45.4% of respondents worldwide considered social networks and applications a ‘top priority’ for 2010, while 42.2% found it ‘important’. Following closely were digital infrastructure, search optimization and mobile with 44.5%, 27.0% and 26.8% of respondents who considered these as their biggest priorities for this year.

However, an important fact that ties along with these findings is that senior marketers are not only allocating their marketing budgets to social media, they also want to see measurable results from their social initiatives.

According to a study from MarketingProfs which interviewed almost 5,000 marketing pros, almost all CMOs declared they’d look to increase their social media activites to engage customers, measure ROI and reach new audiences.

Findings also reported these marketers will execute the following activites during this year:

* A 400% increase in use of Twitter comments to inform decisions about products and services
* A 59% increase in use of customer reviews and ratings
* A 24% increase in use of social media for pre-sales Q&A

Some predictions from CMOs say social media will have an impact on revenue in 2010 and these are:

* 80% say up to a 5% impact, and 15% say a 5-10% impact

* Most companies (81%) plan to link annual revenues to their social media investment in 2010

Of those companies that did tie social media investment to 2009 revenues here are some of the outcomes:

* Companies with 5% or less revenue tied to social media in 2009 foresee that the link between revenue and social media will increase 5% or more in 2010
* Those with 6-10% of revenue tied to social media in 2009 project that the link will increase more than 10%
* Those with higher than 6% of their revenue linked to social media in 2009 foresee that the link will increase more than 20% in 2010

More findings from to the study from eMarketer revealed that respondents (27.9%) considered time spent online as the most important performance metric, followed by unique page views with 23.7%.

Are you looking to engage with your customers and allocate more budget to the digital space? Discuss.

A vast number of brands have already adopted and harnessed many of the digital marketing tools to communicate, engage and interact with customers and prospects to establish a solid online presence as well as increase awareness and build brand image.

Among the list of top online strategies that were mostly used in 2009 were:

*Social Media- Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube: Used to engage with customers on a personal level, interact with brand followers, friends and loyalists more directly. This strategy also helps increase brand awareness and generate a lot of buzz about a product or service.

*SEO/SEM: Used to achieve a high ranking on the SERPs and to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search result pages. The higher the position on a page result, the higher the probabilities of people clicking on your website, knowing about your brand or product and generating a higher ROI.

*Online PR: Used to generate positive buzz around a brand or product. Word of mouth is one the most powerful forms of communication and can greatly influence people’s opinions and consumer purchase behavior.

*Email Marketing: Used to send useful information as well as offers and discounts about a product or service. It is also a vehicle that helps obtain a continuous flow of new business contacts and users who are genuinly interested to your products or service.

*Paid search marketing: Used to bid on keyword phrases relevant to the brand or product. Its highly measurable and helps maximise your return on investment.

*Link Building: Used to build a brand’s credibility. It’s a fundamental ingredient to get a brand’s website higher in the search engines since it’s a key element in search engine optimization.

*Blogging: Used to provide additional information as well as viral and website content on a particular brand or product. Blogs are helpful to build brand credibility and spread valuable information all the way across to the different social networks, thus generating more brand visibility. When a particular blog obtains a certain level of popularity, it is often used as a point of reference for followers and prospects to go back to for general industry information.

According to a study by email marketing solutions company Campaigner, higher growth small businesses are spending more on marketing, and favoring online tools such as email marketing over traditional marketing vehicles.

Despite the economic climate and the challenges it has posed to businesses of all sectors and sizes, many small business owners are beginning to see turnaround and are aiming to keep growing through the use of web-based marketing tools.

Some key findings from the study revealed that 65% of small businesses that expect revenue growth reported that they are spending more or are planning to spend more on marketing by year end. On the other hand, 32% of those that expect flat revenues, and 36% of those expecting declining revenues are spending more or are planning to spend more on marketing this coming year.

Overall, small businesses are shifting their marketing efforts from offline, traditional channels to online strategies via social networks, blogs, search engine marketing etc.

Small business owners are realizing that a small online investment using diverse Web-based marketing tools can lead to business success and help them meet business challenges such as:

Attracting and retaining customers – 50%

Revenue – 15%

Improving cash flow – 9%

Maintaining profitability – 8%

In addition the study also showed that a great number of businesses anticipating growth are already using (82%) or planning to use email marketing. Only 18% declared they have no intention in using email marketing.

Facebook took a bet on FriendFeed showing yet again openness in adopting advanced third party features that would improve its service: Flickr’s photo tagging, Delicious’s link sharing, and now FriendFeed’s search features in its real time search engine powered by Bing.

FriendFeed is the creation of four ex Google engineers that developed Gmail and Google Maps. Popular Facebook features as the “like” and “comment” items in users feeds, have been already inspired by FriendFeed. Pouring FriendFeed’s talent and technology on a social media platform that currently has 250 million users worldwide, is a massive blow to Facebook’s competitors in the real time search field: Google and Twitter.

Introducing the new share to “everyone” option in its Publisher (the application launched when you click on the Share button), Facebook will inject user data in a real time search engine that will allow search through shared media and status updates.

Will SEM switch from Google AdSense to Facebook?

What consequences will this deal bring to Search Engine Marketing and new media advertising? How will Google react?

Acquiring Twitter could be the most obvious response, and Google needs to catch up in integrating the social graph in a real time search engine.

FriendFeed’s co-founder Paul Buchheit, developed the original prototype of Google AdSense: Facebook could become web advertising heaven and a central hub of online social media, enabling 250 million users to share and search feeds from virtually any social media platform available on the web, including Twitter.

