Messenger Business: Facebook Turns Messenger Into Customer Service & Commerce Channel

Messenger for Business offers a range of new possibilities to merchants.

Today at Facebook’s developer conference F8 the company announced, among other things, Messenger Platform, which opens up the app to third party publisher and developers. As one feature of Messenger Platform, Facebook also introduced what it’s calling “Messenger for Business.”
The objective is to “reinvent the way people communicate and interact with businesses.” Initial integrations include e-commerce sites Everlane and Zulily. Customer service software provider Zendesk is also supporting the platform.
Facebook isn’t limiting the program to e-commerce; it wants to make Messenger a customer service/live chat channel for all kinds of businesses. For now the focus, however, is on enterprises. Small businesses have access to similar messaging functionality through their existing Pages.
There are different technical integrations and specifications behind the scenes. But what Messenger for Business is intended to do is replace email and provide real-time business-customer interaction and rich notifications (see graphics above and below). Where Messenger is integrated and consumers are logged in to Facebook, they’ll see an opt-in prompt on partner commerce sites to receive shipping notifications.
If users agree they’ll receive Messenger updates tied to specific shipping events (e.g., delay). Customers will also be able to discuss anything with the enterprise or merchant, including the desire to buy more of something. Facebook told me that both Everlane and Zulily reps could address the potential sales opportunities.
I asked about automation vs. live human support. Facebook stressed that it was up to the partner but the company’s preference was for human customer service and support vs. chat bots.
In an ideal scenario Messenger for Business removes friction from the customer service process (now mostly telephone based) and could result in incremental sales for merchants. There are lots of interesting possibilities. As with all things, however, partner execution will mater to the user experience. Facebook is being careful to selectively roll out the feature to those partners the company believes will deliver a great experience.
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Facebook Targeting Chinese Ad Revenue (Even Though The Service Is Blocked In China)

Can't import your social network into a location? What about exporting the international ad revenue out?

It’s true that the 1.35 billion folks living in China can’t access Facebook, but there are 1.39 billion average monthly users that can. According to the Wall Street Journal Facebook has added a second partner to help appeal to Chinese companies that can target users outside of China. The effort of obtaining international Chinese ad spend may help further boost Facebook’s ad numbers.
The WSJ reports that Chinese clients like interactive game designer Youzu Interactive Co have more than doubled the number of daily users after spending the majority of their ad spend on Facebook. Youzu Interactive now acquires one-half of their players via Facebook.
The overall process works by having Facebook Ad re-sellers like PZoom or MeetSocial help Chinese companies see the value and bring them aboard. The re-sellers then receive a percentage fee (from 10% to 15%) of the overall ad spend.
While China has its own flourishing social networks, only LinkedIn has had any traction within China’s borders to date, but we may see more networks trying to export ad revenue out rather than penetrate the networks in.
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More Unbundling Evidence? Google+ Making Photos Available On Google Drive

Company will push Google+ photos to its storage product, but still remains mum about plans for its social network.

Google announced today that it will make photos from Google+ available within users’ Google Drive accounts. It’s a handy new feature for people who use Google+ to store their digital images.
But is it a sign? Well, maybe.
It could be more evidence that Google plans to dismantle Google+ and concentrate more on the sum of its parts, especially the popular photo and Hangouts features. Early this month, Google VP Bradley Horowitz took control of Google+, announcing that he is now in charge of the company’s “Photos and Streams” products. The fact that Horowitz didn’t invoke the Google+ brand in his announcement, coupled with then-fresh remarks by Google SVP Sundar Pichai hinting at a Google+ split prompted a wave of stories in the tech press that Google is planning to pull apart the social network. Some even reported that Google had made the split official.
So far there has been no official word from Google about the issue. However, Google+’s head engineer Yonatan Zunger commented on Google+ that the changes are organizational rather than product changing. “A lot of misunderstanding and speculation. :)” Zunger wrote in early March. “The internal org was renamed ‘Photos and Streams,’ because Sundar likes org names that match what the teams do. And since our org includes Photos, Google+, Blogger, and News, there you have photos, plus several streams of content. No big user-facing changes tied to this at all.”
That singular denial hasn’t stopped the speculation. And Google’s official silence about the social network that it used to regularly tout as a priority is only fueling the fire, making it natural that any new wrinkle inspires fresh reading of the tea leaves.
The Drive update, which is rolling out today on iOS, Android and the web, will create a new photo folder within Drive. New photos will start appearing immediately and the full Google+ library will be available in a few weeks. Users will be able to organize photos within Drive folders, but that organization will not be reflected within Google+.
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Amazon Launches Home Services, Potential Challenger To Yelp, Google & Others

E-commerce giant vets local service providers, lets consumers hire and review them, includes Amazon Happiness Guarantee as part of sale.

Amazon’s always-expanding product lineup now goes beyond products. The e-commerce giant has launched a new section of its website where consumers will be able to hire local service providers, like plumbers, singers and even — as many tech sites have been quick to mention today — a goat grazing service to help clear out unwanted vegetation.
It’s called Amazon Home Services, and it puts Amazon squarely in competition with the likes of Yelp, Angie’s List and general local search/listing providers like Google and Bing. Amazon Home Services is live now in the U.S. — primarily in major metropolitan areas, with further coverage of more rural areas promised in the future.
Amazon says it currently has more than 700 professional verticals listed, with a total of more than two million unique service offers available. Professionals have to be invited to participate, and Amazon says it’s spent 123,000 hours doing background checks on service providers — only three percent of which get accepted.
Consumers can review their service providers, but only after purchasing a service — something that should add credibility when compared to other local service/local search sites where fake reviews are a problem.
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Apple will let you trade in your Android phone toward a new iPhone

