Google’s latest blog post, Search, plus Your World, came at no great surprise to many industry insiders. The merge between search and social has been on the cards for a number of years now, but many are calling it “a bad day for the internet.”

Google announced that their latest step in the direction of social search would transform; “Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships.”

The changes, which come in the form of three new features;

• Personal results
• Profiles in search
• People and pages

Will, according to Google enrich users’ experience.

What does this mean for users?

It means that when you’ve signed into Google+ and search for information on a particular individual Google will help you by drawing out relevant information from Google+ pages, and display them for you in the first few pages.

The response seemed positive, at least for a few short hours. Twitter was among the first to raise its angry feathers making the following statement;

“As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter, as a result, Twitter accounts and tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users.”

Search strategist, Rishi Lakhani, shared his views on the news in a recent report by Econsultancy; “I think it’s a desperate attempt to make a rather poor product become mainstream. Google has the largest universal audience base, but not the largest social network. So what they are doing is to try and compete with the powerhouses that are Twitter and Facebook, by using the one super strong property they have, search.”

The changes will only be available for users in the US via their Google account.

Google, search engine optimisation, social networks

A report on spending levels among SMBs (small businesses) has provided some interesting insight into the rising importance of social media in the modern marketing strategy. The report, from Borell Associates, contains details of SMB digital marketing and spending forecasts for the coming year. What is interesting is that the report estimates spending on social media marketing could overtake spending on paid search.

Figures on reported spending in 2011 still show that small businesses are still spending most on email marketing, closely followed by search engine marketing and key word purchase. Social media marketing spending is now right behind these types of marketing in spending share, ahead of business directory listings, sponsorships, mobile advertising and banner/display ads. Social media now accounts for just over 15% of total online marketing share for SMBs, which equates to roughly $1.14billion in the USA alone. In total it is estimated that over $6.2billion was spent on social media marketing in 2011 with over 65% of that social media marketing concentrated on Facebook. This shows that the SMB share is a small but sizeable portion of the total market.

The median number of users engaged with small businesses is around 250, but the mean amounts to some 4,000 users. This is because a few SMBs are claiming to be engaged with tens of thousands of users, according to the figures they reported to Borrell. Having 250 fans/likes/followers is a far more realistic picture of an an achievable level of engagement for a small business.

What is clear is that the trend of increasing social media marketing is likely to continue throughout 2012. With over 57% of SMBs measuring return on investment based on new customers, what remains to be seen is how effective their methods will be. At Micrositez Digital we understand the importance of an effective and engaging social media campaign, and also the risk some businesses take by managing their social media ineffectively.

Micrositez Digital: SEO and Social Media Marketing.

Email marketing, keywords, return on investment, search engine marketing, small businesses, Social Media Marketing

Today is the first day of this year’s CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, and tech giants have headed to the Nevada desert in their droves to show off the latest and greatest future tech products.

CES has been the main stage for tech companies to showcase the best of their upcoming technologies to journalists and retailers. This year’s exhibition is the second biggest since its launch in 1967, when the first CES was held as a spinoff to the Chicago Music Show. Notable products that have been launched at CES include:
• The Video Casette Recorder (VCR), 1970
• Atari’s Pong video game, 1975
• Camcorder, 1981
• Nintendo NES, 1985
• DVDs, 1996
• Hi definition TV, 1998
• Microsoft Xbox, 2001, and
• Blu-ray and HD DVD, 2004.

The big news this year is Microsoft’s announcement that this will be the last CES they will exhibit at, and speculation is rife that they’re planning to go out with a bang. At the most anticipated exhibit of this year’s conference Microsoft are expected to demo Windows 8 in tablet format. Other big exhibits that are expected include a large range of ultrabook portable laptops, the follow-up to the Nokia Lumia 800 smartphone, a new super-processor chip from Intel, and TV powered by Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich OS.

There is talk that Microsoft’s move away from CES could signify a challenging future for the show, if it even has a future. The big trendsetter in tech over the past decade has been Apple, and they have never exhibited at CES. Their brand is strong enough to create buzz around their own events, but if the future of CES is in doubt that leaves little space for the smaller tech companies to create buzz around their own innovations.

