We’re happy to be working with Blake Biesecker, our new chief technology officer here at AboutUs. Blake has been on the Portland technology scene for quite a while – he was CTO at Second Porch (which was purchased by Home Away earlier this year) and chief architect at SnapNames (and then at Oversee.net after it purchased SnapNames). He also worked at Gemstone Systems and Object Intelligence.

Blake has settled in quickly, and is turning his attention to hiring more developers to join AboutUs. We’re creating some exciting new things here, so if you have the skills we’re looking for, we’d love to hear from you: Jobs@AboutUs.org.

Are you a software developer who’s got the skills to pay the bills? Or do you know one?

Here at AboutUs we’re entering a period of growth, and expanding our team of builders to meet the demands of this new chapter in our company’s history.

AboutUs is a small, growing, venture-backed and profitable company based in Portland, Oregon.  Our office is open, our culture is entrepreneurial, and our people are skilled, creative and driven. We launched AboutUs.org in 2006 and it’s now one of the most visited places on the Internet. Now we’re tackling the Saas space with our SEO and website analysis tool, and we’re gaining traction.

Our work environment is ideal. There are more windows than walls in our spacious office. Our desks are on wheels, with 30″ cinema displays mounted on adjustable arms. The views of downtown and northeast Portland are unmatched. We play music, share laughs, and fly paper airplanes from one end of the space to the other.

We play harder than less successful companies work. Our ping pong table subs as a conference table. There’s lunch hour yoga once a week. The kitchen and refrigerator are always stocked. We strive to ensure you arrive each morning to find engaging, challenging, and rewarding work.

We’re looking for someone to impress us, and then grow with us. We offer competitive salary and benefits in a great work environment. For more information, visit our Careers page.

I know what you are thinking, YASN! Yet Another Social Network. Comparisons have been made to Facebook and Twitter because Google’s new project combines communication types that they each have – in one tool. Long time AboutUs community member Matt Stephenson at RentItToday asks this question: Is Google Plus a Sexy Twitter or Clean Facebook?

Whatever Google+ is, it is elegant by many people’s standards, and it is a new way to communicate online. I and many other people I have talked to say we haven’t had this level of communicating on Twitter or Facebook – and we are enjoying it.

The funniest way I have heard it described is “And they give you a list of friends and you stuff them in the hole, like Silence of the Lambs, except you are sending them images and text messages and hanging out with them on video chats.” (via Paul Ford)

We are nearly 3 weeks in to the public beta of Google+ and brands are just emerging as identities, next to people. Some are really happy that they haven’t been flooded by brands and some can’t wait for Google+ to launch its way for brands to interact there. I know that both AboutUs and RentItToday are on the list waiting to get in and to see what happens.

One of the things that excites me is the fact that Google has figured out a way to give you your data from all of its projects in a download. This is precedent setting because – they make it easy for you to leave and go somewhere else. If the folks at the IndyWebCamp have anything to do with the future of the internet – it will be open source and even better than Google+.

Whatever the outcome of brands being introduced to Google+, and in general with the product – one thing is certain – Google has a hot commodity on it’s hands.

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When was the last time you edited – or even looked at – your website's profile on AboutUs.org?

It could probably use some love. It may be missing something like contact info or a summary at the top. And we bet you'd be amazed at how much you can do in the Wiki section to transform your site's page into a beautiful marketing piece for your company.

Take a look at some outstanding website profiles, and learn how to do cool things with wiki formatting.

Find the page about your website by searching for it (like example.com) at the top right on AboutUs.org. To edit, sign in a blue pencil icon on the page.

Bonus! Once you're happy with a page, let us know and we can make its links to your website DoFollow. Those are the type of links that help your SEO, and DoFollow pages also show up much higher in AboutUs.org search results.

More Coming Soon + Free Trial
We're working to make the Site Report a more robust SEO tool for you.  Stay tuned for a few new features next week.

Aren't using the Site Report yet? Click to try it free for a week. If you ever stop loving it, you can cancel any time.

Questions? We want to help you create a great page.
Chat with us, reply to this email, or call 1.800.AboutUs or +1.503.488.5763

No April Fools, folks: Eric Schmidt, the “grownup” CEO who’s led Google for the past 10 years, asked the search giant to delete information about a political contribution he’d made from its search results.

This explosive tidbit comes from Steven Levy’s new book about Google, In the Plex, via the New York Times review, and further broadcast by Business Insider.

Never mind that Sheryl Sandberg, who was an executive at Google at the time (she’s now operations chief of Facebook), apparently nixed Schmidt’s request. It still points to exactly what people fear most about Google: that the company’s position as the world’s No. 1 search engine will lead to abuses of one kind or another.

