Back on January 19^th, 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 100^th million member.

So what has contributed to Google+ recent growth? Earlier we heard about the Google plus Your World, a program where Google+ integrated company search results with daily search results. This may have convinced companies to utilize Google+ toward more of a business standpoint. Another intriguing scenario is the move to open the network doors to teenagers. Google+ started with restriction that only 18+ may join, since then Google+ has set the age limit to those 13 years or older – which has presumably gained a larger share in the younger audience.

Timeline Deadline

Another interesting factor is Facebook’s movement toward a universal Timeline. The widespread mandatory Timeline may have forced Facebook users to switch platforms and move toward the Google+ network. This is still taking affect so the real results of this won’t be seen till later.

Facebook or Google+ take your pick. We all know that this battle still has years and years of great competition ahead of these social media sites,  but who do you think will prevail?

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.

Today, Google and Yahoo have teamed up to combat the perpetrators of phishing through DMARC.org – Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. The two search engine powerhouses are working with Bank of America and Fidelity Investments to create this technical specification that will provide reliable authentication results to Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and AOL users.

What’s To Blame For The Increase In Phishing?

DMARC’s group of search engines and financial services blame social media for the spike in phishing because of the readily available user accounts and personal information across social media platforms and e-commerce sites. Well-known brands are easily targeted in emails because users naturally find them more authoritative.

The following is an excerpt DMARC’s site explaining why spammers target email: “Email is easy to spoof and criminals have found spoofing to be a proven way to exploit user trust of well-known brands. Simply inserting the logo of a well known brand into an email gives it instant legitimacy with many users.”

There are already two existing authentication screening mechanisms – SPF and DKIM – that will become standards in the industry with the implementation of DMARC. The fact is that most phishing emails are already intercepted and sent to the user’s spam folder. The goal of DMARC is to remove those emails from the spam folder altogether. Inexperienced users are still easy targets for phishing emails to trick them out of their personal information.

How can you avoid being the target of spammers? Avoid clicking on URLs within emails and be aware of popular scams that are infiltrating the Internet.

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.

David Hallerman, eMarketer principal analyst, states “Advertisers’ comfort level with integrated marketing is greater than ever, and this is helping more advertisers – and more large brands – put a greater share of dollars online.” This is great news for us in the internet marketing industry, in which we only plan to expand our knowledge and skills in services such as search engine optimization and pay per click advertising as the demand for such services increases.

US online spending is expected to continue to grow in the next half a decade, with a mark of $62 billion anticipated by 2016. Displayed below, is a chart of the estimated spending numbers along with the percent change from the year prior.

With so much emphasis on the Internet and online advertising, those in the traditional industry of newspapers and magazines should pay close attention to this transformation. In 2011, total print ad spending was still approximately $4 billion ahead of online spending; but, displayed in the chart below you can see online spending will pull further and further ahead of the traditional channels of advertising in the years to come.

How do you feel about this Internet revolution? And how will this affect how we reach our target consumers if less and less people are reacting to the traditional means of communication [newspapers, magazines]?

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.

The goal of these bills is to censor your web browsing which would also potentially impose damaging effects on American business and even our very own Internet Marketing Inc. All of you last minute paper writing college students must be in for a tough week because Wikipedia is officially blacked out in an attempt to dislodge the bills from being accepted. Wikipedia is allowing you to raise awareness by putting up a fancy box that allows you to input your zip code and let your voice be heard. After submitting your zip code, information of your district officials allows you to contact them. Feel free to drop them a line, express your concern and give them your opinion on censoring your rights.

Now there is always two sides to the story. Google understands that combatting piracy is vital, but, “the most effective way to shut down pirate websites is through targeted legislation that cuts off their funding. There’s no need to make American social networks, blogs and search engines censor the Internet or undermine the existing laws that have enabled the Web to thrive, creating millions of U.S. jobs.” Also joining in is Mozilla as they changed their default home page from a blank white background to black.

What are your feelings as to how citizens have reacted to this attempt at censoring your web searches?

