ArticleSnatch Blog

You are browsing the search results.

TopRank Online Marketing and the Direct Marketing Association have just announced a partnership to develop and deliver a series of educational workshops on social media marketing entitled, “Social Media Smarts: Introduction to the Social Web, Tools and Tactics.”

With marketers facing tighter budgets in the coming months, social media marketing offers new opportunities for companies to engage customers, improve brand awareness and increase sales with budgets that are more recession friendly than many traditional marketing efforts.

Leading the workshop will be Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing, who will introduce participants to the marketing opportunities with social media through best and worst practices examples. As you can see from the photo in this post, I’m much taller than Lee.

But, according to George Markham Director, Education Services at Direct Marketing Association, “Lee is a well rounded digital marketer uniquely qualified with over ten years experience as an internet marketing consultant and a background in corporate training.” Markham adds, “As a consultant working on the front lines of social media marketing for companies large and small, Lee brings first-hand knowledge and real-world examples to teach attendees how to develop a successful social media strategy.”

But I’m still taller.

The Social Media Smarts workshop will provide attendees with insight into blogging and blog marketing, social networks, microblogging, social news and bookmarking, video sharing, image and audio sharing, wikis and social media analytics.

Rounding out the workshop is a social media strategy exercise that will empower attendees to create their own social media strategy and develop a framework for building a business case within their organizations.

Lee is quoted in a press release as saying, “As a high demand digital marketing and PR agency, we’re seeing tremendous benefits from educating in-house marketing staff on the finer points of social media marketing.” He adds, “Offering both good and bad social media marketing examples along with strategy, tools, tactics and analytics can really empower companies to succeed.”

Now, I’ve served on panels with Lee. I know Lee. And that’s exactly the way Lee talks.

The first of the Social Media Smarts workshop series will be conducted in New York, December 4th and 5th, at the Microtek training facility in lower Manhattan. If you are in the nieghborhood, drop by and heckle Lee.

And remember: I’m taller. Actually, I was standing on my toes for this photo. Lee’s actually pretty tall, too.

Google Analytics is now offering Flash tracking. The tracking code is translated into ActionScript 3 programming language. While Google Analytics has been able to provide workarounds in the past, this new feature simplifies the way to track Flash, Flex, and AS3 Content.

Sprout, a company that helps businesses create rich media content, used the code to track videos across MySpace and iGoogle. The Google Analytics team talked to them about their experience:

What do you think of the announcement? Leave us a comment and let us know.

Related Reading:
Google Site Search Integrated with Adobe Community Help
Adobe Provides Flash Technology to Google and Yahoo for Better Indexing

Google announced early this morning that they have updated their Site Search product to provide for on demand indexing of your site. What this means is that if you are using Google’s Site Search feature to provide visitors to your web site with a tool to search your site, you can always keep that on site search tool up to date. It is important to note that this new tool does NOT provide on demand indexing for your site in Google’s general index.

Nonetheless, this is a very cool tool, so let’s walk through a quick scenario. Imagine that you have a site where you have added a substantial amount of new content. Perhaps you have added 100 pages of new articles and data to the site. Prior to this announcement, you would have had to wait for the Googlebot to come along and find those changes, and for them to be incorporated in the index before your Site Search would be able to search on that new content.

Now, with today’s announcement, you can go into the configuration screen for your Site Search, request on demand indexing, and a fresh crawl will be done of your entire site. This data is then made available to users who use Site Search on your site, in real time.

This is a really neat enhancement, ensuring that you can always offer users a full and robust search function on your site, even immediately after you have made massive changes.

Last night I spoke with Nitin Mangtani, the lead product manager for Google Enterprise Search, and he indicated that the new functionality would not be possible without Google’s cloud computing architecture. Basically, the index for your Site Search is unique in nature.

If there was only one copy of that index (perhaps on a Google server near your web site’s hosting location), people all over the world would have to access that server (causing potentially large latencies) to get the data from that index. The cloud computing architecture used by Google results in your unique index being distributed across the globe, and eliminates those latencies.

AT&T is getting into the online video search game. They’ve launched VideoCrawler.com, which indexes videos from thousands of video sites. Users can organize videos into collections, which can be shared through social networking widgets.

