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The iPad As Platform For SEM & Social Media Marketing

Written on February 8, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, marketing

Apple clearly recognizes the importance of the mobile web, but did they get trigger happy and launch the iPad too soon? The launch of the new Apple device has lit up the internet with all sorts of criticisms, praises, questions and opinions. A question remains for those of us in the search marketing and social [...]



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The iPad As Platform For SEM & Social Media Marketing

The New Local: Location Based, Social Centric & Behaviorally Targeted

Written on February 8, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

We’re just weeks into 2010, and already a host of major tech, online, and mobile companies have made some exciting announcements about their latest plans for local search.
In mid-January, Google’s Mobile division announced that it is upgrading its search engine on Android-powered devices and the iPhone to present results reflective of the current or last [...]



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The New Local: Location Based, Social Centric & Behaviorally Targeted

Google Searches Follow To Your Mobile Life – If It’s An Android

Written on February 2, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing

Google continues to bring more and more functionality to the Google experience and in a huge coincidence the latest improvements only run on Android phones. Hmmm……wonder why they would do that?

In a nutshell, Android devices can now access searches made on your computer or other devices. If you do a search query on your desktop then hit the road with your Android phone you can now have that search available on the go. The Official Google Mobile Blog states

If you often use both a computer and a mobile phone in your daily routine, it can seem like a hassle when they don’t stay in sync. You might spend time on your computer looking for a great used bookstore, only to forget the name of the place when you are ready to get directions from your phone. Sure, you could print directions in advance, but we believe smartphones are “smart” because they save you time. That’s why today we’re making your phone a bit smarter with the introduction of personalized suggestions and synchronized starring in Google Maps for mobile on Android.

Google continues to make these kinds of updates aimed directly at the market that is making smartphone choices. If there is a chance to jump ship from say, Verizon, it can be tempting to go over to AT&T for the iPhone. In my case, I have a BlackBerry Storm that needs to be replaced. I have thought about an iPhone forever but Android phones are looking like a strong choice because of my near dependency on Google services. My iPod Touch can do the app thing but carrying two devices kinda sucks. Honestly, though, it may be worth the hassle if Google is going to just do more on the Android phone.

The blog gives a scenario where this feature could come in handy

Personalized suggestions make it easy to find places you’ve previously searched for. For example, imagine you’re on your computer and you come across the Place Page for Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store Cafe. After reading reviews, you decide to stop in for lunch. When you’re ready to go and want to get directions, just open Google Maps on your phone, start typing “mar,” and you’ll quickly see a suggestion – saving you from re-typing a long query and making it easier and faster to be on your way.

The fight is definitely on between Google and just about everyone else. It gets some people like Steve Jobs pretty riled up. What’s more important though is that it gets customers fired up to have a smartphone that helps them be more efficient with the tools that they already rely on for efficiency.

This is only going to get more intense so fasten your seat belts and be ready for the fireworks should be created that the rest of this year and many more to come.

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Google Searches Follow To Your Mobile Life – If It’s An Android

FCC Lumps Google with Mobile Carriers in Termination Fee Inquiry

Written on January 28, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

The Federal Communications Commission recently began an inquiry into exorbitant early termination fees in mobile phone carriers’ contracts. The investigation began when Verizon raised its early termination fee to $350 (from $175) for smartphones. Now the FCC is making the inquiry formal and full-blown—they’re asking the four major mobile carriers and Google about their early termination policies.

Yeah, that’s right. Google. I know they’re selling a mobile phone now, but Google isn’t a service provider. Well, we can all rest assured—a little—the FCC’s letter to Google acknowledges that T-Mobile is the service provider. However, T-Mobile received a letter of its own. So why single out Google of all the hardware providers? (Just wait.)

After all, Apple makes the iPhone, and you can buy directly from its website. Google’s webstore offers you the choice of an unlocked phone without a plan or a (cheaper) phone with a T-Mobile plan (Verizon and Vodaphone are still slated for spring). Apple’s iPhone store doesn’t offer any choice but to buy the phone with an AT&T data plan (that I can see, without giving my info).

