When it comes to social networking sites, there's really nothing quite like Twitter. The simplistic design and layout belies it as a basic program, when it's really just the opposite. It's actually extremely complex, using a number of incredible and unique coding designs, trackers and searches. Entering the world of Twitter is like entering an internet realm all its own.
Twitter gives you the ability to gain a pretty serious following through just the connections of mutual friends alone. It's not like other sites, where a friend request allows a huge amount of access. It's an open-format chat setting that invites communication and connections with anyone who happens by. This is why you might need a little extra something to help keep track of all of your followers.
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The app store analytics firm Distimo has released its latest report on the size of the various mobile app stores, as well as the types and prices of apps that are most successful there. The report compares the Apple App Store for iPad, Apple App Store for iPhone, Apple Mac App Store, BlackBerry App World, GetJar, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog, and Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. Despite all the buzz surrounding apps and mobile devices, the report finds that these stores only experienced moderate growth over the last few months.
No surprise, the Apple App Store still dominates, fueled primarily by the number of apps available for iPhone. However, when you separate that store into two – iPhone apps and iPad apps – you get a different picture. Despite being the largest store, the Apple App Store for iPhone was among the slowest growing stores in terms of relative growth. Even so, that growth was still second only to the Google Android Market in terms of absolutely growth.
After several days of recent downtime with Amazon Web Services, the promise to optimize websites via the cloud may seem both promising and daunting to small businesses. But that's what the Cambridge-based Yottaa is offering with the launch today of a new Web performance optimization service. Yotta knows its way around the cloud, as it was one of the finalists in Amazon's recent Startup Challenge.
Designed to be easy to implement and requiring no code change or software purchases, Yotta's new service aims to improve website speed and development through a variety of techniques including domain sharding, CSS spriting, and CDN balancing.
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A new contest sponsored by OPEN, American Express's small business division, is offering five small businesses a $20,000 check $2,500 in Facebook ad credits and a trip to the social networking giant's Palo Alto headquarters to learn more about social marketing.
The "Big Break for Small Businesses" contest is open to the owners of U.S.-based small businesses with $10 million in annual revenue or less.
Business owners can enter the contest from the OPEN Facebook page between now and May 20, at which point a panel of judges including Guy Kawasaki and Federated Media's John Battelle, will begin poring through the entries. Ten finalists will receive $2,500 in Facebook ad credits and then be whittled down to five winners.
The judges will pick the winners based on the level of "commitment to his/her own business and growth" as well as the degree to which a ramped-up Facebook marketing effort would aid in that growth.
Small businesses interested in entering can check out the details and then head over to the OPEN Facebook page to submit their entry.
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The latest quarterly data from enterprise device management vendor Good Technologyfinds that the Verizon iPhone is popular in the enterprise, and that iPads are still huge. The Verizon iPhone has the highest activation rate of for any new device since Good started publishing its tracking data.
Although Good expects Android devices to eventually overtake iOS devices in activations, iOS is clearly dominating at the moment.
You can find the full report of this quarter's data in PDF format here.
You can find our write-up of last quarter's data here.
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With all the talk about diversifying your revenue and traffic channels, most people often miss that organic traffic itself can be diversified. Traffic from search engines takes on many flavors and paths. A deeper dive into understanding the life cycle of a shopper query will lead you to some interesting avenues. Here are a few to consider if you are an online shopping destination.
Product images and visuals enhance online shopping experience. A larger number of online shoppers are using image search to search for products. Visuals become very important in certain product categories, for example: shoes and handbags. The more varied the color, style and features, the more number of images you will be able to get traffic on.
Google is now displaying a time stamp for images indicating the freshness of a particular image, so it keeping your images updated or adding the latest images for your products will get you more traffic.
There are a lot of news blogs that report on products and shopping trends. Seek these sites out and promote your new products and trends. Make sure your content is newsworthy and relevant to get accepted.
If you have a unique product or have an exciting story about your product, share it with bloggers who have an audience that would be interested in your product. Most bloggers have niches such as fashion trends, gadgets, baby or home and garden and are interested in featuring fun and exciting stories for their readers. Make it easy for bloggers to feature you by creating engaging content about your product. Here are a few ways to get featured in popular blogs:
Make it a point to own the space for navigational queries for your site. If you have a strong brand and shoppers search for your brand or website name, make sure you include these navigational queries into the meta (title and description) as well as on page content for your site.
