Back on June 13, 2009 over 500,000 Facebook users managed to grab a Facebook Vanity URL as their own unique mark in the social media landscape. Now millions are grabbing the chance to have a distinct, indexable web address for a personal or business presence through Facebook.

In the first land rush, Facebook imposed some account age requirements to limit name squatting and the organization offered some allowance for trademarked names, but this also has ended.

As of last Monday, June 29, 2009, the account age restriction has been lifted and new accounts may register a unique user name if it’s still available. Currently, a Vanity URL requires validation via text message to a unique mobile phone number.

I strongly advise any company with a trademarked name to avoid the rights hassle and secure your company name with a Facebook account under your control. You can decide later if or how you want to represent your company through Facebook. But you can’t decide if you allow someone else to grab your name before you do.

Do it now.

How? Visit the Facebook Vanity URL page for details.

Last night we noticed that Google dropped links from the Twitter Profile page for a significant number of web sites.

For our own web sites and our clients' sites, we monitor new links and links lost. It's a good practice for any SEO. More importantly, we monitor when Google recognizes or disregards incoming links to a website as reported in Google Webmastertools.

We've noticed these events seem to occur in clusters, and last night indicated that Google is thinking less of links from Twitter. In one sweep, Google dropped the Twitter Profile "URL" incoming link for every site we monitor.

Examples from a… Continue reading

Google AdWords has finally relented and now shows advertisers the exact keyword behind every click on our ads.

It's very simple to view this new data:

Select the "Search Query Report" under the "Reports" tab in your AdWords account.

In the example above, we are prompted to place a negative match on the keyword "Free".

Use this report on phrase match and broad match groups to find negative keywords as well as surprise phrases that generate better-than-average conversion. …

I'm shopping for another new bicycle chain. My wife suspects I buy them based on fashion because I get a new one every season (oh no - that's last season's chain - everyone's riding titanium this season). No, sweet girl of mine, it's not the passing seasons per se that dictate a new chain, it's the stress of being propelled up the Santa Cruz Mountains. This causes the chain to stretch, which in turn causes the gears to wear rapidly because the chain spacing no longer lines up with the gear teeth. I change chain every 1-2000 miles of… Continue reading

If you're a marketer working online, you know that consumers are distracted and have an ever diminishing attention span. When we're teaching companies how to market online we have to keep reminding them to reduce the amount of copy to bullet points, headlines and scannable text. Consumers simply don't read body copy anymore. On the other hand, those doing SEO will repeatedly hear that you need good copy in your pages so Googlebot knows what the page is talking about. So there lies the paradox: Googlebot is the only entity that can be bothered to read your carefully crafted copy, and even… Continue reading

10 years ago people needed hyperlinks from page to page because finding stuff was so hard. We needed a human being to tell us where other relevant stuff was, via those handy instructions baked right into the content.

Google then exploited these links as a way of determining which page is most relevant, creating the famous PageRank mechanism.

I'm wondering if people use these in-content hyperlinks less these days. After all, relevant stuff is just a search away. With the advent of browser toolbar search boxes, it's even easier for people to search instead of using hyperlinks.

Will content writers continue to link… Continue reading

Google analytics currently imposes limits on the number of profiles (50) and the number of characters used in a report filter (256). But it was refreshing to find no limit to the number of statements in an advanced segment or to the number of characters in the regular expression field within a statement.

Nice move Google! Segmentation rocks!

In my testing, patience ran out at 45 statements which tested as accurate.

I used a 10,297 character regular expression* in one of the statements and it tested out just fine.

Have you gone higher than that?

* I'll… Continue reading

We often talk about the Dream Team of Market Motive, and indeed they are. Here's a "way back" trip to my former dream team. Bryan of ZURB interaction designers just posted some images that remind me of the privilege I had to work with a highly creative and fun team at ClickTracks - back in the day.

Blue guy represented a web visitor in an analytics world, but grew to represent reports, products and promotions over time. We went a little overboard trying to come up with… Continue reading

Here's a simple tool that I use in my email deliverability arsenal that helps eliminate spam words in my outbound messages. The script measures the likelihood that an email will fall into a recipient's "junk mail" folder in Outlook 2003. Outlook 2003 uses a word weighting system and this measurement does not guarantee delivery into other mail clients. However, the spam words indicated by Outlook 2003 are used in other inbox protection systems and we have found this tool to be very useful to help us clean up copy and increase the chance for delivery into all inboxes. Paste your email subject… Continue reading

From John Buckman, via Dave McClure (two people who know vastly more about startups than I do), let me recommend a pithy view of starting a company. Pretty much how ClickTracks got started:

http://www.slideshare.net/johnbuckman/employees-suck-presentation?type=powerpoint