Many of our “100th Tweet thoughts” are still true today, and we’ve added some tools to make our Tweeting even better:

• Our main focus with Twitter remains keeping up with the Search Marketing community and their blogs, re-tweeting information and linking to posts that will help keep our clients updated on digital (and traditional) marketing trends.
• Each day, we highlight our five most recent Tweets on our website home page, ensuring constantly updated content for visitors to the site.
• We track our favorite blogs in Google Reader as the primary source of our Tweet material.
• Each time we update our blog, a Tweet goes out to notify our followers.
• Our tweets are used to update our status on our Facebook page.
• We use TweetDeck for desktop as a personal real-time browser to update our status and to follow the Twitter stream of lists, hash tags and friends.
• We registered g-3.me to use as our Custom Short Domain, then mapped that URL to bit.ly pro. This allows all of our Group 3 Solutions Tweets to be branded with the g-3.me shortened URL.
• Each week or so, we compile our messages into a Tweet roundup blog post.

Has our Tweeting been a game changer for us? Not really. But it has allowed us to improve our knowledge of the real-time information network as we assist our healthcare vertical clients in their social efforts and introduce business-to-business clients to how they can enhance their marketing program with social networking.

Where is real-time information networking heading? Let’s take a look at what is happening in the ever-changing field, and what others are saying.

• Real-Time Search. We think Twitter, and other services like it, will continue to have an impact on search engine marketing, with real-time search results becoming increasingly important in the future. Danny Sullivan, the authority on SEO industry reporting, took an early look at Google’s real-time efforts. Here’s Google’s page on the topic, and Bing has information here.
• Social Media Marketing. As marketers seek to tap into the 120 million or so Twitter users (as of July 2010), new advertising companies are being formed, small agencies are expanding their offerings, and larger ones are buying these smaller firms or establishing their own social marketing divisions. “Ad spending on social networks worldwide is expected to rise 14% this year (2010) to $2.5 billion,” according to research firm eMarketer. “Although social media represents only a fraction of the $55 billion online-ad market, it is one of the fastest-growing segments,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
• Multimedia. ReadWriteWeb reports that Twitter may soon be displaying images and video inline, perhaps “betting that 140 characters just isn’t enough anymore.”
• Real-Time Advertising. Is Twitter best for public relations, or will the new advertising platform be better for ROI? Mashable suggests keeping in mind the affinity already built with Twitter as you consider going to Sponsored Tweets or other advertising opportunities on the service.
• Competition. Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN) such as Foursquare may vie for marketers dollars with Twitter. “The time for marketers to get involved with LBSNs is coming,” Forrester says.

So … a lot has changed while other aspects have stayed the same between our 100th and 1000th Tweets. What will change as we work toward 2000 Tweets? Follow us on Twitter to find out!

That’s why it is hard to look back and realize we didn’t follow our gut instincts and buy into the Google IPO nearly six years ago. Here’s a look at what GOOG has done in that time:

So what brings this up now? In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Google CEO Eric Schmidt offered his first-person account of the “quirky IPO,” from the Founders letter by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to the Google Guys interview in Playboy (we hate to link it; just Google it!) that almost derailed the process to the unique Dutch auction concept that aimed to help allow the little guy to get in on initial shares.

And we were in on every step of the auction bidding process. Until we were out.

So we thought it might be a little fun to take our own look back at that process, which started in January 2003 when we first contacted our Morgan Stanley broker to inquire about Google going public. We followed up in November of that year when we heard the company was getting closer to going public and that Morgan Stanley had been tapped to lead the way. Keep us in the loop, we said, as we’ll be buying shares.

By January 2004, we were really all over it. News was out that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs would indeed be managing the Google IPO. We’re in. Our only concern was: How many shares would we be allotted? We knew we couldn’t afford much, but it would be fun to participate.

In April 2004, Google filed for the offering. By July, things were moving along and Google had outlined a “Dutch auction” process that prospective investors would have to navigate to purchase shares of the company. First, we had to go online to the Google site and register to get a bidder number for the IPO. We did. Number 0126-6035-3855-2803-4600. That gave us the right to participate in the auction process, in which each investor could tell Google how much he or she was willing to pay per share and how many shares he was willing to buy at that price.

