You didn’t hit your head. You read that correctly. In a random act of team-building it was decided during a recent lunch-run that Fresh Tilled Soil’s new Waltham offices were lacking. Needed just a little something extra definitely not available at Staples. Brainstorming began. We started at “stuffed plush mascot”, wound our way right through to “goldfish” and then finally settled on… wait for it now…

Coenobita Clypeatus: The Caribbean Hermit Crab

Two of them, in fact. Complete with creepy, man-made, yellow kitty shells, a pimped out tank and lots of love. We’re not afraid to admit it: Fresh Tilled Soil’s Search Marketing Department loves their new crustacean dependents. They’re adorable in a shelled, prehistoric and faintly smelly sort of way. No need to take our word for it – here is a video from this morning of the larger of our little month-old friends emerging and then retreating into its Fisher-Price “My First Shell”…

We’re in a “pinch” and want you to “shell” us your crab name ideas!

As you’ve probably surmised by now, we’d like your help in naming them. Remember, there are two crabs in need of a moniker, so you can submit just one name or attempt to christen both. Leave your suggestions in the comments below and when we’ve got a good collection voting will be open to the public. First prize is a $50 Amazon gift certificate and may the luck of Neptune be with you all!

8 Clawsome Hermit Crab Facts

1. They don’t breed in captivity. So there goes another value-add for visiting clients.
2. Only experts can determine their gender. We’ll never know so don’t worry about basing your name submissions on a specific sex.
3. A hermit crab with a purple claw can snap a pencil in half. Sounds like a girl I used to date.
4. Hermit crabs are nocturnal. As if the cleaning staff didn’t hate us enough already.
5. They can live 6 to 15 years. We’ll draw straws at FTS to see who pays for tuition.
6. If hermit crabs are kept underwater too long they will drown. Like Natalie Wood. I think that’s why Christopher Walken isn’t allowed to have any.
7. When hermits crabs get too big for their shells they move to another one. Note to self: Call TLC and pitch idea for a show called “Flip This Conch”.
8. The relatives of hermit crabs are spiders and lobsters. Sounds like a girl I… oh, never mind. Submit your own crab name in the comments below!

For Your Inspiration – Our Hermit Crabs’ Very Own Gallery

[View with PicLens]

Ever wondered out loud why it’s so fanatically difficult to facilitate a link from Wikipedia to one of your websites? Were you simultaneously embarrassed because someone caught you talking to yourself at a red light? We feel for you deeply and there are indeed simple ways to make this task easier. Read on for some suggestions which have given our team a serious leg up when it comes to traversing this frustrating hurdle of search marketing.

Even with the variety of <NoFollow> tags now in place, a link from a prominent Wiki article can be the Holy Grail of both relevant referral traffic and algorithmic relevancy bequeathment for your most valuable keywords. Not to mention, there’s a lot of debate within the SEO community as to whether the tags truly negate link juice benefits as was previously thought. You’ll want to rethink spending the first month of a new client engagement obsessing over PR sculpting from now on. Will you choose… wisely?

Wrapping up my incredibly amusing preface, I’d like to start off with a quiz meant to hammer home a crucial point. Please bear with me…

Question: If you haven’t put in your time and developed a reputable profile on Wikipedia, adding links to your site from one of their articles is about as useful as:

a) Teats on a bull.
b) A screen door on a submarine.
c) A cheese sandwich to a drowning ferret
d) A chocolate kettle
e) Shut up and get on with the article, Dave

If you answered “e” – then I already don’t like you. Regardless, I’ve still made my case. It’s darn near impossible to get a new Wiki link to stick if your profile makes you look like an SEO, social media marketer, blogger or anyone with something to promote. Sure, you may get lucky. An established Wiki denizen may see your resource in passing and add it to an article “naturally”. Likewise, you may catch the first individual to review your change on the same day his wife gives birth to healthy twins. Realistically though, in both cases you’ve got a better chance of seeing a three-legged cat bury a turd on a frozen pond.

Wiki is Picky – Build Trust
Why so cynical? Simple – there are oceans of Wikipedia power users who like nothing better, not even World of Warcraft LARPing, than to delete the “contributions” of self-serving online marketers (regardless of what you might want to call yourself). That’s what you are to them and they hate you with every fibre of their being. It’s easy to increase your odds of successful link dropping resource inclusion on Wikipedia by making contributions over an extended period of time which improve the quality of their articles. Your level of trust then increases exponentially with every objective edit that you make within their kingdom. This isn’t hard to do once you’ve figured out the basics, nor does it take a lot of time. Consistency is the crucial ingredient, and here are a few tips to help maintain your momentum.

