Andrea Caruso Online

Google to Add Page Loading Time to Quality Score

Google announced earlier this week that they will be adding your Website page’s loading time as a factor when determining the quality score for your Adwords campaign. In the Adwords help page, Google says this is an important factor because: 

Users value ads that bring them to the information they want as efficiently as possible. A high-quality landing page should have a fast load time as well as feature unique, relevant content. Fast load times benefit advertisers as well, since users are less likely to abandon a site that loads quickly.

If you’re not familiar with the quality score, but you’re planning to run a pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign via Adwords, get familiar with it. It’s a big factor in how much you will pay for your campaign for certain keywords. A good quality score, you pay less. A poor quality score, you pay more. The quality score is also a factor that contributes to your ad placement. (More about the quality score can be found on the “What is an Adwords Quality Score” page on the Adwords help page.)

According to the Google Webmaster blog, this change will happen in the next few weeks. When it goes live, you’ll see the page load time show up in the Keyword Analysis section of your Adwords account. 

Until then, want to get a jump on your page’s loading time? Check out Pingdom to get an analysis of your site’s loading time. If you find that it takes a long time to load, Google lists some factors that contribute to a slow loading time. 

If you don’t get to make some enhancements to improve your loading time before the feature launches, you won’t be too late. The system “re-evaluates landing pages on a regular basis”, so if your loading time gets better, your quality score should improve.

Related Reading:
Landing Page Load Time Will Soon Be Incorporated Into Quality Score 
How Does Load Time Affect My Landing Page Quality — Adwords Help
How Can I Improve My Landing Page’s Load Time — Adwords Help
Test Your Page Load Time Before Google Tests it For You

More Simple Ways to Boost Your Local Search Engine Rank

In a follow up to my post about helping local customers find your business online, here are a few more tips to help your local customers find you online.  

Content: In order to get people to your site, you need content on your site that matches what the person is searching for, whether it’s on your homepage, your about page, a blog, or any other internal page. For example, let’s assume you’re an Orlando, Fl area Italian restaurant. if you want to show up on Google for “orlando italian restaurant” and “italian restaurant in orlando”, you’ll need content that has those phrases in it. Additionally, you’ll want that content to read naturally so that it doesn’t throw up any red flags for Google (so don’t just make a page that says “italian restaurant, italian food, orlando italian restaurant, orlando italian food, orlando restaurant, orlando food”).

More about building incoming links: As I mentioned in the previous entry, if you can build relationships with other local businesses and get them to link back to you, Google sees that as a vote of confidence. You need these links to be contextually significant — in other words, not just a static list of links to businesses, but a link that incorporates keywords related to your business (even better if it can be in a paragraph about your business!) Using our example of the Orlando, FL Italian restaurant, in order to get the best out of that relationship, you’ll want them to link to your site using variances of phrases similar to “orlando italian restaurant”, because that means that site is “voting” for your Italian restaurant to show up in the search engine results when someone searches for those phrases. 

Optimize on your business name: In your incoming link strategy, your SEO strategy, your content strategy, and any PPC campaigns you run, don’t be afraid to optimize on your business name. After all, you want people to find YOUR business when they type your business name into Google!

Make sure you’ve been submitted to search engines: You can submit your site to Google, if you haven’t already done it, here: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Blogging: Keeping a page that’s frequently updated is really important in terms of SEO. Having a blog or articles on your site is a great way to keep the content fresh and keep your site near the top of the search engine results page. Also, submitting these articles to local news sites, bloggers, or social networks, or other local businesses, in hopes that they’ll review/link to/publish them is a great way to continue to boost your search engine rank.

If you need help getting ideas for keywords and keyword phrases to integrate into your content, Google can help you out with that. You can go to: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. You can enter a keyword to get suggestions based on that, and you can also have the tool analyze your website for keywords based on the content you already have.

Five Basic Tips For Building an SEO-Friendly Website Without a Web Design Expert

Internet marketing and Web design are two separate disciplines which work together. A designer makes a site that is easy to navigate and appealing to the visitor; Internet marketing is what brings the visitor to the site. That’s not to say that one is more important than the other, or that a Web Designer doesn’t know SEO (or visa versa). The fact is that people are not going to find your company just because your site is on the Internet. You need to do a little work to make that happen. The good news is that as long as you know a little basic HTML, you can do some of this work without consulting a Web designer.

