So Yahoo and Bing have joined hands to take on Google. So has the playing field for search domination leveled off just a bit you think?

After establishing the Search Alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft, Yahoo had quickly begun transitioning Bing results into Yahoo results. So now, in the US and Canada for English results only, Yahoo search experiences are now powered by the Microsoft platform. This change in other markets will come fairly soon given the speed at which the transition is happening immediately after the public announcement was made.
 
Yahoo will be displaying mostly organic results from Bing. And initially Yahoo will only deliver English-language searches via Bing. As both partners work together to leverage each other, it is not unrealistic to expect that they will soon cover more markets and include other language searches.

Google continues to dominate the search usage market with greater than 60% of users using Google Search.  So has the competitive landscape evened out a little bit with this search alliance between Yahoo and Bing. Or has Google monopoly on search gotten stronger with the search alliance between Yahoo and Bing? Will new players crop up to pick up smaller usage shares in the US and Canadian Search markets?

We're all waiting to see how this plays out….

Whatever search engine you personally prefer, the recent August statistics released by comScore prove that Google has an impressive 65.8 percentage of US search market share under its belt. This compared to Yahoo’s 17.1 percent and Bing’s 11 percent.

But Google did lose a little ground when these results are compared to its 66.4 percent search market share in June.

So how is the search market share calculated?

ComScore calculates these numbers using a methodology called “Explicit Core Search”. This method excludes contextual links and slide shows. Yahoo and Bing recently added contextual links and slideshows forcing comScore to calculate metrics using another method also called “Total Core Search”.

And how do slideshows and contextual shortcuts make any difference?

A single click on a slideshow triggers a series of sites to load automatically and each slide is counted as a click. When users hover over some words in articles contextual links pop up and are counted as clicks too.
 
This different technique of searching was reflected in the Total Core Search statistics. Google accounted for about 61.6 percent of the market share while Yahoo was at 20 percent and Bing followed with 12.6 percent. This difference in patterns prompted comScore to change its methodology and offer two distinct fields, called Explicit Core Search and Total Core Search.

Experts have backed this change in methodology. This is because explicit core search tracks only those searches in which users entered specific queries to get results, unlike when you enter one query and get a cascade of links, all counting as queries.
 
With Yahoo joining hands with Bing, it remains to be seen if they are successful in leveraging their combined strengths to fend off Google and obtain a larger search market share.

When you have something that’s being used by half a billion people, it’s bound to have a huge immediate impact. So can your business when it is featured on your Place Page.
 
Facebook Places is a smart-phone location check-in feature that will allow you to share your location, find the location of your friends, and discover new places based on other Facebook user recommendations – much like Loopt, Foursquare and Yelp! provide.
 
Facebook Places has exploded as a habitual way of connecting. With people migrating their location check-ins to the network where they spend most of their time already – Facebook, it is a suite of advertising tools that provides you a way to list, claim and advertise your business.
 
You can grab your friend’s attention to your Place page by adding a story about your place page that talks all about your business on your profile. Data that you can collect on users and amount of times they check in will prove extremely valuable in tracking customers and advertising spend. What this means is that the customer that comes in every day can now be tracked and even incentivized to get a free gift for every tenth check-in. It’s like the digital/social version of the loyalty card.
 And more so, people are talking and telling others about your business therefore this has the potential for generating new referrals!
 
Offering coupons and special offers for people who check in is a natural way to tap the power of using online tools to drive offline sales. You can also make this more appealing and catchy by creating polls and inviting comments about your business. You can reward those who bring potential customers to your place page or share their experience with your business by offering them exclusive discounts or special offers.
 
All in all, Facebook Places is here to stay and I predict that advertisers will start becoming creative for leveraging Facebook Places.

"Social media marketing is here to stay" could very well be chalked up as the understatement of the year. Social media marketing has been on the rise for the past several years. Even so, there are still a lot of small businesses and corporations who continue to drag their feet on "getting social".
 
It is a new age where corporate reputations can be transformed in an instant, as consumers harness the power of social media to expose wrongdoing and vent their disapproval in enormous numbers. BP is just the latest in a string of global corporations who had to face social networking ire.
 
