Ping has had a rocky road since its launch last Wednesday with Apple’s social network being hit with comment spam and international availability issues. It has also received lackluster reviews from the media.

However, that hasn’t stopped droves of people from trying out the iTunes-based social network. Apple says that 1/3 of users that have downloaded iTunes 10 have joined Ping.

Should we be surprised, though? More than 160 million people have iTunes, and curiosity is always at a high after an Apple announcement. While Ping may have over 1 million registered users, that doesn’t mean they’ll still be using the social network three months from now. Those are the numbers we’ll be interested in, as those will be the figures that determine Ping’s fate and how we can harness it’s power. Watch this space…

So, let’s take a look at how some big brands are using Foursquare…

Zagat

Zagat is the go-to guide for restaurant and hotel reviews, and their embrace of numerous social media channels is noteworthy. The type of service Zagat offers is particularly suited to Foursquare, and they use the network like an individual user would – by leaving food-related tips about locations.

Zagat leaves tips and recommendations in the Foursquare system and Foursquare users can submit their own suggestions for activities and dishes to order at a particular restaurant, which will pop up when their friends “check in” on Foursquare from that venue.

But the Zagat partnership adds a slightly different layer to the content by incorporating recommendations culled from the company’s repository of reader reviews. For example, users who check into a Zagat-ranked restaurant will receive suggestions about great dishes or the best dessert on the menu.

Zagat’s Foursquare account is an obvious way to reinforce everything the brand is known for, and perhaps tap into a new demographic of diners who may be reluctant to carry around a paperback guide in addition to their smartphones.

MTV

Fans can keep tabs on the favorite haunts of stars from Jersey Shore and The Hills, driving the social connection to these personalities beyond the TV and into our everyday lives.

Not only can users see where the stars have been, but also what they did, enjoyed, and recommend.

The History Channel

When users check in around various U.S. cities, they can find historical tidbits about their location and unlock the limited edition History Channel badge (below).

The account leaves tips at various sites, including interesting historical background on the locations. It’s trivia, but with a real-world and educational context.

This is a clever use of indirect marketing. The History Channel doesn’t have to promote its shows or link back to content to remind fans why they enjoy the programming. More than 47,000 followers are already enjoying the historical tips left by the account, since its launch in April.

Conde Nast’s Lucky Magazine

Launched in time for New York Fashion week, the collaboration offers Foursquare users tips for the best places for a cocktail, WiFi, coffee, etc, near all show locations. So if you check into a show location on Foursquare, Lucky will give people tips on where to go near these big venues in-between shows. Each location will be hand-picked and recommended by Lucky editors.

But, just like the other recent Foursquare partnerships, there’s a long-term angle too. This takes the form of a Lucky Shopping Directory which is a list of about 700 stores maintained inside Foursquare. If you pop into one of these locations, and check in on Foursquare, you’ll get tips and incentives like discounts or deals plus the usual Foursquare badges.

New Yorker Magazine

New York Magazine uses Foursquare to drive home its coverage of city-specific culture and targets the social New Yorker with tips on retail stores, bars, and public spaces.

The tips offer details on pricing and goings-on, and provide links back to the New Yorker website for deeper coverage. In this regard, New York Magazines’ approach to Foursquare is akin to the Twitter strategy of many publishers, with the added value of location.

As we discussed before, a good blog isn’t just a chance to build links and include keyword-rich relevant content. A blog is also a brilliant way to boost your company’s reputation – and your professional profile too. It’s a way of voicing an opinion, breaking news and feeding out information to your audience, and places you or your company as an industry leader.  So a blog is well worth the time and effort you put into it – even if it may not seem so at first!

However, getting started is always the most daunting part – and it is easy to make mistakes.  So, to help you along the way, we’ve put together some handy tips when getting started on your blog…

1) Use descriptive titles

Search engines look to the title of a post to see what it contains and they place value on the headline. So, if your blog is primarily for SEO purposes then a keyword rich, descriptive title will be very important – rather than a pun or teaser style title.

2) Use dynamic URLs

Don’t let your blog post URLs go to waste by using numbers for articles. Make sure that you blog posts include the blog title in the URL (like this one). Not only does it look more professional, it’s also great for SEO  and can have a positive impact to clickthrough rates when listed in Google search results.

3) Post frequently

A blog is a bit like a puppy – not just for Christmas, and needs constant care and attention. It’s a big commitment because it needs to be updated frequently, and that’s one of the most important parts of blogging. Additionally, since Google launched its new indexing system, Caffeine, searchers can find new content easier than ever. Therefore,  frequent blog posts will benefit any online company as it’s a great way to get new information to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). Plus search engines love fresh, regularly updated content and they’ll trawl your pages frequently to look for it, so your content will be found sooner. It’s a win win situation but will take time and commitment.

