The Barometer

Want an iPad? Buy a Car!

At the recent International Auto Show in New York, Hyundia unveiled an interesting little perk to go with the 2011 version of its Equus luxury sedan.  Instead of finding the traditional automobile manual in the glovebox, it’s been replaced with an iPad (although it’s not clear whether the device offered will really be a genuine […]

Twitter Finally Reveals Advertising Model

Twitter has finally announced how it plans to make money.  It seems to be in the form of paid ads that exist at the top of Twitter search results.  Only one ad will be displayed per search, and not 10 like on Google and Yahoo search result pages.  It’s called Promoted Tweets.  There’s a nice […]

Social Networking – Do you need more proof?

Remember the good old days when people would ask if your business had a website … the answer would often be “no, we don’t need one.” Flash forward … now the question is, “Does your company participate in social networking?”  Most of the time the answer is the same “no” along with “we don’t understand […]

Apple’s Push to Redefine Mobile Advertising – The iPad and iAd Cometh

Amidst the noise about a certain new device from Apple, you may have missed another bit of fruit-related news: iAd.  Apple is apparently going to be releasing a mobile advertising platform, most likely the results of its acquisition of Quattro Wireless (after a failed attempt at AdMob).  There aren’t many details known but some are […]

Fear of Blogging!

Increasing your client base, boosting your company’s credibility and telling people (and potential clients) about your business is what blogging is all about … however, there are companies out there that are blogging-challenged and very afraid of jumping into the blog world. For instance, you might say “what in the world should I write about?” […]

Insurance Agents Get Results on Facebook – What Every Company Can Learn

State Farm agents have been using and testing Facebook for over a year now. They’re gotten to where they now understand the most effective ways to engage their audience on that platform and rolled out Facebook training throughout their whole organization. What did they learn and are now asking all of their agents to apply? […]

Who’s Tweeting? … Fortune 500

According to a recent study from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center For Marketing Research, Fortune 500 companies increased their involvement of public blogs from 15% in 2008 to 22% in 2009.  That is a significant increase and a more interesting figure is that 35% have a Twitter account with four out of the top […]

Who's spending $80 million to $100 million for an Ad Campaign?

Well, if you want to win market share as a revamped search engine, that would be Microsoft’s promotion of Bing!  The question is, what search engine is so good and has more meaningful features that you would actually switch from using Google?  And, with Google having almost a 70 percent market share of the search […]

Even Google Needs Search Engine Optimization

Google officially acknowledged the relevancy (pun intended) of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, last year and now Google has gone and audited itself.  Google has made its “SEO Report Card” available to the public.  It appears to have only evaluated itself on some basic criteria, but it’s fascinating how poorly they score in several key […]

Google Changes the Rules: PageRank Sculpting

A fairly accepted advanced practice within the SEO community called PageRank Sculpting has been undone by Google.  I won’t get into all of the details but the important thing to remember is that if your site was making use of PageRank Sculpting (or your SEO experts said they were) then you better find out how […]