“We want to do everything possible to connect customers to the content they want, and today more than ever, what they want online is social media,” said Sean O’Leary, vice president, AT&T Business Development. “With thousands of popular video Web sites, it’s become more and more challenging to find, sort and manage all of the best clips that are out there. That’s exactly what we’re working to solve with VideoCrawler by allowing users to search from an index of the most popular media sources from across the Web.”

Related Reading:
Yahoo’s oneSearch Now Default on AT&T’s MEdia Net Mobile Portal
AT&T iPhone Google Deal Pits Apple Against Blackberry
Online Video Advertising to Peak in 2012 Predicts eMarketer Report

I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that election day is next Tuesday. Whether you’re observing or you’re breaking out the campaign gear for some hardcore get out the vote effors this weekend, here are some tools to help you keep up with the news and your efforts:

Google Earth

You can download a KML file that lets you search results from past elections, since 1980. The data is broken down and can show you how different regions of the country voted - even by county. I used to work as a political consultant, and let me tell you - this kind of data is heavily relied on. It’s a bit of a late release for campaigns, who already have this data. But it’s great for political junkies.

Google News

Trying to remember what a candidate said on an issue? Just type their name into Google News. If Google has indexed a quote by that person, it will appear on top of the search results in the one box.

Google Mobile

Want to know your precinct location? The Google Mobile team has created a special tool just for that purpose. Go to m.google.com/elections on your mobile phone, type in your address and you’ll be directed to your precinct.

The tool did not point me to early voting locations, which in my state are not the same as Election Day precinct locations.

As cool as that is, always verify with your local elections office. Google even helps you do that. They have a box where you enter your state’s abbreviation, and it will pull up relevant links to voting information.

Yahoo Elections Hub and Political Dashboard

Yahoo makes the most of its successful portal platforms with its Elections Hub and Political Dashboard. The dashboard is a super slick map showing the latest poll results. Hopefully they update it with real time results on election night. I can totally see myself keeping the dashboard open while watching results come in on the tv.

Microsoft Live Search xRank

xRank, Live Search’s buzz tool, has a politician section. It’s no surprise that the Rep and Dem presidential and vice presidential candidates take the top 4 spots today. The rest of the top 20 is filled with senate and gubernatorial races, with Hillary Clinton and George Bush thrown in for good measure.

MSN Election Live Q&A

Q&A is Live Search’s answer product, and over at the MSN Election Guide, you can find the Election Live Q&A. It’s pretty straightforward. You can ask and answer questions about the election in real time.

AOL Elections Toolbar

AOL has a toolbar for IE and Firefox that can keep you up to date with election news. If you like to surf the net while watching TV - this could be an ideal toolbar for you come Tuesday night.

Well, hopefully that’s enough to keep you busy and up to date.

Got any tools to share? Leave your suggestions in the comments.

Related Reading:
Obama is Winning the Internet War
ChaCha Selected by Rock the Vote for Mobile Answers

Today, there are more updates to Google products than you can shake a stick at. So intead of writing a bunch of short, little posts, I have consolidated them into one for you, faithful SEW reader.

Both my awesome husband and my awesome 11 year old son have pointed out to me the new changes to iGoogle. I personally don’t use my iGoogle page all that much (Keepin’ it real [simple]), but I did browse over to it and found some cosmetic changes (The Foo Fighters theme was already there.)

Notice the tab on the left hand side. It includes links to the widgets on your iGoogle page. When you click on one of the links, it switches to a screen with that widget. Some take up the whole page. Others present a list of similar widgets as suggestions. Still others make use of Google reader to present a feed.

Moving on to other Google properties….

Webmaster Tools now testing a Message Center warning that alerts webmasters to possible vulnerabilities with their Content Management Systems (CMS).

Google TV ads has announced new partnerships with COREMedia Systems and Harris Corporation. The COREMedia partnership allows CoreDirect customers to view their Google TV ads right along with their CoreDirect data. The Harris Corp. one adds more inventory for Google TV advertisers.

