At the NAJ Summit East conference this morning, Jennifer Barbee spoke to the audience of tour operators and destinations on the East Coast about international search and social strategies. Specializing in marketing strategies for destinations, JB’s presentation spoke to the power of SEO across multiple platforms outside of the web site…Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Press Releases, Flickr and more. JB also feels very strongly that a multi level search strategy is necessary when marketing your destination both domestically and internationally. With such topics as “Search Marketing is Forever Changed.” and “Don’t Write Keyword Checks Your Site Can’t Cash”, the discussion was flowing as the latest trends in international search strategy and social dominance was covered. Thanks to all the attendees that attended Jennifer’s presentation at NAJ Summit East this morning!

Here at JB Inc., we have a reputation for being tech junkies. And yes, the reputation is completely deserved. From iPads to Kindles, Seesmic apps to social measurement tools – we like to stay on top of the hottest new developments, and our clients know it.

So, we wanted to announce the addition of the latest new Web tool to our repertoire – Web Position Reporter. As long-term users of Web Position to make sure our SEO efforts are uber-effective, we jumped on board the newest model as soon as we heard the new features, some of which include:

“At-a-Glance Report Visibility – See the big picture in a single view. Your high-level report lets you quickly identify major successes, key trouble spots and the latest trends and changes in your search engine rankings.

Targeted Detail Summaries – Dive into the details. Drill down to see how an individual keyword’s performance fluctuates, which URLs it surfaces and on which search engines. Inspect a specific URL to see which keywords raise its visibility. Filter by search engine or position and sort by gains, losses or rank.”

And believe me, there’s lots, lots more. Like Google Analytics, but almost even cooler. Almost.

So lucky clients, you will reap the benefits of said new technology.  Aren’t you glad we’re such geeks?

As 2009 draws to a close, it’s time for a plethora of year-end lists, from “Celebs We Lost This Year” to “Hot or Not 2010” (be sure and check this one out, if you haven’t already ).

One incredibly interesting list is YouTube’s Most Watched list, recently released on their company blog. So what did the world watch in terms of online video this year? Here are the top 5:

1. Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent (120+ million views)
2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)
3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)
4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)
5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)

The underdog of the year, Susan Boyle, stole the YouTube crown, with a boy’s post-dentist video coming in a distant second.

The Wedding Entrance Dance was another popular favorite, prompting even a copycat move by the staff of NBC’s “The Office.”

In addition, YouTube outlines the fastest search terms by month. For December, the answer is far from a surprise … (hint: golf phenom). Check out a whole bunch of other interesting tidbits on YouTube’s blog.

When I was in school, our primary resource was the library…encyclopedias, history books, autobiographies, maps, etc. That was the first stop with any school project or paper. Now, my ten year old uses the internet to research for his school projects. His school is very smart with helping their students learn how to use the internet for their homework as a resource, even supplying this as part of the library experience. Each week they supply new online tools and resources as part of their newsletter sent home with students called “Web Literacy.” I have to admit that last week’s newsletter even taught me a few things about searching online.

The lesson talked about other engines that could be used to search called “Metasearch Engines” and “Specialty Engines.” Metasearch engines allows you to hit several search engines at once with a single search. These engines search specifically for meta tags used to market web sites across the internet and do so in a specific way to help provide the most relevant result. A few sites that help do this are www.polymeta.com, www.zuula.com and www.metacrawler.com.

Specialty engines can cover one topic exclusively. To search for these specialty engines, you can conduct a search on any engine of your choice with the subject and “search engines” following. For instance, Kevin has a science project coming up so to do some research on his project, he would use the term “science search engines” as his keyword in Google. This search produced www.scirus.com which offers an enormous amount of information for him.

These are helpful tools for our kids and also helps us in this industry understand the need to market your information thoroughly so that our youngsters can find what they need. Destinations especially have an advantage when it comes to those geography projects, history homework or social studies. The “About” sections in many state tourism web sites can provide an excellent resource to students.

According to Insights for Search, two of the top 10 queries in the U.S. are music-related. Google announced on October 28th, a new search feature for discovering millions of songs is made  simple with the new Google music search interface.

Have a song in mind or can’t quite remember the title of a song but know the chorus? Perform a search query and Google’s music search will give give you results that will link to an audio preview, provide links for purchasing the song and eliminate the constant thinking of “What was the name of that song”, which will definitely come in handy for me.

Google has partnered with Pandora, imeem and Rhapsody to include links to their sites that can help you discover music related to your queries. A search engine that helps you find music you like, even if you can’t tell it what you want to hear?  Again, this new feature will not only help me find the exact music I want to hear, but will also  broaden my experience with different genres of music and introduce me to a new generation of licensed online music services.

