Mobile Is Changing Business, Is Yours Ready? [Infographic]

Linkedin 200 Million Members

5 Social Media Biz Strategies You'll See This Year

The way businesses use social media in 2013 will change the way customers and companies interact on the medium. According to social intelligence firm newBrandAnalytics, here are some of those changes.

1. Goodbye, Surveys: "Many of the more progressive brands have already decided to eliminate surveys and instead focus on social feedback as their primary source for customer experience information," said Kristin Muhlner, CEO of newBrandAnalytics.

2. Industrial Espionage Is now Legal and Free: "In 2012, we saw the hot brands using competitive data in new, previously unimagined ways," Muhlner said. "We predict that more than one-third of businesses adding products or menu items will be inspired by their competition's online customer feedback."

3. So Long, Traditional Performance Evaluations: "Sharing online feedback places psychological control on employees," said Randy Stanley, vice president of Parasole Restaurant Group. "They recognize and accept that everyone is a critic and that they can read about their performance online daily, good or bad. They see now that they have to be 'on' all of the time. Every experience counts. That's powerful."

4. Social Media Isn't Just for Marketing Anymore: "Last year we helped several organizations save new locations from the brink of disaster by enabling them to make swift changes in management and operations based on social intelligence," Muhlner said. "This trend is sure to take off in 2013."

5. Everything's Local: "Tip O'Neill said 'all politics is local,'" Muhlner said. "It's no surprise, all customer experiences are local, too. Savvy companies will use location-specific social reviews and alerts to quickly pinpoint trouble spots and react in a way best suited to deliver the best possible customer experience in that location or store."

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By: David Mielach, BusinessNewsDaily Staff Writer for BusinessNewsDaily

Best time to send E-mails

GOOGLE’S ALGO CHANGE AND THE EXACT MATCH DOMAIN PENALTY

Does your Web site use an Exact Match Domain name? Beware. Google’s latest algorithm alteration is out to track and penalize the technique. Expect “EMD penalty” to be a much-used buzzword for a while. Why another algo change, you ask? Google wants to curb the use of what it considers unnatural or unfairly easy routes to good rankings. Concerning the newest update, on September 28th, Matt Cutts posted the following messages on his Twitter account:

“Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality "exact-match" domains in search results.”

“New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. Unrelated to Panda/Penguin.” 

Brace yourself for the same kind of opprobrium that greeted Google’s Penguin and Panda updates. While you’re grunting your way through this inclement online “weather,” remember that it’s no Sandy, 2012’s all too real Frankenstorm, and that not every exact match domain will be affected. All indications point to Google using multiple factors when determining whether to dole out an EMD penalty.

Wading through available data, it appears to me that Web sites are especially at risk to lose rankings if they’ve not been updated in a while, or if they have not been active in link building. Likewise, sites boasting a great many blog updates, but poor-quality backlinks, are susceptible to rank losses on account of EMD.

In my research I’ve found that Web sites using EMD, not undergoing a regular process of betterment, and lacking quality backlinks receive the EMD penalty. If an EMD site’s rankings were attributable solely to its domain name, then it lost rankings with Google’s EMD update.

I cannot say this enough: don’t venture outside of white hat SEO. If you’re experiencing rankings problems because of the EMD penalty, get rid of your low-quality backlinks. And if your content is stale, or if the quality of your written content is subpar -- get started with an overhaul. Remember to keep your content fresh, nicely written, and to keep tabs on the quality of your backlinks.

Top 8 Must-Have SEO Tools for this Halloween

How much do you know about your customers?

The world of people measurement has never been as advanced as it currently is.  Services like Klout allow us to measure ourselves in terms of our online influence for instance.  In the corporate world Big Data promises to give us more information about consumers than ever before.

Now I should say at this point that the very best companies will have been doing this long before Big Data has arrived as the latest buzzword.  They will have been segmenting their customer base so they are fully aware of their most profitable users, and of course making sure those users are as happy as possible, whilst their less profitable users are given much less attention.

They will have used things like the Net Promoter Score to determine who amongst their customers are most likely to promote the company to their friends and colleagues, and with that information ensure that these influential social connectors are happy and excited by what you’re doing.

