Legal Internet Marketing Blog

You may need to order another shot of espresso to keep up with Google’s new indexing system, Google Caffeine, which was officially launched on June 7. The new way for Google to index sites on the web makes having a solid and focused legal Internet marketing strategy more important than ever.

As anyone familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) knows, Google recognizes relevant and properly placed keywords on a site. But this is not all. Google looks for several different factors when “indexing” a website, or making a website show up in search results for specific keyword phrases. With Google Caffeine, Google can index a large amount of content in a shorter amount of time than ever before. Considering how fast-paced our society is, which is reflected in the quick and efficient results we expect when entering a search, Google has created a way to provide us with even more updated material in a matter of seconds.

With Google Caffeine comes an emphasis on adding new content and design to your law firm’s website, building quality incoming links, keeping blog posts current, properly utilizing social media, and making sure that keyword positioning is done properly in addition to several other SEO tactics. Google Caffeine’s quick indexing also makes having a website with sufficient loading time extremely important.

Don’t let Google Caffeine give you the jitters – while it’s valuable to act fast in order to keep up with your competition and the ever-changing ways of the Internet, your actions must be deliberate and not rushed. Don’t neglect quality to get the job done faster. This does not create results that last for your law firm’s web presence. It is important to take your time, while being efficient, with the optimization, design, and structure of your legal website.

Facebook, the wildly popular social networking site that began as a way for college students to interact with one another, has reached a significant milestone. As of July 21st, Facebook now has 500 million users, a number that increases on a daily basis as more and more people use the social networking site to reconnect with old friends, foster new relationships, and discuss topics that they find most interesting and relevant in their lives. What does this mean for law firms, you ask? Plenty. But it doesn't necessarily mean obtaining new clients - at least, not immediately. Due keep in mind, though, that 500 million Facebook users is a very large audience in which to market your law firm, and it shouldn't be ignored.

For any law firm looking to utilize social media platforms in its marketing campaign, the most important thing to remember is that you're not going to create a profile only to send friend requests to a bunch of people you don't actually know, and influence those new "friends" to retain your services. That's simply just not how it works. What your end goal should be, however, is getting your message out there, conveying your law firm as an authority on the type of law that it practices, and gaining trust amongst "friends" and others who stumble across your profile.

For Facebook, creating and maintaining a firm "fan" page is a good way to get your message across, as well as display a variety of information about your firm and its attorneys. This process, at least the creation portion of it, sounds fairly easy, and actually is for the most part. However, like all business matters, if you want a strong return on the time you've invested in your page, you have to put in a significant amount of effort. You can't simply create a page, leave it alone, and expect it to attract fans and potential friends. You wouldn't treat your website that way, so why should you treat your social networking like that?

Ultimately, any strong Internet marketing campaign is going to include time and effort devoted to social media marketing. To do so requires effectively utilizing your resources to establish your online identity as authoritative, reaching out to fans and friends in a manner that is genuine, not sales-pitchy, and relying on those fans and friends to spread your message to others. Remember, social networking sites are not run by businesses. They're run by everyday users who through word of mouth discuss topics that are most relevant or interesting in their lives. Be interesting, be yourself, and word of mouth may end up securing your law firm a few clients along the way.

Regardless of which search engine you use, chances are you refer to the actual action of searching as "googling" something. The word "Google" (used as a verb) has entered the lexicon of speech as a reference to searching for something online. Similarly, when "social networking" comes to mind, Facebook is generally going to be one of the first sites that you think of. In their respective fields, both Google and Facebook are leaders amongst their competition. As a result, it may be easy to assume that both companies are content: one company being the king of search, while the other is tops in the social realm. But Google and Facebook are locked in battle, seeking to stake out a claim in the other's respective field, and neither seems willing to concede defeat at this point.

According to an article on mashable.com, the question of whether or not Facebook is becoming bigger than Google is being debated, particularly since Internet users are now tending to use social networking sites more often than they do search engines. In fact, in March of this year, Facebook actually overtook Google in terms of overall web traffic in the United States. Statistically speaking, this recent victory for Facebook was relatively inevitable. That is, given the more static growth of search engine use versus the ever (steeply) increasing use of social networking sites, a close on the traffic gap was bound to eventually happen. However, neither Internet giant seems content with their place on the Internet, which could spell increased exposure for law firms and other businesses that market themselves using these two Internet sources.

