illuminea web presence agency

WordCamp Jerusalem a few weeks away!

Miriam Schwab — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 21:28:08 +0000

After a two year break, WordCamp is coming back to Israel, this time as WordCamp Jerusalem. And we’ve got an awesome lineup of speakers and topics in three tracks: Beginning WordPress Developers, Advanced WordPress Developers, and WordPress Tips and Ideas.

What is WordCamp?

WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. WordCamps are open to WordPress.com and WordPress.org users alike.

Tell me more about WordCamp Jerusalem

WordCamp Jerusalem is taking place on Sept. 5, 2010 at the Jerusalem College of Technology, who is generously sponsoring the conference. The conference will run from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm, and entrance is free of charge.

Here are some of the planned (tentative) lecture topics:

WordPress performance under various server configurations
Tools and techniques for building accessible WordPress websites
Increasing traffic to your WordPress site
Political blogging
Don’t just shrink your WordPress site for mobile, adapt it
WordPress 3.0 And You

And many more!

Find out more on the site, or reserve your space on the WordCamp Jerusalem Meetup site – you must RSVP there to make sure you have a space since space is limited.

Stay updated and spread the word

Put one of our cool WordCamp Jerusalem banners on your site to help spread the word – the one at the top of this post is an example. They come in English and Hebrew.
Follow us on twitter and/or facebook to get updates before, during and after the event.
Use the twitter hashtag #WordCampJeru whenever possible
Help us find more sponsors – entrance to the event is free, but we still need to cover costs!

Looking forward to seeing you there!

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Sizzling August events from our Israel hi-tech and business events calendar

Illuminea Team — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:08:54 +0000

We know it’s hot outside but these events are too good to miss. So detach yourself from the the couch and check out our August events that are so hot you will need a large icebox to cool down, and no I am not using an old-timer word for a refrigerator, you will need a large box made of ice!

To get caught up on all the latest event check out the illuminea events calendar!

August 1, 2010. Herziliya Pituach, Israel. Workshop: How to avoid strategic mistakes at the early startup phase. Join Yazamiyot for a Business Strategy Workshop where you will learn about the Business Strategy Principals and how they were demonstrated by some of the most renown companies in the world.

August 3, 2010. Tel Aviv, Israel. Tel Aviv Beer Tweetup – August 2010. After a month’s break and half way through the summer, they are back with our regular Tweetup (including A/C). Nothing like a cold beer (or Cava) after a long hot summer day.

August 6, 2010. Rehovot, Israel. August Penguin 2010 Every year in August, there is a meeting for all the penguins (or Linux lovers, if you will) in one place. They hear lectures related topics: Linux, free software, open source, especially – meeting with other penguins! Come join and understand what all the hype is about!

To check out what other exciting event are happening this August visit our August calendar page. To look into the future, view illuminea’s calendar page.

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@OldSpice transforms social media and makes me LMAO

Miriam Schwab — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:12:03 +0000

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 for the manly-manliness of Old Spice Man, and then a series of real-time videos made in response to people’s tweets on twitter and comments on facebook and YouTube. Here’s the original video launched in February which attracted 19 million viewers (this video was actually shot in one shot with minimal computer graphics):

A few weeks ago Old Spice Man returned with this commercial:

What’s so great about Old Spice Man?

Old Spice Man – actor Isaiah Mustafa is just amazing. He gets the message across perfectly.
The writing – the lines Isaiah says are brilliant. I mean, how great is a campaign that ends with the line “silver fish hand catch”?

I have to applaud the @oldspice writers for “Silver Fish Hand Catch” a catchphrase that will last forever.Thu Jul 15 07:48:04 via TweetDeckIain Tait
iaintait
Multiple channels – the campaign is coordinated across multiple social media channels, utilizing each channel’s advantages and cross posting as required. Twitter is used for direct conversation, facebook for posting videos and status updates with longer text and accompanying responses by fans; and YouTube for centralizing the video content.
Appeals to men and women – For example, I can’t stand beer commercials which are obviously targeting men, but this campaign appealed to both sexes which is good for a product like Old Spice body wash, which men use but women often probably buy.
Combines traditional and new media – these videos are commercials, a type of advertising that has been around for decades. But the commercials have evolved to take advantage of social media by using the medium’s potential. Creating new videos in real time is not something you can do with TV; also, the very personal style, and personalized videos (he spoke to his daughter, and helped a guy propose marriage, and even answered his own question), are very social media. But commercials are old media and we’re seeing the two come together here.
Personalization – how fun is it to get a personal video message from Old Spice Man? Thousands sent tweets and comments his way in the hope that he would respond to them, and getting a response was like winning the lottery. In order to create these videos, marketing agency Wieder + Kennedy’s team worked at a furious pace, creating over 180 videos in 24 hours!!
Old Spice Man is a nice guy – many attempts at creating viral media involved tricking people into believing what they were seeing is real, or being mean to others in some way. Old Spice Man is just nice, and cool. He makes us laugh. It’s a refreshing.

This campaign was a hit, with over 180 videos created, over 5.9 million views and 22,500 comments, as reported by Visible Measures. Visible Measures also reports that it is one of the fastest growing online video campaigns ever. Even once the videos have ended, people continued the trend. Reddit users created Old Spice Voicemail (with female and male versions), and some students at Bingham Young University created the a knockoff video encouraging people to study in the library.

Is this the future of social media marketing?

This is not the future of social media marketing. These guys created a groundbreaking campaign, but if companies copy this model, it will get stale. No one will enjoy this level of success because no one else can be first. Because when it comes down to it, success in social media is about creativity and originality, breaking out of the box and grabbing our attention. The next roaring success will have to be something else that’s never been done before.

@OldSpice thanks for making me laugh! You’re amazing.Thu Jul 15 10:15:43 via webMiriam Schwab
miriamschwab

References:

Old Spice Mixes Social Media And Web Ads, Forbes.com
Old Spice: The Archetype of a Successful Social Media Campaign, Mashable
The making of Old Spice’s commercial: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, Twit video with Leo Laporte
How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made, ReadWriteWeb
New Spice | Study like a scholar, scholar, Harold B. Lee Library

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How to create an image map for a static FBML tab on a facebook page

Miriam Schwab — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 22:17:51 +0000

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 acts like a landing page.

I’m not going to get into how to create a custom tab on a facebook page here since there are tons of tutorials around the web on how to do so. What we are going to discuss here is how to put an image map in your custom fbml page.

Step 1: Get your image

First, find the image that you want to make linkable. Maybe edit it in Photoshop or some other editing program and add text. It’s recommended to underline text you plan to make linkable to make them look like links. Let’s use the following image as an example:

If you mouse over the image, you’ll see that nothing happens, and there are no links. I’m going to make the words Social Icons a link to an icon search engine, and each image will link to a similar icon online that you can download.

Step 2: Upload your image to a server somewhere

In order for your image to appear in your facebook tab, it must be hosted somewhere online. That’s the only way facebook can “call” it in to the tab – it can’t call it from your hard drive on your desktop (unless your hard-drive is a publically accessible server, which is usually not the case). Here are two great places for uploading images for free: Photobucket and Image Shack. I like Image Shack for quick and dirty image uploads since you don’t have to create an account there – it’s optional, which is helpful if you later want to remove an image or have control over your images, but not required.

