Well the news is out. Apparently the much discussed search advertising deal between Yahoo! and Microsoft has been given the go ahead by both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Union. Many are heralding that decision as the end of the Yahoo! search market share, which is sad because that’s kind of what Yahoo! has become known for over the years. Sure Yahoo! has their Shopping, Mail and News categories but they’re most thought of as a search engine.

So what does this deal mean for Yahoo! Essentially their free search capabilities will be transferred over to Bing while a paid search platform will become known as adCenter. The justification for this was that the deal would increase the level of competition amongst advertisers. Well this is good news for the companies, but not so much for search engine advertisers since more competition for ad space will ultimately drive those prices up.

So what’s an advertiser to do? The most logical step is to disperse advertising resources across fewer high cost methods and look for effective low cost methods to invest in. One of these is social media, which is possibly the cheapest way to get access to a large number of people. Some SEO gurus are already predicting that 2010 will be the year of social networks, with more and more advertisers moving away from search campaigns. After all, there aren’t that many effective search engines left.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Well, it’s official. Google is getting in on the social media craze. Is there anything that Google isn’t a part of yet? Hey, I’m not complaining. I, like most people I’m sure,  use their services for just about everything, whether it’s for their analytics code or AdSense income. I was wondering though if anyone here has had a chance to check out Google Buzz yet. What do you think?

I’m a big fan of using social networking to market your site and I love the exposure that FaceBook can give you when it comes to your target audience. I don’t mind admitting that I thought it was just a flash in the pan when it first came out. Misplaced loyalty to MySpace, I know. Well I’m amongst the converted now. It’s given a big boost in traffic. Not anything spectacular, mind you, but I say that more visitors is always a good thing.

It will be interesting to see just what Google comes up with. Practically everything they’ve put out has been a hit, although I don’t like their messaging service much, but that’s just me. It makes sense that they would want their own social marketing site too. I’m thinking that the big thing will be in terms of target audiences. They already offer targeted ads through AdSense. Maybe they’ll integrate that into the service. It would be great to have one place where you can do everything.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Social media is hot today. There is no internet-savvy person who is oblivious on what social media means. When we hear the word social media, what words do we instantly associate with it? Do you think of social networking websites such as MySpace or Facebook? How about social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon? And who can forget about the status-updating and microblogging website called Twitter? All of them may be designed differently as well as serve different functions but they all have a common element for them to be regarded as a group.

Social media pertains to websites which has a community of people that shares information through the website. In this situation, the website acts as the medium to get the message across. That is why it is called social “media”.

With this in mind, social media have been utilized by people for various reasons. Mostly, it is used for businesses for it offers a targeted community which you can easily reach out to through messaging. Others have used it for its sheer power of promotion. There is a part of the community, however, that is called as social media addicts. These are people who stay at that particular website for the whole day and concentrate their promotion there.

This behavior is good and bad. It is good because it allows a user to penetrate the culture of a particular social media website in the beginning. This way, he can easily talk to its users regarding their needs. On the other hand, it is also bad. As Kristy Bolsinger said in her article entitled “Are All Your Eggs in One Social Media Basket?“, focusing all your time on one social media website alone will not help you as that website falls down in the future.

Well, we have seen social media sites rise and fall. There are some websites that have consistent traffic and revenue but there are also others which has a decreasing popularity as time passes by. What you need to do is to prevent facing problems in the future and spread your marketing scheme all throughout different websites.

Of course, this does not mean that you have to join every social media website you encounter. Managing 4-7 accounts will do. Besides, you will just create confusion for yourself by joining too many sites.

There is nothing wrong with being a social media fanatic. Participating in social media websites must be done with strategy and care.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

With the emergence of social media, a lot of businesses are hopeful of taking themselves online. However, what they seem to forget is that social media users have a particular culture that they must get to know before they can fully penetrate it. This is the error Skittles committed as they tried to get people to talk about their website last Tuesday.

