Check In Before You Check Out: Social Media Meets Black Friday

With the social media explosion of the past year, everyone's getting in on the Black Friday action.  #BlackFriday has been a trending topic on Twitter for about a week, and scores of people are asking around the social media grapevine which retail outlets have what deals for the famed day of savings.

Gowalla, Facebook Places, and other social media giants have artfully begun their marketing for the shopping season.  Partnering with businesses like American Eagle and Radio Shack, they advertise extra savings just for checking in while you shop.  Target is a retailer that (wisely) invested in promoted tweets for Black Friday, guaranteeing their name stays atop the competition in your Twitter feed.

What do you think?  Is this all just hype, or are you excited by the idea of savings just for hitting a button on your smartphone?

Check out a great article about social media and Black Friday at Mashable, plus a list of participating businesses and their offered deals.

REJECTED: How Google Places Gets Aggressive

In June of 2010, Google Places amped up its algorithm by introducing a much more aggressive listing level spam review process.  What does this mean, exactly?  Well, as it often does in the world of SEO, it means the rules have changed again.  While your Google Places listing may have once been at the top, it can be buried by just tweaking your post a little -- or sometimes, for seemingly no reason at all.

This includes certain touchy rules such as not using the word "google" in a Places entry, allowing only up to 3 capital letters together (such as LLC or LTD), and various sexual words being banned from all listings.

In other words, Google Places means business.

If you'd like to read on and see what else these aggressive new changes entail and how to properly utilize them, see the original article here.