Facebook has tripled its advertiser base in the last year. Yes, tripled. Bloomberg reports on the uptick (comparing it to Google’s first sequential drop in quarterly sales last quarter), speaking with Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of product marketing for monetization.

In case you’re wondering, the specific advertising product that’s garnered so much popularity was first unveiled in 2007. Bloomberg describes it thusly:

The automated ad system . . . lets companies make small edits to their ads during campaigns and suggests words for advertisers to target users. The ads, which appear on users’ Facebook home pages, allow 25 characters in the title and as many as 135 characters in the body of the text and an optional photo.

And it turns out that Facebook is employing a revolutionary idea to get these and other ad formats (such as their “Engagement ads”) out there.

Wait for it.

Wait for it.

A sales staff. I know, seriously, can you believe it?! Aside from selling advertising inventory, this staff also:

The company also has been helping advertisers target users when they become fans of certain products or brands. Users can visit fan pages where they learn more about the products and connect with others.

And if their advertiser base has tripled YOY, it sounds like they’re doing their job—especially in light of recent reports of rampant click fraud on the social network’s ads.

eMarket Analyst Debra Aho Williamson told Bloomberg, “Everything is starting to solidify for [Facebook]. They’re definitely getting the hang of it.”

What do you think—is Facebook hitting its stride or does it have a long way to go to catch up?

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“Be it products, housing, jobs or vehicles, we want to make it easy for you to upload and manage your content in Base,” announced Dimitris Meretakis on the Official Google Base Blog.  “The new dashboard provides a better overview of the status of your bulk uploads and your items.”

A pictorial comparison followed, and the fresh arrangement is definitely a big improvement over the old one; in typical Google style, there’s little clutter and a lot of organization.  The presence of fewer colors even makes the font easier to read.

Meretakis more or less stopped giving out concrete facts at this point in the blog entry.  He did, however, state that other improvements are in the works, writing, “A number of useful features are underway . . . .  We’ll keep you posted as new features develop.”

Now, if I just didn’t have to make six trips to carry in all the paper towels.

These individuals have visited MySpaceMaster.net, CoolMySpaceComments.com, and FreeMySpaceBackgrounds.com (among as many as 110 other sites) in an effort to spruce up their profiles.  comScore’s stats put visits to this “Total Unduplicated MySpace Ecosystem” at 11,928 in September of 2007; in September of 2006, only 8,800 visits were made.

A similar rise occurred in the category of “Duplicated – 2 or More Sites”: the number increased from 3,460 to 5,008 in the span of a year.  These are increases of 36 and 45 percent, respectively; it hardly needs saying, but that’s fairly impressive.

It’s also part of a trend of improvements at MySpace.  In the past few days, we’ve seen the social network launch its first original series, announce a new gaming channel, and plan a huge expansion.  A broader pattern may go against this grain – Peter Kafka notes that “Rupert Murdoch seems to have reduced the web unit’s FY 08 revenue goals” and “[u]nique visitors at MySpace seem to finally have peaked this summer” – but MySpace’s most dedicated users seem unwilling to leave it just yet.

I recently created an Internet marketing mind map and published it on my tools subdomain with a link to it from tools.seobook.com, but nobody mentioned it. A few days later I blogged about it on SeoBook.com and dozens of webmasters linked to it. Same publisher, same content, drastically different results…because one channel has attention while the other does not.

The Flaw of Pull Marketing Advice

Much of the marketing advice offered on blogs assumes that you have a well read blog and can get away with great content spreading based on pull marketing, but when you publish a new site and write about ideas that others covered you don’t get the credit you deserve until you build an attention asset. Which means you have to use push marketing until you get readers / subscribers / brand advocates.

Markets are not fair. People are more likely to link to familiar trusted channels then new channels. It can take years to build a significant readership. And if you wait for it to happen on its own it may never happen.

