AP Says Scrapers Targets, Not Bloggers
- Posted by Jason Lee Miller in MAKE MONEY ONLINE, WEBSITE SEO |
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The Associated Press plans soon to sic a scraper-bot on the Web to find swiped AP content. While no one would argue with taking on scraper sites, the vagueness of AP news editor Ted Bridis might be worth considering.
In an interview with Ars Technica, Bridis talked of a new technology (that writer Matthew Lasar cleverly described as a “search-and-maybe-threaten bot”) that is on the horizon for the AP. The technology will identify and flag webpages copying entire AP articles. Upon flagging, AP lawyers would review.
A scraper-bot would be nice, a positive technology to evolve from this fiasco. What you do you think?
Bridis insisted the news organization would not be going after bloggers or publications excerpting a paragraph of AP content and linking to the original. He admitted AP sometimes borrows excerpts from newspapers and crafts their own story around it.
But Bridis stopped there and made no such concessions about usage of headlines and AP ledes. Arguing the so-called “hot news misappropriation” doctrine, this could affect search engines, aggregators, and sites like the Drudge Report who display headlines and the first line of an article.
Also under the radar would be articles written based on AP content, especially commercial websites rewriting with hedges like “the AP has reported” or the “AP said.” That’s where the vagueness is troubling, and where the lines are fairly blurry. It’s hard to tell if there is more emphasis on commercial or on an attribution method. It is also unclear what is meant by "rewriting." Does he define rewriting only as reporting the facts with only a word or two changed (i.e., plagiarism)?  Or does Bridis also include rewriting as retelling a story in different words, or even summarizing facts?  
Should the AP be able to dictate which facts are fair to retell, which styles are acceptable to retell them, which sentences are acceptable to excerpt, and how attribution is to be made? Let us know.
Depending on how these questions are answered, Bridis could be drawing a line between blogs and news sites, essentially saying nonprofit bloggers can quote and refer but commercial news sites cannot. He’s also drawing a line between textual storytelling and verbal storytelling. Bridis seems to suggest any commercial, textual relay of information wouldn’t be considered “fair” use, so long as they can, in a decentralized communication universe, prove the AP was the only outfit that knew certain facts. That argument is rather stunning considering the AP is a distributor of news first written elsewhere in the world at local publications.
What’s extra interesting is that though the AP has criticized fair use as a “misguided” legal theory, the organization itself is insisting on its own with the “hot news” doctrine, which is mostly a semantic device to create a separate category for “facts,” which are not copyrightable in the first place.
Ninety years ago, the AP sued William Randolph Hearst’s International News Service (INS) for swiping breaking news the AP had gathered and distributing the news on its own. Over a lengthy court battle reaching the Supreme Court, the “hot news” doctrine was born. Though the AP essentially lost the suit because the courts found that facts could not be copyrighted, hot news (a scoop) was designated as a special kind of property to which the outlet breaking the news had exclusive rights for a limited amount of time. Just how long these special kinds of facts are protected is unclear, especially in the Internet age, when hot news gets cold much faster.
To succeed in its efforts, the AP will have significant legal hurdles in front of it. The organization will have to redefine fair use, get a court to uphold that some facts are protected and set some kind of timetable for that protection, explain how textually reporting facts to an Internet audience is different from reporting facts to any other audience by any other method, find a logical differentiation between bloggers and journalists, between Internet forums/social networks and water cooler conversations, convince courts previous precedents regarding aggregating, linking and snippeting should be overturned, all while avoiding federal charges of anticompetitive behavior.
Those are some pretty tall hurdles, and likely a 90-year-old argument from a different world isn’t going to be able to jump them.
This has heated debate written all over it. Sound off in the comment section. 
Maybe It’s Time Craigslist Charged For Some Postings
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This isn’t to pick on craigslist specifically, as this type of thing occurs all over the Net, especially where it’s free to post what other outlets charge for. Craigslist served a crushing blow to inflated classified ad prices in newspapers, and no one but newspapers complained. But besides profiting newspapers, the fees for posting an ad are natural scam deterrents.  
