It's that time of year when all of the search engines are releasing their lists of top searches. Dictionary.com may not get the traffic of a Google, or even an Ask, which is owned by the same company, but its list provides a different perspective to the picture of what people are searching for.

Dictionary.com's purpose is to provide users with definitions (as well as spelling and context). So a look at the top searches there reflect less what people are interested in learning more information about, and more what they are trying to understand the meaning of on a word-by-word basis.

The top words searched for on Dictionary.com in 2009 have been:

1. Affect
2. Ubiquitous
3. Irony
4. Socialism
5. Effect
6. Melancholy
7. Love
8. Integrity
9. Nostalgic
10. Pedantic

Affect and effect are obviously searched for more because they are commonly misspelled in place of one another. Socialism's position is likely a product of much political dialogue over the past year in this country. "Ubiquitous" is a word that has seemingly become kind of trendy to say. I have heard it used much more this year than any other year I can remember. Perhaps the most interesting entry is "love." That, I don't have an explanation for.

The top gainers of 2009 on Dictionary.com were:

1. Esurient
2. Impeded
3. Shuddering
4. Fugacious
5. Suffering
6. Negative
7. Namaste
8. Adjuvant
9. Callipygian
10. Twitter

The top decliners were:

1. Bush
2.  Maverick
3.  Solace
4.  Liberal
5.  Obsequious
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Tue Dec 01, 2009 08:00 am

SocialMouths has put together an excellent list of 10 steps to make your Facebook fan page shine. I would love to add, but they/he did an excellent job at wrapping it up.

Here’s the list, but visit SocialMouths for the details:

1. Insights (Your In-House Analytics)
2. Vanity URL
3. Big Profile Pic (Banner Style)
4. Invitations & Bulk Messages
5. Twitter Integration
6. Facebook Widgets On Your Blog
7. Blog Promotion
8. FBML Landing Page
9. Facebook Ads
10. Facebook Apps

We will be enhancing and going in-depth into some of these as well as add more insights in the future, but this is a great start.

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Read more about Facebook on this Social Media Marketing Blog or learn how to take advantage of Automotive Social Media.

eBay's PayPal said today its PayPal Mobile iPhone app has been downloaded one million times in less than three weeks.

With the new PayPal Mobile iPhone app, users can split restaurant checks, collect money for events, set reminders for recurring payments, donate to causes and manage their PayPal accounts.

For International transactions, PayPal Mobile is available in fifteen languages and features a global currency calculator. The app first launched in Apple's App Store on March 15.

"With PayPal Mobile on the iPhone, trips to the ATM are a thing of the past," said Osama Bedier, PayPal's vice president of platform and emerging technology.

"One million downloads shows just how ready people are to live a cashless and card-free culture with their wallet living safely in the cloud."

 

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Wed Apr 07, 2010 07:47 am

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Does Bit.ly convert for B2B Marketing – a case study

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The short answer – heck yeah!

On December 19, 2009 Avaya completed the acquisition of Nortel Enterprise Services. We announced on that day we would hold a virtual event that would introduce our new roadmap for the combined enterprise in exactly 30 days. This would prove to be a seminal event for Avaya and on January 19, 2010 we did released the roadmap to a staggering crowd of 24,000 people.

Potentially one of the largest virtual events ever held it was important to us to be sure we got the word out to as many people as possible. So the idea of using Social Media and tapping into my Social Media team here at Avaya became key.

Our plan was simple – to blog, tweet and post content leading up to the event that used only a single customize bit.ly link (http://bit.ly/NewAvaya) so we could track the response from the social sphere. What we saw in the first few days was a what I considered to be a huge spike in traffic approximately 10% of the traffic was coming to the site from social and 50% of it had converted. Leading up to the day of the event and even on the day of the event we again saw huge traffic coming to the site from social again approximately 10% of the traffic and 50% of the conversions were from social. What you see in the image is the actual graph from Bit.ly that looks like an “inverted bell curve” with the front and back tails getting most of the play.

I thought you would be interested in the consistency of this data and the net positive effect this had on our event. Hopefully it will inspire you to use similar tactics for you upcoming events.

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  Thu Feb 11, 2010 08:45 am

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