Google, Facebook Emerge As Winners In Britain

In some markets, Google is getting trounced. Take China and South Korea, for instance: the big guy just can’t win. In other regions, Google continues to reign supreme, and the latest numbers from comScore confirm that Britain is willing to crown Google as king of the search engines. Social networks also fared well in the UK.

Still, comScore’s numbers pertaining to Google (and a competitor from Microsoft) are pretty amazing; “[t]he figures showed that nearly nine out of every ten people in Britain visited Google and MSN last month,” reports bigmouthmedia.

For comparison, the Mountain View-based company got 27.4 million visitors in April, and MSN received 27 million - perhaps not as much of a difference as Google might like.

The call wasn’t nearly as close between Facebook and Bebo. In regards to the former, “The site’s rapid growth saw visits increase by 38 per cent for the second consecutive month to 3.7 million, representing an aggregate growth of 90 per cent for the last two months,” according to the bigmouthmedia article.

As for ol’ Bebo (which is described as “another much-loved networking site”), there was just a six percent increase in traffic between March and April. Then again, “just” may not be the right word to describe a growth rate of six percent per month.

In any event, there you have it: Britain continues to go gaga over Google, and is increasingly infatuated with Facebook.

Source:www.webpronews.com

Yahoo And Bravo Partner

Cable network Bravo is entering into the Hispanic market with a promotional partnership with sister network Telemundo and Bravo's popular series "Top Chef 3 Miami."

The promotional elements will include in-show integrations for both "Top Chef 3 Miami" andTelemundo's morning show "Cada Dia", a webisode cooking show hosted by "Top Chef" season two contestant Carlos Fernandez. The show will be produced in English and Spanish for BravoTV.com and Yahoo Telemundo Web sites.

Jason Klarman, Executive Vice President, Marketing and Digital, Bravo, said, "Partnering with Telemundo is the perfect way to leverage the Latin influence of this season and drive viewership with the Hispanic audience."

"This alliance represents the perfect marriage between Bravo's quality product and bilingual viewership and Telemundo's bilingual talent," said Don Browne, President, Telemundo.

"This partnership will strengthen Bravo's presence among U.S. Hispanics and will increase Telemundo's audience and awareness in the general market."

Source: www.webpronews.com

Microsoft, Google Chart New Map Views

Google Maps and Microsoft Live Search Maps released new ways of looking at the world through their products at the Where 2.0 conference.
3-D looks at the Big Apple and street views of Miami were two of the big announcements at Where 2.0 in San Jose. Microsoft and Google each attempted to out-splash the other with these impressive additions to their existing mapping products.

On the Google Maps side, the new feature called Street View provides 360-degree views of city streets. They launched with imagery from San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami, and Denver.
Google also announced the launch of Mapplets, which enable third party developers to create mini applications that can be displayed on Google Maps, much like Google Gadgets are displayed on iGoogle. Mapplets contain a trove of third-party information about cities, like housing listings and crime data, for use in mashups.

Microsoft debuted its 3-D cityscapes on Live Search Maps at the conference. New York and several other cities in the US, Canada, and the UK received the expansive treatment.

The views Microsoft provided for New York show landmarks and notable locations in the city. Business listings feature Yellow Pages information and other details about local businesses.
People will be able to create custom maps and lists of places on Live Search Maps to share with others. Microsoft expects to have cityscapes available for a number of cities worldwide by the end of Summer 2007.

Source: www.webpronews.com

Consumers Would Buy A Google Or Yahoo Mobile

While there have been rumors of Google or Yahoo launching a mobile device, a majority of U.S. consumers would be interested in owning such devices according to a survey from The EQUS Group.

Fifty-five percent of participants said they would be willing to buy a Google or Yahoo branded mobile device, and just 21 percent said they would not. Twenty-three percent said they were undecided.

One area the survey did not address is which brand of mobile device consumers would prefer to own Google or Yahoo? That would be an interesting piece of information to examine.

Al Nazareli, CEO of The EQUS Group, notes: "In addition to these findings, we also found that 69% of consumers currently use mobile search tools on their mobile phones.

"Because search functionality is so highly utilized by mobile phone users, Google and Yahoo! are uniquely well-positioned to enter the mobile device market and may have an advantage over other consumer brands looking to enter the space."

