Just like everyone’s mother always said, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. Or as my grandmother used to say, “Keep mouthing off like that and a bigger boy’s going to pop you one.”

The owned media vs. earned and paid media debate is apparently not immune from the same wisdom passed along by our elders: Google has officially popped Facebook right in the kisser for saying, well, not-so-nice things.

As has been widely reported all over the web, Facebook was caught red-handed engaging in a smear campaign against Google via public relations company Burson-Marsteller. After Facebook came clean on Wednesday, the PR firm admitted they had pitched stories to bloggers and other media with statements like “The American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloging and broadcasting every minute of every day–without their permission.”

The source of Facebook’s ire is Google’s Social Circle, which permits users of Google Chat and Contacts to see public information about each other–including Facebook information, Twitter feeds, and personal websites.

To be fair, Google’s profiling isn’t exactly opt-in. Whether or not users have a Gmail or other Google service account, they must sign up for Google Profiles in order to customize and decide exactly what information is available to others.

But compare this to Facebook’s labyrinthine privacy and security settings, and the frequent complaints about user privacy issues and information sharing, and it seems like the pot calling the kettle black.

Facebook has since stated that it did not intend to engage in a “smear campagin,” but was merely trying to ensure the public was well informed. I don’t recall a public service announcement from Facebook “informing” people that they disclose user information to advertisers and other third parties.

Regardless of intent, in my mind it all comes down to the inherent transparency of owned media. Engaging a PR firm to propagate negative sentiment via earned media about another company, all the while asking that your company’s name be withheld, is a smear campaign whether you admit it or not.

Compare that tactic to using owned media channels to go beyond marketing your services to calling into question the business practices of a competitor. How far would you go, knowing that your official platforms were the source of potentially injurious (or worse, libelous) statements? Would you be more or less inclined to bite your tongue?

Not that any of this will ultimately matter to either company: users are more and more free with their personal information on the web, and to most people this is a non-story about two corporate behemoths pointing fingers at each other in the usual game of “Oh yeah? Well guess what they did!”

Despite the myriad complaints about privacy, Facebook isn’t losing users in droves, and people still depend on Google’s various services like they were oxygen.

White this is far from the first or last such incident, it is nonetheless embarrassing for any company to be outed for throwing such an obvious and ultimately useless low blow. If you’ve got something to say about a competitor and don’t have the sand to be completely transparent via owned media, do everyone a favor and heed mom’s advice.

Taulbee Jackson wrote a blog post on April 7th about Google’s recent investment into high quality video content for YouTube. Taulbee’s post was a great take on this investment and its meaning for search, but people who know me understand that I think the act of optimizing a site for search is the equivalent of securing a hastily constructed building against a Tornado.

In my opinion, if built correctly a site will be found. Getting the site found for what you’d like it to be found for is a matter of becoming a quality website that is worth a visitor’s time.

This post is not about search though, this post is about video. Specifically the recent news that Cisco is discontinuing a product that it bought two years ago, and how that news coupled with the aforementioned news from Google is indeed a very big deal.

The Flip revolutionized consumer video production. I received the Flip Video Ultra for a Christmas gift in 2007 from my wife. I very distinctly remember being dumbfounded by it – not only was I stunned by it’s simplicity, but also by the fact that I knew NOTHING about it. Fancying myself a bit of a gadget geek, I had hit a bit of a slump in my ability to keep up with tech after the birth of my son – so I was truly impressed by my wife’s choice. It was small, portable, and just plain cool.

The Flip was a great tool for capturing moments. I used the small push button camera to capture video of my son, our neighborhood, and all sorts of fun little things. Unfortunately it was also misappropriated as the half lit torch of prosumers, hobby, and hack videographers everywhere. With my first Flip, NEVER did it cross my mind to use this camera for my job. NEVER did I think “640 by 480 pixels, mono sound and a backlit head shot is totally going to make my CEO look rad on YouTube!”