Apple has expanded its trade-in program to include Android phones, BlackBerrys and Windows Phone handsets, the company confirmed on Monday.
Users will be able to trade in their phones from other platforms in Apple stores in the U.S., UK, Canada, France, Germany and Italy via its iPhone Reuse and Recycling Program, and receive a gift card to use at Apple stores. The news was first reported by 9to5Mac earlier this month.
The move is likely part of a larger effort to increase conversion rates from non-Apple smartphones to the iPhone and increase hardware sales.
Previously, Apple updated its website to include a step-by-step guide on how to ditch an Android device for an iPhone — and, most recently, CEO Tim Cook said during an earnings call that the company saw more Android users switch to iOS after the launches of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus than after the launches of the past three Apple devices.
The iPhone trade-in program launched in 2013 to encourage Apple fans to swap their old iPhones for store credit toward a newer one. Apple, which gives credit for the current value of the older device, requires users to purchase a new model on the same day as the trade.
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Microsoft Releases Preview Of Its New Browser ‘Project Spartan’ In Fresh Windows 10 Build

Microsoft wasn’t kidding when it promised to ship Windows 10 builds more quickly. Today, less than two weeks after its last iteration, the company has kicked out a new build that contains an important new feature: Project Spartan.
The new build’s number is 10047 10049, up a total of 68 from the preceding release.
If you are currently on the “fast ring” of the Windows Insider program, say hello to the new code. For the rest of you on the more conservative build cycles, wait for the dust to settle. You can, of course, change your ring setting and get the new tools more quickly. (Note: This is not the upcoming build that will support a host more Windows Phone handsets. This build is nearly all about Project Spartan.)
Project Spartan, the current, public codename of Microsoft’s new browser, will replace its venerable predecessor not all at once, but in steps. This fact has caused some confusion.
What can Project Spartan do? It comes with Cortana, the company’s digital assistant that lives in both current builds of Windows Phone and Windows 10. By bringing it to the browser, Microsoft makes progress on what appears to be an implicit goal to ensure that Cortana lands on every screen where the company vends a platform. (Xbox, gear up.)
Microsoft highlighted pen capabilities, simple reading views, and a rendering engine built for the modern Web as points in the browser’s favor during a call.

This is the first public release of Project Spartan. So what we will see is a preview of Microsoft’s browser vision. Project Spartan remains an incomplete product, the company said in a call. That’s hardly a sin for beta software, of course, but it will be a decent data point to stress-test Project Spartan regardless — how far along and stable is this new vision?
According to a separate blog post from the company, 10047 10049 contains a number of bug fixes, and known issues. That’s par for Windows 10 course.
Build, Microsoft’s developer conference, is next month, meaning that Microsoft might eventually hit pause on new builds to store up new bits and tiddles to show off at the event. Today, however, was not such a case.
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Google Glass could teach you to dance; identifies songs and suggests dance moves

Got two left feet? Don’t worry, Google Glass could teach you to dance by identifying songs and suggesting moves in real time.
Google has filed a patent to create a system by which Google Glass can recommend dance moves to those who wear the high tech device.
“The content identification module may provide information associated with a content of the media sample, such as identification of the song and the dance, to the wearable computing system,” the patent reads.
“The wearable computing system may determine dance steps corresponding to the content of the media sample and may generate a display of the dance steps on the HMD (head mounted display),” it reads.
That means Google Glass will have an ability to determine what particular song is playing in the background before suggesting dance moves from a possible library of moves stored in its database, ‘Tech Times’ reported.
The device may also show the user a video of other people dancing to the same song in order to help the user understand what moves they should be doing.
Google chairman Eric Schmidt recently affirmed Google’s commitment to the device and the technology behind it.
The initial research programme for Google Glass, called Explorer, was scrapped, but a new unit specifically devoted to the device is currently active.
“It is a big and very fundamental platform for Google. We ended the Explorer programme and the press conflated this into us cancelling the whole project, which isn’t true. Google is about taking risks and there’s nothing about adjusting Glass that suggests we’re ending it,” Mr. Schmidt added.
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10 Practical Tips For Using Geo-Location To Reach Your Target Audience

Geography plays an important part in creating customized and targeted marketing campaigns, and columnist Wesley Young lays out ways in which local search marketers can use geolocation to their advantage.

Jeans company True Religion needed to promote events and new products at its retail stores. Using geo-targeted emails focused on areas in which the brand had a high concentration of stores, True Religion was able to serve up dynamic emails unique to each audience to drive in-store traffic.
65,000 geo-targeted emails were opened with a 2.5% click through rate and a 1% in-store conversion, a huge impact for one campaign with a small data set, per True Religion’s Director of Global e-Commerce, Gary Penn.

Examples like the above support metrics that find geotargeting doubles the performance of all kinds of marketing methods, from email campaigns to paid search. Per data from the Local Search Association’s LSA Insights database, it also doesn’t matter what vertical your business is in.  The click-through rate for geotargeted mobile display ads was higher than the industry benchmark for all verticals.

 

The effectiveness of geo-targeting is only going to further improve as mobile use grows and location data becomes more accurate and available. The Local Search Association (LSA) just released data that found that, for the first time, mobile devices surpassed PC use in search for local businesses and services. As I reported last month, the majority of searches (52%) for local information on mobile devices occur either in the car or away from home or work.
Furthermore, 70% of consumers are willing to share their location information if they believe they are getting something of value in return like coupons or loyalty points, according to LSA’s Local Mobile Search Study.  This dynamically moving consumer base is only going to be more receptive to search results and ads that are specific to their location.
Geotargeting is the practice of delivering content to a consumer — via mobile or web — using geographic location information about that individual. At a basic level, a business can restrict its reach to consumers only located in a defined geographic area such as a state or a city. But location often provides much deeper, more meaningful and identifiable traits that tell you what a person wants, needs or is interested in.
Here are 10 practical tips for using geo-location information to reach your target audience.

