Firefox 4 Will Be Adding Bing as a Default Search Engine Option

Mozilla will soon be releasing the newest version of their popular open Web browser, Firefox and will be adding an option for users that prefer to NOT have Google as their default search engine. With Firefox 4 will come the ability to make Microsoft's Bing you're go-to choice for conducting searches. Users will be able to very easily access a drop-down menu and change the default from Google to Bing without any other steps. Although Mozilla's main source of revenue comes from the millions of dollars that Google pays them to be their default search engine, the company has made sure that they do not upset their working relationship with the search giant.  In addition to Bing being added to Firefox 4, Wikipedia, Yahoo and Amazon will also be joining the ranks. With Bing's percentage of the search share steadily rising since it's merging with Yahoo, having them available as an option seemed like a smart move on Mozilla's part.

Display Ad Creation Platform, Dapper, to be Acquired by Yahoo Looking to not only maintain its rank as the "most successful force in display advertising", Yahoo has a signed a deal to acquire Dapper, a technological platform that assists in display ad creation. The deal that is said to be completed by the fourth quarter this year, will help to make display ad creation and optimization easier and more efficient for their customers. Yahoo has also been looking for a way to speed up the adoption of their Smart Ads and this technology may just give them the boost that they have been looking for. Co-founder Erin Shir had a lot to say about the matter: "In display advertising, there's no player with bigger leverage than Yahoo. Being part of Yahoo, we can actually make a dent in what people consider an ad should be. What they expect it to be. We have a chance to lead a revolution centered around the ad unit, the experience it takes a user through, the conversation it generates between a brand and a person. We have seen a thirst for it in the last year as we embarked on our Fixing Advertising crusade and we believe it can be done."

Using AdWords to Test Key Phrase Overall Traffic I recently wrote a post over at SEOmoz talking about how to forecast key phrase traffic. And when I say traffic, I mean the pool of total searches for one specific key phrase. From this pool comes traffic for paid and natural traffic. With all the changes in the Google Keyword Tools, we are all left with a sense of "what do I do now?" One of the recommendations is to run an AdWords campaign to test key phrase traffic. If you have a specific key phrase that you need to know actual traffic on over time, there are some specific steps to get those numbers using AdWords. Step One: Get an Account, etc. If you aren't already advertising with Google, open an account and all that jazz. With a recent client we just started a new account and I used a promotional code for $100 off for new accounts. We've spent more than that, so no skin off Google's back. Step Two: Pick fewer than 25 Key Phrases Why? You are going to want to look at impression share with this test, so you can only have one keyword per campaign. Impression share is at the campaign level only (GOOGLE!!! Can we change this?) and an integral part of the test … and you can only have 25 campaigns per account. Step Three: Create Your Campaigns/Ad Groups/Ads This should not take long. Put your chosen key phrase into an ad group as an exact match and write a good ad around the keyword. You still need a good/quality/relevant ad and landing page, but not too good … unless you are looking to use this as true advertising too. If your ad and landing page are not relevant your ad can be shut down for quality score. Step Four: Set Bid and Position Preference All you need to do is show on Page 1. Remember that the only thing we want is the number of impressions, not necessarily clicks, but those will occur if everything is written right. Step Five: Let it Run and Catalog Keep up with the traffic and take into account impression share. To find impression share, you need to change the columns on the campaign view. Find out more including specific instructions on how to do it here at AdWords Help. Enter information on impressions and lost impression share. Then calculate the number of impressions per day. From here you can go a step further and check the ranking of your organic listing. Use that rank to determine about how much of the traffic your organic listing should get. Then compare to your analytics to see if things are lining up right. If the traffic isn't lining up, you might look into your title and description on the page to increase organic CTR. Here is a sample spreadsheet to track things. Let the campaign run for a month if you have the time and money; otherwise, give it at least two weeks for a good look at traffic patterns. Keep an eye on your quality score and percent of traffic missed using impression share. The higher percent of traffic you miss, the more something is off. Check out your quality score and adjust your ads. If that is okay, adjust you bid to ensure that your ad is showing well. Once the test is done, compare with the keyword tools, and I think you will be surprised. Ours were off by half on two key phrases. We saw half the impressions that Google reported … in the NEW tool … on exact match. Remember, always take numbers with a grain of salt when forecasting. Grab as much data as you can and make sound judgments. If the numbers sound too high, or too good to be true, they probably are.