Last year, Google introduced support for web pages with the same content translated into different languages. This week, Google is extending this support in two situations: multiregional websites using the same content and multiregional websites using fully translated content.

For example, multiregional websites using the same content would be English web pages for the US, Australia and Canada. The difference would only be the price of the page. Multiregional websites using fully translated content proves to be a bit more difficult. Substantially different monolingual pages targeting different regions need more support in providing accurate URLs to users. An example of this would be a product page in German, English and French.

Language And Location Specification

Google has improved support for the rel=”alternate” hreflang link element that handles content that is translated in multiple geographic regions. The hreflang can specify the language and the country (optional) and any other corresponding content. The purpose of this specification is to better provide users with relevant search results.

These changes will help make search results more efficient for users in other countries. It will be interesting to see how these improvements will allow internet marketing companies to better target consumers who speak different languages.

Do you ever wonder who started the juicy gossip you catch up on from day to day? Well now you can find out who were the top contributors to those stories and much more through Google+ Ripples. A few weeks ago Google announced this “Ripple” feature that seemed to almost be overlooked, when in reality it should be of much consideration to us marketers, and here’s why:

The ripple effect allows us to:

1. Find a influencer (Dalai Lama)
2. Make a connection to that influencer
3. Repeat to find who the influencer is sharing with (Vic Gundotra) to virally spread your content even more

The above example was a public post shared by Dalai Lama which illustrates the spread of the post (you can find the Ripple of any public post using the dropdown arrow menu at the top right of the post). If you watch the spread, you will see the content being shared to more and more users over about a months’ time frame.  Also, at the bottom of the page you will see the influencers (people with many public reshares), Statistics (how this post publicly spread), and Languages (of public shares of this post). As seen below:

So How Will This Help Us?

If we’re able to locate the influencer that is sharing content of our interest, then we’ll be able to connect to that influencer through Google+. Usually many other social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) are linked with their Google+ account which allows you to tack action with your preferred method of making a connection.

Once you’ve made the connection, put out something of value to them or possibly share their post so they know you’re interested in what they’re sharing. Hopefully at that point, they will see you sharing their posts and return the favor by sharing your content to their huge circle of followers. It’s important to not bombard the top contributor with too much content; rather research into who they’re sharing posts with (the influencers of the influencer) and reach out to them as well.

It’s all about finding that niche target market, and now thanks to Google, it’s easy (and fun!) to watch content go viral with the use of Ripples.

Google’s search ranking, evaluation and algorithmic processes are ever changing, keeping Internet marketers on their toes when deciding the most efficient optimizing methods to employ. Google often gives a glimpse inside some of their changes, but does not entirely delve into the more than 500 changes they make in a given year. Just yesterday, Google gave some insight into several improvements of the last couple of weeks.

For users making search queries in languages where limited content is available (including Slovak, Afrikaans, Malay and Swahili among others), Google will now translate relevant English pages and display the translated titles beneath the English titles.

Snippets will now include more page content and less header/menu content. This seems like a pretty straightforward concept: more content allows Google to choose more relevant text in snippets. Also, Google is extending application rich snippets, which offer more detailed information like cost, customer reviews and other relevant details for people searching for software applications.

Google tweaked their algorithm, which they say makes a significant improvement on ranking content freshness. This is quite possibly the most important change for Internet marketers. The change impacts about 35% of total searches—6 to 10% of search results in a significant way. It will detect a level of freshness for each query, in addition to another change that detects which pages are official to provide users with more relevant, authoritative results. Google says that this change will rank official sites even higher in the search ranking. Finally, for users who specify a certain date range in their search query, Google is helping to ensure that the results are most relevant to the date range specified.

Site Owners Stay Put

Google provides a disclaimer that these are by no means all of the algorithmic changes, nor will they work precisely as you may imagine. In that case, how helpful are these tips? These changes emphasize what a lot of marketers already know: relevant, natural and authoritative content is the key to success. Do you think Google’s insight provides marketers with enough information to reevaluate search ranking and evaluation processes?

