City Tours is a new addition to Google Labs that puts Google squarely in the tourism business: Give it a city name, and Google not only suggests sites to see, but it also maps out a multi-day itinerary and proposes a minute-by-minute travel schedule for you to follow.
And what’s really impressive is that City Tours [...]

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Sure, it makes sense for most businesses to follow their customers into the world of social media. But before doing so, they must have a firm grasp on how to measure the ROI of those ventures.
For organizations, social media can serve as a private media channel that allows corporate control of the messaging. Social networks [...]

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Web analytics is critical to measuring the success of your website as you identify opportunities to improve your business and marketing initiatives. Most marketers are confused with business implications of analytics reports, so it ends up being simpler to track what you know.
Web analytics has made great strides in the past decade, from when hit [...]

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The rise of websites that empower consumers to write reviews of our businesses is causing many business owners anxiety, or even outright rage. Of course we love it when people say great things about our business, but what about when they say bad things? Do we really have a reason to fear?
Just how significant are [...]

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Bing Travel makes it much easier to find lower price flights and compare the results against many of the top travel sites like Expedia, CheapTickets, and PriceLine.
Bing.com has been launched recently with a number of useful tools. One of the things that we really enjoy about Microsoft Bing is the Travel tool.
Bing Travel makes it [...]

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You may have noticed recently that we’re in the midst of what seems to be a social media mania. You can’t pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV news without reading or hearing something about Twitter, Facebook or similar social media. Manias make me nervous.
First, this isn’t your grandma’s Internet anymore. Social media [...]

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This is now a familiar story: European privacy concerns and complaints against Google Street View. From angry mobs to European regulators, Google is confronting many more objections as it tries to visually map The Continent than it did in the US.
This installment involves German “data protection regulators” in Hamburg who object to the way that [...]

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Let’s say you’ve got a great product or service and you want to promote it using social media and you also know you can’t approach the social web as if it were old-style marketing.
Targeting prospects, talking about consumers and audiences, crafting and broadcasting your messages – that’s not the way it works. But as you [...]

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Mark Hodson discovers which companies are using Twitter in a useful way – and those you needn’t bother with
In recent weeks, dozens of airlines, airports, tour operators and tourist boards have flocked onto Twitter. Not all are using it effectively. Here’s our pick of the winners – and the losers
TRAVEL COMPANIES TO FOLLOW
Lonely Planet has [...]

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