Google is scheduled to make an announcement today at 12:30 pm EST about a great technological advancement…

Based on today’s Google homepage logo and what I’ve seen and heard, my prediction is that Google will announce that will deliver search results on the fly, in real-time, as you type in your search query!!

For example, if you started typing pri then in real time the results page may show search results for private eyes, private party, etc. Then as you continue to type prim the search results would update, in real-time, with results for primates, prime visibility, etc.

4 and a half hours and counting….let’s see!

@AndrewHazen

Google is taking aim at Yahoo users with a new OpenID feature that makes signing up for a Google account a simple one-click process for anyone with a Yahoo account.

This one-click feature gives Google access to the user’s Yahoo email address and authenticates the user’s identity, allowing him access to the wonderful world of Google’s web-based applications and services, including Reader, Docs, AdWords and more.

The Twitter bandwagon continues adding 300,000 new users per day, making the trendy microblogging service a hot commodity in the web world. CEO Ev Williams revealed that the company now boasts an impressive 145 million registered users, up from 105 million just four months ago.

Williams also revealed another interesting numbers tidbit in that sixteen percent of new users join the site via a mobile device rather than the the web. Mobile apps and the recent debut of Twitter for iPad could also help rope in new members accessing the site on the go.

@AndrewHazen

Back in early 2008, Google changed its philosophy on broad match and introduced expanded broad match.  At the time, this had many advertisers upset, as Google’s expanded broad match had many disadvantages to an advertiser looking for quality traffic from their broad match keywords.  Google insisted that its expanded broad match was to give more traffic to advertisers.  Expanded broad match led to many broad keywords mapping to very irrelevant keywords.  Many advertisers began using broad match as a way to increase their negatives.  For example, if your broad keyword was formal footwear, Google would map your keyword to women’s evening footwear, and men’s dress wingtips.

Google recently introduced a new match type called modified broad match.  This new match type gives an advertiser more control over their broad match and with similar high quality targeting than phrase match offers.  Google’s new modified broad match allows you to put a “+” sign in front of your broad keyword.  This can be considered an anchor of sorts for your keywords.  If you now put a + sign in front of your broad keyword formal shoes (+formal +shoes), Google will now map your keyword to close variants of these two words.  These variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, synonyms and closely related variants to those keywords.  Now +formal +shoes can map to frmal shoes, or even formal evening shoes.  Modified broad match makes sure that your keywords are the main keywords in the user’s search query.

According to Google, the new match type should not be a 100% replacement for any current broad match keywords, as you might lose some traffic, but used in the right situations this can be extremely effective.  For example, if you were using phrase match with geographic modifiers within your keywords, such as “orange county charter”, your ad would only appear when the search query contained those 3 keywords in that order.  If you were to use the modified broad match, your ad would now show for any order of those keywords, plus, it would also show for close variations and variations of those keywords along with other keywords a user would search for.  This means that these keywords are effective in picking up long tail traffic, and not wasting money on Google’s expanded broad match.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Digg 4.0 is now live. It’s a LOT different than the original layout and takes some getting used to.  Unlike the original layout, the homepage defaults to stories submitted / Dugg by users you are following, not the top Digg articles. I am curious to see how this has an overall effect on user submissions. We’ll be testing and reporting our findings.

In an attempt to rival the rapidly growing FourSquare, Facebook has launched a new feature called “places” that allows you to check in via your Facebook iphone app or through touch.facebook.com on your browser and share where you are with your Facebook friends. As of now, there are too many limitations for it to rival FourSquare, but Facebook will undoubtedly continue to update Places making it likely to surpass FourSquare in its popularity given Facebook’s 500,000,000+ total users. Below are some key points about the new feature (both good and bad).

• The mobile app is only good for iPhones. Everyone else must check in on a browser. This is a huge turnoff for blackberry and droid users.
• Not all locations are supported through Facebook Places. Where I’m sitting, right now, I am unable to check in on Facebook, but can on FourSquare.
• I can easily tag friends from Facebook when I check in.
• Instead of texting or calling, I can help a Facebook friend easily find my location through Places.  Considering most of my friends are also my Facebook friends, this is a plus.
• Facebook Places has the same limitation with FourSquare where I don’t have to be in the place in order to check in.
• Like FourSquare, you can see other Facebook users who checked into the location you are in. If you think this feature is “creepy” on FourSquare, you will feel the same about Facebook Places.
• There are no “mayor” incentives like there are with FourSquare. This is a huge advantage that FourSquare has over Facebook Places as of right now. I like FourSquare because I know that if I become the mayor (the person with the most check ins at one location) I have the ability to receive discounts from that location. Facebook is not doing anything like this yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see businesses rewarding users who check into their location.