This feature is being rolled out gradually in the U.S.  This new feature should help to organize and improve searching for millions of music lovers and potentially open the doors to previously unknown artists and different types of tunes.

For their three year anniversary, Google has gifted us web worriers with three new features of its Custom Search Engine.  Let me give you a breakdown of what you can expect from these three new features:

Custom Search Themes: Select and style your search results page with themed layouts that are easily customizable and will not lock you into the same uniform format. Adding to this, you can now find a compact mobile layout that would look great for all Android, iPhone, Palm Pre and even you iPod Touch users.

Structured Custom Search: Thumbnails and actions are now part of Google Custom Search results.  This new feature will allow you to restrict your search results page according to these attributes.

Custom Search Skin – Wikipedia: Find Google search results across all Wikipedia articles. This feature will provide users with highly contextual search results while searching in Wikipedia.

These new features will allow small business and large content networks to refine their search results to help make SERPs more relevant.  Please share any comments or experiences you my have with these three new features that Google has rolled out.

Did anyone notice Google’s bigger search box? Oh yes, Google has gone bigger to make your search experience “fun”. Visit Google and you’ll find the larger search box along with larger text in the search, in the drop down menu on the homepage and on top of Google’s search results page.

Google’s Marissa Mayer says the bigger search box is “more fun to use”. I’m not sure how I feel about this statement. I don’t really see a change in my search experience with Google’s larger search box. Perhaps there’s more to the larger search box that we’re not seeing … perhaps it’s something that will be revealed in time. But for now, I will say that the visibility of my search terms has gotten slightly better for my eyes. But can you really call that “fun”?

Any thought’s?

With Microsoft trying to grow Bing with spending and deal making, recently signing a huge search deal with Yahoo, Google is starting to see that this is starting to turn into an alarming opponent.

I came across an article that stated Google has been secretly working on a new project: The Next Generation of Google Search. What exactly is Google planning to stay ahead of the game? The project is still under construction but don’t expect this to be a minor upgrade. This is something that is expected to change the entire infrastructure for Google. A new version of Google! Don’t expect to see too many differences immediately, but the goal for the new Google version is to improve indexing speed, accuracy, size and comprehensiveness.

Here is what Google has to say:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

It never ceases to amaze me how the Web has developed into an absolutely invaluable tool. When I started high school, an email address was the general extent of my Web usage. I certainly didn’t look to the Web for answers to any and all of my questions, as I do now.

Now, anything that crosses my mind, be it a bet, a health issue or the need for marketing research, I go to one place first: Google. Google is the crystal ball of the internet age. And so many other websites now exist to facilitate this “all-knowingness” of the web. Yahoo answers, Wikihow, etc. – all exist for people searching for answers.

What would I do without the treasure trove of the Web? Hard to imagine that in years past, the answer to most questions required a trip to the library and some quality time spent with the encyclopedia. Now, instant gratification is the norm. Granted, there’s clutter out there, and invalid information. But generally, as an astute researcher, it’s a simple task to cross-check your sources and weed out the trash.

Note to all Web researchers: Make sure you double check your information and find additional sources. A recent hoax by an Irish student showed that too often, reporters take information from sources like Wikipedia without double checking that info. The Web, while a superlative tool, should come with a reminder to always check your facts.

Web research is a crucial skill, and one that’s inherent to those of born in the digital age. So thank you, internet, for the vast resources you provide to us as marketers and Web savvy researchers. There is so much time saved and access to so much information that in years past, we never would have seen. It has forever transformed the world, businesses, and our individual lives. We are more educated, more astute and more innovative thanks to the vast expanse of cyberspace.

It’s still yet to be determined just how much market share Bing.com will get from Google, but it’s making more than just an impact on the search engine world…as it should, with more than $80 million devoted to advertising the new engine.

Bing is being branded as a “decision engine” which allows users to get deeper levels of search results for their query. There are four core categories in Bing’s engine: Travel, Health, Shopping and Local. These categories are set up to provide users with more relevant and faster results. For more popular search quieries Bing organizes their results into “Explore Pane” categories and links within those categories called “Quick Tabs”.

Perform keyword and question searches on Bing.com for your brand. See how you rank, where you come up and more importantly how your listing looks within the engine. Your title and description, as with any search result, should provide accurate information relevant to your web site and the page content you are ranking on. The description should motivate the user to click your listing over others. But the presentation of site links on Bing is unique. The anchor text comes directly from the anchor text on your internal pages, so be sure it’s descriptive and not text like “Click here”.

Keep in mind that Bing.com does not give webmasters any control with a webmaster account as Google does.

Local search is a big part of Bing and their engine. If your site/business is not listed on Bing Maps search, add your profile in the listing center.

Bing is still a very distant third when it comes to search, with it’s 10% market share, but keep track of how it’s performing and how you are performing within it.