Author: Ash Nallawalla

About Ash Nallawalla

Ash Nallawalla is a consultant enterprise SEO with a long background in large companies with complex websites. He is a published author of several books and thousands of magazine articles.

Are LinkedIn Groups of any value anymore?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

LinkedIn has thousands of discussion Groups, where actual discussion seems to be minimal. There was a time when a given topic had one or two groups, but now a popular topic will have hundreds of identical competitors. Anyone can create their own groups. Numerous small businesses (and some larger ones) have done this.

Why do people create LinkedIn Groups?

Most people in the workforce know that the Internet is a cheap way of reaching out to millions of people. At one extreme is the pastime of spamming those millions, but that’s the province of shady folks who go to great lengths to remain anonymous. At the respectable end, known as marketing, you need a large list of contacts, so you can promote your messages, being the owner of a discussion group.

So you create a LinkedIn group and call it, say, Internet Marketing, or E-Commerce, or Marketing Communications and so on. It doesn’t matter if someone else has a group with a similar name, but it cannot contain “LinkedIn”. If you’re into SEO, you have only 3143 other groups that appear to cover that topic.

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Twitter: Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!

Reading Time: < 1 minute

For nearly a week I could not get anything out of the Twitter website, i.e. http://twitter.com. I tried to click the links of people who were following me, but without fail, Twitter kept responding, “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”. It didn’t matter if I tried the handles of some famous people — they all did not exist. An appeal to @twitter fell on deaf ears: Continue reading

Like that only

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Let’s look at instances of valid English that would not make sense outside India. Consider this dialogue in India:

Q. Why did you do that?
A. Like that only.
A. Just like that.

Even an Indian knows that the answer makes no sense, but lots of people continue to talk like that. What would happen in the West?

Q. Why did you do that?
A. No idea.
A. Search me.
A. I can’t explain it.
etc

There are many other possibilities. Some of them don’t make literal sense either.
Let’s look at examples of the shortage/abuse of articles in India, particularly Northern India. (By “articles”, I refer to grammar — “a” and “the” are indefinite and definite articles). See Wikipedia.

Wrong: He has gone to office.
Right: He has gone to the office.

Explanation: He has gone to one specific office.

Wrong: She is eating mango.
Right: She is eating a mango.

Explanation: She is eating one mango – some random mango.

Wrong (no other information is known): She is eating the mango.
Right (note emphasis): She is eating the mango.

Explanation: She is eating a specific mango, perhaps one that has some significance, e.g. it is the only one in a bunch injected with poison. (It happens in fiction!)

Wrong: She likes to eat the mangoes.
Right: She likes to eat mangoes.
Wrong: I am doing some time pass.
Right: I am killing time.

Explanation: Passing time has morphed to “time pass”, which is a nice turn of phrase, but makes you look uneducated when you say it outside India.
Sometimes, people forget their high school grammar lessons. This poor soul has given us an example of bad spelling, bad grammar and bad logic (source):

if we really wants to kill terrorism from root then we should take some actions on that places where we know that terrorist are feeded by people for terrorism.We should start form the KASAB sitting in the prison and having fledge service of prison these is the one who is responsible of taking innocent people’s life in mumbai terror attacks.

Punjabi beer can lead to tears

Reading Time: < 1 minute

At a function today, the emcee said, “Please bear with us while we wait for …” but it sounded like “Please beer with us …”
I have heard a few Punjabis pronounce “wear” as “weir”, so it seems that some misguided teacher has created this confusion among thousands of Punjabis. My guess is that when he was at school he missed the lesson where the difference between the pronunciation of “tear” (tear drops) and “tear” (rip apart) was pointed out.
So here it is.

  • Bear (sounds like bare) =  बेर/ਬੇਰ
  • Beer = बीअर/ਬੀਅਰ
  • Wear (sounds like ware) = वेर/ਵੇਰ
  • Tear (drop) = टीअर/ਟੀਆਰ
  • Tear (rip)  = टेर/ਟੇਰ

 

Yellow NZ is back with a bang

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Earlier today, Yellow (Pages) New Zealand tweeted:

Have you checked out the new http://www.yellow.co.nz website? More relevant search results, a fancy new design & improved page load speed!

I confess to not keeping up with the Yellow Pages scene since leaving Sensis some 18 months ago. I had mentioned Yellow NZ a couple of times here and used to know some people there. I check all my Twitter unfollowers and noticed @yellownz had dumped me (probably because I wasn’t following them).

Something about @yellownz’s Twitter timeline caught my eye:

Yellow NZ's Twitter streamIt seems that the Twitter account had been silent since 20 June and wasn’t particularly active before then. Continue reading

Does LinkedIn police its own rules?

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Unlike the majority of LinkedIn users, I pay for my account and I advertise there (as do my clients), so I have a lower tolerance to lax quality control within LinkedIn.

Fake Accounts

I used to belong to some SEO discussion groups (inside LinkedIn) when I noticed that Halle Berry was a participant, except that this was a blonde with the most implausible profile and a strong interest in SEO and techy topics (based on her group activity). I complained to LinkedIn customer service and they replied saying that they didn’t see anything amiss. This Halle is still an active account. Continue reading

Review: Social Media Judo

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Social Media JudoJudo is a gentle art of self defence where you use an opponent’s strength against them, instead of pitting your strength in their direction. It was my favourite sport at college. Nick White, Geoff Nelson, Chris Aarons with Dan Zehr have self-published Social Media Judo, a 167-page guide to social media for business. The book would be a credible sales tool for the company Nick, Geoff and Chris founded – Ivy Worldwide.

The judo analogy is so apt for social media, a field I work in at a leading bank. When any bank’s computers or ATMs break down, it is sometimes scary to see the speed with which bad news travels and how savvy customers use social networks to get a response quickly. My experience enabled me to appreciate this book very well and I commend the authors for speaking the truth, which some companies may find hard to swallow.

I was exposed to some of the Microsoft Windows Vista campaigns mentioned in the Introduction, so I understood the anecdotes better. Continue reading

Community management pays off for Big Four banks

Reading Time: 2 minutes

While browsing through my Tweetdeck, I couldn’t help noticing the @NAB search column nearly full of praise from customers and retweeters. Disclosure: I consulted to this division of NAB (i.e. Direct Banking, which includes social media management) until a few months ago and I am still consulting to UBank at a different location.

Bank Twitter stats
Recent Twitter activity from the Big Four banks. (click to enlarge)

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Creating a Google-proof persona

Reading Time: 4 minutes

A persona is a fictitious person that has certain defined attributes. In product marketing, we create personas for major groups of users who will use the product. For example, a word processor’s set of personas might include a high school student, a university student, a generic office worker, a specialist author, a manager, and so on.

In the world of black-hat SEO or spamming, a persona is usually a very shallow person, with no thought given to its creation. Beyond a rather implausible Western name and Gmail address, there is no sophistication, perhaps because the only purpose of that persona is to send once-off spam. Since you can create billions of fake Gmail/Yahoo/Rediffmail accounts without any worry, you can create a new one for each email if you wish. Continue reading

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