4) Write for an online audience

People tend to read the web differently to books or offline newspapers and your writing style should try to reflect that. The online reader is a little more lazy and will tend to skim-read articles. Just bear this in mind  while writing so: keep paragraphs short, use  sub headings and cut out waffle.

5) Write guest posts

One way to build a reputation, gain inbound links to your site and forge links with others in your industry is to write guest blog posts and articles. So, as well as writing your own blog, consider submitting guest posts to other sites. As with your personal blog, the benefits can be considerable.

6) Socialise

At the beginning, you probably won’t have a huge readership – but don’t be disheartened. Use social platforms like Twitter, forums and comments in other people’s blogs to interact with your desired audience, this can drive traffic to your pages.

7) Publicise your blog on your site

Don’t bury your blog. Make your posts obvious to visitors to your site by showcasing some of the recent headlines down the side of your homepage and link frequently to relevant blogging categories throughout your pages. It may help drive a sale and will definitely show that you’re a company with its finger on the industry pulse.

8) Make it easy to subscribe

Your blog is competing with potentially thousands of other blogs, so make it easy for people to subscribe to your posts.  Offer an RSS feed (like ours above) and perhaps a ‘Follow us on Twitter’ option. Put these in prominent places so that people can sign up quickly and easily to receive future content.  Place any barriers between your reader and a subscription option and you are likely lose them.

9) Offer related posts

Don’t let your reader finish your blog post and leave (it’s not uncommon for blog articles to have high bounce rates). Offer them some related posts so that they can easily find other relevant content and if you are selling a product or service, make sure you like directly to related product pages. This will ensure that your older posts remain useful and will build internal links which are good for SEO.

10) Don’t be afraid to link out

This can be a contentious point among SEOs, but you should link to articles and resources that your readers are likely to find interesting. Not only will this enhance your blog’s value to your readership, but it will also make other bloggers aware of your articles and increase the chance that they will link to you in the future.

Apple is currently soaring on the sales success of the iPad, and the consumer technology giant has smashed Wall Street expectations after profits surged on strong demand for new products – including the iPad.

The company, which sold almost as many of its new iPad tablets as Mac computers, said revenues jumped 61 per cent to $15.7 billion (£10.3bn) in its second quarter. Profits rose 78 per cent to $3.25bn. So far, it has sold about 3.3 million iPads during its first three months on the market.

While it remains to be seen if the iPad’s initial success can be maintained, it is possible that this nifty device has the potential to be a game changer in computing, and the way in which we browse and design for the web.

The launch of the iPad can be seen as a significant step towards the advancement of consumer computing, locking away the complexities of a powerful operating system beneath a streamlined, polished user interface. Although the iPad is a fully portable device, it’s totally different from a laptop, and boasts a large touch screen and 10 hour battery life. This makes it the ultimate tool for enjoying the web. So, with the iPad being different from everything that has come before, how should you approach designing for it?

Should conventional design for desktops apply? Or should designers draw on insight provided by mobile projects? We predict that from the launch of the iPad will emerge a new design hybrid, one which combines aspects of desktop and mobile design.

However, whether the iPad is able to change the world or not, is not the issue of this article. The fact of the matter is that the iPad is here and that, with 3.3 million of them already sold, we must design for the web whilst keeping it in mind. So, what do we need to consider?

Bright screen

The iPad is so bright that long term use can fatigue users. Therefore designers should consider colour contrast. Perhaps use light greys instead of white and dark greys instead of full on black. The backlit iPad screen is not ideal for long term textual consumption, so do your users a favour and mix up photos and video to make for a less strenuous experience.

Pixel density

The device’s pixel density, combined with screen dimensions that lie somewhere between a desktop and mobile phone, mean that neither downscaling desktop sites nor upscaling mobile sites is ideal.

Links and Hover Effects

Most important is the fact that the iPad is a large touch screen device. This is a fundamental long term difference and a move from mouse to finger. Just think, there are a number of complexities in rendering an interface that defines hover and mouse in/mouse out features on a device that has no pointing mechanism!

As the primary method of user interaction with the iPad are the fingers, all those hover effects that were favourable for pointer-based devices will be a hurdle in user experience on the iPad. As, when using a finger and touching the screen, you loose the hover state.

