semwired

15 years ago only very few companies had bought their own internet domain (most of the times with an awful looking page). At the times,  very few understood the importance of the internet would have gained in the coming future.

Nowdays everything has changed. The way companies market their products on the internet (and their own brands) has been heavily affected by the internet itself.

It’s not like tv  anymore: customers have the chance to express their opinions, hence markets slowly became conversations in between producers and consumers.

Given that, online reputation in social media and websites has gained an increased importance for companies.

Here’s a shortlist of the most useful online tools and application check your online reputation and make sure everybody is really satisfied with your product.

Beware of the bloggers

Compared to other internet platforms, blogs are the places which can sparkle really interesting and truthful conversations about products and their consumers from the consumers themselves.
It’s really easy to get involved (with comments for instance) and bloggers are not afraid to express harsh opinions or critics.

Hence the first place to go if you want to really know about your own reputation,  would be blog search engines:

• Google Blog Search
• Technorati
• Yahoo Blog Search
• Blog Search Engine

You might be also interested in blog comments. Here’s a more specific tool which keeps track of blog comments:

• Backtype

Please do not feed the trolls

Before blogs, before PHPBB, even before IRC chat there was only USENET.
It went into a steep decline in the past years due to the overcome of more mainstream internet communities, vertical portals, forums with fancy colors and no need of weird geeky clients to connect (one of the worst aspect of USENET usability) but USENET has been the very first place of discussion on the internet right after the rise of local BBSs.

While doing some research on this post, I bumped into a usenet message I wrote several years ago… it was still there. This is the downside of this service: messages are casted in stone.

Make sure to check this few websites. USENET works as a redundant system of servers: if you manage to delete a post on a local server owned by your ISP, you’ll need to delete from all the other servers in which the same message is stored in other to be 100% cleaned up…

• Big Boards

• Google Groups

The twitter era

In order to criticize someone you won’t need that many words. 140 are enough. Get your hands on the twitter search  and rummage for any clue that my lead to an unsatisfied client.

Twitter brought the internet back to its essential meaning (basic interface, great ease to use and an evergrowing community of users), and if you’re a twitter user yourself you know how easy is to get into any interesting discussion about any kind of product.

• Twitter Search
• Twitter Vision

Search social

Imagine to be able to rummage through Facebook, Mybloglog, LinkedIn, Typepad, WordPress, Blogger at the same time. Quite of a tool if you think in terms of reputation check, especially because these are focused on social networks.

• Samepoint
• Socialmention

Search for people, not keywords

This is more if you getting worried about your personal reputation rather than your company or your product’s.
It’s also useful if you’re looking for info about a prospect employee or a dodgy coworker…

• 123people
• ZoomInfo
• Yahoo People Search
• Peoplesearch

Anyway, the list of online apps you might want to use to check your reputation is endless. The web is a total ongoing permanent conversation, communities, chat, forums, social networks… conversations sparkle everyday, on every topic. It’s up to you to find the right niche and start searching.

EVen if the hype generated by the released had been soon vanished (and its market share seem’s not improving at all), Google as just released a few tricks to make sure your websites will be displayed properly on Chrome.

I experienced some troubles with Chrome recently, Google has released this tricks right on time for me.

Have you ever wondered of being able to see visitor’s IP addresses with Google Analytics?

It’s actually posssible. It’s an old trick but it works pretty well…

Actually I can think of enough scenarios in which to apply this one:

• we want to track competitors visitors
• we want to exclude our own ip address from reports
• we have to exclude several different ip address on an internal network
• we want to find out who’s posting spam on our blog’s comments
• many more…

1. Getting to know custom filters

The weirdest thing though is that we can easily filter ip with custom filters. While creating a custom filter we can set up the IP address as a parameter… even if Google hides it from us.

When creating a custom filter (click on Filter Manager, then Add Filter and from the drop-down menu select Custom Filter) we have to choos the first parameter (Field A -> Extract A) to which makes our filter work. The IP address option is hidden.

