Websites can include the same “Like” button everyone in the universe is familiar with, within their own content.

Why is this a big deal?

• Website visitors can connect your content to Facebook easier than ever before
• Page Titles will be displayed as a live link within user’s wall (looks like ~95 characters max.)
• Personalized content can be displayed on Facebook
• Custom buttons (names, avatars, like vs. recommend text, colors, font, etc)
• Allows for easier content endorsement – users not comfortable leaving comments may prefer this option

The small “counter” style button can be seen at the top of this post. Below is an example of the full size button and how it appears on Facebook for logged in users.

Interested in adding the Facebook Like button on your site? Full instruction included here: Like Button – Facebook Developers

Two WordPress plugins are available (that are compatible) WP-FB-Like-Button and WP FB Like

What are your initial thoughts of the new Facebook Like button?

The innovative minds over at 12Seconds launched a new location based social network called Rally. And its got some pretty nice features.

• real friends get push notifications and end up in your feed
• feed friends just end up in your feed (no push notifications – battery saver)
• lurk allows you to see a friends’ content, but they don’t see yours (it’s okay to be a lurker)
• mute turns off those people whose friend request you accepted under social pressure (we all do it)

Will this replace Foursquare? Probably not at this point. However, other apps and communities could learn a couple of tricks from Rally.

• Sending messages directly to your friends is a nice feature
• Quick access to maps & directions

Plus – I like the overly simplistic style and theme of the entire app. Black and White. Seems like they paid more attention to how people would like to connect with the people in their lives, rather than just making another pretty app. Oh yea, and the “stamps” you’ll get are pretty cool too…

Check it out…let me know what you think.

Google announced their latest social networking strategy by releasing Google Buzz yesterday…

Big step towards the centralized, portable profile mentality by combining the social buffet of stand-alone platforms & channels. In typical Google early-release fashion, it lacks certain items – such as the ability to update your Facebook/Twitter status…but will in time. Having the ability to cut and then measure is an impressive feat.

The various communications tools are being molded – the neat thing is that you’ll still have the ability to customize your own mold depending on your own usage. Email, chat, groups, status, files, geo-location…you’ll get to do all the things you’re already doing, under one roof: Google’s roof.

Here’s the TechCrunch Google Buzz article if you haven’t seen it yet.

Your thoughts? Is this simply Google Wave with training wheels?

Google has been hard at work preparing for one of the biggest recent changes in the world of search – Google Caffeine should roll out sometime after the new year.

What is it? Google is changing the criteria for choosing which websites show up when you search for information on the web.

How are they going to do that? Google has added new “ranking factors” that will determine how high your site appears in the results.(This doesn’t mean existing factors will go away)

Why are they doing this? Google wants to remain King of the World. Changes like this ensure they continue providing the most relevant search results to their users.

What are those factors? Here’s a few items shared recently by Matt Cutts from Google.

• Site Speed – How quickly a website loads
• Broken Links – Links within your site that don’t work or link to pages that don”t exist anymore
• Linking to Bad Neighborhoods – Don’t link to spam sites such as link directories/farms or sites known for hosting paid links
• On Page Factors – More so than before, an emphasis on unique relevant content, page design, clear navigation, unique page titles, relevant descriptions and keyword density
• Analytical Items – Page views, bounce rates, usage/traffic figures, page view time
• Social Bookmarks – How many times has the site/page been added to a social bookmarking site

A lot of speculation surrounds the Social Bookmarking element of the future ranking updates. Including social links certainly allows for the relevant popularity factor, yet does raise some questions around its ability to be gamed. (I’m sure Google is light years ahead of me on this element) Social link inclusion also levels the playing field for those online marketers who didn’t have the ability to compete with a large quantity of paid back links.

Page view time is also an interesting factor. I’ve heard the argument about time spent on a page being less important – or even more difficult to effectively measure with the advent of tabbed browsing. Again, I’m sure Google had someone in a very messy cubicle solve this riddle.

What can you do, even if you’re not a search engine optimization consultant?

Plenty…you can help your company by simply paying attention to some of the on page factors mentioned above: Is your site easy to navigate? Are there broken links? Does the page content makes sense and is it relevant?

If you’re involved with these items in a daily basis, you’re probably already busy with this…or will be.

Search engine results placement is a vital key for so many businesses – what else are you doing to maintain your search rank?

Their unique way of showcasing your personal brand is different than other social sites. The ultra-creative team at Magntize is doing some really cool things in the introductions department. In their words… “Magntize introduces you to the world.”

• Free account
• Pro version – for $9/mo. (extras like custom domain, add a resume & mobile versions)
• Customize your themes
• Full profile with bio, links, tags
  • The Frisco Kid film

Check out my introduction below.

The NFL tries to ban player tweets before, during and after a game for specified period of time; the NCAA has absolutely no clue and tries to ban all fan-based social media activity during football games. Who’s doing something good and having fun with it?

Mark and Brian Cuban. That’s who. Mark tweets a simple message like this:

Then helping the cause even more, Brian Cuban sends the same message over to Facebook:

They could take it even further by asking fans to add their pictures and video. Extending the interaction and activities to other networks such as FourSquare would be a nice experiment to include more people and maybe create some new fans.

These guys do an exceptional job at contributing quality content through their online networks; they engage people and create off-line interaction which creates a better relationship with them and their organization.

So they gave away a few tickets, what did they get in return? Fans showed up, probably spent money and undoubtedly told their friends about the free ticket the Cuban Brothers gave them.

Grab your own tickets and follow Mark and Brian.

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Within hours, Facebook wrangled about 6 million people to convert their profile URL from,

this: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1128085240
to this: www.facebook.com/ericmiltsch

Does this help you? Sure, maybe you feel better now that your name isn’t a number. Personally, I haven’t seen my Facebook profile move up in the search results.