There is no argument about the influence of social media on the customer-business relationship. A lot of businesses have taken themselves online with high hopes of getting in touch with their customers. Customers, on the other hand, are very inquisitive. As the Church of Customer Blog have claimed, 60% of customers communicate with companies and 56% feel better service because of the open communication.

In fact, customers also want to get in touch with companies. According to the Church of Customer Blog, almost 85% prefer businesses to interact with them.

However, when this interaction turns sour, then we see the worst of the business-customer relationship. This is what happened to Skittles. They have not studied the market before diving. In effect, they received negative feedback. It’s inevitable considering that social media users are very critical having a wide selection of articles and websites to sift through everyday.

The things is, social media users are real people. They have a mind of their own and they are not robots who will follow any company’s command. You have to get their interest for them to talk about you. Forcing them will only result in negative comments as what Skittles experienced.

A notable statement that Brand Keys President Robert Passikoff made on Online Media Daily’s post entitled “Skittles Pulled Twitter Campaign” is that this event is a good example of customer power. No matter what the companies do, people still have the discretion on whether or not they will follow. Well I think this is already embedded in the system. The choice of whether or not to purchase a particular product lies on the person’s decision making process. No one can decide for him than himself.

As Gerry McGovern said in his post entitled “Customer Power Driven by the Web“, customers are more powerful today. Before, companies can arrange certain groups to promote their products. But today, people form groups on their own. The important thing here is that these people have their own united opinion and behavior which is something that companies must be concerned about.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

We all know that the social media bubble is at its peak, Facebook is one of the most successful social networking sites ever and it has got a vast pool of celebrities using it. Since the sites launch it has grown to become a type of necessity in world culture. Most people that use the site are very active users and they obsessively check there profiles every day as well as browsing there friend’s profiles.

Twitter on the other hand is a simple micro blogging site where users can update there status bars and allow there followers to hear there shouts. The site is relatively new, but has recently had a lot of media coverage due to the rise in celebrity stars using the service.

It is rumored that Facebook offered Twitter over five hundred million dollars in Facebook stock for the site, but Twitter turned it down. But could this end up being a serious mistake made at there end?

A lot of people (mainly Facebook users) do not really understand the need for a service such as Twitter, as Facebook has its own status update section. What is more intriguing though, is the news that Facebook have opened up there API for the status bar section. Which is ultimately what in fact made Twitter the site that it currently is. There is currently a lot of talk about Facebook killing Twitter. So let’s take a quick glance at the reasons why Twitter may or may not last.

Social networking sites are just like search engines, one of the most important facts is how the site is built. Plenty of social networking sites do not stand the test of time simply because there technologies are not advanced enough.

An example of what I am trying to say is to turn our attention to Google. Google simply revolutionarised search with there technology. This is why over the past decade they have shrugged off any rival search engine and will continue to do so unless someone invents a better way of search. The site cannot be cloned or copied because it is just too advanced.

Ok social networking is not exactly the same, each site offers something different but it’s the same core principle, the reason that Facebook will be around for a long time is because it is very hard to duplicate and they have created a solid platform with a great business model in mind.

Twitter on the other hand has none of this, although the site is great for connecting with people in the same niche, it has got nothing to keep a user there. I see twitter as a passing phase in the networking industry. That come this time next year will be saturated with clones. Heck! we are already starting to see the clones popping up left right and centre, simply because the site is too easy to replicate, it just has not got too much thought behind it, one of the main reasons that Digg is losing popularity is because it has just become over saturated with copycats and people are just getting fed up. Have you ever seen a copycat of Google? A search engine that is able to deliver such accurate results? Twitter just saw what other people have done and (Facebook status bar) and increased it a notch, I don’t know if Facebook status bar will wipe Twitter out, but Twitter will probably end up picking there own fate.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

A very recent survey on blogs shows some interesting stats that would encourage blog writers. It is nothing but more than 75 percent of business establishments which include small scale business and large scale business have taken that good step into the blogging world. Not only for the sake of promotion of their business, but these entrepreneurs strongly believe that blogs are the best social media of recent times.

