I’m Supporting Flash. What’s happening to the world?

We all should keep an eye on Flash, and how we use it in our Web sites. Apple does not support Flash. Consequently, because iPad’s are becoming so widely used, this is going to cause some tough decisions to be made.

This is a strange turn of events for me. I typically am the person who fights against the use of Flash in Web sites. But now I find myself on the other side of the discussion.

Flash has become a solid tool for presenting multimedia content. And right now, I don’t believe there is a better technology that can take its place.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Will you take the Flash movie off of your site?

Here are all the news stories from the past week that I found interesting:

Marketers Respond to the Apple v. Flash Battle

Programmers and Web designers say clients increasingly are asking that their websites or applications be compatible with Apple’s iPhone and iPad. Those sites can’t be built with Adobe’s Flash technology, which is used widely for online video and animation but which Apple has banned from its devices.

Yahoo Buys Associated Content and $5 Per Article ‘Journalists’ Celebrate

The deal, which will be announced later today, is part of an effort to shore up Yahoo’s content offerings and underscores the increased use of low-cost, crowd-sourced content, a strategy that AOL is pursuing through its SEED content factory, as well as by Demand Media, which reportedly hired Goldman Sachs to explore an IPO this summer.

Foursquare Check Ins Growing Rapidly

Responding to criticism for Foursquare’s recent downtime, the company said it’s now handling an average 600,000 “check-ins” per day.

That’s basically double the less than 400,000 check-ins per day in late March — just two months ago — and up about 5X from when it hit 1 million check-ins a WEEK in February.

Google Handles Privacy Blunder Well

Google added that, Google has made a decision to completely stop using the WiFi data collection technology with Street View cars in the future. Those wifi collecting cars will be taken out of the rotation and not be used due to the privacy concerns expressed globally. In addition to these steps, Google promised to ask a third party to audit the software at issue and conduct internal reviewing procedures to ensure that the controls are in place to prevent these issues in the future.

Is Social Conversation The Future Of Polls And Surveys ? [Study] – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

In a study called From Tweets to Polls: Linking Text Sentiment to Public Opinion Time Series, researchers found that online social conversation analysis could also “capture important large-scale trends.”

U.S. Q1 Online Ad Revenues Hit Record $5.9bn As Market Looks Up – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Online advertising revenues hit a record $5.9 billion in the U.S. in the first quarter, reflecting an uptick in the country’s economy as well as the increasing role of online advertising in marketers’ campaigns, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) said in a report.

How to Cloak Your Affiliate Links the Easy Way

Nowadays, I use a much simpler technique that puts all my affiliate links on one php page, i.e. link.php, which resides in the root directory.

Photo from: Philips Box Flash on Flickr

Big Time Social Media In Akron / Canton Ohio

I put a lot on the line with this event.

I’ve been a huge fan and participant of The Web Association for years.

Recently, we were talking and they mentioned that they would like to try an event in Akron.

The first idea that came to mind was a social media event featuring the Akron-Canton Airport. They are doing some world-class, cutting edge social media tactics. I really wanted this to be the first event.

Everyone at the Web Association thought it was an awesome idea.

I then talked to Kristie VanAuken, the airport’s  Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing & Communications Officer about the idea. Because of her extreme awesomeness (you’ll see what I mean) she was all about it.

But here’s where it got tricky. The Web Association was concerned about having the event too far south. They were afraid they might not get enough people at the event.

But it seemed like the place to have the event was right at the airport.

I really pushed for them to try it here. They said it was a huge risk because if we didn’t get a good turnout we might not be able to do another Akron / Canton event.

But I knew my Akron and Canton peeps would totally come through.

And sure enough, the event is filling up fast.

But I don’t want the attendance to just be “good.” I want The Web Association to be blown away!

So, let’s show those Clevelander’s what we’ve got. Let’s fill this puppy up!

If you are available:

May 27, 2010
11:30 AM – 1:30 PM

Please come to this most awesome event.

You are going to learn a lot about how social media is done right. You are going to be able to check out the very sweet CAK airport.

And you will be able to show your Akron / Canton amazingness.

PLEASE COME TO THIS EVENT!

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE AND REGISTER.

It’s Becoming A Facebook World

The story that impressed me this week was Facebook Served Most Display Ads in Q1.

Facebook seems to be an unstoppable force.

There has been a lot of talk about Facebook privacy. But I have my doubts that’s going to do much to their popularity. I have a feeling that most of that conversation is just inside baseball.

