Enrichment Depot – Profiting on the Net

As far as I know, no one has ever set up an online social network as effectively a co-op before, and as you’d expect, Zurker’s set-up isn’t quite that simple. As Zurker’s About page explains, Every Zurker user becomes a co-owner (future shareholder) of Zurker. As Zurker hasn’t had an IPO or anything of that nature yet, users earn vShares. A vShare is a stake in Zurker; it’s the unit of equity the company is allotting to members during the alpha and beta testing phases. They aren’t actually stock. vShares can be thought of as agreements between the owners of a startup about the size of thei…
SEO Chat – Search Engine Optimization Tutorials

Tags: Network, Percent, Social, Zurker

Posted by dohertyjf

On Wednesday I presented at SMX on the panel called "Facebook, Twitter, and SEO". I was excited to speak alongside Horst Joepen (SearchMetrics), Jim Yu (BrightEdge), and Michael Gray (Atlas Web Services). In my talk, I showed some information from patents that talked about how a search engine might detect a person’s topical relevance and authority and use a scale on which to pass link juice from their social shares or not. Let’s explore some of these a bit more.

What Factors Might Search Engines Look At?

There are three concepts I would like to introduce you to.

Topical Trustrank

The first concept you should be familiar with is "topical Trustrank". The original Trustrank was first mentioned in this Yahoo patent from 2004. At the time, it seemed underdeveloped, since it relied on sites to label themselves. And worse than underdeveloped, it was open to spam since it relied on websites to tag themselves (not unlike the meta keywords tag). The patent was granted in 2009 as a way to rank sites based on labels given them by people, according to this article called Google Trustrank Patent Granted.

Another take on Trustrank is Topical Trustrank, which was introduced in 2006. Because Trustrank seemed to be biased heavily towards larger communities that could attract more spam pages (without tripping a spam threshold, maybe?), Topical Trustrank aimed to build trust based on the relevance of the connecting sites (and I would argue now, the topical relevance of those sharing links via social networks).

Author Rank

According to one Yahoo patent application, "…author rank is a ‘measure of the expertise of the author in a given area.’" Since this is delightfully vague, here are some specific areas (taken from Bill Slawski’s How Search Engines May Rank User Generated Content) that the search engines might look at to determine if you are authoritative:

• A number of relevant/irrelevant messages posted;
• Document goodness of all documents initiated by the author;
• Total number of documents initiated posted by the author within a defined time period;
• Total number of replies or comments made by the author; and,
• A number of [online] groups to which the author is a member.

We can take these and apply them to social as well. If they are calculating author rank based off of content taken from around the web, why would they not also use this author rank for your social shares? Here are some more questions a search engine might ask about a user (according to an email I received from Bill Slawski):

• Do they contribute something new, useful, interesting?
• Are they tweeting new articles, or recycling old articles? Are they sharing articles from just one site, or are they sharing articles from a number of different sites? What’s their engagement/CTR?
• Do they participate in meaningful conversations with others?
• Are they replying to others through @replies or others (DMs. maybe?)? What topics?
• Do those others contribute something new, useful, interesting?
• Are they themselves keeping the cycle going and replying to various others, or always responding to the same users?

Agent Rank

According to this article from Search Engine Land, Google applied for a patent around a way to determine an agent, or author’s, authority in a specific niche. According to the article:

Content creators could be given reputation scores, which could influence the rankings of pages where their content appears, or which they own, edit, or endorse.

Also according to the article, here are some of the goals of Agent Rank:

• Identifying individual agents responsible for content can be used to influence search ratings.
• The identity of agents can be reliably associated with content.
• The granularity of association can be smaller than an entire web page, so agents can disassociate themselves from information appearing near the information for which the agent is responsible.
• An agent can disclaim association with portions of content, such as advertising, that appear on the agent’s web site.
• The same agent identity can be attached to content at multiple locations.
• Multiple agents can make contributions to a single web page where each agent is only associated to the content that they provided."

Does the following sound like the new rel=author markup that we’re seeing in the search results? I think it does:

"Tying a page to an author can influence the ranking of that page. If the author has a high reputation, content created by him or her many be considered to be more authoritative that similar content on other pages. If the agent reviewed or edited content instead of authoring it, the score for the content might be ranked differently." "An agent may have a high reputation score for certain kinds of content, and not for others – so someone working on site involving celebrity news might have a strong reputation score for that kind of content, but not such a high score for content involving professional medical advice."

