I was just thinking about how linking up used to mean getting together with your friends for drinks or coffee. Or sometimes it meant phoning around to see if your buddies could go to a party. These days linking up is a reference that is about online life. I like my online life, don’t get me wrong, and I have adapted to the terminology, but I wonder if my kids will someday laugh at my old notion of linking up.

Socializing is now done on messaging clients, chat rooms, and online message groups. If that’s not enough for you, you can connect to your family and friends through social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook. They’ve even become verbs: “I’ll Facebook you.” would have been nonsense a few years back, but we all know what it means today (except maybe my 86 year old grandmother, and even then I am not sure). And a Tweet was a sound that birds made, not something you did with a social networking tool.

The brilliant part about all of these online social tools is that they can be used for professional networking and marketing too. Although some workplaces have had a reactionary view of them and have been vocal in banning applications like Facebook and other social networking tools from being used at work, there are many other businesses that are beginning to understand the scope of the benefits these tools offer to a company and its employees.

Melding social networking and business needs has been a core component of LinkedIn’s purpose, so it is no real surprise that LinkedIn is opening up its platform so that developers can amalgamate LinkedIn into their own business applications. The easier it is for users to use LinkedIn, the more traffic will flow through the site.

Twitter clients can already interact with their LinkedIn network updates, and IBM, Research in Motion’s Blackberry, and Microsoft have all approached LinkedIn about developing partnerships. Cross-functionality of social networking platforms will encourage growth and take this phenomenon to the next level. It is smart of LinkedIn to be part of the pack leading this movement.

As it becomes easier to use these internet marketing tools and interact with several of your favourites at once, we will see increased business networking. In the future, not only will it be possible to do marketing through these tools, but it may become easier to post jobs and find appropriate candidates to fill them, solve general business problems, and even coordinate workflow within a work group. The possibilities are vast.

For the moment though, I am just going to go and update my Facebook status, and chat with my online friends. I like being linked up.

This weekend, I headed down to UWO to watch my daughter play flag football for Huron University College. After they won the morning game, the coach told the team that he would Facebook them as soon as he learned the time of their next payoff game.

So as a partner in an seo company, I couldn’t help but ask the a few of the girls on the team about Twitter. Most of the group didn’t use Twitter but many were considering it because they had overheard one of the Huron alumni tell their coach that he had followed the recent Queens, UWO football game on Twitter.

The conversation summed up the social media demographics in a nutshell.

University students = Facebook
Alumni  (shall we say slightly older) = Twitter

Twitter is still in the early stages and it is still quite spammy but don’t underestimate the power of Twitter or  you may get arrested! It can be a tremendous crowd sourcing tool as well as one of the best real time search platforms.

On Sunday, Macworld reported that Microsoft has discussed “de-indexing” its news website from Google. In effect, News Corp content would cease to appear in Google’s search engine results.

Now this is hard ball at the big league level. If the information is correct, Microsoft will be setting a target on the value of content. This is a massive shot in the arm for newspapers publishers who have been floundering trying to come up with an online revenue model. The ramifications for digital content are enormous.

Microsoft has been doing all the right things in the search arena and the results are staring to show. Comscore recently reported that Microsoft’s Bing percent of searches from 9.4 to 9.9% in October. While Google broke the 65% barrier and continues to  dominate search, a deal of this kind by Microsoft is a game changer.

Microsoft’s market share would increase dramatically as user’s rotate between the 2 giants to make sure they have all the resources they require to research, shop or simply to be informed.  As an SEO company, the increased traffic Microsoft would acquire would force our hand to take Bing more seriously but the traffic would be worth it.

More importantly, a deal like this might provide the solution that newpapers have been searching for for years. Don’t you just love competition?

Twilight is not my cup of tea, but you have to admire the internet marketing behind it. Pretty much anyone, male or female, young or old, would have to be in a media-less bubble to miss the release of New Moon, the second movie in the Twilight series.

Not only are the traditional advertising venues – movie previews for months, television commercials, and print ads – being plied by the advertising machine behind this series, but social networking sites are buzzing with discussions on this movie. I saw a blog by Jeremy Muncy that was talking about this trend, and he mentions that on Twitter alone, Twilight holds 3 of the top 10 trending topics, so I decided to go over there myself and have a look.

By the minute, day, and week, New Moon actually ranked first for the day and week and fell only to second in the exact minute of my visit. Consider that this is just on Twitter! Facebook and MySpace are also burning up with discussion of New Moon, both with intended, focused marketing and then the casual mentions of its membership. Fully half the people I have on my Facebook account alone have mentioned this movie at least once since the middle of last week. And I am not even in their targeted audience!

It’s obvious that the marketing machine here has inspired discussion across the board for social media venues. Wouldn’t we all love to hire the person or team who got this ball rolling? Even if Twilight itself is not your thing, as a business person, brilliant marketing of this magnitude is something to step back, evaluate, and admire. It’s art.

Gone are the days of casual word of mouth advertising, simple print ads, and a few television commercials. It’s been replaced by this vast network of social media marketing. The Superbowl of marketing has arrived, if you will, with New Moon. If you didn’t recognize its existence before (or you were not completely convinced of its strength), surely the release of the latest Twilight flick brings us all to a new understanding of the breadth of the marketing power we are looking at with social media.

It’s a brave new world of  internet marketing. One that changes and morphs at an incredibly fast pace. Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace were only created within the last six years, but they’ve been embraced in the online community and most people are just having a load of fun while they are engaging them. And that’s the part that sells it all the best: it’s fun and engaging. The best marketing strategies pick up on these trends, connect to the sense of play, and jump into this new world with both feet.

It certainly has paid off for Twilight.

