We heard about it last year and now we’re finally seeing it action – partly, anyway.  As Amanda pointed out last week, up to 25% of  Yahoo’s organic search results in the U.S. are being powered by Bing and up to 3.5% may see paid listings from Microsoft adCenter.  The difference won’t be noticeable unless you’re one of the lucky searchers to see the “Powered by Bing” badge on the bottom of a results page (they’re currently testing this badge on just some of the results, but once it’s fully rolled out, it will be on the bottom of all the results pages).  I went to Yahoo to see if I could get a glimpse of a Bing-branded results page by performing a million (read: ten) searches but it was not to be.  Seriously, after 10 searches on Yahoo, I had to leave; I felt like a foreigner in a strange land (I’m a Googler).

When will it ALL be Bing?

Microsoft and Yahoo are currently doing tests for organic and paid results and if all goes well, the US and Canada will see all Bing-powered results in desktop and mobile searches as early as August (August/September is the current time frame).  The paid search platform transition to Microsoft adCenter will be undergoing a bit more testing, but is expected to be fully live by October.

Obviously, this is a pretty big transition, especially for those folks who currently use Yahoo Search Marketing for their PPC campaigns.  Yahoo is trying to make this as smooth of a transition as possible, and has a bunch of information regarding the change.  Not only do they have a complete site called the “Yahoo Transition Center” dedicated to it, there are also helpful posts on the Yahoo Search Marketing blog.

What about the rest of the world?

I haven’t read anything yet about when they plan to integrate the Bing-powered organic results internationally, but for PPC, international advertisers should see the move to Microsoft adCenter in early 2012.  Again, this will all be dependent on a successful roll out in the United States and Canada.

On the tail of this news, Yahoo Japan just announced that it plans to use Google’s search engine technology for their organic and paid search instead of Bing.  Although this may be a bit of a blow to Microsoft, Yahoo only holds a minority stake in Yahoo Japan and cannot stop them from using Google as an alternative.  This proves to be an interesting move, considering that comScore’s figures show that Japan has the third largest number of searches conducted as of December 2009 (behind the US and China).  A good portion of Japan’s searches could be Google-powered if everything goes as planned.

Are you excited about this change?  Are you mad because I dissed Yahoo?  Let me know!

As I was putting together my Weekly Recap this week, I noticed a lot of the updates were about phone upgrades. Every generation has their technological advances that totally creep out the generation before theirs. I think right now we are watching not only the internet drastically changing how we work, but one of our most trusted and valued modes of communication is morphing, too – the phone. The phone was pretty stable for a long run and since the launch of cell phones, there are big new advances happening rapidly; texting, picture messages, voice over IP, video phones, etc. That is enough deep thoughts for me. Here are the biggest news stories I ran across this week in web:

iPhone “deals” with their reception issue – As we mentioned last week, Apple held a press conference last Friday. The boiled down version is there is an antenna problem and they are going to refund anyone who buys an iPhone bumper to help with the reception issues. The iPhone bumper is essentially a fancy rubber band you put around your phone so that you don’t lose a signal when you touch the metal band around the phone. There have been a few other fun alternatives to the bumper like the iPhone bandaid and, my favorite, the new End Call button.

Don’t be alarmed, but we are running out of internet – We are not running out of space, or website addresses but apparently we are running out of IP addresses, according to experts. Your IP addresses essentially tells the internet who and where you are and it is a series of numbers. They just are coming to a point where they are going to run out of numbers. So much like when phone numbers got maxed out we had to add area codes to make the numbers longer, they may have to make IP addresses longer too. Why is it important? I’m not sure but it is interesting that we have so many people accessing the internet now, that we are running out of IP addresses. With other news this week like Facebook announcing that they are up to 5 million users and Foursquare counts it’s 100 million checkins A DAY Microsoft sells 175 million copies of Windows 7 in nine months, I am beginning to think this whole internet thing isn’t a fad.

