I find myself often defending the validity of the review section in Google Maps almost immediately after telling someone that I work for the local division of an interactive direct marketing company. “Those things aren’t real,” they say, “those are written by the owners themselves”. At first, I was surprised that people were so cynical about reviews, but lately, something has happened. I feel my brow furrowing as I examine the review section because of some of the things I see. Things like names of competitors in reviews that had such bad service that the customer had to turn to the business that provided them with excellent service. Or the same review by the same name on the same day in different channels, all pulled in by Google to create one suspicious looking review section. Or, maybe the same person feels the need to write one review for multiple locations of a same business. The latest favorite, the inclusion of names in reviews written by, get this, a person with the same name (sometimes with a competitor’s business name spliced in for good measure). I now understand why the reviews in local results have the stigma that they do.

It’s a shame too because reviews are a great, free way to advertise your business with a job well done. Your customers will write reviews for you on their own if you provide them with good service or give you a chance to turn a walker into a talker if they were disappointed. This can’t happen if you are making up your own reviews that tend to make customers leary. There are some great ways to encourage your customers to interact with the review section some of which are outlined here. If you want to help your business, stop writing your own reviews so that the real ones can help you get business, not drive it away.

The team at Microsoft have been busy working on updating their Desktop application for the MS AdCenter advertising platform in the recent months. If anyone read one of my earlier posts 10 Ways to Make AdCenter Desktop Crash they may have noticed that a few members of the Desktop team commented on it asking me to contact them to follow up on the issues I was having.

I am still not a huge fan of the Desktop tool but I have remained in contact with the developers who reached out to me to follow up on any fixes and new features. They are trying very hard to make it a usable application and with large agency accounts soon to be merged for the alliance they know that it will be more commonly used in the near future.

So the other week I upgraded the app when I was prompted to. Immediately I ran in to sync issues. I had spent an hour or so updating ad copy for a larger campaign and then when I went to Sync the changes I received an internal error. I exported the changes and then tried to restore the campaign. Internal Error. I passed this information on to the MS development team and they worked that week to fix the sync issues.

I ended up uninstalling the Desktop last week and re-installing it this week. One change I noticed was the installation file either installed SQL Server 2008 or at the very least updated it.

Opening up an account has changed in the fact that when you have chosen an account to add (from the very last button on the Home ribbon and in my opinion the location of this action needs to be changed, although I did add it to the quick access toolbar) you will be shown the size of the account and a warning that your database has a maximum size of 4GB. This obviously goes along with my mention of the SQL database above.

Database Capacity

Once you have an account downloaded you can now changed bids en mass when selecting multiple ad groups in a campaign. You will notice that the “3rd State” still exists. That is, when you select multiple ad groups the Ad Distribution controls will be filled in for both Search and Content. After discussing this with the development team, this is because they only pull certain data from the AdCenter database into your database. Whenever you transfer data there is an expense associated with it and to manage this cost they set edit controls to an unknown state. They are, however, thinking about ways to deal with this.

When you make a change in an ad group the right navigation bar will now reflect this change (by making the ad group bold) but it will not do this straight away, I had to click away from the campaign into another campaign and then back into the campaign where I made a change in the ad group.

They have worked on displaying errors. Previously if there was an issue with anything in the account you had to go hunting for where the error was, it was not intuitive enough to display a symbol (or anything) in the left navigation bar so you could easily identify which campaign, ad group, keyword or ad returned an error.

Now the account, campaign and ad group in the left navigation pane displays a red cross symbol and the tabs to navigate between Ad Groups, Text Ads, Mobile Ads and Keywords will display the same red cross. You will also see a big red bar across the top of the Manager pane and it allows you to go directly to the errors by clicking on the View Errors button.

Navigation Bar Error

Navigation Tab Error

Quick Error Link

I had mentioned to them at the start of June that I would like to only sync one campaign, if needed, within an account. At the time they said that they had added the feature and it would go out in the next release. This is now found in the Sync Settings button, next to the Syn Changes button. I selected one campaign (out of about 50) and received a curious warning about unsubscribing other accounts that may contain unposted data, with no option to show the warning again. You then have to click the Sync Changes button after changing the settings.

Sync Settings

Sync Warning

So after syncing those changes you would have to go back into Sync Settings and reselect the entire account again if you wanted to Sync any further changes in other campaigns. I closed down the application and reopened it to see if it restored to what I consider the default sync settings of all campaigns, but it retained the settings I selected earlier.

This processes is a little cumbersome and could be refined to one dialogue screen before you actually hit the Go button to sync. I’ll always make changes to a campaign where I have run out of time, but want to post what I managed to do and pick up on the rest of the changes later. Also I am great at forgetting I changed a setting somewhere so there may be a few frustrated words when I try and sync something and it’s not in my subscribed campaign list.

