Becoming Less Transparent On Facebook

Facebook Cleanup Phase 2. 

A few days ago, on my Facebook profile (About page), I deleted about 100 Likes that I didn't recall clicking Like on. I was not opposed to the topics, activities, products, or organizations. I just don't support them, or they post content that I'm no longer interested in, or they don't post anything and may be abandoned FB pages.

Tonight, I deleted 100 more, almost all the rest of my Likes. I've dwindled down my Likes list to just a few entities that I really care about and want to get updates on.

Some people want to reveal who they are by clicking on things they like, abstract ideas like Organic Gardening or Philosophy or Astrophysics.

They also display on their About pages all their family members, past employers, places where they've lived, schools they attended, and the music, movies, TV shows, sports, games, books, and events they like. They apparently want to "be known" and be transparent about their interests.

I see no point to this. The entities that preach to you "be transparent" are themselves not transparent, especially about why they want you to be transparent. Those who most vehemently want you to submit to the "privacy is dead" mantra are stalkers, predators, identity thieves, "Big Data" mongers, advertisers, and surveillance agencies.

I reveal my basic data about myself and share my insights, photos of places around town, links to interesting information, and food I'm eating. That's about it. The rest of my life and interests are basically boring or of no relevance to what I want to accomplish on Facebook -- which is to help, amuse, inspire, and educate people.

I am also blocking people who follow my status updates, but I don't know them personally. I suggest you consider doing the same.

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Facebook Hashtags and How To Use Them

TechCrunch has announced that Facebook confirms it will implement functional #hashtag capabilities. 

Hashtags are used to facilitate discoverability of content related to topics, issues, people, places, TV shows, celebrities, politics, locations, conferences, beliefs, companies, events, products, etc. -- whatever users mark with a hashtag. 

Facebook claims the hashtag content will be governed by your privacy settings, so a hashtag post will be viewable only by who you enable to view it according to your account's privacy settings. 

I hope this means we can finally search our own FB content, if we hashtag it, like #stevenstreightSEO or #str8sounds or #stevenstreightlocalnews.

Max Woolf is not impressed. He claims that the implementation of hashtags on Facebook is stupid. Hashtags on comments won't be searchable, nor will they be included in conversation feeds. Privacy settings will greatly limit the hashtagged content available for public view. Marketers will exploit hashtags. Porn spammers and other ne'er-do-wells will abuse hashtags.

Read his article "Facebook Hashtags are Fundamentally Broken."

You must learn how to use hashtags correctly and effectively. They must be phrases with no spaces between the words, for example.

The purpose of hashtags is to identify, organize, and find specific conversations. The key to effective use is to determine what the essential keywords are, which is a classic SEO tactic. 

You don't want to pick an unpopular hashtag, nor do you want to use a nebulous or inexact keyword for your hashtag. For example, a #marketing hashtag is so vague, you probably won't find it as valuable as #mobilemarketing or #eventmarketing conversations. 

Instead of hashtagging an event as #conference you should hashtag it with the name and year of the event. For example #smx or #sxsw2013 or #pubcon2013 

Sometimes people are using multiple hashtags to refer to an event, topic, or whatever. So you may have to click on #summercamp2013 and #chillicothemusicfest and #threesisterspark and so forth. 

You can use more than one hashtag in a post, but it pays to discover what exact hashtag others are using predominately for a given topic. For example, ABC Television prefers that people use #DWTS as the hashtag for Dancing With the Stars, rather than, or in addition to, hashtagging the individual dancers. Search a hashtag BEFORE you use it. 

You may find out that what you wanted to use as the hash tag for a topic is already being used, but for a very different topic. 

Using stupid hashtags just muddies the waters. The classic example is Entenmann's using "notguilty" in a hashtag about their cookies, when everybody was using the same tag for the Casey Anthony murder trial verdict. Hashtags are often used by spammers and cyberbullies. 

You should become familiar with the black hat SEO and trolling ways of using hashtags for negative purposes. There are #hashtagdirectories that give you standard hashtags in common use for specific topics, events, people, and issues. 

READ MORE

http://blog.microsecommerce.com/index.php/uncategorized/5-tips-for-using-hashtags-effectively/ 


http://minimaxir.com/2013/06/hashtag-hashtag/

https://support.twitter.com/articles/49309-using-hashtags-on-twitter 

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/hashtags/ http://twubs.com/p/hashtag-directory 

http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/12/facebook-hashtag/

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Amateurish Link Anchors is Smart SEO

SEO specialists are recommending, to avoid "over-optimization", you be a bit amateurish in your link anchor text (the wording of a link).

In most fields, the more professional you are, the better. But in SEO, the spammers and black hat practitioners are spotted by Google due to their slick and sophisticated methodologies.