Source: www.webpronews.com

Top 10 Reputation or Brand Management Tips

Recently I had a chance to post at WPW some reputation management help for Rebecca Kelly from SEOmoz.org. Here is the thread from WPW:

Reputation Management Advice

Basically the problem with SEO brand management arises when bad press gets into the news websites and then finds its way to ranking high on the SERPs for product and company names. If (and when) this does happen how do you combat such a thing? How can you essentially push down ranking of a pesky blogger or news web page? Here are my

Top 10 Reputation Management tips:

1. Try “employing” or offering other bloggers to step up and post about the client. Not so much PayPerPost or Review Me style, but emailing or calling them one by one and doing it the right way.

2. Another idea is to join forums and other websites which require a user name and have a indexable profile page. For instance if you look up my name: “Jaan Kanellis” you will find MyBlogLog Community pages and many other websites that simply list a profile page. Of course your user name has to be the keyword/brand your going after, duh.

3. How about stock quote page? Is this client name/brand/keyword a public company? If so start linking to those stock quote pages from Yahoo and Google Finance.

4. How about getting Social Media websites to help like Yahoo Answers or Google Groups. Once the web page is created start by getting some links pointing to the answer/group page and watch it climb! This really applies to any sort of social media web page that allows you to author your own question/content.

5. How about getting news interviews, podcasts, etc on the subject of brand/keyword live online? Of course these will be primarily authored by the client and positive in nature. Getting the client to do them and making sure the interviewer posts them online is obviously important. Once live you can point to them from many different websites as a resource.

Basically the bottom line of my points above is to utilize already top ranking websites for your own brand benefit, while keeping the end user plenty happy with what they find in the SERPs.
More:

7. Buy, buy, buy domains around your target keyword/brand. Get them live with unique content and offer social interaction/Web 2.0 for visitors. They will rank faster than you can believe.

8. Create another controversy. Well this is very tricky, but rightly constructed it could over power whatever rankings are there now, that are in your way.

9. Try to avoiding the Quixtar route/press:
Quixtar Caught in Search Engine PR Battle
Quixtar Spamming the Search Engines?

10. Make sure your ruling the PPC spots. This can only help protect your brand and will help influence visitors to see who is the real website that they should be visited.

Source: www.jaankanellis.com

YouTube, CNN To Sponsor Democratic Debates

Lawsuit magnet YouTube is partnering with CNN to be a co-sponsor for the first of six Democratic Party debates for the 2008 race.

YouTube has become increasingly active in the political realm as of late. Last month they launched Citizen Tube, designed to attract people to express their views on political topics.

In addition they also launched YouChoose, a presidential channel focused on the major presidential candidates.

"The idea of using the technology of YouTube and marrying it with traditional television could be really interesting" such as giving viewers new ways to comment on the debate and follow-up and ask questions of the candidates, said Bob Boorstin, director of policy communications for Google in Washington, D.C.
It could be interesting or it could be a total failure. By the time the serious meat of the 2008 election rolls around people may be so burned out from hearing the candidates say the same thing over and over that it could easily become meaningless.

Google and CNN are also working with the GOP candidates to plan a similar debate. The DNC is active in organizing debates for its candidates, while the Republican National Committee is not organizing debates for its candidates.

Source: www.webpronews.com

Social Media Marketing is useful for any kind of business

Social media marketing is a very essential marketing tool for the businesses. It is important for the business to consider a significant strategy so that it can succeed. The marketing steps are crucial for any business to make it popular among people. Any business comes up in the market with the aim to flourish for longer time. They also want to make their own recognition and to make huge revenue from their business. Every business has different needs and requirements and depending on the requirements a marketing strategy needs to be considered. The business owner should make sure that marketing method which he is to consider for his business would perfectly suit his business type.

Social media marketing is method that makes businesses exchange their links. The link that travels to other website will help the business become popular. The content is the most important part for any online business. A business owner must look for the latest and relevant information that best suits the requirement. To get a better response from the business, it is necessary to reach maximum customers. All those visitors that visited the website will know about the new website and its purpose. This medium of advertising will make the business popular among various search engines. Many people have become regular user of internet and they prefer to become a member of social networking websites. The website will better response and the will get customer satisfaction.

Microsoft's Biggest Threat: MySpace?

Imagine for a moment that Microsoft's biggest threat comes not from Google, but from MySpace. That view was advanced by Slide CEO and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin in a panel discussion at the Software 2007 Conference on Wednesday.

"MySpace is what's going to take on Microsoft," said Levchin. Google, he said, doesn't have that much data. Never mind that Google's recent personalization push is all about getting that much data and more.
Social networks, said Levchin, are becoming operating systems in the sense that they create consumer lock-in through control of user data. And just as Microsoft dominated the desktop in the '80s and '90s, he expects social networks to dominate in the years to come. He subsequently referred to social networks as platforms, which may be a more appropriate metaphor.

