What is Facebook?

Facebook is a social networking website intended to connect friends, family, and business associates. It is the largest of the networking sites, with the runner up being MySpace. It began as a college networking website and has expanded to include anyone and everyone.

Facebook - a popular name among those who are so into it. Individuals who have an account in Facebook are now using more of their time to socialize with other people amidst the distance and lack of time. And even if a community like Facebook serves numerous advantages, it also proves to have certain disadvantages as well. There are now series of improvements in the system just to make up with the shortcomings. Arguments regarding the different advantages and disadvantages of Facebook are stated below.

Facebook was founded by 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and originally called thefacebook. It was quickly successful on campus and expanded beyond Harvard into other Ivy League schools. With the phenomenon growing in popularity, Zuckerberg enlisted two other students, Duston Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, to assist. Within months, thefacebook became a nationwide college networking website.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Facebook

Advantages
· Allows user search for new and old friends
· Accessible to chosen universities having a high level of security
· Makes it less awkward when communicating with strangers or people you are not familiar with
· Love attraction - can be used as a dating service system
· Makes it easier to join groups having similar likes and dislikes
· Allows members to check students who are taking the same class, living within the same area, or coming from the same academy

Disadvantages
· Overcrowding
· Weakening long distance relationship
· Unsupported by physical adjacency
· Contributes wide-range procrastination
· Rampant addiction
· Stalking is possible
· Acquaintances be labeled as friends


The Characteristics of Facebook

1. Facebook doesn’t begin the conversation, it enhances it – If you’re a new or low profile brand looking to increase awareness, Facebook can be a great way to do it. But it comes with extreme diminishing returns, and this goes double with brands that are already well established. Brands that seem to generate interest and report success with Facebook do so with the understanding that most of their users are already on Facebook.

2.They are non-interruptive – Think about all the times you have non-marketing oriented folks tell you why they are on Facebook. I’ll bet more often than not, you hear something to the effect that “it’s a great way to keep in touch with friends and family”. At its core, Facebook is a communication medium. As a marketer, you ultimately either enhance or diminish its effectiveness.

3.They integrate multiple social mediums – Perhaps I’m overstating this, but trying to silo your social endeavors diminishes engagement. But we all know silo-ing an operation is part and partial to large organizations with many moving parts.

4.They use Facebook to create evangelists – Badges, apps, fanpages…all of these things are ways to turn your existing base into your own built in brand evangelizing army. For a large brand, the value to having a ‘friend’ on Facebook isn’t that one friend…it’s the 120 or so friends that friend happens to have.


Can you use Facebook in E-Commerce?

Yes, Between music, virtual gifting, gaming and retail goods, Facebook is turning into a virtual online mall of sorts. We’ve written about Payvment, a startup that allows anyone to create and operate a retail storefront on Facebook. Today, Payvment is launching an innovative new feature for storefront owners on Facebook: the ability for retailers to provide instant discounts and coupons to users that become Fans or “Like” their Facebook page.

Another compelling feature of Payvment’s e-commerce app is the ability to allow shoppers to carry their goods with them across thousands of Payvment-powered storefronts on Facebook. It makes shopping on Facebook almost like shopping at Target, where you can visit multiple departments and buy all of your diverse purchases at once. Users can also add comments and reviews to Payvment-enabled storefronts.


The Importance of Facebook today

The kind of power and supremacy Facebook has seized today is not unseen or concealed to anyone. It has become a part and parcel of our day to day lives. For a common man who isn't much aware of online industry, considers it to be a platform to get in touch with friends and family, buy things and gain some cool information at the same time. But, for internet marketers Facebook is like a goldmine. Today, almost every single existent grown up individual has an active profile on Facebook, and this is the key for internet marketers like you and me.

Facebook is like a free marketing resource. All you have to do is make the right use of it. It is the best platform to make the public aware about your business and service. It has visitors, whom you have to attract with your tactics and ploys. Let your imagination take the charge, and try developing more unique ways of earning through Facebook.

What is google?

Case # 1

It is a highly successful internet business.
Recently they had broaden there scope with a
multitrade of new tool.

Have you ever wondered what is the meaning of Google? Where did the name google come from? What does google stand for? Google is the name of internet’s most popular search engine and the word Google is derived from GOOGOL.

Googol is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. Google’s play on the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.”

Services of google they offer

Advertise your business with Google AdWords

Google AdWords lets you promote your business alongside relevant Google search results and on our advertising network. Reach people looking for information about your products and services online. Easily control your budget and target prospects geographically


Maximize revenue from your online content

Google AdSense enables website publishers of all sizes to display relevant ads on their online content and earn money. AdSense supports a wide variety of online media including websites, mobile, video, games and feeds.

