Alliance Blog Reviews

OK, I have learned my lesson. I am going to tell you right out of the gate that when I read this piece of information about Twitter turning a profit in 2009 I was a bit skeptical. Now, the second part of this is that the source, BusinessWeek, is well, BusinessWeek so I tend to pay attention a bit more. Well, the times they are a changin’ for sure because the distinction between the venerable BusinessWeek and the rest of the Internet space may be less noticeable than before. As I went through the article I read the following In October, Twitter said it had struck multiyear arrangements that make users’ short blog postings available on Google.com and on Bing, which is run by Microsoft. Those agreements carry sufficient value to help Twitter achieve a small profit for 2009, say two people familiar with the company’s finances , who asked to remain anonymous because Twitter’s books are not a matter of public record. I added the italics because I now immediately place this story in the category of rumor. I suspect that if Twitter wants people to know that it turned a profit, no matter how big or small, they will let us know. Do I think they actually did turn a profit? I honestly don’t know because I don’t do their accounting and I haven’t spoken to ‘sources’ who think that leaking corporate data is cool. Now, of course, let’s not discount the possibility that Twitter allowed the leaks but now we are getting into silly territory. What this looks like though is that BusinessWeek is starting to sound more like the tech blogs and new world media that it has fought against. Verify facts with the company being covered? Nope. Two anonymous insiders will do because the story is “hot”. Oh boy. The one thing that is certain is that the biggest revenue generator (maybe only?) are the deals that were struck with Google and Microsoft for the Twitter feeds to be indexed in the search engines. These are rumored to be in the $25 million range with $15 million from Google and $10 million from Microsoft. If these numbers are indeed accurate I have to wonder what the $5 million difference is since the two companies are essentially getting the same data. Your speculation is welcome in the comments section here, as always. Another part of the ‘information’ that was ‘leaked’ to BW was the fact that Twitter has been cutting expenses and has now been left with people being the bulk of the expense to run the service. The company used to pay a lot of money to telecommunications companies for distributing billions of text messages over wireless networks. Twitter users can send and receive messages over both its Web service and text messages. Now that Twitter has become so popular, it has gained bargaining power with telecom companies and has managed to renegotiate so many deals with carriers that the company pays far less for the services. With 105 employees and estimates placing the needed money to run the operation at $25 million per year either those 105 people are making some nice coin or they have deals that are starting to look like being a pre-IPO Google employee. Either way, good for them. So as always is the tendency when looking at Twitter we must try to figure out just what will happen in the future to make more money through the widely used service. The BusinessWeek article tells us Over the last year, however, executives have started to talk about the various ways the company has been exploring to generate revenue. In addition to the search deals, Twitter plans an advertising program for early next year. The company also will charge for commercial Twitter accounts that would let businesses analyze tweet traffic. Get ready for 2010 to be a big year for Twitter as the world watches how they integrate advertising into the Tweet stream. Also, if you are a company you better make a little budget room for whatever commercial account services become available. Nothing was ‘leaked’ about how much that would cost so your guess is as good as ours or BusinessWeek’s or some anonymous guesser source.

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Twitter Profitable in 2009?

