Twitter and Facebook – the Future of Online Marketing?

Social Media Portal founder Tim Gibbon has claimed that social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook have more potential for online marketing than straight advertising.

Mr Gibbon said that online marketing social media had the advantage of “seamless” integration and so was able to avoid the weakness of direct online advertising – the “unwanted” factor.

He said that since 2005 there has been a huge shift towards social networking, a shift that was finally being recognised by companies who are now focusing on Facebook and Twitter for their online marketing efforts.

A number of companies even print their Facebook and Twitter URLs on receipts to make customers aware of their social media presence, Mr Gibbon noted.

New research this week identified another important phenomenon in the UK online marketing sector, which will have quite an impact on the future – mobile devices and applications.

A study by the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) revealed that most publishers are looking to build online marketing campaigns on mobile devices such as the iPad and even more were planning to launch new apps in the 12 months, offering some of their content and services free of charge.

Researchers found that half of those surveyed were already delivering mobile content, and one in six already had iPad apps. Some 72 per cent had mobile websites up and running, while another 25 per cent were planning to launch them over the next year.

An overwhelming 91 per cent of respondents identified the mobile online sector as an opportunity or “major opportunity” for marketing in the next 12 months – 86 per cent saw the iPad and other tablets as a good place to concentrate, while 84 per cent picked the smartphone and apps 80 per cent would be focusing on apps.

Search Engine Marketing Tips for B2C Marketers

Best described as the Yellow Pages of the 21^st century, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is currently recognized as the highest performing marketing medium available for B2C businesses. SEM is an aggressive method to target prospective customers who are actively seeking a particular product or service in real time. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and ask, “where would I look first?” More than likely, your answer is a search engine.

This is why the importance of paid search is insurmountable for any consumer business. When it comes to online marketing, paid search has the ability to put a company’s advertisement directly in front of the right audience, rather than rely on the search engine to decide how a company should rank on the organic listing.

However, in order for an SEM campaign to be successful, there must be the right knowledge, time and industry expertise in place. Here are a few tips for B2C businesses to keep in mind if they are planning to implement an SEM campaign into their marketing budget:

Tools and Reports - Whether a business has someone in house specifically hired for SEM services or has hired an SEM firm, make sure the right tools and reports are in place to monitor the campaign’s performance. Also, make sure the person in charge of your campaign knows how to interpret and use these tools.

Industry Expert s- Along the same premise as above, it is important to have an SEM expert optimizing the campaign, considering the campaign will be competing against other industry professionals whose sole purpose is search engine marketing. Ensure there is enough experience, knowledge, and focus backing any online marketing effort.

Keyword Selection - When selecting keywords, remember to include words people would use to search for the product, including misspellings. The less competitive the keyword, the lower the cost per click.

How To Conquer Social Media Marketing

Want to learn how to leverage the best social media marketing techniques to boost your online marketing performance. At this week’s Social Ad Summit, we will be discussing the latest techniques being implemented by the leading agencies and brands.

We’ve finalized the agenda and this year are pleased to welcome speakers from Johnson & Johnson, Organic, Huge Inc., Buddy Media, and more. I’ll also be speaking about the best Facebook marketing tactics to boost your performance, something that I’ve been covering in depth on this site for the past three and a half years. If you are looking to stay abreast of some of the latest and greatest strategies, this is an event that you shouldn’t miss.

Cary-based online marketing firm raises $4M, looks to hire 35

Startup netsertive is looking to hire 35 people and plans to move its headquarters to Research Triangle Park after raising $4 million in venture financing.

Netsertive has developed proprietary technology for localizing digital and online advertising.

Greycroft Partners and RRE Ventures led the first round financing.

“We wrote the book on using technology to localize online marketing for small and medium businesses and deliver national online exposure through local online channels,” Netsertive says on its website. “We’re passionate about the industries we serve and continue to add chapters to our book by working closely with dozens of industry leading clients around the country.”

The company is led by Chief Executive Officer Brendan Morrissey, who at one time was an executive with mobile technology firm Motricity.

