Thankfully, it is now possible to list home-based businesses on Google Places and Bing’s local directory without making the street address public. My colleage Jon Loomer – who also runs a business out of his home – explains:

If you have a brick and mortar business, chances are that you already have a Place on Google and Bing. You’ll just need to claim the place so that you can take control of it. But individual consultants who don’t take the opportunity will be left in the dust. There’s little reason for those places to be created if the owner is left in ignorance.

via Brick and Mortar Not Required for Bing, Google Places.

What you may not recall is that the whole mess was sparked by Congress.

You see, Congress passed a bill that, among other things, limited the fees banks could charge for debit-card transactions – theoretically intended to save consumers some money each time they used their cards. The big banks reacted the way corporations always do… with one revenue stream closed off, they looked to open another. Bank of America got most of the heat because they were the least subtle; other banks cut things like rewards programs. In the end, consumers didn’t save a dime.

I’m not bringing this up to star a red state/blue state debate… I’m just using a recent example to show the many ways in which government intervention – from either side of the aisle – can have unintended consequences.

Which brings us to the Stop Online Piracy Act, commonly known as SOPA. Generally speaking, this legislation is intended to help content creators – movie and music companies and such – combat the overseas Web sites that host illegal downloads and such. Sounds fairly harmless, right? Couple of problems with that. First, it was apparently written by people without a basic understanding of things like DNS entries and IP addresses… long story short, it wouldn’t stop people from accessing the sites Congress (and big media) want to block. For added fun, it would give those big media companies – and just about everyone else – a whole raft of legal tools allowing them to harass hosting companies, search engines, social media sites and little ol’ bloggers like you and me.

Now, I understand the underlying problem. Really, I do. By the time you read this post, it will probably be cloned by some site hosted in Southeast Asia and used to run ads for herbal Viagra. I’d love it if I could post articles here, or on basketball.about.com or any of my other sites and feel confident that I’d be the only person getting credit for – and profiting from – my work. But this legislation goes much too far. It’s a bad idea. It must be stopped.

Here’s a rundown of what SOPA is all about, and why it’s more than a little bit terrifying. (Hat tip: @yoast)

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Call your representatives, folks. This is serious.

Some useful links:

• Adam Savage of Mythbusters – “SOPA Could Destroy the Internet as We Know It”
• Copyblogger.com – The Problem with SOPA and How to Stop It
• Yoast.com – Stop SOPA, Help the Internet
• Ars Technica – House Takes Bad Senate Bill, Tries Making it Worse

photo credit: robert.claypool via photopin cc

I’m taking time off from wrapping all those iPhone 4s and Kindle Fires to lodge some requests with the search community from Kris Kringle. I’ve been good to you over the years and it is time you helped Santa fix some of these search problems.

via A Letter From Santa To The Search Community.

The goal? Accumulate 2,000 followers on Twitter, as quickly as possible.

The motivation? A somewhat arbitrary goal, set by one of my employers. Long story short, if I could “prove” my account was valuable to people by hitting that 2k quota, they’d integrate my @charliezegers account into some new marketing channels, which would (theoretically) increase the value of the account even further.

When I started, I had around 500 followers… and no idea how to quadruple that number. So I sought the advice of friends and colleagues, one of whom shared his secret. It’s actually pretty simple:

1. Select the Twitter account of someone you admire, or who covers the same territory you do.
2. Follow every person on that account’s follower list. Roughly 20 percent of the people you follow will immediately follow back.
3. Those that don’t, unfollow.
4. Rinse.
5. Repeat.

Deceptively simple, right? And there are a number of services – Tweepi is the one I found most useful – that all but automate the process. (Twitter policies prevent you from true automation, though I suspect there are ways around that.)

But that method is also tedious. So I tried other avenues. One was Twiends.com. Twiends is partly a directory of Twitter accounts, and partly a marketplace. You get points for following other accounts, and you can offer points to people if they follow you.

In theory, it’s a way to connect with people that have similar interests; Twiends makes suggestions of people to follow based on common interest. But in reality, it became a way to inflate my subscriber numbers. I’d follow anyone that was offering points, and I’d give points to anyone willing to follow me. I didn’t much care if they were into multi-level marketing or promoting a band or selling Honda Accords in Waltham, Massachusetts… a follower is a follower, right?

When the influx of Twiends began to slow, and with my (totally arbitrary) deadline approaching, I resorted to the lowest form of follower-building… the dreaded #followback hashtag. If you’re not familiar with Twitter lingo, a hashtag is a text string, preceded by a pound sign (#). They’re used on Twitter as quick search terms; if you want to see all recent posts about the New York Knicks, you can search on the hashtag #Knicks.