The article goes on to explain that authority scores will be hard to build up, but easy to harm. This would be one way to keep authors producing high quality content. Some more factors that may influence authority:

• Quality of the response
• Relevance of the response
• The authority of those who respond to what you post

The Google Person Theory

How might search engines view my sharing and that of my followers?

Two weeks ago Duane Forrester from Bing posted an interesting article showing how a they might visualize if someone is attempting to game their ranking signals by sharing a lot, or if the increased rise in sharing is natural. According to the Information Retrieval based on historical data (PDF) patent:

A large spike in the quantity of back links may signal a topical phenomenon (e.g., the CDC web site may develop many links quickly after an outbreak, such as SARS), or signal attempts to spam a search engine (to obtain a higher ranking and, thus, better placement in search results) by exchanging links, purchasing links, or gaining links from documents without editorial discretion on making links.

If we take "back links" and replace it with social shares, we get this:

A large spike in the quantity of [social shares] may signal a topical phenomenon (e.g., the CDC web site may develop many links quickly after an outbreak, such as SARS), or signal attempts to spam a search engine (to obtain a higher ranking and, thus, better placement in search results) by exchanging [shares], purchasing [shares], or gaining [shares] from [others] without editorial discretion…

If you are automatically tweeting every interesting article that comes your way, and you have a large network of people who do the same in an attempt to game the signals, here is the image of how Bing might view those manipulated ranking signals (the below is an example of a "Like Farm"). Check out all of the hubs on the image below:

And here is an image of non-manipulated, truly viral signals. Check out the wide scatter of sources:

Some quick pieces of data to dissuade you from spamming or completely automating

We hear a lot of talk around automating your social stream. This seems like an oxymoron to me, since it undercuts the whole purpose of "social" media. Here is an interesting statistical graph for you:  Manual tweets get twice the clicks on average!

Next, if you’re interested in whether automating your Twitter stream will increase your followers, take this next graph into account:

Key learning: Less automation = more followers

(All data gathered from Triberr – The Reach Multiplier)

How can I build my author trustrank with the search engines?

Here are some ways to benchmark and build your author presence in the eyes of the search engines:

Author microformats – if you own a website, you most definitely should implement the new rel=author microformat, validating through Google Plus. This is a fantastic way to directly claim your content to the search engines. Here is how to do implement it on WordPress (via Joost de Valk) and here is the official Google page on authorship.

Klout Topics- Since we were talking about topical trustrank earlier as well, you might want an idea of which topics the search engines might consider you authoritative about. I think that Klout Topics is a good place to start.

Gravatar – Ross Hudgens wrote a great post a few months ago called Generating Static Force Multipliers for Great Content wherein he talked about the importance of a consistent personal brand and image across the Internet. If you have the same photo across many different sites, how could the search engines not use this in determining trustworthiness?

KnowEm is a website where you can find if your username has been taken across many different social networks. This is a great place to go to learn where you need to sign up to protect your username, and therefore your personal brand and author trust.

Conclusion

Author authority has long been a topic of discussion in SEO circles and we’ve wondered "Does Google have an author rank?" From these patents, I think it is obvious that they have the capability, and especially now with Google Plus for Google, and Facebook for Bing, both are going to be making this even more of a priority.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Do you like this post? Yes No

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Tags: Author/Agent, Network, Rank, Social, Spam

After many complaints, followed by a full investigation, the FTC announced last month the final court order involving allegations of deceptive marketing by Swish Marketing and its officers: Mark Benning, Matthew Patterson, and Jason Strober. In large part damned by their own words via email and IM, this trio must pay $ 4.8 million in fines to right the financial harm the FTC believes Swish did to consumers.

The Allegations

In April 2010, the FTC filed an amended complaint against Swish Marketing, a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) network specializing in payday loans. Court documents claim that Swish Marketing collected consumers’ personal information, including bank accounts, when consumers applied for payday loans. In addition to selling the collected consumer data to payday lenders, Swish Marketing used deceptive marketing practices and sold the consumers’ data to third parties, which led to unexpected fees for consumers.