“Our mission is to help businesses that serve their local area bridge the gap between online discovery and offline sales,” Morrissey said in a statement. “Far too many small and medium businesses lose out to larger competitors simply because potential customers cannot find them online. Our approach enables these smaller companies to affordably compete for online presence with the largest companies in the world. The return on investment that our clients experience speaks for itself. ”

Netsertive plans to move into new office space on Oct. 1.

“We’ve looked at many companies in this space and Netsertive was the most attractive to us,” said Jim Robinson IV, managing partner at RRE Ventures, in the funding announcement.

“Netsertive is far beyond simply being a good business idea,” he added. “They have experienced rapid and responsible growth, implementing hundreds of campaigns for clients nationwide. We expect this momentum to continue, as their unique technology solutions play a key role in helping smaller businesses effectively compete for online visibility in their local markets.”

Those Getting Feet Wet in Online Marketing May Find Visa Business Network Helpful

You may or may not be aware of the Visa Business Network. This is a site the company just launched as a way to connect small business owners with one another, providing resources like goal toolkits, mentors, content-ranked information and more.

We feel some of our readers may find this valuable, so we spoke with Michael Lee of the Visa Business Network Outreach Team. He talked about how it helps businesses get started with building their Facebook and Twitter presences.

Lee says, "There are two Facebook goals on the Visa Business Network; one is a basic step to help little business owners set up a Facebook page. The other goal is to help these business owners take the next step and actively promote their businesses through their newly-created Facebook page."

"There is a Twitter goal, which is called 'Learn to Use Twitter'. The Twitter goal goes through setting up a Twitter account and provides tips on best practices for promoting one's business through Twitter. Besides the Facebook and Twitter goals, the site also features a goal on setting up email newsletters and another one on getting found online via services such as review sites and local directory listings."

Online Marketing Excellence Launches New Website for Online Learning

om Aikins, founder of the Online Marketing Excellence training course, announced today the launch of a website that allows consumers to purchase the course and access the 60 video segments that present the course’s information. The site address is http://www.seonorthamerica.com.

Online Marketing Excellence was developed over a two-year period of research and development and was designed in particular to assist small business owners in creating more traffic for their companies’ websites. Unlike many other online marketing and SEO training courses, Online Marketing Excellence was created for people who have limited or no knowledge of how internet marketing works. It was really designed for beginners and does not assume that the users of the course have prior knowledge of online marketing.

Also, the course material is presented completely in video format with most of the video segments showing users how to do things step-by-step using computer screen capture software. Users are shown exactly where to go, where to click and how to use SEO and online marketing techniques in a simple easy-to-follow manner.

According to Aikins, "This course will allow anyone to easily master the techniques and methods that are needed to successfully drive traffic to a website. The concepts are easy to learn and our site offers users unlimited usage for a whole year for only $379 for the entire course. Individual modules can be purchased for $44. Because usage is unlimited, employers can have as many of their staff learn from the course as they want. And, new videos will be added to the existing 60 each week so that users can keep up with new developments as they happen in this fast-moving industry."

The course is broken up into 10 modules with each module containing 4-8 video segments. Module titles include Introduction To Online Marketing, Keywords, Creating Content, Posting Content Online, The Importance Of Video, Using Blogs, Link Building, Using Facebook , Google Analytics And Places, Google And Facebook Pay-Per-Click.

By covering all of these topics the course presents to users all of the methods and techniques that are needed to be successful at online marketing. The overall emphasis of the course is on showing small business owners how to market their bricks and mortar businesses on the internet. It is not for people looking to make money only from a website business. Another key segment of potential users of the course is people who are looking for training so that they can work in the online marketing industry which is one of the fastest growing in the world.

Online Marketing Excellence is presented in English but there are written transcripts of each segment available also beneath each video that are in Spanish, French and German. Other languages to be added soon include Arabic, Portuguese and Russian. And, other sites will be added in other areas of the world.

Founder Tom Aikins is a sales and marketing expert with over 30 years experience and spent 27 years in the magazine publishing industry. He supervised the launch or re-launch of 11 publications covering both consumer and trade segments. He has concentrated on online activities for the last five years and regularly presents short seminars on online marketing.

