David Weinberger an graduate in psychology from the University of Toronto, a book author, a professor and fellow at Harvard Law School at the center for Internet and Society has recently shared his opinion on the positive effects of the messiness of information on trendhunter.com. I listend to his interesting thoughts and wanted to share it with you immediatly!

To put it into a nutshell David Weinberger discusses the effects of miscellaneous ideas.

Everything has lots of different attributes, but people only pay focus to certain attributes depending on what is trying to be achieved. In order to illustrate the basic idea of his concept he lists some attributes of „simple“ strawberries (= colour, weight, size, taste, history, generic information). But only attributes that are important for what a person is planning to use strawberries for really matter. „Let’s say we want to cook – taste matters most; if we want to use them for decoration, colour and size might play a more important role.“ David Weinberger explaines his example. Due to the information overload problem in the 90ies, companies tried to come up with a solution. The solution was in fact to generate even more information and more mata data. As a result, there is messiness, but the good thing is that there is information in messiness, and businesses need this chaos to succeed and be creative. Efficient companies that are structuring and organizing information well are not very smart because they loose a lot of information by being (too) efficient. The reason is that such companies risk to eliminate creative messy intersections where innovative ideas are most likely to occur.

Moreover does a tremendous amount of information come from users, customers and employees. In order to collect most of this (free) data, companies should try to give them a platform in order to gather and collect their information which gives companies a broader source of data to retrieve information from. Consequently, by mining through this shared information, a hugh potential to find new products or markets can be set free.

Another interesting aspect David Weinberger mentioned in his video is that even “unfinished” information together with meta information about the primary information such as medical studies and a note explaining that it is still work in progress is of tremendous value as other users might start working on or adding to that “unfinished” first bit of information.

This was an outline of the points that I found really interesting and worth spending a second thought on. If you want to dig deeper into the unlimited world of information and it’s impact on science and business, check out this video: http://www.trendhunter.com/keynote/david-weinberger!

According to SEOmoz inbound links still account for up to 42% of a website’s ability to rank, far more than any other factor. Therefore I think it’s worth dedicating a blog entry and taking a closer look on the best and most promising ways to connect your website with others. An underlying key to all linking strategies is to create great content on your page that adds value for your consumers and other websites. The most natural way to do link building is also the thoughest one: the holistic approach. This inculdes the creation of lots of high quality, viral, educational and/or entertaining content on a regular basis. In this way a website has more opportunities to capture inbound links. Additionally to Content Marketing, I want to draw your attention to other tools that contribute to a higher page rank.

But instead of listing 10 or more tips, I did some research and want to share the top 2 that are mentioned on “every” website that claims to know how to build inbound links.

Networking is not only important in the offline business world but also online in the form of partnerships. Try to find strategic partners with similar companies or at least in the same industry and share links and content. In order to make it easier for potentially interested partners, try to add a snippet of code they can paste into the “partners” section of their website that will display your logo and a link back to your site every time you send out a new customer email. A more prudent and „personal“ approach is to ask clients for links and establish a „Client & Vendor“- Relationship. It is often helpful to offer to be a testimonial for a vendors website in order to increase inbound links from suppliers. As you see, the give-and-take-basis also prevails online!

The internet is a perfect tool to engage with others and encourage participation. By inviting others and allowing guest blog posts on your own blog, you are practically guaranteed inbound links, as guest bloggers are very likely to promote their original content (published on your blog) to others in social media and on their web properties. Of course, this also works the other way round – so try to actively seek out opportunities to guest post on others’ blogs and link back to your own website. Moreover you should not only try to get involved with other bloggers but also in communities and forums that mention keywords and phrases that are relevant for your company. But keep in mind not to get too aggressive 😉

Having pointed out the importance and power of video marketing in earlier blog entries, I would like to focus on how to optimize video for search engines today. Due to the fact that Youtube is the most famous video website and a lot of companies have already established their own Youtube channel I will focus on SEO for Youtube. As with any other website SEO starts with identifying the right keywords. So always keep in mind that keyword research is a crucial step when it comes to SEO!

A video’s title should contain the keywords or keyword phrase chosen for which your business wants to get found. A good example provided by Mitchell Harper, co-founder of BigCommerce to illustrate how to design a good and effective “SEO-title” is the following: “Let’s say your company sells shoes and you just recorded and uploaded a video about “casual sneakers.” You want to use the phrase in the title twice to maximize SEO impact –- once at the front and once at the end, like this: “Casual Sneakers — How to Choose Casual Sneakers 101.”

The next point is the description that can comprise 2-3 sentences including the keywords or variations of keywords. It is also smart to include a link to your website in order to drive traffic back to your website. Make sure that CTA is on the page the link drives traffic to in order to reinforce desired conversions.

When we talk about SEO, tags always play an important role and SEO for Youtube is no exeption. It is most effective to add at least 5 keywords ad tags for your video that will help to associate your video with other tagged videos. As a result your video will be shown as a „related video“ and users that were originally watching a similar video might also click on your video resulting in additional views.

The other night I went out with friends and as always they order Red Bull and as always I said: „I can’t understand why you love that sweet drink so much – I don’t like it“. After trying to convince me how „effective“ Red Bull is and that it is what coffee is during the day, one of my friends closed his arguments with:“Even if you don’t like the taste, you gotta love this brand because of it’s spirit – just check out their facebook-fan page!“ So I did. And I have to admit, that it is indeed a pretty impressive fan page, where even non-Red Bull-fans like to spend sometime and experience the Red Bull adventures.

After doing some research on different company’s facebook fanpages, I came across this former fanpage approach by Red Bull, which I personally think is a good way to get people involved and a perfect example for CTA (call to action).

On the other hand it would have kept people like me from being able to enjoy Red Bull’s videos and other interesting material posted on the wall which consequently would have kept me from reassessing my opinion about the brand and the values that come with it. Apart form that Red Bull still gets interested users to interact with the company and other users by launching games like the new Red Bull Timeline Timewrap. Some serious prizes are at stake – if this makes you curious, here is the link and GOOD LUCK! 😉

In case you are now thinking the same as I did after having taken a look at a B2C fanpages – „so, yeah… it’s easy to set up an successful B2C fanpage but what about companies that opperate only with other businesses?!“ – let’s have a look at Neenah Paper’s fanpage.

Neenah Paper does a great job engaging with it’s users. In order to create a link between their online and offline appearance they have an event section on their fan page which lists all of their upcoming events. Apart from that you can also browse through and have a look at the variety of colours and textures they offer and find the right paper for you job.

Something (unlike many other companies) Neenah Paper choses not to have is a Twitter, YouTube or Flickr account associated with their facebook page. Below you see how other companies like cisco have their other social network accounts associated with their facebook fanpage.

Here is a very informative slideshow on what to pay attention to concerning B2B fanpages – check it out!