Google want to know where you are surfing, what you are reading in your email, what you are buying, and even what brand of toilet shop you use, just by looking at your use of Google’s services. So, the more offerings Google provide, the more of your information they can harvest. The more of your information Google can harvest, the better Google is going to be able to target you with pertinent ads (yes, Adsense!) – this is how Google make it’s money via Adwords. Google is not only a search company or an ISP. They are a new media advertising company that sells targeted ads to its customers. Google collects every piece of information about you that you let it. It is not necessarily a bad thing, as the risk of privacy invasion is pretty minimal – who can sell you anything if you are an adamant!

It does not stop there, it is also gaining huge share in areas like Document Processing, News Delivery, Maps and GIS, Business Apps, Video Content, Buzz, and more. I am not a die-hard Microsoft fan, but, the question is, if Microsoft can repeat with Google what it did with Netscape i.e. with its marketing and technology power. Not an easy task, with Microsoft facing it’s own battle everywhere. Earlier Google had issues in China and more recently officials in Spain, France & Czech Republic announced plans to investigate Google’s collection of data from wireless networks, raising the likelihood that it could face sanctions in Europe. These may very well be covert PR stunts of a unique kind or may not. Well, this is a risk an investor is always taking in the Google World, isn’t it? It’s paying well also! What do you think?

- Author is the Chief SEM Architect with Solution Point

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So, what a small retailer to do in this ultra competitive market environment? Well, staying close to your customers is probably more important than ever. We think that using social networking to build communities of customers and then reaching out to them with relevant and frequent communications holds a lot of promise, especially for smaller retailers. They should be able to execute better than their larger competitors.

For one thing, they don’t have to deal with the internal organizational bureaucracy and delays that can hinder many larger companies when deciding how CRM / social networking programs should be executed. And, the use of social networking offers significant opportunities to reduce marketing costs, which will help smaller retailers overcome the challenge of their larger competitors’ greater financial resources.

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[Posted by Tom Cummings.]

We recently published WebTrack review of how major companies are using Twitter. Over a span of three days in
October, we tracked 30 marketers on Twitter to see how they named and branded
their accounts, how often they tweeted, how they interacted with other
Twitter users, and more. We didn't just study the most popular accounts on Twitter –
instead, we looked for a broad sample of accounts across key industries (including retail, travel, financial services, auto, and CPG).

For the most part, brands get the basics right. 
The large majority interact with followers (more than three-quarters of the brands we tracked reply and retweet). And most fill their streams with a steady flow of relevant content (80% tweet at least daily). We especially liked seeing companies go beyond traditional marketing messages – like when State Farm promotes fire alarm safety or when Ford gives behind-the-scenes perspective on their new engineering processes.

But while most get the basics right, many branded Twitter accounts still fall short
on some key points.  For instance, it’s surprisingly difficult to
find the appropriate account for many brands.  Neither Google nor Twitter search offer an ideal way to find a company's official account – and often, a company's official primary account isn't the most active or the most followed.

We were also surprised that only half of the accounts we
reviewed “validate” their Twitter page.  It's not enough to link from a Twitter account to a corporate page – those corporate pages must also link back to
the account to prove that the account is official.

We like how Whole Foods – which runs more than 100 official accounts – handles both of these problems: They keep their primary account name simple and searchable (@WholeFoods) and link from that account to a list of all their other accounts. Other marketers should follow suit – because it’s up to them to prove the authenticity of their account
(no matter how many followers they have) and to make it easy for fans to find the right account to follow.

Clients can read more examples and findings in the full report. In the meantime, we’d love to hear how your brand is using Twitter, how you let
fans know about the account, and what other tips you have for best leveraging the power of Twitter.

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Start early! You should already be listening to what consumers say they want for Christmas. See what the buzz is on budget/economy conversations as well as product or brand specific ones. This way, when you do start talking, you’ll be saying the right things and answering the right questions. You should also already have looked at last years’ search patterns and started bidding on the appropriate keywords for this season. Don’t forget to send some of that traffic to your social media as well as your own home page.

Enable better functionality through social! The New York Times wrote about Best Buy’sholiday social media. Not only do they have Twelpforce on Twitter, they have new Facebook features that let friends ask each other what they should buy from Best Buy’s product catalog.

Work with your valued partners! Mall conglomerate Jones Lang LaSalle will be tweeting on behalf of their retail partners to let customers know about last minute or unpublicized sales throughout the holiday season. Check out your own partner’s plans and see what you can do to maximize their success.

If you have any social media plans that will put you ahead of your competition, let me know, I’ll be writing about who I think the winners are this December.