New Program Helps Companies Improve Online Marketing Success

Phoenix Arizona based AKA Internet Marketing has launched a new service aimed at helping bridge the gap between senior executives and tactical web staff. Their Virtual Search Engine Marketing Director Program bridges the gap between the vision of the Senior Management and the tactical Internet Marketing team responsible for deploying a winning online marketing strategy. This program is designed for Mid-Sized companies that employ an in house web marketing team yet does not have the budget for an in house expert to provide strategic direction to accomplish the goals in the most efficient manner. According to Anthony Kirlew, Founder of AKA Internet Marketing “Oftentimes a CEO or Senior VP may know what end results they want, but they simply don’t have the expertise to develop and deliver a solid execution plan to their web marketing staff.”

Kirlew is very clear to emphasize that his company is not looking to take Director level jobs from those who currently hold them, but rather help companies that have not been able to benefit from the expertise of a Search Engine Marketing Director (and often due to cost). “A Search Engine Marketing Director is someone who usually possesses both tactical Internet Marketing skills, as well as high level marketing and business skills. They are often the missing component that a company needs to truly thrive online,” states Kirlew.

The delivery of the service starts with an initial (paid) consultation where a Senior Search Marketing Strategist will discuss the current status of the company’s Internet Marketing program. This includes an analysis of the company’s Internet Marketing goals, progress, and concerns and is followed by recommendations which can be implemented with or without the oversight of a Virtual Search Engine Marketing Director from AKA Internet Marketing. If desired, the Director can oversee the implementation and monitor progress on an ongoing basis, otherwise the company (AKA Internet Marketing) will arrange for periodic check-ups to confirm that the client is meeting their goals.

The basis of Search Engine Optimization in online marketing

Search engine optimization is a kind of complicated methods that help to improve the placing of a website in the search results of the major online search engines. This is because most consumers see the details that they need through the major search engines like those provided by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and AOL, the rank of the online website in the search engine results is a very vital thing in deciding how many searchers will see and look the page.

There are lots of methods that can be used when utilizing search engine optimization. One of the first method that web masters avail search engine optimization is to increase the count and location of keywords on the website that users are possibly to use when browsing for services and goods proffered by the website. Most search engines list a page depend on keyword phrases and many times annex value if the keyword arrive within some concentration level. The warning in this case is that many search engines will reduce the web page ranking if the keyword repeats so many times since it is noticed as a try to cheat the search engine. Keyword SEO utilizes not only keyword concentration but also keyword positioning. Most search engines put higher importance on keyword terms that are positioned in HTML header tags and page titles.

Another way of search engine optimization is to improve the count of links to the website being optimized. Many search engine enterprises outline their algorithms with the belief that a webpage that is greatly linked to be more possibly to proffer quality content than a page that has no links to it. Many webmasters use this technique to increase the search engine optimization of their website. Because of this, many search engines now under estimate to and fro links in favor of one way link. This signifies that a major target of latest search engine optimization is the maintenance and creation of one way links.

Sine one of the major targets of the search engine optimization professional is to improve the count of one way links, lots of techniques have been developed to attain this target. One of the excellent techniques to make one way links is to give testimonials on webpage. These methods will generally produce a link to the testimonial provider’s webpage. Another technique to make one way link is to create posting on internet message boards and place the web page URL in the base line.

SEO is an important factor of any internet marketing plan. By placing a web site rank highly in search engine results, it is likely to improve the count of visitors to the website.

Lee Elliott Enterprise Offers New Online Marketing Service

Lee Elliott Enterprise LLC, Houston, has launched a new online marketing service for orthodontic offices. The service, which is tied to Google Maps and Google Places, provides local online marketing for orthodontic offices.

Google launched Place pages for Google Maps last year. These local maps provide targeted information for users on local products and services based on their searches. Smart phone GPS applications also are starting to use Google Maps Place pages.

According to the company, the service helps make new patient leads and will help push orthodontists’ Web pages to page 1 of Google rankings.

One of the cofounders of the service is Sonny Elliott, who has been involved in the orthodontic community since 1984. He co-founded the seminar company Quest for Orthodontics and also cofounded Omega Orthodontics, a publicly traded company, He spent many years providing in-house consulting, appearing on national programs, and authoring practice-management works.

