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I’ve had my BlackBerry Storm for 72 hours now and I think I’ve gotten familiar enough to write up my thoughts to share with some Twitter friends that wanted to know what I think of it, especially in comparison to an Apple iPhone.

First off, I’m not here to say whether or not the BlackBerry is better or worse than the iPhone. I don’t care about technical specs. Oh, and Apple fanboys, don’t bother. I work on a Mac all day long and love it. I just can’t justify the added expense and diminished cell coverage inherent in the iPhone to get a little extra emotional satisfaction from a device. My judgement criteria are purely selfish and apply to my personal situation and needs for a cellular device.

I was skeptical when I walked in to the Verizon store. But the 30-day return policy convinced me to try it, knowing I could always cancel and switch to AT&T to get an iPhone. Here, in descending order of importance, are the reasons I decided to keep my BlackBerry Storm and not trade it in for an iPhone at the end of my contract this coming May:

Service & Reliability

Advantage: Verizon. I have been 99% happy with Verizon since I got my first cell phone in 2003 after graduating college. I’m a consultant with two offices and no landline at either. So my cell phone is my one and only phone line. It just has to work. I can’t risk dropping calls with clients or not having sufficient service to send and receive emails at critical times. While I’ve never had AT&T service, my family does and several friends in Richmond do, most with iPhones. They complain about the lack of cell coverage in various parts of town and actually described dropping that many calls as “embarrassing”. This would be unacceptable.

Email / Calendar

Advantage: Tie. iPhone and BlackBerry have sufficient native email and calendar apps that sync with my Google Apps service very well. Again, these just have to work.

Mobile Internet

Advantage: iPhone This is an important feature for any internet marketer. I frequently have to search for something or look at a client site from a mobile browser while out of the office. The iPhone’s Safari browser is superior to the Storm’s, hands down. But, the Storm’s browser is surprisingly strong (much improved over previous BB’s) and performs all the basic functions I need, although without as much “sizzle”.

Cost

Advantage: Storm As any self-employed person can tell you, every incremental dollar spent comes straight out of your take-home pay. As a long-time Verizon subscriber, I got a $100 credit towards a new phone because my “New Every Two” discount kicked in. Add the $50 main in rebate and I got the Storm for about $100, compared to the $199 iPhone.

Keyboard/Typing/Input

Advantage: Tie Despite some negative press about the Storm’s clickable touch screen, I actually find that I can type more accurately and just as fast as I can on my wife’s iPod Touch (the keyboard of which gets some negative reviews as well). It takes a little practice, but I don’t see a compelling reason why either phone is superior. It just depends on your taste.

Apps

Advantage:iPhone The iPhone wins this hands-down, based purely on variety. But even iPhone users will agree that most of the available apps are crap and not worth it. I have found all the basic apps for a BlackBerry that will keep me connected and entertained while on the go, so I’m only really missing out on a few games and time wasters. Currently I have installed: Flickr, Facebook, Google Maps, Google Sync, YouTube, TwitterBerry, WeatherBug and there are plenty more out there that I haven’t installed yet. Plus, the BB AppCenter is going to keep expanding and will offer a lot more variety in the coming months/years.

What do you think? Did I miss anything?

Social networks are everywhere these days. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t get invited to join another social site to connect with the same people in virtually the same ways. Most are doomed to fail because they are either too late to market or don’t offer anything of greater value than sites people are already attached to. So naturally I was skeptical when stand-up comedian Aaron Karo announced he was starting a social network for his fans. I got the chance to interview him about his site, how he markets it, and what he hopes to gain by starting dialogues with, and between, his fan base. It turns out it wasn’t just another social media site after all.

About Aaron Karo

For the unfamiliar, Aaron Karo is a stand-up comedian with a loyal following in the college and recently-graduated crowd. As a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, he began compiling random thoughts about his first days in college in late-night emails to friends and family. These “Ruminations” quickly gained popularity and his email list grew to 50,000+ readers around the world. 11 years later, the email newsletter still jokes about college antics and job-related humor tailored to the cubicle-dwelling, entry-level crowd. Karo, as he’s known by his fans, left his Wall Street job to pursue stand-up full time and uses his email newsletter to build awareness and excitement for his upcoming shows all over the country.

About Ruminations.com

Ruminations.com is his latest project. It’s a Digg-style social media site where users can post short “Ruminations”, or random observations about daily life. Other users can award “Gourmet” points for ruminations they find particularly funny or accurate. Most take on a Seinfeld-esque “What’s the deal with that?” tone but surprisingly many are pure comedic genius. Ruminations with the most Gourmet points rise to the first page and can even be featured in the email blast if deemed worthy. Users can become “fans” of other users if they like their stuff.

The Interview

Where did you get the idea to start a social network for wannabe comedians?