Whether social networks are operating systems or platforms or the next bubble, Levchin's point has some merit. User lock-in goes a long way toward explaining why MySpace is reportedly planning to acquire Photobucket.

Brian Behlendorf, founder of Collab.Net and a founding member of the Apache Software Foundation, expressed some skepticism about Levchin's view, noting that social networking sites aren't quite that "sticky," and that people can be part of multiple social networks. He said that an open data movement might well arise and noted that people are developing screen scraping software to make data more portable.

Levchin countered that the metadata associated with social network profiles can also lock users in. As Levchin sees it, the Internet is rapidly recentralizing around a few large players. "No one wants to collaborate," he said offhandedly. "Web 2.0 is a joke. It doesn't exist."

Wes Boyd, co-founder and president of MoveOn.org, also said he was "really concerned about some of these closed communities" such as Facebook. Yet he allowed for the possibility that an alliance between consumers and companies might be able to prompt legislation that would give individuals and businesses some measure of data ownership.
Behlendorf echoed that sentiment, noting that enterprises want to own their data. "That's going to be an upper limit to Salesforce.com," he said.

Source: www.informationweek.com

7 Free Brand Reputation Management Tips

What exactly is online brand reputation management (BRM)? Basically, negative or malicious press in SERPS (search engine results pages) can be combated by creating positive content or and knowing where to post or submit it. If the positive content is deemed by the search engines to appear on more integral websites, the negative rankings will be pushed farther and farther down the SERPs until that post by a disgruntled blogger is on page three and your good name has been restored.

Brand reputation management and search marketing were once very separate entities – but with the emergence of blogs, forums, social media and other user-driven content sites, they now must be performed in tandem. You don’t have to be a skilled programmer, or even know how to build a website, to get your opinions online anymore - This can be a very scary prospect for any company. If you’re not scared, you should be.

How do you combat a high-ranking negative reference to your name or company? Luckily, it is far easier to attain good rankings for a business or domain name because there is far less competition for these words than for the goods or services they provide. It is also reasonable to push down negative rankings for individual people’s names. But not always, obviously. If your client’s name is Gavin Wunderschnitzen, you’re laughing. If your BRM services have just been retained by John Smith, just give him his money back now.

The same blogs, forums and social media sites which can be used to negate or slur a brand, can be used to defend it. Here are some of my methods, and I look forward to your feedback and tips on the subject. Lots of folks are selling BRM as a service nowadays, but before you cannibalize a considerable part of your marketing budget because some 12 year old with a Bebo account and a crap in their diaper didn’t like one of their Christmas presents, consider the following Free BRM tips.

Well-written, newsworthy press releases are a great BRM tool for simultaneous direct traffic and SERP manipulation. Even if you’re using free PR networks, they will still make a visible impact if your targeted name or company is reasonably unique. Ask your client if they have any existing traditional releases that you can repurpose online quickly.

Build a Kiva.org lender profile page for your client. You’ll probably want to donate at least $25, but there’s no harm in building your karma while building your rank. Google seems to treat Kiva with very high regard. Hat tip to Dan Zarrella for this one.

Build Squidoo lenses and HubPages for your client. Use their name in the title and URL - as in both cases you get to pick it yourself - and it is static. This works absolute wonders, regardless of whether or not your lens on Sea Monkeys made any affiliate revenue last year. Oops, that’s mine.

Build a Blogger account for your client, and use their name in the title and URL. Don’t fret too much about content - use their mission statement or About Us page and split it into a few posts. Leave it to simmer and watch what happens.

Social Media/Networking sites with more of a professional audience - Your LinkedIns and your Facebooks as opposed to your Friendsters and MySpaces - will get indexed quickly and rise just as fast. Build profiles for your clients, post haste.

The next step is indexing - Now that you’ve built 7 profiles, a blog, 2 lenses and a hub what next? Get it all spidered lickety-split by linking to each from the sidebar of the blogger account you just created and then linking to that from your client’s site - or another juicy property that gets crawled regularly.

Build a custom RSS feed for the phrase you want to protect. Use the Yahoo! News tool to watch for negative stories or press releases, and a Technorati feed to monitor the blogosphere. This way, you can start to battle any negative mention of your client before they’re even spidered.

Those are my quick tips for the tightwad - and boy do they work wonders. For a more comprehensive guide which includes paid options visit Andy Beal’s take on Online Reputation Monitoring.

Source: http://thirstypony.com

Social Media and Reputation Managment

What do you see when you search for your company or brand name? Is there anything on the first page of the search engine results that you wouldn’t be proud to display on your home page? Consumer review sites, blogs and forums have made it easy for anyone to say whatever they want about your company, whether they be disgruntled customers or competitors who like to play dirty.