This display ad fact is just another feather in a well plumed hat.

Also, this is not good news for Yahoo. Even though search is a deteriorating asset for Yahoo, at least they were world leaders of display. Now they have that taken from them.

It’s a fascinating industry.

Here’s the rest of the news:

YouTube Gets Unlisted (A Step in the Right Direction for Privacy!)

The new feature will keep unlisted videos from the general search results, but still allow anyone with a direct link to watch the video. (So it will still be completely possible for video sharing to get more than a little out of hand if people continue to pass a link along.)

Facebook Served Most Display Ads in Q1, Beat Yahoo

Facebook served 16% of all display ads in Q1 of this year, according to comScore, making it the largest online display ad publisher in the US—handily beating #2 Yahoo

Twitter Biz Center Being Introduced

the most interesting is likely to be the ability to receive a direct message from any follower whether your company is following them or not. This could be a boon to companies using Twitter to assist with customer service efforts. There will also be a verified account optiond as well.

Google Up While bing and Yahoo Slip

Hitwise is reporting that all is once again normal with the world of search as Google garnered 71% of the total searches performed in the US in April. This is a 2 percent increase from March numbers. While bing had been showing some gains recently and giving some people hope that they would be a possible contender to Google at some point the search wannabe saw a 2 percent slip.

Advertisers Eager To Try Google AdWords New Broad Match Modifier

This new modifier is named the “broad match modifier” and it is currently being tested in Canada and the U.K. To implement the modifier, just put a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. Each word preceded by a + has to appear in your potential customer’s search exactly or as a close variant. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) aren’t considered close variants.

Image by Wordle

Internet Marketing News – Don’t Change Your URL’s

Image by: http://www.wordle.net/

I’m one of these people that is always looking for a cause.

In the web world, if I had one main cause it would be: Stop changing your web addresses.

This topic had recently come up on a Google Webmaster Central Forum. But the defining heart of this argument can be found here: Hypertext Style: Cool URIs don’t change. This article is written by the good people at w3.org.

People change web addresses like they change cars. And as a result it causes breaks in the web. This was never the way it was meant to be. Links are meant to be around forever. If you make a page imagine you are making a time capsule for your grand children. They should be able to find the page you wrote about the cool new product you just launched today (April 26, 2010).

This article talks about things like “duty” and “2000 years from now”. You aren’t just a marketer or a web developer… you are a historian. Don’t take your job lightly. I think I’m going to go make some t-shirts for my new found cause.

Here’s the rest of the news:


Mobile Couponing Set to Explode?

Text-based coupons are the fastest-growing and most obvious mobile marketing application, and the easiest to implement, says the report. Redemption rates for mobile coupons are 10x that of mail or newspaper distributed coupons. The report summarizes the future by noting that a restaurant in Texas pays $37 to send out 500 text messages for a “buy-one/get-one-free burger” offer and gets 60 people to walk in the door, for incremental revenue of $1,000 per day.

Hulu Plus: Content at a Cost?

Under the proposal, Hulu would continue to provide for free the five most recent episodes of shows like Fox’s “Glee,” “ABC’s “Lost” or NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” But viewers who want to see additional episodes would pay $9.95 a month to access a more comprehensive selection, called Hulu Plus, these people said.

Facebook Has Over 40% of Social Media Traffic

The chart, according to comScore shows that 41% of social media traffic is going to Facebook.

Google Local Business Center Now Google Places

Google has decided to change the name of what was called the “Google Local Business Center” to “Google Places.” The rationale, according to the press release, is to better connect Google Place Pages with the place where local business information is claimed, entered and enhanced:

Hypertext Style: Cool URIs don’t change.

It is the the duty of a Webmaster to allocate URIs which you will be able to stand by in 2 years, in 20 years, in 200 years. This needs thought, and organization, and commitment.

My Secret to Running Successful Competitions on a Blog

I must have run 50-60 competitions on my blogs over the years but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about which ones work best it is this – MAKE THEM SIMPLE.

Internet Marketing News – Google Webmaster Tools Top Search Queries Kick Butt!

Photo from: The Internet is not a newspaper on Flickr

Some weeks it seems like every story I come across is fascinating and important. This was one of those weeks.

There’s tons of great updates in the stories below. But the one that takes the cake is: Google Wows Webmasters With New Search Reports with CTR.

This is a HUGE breakthrough in how search marketers think about documenting search listings.

This report shows you a large array of key phrases your site is coming up for. It then shows you how many impressions Google has given you for those phrases. And then, finally, it shows you how much traffic you’ve gotten for them.

