Company launches new services to help enterprises and individuals stake out their names on more than 300 social media sites today — as well as those sites to emerge tomorrow

KnowEm, the company working to help brands manage their identity across the social web, launched a new family of premier services designed to further help Fortune 500 corporations and small businesses alike stake their claim in the ever-changing social media landscape. Additionally, the company announced that it has recently acquired FriendsCall.Me, a service that enables companies to manage their personal brands on the web, for an undisclosed amount.

Both KnowEm and FriendsCall.Me launched in April 2009 and quickly grew their client bases — reflecting a strong growth in social media-conscious companies, along with the need to take charge of identity in the social web. FriendsCall.Me was the brainchild of Darius A Monsef IV, the creator of the popular design community, COLOURlovers.com, and community organizer for Microsoft’s Photosynth.com.

Existing FriendsCall.Me customers will automatically be transferred to KnowEm’s service. By leveraging the synergistic technology and functionality of FriendsCall.Me, KnowEm can enhance their service offerings to create further opportunities in social media identity management.

“Much like with domain names, there’s now a race to create identities in social media,” explained KnowEm co-founder, Barry Wise. “But managing identities in social media is far more complex than securing a domain name. There are hundreds of popular social networks, with new sites popping up each day. It’s a challenge enough for companies to keep track of where they have a presence, not to mention the time-consuming work of creating profiles where they don’t.”

For no charge, KnowEm lets brand owners instantly check the availability of their branded usernames and keywords on more than 330 popular social media networks. Sites range from well-known networks like Twitter and YouTube, to influential niche networks in Blogging, News, Community, Entertainment, Photo, Travel, Health, and other categories. KnowEm returns a list of social networks where the brand is and isn’t registered — and then takes it a step farther by automatically securing names, even creating profiles, on all these sites.

KnowEm has been offering its services in beta since April, and has been working with a wide range of clients — including a major search engine, large pharmaceutical company, restaurant chains, as well as mom-and-pop businesses. Over 200,000 profiles have already been secured and created through KnowEm.

KnowEm’s newly announced services include:

• Business Edition ($249): This premium, time-saving service creates profiles on the top 100 social media websites (150 sites for $349), including a complete signup and posting of basic information — photos, bio, URL, and description. As a result, companies can make sure their brand name is protected and initiate their social media presence without the tedious work of manually signing up for each and every network. Each signup and profile creation receives the personal touch of KnowEm’s staff in New Jersey — there’s no automation or offshore labor involved.
• Individual Edition ($99): KnowEm kick starts the signup process by initiating profile creation on the top 150 social media websites. The business owner will then need to confirm and populate each profile to complete the process.
• Subscription Plan ($49/month):  This monthly service continues to protect a brand or username on up to 30 new and emerging social media networks every month. As a result, companies can stay in front of the social media landscape and make sure their territory is staked out on the next Twitter before it’s too late.

“Since our beta launch in April, we’ve seen a strong demand from companies of all sizes and these new services are a direct result from their input,” said Michael Streko, co-founder of KnowEm. “We’re committed to making it as easy as possible for companies to make sure their identities are protected and they’re participating across the full scope of today and tomorrow’s social sites.”

The company also announced that social media pioneers Paige Craig and Brian Solis have joined the KnowEm Advisory Board.

Anyone can visit www.knowem.com to start managing their social media identity today.

About KnowEm

KnowEm.com (http://knowem.com) monitors hundreds of popular websites for social media identity theft. By entering a username, which can be a brand name, internet identity, or vanity URL, KnowEm.com allows you to instantly monitor the availability of that username on over 300 popular social media websites such as Twitter, MySpace and Digg.

2) Free Giveaways/Promotions.  That’s right – Google will also penalize you for asking other blogs to link to you in a free promotion or giveaway.  In their eyes it’s just like buying links. I’ve done it, and I’ve seen it.
SOLUTION: Ask any blogger doing a promotion or giveaway for you to nofollow their links.

A former Google Quality Rater writes “If you publish a product review or giveaway and you don’t no-follow your links, Google will penalize both you and the company that sponsored your blog post.”