Is this the beginning of the end for Google?

For more on the subject, read the announcement on FriendFeed’s blog and Facebook’s press release.

What do pages at the top of Google have in common? Good content.

Marketers are always looking for the best ways to optimize their websites. Before getting into the details of things we can already think of a list of activities to achieve this, for example: URL structure, meta tags, website architecture, keywords in the URL and web content, relevancy, etc.

But before we get into all that, we must turn our attention to content. Google loves content and good content is key to website optimization. It’s very important that you understand who your target audience is when building your website in order to cater your content based on that target market.

In most cases, you have the audience who is looking or needs something in particular, but is not sure what. Then there’s the audience who knows exactly what he/she wants who will go straight to the place where they can find it.

First thing they will do is run their keyword search on Google, land on a specific website, and boom! purchase is made. It is much easier to appeal to a person who already knows what he/she wants because all they do is execute their search using the exact keywords and land on the right website.

Those who are hesitant are harder to convince, therefore, good content is required. Having the right content, a good selection of keywords and clear website strategy will definitely get you a high position in Google.  Some main aspects to look at: keywords, keywords, keywords.

It is important you review your Pages or landing pages against the keywords from search. Study all the possible keyword options, from the most relevant to the least, including stem variations of keywords, and review those generating high bounces or more conversions and make your modifications accordingly.

Also, revise your content thoroughly together with your site navigation as to guarantee a better website experience for your users. This will lead your audience to your final objective. Offering useful information will lead to a call-to-action, this in turn will generate more leads and most importantly, increase sales.

Google today is launching their interest-based advertising which works by delivering ads based on previously viewed sites, searches and activites on the web.

As an effort to make online advertising even more relevant, Google is opening this beta version to select advertisers on their partner sites and YouTube, however, it will soon be available to the entire user base.

Google’s official blog explains how “these ads will associate categories of interest-  say sports, gardening, cars, pets-  with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view. We may then use those interest categories to show you more relevant text and display ads.”

In other words, Google will link ‘categories of interest’ based on the users web surfing habits. So if you’re one who searches for -U2’s upcoming concerts- Google will know that you’re interested in music and show you more music-related ads. Google currently has 30 top line categories and about 600 detailed categories.

Of course privacy issues have once again resurfaced the minute this ad solution was presented. The good thing about it though, is that users are free to opt-out and have complete control over which ads they want to see.

These options can all be set-up on the Google’s Ad Preference page. In addition, users can also add interest categories or remove categories from the preferences.

Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim) offers more insight on the subject in particular Google’s opt-out option for interest-based ads.

Scouting and actually finding the right online agency for your business can be quite a daunting task, not to mention, expensive.

Having an agency to manage all online advertising activities nowadays has become a core element within most businesses’ marketing strategies, thus requires a bit of time and dedication in finding the right fit for your product or service.

The most important initial step throughout the selection process is carefully reviewing the background and experience of the online marketing agency being considered. At the same time, companies should make sure that these agencies provide sources for all of the company’s internet marketing requirements and be fully aware of the services offered.

Being GAAC Certified is already a major plus. And it is why 77 considers it ultimately important in order to qualify as an experienced web analytics consultant and a full service online marketing agency.

Being an official Google Partner involves offering a wide variety of services including:

• Installation: For technical assistance on getting Analytics properly installed on your site.
• Consulting: To help you take action once you have Analytics properly configured.
• Training: Onsite, classroom, and webinars are all available.

Looking for ways to optimize your Google Analytics account or struggling to set it up from a scratch? We will use our vast knowledge in Google Analytics, SEM as well as personal approach to assist you.

We give great value to all our clients and it is why we are committed to offer the best and most competitive services available in the marketplace today. If you would like to review 77Agency when considering the appointment of your online marketing agency visit the full overview of the services we provide or refer to our 77Agency Website.

Due to massive influenza outbreaks and continuous flu-related search queries, Google saw it useful to launch ‘Google Flu Trends’, to provide its users day-to-day flu-related activities. It seems like people, the minute they feel like they’re about to ‘come down with something’ start seeking for the reasons to their symptoms before they even reach the doctor’s office.

This is how Google spots the trend and plots it in explicit graphs such as the one below.

Google along with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention will track cases of the flu throught the US, in this particular scenario. Together the two entities can come up with effective enough results to provide humankind with an early alert system for outbreaks and diseases.

This is yet the first experiment Google has executed, but one can easily imagine the kind of search data they can combine and provide healthcare professionals with. More importantly, the combination of this information and the fact that you can easily log on to your computer to find out which disease is coming your way, is truly innovative.

The image below is a current press release with the latest on Social Gaming; the coming together of casual gaming and social networks. Social Gaming is a new tendency that Fueps is vigorously exploiting due to today’s viral distribution potential of social networking platforms like Facebook and MySpace.

The piece also reveals data on the recent results 77Agency has delivered for Fueps thanks to its efforts in providing effective SEM campaigns to increase exposure of the brand on search engines.

For instance, up to now, the website has attained over 800,000 monthly visitors, of which 340,000 are registered users.

Fueps estimates the average number of users to increase to approximately 1.2 million by the end of 2008.

Just one month ago, a 77Academy student was successfully out placed into Havas and this is what Havas’ Corporate Development Director has to say about this new win-win merge:

“At 77Agency they know what they’re doing. 77Academy is a concept that is not easy to implement, however, they know how to run it and the idea is very good. It is why I trust them and their recommendations. When I think ‘new recruitment’, I think 77Academy.”