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Microsoft has unveiled a number of new improvements to its adCenter platform, according to an article published by Search Engine Watch.
Changes have been made to campaign budget overview, mobile ad targeting and the character limit in ad descriptions.
The character description length has been increased by one – from 70 characters to 71 – to match the limit featured on AdWords; the expansion of the word limit is expected to make running PPC marketing campaigns on multiple platforms much easier.
Microsoft have also added a budget overview gadget to adCenter’s dashboard. This provides a simple overview of the campaign’s budget without the need to install extra plug-ins or programs.
Mobile targeting has also been improved; adCenter now has the ability to tailor campaigns to target specific mobile devices.
Campaigns can also be designed to target different types of phone, such as Windows Phones or iPhones, and tablets utilising operating systems such as iOS or Android.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Having been surrounded by rumours of an imminent sale, Yahoo! – a popular platform for search engine marketing initiatives – has seen the value of its shares drop by the most in two months, according to an article published by Bloomberg.
Share value dropped by 5.6 per cent – now with a value of $15.64 – representing the largest decrease since early August.
With rivals Google and Bing’s owner, Microsoft heavily rumoured to be looking at funding separate deals with other investors, Yahoo! is now said to be looking to sell its Asian assets – instead of selling the whole company.
Any potential sale of Asian assets would see the proceeds redistributed amongst current shareholders.
Co-founder of the search engine, Jerry Yang, speaking at the All Thing Digital Asia conference, stated: “The intent going in is not to put ourselves up for sale.”
“The intent is to look at all the options. There’s plenty of options for the board, and plenty of options for our shareholders to realize value.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
With speculation rife for months that Yahoo! is soon to be sold, Microsoft is rumoured to be working on another possible bid, this time with Silver Lake Partners and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board to buy the search engine, according to an article published by The Wall Street Journal.
The bid, which is currently being discussed, would see Microsoft put up the majority of the finance – around several billion dollars – with both Silver Lake Partners and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board contributing a lesser sum to the deal; while banks would arrange the rest of the financing.
However, insiders close to the matter have revealed that should the financing plan fall through or become too complex, the deal could be abandoned.
Microsoft previously made a bid for Yahoo! back in 2008.
The bid, worth around $44.6 billion, was rejected and since then Yahoo!’s share value has plummeted – losing nearly 44 per cent of their value.
Although a reasonably popular platform for search engine marketing ventures, any potential Microsoft bid for Yahoo! will be aimed at protecting the Search Alliance partnership that the two struck up following Microsoft’s failed bid.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
In a bid to improve financial losses and gain significant ground on Google, Bing is set to unleash an update that will see the search engine produce more relevant results much faster than ever before, according to an article published by Search Engine Watch.
Currently known as ‘Tiger’, the update is being worked on by both Bing and Microsoft engineers, and has undergone a gradual rollout since August.
It is expected that the rollout will be completed before the turn of the year, according to a spokesperson for Microsoft.
By using Solid State Disk (SSD) technology, Bing is expecting an improved level of efficiency – which could potentially improve search engine marketing.
Speaking in a video, general manager of Microsoft’s Search Technology Center in Asia, Yongdong Wang states: “In Tiger, we not only look at improved efficiency but also look at new ways of processing queries.”
Continuing, he added: “These new ways will enable scenarios where we can significantly improve the relevance of the results seen by users.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
For the last few days, there have been rumours that Bing has been running tests of paid PPC ads within the search results. Not placed off to the right or clearly highlighted at the top or bottom, but ‘camouflaged’ within the organic search results.
Now, this may prove to be an advertisers’ dream, but is likely to meet a backlash from consumers and some search agencies who have previously reacted badly to this type of ‘hidden advertising’ within the index. For search marketing agencies who work hard on organic results through SEO and search marketing, this testing of placement of paid ads in the middle of the SERPs will undoubtedly cause the SEO blogosphere to respond.
This is already a time of shifting sands for search marketing agencies, especially those who have been slow to realise the importance of social for both search engines and searchers, and with a growing focus on personalisation, dominating the SERPs is becoming ever harder. Losing one or two positions within the index to paid advertisers is more likely to cause bad feeling from those who believe the search engines need to operate a level playing field rather than favour those with large advertising budgets.
Those organic results are proving important to get return on investment and results for clients, and are where a good agency with experienced SEO staff can still outshine a mediocre one every time a search is returned.
Will Microsoft continue testing? And how will Google respond if its major competitor puts paid ads in the middle of the search results? Bing has been making advances on Google’s market share over the last year but still has less than half of that of Google. There is a fine line to tread in the search engine market between satisfying advertisers and investors, and
upsetting consumers, and only time will tell whether this is a canny move by Bing or a very bad idea.
The video chat feature that Facebook have announced in partnership with Skype is being rolled out today for millions of users. This is obviously a rolling program as we cannot yet see it yet, nor can we see the group chat facility that has been promised (more on that later).
However, having been using Google+ Hangouts avidly for the last week, we can already see a flaw in the Facebook offering. Hangouts allow, today, up to 10 people to enter a group video chat. One on one video chat in a Hangout is a simple matter by only inviting that one person!