1. Use text and HTML. Search engines can’t read images (other than alt tags), and therefore cannot index them. Likewise, search engines can’t index Flash. They need text and HTML in order to index your site. So keep that in mind before you shell out a million dollars on a Flash-only Web design. While you’re at it, make sure all of your HTML works, too. Google (and other search engines) don’t like sites that are full of deprecated tags or broken HTML.

2. Make sure you use the <title> tag. The title tag is so important when it comes to optimizing your HTML for SEO. The title tag needs include keywords that are relevant to your Web site or business. If you look at mine, it says “Social Networking, Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing and More | Andrea Caruso Online”. This tells the search engine that these keywords are relevant to my site, as well as what my site’s name is. The title tag is very important. Don’t ignore it!

3. Alt tags on images. Since search engines cannot “read” a picture, use of alt tags on images is really, really important because it gives the search engine a description of the picture (and therefore can index the image — especially good for Google Image Search). Want to be ranked for “baby photograph”? If you put an image on your site of a baby, make sure you include “alt=baby photograph” in your img tag.

4. Bold and italics. Use the <strong></strong> and <em></em> tags around content related to your site that you think is important for search engines to index. Search engines assume that since you’re using these tags to emphasize certain text, that the words or phrases you’re emphasizing are important, so it will in turn place emphasis on them in their indexing process.

5. Abandon the “click here”. Just like the <strong> and <em> tags, the anchor text you use for a link is seen as emphasized by search engines. So don’t ever link to an internal page with a link that says, “click here”! For example, if you’re linking to a page about really cool cars, say something like, “more about really cool cars”.

There are a lot more ways to optimize your site for search engines by cleaning up your HTML code, but I don’t claim to have a Web design degree so I can’t delve too much further into it. Check out the Related Reading for more tips. 

Related Reading:
Search Engine Ranking Factors
SEO 4 SEO Best Practices for HTML Authoring

Five Ways to Help Local Customers Find Your Business Online

Some customers are still more likely to buy goods and services in person rather than over the Internet, which is why local search optimization is integral to a company’s ability to attract new, local customers and increase profits. Using the proper strategies when optimizing a site for local search will help these customers find your business first.

The following are five tips to reach customers who might be looking for your business online. For the sake of brevity, I won’t go too in-depth, but if you have questions, please, post comments!

1. Get listed in local directories. Listing a business alongside its local competitors on free sites that its competitors are already listed on is a great way to increase visibility and make a business equally as accessible as its local competitors. Check out the regional directories at sites like Google Local, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, and DMOZ. 

2. Get reviewed and stay familiar with your customers’ opinions. Don’t underestimate the power of local business review sites, like Google (and other search engine) local review pages, Yelp.com (which can help your search rank on  Yahoo and Bing as well). There’s two things you’ll want to focus on with reviews — monitoring what customers are saying about you, good and bad, and getting customers to submit positive reviews of your business. I personally don’t condone paying for positive reviews, but posting on your Facebook fan page or tweeting on Twitter asking for this kind of feedback would be okay. (Just don’t spam your fans!)

3. Make sure customers know where you’re located. I’m sure this sounds like common sense, but make sure your address — along with city, state, and zip — is posted on your website! Bonus points if you can somehow get it listed on every page. Look into using the <address> HTML tag as well, which (according to w3schools.com) “defines the contact information for the author or owner of a document” and “is usually added to the header or footer of a webpage”. 

4. Get to know your local competition. Find out who your local competition is, and for what terms they rank highly for. Reach out to your competition and other local businesses to build a relationship where you can share links. For the best SEO benefit for both businesses, finding a way to incorporate the link in a contextually relevant way will go a long way boost your local search rank. 

5. Make sure you’re monitoring your traffic, too. Do not underestimate the power of analytics. Google Analytics is completely free and they will pretty much hold your hand through the installation process, so unless you have a really complicated site, it should be quick and painless. Once you’ve done this, make sure you’re looking at the right analytics. Run a local campaign? Create a landing page for that campaign, and track the traffic to that page. Look beyond the raw visits. How many return? What’s the bounce rate? What’s the conversion rate? Where do they live? (This is really important if you’re seeking to attract local customers!) 

This is not an all-inclusive list, but it’s definitely one way to get started on competing with other local businesses in your industry. For more tips, see the related reading section (below).

