Time’s criteria to choose these sites is quite simple, they pick websites that help users improve their internet experience like yelp.com and its UK version yelp.co.uk – Yelp helps you find the best restaurant, pubs and other local services in your area.

Or another site that meets the selection criteria is Fora.tv; a site with a wide variety of videos in a variety of subjects that are piped in from the top leading conferences from around the world. Its a great site to visit when you are tired of watching cat videos on YouTube and you feel that your brain needs some intellectual stimulation.

Within Time’s 50 best websites for 2009 you will find a list of sites to help you surf the web better, enjoy yourself, shop or just kill time on the Web.

But the big surprise is that sites like Digg and MySpace were left out of this year’s list.

Digg, as most of you already know, is a leading social news site famous for driving tons of traffic when content is promoted to its front page.

MySpace needs no introduction, the second biggest social networking site on the web which over the past year or so lost its top spot to Facebook.

Over the past year both sites have encountered ups and downs which might explain why they were not included in this year’s list.

Do you know any site that should’ve been on that list, or do you not agree with some of sites you saw on it? Please leave your opinions in our comments section and maybe we can make our own top 50 websites list!

With this in mind Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone believes it will lead new users to more compelling questions like “How do I get Involved?” which theoretically will lead to more users joining the service.

Biz Stones own words:

“Defining a ‘tweet’ for the uninitiated and explaining how to create an account doesn’t resonate with everyone. ‘Why would I want to do that?’ is a common reaction. However, demonstrating the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now through our Search and Trends often awakens a sense of wonder which inevitably leads to a much more compelling question, ‘How do I get involved?’”

What’s New?

Besides the new look, Twitter’s home page now has a search box where non-registered users can search for a term of their choice and see what the twitter community is saying about it.

On the same lines as the search box, Twitter’s home page is also showing popular topics by minute, day and week, which highlights even further Twitter’s power for real time search results; again you don’t need to be a registered user to see what’s hot.

We want to hear from you now, what do you think of Twitter revamped home page? Will this incite more users to join the service?

P.S: If you already have an account you need to logout to see the new front page.

What is Bing?

Bing is a new search engine that has been developed by Microsoft; with it Microsoft hopes to grab a bigger slice of the search market by providing a better search refinement.

To have better understanding of the proportions of Microsoft’s large-scale investment on the marketing of its new search engine, here is a quote from AdAge’s article:

The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing; the search engine hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. That’s a big campaign — big compared with consumer-product launches ($50 million is considered a sizable budget for a national rollout) and very big when you consider that Google spent about $25 million on all its advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, with about $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting. Microsoft, by comparison, spent $361 million. Certainly Google has never faced an ad assault of anything like this magnitude.

JWT has been tapped for the push, which will include online, TV, print and radio. Another sign of the campaign’s size: At a time when most agencies are laying people off, JWT added creative’s on the Microsoft business last week.

It won’t be the first time Microsoft launches an attacks ads campaign to try and grab a bigger slice of a market, the attack on Apple seems to be working as Apple’s value perception among 18-34 years old has dropped significantly.

One thing is certain, the group in charge of developing such Ad campaign have some rough times ahead of them as they devise a clever and convincing way to attack the search market (aka Google).

How would you do it? How would you convince searchers to switch search engines? Will this also change the search engine optimisation industry?

Share your thoughts in our comments sections.

Last year Volvo spent £19.75m on advertising, excluding paid search and internet accounted for just 3% of this, or £695,500.

Volvo UK’s head of marketing communications, Anita Fox said that while the car company has reduced its overall marketing spend, channels such as natural search and social media have seen their budgets increased.

‘While we’ve always focused on SEO, as we revise budgets we’re putting more focus on the digital area, including natural search and social media.’

Fox said the success of last year’s Creative 30 campaign, in which it partnered with The Independent and Yahoo to look for creative stars of the future and get involved with a younger audience, had convinced Volvo of the effectiveness of a social-media focused marketing approach.

‘This is an area that’s growing rapidly. You can’t get the same reach for the same budgets now as you would this time last year. This year we’re taking what we’ve learned from the C30 campaign and going much wider.’

Volvo’s focus on social media reflects the car brand’s new ‘Life is better lived together’ slogan.

For more information on TH UK’s Search Engine Optimisation services please click here.

One of the first things on CEOs and Managing Directors minds is to reduce spending; this often includes their marketing campaigns. But this is exactly when marketing plays an important role to ensure a company is well known and easily found for economic growth.

Online Marketing is a great way of providing Local, National, even Global coverage to promote businesses. As the name already suggests – Online Marketing is any type of marketing via the Internet; email marketing, search engine marketing or search engine optimisation campaigns, social media marketing, blog marketing social networking or any other form of promoting your business via Internet.

Four factors put online marketing ahead of any other marketing techniques during an economic downturn:

1 – Measurement

Traditional marketing campaigns often lack measurement. With online marketing and a good web analytics package, you are able to track, measure, document the effect, adjust and justify your marketing investments.

2 – Immediate Effect

It is almost impossible to know how effective a TV commercial or other type offline advertisement is. Online marketing methods have a direct value on sales; especially search engine marketing.

3 – Good ROI

The success of a marketing campaign is measured by its ROI (return over investment); the higher the better; and there are few things beating online marketing. For every dollar spent on online marketing, marketers are making more than a dollar through sales or other conversions on their sites.

4 – Small Budgets

Online marketing can start with a small budget and gradually increase it as it succeeds, then reduce to maintain success. Many multi-million dollar companies are basing their economic strategies around this simple principle nowadays.

The DMA estimates that expenditures with online marketing will maintain a significant growth in the coming year with more than 50% of U.S marketing dollars directed to Interactive marketing.