3) Uncloaked Affiliate links.  Why does Google hate affiliates?  It seems Google hates just about anything commercial – if it makes you money, Google doesn’t like it.  Unless of course you’re paying Google, as in buying Adwords for PPC.  Then they love you.  Not cloacking your affiliate links can cost you in the SERPs.  I’ve done it, and I’ve seen it.
SOLUTION: Cloak the links — 301 redirects work great — and nofollow them.

4) Linking to Spammy and Shady Sites.  Watch those commenters you allow to place dofollow comments on your blog – if you get enough people linking to sites which sell Viagra and pr0n via hacked links you’ll get slammed for linking out to bad neighborhoods.
SOLUTION: Moderate your comments, nofollow links, or both.  Others more experienced than I have blogged about it.

5) Inactivity.  The search engine landscape is changing all the time – if you’re not constantly working on promoting or building your site chances are it’s going to slip in the SERPs. You can’t just put up a 5 page brochure/pamphlet site and expect visitors to find you.   You have to work at it.
SOLUTION: Work at it.

6) Duplicate Content.  OK, this one won’t destroy your site, but it’s not going to help it any.  If your site suffers from internal duplicate content issues search engines may not be returning the pages you want visitors to see.  If your site has duplicate issues with content previously published on other websites, you may not appear at all.
SOLUTION: Nofollow links to duplicate content, block it in robots.txt, and/or use the new Google Canonical tag to specify the authoritative source.

I just launched a new website, the next iteration of CheckUserNames.com.  KnowEm.com not only checks for the availability of your username on 120 sites, for a small fee we’ll stake your claim on every one of them by automatically signing you up.

KnowEm.com (http://knowem.com) launched a new web service today which monitors hundreds of popular websites for social media identity theft. By entering a username, which can be a brand name, internet identity, or vanity URL, KnowEm.com allows you to instantly monitor the availability of that username on over 120 popular social media websites such as Twitter, MySpace and Digg.

“Social Media identity theft is the modern form of domain name squatting,” says KnowEm co-founder, Barry Wise. “10 years ago it was a race to get CompanyName.com. Today it’s a race to secure a brand name on sites such as Twitter, which is quickly becoming an amazing tool for both brand transparency and customer service.”

A quick check today revealed that some of the biggest brands in the world have still not secured their account name to protect their brand from identity theft. For example, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Pepsi (NYSE:PEP), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Exxon (NYSE:XOM) and Citigroup (NYSE:C) still show that dozens, and in some cases over 80%, of popular social media websites still list their brand names as available account names.

It’s not just major media brand names that have dropped the ball — many celebrities have not secured their online identity either. Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey’s recent exposure on the popular new microblogging service Twitter.com has shown that celebrities are taking interest in using social media as a vehicle for PR and communication. But as of today their Twitter screen names, @aplusk and @oprah, are still both available on almost 90% of other websites on KnowEm.com’s list.

“The time is coming when online reputation management is critical even for normal citizens. You would be surprised how many companies are now using Google to see what a prospective hire has about them on the internet,” says Knowem co-founder, Michael Streko. “It is just too risky to let your name fall into the hands of someone else.”

KnowEm not only monitors to see if your username is available on 120 sites, it also offers a commercial service which will register your brand or username for you. For $64.95 you can secure your identity on over 120 different social media websites. For an additional $9.95 per month, they will also continue to monitor new websites and register your username on them as soon as they launch.

The way I have generated traffic has been a direct result of one of two factors; content which is popular and which people want to read (admittedly, I don’t produce a lot of that), or links from sites which are popular and which are getting a lot of traffic on their own merits.  A couple such projects I’ve recently worked on are Tweet Wasters and Check Usernames, both of which went viral on social media sites and as a result attracted a lot of visitors.

