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social media has brought about a great change on the web. it has never been easier for just about anyone to have a voice online, and have that voice heard by thousands. with so many people authoring blogs, participating in social communities, and utilizing the various social communication tools, how do you keep people from saying too much?

i mean it is social and all, but when is it time to ?shut the f**k up already??

marketers talk and they always have. in the past, when they shared tricks, accomplishts, and information, it was done on a face to face basis. whether through an im conversation, emails, or over a drink or two, the sharing was always controlled to a certain extent.

sure even in those controlled environts, information can accidentally get out. for example, when rand fishkin, a well know search marketing expert, overheard matt cutts talking with some people at ses san jose about the sandbox, he blogged immediately about
it and caused quite a stir for publically releasing information that was from a private conversation. luckily, social media was not as evolved as it is now, so the information and visility of the blunder was minimal, thus quickly forgiven and forgotten.

revealing too much information is not is not a new issue that is related only to social media. even as far back as many of you might remember, there was always some marketer giving away just a little too much information. one example was when bob ma, searchking, announced that he was selling pagerank through his pr ad network. this prompted a trend of buying links for pagerank and resulted in google launching a war against paid links.

had bob only shut the f**k up, he could have made a lot of money, but instead he lost the pr on his sites and it took four years to get it back.

so why is that people feel the need to talk about their accomplishts and the tricks they have figured out? there are three main reasons why people just cannot shut the f**k up:

the good guys are really good hearted marketers. when they discover a trick that works, they want to share it with their peers and friends.

we all love the good guys. they already know when to shut up and when to speak, and they are more likely to spend an evening sharing their tips and tricks face to face. it is the braggers and the amtious people that you have to watch out for.

the braggers lack confidence or desire attention. these marketers feel the need to brag about their accomplishts to fit in and make them feel accepted.

normally i would say that the braggers are harmless, since they tend to have small followings and less of a reputation. however, every so often a somewhat visible and reputable marketer brags about something that they probably shouldn?t have.

take matt inman, former seomozzer, who used widgets and quizzes to get inbound links with the anchor text ?free online dating? and ?online dating? to his site mingle2. the accomplisht earned his site the number 1 spot in google for the top dating keywords above top dating sites like eharmony.

matt, obviously proud of his accomplisht, went on to explain in great detail exactly how he did it during ses san jose in 2007. something he would probably later wish he had just shut the f**k up about.

mingle2 was later sold to justsayhi, a competing website, due to matt?s success. next internet, the parent company of justsayhi, later asked
matt to swap out some of the quiz and widget links with keywords like ?cash advance? and point to some of their lead-gen websites.

it was a swap that did not go unnoticed. as a result widget links became an issue that google felt had to be addressed immediately.

the fallout cost matt all of his properties? rankings, which was the success of his technique to begin with, but that was not all. it also
caused many g companies to lose millions of dollars when google put an eye on widgets and the links they contained.

the amtious marketers want to increase their reputation and respect within their industry, at any cost.

the amtious are the people who scare me the most. they will gladly give away any tricks or tips they can so that they are seen as a leader in the industry. they often do not care about the industry or the people who work around them.

the recent lynan situation is a perfect example. lynan is a social media marketer who was well respected among the top social media marketers. he created a social media linkbait for a client that went to the front page of digg and was even
tioned on a television news broadcast.

needless to say, the linkbait was a huge success. lynan probably would have gone on to continue to do more linkbaits for the client, if he had only learned to shut the f**k up.

lynan decided to brag about the campaign and announced to everyone that the article was actually false. ?absolutely-completely-utterly a fabrication, a tissue of lies weaved in a fog of deceit. or what most people would call satire.? in addition to admitting the content was false, he also put his client out in the open to be judged on his behalf. an action that later drew the attention of matt cutts from google, who comted, ?

this resulted in multiple problems for lynan and the social media marketing industry.

although we have seen a major change in the way corporations have begun to embrace social media, there are many who are still concerned about losing control of their image, message, and reputation. the control they are accustomed to with traditional media doesn?t exist online. as a result,
corporations are afraid that one of the extreme or edgy content pieces marketers convince them to do. they are concerned it will hurt their reputation and business.

unfortunately, this incident could hurt the entire industry by making clients wary of participating in social media. it will also impact the way social communities perceive content mitted by marketers.

lynan admitted later, after losing the client and gaining a lot of negative media exposure, that the short lived fame from exposing the success of his campaign was not worth it. he even decided to remove the original post from his site saying, ?at the end of the day it did more harm than good discussing publicly such effective tactics.?

as social media and online marketing continues to grow, we will see an even stronger desire for marketers to expose tricks and techniques in exchange for potential fame and recognition. in an effort to eliminate the chance for this to occur, an increasing number of top internet marketers have stopped talking about their secrets completely. the days of buying someone a beer and having them share their tricks are being replaced by smaller behind the scenes groups. they are increasingly becoming very cautious with who they allow in their circle of trust.

even the newly crowned ?rockstars? can still make mistakes, especially when they don?t realize the power of their voice. a great example is jeremy ?shoemoney? schoemaker. shortly after becoming widely known online for affiliate marketing, he published a picture of a very large adsense check sent to him by google.

