Source: frugaldad.com

“Obviously there’s no censorship in the bill and no one can indicate any censorship whatsoever. It’s not censorship to want to stop illegal activity,” Smith told the publication. “That’s all we do. We’re trying to impede illegal activity by foreign websites.”

Lamar Smith (R-Texas)
House Judiciary Committee Chairman
http://mashable.com/2012/01/18/sopa-not-over

“The Internet is not a free zone where anybody can do anything they want to do and trample the rights of other people.”

Rick Santorum
Former Senator
2012 Candidate for President
http://mashable.com/2012/01/19/sopa-threat-freedom
Rick Santorum Defending SOPA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5iY5Sll72k

“’This is altogether a new effect,’ Mr. Dodd said, comparing the online movement to the Arab Spring. He could not remember seeing ‘an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically’ in the last four decades, he added.”

In another statement, Dodd said Wikipedia and Google’s protests are meant to “intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.”

http://www.worstpreviews.com/headline.php?id=23833&count=0#ixzz1k2bTC7Nr

Chris Dodd
Former Senator (8 months ago)
Current Motion Picture Association of America Chairman

Country Wide Mortgage Scandal
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/top-5/2008/06/12/Countrywide-Loan-Scandal/
“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.”
-Eric Holder
U.S. Attorney General

Former Partner in Covington Law Firm. Fannie Mae Scandal

I’ll add more as time permits…

More Resources

• http://www.sopastrike.com/numbers

http://www.chrisbryanfilms.com

Learn more about the Photocrati Theme and the Photocrati Fund.

Most folks will never go to Facebook to do their searches. Doesn’t mean Facebook on page seo should be overlooked in any way. I’m still using fbml to give my clients an advantage in search for example. This holds even if Facebook stops hiding business page content from Google today.

Aside: Search rose in popularity because of the interface design or lack thereof. We’ll see the same during the next feature contraction of the Internet -maybe in 2012.

Facebook is big but it’s not going get bigger than search unless and until they merge with Microsoft and Yahoo Search, which they may do. See: http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-microsoft-receive-go-ahead-to-implement-search-deal-36465 They still will not be bigger than “search” as a result but they could become the most popular search engine. For Facebook Pages or Twitter to be more popular than Google Pages, Facebook would need to be more popular than search itself.
I agree with: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/11/google-plus-pages/

Facebook Pages are of course much more popular and helpful to business owners right now “in the social space.” But unless they open their content to Google’s index, they’ll stay confined to the Facebook Search ecology.

The likelyhood that “Google Pages” will be easier to find requires business owners and marketers to take notice. Especially while Facebook continues to exclude content from the google.

Therefore, I continue to recommend Facebook business pages and the expansion thereof for business owners. Today I’m hoping my clients will jump into the url grab and secure their brand on Google Pages.

If I’m right, Google Pages will rank better and offer better longterm roi as a result. If I’m wrong, no mattah, good having both.

As a Google Solution Provider I’m simply sharing that my first experiences with Google Pages have been “really” positive.

Reminds me of the worst in government free market interference and I do believe it hinges on the presidential elections. Maybe this is why Eric Schmidt is leaving Google? Would Eric pull a Jim Barksdale?

Google Yourself today to see why any of this is important. Maybe read:

http://www.linkedin.com/today/article?articleID=5562883665060433921&trk=tod-home-art

Why Google Plus Pages (Will) Beat Facebook. And Twitter

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/11/google-plus-pages/

Many smaller clients are still learning to embrace cost-reductions gained from SaaS ie; the cloud using services like Google Apps or WordPress or open source platforms. Many clients are still learning to calculate total costs of ownership. A balanced scorecard would reveal that cost reductions in advertising should be mindful of lower customer acquisition costs.

More than clicks, views and other digital actions, professional online marketers understand how to create and manage successful advertising campaigns that consistently pull “market share” for a client. The challenge in local digital economies where most web professionals serve small business is to keep themselves and their clients from what I would call, Cliff-diving.

