Top Internet Strategy, Marketing & Technology Links – Mar 5, 2010

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Millions of people around the world don’t know what a browser is, they don’t know the difference between a search bar and an address bar and they sure don’t follow the finer points of Google’s many little changes it makes to their search results. They go to the Google and they type in Facebook login. Then they click on the links that show up, sometimes with very humorous results.- Google Solves the Fafebook Problem (ReadWriteWeb)

Many people use Google as a web browser, meaning that they type in the name of where they want to go instead of bookmarking or typing in the direct URL. (Sometimes they even type the URL into Google – check your incoming search traffic, you’ll probably see your URL as a keyword.) ReadWriteWeb wrote an article about Facebook login recently that was showing up higher on the Google results page than the actual Facebook login page (Google is trying to serve news results as well as actual pages). People were confused when they went to the ReadWriteWeb story instead of the Facebook login page. Google’s solution? A yellow star for results these people may be looking for. I’m not sure how well it’s going to work, but I guess we’ll find out soon.

People often ask me if I see value in having a Facebook fan page. It seems as though you start a fan page for yourself, your product or service, collect your fans, and then never hear from them again. So, what’s the point? – What good is a Facebook fan page? (New Media Photographer)

Rosh has some good tips for businesses who aren’t sure how to use their fan page. Especially important is that your posts will show up in the feeds of anyone who is a fan. With Facebook’s recent redesign, news feeds are more obvious on the home page. And the default for most businesses pages is also to publish out to the public web – which is another way for search engines to pick up your content. The more people who can see what you’re doing (targeted, of course), the better.

I spend a lot of time in Twitter search. I do it for several purposes. One is for my client partners. For instance, if I’m thinking of ways to do things for MolsonCoors, I might start up searches on various beer brands to get some competitive analysis. I might start figuring out if there are location-specific tweets about Molson products. For instance, during the Vancouver Olympics, I might have found several people tweeting about their beers while out and about enjoying the events. I could do something with that. – Using Twitter Search for Business (Chris Brogan)

I use Twitter search when doing research for clients, but Chris points out some great little tricks for finding specific information. The great thing about Twitter search is that every search has it’s own RSS feed, so you can drop that into your Google Reader and keep on the ongoing results. Asking customers directly about what they like is important, but sometimes you also need to see a bit about what else they’re saying and these tips can give you some great insight.

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