Facebook, in partnering with Microsoft's Bing, has ventured into the world of search, currently ruled by Google. Likewise, Google, in hoping to secure some of Facebook's users, has entered into the social networking realm with its own such service known as Google Buzz, connected to Google's ever popular Gmail service. Interestingly enough, both companies are essentially in the same place when it comes to growth in their new ventures: Google Buzz has generated little if any buzz, and Facebook search is hardly a rival for the search behemoth known as Google. However, the fact that each company is attempting to secure market share from the other is an interesting notion, particularly when you take marketing businesses, such as law firms, into account.

At this point, marketing your brand on Google is still a must, and having a presence on Facebook is becoming more and more mainstay as the Internet, according to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, becomes a more social place where people want to interact with one another and share ideas. With Facebook and Google both venturing into each other's respective fields, this simply adds two more places where companies would be wise to establish a presence: Google Buzz and Facebook Search/Bing. Now, those two places may not be terribly beneficial at the moment, but the Internet is an unpredictable place, and new developments are changing the face of search and social networking every day. Had you asked someone a few years ago whether or not Facebook would eventually experience more web traffic than Google, even a less tech savvy person would have probably said you were crazy. Similarly, had someone told you that Google would soon create its own social network, you may have laughed it off as nothing more than a fad that would hardly be able to challenge Facebook for web supremacy.

Ultimately, by keeping tabs on the latest trends in social networking and search, businesses such as law firms should be able to adapt their legal internet marketing strategies accordingly. Law firms are able to maintain a web presence not only on the Internet's hot spots of today, but also on the sites of tomorrow that may eventually gain market share and supplant the current industry leaders.

Regardless of what happens, it's important to be prepared for anything. As the battle for the Internet ensues, law firms would be wise to keep up on the latest trends, especially given the latest speculation presented in the article. That is, according to mashable.com, "…while social networks such as Facebook don’t pose an immediate threat to search engines for their core functionality — organizing the web and helping people find content — they do pose a large threat to search engines’ largest revenue source - advertising." The topic of advertising revenue is a topic for another day though.

People with an insider’s knowledge of Microsoft say that the company will make an announcement soon that Facebook posts will appear in Bing’s search results in the near future. Microsoft has said that posts from Twitter users have already been integrated into its new search engine’s search results. It’s also possible that posts from other social media sites will also be included in the future.

The president of Microsoft’s online services division, Qi Lu, was expected to make the announcement about the integrated search results at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. The senior vice president for Microsoft’s online audience business group, Yusuf Mehdi, is expected to conduct a demonstration of the new capabilities of the Bing search engine.

Microsoft’s deal with Twitter, which is expected to be nonexclusive, has reportedly been included in the company plans for many weeks. Microsoft engineers had already included Twitter posts into Bing in anticipation of the announcement. The terms of Microsoft’s deal are not expected to be disclosed, but a person inside the deal who wished to remain anonymous said that negotiations included a payment from Microsoft to Twitter.

Continue reading "Microsoft's Bing Browser Integrates Twitter and Facebook Posts in Search Results" »

Many Internet users don’t know that some Internet service providers allow certain sites to load faster than others do. However, the debate over “network neutrality” is gathering momentum again in Washington and e-commerce sites may finally get to compete on a level playing field if legislation is passed to make access to all websites equal. ISPs and Arizona Senator John McCain lead the opposition to this legislation. Whether the debate will favor e-retailers is still very much in doubt.

The Federal Communications Commission recently proposed new rules that would prevent giant Internet service providers, such as AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and others, from allowing the transmittal of web traffic of some websites at faster speeds than others allow. These ISPs claim that they should be able to charge more to send some traffic at higher speeds since streaming content for television shows and videos are chewing up large chunks of bandwidth and straining network capacity.

Many Internet companies and retailers favor network neutrality, arguing that allowing Internet users equal access to all online content promotes innovation and growth of the web, especially smaller companies that can’t afford to pay more for faster transmission.