Dublins Best Hostels Choose Tailor Made SEO As Online Marketing Partner

The start-up website, which launched in February 2010 is a partnership between 10 of Dublin's Leading Hostels. The website offers in-depth profiles of each of the hostels in the partnership together with online booking facilities.

London based TailorMadeSEO specialises in online marketing and search engine optimisation for small businesses, its parent company also provides web development and business support services focused on the SME sector.

Dublin's Best Hostels began working with TailorMadeSEO in June 2010 and has already achieved several #1 positions on Google and more than ten page 1 listings in the organic search results. The result – an impressive 700% increase in visitor numbers and an upturn in Dublin hostel bookings made through the website.

Ronan Brady, co-ordinator of the Dublin's Best Hostels project commented “Working with Tailor Made SEO was a natural choice for us, their website development team did a smashing job on our website and their SEO services are competitively priced. After three months we are impressed with the results and have renewed our agreement for an additional 3 months”

The Dublins Best Hostels website was originally developed by Tailor Made SEO's sister company, Tailor Made Sites who specialise in producing Affordable websites for small businesses. In addition to securing web development services from TailorMadeSites and SEO services from TailorMadeSEO, Dublin's Best Hostels have now tasked the firm with managing their Google Adwords campaigns.

Saif Bonar, founder of Tailor Made SEO said “We are pleased to work with Dublin's Best Hostels on website development and SEO, we are delighted with the results we have produced in the first three months and look forward to continuing our relationship and building on the success so far”.

20% of Canadians hit by deceptive online marketing: Visa

One in five Canadians report having been the victim of unauthorized charges on their credit cards as a result of accepting a marketing offer online or over the phone, a Visa survey found.

Canadians have made purchases they didn’t intend to make or signed up for offers unintentionally as the result of not reading the small print, or failing to uncheck pre-checked acceptance boxes, Visa said.

While 20% have fallen victim to such deceptive marketing practices, awareness that they exist is high. About 78% of respondents knew of the potential pitfalls, it said.

"Deceptive marketing practices come in many forms," said Gord Jamieson, head of payment system risk at Visa Canada. "While the majority of retailers are honest and legitimate, consumers need to be conscious that there may be fraudsters out there and they should think twice before accepting an offer that sounds too good to be true."

Visa says consumers should check their card statements carefully for unauthorized charges and if they occur try tackling the merchant directly. If that doesn’t work, contact Visa and the report the case to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.

Lyris Launches Email and Online Marketing Partner Program

online marketing expert, today announced the launch of the Lyris Partner Program. The program affords partners – resellers, online marketing solutions vendors, software companies and agencies – the opportunity to sell, implement and support an ever-expanding solution set that includes Lyris HQ, Lyris' flagship email and online marketing solution.

Together, Lyris and their partners offer marketing solutions for marketers who run complex email and online marketing campaigns. The Lyris partner network is comprised of innovative companies that share Lyris' commitment to deliver accelerated and truly accountable ROI to clients.

Unlike other marketing industry partner programs, Lyris' "high-touch" program takes a truly collaborative approach, providing partners with comprehensive offerings and personal support that enables them to grow their businesses.

Depending on the partnership level, specific benefits of partnering with Lyris could include:

• Marketing support: Marketing resources and support to grow partner business
• Competitive margins: Discounted internal use licenses
• Personal support: Dedicated account success managers
• Professional development: Exclusive access to partner portal and Lyris Learning Lab
• Lyris Community: Attendance at annual Lyris Customer Events and User Group meetings

The Lyris Partner Program also allows partners to intelligently integrate key business processes into Lyris HQ via robust APIs to let marketers act on even more complete profile and activity data. Lyris HQ already provides rich email, web visit and transactional data that can be further customized via technology integrations.

"As integrated marketing partner programs gain momentum as a method for online marketers to effortlessly expand their product and service offerings, it is important to understand what to look for when partnering," said David Daniels, CEO of the Relevancy Group. "Program aspects like a comprehensive product offering, a collaborative, supportive program that offers personal technology and marketing support along with robust technology integrations and competitive margins should all be considered when evaluating a program."