1. Find A Venue Where Your Target Audience Will Have Specific Wants Or Needs

Stadiums, airports, universities, and malls are examples of specific venues that can be targeted in order to reach specific interest groups. Stadiums provide a great opportunity to focus on specific short engagement events with an audience defined by that event. They often host fans from two specific cities or schools or fans of a specific music genre that is heavy in one demographic. A band like One Direction, for example, is likely to attract school-age female fans.
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Authorship Is Dead; Long Live Authorship

Google's authorship program may be over, but columnist Eric Enge notes it's still important to work on building authority.

 I will explain why you should still be actively cultivating that authority and discuss the benefits you can get from it.

Why Did Google Kill Support For Rel=Author?

At Stone Temple Consulting, we did a detailed study showing the lack of adoption of authorship tagging by both authors and publishers. The short story is that the adoption rate was abysmally low:

If Google was hoping for mass scale implementation of rel=author tags all over the web, it did not come even close to happening. Not only did the great majority of authors and sites not participate, but even among those who tried to implement the tags, a significant percentage did so incorrectly.
As a consequence, the scope of the impact of the authorship tags ended up being quite limited. This is important, as Google had to implement special algorithms to support scanning for these tags and implementing special search features, such as author photos. The benefit they were getting from the program was not enough to cover the expense of supporting it.
But is that all there was to it? Or did Google use the three years of authorship tagging data to help tune its own algorithms for recognizing and tracking authors? Then, once those algos were tuned, they simply shut the feature off?
To explain that in more detail, Google could have used authorship tagging as a way to train algorithms for identifying authors. This could work by running two algos in parallel: one that read the rel=author tagging, and a second that tried to identify the authors without use of the tagging. Then they could compare the results of the two algorithms and use the rel=author based one to tune the other.
My guess is that this is not what happened, for the following reason: If Google really wanted to train such an algorithm, it would not be a difficult project for them to go through and manually identify thousands of authors and then use that data to test and train their algo to better recognize authors automatically. This would save them from having to launch a public program around Authorship, and it would provide more accurate info than relying on third parties to implement rel=author correctly.
Bottom line for me on this “debate” is that I think that Google wanted author tagging to work, and thought it would benefit users, but it did not succeed on either score.
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Renegotiating Search Deal, Yahoo And Microsoft Extend Deadline

Negotiations likely to yield new terms for Search Alliance.

According to a Reuters report, Yahoo and Microsoft have extended a negotiating deadline as they try to determine the form their search partnership may take over the next five years. The original deal was crafted during a different time by different CEOs.
Even though the original agreement was for a period of ten years, apparently after five years the contract allows for a renegotiation or exit. This original contract was signed by the companies in 2010. According to Reuters, which reviewed a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, the deadline has been extended from February 23 to roughly the end of April.
The Search-Alliance, as the Yahoo-Microsoft relationship is called, has underperformed expectations — especially for Yahoo. The two companies’ combined share of the US search market has remained basically flat for the past five years, hovering between 29 and 31 percent. However Bing has grown its share, mostly at Yahoo’s expense.
Current Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who inherited the Search-Alliance deal from former CEO Carol Bartz, has been openly critical of it. She has tried with some success to reinvigorate search and paid-search advertising at Yahoo outside of the Search Alliance framework. Most recently Yahoo captured the US “default” search slot from Google on the Firefox browser and saw a bump in marketshare, some of which has now been given back.
Despite Mayer’s criticism of the Search Alliance, I would be surprised if the company completely abandoned of the deal. Doing so would probably require many millions of dollars of additional investments to recreate what existed before Yahoo turned search over to Microsoft. Yahoo’s institutional investors would also probably balk at the move.
For its part, Microsoft is somewhat less dependent on Yahoo traffic today than it was in 2010 when Bing was in third place. Both parties may thus have incentives to alter the terms of the deal.
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Apple, IBM's New Apps to Help Business Get in Step With Mobile Customers

Nine months after Apple and IBM began working together on building mobile apps for businesses, some of the first fruits are about to appear at UK pharmacy chain Boots, which has begun equipping store employees with iPads to serve shoppers in the aisles.
These customer service apps are part of a bid by Boots to encourage consumers to pre-order cosmetics and toiletries online, similar to calling ahead for medical prescriptions, while turning its 2,500 retail outlets into convenient pick-up points.
"These apps put all of Boots' inventory at (employees') fingertips," said Robin Phillps, who is in charge of digital and e-commerce business at the company, now part of Walgreens Boots Alliance. "This makes it easier for them ... to interact with customers on their own terms."
Companies across dozens of different industries are now eyeing how these mobile business apps from Apple and IBM can hook up front-line staff to back-office systems and make them smarter in face-to-face dealings with customers in the field.
Businesses which first invested heavily in apps for mobile shoppers have just begun to put customer-service employees on an equally mobile footing, Forrester Research said in a report this month on the phenomenon.
With many companies' in-house technical staff struggling to keep pace with the ways their employees use mobile phones, Apple and IBM are part of a growing market for supplying business and government organisations with a new class of apps for employees on the move.
Technology consultants Accenture, Cap Gemini and Deloitte are also top suppliers to this changing way of doing business, along with dozens of other service providers and hundreds of custom designer app firms.
Making staff "smarter"
IBM says it now has more than 200 global companies gearing up to use mobile phone apps through its partnership with Apple. These include U.S. banking group Citi and Banorte of Mexico, Air Canada, and retailers American Eagle Outfitters and Boots UK.
The partnership has announced 14 app templates so far, which IBM then works with clients to customise with specific company data and analytics. Each app lets employees look up customer profiles and answer questions on the go rather than anchoring them to counter terminals as most businesses typically do.
"We are trying to bring that same 'wow' factor, the same changes we have had in our personal lives, to our working lives," said Katharyn White, IBM's global sales and marketing lead for the IBM-Apple partnership.
(Also See:Apps Go Beyond Selfies, With Live TV Broadcasts Starring You)
The goal is to create 100 business apps running on iPhones or iPads by the end of this year, White said. Companies pay a monthly subscription fee per device running the app, plus the costs of the secure iPhones or iPads running the software, as well as for services to hook them up to back-office systems.
For the airline industry, these apps will let flight attendants help passengers rebook flights in mid-air. Financial service apps allow bankers, wealth advisors or insurance agents to make on-the-spot account decisions with clients in the field.
Other Apple-IBM apps give police secure, instant access on iPhones to crime-scene maps, video feeds and suspect profiles.
Besides design expertise for the apps themselves, Apple provides remote technical support for a company's own technology departments managing the apps. And as part of the deal IBM sells iPhones and iPads along with the business apps, a potentially important new revenue stream for Apple as big businesses begin to mobilise more of their workforces.
For IBM, which has software and design teams developing the MobileFirst apps, the apps themselves also take corporate and government customers to a range of IBM services -- technical support, mobile device management, back-office software integration and cloud computing.
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WhatsApp calling feature coming to Windows Phone

