How to Build Links, Increase Traffic and Exposure

How to Build Links, Increase Traffic and Exposure

By Justilien Gaspard, Search Engine Watch, Feb 11, 2010

Searching for a way to steadily build links every week while increasing traffic and exposure? Get your content published on other Web sites.

This marketing technique has been successfully used in print publications and works even better online. Here’s how to streamline the process.

First, set a specific goal of how many unique pieces to get published every week or month. It’s important to start small so you don’t feel overwhelmed and can make sure all the resources are in place.

A specific goal keeps everyone focused. Once the process is flowing smoothly, increase the targeted goals.

Hire a Writer

Unless you’re a passionate writer with a lot of free time, hire a professional writer. This will save time, keep things focused, and make it easier to scale. It’s also key to streamlining the process.

This could be a professional freelance writer or someone in-house. If you plan to hire a freelancer, make sure the person is knowledgeable of your industry. Tip: find an unemployed, or underpaid, industry journalist.

I won’t even get into the debate about whether your writer should ghost write for you or be listed as a company representative. That’s a decision your company needs to make.

Hire an Editor

Another way to streamline the process of selecting a writer is to hire an editor to review the writing samples. They can narrow down your choices based on the writer’s engagement, voice, and writing ability.

An editor will also be essential if you want to get published on high-quality Web sites. Everyone’s writing needs to be fine-tuned.

Where to Publish

Guest blog postings are a good place to start. These types of postings can deliver good traffic and exposure. Search for niche blogs that cover your industry or demographics.

Article sites are another place to get published. I’m not talking about the free for all sites. Find the ones that review the work, make editorial changes, and rank well in search engines. Buzzle.com is an example of this.

Knowledge sites are great. This could range from Work.com to Squidoo lens.

Let’s take the example of Work.com. Aaron Wall created a piece on Work.com about learning search engine optimization. It ranks number one in Google! That’s with Google personalized search turned off. If it’s worth the time for an industry expert like Aaron to create this page — trust me, it’s worth your time.

What to Write About?

You want to get as much traffic and exposure from this as possible. Design your content based on what people are searching for. If you don’t already subscribe to a paid keyword research tool, check out the free versions such as Google’s Adword Keyword Tool, WordTracker and Keyword Discovery.

Use common sense with these tools. They’re only estimates. Look for those terms that suggest people are searching for an answer to something (e.g., “how to,” “how do I,” “learn,” “advice,” “fix,” and “repair”).

Another starting point for content designed for consumers: ask your sales and customer services staff about questions commonly asked. Discussion forums and e-mail list are another great place to find topics.

Take it to the Next Level

Once you’re comfortable with this strategy and confident in your writer, take it to a whole new level. Start focusing time on getting published in professional publications and industry sites. These include industry organizations, journals, magazines, and top tier blogs. It may take months before you get something accepted — yet it will be worth it.

Getting your company’s content published on third-party sites is a great way to build links and increase exposure and branding. Remember, good link building is just good marketing.

http://searchenginewatch.com/3636452

http://onlinebusinessstrategist.com – Having an online presence isn’t an option, it’s a necessity

Be careful with your tweets and facebook posts

Be careful with your tweets and facebook posts… read this article we found on CNBC

Tweeting Your Way Out of a Job
By: Aman Singh

Remember the sheaf of papers you signed off on when you started work? Somewhere in there was your company’s official Ethics Policy.
Yeah, feel the yawn coming?
And that’s why nine out of 10 new hires simply sign off on that paper without given it more than a cursory glance.

