8 ‘Rage Quit’ Videos Guaranteed To Make You Laugh [MUO Gaming]

I’m a gamer, and like all gamers I have particular tastes. I have adored some video games through the decades, and would count playing them as highly memorable experiences. I have also played some games I ended up hating, and have sought to force the memory of those to the back of my mind.

Video games can frustrate very easily. Whether because they’re too difficult, too annoying, or just generally bad. It’s at that stage we all, as gamers, have to make a choice: continue suffering through the pain and anguish or stop playing and throw the game out of the window. The latter is called rage quit. When the mental torture becomes so grave that the only solution is to stop playing immediately.

The following 8 videos are my favorite from a YouTube series titled simply ‘Rage Quit’. They all show a guy from the Rooster Teeth called Michael getting increasingly annoyed with, well, every video game he plays. All should be considered EXTREMELY NSFW.

We’ve all played at least one Sonic The Hedgehog game, right? i just hope for your sake the one you played came out in the 1990s. You know, when Sonic was actually good. Back then I preferred our spiky blue friend to Mario, who I never felt was all that super. The version prompting the rage quit here was released in 2006 on PS3 and Xbox 360. And sucked.

Arcade games are often the hardest games of all. The difficulty level makes up for the lack of a storyline or ‘campaign’ mode, which means it’s just level after level of increasingly demanding gameplay. N+ is no exception, with the player taking control of a ninja needing to navigate trap-laden arenas in which death waits around every corner. This rage quit comes courtesy of the Xbox Live Arcade version of the game.

Superman Returns was a pretty bad movie, and the video game based on it was nothing less than dire. Believe it or not this was released on the PS2 and Xbox, even though the graphics look more like they belong to a totally different generation of consoles. This is one of the shortest Rage Quit videos, but fittingly so. I wouldn’t have lasted long before bursting a blood vessel either.

The Impossible Game is, if not impossible then very, very difficult. No checkpoints mean frustration levels are high from beginning to end and back to the beginning again. The most amazing thing about this video is the number of attempts made at playing the game before we see him flipping out. I’m not sure I’d have tried even four times, let alone 4,000 times. You can try it out for yourself here.

Dark Souls is considered one of the most difficult games to grace modern consoles. For this reason alone it’s a game I have never played and will never play. Even if I hadn’t read the reviews warning me this wasn’t for the faint-hearted, this video would have put me off ever going near the game. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Game Over screen so many times in quick succession before. But ‘You Died’ is a subtle way of reminding you that you suck. At life.

No Luca No is a video game? I guess it just about qualifies. It’s sold on the Xbox Live Arcade after all. This is many people’s pick as the worst game available to play on your Xbox 360 right now, and this video won’t change anyone’s mind on that score. All you do in No Luca No is slap a cat away from your breakfast cereal. But simplicity doesn’t prevent frustration from setting in.

Bulletstorm stands alone on this list. It isn’t a bad game or an especially difficult game, the two categories all of the other titles featured here fit into. Unfortunately it is rather glitchy, and it’s one of those glitches that causes our friend here to rage quit. I really don’t blame him. It must be annoying to not know what you’re meant to do next and only have a teammate floating in midair to help you figure it out.

I’ve saved the best until last. QWOP is a simple game that’s almost impossible to master. The control method, which sees you pressing the Q,W,O, and P keys on your keyboard to make an athlete run, is really awkward. So much so that QWOP has a cult following. Rage Quit guy isn’t a fan. He just doesn’t have the patience. You may do though, and you can see for yourself by playing the game online right now.

If that selection of Rage Quit videos didn’t make you laugh then I don’t know what will, quite frankly. Perhaps you should cease and desist from calling yourself a gamer. OK, so that’s a little harsh. The point is these videos show an exaggerated version of a behavior all gamers have at one time or another exhibited. Mirror’s Edge was my white whale on this score.

Have you ever rage quit a game? If so, which one? Is there another Rage Quit video you have seen that you felt deserved inclusion on this list? As always we’d love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to let us know them in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Simon Lee

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Starting Points for Selling Your Print Book Through Your Blog

Earlier today we heard from Kevin Cullis, who’s successfully using his blog to support his self-published print book, How to Start a Business: Mac Version.

As print publishing evolves, we’re seeing more and more bloggers release printed books—either themselves or through established publishing houses, like I did.

This is an interesting thrust for blogging. When ereaders first hit the virtual shelves, more than a few people said that print was dead. Years later, we can see that those predictions haven’t—and won’t—come true any time soon.

A print book can help you grow your blog’s audience and build your profile as an expert authority within your niche.

It can open you up to new opportunities—like public speaking, joint ventures, and so on.

And it can take your blogging career in entirely new directions.

Of course, a print book can grow your income both in and of itself, and through your blog.

Have you considered writing a print book? What’s stopping you? Let us know what you think about this blogging business model in the comments.

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The Barnum & Bailey Guide to Internet Marketing

This guest post is by Steven A. Lowe of Innovator Consulting and Custom Software Development.

“There’s a sucker born every minute.”—P. T. Barnum *Note.

“They apparently all have Internet access.”—S. A. Lowe

Rubix D. Newby—Rube to his friends—left the family farm to strike it rich in the Big City. On the road he happened upon a garish collection of tents and lights.

A circus!

But not just any old circus, this was the famous Internet Marketing Circus. He scurried towards the gate. Fishing in his pocket, he wondered if he had enough money to get inside.

An old man by the gate whispered “No money required to get in, son, but best keep a hand in your pocket anyway.” The T-shirt he was wearing was faded and barely legible. “The Secret is Free,” it said.

The barker in front of the gate was wearing a black tuxedo with tails and a top hat. The top hat jiggled back and forth as the barker shouted into a megaphone.

“Step right up folks, and be amazed!” he cried. “Ladies, and gentlemen, young and old, draw near and listen as the story unfolds! Opportunities for riches beyond your wildest dreams await you online through Internet Marketing schemes! So step inside, where gurus and ninjas await! With secrets and contraptions that will never abate! With these treasures and tricks you can build a fortune online! No effort! No labor! All in your spare time!”

The barker pointed his megaphone right at Rube. “The sky’s the limit on how much money you earn, but what is the limit on the time you can burn? So step right up, and go on in, it’s not MLM so you don’t even need to bring a friend!”

Rube flowed with the crowd through the gate, mesmerized by the bouquet of booths, tents, rides, barkers, hawkers, carnies, signs, lights, sounds, smells, and promises inside. “Where to begin!?” he thought.

While Rube was gawking at the spectacle, a furtive young man dressed all in black and wearing a strange sword caught his attention. “Psst!” said the young man, “Have I got a deal for you!”

“Oh?” said Rube. “What is it?”

“Why, it’s a push-button cash machine niche site generator!” he said.

“Oh?” said Rube. “What good is that?”

“What good is it?” asked the man. “Why, it’s my own secret ninja guru formula and system guaranteed to bring you unlimited cash flow, practically overnight!”

“How interesting,” said Rube. “What do I have to do to make it work?”

“That’s the beauty of it!” said the man. “You just pick a niche by following my simple yet comprehensive formula, using a few tools that I conveniently provide for a small fee, then just push a button to automagically generate a web site that starts making you money instantly! And for a limited time, I am willing to sell this to you and only you for $97!”

Rube knew he didn’t have $97. “Not interested,” he said, and started to walk away.

“Wait!” the man said. “Just because I like you and don’t want you to miss out on this spectacular opportunity, you can have it for $7!”

Rube stepped in something. “Must be elephants around here,” he thought.

Rube laughed. “Mister, if I had a magic cash machine I wouldn’t sell it for any price, I’d just push that button over and over and over!”

The man suddenly vanished into the crowd. Rube had a sneaking suspicion and reached into his pocket. One of his dollars had gone missing.

“What a strange fellow,” thought Rube, wiping off his shoes in the straw.

Rube noticed a crowd gathering around a man wearing a suit covered in neon dollar signs, gesturing at a large circular device. He shook the straw off of his feet and shuffled over to the back of the crowd.

“Article marketing is the true secret sauce for building authority!” the man shouted through a megaphone. “A thousand articles on ten thousand sites and you’ll be an authority practically overnight!”

“That sounds like a lot of work,” Rube yelled over everyone’s heads.