Right now I’ll likely use both just to see how Facebook Places progresses. I have a feeling this addition to Facebook will only help FourSquare’s growth as Facebook users starts to discover its existence and the “better” features that accompany the program.   This won’t stop Facebook Places from surpassing FourSquare’s total users given the already 500 million + users Facebook already has.

Every conference I’ve attended over the past year related to Social Media discusses either Twitter, Facebook, blogging, YouTube, FourSquare, mobile, LinkedIn, or a combination of some.  There’s no arguing that these all play an integral role in any Social Media campaign. However, I am surprised by how often Social Bookmarking never makes it’s way into a discussion.  Sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon can refer over 100,000 unique visitors to your website in a 24 hour period.  If you have a content-fueled website, Social Bookmarking should represent a decent amount of your Social Media marketing efforts.

What’s important to note, however, is that achieving success on these websites isn’t as simple as submitting content to Digg.  You could create the best piece of content in the world, but chances are if you sign up for Digg and submit it to the website it will not go anywhere.  To really achieve success on Digg, Reddit, and other Social Bookmarking websites you have to work hard at it..EVERY DAY.  It might sound overwhelming, and it can be at times, but if you work your way up to a power user the benefits are well worth the effort.

In fact, we launched a content website last month that received over 15,000 unique visitors in its first week because of Social Bookmarking alone.  Essentially, we were able to take a website that nobody had ever heard of and drive over 15,000 people to it during its first week because of sites like Digg, Reddit, etc.  Some people would pay thousands for that type of exposure.

While Prime Visibility is actively involved in most Social Bookmarking websites, two of the main ones we regularly participate on is Reddit and Digg. Listed below is some advice on how to work your way up to “power user” status on Digg and Reddit and ultimately drive traffic to your website.

Digg

• Submit other content besides your own.  If the Digg community notices that day in and day out you are submitting content from the same website they will associate you as a spammer and you will lose all credibility. Even worse, Digg can ban your site permanently from ever being submitted by anyone on the site.
• Include a relevant, but enticing title and description. Make users want to click on your link, but do not mislead them into doing so. Remember to also submit your content to the appropriate category.
• Identify power users within your respective category. Does your website mostly discuss business-related content?  View content submitted to this Digg category and locate the users who are frequently getting their content to the front page of Digg.
• Interact with the power users you identified earlier. Digg their stories, comment on their submissions,  and Digg their comments.  Most will reciprocate the favor if they see you doing this frequently.
• Treat Digg like a community NOT a marketing website.  Work on building relationships on Digg by interacting with power users and other users regularly.  Try and have as many two-way discussions as possible.  As with most other Social Media marketing strategies, to achieve success you need to work on building relationships. This is one of the most important parts of being a successful Digg user.
• Friend relevant users.  Don’t go “friend crazy” and start friending random Digg users. Add users as friends who have been digging and commenting on your submissions and are also power users you are trying to target.  Additionally, when a user becomes a “fan” of yours on Digg, you should friend them back.
• Participate on Digg daily.  Look at the top 100 users on Digg and you’ll see that they are on the site daily.  Participating once a week (or even less) will have very little impact.

Reddit

• Work on your comment karma more than your link karma. There are two types of karma on Reddit, “link karma”, and “comment karma”.  When somebody upvotes your comment or submission it will increase your karma and will decrease karma with a downvote.  A high comment karma shows Reddit users that you treat the website like a community, not a marketing portal. This is essential in establishing your credibility.
• Make your comment meaningful. Don’t comment for the sake of commenting.  Read the submission before you comment and make sure what you have to say relates to the story. Writing something bland and generic like “good story” will only decrease your comment karma. Reddit is a very opinionated community so don’t be afraid to be upfront and honest with your comment.
• Submit other content besides your own. This might be even more important on Reddit than it is on Digg. As a general rule, you should mix your submissions between 20% self-promotional and 80% other content (if not less on the self-promotional side).
• Participate regularly. The “power user” effect isn’t nearly as much on Reddit as it is on Digg, but it still is important to regularly participate in order to establish your credibility.
• Submit to the appropriate “Reddit”. On Reddit, categories are called “Reddits”.  Any user can create a “Reddit” which means that you can submit content to thousands of different categories.  It takes a little while to get used to with where you should submit your content, but always make sure you choose a Reddit with at least a few thousand subscribers.
• Comment on new submissions. By the time a submission reaches the front page of Reddit, there are usually hundreds (if not thousands) of comments already. If you just focus on commenting on the front page, your comment will get lost in the clutter. By focusing on new Reddit submissions (located here: http://www.reddit.com/new) you will be one of the first people to comment on a submission. If that submission reaches the front page, it can significantly help with your comment karma.

