Google was granted three different design patents for augmented reality glasses today, showing slightly different looks from one to the other. The first one includes lenses, while the second and third show variations of the glasses without lenses. A fourth granted patent describes how augmented reality glasses could be used with IR reflective painted [...]

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Author Ranking in social media is more than just a popularity contest, and can include things like how frequently an author surfaces content that subsequently becomes popular, topical authority on different subjects, and popularity and influence signals.

Author Authority to Distinguish Signal From Noise?

Social media contains a lot of signal, and a lot [...]

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Manipulative repetitive anchor text, blog comments filled with spam, Google bombs, and obscene content could be the targets of a system described in a patent granted to Google today that provides arbiters (human and possibly automated), with ways to disassociate some content found on the Web, such as web pages, with other content, such [...]

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The following is a review of Shoeboxed.com, a receipt scanning and business card scanning service.

To be honest keeping receipts, accounting, or any book keeping work is pretty much something I hate. I can’t tell you how many times I’d be talking with the accountant, she’d ask for some receipt I wouldn’t have, and I’d have to go digging for it. I was talking with my friend Merrick at PRLeap earlier this year, and he mentioned a service he was using to scan receipts and then organize the receipts online. I gave it a try and liked the service and eventually got around to writing up this review.

Here’s the way Shoeboxed works: they send you two envelopes in the mail, you put your receipts in the envelopes, and you send them to Shoeboxed. About a week or so later you get an email. Your scanned receipts are now organized and available online.  They are organized/broken down by store, purchase category, and credit card. Need a copy of a receipt? No problem. Just log in, search by the amount, and you can print out a copy on the spot.

One of the best things about about Shoeboxed is that it’s painless to use. I just put my receipts in the envelope every day and mail it in at the end of the month. I also have a rule in my inbox that forwards incoming receipts to a secret email address and it goes right into my account. I can also use my iphone to take a picture of a bill and email it in … in a few seconds, my receipts are organized online.

They have a few different plan options. If you are only going to use an iphone, it’s free. If you want to mail in receipts, it starts at $9.95 and goes up to 49.95 a month. The more receipts you need to send the higher the cost. If you want the physical copies back you’ll need to be at the “classic level” or $19.95 a month (that’s what I use).

Two of the other services that they offer are business card scanning and document scanning. Include  important documents and business cards in your envelope and they are scanned and in your account. It’s all pretty painless.

While this is a great service there are some questions you should be asking yourself. I contacted Shoeboxed and spoke with Sonny Byrd who was actually happy to answer these questions:

I’m sending you a lot of confidential information such as complete name, address, social security number, credit card numbers and so on. What sort of precautions are you taking to make sure my information isn’t used inappropriately, or that I don’t become a victim of of identity theft.

This is not actually quite accurate. Receipts by law cannot contain credit card numbers (other than the last four digits which is not a confidentiality threat) or social security numbers. Receipts do not contain addresses other than that of the vendor. Bills, invoices, and statements may have more detailed personal information, and fortunately we are completely equipped to protect our users from data loss or theft. We use the exact same SSL encryption practices as online banks and medical information providers. We are also a TrustE certified site. We protect your physical hard copy documents very intensely when they are in our possession. Our state-of-the-art operations facility is tightly held under lock and key including 24/7 video surveillance and secure key card access. All of our employees are rigorously trained and vetted including undergoing full criminal background checks. We are proud to have a long track record of keeping our users’ data secure and will continue to do so.

What are some tips you can give people to make sure they are getting the most out your service?

Be sure that you keep up with your usage! It’s easy to send in an envelope or two, or use Shoeboxed Mobile for a couple of business trips, then let your paper clutter go back into disarray. Just be diligent with your usage, and be sure to keep the submissions coming into your Shoeboxed account. That way you’ll always be safe and sound for your taxes, bookkeeping, and in case of IRS audit.

Every company has customers who find uses for their products they never would have thought of. Have you had that happen yet, and can you share it with us.

Sure! While Shoeboxed is known for processing receipts and business cards, you can actually send virtually any paper document in to us for processing to your account. This opens us up to receiving a lot of very unusual things. We have had users sending photographs to us, mathematical papers, and have even received the occasional sock!

Thanks Sonny.

I’ve been a Shoeboxed customer since March and love the service. For $20 a month I get receipt scanning, receipt organizing, business card scanning and document scanning, with almost zero extra effort. I can 100% recommend them as a service I use. You can give them a try with a free introduction. I think you’ll find it’s an extremely helpful service that lets you get on with the more important tasks in your life.
photo credit: Carly & Art

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Shoeboxed.com Review – Receipt Scanning & Business Card Scanning Software

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It’s 2012 and social media and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook are constantly mentioned on mainstream media, news and entertainment websites, and broadcast programs. Print ads for everything from movies to toothpaste have those ubiquitous little Facebook and Twitter logos, hashtags, and often special social media vanity URLs. The question is does your business need to be involved in social media, is it worth the time, what’s the benefit, and is there ROI somewhere at the end of the tunnel?

At the current time, in my opinion, there simply isn’t an excuse for your company not to be involved in social media. In 2011 SEOMoz did a study and showed social media helped with SEO efforts. In early 2012 Search Engine Land showed that 20% of all searches had a author icon result in it (see How to Create a Google Author Profile for more information). With an enhanced listing, if you aren’t using social media as tool to get a rich snippet in the SERPs and your competition is, you are playing from a disadvantage.

