After the success of our previous event on the 18th February, we now confirm our second forth coming event for this year!

Social Media: Maximising your brand presence on Facebook, YouTube and other social networks is the title of our upcoming event to be held on the 31st of March, from 4pm to 7pm, at the Soho House in Old Compton Street in London.

The knowledge sharing event for marketing professionals is being hosted together with B! Digital and in collaboration with Viadeo and Google. Speakers at the seminar, other than 77’s MD, Marco Corsaro, include Bruce Daisley, Sales Leader, YouTube & Display, who will be discussing how to make the best out of Video Marketing using YouTube, followed by Ben Duncan-Clark , Survey Manager, Viadeo who will share insights about market research in professional social networks.

The main objective for this series of social media events which we hope to continue running throughout the rest of 2010, is to provide professional marketers with a better understanding of the opportunities and benefits social media networks hold in store for brands.

Social media continues to grow at an exhilarating pace, it can become challenging for marketers to identify the best way to maximise some of the new online tools and channels existent in today’s social media marketing landscape. It is our intention to take a look at  how to utillize some of the key social networks such as Facebook and YouTube, to enhance marketing efforts, increase online brand presence and boost business ROI.

RSVP here!

Visit our 77 Facebook Fan Page to stay tuned for any updates, event photos + more on future events!

You can also visit www.77agency.com for more on 77Agency.

Google’s user-generated video website, YouTube, will make available automatic speech recognition captioning for its video selection.

This new service could be revolutionary since it will open up a huge share of its content to people who are hearing-impaired, and will also lead to creating a network of videos that could be subtitled between many languages.

comScore’s January 2010 press release regarding online video usage reported that 170 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month of November.

Online video viewing continued to reach record levels in November with nearly 31 billion videos (viewers watched an average of 182 videos per viewer).

This feature will not only help out the hard of hearing, it will make them feel connected to society, especially one that continuously communicates itself through online video.

YouTube has offered closed captioned videos in the past, however, the captions were provided by the video producer, and represented a very small share of YouTube’s database.

Today, the new speech recognition technology will allow for automatic transcriptions on all of YouTube’s videos, even if a few funny errors happen to pop up here and there.

How far will Google’s non-complying attitude towards the next world’s super power take them?

Currently, Google is actually threatening to pull out of China and stop censoring its search results which could actually end up closing operations as a result. The Head of the Human Right’s Watch, Arvind Ganesan declared that this is the first time the Chinese have actually targeted accounts overseas even though they’ve always censored the web.

The search giant is implicating that the Chinese government had something to do with the online hacking and ‘highly sophisticated and targeted attacks’ as an attempt to access the Gmail accounts of some Chinese and also international human rights activists. ‘Don’t be Evil’ anyone?

At least twenty other large companies from businesses including finance, technology and media have been similarly targeted and as a result, Google Gmail accounts will be set in an ‘https’ mode, which means email contents will be scrambled so they’re less likely to leak out to unauthorized users.

Google had stopped using this highly secure setting because it proved to be slower than the unprotected mode, which encrypted people’s log-in data only.

However, and despite all this, we know the issue of the attacks is not only about breaking the law, internet security and disobeying the Chinese government. It’s about proving a point and standing up to defend a nation’s right.

We’ve seen how the Chinese government has been quite successful at implementing some of the most restrictive internet regulations in the world, and banning its web users from visiting certain sites as well as controlling freedom of expression.

To some extent, Chinese citizens see Internet as a way to enhance freedom of speech and increase opportunities for political participation, while providing a window to the outside world.

The video runs through some big events of 2009 (mostly from a US perspective), starting with the heroic plane crash landing by Pilot Sully Sullenberg on the Hudson River, the deadly and widely spread swine flu, NY Yankees victory, the Twitter boom, and finally ending with a clip of Barack Obama.

Although is goes by quite quickly, the video provides an entertaining overview of the year, however you might have to watch it more than once.

Check it out:

New Types of Data

The eradication of information overload. This has become one big concern due to the fact that it’s time-consuming and results must be refined in order to find what you’re looking for. Google’s goal is to refine search relevance and accuracy by making significant improvements in understanding search queries.

