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Oct 30 2009

Old/New Media Multiplying Whines?

October 30, 2009 – 12:01 am

I love The New York Times. I really like the writing of David Segal. I didn’t like Segal’s “Soapbox” column last week where he added the muscle of his newspaper to one person’s battle with T-Mobile. (Full disclosure: we represent another mobile firm).

Customer Service: The Office

Customer service according to The Office (click to play)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway, long story short, his subject complains about a never opened T-Mobile account for which she is being charged.

Segal gets in touch with T-Mobile on her behalf, and the PR team at the phone company “sprang into action.” Segal wonders in the piece why (presumably all) ”companies seem to rouse themselves only after they get a tap on the shoulder from someone in the news media.”  He does a bit of a tap himself around the facts: The customer complained. The company asked for some information. She didn’t provide the information, and the collection firm pushed on.

I have often pushed back on bloggers, Tweeters and Facebook status updaters who perform elaborate public whines or rants over customer service issues that they should have solved themselves. Caveat emptor has never been more appropriate than in the brave new world of the internet, yet many seem to think that it’s possible to fly through life unscathed by the unscrupulous or even dented a little by a bad customer experience.

I am impressed with consumer companies that are facilitating good customer experiences by using social media. Dell was featured in a guest post on Mary Ellen Slayter’s Smart Blog on Social Media recently. Matt Jurmann from Chromatics lists a number of good ones, also, in the form of case studies. Maybe Price and Jaffe have it right in The Best Customer Service is No Service.

Maintaining customer satisfaction has never been more important, as Alison says in her Better Business Bureau video/blog post. As our client notes, “you can’t make all customers satisfied all the time.”  The crying of “wolf” over things that can be resolved with a little conversation, though, is troubling. Social networks have the potential to facilitate the resolution of issues; not just amplifying the whining or the shouting.

A more recent look at the multiplier effect of “badvocates” is Laurie Burkitt’s post on Forbes just this week. She repeats a Weber Shandwick stat, saying that power writers like @dmscott represent 20% of the world’s adult population online and each one reaches an estimated 14 people with his or her critiques. Powerful, most often principled, these critics, though, may be encouraging less sophisticated copycats

What do you think? Are we too quick to resort to the online rant or a call to Mother NYT? Is the age of social media encouraging whining? What is the appropriate role of customer service in the era of such transparency when the first complaint can carry such weight?

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Michael Whitlow | Posted in Digital Marketing | Comments (18)
Oct 29 2009

Why Hospitals Need to Retweet

October 29, 2009 – 8:00 am

by Jenn Riggle

Photo courtesy of dotbenjamin

Photo courtesy of dotbenjamin

I read a great article by Brian Solis this week about the science of retweets. The article got me thinking about why hospitals don’t use the Twitter retweet function more often.

According to Ed Bennett’s most recent list of hospitals engaging in social media, 297 U.S. hospitals have established Twitter accounts. Yet when you look at these accounts, one thing is readily apparent – most don’t understand the power of the retweet. Instead of using Twitter to engage with the community and to humanize health care, they’re using it as a broadcasting medium to promote their service lines and extend their brand. And when you look at their Twitter stream, more often than not, they’re doing all of the talking.

Why is this? One reason is that not all consultants seem to understand social media and the value it brings to health care . My client shared with me an August 12, 2009 Advisory Board article that pooh-poohed the value of the retweet function saying: “By retweeting…hospitals missed an opportunity to connect the story to a service offering or a call to action. While retweets can be an easy way to boost the number of messages sent to your Twitter following, you’ll want to be selective in order to retain your own voice with your audience, avoid ‘content spam,’ and maximize interest in your specific institution.”