Skype is changing the game – Skype, the internet calling service, announced that you can not only now use Skype to make calls on your iPhone but you run it in the ‘background’ so you can use other applications at the same time. What does that mean? It means you have more control using Skype to make a call than you do using your cell phone service; you can check the internet, play a game, write a note while you make a call. Skype lets you make free calls to other Skype users and you can make calls to landlines and cell phone with a minimal fee (often less than a cell phone contract). What would cell phones be like without cell phone carriers like AT&T, Sprint etc.? That is where this has the possibility of going.

Yahoo tests out displaying Bing results – In a move we have all known about for awhile, Yahoo has made an agreement with Microsoft to have their search engine, Bing, power Yahoo searches. They started testing it out in organic and paid search by letting Bing power 25% of Yahoo’s search traffic.

Google gives image search a makeover – From the other search corner, Google launched a new Google image search. We like it better. It displays more images and doesn’t take up too much space giving you too much information. To see where the image is from or the context, you just click on the image or hover over it. You can also see results for similar images which I could see being very useful.

Links I liked this week:

• 7 Steps For a Successful Social Media Strategy – Social Media Examiner
• Debunking the Myths of Social Selling for B2B – Socialmediab2b
• Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood Throughout the Day inferred from Twitter Video
• Google Voice Gets Faster For BlackBerry and Android Users

Maybe.

Ranking Factors

Late last year, Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) mentioned that there are over 200 variables used in Google’s algorithm to determine how a web page ranks in the search results pages.  We already know some of those variables, such as the quantity and quality of backlinks to the page, use of keywords in title tag and copy, and even how long it takes for the page to load.  For obvious reasons, we’ll never know all the ranking factors and Google changes its algorithm on a daily basis (yes, daily).  However, Google was just granted a patent on something new that could be incorporated into its algorithm: mouse movements.

Why Mouse Movements?

If you use your mouse to help keep you focused on the descriptions that you’re reading in the search engine results, your mouse may be hovering over some search results longer than others because you are more interested in that particular result.  Perhaps you’re even getting an answer to your question in the that text description of the web page, so there’s no need to click on it even though it gave you an answer to your search (when is Justin Bieber’s birthday?!?!).

Part of the patent’s abstract, which was actually filed for in 2005 but just granted last week, states: “Sometimes, a user may review multiple informational items responsive to a search query, moving a pointer over or near each of the informational items that the user reviews. These various pointer activities can provide another way to evaluate the user’s feedback with respect to a particular informational item.”  In a nutshell, the pointer (mouse) may be a tell-tale sign of which results the searcher values.

Is This Really a Good Ranking Signal?

When I first read about this, my reaction was “no way”.  I don’t think that someone moving their mouse along the page as they read is a good measurement of the quality of the results, or the intent of the searcher.  Google also indicates that “a typical user’s behavior is to move the mouse pointer (or any other pointing indicator) over or near a target informational item, keep the mouse pointer there for a period of time while the user reads the item’s information.”  For me, this is not typical behavior.  I keep my mouse to the side of the text and use my scroll wheel to move down the page as I read, and I’m sure that I’m not the only person who does this.  Granted, Google may have this patent and not even want to use it anymore, or maybe they will incorporate it into a more broad consortium of user behavior data they’re collecting.  There’s really no way of knowing how they plan to use this patent.

What do you think, is this a good indication of search result interest?  Do you use your mouse to follow along as you read?  I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I know a woman who refers to Twitter as a giant cocktail party and loves that you can eavesdrop and jump in on any conversation, at any time. True, but what if your followers stink? They tweet about boring things, share the same links over and over, talk at you not TO you and no one responds to your thoughtful content.

If you focus too much on your Twitter followers being a numbers game and not a relationship starter, you will be blessed with crappy attendees to your virtual cocktail party. Thousands of boring tweeters will clog your Twitter stream with sales promos, what they had for breakfast and whiny tweets about how horrible their lives are.

