PC4Media

Westborough Virtual Office Space

We've been having these meetings at the Westborough Office Park, hosted by Highland March, which offers executive and virtual office space in Westborough. The place is very nice and perfect for a consultant or small business who doesn't want to splurge on having their own office with a secretary, answering service, copy equipment, conference rooms, etc, etc. This has all that, and the cost of those things - that make the occupying businesses look professional - is distributed over all of the occupants.

OutSEO'ing the SEO People

Yesterday, I wrote about Hosted Marketing Pages. Today, my blog (not the post) is result #10 on google.

You'd think it'd be a little harder to get on the first page for a search term that would be coveted by the experts at search engine optimization.

Do I win yet, Jim?  I am atleast looking forward to that We Build Pages wall clock. Address here.

Simple Explanation for Wiki

I tried to explain google docs/wikis to someone who is doing a group writing project. Here's a lot easier way to explain it.

Hosted Marketing Pages, PreSell Pages, Hosted Content et al

I did a bit of research a month or so ago on 'hosted content pages'. It has a lot of other names too. See the title of this post. I found We Build Pages as one of the FEW companies that do it. Here's all the bookmarks I collected. The other two companies that do it are TextLinkBrokers and PreSellPageMan.

Jim Boykin is the CEO of WBP and seems to be one of the pioneers of the technique. I subscribed to his blog. He's no stranger to linkbaiting either. (Yes, I'll take the schwag.)

I have since talked to a bunch of SEO experts, and it seems that this is a grey hat area of SEO, which basically means that a bunch of them do it, but most don't talk about it.

I am not sure how I feel about it. I certainly see the value from the business side. I understand why search engines would frown upon the practice if the content is hosted for the purpose of gaming pagerank, etc. But, if the content is hosted for the purpose of serving visitors with relevant information,  I don't see any problem with it. In the case of hosted marketing pages, it seems that the former goal is primary.  These guys keep the listing of websites private that they publish these pages to. Of course, there's competitive reasons - if the brokers tell you what publishers will host content for a fee, there's less reason to work with a broker. But, the big reason they keep it private - so their sites say - is because they don't want search engines to be able to find the pages.

Certainly gray.

I've turned my energy a bit more towards the intersection of presellpages and SMO, if I must use your buzzwords. Adding transparency to the hosted marketing pages concept and doing it in a social setting - is not much different than going to a networking event with a bunch of business owners, all with their own agendas.

Sidenote: It'll be interesting to see how high this post ranks on a search for "Hosted Marketing Pages".

Unexpected Rewards

David Beisel has a great post on rewarding behavior:

In the past week or two, the notion of unexpected rewards (think: unanticipated acknowledgment of positive behavior) has come up in two entirely different conversations.  But in both instances, the value of rewarding people out-of-the-blue facilitates the same thing - a spirit of goodwill which fosters further positive behavior.

That sums it up perfectly. All I can I add is some supporting experiences. When we launched WhizSpark, we built a very fancy rewards system that rewarded people who invited their contact to events. We had all kinds of metrics and thresholds defined, we had a points system and a direct rewards system. All of it was for naught. We used it several times to great success for big time public entertainment events. But, for the most part, it wasn't used very often. Especially not for business events. Right now, we don't really even push it. The code is there if we want to resurrect it.

What has become valuable is the tracking tools that we built to go along with the rewards system. Why? We can monitor who is spreading the word about an event and how effective they are, whether they are an email affiliate, a publisher, a sponsor, or an attendee.

What I've found to be very effective, is to simply reward people who help. We reward them with recogntion, complementary gifts, passes to upcoming events, etc. They appreciate that very much.

It works because it is after the fact. It is not an incentive. It is not a bribe. They spread the word about the event because they are excited about it. Not because there's something to gain 'monetarily'.

More Fun Stuff

Relevant

I figured I'd go and read a few old posts. What's the good of all this chatter, if I don't reflect on it.

This has been happening now for a few months.

WTD Event

Rick's experience at this event.

Facebook

Yeah. This is a big deal. Very big deal. Leveraging the Facebook API lowers the barrier to viral adoption of almost any web based service. It's the ultimate "tell a friend" system.

I wish I had a developer to dedicate to exploiting this for promoting things like this.

For those that don't quite get the [potential] significance, try this on: the Facebook API is the new hype-errr-link. We'll see.

Networking in Real Life

From here:

The way people network in real life is as follows. The more networked person gives their entire rolodex to the less networked person and says, "have at it!" We should design our business networking websites to reflect this reality.

True. And hmmm.