With any Social Bookmarking website, your account should reflect YOU, the individual, not the company. Communities like to participate with a human, which means your profile should reflect who you are.  Also, it is highly recommended that you carefully observe the conversations / submission on Digg, Reddit, and other Social Bookmarking websites before you jump in.  It will allow you to better understand these communities.

I attended a great conference yesterday hosted by BDI that featured case studies from various businesses using Social Media.  This was my fourth BDI conference, and recommend that anyone who has an interest in Social Media attend future ones.  My only issue with the conference was the overkill of “Social Media and ROI”.  A typical conversation between two people pertaining to this went something like this:

Person 1: “You need to justify Social Media by showing ROI”

Person 2: “Ok, but how do you do that?”

Person 1: “I don’t know, but it’s important”

Remember when direct mailing, television, and radio were the dominant marketing methods? Businesses would typically utilize these media to increase brand awareness and ultimately increase sales.  How was ROI tracked for these businesses? Granted a lot of companies used coupon codes or different phone numbers to track campaigns, but were these effective in seeing full ROI?  Businesses in the past were willing to spend $100,000 on a few television spots without having a clue on what the outcome was.  Sure they might have seen an increase in sales and/or call volume, but could have it been from word of mouth or another marketing effort?

What has changed then? The Google Effect.  Google Analytics brought online revenue tracking into the mainstream.  If you installed E-Commerce tracking and a couple of snippets of code, you can effectively see where each of your sales came from online.  This proved extremely effective in analyzing ROI for your SEO and paid search campaigns.  Back when print and television advertising was in its prime, it was impossible to measure ROI like this so advertisers weren’t held accountable for it nearly as much.

Social Media (at least the  phrase anyway) came after SEO and paid search. When Social Media started to blow up in its popularity, marketers were already used to being able to measure ROI for their SEM campaigns.  Because this was possible, it had to be as well for Social Media right? Companies have been trying to show the ROI of Social Media through programs, formulas, custom coupon codes, tracking codes; even by assigning dollar values to Facebook fans and Twitter followers.  Nobody has been successful in fully tracking Social Media’s ROI.  Why? Because it’s impossible. Assuming that you can fully track Social Media’s ROI is like assuming that when you tweet a link to your company’s website that everybody who discovers your website through Twitter will always click on that link when they purchase a product from you.

I’ve listed below a couple of benefits of Social Media that cannot be tracked in terms of ROI. It’s impossible, yet there is no arguing that these are all important parts of any Social Media campaign.

• Resolving Consumer Complaints: Twitter, Facebook, forums, blogs, and countless other Social Media sites make it easy for unsatisfied customers to voice their complaints.  Since these complaints are public, businesses benefit the most from responding to these complaints publicly as well. When a company is successful in satisfying the complainer, it not only helps with their brand image, but might turn that “I’m never buying from you again” consumer to a repeat customer.   Unless you command that person to give you a heads up every time they buy from you again (which is just awkward), you cannot track the ROI of resolving consumer complaints.  Yet there is no arguing that these is a crucial part in any Social Media campaign. Ignoring these individuals is almost a guarantee that they’ll never buy from you again.

• Buying Behavior: Say, for example, that you discovered the clothing store “American Eagle” because you saw a Facebook contest they were launching.  Imagine that after you researched their website you end up becoming a frequent customer of theirs.  Every purchase (online anyway) that comes from you should show in e-commerce tracking as from Facebook right? Well, it doesn’t.   It wouldn’t make sense for you to click on their Facebook link every time you went to purchase product from them. Chances are you either typed in the direct URL or searched for the company name on Google, Bing, or Yahoo.  Facebook doesn’t receive credit for all of these sales even though they were responsible for turning you into a regular customer. The same goes for some first time purchases as well. People, by nature, will research more than one company to find the best price / value for whatever type of product they are looking for.  They might discover your website through Social Media and decide to buy from you after doing additional research, but the purchase might come from typing in the URL directly upon their second visit to your website.  Again, Social Media is responsible for the purchase, but will not receive credit for it (according to e-commerce tracking anyway).

• Brand Image: Social Media can be an effective strategy in shifting the image of your brand.  How you communicate as a brand on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, forums, etc. will reflect how consumers view perceive your brand (especially if you are reaching individuals on a wide scale).  If you effectively shift people’s perceptions of your brand to reflect that of the company’s goals, it is a definitely Social Media success, albeit one that is not trackable from an ROI standpoint. Remember when Jet Blue had that fiasco in February 0f 2007 at JFK airport when they kept people on planes for hours without taking off anywhere due to weather conditions? People went from associating Jet Blue with being a “cool airline” to one that didn’t know what they were doing by that one incident alone. Thousands of people swore they would never fly Jet Blue again because they apparently didn’t care about their customers. JetBlue used Social Media to create videos, blogs, tweets, etc. to illustrate why the incident occurred, why it won’t happen again, and why you should still remain a customer of theirs. It was effective in counteracting these negative associations with JetBlue’s brand, but if you were to ask JetBlue what the ROI was of this Social Media campaign they would not be able to tell you. However, they would say with 100% certainty that Social Media was crucial in shifting their brand image and keeping (and generating) customers.

These are only three examples, but it clearly shows that holding  a Social Media campaign accountable by its ROI performance doesn’t make much sense.   However, it’s important to show the value that your Social Media efforts have produced.  Value is a must for any marketing campaign even if it’s not ROI-based.  Below I’ve listed some metrics that could help guide you on assessing whether your Social Media campaign has been effective.

Branded Search Volume: Google has a tool online that allows you to measure monthly search volume for any keyword phrase.  An increase in search volume represents an increase in brand awareness.  If this is seeing a regular increase then you can fairly assess that your marketing efforts (Social Media and additional strategies) have been effective in building your brand.

Engagement Levels: I can buy a 100,000 Twitter followers and Facebook likes in a short period of time if I wanted to. I compare the value in this to buying traffic to a website using programs like Monster Pops that produce a 99.9999% bounce rate.  Twitter followers and Facebook likes are important to measure if you are growing your accounts by natural methods, but to truly see the value of these networks you need to look at engagement levels. Engagement refers to any interaction that takes places through your Social Media channels. This could be a retweet, reply, like, comment, etc.  If this metric continues to increase, it shows that people are becoming increasingly engaged with your brand which is extremely valuable from a branding perspective.  When analyzing this metric, it is important to weed out any spam comments or messages as they skew numbers.

Total Website Traffic: Analyzing traffic from Twitter, Facebook, etc. is useful, but doesn’t paint the full picture. Similar to the “buying behavior” bullet point I mentioned earlier, someone might discover a website through Social Media but will likely visit the website in the future via search or directly typing in the URL.  Because of this, site traffic should be analyzed as a whole instead of solely by referring traffic. However, if you are launching a blog it is important to analyze your blog traffic separately each month.

Value Added Benefits: These are benefits from Social Media that you simply can’t put into numbers. Was there a lot of negative complaints online that you resolved successfully through Social Media? Did somebody who is an influencer in the space positively mention your brand? Did you successful get your product listed on a bunch of blog posts via blog outreach? If Social Media has been providing noticeable value in these areas (and in others) it’s difficult to argue the benefit of it.

Impressions: Analyze impressions for all of your video and image content to see how many eyeballs you’ve successfully reached. These numbers will not be reflected in your analytics stats so it is imperative to keep track of these numbers regularly.

Again, as with any marketing campaign, you need to justify its worth, but when it comes to Social Media judging it by ROI will ultimately set you up for failure.

Without eyeballs, all internet marketing campaigns are doomed to fail.  It’s the number of eyeballs that the search engines use to create the most influential reporting metric, impressions.  This is a term that most people often don’t pay any attention to in the online marketing world.  Impressions are the foundation and backbone of every online marketing campaign.  Clicks and conversions are both related to impressions, because without impressions, any campaign will have zero clicks and zero conversions.

What exactly is an impression in Google?  Using a proprietary algorithm, Google offers all advertisers an inventory of available impressions which is based on keywords and groups of keywords searched for on Google.com.  Google then executes its algorithm in order to show the most relative advertisers and websites to that particular user who provides the eyeballs, which is then added to the total inventory in Google.   Google has created a metric based on this available inventory, it’s called Impression Share.  Their definition of impression share is “the percentage of impressions where your ads were shown out of the TOTAL available impressions in the market you were targeting.”