Relationships beat numbers

What are you using Twitter for? As a broadcast tool? To tell you boss that you have 10,000 followers? Then sure, numbers are good but more often then not, your tweets fall on deaf ears (or um, eyes). If you are using Twitter to build and reaffirm relationships with your customers, establish yourself as an expert in your industry or to get feedback on your products and services, then relationships matter more.

Jason Falls wrote a quick and to the point blog this week about what is more important, ‘influence’ or trust? Many people spend too much time trying to get the attention of the people with the biggest Twitter followers or most blog subscribers. If one of those picked up your content, would you really get the eyeballs you want on your content? You are probably better off finding someone in your niche who has followers that would really benefit from your content, products and services.

3 easy ways to find good people to follow on Twitter

1. Try adding your LinkedIn contacts to your Twitter followers. The Next Web thought that with this new easy integration, this could be the ‘a-ha’ moment for many Twitterers struggling to find meaningfulness in their Twitter streams.
2. Look for hashtags that are in and around the target group you are trying to reach.
3. Can’t find a good hashtag? Start your own or start a Twitter chat. Twitter chats are a great way to find new people you can connect with. I have met some really good people through #blogchat.

Lastly, if you feel like your followers are lacking the qualities you need, don’t feel bad about trimming the fat and getting your numbers down to people who care about you and your content.

Old Spice creates a stink on social media sites – Case study exhaustion beware! Every now and then a marketing initiative comes around and it takes everyone by storm. You watch it all happen and then for me, I hear a click in my head, ‘I am going to hear this case study for the next 5 years, over and over and over… damn’. This week Old Spice did something really interesting. They took the actor from their television campaign and had him make personalized video responses to social media power users. He responded to tweets, comments on YouTube videos and more. The funny responses were clever, came in rapid succession and were mostly targeted at higher profile social media users like Ashton Kutcher, Lucretia Pruitt, Guy Kawasaki, Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter) and even a flirty back and forth exchange with Alyssa Milano. To see all the responses you can check out the YouTube channel dedicated to the Old Spice Responses. The marketing effort was clever and won the Old Spice marketers some major pats on the back. Some are of course questioning the ROI of the campaign. No matter what the results, Old Spice had the online world’s attention for 48 hours.

Below is a video response from the Old Spice man to Jason Keath from Social Fresh about his request for an interview.

iPhone 4 press conference – As we have discussed before, the latest iPhone is having some serious problems. The technology darling, Apple, is under fire in a big way, which is new to them. Apple is known for being innovative and is held to a high standard. This debacle has highlighted that Apple and Steve Jobs don’t know what to do in a media crisis. Today, Apple is having a press conference to talk about the iPhone 4. It should be interesting to see what the company has to say and how they plan on fixing the faulty device. Another blow to the iPhone happened when Consumer Reports came out this week and said they could not recommend the new phone because of its known antenna issues. Video below.

Links I liked this week

Gmail allows rich text signatures
Google Tests Multiple Accounts Sign in
B2B Content Marketing Strategy and Practice Is Steaming Full-speed-ahead. Are You Onboard?
12 Favorite and Little Known Tips for LinkedIn

You may have seen them leaving off-color remarks on blogs, or always being negative on Twitter but Internet Trolls can be serious business. If you haven’t run into them first hand, you should probably be prepared to and have an idea of how your business will deal with them.

What is an Internet Troll?

Internet Trolls are internet users who find enjoyment in attacking and criticizing other people’s content. Their mission is usually to get a reaction from the person they are attacking or from their network.

An internet troll can be found in the comment sections of blogs, on social networks, in message boards and more. Their protocol is usually to comment on someone else’s content or profile in a negative and sometimes controversial manner to try to get a reaction.

Where the damage can occur to your business is in how you react to an internet troll. Your comments are as much of your marketing as your original post or profile.