Continue reading "Online Retailers Wish for Online "Network Neutrality" and May Get It" »

Yahoo’s chief executive has warned investors to expect a steep decline in the company’s business since she took the job in January 2009. Carol Bartz called Yahoo’s results "a solid third quarter" recently, but industry analysts were less impressed with its recovery. The company has cut costs since Bartz became boss and sold some of the company’s assets, but the biggest revenue gains by far have come from better-than-expected cash flow from the company’s display ads. Those three factors led to a tripling of Yahoo’s net income for the third quarter of 2009, much better than industry analysts had predicted.

The positive income report sent shares of Yahoo’s stock sharply higher in after-hours trading. However, the company reported that its revenue dropped 12 percent during the quarter, an indication that many advertisers are skittish about the pace of the country’s economic recovery. An interpretation of the drop in revenue was that Yahoo did not benefit from the nascent economic turnaround as much as its chief rival, Google, did. Some analysts said that the results were encouraging, but tempered their optimism by saying that Ms. Bartz’s plans for recovery remained a work in progress.

“The patient is off life support and back in the recovery ward,” said an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “But it is certainly not out playing soccer again.”

Continue reading "Despite Sales Decline, Yahoo Profits Triple" »

After four decades, the Internet heads for the biggest change in its history. Participants in a meeting in Seoul, Korea, are expected to approve the use of international domain names written in languages other than English. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit organization that monitors domain names around the world, is considering allowing Internet addresses in characters other than Latin letters. In the not too distant future, it may be a common sight to see URLs expressed in lettering as diverse as Greek, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and other languages on advertising in sports stadiums and other common advertising outlets.

"This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago," Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a "fantastically complicated technical feature." He said he expected the board to grant approval for the change on the conference's final day.

The birth of the Internet began with a transmission of data from UCLA to Stanford University in 1969. In the early 1990s, its availability and purpose grew from military, scientific and academic applications to the boundless purposes it serves today. If the changes are approved as expected, a spokesperson for ICANN said that the organization would begin accepting applications for non-English domain names very soon, and the first entries of the new URLs would probably be implemented sometime in mid-2010.

Thrush said that the creation of a translation system that allows conversion of multiple scripts to the correct address was the single largest development that enables this change.

"We're confident that it works because we've been testing it now for a couple of years," he said. "And so we're really ready to start rolling it out."

Continue reading "International Domains in Languages Other Than English on the Way" »

An article published recently in the Los Angeles Times reports that Yahoo, parent company of venerable website hosting giant GeoCities, is closing down the site that allowed people to create their own pages a decade ago. Then GeoCities sites created by users ranked well in search results and were a social networking hub of sorts for hundreds of thousands of users. Though rudimentary and generally unsophisticated, these pages allowed users to create fan sites, talk about their hobbies, share their political views and a myriad of other topics. They could create pages at no cost, take advantage of a modest amount of storage for images and documents and stake out their own little corner of the Internet when there weren’t many options to do so.

Yahoo was scheduled to pull the plug on the domain and millions of pages on October 25, 2009, and one of the most common domains in the young history of the Internet was expected to cease to exist except in fond memory. In early 2009, although GeoCities stopped accepting applications, current users were allowed to update their pages and save their sites to their hard drives. Compared to peak traffic and users in the late 90s, comparatively few users remained. Yahoo is urging those remaining to transfer their accounts and pages to Yahoo’s web hosting service for $5 a month.

Continue reading "Yahoo Closes GeoCities Site" »

A group representing Chinese authors has accused Google and their digital library of violating copyrights. Google disputes the claims saying that their online library service is in full compliance with international laws. Google has reportedly digitized at least 10 million books and many publishers and authors have filed lawsuits against the search giant for digitizing their works and copyright infringement. The China Written Works Copyright Society claims that Google scanned thousands of books written by Chinese authors without getting their permission and without providing compensation.

Chen Qirong, spokesperson for the CWWCS, said, "Whether you are a small company or big company you still need to respect the copyright of the authors."

Google said that it had received permission to digitize more than 30,000 books from over 50 Chinese publishers to provide this content in search results and in previews.

