A little over two months ago is when I last posted here at Frank Thinking.

It’s not that I don’t care about the blog any more. It is however a matter of time. Time that I have precious little of (that and a rather unpleasant encounter with unsavory net types but that’s for an offline discussion another day).

So to update you, here is where I spend most of my time doing things online:

Managing Editor of Marketing Pilgrim Internet Marketing Blog

Business Development for Trackur which is a leading social media monitoring tool. Contact me at frank AT trackur DOT com if you have questions.

Consulting, training and online marketing education services for businesses through Local Basix

I do plan to post back here from time to time so please don’t abandon this area too quickly. In fact, I would love to get ideas and content from guest bloggers for Frank Thinking. If you are interested please contact me at freed AT frankthinking DOT com. That would be cool.

Thanks for being there for me. You are too cool.

There have been significant changes in how Google Place Pages are shown in the SERP’s (search engine results pages).

I am not here to confuse SMB’s (small and medium business) owners and marketers with the gory details. You can go to this very extensive and excellently presented post by Greg Stirling at Search Engine Land. It will be a lot to digest especially if you are relatively new to this space but it’s good to take in.

Here’e the basics that you have to know:

1. Google is changing how they present search results with over 20% of their searches having a local element
2. As a small business owner or marketer you need to embrace, learn and do something about your business’ Place Pages
3. You should learn about all of the ways you can optimize these listings but you need to tend to first things first by verifying / claiming your listing and gaining control over the content in it
4. You need to understand that this listing will help you in mobile search marketing even if you don’t think you need or have time for mobile marketing considerations
5. Google has invested some serious juice into this area of search which indicates that the future of search will be influenced by these Pages and that local is important whether you are a mom and pop or a multinational with local offices.

To ignore this trend you risk falling far behind the curve and your competitors.

You have been warned.

Thanks to Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land for bringing this to my attention.

While the reference to Aol. and Yahoo making a deal is pretty funny the rest is even better. Enjoy.

This is going to be a short post, which will be a relief to some of you.

You have heard the expression, keeping it real? It means to not get caught up in the hype, don’t buy into every theory and to really look at how things impact you for real and not just how someone says they should impact you.

How is this important to marketers, especially SMB’s? Because if you don’t keep your Internet marketing efforts real (as in doing only what is going to move your business forward, not buying into every huckster who claims online success and riches are just around the corner for only $99) you are at risk.

You are at risk of

1. Wasting huge amounts of time
2. Wasting huge amounts of energy
3. Missing obvious opportunities that may not even be online
4. Rabbit-trailing or getting way off point in your marketing efforts
5. Losing sight of your purpose

Big claims, I know, but if you are constantly searching for the mythical ‘Internet marketing silver bullet’ you better acquaint yourself with the above list. It’s going to be familiar to you soon enough.

All of this talk of bing being a real threat someday to Google is getting tiresome. So is the talk that Google is slipping and that the move for Marissa Mayer away from the core search product is a demotion.

Has anyone ever considered that because Mayer was given a seat on the Google operating committee, which is an exclusive management group, she is one of Google’s first 20 employees and money is not likely a worry for her, that titles don’t matter to her? I would like to think that innovation and progress are more of a concern to her but, of course, only Ms. Mayer herself can answer that. Search is and will remain important but where the search takes place (as in on the go and at the point of purchase more often) that is the future. Maybe she thinks being at the forefront of progress is better than milking a cash cow.

As for bing and search? If the September search numbers from comScore are any indication even with Google’s perceived lack of innovation and progress (under Mayer’s watch) isn’t hurting them. Why? It’s because bing is not a real threat despite the industry’s best efforts to make it look like one and Yahoo is, well, Yahoo.

When bing and Yahoo combined reach 40% of the search market then you can nudge me and I’ll take notice. Until then let’s move on. There’s nothing to see here.

Whenever we bark about Facebook and privacy I liken it to complaining about politicians. In my mind, you have no, as in zero, right to complain about a politician if you didn’t cast a vote during the election of that official. Plain and simple. If you are not part of the solution then you are part of the problem.

The same thing goes for Facebook. The Internet industry is always up in arms about Facebook privacy concerns. We write angry posts fueled by our righteous anger and the righteous indignation the whole world must feel when Facebook treats our privacy like a piece of toilet paper by, well, you can guess where this is heading so I will stop.

Well, now Facebook is pulling another stunt regarding privacy and how you can manage who is getting easy access to your information. Now, please note it is only your public information but the easier it is for Facebook to connect the dots with people the better it is for them even if the new feature equates to a “de-facto follow feature” as noted by TechCrunch’s MG Siegler. He writes:

A few days ago, Facebook made what seemed to be a small tweak to its Friend Requests area. As first noted by Inside Facebook the social network changed the way friend rejections work. Previously, you could either Confirm or Ignore (deny) a request. Now, Ignore has been replaced by “Not Now”. This new option takes some of the pressure off you having to reject people as it instead moves them into a state of limbo, where they’re neither accepted nor rejected. But it actually does a lot more as well.

You see, when someone requests to be your friend on Facebook, this automatically subscribes them to all of your public (“Everyone”) posts in their News Feed. Facebook doesn’t talk about this much, but it’s a very real feature, which we reported on in July of last year. You see these posts until this person rejects you (because obviously if they accept you as a friend, you’ll keep seeing them). So with this new Not Now button, and the removal of the simple rejection mechanism, Facebook has basically created a de-facto follow feature.

Facebook is becoming masterful at knowing just what people fear (rejection and actually doing the rejecting) and as a result they are using that to get ever sneakier in how they push data out into the world. Considering the apparent lack of morals and ethics that exist at the top of the Facebook tree (as in few if any) this kind of action is really to be expected but it doesn’t make it any more acceptable.

Siegler continues

Now, to be clear, all of this information seen by “followers” is information that is already public. A random person could visit your profile page and see all of this stuff. But it’s interesting that for pending friends (which again, will now be a ton of people), Facebook starts pumping this info into people’s News Feeds. Remember, this was basically the cause of one of the early backlashes against Facebook when the News Feed was first implemented. Even though it was just showing information that everyone already had access to, it was doing it in a more streamlined way that freaked everyone out. Now they’re doing something similar again, just in a more stealth manner.

He last two words, stealth manner, are the ones we need to be most careful of regarding Facebook. They are not interested in your best interest or your privacy. They are interested in exploiting your data and using lawyer like precision to work around things so they can say it is an ‘acceptable practice’ but is it really without everyone at large knowing what they are doing and why?

Facebook is going to become a huge problem for many people when they start to see a lot of requests from people they have no clue as to who they are. I am seeing more of these already. I just reject them. If I have not been given some kind of genuine introduction I am not calling anyone my friend. To do otherwise is to feed into the apathy toward these requests that Facebook is relying on.

So what can you do? Lock down your profiles and tell everyone who is not a friend that you are not interested. You won’t hurt their feelings because they are likely some kind of Facebook spammer or miscreant anyway.

Until that time that you completely prevent Facebook from using you and your friends you have nothing to complain about. Remember to vote against Facebook’s schemes and deceptions designed to line their pockets. If you don’t then please be quiet and just let Facebook steamroll your apathetic social media existence. You deserve as much if you don’t take action.

No great insight here.

Score one for GEICO.