News

Microsoft’s Bing solidified its #2 position in US search engine market share by expanding its deal to provide search and ads for all AOL platforms worldwide.
Many organizations discounted Facebook Messenger for a long time, but the app now has 800 million monthly users just 14 months after reaching 500 million. Ad Week takes a look at 2016’s features.
Watching gaming videos is a real thing. That is, people are going online and watching uploaded videos of other people playing video games. It’s so popular that 47% of the audience have children of their own. Take a look at the in-depth study from Google.
Caitlin Dewey of the Washington Post digested a well documented sociology study about how all those “not true” things reach your Facebook feed with people swearing by them. Dewey’s story is here. The peer-reviewed study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is here (PDF).2
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local services
Facebook continues refining its professional and local services search pages. There are still many issues with the service, but when more than one billion people have an active account, you owe it to your organization to know what Facebook is doing for you or your competitiors.
local services
You can examine Google’s counter to Facebook by looking at its new local service search features.thanks to this terrific article by The SEM Post that shows google will not be left behind in the local / mobile space for small business searches.
local services
A study of more than 400 million Tweets made in 2015 shows that there weas a lot of agreement among four big topics. Take a look at the details of the biggest Twitter subjects.
local services
Twitter is adding new teeth to its abuse policies to protect people from inappropriate messages.Among the new mandatory steps in such cases are name and telephone verification before an account can be unlocked once it is involved in abuse. Removing anonymity is a great first step to curbing abuse.
News

The FTC is serious about online advertising. Several weeks after reaching out to the online marketing industry at a conference, an “Enforcement Policy Statement” about deceptively formatted advertisements was published December 22.

Talk with your agency and make sure they can tell you what it means. If you don’t have an agency and still have questions, click the “Write George” button below.

If you use Google’s Search Console (once called Webmaster Tools), your data may have changed. Google says they have updated how they analyze web search logs.

What it means for you:the number of clicks and impressions may be higher. If your data beginning two weeks ago looks very different than what you expected, you’ll want to start analyzing the changes here.

The FTC busted LifeLock in December and now it’s added an Oracle pelt to its trophy case. Without admitting fault, wrongdoing, or paying a fine, the computer giant will have to inform the owners of 850 million computers that the Java SE software on their computer is “outdated and insecure“.

And they have to help people remove the software. The FTC suggeststs people start at this location:  https://www.java.com/en/uninstall/info.jsp

Geico’s “Moversations” ad campaign is garnering a lot of praise thanks to actress Cindy Drummond. You can see them all at AdWeek.