It’s not difficult to understand the importance of high quality, unique and relevant content in the modern SEO industry; content of this type published on your own site can do wonders when it comes to link magnetism and social media metrics and similarly, can help you obtain extremely powerful links from high authority domains that might otherwise be out of your reach. But creating this content is easier said than done, particularly if you’re trying to compete in a crowded industry. Sure, if you’re working on behalf of a client in a fairly dull field it can be relatively easy to produce content that will attract attention, but competing in content-heavy industries like SEO, gaming and entertainment (for example) can be very, very difficult.

So how can you make creating high quality, shareable content easier? What processes can you follow to minimise the time you spend researching and thinking and maximise the time you spend creating and sharing your content?

To try and answer these questions I’ve put together the following article and infographic (a large chunk of my time working for Designbysoap is spent designing infographics) that aims to give you a structure for content creation, as well as some useful tips and tools. I hope you enjoy it and, more importantly, I hope it helps when it comes to creating high quality content for your own campaigns.

Click for a full size version if you’d like to print it.

Research

Typically, this is often the most time-intensive element of content creation, whilst annoyingly yielding the fewest results. I’ve spent numerous hours reading posts and analysing data that ultimately comes to nothing. Sure, it can be enjoyable and often rewarding in terms of learning about an industry, but it’s not always permissible to spend huge chunks of your time (or a clients’ for that matter) reading and searching only to end up with nothing to show for it.

Having said that, the research portion of your content creation process can often be one of the most important – delivering content based on flawed, incorrect, irrelevant or (perhaps worst of all) boring information will get you nowhere and will essentially nullify all your efforts in the latter stages.

Ultimately, you need to find out what’s popular in the area you’re working in. Your research needs to be around a topic that’s current, relevant to your industry, popular and, most importantly, likely to gain traction (whether that be via social media platforms, inbound links or attention from high profile sites).

To help you identify this kind of content, there are several excellent tools at your disposal;

Google News – helps you highlight areas of interest and current news

Google Trends – helps you hone into specific topics in any given area of interest

Google Insights – helps you discover what people are searching for around an area of interest. Great if you’re writing blog posts

Digg, Twitter, Reddit – helps you find out what’s popular with the readers, what kinds of topics are receiving the highest level of sharing

These are the platforms I turn to first, but there are plenty of others (Cracked, AllThingsNow, Bing News, Fark, etc.), all of which will add to your level of insight around any given topic. Now, these can certainly help you find up to date, reliable and current information and can be invaluable when it comes to highlighting the most popular topics, but they don’t solve the problem of minimising the time you’re spending on research.

This is where a phenomenal tool from SEOGadget comes in, that makes ingenious use of Excel and Google Docs. I hugely recommend you follow the link and save a copy of the document to your own Google Docs (when you’ve finished reading this post of course), as it will save you a massive amount of time and effort during the research stage. The tool allows you to add a search query within the excel document, after which it will pull in invaluable data from Google News, Google Insights, Twitter, Bing News, Digg and numerous other platforms. You can not only quickly and easily find out what’s hot, but you can see the most popular topics on a range of social media platforms and highlight the top and rising searches around any given topic. There’s a fair bit more to it, but I’ll leave you to discover all it has to offer – suffice it to say it’s a perfect tool for the content creation research stage.

Ideas

Once you’ve got a solid set of data and a firm grip on the type of information likely to be shared, you need to start brainstorming some ideas on how you’re going to present the information.

The first thing you need to decide is the angle from which you’re going to approach the information. It’s no good just re-formatting a post or piece of content that already exists (you see this a huge amount when it comes to content creation, particularly in the SEO industry), you need to add something new or interesting to what you’ve already got. Can you come at the information in a new way? Or add something new to the story? Can you produce something unique to the industry?

Essentially, you’re looking at how you’re going to present the information you’ve gathered (an in-depth blog post, a video, a static infographic, an interactive infographic, etc), how you’re going to approach the subject (informative, analytical, satirical, etc) and how you’re going to add something beneficial or attractive to the target audience (drawing new conclusions, bringing together lots of pieces of information, attempting to shock, informing, entertaining, etc).

