In this Marketing Over Coffee learn:

About Twitter, Chromebook, Negative Keywords! All this and more…

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Show length 23:56

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01:28 Did you check out the Steven Pressfield interview?

01:35 bot traffic increase, Manage Flitter for twitter management

06:08 What’s up with the Chromebook

08:46 Backup PSA: Automatic WordPress backup that dumps to Amazon S3

10:22 Erik asks Do “negative keywords” work in Google AdWords and SEO?

17:03 MoC Award winner Ben Strong asks: I have a FB account, group, & “fan page” for our office at work. I need to clean it up and want to just have a fan page. Talk to chel.

18:30 From the linkedin group – John asks: mobile app and browser extension permissions

20:00 Chris continues checking out Empire Avenue

21:44 Upcoming Events: Blogworld Expo NY – MOC20 and MOC50 discount codes, Profs B2B

22:04 Question of the Week: Have you set up Facebook Insights? Why haven’t you bought the MOC app from iTunes yet? Or The Marketing Over Coffee T-Shirt (and limited edition Beantown Version)

Check us out on LinkedIn: John and Chris.

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Our theme song is called Mellow G by Fonkmasters in the Music Alley from Mevio.

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Unknown Speaker 0:08
This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall

John Wall 0:19
Good morning Welcome to marketing over coffee I’m John Wall I’m Christopher Penn Today’s marketing over coffee brought to you by go promos calm custom promotional products, incredibly low prices. Stuff like custom pens, water bottles, of course coffee mugs, enjoy free shipping on all products and other exclusive offers at grow promos.com slash coffee today, swinging over there, check that out so that we can keep the lights on and the web server rolling here and marketing over coffee.

Christopher Penn 0:44
Actually we’ll be having some downtime on the website if for anyone interested in not in the immediate future but know probably within the next month and a half, two months or so because we’re going to be switching over to a VPS It is a very nice problem to have but you guys have been I’ve been so good about showing up to the site and and you know, looking around stuff that we actually are under strain on our cheapy shared hosting account so we’re moving up the food chain there

John Wall 1:12
time to upgrade. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So again, check out that GoPro calm at the top because that will keep the the fuel rolling. Yeah, show downloads to where it would this did that special interview with Steven pressfield and wrote that on Tuesday so rolling to for this week, you know, it’s just like huge boost to the numbers. So plenty going on. Now you’re talking about bot traffic this week getting out of hand what was

Christopher Penn 1:36
Yeah, you know, I don’t know if other people have seen this. But I’ve seen this on all the Twitter accounts that I have responsibility for. Where it wasn’t actually this was it was up to the week of May 3 just saw a huge number of of increases in followers that are you know, just extremely low quality, bought her bottled style accounts and things and, you know, on the blue sky factory account, for example, there About 1000 extra that just showed up one day, you know, so you know, selling one to 6000 followers or 7000 followers or something I’m not sure what it’s about. I pulled the data and the, you know, the the data looks a lot of those accounts, you know, I run I use clouds, the, the, the cloud API, and I score all of them and all thousand of them at the same time. And, you know, the vast majority of scores are in the red zone and under 15. And it’s like, okay, I don’t either, you know, 1000 random people just showed up there and not, you know, it’s hard to see on my own account, because my personal accounts got, you know, 32,000 people on or something like that. So, it gets more muddy, but I have noticed a lot more bot traffic and stuff. I’ve seen a lot more actually on Twitter, of, you know, bots just reach tweeting everything. I mean, if you if you seem to get onto one of their target lists, like this is one like, you know, web marketing filter or something like that. Everything you put out there, right out the door, you know, something’s rebooting all the time, which is good for, you know the for spoofing The influence measures but not good if you’re actually trying to see what’s really going on.

John Wall 3:04
Right? Yeah. Cuz if you’re gonna lose those links to somebody else passing down, I didn’t notice they did some cleanup too, because I had, you know, lost maybe 10% of the folks I was following vanished. Right. You know, it’s so they were like accounts that either fell off the off the map, obviously getting a lot of traffic and a lot of, you know, just pure action, it seems like folks are starting to try and leverage that for search. Juice.

Christopher Penn 3:33
Yeah, well, everyone’s seeing in real time search going, Okay, we got to do something with this whole Twitter thing. If you want to play around with some of the data cleaning stuff that’s out there. There’s a service that I use, called manage flitter, which is a stupid name. But, you know, manage flitter calm and at the very least, it’ll show you you know, how to unfollow the folks who aren’t following you and stuff like that. And if you if you pay for the pro version, which actually isn’t all that cheap for a web service, it’s like 12 bucks a month. I mean, In the big scheme of things, you spend more on coffee, but it will let you do stuff like unfollow folks who don’t have profile images that are grabbing tweeted in a year or something like that. And you can just get rid of them.