1. Every time you edit something in your own interest, work on at least one other article for no reason other than improving the resource.
2. After you make your calculated edit, hit the Random Article link in the navigation sidebar if you’re feeling low on inspiration.
3. Contribute to subjects you enjoy and are knowledgeable about. Books, authors, movies, directors, cars, countries, pets, houseplants – there’s an article for absolutely everything!
4. Link to well established sources of information you see sticking on other articles – news sites, reputable blogs, guides, manuals, etc. Keep a list of these for future reference.

One more time for the cheap seats: Any individual or agency devoting eons of time to creating free, objective, Wiki-friendly resources must also devote time contributing to the general Wikipedia community. Set a reminder, form a habit, pick subject matter which genuinely interests you – but stick with it. In a few months the suspicion with which new or rarely-used Wikipedia profiles are regarded will have turned to trust – vastly increasing the likelihood your business-related additions will remain intact. You could say that the aforementioned elusive, disabled and incontinent feline might just become one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. However… I’m pretty sure you won’t.

We here at fresh tilled soil have been lucky enough to call SevenFund.org one of our valued clients for the better part of two years now. Their international goals include fostering awareness and discussion regarding the potential success of entrepreneurial approaches to wealth creation and poverty reduction. As their approach is truly revolutionary and game-changing I’d be wise to let them explain their own mission:

To catalyze, support and disseminate research on questions of economic development, prosperity and entrepreneurship, particularly new frontiers related to enterprise-based solutions to poverty and innovative ideas unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.

SevenFund.org

SevenFund.org co-founder Michael Fairbanks recently attended the 2009 United Nations General Assembly Week in New York City and co-hosted a reception for President Paul Kagame at the Four Seasons to honor Rwanda’s efforts in enterprise solutions to poverty. There are some very familiar faces among the revelers and we invite you to have a look, learn about SevenFund.org’s unique undertaking or even get involved yourself by requesting more information or entering one of their current essay contests. There are two additional galleries to peruse which include photographs from SevenFund.org events and the In the River They Swim project.

United Nations Reception: Hosted at the Four Seasons in New York City. Guests included President Paul Kagame of the Republic of Rwanda, Academy Award-winning producer, Brian Grazer (Frost/Nixon, Apollo 13), columnist Deroy Murdock, Economist Paul Romer, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Filmmaker Laura Hinson and many others. Click or mouseover images for more information.

“In the River They Swim” Book Launch: SevenFund.org recently published In the River They Swim – a book essays from around the world on enterprise solutions to poverty, which gathers a unique mix of participants who reflect on their experiences in the struggle to close the global development gap. In attendance at the book launch were Rwanda President Paul Kagame, Dr. Frances Frei of Harvard Business School, Soozi Sinegal McGill, David Rabkin of American Express, Jeffrey Chu of Fast Company Magazine and Nicholas Negroponte of One Laptop Per Child.

The “ITRTS” Collection: Photographs that relate to the book In the River They Swim, and the places and people discussed in the individual essays. Remember to click on any image for more information. Specific images include Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere, Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernandez, Pope John Paul II and more.

“Come up to the lab… and see what’s on the slab.” – Dr. Frankenfurter

It’s been a big, bile-filled week for new application launches and the evil scientists behind them. Both Squidoo’s Brands in Public (another in a long line of brainchildren from Seth Godin,) and Google’s Sidewiki have bloggers and traditional journalists clamouring to dissect and criticize these potentially game-changing additions to our online world. And the villagers are definitely restless.

What is Google Sidewiki?

The latest offering from the Google Labs has been live for a few days now and opinions, especially within the search engine optimization/marketing industry, have been flying fast and furious. Sidewiki has sparked as much debate as any application to ever come out of their underground lair, and that’s hardly surprising considering the massive impact it may prove to have on brand reputation management and other aspects of user-generated discussions in the social sphere.