An excellent example is SEOmoz’s own Google Algorithm Change History; all of this information is available elsewhere on the internet, but by pulling it all together and keeping it up to date, they’ve provided a piece of content that makes life easier for readers (bringing all the information together in one place), keeps them up to date (by displaying the latest information) and provides new insight (by viewing the complete history of algorithm updates, you can see the progression Google has taken, which offers far more insight and value than a post discussing just the most recent change).

Sometimes, it’s enough to simply be first – as long as the content you’re producing is high quality. A great example from a different industry is the Angry Birds Space infographic (section included below). This was the first quality infographic to be published on the latest Angry Birds installment; a game that saw a huge amount of buzz across news platforms for reaching 10 million downloads in just three days. The infographic is not only very nicely designed, but gained a decent amount of traction. Only two days after being published, the infographic has seen over 1,000 Facebook likes:

Infographic section via PlayVille

You can also gain a decent amount of traction by focusing your content around an upcoming event – a great example is the F1 2012 Season infographic (a section of which is included below). The infographic doesn’t necessarily offer anything new, but took advantage of the excitement surrounding the start of the new Formula 1 season, resulting in a very high placement for the infographic.

Infographic section via Autoblog

Another excellent idea is to try your best to involve other people in the idea (or even the research) stage; specifically, people you know have an influence in the industry you’re working in.

Let’s say you’re producing an infographic on console gaming – why not email some people from Destructoid, G4TV, Gamespot, IGN, etc. and ask them what they’d like to see in an infographic. Or give them a collection of your ideas and ask them which they think is the best – not only does this involve influencers in the early stages of your content creation, but it can help massively when it comes to placement and promotion.

If these people give you valuable insights or information, then include them in your content (in the sources section of an infographic, or via a credit link in a blog post) – you’d be amazed how much more willing people are to share things when they’re credited with a hand in the research or production.

Placement

Once you’ve gathered your information and you have an idea of the type of content you’re going to produce, you need to try and identify where the content is going to be placed.

Obviously if the content is going on your own website, then this is less of an issue, but if it’s a link-building exercise then having an idea of the kind of site you’ll be aiming for can make a big difference to how you approach the creation stage.

It can be a good idea to start your outreach before you approach the actual creation of your content, as confirming a placement beforehand will make your life much easier in terms of considering the target audience. If you know where the content is going to be placed, then you can tweak the language, style and tone you adopt throughout the piece in order to maximise your chances of appealing to their readers.

Conversely, you don’t necessarily need to have confirmed the placement location before you start work on the production stage. Often you may find it easier to convince sites to place your work once they’ve actually got something to look at, rather than trying to tempt them with just the concept. If you’re planning on completing your outreach once you’ve finished the content creation stage, then you should at least have an idea of the sort of website you’re going to be targeting. Don’t specifically aim content at one website before you contact them, as if they turn it down you may struggle to place it somewhere else.

When it comes to contacting specific websites, your best bet is to write a concise and polite email to the most relevant person at the organisation, then follow this up with a call a day or two later. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t hear back from your preferred placement, it’s still worth giving them a call just to check they’ve received your email and even if they turn it down, you’ve got a contact you can use for future pieces.

Creation

So you’ve done your research, you’ve got your content and you’ve got an idea of where you’re going to place the piece – now it’s time to actually create your content.

Giving you advice on the creation stage is a little tricky, as it will depend on what type of content you’re putting together. To overcome this, I’ll quickly cover the two most popular content types; blog posts and infographics.

Infographics

Having produced around 100 infographics personally over the last 18 months (and overseen scores more), I consider them to be one of my main areas of expertise. One of my major pet hates when it comes to infographics is people telling me that there are ‘rules’ to infographic production – there aren’t. An infographic doesn’t have to tell a story, it doesn’t have to avoid using text at all costs, in fact it doesn’t have to do anything other than display information that is either complimented by, or portrayed via graphics. So don’t get too caught up in the non-existent infographic ‘rules’ and just focus on producing something that is engaging to your target audience.

Some topics will require more text than others, particularly if the data is qualitative rather than quantitative. A lot of people will use phrases like ‘don’t make me read’ when they’re looking at infographics, but you should give your audience more credit – people don’t mind reading, as long as the information you’re including is concise and adds something to the visuals. If you can visualise it (i.e. statistical information), then do, if you can’t then don’t worry too much about it, people will forgive you.

