This Week’s Industry News

Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Named Time’s Person Of The Year

Bill Clinton. George W. Bush. Barack Obama. Mark Zuckerberg.

Obviously Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg is not going to be the next president, but he now shares a distinction with our last three Commander-in-Chiefs as the latest Time Person of the Year for 2010.

Time gives out the award each year to the most influential person, whether in a good or bad way, over the past 365 days. Zuckerberg received the honor for his efforts, “connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was a close second, and the Reader’s Choice Person of the Year.

Source: Time

Yahoo Gives Early Christmas Gift Of Lay-Offs To 600 Employees

While the rest of the tech world seems to be booming as the Internet becomes more and more profitable, Yahoo has announced a cutback of roughly 4% of its workforce, or 600 employees. The good news for most of these soon-to-be former Yahoo staffers is that many of the search engine’s competitors, including Google, Facebook, and AOL, are hiring in their fields of expertise.

Hindsight is 20/20, but you have to wonder how much Yahoo, which is currently worth about $21 billion, is regretting its decision to reject Microsoft’s 2008 offer of $45 billion for ownership of the company.

Source: Wired

Yahoo To Close Down A Few Services, Including del.icio.us And AltaVista

Going hand-in-hand with the company’s lay-offs, Yahoo is cutting down on a good amount of web services, including Buzz, Traffic APIs, del.icio.us, and AltaVista. A Yahoo statement provides a partial explanation:

“Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in under-performing or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond. We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months.”

Just as an obvious word of advice: Jump ship on these services before they sink completely.

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Includes Display Network In Renewed Contract With MySpace

Google has extended its business with MySpace over a long term period of time, and will include the debut of the Google Display Network on the floundering social site. The president of MySpace’s parent company, News Corp, has recently expressed a need for the site to improve drastically over the next few quarters, rather than years.

The move is sure to bring some good fortune to MySpace, but even Google can’t save the site’s profit margins, and a rumored provision in the contract requiring a minimum amount of traffic for MySpace to collect on the search paycheck.

Source: Marketing Pilgrim

Bing Gives Itself An Extreme Home Makeover

In the constant battle to take some of Google’s market share in the search engine world, Bing has rolled out many new features, highlighted by further assimilation of Facebook in search query results. Other changes include the look of Bing Image search results, a new mobile app for iPhone and Android devices, and the ability to make quick reservations or tour a restaurant on OpenTable.

I could describe each of these changes separately and more in-depth, but it’s strongly recommended that you explore the new features for yourself by using Bing.

Source: CNN

Google Webmaster Tools Now Includes Top Pages Tab

With the new Top Pages tab in Google Webmaster Tools under Search Queries , the service continues to move towards becoming a “diet” version of Google Analytics. The tab features information about click counts, impressions, average positions, and more about each page on your site. Here’s a screen shot of the new feature:

Source: Search Engine Land

Facebook Recognizes Your Face

It seems as if Facebook and Google are in an unspoken competition for daily updates, and the latest from Facebook is definitely one of its most interesting and controversial (which does say a lot, considering the social network’s issues with privacy). The feature is called Tag Suggestions, and prompts you to tag friends in recently uploaded photos based on facial recognition technology.

As always with Facebook, potential privacy issues are abound, but the company has already announced a setting in place where the user can disable this new feature.

Source: CNN

Having Trouble Managing Multiple Gmail Accounts? Not Anymore.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about having more than one Gmail account is having to sign out and sign back in to view each one. Granted that inconvenience isn’t much to complain about, but this problem has been officially put to rest thanks to e-mail delegation from Google.

Just sign in to your most used account, click on the Settings tab in the upper right hand corner, then click on the Accounts tab. The button to grant access to your account is halfway down the page, and allows you to send and receive emails from all of your accounts without having to leave your primary inbox.

Source: CNN

Is Google Too Narcissistic?

Is Google playing fair when it comes to promoting Google’s own services? Well, an anti-trust investigation in Europe and several small start ups don’t think so.

Companies including Yelp, Yahoo Finance, WebMD and others believe that they are more relevant than services that Google provides (i.e. Google Places, Google Health, Google Finance).  Because of this, these companies are complaining that their businesses are being negatively affected by Google promoting their own services and hence taking up top spots on search results pages.

