Welcome to the Screen Pilot water cooler. Our team randomly posts things they find interesting, funny or just generally think might be of use to others. If you've come in through the side door, you can knock on the front door here.
Google just introduced new features to their search results that brings a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, Google will show the most recent posts towards the top of the search results page.
Where do the feeds come from? Google announced official partnerships with the following web entities; Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca to power their aggregate real-time feeds.
Get a first look at the new search interface and some sample searches.
So the big, very big question is what does this mean? More spam unfortunately. More attempts by affiliate marketers to skew the system in their favor and more automated recycling of posts to always have a presence in real time results. It’s not going to be a bed of roses while the search engines get to grips with reputation management of the contributors that author content on these new partners. We know that Twitter’s user profile management is basic at best. Silly algorithms that weight banal factors as negatives or positives can easily be circumvented and before you know it you’re being stuffed with affiliate cookies and pimped malware for having clicked on what you thought was a legitimate real-time search result from your ‘trusted’, favorite search engine Google.
Moving away from the pessimistic side of what will happen, there will be advantages. More so for mobile search’s integration of real-time results. That’s another post however.
Anyway, real-time is rolling out over the next few days and when you have it, you’ll see it just happening withing your search results.
Charlotte, NC — Screen Pilot, a digital marketing and technology firm, has several simple steps for marketing professionals to realize the benefits of understanding what is occurring in their online marketing world. If you don’t have analysts to decipher your company’s Internet marketing results, there are five easy ways to add clout to your marketing budgets. You might just be surprised at how underutilized your existing web reporting tools are.
1. Uncover Hidden Potential:
Marketing professionals need to customize the way they track their digital marketing campaigns. They should take a look at what kind of measuring tools they currently use. Are the goals that have been set for a web reporting platform meeting the needs of the company? By creating a list of must-haves, it’ll be easier to narrow down what the needs are and how they can be fulfilled and by which products.
2. Add Tracking To Your E-mail Campaigns:
You can add tracking parameters to your e-mail marketing activity that enables marketers to start tracking visitors and their actions once in your web site that are driven by e-mail efforts. Setting up to measure conversions, from shopping carts or other areas of your site that are important to you, will enable you to see which e-mail campaigns have higher returns on investment (ROI) than others. With this tip, you can now test scientifically based on the ROI and not solely on the click-through rates and engagement factors.
3. Are Your PPC Campaigns Set-Up Correctly?
If you have potential customers click on your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads and immediately leave your site, your advertising money spent is wasted. You could be missing opportunities if your web statistics aren’t giving you the whole picture about the visitors you get from paid search channels like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Reporting from search engines only goes halfway in educating you on how effective your PPC actually is. Set up your reporting to measure key performance indicators from paid channels. It can help you increase ROI and make intelligent decisions about how and where to spend your marketing dollars.
4. Don’t Rely on 3rd Party Reporting:
It is very common that the amount of clicks the advertisers say you have is different than what you receive. Countless times we are requested to create audit trails for costly marketing channels that report higher numbers of clicks from their networks than you actually receive. Using your web statistics platform correctly will tell you exactly what traffic you received from a specific campaign and the value of that traffic.
5. Track Calls from Campaigns:
If you sell product offline then you need to track the call volumes that are generated from each specific digital campaign and types. This will easily tell you how effective a campaign’s response is when people go online but don’t convert. Quickly what channels such as PPC, email, banner ads and other create calls and which don’t. By adding this new dimension it might make you adjust some efforts for best returns.
If your current tracking and measurement tools aren’t producing results, you may need to reconsider the platform.
In a bid to help the struggling travel and hospitality industry in Europe and the U.S., we’re launching a specifc QnA channel on Twitter which we will answer (in a Tweet) online marketing questions from sales and marketing staff at any flagged or independent properties. The Twitter channel to follow and post questions to is @HotelMktgQnA.
By posting a question or query or just general thought on the stream, Screen Pilot @reply to the query each day.
So if you ever wanted to know quick bits of info like the answer to “Should I bother with PPC on Bing?” or “Is a bounce rate of 40% on my emails campaigns good?” then follow this new channel at @HotelMktgQnA .
While you’re there, go ahead and follow @ScreenPilot
It’s not been long since we started working the Riviera Resort & Spa in Palm Springs. An amazing place, you really need to check it out if you ever need to stay in the Palm Springs area. So we started working with them on their search marketing and as with any new domain, had a pretty hefty uphill struggle and knew that things were going to happen overnight. With persistence, patience and quite a bit of our ‘know-how’, we’re happy to say that Riviera has now penetrated the top ten organic results for Palm Springs hotel and resort phrases. What does that mean, well YoY, it’s a 1,546% increase in traffic for ‘palm springs hotels’ alone and we all know what qualified traffic turns into.
By the way, they’re actually celebrating their 50th Anniversay so if you’re looking for a Palm Springs escape, maybe a spa weekend with the girls for Christmas to prep for all that shopping, then check out their 50th Anniversary deals.
According to PC World “Quickoffice” is one of the Top 10 Must-Have iPhone Business Apps”! If offers Office functionality on the iPhone with an impressive suite of features!
Quickoffice is available for iPhone and iPod Touch running on iPhone OS 3.0. Enjoy superior Microsoft® Word and Excel CREATE & EDIT functionality today in a powerful productivity suite. VIEW, EMAIL, and ACCESS attachments with the most popular file formats.
The core Quickoffice suite comprises four great programs which allow users to work on important documents such as contracts, business plans, sales presentations, financial reports and other documents sent as email attachments – directly on their phone. Plus, Quickoffice users can “push” their documents to a printer, fax, projector or back to a desktop with complete confidence.
