If your job or current tasklist includes building a social media strategy for your organization (or yourself, personally), you should be thinking about the branding created by the profiles you create. The profile name, the image you use as an icon or avatar, the webpage you link to and the words you use to describe yourself have a significant impact in how you're perceived and how you're rememb...

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Sigh. After much badgering, cajoling, nudging, and subtle threatening from my coworkers, colleagues, friends, and Jane (yes, Jane gets her own category--she badgered me a lot), I finally joined the Twitter. Much like Jane did when she begrudgingly joined, I'll take you through the terrifying process of nervously dipping a toe i...

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Disclaimer: This post doesn’t include any information about SEO. If you are looking for SEO related content, please read the normal search related posts on this blog. The SEOmoz community has always been a fundamental driving force behind this company. All of you provide the motivation to keep us working and the guidance to keep us on the right track. When asked why I like my ...

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Quite often, people ask me this, either to my face, via Q&A or in emails: how do I come up with truly unique, never-before-seen, shiny new ideas? What a question. It's a rare thing to come up with something that's really never been done before. Many of the novels on a bookstore's shelves contain stories that have been told before in one form or another. Real originality is fantastic, but there is plenty to be made from taking a good idea and putting a new spin on it and making it better.

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There's been a fair amount of buzz recently about online reputation management and how to do it. One thing which I think has been missing from the discussion however is looking at the different ways a negative reputation can manifest itself online. After all, not all negative reputations are created equal. Sometimes it's a page that looks innocuous but contains mildly negative negative things once...

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It is greatly ironic that algorithms, the quintessential example of all that is not human, would be so fundamental to social media. Last week I wrote a post about how Google gathers user data. This week I continue by exposing how popular social media websites use algorithms to ut...

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Danny Sullivan's lovely wife, Lorna (who lent me a hat and gloves when we went to see Stonehenge on an especially cold, windy day), recently created Boudica, a social news site for women. The site is pretty new and is currently in Beta testing mode, but I thought I'd give an initial review of things thus far. I'll start with the following caveat: I'm not super...

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I am conflicted. I'm in an abusive relationship with reddit. And I keep going back, thinking I can somehow change things.  I keep visiting, keep commenting, keep frantically checking my comments every hour or so to see if anyone's replied. I think if I say the magic word, somehow, things will get better. I'm addicted to it, yet I don't enjoy...

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There is plenty to read about social media online, but rarely do I come across something that I find really interesting or even particularly believable. On any given day, you can wade through a mass of blog posts and articles about new tools with which to waste time on Twitter. I know how to waste time on Twitter. I do it all the time.

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As you fully know, this week we launched the 2008 Web 2.0 Awards. Like last year and the year before, the awards were met with praise and kudos (good job, Jane and crew), and the page was submitted to Digg in hopes of making the home page. Jane and Rand sent out some tweets and commented on the blog post, urging various colleagues and users to digg t...

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If you take any interest in Sphinn and the debates which rage therein, you properly noticed last week's uproar over linkbait specialist Lyndon Antcliff's fake story that ended up being mentioned on Fox News. We've dabbled in a fair few linkbait projects over the years and since the Sphinn discussion was still alive just two days ago, I don't think it's t...

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There are over 200 million blogs online, thousands of review sites, sites specific to leaving feedback about companies and thousands of forums on any topic imaginable.People can talk about whatever they want, pretty much wherever they want, and with so many people "conversing online" a lot of that conversation is involving brands - their products, their services and their busin...

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I've been reading some of the papers from AIRWeb '08, the recent web spam conference, and I came across one which suggests that just six spammer controlled accounts can half the performance of search over question answering services.

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I've been shout-neutered, folks, and it ain't cool. Let me explain. Yesterday I submitted a story to Digg. I didn't expect it to get on the home page, but I had an "Oh well, what the hell" mentality about it. My plan was to do the usual--shout it once and call it a day. After I submit a link to Digg, I typically shout the story to my friends in about three waves. You can o...

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I apologise for another Facebook-centred post, but something interesting happened to me this week. I also realise that it is a bit strange to title an original post, "The Revised Edition," but this is indeed a complete re-write of my first draft. My initial post was titled, "Cusomter Service Protocol 101: Threaten To Ban Your Most Loyal Users" and it was quite the diatribe. You see, on Monday Facebook threatened to ban me. They said I had been caught spamming. I became very angry, as I hadn't spammed anyone. I'm also one of Facebook's biggest fans in an environment where everyone has something bad to say about the company.

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