If you’re in a situation where negative publicity is front and center in search results, there are ways you can reclaim search engine real estate for your corporate identity. Though you can’t make negative results disappear from the search engine indexes entirely, the following strategies can help them slip off the first few pages of search engine results.

1. Good Old Fashioned Networking

Even if you take none of the advice following in this article, the first thing you should do is contact the webmasters of the sites in question with a polite request for removal of negative comments. There’s a good chance they’ll be willing to co-operate. Note that, even if they do remove the listing, the cached pages may remain in the search engine indexes for some time. But users who click through the search engine results will land on a page with the comments removed.

Check out some of the sites that already have something good to say about you. Send them an appreciation note, and offer them a link back from your site. You could even create a special page called “Gary’s Garage On The Web” (if that’s the name of your business) or “Press Room.”

2. Tap Into the Power of Wiki

Wiki websites allow users not only to add their own content, but also edit pages. They get their name from the Hawaiian word “wiki wiki” meaning “rapidly.” There are many wiki pages like AboutUs.org and LoveToKnow.com that you can use to create content about your company. If your company name is “notable” enough (meaning there are objective third party sites that already have pages citing facts about your company), you might also be able to create a page in Wikipedia. This is easier if your company is publicly traded.

3. Raise Your Profile

Some websites like PR.com allow you to post your company’s profile. An annual fee might be required. It’s not easy to find these sites, but you may find some opportunities by searching your competitors’ names and discovering where they are listed.

4. Wet Your Pen

Articles can help you kill three birds with one stone. Not only can articles rank for your company name, they also build valuable backlinks to your site and position you as an expert in your field. You can use your company name in the resource box at the end of an article along with a link back to your site.
Using your company name in the article body gives it a better chance of ranking well. You can research potential sites to submit your article to by searching for one of your industry keywords in a search engine like this: “car mechanics” + “submit article.” Or submit it to various article directories like Article Alley.

5. Become A Socialite

Using social bookmark sites like Netvous and Del.icio.us is an easy way to quickly create a page that ranks for your name. You can create an account for yourself that bookmarks all of your positive press, and anything interesting on your website, such as articles or videos. Make sure you use your company name in the titles of the articles (even if they are not the real titles) and in the descriptions. Although this may seem to be “spamming” the bookmarking sites, it really is not, as the purpose is to create a page that ranks for your name, and there is no ethical reason why you should not be able to create an account that keeps track of all your company’s press. You are simply choosing to make the list public for those that may be interested.

The links themselves are not given much weight by search engines, but you have an opportunity to use your company name in the titles and descriptions of your bookmarks and photos. Make sure you make good use of the tagging feature, using general keywords as these will also begin to rank for your name. For example, Gary’s Garage should tag: “Garys Garage,” “garage,” “autobody,” “mechanic,” mechanics,” “body shop,” “car,” “auto body” and so on. When you are first starting out, the more popular tags will start appearing on pages 1-5 in Google. They will eventually drop off as Google finds and indexes your content as you get it out there on other websites.

6. Become A Lensmaster

A company blog is certain to rank well, and it’s easier than ever to create one with Squidoo.com. When you create a “lens” for your site, you can easily upload pictures and also make use of tags. Unlike other blogs, Squidoo won’t show the posting date, so your lens won’t look neglected if you ever stop posting. You can build your blog’s link popularity by submitting it to blog directories like LSBlogs and BlogHub, and linking to it from your site.
Once you’ve done that, why not drop some other lensmasters a line and exchange lensroll links (Squidoo’s answer to blogroll). This may be a tactic that is passee in search engine optimization link building, but remember that Squidoo is a community. So it’s not as much link building as networking. In my experience, Squidoo lensmasters are quite keen to cross-promote.

7. Broadcast Yourself

Do you have promo videos or other visual media about your site? Why not create a channel on YouTube?

8. Explore Shopping Engines

If you sell products online, consider listing them in comparison shopping sites, or “shopping engines” like Shopping.com, Bizrateor Nextag. If you are not ready to manage a new e-commerce channel for many products, you might consider listing one product in one engine to start.

9. Use Directories For Deep Links

Search engines still consider a page’s number of relevant backlinks to be a strong indicator of quality and relevance to a search term. Octopedia, WorldSiteIndex and Microsoft’s Small Business Directory are a few examples of solid directories that allow you to link to deeper pages of your own site, like your About Us page, to help raise their rankings for your company name.

