EQUTE — The Wall Street Journal says that Google has been testing a new set-top box to create their own schedule and find videos from around the internet and TV shows — and deliver Google ads to everyone.

Google Inc. is testing a new television-programming search service with Dish Network Corp., according to people familiar with the matter, the latest development in a fast-moving race to combine Internet content with conventional TV.

The service, which runs on TV set-top boxes containing Google software, allows users to find shows on the satellite-TV service as well as video from Web sites like Google’s YouTube, according to these people. It also lets users to personalize a lineup of shows, these people said.

This could be huge, huge, huge for Google, funneling people to its vast media pool from anywhere — YouTube especially. It also means Google ads online and on TV could get heavy rotation. Advertisers not pushing YouTube or preroll ads should take note and start planning for the device.

It surely could flop like many set top boxes, but if it takes off with the same precipitous rise that Tivo did, advertisers without a plan will have to race to catch up.

[Via Wall Street Journal (Subscription required)]

The partnership between Yahoo! And Microsoft hit another big milestone as the companies give some hint of when major changes to advertising will actually happen.

Details are few, but one thing is certain, Yahoo’s advertising center will migrate over to the Microsoft Ad Center when the process is finally complete.

Currently, according to a news release and the companies new search alliance web site, the deal is set to go through before the 2010 holiday season. The timing sure to annoy just about every advertiser currently using Yahoo, so the duo left the window open for early 2011 after the holiday search season.

Once the deal actually goes through, Microsoft says advertisers using their Ad Center will reach up to 577 million searchers; which converts to better ROI and making it easier to segment campaigns among a large group of many niches.

While Microsoft is taking control of the advertising side of the partnership, Yahoo! continues to push its content and human support system.

Yahoo! and Microsoft will each provide customer support to different advertiser segments: Yahoo!’s sales team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their clients. Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns.

Everyone remembers the great Google snafu that saw search results change dramatically right before the holiday season, so my bet is on this partnership actually taking off in early 2011 — despite the fact that Microsoft surely wants to demonstrate Bing in a complete form for the holidays.

Microsoft and Yahoo! promise to give a three-month warning before the actual change and provide more details about making the switch to Ad Center or how advertising will change for either company. Until then, the partners’ Search Alliance Web site has some good details mixed with the self promotion

[Via Search Alliance]

When Foursquare first came out, it seemed like just another silly social app for iPhone geeks, but now that it has had some time to grow, it’s becoming a must have for just about any business.

Major players like Zagat have signed on and will be doing more than just providing badges (the way users boast to each other on Foursquare). The foodie staple will be interviewing the mayors (biggest visitors to a venue) of Zagat-rated restaurants and will also suggest local Zagat restaurants to users.

Foursquare has also penned deals with Bravo that correspond with network shows; with the new star vehicle “Valentine’s Day;” with HBO’s “How to Make it in America” — even Harvard University.

If you aren’t already on Foursquare, you should be. No matter what kind of company you have, the old adage of marketing is “meet your customers where they live.” And your customers are on Foursquare.

A lot of companies will get on Facebook and Twitter and say they have a diverse social media portfolio, but these secondary social sites are key to getting to as many people as possible. So instead of playing on Facebook for far too long and calling it work tomorrow, get on Foursquare, Mobile Spinach, Whrrl, Loopt, GraffitiGeo, Hotlist, Yelp, Qype, Brightkite, not to mention Google Maps.

The Search Engine Strategies conference is one of the greatest conferences to hit up for the SEO worker. Experts and novices alike can get some good information out of the show.

The conference features a lots of great speakers from big New York powerhouses such as the New York Times company SEO staff, the ABC News SEO staff, the author of World Wide Rave and of course a Googler.

The main page of the SES site said it perfectly:

Your customers, colleagues and competition will be in attendance — will you?

It’s always something to ponder, going to these type of events. Sometime you’ll come home thinking you didn’t learn anything. But even if you didn’t learn anything new, a whole slew of other people did. So if you learn one thing, it’s exactly what your competition knows.

I don’t think I’ve been to a conference where I didn’t take at least a small helpful nugget of advice. It’s always good to see what the big dogs are doing — even if they are far behind the smaller agile SEO experts.

See you at SES New York!

EQUTE — While press releases have been key to getting into the media, but it was murky how they affected search traffic once they made it online.

PR powerhouse PRWeb said before that it pushed search traffic by a large margin.

“Search engine rankings are arguably the most important small business marketing tool available today because it drives Web traffic — and potential prospects — to a small business’ Web site,” a PRWeb spokesperson once told WebProNews. “However, because improving search rankings is desirable, achieving results can be both challenging and highly competitive.”

A study showed that sites got 50 percent increase in traffic, and up to a 400 percent boost. The company involved in the study also said that the traffic spike lasted for days. When linked to social media, a press release creates a slew of links back to a site. Even though the site may not rank as well, those press releases will rank because of their authority and get great placement in news aggregators and news searches.

Every press release has a chance to grow beyond the initial campaign. If a noteworthy site makes it into a story or a top blogger grabs onto it can spread like wildfire.

So there it is, the cat’s out of the bag. One of the oldest sources for press and public exposure still works on the Internet.