Well the beauty of the site is that it’s expressly not for wannabe comedians. It’s for anyone who’s ever had a funny thought or observation and wanted to share it with other people and see what they think about it. My previous site was very one-way – I published my column but there was little interaction. I could have augmented it a little bit and added commenting or whatever. But then I was like, fuck it, lets just take it to the extreme and let my fans post their own material and see what happens.

What are your goals for Ruminations.com? Are they personal, professional, or both?

The best part of my job as a writer and comedian is interacting with my fans, so on a personal level, this has given me an opportunity to do more of something I already loved. On a professional level, obviously the site helps build and expand my brand. It can’t hurt when you run a web site that is populated pretty much across the board by people in their twenties and thirties. It is a pretty lucrative demographic.

How is the site doing so far?

It has exceeded all my expectations. Within six weeks I had to bring someone on to help me moderate everything because it was getting out of control.

How have you leveraged other social networking sites to build the Ruminations.com audience?

I’m on Myspace, and my Facebook account has actually been capped at 5,000 friends, which sucks. So I’ve used those, along with YouTube, to spread the Ruminations love.

What have you found to be the most effective tactic for getting people to the site? To contribute?

People don’t seem to need much incentive to contribute. They are submitting like crazy. As far as getting people to the site, it’s just a question of plain old marketing. I need to get the URL in front of as many eyeballs as possible, and they will come.

What does it take to stand out on Ruminations.com? Which kinds of content get the best response?

Ruminations that are pithy, insightful, well-written, and unique. It also doesn’t hurt if I award it a gourmet point myself. Even though my points are worth the same as everyone else, I’ve found the ones I vote for tend to do well.

Most people are not as funny as they think they are. Do you think your site is better at rewarding comedic genius or dispensing comedic justice?

Probably the former because, unlike Digg, you can’t “bury” or “un-gourmet” a submission, you can only give it a point. So the worst that can happen is you only get the one point that everyone gets automatically. I want Ruminations.com to be a happy place, so I didn’t think the ability to take away points was appropriate.

What kinds of patterns do you see in the connections people are making on the site?

At times it seems like every single person on the site is sitting in a cubicle hating their job. People get really excited when they find out they’re not the only one.

Why did you decide to build a custom site instead of using an open source solution like Pligg (a Digg clone)?

My developers recommended it. There’s a lot more functionality and customization available to me this way.

What plans do you have for the future of the site?

I’m gonna implement some banner ads in the coming weeks and we’re constantly adding new features. Next up will be a breakdown of the most gourmet users by points earned.

Why can’t I get my ruminations on the first page? Am I not funny?

You answered your own question. The gourmet points don’t lie! (Editor’s Note: Damnit!)

Lessons for Social Media Marketers

Judging by the initial success of Ruminations.com, it becomes apparent that having an established fan base (or customer base) is a huge advantage and can make or break your attempts at building a social networking site. Nobody wants to be the first to join a new social network, so it helps when you can introduce a lot of people at once to avoid the “echo chamber” effect that occurs when early adopters join a new network but there’s nobody to connect with. See my predictions about the failure of Yahoo! Mash for a prime example.

It also helps to have established social media presence elsewhere to promote your content and build awareness. In Karo’s case, the site was initially announced in the bi-weekly email with follow-up exposure on his Facebook profile (maxed out at 5,000 friends), his Facebook group (1,200+ members), and his Facebook fan page (2,000+ fans). He also created a YouTube channel (170+ subscribers) and a MySpace profile (5,400+ friends).

Let others carry the message for you. Word of mouth (online and offline) is the most effective form of marketing. Make it easy for people to share content from your site on other social networking sites, email, etc. Even if it’s simple RSS feeds and social media chicklets, give people a way to spread the love. More advanced interactions like mobile web access and SMS are not essential but open up literally millions more portals to your content.

And of course, compelling CONTENT! I can’t stress this enough. Whether it’s user-generated or corporate-backed, it has to give people a reason to want to get involved and keep coming back.

I am looking forward to keeping an eye on the growth of Ruminations.com, both as an active user and a social media marketer. If you can relate to Aaron’s sense of humor, you may enjoy his books: Ruminations on College Life and Ruminations on Twentysomething Life.

[Disclosure: I provided some SEO advice to Aaron before and after the launch of Ruminations.com. You can find my ruminations and profile here.]

As I mentioned in a previous post about the numerous reasons for organic search engine ranking discrepancies, there are a wide variety of tools that can help simplify the process of checking a site’s rankings for multiple keywords across the primary search engines. In this post I will explore four methods for tracking rankings and compare the features, costs, and results of each.

