In Reddit’s continuing effort to weed out spammers, it has taken another not-quite traditional step: email verification.

Okay, so it sounds perfectly traditional, but the site has gone and taken it one step further – email verification that is completely voluntary.

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Earlier this month, the social news and bookmarking site announced that it was going to be drafting its users in a form of crowdsourced spam filtering. This next step, it says, could make “the spammers’ job dramatically harder”.

From Reddit engineer Mike Schiraldi’s blog post:

First and foremost, nobody has to verify their email address. If you’re paranoid about this sort of thing and would rather jump off a cliff than tell reddit your email address, you’ll still be able to log in, vote, post crazy comments, submit links to bunker supplies and tinfoil hat designs, and everything else that you’re used to.

In fact, we think (and hope) that normal, non-spammy users won’t even notice any change. The only ones who should have a problem are people who submit one crummy link after another, as often as the site will let them. We’re going to start limiting them to a certain number of crummy links per hour (and per day, per week, etc).

Schiraldi goes on to explain that “crummy” links are ones that are flagged as spam, fail to pass “deputy moderation” (that crowdsourced spam filtering me mentioned above) and links with more downvotes than upvotes.

So, if you surpass the number of crummy links allowed, all you need to do is verify your email address and “you’ll be granted a lot more leeway.”

It’s interesting to see these attempts at slight twists on traditional spam filtering because, as Schiraldi notes in the beginning of his blog post, “there are plenty of occasions when reddit users wish to remain anonymous” and “it’s a fine line to walk, crushing spammers without hurting [their] community.”

The IAmA is a perfect example. The name is a multipurpose anacronym, where someone says “I am a” but it also means “Ask Me Anything”. Without anonymity, this massively popular section of Reddit would be far less interesting, if not impossible.

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Yesterday morning, social news and bookmarking site Reddit announced to its users that they were being drafted. For what, you might ask? The ongoing battle of sites like Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon against that ever-present foe, the spam submission.

Using crowdsourcing to combat spam submissions on an already trained populous that already votes on everything seems like a smart way to outsource an otherwise difficult task.

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As the site notes in its blog, this move comes after a number of other attempts at thwarting spam submissions, including adding moderators to handle spam. But at each turn, the site found that the traffic became overwhelming and false positives, that is, valid content that set off the filters but should not have, became an issue.

In addition to these problems, the site also found that the generally American make-up of the moderators left those of you in Australia, New Zealand and other parts of the future stuck with valid submissions sitting in spam boxes, as the moderators were fast asleep.

Thus, Reddit has “deputized” its users, enlisting them all in the battle against spam submissions by including a box that will appear “at the top of the front page every once in a while”.

Average Reddit users will have the ability to pitch in and say whether or not a specific submission is indeed spam or was inadvertantly flagged, much the way you can train your email program to detect spam.

We asked Jared Goralnick, founder of AwayFind, how this might differ from standard spam filters on email, to which he replied that the method itself was not novel, but “taking just a few of the messages (the quarantine) and making them very prominent (the the front page of the site) seems novel”.

The sort of filtering Reddit is employing, he said, elaborates on the old binary sort of spam filtering, where something is either spam or not spam, adding the quarantine as the third category. While this is not new, the method of dealing with that third category is interesting.

“In short, the technology behind their decision has a deep history…” he said, “…they’ve always been very community-oriented and this seems like a good next step.”

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A spin-off of Finnish software development company Nodeta, Flowdock aspires to help developers and others sift out actionable bits of knowledge from ongoing conversations and make them retrievable. Their team messenger services allows separation and tagging of conversational elements.

“In Flowdock, the epiphany comes when you tag a chat message for the first time,” Nodeta and Flowdock’s CTO Otta Hilska wrote us. “You realize how you just took a piece of conversation and turned it into a nugget of knowledge. Somebody talked about a bug, and you turned it into a bug report. Or pasted a snippet of code, and you categorized and organized it. The real validation for the concept comes when you are looking for some other snippet of code, a link to a partner, an eBook or something else and come to think ‘I wonder if it’s tagged in Flowdock”. Sure enough it will be.’”

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Designed for groups, Flowdock attempts to address a new kind of information overload, the one that intensified when social media tools began to be adopted by exponentially more people. The theory is that by tagging bits of the conversation, they are made discreet and retrievable based on folksonomy.

