I came across an article by Rachel Leibrock in the Post-Bulletin talking about how younger generations seem to now view e-mail as a formal medium of communication. Recent studies have predicted a decline, or possible demise, of e-mail. According to a 2007 study by Pew Internet & American Life Project, 92 percent of adults regularly use e-mail versus 6 percent of teens. However, 36 percent of teens use text messaging.

I‘m intrigued that Leibrock doesn'‘t seem to think that e-mail will ever go away. Instead, she seems to think that it will be used for more formal communications, such as invitations, messages to old friends, etc. — services that were once sent by post.

Current and forthcoming generations are definitely not as dependent on e-mail on as their older counterparts. Many of my college friends don’t read their e-mail for a couple of days. When I ask them why they haven’t responded, they tell me to text message them in the future.

With a vast rise in the popularity of text messaging, micro-blogging, social network messaging and other short message systems, it seems possible that e-mail may have already seen its heyday. Check out the article and see what you think.

BlogHer’s 2,200 bloggers will now be accessible to NBC Universal’s iVillage, BravoTV and Oxygen entities following last week’s announcement of the partnership. iVillage, the No. 1 site for women, serves as the largest media company dedicated to providing women information for all stages of life. The partnership offers synergy with BlogHer, the No. 1 network of blogs by women.

Lauren Zalaznick, president of Women and Lifestyle Entertainment networks for NBC Universal, also announced the creation of Women@NBCU, which will target content and marketing through various advertisements to women.

According to iVillage’s press announcement , “The sales network, comprised of BravoTV.com, Oxygen.com, iVillage and Sugar Inc., creates the largest online aggregation of top-tier women‘s media brands.”

This high-estrogen alliance will no doubt make ad-buyers who market to women very happy.

To have a client’s video go viral, are you working hard or hardly working? Gatorade’s latest video gone viral has founder of BuzzFeed.com Jonah Peretti talking with NPR about how videos can turn into Internet phenoms, “Behind the Viral Video: What’s Fake, What’s Real.”

Right from the start, Peretti isn’t afraid to tell a company with megabucks to spend that they can’t just make a video viral. Additionally, companies that pay for the video’s promotion via advertising shouldn’t call it viral. Peretti feels, “It’s about creating a meaningful piece of content that snowballs conversations online.”

With all the advances in technology, today’s consumers are wiser and are searching for something that is authentic versus a hoax or an advertisement. Peretti’s conversation with NPR is definitely worth the listen and is a great educational piece on how to better service our clients.

Google announced last Monday: "We've improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash ‘gadgets’ such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between."

Does this mean that the use of Flash will not impact search engine rankings negatively anymore? No, because there's a difference between getting indexed and achieving a top rank on Google or Yahoo. PDFs are also indexed, but do they frequently come up as No. 1 in search results? Can they compete with highly optimized HTML-based pages? No.

Text sites will continue to beat Flash sites, in my opinion, because of the specific value the search algorithms assign to various HTML elements, especially tags that indicate headlines or emphasis. I doubt that Flash content will be assigned a higher value than regular text. Therefore, indexed Flash content will not improve a site's search engine rank significantly, especially if competition is strong and if competitors stay away from Flash and optimize their pages with the appropriate HTML tags.

If you think it's only the early adopters and techies who are in on this "Twitter thing," you're incorrect. Sports fans have found out this Twitter thing, too.

July 1 is Christmas morning for hockey fans. It's the day free agents can be signed; new, freshly signed players who are now competing for your fair city, unwrapped and ready to go. But if you're a serious hockey fan, are you simply going to sit around and wait for the 11:00 p.m. news to find out who your team has signed or is in talks with? Heavens no.

Does having sports fans using Twitter for player signing news mean Twitter has become mainstream? You think on that for two minutes while you head to the penalty box for a Twitter misconduct.

I already wrote about how publishers can effectively sell books through pay-per-click advertising. But, like everyone else who is offering products and services online, publishers should also invest in the other side of search engine marketing: organic/free search results, and name their products accordingly. This will not only ensure valuable search traffic from engines like Google and Yahoo, but will also help with online booksellers’ internal search results.

