The other day, a troll hit me up on Quora, and I tweeted about it. It wasn’t long before Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever (@ccheever on Twitter) came to my rescue:

and a bit later:

With such excellent customer service as that, you better believe that Charlie Cheever earned himself a new Twitter follower. Monitoring brand mentions for instant, proactive CRM is an excellent use of Twitter. Many kudos to Charlie for that!

Recounting the incident later to friends, one of them told me, “Wow, look at you, you’re famous!” To which I blushed and insisted that no, I’m really not. I mean, take a look at my current Twitter stats:

501 followers is so not even close to famous, at least not on Twitter. And yet, my Klout score isn’t half bad for someone with so few followers:

Klout attempts to assign a score to a social media user to gauge their actual influence. How these numbers are calculated is not really important for this article. You can visit their site to read all about it if you like. What is interesting, however, is what happens when you compare my score with those of a handful of the better known players in the internet marketing industry.

@dr_pete: 56
@joehall: 58
@ccheever: 43
@randfish: 68
@tomcritchlow: 58
@justinrbriggs: 50

That’s a pretty random sample grabbed from whoever happened to be sitting in my Twitter feed just now. Every single one of them has more than twice the followers I do, and yet in most cases my score isn’t too far behind theirs. What’s more, I somehow beat the founder of one of the hottest web properties out there! What the heck is going on?

(more…)

Photo by Annabel Symington (stringer_bel on Flickr)

SEOmoz is conducting an informal test of Twitter and link influence and has reached out to the SEO community for help in generating the test data. But even cooler is that their guinea pig for this test is a really awesome cause, SeeYourImpact.org‘s efforts to help end hunger in Sierra Leone. The SEO ninjas are more than happy to participate in this test, look forward to seeing the results, and might pledge eternal devotion to you if you were to make a donation.

Help end Hunger in Sierra Leone and meet the life you change.

This week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt visited The Colbert Report, and Stephen Colbert asked Schmidt why nothing comes up when he searches for “tall women carrying heavy things”.

My first thought was that someone should buy that domain, bid on the phrase in AdWords and give Mr. Colbert his fantasy. Seriously, how many people tried that search once he mentioned it? I know I did…

It turns out that this is not the first time Colbert has mentioned his unusual fetish.  TallWomenCarryingHeavyThings.com was registered in April 2007. A guy named Alex posted a long rambling page describing his apparently lonely and somewhat sad life and how he came to purchase the domain after seeing it listed as Colbert’s third most checked website.

“My name is Alex. I currently have no girlfriend, in a few days I will have no job, and I just got back from watching a movie that was considerably out-of-focus at the local theatre. I come home to my sister’s dog welcoming us back and still constipated (sadly he has been ill all day).”

Poor guy.

I was somewhat disappointed that someone had gotten to it three years ahead of me. But then I started poking around a little bit and got to thinking about it, and man, this guy is missing out on some major opportunities here! The site name alone is wonderful link bait, given that it was mentioned in front of Eric Schmidt on The Colbert Report. So here are my suggestions for Alex:

1. Convert it to a WordPress site. Easy to do, lots of theming possibilities that don’t look like something off of Geocities circa 1997. Use it to post pictures of, well, tall women carrying heavy things! Something about this whole concept reminds me of another old Comedy Central gem, The Man Show, and how they always ended the show with totally gratuitous video of hot girls jumping on trampolines. Run with the concept!

2. Toss some AdSense on this puppy. As SEOs we sometimes tend to eschew AdSense on the notion that it somehow devalues the site’s authority, but let’s face it, this is an extremely niche-y site that doesn’t need a lot of page rank. It’s a gimmick, really. Might as well make some cash on it.

3. Set up AdWords. I have a sneaking suspicion that “tall women carrying heavy things” is not going to be all that expensive to bid on. The only ad that shows right now is for The Colbert Report, and they’re essentially advertising your website for you.

4. Set up Google Analytics. While I’m pretty sure it’s a no brainer that your top referring keyword will be “tall women carrying heavy things”, wouldn’t it be interesting to see how many of hits are referred from ColbertNation.com? Or even just how many people search it every time the show mentions it?

5. Put @BobbyGeorgina to good use. Use that poor, underutilized Twitter account of yours to promote your new blog of photos of tall women carrying heavy things. Tweet them at @StephenAtHome in fact! And while we’re on social media, set up a Facebook fan page for your site. Post about it on the fan page for The Colbert Report. By the way, congrats on curing that pesky “no girlfriend” situation, but you’re following six Twitter accounts, and none of them are Stephen Colbert? Really??

Please, Mr. Alex Kirkland, you’ve got first mover advantage here. Please do something awesome with this site!