Related Reading:
8 Ways to Improve Your Local Search Results
3 Keys to Success For Local Search
The Beginner’s Checklist for Small Business SEO 

Twitter’s New Retweet Feature: A Win!

The other day, I signed into Twitter and was greeted with the following:

I love it.

For those of you not familiar with the concept of “retweeting”, this is the term used for when someone takes something you’ve posted to Twitter, copies it, and attributes it to your name. It would say something like: RT @andrea_caruso THIS IS AWESOME. It would display the retweeter’s Twitter name and their Twitter picture, though still attributed to you (hence the “RT @”)

The new feature is fantastic for companies that use Twitter to promote their brands, because now, when someone retweets your tweet, instead of showing their branding (username and picture) it shows yours! What a great way for Twitter to allow business to further increase their online visibility.

Using the “Your tweets, retweeted” tab also gives you a great chance to build relationships. It provides a streamlined view of who is talking about your tweets, so you can more efficiently respond, whether it’s just to thank them for retweeting or respond to any additional feedback the person might have added to the tweet.

This feature also promotes conversation, because it shows a list of everyone who retweets the item. This promotes the concept of social networking - it shows like-minded individuals who all have an opinion, good or bad, about an idea, and if done right, some great discussion could come out of it.

The only thing I’ve noticed is that, even though Twitter now removes the “RT @username” part and replaces it with the retweet symbol, that still counts in the 140 characters. I’d like to see that changed, since sometimes the tweet you’re retweeting is already 140 characters and you then have to edit the tweet to fit.

Those of you who have the feature, what are your thoughts?

Using Social Networks to Build Personal Brand

Last month I was very fortunate to be able to attend a webinar by Andy Beal, author of the online public relations and reputation management strategy book Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online (Amazon affiliate link) and the creator of Trackur (affiliate link), an online reputation management tool. In this webinar, he provided a lot of insight on how people can use the online tools that already exist to promote their corporate as well as their personal brands.

In this post, I want to relay a bit of what I learned from Andy Beal’s webinar as well as my own thoughts on building your personal brand online. There is more to this subject than I would dare try to fit in one blog post, so I will just cover the basics, but if you have questions, please comment, email me, or find me on Twitter.

What is personal branding? On the Internet, your personal brand is comprised of how you portray your unique values and skills, and your online reputation. Google yourself to find out what the top search engine results are for your name. That should give you a good starting point for figuring out what your online reputation is. If it’s non-existent, or bad, there are ways to fix it.

Why is a personal brand important, especially online? Many employers are using social networking to screen candidates, so having a strong personal brand online is your first opportunity to make a good impression. Secondary to that, social networking sites can help build your personal brand and establish yourself as an expert in your industry, which can help you in your job search, or if you are a business owner, can help you promote your business. Think about our President, Barack Obama, and how social networking contributed to his campaign in 2008. That is the power of social networking in terms of personal branding.

Start with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and Bebo. Those are the five biggest social networks right now and will help establish your presence online. Beal also suggested that you can also branch out into social bookmarking sites, such as Digg and Delicious, and social conversations such as Yahoo Answers and Google Groups to help establish yourself as an expert in your field. If this seems overwhelming at first, Beal recommended to pick one that is best suited to your needs and master it before moving on.

Finally blogging is an excellent way to build a personal brand. Start your own blog - it’s easy to do, relatively inexpensive and in some cases free, and gives you an open space to showcase your expertise.

If your reputation is non-existent, it’s not too late to get started. Beal recommended signing up with social networking sites even if you don’t plan to use them, since you can at least reserve your namesake in case you decide to use that platform in the future.

Finally, something that Beal didn’t discuss in detail during the webinar but he does discuss in Radically Transparent is the concept of monitoring your online reputation. Trackur will do this for you (for a very low $18/month for personal accounts), but if you’re a little more Internet savvy, you can get started by using Google Reader. Add feeds for Twitter searches for your name. Create Google Alerts for your name and add them to your Google Reader. Google’s Reader and Alerts are free and will give you a good head start on monitoring your online presence.

The next step would be controlling your online reputation, but to discuss that in any detail will require a post of its own, so look for that to come in the near future.

Sidenote: I read Radically Transparent as part of the Internet public relations course I took during my master’s degree program, and I have to say it is a very well-written and accurate analysis of how online reputation management works and how people and companies can promote, protect, and enhance their brands online. I very highly recommend it.

Got something to add? Questions? Comment, send me a tweet, or an email.