• Create a list of keyword phrases that search engine users will most likely use to find your content.
• Use Google’s keyword tool and check for variations of your keyword phrases and for their search volume.
• Create a new list that contains the keyword phrases with the most search volume.
• Check out your competition: Who is top-ranked for the keyword phrases on your list? What have they done to optimize their book titles for the particular keyword phrase? Could you do better?

By the way, traditional book publishers can learn a lot from e-book publishers. Since they sell their books exclusively online, their success completely depends on search engine marketing and affiliate programs.

Aaron Wall in particular has done a superb job marketing his e-book. His book is about SEO. Therefore, he simply calls it SEO Book. Most people who link to his site, use these two words as link anchor text, which helps tremendously in getting his identically-named product website top-ranked for these search terms. As a result, search engine users will always come across his product when they conduct a general search for a book on SEO.

Pay-per-click ads on Google or Yahoo are an effective and affordable way to market non-fiction books to people who are actively looking for specific information. This is ideal for small publishers and self-published authors but also works for big publishers and university presses.

A well written pay-per-click ad will let search engine users know that your book exists and lead them to your website or blog. If your landing page content is convincing, you may easily convert them into buyers.

The key to a high conversion rate and maximum ROI is to match ad text, search terms and book content as closely as possible and make the landing page extremely informative.

An example: Let’s say your book is about the body language of dogs. According to Google’s keyword tool, there’s noticeable search volume for keyword phrases such as “dog body language” and “reading dog body language”. However, currently there are no pay-per-click ads for these search phrases. Therefore, if you have written or published a book about the body language of dogs, you can easily reach thousands of potential book buyers through pay-per-click ads and significantly increase sales.

Contact me if you have questions about pay-per-click advertising for books.

Any of the following redesign mistakes can negatively impact your Google rank:

1. Change page URLs and other file names (images, pdfs)
2. Use different page titles and descriptions
3. Replace HTML-based headlines and texts with graphics or Flash
4. Make page text changes (content, formatting)
5. Change your internal link structure
6. Make changes to link anchor texts
7. Make changes to alt tags of navigational elements and images
8. Change links to external pages

In other words: Stay away from a complete redesign, if your web site is already ranked No. 1 on Google for your most important keywords phrases — unless you have an unbeatable number of quality inbound links. Even then, be very careful not to make any of the mistakes listed above, because on-page optimization is the foundation of search engine marketing success!

By Kai Blum

Seventy-four percent of U.S. consumers use search engines to look for local business information, according to Nielsen.

When they use a specific keyword, let’s say “massage” and combine it with a city name, for example “Ann Arbor,” Google will not only display the organic search results and the pay-per-click ads, but also ten “Local Business Results” near the top of the page and “number” them A-J.

The businesses with the most central physical address are usually listed first. I say “usually,” because there’s always a stray.

Google explains:

“As with all other Google search results, Local listings ranks results based on relevance. Distance is one factor that goes into our relevancy ranking, but there are many factors as well. Sometimes our search technology will decide that a business that's farther away is more likely to have what you're looking for than a business that's closer.”

There’s no doubt in my mind that distance is the most important factor and therefore you should not only use the right keywords when naming your small business, but also choose a central mailing address.

By Alicia Dorset

As you probably read from Charlie's last post, he was at BlogHer Business last week, and I was right there next to him, enjoying another great discussion from some of the blogosphere's best minds. You might be wondering why you didn't see live updates from NYC here on BlogWorks. Here's why.

In our office, I think we can best be described as techy nerds. We love new digital technology, and right now there seems to be a never-ending supply of it. Some of us have been obsessed lately with Tumblr, a microblogging platform that lends itself perfectly to live blogging, blogging on the go and sending quick updates (photos, videos, links and even quotes). Think of it as a beefier Twitter.

Damian Rintelmann, our director of web operations, is a devoted Tumblr-er (not even close to a word), and is a fan of Jon Cockle, better know as Yongfook, a web designer based in Tokyo. He's turned his Tumblr into a "lifestream," and pulls in feeds from all of the web properties he's a member of. It's a brilliant concept and shows you the potential of the platform.