Twitter may have began as a simple communication platform for friends and family, but it quickly evolved into an amazingly powerful marketing tool. Arguably, becoming one of the most effective resources for marketing and business professionals alike. One of the really great aspects of Twitter for any professional is the ability to target large amounts of people based on their interests and location. It is this niche/geo targeting that enables “web savvy” real estate agents to reach much larger amounts of prospective clients than ever before. ** Traditional marketing serves as no challenge to a successful Twitter campaign. The Power of Twitter Friends To find success on Twitter you need friends, lots of them. The more people that befriend you the better as it extends your reach each and every time you post a new tweet. Building a substantial amount of friends often requires a physical attempt on your part, unless of course you also happen to be famous. Its important to remember that the more targeted your twitter friends are to real estate and/or your area, the more potential leads you will find. Here are a few tips for finding targeted prospects: Location Search: One of the best things you can do is find friends in and around your local area, after all they are likely the ones that will be buying houses there. For example, a search for Portland Oregon turns up a lot of people that live and work in the Portland area. Industry Search: Search for terms like “real estate,, “real estate agent”, “buying real estate”, you could come up with these for days. Many of these searches will return other real estate agents. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that befriending another real estate agent is a bad thing. Agents refer clients to other agents all of the time, don’t pass on that opportunity. Searching for Related Terms: Search for terms such as “need to move”, “house shopping”, “shopping for a new home”, etc. Admittedly, this type of search tends to be less targeted but can still provide additional exposure and possible clients considering a move to your area. Please note: While the Twitter search bar may not look like much at first glance, it harnesses a tremendous amount of power under the hood. The search tips above are designed to drill down into targeted areas of interest and reach more clients. Twitter Tools for Real Estate Agents There are a number of great tools out there that can increase the power of Twitter and decrease the amount of time and effort required to use Twitter successfully. Some that would be valuable to real estate agents are: Twitter Local : Twitter Local is a pretty neat Adobe Air application that allows you to filter tweets by location. This makes finding potential clients in your area extremely easy. Monitter : Monitter allows you to monitor specific terms and keywords as they are mentioned. This is very powerful to a Twitter marketer and can open up a lot of possible new relationships for real estate agents. Twellow : List your real estate business in Twellow a Yellow Pages type listing directory for Twitter accounts. This is also a great place to find other real estate agents in your area and across the country. TweetLister : TweetLister is a really unique service that makes adding your property listings to Twitter easy! This online service automatically converts your listings to tweets and posts them to Twitter. Pretty neat, huh. Twitter, Another Tool for Real Estate Agents Basically, what it boils down to is that Twitter is a unique platform with a lot of potential for maximizing exposure to your real estate business. As with any tool or service, you have to actually use it to make it work. Nothing happens on its own. The great folks behind Twitter have given you the people and the platform, now its your job to do the sorting and marketing. Have fun with it! © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Twitter for Real Estate Agents – From Tweets to Clients

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Twitter for Real Estate Agents – From Tweets to Clients

Admit it. How many of you read that title and thought that your SEO career was about to come tumbling down? Yeah, I’m mean like that! Anyway, while I have you hear, can you tell me what you think of this: The "Guru" product is not showing for everyone, and apparently if you click the link it takes you…no where actually. Any guesses what it may be? A return of Google Answers perhaps?

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Why Being a Google Guru is a Dead End

Google is taking mobile very seriously, as in they are partnering with Audi to bring Google services including Google Earth to the A8. This marks the continuation of Google’s attempts to bring their services into automobiles and does it at a new level. According to Google’s Lat Long blog : With their newly unveiled Audi A8, Audi is the first car manufacturer to bring Google Earth directly into the vehicle and to combine that with a set of useful Google services. We’ve worked closely with them to create a compelling in-car experience integrated with the Audi navigation system. You’ll be able to enjoy 3D satellite imagery, terrain information and a wealth of additional geo information relevant to your current location: layers like Wikipedia to learn more about your surroundings or Panoramio images to get another view. Wow, that is pretty neat. Of course, some folks are going to have concerns about just how interactive this is especially when the area of greatest consideration while in a car has not changed since the first one rolled off the assembly line: pay attention and stay safely on the road. Here’s a picture of the system in the car. Another nice feature is the tie in with the desktop that has been developed which will roll up local search and Google Maps in the services offered with the A8. You can send business listings directly from Google Maps to your car: search for an address at your desk, send it to the car, and by the time you go to the parking lot your car will know where to go. While in the car, you can use Google Local Search in the same rich quality as at your desk. Imagine you get hungry on the way or want to find a cinema – simply perform a live Google search on your car navigation system and immediately get up-to-date, rich and relevant results. I’m not sure how that live search is going to be preformed (hopefully at a red light or stop sign but that’s not likely) so it sounds real cool but would be even better to see in person. Of course, seeing it ‘in person’ comes with an MSRP for the A8 of $74,550-$78,400. Unfortunately, I was not compensated with my own A8 for this post (c’mon, Andy, what gives?). I just felt you needed to know that so I won’t get in trouble with the government. Despite that, here’s to driving informed!