Mr. Schmidt said this process would allow his company to “do a better job than the traditional approach of setting a price for our shares – and would allow our share price to remain stable after we went public.” In other words, the large institutions couldn’t hoard all the shares, then flip them at a huge profit at the opening bell as the stock started trading and the small investors got their first chance to buy. Theoretically, the little guy would have as much of a chance as the big boys, and Google would not leave any money on the table at the offering.

So now that we had our bidder number, it was time to bid. The company initially came out with a suggested bid range that went up to about $140. The Dutch auction process is complicated, but the general concept is that the company takes bids on what investors are willing to pay and the amount of shares they would buy at that price. Each bidder can even offer a range of prices they will pay and shares they will buy. Mr. Schmidt says the company could then “move down from the top bid until it reached the highest price at which it could sell all the shares it wanted to offer.” So if it had enough orders, it could sell all shares at $140. If not, it would move down the list until it reached a price where all the shares would be purchased. Everyone who bid that price or higher would get the shares at that price.

So here was the chance we had waited for. We’d already been working in Search Engine Optimization for some time and had dabbled in the AdWords bidding process for our clients, an online auction if you well that somewhat resembled the Dutch auction. As a result, we (like so many others) were convinced that Google was the best positioned search engine in the market place. We wanted to have a little bit of equity in the company. Make no mistake, we didn’t have a lot of money, and what we did have for retirement and our young children’s college funds we didn’t usually “gamble” on stocks. Instead, we mainly invested in mutual funds and hoped to watch those investments grow slowly over time.

But in this case, we decided to make up to a – gulp — $10,000 investment. So we bid on 25 shares if the price at which Google went public was $140. If it ranged down to $125, we’d buy 25 more shares (50 total). At $110, we’d buy 25 more (75 total). And if it went to the low end of the estimate at $100, we’d go with a round lot (100 shares) and invest the full $10,000.

We put in our bid and waited to see what happened. Which was nothing. Instead, the range for the offering was lowered to a top end of $135. That’s okay, we’re still in. But clearly Google had to lower the bids because not enough folks bid high enough to cover all 20 million or so shares being offered in the initial range. What did the savvy investors know that we didn’t?

Anyway, we put in our bid again in the lowered range. Starting with 25 shares at $135, down to 100 shares at the lowest end. And once again, they didn’t end the auction. Meaning that, even at the lowered price, Google and its investment bankers couldn’t get enough bidders. So, the range was lowered. We were still in – we love Google, remember? – but we were getting very jittery. Why were we willing to pay up to $140, but not enough folks were even willing to pay the previous low end of $108 to buy up all the shares? We put in our bids again, down to $90, but we weren’t near as confident in our decision.

Then it happened. They lowered the pricing again. To a range of $85-$95 per share, or 60% of the initial price we were willing to pay. So if we liked the company at $140, we must really love it at $85, correct? What we should do now is double down, put in $20,000 and enjoy a good investment over the coming years. Sure, the stock price might go down initially. But Google is such a good company, the investment will pay off in the long run. And we’re long-term investors, so let’s go for it, right?

Wrong.

We called our broker and dripped out of the auction. We’re not in for any shares of Google. Not 25 shares at $140, nor 50 shares at $115 or 75 shares at $100 … not even 100 shares at $90, which had been our final offering on the low end. Nope, we don’t want any shares at $85. Though in our gut we just knew that Google was the major player in the ever-expanding field of search, we worried that all the smart money folks had driven the price down, so there must be a reason. Surely the stock was going to go down, not up, when it started trading.

The rest, of course, is history. Initial investors received their shares at $85 in the IPO. The first public trade of GOOG on that first day (August 19, 2004) was $100, which is about where the stock closed that day. So a 100-share investment at $85 ($8,500) was already worth over $10,000, a gain of 18%. As you know, it gets worse from there (worse, that is, if you didn’t buy any shares). At its highest point in late 2007, the stock reached $714.87 per share, meaning that initial $8,500 investment would have been worth $71,487, about 8.5 times the original investment.

Of course, we probably would have sold long before the $700+ peak. But you get the point. We really wanted to be a part of the unique IPO. We were willing to invest at $140 per share. But we couldn’t pull the trigger at $85 per.

