83 Best Social Media Tools - eBook review

This is another book by 60 second marketer. As always I approach books with an open mind when I review them. Flipping quickly through its 14 pages, I saw no immediately apparent chapters or overview which had me wondering what on earth I was looking at.

Reading this on a 7 inch tablet is not really recommended - the format works better on a bigger tablet as on a 7 inch, the text is small unless its panned and zoomed. This is just a layout issue that's not really a big problem. It'd be nice if it was addressed since most tablets are 7 inch.

Looking more closely at the content of the book, its actually a rather nifty list of resources available online. I can't say I have used many of them. In fact I've used maybe half a dozen. Some I really like such as Twitterfeed which feeds this blog to Twitter so it reaches potentially 14,000 accounts. Some I found less useful but I really like what the author has done here.

Ages ago, I used to rate things on a star scale. I used to award five stars for the best and five blackholes for the worst. These days I just give my opinion. My opinion is that this is a bloody excellent resource. Full marks on this one, 60 second marketer.

Preparations are underway

Preparations are underway to dump the domain names. Over the next few weeks, blog entries containing links might have to be updated. The Facebook link has been eliminated from the bottom of new blog entries.

Domain names were a flight of fancy that cost me $7.98 and which proved to be rather worthless. It was just so much easier to say "britphoto" than "tehisp". Really and truly though, I've come to the conclusion that pushing people toward my blogs is a futile exercise. Going back to the age old phrase - you can lead a horse to water but cannot make him drink. It was like my photography business - I could wave photos in front of people's noses, shout about my photo website, scream about discounts and wonderful service but couldn't make people look. It was pretty futile.

More and more I have come to the conclusion that dedicated domain names are rather frivolous that might help in "branding" but that for the vast majority of hobby websites are just a complete irrelevance.  Let's face it - most websites are hobby websites. Some are more aimed at making money than others. I'm not selling goods nor services so this is definitely a hobby website.

Time was when I really cared about massive hit numbers and agonised over why they weren't coming. I struggled and fought to raise them. I agonised over low hits and tried every which way to raise them. I noticed several interesting things

• Sites that gain the biggest hits are entertainment websites
• People aren't going to the internet to buy things - they're going to be entertained.
• People look for information or humor online. 

Facebook reportedly has 2 billion users. This is a testament to how people want to be entertained. They want to write about their boring little lives and post pictures of food they've just eaten or things they photographed on the way to work that amused them.

The way people find things has changed. Labels are now quite important. Labels are the search terms people may use to find an article. It's no no longer good enough to use Meta Tags. If I do a search then I'm not going to search for coffee shop, columbia. I'm going to search for "coffee shop in columbia sc". Searches have become much more specific as people are more specific about what they want.

Search engines look for exactly what you type. If I type "coffee shop in kathmandu" I get a list of coffee shops in Kathmandu. If I qualify that by "worst coffee shop in kathmandu" then I get a list of 1 star reviewed coffee shops and restaurants. If I simply type "photographer, washington DC" then I get about 28 million results. If I qualify it then I get closer to what I want. For example "newborn photographer washington dc" which gets me 383,000 hits. If I wanted specifically a male photographer then "male + newborn photographer washington DC" gets me 5 hits all of whom are female. Somebody there is missing a trick.

People don't like to hunt through massive lists of pages on the internet. They will add extra phrases. If you're afraid of missing out on potential search traffic then put "a" and "and" in as individual search phrases and your site will come up amid the millions of sites but it won't likely be at the top of the list. Only the most popular sites are at the top of a vague search. The more specific the search terms are, the less likely they are to be searched for but the more likely your site is to be at the top of the list.

Where most people go wrong, including myself, is in using very short search terms. We're all afraid of missing out. By being afraid of missing out, we use shorter terms and do miss out. The trick is to use search terms that aim for niches. There's no point in copying the masses and being buried at the bottom of a search - particularly if you're an unknown website.

Thus, search terms are becoming more specific since searches are how people find things these days rather than via domain names. Slowly references to my old Facebook page are being eliminated. As I find them, links using my old domain names will also be changed.

Fake photography job.

Somehow, a photography position came to my attention. It was discovered long enough ago to forget how it came to my attention. It was interesting enough to turn up to find out about though there were reservations about it. The office turned out to be one of the shoebox offices that seem to be rented by the hour. There are a lot of these in Columbia. While there may well be some genuine businesses there taking full advantage of the low rent, these are also the realm of the scammer. It's not really fair to say not to visit such places ever because that would harm the genuine businesses. Perhaps it's more a case of just taking extra caution.

The modus operandi is the same for pretty well all of the scam businesses. The office is rented and furnished with ready-provided Ikea furnishings. The lights are seldom switched on. Frequently advertisements for positions are listed via notices and flyers or online. Sometimes they are even posted on government employment agency websites. Usually the scam involves parting fools from their money or from personal information.

Two men in their 20s and 30s were involved. One was hiding behind a pair of women's sunglasses (in an office that had no lighting switched on). The other was sitting behind a desk, conducting the "interview". Neither had any interview or management skills. They advised that in order to work with them, it was important to pay $15 cash to join their "organisation" and then another $15 to obtain a permit of some kind that I'd never heard of before. It would be a total of $30 which had to be paid in cash, there and then. To cap all that off the two demonstrated some very fake looking permits.

Clearly that was a scam. It was not a well organized scam either. The scammers were opportunists and not professionals. It was also quite likely their very first scam. It had me in mind of a scam a few weeks ago where a "company" had broken into a disused bar after advertising on a jobs website. The phone had run early one morning with an invitation to an interview that afternoon. Turning up, the door lock on the bar had clearly been broken. Inside were a pair of men who did not look at all businesslike. There were no lights on and only plastic picnic tables and chairs set up to use. The application forms required to be completed were badly photocopied generic forms with no company name. Quickly finding an excuse that crime scene was quickly left behind. There was clearly no real job there.

Similarly, two more positions on jobs websites. Both were with a company that I did find a bad reports about online. That company did not actually appear to have anything more than a website and did not appear to be anything more than a trading name. Entering the office, the lights were on. The whole place had the feel of temporality. During the "interviews" I had a feeling that everything could be thrown into the trunk of a small car and gone within moments. Both were promises of management positions as long as a "trial" period was carried out. The first position turned out to be flogging cosmetics, door-to-door and the second was flogging car care products door-to-door.

The comment generally is that there are so many fake adverts out there, particularly on general jobs websites that it makes job applications very fraught. It doesn't matter whether it's a photographer looking for a position or anybody else. The chances of finding a scam are greater than the chances of finding a real position advertised. As I said a few days ago, avoiding the general jobs websites is the smart thing to do. I don't continue with an application if a 3rd party website is involved.