The Week in Review

E-Mail Spending Remains Flat

According to a report released by Razorfish, ad spending on e-mail remained mostly flat in 2009, while social media non-display ads saw a significant boost. The company notes that while social media will continue to see more spending going forward, it will be hard to measure since impressions and clicks are typically not involved. (Marketing Charts)

Starbucks Ruining Foursquare?

This senior analyst at Forrester Research thinks that Starbucks’ program on Foursquare may “kill the goose that lays the golden eggs (or at least demonstrate how that goose may die a slow, lingering death of neglect).” The ubiquitous coffee brand is creating too much noise on Foursquare because of oversaturation, difficult redemption and lack of geo-targeting, among other problems. (MediaPost)

Creating a Strong Guarantee

What makes a good guarantee? Reducing perceived risk is where it starts. Assuring the customer that you believe in the quality of your product, clearly spelling out your terms and conditions, specifying an ample evaluation time period and conveying what you’ll do if the customer isn’t satisfied are all key components of writing a good guarantee. (Copyblogger)

AdWords Bidding to Help PPC Spending

Your marketing goals should always guide which bidding options you use in your PPC campaigns. Maximum PPC bidding, budget optimizer, conversion optimizer and CPM bidding are the four options highlighted and explained in this overview. (Search Engine Guide)

Online Ad Revenues Will Pass Print in 2014

PricewaterhouseCoopers expects online ad revenues to reach $34.4 billion by 2014, which would put it above print ad revenues. PwC also forecasts that mobile advertisements will nearly quadruple in the next four years to $1.6 billion. (ReadWriteWeb)

Facebook Ads for Other Sites Disliked

A survey conducted by Inside Facebook found that 53.5 percent of respondents said they don’t mind Facebook ads, while 40.3 percent said they dislike them and 6.2 percent said they like them. Ads for other websites were the ones that users liked least, followed by ads for a Facebook page and ads for events. Dating sites were far and away the lead liked advertised product, followed by educational programs or job sites, and games. (Inside Facebook)

Foursquare Hears Businesses’ Gripes

Foursquare understands the impatience expressed by businesses who have endured long waits to have their requests fulfilled. Founder Dennis Crowley admitted that the inability to meet every request in a timely manner is due to a lack of manpower, though he says a scalable system that will automate the process is on its way. (ClickZ)

Rating Your PPC Agency

Here’s a list of five quick litmus tests you can use to evaluate your PPC agency. The list includes asking whether your agency is defending your brand term, utilizing KeywordSpy.com and using Google Analytics. (Econsultancy)

Chatroulette Out of Luck?

According to comScore’s figures, Chatroulette had a down month in May, finishing the month with 1.33 million visitors, down from 1.56 million in April. The young site’s NSFW issues might have something to do with it, or the video chatting site might just be a fad. Can Shawn Fanning help? (Business Insider)

How to Get Indexed Faster

Updating your XML site map, using PubSubHubbub and taking advantage of Ping-O-Matic are three ways to make sure that your site gets indexed faster than with normal crawling. (SEOmoz.org)

Android Has 20% of the Market

Yes, iPhone dominates the mobile OS market, but Android continues to creep up the ladder, finishing May with 19.9 percent of the North American market in terms of mobile Web consumption, according to Quantcast. (Quantcast)

Starbucks Opens Up Wi-Fi, Premium Content

Starbucks has finally announced that it will open up its Wi-Fi for free starting on July 1. Not only will patrons be able to surf the Web at no cost at their favorite Starbucks locations – they’ll also be given access to paid content, like WSJ.com. (Mashable)

Facebook’s Newest Employees

Here’s a look at 13 of Facebook’s newest hires, according to data gleaned from LinkedIn. Among them are an MBA intern, site-reliability operations technician and customer content manager. (Inside Facebook)

Google Caffeine and What It Means For SEO

Google Caffeine shows that Google is no longer relying on the notion that 80 percent of the Web’s content changes slowly, while the other 20 percent changes quickly. As the Web has focused on “collapsing the time gap between something happening, being captured, and being viewed,” Caffeine is Google’s response to the different nature of content today. For those vying to get the No. 1 spot in search engine results pages, there are three keys in light of Caffeine’s unveiling: make sure your SEO group gets social media, experiment and explore, and keep a close eye on your competition. (ClickZ)

Bing’s Latest Moves

With Google Caffeine and the introduction of background images on Google’s home page, it’s even more evident that there’s some real elbow jabbing going on between the search giant and Bing. Here’s an overview of Bing Webmaster Tools, privacy concerns related to Bing Social and Bing’s wooing of Apple. (Search Engine Watch)

