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We’ve seen an increased amount of site traffic to the Mustang homepage. We’ve seen an increase in leads. We’ve seen an increase in engagement rates when we post about it on our Facebook page. We’ve seen increases across the board.

Source: Ford Mustang Rides Social App For Sales Leads

Yes, social media is oversold. It’s no silver bullet. This isn’t social media’s fault though, sometimes there are only lead bullets. (Most times, actually.)

What social media is is another tool in a vast array of publishing options available to marketers today. And occasionally, as in Ford’s Case above, it’s just the thing.

Israel announced plans last week to use the Web to improve its image abroad in two ways: by setting up a new unit of the Israel Defense Forces devoted to fighting criticism on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and through what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz described as “an initiative by the Information and Diaspora Ministry to train people to represent Israel independently on the Internet.”

Whenever you read about the newspaper industry all you hear about is the decline of revenue and how all papers will soon disappear. Everyone is fighting for eyeballs and the way they do it is by looking like their competition?

A good breakdown on the the current state of online news from a web design standpoint. Rightly so, many of the comments point to Article Skimmer by The New york Times as being out in front of the competition in this area.

Is this you reading these lines in your very special personal way? Or is this me letting you read my lines in my way?

Yet another excellent (short) essay by Information Architects on the industry we work in. Ending with the astute observation that design does not let us control how people feel, but who we reach.

Use themeleon to customize the way Twitter looks for you and how your profile looks to others. Use any of the more than 679,339 background patterns & 1,037,130 color palettes on COLOURlovers or customize any of the colors or patterns to get just the right design for you.

The concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages.

Under the First Click Free programme, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites.

Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages…

…BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones said the concession was relatively minor but Mr Murdoch might see it as vindication of his decision to take on Google.

Now seems like a good time to revise and extend my remarks… Not really, I stand by what I said not 12 hours ago: Rupurt Murdoch and Newscorp are underestimating a lot of lean content producers. The less old media that’s available online the more new media there will be to fill in the blanks. (And I suspect this more about Bing than newspapers for Google.)

Google isn’t a strategy, or even an e-marketing strategy. Google is a tremendously robust search partner for marketers, but it’s one partner in the tactical execution of search, where search may be one of the channels used in an overall e-marketing strategy.

Considering how popular and succinct the “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” cautionary tale is, it’s surprising how many people don’t get it. Google is a basket, not the basket.

After launching IE 8 in March, Micosoft has concurred with critics that IE 6 is outdated. Many people have dropped the older browser, but the remaining users are often the tough cases–those who don’t have a choice because of corporate computing policy or who aren’t tech-savvy enough to realize there’s a reason to move on.

It’s this latter population Microsoft is targeting with a campaign that runs through June 2010 that touts its own IE 8 as a better alternative. The campaign’s first visible elements are a video aimed at online holiday shoppers and a Web slice to promote daily deals at eBay. Web slices are basically live bookmarks that can show miniature Web pages in the browser.

The rough-hewed interiors of these not Starbucks Starbucks haven’t really mattered to the journalists and bloggers who have been writing about them.  They talk only about the naming patterns in Starbucks’ most recent branding strategy.

To them, the names of the stores represent a brand crisis.  Quite rightly, they point out, when a brand hides its own identity, it is in some ways admitting defeat, saying that its name – a central part of any brand – has lost value.  When it comes to Starbucks, all of this is true, but the question is why?  Why has the Starbucks brand lost so much value that it has to hide from customers and act like a small business?  The answer to these questions rests with communities and consumers, what they care about and desire the most these days.

Over the last several years, a quiet but decided shift in buying patterns has taken place.  Really, there is something of a velvet revolt or a quiet rejection of brands going on.

…could the fact that Twitter.com’s new list feature lets users create arbitrary lists with free text descriptions expose the potential to damage somebody’s reputation?

The answer is a resounding yes. As an experiment, Michael Gray (SEO expert) created a Twitter list titled People who bought links, a big SEO no-no, and populated it with a single Twitter user; Matt Cuts. (Har-har, Matt Cutts is currently head of Google’s Webspam Team.) Then it got interesting…

That Twitter list ranked 1st for the keyphrase “people who bought links” within 48 hours. (It’s since been taken down.) Is this a problem? You bet. Appearing on the wrong list could definitely lose you a job interview or a first date, if not even more serious things.

There is a simple solution for this: block the person that has set up the list and your listing disappears. But this means constantly monitoring what Twitter lists you are on. One more opt-in solution of online reputation control is not what any of us need. We need simpler solutions, few of those are coming, however.

Businesses are under no obligation to sign up to a paid account, but doing so will provide them with a “special layer of access”, including feedback and statistics, said Stone. Many big name brands and companies have embraced Twitter as a way of communicating directly with consumers and engaging with customers. Personal accounts remain free.

I think the real goldmine, here, is that the accounts with come with verification, so that pro accounts also come with credibility. They could charge thousands, and businesses and valuable personae would be lining up around the block city state to buy them.