"We believe the book search complies with international copyright law," said Google representative Courtney Hohne.

Google’s ambitious plans to create a huge digital library has been praised by some and condemned by others here in the U.S. and abroad for copyright, antitrust and infringement of privacy. The alleged copyright violations are the latest in a series of controversies—real and imagined—that have made headlines in China for Google. The negative publicity has made it hard for the company to gain market share in the country where numbers of its users are well behind Chinese search giant Baidu.

Continue reading "Chinese Authors Say Google Violated Copyrights" »

Google’s innovative telecommunications service, Google Voice, allows easy management of multiple phone numbers, blocks telemarketers, makes inexpensive global phone calls and even provides voicemail transcription. However, these conveniences came at a steep price that many people were unwilling to pay: it required users to get a new phone number. In a move to entice more users to the service, Google is offering a less comprehensive version of their services that allows users to keep their existing phone number.

Google says that participants in the new program will be able to use the company’s online voicemail service instead of their cell phone provider’s voicemail. This service is central to the services, as users will be able to read their voicemails online, save them, play them back, forward them to a designated email in-box or receive them as a text message on a mobile device. They will also be able to save these massages, search them and forward messages to others.

Continue reading ""Lite" Version of Google Voice Allows Users to Keep Their Phone Number" »

Google Labs has just launched a new search function called Social Search, which allows users to enhance their search experience by providing them with search results that are more personally relevant. Google announced that it is working on implementing Social Search at the Fall Web 2.0 Summit, but doesn’t expect to make it available until later in the season. The personalized search function utilizes a user’s social network profiles to display relative links as well as status updates that members of the user’s social network have shared at the bottom of a page of search results.

People interested in checking out Social Search will need to point their browser at Google’s experimental section and activate the new search feature that is only available to users in the U.S. and only in English. Social Search creates personalized searches utilizing Google Talk, Gmail, Google Reader subscriptions and social networking profiles that a user has added to his or her Google Profile. While participation in Google Profile is not mandatory, based on information in a user’s Google Profile, Social Search can automatically detect a user’s social networking profiles and friend lists on BrightKite, Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube, FriendFeed, Flickr and other networking sites.

Not every search will yield Social Search results at the bottom of a search results page. When it does, however, socially relevant search results will appear at the bottom of the user’s page labeled as "results from people in your social circle." Users will also be able to start Social Search from the search options panel currently embedded in the search page, and Google will provide a list of the user’s friends that it decides are the most closely related to the search terms. If a user clicks on a name, they will be able to confine search results to see results from that friend.

Continue reading "Google Labs Launch Social Search" »

Managers and employees at Internet payment giant PayPal envision a future in which cash is an obsolete form of currency. We will order drinks through a touch screen at a bar and buy movie tickets by touching a movie poster on the side of a building. In PayPal’s forward-thinking future, software developers working for other companies will be able to create these alternative ways of purchasing the products we want by using PayPal’s technology. These visions of our possible future got a lot closer when PayPal announced that they would open their platform on November 3 to developers who want to build payment applications.

While innovations in many other industries have changed the way we live, work and play, there has been significantly less innovation in new and alternative means of making online payments. PayPal President Scott Thompson said as much recently at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. He said that the industry has been resistant to change, but legitimate concerns about fraud and security have been the largest impediments to innovation in the field. He also said that payments are a highly regulated business and require a great deal of cooperation and coordination between senders and receivers.

Still, “there’s a clear sign in the market that people want something better than they have today,” Mr. Thompson said. “Cash and checks are dying a slow death.”

PayPal, an integral part of Internet auction giant eBay, has primarily been driving the growth of the popular auction site. Now, the company is keenly interested in becoming the way that people pay for everything online, on their cell phones and in the course of their daily lives. Mr. Thompson said that the company has been working with software developers at big hardware and software companies, start-ups, mobile telecommunication device manufacturers and other companies. “Payment innovation needs to move from the hands of a few big entities to the hands of many,” he said.

