- CUT -

Now it’s the daytime with our protagonist, who is clearly a veteran skydiver, is giddy as he walks to an airplane with his girlfriend who is excited, but a bit timid, about doing her first solo jump. She murmurs something to this effect and he comforts her. The best friend cameraman whips the camera around on himself and gives a grin and a wink as they all three climb into the plane.

- CUT -

It’s noisy now in the plane up at jumping altitude. Our threesome are pumping themselves up with excitement and anticipation. The pilot says, something cliched like “Okay, bombs away!” and they open the door, and jump simultaneously, with the couple holding hands. Some excited screaming, and then the protagonist waves to his girlfriend and points down at the ground. The camera shakily pans down and we can see what they had been up to the night before. In the corn field below is written “WILL YOU MARRY ME, SUSAN?” The girlfriend squeals with delight and gives the thumbs up, and they hug, causing them to somersault a bit.

The cameraman shouts a barely audible “Okay, guys, that’s enough!” and the couple push apart and prepare to pull their chutes. The girl pulls her cord, but nothing happens. She freaks out a little bit, but her more experienced fiancé reminds her about her secondary cord. She pulls that, and nothing happens. We hear the camera man utter an “Oh my god!” Our protagonist goes to his fiancé’s pack and tries to pull loose the chute. The camera man pulls his cord and we briefly lose sight of the free falling couple. The camera is lowered and we see them plummet to the ground, landing with a puff of dust right in the flattened dot of the question mark.

The video continues shakily, to let the audience marinate in their horror, as the cameraman lands in the corn sobbing. We get a brief shot of his face before he reaches behind the camera and it cuts to black.

After a second, we see the text with the sponsor’s name, and some message like,

You handle the romance.

Let ErikRas Insurance keep you safe.

Is that a complete non sequitur? Yes. Does anyone care? No.

What’s Needed?

The budget for making such a video could be kept pretty low. You need three skilled skydivers and maybe two or three jumps worth of takes. You need a field where you can film the initial scene of corn flattening. And the rest is computer effects. Any halfway descent Hollywood effects studio could generate the 3D model of the message written in the corn and sync it to the motion of the camera, probably with some sort of grid of bright dots on the ground that would later be edited out. And then you just need a 3D model of two humans with parachute packs on to fall to the ground.

Why It Will Work

The best viral videos are the ones that get forwarded both by those who love them and by those who hate them. You’ll have plenty of haters, people annoyed a corporation for tugging at their emotions or who simply think it’s distasteful. And it is distasteful…but it’s also sensational and shocking. Searching the internet for “skydiving marriage proposal” turns up several people who have thought of popping the question at terminal velocity, even some that have written it on the ground. The whole point of viral video marketing is to get your company name out there and into people’s heads. A video like this, if done well, would definitely get passed around. Neither confirming nor denying that the video was faked will only add to the publicity.

I also found this news report, which is in Spanish, of course.

Apparently there are recycling companies who have some interest in receiving these plastic caps. They have offered to donate 200€ for each metric ton (1,000 kg = 2,204 lb) of caps collected. The little eleven-year-old girl, Aitana, requires an operation in Boston (“which is very expensive since medicine is private over there”, the reporter mentioned) that costs 200,000€.

Let’s do some math, shall we? For every kilogram of bottle caps I save, the company will give 0.20€. I asked the internet how much a bottle cap weighs, and the general consensus is that it’s between 2-3 grams. That means that I need 333-500 bottle caps to complete my kilogram, which comes out to 17-25 bottle caps for one euro cent going to Aitana’s 200,000€ operation.

Further research has uncovered the recycling companies’ motivation behind such an effort.

Plastic bottle caps are often made from a different type of plastic from the bottles they’re attached to. Soda bottles are generally made from Type 1 Plastic (Polyethylene Terephthalate) while bottle caps are made from Type 5 Plastic (Polypropylene). These different types of plastic have to be recycled separately. If the bottle and the cap were recycled in the same batch of plastic, the two different plastics would melt unevenly and the whole batch would be ruined.

Whoever came up with this idea is an absolute genius. Ignoring any marketing philanthropic “corporate image” benefits for the recycling companies – of which there aren’t many since I can’t seem to find the name of any participating companies – it seems pretty obvious that it would cost considerably more than 200€ to remove the caps from 500,000 bottles, even if it could be mechanized. The task of getting the general public to properly separate items for recycling must be one of the hardest issues for recycling companies to tackle.

