This is a guest post by Kimberly Wilson
I read an interesting article the other day about how frictionless online sharing is causing information overload and thus decreasing the practical value of social media. This not only affects the casual users of social media, it also affects the marketers.
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Many may find this title, Social Media Forces Customer-Centric Marketing, somewhat puzzling. To understand what is meant, we should look at a few definitions.
Most eyes were on the world’s leaders this past weekend as they sought to limit the devastating effect of the downgrading of the United States financial rating. Meanwhile in Las Vegas a weekend contest dealt with a topic of almost equal concern. The world’s largest hacking convention showed one reason why big corporations seem to be such easy prey for cyber criminals: their workers are poorly trained in security.
Stop sending junk e-mail is good advice for anyone, but you may inadvertently be sending junk e-mail when you don’t intend to. If you find that surprising, read on because you’re in for some major surprises.
None of us likes junk e-mail, which is e-mail that we have not requested. If you wish you can add a spam filter to your e-mail service and weed out what you do not wish to receive. For example I use K-9, which learns as you teach it what you regard as spam and what you believe is acceptable. I find its performance excellent and it does a fine job in filtering out over 40% of my incoming e-mail, which is spam.
What you may not realize is that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) has already filtered out some other spam e-mail that you never saw. Indeed any e-mail message passes across a number of ISPs in travelling from the sender to the receiver. That means that other ISPs on the route may also have cut out some spam e-mail by their definition of spam. They do this to help their clients but also to act as a deterrent to others who may wish to tie up their bandwidth with automatically generated floods of spam messages.
What exactly is their definition of spam? In fact the answer will always be complex and it is most unlikely that you can get a clear answer. What follows is based on some extensive work done over 6 months ago. In the interim, despite further analyses, the situation is no clearer.
The first and probably most important factor in determining what constitutes spam is the Internet Protocol (IP) of the originator of the e-mail. There are a number of services that evaluate the reputation of the originating IP. One such is Senderbase.org. If you evaluate my own IP, 70.70.29.11, you will see it has a Poor reputation.
You can find out your own IP by using a service such as WhatIsMyIPAddress.com. The reputation of your own IP might be rated as either Good, Neutral or Poor. Even with a Good reputation, there is no guarantee that any given ISP will not reject your e-mail message as spam or junk e-mail but the odds are low that this would happen.
In the worst case, if you have indulged in deliberate e-mail spamming then it is possible that the IP address of your mail server is currently listed on the SpamCop blocklist. This is a sure-fire guarantee that your e-mail messages will likely not get through. In this case, you will need to read the SpamCop FAQ for more information on getting de-listed from this SpamCop blocklist.
There are two other tests you may wish to do on your IP to determine how reliable it may be as an originator of an e-mail message. The first is to do what is called a Ping test which determines how well your IP communicates with other IPs. You may find that even with a neutral reputation IP, no pings are reported, which is not a good sign.
The problem is compounded when the your e-mail message must pass across several ISPs. To get an indication of what is involved you can do what is called a TraceRT test. This will give you an indication of the places your e-mail message must pass through to get to its final destination. Remember that each ISP may possibly delete your message if it seems that it could be a potential junk e-mail.
Your own e-mail service will have a certain policy on what e-mail messages it defines as junk and what e-mail messages it allows to pass through to its e-mail clients. In some cases you may be able to modify the default policy and allow either more or less junk e-mail messages to get through to your Inbox. If you are aware of the IP of a source of messages that you wish to see then you may be able to whitelist the source with your e-mail service provider. However in practice this does not always work.
The reason why the reputation of the IP is not an infallible indicator of junk e-mails is that the message itself is also analyzed. A simple text message will usually get through from a good reputation sender. Anything more than that may be questionable. Here are some of the reasons why e-mail messages are deemed to be spam:
Whether any given message is deemed to be a junk e-mail message will depend on a combination of factors above and the reputation of the e-mail originator. Different e-mail services will be more or less stringent in approving these rules. For example the Google Gmail service is fairly strict in this regard.
There are a number of factors you may wish to consider to ensure your e-mail message gets through to as many as possible of your intended audience:
Given that no e-mail message is guaranteed to get through, it is useful to monitor whether all your messages get through or whether a certain proportion of your audience does not receive them. If this proportion is unexpectedly high, then you may need to change the content of your messages or the e-mail address you use to send them.
The more of these you can cover, the greater fraction of the audience that will see your message.. However there are never any guarantees and the ideal is that your recipients should also whitelist your originating e-mail address. Even that is not surefire so in critical situations, it is better to seek some confirmation that your readers have indeed received your e-mail message.
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Hyperlinks have never really got the respect they deserve. Without them the Internet would be impossible. The word is often now shortened to link and this word is often bandied around without thinking about the mind-opening implications bound up in that hyperlink word.