10. Post An E-Help Wanted Sign
Leverage the strength of sites like Craigslist.org to post your company’s current job offerings. Make sure you use your company name first in the posting headline: “Gary’s Garage Now Hiring Junior Grease Monkeys,” for example. This will ensure the title tag for that page is optimized, which is very helpful for SEO. And make sure to describe your company in the ad, repeating your name three or four times.
Tracking Results

I strongly recommend setting up an account with Google Alerts (free) which monitors the top 50 results, or with Google Alert, a professional tracking system that will monitor the top 200 results for you for as little as $4.95/month. You will be notified daily when new references to your name have been found in Google – not only to see when your articles, profile pages, blog posts and so on get indexed, but also to keep on top of any new negative or positive references to your name outside of your own reputation management efforts.

How Long Will This Take?
Results may vary but they won’t come overnight. You will get out of your reputation management efforts what you put in. It could take anywhere from a few months to a year. Expect monitoring and tweaking your strategy to be a long-term activity. As new pages are being added daily to the Web, search results for your name can fluctuate daily, even hourly.

The danger with social media optimization for reputation management purposes is that whatever you create easily through social media sites can easily be re-created by users disgruntled with your company. Using sites like 43Things to quickly create a high ranking page using your name in the title bar for “Buy XYZ Product” can attract similar posts like “Boycott XYZ!!!”

Wrapping it Up
As the World Wide Web turns, you may come across new or different ways to help your cause, especially as social media sprockets keep creating new opportunities. If SEO’s not your bag, consider hiring a consulting firm skilled in copywriting and public relations. The key is to look at reputation management as a long term activity and to take advantage of all the options you have to keep the search engine results positive.

Source: http://smogger.wordpress.com

SEW Live - The Pros And Cons Of Social Media

Social media is becoming increasingly important in the modern business world, and that’s why Matt Bailey, founder of SiteLogic, gave a “Social Media Analysis” talk at today’s SEW Live event in Ohio. Luckily for you, WebProNews was there to take notes.

Bailey touched on several different aspects of social media, from blogs to forums to Wikipedia itself, and guided listeners through the highs - and lows - of each of them. The main thing, Bailey said, is to check out the reviews so that you know what consumers (read: potential customers) want and like.

There’s also the matter of accepting what comes your way. After the EepyBird video hit YouTube, for example, Coke huffed, “We would hope people want to drink [Diet Coke] more than try to experiment with it. . . . The craziness with Mentos . . . doesn’t fit with the Coke brand personality.”

Mentos was a little friendlier about the free publicity. “We are tickled by it,” said Pete Healy, Vice President of Marketing. Mentos, according to Bailey, spent less than $20 million per year in the U.S. on advertising, but received a buzz worth over $10 million due to EepyBird.

Still, there’s no point in trying to be something you’re not. Bailey took issue with AT&T, which had a billboard that proclaimed “Blogging Delivered,” and yet does not have a blog. The SiteLogic founder doesn’t even have a problem with fake blogs (or "flogs,” as they’ve been called), so long as businesses clearly mark them as such.

But even when successful social media brings in lots of traffic, Bailey warns businesses to remain aware of sales. Sales, not rankings, are the end goal, after all. The bridge between traffic and sales can include key performance indicators such as “time on site,” “pages viewed,” and conversion statistics.

Bailey has found that blogs are often a business’s best source of customers - there’s simply less competition for attention among blogs and articles than on a social news site. To be effective, though, businesses must remain focused on who their customer is. And if your customers aren’t exactly tech-savvy, always remember to apply the “mom test.”

Source: www.webpronews.com

Social Media Marketing is a popular among business owners

The world is running with the advancement in new technologies and latest techniques that that has made many things tech savy.Every one is influenced by the technology as everything has somewhere use of technology. The world of marketing is also much influenced by it. Social media marketing is a businesses technique or a method that makes business more popular among the visitors of social media websites.

Many businesses saw huge run-up by the use of technologies and got a big popularity. Link popularity makes websites less inert. If you want online users to visit your website then you need to put correct and meaningful information. For the purpose of online promotion, the content is the most important part that has to be considered.

The link also plays a major role as it brings huge traffic to the website. The link needs to be promoted on those websites that has a huge public response. And for this, social media websites is definitely the key to make the business popular. There are many methods of marketing but social media marketing has its own importance.

This technique is easily accessible and can bring big response in less span of time. The branding is an important aspect of promoting any business. The owner needs to look for the customer satisfaction that his business brings for him. Marketing resembles the concept of advertising about any product or services and for this purpose social media marketing can really prove worth for it.