But there’s something that Google does that Apple doesn’t. The unlocked Nexus One is $529, but when you buy it with a T-Mobile plan, the price drops to $179. However, if you cancel your contract in the first 120 days of service, the Terms of Sale state that in addition to T-Mobile’s early termination fee, you’ll also be subject to an “equipment recovery fee”—the $350 subsidy on the phone price.

To my knowledge, when you buy a discounted phone from other mobile carriers, they don’t charge that subsidy on top of their ETF. In fact, that was part of Verizon’s initial justification of its high early termination fee to the FCC. (A justification the FCC found “unsatisfying, and in some cases, troubling.”)

The FCC’s look at Google may be prompted by consumer complaints (they aren’t saying), but it still shows an impressive level of sophistication in the modern marketplace. (Let’s face it—after looking at the way federal commissions handle the Internet, it doesn’t take much to impress me.)

Google, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T have until February 23 to respond.

What do you think? Will the FCC knock down early termination fees—and if they do, will phone subsidies from mobile carriers be a thing of the past?

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FCC Lumps Google with Mobile Carriers in Termination Fee Inquiry

Playing Games With Customers: Is Foursquare The Future Of Local Search?

Written on January 25, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

Congratulations! You are now the Mayor of Search Engine Land!
If that sounds familiar you are one of the growing number of people using/playing Foursquare, a mobile app that uses the location of your mobile device to encourage users to “check in” wherever they might be in exchange for points and recognition like becoming the [...]



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Playing Games With Customers: Is Foursquare The Future Of Local Search?

24 Hours With Google’s Nexus One

Written on January 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, book, searchengineguide, seo

by Miriam Ellis

Tech reviewers are praising the Nexus One and tech reviewers are bashing the Nexus One. Predictable, of course, but I’d like to bring a different perspective to the rollout of Google’s headlining smart phone.

Are you a sophisticated tech reviewer? I’m sure not. In point of fact, buying the Nexus One yesterday represented my first-ever purchase of a cell phone. I can’t compare the Nexus One to anything else, and I can’t talk to you about Snapdragons and Sim Cards. It’s all new to me, and anyhow, it’s always been my habit to think of how people use technology rather than thinking very hard about how technology is created. If, like me, you are a late adopter of cell phone technology and are just now considering how a smart phone might benefit you and your business, I’m going to show you what I’ve learned to do in a single day with this remarkable device.

I Can Use The Web

This was the big deal for me as a website designer. Connecting to the web from the Nexus One is absolutely simple. We purchased the phone unlocked (meaning we didn’t buy it with the locked T-Mobile contract). However, we discovered that T-Mobile coverage is very strong in our corner of the world and so purchased an unlocked, unlimited T-Mobile service plan that will actually be less expensive than the locked plan over time. I can visit any site I want on the web and am already seeing how badly Mobile design standards are going to be needed as the whole world goes Mobile. I can send emails, visit blogs and forums and do all the stuff I normally do on my laptop. It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to navigate around easily, but I’ve got it down now and I’m really impressed! If being on the web is important to your business, I think the Nexus One will make it easy for you to stay connected to your business affairs no matter where you are.

I Can Use Google Maps

This was the big deal for me as a Local SEO. The Nexus One comes with a connection to Google Maps built right into the main set of icons. Now, I confess, I’m having a little harder time getting acquainted with using Maps as I’m so used to doing on my laptop. The navigation I’m familiar with doesn’t seem to be there, and only some locations can be viewed in StreetView. I need more time to play with this, but Local and Mobile are quickly becoming one and I’m sure I will get the hang of the whole Maps feature with a little more practice. The Nexus One also tracks my location as I’m driving about - really interesting. So far, it knew where I was about 70% of the time. Then, the little blue marker indicating my location seemed to get confused and was placing me and my car a street away from where I actually was. This feature definitely deserves further exploration, as does the phone’s ability to give me directions.

I Can Make Calls

It may seem obvious that a smart phone makes phone calls, but the Nexus One has so many capabilities, this function almost seems like a sideshow. The quality of the calls I have made has seemed remarkably clear to me, both on the sending and receiving ends. The phone has a device which mutes background noise and it appears to work very well. I’m used to cell phone calls that have tons of static and noise. This phone, with T-Mobile coverage, sounds marvelous in my area. I also absolutely love the fact that I can click a phone number on a website, in an ad or email and the phone automatically starts calling the designated party. Phenomenal! It was very easy to begin setting up a list of folks I frequently call and, so far, I’m favorably impressed with this aspect of the Nexus One.

