Adam Sherk

JUNE 16, 2011

According to the new Pew Internet study Social Networking Sites and our Lives there are nearly twice as many male LinkedIn users as female. What gives? So what accounts for this disparity? More males in the workforce? Do men prefer LinkedIn’s brand of simple, stripped down, business-oriented networking? For what it is worth, females have stronger participation overall and in every other social network that was examined.

LinkedIn 174

LinkedIn MySpace Survey Study 174

Adam Sherk

JANUARY 27, 2011

Last year I did a couple of posts on the reach and engagement of NBA teams on Twitter and Facebook. Yesterday Yago Colás came across one and shared it with the students in his Cultures of Basketball course. The students thought it was an interesting concept and one of them, Blake McLimans , pulled updated numbers for all of the teams. Since it has been a year since my original post I thought I’d use Blake’s figures to look at the growth percentages for all of the teams.

Team 165

Team Twitter Facebook Course 165

Adam Sherk

NOVEMBER 14, 2011

Google’s recent algorithm change that favors the most recent content for certain types of queries offers good opportunities for news and content sites. But for individuals and organizations, does the freshness update make online reputation management more difficult? If you cover breaking news, hot topics or regularly occurring events the freshness update will create more chances for your latest content to surface highly for general search queries (like the name of a celebrity, sports team or TV

Reputation 155

Reputation Google Wikipedia Embedding 155

Adam Sherk

APRIL 20, 2011

Thanks to Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead we know that the band’s approach over the years offers useful insights for marketers. But how is the organization itself doing with social media today? Based on a current promotion on the Grateful Dead Facebook page I’d say they’re doing great. In support of the release of the complete recordings from the Europe ’72 tour (and the 40th anniversary of that tour) the Grateful Dead Facebook page utilizes a separate tab to create a multi-page interac

Content 154

Content Facebook Buy Social Media 154

Adam Sherk

MAY 3, 2011

This year’s NBA playoffs have been great so far, a nice surprise considering it is still early in the second round. Since I like looking at the social media presence of NBA teams I thought I’d run the 2011 playoff teams through the beta version of the new Klout to see how the fare against each other. Last year I simply ranked the NBA playoff teams by Facebook engagement , so this year I thought I’d try a different approach for Twitter and apply Klout scores to the actual bracket and declare a wi

Klout 148

Klout Twitter Conference Team 148

Adam Sherk

JULY 12, 2011

While watching the film The Social Network over the weekend one scene in particular caught my attention. Mark Zuckerberg and key members of the early Facebook team are meeting to discuss roles and ownership stakes in the company. To quote the Mark Zuckerberg character in the film (emphasis is mine): “Now here’s the arrangement. Eduardo is CFO and owns 30% of the company.

Startup 146

Startup Film Team Meeting 146

Adam Sherk

MAY 24, 2011

Alterian recently released some data on the most popular summer blockbusters in social media, focusing specifically on movies with May and June release dates. According to their data Fast Five and Thor are far and away the most popular summer movies with each getting 38%+ of social media activity among the selected group of films: (click to enlarge).

Alterian 143

Alterian Social Media Film Sentiment 143

Adam Sherk

OCTOBER 26, 2011

I was talking with John Shehata from ABC News yesterday about Facebook, and he brought up an interesting question. What’s a better approach for journalists, creating official Facebook Pages or enabling the subscribe button on their regular profiles? Facebook is certainly encouraging the use of the new subscribe button. Journalists were specifically referenced in the launch post : The Subscribe button also lets you hear from interesting people you’re not friends with—like journalists, artis

Facebook 138

Facebook Widget Digg News 138

Adam Sherk

MARCH 7, 2011

There were some interesting posts over the weekend from Steve Cheney and Robert Scoble on whether utilizing Facebook Comments kills or in fact increases user authenticity within on-site commenting. TechCrunch also shared that comments are down but quality is up since implementing the system and they’re going to stick with it for the time being. As someone who limits his Facebook friends mainly to actual friends but who frequently reads and comments on industry and marketing blogs, for me the mai

Comments 132

Comments Publishing Facebook System 132

Adam Sherk

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

Pinterest is getting a lot of attention these days and deservedly so. The photo and video sharing site offers great opportunities for promoting lifestyle content and reaching niche audiences and specific demographics. Need a primer on Pinterest? Kerry Jones did an excellent one on the BlueGlass blog: Everything You Need to Know About Pinterest. While any photo-rich site can benefit from Pinterest, at least at this stage in its evolution there are particularly strong opportunities for lifestyle p

Publishing 130

Publishing NoFollow Brands Real Estate 130

Adam Sherk

JULY 27, 2011

While going through some old documents I came across an article I’d written on email press release best practices back in 1999. It’s a fun look back at the early days of online media relations so I thought I’d share it. I started doing online public relations activities in 1995 and from 1996-2000 I managed an online PR team and helped run an email press release service called Internet News Bureau that was eventually acquired by Internet.com.

Press Release 129

Press Release URL Process Groups 129

Adam Sherk

APRIL 19, 2011

eHow is back in the news after claims it was hit hard by latest expansion of Google’s Panda update and subsequent denials from Demand Media. Articles like “How to Pour Water Into a Glass Cup” make it difficult to dispute eHow’s reputation as the poster child of content farms. But in terms of keyword targeting, how different is eHow from major news sites?