Now, I realize that not everyone knows the subtleties of video compression schemes or frame rates and sizes. What everyone does know, but conveniently forgot in the last few years, is there is a difference between video of their kids playing on a slip and slide and videos of their brand messages. The years of 2007-2011 saw anyone with an eye for quality video living in a hell I could have never imagined.

Don’t get me wrong. The Flip product line matured very well, and as the company introduced smaller form factors with higher definition recording capabilities, I found myself occasionally using footage from it, and the team at Raidious has even deployed the Flip in quick capture scenarios. I believe strongly in the right tool for the right job, and while I have quite a few rants on the misappropriation of technology – the inappropriate application of the Flip to corporate and brand video had been hard to argue when consultants, speakers, and other short sighted social media specialists started writing blog posts and speaking at conferences about how easy making viral videos could be.

I can image it quite vividly, coming from the speaker in the sport coat and jeans – “It’s easy! Just buy a Flip and start talking to it! Your brand will explode into a social media ROI viral dynamic of user generated twitter SEO resulting in a zeitgeist.”

But now the Flip is dead – long live video on the internet!

As the aforementioned blog posts rot away in link bait hell, the Flip sits in purgatory. The marketing folks that learned how easy it could be to create videos are now caught trying to figure out what is next.

I admit that there have been some great videos produced and shared using the Flip. I know that this camera helped usher forth an era of videos, pod-casts, and other great content from social media gurus, not for profits, bands – some of which was created by yours truly. I appreciate that and I think it is cool, I do.

My recommendation is that companies take a long hard look at their video strategy, then call us for help. If you don’t call us, at least start thinking about how your video is going to stand out from the videos of the next few years, and how your brand is going to compete against YouTube’s professionally produced videos that it WILL be featuring over yours.

The Flip was the disposable party camera of the 2000s – remember those? I’d be willing to bet that young couples didn’t use the disposable for wedding portraits, but for the photos of the guests. I am hopeful that the death of the flip means one less excuse for bad video. As Google puts their money where their mouth is, I look forward to the internet of the next decade – an internet where sites like YouTube are full of professionally produced, high quality content that people want to watch, not full of your friend’s drinking at the reception.

Use your cell phone for that.

For a great article on how the Flip could have been saved, check out this great article by Peter at GDGT.

Google announced today that it will be investing over $100,000,000 in quality content for YouTube.

As mentioned in an earlier Raidious post featured on SocialMediaToday.com, directly from Matt Cutts at SXSW, Google has admitted time and again that SEO is about one thing – delivering quality, original content. It is the best way to rank your web property, the end – not link building, or other gray-hat SEO tricks that try to game the system. High quality original content always has, does, and always will help you win rank.

That’s what SEO is – it is the optimization of content.

It’s one thing to hear Matt Cutts say this to a room packed full of people at the biggest digital marketing conference on the planet. It is another for Google to back up that statement by investing significantly in its own properties.

Google is making a $100,000,000 dollar bet on high quality, original content, because guess what – Google knows it can’t lose.

One thing that YouTube is that Netflix and Hulu are not is a search engine. In fact, YouTube at one point was the second largest search engine in the world, behind Google, and it is still by far the first-choice destination for any user looking for video on a given topic. The fact that Google is investing like this, in high quality original content, should be the mother of all clues to anyone who wants to rank a website – you should be spending your money on high quality original content. Because that is exactly what Google is doing for its own properties.

Related articles

• YouTube to get more TV-like with channels and $100M worth of original content (venturebeat.com)
• YouTube Drops $100 Million to Add Original Content (techland.time.com)
• Google planning premium YouTube channels (gadgetell.com)
• Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO – Filing a reinclusion request (blogs.sitepoint.com)

Monday, March 14th was another day full of panels all about web content and why it matters to brands, publishers, and brand publishers. I hopped between a few panels to listen in on what was being said, and settled into a line to see a panel called “Q&A With Google & Bing On Website Ranking” featuring Matt Cutts from Google, Duane Forrester from Bing, and Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land. I must admit that while I was interested in hearing what these guys had to say, the format (all Q & A from the audience) was laden with terrible questions that always had the same answer, one I have been preaching for years:

The number one thing that search engines are looking for is quality content.