That doesn’t mean they’re nonexistent, but it does mean scams are perpetrated less often when there’s a cost of conducting one. And though craigslist lovers across the world would likely protest (for a short time), it may be time for craigslist to enact at least nominal fees for posting certain types of ads, especially employment and real estate ads.
Real estate scams, especially involving rental properties aren’t new, and craigslist warns renters about transactions not made in person. Most of the scams there involve someone posting a real address and pictures, but the property is posted for much lower than the market rate, ensuring lots of inquiries. The “landlord” claims to be out of the country, and if the renter sends a deposit and first month’s rent, then they’ll send a key for move-in. Scammer keeps the money, renter gets bupkis.
But recently a new con has emerged involving real estate, and it’s pure information phishing and/or affiliate gaming.  When a prospective renter inquires, the landlord responds promising a walk-through on a nonexistent apartment, delivers an application, and asks for a credit report via a specific link. The link actually has the ad poster’s affiliate code, and they get money every time a person requests their report.
Both real estate scam examples are still fairly avoidable if the rental-seeker is savvy enough about how the system works. But job ads are different from other classified listings in that there’s more often an exchange of information instead of money, and responders are used to sending out resumes into the abyss and never hearing back. If you think of the information included in resumes—name, address, phone numbers, email—they’re phisher-spammer goldmines.
Many of the scam ads target the most desperate for work: the unemployed, the under-employed, the stay-at-home-moms, the recently graduated, part-timers, freelance writers, actors, and artists; and the ads often promise salaries or pay well above the market rate for the types of jobs described. Part-time teachers aides in Kentucky don’t make $20 per hour. Secretaries don’t make $60k per year.
Plus the employment market isn’t so great right now. That topless coffee shop up in Maine that just got burned down? The proprietor interviewed 150 applicants for ten positions in a town of 4,700. Craigslist says it generates an average about 50 responses to each job ad—and that has to be much greater in some places. It’s unclear what 50 people’s personal information is worth, but when an ad is free to post, whatever the scammer gets is pure profit.
Craigslist only charges to post job ads and real estate ads in the biggest US markets, just one when it comes to real estate. Even in those, it’s a fraction of what the competition charges–$25 compared to $475 at Monster.com. Everywhere else it’s free and little risk. Scammers don’t even have to show a real email address to their targets. If craigslist isn’t going to start charging for job advertisements, they should at least require more information of employers and brokers looking to post along with some sort of verification.   
Craigslist provides a scam guide instructing users how to identify scams and what not to do. The proprietors also tout their crowd-sourced flagging system, but it’s difficult to gauge how many people hand over their information to scammers before a listing is removed.
What’s Sotomayor’s Stance On Intellectual Property?
- Posted by Jason Lee Miller in MAKE MONEY ONLINE, WEBSITE SEO |
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As Big Content continues its assault on network neutrality, privacy, personal and digital freedom, and stacks government with industry friendly insiders, President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor should be heavily scrutinized regarding her stance on intellectual property and copyright issues.
But given this government’s track record, an industry-friendly justice is good for both the entertainment business and the business of government. And unfortunately, there is no white knight remaining big enough or confident enough to take on both Big Content and a sympathetic federal government.
Before she entered the judicial realm, Sotomayor was a litigator dealing in intellectual property at a major Manhattan law firm. She spent much of her tenure tracking down and rounding up counterfeiters on behalf of Fendi, and suing importers of counterfeit products.
As a Supreme Court judge, Sotomayor would join a justice system already stacked with former intellectual property attorneys. President Obama has already appointed five attorneys to the Department of Justice who made names for themselves bringing lawsuits against file-sharers for the Recording Industry Association of America.
