Friday, November 28, 2014

Are We Good at Twitter Yet?






@homeschoolcurr - connectthethoughts


VSC  FB 180K, TW 6.1K so 3.3%
T4L  FB 80K, TW 2.5K so 3.1%
Sonlight FB 21K, TW 542 so 2.5%
ABCya FB 25K, TW 5.8K so 23%

ErinKlein TW 43K
@AngelaMaiers 122K
lauracandler   FB 545K, TW 4K


The Plan
1. define goals
2. Have a pinned tweet
3. Use a twitter card
6. Post news multiple ways using buffer
7. Expand vision of market
8 pick big people to interact with....

- pick someone with big complementary following
- follow 300 at a time, request that they follow you

- see retweets and mentions and from whom
- which tags

twitters own analytics, where's that?


Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Efax - Who Owns the Phone Number?




And to you efax....Shit.

Saturday, November 15, 2014

Robocall Fraud





He hung up at that point.


Should I tell someone else?

Friday, October 31, 2014

Travel Bloggers: New Media Strikes Again!





Hotel Danieli - Best Breakfasts Ever

Arriving in Europe at the Crack of Dawn




Twitter: Getting Hands-On with Buffer

It's been awhile since I've gotten hands-on with first level marketing and first of all, I'm finding it fun, frustrating, and far-from frivolous.  Furthermore, for no real foundational reason, I'm become fixated on the letter "F".  Far out. OK, that's enough.

The metaphor that I use to understand Twitter is that it's a bit like radio.  If you want to make a splash, you think about putting up a Twitter campaign with Tweets going out regularly, many of which are repetitive or mild variations on the same.  And most of us don't really want to login and tweet many times a day so there are Twitter add-ons that allow you to schedule them.  Two leaders that I've heard about are and I'd heard that bufferapp was superior in that it allowed the embedding of images (not just the linking to them) so I signed up for Buffer.
Great Welcome Email from President Joel

Initial reaction to Buffer was fantastic. Slick modern UI and marketing which I found inspiring. In fact, I sent some of their welcome emails to my staff saying that we could take a lesson from his writing and graphical style.  I thought this was a pretty great free service and I wondered about how they would handle their effort to get me into their premium service, a business issue that we wrestle with daily.

Pretty quickly, I ran into a Buffer usage constraint. I could only put 10 tweets into my queue which, at four a day, means that I have to login ever two and a half days to put new tweets into my queue. So I put in my credit card and upgraded to their paid service.  $10/month.

When I back into the service, I found that my queue was still only 10 deep. I logged out, logged back in. Still just 10.  Switched browsers to see if it was stuck in my cache somewhere. Still 10. OK, not a simple bug, maybe that's the policy. I found their question section and asked them how much I have to pay to get more than 10 items in my queue.  The feedback process wasn't great.

When you submit the feedback, there's one somewhat unnecessary item that I guess is an effort by them to do their triage from them. It's pictured on the left.  A pulldown in which you rate the urgency of your query.  The problem is that it's too cute, not clear. I can tell what emergency means, it's high priority. But how does that compare to being stuck where nothing works?

After studying it for awhile, I decided that it was a hierarchy and that the least urgent was the top one and the most urgent was the bottom one.  But, I'm a believer in the "Don't Make Me Think" school of UI design and in this last, Not Urgent to Most Urgent would have served me better.

Worse, I didn't really get an answer. I did get an email, perhaps unrelated, that said that if I signed up for their affiliate program and someone actually signed up and paid them, I could get an extra item in my queue. That really pissed me.

So I've contacted them again and have asked the question, how much more do I have to pay to get a bigger queue. I've been through the service and it's very confusing. When I click on the page to upgrade your service, I see:

Awesome Plan. Which I think what I signed up for at $10 a month.  But then, on this page, it looks like they are marketing a higher end plan called the Awesome Plan which has a queue of 100. This is what I want.

But now I can't seem to figure out how much changing from my current plan, the unnamed plan, to the Awesome plan will cost. I've clicked around at some length and found lots of info on the benefits of the Awesome plan but no direct answer to the new monthly cost.   They keep directing me to a page that has three business plans which have all sorts of features in terms of number of users and unlimited accounts (see below) but I really can't seem to find any answer to the question of how to up my own queue to the 100 on this Awesome plan. GRRRRR.  But, I do sort of have an answer. For $50 a month, I can have an unlimited queue and all sorts of other stuff that I don't care about.  In any case, I've sent the Buffer people another feedback and we'll see if I can get an answer.