Related Reading:
How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power (NY Times) 
Nearly Half of Employers Use Social Networking Sites to Screen Candidates (Careerbuilder) 
Reputation Management Tips From the Brand Known as Andy Beal (personalbrandingblog.com)
10 Methods of Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses (cheasyy.com) - Could also very easily be translated for use in marketing a personal brand.

Top Five Pet Peeves in Email Marketing

Truth be told, I am not a fan of email marketing. When done right, it can be effective to regain the attention of customers who have lost interest, or continue to feed and improve existing customer relationships, but in my experience, most companies do not use effective strategies in targeting and segmenting their email newsletter lists, rendering their email marketing campaigns ineffective.

Over the past few days, I’ve been reviewing email advertising sent to my email account, and have compiled a list of my top five pet peeves when it comes to email marketing campaigns, in reverse order, so you’ll have to go to the bottom of the list to see what I find the most annoying when it comes to advertising emails.

5. The content of the email is completely irrelevant to me.

The best example I can give from my own email box is from a parenting newsletter I’m subscribed to. The site asks you for your child’s date of birth or due date, so that they can send you information about what your child should be doing at a certain age, milestones they should be working toward, and so on. So why, with an 18 month old, am I getting email advertising (presumably used to cover the cost of the company’s newsletter) about signing up for cord blood banking services? Not only do I not have any interest in this service, once a baby is born and you’ve taken them home from the hospital, you physically can’t use this service.

4. I can’t find a way to opt-out from your email newsletter without a magnifying glass.

I realize that it’s not ideal to have people want to opt-out of an email newsletter, but it happens. I recently got subscribed to an email mailing list because I had started to order a product from the company and then found a better deal elsewhere. When I started getting their newsletter twice a day (another pet peeve I will address shortly), I wanted to opt-out. Buried in some legal mumbo jumbo at the very end of the email, in four point font, was a link to “change your email settings”.

To be fair, the company smartly offered me a 25% off coupon after I had unsubscribed (great strategy!), but at that point I was so annoyed by the fact that they had hit on two of my five pet peeves that I didn’t want to do business with them anymore.

3. The subject line in your email doesn’t grab my attention.

I don’t have much to say about this, other than that if your email headline says something to the effect of “Hi friend”, or “Just for person@emailaddress.com”, I’m not going to open the email. You might be legitimate, you might be part of a phishing scheme, but from this headline, I have no way to know, and I’m not going to open the email to find out. Where is the targeting? Where is the call to action?

2. Your email newsletter sends me so a page I don’t have access to!

I can understand, sometimes you want to send an email newsletter to get someone to sign up for premium content on your website, especially if you’re a blogger or news-oriented site. However, it is really annoying to see a headline and summary for an awesome story in an email newsletter, and then click on the link and be told “Sorry, you need to be a paid subscriber to view this content.” When this happens, I just feel tricked, like my intelligence has been insulted.

My suggestion: link to free content within the email newsletter, then within the free content, offer links to premium content (and indicate on your website whether that content is premium or free before I click the link).

Furthermore, if your email newsletter has broken links…shame on you.

1. You send too much email!

I cannot express how annoying it is to get email advertising from a company three times a week. If I haven’t purchased from you in six months (or never), emailing me multiple times within a week isn’t going to change my mind. Be smart — segment your email lists based on purchase history and frequency. If I’ve bought from you in the last month, I might want to hear from you weekly or biweekly. If it’s been six months or more (or never), I might only want to hear from you once a month.

Related Reading:
Creating a Good Email Marketing Strategy (Clickz.com)
Finding Success with Targeted Email Campaigns (Constant Contact’s blog)

Adding Meaning to Metrics on Blogs, Plus Commentary on Google Analytics’ Intelligence

I recently read/watched a blog by web analytics evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, on the new Google Analytics Intelligence features. At this time, I haven’t had a chance to play with them, since the feature is still being rolled out and my account does not yet have access, but I was inspired and wanted to discuss a little bit about putting meaning to metrics. In this post, I’ll be focusing on blogs, but some of this could easily be adapted for use in e-commerce and news sites.

Anyone with any kind of website can get Google Analytics. It’s free and easy — on the surface. You embed the script in your site’s code and about 24 hours later, you start getting some information on your site’s traffic. Notice the emphasis on the word traffic. Traffic is a metric in the sense that it measures something, but in order to really be web analytics, you need to put meaning to that traffic. In other words, you figure out what that something is that your traffic is measuring.