So what good is Google PageRank?  It seems to only serve a purpose as a self-perpetuating myth.  Some SEOs think they need to get links from high PageRank websites, so they come here and comment on my blog posts with a link to their site.  Which in turn drives traffic to my site.  Which is what I want – so did the Google PageRank increase my blog traffic, or did the myth do it?  Some SEOs want to advertise or buy links on high PageRank websites in order to increase their own PageRank, so they come to a blog this and ask to buy links.  So did Google PageRank just make me money?  It would if I sold links, but I clearly do not, otherwise you’d see some banners or even some Google AdSense on here.

So the myth continues – even though Google PageRank doesn’t really mean anything, as long as people think it does it will continue to generate traffic and income.  So should I educate everyone with blog posts like this, or should I just let the traffic and money come rolling in?  Please answer by leaving a comment, and in the process you’ll give yourself a PageRank 5 backlink – which is why you came here in the first place, wasn’t it?

The site is based on the original concept by the creator of usernamecheck.com, Jon Skypes.  Unfortunately, Jon had to take his site down due to the massive amount of incoming traffic. Soon after he did, Michael Gray and Mike Streko brought it to my attention.  Seeing the need left by the loss of his site, yesterday afternoon I got to work coding a replacement.

Jon was nice enough to post some of his PHP curl code and I used that as a basis to create an all new Ajax object to go out and grab the result screens from all these social networking and social bookmarking websites.  By last night I already had 25 or so sites done.  This morning Jon emailed his old database to me which has proven very helpful in adding more sites to the list.  As of this writing we’re up to 54 and have plenty more left to add.

The concept behind the site is very simple; you enter a username, and one at a time the application goes out to each site on the list to find out if the username exists or not.  It’s a little tedious to set up, since I do have to manually go to each site and look for the unique “User not found” message on each page.  And of course I also have to design the little logo graphics that go along with each site.  But it was such a simple and quick project to work on I couldn’t pass on it.

So if you still don’t have an account on obscure social sites like BallHype or Linkfilter yet, check their availability and go sign up!

[youtube]video_id[/youtube]

Where video_id is the (usually) 11 character string at the end of the Youtube URL, as in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxxxxx.

Download:
Youtuber2 WordPress Plugin
Version 1.0, Feb 9, 2009

The features we’ve added to the plugin include the ability to:

• Turn on or off the embedded search bar.
• Disable the related video links which appear at the end of the video.
• Disable the title and ranking stars (and other info) which Youtube often bundles with any videos you embed.

Installation is pretty standard as with any WordPress plugin:

1. Download the zip file and extract the contents.
2. Upload the ‘youtuber2′ folder to your plugins directory (wp-content/plugins/).
3. Activate the plugin through the ‘plugins’ page in WordPress.
4. See ‘Settings->Youtuber2′ to adjust the display size and other options.

If you’ve got any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us for assistance in setting up or installing it.

NOTE: An absolute URL is the fully qualified path to a resource; such as http://www.barrywise.com/images/image.jpg.  A relative URL will only work when the file is relative to the path of the current page, such as ../images/image.jpg.

So here I was with a couple hundred pages of content with image URLs all pointing to the wrong address on the staging server.  I needed a quick way to do a find and replace on every post in the WordPress MySQL database.  It was actually pretty simple.  In my case, I just had to execute this SQL code against the MySQL WordPress database:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, 'staging.server.com', 'www.productionserver.com');

This code will search through every “post_content” field in the wp_posts table and replace the staging URL address (staging.server.com) with the production address (www.productionserver.com).  The format is easy to understand and can of course be used with any MySQL table, not just WordPress:

UPDATE [your_table_name] SET [your_table_field] = REPLACE([your_table_field], '[string_to_find]' , '[string_to_be_replaced]');

I realize this isn’t the most complex or enlightening code sample, but I hope this helps anyone stuck with an annoying repetitive text string in all your WordPress posts which you’d like to search and replace with one quick command.

So presented here are the top 10 suggestions I make to just about every new SEO or SEM small business client that comes to me looking for online marketing assistance:

Website Design: First of all, spend some money on web design.  If you have a retail storefront on Main Street, would you create the sign over the front door yourself with a piece of plywood and a spray can?  No.  Would you buy a cheap template for a sign which everyone on the block shares just to put your logo on it to try and make it look unique?  No.  It works the same with websites.  Have someone design an attractive and intuitive design, and don’t buy some cookie cutter template site design. 