AdWords has separated the metrics for Google and search partners such as Ask, AOL, etc. This is probably in preparation for the implementation of the Yahoo search advertising partnership.

Last but most important is the changes to the Google algorithm regarding Adobe Flash. Brian Ussery has a writeup about it on his extremely minimalistic-looking blog. Basically, he finds that indexing of Flash still isn’t ready for prime time. I know there may have been some hope with recent news of Adobe working with Google to provide better indexing, but we’re just not there yet, folks.

And that concludes the flurry of Google updates for Friday, October 17, 2008. Leave your thoughts, impressions, etc in the comments!

Yahoo is beginning an aggressive advertising campaign in order to get people to use it (again) for search.

Expect to see display ads (like the one below) and hear radio ads as the campaign unfolds.

The Yahoo Search blog posted a radio ad on its blog. It uses the concept of searching the web as a jungle and that users need Yahoo’s security measures to protect them from the dangerous and even wacky stuff on the web.

What do you think of the new advertising push by Yahoo? Leave your first impressions in the comments.

Related Reading:
Yahoo Sets Q3 2008 Earnings Call for Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Yahoo Updates Contextual Advertising Solution
Yahoo Stock Plummets to $13, Investor Proposes Microsoft Acquisition at $22
Yahoo Rebrands IndexTools as Web Analytics; Launches Limited Release

Google Webmaster Central has released a couple of updates: one to the API settings and one to the crawl errors feature.

Here’s the sparkling new things you can do with your API settings:

• Crawl Rate: You can request that Googlebot crawl your site slower or faster than it normally would (the details can be found in our Help Center article about crawl rate control). If many of your sites are hosted on the same server and you know your server’s capacity, you may want to update all sites at the same time. This now a trivial task using the Webmaster Tools GData API.
• Geographic Location: If your site is targeted towards a particular geographic location but your domain doesn’t reflect that (for example with a .com domain), you can provide information to help us determine where your target users are located.
• Preferred Domain: You can select which is the canonical domain to use to index your pages. For example, if you have a site like www.example.com, you can set either example.com or www.example.com as the preferred domain to use. This avoids the risk of treating both sites differently.
• Enhanced Image Search: Tools like the Google Image Labeler allow users to tag images in order to improve Image Search results. Now you can opt in or out for all your sites in a breeze using the Webmaster Tools API.

For the crawl error feature, you now get to see the URL of the inbound link that is linking to an error page.

Related Reading:
Google Extends Webmaster Tools Access Program to Qualifying Hosting Providers
Google Webmaster Central Blog Addresses Duplicate Content Issues
New Google Webmaster Tool Aids Robots.txt Creation

New Article - You are able to incorporate all these elements on all of your copies! Po.. http://tinyurl.com/4ff6n6 #
New Article - Article Marketing plans - Uncover few Steps to Article marketing achieve.. http://tinyurl.com/3ttf7z #
New Article - How to Build a Huge Opt-In Email List immediately Posted By : Mohit Shar.. http://tinyurl.com/4w8jdp #
Virginia Personal Injury Lawyers [...]

ChunkIt is a new search toolbar that bills itself as an x-ray for search. What it does is search your choice of the “big five” search engines, and then displays results on the right and the textual content of the results on the left.

Once the results are loaded, users can click on a paragraph in the left hand side, and it will highlight the paragraph - and then load the full page in the right side.

Highlighted paragraph

Page loaded in the right hand side

I personally find this to be a great tool for search. But one issue for ChunkIt might be copyright. Google has come under fire from newspapers for the issue of copyright when it comes to indexing their pages. Their argument, which has won over some in Europe, is a poor one since Google primarily provides just links to articles.

So, I contacted Brian Cheek at TigerLogic Corporation, the company behind ChunkIt, and here’s what he had to say:

“ChunkIt! is a user-driven device that resides on the client-computer and is not a web service. All processing is handled by and all logic resides on the user’s local computer. ChunkIt! does not persist, store or cache information and does not use a back-end server to perform any of its functionality.”

Smart companies will see the value in ChunkIt’s search tool and not make a fuss over copyright. But expect a few to ignore a good thing when they see it and challenge ChunkIt, but only if and when the tool gets wildly popular.