We’ll I’ll stick my neck out and say that one of the areas I’m tipping to see exponential growth next is Social Commerce.

We’ll no longer have to search for products and services, they’ll soon start to find us! We know ‘word of mouth’ is one of the most powerful tools in a marketers armoury, and the technology is now in place for customers to see what their friends, colleagues and wider networks have purchased, found relevant, liked or commented on.

Imaging looking to book that summer holiday but noticing in your social network, news feed or status update, that one of your friends have booked a holiday to destination ‘A’ and another five of your friends and colleagues with similar imterests have liked or left positive comments about their choice. Imagine then being able to book the same holiday or similar through the same companywithout having to leave the site you are on! This could apply to any type of product or service. It would be fully trasactional, secure, searchable, marketable and be conveniently integrated in to the sites you visit most – your social network.

The trust you have in your network would be so much more powerful, than anything we have seen before such as blind reviews or testimonials, and the benefits this would bring for customers would include peace of mind, saved time, energy, fustration and money.

Now granted we have seen some steps in to this area with success stories such as Dells ‘Outlet’ store on Twitter, but I’m envisaging a much wider adoption which will be fully transactional with increased viral awareness across social networks – think referral programmes on steriods!

So what form do I think this will take? Well, the most ovious place and the social network most geared up to this currently, would be Facebook. Perhaps this will be in the form of custom tabs or canvases on a companies page and feature a secure shopping cart and checkout process.

Does this mean I’m predicting the end of the standalone e-commerce site? Of course not. Well, not in the short term anyway, there are numerous benefits for having multiple online precence across the web but this is another example of how companies should now be thinking, engaging with and leveraging the power of the customer, providing them with a choice of how to interact with your brand.

For those wanting to know more about how the best to implement social-commerce in to your social media presences, feel free to get in touch.

Hot on the heels of search engine, Bing’s launch, which aims to rival Google’s crown comes a new kid on the block – WolframAlpha!

Termed as a knowledge engine rather than a search engine, WolframAlpha aims to answer your queries rather than take the traditional approach, which often identifies sites that may have the content with the answers, a la Google.

On first glance the site seems to work pretty well, coming up with the answers quickly and efficiently for everything asked. I have already added it to my bookmarks and will be continuing to use it when I’m in need of an answer to a specific question.

To some extent and despite Google placing relevancy at the heart of its model – the day may come where it becomes a victim of its own success with online surfers becoming frustrated having to search through a list of results to find the content or answers they desire.

As ever it will be interesting to see if our search habits begin to change, with recent figures showing an increase in market share for Bing, and as our surfing habits become even more advanced perhaps now is the right time for a new breed of search site to take advantage. As always only time will tell…

Let me know how you get on using the above or if you have any further areas or tips for improving a campaign futher.

So Microsoft has finally launched its predecessor to Live Search, the newly titled Bing. Promising to find and organise the answers we need, so that we can make faster, more informed decisions!

But we are creatures of habit, so what will stop us from Googling and start Binging???

Whilst added features such as the elongated text preview of a site, so users can get a better idea of what’s on the page before clicking on the result are a nice touch (despite the similarity with Ask.com’s page preview offering) - its relevancy and quality of the results that will be key.

If Bing can achieve this and improve on the quality of results supplied by Google then just maybe we’ll begin to change our ways – only time will tell.

One of the more interesting features promised is the integration of results with Microsoft’s existing Farecast system. Which predicts whether displayed prices for a particular search, e.g. ‘Flights Abroad’ are going to go up or down in the next week – thus recommending whether you should buy now or wait for a better deal. A feature which I will definately be using once live and when looking to book my next holiday abroad!

Whilst more improvements and features have been promised over the coming year, Microsoft will need to significantly up there game if they are to break our habit and if one thing is guranteed, Google won’t be standing still – so let the battle commence!

SEO – otherwise known as Search Engine Marketing is the practice of improving a websites ranking through natural or organic search results on sites such as Google, Yahoo or MSN.

With increased demand of PPC keywords and increasing costs, a greater emphasis is now being placed on the natural ranking of a website. So much so, that SEO has evolved in to two fields;  On-Page  Optimisation and Off-Page Optimisation.

As a result, I thought this would be a good opportunity to distinguish between the two and provide a quick reference guide to the type of activities which fall in to each category.

On-Page Optimisation

As it says on the tin, on-page optimisation primarily involves editing the content and HTML coding of a websites pages to increase relevance of specific keywords (the stronger the match to the content, the better!) and removing potential barriers to indexing for search engine robots or spiders.

This can include, but isn’t limited to;

Title Tags
Meta Tags
Alt Tags
H1 Tags
URL Structure
Meta Data
Image Names
How the site is built (E.g. CSS not tables)
Formatting of content
Usability (Remember, a viewer should be no more than 3-4 clicks away from what they want!)
Internal linking
No duplication of content
Site maps
Site architecture

Off-Page Optimisation

Off-page optimisation primarily concerns strategies that are done off the pages of a website in order to maximise the performance in search engines for specific keywords relevent to the page content.

Once again, these can include but are not limited to:

Press releases
Article distribution
Local marketing
Social networking/bookmarking (E.g. Twitter / Digg)
Promotions (Competitions/Freebies)
Keyword research & analysis
Duplication checks
Website analytics
Link campaigns
Directory listings
Link exchanges
Blogging
Anchor text