2. Hide & Seek

If we’re clever enough to take a peak into the source coude on line we’ll find this on line 76:

<option value="30">Visitor Flash version</option>
<option value="31">Visitor IP Address</option>
<option value="32">Visitor Geographical Domain</option>

The chance to track IP address it’s right there, but to use it we have to write the line down in the drop-down menu… Anyway. It does not work, but we can sort it out anyway.

Back in 2006 someone found this out, then Google quickly patched it.

Still there’s some way to get what we’re looking for.

3. Gotcha!

Giving the right variable to track to the _trackPageview() call we can store all the visitors IPs.

The PHP code would look like this:

pageTracker._setVar("<?php echo $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];?>");

…it works!

There’s only a problem: it is not legal. According to Google Analytics Terms of Service:

7. PRIVACY . You will not (and will not allow any third party to) use
the Service to track or collect personally identifiable information of
Internet users, nor will You (or will You allow any third party to)
associate any data gathered from Your website(s) (or such third
parties' website(s)) with any personally identifying information from
any source as part of Your use (or such third parties' use) of the
Service. You will have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy and
will comply with all applicable laws relating to the collection of
information from visitors to Your websites. You must post a privacy
policy and that policy must provide notice of your use of a cookie that
collects anonymous traffic data.

It’s a silly restriction honestly. Everyone is still able to parse is own server logs and find out who is who. On the other hand it shows Google’s care for privacy of his users and all internet users. It definetely makes a point for them.

Anyway, it’s a neat trick and still it’s worth to talk about it for the sole purpose of spreading some “hacking” mentality to people working in analytics and marketing.

Disclaimer

This technique is a violation of Google Analytics Terms of Service. This technique might result in Google suspending your account or even worse. I reject any responsability for any consequence of this. This post is intended only for educational purpose.

I don’t mean to break any rules (neither want anybody to do that because of this post) but playing around with code can lead us to interesting discoveries, making us more aware of the tools we use everyday rather than being just simple users… it’s just up to you.

Ever wondered of managing redirect without Google getting to know about it?

We can actually play around with CSS in order to redirect pages and traffic. Since this trick will involve only CSS, we can be pretty sure of going unnoticed by search engines still achieving what we want.

This trick still uses Javascript in some sort of way. But the good thing about it is that CSS code does not get analyzed by Google.

Now, just think about all the possible SEO exploits this trick can have…!

We just need these three files:
redirect.htc

<attach event="ondocumentready" handler="redirect" />
<script language="JScript">

function redirect() {
window.document.location.href = 'http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com';
}

</script>

Then redirect.xml

<?xml version = "1.0"?>

<bindings xmlns = "http://www.mozilla.org/xbl" xmlns:html = "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<binding id = "redirect" applyauthorstyles = "false">

<implementation>
<constructor>
//

var elem = this;           // maintain a reference to the bound element

window.addEventListener('load',
function()
{
location.href='http://www.xxxxxxxxxx.com';
},false);

//
</constructor>
</implementation>

</binding>

</bindings>

index.html code

<style>
body {
behavior:url("./redirect.htc");
-moz-binding: url('./redirect.xml#redirect');
}
</style>

According to a new report from Hitwise about search trends, the average number keywords used in search queries is increasing. Queries with four words and more are showing an increase in number of searches. It’s the final proof to the long tail theory . People is realizing how crowded the web is and how hard is to find exactly what they’re looking for. Hence a more specific search query which supposedly will turn up better results.

It’s good news for advertising as well: long tail queries mean a higher rate of conversion when it comes to turn a lead into a customer.

The weirdest thing though is the steep increase in search queries with eight or more words. Is people actually treating search engines like some weird kind of slave robots, submitting articulated and verbalizaed queries? Are those words only keywords or proper sentencies? Anyway, it’s just good news for SEO. Being more specific on content can only help and this is the final demonstration.