Apparently, if you give a mouse a 50 percent discount, he’s going to give you a poor Yelp review.

A recent study showed that Internet customer ratings for businesses running daily deals drop by an average of ten percent. According to Web Pro News

That research, from computer scientists John W. Byers and Georgios Zervas of Boston University and Michael Mitzenmacher of Harvard, finds that ratings scores on Yelp for businesses running daily deals are 10% lower on average.

[…] The new study also looked at text, and found that reviews mentioning either “Groupon” or “Coupon” are associated with star ratings that are 10% lower on average than reviews that don’t use these words. The few reviews that used both words were actually 20% lower on average, according to the report.

It’s interesting to think about what problems could arise from Groupon-type customers.

While many are likely eager to explore new restaurants, and use Groupon basically as a way to explore their communities, many of them, of course, could probably care less about the restaurant itself and just want something cheap to eat. Guess which group of customers is more likely to take to the world wide web to express their frustrations? In fact, guess which sort of customer is likely to look for an outlet for their frustrations in the first place — full and happy or unsatisfied and aggrieved?

Unfortunately, negative feedback made public on the sites like Yelp, Twitter, or Google Maps can be devastating for local businesses. If you’re a smartphone-toting person hungry for Thai food in an unfamiliar town, there’s a good chance you’ll use that handy little super-device in your pocket to find the best green curry — or at least what a bunch of grumpy discount-seekers think is the best green curry.

Our online reputation management services (ORM) can help.  It lets you know what’s being said about your business across the vast and rapidly evolving Internet, and gives you a chance to respond, engage, limit damage, and prove to the public that yours is a company that cares.

Say it smart. Say it with heart. And say it in as many different ways as possible.

Some interesting stats were released this week from a new Nielsen Three Screen Report about how people are watching online video.

According to Web Pro News:

High-speed broadband access, now in 63.5 percent of homes, has created a better user experience for watching online videos and nearly a quarter of households have smartphones, allowing people to “place shift” and watch video anywhere.

Despite the common perception that viewers of videos on mobile phones are mostly teens, more than half (55%) are adults aged 25-49. While mobile online video viewing is still fairly limited, year over year growth is notable at 51.2%.

[…]Also in the first quarter 138 million people watched video on the Internet spending on average 3 hours, 10 minutes.

When it comes to mobile video, 20.3 million watched mobile video in the U.S., spending on average 3 hours and 37 minutes each month.

So online video is officially mainstream. How do these stats affect your web design and Internet marketing strategy?

Basically, it just means that there’s more and more reason to effectively integrate video into your comprehensive web presence. It can pay big dividends: Catchy content tends to get passed around. Shared links both spread your message and boost search engine rankings. Video platforms like YouTube give viewers the chance to respond and interact with your company. And with the rise of mobile video, these elements could be targeted in ways that will benefit users on-the-go, potentially giving your company a critical edge.

In other words, there are limitless ways now to creatively reach potential customers.

At Masterlink Interactive , we recommend a multi-faceted approach to Internet marketing and web design. All of our clients provide great products and services—our goal is just to help broadcast those impressive capabilities via as many different platforms as are needed to reach their potential customers. Different people will respond to different modes of communication, so it’s important to modify your message where possible.

Beyond video, this also means integrating elements into your web design like social media marketing, flash design, and e-mail marketing.

Contact our Dallas interactive marketing experts to learn more about video elements in web design and internet marketing.

Each week I have the privilege of speaking about the developments of the Internet on Everything Internet Radio. In the two years since our show began airing we have covered a wide range of topics including Internet Marketing, Blogging, WordPress, Google, Yahoo, Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click Advertising, Web Design, and Security just to name a few. The Internet is a rapidly changing place and what was in two years ago in some cases is gone today. The life cycle of the new products and ideas has grown ever shorter over the years and is likely to continue getting shorter.

We introduced Twitter to our audience 18 months ago on Everything Internet and it was just a cute word, we were twitting, tweeting, and trying to explain a blog that was only 140 characters long. When we would get questions and explain it, people usually responded with “why would I want to know what my cousin had for lunch”. In fact one cell phone company actually launched a campaign featuring a father tweeting and a mother on Facebook using their mobile phones while their teenage children attempt an intervention.