So those things aren’t new, but a new form of measuring customer value for e-commerce sites is nonetheless interesting.  It’s called the e-score and it measures our potential value as customers.  It’s interesting because whilst traditionally companies could measure their own customers nicely enough, the e-score lets them measure people that aren’t customers yet.

E-score is measured by a number of start-ups that are specialising in the field of predictive customer analytics.  It basically uses a shed load of data and uses algorithms to make sense of it.

Of course you might say that credit ratings have been around for donkey’s years, but e-scores are a step further on.  They can take into account facts like occupation, salary and home value to spending on luxury goods or pet food, and do it all with algorithms that their creators say accurately predict spending.

Companies can then use this information to both target their marketing more effectively to attract the right kind of customer.  These scores can determine whether someone is pitched a platinum credit card or a plain one, a full-service plan or none at all.

Suffice to say that the potential power of these scores has worried as many people as it has excited, with the clear potential to create a financial underclass on a whole other level to existing credit scores.  What’s more, the values used to create the score are largely secret, so it’s not like people can work to improve their score as they can with a credit rating.

It’s just another sign of the rise of what might be called the Scored Society. Google ranks our search results by our location and search history. Facebook scores us based on our online activities. Klout scores us by how many followers we have on Twitter, among other things.

By: adi gaskell

Pay-Per-Click Search Result Advertising On Facebook!

Facebook is undeniably one of the most influential companies on the internet; they dominate the social media landscape and cause web-wide rage with even the most minor of updates. Could they do more, though? They certainly seem to think so.

The social media company?s latest foray is encroaching ever so slightly into Google?s turf. Facebook is now offering a new form of search-based advertising. Much like Google and others, Facebook will allow paid ads, or “sponsored listings”, to be placed at the top of their search results.

The trial run is currently underway, with prominent companies like Disney and Zynga already showing up in the sponsored results section. Stylistically, the ads blend in fairly well with the organic search results. The only major distinguishing feature is the “Sponsored” header and a small X in the upper right corner, allowing users to close that ad.

For the duration of the trial, Facebook is allowing companies to buy sponsored ads on a pay-per-click system. These ads can then be targeted in a variety of ways. As of now, it seems likely that the payment system will change once the trial is over. The simple pay- per-click is great for enticing and for proof of concept, but it appears Facebook will be moving towards a more aggressive bidding model when the program goes live.

Even with this change, Google appears safe for the time being. Facebook?s search tool only works internally. Everything the company does is still designed to keep users on Facebook?s own little patch of the web. So once clicked, the new ads will only lead to the Facebook page of the sponsor, and not offsite. Moving people from your Facebook content to your landing pages still takes effort, so make sure you?re Facebook page is looking good after the Timeline update.

By: Tim Martell

To Link or Not to Link, That Is the Link Building Question

When Google finally realised their PageRank ‘guidelines’ were simply functioning like a scarecrow that has become a perch for the black hat crows then something had to be done. The powers that be decided they were prepared to sacrifice search rankings to prove they no longer wished to tolerate those who refuse to follow their guidelines; so, to deter the crows they unleashed a penguin!

As a consequence there has been much disquiet in the kingdom of Elsinore…. sorry, Google recently and Webmasters are still not convinced the coast is clear regarding text links and link building. Before we go any further, I guess the first thing to say is that the penguin update was never about improving search results; it was a clean-up operation, the problem is when you use a high powered pressure washer everyone and everything gets soaked!

The question people are asking is, ‘does Google actually have the right to tell a website how to market itself?’ This is difficult to answer and has provoked much debate. On the one hand any community needs a set of ‘laws’, I don’t think anyone would disagree with that fundamentally; although people do get very twitchy, when it appears to be ‘one rule for one and another for all the rest’.

Matt Cutts has stated for a long time now that Google felt gaining PageRank by buying links was not the correct spirit to adopt as most search engines view backlinks as a way of establishing a website’s reputation. Therefore if you artificially skew this process it undermines the search ability of a search engine to bring up appropriate and useful results. Right, we all get that and if hyperlinking was all that happened it would be a level playing field but, and here’s the big one:

“penalizing paid links is trying to go against the natural commercialisation of the web and the fact that Google makes its fortune from advertising based on people wanting to search the “organic” listings.  While they do that they are also being force fed sponsored ads, which does appear to be slightly hypocritical.”