Searchers may not start out as shoppers, but may quickly change their intent based on what they are to do. If a searcher is working on a DIY (Do It Yourself) project and finds your site searching for a "how to" query, you have the opportunity to convert the user on your site when their intent turns to shopping.
These are just a few ideas. If you start thinking about your target shopper and storyboard their shopping needs and process, you will see a whole new world of sites that you have been missing.
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Google Mapmaker is a product where Google allows the general public to draw shapes to tag buildings, parks, paths, rivers and more inside a Google map product. Mapmaker has been around since 2008.
To prevent spam and verify accuracy of the information, each of the edits made need to be verified by other Google users before they are made live. To get people to assist in editing, Google states that if you review some edits, your edits will get reviewed faster. If you don't want to edit, using Google Earth you can watch others as they edit live.
To make edits in Google Mapmaker, navigate to the location you want to edit and click one of the icons in the "add" toolbox. You can add a point, a line or a polygon shape. When you do, Google presents you with a series of fields with which to label your new location. These labels include name, street address, categories, web address, email, and many more context-specific tags.
I harp on it a lot but PPC is getting really complicated. I'm a search marketer, and it's near-impossible to stay up to date with the seemingly endless stream of updates to AdWords search targeting, never mind the content network, Bing, Facebook, etc. I think what tends to happen is a bit of analysis paralysis – you spend so much timeplaying with the newest AdWords feature that you neglect basic PPC best practices and your account winds up suffering.
This is where a clear, organized approach to PPC marketing is vital for small businesses. If I struggle to stay up to date with the newest AdWords features and functionality and it's basically my business, how is a local business owner or busy marketing director supposed to know where to go once they're dropped within the AdWords interface? I've seen a lot of SMBs spending thousands a month on paid search and display advertising where they've filled in every ad extension and turned on every experimental feature, but neglected basic blocking and tackling like negative keywords, sound use of match types, ad copy testing, etc. It's important to understand what's important, what's less important, and how to build a solid methodology around it.
This prioritization and methodology is precisely what Elizabeth Martsen's new pair of eBooks "PPC for Your Small Business" attempts to develop for small businesses looking to get the most out of PPC.
Elizabeth is the Director of Search Marketing at Portent Interactive. I've long been a fan of the Portent blog, Portent founder Ian Lurie's blog, and Elizabeth's posts in particular (some good examples of her writings if you're looking to "try before you buy" are a series on taking the AdExcellence exam, updates to product feeds and rich snippets, and a great guide to AdWords Remarketing that I pointed someone with questions about the feature to just this week) so I went into the eBook anticipating that it would be a pretty valuable read.
The first eBook in the series Elizabeth walks through the basics of PPC advertising. She starts at what I think is really the beginning and the number one thing I see SMBs getting wrong: setting budgets and goals. The fundamentals of PPC are driving leads and ultimately sales for your business – many small business owners get so caught up in the rather overwhelming mechanics of PPC that they seem to "forget" that this is just a form of advertising their business, and they need to see profitable returns for their investment. Elizabeth does a nice job of grounding the discussion in these terms right off the bat, and walks through some of the basic math and general approach to running a profitable PPC campaign.
From there she takes a very nuts-and-bolts approach to helping advertisers understand how to initially set up their campaign with sections focused on:
For me the strength of the book is in what I'd describe as an "Apple approach to information sharing" – the only pieces included in the eBook are the essentials. I think a small business owner trying to figure out how to get maximum returns from AdWords would have a really strong understanding of what makes for solid, effective PPC campaigns after reading this first eBook, and wouldn't be weighted down by confusing information overload.
The second eBook focuses more around continuing PPC campaign maintenance. Beyond the idea of how to measure and focus on goals, I think the second biggest question I see small businesses asking in regards to PPC management is "where do I go from here? What do I do next?" This is the focus of this second eBook.
Elizabeth starts with what I think is an under-talked about area of PPC: trouble shooting specific issues (like what to do when your PPC campaign isn't driving any traffic). I really love the format here of problem/solution, and it's obvious from the get-go that this eBook will offer a lot more specific detail around particular scenarios and more granular best practices than the first. I think she does a great job of covering off a nice range of FAQs regarding PPC issues (obviously from having managed and inherited numerous PPC accounts).