Hospitals that feel this way are never going to harness the power of the social media. Here are five reasons hospitals should retweet more:

  1. Give credit where credit is due: If someone says something interesting or compelling, you should retweet it. Not only does this acknowledge the person or the organization for saying something noteworthy, but it also allows you to share it with your followers.  
  2. Prove you’re not a robot: Too many hospitals are talking to themselves – sending out information about their service lines and their clinicians, but not listening to what their followers are saying. By retweeting others, you demonstrate that you’re not a robot and are reading the tweets of others and finding what they’re saying is relevant and worth sharing.
  3. Develop a closer connection with the community: We all know health care is local, so it’s important for hospitals to show they’re a member of the community they serve. By retweeting area residents or sharing information about things that are happening in their community, you can become a community cheerleader and show that you care about what happens in your community.
  4. Serve as a healthcare resource: Hospitals are a major healthcare resource for the community, so it’s important they share health information with their followers. By retweeting healthcare authorities, such as the Centers for Disease Control or the New England Journal for Medicine, you’re sharing important health information with your community and becoming the place people can go to for health care information.
  5. Provide consumers with what they want ? health information: While hospitals want to promote their service lines, consumers don’t want to read a steady stream of information about what your doctors are doing or how many times a doctor has performed a specific procedure. You can share this information, but you should also provide consumers with what they want – health information. By retweeting health information and providing links to where people can go to find additional information, you’re providing real value.

Hospitals need to realize that they can’t just talk about themselves – they need to provide information that is relevant to their community and their followers. Retweeting others is a great way to do this.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Jenn Riggle | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (27)
Oct 28 2009

3 Ways To Use Curiosity To Convert Fans Into Activists

October 28, 2009 – 9:00 am

A Kitten's Curiosity

By Wyatt Wood

Originating from the human desire to share, its obvious that the success of social media is the ability to connect users. A network’s success is determined by how easy it is to connect and share. For example compare Twitter vs Plurk, Facebook vs MySpace, Bing vs Google (perform your own comparison).

Success can be a two-edged sword, if focusing on the wrong metrics can leave the message stale, using return on influence can provide an accurate measurement of message activists.

“Influence isn’t about having the best “thing.” It’s about reaching the right people, with an engagement that delivers value, offering your audience a meaningful connection to your brand. Having great content isn’t enough if you don’t have, don’t know, or don’t understand the audience(s) you want to reach and how they want to engage with you.” (Jen Houston)

Micah Baldwin defined influence as “influence is one person influencing one person about one thing” during his presentation at Gnomedex 9.0.

How to be Awesome – Gnomedex

View more presentations from micahb.

So how do you convert curiosity to increase your influence? Here are 3 simple steps to strengthen your influence within your network:

  1. Use strategic reciprocity to entice your network into participation. While value differs between users there is always purpose that defines an engaged user. TGI Friday’s successfully converted customers and potential customers with their campaign for gaining 500,000 fans on Facebook. Allowing for benefits in exchange for an action from the user uses tangible ways measure the engagement.
  2. Be consistent with your message and values when the situation is adverse. It’s no surprise that given the success of the Facebook campaign for TGIF that to execute the promise of a free burger could be a challenge. The ability for conversation doesn’t always mean that it will be positive. Nick Cifuentes provides several tough examples of hands on social media crisis management. Given the change in the landscape of communication there is no excuse for not being responsible, but staying traditional while communicating during backlash can perpetuate the damage.
  3. Take advantage of opportunities for social validation. This week Facebook extended their share tool, including adding new functionality to count of the number of times the URL has been shared on Facebook. The ease of using the new features helps the silent fan become an extension of the conversation. Touting the new analytics for the share tool, you can now access the information associated with each link shared on Facebook:
  • Users share the link on Facebook.
  • Users “like” the shared story.
  • Users comment on the shared story on Facebook.
  • Users click back to your site from the story.

Have you used these concepts or tools to affect your network to convert fans into participants? What metrics are most important to your decision making to determine the return on influence?

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Dave McNamara | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (15)
Oct 27 2009

Lubricating the Wheels of Social Media

October 27, 2009 – 8:00 am

by Mike Mulvihill

YouTube Preview Image

There is nothing quite like political controversy cooked up in the land of meat pies, pints and the Queen. The latest controversy is full of contradictions. It is a great mile marker for the ever symbiotic connection between traditional media and social media (and vice versa). And, it is significant for reasons more societal than social. The U.K. has faced immigration issues longer than the States, and things have become a bit more politicized than here. (They actually have two elected member of Parliament who got there on the wings of some pretty severe, if not Fascist views on immigration and immigrants).

From a social viewpoint, this latest controversy underscores how, from a PR perspective, traditional and social media constantly feed one another. Media today mean everyone with credentials and anyone with a keyboard and a following. From a societal viewpoint, it’s more than a little bit scary.