Micrositez Digital: Social Media Marketing.

CES 2012, Google, Intel, microsoft, Nokia, tech innovation

The most recent Google monthly update has arrived, and was summarised yesterday in their official Inside Search blog. As promised, Google is using their blog to update users on the latest search updates and improvements to the current algorithm.

Google has given some interesting launch codenames to these changes, incuding:
• “old possum” – a faster redirect system to speed up mobile browsing
• “Hoengg” – an update to the SafeSearch tool
• “simple” – an improvement to image search which adds value to high quality source pages
• “SweatNovember” – an improvement to Hebrew synonym handling across multiple languages, and
• “baschi” improved lyric search results.

Among the tweaks and updates undertaken in December was given the project codename “megasitelinks”. This is what Google is calling an algorithmic improvement for selecting and displaying sitelinks, including a new localised sitelink update. The aim is to show sitelink specific to users’ region, which can be controlled through location settings. SearchEngineLand have reported that the localised sitelinks don’t appear to be completely up and running as yet, but it will be one change to look out for in future.

These aren’t the only Google projects and changes to be given some interesting and amusing names, many people will be familiar with the delicious codenames for Android versions, such as FroYo, Gingerbread, Cupcake and Ice Cream Sandwich. Today’s blog is unusual because it is one of the few occasions that Google has openly published the codenames for search updates. Inside Search explains that the codenames make projects easier to talk about and gives employees a memorable moniker to refer to the project.

One example they provide is their old question answering feature, nicknamed DAFFIE (Database of All Fact Fiction Information and Exaggeration). When the feature was overhauled and a new system put in place in a project led by Amit Singhal, he nicknamed the system Porky Pig because, according to Amit “Porky Pig was trying to kill Daffy Duck.” Google staffers, convinced Amit was confused, had their giggles stifled when it was discovered that in the original 1937 cartoon, Porky Pig was indeed hunting Daffy Duck.

You have to wonder if the team Googled that little fact…

Micrositez Digital: Social Media Marketing.

android, Codenames, Google, Inside Search, search algorithm

According to recent figures from StatCounter, the massively popular Chrome browser from Google is poised to overtake Internet Explorer as the most popular browser in the world. Chrome 15 (the latest version) only trailed IE8 in terms of worldwide browser usage by 0.01%, and Chrome is still growing.

It should be safe to assume therefore that when searching Google for a web browser the first result you’d see is Chrome. Not anymore. In a demonstration that even Google plays by their own rules, they have temporarily demoted pagerank on the Google Chrome homepage for no less than 60 days for breaking rules on sponsored blog posts.

Google hired Essence Digital as a contractor to handle their online video marketing campaign for Chrome, but Essence Digital contracted a company called Unruly to implement the campaign. Unruly arranged some paid-for or “sponsored” blog posts to spread the video as widely as possible, and included a link back to the Google Chrome homepage, however the links did not have a “nofollow” attribute. What this meant, was that Google was paying for links. As a company already under scrutiny for allegedly promoting its own sites at the expense of their competition, once Google had discovered the error they had no choice but to act.

Google issued the following statement to SearchEngineLand on the matter: “We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days. We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users. While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.”

So Google’s reputation as a stickler for rules is maintained, but as Chrome no longer appears on the first page of Google results for “browser” they may also have handed advantage to Mozilla’s Firefox and risked the future growth potential of Chrome.

Micrositez Digital: SEO and PPC.

browser, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, webmaster guidelines

As 2011 draws to a close, we thought we’d take a brief look at some key events that took place throughout the industry over the last year in social, search, web, and PPC;
From Facebook, to HTML there have been significant movements and achievements particularly amongst social and search as the two continue to merge closer together.