Yes, Google is a private company, not a public agency. But its dominance, coupled with the increasingly central place the Web occupies in our lives, makes Google into almost a public utility. When 70 percent of the world uses your search engine to get information, do you have the right to censor its results?

On a more human level, I never fail to be surprised by the impulse of powerful people to eff up make the wrong decision. Okay, so a few hundred, or even thousand, people may have wanted to know which party or candidates Schmidt backed – and yes, that could have lessened some people’s opinion of him. I’m willing to bet that the number of people who now hold him in somewhat lower regard is bigger by orders of magnitude.

As the largest wiki directory of websites on the internet, we want to shout this out loud!

If you’ve ever made a wiki better, pass along your birthday wishes at the original wiki! Here’s a wiki birthday greeting to wiki lovers from Ward Cunningham, the inventor of wiki:

Best to anyone who ever made a wiki better. Thanks. — Ward

If the simplicity of wiki editing seems scary — “What!?! I don’t have to log in to edit? How will that ever work?”  – Then go ahead and ‘like’ the wiki birthday celebration page on Facebook.

You might even want to post something longer, like Alex William of ReadWriteWeb.com. He wrote a great story of how he was introduced to wiki. Maybe you’d enjoy seeing what people wrote for the past two wiki birthdays: WikiBirthday 15 and WikiBirthday 14.

You might know AboutUs as a resource for great SEO advice. Maybe you didn’t realize that AboutUs offers every website on the internet a wiki profile page, which we encourage you to improve. Kate Ford thinks we are the Slickest Wiki In Town, in part because we provide friendly hands-on help to anyone who asks.

Andreas, who’s known AboutUs for a long time, pointed out in a recent post, “AboutUs.org has developed from ‘just’ a wiki about sites to a good resource for information for webmasters and web site owners.”

We love Wiki. Linking is arguably the most valuable thing on the web, and wiki is the easiest, purest form of linking. You can even link to a page that doesn’t exist yet, creating an invitation for anyone to edit and provide good information. What could be more creative?

Backlinks get you only partway there

Every so often someone writes a weblog post about the top websites to get an immediate backlink from – and we are often included in these lists. This is really great, and an AboutUs backlink is just the tip of the iceberg!

The good folks at Search Engine People included us in their list of backlink sources in Get Your New WordPress Blog Indexed In 24 Hours [checklist].

What we want folks to know about is that you can do sooooo much more at AboutUs.

Firstly, check out our weblog series on how to improve your wiki page.

Secondly, check out our NoFollow policy – I think you will appreciate it.

Thirdly, check out the Website Visibility Report for your website’s homepage.

Lastly, we have a great collection of articles for people to learn SEO – search engine optimization – and online marketing. Best part is, they are written in plain, jargon-free English.

Keep your eyes out for an announcement next week – there is a new product on the way that takes the Website Visibility Report even further!

Just found a press release from PositiveRevolution.org today that mentions AboutUs and is similar to our article on the subject.

Here is the part about us:

3.Wikis: these types of websites allow users to add or edit almost any page on the site. In addition to Wikipedia, you can use websites such as AboutUs.org and LoveToKnow.com to create positive content about your company. Do not spam wikis. Only add information about your company if it’s appropriate. Spamming can backfire.

See what other strategies are mentioned in the press release.

Last week I had a great opportunity to attend the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego.  It’s a conference that attracted more than 1,000 professionals from across the country and globe who were eager to learn more about online marketing and SEO from expert speakers.

I decided to take and share my notes on Twitter so that I wouldn’t run the risk of not being able to read my handwriting later, or losing my notepad.  And I’m glad I did — I connected with several great people who noticed my tweets and then recognized me in a session.  (Side note: This is the big benefit of using your real name as your Twitter handle and having an avatar that looks like you.)

You can see my tweet notes from OMS here (look for the #OMS11 hashtag from February 8-10) for bite-sized nuggets of insights as I heard them.  In this blog post I have digested the key things I learned or had re-affirmed at the Online Marketing Summit for easier and more thorough consumption:

• Local and mobile are the big trends to prepare for. One speaker said a trend to watch out for is sites being pushed down in search results by local results.  To compete in the local space, the first thing you will want to do is claim your Google Places and other listings. People are checking email more and more from their mobile phone, so keep your marketing emails and newsletters short. Use fewer images and a compelling subject line.

• Reviews are very important.
  • More and better reviews of your company (on Google, CitySearch, etc.) can help you rank better for local SEO.
  • Visible reviews for products on e-commerce sites can help build trust and make your visitors more likely to convert or purchase.

• Site speed is more important for SEO than we thought. Two speakers stressed the importance of site speed for SEO and rankings, including empirical tests by Covario.  This makes our article about simple ways to make your website load faster even more relevant, so I loved hearing it.

