Street Level Google Flashes The World - Literally

Ironically, you'll need the latest version of Flash to see this. Google's latest addition to its Maps service – Street-Level pictures – could cause some folks to get their, um, panties in a twist.

That is, unless they don't mind showing their thongs to all of creation. San Francisco is pretty well known for its liberal tendencies, so maybe she's cool with it.

Or maybe it's an art exhibit. The query was, after all, for a museum.
If you're looking at this article through your fingers to maintain your pure thoughts, here's a brief description: the street level view shows a young lady getting into or out of a white pickup.

While it's not exactly the Full Monty – and certainly viewable on network TV – I don't know too many young ladies on this coast that would be comfortable showing their underwear, literally, to the world. (Click on the image to see it better on Google Maps. -- UPDATE: the image has been removed from Google Maps.)

But we're going to look anyway, aren't we? In the end, it's not a picture of her face.
Sorry for being cheeky.
And for cracking jokes.

This is a mild PG-13 example, but it makes you wonder what else photographers have captured at the street level, and how much Google is monitoring or approving the pictures that show up there. It's only been a week or so since the Street-Level view was launched and already we've been mooned.

Privacy, for sure, seems a thing of the past.
Willie Nelson, whatever you do, do it indoors.

Source: www.webpronews.com

DoubleClick, Pepperjam Partner

Strictly speaking, this alliance only involves two online marketing companies, but you know that, somewhere back there, Google’s watching. It’s Google’s pal DoubleClick that’s involved, you see; the other party in this technology partnership is called Pepperjam.

Details about the deal are slim. According to a press release, “Pepperjam ... has selected DoubleClick’s integrated DART platform to meet the digital marketing needs of Pepperjam and its clients.”

And that’s all good and well, but it may leave some of you wondering what, exactly Pepperjam is. The job of describing - or at least giving you an idea of - the company may be best left to Jason Bigler, DoubleClick’s vice president of product management. “Pepperjam is growing tremendously, adding new clients each week and we are thrilled that they have decided to streamline their ad management with DoubleClick,” said Bigler in a statement.

He went on to describe Pepperjam’s work as a series of “world-class advertising campaigns that produce great results and allow Pepperjam to achieve operational excellence.”

DoubleClick and Pepperjam should be able work together - and hopefully achieve still more of that “operational excellence” - without upsetting any of the FTC powers-that-be. On Pepperjam’s blog, Kris Jones, the CEO and president of the company, writes, “Truth is we’ve been in negotiations with Doubleclick dating back before Google’s $3.1 Billion acquisition.”

There’s been no word from the Googleplex, but, if Google was unaware of these dealings, that information had to come as good news. I’m sure the search engine giant doesn’t, on the whole, mind the deal between DoubleClick and Pepperjam, either.

Source: www.webpronews.com

Google, Salesforce.com partner on Web site

Salesforce.com and Google launched a Web site on Tuesday that is designed to allow the online customer relationship management software maker to act as a reseller for Google's AdWords.

For Salesforce.com, the alliance expands its efforts to tie its hosted CRM software with Google AdWords, following its acquisition last year of privately held Kieden, which had created an add-on to Salesforce's hosted services for purchasing and managing Google-driven ad campaigns. Salesforce.com will expand beyond allowing its customers to launch Google AdWords from a Salesforce.com application to one in which it will act as a reseller of the Google AdWords platform.

The two companies jointly developed Salesforce Group Edition, which features Google AdWords, and will jointly market the offering, said Kendall Collins, senior vice president of marketing for Salesforce.com.

Salesforce Group Edition is designed to allow companies to connect to Google AdWords and have their advertisement displayed on Google.com when related search terms are entered on the site. They can also distribute their ads on Google AdSense, the advertising program that allows Web site publishers to earn a portion of ad revenue by hosting Google-sponsored ads on their sites.

When potential customers click on the advertisement, they are taken to the company's Web site and are encouraged to fill out a form that records their name. This information is then transmitted to a company's sales team as a potential sales lead via Salesforce's technology.

"This alliance was a natural fit for us," said Collins, noting that the two companies are similar in the way they approach delivering services over the Internet, such as leveraging open application program interfaces (APIs).
The Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords targets midsize to small companies and costs $1,200 per year for five users, although a 30-day promotion is under way that offers the product for $600 for five users for the first year. That promotional price includes a $50-per-year Google AdWords credit.

