Organisations Find Enormous Potential in Web 2.0 to Influence & Predict Consumer Behaviour

The use of Web 2.0 has now been channelised by the top companies and consumer oriented organisations to predict the customer behaviour and buying decisions. The various social media web sites and platforms that include blogs, discussion forums, social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook etc. have provided the common public, the consumers a platform to voice their opinion and reach to people in different corners of the world. They can now share their experiences and opinions, both positive and negative about various products and services.

Major organisations are waking up to the power of the consumer voices heard over the various forms of Web 2.0 platforms which have tremendous potential to shape the opinions and buying decisions of other consumers and also their brand loyalties, purchase decisions and their own brand advocacy.

According to the recent survey by Aberdeen, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS), Best-in-Class organizations are over 680% more likely than Laggards to improve their ability to predict customer behavior through the use of social media monitoring and analysis tools.

Microsoft Bid Yahoo to Establish Foothold in the Mobile Ad Market

In order to attain a bigger share in the mobile market, Microsoft is reportedly bidding US$44.6 billion for Yahoo. Though Microsoft itself is a big company it is difficult for it to reach out to the advertising genre, whereas with a 500 million global monthly user estimate, it is easier for Yahoo to approach the mobile advertising market.

Though Microsoft executives directly refuse to discuss the mobile advertising opportunities and the Yahoo deal, news also floats that they have also began discussions and possibilities with different carriers including Sprint Nextel.

Mobile advertising is not a rage currently amidst advertisers, in a few years time it shall be an exciting market for all of them who wish to reach out and expand their target audience manifold. With several location based technologies and the latest GPS that is being introduced in the mobile technology, it is going to become so much easier to target customers and to learn about their proximity to buy goods.

Microsoft AdCenter Labs Showcases Cutting Edge Digital Advertising Innovations

At its 4^th Annual Demo fest, Microsoft Corp. revealed a series of next generation digital advertising technologies on tuesday, 5^th February 2008. This fest is known for propounding Microsoft adCenter Labs' latest leading edge technologies and developments. This year, the event showcased the latest advances and algorithms in content analysis and computer vision for video and images, speech recognition for contextual video ads, and advanced marketing intelligence that enable enhanced audience insight and better targeting capabilities for advertisers.

According to Tarek Najm, technical guy in Microsoft, "We believe the technical advances and intelligence we are creating at adCenter Labs can change the game of online advertising. Solutions to today's challenges must be capable of handling and understanding the complexity of vast amounts of data. To address that challenge, we are developing advertising algorithms that can anticipate and understand consumer behavior faster than the speed of thought, so that we can help advertisers create more efficient and relevant user experiences."

Security and Compliance Services for Emails at Office, by Google

Google is now set to use its Postinin acquisition to provide security features for any e-mail system. The company is about to launch many new security applications that are already part of the Google Apps platform. These products are targeted at the organisations that are not using Gmail or other Web hosted applications from Google, like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Start Page .

These products are powered by Postinin and act as message filtering with spam and malware filter and this is available to you at $3 per user every year. For $12 per user per year, you can get message filtering services along with improvised virus detection content policy management, and other support to stop e-mail data leaks. And for $25 per year per user, you would get message discovery, which increases one year of message data archiving, retention, and discovery to assist companies comply with legal and government regulatory compliance requirements.

According to Sundar Raghavan, a product marketing manager for Google, this is specially useful to those organisations and executives who are anxious about employees downloading copyrighted content, such as MP3 files, at work and leaking confidential information through e-mails.

AOL Bags Buy.at to Boost Advertising Operations

On Tuesday, AOL has declared that it has bought buy.at as per its strategy to boost its Internet advertising operations. Time Warner Inc.'s AOL did not reveal the financial terms of the purchase. For those who are not aware of buy.at, it is a network in which those who are putting up their advertisements need to pay the member Web publishers only when a visitor comes to the site and takes the action as desired by the advertisement.

Soon after the first quarter financial report by Time Warner, AOL announced its purchase, which is the fifth purchase in 12 months. This urgency of such declaration and strategies by AOL has been fuelled by the surprise announcement by Microsoft of its offer to buy Yahoo for $31 per share, last Friday. As per Wall Street Analysts, the Time Warner strategies and plans have a possibility of creation of 84% ownership of Time Warner Cable.

Trademarks Simplified: What Are They and Why Do We Need Them?

So you have a business and you have a logo, a name and a slogan that you want your clients to associate with your organisation, but have you ever thought of protecting it? You may have thought about it – how to refrain your competitors from using the same logo or name, especially if you are successful in your industry. What you are actually thinking about is called 'trademark'.

For those of you, who have already registered trademarks for your organisation, this is just a review. But for those who are not yet clear with the concept of trademarks or do not understand the trademark laws or not sure whether you can use trademarks or not, here is my attempt to clear the air.

What are trademarks? Let's get down to the very basics. Trademark is any thing that you want people to associate with your product or service. It can be a word, a phrase, a slogan, a sound, a musical interlude, a symbol, a logo, a design, your domain name, your website designs, your packaging or dressing, the uniform of your sales staff or anything that helps people remember your products or services.