Semantic Search

The meaning behind words in a search query via semantic and statistical processing does not only require matching queries with the keywords and delivering results. Google takes into account every single element of the search query, from synonyms to morphology and other variables in the search equation.

Cloud Computing

More people are using the internet, therefore they are growing more comfortable with using cloud based apps like Gmail on a daily basis. As this tendency increases (and it already is) more and more information will be stored from the hard drive to the various cloud services and the easier it will be to find information and relevant content online.

Real Time Search

Real time will become even more big. People like to be updated with the latest news and updates on-the-spot. No matter where they are, people are more and more thirsty for news and information. And its basically one of the reasons why Twitter became such a phenomenon in 2009 and will continue to be so.

Mobile Web

People need information on the go, regardless of their location. This is why more people are accessing the web via their mobile devices. Therefore, business be well prepared to cater to the increasing number mobile web users and build mobile versions of their websites.

Any predictions you would like to add to these? Please feel free.–

Today, Bing’s CTR is 75% higher than Google’s.

Let’s head towards the social media network front instead. A recent study by comScore, reported that Facebook is the fourth largest website in the U.S. Numbers show that Facebook surpassed with 102.9 million unique visitors in the U.S., versus 99.7 million for Aol. Other interesting values revealed that although AOL grew millions in October 2009, while Facebook grew by more than 5 million.

Last summer Facebook has already become the fourth largest site worldwide last summer when it became more popular than Wikipedia. So, how long  do you think it will take for Facebook to catch up to Microsoft’s 136 million U.S. visitors? or Yahoo’s 160 million U.S. visitors? and for tha matter, Google’s 168 million visitors?

This information should be quite useful to 72% of 8,500 senior marketers who declared they will increase their spending on digital media in 2010, as presented by a study from Round2 Communications. Along similar lines, 33.9% of marketers said ROI for new media is “somewhat” better than traditional, and 28.2% said new media’s ROI is “significantly” better.

The downside to this- 86% of the respondents say they expect their spending on traditional media, including broadcast TV, radio, print newspapers and magazines, to suffer very little change or simply decline in 2010 as declared by 40.3% of respondents.

One small bad review will make an organization look terrible, and no matter how much effort a company puts to rank first within the top positions in Google, Bing or Yahoo, the negative content will still show up. Even if just one negative content appears anywhere within the SERPs it can still damage a company’s reputation.

To avoid such content from invading the SERPs, a company must dedicate a lot of time and effort to build up its positive presence on the result pages while at the same time pushing the negative content below the fold.

One way of doing this is by using social media. Establishing your company’s presence in recognized social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and LinkedIn can efficiently help reduce the negative results.

Another way is by blogging on a regular basis. Aim to publish one page blog posts on a regular basis about your company’s products or services and the benefits of buying them. At the same time, you can try to establish relationships with the press as well as bloggers in order to score a potential article or blog post that could help build a good name for you.

Lastly, another good solution is link building. Linking your company’s name or specific keywords between different social media profiles, blog posts and any good review you’ve obtained about your organization can also help increase your rank on the different search engines.

Online reputation management is vital for your organization to gain a priviledged position on the SERPs. Like I said, it takes a lot of time and effort to build a good reputation online. However, keep in mind that the more information there is available to readers, prospects and customers about your organization, the easier it will be to eradicate the bad press and generate good results for your online marketing strategy.

1. You signed up early on for a Google Wave account, which could be done through a request form Google had put up not long after the product was announced.

2. You have an account on the Developer Preview of Wave. The Sandbox version of Google Wave was put active for developers to test the new Wave.

3. Some paying users of Google Apps will get accounts.

4. You received an invitation from someone currently using Wave and this is how Google put it: “We’ll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.”

If you’re reading this post now, it might not be that late for you to secure an invite for there’s still a Google Wave frenzy out there for the famous invites.