Use examples include agile development and handling to-dos.

Flowdock is out of private data and you the public is invited to try it.

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More often than not, an entrepreneur with a great idea looking for funding will pitch his or her startup dozens, if not hundreds of times to potential investors. There is an endless amount of resources out there for entrepreneurs looking to learn the best practices for their pitch, including what to include in their decks, how long to speak, and what pitfalls to avoid. By the time an entrepreneur actually gets funding, they’ve probably mastered their pitch to a point where they could recite it in their sleep and provide advice of their own to newcomers. The problem with this is they can get stuck in their pitch mentality and it can creep into areas of their business that need the ole straight talk express.

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Michael Hirshland of Polaris Venture Partners, who blogs under the name VCMike, wrote today about a problem he often sees when in board meetings with startups. The issue is that entrepreneurs are so used to speaking a certain way to VCs that they sometimes have a pitch-like tone that gets in the way of board room progress. As Hirshland points out, don’t try to beat around the bush when it comes to bad news.

“VCs hear bad news all the time — it is part of the startup process and part of the VC job description,” says Hirshland. “Any VC worth his or her salt should respond to bad news, provided it is shared in a timely fashion, by helping the entrepreneur figure out the best way to respond rather than dwelling on what went wrong.”

He advises CEOs to stear clear of attempts to placate their board members by spouting off excuses for whatever their bad news is, or by claiming that they are already fixing the problem in hopes of avoiding any impending wrath. From what Hirshland says, board members are not schoolmasters there to punish you and whip you into shape; they are there to help, so don’t isolate yourself, he says. If you speak openly and honestly about your issues with your board, chances are you will preserve your most valued asset as an entrepreneur and as a startup: credibility.

“Early stage ventures are filled with ambiguity. Entrepreneurs and their investors need to make quick decisions based on information that is far from complete,” says Hirshland. “This necessitates relying to a very substantial degree on the entrepreneurs’ interpretation of the situation and prospects.”

In other words, you are the eyes and ears for your board, and if you aren’t being open and honest with them, bad things will happen. Worst of all, speaking with fluff and rounding out the rough edges of your company will destroy your credibility, which Hirshland calls “toxic” to your partnership and “not a happy place for either the entrepreneur or the investor.”

As we mentioned earlier this week, credibility is your best friend when trying to get funded, so make sure you carry it with you and preserve it in your board meetings and into your company’s future. Save the pitching for future rounds of fundraising, and when it comes to your board members, don’t try to win them over, simply treat them like equal members of your team.

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A few weeks ago we brought you a brief list of social networks for meeting and conversing with entrepreneurs, and in the comments section we received lots of suggestions that could have made the list as well. One such suggestion was Sprouter, which is, for lack of a better description and despite having a few unique features, a Twitter clone for entrepreneurs.

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Users can enter a 140-character status update and see both a public timeline and a list of updates from the users they follow which can be filtered into groups. Users can also create “Events” and “Topics” around which to talk about by using hashtags – a nice feature that adds on what the Twitter culture has developed.

When I checked out Sprouter a few weeks ago, it was lacking a few obvious features, namely Twitter integration and the ability to find friends on other social networks. Just yesterday, however, both of these features made their debut on the service, making it exponentially more useful.

Sprouter’s over 10,000 users can now link their accounts and send updates back and forth between the two services, either by choosing to push all of their updates out from Sprouter, or by using the #Sprouter hashtag in Twitter.

“Twitter has a huge audience, and we recognize that many Sprouter users also use the service,” says CEO Sarah Prevette. “Now it’s easy for members to keep both accounts up-to-date while still leveraging the niche power of Sprouter – Twitter integration will only add to the number of conversations taking place and resources being shared.”

In addition, tools for discovering contacts from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Gmail now make Sprouter a less lonely experience. When I tried them out, they all worked with the exception of Facebook, which after connecting left me with a blank page. Multiple attempts on various browsers returned the same issue, but Sprouter’s community manager Erin Bury says they are looking into the error.

Previously, the most glaring problem with the service was that I had no idea if anyone I knew was on Sprouter. With the contact importer I now know that a handful of my contacts are in fact using the service, and with the new Twitter integration, I could see myself and others making use of this service to share information and communicate with entrepreneurs.