So let’s use Image Shack as our example. Follow the directions to upload your image, and you will get to a page that looks like this:

We care about the field above called Direct Link (I put a green box around it). Select and copy the whole URL in that field.

Step 3: Create an image map

The image map must be created with CSS. If you use HTML it won’t work in facebook. Lucky for us, there’s a great free tool online for creating CSS image maps: Image Map Tool.

Go to http://image-maps.com.
Once you’re in the Image Map Tool, enter the image URL you copied from the Image Shack page into the field that says “From a URL”:
Click on Start Mapping Your Image. You’ll come to a page that says that your image was uploaded successfully:
Click on the link “continue to next step.” That’s where the fun begins.
You need to select the parts of your image that you want to make into links. Most parts of the image can be selected with the Rectangle tool, but unusual shapes can be selected with the Custom Shape tool. In our case I’m going to use the Rectangle Tool.
When you click on the Rectangle tool, you get this floating thing that you can move around and resize, and enter the link and link title/alt text:

As you can see above, I moved the floating box thing over the words Social Icons and resized it so it covers both words. I entered a link to an icon search engine Iconfinder, and entered the alt text for the link. Next, click Save.
Click on the Rectangle button again and repeat this process as many times as you need until all hotspots are created. Since I want four links in this image, I repeated this process another three times.
Now, choose the options that you want from the sidebar under Advanced Tool Box. There are some useful and advanced options there, and I recommend you check them out, but take note of the options to Show Text Links and Allow Backlink. If you choose to show text links, text links will appear under your image with links to the places you’ve linked your image to. This could be good for usability since you’ll offer a text version of the links in addition to the image links.
The Allow Backlink option will put a text link under your image map to the Image Map site. If you can, it’s nice to give credit to this site for creating such an awesome free tool. But if you can’t, make sure to deselect that option.
Now click Get Your Code. This takes you to a very confusing page with lots of text and tabs at the top. Click on the CSS Code tab at the top of the page:

You will see a bunch of code. It’s basically ready to copy and paste into your FBML tab, but you need to make one change to it first. Image Map Tool adds a dotted black line that appears when you mouse over any of the links on the image, which is pretty annoying so you probably want to get rid of it. So you need to get rid of lines of code that look like this:
```
a.LINKx:hover {background:transparent; border:1px dashed black; color:black;}
```
The x above represents a number. The above line of code will appear as many times as links that you created in the image, and the x will be a number. So if there are three links, the above line will appear three times, and the x will be the numbers 1, 2, and 3 in each line.
Once that’s done, paste the code into your FBML tab and you’ve got yourself a working image map in an FBML tab!

Sources:

Design Your Facebook Page Like a Pro – Image Maps Tutorial
“Image Map” on the Facebook Static FBML forum

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Hot July events from our Israel hi-tech and business events calendar

Illuminea Team — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:09:06 +0000

Ya feel the weather getting hotter outside? WRONG! You are feeling the hot July events sizzling off the illuminea calendar that you DO NOT WANT TO MISS!

Here is just a glimpse of what is going on. To get caught up on all the latest event check out the illuminea events calendar!

July 6, 2010. Tel Aviv, Israel.The #140conf. The #140conf Tel Aviv conference will be a place for people to share their passion about the real-time web and it’s ongoing effects on both business and on people.

July 14-16, 2010. Tel Aviv, Israel. Start-up Weekend 2010. Startup Weekend has been introduced to over 15,000 entrepreneurs in more than 100 cities around the world. Founded in June 2007, Startup Weekend provides a platform to pitch an idea, build the concept and present it to the audience in around 50 hours. At least 500 companies have been created over the lifetime of the worldwide event raising more than $2M in financing. This Startup Weekend will be held in The Peres Center for Peace’s facility. The event is planned to be significantly larger with 160 attendees and will offer more services than before. The Center will work with the management team in bringing Israeli & Arab entrepreneurs and “startupists” from the ICT community in Israel as well as the Palestinian Authority.

July 21, 2010. Tel Aviv, Israel. Hottest Trends and Innovations in the Digital Signage Market!. Aran Electronics will uphold a special seminar for marketing people to reveal the hottest trends and innovations in the Digital Signage market. The seminar will take place on July 21st at “Yafe Lee”-Park Hayarkon, Tel Aviv- between 09:30 – 12:30. Admission is free but subjected to early registration [limited seats). Come and learn how you can recruit the most powerful marketing tool to the advantage of your organization!

To check out what other exciting event are happening this July visit our July calendar page. To plan ahead, view illuminea’s calendar page.

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PayPal Israel now has a customer support number!

Miriam Schwab — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:42:20 +0000

We at illuminea get quite a lot of PayPal support requests due to the fact that if you search for PayPal Israel on Google we appear high on the first page of results.

Well, we just found that PayPal Israel has established a local support number!

The number is 073-713-7777 and is open 9am to 6pm Sunday through Thursday.

I had a PayPal question so I decided to call and see how the support was. The rep was very friendly and helpful, and it turns out he’s located in Dublin. He told me that since this support service is new, the Dublin office is taking Israeli support questions until about the end of July, when the Israel office will have finished setting up Israeli support agents.

He also told me you can email your questions to israel@paypal.com. This is a temporary address until the Israeli support team is up and running.

Hurray!

Here are some other PayPal posts we’ve written that you may find helpful:

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Facebook Community Pages and Connections: what it means for brands, reputation management, and privacy

Miriam Schwab — Tue, 11 May 2010 14:41:08 +0000

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 Internet marketing. You can identify a Community Page by the lovely (not) logo that facebook plops in there automatically:

I’m guessing that at some point facebook will start to automatically enter images that they have deemed relevant to the content in the logo space, but in the meantime this meaningless DNA symbol is what we’ve got.

The pages automatically aggregate content related to the topic and displays it on the page. It places an emphasis on content from Wikipedia, Google Maps, posts from facebook, and content posted off of facebook. It seems to have the potential to become a pretty rich page, if we can judge from the Community Page for Jerusalem, Israel.

From what Facebook wrote in their introductory post on the subject, it seems that the goal is to help us have the things we “Like” appear in our facebook profile. They say that:

Some of you added information about yourself, such as your likes and interests, favorite books, music and movies, when you first joined Facebook. But we’ve noticed that more than three times as many of you have connected to Facebook Pages, such as those for bands, non-profits, universities or anything else you care about, as a way to express yourself. So to make it even easier to display your affiliations, we’ve improved the profile.

So Facebook is saying we’ve been more active Liking pages, than adding our likes to our profile info. So if we “Like” the page of a certain brand or entity, why wouldn’t we want that affinity to appear in our profile information, right? Well, kind of right, but here’s why their implementation of this idea doesn’t make sense:

Pages should be enough

People used to be able to easily see the Pages that we like on our Info tab on our profile. Why wasn’t that good enough? Now the Pages we like appear under Likes and Interests in an obscure link called Show other Pages:

You have to click on that to see all the Pages that person (me) has Liked, as follows:

If facebook really wanted to help us share our interests, why not prominently present the Pages we’ve liked in our Likes and Interests section? If they would do that, there’s no need for Community Pages.