This is data that we have never been able to see before.

My biggest recommendation is to go over to your Webmaster Tools account at Google and check it out for yourself. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

Be sure to check out all the other impressive news stories too…

Ning Free Rides Coming to an End

It has just announced that it is killing off its free product, forcing existing free networks to either make the change to premium accounts or migrate their networks elsewhere. Rosenthal has also just announced that the company has cut nearly 70 people — over 40% of its staff.

Twitter Accounts Cross the 105 Million Mark

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the group that the number of registered users (let’s call them accounts) is 105 million. That is considerably more the 65 million that comScore has estimated the number at.

How Much Are Facebook Fans Worth? $3.60

Social media specialist Vitrue looked at its clients’ data for Facebook to determine exactly how much a Facebook fan is worth, as AdWeek reports, and they came up with a number: $3.60.

Paid Search Grows 11%; Bing Up 21.6%!

According to SearchIgnite, U.S. paid search spend increased a whopping 11% in Q1 of 2010 from Q1 of 2009–”whopping” by recessionary standards! In addition, we can actually celebrate a flat quarter, with paid search dipping just 0.5%, which is remarkable when you consider that there’s normally a drop after the holiday blitz.

Twitter Ads Finally Set To Make Public Debut

The advertising program, which Twitter calls Promoted Tweets, will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought to link to their ads. Later, Twitter plans to show promoted posts in the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user.

Twitter + Video = Magic! (And Engagement!)

consumers that find online music videos via Twitter watch an average of 2:30 minutes per stream compared to the 1:30 minutes viewed on average by consumers discovering online music videos via search engines like Yahoo!.

TubeMogul released research last year that showed that more than half of all online video watchers moved on by about 60 seconds into a video.

Twitter, The Second Largest Search Engine?

# 105,779,710 registered users.
# 300,000 new users per day.
# 180,000,000 unique visitors to Twitter.com
# 60 per cent of new accounts are outside the US.
# 75 per cent of traffic is not on Twitter.com.
# 100,000 registered apps

Google Wows Webmasters With New Search Reports with CTR

Not only did Google add more queries and neat charts, they also added impressions, clicks and click through rate data – yes on the organic search results. Not only does this really trump keyword ranking reports, but it also unveils how important being in the top three positions on Google.com.

Free Search Marketing News Webinar

I’m trying a new webinar at SageRock Institute.

I’m going to be hosting a live webinar this coming Wednesday. We will be covering the most important news in the search marketing world from the last week. Believe it or not, there is enough going on in this industry that we’ll have plenty to talk about.

It’s completely free. If you are interested, GO HERE TO LEARN MORE AND REGISTER.

SEM News – Site Speed Is Now Search Ranking Factor – April 12, 2010

Me at my Palmer House in Chicago “office” for the next couple days.


I think the big news that seemed to make the rounds of all the major blogs this past week what the whole “Using site speed in web search ranking” thing. This makes search engine optimizers all abuzz. But I suspect it’s going to end as much ado about nothing.

Just the same, if I were you, I’d read the article and then follow the links to learn how to determine what your site load time is. Chances are it’s fine. But if you find there is an issue you might want to take a look to see what you can do to speed things up.

Here are all the rest of the Web marketing news articles in the last week:

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Using site speed in web search ranking

that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

Apple’s iAds Bring Advertising to iPhone Applications

Apple plans to host and sell the ads, and will give the developer 60% of the collected revenues.

The ads will be interactive, take advantage of video, and allow developers to create free apps and monetize them with the ads.

Retargeting Picking Up—And So Are Privacy Concerns

Last month, Google announced a new “remarketing” feature, allowing advertisers to later target people who’d visited their sites or YouTube channels. Retargeting like this is a popular marketing topic: an Advertise.com/SEMPO survey (via) found that slightly under 70% of marketers had never used it, but 46.3% of marketers thought retargeting was the “most underutilized marketing strategy.”

Post Tech – FCC loses Comcast’s court challenge, a major setback for agency on Internet policies

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in a 3-0 decision, ruled that the FCC lacked the authority to require Comcast, the nation’s biggest broadband services provider, to treat all Internet traffic equally on its network.

Search Market Share Reports Show Google Losing & Bing Gaining?

Both showed Bing growing and Google not from the previous month, in fact, Google has lost share for the “fourth straight month” according to Hitwise.

