Search giants like Bing and Google have been promoting personalized search stating that it offers much better results, but users don’t seem to agree. In a recent survey carried out by Pew Internet and American Life Project, personalized search was viewed as ‘bad’ by more than 2/3rd of the participants.

While 29% respondents said that personalized search was a ‘good thing’ as it offers more relevant results, a majority, 65%, said that it was a ‘bad thing’ as it restricts the available online information. Three out of four survey participants looked upon the collection of data for the personalization of results as an invasion of their privacy.

Pew broke down the results based on demographics like race, income and age. Compared to Hispanics and black, whites were much more likely to view personalized search unfavorably. The negativity towards personalized search seemed to increase with age and income. The survey took place from the 20th of January to the 10th of February and covered approximately 2000 US adults.

SEO companies need to be on top of anything to do with search and personalized search seems to be the current buzz word. It does offer a number of benefits, which have been well emphasized by Google. Although a majority of users view this feature negatively, not many seem to be making special efforts to prevent it. While personalization can help increase the relevancy of results, the problem arises when the search engines cross the limit and go too far.

Ever since the launch of Google+ in 2011, the online marketing industry has been abuzz with discussions over its potential. Until recently the platform was open only to end users, but the long awaited Google+ business pages have been finally launched. Regardless of the popular opinion, the search giant remains confident about the platform. According to the vice president for Google+ products, brands will notice the platform’s potential and tailor their marketing plans based on it.

Creating a brand page on Google+ is simple and quick. You just need to signup and login as an individual and click on ‘Create a Google+ Page’ button. You can choose a category that best suits your business from a list of five which includes- company, institution or organization; product or brand; arts, entertainment or sports; place or local business and others. The platform also allows you to select an appropriate age group.

You can customize your brand page by adding a tag line, logo, images and ‘About Page’. You also have the option of including links to your social profiles on YouTube or Facebook. Adding your firm to Google+ Direct Connect is also a good idea.

At present there are a number of big players in the social space. Facebook boasts over 800 million active users, while Twitter and LinkedIn respectively have over 200 million and 120 million users to their credit. It remains to be seen whether the search giant is able to make it big in the crowded and highly competitive realm of social media marketing. Although it is too early to predict the future of Google+, the platform does offer some very interesting features.

So, the question is, how is Pinterest used from a business perspective? Before we jump into the solutions, let’s pause and do a quick overview of Pinterest. It’s a new social network that enables users to share and learn about new interests by pinning (posting) images or videos to what’s called pinboards.

Pinboards are a collection of pins that typically have a common theme. There are two primary ways to upload images and video. You can either upload them from your computer or by sharing things you find on the Web by using their Pin It button.

You can search through items that users have pinned and you can like, repin, or comment on them. You can even share pins on Facebook, Twitter, or through email. And can add share buttons to your Website or blog.

The purpose of Pinterest is to connect people who are interested in the same things. If you’re interested in another channel to drive visitors to your Website, you’re going to want to join Pinterest.

If you use the Pin It button on your pages, your pins will even include a link back to the Web page, enabling prospects to click through to your site. This is a great way to drive additional Website visitors and link to a Web form to generate leads.

Access to Pinterest operates under an inviation-only basis. However, you can request an invitation by visiting www.pinterest.com.

Try to use the same email address that you used for Twitter, so you can easily share through Twitter. Pinterest does not currently have a connection to Facebook Business pages, so when you set up your account, sign up through the Twitter option.

Once your account is activated, optimize your Pinterest profile under the settings tab. Choose your company name as your username and complete your profile information, including a company description, logo, and a link to your Website.

If you have any questions on setting up your account, pins, or pinboards, please feel free to comment or connect with us. We’d be happy to help!

For many businesses that developed a welcome page, including us as an Internet marketing firm, to maximize the number of visitors that “Like” us and opt-in as a lead, we now have to shift to a new strategy. The question is, how do you use Facebook now, from an Internet marketing perspective?

In this post, we’re going to show you how it’s done and provide some examples of companies that have already approached this correctly.

Before we get started, for those of you who are not aware of this change, you may want to check out this quick video from Facebook.

It provides a quick overview of the new look and feel. If you’re ready to make the transition, here’s a quick guide of the key areas to focus on to drive results from a business perspective.

The first area that you want to work on is your cover photo. It’s 851 x 315 pixels. Facebook has imposed some serious guidelines that you have to follow, whereby you can’t include:
- Price or purchase information, such as buy now, or 25% off.
- Contact information
- References to Like and Share
- Calls to action

With that said, the cover photo is a great opportunity to position your company and reinforce your brand.

In this example, Mari Smith, has done a great job of positioning herself as a Facebook expert, while coming across as someone who is approachable and likeable.

The next thing that you want to do is to set up your profile picture. You want your profile picture to work off of your cover photo. Red Bull’s done a great job, as a larger company, of integrating their logo with the positioning of giving you flight and wings as you can see here.

The next step is to organize your views and applications, which is the section below the cover image. The key here is that you want to appeal to different types of prospects that are at different stages in the decision making process.

