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There are many companies offering an online server backup solution, but which one will you trust your important and confidential data with? We live in a digital age. If you are running a business you may have crucial data stored on your computers, such as customer contact information, credit card numbers, and databases containing financial records or project details. Imagine losing all this data as a result of a fire, a burst water pipe or theft. How much would you be willing to pay to save your business from ruin? An offsite server backup solution is critical for your business continuity and should be part of your disaster recovery plan. Read more…

With holiday shopping in full swing, social shopping is already making a big impact. Data from Hitwise shows that downstream traffic to the Retail 500 coming from both Facebook and Twitter increased 36% and 15% respectively on Thanksgiving from the previous day. Downstream traffic to retailers grew again on Black Friday and Cyber Monday as many retailers promoted sales through fan pages and tweets.

This data is very encouraging for marketers, but a social media campaign must still be managed correctly for maximum ROI. Here are some tips on how brands can best engage their customers by offering what everyone now looks to social media for – a bargain.

New Strategies to Turn Buzz Into Buy

Other recent research confirms the fact that people are increasingly turning to social networks to get deals on products and services. Razorfish found that the primary drivers of “friending” or “following” a brand were promotions and discounts. Over one-third of social network users and 44 percent of Twitter users engaged with a brand through discount promotions. This is good news for marketers, but the stats also pose challenges to the way marketing programs and advertising budgets will be structured in the future.

Brands have long spent big money on commercials, media placements, direct mail, and more. With most of these methods, there is little way to measure the impact on your bottom line. You either get lucky with a surge in sales after your campaign, or it didn’t work. Either way, success or failure was impossible to measure.

If done right, social marketing is a fantastic way to get the best of all worlds from a campaign – wide-scale and targeted distribution of your offer, for free. But to get it right, marketers have to step lightly. If you’re too pushy with too many promotions, your followers will feel “marketed at” or “spammed.” If you don’t offer good enough deals, your customers may become frustrated and stop following you. After all, they don’t really want to be your friend. They want bargains. Here are some steps for getting social media promotions right.

1. What Are People Saying About Your Brand?

Find out what people are saying about your brand, why they are saying it, and who they are saying it to. You have to do more than just get a vague reading on brand buzz. Track the actual pass-along of your brand’s social content via tweets, blog posts, Facebook postings, etc. to see which content is driving the most sharing on which sites. You can use social media traffic tracking software to do this.

Tracking this word-of-mouth buzz is crucial to formulating the right marketing messages and promotions. You must deliver relevant social deals that resonate with people’s interests.

2. Create a Social Promotion

Once you figure out what people want using the tracking methods above, go ahead and give it to them. For example, you might find that everyone loved your last 20% promotion – it was shared to hundreds of thousands of people via social sites and email – but that the most frequent negative comment was that shipping costs were too high. In your next promotion, offer free shipping.

Or, you may find that there was a huge surge in Twitter searches, blog comments, and Facebook updates about your brand’s winter boots during a snowstorm. This is a great opportunity to immediately put out a social promotion for 20% off boot purchases for one day only via Twitter, Facebook, and/or your company blog.

Have fun with your social promotions. Unlike paid search ads and other media buys, you don’t have to plan and budget for them. Instead, just try one or two out and see what happens.

3. Did It Work?

Figure out whether your promotion worked, and what bottom line impact it had on sales and profits. Go back to your social media tracking and measurement tool and find out how much your promotion was shared, what increase it caused in traffic to your website, and what direct impact it had on conversion. You might want to compare two different promotions run during a similar time frame to see which worked better and why.

For example, did a 50% Off promotion drive more sharing, visits, or conversions than a Two-For-One? In addition to doing simple “A/B” tests, compare results for promotions like these against the data from your regular marketing analytics platform to see whether your social media promotions are performing better or worse than traditional paid marketing campaigns. Social promotions almost always perform better than paid media ads in terms of conversion, but paid ads may drive a higher volume of traffic to your site.

Lastly, do an ROI analysis of your social media promotions to find out their real impact on bottom line profits.

Conclusion

Social media promotions are here to stay. Make sure you use the social channel to deliver “exclusive” deals that make your friends and followers feel special. They’ll thank you by making purchases.

What social media tools do you use to increase sales and measure your brand’s reach? Please share them in the comments below.

The latest Chrome beta build ushers in a great new feature: bookmark syncing. If you use multiple computers, or even just appreciate a cloud backup of your browser bookmarks, this feature will be a boon.

