Social media’s heavyweights continued to fill the new year with not-so-sparkling headlines over the past week.

Google came under fire for announcing in new privacy guidelines that it would be sharing user data gleaned from each of its platforms (search, mail, YouTube, etc. — plus anything you use and everywhere you go on an Android phone) across all its platforms.

Not to be outdone, Twitter announced that it would allow individual countries to censor specific tweets when the content violates local laws (consider the role Twitter played in the Arab Spring, and you can imagine the reaction this provoked).

An important caveat first — Twitter’s changes are probably not the menace to life, liberty and free speech that they’ve been made out to be — but rather they might actually enhance free speech. For example, here’s a worthwhile defense from one free speech activist (read the whole thing here):

1- The policy is narrower than before. Previously, when Twitter would take down content when forced to do so by a court order, it would disappear globally. Now, it will only be gone in the specific country in which the court order is applicable. This is a great improvement.

2- The policy is realistic–and non-realistic policies are not better as they won’t work. The idea that Twitter can just ignore court orders everywhere is not only unrealistic, it would result in more countries to try to block Twitter completely–or make it accessible only via proxies and thus greatly restrict its power. The Internet is not a “virtual” space, and cyberspace is not a planet which can float above all jurisdictions forever. In this move, Twitter is acknowledging this fact while complying within the bare minimum framework.

Google’s changes, however, aren’t nearly as likely to earn praise from any activists. Still, if you’re looking for a bright side, its that such shared data is highly useful in helping businesses more accurately target ads at likely customers.

In fact, that’s the point of the changes — to make Google’s wildly innovative web-based advertising tools even more efficient, innovative, and profitable for the companies who use them.

That’s not an attempt to dismiss the very real privacy concerns, but more so a realization that everyone — from companies to individuals — needs to view all the fantastic, free tools a little bit more soberly.

The web and social media make it easier than ever for companies to connect with potential customers and clients. But in the end, using the web will always involve at least a little bit of faith and risk. Slate blogger Matt Yglesias put it this way:

Gmail is great, and it’s free. Google Search is great, and it’s free. Google Maps is great, and it’s free. Android is not my favorite smartphone software, but you’ve got to admit it’s impressive that Google went through the trouble of creating it and then gave it away for free.

But of course Web services actually have a lot of costs associated with them. You either need to engage in a lot of fundraising, à la Wikipedia, or else you need to sell ads à la Google. And so once the basic business proposition is “this company will make the most amazing Web services available and give them away for free in order to sell you to advertisers,” plummeting levels of privacy become inevitable.

So basically you have three options:

1. Avoid the web. Bunker down. Ignore the unprecedented allure of Internet marketing and irresistible opportunities it can provide for your business.
2. Use the web blithely and carelessly, leaving your privacy in the hands of faceless companies.
3. Be smart. Be strategic. Be intentional. Be engaged. Explore the endless opportunities of the web, but do so with a strategy, with expertise, and with an understanding that managed risk can reap huge rewards.

We can help with no. 3.

At a basic level, services like our online reputation management can help give you a little bit more control over the web (specifically, what customers, critics and competitors might be saying about you). A committed Internet marketing strategy can make a difference as well. If you understand the web and social media, and if you take an intentional, strategic approach to using them, you’ll be less likely to accidentally throw a bunch of information up on the web.

So go. Boldly explore the opportunities opening up to your company. Just be smart and strategic about it. Our Dallas Internet marketing team can help.

A couple weeks ago, we mentioned that Google got 2012 rolling with a big splash by introducing its new “Search Plus Your World.” Now, when you search for something while signed into a Google account (which you likely are automatically if signed into something like Gmail), results will include little bits of “recommendations” by your Google contacts sprinkled in.



Cool, right? No? Hate it? Have no desire at all to know what your friends recommend every time you search for a Dallas auto-mechanic? Annoyed that Google incorporates Google+ results for companies, even if you’ve never use Google+?



Don’t worry — a small-time Silicon Valley programmer named Mark Zuckerberg has your back.



In an unusual twist, Facebook, Twitter and Myspace (still around, apparently) have publicly teamed up and introduced a “bookmarklet” that allows you to return social search results based on relevancy from across the web and not solely, as Google would have it, from their own network, enabling social results to populate in three areas on Google — “People and Pages,” organic results and the results typeahead.


So why would a couple tech rivals publicly describe what they think “Google should be?” And why does it matter to your company?



