Technology

It's almost 2011, and every business-big and small-is looking to leverage social media and all it has to offer. Social media strategist Jay Baer says that the most important question that will be "put to bed" this year is "Should my company be active in social media?"

He maintains that "every company will have to be social eventually, whether they like it or not. Our customers will demand that they be allowed to interact with businesses in this way -- the same way they demanded that we connect via websites and e-mail."

However, as a small business owner your principal concern is how to get that next sale. Everything else is merely nice to have. Your fan base on Facebook is growing but you struggle to see how photos of your company's holiday party will help close your next deal. You have over 1,000 followers on Twitter and you tweet regularly, but you struggle to link

Read More At Source:Huffington Post

hy are my great performing ads on Google underachieving on Facebook?

Search Marketers will commonly list distribution partners they feel online advertisers should be spending money with. This typically includes Google, Yahoo, Bing and Facebook listed in a neat little row.
Grouping these together can spell disaster if you don’t have a completely different strategy for search engines and social media.

Google Inventory – Users are actively seeking new information on any topic.
When building a search strategy, marketers focus on keywords that are typed into an empty field with a search button next to it. There are no rules with search queries; anything goes. Google does not suggest (at least not yet) that maybe you should be looking for a new car, finding a deal on a cashmere sweater or ordering a copy of the New York Times new bestseller. A user goes to an empty search box when they need new information and do not know the URL of a webpage that can help them with their question.

Facebook Inventory – Users are passively sharing predefined interests.
Profile pieces are the main targeting vehicles in social advertising. When joining Facebook, users are asked to fill in any of the following information: location, age, gender, sexual orientation, relationship status, political leaning, religious views, employers, education, activities & entertainment. These subjects are predefined by Facebook to engage users within a community. There is no section that asks for future predictions on hobbies, dreams or business goals they would like to hit. In addition, these fields are mostly filled in when a user first joins. Each day that passes a social profile gets less relevant. An untouched profile can drift from an accurate depiction of an individual towards a time capsule of interests from 2006.

Google Strategy – Trust in the power of the confessional box.
With Google, users type in exactly what they want to see at that moment. Advertisers should continue to focus on targeted sets of keywords within each ad group paired with highly relevant ad copy. The advertiser can utilize unsocial keywords knowing that the search is between the user and the search engine. Algorithms don’t judge and keywords are an honest view into what someone is searching for in real time.

Facebook Strategy – Build off interests that are ongoing, niche or commonly updated.
Some aspects of a Facebook profile will be constantly updated and should shape your strategy for buying social advertising. For example, relationship status will be updated; while location, gender, birth day and sexual orientation are ongoing. Therefore an advertiser in the dating space can trust that a campaign targeting 27 year old, single, straight, women in New York City will accurately reach their target audience. To improve click through rate, advertisers should make sure to use profile points in the photo & ad copy to convey why a Facebook user should engage with an advertisement.

Don Batsford, Jr is a Partner with 31media.com, a Boston based search engine marketing firm.

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There's no anonymity online, especially if you are stupid enough to post everything about yourself. Boasts of misdeeds on social media sites may stem from the desire to impress, but the consequences, as some are learning, go far beyond the circle of friends who follow you.

Earlier this month, Washington Post writer and editor Marc Fisher's home was burglarized. His new coat, still in the box, was missing. As were his son's iPod, savings bonds, cash and a laptop. His son took the loss well, he says, until he saw his Facebook page.

The person who had apparently stolen the laptop opened the computer and posted a photo of himself to Fisher's son's Facebook page.

In the photo, the man is showing off the cash and is wearing Fisher's winter coat undefined plus "a big smirk on his face," Fisher tells Weekend Edition's Liane Hansen.

More at the source:NPR

Looking to make life easier for users who apply 100 million tags daily to photos on its social network, Facebook Dec. 15 said it is adding tag suggestions that use facial recognition software.

The new tag suggestions help users easily tag batches of photos that contain many of the same people. This has historically been a cumbersome practice because users have had to type in a friend's name for every single photo. There are more than 100 million photos uploaded to Facebook each day.

Facebook in October added group tagging capability to let users apply a single name to multiple pictures of the same person. Tag suggestions take the efficiency factor up another notch.

Now users upload new photos Facebook scans them with facial recognition software to match new photos to other photos you're tagged in. Similar photos are then grouped together, with Facebook suggesting the name of the friend in photos. See an example in this Facebook blog post from Facebook engineer Justin Mitchell. 

"Now if you upload pictures from your cousin's wedding, we'll group together pictures of the bride and suggest her name," said Mitchell. "Instead of typing her name 64 times, all you'll need to do is click "Save" to tag all of your cousin's pictures at once."