Ineffective Blogging

It is hard to be the regular news spot just by producing similar news to what is available on other channels. If you cover stories that are worth spreading, but are not dong much more than syndicating them, then even if your content is useful the reference links skip past you and on to the end story you wrote about. You might get a hat tip link here or there, but you are not going to get many if you have few readers. And those links are not going to be enough to pull readers away from market leading channels, to do so requires people talking about you. Your content has to amalgamate ideas from multiple sources or unique perspectives such that people are TALKING ABOUT YOU.

Owning an Idea

If you do not have enough leverage to own mainstream ideas then you need to own ideas on the edge or borrow the authority of someone or something else. The first person to crack an iPhone got lots of exposure. Announcing a new Google feature gets you exposure. Real in depth reviews of exciting new stuff gets you exposure. Every market has an Apple, a Google, or some relation to one of those companies.

The easiest way to get a community involved in your site is to ask them for involvement. Collect their feedback and aggregate it in a meaningful format. And interviewing a market leader is an easy way to leverage someone else’s brand and gain attention. Getting community involvement is crucial because each trusted person who associates with you moves you that much further away from being irrelevant or potentially spammy. They make you worth paying attention to because they cared enough to participate.

If you get community participation it also protects your idea. It gets competitors called sleazy when they clone your idea and throw a few more marketing dollars at it.

What if you can’t get anyone to participate? Desperate times require desperate measures! Wrap your message in a fictitious backdrop based on real world opinions. Want to reach out to financial bloggers? Notice they are talking about Alan Greenspan a bunch recently? Tell everyone why Alan Greenspan thinks Google is under-priced. Quote his principals and use them to justify Google at $2,400 per share.

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All right, so it sounds a little hokey, but the effort has some admirable goals.  Google.org has partnered with TechnoServe, and “[t]he program is designed to help Tanzanian entrepreneurs develop skills, obtain seed or expansion capital and establish the networks that help transform their business ideas into successful enterprises that create jobs and other income sources that transform the lives of all Tanzanians,” reports Alex Mkindi, TechnoServe’s Deputy Country Director in Tanzania, on the Official Google Blog.

Aside from the human-interest aspect, it’s also a pretty good PR move – thanks to Street View, and to some less-than-complimentary findings from Privacy International, Google’s not being looked at in quite the same “fun and quirky” way.  Believe Begin Become should at least reinforce the image of “goodness” that Google prefers.

It should act to elevate Google’s position within Tanzania, as well.  The search engine company has previously arranged to bring servers into the region, but with a new base of operations just a bit to the north, training 250 people in business management could lead to some very positive outcomes.

Indeed, David Bulengo, who works on the Believe Begin Become Organizing Committee, states, “The network of professionals and business leaders involved with Believe Begin Become will allow a new generation of young entrepreneurs the chance to learn from their experience and to create wonderful business opportunities.”

Whatever Google’s reasons for participating in this endeavor, it seems that Believe Begin Become’s outcome will be undeniably positive.

It took five years to collect some 80,000 incidents from 1970 through 2004 and assemble them into the Terrorism Knowledge Base, at The Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT).

Resource Shelf noted the unveiling of the Terrorism Knowledge Base. The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism based at the University of Maryland put it together.

"We’re not just counting up the number of attacks. We’re looking at a long list of specific details, as well as social and economic considerations that may help us understand the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of terrorism," Gary LaFree, director of START, a University of Maryland professor and a criminologist by training, said in the announcement.

Some interesting facts have emerged from early searches of the database, according to LaFree:

Already, searches of the database have offered some myth-busting findings: average age of a terrorist group is one year or less; 74 percent of all groups known to launch attacks between 1970 and 1997 lasted for only 1 year or less; majority of attacks resulted in zero fatalities; 1.2 percent of cases resulted in the death of 25 or more people. Terror incidents began rising some in 1998, and that level remained relatively constant through 2004.

While a lot of information is now open to the public, some data will be limited to access by the Department of Homeland Security, which funded the project, and other elements of the Intelligence Community.

