Hookers Love Twitter

Giving new meaning to the term “Twitter”, a very entrepreneurial little startup has started their own account to promote the services of their “massage providers” and “escorts”. Http://twitter.com/chicagoescorts (which is clearly not safe for work, unless you work in the porn industry) provides links to pictures and reviews of their newest employees, info on how to “get in touch” with them, and even prices. Plus, there are john-friendly forums like “What’s the Craziest Place You’ve Ever Had Sex”, and “What’s the Worst Thing She Can Do?”

It looks like the same people have set up accounts in about 30 major cities; @miamiescorts, @bostonescorts, etc. Altogether they have many hundreds if not thousands of followers. 

Presumably this has benefits not just in marketing, but also in recruiting new employees. Recruiting is vital in any business, and I hear prostitution has a lot of turnover. [Sorry, I couldn't resist that one.]

For the record, I think prostitution should be legalized, taxed and regulated. I’d say Health and Human Services was tailor-made to oversee it; just look at the name. And if we can have “sin taxes” on other things, why not on the big daddy of them all?

But for the moment it’s illegal, at least on paper. So, a Twitter account? One might think this would give law enforcement a “leg up” in finding this company (which doesn’t appear to be hiding anyway). But it seems they know the police care more about busting the hooker on the street than the pseudo-respectable “escort company”.

But how about the over 100 people following this account? Many of whom have apparently real names and faces on their accounts?

Hi Chris! Saw you on the internet!

Isn’t there a possibility that one might get in a little hot water with the wife/girlfriend/employer/potential employer/clients/friends/family for keeping up with the local hookers in such a public fashion?

And what about those being followed? As of now, this company is only following their other escort accounts. But unless I’m wrong, Twitter allows you to follow whoever you want. So don’t be surprised if you one day find yourself trying to explain why there’s a link to a prostitution service on your Twitter page.

If you do have that conversation, please let me know. I’d love to hear how it goes.

Twitter Fails Once Again, Slavish Devotion Continues

Nice grammar.

Previously I’ve written of my hatred for Twitter, including 15 Reasons Twitter Must Die, 1500 More Reasons Twitter Must Die, Twitter Fails Again, Twitter Officially Goes Mainstream, and Why is Mashable Obsessed with Twitter?. Not belabor the point (well perhaps), I’m afraid we need to revisit the issue. So let’s call this a series.

If your cell phone service occasionally went dead for an hour, would you be ranting all over the internet about how great it was? 

If the post office sometimes just didn’t deliver the mail for a day…OK, bad example.

How about if your cable or satellite TV went down during a big game like the Superbowl – even if you were watching something else? And next, during the World Series of Poker? And then during fairly-popular episodes of Oprah? Would you be excitedly proclaiming your provider’s greatness in your blog and encouraging others to use it?

As of today, Twitter worship continues, and yet this glorified Fisher-Price toy remains as unreliable as ever. This morning, TechCrunch reports on another Twitter outage, this time due to a “database problem“.

OK, fine. We all have our database problems now and then. My problem isn’t with the people at Twitter, though their Jack and Jill Magazine attitude toward their own failures must even get on their fans’ nerves sometimes:

No, my problem is with the slobbering fanboys and fangirls who are basing their monumentally pointless lives around it.

An exaggeration, you say? Let’s look again at Mashable, whose Twitter fandom remains unabated. On Monday, they posted the horrible “HOW TO: Live Inside Twitter and Still Stay Productive“  by Elliott Kosmicki, which recommends using Twitter to accomplish various important tasks. A few of his most ridiculous:

• Manage to do lists (“Next time you’re telling your followers what you ate for lunch, you can also make a note to call the cute waitress you met while you were there.” Yes, I’m sure she’ll be impressed when you tell her the story of how you twittered yourself a to-do note about her.)
• Set a timer (Be sure and use it for really important things, like “remember to feed the baby”. And what device are you using to access Twitter anyway? Does it not have a built-in clock?)
• Get your flight information (Are you really going to depend on Twitter to help you get to the airport on time? If so, you deserve to miss that plane.)
• Track your expenses (Sounds like a solid plan. I’m sure the security is top-notch.)
• Get news alerts (Because you can never have enough news alerts. Hey, have they found Caylee yet?)
• Track packages (“If you’re like me and spend too much time tracking your latest Amazon order…” No, thankfully, I am nothing like you.)

