As human beings we’re more likely to tell tales on a business than sing their praises. Bad customer service experiences, a hair in your soup – those make for great stories around the water cooler. Today, a great deal of this story telling is happening on the Internet. Are you monitoring what consumers, competitors and your trade industry are saying about your company?

As an agency, we are asked a lot of questions about everything under the sun. From all the new techniques of advertising online, to what is the “greenest” paper to print on. Today’s post is about something that has been a sort of attention getter for a while now, behavioral marketing. Behavioral marketing targets you, a web user, according to your past searches etc.

A great article by Sarah Perez, for ReadWriteWeb about Google’s Tweet-Ranking Algorithm sheds some light on a couple of things to think about as you and your business swim around in the waters of Twitter. Google is working hard coming up with a real-time search function which scans Twitter’s updates and ranks them. Amit Singhal, of Google, stressed Google’s focus on a Twitter user’s overall reputation as a ranking measurement as opposed to simply tallying follower counts. Another example of why it is important to provide good content. When it comes to SEO, it is always going to be about the content, the substance of your tweets, website and Facebook interactions that helps you get ranked higher. And frankly, it is the most important thing you can be giving your audience. What it is NOT about is how many friends or followers you can recruit.

It’s hard to imagine not having a search engine to use to search for information, research topics, check sports scores, or read news articles. So when did this whole search thing begin? The world’s first search engine, dubbed “Archie” (short for archive), was founded in 1989 or 1990 by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and J. Peter Deutsch, students at McGill University in Montreal.

Last week, our friend Drew McLellan at McLellan Marketing Group in Iowa blogged about the importance for small businesses to have a Google account. Not only do we completely agree with Drew’s opinion but we wanted to expand on Drew’s points. Let’s start with the free listing on Google Local Business Center.