From an SEO standpoint, the importance of having a blog on your website is paramount. Having a well written, industry-related blog will not only contribute to earning your site a higher Google ranking, but it will also dramatically increase traffic and maybe earn your site one or two extra inbound links.

Blogs are also an excellent way to keep informed about what’s happening in your industry. Starting the day by checking the industry related blogs like Inside Adwords and TechCrunch have began part of many people’s daily routine.

In fact, the pressure to turn out a daily blog has become so great that companies have begun adding blogging onto the job specifications of their SEO strategists. Some companies have even gone to such lengths as hiring bloggers specifically for the task of writing blogs for the company websites.

The quest for rankings causes its own set of problems as the Internet becomes saturated with copycat blog posts. The danger occurs when bloggers copy other blogs and post it as their own. If you find an interesting industry blog at your favourite blog site the chances are that you will find at least three other blog posts that have copied the original blog verbatim and published it under another name. The pressure to blog can sometimes lead some to these black hat tactics.

Micro-blogging, which has always thought to be a useful social networking tool, has emerged to be a source of marketing potential as well.

Micro-blogging websites like Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook are excellent applications to get your ideas and news out fast. These websites can be used as tools to make industry connections as well as to pass information to these connections quickly and en mass. With micro-blogging, you can keep track with what your connections are doing and vice versa.

It is no wonder that Google purchased Jaiku in October last year.

I cannot recall the first time I ever heard the word “Facebook” yet the website has a curious drawing to it hoarding millions of users a day. I like to call it “intrigue”. As an overprotected schoolgirl I would throw myself into chat rooms on sites like Yahoo and correspond with random individuals across the globe. Fond memories include a janitor of a school in India trying to be my “friend” and having two cyber boyfriends, one of whom from the USA wrote all the words to the Titanic theme on pink, frilly paper and posted them to me.

Waiting for emails to arrive from across the seas became my reason for getting out of my bed in the morning. It gave me a sense that I was maybe special because “Wade” in Arizona thought I was beautiful. Consequently, reality struck (and my father’s phone bills) and I lay low on the “social networking” side of the web. Until I met www.facebook.com. I often had people asking me “Are you on Facebook?” My disgusted response: “(Snort) NO!!!”

I found it sad that people would spend hours in front of a computer, waiting for someone to slap them around the face with a trout. Yet on a cold, rainy day in miserable July, I uploaded my picture on my profile and told people how I was feeling. And that was me and life as I know it… gone. Life as I knew it was all about to change.
So I am now what you could call “a Facebook user”. I have made friends with people who pulled my pigtails at age 11, fellow school mates and ex boyfriends who cheated on me. Yet with over a couple of hundred friends on Facebook, it is quite hard to keep in contact with each one.

This is where the “intrigue” part I spoke about earlier comes in. A select few friends who offer some excitement and meaning to one’s life are regularly corresponded with. Forget picking up the phone or getting in your car to take them out for dinner. You give them flowers for their virtual garden and wink at them using an application which mimics “bodily movements”. But what happened to the old fashioned “I’ll pick you up at six, dinner’s on me” line. Chivalry is dead it would seem because nobody needs to be chivalrous anymore. Social recognition is at one’s fingertips, literally as all you need is to move the mouse and type to be a complete social butterfly.

And with Facebook, stalking seems to be an inevitable problem.
More disturbing is the false sense of security one gains from Facebook. A girl who I fell out with at 14 is now my friend on Facebook. Having not spoken for over 10 years we now post funny pictures to each other. It would seem that a mutual understanding has been (falsely) created.

Out of the many friends that people collect into their “friends” stash, how many do they converse with regularly? Maybe 10%? The other 90% smile happily and are ignored. I myself have been victim to the “hey! I borrowed that girl’s lighter when I was in the queue for the loo at such and such a club! Lets be Facebook friends!” trend. This is followed by a description of how we were in the CIA until 1969 when we left to join a commune of hippies in our “how we know each other” column. It alarms me that when I meet up with my circle of friends, the one topic which always rises to the front of the conversation is Facebook. We are on the site all the time when we are apart and now we are spending time together in reality, we can only talk about a representation of reality.
Facebook may be an incredible social networking tool, but it is keeping us from the fundamental part of being sociable: spending time with people.

