Web 2.0 has a huge me-too problem. Everyday a new company announces a ‘new’ product which is nothing more than an old product slight modifications or a few small additional features. This mentality is not only bad for users but also for marketers and even the startups.
While the decision to allow everyone to register and join Facebook has gotten the site millions of users, the larger user base hasn’t come without its own set of problems.
On this week’s episode of Rush Hour Neil and I welcomed co-host CShel for the second week in a row. They discussed the rumors around eBay’s acquisition of StumbleUpon, Search Engine Strategies New York, and they also talked about social bookmarking strategies & ethics.
Joe Whyte pinged me this morning to tell me that StumbleUpon has removed the audience rank feature. For those of you who don’t know, the audience rank was a way to tell how many people stumble upon your favorite sites.
Neil and I are leaving to Search Engine Strategies NY on Sunday morning. We’ll be arriving at the conference hotel probably sometime around 6 on Sunday evening. Once we check in I’m sure we’ll quickly make our way to the bar so we can begin the week’s festivities.
On this week’s episode of Rush Hour, Neil and I cover the latest in social media news from around the web. They talked about [StumbleUpon's redesign](http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/time-to-join-stumbleupon22235.html), [April Fool's Day jokes](http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/why-im-hesitant-to-blog-on-april-fools-day56723.html), [Digg's new features](http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/diggs-unknown-social-networking-functionality12437.html), and more. We also discussed strategies that still work for getting on the [homepage of Digg](http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/how-to-still-get-on-the-digg-homepage234032.html).
What brands are the most popular with the Digg audience? I did a little research to gather some data so I can figure out what brands are mentioned most on Digg. What I did is I looked at the number of times a story with the brand name in the title, description, or URL has appeared on the Digg homepage in the last year.
On this episode of Rush Hour, Neil and I talked about the Jason Calacanis SEO challenge, the launch of Search Engine Smackdown, and Neil’s experiences at Elite Retreat. We also talked about strategies for getting stories popular on Digg and StumbleUpon. CShel called in at the end of the show and got some social media advice from Neil and I.
We’re bringing Serph out of beta today. We first mentioned our reputation management tool; Serph, a couple of months ago and we’re now ready for it to be open to the public. We appreciate everyone who used Serph during our beta period and those who provided feedback and brought our attention to various bugs.
In this week’s Rush Hour episode Neil & I were joined by Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney) to talk about monetizing social media traffic. Shoemoney explains the success he has had with MySpace and other social media sited for a number of his different businesses. He also walks us through a day in the life of Shoemoney and what it takes to make $500,000 in two months off of ringtones.
