Search Precedes Purchase Decisions for Canadian Moms

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Online search is a fairly standard tool for finding anything from directions to a restaurant to conducting price and feature comparisons on a new refrigerator. So it’s no real surprise that Canadian moms head online to conduct research about potential purchases large and small. And in particular, they go online to learn more about consumer [...]

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How To Optimize Your Site for Search Engine Marketing

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For millions of websites, publishers, and online businesses, search is still the king. While social media may have the media’s attention and Twitter and Facebook are garnering a lot of the hype, search still trumps them when it comes to driving traffic and being discovered by potential new customers. Because of the importance of search [...]

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Why Small Businesses Shouldn’t Take Social Media for Granted

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It seems like social media is everywhere these days. But the 2010 Business Monitor United States report — commissioned by UPS — shows that when it comes to small- and medium-sized businesses, social media is still a missed opportunity. A mere 24% of respondents said they’ve received sales leads from social media, with just 1% [...]

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5 Creative Ways for Local Biz to Leverage Social with Google Maps

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There are so many creative ways for local businesses to get creative about marketing for dirt cheap, even free.  Google Maps is one resource forgotten to many local businesses.  Here are 5 ways local businesses can use Google’s user generated mapping functions, and social mapping tools to gain an edge in your area. Incentivize by [...]

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The Local Advertising War Will Be a Clash of the Internet Titans

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When Google upgraded their Local Business Center to Google Places, it launched the opening salvo in what we expect to be a long war for local advertising dollars. With local advertising revenues expected to reach $144.9 billion in 2014 according to BIA/Kelsey — and more and more dollars are shifting away from traditional media toward [...]

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Facebook Sends Window Decals to Local Businesses

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Facebook may not have made any big announcements about local business marketing at last week’s f8 conference, but the company is certainly stepping up its efforts in that area. Today, we discovered that Facebook is sending out window decals with text-to-Like SMS instructions to select local businesses. Twitter user B.J. Drums, who works with the [...]

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Small Business Secret Weapon

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Time and time again I find people in business trying to come up with new ideas, fresh ideas, something to bring in more clients and keep existing clients.   Teams of people sit around trying to come up with ideas people will like, services people will want, products people will buy.  In the game of simplicity [...]

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Facebook Now Commands 41% of Social Media Traffic

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Facebook and YouTube are displacing rivals and taking over the social web, according to data we’ve just received from comScore. In addition to showing massive and continued traffic growth throughout 2009 and the beginning of 2010, Facebook and YouTube continued to capture the highest volume of social web traffic. Twitter also garnered a ton of [...]

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Search and Rescue: How to Become Findable and Shareable in Social Media

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Search isn’t an isolated experience. The act of looking for information is now fused with validation, which means the socialization of search will unite discovery with context and relationships. It all begins with where we purposely search for relevant content and also where we respond to interesting information that crosses our path. ComScore’s most recent [...]

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Are You Ignoring Email Marketing Because of Social Media?

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Social media is on the minds of marketers everywhere. With its increasing popularity, marketers are thinking, “We need to be on Twitter! Let’s create a Facebook fan page! Crank out the viral videos!” Unfortunately, this often has no strategy behind it, and organizations are flying blind on the social web. While social media isn’t “killing” [...]

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