Sotomayor by herself should yield little concern about how she would handle Web-related intellectual property cases destined for eventual appearances before the Supreme Court. But in conjunction with this administration’s obvious preference for Big Content IP skull-crackers—and Congress’s willingness to bend to the will of Big Content—should raise the volume of an already sounding alarm.
We need to know: Who’s side is Sotomayor on?
Those currently making, prosecuting, and interpreting intellectual property laws have a clear historical record of siding with Big Content. Sotomayor’s most notable decision as a judge regarding the digital copyright issue involved freelance writers versus Big Content publishers like the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and Newsday. Freelance writers were peeved that their work, which was contracted for one-time print publishing, was being stored in online databases for use on publication websites.
Sotomayor sided with Big Content by interpreting the law in their favor. An appeals court would later overturn her decision, saying that the publications needed to negotiate for digital rights. The appellate decision was upheld by the Supreme Court. It might be unfair to say Sotomayor would bring a pro-Big Content viewpoint to the Supreme Court based on her anti-counterfeit work for Fendi, but her judicial history might suggest otherwise.
Despite Motion-Picture-Association-of-America-backed research spread worldwide to influence the creation of tougher international intellectual property law—research that equated pirating with counterfeiting and linked piracy to terrorism, drug trafficking, the sex trade, and Asian knife fights—two counter studies have surfaced recently illustrating how file-sharers and torrent users buy more music and DVDs, go to more movies, and buy more entertainment equipment.
Nevertheless, government agencies have a record of siding with recording and motion picture companies who pretend they are hemorrhaging money due to those same file-sharers and torrent users. They’d rather it not be pointed out that even though “Wolverine” was leaked onto the Internet a month in advance of its release, it still grossed $87 million opening weekend, or that Forbes’ Celebrity 100 list reveals Beyonce herself made $87 million last year, and Madonna made over $100 million.
The point is Big Content is not suffering as they pretend, but they sure have a lot of friends in government around the world. It’s not so much about what’s right and just, it’s not even so much about how much money Big Content isn’t really losing. It’s about ultimate control of a digital environment and squashing competition.
In the past ten years, Big Content has brought its business-is-war philosophy to the only real competition remaining: Internet upstarts and Internet users who don’t want to be corralled back into walled gardens with premium entry fees and anti-consumer, abusive pricing structures.
The assault on consumer rights and personal liberty is happening everywhere continuously, perpetrated in the name of intellectual property rights. The MPAA labeled RealDVD “StealDVD” because the motion picture organization doesn’t think even paying customers have a right to back up their own legally purchased discs for personal use.
Cable companies are putting caps on data, introducing tiered pricing, throttling torrents. Telecoms want to block unapproved video transfers. The Associated Press wants to rewrite fair use, revive “hot news” protections, and block out other forms of news distribution. The National Football Association wants to say football players names and stats are solely its own intellectual property. Big Content wants to snoop into and control everything Internet users do online. 
It goes on and on, and unfortunately there are few people’s champions remaining. The government is clearly on Big Content’s payroll. Google, which at one time was brassy enough to make grand shows of defiance, has now also fallen in line. All it took was a billion-dollar Viacom claim, and Google bent over to the AP, and now to the rest of Big Content by actively blocking torrents.
With all that in mind, it’s a good idea to quiz Sotomayor fairly heavily about her stances on intellectual property. If Big Content gets its own Supreme Court justice, the Internet as you’ve come to know it—the one where what you do is your business—is toast. There’ll be nobody left to fight for you.
 
 
Execs Mulling Subscription Model For Hulu
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Jonathan Miller, the new chief digital officer for News Corp., wants to see Hulu become a pay site. In fact, Miller thinks Web companies are going to have to find a way to charge for what they used to give away for free.
Speaking from a couple of different venues this week, Miller expressed his desire to make Hulu content available on a subscription basis. He also seems to have soured on ad-supported business models. 