Facebook alerts users when they've been tagged, and they can untag themselves at any time.

The idea of facial recognition software makes some people nervous. Google can do this with its Google Goggles visual search application, but has declined to do so for fear of the privacy backlash.

Facebook has the benefit of a closed social network of 550 million users at its fingertips, so it can make such a push with the right safeguards.

To ensure user privacy, users who don't want their name popping up in a suggested tag can disable this feature in the privacy settings section. Users must click "Customize Settings" and "Suggest photos of me to friends and their name will no longer be associated in photo tags.

However, friends may continue to tag friends the cumbersome way -- manually. Per usual, only friends can tag each other in photos.

Tag suggestions will be rolling out to U.S. users in the next few weeks.

Source: E Week

The Walt Disney Company had two things to celebrate Sunday: It was founder Walt Disney's 109th birthday, and the company reached 100 million fans on Facebook.

Disney has over 200 Facebook pages, which get over 5 million new "likes" per week. The company started using the social networking site regularly in August 2009.

The company released a YouTube video celebrating the news. According to the video, 70% of Disney's Facebook fans are female, and over 60% live outside the United States.

Tennant Company (NYSE: TNC), a world leader in designing, manufacturing and marketing solutions that help create a cleaner, healthier world, has put its competitors on notice that it stands behind its proprietary ec-H2O technology and will defend this industry-leading technology from misleading claims against its cleaning effectiveness. This announcement stems from a recent press release issued by Nilfisk-Advance, a division of NKT Holding A/S, and related statements that attempt to discredit the effectiveness of Tennant’s electrically converted water technology.

Nilfisk-Advance has claimed that a study they commissioned showed Tennant Company’s ec-H2O technology on floor scrubbers worked “no better than tap water” and not as well as detergents when, in fact, the study only tested the ec-H2O technology on petroleum-based soils. Tennant does not claim that its chemical-free cleaning technology is effective on such petroleum-based soils and has consistently recommended chemical cleaning, such as Tennant FaST™ 965, for such applications. Tennant has demanded that Nilfisk-Advance take immediate actions to stop the dissemination of these misleading statements.

“We will continue to develop and market innovative technologies and solutions and would expect to face competitive challenges as we become more and more successful in the marketplace,” said Chris Killingstad, President and CEO of Tennant Company. “We will vigorously protect our technologies, products and brand from being the subjects of false and/or misleading statements.”

How a website gets this all important ‘traffic’ is where the really big differences are and can be confusing.   Using ‘Search Engines’ is the most popular form of finding goods and services on the Internet, in fact a massive 91.4% of Australian Internet users said they search the Internet when looking for a business. Source: Coredata May 2009.   This makes appearing in Search Engines if you are a business very important, (as the rise in SEO business attests to, though that is a conversation for another day).  Not only do you want your business to appear in the Search Engines, you need to know ‘which’ search engines (as there are 100’s of them), and you want to be as high as possible to the top of the first page in a particular search.

In this country, basically Google is the only search engine that counts.  It can be hard to find decent studies and statistics, the most up to date I could find was on the Victorian Government’s eGov site (and kudos to them for taking the internet seriously), which has a ‘Search Engine Market Share report as at April 2010 (it is very interesting and I would suggest you click on that link to view it in full).  The top 3 Search engines used are as follows:

Read More At Te Source Sunshine Coast

A new social networking site for mothers has just launched at mommysbestfriends.com. The site was created by Talina Hermann, a Los Angeles fashion designer who conceived of the site when she was pregnant with her first child.

"Initially, I wanted to create an online community where style-conscious, entrepreneurial moms would hang out and meet new friends," said Hermann. "After having my baby, I realized how many moms would prefer to stay at home close to their little ones and be able to operate their businesses from home. I created MommysBestFriends.com to be the best of all worlds -- a place to share parenting experiences, a support network for mom entrepreneurs, as well as a place to just chill and socialize."

The site is beautifully designed with an easy user interface and a variety of features, including:

• User profile with picture and video sharing
• Event posting
• Group creation
• Blog creation

"We introduce each mom to the rest of the network by sending out weekly newsletters," says Hermann. "It's a great opportunity for featured moms to talk about their blogs, businesses and connect with other parents based on their interests."

The site also offers high end giveaways and weekly newsletters about style, health, parenting, cooking and more.

MommysBestFriends.com promises to be the online destination for new mothers, a place where they can share the joys and challenges of parenting with other new moms, and a sanctuary that offers just a little escape from an otherwise very busy life. For more information, please visit http://mommysbestfriends.com