Trademark laws are laws that protect your trademarks – slogan, logo, domain name or designs – as your intellectual property, somewhat like copyright and patent. You can have trademarks for your commercial ventures, but you can not have trademarks for your non-commercial or personal ventures.

You might have a product based business or you may have a service based one – you can protect all your intellectual properties with trademark laws. For products, you have the 'Product Marks' and for services, you have the 'Service Marks'.

The main idea behind having your intellectual property protected with trademark laws is to protect your competitors to steal your property and promote their businesses under the banner of your slogans or logos. It is also to protect your organisation from frauds like selling bad quality products or providing unsatisfactory services with the name of your organisation. This can bring a bad name to you and your business without even being responsible for it.

Increasing Frustrated Netizens of China Plan to Break the Wall

The restrictions on a wide range of web sites in China is facing resentment from a growing number of netizens in the country. Web sites like Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia and MySpace are not accessible to the Chinese masses due to internet censorship rules of the land. China's censors have also blocked sites like Blogspot etc. which is growing concern amongst the people there.

According to one of the increasing population of netizens in China, Mr. Zhu Nan, “Officials in our country claimed that Internet censorship is done according to the law. If so, why not let people know about this legal project, and why, instead, ban the Web sites that publicize and examine those legal policies? If you’re determined to do this, you shouldn’t be afraid of criticism.”

Recently, the censorship on usage of internet in China has been further tightened and sites are said to have been blacked out, even those which had no discernible political content. This is resulting into a backlash from people, including those who never had any interest in politics.

The Pros and Cons of Google IP Exclusion in Pay per Click Community

The facility to exclude certain IP addresses in Google Adwords has proven to be beneficial in many ways in the Pay per Click community. You can both control your ad placement through various methods and focus your targeting with IP or Internet Protocol exclusion, now. You can control the view of your ads by methods such as location and language targeting, site exclusion and network distribution preferences. And you can also block certain IP addresses where you do not wish to make your presence felt.

With Google IP exclusion options, now you can also deal with click fraud techniques from competitors. If you can get the IP addresses of your competitors, then you can exclude them from seeing your ad and therefore you can stop their clicking your ad just to increase your ad spend.

However, tehre is a disadvantage to this IP exclusion technique. Some large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use a range of IP addresses for all their users. This would mean that if you exclude one IP address which could be a proxy for many users, then you might just block many potential readers and customers from reading your ad.

Microsoft Plans to Borrow Money to Fund the Yahoo Deal

Having made the public announcement on Friday about its intentions to take over Yahoo for a formidable $44.6 billion, Microsoft now intends to fund a portion of the amount by borrowing money. This is the first time in the history of Microsoft that it would be borrowing money to fund its acquisition.

Chris Liddell, Chief Financial Officer at Microsoft, says that the software company may take on some debt to finance the cash portion of its 50-50 stock and cash offer for Yahoo. In an annual strategy meeting with analysts, he told, "It's likely we're actually going to borrow for the first time."

Although it wants the board at Yahoo to make the deal faster, the latter wants to take more time to go through the proposition Microsoft has made. Yahoo says it wants to measure all the strategic options which also includes the option of remaining independent.

Google-DoubleClick Acquisition Still Catches Attention

The news of Google's taking over of online advertising company 'DoubleClick' had hardly settled down, when Microsoft's unsolicited bid for Yahoo, had created yet another storm in the international online industry. But that does not put Google's acquisition out of focus. According to DowJones newswires, "the European Union's antitrust regulator has prepared a draft 'statement of objections' to Google Inc.'s planned $3.1 billion takeover of DoubleClick." The 'statement of objections' is not yet issued, and till that time, it is kept confidential.

This, however, does not mean that EU has plans to block the deal between Google and online advertising company 'DoubleClick'. Yet, it would impose conditions or ask Google for a compromise in the deal it has up its sleeves.

6 Ways of Dealing with Negative Search Engine Results

Are you suffering of the negative search engine result syndrome? Is your organization making news for the wrong reasons? Then here is the antidote that you would like to try, to deal with all the negative search engine results and bring back the desired SERPs.

Negative SERPs are not only a complete mood killer for you, but it is also a huge turn off for your clients who are looking ahead to buy your products or services. Researches say it, that in around 40% of the cases, people who see a negative search engine result page, get so disinterested that they do not consider the organization a second time.

But now you can deal with it efficiently and the good part is that there are 6 different ways to nail them down. Though they are easy, but you have to be patient and diligent with the practices in order to get positive results.

1. The first way to go about it is by resolving the negative issues. I would put it in the first priority, so that the negativity can be dealt with and clamped down to as much extent as possible. So try to sort out the problems first. Is it a dissatisfied customer posting negative feedback in his blog? Or is it a social activist who is frustrated with some issue? You can respond to them online, if possible in the same forum or blog, in a professional manner and try to help the person if possible. This would also give you bonus points for good customer service, which might just help create a good image to some other visitor.

2. Another interesting way to deal with negative search results is by pushing them down and out of sight in the search engine rankings. How? Well, you can create new pages talking about your product or services, your organization, any latest launch or invention, FAQs... just about anything. This when optimised properly would rank higher in the SERPs. As a result the negative results would go down and under several other results.