We would like to hear your opinion; with the computer screen rapidly becoming the shop window of the future, should companies prioritise their marketing budgets on online marketing? Add your view in our comments section below.

The campaign team used traditional marketing methods such as the radio, television and direct marketing, effective because they understood their audience and delivered crisp relevant messages to them.

What was more effective however was how Obama embraced not only the internet as an affective marketing tool and mobile technology to mass communicate his message, he also embraced the millennial audience; in fact 66% of 18-29 year olds voted for Obama which amounts to a huge majority. Co-incidentally Chris Hughes the co-founder of the social networking site Facebook, left Facebook to run Obamas online marketing team and together they created one of the most successful marketing campaigns to this date.

Millennials are the first generation to have never known a world without the internet; SMS texting is second nature and communicating online is a day to day occurrence. They have grown up in a world where they can see that anything is possible and achievable. Millennials are not just listened to but, because they are special, their opinions are taken seriously by their elders and because they are natural online content creators, they are highly influential.

Obama understood this – his campaign had a relaxed and informal tone so he could be relatable to all – old and young alike, and all the while he reiterated the same positive messages. He wanted people to believe in not just his abilities, but more importantly their own. His slogans of “Yes We Can”, “Hope” and “Change has come to America” always echoed this same message and in turn he left Americans and citizens worldwide inspired and ready to embrace change.

J.P. Morgan recently conducted research to see what factors (if any) would encourage a switch to an alternative search engine. Interestingly, 45% of respondents said that if better search results were achieved with an alternative search engine they would change, yet as you can see from the table below 38% would not switch over at all.

Here is a breakdown of the results from the poll:

Factors that would cause search engine switching

 What factors would cause you to use a different search engine?

The new browsing algorithm is called BrowseRank and it is meant to compete against Google’s controversial PageRank.

BrowseRank calculates how often and how long users visit the site to determine the rankings; Microsoft believes that will give more control over page relevancy leading to a more democratic Internet

The researchers said

“The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important,”

This will give more control to web users emphasising the concept of a more democratic rankings systems.

Compared to PageRank the main difference is that BrowseRank uses a continuous-time Markov process while PageRank uses a discrete-time Markov process also know as the Markov Chain.

There are no editors at Digg, it is the users who decide how good the content is by voting or let’s say “digging” others peoples’ content found on the internet, so the more ‘diggs’ a submission receives, the more popular it becomes and when it reaches a certain numbers of ‘diggs’, the submission gets promoted to the first page.

That is when things get serious; the benefits of making to first page on Digg are numerous, from huge amount of traffic to 10′s maybe hundreds of links. We all know how important traffic and links are for  successful online marketing and search engine optimisation campaigns.

As any online community, Digg has its “Popular” users, or as they are called at Digg – “Power Diggers”, these are Digg users with a high success ratio in getting submitted stories to Digg’s home page.

Some of these “Power Diggers” are starting to take advantage of this popularity, by charging other people to submit and promote their stories to Digg’s home page. To submit a story the charge is $500 and to promote the story is another $700 making a grand total of $1,200 for a home page story.

Digg has a strict policy against spamming but in this case there isn’t much Digg can do to stop users selling their influence.

“How can email marketing help my business?” – This is one most common question we are asked.

At first glance this may seem pretty obvious (it’s advertising, with all the benefits to your business that this implies), but there is a serious point behind it.

In most cases what people are really asking is something like: “Direct email advertising is often ignored, so what’s the point?”

This is a much more complex question, and by no means easy to answer. There are, however, certain advantages to using email (when compared to more traditional direct mail techniques) which can significantly improve the chance that your message will at least be read.

Before we get started, let me first clear up a common misconception. There is absolutely nothing we can do to force the recipient to open the email. Even if there were, we would not do so – such tactics are not the methods of a reputable company.

So, how can we maximise the number of emails that are read (as opposed to being deleted or simply ignored)?

This is two-fold: initial email design and statistical analysis.

Email Design: The first problem is to get your message into your customers’ (or potential customers’) inbox. This is by no means as easy as it sounds since most email servers these days have filtering software installed that shunts obvious direct advertising into junk mail folders, where it is extremely unlikely to be read.

For obvious reasons, the authors of this software do not advertise the criteria they use to decide what is, or is not, direct advertising. However, with a little experience, it is possible to learn what usually works as opposed to what usually does not.

The second problem is encouraging the recipients to read the email. After all, most people have a dozen or more emails to deal with every morning before they can even think about starting their days’ work.

In order to avoid your email simply being deleted as “just somebody trying to sell me something” it must be attractive, interesting and relevant to the recipients concerns. And that is the big problem – some email filtering can be disconcertingly good at picking out “attractive” emails and shunting them into the junk mail.

Clearly there is a fine line between an attractive (and therefore hopefully successful) email and one that will never be read.

At TH UK we have been sending bulk email campaigns for a long time, and consequently we have a lot of experience in this area. We employ this from the outset to design an email that will pass through the filter systems into the recipients’ inbox.

Statistical Analysis: So, how do we assess the effectiveness of an email?

Quite simply, we collect statistics on every campaign we run.

This is perhaps one of the biggest advantages email marketing can offer over more traditional (postal based) direct marketing campaigns.

Email servers routinely return several status flags to the sender on every email that sent. These status flags can reveal if email reached it’s intended target (possible but difficult with traditional mail), if it was opened (impossible with traditional mail), if the recipient click any of the links in the message, and much more.

We record all this information and then analysis it to get a much clearer idea of just how effective a campaign has been. The results of this are used to both refine the initial design and better target the email list so that future campaigns are even more effective.