Try and create an immediate impact with the visuals and draw readers into your infographic as early as possible, the most obvious place to do this is with the title. It’s amazing how many people are happy to just type the title in a nice big font and then move on to the rest of the content. But if you look at some of the best infographic designers (and the most popular infographics online), you’ll see that the title is a fantastic opportunity to grab the reader with a strong, relevant visual. I’ve included a few examples below to show you what I’m talking about (please note these are just a part of the original graphic — there is a lot more to see when you click on the link underneath each image!):

Infographic section via the Designbysoap blog

Infographic section via Volvo

Infographic section via HotelshopUK

Infographic section via Geekosystem

When it comes to visualising the data you’ve got, try and keep a consistent theme throughout the infographic, whether that’s through your choice of visualisation methods, the colours used or the style of design. If you can help it, try and avoid using too many infographic ‘cliches’ – a good example of this is using a line of six person icons to visualise a statistic like ‘60% of people use people icons in their infographics’.

Just try and be as creative as you can (which I realise isn’t really all that helpful, as it’s like saying ‘be more musically gifted’), and don’t take the lazy approach just because you’d like to get it finished.

My last point is on orientation – generally speaking, if you’re going to be placing the infographic online then you’re probably better off opting for a portrait infographic, rather than a landscape one. This is because it’s far easier to use online and usually allows you to use a longer file (people will always prefer to scroll up and down as opposed to left and right, if the web page even allows it).

Blog Posts

It seems like an obvious thing to say, but in-depth blog posts are far more likely to encourage sharing than a quick post that just skims over a topic. Long blog posts are great as long as they’re adding value to a topic – you should be informing, educating or entertaining your readers as much as you possibly can.

Include relevant, quality outbound links that are useful to your readers – if you find a good tool during your research phase, link to it. If you find a post that offers an alternative argument to what you’re saying, or adds additional information, link to it. Too many people are hesitant to link out from their blog posts, worried that it will give readers a reason to leave their page. Trust me, if you’re producing high quality content, they will come back (for example, when I’m reading blog posts and I come across a link I want to follow, I tend to open it in a new tab and then continue reading).

Again, it seems obvious, but pay attention to grammar and punctuation – it’s hard to come across as authoritative if your content is full of spelling mistakes, misplaced commas and missing capitalisations. It might sound strange, but grammatical errors can also put off people from sharing your content and you want to do everything possible to increase the likelihood of shares and links. If writing isn’t your strong point, then get someone else to proof read your articles before publishing, particularly if you’re sending them out as guest posts.

Another good tip is to try and engage your readers as early as possible in the post – the best places to do this are the title, the sub-title and the opening paragraph. There are many different ways to do this; provocation, humour, questioning, etc. just make sure you grab people as early as you can. Bear in mind it’s the title that will encourage click-through rates when it comes to blog front pages and aggregation networks such as Inbound.org. Having said this, don’t be deliberately misleading with your titles – sure it can increase click-through rates and traffic to have a title that draws attention, but if it’s erroneous then you’re far more likely to piss people off than you are to encourage sharing.

You should also try and help your readers as much as possible; something that often means not assuming knowledge on their part. Unless you’re writing for particularly high level, technical websites, it’s best not to over-use entropic language without clearly explaining yourself. If you’re writing a post full of tips, explain things to your readers – rather than just saying do this, tell them how to do it.

Another valuable tip is to try and break up the copy in particularly long articles – use sub-headings and paragraph breaks to make the article look less dense and more accessible to readers. You should also make sure you’re using images in your posts, not only do they break up long sections of text nicely, but they can often be extremely helpful, particularly in tutorials and ‘how-to’ articles (screenshots can be especially useful). When it comes to sourcing images, you should either be creating them yourself or using an online platform such as Shutterstock or Creative Commons, rather than just stealing them from other websites. Having said this, the latter is permissible in some situations, just be sure to include credit links to avoid upsetting other webmasters, and check the copyright laws in your country. Don’t forget to properly name and alt tag your images either – it’s amazing how often you see people missing this potentially valuable ranking signal.