If you are using WhatsApp on your Windows Phones, then get ready to enjoy the experience of making phone calls on a go via your favorite instant messaging space. The WhatsApp calling feature is expected to come soon to Windows Phones.
Earlier this year at MWC2015, the WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum revealed the plans of the company to add the voice services to its feature list. After rolling out this new functionality on the Android platform, the developers of WhatsApp are all set to showcase it to their Windows Phone users in the near future.

WhatsApp Calling feature for Windows Phone

According to an Italian website, the new voice calling feature will soon arrive on the Windows Phone platform, probably in the upcoming weeks. The email shown below from the WhatsApp team shows that the company is inviting the Italian developers to locate the menu items related to the new feature for Windows Phone. The text confirms that the feature will be soon headed to the WhatsApp Windows Phone version.

This new feature for VoIP calls will not only enables users to make voice calls over the Internet, but also allow them to access the history of incoming as well as outgoing calls. In order to enjoy this new feature, you might have to update your app to the stable version (without any bugs).
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How Microsoft should woo Android and iOS developers to build Windows 10 apps

It’s common knowledge that Microsoft has an app problem, both with Windows and Windows Phone. The state of both has been improving steadily for a while now, developers still largely don’t care anywhere nearly as much as they do about Android or iOS.
Internally, Microsoft has explored various ways of offering Android apps on Windows and Windows Phone, including by way of an emulator (similar to how BlackBerry allows Android apps to run on its devices). The rumor that Android apps will one day run on Windows devices is one that simply refuses to die.
While such a strategy is attractive for many reasons, mainly because it could potentially quickly solve the app quantity problem on Windows, it’s the wrong approach. Microsoft should instead woo Android and iOS developers to use its developer tools, and then deploy their apps to Google Play and/or Apple’s App Store, in addition to the Windows Store.
That way, the company avoids potential performance problems, possible legal issues, and can still ensure apps are built specifically for Windows 10, as opposed to simply getting a flood apps repurposed from other platforms. The pitch would be quite straightforward: ‘Use the best developer tools on the planet to build apps that reach the millions of new Windows 10 devices on top of the millions of Android and iOS devices.’
This is not a new strategy. Microsoft has done started down this road with Visual Studio’s adoption of Apache Cordova, an open source platform for building multi-device hybrid mobile applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But those are very basic apps.
Microsoft’s next step is to offer tools that could directly compete with Apple’s and Google’s offerings. iOS tools are already quite advanced and Google has finally ramped up its efforts with Android Studio, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room to wedge in between the two.
It’s no wonder the rumor of Microsoft acquiring Xamarin, which lets developers use C# to build native Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows apps, keeps popping up every few months. When it comes to supporting programming languages for building on non-Microsoft platforms, there’s absolutely no reason why Microsoft should stop at HTML.
Despite its failures in mobile, Redmond is still known for how well it supports developers. And again, the company would be able to make a very unique offer: if you use our tools, you’ll simply be able to reach more users. Instead of developing for just Android, or just iOS, or even just Android and iOS, why not build for Android and Windows 10, or iOS and Windows 10, or all three?
That’s something Apple would never do, and given its disregard for Windows Phone, neither would Google. Despite a multitude of mistakes in mobile, Microsoft still finds itself in a very powerful position: it has the money, resources, and expertise to win over developers. Furthermore, even though Windows Phone is a very distant third to Android and iOS, the Windows Store on Windows 10 will be pushed to millions of users because it will work across PCs, tablets, and smartphones. That’s potentially very enticing for app developers.
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WhatsApp chat history backup to Google Drive might soon be possible

WhatsApp is all set to make backing up chat history as well as media filed to Google Drive an easier and simpler process. Leaked text strings from the WhatsApp translation group have revealed that it will soon be integrating to Google Drive in order to backup/restore chat history as well as media.
According to a report in Android Police, a WhatsApp Translation group member has claimed there is a new string in the app. The report also claims that a leaked screenshot has shown that "there's a time stamp for the last Drive backup and an option to delete it."  Dutch website DroidApp.nl has reiterated these claims and has said it has received the same set of strings to translate.
The report in Android Police reveals that the media that can be backed up will not include videos and that a back up on Google Drive will only be possible through a Wi-Fi or cellular network.
One of the screenshots also reveals that the restoring option is only available on apps that have been installed on new devices. Upon not accepting this request, users will lose all backup. So far, WhatsApp has not confirmed the feature.
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Content Marketing And SEO: Holding It All Together