The FTC alleges that consumers who submitted a loan application automatically had their bank accounts debited for a zero-balance, prepaid charge card provided by VirtualWorks, LLC, without proper consent. Hundreds of thousands of consumers were charged anywhere from $ 39.95 to $ 54.95. Additionally, many consumers experienced bank overdraft fees due to the unexpected withdrawal from their accounts.

VirtualWorks paid Swish Marketing a $ 13-$ 15 commission per debit card. Thousands of consumers filed complaints with Swish Marketing, VirtualWorks, law enforcement, the Better Business Bureau, payday lenders, and banks with only a small portion of the consumers ever activating the debit card. Swish Marketing stated that the sale of consumer data to VirtualWorks accounted for the largest portion of their profit margins.

The Deceptive Advertising

Swish Marketing operated numerous payday loan web sites. The homepages of these sites were typical landing pages containing an online application form. The home page displayed no statement or reference of any fees associated with the payday loan application or fees for other services.

Upon submitting the application, consumers were taken to a co-registration page for four offers unrelated to the payday loans. This co-registration page indicated the consumer could bypass any of the offers without penalties to their loan application. At the bottom of this page, consumers had to click a second submit button to complete the application process.

The debit card offer was preselected to “yes.” Below the “yes/no” radio button for the debit card offer Swish placed a multi-line disclaimer in small print for the debit card. The disclaimer did contain information regarding the cost of the debit card. However, the disclaimer was not conspicuous and prominent enough to meet FTC guidelines.

On other websites, Swish promoted the debit cards as a “bonus” in large type above the payday loan application form. The submit button for the payday loan application was tied to receiving the “bonus” debit card. In order to see any disclosures regarding the debit card, the consumer had to scroll down to below the submit button. The disclosure was again in small print and did not mention any fees associated with the debit card until the second paragraph. While some disclaimers were present on the websites, Swish again failed to meet FTC guidelines regarding the prominent and conspicuous display of disclosures.

In addition to the deceptive advertising practices, the FTC provided several examples of communications, such as emails and IMs, showing that Benning, Patterson, and Strober were aware of the massive consumer complaints, reports to law enforcement, and payday lenders expressing their concerns Swish Marketing’s collection of payday loan leads. At one point, Benning described Swish’s own practice of defaulting to “yes” as “fraud and identity theft.” In another discussion regarding whether Swish Marketing should change their tactics in light of the consumer complaints, Strober stated:

[I]f we immediately switch this to ”no,” it will be tantamount to shutting down the company. All of the margin currently comes from this product. We are essentially break even on the other products. Turning this off will require us to fire half the company and basically restart. I don’t believe this is a prudent move.

The Court Order

The final court order requires the defendants to pay $ 4.8 million to the FTC within 10 days to redress the financial losses of consumers.

Swish Marketing cannot use or benefit from any of the consumer information obtained in connection with the VirtualWorks debit card offer. Additionally, they must dispose of all such consumer data.

Several of the judgments in the court order apply not only to Swish Marketing but to their marketing affiliates, too. The court order defines marketing affiliates as “those who receive commissions from Swish Marketing for advertising and those who pay Swish Marketing commissions.” The second part of that definition also includes advertisers of Swish Marketing and could possibly include situations where Swish Marketing acted as an affiliate themselves (e.g. sub-affiliate). Swish Marketing must also provide all affiliates with a copy of the court order along with obtaining a signed and dated confirmation of receipt of the order. Swish Marketing must also immediately terminate any affiliate found in violation of the order.

With regards to their marketing practices, Swish Marketing and their affiliates are prohibited from engaging in the following:

• Using or assisting others in using a negative option feature in their advertising and marketing
• Misrepresenting or assisting others in misrepresenting a product or service as a bonus, free or a gift; the cost; the consequences of submitting an application; and method in which the consumer will be charged or billed
• Representing a product of service as a bonus, free or a gift without disclosing clearly and conspicuously in close proximity to the representation all of the terms and conditions which apply to the offer

Swish Marketing and their affiliates must obtain express, informed consent from the consumer prior to the use of any of the consumer’s billing information. In addition, they must also obtain express, informed consent from the consumer prior to the use of co-registration marketing.

The FTC indicated that it may monitor the compliance of this order for up to five years.