As part of the nonexclusive deal, Salesforce will receive all proceeds from the sale of its Salesforce Group Edition and share a nominal portion of any Google AdWords sales, Collins said. The remainder of the proceeds from Google AdWords will go to Google.

While the joint-development efforts between the companies has produced one product, Sean Whiteley, director of Salesforce's search marketing, said its customers will drive future development plans.

"We're hoping that as people use these products, it will become evident what we should do next," Whiteley said.
The two companies also share common values, such as placing a high priority on services, multitenancy and ease of use, Marc Benioff, Salesforce chief executive, said during a presentation Tuesday afternoon in San Francisco to introduce the Google alliance and debut the company's Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords.
"We have a dream to create millions of AdWords users," Benioff said.

Google, meanwhile, said the alliance will aid them in their effort to make marketing campaigns and advertising, as cost efficient as possible for their advertisers--a customer group that supplies the Internet giant with the bulk of its revenues.

Citing a common complaint in the advertising industry, Sheryl Sandberg, Google vice president of global online sales and operations, said advertisers lament: "I'm wasting half of my ad budget, but I just don't know which half."
The alliance is designed to provide advertisers with information and graphics on how their customers are responding to their ad campaigns, via following their movements on their respective Web site from the time they click on a banner ad to the time they exit the site.

Source: www.news.com

Get Innovative by Adopting Social Media Optimization

Social media optimization is the different strategy that is adopted to make a website more visible and accessible on all social networking platforms. The different strategies if implemented in the correct way can bring about huge amount of traffic to a website and make it popular pretty soon. The idea behind social media optimization is to drive a large amount of traffic and these results in great amount of exposure and visibility among people who are interested in whatever that site is offering them. There is not a huge amount of difference between social media optimization and search engine optimization. However before implementing social media optimization or any other strategy one must be clear about the very concept.

Today social networking is the most popular means through which people stay connected with their family and friends. Gone are the days when one actually had to travel to long miles to meet their childhood friend or college friend. Now with the wonderful innovations made in the world of internet staying in touch has become extremely easy. The ideal platform to be in touch on the web today is trough the social networking platforms. A study has indicated that more then 80% people have an online profile of some kind or the other. So now if you have to optimize your site on the web, these social networking platforms are the best place to do it. Social media optimization has immense potential if used in the right ways.

Having great content on the site is one of the benchmarks of doing good and successful social media optimization. There has always been a scarcity of good content on the web and if you have that on your site, you are already ahead of your competitors. Earning profit and being ahead of competitors is what all business aims at doing. It is another matter that only few of them actually manage to be successful and implementing social media optimization strategies can surely help a business in becoming a success story. Another thing which you can implement for social media optimization is to make your content in the form of audio and video files. Being innovative and different is what attract people these days and if you can incorporate your content in the form of audio and video files you can go ahead in the market really soon.

Change is the one thing which you need to bring about in your business. So whether it is social media optimization or any other new business strategy, as the owner of a company or business, you have to make a wise choice about this. Remember that every strategy will not be successful and just because one technique is very popular does not mean that you have to use this or that it will be perfectly suitable for your business. You need to analyze the market thoroughly and determine what you need to do for your company. The call is your and make sure that you make a wise move and do not get swayed by anything and everything that you come across.

Having great content on the site is one of the benchmarks of doing good and successful social media optimization. There has always been a scarcity of good content on the web and if you have that on your site, you are already ahead of your competitors. Earning profit and being ahead of competitors is what all business aims at doing.

Source: www.cometsearchenginemarketing.com

Defining Social Media

It's hard to hold conversations when everyone who's talking has varying views on the definitions of key vocabulary. Yet our entire industry is talking about social media -- and I defy you to find two people that define social media the same way. Determined to solve this problem for the industry single-handedly... I looked up the term on Wikipedia (which, incidentally, cites itself as an example of social media). What I found was not only woefully incomplete (first time this has happened to me on Wikipedia), but there are a couple of areas where I would differ with the entry entirely. Here's the meat of it :

"Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives and media itself.

Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. These sites typically use technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs to allow users to interact.

A few prominent examples of social media applications are Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Gather.com (social networking),YouTube (video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Digg (news sharing), Flickr (photo sharing) and Miniclip (game sharing)."

You have to start some place. OK, first I think one of the biggest myths regarding social media is that it equals user-generated content. I think the definition of "user-generated" content might be the only thing more confused than the definition of social media (which might make them a great pairing). Second, there is nothing about social media that demands user creation. The "media" part of social media can be anything from professional content to home videos.