We often wonder how many small investors there were who, like us, wanted to be involved but got skittish and backed out as the big money drove the price down. Did Google accomplish its stated goal of letting everyone participate? In the end, the answer is probably yes, at least to a degree, though the company didn’t accomplish its goal of not leaving money on the table. With the IPO priced at $85, remember, but the first bids coming in at $100, Google could have made 18% more for the company. Just like we look back with a little regret, we guess Mr. Schmidt and Company may as well. But with the stock currently hovering around $500 per share, that regret likely passes pretty quickly. Ours lingers.

Jill Whalen

I hear from many people who want to be told exactly what they need to do to get high rankings and bring more targeted search engine traffic to their websites. I wish I could provide them with a straight answer, but every site has its own needs when it comes to SEO. Which means there’s no exact rule that will work each and every time for any website.

One thing, however, that can help you figure out how to SEO your site is to learn the whys behind the specific techniques you always hear about. But to understand the whys, you first need to get the gist of how search engines work. Sounds scary, I know, but I’m going to make it as simple and painless as possible – so stick with me!

In very simplistic terms, there are 2 main components to the search engines: the crawler and the algorithm.

The crawler, which is sometimes referred to as a spider, a robot, or simply a bot, is what goes out on the web and fetches all the pages of information that it can get its virtual spidey legs on.

The algorithm (or algo) is basically the ranking formula that each search engine uses to determine the relevancy of any page that the crawler finds.

The search engines use this formula to decide – out of the pages that were previously fetched – which pages they should show for which keyword phrases that any searcher might type into the search box. Those keyword phrases are also sometimes referred to as a person’s “search query.”

While the algo is a formula, it’s so complicated that it’s not something you can simply reverse-engineer. The engines look at hundreds of factors and weigh them all differently. This is why you’ll find that automated SEO software doesn’t work well to increase your rankings.

Here’s an interesting point – those hundreds of factors that go into the relevancy algorithm boil down to two major things:

What you say about yourself, and what others say about you.

Really. It’s as simple (and as hard) as that!

“What you say about yourself” means the information you provide on your website, or the words that you write on your pages. The Internet is mostly a word-based medium. Every single web page has its own story to tell. Each page should be relevant to one or more search keywords or phrases. And each page’s story helps the search engines understand which search queries the page is relevant to.

Make sense?

So now let’s look at what others say about you. This aspect of how the search engines determine relevancy is known as the “off-page” criteria, and it’s typically done through links.

That is, another site owner likes what you say or offer on your site, and wants to tell their own site visitors about it. The way they do this is by linking to your site – or a specific page of your site. Search engines take these links into account because what others say about you provides an additional layer of trust beyond what you say about yourself.

Still with me?

These two major factors – how search engines work and what they’re looking for – help clarify what you need to do SEO-wise to keep them happy.

First, you need to steer clear of any technical issues that can impede the crawler from finding, reading and indexing the pages of your website. The easier you make it for them to do their job, the better chance your pages will have of showing up for relevant searches.

Which means you need to start on the SEO of your website from the very beginning. You’re going to need lots of up-front research on keywords and other elements. You’ll also need to make sure your content is written to appeal to both your users and to the search engines. While all of this *can* be done later, you’ll save yourself tons of time if you plan your SEO before you ever start developing your website.

Then, once you’ve got a crawler-friendly website, you’ll need to create pages that conform to the search engines’ algorithms by making sure they are not only relevant to what people are looking for, but interesting and unique enough for others to want to link to them. You’ve also got to spend time getting the word out about your website, because even the greatest content in the world won’t market itself!

I hope I’ve simplified the search engine process and SEO enough that you understand why you need to use the specific tactics that are involved. If you always keep the two major factors that search engines are looking for in mind – what you say about yourself and what others say about you – you’ll always be able to make the right decisions for your website.

It’s those two factors that drive the SEO process and fulfill its goal of helping your target audience find your website when they’re seeking out exactly what you offer.

Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings a Boston SEO Consulting Agency, has been providing SEO services since 1995. Jill is also the host of the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum.

