As you load a website, the text you were looking for is surrounded by icon buttons, from Facebook to Pinterest. You can “like” or “recommend” posts, text and items at the click of a button. Although these benign entities lining almost any website seem harmless enough, they are part of a larger structure, referred to as social commerce. With traditional advertising barely lifting an eyebrow, businesses are looking for different ways to engage customers and increase profits. Although social commerce is still in its beginning stages, it is more prevalent today than last year. Take a look at some of the main ways top sites manoeuvre you to purchase an item: [Read more…]

According to Social Media Today, the rate of social media usage rose by 18% in 2013. This brings to nearly 25% the number of subscribers using social media today. This includes personal and business accounts. Social media has defined the marketing fronts of most companies with many of them registering phenomenal success. With this rapid growth in social media uptake, the demand for social media training and consulting has risen tremendously. Business, individuals, and even governmental institutions are all looking to hire experts to help them in their social media functions. [Read more…]

Twitter.com is not being archived by the WayBack Machine, the Internet Archive. Although this doesn’t seem to be anything new, I have just personally noticed recently that it’s not being archived. [Read more…]

Here’s one of my favorite current hobbies: I sit down with potential clients, throw out a reference to Google+ and pause for the inevitable response – that “it’s never going to take off” or “we don’t believe in it.” [Read more…]

Yesterday, Matt Cutts tweeted a link to a new scraper report tool that you can use to report websites that are outranking your website. If this other site has scraped or copied or stolen your content, then you can use the form to report the spam to Google. That new form could be useful for some, and I applaud Google for adding it. But that’s honestly not what I’m interested in here. In fact, what I find more interesting, is that fact that Matt Cutts tweeted a Bit.ly URL. And as a result, we can get all sorts of really cool data about his Tweet and the link that he Tweeted. [Read more…]