The Name Game

As is common with these types of FTC settlements, the defendants, including the individual officers named in the suit, must inform the FTC of any changes in the business entity such as dissolution or incorporation. This is to prohibit individuals from starting a new corporation in order to avoid compliance within FTC settlement.

The Swish Marketing home page is currently just a splash page with the company’s contact information. It would appear that the Swish Marketing network is no longer in existence. However, internal web pages of the Swish Marketing website appear to be for a CPA network called Tressel Group.

The Tressel Group website is the same as seen on the internal pages of Swish Marketing site.

While both sites use Whois Privacy, the IP location for tresselgroup.com is registered to Swish Marketing.

Additionally, the address provided on the Swish Marketing home page is the same as the address on the bottom of the Tressel Group’s Acceptable Usage Policy.

It would appear that Swish Marketing now plans to operate its network under the new name of Tressel Group. Any affiliates or advertisers now partnering with Tressel Group should familiarize themselves with this recent court order to avoid running afoul of the FTC.

ReveNews

Tags: $4.8, Changes, Fines, marketing, million, Name, Network, Ordered, Swish

Posted by caseyhen

Last night I got my first look at Google+, I spent just over three hours diving in and playing with all the features they have to offer. For those of you who already have access, please share your thoughts in the comments and those without access, enjoy this preview and share your thoughts on what this new social network could mean for SEO.

First Look

Below is the "Home" screen, which seems vaguely familiar to a different social network I use but seems to be somewhat more streamlined. You can simply sort your friend groups, called Circles, by clicking on the "Streams" in the left sidebar. This give you a chance to only see things shared from your family or other Circles, for example I can select "Family" and see only their content. This looks like it makes it really easy to combine all your work and personal contacts into one network.

Circles

The first thing I got right into was creating Circles, which are much like Facebook groups where you can categorize people. This is helpful for people like myself who don’t like to share my SEO related stories/posts with my friends/family members. The process of adding people to these Circles was relativity easy, granted I only had 8 people in my list, but this process seems very streamlined.

Hangouts

An interesting feature that Rand, Space, Mike and I got to try last night was Google Hangouts. It’s a feature that allows you to chat and video chat with up to 10 friends. We found the feature to work, though it wasn’t as great as I thought it was going to be. The cool thing is that when you start a Hangout, it alerts other people in your Circles that you have started a Hangout so they can join. You can limit who sees that you have started a Hangout this prevents you from starting a business Hangout and having your Mom show up.

Sparks

Next up was something that Google calls Sparks and describes Sparks as “an online sharing engine.” To me, Sparks seems to be a way to add a "live" SERP into your social network. I added SEO and Cycling as my first two Sparks to see what happens. Basically I got a list of webpages, press releases, and videos that relate to the term I entered and they seemed to update over the few hours I watched them. The content listed in each Spark has a Share link, which allows you to easily share that content with your Circles.

Photos

As with any social network, having the ability to share photos with your friends is key! Google+ has a few different ways of displaying and sharing photos with your friends. Below is the first way to see the photos that your friends have shared. It is quite a user-friendly way of seeing what images are included in each album your friend shared.

If you click on one of the options above, it opens a slideshow of all the images your Circles have uploaded. It allows you to quickly flip through your friend’s images and add comments quickly, along with seeing all other comments. Like other networks you can tag your friends in photos that you upload.

Next is what it looks like when you share a picture within an album that you created. When you roll over the image it increases in size and displays the whole images, which is helpful for some images. I found the ability to upload photos very easy and the uploads happened very quickly.

Overall I found that the ability to share photos was not as streamlined as I would have liked it to be but I’ll leave the final judgment up to others.

Security

Below are some of the security options that you can set when sharing things with your circles. It allows you to stop people from commenting on the thing you shared and you can stop them from resharing it with their circles. Also when you first share something it allows you to pick what Circles you want to see the thing you shared. So if you don’t want your Mom to see the picture of Carlos from Agillian below, then you should make sure you share it only with your SEO friends.