The media, of course, absolutely loves tearjerking stories of little dying girls, so there’s no problem getting the message out. Local governments are also suckers for positive press, and are willing to set up bottle cap collection centers at the town halls. Schools can use it as an easy way to teach simple philanthropy to the nation’s children.

Your average citizen that decides to participate in this scheme by saving bottle caps isn’t going to do the math and see that, if it takes five seconds to save each bottle cap, then it requires three and a half hours of work to produce a single euro to help the little girl. But, what it steals from you in paying ridiculously low wage is made up for by the positive feelings of wellbeing that philanthropy brings. I’m certain that, psychologically, someone saving bottle caps is going to be happier than a cynic who has done the math and refuses to based on the triviality of it.

It’s nice to find a scenario in which all parties involved come out winning.

• The people saving the caps get to feel good about themselves.

• The schools get to teach philanthropy give children the experience of happiness through helping the less fortunate.
• Local governments and organizations get to put on a positive philanthropic face.
• The recycling companies save money, which, in turn, results in lower government contract bids and tax money saved.
• The environment is ultimately less contaminated.
• A little girl gets a life saving operation. (I’d be skeptical of them reaching their goal, but this isn’t the first iteration, so they’ve done it before.)

It’s a win-win-win-win-win-win-win situation. Like I said, pure genius.

To allow their content to be crawlable by search engines, they display it all, but then put up a translucent element on top of the entire page to block navigation and easy human consumption. If they really wanted to get serious about the paywall, they could do so pretty easily, but I guess they assume this tactic will stop most people.

AdBlock rules to disable The Onion’s paywall

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International Only

At the moment, this paywall is only in effect for international visitors. A statement from The Onion:

We have found that most of our readers share articles with each other, and flow in and out of our site, and we do not want to limit that behavior.

There is also a set of avid readers, and we have chosen an article limit which allows that fan base to support us directly. On other platforms like the Kindle and Nook, we have had great support from our fans and other interested readers, which has given us confidence for this move.

We are testing a meter internationally as readers in those markets are already used to paying directly for some (other) content, particularly in the UK where we have many readers.

WTF is a cookie?

A cookie is a tidbit of information that a website gives your computer so that your computer can identify itself the next time it talks to the website. You see, the way web browsing works is that your computer (the client) requests a certain page from a certain computer (the server), and the server returns the page to the client. That’s it. The connection is closed and there is no agreement that any more communication will take place. Each page request is discrete.

This worked fine when the World Wide Web first began back in the 90s, when it was just pages of information linking to other pages of information, much like Wikipedia is now (but much uglier). But then people wanted to start making web pages do more than display a simple page of text. To make a web application, the web server must know who the client is from request to request. The only way to do this is for the web server to give the client a special “key”, a unique number or series of characters, on the first request, so that the client can give the key back with the next request to identify itself.

Cookies are a bit like those membership cards that grocery stores give you. Your card has a unique number on it, so whenever you come back to the store, they can swipe the card and know that you are the same you that bought milk at the other franchise across town last week. That’s all cookies do.

If You’re Not Paying For It, You Are The Product

This business trick was probably originally conceived by the newspaper industry, but it was perfected by the radio and television industry. It really is a win-win-win situation for all three parties: the content producers, the advertisers, and the audience. The best internet example of using free products to get an audience to sell to advertisers has to be Google. They wrote the best search engine, the best online email platform, and the best online RSS reader…and they gave it all away for free. Why were they successful? Because people found their products useful and their ads non-intrusive. That’s what’s so great about this system: it uses the free market of internet users to reward excellence and punish mediocrity.

Why track users?

I work at a company that makes e-commerce websites, and we use cookies to track users for a variety of reasons. The primary reason is to remember where visitors that buy products came from, in other words, how they heard about us, or what they clicked on to get to us. Most visitors find us by doing an internet search on a certain type of product they are interested in buying. Why do we want to know this? Well, it helps us better target our advertising, i.e. not waste money on advertising that does not work. If we spend money on ads with the words “jet powered tricycles” and no one makes a purchase after searching for that phrase, then we can stop marketing that phrase. If, however, we sell lots of products to people searching for “speedy trikes”, then we know to focus on those words.