Continue reading "PayPal Open Platform to Ignite Innovation" »

Dell’s founder and chief executive, Michael Dell, said recently that people who purchase a new computer with Windows 7 installed and then buy Office 2010 when it comes out next year would experience a “computing catharsis.” While speaking at an event hosted by Silicon Valley’s Churchill Club, Dell said, “You will love your PC again. We have not been able to say that for a long time.”

The well-documented problems of Microsoft’s Vista operating system created a marketing nightmare for the software giant and personal computer manufacturers that pre-installed the Vista OS on their desktops and laptops. After Vista’s release, its shortcomings were shared around the world online and both Microsoft and PC makers went into damage control mode.

Dell knows firsthand how customers’ relationships with their PCs suffered during the Vista years. Around 80 percent of Dell’s business customers requested that Windows XP be installed on their new computers instead of Vista. Since Vista’s release, Dell has resorted to extraordinary measures to distance itself from the flawed operating system. Surprisingly, the company has been an aggressive advocate for Linux—an up-and-coming and far more secure and stable OS than Microsoft’s products.

Continue reading "Founder of Dell Says Windows Users Will Love Their PCs Again" »

Microsoft is hoping to end its 3-year Windows Vista nightmare with the release of Windows 7 in late October. When Microsoft released Vista, that operating system (OS) quickly developed an unenviable reputation for its slowness, intrusiveness and incompatibility with many gadgets. Microsoft altered its operating system many times to make it less dependent on high-end computers since its release, but Vista’s reputation as an overly gimmicky and flaky OS was hard to shake.

As recently as this past summer, at least two-thirds of corporate computers were still running the less flashy, but far more reliable Windows XP OS. However, early reviews of Windows 7 are positive. According to several reviewers, Windows 7 keeps the best of Vista, like security, stability and lots of eye candy and addressed most of what Vista users disliked, such as:

• Sluggishness
  Microsoft says Windows 7 offers “faster, more responsive performance” than its predecessor.


• Hardware requirements
  Users with older computers cried foul at the time about Vista’s higher-end hardware requirements. The standard edition of Windows 7 only requires 1 GB of memory and 1-GHz processor at the minimum to run, well under the current standards for new computers.


• Less alarmist than Vista
  Vista users reported that the OS freaked out anytime any real or perceived security threat occurred. With Windows 7, no less than 10 different categories of warnings accumulate in a unified Action Center and don’t interrupt processes.

Another aspect of the new OS that some users aren’t wild about is the fact that there are five different versions of Windows 7: Starter, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate. Each version comes with a different set of features and ranges from $120 to $320 in price.

Continue reading "Windows 7 to Atone for Microsoft's Vista Flaws" »

What started only two years ago as a messaging service with few bells and whistles has evolved into a company with worldwide recognition, millions of Tweeters and the fans who read their tweets. Twitter founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, had the business savvy to outsource ideas on how to grow and improve their service to the people who use it on a daily and hourly basis. The company monitors how users use the service and which ideas become popular. Then company engineers transform these ideas into features.

The company has announced that two new features will be rolled out sometime in the next several weeks called Lists and Retweets from users’ ideas.

“Twitter’s smart enough—or lucky enough—to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them,’ ” said Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at MIT and author of the book “Democratizing Innovation.”

Professor von Hippel said that economists have thought that the people making products and running the companies are natural sources for new ideas and innovations. However, technology companies have turned that model upside-down successfully by allowing others to innovate for them. This works primarily because the Internet lets people around the world share ideas in real time and software allows users to design new products inexpensively. A good example of this is photo-sharing giant Flickr that started out as a small part of a game. When Flickr founders discovered that the photo-sharing aspect was more popular than the game, they shed the game and focused on building Flickr.

This shift favors young start-up companies as older companies tend to rely on proven ideas and techniques, and the structures of their companies may discourage outside-the-box thinking intentionally or unintentionally. Nevertheless, that may be changing somewhat as older companies now try to emulate the methods of new companies after watching how new companies grow to success. One good example is Ford Motor Company—it noticed that users were modifying the voice-activated entertainment and GPS system, Sync, and so invited college students to create new features for the system.