How To Monetize The Twitter/Facebook Bubble Before It Bursts I had an interesting discussion with Jeremy Koch of Pertnear (the guy responsible for 88,000 fans, in 4 weeks, at half price) to try to answer some questions a lot of businesses have right now about social media marketing: How do we monetize Twitter and Facebook? Should we wait to build audience on those platforms until we've figured that out? How do monetize the audience once we have it? Brian: I've heard some discussion that Social Media is just a bubble…. that we should expect some bursting in the not-too-distant future… Do you think that's true? Jeremy: It has been my experience that "bubble" bursts come from imbalances.  If you can identify the imbalance, you can avoid suffering from the burst. Brian: What are some of the most common questions you get about Social Media? Jeremy: The most common are 1. How can you monetize Social Media? 2. Are there any case studies that show a return on investment with Social Media? Brian: And how do you answer those? Jeremy: As soon as there is a widely accepted theory of how to monetize Social Media, the game will change and it will become much more expensive.  And when everyone adopts the same theories on how to monetize Social Media, it won't work as well as predicted, in part because of the competition.  Keep in mind, people will still use the same methods, simply because there is a track record and/or case studies. Companies will throw significant dollars at these methods, and then you can throw the case studies and theories out the window.  There could be a mass exit for companies using Social Media, or at least significantly decreased ad spend and resources dedicated to the strategy. Brian: So you're talking about how the bubble would burst for individual companies? Jeremy: What is interesting about the bubble burst is we do not expect it to be on a global level, but rather at the company level.  If companies do not put the proper strategies in place, their bubble will burst! Companies will decrease the size or even eliminate their social media departments.  As this takes place you could potentially have the same theories and methods start to work again. Brian: So what do you recommend companies do now? Jeremy: We run a small Social Media agency (shameless plug) and we get to talk to many companies at many different revenue levels.  We have dealt with everything from Fortune 1000 clients to the small mom & pop bistro with 10 tables.  We run in to many of the same questions and concerns regarding social media marketing, we also run into a few that really get "it".   There is no Social Media strategy that will work for every company. We have a small percentage of the people we talk to that seem to get "it". Brian: What is "it" that they get that others don't? Jeremy: It's not knowing HOW they are going to monetize social media- but they believe they will be able to.  They see that if they build this large audience while it is still relatively easy and inexpensive, then while their competition is playing catch-up, they will be driving revenue. Brian: Facebook audience building does seem to be huge right now. What I'm seeing (and working on) is Fortune 1000 companies going after 6 figure audiences, or bigger… mid-sized companies in the low to mid-5 figures. Small businesses are trying to get higher in the 1,000′s. Jeremy: Eventually what will happen is every company you can think of will be purchasing ads to try to build audience.  This will drive demand and cost up across the board. Companies may be so concerned about building their audience that forget about building the relationship with their audience. Brian: And yet the relationship is critical to monetizing the audience, isn't it? Jeremy: Driving revenue and monetizing social media marketing is not automatic.  It takes a significant amount of time and effort to build a relationship between a brand and an audience, but it can be accomplished. Building a relationship with an audience can be a very difficult task for a brand, especially if they have had a tendency to be very stale and without personality in the past. Brian: What's the key to building a relationship that drives revenue? Jeremy: Passion drives revenue! There are no rights and wrongs in creating a successful social media campaign – there's not something that will never work, and  there's nothing that will always work.  The good news is there is something that will usually work, if you know your audience and you know how to create passion and positive emotion. Brian: So what's the take-away about Facebook marketing for the average company? Jeremy: What it comes down to… Really at the end of the day, if you build the audience, you have the ability to figure out how to drive revenue.  If you wait until "everybody is doing it" you might not be able to. As long as there is no widely accepted method to monetize social media, and there are companies not really getting into Social Media, there is a huge opportunity. ———— Here are the takeaways I gleaned from the interview: We're in a unique early phase of social media marketing history, ripe with opportunity. And it's cheaper now than it will be later on. Audience building comes before monetization. How you will monetize the audience becomes clear during the audience building phase – not before audience building. You have to build the relationship and find out what they respond to before you can monetize. Don't just build audience. Build relationships while building audience size. Case studies are nice, but standardizing Social Media strategies leads to increased competition and decreased opportunity. Early adopters win – middle adopters can still win – but as for late adopters, who knows… maybe not. This is nothing new. The same pattern happened with SEO and AdWords. As time went on, competition increased, and the slowest companies finally looked for help based on success stories that happened earlier, when things were easier. In the internet marketing age, the spoils go to the early and mid-adopters. The earliest adopters suffer from the bleeding edge, but those who adopt a new marketing channel just after that may be the wisest. And that time is now for Facebook Marketing. If your competition adopted earlier and is suddenly beating you, and if you're a public company and the board is pressuring you, you're going to be building a Facebook audience really soon. It's some of the mid-sized and small companies that demand proof of monetization first, because they believe they can afford to wait. Hopefully this interview shows that you may not get those answers ahead of time, and that when other companies find those answers, you may not be able to use the same answers at a positive ROI.