It’s not “tracking” in the sense of a private detective who knows where you were and who you were with last night. It’s just anonymous “79 people saw ad X, 32 of them clicked on it, and 2 placed an order” kind of data. The corporations don’t care who you are; they just want you to give them your money.

Where can you be tracked?

Assuming you haven’t installed some sort of browser plugin by an advertising agency, a website can only track you when your computer is making requests to that company’s servers. So why are everyone’s panties in a bunch about Facebook? In making such an excellent sharing platform, Facebook has also created an incentive for me, as a content provider, to make it as easy for visitors to share my content as possible, such as placing a Facebook “like” button right on my website. And what does the “like” button do? It makes your computer contact Facebook’s servers every time you view a page on my website, thereby enabling them to – dum! dum! DUM!! – know you are visiting my website!

So what can you do about it? Well, there are several browser features and plugins that allow control over “third party cookies” (cookies not coming from or being read by the website you are actually on). There are many, but one that I’ve recently discovered and like is Ghostery. It gives fine control over which tracking services you will allow to track you and which not. Why would you want to allow some services? Mainly so that the social sharing buttons – which are useful sometimes – will actually work.

The other option is to use a “private browsing” feature of your web browser to open up an anonymous browser window. Safari, Firefox and Chrome will all do this. Of course then you’ll be logged out of all internet services and you won’t have any of the benefits that cookies have been providing you. Go try out private browsing mode and notice how the internet works differently, and you’ll understand what cookies help do.

Targeted Ads

As I mentioned earlier, Facebook is an expert in targeting ads. But here’s an offline example to compare online ad targeting to.

Today in the mail, we received a coupon for some wet wipes designed for kids learning to use the toilet and wipe themselves. As far as targeted marketing goes, that was a hit right on the bullseye! The advertising agency probably got our address because my wife signed up for a store membership card when we bought a changing table almost three years ago. Has my privacy been breached? Hardly.

All Facebook or Google might learn from you visiting this page is that perhaps you like Spain, and they can infer to offer you some all inclusive deals for a Spanish vacation or something. Not such a bad thing.

Conclusion

Yes, companies like Google and Facebook can track you in the same way that a credit card or a store membership card can track you. If you’re an undercover spy or terrorist or something, then you probably already know not to use any of these internet services with your real name anyway. If you’re planning on murdering your spouse with cyanide, then you might want to consider taking some steps to protect your anonymity before Googling how to get your hands on the stuff. But for the rest of us, the tracking that cookies provide is actually a good thing, in that it tailors ads to stuff you might actually be interested in. I don’t need to see ads for rifle scopes or parakeet cages because I’m never going to buy one. Why not choose see stuff you are interested in?

I’m aware that the “privacy doesn’t matter if you have nothing to hide” argument is totally vacuous, but I don’t think a hardline stance against all cookies and social networking is a reasonable extreme, either.

A few months ago, I placed an ad on Facebook, mainly as an experiment to satisfy my curiosity about how their advertising system works. It was a few days before the British royal wedding, and I had done up a silly little photoshopped image of the bride and groom with their faces swapped, so I decided to see how much traffic I could drive to that page. I told Facebook I was willing to spend up to $10 on the ad over three days (I ended up pulling the plug, curiosity quenched, after spending only $8). Then I got to select who the ad was presented to…and that’s when things got creepy.

Because of all the causes and opinion crap that people “like” on Facebook, I was able to choose to only show my ad to people who liked any of the following pages/causes/ideas:

• Royal Wedding
• William and Kate
• Celebrity Face Swapping
• Kate Middleton
• Prince William
• Princess Kate
• DOWN WITH THE ROYAL FAMILY!!
• WE HATE KATE – Britons Against Kate Middleton

I don’t remember them exactly, but that’s about what they were like. I chose both pro and anti-royal people since both might have liked the image. In the end, the page got 78 likes, an order of magnitude more than I’ve ever received for anything else, aside from this entire blog.

What was really fascinating to me was how many options and combinations were available to Facebook advertisers. If you wanted to target an ad at the subset of society of “seventh-day adventists that love Mitt Romney, Sesame Street, Astrology, Keanu Reeves, and Scuba Diving”, Facebook can actually produce those people for you to advertise to. That’s immense marketing power.