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Plug Your Blog: Embed your blog feed into an ad unit. Include a call-to-action in the unit to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Add Media to the Ad: Advertise new podcasts or vodcasts as they become available. Include part or all of the podcast in the ad unit. Promote links to subscribe to your feeds in addition to offering individual download links.

Bring it All Together: Package all your social media channels — blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, comments feeds — into one comprehensive widget. Allow people to share it on their blog or social network of choice. Seed the widget by running it as a shareable ad on relevant paid media.

Posted by Sally Cole on February 17, 2009 5:42 PM

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Among the most popular ones in India are Real Estate Times (for real estate) and India City Pages (for India specific information). Coming up are social networks for jobs and career, politics, insurance, health care, education and many others with common technology platform and niche user-base.

There are several reasons for the more targeted approach to social networking and the major one is now users prefer to connect with people with whom they share common interests, such as hobbies or professional associations, other than knowing somebody who knows somebody who is listed as a MySpace friend. The sites that commend the highest figures per ad impression are typically those that can tell the advertiser something about their audiences’ likely spending habits. Sites focused on shared interests allow advertisers to better target their messages.

For example, if a company wants to market Rs. 2 crores worth golf villas, would it seem more worthwhile to entice the eyes of millions of heavily under-financed, under-graduates on Facebook or MySpace? Or would it be better to seek clicks from a smaller supply of people, such as Real Estate Times, the total membership of which may be low, but many of them are likely to be far more interested – and able – to make such a luxurious expense? Moreover, such niche networks are managed by REAL professionals – as the lesser mortals prefer something very general, which are TOO easy to build and manage.

Our new media trend analysis and consumer insight studies show that marketers are now willing to look at the general demographic of a membership site or portal before purchasing ad spots, don’t be surprised to see even more niches getting social networked! With global downturn and squeezing ad budgets, media planners can go any length to put their bucks right on target, avoid gimmicks and noise.

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Advanced link building: Though everyone in the SEO world knows about exchanging reciprocal links with other relevant sites from the same niche but contextual link building is a new SEO strategy that is highly appreciated by web spiders.

Online word-of-mouth advertising: You may compare contextual link building with the word-of-mouth advertising offline. This is because this method of link building provides information to the readers and at the same time recommends your name without any selfish motive (of getting reciprocal links). This is the reason why such links are the most effective and often gets your website the topmost search engine rankings. Adding anchor text in the post thereby helps a great deal in this regard.

This powerful tool is a division of the link popularity strategy that comes under the wider SEO umbrella of the Internet marketing. Hence, you must hire an affordable SEO Company to bring your website into the limelight through contextual link building campaigns.

SEO firms get other websites and blogs to write relevant information for keyword topics that relates to your website. Not to forget, the main motive is not merely to disseminate information but also to add a relevant inbound link to your website in the post.

Blogging network: Most professional SEO companies maintain their own blogging network on a wide variety of niches. Not only this, the various well-promoted blogs are listed on different IPs for an added advantage. This is one of the most cost effective methods of website promotion.

Another striking thing is that the backlinks of websites and blogs that discuss about your niche keywords and incorporates link to your site are themselves very strong that also ranks them higher in search engine rankings. Hence, your website also gets the advantage of the strong backlinks of these blogs from various relevant websites.

Needless to say, make sure that the content posted by the company that links back to your website is plagiarism free lest all your efforts are waste. Adding anchor text in the post thereby helps to enhance the relevance of the blog post. Another essential thing that will lift up the spirits of webmasters is that these are permanent links.

Contextual building within the website: It is very much possible that while some pages of your website has many inbound links, others may hardly have one or two inbound links. A Professional SEO company also makes efforts to strengthen these weaker pages as the contextual links are created in the content of strong pages that links to the weaker pages and pass their link juice and influence.

The best approach is to go for a bigger contextual link building package and get your blogposts made over the month. It’ll show the best results as Google and other search engines will find it natural, slow and ethical. So, do not wait any longer and get professional SEO experts to back up your website with powerful contextual link building service.

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There is a growing rush to join social networks all around both highly popular websites and small niche and local sites (like IndiaCityPages.com), online consumers are moving towards establishing connections in some form or another. Networking trends has brought millions of advertising money to these networks. The ultimate sign of success is when you make it out via one of these sites – but keep sailing if you think you have a shot at the next exit.