Who does this help? Facebook. They’re hoping everyone forwards their address to everyone not on Facebook. Imagine if half of those 6 million people sends their new URL to 25 Facebook noobs. That’s 75,000,000 new, warm referrals. Imagine if your business got 75mm warm leads. For free.

Want to beat Facebook at their own game? Here’s two ways to make either your personal, or professional brand, just a little different from everyone else. And that little bit can go a long way.

Collateral full movie Shorten your URL using any site that shrinks URL’s with the ability to customize and provide tracking. Several sites will do the trick – for this example I’ll show you what I did using BudURL.com’s service a few months ago.

Radio Flyer divx I changed my original long URL to this: http://budurl.com/fbem. The last four characters signify ‘Facebook Eric Miltsch’

Other examples follow the same naming convention for consistency:

budurl.com/dgem | Digg

budurl.com/dlem | Delicious

budurl.com/viem | Vimeo

budurl.com/twem | Twitter

budurl.com/suem | Stumbleupon

Another easy way is to purchase your own custom domain name and simply forward it to your social profile site, such as: EricMiltschOnFacebook.com or some other variation.

You need to do everything possible to promote your personal or professional brand – put your name(s) first.

We’ll see what happens in a couple of weeks when Facebook Pages can get their Vanity URL’s as well.

Let’s define quality twitter followers – everyone wants them. A quality follower for me:

• Rocky IV ipod

• Follows back
• Has a full bios with link(s)
• Engages and participates
• Has a nice balance of self-promotion & re-tweeting
• Has positive energy

Keep in mind, my activities center around providing valuable automotive content, among other things, to help consumers. I’m always trying new stuff, always measuring things and just making sure our hits outweigh our misses. Here’s a random list of my activities for @AuctionDirect.

• Address people by their names in direct messages
• No automatic direct messages
• Try to get to know people – I ask everyone to take my twitter interview
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• Promote others when possible; Re-tweets are good, FollowFridays are cool and links to other people’s sites are awesome!
• Provide informative, relevant links
• Humor which doesn’t attack or offend. (Especially when tweeting from a business account)
• Help people and answer quick questions
• Acknowledge other people’s awesomeness
• Meeting people face-to-face; get out from behind your screen and talk to some of your followers – Meet-ups really help
• Don’t RT content from people with say, 350k followers. Odds are a ton of people have already seen it
• Don’t to talk about money, sex or religion. (I try not to at least…)
• Follow people my followers follow. Birds of a feather…
• Don’t complain

Thankfully, most of the people I know do these things very nicely.  @JasonFalls is a great example of someone who applies tactful, real-life common-sense to his twitter stream.

Sometimes, people just aren’t interested in automotive content and I can appreciate that. I’m not there to sell to anyone a car; just trying to educate and inform consumers. Its another place I can help change the way people buy used cars.

What are you doing to get and maintain quality twitter followers?

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Here’s 7 sites that are easy to set up, easy to use and best of all, the search engines play nice with them:

1. Google Knol.

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   Assault on Precinct 13 buy

   (short for knowledge) Create a bio and simply share your knowledge. About anything. This a great place to create an expanded profile and link to your sites.

2. Live Journal. This is one of the Internet’s original blogging/journal sites (dating back to 1999) Simple control features, nice templates to customize your appearance and its social networking features make this is a long-standing favorite.  Originally created by Brad Fitzpatrick.
3. Ning. Ning is the most expansive on the list as its actually a community platform – you can easily design and create your own social network using Ning’s template driven platform. Netscape founder Marc Andreesen started Ning to let users create their own networks based around specific interests.
4. Squidoo. This is a fun, easy to use, interactive set of pages called lenses.  Squidoo gets a lot of traffic and plenty of features for users to enjoy: RSS feeds, images, videos, links  – plus you can even earn $$ for your content and/or contribute to charity. Another great contribution from Seth Godin.
5. Tumblr. One of my personal favorites. David Karp whipped up this micro-blogging platform in 2007. Use the stock designs or add your own custom themes; use it for blogging, pics, videos, links and audio files. Follow others & people can follow your tumbleblog to build your own community.
6. PitchEngine. Perfect for your press release content.  Created by Jason Kintzler as a new school method of publishing Social Media Releases. (press releases on steroids.) Add links, tags, images and videos to build a powerful press release.
7. PollDaddy. High Anxiety film Supercross rip Not necessarily creating new content, rather, letting the new content come to you in the form of online polls. Great for feedback and learning more about – well, anything. Especially useful for creating new content based on poll results.

Not using any of these? Make your own 7 day challenge and you’ll have a whole new level of content sites created within a week.

What are some of your favorite sites?

Image by shashiBellamkonda via Flickr

What’s Your Elevator Pitch?

Today is the first day of the Build a Better Blog Challenge, by Darren Rowse from Problogger.net.

This is an excellent way to learn more about blogging and your own blog. It’ll also provide a daily task to help make your blog more effective.

The first task: Write an elevator pitch for your blog. If you don’t have one, this is a great way to quickly communicate what your blog is all about and help ensure you’re positioned properly within your niche. Don’t get tongue-tied when someone asks what your blog is about. Hit them with your elevator pitch and wow’em with an overview that tells exactly whats going on within your blog.

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I’m still perfecting my pitch for this blog, but I did I create one for WhyBuyUsedCars.com.

My short pitch: “It’s the How, What, Where & When of Used Cars.” Short, yet descriptive – haven’t had any complaints yet with regards to its focus.

When appropriate and/or needed, my long pitch is:  WhyBuyUsedCars.com aims to educate and inform used car buyers with the best information and resources on the web – with an entertaining spin.

What’s your pitch?