“Ah, my friend,” replied the man, pushing through the crowd, “ordinarily it would be!” He draped one arm around Rube’s shoulders, and steered him towards the strange device. “But not if you have this magical Spinner! Care to give it a try? Five spins for a dollar! Lifetime use for only $97! Step up and speak a few words into the magic funnel.”

“Well, okay, I’ll try it,” said Rube. He gave the man a dollar, and considered what to say. “The effect is amazing!” he said.

The machine whirred and spun and spouted great gouts of flame and billows of smoke, then intoned “The outcome is astounding!” “The consequence is impressive!” “Extraordinary is the result!” “Amazed by the effect, you will be!” “Become awestruck by substantial ramifications!”

The spinning and the smoke made Rube a bit nauseous. He was glad he only paid for five spins, as they were starting to sound rather silly.

Rube thanked the man and wandered away. Soon he noticed another barker in front of a dark tent. The man was dressed up like a spider.

“Master the web! Feel important! Instant authority!” hollered the spider-barker. “Superstar rankings! Fully automated mega backlink generation!” he continued.

Rube still felt a bit ill from the spinning, and was becoming somewhat disenchanted with the circus. But, he still had one dollar. “Surely one of these things has got to work,” he thought.

“I could use some instant authority,” said Rube, and handed the spider-barker his last dollar.

“Excellent choice, son,” said the barker. “Nothing builds authority faster than a thousand carefully-chosen backlinks! Just take the lighted path to the center of the tent, and prepare to be amazed!”

Rube stepped through the entry way and followed a dimly-lit path to the center of the tent. A spotlight snapped on as he stepped up on a small pedestal.

“Speak your mind, and let your authority be recognized!” intoned a disembodied voice.

Rube thought for a moment, and then said, “Farming is hard work!”

A fanfare of music swelled, and the lights started to rise. Rube saw that he was surrounded by bleachers, but they were empty.

As the illumination increased, Rube heard the screech of rusty gears, and noticed an odd bellows-like machine at the top of the tent. “Commencing generation of massive authority-building backlinks!” shouted the voice. The machine sprayed something onto the bleachers with a loud Hroof! and a Hurrrm!

Now the bleachers were no longer empty, but were covered in …ants! There were thousands of them, arrayed around him in neat concentric circles.

As the lights reached full glare, the screeching stopped and all was quiet. Suddenly, all of the ants pointed at him and whispered, “Farming is hard work!”

This did make Rube feel important—for a moment. “But they are just ants,” he thought. “And they seem to be dead.” He was very disappointed, and headed directly for the exit. He crunched over a few hundred ants on the way out.

“This circus is not fun,” Rube thought. “And now I’m broke. Might as well go back to the farm.” He dejectedly shuffled back towards the gate.

“I guess I’m not cut out for this Internet Marketing thing,’ he ruminated. “It’s too complicated, and costs too much money—and seems to be run by some very strange people!”

Lost in thought, he stumbled into a sign that had only two words: “Simple Truth.” The sign was in front of a plain table with two chairs. Sitting in one of the chairs was the old man from the gate, except now his T-shirt read: “There is no ninja sauce”. The old man gestured at Rube to take a seat.

“I got no more dollars,” Rube told the old man.

“Don’t need ‘em,” he replied.

“Then what do you want?” asked Rube.

“I want you to succeed,” he said. “Have a seat.”

Rube sat. The old man continued, “So, your money’s gone, is it? Went broke fast trying to get rich quick, eh?”

“Yeah. I guess I don’t understand this stuff; best give up,” Rube said.

“There is another way,” the old man said. “It’s not flashy, it’s not sexy, it’s not overnight, and it’s not a fully-automated push-button solution guaranteed to bring you loads of cash on autopilot while you sleep for only $97 per month. But it always works, and it costs nothing but time—and motivation. Oh sure, you can accelerate the process some if you spend wisely, but the knowledge and tools are essentially free.”

“What is it?” asked Rube.

The old man chuckled. “It’s called ‘Getting Educated’. Learn the fundamentals. Internet marketing is not about tricks and gimmicks, it’s about serving people. It’s about relating to prospects and customers online the same way you would relate to them in person. That means finding them, listening to them, and caring about them. That means creating the most valuable content or product that you can, tracking and refining your methods, and never stopping learning. It’s about real marketing, not trickery. And it works every time.”

“Where do I go to do that?” asked Rube.

“Well, there are a few good places, and in time you should visit them all,” he said. “I suggest learning about blogging, especially content marketing, then perhaps social media, how search engines work, and copywriting, for starters.”

“But wouldn’t these whizz-bang doohickeys be faster and easier?” asked Rube.

“If they actually worked, they might be,” the old man said. “If they added value instead of noise, they might be. If they solved problems for people instead of gaming the system, they might be. If they provided lasting value instead of temporary gimmicks, they might be. Now, suppose you bought one, and that it worked for a while and then stopped; how would you fix it?”

“I don’t know,” replied Rube.

“That’s right. You wouldn’t know how to fix it. And if it didn’t work to start with, you wouldn’t know why. So you would be depending entirely on something you don’t understand, that may be of dubious construction and quality. Does that sound like a good business model?”

“Well, no,” said Rube, “of course not.”

“Right,” said the old man. “You’ve got to learn to earn. You got to give to get. That’s the way of the world. The Internet is no different.”

“Okay, I’ll give it a try!” said Rube.

“You do that,” the old man said. “And remember what you learned on the farm—prepare the soil, plant the seeds, tend the crops, and be patient. You can only reap what you sow, you know.”

Rube stood up to leave. “Thank you. Anything else I should keep in mind?” he asked.

“Yes,” the old man said, and handed Rube a tattered card. It read:

Rube put the card in his pocket, and found he was once again alone on the road to the Big City. But now he walked on with a confident smile.

Steven A. Lowe knows 101 Ways to Land More Business Using Landing Pages. When he’s not studying marketing and copywriting or reading problogger.net, he runs Innovator LLC, which specializes in innovative consulting and custom software development.

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Virtualization Versus a Private Cloud

Since the mid 2000s one of the prevailing trends in the IT world has been to move networks, data, operating systems and servers into an environment where they are not tied to a specific piece of hardware.

In the early days the emphasis was on virtualisation. Organisations concentrated on increasing the number of servers on one machine using a hypervisor program with the activities kept in-house.

More recently there has been an emphasis on cloud computing, with more functions passing into the hands of a third party. The latter includes the option for a private cloud, dedicated to one enterprise.

Virtualisation and private cloud strategies are sometimes confused, not helped by the varying definitions.

The strongest distinction is that virtualised technology is a fixture of an IT estate while cloud computing is offered as an on-demand service, for platform, infrastructure or software, available on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Cloud is currently drawing more attention, with the government opening the Cloudstore for the public sector and a stream of big deals in the private sector, recent examples being at Deloitte and Proctor & Gamble.

But there is still a steady, if more low key, move to virtualised environments, with recent deals for organisations such as Thames Water and Medway NHS Trust. Also, Forrester has recently predicted a rise in demand for data virtualisation technology.

As organisations consider which route to take they have to look closely at which is better to meet their business needs.

This can be difficult, not least because both are often described in language which bears little relation to business processes, but there are a number of factors that should be taken into account.

Costs offset

Cost is the most obvious. It will be higher for virtualisation as it involves a considerable amount of work in setting-up and customising, while the provider of a cloud service has already borne these costs.

The latter also provides the scope for efficiency savings through the utility computing model, in which the customer only pays for what they use; but if the service is heavily used the costs can increase and begin to offset the initial savings.

This is unlikely to be the case for many organisations, but there are times when it is cheaper to own the asset.

Virtualisation can provide clear advantages if an organisation needs a high degree of control. Keeping operations within its own data centre can make it easier to manage and make changes to its IT environment, providing more flexibility.

This can be important if it runs a number of specialised applications that have to be tailored to the platform, and if it wants to respond to changes in the use of technology.

It could also be a significant factor for organisations that are increasing their use of remote technology or adopting a BYOD policy.

Greater control is also relevant to the concerns around data security.

There is no doubt that cloud providers take the issue very seriously, and they will offer service level agreements that provide strong guarantees on the integrity of the data they hold.

But the more sensitive the data the greater the anxieties and some organisations will get more assurance from holding it in their own facilities, where their own people are in charge day to day.

The control can also provide more assurance around the management of risk around legal and regulatory issues.