EQUTE — As Google continues tweak its use of canonical tags to work across domains, Bing is saying that the tags aren’t all that necessary for their search results.

Bing Search Engine Land told webmasters should essentially use canonical as a last resort.

“Our first and foremost advice is the same as it always has been: 301 redirects and good site design should be the primary focus of webmasters, with canonical tags picking up the slack when technical limitations impede other solutions.

So this means, of course, that both 301 directs and canonical tags are necessary to stay competitive with duplicate content across all the search engines.

Bing said it would have full support of the canonical tag within several months, but in what exact form is still unclear.

EQUTE — Augmented reality is nothing new, it was featured prominently in James Cameron’s Terminator allowing Arnold Schwarzenegger to see a slew of information on a sort of heads up display.

Now you don’t have you don’t have to be a robot, or even a star to tap into this fascinating space.

Brightkite has implemented augmented reality ad campaigns into its location-based service — based on the sleek Layar browser.

Now, along with restaurants, parks, venues and other GPS points, users of Britekite will see exclusive ads and special augmented-reality-only offers. Best Buy has signed on through the rest of the year, and others will likely follow.

It’s an interesting development, but a basic one at the heart — reach your public where they live.

The only touchy subject is scaring your public from the places they live. If their augmented reality browser is suddenly full of ads, they may be turned off and find another browser or go back to their own reality altogether.

EQUTE — John Chow has a great article about how to get featured in traditional media, something that can propel a company, blog, individual to bigger news sources and smaller alike.

In a blog entry , Chow gave some pretty good tips about how to go about getting into a traditional newspaper.

His first point was have a story to tell, it’s an obvious first step, but thinking hard about your own story is essential. Don’t just say what your company, blog or site does, make sure to insert the human element — it’s what local newspapers want to see.

Which brings him to his second point, start locally but aim high:

Generally, the bigger the news outlet, the easier it is for them to find content because they’re bombed with story ideas all the time from people or companies wanting to get coverage. Your best bet is to start at home with your local papers and magazines. Once you’ve been featured locally, you can leverage it to get featured nationally and internationally.

Shooting for a big local paper makes sure you can get coverage, but also make sure that other news outlets will see the story.

His third step is to sell your brand. Make sure that your story hasn’t already been done, newspapers don’t want to rehash news.

With one newspaper story, your company can get great placement, find your way to bigger outlets and move laterally and across the blogosphere within your industry or niche.

EQUTE — New research shows again that Microsoft users have a better click through rate for advertisers.

According to Chitika, a survey of 135 million impressions showed 1.05 percent of clicks came from consumers browsing with Internet Explorer — 40 percent higher than Firefox users (0.66 percent), 50 percent more than Safari users (0.50 percent) and 80 percent higher than Chrome users (0.21 percent). By operating system, Chitika found that 0.92 percent of its clickers were using Windows vs. 0.52 percent using Mac OS and 0.46 percent tooling with Linux.

Gavin Dunaway, of Adotas, had some interesting insights into why this might be.

Some of this I believe goes to the branding — Google is getting an increasingly snotty rep — similar to its mobile competitor Apple. It’s smarmy kids that dress like Justin Long who are Googling on their iPhones (Droids?) — a stereotype for sure, but one that is continually propagated by the media. Microsoft has long been a media punching bag — can you be more condescending than calling Microsoft users gullible?

Microsoft, as much as a misnomer as this may be, seems to appeal more to common people, something it’s shot for increasingly in its ad campaigns — and those would be who advertisers are shooting for.

Even trying to partner with the animated TV series “Family Guy,” which definitely falls toward the low end of middle brow, for the Windows 7 launch was an attempt to appeal to the masses. A friend sent me an unironic video for how to host a Windows 7 installation party — I laughed, but at the same time realized how stuck up I appeared. (I should note I’m a Mac user and a Googler, and I’d like to believe my preference is about function rather than intellectual snobbery.)

As Microsoft continues to be rolled out with new systems as normal, Bing ad clicks will keep on going up, after the holidays would be a great time to get ads going on Bing if you haven’t done so and take advantage of all those new computers.

EQUTE — Twitter is getting even more business friendly with co-tweets.

This is a wonderful addition to any tweeting company, instead of having one master account and a dedicated “tweetologist” or passing around the Twitter login (unwise).

Now people can be invited to tweet under the company Twitter account along with a byline. The benefits are endless in news organizations, segmented companies, blogger networks where there are many people involved in content that don’t necessarily interact. By allowing them to tweet under the company account it gives the account more depth, and if someone on a newspaper’s politics beat is tweeting great stuff, they will get their own followers and fans.

This neat trick could also scale to huge companies or franchises, allowing project leads or franchise managers tweet their hot sellers, or interesting stories — giving transparency, internal communication and valuable, personal information to followers.

On a grassroots level, the trick could be used to run a neighborhood watch or even a apartment twitter party.

Anamitra, of Twitter, described the feature (currently in beta) in the Twitter blog

The feature we are beta testing is called ‘Contributors’ — it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.

It’s the next step beyond lists, giving tweeting organizations control of what their fans see beyond lists that still feature the ubiquitous “I like sandwiches and beer” comments.

One can only hope the feature is rolled out to the general public sooner than later.