In a few significant ways, Facebook is the new AOL. Users filter links to new content through their Facebook accounts, and tend to have active sessions lasting for hours. So in a very real way, the way we interact with the web now is shaped by our Facebook experience.

Agree or disagree? Comments are always welcome.

Two researchers who set up doppelganger domains to mimic legitimate domains belonging to Fortune 500 companies say they managed to vacuum up 20 gigabytes of misaddressed e-mail over six months.

A doppledanger domain, of course, is one that closely mimics a legitimate web address and is designed to capture information from users who slightly misspell the legitimate address. Click here for the complete article.

It might come as a surprise that, generally, it’s best to limit the number of measurable data to 10-15 KPIs, which allows for a laser-like focus
on true web site performance without forcing your metrics professionals to invest precious time and resources in tracking data which truly
doesn’t affect your web site’s financial performance. It’s an attitude and a precise mental set, to be exact about it, a determination to use
your metric reporting tools to answer a set of pre-defined questions instead of allowing the software itself to dictate the scope and terms of
your reports.

Here are just a few KPI’s which are generally applicable to all web sites, no matter what industry you’re in. Before we begin, though, it’s good
to remember that there are two types of metrics: those which apply to the physical performance of your web site, and those by which you measure
financial success. So, here are some metrics you can use:

• Conversion Rate: The percentage of site visitors who become customers, subscribers, or otherwise engage in a lasting interaction with your web site (and your company)
• Unique Visitors: The true number of individuals who visit your site, providing a snapshot of how busy your site truly is
• Length of Visit: How long, in average terms, that visitors remain on your site; close examination is required, because a longer length can indicate greater interaction with your site or simply that your site is difficult to use

These metrics are just the beginning, of course. Although all metrics reporting programs will share some similarities (such as the KPIs listed above), your company or business will require unique and custom metrics–because, after all, you run a unique company and a unique web site.  So get started on deciding which KPIs are important to you–and use the resulting intelligence to improve your company’s bottom line.

• By some measures, Twitter has a total of 1.5 million active accounts.
• Facebook, on the other hand, claims a total of 750 million active users.

Additionally, it seems that Twitter and Facebook have different user bases, with Twitter focusing on sports and celebrities, while Facebook caters to businesses and to those of us not cursed by fame and fortune (or something like that). Don’t believe me? Watch ESPN Sportscenter for only a few moments and you’ll hear numerous references to Twitter, even the regular broadcast of Tweets from ESPN viewers.Twitter has actually become part of of the Sportscenter program in a way that Facebook is not part of the mainstream media. Having said that, I advise my clients to focus on Facebook–unless, of course, the Twitter demographic better suits their needs. Knowing the sports connection, you’d want your sporting goods store to have a Twitter presence, right? But all things considered, focus on Facebook instead. The potential audience is exponentially larger, and since each online relationship must be approved, most posts carry the added credibility of that imprimatur. No matter which route you go, though, don’t dive in without an editorial calender. It helps cross-promotion within you company, and helps ensure the  quality of your posts–quality, if something goes wrong, is extremely difficult to get back.

In the May 22, 2010 issue of The Economist, this raised the charge that “online privacy is being trampled underfoot as internet behemoths race to grab as much data as possible…The worst thing is Facebook’s underlying prejudice against privacy. Sign up and it assumes that you want to share as much data as possible; if not, you have to change the settings, which can be a fiddly business.”

To a sophisticated user base, this is an open invitation to drop the service entirely. And to those of us who rely heavily on Facebook and its kin for our social marketing strategies, there is real danger of reduced scope for our campaigns. After all, a smaller user base means we reach fewer people, and ultimately pay more for each customer or client acquisition. Ultimately, although we need accurate and comprehensive information to increase our Return On Investment, it’s our job to keep the social networking sites honest. If not, we run the risk of losing one of the most successful channels in the history of Internet marketing.

But there is a way to level the playing field, so to speak. Viral marketing and social networking strategies can exponentially increase your site traffic, and not only that, increase qualified traffic. The basic question, of course, is what is your company’s true goal? Is it bragging rights for high placement on Search Engine Result Pages (which few people might actually see)? Or is it a greater amount of site traffic and increased conversions? The answer, I hope, is obvious. We are, after all, in a results oriented business.

It’s my opinion that results take precedence–that results are all that matters (while still wearing a white hat). Our job is to increase qualified traffic and conversions by the most efficient and cost-effective means possible. And obviously, if you have little chance of winning the keyword war (and sometimes that is indeed the case), the task then becomes to build site traffic by any ethical and affordable means possible.

The answer, of course, is to devote your energy and resources to social networking. This is the one area where Page Rank and other search engine criteria are tossed out the window, and the victor becomes whomever is willing to work the hardest. Here are some valuable guidelines:

• Standardize your employees’ e-mail signatures to promote your most important URL(s)
• Encourage your employees to post about the company in their social networks
• Develop a content schedule/editorial calendar for Twitter, FB, etc.

Deep pockets or not, your competitors become vulnerable when you pursue an aggressive and comprehensive social networking strategy. In this case, the ends justify the (white hat) means. The bottom line? Take the fight to an arena where you can win. And never stop until you do.