Downtime factors

Reliability is also the subject of a debate that is difficult to settle. In a virtualised environment the loss of the network connection can cut access to multiple servers; but there could be a similar problem for a cloud set-up of the wide area network link goes down.

But there is a case for stating that the cloud offers greater resilience in the event of a problem, with the provider likely to have more options for using multiple servers or shifting to other data centres.

In addition, there will usually be more scalability in the cloud, with the scope for a rapidly expanding business to increase its data holdings and processing capacity without the time and cost of a big in-house investment.

This aligns with the flexibility that comes with the short term deals offered by cloud providers, sometimes with commitments of months rather than years, to make it responsive to what the customer needs.

But the fanfare around cloud computing should not distract from the case for virtualisation. Overall it's not clear cut, and depends on a series of value judgements determined by the nature and circumstances of the organisation's business.

Virtualisation is sometimes described as a component that can provide a step towards the adoption of a private cloud.

But some enterprises may want to pause when they have taken that step and see if it has given them everything they need.

David Clarke, MBE is CEO of the BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT

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Cost of Protecting U.S. Classified Data Doubles Over 10 Years

The U.S. government -- minus key spy operations -- spent $11.36 billion to protect classified data in 2011, according to the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO)

The number has increased substantially over the past decade, from $4.7 billion in 2001, the agency said.

The ISOO report comes from its compilation of cost estimates provided by 41 executive branch agencies, including the U.S. Department of Defense.

The report doesn't include cost estimates from the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other secret spy agencies.

The ISOO reports to the White House and oversees the implementation of a government-wide security classification system for protecting sensitive and classified data.

Each year, the ISSO collects estimates from federal agencies on how much they spent on personnel, physical controls and IT systems to protect classified data. The estimates also include training costs and salaries for those involved in classifying and declassifying data.

The ISOO's latest report shows that the agencies spent about 12%, or about $1.2 billion, more on security classification in 2011 that the previous year.

The biggest costs increases were associated with IT systems and training.

Spending on information security controls for classified data jumped 19% from $5.21 billion in 2010 to $6.18 billion in 2011. Costs for professional education, training and awareness rose from $102 million in 2010 to $502 million last year.

The 2011 figures reflect a steep increase in security classification costs since the terrorist attacks of Sept., 2001, much of it for counterterrorism programs and an increased focus on preventing Wikileaks-type hacks into government systems.

For instance, President Barack Obama last October issued an executive order directing federal agencies to implement new measures to limit access to classified networks and data. The order required the heads of all federal agencies to appoint a senior official to oversee the protection of classified data security and required agencies to put in place insider threat-detection and prevention programs.

Obama issued a similar executive order in late 2009 that directed federal agencies to adopt uniform standards for classifying, declassifying and protecting national security information including that related to counter-terrorism operations.

Such directives, and fears of data leaks -- such as those related to the Stuxnet attacks that have dogged the Obama administration -- have considerably heightened attention on better protecting classified data.

John Pescatore, an analyst at Gartner, said the ISOO spending report reflects several trends.

"Quite often in the past, government agencies have gotten bad publicity when individually unclassified bits of information were made public [and led to] huge headlines," Pescatore said. Therefore, there's a natural tendency to sometimes over-classify data within government agencies, he said.

There is also a tendency by government agencies to overestimate the cost of protecting classified data, Pescatore said.

Government agencies at times also underestimates the risks and costs associated with not classifying data properly, Pescatore said.

"When the Web first reached government use, many government agencies put unclassified floor plans, phone lists [and other data] on their websites," he said. "When it was pointed out that this made it much easier for terrorists to plan, they had to remove all that," resulting in some very real, but often, underestimated costs, he said.

"So, I think there is perennial overhype about over-classification and perennial denial about the real need for "need to know" controls," for accessing classified data, he said.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at @jaivijayan, or subscribe to Jaikumar's RSS feed . His e-mail address is jvijayan@computerworld.com.

Read more about government/industries in Computerworld's Government/Industries Topic Center.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright © 2011 Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved.

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Apple Preps 7-inch iPad to Battle Nexus 7, Kindle Fire: Report

Fresh reports that Apple is prepping a launch of a 7- or 8-inch version of its' iPad have surfaced once again. Claims, from the Bloomberg news agency, come about a week after Google launched a $200 7-inch tablet, the Nexus 7. Apple's smaller iPad, nicknamed by Apple watchers as the iPad Mini, would launch in October and sell for around $200 just like Google's new device and Amazon's Kindle Fire. To help it hit that low price, the purported iPad Mini would come without the current iPad's popular high definition Retina display, according to Bloomberg.

It's not clear if the rumored iPad Mini would lack any other hardware features of the standard iPad such as an LTE radio or front- and rear-facing cameras. It's also unknown if a smaller iPad would have less storage, say 8GB, compared to the 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB versions of the current iPad.

Several months ago the idea of Apple launching an iPad Mini seemed unlikely. But that was before Google released the Nexus 7 and Microsoft announced its own brand of Windows 8-based tablets called Surface set to hit store shelves later in 2012.

Apple is still the market leader for tablets by a mile. But with new tablets coming from Apple's main rivals and a trend towards offering bargain basement tablets Apple may be feeling the pressure to answer the competition. In addition to the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire, other cheap tablets include Lenovo's Android-based IdeaPad A1, Barnes & Noble's Nook tablet, and even the 16GB BlackBerry PlayBook.

There are also indications that an iPad Mini would be a popular choice for many people. A recent survey of more than 2,000 online consumers by PriceGrabber found that 52 percent of those surveyed said they would look at buying an iPad Mini.

But Apple has said publicly that 7-inch tablets are a bad idea. In late 2010 then-CEO Steve Jobs said 7-inch screen sizes were not sufficiently large enough to build great tablet apps. However, the recently deceased Apple co-founder was also famous for disparaging products right before Apple got into the business or offered a similar product as it did with video iPods, mobile phones and e-books.

So will Apple offer an iPad Mini later this year? It's certain looks more likely in July than it did a few months ago. But speculation about a smaller iPad has circulated before including in 2010 and 2011, and an iPad Mini never appeared following those claims. This time reports about a smaller iPad are also starting to build up. Bloomberg's report follows a similar claim from iMore in May and further iPad Mini rumors may appear the closer we get to October.

Given this rumor's past popularity, multiple reports can hardly count as a guarantee we'll see a smaller iPad later this year, but an iPad Mini launch certain feels like a stronger possibility than ever.

Connect with Ian Paul (@ianpaul) on Twitter andGoogle+, and with Today@PCWorld on Twitter for the latest tech news and analysis.

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A Few Takeaways from the Big Boulder Conference on Social Media Data

Last week I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the Big Boulder conference put on by GNIP in Boulder, Colorado.  Around 200 attendees joined together in the St. Julien Hotel to attend what was billed as the world's first social media data conference. GNIP, a company focused on aggregating and providing social data, assembled a great lineup of speakers, the majority of whom provide or consume social data. I enjoyed the conference and took the opportunity to learn more about social data that is now available to consumers, hear about the creative ways people are using such data, meet some great minds in the social media space, and enjoy the great food, beautiful scenery, sunny weather, and friendly vibes that are hallmarks of Boulder.

The Big Boulder presentations were mostly in a Q&A format with a few panels mixed in. I've pulled together some of the key themes that I observed from the sessions to share in this post. GNIP also posted some detailed summaries of the presentations on their blog. If anyone who attended or presented at the conference sees anything that needs to be added, please let me know!

Folks from Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook all presented at the conference in some form. All noted that they are continuing to develop their APIs to provide better access to their huge data sets, though there weren't any big announcement of specific new capabilities. 

Twitter confirmed its intention to continue sharing data from their firehose through a limited set of partners in all but a small number of cases where customers have unique needs. Their rationale for limiting access is that the vast quantity of data that comes through the firehose is too expensive for most companies to consume, store, and parse. It makes more sense for them to work through third parties who can help provide only the most relevant data to businesses looking for that data. They were asked whether they would be providing a location-based API, but they have no short-term plans to do so. They say that currently only 4% of Tweets are geocoded.

Facebook provides API access to a lot of valuable data, and states that they want to provide realtime insights to businesses. Howeve, they do not yet offer a firehose like Twitter. When asked about making more data from their social graph available, they noted that the biggest challenges they face are with managing privacy and in balancing syndication with standardization. If the language and methods for measurement are all different between sources, it gets hard for everyone to understand what the data means. Facebook said that they are looking for ideas from the community for new data to offer and some great use cases to show how it would be valuable.