Others, such as Toyota and Goldman Sachs, have been forced into overdrive to repair damage resulting from perceived wrongdoing-often at immense cost and significant damage to their reputations. What makes these crises different today is that corporations are fighting to protect their reputations on all fronts, particularly online, and the challenge is getting more complex as millions more people sign up for Twitter, Facebook and the next generation of social media services.
 
The example of the month for Internet reputation management problems is British Petroleum. Their massive oil spill off the coast of New Orleans, an already-embattled city in a struggling state, has caused a reputation problem the likes of which have not been seen since Enron.
 
Twitter and Facebook continue to be the most used social media marketing tools by marketers, according to a new survey. Recent research shows one in four adult users of social media is now willing to lash out at companies online.
 
Twitter appeals to people due to its informality.  Facebook has now passed the 500 million mark and although it is popular, it's popularity in business application remains to be low. However, many business leaders are still failing to make the connection between protecting their reputation and being prepared to actively engage with their customers online.

More than ever before, people are using social media as a game changer to create major tremors across the corporate landscape. Whether it is to lobby Apple for its failure to respond adequately to the iPhone 4 product quality issues-which led to $9.9 billion being wiped off the company's value-or to ridicule BP for its ongoing problems in the Gulf of Mexico, social media's impact on corporate reputations and business strategy is increasing.

As a small business owner, isn't it time to jump on the bandwagon?
 

Facebook could release updates to services within the next several weeks that would allow its more than 500 million members to personalize offerings from news feeds to business and location-based applications, according to sources.

Third-party companies involved with the latest update have been told to have their application programming interface (API) integration ready to go by Aug. 19.
 
Third-party developers say the API will provide deeper integration through a one log-in toggle that takes members across a variety of applications, similar to Google's OpenID API that allows users to sign in to third-party Web sites using their Google Apps user account.
 
The ability to seamlessly move from one application to another also provides a clear path for advertisers to target ads. The integration would also fortify Facebook's search feature. The app will likely provide advertisers and companies that have Fan pages on the site with a little extra zing. The services will offer more than a geo-location check-in feature similar to Foursquare.

A new client who came on board last week had the following challenges with their ex-web provider:

• Received a BEAUTIFUL but disorganized website with information plopped in here and there and everywhere
• Believed that their search engine optimization was being handled but received no rankings or ranking reports to demonstrate performance
• Paid for paid marketing campaigns (PPC) but never received any reports showing keyword performance or ROI

 
I find all this quite perplexing. As a search engine marketing company owner, I know very well that what we sell is considered "loosy-goosy" because the client is not getting a physical product for their money. We sell marketing know-how essentially and the only tangible products we can offer are reports demonstrating performance of the campaign.
 
We have a tough time selling our solutions and know-how to begin with. But it becomes difficult when we have to prove that we are better than the last guy / gal who promised all the same things and never delivered. 
 
Come to think of it, I think others should keep non-performing! That way companies like mine can come in and demonstrate search engine marketing results that are tangible!

Ok so on Twitter, of course I'm following more strangers than I'm following friends. Maybe because some of my friends aren't on Twitter. Maybe because I don't want to follow friends on Twitter, I want to follow others who will become friends. But Twitter seems to think that instead of following strangers, people will find tweeting more fun if they can find their friends on Twitter. So they added a Find Friends feature which allows you to find Facebook and LinkedIn friends to Twitter.

You can find which of your friends are on Twitter using the Twitter Facebook. You can follow them instantly or add them to a list. Of course you can also post tweets directly to Facebook's pages when posting to your Twitter profile.

Twitter LinkedIn shows you which of your Linkedin connections are on Twitter. You can follow them and also post tweets on Linkedin.

Ok so! If you are my friend, now I can be your friend also on Facebook, and connect on LinkedIn, AND follow you on Twitter.

Uh but why do I NEED to connect with my same friend everywhere???

Social networking means "public conversations" about you, your company, your brand or your products and services. Public conversations are great when they are positive. Negative conversations; not so great!

However, not going online is not the way to avoid negative conversations. Remember, they're happening; whether you are online or not. So why not proactively monitor those conversations, participate in them, and ensure that you influence how they continue?

The first step towards Reputation Management is knowing that someone's talking about yourself. So first keep track of the conversations around you. To do so,  go to Google Alerts today and sign-up to receive alerts about your name, your company name, or your products and services. Google Alerts delivers emails with alert results to you or you can go to Google Reader to read them.