Impression Share is a great method to use in finding campaigns that are not converting very well due to a variety of reasons.  The information retrieved on these impression share reports can help describe what problems exist in a search campaign.  The report also details percentage of exact keyword matches, percentage of missed opportunities due to low rank (low average positions), and lost opportunities because of not enough budget.  All of these metrics can help diagnose an important problem in most paid search campaigns, QUALITY!  Low quality keywords, low quality creatives, and low quality bid management strategies, are important problems that once discovered will help improve the performance of a campaign.

There are many solutions to the lost impression share problem.  Some of those solutions include adding in the additional match types of converting keywords.  New match types, such as phrase and exact match, is one of the best methods of increasing impression share for a campaign.  Other solutions include increasing max bids for converting keywords and raising daily budgets of high volume campaigns.  Running an impression share report and understanding it value, is a great report for not only helping to improve a campaigns performance, but also gain additional market share in the Google sponsored ad space.

Many “Twitter Experts” have different theories when it comes to following people on Twitter. You have users like Guy Kawasaki who go by the “let’s follow everyone who follows me” rule and then you have other users like Conan O’Brien who followed nobody until he started following a random person (and subsequently changed her life).  There is no arguing that both of these individuals have seen great success on Twitter, but have both incorporated a different mindset when it came to following other users.  The question of which one is right and which one is wrong is difficult to answer since both have a substantial following base.  Granted, they were both well known before Twitter which makes it a lot easier for them  to gain  a high number of followers.  Either way, the question of “how should I go about following other users” doesn’t have a right or wrong answer as different strategies work for different people.  The messages being tweeted out and how you use Twitter to communicate with others is what truly determines your overall success.  That being said, I still follow some personal guidelines when it comes to following other users which I’m sharing below.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that following these guidelines will vastly improve your success on Twitter, but I’ve found this process to work for me the best.

1. Frequent Spammers Never Get Followed – If you want to send me an automated DM that promotes your business, fine.  If you send me ten of them, not fine.  If an account is flooding my Twitter stream with self-promotional garbage or my Direct Messages with the same type of content, they will be unfollowed, blocked, and reported for spam.   They are not contributing anything worthwhile and I could honestly care less whether or not they follow me back.  Plus, there tweets could potentially prevent me from seeing a worthwhile tweet.

2. Interesting Tweets = Follow: Might sound obvious, but if I find an account’s tweets interesting, I will follow that person.  Some users will avoid following these types of accounts if it doesn’t guarantee a follow back.  This kind of mindset misses the point of Twitter altogether. Twitter isn’t about growing followers, it’s about communicating, learning, and in some cases entertaining yourself.

3. Users Who Follow Me First (Varies from User to User): I follow users who follow me first generally 50% of the time.  If someone is following me because they seem like they are generally interested in what I have to tweet about, aren’t a spammer,  and are communicating (not just self promoting) I will almost always follow that person back.  If, however, their motives seem entirely selfish and have a tweet stream flooded with spam, I will usually not follow back.

4. Friends, Family, and “Real Life” Connections: Just like Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter can be an effective tool to connect with people you already know or have recently met.  If you met somebody at a networking event, I recommend finding them on Twitter, following them, and then sending them a quick hello.  In my opinion, this is the most effective (and simplest) way to grow your total number of quality followers.

5. Industry Experts: This can fall under guideline 2 (interesting tweets), but I follow a select few individuals I few as “industry experts” pertaining to Internet Marketing (especially Social Media and SEO).  This approach has helped to keep me abreast of the latest news and information pertaining to my industry and has proven Twitter’s value as an educational tool. What works even better is categorizing these users via Twitter lists or custom lists on TweetDeck.

6. Brand Ambassadors: If a user tweets positively about a business whose Twitter account I’m managing, I will not only reach out to that user, but will follow them as well.   This allows me to easily see any future brand mentions by this particular user.  There are many Twitter alert tools that exist that will automatically e-mail you every time your brand is mentioned via Twitter.  If someone misspells your brand, however, this will generally go undetected in a Twitter Alert service. I implement the same strategy for individuals negatively tweeting about a brand I’m managing as well.

As mentioned, there is no right or wrong when it comes to following other users on Twitter.  As long as you are effectively communicating and informing on Twitter, your followers will grow naturally.