For those who are simply information gathering, we’d recommend including a free download option and events if you have them, such as webinars. For prospects that are at a more mature stage in the buying process, we’d recommend including success stories and case studies.

The key is that you want your applications to appeal to people at different stages. A company that has done a great job of this is HubSpot. As you can see in this example, you can view case studies, opt-in, or attend an event. It’s a well-balanced solution.

Facebook now allows you to pin or anchor a story as your feature story. This is a huge opportunity to maximize conversions and opt-ins. We always recommend the importance of building a complete marketing campaign. Here’s a great opportunity to do just that. We recommend providing some exceptional value in this feature story with a call to action to learn more by opting in.

You can also use the timeline feature to tell your personal and company stories. Mini has done a fantastic job. What I love about this feature is that you can now tell your story and start building a relationship with your prospect. You can show them how you developed as a company over time to be where you are today. The fact is that people buy from people, and this is a great way to show your personality.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment and look out for our new Facebook design coming soon!

Google had earlier said that by unifying the policies, they will be able to use and share data from one service for the other. Basically, every user will be treated as a single entity across all the products offered by Google. The information that you give to Google+ can be used in personalized search results.

A lot of legislators, advocates, and the Federal Trade Commission believe that Google is trying to provide its customers a better service by consolidating the policies. But not everyone has taken as kindly to the changes. Many of the users have also asked about the data which the company will track and how will this data be used and protected by Google. They also feel that a customer should be able to opt out of any data gathering phase.

Google’s response will come on 16th February, but it has said that users can easily opt out of data gathering through various methods, like not signing in when searching. Even if you are signed in you can use the incognito window in Chrome. Or you could switch off the search history and change Gmail chat to off the record.

It has been observed in these six months that marketers do not use their PPC accounts as often as they should be. The CTO of Wordstream has revealed that there are many marketers who are not even using the fundamentals of PPC advertising.

Currently, there are over 1000 users of this tool and Wordstream has analyzed over half a billion dollars spent in PPC campaigns. Because of this, they are able to offer a highly precise peer report. The AdWords Performance Grader tool can do a health check of your campaign by comparing your account against another account with a similar range of monthly expenditure.

The great thing about the tool is that it comes for free and there are no limitations on the number of times it can be used for a single account. The tool analyses the data and makes the recommendations based on various industry factors. These factors include account activity, click through rates, wasted spend, and quality score to name a few.

The wasted spend feature in the tool tells marketers about the match type use and predicts the waste, and tells them where they stand against the competition. The click through rate analysis lets a marketer know their comparative performance with respect to other marketers, through a very detailed graph and score. Its an interesting tool and the guys at Wordstream are great to work with.

If you need help with your PPC program, give us a call, we would love to help.

As an advertising professional, I’ll admit it: watching commercials prior to a feature presentation in a movie theatre is what I would call a slight agitation of mine (others may call it harassment).

I’m forced to unwillingly gaze up at these advertisements commanding my attention on a gigantic movie screen. Hurray.

Yet marketers have found a new way of beating the boredom and irritation of movie goers with social mobile marketing. Perhaps no longer will people have to squirm in their seats at the site of yet another hair mousse or energizing drink commercial (have we not seen enough of those already?).

TimePlay Inc., a Toronto-based company, is appropriating a push strategy towards such captive audiences and encouraging engagement with products and services. TimePlay Inc. is placing interactive ads throughout Cineplex theatres based in the Greater Toronto Area that screen before feature presentation.

TimePlay Inc. hopes to encourage smart phone users to download apps onto their phones or call a number on the movie screen that allows them to participate in a company’s or agency’s marketing plan.

For example, Ford asked the audience to text in their vote as to whether or not they should incorporate more male or female leads in the movie industry; nearly 18,000 downloads were made of the interactive app in the first month of the campaign launch.

According to Susan Krashinsky of the Globe and Mail, interactive advertising has become a trend and advertisers are all about reaching people at a “dead time” with their smart phones through contests, coupons and other incentives.

This all sounds like a pocket full of roses, but most advertisers seem to be approaching this opportunity all wrong. The idea of connecting with people with their companion mobile device that goes everywhere with them is a smart tactic, yet customers may feel vulnerable that marketers can reach them day or night and bombard them with messages to interact with a company’s product or service.

Thus the question of where the motivation is to encourage interaction remains. There is no guarantee that customers will be motivated or feel “energetic” enough to engage just because marketers can now reach them through clever means.

Additionally, not everyone can participate. Mobile interaction requires smart phones, something a little more sophisticated than the regular flip phone. According to Krashinsky, 40% of mobile users in Canada own a smart phone, meaning fewer than half are unable to respond. Lastly, not all mobile users are aware of how to utilize apps.

The first step for advertisers is therefore to motivate audiences to interact in spite of conditions that may seem too complicated or time-consuming to do on their phones. Marketers then need to teach people how to interact with companies on a clear, step-by-step process. And hopefully, this move will make social mobile marketing more of a good thing.

During AdWeek in Toronto, Google’s own Jesse Haines, Group Marketing Manager at the big media mogul, introduced “How to Go Mo in 2012″ to emphasize the importance of utilizing mobile.