The application is definitely getting there and it will be interesting to see how much it changes in the next 6 months as the Search Alliance goes into full swing. At least the development team is all ears and is open to discussing possible solutions and alternate methods for the everyday tasks of an account manager.

Cory Treffelitti wrote a great blog post today on MediaPost.com titled “What Does It Mean To Be a True Partner?” This article should resonate strongly with any and all agencies that care about their business and care about their clients. Location3 has always tried to interact with and establish all of our client and partner agencies in this way but Cory has put it into words quite nicely.

“The antithesis of a partner is a vendor, and there is a simple point of differentiation.  A partner is a valued relationship.  A vendor is an order-taker.  A partner is someone who adds value beyond the exact words of a contract, where a vendor does exactly what they’re told and nothing more.  A partner is willing to say “no” and willing to fight for ideas and engage in intelligent discourse.  A vendor fears conflict and does what they’re asked, even if they don’t believe it’s the right thing to do. ”

You can read the full post here.

On July 26 Ford is going to reveal their 2011 Ford Explorer. No, not at a car show or on a commercial—on Facebook. Didn’t have enough proof social media is used for EVERYTHING? Here’s your proof.

According to an article on Mashable, on reveal day, you can expect to see a number of videos introducing online users to the new vehicle. Scott Monty, the head of social media at Ford, disclosed that some of the videos will serve as virtual walk-arounds designed to mimic the experience a person would have at an auto show.

Along with the reveal of the new car, Ford promised  that if they’d reach 30,000 Facebook Fans, they’d give away a new Explorer. Well, their planned worked and 32,000+ fans later Ford now has quite the crowd of fans crossing their fingers for a new car—including me.  This campaign has now changed the entire auto industry’s tradition with revealing new vehicles and I wonder if other major motor companies are going to follow closely in Ford’s footsteps. Actually, who am I kidding? I know they will because social media marketing these days is viral.

So props to Ford’s Scott Monty for contriving yet another creative marketing strategy to add to the list— I’m sure the auto industry is pleased.

One of the first key pieces to good mobile marketing is ensuring your site renders well across all devices and browsers. After all, conversions on a small, difficult-to-navigate site are not easy to come by. There are two tools (more than that really!) you can use to test your site against mobile web standards.

The first is mobiReady from dotMobi. According to dotMobi’s site, “the mobiReady tool evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices and standards.” This tool is free and offers a score 1-5 as well as an analysis of your site’s performance on a mobile device.

mobiReady Test

The second tool is the W3C mobileOK Checker. This tool checks “the markup validity of web documents” in a variety of languages. These standards are set forth by W3C, or the World Wide Web Consortium.

W3C Mobile Checker Test

mobiReady incorporates pieces from the W3C mobile checker and usually provides a very comprehensive overview of your site and any necessary changes. For a complete list of quality assurance tools recommended by W3C, visit their toolbox.

On Friday, Google announced that their location extensions were given a makeover. Location extensions, which allow advertisers to enhance their paid listings by either manually or automatically including their location information, used to be limited to one location per ad. Now, if you have a Google Places account linked to your AdWords campaign up to four of the business locations closest to the searcher can be displayed.

This new feature can have some great benefits for brands with multiple locations.

1) For brand terms location extensions allow the customer to pick the closest location to them. It also adds real estate to any brand term search

2) For non-brand terms location extensions allow a brand to gain additional coverage on the SERP. This is especially helpful for locations that may not be in the 3 or 7 pack of the map listing results

3) Improved campaign click through rate. This is from an informal survey of my campaigns that have location extensions implemented but the ads that show with location extensions tend to have a CTR that ranges from .8 to 2% higher than ads that don’t show with location extensions in the same campaign.

Although this makeover is a step in the right direction, there are some situations where implementing the new set-up may not be right for an advertiser.

1) The new extensions only allows for four locations to be visible so groups of stores larger than four that are advertising together may not want to take advantage of this feature because it may result in uneven exposure of the stores.

2) You need to have a Google Places account hooked up to your campaign to take advantage of this feature. If you don’t have access to the Google Places account or you don’t want to hook it up because you don’t want up to four locations to show, this feature is not available to you.

Yes, Facebook is distracting, but the reality is that graduates who are entering the workplace have been eating, sleeping, and breathing status updates, blog posts, photo/video uploads, and more. It’s time social media tools are put to good use in the workplace and collaborating in real-time seems like the perfect fit. An article on Mashable couldn’t better define the concept of immediacy when it comes to our obsessive habits when using Facebook and other social media outlets.  We aren’t home five minutes before we are posting pictures from our summer vacations even though we tweeted and updated family and friends everyday of our whereabouts and what we ate for dinner. Imagine how the concept of immediacy at work could change efficiency?