Increase website conversions and marketing ROI
Use Google Analytics easy-to-understand reports to make measurable improvements to campaigns and websites. Learn which keywords, sites and locations bring high-value traffic, and be more informed about how visitors are reacting to your site's content.


What makes google unique?

Although known mainly for being a popular search engine, Google has many other features that make it unique, such as Gmail, the web-based e-mail that offered 1 gigabyte of e-mail storage. This limit has recently increased to over 2.6 Gb. The idea behind it is that people really don't need to delete their e-mails because it would take many e-mails to hit this limit, and users can search through their old e-mails through a special search feature.

Also, a new Google Video store offering movies for downloading and viewing on a Google Video Player has been released. Filmmakers can set the price of the movie and the "copy protection" level in order to give viewers more variety than was previously available. What makes the Google search special is the unique advertising on each search page. After entering a search query, the AdWords program pops up relevant ads on the side of the results. For example, if someone searched "formal dresses," the right side of the results page would have a list of ads that contained the word "dress" in them to attract the user to their sponsors' sites.
Posted by sieweh


How competitive are they in the market?

Google Analytics has now been around for some time. Google Analytics is a free web application that helps web masters learn everything they want to know about how their visitors found their site and how they interact with their site. They are able to focus on their marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve their site to convert more visitors.But what can Google get in return: Competitive Market Research regarding the Search marketplace.Using Google Analytics Aggregated data Google can collect statistics regarding other search engines and how they refer you to sites.In effect what keywords they refer, vs. what keywords others refer. They also can get raw counts in the number of unique visitors and total visitors by referrer.


How have they used information Technology to their advantage?
Google's advantage is more of a company philosophy than a technical
advantage. Thus far they have simply remembered what works on the
Internet. Some history.

Back in the days of Yore, (lets see that was a whole 8 years ago
maybe), search engines weren't very good. They were better than
nothing, but trying to find things took quite a bit of skill or a
large sense of humor. You could put in a query and almost anything
would come up, and that anything would number in the 10,000's. A
Researcher on the web could use plus and minus signs, quotes and AND
OR logic to wade through the results, getting a bit better listings
for his query, but for the average user, it was still a mess.

META keyword tags were then used, because the thought was "You know
what your page is about, so you tell us" and that worked a little
better for a while until the marketing people got a hold of the idea.
Any marketing person will tell you that it is better to have your
company name show up as much as possible, than to only show up when
it's relevant. "Keep your product in view" is the thought there, so
webmasters started putting all kinds of keywords in their META tags,
and descriptions. Not based on the contents of the page but on the
popularity of the keywords used for searches.


How competitive google in the international market?

Having studied Google abroad somewhat significantly, I believe this article provides a very naïve view on Google’s success abroad. Absolutely, Google, as any American company, needs to be extremely aware of the impression they make when entering foreign grounds, as the risk as being seen as arrogant – the ugly American – is omnipresent. And, yes, Google should continue to grow their in-country teams significantly in order to best overcome cultural and sales hurdles and take advantage of unique opportunities and the gigantic world market that is growing at a quicker pace than the U.S. market.Recent stats point to European e-commerce in a position to surge past U.S. e-commerce.Yet, don’t attempt to fool anyone here: Google has enormous international market share. Though I’m on a plane and not able to access these stats immediately, I believe that Google has approximately a 10-point higher share of search in Europe than they do in the States. I attended an online and multi-channel retail conference in London earlier this year, and Google was constantly mentioned, and never in a bad light. I am attempting to arrange a dinner in Paris later this year or early next with top French e-commerce companies, and Google is the likely sponsor, due to their relationship with the French agency that I am in contact with and their relationship with the likely invitees. Google is dominant in most countries, with their distant following to Baidu in China and the Russian example in the article notable exceptions.


Who are the Competitors of Google?

Despite their similarities, Teoma and Wisenut are looking to cut into Google’s dominance by carving up search results in slightly different ways. Each service says it has cracked the formula for delivering germane results in a way that is faster and more cost-efficient. And each is frantically working to amass the largest database of searchable documents to outstrip Google’s lead in the marketplace with more than 1.3 billion indexed pages.

Although the technology looks promising, Teoma and Wisenut may have some difficulty wooing partners away from more established players, search experts said. “Teoma’s technology looks very good, and its results are relevant,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com. “That’s hopeful because if they are trying to compete with Google they’re not at an immediate disadvantage. But its big weakness is that its database isn’t very large...Their real challenge will be to win new customers, and it’s going to be harder to try to convince some of them that they should come away from Google.”