My Takeaways

In closing, I have to say I was impressed with some things but overall I think they have some work to do before this really catches on with the main stream public. Google+ seems to have a large learning curve which could deter many new users. I spent just over 3 hours on it and don’t feel like I really touched the surface of what it can do, nor do I fully understand what the purpose of some of their new features. Rand may have said it best with what he shared on Google+ last night:

How Does This Affect SEO

How do you think Google is going to integrate Google+ with your search results? We did some quick tests last night to see how sharing things on Google+ will effect the SERPs of the friends in your social Circles. So far we couldn’t see any noticeable difference when your friends share something or +1 it within Google+. Now this doesn’t mean anything as Google often rolls out products early and works them into the SERPs later.

We will be doing more testing to see how this new release from Google will effect the way we do our jobs, so stay tuned. Also if you have seen anything that I may have missed, please do share it in the comments below.

Do you like this post? Yes No

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Tags: Google, Network, Social

Posted by randfish

For years, the best way to gain rankings in search results was to have:

1. Accessible pages featuring
2. Quality content
3. Targeting the right keywords
4. In a way that naturally earned external links

But this changes things:

The cupcake post from Everywhereist normally wouldn’t rank there. In fact, unless you follow Geraldine on Twitter, chances are you won’t see much of her site in even semi-competitive results. Here’s a screenshot of a logged-out view.

Not only is Google annotating the listing with a photo, creating social proof and certainly increasing click-through-rate, they’re also biasing to put these results on page 1 that might normally rank in utter obscurity. This isn’t just true for obscure, random searches either, nor is it exclusive to Twitter.

"Web analytics" is a highly competitive query, and though they try, KISS Metrics and Market Motive aren’t normally ranking page 1 for everyone… but they are for me thanks to my connections to Neil on Quora and John on Facebook.

This should be giving everyone in search marketing a huge "ah ha" moment. As Google scales this out, concentrates on getting more people claiming their profiles and using logged-in accounts to search (supposedly this number was ~20% in March of 2010), the reach of your social network and the sharing you do to those networks will have a substantive, possibly massive, effect on your search traffic. The socialization of search is more than just Tweeted URLs or Facebook Likes or LinkedIn Shares having a positive first/second-order impact on generic rankings, it’s about influencing your social graph to see the content you share in their search results.

You can see how you’re connected in Google by visiting this page (while logged into your Google account)

Suddenly, a huge social reach is a competitive advantage in SEO. If you’re doing SEO today, I think it’s no longer possible to ignore the growth of your social connections as a big part of your SEO strategy. Honestly, I expect in 18 months, Twitter followers, Facebook connections, LinkedIn account size and engagement across these won’t just be social metrics; they’ll be KPIs for our SEO, too.

p.s. I don’t mean to suggest these features in Google are new – they’ve been around a while. But Google’s aggressiveness with showing and the user happiness and CTR that predicts, likely means this is here to stay, and will be a part of Google’s strategy for a long time. Bing’s doing this too with Facebook, and in a much more directly integrated way.

Do you like this post? Yes No

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Tags: Annotations, Network, Rankings, Search, Social

SEO Book.com

Tags: Network, SubHuman

A Cautionary Tale

I’m about to offer you two bits of information. One is probably something you learned a long time ago. The second bit is news, a comparative of two major companies, in a way. Sabre Travel Network and Travelport are two huge online travel players, and dogged competitors mind you. What occurred yesterday, I think you will find interesting, if not downright funny – even ridiculous.

Origins of News, Fluffy PR Goofs, and Arrogance?

ITB in Berlin is the world’s biggest travel trade show. Stories that arise out of that conference, usually things worth covering, things people at both ends of the B2B and B2C market should know about, and then there are “fluff” stories. You know, products or services some corporate genius decided to hype a bit, which should have been refined some more before the horns went off.

Well Sabre Travel Network released a German version of hosted social platform AgentStream just for ITB Berlin. Laid on top of Sabre’s proprietary Cubeless product, AgentStream is designed for the “brick and mortar” travel agent primarily. Sabre has some 200,000 in their network worldwide (remember that number), who probably should start migrating thought to digital, but that’s another story.  I ran the story about this, off of a Tnooz report.

AgentStream’s landing page. Note the fields where agents are separated from us “outside influencers” – woe be it for Sabre Group if a Michael Arrington, Richard MacManus, or Pete Cashmore ventured in this port.

As you can tell by the title, “Sabre Launches AgentStream Germany With Resounding Thump” my analysis of the product was not complimentary. The gist of the scathing report was, “A company with Sabre’s resources should never have a far more refined product after three years.” However, just a few dead links and a mediocre landing, is only the tip of the iceberg. What’s was inside, and the B2B interactive to come, is the real story. Bear with me, it is circuitous.