Big brand discrimination

If facebook is trying to make a stronger connection between our profiles and the things we have actively Liked, why not help us link our Interests to existing Pages, rather than force us to link to their Community Pages? For example, I’d much rather have the link in the Employment section of my profile info for illuminea go to our illuminea page, rather than the useless illuminea Community Page that facebook created (see below).

And here’s what makes this even worse: if you want to enter a well-known brand or entity as part of your profile information – like Coca Cola, or 30 Rock – Facebook is helpful enough to offer up a link to those brands’ Pages! But if you’re (hypothetically) a tiny little company in Israel, fugetaboutit. Facebook helpfully creates a Community Page for your brand and ignores your existing Page cuz you’s too tiny to really know what’s good for yous.

Reputation management nightmare

In continuation of the above, if your brand is too tiny to matter, your brand now has two homes on facebook: your Page and your Community Page. Check out this example for illuminea. Here’s a screenshot of our Page that we created:

And here’s how the Community Page looks:

You have no control over the Community Page and what shows up there. I’m not just talking about avoiding negative feedback about a brand – at least complaints would be related to the brand. I’m talking about garbage showing up there.

Orli Yakuel from GO2WEB20 posted the following on facebook:

The link in that update takes you to the Orli Community Page:

What the heck is that? But it might not seem so bad. I mean, the posts are all from Orli. It’s kind of like a duplication of her facebook profile, another home for her on the web. But if you scroll down on the page you see this beauty:

And that’s not all that Orli has to face. If you do a search for her on facebook, you get this:

You’d think with a unique name like Orli Yakuel she wouldn’t have to compete for her name online. At least she appears first.

But we can’t expect to always be first: Rena Reich recently posted on the Digital Eve Israel mailing list that she knows someone whose facebook Community Page for their brand is appearing higher in search results than their own Page. Yikes.

You want privacy? On our web? Hahaha

People might have interests that they only want to share with selected people. But if your info is linked to Pages, that means you appear in the list of people who like that page:

Keep in mind that Facebook Pages you connect to are public. You can control which friends are able to see connections listed on your profile, but you may still show up on Pages you’re connected to. (Connecting to Everything You Care About, The Facebook Blog)

And you can’t not link, because if you choose not to, the interest or info won’t appear in your profile any longer:

Connecting to Pages is now the main [I think they mean “only” – MS] way to express yourself on your profile. If you didn’t connect to any of the suggestions, the sections of your profile to which those suggestions corresponded will now be empty. If you chose to not connect to Pages during the transition process, there will be the opportunity to connect to the suggested Pages later at the top of the “Info” tab on your profile, and of course, going forward, you will always be able to add new connections by Liking Pages and/or editing your profile. (Facebook Help Center)

People really seem to hate this. Here’s what one guy commented on the facebook blog:

Orwell’s 1984 is happening now!! one of the reasons i joined facebook was to connect with people I KNOW!!!! not to share private information about me to people i do not know or for facebook to remember my deleted information and make public sensitive information about me!

Let’s say that the reason facebook is doing this is that also want us to be able to network around general themes, like Internet marketing, and to do that they have offered to create Community Pages for these topics that we can all gather round. That’s a nice idea, but they shouldn’t be forcing us to link to these pages; it should be optional.

Don’t post it if you don’t want Mom to see it

Facebook has been chipping away at our privacy bit by bit over the past few years. Check out this snazzy infographic for a visualization of what information used to be private on facebook, and what is private now (almost nothing). Why is facebook doing this? Pete Cashmore from Mashable sums it up nicely in the title of a recent post:

Facebook “Likes” World Domination

Basically, Facebook is working hard to avoid the fate of other dead or dying social networks like Friendster and MySpace. They hope to do so by not only interacting with you on facebook.com, but all over the web. That’s why you can now Like pages that are off of facebook.com, for example. I think Pete sums it up well:

It’s in Facebook’s interests to lock up your social graph, and it’s in your best interests that it doesn’t [my bold]. If Twitter, Google or another player were to make your social graph portable, you wouldn’t need to store all of your information on Facebook — you could do whatever you please with it.

I’m not advocating that we all stop using facebook. But like anything in life, consumer responsibility is important here: know where you stand with facebook, and what it can and can’t do for you, and hopefully you can put good use to it. In short, use the Mom Visibility Quotient: don’t post anything on facebook (or anywhere on the web) that you wouldn’t want your mother to see, and you should be ok.

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Fresh May events from our Israel hi-tech and business events calendar

Illuminea Team — Mon, 03 May 2010 14:19:45 +0000

You might have sunshine on a cloudy day, but you definitely don’t have the month of May unless you know what’s going on this month!

Here are some of the hottest business events going on in Israel this spring-time:

May 4, 2010. Ramat Gan, Israel. Techonomy 2010! 6 new companies will present their new products for the first time on stage in front of the Techonomy crowd and an expert panel of judges. Live updates will be taken by twitter from the audience and those watching on-line.

May 6, 2010. Jerusalem, Israel. Next Jerusalem Tweet-up HaGov / The Lion’s Den is a great new kosher bar and the perfect location for this event. Happy Hour specials last until 9:30. (That’s why the little Twitter Bird up there has passed out — no, he is not dead.)

May 17, 2010. Haifa, Israel. Web Personalization: From ICQ to Facebook. Personalization involves the use of technology to accommodate the differences between individuals. Personalization is increasingly becoming a factor in Web applications in education, healthcare, and business settings. This lecture will focus on current Web personalization trends in the hi-tech industry.

To check out what other exciting event are happening this may visit our May calendar page. To plan ahead, view illuminea’s calendar page.

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Featured April events from our hi-tech and business events calendar

Illuminea Team — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 10:17:36 +0000

We know how tough it can be to keep track of all the exciting events going on in your local, networking and business communities. So, because we care sooooooo much, we have decided to do it all the work for you! We put the AWESOME events in one easy-to-find place on our website at http://illuminea.com/events/.

In addition, because its fun, we will highlight the top events at the beginning of each month on our blog.

Check out some of the most popular and exciting April 2010 events below:

April 15, 2010. Ramat Gan, Israel. Meet the WordPress Developers. Come meet the Israeli WordPress developers and learn about the upcoming 3.0 edition. Sign up now, space is limited.

April 12, 2010. Tel Aviv, Israel. Innovate!2010 Pitch Slam. Guidewire Group, a global market intelligence and advisory firm passionate about technology entrepreneurship, is teaming up with leading partners and sponsors to host a global competition to identify and accelerate the world’s 100 top technology, media and telecommunications startups.

We are sorry to inform but the innovate2010 event actually took place on April 12, 2010. Sorry for the mix-up.

April 26, 2010. Tel Aviv, Israel. IMA Mobile Hybrid Challenge. This full day workshop for developers will cover the challenges of developing a mobile application in the 3 different architectures – Native, Web, Hybrid. Get the discounted price of 320+VAT (only offered to MobileMonday Tel-Aviv members) when you register.

To view the rest of the events for April 2010 click here.

To view the whole calendar click here.

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10 Tips for Writing a Great CV

Illuminea Team — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:50:22 +0000

10 Tips for Writing a Great CV Guest post by Elinor Bat-Genstein, Founder & Managing Partner of CommuniTech. Elinor has worked as Marketing Director, Product Marketing Manager, and Sales Operation Manager in the Israel high-tech industry since 1996. Elinor established CommuniTech in order to develop best practices and domain expertise, with a special emphasis on Product Marketing for global companies, so as to utilize her personal strength in this domain.