through blog posts and his radio show net in, jeremy explained how he was able to make large amounts of money from the ringtone industry. this caused a lot of people to get into the ringtone market and drove up the keyword costs in ppc engines. something he admits probably cost him a lot of money.

i have a lot of respect for each of the people referenced in this article. they are all experienced internet marketers, who at one point or another made a mistake. i use their examples only because they had a large impact on the internet marketing industry as a whole.

everyone brags and everyone shares secrets, but you need to pick and choose the right time and place to do so. if you really want to gain the respect and reputation in the industry and your peers, save the bragging and amtion for the face to face encounters.

when it s to disclosing your techniques and tricks, just shut the f**k up already!

brent csutoras is an internet marketing consultant, who specializes in social media, viral and search engine marketing.

filed under: motorola, misc

a man has been accused of attempting to p a $360 llion check, which he claims was given to him by his girlfriend?s mother to start a record business, fort worth police said.

charles ray fuller, 21, of crowley, was arrested on april 22 on an accusation of forgery, police said.

police responded to a report of a man attempting to p the check about 4 p.m. that day at the chase bank in the 8600 block of south hulen street, fort worth police lt. paul henderson said.

in saturday's seattle times, there was a short article about microsoft's hack day. i was part of the virtual team that helped kick off and organize the first two hack day events. they serve as a great venue to experit and meet others. the first two focused on hacking spaces modules and building unique gadgets.  we typically give a few short presentations, and then let everyone loose on the code base to experit and innovate.  check this article out to get a little glimpse into the windows live culture... 

quote

"hack day" is creative play at work

...

and that's how a group of 75 microsoft developers set out thursday to brainstorm at an internal event called "hack day."

...

frank newport / gallup:
among blacks, hillary clinton's image sinks over last year  —  mccain's image also deteriorates, while obama's improves among blacks  —  princeton, nj — in an election year in which race is front and center, american blacks have grown more negative toward hillary clinton &ip;

almost every blogger now is using feedburner to publish their feed. the most obvious benefits of using feedburner are the statistics and the scriber count, but there are plenty of other free options that you can use or customize to enhance your blog. one of these options is called buzzboost, and essentially it republishes your feed as html so that it can be used anywhere.

one of the most productive ways to use buzzboost is to publish links to your blog posts from somewhere outside of your blog. in the example that we’ll be looking at here, i to include links to the most recent blog posts from our website’s home page, which is outside of the blog. (see the end result in the image below.)

if you’ve looked around the portfolios of other designers you have probably seen the same thing in action. a growing number of designers are including a blog as a part of their portfolio sites, so it makes sense to promote the most recent posts from the home page. in this tutorial i’ll quickly take you through the process of getting the links from your feed displayed on a static html page.

step 1 - login to feedburner

if you already have a feedburner account set up, login and click on your feed.

step 2 - activate buzzboost

click on the “publicize” tab, and then click on “buzzboost” in the list at the left side of the screen (see image below). at this point buzzboost will give you a number of different options. you can choose how many items (posts) you want to be displayed, if you want the links to open in the same window or a new window, displaying the feed le, displaying the date, and several others. one of the options is “display item content.” if this box is not checked all that will be displayed is the le of the blog post (which is what i will be using), and if that box is checked you can choose to display the entire post or a brief excerpt in plain text or html. for my purposes i have chosen to show 5 posts, have them open in the same window, and everything is left unchecked. once you have everything set the way you want it, click “activate” at the bottom of the page (you can easily change these settings later). if you’ve already activated buzzboost you’ll see the option to save instead of activate.

step 3 - copy and paste the code

once you choose your settings and activate buzzboost you will be provided with the piece of code. copy the code provided by feedburner and paste it into your page wherever you want it to be displayed.

step 4 - customize

now that you have pasted the code into your page, buzzboost should be completely functional. most likely though, you’ll want to make some customizations to the appearance of the output to fit with the rest of your page. fortunately, this is a pretty simple process that can easily be done by editing your style sheet. feedburner/google provides some common buzzboost styling tricks that gives you a good starting point for making your customizations.

in my case, i to put buzzboost into the sidebar of the home page and display the blog posts in a list, very similar to a blog showing a list of recent posts in the sidebar (in this case, the home page is outside of wordpress, so simply using the standard method of displaying recent posts is not possible). i to style the list a little t to get rid of the bullets, change the link colors, set padding and borders, and remove the feedburner image at the end of the list.

earlier i said that i left all of the boxes unchecked in the buzzboost settings, including the option to display the feed le. instead of displaying the feed le i simply inserted a link directly above the buzzboost code that says “from our blog”, which serves as the le. you can do it either way, use buzzboost to include the le, or simply enter it yourself.

feedburner uses divs and cles for everything produced by buzzboost, so it’s pretty simple to style it however you like. the css code that i am using is shown below.

and this is what the finished product looks like.

possible uses

as you can see from this example, this is a very simple way to display the most recent posts from your blog on another page. in this case the page is on the same ain, but it doesn’t have to be. if you run a few different blogs you could set up a one-page o site that uses buzzboost to display your most recent posts from all of your blogs. additionally, you could use it to put a list of your recent posts from one blog on another blog that you own. for example, i could use buzzboost to show links from this blog at my other blog, traffikd. there are a number of different things you can do with buzzboost, so i hope this tutorial helped to show you how easy and how useful it can be.

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