• Jan. search market share (comScore version): Google 65.4% — Yahoo 17% — Bing 11.3% — Ask 3.8%. SEL: http://selnd.com/csp4Ss
• Jan. search market share (Hitwise version): Google 71.5% — Yahoo 14.6% — Bing 9.4%. WSJ: http://bit.ly/daoJXE
• ‘For Some Brands, Super Bowl Ads Yield Big Impact on Facebook and Twitter.’ http://bit.ly/9KfBsu
• The buzz on what Google Buzz can do on mobile devices. http://bit.ly/c2yADD
• Check out the liveblog from the Google Buzz Launch today: Search Engine Land. http://selnd.com/bH87Zr
• RT @shalinibahl: Google to add social networking features to Gmail. http://ow.ly/15w7w
• ‘Google Airs TV Ad During Super Bowl – But Why?’ http://selnd.com/bFOY1M
• What did you think of this year’s Super Bowl ads? Read what agencies and critics had to say. http://bit.ly/d9tVI9
• Jeff Jarvis tells what ad sales people are hearing from local merchants: sell service, not media; local voice is huge. http://bit.ly/949A2n
• A Facebook win and loss for Microsoft: their display ads are out, but Bing search deal expanded. http://bit.ly/aBi638
• Search Engine Land: Siri: Not A “Search Engine” But You Might Use It Like One. http://selnd.com/9w7sql
• TechCrunch intern requests computer for post: http://tcrn.ch/brPA9F | Intern explains: ‘The Line Was Crossed.’ http://bit.ly/bLiTaq
• Google Maps To Add “Google Store Views.” http://selnd.com/az8hmb
• YouTube: ‘Stand Up for Your Favorite Health Organization.’ http://bit.ly/aSbVjT
• Free access to The Wall Street Journal Online today courtesy of Acura. http://bit.ly/d9cG6q
• The Great Debate: Should Blogs Allow Comments? http://bit.ly/bC5tRu
• 5 Social Media Tips for Better Corporate Social Responsibility. http://bit.ly/beGEC2
• Group 3 Solutions Tweet Roundup: Our week of Tweets about SEM, digital marketing and Kansas City news. http://bit.ly/dBegw4
• ‘We. Can’t. Remember. Passwords. And ‘The Internet Wants to Get Paid.’ And other salty rants from Dave McClure. http://bit.ly/c6X4CN
• LinkedIn Blog: ‘We bring you the ability to reorder the sections on your LinkedIn profile via drag-and-drop.’ http://bit.ly/cDD68R
• Barkley named agency of record for Kansas City Wizards. http://bit.ly/bbGljh
• For $25/month, Google offers enhanced listings that allow businesses to stand out on maps and map-related serps. http://bit.ly/a7mJnS
• ‘AP and Yahoo Ink Content Deal, Leave Google in Limbo.’ http://bit.ly/cYBR8e
• Search Engine Land: A review of the 2000 decade and search developments. http://bit.ly/cKedyq

Previous Tweet Roundups. Group 3 Solutions and Darrin Widick on Twitter.