John Wall 4:11
Yeah, no, that’s a great service. I’ve been using that for a while. Yeah, I like that function of folks that haven’t done anything in like six months or eight months. So you can just pitch those overboard, there’s no reason to waste your time running with those up here, the quality of what you’re getting back in.

Christopher Penn 4:27
The one thing is really handy is in the pro version will actually let you download the entire index of your Twitter database, who you follow who’s following who you’re not following who’s not following you. and stuff like that I use, I do that, where I’ll take everyone who’s following me that I’m not following back, pull them out, put them into an Excel spreadsheet, and then run cloud on all those and you know, and then you know, take you know, scores usually 20 and above, because that’s that’s the, you know, the more or less the green line and just start following back all those folks so that way, you know, if if people who are following me are legit accounts, so That, trying to pick them up too. But it’s it’s a really, really handy way of doing that stuff on a very large scale.

John Wall 5:06
Yeah, no, that’s it. That’s a great tip. I like that because I usually don’t spend much time worrying about the falling back on the, the, you know, medium quality ones. But that’s a nice way to screen through and figure out what’s going on with those.

Christopher Penn 5:18
Now, the trick is with the cloud API, you got to have some skills with PHP. There is a to my knowledge and and you’ll leave a note in the comments or in the LinkedIn group, if you know of one. But to my knowledge, there is no good tool that will let you do this as a desktop app you have, you’ve got to write the code, and then be good at at running PHP on your on your machine. And if you can do that, it’s all yours.

John Wall 5:43
Right? Right. You’re there. But this is a very hands on, right. If you can’t

Christopher Penn 5:46
for a premium fee of marketing over coffee, we’ll do it for $10,000. We’ll

John Wall 5:51
definitely we can do some outside projects. If you need some help Exactly. bundle that up into an app. They don’t see the App Store letting anything like that into town after probably not different channel to make that work. Yeah, some chatter in the LinkedIn group about the Chromebook. Have you seen right? I guess I guess my big pitches Google, why haven’t you sent us our Chromebooks? That would be my only my only news on that so far, have you heard anything else on

Christopher Penn 6:19
that? There’s going to be a rental program for them. So for those who don’t know, Google is talking about releasing very low cost notebooks using Chrome OS, which is basically it’s a notebook with a web browser. And that’s really all that’s going to it’s going to come with that it’s going to run on a very slimmed down, I believe it’s a Linux distribution just to get the browser up and running. And then Google Chrome was it, they’re talking about leasing it out to students, initially in the in the first run of the program for $20 a month. So you know, you can get access to a web based laptop for about 20 bucks a month, and it’s going to be you know, it’s not going to be a MacBook Pro by any stretch of the imagination. But since everything is in the cloud these days anyway, and you can do you know, 90% of the stuff you need to do, particularly an academic environment, we’re really just using a word processor most of the time. Except for specialized apps, it’s it’s they’re positioned as low cost notebooks for for education. They say they may do something with a corporate down the road, but I have a hard time seeing, you know, anything other than small to midsize businesses that would go for something like that in mass, because there are you there are more specialized applications, I think in business than there are for you know, your English majors.

John Wall 7:31
Yeah, yeah. And I think, because that was one of the in the LinkedIn group, somebody chimed in about the fact that, you know, there’s still like, you have a couple specialized apps and can’t get to those. Those are deal killers. Plus, it’s tough for the laptop, you know, people want to go with a cheap PC. I mean, you’re getting down to that 300 $400 price point. So even you’re kind of gouging the folks that don’t have the cash flow at 20 bucks a month. Right, you know, but, but if that’s the best, you know, if that works for you, that’s if that’s your only choice that I can see doing that.

Christopher Penn 7:59
It’ll depend on on what it comes with to I think, I mean, if it has like automated backup and stuff, because everything’s in the cloud anyway, then, you know, it might be worth it. The days of saying your term paper was was eaten by your hard drive will be

John Wall 8:12
ancient history. Yeah. And that is true. That is a great point. If it had an automated backup system, then suddenly there’s that whole class of folks where, you know, the average listener to this show is probably their families, IT department and right would definitely appreciate that kind of stuff. I could see that Yeah, especially you know, if you could just throw them another one and they log in to the same machine. Plus, you do have the benefits with a Linux distribution like that to have like, automatic automatically updating all the drivers and stuff like that. So it can be a lot easier to maintain.