Not 49 minutes after my article went live, Sabre’s Social & Community Product Marketing Manager,  Sarah Kennedy Ellis (a lady who speaks before PhoCusWright conferences) , was making in depth comments  – even adding me on Twitter (and tweeting my exclusion below  –  I felt unworthy). How’s that for wired? The track taken, the insinuation, and ultimately the quality of the engagement B2B and B2C wise, went way South. What should have been an opportunity for AgentStream to gain feedback and make progress, turned into a ham handed segue into more corporate dogma and hype?

The image below is self explanatory. However, Sabre did not take into account an old beta tester would stay logged in. Opps.

Ellis tossed out the numbers, the defense posture, the techno mumbo jumbo, of product manager blathering – the warning siren “BS is headed your way.” A barrage of pseudo intellectual jibber jabber ensued, in comments and on Twitter, and just my “mention” of competitor Travelport’s Opinion platform? Fuel for another rant of directed angst toward our readers (you guys). Here is an excerpt.

“I’m actually quite glad you brought up many of the points you refer to in your post so they can be addressed. Regarding AgentStream being the “largest travel agent community in the world” – simply put, based on the facts, it is.

The term that seems to continue to be “fudged” in reality is what defines a “travel professional” related to these private communities where travel agents are told they can securely exchange information between other agents.

In the case of the other community you mention, it is not exclusive to travel agents, while it may imply that it is in its marketing materials.

That community’s membership numbers include nearly 1,000 employees of Travelport, as well as apparently any other warm body who happens to wander onto the site to register. How do I know? I’m one of them…”

The interchange became a rather lengthy discourse I will not burden you. As you can see, Sabre’s representative (who happens to be the community manager inside AgentStream too) is, let’s say “proud” at best.

Reality Smacks

AgentStream, nor Travelport’s Opinion, can lay claim to being the world’s largest travel agent community. The former asserts they have 4,000 + agents using the platform (define use), and the other actually proved me proof the have 7,100 signed up. Well, it took me one Google search to discover at least one, Travel Agent Central, that gets that many visits in a day. Okay, Ellis will argue TAC is not a true “Facebook” like community, blah blah. I looked for 5 seconds to find one such arguable site.

And furthermore, AgentStream is supposed to be a “walled garden” where travel agents in the Sabre network can ask important questions and prosper via community. Profiles, Q&A, mini-blogs, you know, all the bells and whistles of Facebook – aimed at being a resource. But an agent of the company, bragging about user exclusivity and privacy, the “pickiness” Ellis referred to from Sabre – should have prevented me from gaining access in the first place.

Below, the already successful Vinivi travel startup – probably the best in France.

Sabre evidently was not as meticulous as they needed to be, a product tester of some refute just waltzed in and took the screens you see. Conversely, Travelport’s representative sends an email – in a nice, and genuinely professional way.

Katherine Boyns, Project Coordinator for Vinivi (above), the travel innovators who Travelport wisely decided to use to create Travelport’s Opinion platform, invited us to give their competitive variant a spin. Not only was the result dramatic (as some of the labeled screens suggest), ultimately Boyns connected me with CEO of Vinivi, Gilles Granger straight from ITB Berlin.

Now we’re set for the “night and day” exemplification of perfect social media engagement (Brian Solis may use this as a case study for Engage II). Who knows why, maybe it was Boyns’ time as Manager of Marketing at Ernst & Young, the characters in this dialogue between me, Sabre, and essentially Travelport, could not have been more divergent.

Clearing Smoke

Here’s a  break down comparative of Sabre’s AgentStream versus Travelport’s Opinion, into the simplest terms. Both platforms have value. Neither platform is taking the world of travel agents by storm. Opinion, from what I have seen, has 10 times the user value. Most importantly for potential users of these systems of engagement – Travelport, nor Vivivi claimed anything bogus or in the least bit inflated about their product. In fact, Gilles Granger asked my feedback and collaboration where agent conversion is concerned.

