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.

Google Fellow Amit Singhal describes the function of search engines like his in just about the best way possible. “Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more,” he says.

Imagine the impact of such a tool. Okay fine — no need to imagine. Just log and start exploring distant corners of the information universe. It really is a miracle. Or at least it should feel like the most ridiculously amazing, enriching and empowering human achievement in the long, ridiculous history of human achievement. Find the information/art/music/entertainment/community/birthday gift/driving directions/restaurant recommendation/cloud-stored memory you need within milliseconds of banging your fingers against a few keys.

Show up in 17th century New England with an iPhone, and you’d likely be crowned king (if not first burned at the stake with the other witches).

But Singhal also highlights what’s lacking in this otherwise-marvelous tool — and demonstrates what his pioneering company is doing about it.

“Clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.

As a child, my favorite fruit was Chikoo, which is exceptionally sweet and tasty. A few years back when getting a family dog, we decided to name our sweet little puppy after my favorite fruit. Over the years we have privately shared many pictures of Chikoo (our dog) with our family. To me, the query [chikoo] means two very sweet and different things, and today’s improvements give me the magical experience of finding both the Chikoos I love, right in the results page.”

Check out what Google is calling “Search, Plus Your World”. More social. More personal. More elements like personal profiles, shared websites, and results directly related to folks you know.

See the advantage?

Many of these features have been featured in Google results for some time now, especially pages recommended by contacts you might have if you use Gmail or Google-Plus. But what’s new is the intentionality of it — you can actually search specifically for results related to folks you know, as well as decide what you want to show up. Google-Plus profiles will also show up in auto-recommend while searchers are typing in their queries.

The move makes sense. In many ways, the core aim of this is the same thing that has many techies speculating that Facebook might one day conquer the search giant at its own game — access to information that’s tailored to the unique worlds that each searcher lives in. Facebook tends to have lots of information about its users. Google is getting there as well. That’s the future of search.

We’ll get into more of why this matters to Dallas businesses in the future, but you can imagine its implications on social media marketing, search engine optimization, and mobile web and search. In the meantime, our Dallas social media marketing and Dallas SEO specialists are happy to help you devise an Internet marketing strategy unique to your company’s needs.

New year. New social media trends and technologies. New opportunities to connect with a wider and wider range of potential customers and clients.

Social media marketing seems to evolve at breakneck speed, but let’s take a look at just a few of the larger trends we expect to see in the upcoming 12 months.

More Mobile

We talk about mobile a lot because, well, it matters a lot. A whole lot. For example, according to CNet.com, approximately 300 million smartphones shipped in 2010. This past year, that number jumped to around 468 million. In 2012, it will likely jump again to 630 million users.

In other words, don’t put off developing your company’s mobile web capabilities. A sizable chunk of those smartphone users will take advantage of the increased access to social media that those marvelous little boxes in their pockets provide. Make sure you have a mobile website design ready when mobile social media brings them to you.

More Social Media Advertising

TV and radio audiences are declining, which means that companies are going to be increasingly looking to advertise where all those eyeballs have gone — social media. In other words, social media marketing won’t just provide the standard opportunities to connect with potential customers and clients that social media provides (for free). But, increasingly, you’ll be able to buy prominent space on social media networks as well.

More News

Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are excellent ways to follow the news — you simply follow news outlets or people you respect, and get alerted every time there’s something new worth reading. So more people are going to be using social media as a way to follow the news in 2012. This matters to businesses because the more uses people find for social media, the more time they’ll spend there.

More, More, More of Everything

Facebook could top a billion users this year across the globe — let that number soak in for a second — and growth could explode even more if it’s ever allowed into China. Even if some people get sick of the whole experience and begin pounding out letters on typewriters again, social media still has plenty of room left to grow. It’s not going away, so it’s a good idea to figure out ways to make it work for your company.

Let us know what social media trends your company is expecting to see in 2012 in the comments below. Happy New Year!

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.

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.