Communication may be occurring through Facebook but does facial expression count for nothing anymore? The world seems to be getting smaller and smaller. I poked a relative in the UK yesterday and I didn’t get on an aeroplane and fly 2000 miles to do it. I did it in my office! Distance, time, and mutual hatred seem unimportant and irrelevant when it comes to the Facebook race.

One hopes that this will not progress to a stage where communication in the present and physical is not needed. Upon starting Facebook, a friend of mine at work waved her finger at me and said “watch out for that site, you’ll lose your entire life to it”.

Maybe I should have listened.

As a Clicks2Customers German speaking employee I want to set my main blogging focus on the German, Austrian and Swiss online, Web 2.0 market. In my first post I want to write about the most discussed and most controversial social networking platform on the German speaking market, StudiVZ.net.

The StudiVZ network was founded in October 2005 by the two German students Ehssan Dariani und Dennis Bemmann.
StudiVZ is a network especially created for university students. It allows it members to register profiles in the categories student, graduate and university employee. Especially in 2006 StudiVZ grew massively in the number of registered members. In August 2007 StudiVZ claimed to welcome the 4^th million member.

Since January 2007 after many problems with the former StudiVZ management the company was sold to the “Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck” a huge German publisher which owns newspapers and magazines all over the world. There were never officially selling figured published but a spokesperson told the German magazine “Focus” a selling price “higher than 50 million but less than 100 million Euros.”

In the meanwhile StudiVZ employ 140 people and have launched a similar service especially designed for pupils called SchülerVZ.net. Besides this networks StudiVZ is trying to grow in different European markets. StudiVZ launched its service also in French, Spanish, Italian and Polish.

In my further posts I want to focus on the business model of StudiVZ, and also on the problems and scandals mainly produced by the former StudiVZ management and the lessons Facebook can learn from them.

One of the stories that recently grabbed my attention was an article on PlentyOfFish.com. This free dating site almost epithomises the internet business model of the future: user generated content made possible by online advertising. I say almost, because the site is not quite ‘2.0′. In fact, it is a very basic dating site, and is hardly more than a user forum. But it is free, and according to this article it could be worth a billion dollars (by today’s optimistic valuations). It’s revenue all comes from advertising, mainly Adsense.

Adsense (or content targeting on Adwords) has never really been the prime focus for most PPC marketers. On forums such as Webmasterworld people invariably report mixed results from content targeting (more so than from search). Common complaints are low CTRs, low ROIs and high levels of click fraud. Nevertheless, Google reportedly makes 40% of its revenue through this channel and it is now allowing advertisers to hand-pick the sites on which they want their ads to appear, rather than rely on Google contextual algorithms.

So for some people, contextual advertising is obviously worth their while. As an advertiser, why would you want to consider contextual targeting and would you want to hand-pick the sites you want to advertise on?

I would argue that Google generally does a good job at matching your ads to content. ‘Relevancy’ is the cornerstone of Google’s success (not to mention revenue) so they are motivated to make sure you get quality traffic. But Google is also fighting a continuous battle with fraudsters who are incentivised to defraud the system because they share in the Adsense revenue. Advertiser can now exclude sites from their content targeting if they find that the traffic originating from them is of questionable quality, but there can be so many of them that is costly and time-consuming to weed them out.

Site-targeting eliminates that problem because it is an ‘opt-in’ rather than an ‘opt-out’ approach. You can choose to only advertise on site you trust. The trick is still to identify the right sites and I think the PlentyofFish example demonstrates that nicely. Advertisers like the site because people on a dating site are inherently searching for something (in this case, love). This makes the site very different from for instance a site like facebook, which is more used for entertainment and social interaction. Understanding the mindset of visitors and targeting ’searching’ visitors is key to running a site targeted campaign. The problem with site-targeting though is that competition for premium sites will soar, as will advertising costs.

But given the dynamics of the web there will be not be a shortage of new content and new customers anytime soon. All the more reason to get more familiar with contextual advertising.