That’s right: I heard that straight from Google and Bing’s mouth. They both agree. Search engines aren’t looking for keywords, they’re not looking for backlinks, they’re not looking for metadata. They are looking for quality content.

I implore you: stop spending your money buying ads and links, and start investing it in a long-term strategy to secure your site’s authority. Create content yourself, hire a company like us to augment that strategy, or hire us to take it over entirely.

After this session wrapped up , I was excited to grab some lunch and catch the Felica Day keynote. It seemed fate had other plans, as I met up with Lindsay and randomly bumped into two fine folks I met the night before as a tent full of some of the most amazing and free food appeared on the corner. We were quick to jump in line, grab a plate and pull up some floor.

Much to my surprise, we then met NASA.

Felica Day could wait. Two strangers stopped by and asked if they could join our group, and we were quickly chatting about our day jobs, but these two quickly stole my attention when they started talking astrophysics and moon missions. Needless to say, I missed the keynote, but met some amazing folks.

My afternoon consisted of a session about value-based pricing, a concept that I am excited to continue to explore at Raidious, as well as “Anatomy of a Design Decision.”

Tuesday I was fortunate enough get to meet Holly Jeter and learn a few things about the film business, catch an inspiring keynote by Blake Mycoskie’s of Tom’s Shoes, and spend some quality time on the trade show floor where I purchased quite possibly the most important thing I could buy before SXSW Music started: a Mophie JuicePack Air.

As I continue to let the whirwhind that was SXSW settle in, I’ll be posting some additional thoughts on some of the emerging trends I witnessed, as well as some of my thoughts on the gear and production of SXSW. I saw some really cool stuff going on, and I am excited to share it with Raidious and our clients.

Courtesy WikiMedia Commons

After barely a year, Google killed their next-generation collaboration tool, Google Wave.

You can read the various lamentations and exaltations yourself; I don’t have to recount them here for you. Why did they kill it? What does it mean? Where do we go from here?

The collaboration tool’s sudden infant death iterated people’s need to Keep It Simple, Stupid. Sure, it’s possible to combine chat, document collaboration, email, and whatever else they crammed into that buckshot interface. But why? If you’re like me you found it impossible to follow.

Don’t get me wrong: the way most enterprise organizations collaborate on documents and projects is downright draconian. If you’re still using email and the “Track Changes” feature in Word to share work rather than using a slick and easy-to-use project management suite like Basecamp, you need serious help.

I for one, though, like a little separation. I don’t want to save every single instant message about a project. Keeping every file up-to-date by sharing and and funneling all email communication through Basecamp, chatting via iChat, and employing other tools that do one thing each (really well, I might add) lets me keep things organized in my own brain.

Trying to figure out Google Wave was like taking a five-year-old off his Big Wheel and putting him at the helm of the Space Shuttle. Amazing and ahead of its time, sure. But a bit like killing a fly with a nuclear weapon. Too much, too fast!

Google Wave reminded me of those Tex Avery “Home of Tomorrow” cartoons. The homes featured all manner of whiz-bang technological advances that actually didn’t serve much purpose, such as the radish de-burper found in the kitchen.

(Why not take a break and watch one now? I’ll wait.)

More concretely, using Wave was like searching for a coffee maker that Just Makes Coffee. Not a combination grinder/brewer/cappuccino/steamer/frother with several parts that must be removed and recombined to make a pot of joe, like some kind of domestic Voltron. Just a pot of black coffee, please.

I always advise people that web designers, developers, advertisers and the like have one purpose: to help people solve business problems. What problem was Google Wave attempting to solve? Who asked for all that development time to be put into something so complicated and convoluted even their own employees couldn’t figure the thing out?

