Google is king but people more likely to Bing?

MediaPost has an interesting write-up on a study suggesting that although Google is still the king of search (by a landslide), more people are likely to click ads on Bing;

A study by the search advertising network Chitika suggests people who land on sites from organic search results via Bing are 55% more likely to click on an ad, compared with arriving on the site from Google.

Analyzing click-through rates from 32 million ad impressions across a network of more than 50,000 sites during seven days in July, Chitika found that people finding their way to sites from Bing clicked on ads 1.5% on average, compared with 0.97 percent for Google, and 1.24% for Yahoo. About 200 million unique Internet users come through the Chitika network monthly.
Although studies come in all flavors, and it’s difficult to say that Bing ads perform better than Google, I’m a growing fan of Bing. Microsoft has done a great job with image search and items related to your original search really help to guide you to what you’re looking for.

Competition is great. Let’s let Microsoft, Google, and others keep innovating and we all win.

Check out the full article here.

Twitter and Your Business… :) or FAIL?

Much has been made this week of Twitter’s 101 Guide for Business. With all the excitement around Twitter these past few months I’m glad Evan, Biz and team are leveraging the limelight to reach out and educate the enterprise on what Twitter is and what a valuable tool it can be for business. But (very big but!), Twitter, like every other tech tool is only as valuable as the corporate strategy and execution behind.

Here’s what Twitter says it can do for business…

So what does Twitter do for businesses?

Twitter is a communications platform that helps businesses and their customers do a number of useful things. As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and other people who care about your company. As an individual user, you can use Twitter to tell a company (or anyone else) that you’ve had a great–or disappointing–experience with their business, offer product ideas, and learn about great offers.

Great! In a nutshell Twitter is a communications platform a business can use to connect to customers. It’s PR, Marketing, Customer Relationship Management, and Customer Care all in one! Of course not.

What Twitter (or really Social Media) Really Means for Business

Twitter is the latest and greatest method of technology to connect us. As such, it can be used for any and all of the above needs but can also be a huge waste of company time and resources, and lead to disastrous outcomes. Factor in a recent Harvard study suggesting only about 10% of users generate 90% of activity, and the audience mix, and it becomes very clear…as usual, it’s not about the tools, it’s strategy and action that matter!

Twitter for Marketing: is your audience on Twitter? Are they active? Are they receptive to brand messaging? How can you reach them and not sound like a pushy sales person?

Twitter for Customer Care: which tweets matter and which are rants of a negative attention seeker? Which messages require action? What action? Do you have a process to respond effectively?

Twitter for Customer Relationship Management: do you have the tools to find out what’s being said about your brand/company? Which metrics matter? Is there a strategy to follow up and act?

Wait! Before dumping your budget into the company saving Twitter plan, recognize this: a whole lot of pundits were saying the same thing about Facebook last year! It’s not your Twitter strategy that matters, it’s your Social Media strategy and execution that is the key. The Web gives us many ways to make customers happier and business more successful and all tools used effectively can have great outcomes.

So before you stake your business or budget on social media ask these questions:

1. Is your corporate culture ready for social media; a place where you don’t always control the message?

2. Do you have a good understanding of the tools to engage and measure?

3. Do you know if your audience is engaged and on which platforms?

4. Can you devote company time and resources to be successful?

5. Ready for a brave new world where people control the message not you?

6. Can existing company processes and systems be used to take advantage of these great new opportunities to reach, enagage, and learn from consumers?

7. If yes to all (or most) of the above…ready to get started?

Need help, we’d be glad to lend a hand at Sensidea!

SocialSeek has lift off, thanks everyone!

Yesterday we launched SocialSeek, a cool little social media monitor that lets you track all the social goodness for free. With some great coverage on Techcrunch the news spread quickly and by the end of day one we’re at 700+ downloads and some great feedback!  Just wanted to extend a HUGE thanks to everyone for the feedback, tweets, and spreading the word. We hope you enjoy SocialSeek and look out for some great new stuff coming soon!

What people are saying…

“The ability to crawl social media sites and websites for a brand can be valuable, but what I find useful about Socialseek is the ability to track an item over image sites like Flickr and even event sites. And it’s also interesting to be able to limit chatter over the web about a particular topic to a geographical region or city.”

“Socialseek a blessing for brand marketers, lets users search for a brand across the web”

“This is the innovation social marketing gurus have been waiting for, I must admit that the tracking of an image over the blogosphere and social networks is a great piece of work”

“This is great, very helpful!”