Many people still think of search engine optimisation (SEO) as purely metadata sets, or on-page key phrases. But over time SEO has become a lot more sophisticated, and a much more holistic approach is required.
And what really pleases me about SEO today is that it requires an ethical approach meaning transparent, honest and truly helpful marketing content is required. Today the search engines have caught up with the cyber wrong-doers, and are ready to penalise them.
Tell me a story

While many traditional SEO techniques, such as early key phrase placement and alt attribute applications are still valid, search engine crawl technology has evolved to a point where robots interpret your content very differently from previous times.
In fact, it is true to say that robots can now ‘read’ textual and visual content. They will also analyse link structures, and through this, make sense of the flow of web pages.
This means they will understand the complete structure of your website, and they will read the entire story, and if there are any gaps in that story, there’s going to be gaps in your search return performance.
Shared successThis means care should be taken in not only the creation of individual pieces of marketing content, but also the entire structuring of the site. And everything counts: content structure, navigation, tag descriptions and link structures are all scrutinized during a crawl.
The effort required to meet the rising website performance standards required by this high-level scrutiny will deliver well structured, accessible and high quality content. The kind of content people will want to share with peers and when they do, this sharing will be detected, and will further improve your search ranking.

So, what the search engines are looking for, and are rewarding, is well created content which is readily accessible in a logically structured web environment. So the better your website, the greater the rewards in visibility, and more importantly the better the user experience.
But beware, robots will detect inconsistencies in inbound links, navigation and headings in relation to actual page content. This means that if inbound links or on-site navigation are misleading, your ranking will be affected and your visibility may be significantly reduced. So it’s well worth getting this right. 
Be helpful, and be seen
Many agency-side people in the digital space seem to suffer with separation anxiety issues. That is to say that they don’t like including links that cause site visitors to leave their website to view off-site knowledge bases or other digital resources. At Novacom, we think this is short-sighted.
If you have developed a well structured and highly navigable website with helpful, accessible content, transparent and ethical marketing communications, you have nothing to fear.
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Microsoft and Yahoo likely to end US search alliance as Google remains market leader

Internet giants Yahoo and Microsoft failed to make progress with their renegotiation of a ten-year search deal that was made by the companies' former bosses to rival Google.
The companies have extended the deadline to re-negotiate the deal by 30 days, signalling a possible break-up between them.
The partnership agreed in 2010 allowed Yahoo to use Microsoft Bing's search technology and Microsoft's search-based advertising system. The partnership was pioneered by Carol Bartz and Steve Ballmer, who were heading Yahoo and Microsoft respectively.
The agreement included a provision for Yahoo to exit its search alliance with Microsoft within a 30-day period after 23 February, 2015, provided Yahoo's 12-month average revenue per search in the US was less than an undisclosed percentage of Google's estimated 12-month average revenue per search in the US.
In a regulatory filing, Yahoo said the companies amended the terms of the search alliance agreement, extending the time until late April to terminate the deal.
According to the initial agreement, the search alliance would remain in effect for another five years if there was no exercise of option to exit. Therefore, the extension could mean that Yahoo may be planning to opt out of the alliance.
Microsoft and Yahoo declined to comment on the negotiations.
Before the partnership, Microsoft and Yahoo together handled about 28% of Web searches in the US. In February, their combined market share amounted to 32.6% of US desktop searches, while Google controls roughly two-thirds of the US search market, according to comScore Inc.
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5 PPC Testing Myths & Mistakes: How To Avoid Them!

Columnist Mona Elesseily has run a lot of landing page tests over the course of her career -- and seen a lot of these mistakes repeated over and over again.

Tons of new ads are created each year worldwide, so how do you know yours will make the grade? The answer is to test, measuring your ad copy/design against possible alternatives to determine which iteration produces the best results.
But there are lots of myths and mistakes being made when it comes to testing PPC ad copy and design. This article will bust some of those PPC myths/mistakes and help you improve your overall PPC revenue. If you’re super smart, you’ll also incorporate winning test data into other aspects of your online marketing like SEO, website copy, Facebook advertising and more.
You can be a winner at PPC advertising if you take heed and avoid the pitfalls of A/B testing below.

Myth #1: You Should Test Everything All The Time!

It’s true that you should do lots of testing – but it’s very important to take your time and develop a testing plan!
Many folks feel the need to get a running start and to test every element they can come up with, and this is exacerbated by the availability of inexpensive testing tools. Their mantra is “Start testing right away!” or “Test everything all the time!”
My advice is slow down and plan out your testing. The goal is to really consider what you’re testing and why you’re running a test. Here are some examples of what I track for each test (I do this in an Excel spreadsheet):

1. Testing Goal. What is the goal of this particular test? An example might be to determine the most valuable free shipping threshold offer.
2. Testing Execution. What elements am I going to test to achieve my testing goal? For the free shipping example, you might test alternative threshold values and the messaging of the free shipping offer.
3. Technical Level Of Execution. How much technical work will this test require? The folks responsible for the landing page can directly make comments on this part of the spreadsheet.
4. Creative Level Of Execution. How much creative work will this test require? The folks responsible for the creative could add suggestions here.
5. Test Executed? This lets folks know the test was deployed.
6. Test Evaluation. What were the results of the test? How did the test version fare against the baseline? Following our example above, you might note that there was an increase in conversion rate with no negative impact on shipping costs.
7. Iterated Upon? We’ll talk more specifically about iteration later in this article.