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Google Services Takes the Audi A8 for a Spin

It seems that Google likes to roll out new tools to help webmasters without really saying why. So, when Google launches a new tool that helps you determine if your web page is too wide or long for most browser sizes, you have to wonder: will the dimensions of your web site become the next variable added to Google’s algorithm? It’s not out of the realm of possibility, when you consider that the speed of your site will soon be a factor in determining your Google ranking. Whether I’m reaching here–or close to home–I don’t know. What I do know is that Google wants YOU to be aware of how many Google users don’t get to see all of your web content at first glance. Browser Size is cute, ugly, and useful. It’s best to just show you: As you can see, Trackur.com fits within the entire web browser of only 20% of all users, but our call to action gets seen by 90-95%–without any scrolling needed. You’d think that the tool would have cleaner lines, but I suspect the “kids crayon” interface is designed to not look too sinister and official–so you don’t suspect it will become part of Google’s algorithm. Go and check your own web site and let me know how you fair. PS. Keep in mind that if you use a floating width/margin, you should re-size your own browser to lose the white space either side of your main content.

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Size Does Matter! Google Says Small & Narrow is Best!

Back in February, Google, Yahoo and then-Live premiered a solution to on-site duplicate content: a canonical URL element that let you designate which version official word was, of course, that the element is still just one signal.) Unfortunately, that element only worked within a single domain—if you had your content copied on another domain, no joy. Until now. Yesterday on the Webmaster blog, Google announced a new cross-domain canonical URL element . Now, if you have the same content on two domains, you can indicate to search engines which one is the preferred URL. The element uses the same syntax as the prior version, but now you can indicate the canonical URL is on a different domain: As part of the announcement, of course, they review other ways to handle cross-domain duplicate content, including 301 redirects. However, if you can’t use server-side redirects, the cross-domain canonical URL element can help search engines find the new content and possibly use that new URL in search results. In the questions sections of the post, they note that you can’t use the cross-domain canonical URL element to just redirect search engines to a new root site (it’s for 1:1 mapping of substantially similar pages), and that pages with redirected cross-domain elements should not use meta noindex.

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Fix Cross-Domain Duplicate Content

So you are bit.ly and you just suffered through the announcement that your already crowded area of the Internet space has been sat on by the 800 pound Google gorilla with their announcement of the arrival of their own URL shortening service . That can make for a rough day. Sure competition is a good thing because all ships rise with a rising tide. Google makes those tides rise so fast sometimes though that the little ships get tossed in the air and don’t always land well. Well, bit.ly is trying to do its part in making the URL shortening industry a little more interesting. They have announced their new Pro service. One wonders if they needed to announce it a little more hastily than anticipated considering the new “Google’s in the URL shortening house!” scenario. At any rate they are offering a chance for users to provide customized / personalized / whatever-ized shortened URL’s for those looking t stand out from the crowd. Their blog’s description goes a little something like this : As part of our initial beta program, we’re making custom URLs available to a limited number of large and medium-sized Web publishers and bloggers, including AOL, Associated Content, Bing, Clicker, The Daily Telegraph, foursquare, GDGT, Hot Potato, The Huffington Post, IGN, kickstarter, Meebo, MSN, /Message (Stowe Boyd), The New York Times, OMGPOP, oneforty.com, The Onion, slideshare, someecards, TechCrunch, The Wall Street Journal Digital Network — which includes WSJ.com and MarketWatch.com — and blogger Baratunde Thurston (baratunde.com). Users and publishers benefit from the additional transparency that this private-label service provides. When you see a short URL like nyti.ms, you know the destination web site before clicking on the link. OK, good if you are one of the big boys. Goes on the wish list of most others. In addition the service is introducing a new dashboard as well. Go check out the picture at their blog which has itty-bit.ly print for you to strain over. The readable words from bit.ly about the dashboard are We’re also excited to be introducing a unique real-time dashboard that will provide publishers with even more information about their bit.ly traffic. It’s a real-time view of how a given publisher’s content is being distributed across networks like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace and services like email, SMS, and instant messenger. Now, I have to admit that this is cool. It’s fun to see this kind of innovation from someone other than the big names. I can’t help but wonder though just how long this kind of innovation will be available now that Google has entered the space. I have been a fan of Google for quite some time but it is starting to feel a little too ‘big brotherish’ at times. When Google talked about the 3 S’s of their URL shortening service (security, stability and speed) all I could think about is the speed with which they are going to take all of the air out of the room for the little guy in this space and determine who may be allowed to stick around. What if Twitter decides to remove bit.ly as their default URL shortener and creates Twi.tr for their own branding purposes? There may be too much muscle for a player like bit.ly to stick around no matter how much innovation they provide. Am I overreacting here? I’m sure you will let me know because that’s your job here at Marketing Pilgrim. Let’s hear it.

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A bit.ly of Interesting News