LinkedIn didn't talk much about their API specifically, but presented interesting insights and use cases about how they are using that data to drive their business forward. I'll share a few of these insights  later on.

A good percentage of the presentations at Big Boulder were from companies that are providing data that is social, but perhaps not from the traditional companies that come to mind when you think of social media data. Some were blog platforms, like Wordpress.com and Tumblr. Others were blog commenting platforms like Disqus, or forum-based like Vanilla Forums and Get Satisfaction. Formspring provides a forum for general discussions around specific questions, and GetGlue is a rich community and check-in service centered on TV, movies, and books. StockTwits was another, which curates stock data from Twitter and provides a layer of social information to inform investors beyond just the traditional data.

I was seriously impressed by the volume and variety of interesting data that is being collected, curated, and shared via APIs. 

A fascinating panel discussion brought together Zach Hofer-Shall (Forrester Research), Susan Etlinger (Altimeter Group), Nathan Gilliatt (Social Target), and Shawn Rogers (Enterprise Management Associates) to discuss emerging trends in analyzing social data. They discussed the challenges of integrating social data into enterprise organizations. 

The four panelists were in agreement on the majority of topics disucssed. The first is that social media data is most frequently brought into organizations by PR folks, but hardly used to its full extent, as PR is usually not focused on detailed quantitative analysis. It's used more at surface level to catch and engage with positive and negative press and to do "damage control". 

Another barrier discussed is that social data has not yet been integrated with BI teams at enterprises where the focus is mostly web analytics. At the enterprise level, there are challenges not just with siloed organizations, but siloed data. There a lots of different roles that benefit from social data insights and each has a different context. Integrating that data and offering it in ways that provide the most useful insights to those who need it is a challenge that plenty of companies have yet to surmount. 

The panelists also agreed that one of the biggest challenges with getting value out of social media software is not necessarily with analytics to understand how the data relates to a business, but rather in existing software's abilities to provide actionable insights. Though there are some pieces of this out there, the panel saw a lot of opportunity for social analytics software to really step up in this space. 

There were a few insights that were shared throughout presentations, including:

From Martin Remy at Automatic (which runs Wordpress.com)

Fashion bloggers are the most "chatty." Baseball, religion, and politics are also high on the chatty list. At the bottom of the list, interestingly, are advertising and social media. Tech falls in the middleTurkish speakers are most conversational, followed closely by Hebrew. Japanese and Korean speakers are some of the least chatty. 

From Yael Garten, Data Scientist at LinkedIn

Yael shared a chart of growing vs. shrinking industries. Unsurprisingly, the newspapers industry shrinking most. The renewable industry was the fastest growing (by a bigger margin than I would have guessed).She shared a test of a hypotheses that people would be leaving the banking industry after the financial crisis. This turned out not to be the case. Lots of people left the banks at that time, but mostly ended up moving to different banks rather than finding new fields.We also learned that male CEO names tended to be short (or shortened), approachable, 1-sylable names, while female CEOs tended to have more classic names multi-syllable names. Short names were even more popular in sales, with names like Chip or Trey.

Spam in social data has become even more of an issue with people paying for data feeds. For example, if you are paying by the tweet for your Twitter data, you don't want to pay for the spammy tweets.

Given that notion, Twitter is working hard on combatting spam and noted that their spam team has grown to be one of the biggest teams at the company. Twitter combats spam through initial filtering, which would keep it out of the firehose feed, though they can't catch everything that way without risking pulling legitimate content, too. Therefore, some spam gets through the system initially and is pulled after the fact.

Ken Little, Director of Engineering for Tumblr, also talked about spam being a big priority. They try and shut down spammy looking registrations right out of the gate. Tumblr uses a simple 3rd party content analysis to identify some spam and have been are developing an in-house system that identifies spammy accounts based on behavioral analysis. Some people just don't use their accounts in ways consistent with your average human.

For most businesses, verification of the content and source of social data is important, but not critical. In one panel discussion, however, we learned about some fascinating uses of social data for the public interest that are providing insights, but struggle with the verification of social data sources.

Moeed Ahmad, Head of New Media at Al Jazeera Media Network, talked a fair bit about the challenges and need for data verification, especially for his news organization. Al Jazeera's charter is to provide voices to the voiceless. This proves a challenge in the regions they traditionally report on most, where media is generally state-run. Social media has proven to be a great way to hear directly from the the people and surface amazing stories and viewpoints that might never have been heard otherwise. The challenge with this, as with in any reporting, is to ensure that the information shared is correct and can be verified. To try and manage this, Al Jazeera Media added procedures to the usage of social data in reporting. This change was largely an issue of verifying as much as possible and setting context in the report itself. Conversely, Moeed talked also about using social channels for verification of information. He spoke of a particularly gruesome video that had been sent to Al Jazeera showing what was reported to be a recent atrocity. Unable to verify the video and story, he posted it on Twitter and quickly found out that the video was 3 years old, and was actually from a totally different country than suggested by the person who had submitted it. 

Katie Baucom, Geospatial Analyst at the Geospatial Intelligence Agency, has been working to use social data to aid in disaster response and in assessing the damage done by natural disasters. Her organization is traditionally focused only on satellite imagery, but can receive social data and photos far faster than the satellite images can be processed. Their process seems like an incredibly powerful use of social data, but verification of authenticity and location is critical in their context. They need to ensure that they are providing accurate data to ensure that disaster response is applied first where it is needed most. 

Rumi Chunara, instructor at Harvard Medical School, works on a project called Healthmap, which  seeks to discover and track the spread of infectious diseases in real-time using as many data sources as possible. Her challenge in this is determining fact from rumor in Tweets. To help solve this issue, they've been comparing information from social sources against trusted data from doctors on the ground. Her team is hoping to compare where the differences lie and model how they might be more accurately predictive using the social data. She also noted that Google Trends has been a great tool in finding outbreaks. For instance, when the flu hits an area, the searches for flu symptoms in certain geos increases noticeably.

We heard this topic discussed from a good number of people in the blog, forum, and commenting space. One panel focused specifically on how people engage online. A rule of thumb that was generally substantiated was the 90-9-1 rule. 90% of blog or forum readers are passive lurkers, 9% engage lightly, and  1% of the readers create most of the content. Everyone in the panel seemed to agree that making light social engagements, such as likes, or thumbs up, or even smiley faces easy to engage with is the path toward starting to draw in more of that 90%. One of the reasons this is so important, beyond further engaging the readership, is that it further engages the bloggers, who in turn write more content.

Brad Feld of Foundry Group led off day 2 of the conference with a quick talk about why Boulder has a thriving startup scene and shared his thoughts about principles to build an entrepreneurial community. His four points for a successful community are: 

The community must be lead by entrepreneurs. The community must take a long-term view. There will be good and bad times for business and entrepreneurship, so you need to take a look at the last 20 years to see the bigger future trends. Your community must be inclusive of anyone that wants to engage in the startup community in any way. There must be institutions that engage the entire stack of the startup community. TechStars and Startup Weekend are two great examples of this as they help bring mentorship, investors, and teachers together with entrepreneurs. 

Beyond putting on a great conference and pulling together some fascinating people, GNIP sought to show off their hometown of Boulder, Colorado. They definitely succeeded, starting with the conference hotel. We stayed at the St. Julien Hotel and Spa right off of Pearl Street where we enjoyed the great food and drink in the walkable neighborhood, and were amazed at the throngs of students, profs, techies, families, and aging hippies all hanging out late on a school night. 

To show how outdoorsy Boulder is, GNIP lined up a bunch of 'healthy' events for us to enjoy while there. Unfortunately I missed the morning yoga sessions at 6AM and a hike planned out at 6:30AM as sleep won out. However, Jamie and I made it out for the biking pub crawl after the close of the conference. GNIP sprung for a bunch of bikes from a local rental service that allows you to pickup bikes from standing bike racks and return them to any of their racks around the city when you are done. We all converged on a row of bikes just outside the hotel and cruised around the area, looking cool with our bright red bikes with big baskets on front. After a few pints and biking in 90+ degree heat, we were all feeling fine. A fun and unique way to close out a fun and uniqe conference.

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Headsmacking Tip #21: Write Better Headlines Than Anyone Else

This tactic is so simple and obvious, it's probably illegal somewhere.