While there has been a lot of fun poked at things like Twitter, there are emerging very useful applications of the technology. It will be interesting to see if Twitter can actually make it. They still lose money.

Along with Twitter we spoke about My Space which was replaced for the most part by Facebook. Like Twitter these social media applications have trouble finding ways to make money. Thanks to Farmville and freemium games, Facebook is making a profit. (freemium is a new Internet word for part free and part fee based products). Predictions however say that Facebook will soon be replaced by yet another form of Social Networking within a couple of years.

Old stable Internet operations also have their challenges. It seems Google is gobbling up all the new ideas as quickly as they hear about them. Even companies like EBAY have slowed down when they changed some policies that their users did not care for. Amazon keeps running strong in the web store space but both Google and Yahoo are angling for the space.

One of the best things about doing a weekly radio show like Everything Internet is having a company Like Masterlink Interactive to draw on for expertise. None of us can know it all and being able to tap the experts at Masterlink has provided a valuable resource for our clients and listeners alike. It really helps when your resource for knowledge has been there from the start of the Website industry. Masterlink has been there since 1995. For those of you mature enough to know that’s when it really started to develop.

If you get a chance, drop by the www.eiradioshow.com website and listen to two years of archived program segments or listen live Saturdays at 1:00. You will find just about everything that is and will be happening on the Internet. You will also hear from some of guest experts we have on the show many of whom come from Masterlink Interactive.

By Ed Frazier – CNN 1190 AM – Everything Internet

The iPad has arrived with gusto. It’s hardly the first, but it’s definitely not the last. This week Dell announced plans for their own tablet computer, following similar announcements by, well, just about every other tech company with an interest in staying competitive. Even money says another company or two or six reveals plans for a tablet next week.

So what does this mean for your Internet marketing strategy? Do you now need a regular site, a mobile site, and some weird tablet-oriented hybrid of both? Three sites?

According to R2Integrated:

Because the iPad is now a receiving device, count on the creation of an entire Internet-based or e-based advertising platform around it. This will usher in a new era of services offered by digital marketing companies, ad agencies, brand managers, and more, and you will actually witness a new advertising model evolving very quickly—not unlike the advertising paradigm that evolved on laptops with the first generation of Internet publishing.

Kikabink News points out that NPR and the Wall Street Journal already have iPad versions of their own sites. And ReadWriteWeb sums it with an almost grim take on the new Internet marketing reality:

Thanks to varying screen sizes and differing feature sets (most notably Apple’s refusal to allow Flash on their mobile devices), those who want to provide compelling content to all their site visitors will be forced to re-code their site multiple times. Publishers without the resources to do so will have to make a tough choice — remove the unsupported content and the media that makes it slow to load on mobile devices entirely? Or leave it be and risk losing their mobile audience instead? That’s a “Sophie’s Choice” no one wants to make. Unfortunately, in a down economy where money is tight, that may be just what happens.

So what’s next for Internet marketing — sites that are 3D compatible?

If your company is just starting to dip its toe into the Internet marketing game, and hasn’t even started thinking about a mobile-friendly site yet — take a deep breath. Look at the coming spread of iPads and other “tablets” as an opportunity — not a burden. Because while iPhone app makers are scrambling to redesign their apps specifically for the iPad—and while, yes, it might become advantageous to develop iPad-oriented versions of your company’s website—an iPad site isn’t something you’ll necessarily need right away.

Why? Let’s take a look at how iPads will probably be used:

They’re small, accesible and can operate easily on mobile 3G networks via the same operating system as the iPhone. This means they’ll likely be used similarly to smartphones, whose users are often seeking quick, easily accessible information on the fly like phone numbers and driving directions.

But iPads also feature bigger screens and touchscreen keyboards, meaning users are more likely to rely on them for more typical web browsing than they would a smartphone.

So build an easy-to-use mobile version with easy access to your more-developed regular site, and you’ll have something for both of the iPad’s primary uses. Worry about more iPad-specific tweaks when the industry that sprouts up around the new technology shakes out a bit.