She then moves on to talk about:
Again I think the strength here is that there's a progression before specific tools and features are introduced, and when they are she highlights the most universally useful features within AdWords: too often I think beginners turn to blogs and sort of "jump in half way through the story" and have new AdWords features introduced to them before they understand the basics of PPC advertising.
One of the cool things about buying and selling low-priced eBooks and tools in the search space is that seemingly small improvements to paid and natural search campaigns can lead to really big yields for your business. I think these eBooks do a great job of walking small business PPC advertisers through the process of creating a PPC campaign to managing it on an ongoing basis, but for $37 and a minimal time investment, all you really need to get out of the book is one actionable tip to have to it pay for itself many times over. Well worth the investment for SMBs who are new to AdWords or looking to get more out of the platform, from my perspective.
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Recently I participated in an article where we outlined how to monitor and measure your brand in social media. It was a really fun article to help put together thanks to the great questions outlined by Debbie Hemley. One of the questions she asked I've been thinking a lot about: Have you changed your direction(s) based on anything you've learned from metrics? Now you can read through her article to find mine and a few other people's answers, but it got me wondering what everyone is doing with their social media data.
I mean think about it: we're all investing countless hours and dollars into our social media campaigns, but how many people are actually making adjustments from them? I think a lot of companies just like to know they have a presence on sites like Twitter and Facebook, but don't actually take the time to learn from what they're doing.
What kinds of things can you learn? Well part of that depends on what you've been tracking. Let's take a look at the types of insights you should be keeping an eye open for.
What are common misunderstandings and complaints about your product/service?
Just about everyone is tracking sentiment which makes this an easy insight to start leveraging. The company I work for, Raven Internet Marketing Tools, offers such a large variety of tools that users often wish we had a feature that already exists. By keeping track of what users are saying we can then focus on educating them about these features. Based on what they are asking for, we create blog posts, webinars and push out links to our Knowledge Base to help show them that the feature already exists. It's a great way to help with both customer retention and retargeting.
What's the overall perception of your company?
A great example of this deals with restaurant owners. Take a look at the types of things people are saying about your menu and food. When I used to help a restaurant with their reputation management, I noticed the majority of people loved their food but always complained about how bad it was for you. They mentioned how they wouldn't eat there frequently because of that.
After discovering that, we quickly launched a new marketing campaign that talked about the healthy food options offered at the restaurant. People had no idea that there were options that were both tasty and wouldn't give them a heart attack.
What types of messaging resonates best with your audience?
Do they enjoy a more laid back approach or is it better to be more corporate? You can test this out anywhere you're participating. See what type of messaging has the highest user engagement. That can help influence the copy on your site, your email marketing and even your offline marketing activities.
Those are just a few of the ways you can start taking action on all of the data your collecting in your social marketing. What types of social insights have impacted your marketing?
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The quarterly revenue reports – and the shareholder dividends that accompany them – are crucial for any company. For companies as big as Google, however, that quarterly report can give a strong image the company's current strength in the market and foreshadow the actions of the company in upcoming months and years. Google first quarter (Q1) report in 2011 is very telling: Its earnings have broken all previous records, while its profits have declined.
The previous record set by Google was $8.44 billion, set in the fourth quarter of 2010. Having an increase in the first quarter is surprising, since the fourth quarter is generally expected to be the highest in revenue. Last year's first quarter earnings reached $6.77 billion, a far cry from the 2011 figures. That means that 2011 should be a record year all-around for Google, and that the posted revenue of $8.58 billion will be little more than a temporary milestone.
The vast majority of the company revenue comes from Google-owned sites, which generated $5.88 billion is the first quarter. Networked sites, meanwhile, $2.43 billion. Only three percent of all revenue was generated outside these two major sources.
Additional details include:
But Google shareholders aren't all happy; they were unhappy enough, in fact, that the stock value for Google dipped by nearly five percent. The reason is Google's profit of $2.3 billion, compared to $2.54 billion from Q1 of 2010. Lowered profits have been blamed on long-term investments, the company's bulk hires, and expanded marketing efforts.
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One of our top posts this week was Richard MacManus' look at the future of the camera. We all know how smartphones integrated cameras. "Could we be about to see the inverse – cameras integrating smartphone technology?" he asked. The story is part of our ongoing series looking at what it means to consume and produce media in post-PC-centric world.
After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key trends that are shaping the Web – mobile, location, Internet of Things – plus highlights from our six channels. Read on for more.
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