Google April 2010 PageRank Update

Google had update the toolbar PageRank scores over the weekend. The last PageRank update was about 3 months ago in late December or early January. But an interesting fact is that Google has updated their PageRank values in the toolbar every year in April since 2004.

Product Feeds Offer Untapped SEO, PPC Opportunities – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Product feeds are so imperative because, quite often, these are the source of data for your Web site, shopping engines, search ads, and more.

Research Shows Social Media and TV Importance By Age

What it shows is that the young crowd has greater saturation in who has profiles but the older age groups are seeing large percentage increases in social networking profiles.

SEM News – Bing your decision engine – April 5 2010

I’ve been out of the office for much of the last couple weeks. So I’ve been slow to get the news out to you.

There’s been a lot going on in the last couple weeks. I was at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York last week. These shows are important for our industry because they often inspire the search engines to bring a new tool or concept to market.

The third keynote address was by Bing’s Senior Vice President of the Online Audience Business, Yusuf Mehdi. Here are some of the quotes from him that jumped out at me:

  • Search is now transactional & for advanced research. “What r the 5 top causes of pancreatic cancer?”
  • More than 60% of the time people take 2.5 weeks to finish a travel purchase online.
  • “Dialogue model” now is where search is. How does a search engine help you complete a task?
  • Best practice to be found at Bing: use proper keywords, be spiderable, related anchor text.
  • You need to understand my “intent”.
  • “Helping you get a task done, not just giving you links.”

Bing appears to be taking an approach of addressing complete transaction needs of their visitors. This seems good on the face of things. But it is definitely a departure from the model we currently have.

The goal of Google is to get you to directly to the site that answers your search query. The Bing goal appears to be to solve the majority of your question on Bing. They say, “Make Bing your decision engine”.  This is clearly a different end result. It will be interesting to see how this all evolves.

Here are the other news stories that struck me as interesting:

Now Compare Your Search Ads to Facebook Ads Performance

It will soon be possible to compare the performance of search and social ad campaigns side by side. Clickable, the ad management platform that lets search marketers measure and track the performance of their online marketing campaigns across different search engines and advertising networks, will be adding Facebook Ads as an option on April 12.

Nestle Finding That Social Media’s Not So Sweet

Nestle has stepped in the social media muck as of late with its association with a company that supplies palm oil to the Swiss chocolate giant. So much for being neutral, huh?

Forrester Predicts the Interactive Agency of Record Will Die

You see, “the agency of record” will need to be able to handle both traditional and interactive marketing–the lines have blurred. If you’re not the agency of record, you’ll still have a role to play–even if it’s a niche role that your firm specializes in.

Google’s SiteLinks Program Very Good …. For Google

Ad Sitelinks allows advertisers as many as five links in three lines of text. Macy’s, for example includes links to “free shipping deals,” “shop online,” “find a store,” and “account login,” in addition to a link to its home page. Toys “R” Us includes a link that says, “Buy one get one free little tikes!”

Social Media Pays: People More Likely to Buy from Brands they Follow

The most popular reason people follow brands in social media is to receive discounts. But there were also many people who responded that they follow as a customer of the brand and to show their support of it. On Twitter, that reason was less popular. Only 2% of respondents followed a brand to show their support. More often, they are looking for discounts, new information and exclusive content.

Study Predicts Mobile App Market Will Show Significant Upward Mobility

According to the study, created by Chetan Sharma Consulting, mobile app downloads should jump from 7 billion in 2009 to almost 50 billion in 2012. By this time, the market will be worth 17.5 billion dollars, the study predicts, despite the expected lower price of mobile apps, which should drop from the current average of 2 dollars per app to 1.5 dollars in 2012.

Fuzzy Math Puts Facebook Ahead of Google as Most Visited Site

Facebook just overtook Google as the most visited site in the U.S

Google Acquires Episodic Online Video Platform for Broadcasting Live and On-Demand Content – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

The online video platform lets publishers and marketers host, stream, measure and monetize their video content. Content creators, marketers and enterprise customers like Showtime Sports use Episodic to deliver video to the Web and mobile devices.

Google Made A Major Move To Behavioral Targeting This Week! Did You Miss It? – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

The “search funnel” allows people to check what other keywords were clicked on before a conversion occurs.

No Mobile Version of Your Site? There’s a Mobile Ad for That – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

AdMob now offers mobile ads for non-mobile sites.

It’s called the Adaptive Mobile Ad Unit. The ad automatically scales, even when users scale to view desktop versions of websites on their mobile browsers.

The ad appears – and stays – at the top of the page. Initially, this is only being rolled out for iPhone traffic.