 Smart marketers have realized SEO and Search engines are only one channel of an overall marketing strategy. You should be using email marketing, print, SEO, and social media combined to make your website immune to algorithm updates. IMHO this social validation is now part of Google’s algorithm and, if you aren’t engaging in more than one type of marketing, Google is going to notice it–or, more to the point, not notice it–and your website will suffer.

It’s not simply a matter of having social profiles on all the prominent and important social websites. It’s being involved that counts too. Use social services like KnowEm to secure your profiles to prevent any trademark issues. Test and try each of the platforms to see where your customers are, where you get the most engagement, where you get the most traffic, where you get the most links, and, most importantly, where you get the most sales. Once you know which channel is most effective, interlink the rest. Crosspost from your Twitter profile to Facebook if that’s what works for you. If Facebook works better, crosspost to Twitter. If Pinterest is what drives your traffic, then focus your efforts on creating the most crazy awesome wedding board you can create. As Steve Martin says “Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You.”

Unless you happen to be in a very specialized niche, chances are good that Facebook or Twitter is where you’ll find most of your audience. Google Plus is ghost town unless you are chasing Web 2.0 weenies (or Google employees … yeah I went there). If you get traffic from other social sites and want to enable cross posting, look into services like If This Then That to try to automate the process and remove the grunt manual labor. Automate your primary feed and, with cross posting and scheduled posts from Hootsuite and/or Bufferapp, you’ll be spending less than a hour a day publishing on social media. Thanks to services like Tweriod, you’ll have some idea when those ideal times are without having to be chained to your desk to reach your optimal audience. Just remember that customer service is now an integral part of social media. Use it as a contact starting point to take the discussion offline or out of the public eye whenever possible. It’s not that you’re hiding; it’s that you don’t need to broadcast every part of every customer interaction.

In my opinion, having your links pass through social media channels, whether the links are nofollowed or not, creating the corresponding user data, and developing trusted author accounts are the three biggest areas you have the most to gain from by using social media. In my opinion, those are the three areas you should spend your time on.

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Does Your Small Business Need a Facebook and Twitter Social Media Account

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I recently wrote a story How Brick and Mortar Stores Can Use eCommerce to Drive Sales about tips that eCommerce stores can use to drive traffic to their brick and mortar locations. However, what really needs to happen is offline stores and small businesses need to grow up and  stop hiding in the corner from online commerce bogeyman. They need to give up their antiquated who moved my cheese mentality. It’s a fact that consumers’ preference for eCommerce stores will continue to grow, smart phone and tablet shopping will continue to rise, and merchants who don’t recognize this trend will fail. The first will be the small local stores followed by strip mall tenants but, at the end of the day, no one including big box retailers like Best Buy is immune. No one is too big to fail.

So what do small local businesses going to do to need to compete:

 Make sure your website is mobile friendly. In fact, if you don’t have a mobile website, IMHO you need to make having a mobile website your number 1 priority. You need to do it properly with a one URL implementation strategy. Mobile subdomains and mobile sub folders create more trouble down the road than the time you save at the beginning, so don’t go down that route. If you do you’ll be contacting me–or someone like me–to clean up the mess you inadvertently created because you wanted to save a little time in getting up-to-speed as fast as possible.

Your website has to be more than a 20 page brochure-ware website. You can’t show up to the Indy 500 in a stock, off the floor Toyota Camry and expect to compete or ever win. Be smart. “Find your spike” that makes you stand out from everyone else and embrace it:

Don’t strive to be a balanced, well rounded merchant; embrace your uniqueness and the customers who are looking for it. Studies have shown that people on dating sites who embrace their unique beauty and set themselves apart from what is considered traditionally attractive do much better at finding dates and long term partners.

Do a content audit on a regular basis. Create as much evergreen content as possible and update evergreen content as needed. Engage in predictive SEO spot and jump on trends. Write, add, build, and create new content on a regular basis. Don’t add content to meet a quota; add content because you have something of value to add to the conversation. If your website isn’t important enough for you to pay attention to it and help it nurture and grow, why do you think Google’s ranking algorithm will magically compute that you deserve to show up in a search engine result … for anything.

Engage in social media … regularly. Social media is a time consuming aspect of marketing. Unfortunately, small businesses can’t afford to ignore it anymore. You don’t need to spend all day on Twitter: look for tools that allow you to spend less time on social media sites and be more effective with the time you do spend.

Don’t get in a position where you are dependent on Google to survive. Diversify your income stream and pipeline for traffic, leads, and customers. While I’m a zero inbox type of person, and creating and sending out email messages fills me with overwhelming level of self loathing, the depths of which you will never understand, I firmly grasp that it’s a necessary evil to survive. It’s simply impossible to make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Just do it in a way that adds value for your customers and doesn’t clog up their inbox with useless drivel. By building a firm social media fan base, cultivating your customer engagement, and implementing a proactive outbound marketing channel strategy, you will be sending Google the social validation they are looking for, and you’ll be immune to Panda Updates, Penguin updates, or whatever naming structure Google finally gives its algorithm changes.

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There are many sites that curate content and links on the Web, including many blogs and a number of social sites that do it through submissions by their members, who can also vote upon those submissions. The inventors of PostRank came up with an algorithmic approach to rank articles and blog posts and other [...]

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I was looking at the peaks and valleys of traffic in Google Analytics, and thinking of the Google Panda and Penguin updates, and couldn’t stop myself:

Wondering how long it will be before Google runs out of black and white animals to name updates after?

Copyright © 2012 SEO by the Sea. [...]

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