Continue reading "Twitter Evolves and Grows Successful by Listening to Customers" »

Google’s innovative telecommunications service, Google Voice, allows easy management of multiple phone numbers, blocks telemarketers, makes inexpensive global phone calls and even provides voicemail transcription. However, these conveniences came at a steep price that many people were unwilling to pay: it required users to get a new phone number. In a move to entice more users to the service, Google is offering a less comprehensive version of their services that allows users to keep their existing phone number.

Google says that participants in the new program will be able to use the company’s online voicemail service instead of their cell phone provider’s voicemail. This service is central to the services, as users will be able to read their voicemails online, save them, play them back, forward them to a designated email in-box or receive them as a text message on a mobile device. They will also be able to save these massages, search them and forward messages to others.

Continue reading "'Lite' Version of Google Voice Allows Users to Keep Their Phone Number" »

Branding consultancy giant Interbrand released its 2009 list of the best 100 global brands recently. Sysomos, a social media monitoring and analytics firm, looked at Interbrand’s data from the perspective of the top 20 brands’ social media presence on blogs, forums and news sites. This led to some intriguing differences in positioning. For example, Google, which placed seventh on the Top 100 Brands list, ranked first in social media mentions. Coca-Cola, the top brand on the Interbrand list, slipped to eleventh on the Sysomos list.

The Interbrand list put Coca-Cola, IBM and Microsoft as the top three in their list, while Sysomos’ top three included Google, Apple and Microsoft. Sysomos found that the fastest-growing brand this fall was Gillette from a social media standpoint. Sysomos determined that most of the mentions that drove the results for Gillette arose from the marketing campaign for its new Fusion razors. Curiously, 13 of Sysomos’ top 20 brands saw their social media mentions drop over the last two months with BMW down 31%, Honda -25%, and Toyota -24% as the steepest declines. Google registered a 13.45 drop for the same period.

Continue reading "Google, Apple and Microsoft Top Three Brands in Social Media" »

Not so long ago, small business owners had to be very selective about their advertising with their limited marketing budgets. Google AdWords and Internet marketing have leveled the playing field for small businesses substantially. However, unless owners or their Internet marketing expert plan their AdWords campaign carefully, they can quickly find themselves spending thousands of dollars with little return on investment.

First, determine if a Google AdWords campaign is the right choice for your business. For example, if your company produces a new product with very little name recognition, an AdWords campaign centered on a keyphrase like “organic turkey pastrami” might result in very inexpensive clicks, but little traffic to your site.

Next, establish an affordable budget and stick to it. Regardless how competitive your target keywords and keyphrases might be, unless you set a daily and monthly budget and stick to it, you’re setting yourself up to pay an expensive tab for pay-per-click. Instead of focusing on the quantity of clicks on your ad, concern yourself with the quality of those clicks.

Third, consider modifying your selected keywords and phrases with the names of nearby cities or your county. Also, bear in mind that AdWords will let you select a defined geo-specific area where your ads will reach local customers. If your snow plowing business is in Manchester, New Hampshire and you’re trying to attract qualified traffic with a PPC campaign for “snow removal,” it doesn’t do you much good if a user eighty miles away sees your ad. Select Manchester snow removal, Bedford, NH snow plowing services or another nearby community.

Continue reading "Small Business Guide to Using Google AdWords" »

Internet marketing professionals are taking a wait-and-see attitude towards Bing, Microsoft Corporation’s recently released search engine. The company is reportedly spending $100 million on marketing for their new search engine in an effort to gain market share for Internet searches as well as the lucrative advertising revenue that a larger market share would provide. For many years Microsoft’s Live Search was the company’s search engine and, while it was the third-most popular search engine in a fairly crowded field, the company steadily lost market share to industry heavyweight Google. But now the company has thrown its considerable resources behind Bing in the hopes that the new search engine will attract more users and advertising revenue.

“They've added a few nice things, and I think the shopping comparison stuff with reviews is pretty compelling,” said Rich Dettmer, director-digital strategy at b-to-b agency Slack Barshinger, Chicago. “As far as paid search is concerned, we're going to be on it. Our clients will use it. But, of course, I will tell you that the lion's share of the budget still has to go where the lion's share of the searches are, and that means Google.”

