I try to read through my RSS feeds every day. Today I stumbled upon an article by my friend Christopher S Penn, entitled Social media now directly influences search rankings.

It shows that Google is playing Tri-D chess in a world where most companies are mastering checkers:

If you’re marketing something, there’s now a direct incentive to build your network as large as possible among your prospective customers. Size matters.

Long story short: every search you make on Google returns results that are weighted heavily to favor people in your social network, especially those people and brands to have a lot of friends, likes, and followers.

In other words, you can access top organic search engine results for your company, brand, products and services by really diving into social media marketing and eveloping connections, followers, likes, and lists–getting people to like your brand on Facebook or follow your brand on Twitter hasn’t ever just been about brand awareness, it has also become an essential secret weapon for search engine ranking.

You should read Chris’ article for sure, but I have my own example to show how personally-tailored Google search has become

A few days ago a journalist friend of mine popped me a note to ask me if I knew the Rosetta Stone CEO. I didn’t, however, he thought I must because my name came up twice when he searched for ‘Rosetta Stone” on Google.

See, I blogged for Rosetta Stone for a while and have used their products for years. When I did the same search, I didn’t show on the first page at all. Online, my friend’s world is heavily colored by me.

I showed up because he and I are connected via LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Talk, Gmail, Twitter, and who knows where else.

His search reality isn’t objective at all. It is being heavily adjusted by the connections he has and will make to other people and brands online. In real time, immediately, to order, based on dozens of tacit connections.

Google isn’t stupid. I won’t show up in all of his web searches–only those that are relevant to what he wants. However, if I have ever written and published anything online that is, in fact, relevant, there’s an excellent chance I will turn up on page one, possibly even if he’s logged out of Gmail.

With the multitude of social network profiles that I possess and maintain, the nearly five-thousand friends I have on Facebook (including the high-caste of many of my friends), the 38,000 followers I have on Twitter, and my 12-year-old blog, my 2,200 contacts on LinkedIn, 3,400 folks on FourSquare, subscribers on FeedBurner, all my content on YouTube, and others, means that Google generally tries to include me in other people’s searches of the Internet, gaming serendipity to the point that I come up as a few of the search results on such a competed-for search term like Rosetta Stone in the Manhattan offices of one of the top global newspapers.

I chose to use this example because I have invested myself so heavily towards building these connections shamelessly. People wonder why I would engage in promiscuous “follow back” on Twitter and maintain the maximum friends on Facebook? Surely I am not special. I, like anyone else, cannot maintain close friendships in excess of Dunbar’s Number of 150 friends.

I have been doing this for myself, for my company, and for my clients, using myself as the most shameless example to prove the concept that having the “right” friends online, following the few “right” people and brands is not only wrong but dangerous.

Yes, get the right followers, but also get as many followers as possible. In a world where people get their search results based on who their friends are and what they’re looking at or doing, you’re going to want to become connected to as many as humanly possible, possibly indiscriminately but certainly promiscuously. The more people you touch via social media and social network connections, the greater the chance that you will always be a top result whenever they do a search in your general direction.

Sure, my level of social media populism is not for everyone because it does take a lot of work, and pursuing the Cluetrain long tail of everyone can surely scare away some of your elite contacts and friends, which it has done, personally, because I do create a lot of content and “noise” to someone who only has 150 friends on LinkedIn, on MySpace, Friendster, and Twitter. I have surely driven them away and hear, “I had to unfollow you because you were the only person I ever saw on my
Facebook wall.” Fair enough. No worries.

While this example is personal, all of these map across to brand beautifully. I am co-founder and president of Abraham Harrison and Google knows that. It is on my Google Profile (you really need to look at this and set this up and try to get all your employees to set their profiles up as well). Google met me halfway when it came to the profile, too, as it was mostly already sorted out for me when I arrived. I just made sure they didn’t miss anything.

This might all seem like Mickey Mouse child’s play but the net effect is that the experience of daily search for tens of thousands of people online tends towards returning content that I have liked, dugg, retweeted, blogged, stumbled upon, thumbed up, shared, starred, emailed, and recommended, including a mainstream media highest-caste global newspaper journalist, and others. Their search reality is strangely influenced by my Internet behavior. That’s powerful. In the attention data game, I am considered a super-node.