Obviously living in what purports to be a free society and with capitalism still alive and kicking, albeit in a slightly weaker state it has to be said, then links will continue and what should happen is  Google must consider just how useful any kind of link is and ultimately what specific  impact they have on overall rankings. Let’s face it if a link is useful and advantageous then surely that adds something to a website, doesn’t it? This would represent an improvement on the real world, I mean, since when did Coca Cola and McDonalds equal the kind of diet an athlete might adopt for a top flight Olympic performance, but I digress.

If the web had been set up in such a way that it was a non-commercial, non-profit making area then no one would buy or sell such links. One would imagine people wouldn’t just keep up blogs, updates, etc. just for the good of their health and nothing would be bought or sold. Come one guys, it’s commercial!

The irony of it all, of course, and the thing which really sticks in people’s collective craw is that Google profits from paid links but they are called AdSense. So Mr Cutts, who exactly is going to want to shell out for links if they have to be ‘nofollow’ ones? It’s not going to happen.

So there needs to be an alternative solution and right now the insistence on not using link advertising that also passes Page Rank is causing much discontent and you know what people do when they are discontented!

One has to ask the question why have Google tried to eliminate paid links when they use back links as part of their ranking algorithm? Is it just because they don’t receive the dosh? Can you fight human nature and natural commerce? Is it time for them to change how they rank sites overall?

Yes, we are treading new ground and it’s probably time for Google and other search engines to actually consult with their users, be slightly more transparent and appear supportive. Just because an organisation reaches a dominant position it doesn’t mean they are always right and if fail to listen to dissenters then that’s not the greatest scenario.

Should we simply capitulate and adopt the lowest denominator, greed? Or should we develop another approach? Looking at the rumbling undercurrents regarding the various financial crises playing out all over the world one might hope Google, of all people, could come up with something creative to solve this dilemma which has so far been responsible for too much collateral damage. Does anyone have any good ideas I wonder?

‘To link, or not to link: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The pandas and penguins of outrageous Google,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them?’

With apologies to Shakespeare and Hamlet

By: Silver Teede

Too Funny: Google wants .LOL Domain

Google has applied to control a slew of domain names that are not only related to its core business but have “interesting and creative potential.”

The company announced on its blog on Thursday that it has submitted applications to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for the following domains: .google, .youtube, .doc and .lol.

ICANN, which assigns top-level domains to sites worldwide, will announce in June which domains will be added to the existing list that includes “.com” or “.gov.”

“In 2016, it’s estimated that almost half of the world’s population will be online, yet nearly 50 percent of the websites we visit are found in the .com top-level domain (TLD), which was among the first TLDs created in 1984,” Google wrote on its Official Blog.

“Despite the great opportunities the web has enabled for people around the world, there is still a lingering question about the diversity of the domain space (given that the number of generic TLDs has only increased by 14 in the last 28 years).”

Google aims to grow the number of TLDs in four categories, such as trademarks (such as .google), those related to its core business (.docs), ones that improve the user experience and increase the identification of certain genres (.youtube) and fun options (.lol).

The search engine giant also noted that it plans to keep security and abuse prevention top of mind in creating a positive experience for web users.

“We’re just beginning to explore this potential source of innovation on the web, and we are curious to see how these proposed new TLDs will fare in the existing TLD environment,” the company says.

“By opening up more choices for Internet domain names, we hope people will find options for more diverse — and perhaps shorter — signposts in cyberspace.”

What do you think of Google’s choice for new top-level domain names? Which ones would you like to see pop up on the web? Let us know in the comments.

By: Samantha Murphy

How To Market Your Handcrafts Business Online

You’ve got crafts to sell, and they’re awesome. How come you’re not making money from them? Chances are, you have not taken advantage of online marketing for your business, and all its accompanying tools.

Let’s say you have a handcrafted jewelry business, and you want to make people aware that it exists. What do you do?

For starters, recognize if there is already an existing market for your kind of business online. If it does, check it out and do a bit of research to see if it is thriving, and if you’re up for a lot of competition. This will help you come up with a unique approach to sell your wares and see the bigger picture as to how long you can sustain your online business.