Sites 125

Sites News Posterous Reputation 125

Adam Sherk

AUGUST 10, 2011

It has been a year since I took at look at the followers and activity of News Sites on the New Digg so I thought I would see how those official profiles are faring today. When I did my original post Digg v4 was just about to come out of alpha so there has been a significant increase in exposure for the profiles and many more publishers have created them.

Digg 121

Digg Publishing Yahoo Journal 121

Adam Sherk

SEPTEMBER 1, 2011

News publishers are all too familiar with the fact that Google News doesn’t always do such a great job of favoring original sources in its story clusters. It is not usual to see a syndicated, aggregated or simply re-covered version of an article gain prominent visibility over the original. Today I noticed an example that is worth pointing out because you’d think Google News would be able to handle it properly.

News 121

News Google Syndication Aggregator 121

Adam Sherk

DECEMBER 21, 2011

As another year comes to a close I thought I’d finish off with a roundup of this year’s most popular posts. Original idea! Nevertheless, here are my top 10 posts of 2011 by pageviews: Which NBA Teams Have Seen the Most Growth on Twitter and Facebook? PRFilter Shows Press Release Buzzword Abuse Still Prevalent. Google Expanded Sitelinks: Optimize Opening Text in META Description Tag.

SEO 119

SEO Publishing Press Release Social Media 119

Adam Sherk

FEBRUARY 2, 2011

While on The Huffington Post yesterday I couldn’t help but notice the large number of tags they’d added to a couple posts on the Kim Kardashian photo in W Magazine, and the terms being targeted. First on Kim Kardashian: W Magazine Showed ‘Full On Nipple’ : Then a link in that article led me to Kim Kardashian Goes NUDE For W Magazine : That’s when the full-on tag-o-rama began.

Sports 118

Sports SEO News Issues 118

Adam Sherk

JANUARY 20, 2011

For the past couple years Google has been embedding a Hot Trends graph in the regular search results for the top 100 fastest rising terms. I referenced this in my post on tools for monitoring search and social trends because it was a useful way to check for trending terms beyond the top 20 shown on the Hot Searches page. Then in December a colleague pointed out that the graphs were no longer being embedded in the search results.

Embedding 114

Embedding Trends Google Tools 114

Adam Sherk

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

Based on first impressions, I have to say I like The Washington Post’s Social Reader on Facebook. It offers a clean, simple user experience – big and open with lots of white space (in fact too big to capture well in a screenshot): (click to enlarge). There are enough additional sources to offer a wide range of content choices which makes it more engaging.

Facebook 111

Facebook Journal URL News 111

Adam Sherk

SEPTEMBER 14, 2011

When I got a Google Alert that my name appeared in an article on NFL jerseys, I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. Perhaps a reference to one of my social media super bowl posts? Nope! Instead it seems I’d been given the honor of being in the first sentence of a spam article that had scraped together a bunch of random content. I’m not going to link to it but it was on a subdomain of bloglines.co.za.

Press Release 111

Press Release Sports SEO Buy 111

Adam Sherk

JULY 8, 2011

Earlier this week Search Engine Land reported that Christian Oestlien, the Ads Lead for Google+, had posted a message asking businesses to hold off on using personal accounts to create business pages and that non-user profiles would be shut down. Quite a few media outlets have already created personal Google+ accounts and many of them are still up and running.

Google 111

Google News Engineering Report 111

Adam Sherk

JANUARY 12, 2011

By now most editorial sites are employing basic SEO best practices in the newsroom but how many are taking full advantage of every opportunity? To be successful an editorial staff needs to do more do more than just optimize headlines and title tags; there are a wide range of editorial SEO tactics that need to be employed. Here are some of the key areas to address: To be clear this is not meant to encompass the full spectrum of technical, editorial and marketing components in a comprehensive SEO

SEO 198

SEO Hitwise comScore Adwords 198

Adam Sherk

APRIL 4, 2011

The launch of Google’s Page Speed Online (which allows users to get Page Speed scores without installing a browser extension) reminded me that it has been a year since I looked at the page load times of major news sites. So I thought I’d go back and see if there have been any performance changes in the past year. Last year in 25 Major News Sites Ranked by Page Speed I ran the Page Speed tool on the home page of a selection of online news sites including newspapers, magazines, TV sites, wire serv

Sites 128

Sites News Google Yahoo 128

Adam Sherk

MARCH 30, 2011

Many publishers are now doing a good job of developing social media strategies for brand awareness, content promotion and user engagement. And they’ve made good strides in utilizing social media monitoring and measurement to better understand user behavior and quantify the success of their efforts. But is it possible to extract user intent in a meaningful way?

Publishing 131

Publishing Social Media Aggregator ROI 131

Adam Sherk

FEBRUARY 9, 2011

In reading a Search Engine Land article about Jason Calacanis’ remarks during “Ending the Content Arms Race” at Signal LA this passage caught my eye: Calacanis shows a “How to cook a turkey” page on Mahalo which he says has tons of good video content, then decries it has to compete against 17 different articles from eHow on every variation of how someone might want to cook a turkey.

SEO 163

SEO Compete URL Engineering 163