Facebook Ads Perform Five Times Better!

Mashable is telling us that facebook ads are doing much better than standard banner ads. According to a study done by Webtrends on more than 11,000 ad campaigns on facebook, They found out that the average click-through rate (CTR) for Facebook ads in 2009 was 0.063% and 0.051% in 2010 — substantially more than the industry standard, also, they cost more, $0.27 to $0.49, CPC, Cost per Click. But again, these numbers as per mahable as there was no links to the Webtrends study. Perhaps Webtrends did not publish it.

Mashable

Socializing The Local Business', FourSqure And Groupon CEO's Talk DLD11

The CEO's of FourSqure And Groupon were interviewed at DLD11 conference in Germany. Both the companies, which has strong presence in Local Business,
Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley says that FourSqure is more than a social business, It is Social with location. Groupon CEO Andrew Mason says he does not know what Social Commerce means but say local ecommerce means a lot.
It a candid interview and and you will learn a lot about socializing Local part of the Business, here are two questions and answers, there are many more at TechCrunch.

Q: What’s the biggest misconception about Foursquare?
Dennis: The company’s size is the first. Second is that some people seem to think Foursquare is for hipsters in New York and San Francisco. That’s certainly how we got started, but we have a lot of international usage, all over the world. It’s a big surprise for us.
Q: What are the biggest challenges when growing as fast as Groupon did?
Andrew: Our growth may have been quick, but it was incremental. We started in Chicago, and it took us 5 months before our second city, and then the time shortened each time we launched in a new city. So we took our time to develop the original playbook, and we try to copy that strategy with our international expansion.
By creating a strong cultural foundation, and hiring great people and entrepreneurs. So we provide the playbook, they execute.

Real MRE, ( Money, Results, Experience) With Google Online Marketting Challenge

Real money, real results, real experience is possible dream if you are interested in marketing. Google is presenting The Google Online Marketing Challenge which is a global online marketing student competition targeting all Marketing students from any higher education institution from anywhere in the world.
This will be a great opportunity for teachers professors to introduce their students to a truly global experience, in creating a valuable online marketing strategy and benefit form it in multiple ways, education, experience and money as well.
What is more, the global winners and their professor receive a trip to the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California to meet with the AdWords team. The Regional winners and their professor receive a trip to a regional Google office, both of them a real experience. and a way to see how the search giant operate, day to day.
Student teams receive US$200 of free online advertising with Google AdWords and then work with local businesses or NGOs to create effective online marketing campaigns. Learn more about the Challenge, at Google.
NEW! Students now have the opportunity to help an NGO and compete for the NGO Impact Award and win a US$15,000 donation.

How Popular Are Your Keywords? Find Out With Google Keyword Tool!

How Popular Are Your Keywords? Find out With Google!
I hope you have a list of keywords pertaining to your site! If you do not have list of keywords, do not worry, you will be able to generate one. I will refer you to a site that will generate a list of keywords from your content, already on your site or blog, after telling you how to find out if your keywords are popular.
Once you have your keyword list ready for reference, it is our task now to findout  how popular your keywords are. Like how many people have googled them in the past month / year as well as now. So where do we go for that? Well not very far, just click on the link below which will lead you, to Google provided free keyword analysis tool.. Many people including yours truly use Google keyword analysis tools to evaluate their keywords.. Once you are at the site, you can either enter all your keywords, one per line or one by one. Either way once you are ready, click on  “SEARCH”; Google adwords will provide you with Global, local search volume as well as competition information on all your keywords

Remember I told you I will give you a link where you can find your keywords list from your own site. Well it is from the same site, instead of entering keywords, select the second option website to let Google adwords pull up keywords from your website and analyze the words in the same way. But you may have to filter out some irrelevant keywords.On the same site is the Traffic Estimator which will give another set of information on your keywords,like Estimated Avg. CPC, Estimated Ad Position, Estimated Daily Clicks, and Estimated Daily Cost.
Google Keyword Tool

Google's New Metatags, syndication-source and original-source Give Credit where credit is due

