One of the perks of working in the field of social media is that you get to pretend that you’re working and learning while watching hilarious videos of a good-looking guy in a shower. You know, the Old Spice guy in the shower, the guy who used to work in shark dental care and rides lions as a hobby? If you don’t know what I’m talking about (i.e. have been hiding under a rock etc.), Old Spice launched a campaign that combined twitter, YouTube and a bit of facebook that took the web by storm. The campaign included some planned commercials that set the stage ...

When creating custom FBML tabs for facebook pages, it can often be helpful to use an image map. An image map is a flat image (like a jpeg or a gif) that has been coded with HTML that makes parts of the image into live hyperlinks. A custom FBML tab is a tab on a facebook page that has been coded with FBML and/or HTML to do something unique. Here’s an example of a custom tab on a facebook page on the The Wall Street Journal’s facebook page: As you can see, the Wall Street Journal greets new visitors with a custom tab called News, which ...

Facebook made some drastic changes to its services and features a few weeks ago. First, Fan Pages are a thing of the past. Now, there are just Pages, and you can’t become a Fan of them, but you can Like them. Ok, weird but basically just a semantic change. Facebook also announced their new “Connections” system, which anyone who has logged into facebook since this was announced had to notice. Connections is a nasty feature that doesn’t allow you to control your profile information anymore. For example, if you want to say that one of your interests is Internet Marketing, your entry for that must link to a new automatically generated Community Page that facebook creates for ...

Yesterday was the second time Sphinncon took place in Israel. Sphinncon is “a version of the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Conference, but tailored as more of a low impact and more social gathering for search marketers” (taken from the event booklet). Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Land, and RustyBrick, was the organizer, and the Jerusalem College of Technology provided the venue. I really enjoyed the event and here’s why: It was in Jerusalem: We Jerusalemites are always schlepping to Tel Aviv for internet and technology related events. Good networking: The crowd was awesome. I had a great time schmoozing. Impressive ...

Those involved in search engine optimization (SEO) know that one thing Google “loves” is content. The more content the better, and one of the ways to analyze the competitive level of other sites in search engine results is to see how many pages of that site are indexed by Google. The bottom line on this metric is that the more content you have, the more can be indexed, and the more that is indexed, the better for you and the harder for your competitors to shake your site out of its position. Of course, ranking in the search engines is not just about quantity; the content has to be relevant to the keywords being searched for, and there are certain quality ...

A few days ago Google announced that it will be extending personalized search to all Google users, whether you are logged in to your Google account or not. Personalized search is not new, but until now it was only applied to users who were logged in. Now everyone will get personalized search results in their Google searches. Personalized results are based on your previous activity, mainly what results you clicked on in the search results. Google gives the example of someone who searches for the term “recipes,” and clicks on the fourth result rather than the first, which is for epicurious.com. Next time this user searches for recipes, epicurious.com may appear higher in the results for them, but not necessarily ...

Ikea Sweden got some good coverage yesterday for a facebook campaign it ran to promote the opening of a new store in Malmo, Sweden. The company wanted to promote the opening of the new branch, but their budget was limited. They hired an advertising agency called Forsman and Bodenfors, who came up with the idea of using Facebook’s photo tagging feature to create a viral effect that would spread word of the new branch opening. Forsman and Bodenfors opened a facebook profile for the branch’s manager, Gordon Gustavsson. The profile was to be used for business purposes only, as is evidenced by the vanity URL chosen for ...

After a long break I’ll be giving a course on social media marketing for businesses on Sept. 23 and 30. The course had filled up already, but we’ve moved the venue to a bigger room so we have 5 spaces left for anyone interested. The course will take place in the Sandisk offices in the Kfar Saba Hi-Tech park. Each session will be four hours, and we will get hands-on at every stage with tools and techniques for optimizing your social media activity. For more information about costs, venue, topics, etc., please contact us at (02) 5660297 or via email at info@illuminea.com. Agenda Sept. 23: What exactly is social media, and how do I use it effectively? Part 1: What is social media ...

We often get emails from people who want to increase exposure of a new online service or software and hope that we'll blog about it. I have no problem with this as I see this practice as acceptable...as long as the writer has a clue who I am and why there's a possible connection between their product and my interests. But a few days ago I got the funniest pitch letter ever, and I mean "I'm laughing at them, not with them" funny. This letter was a form letter with all the options left in. I'm reprinting the first paragraph here for your entertainment, and I will omit the name of the of the writer, but not of the product because it ...

This past Wednesday (July 15, 2008) I presented at an ISOC Israel event on the topic of day-to-day use of social media. My presentation was about personal branding, why one would want to create a personal brand online, and how to go about doing so. Why? In the past, creating a personal brand was solely the domain of celebrities. However, today everyone can create their own "brand," thanks to the proliferation of online networks where one can create a branded profile, and blogs which allow owners to present their knowledge in a useful and accessible manner. Aside from being good for one's ego, why would people want to create their own personal ...