The big question is, how to build a user base, when users join social networks only when their friends are already using them. Mike Speiser, who founded talent competition social network Bix and sold it to Yahoo. He said everyone at the start-up to send a link to the site to everyone in their address books. Sure, there is no silver bullet for overnight success.
Social networks brings a sense of connection for people online. I remember one of the things I loved to do when Yahoo first came out was chat. I would go into chat rooms all the time, and it was new and it was fun. Although the need for human interaction online has always been there, however, the realization of that need did not take place until emergence of many other players. They did not provide the type of social networking that you and I do today but it did provide a way for people to reconnect, email and chat with each other. The evolution of online social networking has reached its realization with sites like Facebook and MySpace breeding millions of users.

Who are these millions? Why are they gathering on such networks? Well..

1. They lack time and are getting busier. Such networks allow them to do it at their time.
2. Lack of face-to-face networking lowers ambitions and allows people to be more open, maybe.
3. Sharing with people and learning from each other in a fast paced environment.
4. Social networks that are user generated provides an entirely new way to find content.

As eager as online advertisers are to tap into the rich source of information that people freely offer about themselves on sites like Facebook and MySpace.com, there are nevertheless growing concerns about the privacy issues raised by such tactics. Facebook is allowing advertisers set up their own profile pages at no charge and encouraging companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi to share information with Facebook about the actions of Facebook members on their sites. Ad Executives from consumer brand companies view ads on social networking sites as a priority in their ad spending. I heard they are now spending less on traditional broadcasting and print media!!

In business, appeal of social networking is limited largely to industries where workers are fairly isolated from their colleagues on a daily basis, like medicine, construction and sales. Online services are trying to promote a more personal type of business networking. Unlike relatively simple message boards that are open to all, these new sites for doctors and engineers have features such as profile pages showing professional credentials; personal blogs that function like a kind of online diary, links to friends online, invitations to real or online events, and instant-messaging.

Some social sites also charge a membership fee. For example, Reuters Group PLC is launching a new social-networking service (Reuters Space!), for fund managers, traders and analysts. They will be able to log on to create profiles with industry-relevant information like their asset class and instruments, check financial news feeds and ruminate about the industry on personal blogs. It also plans to allow companies to block certain features like blogging and to archive employees’ online activities for compliance purposes. No stopping here, though!

Sites like StumbleUpon.com, del.icio.us, newsvine.com and digg.com provide very unique content which, most likely, we would never find using Google. These reasons have brought the need for connecting online directly to the end user or consumer. The fact that many are now using social networks makes it clear why there is so much money being spent on social network advertising.

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In best scenarios, technology always stays in the background: it creates the necessary conditions for spreading our own creativity through digital media. If we accept this position, no matter if a web site is made using HTML or Flash, what’s really important is the beauty it expresses. We must build aesthetics, starting from the perceptive and sensory world, not from the idea. Authentic advances in Web Art will be reached when we cease thinking of the Web as an expressive medium, and more of a cultural and social interface.

And to affirm that aesthetic forms possess a social and cultural value, it means to negate – at root – the modern social organization that comes to measure any expression, including artistic ones, on the basis of market value. Again, to affirm that a message, a form, a thought, has an intrinsic value before the commercial one seems banal, nevertheless is an aversive affirmation if compared to global capitalism. Diffusion of Web aesthetics is ultimately one of the few practicable ways to liberate the new media world from the slavery in which it has been condemned by commercial communication.

Most of the new internet workers seem to incarnate the ideal consumer model dreamed up by marketing gurus. They uncritically accept a lifestyle that other people have designed for them, rather than shaping their own. The picture of the situation could appear tragic, nevertheless, it’s amazing to look at the reactions that you can breed in them when you are able to uncover some conditioned thought processes of which they are victim. When it happens, you can clearly see how a growing interest rises in them, together with the determination to react (also in a creative way). The walk is quite long, therefore it’s important that none of us give up the responsibility to educate and make new generations aware.

The market still doesn’t know how to sell objects like websites, but if we erase the commercial layer, then Art returns to its natural function: to open windows where mankind can look at its own condition. The first decade of web design was focused on speculative thinking about the potentials of the medium, followed by “best practices” literature and the long silence after the dot-com boom crashed. Now we are at the Web 2.0 point, and this indicates an evolution of the way we look at this medium. Despite a lack of unanimity on what Web 2.0 should be, we certainly have made some steps forward – for example, we have dropped the useless antithesis between texts and images: now we consider them as modalities of reading and representing reality, and we believe that a rich media has to enhance them both, instead of contrasting them.