You may remember Miller from his days as CEO of AOL. He was made CEO in 2002, right around the time AOL Time Warner’s market cap had gone so far south penguins could be seen out the window. Miller oversaw 21 percent annual profit growth at AOL via online advertising.
His last year, 2006, was a big year for AOL, though. That was the year the company was hauled in front of the California legislature for its apparent intention to charge bulk emailers a per-email fee. Right after that fiasco, as AOL was hemorrhaging dial-up subscribers, came the infamous “call,” where retention bonuses led a phone rep to ignore a subscriber’s demand to cancel. It didn’t end though—2006 was rough for AOL, like how 2008 was rough for banks—and the AOL Data Valdez leaked millions of search queries traceable to the original searcher onto the Web.
Though Miller made one right move that year to save his sinking-fast ship by opening up an ad-supported AOL for free and discarding overpriced and outdated business models, it was too late after all the trouble that year, and Miller was booted. So one supposes he’s not going to make the “mistake” of free content again—the last time he did, he got fired.
Besides, News Corp. also owns lots of newspapers, and it wouldn’t look so good if their shiny new Web-exec didn’t share the company’s desire to charge for every single thing it possibly can.
Funny how getting a new job changes a person’s perspective on sustainable business models, especially among former AOL executives. All it took for Michael Lynton, former CEO of AOL Europe, to realize nothing good had come from the Internet was to land a job as CEO of Sony Pictures.
I’ve never been interviewed for a CEO position at a mega-multinational corporate content provider before, but I bet the first question is, “How do you feel about free stuff on the Internet?”
If you answer, “Puh, puh! I hate the Internet! Buncha freeloaders,” you’re in for sure.     
Bygones. But if Miller and News Corp. want to sink Hulu faster than Bill Clinton sinks a cigar, then anchoring it down with a subscription wall should do the trick.
 
Google ‘Evaporating’ Excess PageRank
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PageRank sculpting is a pretty advanced SEO tactic, and it has been widely used by SEO pros since Google’s Matt Cutts described its use on YouTube, giving the strategy the official green light. At SMX Advanced in Seattle, the same harbinger of Google insider information offered a stunning revelation: Google changed the way it handled link structures intended for sculpting.
Coverage of SMX Advanced continues at WebProNews Videos. Stay with WebProNews for more updates and videos from the event this week.
An Explanation of PageRank Sculpting (If you know already, skip to next heading.)
PageRank sculpting works for sites that already have a high PageRank and, as a result, have a lot of “juice” to pass around. Webmasters looking to have more control over which pages appear in Google’s search results would thus harness the trust (juice) Google gave their site to boost certain pages they consider important while blocking other unimportant or less useful pages.
For example, a webmaster may find that a sign-in page or contact page appears in the search results but a page more useful to the end user digging around the Net doesn’t, perhaps because the Googlebot hasn’t been able to locate it. The webmaster could help “sculpt” different pages’ rankings by adding a nofollow tag on links pointing to unimportant pages while linking to preferred pages.
In this sense, PageRank was seen as a finite amount of energy to divvy up among a certain number of pages. If you have 10 liters of PageRank juice to distribute, you could deprive one page of receiving any juice and evenly divide the rest among pages needing a boost. With six links, one is nofollowed, the rest normal, giving the Googlebot directions on where to crawl while passing on two liters of juice per page.
Google officially cleared this practice in 2007 by using it with YouTube. The video site links to random videos from the homepage, and as such, when the Googlebot came by, it would pass on the tremendous amount of juice YouTube carried to those random videos. Google used PageRank sculpting to keep it fair and prevent favoritism of certain videos in the search results.
That Was Then, This Is Now
Matt Cutts
Using the 10 liters of juice model, if a webmaster had ten links, blocks five, then five got two liters and five got none. If the webmaster unblocked five, then the juice was evenly redistributed. It also worked in reverse. If a webmaster had distributed the juice among the ten but decided to dam up five, then the juice would evenly redistribute two liters to the preferred five pages.