Myspace would probably team up with anyone who could help return them to relevance at this point, so there’s no reason to put much stock in their involvement. But Facebook and Twitter openly teaming up to do something like this (and bragging about it) is definitely noteworthy. Most likely, Facebook is doing this because they’re just a teensy-weensy bit threatened by Google’s move into the social media arena. While Google has dominated search, Facebook has been steadily stockpiling the kinds of personal information that Google is now integrating into search. If Facebook didn’t have personalized search plans of its own, it wouldn’t care so much what Google does. But apparently they both have similar big ideas for personalized search — here’s why:



Social changing the way people and businesses, do, well, seemingly everything. Eat. Drink. Shop. Watch TV. Listen to music. All of it can be social, and much of it can be enhanced by social media. It’s useful for friends and families, of course, but also for big-spending American businesses. Building the platform that can harness and search through everything that social media adds to the web, therefore, is enormously lucrative and what this battle of digital age titans is all about. 



In other words, personalized search is a high-stakes game for a reason. And that’s why this heavyweight fight matters in the Dallas social media marketing ring as well — they’re battling to come up with the best way to help businesses like yours connect with an unprecedented number of potential customers and clients.



Our Dallas Internet marketing specialists can help your company craft a customized social media marketing strategy that harnesses these ever-evolving new powers and open up new channels to connect with folks out there who are looking for a company exactly like yours.

The Internet’s governing body — an organization called ICANN — is considering opening up the door for a whole new wave of domain categories.

According to National Public Radio:

Vast new tracts of the Internet are up for sale as of Thursday. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, known as ICANN, is forging ahead with plans to sell new domain categories despite some vocal opposition from regulators and advertisers…. Currently, there are 22 generic domains like .net or .gov. Under the new program, as many as 1,000 new ones could come to market every year. Applicants must qualify and pass ICANN’s various criminal and other background checks.

In May, ICANN will publish a list of all the proposed domains. One can imagine .food or .hotels making that list. Although, for example, .Nabisco or .Marriott could also appear. Opponents will get 60 days to file objections.

Interactive Marketing Implication:

Search (and therefore search engine marketing) will become more important.

If it’s easier for multiple companies to increasingly use similar domains, then people will increasingly seek to find the correct website via search. For example, if my potato company had the lucrative web address “potatoes.com,” and suddenly my competitors were able to buy “potatoes.food” or “potatoes.potatoes,” my domain alone suddenly wouldn’t quite be so profitable.

This would highlight the need for a committed, sustainable Internet marketing strategy. If folks begin pulling up the wrong potato site, they’ll take to the search engines to find you. It’s a good idea to do everything you can to make sure your company shows up on top of the search results.

Still, except in cases where companies have a general, non-branded web address, this seems unlikely to cause many problems for businesses. Think about it — what percentage of websites do you visit by actually typing in the complete URL? You likely either have the website already bookmarked, or you get there via search engine. The address bars on most web browsers these days double as a search portal anyway. I’ve noticed a tendency to search for a site by its nearly completed web address (e.g. “Masterlink”), which is somehow easier than the (not-so) burdensome effort just typing in the whole thing (“masterlink.com”). Statistics show that this is how many people access websites.

In other words, this won’t significantly change Internet behavior — but it is something to watch. Our Dallas Internet marketing specialists are happy to help sort through these and any other changes and craft a profitable, cutting-edge interactive marketing strategy.

From an SEO perspective, 2011 was filled with no shortage of tweaks, twists and turns. But a core tenant of our strategy for search engine optimization in Dallas is identifying sustainable long-term strategies that will withstand the whims of the major search engines and satisfy the search engines’ own goals and interests.

So as SEO continued to evolve at a torrid pace this year, one timeless trend continued to prove true: content is still king.

The goal of the search engines is to deliver the best, most relevant information possible every time someone goes looking for it. So no amount of SEO tricks can replace solid, relevant, compelling web content.  Here at Masterlink, we can help you make high-quality content a central feature of your websites (and mobile website) in two main ways:

Web Content

First and foremost, web content is one of the most valuable parts of your website. It’s your message. It’s your first impression. It’s the handshake of potential customers and clients who visit your site.

While there’s a relatively small amount of content on most websites — and therefore relatively few opportunities to seamlessly work in valuable keywords for SEO purposes — your core web content carries the most potential to leave a lasting impression. Memorable, high-quality sites are the ones that are visited widely and linked to on other sites. The search engines reward this.