And Sabre? The end of enumerable tweets, no email, and my supposed expulsion from the super duper, top secret enclave of Texan technological thought (sorry, love Texans, but)? My request to speak with someone for the sake of fairness left me directed at normal PR channels (final screen). The tweet below came after Sabre argued to like Karnak the magnificent that tens of thousands of travel agents utilize this immensely engaging tool in their daily travel business doings. The largest travel agent community on Earth, where:

• Tnooz travel bits are broadcast across the breadth of AgentStream and their group engagement totals 61 living souls
• The AgentStream “Newbies” group tasks the Sabre servers with 58 members
• The all critical Social Media Marketing & Technology group hosts a staggering 103 members
• A massive total of no less than 12 groups have been created in almost three years
• 71 agent mini-blogs have been created
• And the fearless leader of AgentSearch, Sarah herself, has been viewed 941 times

If you are not chuckling by now, factor in that since June 2008 only 71 questions have been asked of the throngs of inquiring agents. Also, a search for questions pertinent to Paris for instance, reveals 21 travel agents in the Sabre network desirous of any tidbit about that destination.  And then there is are the aesthetics, the UI, nav, the drill down – end user value. The problem being, Sabre has massive resources at their disposal, and just exaggerated and defended what can only be described as a mediocre digital tool.

The image below shows the minimalist nature of Opinon.

Onward and upward to Travelport’s Opinion (landing above), which Sabre Group’s watchdog tried to pummel into middle Earth in my comments, and in the ensuing twitter exchanges etc. Neither Katherine Boyns, nor French travel startup Vivini’s CEO Gilles Granger, has the slightest derogative for AgentStream.

The screen shot below (sorry you can’t see well) shows a bit of the depth of Travelport’s offering to agents. There is actually no comparison at all between AgentStream and Opinion.  Users of the latter have the simple and the complex options available.

If you want to be met with humility and correctness, contact either of these people. As for their product, the same transparency and credibility shined through. Opinion has exactly 7614 signups (their term) as I write this. Nothing I asked of these people caused them to hold back, I have to say this. Beside the screen history I provide, the list below encapsulates Opinion versus AgentStream.

• Groups for Opinion were only added two months ago – they now total 23
• Opinion has a far deeper platform and refined features comparatively
• Search, databases, community interaction wise, Opinion dwarfs AgentStream
• Aesthetically, and bug wise, Opinion seems to exhibit far fewer even if more complex
• The only negative I could find is a bit of UI inflexibility – and admitted lack of Opera support
• Opinion’s “Find an Expert” aspect alone makes it a more valuable tool

I could go on and on about the differences here. In Sabre AgentStream’s favor I must admit the interface is far simpler and easier to navigate. But then too, there is so much less depth, so many fewer needed nav elements – the comparison I made when talking about these was; “Comparing AgentStream to Opinion is like describing a bicycle to the space shuttle.” It’s easy to have a clean user interface when it only has three buttons.

The image below, one of 35 screens I had to take to grab Opinion function, reveals an agent’s view of a Google API enhanced, Wikipedia enhanced, map element Vinvi created for Travelport. In a closed system or community, such enhancements are crucial to user value.

My problem here, should be anyone’s problem. The best a billion dollar company can come up with is a LinkedIn wanna be? Then they beat up an industry expert about it?

Just Vinivi’s agent/map aspect enables agents more than playing 20 questions within a “so called” platform. Let me get off Sabre’s case for a moment. Aren’t you sick and tired of companies who continue to try and baffle you with BS? Are you sick of arrogant corporate types who do not even have the common decency to figure out with whom they are exchanging? What does behavior say about the underlying products we consume?

Summary Judgments

In all honesty, neither of these products is the YouTube of disruptive technology innovation. Either can improve dramatically, but which one will? When I spoke with Gilles Granger, from ITB Berlin, with questions about a secondary product he created; my own sense of values was re-invigorated – there are people who work for huge companies that can act appropriately still – there’s hope for the “conversation” after all. Products, companies, are reflections of the people behind them. Once your customers or clients understand this reality – there is no going back.

Texas (Sabre Group is headquartered there) is famous for hospitality and a bit for cowboy arrogance too. The balance stuck there is admirable if you think about it. We all admire the state, it’s legacy, and the strong character of the people there. But, what if the balance shifted and arrogant cowboys were all we understood?  This is Sabre’s dilemma, your dilemma too. I leave you with the final Twitter message exchange, right after a request to do a like interview to tell Sabre’s side of things. The rest I leave to you.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Sabre Travel Network versus Travelport: Who Knows What About Being Social?