Apart from the very strong reason that makes all businessmen write blogs, there is another good reason to continue them blogging. The fundamental reason is blogging is the best way to interact directly with the customers as it is the easiest and best accessible mode of communication for both the readers and the writers. The best news from the business world is that business bloggers have started learning the tips and tricks behind producing quality blogs. This is in the sense that they have understood the importance of producing search engine optimized blogs. As a matter of fact, optimization techniques have largely been injected into business blogs, and profit is the only thing that will follow. These techniques have helped them greatly to get good page ranks among search engines and hence, their business has started defining new dimensions.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Yes guys well today was the day that I had to do my first ever slating post. Yes I am an SEO (and a very good one) I work with some of the industries finest. But my decision to right this post has nothing to do with any SEOs but instead to do with the shambolic people that have recently banned my account. Read on for this interesting development.

If you are a regular reader of my blog you will notice that I did a post a few weeks back explaining that Sphinn has become a one man show. The blog post upset a lot of so called SEO’s, well after reading through some of the comments these people stated that the people that get front page stories, get in there first and submit stories from the big sites such as Search engine land etc, Ok I knew this anyway but to be honest I didnt ever use Sphinn that much (As I am not a big fan of Sphinn, even more so now).

So today I decided let me test the waters and see how easy it is to get to the front page. I kept and eye on all the big boys blogs and if they posted anything interesting I submitted it to Sphinn. So towards the end of the day I could see that it was very easy to get early submissions as no one was really participating.

The stories were building up quite a lot of Sphinns, they were quality stories from all over and none related to my sites. Suddenly I go to log in to see how they were going and wham! Musa (This account has been terminated.)  http://sphinn.com/user/view/profile/Musa What the heck? I have just been banned for submitting great stories, which is the whole purpose of the site. Read on for the real reason.

After much consideration there are a few reasons why I have been banned

1) The big boys or as they like to think of themselves had some competition, I beat them to the pip and got the great stories in there before them. They therefore missed out on their coverage!

2) Just because most of them talk in conferences they think they are something big. Il tell you what come and see us both and see who can rank a site better. (Most of these so called speakers dont have a clue how to put there words into action) They can talk the talk but they are lost when it actually comes to ranking a site. I have seen this hundreds of times..

3) I do not live in the USA, We all know that the Americans do not like the British. But when it comes down to it you my try to hide us from social sites that you own and give leway to fellow citizens. But I again can probably outrank the lot.

4) Again people meet in the conferences and become friends, if they see someone better than them. Wham bham your banned.

There are plenty more reasons that I could list down all night, but when it comes down to it Sphinn is a shambles. Please remove the voting feature and just let the editors place stories onto the front page (Oh sorry thats what they are doing anyway!)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

AOL has today stated they have purchased social media site Bebo. So what does this mean for AOL’s future – well we believe it is a great buy for AOL as it gives them a very strong launching pad to compete with Myspace, Hi5, and facebook, it is going to be very interesting as to what AOL will do with Bebo.

Bebo claims to have over 40 million registered users wordwide and with AOL’s takeover it is expected to rise very fast as they plan to expand globally as they are already one of the top players in the UK abit about bebo taken from the takeover statement below

Bebo, founded by Michael and Xochi Birch, is the world’s leading global social media network. Building on the notion of traditional social networking websites, Bebo combines community, self-expression and entertainment to enable its users to consume, create, discover and share professional and user-generated content through the Bebo website. Bebo has 11.4m unique users in the UK and a total membership of more than 40 million worldwide. Bebo also ranks as the UK’s most engaging social network with users spending an average of 33 minutes on the site per usage day

So in all conclusions this has been a great buy for AOL as they are firmly establishing themselves in the social market. Although a hefty price tag the conclusion is that its very much worth it

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!