Today CommuniTech is concentrating on placement of, and training for, Marketing and Sales position worldwide. Growing up in Paris gives Elinor a clear advantage while helping Israeli organizations in placement projects for their European subsidiaries. Before founding CommuniTech, Elinor was the marketing director at the Israeli Mobile Association (IMA), Global Director of Marketing at Personeta, and Product Marketing Manager at Amdocs, from where she has a vast and global network of candidates. Learn more about Communitech here: www.communitech.co.il.

Today when the market is full of excellent candidates – the first buffer for you to get an interview is your CV. Your CV is your most important marketing tool – worth investing.

1. Personal Details – Must: Name/ Phone number and email

Do not forget email; companies use it for communication!

You can add other parameters like if you are born elsewhere – but marital status, children and your age are not relevant for getting a job and should not be listed

and no picture on the CV

2. Try not to exceed 2 pages (and yes – we know you have a lot to write about yourself)

Do not have more than 5 bullets on each position

3. Font: people are reading your CV.

If you want recruiters to like you use: Ariel font – size 11

4. Colors: I personally adore it; if someone is writing the company names in another color, it makes it easy to follow

5. Companies’ logo – if you worked for well known companies – add the logo to the CV – this always makes an impression

6. Executive summary – personally I am not a fan, but in some cases when it is hard to categorize the person, try to have a short one : write 4 bullets about

a. The role you can perform

b. Your market experience – Telco/ Web / Security/ Clean-Tech

c. Geographic expertise (Europe / APAC / Africa etc.)

d. Your strengths

7. Always write a short sentence about the companies you worked for – do not assume all recruiters know all the market (i.e. ” leading provider billing-ordering and CRM for telecom and IPTV”)

8. Education vs. Work Experience – what comes first? The order should be as follows: if you went to a well known university: put in on the top page (you worked hard to get in and it worth credibility). However, if you chose an unknown university but your career path is impressive: put the education on the bottom (and spare us your high-school name…and “megama”)

9. Prizes and awards: write about every single prize you ever got and if your company gave you a bonus awards / top grades – mention that as well.

10. Tips per roles:

a. Sales: write your customers’ names and size of deals

b. Marketing: write which PR agency / firm you used and which conventions you promoted

c. Engineer: write about all the technologies you are familiar with

A good CV is all about MARKETING!

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Sphinncon Israel: overview and my presentation on WordPress as social media and SEO hub

Miriam Schwab — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:36:24 +0000

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 panelists: I may not have had to schlep, but some pretty amazing speakers did schlep from around the world to come to this event, like Vanessa Fox, Dixon Jones from Majestic SEO, and Tomer Honen from Google’s Ireland office.
Good food: Especially the caesar salad and the hot chocolate cake thingy. Yes, I’m shallow. And the fact that I got a free pen really made this event aces in my book.
Funny people: Sam Michelson from Five Blocks did not disappoint. His title slide said he was going to talk about “Reputation Management for the Mossad.” Turns out he was kidding (though right now they probably could use some rep management). Loved that. Gil Reich from Answers.com was pretty entertaining too (check out his post about the best everything at Sphinncon).

Here’s what I think could be better:

More useful content from the speakers. I did learn a few new things, but the presentations I heard were nice but kind of fluffy. I got the feeling that the speakers didn’t want to share any really valuable information with the audience.

Check out Barry’s run-down of the event for more details, speaker information, and photos.

Update: I forgot to mention something very important. The last Sphinncon didn’t have any women panelists or speakers, and although I thought the event was great, that bugged me and I wrote about it. For some magical Google reason, if you search for the term Sphinncon Israel, that post is always in the top 10 results. Anyways, this Sphinncon really made up for that with a good number of women panelists. I wouldn’t say it was 50-50, but I think this industry is not 50-50. A quick glance at the crowd certainly seemed to indicate that this is a guy-dominated industry, which is fine, but it was nice to see women represented too. So thanks Barry!

WordPress for social media and SEO

I was on a panel about social media with Vanessa Fox, Debra Askanase and Roi Carthy. I spoke about how to set up WordPress to be the hub of your social media and SEO activity. Here are the main points. The presentation is embedded further on:

Your internet presence must be based on a hub which is your blog, or website combined with a blog. WordPress is a great platform for creating that blog or website/blog.
WordPress is great for SEO. Yes, there was recently a kind of “WordPress SEO showdown” between Michael Gray and Robert Rolfe about whether WordPress really is good for SEO. Rolfe says it’s not because the permalinks (URLs) that you can set up are limited and not perfect from an SEO point of view. Gray says that WP is not perfect, but its benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
Sidenote: before I got up to speak Barry told the audience he wanted them to see something. Then he searched for the term Sphinncon Israel in Google and our blog post about Sphinncon Israel two years ago appears on the first page.
Social media should be used in conjunction with SEO, and vice versa. If you use the tactics of one without the other, you are missing out on a lot of untapped internet goodness like more keyword opportunities, diverse traffic streams, link building, long tail keywords, etc.
Some good tools for integrating social media are Chat Catcher that aggregates all the conversation taking place about a post and publishing that conversation as comments on your blog; facebook fan box and facebook connect; flickr galleries, YouTube galleries; LinkedIn TypePad application called BlogLink for displaying an RSS feed on your LinkedIn profile – this app is better than the WordPress one because the WP one is limited to one WP rss feed while the TypePad app allows you to pull in any RSS feed.
Track your feed subscriber stats with Feedburner. Make sure that auto-detect for feeds will find your feedburner feed URL, not the built-in WordPress feed URL. Can use a plugin, htaccess, or hard-code the header.php file.
Don’t forget about email. Use RSS-to-email service to make your life easier. Feedburner is free but you can’t brand your mailings or add people to the list; MailChimp allows you to brand your mailings and add people to your mailing list, gives you more control.
Track how you’re doing socially with the following tools: bit.ly for tracking how many people clicked on tiny URLs you posted on twitter etc.; tweetmeme; Topsy (check out the Topsy page for Sphinncon); PostRank
Hootsuite allows you to fire and forget the sharing of your blog RSS feed with your various twitter profiles, facebook profile, facebook fan page, and LinkedIn.
Don’t leave the growing mobile user demographic out in the cold: easily make a mobile version of your WordPress site with the WPtouch plugin.
WordPress is itself a social network thanks to BuddyPress which allows you to create a social network on the WP platform. The most recent version of BuddyPress can be used on a single installation of WordPress, as opposed to only being compatible with WPMU (multi-user WordPress).
WordPress and SEO – WordPress makes it easy to implement a lot of the SEO basics, like rel=canonical meta tags, redirect all pages to with or without www, add an XML sitemap. The All in One SEO Pack plugin helps you manage page and post title structure site-wide, control meta-descriptions, no-follow areas of the site like categories, and more. Yoast’s Meta Robots Tag overlaps a bit with All in One SEO, but it offers additional features too.
Google recently started to display breadcrumbs in search results. Add breadcrumbs to your site with a plugin or by modifing your functions.php file.
Check for broken links in your site, and correct them on the spot, with the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin.
Easily add internal links with SEO Smart Links plugin that allows you to enter a word, and then tell the system that whenever that word appears on the site, it should link to a specific page. There are quite a lot more plugins that I mention, but why not view them yourself in the presentation embedded below.
Optimize your site for speed – the speed with which a page loads is apparently considered for its ranking. Therefore, you need to speed up your pages. Check out the presentation for some ways how.
You also need to secure your WordPress site against hackers. Some ideas for that are in the presentation too.