Here’s a little background on the controversy in question (with some background on some of the players). First a quick synopsis: The top-ranked U.K. political talk show (the BBC’s “Question Time” – think more like a snarky health care town hall meeting format than “Meet the Press”) last Thursday had on its show Nick Griffin, leader of British National Party (BNP) whose mission statement reads like a page from a Klu Klux Klan playbook. The show’s producers proceeded to set up Griffin in front of 200 audience questioners who pound him for his views while four normal interviewees stood by to provide stark contrast color commentary. Later, it is revealed the BBC violated its audience “random” selection guidelines to stack the studio crowd against Griffin and even urging them to ask “provocative” questions.

If you watch any of the video clip contained in this post (yes, it is a long one), you can see that Griffin gets lambasted. But the result wasn’t necessarily all bad for the bad guys.  The BBC had 243 complaints that the show was biased against Griffin, compared with 114 complaints about him appearing on it. Coverage was all over the newspapers the following day, some of it fairly positive for Griffin and the BNP, and some of it sounding dire warnings of a growing anti-immigrant base.

The traditional media bottom line: This episode of BBC “Question Time” attracted 8 million viewers, a record viewership for a 30-year-old program. The show was so anticipated that leading U.K. newspapers, The Guardian and The Telegraph, ran live blogs during the show (which complemented the show’s existing method of engaging viewers by crawling their text messages across the screen during the broadcast. The show’s Live Chat had the most participants ever.)  No less than 68,000 blog posts were generated. And Tweets mentioning Nick Griffin’s name skyrocketed.

TwitterScoop graphic:

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Like the traditional media coverage, there were a surprising number of positive social media comments about Griffin and the BNP. In fact, the commentary seems disproportionately more favorable than the 6 percent of the vote the BNP garnered in the last elections. All this causing our cross Atlantic allies to ponder if social media can play an Obama campaign-like role in their political process with national elections coming in 2010.

Politics, especially when combined with controversy, is the oil that lubricates traditional media. It sells newspapers, drives viewership and, thereby, generates revenue. It appears social media shares a kindred spirit on the politics and controversy front. Traffic spikes and users engage when these ingredients are in the mix, especially when the message engages or, in this case, scares us enough to capture our attention.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Mike Mulvihill | Posted in Digital Marketing, PR Industry Trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)
Oct 26 2009

Survival Demands Change

October 26, 2009 – 7:06 am

One Tree Mountain

by Geoff Livingston

You may be strong, you may be smart, but if you cannot adapt to rapid change you won’t survive. A rather Darwinistic statement, but a truth that companies and communicators increasing must accept. Communications technology has turned our world upside down (this post owes a special hat tip to Kyle Reis, and the great conversation he had with me that inspired it).

I imagine social media wonks grinning like cheshire cats and traditional communicators groaning. But the observation applies to all. Five years ago Twitter didn’t exist and Facebook was a blip on the map. Where will we be in another five years?

Today’s communications reality: Every decade brings sweeping challenges to the industry, driven by more telecommunications bandwidth and computing power. Consider the following:

  • 70s: Broadcast TV dominates, while metro newspapers consolidate to fight off the evening news. Cable TV is born.
  • 80s: Personal computing takes off, cable becomes widespread, commercial adoption of the Internet begins
  • 90s: The decade of email and Web 1.0 (.com), satellite rivals cable, wireless takes off
  • 00s: Web 2.0 rises to the fore, 1.0 community properties like Prodigy, AOL suffer; wireless Internet services blow up. Print pubs start failing en masse, while electronic books become available.

The rate of change accelerates with each new decade. As we conclude this one, we have seen the birth of next generation email (Google Wave), the virtual reality network Second Life (rise and fall, in this case), the beginning of a pitched battle for the mobile Internet between Apple and Google, and Verizon’s recent declaration that it’s done investing in it’s landline business.

We focus on how organizations use these tools to communicate with their stakeholders, but bit and bytes have become so disruptive communicators can no longer afford to turn their backs on media advancements. The only certainty is flux and change.