Christopher Penn 8:42
Yeah, that’s interesting. Speaking of backups for folks that don’t know if I mentioned this on the show yet or not, but there’s a WordPress plugin called automatic WordPress backup that does a really, really nice job and then dumps to Amazon s3. So if you have an s3 account, the storage the Amazon store account in the cloud, I think it comes with like two gigabytes free of space or whatever. But this, this plugin will backup your WordPress site everything images, files, comments, all this stuff to the cloud every day automatically, which is huge, because it means that, you know, you don’t have to remember to either check your email or pull stuff down to the desktop, it just does in the background and, and, and your site’s back up. If you are, you know, using WordPress on a corporate level, and you have not implemented the backup schemas, many, many have not. This is a nice way of doing it because it also gives you snapshots that you can roll back to if you get hacked.

John Wall 9:33
Yeah, no, that’s great. I like that idea of it running across s3 and not having to do anything because even even having to clean up your inbox quarterly if you have an email the backups to use, you know, something you have to do if he’s right to be completely. At least do yourself a favor though and have it send you a quarterly notice or something that it’s running so that you don’t just assume that your site is working properly. That’s a Yeah,

Christopher Penn 9:58
well, you’ll get the bills, ma’am. On the bandwidth costs because it’s like, you know you’re charged for this month was 15 cents. It’s like, you know, it’s it’s not a lot you’ll use the, you know, the one get it’s like I think it’s like either five or 15 cents per gigabyte transferred. So every month you’ll get a 15 cent bill,

John Wall 10:14
get the nominal fee shown up or that you’ll miss that if if it’s not getting done. We had in the also in the group, Eric was asking about whether negative keywords work in Google

Christopher Penn 10:26
AdWords and SEO, AdWords for sure.

John Wall 10:29
Yeah, no, that’s a huge I know, we would do tons of stuff. So the idea of negative keywords is, you know, okay, so you’re doing, you know, you’re buying certain phrases. And what you’ll find is that there are certain ones that are indicators of quality or a good example, actually, was when I was doing stuff over in software development space. There’s a product called CVS which people use for version control to backup their stuff. But of course, there’s also a drugstore pharmacy here in Massachusetts, and basically, you know, for anyone in the New England area 95 percent of the searches for CVS are people looking at where to put in their prescription, whatever drug. And so by doing, instead of just buying the free CVS, you buy CVS minus pharmacy. And that way you only get the ones that don’t include pharmacy. And of course, you would modify that to you throw in minus prescription minus drugs minus, you know, minus a whole huge boatload of stuff. And when you’re done, you’re paying 20 bucks a month instead of 35,000. Right, which is, you know, exactly where you want to be. So yeah, they’re absolutely necessary for running great campaigns and getting things to work. I don’t know, how

Christopher Penn 11:37
about other stuff that you keep in mind when you’re using them. And I mean, the if you’re not using if you’re using Google AdWords and you have not downloaded installed and you’re using Google’s free AdWords editor, it’s a desktop app. At the risk of being an obnoxious CAD, you’re doing it wrong. And the reason I say this is in fact, I think it was LinkedIn marketing over coffee a listener that tipped us off to the existence This app, you can manage but in bulk everything that you do inside of AdWords, including setting up, you know, negative campaign keywords, you can set them up on individual, you know, campaigns or you can set them up campaign wide. So, you know, the, in our industry, for example, there’s, there’s all these different levels of email service providers, there’s the low cost the free and cheap ones. And then there’s the enterprise ones. So when we’re out there, you know, bidding for keywords and stuff, we definitely want to exclude the people who are looking at for your free or, you know, the even an entire blackout entire phrases like what’s the cheapest email service? Like? No, we don’t really want that person as a customer. We want the person who wants to know the enterprise level stuff. I think so those those things are huge because you can set them on a campaign basis and then you can update your bids and stuff automatically inside there and change stuff around. The thing I would also recommend is that you try mixing up types. So in AdWords, you have the option for a broad match phrase Matching exact match which broad match if you type in marketing podcast, anything matching either word it’s going to come up phrase will match the phrase, you know, plus variation. So best marketing podcasts worst marketing podcast and stuff like that. And then and then exactly the only people who search for marketing podcast what I find has been working for, you know, keeping costs down but getting good traffic is you do phrase match on your on your terms that you want. And then you do broad match on the neck on the negatives. So anytime someone writes the word cheap in any part of the query, I wouldn’t want to knock that person out. I don’t want to want to show the added stuff and I’ve seen a huge reduction in in costs and then invalid clicks and stuff that way.