But today this policy may be under attack.
At an event hosted by The Conference Board last week on Business Ethics & Compliance, I heard ethics and compliance officers from different industries discuss their industry-respective takes on regulatory reform and challenges of instilling ethical behavior in the workplace.
And somewhere in the middle there was suddenly a confession from one of the panelists.
One that surprised me not only because of their acknowledged bafflement with it, but also what followed as an honest confession of not knowing how to deal with it.
They were referring to the new phenomenon called social media.
With Facebook and Twitter blurring the line between personal and private, companies have to deal with a new challenge for their ethics policies, including confidentiality, privacy policies, and reduced productivity. How much company information is it okay for someone to post on their Facebook status, if at all? Is discussing their daily work on a public forum considered a breach of confidentiality? And what if this includes a client name or a product in the making? Lawsuit written all over it?

But the No. 1 concern, according to the panel—which comprised of ethics officers from PricewaterhouseCoopers, Lincoln Financial and PepsiCo—was where to draw the line between personal and professional. One of the key speakers was Jude Curtis, the chief ethics and compliance officer at PricewaterhouseCoopers, who discussed his team’s efforts in putting together an official “Social Media Policy.” Curtis also added that PwC considered their employees’ presence on social networking sites serious enough to set up a Social Media Steering Group, which is tasked with continually reviewing their policy as the field evolves.
Pepsi’s VP of Compliance, Stephen Noughton added yet another dimension to the discussion by expressing his concern: Does a potential candidate’s presence on social media deserve a place in the traditional background check? While the jury is out on this one, as a jobseeker, does that worry us? With industry experts citing social media key for your career success, I’m willing to bet yes on that one.

Finally, the last segment to this conversation:
We are all asked to sign a “Code of Conduct” at work, however, what happens when we flip this?
What about the board signing an ethics policy that asks them to adhere to the triple bottom line principle when making any strategic decisions?
Sound untraditional?
Well, it is, but it might not be for too long as corporate social responsibility gets concretely defined across board rooms and shifts from pure advocacy quests to instrumentally changing strategic direction at corporations.
Ethics will soon have to bridge the gap from being solely an individual responsibility to a conscious common denominator in our business decisions as well. If you’ll understand this better in business terminology, it’s also called sustainable capitalism.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/36825872/

http://onlinebusinessstrategist.com – Having an online presence isn’t an option it’s a necessity

SEO Tips for Your Blog, Business

By Donna Fuscaldo – FOXBusiness

With social media here to stay, many entrepreneurs smartly figure they have to be part of the 24-7 conversation, and not simply an observer.

For Michael Wink, when starting a law firm last summer with his wife Gailyn, co-authoring a blog was a no brainer. The husband and wife bankruptcy-attorney team started Wink & Wink in Broomfield, Colo. to both make a living and help people – and, they said, a blog helps facilitate both goals.

“We can share information about bankruptcy law that can be quite useful and for people looking for an attorney it gets us through to prospective clients,” said Wink.

Increasingly small businesses are embracing the idea of writing blogs to coincide with their business. For many, it’s a way to connect with existing customers and reach out to potential new ones. The successful ones are able to strike a balance between offering opinions and coming off as an expert in their chosen field.

“There’s a lot of sources of information on the Internet. To the extent you’re merely authoritative you may not stand out quite enough. Of course if it’s only opinion it may not come across as professional enough,” said Wink.

Both husband and wife take turns writing the Wink & Wink blog called He Said, She Said. The blog, which is updated at minimum once a month, focuses on interpreting the laws of bankruptcy, issues facing people considering it, and current events that may impact a decision to file.

“People don’t always understand that bankruptcy can help them,” said Wink. “At the minimum they need to understand their rights with bankruptcy.”

For Wink, starting the blog wasn’t too overwhelming of an endeavor. He had dabbled in using the medium with his former venture, running a fish farm. There he said he first discovered the power of a blog to share information.

While it’s hard to quantify how many new clients came to Wink & Wink because of the blog, Wink said it has helped the law firm move higher in rankings on Google when someone searches for a bankruptcy attorney in Colorado.

“One of the most palpable marketing goals achieved through the blog is search engine optimization,” said Wink. “The more authoritative content the better ranking it gets you.” For Wink & Wink, a new firm trying to gain market share, a blog is a “relatively inexpensive” way to gain clients.