 
But, according to Matt Cutts, in a Q&A moderated by Danny Sullivan at SMX Advanced, that’s all changed. Now, if the webmaster dams up five, that half still receives nothing, but the remaining half remains at one liter each instead of being boosted up to two liters.
Now, instead of having a certain amount juice to distribute as a webmaster likes, Google allows only that select pages be deprived of juice. And where does that all that excess PageRank juice go? “You can almost think of it as just evaporating,” said Cutts, and one imagines the number of stomachs turning over at that moment.
It’s important to note that Cutts said Google would not penalize a site for PageRank sculpting, but Cutts did suggest the practice wasn’t a great use of a webmaster’s time unless using nofollow for sign-in pages, RSS subscribe links, et cetera.
 
Highlights From the Cutts Q&A Regarding PageRank Sculpting
Cutts on penalties
It’s not gonna get you a penalty. You’re not gonna get in trouble or anything. We’re not gonna say "oh all of these internal links are nofollowed" or anything like that. However, it’s not as effective, so it’s definitely a better use of your time to go and make new content.
Cutts on sculpting
If you’re using nofollow to change how PageRank flows around within your site, it’s almost like a band-aid. It’s better to make your site the way you want PageRank to flow from the beginning, and then it’s good for users, and it’s good for search engines.
So how you choose to link within your site is your own business, and I would tell people you can try to sculpt PageRank, but it’s not gonna be as useful. So I would urge people to make new content or think about how to link within your site. Put your best products right up on your root page, and things like that. And that’s gonna be a much better way to "sculpt" PageRank than using nofollow.
Cutts on site architecture
What we’ve been saying from the beginning is don’t spend as much of your time on the PR sculpting aspect of it. Spend your time making good site architecture so that PageRank just flows wherever you want. That’s why we’ve been saying use it sparingly. Don’t use it for links you can’t vouch for. Don’t use it for user-generated content that you don’t necessarily trust. And this is all up on the HTML documentation page made for rel="nofollow”.
Cutts on nofollow use:
If you are a power user and there’s a specific page you don’t want like a sign up page or a login page, that’s a fine way to use nofollow.
For example if you look at mattcutts.com, the only thing I have nofollow on (I believe) is my subscribe link and that’s because it goes to an RSS feed, which is really not all that useful for the main web index. So for me personally, I tend not to use nofollow on my own internal links
Chris Crum contributed to this article.
 
Cutts Explains How Blogs Can Rank Higher In Google
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If you want your blog to do better in Google’s search results, Matt Cutts recommends WordPress. According to a presentation Google’s Webspam captain gave at WordCamp San Francisco, Word Press takes care of about 80-90 percent of SEO mechanics.
The presentation, which spans 50 pages, is available at Cutts’ blog in Google Docs or PowerPoint. Other than how WordPress helps automatically, Cutts gave tips about how to get a blog to rank better in Google. The two biggest ones are be relevant and be reputable.
Being Relevant
Some of this is voodoo and some of this technical, obviously. The big questions are necessary, equivalent to who am I? Why am I here? Cutts recommends asking yourself: “What do I love?” “What am I really good at doing?” What do I have to say?”
Once you’ve answered those questions and commit to exploring them via bloggery, there are some technical things for gaining relevance, like keyword relevance. Choose words users are likely to type, and include them naturally in blog posts. For example, a blogger can use name variations referring to the same device: usb drive, thumb drive, flash drive, pen drive.” Cutts recommends ALT attributes.
Also consider URL structure. WordPress default URL structure uses question marks and numbers, instead of day and name, month name, etc.. Cutts says these types of URLs improve aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility. For URL paths with keywords in them, Cutts says dashes (hyphens) are preferred over underscores to separate words, but no spaces between words is a bad idea (example.com/my-keywords).
Don’t overdo keywords in the text. Make sure they flow naturally. Otherwise, Google could bust you for keyword stuffing.