(NOTE: Black hat SEO means taking advantage of loopholes and gimmicks to trick Google into thinking a thin content, poor quality, or deceptive/malicious website is relevant to keyword queries and should be ranked high in search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Don't let anybody use black hat tricks on your website, because eventually Google catches on, changes their search algorithm, and penalizes or de-indexes websites employing black hat techniques.

Once your website is removed from Google search results, it can take you 6 months to a year to plead with Google to put you back on.)

Now it is recommended that in your wording for links, you should use naked URLs (e.g., www.pluperfecter.blogspot.com), brand anchors (Pluperfecter), brand-keyword hybrid anchors (Pluperfecter web content development and SEO blog), and junk anchors (click here, read more, next page).

The former rules were (1) never use naked URLs as they look clueless and slow down reading, (2) use brand and company anchors for domains only (home pages), (3) use either brands or keywords but not both, and (4) never use junk anchors because they don't convey to human users or search engines the keywords indicative of the information you're going to navigate to and see when you click the link.

It's funny that, in the current SEO landscape, to appear less malicious, you need to appear less competent and consciously violate usability principles.

Another odd thing I came across in my SEO research is that when Google comes out with a new algorithm update, don't respond to it immediately.

Why? Because spammers and black hats typically change what they're doing the minute there's a new update, while legitimate webmasters are more sluggish and less attuned to Google's changes.

READ MORE

Search Engine Journal "Post-Penguin SEO Link Building"

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/post-penguin-seo-link-building-the-naked-url-truth/46936/

Google's Matt Cutts video on internal links and anchor text

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The Internship: Google PR Movie fact check

The Internship -- a comedy loosely based on a false notion of Google internships?

How many movies have you seen that claim to be "based on a true story," or "a dramatization of real events," only to find out that there were so many factual aberrations, that the film's rendition of the story is mostly fantasy, or falsified in important points, and thus  gives a warped viewpoint of the reality?

The Internship is one of those movies, apparently. A film about two older guys who want a job in technology "with Google as the backdrop." That means, with a fictionalized, unreal portrayal of Google. 

Many reviewers are calling The Internship "a love letter to Google" and "a 2 hour  commercial for Google," but there are some odd misrepresentations.

FACT: There is no public Google "help line" you can call.

FACT: Google internships are not given out as prizes for team competition events.

FACT: New AdWords accounts for small businesses do not get processed through written purchase orders.

FACT: Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson do NOT have GooglePlus accounts.

FACT: Google, in fact no corporation or organization, is as wacky, fun, altruistic, and innocent, as this film makes Google out to be. It's easy to chant "Do No Harm" -- but that doesn't mean that you are in fact never doing any harm. Of course, no group of humans will ever be perfect.

The film makers confessed that they weren't trying to portray Google accurately. They admit to not caring about the facts. Then why not call the firm Zillions, give it a fake name and fake characteristics?

The movie revolves around Google internships, but presents a very inaccurate perspective on Google internships, offering a make believe substitute instead. It strongly pushes the good intentions of Google and its Do No Harm mantra, while avoiding any of the negative publicity related to Google's policies.

What is the point of doing such a thing? Didn't the producer have enough imagination to build a story on the truth about Google internships? Was the truth "too mundane," not exciting enough?

Why can't a film maker take the reality and build a story around the actual facts, instead of twisting things around, for the sake of "what I want to imagine it to be"?

My reason for disliking this common ploy is that the movies create a powerfully embedded false sense of a real thing. The fantasy of the film dictates what the masses perceive about the object of the film. 

Movie-goers walk away with a fake that they consider the real deal. This can cause trivial or serious problems when people discuss the true story, or the actual entity, and base their opinions on what they remember seeing in the movie.

I'm not saying that every film based on a true story or a real entity has to be a documentary. What I'm saying is be faithful to the facts of the real entity, because your portrayal will be taken by most movie-goers to be the truth. Most of them probably won't fact check the film.

I believe that films based on true stories or real entities swerve from the facts due to the arrogance of the producer. Ego gets in the way. A power trip ensues. The producer gets some kind of weird thrill imposing his vision and disregarding the truth.

The motivation of the film's producer often is declared: "I told the story in my own special way because I wanted to put my personal stamp on it." They apparently want to tell their own story, and just use the true story or the real entity as a convenient springboard to go off in all kinds of wild, fanciful directions. To me, that's not cool.

Will The Internship be a funny movie? Probably. Will it be enjoyable to watch. Undoubtedly. Will it get people interested in pursuing a career in technology? Hopefully. Will it implant some errors about what Google is really like in the minds of viewers? Unfortunately.

Bottom line: A good PR tool for Google, that pointlessly deviates from the truth about Google internships. A better idea for a movie might have been the zany antics of brogrammers that occur at Google's Summer of Code (SOC) program.

https://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/

http://readwrite.com/2013/06/01/why-i-wish-the-new-google-internship-movie-was-actually-true

http://marketingland.com/the-internship-movie-google-45618

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