Wink said for small business owners considering writing a blog, one of the best things to do is actually write it, instead of having a ghost writer. After all, the goal of the blog is to connect with clients and what better way than by showing your true voice.

Stacks & Stacks, the San Francisco retailer of de-cluttering products, said its goal of staying on top of current technology pushed it to launch its blog cluttercontrolfreak.com in August of 2007. The blog, which has content written by company staff as well as experts in the field of organizing, provides consumers with tips to reduce the clutter and get organized.

Eva Wallace, Web site and social media manager at Stacks & Stacks, said the blog garners positive feedback, but measuring how many sales come as a result is difficult to do. She said it gets 9,000 to 10,000 visits per month.
Wallace tries to keep the blog casual and doesn’t shy away from including personal stories.

“It’s not too personal, but enough so there’s an actual face behind the brand,” said Wallace, noting she does try to inject some humorous pictures and stories. One recent blog post focused on washing clothes by hand after the washing machine broke, while another simply said Happy Easter and features a picture of a dog with bunny ears.

Wallace said that small business owners considering launching a blog should be sure you are willing to commit the time needed to update and manage it. Spending two-to-four hours a day on the blog isn’t unheard of for Wallace.
“You have to be consistent and put up posts two to three times a week at least,” said Wallace. What’s more, she said small business owners need to be transparent and balanced when it comes to the blog.

“They have to let readers know they do represent a brand and not try to hide that,” she said. “[But] try not to be really self serving [and/or] make everything about the company.”

www.onlinebusinessstrategist.com
Having An Online Presence Isn’t An Option, It’s A Necessity

http://www.foxsmallbusinesscenter.com/technology/2010/04/14/seo-tips-blog-business/

Getting connected: Business owners join LinkedIn, Facebook to network Read more: Getting connected: Business owners join LinkedIn, Facebook to network – Birmingham Business Journal:

Are you LinkedIn? Do you have a Facebook profile? Do you ‘Tweet’? If not, consider joining the social media crowd
BIRMINGHAM BUSINESS JOURNAL – BY Lauren B. Cooper STAFF

Read more: Getting connected: Business owners join LinkedIn, Facebook to network – Birmingham Business Journal:
TicketBiscuit’s Eric Housh said he picked up 10 to 15 new leads on clients in the entertainment industry across the country in a matter of days last week.

No, he wasn’t racing from airport to airport like O.J. Simpson or spending hundreds of dollars to wine and dine potential clients for the local online ticketing and entertainment marketing firm he works for.
He was sitting at his desk, maintaining the company’s Twitter feed, he said.
Not sure what Twitter is? (See box.) It, along with LinkedIn, Facebook and other online social media and blogging sites, is what some say is the fastest growing marketing tool and a way to keep track of what’s going on with your clients, your industry, your competitors and your friends.

And Housh isn’t alone. He’s joined by millions of CEOs, top executives, dedicated employees and professionals of some of the nation’s largest and most respected companies, including Home Depot, Zappos.com, Best Buy and Dell to name a few, that have expanded their presence through online social media and blogging, claiming increased visibility and the ability to respond to customers instantaneously.

Doing so takes time and transparency, but if done properly and with a plan some experts and those who use the sites say it can be a very affective marketing tool.

Housh, chief marketing officer for TicketBiscuit, said while he uses Facebook and LinkedIn on a more personal basis, Twitter allows him to keep track of what’s going on in the entertainment industry and what people are saying about his company and his competitors.

For example, he said, last week he was able to monitor what people were saying about the announced merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster and reach out to those looking for a more independent ticket broker and event marketer.

“The benefit for us is put in one word – visibility,” he said. “I search on what people are talking (or ‘Tweeting’) about. If anyone mentions TicketBiscuit, I can see what people are saying about the company and immediately respond, if it’s positive or constructive or I can say, ‘Let’s fix this situation.’”

Sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn are another way to get a company’s name on people’s mind or connect with other like-minded professionals, said Kara Kennedy, head of consulting firm Kennedy Resource Development and director of external affairs for Samford University’s Brock School of Business.

“LinkedIn is a good value for marketing,” she said. “You get to write a profile and your accomplishments. On LinkedIn there opportunities for business discussion groups that have questions about (human resources) or accounting and you can pose a question that more than likely will get answered immediately.”

Kennedy said she often uses Facebook to post Samford alumni events and updates and LinkedIn to maintain a growing database of contacts where other companies can look for business and potential employees.
“You can guarantee your competitors are online,” she said.

However, gauging the effectiveness of online media for companies is a daunting task, since there are many different ways to measure how many people you reach, said David Griner, social media strategist for advertising and public relations firm Luckie & Co.

“It’s a daily struggle finding ways to tell clients about its effectiveness,” he said. “But it’s opening the lines of communication and that’s the rewarding part.”

Griner said some corporate cultures just aren’t ready for online social media, but warns that those companies should be prepared to face the fact that their competitors probably have a strong online presence.
“They are staking their claim on being the company that’s listening and being involved,” he said.

Griner advises to have a plan before launching an online marketing campaign and be prepared to update and participate consistently, because it’s something people can’t do half way, he said.
TicketBiscuit’s Housh agreed.

“Most people’s hands are being called because they can’t afford print advertisement any more,” he said. “You can’t get in there blasting and take, take, take. There’s a delicate balance. If you blast in, people tune you out.”
But balancing all that takes a lot of time.

Derek Waltchack, a principal at Shannon Waltchack Investment Real Estate, said his company recently started a blog to convey to investors and other brokers the type of work the company does.
“You have an idea to do it and you go great guns at first,” he said. “But continuing to have content is more daunting than it seems. You have to feed the beast.”

But so far the blog has enlarged the company’s sphere of influence, he said, with more brokers and investors going online to learn about the company and other bloggers linking to Shannon Waltchack Investment Real Estate’s site and blog entries.

www.onlinebusinessstrategist.com
Having An Online Presence Isn’t An Option, It’s A Necessity

http://denver.bizjournals.com/birmingham/stories/2009/02/23/smallb1.html

Online marketing evolves away from banner ads

Denver Business Journal – by Lyn Berry Tech

The year was 1996. The place, the Internet.

As with its predecessors, television and radio, the Internet showed incredible promise as an advertising medium.
Scads of companies jumped on this new electronic bandwagon, snapping up Internet “banner” advertising space, while marveling at the medium’s interactive capabilities. Not only could banners accomplish brand recognition, but with the click of a mouse, products could be bought and sold.
Now, a new trend shows the popular banners are losing steam, while direct e-mail marketing is emerging as the high-growth darling of electronic advertising.
“Demand for e-mail marketing is definitely soaring,” said Ben Addoms, executive director of MatchLogic Inc., a Westminster-based provider of online advertising and marketing products and services.
MatchLogic reported a 2,000 percent increase in its clients’ direct e-mail usage, when comparing first quarter 1999 and 2000 results.
“However, our brand advertising was only up in the neighborhood of 300 percent during that time,” Addoms said.
MatchLogic’s experience mirrors a national trend spotted by Forrester Research. The Massachusetts-based independent research firm predicts the direct marketing share of all interactive advertising will swell from 25 percent in 1999 to 65 percent in 2003, producing a $5.5 billion market.
“What we’re really watching is the evolution of online marketing,” said Addoms. “Pricing and demand for different kinds of advertising are reflective of their performance, and e-mail is more effective on a cost per basis.”
This doesn’t mean e-mail is less expensive on its face, however.
The cost for a banner ad can run between $3 and $30 for 1,000 “impressions,” or people who see the ad. Direct e-mail marketing is much more expensive per thousand, falling in the $275 to $450 range.
Despite the price differences, e-mail marketing can save a company money down the road because it is a more targeted form of advertising, according to Pete Estler, founder and managing partner for iBelay, a Boulder-based Internet holding company that invests in a number of online direct marketing companies.
“It comes down to how many responses you get for each contact,” he said. “E-mail is getting much more response.”
According to a study published by E-BuyersGuide.com, e-mail promotions inspired 63 percent of consumers to shop online in December 1999, while only 38 percent of consumers were motivated by banner ads.
“Brand advertising is not very targeted,” said Estler. “You’re playing banners to everybody. There aren’t any consumer characteristics tied to banners.”
E-mail, on the other hand, is not only more targeted, but it allows a company to “get smarter” in its marketing efforts every time it receives response from customers, which happens more quickly than with other marketing techniques. “It’s an opportunity to refine the next e-mail effort and send it to a tighter audience, which improves performance,” Estler said.
Most e-mail solicitations are driven off of “opt-in” or privacy-protected databases, such as NetCreations Inc. and YesMail. These databases store lists of subscribers who have opted in to receive information about certain products, through avenues such as e-mail newsletters on the Web.
“This is a more receptive audience that is involved in the company’s marketplace and interested in its topic,” said Dan Murray, e-mail marketing strategist for Boulder-based MessageMedia Inc. “This leads to a much higher percentage of response.”
The database approach works especially well for companies that strive to maintain their current customer bases.
“It’s a lot cheaper to grow your current customer base than to go out and beat the bushes for new customers each month,” Murray said. “E-mail allows a company to provide excellent customer service by keeping customers updated.”

