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Google is personalizing  search results by including more Google+ profiles, business pages, posts, and Google+ and Picasa photos in a significant new initiative called Search plus Your World.
It will allow each user to surface content that has been shared with him or her on Google+ along with information that has been shared publicly integrated into typical Web search results.
Three types of Google+ content will be included in  Search plus Your World results: personal results, profiles in search and profiles and pages. Results may include non-public Google+ photos and posts that …

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Creating brand awareness and enhancing corporate reputation are most often the objectives of content marketing initiatives, but marketers are finding that having quality content actually drives in quality sales leads, according to a report published by eMarketer.
“Informative, nonpromotional content in the form of webinars, white papers, videos, blogs and peer recommendations on social networks and forums can attract prospects,” said eMarketer’s Lauren Fisher, author of the new report, “B2B Lead Generation: Using Content to Acquire Customers.” “It can also be used to build and maintain ongoing relationships with potential buyers—a …

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The majority of moms online don’t mind getting marketing messages via social networks as long as those messages are directly relevant to them. This is the main finding of a study carried out by social media agency Big Fuel and SheSpeaks, a women’s social engagement platform.
The study, titled “Her-suasion,” surveyed more than 1,000 women from the SheSpeaks community on their social media habits, and results are reported on the 72% of women surveyed who are mothers with children under the age of 18.  It finds that mothers are more likely …

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Are you someone who enjoys food, fashion and interiors, who is social media savvy and who can write well?  Then maybe you are just the person that  home appliance brand New World is looking for.  The company has just  launched a campaign to find a member of the public to become the ‘face’ of the brand, and to take over  control its Twitter and Facebook channels.
As the brand ambassador, the winner will not only be tweeting and blogging on New World’s behalf, s/he’ll be attending interiors exhibitions, design shows, …

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Fancy a free European holiday? Then enter this neat Facebook competition from the The European Travel Commission.  Entitled, “I Wish I Were There”, fans of the Visit Europe page are invited to superimpose images of themselves in their dream European destination and post them to be automatically entered to win a trip for two to Europe.
The top five photos with the most “Likes”  will go into an online vote to determine the Grand Prize Winner, who will be awarded a dream European vacation to either Austria, Croatia or Poland.
“I Wish …

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According to a new study from BlogHer, the community for women online, people are now more influenced by the opinion of a blogger than a celebrity when it comes to learning more about products or making a purchase.
The BlogHer 2011 Social Media Matters Study, co-sponsored by PR firm Ketchum, also shows that 78% of the female adult online population are active social media users and nearly twice as many (20%) are motivated to consider products promoted by or with a blogger they know, than by promotions featuring a celebrity (13%).
The …

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Almost half of marketers are now implementing content curation as part of their marketing strategies, according to a survey recently carried out by HiveFire Inc. providers of Curata, a software service.
Content curation is the practice of finding relevant, valuable and useful information online and presenting it  in a cohesive and comprehensive package to improve understanding and context for any topic or issue.
HiveFire surveyed more than 150 marketing professionals representing a  range of industries to better understand the extent to which they curate content as part of marketing and customer engagement …

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Jeremiah Owyang and his colleagues at Altimeter Group continue to push the boundries of the social internet by helping us to better understand people’s behaviours and how brands might tap into this.
He’s very generously published a summary of the research on how to harness new data types from online experiences.   The research  included ‘tried and true’ data as the top tier: demographics and product. Then, Jeremiah segmented the data that digital marketers are now very keen to understand in the middle tier: psychographic, behavioural and referral data. At the …

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You might think that Facebook is the silver bullet for today’s marketers, but a recent study shows that most large companies are finding that using range of social media as part of their business and marketing strategies is the way to go.
According to a study by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research, 71% of companies used Facebook in 2010, up from 61% in 2009. Twitter, at 59% in 2010, and blogging, at 50%, are also still high on the list.
Companies engaged in social media marketing are seeing …

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In 2011,  social networks are likely to surpass one billion unique members, according to a report by international consultant Deloitte.  Also, they may deliver more than 2 trillion advertisements.
However the data shows that advertising revenues directly attributable to social networks may remain relatively modest compared to other media.  With per member annual advertising revenue of about $4, that implies total 2011 advertising revenues of about $5 billion.
This is a divisive issue. Some people see social networking as the technology sector’s “next big thing” that will overtake search advertising. Others take …