Social
• Facebook attracted over 55% of the world’s online population in October
• Twitter grew by 59% with over 160 million unique users visiting the site every month.
• Linked In grew by 55% this year
• Google+ was unleashed into the world, reaching 65 million users world wide

Search
• Google, Mozilla renew search partnership for a further three years.
• Google’s Caffeine Update impacted 35% of searches, increasing demand for fresher content.
• YouTube attracted more than 1 trillion videos views this year
• Integration of search and social data that enriched our real time search results
• Google Panda Update back in February 2011

Web
• This year saw the arrival of a long awaited CSS3 and HTML 5
• Simple colour schemes proved to be a great success
• With the rise of smartphones, came the rise of mobile web design
• Domain names became that little bit more creative giving people more option than .com or .co.uk, to .me .us .pretty much anything you can think of.

PPC
• Online shopping increased this year. An estimated £15 Billion dollars has already been spent online in the run up to the Christmas period.
• Rich media ads are almost three times more effective in driving purchase intent v basic Flash
• Rich media ads grew 66%
(Sources include: Inside Adwords and ComScore)

May we take this opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year from everyone at Micrositez Digital.

Micrositez: Social Media and Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing, PPC, search, social media

Search engine marketing and SEO went from strength to strength in 2011. It’s been a big year for developments in search, with increased social media marketing integration, and plenty of changes from search engines themselves. Here at Micrositez Digital, we’ve been taking a look at the key trends that shaped our year.

1. The sad passing of Yahoo Site Explorer
Yahoo Site Explorer closed down in November, and integrated most of its services with Bing Webmaster Tools. SEO professionals and webmasters everywhere were sad to see it go. Yahoo’s free analysis tools for webmasters were unrivalled, and Site Explorer’s ability to check rival websites was a huge advantage. A number of similar services have benifitted from its passing, but as yet there’s no frontrunner for the title of natural successor to the popular service.

2. Google’s caffeine injection
The Panda update in February 2011 was big news; up to 12% of searches were impacted as Google got tough on content farms and low-quality content. This was nothing compared to what they had up their sleeves for later in the year. Google’s move to the caffeine infrastructure in 2010 was an indicator of the move toward fresh and relevant results, and in November this year they took some of that caffeine buzz and implemented a massive algorithm update. Up to 35% of searches were impacted by the update, which rewarded new, up-to-date and relevant content. The message to webmasters was clear: freshness matters.

3. The social boom
It would have been impossible to miss the social media boom this year. Facebook and twitter saw record users, updates and traffic, social sharing sites like StumbleUpon and Reddit soared in popularity, and photo sharing from mobile devices took off in a big way thanks to Instagram. The biggest social impact on search is still in its infancy: Google+. Google+ is a new player on the social field, but with 25 million users, Google search integration, business pages and the “+1” button, it’s a force to be reckoned with. Google’s integration of the “+1” button into search results is an indicator that influence on Google+ may well impact on search engine rankings. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.

At Micrositez Digital, the big search engine marketing trend this year has been success. More clients than ever are enjoying soaring search engine rankings, and even number one rankings. Our small company has grown into an international digital marketing agency, and continues to work hard to achieve the best results and increase traffic to our customers.

We’d like to thank all our clients for sticking with us through 2011. We’re excited about 2012, and look forward to continuing our successful relationships, and seeing all our customers’ search engine rankings climb.

Micrositez Digital: SEO and PPC.

Google, Google Panda, PPC, SEO, social media, Yahoo! Site Explorer

Google+ has announced they are rolling out some improvements to their site before the new year. The fledgling social network has reviewed some of their functionality in line with user feedback, and given their users some pretty interesting new features. Along with improved notifications, Google+ has introduced three new improvements:

1. Circle Volume
Google+ now allows users to turn up and down the “volume” of their circles. This means users can choose which circles are more important and make their posts “louder” or more visible, allowing people more control over which content they access first.

2. Google+ Pages admin
A particular bugbear of users when Google+ Pages were introduced was the lack of multi-admin. All pages could only be administered by one person. Google+ have amended this, and up to 50 users can administer a single page, making it easier for multiple employees of a company to work on their Google+ page. We have to admit, this is our favourite new feature in the Micrositez Digital office!

