Online reputation management professionals advocate creating multiple profile pages on social sites, forums and blogs for, let’s face it, parasite SEO tactics for the entity you’re doing ORM services for. What most pros fail to tell you is that most of these social sites are open, meaning they allow other users to add content, either via testimonials, comments or thread replies. This makes it easy for anyone with sinister plans on your reputation to hijack a seemingly positive/neutral page and load it with potentially damaging information.

Yes rely on these established sites for your ORM profile pages, but make sure you have moderation enabled for the UGC sections. Do not push a specific thread, blog post or profile page up the SERPs if you have no means of controlling the user generated conversation that can (and will) occur. There’s nothing funny or easy about having to push down a Wikipedia entry or forum thread that has mutated into an out-of-control complaints board for your company’s customers.

Is it time to finally delist open rate as a success metric for email campaigns? While some marketers still see value in it, others are pointing to its inherent weaknesses and are proposing that we graduate to ‘better’ metrics like click-to-open-rate (CTOR).
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This site threw some e-commerce SEO questions Aaron Wall’s way. Some of the questions were just too close to home, I couldn’t resist not answering…
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Click fraud is down somewhat, according to the latest Click Fraud Index from Click Forensics. Content networks still give me the shivers; there’s no way I’m ever showing ads on them:
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The veterans always espoused keeping the users in mind when undergoing a site redesign. This is still true but the one lesson people need to remember is that user preferences change. Whoever thought Amazon’s tabbed navigation would go out of fashion? Whoever thought 1024 would be the screen resolution to design for now (kudos Zappos - old and new)? Maybe it’s ‘Proceed to Checkout’ now but who knows in the next few months it just might be ‘Click Here to Send Us Your Money’.

There is a point to all of this. Competitive analysis is good to some extent, but what’s working for the leader today may not necessarily work for you.

My office is two doors away from the ant hill and three doors away from the bee hive. I’m physically separated from the rest of the department. It has its perks… the best being you can go to your alpha state whenever you please: you can play your alpha state-inducing anthem at the volume you want whenever you want and if you’re like me who likes to keep the competitive spirit up, scream at the latest resident office asshole without her hearing it.

There is a price to pay for these ‘perks’ though and that is less face time with the people who pretty much determine whether you meet your KPIs or not. To tell you the truth, it’s pathetic. The wired culture has dulled me to the point that I now rely on email, RSS, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and instant messaging to keep myself updated on the lives of people. To quote somebody who threw paragraphs of wisdom my way a few days ago: it’s a scalability issue. There’s just no way you can sustain a high level of interaction with each and every one in your team day in and day out and still be productive.
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Blog in blog out you hear about the social media importance of bloggers in the influencing/evangelizing mix of things. Prevalent 2.0 knowledge would have you believe that for any online WOMM initiative to flourish, A-listers would have to be seeded, fed and sometimes paid to spread (maybe even host) the virus. Previous conference discussions on the subject that I’ve attended swear by the same old recipe: get an A-list blogger, get forum veterans, get senior Diggers talking about your virus…and the rest will come.

Now for a research firm to come out and shoot down this sacred belief…that’s just SMO heresy. Or is it.
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Would you like to know Christine Hermosa’s condo address? Fanboys and stalkers click on…
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Damn, did they make her ride coach?

The local blogosphere was abuzz when YouTube star Christine aka Happyslip Gambito flew down to ‘experience’ the islands. Hats off to the marketing crew that hatched this idea. She connects well with a Fil-Am generation that feels 90% American already. She also connects well with local Filipinos, specifically the generation that’s working hard to be 10% American. She is humor, she is sex and to top it all, she is Filipino.

Her visit will no doubt inspire countless rootless Fil-Ams to come over and discover Cebu, Palawan, Taal, Bohol….and maybe take a side trip for that short photo-op with the grandparents they didn’t know existed. Making her the spokesperson was a brilliant move. I would have doctored some of the clips a little though, they didn’t really look that impressive. Must be the clouds.