But is it a breach of privacy? Not really. Facebook only knows what you tell them, and they only want that information to facilitate your consumerism.

Accounts

An account represents one Facebook user, actual human being that is interacting with Facebook. For privacy reasons and because of how our species generally interacts socially, connections between Facebook accounts must be mutual. You can “request” to be my friend, and we won’t be connected until I “accept” your friend request. Once we have mutually agreed to be connected, then I can see what you post on your wall, and we can comment on each other’s posts.

These rules vary slightly if you are insane enough to not restrict your privacy settings to “Friends Only”, but I’ve captured the gist of the system.

Pages

A page, on the other hand, is for an entity that is not an individual human*. The primary difference between an account and a page is that the connections between users and pages do not have to be mutual. Rather than “request” to connect, you simply “like” a page, and you are automatically connected to it. Then, when a page [admin] posts to its wall, you see it in your news feed and can comment on the item. Pages are used for companies, products, websites, bands, clubs, charities, sports teams, and celebrities.

*Sometimes a page can represent a human, but that is only for a celebrity communicating with fans, and because accounts have a limit to the number of friends you can have.

When you “like” a page, you are giving it permission to see your name and put updates into your news feed. It’s a little like subscribing to an RSS feed. Personally, I don’t often “like” many pages because I don’t want too much polution in my news feed, but there are some bands that I follow. Speaking of “follow”, you will note that Facebook pages are very much like the one-way connections that govern Twitter.

Changes

I am officially canceling my Bilingual Social Networking experiment. In the almost four months that it lasted, the only friends that “Spanish Erik” got were already friends with me on my regular account, and it caused quite a bit of confusion among my friends that had not read that blog post. I’ve found that it’s just as easy, or easier to do bilingual posts to my regular account when they are topics that my monolingual Spanish friends might care about. I was breaking the unwritten “one account per person” rule.

Until now, I have been posting, either automatically via Twitter or a blogging plugin, or just manually, my new blog posts to my Facebook wall for my friends to see. While not a terrible violation of Facebook etiquette, it could be done better. Although everything on it comes from me, my blog is an entity that is not me. It has regular readers whose names I do not know. My blog’s proper representation on Facebook is with a page. And now it has one.

I will no longer be posting my blog entries to my Facebook wall. If you are a friend of mine, and you have enjoyed those wall posts, you need to “like” my blog on Facebook. That will ensure that you continue to get updates about my posts.

I had one of the very first computer webcams, the Connectix QuickCam, back in 1995. I took it with me to college and actually video chatted with my parents a few times from my college dorm room. At the time, the webcam software and propaganda was very excited about the idea of “video email”, and that, in the very near future, we’d all be sending short video recordings to each other like on Star Trek. But then again, everyone thought we’d be surfing the web in 3D with VRML by the end of the millennium, too.

The iPhone 4, and other front-facing camera phones, have finally lowered the hassle level of sending a video email, a requisite for any technology taking off. Bandwidth speeds and video compression algorithms are now good enough that a 30 second video clip can be downloaded in less than 20 seconds.

Even with all this level of ease, I still don’t think video emails will become standard any time soon. Google’s increasingly popular Google Voice service is handy specifically because it is moving in the opposite direction, translating spoken voice messages into text. Text is the most efficient way we receive communication, since most people can read faster than they can talk. It’s also much easier to edit and perfect just what you want to say in text than with video (e.g. “Darn, that’s not what I meant. Let’s record another take!”)

One might think that if the literacy rate continues to drop, voice and video emails might become more popular, but one look at social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook confirms that a lack of literacy doesn’t seem to be stopping anyone.

A Case Study

For a couple weeks now, I’ve been working on getting Nora to say “Good morning”. She doesn’t yet say it perfectly and requires some prodding in the morning to say it, but she’s made some progress. Earlier in the week, I thought that if I could pair “good morning” with “grandma”, a word she knows well (she says “meh-mah”), it might be nice to record a little video to send to my mother for her to see when she woke up. It only took about four takes, and then another thirty minutes for her to stop saying “Good morning, Grandma!” Not surprisingly, we had a video response in our inbox the next morning. This time in our response, we tried saying “Good morning, grandpa!” as well, but to limited success. It was a fun experiment this week, but our vocabulary has run out, I think.