A core competency for successful communicators and their companies — agencies, for profits and nonprofits alike — must be adaptability. Our media world will continue to move like a river, relentlessly flowing over any barrier until it reaches the see. Now more than ever we must think liquid.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Geoff Livingston | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (13)
Oct 23 2009

Using LinkedIn as a PR Tool

October 23, 2009 – 12:01 am

One of the social media questions most often asked of the consulting team at CRT/tanaka relates to the use of LinkedIn by individuals as a way to help their companies or causes. There have been some good recent posts on how to increase the SEO juice from LinkedIn, and I’m not above borrowing from them to share with our readers on The Buzz Bin.

Google Trends "LinkedIn" Searches 10/06 - 9/09

Google Trends "LinkedIn" Searches 10/06 - 9/09

Kevin Gibbons took a shot the other day at laying out some ideas, for instance, offering good advice for novice or slightly practiced users of LinkedIn. For starters, LinkedIn is nothing without a complete profile. While most consider this a personal page, make sure you include your company website and carefully craft the keywords that are included in the Summary and Specialties sections.

You should also edit the profile to claim your vanity URL. This helps optimize your own name in the search engines, but also remember to include it in you company site and to tie it as closely as you can to Facebook, Twitter and other instances of your name on the web.

Making your profile publicly available may seem like a “duh!” for most PR folks, but you’d be surprised at how many of the 50+ million LinkedIn users don’t.  Steven South offers thoughts on how much to include. Blocking too much of your client/work experience may lower your SEO score.

LinkedIn. The name would seem to indicate people in search of connections, but I can’t tell you the number of times I look up a prospect’s profile and find a truly anemic number of connections. Link. Connect. Join groups. All extend your reach and improve the ability of others to find you (and your company) on the Interwebz.

Recommendations also are an often overlooked aspect of LinkedIn, and I’ll admit that I get suspicious when I see the obvious quid pro quo (you recommend me, and I’ll recommend you). Your abilities, particularly in the consulting business, are best reflected in honest recs. Don’t forget to ask for mention of your company as you seek them from your business associates.  Higher numbers of recommendations also increase your profile in searches internal to LinkedIn.

CRT/tanaka also has a company profile (please don’t judge us yet). Links to this from employees throughout the company are important steps also. Building other connections is critical. (Remember to have employees exactly match the company name.)

Gibbons also reminds us to make use of the three website hyperlinks in the profile section. I link to the The Buzz Bin and to CRT/tanaka’s blog in addition to the company Web site.

LinkedIn is now reaching its stride in the groups section. While I’d not rank groups at the top of my list for helping stay informed in key business interests (Twitter is still my favorite), there are great groups formed around almost every interest area in PR. Lindsay Olson mentions some of them in her post.

LinkedIn Answers is an evolving opportunity, particularly for consultants. The professional version of FixYa (couldn’t resist – I love this site), the Answers section is a wide open field for intelligent thought to be shared, and with the powerful base of LinkedIn and the wide-ranging interest areas, Answers has the potential of Marketing Profs (350,000 participants there) on steroids.

I also liked the ideas from Patrick O’Malley, who mentions that the headline should carry an active voice, and the Linked Secrets duo Nathan Kievman and Peter King, who are thought provoking on the subject of effective use of LinkedIn. I particularly like Nathan’s ideas on how to use video on the service.

With LinkedIn gaining one new member each second according to Jeff Weiner, CEO, on his official blog, the world is getting a lot smaller and your connections are getting a lot easier.  PR people have an opportunity to make the most of this interesting communications environment.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Michael Whitlow | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (38)
Oct 21 2009

Is Social Media the Kudzu of Our Lives?

October 21, 2009 – 11:00 pm

by Jenn Riggle

Photo by Jack Anthony

Photo by Jack Anthony

It seems wherever I turn, I’m being bombarded by social media and its constant stream of information. Like kudzu, the green menace that covers much of the southeastern United States, it threatens to take over my life.

My day is consumed with social media and social networking sites. Whether it’s getting up early to read the news, keeping up with the endless stream of tweets coming through my TweetDeck, finding something interesting to add to the online conversation on Twitter and Facebook, writing my weekly blog post or making sure my daughter is using the Internet to research the solar system rather than watching singing cats on YouTube.

If you don’t live in the southeastern United States, you may not be familiar with kudzu, a fast-growing vine that covers anything that comes in its path. My 11-year-old daughter loves the way the vines turn trees, telephone poles and abandoned homes into gigantic topiaries. Yet for all its apparent whimsy, kudzu costs nearly $500 million every year in lost cropland and control costs.

