For Super Bowl advertisers, major plays in the big game are moving from the TV screen to the computer screen, proving that internet marketing via social media is an ever-intensifying factor in winning customers and sales for any company that wants to succeed today and into the future. Budweiser, a consistent favorite among Super Bowl advertisers turned to its Facebook fans to give the final green light on its Super Bowl commercial. Via a tab labeled “Game Day Pick,” Fans viewed clips of three potential commercials: One outlining the scenarios in which it’s appropriate to compensate a friend with a beer; another offering various tactics for getting a bartender’s attention; and the third starring the beloved Budweiser Clydesdale horses. It was no surprise either to marketers or longtime beer fans that the Clydesdales rumbled forward, winning by a long shot.

The ploy helped build Budweiser’s Facebook fan base. A Facebook user had to sign up as a fan in order to participate (Facebook forbids advertising of alcoholic beverages to underage users). When the company announced the contest on January 29, it had fewer than 135,000 fans. Today, that number is at nearly 270,100, meaning that Budweiser doubled its Facebook fan base with just one week-long promotion.

Other advertisers incorporated social media factors into their Super Bowl commercials and campaigns as well. In the two weeks prior to Super Bowl, Coca-Cola announced shortly before Super Bowl that Facebook fans would be able to send friends a virtual Coca-Cola, an image of a Coke bottle displayed on their Facebook pages and newsfeed along with a 20-second sneak peek of one of Coca-Cola’s two Super Bowl commercials. The company also donated one dollar to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America for each virtual gift sent. Pepsi, a faithful Super Bowl advertiser for the past 23 years, announced earlier this year it would forego a TV commercial altogether. Rather than pony up the average $3 million per 30-second slot, the company announced it would instead launch an online social networking campaign.

Perhaps the biggest benefit social media lends to advertisers is an instant gauge of how well received their commercials were among viewers. Mullen, an advertising agency with offices in Boston, New York, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Winston-Salem partnered with Twitter to measure Super Bowl commercials’ effectiveness via viewer tweets. More than 98,600 tweeting participants levied their opinions. Combining their comments with ad reviews and other metrics, Mullen declared Doritos, Google and Focus on the Family tops among Super Bowl advertisers.

The face of the advertising and marketing environment is changing rapidly. Consumers demand and expect interactivity, and only those who are fully engaged in the most effective online social media platforms will succeed in the coming years. AppSoft Web Development offers social media services for all clients. We can set up and maintain your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn pages, building your fan and contact base and posting status updates designed to boost interest in your company’s products and services. We also offer blogging services – monthly blogs of 200 words or more written by a professional copywriter and based on your company’s keywords and monthly SEO reports. Tiered pricing levels assure quality social media and blogging services at a price any size business can afford. For more information, call Rachel Kuncicky or Devan Stuart at 904-241-9777.

Google search functions are getting increasingly social. This month, Google added image searches to its Social Search experiment, allowing for ever more personal searches. Soon, your image search results will include related images and web content from your friends and online contacts.

For instance, say you’re thinking of getting a dog. You’ve got a small apartment, so you want a small dog. You do a Google search for “small dog breeds” and Google turns up all the usual, expected results, including articles by pet experts, pet stores, dog trainers and the like. However, you’ll also find images and web content posted by your friends. If a friend of yours has written an article or blogged about Chihuahuas, that article or blog page will appear under a special heading called “Results from your Social Circle.”

Now that Social Search has been added to Google Images, you’ll see results there as well. For instance, if a photographer friend of yours has posted photos he’s taken of a client’s Pomeranians on his professional website or a neighbor has posted pictures of her miniature dachshunds on her Facebook page or on a web photo sharing site such as Flickr or Picasa Web Albums, these images will appear under the “Results from you Social Circle” heading as well.

The screenshot of images also will include links titled “My Social Circle” and “My Social Content.” Click and you’ll be taken to one of two new Google interfaces. Clicking on “My Social Circle” shows your extended network of social contacts. “My Social Content” takes you to a list of your public pages that may appear in your friends and contacts’ social results.