3. Photo Lightbox
Google has boldly claimed on their blog that their new Lightbox feature is “a more beautiful and useable photo experience”. We are prone to agree with this. The new interface is uncluttered and focuses the user’s eye on the photo. Coupled with improved navigation and better photo-tagging, this should be sure to please the large and vocal photography community on Google+.

In addition to these changes, the Google+ app on Android Market has been updated and improved, with easier access and use of the popular hangouts feature. It is hoped that the video chat capabilities of Hangouts will help the community to grow, and entice users away from Facebook (whose mobile apps are notoriously buggy). While the new Google+ changes aren’t quite as revolutionary as the Facebook timeline, they are certainly a small step in the right direction.

Micrositez Digital: Social Media Marketing

android, circles, facebook, Google, Hangouts, Photo Lightbox, Social Media Marketing

Twitter receives a $300m investment from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bi Talal.

The billionaire Prince known for his substantial investment in Robert Murdoch’s News Corporation, where he holds 7% ownership, is also the principle owner of Saudi Arabia’s largest company, Kingdom Holdings.

Prince Alwaleed was listed by Forbes Magazine as the 26^th richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of around $19.6 billion. His stake in 3.75% stake in Twitter was purchased through this international investment company, Kingdom Holidays, in which he owns 94%.

A statement released by Kingdom Holdings spoke about their latest investment in the social-blogging site said that this had been “the result of several months of negotiations and comprehensive due diligence”.

Prince Alwaleed has also made a comment adding; “Our investment in Twitter reaffirms our ability in identifying suitable opportunities to invest in promising, high-growth businesses with a global impact.”

Picture sourced from Flickr.com by eldh

Micrositez: Social Media and Internet Marketing

kingdom holdings, social media, social networking, twitter

The fairly new social discovery platform, Pinterest proves itself to be a growing trend clocking up 421 million page views on its invite-only platform. The idea behind the site came out of a group of friends who love collecting, started working on the site for fun, by pinning and bookmarking images of things they liked.
Since it’s official launch back in March 2010, Pinterest has grown itself to 3 million users, gathering up interest from people looking to organise and plan their wedding, decorating their dream home, or create that all important vision board.
Co-founder Evan Sharp, explained to Mashable why they have seen immense growth without taking the usual tech start up avenue through a tech site.
“We didn’t build this company to build a really hot tech start up; what we wanted to do was build a product — and also a company — that we wanted to work on for the next five or ten years.”
Even’s valuable lessons from Facebook, where he previously worked have led him to adopt and install some of the same ownership principles in Pinterest.
Although the social discovery site says it’s not primarily for self-promotion many businesses and marketers have already found ways to promote their products, and share brand messages through a symbolic collection of images.

Micrositez: Digital marketing agency

facebook, pinterest, social media, social network

Google has released the annual Google Zeitgeist list for the UK, detailing the most popular search terms and stand-out trends of the year. Unsurprisingly, “royal wedding” was the fastest growing search term in the UK for 2011. Tech trends feature heavily in the top 10, including the yet-to-materialise iPhone (2nd fastest rising search), Groupon (4th) and the iPad (5th), and gaming terms make an expected entry at 3rd (Fifa 2012) and 8th (Minecraft).

The list of the most popular overall searches also yields few surprises. Top inline brands are still dominant forces, and it’s been a similar picture for the last few years:
1. Facebook
2. YouTube
3. Hotmail
4. eBay
6. Google
7. BBC
8. Amazon
9. Argos
10. Yahoo

Google have been publishing Zeitgeist information since 2001, and the archives make interesting reading. What is clear from this and previous lists is that search has become such a common part of life. Popular search terms invariably relate to what is important in popular culture and news, and genuinely reflect what people are talking about. In the future, historians could well view the Google Zeitgeist as a genuinely valuable social document, giving a very real reflection of society at the time of publication.