There is no reason in 2009 for a small business website to look like you have a limited budget.  Use your budget wisely and always invest in a professional designer.  Whatever website you try to throw together yourself with Frontpage or Dreamweaver is not going to look professional, no matter how proud you are of it.  If you don’t, the next steps won’t matter, because no amount of traffic to your site is going to help you convert sales on a poorly designed site.

Site Usability: User experience is even more important than design, but the two should go hand in hand.  Don’t hire someone with no web experience, like a print designer, to get a really pretty website; chances are the site architecture and usability of the design are going to be poor.  Spend some time with a professional web developer who has experience with usability.  Placement of elements in a web design really do matter, and the navigation of your site is very important if you want your visitors to effectively find and meet your end goals.

Site Hosting: Prices for hosting have come down considerably over the past few years, and you can easily find hosting for $5/month.  But all prices being equal, you want to choose a host who will not only keep your website up and running, but also provide you with immediate support whenever something goes wrong.  If I’m not hosting the websites myself, I’ll send clients to HostGator, where hosting plans start at only $5/month, but their support is awesome.

Unique/Compelling Content: Syndicated news feeds, content stolen from other websites, and just plain poorly written copy are three of the biggest problems I find on existing small business websites.  Don’t get me wrong; sometimes a syndicated news feed has its place on a site, but don’t depend on it for the bulk of your content.  Duplicated news feeds, along with content stolen from your competitors, is useless in the eyes of the search engines because it’s duplicate content which can be found elsewhere.  Poorly written copy can be just as bad.  Although you can pepper it with a few keywords and it may indeed help you rank, it’s not going to help you convert sales.  Again, seek assistance in writing professional sales copy.

Social Networking is NOT for everyone: Social Networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter are often compared with parties, because people like to interact, converse and make friends with others in a social setting.  And what is sadder than a party where no one shows up?  If you want to create a Facebook page to support your business, you better be committed to continually updating it, seeking out new friends and connections, and growing a network – in other words, use it the way you’re supposed to.  If your customers click the link to your MySpace page and see you only have 4 friends and haven’t updated it in 4 months, they may equate your lack of social networking effort to a lack of customer service.

Keyword Research: Don’t just guess which keywords you think people are going to enter into Google to find your site.  Take the time to do some research, find out which keywords have the highest volume and the least competition, and also take a look at what your competitors are using.  If you’re just starting to build a brand or market a site, look into long tail keyword options and local search results.  These are going to be easier to obtain than one-word keywords with search results with so much competitive volume you’re trying to outrank 32 million other pages.

On-Page SEO Factors:   There have been volumes written on this (some of it by me), so I won’t go into detail here.  At a minimum, make sure your site is making effective use of unique content for Title tags, Meta Description tags, and using and limiting the use of H1 header tags to one per page (and don’t make it a link).  You can also read more about SEO semantic coding and markup, internal link structure, useful meta tags, and improving search results.

SEO URLs: Internal page organization is also very important to a site’s searchability.  I see a lot of clients coming to me with page URLs that look like “/default112.htm” when they should look like “/2-slot-countertop-chrome-toaster”.  Having a descriptive URL still assists search engines in determining what is on a page.  Remember, search engines want to return the most relevant results to users searching for your products.  You can and should help them by using not only descriptive titles and keywords on your pages, but right in the URL of the page.  You can read how to create search engine friendly URLs with ASP.NET and IIS if you’re hosted on a Windows server.

301 Redirects: If you’re going to take my advice and create a new URL structure for your site (and you should), take the time to redirect the old URLs to the new ones.  Using a 301 redirect means telling search engines that this page “/default112.htm” has moved to this new location: “/2-slot-countertop-chrome-toaster”.  Whenever you move a page on your site you should put a 301 redirect in place; this will channel all the link authority pointing to the old page to the new one, and that page will also keeps its position in the search indexes such as Google and Yahoo.

