With so much competition among the many social media platforms it takes something very unique about the platform in order to drive the most traffic. So perhaps the world’s new obsession is “pinning”; browsing the web for the latest trends in style, food creations, photography, and home décor. Pinterest is sure beginning to catch the attention of many web surfers, specifically the online pin board accounts for 3.6% of the total referral traffic from January, according to Shareaholic (which is based on aggregated data from more than 200,000 publishers that reach more than 260 million unique monthly visitors). Pinterest is up a notable 1.1% just from December, making it almost even with the amount of traffic driven through Twitter; while Google Plus on the other hand dropped 0.02% to a total of only 0.22%.

Back on January 19th, Larry Page of Google noted that their social networking site Google+ had reached the 90 million user mark. Now, Paul Allen, a “unofficial statistician” for Google posts that the membership has grown more than 10% since then. By the end of today, Google+ is on mark for a whopping 100.8 million users. That means sometime today maybe you could be that 100th million member.

Transmitters of phishing have been manipulating users out of credit card numbers and other personal information since the mid 90s. The problem has been brought to light more recently as users have become more knowledgeable of the Internet and the methods that phishing uses to lure people into revealing sensitive information to unreliable sources. However, the problem has still managed to spike recently.

A retail chains worst nightmare is consumers who come into their stores and check out their merchandise, but then use smartphone apps to shop for less expensive deals online. Businesses like Target, with low-end retail, are tired of people that seem to be customers coming in to their stores just to check out their products. Target plans to put a stop to this activity by increasing their business model quality and asking their vendors to make exclusive products not offered online. Target recently sent an urgent letter to their vendors urging them to create unique products that separate them from their competitors. It also entailed that Target would not be a showroom where consumers go to ‘window shop’ and then find those same products or similar items for a lot less online.

Today is quite the milestone for YouTube. YouTube announced via their blog that users are watching and uploading more videos than ever before. The fascinating rate at which a video is being uploaded is one hour of video to YouTube every second. That means within the next 24 seconds of reading this article, YouTube will have another 24 hours of video ready for you to watch.  Speaking of watching videos, users are watching videos more frequently, a lot more. YouTube is now exceeding four billion views every day which is surprising.

The Facebook-only e-commerce player (Payvment Shopping Mall) has seen customers rise more than double from 500,000 to 1.1 million. This has been achieved by not having to buy an ad space on Facebook says Payvment CEO Christian Taylor. What the want and own buttons do is spread the word about certain products that you choose to share, enhancing social media marketing. When you or your friends tap these buttons, those products appear on people’s news feed, allowing your friends to see what others are looking at and are interested in. The like button has always been in place for every product from the 150,000 sellers on Payvment but has never been very effective.

With the rapid growth and technological advancements made through the Internet, eMarketers are estimating $39.5 billion will be generated in sales in the year 2012. According to a study by eMarketer, online advertising will continue to prove its worth in this time of economic hardships with a 23.3% increase in spending from 2011. This is nearly six billion more advertising dollars that will be spent in comparison to print ads in newspapers and magazines.

Google announced it would begin penalizing websites heavy-laden with advertising, updating their algorithms to exclude sites with buried content. As stated in the blog post announcing the changes, Engineer Matt Cutts explains that users simply want to see the page content without having to scroll down and search. The changes target sites with too many ads stacked on top of the page, or “above the fold.” Following a flood of complaints from users, Google is rolling out the new “page layout algorithm” to downgrade search rankings of sites with a higher ratio of advertising than content, and to reward and encourage sites with good practices.

In this week’s video, I cover four key tips to consider when marketing your business to a global audience. Expanding your business to international territories is great for growing your company and brand, but implementing international marketing campaigns can be very difficult. Whether you are looking to implement an international SEO or international PPC campaign, these marketing tips should help you start off in the right direction.

Many people took time out of their day yesterday to take action against the passing of two proposed bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property  Act (PIPA). An astounding 4.5 million people signed Google’s Anti-SOPA petition, according to the LA Times. Eighteen senators pulled back their position on PIPA, including Senator Marco Rubio (co-sponsor from Florida), and SOPA co-sponsor Arizona rep. Ben Quayle also changed his stance to opposing the bill on Tuesday.