The Internet Trust Index has reported a modest level of trust amongst U.S. online adults of 61.5 on a scale of 100 – with zero representing no trust and 100 representing absolute trust in the Internet. This is interesting as getting a pulse on how users perceive the Internet could be valuable for a number of reasons. It provides some insight into what activities users are likely to engage in online, whom is most active online, and where demographically. From a design perspective, this can help guide decision-making with regards to driving feature sets, look and feel, and even communication design. This can also help with regards to technology considerations such as decisions to implement trust marks on a Website such as a trust seal, green bar, or other markers.

The recently released Internet Trust Index (pdf) provides a gauge of consumer confidence on the Web. The results are compiled from a survey of U.S. adults designed to understand their Internet-related behaviors and attitudes. The survey measures nine different criteria to explore consumer’s online activities, experiences, behaviors and concerns. It characterizes major Internet user groups to arrive at why some groups trust the Internet more than others and what are influencing factors. The results are sometimes surprising.

Here are some key findings:

* Though equally active online, men and women tend to engage in different
activities. Men check sports scores more often, while women engage in
social networking more. Women are more concerned about being online than
men when conducting financial activities and releasing personal
information online.

* Users in the Pacific region are more likely to engage in a wide range of
online activities. Across all regions, up to half or more of overall users would never engage in such activities as online dating, social networking, adult content, virtual networks, managing stocks online and logging into work remotely. However, the Pacific region (compared to Mountain and West North Central regions) is less inhibited to engage in these activities, most likely due to the West Coast’s more tech-savvy contingency.

* Trust in the Internet is highest in West North Central, New England and
Mountain regions, and lowest in East South Central and East North
Central regions.

The report is published bi-annually. The survey is conducted for VeriSign by TNS who also conducts the monthly Consumer Confidence Index survey for The Conference Board.

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Brands have rushed to Facebook to build fan bases, with some amassing millions of connections. The nagging question has been: What is the monetary value of these fans?

Social media specialist Vitrue, which aids brands in building their customer bases on social networks, tried to put a media value on such communities.

The firm has determined that, on average, a fan base of 1 million translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year.

The company’s findings are based on impressions generated in the Facebook news feed, the stream of recent updates from users’ networks.

Vitrue analyzed Facebook data from its clients — with a combined 41 million fans — and found that most fans yielded an extra impression. That means a marketer posting twice a day can expect about 60 million impressions per month through the news feed.

“It’s important to understand that once you build that fan base, you want to make sure you’re leveraging it,” said Michael Strutton, chief product officer at Vitrue.

Not all brands are created equal. Vitrue found wildly divergent impression-to-fan ratios. Some marketers generated just .44 impressions per fan, while another saw 3.6 impressions. Strutton chalked that up to sexier brands having more engaged connections, giving them access to the news feed more often. The impressions are not unique.

Vitrue arrived at its $3.6 million figure by working off a $5 CPM, meaning a brand’s 1 million fans generate about $300,000 in media value each month. Using Vitrue’s calculation, Starbucks’ 6.5 million fan base — acquired in part with several big ad buys — is worth $23.4 million in media annually.

“It helps [marketers] justify the spend they’re making, especially in acquiring a fan base and engaging that fan base,” Strutton said.

Of course, the figures don’t include perhaps the most powerful incentive for brands building fan bases: social customer-relationship management. Marketers often use their Facebook hubs to inform fans of new products, services and promotions.

“When you start to [add] engagement value, it goes higher,” said Strutton. “We were trying to get an easy-to-understand valuation terminology.”

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States hungry to grab billions in back taxes can now call in the big guns in the form of IBM.

Big Blue announced on Monday new Tax Collections Optimizer software designed to help state governments more effectively collect money owed from deliquent taxpayers.

The software uses data analytics to determine the total amount of back taxes owed. It then compares those findings with the existing workload and available staffing at state tax agencies and recommends the best methods for collecting those taxes.

Specifically, the software analyzes certain taxpayer information, such as the total amount of money due and an individual’s past tax payment history. It then determines how tax collection agents can most effectively follow up and deal with each delinquent taxpayer, given the limited time and resources of each agent, IBM said.

“The current processes used to recover unpaid funds by tax agencies around the world are complex, outdated, costly, and generally ineffective,” Michael Schroeck, vice president of Business Analytics and Optimization Services for IBM Global Business Services, said in a statement. “Organizations are handling more information and data than ever before, but at the same time they know they are not keeping pace.”

State governments are under pressure to balance their budgets with less staff and fewer resources, prompting them to turn to technology to bring in tax dollars. The average state is now looking at billions of dollars in back taxes owed, said IBM.

The state of New York already worked with IBM last year to implement the new software and is hoping to scoop up an additional $100 million over the next three years as a result.

The Tax Collections Optimizer was designed with IBM’s research arm as part of the company’s fraud detection software.

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Kontagent, an  fbFund winner and social analytics platform has raised $1 million from a number of angel investors, including Jameson Hsu, co-founder/CEO of Mochimedia; Greg Thomson, founder of TallTreeGames and creator of YoVille (Acquired by Zynga); Mike Sego, Chief Product Officer of Gaia and creator of (Fluff)Friends (Acquired by SGN). Kontagent previously raised $250,000 from the Facebook Fund.

It’s no coincidence that all of the new investors are in the gaming world; Kontagent’s deep analytics for Facebook apps offer compelling metric for the gaming sector and currently tracking over 50 million monthly active users with its analytics.

Kontagent’s platform gives Facebook app developers and publishers detailed data of demographics based on geographic location, age groups, gender, user engagement times, social interaction and other variables. The platform provides powerful A/B testing across any viral channel (a button, an invite or a notification) that sits inside Facebook. Kontagent also offers developers viral optimization tools to track the virality of the application on Facebook. And Kontagent offers these analytics to iPhone and web applications using Facebook Connect.