 As noted in todays post by on the Google Base blog one way to solve that problem is to create different landing pages for your Google Base entries. That is not so great advice from a company that suggest that we make pages for people and not bots. Besides the amount of effort you would have to put into making the pages, you could end up looking spammy and creating a metric crap ton of duplicate content. I don’t think the they really thought this post all the way through.

An altogether easier way it to simply add a query string to your Google Base submission that designates the source of the traffic. An example might look like this “http://mycoolsite.com/super-cool-page/?ref=base”. Then to determine the amount of traffic you get from Google Base go to the Content Section, select the “landing pages report”, and in the “find url search” at the bottom search for urls containing “ref=base”.

Now isn’t that much easier than duplicating your whole site?

Step One:

Step Two:

Step Three:

And the new:

It’s like this for all the verticals listed on the homepage, including recipes, housing, jobs, hotels, and anything else listed here. It’s a really nice improvement, besides looking better and having more white space, also giving you all those boxes to refine your search, and multiple views for the search results (list view, grid view and map view.

Thanks so much for Arie for pointing me at the new interface.

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Froogle Shops For A Frugal Experience

White background, Google name on top, search box in the middle, one or two buttons next to the box.

That’s pretty much the trade dress for a Google product finding its way into a browser window, and as of now it’s a look shared by the service formerly knows as Froogle.

Google’s shopping and product search now goes by the more descriptive name of Google Product Search.

Google’s Marissa Mayer blogged about the name change, saying the Froogle name caused confusion for some people.

We liked the Froogle name, a mild play on the word "frugal." Frugal Google, find stuff for sale on Froogle. Even though it may look like a missed opportunity, Froogle never really caught on with people and had been one of Google’s low-trafficked services.

Now it’s being recast as a pipeline into Google Base, with a helpful link to Information for Sellers on the Product Search page.

Google also touts its Checkout service at the same link. Upload your stuff, set up a payment process, and wait for the buyers to arrive.

The seller is also invited to create AdWords ads for their offers. That’s the real aim of Product Search, since search advertising is virtually all of Google’s revenue.

Something that we aren’t seeing at press time is Product Search results appearing in regular Google searches.

Doing a query on Google for something showing up as an item "recently found with Google Product Search" doesn’t bring up a OneBox of shopping results. We expect that will change as Google finishes the switch away from Froogle.

The session, simply titled "Shopping Search Tactics," featured presentations from analyst Brian Smith of ComparisonEngines.com, and from Brian Mark, chief technical officer at Toolbarn.com.

Smith opened his portion with a gloomy warning: This will not be as easy as Google AdWords. If you’re submitting your product information to a shopping engine, read the directions carefully – each engine has its own guidelines for data feed submissions.

There’s no optimal automated XML solution (though some circles are pushing for an open standard), so for each feed, you’ll have to hand key the information, adding as much as possible in the spaces provided. 

There are lots of engines to submit a feed to, but an important one is Google Base. "There is an amazing opportunity to get a lot of sales through Google Base," said Smith, "because if you get to the top of these results you appear in Google’s main results."

But also, he teases, Google Base offers custom attributes, and the Mountain View, Calif.-based company "is going to announce something very soon that will make this more advantageous."

Until then, Smith gives this nutshell full of advice:

There is an opportunity to do great SEO work through your data feed. Look at the data feeds for blank fields.

If you don’t have a title that is unique you are in trouble. Make titles that are more specific for search engines. There is an opportunity to really get out there and show the user what they are searching for.

No matter what people say search engine optimization is still about the content on the page. Make sure your product pages have good content.

Don’t use image links with the shopping engines.

Say exactly what you sell in the one-line description in your data feeds.

Just how important is it to establish your presence in the shopping search engines? Brian Mark says it’s about 40 proof worth of important.

"The shopping engines can offset drops from organic search results," said Mark. "We are getting over 20% of our customers from shopping engines. From AdWords, 4%; MSN, 6%; Yahoo, 9%; and 22% of our customers are repeat customers at toolbarn.com."