Publish

So you’ve spent hours putting together a high quality piece of content, now it’s time to get it live. Hopefully you’ll have started your outreach before putting the content together, but if you didn’t, now’s the time to start sending some emails.

I would always advocate aiming as high as you possibly can (as long as the quality of the content is good enough), as it never hurts to try. When we’re advising our link-building engineers on gaining high profile placements, we get them to put a list of five or six potential placements together, in order of domain authority, traffic or level of engagement via social media (depending on the post content and what we’re trying to achieve). From there you can start at the top and work your way down, until someone agrees to place your content.

Once a placement has been confirmed, make sure you’ve got an idea of when it will be published, so you can start sharing as soon as possible. You should also keep up a level of etiquette when you’ve posted on someone else’s website – push the content as much as you can, link to it from other posts and send as much traffic and social media engagement as humanly possible. This not only makes the link more valuable, but will encourage the administrator to publish your posts in the future. You should also keep an eye on the comments and reply to as many as you can; keep up the level of engagement and discussion and be involved.

Promote

It’s amazing how many times we see people produce fantastic content, and then just leave it to either reach a large audience or, more often, fall flat on its face. If you’ve gone through all the effort of researching and producing a high quality piece of content, then you should continue that effort through to the post-publishing stage.

It’s true that if your content is good enough and it’s published on a high profile platform, then it will likely achieve a high level of social media traction and natural inbound links, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your best to push it as best you can.

You should aim to utilise as many avenues as you can to promote your content, including social media, news aggregators, infographic publication sites and inbound links from other domains (particularly applicable if you or your team writes lots of related guest posts). I could include a massive list of sites you can use, but honestly it depends on the vertical in which you’re working. Instead, check out this awesome link building strategies post, this list of infographic distribution sites, this post on finding the perfect content promotion platform and this handy list of social bookmarking websites.

You should also try to reach out to influencers in the industry you’re working in, whether that be via phone, email or social media platforms. The success of this practise will depend on a variety of factors (including the content itself, the domain it’s published on, the author, the way you choose to make contact and the area of discussion), but it never hurts to try. If you made the effort of reaching out to people during your research and ideas phase as suggested, then you may find you get some great traction via some very influential people.

So that’s about it for my guide to creating good content – did I miss anything? Disagree with anything I said? Let me know in the comments below.

Post by John Pring from Designbysoap Ltd.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/ZZcvthFeGhA/indepth-guide-to-content-creation-with-infographic

Mack Daddy Ads explains how to use newspaper advertising to promote affiliate offers and other products.

For the next three days, you may download Mack Daddy Ads at no charge here.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/imnewswatch/sNTr/~3/8EExstlZAJY/

Distilled has been offering conferences for the past three years. I have not been able to attend, but was very happy to learn that I could buy the video coverage of the conferences and not miss out on all the great information that so many write and tweet about.

I contacted Distilled and interviewed Lynsey Little, the Events Manager for Distilled. She is responsible for their SearchLove and LinkLove conferences hosted in London, Boston and San Francisco.

Q. What was the original reason that you started to run conferences alongside consulting?

A. The search community rely upon their peers to share knowledge, debug queries and educate each other. Distilled have always embraced and appreciated the sharing aspect of this, getting involved in online QA’s and helping other SEO find solutions to problems posed on twitter.

SEO isn’t a traditional career, there aren’t college degrees that can train you for the industry. The networking and knowledge sharing that happens at conferences is imperative to the whole community. Since we are practising SEO everyday, running our own conferences and sharing our knowledge and experience with other SEOs on mass, it was an easy decision to make, and a natural extension to our business.

We felt there was a gap in the market for conferences that were not product pushing and were all about actionable knowledge.  Too many conferences seem to push products and provide information that is too fluffy to be used straight away. We really wanted to share actionable insights, for our delegates to feel that the moment they left the building they were going to be better at their job.

It sounds silly but we also put a lot of time into our after parties, yes they are intended to be fun, but the key point here is that they are known for being great, so almost all delegates come, sometimes with others too!  This really makes the networking aspect of our conferences excellent, furthering the community’s connections.