I Can Type

The keyboard is very small, even for my dainty fingers. Turning the phone sideways helps a bit. One has to switch back and forth between keyboards with capital letters, lower case letters and numbers and symbols. After just one day, I’m already starting to feel comfortable with this, but I am typing very, very slowly after a day of use and this feels odd to me - a really fast typist. However, there is a feature of the keyboard that I discovered this morning that ameliorates some of the awkwardness. While you type, a little bar is constantly suggesting to you complete common words that you can click on rather than having to type whole words out, and this is pretty helpful. I also love that the keyboard has a special key for the phrase ‘.com’. Very useful.

I Can Talk To The Phone!

For me, this is the feature that makes the Nexus One like something from the fabled ’space age’ that has been predicted by humans for several generations. There is a little microphone icon that you can press and begin speaking into the phone and the words appear on the screen. Imagine that! However, there is a pretty serious problem with accuracy, and I did an experiment today, using the Voice function to dictate a blog post.

If you click my example, you will immediately see that I ended up with some pretty foolish gibberish. In a 102 word paragraph, the Nexus One misunderstood 12 words. When you add to this the fact that it had no idea how to punctuate what I was saying and was using numbers like ‘1′ instead of writing out the word ‘one’, you end up with text that is far from publication-ready. The meaning of what I was trying to say got totally lost, and while I suppose this might be okay in the world of Text Messaging, this is one spaceship that won’t fly when it comes to important business communications.

Nevertheless, it’s an amazing emergent technology, and I had a blast speaking in the names of local places and businesses, famous people and other phrases and then watching with amazed eyes as the phone brought up accurate results time and again. This technology is going somewhere and it’s thrilling to see the beginnings of it.

I Can Take Pictures

The Nexus One gets high marks from me for the ease of use of the camera which takes very clear pictures. Here’s an example of an un-touched, un-photoshopped image I took very quickly, on a dark grey afternoon while I was out grocery shopping today:

It took me about 2 minutes to figure out how to sort and and delete images in the gallery feature and how to email them to my computer. Super simple and fun! If your business runs a blog and you’ve got a roving reporter, this phone is going to make him a powerhouse when it comes to collecting on-the-spot images to enliven your content.

What Else Can I Do?

I can listen to music, and it sounds okay for coming out of such a tiny device, but to be honest, all I’ve done so far is delete all of the pre-set music out of the phone because it sounded like guys with adenoid trouble torturing washing machines. Google - what was with that music? I’ll find something lovelier to my ears soon. I can see the time, bookmark my favorite places, read news, get weather, and sign into a marketplace where I can download cool apps for the phone. I watched some YouTube videos and they looked astonishingly good. Wow!

I know I can also text message folks, but I haven’t even looked into it yet. Frankly, I have the distinct feeling that my first 24 hours with the Nexus One has just barely touched the tip of the technology iceberg of features present in this pint-sized gadget. Is the Nexus One the right phone for you? Budget, coverage and your location are going to determine the answer to that, and I highly recommend reading Mike Blumenthal’s fantastic guide to choosing a smart phone.

Most importantly, I’m suggesting that you consider the common scenarios of your daily personal and business life. For me, running my business, getting a smart phone is a smart thing to do. Would your business benefit if you were able to browse the web, make calls, send emails and text messages, take photos, find important places locally and turn spoken words into text, no matter where you are? And, don’t forget to ask yourself whether it will become important to your business in the next 5 years that your business’ website renders well on mobile devices. How about mobile-based advertising? That’s ramping up, too. What do you need to be doing to make sure your business is keeping apace with how people live and do business as we enter the second decade of the 21st century? I do believe that Google’s Nexus One is hinting at the answer.

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24 Hours With Google’s Nexus One

Google AdWords Allows Advanced Mobile Targeting & App Downloads

Written on January 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

The Google AdWords blog announced new targeting and ad features for the mobile search ad product.
The first feature allows you to specify the device type and carrier you would like to target your ads to. The device type options include iPhone/iPod Touch, Android and Palm WebOS. The current carriers targeting is [...]



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Google AdWords Allows Advanced Mobile Targeting & App Downloads