Perhaps one day we will be recording messages back and forth all day long, but I suspect that people will still be typing with their fingers and scrolling through text on screens at the end of the twenty-first century.

I first learned about these authors through their TED Talks. Dan Ariely has done two, Malcolm Gladwell has done one, Dan Gilbert has done two, and Jonah Lehrer is constantly appearing as the neuroscience expert on my favorite science podcasts, Are We Alone? and Radio Lab. Dan Ariely has a blog on which he often posts interesting ideas and YouTube videos of himself explaining his research. And Jonah Lehrer’s blog, The Frontal Cortex, is one of my favorites to read every day. Lehrer writes about how irrational decision making effects current events like the banking crisis, the volcanic ash cloud, and, most recently, the BP oil spill.

I guess what I’m wanting to describe is a new sort of connectedness between author and reader. It feels more like a teacher-student relationship. Authors can get more feedback quicker, directly from readers, not just from literary critics.

Last week Dan Ariely tweeted that his new book, The Upside of Irrationality was released. So I pulled out the iPad, went to the iBookstore, and sure enough, there it was as a new release, I chose to download the free sample, and within five minutes of his tweet, I was reading the first chapter on my handheld device.

Another publishing trend I’ve been following with interest, on both Twitter and his blog, is how Wil Wheaton is self-publishing his books using Print On Demand (POD). Rather than a publishing company deciding how many copies to print, the author signs up with a printing company and they print and ship individual copies as orders come in. In the same way that a recording artist, like Zoë Keating, no longer necessarily needs a record company to get her music out to fans, writers will now be decreasingly dependent on big publishing houses. Not to mention that once eBook readers become more widespread, a book might never need to take the form of ink on paper to get from the author’s mind to the readers’…much like this blog entry.

Before I begin the reviews, I’d like to mention something. Personally, I don’t know anyone who uses a naked iPhone (I call that “going commando”). The fact that everyone uses a case of some kind is pretty good evidence that the sleek nice-for-the-eyes backing of the iPhone is actually not very practical. It’s just too slippery. It will slide out of your pocket or hands very easily, which is not something you want your high-end mobile phone to do. There are soft cases, leather cases, and hard plastic cases. Shortly after purchasing my iPhone, I, without much thought on the matter, purchased a Griffin Clarifi case, which has a built in close-up lens. I have been very happy with this product, even though the lens is sometimes hard to clean.

So that’s where I’m coming from when I began to test out Proporta‘s products.

Antimicrobial Silicone Case with SteriTouch for the iPhone 3G

The silicone case with its paper insert next to my naked iPhone.

For no good reason, I decided to replace the anti-scratch film on my iPhone’s screen that had come with my Clarifi with the identical one included in the Antimicrobial Silicone Case. The case does what it promises.

• It makes the iPhone less slippery
• It prevents scratches from casual drops or bumps.

After a couple days of use, however, I began to get annoyed by two main problems.

1. The silicone backing becomes a magnet for pocket lint, which is hard to brush off of the case.
2. The case doesn’t fit quite snugly enough around the phone. Particularly down at the bottom where there is only a fine strip between the hole for the USB connector and the main button. When you press the button, the silicone case moves a little bit and generally gives the sensation that it’s going to fall off.

I suspect that these complains are true of all silicone soft cases, and that it is not a particular problem with this case from Proporta.

Ted Baker Leather iPhone 3G Case

Personally I have no idea who Ted Baker is, but when my wife saw it, she said, “Oooh! A Ted Baker case!”, so I guess handbag-aware women might be impressed. The quality of the case is very impressive. The leather screams elegance. And there’s something very appealing about the wrist motion to flip up the cover to use the iPhone.

My only complaint about the Ted Baker case is that it makes touching controls on the edges of the screen rather difficult, which is pretty important for doing anything with the onscreen keyboard. Several times during the week I used it, I found myself removing the iPhone from the case (which is very easy, by the way) to type an email before placing it back inside for protection and reading of email.

After a week of normal use, the snaps that seemed so pleasingly crisp when I first began using the case began to get stubborn to unsnap. And eventually one of them broke off. Remember that this is after only one week. Proporta assures me that all their products come with a lifetime warranty and that, due to the handmade nature of this particular product, defects sometimes occur.

The broken snap on my Ted Baker iPhone 3G case.