Here’s a good lesson: Don’t get so blinded by the dazzling potential of social media marketing that you forget to make it, well, social.

For example, both Facebook and Yelp decided to quit the “daily deal” game (sites like Groupon, etc.) in the past couple weeks, highlighting an important lesson for businesses trying to navigate the new Dallas Internet marketing landscape.

Let’s review how the daily deal story has developed over the past year:

Groupon and LivingSocial showed up and turned the relationship between local businesses and the web on its head. These pioneers were then followed by about a thousand imitators, since daily deal sites have very low barriers to entry (all you basically need is a website and a sales staff to get rolling). So it was only a matter of time before some of the web’s true heavy hitters would realize how seemingly well-positioned they were to dominate the deals market. The idea was simple: people already used tools from those sites to connect with businesses. Why not put a deal in front of customers while the sites have their attention?

Sure enough, Facebook jumped in. Yelp jumped in. Google jumped in. Foursquare jumped in.

But a funny thing happened: Domination didn’t ensue quickly. And as we mentioned, Yelp and Facebook soon decided it wasn’t worth the investment.

According to Dave Payne, CEO of innovative daily deal startup Scoutmob:

Each of these companies came with different assets, but all of them had one thing in common…they were big, scalable platform companies.  Platform companies are fantastic if they can scale quickly (like these could), but they are not accustom to the high-touch relationship necessary to be successful in local advertising. The companies that have found success in the past (eg the alternative weeklies like Village Voice or coupon magazines like Clipper) have the DNA required to focus an inordinate amount of resources to identify, communicate with and close quality local businesses. This is not a problem that can be solved with a server and an iPhone app.  Over the past few months this has become apparent to Facebook & Yelp, so they decided that focusing on their core businesses — platforms — is their best bet.

One of biggest strengths of industry leaders like Groupon and LivingSocial are their huge sales staffs already well-established in local communities across the country (read: relationships). Scoutmob succeeds thanks to a slow-growth strategy that carefully gets the community involved, engages with local bloggers and artisans, and gives businesses a chance to tell their stories (again: relationships).

But just because Facebook and Yelp have built fantastic platforms that make it easy for other people to build relationships with businesses, doesn’t mean they could quickly or automatically build those relationships themselves.

In other words, stuff like a snazzy web design, a devoted company blog, and a smart social media marketing strategy can’t succeed by themselves. They’re just platforms. But what they can do incredibly well is give your company an unprecedented number of ways to engage with your customers and clients — to build relationships. That’s key.

Our Dallas social media marketing specialists can help you figure out which parts of the digital world can best enhance what your company is already doing well, and show how to use such tools to build fruitful, long-lasting relationships with your clients and customers.

A couple things have happened recently in Internet marketing land worth noticing — and understanding their implications without jumping to drastic conclusions:

1. After Google+ exploded onto the scene, raised a big ruckus, successfully built an enormous amount of media buzz, and posted meteoric first-month growth numbers, it promptly shrunk back to mortal levels. Following its first month, Google+ usage dropped 3 percent, and time spent on the site dropped 10 percent — not a good way to catch Facebook.

2. A recent study showed that social media use growth has slowed down significantly across the board. According to Web Pro News:

eMarketer estimates that Facebook growth will hit only 13.4% this year after experiencing 38.6% acceleration in 2010 and a staggering 90.3% ascension the year before. Facebook isn’t alone in its sobriety either. The rate of Twitter user adoption fell from 293.1% growth in 2009 to 26.3% this year. [...] Installing apps is on the decline, down 10.4% in the U.S. and 3.1% worldwide.  Sending virtual gifts may not be gifts worth giving after all, with numbers declining 12.9% in the U.S. and 7.5% around the world.

Don’t get me wrong, people are still embracing social networks. However, the severity of competition for consumer attention is now unmistakable. Once liberal with their likes, Retweets, and follows, consumers are becoming much more guarded and realistic. Therefore brands will now have to more effectively listen to markets to make more informed decisions about how social media impacts the enterprise and in turn customer experiences.

