From the category archives:

internet marketing

    

I read an article last week about Bing that made me say, “Wow!”

No offense to the fine folks at Microsoft working on this product but I don’t often use “wow” and “Bing” in the same sentence. We assume the search engine market was locked up years ago and Google walked away with the top prize.

However, with change comes opportunity and the major search engines are working hard to figure out how best to integrate social signals with traditional search results. Click to continue…

    

Are you thinking about incorporating Google+ into your social media strategy but haven’t made the leap yet? There are a few important advantages to participation you need to consider. But first, some background.

What is Google+, really?

For the uninitiated, it’s a social network. For those in the know, it’s a Facebook clone (that’s a tongue-in-cheek comment but it’s partially true). Google is understandably avoiding making any comparisons to existing social networks. If I were forced to do so then Facebook would be the most likely comparison. As you think through both this post and your strategy, Facebook will do if you absolutely need a point of comparison (at least for now).

Something to keep in mind is that Google+ is not +1. They are two separate names to two related but very different things. For those that don’t spend their professional time geeking out on social networks (I do) the terms can be confusing. That’s completely understandable. As discussed above, Google+ is Google’s social network. The +1 is their equivalent of the Facebook Like (to stretch the comparison a bit further). So when you “+1” something you are giving Google a signal that you like the page/link/ad (Yes, you can +1 an ad. Who does that?!!?).

To add further confusion to the understanding of Google+ terminology, Google is now aggregating +1 and Circle activity for business pages. I’m not even going to go there right now (see the footnote for an explanation1). Click to continue…

    

——————– UPDATE: Almost 3 years later from the original post below (July, 2008) and AT&T took the lead on location-based shopping alerts in partnership with Placecast.  It took 3 years and AT&T to make this happen?!!?  Really.  Really!  I’m either way off base on the power of location-based marketing or the revenue model just isn’t [...]

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I commonly run single word queries through Google when seeking formal definitions.  Several years ago, Google started providing direct links to definitions of words via Dictionary.com.  This relationship fizzled but the helpful “definition” link on Google continued to function with a new partner, Answers.com.  I saw an ad today on Google (yes, they commonly run [...]

    

eMarketer points out the blindingly obvious to us today in an article titled, “Marketers Need Metrics to Integrate Traditional and Digital Media“. Good for them. If you are not focused on explicitly measuring your internet marketing efforts and tying those efforts back to an actual increase in revenue or reduction in costs then you should [...]