At its simplest, Sidewiki allows any website visitor to leave a comment about it which is then displayed for any other visitor to read, should they have the capability turned on. Anonymity is not an option, however, so this should greatly reduce the number of participating trolls, rivals and doodie jokes. Reactions from around the web:

Goggle’s new Sidewiki web annotation feature doesn’t allow anonymous commenting, and that is an excellent thing. The Web has been held hostage by anonymous comments for far too long. But, Google is also treating other peoples’ content as its own, and that’s bad. – David Coursey

Somebody should have asked the “is it evil?” question. That’s why it’s there. I sense no one did. – Jeff Jarvis

 

Several of us here at FTS have installed the new toolbar and are getting under Sidewiki’s hood. First impressions seem to all come back to one thing – will the lack of anonymity be enough to keep the new tool useful or will it degenerate into a chorus of moans. As the old adage goes, if someone has a good experience they might share it with one person. If they have a bad experience they will scream it from the rooftops. The jury is understandably out – but the potential for a great addition to the Google toolbox is definitely there.

What is Brands in Public?

Seth Godin, usually heralded as nothing short of a marketing genius, has kicked up a lot of dust with his latest Squidoo-centric baby. Similar to that network’s user-created “lenses”, Brands in Public will allow companies to create and manage the same sort of entity centered around their brand.

You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time. – Seth Godin

 

As with a lens, BIP will pull in and syndicate any brand mentions it locates via RSS feeds – news, blog posts, tweets, videos, images, etc. Where the problem for the new service’s detractors lies is its $400 a month price tag. While the hefty cost is a good thing when it comes to making sure the brand-specific real estate is actually owned by its associated company and not an affiliate marketer or competitor, it has also created the impression of extortion among many:

Give Squidoo $400 a month. Or your brand gets it. – Meghan Keane

Wow. I’d personally like to welcome Seth Godin to the world of brand-jacking and hostage taking. I didn’t know you had it in you. – Lisa Barone

 

If you’re a highly visible company Godin and his team intend to create your brand’s dashboard for you. In fact, they probably already have. If you want to have some degree of control over this entity, which will surely end up ranking very well in the search engines for your brand-specific searches, you have to cough up the dough. Monthly membership includes:

• The ability to highlight positive blog/news mentions.
• The ability to respond to negative comments left on the “lens”.
• Being able to interact with your audience via contest and poll modules.

It would also appear that you can make money for charity (or contribute to Squidoo’s bottom line depending on your payment choices) via the Amazon, CafePress, etc. affiliate revenue modules which the network has offered since its inception. It’s Squidoo for brands. At a hefty cost. I don’t like its chances and I think big-business participation will be done begrudgingly as part of an existing online reputation management strategy which will now require an additional $400 a month. I could be wrong, though. There’s always the Stockholm Syndrome to consider.

Link Building: Keep Rising to the Top!

Arranging reciprocal link partnerships with other websites used to be an extremely effective tool for bolstering your organic search engine rankings. As webmasters figure out how to manipulate algorithms, however, those algorithms will inevitably be updated by the powers that be. Currently, search engine algorithms give far more credence to one-way incoming links, and the art of facilitating these is commonly referred to as "link-building". Link building methods are extremely diverse, and the term should only be considered as an umbrella over a variety of specific strategies, including:

1. Paid links: Links can be purchased through link brokers or manually sought out one at a time by webmasters or web marketers. Brokers will provide you with a network of sites to choose from whereby you can customize the ever-important anchor text and select publishers relevant to your subject matter for a monthly fee. Doing it the old fashioned way is a long process, involving many emails or phone calls to prospective paid publishers, but may ultimately lead to the best value. Warning: Purchasing links on sites irrelevant to your content, or from link broker networks which Google has already "sniffed out", can lead to penalization – so do your homework and be cautious.
2. Link baiting: Writing original, catchy content and submitting it to news sites and social media sites has become a popular way of garnering one way incoming links, and is commonly referred to as “link baiting”. Particularly effective are “how-to” articles, top 10 lists and video clip collections. The catchier the title, the better. Should you strike gold by becoming the next viral marketing darling, the huge number of links you’ll receive from other sites, blogs and news sites will be priceless. Here is a link bait example FTS created recently for a client which focuses on the term "wedding songs".
3. Topic and content networks: Sites like Squidoo, HubPages and WetPaint can be categorized in a number of ways – content site, social media, etc. – but one thing is for sure – they are free and easy ways to create links pointing back to your website. If, for example, your website sells cell phones, you can build a resource lens about your company or a relevant topic and link using your choice of anchor text. The more your lens, hub or canvas is perceived as being an objective resource, the more traffic and incoming links it will get from other members of the network and people who stumble across it via search engines, passing the “link juice” on to your main site.

