SEO World

 Only it’s not good. In fact it’s even worse than Fine Gael’s desperately bad Valentine card. I’m not going to even link to it. It’s just too dire. It was the worst online effort in #GE11 so far. But then the Green’s did something worse – even worse than even not doing anything at all.

I was in the middle of gathering my thoughts about the challenges facing internet businesses in Ireland and the complete lack of them on anybodies radar. The challenges I’m referring to aren’t about driving traffic or recessionary but a look at the wider challenges of a developing but diverse Irish Internet scene. Gateway providers, retailers, enablers and consumers are faced with a growing range of problems that are not being addressed or even heard of at a national and political level.

But, despite these the Green Party has decided to be completely unhelpful. They’ve suggested that we tax data usage on the internet. Just trying to do that would be an exercise in futility but it would seriously damage our international competitiveness, our fledging internet businesses and our campaigns to make internet access more universally acceptable (and this after we’re already behind). I’m shocked and slightly outraged to be honest. Cynically, I’ve wondered if this was a bit of a political “smoke screen” – designed to create a diversion – but why would you want to divert people by destroying your own name? Something they learnt while in power perhaps,…

They suggest that this would be a good replacement for the TV Licence. Granted, the TV licence should go. Afterall, it subsidises RTE’s overpaid staff – allowing them to charge less for advertising (pushing more effort on the independent channel TV3) while pretending to carry the voice of the national as the “national broadcaster”. Got to love the recent Edelman Trust Barometer that highlights that Google is now more trusted than RTE by the public as a news source. And its not even a news source…

It does highlight the plain ignorance and almost contempt that Irish politicians treat the internet with. Comparing a data download tax with the TV Licence assumes that data is nothing more than idle 21st century consumerism – digital “Fair City” if you will.

Ireland’s future is intertwined with the Internet – it will either take us into the future as product developers and technology owners or it will drag us there, enslaved because we failed to identify, adopt and embrace it.

————–
Source
SEO Blog

Bing has announced that they have created a whole new level of Facebook integration into their search results and have "designed a new way to experience search, focusing on great design, task completion, instant answers, and vertical categories like shopping and travel to help you make decisions faster."

Bing states in their blog post that Research tells us that 90% of people seek advice from family and friends as part of the decision making process. This "Friend Effect" is apparent in most of our decisions and often outweighs other facts because people feel more confident, smarter and safer with the wisdom of their trusted circle.

In October 2010, Bing formed a partnership with social networking giant, Facebook that would allow Bing to use the Facbook social data and integrate them into Bing search queries. Initially, Bing was slow to integrate the data. In February of this year, Bing took a step towards more complete integration but still was not utilizing the full potential of the data that was available to them.

With the new update from Bing, search results can now be tailored to your Facebook profile based on your friends and even the collective Facebook network (not your FB friends).

Some of the biggest changes are:

• Receive personalized search results based on the opinions of your friends by simply signing into Facebook.
• You can see what your Facebook friends "like" across the Web
• Incorporate the collective know-how of the Web into your search results, and begin adding a more conversational aspect to your searches.
• You can quickly see what your friends like and are sharing.
• Showing which of your friends liked the search results given by Bing via Facebook.
• Bing will promote search results that are "liked" by your friends to the front page of the Bing personalized search results.

Google has used social media as a ranking signal for many months and continue to attempt to incorporate social media signals into their search results. Until Google has a popular social networking platform from which to draw data from, it looks as though Bing has taken the lead in personalized searches by utilizing Facebook social media data.

————–
Source
Beanstalk’s SEO News Blog

Dan Rose, VP of partnerships and platform marketing at Facebook gave an April 6 keynote address at the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit and he touched on a couple of companies who are seeing a measurable increase in revenue by being on Facebook.

Rose said marketers that are seeing results from integrating Facebook social components on their websites include American Eagle Outfitters, Levi’s, OpenTable, ShoeDazzle, Ticketmaster, Travelocity and Benefit Cosmetics.

American Eagle implemented a “like” button on its site and found Facebook users it tracked spent 57% more than non-Facebook customers. Rose said Levi’s implemented “like” buttons on all product pages last year, and more than 50% of its Cyber Monday traffic came from Facebook.

Benefit Cosmetics is allowing customers to add product reviews on their Facebook page. Those reviews flow to the Benefit website through the Bazaarvoice SocialConnect Suite platform. Within two weeks, he said, 80% of Benefit’s products were reviewed and rated on Facebook.

Ticketmaster has a new feature that allows concert ticket buyers to tell friends about the purchase on Facebook. Through tracking, Ticketmaster says that it receives $ 5.30 per link shared on Facebook in revenue. At first glance that it not a big number. But when you realize that there are hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, then that $ 5.30 per link suddenly looks very impressive.

“We now have a direct link between sharing on Facebook and revenue generation at e-commerce sites,” Rose was quoted as saying in the New York Times. “This is word of mouth on steroids,” Rose said, according to Direct Marketing News. “This is how you take advantage of the social Web.”

 

————–
Source
Social Media Optimization