Mashable illustrates a side by side comparison of social media in the workplace vs. social media and personal life. My favorite comparison is “You follow @Starbucks on Twitter for the latest deals and customer service in your personal life, try following important customer accounts to be sure issues and open items are resolved.” Most of us already have our Facebook and Twitter accounts open in our browsers to periodically check on, how convenient would it be to work straight from Twitter? The best part behind this social move into the workplace is that we all know how Facebook and Twitter work—we don’t need the IT guy for this one.

Tomorrow (June 30^th) is officially Social Media Day!

We celebrate Bike to Work Day, Go-Skate Day, Have a Coke Day, National Deviled Egg Day, Moldy Cheese Day, and Sneak some Zucchini ion your Neighbor’s Porch Night. Why would we not have a day in Celebration of Social Media? By the way, I did not make up any of those holidays; they are all the real deal.

Social media has changed the way we do business and conduct our daily lives, so a celebration in great uses of technology is in order. Across the world on June 30^th there will be events held where people can gather and hear social media experts speak.

Victoria, British Columbia started the events off when the city council declared June 30^th officially Social Media Day. Now, driven by mashable.com, there are events and ‘meet-ups’ in 92 countries with over 9,600 registered attendees on every continent except Antarctica.

In Colorado we have four registered events, the largest one being in Boulder at the Lazy Dog on Pearl Street. The Denver event is located at Paris on the Platte on 15^th and Platte, but there are only 3 people registered to attend.  Step it up Denver, I guess we are winning over Antarctica! At least go and check it out, try the tuna melt and the guacamole it is delicious!

So grab your alpaca friends (the mascot for Social Media day.. it is the most social farm animals of course) and form an event or register to attend a current listing. To receive updates on the celebration follow @mashSMday on twitter and use the #smday to tweet about where you will be commemorating. There are also pages on Facebook and Flickr.

For all you fledgling internet barons out there – your real estate is about to increase in value (and cost). Starting July 1, pricing on .NET and .COM extensions are increasing. Reasoning is hard to come buy. VeriSign, the organization who manages the registry for those extensions merely announced that prices are increasing (so get over it).

Before you get too bent out of shape – the effects are minimal, 10% increase for .NET, 7% increase for .COM – keeping both likely within the $10 range for new domains. The best plan for beating the spike is obviously to renew any domains you plan on keeping now – and maybe decide to snatch up the ones you have been considering.

Techbargains.com compiled a handy little list of coupons for registering cheaply before the hike:

• GoDaddy $7.49 .COM ($2.50 off) Renewals Work! Coupon Code: OYH10 (Exp 6/30)
• GoDaddy 10% off Sitewide Coupon Code: PODCAST10 (Exp 6/30)
• GoDaddy 25% off $75+ Orders Coupon Code: gdd5013g (Exp 6/30)
• 1and1 .COM Domain Registration FREE for one yr, .info $0.99, .net $6.99 Coupon (Exp 6/30)
• dotster Free Domain Registration w/Hosting Coupon Code: FREEDOM9 (Exp 6/30)
• dotster Transfer now and get your .COM domain 1 year for FREE (Exp 6/30)
• dotster Transfer your domain + get 1yr renewal for $6.99 (best for non .COM domains; Exp 6/30)
• Network Solutions $25 off $150+ Coupon Code: GCXXX02978 (New customers only; Exp 6/30)
• Network Solutions $50 off any $250 purchase Coupon Code: GCXXX02902 (New customers only; Exp 6/30)
• Network Solutions 20% off new domains (.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .name, and .us) Coupon Code: PCXXX02980 (Exp 6/30)

Mergers and acquisitions happen every day in every industry and rarely (ok, pretty much never) do I feel compelled to write about them. So what makes this one different? If you have ever attended a conference on search and/or social marketing, whether that is SMX, SES or PubCon, you’ve most likely seen the prime suspects strutting their stuff on stage. These are people to know in the search/social industry, and now they are joining forces to bring their collective knowledge together under one virtual roof.  Chris Winfield of 10e20, Brent Csutoras of Brent Csutoras Inc, and the team from Search and Social have come together to create BlueGlass Interactive, an agency offering everything from Social Media and PR to Pay Per Click and SEO (much like another agency you may have heard of…ahem…Location3).

BlueGlass Interactive is a Tampa based company, with 40 employees across 4 major cities: Salt Lake City, New York, Tampa and LA.  One criticism is their complete oversight of the best city in the US. What, you guys don’t like to ski?

After speaking with both Chris and Brent at the last SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, their enthusiasm for this merger was infectious, so much so that I am excited to say that we will be working with them on some big projects in the near future. Bringing all of their various strengths together can mean great things for those posed to take advantage of their services, and we look forward to doing just that.