One of the features that helped Twitter become a break-out success was their support for SMS updates and their API which spawned countless desktop and mobile applications. Sprouter says they have an iPhone application on the way in order to view and post statuses, but the new Twitter integration with the #Sprouter hashtag makes any Twitter client a portal through which to post to the service. To get more familiar with Sprouter, check out their screencast embedded below.

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Google is warning users about an increase of spammers promoting Google scams.

"We’re seeing disturbing cases in which websites, emails and advertisements claim that you can make large amounts of money from home with very little effort using Google products and services," the company said on the official Google Blog.

"They’re designed to look like they were written by a regular person, just like you, who stumbled across an amazing opportunity to make their monetary dreams come true. What they don’t tell you clearly is that Google is not affiliated with these sites and that they may add extra charges to your credit card or misuse your personal information."

Google has offered users a number of ways to report such scams.

 If you’ve been ripped off, or suspect others are, report the site and file a complaint with the appropriate agency.

If you come across many sites with duplicate content or common templates intended to direct users to the same product or scheme, please let us know with a spam report

If you’ve been contacted to place suspicious links on your site for money, let us know with the paid link report form

 If your site’s forums or comment sections have been spammed with fake offers of fabulous financial gain, you may need to take steps to fight comment spam. Spammers will take advantage of any user-generated content sections of your site, and will even generate thousands of fake user profiles to try to slip under the radar.

If you receive suspicious messages that claim to be from Google, these may be phishing attempts. Please report them to phishing@google.com

Marketers who spend time on Twitter may not want to count on it as a way of reaching consumers under the age of 25.  The results of a new study indicate that only 22 percent of people who are part of Generation Y (defined here as 18-to-24-year-olds) use the micro-blogging site. 

This statistic, which was released by the Participatory Marketing Network, doesn’t say great things about Twitter’s popularity among traditional early adopters.  And it looks even worse next to a second PMN stat: 99 percent of Gen Y consumers have a profile on at least one social networking site.

 

There is another perspective on the data, though.  Michael Della Penna, co-founder and Executive Chairman of PMN, said in a statement, "[C]learly we’re only touching the surface of its potential as a marketing vehicle.  This is a classic ‘glass half full’ scenario for Twitter because it’s clear that Gen Y has an appetite for social networking, but still hasn’t fully embraced micro-blogging."

Della Penna then continued, "There is a tremendous opportunity now for marketers to develop strategies to get this important group active on Twitter too."

So marketers can perhaps use Twitter in their attempts to reach young people . . . they should just understand that there will be more work involved than typing out messages 140 characters at a time.

In today’s business climate it’s no secret for the need of a strong customer base and to keep attracting new ones. Yes, we all want more customers with less leads. This is a strategy that greatly improves your profit and saves your company from throwing away money for marketing. Bringing in customers with less leads is key in this climate. Companies are throwing away opportunities every day. If you want to win more deals its important to use proper sales management to increase your sales numbers! It’s important to fix these gaps in your sales process to put you on top!

Here are 5 common lead management mistakes that should be fixed to increase sales performance:

1. Email Doesn’t = CRM Software

This is unquestionably the top killer of sales leads. Email is a communication tool. Meant for short-term discussions or collaborations, not sales account management. It is not a tool to build sales relationships, with hundreds of clients, over numerous years.

Fact: the human brain can only manage so much information.

Your attempts at remembering to follow-up and diligently stay on top of hundreds of prospects and customers is a guaranteed failure. Real sales performance needs a system that will routinely automate some contacts and remind you to reach out personally on a regular basis.

2. One Call Close are Unlikely

It is certainly the stuff of sales legend, that Boiler Room like close. The real sales pro’s understand that this ranks up with winning the lottery. So, if you hit it be happy, but don’t expect to pay your bills and feed yourself playing that game.

This is why a disciplined process of following up, on all prospects, is critical to success. Industry surveys show that the average lead takes a minimum of 5-7 contacts to close and generally requires 30-60 days. So, don’t get frustrated and toss out that two week old lead–nurture it.

3. Stop Picking Threw Leads

The Call of the Wild fouls this one up too, our primal nature lures us to the biggest fish (whale) of the freshest meat (new lead). Two notoriously bad choices.

We can’t pick the right leads! We invariably gravitate to our biases, which is typically counter productive to our sales numbers.

Grabbing for the brass ring (tackling only the biggest accounts or loan amounts) and neglecting the opportunity to land a few small ones along the way, is the perfect example. Your sales management system should help you create an ideal lead profile for each of your sales agents. You will be amazed at how different your “perfect lead” looks from your “preferred lead.”