www.onlinebusinessstrategist.com

Having An Online Presence Isn’t An Option, It’s A Necessity

http://denver.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2000/06/12/newscolumn1.html

Bringing a Smarter Search to Twitter, With Fees

By: Todd Woody

Bill Gross, the serial entrepreneur who pioneered search advertising, is unveiling a venture on Monday that aims to make money by allowing people using Twitter to bid on key words to give their posts top ranking.

Called TweetUp, the service will also organize the posts according to their popularity as measured by how often readers repost them and click on links they contain.

Mr. Gross said he had signed deals with other outside Twitter services like Seesmic, TwitterFeed and Twidroid to display TweetUp’s rankings. A TweetUp search bar will appear on Web sites like Answers.com and BusinessInsider.com. TweetUp will split revenue evenly with each partner, he said.

The goal is to cut through the clutter of thousands of irrelevant posts on topics of interest and keep the useful ones from disappearing into a torrent of messages.

The gamble is whether Twitter users who have turned the microblogging service into global communications phenomenon will be willing to pay to get their 140-character messages noticed — and whether other Twitter users will view such paid placement as legitimate.

“We feel Twitter is unbelievably powerful, but finding the thoughtful tweets amid all the noise is unbelievably hard,” said Mr. Gross, founder of Idealab, a technology company incubator based in Pasadena, Calif. “What we’re bringing is a new sort-order to tweets.”

Mr. Case said he was persuaded to invest in TweetUp by Mr. Gross’s role in developing paid search at GoTo.com, an Idealab spinoff, in the late 1990s. Advertisers bid to have their listings placed at the top of search results, a controversial practice at the time. Yahoo acquired GoTo.com, which had been renamed Overture, for $1.6 billion in 2003.

“TweetUp is to Twitter what Google is to the Web,” Mr. Case said.

Here is how the service will work, according to Mr. Gross: people can bid on key words or phrases, like “iPad” or “solar energy,” to push their Twitter profile or posts to the top of TweetUp’s rankings. Bids begin at 1 cent and people will pay each time their profile or a post shows up in a search.

Mr. Gross stressed that bids were not required to appear in search results. The service will also calculate rankings based on an algorithm that uses data from a company called Klout that measures a Twitter user’s influence. Bit.ly, a service that shortens Web addresses for display on Twitter, will provide data on how often people click on a link in a post.