Mobile is a market that every marketer should be appropriating in their campaigns, as mobile technology is becoming the fastest growing technology among consumers.

Haines took the audience through four steps in how to mobilize mobile:

1. Embrace the Nonline World

Android and iPhone apps act as brand extensions to deepen relationships and build loyalty. QR codes act as silent salespeople. Google Wallet is handling your credit card information to complete transactions. All of these new gadgets have become the new and hip way of communicating brand identities and messages.

Several airlines, including Delta for example, places QR codes as passengers plane tickets to be accessed on their mobile devices, without the need to print a boarding pass. Mobile is making it easier for consumers to access information on the fly, without the hassle of performing monotonous, everyday tasks.

2. Cover the Basics

According to Google research, 79% of large advertisers do not have mobile optimized landing pages. What these advertisers do not realize is that mobile search is exploding and has increased by five times in the past few years.

Haines shared some other interesting statistics: 30% of restaurant searches are made on mobile devices and 25% of search on mobile is movie-related. Moreover, 40% of users who visit a mobile-friendly site go to a competitor’s site, while 11% screamed at their phones from having difficulty accessing a website.

One way to analyze and evaluate a business’s website on a mobile device is through howtogomo.com. Google offers a measurement tool called the gomometer, where users can type in their business website and see how it renders on mobile devices. The gomometer caters to both small and large businesses and at different prices and can take up to merely 30 minutes to upload.

3. Make meaningful connections

Haines contends that mobile offers another route for clients to connect with their customers. Through interactive click-to-calls and an emphasis on hyper-local content, engagement has become a desirable feature for mobile display.

Take the Angry Birds game as the more popular example. This interactive game became so entertaining for consumers to play with on their iPads that the company extended the brand connection to make plush toys and sell them in stores.

4. Access more than one screen

Tablets have also become a desirable commodity in the mobile realm. According to a PEW Internet research study, tablet ownership doubled over the holidays. The tablet is the fastest growing technology used for entertainment purposes as opposed to work purposes, since it is not often taken outside the home (except for travel).

According to another Google study, tablets and mobile usage increase during prime time hours (whereas desktop usage peaked in mid-morning and dropped during prime time hours).

In the same study, Google found that 46% of mobile users searched for content that was not related to TV. What this means for marketers is that they need to be on all sorts of platforms (both TV and mobile), combining the best communication platforms to increase interactivity.

Mobile usage is growing at a fast pace. It is up to marketers to solidify the companionship between mobile devices and the people that carry them. Marketers need to provide multiple outlets to accompany users wherever they are going, and mobile delivers in every category.

If you want more information on how to appropriate mobile devices for your marketing plan, do not hesitate to ask for our help.

The Search & Social night invited entrepreneurs and partnerships of corporations to  inform the audience of various SEO and social media storytelling techniques.

One topic in particular that caught my interest was a presentation by Craig Backman from the McLellan Group who spoke about the importance of incorporating video onto one’s branding and SEO plan.

Backman provided five key takeaways for incorporating video in your marketing strategy:

Video is the preferred medium by most site visitors. According to Cisco Systems, 90% of web traffic will be from video by the time we reach 2013.

Video is relevant to all demographics. It is not just youth that are broadcasting their talents through online video, but people 55 and older are also finding a space to share their stories.

Video is more persuasive. According to Nielson data, product users are 85% more likely to buy from video content than from text.

Video is more memorable. Videos are sensational and require more than just one sense to understand a message. They thus attract better site traffic and higher quality content than text does

Video enhances SEO results. Forrester found that video is 53 times more than text content to rank within the top search engine results. Google looks at the description, title and tags for indexing a video.

Video will not only help gain site traffic, but it offers another route for Google to find content, by crawling keywords within description, the tags assigned to the video and its title.

Moreover, video requires less effort to participate in. Because our technology-driven society has socialized citizens into becoming instantly-gratified beings, videos deliver information at a faster rate than reading a lot of text. Thus you are more likely to attract customers and have a higher retention and recall rate.

Utilizing video on your site also helps to captivate audience interest and provide a more engaging experience than text: it offers unrivalled ways for companies to interact with their customers and provides a unique experience altogether.

If you would like more information on using video to enhance search traffic to your website, we would be happy to help.

When users click on a search result, they want to be able to see relevant content immediately rather than having to scroll down the page past numerous ads to reach it. With the latest update, Google algorithm will now take into consideration the layout of a web page and the amount of relevant content available above-the-fold in the rankings process.

The page layout algorithm improvement is likely to affect the sites that do not offer sufficient content ‘above the fold’. The search engine giant has clearly mentioned on the Webmaster Central blog that going forward the search rank of sites having their initial screen real estate largely dedicated to ads rather than actual content is likely to slip.

The change is hardly surprising. The popularity of Google search is based on the user experience offered by it. The search engine giant is constantly making efforts to improve the same. SEO experts are well aware of the fact that too many ads above the fold do not result in a great user experience. According to Matt Cutts, the number of sites likely to be affected by the change is small. While the websites offering good value to the users have nothing to worry about, a change of strategy may be required in case of self-serving sites.