So what do these sorts of developments say about your Dallas social media marketing strategy? That social media is overrated? Just a passing cloud in the ever-evolving marketing sky?

Not likely.

With any new product or service, the initial buzz is likely to suffer from a steep drop-off — especially when the product or service is free for people to try, when their friends are trying it, and when it could seem useful for a broad variety of users. People will inevitably give this new service a try. A smaller percentage of folks will find actually explore its usefulness. A fraction of them will stick, and use the service to varying levels in their daily lives.

So yes. Hype springs eternal, and social media sites do everything they can to build that initial buzz. But making a decision about your social media marketing strategy based on how quickly hype dies is just as rash as investing heavily based on the early buzz of every emerging Internet marketing trend out there.

Social media is still an unprecedented way to reach customers and clients, engage with them, and learn about them. So don’t try to decipher the passing clouds — look for bigger, more permanent shifts in the Internet marketing landscape. Don’t look at the drop-off — look at how people settle into long-term usage of a social media tool or app, and build strategies around those potential clients and customers.

At Masterlink, we can help. If you’re too busy, you know, actually developing and refining your company’s core products and services to spend a bunch of time figuring out social media, contact one of our Dallas interactive marketing specialists. Following Internet developments a little bit obsessively is part of our business, and we’re eager to help Dallas companies mold web marketing strategies that work.

With 1.3 million friends like these, who needs voters?

News broke yesterday that presidential candidate Newt Gingrich had possibly… well… overstated his popularity a bit. Without getting into politics, Newt’s nefarious Twitter strategy is a useful example of how your company should — and should not — approach social media marketing.

According to Gawker:

Gingrich currently boasts 1,325,842 followers, whereas competitors Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann have yet to crack 100,000. [...]

About 80 percent of those accounts are inactive or are dummy accounts created by various “follow agencies,” another 10 percent are real people who are part of a network of folks who follow others back and are paying for followers themselves (Newt’s profile just happens to be a part of these networks because he uses them, although he doesn’t follow back), and the remaining 10 percent may, in fact, be real, sentient people who happen to like Newt Gingrich. If you simply scroll through his list of followers you’ll see that most of them have odd usernames and no profile photos, which has to do with the fact that they were mass generated.

To answer your first question: Yes, there are ways to do this. There’s no need to get into the details now, but anytime a new marketing medium like Internet marketing emerges, people are going to figure out how to game the system.

To answer your second question: No, you shouldn’t do this. And no, your competitors won’t gain much of an edge if they do.

As we discussed a year ago when Texas gubernatorial candidate Kay Baily Hutchison’s campaign was caught using “blackhat SEO tactics”— in her case, loading her website with random, invisible keywords like “Cooper Tire Texarkana” that had nothing to do with her campaign in order to boost traffic — shady SEO or Internet marketing techniques just have a way of coming back to bite you.

Beyond the political realm, we’ve seen several companies build elaborate, but fragile SEO schemes in order to improve their position in search results. And then we’ve seen how even a small algorithm tweak by Google sends the whole SEO house of cards crashing down.

Instead, companies who use social media’s enormous power to engage with their customers, to listen to their concerns and requests, and to add a humanizing voice to their communications strategy build organic, lasting followings.

So let’s be fair and hear Newt’s response. According to his campaign:

“[I]t’s his personal touch: He tweets and manages his Twitter feed himself, his campaign confirmed to POLITICO. All told, he has tweeted 2,611 times in the 29 months since he joined the site.”
It might seem implausible, but that is basically the strategy we recommend with interactive marketing tools like Twitter and Facebook. Be prolific. Be engaging. And most importantly — be personal. Give potential customers and clients the chance to know a different, more human side of your company — and give them a chance to connect and be heard. Your numbers will see a more sustainable rise.

For Newt, in all likelihood, there was probably a mix of both strategies. He should’ve just stuck with the latter.