Mullet vs Mulldina or just use a domain?

It’s the question that has been keeping you awake at night, do you go for the full on Mullet or just the appearance of a Mullet with the Mulldina?
I know your problem I to have had the same sleepless nights and the answer is to use both in your social media campaign.
Please note no 80s TV idol was harmed during the writing of this post!
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How to track Social Media Users with Google Analytics

Social media Stats
One of the questions we are often asked is how we track various social media sites users and their interaction with sites the answer is in a variety of ways but here is just one of the techniques we use with Google Analytics. Read the rest of this entry »

Centralising your social world

Using Send To as a information centre

Most of you will be familiar with the Stumbleupon toolbar and in particular with the send to button we have discussed its uses before and when I first reviewed it considered it a fantastic tool to start a stumble however since then the “send to” has become devalued.
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Re-captcha your comments

Comment spam sucks, its as simple as here at Venture Skills blog we get hundreds of spam a day most are caught by Akismet but not all are. If your hosting your own blog or site then no doubt you have tried many combinations. One simple method of reducing spam is a CAPTCHA “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” These provide puzzles which are easy for a human to solve but are much more difficult for a machine. Read the rest of this entry »

User agents and referrers – who are you any way?

We rely on knowing who is coming to our site and how they got their our conversion goals are set by this and sometimes our authentication systems rely on them but what are these concepts and how can we abuse use them.

User Agents

A user agent is the client application used with a particular network protocol; the phrase is most commonly used in reference to those which access the World Wide Web. Web user agents range from web browsers to search engine crawlers (”spiders”), as well as mobile phones, screen readers and braille browsers used by people with disabilities. When Internet users visit a web site, a text string is generally sent to identify the user agent to the server. This forms part of the HTTP request, prefixed with User-agent: or User-Agent: and typically includes information such as the application name, version, host operating system, and language. Bots, such as web crawlers, often also include a URL and/or e-mail address so that the webmaster can contact the operator of the bot.

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Organic Stumbling Tip

UPDATE: Don’t use this feature! – since this article things have changed see Centralising your Social World for more details

Have you noticed when all your friends stumble your post it seems like they have little or no effect? Well it appears that Stumbleupon Algorithm treats artificial stumbles differently by artificial I mean stumbles that don’t have the Toolbar as their referrer. The solution is to use the “send to” option to your friends, they will then arrive via the toolbar and when they thumb up the site it will appear as an organic stumble with all its juice…
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