Elliott isn’t the only offender, of course. In fact he’s not even close to the worst. Take Darren Rowse of the execrable Problogger.net (How to make your blog stand out? “Pick a unique topic”). Darren smelled the money and started a Twitter-specific site, the atrociously-named Twitip.com. Are these people unaware of the meaning of the word “twit”, or is there some type of irony involved?

The titles of the posts tell an ugly tale of pointlessness: 

• How to Target and Attract High Quality Twitter Followers from Your Blogging Niche (because we don’t just want ordinary readers, we want “high-quality niche eyeballs”) 
• Would you say what you say on Twitter if it was a Real Life Face to Face Interaction? (What would you say if I suggested you had no social skills?) 
• Helping others leads to Twitter Success (which contains the odious terms “Twitterating” and “Twitternation”)
• Using your Blog to Promote Twitter, (“Twitterverse”, “Tweeple”)
• The Quest for 5000 – How many Followers are Enough
• And the question on all our minds, Does The Way You Twitter Cause You Stress?.

There are so many more examples of sites like this, but my brain hurts already. So in summation: if you find yourself acting anything like these people, please seek help. And please don’t tweet about it.

Google Keywords Part 4: Targeting

In the last entry in our series on Google keywords, we talked about assembling a list of potential keyword targets. Today we’ll move on to the next phase, deciding which keywords to target.

By now, you should have repeated the steps in part three until you have a long list of possibilities listed in your spreadsheet. Depending on your subject, try to get to a list of at least 20 possible keywords (remember that the term “keyword” refers to a word or phrase).

Now return to Firefox, and open up your “Google keywords” bookmark folder in tabs, so that all the pages are open in one window.

Google Keywords Research

Copy the first keyword from your spreadsheet.

First we’ll check for additional related terms based on search traffic. Go to the second tab in your Firefox window, the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Paste in your Google Keywords in quotation marks, type in the CAPTCHA text if necessary, and click “Get keyword ideas” to see the results.

Next, in the “Match Type” dropdown menu, select “Exact”. Click the “Approx. Avg. Search Volume” header to sort by search popularity. Be sure to use the average search volume – this is a monthly average for the past year.

Look for additional related keywords with similar amounts of search traffic, and add these to your spreadsheet. Scroll down to “Additional keywords to consider” and look for additional related, popular keywords. Add these as well. Leave this window open, you’ll be returning here. If you are informed that you have been logged out upon returning, simply refresh the page.

Assessing the Competition

Click the “SEO for Firefox” icon in the bottom right of your Firefox window if it is grayed out, making sure it is activated. When your research session is over, be sure to turn if off again so that your IP isn’t banned for too much activity.

Now go to your third tab, Google search. Paste in your Google keywords in quotation marks, and click search. In the results, note all the additional information added by the SEO plug-in.

Look through the top 10 results for your keyword phrase, and check the first bit of added info, “PR”. This is the Google PageRank at the time of the last public update, denoting the “strength” of the page with a number from zero to 10. With some solid SEO and link building, you have a great shot at beating 0 – 2 ranked pages, a decent shot at 3 – 4, and 5 and up will be tough. Note an approximate average PR for your front page competition (figure the exact average if you like), and type this in the second column of your spreadsheet next to the keyword.

Next, go to the third tab, Wordtracker GTrends. Paste in your Google keywords and click “Hit Me”. If your keyword appears in the results, click the graph-style icon and wait for the query to complete. This returns the number of competing sites for that keyword, and the approximate daily traffic to the number one page. Note Wordtracker’s recommendations. If you get one green checkmark, type an X in column three of your speadsheet. If you get two checkmarks, this is an excellent target, and place two X’s in your spreadsheet.

Go to tab four, the Keyword Difficulty Check Tool. Paste and click submit. Note the difficulty rank that is returned – the lower the better. Type this number in the next column in your spreadsheet.

Sorting the Results

Repeat the above steps for all of your keywords. Now sort your Google keywords spreadsheet by the last column, the Keyword Difficulty rank, from lowest to highest. Look for the lowest difficulty rank, with the highest number of XX’s in the previous column, and the lowest average PR competition. These are your best opportunities to achieve a high ranking. Highlight these in bold and save your spreadsheet.

Next time, we’ll refine our list, and get more information about our selected Google Keywords. I know this seems like a lot of work, but stick with it – it will be worth it.