MySpace Acquires Photobucket - Now Confirmed

Although the deal has yet to be confirmed by either party, it appears that MySpace did, in fact, acquire Photobucket. And although the figure $300 million has been mentioned, the terms of the arrangement (assuming such an arrangement exists) remain unknown.

News of this deal first came courtesy of Valleywag, the well-known “tech gossip rag.” Nick Denton writes that “[t]he photo sharing service . . . may announce the deal as early as this [Monday] morning.” Also, “After final negotiations at the end of last week, Photobucket has called an all-hands staff meeting for 10am PST this morning.”

A number of onlookers have already said that they believe this is the “real deal” (forgive the pun); 108 people (out of 280 voters) on Mashable thought the two companies are a “perfect match.” And Hitwise's LeeAnn Prescott, among other notable figures, might agree - just last month she wrote an article titled, “Photobucket Accounts for 73% of MySpace’s Photo-Related Traffic.”

On a more practical level, that 10 AM meeting would still leave plenty of time in the business day for all the usual speech-making and press release-writing.

Yet a point against the deal’s reality also exists: Photobucket already updated its press page once today, and the single new post merely announces a partnership with Snap. (The result: “What used to be an ordinary link now has a nifty thumbnail ‘SnapShot’ that lets people browse through your Photobucket album.”)

So did MySpace buy Photobucket or not? How about Microsoft and Yahoo? Or Google and Dow Jones? These past few days have been filled with acquisition-related rumors, but in respect to the MySpace-Photobucket deal, at least, we may soon receive a definitive answer.

Source: www.webpronews.com

Yahoo! launches oneSearch in Europe

Yahoo! has launched its oneSearch mobile search service in Europe and Canada.

Making searching for information across a range of category types easier on mobile handsets, oneSearch was previously only available in the US and as part of Yahoo!'s integrated Go 2.0 search application.

The company made the service available via any mobile web browser in March and has now localised it for the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Canada.

The Go 2.0 application (here's a tour), which bundles a further range of Yahoo! services in a widget application suite, still does not work on many handsets, however.

oneSearch enhances mobile searching for the small screen by making results more relevant and by giving higher billing to listings and other content types.

Jut like the US version, ads will be placed on European oneSearch results as Yahoo!'s innovations look to steal a march on rivals who may not yet have adapted services for mobile handsets to the same degree.

Source: www.e-consultancy.com

YouTube Will Share Revenue With Top Producers

MAKING GOOD ON ITS PLEDGE to start compensating independent producers, YouTube will begin sharing ad revenue with some of its most popular personalities.

"Up until now there's been a distinction between the content you create and the content created by YouTube's professional content partners," YouTube said Friday on its company blog. "Now some of your favorite YouTube members--including LisaNova, renetto, HappySlip, smosh, and valsartdiary--will begin to participate in the same revenue-sharing and promotional opportunities that are available to YouTube's other partners."

YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley hinted at such a revenue share earlier this year while at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The move comes as YouTube faces greater competition from rival video-sharing sites, many of whom already offer payment for consumer-generated media.

Revver was the first when it announced plans back in October 2005 to split ad revenues with indie producers evenly. Then late last year, Metacafe introduced its producer rewards program, which pays video creators $5 for every 1,000 views of their video shorts.

Discussing its new "partners," YouTube said: "Because they have built and sustained large, persistent audiences through the creation of engaging videos, their content has become attractive for advertisers, which has helped them earn the opportunity to participate on YouTube as a partner."

Participating user-partners will be treated as other content partners, according to YouTube, and will have the ability to control the monetization of the videos they create. Once they have selected a video to be monetized, YouTube will place advertising adjacent to their content so participating user-partners can begin earning revenue.

Content creators who have had the privilege of participating in YouTube's partner program until now have included video game companies, universities, and large production houses.

Added YouTube: "We hope that this program inspires people to keep creating original videos, building audiences and engaging with the YouTube community."

Source: http://publications.mediapost.com

Microsoft's Urge to Merge

Deal or no deal with Yahoo!, the software giant faces pressure to close the gap with Google, and acquisitions are the most likely avenue

A day before reports that Microsoft resumed talks to buy Yahoo!, the head of mergers and acquisitions at Microsoft said the company is still angling for a big fish in the online market and has been ramping up its ability to absorb large targets.

Microsoft's purchases have been getting bigger of late, but Yahoo (YHOO), with a market value of $42 billion and likely a higher price tag, would be the largest deal Microsoft (MSFT) has ever attempted. Reports on May 4 said Microsoft had considered buying Yahoo or striking up another kind of partnership with the Internet company, but that talks had stalled. The companies had last considered a tie-up in 2006. Microsoft declined to comment.

