Greplin is a personal search engine for all the data you keep in the cloud. It works a lot like the desktop search Spotlight where you search for a word or phrase and Spotlight will go through your entire hard drive looking for matching files and documents.

Greplin does the same thing but for your online data that you store on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Voice, Dropbox, Gmail and a bunch of other services. You can run a query and find public and private data on those sites. Tweets including DMs are shown as well as digging into the transcripts of your Google Voice voicemail.

Greplin uses OAuth and other APIs for authorization, so they never see your third party credentials. Since Greplin’s searches work on a variety of online sites it is invaluable to the small business owner who does business online by saving them a lot of time locating the exact information they need when they need it.

Greplin.com is in closed beta right now. Most of what Greplin offers will be free. A fee is charged for more features like searching within attachments. Below is a video illustrating how Greplin works. To register for Greplin go to http://www.greplin.com and pick the first index you’d like to use.

Let us know how you envision you could use Greplin in your personal life and business.

Greplin Demo from greplin on Vimeo.

Just wanted to update everyone on the recent happenings with Yahoo and Bing. Last year Yahoo and Bing formed an alliance which is now coming to fruition. Starting now until late September, Yahoo will be combining its paid search platform with Bing’s paid search platform, Microsoft AdCenter.  For those of you that we run PPC campaigns for, we’ve begun to migrate your Yahoo PPC accounts over to Bing where applicable and working with representatives from both Yahoo and Bing to ensure a seamless transition.

Another feature of this alliance, is the fact that Bing’s organic search results will now make up 30% of Yahoo’s organic search results. Given that this form of exposure is available to websites, for those clients we perform universal search engine optimization for, Ycwe have been optimizing your websites for the best possible organic results in Bing.

If you have any questions or would like to know more about this alliance, or our universal SEO services, simply contact us.

To be successful in social media it is important to have a plan, timeline and measurable goals in order to evaluate the success of your campaign. Below are 4 steps that should be included in any social media campaign:

1. Listen

It is important to understand the social media presence of your target audience and your brand. Listening first and then coming up with a plan based on the information learnt will maximize the ROI of your online efforts.

Some key points to consider include where your target audience are interacting online and who the key influencers and brand advocates are.

2. Strategy planning and metrics

Some social media monitoring tools available can help you identify a baseline that will provide you with comparatives to measure success. You need to consider both the creative and technical sides of your campaign. Things to consider:

• What are your campaign objectives?
• What will inspire and motivate consumers to participate?
• How can you make your campaign easy to share amongst consumers?
• What resources will you need? (technology, staffing, etc.)
• How will you track and measure your campaign?

What to measure will depend on your objectives. Easiest measurement is what percentage increase or decrease in behavior would you like to see over time? For example, reduce in demand on call center by 5%, increase in conversations about a new product you are launching by 10% or increase in customer satisfaction by 12%.

3. Online Engagement

Creating the opportunity for human interaction with your brand is key. Your staff who are internet savvy are great ambassadors of your brand. Invite them to participate and provide training to them as they will become great resources to your campaign’s success. They can use their networks to spread the word.

The key goal of your campaign should be to create something so “talkable” that people are discussing it everywhere. Being responsive to those who participate in the conversation is also essential to success.

The tool you use should be able to help you identify who your brand advocates are and their online influence. The tool should also be able to provide you with daily reports and real time alerts so that you can respond to those who are participating and responding to your campaign.

4. Evaluate and Revise

Reviewing the success of a campaign is necessary for the planning of future ones. Some questions to consider are:

• What worked and what didn’t?
• What could be improved?
• Did the campaign increase customer satisfaction?
• Was the campaign worth the investment?

It’s important to remember that social media marketing is about building relationships and having the resources to continue the interaction with consumers online. A social media campaign is a part of your social media strategy. It needs to be an ongoing effort.

Social Media adds value in the form of interaction with “fans” who also tend to be existing customers. In recent years consumers have grown increasingly wary of vendors and our “fans” are our best resource to bridging that gap in trust.

Our “fans” also renew at a very high rate therefore the more “fans” we convert, the better our renewals will be. Some simple principles like being honest and interesting and adding value to people’s lives can go a long way in the social realm.

It is important to learn who the influential leaders are in social media that relate to your product/service and build a relationship with them. For instance if you are in the software developer business, you will want to find who the influential leaders are in social media that discuss topics that relate to software reviews and connect with them. Offer suggestions, help, advice, answer questions that might arise that are in your area of expertise and be consistent and authentic.

In return you will be building trust for you, your brand and a loyal following of “fans”. “Fans” who through word of mouth are your best referrers and potential customers. The more “fans” you convert, the better your business will be, and therefore the more you are able to grow your revenues year over year.

Some of the metrics that help evaluate the value of social media include:

• increase in “fans” which in turn means increase in influence and brand reach
• increase in new customers as a result of brand awareness and word of mouth through “fans”
• increase in customer renewals as a result of increase in “fans” which in turn means increase in revenue.

How are you using the value social media creates to grow your business and what results are you seeing?

Flipboard is a free iPad app that you can quickly download from iTunes and then request access to the service via email.

It downloads your latest incoming updates from your Facebook and Twitter accounts and turns it into a colorful digital magazine. Flipboard will turn the links you receive from your Facebook friends that might include photos and displays it on your iPad along with the first few paragraphs. If you touch the photo or image it will expand to fill the entire iPad. If you touch a link it will bring up the page on Flipboard’s built-in web browser. You even have a comment section to discuss the story with your Facebook friends.

You can use Flipboard to read your Twitter incoming messages. It displays a few paragraphs of the web page along with any links or images so you are not limited to the 140 character cryptic messages your followers send you!

Flipboard also acts as a Twitter feed reader so you can put your favorite feeds into Flipboard and it will turn into an instant news magazine that updates itself. You can link to lots of Twitter news sources such as Fortune, Economist and Wired to name a few.

You can also use Flipboard to aggregate data feeds from major news sources. It sorts the stories into useful categories — news, business, sports — allowing you to riffle through a great variety in just a few minutes.

Flipboard is still in it’s infancy with lots of bugs that need tweaked. For instance, it doesn’t store downloaded data for when you’re not connected to the Internet and there’s no reload button to refresh content. At the moment you have to shut down the app and restart it to refresh content. Sometimes there is a lag of 30 minutes updating Facebook content. You also can’t bookmark a webpage within Flipboard to your iPad’s Safari web browser. Future releases of Flipboard should iron out some of these bugs though. For now there’s still plenty to like about Flipboard.

One example of how you could incorporate Flipboard into your social media marketing and sales efforts is to create a dummy Twitter account that you will not use to promote your business or proactively seek followers. What you would use it for is to tweet to this account any customer reviews about your product you find online or any videos you post to YouTube of customer testimonials. This Twitter account is essentially your social bookmarks that you link to the Flipboard app on your iPad. This will enable you to create a social media magazine that is portable and attractive which you can show your potential clients to assist in the sales process.

Are you using Flipboard as part of your marketing/sales process? If so, share with us how Flipboard has been able to help you and your business.