These points are a high-level starting point, but specific examples help paint a good link building picture for the uninitiated. Simply put, high quality and original content, coupled with a base knowledge of the emerging social media and voting sites that have been rushing onto the scene, can do wonders encouraging the outside world to link to you. Build it, and they will not come. Build it and make it helpful or entertaining enough to the right person – and they will gladly link to you in a heartbeat.

What is link building?
Link building is a very general, umbrella term used to describe any activities or tasks that involve getting other web entities to link to yours. Links are of the most value when they are “one-way”, meaning they link to you but there is no reciprocal link in return from your site to theirs. Search engines see one-way links as more objective because without reciprocation there is no need for another site to link to yours, unless they were truly impressed for some reason. One-way links are measured as more “objective” for that reason.

What are some practical examples of link building?
Link building activities can include relevant directory submissions, careful and relevant paid link brokering, press release/article authoring and submission, forum and blog commenting, linkbait strategies, providing link-friendly and free onsite resources and much more.

Why is link building so important to SEM?
Google, Yahoo and MSN consider one-way incoming links to a site to be “votes” for the site. It is also a good idea to ensure that any link to your site contains specific keywords that you are targeting, as search engines are very likely to begin associating link text with the site said link resolves on. The more general links to your site the better your overall chances for well-ranked keywords. The more targeted and relevant incoming links the better you will likely do for the keywords you are using in your hyperlinks.

Chances are that if you’re a self-respecting businessperson in 2008 you have an account on Plaxo, LinkedIn, Xing – or maybe even all three. What you may not know is that these behemoths of the social business networking space have a considerable amount of red-headed stepchildren nipping at their heels. Although these lesser, 2nd tier sites may seem like overkill at first glance, don’t be so hasty to discount them. Now I’ll tell you why.

Tip the Social Scales in Your Favor.
Forget about networking, finding old school chums and job searching for a moment. Creating multiple profiles for yourself on a variety of professional business networking sites may be time consuming but is well worth the effort in terms of the ORM (Online Reputation Management) benefits. Simply put, ORM is the practice of positively influencing the search results that rank highly for your name or that of your company/products. Filling Google’s top 10 with positive references (like profiles on a variety of social business networks,) while pushing down existing or potential blog posts, forum messages or other content which may be negative in nature.

A Practical, Real World Example Would be Helpful.
On many of the sites I use for both clients and myself it’s possible to get your company or personal name into the URL, header tag, title tag or a combination. As these three elements are held in very high regard by search engine algorithms, business networking sites can be tremendously helpful for online brand reputation management. Simple. If someone “Googles” the name of your company, for example, and finds your dedicated page on Spoke – that could mean a negative blog post from a critical customer being pushed down to the second page of the search results for a potential one. Web 2.0 gives anyone the opportunity to become an evangelist or a skeptic – be they an objective reviewer out to help their fellow mankind or a drooling wingnut. It will be tough for potential customers to tell the difference.

You Have my Attention, Dave. Where do I Start?

• My Cubicle Space: Their stated mission is to provide a search engine platform where any business can promote their product or service in a creative way to the fore front for millions of people. Free to use and includes press release submission, blog and keyword targeting capabilities. HQ: Watertown, MA.
• Ryze: Members get a free networking-oriented home page and can send messages to other members. They can also join special networks related to their industry, interests or location. The local features are particularly impressive and should be perfect for businesses with physical store locations or service areas. Both free and paid options exist. HQ: San Francisco, CA.
• Ziggs: A definite fore-runner of the emerging LinkedIn competition, Ziggs allows you to build a profile, network, post jobs and other classifieds and is strongly marketed as an online brand management resource. HQ: Boston, MA.

Act. Don’t React.
ORM is a dish best served… in advance. Why wait until the #1 spot in Google and Yahoo for “Your Name” is the profile off a semi-retired Austrian adult film star? If I had a nickel. Listen to me very carefully: Start tailoring your own set of search results today. Here is a full list I recently compiled of lesser-known business networking sites and check back as my ORM for beginners series will continue next week with part 2: Domains and Blogs.