Without a plan, you may be able to periodically hit the “testing ball” out of the proverbial park, but your testing efforts will not be forward-moving and iterative. Another big mistake is that companies don’t keep track of their tests and often run the same tests. A solid testing protocol or system prevents this.

Myth #2: A Large Majority Of Tests Kill It!

The sad reality is that most people spin their wheels when it comes to testing, and the deck is stacked against them from the get-go.
Based on my own research and experience, I would say that tests are more likely to fail — that is, have no meaningful impact at all, positive or negative. Furthermore, of the small minority of tests that do have a notable result, about half will negatively impact the bottom line!
To add more salt to the wound, very few tests with a positive impact really “knock it out of the park.” The deck is stacked against testers that don’t know what they’re doing!
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REPORT: Key Players in Digital Marketing Are Shifting

For many tech companies, like Google and Yahoo, digital advertising has become an important part of their business models. Companies that can capitalize on digital ads can push themselves to the top of the market, as Facebook has done in recent years. New data from eMarketer examines how digital marketing’s key players will shift positions in the coming years.
The revenue generated by digital marketing is growing every year, so it is no wonder that social companies would attempt to leverage their user bases to cash in. eMarketer predicts that the combined expenditure on U.S. digital display ads in 2015 will top  $27 billion, and that spending could increase to more than $37 billion by 2017.
Facebook is predicted to capture 25.2 percent of the revenue in the market this year, possibly a result of aggressive expansion. This represents growth of 1.4 percent compared to 2014; however, the growth of market share will increase revenue 29 percent to $6.82 billion, according to eMarketer’s predictions.
Twitter’s share of the market is predicted to increase its by 1.3 percent, with a revenue increase of more than 62 percent. Emarketer expects Amazon’s revenue to grow by more than 23 percent to $820 million, but there is no predicted growth in market share this year.
Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft are all predicted to lose market share and revenue in the coming years. According to eMarketer, Google’s market share is expected to shrink 3.3 percent between 2013 and 2017, while Yahoo will lose 3.7 percent, AOL will slip 1.1 percent and Microsoft will lose 2.7 percent.
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Facebook Launches App Analytics At F8 Developers Conference

New tool is free for app developers and one of several announcements as F8 conference begins.

One of the many announcements coming out of Facebook’s F8 conference for developers today is Facebook Analytics for Apps, a free service that Facebook says can help developers in several ways.
The analytics tool is available today for apps that are logging App Events, which Facebook says is 87 percent of the top-grossing apps in the U.S. Developers that aren’t doing that but want to start can head over to Facebook’s developer documentation to get started.
From Facebook’s announcement, here’s an overview of what Analytics for Apps offers:

Cross-Device
People now use multiple devices to interact with businesses across apps and websites, and Facebook Analytics for Apps can help developers and marketers understand their traffic across these devices, which in turn can help them improve performance.
Segments
You can look at segments, or groups of people who have certain characteristics, like women or people using Android phones. You can then look at metrics for these groups to see how they use your app differently than the overall population.
Cohorts
You can now also look at cohorts, or groups of people who took a set of actions in your app. Then you can review specific metrics for that group, like what percentage of them launched your app, completed a registration, or made a purchase.
Funnels
Creating funnels lets you look at how people move through a series of steps in your app, like a purchase flow. This can help you see where people drop off, which can help you figure out where to devote resources to improving performance.
Improving your advertising
Facebook Analytics for Apps can help developers understand and improve the ads they’re already running, and figure out how to run better ads in the future. Analytics helps you measure the lifetime value of your Facebook ads, and re-engage people who have dropped off using re-marketing.

Facebook Analytics for Apps is accessible at facebook.com/analytics, a dashboard with access to all of a developers’ apps.
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Android fans confess what they envy most about iOS

Android fans are a proud bunch who don’t like admitting things they envy about other platforms, especially those made by (*spit*) Apple. However, open-minded Android and iOS fans alike can see things in other platforms they like and Reddit’s Android community recently had a confessional session in which they admitted what iOS features they’d most like to see Android adopt in the future.
The most popular response had to do with having more granular app permissions on the Google Play store. While Apple lets users grant individual app permissions to apps while rejecting others, app permissions on Google Play are an all-or-nothing proposition where you either grant all permissions or not use the app.
Full device backup is another popular choice for Android users, although one Android fan writes that “Lollipop went a little bit towards fixing this, allowing you to restore the apps you previously had installed,” even though “it still doesn’t restore data, settings, or anything like that.”
Another popular answer — and one that we’ve been harping on for a long time — involves how quickly Android updates get pushed out to devices. Although this would be nice, we’ll never live in a world where an update comes out and every Android user can go get it at once. Android’s business model is based on having multiple OEMs who will want to all install their own apps and customized skins onto their devices. The downside of this is that it takes longer for them to test each new update out and adapt their own software to it.
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Google News Ranking Won’t Be Impacted By The New Mobile-Friendly Algorithm

Google News ranking algorithm won't factor in if a publisher is mobile-friendly or not, at least not yet.

Everyone is preparing for the mobile-friendly Google algorithm which will touch down April 21st. But Google News publishers don’t have to worry just yet, at least in terms of the ranking in the Google News search results.
Google News community manager, Stacie Chan, said in a Google+ hangout yesterday, that as of now, the Google News ranking team has no plans on implementing the mobile-friendly algorithm into the Google News results, at least not yet.
Stacie said this at the 23 minute mark into the video, which I transcribed:

As of now, Google News is not committed to making that change yet. We are always exploring because we think it is awesome that sites are trying to be more mobile friendly. I love that. And Google News is very well aware that search is doing that… We are definitely exploring that option as well but don’t have an exact timeline for that or even weather or not we will implement that.