Thus far, Goggle’s Social Search functions are available to everyone in beta on google.com. Social Search for images and the two new interfaces launched only recently, so it may take several days for your connections and content to update. Currently, they’re available in English only to all signed-in users.

Google this week launched three new enhancements to its search results: hours and menus, informational snippets about events, and highlighted answers to search questions. Each promises to boost your search experience by delivering targeted information in record time.

Of the three new enhancements, the most used likely will be the hour and menu information that pops up in universal searches. Think about every time you’ve searched for a particular store and had to wade through pages of info until you found the page that listed the store’s hours of operation. Now, by entering the store’s name, city and the word “hours,” you’ll get a universal Google search local result with the hours immediately listed. Here’s what we found when we Googled a client using the query “Garcia Institute Jacksonville Beach hours.”

When it comes to restaurants, a website that shows a few photos and gives great verbiage about the chef, the décor and the local jazz band that plays on Friday nights just doesn’t cut it. Even if it’s a restaurant/lounge, the “restaurant” part comes first. And chances are you’re hungry. You want to know what’s on the grill and you want to know now. Take a look at the Google local results we got when we searched “A1A Ale Works St Augustine menu.”

The Rich Snippets function delivers brief annotations that webmasters make summarizing what’s on the page. Rich Snippets for reviews, including restaurant and movie reviews, and people already were in place. Now, we’ve added Rich Snippets for events such as concerts movie show times. Type in an event type and the city and you’ll see a short list of events with snippets of information including dates, locations and links to the official event pages. Of course, much of this depends on webmasters implementing the new markup on their pages. You’ll see this happening more frequently as time passes. Here’s what turned up when we searched “concerts in Jacksonville FL.”

When you type your search in question form, Google’s new answer highlighting function is designed to deliver the most likely simple answer to your fact-based question in boldfaced type within the search results. This function is meant to provide quick answers that are fact based. For instance, “When was the Internet invented” will deliver better results than “Why did Carl Perkins write ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’” and the latter will do better in search results than “What makes a hero.”

In today’s world of news and information, immediacy is king, so Google’s rollout of a host of new real-time search features is generating lots of talk. Most noticeable is the “Latest Results” scroll that now appears beneath the “News Results” box, dishing out up-to-the-second, related news articles, blogs and posts on social media sites including Twitter, FriendFeed.

For instance, a Google search for the word “crime” returned a “Latest Results” scroll of a Cape Town news story about a South African credit card scam; a Seattle Times post of a Mike Huckabee’s first-person Creators Syndicate piece on why he commuted Maurice Clemmons’ sentence; a Milton Keynes, UK story on a rash of armed jewelry store raids; an asylum.com article about a Houston cop with the badge number 666; and several Tweets about making transmitting HIV a crime, insurance scams, and an anti-Italian quip about the Amanda Knox murder conviction – all that and more in less than 60 seconds.

Google’s real-time algorithms and a deal with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca that allows for utilization of more than a dozen new search technologies make the real-time searches possible. Google also added a “hot topics” feature to its Google Trends to show the most common topics being published to the web in real-time.

Google real-time search also has gone mobile. Smartphone users now can search by a number of new modes including voice, location and sight. Google extended its voice search capabilities on Android devices to recognize Japanese, and is using a smartphone’s location to help users find “what’s nearby,” including restaurants and movie theatres. And Google Goggles, a new visual search application that uses images rather than words, and already recognizes books, wine labels, CD covers, landmarks and more. For instance, snap a photo of a wine label and up pops all the info, including a history, information on the makers and whether that particular wine has a hint of apricot. Happy searching!

Feel like you’re seeing red today. If you’re online much, chances are you’re right. In honor of World Aids Day, Google, Twitter and Facebook all ran red themes to varying degrees today. The aim was to support JoinRED, an initiative to raise funds to fight AIDS in Africa.

Twitter’s login page went red with a banner that encouraged member to follow @JoinRED. Entering #red or #laceupsavelives turned your tweets red as well.

Facebook urged its members to become Read more »

Yesterday, Google released the new search results page that allows you to update the ranking of search results, if you have and are logged into a Google account. This wont effect how other users see search results for your search term, only how you see your results while you are logged into your Google account. Read more »

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