Methodology

I tested the same set of 78 keywords on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN using each of the four methods listed below. The destination domain was AmericanAqua.com, a Michigan-based small business that provides a variety of services including bottled water delivery, salt delivery, water treatment, and water analysis. The keywords selected were a mix of branded terms, product/service terms, and geographic terms. As a control, several broad, generic keywords were chosen where the company has no supporting content on their site and thus would not expect to be ranking. Only the first listing for the destination domain was counted, so if the site was listed in positions 4 and 12 for the same keyword on the same engine, only the position #4 ranking was counted in the results.

In order to control for as many variables as possible, the data was collected in a 4-hour window from the same computer, using the same browser. I was not logged in or cookied by any of the engines at the beginning of the data collection period. The automated rank checkers were set to query no faster than once every 5 seconds to avoid triggering the engines’ anti-scraping mechanisms. Only the first 30 organic results (3 pages) were scanned because let’s face it, if your site doesn’t appear in the first 3 pages you might as well be invisible.

The Contenders

• Web Position 4 is a feature-rich software package that was launched by WebTrends in 2005. Judging by the age of the content and “latest” press releases on their site, there hasn’t been much activity or improvement of the software since then. The software is available in “Standard” and “Professional” packages. Only results from the Professional version are included below.
• SEOBook’s Rank Checker Firefox Extension is a free product offered by Aaron Wall. Once downloaded, the tool itself lives within your Firefox browser as an extension and does not require any additional software.
• SEOMoz’s Rank Checker is another web-based tool offered by the SEOMoz.org team. Unregistered users can run a limited number of queries per day for free, but premium members get unlimited usage for a monthly fee.
• Manual Rank Checking is done the old fashioned way…with a keyboard, mouse, and a spreadsheet. No bells and whistles, just you and a mild case of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

¹Web Position 4 Standard edition is $189 and performs all of the same organic rank checking functions. The Professional edition has a few useless add-ons that are not useful for experienced SEO’s or no longer considered useful, i.e. search engine submissions.
²SEOMoz allows registered, non-Premium members to check up to 5 keywords a day for free. Unlimited usage of their Rank Checker tool requires a $49 per month Premium membership, although discounts are given for 6 and 12-month subscriptions.
³For some reason there is an arbitrary 45 minute delay in running Web Position reports on Yahoo after about 50 keywords. Total running time was 84 minutes, but 45 of those were just waiting around.
⁴This probably would have taken much longer, but I didn’t bother checking the ranks of about 150 keywords (50 KWs * 3 engines) that did not show up in any of the other tools.

The Results

Despite the various data collection methods and reporting tools, all 4 data collection methods returned the exact same rankings nearly 72% of the time. Where they were off, the average standard deviation was only 0.84, meaning the difference between collection methods was off by less than 1 position on average. That indicates that the tools are consistently pulling very similar rankings.

However, it should be noted that of the 78 potential rankings on each engine, at most we saw 29 keywords ranking at one time. When the non-ranking keywords are removed from the previous calculations, we only see the same results from each tool 35% of the time with a much higher standard deviation of 1.95.

The complete set of data and calculations are stored in this Google Spreadsheet for you to examine.

Interesting Findings

The following tidbits stuck out while collecting and analyzing the data:

• The four rank checkers agreed most often on MSN rankings. Of the keywords that ranked, the standard deviation on MSN was only 1.08, compared to 1.99 on Google and 2.77 on Yahoo.
• Yahoo’s results were the most inconsistently reported by the four rank checkers.
• SEOBook’s Firefox Rank Checker was the fastest, but missed a few rankings than the other tools found.
• SEOMoz’s tool only allows one query at a time, which slows down the data collection considerably for larger keyword sets.
• SEOBook’s Firefox Rank Checker managed to delete one word from the file export, which caused a few minutes of working backwards to determine what was dropped. I ran that one again and it was fine.
• SEOMoz’s tool reports results as “Found on page X, position #Y”, which slows down the process even more to manually convert to an exact position out of 30.
• Many of Web Position’s additional features are no longer selling points and are practically worthless, such as their search engine submission tool. The only compelling features are the ability to run multiple keywords across many engines and the data trending and export functions.

Conclusions

Given the similarities in results between all four methods, I recommend SEOBook’s Rank Checker Firefox Extension because it is free, fast, can handle multiple keywords across the top engines, and has sufficient data export capabilities. It won’t trend your results over time, but a simple Excel spreadsheet or database can make some great charts and graphs from the raw data. Each rank checking method has their own pros and cons, but Aaron’s tool has the right combination of cost (free) and features (just enough to get the job done, without too many bells and whistles). Other tools have more robust feature sets but are too expensive, or are free but too time-consuming and limited in functionality.

None of the organic search ranking tracking methods proved to be dramatically more or less accurate than the others. There are many external variables that could influence rankings by a few positions or more, and these are likely the main cause for the discrepancies between the various tools.

These data only represent rankings at one point in time. The best way to determine the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns is to measure rankings across multiple engines at regular intervals so you can examine the trends. Do not put too much emphasis on any one data point, since they are very likely to fluctuate over the short term. Instead, pay attention to the longer-term trends to look for signs of improvement in your rankings.