SEM News – Print Is the MySpace of Marketing – March 15, 2010

Image from here: The Death of Print « Damn Pesky Indie Kid

I have always had this theory that “March Madness” is something that is also experienced in the business world. It seems like March is a month where people really get stuff done.

All the really cool headlines I found this week seem to support that belief. There is just a ton of interesting, industry-evolving news I came across.

If I had to pick just one headline that had a major impact on me, it would be “Outsell forecasts that online spending will overtake print in 2010.”

I’ve always felt like my industry is the tail of the dog. Web marketing has always been the marketing that was thrown leftover scraps of the real marketing budget. Print and TV always got a fire hydrant blast of money and Web got the equivalent to the little hose that was plugged into the ice maker in my refrigerator.

That just doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

Since the beginning of my career in Web marketing back in 1999, I knew this day would come. I also believe that this is still only the beginning.

In the future, TV and print will just be a support mechanism to the “real” marketing that happens online.

The reason I know this will happen is because of one simple reason: Online marketing can be tracked. Offline marketing will never be able to fully track the way we can track online. And that’s how us online people will win the war.

The big hurdle, however, is the status quo. People don’t like to change. Recessions, however, do a great job of getting people to move in new directions. This recession will ultimately be a major push for this new change of the guard.

But that’s just one of the many great headlines from the past week. Check out the rest of ‘em here:


Companies Spend More on Email Than PPC; 39% Have No Clue of ROI

Well, according to the data discovered in Econsultancy’s 2010 Email Marketing Census, companies are spending more on email marketing (17% of online budgets) than PPC (16%) despite not fully understanding the return on investment (ROI) achieved or taking advantage of one of the most important benefits of email marketing: segmentation.

Almost forty per cent of those that are spending more on email marketing than search, have no idea why they do so!

Eye-tracking Proves Real-Time Search Not Useful

It took consumers 7.09 seconds to look at the real-time results, even though they’re listed just below the news results and before the organic results. In fact, they scrolled below the fold to view the image results before they fixated on the real-time area, the eleventh area they focused on.

Bing Takes Baby Steps Towards Catching Google

According to comScore’s data, Bing climbed from 11.3% to 11.5%, likely stealing that share from the “we’ve given up on search” Yahoo, which dropped from 17% to 16.8%.

Study: 79% of Twitter Accounts Are Not Actively Used

Lastly, who tweets the most? Those with around 1,000 followers do:

How Important is Google PageRank in 2010?

Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig: “Yes, that computation is important but it’s just one of many things.”

Outsell forecasts that online spending will overtake print in 2010 – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

According to Outsell, spending on online advertising and marketing will overtake print in 2010 for the first time. The research and advisory firm’s annual forecast predicts companies will spend $119.6 billion on online and digital strategies, from search engine keywords to webinars, while committing $111.5 billion to print media such as newspaper and magazine ads this year.

Razorfish Improves Efficiencies by 50% with Marin Search Marketer – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Razorfish turned to Marin Software to streamline paid search efforts for their clients. As a result, they’ve reduced time spent on daily bidding, reporting, and campaign management by up to 50%.

Roundup: Social Media Monitoring Tools – WebWorkerDaily

So here’s a roundup of some of the more popular tracking tools.

Best Keyword Ranking Tools for SEO | WordStream

Now, there are a lot of a lot of paid and free tools out there that help SEOs track keyword rankings. Some are paid and some are free. In writing this post, I did a lot of research to bring you the best keyword ranking tools for SEO.

How to Create a Text Marketing Campaign : Marketing :: American Express OPEN Forum

More sophisticated SMS marketing services offer campaign software, a dashboard, reports, customer databases and more. An all-in-one service like MobileCommons allows you to create a list, start a campaign, track it, and refine it as necessary – just as you would with any ad campaign.

You can use a service like MobiQpons which allows people in your area to sign up and receive coupons for discounts. Only people within 10 miles of your business will receive your coupon.

Foursquare Courts Business Users with Checkin Analysis Features

Data includes total checkins, unique visitors, male-to-female ratio, social media-sharing (i.e. showing how many users are sending their checkins to Twitter (Twitter)), top visitors and checkin time breakdown. Users can opt-out of sharing their checkin data via settings section of the website.

SEM News – Dear Leader Wants Your Link Spam – March 8, 2010

I was out of town most of last week. So you didn’t get any news overview from me then. But I’m making up for it this week with both this week and last weeks’ news.