Ironically, even though I mention all the plugins above, if you really want to promote your site online, it shouldn’t be running too many plugins since that can seriously slow the site down. Many of the plugins I mentioned can be run briefly to accomplish something, and then deactivated once you don’t need them to do their deed anymore.

Here’s the presentation:

Sphinncon 2010: Using WordPress As Social Media & Seo Hub

View more presentations from illuminea marketing & media.

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Startup contest Innovate!2010 coming back to Tel Aviv

Miriam Schwab — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:04:42 +0000

About a year ago we reported that Innovate!Europe was holding a workshop and networking event in Israel, through which one startup would be selected to participate in Guidewire STUDIO, an in-residence business accelerator in Silicon Valley.

Well, Innovate!Europe is coming back to Israel, but this time as the Innovate!2010 global competition. The goal of the competition is to identify and promote up-and-coming technology and media startups. They’re looking for early-stage companies that “have what it takes to be named one of the world’s most promising startups.”

Here’s more info from an email they sent around:

The top 100 companies will be featured in a prestigious list known as the Innovate!100 – and the best of the best will receive a share of prizes valued at nearly $250,000. In addition, every startup that applies will receive promotional exposure and free training designed to improve their chances of success.

Participating startups will be evaluated using Guidewire Group’s proprietary G/Score assessment methodology, which is based on our team’s experience vetting more than 20,000 startups for DEMO and Guidewire Group. Finalists will then be invited to deliver rapid-fire pitches in front of a panel of expert judges and audience members at one of our Innovate!2010 Pitch Slams.

We have scheduled Innovate!2010 Pitch Slams in over a dozen European cities between March 1 and March 29, and additional events will be held in the United States in the coming months. There will also be an online evaluation process for finalists that are not able to attend in person.

The Innovate!2010 Pitch Slams will be held in a bunch of cities, including Tel Aviv on March 15. To apply go to the Innovate!2010 application page. Here are some bits about the application stages according to that page:

Step 1: Startups apply online to receive:

2 tickets to an Innovate!2010 Pitch Slams (worth over $100 USD)
Access to online pitch training
Promotion to local journalists and through a network of over 5,000 news sites
The chance to be chosen to pitch at a local Pitch Slam to win a place on the Innovate!100, cash and other prizes.

There is a $75 application fee – approximately €54 – which will not be charged until you complete the form.

Guidewire Group’s analysts will evaluate all applications and invite 10-15 Finalists to pitch at a local Pitch Slam.

Step 2: Local Pitch Slams take place

Startups invited to pitch at the Innovate! Pitch Slams will be notified by email 7-10 days before the event where:

Each finalist pitches for 5 minutes
Each company is evaluated by our team of expert judges and provided with a G-Score.
The Most Promising Startup of the night is chosen.

Finalists who are not able to attend their Pitch Slam will be invited to participate in a web-based pitch session.

Step 3: Promotion of the Innovate!100

Pitch videos for all of the Innovate!100 Finalists will be used to promote pitching companies to local journalists and a network of over 5,000 news sites and via the Innovate! Connections Program. Startups with the top G/Scores will be named to the Innovate!100 list for 2010 and the Innovate! Challenges prizes will be awarded.

I think this is a great opportunity for some early-stage startups to get the resources and support they may need to take their company to the next level.

Good luck to all the applicants!

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Round-up non-profit expands micro-donation options to salaries

Miriam Schwab — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 09:23:35 +0000

Ever since Barak Obama managed to raise $6.9 million out of $25 million through small donations on the web, 92% of which were $100 or less, many involved in the non-profit world started to understand the potential of crowd sourcing small “micro-donations” instead of, or in addition to, the traditional approach of getting small numbers of large donations. Micro-donations are generally under $10 per person, with the idea being to crowdsource very large numbers of donors. A good example of an organization that maximizes the potential of micro-donations is Kiva. Kiva’s fund-raising activity takes place almost exclusively on the web, where it allows donors to make small donations to finance small businesses in developing countries. Kiva uses the web and social media brilliantly (their email newsletter is one of the best I’ve seen), and their emphasis on the fact that donations are “person-to-person,” and the transparent nature of their enterprise succinctly represents the personal culture that users of social media expect and appreciate.

round-up simplifies micro-donations

A new initiative in micro-donations came to Israel in 2008 in the form of round-up, or “Igul Letova” in Hebrew. round-up is a non-profit that enables people to give micro-donations to non-profits of their choice by rounding up purchases on credit cards or by rounding down salaries. The option to give automatically every month by rounding down one’s salary was recently added by the organization.

I interviewed Vered Shavit Mazor, Manager at round-up, to learn more about their initiative.

Me: How can people join the new employee salary round-up option?

Vered: This is being implemented in companies that are characterized by an ongoing connection (like computerized payment or collection) with a large user base. Until September of this year, the only option for rounding up was available credit card companies. In September, we introduced the option for companies that use Hilan Tech to manage their salaries to offer round-up to their employees. Hilan Tech developed a unique module for their system which enables direct donation from an employee’s salary slip. Amdocs and Matrix are already offering their employees to round-up.

The way the rounding up works is as follows: an employee chooses to donate a small amount on a monthly basis by rounding down their salary to the nearest 5 NIS, 10 NIS or 20 NIS, which would yield an average monthly donation of NIS 2.5, NIS 5 or NIS 10 accordingly. The employee chooses which cause or category of causes will receive their donation. In the event that the company is interested in doing so, the module can also enable the employer to match the employee’s donation, for the same cause.

Me: How does the employee choose the cause they are donating to?

Vered: Employees can choose to donate to a minimum of one or a maximum of three causes from the list of eligible causes compiled by round-up. The donations can be made to general categories of non-profits, like health or education, and/or to specific designated NPOs. The employee’s donation will be divided equally between the selected causes. In the event that a general category is chosen, the donation will be divided equally between all the NPOs in that category.

The amount of the donation will appear on the salary slip as a debit line and the cause/s for the donation and the amounts transferred that month shall also be presented. If the employer matched the donation, an additional line item will appear on the salary slip noting the employer’s donation. round-up transfers the monies in full according to the specifications of the donors, based on a report received from the employer via Hilan Tech.

Me: What does a company need to do to join?

Vered: The implementation of round-up is via the salary accountant and/or the human resources department, and based on the Hilan Tech salary system which has been configured to handle the matter in a simple and effective way.

Me: How did round-up select the organizations that receive the donations?

Vered: A public committee founded by round-up and headed by President of the Supreme Court (ret.) Judge Meir Shamgar prepared a list of categories and foundations that can be selected by donors. All the causes in the list successfully passed the “Seal of Transparency” test of Midot, an organization that rates and screens non-profit organizations.

The list of eligible causes currently includes over 40 foundations in the following categories: health, education, children and youth at risk, welfare and employment, women in distress, culture and recreation, communities in need and new immigrants, quality of the environment, tolerance and human rights, and people with disabilities.

