You might have heard a lot from your fellow Scandinavian friends lately. You know, we tend to win a lot of golds in the Olympics when it comes to Cross-Country Skiing and other winter sports. But we do not only kick your ass in hockey and skiing, we also kick your ass when it comes to Facebook usage!

I have recently studied statistics from Facebook when it comes to demographics and growth. I’ll publish the whole thing on monday on my Swedish blog but in the meantime it’s interesting to look at some statistics for Scandinavia and the Nordic countries.

40% of Scandinavia have Facebook

If you compare Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Denmark) with the rest of the world we have a lot more users in % of population than the most of the countries in the world.

If we compare the Facebook data with official population statistics we see that almost 40% of every living person in Scandinavia have Facebook. Fortsätt läsa hela inlägget →

I love Matt Cutts videos on YouTube. They are good and for webmasters they can often be quite educational when it comes to SEO.

Sometimes the videos are just funny or sometimes you just ask yourself: Why did you put up this video on YouTube?

A couple of days ago Matt Cutts published a short answer from a person who asked: “Why do cats bums go up when you stroke them?”

Actually a quite interesting question where Matt Cutts answers the question with “I have no clue”, “Go and check a website” and somewhat indicates that you should just “Google it”.

There’s just one problem here. If you search for that exact phrase on Google you will find this spammy SERP:

Thanks to Matt Cutts and this video the first results refer to this video and do not answer the direct question.

If you search for results that were not published before this video you got this result:

Yep. You’re totally right. Matt Cutts just made a SERP worse

For the record: I love cats.

The art of Picking Up girls and boys have a lot of similarities with marketing, especially when you combine this with Late Night, which is one of the themes of this blog. So, why not a blog post about this? Let’s do it.

For those who know me I have the track record of breaking iPhones. I manage to drop them but like a miracle they still work even though the glass is broke – but they are not that pretty.

The first reaction you have when this happens is that you get sad. Your love no #1, iPhone, is broken!

But after a while you don’t cry that much anymore, simply because the broken iPhone has turned into a enormous tool with a lot of possibilities.

Why? It’s your perfect pick up tool! Forget all that’s been written about peacocking, dressing up like a rock star and everything else.

If you want the techy, cool, iPhone-loving girl or boy – all you need is a broken iPhone.

This is how you do it by the playbook:

Playbook – The Broken iPhone

1. Make sure you’ve got money to buy a new iPhone or a bulletproof insurance that covers it.
2. Smash your current iPhone so the display breaks (see pic above). You don’t want to break it too much, you want the iPhone to work afterwards.
3. Prepare an amazing story on how it was broken:
   “I was on safari in Africa last week and then a lion came and started chasing me…”,
   “I was at the release of the movie Shutter Island and at the party Leonardo Di Caprio and I had a drinking game. Suddenly…”
   - You can pretty much come up with anything. Just make sure the story boost yourself.
4. Find a girl/boy that have a nice phone. Preferrably it would be best if it’s an iPhone.
5. Walk towards her and stand next to her. Look important while you put up your iPhone so she/he clearly can see that it’s broken.
6. Wait for it… She/he will ask the question: “Oh, what happened to your iPhone?”
7. Game on! Start telling the amazing story with the lion or Leonardi di Caprio, lions or another amazing story.

That’s pretty much it. Now you’ve broken the ice and the rest is up to you.

There have been a lot of talk about that Twitter doesn’t grow that much anymore and that we are seeing the end of the hype behind Twitter. I think this is wrong in so many ways and there is one thing that you can look at that shows that Twitter is growing and that is Twitter Search.

During 2009 Twitter Search has become the natural place when it comes to real time search, especially during live events like Michael Jackson death, Iran election etc.

Search + Integrated Search = Twitter Search

One problem many people do when they try do analyze Twitter Search is that they only look at search.twitter.com which is a big mistake. In July 2009 Twitter launched their new site and there you could see something quite interesting. They focus with a big search box and every search made through the homepage are done on integratedsearch.twitter.com.

Many people just look at search.twitter.com and the they see that the traffic didn’t increase that much during the last couple of months.

Twitter growth 2009

To solve this problem I’ve added upp both search.twitter.com & integratedsearch.twitter.com to see how the growth has been during 2009. The data below is from the fantastic Compete.com where you can find good data for U.S.

As you can see in the graph the growth of Twitter Search have been quite amazing in the US during 2009. From December 2008 to December 2009 the growth is 457%. Twitter Search was launched during 2008 so we can only see data from July 2008 and forward, therefore you can’t compare whole 2009 with 2008 but…

If you compare Q4 2009 with Q4 2008 it’s a 586% increase in traffic.

It’s not fair at this point to compare the traffic with big competitors like Bing, Google or Yahoo Search but you can indeed compare it with niched search engines like Google Blogsearch, Technorati, Yahoo Images etc.

Here you can see the interesting regarding Twitter Search growth. In comparison with these Twitter Search has grown and today Twitter Search has 4 times as many visitors than Google Blogsearch.