From a business point of view, the Hangout option of up to 10 people is extremely attractive. Live webinars with 9 invitees, live focus groups with attendees from across the planet, online project collaboration between diverse teams and/or experts/consultants, share a Youtube video to highlight a point or to see what your competitors are putting online in video media, feedback from your customers, tech support through video. IN reality, the uses are endless and Facebook does not offer more than a limited spectrum of uses because of the 1 to 1 only choice.
Yes, we understand that for businesses using Facebook already, the closed space that is currently G+ means that many of your customers are not in there. Yet. But the field trial is not going to remain closed for long. And when your customers start moving to Google +, which undoubtedly they will because it is Google, then you need to be ready to make the most of it.
Google has played the canny marketing game it often does – using scarcity and hence DESIRE as a driver for adoption. However, there is a very practical reason why G+ is closed – much of it is definitely not wrinkle free yet, and whilst much is intuitive, there are features which will flummox your average home user. And those home users = customers for the businesses which generate Google’s billions. So it must work for those people before the doors are fully open.
Focusing on the positives of Facebook’s video chat, it has long been believed that video would be the ‘killer app’ on the Net and not just video content from Hollywood etc. The telephone took off when it stopped being used to transmit content in broadcast mode (songs on a Sunday as I recall was the earliest use!). When users were allowed to make their own content by talking to each other, the telephone became a ‘must have’; so the advent of sufficient bandwidth allowing video chat to be possible, (with broadband becoming more affordable and accessible) has meant that the opening of channels to allow that video content to be created have become possible.
Allowing everyone to be able to talk to anyone who they have friended on Facebook opens a huge raft of possibilities. For businesses, the most obvious use is customer services. Here is a direct line to the company you want to talk to, and you can see the person at the other end. This gives a boost in confidence to the consumer, and businesses should be rapid adopters of the opportunities this presents. Although this does mean that any company will need to have customer support staff who are comfortable using this technology and have the time to attend to video chat requests.
Now, on to this improved chat. The actual announcement is a nothingness – it’s just group text chat. This has been in existence for such a very long time outside of FB that the announcement falls flat really. Its use for businesses may allow another level of open, two way communication – which businesses really need to come to terms with in this new era of so-me – but it is no ways a ground breaker as Skype conference calls with the added chat facility have been around for sooo long, as well as a zillion other text chat options. This is no ground breaker and in itself simply re-inforces the feeling of fear that this entire press conference communicated.
Overall Summary – the quality of the video chat seems to be better at this time than Google+ Hangouts, but G+ is a trial and Google have not thrown the resources at it yet whilst in test mode. Multi-person video chats are the killer app, not one to one. The group text chat means nothing.
BUT, businesses need to start thinking how they are going to manage the human resources to back up their presence on social media. There are going to be two major social networks now, and whilst G+ looks like it might be the choice of the more techy audience (for now at least), the reality is that in a few short months, any business will need to be on both, whoever your target audience is.
This means that whilst metrics are important, business behaviour will need to be far more pro-active and imaginative about how to engage. Customers already complain regularly about business failure to engage with them using the tools that the customers are using eg Twitter, FB, etc and being in broadcast rather than dialogue mode has the potential to be a reputation killer. We all know what happened to Ratner and understanding how to communicate in and with the public using social media is going to become a core business skill.
Social media is no longer an ignorable sales, marketing and promotion mechanism. The big players are evolving their partnerships ready for one enormous battle for users – Skype + Microsoft + Facebook vs Google + their constant buy-outs of partner technologies, services and apps to give them an ever-extending portfolio. You cannot as a business pick a side, so you will need to learn to work with and on both of them.
Microsoft is hoping to rival Google by joining forces with Chinese search giant Baidu.
The firm has signed an agreement with Baidu to provide English-language search results, using Microsoft’s Bing engine.
Baidu has grown massively through its Chinese language search options, and views a partnership with Microsoft as key to expanding into multilingual search.
Market commentators said the move would seriously weaken Google’s position, as it currently has a stranglehold on English-language search in China. Google has already axed it’s Google.cn engine.
According to Bloomberg, Jake Li, from Guotai Junan Securities in Shenzen, said: “This is not good news for Google. Most Chinese internet users currently prefer Google’s English-language search results over Baidu, whose service will be improved by the partnership with Microsoft.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Here are a few reasons you cannot ignore Empire Avenue. This is some of what I have discovered after almost two weeks playing on the latest social media hot property.
In case you don’t know, Empire Avenue allows people across the world to buy and sell shares in individuals, brands and businesses. Your share price is based entirely on your social media activity, both within the site, and also on an ever-increasing variety of social media properties, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Tumblr, blogs and so on.
It could be seen as a game, but it is also much more than that.
Empire Avenue launched around a year ago, in beta, to a small group of friends and family of the Canadian developers. It has obviously undergone some fairly radical changes during that time; including a major reset which returned everyone’s share prices, which they had worked extremely hard to increase, to 10eaves.