• Content is key. Creating more content on your site provides more opportunities to get linked to, and fresh content can help keep search engines coming back to your site.  The more content the better, but don’t sacrifice quality: You can do all the online marketing in the world, but it won’t help much if your content isn’t good.  If you don’t have the time or resources to devote to building content, look for opportunities to:
  • Take offline content and put it on your site
  • Re-purpose content you already have
  • Add basic content to pages that don’t have any, like product category pages on an e-commerce site

• Don’t forget about people once they’re on your site. It can be easy to focus entirely on getting more people to your website, but don’t forget about what really matters: visitors converting into customers.  Several OMS sessions focused on testing, conversion, and usability, all with the goal of making the most out of your visitors.  One simple but often overlooked change that can improve your conversion rate is making your call to action (like the “add to cart” or “sign up” button) more obvious. Tim Ash suggested making sure your mother-in-law could figure out and do what your site wants her to do.

• Know your target audience and goals. This is important at every stage, whether you’re choosing keywords, designing your home page or writing content.

• Social is even more important now that it’s a ranking factor. The Online Marketing Summit was abuzz with talk of social media. It’s important as a stand-alone marketing tool, plus now it can influence your site’s SEO.  Rand Fishkin shared how SEOmoz shot to Page One of results for a particular search after a tweet linking to his site was retweeted about 100 times.

• Links are still very important for SEO. Several speakers said that about 75 to 80 percent of ranking is tied to the backlinks to your site.

I look forward to attending SearchFest and other online marketing events so I can share the latest and greatest insights about online marketing with you.

Five years ago, a company’s gaffe or misstep might have taken time to notice, and then passed quickly from view. It might even have stayed below the radar.

Today, no such luck. We’re all focused on how quickly the Internet and media can get our message out. Even when our message starts in traditional media, there’s the desire for the Holy Grail of “going viral.” But going viral can backfire on us.

As we look at the Groupon and Kenneth Cole episodes discussed in our Train Wreck entries, I find myself looking back to the time before Twitter, Facebook and other instant feedback enabled by the Internet. The Kenneth Cole scenario would have been non-existent – that misguided remark would not have been noticed in the least. Sure, the audience for the SuperBowl was still massive, so Groupon’s misstep would have still been noticed, and remarked on in the media. But larger notice would have been buried, slow to develop, or both. It’s amazing not only how fast the commentary has developed, but how persistent it is.

We’ve already talked about planning for disaster, but what else can we learn from the Groupon and Kenneth Cole missteps? Their common element is humor and the use of jokes in the message. Jokes are fine, and usually great for advertising.

But there is a danger in using them.

If you want to use a joke in your messaging, make sure everyone gets the joke – or at least, make sure people won’t be offended. It becomes very easy to lose people as you cross cultural boundaries and other divides in your audience. Once the joke leaves the safe confines of the meeting room or organization, it’s open to a variety of interpretations and personal emotions. You run a significant risk of being misunderstood – and possibly reviled – for a joke that you perceived to be harmless and in good fun. It’s one thing when a comedian has a joke go over poorly, as that’s the nature of their business. It’s quite another when joking is not in the nature of your business. A poorly aimed joke could cost you sales and customer loyalty.

This is especially true when your joke might touch on emotional or personal lines. You have to be aware that regardless of intent and post-mortem explanations and apologies, the damage is already done. An angry response might not be easily soothed.

When we look at the Kenneth Cole Tweet, it appears to be a spontaneous thought and action – a quick joke made without pausing to consider how it might be interpreted, and without the benefit of anyone else’s input or response.

Groupon’s gaffe was the result of a long process and great expense. It’s easy to see that being offensive was not their intent. Actually, at the back end of their ad was a very real commitment to match donations to Tibet up to $100,000. That may be where the misunderstandings ond oversights began.

The folks at Groupon knew they were backing their attempt at humor with this commitment. Unfortunately, the general public did not. There was no mention of the charitable purpose in the ad, as network restrictions prohibit mentioning it. Visitors landing on the main portion of the Groupon website didn’t see a message about the charitable effort, either. The company had posted something about it on its blog, and a Tweet referred to it, but both of these were missed by many of Groupon site visitors who reacted immediately to the SuperBowl ad.

Even now, several days after the advertisement, we’re seeing Groupon Tweets that say “Glad you know about the charities now.” The charitable message Groupon wished to portray from the start is still lost to the general public, and still not easy to discover. This hasn’t done much to comfort people’s outrage.

Time, or course, will reduce the outrage. But the outrage was unnecessary to begin with.  If Groupon had put more thought into how the public would react to the joke, and clarified its intent, much of the anger would have been prevented. The need for any sort of damage control in the form of apologies or clarifications would have been negated.