Marketing Pilgrim

If you’re a new Twitter user, you’ve probably stumbled over the correct etiquette for "retweeting" someone else’s tweet. Do you use "RT: @andybeal…." or "Retweeting @andybeal….."? And what about those precious characters lost when you retweet? We only get 140 to start with!

Well, Twitter has watched the practice of retweeting closely and thinks it has an official solution. The question is, will you like it?

The plan is to add a "Retweet" link to each tweet in your timeline. It’ll look like this:

Once you’ve retweeted, you’ll see that Twitter didn’t add "Retweet @andybeal" anywhere in the actual text. Instead, it will add a small discrete note below the tweet. Like this:

We tend to stay away from covering SEO advice, but Google’s recent change in recommendations for the use of “nofollow” have everyone buzzing…still!

So, when SEOmoz posted this brief video interview with Google’s Matt Cutts, we thought you’d like to see it:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Matt Cutts on NoFollow from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Interestingly, Matt appears to be OK with simply leaving things “as is” on your site.

“It’s kind of your call. If you are happy with where you are ranking and don’t want to do a lot of work on your site, you can always just stick with what you’ve got,” said Matt.

I like the advice that Rand Fishkin offered up:

eMarketer recently came out with its latest analysis on online video advertising—and while the medium remains as popular as ever. However, although the two media are similar, it’s not expected to command similar ad dollars to television advertising for a while (2013, I think, might still be rather optimistic for spend-per-hour parity).

The problem, however, doesn’t come from the content, but from the context. David Hallerman, a senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the report, explains, “The lean-forward, immersive mindset of Internet users is often not receptive to the story-based brand messages of typical video advertising.”

As MediaPost reports,

In order for Internet video to grow more quickly, it needs to reach an inflection point where Web video and TV video have substantially converged.

The Online Publishers Association and Dynamic Logic have come out with a new study on the effectiveness of online ads (PDF). While ad networks’ effectiveness is nil, ads on content sites—and especially video ads—were highly effective.

With Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms data (on 4882 campaigns and 7M+ survey responses), the OPA examines ad effectiveness by looking at advertising’s effects on brand awareness and favorability, online ad awareness, purchase intent and message association. Breaking down the results by campaign locations, the OPA found (probably not too surprisingly) that its member content sites saw the highest ad effectiveness.

OPA/Dynamic Logic also compared this data to the same survey’s results over time—and once again, OPA member sites came out on top:

We all know that Google is often caught testing tweaks to its search interface, but has it stepped up its efforts on the back of Bing’s apparent success?

I ask because it appears that Google has been unusually active in tweaking the magic formula behind its success. The latest was spotted by Barry Schwartz and shows yet another test of product images in AdWords:

Combined with other recent interface changes and the public testing of a new search index, it makes me wonder if this is all part of Google’s natural evolution, or a knee-jerk reaction to the threat posed by Microsoft’s Bing. The new search engine has brought an entirely new way of searching to the masses–Ask.com historians, note the use of the word “masses–and I believe Google is reacting to Bing.

If you’ve ever been knee-deep into your Google Reader and wished you could tweet that awesome story about the dog that saved the family from a burning house, now you can.

Thanks to a host of announced updates to Google Reader, you can now send any item to Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, etc, etc. In fact, Google not only provides an already extensive list of social networks you can share RSS items with, but even includes custom fields so you can send an item anywhere you wish. Head to your "Settings" and you’ll see the new "Send To" tab:

At the bottom of each item in Google Reader, you’ll now see the new "Send To" option: