TKG’s Breakfast Bootcamps are back for 2010-2011! These hour and a half SEM training sessions dive into one topic at a time and provide an atmosphere with one-on-one interaction and plenty of opportunity for Q&A.

The lineup starts in October:

October 7, 2010 – Website Must-Haves
November 11, 2010 – Landing Pages
December 9, 2010 – Social Media for Newbies
January 13, 2011 – Beyond Twitter and Facebook
February 10, 2011 – Online Lead Generation
March 10, 2011 – Reputation Management

These bootcamps are completely free and space is extremely limited. Learn more about each session, location, times, etc and sign up.
As an added bonus, if you attend all 6 sessions, you’ll receive an “I Survived TKG’s Breakfast Bootcamp” t-shirt!

What is a meta description tag? It is a brief summary of a web page’s content and most often used by search engines to describe the page on a SERP (search engine results page).  The meta description tag appears between the clickable page title and the URL like so:

In the early days of web search, meta description tags played a significant role in search engine optimization.  They used to be one of the main factors in determining a site’s ranking.  Today, meta descriptions have little to no effect on ranking!  As far as search engines are concerned, a meta description tag is just that—a description.

Why waste time writing one then?  A new eye tracking study determined that searchers spend more time focusing on the description rather than the title or URL.  As you can see in the example above, Google “bolds” the keywords searched in the title, the URL, and the description.  So, the meta description tag serves as a powerful advertisement for your website.

Meta description tags won’t do much for your search engine ranking. But, writing a persuasive description will have great impact on your website’s click-through rate.  While meta description tags are not an effective SEO tool any longer, they provide valuable space for marketing calls-to-action.  Just think of them as the “prime real estate” of organic search results.  If done well, it may make the difference between users clicking your website versus the competition!

Last week, Facebook rolled out its very own location-based service, Facebook Places.  In Palo Alto, California, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a few words to say on the launch of this new service:

“This is going to be a really fun and interesting summer,” said Zuckerberg at the start of the evening. “We’ve got a lot of new products coming out.” The first of these new products — Places — is a smartphone-based service that takes on much of the functionality provided by existing services such as Foursquare and Yelp.

In other words – Foursquare, you’d better be ready for a battle of epic social proportions.

As with other location-based applications, Facebook Places is designed with a few simple goals in mind:

1. Help people share where they are, socially.

2. Let people see who is nearby.

3. Let people discover new places through their friends’ profiles.

Foursquare, Yelp!, and Gowalla have been consistently picking up steam, and it only makes sense that social giant Facebook would get in on the action. We know that people like these services – but the real question is, how quickly is Facebook going to decimate the competition?

With more than 500 million users already on Facebook, Places has a massive potential following. Although not every user will adopt Places, in a few weeks, as the brave begin to check-in to their favorite theaters and restaurants, there’s a (better than) good chance that a massive domino effect will start rippling throughout Facebook.

What do competitors need to stay afloat?

It’s simple, really – offer value above and beyond what Facebook can offer right now with extra features.

Gowalla may stay ahead of the curve, since its GPS “game” is a scavenger hunt. As people check-in to different places, they receive souvenirs. It isn’t simply a social check-in service, rather a program that people use to compete against each other using their smartphones and gas money.

Yelp!, and its already large database of user reviews, might be able to keep up momentum as well. The user following is already strong, and the focus on reviews is key. The addition of check-ins is relatively new to Yelp!, so knowing the location of friends is already a non-priority for these users.

The location-based giant that’s in Facebook’s sights is Foursquare, which has been the leader in location-based services. But that may not last for long. Foursquare has the least amount of differentiation from Facebook Places since goals and features are essentially the same. You check-in to different locations, share this information with your friends, and collect badges for different types of check-ins and achievements.

Although Foursquare plans to beef up its program with additional features, tips, to-dos and specials, the company should still be wary. Unless Facebook Places proves to be a clumsy, clunky program… Foursquare has some serious competition to worry about.

Facebook has given us some novel meanings for words such as “friend” and “poke”.  It is now attempting to give new meaning to the word “like” by creating a Like button that will tie internet content on a single networking platform – Facebook’s. 

Some Facebook users may not have yet noticed the subtle movement in the Like attribute, which was launched in April.  For a while, users have been able to give their virtual thumbs-up on their friends’ pictures, status updates and other content by clicking the like button.  In the past, users could “Become a fan” of a variety of pages hosted on Facebook.  The new Like button merges both the “Become a fan” and your typical “like” options by giving website administrators the option of placing a branded Like button on their individual content pages.  Currently, there are a variety of tools that you can add to a content page to allow users to “share this” on Facebook.  In contrast, the new Like button allows users to do both of the above:  Share content he/she found interesting on the internet with his/her Facebook friends.  And, automatically “become a fan” of the website containing the content.

As of now, all it takes is one line of code to place Facebook’s Like button on any web page.  Once the button is clicked, the page, plus a link, will be shared on the user’s Facebook page and news feed.  The Like button also shows on the original page how many users have “liked” that page so far.  

In the first week it was announced, more than 50,000 websites signed on to use the new Like button.  Beyond the ability to “like”, Facebook is trying out Open Graph as a way for websites to integrate the tools of Facebook, such as photos, notes, links, and more.  Facebook’s team has collaborated with several digital content companies including review site Yelp and music service Pandora in this endeavor.

The mobile app Foursquare is also jumping on the Like button bandwagon.  Foursquare allows users to “check in” when they spend time at any of their favorite spots.  When Facebook users visit a location (restaurant, library, mall, etc) and “check in” through Foursquare, they now have the ability to click on a Like button to instantly share a link to that location on their Facebook page and news feed.

At the annual f8 Developer Conference, Facebook presented its new tools as groundbreaking ideas with the purpose of breaking barriers between content sites and promote user collaboration on one platform.  However, other social media networks like Digg.com already have similar tools.  While the Like feature and Open Graph may not be completely new ideas, they will definitely spark a change in the way that content companies interact with members of established web communities, such as Facebook’s users.

Privacy is hard to come by on the Internet. You never know who has access to your data and who could be profiting from it. Issues over user privacy certainly do get people fired up, and for good reason. No one wants their information to be sold and used to sell products/services. The latest business to consider selling user data is none other than Google.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an article with information from a ‘secret’ document outlining Google’s plans for user data. For years, Google has avoided this for fear of negative repercussions and user backlash. So why are they considering it now? Most likely this is due to the success that Facebook Advertising has seen and the fact that they are second to Yahoo! in ad revenues.

In my opinion, Google has access to too much information. Some people rely exclusively on Google and its programs (such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc) to help them run their professional and personal lives. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t feel comfortable with Google scanning my emails and using that information to ‘sell’ to me.

On social networks, users can choose to omit or hide certain information from their profiles. However, Google has access to so much more personal data across their various programs; information that needs to be documented somewhere such as that meeting with your divorce attorney. Do you really want Google know about that?

What are your thoughts about Google and YOUR data? Do you think that Google will push ahead or take a step back?

Have you heard about the new movie ‘The Social Network’ about the rise of Facebook?  I first heard about this movie while watching a behind the scenes look at Facebook that Diane Sawyer did for ABC News.  On October 1st, ‘The Social Network’ will be released in theatres nationwide.  The movie is based on the 2009 novel ‘The Accidental Billionaires’ by Ben Mezrich.  The movie chronicles the true story of the creation of Facebook which included intense rivalries and backstabbing.  The movie is told from multiple points of views, including that of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as well as other young entrepreneurs who sued him saying the site was their idea.

The movies tagline is ‘you don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies’ and labels Mark Zuckerberg a “Punk, Genius, Prophet and Traitor” – view the full trailer below:

I think this is a fascinating take on something that millions of us use every day and may never think where its origins came from.  While Mark Zuckerberg said that he “probably” won’t see the film and that it’s “fiction’, I will definitely be there on October 1st with a bag of popcorn!

What about you – will you go and see ‘The Social Network’?