The term “hyperlink” was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by Ted Nelson. The Wikipedia explanation describes what he had defined
Hyperlinks are the basic building block of hypertexts. For example, some key words in a wiki such as Wikipedia are highlighted, and provide links to explanations of those words at other pages in the same wiki.
In directed links, the area from which the hyperlink can be activated is called its anchor (or source anchor); its target (or destination anchor) is what the link points to, which may be another location within the same page or document, another page or document, or a specific location within another page or document.
He also coined the word hypertext and the associated word hypermedia. He bemoaned the fact that the latter had not taken off and instead became what we often call interactive media.
The hyperlink concept is really very powerful. However Microsoft, as it has done with so many great ideas, did not leverage that power. It is true that files or documents in the Office Suite of programs always have the hyperlinking capability. So you will find:
Adobe also to an extent slowed down the wider use of hyperlinks since it is only recently that you can now create a PDF document with their software with active hyperlinks.
Luckily the hyperlink concept is much too powerful to be sidelined by this somewhat lukewarm support. What really caused the hyperlink concept to take off was the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. No longer would a hyperlink merely connect you with some other point in the same document. You could now connect with some online website that could be half way round the world.
The other powerful influence was that the two Google founders latched on to the notion that hyperlinks confirmed the popularity or authority of web pages. They then they used this concept within their search algorithm. Since for a given Web page they were interested in hyperlinks pointing to that web page, they used the term Backlink instead of hyperlink. If they had only stuck with the term hyperlink, then again the concept might have gained more general understanding.
The strength of hyperlinks is confirmed by what was written in 1999. As the ClueTrain Manifesto authors pointed out, almost everyone was hyperlinking and this was a movement that could not be stopped.
However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.
Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.
Ten years later, the strength of hyperlinks and the World Wide Web they made possible cannot be denied. Most website owners acknowledge the mutual networking benefits they receive and include hyperlinks to other relevant sites that their visitors may wish to visit. This summer there was even a question whether the BBC had finally changed policy and was using hyperlinks to external sources. The answer is unclear but the eventual outcome will undoubtedly include external hyperlinks.
The latest word from Google points to an even greater support for the hyperlink concept. The Google Webmaster Central Blog is now encouraging webmasters to include named anchors to define sections of their webpages and tips on how to do this best. This will mean that a keyword search could actually rank most highly a hyperlink to a point within a document that is deemed to be most relevant.
As the Official Google Blog explains, the aim is to enable users to get to the information they want faster. Searchers will now find additional links in the result block, which allow users to jump directly to parts of a larger page. This is useful when a user has a specific interest in mind that is almost entirely covered in a single section of a page. Now they can navigate directly to the relevant section instead of scrolling through the page looking for their information.
We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn’t involved in any way, so you can’t pay to get these links). There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1″), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors. The new in-snippet links only appear for relevant queries, so you won’t see it on the results all the time — only when we think that a link to a section would be highly useful for a particular query.
If you have such web pages, this should ensure greater visibility and higher rankings for sections of your information-packed pages, so this is something to carefully consider. As a small test, you may wish to see how these internal web page links for Therapeutic Riding Associations and for Associations for the Disabled rank in Google searches for those terms. Once indexed, they should rank highly in related searches. Those hyperlinks certainly deserve some serious respect now.
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Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, London, England is an amusing place to visit if you like to hear empassioned debaters. They often take up extreme positions so as to attract the crowd. Ideally if a few hecklers join in with counter-positions, it all adds to the fun.
You might imagine that Speakers’ Forum was not a suitable place to discuss how best to make websites perform well on the Internet. You would be right except that the online debate often resembles that Hyde Park scene.
That image came to mind in a recent post by Jill Whalen that talked about A Fatal Flaw In SEO. Those are dramatic words and you might wonder what would elicit such a headline. It turns out that Jill was incensed by a post by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. This had included in the title equally inflammatory language with the words, Terrible SEO Advice.
Jill said that Rand’s advice could
… potentially set SEO back at least at decade, in my opinion.
In the article, he apologized to his audience of budding SEOs for having ever told them to do what’s right for their users. In fact, he called putting your users first, “utterly false and tragically misleading.”
If you listen to this advice, your SEO will be fatally flawed from the get-go.
This is certainly soap-box rhetoric. Both have taken extreme positions. After all that’s what attracts the crowds, … and the comments, … and the backlinks, which is what SEO is all about, at least with Google.
Whichever you would label Black or White, neither is correct. The truth as usual is a shade of grey. You need a balance and should be considering both Users and the Search Engines at the same time. It’s probably 70% Jill’s advice and 30% Rand’s advice. The problem is that such a shade of grey will probably not stand out against the simple Blacks and Whites.