Blogs

Search engines also love fresh content, and reward sites that find ways to continually add new (and valuable) content. After investing in finely tuned core web content, you probably won’t want to just redo it week after week for the sake of keeping it fresh. Instead, the best way to add regular injections of fresh, conversational content is a company blog.

Blogs are ideal for reaching out to customers and posting news updates or compelling information that doesn’t have a natural place anywhere else on the website. Comment sections give customers a chance to be heard. And, most importantly for SEO purposes, compelling, keyword-rich blog posts often get shared around on other sites. Links to your site are SEO gold.

Marketing in the digital age evolves at breakneck speed, and 2011 was no different. So let’s review some of the big events and trends of the year before jumping headfirst into the inevitable social media marketing madness that awaits in 2012.

Google-Plus: The Arrival of Social Media Fatigue

By far and away the biggest story of the year was the launch of Google+, the search behemoth’s no-holds-barred attempt to go toe-to-toe with Facebook. Or, at least, it got the most headlines. Whether or not Google+ will actually matter in the long run depends on if it can back up all the initial buzz. Growth slowed considerably after a blistering start.

Part of this may be due to social media fatigue. The human brain only has so much bandwidth, and social media has not done much in the way of making the earth spin more slowly and add an hour or two to each day. And Silicon Valley seems to produce a new glittering social media tool once a week these days. If a new social media tool can’t quickly and clearly demonstrate how it will make life easier or better for folks, they’re likely to react by deleting the app, pulling out a hardcover book, and tune out the digital age until spring.

The Lesson? Don’t feel pressured to chase each and every “next big thing.” We can help you know when a social media marketing tool becomes worthwhile.

Still, Statistics Show That Social Media Marketing Matters

For example, Facebook topped 700 million users in 2011. Try to wrap your head around that for a bit. And it’s not showing any major signs of slowing down. In fact, if Google-Plus had any landscape-altering effect, it’s that it made Facebook better. A few years ago, Twitter’s emergence led Facebook to introduce the timeline feature. Google-Plus encouraged the site to vastly improve user controls and privacy issues.

The lesson? Social media is getting woven into more and more parts of our lives — especially Facebook — and it’s hard to see that ever changing. Your company’s potential customers and clients are all over social media sites like Facebook. We can help you connect with them.

Especially… “Location, Location, Location”

That social media still matters is especially true for location-based social media marketing, because it’s everything that the glittering, useless social tools that fail are not: It’s so intuitive. So life-enhancing. So easy. And such a natural utilization of the smartphone explosion. It helps you find businesses. It helps you review them. It helps you recommend the good ones to friends. It connects you with everything in your community that you need. Different social media marketing players are still scrambling to figure out how to best capitalize on these new possibilities, and it’s changing the way we think about SEO in Dallas, but the principle is only going to expand.

The Lesson? A mobile web design is an excellent (nay, critical) thing to have when location-based social media marketing leads customers to your business. Our Dallas mobile web design specialists can help.

The first time we talked about Google+ here on the Masterlink blog, it was exploding onto the Internet marketing scene. Just a few weeks later, the bubble seemed to already have popped: overall usage of Google+ dropped by three percent, and time spent on the site dropped 10 percent.

So, nearly three months later, how is it doing now? Well, 40 million people now have Google+ profiles — just a fraction of Facebook’s 800 million users, but a sizable number nonetheless. And, perhaps more relevantly, Google+ for businesses has arrived.

According to the AP:

The expansion, announced on Monday, is the latest feature on Google’s Plus service to imitate what’s already available on Facebook, the leading website for sharing with family, friends and businesses.

Google Inc. unveiled Plus in late June to counter Facebook’s popularity and learn more about people’s interests. It hopes to gain insights that will help its dominant Internet search engine spit out more compelling results that keep people coming back to click on ads.

Until now, Plus was open only to individuals. In addition to companies, celebrities and sports teams will be able to set up Google Plus pages just as they can on Facebook. Google showcased the new Plus feature Monday with pages from 20 business, celebrities and sports teams. The initial list includes Toyota, the Muppets, the Dallas Cowboys, Pepsi and the pop music group Train.

So is Google+ worth becoming part of your Dallas social media marketing efforts? Here are just a handful of reasons to give it a try:

1. Fewer users means less competition as well

Sure, Google+ is still just something like a fox trying to take down the Facebook elephant, but think of it like starting up a business in a small town. There are fewer customers, but less competition as well. And if the town grows (which it’s likely to do), you’ll have a huge head start on the competition that eventually moves in down the block.