• In battle with Fox, Time Warner shows how to grab video directly from the web. WSJ: http://bit.ly/6iitC8
• Slate answers the question: ‘Is Facebook Spying on My E-Mail?’ http://bit.ly/6HtCuu
• Verizon gets $550+ million from Microsoft, we get server-side install of Bing on our BlackBerry. Search Engine Land: http://bit.ly/7BDzhw
• For those who care … Google Toolbar PageRank appears to be updating today. SEORoundtable: http://bit.ly/74CiH4
• Jenn Strathman (@KSHBConsumer) takes a look at the top KC investigations of the year for NBC Action News. http://bit.ly/4×1uSG
• What to do? ‘The amount of time people devote to LinkedIn is a fraction of the time they spend on other social sites.’ http://bit.ly/822q6a
• Watch out! Nearly 15 inches of snow for Kansas City in Dec. The last time we had this much (1961), we followed up with 30.5 inches in Jan.!
• Anil Dash on being on Twitter’s suggested user list: ‘makes no appreciable difference in…retweets, replies, clicks.’ http://bit.ly/8lkdjY
• ‘Facebook was the #1 most visited website in the United States on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day this year.’ http://bit.ly/8uIZeZ  
• Fun breakdown (first in a series) from Bruce Clay Inc. on the ‘Best of Search Conferences 2009: The Agenda.’ http://bit.ly/87bB6F
• In Kansas City and elsewhere, Time Warner and News Corp. are fighting over subscriber fees for Fox programming. http://bit.ly/5×51tS
• Nice profile of Kansas City’s ‘White Ollie Gates,’ Joe Zwillenberg of the Westport Flea Market. Hearne Christopher: http://bit.ly/74DpNA
• ‘Fun Stats: 28% Of Sites Use Google Analytics; 5% Have Facebook Or Twitter Links.’ Danny Sullivan: http://bit.ly/6Q0Dh5
• Twitter CEO on purchase of Mixer Labs: ‘We want to know What’s happening?, and more precisely, Where is it happening?’ http://bit.ly/4BOo41
• Roger Twibell leaving KC radio to start Clear Golf. (via KC Confidential) http://bit.ly/7xTaVV
• According to Firefox, the first mobile phone version is just “days away.” http://bit.ly/8dIBWx
• Facebook projected to surpass its rival, MySpace, in ad revenues in 2010. http://bit.ly/5sclyG
• YouTube launches youtu.be as a shortener for video links — and nothing but YouTube links. http://bit.ly/4nQ9Oj
• Google, Yahoo! and YouTube led the way as far as most accessed sites and brands on the mobile web in 2009. http://bit.ly/6D2zwN
• Over one in five households have ‘cut the cord’ and gone to wireless only. Nielsen: http://bit.ly/565eqs
• Google Content Network YouTube Channel ’stockpiled with videos, links and downloads about the full suite of features.’ http://bit.ly/8IIYlH
• WordPress 2.9 is released … watch ‘a short video summarizing some of the cool things about the new version.’ WP blog: http://bit.ly/6PuXps
• ‘Google-Yelp Deal Not Happening Now.’ http://bit.ly/4QUJwa
• Google in Talks to Acquire Yelp for $500 Million. http://bit.ly/5OihXB
• ‘Trident Gum Turns Fan Tweets Into Full-Page USA Today Ad’ http://bit.ly/8ceTX8
• Search Engine Land: ‘SEO Expert Swears In Court That Google Uses Meta Keywords Tag.’ http://bit.ly/6sbpIY  
• November Search Engine Marketshares: Google and Bing Up, Yahoo Down. http://bit.ly/87amZ1
• ‘Now You Can Reply To Facebook Status Updates By Email.’ Inside Facebook: http://bit.ly/7fXukc
• ‘To help you understand how everyone sees your website, we created a tool called Browser Size.’ Google blog: http://bit.ly/5pvCpQ
• ‘Marketing (as we know it) dies’ in 2010. Newspaper circ down; TiVo & TV; FTC & privacy; FB gets ‘MySpaced’? Forrester: http://bit.ly/6gEzyC
• 5 Great Website Tips To Help Keep Your Brand Image Fresh http://bit.ly/8aNfPp
• The first official Bing App for iPhones and iPod touch is now available. http://bit.ly/5UNL9P
• According to comScore, Facebook traffic grew by around 5.5 million users in the United States last month. http://bit.ly/8Qb8Xm
• Yahoo! Search makes it easier to search and find local businesses. Yahoo blog: http://bit.ly/70Dds0
• Tweets from Santa! http://bit.ly/92zsVd | Group 3 Solutions blog.
• Search Engine Land: The Importance of Creating an Inventory of Link Building Assets. http://bit.ly/5Syina
• NielsenWire: ‘U.S. Web Users Spent Just Over 66 Hours on the Computer in November.’ http://bit.ly/5tu592
• Our week of Tweets about search engines, digital marketing and Kansas City stuff. | Group 3 Solutions Tweet Roundup | http://bit.ly/7ZQvgQ

Previous Tweet Roundups. Follow Group 3 Solutions and Darrin Widick.