You can grab the new beta build 4.0.223.16 here, which also includes speed improvements by as much as 30% since the current stable release. For more information on how the bookmark sync works in the new build, head on past the break for an introductory video from the Chrome team.

Whether it’s a laptop and desktop, machines at home and at work, or just more than one machine in the house, it’s a pain to try to keep them in sync — you inevitably don’t have access to that one bookmark you’re looking for no matter which machine you’re on. That’s undoubtedly the reason Xmarks syncing extension was so popular in our “Favorite Firefox extensions” Lunchtime Poll.

The bookmark syncing feature actually debuted earlier in the developer version of the browser, but required setting a command-line flag. Now that Chrome supports bookmarking sync natively — if only in beta — will any of you consider switching or perhaps just adding it to your browser arsenal?

Remember that for now, unfortunately, this is only enabled in the Windows version of Chrome (Mac users are sadly still waiting for an official version). You’ll also have to of course download the beta and also enable each computer individually for syncing, by choosing “Synchronize my bookmarks” from the Wrench menu.

Check out the video below and let us know if you plan to use the new syncing feature in Chrome beta.

Way back in April, Google relaunched Google Labs, the place where the company tests its new and experimental features. When it relaunched, it added a very interesting experimental feature to Google Image Search: Similar Images.

A recap if you don’t remember similar images: it utilizes image recognition technology to help filter search results. If you find an action shot of soccer/football star David Beckham and want to find more like it, for example, you can use Similar Images to filter your results and find similar images.

The feature has been in Google Labs for over half a year, but that’s no longer the case. Google has announced that Similar Images has now become a standard feature of Google Image search.

It was only a matter of time until Similar Images made its debut in Google Search. It’s a very useful and surprisingly accurate feature that really helps you filter images. We can expect to see a lot of users utilizing this feature very soon.

It could be the ultimate admission of defeat, or, a pretty smart move given its current strategy. According to The Telgraph, MySpace is currently discussing a partnership with Facebook where music and video content published to MySpace could easily be shared on Facebook via Facebook Connect.

How far that Connect implementation might go isn’t clear, but Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg tells The Telegraph, “MySpace could become a Facebook Connect partner – which would allow people to share content they liked from MySpace with their Facebook network.” MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, who used to work at Facebook, confirms the talks with the paper.

Why This Would Be Smart

MySpace has one of the best catalogs of music and videos on the Web. Allowing users to share them on Facebook – far and away the most popular social network – would increase distribution for this content, and potentially get Facebook users to re-consider MySpace as a content portal and not a dying social network.

Why It’s Risky

Although MySpace may envision itself as an entertainment portal, its bread and butter is still its social network – diminished as it may be. Encouraging members to use Facebook for sharing content could hasten its demise in social networking at a rate far exceeding its growth in music and entertainment.

The result of that would be even more domination by Facebook, which, it should be noted, is already starting to move into digital music on its own (and already serves as a major distribution point for YouTube content as well).

A Bold Move Is Needed

If MySpace wants to remain relevant it has to be bold, and partnering with the site that toppled it as world’s biggest social network would certainly be that. Given its current goals, and the benefits we already know that Facebook Connect can provide to content sites, don’t be surprised if this deal comes to fruition in short order. We’ll keep you posted.

Google Docs has become a viable tool for web workers and businesses looking to create, manage, and share their word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet files in the cloud. To-date, however, if you’ve wanted to take your data out of the cloud and download it to your desktop, you would have to do so one document at a time. But today, Google announced the “Convert, Zip and Download” feature in Google Docs to tackle this challenge. The new features make it a simple two step process to pull down any and all the Google documents of your choosing (up to 500 MB), convert them to your preferred file types, and zip them up in a concrete package you can download and save to your desktop.

The new feature is accessible from the Google Docs home page, and all that is required is that you select the files you wish to download, click the “More actions” tab, and select “Export.” You’ll then be guided through the straightforward process, which will let you convert your files to a number of different formats, including PDF, .xls, and .doc. Once you hit continue, the file zipping process automatically begins.

Though Convert, Zip and Download is a rather unsexy update to Google Docs , it should prove to be an incredibly handy utility and time saver should the need arise to ever export all your data out of Google. We can thank the Google Data Liberation Front for today’s important update, and we can expect even more liberation features in Google products in the future.