How a Young Site Got 958,373 Visits via Google

By leveraging current events and news to churn out relevant content, a three-month old site was able to grab nearly 1 million visits from Google. The good news is that this is something that’s easy to replicate and monetize. (ViperChill)

FCC to Step Up Focus on Online Security and Privacy Issues

In the aftermath of recent security breaches of Apple’s iPad tablets and Google’s Street View privacy faux pas, the FCC announced that it is “committed to working with all stakeholders to prevent problems like this in the future.” Consumers are also urged to read a wireless-safety guide issued by the FTC. (NYTimes.com)

Yahoo and Microsoft’s Gaming of Search Rankings to be Confronted by comScore

Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Bing have been using slightly nefarious methods to boost their search engine numbers. Both search engines have placed links on their home pages that are “search queries disguised as content,” and have also been using image slideshows as queries. comScore is set to address this by calling for a “thoughtful review of how we classify various types of searches, count them and report them.” (Business Insider)

‘Cristiano Ronaldo’ is Top World Cup Search Term

According to Experian Hitwise, “cristiano ronaldo” is the top World Cup player being searched for in the U.S., accounting for 19.19 percent of searches for World Cup players. “Ronaldinho” was second with 5.63 percent, followed by “landon donovan" with 4.24 percent, “lionel messi” with 4.19 percent and “calros vela” with 3.24 percent. (Hitwise.com)

Google TV is Important

Google TV isn’t getting much attention these days but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. The TV remains a central part of most homes, and it still manages to suck up 4.5 hours a day from each of its viewers. The keys for Google TV’s success are the proliferation of broadband, partnership with Sony and a superior product than Apple TV. It’s not just an input; Google TV is an embedded experience and the search giant’s attempt at “siphoning away ad dollars” after grabbing your attention. (paidContent.org)

E-Mail Penalties

In honor of the Chicago Blackhawks, the winners of the 2010 Stanley Cup, here’s a look at some penalties on e-mails this writer has seen in recent weeks. These include multi-step unsubscribe processes, ignoring image rendering and ignoring social Web opportunities. (MediaPost)

Relevancy in PPC Efforts

Bad PPC campaigns are like old cars. To turn that old car into one running on all cylinders, relevancy is required to boost your quality score. Segmenting one ad group into several, more targeted ones is helpful. Improving relevancy also improves management efficiency. (OrangeSoda Blog)

Foursquare is the Best Check-In App

According to an unscientific study conducted by uTest, Foursquare was tagged as the best check-in application based on five of six metrics. One check-in app that wasn’t mentioned is Topguest, which enables users to leverage the major check-in apps to get travel benefits. (Mashable, ReadWriteWeb)

Companies Investing More in Analytics

A recent report from Econsultancy and Lynchpin shows that 48 percent of responding companies are planning to boost the number of employees they dedicate to Web data analysis. Additionally, 87 percent of companies are utilizing Google Analytics for online measurement, with 49 percent of this group using the free tool as a complementary instrument. Seventy-three percent of respondents say they’re using some sort of measuring tool to evaluate their online reputation and social media activity. (Econsultancy)

Mobile Internet Faring Well

The mobile Internet is having big-time success in its early stages, growing faster in its first 20 years than the desktop Internet did, according to Morgan Stanley. The report also projects that global smart-phone shipments will exceed PC shipments within two years – in North America, this is expected to happen within just one year. Also, when comparing the amount of time spent with online media to ad spending, the company sees a $50 billion opportunity. (SlideShare)

All About Google Caffeine

Here’s the rundown of Google Caffeine, the search engine’s new Web indexing system. The name of the game is speed, but it also involves crawling/indexing/retrieval. However, the real impact of Caffeine might be felt in the future, not today. (Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, The Fire Horse Trail)

Starbucks is King of Social Media

Taking into account Facebook and Twitter, Starbucks is the ruler of the social media landscape for brands, according to Famecount. Coca-Cola is a distant second, followed by Whole Foods Market, Skittles, Oreo, Red Bull, Zappos.com, JetBlue Airways, Dell and Woot. (VentureBeat)

The 5 Best Networking Questions

Have you ever found yourself at a loss for questions at a networking event? “What do you like most about what you do?” and “Where else do you usually network” are among the five questions the best networkers ask. (Business Insider)

20 Ideas for Displaying Twitter Updates

Here are 15 examples of websites that employ creative ways of displaying Twitter updates, along with five resources that can help you display your tweets in new ways on your own sites. (Mashable)