John Wall 13:46
Right? And you’re always, you know, you want to start with the tightest settings and loosen them up. If you find successful avenues to pursue you don’t want to go the other way around because you can even just burn through so much money so fast. Yeah, you know, you’ll lose your course. budget in a day, if you screw up and set up something the wrong way.

Christopher Penn 14:05
The other thing you want to do that and you can’t do this in the desktop app yet, which annoys me, is that you can do very, very, very tight geographic targeting. If you are, let’s say you want to get reached, you know, the world’s best ad agencies, you can actually set in in your targeting function, give me a picture of New York City and just draw a little blob around Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, you know, and say, Okay, I just want to go to Madison Avenue firms and you will pay you will pay much less, and you’ll get exactly the targeted audience you want to nobody else, it’s pretty incredible.

John Wall 14:39
Yeah, that’s great. Well, and the other factor of that, too, is for budget control to you know, just take when you’re trying to campaign say, Alright, I’m just gonna roll this out to, you know, pick a market, you know, at one city or whatever. And that way you can test it before you spend, you know, 20 major markets. Yeah, yeah, and the whole geographic into it too. That’s a whole There’s some cosmetic that you’ll have to do, it will depend on how many garbage clicks you’re getting. Like, if you tend not to get a lot of garbage clicks, then maybe it’s not worth the hassle of trimming the jails. But if you do get any, you know, even 10% of the clicks or trash, then by, you know, if you’re able to cut your market by 90%, that’s a it’s a huge savings for you.

Christopher Penn 15:21
Yeah. I wonder, has anyone ever tried targeting like an individual businesses locations, like, you know, if they’re just trying to get a very specific business as their client, I wonder, again, let me know, if you’ve done this. Feel free to change the names to protect the guilty, but I’d be curious to see Do you know, for example, like Boeing, the corporation has its test offices here, here here and just do the very fine targeting

John Wall 15:46
I did. I read a case maybe about a year or two years ago, about a designer who was really a sharp cracker and got all the keywords of all the creative You know, project managers all the bigwigs that a lot of the major agencies in New York City so when any of these guys looked up themselves or they look ego searching yeah yeah and it was like alright you know do you need designer that gets SEO stuff and it was a click right through to his resume that and Oh, that’s awesome he landed a job like within two weeks or something like that like a big time

Unknown Speaker 16:27
he totally tagged that is very, very clever. I know. I know. I got some work to do this way.

Christopher Penn 16:33
We can find out the marketing managers of a certain subset.

John Wall 16:38
Right right. The again you just type draw a

Christopher Penn 16:42
circle around the office. Oh, yeah, actually, you know that would be killer on that would be killer on all those market those marketing conference attendee lists that you have laying around. After wouldn’t attend to that show. Just just describe the nameless, nameless and then load them up in AdWords. That’s is clever. I like it.

John Wall 17:01
Give that a crap. Let’s see, we had marketing over coffee award winner Ben strong was asking about. They have a Facebook account group and fan page for the office. He wants to clean it up to just a fan page. What’s the best way to consolidate and customize that? The I’ve only know of one guy that has done this. And it was because he knew people at Facebook who were able to clean it up for him. How about it? Do you have any tricks on that

Christopher Penn 17:26
there are merging options. I have not done it personally. But I’m the one of our staffers for the show. Shell Wolverton actually offers that as a paid service to merge and things like that. So that should probably be the bit the best person to talk to you. But I know in the past when I’ve had to do that, I’ve usually just sent a notification to the group saying, Hey, we’re folding up shopping, we’re all over here, and usually give them 30 days and just hit them every day in the group saying hey, we’re moving over, hey, we’re moving over here, a woman over here. And then after 30 days, say okay, you almost closed down the group

John Wall 17:58
and you actually do both Plug on the grid, we actually pulled the plug. Yeah, just because, you know, you lock it down then

Christopher Penn 18:03
just, you know, make it private or whatever. But ideally, and hopefully the fan page is the one that has the URL that you want, because that part, I believe, is extremely hard to change.