• LinkedIn: ‘Faceted Search offers dynamic filters that are automatically generated based on your actual query results.’ http://bit.ly/4ImjsR
•  [We still like 'Cat Herders.'] AdWeek names Coke’s, “It’s Mine’ the Super Bowl Spot of the Decade. http://bit.ly/7iTyaR
• If you ’search for buzzy topics’ now ‘you will see recent tweets directly integrated on the SERPs.’ Yahoo blog: http://bit.ly/6XLm8g
• New Aol. strategy appears to be ‘content, content, content.’ And which theme are you: goldfish? monster? Mashable: http://bit.ly/5cp44g
• Hershey selects KC’s VML (@vmltweets) as its digital agency of record as they ‘look for ways to show ROI on digital.’ http://bit.ly/8Jf95A
• New LinkedIn nav design. ‘All global navigation is in the top nav bar … to free up space for page content.’ http://bit.ly/6TZxZ2
• Ad spending to grow about 1% in 2010, better than the +/- 10% decline in 2009. Internet to lead the way. DMNews: http://bit.ly/5zXhj2
• Living Stories from Google, NYT, Wash Post: ‘a different format for presenting news coverage online.’ Google blog: http://bit.ly/5AKj6Y
• Yahoo’s $100mm campaign has not increased unique audience, but it has increased home page minutes. NielsenWire: http://bit.ly/5aPDxR
• Google Real Time Search offers results from Tweets, news, blogs, new pages, etc., says Danny Sullivan. http://bit.ly/8GnGpi
•  [That would make us all journalists, right?] Cisionblog: ‘Does tweeting make you a journalist?’ http://bit.ly/4pITpG
• ‘Normal is dead,’ says Danny Sullivan regarding search and Google’s Personalized Results. http://bit.ly/7kLTAs
• Ad Interest Manager from Yahoo offers control of your level of exposure to Behavioral Targeted ads. http://bit.ly/5L73BV
• Google’s personalized search, ‘enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity.’ http://bit.ly/8SLL9f
• Is Google covering up Climategate? Danny Sullivan takes a deep look. http://bit.ly/4BTVxO
• Check out your Biz Journal today. 4-page ‘wrap detailing the niche their papers fill in each of their communities.’ http://bit.ly/5UjknF
• Just like real-time and streaming quotes, Google Finance is now doing the same with news. ‘News can stimulate trades.’ http://bit.ly/7hIKHx
• Have you used Google Webmaster Tools to review your site’s speed stats yet? On your dashboard, it’s under Labs > Site performance.
• Pretty funny. Couple updates Facebook relationship status at the altar. http://bit.ly/8×0RpA #fb (YT video via Inside Facebook.)
• Google’s new homepage. ‘When the page first loads, it shows only our logo, the search box and the buttons.’ http://bit.ly/6BnHME
• With Twitter: ‘The novelty factor had to wear off.’ | ‘Ghost Followers.’ | ‘Global Ponzi scheme.’ AdAge http://bit.ly/8GGufj
• Jeff Jarvis et al. to FTC: ‘Get off our lawn!’ http://bit.ly/6w5D8u
• Google Image Search: ‘We hope this new layout makes finding the images that you’re searching for even easier.’ http://bit.ly/87lJxU
• Zuckerberg to all 350 million Facebook users: ‘we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings.’ http://bit.ly/6W1azf
• Google changes for publishers: Will this ‘appease Murdoch?’ Mashable: http://bit.ly/6SUEsj
• Now you can tag at the top of your site without concern that it will slow down page load http://bit.ly/59Itjn | RT @brettc @googleanalytics
• Top 10 Searches 2009: Yahoo: http://bit.ly/5ZC6RX | Bing: http://bit.ly/6dBNAn | Google Zeitgeist: http://bit.ly/86vRVo
• Cyber Monday 2009 sales up 13.7% compared to Cyber Monday 2008. Search Engine Watch: http://bit.ly/6JFQa0
• Twitter founder Dorsey’s new service lets folks ‘accept physical credit card payments from their mobile phone.’ TC: http://bit.ly/8SNv9Y
• ‘Online Shopping Up 11% on Black Friday’ says comScore (via Search Engine Watch). http://bit.ly/5uVyLO
• KC aviation news: Stowers’ Hangar 10 FBO project being sued by owners of Executive Beechcraft. KC Biz Journal: http://bit.ly/58YlD6
• Search Engine Land: Matt Cutts of Google confirms that IP 209.85.225.103 hits the Caffeine index about 50% of the time. http://bit.ly/50uZ28
• Find out what’s new in TweetDeck v0.32. LinkedIn, retweets, geo-location, and more. TweetDeck blog: http://bit.ly/68SjBw
• Our weekly Tweet Roundup, a recap of a week of tweets about search engine marketing. Group 3 Solutions blog: http://bit.ly/4xA4jG
• Mark Cuban: ‘No taxes or license fees of any kind on small biz. No employer payroll tax. No taxes on earnings. Nada.’ http://bit.ly/8tAqdE
• ‘Newspapers aren’t aged news. They’re TiVoed news.’ Danny Sullivan with a unique angle on monetizing online news. http://bit.ly/7p7Zy6

Previous Tweet Roundups.  Follow Group 3 Solutions and Darrin Widick.