In terms of an SEO strategy, this means–and has meant for a while–that simply nailing your site’s information architecture, naming convention, keyword-rich URLs and titles, content, keywords, ALT tags, and link strategy is not nearly enough.

The new secret weapon for Search Engine Optimization is digital Public Relations and Social Media Marketing.

Even more info on this strategy over on Steve Rubel and SEOmoz. Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmdia.biz via Mike Moran’s Biznology blog.

Cover via Amazon

I carry my Amazon Kindle 3G device everywhere.

Currently, I read MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times exclusively via my Kindle, delivered via WhisperNet.

I run through as much content as possible at the gym on the machines or maybe on walks.  Yes, I have books as well.  I can buy them too easily and on the fly.

I found a gorgeous bullet list of reasons I wish I had thought of as to why I love the physical Kindle device, with 3G Whispernet, from Robin Sloan in the form of The Kindle abroad:

• The Kindle has a web browser. It’s simple and slow, but solid enough to check Gmail and mobile.twitter.com. In fact, it works beautifully with the mobile versions of most sites.
• It’s almost miraculously connected. The browser wouldn’t mean much if Whispernet—Amazon’s set of carriage agreements with cell networks around the world—didn’t work everywhere. It does, and it’s also free. I was using Edge and 3G Whispernet reliably in remote-ish provinces and on sleepy islands. In fact, my Kindle generally got a stronger signal than my iPhone.
• It’s light and durable. There’s a big difference between older Kindles (which I’m toting) and newer ones in this regard; I’m considering snagging one of the latest simply because they’re so much smaller, slimmer and lighter. But any Kindle is more portable than any iPad, and I also felt a lot more comfortable tossing the Kindle into a bag or dragging it across the beach. (I had my iPad on this trip, too, but barely used it.)
• The Kindle works in direct sunlight. Especially when you’re traveling, this is a big deal. Standing on a busy corner or sitting on the beach, the Kindle is always totally usable. And this provides another contrast to the iPad, which always sends me scurrying to the shadows. (It really is a resolutely indoors device, isn’t it?)
• The battery lasts forever. You know this already. My Kindle was on a once-a-week charging schedule, and that’s with lots of reading and regular internet checks.
• Your Kindle is your itinerary. Using the Kindle as a virtual folder for travel documents was perhaps the biggest aha; it was my traveling companion who figured this out first. We got into the habit of forwarding tickets and reservations straight to our kindle.com addresses, which all Kindle owners have. (Oddly, this is the one part of international service that’s not free, but the price is negligible: $0.99 per megabyte for documents delivered this way.) It feels so good to have all of your information right there, in a format that’s so legible—not just to you, but to others. Once, in Turkey, I simply passed my Kindle to a ticket agent to help her understand where we were trying to go.
• Travel guides on the Kindle work great. I was a little skeptical about this—I think of the Kindle as being bad at random-access material, and a travel guide is definitely one of those books you want to be able to flip through freely. But as it turns out, we got a ton of use out of a Lonely Planet Kindle edition—purchased mid-trip, natch—and by the end of the trip, I felt like a dope for having bothered with a physical guide (which weighed in at about five Kindles).

I am going to add a few more of my own:

• The deal for using WhisperNet abroad is a bargian. When you are abroad, in whatever country, you only have to pay, I think, $4.99/week to connect all week, wirelessly, via their local 3G and once you agree to that, it will recur as long as you’re abroad.  Considering how expensive 3G can be abroad for international roaming.
• While you don’t want to do it, losing or breaking your Kindle doesn’t hurt as much as it could. I know you could read your Amazon content at the gym via your iPad or iPhone; however, losing a $114-$189 device is a lot more bearable than losing a $300-$900 device at the gym or in your travel bag or in your backpack or anywhere.  In addition, all of the content is completely replaceable.  If you lose your Kindle, disable it via your online Kindle home, order a replacement, and all your content will be there when you re-connect.  And even if it is not, you can “send” any content you have purchased to your new Kindle.
• You can afford and support more than one Kindle with mirrored content. You can buy one 3G Kindle and then a couple cheaper Kindle with Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers at just $114 each and then leave them at home, leave one near the sofa, one in the bathroom, and make sure your Kindle 3G is reserved for the road — so just leave it in your “to go” bag like I do.
• The only Kindle that sucks is the Kindle you don’t have. Be sure to either keep your Kindle, habitually, in your day pack, your work briefcase, or your purse, because there’s really no reason to have a WhisperNet-enabled Kindle unless you bring it with you.  It should not be preserved at a precious thing — it is a lot more durable and tough, even without a pretty Kindle Lighted Cover like the one I have, with integrated, Kindle-powered light.
• The official covers are the best covers for the Kindle, especially the one with the reading light. I personally use a black Kindle Lighted Cover which I use to read the Kindle on flights or in bed. Just beware that using the integrated light really sucks the power out of the device, rendering it as power-hungry as its cousins the Android tab, smartphone, the iPad, and the iPhone.  Otherwise, Robin is right, the batteries last forever!
• While it isn’t perfect, Kindle does have a sort of Social Network and Social savvy.So, this should be my official Chris Abraham Amazon Kindle Profile that you can look at and, I guess, connect to.   Also, if you have a Kindle be sure to sign up in order to be able to share what you’re reading and selected excerpts to Twitter and/or Facebook, which I do; caveat, the links aren’t friendly and only go to a promotional page and not to the free, web-accessible, page, which is pissing my friends off, even though they all probably know how to use Google to find the content if they need to and are just being lazy bastards.
• Finally, you don’t have to buy every single book you want to remember to read when you own a Kindle.Thanks you to the doctor who told me that I can add any title I think of without paying if I want to remember the books by adding them as “Try a Sample” instead of buying the whole book. Who knows if I will actually like A Game of Thrones; however, I can download a sample, which acts as a reminder, costs nothing, and also allows one to see if you like it by reading a bit, like you might do, at your leisure, while spending a lazy afternoon at Powell’s City of Books.
• I have replaced a lot of paper media with ones and zeros towards saving the earth. I can gloat here in Portland because I have replaced a lot of paper-based monthly and weekly magazines and daily papers with digital content, saving the forest and oil and the gas-emission of Mr. Postman.  Aside from the daily Oregonian and New York Times, which I receive at my door every morning, most of my weekly journals and magazines and daily newspapers  are delivered automagically via WhisperNet currently in the form of MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times.  That says nothing of the hundred or so books I have downloaded to my ebook reader, both bought or downloaded for free.  And, I am pretty sure that powered by technology developed by E Ink Corp requires a lot less energy for its batteries from the mains and is better for the environment anyway, all on its own, rather than needing to be charged nightly — or several times a day for the power users — like the tablets and smartphones are.  Yes, yes, a well-used book is way more environmentally kind as is library use — unless you consider the overhead of heating, cooling, and lighting a library, that is.

Again, thank you so much to Robin Sloan of Snarkmarket in the form of The Kindle abroad for inspiring this post.

Thank you, Google. Thank you, Google Apps. Thank you, Google Mail. Thank you Gmail:

Gmail used to have a limit of 10,000 contacts. For most of us, this was way more than enough, but we heard from some of you who use Gmail to communicate with more than 10,000 people. We want you to be able to store all of your contacts in a single place, so starting today, we’ve increased the limit for all Gmail users, including all those of you who use Google Apps, to 25,000 contacts.

Also, previously an individual contact could be no larger than 32KB — big enough for most people, but not always sufficient for those who like to keep a lot of notes on individual contacts. Now, each contact may be up to 128KB in size, allowing you to store more information in the notes field.

Permalink

The lovely Lindsey Mastis called me today, asking me if I would drive up to the headquarters of WUSA Channel 9: 4100 Wisconsin Avenue, NW, to make a statement and give some advice about yesterday’s Gmail outage, including my company’s worldwide use of Google Apps Premiere.  I donned my monkey suit and shot up there and got to record a segment that ended up being called How To Survive A Google Outage:

WASHINGTON, DC (WUSA) — On Thursday morning at 10:30, Gmail went down. For those who rely on Google solely, work came to a halt.