Being Reputable
Cutts recommends the following to boost a blogger’s reputation:
Be interesting
Update often
Find your niche
Provide a useful service
Do original research or reporting
Give great information
Live blog
Make lists
Create controversy
Meet people on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed
Other Useful Information
Google crawls in decreasing order of PageRank, which means if a site has a low PageRank, it will be crawled last, behind sites with higher ranking.
Cutts’ simplified definition of PageRank is “the number and importance of links pointing to a site.”
Cutts also recommends plug-ins he uses for his blog, which include Akismet (a comment spam catcher), Cookies for Comments (another comment spam catcher), Enforce www. Preference (301 redirects to no-www or yes-www preference for link building), Feedburner Feedsmith (for tracking subscribers), and WP Super Cache (for fast caching).
 
 
Blackhatters Hit Google, Twitter
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PandaLabs has identified thousands of links designed to target searchers looking for information on recently popular targets. With the goal of infecting unsuspecting victims with scareware, Twitter recently has also been bombarded with trending spam.
Blackhat SEOs targeting Google search results came to light this spring to redirect trusting users to scareware sites—sites falsely warning targets of viruses on their machine, offering fake system scans, promoting expensive fake anti-virus programs, and installing Trojans.
The cybercrooks were tremendously successful in manipulating Google’s search results by following trending topics on Google trends and dropping links into comment areas and forums all over the Web to boost a site’s authority.
PandaLabs discovered a reprisal of this success with scareware sites ranking at the top of Google’s search results for queries about YouTube videos about Microsoft’s Natal project. That’s a double whammy, a popular target on an incredibly popular website.
In fact, PandaLabs’ Sean-Paul Correll discovered 16,000 of these malicious links targeting YouTube queries. Another 10,000 targeted “France” as malware distributors sought to catch traffic related to the Air France plane crash. Targeting “Microsoft,” almost 9,000, “E3,” over 3,000, “Eminem,” about 3,000.
“The sites are all hosted via Lycos Tripod, which is a free web host,” writes Correll. “This allows the cyber criminals to create thousands of free sites to take advantage of the Blackhat SEO and then simply redirect the free sites to just a handful of their own servers.”
Focusing on trending topics and hot web properties has caused Twitter to become a target as well. Over the weekend, Twitter was hit with what is thought to be the first scareware distribution attack. It didn’t stop at the weekend, though. Scareware attacks continue through today as cybercrooks target trending topics.
Today, as the band Phish’s “PhishTube Broadcast” became listed to the side of the microblogging platform, cybercrooks spammed the topic via bogus accounts, taking advantage of URL shorteners to mask the destination site. According to PandaLabs, the links led to malware residing on PornTube.
Correll found that zombie accounts were posting hundreds of malicious tweets targeting popular topics like Conan O’Brien, E3, and Will Ferrell. Applications allowing people to automate their tweets makes spamming Twitter’s trending topics list incredibly easy.
Security company Finjan says this weekend’s attack invited Twitterers to click on a “best video” link leading to a scareware application hidden within what appeared to be a YouTube video. This triggered a second download of malware-infected PDF file.
 
 
Twitter Used For Mass Psychic Experiment
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If you’ve ever listened to late night AM radio standard “Coast To Coast AM,” you’ve likely heard Art Bell or George Norry talk about remote viewing—the practice of viewing geographic locations telepathically, once experimented with by the CIA and the KBG. Well, how about some remote tweeting?
A British academic specializing in scholarly paranormal investigations has already begun a grand experiment using Twitter. There will be four trials through to the end of the week testing whether the wisdom of the crowds can predict where Professor Richard Wiseman is.
During each stage of the experiment, Wiseman will go to a different location and Twitter users are invited to tweet thoughts about the things around him. Twenty minutes later, Wiseman will post five photos online, four of which are not where he is, and participants will vote on which location.