Also the links can no longer be concealed in a text and left for the user to dexterously click upon. Therefore you might want to resize the links so that the user experience does not suffer. Also consider the concept of mousing (and Fitts’ Law). Will users be as accurate with their finger as a mouse cursor?

The Fold

The iPad changes the nature of the fold. The ability to change orientation makes the fold exist twice – and in two different places. Hopefully, this will stop people worrying about whether users will scroll because, if there ever was a device that makes people want to scroll, the iPad is it.

Device orientation and fluid width design

As some iPad apps lack consistency between modes (sometimes only some features are available in landscape mode) it would not be advisable to have different designs for different orientations. Two designs may also confuse users when they switch modes. It’s also worth thinking about how a user might hold the device and the fingers they may use to navigate a site.

As the iPad has no right way of viewing websites, you can view pages either in landscape or in the portrait mode. But for the designer that means two completely different layouts for which to design. It is for this specific reason that the iPad highlights the need for smart fluid width design. Using a smart combination of CSS and Javascript the User Experience can be made to improve drastically.

HTML5

Every new Apple mobile device and every new Mac (along with the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser) supports web standards including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. The iPads strong support for web standards may also benefit designers in another way, especially with the release of the OS4. Apple’s iAd platform is based around HTML5, which offers opportunities to anyone well versed in the technology. Revealed by Jobs last April, iAd aims to provide media rich in-app mobile advertising that (according to Apple) will provide the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web. With Google openly adopting HTML5 for Youtube, it is only a beginning of the things to come with HTML5.

Additional benefits

Although unconventional in interface terms, the iPad is a good citizen when it comes to webs standards. Safari for iPad is one of the most advanced, standard compliant browsers around. Also, WebKit (an open source web browser engine and also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari) is the only browser engine. WebKit is appealing to designers because they know exactly what they are designing for and don’t have to worry about how a design may appear on a range of different browsers. This allows for more focus when creating an iPad specific site.

Two sides of the argument

Designers are not united regarding optimisation for the iPad. Some say that there is no need unless iPad users are your core audience. However, if you can make something look good on the iPad, it is likely that it will look good on a desktop too.

Others say that designing specifically for the iPad will mean that users are not left in the lap of the Gods. Removing the need to zoom to read text, or ensuring that text links are large enough to be easily ‘clicked’ by a finger will remove a barrier between the users and your content. You don’t want uses to have to constantly adjust viewing behaviour because your content does not arrive formatted for easy consumption.

Nevertheless, it would be bad practice to develop a website specifically for the iPad platform – just as we no longer create sites specifically for the Mac or PC. Think of the iPad as another step in the evolution of the way in which we design for the web. As with every new device that comes out, we must take into account the subtle differences and play to its strengths and weaknesses.

Now, six months later, almost half (47%) of 18-24-year-olds use real-time search results. However, just 8% of these users find them useful (according to research by Tamar).

But what about other types of search results?

Interestingly, by looking into the search habits of 2,210 people, Tamar’s report also showed that just 4% of people would choose paid search results over natural search results, down by 1% on 2009 and down 6% on 2007.

The research found that people over 55 were the least likely to trust paid search as a trusted source with just 3% choosing it over natural search results.

Younger people are increasing their use of mobile to search as 14% of both 18-24-year olds and 25-34-year-olds use mobile search every day.

Neil Jackson, search strategy director at Tamar, said, “Consumers have decided that natural search is the route they trust more and this defines the strategic starting point for all brands, which need to focus on being highly visible ‘naturally’ through campaigns that reach effectively across a wide range of media and devices, especially mobile – a huge growth area for the search engines.”

Take a look at Temperley London’s facebook page , click on the ‘Store’ tab and you’ll see a page that acts as a shop front to the Temperley online shop – directly from Facebook.

Of course, Temperley aren’t the first brand to embrace this idea (brands have been using FBML (Facebook Markup Language) in Facebook to modify pages for a while now). However, what’s so clever about the Temperley Store page is that website and social media administrators at Temperley do not need any knowledge of HTML or FBML in order to modify the page.

In fact, this page is created and controlled entirely through their CMS. So, if they wanted to change their hero product, layout of the page or link through to a specific product instead of to category pages, they could do this quickly and easily in house.

Although it seems as though Facebook will be launching a payment platform very soon, this is currently not available and (for many reasons) may not be right for them in the future anyway. So, for Temperley London, this method of directing Facebook users straight to purchase on the website is  a perfect way of monetizing their page quickly and efficiently.

You may remember a previous post on mobile apps and mobile websites which explored the necessity to build apps for different operation platforms (android, apple, blackberry and so on). Whilst I am still a firm believer in the fact that other phones will slowly eat into the iPhone’s market share, there is no denying the unbelievable appeal of the iPhone (especially with the release of the iPhone 4 tomorrow at 8am).

