Posts tagged integration
Klout Integration Pushes Human Powered ‘Expert’ Answers Atop Bing’s Search Results
May 8th
From Yahoo! to Facebook to Quora, social sites have long been struggling to leverage the Q&A format successfully. Today Klout officially enters the ‘social answers’ space with a unique proposition, integration with Bing search — outside of the social search bar and into a big…
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Google Upgrades Its Google Places Dashboard With Google+ Local Integration
Apr 2nd
Google has begun a staged upgrade of its Google Places Dashboard — the backend tool that allows local businesses to manage their business information that appears in Google’s search results. A new dashboard that looks much more like the current Google (and Google+) aesthetic, and also…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Search Marketing Integration Starts With Your Sales Team
Mar 8th
Successful SMI requires the full integration of your whole organization. This means departments that, before, were completely separate and autonomous, should now be contributing to your online marketing mix. And it all start with the sales team.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
The New SEO: Search Marketing Integration
Jan 30th
The days of SEO as a distinct, independent discipline are numbered. SEO is fast evolving into a more creative, diverse, and challenging profession. Here’s how the integration of social, branding, PR, paid search, and video is changing the SEO model.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
The New SEO: Search Marketing Integration – Search Engine Watch
Jan 30th
 MarketingProfs.com (subscription) |
The New SEO: Search Marketing Integration
Search Engine Watch search-marketing-integration Every year, somebody proclaims that SEO is dead simply because Google has made some changes to its algorithm. But don't worry, this post won't be declaring that SEO is dead, dying, or even coughing up blood. However, the … The Value of Local SEO to Small Businesses February Small Business SEO Tips and Tools Seminar Announced by JM … SEO Coaching Experts Help Retrieve Stolen Content |
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2013: The Year of Marketing Integration
Dec 31st
It’s not too late to get your marketing ducks in a row and leverage new and old channels to generate demand for your company. Here are five trend predictions in the world of B2B marketing for 2013 and where to focus your attention.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Bing Launched Elections Portal: Filter News By Party, Social Integration, Maps & More
Oct 26th
Bing announced on their search blog a new portal for tracking the US Presidential Elections at bing.com/elections. The portal has some nice search features, such as the ability to filter news sources by your political views. The downside of this news filter is that only specific news outlets are…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Why I Love Apple’s Facebook Integration
Sep 26th
The Facebook integration into Apple’s OS X and iOS brings me relief. It’s the easiest, least icky, most user-friendly partnership between two major tech companies I’ve seen in a long while, and that’s saying something.
The rubber has hit the road for the social Web, and it has to start making money. This has led mostly to decisions that hurt users. But in the case of Apple and Facebook, with one possible exception, this is a good long-term idea, and as a result, the users actually win.
The address book and the calendar were the things holding smartphones back. Aside from maps (which is another story), they’re the two most important features. The address book is for communicating, the calendar is for making a plan and maps are for getting there. Those are the three most important things you do with a mobile computer.
The problem smartphones had with communicating and planning is that you need other people for them. Facebook is where the people are.
Facebook & Contacts
Before this integration, you had to manage your contacts yourself. You could have email addresses, phone numbers, job titles, even last names that were long out of date. It was on you to figure that out and change it. If you turn on Apple’s Facebook integration, you can merge your contacts nicely with their Facebook profiles. When your contacts update their profiles, the changes are pushed to your devices.
Apple isn’t the first phone maker to have this feature, of course. Facebook was deeply integrated into the ill-fated WebOS, and Bing and Windows Phone integrate Facebook in many ways, too. But iOS is a dominant platform, so this is the first such integration to reach massive adoption.
Pro tip: You might get some duplicate contacts if the names are too different between your own contacts and Facebook. It’s easy to link them together, and if you disconnect Facebook later, your old contacts will be fine. Just edit one of the contacts, scroll to the bottom, then choose the other one as the linked contact.
Facebook & Calendars
Facebook Events have long been the easiest way to plan something with a bunch of people connected on Facebook. Facebook is also – let’s face it – the de facto way to remember people’s birthdays. Now that it’s integrated into Apple’s calendars, all the scheduling can finally be done in one place.
Events and birthdays are the easy part. They just appear in the Calendars apps on iOS and Mac as new calendars that can be shown or hidden as needed. New or changed events are pushed down from Facebook in the background, and you receive push notifications when they’re coming up.
Protections For Users
With any other hardware company, I wouldn’t let Facebook climb aboard my phone in a million years. Facebook wants our data, all of it, all the time, and the phone is where it all comes from. But Apple doesn’t let Facebook take over the phone. Facebook gets intentional sharing of text, photos and location, and it gets to easily link together any apps we use with our Facebook login. That’s all it gets, and they’re all conveniences for us.
You only have to push one big, red button, and all the Facebook integration is yanked out of contacts, out of calendars, and out of the sharing menus in apps and in Notification Center. You can even control access from Calendar, Contacts and the Facebook app separately.
One Trouble Spot
Google is the elephant in the room here. Hundreds of millions of people use Google for email and calendars, and both Facebook and Apple would like them to stop. Josh Constine over at TechCrunch has an interesting theory that a recent, annoying change to Facebook profiles, which replaced your default email address on Facebook with your [username]@facebook.com address, was all about hiding Gmail after integration with Apple.
Think about it. After most people merged their address books with Facebook, all the @gmail.com addresses would go to Facebook Messages instead, since most people didn’t notice the change. Here’s how to fix that, by the way.
That was shady. Facebook shouldn’t have done that. Maybe Apple even pressured them into it. But it was kind of a desperate move, and at least users can undo it. This was one unfortunate inconvenience that may have resulted from the Apple/Facebook partnership. But at least it wasn’t a Twitter-style banishment of a beloved service.