Link Building: Finally, once you’ve got everything else taken care of, you can start building links to your site.  As this is probably the most important part of any SEO campaign, the topic is so broad it’s out of scope for this discussion.  But let me just say that Google (and others) want a site to gain link popularity naturally.  Don’t go around submitting your link to spammy directories or buy links for $100/month.  Search engines don’t like artificial linkbuilding practices such as directory links, spam links, and paid links.  The best way to start linkbuilding is to create unique and compelling content which other sites want to link to.  Instead of spending the time, effort and money on artificial links, put that into your own site content or SEO budget and watch others link to you willingly and naturally.

Now that you’ve got the facts, you can spend countless hours in the weeks and months ahead doing this all yourself, or you can just simply [shameless plug] hire a Web Design and SEO firm to do it all for you [/shameless plug].

But PageRank is Pointless

Yeah I said it.  While I am pleased with the blogs and NJ small business websites I’ve brought from new domains with a zero up to 4, 5 or 6 — because we all know it’s tough to get an unknown new blog or website started — in the end, PageRank doesn’t mean much. A good link building strategy may help bolster your PageRank, but an effective online marketing strategy will help you target more customers and convert more sales.  So why bother with PageRank?

Google PageRank is just one yardstick to help measure the authority a site may carry in the Google index.  Note I said it is just one of many tools which may help; PageRank is not, I repeat, not an effective measurement of a successful online marketing strategy.  You can have a PageRank of 10 but if your traffic isn’t converting into sales, what good does it do you?

PageRank Doesn’t Determine Your Position In Results

What’s important to note is that PageRank doesn’t even necessarily help your site rank for your target keywords in Google.  There are so many factors which go into determining where your site ranks in the SERPs that it would be ludicrous to assume Google is going to boil down its billion dollar patented ranking algorythm into a number from zero to 10.

In fact, I don’t even like to work with clients who just want high rankings in SERPs; I prefer to work with clients who want to create an engaging customer experience, intelligent branding, and effective marketing.  Let’s face it — as Google and the other search engines evolve to offer more personalized results (and perhaps even begin basing results on user involvement), better websites which offer a better user experience will always rank better in results.

So What Good Is PageRank?

It can be useful for a few reasons:

A higher PageRank will help you sell more advertising space.  I’m not sure why, for all the reasons outlined above, but it does.  You’ll find sites with higher PageRanks can charge more for monthly banners, text link ads, or site reviews.

A higher PageRank will raise the value on your site.  If you’re in the business of flipping domains or selling blogs, PageRank comes into play for the valuation of your site.

A higher PageRank will let you laud it over your friends and competitors.  Let’s face it; among SEOs, website owners and Bloggers, PageRank will always be an ego stroke.  It feels good to have a higher PageRank, because it leads you to believe your site is more important than those with a lesser rank.  In some cases, but not all, this is actually true.

Even though it’s kind of a useless application, it’s fun, and has become pretty popular – we made the top 10 Alexa list (briefly) about an hour or so ago. It’s all thanks to the brilliant genius of Sugarrae, who dreamed up the idea when she noticed how much time Streko was wasting on Twitter. Her argument being anyone who has spent over 24 hours of his life on Twitter can’t be getting much real work done. And then she thought, wouldn’t everyone like to know how much time they’re wasting on Twitter? Know it? Hell yeah, Streko said, they want a WordPress plugin for it!

So Streko asked if I could program the site and the WordPress plugin, and after they sat me down in front of a blackboard and explained the complex math involved in the calculations, I said OK. And about 45 minutes later tweetwasters.com beta was built. But it wasn’t very pretty. That’s when they called their friend Reese in; she’s a great designer that put a beautiful logo, design and face lift on the whole thing.

You can see the WordPress Plugin on the sidebar to your right – and you can download it from Rae’s site for free if you would like to add it to your own blog. Or just visit Tweetwasters.com and enter your Twitter screen name. You might be suprised to find out how much time you’ve wasted :)