2. It’s all about search

Already, if you have a Google account, search results will show you pages that have earned “Plus 1” clicks by connections of yours on Google+. In other words, imagine search engines pointing out Dallas caterers, auto body shops in DFW, or Dallas limos “Liked” by your friends on Facebook every time you go searching for one. Google’s bread and butter is search, and it’s a good bet that they will increasingly use info gleaned from Google+ to improve their search capabilities.

3. It’s easy and free

In other words, give it a try and see what bites you get. If you find yourself connecting with potential customers and clients, stick with it. If not, pull the plug.

To learn more, check out Google’s handy step-by-step tutorial. It’s pretty easy, but if you don’t want to sink a ton of time into maintaining your Google+ page and responding to every post from a reader, our Dallas interactive marketing specialists will be more than happy to do it for you.

With interactive marketing, what’s most important: How frequently you connect with potential customers and clients? Or how valuable you make each connection?

My own social media habits show how it’s not quite one or the other. For example, a quick survey of my own Twitter habit reveals this statistical tidbit:

• 13 percent of accounts I follow are family and friends.
• 87 percent are bloggers, news outlets, reporters, celebrities and other people I’ve never actually met.

Furthermore, the majority of friends I follow are living overseas, doing something unique, or consistently tweet out information I find either valuable or humorous. Why? I love my friends and family, but unless their tweets add something valuable, illuminating or entertaining, they don’t get a spot. The chronological nature of Twitter makes it too difficult to consistently read valuable tweeters if my stream is clogged with minutia.

Inversely, while I’ll happily follow everyone I’ve ever met on Facebook, I only use the platform to keep tabs on a handful of businesses, reporters, or celebrities. In fact, I enjoy catching up on the minutia of people’s daily lives. The value of the content they post on Facebook is less important to me than the chance to just connect and catch up.

Three conclusions:

1. Content is King (Sometimes)

On Twitter, content matters (for me). My time and mental bandwidth are limited, and I’m loathe to waste either on frivolous information. If I followed everyone I know on Twitter, I’d miss information from people on Twitter who I want to hear from. Content is king.

2. Connecting is King (Other Times)

On Facebook, relationships matter (for me). I just want to connect with people, see what music they like, what photos they’ve posted, what events they’re attending, and what local businesses they recommend. Connecting is king.

3.  Social Media is Inexact and Always Shifting

How people use social media changes from person to person. And as new platforms come and go, how each person uses social media likely changes as well. The key, then, is to focus on both connecting with potential customers and clients and providing them with valuable information — on the multiple platforms across the social media spectrum. Explore all your social media options to figure out what’s most worthwhile for your company.

Sound like too much to keep up with? Our devoted Dallas social media marketing experts can make it easy for you. Contact us for more information.

If you want to understand how web giants like Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon should influence the long-term vision for your business, it’s a good idea to spend some time exploring their long-term visions.

This is especially true if:

• If you’re overwhelmed by how quickly what matters on the web changes
• If you get the feeling what’s happening on the web matters, but you just don’t have the time to keep up with it all
• If you don’t think the web can play much a role in your business or industry
• If you’d love to see the big picture, but the forest keeps getting obscured by the hype involved with each tree

Look long-term. Get an idea of where these guys want to take your business. Understand the road the web is trying to travel, and it’ll be a whole lot easier to keep up with each twist and turn.

For example, Fast Company Magazine took a long, but illuminating at look each of the major web giants. Step one is to understand that while Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple all might seem to be competing in separate spheres, in many ways they’re all trying to climb the same peak.

According to the article:

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google don’t recognize any borders; they feel no qualms about marching beyond the walls of tech into retailing, advertising, publishing, movies, TV, communications, and even finance. Across the economy, these four companies are increasingly setting the agenda. Bezos, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Page look at the business world and justifiably imagine all of it funneling through their servers. Why not go for everything? And in their competition, each combatant is getting stronger, separating the quartet further from the rest of the pack.

Everyone reading this article is a customer of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, or Google, and most probably count on all four. This passion for the Fab Four of business is reflected in the blogosphere’s panting coverage of their every move. ExxonMobil may sometimes be the world’s most valuable company, but can you name its CEO? Do you scour the Internet for rumors about its next product? As the four companies encroach further and further into one another’s space, consumers look forward to cooler and cooler products. The coming years will be fascinating to watch because this is a competition that might reinvent our daily lives even more than the four have changed our habits in the past decade. And that, dear reader, is why you need a program guide to the battle ahead.

