At work we started using a web application called Short Stack that allows you to easily create Facebook applications without dealing with a lot of code and has built-in functinalities that would take a lot of work if you were to code or manipulate manually in the Facebook developers section.  We’ve saved a ton of money by being able to create more dynamic and better looking Facebook applications in half the time we were developing them in the past. I now don’t balk at quoting to do a contest for a client. Here are some of the types of apps we’ve created for clients so far:

• Fan Gate Welcome Tabs
• Photo Contests/Giveaways with voting capabilities
• Contact Form (submit straight from Facebook page and emails to recipients of choice)
• Twitter Feed/Foursquare Feed
• Mailchimp sign-up form

Here are some major advantages to Short Stack and why it makes sense for small and medium-sized marketing agencies and businesses looking to develop apps in-house.

1. Cost-effective. If you have less than 1,000 fans, you can create apps for FREE! There are some limitations, but this is pretty awesome, because you can try the product with no obligation and no trial period.
2. Ease of use. It’s all widget based, so it makes creating Facebook apps very easy, and you can install them on Facebook all through their interface.
3. Manage multiple apps for multiple pages. You would be surprised how many app managers there are out there, but every one I came across required you to create a separate account for each fan page. Shortstack doesn’t work that way. You can manage unlimited apps for unlimited pages. Their pricing plans are based on the amount of fans, not the amount of pages.

There’s always those weird headlines you see in your Twitter or Facebook feed that catch your eye and this was one of them:

Stumbleupon Drives More Than 50% of Social Traffic.

I didn’t believe it when I saw it on Mashable. I thought Stumbleupon was so 2008. But apparently, it’s still going strong, and its viral capabilities still pump in droves of traffic to blogs. Stumbleupon only has 12 million users compared to 750 million that Facebook has, but the difference is that all Stumbleupon users are doing is surfing the Internet based on their interests and receiving targeted results based on community votes.

So the question is, “Do you need to start paying attention to Stumbleupon again?”

Should Internet marketers include this in their strategy for building traffic to client websites?

These are all questions to consider, but it all depends on what your business has to offer. If your business doesn’t have a blog that’s integrated into your website, then Stumbleupon doesn’t make a lot of sense. Stumbleupon is about discovering great content that teaches you, inspires you, or makes you think. If you Stumble your “About Us” page, that’s not what people want to stumble on.

This brings up the importance of small and large businesses using their blog as their main source of producing original content. It builds credibility and it’s SEO gold these days. Having said all of that, I’m going to resurrect my old Stumbleupon account and start being more active with it, because I think it does serve the purpose bringing in a steady flood of new visitors that could be converted into regulars if you capture them with your content.

I don’t know about you, but I am always skeptical when I hear about the next great social network being rolled out by Google. If you keep throwing darts at the dartboard, and you keep hitting the wall, don’t you think you’d stop throwing darts?

Google has failed miserably with Orkut and Google Buzz. Now, they are rolling out a more robust platform that includes the +1 button and Google+, a social network that tries to take what works best for Facebook and Twitter and make it better for a certain niche of social network drones. By the way, don’t make a comment to me that Orkut is big in South America, so therefore, it’s a success.  I guarantee Google’s intention when they rolled it out was NOT for it to get big in South America.

Google +1 Button

This was the first piece to the puzzle of this new social network that Google put together. It’s a pretty nice concept. Google found a way to make search results social. The +1 button allows anyone logged into a Google account to +1 a search result they like or found useful, and Google remembers it to help deliver more and more relevant information in the future.

The +1 button is supposed to have SEO implications for those on the other side of the spectrum looking to have their website +1′ed. Those SEO benefits are still undefined, but my recommendation is that you add it to your website, because it can’t hurt it at this point.

Google Plus Social Network

So in true Google fashion, they made the new product available by “invitation only” to make people feel special if they got invite to join it. I wonder who perfected the exclusivity marketing tactic first, Google or Apple?

Google+ has a couple of unique features, Circles and Hangouts. Circles is a feature of Google Plus that allows you to connect and segment the different groups of people in your life. Circles allows you to choose which information to share with your friends, family, and professional connections.

Hangouts is an innovative feature that allows you to group video chat with up to 10 other people — for FREE. Google is trying to virtually simulate the experience of bumping into someone in real life by making video chat easy and convenient. Hangouts could also become a popular tool for small and large businesses to run more interactive conference calls and meetings.

I’m a part of Google+, but I haven’t used it much yet. However, I am intrigued by the fact that I can segment out my network as much or little as I want, which is annoying with Facebook. If I want to share something with just my best friends, I can. If I want to leave out my co-workers, I can. I think it has promise, but I am still a little skeptical, because so far, Google and social haven’t mixed well.