I know I use Tumblr as one of my personal blogs, and Damian and Dan Nixon, one of our web producers, have integrated Tumblr into their exisiting blogs. I can't wait to see it put to use for our clients.

Tumblr wasn't the only tool we used to get conference info during BHB. Charlie was regularly updating his own Twitter feed to not only get the word out, but stay up to date with some of his favorite mommy bloggers who were attending other conferences that day.

I'm curious... What do you use when you attend a conference to let others know what you're up to?

By Charlie Kondek

I attended BlogHer Business last week in New York City. It was a good conference and a great chance to meet a lot of interesting people. Some of the folks I met are bloggers, some PR and marketing folks, and many are both. I even got to meet a few folks I've previously only known online or over the phone.

• Research by BlogHer showing the habits of women bloggers. More of them are blogging, and more frequently. Their top motives for blogging are: fun, self-expression, and to connect with others. That's just a few of their findings.
  
• Jennifer Cisney of Kodak's Thousand Words blog talked about how the blog expresses the brand. It is, simply, passion for photography.
  
• General Motors (a client of ours) talked about the success it had with an event for the Manic Mommies community that shifted perceptions about the brand and engendered goodwill between the brand and the participants.
  
• Heather Gorringe is a delightful presenter, the chief brain behind Wiggly Wigglers, creator of a web site, blog and podcast for a company that sells worms from Herefordshire, in the U.K. Ok, it's not just worms, it's earth-friendly gardening supplies of all kinds. What was most remarkable about Heather, to me, was her down-to-earth manner of reducing what are seemingly complex marketing problems to the very simple process of "having a chat." She makes the new media landscape as approachable as an English village.
  
• Graco talked about the success it had with bringing bloggers to an event, and made the very important point that while people distrust companies, they trust individuals. They communicated through their work in this space that Graco, the company, is also people, and wants to relate, person to person, to its customers.

Those are just a few of the high points, as I said. One of the big messages I got from the conference was the recurring theme that in approaching bloggers, it's not about you, the agency, the brand, the company, it's about them, the blogger, the customer. Even a casual survey of social media shows we're living in a consumer-centric world. Talk to these bloggers, as Susan Getgood said, the way you'd talk to your customers.

Information Week has a great piece by Boing Boing contributor Cory Doctorow on making it easy for bloggers to write about you. He runs down 17 tips to make your web site or the web-based part of your promotion friendlier to other bloggers, including the judicious use of permalinks and images, and a smart linking policy.

Looking for a way to get involved with Facebook applications at no cost to you? Do you like buttons? If so, "Pieces of Flair" just might be the right application for you or your client.

Playing off one of the best parts of Office Space, the flair application allows Facebook members a spot to display user-created buttons on their virtual bulletin board. Here's mine, just to give you an idea. And yes, I went over the "minimum flair requirement..."

For companies, this is a fun, easy way to toss up some branded imaging and add it to the mix. I think this could be a great way to encourage brand enthusiasts to try their hands at making their own flair for your product.

By Alicia Dorset

Thanks to my co-worker Nichole Woodcock, I've been fascinated with Brides Decide this morning, a site brought to us by super-big wedding giants the knot, the nest and Wedding Channel.com. And if you're wondering what this site's all about, the title sums it up:

When it comes to electing the 44th president, it's savvy women like us who are going to make history. That's why we created BridesDecide.com, a front-row ticket to the 2008 presidential election. Get informed, take our survey, and check out the candidates' real wedding photos (we couldn't resist!).

Thanks to the site, I now know that Ron Paul was married at age 21 back in 1957 and still wears the same tux size he did back in the late '50s. Would this help me make a decision on who to vote for this fall? Probably not. But for some of my friends whose poor brains are mushed with everything wedding right now... I bet it might.

What is useful for the site are the quick links up top on key issues, such as abortion, education, the war in Iraq and more. Clicking on a topic gives you a quick rundown of who's for it and who's against it. There are also links on where to register to vote and forums on the various wedding web sites that are currently talking politics.

While you might initially laugh at the thought of someone spending time looking through Hilary Clinton's wedding photos, Brides Decide is on to something- they realized their target audience has one BIG non-election topic on their minds this year, and if they want those brides to get out and vote, they need to reach them the best way they can.