Android Takes the Lead as Most Popular OS Among Recent Smartphone Buyers As of Tuesday, Android is the most popular operating system among recent smartphone buyers. According to The Nielsen Company's blog from the six month time period ending in August, the percentage of Android purchasers rose from 14% to an impressive 32%; surpassing both Blackberry's RIM and Apple's iPhone OSes.  Blackberry and Apple are neck and neck at 26% and 25%, respectively. The reasoning behind this might have to do with the fact that Android can be found on a wider variety of smartphone devices, whereas if you want RIM you have to buy a Blackberry and if you want Apple OS you, obviously, have to buy an iPhone.  While Blackberry and Apple still hold the first and second place spots for total market share among "long term" smartphone users, Blackberry's has declined from 36% to 31%, Apple has remained relatively steady and Android has gained 11%; taking it from 8% to 19%.

You Have Invested in SEO and SEM – Now What? We recently visited an Internet startup in Silicon Valley to discuss social syndication tools. The CEO of the company was really focused on SEO and SEM. He was asking that we help them in the user-acquisition area. Focusing on the ever changing "keyword landscape" is a full-time job in itself, most often requiring expert skills. Depending on the business, you typically also know the return on investment. For example, for every dollar spent on SEM, you make 2 dollars. However, there is plenty of reason to look beyond SEO/SEM. For starters, you may be able to improve the ROI with the budget you have. Secondly, referrals from sources other than search portals, are increasing. In fact, indications are that social networking referrals havedoubled in the past year. Another interesting development is the integration of social networking into web sites with Facebook leading the charge. Mashable shared some statistics on the effects. For example, page views per user was up by 92% for some sites (e.g., NHL.com). Current Model for SEO and Social Syndication Most web sites attract visitors via search. Once on the site, the visitors are offered social tools for sharing content, such as Retweet or Facebook Like buttons. Sharing extends reach into social communities and attracts additional visitors. The visitors are interested in the content offered by the site and they will share content they like. They will spend time but seldom convert to customers on the first visit. When they leave the web site, they rarely remember the URL. If you are lucky, the user will bookmark your site. Additional resources are therefore invested to get them to revisit, which then drives down the ROI. Leverage User Intent The visitors were genuinely interested in the products the site had to offer. They would benefit if it was easier for them to find their way back. There are some tools available to connect with the audience,  such as email newsletters. Some users sign up, most people don't due to the spam perception. Sharing has been simplified by Facebook via the Like button. You can leverage this user expression of appreciation to generate more revisits without the additional SEM expendeture. Sharing and Keywords Combined The Facebook Like button defines a relationship between the publisher and the user. The relationship is reflected on the Facebook wall and the event is shared in the news feeds for that user. If you add a context and automate the way you touch the user with ongoing, relevant content, revisits increase as well. The context should be defined by user actions, such as on-site search, reading and liking articles or visiting and liking segments of the site. One such tool is Facebook Like for Dynamic Content by IngBoo. IngBoo generates Like connections, defined by keywords (tags, categories, search expressions, etc.). When new content is available on the site, IngBoo automatically detects this, filters by the keywords and updates users who are connected. The updates appear in the Facebook news feed. We have seen exponential (30x) improvement in revisits with 25% increase in page views as a result. There are at least two feedback loops here: First, the keywords that represent the most popular connections can be used in SEO and SEM efforts. Second, content that is shared (Liked) inside the Facebook news feed represents elevated engagement levels, something every editor pays attention to.

WhosTalkin: Introducing Facebook's New API & New Social Media Metric Our great friend Joe Hall has shared some exciting news about his service WhosTalkin, a social media search engine that searches real-time conversations from around 60 different social media gateways. WhosTalkin has integrated Facebook's new API, giving the search tool unrepresented reach; the tool is also launching a new aggregation engine, a new real time metric, and the ability to export results directly from the search tool. The tools is also introducing – TalkRank – a new metric that "gives a very accurate picture of the level of conversations in social media". How does TalkRank work? On an hourly basis we run analysis on a "seed set" of popular terms in social media. Then we run an individual analysis on each query that goes through our system. With this analysis we monitor the number of updates or postings to Twitter, Facebook and blogs in the past hour. We then use these results to compare to our static seed set to form TalkRank. All of this happens in a matter of seconds using our powerful aggregation engine.