Q. How have the conferences changed over the past three years?

Initially we only ran them in London however the demand for top end Search training in the USA could not be ignored, so we began running conferences there too, in Boston and San Francisco.

Not much about the business model or structure needed to be changed to adapt to the US market, the demand was almost identical to what we saw in London.  Non product led, highly actionable insights delivered by charismatic presenters.

We wanted to give delegates more opportunities to network, ask questions and problem solve their specific issues. All of which led to us running free SEO site clinics with our expert consultants, and topic tables with the speakers during the lunch hour. These have proved really valuable to clients and delegates as some issues are very specific.

We have also begun selling videos of our conferences, which allows for the event to be shared beyond the actual day, especially important for people who cannot make it to our conferences.  We have also found that once coming to a conference delegates want to pass the information onto their teams, this makes that easier.

Q. How successful have the conferences been?

To be honest they superseded our expectations. Despite the economic down turn in the UK. We are finding more and more people would rather have the knowledge to optimize their own sites than have to permanently rely on an agency.

We get other agencies attending too, it might seem like an odd business model to train competitors in what we know, but knowledge sharing is integral to the search community’s values.  It also help push us internally to learn more faster .

The testimonials we receive from the feedback forms reflect how important the conference has been in terms of furthering knowledge, and improving the ROI of our attendees businesses. Our attendees complete a feedback survey after the conference is over and our average ‘would you attend again?’ rating has been just under 90% of attendees saying ‘yes’.

Q. What benefits do you see from running smaller conferences?

Each delegate gets a chance to have more one on one time with the speakers and all their questions are answered in the QA. Smaller conferences also create a feeling of exclusivity too, we find there is some information speakers are more inclined to share with a smaller audience than with a larger one.  We often find that at smaller conferences delegates tend to feel more comfortable to network.

Q. What’s the plans for the future?

We hope to be running six conferences next year, two in each of our three locations. The two different types of conferences we run are SearchLove and LinkLove, the first covers the whole spectrum of search marketing, and the second is a specialist conference focused purely on the art and science of link building.  If we find an area of knowledge that the industry requires and we can fill it, we almost certainly will!

A Big Thanks to Lynsey Little and Distilled

I appreciate the time Lynsey and Distilled took to answer questions. I know they are busy planning for the SearchLove San Francisco Conference next month, June 18th and 19th, and their time is limited.

On a side note, I personally enjoy the smaller conferences. I appreciate the opportunities to interact with speakers and create lasting friendships with attendees.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/FmjdzOWWLbo/

In all communications, including email and business cards, give people your contact data for all social media. Take every opportunity to generate a lead, and that is one more you did not have yesterday. People will tend to trust those in their area more than someone online, and that will work to your favor. Getting more and more high quality leads depends on your efforts and how you take things. But once you apply it, you’ll know for yourself how simple and easy it is when it comes to getting results.

If you have no tracking scripts in place, then get some fast because you need to know what is working or not. You have to know what kind of visitors you are getting, and then you have to optimize your sites, etc. Of course the value depends on the traffic volume you get because it is all statistical information regarding conversions. Facebook is different in that their version of analytics is already in place. Aside from that site, it is necessary for you to use a script on your end that you install. Check out this cellgevity page

Should you choose to send folks out of social media to your site such as a blog, then obviously everything still applies there. People will comment on your sites, or blog, and then be sure you engage them and talk to them. This is the stuff of relationship marketing which is needed on your blog as well as all your social media campaigns. You know that what you have to promote at social media is your main site which would be your blog. You do not have to spend inordinate amounts of time at Facebook or Twitter, but you do have to simply communicate with your audience.

So much can be accomplished with social media and integrating it with your lead gen efforts. Remember that all your efforts are important to your business, and therefore everything you do has to count for something. Social media will only continue to grow over the years, so there are plenty of leads out there for you. One thing is you never neglect your leads or the people on your list because that is letting something good become spoiled. Be sure you optimize your marketing funnel so it becomes powerful and hard to resist. Never underestimate the power of saving money at this glutathione supplement site

From Search Engine Land:

• Search In Pics: LinkedIn Bike, Chrome Watch Facebook @ Google

  In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. LinkedIn Bike Parked At Google: Source: Google+ Google Chrome Watch: Source: Google+ Facebook Engineers At Google: [...]