We have also dropped the ideas that the Web constitutes a return to the oral tradition or to the written word indeed, both statements have proven fallacious, and we now prefer to speak about a continuum of languages. These conceptual advances also find a hands-on application in web design, as interface designs are responding to narrative and orientation needs that are miles beyond the early desktop metaphor. As a consequence, the web designer’s role is no longer to draw, but rather to arrange environments for interaction (between users, between image and text, between books and TV, between the symbolic and the perceptive, between the active and the passive, etc.). We have overcome that stage of excitement over the potentials of the medium, and we are now focusing on the nature of the Web itself – its developments and the interactions between the Net and society.

Practical Aesthetics on the Web: If we look at the Net we can clearly see a lot of genres (mail art, ASCII art, generative art, hacker art, pixel art, and so on.), but we can also identify a style. A couple of the main elements of this style are; the remixing attitude and the D.I.Y. practice. New media force us to do a continuous cut and paste’ of the endless digital data surrounding us. Thus, we can assume that remixing is the composition method of our times.

At the same time, new media give us the potential to get our hands around this growing digital data sea, indeed, we can manage and shape it even if we don’t have particular expertise. So we draw data from an endless source and we recombine them using all kind of digital tools, in few words: we remix culture on our own.

With Internet culture the masses of users these days are so advanced. Theory and criticism have yet to discover blogs, Second Life, Wikipedia and all that. Having said that, it’s clear we no longer live in the 1980s and have to promote a serious study of popular (media) culture. But who’s discovering a new world like Second Life? Who’s populating our databases, our wikis and our blogs? Who’s testing our new digital tools? First, we need them to reach a critical mass. As a consequence all the communication is directed to them: try this new product for free’, trial period’, make a free tour’, open your own blog’, publish your photo album’, these and many others formulas witnessing that we need the masses of users in order to get feedback, to give basis to our theories, to shape our products.

We don’t need them just as audience (the TV age model), the Internet age postulates an active participation, thus, the masses are required to turn themselves into players. With all the digital media and contexts we are creating the masses have also produced an incredible amount of user-generated content. If that is actually what we define as popular culture’, then the questions are: what are we supposed to do with all this stuff? Is this cultural production significant? Should we spend our time in studying and analyzing it?

For sure we don’t have time to do that, so we limit ourselves to give a bit of our attention to the events that, pushed by mass media, bounce under our noses. For example, the most interesting thing for us is to observe how the top rated/most viewed videos on YouTube are all commercial TV like’ products; the usual Second Life public spaces are crowded with more advertising than Las Vegas (most of them are dedicated to sex); the stick memories of the average MP3 players are filled with the same music you can listen to on any commercial radio station, and shall we talk about the subjects of the photos stored in millions of digital cameras?

With new media we are repeating the stupidity and the uselessness of our TV formats, the advertising’s invasion of any public space, the boredom of the pop music scene, etc. Vulgarity and the dissipation of any significance are moving from old media to new media, and we don’t see any good reason to spend time with such popular culture’.

It’s also very interesting to observe how the old media are becoming more and more permeable to blogs and D.I.Y. information. This phenomenon is not due to a fascination in more democratic information sources. On the contrary – the pressure is rising due to the growth of the eyes’ (cameras and new digital devices) that are watching the same events that mainstream media are reporting to us: the possibility of being uncovered are too many and broadcast journalists are forced to tell the truth (or at least a plausible version of it). As a consequence, blogs have become the major source of news and information about many global affairs. We also have to consider that bloggers are often the only real journalists, as they (at their own risk) provide independent news in countries where the mainstream media is censored, biased or under control.

Towards this goal, no sophistication, we prefer minimalist approach to web design, with clear and linear interfaces that give intuitive access to sophisticated and very structured data. When you have to manage complex data sets or very rich multimedia contents, the best you can do is design a structure that is very minimal. Indeed, you don’t have to add meaning to the content you are representing, otherwise you make it useless and baroque. Nevertheless, minimalist doesn’t mean careless or dull, instead it means “not one sign more than necessary”, it means taking care of details, it means being moderate and objective.

We also have to consider that there are so many kinds of data that there can’t be one universal formula of access. In fact, some information, such as the structure of a network, need graphic expedients to be understood. Also, there are many realities that have no meaning if showed only in a textual format. In those cases we use graphs, charts, etc., and very often we obtain wonderful and unexpected forms.

Finally a right answer for creating a perfect new media asset (a website) should be discovered on a case-to-case basis, and the only line we can certainly detect is the one between the amount of complexity required by a representation (objective factor) and the self-satisfaction that pushes any web designer into going over what is required (subjective factor).

- Ref. networkcultures.org, and few other media journals/stories and online ad channels.
- Author is the Lead Web Interface Consultant with Solution Point, India

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