• [Hey, we didn't get one!] Promoting its Travel Community, Bing hands out 1000 gift cards at BOS and SEA airports. http://bit.ly/8vApJR
• Kansas City’s YRC Worldwide fights hard to avoid bankruptcy. http://bit.ly/6jiDRn
• It’s only one month, but what to make of Twitter flat numbers vs. blogging’s growth? TechCrunch: http://bit.ly/6JXoOs
• [Better call our stock broker!] Facebook creates Class A and B stock shares. Is a Google-like IPO on the horizon? NYT: http://bit.ly/87zOEM
• Search Engine Land: ‘Yahoo’s Search Box Gets Smarter’ with new features for Search Assist. http://bit.ly/4AyHc9
• Avinash Kaushik on Twitter analytics: ‘be a lot more critical when you think of analyzing these new media channels.’ http://bit.ly/7Lpo5J
• Jeff Jarvis: ‘News Corp. leaving Google would be a mosquito bite on an elephant’s ass.’ http://bit.ly/7iVuwF
• AdWords: ‘Experimentation Is Worth the Risk.’ In 2010, try Website Optimizer, YouTube Insight, Display Ad Builder. http://bit.ly/6nmYqT  
• In 2010, 75% of small businesses will increase email marketing, 70% will increase social media spend. eMarketer: http://bit.ly/7F80uN
• ‘Using Texts to Encourage Healthy Habits.’ Reminders for meds and sunscreen, STDs and sexual health. Dobies Healthcare: http://bit.ly/5wFWPG  
• Google Wave is changing journalism with town squares, engagement, content planning, embedded blogs. Mashable: http://bit.ly/7VNyIR  
• We look at Joomla Tabs and Slides plugin, allowing for ‘multiple content items to be displayed in the same window.’ http://bit.ly/5zl0xx  
• Wikipedia losing editors ‘in droves,’ harder to edit, unwelcoming to new content and cntributors. WSJ Digits: http://bit.ly/5How80
• ‘Our new identity is uniquely dynamic.’ AOL is now Aol. with a period, like Yahoo! with an exclamation mark. http://bit.ly/7sVV5H  
• Danny Sullivan: If Murdoch blocks Google from indexing, should Google block News Corp. from searching? ‘OPEC for News.’ http://bit.ly/8Rnxiq
• Mashable: Will Google Wave transform journalism? Fostering engagement, town squares, content planning, embedding blogs. http://bit.ly/7VNyIR
• A weekly Roundup of our digital marketing Tweets. Group 3 Solutions blog: http://bit.ly/78TEKd
• Chiefs win! Kansas City has now surpassed last year’s victory total.