Build and Promote Your Online Resume with DoYouBuzz You should have several well-compiled online resumes even if you are not looking for the job and are not planning to. The main reasons why I am maintaining and updating carefully my online resumes are: Google SERPs reputation management: these resumes are usually very well ranked for your name in Google; Social media marketing: online resumes work great for aggregating, interlinking and promoting your social media profiles. Today, I am sharing an awesome tool for building and hosting your online resume:DoYouBuzz. The Best Thing About the Site: User-Friendly Design and Structure I really loved the way the site is built from the very registration page where one could clearly see which further steps he should to take and what is going to happen: To all further steps: Including the initial resume information set-up (where you can clearly see which information was already submitted correctly): It is a rare case when I come across such a user-friendly and appealing site – definitely a win! Both Facebook and LinkedIn have a good sample to learn from. The resume is built in seconds. After importing your LinkedIn profile you have quite a few other options to fill in about yourself. You have also a few design customization options where you can select a template and choose the color palette The resulting profile looks really nice (again something to learn from): Sample Some Other Things to be Aware of I've been browsing the site, F.A.Q. and other sections and have come across some really interesting things, for example: 1. Your resume will have nocache tag in the header "so that potential employers and other visitors to your resume will not be able to access previous versions of your resume." – smart, isn't it? (that's what I call caring about your users) 2. Your resume can be exported to your Facebook profile and will appear as a separate tab (the process is as well very well-outlined): 3. Your resume has various options of visibility and privacy: Published Resume, Public Search Listing: Anyone who knows your resume's URL is able to access your resume. Your resume will also be submitted for public search indexing. This means that your resume may appear in search results for keywords such as your first and last name. Published Resume, No Public Search Listing: Anyone who knows your resume's URL is able to access your resume. However, your resume will not be made available to search engines. Published Resume, Access Code Required: Your resume will not appear in search engine results. To access your resume, visitors will need to know the URL and an access code determined by you. If someone wants to access your resume, they will need to fill out a contact form. We will forward their message to your email address on their behalf. If you choose to allow them access, you will need to send them your code. Remember this is not your DoYouBuzz password. Unpublished Resume: Only you can access your resume by logging into your DoYouBuzz account. To add some insight to this review, I got into contact with Evy Wilkins, COO, DoYouBuzz, Inc. for a brief Q&A about the service. She was very quick to get back to me with the answers: Please tell us about yourself. How long have you been with DoYouBuzz? I'm a former natural sciences junkie turned project manager turned marketing and business development pro. I have been with DoYouBuzz since the summer of 2009 and have helped expand the service to the U.S. (We were founded in Nantes, France). If you're looking for a fun fact – I've lived and worked on three continents including Europe and Africa. When the tool was launched and who is the person behind the initial idea? DoYouBuzz was launched in France in 2008 and in the U.S. in April 2010. We're coming up on our two year anniversary! Ludovic Simon, the founder & CEO, is the driving force behind the startup. He created DoYouBuzz to bring innovation to online recruiting and make it easier to find talent and jobs. You guys have just AWESOME usability. How many times had the interface been changed until it became that perfect? How did you come to realize what features, tools and user experience elements needed to be added and how to make the tool that usable? First, thanks for this super question and nice compliment! Usability is at the heart of everything we develop. The application, in its current state, was achieved by taking a really close look at resume builders. We were looking for all of the reasons why resume writing is such a pain, why online employment forms are so burdensome and why resume builders often leave professionals extremely frustrated. We went through many iterations during development and private beta – making tons of minor changes to just about every piece of the application, several times over. For example, we went through at least five or six versions of the drag and drop feature before we were happy with it. Our goals was to provide creative freedom and structure so that a professional would know how to use the tool, how to present his/her experience and also be inspired to show off their uniqueness. All this while ensuring that the end product would please recruiters and fit in their work flow. Suffice it to say, we are obsessed with UI and UE! Do you plan any other features added? Maybe Twitter integration or something? Yes! There are many features on our todo list. Users most often request a recommendation tool. That's on the horizon. We are also working on some cool stuff that will allow professionals to distribute their resume with ease. We are focusing on integrations and powering professional communities on other sites and services.