For now, there are a few changes to be aware of. Take AdWords targeting, for example:

AdWords users who feel an urge to target iPad owners can now do so without reaching out to people carrying Android devices and iPhones, as well. Google’s added an option to its “networks and devices” screen that’ll allow advertisers to adopt a narrow focus.

A post on the Inside AdWords blog announced late yesterday, “[W]e feel confident adding the iPad to the list of mobile devices that you can target specifically. To do this, simply edit the ‘Devices’ section in your Campaign Settings, and select the iPad under ‘Advanced device and carrier options.’”

More research will show in time just how people are using the iPads, and the best methods for businesses to target them. Of course, we’ll keep you updated.

Herb's Paint & Body Mobile Web Site

So how can you capitalize on this inexorable trend? Check out the work we’re doing with our friends at Herb’s Paint and Body Shop — simply the best auto paint and body work you’ll find in Dallas.

According to the Search Engine Journal, Google is currently in negotiations to begin offering paid movies and shows on YouTube. Hulu and Apple are already knee-deep in paid content. Amazon is now offering paid videos online, and Yahoo is exploring the possibilities. How long will it be before Microsoft gets into the game? Begun the video wars have.

Some of these services draw you in by giving lots of free content. Some just have a good pricing scheme. Each one of them is stepping directly into the “streaming” content that Blockbuster and Netflix have already pioneered via rental service agreements.

Rentals sound great until users look at their monthly bills and realize they’re being nickel-and-dimed to death. The word “subscription” is being thrown about wildly. After all, these companies have to pay for the infrastructure and bandwidth to support the viewings.

Many web companies have tried to use advertising to avoid this outcome. Still, they’re all finding that it just can’t support everything as Joost found out the hard way. They’re going to keep the site running, but they’re joining Crackle in being one of the numerous video application providers.

This all comes down to the question over whether free online video content will eventually join the horse-drawn cart in the dustbins of history. If this comes to pass, video stars such as Thunderf00t, communitychannel, hotforwords, and even the lovable Fred Figglehorn.

Even if the signs are on the horizon, the winds of change won’t blow in overnight. So, in the meantime, let’s all enjoy the free video content throughout the internet.

Real-time search is one of the newest battlegrounds on the web. In fact, history may show real-time search as the development that saved social media sites like Twitter and Facebook as stand-alone entities.

You see, despite all of the growing attraction of web users to social media sites, the ugly truth is that most social media sites have never been able to show a long-term profit. Myspace has been the exception since completing a 3 year, $900 million advertising contract with Google in 2006, but there is no way to know whether Myspace will be able to maintain their Google contract or their profitability.

One common way of start-up companies making money is to auction their business to the best offer such as when Google bought Youtube. There have been rumors of numerous companies from Microsoft to Google and even Apple buying up Twitter.

Real-time search may just re-define how users use the internet. It is the ultimate combination of search and social media. Searching real-time information allows engines that provide the service to display as results that are happening across the web without delay. Since social media postings are updated frequently they are easily able to gain dominance in this sort of platform over traditional articles or blogs. Combining these results with ads seems to be the obvious sought after answer to the profitability questions. Below are some of the hottest real-time search engines across the web.

General Real Time Search

Collecta: This site has not quite reached beta, but the home page does provide two example sneak-peaks. The layout is likely to change before it gets to beta.

Google: Google recently launched a number of new features, and real-time search is one of them. This is found by doing a search from the Google main page, and then selecting “show options” directly under the Google logo. One of the options available is “Past 24 Hours”. Larry Page recently discussed real-time search at the Google Zeitgeist conference in the UK. It is difficult to imagine Google being left behind in anything search-related. The results from this page appear to contain very few, if any social media pages, so it is possible that Google is focused on displaying links that come from already trusted sources.

OneRiot: From the searches I’ve done this site also appears to show links indexed from posts on social media sites purely. They appear to rank the posts by popularity (re-tweets, diggs, ect. ) and how recently they were posted. Each link shows the original author’s logo or profile picture that posted the indexed link so that credit is given. While each of the sites give credit to the original posting author, this extra step may be the distinguishing feature makes OneRiot more favorable. The layout is a basic vertical format.

