Marcel Media's Blog

Following user trends is one of the challenges that businesses face as they struggle to capture a loyal audience. Sometimes, however, companies see a spike in their online traffic, or a sudden decrease. How can companies become more informed of the trends in their industry? While Google Trends has quickly become a tool for tracking trends on user searches, there have been more developments in tracking trends.

Trendrr is a new site which allows users to track the popularity of different products, keywords, videos and other outlets within numerous sites.  Some of the sites Trendrr uses to track trends are YouTube, Amazon, Technorati, Google News, eBay, BoxOfficeMojo, Monster and Compete. Trendrr’s insight into online trends comes in forms of charts and graphs which are interactive.  Trendrr also presents a social networking aspect to its site, allowing users to share their graphs, view recently updated graphs, as well as voting up a graph similar to how articles are dug on Digg.com. Trendrr has the potential of helping businesses see the popularity within their industry.

Social bookmarking sites are quickly replacing the conventional way of saving one’s favorite websites on an Internet browser. Sites like Digg.com are becoming more widely used as a means for catching up on news in technology and entertainment, among other industries. And although Digg.com has reigned in popularity, it appears other companies want to take social bookmarking one step further. Twine is a bookmarking site which also prides itself in being a knowledge-tracking application that plans on changing the way in which users bookmark.

What will set Twine apart? The New York Times reports that “Twine is built on years of work in semantic technology, a branch of computer science that makes human-generated information understandable to computers.”  That is to say, Twine will go through different submissions and pull specific information to create tags. The semantic web is the most up-and-coming technology that industry leaders are looking to enhance user experience. Only time will tell if Twine will bring semantic to the forefront and users will be able to understand how semantic can help their Internet experience.

Although some forms of social media have helped schools enhance admissions, social media is taking on a new form: a learning tool.  The Social Media Classroom is a project that incorporates several social media tools into the learning process of students. That is not to say that it replaces student-teacher interaction, rather, it is said to enhance it.

According to the Social Media Classroom, the project is “a free and open-source web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—[including] integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, and video commenting.” As social media becomes a more imminent part of peoples’ lives, different industries, including the most unconventional, will utilize these tools to facilitate their goals.

The increased availability of smartphones like the iPhone and phones by Blackberry has brought on many an opportunity for companies to promote use of the mobile web.  Several companies including Google, MSN and Yahoo are developing mobile-dedicated search options.  Research has also shown an increase in on-the-go search.

According to reports, search for local businesses have produced excellent returns for mobile search and mobile marketing. YellowPages.com, for example, has made a seamless transition to mobile search. As an AT&T owned company, YellowPages.com has the exposure it needs for success. In fact, cell phones with AT&T services are beginning to come equipped with Yellow Pages’ mobile application.

Video sharing giant, YouTube (powered by Google), has become a phenomenon with its vast audience and influence on users. However, one struggle that YouTube has come across has been monetizing its successes.  YouTube aims at monetization through different outlets. YouTube will be going the e-commerce route, enabling users to purchase music from Apple’s iTunes or Amazon.com.  When users view a video with a music track, they can click on an icon next to the video and download the track from the two providers.

Another way in which Google is trying to bring revenue into YouTube is through ads.  Google is currently testing a system which will generate ads similar to those of Google AdWords. For example, when a user searches for a certain video, ads for related products, movies, etc. will also appear.  Ads for a product’s own YouTube channel might also appear. With the power of Google, YouTube may find a way to generate revenue in the future.

Social media has become a catalyst for many opportunities ranging from networking with potential employers, meeting new people with similar interests and most recently, as a way to sell a product. As social media becomes more and more widely used, businesses are taking advantage of this outlet to reach out to their prospective and continuing customers. Moreover, users are starting to rely more on word of mouth through blogs, user reviews and other influential channels.

According to recent studies, users feel that companies should use social media to interact with consumers. In fact, eMarketer states that “85% of social media users thought companies should interact with their consumers through social media, at least when needed.”  Businesses have been smart about what their customers want. As a result, 32% of online retailers maintain a Facebook page and 27% are on Myspace, among other social networking sites. While these numbers may seem a little low now, they have the potential to grow quickly.

Ask.com is revamping its site in attempts to draw more traffic, and add a competitive edge to the search engine industry.  Part of the initiative in the revamp is making the search engine up to 30 percent faster. In doing so, users would be more inclined to return to the site more often than not.  Another element going into Ask’s new structure will be a push to engage an international audience.

Most importantly, Ask seeks to give users the most relevant answers as possible, with ease. Reuters states that the “relaunched search engine will improve search relevance by adding structured data feeds to its results rather than finding random or unorganized data from around the Web like most search engines do”. One way in which Ask will improve on its results is by giving the answer to the question asked on the results page.  With the user in mind, Ask.com is positioning itself for success.

SEOmoz has launched a new tool, Linkscape, which can change the way in which website owners utilize their links and content. Linkscape allows access to link information on more than 30+ billion web pages across 200+ million domains. It also refreshes every 25 days for latest changes in the web’s structure. The tool is an excellent asset to those in the SEO industry trying to find greater insight on what helps a website’s exposure the most.

Linkscape offers many features such as mozRank,  mozTrust ,full lists of links that point to a domain, and anchor text analysis.  mozRank gives users the popularity of a link in based on how many  other sites are linking to that particular link.  Then, mozTrust evaluates a site’s level of trust based on the quality and quantity of trusted sites linking back to that site (this is also evaluated by search engine results).  The analysis of a site’s anchor text is a key component of Linkscape as it shows where the terms are distributed as well as their popularity.  The new Linkscape tool will help website optimization through its astute features, allowing users to tweak their sites for ultimate exposure.

Social networking giant, Facebook, has brought several people together. Users can keep in touch with current classmates and friends, friends from high school and grade school and even families.  Back in the early days of Facebook, users needed a university or college email to even sign up for the site. Nowadays, anyone can sign up for an account. In particular, the education industry has taken advantage of prospective students using Facebook to get in contact with them.

Many colleges and universities report great success with using Facebook as an admissions booster. Universities can create fan pages for their schools which can include school events, news, videos, images and other creative outlets. Creating these pages also gives prospective students a point of contact to ask questions about the school. A contact on Facebook is more intimate for the prospective student, building a foundation of trust between the student and the school.  A university’s Facebook page can be highly successful through raising enrollment, and it can be a form of reputation management.

Google’s new look on the Blog Search page shows new features, similar to the Google news search page. Google is taking advantage of a set of algorithms to interpret which stories should come up at the top of the blog search. This emphasizes the importance of having the right kind of blog. Google’s FAQ reports that Blog Search considers things like a blog’s title and content, as well as its popularity throughout the rest of the blogging community. Blog Search then takes these results and posts related blogs as results. One thing to note, however, is that the authority rank of the blog is overlooked.

Google’s blog search also categorizes blogs by eleven different topics such as politics, US, world, business, technology, video games, science, entertainment, movies, television and sports. And although some may yield better results than others, blog search’s new look is an improvement overall. Reports suggest that it might be of Google’s benefit to incorporate blog results with news results.