So who does Mr. Gross expect to pay to put something as ephemeral as a Twitter post on top of the charts? “I think everyone who is looking to build a following will pay,” he said. That means companies that want to build their brands as well as individuals who hope to drive readers to their Web sites.

Loic Le Meur, chief executive of Seesmic, said TweetUp would appear as a new search option for his one million users.

Seesmic has had discussions with Twitter executives about their moneymaking strategy, Mr. Le Meur said, but he does not believe TweetUp will conflict with those plans.

Mr. Gross said the idea of rankings intrigued him as he followed thousands of Twitter posts related to the Copenhagen climate change talks. “It was mostly noise, so I wrote a very thoughtful blog piece on renewable energy and tweeted it,” he said. “Then 20 seconds later as I gloated in my success, I typed in ‘Copenhagen’ and my tweet was bumped off the page by people saying, ‘Where do I buy mittens in Copenhagen?’ ”

At the TED technology conference in February, Mr. Gross said, he read 10,000 Twitter posts about the gathering. “There were only 200 to 300 great ones, and I thought it would be great to be able to filter those,” he said.

He pitched his idea for TweetUp to venture capitalists attending the conference, including Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, a European firm. By the time Mr. Gross left TED, he had a handshake deal to finance TweetUp and quickly enlisted Idealab workers to begin writing software.

“We have been scavenging the marketplace quite comprehensively, and we haven’t seen anyone come up with what TweetUp’s doing by adapting Bill’s original Overture model and layering it on real time,” Mr. Rimer said. “The big bet, of course, is whether people are going to adopt it.”

This story originally appeared in the The New York Times

www.onlinebusinessstrategist.com
Having An Online Presence Isn’t An Option, It’s A Necessity

The Top 10 Companies on Twitter

Top ten companies on Twitter… let us help you become one of them.

1. Dell
“For overstock and obsolete equipment, getting outlet inventory sold fast is the name of the game. Twitter is the fast-paced grapevine that gets the word out – to the tune of $3 million in annual sales.”

2. Whole Foods Market
“Whole Foods uses Twitter to go deep on their customers’ needs, test concepts, and extend the conversation about values that drive them.”

3. Zappos
“Extending the zany brand relationship between the online shoe company and customers, encouraging everyone from CEO to newbies to join the party.”

4. JetBlue
“Never again for JetBlue after their 2007 ‘day on the tarmac’ PR nightmare. Constant communication with 1.6 million followers keeps them from falling out of touch; plus JetBlue Cheeps broadcasts fast-moving deals to their most devoted 50,000.”

5. Comcast
“The cable TV giant stages a perceptual makeover of customer disservice by converting a gripeline into a testimonial factory through @comcastcares”

6. New York Times
“This publisher broadcasts all the news that fits in 140 characters to keep in touch with 2.4 million readers, with subchannels for specific interests.”

7. Southwest Airlines
“Replicating that same fun, casual flying relationship to enthrall their customers. The (only) airline that knows how to make customers LUV (the company’s ticker symbol, based on the Love Field airport in Dallas) them, one tweet at a time.”

8. Starbucks
“The #1 most socially engaged of the Interbrand Top 100 brands, Starbucks is on top of ‘in the moment’ customer interaction. Starbucks says, “It’s about the relationships we form with our customers, not marketing.”

9. Kodak
“With a Chief Blogger and a Chief Listener both hooked onto the party line, this venerable brand now uses the most forward communications to help them stay up-to-date with their product and market.”

10. Home Depot
“The Home Depot goes beyond just product and store questions to help showcase how consumers use the store in their home improvement projects.”

www.onlinebusinessstrategist.com

http://www.cnbc.com/id/36421561

Having an online presence isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.

Facebook Becomes a Bigger Hit than Google

By: Chris Nuttall and David Gelles, Financial Times

Social networking website Facebook has capped a year of phenomenal growth by overtaking Google’s popularity among US internet users, with industry data showing it has scored more visits on its home page than the search engine.

