Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Bebo, FriendFeed, Digg, YouTube, MySpace… with new social media sites popping up almost daily, it can seem quite daunting as to how your business can use them effectively.

This is where the highly anticipated Media140 conference comes into play. The Perth leg of the event was held last week and I was lucky enough to score myself a ticket.

For those readers who are unaware…

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As the economic downturn continues to impact marketing budgets, more small businesses have turned to alternative marketing methods such as embracing social media.

According to results from the small business success index, levels of social media adoption increased from 12 percent to 24 percent over the past 12 months.

The research identified that around one in five small businesses owners are using social media in their business, which…

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Google said last week that they are considering pulling out of China after a sophisticated attack on the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Google have explained their new position on China in a lengthy blog post on the official Google blog. Here are some of the core messages from the post:

In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from…

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Google have released an update to their local business ‘Place Pages’ which gives business owners the ability to post short updates to their pages. Google says these can be used to promote a new product, event or coupon.

Here’s an example of what the new feature looks like on a business listing:

I can see this feature being especially useful for restaurants that will get a lot of traffic…

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I recently read Dennis Yu’s blog article Evolve or Die: 2010 Local Ad Agency Fiscal Models. Having met Dennis (2009 Search Marketing Expo in Sydney Australia), I have great respect for him as an individual and also for what his company does.

Many of the points that Dennis has made, are right on the money. Others, I feel, miss the mark.

At the centre of Dennis’s article, is…

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Net Market Share from Net Applications provides global usage market share statistics for browsers, operating systems and search engines. This data offers valuable insight into significant trends for internet usage.

Below we will examine browser usage for the past year, and the significant events of the past year to affect usage market share. Data included spans from December 2008 to December 2009.

From December 2008 to December 2009,…

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Google’s now famous for changing their logo with major events and this holiday season has been no exception. Below you can see a collection of holiday logos (or homepages) from Google and other major search engines!

Google

Yahoo!

Bing

Ask.com

Search Engine Roundtable has a full coverage of even more logos if you’re interested!

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Google Analytics have launched a new ‘annotations’ feature which lets you bookmark major campaigns/events within your statistics for future reference. This will help to explain a spike or drop in traffic to other members within your organization, without having to dig through the past.

Here’s an example of how this will look,

This is a great feature which will end up saving many people a lot of time.…

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Reports have surfaced that Yahoo! is considering closing down their blog social networking service, MyBlogLog, which they acquired in 2007 for around 10 million dollars.

If you’ve never used the service before, MyBlogLog offers the ability to create and interact with different blog communities. Users can install a widget on their blogs which shows MyBlogLog members who have visited their pages and also provides some basic readership…

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Nielsen have shared their predictions for the advertising market in 2010, with smartphone and social networking advertising set to provide new sales channels.

Here’s a look at their top 5 trends from the Nielsen blog:

1. Optimizing media convergence is a top priority. A better understanding of media convergence will manifest in order to deliver a better return on investment. The ability to accurately measure activity and link online ads…

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