Social networking sites are among many new tools law enforcement has adopted tofind underage drinkers, said La Crosse police officer Al Iverson, who works in alcohol compliance and education.

“Law enforcement has to evolve with technology,” Iverson said.

Right or wrong, it’s one more case of don’t-put-things-about-yourself-online-that-you-wouldn’t-hand-out-on-a-busy-street-corner, because that’s a pretty good analogy for the internet. (Note: this includes pictures of you drinking under age at a college party.)

I do think it’s amusing that the police in this case were ostensibly using a fake Facebook profile with a hot girl’s picture to socially engineer their way into private profiles by getting friended.

Firefox is steadily gaining in use. Last week, Web traffic monitoring firm Net Applications announced Firefox cleared 25 percent share of those using browsers worldwide–not dethroning Internet Explorer by any means but still winning over new users. Mozilla estimates there are more than 300 million Firefox users total, and this week said there are more than 300,000 testers using the Firefox 3.6 beta.

This page shows the daily web browsing marketshare for mobile phones of interest, which is calculated from all mobile traffic across the 150,000+ sites that are tracked by getclicky.com. It is updated every 30 minutes.

In the past 10 days the iPhone has been bouncing between 51% and 58% of total mobile web surfing in the US (Outside the US it’s spiked as high as 66%-one third of all non-us mobile devices online are iPhones). I’ve yet to get my hands on a Droid, but I’ve surfed the web with both Palm and Windows Mobile hand-helds and there’s just no comparison to the iPhone in that respect. Honestly, I’m surprised these statistics aren’t even more skewed in the iPhone’s favor.

ZURB, a well-regarded interaction design and strategy firm in the San Francisco Bay Area that has in the past done work for eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, Zazzle and many other familiar names, regularly publishes insightful design deconstruction posts for homepages of some of the most popular websites on the net, using its very own Notable app (also see our review of the website feedback tool).

After taking a critical look at CNN.com, MSN.com and Twitter.com, the ZURB team has recently shined its light on TechCrunch.com.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the most popular tech blogs online is doing quite a few things right.

I don’t think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don’t think they realize how much it matters that it’s broken.

The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they’ve ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.

The organization responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses has approved a new plan to allow non-Latin characters in Web extensions.

Known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), the system is designed to globalize the Net so regions around the world can use their own local alphabet characters to surf in cyberspace, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, said Friday.

I’m pretty conflicted on this. It’s going to be a technical nightmare and it will segment the web horribly, further dividing up information along language barriers. Having said that, there’s no reason that the billion Chinese speakers online should have to know my alphabet; I’m certainly not going to learn theirs.

Today we’re excited to announce the next step for Google Maps for mobile: Google Maps Navigation (Beta) for Android 2.0 devices.

This new feature comes with everything you’d expect to find in a GPS navigation system, like 3D views, turn-by-turn voice guidance and automatic rerouting. But unlike most navigation systems, Google Maps Navigation was built from the ground up to take advantage of your phone’s Internet connection.

Garmin stockholders may be shaking in their boots because big bad Google has released a free version of their product; but the little G has the same advantage over the big G that Apple has over Microsoft–they control their hardware. This means they can offer a better user experience, which as Apple has just shown again, may be all that matters.

This does raise a good question that many a navigation software company may be asking themselves today: What do you do when Google enters your market?

- The bottom of search results will soon have social networking information from your friends, like their Flickr photos or their status updates. It’s a blended search integration, similar to seeing news or image results.

- These are pulled from social networks connected to your Google Profile. The more that are connected, the more social information that will appear in search results.

- They have also improved searching for images using social networks. Images become more relevant using social networking data.

Google just announced that social search features are coming to Google Labs in the next few weeks. It works like this: you link a social media account to your Google Profile; they start crawling/indexing that content and sticking some of the results at the bottom of your SERPs, if you’re logged in.

This seems like a sloppy approach. I’d much rather see an option to search only your social media accounts (see pic below) and have all returned results be from that index, rather than have those results mixed in with the regular stuff.

Google social search mock up - click to enlarge.

Having some social stuff pop up in my daily searches seems like feature bloat to me. Although, it would be nice to have a robust search function for that part of my online life when I need it.

Created a campaign attached to a bundle of search terms: mystery, detective story, sherlock holmes, noir, and more like those.

Came up with a whole set of names, basically wide variations on a theme. One was my original pick, but I liked all of them. Then, I created an ad for each one, all with the same body text but each with a different name swapped in for the headline.

Allocated a small budget ($40, to be exact) and kicked off the campaign. And wow there are a lot of people searching for stuff on Google. Over the span of 24 hours, my ads made about 100,000 impressions.

So the question—and I do think it’s a serious question, insofar as it’s a simulation of a decision that will confront many potential buyers of this book—the question is, which name worked?

You can do a lot with Google Adwords if you have the right mindset and a few bucks to spend. (She should use our Darwin tool to make sure she’s actually seeing real differences in the data she collected.)