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May 20, 2008 Yahoo Makes Minor Updates to Sponsored Search In the midst of a proxy board fight, new negotiations with Microsoft, and a possible deal with Google, Yahoo has made updates to its sponsored search listings. In an announcement on the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog, Jeff Hecox said the changes wouldn't make "worldwide headlines" but they designed the changes to be more intuitive to users. Here's what to expect: • Names of objects (campaign, ad group, keyword, etc.) that are offline will be displayed with red text for easy recognition. • "Top Campaigns” and “Watched Campaigns” tables on the Dashboard page now include a “Status” column to help you identify if and why any campaigns are offline. • On the “Campaigns” page, there's a new “Status” column, the ability to filter by “Status” when using the Advanced Search function, and the “Campaign On/Off” button have been replaced with individual “Pause” and “Unpause” buttons. • On the Ads table On Ad Group pages, a “Status” column has been added and “Pause” and “Unpause” buttons have replaced “Campaign On/Off” button on the Ads table. • New status settings have been added on the Search page, under the Campaigns tab. • The ability to export (using the “Download” button) account information has been added to account-level Ad Group and Keyword pages, under the Campaigns tab. What do you think about the updates to Yahoo's Sponsored Search? Leave a comment!

Microsoft Tests Social Media Monitoring Product By Christopher Heine, ClickZ, Sep 24, 2009 Microsoft has developed a social media analytics tool that's designed, among other things, to improve a marketing organization's ability to adjust to social media phenomena on the fly. Called "Looking Glass," the product is still in prototype and will only be available to a few companies in the near term. It sends e-mail alerts when social media activity picks up considerably. The sentiment (i.e., negative or positive) of that chatter and the influence level of the content creator are reported in the alert. Digital flow charts show what days of the week generate the most activity on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and other social media sites. But interweaving social media data with reporting from other campaign channels may turn out be Microsoft's most significant contribution to the already mature field of social media analytics. Feeds from social media sites can be connected to other business elements like customer databases, CRM centers and sales data within an organization. The data integrate via Microsoft's enterprise platforms like Outlook and Sharepoint. A handful or so companies will begin testing Looking Glass in the coming weeks.

URL shorteners do two things. First, they shorten URLs. Second, they create a unique URL to a destination, which can be tracked. That's the key element for marketers. In fact, one of the up-and-comers in this space, bit.ly, has built analytics directly into its interface. By using URL shorteners, you can begin capturing some excellent insight. For example you can see how many times a particular community forwards a message compared to another community. That is, since you can create two unique short URLs to the same page, put one on Twitter and embed the other in an e-mail. You can then analyze the clicks you get in standard A/B testing. You can also measure pass-along rates. Since the recipient of the original short URL will most likely pass along the short URL (not the original URL), you can see how far down the particular path you've created to a page goes. Not Just for Other People's Content and Twitter The cool thing about URL shorteners is that you can shorten anything. Sure, the traditional way to use these services is to shorten a link to someone else's content and send it via a medium that requires you to be terse. But there's no reason you can't use the same method on links to your own site. Or put it in an e-mail. Or on your own site. Fact is, URL shorteners provide an easy way to track traffic you're generating via social media channels. Like most things on social media, the cost of entry to use these tools is free. They're definitely worth a try.