Alert Blog Reviews

Over the last few days I’ve been playing around with Mobypicture.com and more precisely their Geo-tagged picture map feature. I’ve found a way to have a map embedded on any blog that automatically centres on the last picture uploaded. What’s more it’s all done from a mobile phone… Perfect for any Travel Blog… Other features include: Micro-blogging and blogging brought together. Automatic posting to twitter and Facebook etc. One simple upload from any GPS enabled phone perfect for travellers on the road. Centres on last uploaded picture. Have a look at our Geo-Tagged Picture map. (might still have issues with Internet explorer, that’s not the map, it’s my limited code knowledge). Here’s How to do it: Sign up for free account at www.Mobypicture.com. Connect it with your social network services. i.e. Twitter and Facebook. Download the mobile app or set your favourite (Mobypicture has it’s own apps but I use Twibble ). Upload some Geo-tagged pictures from a phone or computer and it will put them in your stream, post them on your MobyMap (if you click on your Username on the right sidebar you will see a link that says “Launch MobyMap”) and update your selected social networks. FinallyPaste this code where you want the map to appear on a page on your blog or website:

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Embed a Geo-tagged Twitter Picture Map in Any Blog

At the LeWeb conference in Paris Twitter is busy making sure that all the developments in the real-time search and social media world aren’t just coming from the Googleplex. Maybe it’s the end of the year rush or it’s the need to create excitement going into 2010 since 2009 was a rough year for many. Whatever the reason the news is fast and furious inthe space in general. Twitter’s busy letting the world in on the sheer volume of apps that have been developed for the service and how they are going to help foster more growth in the near future. TechCrunch is convering the event and tells us Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver just took the stage at LeWeb a couple of minutes ago, and shared some announcements with the audience about the future of the platform and the effect this will have on the ecosystem. He also shared a milestone for the company: Sarver said 50,000 registered applications to date have been built using Twitter APIs. The roadmap ahead: Transparency : “we need to be more public about our policy and intentions” Communication : “we need to be out there and let our developers know what’s going on” Utility : “we need to keep providing our robust APIs and enable third-party developers to thrive” Profitability : “when our partners succeed, we succeed” (more details coming early 2010) Of course, since this is Twitter most people will laser in on the P word (profitability). Some of the significant ‘details’ around these areas is that everyone will have full access to the data stream in 2010 (what that actually means is TBD). Look for a new website for developers with dashboards and the like for the development community. Also, as a sign that the development of apps is truly a big deal there will be a Twitter developer conference in 2010 called Chirp in San Francisco next year The conference, which will be geared towards developers, is likely to be similar in some ways to Facebook’s F8 conference that is held each year in San Francisco. Not too many details were given but there is a landing page up already for the event (which is scheduled to take place sometime in 2010). So Twitter continues to flourish and develop to try to handle the continued growth despite some concern about visitor fall off recently. I suspect that some of the developers are the very reason for this ‘concern’ as many people access Twitter through third party apps to begin with and those growing numbers are not tracked by these number crunching entities. Looks like 2010 is going to be another big year for Twitter.

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Twitter’s App Nest Is Big and Growing

While Google’s CEO is experimenting with the wonders of Twitter (which by the way has been switched to @ericschmidt and has over 10k followers so adjust accordingly) the mothership, Google, is announcing some new search additions that are, well, timely. Today Google made the announcements from the Computer History Museum in Mountain view. The official Google blog tells us Be sure to check out the video there as well. First, we’re introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page. Wow, this has been a rough day for SEO’s for sure. First, personalization is made the norm by Google for all users and now more front page real estate is threatened by the real time search offer. Of course, this type of offering will be more useful in some areas since searches like “injection die mold” won’t have much current activity around it (or will it?). There is a lot to digest with this new offering and it looks pretty comprehensive. I think it’s better for Google to tell you so here you are. Click on “Latest results” or select “Latest” from the search options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling right on Google. You can also filter your results to see only “Updates” from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others. Latest results and the new search options are also designed for iPhone and Android devices when you need them on the go, be it a quick glance at changing information like ski conditions or opening night chatter about a new movie — right when you’re in line to buy tickets. And, as part of our launch of real-time on Google search, we’ve added “hot topics” to Google Trends to show the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time. With this improvement and a series of other interface enhancements, Google Trends is graduating from Labs. Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we’re announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago. You can go to Google Trends and click on a hot topic to test out these new features which will be available in English over the next few days. This addition to Trends also marks its graduation from Google Labs. Sniff, sniff, our little application is growing up so fast sob, sob. So as to try to out do themselves, Google also announced mobile search changes as well. We have also made some new strides with mobile search. Today’s sensor-rich smartphones are redefining what “query” means. Beyond text, you can now search by a number of new modes including voice, location and sight — all from a mobile device. So we’ve been working to improve technology that takes advantage of these capabilities. Well, today could prove to be a watershed day in search as Google is now changing the game in a way that only Google can. What does this mean to the way you do business? How to you see these changes impacting your SEO practice? Is this a true game-changer or just another step along the way? Let’s hear your thoughts.