Where The People Are
Facebook is exactly the right partner to help Apple build these features. If your entire network is deep into Google+ for communication and planning, Android is always going to work better for you. But otherwise, Facebook integration provides Apple users two major conveniences that complete the feature set of the smartphone, but it doesn’t force you off of another provider for email or calendars, if that’s how you work.
Lead photo courtesy of Gdgt.
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Why Bing’s Facebook Integration Won’t Help Most People
Jul 31st
On Monday, Microsoft added the capability to “tag” Facebook friends while searching in Bing, actively soliciting the wisdom of real people when conducting searches. While this sounds like a great idea in theory, it’s unlikely to be used except by a majority of users.
That’s not to say bringing Facebook to search isn’t a good idea. Microsoft’s search strategy now leans heavily toward social, and encouraging one’s friends to engage via Bing can only help the company’s case.
But is it useful? Only in certain situations.
When Does It Help?
Here’s where the new announcement fits in. In May, Microsoft redesigned Bing to passively search information from virtually all of a user’s social networks. Bing now uses a “sidebar” to let users optionally search these networks, complementing the results from the main Bing algorithm. At the time, Microsoft said it might launch a future feature called “Broadcast,” which would actively ask friends on those social networks for advice or answers. That Broadcast feature, specifically for Facebook, went live on Monday.
Specifically, users can “tag” friends by naming them. When the search is “submitted,” Bing publishes a query to a user’s timeline, asking them, for example, “Can you recommend the best hiking trails?” for a given area. Bing can tag up to five friends at a time.
What “Search” Really Means
A quality search engine excels in providing immediacy, relevance and context. The race toward immediacy has largely faded into irrelevance; Google has argued that its Google Instant results save 2 to 5 seconds per search, or 350 million hours of user time per year. Still, users who search via the Internet Explorer or Chrome browsers can find relevant results almost instantly, through previous searches, autosuggested results or through an actual search via toolbar or search field.
And, in a way, that’s the issue with Microsoft’s tagging feature. Having essentially “solved” the problem of immediacy, Google and Microsoft have moved on to relevancy (apple trees vs. Apple) and providing context. Both Google and Microsoft now attempt to return “answers” to common questions, such as the height of the Empire State Building. Context is provided by related searches and, most recently, the social aspects of search.
But every time a friend is asked what his favorite restaurant in New York is, there’s an implicit delay. That’s not to say that the average Bing user won’t have a network of connected, informed enthusiastic friends. It’s that this network has to respond almost instantly for the “immediacy” aspect of the search paradigm to remain in effect.
Do Delays Matter?
Now, does this hesitation matter? For certain searches and certain users, no. If I’m planning a trip to Hawaii, and want to know the best hotel to stay at on Kauai, soliciting my Facebook friends during the planning stages makes sense, especially if I have a buddy who was stationed at Pearl Harbor and may know. But if I have 45 minutes to find the best BBQ joint near the Kansas City airport, I’m not sure that my friends will be the fastest, most reliable source of information.
There’s an exception, though. On July 18, Bing added Foursquare results to its social sidebar. Foursquare, Yelp and a number of other social networks publish your opinions for the world to see. They’re chiseled in stone, so to speak, and permanently searchable by your friends and others. It may be that my friend Dave has also been grounded in Kansas City, sought out some ribs and posted his experiences on Yelp. In that case, that results of that search would be immediate, relevant and fruitful.
Naturally, Bing – and anyone who uses this new feature – will have to tread carefully about bothering others for answers. Users are already hypersensitive to “spamming” their friends with pithy updates from Facebook social games and other apps. On the other hand, Microsoft has made the right choice to not automate the social search, instead forcing users to write their own “query” to their friends, using their own jargon and phrasing. That’s an important touch, as it will encourage the recipients to think of the query as a request for assistance, rather than an auto-generated spam message.
Right now, suggesting friends seems to be largely based on location. Still, it’s easy to imagine scenarios where you might be in the market for a new car, for example, and your friend across the country already owns the Acura you’re considering leasing. Bing needs to know that, however, in order to take advantage of the connection.
Bing vs. Google
Google, meanwhile, offers Search Plus Your World, but nothing that’s comparable to the new Bing feature. For one thing, Google’s offering focuses almost exclusively on Google+, and performs searches against information there. A user might get lucky while looking for a New York City restaurant recommendation if a Google+ contact happened to have put one in a post, but there’s no way to reach out to your contacts. For what it’s worth, Bing is head and shoulders above Google in this area.
Microsoft is likely thinking of the problem in a sort of hierarchy of value: Bing can deliver millions of search results, curated for you, which you ultimately select and explore via its search engine. Searching the social networks that you belong to narrows those results and adds value. At the top lies the personal recommendation from your friends, the highest value, but also probably the least timely.
Basically, there’s nothing different here than the person who tweets or updates: “HELP! Need Thai recommendations for the Mission, quick!” or “So what do you think of the new BMW 3-series?” That person may get lucky and get a timely, useful answer. Or, well, not. And that person doesn’t need Bing to do it, either.
To take advantage of Bing’s new social element when you really need it, though, it helps to have lots of friends with many, many opinions – and who have already published them for Bing to find.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
BrightEdge Integrates Majestic Data into S3 Platform BrightEdge’s Integration … – CNBC.com
Jul 7th
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BrightEdge Integrates Majestic Data into S3 Platform BrightEdge's Integration …
CNBC.com BrightEdge Integrates Majestic Data into S3 Platform BrightEdge's Integration Marks the Largest Implementation of Majestic Backlink Data for Global SEO. BrightEdge Integrates Majestic Data into S3 Platform BrightEdge Looks Toward Majestic Backlinks |
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