So many digital communications channels, yet so little time. As more and more channels emerge for website traffic acquisition, it becomes ever more important to accurately measure a channel’s effectiveness. That means asking and answering difficult, if sometimes awkward, questions of the type “Does anyone really engage with the monthly newsletter?”. If readers are engaging, where exactly does the engagement occur, i.e. which links get clicked? In the case of social media marketing, does anyone really care enough about Facebook page posts or twitter tweets to click through to the company website?

Have you ever wondered how to insert a proper link in the Website box on your Facebook profile? Not just a raw URL, but a URL with user-friendly clickable text?

Don’t bother trying normal html, it doesn’t work.

The solution is actually rather trivial. Just enter each link URL followed by its associated anchor text, one per line, i.e.

http://antezeta.com/news/ Web Marketing News & Views
https://plus.google.com/109425077132341219276 Google+
https://www.facebook.com/sean.carlos Facebook Profile

You should then see something like this

Currently there seems to be a limit of 6 websites.

Email is still one of the most widely used Internet tools and, as such, a great marketing tool not to overlook. Like other web marketing tools, email marketing has an advantage in that it is also highly measurable.  That said, there remains much confusion among professionals on how to measure email marketing and what metrics are reliable.  Recently the industry group the Email Experience Council finally defined standards for email marketing measurement, as the Web Analytics Association did in 2007 for websites.

The historical email marketing metrics

Before considering the new metrics definitions, its worth understanding what metrics have historically been used in order to better understand the rationale underlying the EEC standards.

Ever notice how MS Office can import umpteen different document formats but export options are pretty much limited to Microsoft formats (by the way, rtf is a Microsoft format)? This is by design. Smart companies have realized that data is an asset, to use strategically, including as a barrier to keep customers from jumping to the competition.

Why data portability does really matter

The ability to transfer data from one application to another, data portability, is becoming an issue for users on the social web as they try to find the social and business contacts they cultivated on one social site on other social websites. Contacts accumulated in Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and similar sites don’t happen by chance. They’re the fruit of socializing with friends and professional networking over time: activity such as photographing the moment, speaking at conferences, contributing at barcamps, and, why not, just being simpatico. Activities people do, not Facebook, not LinkedIn, not Google+. A social website is just a container, albeit a significant container. If a user has worked hard to fill the container, they should be able to transfer their contents, at will. That includes priceless contact information which has been shared with them. The user shouldn’t be locked into the container.

It might be wise to say up front that I’m ecstatic over the launch, albeit, in limited test, of Google+. Google+ is already a significant improvement over Google’s other, often forgotten social site, Orkut, and seems to demonstrate that Google has learned a lot from its other previous social efforts like Friend Connect and it’s twitter-like Buzz.

Google says it is currently focusing on consumer usage of Google Plus, which explains the absence of business profile support. Unfortunately, Google seems to have underestimated the mixed professional and social use of social networking sites today: many potential users cannot create a profile with their primary email address as addresses associated with Google Apps aren’t currently supported. This is kind of surprising as one would have thought that Google itself is in this situation, but their internal version of Google Apps must have an extended feature set!

Joomla is one of the most used content management systems (CMS) on the web, trailing only WordPress in popularity. Like other common web CMSes, Joomla requires a bit of tweaking in order to achieve Search Engine Optimization (SEO) bliss. One of Joomla’s annoyances is an insistence in spewing out bad meta tags. Fortunately, these problems can be resolved by correctly defining Joomla’s Global settings and by applying a small patch to Joomla’s core code.

Joomla meta robots tag issues

By default, Joomla outputs a default robots meta tag,

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />

which is superfluous extra page weight as index, follow is the default for robots. To a SEO professional, the presence of this useless tag is rather embarrassing. The default robots meta tag exists in Joomla versions 1.5 and 1.6. While you can override the robots value on an article by article basis – and there can be very good reasons to do so – you cannot suppress the default index, follow value.

While Facebook captures the hearts and minds of many internet navigators (around 600 million users as of January 2011), Google has been been working on its version of the social web, releasing a myriad of services which facilitate social interaction on the web. Some, such as buzz, were ill-conceived and justly lambasted on their release. Yet others, like Google Friend Connect (GFC), probably haven’t gotten the attention they deserve. Google’s Friend Connect offers a broad set of basic functionality to support the creation and nurturing of a website community.

Sometimes its easy to overlook how social Google has become – from Google Social Search which gives results from a user’s social circle more prominent display to Google Friend Connect which provides building blocks to make any website social.

What becomes clear after perusing the list of Google social web tools is that Google seems to be missing a central activity hub such as… Facebook. With the launch of Google Buzz Google tried address this problem by transforming Gmail into their social hub but that effort predictably fell flat.

Google CEO Larry Page tied 2011 bonuses to the success of Google’s social strategy but will bonuses stimulate a and execute a coherent social strategy?

Google Social	Google Description	Date released	Date closed	Notes	Video	Twitter
	Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.	2011-03-30		Used in discussion lists as approval shorthand	video

It happens to every company and / or professional which wants to promote their products and services on social networks: they are asked to permit the social network to access a contact list in order to find contacts which are already on the social network and to invite others to join them on the social network. A find contacts feature can be an excellent opportunity to quickly grow presence and influence on a social network, but it is also a process that contains many potential pitfalls. The sections that follow consider some of the most important traps and look at how the use of a temporary webmail mailbox can help in avoiding many problems.

Google has finally launched Google Shopping search in Italy, more than 8 years after they launched Froogle, the original name for Google Shopping (called Google Product search in the US). Google shopping has been available in the UK and Germany since 2004.

Figure 1. Google Shopping Search home page in Italy Companies wishing to include their products in Google Product search need to upload their data using Google’s Merchant center, previously known as Google Base.

AdWords advertisers should look into AdWords product ad extensions which allow advertisers to highlight products directly in Google search ads and/or and Google Images ads in the Google Search Network. Ad extensions for products are available in the US, UK and now Italy (and a few other countries including Australia, Spain and the Netherlands).