I personally prefer getting emails once a day because that way I can quickly scan through them and know if something jumps out at me.

Google Alerts can be setup for other reasons too. You can monitor Request for Quotes (RFP's) in your industry or you can create a Google Alert to stay abreast of a favorite topic or person. Perhaps you are a Lady Gaga fan or perhaps you just want to see all the conferences that are happening in 2010 so that you can plan to participate; whatever your interest, Google  Alerts allows you to keep stay abreast of things that are important to you. And that's called Conversation Monitoring.

(Disclaimer: Google didn't pay me to write this promotion about Google Alerts)
 

I call Social Networking, Social Brandcasting. Brandcasting means simply “casting” your brand out there in the social networks, period!

However many businesses are still not able to see the value of Brandcasting.

Brandcasting on Social Networks has the following key benefits
•    You can reach more people through popular sites like Facebook & Twitter due to the sheer volume of users each of them has

•    You can continuously promote your services and company events without spending any money on printing collateral, direct mail pieces, etc.

(Note: Although social networks are “free”, social networking is not free, but that’s a topic for another blog)

•    You can brag about yourself and your products or services and no one will think less of you.
You can do "horizontal" brandcasting which is to everyone and everywhere across the board, same message, same positioning. In horizontal brandcasting, you would use common messaging to promote generic messages about your brand or products and services.

Then you can do the "vertical" brandcasting where you position different messages on different platforms. In vertical brandcasting, you use different methodologies to reach different audiences. You may choose to reach a specific age demographic or you may target market using geographic area, etc.

The other important aspect of Brandcasting is the need to balance quantity (number of followers, fans, connections) with quality (what you say, how you say, and the persona you create of yourself or your company online, etc.). Quantity AND quality matter and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Brandcasting is a powerful strategy and social networks are the vehicle for executing that strategy to get visibility for your company or products and services. Isn’t it time you got started on your Brandcasting campaigns?

There are a lot of social networking sites out there. Facebook is right up there in my eyes (and in the eyes of about 500 million others) in terms of interactivity, ability to share content, comment on other people’s statuses, etc. etc.  LinkedIn is pretty good too and although it's getting a bit crowded with every recruiter and outsourcing company from India, it overall offers quality content in the form of connections and interactivity. I'm pretty opinionated so blogging fulfills the need I have to opine on things.

Then there are other platforms which I off and on play on; Google Buzz, Digg, Stumble Upon, et. all.

But Twitter is my absolute favorite networking site. Twitter provides:

• total interactivity with multiple conversations all going at once
• access to those companies or people that I want to reach now
• global promotion of any content that I publish, period!

But know that I'm not "tweeting" just for fun! It's a business tool that we use to promote ourselves and our clients. Yep, you as a prospective client will love to hear about our "hassle-free campaign management services. But I digress.

What I want to convey here is that you as a business owner need to get on Twitter, now. 

Why?

Because Twitter allows you to:

• Brag/showcase/share as much information as you want: We'll prove to you that it is the most “COST-EFFECTIVE way you can generate global visibility for your company
• Engage with prospects and customers: If you have a customer service component, this is the best way to be “agile” and “responsive” to your customers. For all companies Twitter can be leveraged to reach those who are not as easily accessible through normal channels
• Streamline the business development process: I mean how often in the past could you have direct access to the local governor, the top celebrity, the top TV show host, or the CEO of a company?
• Identify alliance partners. Since everyone's talking about what they do and what they sell, what better way to identify alliance partners than browsing Twitter to find prospect alliances?
• Create a referral network: Let's not forget the need for referrals. When people interact and form a "trusted" relation, referrals are just a step away.
• Promote brand awareness: Yep, tell everyone who you are and what you do and why you believe in some cause and how you are a good corporate citizen. People want to hear this from you. By posting it on Twitter, everyone gets to read what you do and who you are.

Don't get me wrong. Facebook is wonderful. Twitter though is totally "now". Chat with multiple people all at once. Promote one message to thousands with just a simple click of the button. Request the forwarding of your message and voilà, several followers jump up to fulfill your request.
 
Twitter is fun; Twitter provides engagement galore; Twitter is good for business! It may be just my opinion but it's validated by millions!