• Dylan Hoffman’s Pirate Times Doodle 4 Google Wins Pirate Booty

  Google announced the winner of the Doodle 4 Google competition and today that winner’s logo is on Google home pages around the world. The Winner is Dylan Hoffman of Caledonia, Wisconsin for his Doodle named “Pirate Times.” The Doodle won him a $30,000 college scholarship, a Chromebook computer and a $50,000 technology grant for his [...]

• adCenter Updates Microsoft Advertiser Intelligence With Templates Mobile Data

  Microsoft adCenter recently launched an improved version of Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (MAI). MAI is a keyword research tool that helps Advertisers find related keywords and their historical and projected traffic and performance data from the available adCenter traffic. As an Excel add-in, it offers powerful API-based access to data, right in the familiar Excel environment. [...]

• Google Improves AdSense Reporting And Bolsters Smart Pricing With New Research

  Google has introduced several new reporting improvements for AdSense publishers, and it has released new research that shows publishers make more money with “smart pricing” — even though their revenue-per-click is discounted as compared with search ads — than they would without it. One reporting improvement is that AdSense publishers can now view “all time” [...]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

• Marketing Biz: All The Non-Facebook IPO News Fit To Print
• Americans Watched Record Amount Of Online Video Ads In April [Report]
• 7 Ways To Re-Energize Your Affiliate Marketing Program
• Report: Facebook Sued For $15 Billion Over Improper User Tracking
• Twitter’s “Tailored Suggestions” Will Use Widget Button Data To Make Better Recommendations

Search News From Around The Web:

Business Issues

• Exclusive: Yahoo Finally Set to Strike Alibaba Share Deal, AllThingsD
• Foursquare Hires Former iAd Exec as Revenue Chief | Digital, Ad Age
• Groupon Stock Spike Probed, Wall Street Journal
• Karma is moving to Facebook: Why social gifting is about to get a lot more social, Karma

Local, Maps Mobile

• Google Can’t Get Guggenheim Museum’s Contact Information Correct, Search Engine Roundtable

Link Building

• Good Link, Bad Link: How to Stop Breaking Your Website, SEO Theory
• Link Decay, Your Link Profile Might be Rotting Away!, Search Engine People

Searching

• Making more pages load instantly, Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Bing Our Latest Release: Your Questions Answered, Bing Search Blog

SEM Industry

• Best SEO Thing of the Day: Google Bugle, How’s Your Pony? Blog
• International SEO School Opens in Barcelona, State of Search
• SEO in 2012: The Best of Times or the Worst of Times?, Search Engine Journal
• Video: Google Penguin Hack, Google Purges Directories, Bing Updates, Yahoo CEO Fired Facebook IPO, Search Engine Roundtable

SEO SEM

• Was Target Hit By Penguin?, RKG Blog
• Ways to Win Customers and Influence Rankings – Whiteboard Friday, SEOmoz
• Why Keywords Suck, MediaPost

Social Media

• YouTube Phases Out the +1 Button, thenextweb.com
• Want to find new favorites? Check out ‘Explore nearby’ for shortcuts to places like the ones you love, Foursquare Blog

Video, Music Image Search

• Searching for a way to get a human being at Google on the phone, Los Angeles Times

Related Topics: SearchCap

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry’s personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here.
See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/0RNs35A1Wps/searchcap-the-day-in-search-may-18-2012-121913

Last month, IAB asked a group of mobile shoppers to keep a diary of their activity in a two week period. Here are some of the things they found out:

Home Usage

Here we see that almost half of all e-commerce interactions happened at home. They found that purchasing peaked in the late afternoon, early evening. 49% said they shopped while watching TV.

The dollar amounts aren’t too impressive, only 38% reported spending more than $21 a month. Most of the purchases were digital downloads with clothing and entertainment items coming in second.

Out and About

Only 29% used their mobile phone to shop while they were out, but 73% used their phones while they were shopping in a brick and mortar store. 34% used their phone to look up a price and 53% abandoned their purchase because of what they found. A few abandoned the purchase because they saw a bad review but most were lured away by a lower price – the downside of mobile commerce.