But Technology Strategist Chris Abraham knew what to do.

He backs up everything.

“Have another copy in another place then you can continue working,” he said.

Abraham suggests forwarding a copy of all your e-mails to another account, like Yahoo or HotMail.

When it comes to documents stored on Google, Abraham says save a copy on your hard drive every week.

“Google also allows you to download all your contacts as either an outlook export, or as a CSV file– which is a type of data file,” he said.

There are dozens of programs online to help people and business backup their data. And you can do this for free.

Google even has a site called Apps Status Dashboard with the latest outage updates and ways to get around programs with problems.

Abraham says the only reason his company could continue to work during the outage, is because he created a backup plan ahead of time.

Segment Featured on Main Page of WUSA9

Google does everything you could ever want, just a little ghetto. That’s why Google is permabeta — because they are interested in being everything to everyone first, and then refining over time.  Well, Gmail and Google Mail now offers the ability to be able to attach more than one file at a time to an email, something that everyone else has always done, even Google Video and YouTube, if you know where to look.  And so does Facebook and Flickr as well.  And now, Gmail! Huzzah!

If you use Google Mail for your email needs and get frustrated that you can’t select more then one file at once well you can now rejoice because Google have enabled the feature in their service. The system works a bit like the flickr uploader where when selecting a file you hold down CTRL and select the other files you want to attach and what’s even better when you attach them you can see each attachment uploading through the new progress bar. This is another great feature added to an already amazing email service. (Via Neowin)

Google is now fully able to attain the Holy Grail of email: the unified mailbox, via Lifehacker and the Google Blog:

Earlier this month a feature appeared in Gmail Labs: multiple inboxes based on labels. Zach Gellar, over at The Official Gmail Blog, has a great tip for leveraging the multiple-inbox trick into a full fledged control panel for multiple email accounts:

1. Turn on Multiple Inboxes from the Labs tab under Settings.
2. Set up a filter to auto-archive all mail sent to your work or school address.
3. Customize one of your multiple inboxes to show mail sent to your other address. To do this, go to the Multiple Inboxes tab under Settings and set up one of the panes to search for mail sent to your other address.
4. (Optional) Use a “custom from” address so that replies will be sent from Gmail but as if they’re from your other account. This way, your coworkers or classmates won’t know the difference.

Once you’ve set your email to be forwarded and properly labeled, you can use the other inboxes not as subdivisions of your primary Gmail account, but as inboxes for separate email accounts. Genius!

(Tip of the hat to Meredith)

This news is from the hasn’t this already happened before department?  Also, from the I can’t believe it took this long department. Via the Washington Post.

Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang will step down, the company announced last night, as the once-highflying Internet portal struggles to steady itself in the turbulent environment for Web media.

Yahoo! should be one of the coolest brands on the block.  With Flickr and del.icio.us, Yahoo really should be #2 — and it could be #1 if it would stop with the self-loathing — and it is not. Why?  Because Yahoo isn’t nearly shameless enough to survive in the 2008 Internet.  It is no longer the world of wizened Unix gurus who would easily define what is and isn’t couth on the Internet. Yahoo! is stuck in the days when it was uncool to splash your own brand on the brands you own (so is AOL); Yahoo! is stuck in the Internet of the 90s, an Internet wherein being good enough was good enough.

If Yahoo! was trying not to become gauche or become an ugly American in the Europe of the Internet, then it was successful! Yahoo! has become irrelevant. At least people hate Microsoft & AOL. Hell, I have nothing at all to say about Yahoo! except I adore del.icio.us and Flickr.  How could the owner of two of the Internet’s coolest properties never be able to harnest the gravity of these two major celestial bodies and slingshot themselves into #1?