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• Sorry to see KC’s Bernstein-Rein losing Bayer Animal Health, but glad they picked up BV, Banfield and the Chiefs. http://bit.ly/8pYdLQ
• ‘Hey news publishers. Stop acting as if your content only appears printed on dead trees.’ Danny Sullivan w/Josh Cohen. http://bit.ly/6m4FAS
• Using Brizzly? We all can now. The Twitter & FB reader has inline photos, mute, threaded DMs. YouTube video: http://bit.ly/5GZBXV
•  [Hey, where were they when we were BUYING textbooks?] ‘Textbook RENTAL Service Chegg Raises $57 Million.’ WSJ: http://bit.ly/27X7aW
• ‘Will you be turning on geolocation support for your tweets?’ Mashable: http://bit.ly/3VTGSO
• If posting from the web, did you notice? Twitter now asks, ‘What’s happening?’ instead of ‘What are you doing?’ http://bit.ly/fUmfv
• Great news for the hearing impaired AND search engine optimizers: machine-generated automatic captions on YouTube. http://bit.ly/4sRRKy
• Couple of Nielsen posts about video: viewing of online video up 26% YOY and up 98% YOY on social networking sites. http://bit.ly/3pUYHA
• Dobies Healthcare Group salutes the Volkswagen initiative to use fun to change behavior for the better. http://bit.ly/45HyXX
• Best Open Source CMS award ‘marks a shift in the…perception of WordPress, from blog software to full-featured CMS.’ http://bit.ly/6Gadx
• ‘New Site Hierarchies Dsplay In Search Results.’ Replaces green URL in Google SERPs with hierarchy of location. http://bit.ly/3Te9GI
• Digital practice leader shares his ‘love-hate thing’ with Twitter in AdAge. http://bit.ly/4otBzr | ‘76% of accounts are infrequent users.’
• Kansas City’s Zack Greinke wins the 2009 American League Cy Young award. We’ll take that bit of good news! http://bit.ly/efRZp
• Failure or good business? Doesn’t someone have to pay? ‘The Times Plans to Charge For One-Day Access.’ TechCrunch: http://bit.ly/kasOH
• ‘In 2010, we’ll be looking to maximize impressions…through the…integration of social sites, search engines.’ Cision http://bit.ly/TjIiX
• YouTube Direct lets media ‘request, review and rebroadcast YouTube clips directly from YouTube users.’ YT Blog: http://bit.ly/1JzvKz
• ‘New companies and the entrepreneurs that lead them are the engines of job creation and economic recovery.’ BizWeek: http://bit.ly/2wiYRb
• The pros and cons of Google’s algo including a site’s speed as a ranking factor. Mashable http://bit.ly/3FQass
• How can you adjust your online campaign(s) to better reach the Hispanic market? ‘Language Targeting in Google AdWords.’ http://bit.ly/3RP7hY
• Our weekly Roundup of tweets about search engine, social media and digital marketing. Group 3 Solutions. http://bit.ly/8TzLJ
• [Hint: The answer is yes.] Is Google’s market share 70.6% or 80.4% or 64.9% or 66.1% or 78.2% or 77.8% or 76.7%? http://bit.ly/19Qtp4

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So as an advertiser, how can you adjust your online campaign(s) to better reach this demographic?

Here are ways to target your online campaigns (specifically AdWords) to reach the Hispanic market.

• When setting up your campaign, you can select the Spanish language box in your language setting options. By doing so, your ads will reach users searching Google in the Spanish interface. Note:  In this scenario, users would still need to search on the English keyword and ads would appear in English.
• If you’re looking to take the extra step to reach your intended Hispanic visitors, setting up a separate AdWords campaign with translated keywords and ads is the way to go. By creating a second campaign in Spanish, you’ll be sure to reach Hispanic users that search in both English and Spanish. Google provides tools to assist in the translation, or you can utilize the services of a third-party vendor.
• Make sure the designated landing page for your campaign takes users to a useful page. If a user clicks on an ad in Spanish, leading them to an English-only website would negate your efforts and provide for poor user experience. Make sure your landing page addresses the Spanish-speaking user either through a translated page or an action item that directs Spanish users where to go (i.e. a phone number to call to get more information).

By knowing how to better reach Hispanic users through your AdWords efforts, you’ll be better equipped to create smarter, more effective campaigns.

The answer is: Yes …

… depending on which stats you believe. With a range of 65% on the low side and 80% on the high, there’s a pretty large gap in the numbers. So when clients ask how their monthly search engine traffic distribution compares to the average, which numbers should we compare them to? The ones that say Google, Yahoo and Bing have 65%, 19% and 9%, respectively, of the market, or the ones that say they have 80%, 9% and 9%?

So we thought we’d try to establish an “Internet Average” of the market. We took market share numbers from six different companies, added in our own numbers based on observations of sites we monitor, and came up with this table.

Granted, each company has a different universe of searches from which it draws, and uses different methods of calculating its numbers. So this certainly is not a scientific process. But we do think it strikes a happy medium from the low to the high across Internet statistics. And we think it provides a nice baseline to which folks can compare their own traffic numbers.

Here’s where we pulled the data:

• Experian Hitwise
• StatCounter Global Stats
• ComScore (via PC World)
• Nielsen Wire 
• Group 3 Solutions Data
• Enquisite
• iCrossing (via search engine land)