The good news is that 70% said they saw mobile as as more of an “invitation” than an “invasion.” They do not want ads to take them straight to check-out. They want to be taken to a page with additional options. 30% said they’d like to pay with mobile then pick the item up at the store.

Overall, the IAB Mobile Phone Shopping Diaries shows that consumers see mobile shopping as a way of getting the best price with the least amount of effort. They want information and options and in return they’ll allow you to use their geo-location to target them and their phone to contact them. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Article source: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/05/iab-reveals-a-week-in-the-life-of-a-mobile-phone-shopper.html

The lawsuit, filed in Federal Court in San Jose, California, combines 21 cases filed across the U.S., according to a statement by Stewarts Law US LLP, one of the firms leading the claim. It accuses Facebook of improperly tracking users even after they logged out of their accounts.

Article source: http://www.webmasterworld.com/facebook/4455027.htm

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

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• NASDAQ:FB (Facebook) Now On NASDAQ At $38
  Facebook is now officially listed on the NASDAQ as FB and the shares are currently set at $38.

  Reminds me of the day GOOG was on NASDAQ and I did not invest. Google was set at $85 and now it is at $623. Where will Facebook’s stock go? Who knows…

• GoogleBot Can Execute JavaScript? Really – Yes, Really!
  I love it when old news makes it to larger publications as breaking topics that no one covered before.

  Ars Technica reports GoogleBot can now index and execute JavaScript and more content behind AJAX. This came from a post by the swapped.cc blog…

• Guggenheim Museum’s Phone Number Wrong On Google
  The famous and prestigious Guggenheim Museum in New York City is having problems with Google. Despite several weeks of trying to update their phone number in Google Maps…
• Dylan Gets Google 4 Doodle Treasure

  Today on Google you will see a special pirate looking logo on most properties. That is because the Doodle 4 Google winner was announced last night and that logo is featured on Google globally…

• Robots Invade Google
  Louis Gray shared several pictures on his Google+ page of Android robots with also this Predator looking robot in the middle. I am not sure if Google is getting ready for some sort of announcement bu

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

• Pinterest to get $100m boost from Rakuten, WebmasterWorld
• An Inside Look at Algorithm Changes: Amit Singhal keynote at SMX London, WebmasterWorld
• Doodle Paraguay ind. day, Google Blogoscoped
• Help Google just nerfed us out of the blue, Hacker News
• Maintenance Notification, AdWords Community
• New Tailored Suggestions, And Twitter Supporting Do Not Track, WebmasterWorld
• Omar Khayyam was maybe the original jack of all trades.…, Google – Google+
• Yahoo Syndicated Search Partners – How to turn it off?, Microsoft adCenter Help

Article source: http://feeds.seroundtable.com/~r/SearchEngineRoundtable1/~3/iAcf98HmSAU/recap-05-18-2012-15171.html

While there will no doubt be tremendous demand for Facebook stock today, as it begins trading at 11 AM Eastern time, there should be plenty of it available. As David Angosti reported for Search Engine Journal, the social network raised its target IPO price range to $34 to $38. The move prompted a number of Facebook’s major stakeholders to increase the number of shares they plan to offer – and in some cases, that number went way up.

I am not a stock broker; I don’t even play one on the Internet. But I think even the people who crunch these kinds of numbers for a living would be amazed by the change. For example, James Breyer and Accel Partners now want to sell 49 million Facebook shares, rather than 38 million. Peter Thiel more than doubled the number of Facebook shares he wants to sell, from 7.7 million to 16.8 million. Investment bank Goldman Sachs likewise more than doubled their sale order, from 13.2 million shares to 28.7 million shares. Tiger Global Management, meanwhile, makes all of these investors look tight-fisted; they went from selling 3.4 million shares to 23.4 million shares!

Angosti noted that “If Facebook shares sell at the upper limit ($38), the social network will raise about $12.8 billion and its market value will be approximately $104 billion.” But that’s just assuming the original allotment sells. If the over allotment shares sells, figure that Facebook will raise nearly half again as much money – an astonishing $18.4 billion!