Last week I had lunch with a friend at Celadon House in Oakville. When the owner came by with the bill, he gave me a coupon for 250 CIBC airmiles that I could acquire by returning to the restaurant within the next 45 days.

Awesome! 250 airmiles and all I have to do is show up and pay for a meal at a restaurant that I love to go to. I doubt I would have been back there in 45 days so the restaurant benefits as well. OK, they are Aeroplan miles and my be devalued any second now but still, it will bring me back to the restaurant before I would normally return.

More importantly, it gave me a good feeling when I left the restaurant.

On the flip side, I flew down to Texas last week using United airlines. Wow, United not only breaks guitars, they don’t serve food either. Not even peanuts! And….no TV!  The lack of food was one thing but no TV on a 2 1/2-3 hour flight; unheard in a civilized country like Canada. We flew out of Buffalo for the first time so we didn’t know the policy of no TV for internal US flights under 3 hrs. I will plan my flight better the next time and check out the airplane amenities on Seat Guru.

The Great, The Good and The Ugly Marketing Tactics

Viral Marketing – How about the viral marketing produced by the, “United Breaks Guitars Video”. A campaign any seo company would be proud of.

Celadon Restaurant – Little things mean a lot, especially if they are the last thing a client remembers about your encounter.

United Airlines – Even if you are running a cut rate service, clients still expect a minimum of civility.

Here is why you Need to Listen to the Social Web

Social media transparency is critical if you are going to attempt a social media campaign. It is too easy to be found out and there are those individuals sitting at home with nothing better to do than take a shot at you.

Just to give you an example,  when people ask me where I went to university, I tell them I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York on a hockey scholarship. That is the truth, however, that if someone wanted to dig deeper it is easy to find my statistics on the internet. The stats reveal that I only played about 7 games in total and that is close to the truth. I partied my way out of a scholarship but that is another story.

I have listened to a plethora of other athletes embellish their athletic careers only to find out the truth on a reasonably reliable website.

On a recent trip to a social media marketing session in Atlanta, a guest speaker told 2,000 people about his encounter with P Diddy on Twitter. By the time I got home the following day, several of those in attendance were questioning the authenticity of the story through Twitter, Facebook and some well know blogs. Accusations were flying around the net at a feverish pitch. By the end of the day, the story was proven false and the presenter had apologized in multiple formats.

That took all of 48 hours and the guest speaker’s reputation is now in the can.

The perception is that if you are embellishing, hiding, or purposely attempting to fool the public on one part of your career or your business that you most likely you are BSing about everything else.

In Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s book, Trust Agents, they talk about companies being “naked on the web“.

Here are a few of Chris’ tips on how to be naked on the web.

• Be who you are, not an icon. People want the real public face of you (at least, the “best of” you).
• Be helpful. It’s not always about pushing your brand. Sometimes, the best way to get results is to help others be successful. Can you equip others to do their job better? Do that.
• Be there before the sale. The best way to drive stronger marketing experiences and convert people into customers is to be there long before you need something from people. Sure, it takes longer, but I’ve seen lots of situations where this is what brought in the big sale over another person. If your prospect feels like she knows you, it works really well.

Read the complete blog entry for more on social media transparency.

If you are a National company and you have logged into your Google Analytics account lately, you’ve noticed that there is a steady increase in visitors coming to your site using a local search modifier with a keyword term.

More and more often , users are typing in seo company Toronto rather than just seo company. Although Google renders results based on your IP location, tweaking the algorithm is an ongoing process and the general population doesn’t know or care about how the results are rendered. They just want local results.

The growth of mobile advertising only serves to increase the urgency for advertisers and advertising platforms to get creative in their approach to local search opportunities.  In an interview with MarketingMag.ca, Marc Tellier, CEO of Yellow Pages Income Fund agrees; “I think we’re going to see a trend in the Internet, broadly speaking, or digital media, to go more local.”

SEO companies have been preaching local search for a couple of years now but it has taken time to develop into  a category that can produce a significant return on investment. Looks like smartphones might be the vechicle to kick it into overdrive.

Sean Michael Kerner of internetnews.com covers the breaking “news of the approval of the new International Domain Names Fast Track Process by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush stated that “The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago.”

“Right now Internet address endings are limited to Latin characters – A to Z. But the Fast Track Process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names.”

On November 16th, 2009, ICANN will allow countries to request their country name as a top-level string with the ability to launch the new extensions in early 2010.

ICANN Announcement (7:10)

There will be some technical issues as indicated in the internetnews.com article , however, Tina Dam, senior director of IDNs at ICANN, points out that, “This is not about ‘the Internet will break suddenly’ or something — the stability is clear and this will be fine and it will be great. It will also be good to have the experience with a limited number of top-level domains and see how it goes, and then build from there. ”

We will be following the story closely to give our take on how it will effect SEO.

According to Hitwise, Facebook almost triples its market share of social networking sites with a 194% increase year over year since September 2008 while MySpace dropped 55%.

Meanwhile, according to eMarketer, Twitter’s market share grew 1,170% from .15% to 1.84%, however, time spent on Twitter took a significant hit. The average time a US user spent on Twitter dropped from 36:27 minutes in 2008 to 15:52 minutes in 2009.

Hitwise also reports that US Internet users spent 20% less time on social networks over the same time period.

The old adage, “Half of all my advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half!”, shouldn’t be included in your corporate brochure this year. There are plenty of tools out there to track email, SEO and PPC and even social media.

But since different advertising tactics work for different industries you really need to get your hands dirty and see for yourself. Here is where other marketers expect to be spending their dollars over the next few years:

It has been a rough ride for traditional media over the past few years and it doesn’t look like it will get any easier. Yellow Pages Group took a step in the right direction this morning announcing an agreement with Marchex .