Merry Christmas
Wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas!
Happy Winter Soltice
Happy Winter Solstice!
Today is the first day of winter. It is the longest night of the year and every day after today will be a little longer and have a little more light than the day before. Have a wonderful first day of winter!
Facebook Releases New Timeline Profile
I have had the new profile since it was released to developers in September. At first I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. But since using it, I have come to really like the new design. It is much more graphically oriented and fells more comprehensive, like it is giving you a more robust snapshot of the person.
The new profile is simply beautiful. It is a chronicling of your life, even before your started on Facebook. The timeline features photos and life events starting at birth. You can add information, photos, videos and posts into any time period. Have a prom photo from 20 years ago, add it in to the year 1976.
The beautiful layout, featuring photos and comments from your friends, has a deep emotional resonance. You are able to go throw the years and see your pictures. The things your friends wrote on your wall. The posts you shared and were shared with you. You not only get a glimpse of your history on Facebook, but a glimpse of your life history. It is like watching an old home movie on an old reel-to-reel.
Reminiscing has always been a social activity. Facebook has found a way to harness that.
For people using their profile to promote their business this will give additional opportunity for branding. You can have a banner photo at the top and still have your head shot for the profile pic. It will give a way to create a more graphically beautiful display for your business.
Read more about the new Facebook Timeline. To get yours you just have to wait. When it is available to you there will be a notice at the top of your old profile.
Mainstream Thinks Dot XXX is a Bust
An op-ed piece was written on Mashable about the new dot XXX domain. It was a criticism piece about dot XXX being an irrelevant domain and that main stream people will only be buying it to prevent pornographers from using their trademark.
The author was ignoring the first non-adult trademark to purchase a .XXX with their own uses in mind..PETA. PETA was one of the first companies to buy a .XXX and they have every intention of using the site for their own marketing purposes. Since many people think that their ads are verging on pornographic anyway, it will be interesting to see what they do with their new domain.
The writer continued to criticize the adult industry and their history of domain names, saying that most of our traffic is based off of accidental web stumbles instead of specific searches, SEO and all the other traditional means of driving traffic to a site. He used the example of Whitehouse.com being an adult site and not a site for the White House. In that case, yes accidental traffic was the primary source. Of course the domain also gained a big reputation because it is not the White House and people liked the humor of it. In this case the criticism was more that someone was quick enough to buy that hot domain real estate and figure out a way to monetize it in a big way.
He also used Whitehouse.com as an example of a site not being what is appears to be. According to this logic, your business URL and name needs to be reflective of exactly what you do. So if you make wool scarves, you better call your business Wool Scarves Inc and have the domain be woolscarves.com. Because branding like “Warm Sheep” is misleading. I think the marketing world on a whole would have a huge issue with this logic.
Is he right that most mainstream businesses will buy a .XXX domain to prevent someone else from using it? Yes. Of course that is why they also bought .net, .me, .com, .co, .info, .cc ….you get my point. If your business is trademarked and branded you want to make sure that you are capturing every possible source of traffic. You don’t want someone else benefiting from your brands hard work. Is .XXX any different? No.
So will there be some mainstream .XXX that is actually used? Yes. Will some be parked? Yes. Does it mean that .XXX is a failure? ….no.
Google+ on Hootsuite? Yes, if you have the money!
If you weren’t sure if you should get started with Google+, here is another reason to give it a good thought. Hootsuite has announced that they will be supporting Google+ through their platform. This means that Google+ Pages will be able to be monitored much like you monitor your Twitter accounts. However, this is only available to their Enterprise level clients. So the average Josephina will not be able to use this function yet.
The integration will likely be a big cross over point for Google+. This will allow people to increase their engagement and use Google+ more like they use Twitter. They will be able to have columns with their different circles, and will be able to interact with the posts, much like you interact with peoples tweets.
For adult entertainment you can easily categorize people in your circles by fans, pornstars, fetishes, adult sites…or however you want. But it will make interacting with other industry people much easier than it is on Facebook. Of course that is not hard to do, it is almost impossible to do it on Facebook.
This will accomplish 2 things.
1. Circles: It will encourage people to put people and pages into appropriate and topic relevant circles, as opposed to lumping them all into the “friends” circle. The increase in functionality will make browsing the content of the circles much easier to manage. Plus you will have the benefit of having the different columns to show all your circles posts simultaneously, but still categorized in easy to swallow bites.
2. Engagement: It will encourage engagement. The reason why Twitter has the highest level of engagement is because of how the information is presented. The platform is conducive to a high level of conversation. By applying the twitter platform to Google+ Pages, they are encouraging a higher level of engagement with people’s posts. This could actually be a breakthrough for Google+ Pages. Facebook pages have always been limited in the level of potential engagement, but this opens things up for the new social network.
The Hootsuite integration is a big development for Google+ Pages in the social network popularity race. Unfortunately it is only available to the “Enterprise” level clients. Those are the people paying $1500/month to use the platform. Yes, you read that right. Basically if you are a big brand or manage a large number of social media accounts, you are this level user. Maybe we will hear how playboy likes it because right now, not many other people will be using it.
The reason it is being reserved for these high level users is because it is in the beta testing period. They are running it through their power users to vet the new integration for any functionality issues. Hopefully in the near future they will open it up to the rest of us. In the mean time, we can get use to Google+ Pages and get ready for it to be more user friendly on Hootsuite!
Feed Me! Moving Your RSS Feed
Have you ever thought about moving your blog? For many of us as our blogs grow, we think about moving to a different URL or to a self hosted site (like using wordpress.org which allows you to use the wonderful framework and blog designs of wordpress while having your own personalized domain) if we are not already self-hosting. But if your blog has been housed at one location for a while, how do you move it without losing your feed subscribers? This is a question a lot of people don’t ask until they are faced with the issue. So if you are asking this question then you have likely moved your blog and discovered that your subscribers are no longer getting their RSS feed.
I have moved blogs before and I spent a lot of time looking into the best way to redirect the URL. I was concerned that people who knew my web address would have difficulty finding the site. Plus I did not want any outside links to unlink because I moved my blog. Eventually I chose to do a 301 redirect. What this does is when you go to the old URL it takes you to my new site automatically. Using the 301 redirect I don’t lose the SEO work I have done, page ranking I have gained in search engines and people would still be able to easily find my blog. However, that 301 did not seem to work on my RSS. Now that is strange.
The research that I did indicated that it would. However, though some feedback from subscribers I found this not to be the case. That is because I was using feedburner to manage my RSS. Apparently the 301 redirect does not affect the feedburner feed because that feed is through an outside source and you cannot redirect a feed that is not your own, though if you are not using an RSS manager the 301 will work perfectly well.
Thankfully, there was an easy fix. I grabbed the feed URL for my new domain name and replaced my old feed URL with the new one. This then solved the issue of my existing subscribers missing out on my feed. Now my new website is feeding to the new feedburner RSS and the old one. So new subscribers and existing subscribers alike will be able to read the feed.
Your domain name is an important part of your branding, but taking care of your existing audience is also important. You want to make sure if you do a domain change that you are not losing the audience you have built up!
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