If you can afford it, buy a domain with your store’s name as the site name. This will give your products instant recall and it will be easier to look for your online store once your jewelry start making a name for themselves. If you can’t afford your own site yet, take advantage of free blogging sites like WordPress to start with. There are a lot of templates you can choose from, and you can tweak the settings to come up with a more personalized and customized look that will go with your wares.

You can customize the site to look like a virtual brochure where clients can pick out the designs they want. Or you can make it look like a virtual tour of your workshop. Add lots of interesting pictures so people can have an idea of what goes on behind your craft. A lot of customers like a bit of history with their finished product, so take advantage of that curiosity. It’s always vital to keep your site update because it will make people aware that you’re always working on something new for them.

If you’re going to be transacting online, bear in mind that you have to be committed to checking out your site regularly because it’s not nice to keep customers waiting for answers. Also, you must have a reliable shipping service that will deliver the goods to clients on time. This will pave the way for satisfied, and hopefully returning, clients who can promote your online business for you without you asking them to!

You can also participate or sign up in an online crafts forum or gallery. Etsy and Multiply are good examples. You can think of them as a virtual crafts bazaar or mall where you can check out other people’s wares. This way, if you aren’t too confident about how to price your products, you can use others’ pricing schemes as a gauge for your own. The beauty of these sites is that your wares can be instantly categorized so anyone looking for hand crafted jewelry has a big likelihood of stumbling upon your stuff.

The downside of this is of course, the competition. While handmade jewelry pieces can be considered one-of-a-kind, the handmade jewelry niche is by no means a unique one.

Posted on May 12, 2012 by newmedia

How people spend time online [infographic]

Google, Facebook and Mobile Flush Groupon Down the Toilet

Online daily deal provider Groupon, once the darling of Wall Street, has had its share of woes in recent months. Its stock is down over 50% from November's IPO price, thanks in part to a pending SEC investigation of the company’s Q4 2011 earnings restatement (actual net revenue was significantly lower when refunds to consumers for unused deals were factored in). In addition, merchants are beginning to pull back from Groupon, surveying their options in an increasingly crowded geo-local marketing landscape that includes the likes of Yelp, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Living Social and Foursquare, to name a few.

In his yearly letter to shareholders released Monday, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason tried to rally the troops by announcing his vision to re-shape the company into a one-stop marketing solution for local merchants, or as he put it, “the operating system for local commerce.”

Unfortunately for Groupon, Mason’s vision does not mesh with reality. The truth is, the daily deals site has already seen its best days, and will soon be marginalized by its competitors, especially Google and Facebook, who are rolling out geo-local couponing programs that will suck the air out of Groupon’s market share.

MOBILE HASTENS THY DEMISE

As smartphone adoption continues to grow nationwide, nearly three-quarters of smartphone owners are accessing their mobile devices to get location-based information in real time. A new study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that about 74% of smartphone users utilize location-based services to find information. In addition, one in five (18%) are checking in to local businesses with geo-social services like Foursquare.¹

Facebook and Google have responded in kind to this trend toward mobile-based local marketing.

On May 3rd, Facebook rolled out its new local marketing platform, Facebook Offers, to all local U.S. companies. With Offers, businesses can distribute coupons or other promotions to fans directly through their news feeds. Facebook isn’t charging anything for the service, and when a Facebook user claims an Offer, his or her friends will see it in their news feed, further amplifying its reach.

Less than a week later (May 9^th), Google announced its latest update for Google Maps for Android that supports Google’s Groupon-like daily deal platform, Google Offers. With the new update, local merchants can attract customers to their storefront with free giveaways or coupons that Android users can see pop-up in real time on Google Maps.

THY COMPETITION ENSURES IT

This is not good news for Groupon, considering Facebook has nearly 500 million fairly engaged mobile users. Groupon, on the other hand, cannot boast a huge social media or search platform. As such, the daily deal site is dependent on people going out of their way to engage with its mobile app when looking for offers. The problem is, if people don’t find any relevant offers on Groupon’s mobile app, they might give up and jump on Facebook or Google, where they’re much more likely to stay engaged. It’s more advantageous for platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google to insert on-site offers because people are already there.²

As Facebook and Google adapt to the dramatic consumer shift to mobile, Groupon’s days are numbered. Each will utilize economies-of-scale coupled with their massive reach to outflank Groupon, while smaller players like Yelp and Foursquare continue to nibble away at Groupon's market share one merchant at a time.