So too, social media can take over your life, providing you with so much information that you have little time for anything else – let alone your work. You read about people whose marriage vows are broken when they find a former flame on Facebook. And when I get up early, I’m always surprised by the number of insomniacs who are tweeting at all hours of the night and morning. Even John Mayer received some flack from his on-again and off-again girlfriend, Jennifer Aniston, for his incessant tweeting.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the immediacy that news and information is shared on Twitter and how social media has helped our clients reach out to their customers in new and meaningful ways. However, if you let it, social media will creep into your work, your life and your relationships. That’s why it’s so important to chop away at it and decide what adds value to your life.

Maybe you can’t follow everyone on Twitter. Or you only tweet during certain times of the day or only during the work week. Or maybe you focus your energies on using a couple of social networks well, rather than trying to be everywhere at once.

There will always be another message that needs to sent or another story breaking somewhere in the world, but my kids are only going to be young once. It’s important to make sure there’s time to catch Mike Ness and Social Distortion play a rockin’ set at the NorVa, watch my daughter swim a 200 IM at a swim meet, proof her research paper one more time or play yet another game of SORRY! (okay, I still need to work on this).

And maybe I’ll even tweet about it.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Jenn Riggle | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (8)

Mobile Is All About Community

October 21, 2009 – 3:00 pm

By Wyatt Wood

It’s no surprise that mobile web use is increasing with records sales for iphone and the buzz surrounding the upcoming Motorola Droid smartphone. Taking this increase into consideration should be part of any current interactive/social strategy. With more than 60 million page views from mobile devices WordPress.com took notice and provided mobile template options for its bloggers.

This really shows how mobile devices are becoming the next entrance into the cloud. It’s pretty easy to see how the simplistic interface is geared for searching and quick delivery of information. The medium is perfect for engaging users on the move but I’m not satisfied that it’s good at retaining the average user long term.

Mobile location services such as Loopt are attempting to tackle this problem by providing behind the scenes (always on) monitoring and updates. I see this taking lifecasting to a new level of information sharing. Combined with SenseCam, which reportedly can hold 30,000 images on its internal memory, the possibility of having a device or service that can track and broadcast your movements has major implications.

Given my own usage of services like Foursquare, Latitude, Brightkite and other mobile/location aware services I think location broadcasting is a great idea. Especially coupled with a sense of competition to become recognized as a “regular” I think helps combat boredom with a service. But what’s next for the interactive mobile user? It’s not always about gaming or entertainment – given the trends I think it is clear that community is emerging point of mobile devices.

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Dave McNamara | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)
Oct 20 2009

Facebook’s Five Power Plants

October 20, 2009 – 9:01 am

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by Mike Mulvihill

Photo by Laban West.  Lightning over Muskogee Power Plant, Muskogee OK.

Last week the number of the week was 30,000  –  that’s how many servers support Facebook’s operations.  (No wonder, Facebook produces 25TB – yep, tera-bytes – of log data per day).  The numbers comes from Jeff Rothschild,  the vice president of technology at Facebook, who discussed the company’s infrastructure in a presentation last week at UC San Diego.  BTW, this is a pretty rapid ramp up from the 10,000 servers  Facebook has been claiming since April 2008. 

At 30,000 servers, Facebook data operations now consume somewhere in the order of 3,800 MW of electricity,  including cooling and power distribution costs,  just so we can stay connected with our friends.  (Since I don’t know exactly what servers Facebook has in use, this number could be slightly lower or a lot higher.)  To put 3,800 MW in perspective, that’s about five power plants (big electric generation plants of 750 MW a piece).  Not an insignificant footprint. 

Social media is a great tool for spreading information and mobilizing people on lots of topics and issues. Here’s an issue to add to the pot – at what point does the fantastic rise of social networks create enough harm to offset the benefit?    