Search Engine Journal

Tags: About, Being Social, Knows, Network, Sabre, Travel, Travelport Who, Versus

For several years GoDaddy has scored hits with it’s “see more” videos offering to show glimpses of spokes model Danica Patrick and other models in “hotter” situations than television allows. Although the videos were questionable in taste, they were a hit and increased sales mostly due to efforts of GoDaddy’s affiliates. The fact that the Super Bowl supposedly banned some of the videos for being too racy, only increased their success.

When Shashi Bellamkonda, Director of Social Media at Network Solutions, contacted me today about their parody of GoDaddy’s Danica videos I couldn’t wait to see what they cooked up. Now, full disclosure, Shashi is a friend so I was already biased to his video. When I heard about his “starlet” I was sold. I am a huge fan of Cloris Leachman. Not just for her iconic Frau Blücher character from Mel Brooks’ film Young Frankenstein; or for her whip wielding follow-up as Nurse Diesel in Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety; or her near silent cameo as Agnes in one favorite films Butch Cassidy and the Sun Dance Kid. What cemented her status for me was her Oscar winning role as Ruth Popper in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show based on the great Larry McMurtry novel.

As you can see Shashi didn’t have to do much to get me in his corner. His team just had to be smart enough to let Cloris due her stuff. Now, it is apparent that whoever directed the video can’t hold a candle to Mel Brook’s ability to setup a comic scene…thankfully they mainly just seem to have let Cloris loose.

With lines like:

This new girl they got the race car driver or whatever, she’s ok but that thing she does with her hair…she got that from me.

and

million dollars for a Super Bowl commercial? No wonder they have them dressed up in a super hero costumes. They aught to have flames shooting out their ass for that kinda money.

Network Solutions is gunning directly for GoDaddy and Danica. But my favorite line Cloris delivers is:

Yeah…that’s my ride. For when I play Texas Hold’em…and I’m not talking about cards either.

The appearance of BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone tries to bring some professional poise to the escapades. But frankly it wasn’t needed.

Ok, enough of my fan boy raving, check out the Network Solutions’ Go Granny video for yourself:

Click here to view the embedded video.

ReveNews

Tags: Cloris, Danica, Hottie, Leachman, Network, Patrick, Solutions, Watch, “Sisters”

When I was in Vegas, I met up with Clickbooth’s old social media manager, Eric. One of the things that I was really excited to hear was that Clickbooth would be launching a new CPC network called, Clickbooth CPC, soon that focused on getting traffic from the top 1000 websites.

Epic. Sounds like money to me. Just for full disclosure, I have not yet tried their CPC network… but I plan on it.

Stop Fighting Your Traffic Source

*nerd fight*

The reason I am so excited for this is because an AFFILIATE NETWORK is obviously going to understand affiliates and design their system to work for their affiliates as best as they can. No longer are going to have to fight with them like you might have to with other places (cough Google cough).

Will Integraclick live up to their “Integrity” name?

I think the biggest concern affiliates are going to have is clickbooth stealing their campaigns. Just think. You’re an affiliate manager looking to make some bucks. You go to your “super duper” affiliate and say… “Hey, here is the campaign… our offer at a good payout… ready, set, go.”

One of the things I really appreciated about meeting with Eric is that he was telling me the name Integraclick (Clickbooth’s parent company) comes from the word integrity. Apparently they base their business model on integrity because in the end… that’s the best way to do business. (Someone correct me if I am wrong)

I really appreciated that. In this industry, things can be very shady… so I highly respect companies that at least say they have integrity.

The only way you can ever find out if it’s true is by time. If anything like that does happen, contact me. For now though, I am excited to see this new network launch. As always, those who get in early have a huge opportunity to make a ton of money.

Press Release

Check out the official press release here.

Check out Clickbooth CPC now!

[Image source]
[Image Source]
[FYI, this was not a paid post]

© JonathanVolk.com – A Blog about Making Money Online, 2010.

Want to Learn To Make Money Online?

• Get My Facebook Advertising Guide!
• Get My Affiliate Marketing Guide!

How To Make Money Online

Tags: Clickbooth, Launches, Network