As with any software decision, you must draw your own conclusions based on what is important to you. What features do you think are lacking from today’s rank checkers? How should they be extended to be more useful? Which do you use, and which are your favorites?

I wasn’t going to blog this at first, but after reading Wired’s article on 37signals I felt I should post my experience with Basecamp. I like their attitude towards small businesses and focusing on usability rather than feature bloat, so they get a free plug.

Like most business owners, I am always looking for more effective ways to manage my daily list of to-do items and longer term milestones for a variety of projects. Currently, I rely on a single legal pad of paper and a whiteboard to manage my daily, weekly and monthly lists. This works very well for one or two clients or projects but it doesn’t scale well. Additionally, it makes it hard to keep a running list that spans weeks or months with different projects coming in and out of focus at any one time. There are no backups and no security measures in place, but I challenge anybody to make sense of my chicken-scratch handwriting. As limited as this system is, it has its advantages. It is portable, always on, doesn’t require an internet connection, fully customizable on the fly, and is essentially free.

For the last couple of weeks I have been experimenting with Basecamp, a low-cost project management tool available from 37signals, the creators of the Ruby on Rails web app programming platform. At first I loved the easy way to jot notes, to-do items and milestones and separate them by project or client. I soon realized that as a one-person company I didn’t need the sharing and collaboration tools (yet). So, it basically became an online extension of my legal pad and white board. I did appreciate the integration with my existing Google Calendar so I could view my items alongside my daily agenda. I signed up for a mid-tier package at$24/month, although cheaper and free options exist.

However, the downside of online project management software is that it is not conducive to spur-of-the-moment note taking or stream of consciousness brainstorming, especially when I am away from a computer, on the phone or in a meeting. I found myself going back to the legal pad for these activities, then transcribing those notes to Basecamp. That turned out to be much less efficient than just tracking the activities on paper to begin with. There’s something satisfying and reassuring about putting something on paper rather than storing it in “the cloud”.

At the end of the 30-day free trial period I determined that Basecamp was not generating enough efficiencies to justify the $24/month fee. The free version is attractive but doesn’t alleviate any of the overhead associated with using online tools versus old-fashioned offline tools.

However, I will leave the door open to re-evaluating the tools when I need the collaboration tools for sharing files and delegating tasks to employees or partners. Also, I will probably experiment with some of 37signals’ other offerings, like their CRM, intranet or group chat tools.

Dear Comcast,

By the time you read this, I will have already canceled my Triple Play account. Don’t bother trying to find me…you already know where I live. I couldn’t put up with your frequent internet outages anymore. I called you several times and somebody different picked up each time, making promises I knew you couldn’t live up to. You see, my cable internet connection is my lifeline to work, friends and family. As a search engine marketing consultant, my job is next to impossible to do without access to the innerwebs. I think we should see other people.

What’s that? The rolling service outages aren’t your fault? Just another lame excuse to cover for the fact that you have been jacked into by all of my neighbors too. Don’t think I didn’t notice the 3-4 times a day that we failed to connect, always at the most inopportune times.

We did have some good times, didn’t we? Your cable TV and land line phone services were fine. Oh yeah, except when the power goes out and you disappear again. And you were a pretty cheap date. The $99 monthly promotional charge was almost too good to pass up…until I realized that you were about to raise it to about $130 in another few months. For what? Because we would have been together for a year at that point? Are you trying to drive a wedge between us because you are afraid of commitment, or do you think that you have me wrapped so tightly around your little finger that I couldn’t dare leave you? Is that how you treat a faithful partner?

I need somebody more reliable. Somebody that I can count on to be around when I have deadlines to meet and internet-enabled conference calls to sit in on. Somebody that won’t get more expensive over time. So, Comcast, I’m moving on to AT&T’s new U-verse system starting next Wednesday between 12 and 2. They can offer me what you can’t – a faster internet connection that won’t flake out at the first sign of stress. Plus, they offer just as many channels so I know I won’t get bored and I don’t even have to pay extra for a DVR or multiple receivers. To top it off, I hear they are very low maintenance so I anticipate a long, healthy, mutually satisfying relationship.

Surprisingly, you took the breakup pretty well. I expected much more of a fight and promises to be more faithful and cheaper. It was too late for us at that point. You got your revenge by pulling one last trick…disabling my internet service the moment I hung up the phone. I thought it would take you at least a few days to pack your things and go. Now I’m left with nothing until AT&T comes around next week. I wish I had planned that a little better.

Sincerely,

Andrew

P.S. Maybe I’ll see you around sometime. Can we stay friends? I think you have some growing up to do, but some day you will make somebody very happy and I will be just a distant memory. Who knows? We might have a future together at some point, but for now I just need my space.