Search engine marketers can also gain real value from the Zeitgeist. A look at the bargain hunting section of the results gives a clear indication of what shoppers are searching for online, and subsequently what the most hotly contested key terms for search will be. This year’s bargain list shows that the toughest search market online is likely to be travel:
1. Cheap flights
2. Cheap holidays
3. Cheap hotels
4. Cheap tickets
5. Cheap insurance
6. Cheap cars
7. Cheap breaks
8. Cheap shoes
9. Cheap dresses
10. Cheap clothes

For a graphic presentation of information on the worldwide results this year, and a look back at what shaped search (and popular culture) in the past, see: www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist/yearend.html.

Micrositez Digital: SEO and PPC.

e-commerce, Google Zeitgeist, key terms, search engine marketing

Apple has announced that their Mac App Store (for direct downloads to iMac and Macbook computers) has amassed 100 million downloads. This is an impressive milestone for the service, which took the wildly successful App format and transferred it to the traditional desktop and laptop computer. While this is an impressive figure, it is dwarfed by the success of their iOS App Store for mobile devices. Over 18 billion apps have been downloaded to Apple iOS devices; iPhones and iPads. Android Market, BlackBerry AppWorld and Symbian’s Ovi Store have enjoyed some success, and made app use synonymous with smartphone use.

While the Mac App store isn’t as much of a runaway success as its mobile predecessor, it is an encouraging sign of the potential of the App platform outside of mobile devices. 100 million downloads is not to be sniffed at, and could be a sign that app infiltration is going beyond the smartphone. Google Chrome and GetJar already integrate apps into browsers, but development could move beyond even that.

Robert Reich, CEO of Openspace thinks in a similar way, and his company have taken the bold step of opening a bricks-and-mortar app store in Boulder, Colorado. Explaining this unusual move, Reich said: “If your iPhone has a problem, you take it to Apple. If your Android tablet has a problem, you take it to [your network or the store of purchase]. But if you have a question about which camera app would be great for taking pictures this weekend on the slopes, where can you turn?” Openspace’s online store already looks very different to mobile OS offerings. They allow developers to supply their apps through openspace and maintain as much control as possible, and categorise their offerings in non-standard categories; everything from “games a 10 year old girl would enjoy” to “zombies”. Users of Openspace can create their own “collections” for other users to enjoy, integrating a social sharing element to apps.

App integration in the real world? Let’s wait and see.

Micrositez offers award winning link building services.

Android Market, App, Apple App Store, BlackBerry AppWorld, Openspace, Ovi Store, Smartphones

The Philadelphia 76ers NBA team launched contest last week, encouraging fans to choose a new team mascot from three finalists. The campaign was advertised on their official social media accounts, but the response had been lukewarm. The team’s CEO Adam Aron had made it clear that he saw increasing social media presence as a priority when he took over in October, but the contest had failed to catch the fans’ imagination.

Enter Jerry Rizzo and Hunter Coleman. These two enterprising fans decided to help the team out by launching and running twitter accounts for two of the mascots. Soon @PhilEMoose and @BFranklinDogg were engaging in friendly banter online and encouraging fan votes. This quickly caught the attention of Adam Aron, who sent a friendly but firm e-mail requesting ownership of the accounts “without the use of lawyers or anything like that”.  When voting closed, Rizzo and Coleman dutifully handed over the account passwords, and the 76ers rewarded them with box seats for the season opener, and season tickets for their troubles.

Adam Aron wasn’t finished yet. He began to research Jerry Rizzo, a self-confessed “social media sponge”, and was impressed by his social media presence and the quality of writing in his blog posts. So impressed, that he offered Rizzo the role of Social Media Consultant for the 76ers. Jerry Rizzo accepted the offer of his “dream job” and the story gains an even happier ending.

This doesn’t appear to be an isolated fairytale. Beverly Macy, social media author and Huffington Post contributor, sees this as evidence of shift in the communication industry. She told Mashable: “It just shows that people now have the ability to showcase who they are for good and bad, and that all of that is findable. It says it’s about personal initiative and that if you have a love or an affinity for something just go do it, because you don’t know what might happen.”