I fear that before it’s all over, Andrew Mason and crew will be wishing they had taken Google up on the $6 billion buyout offer while they had the chance.

For small businesses trying to shape a marketing strategy, the intense competition in the geo-local business space is a good thing, especially with the relevant players tripping over themselves to offer your brand a better deal.

Whatever you do, make sure to experiment with various platforms, and avoid committing to any large ad spend or long-term contract until you’re absolutely sure you’ve found the golden goose. Above all, remember that in today’s era of frenetic marketing-tech innovation, the only certainty is change.

By: Chris Horton / Socialmediatoday

The Real Relationship between Social Media and SEO

Everybody knows social media and SEO are connected, but how? The better you understand the nature and strength of the various connections, the better you can focus your efforts on activities that get results.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to sort things out because the social-SEO relationship is becoming more intertwined (some would say, muddled) all the time. In this post, I’ll bring up a few points we’ve been discussing at our agency as we try to respond to the changing environment.

Comments and ideas welcome! We are all learning together here.

Ranked Results versus Display in SERPs

The first thing we’ve been trying to do is distinguish between rankings and display visibility on Google SERPs.

• Ranking optimization is the traditional way of thinking about SEO. We apply a set of activities to specific URLs and domains in ways that leverage Google’s search algorithm and improve the ranking position of particular pages of web content.
• Display optimization applies to making content visible in new/other sections of Google SERPs – personalized search, time subsections, and search subsections such as “Blogs” and “Discussions.”

Google is now giving much greater emphasis to personalized results, at the expense of traditional results. Social content, such as Google+ postings and blog posts, appear prominently in SERPs. As time goes on, it’s likely that Google will give equal weight to content in SERPs that is both subjective (i.e., content that is favored by people in your social networks) and objective (i.e., content that is indexed and ranked according to Google’s traditional algorithm).

In light of all this, here are three strategic points worth thinking about from a social and SEO perspective.

1. Social shares – Tweets, Likes, Google +1’s, etc. – carry weight in Google’s ranking algorithm, but as yet it’s hard to establish more than a ballpark impact.
2. In contrast, social media content and shares have a clear and significant impact ondisplay visibility. Original Google+ and/or blog content is indexed and displayed in regular, personalized, time-sensitive and social subsections of a SERP. Content endorsed with shares by your social connections is visible. (Original Twitter content has been devalued lately, but I think in the long term it is likely to gain prominence.)
3. User behavior and preferences are critical element in devising SEO strategy. The importance of display visibility depends largely on whether a user is logged into Google, and the extent to which a user has an active social media network. If your target market is not logged in and/or has few active relationships, traditional search results are all that will matter to them.

10 Social SEO Action Steps

In terms of focusing on social media activities that have SEO impact, here are things most worth doing.

1. Add Google+ buttons to your blog and most sharable web pages. Make social sharing as easy as possible across all popular/relevant social platforms.
2. Create a Google+ company page and share your content on it.
3. Write keyword optimized, original content on Google+.
4. Shares and original content on Google+ matter more if your company page is circled by many users. It therefore may be helpful to make a strong effort to build your Google+ community.
5. Encourage people to +1 your content.
6. For Facebook and Twitter, having an active social media presence is useful IF social sharing is generating links to your content. Links, not shares, are the more important social media metric from an SEO perspective.
7. Content that is unlikely to be shared on social media, such as a company’s About page, should be optimized in the traditional way. Pushing social shares is not worth the effort.
8. Content that is likely to be shared, such as a blog post, should, conversely, be promoted heavily through social media activities.
9. If your target market isn’t active or interested in social media, focus less on content sharing through social media and more on traditional link acquisition activities. If your target market is active in social, balance the two.
10. Measuring traditional rankings is pretty straightforward: what we need are ways tomeasure display visibility. Any tips for how to do this?

By: Brad Shorr from Straight North.