In a world where blogs and news sites mushroom, a source of a news item might get lost in the translation of the links. We usually try our best to give a link back to our source, like in this case there is a backlink to the source in the title and at the bottom of the article. But of course I learned about the post elsewhere, on twitter. But the link to the Twitter is missing and I went back to look for it and it is now lost among thousands of tweets. But that would have been a good example of syndication link or a syndication source.
But expect Google to provide a solution, Google is experimenting with two new metatags for Google News: syndication-source and original-source. Each of these metatags allow publishers to take credit as well as give credit to other journalists, the only way everyone will be able to survive and a do a good job on the long run. The following two Metatags will be valid to point to original source(s) in one page. In case of not knowing the exact originals source URL, you can point to the general domain, so the credit will travel in right direction..

• syndication-source indicates the preferred URL for a syndicated article. If two versions of an article are exactly the same, or only very slightly modified, we're asking publishers to use syndication-source to point us to the one they would like Google News to use. For example, if Publisher X syndicates stories to Publisher Y, both should put the following metatag on those articles:
  

• original-source indicates the URL of the first article to report on a story. We encourage publishers to use this metatag to give credit to the source that broke the story. We recognize that this can sometimes be tough to determine. But the intent of this tag is to reward hard work and journalistic enterprise. For example, to credit the publication that broke a story you could use a metatag like this:
  

These metatags are already in use by Google, Google is telling us that the impact may not visible right away. But we all can help by adopting these Meatatags in our sites.
You can learn how these metatags work, and how you can implement them for your site, by visiting Google Help Center article.
Google News Blog: Credit where credit is due

Groupon Valued At $4.5 Billion After Closing $950 Million Investments Round.

If you were wondering why Groupon rejected Google's offer recently, now you know the reason. Groupon has raised nearly a billion dollars from various investors driving the company's value to 4.5 Billion. New investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mail.ru Group, Maverick Capital, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures.

Press Release;

CHICAGO--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--Today Groupon announced that it has completed a $950 million round of financing. Groupon will use the funds to fuel global expansion, invest in technology, and provide liquidity for employees and early investors. 
The financing consists of several venture capital firms and late-stage investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mail.ru Group, Maverick Capital, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures. Allen & Company LLC acted as financial advisor. Previous funding rounds were led by New Enterprise Associates, Accel Partners, and Mail.ru Group (formerly DST).
In the last year, Groupon has been called “the fastest growing company ever” by Forbes Magazine and “America’s best website” by one of Groupon’s television commercials. In 2010, Groupon:

• Expanded from 1 to 35 countries
• Launched in almost 500 new markets (from 30 markets in 2009)
• Grew subscribers by 2,500% from 2 million to over 50 million
• Saved consumers over $1.5 billion
• Worked with 58,000 local businesses, serving over 100,000 deals worldwide

“We’re thrilled that Groupon has earned the confidence of some of the world’s most respected investment firms,” said Andrew Mason, founder and CEO of Groupon. “With their support, we will continue on our mission to change the way people shop locally and serve the world’s local businesses.”
About Groupon
Groupon, launched in November 2008 in Chicago, features a daily deal on the best stuff to do, eat, see and buy in more than 500 markets around the world. Groupon uses collective buying power to offer unbeatable prices and provide a win-win for businesses and consumers, delivering more than 650 daily deals globally. For more information, visit http://www.groupon.com. To learn more on how to become a featured business on Groupon, visit http://www.grouponworks.com.

Contacts

Julie Mossler
Groupon
1 312-242-2033
Julie@groupon.com

Bringing Your Business Online With A Google Account.

Happy New Year Folks, We wanted to greet this new year by telling you how to bring your business online with a simple Google Account and an optional $10 bill you may find in your pocket. The $10 is optional but will give your site a legitimate domain name which will make it easier for you to take main stream once you hit big in the internet arena. Read on
If you did not know, Google provides a vast array of free products that allows one to business and to get the toes wet in the Internet before going gaga like Lady Gaga.
The most important part is to get a Google Account if you do not have one yet. Once you have that, it is your key to surf through all that Google offers free to us.
Starting with blogger.com, which you could access with your Google login will allow you to start a weblog or more commonly known as a blog, like our blog, MyADLETS, the viral frontier is known all over the world. It will help us to go main tream once we have completed our plans that we are cooking. "myadlets" is a valuable keyword in our plans. Keyword is something that you will learn, once you have setup your site.