The Lyris Partner Program offers five categories of partners, each with a separate set of benefits specifically focused on individualized needs and business models:

• Reseller partners: Become certified by Lyris to sell Lyris subscriptions
• Solution partners: Sell Lyris HQ as a complement to or as part of their products and solutions
• Integration partners: Software companies that embed the Lyris HQ solution into their offering or complement it with an integration via Lyris' robust APIs
• Agency partners: Provide marketing expertise to their clients and are certified to properly sell, service and provide level-one support for Lyris HQ
• Referral partners: Connect Lyris with other marketers seeking a solution like Lyris HQ

Internet Marketing Can Help Businesses Grow

Every time a person visits your website and leaves without taking action, you have lost a prospect. The easiest way to capture that prospect and lead him or her into your sales funnel is through the effective use of e-mail marketing. Building an e-mail list through your website is a crucial element of keeping in touch with your prospects and increasing your sales.

Once visitors reach your website, they'll do one of three things.

They take action (make contact, signup or buy something), bookmark you or click away. If someone takes action, great! If they click away, there's not much you can do. And don't count on those bookmarking you to come back anytime soon.

Fortunately, with a smart e-mail marketing game plan and the right invitation, you've got your best shot for capturing their e-mail addresses. And that can only mean one thing: more business.

Step 1 is to use a professional online e-mail marketing service that provides the tools and support you need to be successful. There are several options depending on the size of your company, but I've been most happy with Aweber (www.aweber.com) during the past five years. If you have a webmaster, ask that person's preference. If you don't have a webmaster, go with Aweber for its simplicity and service. E-mail marketing services start at less than $20 per month.

Step 2 is to create the form (simple) at your e-mail marketing services website and paste the code for that form into your web pages. This is not as hard as it sounds. The e-mail marketing service will have a simple way to create the form, and you or your webmaster can just paste it right into your web site.

Step 3 is to create a compelling offer why a visitor should join your e-mail list. Best ideas include a special white paper or special report, a helpful top 10 list about your business or industry or even a coupon toward a visitor's first purchase. For the best shot of receiving those e-mail addresses, offer all three for signing up.

Step 4 is to create a thank you or autoresponder message. This is the e-mail your new subscribers will receive after they've signed up on your web site. This is a great place to introduce yourself, provide visitors what you offered in your invitation and let them know how you can help them any further.

Step 5 is to stay in touch with your subscribers every couple of weeks. What should you e-mail your list? Well, anything that would interest them as a potential customer.

Looking for SEO services and PPC management services in Manchester

Search engine marketing is a form of internet marketing that helps to promote your website by increasing its visibility in SERPs (Search engine result pages) through the use of search engine optimisation techniques, Affiliate Programs, PPC Campaigns, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.




Totally SEO Manchester is a highly reputed affordable SEO services company providing cheap SEO services, pay per click management, affordable SEO web design and all other online marketing services in Manchester, U.K having professional SEO experts, link building experts and ecommerce web designers.




Once you try the affordable SEO service of this search engine marketing company, the company can provide guaranteed ethical SEO practice to your website because of their white hat techniques to promote the websites. Their SEO process is customised and industry specific, when the company get a new website, its Manchester SEO expert team do proper research like keywords research, industry & technical analysis, market survey, website structure analysis, content analysis, code optimization whatever is needed to promote a website legally on popular search engines like Google and Yahoo.




As a cheap SEO services provider, the totally SEO Manchester do also link popularity analysis for your website so that huge traffic can be achieve through link building, search engine marketing and optimization services. Totallyseo online marketing firm also provide free SEO consultancy services to the clients in U.K and worldwide so that the clients can aware about the current status of their website and also get to know which SEO package is best for promotion.




Totally SEO Manchester is dedicated to the field of online marketing providing cheap SEO services, web design services and PPC management services to the clients. The main focus of this Manchester SEO Company is to work with business owners by educating them about various online marketing channels and creating a customised solution which will ensure better results for their business in terms of Page rankings, Sales, Awareness & Branding.