Say, for example, you’re a blogger who has Google Analytics running, and you notice that your most recent blog post got 50% more visits than the average. That’s a statistically significant increase in raw traffic, but what caused that blog post to get more traffic? Where did they come from? How did they find it? How engaged were the visitors?

Given the above questions, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that in the grand scheme of things, raw traffic means absolutely nothing. The fact that someone clicked on a link does not translate to quality, and unless you’re getting paid per impression, you do not benefit from an increase in raw traffic.

Think of it this way: On a blog, you’re selling content. On an e-commerce site, you’re selling products. Does an e-commerce site benefit from someone clicking on a product page and doing nothing else, or worse, hitting the back button or closing the browser? You might see a slight increase in product awareness from that, but even that relationship is tenuous.

So, if raw traffic is meaningless and we need to measure engagement, what metrics should we look at? While not all-inclusive (I will keep this brief since this post is already long), the two things you’ll want to measure are:

- Are visitors staying on the page long enough to actually read the content?
- Do I have a low bounce rate? (Generally, bounce rate measures how frequently people leave your site and go to another site.)

So why is measuring visitor engagement on a blog important? Well, for one, it tells you what types of content work best for your audience, so you can create more of that and less of what they don’t like. This helps you keep the audience you have, and ideally, gain a larger audience (perhaps even through word of mouth) because you have a consistently good product. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, if your site is monetized through affiliate advertising, either cost per action or cost per impression, more time spent on the page means more exposure to the advertising on your site.

Once the new Google Analytics Intelligence features roll out, you’ll be able to set up custom alerts for these metrics, so you can create segments for your best and least performing content without having to dig. For example, you could set up an alert for content that has that tragic 90% bounce rate, but you could also set up alerts for content that has a magical 10% bounce rate.

I would go into further detail, but I don’t have access to the tool yet, and besides, Kaushik does a much better job of explaining Google Analytics Intelligence on his site. Make sure you check out the videos, they’re the best part.

If you’ve got anything to add, feel free to comment, email me, or send me a tweet!

Related Reading:
This I Believe [A Manifesto for Web Marketers & Analysts] - Avinash Kaushik
Analytics Becomes Intelligent. Hello Insights! - Avinash Kaushik
Wikipedia’s entry on Bounce Rate

Social Networking in Uncertain Times

I live and work in Orlando, Florida. Yesterday, fifteen minutes from where I work, there was a shooting at a high rise office building. One person was killed, five were injured.

How did I first learn about this situation happening so close to where I sat?

Facebook.

During lunch, I hopped on Facebook and there it was. I wasn’t the only one in my office to hear about this through a social networking site, either. A few minutes later, a co-worker returned from lunch and checked Twitter and found out about it. A few minutes after that, my another colleague returned from lunch and said she’d read about it on Facebook on her mobile phone.

Five minutes after that, I got Facebook messages and wall posts from friends in other states, asking about the situation, what I knew about it, if we were safe, and so on.

Fast forward to the day before that, when the tragic shooting in Ft. Hood, TX took place. I first read about this on Twitter. I discussed it with people on an message board.

In this day and age, news spreads so fast via social networking sites — so much so that many people use social networking sites as their primary means of finding out what’s going on in the world. As I sat back and thought about how I learned of yesterday’s incident, I was reminded of another incident that took place eight years ago.

On September 11, 2001 I got in my car to drive to work. I turned on the radio and heard about a plane hitting the twin towers. I went to work, business as usual, and kept the radio on in the background. That’s how me and my coworkers heard about the second plane. The pentagon. United 93. The falling buildings, the trapped firefighters, and so on. When I got home, I called and emailed friends in New York City to make sure they were okay. I watched the news on TV. I bought the newspaper on September 12. I read CNN.com.

There were no alerts being pushed to my smartphone from Facebook, no Tweets to tell me what was going on in my world. I didn’t write on Facebook walls to find out how people were doing, I called them. The news moved slower. Communication moved slower. It was a different time.

(Please note that in no way am I saying that the Orlando shooting and Ft. Hood are comparable to 9/11, because they’re not.)

In the past eight years, social networking sites have had tremendous impact on the pace of news. We can get hold of our friends faster during scary situations, we can quickly share news as it unfolds, and even better — news outlets can get news to the population faster. You no longer have to wait for the morning newspaper to come, or for the 5 p.m. television news report — all you need to do is follow CNN (or your favorite news outlet) on Facebook and Twitter or sign up for mobile alerts.