Me: What’s the big vision behind round-up?

Vered: Several shekels from many employees can total tens of hundreds of millions of shekels per year for advancing social causes.

Me: Thanks Vered!

—————————————-

While round-up doesn’t specifically use the web or social media to crowdsource their donations, the approach to micro-donations via credit cards or salary slips is simple and therefore effective. Additional details about round-up can be found on the website: www.round-up.org.il.

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Review of PayPal Israel Q&A Event with Nissim Ohayon

Rebecca Markowitz — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:17:40 +0000

Still confused by how to use PayPal in Israel? You’re not alone. No matter how many times we write it up and try to understand all the ins and outs, and jump for joy over new developments, we still have more questions. Ever since PayPal started paying attention to Israeli online payments, we’ve eagerly been following the developments along the way, and have even become so PayPal obsessed that we’re now considered PayPal experts.

But of course we’re obsessed since being able to easily accept and send online payments is crucial to any kind of online commercial activity. If you’re driving traffic to your ecommerce site with SEO (search engine optimization) and/or social media marketing, you need to see measurable results and often that includes making sales. The ability to use PayPal or other online gateways without having to sell our unborn children (someone on twitter actually made that comparison) can make all of that possible.

Luckily, Nissim Ohayon, Sr. Business Development Manager at PayPal Israel came to Jerusalem Web Professionals last night to try to calm our anxiety.

Here were the major questions and answers from the evening

Can you withdraw US dollars in Israel?
No, you can only withdraw money in the currency of the country you’re in. In Israel, you can withdraw shekels. In the US, you can withdraw dollars.
Can I use a local Israeli credit card like Visa Cal or Isracard to RECEIVE money?
No, but now it’s not really an issue since you can withdraw funds to your Israeli bank account.
Can you use a local Israeli credit card to SEND money?
No, only PayPal or international credit cards at this point. No plans yet to make this available.
How can I fill up my PayPal account with money?
Right now, the only way to fill up your account is through getting paid by someone else. No plans announced yet for when you can transfer funds from your bank account to your paypal account.
There are 3 types of PayPal accounts – Personal, Premier, and Business. What’s the difference?
Personal: You can receive payments via PayPal only.
Premier: You can accept credit cards. For individuals who buy and sell online.
Business: You can accept credit cards. For merchants who buy and sell online.
What are the fees associated with the Merchant (Business or Premier) accounts?
You can look at the PayPal Israel site to see a list of transaction fees.
Are there any fees associated with the Personal account?
PayPal to PayPal payments are free. However, let’s look at the following example. Let’s say you have a personal account and someone is supposed to pay you $10. If their account has $0, the money will come from their bank account or credit card. If it comes from their credit card, you pay 5.4% fee to PayPal.
Can you set up a PayPal Debit Card in Israel?
Not at the present time.
Are there any plans for Hebrew integration, Hebrew buttons, etc.?
Not at the present time.

Handy Israel-Specific Send, Receive, Withdraw VISUAL

For Web Developers

Nissim discussed X.com, a developer network community for developers looking to extend PayPal’s usage with new applications.

Alternatives to PayPal in Israel for accepting local credit cards

Since PayPal doesn’t accept local Israeli credit cards, Tranzila came up as the only alternative to PayPal to accept local Israeli credit cards. The problem for small businesses in Israel is that Tranzilla charges a monthly fee which is not cost effective for minimal monthly transactions.

Conclusion

In short, Nissim reminded me what a great option PayPal is for safely accepting international payments. He also emphasized what a huge marketplace PayPal is with over 200 million users and $3Billion in play every 2 weeks.

It was also so nice to see a real person behind the faceless company come to Jerusalem to explain the nitty gritty and answer our zillions of questions.

Unfortunately, PayPal Israel doesn’t look like it will be in Hebrew or accept local Israeli credit cards any time soon.

For more questions, you can follow Nissim on Twitter, or ask questions here in the comments. He’s been very responsive here on our other posts about PayPal.

More on using PayPal in Israel:

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The impact of content farms on social media and SEO

Miriam Schwab — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:12:59 +0000

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 checks that Google can do on pages to determine whether it contains spam or is stuffed with keywords. But a newish phenomenon is rising on the web that has been getting quite a lot of coverage from major blogs like ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch, and that is the “content farm.” Many of you may be familiar with the term “link farms,” which are sites that link out to hundreds or thousands of other sites, giving them the inbound links that many sites desire in order to rank higher in the search engines. This type of strategy worked for a while, but Google altered its algorithm so that not just any inbound link would contribute to a site’s ranking; in order for a link to be worth anything now it has to be from a quality and relevant source, among other factors.

“Content farms” are a new way of gaming Google. These types of sites pump out hundreds or thousands of new pages of content per day. The quality of this content is medium to low since the goal of the content is not to teach or inspire, but to create content for content’s sake, increase traffic and reap the rewards from ad revenues. Some examples of these types of sites are Demand Media and Answers.com. ReadWriteWeb reported that Demand Media produces 4000 pieces of content per day, and Answers.com (which has origins in Israel) has nearly 38 million pieces of web content. Both sites are in the top 20 web properties in the US.

At the moment, Google can generally identify, and penalize, very bad content. However, it cannot tell the difference between ho-hum content and great content. Ho-hum content is content that meets the rules of language syntax, and says something that can be understood by humans, but does not contribute to our store of knowledge. This type of content would be relatively harmless if it wasn’t being created on such massive scales, and if it wasn’t having such success in the search engines. The scale of this content’s production means that we may find a lot of ho-hum content taking over search results, and it will become increasingly difficult to find the really useful and thought-provoking content.

What this means for SEO, social media and the web

SEO professionals will increasingly face competing sites whose only redeeming factor is the number of pages they have published. In order to compete with those sites, they will have to create the same amount of content, or more. This is a matter resources (money), and very few web properties will have the budget to support this type of activity.

Unless Google figures out a way to determine whether content is quality or ho-hum, users will become more and more frustrated by the results and start to depend on their peers and social media to refer them to quality content. Highly retweeted posts on twitter, for example, may start to take on more value than the first result on Google.

And finally, if ranking well on the search engines is about who can produce the most content, which is theoretically infinite and linked to one thing only: money, this means that the winners on the web will not be those with brains, but those with brawn. Demand Media has $355 million in funding to put towards creating tons of mediocre content. If the winners are those with millions, this will destroy the much trumpeted democratic web.

But isn’t this just survival of the fittest?

The traditional news sites have been complaining about the hit they’ve taken by blogs and other forms of new media that, according to them, produce content that is not on the same level as that of news sites. Bloggers were quick to tell the news sites that they must adapt to the new realities or suffer the consequences. Now it seems that the bloggers are getting a taste of their own medicine as they face this new threat from low-level mass-produced content. Shouldn’t they just accept that things evolve, especially on the web, and that this new reality is par for the course?

I don’t think so (obviously I’m a bit biased). In my opinion, blogs add value to the web. High traffic blogs get so much traffic because they are written by authority figures who offer useful insights and breaking news that weren’t previously available on conventional news sites. Also, readers find the personal, casual style of blogs to be refreshing, and appreciate the opportunity to contribute to the conversation in the comments.