The Manchester SEO experts of this company use their whole experience and expertise to help small and large businesses create a successful online presence. They work as per the Google guidelines, and make your websites search engine friendly according to search engine requirements.

Shanda Profit Falls 60%

Chinese online media company Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd. said Thursday its second-quarter net profit fell 60% from a year earlier due to higher expenses and a slight decline in revenue at its online games unit.

The company's games unit, Shanda Games Ltd., reported a 16% decline in second-quarter net profit because of decreased sales and margins, though the results were in line with analysts' expectations. The unit also said it plans to acquire Korean game developer Eyedentity Games Inc. and to form an online-game joint venture with China Network Television.

Shanda Games said given Eyedentity Games' portfolio of internationally licensed games, its planned acquisition of the company would support plans for global growth, and its said its joint venture with China Network Television would offer new game products and online video.

Sales in China's online game sector have slowed as the industry has matured, weighing on the results of both Shanda Interactive and Shanda Games. In response, Shanda Interactive has sought to diversify its business by boosting revenue from businesses such as online literature and videos.

Shanda Interactive's net profit for the three months ended June 30 was 168.8 million yuan ($24.8 million), down from 426.9 million yuan a year earlier. Its earnings per American Depositary Share fell to 2.76 yuan, from 6.14 yuan a year earlier, below the average 53 cents per ADS forecast by nine analysts in a Thomson Reuters poll.

The company's total operating expenses grew to 597.6 million yuan from 385.6 million yuan a year earlier because of higher costs for product development and sales and marketing.

Shanda Games reported a second-quarter net profit of 304.3 million yuan, down from 363.2 million yuan a year earlier. Analysts had forecast a net profit of 16 cents per ADS, according to a poll by Thomson Reuters.

Chocolate, Vanilla, or Swirl: The Debate Between Online and Offline Marketing

Cone or cup. Rent or buy. Hire or outsource. Fund or cut. Clearly, there are times when you have to choose one thing at the exclusion of another.

But, that’s not always the case.

And, contrary to what others may lead you to believe, marketers today shouldn’t be struggling to decide between online or traditional marketing practices.

Quite simply, this is not one of those classic “either/or” propositions. Instead, the key to marketing success these days is to develop a productive mix, to strike an effective balance, between digital and more traditional “offline” tactics. Right now, it’s more important than ever before to integrate messaging across a variety of channels so that you offer a seamless, compelling experience –wherever your customers and prospects are, and whenever they choose to engage.

I am not debating that digital marketing offers tremendously valuable opportunities to reach out to and connect with consumers. In fact, when Aprimo polled hundreds of marketing professionals who attended Online Marketing Summit events over the past few months, we found that, not surprisingly, 62 percent are increasing their spend for online marketing. It makes great sense. Digital is more cost effective, easier to measure and satisfies instant gratification – for our online audience, as well as for us as marketers.

Marketing Internet Strategy – Why Your Business Needs an Optimization Engine

In case you didn’t know, an optimization engine can play a huge role in your business’s overall success. Nowadays, most people suffer from business downfalls, with what the recession and all. So, if you truly want to protect your business, regardless of what might happen, you need to look at your possibilities in strategies for online marketing, such as an optimization engine and meta HTML.

A lot of businesspeople mistakenly believe that just having a business website can help them succeed, but this is not the case. If you do not have a marketing internet strategy whatsoever to go with that website, you could actually lose any hold you might have had over your competition and also lose more customers in the process.

If you have plans of making a new website from scratch or of updating your current website, an optimization engine would be a great way to do some online marketing for it. This would be essential to make sure that your business website ends up having high rankings in the end. All you have to do to get this done is look for a certain marketing internet strategy that leading companies use for their businesses in today’s day and age: one that involves an optimization engine.

As high as the amount of companies who concentrate on search engine optimization or SEO may be, it would still be important for you to find the one that will match your business to a tee. Since the importance of your business cannot be rivaled, you need to focus all of your attention on finding the best optimization engine for it. This happens to be the best online marketing move that you could make today.

