Could Google Wave change email?

For anyone who hates reading through a long list of email chains, Wave may be the solution. Google Wave combines real time chat features, video and Twitter like conversation streams. If chat, email, and Twitter had a love child, it might look something like Wave. It will be interesting to see how Wave will impact current email marketing, Twitter and other chat technologies.

What About Bing?

I'll save you from all the cheesy post titles out there like, "Bada Bing", "It don't mean a thing if you ain't got that Bing..." and so on. There is a lot of hype, including commercials, about how Microsoft's new search engine Bing can help cut through the search clutter to help us make better decisions. While I do like the enhanced image search I still feel like the search engine has not done enough to pull me from the grasp of Google. The universal search features are impressive and I do enjoy the image of the day.

What will become of Bing?

Microsoft has come a long way from their early days of search. Yahoo's #2 status in the search engine space may be in trouble with the release of Bing. Yahoo's role as a web portal may be enough for them to hold off Bing for a while, but that value is slowly decreasing over time.

What Google has to offer over Bing are all the value added web based programs, such as Google Docs. These services are the difference maker for many search engine users. I use search engines to do research, but spend more time using Gmail and Google Docs. Until Bing offers some truly unique web based services, I will still be "Googling" and not "Binging".

Twitter For Marketing from Hubspot

Found a great presentation on how to use Twitter for marketing your personal brand or business. The strategies discussed in these slides are very helpful in establishing best practices. What I found most interesting are the average number of tweets per day, key tweet ratios and bio keywords.

Sean Hecking - @seanhecking
Hubspot - @hubspot

Link-ability

When discussing the subject of inbound links as it relates to search engine optimization, many an SEO will go into a discussion about Google's PageRank, link popularity, anchor text and so on. What many experts fail to touch on is the connection between the content on your site and how likely your pages are to receive natural inbound links.

Natural inbound links are the ultimate goal for any search engine optimization campaign. Natural links offer a relevant and diverse link profile, much of what Google is looking for in how it ranks your site. Google is also looking at from where your links originate. Are they from low quality sites with little visibility or are they from high quality sites with lots of visitors? I've put together a description of what I feel makes a page gain natural links.

Link-ability: The copy, images, look-and-feel and topical subject matter of a web page that increases it's likely hood of being linked to as a valuable resource for an online audience. The ability to easily share a web page with friends and transfer knowledge by way of links.

What do you think makes a web page link-able?

Added Search Marketing Resources

To help add insight into search marketing and social media topics, I have started a resources section to help answer common questions that arise during a social media marketing or SEO campaign. The first article entry added is called "What is SEO?" The goal of this article is to clear up some of the myths around search engine optimization. In the coming months, I plan on adding more 101 type resources to this section to help marketers better understand key SEO topics and basic social media strategies.

Deathmatch: Twitter vs. Email Marketing

In the graphic above, I pulled searches for "twitter tools" and "email tools" in the United States. (email tools=red, twitter tools=blue) I could have just pulled a report of twitter and email marketing, but I think this gives us a more clear picture of how people are searching. When using a technology, people tend to look for tools to help them manage that technology or make things more efficient. Obviously there are more people with an email address than a twitter account, but this gives you some insight into how much real activity is taking place in this space.

Does this mean that Twitter is going to replace Email?

Lets take a look:

• Tools and Analytics: Both technologies have tools available to measure impact, emails are more mature. (Let)
  
• Subscribe: This one is pretty easy, just follow someone on Twitter, like me @seanhecking (Advantage Twitter)
• Content: 140 characters? please! Email allows you more space for delivering your message with branded content (Deuce)
• Forward to a Friend: Twitter allows for a retweet (RT), the equivalent of forward to a friend. Email allows for traditional forward to groups (Let)
  
• Unsubscribe: Twitter also allows you to unsubscribe (unfollow) and means it! (Advantage Twitter)
• Tagging: Twitter allows for content tagging to help organize tweets. Email: "what are tags?" (Game, Set, Match?)

What are your thoughts on this match?

Rand on the future of SEO

One topic that doesn't get discussed often enough, in my opinion, is the future of SEO. While doing some research, I found an interesting video interview with Rand of SEOMoz. In the video are a couple topics I would like to highlight:

• Trends to Watch: Searches on search engines vs. searches in social network sites.
• Links: Still the trump card for gaining search engine rank for traditional SEO.
  
• Google Tags: Helping webmasters with technical issues.