Equally if the best advice is somewhat more complex, some will opt for a simple approach that is supported by one of the luminaries of the SEO world. After all, that is what a Google search may indicate is the most relevant advice. The only saving grace here is that hopefully these contradictory positions will make some people realize that the true answer may lie somewhere in the middle.
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Internet Explorer 6 should be given a respectful and speedy burial according to Shane Richmond in the online Telegraph. He encourages you to tell an IT person that Internet Explorer 6 must die.
If you’re not familiar with online chat shorthand, “kthxbye” is a slang term generally used sarcastically as a condescending and dismissive insult (“Thank-you for your useless contribution to this discussion, now please go away”).
Richmond writes that:
IE6 was never a top-notch product. And these days it’s even more of a nightmare to work with, resulting in extra time and money being spent ensuring that websites are compatible with the damned thing. Digg, Facebook and YouTube are all about to end their support for IE 6 and are recommending that users switch to a browser that works.
Among those speaking out against IE6 is a group of more than 70 developers who have banded together to form a project called ie6nomore.
Despite this clamor, according to the BBC, Microsoft is backing a long life for IE6. Indeed the software giant now says it will support IE6 until 2014, four years beyond their original deadline. Their reasons may be more bound up with strategy versus Google and its cloud computing initiative than with what is best for customers.
The opposition as documented in the online Telegraph is virulent:
A crueller person might say that any IT manager who forces his company to run IE 6 in 2009 is dangerously incompetent and should probably not be in charge of anything more complicated than buying biscuits. However, it’s possible that they’re doing this because their company uses an intranet – or some other custom-built web service – that was designed to work in IE 6 and is useless in any other browser.
It is suggested that victims locked in by corporate policy should use one of the range of posters produced by the helpful people at Hey IT!
It is suggested that you should print it out and stick it on your computer, around the office or on your IT manager’s forehead. The Internet as a whole will be much improved when we all have said kthxbye (or should that be kthnxbye) to the worn and weary Internet Explorer 6.
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AWeber provides a fine email newsletter marketing service, so you might question whether what Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO) writes in an article on Email Deliverability Tips may represent a slightly biased view of the situation.
Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.
Having found that my own email newsletter delivery system has encountered even worse problems than that, I can state that Tom Kulzer is not in any way exaggerating. This article sets out what I found and what you need to do. It all concerns an email version of the SMM Newsletter, which was sent out monthly.
This has been delivered to just under 1,000 subscribers for many months. Originally it was a text newsletter but for some months has been an HTML newsletter. It is issued using the Pimex Mail Express newsletter software. It was sent out in blocks of 20 with a 5 second gap between blocks. Suddenly this month something triggered the Shaw Spam filtering system and although it appeared to have been sent, it never got to its recipients. Explanations and solutions follow.
Although it describes a multi-delivery email message, you should note that some of these problems can affect single email messages that are junked on the way to their recipient, even if they wish to receive the communication.
You should be clear that there are two definitions of Junk Mail. You may believe it is mail that you do not wish to receive. Your email delivery system has a different definition and different email delivery systems have slightly different definitions. Each has a computer algorithm that applies a host of factors to determine whether any given email message should be deemed Junk or not. Part of it is determined by who is sending the email message and part by its content. In some spam filtering systems, particular senders can be whitelisted. In other cases, this is not possible, for example Gmail.
The key parameter in the system used by many ISPs, the Cisco IronPort SenderBase Security Network, is the Reputation of the individual IP. This is determined by the Senderbase Reputation evaluator.
The Reputation can be shown as Good, Neutral and Poor. Only the first Good reputation gives an assurance that email will be delivered. For both the other categories, mail may be caught in a Junk trap. The Reputation for the SMM IP (70.70.29.11) at the time of writing is Poor. By ensuring no continuing transgressions, a weak reputation may gradually be restored. There are other databases that may be consulted. SpamCop is another but that has no indication about the SMM IP.
The SMM IP (70.70.29.11) is used for only minimal email apart from the batch of emails once per month. The ISP tech support felt that this highly bunched up activity might have triggered the Poor Reputation value. This could have the appearance of virus or trojan related email activity. 500 emails per hour may well be a possible acceptable limit although it is probably prudent to have no more than say 200 going out per hour. This is undoubtedly affected by whether each is a simple text message for a few hundred bytes or multimedia or HTML messages that could be 25 kb or much, much more.
In testing different variants of the SMM Newsletter to try to avoid the Junk trap, some interesting facts emerged. It should be noted that each ISP or service receiving an email message may have different degrees of stringency. Indeed with the Shaw email service you can select the level of spam you are willing to tolerate. It turned out that Gmail treated as Junk what was acceptable to the medium level of stringency for Shaw.