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Goodbye Blekko: Search Engine Joins IBM’s Watson Team

Quiet for nearly two years, Blekko's home page says its team and technology are now part of IBM's Watson technology.

Add Blekko to the list of startup search engines that has come and now gone.
A message on the Blekko home page, shown above, says that “The blekko technology and team have joined IBM Watson!” The page redirects to a post on IBM’s Smarter Planet blog, where things get a bit confusing. Blekko’s home page message gives the impression of a complete acquisition, but IBM’s post mentions the acquisition of “certain technology.”

In our work to enhance the performance of cognitive computing systems, we’re constantly exploring new ways to identify, understand and make use of information from both public and private sources. Toward this end, we are excited about the acquisition of certain technology from Blekko, Inc, which closed this afternoon. This will provide access to additional content that can be infused in Watson-based products and services delivered by IBM and its partners.

We’ve reached out to Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta (who tweeted the news) for clarification on what IBM is acquiring, and we’ll update this if we learn more.
Blekko came out of stealth in 2008 with Skrenta promising to create a search engine with “algorithmic editorial differentiation” compared to Google. Its public search engine finally opened in 2010, launching with what the site called “slashtags” — a personalization and filtering tool that gave users control over the sites they saw in Blekko’s search results.
In 2011, Blekko went on the offensive against Google over spam, launching a “spam clock” website at spamclock.com that counted up the one million spammy web pages that Blekko claimed were being published online every hour. This was just as the debate on content farms and Google was really heating up, and in early 2011 Blekko even announced that it was banning content farms from its index. About three weeks later, Google announced the Panda algorithm update, its own effort to combat spam in search results — by no means a response to Blekko’s announcement, but certainly indirect validation that Blekko, and others who had been complaining about the amount of spam in Google’s search index, were on to something.
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Facebook Launches New Video Embeds & Comment Syncing From Site To Page

Facebook video now can be embedded independent of Facebook posts; conversation threads in the Facebook comment plugin will have the option to be mirrored on Facebook Pages.

Have you found the perfect Facebook video to illustrate a blog post? Now you can embed it directly on your site without its supporting post. Facebook also has a beta test that allows comments on publishers’ sites to sync to their Facebook Page and vice versa.
Facebook announced the new features today at its F8 developers conference in San Francisco.
Previously, if you wanted to embed video on your site, you had to embed the entire Facebook post containing the video. So like Twitter before it, Facebook is enabling YouTube-like video embedding. That will please publishers, journalists and the creators of videos who should see greater distribution of their content. It should also increase the number of Facebook video views, which are already averaging 3 billion a day according to the social network.
The update to the comment plugin will affect fewer publishers — at least immediately — but it could prove to be a major development. At launch in 2011 and until now, the comment plugin gave publishers the ability to host a Facebook powered discussion board on their site, but the conversation there is largely siloed. Commenters are given the ability to post comments on their News Feed, but any conversation on a site’s Facebook Page is separate from the discussion going on within the comment plugin.
Now publishers will have the option to mirror those conversations. The discussion thread from any link posted on a site’s Facebook Page will automatically pull in comments from the plugin and vice versa.
“The value here is we can unify the conversation in multiple places,” said Simon Cross, a product manager on Facebook’s platform team. “We think that’s going to increase engagement on your website because there will be more comments there.”
The new feature is being rolled out in the next few weeks as a beta test with six publishers: BET, NHL, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Elite Daily and Fox Sports.
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B2B Marketing Automation Platforms 2015: New Market Intelligence Report

Do you need a marketing automation platform?

Our sister site Digital Marketing Depot has just published a new Market Intelligence Report, “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms 2015.”
You may have noticed the increasing number of options for automating marketing tasks such as landing page development, email marketing, lead nurturing, tracking website visitors and analyzing results. This 46-page report will help you navigate those choices and make a more informed decision about the current market of B2B marketing automation vendors.
This guide analyzes the current market for marketing automation platforms including the types of vendors serving the market and the capabilities available. If you are considering licensing a marketing automation platform, this guide will help you decide whether or not you need to. It provides recommended steps for evaluating which is best for your business and contains profiles of leading vendors.
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Flipkart to create 2 million jobs in 2015

Flipkart said 50-60% of the jobs created by the company in 2015 would be in Tier II and Tier III cities

Leading e-commerce company Flipkart on Wednesday said it would directly and indirectly create about two million jobs in 2015 through its marketplace and ancillary services.
Among other segments, logistics and warehousing would be key employment generators, the company said.
In 2014, the e-commerce industry created about half a million jobs, according to Flipkart.
The Bengaluru-based company employs about 33,000 people. Earlier this week, Flipkart said it planned to double the size of its technology team in 2015 to 2,000.
“E-commerce has contributed a lot to generation of employment opportunities while enabling small and medium enterprises and local artisans,” said Ankit Nagori, senior vice-president for marketplace at Flipkart. “Sellers on our marketplace have been responsible for driving employment within their own communities. Support facilities like merchandising, buying, packaging and cataloging have generated more than 75,000 jobs in the last year,” he added.
Flipkart said 50-60 per cent of the jobs created by the company in 2015 would be Tier II and Tier III cities. “Jaipur and Baroda have become ancillary industry hubs (cataloging and packaging) and they will continue to generate more opportunities,” the company said.
Sellers would create around 20-25 jobs each, Flipkart said. The company has 30,000 sellers in its online marketplace.
“We offer programmes in 20 cities in association with the ministry of labour to train interested people, helping them upgrade skills and chart out careers in industries they choose to enter,” Nagori said. “We plan to scale up this to 40 cities in the next six months,” he added.