The greatest marketing internet strategy should incorporate various things, such as keyword search, meta HTML, link popularity and online marketing of your site. Just by finding the right keywords to work with – which you can do by doing proper research – you can make your website rank high in no time at all; believe it. Another benefit would be that you will be able to generate a ton of traffic without having to pay a cent. As you can see, website optimization doesn’t just have the power to make your rank high, but it would also be the best and quickest way to get the most traffic to your website as possible.

ASA to extend regulations on online marketing

Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is to extend its advertising regulation to corporate websites, social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter and mobile applications.

UK is going to introduce one of the world's most ambitious efforts of regulating the online marketing from March of next year.

The Chairman of ASA, Chris Smith said, "When this goes live next March this will be the most comprehensive approach to the regulation of advertising in website space anywhere in the world."

The ASA has received around 4500 complaints related to online marketing in recent years, which, it failed to fix.

But with the new rules, to be applicable from 1 March 2011, ASA will be able to maintain the self-regulatory system in the industry, especially ensuring the safety of children on social networking sites which is a major issue of concern these days.

There will be a "rogues' gallery" on the ASA website and warnings that will appear in the search results.

Along with this there will be list of products and brands of companies that refuse to comply with the code.

Social Media Marketing – NOT for Everyone?

After 10 years of preaching the merits of search engine optimization to sceptical business owners, I’ve found there’s a new challenge in online marketing and it’s a funny one.

Nearly all business owners I meet think they should use social media marketing to promote their businesses, but a good number have a real aversion to using social networking channels.

I am finding many people are afraid that if they don’t start using social media they’ll end up behind their competition – or even that they are just going to be missing out on this ‘next big thing’. I’ll be called in for a consultation on using social media for a business, and after discussing the ins and outs of a successful social media campaign, I see there’s something not quite clicking — but as averse to using social media the client may be, he still feels that he must use it.

Do you convince such people that they need to push on, as social media marketing is a necessity these days, or is social media just not for everyone?

Whilst we’ve all heard the benefits of using social media to promote businesses, the dilemma is that using social media as an effective marketing tool also requires:

* some technical ability (albeit pretty basic);
* time, when you may already have issues with time management;
* putting yourself ‘out there’, the social aspect of social media is intimidating to many;
* creative writing skills;
* buy-in from management that may be concerned about dealing with unfriendly comments, time and money spent, etc.;
* a budget to hire a professional to get started or run your campaign, if you just cannot manage it internally.

Mariner Energy down 2 pct after platform explosion

Mariner Energy shares dropped about 2 percent Thursday following news that one of its production platforms exploded in the Gulf of Mexico.

Mariner shares lost 47 cents, or 2 percent, to $22.88 in midday trading.

The platform is west of where BP's Deepwater Horizon exploded in April, setting off a massive oil spill.

Ex-Wachovia Chief Steel Says Bair Sought to Avert Systemic Risk

Former Wachovia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Robert Steel told a panel probing the bank’s near-collapse in 2008 he was ordered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to head off a meltdown of the banking system by selling his company.

FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair informed Steel on Sept. 28, 2008, that “Wachovia’s situation posed a systemic risk” and that he should begin talks with Citigroup Inc., Steel said in testimony prepared for today’s hearing before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Citigroup then made an offer supported by a loss- sharing agreement with the FDIC, only to be trumped within days when Wells Fargo & Co. bid more for Wachovia without U.S. aid.

The hearings in Washington are examining events during the financial crisis and the government’s decision to salvage firms such as Wachovia and American International Group Inc., while leaving others such as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. to collapse. Former Lehman CEO Richard Fuld is scheduled to testify today, while Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Bair are slated to speak tomorrow.

“The government had deemed Wachovia too big to fail; Lehman fell into a different bucket and we have lots of questions why,” said Tucker Warren, a spokesman for the commission.

Steel, the former U.S. Treasury Department and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive, was brought in to lead Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia in 2008 as the lender struggled to recover from the aftermath of its $24 billion purchase of Golden West Financial Corp. The deal saddled Wachovia with about $120 billion of adjustable-rate mortgages that allowed borrowers to skip some interest payments and add them to the loan balance.

Source : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-01/former-wachovia-chief-steel-says-fdic-s-bair-sought-to-avert-systemic-risk.html