Have you ever taken a look at some of the crappy photos thrown together on a Google local listing that hasn’t been claimed by the owner? Google might have pulled them from Tripadvisor, Yelp, or some other review site where the photos were taken by customers.

Google sees the gateway to more profit from the very people that drive our economy, small business owners. And now their testing 6 cities by offering up free photography to businesses that will be posted on their Google local listing. There is a catch of course…Google will own all of the rights to the photos, so you can’t go and grab them and use them on your website or other third-party review/local sites.

It’s a good move on the part of Google, because if they’re going to bank a lot of their revenue success on these local listings, they need them to look good, and photos are everything when it comes to appearance.

To learn more about Google business photos, watch their video:

I find myself constantly saying this to clients and colleagues, and they usually look at me with a blank stare.

“What do you mean, don’t write for Search Engines?”, they say.

“I mean, stop writing with only SEO in mind. Your goal is to get people to read it and for the content to compel them to take action on whatever you want them to take action on”.

SEO has killed good writing on the web. All we care about is inserting our keywords and writing crap that hardly makes sense, but as long as the keyword shows up in our copy three times, it’s all good. I write this with a lot of passion and authority, because I know that Google would agree with me.

In the late 90′s and early 2000′s, so many SEO “specialists” were trying to trick Google with a bunch of different tactics, and that’s why Google started changing their algorithm to reward content that was bringing value to the people that were reading it. They started building the algorithm to focus on the content that was getting passed along by other websites and other influential players on the Internet.

This article by the The Atlantic got me thinking about how much Internet copywriting sucks nowadays. You never get those catchy, witty headlines online, anymore, because everyone is so concerned about keywords and making sure headlines have all the right search terms in them.

There’s no fun in that, and it’s at the expense of the end user. So loosen up, and know that Google is smarter than you think. Just because you put a keyword in the page title, the meta description, and the content, doesn’t mean you’re going to rank highly for it. Instead write something that’s interesting, solves a problem, or inspires someone and it’ll be linked to and shared with others, and Google will notice and value that much more than old-school SEO strategies.

Here’s a fun social media infographic from the people over at Hubspot. By the way, Hubspot is one the BEST original content creators in the Internet marketing industry, IMHO.

I thought it was pretty interesting that 17% of social media marketing spending was done on MySpace. It just goes to show you that MySpace isn’t dead just yet. I also thought it was interesting that so few corporations focus on blogging. Blogging was the first social activity on the Internet, and it still serves as a very important role for website SEO. Blogging, when done right, can be the ultimate source for inbound links, and inbound linking with quality anchor text is search engine optimization gold. It’s what Google focuses on the most these days when it comes to giving your website higher rankings.

$1.7 billion spent on social media in 2010, what do you think it’ll be in 2011? My prediction is $4 billion dollars. Looks like I am in the right industry!

So Facebook and Google are now looking to flex their muscles and take down Groupon and Living Social for the business that’s growing faster than our national deficit, social group buying.

Google Deals

I don’t know much about the Google Deals, but the logical place for them. O be run is Google Places. It’ll be interesting to see how much they charge for the deal. A lot of companies are deterred by Groupon because they take 50% of the revenue.

I think Google could be successful with it simply because Google local listings have become so important. They now show up almost always for location specific search terms, and Google has put so much emphasis on them for a reason. It’s one of their few profit centers that has the potential to make them a lot of money.

Facebook Deals

The intrigue with Facebook deals is how they plan to implement it. The rumor us that they won’t charge anything to the retailer, and the consumer will have to pay with Facebook credits. The consumer will be charged a fee to buy the credits. This could be huge for Facebook because they’ll get a lot of interest from retailers to try it out since there’s no risk for them.

Both group buying programs are still in beta band only in select cities, so when I do one for one of my clients I’ll update you on whether they are worth the effort.

Google surprised everyone yesterday by rolling out an entirely new way of searching on Google.com. It’s called Google Instant, and it aims at being one step ahead of you when searching for something online. Instead of statically typing in a search term and hitting enter, the moment you start typing a search term, Google starts pulling up instant search results based on every character you type. Like the typical computer nerd that I am, I first stopped and pointed to the west and bowed down to the Google gods. Then, I immediately thought, what does this mean for SEO and all of the bread and butter SEO techniques we perform every day? I figured large search engine news sources would be asking this same question, and I was right:

• Has Google Killed SEO?
• Google Instant Complete User Guide

Long Tail vs. Short Tail Keywords

This will be a huge debate in the months to come, because now every SEO professional will be wondering if ranking for long tail keywords is even worth it if similar results are going to pop up half way through the user keying in their search term.  Personally, I don’t think it will take away from the relevancy or strength of long tail keywords, because there’s a big difference between searching for “new york” and “new york dentists”.  No matter what, short tail keywords will still be harder to rank for and stay competitive, so I don’t think that Internet marketers should abandon their current strategies.