John Wall 18:14
Yeah, once that’s set up, no, it will. It seems like everybody wants the fan page as the final. Yeah. Final take. So all right, let’s see. Other stuff in the LinkedIn group, john was asking about mobile app and browser extension permissions. He was saying that when he’s using Chrome that all these extensions when he’s looking at the agreement, it’s basically giving the extension the right to view all the data on all sites, which seems to be kind of a little bit out there. From everything I’ve seen, yeah, it is you don’t trust these guys. I mean, the majority of them are, you know, well, actually, you don’t even know the majority. You are presumed the majority of them are only using stuff that will make the app itself work. But you know, you are giving up the full keys to the shop and I didn’t you know, there you Enough to turn back on, off, you know, if you want to disable them. So it’s not that big a deal. But

Christopher Penn 19:05
that’s pretty standard, though. I mean, most, most apps and most of everything, if you look, if you actually look to see what your average Facebook app requests, you know, when it talks to your profile, it’s pretty much like, give me everything that you possibly have. And that’s, you know, if you’re not comfortable with that, and then you probably shouldn’t be, you’ll want to obviously, you know, just not install that. But there’s, there’s really no good way of throttling that stuff down unless you are really, really super geeky. And you can edit the hosts file on your own applicate on your own machine to redirect you know, calls back to it, you know, when the when the app tries to call home, but that that’s a pain in the butt for for not a lot of reward. Right, right. You’re not using the app and telling the developer You know what, I’m not gonna use your app until you clean up security settings,

John Wall 19:55
right, right before they get things straight.

Christopher Penn 19:57
Yeah, I got some feedback by the way from last week. discussion on Empire Avenue a couple of folks, Jim Durbin, and a few others, even Robert Scoble leaving comments saying, you, dude, you’re doing it wrong. So I’ve been poking around. And hopefully in the next week or so I’ll have some actual metrics of stuff that I’ve been doing on the site. I’m playing around with it. And there’s, there’s a lot of cool stuff in there, in the sense that it’s a pretty good aggregator, and it generates a lot of interest. But you know, I’m running a couple ad campaigns, you know, in in, in app, which is actually that part is kind of nice. There’s an app, ad manager or text ad manager that you pay for with the virtual currency. So if you’ve happened to be popular already, and you know, people giving you several hundred thousands, you know, of the virtual currency, you can run a lot of ads and stuff, but it’s not really generating any heat. I mean, I’ve got I’ve burned through two campaigns of 10,000 impressions each and stuff and I’ll drive trying out links to ebooks, links to listen, just not not getting the attention.

John Wall 20:57
So so the verdict so far is your You’re still not buying it, then.

Christopher Penn 21:01
It’s not nearly as scammy as I thought it was because the one of the things that the mechanics internally is that you get dividends based on how active in social media the people you have invested in are. So it rewards you on following chatty people. and stuff. I don’t know whether that’s a good measure of influence, depending on how much you talk. But you know, there’s so that does generate a decent amount of in game currency and of itself. But like I said, I’ve been checking Feedburner I’ve been checking my analytics. I’ve been checking all these landing pages and promoting and ads and just just not not getting any heat from it yet.

John Wall 21:38
All right, well keep an eye on that and see what’s going on with the upcoming events here. We’re going to be down at blog World Expo city next week is New York. So I’m Yeah, kind of psyched to get a chance to hang out in New York. See, Bob North hanging out with him, see what’s going on. Cool. We have some discount codes for that. If you’re looking for the conference, MLC 20 if you’re going to the Expo, MLC 50 and so what you Get two sessions going two days. Monday, Tuesday.

Christopher Penn 22:02
Yep, doing Facebook analytics. And then we’ll be doing, you know, marketing over coffee stuff.

John Wall 22:07
All right, cool. Yeah, yeah, we’re gonna get the show hopefully down from Florida and we a lot of folks down there that haven’t seen in a while, so that’ll be cool. And then marketing cross b2b is coming from June to around the corner both presenting for that.

Christopher Penn 22:20
I got a ton actually. So I’m June 1, and second, I’ll be up in Ottawa, Canada, for the Center for Excellence in public sector marketing, their mark annual conference, which will be cool. It’s a mix of nonprofits and the Canadian government. So for those of you who don’t like Stephen Harper, I guess

John Wall 22:39
that’s a great city, though. Have a blast. Oh, yeah. It was a lot of fun.

Christopher Penn 22:42
The following week, I’ll be in Austin, Texas for the National Coalition of higher education loan providers. We’re talking social media one on one, you know, props. B2B is after that 140 conference in New York City after that, and blue sky factory is having an email marketing conference in on June 22 in Chicago. So you’re all invited to check that out and stuff and so it’s gonna be I have six weeks solid and travel ahead

John Wall 23:09
heading into the summer full travel exact code. All right that will do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the coffee

Christopher Penn 23:17
enjoy coffee.

Unknown Speaker 23:19
Listening to marketing over coffee. You can find Mr. Pan at Blue Sky factory calm and read more at Christopher S Pen calm.

Unknown Speaker 23:30
Mr. Wall blogs at Roane and market to your.com and appears regularly on the being cast. The marketing over coffee theme song is called metallurgy by funk masters. And you can find it at music alley for me to go or follow the link on our show notes.