Scoopler: My favorite between each of these has been a toss-up between Scoopler and OneRiot. Scoopler appears to index any links it from posts all over the web as fast as possible, though I did not notice any repeat links. While this allows for seeing a lot of information this also allows for a site like Twitter to dominate the results. To combat one domain dominating the results the site provides popular searches and popular links that are posted throughout the web. The site also automatically displays the next result on the page without requiring the user to refresh or click a button. The layout is probably the best out of the four general real-time search engines.

Twitter-Based Real Time Search

Twitter Search: The search feature allows a user to search all of Twitter’s posts for the specific keywords. While the search is only for Twitter users it is a very powerful tool.

TweetMeme: This tries to display Twitter posts by popularity as well as organizing the posts by categories. It has a search option that mimics Twitter Search for the most part, and each link has a button that allows the user to re-Tweet the link in question. There also seems to be a lot of integrating features with Twitter, which may help it keep from being disregarded as Twitter Search expands.

Twitmatic: Much like TweetMeme, Twitmatic tries to integrate with Twitter by having a Twitter login link directly on the page. It only indexes videos posted on Twitter. I tried multiple attempts to search on two different days with no success after at least 10 minutes. This service will need to be at least serviceable to attract users.

The recession is making the change away from “old media” far more rapid than it would have occurred otherwise. While we are concerned about the downfall of some traditional companies, like the NY Times, the rise of some of the newer companies is being missed.

Hulu.com is now one of the best, yet legal sources for watching shows and movies. They have a wide array of videos ranging from over a half decade to some that were aired the previous night. Youtube is now following in their footsteps, and they have the backing of the all-mighty Google. The “old media” are just now discovering the importance of these, on-demand, sites. Watch the video to the right.

Each of these services, Hule and YouTube, are being paid by simply displaying ads just like on regular television. Why did the big media corporations like NBC miss this obvious opportunity? To be fair they actually are posting some of their shows, like Heroes, on their own site, and the imbedded video on the right is also hosted their, but they could easily have led the wave of the television merging onto the internet. They missed the opportunity because many “old media” executives don’t want to change their entire method of making money. They’ve made money the same way for so many years, and they’ve seen no reason to change it, now. Instead, they’ve spent most of their time trying to make television more relevant to the lives’ of the average person.

What they misunderstood was that the concept of television isn’t what is becoming less relevant. What is becoming less valuable is the medium on which television is being played across. The same is true in the music industry.

The music industry has tried punishing individuals that have illegally downloaded their music on the internet for years. The record companies successfully took down Napster in the early 2000′s and used the courts to fine thousands of its users. The backlash from the internet users was profound.

Swedish courts just sent four of the people running the Pirate Bay, a popular file-sharing site, to jail for allowing users to illegally exchange movies and music files. Alas, this will not stop the users either.

It should be noted that I am not endorsing the illegal sharing of files. I am simply noting that the number of people sharing files illegally has gone up significantly over the years, and stopping them appears to be a losing battle.

Two lessons any company must learn when approaching the internet are:

1. The spread of information cannot be stopped. One can only try to affect how people view that information.
2. People naturally follow the path of the least resistance. Rather than stop the way users act on the internet, take advantage of their habits.

With so many people needing to cut costs, they will inevitably cut the least important costs first. How about TV? It can all be seen online. What about land lines? Cell phones work perfectly fine. Don’t we need newspapers? We can get all our news and classifieds online as well. What will we do for entertainment? Maybe we’ll pick up a pack of popcorn at the store and spend a night watching episodes of The Family Guy on Hulu.com or read interesting information on Digg.com or Reddit.com.

The fact is that businesses are going to have to adapt to the internet users. They can’t continue to do business the way they always have, or they will no longer be in business.

When you aim for perfection, you discover it’s a moving target. ~George Fisher

Don’t let your desire for perfection get in the way of your marketing goals. Being hesitant and indecisive when forming ideas for your interactive marketing strategy can waste a lot of valuable time. It can also cost you some valuable leads that you would be generating if you had just committed to getting it up and running. Time is money, and the more time you spend not having an effective online marketing solution, the less money you are going to be making.