I’ve been using (and cursing) the Squarespace Content Management System for over a month now, and I must say that free blogging services such as Blogger and WordPress (not to mention paid services such as Typepad) have much more flexibility and accuracy when it comes to Search Engine Optimization and operating in HTML mode. I’m quickly growing tired of:

• Broken tags, especially the most basic ones
• The inability to customize page titles (especially for “child” pages…by default, Squarepace pulls the page title from your file name)
• No functionality for inserting keywords (I don’t want to hear that keywords are passe…do you really want to take that chance?)
• Odd behaviors such as uploading replacement files and still accessing the old one (even though a mouse hover points to the new URL)
• Not having access to your directory tree
• Their refusal to provide raw server logs for inspecting serious user problems and error messages (they say the logs don’t exist!!)

These aren’t quirks with easy workarounds; these are serious problems in conception, service, customer appreciation and functionality. Also, the Squarespace customer support is a tad worse than mediocre; they have a documented tendency to literally throw up their hands and say there’s nothing they can do to resolve your issue,

The bottom line? Avoid Squarespace like the plague. If you’re a client, they certainly don’t care about you. Why should we care about them?

The New York Times includes an especially perceptive article in its August 26, 2009 edition which ostensibly focuses on the demographics of Twitter, but also illustrates the different business applications between the microblogging service and social networking sites such Facebook.  According to the Times, teens would much rather communicate with friends via text message–after all, it’s theoretically more private (barring scores of forwarded texts) than Twitter  and sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

“I just think it’s  weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,”  said 18-year-old Kristen Nagy of New Jersey, who sends and receives up to 500 text messages per day.

According to comScore, a leading purveyor of “digital marketing intelligence,“ only 11 percent of Tweets are posted by those in the 12 to 17-year-old demographic. It doesn’t get much better for Facebook: teenagers account for only 9 percent of FB’s user base.

So, who’s driving the growth and success of Facebook and Twitter, especially since teens are seen as the early adopters and drivers of new technologies? According to the Times, “Almost everyone under 35 uses social networks, but the growth of these networks over the last year has come from older adults, according to a report from Forrester Research issued Tuesday. Use of social networking by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent in the last year.”

Based on personal experience and my own research, that does make sense. But Twitter’s true power is not as a social networking tool, but as a way for businesses and professionals to keep track of industry news and developments, comment on relevant trends and threads and become an authority in their industries, while of course (discreetly) promoting their products and services. I say discreetly because as much as I love The New York Times, I quit following the publication on Twitter because it seemed that Times personnel were repackaging every single article from their online edition. A few posts a day to keep me informed of breaking news and entice me over to the Times’ web site; I can appreciate and live with that. But as many companies are finding out, too many self-promoting Tweets quickly assume the air of so much white noise. Lesson learned: your business presence on Twitter will not succeed if every single Tweet contains a self-promoting link. So, join the continual discussion. Comment on, and at, the peers you elect to follow (@username to have your Tweets show up in their news feed). You’ll quickly find yourself with more followers, and eventually, more business and more traffic to your web site. Isn’t that why you created a Twitter account in the first place?

Content Management Systems (CMS) are now a fact of life–even a necessity–for companies both large and small; whether it be Microsoft Sharepoint or start-up companies such as Squarespace, the basic idea remains the same: to encourage and facilitate content contributions throughout your company, and allow your web manager(s) to spend more time planning and creating content (white papers, news releases, videos, etc.) instead of writing seemingly endless amounts of code.

So, what could possibly be the drawback with that? Although it might seem relatively minor, given the simple, easy-to-use WYSIWYG blog-style interface of most systems, some Content Management Systems seem to more or less choke on even perfectly written code entered in HTML view. Working with Squarespace, I’ve seen brackets disappear or break (rendering, of course, the content gibberish or eliminating it entirely depending on the permissiveness of the browser) while noticing the sudden appearance of repetitive or meaningless tags (I didn‘t enter that table body tag!). Not to single out Squarespace, but it can get pretty…hinky…under the hood. And from an SEO perspective, that’s not exactly a  good thing when you want crawlers properly indexing and ranking your site (especially since crawlers don‘t seem to enjoy parsing through great amounts of extraneous code to get to the content they‘ve evolved to evaluate).

Now don’t get me wrong…there’s nothing at all wrong with the concept of creating content for your web site without getting bogged down in endless hours of writing code (hey, I enjoy coding sometimes, but I don‘t want to spend hours a day doing it…I‘d rather be writing, networking with content creators and strategizing with my boss). CMS solutions do indeed free up valuable time for other tasks: SEO, strategy, keyword research, competitive analysis, social networking and viral marketing. And that’s a good thing: it’s what Content Management Systems are designed to do.

But even though the idea is to promote a relatively hands-off approach when it comes to writing code, there are definitely times when it’s absolutely vital to customize existing tags (ALT tags, of course, to cite just one example) and to enter SEO friendly tags that form the basis for emerging best practices (ACRONYM tags, for example). And then there’s the matter of entering keywords for individual pages; although Squarespace doesn’t permit such editing and claims their sites are already optimized for SEO (questionable at best, since I’ve never, ever heard of out-of-the-box optimization). You’ll hear a lot of conflicting opinions these days about the importance of keywords, but given that the best SEO strategy is a holistic approach, do you really want to live without them? My own research indicates that keywords are decreasing in importance, but I’m not exactly ready to do without them entirely.

Ultimately, however, the regular publication of keyword-rich, market-relevant content is the single most important factor in gaining search engine traction and, ultimately, higher rankings. The main idea should be to use your content to increase qualified traffic and conversions, and leverage relevant social networking opportunities to increase the number, quality and inbound links to your site. This is the most important key to an uptick in traffic and the search engine placement you (realistically) desire. All it takes is hard work…ready to get started?