Just because "America's Funniest Home Videos" consisted of user-generated content certainly didn't make it social media. Conversely, just because "Heroes" is professionally produced doesn't mean that it can't be social media.

The real difference between broadcast media and social media is not the media itself, but the system of discovery, distribution, consumption and conversation surrounding the media. This brings me to my point of contention with Wikipedia's definition. As "America's Funniest Home Videos" was user-generated content before the YouTubes of the world, so social media existed before MySpace. It's just that before digital technology, it took significantly more effort for media to inspire dialogue and sharing among communities of people. Sharing a VHS among friends, or gathering groups to watch a popular television show, is a lot more work than simply clicking and sharing media content.

What many of us are defining as social media today are actually just technologies specifically architected to facilitate people's natural tendencies to seek out, share and discuss media content. Think about it.

How is MySpace social medium? I would certainly say that MySpace is the largest and most influential social media platform of our time, but it doesn't create media (at least not for most of it). The media one finds on MySpace is a mix of professional, semi-professional and (I hate using the term) "user- generated" content, and that media is made social by the context of its distribution and its ability to create dialogue between people.

ANY TYPE OF MEDIA CAN BE SOCIAL MEDIA -- and eventually all media will be social media in the most literal definition. This will have serious implications for media companies and advertisers alike, so it is important that we are not dismissing social media as the user-generated portion of the Internet.

By Joe Marchese Source: www.mediapost.com

Google, BBC Make Mash-Ups

The word “mash-up” has certain connotations; the product may not be too polished, or it could be downright amateurish. The British Broadcasting Corporation is not an amateur, however; the BBC is, in fact, the world’s biggest broadcasting corporation. And the BBC’s into mash-ups.

That’s interesting information, but even more interesting is the name of the BBC’s pal in this endeavor: Google. “One-third of the prototypes hosted on backstage.bbc.co.uk - where developers can post ideas and prototypes for reusing Auntie’s content in new and interesting ways - are mash-ups with Google Maps or other Google apps,” reports Silicon.com’s Gemma Simpson.

Also, lest you should get the idea that Google somehow slipped those mash-ups into place while “Auntie” (also known as the BBC) was looking the other way, Simpson adds that “Matthew Cashmore, BBC Backstage producer, said a lot of the content on the BBC website has a geographical element . . . and this sort of content fits well within a Google Maps mash-up.”

The BBC has, after all, proven that it wants to transition smoothly into the 21st century; it even arranged a deal with Google-owned YouTube. As for Google, well . . . we all know how the search engine company loves to forge partnerships and make acquisitions. In the end, it’s nice to see both gigantic corporations taking an interest in mash-ups, though what this means for the traditional creators of such things remains to be seen.

Source: www.webpronews.com

SMX: SEO Tip! Love The Social Media

Social media marketing can turn the mild-mannered site marketer into an energy-wielding superhero, infused with the pure power of link love and heavy traffic.

WebProNews will have stories and videos from Danny's inaugural Search Marketing Expo titled "SMX Advanced" in Seattle this week. Stop by our site or sign up for our free newsletter and follow the search marketing news.
Mmm, site traffic. More of it can be attained through social media marketing, as a variety of search marketing and optimization pros attested at SMX: Advanced.

Rand Fishkin talked about differences between social media marketing and viral marketing. The key difference comes in building authority. Social media links can be a big authority boost.

He noted some examples of what's out their in social media. The very popular Yahoo Answers has its topics place well in the SERPs for Google as well as Yahoo. A site publisher with quality content for a given category should try being active in the relevant section of Answers.

Comments from photo sharing site Flickr don't place a nofollow attribute on their outbound links. As for blog search site Technorati, site publishers should definitely tag their content to take advantage of its recently updated properties.

Viral media, especially when video sharing site YouTube is in the conversation (and virtually defines it) can boost search rankings and site traffic thanks to the growing fan base. Other viral sites that can push a flood of traffic include Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and NewsVine for those who reach the "top of the vine."

Neil Patel chatted about the rules for social sites: don't pay for votes; don't create multiple accounts for voting purposes; and don't submit illegal content.

He put those tenets to the test on one such social media site, creating 30 accounts from his IP address while submitting illegal content and paying for votes. The result: he was banned within hours.

In Patel's experience, the young and frequently chippy audience for many of these social media sites can be a problem. A site publisher who participates in the community, and submits comments and content of value, can build a valuable social brand in turn.

Seeking social media superpower requires intelligent, focused effort. The rewards for that work can be, well, super.

Source: www.webpronews.com