3. Feed the ever curious and cynical visitors with topics that contain their search term. Let me explain. There are many people out there who are pessimistic in their approach. They like to find and read negative remarks and criticism of an organization. They would search results with keywords and key phrases like 'Company problems', 'disappointed customers of a company' etc. You can add a twist to your web page topics by making them sound something like 'company problems resolved at the behest of the customers' or may be 'organization out of the list of disappointed customers of a company'.

4. You might find the point just above funny, but here is some food for thought – you can publish or create new pages in other sites, especially the social media web sites where you can also send some links back to them. You can choose to post them in domains that have some authority. This would be highly beneficial for you.

5. A good trick would be to promote some other articles or posts in the same site. This would remove the other negative articles about you since Google and some of the other search engines show only two pages per domain apart from the site links and universal search results.

6. And finally, now it is your turn to look inward, into your own services. You can take hints and clues from your critics and try to better your services and production. If you are not transparent about your activities, you can not just do away with the negative search results.

Now Suppliers Can Get Closer to Their Buyers Through PPL

Upgrade your promotional measures to PPL – a revolutionary trend in online marketing brought to you by C2B Connect! (www.c2bconnect.com). C2B Connect! is a B2B platform where buyers can request RFQ or 'Request for Quote' over 100 categories with pre-qualified suppliers. The C2BConnect.com now offers a better way of promotion of your brands through PPL or 'Pay per Lead'.

If you thought PPC or 'Pay per Click' brought the buyers and suppliers very close, then PPL brings the both of them even closer. The difference lies in that PPC brings the suppliers closer to the buyers and in case of PPL, the buyers are virtually brought to the doorstep of the supplier, leaving the rest to the supplier's selling techniques to make the buyer act in the desired way and close the deal.

Google Presents Urchin 5 - On-Premise Web Analytics Software

On Friday, 1st February, Google released in beta an upgraded version of it on premises Web analytics software called Urchin Software. This software is developed for those who do not prefer to use the online analytics services provided by the search engine. Urchin Software has similar scope as Google Analytics. However, it is programmed to run on an organisation's server, as per Google. As of now, Urchin Software is just available for evaluation purposes and it is not to be used for production purposes as yet.

Urchin Software is prepared for the organisations that have their content behind a firewall or impose restrictions against using an online service. This is similar to the predecessor Urchin 5. The other uses of Urchin software, as per Google, would be for performing ad hoc historical processing, storing Web analytics on the local servers and for collecting data for third party audits.

Google and Microsoft Tug of War

On 3rd February, Google came down heavily upon Microsoft's unsolicited buying of Yahoo for a whopping $44.6 billion. According to Google, this takeover can lead to the monopoly of the software group in the internet. This is not the first altercation between the two companies, rather it is yet another blow in the already growing animosity between both the organizations, the last dispute being Microsoft's accusing Google for proposing acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick.

While Microsoft feels that acquisition of DoubleClick would provide Google with dizzying power to control the online advertising, Google on the other hand feels that with the takeover of Yahoo, Microsoft would gain the power to control the evolution of the web itself. The organisation says that the Microsoft-Yahoo deal would give the former a position where it could undervalue the principles of “openness” which forms the basis of web.

A possibility of an alliance between Google and Yahoo is also not rejected at this moment and is given consideration, unlike last year.

Google Fails to Please Wall Street Analysts and Investors

The quarterly results as posted by Google could not meet up to the expectations of the Wall Street's Analysts and this led to a reduction in the value of shares by 8% on Friday. According to the results, Google's fourth quarter net income rose to 1.21 billion, or $3.79 a share, in comparison to $1.03 billion, or $3.29 a share, in the same period, a year ago. There is a rise in the revenue to $4.83 billion, that is 51%. Google says that it earned $4.43 per share after excluding special items. The revenue was at $3.39 billion after subtracting the payments made to other sites to gain Internet traffic.

Chief Executive of Google, Eric Schmidt commented on the results, that the company was quite pleased with the year and also the quarter that just ended. However the Adsense program experienced some problems in the quarter, as put by co-founder Sergey Brin, due to the difficulty in getting users to click on related ads and generate revenue. Brin also said, “ We have had a challenge in the fourth quarter with social networking [advertising] inventory as a whole. Some of the monetization work we were doing there did not pan out as we'd hoped.”

Mixed Reaction on Microsoft's Yahoo Take Over

Microsoft's $44.6 billion leap to buy Yahoo has triggered mixed reactions from active internet users and those who follow the online industry closely. While on one hand a group of readers and enthusiasts have a strong feeling that Microsoft is attempting to clamp down the competition by monopolising the online industry, on the other hand a second group of people opine that Microsoft and Yahoo are perfect fit for each other and the end consumer would be benefited if this marriage happens.

Predictions are strong that this would also compel Google to wake up and take notice of the competition. This, in other words, would mean that Google would be forced to better its services and provide more user friendly Internet tools and expand the existing ones, in order to stay ahead of the competition, the position that it enjoys at present.