While free invites may still be circulating the Web, just last week Stephanie Hannon from Google announced that ‘Wave had a great weekend. Sent out a bunch more invites. Soon it will be Monday morning in Sydney and we will send out even more …, some have been diligently using Twitter to create contest in order to raffle out, on a first come first serve basis, the 8 invitations each invitee gets access to.

So keep an eye for contests such as this one or all of those who’ve requested their Google Wave invite and who are now waiting for the invite knock on their inbox’s door. You can use Twitter to find out who’s gotten and invite and hope to stand in line and be one of the fortunate 8 ‘friends’ who get one.

Otherwise, you can buy one on eBay, where many have been capitalizing from this invite frenzy. If you weren’t lucky on Twitter and don’t have too many followers, then chances are slim for you.

On eBay, however, you can find a vast number of Google Wave Invites, Google Wave nomination email, Google Wave ACTIVE LINK, Instant Google Wave invite, so on and so forth, that you can buy instantly or bid on and try your luck.

The most popular video site in the planet has just launched a new ad format, currently available in the U.K., France, Italy, Canada, Germany, Spain and The Netherlands– YouTube Promoted Videos. The new ad format allows for advertisers to choose, through the AdWords interface, a promoted video ad template so that when a YouTube viewer clicks on your promotion, they see your video. You only pay when people click to see your video – not when people see your promotion.

The YouTube Promoted Video ad option consists of a thumbnail on the left and three lines of text on the right. When a user clicks on a video ad, he/she will be taken to the YouTube page or channel with the video. Any user can promote ads on YouTube for just a few dollars a day, though most of the promotions on the site are run by larger organizations.

According to Nielsen, online video streaming is growing slowly but surely. This September, total video streams increased 24.8% compared to 11.2 billion streams in the same period last year. YouTube in particular leads over 50% of all video streams in the U.S., a total of 6.7 billion streams.

Just like sponsored links on Google, advertisers will be able to pay for their Promoted Video when users click on the ad. In addition, advertisers will also be able to add a ‘call-to-action’ clickable overlay on videos to engage people and drive them to their websites.

Watch the YouTube Promoted Video presentation:

Last Thursday, for the second time in Italy, 77Agency and Buongiorno Marketing Services, in collaboration with Key-Com and BootB, presented 360° Marketing: Using creativity to integrate offline, social & mobile activities, at the beautiful Adriano Hotel in Rome.

This time, the keynote speaker was Angelo Liverani, Agency Relationship Manager- Google Italy, who spoke about the benefits and opportunities that the greatest platform for user-generated content on the Web– YouTube– has to offer. Liverani also talked about the role of YouTube in the media mix including targeted advertising campaigns along with several case studies.

77Agency, who in 2009 was officially recognized as Google Analytics Authorized Consultant and Google Website Optimizer Consultant and who currently has a portfolio of clients such as Lavazza, Dimensione Danza, Barclaycard, RadioDeejay, RCS Group, Lottomatica, JP Morgan and Saxo Bank, aimed to offer to the exclusive attendees of the seminars, useful insights about the importance of using creativity in the development of multichannel campaigns, the integration of online campaigns with offline activities and finally, mobile social media.

Other additional speakers included Key-Com, who spoke about the importance of merging online marketing initiatives with the offline world. As we know, billions of people are now online, and the rapid growth of emerging technologies and social communities is at a very high point. In addition, innovative advertising campaigns can capture the overflow from the online world, while at the same time merging it with traditional offline mediums to engage the right audiences in a direct and creative manner.

Buongiorno MS on the other hand, explained how social networking and consumer generated medium have moved beyond computers. There’s a bigger audience that’s now accessing their favorite social network from their mobile devices, therefore, there’s definitely a monetizing opportunity there for marketers.

Last but not least, BootB, the online pitching engine, enlightened the crowd with its innovative concept of giving brands online access to an unlimited amount of creative proposals from which they can choose without going through the hassle of booking meetings or tweaking strategies continuously.

77Agency’s next seminar, Developing a Coherent Facebook and Social Media Strategy, will be held at the Soho House London, October 15th. Book your place now at seminarslondon@77agency.com