Every day, the web produces millions of pieces of content. Several thousand are almost certainly of interest to folks in your niche - those who might be reading your blog or sharing the content you produce. Creating unique stories requires creativity, research and time that many in the field don't have. But... writing the best piece, or even just a decent piece of content about an interesting topic and giving it a fantastic headline? Well, let's just say there's no such thing as a free lunch, but this one costs just pennies.

Here's how it works:

Step 1: Get Informed

Follow the right accounts of Twitter for your niche (those that share a lot of good stuff)Set up some smart Google Alerts (particularly "news" and "blog" alerts)Subsrcibe to Google News' subsections if there's an appropriate oneUse aggregation services like Reddit's subreddits, PopURLs, Topsy, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Metafilter, Alltop, etc.

E.g. The other day I found a research paper from Cambridge (via Reddit) on how negative thinking adversely impacts problem-solving ability.

Step 2: Choose the Best Pieces Each Day/Week

Find stories that have high overlap with your audience's interestsDon't exclude things that aren't "on topic!" Your goal isn't to only talk about your exact niche; it's to provide value to those who might be potential customers (big difference, probably deserving of its own blog post and illustration at some point)

E.g. That research paper had been written up in some small press pieces (as seen via this Google News query), but had yet to receive any major writeups, suggesting it's a perfect target.

Step 3: Rewrite the Headline Phenomenally Well

Get two solid writers in a room and have them brainstorm 10 ideas and angles for the headlineHave those two folks hash through and come up with the top threeShare with a wider group and get feedback about which will earn a clickOR if you have time, you can A/B test by sending an email to a small group with click tracking on each one and see which performs best (make sure to control for or randomize position in the email, as the first link often gets the click)

E.g. "Stay Away from Negative Thoughts to Improve Problem-Solving Ability" could be transformed into headlines like "Scientific research suggests haters really are harming your productivity," or "Is distraction a better problem-solving technique than deep thought?"

Step 4: Cover the Story from Your Angle

Relate the story back to your audience, but cover it accurately and be sure to cite your sources (linking out to these folks can have positive benefits all its own from trackbacks, traffic driven, future reciprocity, etc)Include a graphic or image if at all possible (but stay far, far away from most stock imagery)If possible, gather input from folks in your field via social channels or email; a few well-placed quotes can help the reach get wider and creates incentivized sharers

E.g. If I were writing for the marketing world, I might take an angle focusing on what gets marketers stuck in ruts, provide suggestions for distraction and draw on some of my own experiences (like those frequent ideas in the shower moments).

Many folks will presume this only works for news-focused sites or news-focused content. False! You can relate news and events to nearly anything you desire and make it function with the brand and voice you're trying to craft. E.g. "How the Facebook IPO Will Change Commuting Patterns in the Bay Area," "Will Rising Sea Levels Affect Your Favorite Beach Getaway?" "Dental Implants May Be a Thing of the Past Thanks to Gene Therapy," "The Privatization of Space Flight Will Come at a Cost for Floridian Home Owners." I'm not suggesting any of these are particularly excellent, but hopefully you can imagine how to extend the concept of headline-writing into your field.

p.s. If you're looking for some headline advice, I particularly liked this piece on Why Gawker's Writing Better Headlines Than the Rest of the Web and this section on Copyblogger.

Oh - and don't miss Dan Shure's excellent "Are Your Titles Irresistably Click-Worthy & Viral?"

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Getting Started with Guest Posting - Whiteboard Friday

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, I am going to be walking through how to get started guest blogging. There are plenty of articles all over the web that go into the finer details of guest blogging, but let's step back for a second and really talk about how to get started.

From getting into the guest blogging mindset to building up your list of guest blogging opportunities, we'll cover this topic from a top down approach.

Happy Friday everyone! Please leave your own ideas and advice in the comments below too.

Hi, I'm Eric Enge with Stone Temple Consulting. I'm here at SEOmoz to do a Whiteboard Friday today. We're a 25 person online marketing company that does consulting services for various people through the industry. What I actually want to talk about is how you get started with guest posting. There's a lot that goes into it, and there have been some great articles on SEOmoz that really get into the details of some of the aspects of it. But I want to step back and take you from the top down to help you get started.

The first thing I want you to think about is the mindset. The mindset is really important. There's a lot of stuff out there, guest blogging services that offer you all kinds of "sounds almost too good to be true" type options. The reality is, for the most part, they are too good to be true. Done well and done right, this is hard work, but it can bring really good returns. What I'm going to do today, I'm really going to focus on the high-
end approach to guest posting and how you get posts that are really brand building in nature. So let's dig in a little bit further.

The first thing I want you to do is I want you to tap into your team knowledge. Get your key team members together. Get them in a conference room. Get them brainstorming. Where are the places you'd love to be covered in an article? Great place to start, because after all, some of them it might be possible.

Once you have that kind of list in your mind, the next thing to do is to actually go check and see if they take posts. They may or may not have a policy on their site. If they do, that's a great thing to look for and can be very helpful. But sometimes they take guest posts without actually ever having been quite so overt about it. You can basically take this query here, site:targetdomain.com, whatever it is, and then put "guest post" or
"guest contributor" or "guest author." You can try different phases, and see whether or not they've ever taken those kinds of guest contributions in the past. Great place to start. Hopefully that gets you off to a good start.

If that's not enough, you can actually go to next step, which is you can try some industry search terms. You can try things like, let's say you're in the Tupperware business. Tupperware and then guest post and you search on that in Google. That can be very helpful in potentially bringing targets up.

These kinds of queries tend to be very noisy. You can actually do the same thing with Twitter by the way. There is a tool that somebody posted up on SEOmoz recently which is good at this. But it does tend to be very noisy. You'll have to sift through a lot of stuff to find targets that you'll want to deal with, but it still is worthwhile to get started if you have to go that way.

The point of all this is you're looking for initial targets. Where the big win really comes in is when you start finding other prominent people in your industry space who are doing guest posts, because then you can follow their trails and see all the things they're doing. That's really the next step here that I want to lead you to.

Once you've found authors, first of all you'll want to assess their prominence, because there are probably going to be a lot of spammy operators out there in your space that are doing guest posts, and you really don't want to follow their trails and see everywhere they've posted because you're going to get in the same kind of trouble that they're eventually going to be in. But you can see where these authors have guest posted by taking the author name in double quotes, and then put "guest post" or "guest author" or "guest contributor," those various flavors. You can then see all the places where these people have posted in the past. Wonderful way to get a long list of targets and really get your campaign off to a powerful start. To me this is really the big payoff that you're looking for in terms of developing a good target list.

Once you have this good target list, the next thing you want to do is you want to evaluate the target quality. You want to start thinking about: Are these sites where we want to be seen? Certainly if one of your prominent competitors or a prominent pundit in the industry writes on that site, that's a very good sign. Do they have a good readership? Is there a lot of social activity that happens from what they do at the site?

Also the types of links allowed. It used to be when people did guest posts, it was all about those free, in context links with rich anchor text. I am telling you that strategy, which may still work for some people, is really a Titanic looking for an iceberg. So you really want to focus on how you find targets which are actually a little more restrictive. It's actually good if they allow outbound links in the body of the article. But if they're allowing you to stuff anchor text links to yourself in the body of the article, that's actually not good for you. The main thing you should expect when you're working with the right kinds of targets for guest posting is you're going to be getting attribution, byline level links, and that actually is the safest place to be in the long term for guest posting. It's the kind of policies that you're going to find on the most valuable sites anyway.

So those are my thoughts on guest posting for today. I've enjoyed doing this Whiteboard Friday for you. Have a good day.

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10 Reasons Why You'll Blow That Big Deal

Okay, maybe not you personally… I'm only speaking in hypotheticals here. But let's face it, some of us are better at closing than others, and that's okay. We can get better.

I've been meaning to write this post for awhile, but really wanted to frame it in a way that would allow everyone to pull value from it, regardless of your function. As I thought through that framing, I realized that there's no surefire way to close more deals, per se, but there's a lot of things that you need to avoid to better your chances.

That's what we'll focus on here.

A deal can be many different things, depending on your business -- really, I'm just using it as a placeholder. Whether it be a new client, a big partnership, a fresh distribution, a juicy link, even an acquisition, they're all in the same ballpark. From experiencing it first hand in my work to being on the receiving end of some really bad attempts, here's 10 reasons why you'll blow that big deal.