Here’s why understanding this major trend toward both convergence and real-world diversification matters: These companies aren’t just building products like an excellent search engine, a cool phone, a convenient shopping marketplace, or a social network. They’re building platforms for making multiple areas of life easier, from shopping to communicating to connecting to doing business and beyond.

That’s the race — who can come up with the best, most comprehensive tool for making the web improve the most possible areas of life for the most people. Understand that, and you’ll be more likely spot opportunities for your company on these platforms when they open up.

Anyway, it’s a long, but fascinating look at where the worlds of search, social, and online shopping are all going (and where they’ll converge). Our Dallas Internet marketing specialists are here to help you stay up with what matters.

There’s probably nothing new we can say about Steve Jobs that hasn’t already been said. But there are a couple key lessons we can learn from the torrent of praise, followed by torrent of backlash to that praise, followed by a torrent of even-handed looks at what did and did not make the guy successful (dying famous in America ain’t easy). One of the main points goes something like this:

“He wasn’t a techie genius or innovator. He was a marketing genius.” Setting aside debates about Macs vs. PCs, let’s look at this this.

Apple products have never been necessarily the most powerful or packed with possibility. They’re not for everyone, and they’re not for certain high-end industries. But they’ve succeeded because they make you feel like they were designed to make your life just a little bit easier. And in that way, their products were marketing.

Let’s let Steve explain in his own words:

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Or (again as Steve put it):

“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do. We just want to make great products.”

It turns out that a lot of people just want their computer/phone/music gadgets to be helpful, easy, and reliable. They’ll trade high-end computing power for something that doesn’t easily get plagued by viruses and spyware and paper their screen with little warning popups that don’t make any sense.

Apple got that better that most tech companies. They designed their products to appeal to their customers’ (sometimes unexpressed) deeper frustrations and desires. And their marketing strategy simply highlighted those strengths.

So that’s the goal: Listen. Understand. Anticipate. And then infuse what you understand about your customers into both the design of your products and services and into your marketing strategy.

Each aspect of your interactive marketing strategy — from your web content to social media marketing to web design — should seek to achieve that second goal. The beauty of Internet marketing in Dallas is that it’s makes connecting with the community around you and understanding them easier than ever.

10 Million people are now using Foursquare to tell the world about their favorite places to eat, drink, dance, and shop. Let’s take a look at how apps like these can become an important piece of your Dallas Internet marketing strategy:

Foursquare is what’s known as a “location-based service.” When app users go to restaurants, bars, clubs, or stores they like, they can “check in” on their a smartphones. As extra incentive, there’s a game aspect to the app as well, where the people who check in the most times at specific hotspots get crowned “mayor” or other titles—encouraging them to return again and again, and tell all their friends when they do.

It might sound silly—or just one more step on the why-do-I-care-where-you’re-eating-dinner ladder—but 10 million users is impressive, and location-based services do matter. Austin-based Foursquare competitor Gowalla is approaching two million users, Facebook has made checking in easy for the fraction of its 700 million users who use smartphones, and Google Maps has recently added check-ins so users can rate and review locations in real-time. Including geolocation tags with stuff like Twitter updates is also increasingly common.

In other words, more and more people are carrying smartphones around, and more and more of them are using LBS apps to share where they are and what they are doing in real-time. Depending on your clientele, LBS could be a fun, effective part of your Dallas interactive marketing strategy:

According to PCWorld:

The partnerships Foursquare has made with large brands provide an idea of the utility it provides businesses. As a small or medium sized business owner, you have the same access to the technology that’s checking millions of users in to local businesses around the country. Simply set a deal — such as giving a free coffee with the purchase of a pastry to customers who check in on Foursquare — let your staff know, and get the word out. Those who use the service and redeem the deal may enjoy a feeling of exclusivity, and tell their friends.

Foursquare showed how LBS can easily be used for to boost business last year, when McDonald’s gave app users discounts in exchange for check-ins, increasing in-store foot traffic by 33 percent in a single day. Recently, the app announced that it would be pairing deals with the rest of its services more regularly. Facebook has taken a similar approach — “check in” at certain locations, and you get a bargain from the business.

The advantage to businesses is simple: In exchange for the discount, the customer tells all their friends, followers, and Internet stalkers about the business and deal. In exchange for “titles” and other parts of the game, the customer returns again and again. It’s viral marketing made easy.