Marketing and advertising are interesting avenues when it comes to products that may initially be considered "bland" or "not exciting". Creative professionals have such an uncanny and amazing ability to bring these "ordinary" products to life through commercials, motion graphics, visual effects, and more. I know you're probably expecting )and hoping( to see hilarious commercials for beer and other products that have proved to be pretty risque. I hate to put a damper on things,

A comprehensive and effectively written social media release can do phenomenal wonders for any online business. They bring exposure, traffic, and heightened awareness, as well as encourage calls to action and energize various sectors of the online community in many different ways. A social media press release needs several pieces to make the whole, in order to work properly and achieve the end result that will meet the goal of the business issuing the release.

image courtesy of http://trendslator.wordpress.com If you've been reading my posts on here, you know that I'm very into the future of internet marketing and search, and predicting how things are going to come out. In an article I posted a little while ago about the F8 event , I made a small note in my ending about what this means from an SEO perspective. We have these new means of identifying open graph enabled websites via "liked" ' will they replace links?

WordStream has announced that they'll be offering a free negative keyword tool . In PPC marketing, the ability to narrow down your keywords and have selective strings can mean the difference between wasteful and efficient spending. If you're used to using a traditional keyword suggestion tool, this will be no different- it gives you suggestions on negative keywords that you should add, that could ultimately affect your campaign.

We are pleased to announce that one of the amazing social media monitoring dashboard tools has decided to offer its services as white-label!  Trackur has always been a trusted monitoring tool, and now having one with your branding can be more affordable than ever. Not only will everything be custom to your company, but you won't have to spend time in development attempting to make a tool of your own. The Trackur dashboard, which can be found in its new location-  track.

The anticipation was killing me, so I decided to let the news go a few minutes early. Without further ado, I would like to announce who the BlueGlass LA moderators announced as the winner of a free ticket and hotel room for BlueGlass LA! Drum roll pleaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase! *bang bang bang bang bang* '. *tap tap tap tap tap*???? okay' pathetic drum roll'but really, who can type that sound out without it coming off as weird? So yeah- the winner is'.

I've recently started learning about PPC and I'm really loving it so far. One thing you may notice )especially if you're working through Google Adwords( is that it can be very confusing at times. Not anymore. Launched by Aaron Wall )you may recognize him as the CEO of SEO Book ( we are proud to present the PPC Blog Community - a site which encourages learning about PPC and offers training so you're not alone.

I'm sure by now, you've heard of the joint conference coming up from Search & Social and 10e20 called  BlueGlass LA . We ran a few contests for our previous conference, Search & Social Spring Summit, and have decided to do the same for this one. I was thinking, and pondering, and thought this would be a contest everyone would have lots of fun entering. What's the prize? A free ticket to BlueGlass LA and hotel room. Travel is  not included. What's the contest?

The WebM open media project was announced recently and will hopefully change how we load and handle videos online for a long time to come. As of right now, depending on what website you're on, you have to adhere to certain video formats' and there's quite a few. If you're not very tech savvy, putting a video up may just be too much of a hassle and your child may never be an Internet singing sensation.

Because Facebook privacy is such a hot topic lately, I thought I might write something so you know where you can check your privacy settings, or at least get a laugh out of what other people aren't making private. With the amazing )that's right, I said A-M-A-Z-I-N-G( capabilities of open graph and all the changes that came with it, we all want to make sure we are keeping our personal lives under wraps. After all,

Ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention please?! Will the real Slim Shady please stand up? Oh' wait. Wrong audience. Sorry. The Search & Social awards results are now in! If you were entered in any of these categories, check to see if you made it into the top 3. We had A LOT of close calls with the results but I think many of you will be please :( So take a looksie. *ps: all results are out of 5, except for the ones in a percentage.

You may have noticed the past year that both Google and Bing are doing real-time searches that are including tweets and other information. This is extremely useful when keeping up with trending topics. I wanted to give you a quick run down on this new real-time image search engine called NachoFoto that I came across. When searching images in this, you'll find that the results are directly correlated to the trending topic and news that has recently occurred. For instance,

If any of you were looking at Google Adwords the past few days, you may have noticed a few interesting things. Google has decided to add some new features into the mix. Because relationships with advertising agencies are changing, they find it only fair that they shift and change with it. in regards to the GAP Program: The GAP )Google Adwords professional( program will now be replaced with a Google Adwords certification program- with more extensive,

In San Francisco today, a great even called "F8″ took place. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg announced a few new key features that will help improve our social experience internally to Facebook as well as externally to the web. You know, I always joke about how Facebook is going to take over the world. Little did I know that my prediction may be true. So, to recap a little for you: New Social Plugins Social bar plugin: something that can be added,

Tampa, The epicenter of foursquare day )#4sqday(, will be erupting with foursquare fun-ness! Search & Social has decided to sponsor this event today )April 16th( by donating a free ticket to be raffled off for our Spring Summit ! We donated the largest prize there. You can obtain raffle tickets by either checking in at the event or doing the puzzle piece search throughout town.

Short update! Google is a monster when it comes to searching. One thing that attributes to their all encompassing search features is that they are insistant on working with real-time search results and updates. It was announced recently that along with the ability to search updates for Twitter results, you'll now also be able to search back in time to see a cluster of results from a certain time period.

Search and Internet marketing can, at times, be a 24 hour job. It doesn't necessarily HAVE to be, but if you want good results and want to keep up with new information often times it is. Sometimes we just want it to be regardless; it's something we enjoy. Even when we leave our computers we're still tempted to take a peek at things or be able to manage our tracking and analytics. Thanks to the beauty of the iPhone and the app store,

Traditional marketing will never go away- it has a habit of sticking around. I still get random surveys through the mail, physical coupons as well as those oh so lovely hang tags on my door knob. But there's a new animal in the 21st century' and that animal is social media. It's hard sometimes to reach through to companies who have been around for a long time; it's hard for them to see the value in having an 360 degree online presence.

Hey everyone!! It's that time of the year again for the Spring Summi t and we have some great contests going on! With the success of our Twitter #team contest )which is currently going on until midnight(, we decided to roll out ANOTHER contest today. If you're interested in winning a free ticket, then try your luck on this one! It'll be fun. Contest details and the video to post a response to can be found here: Contest Video . On this,

Okay, so my title is fairly misleading. Google Wave HAD extensions' just maybe one or two. When Wave came out I was so excited that I totally exhausted the "poll" option. I sent out ridiculous polls to all my friends such as, "Can you make me blueberry muffins? Yes, No or Maybe?"'. to which I would always get a maybe. I guess nobody wanted to make my day. Anyway, I'm getting completely off track here.