The most common screw-up is probably a lack of understanding or care to understand the business that you're trying to work with. I can't tell you how many times I've been pitched for services that are dependent on Moz being a consulting company. This obviously isn't relevant anymore, which means that you wasted my time and yours.

Each business has very different drivers that dictate the decisions they make. Before you can provide value, you have to take the time to truly understand what they find valuable and what will help their business. Sounds simple, I know. Yet, it's one of the most common mistakes, because it takes extra effort. Before pitching anyone, make sure you do your due diligence; dig through Crunchbase or run a quick search.

Aaron Levie from Box said it best.

Email length is proportional to how much happiness you want to take away from your recipients.

— Aaron Levie (@levie) June 11, 2012

The same goes for pitching. The importance of distilling your message down to only the most important information is often times a deciding factor in the what gets ignored and what doesn't. As a rule of thumb, any email over two (very short) paragraphs and some bullets is likely too long. Distill your message down to the most pertinent points, and then refine it even further. It's not dissimilar from pitching press; the same concepts apply.

If you're talking to the wrong person, you're done before you even get started. The organizational structure varies greatly from company to company, which of course makes it difficult to track down the right person to talk to. Just try to think about it as logically as possible -- your intuition is likely right. Typically, I like to start from the top and work down. I've found that more senior folks usually have a stronger vested interest in the company and thus help you navigate the waters a bit more efficiently.

I rely on tools like Rapportive (screenshot above) on a daily basis to help refine and guess the contact info of the people that I need to get ahold of, if it's not shown on Linkedin or a personal site. 

Pro Tip: If you're trying to guess the right email address, start with first name @ domain.com and press tab, if it's correct, their profile will show up on Rapportive. If not, guess again. The folks at Distilled have some clever tricks, as well.

Have you ever had anyone ask you to sign an NDA before you even know the context of the discussion? Me too, and it kills the conversation before it even starts. A lot of people let legal take precedence over the basics. Legal is a necessary evil, but it's something that rarely comes into play.

You've got to know where to give and where to take with legal, and less is always more if you can get away with it.

People can't move forward if they don't know what they need to do. Some of the best folks that I've worked with on a deal are always action oriented. After every call, they lay out a clear list of action items in bullet format. Laying out next steps in this format allows both parties to stay focused on progression. Here's what a typical follow-up email should look like.

YOU Check in with your legal department to see whether the amendment has been approvedYOU Send over logo on transparent background for our announcement blog postME Coordinate with team on announcement timelineME Tell Jen Lopez she's awesome, and buy her cupcakes

Bullet format is usually more efficient than putting the action items in a long paragraph. Separate out what needs to get done, and keep on keepin' on.

As the person initiating the deal, it's your job to make sure it doesn't fall off the radar. Agree on a check-in timeframe after each correspondence. If you don't hear back after that timeframe, it may not be because they're not interested -- it may mean they got busy. Life happens.

There are a lot of good tools out there for remembering where you left off and reminding you to follow-up, Stride is one of them that I helped create. Other good tools are task managers like Wunderlist or FollowUpThen (screenshot above), which is made specifically for email reminders.

This is the #humblebrag portion of the list. I'm not one for name-dropping, Justin Beiber, but it's important to make it clear why others should listen. Use things like customer names, press coverage, usage numbers, success rates, etc. to shine your best light. Nothing wrong with making it clear that you're the real deal.

There's a fine line between overly persistent and not persistent enough. When you're actively engaging with another company, it's important to walk the line. The reason why it's so difficult is that it varies on a case-by-case basis, but the signals you get back from the other side can likely direct you on whether or not you're being persistent enough.

As with not dropping the ball, some people need persistence to stay on top of things. It's better to be overly persistent than not enough. Walk the line, but don't overstep. If someone tells you that it can't happen right now or that they're not interested, that's not a cryptic message to keep bothering them.

You may be the cat's pajamas offline, but if you're online life doesn't reflect that, who would know? As you're well aware, we all have access to the Googles, and we're likely to research someone before we engage with them. Take the time to clean up your Linkedin, set up a personal site and for goodness gracious, get to tweetin'. 

Personal branding is a separate post in and of itself, but for the sake of this post, realize that it's one of, if not the most, important pieces to being able to do a deal with a person or company.

As with the last point, the personal side of a deal matters. We do business with people we trust. When you're looking to work with someone, you've got to take the time to make the personal connection. Follow on Twitter, friend on Facebook -- become top of mind. Don't make it all about business, find commonalities and make the connection.

 

Let's take the wonderful Sha for example. She saw on my Twitter feed that I was damning myself with trying to learn Ruby. So, she whipped up some Ruby on Rails Cookies to help me through the process. Awesomeness person award goes to... you guessed it. Next time I get an email in my inbox from Sha, guess who's getting an immediate response? 

When you're in the sales process, the things that matter most are the subtleties, the tiniest bit of finesse is what separates winning from losing. Go about your business how you'd like, but keep these pitfalls in the back of your mind. Take the pain points that you experience while others are pitching you and learn from them -- don't inflict the same.

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Which Page is Canonical?

It sounds like an easy question, doesn’t it? While we hear a lot about duplicate content since the Panda update(s), I’m amazed at how many people are still confused by a much more fundamental question – which URL for any given page is the canonical URL? While the idea of a canonical URL is simple enough, finding it for a large, data-driven site isn’t always so easy. This post will guide you through the process with some common cases that I see every week.

Before we dive in, let’s cover the biggest misunderstanding that people have about “pages” on their websites. When we think of a page, we often think of a physical file containing code (whether it’s static HTML or script, like a PHP file). To a crawler, a page is any unique URL that it finds. One file could theoretically generate thousands of unique URLs, and every one of those is potentially a “page” in Google’s eyes.

It’s easy to smile and nod and all agree that we understand, but let’s put it to the test. In each of the following scenarios, how many pages does Google see?

www.example.com/www.example.com/storewww.example.com/aboutwww.example.com/contactwww.example.com/index.phpwww.example.com/store.phpwww.example.com/about.phpwww.example.com/contact.phpwww.example.com/index.php?page=homewww.example.com/index.php?page=storewww.example.com/index.php?page=aboutwww.example.com/index.php?page=contact

The answer is (A) 4, (B) 4, and (C) 4. In Google’s eyes, it doesn’t matter whether the pages have extensions (“.php”), the home-page is at the root (“/”) or at index.php, or even if every page is being driven off of one physical template. There are four unique URLs, and that means there are four pages. If Google can crawl them all, they’ll all be indexed (usually).

Let’s dive right into a few examples. Please note: these are just examples. I’m not recommending any of the URL structures in this post as ideal – I’m just trying to help you determine the correct canonical URL for any given situation.

I’ll start with an easy one. Many sites still use URL parameters to track visitor sessions or links from affiliates. No matter what the parameter is called or which purpose it’s used for, it creates a duplicate for every individual visitor or affiliate. Here are a few examples:

www.example.com/store.php?session=1234www.example.com/store.php?affiliate=5678www.example.com/store.php?product=1234&affiliate=5678

In the first two examples, the session and affiliate ID create a copy, in essence, of the main store page. In both of these cases, the proper canonical URL is simply:

The last example is a bit trickier. There, we also have a “product=” parameter that drives the product being displayed. This parameter is essential – it determines the actual content of the page. So, only the “affiliate=” parameter should be stripped out, and the canonical URL is:

www.example.com/store.php?product=1234

This is just one of many cases where the canonical URL is NOT the root template or the URL with no parameters. Canonical URLs aren’t always short or pretty – many canonical URLs will have parameters. Again, I’m not arguing that this structure is ideal. I’m just saying that the canonical URL in this case would have to include the “product=” parameter.

Unfortunately, the word “dynamic” gets thrown around a little too freely – for the purposes of this blog post, I mean any URLs that pass variables to generate unique content. Those variables could look like traditional URL parameters or be embedded as “folders”.

A good example of the kind of URLs I’m talking about are blog post URLs. Take these four:

www.example.com/blog/1234www.example.com/blog.php?id=1234www.example.com/blog.php?id=1234&comments=onwww.example.com/blog/20120626

Again, it doesn’t matter whether the URLS have parameters or hide those parameters as virtual folders. All of these URLs use a unique value (either an ID or date) to generate a specific blog post. So what’s the canonical URL here? Obviously, if you canonicalize to “/blog”, you’re going to reduce your entire blog to one page. It’s a bit of a trick question, because the canonical URL could actually be something like this:

www.example.com/blog/this-is-a-blog-post

This is why we have such a hard time detecting the proper canonical URLs with automated tools – it really takes a deep knowledge of a site’s architecture and the builder’s intent. Don’t make assumptions based on the URL structure. You have to understand your architecture and crawl paths. If you just start stripping off URL parameters, you could cause an SEO disaster.

It might seem strange to put the home page third, but the truth is that the first two cases were probably easier. Part of the problem is that home pages naturally spin out a lot of variations:

www.example.comwww.example.com/www.example.com/default.htmlwww.example.com/index.phpwww.example.com/index.php?page=about

Add in complications like secure pages (https:), and you can end up multiplying all of these variants. While this is technically true of any page, the problem tends to be more common for the home page, since it’s usually the most linked-to page (both internally and from external sites) by a large margin.

In most cases, the technically correct home-page URL is:

…but there are exceptions (such as if you secure your entire site). I don’t see the trailing slash (“/”) causing a ton of problems on home pages these days, since most browsers and crawlers add it automatically, but I think it’s still a best practice to use it.

Another common exception is if your site automatically redirects to another version of the home-page – ASP is notorious about this, and often lands visitors and bots at “index.aspx” or a similar page. While that situation isn’t ideal, you don’t want to cross signals. If the redirect is necessary, then the target of that redirect (i.e. the “index.aspx” URL) should be your canonical URL.

Finally, be very careful about situation #5 – in that case, as I discussed in the first section of this post, the “index.php” code template is actually driving other pages with unique content. Canonicalizing that to the root or to “index.php” could collapse your site to one page in the Google index. That particular scenario is rare these days, but some CMS systems still use it.

In some ways, product pages are a lot like the blog-post pages in Case #2, except moreso. You can naturally end up with a lot of variations on an e-commerce site, including:

www.example.com/store.php?id=1234www.example.com/store/1234www.example.com/store/this-is-a-productwww.example.com/store.php?id=1234¤cy=uswww.example.com/store/1234/redwww.example.com/store/1234/large

If you have a URL like #3, then that’s going to be your canonical URL for the product in most cases (especially #1-#3). If you don’t, then work up the list. In other words, if you have #3, use it; if not, use #2; if not #2, use #1. You have to work with the structure you have.

URLs #4-#6 are a bit trickier. Something like the currency selector in #4 can be very complicated and depends on how those selections are implemented (user selection vs. IP-based geo-location, for example). For Google’s purposes, you would typically want them to use the dominant price for the site’s audience and canonical to the main product URL (#1-#3, depending on the site architecture). Indexing every price variant, unless you have multiple domains, is just going to make your content look thinner.

With #5 and #6, the URL indicates a product variant, let’s say a T-shirt that comes in different colors and sizes. This situation depends a lot on the structure and scope of the content. Technically, your T-shirt in red/large is unique, and yet that page could look “thin” in Google’s eyes. If you have a variant or two for a handful of products, it’s no big deal. If every product has 50 possible combinations, then I think you need to seriously consider canonicalization.

Now, the ugliest case of them all – internal search pages. This is a double-edged sword, since Google isn’t a fan of search-within-search (their results landing on your results) in general and these pages tend to spin out of control. Here are some examples:

www.example.com/search.php?topic=1234www.example.com/search/this-is-a-topicwww.example.com/topicwww.example.com/search.php?topic=1234&page=2www.example.com/search.php?topic=1234&page=2&sort=descwww.example.com/search.php?topic=1234&page=2&filter=price

The list, unfortunately, could go on and on. While it’s natural to think that the canonical version should be #1-#3 (depending on your URL structure, just like in Case #4), the trouble is pagination. Pages 2 and beyond of your topic search may appear thin, in some cases, but they return unique results and aren’t technically duplicates. Google’s solutions have changed over time, and their advice can be frustrating, but they currently say to use the rel=prev/next tags. Put simply, these tags tell Google that the pages are part of a series.

In cases like #5-#6, Google recommends you use rel=prev/next for the pagination but then a canonical tag for the “&page=2” version (to collapse the sorts and filters). Implementing this properly is very complicated and well beyond the scope of this post, but the main point is that you should not canonicalize all of your search pages to page 1. Adam Audette has an excellent post on pagination that demonstrates just how tricky this topic is.

Finally, an important reminder – the most important canonical signal is usually your internal links. If you use the canonical tag to point to one version of a URL, but then every internal link uses a different version, you’re sending a mixed signal and using the tag as a band-aid. The canonical URL should actually be canonical in practice – use it consistently. If you’re an outside SEO coming into a new site, make sure you understand the crawl paths first, before you go and add a bunch of tags. Don’t create a mess on top of a mess.

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Define and Align: A Manageable Content and Social Media Marketing Process

In our experience, we’ve discovered that we usually have to ease our clients into the realities of organic web marketing. They can get behind the groundwork of SEO easily enough; user experience and integrating the right keywords: these are not totally alien concepts to anyone who’s been around the marketing scene for more than three seconds.

But when we get into the truth of how much time and effort goes into the actual work of raising their web visibility--that it’s an ongoing process that will require them to generate content and build relationships--we often see some reluctance.

To combat that reluctance, we’ve put a lot of thought into how we conduct and explain our particular version of content marketing.

Before we get into that, a quick note about said version of content marketing. In general, we understand that content marketing is usually considered different from social media marketing. Content marketing is about drawing attention to the content on your website; social media marketing is about encouraging engagement on the various social media forums out there in cyberspace.

When we work with clients on their web marketing, we tend to blur that line between content and social media marketing. Every strategy we develop includes both. Valuable content--blog posts, infographics, videos, whatever content type aligns with the client’s goals--forms the foundation of any web marketing effort. Once we’ve got the value, we utilize social media to get the word out, engage, build relationships, and ultimately brand awareness. See the blurring?

To us, the label matters less than having a deliberate and intentional strategy to provide something of value on an ongoing basis, because content and social media marketing ultimately work together to build:

Value in your company or organization (or on behalf of your client)A personality and brand that people know and trustSustainable relationshipsA supportive online communityDomain authority and desired rankings

So, when our clients consistently had a tough time grasping what it takes to raise their visibility on the web, we decided that something had to be done.

To that end we’ve developed an approach that clearly explains and delineates the process, step-by-step. It spells out who does what and when and how and just, in general, makes the whole thing both more manageable and more palatable to our hesitant clients.

We always start out by explaining that our organic web marketing process includes three stages:

Stage One
SEO & Local Search (research & implementation)Stage Two
Link Building & Social Media Strategies (research & development)Stage Three
Ongoing Implementation & Measurement (which never, ever ends)

This graphic depicts Stages Two and Three. It is the process that we use to develop and implement content and social media marketing strategies for our clients:

By the time we get to this part of our (almost painfully) well-defined process, two things have come to pass:

[1] Stage One Has Been Completed
Way back at the beginning of Stage One, the clients completed a data collection questionnaire that provides us with a general understanding of the following:

design preferences & assetslogins (website, analytics, social)competition (top 3)target audience (and level of expertise)website (most important pages, most significant tasks)calendar (highs and lows, significant events, holidays, roadblocks)team (point of contact)marketing efforts (print, social, SEO, email marketing)goals & expectations (SEO, social media)

We have reviewed these findings and worked through all of the necessary website and SEO efforts that are part of Stage One of the project (site audit, navigation development, user experience, keyword research, on-page optimization, local search integration, etc.). ??Stage One lays the groundwork so that the website is optimized and ready for all the targeted traffic we’re going to generate. We’ve also discovered the keywords that we will be integrating into both their link building and content/social media marketing strategy so that we are building links to the right pages on the website once we get to Stage Three.

[2] We Have Defined & Aligned Everyone’s Expectations & Responsibilities
Every client has different budgets and expectations of participation. Some clients have a large internal team that can dedicate the time to ongoing content generation and strategy implementation. Other clients really need to lean on our knowledge, expertise, and resources, so at that level we act as their third party web marketing team and carry most of the load for them.

No matter what level we are working with a client, we always make it very clear what it takes to achieve desired results and who will be held accountable for achieving these results. If a client asks us to assist them with research, analysis, and strategy development, but they want their internal team to do the ongoing implementation, we cannot be held accountable if our recommendations are not carried through. It’s really important to establish these guidelines with a client even before you go under contract. It will certainly make for a more successful and long lasting consulting partnership.