The changing world of internet marketing is constantly strengthening and developing new avenues for lead generation. This year, SEO takes the prize as the number one source for generating leads. Out of the 500 U.S. online marketers surveyed by the 2011 State of Digital Marketing Report, two-thirds identified themselves as business-to-business marketers.

Social media marketing, PPC and SEO were among the categories considered to have the largest impact on lead generation. B2B marketers accredited 57.4% of their lead generation to SEO, while B2C marketers credit 41%. Although SEO was the number one generator of leads, marketers are planning to increase their social media budgets in 2012 even more than their SEO budgets.

PPC, social media and SEO are all essential aspects of  internet marketing for businesses, but each year we will see those numbers shift with new developments in online marketing efforts. It will be interesting to see how marketers spend their internet marketing budgets in 2012.

The moment we heard the news, the first question we asked, is Steve Jobs dead? A few weeks ago, similar news came out but was a hoax. But this time it is true. He died October 5, 2011. He is well known for being the former CEO, chairman and co-founder of Apple. Aside from being a technical wizard, he had very sharp marketing acumen and was an excellent visionary. The products that came out of Apple was often part of Steve Jobs’ vision.

Remembering Steve Jobs

In the Stanford University commencement exercise of 2005, Steve Jobs has been speaking about his views of life and death. His condition of Pancreatic cancer and his direction he decided to take.

Looking back at where Steve Jobs early beginnings with Steve Wozniak when Apple was formed, was immortalized in the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley.

Pirates of Silicon Valley

In the movie, you get to see a depiction of Steve Jobs and how his vision has brought Apple to where it is today.

For sure he will be missed by everyone within the industries he directly influenced. I have always admired Steve Jobs for the many things he has done. May he rest in peace.

After a much anticipated wait, Apple announced yesterday the innovative new features the iPhone 4S has to offer. From a lightning speed dual-core processor, to over 200 new software features, to a voice activated assistant who learns to understand your exact wants and needs, the iPhone will once again take us into a new world of technological advancement. So what does this mean to marketers? In a nutshell, the iPhone will be more advantageous and more essential than ever before, and the new iOS software will be hard to pass up – resulting in an expansion in market share.

Siri App and Its Ability to Understand Consumers

Some people may be familiar with the Siri App, which has been in the improvement stage for the past 18 months at Apple. Bringing the consumer a natural language processing assistant capable of responding to text messages, finding ideal restaurants proactively, and even helping to set reminders and schedule appointments, without even leaving your pocket (via Bluetooth).

This voice activated assistant not only understands what you say, it knows what you mean. For example, if one was to ask Siri “Where can I find some good breakfast cafes nearby?” Siri would respond, “I found a number of breakfast cafes near you.” It would then proceed to generate a list of possible cafes to choose from.

If your business is in that location, this new application serves as a strong advantage for your company against competitors. Although, it is not yet stated to what degree Apple will give developer’s access to the Siri API, but
if and when this happens, third-party applications will be able to push their company to its target market through this innovative form of mobile marketing.

3 Price Levels Will Expand iOS Market Share

In efforts to remain ahead of the Android market, Apple had to be wary as to how they would introduce the upgraded iPhone 4S. They decided to remain in line with their current pricing level for the 16GB version and 32GB version at $199 and $299, respectively. Apple is also introducing for the first time a whopping 64GB edition, priced at $399. In order to drive up iPhone market share, Apple is offering the 3GS version for free with a two-year contract, in addition to purchasing the current iPhone 4 model at a mere $99 (8GB).

With an increased market share, marketers will find it easier to focus solely on the iOS platform in order to allocate their dollars and mobile marketing efforts adequately. We can then assume those contemplating switching to the Android platform may be deferred, due to the increased attention for the iOS platform.

The Siri app and subsequent market share expansion, are only two of the defining highlights of the new iPhone 4S. We are anxious to see what Apple will come out with next that is sure to help us, as marketers, reach our audience in more innovative ways than ever before.