Whatever the outcome of talks with Yahoo, the software maker clearly is willing to spend more on purchases. Microsoft's corporate vice-president of corporate development, Bruce Jaffe, says the company has doubled its average acquisition size, to about $60 million, this fiscal year. During the first three quarters of 2007, Microsoft has spent between $1 billion and $1.5 billion on acquisitions, vs. $649 million in all of 2006.

Getting Up to Speed
And the company has been investing in financial, human resources, and IT systems designed to get newly acquired teams up to speed quicker once inside Microsoft. These new processes and computer systems can track on a daily basis how an acquisition is performing and generate reports for the executive responsible for a deal. "The great acquirers have built these," Jaffe says.

If the opportunity arises, Microsoft is also equipped to fold in a big Internet company, Jaffe says. "There's nothing structurally that's preventing us from doing it," he says. "We just haven't found the right company at the right time." Jaffe declined to comment on specific deals. "We'd love to find a way to accelerate the growth of our business in consumer online," both through acquisitions and in-house development, he says. Trouble is, there aren't that many Web companies with reach. "The sample size isn't that large," he says.

And while Microsoft has been one of the computer industry's most voracious acquirers, snapping up roughly 150 companies since 1990, its track record on integrating deals is spotty. It has excelled at grafting small technology teams onto existing products but has struggled with larger buyouts. That may need to change in a hurry as online software leader Google (GOOG) pulls further ahead.

Gaining a Stronger Foothold Online
"They need to do something bigger, faster," says Brian Roberts, senior managing director at investment bank Evercore Partners (EVR), and Microsoft's former head of M&A, who left the company in December, 2005. "From where they're chasing Google at this point, they can't do it organically. It's beyond throwing bodies at problems. It's bringing in new DNA and new technologies and trying to do more faster. Google is a very formidable, very scary competitor."

Microsoft's acquisition of voice-recognition software company Tellme Networks, which closed on May 3, could be a template for future deals. When the transaction was announced in March, Credit Suisse (CS) analyst Jason Maynard said Microsoft paid more than $1 billion (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/15/07, "Microsoft's Expansive Plans for Tellme"). That's a far cry from the $50 billion or so that Yahoo might fetch, but it points to Microsoft's increased willingness to pull out the stops to get a stronger foothold on the Web.

Source: www.businessweek.com

Social media marketing makes websites admired

Today, world is connected by the means of internet. Anyone residing in one corner can of the world can reach easily to the other part. So, can the business reach to other parts efficiently. The internet is one such source that almost every business considers to make itself popular.

Social media is a platform where many people get connected everyday, no matters where they are residing. They get connected on daily basis, express each other views and many more things. The social networking websites do help newly born businesses to become popular.

And if the new business proves to become relevant and of much use then, it can see a huge response from the online users. The world of e-business is growing very fastly and so many businesses are working well.

Social media marketing must be followed by many businesses to make themselves popular and so to flourish in the market for a longer period of time. It makes them quite popular among the online vistors.The web owner needs to put his website’s link on other popular website so that all the visitors of the popular site will come to know about the new site and its services and specialization.

Through this way, the new business gets branding and the service becomes popular among many online visitors. On social media sites, one can find huge traffic and this traffic would really help the business to become popular.

Ask Mobile Spins A Webby Award

The Webby Awards recognized a variety of websites and services, and when it came to mobile sites there were none better than Ask's product.

Ask Mobile swept up a pair of awards from this year's Webbys. Ask took both the Webby and the People's Voice awards for the mobile service it launched in October 2006.

"It feels pretty good to be recognized by our peers and by the folks who use Ask Mobile as well," Brendan Hallett, Ask Mobile's product manager, said in his euphoric blog post about the win.

Ask Mobile withstood challenges from Yahoo's potent Mobile Web, which is now equipped with oneSearch, a search approach similar to Ask's 'information at your fingertips' philosophy; Weather.com, Century 21, and Market Annex's Travelosa were also nominated in the category.

Ask's design choice for its mobile product, as Hallett noted and Gary Price, Ask's director for online info resources, told WebProNews in January, minimized the number of clicks a person needs to get to the information they need. Gary called it "simple, clean, and effective," and most importantly, easy to understand by new users.

That also meant not having a search box on the main Ask Mobile page. It's a click away from there. By placing it a level below the main menu, people are encouraged to navigate directly to the most popular features available, which generally satisfy a mobile user's needs.

We anticipate Ask will have its Ask City service available via mobile at some point this year. Gary mentioned it in January, and we're guessing a summer release could happen, in order to take advantage of traveling vacationers who may need a little help from their mobiles.

