Although the “thud” wasn’t verified until this afternoon, it seems that an online giant fell a couple of days ago.  According to new data from Hitwise, Facebook managed to beat Google in terms of visits between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week.

Heather Dougherty explained, “The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame.”

Then here’s one more interesting fact, courtesy of Dougherty: “Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.”

Anyway, this development represents a major win for Facebook.  The ability to represent the social network as the number one site should count for a lot as corporate representatives talk to advertisers and investors, and could result in a direct boost in revenue.  A further snowball effect in terms of user interest might occur, too, since most people like to be part of something that’s popular.

Original Article and Graphs: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/03/15/facebook-unseats-google-as-most-visited-site

Foursquare might’ve been last year’s breakout app at SXSW, but it looks like this year’s conference had a much more profound impact on the service’s growth. The location based networktweeted on Wednesday afternoon that it’s added “almost 100,000 users” in the past 10 days.

That’s a huge number when you consider that the year-old company reported having “over 500,000” users less than a week ago. Anecdotally, I can also tell you that the surge in friend requests received over the past several days roughly lines-up with the numbers that Foursquare is reporting – in other words, my network seems to be growing proportionally to Foursquare on the whole.

Foursquare also reported a record check-in day over the weekend, with 347,000 of them taking place on Saturday, a surge also fueled in large part by SXSW festivities. As for the much talked about rivalry between Foursquare and Gowalla, we’ve reached out to the latter for their own comparable stats, though theyindicated that as of Tuesday evening they’d seen 100,000 check-ins in Austin since last Thursday.

Original Article: http://mashable.com/2010/03/17/foursquare-user-growth/

Here are seven steps to getting more and better referrals, and raising your net promoter score:

Step 1 – Create a referral-generation plan: Referrals are not automatic. Some “just happen,” but most occur because you do something to trigger it. Some business owners assume that a great product or terrific customer service will generate referrals by default. Not so. You have to learn to ask, and make sure employees are on board as well. Most customers are open to being asked for referrals. Some even appreciate the opportunity to tell friends, family and associates about something good they’ve discovered.

Referral tip: The worst time to ask for a referral is at the cash register or when you present a bill. Look for opportunities earlier or later in the process when customers are more receptive.

Step 2 – Provide support: Don’t ask customers to recommend you to others without offering them some backup. It can be as simple as a supply of your business cards, or a link to a special page on your website. Or it could be a brochure, your latest newsletter or some other type of printed material that describes what you do and can reinforce the referral.

Step 3 – Offer incentives: But incentives can be tricky. The type of incentive you offer must fit with the kind of business you run. It could be a discount, service credits, an upgrade, a free item or some other trigger that will entice clients to provide referrals. Don’t be afraid to test offers to find out what works best. Communicate details of your referral program to your best customers through whatever means you have available, including a blog, newsletter, email or customer mailings. And be sure to thank customers when they make referrals.

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When you start hearing about social media taking up more budget rather than having to struggle for dollars and attention, it’s clear that the practice is gaining in legitimacy.

Remember the days of having to gently introduce the concept, or of having to prove that in fact it’s something that’s a coming trend? We had to deal with skeptics – the same type of people, who maybe less than 10 years ago, doubted that the Internet was going to catch on. And we’ve had to deal with a struggling economy and limited funding.

Things are a little different now. In fact, you might say that things are actually looking up. I think part of it may be that the tough economy forced marketers to be more savvy and frugal about their efforts, and social media became a natural receptacle for the underfunded. As such, it’s grown in stature and maturity, and with the rise of the awareness of social networks in the general public, it’s only going to get larger.

Here are a couple of charts from “The CMO Survey” undertaken by the Duke University Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association, as reported by eMarketer:
Read more: http://www.scottmonty.com/2010/03/social-media-marketing-spending-spirals.html#ixzz0iVvVsmSt

With traditional advertising proving less effective, marketers need new outlets like Twitter and Facebook to help create interest and demand. Here are some ways Twitter can make money.

1. Answer a Person’s Product Need.  We all search in Google, Yahoo, and MSN because we’re looking for something. How do the search engines make money? When people search for products and services.

A similar revenue stream could be Twitter’s. Simply ask a question, such as, “Where can I buy the foam things for my iPod headphones?” If a user tweets this, they could get answers from their “followers” — in other words, real people. Or, if they opted in, they would receive information direct from foam ear bud cover suppliers.

Now, the key for this to work, just like in search, is the relevancy. A good first step would be a simple “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” relevancy button for the supplier tweets. This puts the onus not to spam back on the advertiser, similar to Google’s quality score.

You can see why Google is possibly interested in acquiring Twitter, and also why Google launched Google Suggest, which allows users to rate search results and comment on them. Google understands that social media is their most daunting of competition.

2. Be a Recruiting Tool for Job Seekers/Recruiters.  Just like Craigslist, Twitter could have employers pay a small fee to easily tweet their jobs. The user would select which titles and occupations they want to receive tweets for.

3. White Label Twitter Functionality for Fortune 500 Companies.  Fortune 500 companies don’t understand the Web, but think they do. These companies believe they need micro-blog functionality to keep up with the “Web 2.0 times.” Don’t believe big companies do this? American Airlines and Lufthansa unsuccessfully tried to build their own social networks.

Or going back to the ’90s, remember when every company wanted to build out their own portal? AT&T thought everyone would make their My AT&T page instead of MyYahoo. A company called MyWay (part of Diller’s IAC) made some serious bucks off these portal wannabes.

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