Statistics released by MBAworld this week show that social media recruitment is on the rise. Over 18 million americans credit Facebook with getting them into their current roles. Over 10 million LinkedIn users got jobs through the site, and 8 million Americans are in jobs they found on twitter. Employers are more open about monitoring the social media presence of job applicants, not just for the screening process, but for recruiting stand-out “superusers”.

The moral of this fairy story? Make your social media presence stand out and it could reap real rewards.

Micrositez: SEO and Social Media.

facebook, jobs, LinkedIn, NBA, social media, twitter

Google celebrate Silicon Valley icon, Robert Noyce on what would have been his 84th birthday today. Google’s doodle features an animated interpretation of the micro-chip, which Robert co-created with Jack Kilby back in 1958.

The duo’s invention revolutionised the world of computing, is known today as the driving force behind the icon hub, Silicon Valley, home to the world’s largest technology companies.

Also known as a father and mentor too many entrepreneurs of his day, Robert Noyce later co-founded the world’s largest semiconductor chip maker, Intel in 1968.

Robert died in 1990, aged 60. His family later set up the Noyce Foundations that works to improve education of science, maths and English across US schools.

Micrositez: Social Media Marketing

Google, Intel, Silicon valley, social media

More changes taking place within the social sphere this week. It’s now twitter’s turn, First Facebook, Google +, Google pages with some update in between from Twitter who introduced their own version of Timeline with new activity feed intertwined amongst the traditional twitter home feed. Earlier this week, we reported news on our blog linking back to StumbleUpon and told of their rebrand, I guess it was only natural to expect that Twitter would be next in line given its current growth and influence.

The social network originally famous for its micro blogging services has growth tremendously in the five years since CEO Jack Dorsey founded the business back in 2006. Now Twitter has over 380 million users, has seen over 60 billion tweets posted in this year alone, and has become increasingly used as a search and news wire, raking in more than 1.6 billion search queries every day.

Announced via the company blog, Twitter revealed to users a new look for their profile that they believe will enrich user’s experience, and be made available for both desktop and mobile apps. Adding further information, the blog went onto explain;

“We’ve simplified the design to make it easier than ever to follow what you care about, connect with others and discover something new.”

What will this mean for users?

Well your new profile should look like this…

And feature these…

The four new tabs Home, Connect, Discover and Me will be rolled out over the next few weeks, but for the curious cats with an iPhone or Android mobile, updates are available for download from your Apps provider now.

Micrositez: Social Media Agency

tweet, twitter, web design

Ten weeks after Facebook’s annual developers conference and the Facebook team are about to roll out the networks new Timeline feature for the first time since their detailed illustration back in September.

Since then developers have been given access to the beta of Timeline, which has enabled them to build apps around the new feature. Over a million coders have signed up to the test version and so far feedback has been positive.

In true Facebook fashion, the news was announced through the update of the original blog post published back in September.

Timeline, which is all part of the Frictionless experience, has been designed in such a way that users will now be able to share their whole life in a chronicle fashion, everything from place of birth to the present day.

There has been some controversies regarding the level of openness Facebook are encouraging, however; Facebook believes this is in the interest of their users.

Micrositez are a social media company.

facebook, social media, social networking, timeline

Last week, it was Google who wow us with their new and improved product design, from the sleek new Google display bar, to a complete redesign of Google’s other search engine YouTube.

This week, it was StumbleUpon’s turn. The discovery engine revealed yesterday that they too have been busy revamping their own website with a new logo, design and brand friendly feature enabling businesses to take a non-intrusive role in the StumbleUpon service.

StumbleUpon say these are the biggest changes ever made to the site, switching from the old green and blue SU logo, to an orange logo with a greater focus on images. The changes will also incorporate the brands Social bar, released back in August in conjunction with their new iPad App.  Now StumbleUpon users can connect to the people or brands behind their favourite article, story or page.

Since the site began in November 2011, Stumble Upon has seen immense growth. In October of this year, StumbleUpon announced there were over 20 million registered users of the site, with over 1 billion stumbles being added every month.

Until now, businesses have been banned as part of the sites terms of service, although, many businesses were clearly using the service under regular individual accounts to promote themselves. The sites new feature, ‘Channels’ will now give space to the brands and businesses previously unwelcomed, by giving them their own place or ‘channel’ to share content.