Maybe it didn’t solve the problem nobody asked for help with. Maybe it was created for the same reason people climb Mt. Everest or visit Graceland: because they can. More likely it was the first real attempt at giving email a serious, much-needed overhaul.

Sometime in the near future, someone will inevitably bring a Wave-clone into existence. It will have nearly identical functionality, but it will be more attractively designed (I can’t stand Google’s UI design, so drab and ugly). And this time we’ll all be ready for it. But for now we’ll all revel in the simplicity of collaborating the way we have been.

How to Use Google Apps to Improve Your Business - Inc. Magazine

In the hullabaloo and hubbub of making our business go, we neglected to mention that Raidious was recently featured in an article in Inc. Magazine.

Brian Wyrick, VP of Operations, was among those interviewed for “How to use Google Apps to Improve Your Business,” published June 10, 2010.

At Raidious we have a “no software” rule, which we enforce as strictly as possible. We use Google Apps for document collaboration, Google Voice for our phones, Basecamp for project management and time reporting, and Freshbooks for invoicing and billing. We even accept client payments via PayPal.

We’re thrilled to serve as an example of the way things are getting done in today’s cloud computing environment.

Read the article online to find out more.

Can a privately held, for-profit company be trusted to act in the public good? If you use the multinational banks or energy companies as examples, then the answer by most measures would be a resounding “no.”

But what if that company is Google?

The company whose brand image is “Don’t be evil” has placed itself at the center of a geopolitical debate, and print and broadcast news and blogging outlets are awash with opinions. Issues of weapons, international trade, and human rights aside (not that any are small issues), it seems the new cold war is an information freeze.

When Google opened up virtual and physical shop in China in 2006, many questioned the company’s motives. Google itself championed social change, maintaining that despite its acquiescence to government-mandated censoring of search results, for the citizens of China some access was better than none. Now following a series of hacking attacks on Gmail accounts and other Google services in China, the company is refusing to censor its results and threatening to pull out of the country entirely.

The always spot-on Farhad Manhoo has a great article about the issue on Slate, so I won’t get into the details here. But all the reading I’ve done only leaves me with the single burning question:

Can a private company be trusted or expected to succeed where governments, the United Nations, and citizen activists have not?

Amnesty International reports that China “has the largest recorded number of imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents in the world.” Those imprisoned are accused of offenses such as signing petitions, disseminating health information, and planning to form pro-democracy groups.

The commodity internet was formed with one explicit purpose in mind: to connect people to each other through the exchange of information. Much as the strategies of the American and French revolutions were fleshed out in coffee houses, the internet is a meeting place where ideas are exchanged and the merits of these ideas are discussed. More than that, the internet is an always-on source of the latest information on natural disasters, political news, and public health issues.

If average citizens seeking to find out about disease outbreaks, discuss government reform, or just learn about the world around them are subject to imprisonment, what then is the role of the provider of the conduit for this information? Companies should respect the laws and regulations of any country in which they do business, but what if that business is itself intellectual freedom and exchange of information?

What are the geopolitical ramifications of Google’s words and actions? If history is any indication, China will not bow to pressure from the world community based on this issue alone. But what if Google’s protest and threats are simply activism on a broad scale, designed to use their enormous financial leverage and highly favorable brand standing in order to focus attention on China’s well-documented human rights abuses?

Will the world take notice? Will the world care? Will two guys who ran an indexing server in their Stanford dorm rooms suddenly find themselves emissaries of political and human rights reform?

In the entertaining and exhaustive corporate biography, “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” (John Battelle, 2006), Google co-founder Larry Page describes his fascination with inventor Nikola Tesla. Tesla, despite research and inventions that laid the groundwork for–among others–wireless communication, solar cells, X rays, and the modern power grid, is usually overshadowed by competitors like Thomas Edison.