Fast forward to today, with the House working to pass or kill the new health care bill, and we have another great example of how Web 2.0 is being used for disseminating news. Check out the Huffington Post, who is using the new Twitter Lists to inform as well as fuel discussion of the health care debate, as well as tweets by Democrat and Republican representatives. How cool to, at a glance, be able to take a look at the discussion as well as get the left and right wing views of the bill right on one page.

I think social networking benefits both the population and news outlets. In an age where the newspaper is a dying medium, news organizations can revitalize themselves by using social networking when and where it counts.

How has social networking changed your access to news? Comment, email, or sent me a tweet!

Additional reading:
Out of Print: Death and Life of the American Newspaper (the New Yorker online)
Orlando Sentinel’s Twitter (Read this to see an example of tweets during the Orlando shooting incident)
Details about the Orlando shooting incident (Orlando Sentinel)
Health Care Debate LIVE on Twitter (Huffington Post)

Twitter Lists: Pros and Cons

I am a fan of all things Twitter. Last month, when Twitter rolled out their new Twitter Lists, I was excited to get down to business and start categorizing my followers.

The new lists functionality is an excellent business move on Twitter’s part. Until now, people had to use third party applications, such as Tweetdeck, to organize their Twitter followees, and I am sure a side effect of this was that the Twitter site itself received fewer visits. This is not exactly the best thing for them if they ever plan to monetize the site.

Twitter lists give users that missing functionality. Other social networking sites, especially Facebook, already allow you to categorize your friends, family, co-workers, and set up privacy functions around those customizations.

This new functionality was widely discussed in the blogosphere. For example, Internet marketing guru Chris Brogan, discusses one negative aspect of lists — the fact that they are exclusionary by nature. You can read his take on this in his post titled Twitter Lists - I’m Not Down.

Brogan makes valid point. Extending beyond categorizing your friends and family (who might be hurt if they’re excluded from one list or another, depending in how you’ve set up your lists), suppose you’re a company categorizing your clients via Twitter’s lists. Perception is a tricky thing, my friends, and how you perceive and categorize your clients may not necessarily be how they see themselves.

On the flip-side, there are many ways that lists can be useful. Above I mentioned categorizing lists for reading purposes. For example, on my Twitter page, I have categories for Friends and categories for News. I don’t always want to read the news, but I love to find out what my friends are up to, so this allows me to skip news posts and just read what my friends are saying. Additionally,  post on Mashable gives 10 Ways You Can Use Twitter Lists, all of which provide an interesting and very purposeful uses of Twitter lists that individuals and businesses alike can benefit from.

My favorite of the suggestions in the Mashable article is to build a directory of employees. If you’re a small business and you’re using Twitter to promote yourself, why not have your employees set up Twitter accounts? They can be separate from their “personal” Twitter accounts, and if done right, this use of social networking gives your company a welcome, inviting, friendly Internet presence.

The Mashable article brings up one of my two concerns about Twitter lists, when it suggests creating location-based lists. I think this opens up the potential for safety risks. For example, a person may not specify on their Twitter account, blog, website, or anywhere else where they live — especially in the case of bloggers who wish to remain somewhat anonymous. A friend might add them to their location list, giving away that they live, for example, in San Antonio, TX. This is not so much a big deal for businesses, but can be risky for individuals wishing to protect their online presence.

My only other concern about Twitter lists is their impact on public relations efforts. Companies work hard to protect their online reputation, and there are individuals out there who will have a bad experience with a company, and will use Twitter to make it known. Lists add one additional way to do this. Imagine if your company was added to a “bad businesses” list. Fortunately, Twitter allows you to see which lists you’ve been added to, and hopefully your company has an effective online PR department who can address this, but with the rapid pace of online communication, this can be difficult. I don’t think Twitter notifies you when you’re added to a list yet (I may be wrong, so if I am, feel free to correct me), so without an email notification or RSS feed, it will be tricky to keep up with this.

Thoughts on Twitter lists? Feel free to send me a tweet or an email.

Related Reading:

Chris Brogan: Twitter Lists: I’m Not Down
Mashable: 10 Ways You Can Use Twitter Lists
Huffington Post: Twitter Lists: Open House or Velvet Rope