Michael Jackson passed away just over four months ago, but his legacy continues to live on, both on and offline. On Wednesday, Columbia Pictures is releasing the documentary “This Is It” in theaters across the world.

Before the film hits theaters though, it will make its worldwide premiere at the Nokia Theater in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday. The red carpet for the premiere will be live streamed via webcast across the world, starting at 4:30 PM PDT. Here’s where you can watch the coverage:

Ustream

Columbia Pictures is partnering with Ustream to bring the red carpet to Internet watchers. As you may recall, Ustream also broadcast the Michael Jackson Memorial back in July.

To watch the red carpet coverage on Ustream, you can head to the Michael Jackson “This Is It” Red Carpet Premiere channel. You can chat with other viewers in Ustream’s chat room during the event to share your thoughts on the King of Pop.

Facebook

Facebook is also carrying the red carpet premiere via the Michael Jackson Facebook Page, where you can chat with other Facebook friends, leave messages on the wall, and invite others to watch with you.

ThisIsIt-Movie.com

The Official Website for “This Is It” will also be carrying the red carpet show and you can also buy tickets to see the film in the theater directly from the site.

Crackle.com

Sony’s Crackle.com will be carrying the red-carpet stream too. You can chat with other fans on Crackle .com and watch some of Michael Jackson’s most famous videos on the channel as well.

Will you be seeing “This Is It” in theaters? Let us know!

One of the sticking points with the otherwise highly convenient Google Voice service has been that you had a choose a new number to use with the service. If you had an existing number that everyone already knew and wanted to switch over, you were pretty much out of luck.

Luckily that changes today, with tonight’s Google announcement that you can now use Google Voice with an existing phone number. Also notably, you can now add Google voicemail service to any of the mobile numbers linked to your account. Think of it a bit like Gmail for voicemail.

Now when you first sign up for Google Voice you can choose between using your own number or choosing a new Google number. You still get many of Google Voice’s features when using your own number, including the Google voicemail feature you can now add to linked phones.

Unfortunately it’s not a full number port, and you won’t get all of the Google Voice features when using your own number — at least not yet. But especially if you have an older phone that doesn’t already have a nice visual voicemail interface, the Google voicemail feature alone might be reason enough to switch. The company also says it plans to roll out a full service compatible with your existing number, including other great features of Voice like conference calling, call screening, and listening into calls before deciding to pick up.

Check out the video about how Google voicemail works below. And if you’re still hunting for an invite to Google Voice, you can ask a us for one.

Do you use Google Voice? If not, will you consider using the service now that you can keep your existing number? Let us know in the comments.

Another new virus is overextension through social networks, this time, via Facebook. This one – accepted as Bredolab – masks itself as a “Password Reset Confirmation Email,” appears to appear from Facebook, and attaches a book that purports to accommodate a new password.

That file is actually a trojan horse that will download a host of nasty files from the Web and infect your computer with them. Email security firm MX Lab explains further:

“Bredolab is a trojan horse that downloads and executes files from the Internet, such as rogue anti-spyware. To bypass firewalls, it injects its own code into legitimate processes svchost.exe and explorer.exe. Bredolab contains anti-sandbox code (the trojan might quit itself when an external program investigates its actions).”

The way to avoid this one: if you didn’t request your password from Facebook, there’s no reason you should be getting a password reset confirmation email, so don’t open it. Further, even if you did, Facebook would not send your new password as an attachment. Finally, f you’re still not sure, take a look at the full details of the email – if the mail server’s don’t belong to Facebook, you know the message is not legit.

With over 300 million users, Facebook is undeniably one of the best places to keep in touch with friends, and one of the reasons it’s so popular are its applications. Most of Facebook’s user-favorite features, like its massively popular photo sharing, video sharing, user groups, or events functionality, are powered by applications. These core apps come installed by default on every user’s profile and cannot be removed.

But Facebook is also home to over 350,000 other applications created by thousands of third-party developers across the world. With so many apps, the Facebook Application Platform can be a little bit overwhelming to navigate and finding the best apps can be difficult. This guide will show you how to find, add, and manage Facebook applications.

What Are Facebook Apps?

Launched in May 2007, the Facebook Platform allows outside developers to create applications — such as games or other programs — that run inside of Facebook and have access to your social data (if you grant such access). The platform has become of the most popular developer ecosystems on the Internet.

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to define a Facebook app as any application that runs inside of Facebook itself and can be found in the official App Directory. We’re also going to focus on consumer apps, rather than those made to run on Facebook Fan Pages.