Increasing Search Queries by 20 Times

I am not sure what the ramifications will be on this, but I am assuming that Google has already done a significant upgrade on their infrastructure to accommodate this massive increase in search volume.  Within one search of a keyword, you could easily have 10 to 20 queries pulled up.  That seems a little excessive to me, but I guess Google’s thought process behind it is that the user gets a better experience.

Pay-Per-Click Ads

PPC managers are going to see a decrease in CTR, because impressions are going to rise.  Maybe Google will have a way to combat this, such as if the ad doesn’t display for longer than a second, then it won’t count the impression.  I’m not sure, but this will be something that every PPC manager has to explain to their client when they wonder why their CTR dropped so much.

Here’s a bullet point summary of my thoughts from Google Instant:

• Google Instant will make long-tail keyword terms more important than ever, because each letter will directly affect the outcome of the search result.
• Search users are no longer required to commit to a certain keyword term.  This means that Title Tags not only need to be full of relevant keywords, but they must be compelling to the user to force them to stop their search and click on your particular website.
• The overall importance of having quality SEO has increased dramatically, because showing up in relevant search results becomes more competitive with the introduction of Google Instant.  Hiring a company like Revenue Performance adapt to these changes is invaluable to the success of your business.
• Google’s search queries will increase from 1 billion per week to roughly 20 billion per week.  This means that the chances of your website being found in a search result due to quality long-tail keyword SEO strategies increases your chance of being found by 20 times!
• PPC campaigns will be affected, because the amount of impressions for a given ad will increase, and this will ultimately decrease the click-through-rate percentage. If Revenue Performance is actively managing your PPC campaign, remember this when looking at next month’s PPC analytics.

WordPress has recently released its 13th major update since it was first developed, and this is a significant. I’ve been using WordPress for 5 years now, and It’s definitely the best open-source blogging platform in the world. You cannot find a better blogging platform with more plugins, free themes, and premium themes than WordPress. It’s now evolved into more of a comprehensive content management system. Here’s a video put together by WordPress to highlight some of the highlights of the 3.0 release:

Key New Features:

1. WordPress and WordPress MU have merged, allowing the management of multiple sites (called Multisite) from one WordPress installation. I’ve got to look more into this. I am not sure how it will work, but this could really help someone like me who manages about 5 different WordPress sites.
2. New default theme “Twenty Ten” takes full advantage of the current features of WordPress. Thank god, they’ve finally retired the default “Kubrick” theme.
3. Bulk updating of themes with an automatic maintenance mode during the process and bulk plugin-in upgrading. I hated going through plug-ins individually and updating them. This is a nice feature that was long overdue.
4. New custom menu management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.

So if you’re wondering if you should upgrade to version 3.0, my opinion is “yes”. I know that the new installs can be buggy sometimes, but since this is such a big roll-out, I think it will be generally bug-free. Of course, there always seem to be conflicts with third-party plug-ins, so make sure you back up your database and upgrade your plug-ins before you make the new install. You can either do the automatic upgrade in your WordPress install’s dashboard or click here to download it.

It’s official, I’m upgrading to the new iPhone 4. If you tried pre-ordering one yesterday, it was freakin’ frustrating. There were so many people trying to pre-order, it crashed AT&T and Apple’s servers. You’d think that multibillion dollar companies would account for the amount of bandwidth they’d be eating up, but apparently not. I got a hot tip from a Cult of Mac reader to download the Apple Store app and reserve one through that. I was able to do it, before that secret little tip went viral on Facebook and Twitter, and I’ll be picking it up sometime on June 24th. Hopefully, I don’t have to wait too long in line. Did I mention that I hate waiting in line? Plus, the little Mac genius/nerds are gonna try to sell me a bunch of crappy accessories that I don’t want or need. But anyway, I was successful, and here’s my confirmation!

I sat through the entire live blogging on Engadget of the iPhone 4 unveiling at WWDC for Cult of Mac, because I run their Facebook and Twitter profiles. Even though the iPhone 4 was leaked months ago with the whole Gizmodo and lost phone debacle, there were still a TON of features that I was floored by. Here’s just a short list:

• 720p HD video capture, nice!
• Multi-tasking in the OS. ‘Bout time!
• LED camera flash.
• Gyro-scope. Not sure how to explain it, but it’ll make gaming even MORE fun
• A beautiful HD display. It’s going to be gorgeous.

I know there’s other smart phones out there with similar specs, and I know that AT&T is horrible, but the one trump card with the iPhone is its app store. It will ALWAYS have the best apps, because the best developers focus on the iPhone. Why? Because they’ll make the most money in iTunes. Without being too dramatic, the iPhone has changed the way I approach my life and my business. I can literally run my business from my phone, get all of the information I need throughout the day, and I can always stimulate my mind while waiting in line!