In a world looking to reduce the impact of energy generation by using less energy, our social media jones is one of the drivers behind the doubling of servers in use in the U.S. (from 5.6 million in 2003 to 11.8 million in 2007).  An individual data center consumes somewhere in the area of 5 MW of energy – the equivalent of 5 million houses of electricity.  Some data centers consume as much as 30 MW.  (I have even seen plans for a 50 MW data center that proudly points out that it would be a very green 50 MW data center.)  In 2005, it is estimated that 1.2 percent of al U.S. electricity was consumed by servers, a 100 percent increase from 2000.  IDC projects another 40 percent to 76 percent increase by next year, which would be about 2 percent of all electricity in 2010.  

I’m not picking on Facebook or even social media, but the point is we all have behaviors that impact our environment, some are just more self evident than others.  Plasma TVs that consume as much as 9 percent of a home’s power consumption mostly in standby mode.  More and more devices consuming more and more energy – if we’re going to try to reduce the number of power plants needed to feed the beast (us), then we have got to change our ways.  Change our behaviors. Do things differently. Energy efficiency – it’s great to talk about.  But are we really having any impact or is all that talking just adding more servers to Facebook?

 

 

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Mike Mulvihill | Posted in PR Industry Trends | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (11)
Oct 19 2009

Redefining Authority – A Question of Now

October 19, 2009 – 6:42 am

by Geoff Livingston

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Just prior to BlogWorld Expo this past weekend, Technorati released it’s new authority system, a more mercurial gauge of popularity. The effort redefines the much maligned authority figure, and reclaim respect from the blogosphere.

Technorati, once the end all, be all of blog rankings, now often finds itself derided as broken and inaccurate. At play was the blog search engine’s inability to match authority to inbound links from social networks, and the rise of Google BlogSearch. As a result, blogs saw dwindling authority with the rise of social networks like Twitter and Facebook (image: Rosie, the Blogger).

Bloggers have largely abandoned Technorati as a benchmark, though the site is still considered by comScore as a top ten social media property. In an attempt to reestablish it’s foothold, the social index has recalibrated it’s authority and ranking system:

  • Authority is calculated based on a site’s linking behavior, categorization and other associated data over a short, finite period of time. A site’s authority may rapidly rise and fall depending on what the blogosphere is discussing at the moment, and how often a site produces content being referenced by other sites.
  • The new Authority calculation differs from the past version, which measured linking behavior over a longer 6 month timeframe. Please note that links in blogrolls don’t count towards Authority, as they are not indicative of interest in relevant content; we stopped including blogroll links in August 2008.
  • Authority is on a scale of 0-1000. 1000 is the highest possible authority.
  • Technorati Rank is a site’s rank among the Technorati Authority of all sites. 1 is the highest rank.

The new Technorati authority provides a pulse read on the Authority of Now, so to speak. What’s going to make us think this new system will work?  Well, though feedback has been expectedly positive to negative, we actually have reason to think the new benchmark may be working as a current barometer. Take a look at this graphic: influence-1

As you can see, I am a team member or author of two top ten thousand (10Kk) ranked blogs, according to Technorati. What’s not surprising is the Buzz Bin’s placement in the 10K. But what is surprising is the appearance of my personal blog.

Why? By no traditional metric – links over six months, traffic, RSS readership, etc. – should this blog be in the 10K. However, 19 days ago we shifted the Buzz Bin to a group blog status.  During the immediate ramp up period and for the past few weeks, I have been blogging much more regularly on the personal blog, and sure enough traffic and interest has increased. 

Technorati’s new rankings reflect this relatively recent change. It delivers an accurate barometer of not only the Buzz Bin’s continued performance over the past few weeks, but also my personal blog’s traffic as well as outbound and inbound links in a generally accurate fashion. 

The implications for bloggers (new and old) are simple, now more than ever you cannot afford to rest on your laurels. Older bloggers still have the advantage with established RSS readerships, legacy posts and links, etc. from a traffic perspective, and thus, a better ability to influence current links. But now, newer entrants will have a much easier time measuring relevance through the ultimate currency – hyperlinks.

That in turn will force the Technorati 100 to be much more responsive to their communities. Let’s just hope Technorati’s spam bots are able to weed out the black hat SEO types.

Hmm, maybe they actually came up with a better system for now. At the same, time, I think authority needs to reflect past performance. What happens if someone goes dark for a maternity or paternity leave? Does all of their past work simply not matter? What do you think?

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AddThis Social Bookmark Button By Geoff Livingston | Posted in Digital Marketing | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (17)