In a sign that the web is becoming more sociable than searchable, research firm Hitwise said that the two sites accounted for 14 percent of all US internet visits last week. Facebook’s home page recorded 7.07 percent of traffic and Google’s [GOOG 560.00 -6.40 (-1.13%) ] 7.03 percent.

It is the first time that Facebook.com has enjoyed a weekly lead over Google.com. The lead may be slim, but it has become inevitable as Facebook’s popularity has grown rapidly from just over 2 percent of visits a year ago. Heather Dougherty of Hitwise said that Facebook had “reached an important milestone” with the weekly figures.

Facebook’s membership has more than doubled in the past year, passing the 200 million mark last April and 400 million in February.

“The true value of Facebook and social networks is just becoming clear to marketers,” said Augie Ray, analyst at Forrester Research.

Although Facebook is enjoying rapid growth, it is only beginning to cash in on its success. Revenues at the social media company are estimated to be in the range of $1 billion to $1.5 billion this year, while Google took in $23.7 billion last year.

Google has responded to the ascendancy of the social networking site with its own Buzz service last month. Buzz allows users to add status updates, friends, pictures, videos, location information, comments and links to other networking sites. Buzz, though, has struggled with privacy concerns just as Facebook has been criticised for encouraging members to reveal personal data to search engines.

The Hitwise figures only cover visits to the Google.com site, meaning that services such as Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps and searches carried out in a box in a browser toolbar are excluded. Taking all Google properties into account, the internet company accounted for 11.03 percent of US website visits last week, compared with 10.98 percent for Yahoo [YHOO 16.44 -0.12 (-0.72%) ] properties and 7.07 percent for Facebook, according to Hitwise.

Facebook’s trajectory suggests that it will soar ahead of Google.com in the coming months. However, social networking sites have fallen in the past. Google.com had led since September 2007, when it overtook News Corp’s [NWS 16.56 -0.14 (-0.84%) ] MySpace.com.

Internet users worldwide spent more than five-and-a-half hours a month on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82 percent increase over the previous year, according to the Nielsen Company research firm.

US users spent nearly six-and-a-half hours on Facebook compared with fewer than two-and-a-half hours on Google.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. You may share using our article tools. Please don’t cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

© The Financial Times Ltd 2010. “FT” and “Financial Times” are trademarks of the Financial Times.

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Having an online presence isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.

Bing vs. Google

Read the article below or go to Time Magazine’s Article:
TIME ARTICLE

Bing vs. Google: The Conquest of Twitter
By JOSH TYRANGIEL / SAN FRANCISCO

Microsoft revealed a nice little coup in its dual quests to make search more dynamic and crawl its way into Google’s monolithic grill. At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, the company’s digital head, Qi Lu, announced that three-month-old Bing had reached an agreement to crawl all of Twitter’s public results in real time. Bing’s Twitter search — Bing.com/Twitter — is already live.

For Microsoft, latching onto Twitter’s rise is more than just a big marketing win; it’s also a technological victory. Twitter is a huge, previously untapped resource in the movement toward search that relies on real-time data rather than archived links. (There was also a strong industry rumor that a similar deal between Bing and Facebook had been reached, though neither party commented on that.)

(Update: Not so fast, Microsoft. A few hours after Bing announced its Twitter deal, Google announced one of its own. The second Twitter deal of the day doesn’t quite erase Bing’s advantage. Bing’s Twitter search is already live, whereas Google’s Social Search, which was previewed at Web 2.0, is a few weeks away from launch. But it does change the day’s big-picture winner. That would now be Twitter. Neither Microsoft nor Google revealed the terms of their Twitter deals, but the critical point is that there were terms. For Twitter, and more importantly for its investors, that means selling its public data is the beginning of a revenue stream. And while the search giants battle over how best to aggregate that data, Twitter can celebrate the fact that companies with very deep pockets are willing to compete for the honor.)