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Latest Android malware sneakily installs rogue apps, but Play Store users need not worry

Quick heads-up on a vulnerability you might learn about soon. The folks at Palo Alto stumbled across a major security vulnerability within Android that could allow malicious apps to hijack an app install. Before you freak out and hook your phone up to a chemo machine to rid it of any impurities, stop — there’s almost nothing to be worried about here:

• Google has already patched it ahead of this report being released
• The initial bug was reported to Google as early as January 2014. We suspect Google kept it under wraps this long to make sure no-gooders wouldn’t try to target exposed devices
• The vulnerability only affects sideloaded apps or apps downloaded from third-party app stores
• It only affected Android versions prior to 4.4
• For devices not on 4.4 or higher, Palo Alto worked with top manufacturers like Samsung to patch this fix in with their most recent software updates. Amazon also updated their Appstore to patch the vulnerability

So what does it do? According to them, since a side-loaded APK is installed from an unprotected source such as an SD card, an app could hijack the process of installing the app by Android’s package installer. It’d do this by replacing the legit APK with one that would most likely contain some sort of malware and other nasty stuff, and it would all happen without the user even knowing.
The dirty (but full) details can be found in the report published here, but the reality is that most folks with a phone made within the past couple of years are probably safe. Still, if you’re the oddball who still as a Nexus One on Android 2.3 and might be using a third-party app store over Google Play, you’ll be glad you know about it.
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Microsoft Makes Office Free for Small PCs and Tablets

Microsoft said Wednesday that it plans to make the core viewing and editing features of Office free for devices with screens of 10.1-inches or smaller.
That will bring the Windows side of things more in line with what the software maker has done with its recent Office releases for iOS and Android, where most core features are free, with some advanced features requiring an Office 365 subscription.
“Based on our research, we are classifying anything with a screen size of 10.1 inches or less as a true mobile device: You’re probably using it on the go, when it’s not practical to use a larger computing device such as a PC or a Mac. You probably aren’t using a mouse or a keyboard, instead navigating via touch interface,” Microsoft corporate VP Kirk Koenigsbauer said in a blog post.
The software maker is also working on new Windows versions of Office, with one focused on touch-centric devices and the other, known as Office 2016, aimed at traditional desktops. Both versions are due later this year.
Microsoft, which has historically made most of its profit from Office and Windows, has been increasingly willing to offer its core products for free in areas where the company has smaller market share, such as phones and tablets.
Windows is also offered for free to makers of small-screen devices, though Microsoft’s definition there limits the no-cost version of Windows to machines smaller than nine inches. Microsoft says there is no change to that policy.
In the past, Microsoft and its partners have offered a free year of Office 365 on some small-screen devices.
Microsoft says it plans to continue crafting deals with all manner of hardware makers. This week it announced deals with Samsung, Dell and others to preload some Office and other apps onto Android devices.
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Google Clarifies The Mobile-Friendly Algorithm Will Roll Out Over A Week, Be A Yes/No Response & More

As we approach the April 21st date of the release of Google's mobile-friendly algorithm, we uncover more SEO facts about what to expect around the algorithm.

Google’s mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that is launching on April 21st will be on a page-by-page and real-time basis but how long will it take to roll out and how do you know if your page qualifies to benefit from it?
Since we know this algorithm will be significantly larger in impact compared to the Panda and Penguin algorithms, webmasters are kind of anxious about the release.
Yesterday, Google answered a series of questions in a Google+ hangout on the topic of this new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm. The three things we learned were:
(1) The algorithm will start rolling out on April 21st and will take a few days to a week to completely and globally.
(2) You are either mobile-friendly or not, there are no degrees of mobile-friendliness in this algorithm.
(3) The fastest way to see if your web pages are mobile-friendly is to see if you have the mobile-friendly label in the live mobile search results now. If not, check the mobile-friendly testing tool, which should match the live Google search results, whereas the mobile usability reports in Google Webmaster Tools can be delayed based on crawl time.

Roll Out Will Be A Few Days To A Week

I transcribed Google’s Mary response on this where she said:

We are expecting it (the mobile friendly algorithm) to roll out on April 21st, we don’t have a set time period because it is going to take a couple of days to roll out. Maybe even a week or so.

Your Page Is Mobile-Friendly Or Not

The mobile-friendly algorithm is an on or off algorithm, on a page-by-page basis, but it is not about how mobile-friendly your pages are, it is simply are you mobile-friendly or not. I transcribed this one also:

As we mentioned in this particular change, you either have a mobile friendly page or not. It is based on the criteria we mentioned earlier, which are small font sizes, your tap targets/links to your buttons are too close together, readable content and your viewpoint. So if you have all of those and your site is mobile friendly then you benefit from the ranking change.
But as we mentioned earlier, there are over 200 different factors that determine ranking so we can’t just give you a yes or no answer with this. It depends on all the other attributes of your site, weather it is providing a great user experience or not. That is the same with desktop search, not isolated with mobile search.

How Do You Know You Are Mobile-Friendly

How do you know if your web pages will be mobile-friendly or not? There are a few ways, but Google said the easiest way is to see if your current pages have the mobile-friendly label in the live mobile search results now. If so, the mobile-friendly testing tool should also confirm this. Keep in mind, the a href=”http://searchengineland.com/mobile-usability-reports-come-google-webmaster-tools-206885″>mobile usability reports in Webmaster Tools can be delayed by crawl time and general webmaster tools reporting delays.
I transcribed the three times Google answered this but I’ll share one here:

Take out your phone, look up your web site. See if there is a gray mobile friendly label in your description snippet. If it is in the search results, if you see it, that means that Google understands that your site is mobile friendly and if you don’t see it then we don’t see that your site is mobile friendly or your is not mobile friendly.

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