August 29, 2012

Remove those regrettable online reputation tattoos

The way you feel now about all those photos of you at the beach, in your suit, body-proud, tanned and drinking — liberation and joy — may end up making you feel completely different in your near future — trapped and ashamed. No matter how young you may be, reading these words, you need to start thinking long-game when it comes to your online reputation.

You’re at the mercy of the Panopticon: networked cameras are almost ubiquitous

Your online reputation on Google Search is a culmination of all your separate, discrete (or indiscreet) choices — sort of like tattoos — and it’s always easier to not get inked in the first place than it is live with the consequences or go through the pain and expense of having all of your tribal, prison, lower-back, ankle, neck, and face tattoos removed. Continue reading →

August 27, 2012

Memolane: Helping tell our stories through social media

Memolane organizes content into a storyboard format.

How one startup is transforming social content into digital scrapbooks

Guest post by Benjamin Kimo Twichell
Marketing Manager, Memolane

Target audience: Individuals, businesses, diarists, people with multiple social media accounts.

The amount of information being distributed across social media channels is becoming overwhelming for the average consumer. Much of the content is transient and is only available for moments after its creation. It seems impossible to keep track of everything that is happening, and almost as difficult to look back on what has happened.

Humans have always looked back on the past. Some 43,000 years ago we first began recording our memories and experiences with cave wall paintings. Beasts from successful hunts were depicted in Spanish caves. It is only natural that there is a desire to record the moment — only the medium has changed with time. As the eons passed, people improved their ability to capture experiences and events, first through art (paintings and drawings) and then through photography.

Just as technology has revolutionized how we hold onto our memories, it has also shifted the way we experience them. People once used to jot down their thoughts in leather-bound journals. Now everyone and their mother has a blog. Photos are no longer stashed away in a closet, they’re shared across Instragram, Facebook, Twitter, and other media sharing sites. Now, more than ever, we have the ability to view other people’s lives, and glimpse personal memories. While this has become an efficient way to share content, it can lacks the ability to effectively tell a story. Continue reading →

August 22, 2012

Own your online reputation with help from your friends

Many hands make light online reputation work. Changing your reputation online is no small task. It’s also a house of cards. You can either do it yourself, about yourself, for yourself, or you can start the equivalent of an online reputation club, inviting friends, family, your colleagues, and your industry to start building a universe of content that is germane and salient to who you are, what you believe, what you’ve done, and what you’re doing as well as who they are, what they believe, what they’ve done, and what they’re doing.

Continue reading →

August 20, 2012

Content is king: Still true in the mobile era?

Image by iqoncept on BigStockPhoto

Why native apps are vital to the Internet’s future in the mobile era

Guest post by Gal Brill
CEO, UppSite

Content is king, but in the mobile era, it will only remain king if it is optimized for mobile devices.

Bill Gates was the first to coin the phrase “content is king,” and ever since he coined it in 1996, content creators, website owners, journalists and pundits of the digital era have recited it, dissected it, argued about it or agreed on it.

In 2007 Apple completely changed the way we consume content and digital media. That year, Steve Jobs introduced the first smartphone to the world, the iPhone, and a new era was born.

The mobile era, ushered in by the iPhone and the iPad, significantly changed the amount of content, its timing and of course the method in which we consume it – the iPhone 2G, Android and Windows-based phones gave birth to millions of mobile apps and the app store empowered us to install them on those little supercomputers in the palm of our hand.

One of the aspects that was left behind in this mobile era is the Internet itself. The Internet that heralded the dawn of the information revolution and the digital age has been largely neglected in the age of mobile. And when you really think about it, there is no surprise here at all. Continue reading →

August 16, 2012

Is Google turning from a search engine into a publisher?

From left, Incisive Media Global VP Mike Grehan, Matt Cutts of Google, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land and Brett Tabke, who runs PubCon (Photo by Search Engine Land).

Webmasters push back against recent changes at Google

Target audience: Businesses, brands, marketers, search specialists, SEO experts, Web publishers — anyone with a business website.

By and large over the years on number of fronts — search, mobile, open source, public policy — Google has generally worn the white hat. They’ve played the good guys in this still unfolding Internet saga right from the start. Back when search was still young, as I wrote in 2001, Google decreed that there must be a clear demarcation between search results and sponsored links, and it has been thus ever since.

So it was somewhat jarring to see the cool reception that Google’s Matt Cutts — probably Google’s biggest superstar behind Larry, Sergey and Eric — received yesterday at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco. Cutts laid out a rosy portrait of the company’s Knowledge Graph, unveiled last week. Search on “chiefs” on Kansas City and you’ll get a different result than if you searched out the Chiefs rugby team in Australia or New Zealand. (For the possible downsides of this, see my interview with Eli Pariser, author of “The Filter Bubble.”)

But Google is doing more than just personalization, and audience members took to the microphone to push back. Their objection came down to this: By all appearances, Google’s recent moves seem to be moving the company away from its search roots and more into the role of an online publisher, a one-stop shop, a commercial Wikipedia. Continue reading →

August 15, 2012

For online reputation, the best defense is a good offense

You can’t ignore the power that search holds for your business

If you’re a serious business person whose business isn’t digital, you’re probably too busy making money to fool around on social media. Social media’s stupid, right? Just baby pictures, workout check-ins, adorable kittens and the self-indulgent ramblings of under-employed folks too far to either the left or the right to amount to much.

Just because you’re old-fashioned doesn’t mean what you’re doing isn’t working.

Big business has adopted many of the tools of the digital age, but it hasn’t gone native — because it doesn’t need to. Big money doesn’t need digital to do big business. It’s just cream — an additional channel for additional revenue.

There’s a lot of business being done and a lot of money being made using ’50s-era technology: phone calls, meetings, conference calls, lunches, dinners and hours at the club or the golf course. The Internet has not usurped the traditional, it has merely enriched it; however, there’s also no barrier to entry so this party isn’t exclusive but it’s super-saturated with powerful influencers and new media gods. So, please beware. Continue reading →