Google sort of shrugged and responded by saying that their preference for their own services is simply because that they are the best for the user. While these companies may have just cause to gripe, inevitably it is up to Google to decide which pages land where.

Stay tuned to see if these allegations cause Google to make any changes.

Source: Business Insider

Mall Of America Rewards Their Loyal Twitter Followers With…Parking

The final days leading up to Christmas (December 20-23) are bound to be some of the busiest shopping days of the season. With that in mind, Minneapolis’s gargantuan Mall of America has a treat for their loyal Twitter followers. 96 of the closest parking spaces will be rewarded to lucky followers of the mall that provide them with their Twitter handle.  They will also be giving out $25 gift certificates to the first five people per day that check in at mall on Foursquare.

A spokesman for the Mall of America stated that they really want to reward their followers “with something that is very coveted during the holiday season-a close parking spot without the hassle of a time consuming search.” They’re also hoping that this event will boost their amount of followers and that the event will be a good barometer for future events.

As of 11:54 a.m. on Friday, December 17, the Mall of America had 5,317 followers. Let’s keep an eye on this and see how many people cherish a good parking spot.

Source: Marketing Pilgrim

Hanson Dodge Adds Comet Branding

Already located in the same building in the Third Ward, two Milwaukee companies are going to be getting even closer. It was announced yesterday that marketing agency, Hanson Dodge Creative, will be welcoming the social media specialists at Comet Branding, into their organization.

This is some pretty exciting news that really drives home and draws attention to the idea that social media is indeed affecting the way that people do business. It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of the combining of these two forces.

Source: Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Press Release Announcing Rocket Clicks’ Partnership With AdGooroo’s Link Insight Platform Gets Heavy Circulation

Earlier in the month it was announced that our premier link building service, Link Publicity, is partnering with AdGooroo’s industry leading link building tool, Link Insight. While we at Rocket Clicks believe this to be some very big news, it appears that we’re not the only ones. The press release was picked up by a lot of media outlets, including CNBC, and we couldn’t be more thankful for all of the coverage.

Source: Internet Retailer, CNBC

Notable Commentary

From Our RSS Feed To Your Screen

Ian Lurie Tests Six Internet Marketing Trends

I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of chatter surrounding Internet marketing trends. You’ve probably heard that anchor text is still really important, Facebook and Twitter affect your search rank, and the worst one of them all, that SEO is dead. Read this article to see which trends Ian Lurie tested and what he found.

Analysis By: Ian Lurie, Conversation Marketing

Anchor Text. Meh.

Once upon a time, it was assumed that anchor text figured heavily into where sites landed on search engine results pages. Read this article, referenced by Ian Lurie and written by Chris Grice, that talks about anchor text losing relevancy and gives you ways to fill in the holes that it left behind.

Analysis By: Chris Grice, SEO Wizz

Anatomy Of A Perfect Landing Page

Ever wondered what a perfect homepage looks like? Head over to the source link and see a diagram of the 10 key landing page features that will bring visitors to your site.

Analysis By: Formstack

Amit Singhal Responds To Brand Bias Accusations

Read this article in which top Google engineer, Amit Singhal, responds to claims that Google is biased when it comes to what shows up first with Google Instant. What does he say?

Analysis By: Austin Carr, Fastcompany

Does Your Resume Look And Sound Like Everyone Else’s?

I’m sure you’ve probably done extensive research regarding what your resume should say about you and the correct words that mean exactly what you’re trying to get across to potential employers. Well, Linked In wants to give you an upper hand. Check out this interesting article that breaks down the most overused words on resumes and then go and rewrite yours.

Analysis By: Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Wall Street Journal

SEOmoz’s Top Posts Of The Year

When it comes to year end lists, SEOmoz isn’t messing around. Set aside some time and click the source link and find out which articles got the most “Thumbs Up” in 2010, the most unique page visits, were the most linked to posts by root domains, the top comments, and the top posts based on retweets.

Analysis By: Jennita, SEOmoz

New Scientist Talks About Cyber Warfare

In 1989, Pat Benatar proclaimed to the world that “Love is a Battlefield.” Well, just yesterday, New Scientist suggested that the Internet is a battlefield. Check out their take on cyber warfare and the possibilities of it.

Analysis By: Jim Giles, New Scientist