Update: Just got this tweet from bugger:

Hey there, John! I have a hunch our emails may not be making it through to you. Anything we can help with here? :)
Reviewed emails from Buffer. Nothing but standard autoresponder. Checked Spam folder. Bingo! Found email from Adam. TX 4 Follow up.
So stay tuned..... 

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Status and History of the

I should update the blogosphere on the status of the  

Blog Writing Course Logo 
Still Online, Not Active. Hibernating.

Carmen Edelson





Start by standing at attention.
1. Look Left while Blocking Left.
2. Punch Left.
3. Step Left while looking right.
4. Block Right while Blocking Right.
 etc. right up to number 50 or a hundred.









Black Belt Blogger was born! Still to come:



3.  Target an audience that would care

Me as a Student of the Black Belt Blogger Course




From there (outline of article still to be written):
- thrilling first educational  experiences in taking the course.
- commercial disaster
- repeat
- repeat

Morphing into



- thrilling educational experiences
- commercial disaster
- repeat
- innovate
- thrilling educational experiences
- commercial disaster
- repeat

- commercial disaster
- repeat
Mothballed it! 



Sunday, October 05, 2014

Amazon knows me better than Facebook or Google.

Who Knows You Best?

I just opened  Amazon to buy a book and I was astonished at the number and accuracy of the suggestions that they suggested to me. They seemed to have 1-2 books across all the areas that I like to read about.  It was incredible how accurate and intriguing their selections were.  And I bought a few more books.

Wife's Brand, Including Facebook Page
Facebook seems to have no idea what I want.  They keep allowing game invitations to make it to me although I routinely ignore or ban every game invitation.  And many  posts that my friends make that I would have loved  to  know about, I never see.  I am the manager on half a dozen Facebook pages and I love to read and comment on there but these posts never seem to make it into my feed. They force me to click through just to fine them.  .  And my wife's blog which I religiously comment on and like, they never seem to show me.

In contrast, Google seems to be clueless about what interests me and my history. I know this is apples and oranges but when I start to type into an email address bar, Google is as likely to suggest email addresses of people that I haven't mailed to for years as they are to suggest the people that I write to ten times a day.  And don't even get me started on the random collection of posts that make it into my Google Plus feed.

Youtube is a little better and making suggestions but their responses to searches are weird.  For instance, I like to track popular and interesting homeschool curriculum review videos but when  I search on Youtube for homeschooling, they give me a totally random collection of new and old, popular and not videos.  Why? Anybody know anything about how they make their choices?

The other social media that seems to get me in LinkedIn   Their suggestions of people are often enthralling and I find myself clicking through reading about people that I know or who I would like to know.

Friday, September 05, 2014

Youtube Search Marketing Algorithm

I continue to be confused and  intrigued by the mysteries of the Youtube search algorithm. How does it decide what to give. Here's some data, lets analse it. I'm going to a blank browser that I'm not logged into.  "home school."

Top Video in youtube search for "home school": What's the Youtube search algorithm doing?
Here's a summary of the top items, can anyone see a pattern? The full results is down below.
8M views, 1 year ago: 701K / month (approx)
55K views, 7 months ago 7.9K / month
806K views, 6 months ago 134K / month
99K views, 1 year ago 8.2K / month
102K views, 1 year ago, 8.5K / month
26K views, 2 days ago,   est at 396K /month (moving up as this number solidifies)
31K views, 10 months ago, 3K / month
77K views, 7 months ago, 11K / month
527K views, 6 months,   88K / month


Who is in the game for relevance? For this, I would have to search the tags, script, title, and so on related to each of the top 20 or so videos.

How do they get to the top of the Youtube search engine?
There's a certain thresh-hold of views per month or day to make the top?
I could do the math on each of these doing a per month view. Does it all have to do with momentum?
The top is determined not by overall history but recent trends?
Is there a random factor? How much does it shift at a given moment, over a week, two, a month?
Does relevance relate to position as part of popularity?  