Some people will spend months or years polishing a business plan, making sure every single detail is examined and estimated, only to find that in practice, it’s not as they imagined it. That’s way too much time wasted planning and thinking, when they should have be doing and learning.

The same is true about your Interactive Marketing Solution. You know that you need to figure something out to stay competitive. All this talk about Web 2.0, corporate blogging, and social media is pretty confusing. It’s scary knowing that you need to do something, yet having no clue on what to do. How can you identify what is right for your company?

Well, the best advice is to let someone (I suggest MasterLink) help you formulate an Interactive Marketing Action Plan. Working with a collaborative Interactive Marketing partner to identify your goals and objectives is a great way to establish what your interactive marketing solution should be. By setting goals, it is then easy to work backwards to discover ways of achieving them. Hey, it turns out you don’t need that corporate blog or the fancy 3-d flash intro after all. Nice!

Marketing is an ongoing process. You discover that your favorite campaigns are not quite as effective as you planned, or that the one you had no hopes for, surprisingly has a high conversion rate. Because the nature of marketing is so volatile, the best strategy is to get it going and just test, tweak, test, tweak, test, etc.

You can come up with millions of excuses not to get a website up, not to set up a Pay-Per-Click campaign to drive traffic to your company’s product pages, or not to start utilizing Search Engine Optimization to increase your business’ online visibility and credibility. Stop it! Quit making excuses.

Your best option is to start right now before your competition leaves you in their dust. When you spend so much time looking for the “best” choice that you never actually do anything, you are sabotaging your company.

Even if the target is moving, it still is best to shoot. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

 The downpour of negativity towards Microsoft is beginning to wear on me. I feel the need to stand up and voice my reasons why I still believe in Microsoft. After all, weren’t they the darling of the media just 10 years ago? Bill Gates was a capitalist icon. He was the geek that proved everyone wrong. He was the one that made being a nerd “cool”.

Let me take you down a trip to memory lane. Apple was the big boy, with Steve Jobs at the top. Macintosh and its powerful word processor were destined to replace the typewriter. It was a far better platform than those of us that played around on the old Apple IIe. Its GUI interface was mind-blowing, and floppy disks were rumored to hold entire megabytes someday. Any office place worthy of being in business had to have one.          

A decade later, Apple was faltering, and almost half the homes in America had a PC. Microsoft was innovative, and above all else it was cheap. Mac lovers were either dinosaurs or were working on graphic designing at the universities. Billions of dollars were spent on hardware upgrades for PC’s, while Mac’s had a hard time being upgraded. It really didn’t matter that Mac’s didn’t need to upgrade much, since they were top-of-the-line to begin with. Computer geeks were able to fiddle with IRQ’s for hours, while Mac users rarely knew what an IRQ was. Working on a broken PC made a geek seem smart in the eyes’ of others.

Working on a broken Mac was short and simple. It was no coincidence that Steve Jobs’ tenure at Apple was also short at the time. Steve Jobs has only achieved great success since he came back to Apple because he learned one valuable lesson; don’t challenge Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop market.          

All of the major failings of PC’s became huge selling points, while Apple struggled to market to a small percentage of the population. Why was that? Simple: It was the price of the Mac. Apple was determined to make the Macintosh the Mercedes Benz of the computing world. Microsoft wanted their computers in the home of every home. Here’s a simple fact: the Volkswagen Beetle (Bug) was the most sold car in the history of cars. It was also one of the cheapest, and easiest to fix.          

I might own a Mercedes Benz, but I will probably buy numerous cheap cars in the meantime. I don’t have to search for parts for cheap cars, just like I don’t have to search for PC software. It is the exact opposite for Macintosh and Mercedes Benz. If most people used a Mac, most viruses would target Macintosh computers. Is my point becoming clear? For the many awful mistakes that Microsoft has made through the years, there is a reason why they dominate the computing market. Without Microsoft, most homes in America would not have a computer at all.