If leather cases were my thing, I would definitely buy and use this product. But I just don’t like the extra unsnapping and flipping motion every time I want to use my phone. However if you like leather cases and you want to look like an elegant executive when you use your iPhone, I highly recommend the Ted Baker iPhone 3G case from Proporta.

Handy Travel Bundle

The third item I chose to review was the Handy Travel Bundle, which consists of an Airline Headphone Adapter, which lets you listen to movies on an airplane without paying the 5€ ridiculous fee the airline offers you, a leather Passport Holder, and a Leather Memory Wallet. I have not yet been on an airplane, so I have not been able to test the audio adapter, but it looks just like my old one. The passport holder is quite nice and will come in very handy in displaying the picture page of my passport in the future. The memory wallet…well… You see, the memory wallet never actually arrived…

Shipping Confusion

First they sent me the entire Handy Travel Bundle except for the Memory Wallet. I wrote back that the whole shipment had arrived except for the one item, and my contact apologized and said she’d send the Memory Wallet immediately.

A week later, I had a package in the mail from Proporta, but rather than the Memory Wallet, they had sent me another Passport Holder. I reported this to my contact and she asked if I’d send it back to them. I told her that I wasn’t willing to pay postage out of my own wallet (not a memory wallet) for Proporta’s mistake, but that if she’d like to send a courier, I’d give it to them. She said I could keep the Passport Holder and that they’d send the Memory Wallet.

Shortly after this interaction, out of professional curiosity, I began examining the product ids listed for the products I’d ordered on their website and the ones listed on the invoice. The Passport Holder had the same product id as the Memory Wallet! That would make it pretty easy to mistake one for the other in their shipping database. I informed my contact of my discoveries and she passed my information on to the web developer. Managing databases full of products and the website that displays them and takes and organizes orders is what I do, so I understand that sometimes mistakes like this can happen (although I’d never ever have two products with the same id – that’s an extremely amateur mistake).

Another week goes by and I get another package in the mail, and what do I find inside? A Leather Wallet – Limited Edition (St. Patrick’s Day). Well blimey!

I emailed Proporta and told them that with their third strike, they’re out. I don’t really want a Leather Memory Wallet. I just chose the Travel Bundle because I needed the audio adapter and as a bundle, it seemed like more free stuff. Within a half hour I received a call from my contact apologizing again. She said that the Memory Wallet was out of stock and she had, without contacting me, chosen a similar product based on the upcoming holiday. At the very least some sort of “We didn’t have X, so we sent you Y. We hope you don’t mind.” note should have been included on the invoice.

The St. Patrick’s Day wallet is actually very nice, and of high quality. If I hadn’t just bought a new wallet this week, I might use it for a while. At least now I have a backup.

Conclusion

Proporta’s products are very nice. The level of quality and detail is very high. While some mistakes may be made and flaws found, they are very professional about it and, most important of all, actually stand by the motto “The customer is always right.” Not all companies do so, and Proporta deserves some respect.

However, none of their products really interest me, so I don’t think I’ll be using any of them in the long term except perhaps the passport holder. Really, Proporta, it’s not you, it’s me.

Time to put my Griffin Clarifi back on my iPhone….

To be honest, I was a little doubtful, but I added the link and replied that I would remove it if I didn’t receive $50 in my PayPal account within 24 hours. Sure enough, the next day, there was a big fat Ulysses sitting in my PayPal account. Awesome.

What I did not expect was to later find, in my blog stats, a referrer back to a Google Spreadsheet that was publicly viewable (I’m row 302 of the “LA” sheet). This is the document where the Search Engine Optimization company is keeping track of websites where they see the word in question and are willing to offer money. It seems that offers range from $25 to $100 per year. It makes me wonder if I could have demanded more. Anyway, I was pleased to note that one of my row neighbors in the spreadsheet is none other than Zoë Keating.

Anyway, it seems pretty amateurish for an SEO company to A) click on links in your online spreadsheet without disabling referrer information in your browser, and B) allow public access to your spreadsheet so anyone, particularly those that you may not have negotiated a deal with yet, can see how much you’re offering to others.

UPDATE (2010-Jan-19): I’ve donated my Ulysses to Non-Believers Giving Aid to be split 50/50 between Doctors Without Borders and the International Red Cross for use in Haiti. I can’t think of a better place for the money of this incompetent SEO company to go.