My Home School Routine!
  • by SevenSuperGirls
  • 1 year ago
  • 701K / month (using 1 year)
13 year old Logan quits school and starts home schooling education system - TED

  • 7889 / month
  • by KittiesMama 
  • 6 months ago
  • 134K / month
Homeschool Room Tour Part 1
WHY I QUIT PUBLIC SCHOOL... (My Thoughts on Homeschooling) |BACK TO SCHOOL #2|
Homeschool, Rainbow Rocks and Doctor Who - Tangents Episode 1
Ron Paul, Home Schooling & Glenn Beck Discuss "The School Revolution" Broken Education System
Madison's Homeschool Routine

Public School vs Homeschool
  • by our2ndlife 
  • 6 months ago
  • 87,906K / month
10 Homeschool Morning Routine
11. Home School - A True Story (Part 1)
12 Public vs. Home School, Does the US Education System Dumb Kids Down or Help them Learn? Truth Talks
13 Video tour of our Homeschool Classroom
14 Our Home School Classroom
  • by Lady T
  • 3 years ago
15 The Whitest Kids U Know - Home School
  • 4 years ago
  • 20,443 /month
16 Homeschool Room Video Tour - part 1
17 2014-2015 Kindergarten Busy Boys Homeschool curriculum
  • by Erica Arndt
  • 6 months ago
  • 2398 / month
It's now been two months since I posted this so I should do the same search and compare the results.  I'm working from a similar study that I saw done at Learning Today, there was also a homeschool project down by some high schoolers on homeschool literature and how it placed in the search engines . 

Thursday, September 04, 2014

More Youtube Search Questions

Youtube Search.

 Is it personalized (ie, like the modern Google) or is it the same for everyone (like Google circa 2010)?

Let's test, I just typed in "spellingcity" to the youtube search bar on my account.  My account often does SpellingCity stuff.

1.  SpellingCity App, by ck tg, 1 year ago, 3,580 views
2.   Vocabulary SpellingCity - the channel.  Active 3 months ago - 103 videos
3.  Using Iprimary 5,528 views.
4.  SpellingCity glitches - 1,744 views
5.  Spelling City Premium Membership 1,011 views

OK, never mind the question of personalized or not, I've just done a series of searches and my new theory on Youtube's search principles:
1.   Recent
2.   Hot - Has some momentum

So one marketing program might be to pick some keywords that are of interest to us and frequently (every 2 months?), add a new one for the same terms. Perhaps put it on the same playlist as the previous one.

Also, given the vast number of views for little kids, we could do something really simple aimed towards little kids but heavily branded to VocabularySpellingCity.

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Youtube - My top Unanswered Search Questions

I'm a pretty big expert in online marketing and search marketing. I have ten years of practical experience and frequently attend sessions held by leading national experts. I consult with some of them.  Yet, there are some big questions about Youtube that nobody seems able to guide me on.

Youtube. Youtube is a huge search engine but I can't seem to find any info, even by original research, on how it works. My specific questions are in two categories. How does Youtube decide what video to suggest? And how does Youtube affect  Google's main search engine rankings?

 How does Youtube decide what video to suggest? 
1.  Which videos does it show in response to a search query?  How much is it like Facebook and does it tilt towards recently trending? How much does it operate like the traditional Google search engine and have a ranking that it mostly maintains?
2.   How does it categorize the content in videos? Does it rely on the keywords that we type in? The descriptions that the author puts in the "about"?  Or does it search it's own transcript of the audio content (as redacted by its own speech recognition software)? Does it look at other videos in the same playlists or by the same author?
3.  How does Google decide which videos to suggest at the end of a video? Does it look at other videos that might be in the same playlist?
4. What role does the number of started views and the number of completed views and the ratio of completed to started views play in these questions?
5.  Do links to a video increase the authority of a video's in its Youtube ranking? How about the number of times it is embedded?

Youtube as Content - What influence on the Google main search engine results? 
6.  What about the impact of outgoing links from Youtube? In the description section for a video on Youtube, there is a chance to link to another video or another site. Does Google count these links in ranking sites?
7.   If Google does count these links in the ranking, how does it grant authority to these links? Does it have to do with the number of views of the video?  Since the older the video, the more views, would it make sense for Google to weigh these links by views per month?

Sunday, August 10, 2014

Facebook's Advertising Strategy

I can discern over the last three years, three phases of their messaging to potential advertising clients.

2012-13.  Big focus on taking out display ads next to different targets. The emphasis was on competing with Google by having good cost per conversion.

2013-14.  Big focus on improving your company's Facebook page and getting more followers. We were encouraged to advertise our page to get more followers. Now, businesses have lots of followers but only 4% of them see the posts.

2014-forward.  The focus now seems to be on brand building on a mass market scale.  Much like TV, the emphasis in their marketing now seems to be on creating broad brand awareness in the market about the brand and its positioning which is an investment in longer term market development, not a short-term sales generation tool.

I wonder what's next....