Twitter Search may not be the largest engine right now, but if it continues to grow like it did during 2009 it will become an engine that marketers need to focus on.

Today I saw the video from Matt Cutts regarding 2010 Search Predictions and as always it’s good to know what comes out from the Google Plex. I don’t know if there were any good predictions in the video but I do agree with him regarding the problem with illegal Black Hat stuff.

But to get serious – there must be some other predictions regarding search than hacking, malware in 2010, right? Of course there are! Some weeks ago I wrote an article about trends within Search in Swedish. It was before I started this blog so now  I’ve taken the time now to translate it into English so you won’t have to use Google Translate all the time.

Some of the predictions in the original article are completely based on Search in Sweden, and it’s quite differenent internationally. Therefore some predictions have been taken away and some have been modified.

So here comes this weeks list: 10 Search Predictions for 2010 that not have gone through Googles filter: Fortsätt läsa hela inlägget →

Yes, it really does and it should be a lesson for all marketerers that “The Google Zeitgeist fail” – To make a conclusion based on false or not enough data is not a good strategy.

Google Zeitgest 2009 sucks

Yup, do not believe what’s says in the Google Zeitgeist 2009. The reason is quite simple: More than a month ago, before the last month of  2009 have not even started Yahoo launched a Press Release of the most popular searches for 2009. Bing/MSN couldn’t be far behind so they released their data as well. The Spin Doctors at Google then thought this through for maybe 2 seconds before they released their own Google Zeitgeist 2009.

There is only one problem…

The data is not correct, 2009 wasn’t over at that time. Fortsätt läsa hela inlägget →

As a gift to myself and to all of you readers I’m now officially open up my English blog with the name Late Night Marketing.

The reason behind this is quite simple. During the last year I’ve blogged a lot about Marketing, Social Media and especially SEO in Swedish. The number of readers has consistantly grown and the blog has from then become one of the largest blogs in Sweden within Social Media and SEO.

During this time I’ve also been twittering a lot and also spoken and chaired a lot of conferences about Social Media & SEO. This has led to a lot of communication in English and a lot of interesting discussion with international experts within Marketing and specifically Social Media and SEO.

The long wait
Due to this I feel like I want to get my word out about Marketing and how I look at things. A lot of people have asked for me to blog in English and I’ve always answered:

“I will start to blog in English soon…”

The only problem with this is that I’ve said this for about one year now but there has always been something else that I’ve had to do. A year ago I tried to launch the English site under the name “Late Night SEO” but during that time I had too much at work so I didn’t have time to blog in English.

I’ve now decided to brand it as Late Night Marketing instead because everything will not be about SEO. I know that this site may look crappy as hell right now, but I don’t care because for me it’s more important to launch this than to make it absolutely perfect. I even made it look almost exactly like my Swedish blog

Suicide mission ahead?
As many of my fellow Swedes now I’m partner and Digital Director at the Advertising & Communications Agency Honesty which takes up a lot of time. It’s a hard job to be an SEO in a world of Advertising people. Add this that I have two blogs in Swedish: Joinsimon.se and my personal blog Simonsez.se.

So now I’ll begin to write a third blog. It’s almost a suicide mission but I’m determined to accomplish it. It may be that I will not update my personal blog as much but all of you Swedish readers can be calm: I will not let Joinsimon.se down.

So what will this blog be about?

Simple as it sounds – it will be about Marketing. When I say Marketing i mean everything but I will focus on SEO, Social Media, Internet Marketing and also some PR. You can also see the name of the blog to some form of tribute to David Letterman, Conan O’Brien & Jimmy Fallons great show “Late Night with…” on NBC.

Because of the name I will also make this blog with at least one weekly video update and also invite more persons than be to blog here. There’s a lot of knowledge from the SEO & Social Media community in Sweden that doesn’t get through because most of it is written in Swedish. So are you interested in writing here, just send me a mail or DM on Twitter.

So stay tuned for more blog posts this week and welcome to Late Night Marketing!

P.S. The on-page for this site sucks right now, but it will be fixed soon.

I searched for my own name this morning on Google to check the Search Results and look what I found on Google SiteLinks for my Swedish blog…

Nice to have Black Hat associated to me, thanks Google! The interesting thing here is that I have almost never written anything about Black Hat except for on my Glossary. The other silly thing about this is that the SiteLink does not point to this Glossary, but instead to my Wordpress admin page.

I investigated this a bit more and I realized that one time I had a broken link on my Glossary that instead of linking to http://www.joinsimon.se/ordlista/#Black-hat linked to http://www.joinsimon.se/wp-admin/#Black-hat. This was up approximately for about 12 hours.

Come on Google! One small mistake that links to WP-Admin should not result in these kind of SiteLinks, especially not if it was up 12 hours and then taken away…

I know that I can take away this in Google Webmaster Tools, but I will let it stay up for educational purpose for some days.