Wikipedia Defines Troll (Internet)
In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

As you become an authority in your industry, you are more susceptible to trolls. Remember when your mother told you that kids were mean to you because they were jealous? Well the same applies here but with grownups and new tools for malicious behavior. As you establish yourself as an authority and broadcast to your network what your point of view is on a topic, you have put yourself out there and need to be prepared for trolls to try to get a rise out of you.

Sonia Simone from Copyblogger had a great post called The Dark Side of Authority where she explains that we all know being an authority in our industry is what we want, but trolls are one of the downsides of being an ‘expert’. She goes on to say that it is human nature to admire authority, but it is also human nature to for some to resent authority.

How to Deal With an Internet Troll

First things first, an internet troll is looking for a reaction so carefully consider your response or your decision not to respond.

Here are a few tips for dealing with internet trolls:

• Have a plan first – As with all things we talk about with internet marketing, it is important to have a plan first. This could be a conversation with anyone who is participating in your business blog and social networks or an official policy on how to respond to off-color comments. Going into the situation blindly without considering the possibilities means you could be more prone to having a gut reaction, and giving the troll exactly what they are looking for, attention.
• Approach each comment as constructive – As many of us have learned the hard way, there is no tone in written text. You cannot tell when someone is being sarcastic, or trying to be funny, maybe had a typo, or shouldn’t have read your blog after that martini and they misunderstood your content. Treat each comment like it had good intentions. Some will be very easy to tell that they are malicious but if it is borderline, treat it like it had the best of intentions.
• Delete content that hurts your network – I think leaving negative comments on your blog or profile is usually ok, if not good. It shows debate or lets you realize how other people view your opinions and you can have some really great conversations that help you grow. You should delete content that attacks another member of your network, has profane language or that you find offensive. You don’t want to be the arena that one of your readers gets into an argument with a troll.
• Say ‘Thank You’ – If there is a comment or a tweet that I think is malicious but I don’t have anything constructive to add, I will just say a simple ‘thank you for your comment’ or ‘thank you for your perspective’. That way, they know they were heard but they did not get a big reaction out of me.
• Follow up – On at least a dozen occasions someone has said something hurtful about me, my work or my company I have followed up and made a relationship out of it. A few have even become partners I refer work to. A whiny tweet could just be someone else who provides similar services but thinks their way is better, a cry for attention to view their work or a faceless crime and when you meet them face to face they are guilt ridden for their comment.

Dealing with internet trolls or off-color remarks is definitely a case by case and company by company basis. You need to do what is best for your business, your employees, your network and you. If you are prepared beforehand, you will probably have better results versus a petty battle of words in the comments section of your blog.

Robots.txt files are very basic in structure but play an important role in telling search engine crawlers what content they can and cannot crawl for indexing. The main purpose of this file is to prevent certain content within your website’s directories from being indexed and displayed in search engine results pages.

While there is no governing body that enforces whether crawlers are accessing content they shouldn’t, most crawlers are good and abide by the rules set forth in the robots.txt file.

When a crawler reaches your site, it first looks for this file which should reside in the main directory of your site only and nowhere else. If it finds one, it quickly scans the contents and its rules and proceeds if it is allowed.

Here is an example of how Google’s robots.txt file looks. You’ll see on the very first line some text that says “User-agent: *”. In simple terms, User-agent is a web crawler and the asterisk is a kind of “wild card” that states that ANY crawler can access the site for indexing purposes. There are ways to tell some crawlers they have the green light but block others within this first line, but for today we are just focusing on the simpler method of allowing all crawlers.

In order to determine if your site should be using a robots.txt file, take a look at your remote files and folders for your website. If you see directories such as /admin/ or /includes/ then they should probably be blocked from crawlers since they do not have any relevant content specific to search. An example of how this would look in your robots.txt file would be this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /includes/

Here’s an example of how the URL would look if you wanted to review it in your browser:

http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt

And that’s it! There are some other elements, however, that you can include in robots.txt such as your xml Sitemap location. This should not be confused with an HTML site map that lists the URLs of your site for easy navigation, though! I’ll be talking more about the importance of an xml Sitemap and how they differ from “site maps” in my next blog post.