4. Start to Value Your Leads

Are you trashing valuable non-responsive customers? More so than ever, leads need to be effectively nurtured. Challenging economic conditions slows everyone’s buying decisions. Stay top of mind, so you will be first in mind when the pain or the need becomes right for the big buy.

This doesn’t mean just throwing all your old leads into the autoresponder. Smart sales people build a detailed follow-up plan that includes email, mail, and telephone. And don’t forget the value at each of those touch points–an interesting article or report, an example of success, or best practices session.

5. Get to the Next Lead!

Sales usually always comes down to the numbers.

How many times do we spend too much time organizing or getting ready to do something? The best strategy in most cases is to do as my Dad was found of saying, “Do something, even if it’s wrong.”

Simply getting onto the next lead will produce more sales than any other strategy. Get To Your Leads Now!

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Lead Management Software, The 5 Mistakes That Kill Sales

Conflicting reports, none confirmed, are circulating today about Facebook’s latest attempts at raising funding. TechCrunch says that Facebook has been shopping itself around at a $4 billion valuation somewhat unsuccessfully, while VentureBeat says they just decided not to accept funding at that level.

In October 2007, Facebook announced a major deal with Microsoft—1.6% of the company for $240 million, placing the overall valuation at $15 billion. However, in the intervening eighteen months, the company’s speculated value has fallen off, being projected as low as $5 billion last June. By October 2008, many sources thought Facebook was headed for financial ruin.

TechCrunch’s story is that Facebook is having trouble coming up with new funding:

the company has been pitching hard for new cash at a much reduced valuation, hoping for at least $4 billion. And some investors are biting, but perhaps not at that price. A source with knowledge of the possible transaction tells us that General Atlantic may have submitted a term sheet at “around a $2 billion” valuation.

Also troubling is the potential costs of taking such funding and accepting such a low valuation: “In addition to the direct dilution to stockholders from the new money, old investors at the $15 billion valuation may need to be made whole.”

VentureBeat, on the other hand, reports that the company’s financial future may be very bright. In addition to allegedly rejecting a $4b deal, they have $200 million in the bank,

So there’s a good chance costs aren’t outpacing revenue. Facebook made under $300 million last year, was a little shy of breaking even, and at first expected to make towards $400 million in revenue this year. But the company said in late March — incidentally at the time that chief financial officer Gideon Yu left the company — that it was beating projections by 70 percent. I’ve confirmed that this run rate has the company possibly breaking half a billion in revenue by the end of the year.

VB also reports that FB may be revealing more information about its infrastructure soon, possibly to allay reports that their operating costs for their 200 million active members outpace their revenue.

What do you think? Is Facebook barely keeping its head above water, or is it smooth sailing for the most popular social network on the Internet today?

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Posted by great scott!

We here at SEOmoz have been fortunate enough to work with some incredible consulting clients over the years. We’ve achieved some amazing results and built some wonderful relationships with many of them. We’re often asked about what it takes to really develop a standout SEO consulting brand and, since it’s an oft overlooked topic, that’s exactly what we’ll cover in this week’s Whiteboard Friday.  We’ll look at some of the key elements that we feel are truly important to building and solidifying a consultancy’s brand, reputation, and client loyalty.

And as Rand mentions in the video, if you’re an SEO consultant you definitely need to list your company in our SEO Services Marketplace. It’s completely free and it’s a great place to gain exposure, find contracts, and look for talent.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Differentiating Your SEO Services from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

I’ve also migrated all of the legacy videos into the new PRO Video Tips area. There are now over two dozen exclusive, PRO-only video tips available, and we’ve already got more planned out.

Even if you’re not PRO, you can visit the page and read short descriptions of the videos to get an idea of what’s available to PRO Members.

PS–I’m sure most of you have noticed that it’s Tuesday, not Friday. Some may even have noticed that this post went up and came down a couple of times on Friday. Unfortunately, Vimeo had some technical issues with the first two attempts at uploading the video which caused it to be unwatchable, so it had to come down. Then I had some technical issues with the plague that kept me unable from getting it re-uploaded and live until today. Sincere apologies to all Whiteboard Friday fans for the delay. The video should be working just fine now and, in my opinion, it’s worth the wait.

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