If collectively—his goal is 10,000 participants—the crowd guesses his location three out of four times, he says the event will support the existence of ESP.
The professor says Twitter’s realtime capabilities make it a perfect venue for conducting a mass experiment regarding remote viewing. Stage 1 is already finished, but Wiseman invites newcomers to give it a try tomorrow at 3 PM UK time.
As a side note, Wikipedia says Wiseman is known for conducting research on humor. Seeking the world’s funniest joke, the research found a 1951 classic to be the winner. It goes like this:
A couple of Mississippi hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: "Just take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says: "OK, now what?"
 
Tools And Tactics For Professional Tweeting
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Though a large percentage of created Twitter lay dormant—one study found 10 percent do 90 percent of the tweeting—that isn’t stopping aggressive and forward thinking marketers from squeezing every last drop of utility out of it. A pair of the top social media and search marketers in the country think the last thing a marketer should do is take Twitter lying down.
Coverage of SMX Advanced continues at WebProNews Videos. Stay with WebProNews for more updates and videos from the event this week.
Michael Gray
In fact, SMX Advanced Seattle speakers Michael Gray (Atlas Web Service) and Joanna Lord (TheOnlineBeat ) recommend marketers be so present on Twitter that they approach omnipresent. Advising as panelists for the Twitter Tactics & Search Marketing session, Lord and Gray think 14 million unique monthly visitors is incentive enough to tweet, retweet, and autotweet.
“Be helpful, be friendly, and be aggressive,” said Gray, who prefaced his presentation by saying all advice was from a commercial perspective and not a personal one, though there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong way to tweet. People are talking, asking questions, using Twitter as an information source. Marketers should reward their followers by helping out.
Joanna Lord
And of course, being aggressive by definition means not being a passive tweeter. “Retweet if you think the information is useful. It really helps people like you.” In addition Gray offered these tips:
Dig through other people’s follow lists to find people to initiate a relationship with by following them also. He recommends WebProNews’ Twellow, our Twitter yellow pages, to help with this process of finding people with expressed interest in the service or product you provide.
- Answer @replies when necessary.
- Use scheduled tweets whenever possible.
- Ask questions, take surveys, conduct polls.
- Look for every opportunity to automate your account.
- Keep it short and tweet: direct, relevant
- Tweet early, tweet often
- Ask for retweets
Aside from the large number of Twitter users, Joanna Lord finds marketing value in the site because it reaches all demographics on an international level. But because professional tweeting can be so time consuming, she also recommends automating the process. At the same time, she warns against overdoing it. “Spammers are the enemy, so don’t become one,” she said. “You love Twitter tools, but don’t one,” Lord finished.
Nonetheless she provided a rather extensive list of tools to consider:
- Tweetlater.com
- Futuretweets.com
- Tweetspinner.com
- Tweetmeme.com
- Backtweets.com
- Twitturly.com
- Twibs
- Twitterfeed
- Grouptweet
- CoTweet
- Twitterhawk
- Hootsuite
WebProNews Video anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this article.
Men Most Followed on Twitter
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Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, graduate students at Harvard Business School, examined a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users and discovered an interesting phenomenon. Though women outnumber men on the microblogging site, men have more followers and are twice as likely to follow a man than a woman.
Women make up 55 percent of Twitter users, according to the sample, and both sexes are likely to follow the same number of people. But it’s not exactly a classic boys-versus-girls or good-ole-boy scenario, however. Women are 25 percent more likely to follow a man than another woman.
Interestingly, though it’s been said women talk more than men and men use technology more than women, neither sex tweets more than the other, so aside from women outnumbering men on the site, it’s not a matter of message volume.
These results are rather baffling to the study’s authors. “These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks,” they write. “On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know.”
A few other interesting findings from the study:
- The median number of lifetime tweets per user is one.
- On average, over half tweet less than once every 74 days.
- The top 10% of Twitters produce 90% of the tweets.
 