Two stories, in particular, have interesting implications from my point of view.

First, Matt Cutts’ blog post “Calling for link spam reports” is a real forward call on Google’s behalf to root out link spam. Google wants you to turn in anyone you think may be engaged in link spam. Maybe it’s just because I was watching MSNBC’s “Lockup” last night, where the prisoner code is to never snitch, but I am initially turned off by the whole snitching mentality. While I think that a show like “America’s Most Wanted” is probably a net positive for our country, I just have a hard time thinking that everybody is out there waiting to turn in anybody. I have a little resentment every time I think of the Unibomber’s brother turning him in.

But that’s just me. Apparently I’m way in the minority here. And honestly, I’m sure reporting link spam will make things better. So, go forth and report link spam.

The other report that struck me as particularly interesting is “B2B Marketers: 490% Increase in Social Media Spend by 2014?“. Actually, that headline isn’t the most interesting part of the report. The vast majority of money spent by b2b marketers online is in paid search. That intrigues me. It’s not display, email or SEO. They are buying pay-per-click ads in droves. That is interesting if you are a b2b marketer so you can see how you line up to your peers. And it’s interesting if you are an agency that caters to b2b companies. You probably should be pushing ppc ads real heavy.

So, those are the thoughts that jumped out at me. Here’s the rest of the headlines:


Calling for link spam reports

Google has been working on some new algorithms and tools to tackle linkspam and we’d like to ask for linkspam reports from you. If you’d like to tell us about web sites that appear to be using spammy links (e.g. paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers, etc.), here’s how to send us more info.

126 Million Blogs on the Internet – Search Engine Guide Blog

  • 1.73 Billion Internet users worldwide
  • 90 Trillion Emails Sent in 2009
  • 81% of Emails were Spam
  • 126 Million Blogs on the Internet
  • 27.3 Million Tweets Per Day
  • Faceboook serves 6 million pages per minute
  • 4 Billion photos hosted by Flickr
  • 182 Videos watched on average per month (per user)

Study: 43% of Email Marketers Want a Slice of the Social Media Pie

43% of email marketing firms are already offering social media marketing as part of their service line-up:

Facebook Increases Local Ad Targeting Capabilities and SMB’s Rejoice

In its latest move to expand its performance advertising program, Facebook is offering what it tells us is “thousands” of new cities in its self-serve advertising tool, meaning advertisers can more narrowly target users across the United States and around the world.

B2B Marketers: 490% Increase in Social Media Spend by 2014?

Forrester is predicting a significant uptick in internet marketing by those in the B2B space. In fact, it’s predicting spend will almost double over the next five years–going from $2.3 billion in 2009 to $4.8 billion in 2014!

Trackur Shakes Up the Social Media Monitoring Space with a Free Plan

Trackur Free comes with all of the great functionality we offer in our Personal and Corporate plans, but without the price tag! You get unlimited search results, anyone can share your login, you get reports, CSV export, RSS and email alerts. Just about everything we offer. The only restriction is that you can only save one search on Trackur Free. For individuals or small businesses, that may be all you ever need!

Display Makes Searchers Buy Faster

They found that early one in five people who convert after using search had seen at least one display ad before searching. Eyeblaster concluded that display advertising increases the reach of campaigns, pushing more consumers to search. Those consumers then move through the purchasing funnel faster.

Local Advertising to Make Gradual Comeback With Digital Leading the Way

BIA/Kelsey said there was a slowdown in the growth rate for digital, including search, display and classifieds, but it predicted that digital – now about 14 percent of total local ad spend – will encompass 25 percent by 2014.

Yahoo! Launches Paid Search Desktop Tool – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

New tool allows you to manage multiple search marketing campaigns offline.

AdWords Extends Mobile Click-to-Call to National Advertisers – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

For example, let’s say you’re searching for a car rental and an ad from a national chain pops up in your mobile search. Perhaps they want to funnel all calls through a single number. Now, they can do so with Click-to-Call mobile ads in AdWords.

DiggAds Off to a Good Start – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Buch said that revenues are great and that advertisers are pleased with the results. For example, Paramount saw great results promoting the low-budget scare flick Paranormal Activity using DiggAds.

Digg users for the most part seemed pleased. They’ve requested the ability to comment on ads and Digg has listened – that feature is in the works.

Google Adds Sidewiki Control to Google Webmaster Tools

The feature basically let’s you control the message you show to users who use that Google Sidewiki within the Google Toolbar. In the past, webmasters had to use the Google Toolbar to add a site owner message.