Suite features:
Open, edit, and create text (.TXT) files, Word (.DOC, .DOCX) documents, and Excel (.XLS, .XSLX) spreadsheets compatible with Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows and Microsoft Office 2008 for Macintosh
Auto-save and auto-restore
High-fidelity rendering and crisp characters
Advanced notepad editor
Intuitive cut-copy-paste compatible with the iPhone OS 3.0
Set custom passcode lock to prevent sniffy people from running the app and much more!
Quickoffice is running a special offer of 50% off for the first 10,000 customers at $9.99 which is a steal! If you are on the go and work with Microsoft Office then you’ll find this app invaluable. To learn more and to take advantage of the special offer click here.
Social Mention is an alert tool that acts similar to Google Alerts but focuses it’s results from blogs, microblogs, networks, bookmarks, comments, images, news, video, audio and other social web information.
How can you search with Social Mention?
It’s similar to doing any search you would on search engines such as Google. You just enter a phrase you’re looking for, a product, company name or person’s name and you will receive a daily email alert when your keywords are triggered.
You can also track your topic easily by setting up a Social Mention breaking news alert or RSS feed. For instance you can do a real-time search on a topic such as “Walmart Black Friday Deals 2009” and choose from a variety of sources and I chose for this example “Google News” and it returned the following results:
As you can see it’s pretty powerful with lots of information. If you would like to give it a try, click here!
As the Holiday Season is fast approaching many of us will be on the road travelling to visit family and friends. If you own an iPhone below is a list of 11 apps that could just help make your journey that much easier and pleasant!
These apps will help you locate the nearest gas stations, hotels and restaurants. They will also help you to learn more about the local scene and current weather conditions.
Mapsbuddy – helps make search on Google Maps easier. Quick shortcuts to finding gas stations, restaurants, post office, and many other things you’ll need for the road.
SimulTravel GPS – an innovative application that locates hotels around you to plan travel while you travel. You can locate hotels that are not near your current location. There are over 35,000 hotels to choose from in other cities or near other airports.
Urbanspoon – if you can’t decide where to eat, shake your iPhone and Urbanspoon will pick a good restaurant for you to try. Keep shaking until you find a restaurant you’re happy with.
Yelp – Yelp the popular review-based social network also has an iPhone app. Use it to search for places to eat, shop, drink, relax and play then read reviews from an active community of locals in the know.
Road Trip – is the fastest easiest way to log your mileage and gas expenses. You can graph out trip expenses and even export the data in csv format into Excel. It has multiple currency support. It can also record your car’s information such as VIN, insurance policy number, emergency phone numbers and registration.
The Weather Channel – this app provides in-motion radar maps, traffic cams (select markets), improved graphics and more.
WifiTrak – this app will help you find FREE and open WiFi hotspots and public access points quickly and easily. Network list sorted from best to worst.
Road Trip Fun – this app contains a list of games that you and your family can play on a road trip! Helps keep the kids in the car busy whilst you drive! No internet connection is needed!
Flashlight – when you find yourself in a dark spot, Flashlight will illuminate where you are with a bright white light or you can customize the color of your choice.
When you have a team working from different locations and you need to collaborate on documents, DocVerse might be the tool you need!
DocVerse is a plug-in for Microsoft Office that adds functionality to the sidebar within Microsoft Excel, Powerpoint and Word. You can invite friends and colleagues to collaborate on any documents. As edits are made, the changes are synced to the cloud.
Apart from a hard copy, a web-based version of the document gets automatically save for team members to see making collaboration easier.
DocVerse also provides some great discussion and tracking features through the sidebar as well. It allows you to IM anyone collaborating on the document. You have the ability to track recent changes and who made them. There is a history tab that provides you with a larger view of the history of the document.
It’s real easy to use and great for employees who are already using Microsoft Office to get things done. Docverse is not free, however. It costs $49 per month for 10 users and 500 documents and $99 per month for 25 users and 1500 documents.
To learn more, watch the video below for a brief tutorial or visit Docverse’s website – http://www.docverse.com/
With the number of iPhone users increasing every day, mobile web users are growing at a fast pace as well. Over 60 million page views a month of WordPress blogs have been on mobile devices according to WordPress. If you are a business that uses WordPress for your website then there’s great news! WordPress has launched two themes that will be automatically displayed when a compatible mobile device connects to your site.
WPtouch is intended for the more robust and fully featured devices that utilizes a full HTML browser like the iPhone or Android ones. Most of the blog features are available with this theme.
A second theme, based on the WordPress Mobile Edition, is intended for all other devices with a simple layout excluding all the unnecessary features which means that older devices can now access the blog.
The themes will be enabled by default for all blogs, but blog owners can choose to disable them from the Dashboard.
Google Social Search is an experimental feature that allows you to do searches that find relevant public web content from people in your social circle.
When you join the Social Search experiment Google will bring up results from your friends and contacts. These special results appear at the bottom of the search results page. Your social circle consists of contacts from your Gmail and sites listed in your Google Profile.
The following people make up your social circle:
People you’re connected to through social services that you’ve listed in your Google profile, such as Twitter and FriendFeed.
People in your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list.
People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers contact groups for Google.
If someone you don’t know shows up in your social search results, it’s likely that they’re connected to someone you do know. For example, if you’re following someone on Twitter, and that person is following five other people, those five other people are also included in your social circle.
We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words so we’ve included a video from Google explaining in more detail what Google Social Search is all about. Enjoy!