In one illuminating passage, Page describes his desire from the age of 12 to invent things that mattered to people:

I realized Tesla was the greatest inventor, but he didn’t accomplish as much as he should have. I realized I wanted to invent things, but I also wanted to change the world. I wanted to get them out there, get them into people’s hands so they can use them, because that’s what really matters.

Page wanted to change the world at age 12. Now Google wants to change the world. I don’t know if it’s possible, but very few have managed to stop Google yet.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Groups Praise Google (techdailydose.nationaljournal.com)
• Leaving China, my view on Google’s recent statement (yihongs-research.blogspot.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Search engine optimization is no longer about gaming the system by stuffing loosely related (or completely unrelated) metadata keywords into a site’s header. Search algorithms are finely tuned to prioritize a site’s actual written content over almost all else.

What does this mean? It means that search engines are built to “read” a site as a human would. An outstanding model to follow for web content writing comes from elementary school.

The old “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them” structure you learned in fourth grade holds true.

The first paragraph of a page or article gives a summary of the entire piece. The body paragraphs contain the relevant information with examples, data, lists, and quotes/testimonials. The final paragraph is a conclusion on what has just been read.

And let’s not forget the importance of proper spelling and grammar; while Google may not care about good spelling, it helps to keep the “search spiders as humans” concept in mind. Would you trust the New York Times if it were full of spelling mistakes?

All too often the job of creating web content is left to web developers, sales managers, or even the secretary. Looking again at the Times, do the Editor in Chief, Ad Sales Manager, or receptionist have a hand in reporting? Or is the job of finely crafting news and editorial content up to the journalists who have expertise in not only their reporting field but also in writing about those topics?

Finally, remember peer reviews? Reading and commenting on other relevant blogs is a great way to not only promote your own site, but also get other folks reading and commenting on yours. Easy-to-understand content will help others in the process of vetting your information by commenting and linking to your site.

So it’s not just important to have great content; putting your site out there for review/comments is a great way to promote and get links.

If your company lacks the resources to hire content producers with an intimate knowledge of the Chicago Manual of Style, at the very least you can remember your elementary school compositions and keep it short, simple, and relevant. You will undoubtedly find your site is rewarded with the A+ grade of increased search ranking.

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• With Quality Content, Article Writing Always Shines Through (ronmedlin.com)

Let’s assume (quite correctly) that content freshness is one factor in search relevance. One of the primary means to ensure content is constantly updated is with a blog.

Okay, now you’ve got your corporate blog. How can it actually make you money?

As the old saying goes, you don’t make money writing checks. Your corporate blog should demonstrate ROI (the bottom line) and increase brand awareness (marketing goal). But how do you get there?

The key here is patience: is your goal spiking short-term traffic or establishing longer-term customer relationships?

If your goal is the latter, the SEO specialist promising to get you to the front page of Google overnight is selling you a bill of goods. Rome wasn’t built in a day, remember?

You are a professional marketer. You know how to market your services, but it’s your product line specialists who can really help your products shine. They can translate their expertise about your company’s products and what they can deliver into an online body of knowledge that will establish you as a respected, trusted authority.

This authority is achieved by writing thoughtful, insightful pieces at least once or twice each week, purposefully building up the amount of quality information about your products in the digital space.

Your job as the marketing expert is to take this information produced by your product specialists and align it with your marketing goals and initiatives. What’s the use of having all this information on your website if it’s inconsistent with what you’re currently trying to say?

Once product specialists have submitted their blog posts, take a crack at editing them. Utilize a list of Google AdWords suggested for that product or service and make sure those key words and phrases appear often in the posts. Use the same language and tone as what’s being used in your current press releases and media buys.

You and your customers know there are many, many sites out there claiming to be experts on any given product or service.

Those that are successful actually provide information and help to current and prospective customers, not just a list of available products.

As your store of information fills out, people will find you and link to you because while you’re definitely trying to sell them something, you are above all else helping them learn. Your blog posts will receive organic incoming links from other posts and Twitter tweets.

And all of these factors will help ensure you are the source of truth in your field. That’s what builds business.