All that being said, here’s how content marketing and the social process breaks down:

?In this first step of the process, you’ve got to get a really strong understanding of the the social climate. Analyze what the client is currently doing (or not doing) with their social on their website, blog, and print marketing efforts. Do the same for their competitors. Get a solid understanding of what is going on in their industry, focusing on the social space.

??Your goal with this analysis is to put together a list of general observations: what are the common threads between the client and their competitors? What could be done better? Note the gaps in content and where gains can be made. We record these observations on a chart so that we can integrate them into the analysis and recommendations that we provide the client. These observations will also be very helpful when you begin developing the strategy and calendar in Step Three below.?

?In Step Two, you will be establishing the foundation for the online community. At this point, the goal is simply to get acclimated to the social spaces where the client will be following, reading, engaging, and at some point, providing valuable content. ??

So, based on what you discovered from the data collection findings about the target audience(s), current efforts, and goals, which social media outlets seem like a match?

??Let’s say you’re going to recommend Twitter and Google+ as targets in their content marketing and social strategy. Find the thought leaders in their industry on Twitter and Google+ and follow/circle them. Read the content they’re passing around, engage with them where appropriate, add the people that they are following to your list. Start to get a feel for how the online community operates (posting frequency, content type, tone, etc.) and get acclimated. Take it slow.??

Reminding clients that social media is a tool and not a strategy helps them to understand that it’s important to have a plan in place. It’s not about being on every social media outlet. It’s about being on the right social media outlets and customizing the content to the target audience. This will ultimately build the best online community and bring your client desired results. ??

Developing an online community is an important and ongoing process that is worth a great deal of dedicated time and effort. This community is going to help you carry the load. If the community trusts and values you, they will help to do some of the heavy lifting when it comes to getting the word out (marketing your content). More on this in Step Five.

As mentioned, at the beginning of a project, we ask our clients to define their goals and expectations. This allows them to communicate their desires, and it gives us an understanding of whether their expectations are realistic.

If there are any red flags (i.e. wants a too-quick turn-around: 15,000 followers in six months with no budget to fund large campaigns), then certainly we address any concerns at the beginning of the project. ??

Before we begin developing the strategy and calendar, we outline a list of realistic goals and how we are going to work toward them. Again, we integrate this chart into the analysis and recommendations that we provide the client so that they have an understanding of what we are going to be accountable for.

These goals and action items are just the precursor to their strategy. The analysis and recommendations that we provide the client includes a very detailed, step-by-step breakdown of their strategy (all the stuff we’re going to help them do or do for them). ??

As you’ve probably guessed, every strategy we develop includes content generation on an on-going basis. But we also include targeted strategies and ideas for whatever is necessary to meet their unique goals, things like apps, contests, events.

?Our strategies are detailed and very specific. We provide step-by-step instructions for every campaign (i.e. what to do prior to the contest to ramp up, what to do during the contest, what to do after the contest), so that the strategy can be easily followed by the client’s internal team (in case we’re not handling the implementation). And, hey, if their budget allows us to do the work, then these details make it easy for our team to execute.

??The narrative of the social strategy is also accompanied by a digital calendar that includes all actions to be taken and who is responsible for completing them. We make sure the calendar allows plenty of time for first-draft content reviews and revisions prior to launch/implementation.??

?Our clients prefer that we provide some guidance, so each of these calendar items includes a brief description of the task. If you click on one of the calendar items, there is some detail so that whoever the task is assigned to, they know exactly what is expected of them. Because the calendar is digital and everyone on the team has access, when we make changes to their schedule or strategy, everyone is alerted.

When you’re developing the content and social media marketing strategy, make sure that you are aligning all efforts (SEO, link building, social media, email marketing, etc.). Everything, from print to web, should be integrated and leveraged. You can then determine which tools and methods you will use for measurement (we love Raven, SEOmoz, Google Analytics, and Sprout Social) so that you can show the client the progress that is being made.

Once the strategy is ready, it’s time to create the content. Clearly this is an ongoing effort, but having a strategy to follow will ensure that content is being generated on a regular basis and that it is working towards meeting the goals that have been outlined. It will also keep everyone involved organized and focused so that you’re not heading towards burn out.

??On a side note: we like to encourage clients to integrate links to other valuable content (articles, video, infographics, etc) in their posts. This helps to provide a more engaging user experience and it also gives the opportunity for link and egobait. You can always publish a post and alert the author that you liked one of their articles and mentioned it in your post.

The content has been created, so now comes the fun part. When getting the word out, you have two main goals:?

First, provide something of value.

Second, be authentic (and make sure that you’re consistent with voice).
Every social media outlet is different and your approach should reflect that. Don’t use the same teaser for Facebook as you use on Twitter. Not only are the formats of these outlets different, but so are the audiences, their behaviors, and their expectations. Take the time to customize your messages and you’ll get better results. You can then measure and analyze these efforts in Step Seven and determine if you need to try a different day of the week, time of day, reduce/increase frequency, or a whole different approach altogether.

?Once the content is out, you will want to be hands on, so get ready to monitor and engage. If you’re not getting bites on your content (re-tweets, mentions, etc.) try some direct engagement. Tweet, use other social outlets, or even email people directly to encourage some action. ??

As we’ve said, depending on budget, we may do some or all of this work for the client. We always define specific tasks that the client is responsible for and specific tasks that we are responsible for (and they are always noted on the calendar). Joint tasks usually include things like daily review of the online community and social media outlets, as well as responding and engaging. ??

Even if we are not engaging on behalf of the client, we are always monitoring the client’s efforts. This provides the client with useful feedback that will help them to learn, improve, and ultimately be successful. Certainly we are always monitoring data, and we provide a series of reports analyzing and explaining their metrics in the next step, Measure & Analyze, below.

?Accountability is really important, especially because clients will always be concerned with ROI which can be difficult to quantify with content and social media marketing.

We continually communicate with the client and provide bi-weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports that all serve specific purposes.??

The bi-weekly report is meant for a quick look. It’s a short, 1-2 page report that we email to the client that includes a ‘Way to Go’ section (things they’re doing well), a ‘Some Reminders’ section (things they need to remember to do to keep them aligned with the strategy), a ‘Benchmark’ (current state of social efforts), and a ‘Looking Forward’ section (actions required). It’s a quick accountability report that provides the client with an understanding of what we’ve been working on (and perhaps what they need to be working on). ??

The monthly report is the month at a glance, including significant social media activity (increase in following, furthering reach, etc.), trends we’re seeing, and other things to look out for (there may be some link building or SEO items to point out here). We include screen shots from both Sprout Social and Raven, as well as any screenshots of analytics specific to the social media outlet (i.e. Facebook).??

The quarterly report is the most in-depth as it includes a look at the global picture. This report illustrates the progress of everything we are working on for the client: SEO, link building, content marketing, and social media. Clearly we are monitoring, analyzing, and taking action on these pieces throughout the quarter, but this reporting session is meant to really dig in, analyze the data over a longer period of time, and make the necessary improvements in all areas (SEO, link building, and social media). This meeting is always a sit down, face-to-face (if possible) with the client. We may make changes to the strategy in this meeting or address new work that the client would like us to take care of.

Once you’ve completed this process, you can start over with a new idea, a new goal, and a new strategy. Follow the same steps and customize the process for the work you do with your clients. ??

Along the way, don’t forget to celebrate the little victories. We get really excited about getting re-tweets, targeted links, and engaging with thought leaders. We teach our clients to bask in the excitement of even the smallest accomplishment. It helps them to understand how hard we work for them (with them) every day.

So, that’s how we do it. For now, anyway. We are continually working on shaping our systems and processes so that we can provide our clients with the most value (and get them desired results). You can certainly use this process as a guideline, but keep in mind that every client and project is going to be unique and will require customization at some level. And, of course, as content and social media marketing evolves, this process will require adjustment.?

We’ve discovered that spelling things out, dissecting and cataloguing the entire process, severely reduces the terror that our clients experience in the face of the alien world of content marketing (just like Area 51 does it). And it makes sure everything runs smoothly for us as we implement as well.

So, how about you? How do you convince your more timid clients to commit to the real deal? And, since we are always striving for improvement, we’d welcome your thoughts on how we do it, too.

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