In fact, a statistic (posted on  NMA online and taken from ComScore) today stated that: “The number of European iPhone users rose 161% to 10m users in the year to April, accounting for 18% of all smartphone users”.

However, it seems as though the Android is slowly starting to catch up…

ComScore also indicated that the number of people with smartphones using Google’s Android operating system is rising at an even faster rate. The number of Android users rose 2,429% to 1.8m in Europe between April 2009 and April 2010.

And to finish, some words from Jeremy Copp, European VP of mobile at ComScore,  “Google’s Android is most certainly the one to watch. It has gained about 1.7m users in a very short period of time and now accounts for 3% of the European smartphone market.”

Although this news is nothing new, the topic of brand name bidding re-emerged when, earlier this week, an article published in NMA stated that, according to a report sent to them by Marks & Clerk: “[out] of 266 UK marketers and business executives, 71% were “uncomfortable” with Google allowing brands to bid on rivals’ keywords, with 63% saying it’s unacceptable when a brand is protected by a trademark.” (NMA, Trademark bidding may be controversial, but is it common place? May 28^th 2010).

However, the overall gist of NMA’s article was that although some brands are bidding on their competitors’ terms, it might not be happening as much as one might expect, and that additionally, it might not be as detrimental an effect on brands as was once expected. This was the conclusion arrived at after researchers at NMA looked at all the main department stores and supermarkets on the UK high street. They found that the only brand bidding on a rival term was House of Fraser on Debenhams.

So, never one to be out done, I conducted a little research of my own, but this time looking at smaller, more high end brands…

One of the first brand names I researched was ‘links of london’. The results were surprising. In the sponsored links, were a host of counterfeit websites with ‘links of london’ in the URL but with no use of the phrase in the ad text (Google will investigate ads which are using the brand keyword in the ad text). Some websites listed in these paid for links were so similar to the real thing, that it was quite hard to tell the official from the fake. Damaging? I think so – especially to luxury or high end brands. The same went for other luxury brands which returned sponsored links that the official brand might not be too happy about.

However, I would agree with NMA in that it is probably not happening as much as we all expected when Google first broke the news. In fact, during my search, I found few reputable, well known brands which had bid on other, similar sized, rival brands. In fact it tended to be poor quality, counterfeit or little known websites which had bid on bigger brand names (when the brand was not available to buy on the site in question – instead offering an alternative or fake product). That, or the listings were genuine stockists of the brand.

Therefore, in conclusion, although rival companies do not seem to be bidding on their competitors as much as expected, it is still damaging to a brand who does not want to see their product flogged on a discount or counterfeit site. Additionally, according to studies conducted back in 2009, the sectors most affected by the change was the travel and insurance sectors (ones which I did not research this time round).

So, what should a brand do?

Firstly, as demonstrated by Google vs. LVMH, there is little to be gained in taking legal action out against an online giant such as Google. Therefore, I would persist in arguing that brands need to remain focused on their organic search listings, and not focus solely other types of online brand building activities. Any brands’ strategy – large or small, should include organic SEO so that they appear at the top of Google’s organic search results.

Do not rely on paid listings to avoid good, old-fashioned search engine optimization – consumers still prefer organic listings over paid for links. Regardless of what’s going on in the paid section, ensure your site and brand shows up at the top of the natural, algorithmic section of the search. This alone will reinforce the relevance of your brand to the search term entered.

But remember that YouTube isn’t the only video online video community on the web. Although Google sites (YouTube is owned by Google) continue to dominate the space, they account for just under half of videos streamed during a month. According to comScore.com, the main growth drivers were sites such as BBC properties, Megavideo.com, and Facebook.com.

The time has come to showcase another brilliant viral, and how fitting that this one should include the much anticipated iPad.

Right now we just can’t get enough of the guys at Blendtec who have created a superb collection of video virals entitled ‘Will it Blend’ to market their Blendtec blenders. Each week, Tom Dickson (the founder of Blendtec) asks the all important question, “will it blend?” and attempts to blend a varity of items to demonstrate the power behind his blenders.

Click here to see the iPad being blended.

Although we’ve chosen to showcase the iPad episode here, other previous experiments have included: Toms’ Tom Tom, Nike trainers, a Rubik’s cube, 6 Bic lighters, a 15 foot garden hose, Spam, Cubic Zirconia, an iPod and oysters.

To see more of Tom’s crazy antics visit: http://www.blendtec.com/willitblend