Once you have registered your blog, in the line of mybusiness.blogspot.com, as in myadlets.blogspot.com you can start customizing your site with templates, which are available all over the web. You can also add your fellow business partners or employees as fellow bloggers (they will need to get their own Google Accounts). Once you have gotten all these detais sorted out, you can start blogging about your business.
You can create pages, one about your products enhanced with photos, drawings etc and another for your contact information and so forth. Once search engines learn about your blog and start indexing, the world wide web will learn about your site, slowly. There are other ways you can make the faster. You will learn about them as you go.
Now about that optional $10. Remember we just said about your "mybusiness.blogspot.com", now by investing $10, you will be able to purchase a domain name, "mybusiness.com", as in myadlets.com reflecting your business, provided the name is not already taken. In that case you have to get creative about the name.
Either way "mybusiness.com" will give you counless options to expand. Even in this no cost setup, you can still go further with a custom domain name. From Google it self, you will be able to get an e-mail, calendar and document system identical to the free products on the web, but which operate within your custom domain.
Mashable editor Matt Silverman has written a more descriptive article on the same subject on openforum.
Good luck with your online ventures.

Stop Adobe SuperCookies (Flash Cookies) Sharing Your Personal Data

It was known for a while that Supercookies were persistent even if you regularly delete the cookies that companies or websites leave on you computer. Supercookies like Adobe's "Local Shared Objects" or Microsoft's "User Data Persistence." Basically the supercookies are harder to remove and harder to see. But if you want to learn a bit more about supercookies, you can have a good look at evercookie, an open sourse program that shows how theses rogue companies leave persistent cookies.
So for the moment I will focus on Adobe Flash Cookies and perhaps return to others later. But you can learn more about these cookeis and clean them up by visiting the links provided, specially, EFF.
Do not forget to run Panopticlick on EFF to see how much information your browser is giving away and I also use breadcrumbs to check what my browser is doing.
Adobe Flash Cookie which is also known as privacy killer, on such supercookies that even go beyond the perimeters of browser. according to EFF;

a kind of cookie maintained by the Adobe Flash plug-in on behalf of Flash applications embedded in web pages.1 These cookie files are stored outside of the browser's control. Web browsers do not directly allow users to view or delete the cookies stored by a Flash application, users are not notified when such cookies are set, and these cookies never expire. Flash cookies can track users in all the ways traditionally HTTP cookies do, and they can be stored or retrieved whenever a user accesses a page containing a Flash application.

 You can read about Adobe Flash cookies in this article, written by developer of Gnash, an alternative open source flash implementation.
According to Berkeley researchers, site operators use adobe flash cookies to respawn a deleted HTTP cookie, because even when you delete cookies, flash cookies continue to be on your computer. Basically flash cookies;

* Stay on your computer for an unlimited amount of time
* Store 100 kb of data by default, with an unlimited max
* Couldn’t be deleted by your browser
* Send previous visit information and history, by default, without your permission

So how you get rid of these cookies or control the behavior of these? well you need to visit adobe site (Bookmark this site until we find a better way to clean up flash Cookies) and change some settings and hope and pray that they do what they promise. The tabs related to "Privacy" just allows you to change camera and microphone settings.

To delete all the Flash Cookies currently being stored on your machine:

1. Go to the Settings Manager
2. Go to the Website storage settings panel
3. Click “Delete all sites”
4. Go to the Peer assisted networking panel
5. Click “Delete all sites”

To prevent websites from storing any more information on your computer:

1. Go to Settings Manager
2. Click the Second Tab from the left (Global Storage Settings)
3. Set the Storage Settings slider to None
4. Uncheck “Allow Third Party Flash Content to store data on your computer

But this is just the beginning.Keep your privacy. Please read "" and visit the related links to educate yourself.


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