In a demo by Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the online audience business group at Microsoft, a number of advances were immediately apparent. The most important for Twitter fans is that Bing reorders the massive, unwieldy Twitter stream by creating a “social relevance” score based on the quality of the tweet — “Life sucks” for instance, would not achieve high relevance — as well as the popularity of the tweeter. Then the tweet is run through spam and obscenity filtration to get a final result.

Bing-Twitter search also allows users to separate the most popular embedded links from the tweets that surround them, allowing people to understand the source of a conversation without having to endure the din surrounding it. Bing-Twitter also expands a tweet’s bit url and shows users the real domain, creating greater transparency before you click. In short, Bing makes Twitter make sense.

What this means for Twitter, which has been answering questions about possible revenue streams almost since its founding, is still unknown. Qi Lu refused to announce any terms of the deal, and Twitter CEO Evan Williams was similarly mum. But for Microsoft, it’s another territorial advance in what’s shaping up to be a very interesting search war.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1931532,00.html#ixzz0hw7pggut

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Having an online presence isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.

10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Business

Microblogging platform Twitter has 32 million users, an increase from about 2 million a year ago, according to research mentioned in the Wall Street Journal. Some Internet measurement services show that figure increasing 50% to 100% month over month. While it is not clear that Twitter will become as large as social networks MySpace and Facebook or video-sharing site YouTube, the company could certainly have 50 million visitors by the end of the year. View the 10 ways Twitter Will Change American Business here.

Because Twitter can be used with ease on both PCs and mobile devices, and because it limits users to very short messages of 140 characters or fewer, it has become one of the largest platforms in the world for sharing real-time data. A number of large businesses and celebrities have hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. This includes personalities like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher. JetBlue (JBLU), Whole Foods (WFMI) and Dell (DELL), along with other multinational corporations, are among the most followed names on the service.

As Twitter grows, it will increasingly become a place where companies build brands, do research, send information to customers, conduct e-commerce and create communities for their users. Some industries, like local retail, could be transformed by Twitter — both at one-store operations that cater to customers within a few blocks of their locations and at the individual stores of giant retail operations like Wal-Mart (WMT). In either case, having the opportunity to tell customers about attractive sales and new products can be done at remarkably low cost while providing for greater geographic accuracy.

For Twitter to be a part of a company’s efforts to communicate with customers, the customers must be willing to “follow” the company on Twitter. That allows the individual consumer to choose which firms he is willing to get messages directly from. It may not be surprising that “new age” brands like Whole Foods and JetBlue have large followings and older and much larger brands like Kroger (KR) and American Airlines (AMR) do not. Whole Foods and JetBlue have successfully marketed themselves as being “customer-centric” — the kind of companies that would not misuse the access to a customer’s private Twitter information.

While there may be commercial value for using Twitter to communicate with customers, the danger is that the Twitter community could turn against a marketer viewed as being too crass by being relentlessly self-promoting. Twitter users have set up their own rules of conduct when using the service, not unlike those with MySpace and Facebook. These rules were not put together by Twitter itself, which mandates only rules of use. Like many social-network sites, Twitter is self-governed by its members, and companies must take that into account as they join the service.

Twitter is still in the early stages of developing a plan for making money as a company, but plenty of large corporations like Starbucks (SBUX) are already using it as a marketing tool. Twitter will probably evolve into both a community of individuals and a community of companies that provide goods and services for those individuals.

24/7 Wall St. has come up with 10 ways in which Twitter will permanently change American business within the next two to three years, based on an examination of Twitter’s model, the way that corporations and small businesses are currently using the service and some of the logical extensions of how companies will use Twitter in the future. Some of these firms are already using Twitter, but their efforts are in the earliest stages of development. 24/7 Wall St. evaluated other sensible and potentially highly profitable ways Twitter’s real-time, multiplatform presence is likely to be exploited — in the best use of that word — to expand businesses both large and small.

— Douglas A. McIntyre

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1901772,00.html#ixzz0hw6fFtF0

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