If you want to inflate your Twitter following really quickly, you can start including the hashtag #followback in your posts. Or #teamfollowback. Or any one of at least a dozen other versions. Using those tags says to the greater Twitter community, “if you follow me, I’ll return the favor.” And there are thousands of Twitter users who will return the favor. That’s about all they have in common, though. The members of Team Follow Back ranged from raging Justin Bieber fans (is there any other kind?) to high school kids to self-appointed social media gurus to shady SEO consultants (is there any other kind?).

One trait noticeably lacking in the followers I’d picked up from hashtags and follower-building schemes: any interest in what I had to say. I reached my goal of 2,000 followers, actually topping out at close to 2100. But I stopped picking up value somewhere along the way.

Extracting Value from Social Media

My interactions on social media sites have a great deal of value to me. I’ve picked up several jobs by networking on Facebook. On Twitter I get ideas for stories, build my credentials as an expert in my field by interacting with other writers and consumers. There are people who benefit from having sheer numbers of followers – some celebrities reportedly make thousands of dollars per day by pitching products on social networking sites – but I’m not one of them, and I’m guessing most of the people who read this aren’t either.

To get value from your involvement in social media – or any marketing channel – you have to begin with the end in mind. My race to 2,000 followers really crystallized that for me. Many of my new followers would never contribute to a substantive discussion of issues that matter to me… or click on one of my links and generate ad impressions on one of my sites. They were just… there.

I’ve since stopped propping up my numbers with followbacks and Twiends. I’ve lost around 200 followers in the process – and will lose more as I continue to weed out bad fits from my “follow” list.

Your follower count isn’t the only mostly meaningless number that can distract you from your real goals in social media. My friend/colleague/client Jon Loomer recently pointed out how obsessing over a Klout score can have a very similar impact.

Attendees may have noticed ctzdesign.com as one of the sponsors of the bottle toss. (I confess, “bottle toss” turned out not to mean what I thought when I signed up…)

Did you attend the event? Do you need help with your web presence? Give us a call… and make sure to ask about the Tuckahoe Tiger discount…

Clearly, I’m not the only person in that position, so I thought I’d share this blog on self promotion, written by my About.com colleague Alyssa Gregory. This passage seemed particularly apropos.

If you want to effectively promote yourself without pissing people off, my perspective is that you MUST be willing to promote others. It irks me when I see people promoting themselves to the extreme, asking others to do the same for them, and offering not even a whisper of support in return. This is simple reciprocity, folks.

via How to Promote Yourself without Being a Jerk | Small Business Bonfire.

For the record, I make a point of promoting my clients’ businesses whenever possible/appropriate. If you ever have good news to share, please send it my way and I’ll alert the masses.

Facebook and Twitter are particularly useful venues for such things.

But I digress.

I’d give you a long laundry list of all the reasons the new version is new and cool… but Lorelle on WordPress has already done that very nicely.

• WordPress 3.2 Released: Faster, Prettier, Powerful « Lorelle on WordPress.

That might be a big mistake.

I’ve been on Google Plus for a couple of days now; got an invite from one of my About.com colleagues. I’d describe it as a cross between Facebook and Twitter.

The big selling point is the “circles.” Basically, you can group your contacts into different circles and choose what information you share with each. Ever tried using Facebook for professional networking? And then realized you’ve sent a FarmVille update to your biggest client? So you see why that would be valuable, huh?

Google Plus photo-editing tools are getting positive reviews from many of my colleagues as well.

The negative? Critical mass. Facebook and Twitter are useful because there are so many people in the network. Google Plus can’t compare with either network. But I suspect it will. Once the product is out of the “soft launch/invite only” phase, integration with all the other Google products is going to drive a lot of sign-ups.

As I’m browsing around Google-powered sites there’s occasionally a red notification alert that pops up and immediately grabs my attention. Soon enough I’m clicking through the various notifications and seeing what my friends have shared and who has recently begun sharing with me.

via The One Google Plus Feature Facebook Should Fear.

Facebook-killer? I doubt it. Too many people have too much invested in their Facebook networks to up and leave for something new any time soon. But it seems clear to me that Google Plus will be a valuable asset – and a must-have – for anyone marketing a product or service online.

If you’re interested in checking it out, drop me a line. I don’t know how limited the invitation system is, but I’m happy to send one to any client (or prospective client…). Once you’ve joined, look me up at gplus.to/charliezegers

The Cicada Principle and Why It Matters to Web Designers » HTML & CSS, Layout » Design Festival.

The +1 button will allow visitors to your site to recommend it to others, in a way that will be displayed in Google’s search results. It seems reasonable to expect the +1 button to influence those results as well. (Bing search has already announced that social links will factor into their search algorithm going forward.)

Worth noting: I was able to add +1 links to LaneViolation.com in about 90 seconds.

Would you like to add +1 to your site? Contact me, and I’ll get you set up.