Cliff-diving is when you become stagnant. In the case of web professionals it’s when you learn about and even master a particular SaaS, software platform or even a stand alone tool and stick with it too long. Consider the auto mechanic that gets certified for and makes a career out of working on carburetors never learning about fuel injection. This is happening to many professional online marketers in the advertising space.

Cliff-diving used to be okay for Web Professionals. Jumping into tools like Photoshop and Dreamweaver has worked for millions of web professionals. But in the advertising space, everything is changing more rapidly. A web professional betting their career on any platform could easily find themselves looking for a job in a few years as more agile web professionals come onto the scene.

Time will tell if the data explosion which I believe we’re now experiencing is geometric or exponential but it certainly continues to create a lot of digital energy. Harnessing this new form of energy can help your clients reduce costs and attract new customers. The rise in Internet traffic, lead collection forms and more cookies are all creating more data than we can mine and keep anonymous. Read “Introduction to Shannon Entropy.”

Online advertisers may similarly consider astro-physicist attempting to explain our Universe as new planets are being discovered on a somewhat regular basis. Or it may help to consider a metaphor by Nicolas Negroponte (read: Being Digital)  when he suggested that we’re shifting from processing atoms to processing bits. In my humble opinion this explains today’s opportunities in manufacturing. Use this to understand advertising as a form of manufacturing if it helps your clients.

Please also consider helping your clients by thinking of mom and pop websites where the best data is available as a result of providing the right service or product. In other words, a single, small, niche website owner may have access to better information about a customer’s behavior than Facebook considering the fact that Facebook is currently locked into a digital environment. Many of your local clients have cash registers. It’s going to take a lot of QR codes for Facebook to ever achieve the quality of data a local website can successfully mine. The “a-ha” for me is realizing that each client will be capable of owning their own ad network and this ability will be built into the code.

So the awareness shift might be in knowing that website visitors, even those most concerned with privacy are still leaving bread crumbs behind that tell us way more about their behavior than existing digital networks like the open graph are capable of providing.

While some of the most capable Web Professionals have chosen the path of cliff-diving it’s encumbant on future Web Professionals to help customers go beyond existing networks and harness the opportunities within their customer base. Learn to leverage existing while securing new data by helping your clients understand the need to learn as much as possible about their visitors, customers and prospects.

This is the data they already have access too and the data that you’ll help them access via new strategies and tactics to help your clients “own” and build their own ad network functionality into everything they do online. Offline opportunities in particular will help them reduce costs and attract new customers.

A potential take-away: Web Professionals must learn new ways to serve clients using innovative data collection techniques that respect the privacy of the customers your clients serve.

This page has been combined into part one for easier reading. :)

You realize that by leveraging organic methods you can use the slower economy to gain mindshare. If you see a noticeable drop in clients, use any extra time to gain mindshare. So how do you do that?

Here’s a few ideas:

Look smart – go analytical. Focus on the details. Use this opportunity to solidify your landing page strategies. Review your clients analytics carefully to insure all the top ranking keywords have great landing pages. Produce charts and graphs that you might not otherwise have time for. Show these to your clients and create a page that helps sell your services when the budgets turn around.

Look fast – think of the recent projects that have gone smoothly. Build a new page on your site highlighting the des/dev/mktg process in a timeline that’s easy for potential clients to grasp. Helping clients understand your process and the time commitment can help seize more dollars from other areas of your client’s budgets like traditional newspaper advertising.

Look popular – get your company’s info on more social sites. Use life-blogging tools to enforce your brand and build the story of your company. Post the output on your site.

Be the best – if the greatest tool in your arsenal is you, improve yourself. Take some online video tutorials, like tubetorials or some step by step design or development tutorials. Listen to some professional podcasts on how to improve. Differentiate yourself further by joining trade associations. If you’re not the greatest tool in your arsenal become your most valuable asset.

Get Educated! – Seriously, if you’re looking for differentiation between yourself and your peers seeking the same job, show you have earned a certificate in standards-based education for web professionals.

This growth rate represented the eighth consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth and fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth rates.

If you need help with an online ecommerce solution, I can help.