The fact that an email is HTML is perhaps the biggest factor affecting how a message will be assessed in Junk terms. Another is the quality of the URLs (hyperlinks) that may appear within the message. Initially a URL shortening service had been used for the link to the online version of the SMM newsletter. The domain for the URL shortener turned out to be on a URL black list (https://admin.uribl.com/) and this was sufficient to cause the email to be Junk for Gmail (although not for Shaw). Another black list service is to be found at http://www.surbl.org/ and you can check particular URLs you are not sure about at http://george.surbl.org/lookup.html
One way of avoiding that problem is to use your own URL ‘shortening’ service. The shorter URL for the SMM Newsletter is http://www.otherbb.com/n.htm The page n.htm does not exist. Instead a 301 redirect is arranged in the .htaccess file on the domain to transfer automatically from n.htm to the actual online newsletter.
Given that the IP being used for transmitting the SMM Newsletter is still rated Poor by some services, the decision was made to use a text version of the Newsletter with a minimal number of URLs included and using the 301 redirect approach for the link to the actual online Newsletter. Even so there were 1% of bounces due to possible spam content of the Newsletter, although there was no questionable content in the Newsletter.
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Another way of avoidng these Junk concerns and many other concerns of publishing a successful email newsletter is to use one of the commercial services. One which is highly rated by its users is that provided by AWeber (for which I am an affiliate). If you would like to check out what is involved, why not sign in for that Free Test Drive in the form on the right. You won’t regret it. The service provides all you could possibly need.
Whether you’re looking to get your first email campaign off the ground, or you’re now ready to dig into advanced tools like detailed email web analytics, activity based segmentation, geo-targeting and broadcast split-testing, you will find that AWeber has all you need to make email marketing work for you.
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Opera Unite reinvents the Web, according to Opera who feel that cloud computing and Web-based applications will never be the same.
Seth Rosenblatt at Cnet thinks Opera may have something interesting as it tries to Unite users across browsers.
The Web server is interesting, as well. Being able to host a Web page from your desktop computer, without having to worry about paying somebody for the privilege, has the potential to usher in a new age of Web hosting where the only cost is what you pay your ISP and there’s no middle-man to go through. However, the most popular things to do online that require your own site–sharing media and writing blogs–can be done effectively and cheaply from third-party hosts. Still, Unite-based Web-serving has potential.
What as yet has not been sufficiently discussed are the security aspects of allowing others to use your computer as a server. Some feel that Opera’s Unite Is One Incredibly Bad Idea
Then there are the security implications. Unite lets users set permission levels for who can access their files, but one of these levels appears to be "completely open." That doesn’t sound good. Ostensibly, you’re sharing files with people you know, but I could envision someone setting up a link to their Opera Unite service that leads people to a file that’s really malware.
For most of us, we will stick to traditional web hosting. There are many fine hosting services that are economical and reliable throughout North America. Even if we all become confident that Opera Unite can be the way we share some of our online properties, undoubtedly this will be complemented by a standard web hosting arrangement.
The recent US Presidential election was a stunning demonstration of the power of social media as now supported via the Internet. Indeed social media such as Twitter may now be the principal medium of communication if one measures the ‘bandwidth’, interpreted loosely, that goes into such twittering.
Now the dreadful incidents in Mumbai provide another far-too shocking example. That prompts Tim Malbon to ask a fundamental question: Mumbai: flash mob or social media in action?
When news of the ‘terrorist outrage’ broke yesterday evening several people mailed and messaged me with links to the coverage on Twitter. I was awestruck by the live feeds provided at #Mumbai and others (such as Twitter Grid). Having looked around elsewhere, my initial reaction was that the main old-school news agencies like Reuters, CNN and the BBC just weren’t providing the coverage, in contrast to the truly MASSIVE volume of tweeting going on.
However as the evening continued, he become somewhat disillusioned about the chaotic nature of the torrent of information that was being generated
There were no doubt many well-meaning people Twittering. Some on the ground were no doubt using the service to share their personal horror and to connect with the outside world must have been a comfort. But very few were on the ground. Most participants were far away. There needs to be some way of working out who in a situation like this has more authority than someone else. … Last night scared me. We’re like kids playing with things that we still don’t understand. A human tragedy became “something to follow”.
Crowdsourcing is of course an attempt to bring some order to the chaos. Cloud computing in Africa, for example, can help aid workers to better identify what is really happening in major crises. As one aid worker has noted:
Crowdsourcing means that crisis situations can be explored at comparatively little cost, by making information freely available from an untold numbers of sources. We would basically be liberating information from the vaults of Non Governmental (and governmental) Organizations that have of necessity safeguarded information release for self-preservation.
Another and perhaps better way of marshaling all this data is to consider online surveys. Of course cell phones can be used merely to indicate who you think should be the next American Idol. However as we all become more at ease in the digital world, we may well be more inclined to make sure our opinions are known.
This is one of the SMM blogs. Contact us for Local SEO and Social Media Marketing (Google+, Facebook, Twitter) for SMBs and NPOs in Langley, Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley.
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