Digital Connections – 360i Blog, Digital Marketing Agency

Today, Apple announced a new iTunes add-on, called Ping, which aims to make the process of listening to and purchasing music through iTunes a more social experience. Apple CEO Steve Jobs described Ping as “a social network all about music.” It’s like “Facebook and Twitter meets iTunes,” he said.

This notion of a music-centric social network isn’t entirely new. In fact, Last.fm has offered an almost-identical service since 2002. Popular music streaming sites like Grooveshark, Pandora and Playlist.com also allow you to share what you’re currently listening to with your social networks (like Twitter, Facebook, etc.). That said, Apple does have a very clear advantage, and that’s its already massive user base that will simply need to “opt in” to become a part of Ping. Jobs noted that Ping could potentially attract 160MM users – more than Twitter’s 100MM, though significantly less than Facebook’s more than half a billion.

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Google has rolled out a significant change in their natural search algorithm, announced last Friday.  According to industry bloggers, the new change might be connected to a Google’s patent submitted last May: Query rewriting with entity detection (U.S. Patent 7,536,382).

Historically, a Google keyword search (brand or non brand) would only result in a single subdomain such as ‘www.yourdomain.com’ appearing one or two times within the natural rankings.  But today, the number of ranking opportunities for a single subdomain (and consequently a portfolio of subdomains) has expanded to an unknown limit. Therefore, if a given domain according to Google’s judgment (algorithm) provides multiple results across unique URLs, the domain might rank numerous times. This update shakes up the natural rankings and potential domination strategies for certain types of search queries, those with a “brand plus” combination.

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In late 2009, Yahoo! & Microsoft’s Bing announced a strategic partnership, better known as the Search Alliance, which would effectively consolidate the search landscape by allowing Bing to power both paid and natural search results across the Yahoo! network.  Last week, Yahoo! officially announced that the transition to Bing-powered natural search results was complete for U.S. and Canadian (English only) Yahoo! properties. Other languages and regions will follow in the coming weeks.

This latest report from 360i covers:

• Changes search marketers can expect within the Yahoo! search results page
• New features within Bing’s Webmaster Center interface
• Key recommendations for brands to consider now that the integration has fully taken effect

Read & Download: Impact of Search Alliance on SEO

This week’s roundup has something for everyone – news from each of the Big 3 engines, a big announcement from SCVNGR (hint: it involves Facebook), Time’s list of 50 awesome websites and more. Catch up on all the top stories in our summary below.

Google Expands Its ‘RealTime’ Search of Tweets, Buzzes

On Thursday, search market leader Google made strides in order to make its results more up-to-the-minute. Google Realtime Search (google.com/realtime) displays the latest conversations in a self-refreshing newsfeed as they happen across services like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Google Buzz.

When a user searches within Google Realtime, new results appear as they become available. Depending on the topic, these updates can be quite frequent – as the Wall Street Journal reports that people provide more than 70 million updates via Twitter on a single day. Above the results, users can see how the volume of conversations grow or shrink over time. To the right of the results, Google lists “top links” related to the user’s search query.

Google first began incorporating realtime updates back in December 2009, but up until this week those results had been limited to the “Updates” feature within the main search product. Now, these results have been given their own offshoot page.

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Let’s be honest – we’re digital strategists, not interior designers. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try our hand at other crafts, or harness the creativity and innovation of our employees in the name of more artistic pursuits. Perhaps as a result of watching a little too much Design Star, our Atlanta team recently held an office-wide competition – Cubes2Cribz – which challenged employees to transform their work areas into posh living spaces.

Here’s how it worked: We divided into ten teams based on workspace location and the big bosses gave each team a $200 American Express gift card, which we could use to make our design dreams a reality. In addition to going all out to transform our cubes to cribs, we were also asked to concoct a custom drink to go with our themes.

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Image via Mobile Behavior

Over the past few months we’ve embarked on quite a large endeavor — 7 mobile reports covering nearly every topic of this emerging landscape, from mobile-social and apps to SMS marketing and search. Below is a final rundown of the series. You can download the full PDF for any of these by clicking the “Download” button within Scribd.

• Mobile Marketing Overview
• Mobile Search
• SMS (Text Messaging)
• Mobile Social Marketing
• Mobile Applications
• Mobile Shopping, Coupons & Barcodes
• Mobile Marketing & the Challenges that Lie Ahead

You can expect lots more from us by way of mobile in the coming months. Which topics would you like to see more of on the blog? Let us know in the comments below.

The biggest news in digital last week came from Facebook, which made a much-anticipated announcement that could bring location updates to the mainstream. Other items of note included Yahoo gaining search market share on Google, interesting research on SMS marketing to parents and a new app that offers real-world incentives to shoppers via their mobile devices. Check out our full recap below.

Facebook Gets in On the Check-in Game with Places

Last Wednesday Facebook announced its much-anticipated location feature, appropriately named Facebook Places, which allows users to let friends know where they are in real time via their mobile devices. With this new feature, Facebook (and its 500MM strong user base) could potentially make “checking in” a mainstream social activity, rather than one limited to early adopters who use much smaller services like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Image via Telegraph.co.uk

In our report we take a look at Places and the opportunities it holds for businesses of every size. Check out our full recap here, where you can also download a PDF of our newest POV.

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