Five Lessons for Making the Most of International Search Engine Optimization (ISEO) There are a lot of benefits to being first to market.  You get to define your space, set the bar for followers and enjoy some relative comfort in your singular position, at least until the competition catches up.  At that point, being first no longer matters.  Being the best becomes far more important. First-movers in many industries have learned this evergreen lesson anew as more and more companies have harnessed the power of the Internet to globalize their businesses and tap revenue streams from across the world.  In countries with less competitive Internet markets and less refined search engines, it used to be enough for a first-mover to simply translate its English copy into the local language and start doing business.  With so few companies doing it, there was no competition for e-business or Google rankings.  This is no longer the case.  Most businesses today realize that focusing on the consumer base of only one country is a sure way to quickly plateau revenue and growth. Any company with websites in international markets – whether they have been there for years or are just launching – should be aware of international search engine optimization (ISEO) best practices in order to make the most of their localization efforts. What is ISEO? Clearly, website visitors are more comfortable reading, browsing and converting in their own languages.  Businesses know that customizing their websites to suit the linguistic needs of each national market can result in significantly increased web traffic, as well as increased revenue per order and improved international brand recognition. However, merely translating a U.S.-based website into another language is not enough to take advantage of the potential expansion in foreign markets. ISEO is a key ingredient to success, and it's attainable for any retailer willing to embrace a few important lessons learned by first-movers and recent innovators. Lesson #1: Consider ISEO first There is little value in going live with a website that is not optimized for international search engine optimization.  Companies might be tempted to start with website translation first and optimize later to keep initial costs down.  However, this phased approach is actually more expensive in the long-term. Building multilingual websites should not be done in staggered attempts.  Rather, ISEO best practices should guide a company's entire content development and site-architecture strategy.  Otherwise, it is building a website based solely on what looks good, rather than what conveys the most accurate information.  Only when foreign SEO and design are done in conjunction can a business clearly answer the question: "Have we launched a website that will attract customers?" Lesson #2: Automation is great, but make sure you have human experts, too. Relying solely on software to translate website copy is likely to fall short of overall localization goals.  The work of maintaining the message and feel of the original language takes knowledge and skill that can only come from human involvement.  Machines cannot support all the details involved with localization projects, and when companies rely on machine translation, their ISEO shortcuts become obvious. Organizations that deploy such solutions are almost putting themselves at a greater disadvantage than those that don't translate at all.  Machine translation is not adept at catching subtleties, which can make or break a campaign. Total automation can only take a company's brand messaging so far in the arena of customer communications. Lesson #3: Your website is your virtual storefront. Craft your signage carefully. Copy optimization and proper keyword selection are the first items that should be on the minds of companies moving into foreign markets.  It is vital in website localization projects to validate keyword choices before going live in other languages.  Just as an upscale boutique wouldn't hang a discount store's sign over its front door, businesses operating in foreign markets must choose the words that best convey who they are, what they do and why customers should care.  Localizing communications for other cultures must be handled carefully by professionals who understand the nuances of word choice and connotation in any given language.  Settling for anything less puts the effectiveness of international campaigns and foreign SEO at risk. Lesson #4: Choice is appealing in any language. Localizing content for foreign markets is all about making global audiences comfortable with your company and open to receiving its messages.  In your eagerness to reach that goal, don't remove the visitor's option to choose his or her language preference.  Depending on the country in which you are working, any given visitor might prefer French over English or Arabic over Spanish or any number of other possibilities.  Don't guess which language might be best.  Instead, offer a dropdown language menu.  This will reduce visitor frustration and increase your site's effectiveness. Lesson #5: Translation is about more than words. Images count, too, and they might broadcast unintended messages abroad that only a trained professional can identify. For example, the company that adorns its site with images of notable buildings around the world might run into a problem if one of its randomly selected photos conveys waste, corruption or failure in a specific market. A picture is worth a thousand words.  Make sure they're the words you want to convey. Whether a company already offers its website in multiple languages or is simply in the planning stages, it is vital to understand how investing in international search engine optimization (ISEO) can result in greater online visibility in the short term and faster return on investment (ROI) in the long term. Professional translation services set a strong foundation for companies that want truly localized communications that reach the intended audiences with the intended messages and lead to conversions.  That goal is easy to understand in any language, and as international competition grows, companies need to take their website efforts to the next level with careful, informed localization and optimization.

Google Goggles Now Available For the iPhone In December Google Goggles was released for Android. The feature allowed users to search in the Google Maps for Mobile by using a picture they took on their mobile device. It highlights recognized objects and then all you have to do is click on it to find out more information. Also, it can help with more relevant local search results by using the pictures as landmarks. Today, Google announces that Goggles is available for the iPhone! Google Mobile's blog does warn that since "computer vision" is difficult that it's still a Labs product and that they will continue to work on it to make it work better. Google Mobile App is in the Apple App Store and users need only downloaded the updated version on their iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 devices. Devices must be running iOS 4 or above and Goggles is only enabled for English-speaking users.