Before Bing launched, Microsoft’s Live Search came in third behind Google and Yahoo for market share for total searches. But with only 8 percent of search market share, a percentage which gradually and continually eroded and lost users to Google, it became a source of embarrassment (and far more important, lost revenue) to Microsoft. According to the latest available search engine statistics, Google logged 64.2% of all search queries in the U.S. in April 2009, with Yahoo at 20.4% and Live Search, Bing's predecessor, at 8.2%.

But some Internet marketing professionals are keeping a close eye on Bing’s market share, how it presents relevant search results to users and how Bing might fit into the Internet marketing strategies they craft for clients.

Microsoft has unsuccessfully tried to reinvent its search engine several times in the years since it launched MSN Search in 1998. As Internet marketing and advertising have grown in popularity and relevance since then, MSN Search has morphed into Microsoft Search, then Windows Live Search, then Live Search with each iteration failing to attract the desired number of users.

Continue reading "Internet Marketers Taking Wait-and-See Attitude towards Microsoft’s Bing" »

Around twenty years ago, a Cornell graduate student wrote a simple software program that was intended to be a harmless prank. He wanted it to be a trivial bit of digital graffiti, but a programming error allowed the program to move from one computer on the network to another with unexpected speed, which brought the precursor to today’s Internet to a halt.

Since that prank occurred, the security of the Internet has grown much dicier. This point is reinforced and illustrated by the amount of anti-malware software that is sold each year around the world and the amount of computers and networks that are infected with viruses and other malware every day. Security on the Internet has deteriorated to the point that many engineers and security specialists now believe that the only way to fix it is to start over.

What the new Internet might resemble is still fiercely debated, but one proposed model would resemble a gated community of sorts where users trade anonymity and some freedoms in exchange for network safety. This model already exists for many users who access the ‘Net while working for some governmental and corporate entities with restricted access. As this newer and more secure Internet emerged, the network that is such a big part of many peoples’ lives might resemble a rough neighborhood where users enter at their own risk.

“Unless we’re willing to rethink today’s Internet,” says Nick McKeown, a Stanford engineer involved in building a new Internet, “we’re just waiting for a series of public catastrophes.”

The validity of this assertion is reinforced each time a new virus emerges and infects computers and networks around the world. The latest piece of malware, called Conficker, is an especially pernicious program which has infected more than 12 million computers and derailed the computer networks of the French military, a surgical ward in England and countless others. Unlike other viruses that require a user to click on an executable file of some type, Conficker can install itself via banner advertising while a user views the content on a favorite site. Most versions masquerade as a form of anti-virus software with pop-ups warning users to provide credit card numbers and other contact information to buy the ‘upgraded version’ that will remove the malware.

Continue reading "Is a New Internet in the Works? Malware May Force the Issue" »

Microsoft is sparing no expense and thinking well outside the metaphorical box in its efforts to market its new search engine named “Bing.” The corporation is buying prominent placement in television programs and the online video hub Hulu.com as part of their efforts to raise awareness about their new search engine. In fact, Microsoft plans to air an hour-long “Bing-a-thon” on Hulu.com, matching the new search engine with the old marketing standby - the infomercial. Tired of having its old search engine a perennial afterthought to the undisputed champion of the search engine Google, the Microsoft Corporation is believed to be spending between $80 million to $100 million on advertising to give Bing a running start on the competition.

Microsoft is willing to invest in all this Internet marketing in their new search engine because Internet marketing has become such an effective way to build brand management, attract targeted, qualified traffic to a Web site and drive sales. In addition, search engine market share has become increasingly coveted because online ad spending has held up much better than most other types of media in a tough economic climate. It’s fair to say that Microsoft is implementing all this Internet marketing for Bing to get a bigger chunk of Google’s share of ad revenue.

Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president for the online services division of Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, said, “It’s a very tall marketing challenge and a very tall product challenge…It’s going to take multiple steps to get where we want to go,” he added, “and this is the first step. The key will be whether we deliver a product and connect with people emotionally in the advertising.”

Mr. Mehdi added that to achieve the second point, “You have to do something a little bit more surprising.”

Continue reading "Marketing for “Bing” Search Engine: Microsoft Thinking Outside the Box" »