Source: www.webpronews.com

Social media marketing is a valuable marketing method

Social media marketing, as name resembles is the process to do marketing for the business through a social media website. Every business wants to strive foe a longer period of time and to make huge profit from its business. There are many search engine marketing firm that provides all kinds of business solutions that a business demands. Many website that are popular on web can help to bring popularity to other website that are new on the web.

Any business needs certain strategy to become successful in its business arena. So, social media marketing is one such strategy that makes popular among the users. The businesses come across rapid growth in through the help of search engine marketing. The business owner needs certain methodologies and techniques to make itself different from others.

One way to make the business popular is to share links to other websites so that business can get rapidly popular among the online visitors. Search engines do make website popular by assigning them a good ranking. This is one of the common methods that businesses undertake to get publicity. But social media marketing is another means that makes in working smoothly.

The owner of the business needs to consider branding as an important tool and to do it in the best possible way .Today, there has been seen big increase in the number of online visitor’s .So, it has become essential for any business to consider online marketing strategy that will help the business to boost. This strategy has made many businesses popular and got good response from the online techniques.

MediaSense Blog Measurement Tool Debuts

Umbria and PR Newswire have partnered on the launch of MediaSense Blog Measurement, for use by clients seeking insight into the buzz around their brands on the Internet.

The subscription-based MediaSense Blog Measurement service will delve into the sometimes murky and always widespread conversations of the world of blogs and other consumer-generated media. Clients will be able to find out what people have to say about their brands.

The aphorism about knowledge equaling power has become more of a truism in the 21st Century. Problems arise when trying to sift the more useful knowledge about people discussing brands from the many disparate conversations taking place online.

Specialized services have evolved to focus on intelligence gathering from blogs, and Umbria has been among them. Their technology will be at the core of PR Newswire's MediaSense Blog Measurement service.

PR Newswire said the Blog Measurement service will be available separate from or bundled with their MediaSense product. More details arrived from them in a statement about the deal:

Reports are delivered monthly and contain an evaluation of media coverage based upon several measures including volume of coverage, coverage by media type, tonality (positive, negative, neutral), the presence of key corporate messages within articles, the overall quality of coverage based upon an article’s length, placement, publication type and tone, and the equivalent ad value.

Metrics are evaluated based upon comparison to a company’s key competitors, while also offering an unbiased assessment of how a company is portrayed in the press.

PR Newswire has promised it can deliver demographic profiles of the conversations taking place about a topic, as they show how a given message may be resonating with the audience. Instead of focusing on what articles are written about a company’s news, as in the past, the service follows the conversations.

Used competently, the service can allow a company to quickly act upon critical discussions before they can explode into a full-blown PR nightmare. Conversely, companies can see what is generating the most positive buzz about their operations, and capitalize on that.

Source: www.webpronews.com

Yahoo Wants You To Be Better

Yahoo has launched a new ad campaign called "Be a Better" designed to help people be better at whatever their interest maybe.

The new ad campaign will promote Yahoo Answers and Yahoo oneSearch, a mobile search service launched in January. The " Be a Better"messaging will be integrated into properties across the company through interactive ads and promotions, such as "Be a Better Globetrotter" (Yahoo Travel) and Be a Better Roadie" (Yahoo Autos).

"From everyday tasks to pie-in-the-sky aspirations, this campaign is really about empowering our customers be to better at whatever is important to them," said Cammie Dunaway, chief marketing officer at Yahoo! Inc. "It's not about what Yahoo! does, but what you can do with Yahoo!."

Television and radio spots will air today as well as interactive online ads in hopes that the campaign can be successful on and off the Yahoo network. They are also planning on running ads in movie theatres throughout the summer.
"The global nature of this campaign required us to transcend age, gender, language, and region and be flexible across all of Yahoo!'s properties," said Alda Abbracciamento, managing director at Soho Square.

"The 'Be a Better ...' theme is a clear and simple call-to-action that resonates universally."
The ad campaign also hopes to attract marketers and small businesses by promoting the Yahoo Search Marketing System, also known as Project Panama.

Beginning today users can go online to view, rate and comment on the ads, and see behind the scenes footage. Starting May 5th, users will be able to remix the TV spots, choose their own endings and share the results with friends.

"Most companies focus on the new bells and whistles. In Yahoo!'s case, they asked us to point the camera away from them and onto their customers," said Alan Pafenbach, executive creative director at Soho Square.
"Our solution was a campaign that allowed people to fill in the blank with whatever they hoped to be better at."

Source: www.webpronews.com