Content farms do not add anything refreshing or useful to the world of publication. Writers of content farm content are, on the most part, not writing with the goal of inspiring and educating. Instead, their goal is “produce 10 articles of 350 words by 5 pm.” This content is not ranking thanks to its value, but due to the sheer volume being created. Therefore, unless something changes we may find our web increasingly clogged by useless information.

Let’s just hope that it’s in Google and Co.’s interest to serve us useful content rather than increase their revenues from AdSense ads placed on content farms.

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Faxes are so 1995. Move to email and social networks for communication please.

Miriam Schwab — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 08:12:12 +0000

Why oh why do people still use fax machines?

We don’t have a fax machine in our office. From the beginning I decided that we would withstand the pressure and insist that people email documents to us so that we can be a mostly paperless office. Yes, I know that there are fax services that will deliver faxes to your inbox, but in that case why not just use email? And for those that think that there’s no way to get a piece of paper to someone remotely without a fax machine, I’d like to introduce you to a handy device called the scanner.

We have so many ways to communicate online today: email, facebook, twitter…there are even people talking about how communication via social networks will push out email communication. I think that’s an extreme point of view, and email’s not going anywhere, but the point is: get rid of your fax. It deserves to be in the same place as your record player, dot matrix printer, and fluorescent slouch socks (I shudder when I think of how we wore those).

And since Dilbert agrees with me, we know that what I say is Truth:

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Why Google’s personalized search means social marketing is more important than ever

Miriam Schwab — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:19:49 +0000

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 for anyone else.

What this means is that we may all start seeing completely different search results. Watch the following video from Google for a short overview:

Personalized results are the default setting for all users, but users can choose to disable personalized results. However, considering that most people don’t even know what a browser is, I’m doubtful that people will be aware that their search results are personalized, let alone that they can opt out of these types of results or how to do so.

But why would people opt out of personalized results? They probably won’t want to. We have yet to see the quality of these results, but I’m assuming that results will be based on sites that Google has ranked as having adequate quality, combined with the personal preferences of the user. What this means is that users will still be choosing between sites ranked highly by Google, which isn’t so bad. I think we can assume that most people will continue to like the Google search experience.

What this means for SEO

I’m guessing here, but it is possible that if a user really likes a particular site, it will start to take up more spots in the search results, which means that other results will be pushed down and off the first page. You may have noticed that sometimes when you conduct a search, some sites have expanded results that also display further internal links and navigation to the user, like this:

Or a site gets two spots like this:

Maybe sites preferred by users will start to get expanded results, or multiple results.

But in any case, since most clicks happen on the first page of results anyways, chances are that most users will see some kind of varying order of the global top ten results, i.e. for John Site A is the first result and Site B is in third place, but for Jane it’s the opposite. In both cases, Site A and Site B stay on the first page of results. So in that scenario, site owners will still have to work on the usual things that help their sites rank (on-site factors like Title tags, off-site factors like inbound links, etc.) in order to ensure that their sites are exposed to searchers. As Danny Sullivan says:

SEO remains important to ensure that you’ve got that first shot at being considered.

What this means for social media…and SEO

At the same time, it means that site owners will have to work harder on the user-experience side of things to get people to click on their results in the SERPs. Sexier titles and meta descriptions will be necessary since these help the user decide whether to click through or not. And once a user clicks through, they’d better find themselves somewhere interesting and attractive, because if they click back right away to the search results, that’s a sign that the site was no good, and may affect that site’s ranking in future personalized search results.

It also means that social marketing should be taken more seriously by SEOs. Many site owners and search engine optimization professionals (not the great ones, I admit, but still there are lots of them) see SEO as all about getting their sites to the top positions in the SERPs – and that’s it. But Google’s goal is to provide the best user experience, and therefore is experimenting with, and adding, many social features to their search service, like:

“universal”, or mixed media search results – these results include non-traditional sources like video (most often from YouTube) and blogs
search results based on your social circle (Google doesn’t call it a social graph) – these results identify your social networks through your Google Profile and serve you links that they have shared or created. Learn more about Google’s Social Search.
real time search results – this is a search results page that is constantly updating with results from various social networks including twitter, facebook, FriendFeed and general news sites.

The reason for these new features are assumedly because Google figures that people will be most interested in, and most appreciate, results that are linked to trusted sources and connections. So site owners and SEOs will have to start taking user experience on their sites (content, navigation, and even design) much more seriously. Jill sums up the new SEO reality nicely on the High Rankings forum: “Good news…for moving people further and further away from traditional rank checking as a measure of success”; i.e. SEO can’t just be about ranking in first place anymore, it’s about results, conversions, and maybe even relationships.

It also means that with features like universal and real time search results, site owners should be optimizing social media activity for search engines as well. This means creating useful videos and uploading them to YouTube, creating fresh blog content, and using keywords in your tweets and facebook status updates.

And finally, long tail search rankings will play a more important role. Search engine ranking may become about diversity rather than laser focusing on particular keywords or search engines. The reason for this is that if you can’t know where your site is appearing in people’s search results, better to appear in more places where you have the chance of getting clicked on (pick me! pick me!). Creating new content for your blog on a regular basis that is related to a particular theme will help you rank for terms you would never have thought of.

In addition, social sites are becoming serious addresses for search. A recent Comscore Search Engine Rankings report showed that three of the top search engines in the Expanded Search Rankings category were social media sites: YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. Lee Odden at TopRank sums up what this means as follows:

Companies that focus their optimization efforts solely on Google.com will miss the continued trend towards social search or search within social networks.

So where do we go from here?

SEO professionals have had to evolve to meet new realities since the dawn of the search engine. What worked five years ago to get a site to the top certainly does not work today, and what works today won’t work five years from now. Barry Schwartz says he’s not worried (from Search Engine Roundtable):

Honestly, if this makes Google more relevant for their searchers – all power to them. I am not going to say I know what is better for the average searcher. They can quickly figure this out after days and decide to keep it, turn it down, or off completely. SEOs will adapt, like they always do – we are a strong and smart bunch – I am not worried.

SEO professionals will evolve to meet this new challenge. But it is possible that we are at a turning point regarding what SEO means. The goals will probably stay the same: increasing traffic and conversions. However, the ways that these goals are achieved may change drastically over the coming months to include social activity and improved online relationship building. All in all, I think that we’re talking about a better web experience for the end user.

Some questions

But there are still a lot of unknowns about the new personalized search feature, and here are some questions I have:

Ethics: Google is basically forcing all users to accept a new cookie and allow Google to track their search activity. Opt-out is only for the web savvy since most users won’t even know that Personalized Search exists. Shouldn’t people be given the choice whether they want to participate in personalized search or not by opting-in? Is this a sign that it’s time to move to Bing?
Will my personal preferences affect your personal results? If lots of people click on Site A in results, does that mean that Joe will start to see Site A rank high in his own results?
Are personalized results only affected when someone conducts the same exact search over and over (i.e. “recipes”), or will it affect related searches as well (i.e. “cooking,” “chocolate cake recipe,” even “buying new dishes”)?