The App Directory

The main place to find Facebook applications is the site’s official App Directory. You can access the directory by click on the “Applications” button in the lower left hand corner of the Facebook screen (on the bottom navigation bar), and then clicking on the “Browse More Applications” link.

The directory also lists external web sites that connect with Facebook, mobile and desktop applications, and “prototypes,” which are new features and applications that Facebook is testing out. For this guide, we’re concerned mainly with the apps found “On Facebook.”

The App Directory lists every application available to you on the social network and offers five ways to find new applications:

Featured by Facebook – At the very top of the the App Directory page, the first thing you see are featured applications. These apps, shown two at a time with left and right arrows to page through the entire list, are apps that the Facebook staff have selected as particularly noteworthy, well-made, or unique. All of these apps are “Verified” (more on that later).

Applications You May Like – The second section on the page, is a list of applications that Facebook thinks you may enjoy. This list is generated based on which apps are popular with your friends, which apps are popular with all of Facebook, and which apps closely resemble the type of application you have already installed.

Search – If you’re looking for an app that accomplishes a specific task, then the search function (found in the upper left-hand corner of the App Directory page) is the place to start.

Browse – If you’re less sure about what you’re looking for, you can browse the App Directory in the categories of: Business, Education, Entertainment, Friends & Family, Games, Just for Fun, Lifestyle, Sports, and Utilities. Each category page will also have featured and suggested applications.

Recent Activity From Friends – Finally, on the bottom of the page, is a familiar news feed of recent app-related activity from your friends. This section gives you a birds eye view of the types of apps your friends are interacting with.

When you search or browse for applications you’ll see a brief overview of each app, as well as a star rating out of five, the number of monthly active users, and the number of your friends that use that application. You also may see a little green check mark next to some apps. The check mark signifies that that application is a “Verified App.” Verified applications have passed through a rigorous review process by Facebook and are deemed safe and trustworthy by the site.

Clicking on the application will bring you to its App Page, which closely resembles a Facebook Fan Page. The page will give you a lot more information about the application, including which of your friends are using it, reviews and discussions from users, as well as news and any other information about the app from its developer.

The App Directory is really the best way to find new applications on Facebook, but you should also pay attention to your Facebook news feed. That section will sometimes include updates from popular apps that your friends are adding and interacting with. Further, keep an eye out for app suggestions and invitations from your friends.

Installing an App

Once you’ve selected an application to add, navigate to its App Page. From there you can add the application, block it (so that you won’t get updates about it in your news feed if friends are using it), become a fan of the app, or add it to your favorites.

To add an app, click on the “Go to Application” button beneath the app’s logo. If you have the app installed already, clicking this button will bring you to the actual app. If you don’t have it installed, you’ll be directed to a page asking you to grant the application permission to access your Facebook data. Some apps may have additional steps as part of installation or set up, such as creating a character for games.

Managing Apps

Once you have apps installed, it’s a good idea to go to the Application Settings page to tweak the privacy and notification settings of your apps, or to remove an application. To access this page, click on the “Applications” button on bottom left of the Facebook screen, and then click on the “Edit Applications” link.

By default, the Application Settings page will list your most recently used apps. You can change this by clicking on the “Show” drop down menu and choosing which apps to display. To see a list of all applications you have installed, choose “Authorized.”

Once you have found the application you wish to manage, you’ll see three links to the right side of that application’s name: Edit Settings, Profile, and an X. “Profile” will bring you to the app’s Application Page (where you can leave a review or rating or discuss issues you are having with the application with the developers). “Edit Settings” will pop up a settings dialog box that has three tabs allowing you to control how the app interacts with your Facebook profile.

Profile – On this tab you’ll find privacy settings about who can see this app, as well as the ability to add or remove a profile Box or Tab for the application, if available.

Bookmark – This controls whether a link to the app appears in the “Applications” menu on the bottom navigation bar.

Additional Permissions – This tab allows you to control what other types of things the app can do, such as notify you about new activity, or post stories to your news feed or wall.

To remove an application, simply click on the “X” link. Facebook will ask you to confirm your decision and will allow you to optionally rate the app. You’ll notice that some applications cannot be deleted; these are official Facebook apps that are vital to the core functionality of the site. While you can’t delete these apps, you can effectively disable them by denying all of their permissions and setting up strict privacy rules.