Mark Zuckerberg, who rang the NASDAQ bell this morning, will almost certainly never have to worry about money again. The Facebook founder and CEO is selling six percent of his shares, and will probably make in the neighborhood of one billion dollars from the sale. Interestingly, though, he says the proceeds will be used to cover his anticipated income tax bill. Even after the sale, he’ll still own more than 500 million Facebook shares, representing 31 percent of the company.

In total, 421.2 millions shares of common A-class stock in Facebook will be on offer today. It may be highly desirable now, but will it continue to be in such demand – and for how long? ABC News noted that of four recent technology IPOs, three have fallen below their IPO price and stayed there. Those three were Zynga, Pandora, and Groupon. But the successful one, LinkedIn, is flying very high: about a year ago, its IPO came out at $45 per share, and it recently traded at $103.

At least in the short term, I expect Facebook’s stock performance to mimic LinkedIn more than that of the other three; like LinkedIn, Facebook is a social network. Despite the cloud of recently losing General Motors as an advertising client (representing $10 million a year of business), the company is definitely riding high.

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Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-News/Facebook-IPO-By-the-Numbers/

Aiming to be “GQ meets QVC online,” flash sale retailer Sharpmen wants to make the men visiting its e-commerce site feel as though they are paging though a glossy fashion magazine. It’s turning to YouTube videos to get the job done.

The members-only site, which launched this week, offers a range of items including apparel, tech gadgets, sports gear and art. So far the e-retailer has signed 120 partner brands and is featuring about 10 of them a week, says CEO Yazid Aksas.

Sharpmen says it is heavily focusing on content, with the goal to keep men coming back regularly for entertainment and information. Its narrative-based videos from YouTube are designed to work like ever-changing magazine features, Aksas says. Sharpmen produces all videos itself and plans to start live-streaming some of them from its New York office for special deals, he says. Members receive weekly e-mails with the latest “issue.”

In the future, Sharpmen plans to display personalized home pages for each consumer based on the preferences profile he fills out when signing up. For example, an outdoorsy type will see camping gear, perhaps, or a wine lover will see wine, Aksas says.

Sharpmen videos are either one-minute-or-less product features, showing, for example, how a gadget works or apparel fits, or two-minute-or-less productions that include interviews with a brand’s founders. “We’re interested in finding brands that are less known but have cool products,” Aksas says. “That’s something else we find with guys, they’re less brand sensitive than women. They’ll buy things if they look good and work well, regardless of the name on the tag,” he explains.

Oliberte, which manufactures specialty shoes entirely in Africa with the goal to help build jobs and infrastructure in the region, worked with Sharpmen to produce a video for the site. “They were as much interested in the product as building the video to tell the story about it,” says Oliberte brand director Steve Trayner of the partnership. “As much as a product is good, it’s the story that garners the loyalty of the audience—true supporters knowing that their shoes are doing a lot more.”

The Sharpmen for Oliberte video features Trayner in the shoe showroom explaining the origins of the brand and the evolution of the products, including the reasons behind particular design features on some shoes, which he picks up and points out while speaking. Upbeat synthesizer music plays in the background throughout.

Trayner predicts the site will quickly be on par with other magazine-style men’s e-commerce sites like that of apparel, shoe and accessories retailer MrPorter.com. What sets Sharpmen apart, in his view, is the breadth of product offerings, which he expects will draw new customers to the Oliberte brand who may not have found it otherwise.

Aksas decided to launch Sharpmen after operating the direct-to-consumer menswear store Akselparis.com for more than a year.

Aksas says he saw potential in using YouTube to connect with male consumers. “Guys spend more time online, guys love YouTube, and there’s no kind of shopping channel for guys,” he says.

Other brands that sell on Sharpmen like the education the videos provide.

“Men need to be educated, they need to feel comfortable about whatever it is that they’re buying … they need to be hand-held a little bit,” says Pamela S. Viglielmo, executive vice president of Mënaji Worldwide LLC., a seller of men’s skincare products which sells on Sharpmen.“Whenever you can have this live face, this live interaction, it helps.”

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Article source: http://www.internetretailer.com/2012/05/18/sharpmen-uses-youtube-videos-bring-its-flash-sale-site