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Google Announces New Offerings in Real-Time, Mobile and Social Search

I’ve been a contributing analyst for the eConsultancy/ cScape Customer Engagement Survey over the past few years. The 2010 edition has just landed and I thought I would share with you the data that jumped out at me. Email Newsletters Fading? The 2nd Customer Engagement Survey saw businesses focusing their efforts on using email newsletters to improve customer engagement. An incredible 69% of companies stated that they had measured a tangible improvement through their e-newsletter campaigns so it was not a surprise that 59% planned to invest heavily in email marketing by the time we came to the third survey. By contrast, investment in social networks – such as Facebook – was down on the list of priorities with only 36% of companies planning to increase their investment in that area. Social Networks See Huge Investment So, what happened now we are on survey four and looking at 2010? Those that took a chance and invested in social networks saw a big return on investment. For companies, email newsletters still rated as the tactic offering the highest tangible improvement (67%) but a whopping 44% – almost double the percentage from 2009 – have discovered that social networks helped increase their online customer engagement. That return on investment has clearly caught the attention of both companies and their agencies. In 2010, the survey predicts that 61% of company executives will be increasing their focus on social networks , while agencies are even more bullish, expecting their clients to spend more on social networking (66%) than even email newsletters (41%). Twitter’s King of Engagement Perhaps the most stunning statistic is the percentage of companies that plan to invest in Twitter as a channel for customer engagement. In last year’s report, Twitter barely registered with survey participants with just 7% of companies realizing improved customer engagement from Twitter, hence only 13% planned to invest in Twitter in 2009. What a difference a year makes! Twitter has seen massive growth and companies are scrambling to make the micro-blogging channel a key part of their customer engagement efforts. In fact, with 35% of companies seeing an improvement in their customer engagement from Twitter in 2009, almost 44% of companies plan to increase their investment in Twitter in 2010. That’s a three-fold improvement over last year! Engagement = Conversations What conclusions can we draw from this? Well, it’s apparent that companies are realizing that customers expect engagement to be a two-way dialogue. Email newsletters are a great way to keep customers updated but they don’t really engage them. Instead, companies are seeing measurable benefits of actually having a conversation with their customers be it via Facebook, Twitter or whatever, making them willing to invest more of their marketing/PR budgets to reap the fruits of that engagement. Want to get your hands on all the data? Get your copy of the cScape/Econsultancy report!

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Customer Engagement Survey Shows Twitter is King of ROI

Two years ago, Microsoft bought a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240M . In exchange, Microsoft Live (and now Bing) provided web search for the most popular social network in the world. Two months ago, the two companies entered another deal with Bing to integrate public updates on the social network into Bing search results on real time searches. Okay, this time, it’s not really that big a deal, but Bing and Facebook are here yet again , reminding us all how buddy-buddy they are (and thus how cool Bing is, really, guys, can I play now?). As part of their continuing $100M marketing blitz , Bing is running a contents with Facebook. The theme is “hometown pride.” (I’ve got this great picture of my son. . . .) and the winning image will be featured as the Bing background on January 6. This is similar to a contest run this summer. Maybe this time they can break 100,000 Facebook fans. What do you think? Will Bing’s efforts net them more popularity?

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Bing Wants In with the In Crowd

At the rate Yahoo is dumping its own technology and partnering with others, the only thing left that will be “Yahoo built” will be these bloody big pens: A little over a year since Yahoo announced the expansion of Yahoo Profiles, the search engine, portal, social network , we-don’t-know-what-we-are company is apparently ready to ditch its own social network aspirations and jump into bed with Facebook : It will enable them to connect with Facebook friends on Yahoo!, view a feed of their friends’ related activity on Yahoo!, and share content—such as photos from Flickr or comments on news stories—with all of their friends on Facebook. The content that consumers share with Facebook friends will then create a loop that drives visitors back to Yahoo!. OK, so you can’t blame Yahoo for making this move. After all, social networking is Facebook’s strength, and not Yahoo’s. But, I’m starting to worry what Yahoo has left to call it’s “strength.” When your business is supported by the strength of other companies, it becomes very easy for your foundation to be undermined by them.

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Yahoo Partners with Facebook, Plans to Focus on Selling Big Pens?

When most people hear the word exploit they automatically think that you are doing something unethical or illegal.  However, exploit actually means to take advantage of a situation or to use or develop something in order to gain a benefit.  Thus, exploit is actually the perfect verb to describe how you should approach the online business because you want to take advantage of the fact that the web offers easy access to millions of potential consumers and you want to develop the recession proof business venue to produce high sales figures.  The only thing you need to know now is how you can exploit the online business world in four easy steps, and believe it or not it’s not that hard! Find your target audience- First off; you need to discover where your target audience is located on the web and what their interests are.  It is much easier to see results from your advertising and marketing campaigns if you start by aiming them directly at the crowd of web browsers who are most likely to purchase your product or service.  You can conduct your own research to find their tastes or simply hire a consultant, but you will see much higher sales profits if you go out and find them instead of waiting for them to come to you. Utilize social media- The largest advertising tool on the internet right now is also conveniently very low cost and easy to use, social media websites.  Social networking is becoming the ‘IT’ thing in pop culture even more so every day since you are not somebody until you have a Facebook and Twitter account.  Take advantage of the easy exposure and free advertising venue via status updates by joining and offering users easy access to your company.  Additionally, this is a great way to collect consumer feedback which can help you improve your business in the future. Develop your website- If you had an actual store you would never let the door way and front side look as if it were ancient, so why would you leave your website looking this way?  Your homepage on your website is the first thing that people see when they head over to take a look at your product or service.  In this increasingly technical age people are highly critical of website design, webpage usability, and overall current information.  If you are lacking any of these elements potential consumers will move on to another website that has them, even if your product is great.  So remember, your sale starts with your homepage, not with the actual product introduction. Delegate!- Finally, this is the key to any group project or large business project, in order to accomplish all of your business objectives you cannot be afraid to delegate.  The truth of the matter is that people who try to handle every aspect of their business on their own are doomed to fail because there is not enough time in one day to handle mundane tasks and still have time left for future development and expansion.  Hire a virtual assistant or outsource some of your smaller tasks and web tasks that are outside your area of expertise and you will be surprised with how much time to put your energy where it really counts, into the future progression of your business!

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How to exploit the online business world in four easy steps