Once again Gary Vaynerchuk is RIGHT!

Check this viral video out. It’s unbelievable.

Jesse Newhart (@jessenewhart) has posted an amazing video on YouTube on how you can get the most out of Twitter using Tweetdeck. Check it out. How do you have your Tweetdeck setup? Post your comments below.

Google’s Analytics team has put together a great video to help people fully understand the power of their analytics program. It’s worth checking out. I’d like to hear what you think and how you use analytics for your Website. Post them below.

A must watch from Gary Vaynerchuk. He makes some very good points about leveraging your brand on the Internet and how if a company isn’t they need to be.

Recently Google screwed up. The search giant found a bug that shared unshared documents in Google’s famed Google Docs with others. According to their figures only affected 0.05% of users, the the implications are huge for the idea of putting everything in the cloud.

Dear Google Docs user,

We wanted to let you know about a recent issue with your Google Docs account. We’ve identified and fixed a bug which may have caused you to share some of your documents without your knowledge. This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets.

To help remedy this issue, we have used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as being affected. Since the impacted documents are now accessible only to you, you will need to re-share the documents manually. For your reference, we’ve listed below the documents identified as being affected.

We apologize for the inconvenience that this issue may have caused. We want to assure you that we are treating this issue with the highest priority.

The Google Docs Team

Granted there is an inherent risk to putting your documents online, but a snafu like this could have cost companies using the Google “operating system” tons of money.

The draw to using the Cloud for computing is simple. You can access your documents and files from anywhere in a “secure maner.” Now Google says it’s fixed the problem, but should we trust that it won’t happen again? I’m not so sure.

What are your thoughts. Post them in the comments.

Gary Vaynerchuk had another great video posted today about how a hip/swanky hotel’s brand was damaged because of a decision they made. Never under-estimate the power of social media. Check Gary out on Twitter at @garyvee

I was in Miami last night and we had a little run-in with the hotel, which led to some tweets about the situation, which led to a person changing their mind about using the hotel. Watch as Dave Morin and Josh Elman of Facebook and David Recordon of 6 apart tell the story.

“Every Touch Matters”

Gary Vaynerchuk has a great video about following your passion and not a buck. He talks about how those who are passionate but not as talented as those who are just out for a buck in an industry will still do better because they will put in more effort and in the long run do better. Gary does a better job of explaining. I’d like to hear your POV. Post your comments below:

Dear Readers,

Apparently, sethgoldstein.net has been linking to another site about a woman Wanda Spann’s advocacy site. Now I have no idea how this is happening and I’ve been getting almost daily calls from a nice lady involved with the group trying to figure out how my site is linking to theirs. I’ve told her everytime that there is no link from my site to theirs and that there is a bug in their site or it’s just a matter of link juice some how being passed over to them. Apparently the higher-ups in the organization are a bit ticked (for reasons I still have yet to figure out) and are demanding that this nice woman call me to figure this out. Now like I’ve told her, I have nothing to do with those links going to her site. I’ve never linked to her site before. But in the interest of sending so link juice to a good cause, I’m sending a link to them now. Please if you get a chance check out the site about Justice for Wanda Spann and form your own opinions about their site.

As of right now, I’m beyond perplexed and I’d be happy if this all just disappeared. Honestly I have no idea how it all started in the first place.

Thanks for listening.

Okay, now I am a fan of John C. Dvorak. I’m a big fan of Cranky Geeks and TWIT and his blog. But I do think he is a bit full of cow poop sometimes. Especially when he decides from one bad experience withe “SEO” that SEO and those practicing it are a bunch of crackpots. Now I respect his opinion, but I really think Dvorak is shooting from the hip here with no real aim. Now I have to admit that he is a bit of an aquired taste, and though many might think he’s a total jerk and crank, I feel that he’s just a bit off with this accusation. Mark Jackson over at Search Engine Watch has a great column responding to Dvorak’s crankyness. Here’s a excerpt:

An article in a major publication last week disparaged SEO, calling it “snake oil” once again. How did the columnist decide SEO doesn’t work, and that its practitioners are a bunch of snake oil salesmen? Well, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (I hasten to give him any attention, as that’s what he and his editor are after) had rewritten his URLs to make them search engine friendly, but lost traffic in his efforts.

Here’s his exact quote:

Search engine optimization (SEO) has turned into a big business, and from what I can tell it’s the modern version of snake oil. The unproven nonsense spewed by so-called “SEO Experts” simply doesn’t work. And worse, it’s screwing up the elegance of the Web.

Ugh. Here we go again.

First off, dear readers, I exchanged e-mails with his editor-in-chief, and even offered to rebuke this column in a column of my own on his Web site. I just can’t let false claims such as his stand uncontested. When people write columns like this, it affects our industry.

We, as an industry, accept that many people have jumped on the SEO bandwagon, calling themselves SEOs when they have a difficult time even writing compelling title tags. We know that some people will quickly respond to RFPs, get a prospect to cut a few checks, and deliver little in return. Then, there are those of us who have studied for years to understand what good SEO is and worked hours helping our clients achieve measurable results.

OK, time to respond to the column. Begrudgingly, I’ll link to it so you can read it for yourself. At least we can discuss something that works for SEO: good URL structure.

Optimizing URL Structure

The columnist refers to the “fact” that long URLs don’t work. Here’s what he wrote:

My blog had typical, efficient WordPress default URLs, such as http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=3100 or some such thing. Now on my current blog, that particular URL — which used the simple story ID number to access the post — has been supposedly SEO-optimized behind this URL: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2005/10/20/hollywood-unions-want-cut-of-itunes-pie/.

From what I can tell, this guy did at least one thing wrong — and possibly two — with this one element of proper SEO. I wish I could speak with him directly to confirm my suspicions, and perhaps even teach him a thing or two about what real SEO involves (much more than just one thing).

First, there’s really nothing “wrong” with his original URL structure (/blog/?p=3100). There are only two trailing backslashes.

So what if the URL has a couple of dynamic characters in it (the question mark and equals sign are referred to as “dynamic” characters). Search engines nowadays do fine indexing and ranking these. So long as you’re keeping your content as close to the root as you can, you should be in good shape.

However, it’s not “optimal.” How do we make this optimal? We “optimize.”

via Ignorance: The Trouble with People Who Claim SEO is Snake Oil – Search Engine Watch (SEW).