(The virtual currency on the site is Eaves, which you can earn by carrying out a multitude of tasks – from joining and commenting in discussion groups, earning badges, adding new content, buying and selling shares, and generally getting engaged with the site and the social media sites which it links to.)
Empire Avenue only really began to come to the notice of the social media world a few months ago when individuals such as Robert Scoble (aka Scobleizer) began “playing” and then interviewed the man behind the Empire Avenue concept, Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana
I joined because there is never any point in hearing about something new and not looking into it. And some of these applications cannot be assessed easily in just a single visit when you have half an hour to spare. Empire Avenue needs a small amount of dedication to really get to grips with what it could prove capable of – for businesses, for brands, for internet marketing agencies, for individuals looking to network.
So, after two weeks here are a few thoughts about its potential value to YOU.
Firstly, if you are not actively engaged in social media by now, you a) should be and b) EAv (as it is known on twitter) will help you to see where your efforts may be better co-ordinated and effective.
Your profile and interests offer you the chance to describe to passers-by (and potential investors) what you and your business is all about. You can go into detail using the interests section, and this offers you a great chance to make the most of your SEO keyword list.
By joining up all of your social network accounts – Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Tumblr, Flickr, youtube, RSS Feeds from your social bookmark accounts, etc – you become a better prospect to invest in. BUT, this action alone will help you see where you are missing a few tricks to get onto as much social media real estate as possible, and to populate these sites with VALUABLE CONTENT for your target audience.
As you can see from this screenshot, the boxes on the right show the scores out of 100 for social networks. This would immediately infer that more work is required on the Facebook fanpage, LinkedIn, Flickr and Youtube to bring those accounts into line with Twitter, the Facebook profile and Empire Avenue activities. This is 100% true that those accounts are under-used and partially neglected – these are my own personal accounts and I never seem find time to upload videos or photos.
So, if you have only one video on your YouTube channel – isn’t it about time you made another?! If you have no photos on Flickr, why not add your entire product catalogue, add keyword rich descriptions, and tag them all?
All of these actions will also help with your search engine optimisation efforts. So, it’s a win-win.
Are you using an agency to do your social media marketing? Or using in-house resources? Once all your accounts are linked up, you have a great, free, third party tool to assess how well those actions are working. Eav assigns a score out of 100 for the content and engagement of your activities, and this is very valuable for any business to see whether your social media campaigns are being effective.
If you are using a social media agency to carry out your campaigns, this is a very simple mechanism for checking whether activities are being carried out regularly, and are capturing the necessary target audience and engaging with them. It need not be the only tool – there are also sites such as Klout.com and PeerIndex.com which help you measure effectiveness and authority as well. Empire Avenue is just one of many options to measure your social collateral, but it is a fun and easy way to do so, whether you are an internet marketing client or an agency providing social media marketing services.
The final comment has to be about the networking and exposure possibilities. Just having a presence on the site does give you a chance to engage with others in your industry, in your area, and whilst it is still new and fresh, it allows you a unique opportunity to talk to some of the biggest brands and names in the business. After all, it is not every day you get a message like this:
Or this:
More to follow soon as more of the intricacies and subtleties of the application reveal themselves.
It has to be time to ask – is this innovation or are they all following the cloud crowd?
An interesting social media cartoon has surfaced today….implying that each of the CEOs of the top social media players are watching, and imitating, their competitors far too closely.
Is it accurate? Well, without access to each CEO, it can only be guesswork, but are we not all beginning to feel that there is a deal of toe-stepping and encroaching on each other’s territories going on?
In fact, aren’t many of the social media worlds beginning to look remarkably similar? Even SXSW failed to throw up a clear winner in innovation this year.
As a business looking to use social media for your internet marketing campaigns, it may be worth considering whether during the next year these companies are going to become ever closer, whether one will find a unique selling point, or whether 2 years of similarities may force a new player out of the box?
And if they are all much of a muchness, where do you put your budget if there is barely a cigarette paper to fit between them over the coming months?
Your thoughts would be welcomed.
The horrendous events in Japan have created an unexpected problem for Microsoft and their search engine, Bing. Whilst trying to be generous and offering financial aid to Japan, someone in the marketing department thought it would be an idea to publicise the donation on Twitter, with a promise of a $1 donation per Retweet of the original message, up to a maximum of $100,000.
Whilst many Twitter users have been happy to RT, the inevitable has happened – the Twittersphere has erupted at the thought that Microsoft are attempting to cash in, and we are seeing a tsunami of bad PR.
Too many people feel that this is a somewhat crass moment to seek publicity, especially considering that the latest news appears to show that possibly many thousands of people have lost their lives. The growing feeling on Twitter is that Microsoft should just have donated the money, without seeking to promote the search engine at the same time as people are dying.
This is not the first time that a large company has attempted to cash in on a global crisis or breaking news story. It surely won’t be the last. But it should act as a salutory reminder to all marketing departments that it only takes 140 characters to create an unholy PR mess that could damage a brand reputation for a long time.