The whole reason I started these Weekly Recaps is because I was having many conversations with people who were so overwhelmed with how fast this whole ’social media’ thing was moving. Keeping up is hard in our busy lives.

As I collected the items I wanted to highlight this week I noticed we aren’t the only ones who are trying to keep up – the tools and businesses we feature each week are still working all of this out too. There were some bad decisions, some failed attempts and just some things that were not working and they had to be cut loose. So when you feel overwhelmed, remember we are all (including the most savvy) still trying to figure out all these tools, what they can do and how we should use them.

So here are the items I am highlighting in this week’s Weekly Recap

Mobile phones used more for internet than games – PewInternet released some facts about mobile phone usage. With more options for smartphones, use of non-voice data applications on cell phones has increased. Taking pictures tops the charts as the activity most users said they are likely to do with their phones. A third of the respondents said they use their smartphones to access the internet, that is a lot! We as businesses need to make sure when people are looking for information about us on their mobile phones that they can find us and read our content. Mobile phone internet access is only going to increase, so we make sure our websites, shopping carts and content are prepared. If you want to know more you can read 3 Quick Things to Make Sure Your Website is Ready for Mobile Browsers or watch What Your Business Needs to Know About Mobile Marketing.

How Fast Company got it wrong – This week Fast Company launched The Influence Project, an alleged method to find the most influential people on the internet and the winner would be featured in the November print issue of the magazine. Instead, it turned into a weird pyramid scheme and link bait. To participate in the project you had to create a profile and upload your picture, then Fast Company gave you a unique URL to use however you wanted. As people clicked on your unique URL you got more points and your image got larger on the collage of other internet ‘influencers’.

Users who clicked on the links felt duped and those who registered felt they were set up in some sort of weak scam from Fast Company. The backlash from the experiment definitely overshadowed any participation. Some were irate while others explained why they were irked more eloquently. The biggest argument against the project is that this link baiting was more of an ego boost to those that were fine duping their online networks versus providing any actual value. The social media landscape is a slippery one. Many businesses are trying to figure out how to make it work for their business, but it appears Fast Company got this promo wrong.

Twitter comes up with another plan to try to make some money – Twitter has recently rolled out a few ways the popular microblog, with little to no revenue stream, can make a little extra cash. This week they announced @earlybird, a Twitter handle that you can follow to get the first alerts on specials from popular brands; businesses pay to have their specials added to the @earlybird tweets.

Foursquare is adding more features and talking about hardware for brick and mortar stores – Foursquare, the popular location based app, is refining their game as they recognize what users want and need from the service. In a blog post from them this week, Foursquare mentions allowing businesses to enter employees so they can still participate in the game but won’t qualify for mayorships or loyalty rewards, rotating ‘Specials Nearby’ alerts so you don’t see the same one all the time and expanding the reach of specials. They also mentioned making it easier on merchants to redeem offers. Sounds like Foursquare is going to pay a close attention to scanning devices in the future to see how they can incorporate them with their rewards programs. If you want to know more about Foursquare, TechCrunch had a nice piece about the company including some really interesting data.

Facebook got it wrong and is pulling the plug on the online gifts – The Facebook Gift Shop is closing August 1st. Facebook opened the gift shop hoping to be a major player in the online gifts industry but the offer missed the mark. Facebook gifts were little images that you could buy (for usually $1) to virtually give to a friend and they could keep it on their profile. I don’t think many will miss this feature but I always like when a company recognizes something isn’t working and isn’t afraid to let it go. Now they can focus on other products.

Links I liked this week:

• 5 YouTube Channels for Small Biz Advice
• Is Social Media Failing to Produce Business Leads?
• 10 Easy Steps to Social Marketing – and it’s all free!
• Listen, Social Media Expert! Tweeting is Easy, Marketing is Hard
• Ten Things You Need to Know About Design