking signal?” The definitive answer, from Matt is “Yes”.
To be honest, this rather surprised me because rarely have I ever heard Matt answer a question with such forthright authority. Usually the answer is more along the lines of “Yes, but…” with all kinds of subjective material added to the answer; making it virtually impossible to detect if what you’re doing yourself actually matters at all.
This question stemmed from a recent article written by Danny Sullivan Editor-in-Chief at Search Engine Land.
In this article (which is a great read by the way), Danny offers responses by both Bing and Google on specific questions such as:
- If a link is retweeted or referenced a lot in Twitter, do you count this as a ranking signal?
- Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets?
- Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending upon who Tweeted it?
- Do you try to calculate the authority of someone on Facebook?
- Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight on Facebook depending upon who posted the link?
It’s very interesting to read the answers and even more interesting to associate it with your own activity on both of these social networks.
Part of the curiosity with Twitter in particular, is because Twitter does not follow links. They used to, but I believe it was back in 2009 some time, they added nofollow to all of their links.
What this means is that even though you’re tweeting a link and others may retweet it, the “nofollow” portion of that link is telling the search engines “Hey, if you see this link, don’t follow it to its destination and give that destination credit for it.”
But what’s so much more important here is what Danny has referred to as “SocialRank”. And I am totally on board with him here…let me explain…
Years (and I mean years ago) when Google especially was gaining ground as the “go to” search engine, people realized that you could manipulate the rankings by:
- Stuffing a bunch of keywords into your meta keywords tag (and if you don’t know what this is, don’t worry, it doesn’t matter any more anyway).
- Stuffing your page full of keywords in order to rank well for the keyword you were after.
- Hiding text on the page in the same color as the page background so that the search engines could read it but your site visitors couldn’t.
When this failed to work any longer, people realized that links were a major factor in where you ranked. And so…reciprocal linking came along (that’s when you trade links with someone else in an effort to help increase the importance of your website.)
Again, Google soon realized that this wasn’t really a *true* indicator of authority and so it began discounting these kinds of links.
So it became important to try and get links to your website from other important websites (“important” as deemed by Google), in order to help your own website ranking. This “importance” at least in reference to Google is referred to as PageRank which you can see by installing the Google Toolbar within your browser.
But…it’s also important to understand that the PageRank that you see in your browser for a web page is NOT the *true* PageRank of a web page or website. As a matter of fact, it’s quite old information. According to Google PageRank Data, the last time it was updated was April 2, 2010 (it’s now late December 2010). So…over 8 months ago.
The fact is, Google updates this internally quite often but what you may be looking at today is in fact, 8 months old.
So, all this comes down to this: Google has hundreds of ranking factors that determine where to place you within it’s search results and for what given terms. People know a little about how Google determines importance of your web pages, but like all indicators that we at least know of, it can all be manipulated. Whether or not you choose to manipulate it is up to your own moral standards, but the one thing that is extremely difficult to manipulate is your online reputation.
Who believes you? Who trusts what you say? Who retweets your links? Et cetera, et cetera…
This is what Danny refers to within his article. And I truly believe that this is the wave of the future for websites and their owners; simply because it is so difficult to fake. If people trust you, they’ll read more of your stuff. If you offer valuable information, you’ll be talked about more online, and so on.
Consider a great example of Mari Smith who is trusted by thousands of people online for her information and advice on how to use Facebook effectively. She is a fantastic example of how SocialRank likely works. I guarantee that if Mari posts a link, it’s retweeted and shared on Facebook a thousand times over. She has “SocialRank”.
Take the time to read the article by Danny – I think you’ll find it very enlightening.
P.S. The video by Matt is below…