Maybe there is too much modesty, not enough braggadocio, in the halls of Yahoo!  Maybe if you look closely, Yahoo! is the company that does no harm and does no evil.  Maybe the company who’s motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” is actually pretty shameless and far from modest. Maybe on the modern Internet (and in modern business) it is more important to say you’re doing good, being good, and being modest than it is to actually be modest.

Yahoo!, Yahoo!, Yahoo! please try your darnedest to spend more time sharing yourself with the world and less time being the best of the good citizens.  Google is absolutely shameless when it comes to all the good work they’re doing.  They are not keeping their religion to themselves, they’re not praying quietly to themselves in a bare cell, away from prying eyes!  Google is on the soapbox!  Google is bragging!  Google is sharing the Holy Spirit with the world!

If you keep on slipping those alms into the alms box of Internet Good Works by dark of night you will actually become irrelevant.  Nobody is against you but nobody is for you, either. Nobody cares.

What’s worse, I don’t think enough people even really think much about Flickr and del.icio.us being Yahoo! properties.

Yes, you make folks become Yahoo! members, but that’s not enough. In DC and Virginia, everyone has a Safeway card but nobody like to shop at Safeway — it’s only because Safeway makes it super-easy to become a member.  There is no brand loyalty, there is no passion behind the brand (OK, OK, Safeway Select pasta sauce is awesome — it is like Safeway’s Flickr), even if everyone has a Safeway scan card on their key ring.

Anyway, Yahoo!, I am so sorry for the rant.  Oh, also, why is it that all of my geeky friends in the Zope and Python world all want to work for Google and not for Yahoo!?  How come all of my PHP and MySQL friends ache to work for Google and not for Yahoo!  How pissed you must be to suffer that Google drank your milkshake.  They took you toys!  You, Yahoo!, where supposed to be that success story!  I mean, you were the first search engine, after all!  You were the first directory, right?

Well, it is time to get off your pity pot, kick Jerry to the curb, and again become the Yahoo! I have known you since 1994 and have loved you (although I have not used your email address since Gmail came out, sorry) and I really want you to get you some smarts.  Give me a call at +1 (202) 352-5051 or +49 (0)151 52579077 — I would be more than happy to try to help you turn this ship around!

Viel Glück

Last week, Mark was contacted by a reporter from IDG who wanted to know about how Abraham Harrison LLC uses Google Apps Premier, and Mark Harrison, our CEO, obliged. The article was published online today, For Web Apps, Get a Service Guarantee, in PC World (via Marketing Conversation):

For example, the Google Apps Premier Edition suite contains an availability guarantee only for its Gmail portion (for 99.9 percent uptime) and offers no commitment for the other components, which include word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software.

“It would be comforting to have an SLA that covered the entire suite,” says Mark Harrison, founding partner of Abraham Harrison LLC, provider of online marketing services.

Abraham Harrison, founded in 2007, has been using Google Apps Premier Edition for about one year, and the uptime of its hosted applications and services, though not 100 percent, has been excellent, according to Harrison. Downtime incidents have been rare and brief, and have never proven disruptive to the company’s operations, he says. “We’ve never been crippled by an outage,” Harrison says.

Still, should a significant Google Apps outage occur, it certainly would impact the company, which is highly dependent on the suite. The company chose Google Apps in order to give its geographically-dispersed staff an array of software to use for communication and collaboration. In addition to the suite’s productivity applications, the company also uses Google Talk instant messenger and Gmail for e-mail. The company’s 22 employees, located in six countries and four continents, operate in 14 different time zones, and since most of their work is collaborative, Google Apps–which lets users jointly edit documents located on a central server–was a better alternative than e-mailing Microsoft Office documents back and forth.

Harrison would also like to see Google Apps provide an offline component that would allow users to work on their local PCs when disconnected from the Internet, a capability he knows Google is pursuing with its Gears technology.

That Harrison would feel more at ease with an SLA is telling. His company isn’t an ordinary Google Apps customer. Although the relationship between Google and Abraham Harrison is purely of the vendor-client type, meaning that the company receives no compensation from Google, the Google Apps team has singled it out as a model small business whose feedback it regularly seeks. As a result, Harrison is in close contact with the Google Apps team.

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