Top Internet Strategy, Marketing & Technology Links – Jan 27, 2010

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Starting as soon as sometime this week, the 75 million monthly active users playing Zynga’s FarmVille will have a new way to buy virtual tractors and seeds; they’ll be able to “Pay With Facebook.” – Revealed! Facebook’s Plan To Double Its Revenues (Silicon Alley Insider)

If people are addicted to playing games on Facebook (and judging by the number of Farmville, Mafia Wars & Restaurant City updates, they are), then being a middleman to help feed that addiction is what Facebook wants to be. So Facebook is providing the payment service by which Facebook users will be able to purchase virtual goods or services in these games. Facebook applications already make a lot of revenue, so by providing the payment service, Facebook has found a way to take a percentage of each transaction. Sounds like an obvious revenue stream now, doesn’t it?

Periodically some person will publicly speculate that SEO is dead, dying, or useless. The reasons for this are many and varied. It’s easy to find articles on this topic, simply by searching for “is seo dead.” Here are a couple reasons that people may think that SEO is dying… – Is SEO Dying? How will it Evolve? (Search Engine Watch)

SEO will be important as long as people use search engines to search for things and there are things that you can do to optimize your site for those search engines. If search engines get smart enough to figure out intent and context and all those other things that let humans understand what’s going on better than computers, then you won’t need to do things to help the search engine figure out what you mean as a site owner. If some other technology comes along to replace search engines, you won’t need search engine optimization anymore (although it may have a slow death) – but you may need optimization for whatever’s next.

There are an alarming number of things that my user found hard to use in this sign-up process. The service is not dis-similar to alot of others out on the web but they seemed to lack guidance and context at a couple of main junctions and on occasion were given too many or not enough options to choose from. – Experiment: Twitter Usabilty – A new users first experience (Idea du Jour)

This post is excellent both from a design standpoint (understanding how people use your designs and what you need to do to make things easier) as well as for anyone helping someone setup a Twitter account (agencies, Internet strategists, web designers, etc.). Also, it reminds anyone who designs (sites, applications, whatever), that you need to put your design into the hands of people who use it and see what works and what doesn’t.

One of the most common fears I focus on defeating among executives and brand managers is that in new media brands lose control by publishing content and engaging in social networks. The general sentiment is that by sharing information and creating presences within public communities that they, by the nature of democratized participation, invite negative responses in addition to potentially positive and neutral interaction. By not fully embracing the social Web, many believe that they retain a semblance of control. – The Myth of Control in New Media (Brian Solis)

Brian makes the same point that I make with my clients. Just because you’re not providing a place where people can have a conversation with you (or with each other) doesn’t mean that they’re not having a conversation somewhere else. People are talking about your brand, company, product, etc. If you enter that conversation and engage those people, you have the opportunity to learn from them, improve your product and have a say. You’ve already lost control (if you really ever had it). Join the conversation and at least have some input in what’s said.

The crusade against prerecorded telemarketing messages, aka “robocalls,” went into high gear over at the Federal Communications Commission in the past few days. The agency is proposing tougher restrictionson the technology, which allows vendors to generate over a thousand annoying phone messages per minute—a bargain at about two cents per hit. – FCC ramps up crusade against robocalls (Ars Technica)

When the Do-Not-Call list went into place it really helped people get less of these robocalls. Except that businesses that you had a business relationship with could call – and that definition was stretched to include partners and unrelated parts of the business. Robocalls are different than cold calls – and are more annoying because they’re automated. Just about everyone finds robocalls annoying so it’s good to see the FCC stepping in to regulate them and make it easier for consumers to stop them from happening (especially if your phone is a cell phone and you’re paying for the minutes).

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