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Successful Ikea facebook campaign shows importance of offering deals to consumers on social media

Miriam Schwab — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:29:58 +0000

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 Gustavsson’s profile: http://www.facebook.com/ikeagordon – note that his vanity URL is ikeagordon, and not gordongustavsson. Better hope he works at Ikea forever…

Over a two week period, the agency uploaded pictures from Ikea showrooms to Gustavsson’s facebook photo album, and then made the announcement that changed this from run-of-the-mill social media activity to a raging campaign: they announced that whoever was the first person to tag a product in the pictures with their name would win it. And boy did people rush to tag the photos:

Check out this video overview of the campaign and how it was set up:

Why this campaign worked

The coverage of this campaign focused on the agency’s ingenious use of facebook’s photo tagging feature. It definitely was an original and unique use of this feature of the world’s largest social network. However, in my opinion that usage is just technical, and the reason this campaign was so successful is because it delivered what consumers want when engaging online with brands: exclusive deals or offers.

Digital marketing company Razorfish recently released its third annual FEED study which charts how technology is changing the way consumers engage with brands. Among the other interesting pieces of info gleaned from their study is the reasoning behind people’s choice to follow a brand on twitter and facebook. In the cases of both networks, the majority of people cited that they follow brands in order to get “exclusive deals or offers.”

It makes sense. Unless your brand is Apple or something that makes people feel all warm and fuzzy, consumers don’t want to be your brand’s “friend.” They may like your product and use it on a regular basis, but that doesn’t mean they want to create an ongoing and public relationship with you…unless there’s something really worthwhile that’s in it for them. In the case of this Ikea campaign, people were more than happy to tag and share photos of Ikea showrooms if it meant that they would get to take a couch home for free.

Another example of success through rewarding consumers is br.st. br.st is a new web-based twitter client that became one of the top trending topics on twitter yesterday as well:

While I’m sure this new twitter client is nice, it didn’t get this level of exposure because of their great features. They got it because they are handing out 4 MacBook Pros and 21 Nintendo Wiis to people who tweet about br.st. As br.st CEO Jared Stauffer says on the site’s home page:

Instead of spending money on advertising we decided to give it to you in the form of prizes. So help spread the word by telling your friends and enter to win some cool prizes.

In fact, most of their home page is dedicated to the contest, as opposed to reasons why you should use br.st. Take a look at the following screen shot of their home page – out of all the screen real estate, only the grey box on the right refers to why you should give br.st a try:

While br.st may have gone to the extreme with their prize campaign, it did succeed in getting them a lot of viral exposure for a new product.

Recipe for social media success: viral + free stuff

Many social media evangelists talk about how the social networks can help you and your brand create warm and fuzzy relationships with your consumers. It’s not true. Consumers don’t want a warm and fuzzy relationship with most businesses or products. But they will help you spread the word if you offer them something really worthwhile in return, like a free couch or Ninento Wii. So by combining the features on the social networks that have the potential to make your brand or campaign viral with consumers’ base interest in free stuff, you’ve got a great recipe for social media success.

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Israel PayPal accounts can now withdraw funds to Israeli bank accounts! Amen!

Miriam Schwab — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:20:29 +0000

The day that I thought would never arrive is here: Israeli PayPal account holders can now withdraw their PayPal funds to Israeli bank accounts! Oh happy day.

PayPal says that it will take 3-5 days for your funds to arrive in your Israeli bank account, and there is an 8 NIS fee if you withdraw less than 1000 NIS at a time:

To add a bank account to your PayPal account, you have to fill out the following form:

If you click on “What’s this?” next to where it says “Bank and Branch Code,” the following pop-up window will appear with the exact spelling of each bank in English for entering in the field called “Bank name,” and the exact bank code for entering in the field that says “Bank and Branch Code.”

In the “Bank and branch code” field, you need to enter the two digit code for your bank and then the three digit code for your branch number. So let’s say your bank account is at Bank Leumi in branch 368 – you would enter 10368 in that field.

Note that there is a minimum that you can withdraw, and that is 40 NIS.

I managed to add a bank account, but I haven’t yet tried withdrawing funds. But it seems to be set up to work, so hopefully we Israelis can now use PayPal as a real means for accepting credit card and online payments, without the stress we had to go through until now.

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New! Course on Social Media Marketing for businesses

Miriam Schwab — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:41:10 +0000

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 marketing? (1 hour)

What makes something social? What is Web 2.0? We’ll look at the most important elements of social media today: RSS, Video, Widgets, Tagging, and more to get everyone on the same page.
The importance of social media in your marketing activity
Case studies: companies and organizations that have successfully and unsuccessfully used social media

Part 2: Planning effective strategies for social media activity (3 hours)

Elements of an effective social media strategy
Setting goals
Important considerations before starting
Research your space
Implementation
Monitoring & engaging – how, what
DO NOT neglect the other “boring” stuff: SEO, email, advertising, etc.

Sept. 30: Practical techniques for implementing your social media strategy

Part 1: Overview of important social networks – what they are, how to best use them for marketing (3 hours)

How to use twitter for marketing: setting up profiles that work for business, building up community, promoting your profile, what and how to write, monitoring, measuring, the best tools, etc.
Using facebook for business: profiles, Pages, applications, events, etc.: critical differences between each of them, how to choose the right ones for your purposes, setting up a facebook presence that works for marketing and promotion.
YouTube and other video sites: why video is the next generation of web marketing, what to keep in mind when working with video, ideal length and content, how to promote your video to achieve your marketing goals
Blogs – “old fashioned” but crucial: blogs are the hubs of an effective social media presence. What to keep in mind, how to set it up, how to integrate it with your other social media activity, ideal frequency for updates, what to write, how to write, how to promote.

Part 2: Personal branding (1 hour)

What is personal branding?
Why everyone should work on their online personal brand today
How to create a successful personal brand with social media

Summing up: Where to go from here (0.5 hours)

Key points to keep in mind when branching out into social media
Putting it all together
Working with (skeptical) upper management

About the speaker – me, Miriam Schwab

Miriam is the Friendly CEO of illuminea, and has been speaking and teaching about social media and blogging for business for over two years.

illuminea is a marketing firm dedicated to helping businesses and organizations use the social web effectively as an integrated part of their marketing mix. illuminea has extensive expertise in designing, developing and strategizing business blogs, and using these blogs as the hub for launching successful social media marketing activities. Part of illuminea’s day-to-day activities involve keeping up with the latest developments in the social web so that we are always able to offer our clients the best solutions for their needs.

Among illuminea’s clients are some of Israel’s leading companies and personalities, including Comverse, Commtouch, Natan Sharansky, and more. Click here to view testimonials from illuminea’s clients.

Here is a list of the conferences and events that Miriam has spoken at:

Wordcamp 2007 – moderator http://english.wordcamp-israel.info/ and the schedule

Techshoret 2007

Marchshoret, Nov. 2, 2008. Presentation is here

Partnership 2000, Nov. 12, 2008

Pradler Institute

SSVN, hosted by IBM on July 8, 2009. Read reviews. Presentation.

ISOC Israel:How to create a personal brand by using online tools- MP3 of lecture; presentation; article on The Com (Hebrew).

MEET Alumni Conference, August 4-5, 2009 Istanbul Turkey: “Blogging Secrets: Tips for marketing your business online.”

For more information about costs, venue, topics, etc., please contact us at (02) 5660297 or via email at info@illuminea.com. Hope to see you there!

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