Micrositez: Social Media Marketing

brand marketing, search engine, social sharing, stumbleupon

As the online world of marketing adapts to a world of personal experience and social influence, could Facebook be in line to strike a deal with location based service, Gowalla?

That’s what reports are suggesting today as the Gowalla app has struggled to obtain any great level of success similar to their rival, Foursquare.

Although Mark Zuckerberg and his team have yet to comment on the matter, Josh Williams, founder and CEO of Gowalla has made the following statement; “The ink on the deal is not dry, so our holding pattern is that we do not comment on rumours and speculation. I have another email penned that was ready to send you today, assuming you would get this news before the story was officially released.”

“But now it is all over Twitter, so you have likely heard. A longer email will be sent soon.”

We know there is a growing trend for consumers to share more information online than ever before. Back in September, Facebook announced that over half a billion users were recorded to have logged in one day – breaking social web records.

Facebook already have their own check in tool enabling users to share their location with friends from their mobile, but it would seem that until now Foursquare has certainly dominated in their share of market.  Would this be the case if Gowalla did receive a Facebook takeover?

Micrositez: Digital marketing agency

facebook, Foursquare, gowalla

In today’s news we were warned by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange that anyone with an IPhone, Blackberry, or using Gmail are “all screwed.”

The organisation that publishes classified documents from anonymous sources, have now released their new project ‘Spy Files’ to the public to highlight their belief that we are now living in a “totalitarian surveillance state.”

The Spy Files includes hundreds of documents highlighting that as many as 150 organisations have access too, and are monitoring data on our mobile smartphones.

Although he adds it is all above board. The founder branded the act, “Mass interception” and went on to add that this was “a secret new industry spanning over 25 countries.”

Have they told us anything we didn’t already know?

It’s safe to say this has been a controversial subject for the best part of last year. On the same token many now believe their relevance has certainly been tainted and the novelty worn off.

With over 50% of us using our blackberries and smartphones to surf the net today; logging into Facebook and Twitter has formed a daily habit for most.

With the consumer demand on businesses to provide a more personalised user experience. The question lingers that how much of today news is really that relevant anymore?

Is privacy an issue? Of course, but it’s not a new issue. There is an awareness of the matter, and we are continuing to hear about improved changes. From Google’s Algorithm changes, to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announcing yesterday that they would be committing to the release of more tools and resources to improve privacy for their 800 million active users.

There is a strong argument to suggest the need for businesses and organisations to use location-based data in order to improve customer service, product and give consumers an all-round better personalised experience.

Micrositez: a digital marketing agency

facebook, Google, privacy, wikileaks

Although Micrositez doesn’t offer performance based marketing, we thought we’d share some great points outlined by a fellow marketer in one of his recent articles, which can be found on http://www.conversationmarketing.com. The author who goes by the name Ian, made eight great points in his answer to one of the most commonly asked questions, of one of the most misunderstood internet marketing campaign; “Can I pay you based on performance?”

It seems many clients are miss-lead by the term ‘performance-based’ when it comes to internet marketing. Ian echoed the frustration of many marketers who are worn out from explaining to clients why this route can often cost more, and not less than other marketing campaigns.

Here is a summarised list of those eight points that were given in hope of dispelling any confusion, or bad feelings between clients and agencies.

• The agency must have 100% control over the client’s site’s design and development.
• It is the client’s responsibility to guarantee fulfilment capabilities.
• There should be no interference – let the professionals do what they do best.
• Trust is a vital component between both parties, or there is no point.
• Once an agreement is in place, it can’t be changed.
• It’s not a route if you’re looking for cheap marketing
• Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, but consider other sources.
• Keep the contract simple.

If you’re considering going down the route of performance based SEO, or just interest in finding out more about this topic. We recommend reading Ian’s article, ’Performance based contracts ain’t cheap‘ first.

Micrositez is an award winning digital marketing company.

Internet Marketing, performance based marketing, performance based seo, SEO Marketing