Over the past year, Kontagent has seen attracted a number of casual and social game developers using its platform, says co-founder Albert Lai. Lai says that Kontagent’s deep set of analytics that show traffic and behavior across features as small as a notification or or invite, give game publishers greater insight into the strategy of attracting traffic to their games on Facebook. As casual and social gaming on Facebook continues to rise, Kontagent’s deep analytics will be able to capitalize on this growth.

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Things do change fast in the search industry. That’s why the six years between Search Engine Strategies NYC 2004 and SES New York 2010 seems like the 20 years that Rip Van Winkle was asleep.

“You’ve got to keep up or get left behind.”

Hopefully, this observation will help you wake up the marketing team, C-level executives, and IT/Web people in your organization on the need to keep up-to-date with industry trends, see new products and services, and maintain and build relationships.

Search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and social media marketing aren’t programs that you can set and forget.

Do the folks in finance mistakenly think that learning search engine marketing is like learning the multiplication tables?

Tell them that YouTube and Twitter didn’t exist in 2004 and Facebook was still restricted to college students. Today, six out of seven U.S. Internet users now view online video content in a month, with YouTube continuing to experience rapid increase in viewership. And nearly four out of five Internet users visit a social networking site on a monthly basis, with Facebook and Twitter propelling much of the growth in the category.

Tell them that Google didn’t begin its move to universal search until May 2007, Bing wasn’t launched until May 2009, and Google didn’t launch real-time search until December 2009. Oh, and let them know that the U.S. core search market grew 16 percent in 2009, driven by a 6-percent gain in unique searchers and a 10-percent gain in search queries per searcher.

Tell them that Google didn’t reveal that Quality Score was used to determine which ads it would show above organic results until late 2008. And inform them that a high quality score can actually cause ads to jump over ads with lower quality scores that would otherwise not merit that prominent placement.

Tell them that your organization wouldn’t try to launch a new product or service based on market research conducted in 2004. And your organization wouldn’t try to gain market share based on a competitive analysis conducted six years ago. So, why would your organization try to get by without letting you attend leading conventions and tradeshows in the search industry?

I know, I know, the folks in finance are more interested in improving your organization’s return on marketing investment. Ask them how they expect you to do that if you can’t keep up-to-date with industry trends, see new products and services, and maintain and build relationships?

If all else fails, tell them the story of Rip Van Winkle. One autumn day, he encountered some strangely dressed men, who were playing nine-pins. After drinking some of their liquor, he settled down under a shady tree and fell asleep. When he woke up and returned to his village, he found that 20 years had passed. And he immediately got into trouble when he proclaimed himself a loyal subject of King George III, not knowing that the American Revolution had taken place.

Then, ask the folks in finance if they enjoy playing nine-pins or if they are loyal subjects of King George III. They may not get the literary allusion. But only Rip Van Winkle would expect you to improve your organization’s return on marketing investment using out-dated industry information and obsolete search engine marketing techniques.

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NEW YORK, Apr 07, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Starting April 7th, Bluefly.com (NASDAQ Capital Market: BFLY) revolutionizes the way we interact with fashion content with the launch of www.BlueflyClosetConfessions.com. With social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook fast becoming today’s leading tools for brand expansion and outreach, Bluefly.com ups the ante marrying fashion and social media to create the ultimate online social destination for fashionistas, shopaholics & closet cases alike. This interactive portal for sharing style obsessions and ideas gives Users the tools and platform to simultaneously create their own content and become style icons with the click of a button.

Featuring an exclusive short film series that opens the closet doors of style stars including socialite/designer Nicky Hilton, hugely successful fashion designer & Project Runway Season 4 winner Christian Siriano, Manhattan DJ & It-Girl Harley Viera-Newton, and power publicist & television personality Kelly Cutrone–Closet Confessions is a custom-designed site complete with embeddable video, live Twitter feed (hashtag: #bfclosets), voting scenarios reminiscent of Digg, and comment features that allow the community to interact with one another. Closet Confessions will not live on Bluefly.com, but feature direct links to Bluefly’s main categories. The films are shot by award-winning director & MTV alum Lena Beug and produced by Moxie Pictures.

The industry leader in online retail, Bluefly has taken note of the increasing portability of community and content by allowing consumers to be in charge of their own programming. “At Bluefly, our strategy has been to create content collaboratively: inviting the user to create and directly participate in the media they consume,” Bluefly’s Chief Marketing Officer Bradford Matson explains. “With Closet Confessions, we’re giving them the tools and the platform to do just that.”

Matson adds, “We’re already successfully engaging our customers this way on Facebook and Twitter, just as we’ve done in the past with content that extends their favorite shows and movies–America’s Next Top Model, Project Runway, Gossip Girl, and the Sex & the City movie–into the online space.” The March 2010 Bluefly go-see challenge on America’s Next Top Model for example, (which caused Bluefly to be the #2 search term on Google for the 12-hour time period directly after the episode aired), was extended by a robust content experience on Bluefly.com that included exclusive footage, blogs, and an interactive “You Be the Art Director” feature that enabled Users to engage with the content on a deeper level. “The success of our on-air to online extensions just confirms that our customers are hungry for the increased interactivity we’ve built into the Closet Confessions experience.”

As an added bonus, Closet Confessions Users can enter monthly contests sharing “The Fly-est Thing” in their closet, for example, for the chance to win a $500 Bluefly hook-up. (The closet with the most “flies” wins.) Matson points out, “With Closet Confessions we’re customizing social media for the fashion-obsessed.”

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Serials Solutions (www.serialssolutions.com),  a business unit of ProQuest, has released a new SaaS (Software as a Service) version of AquaBrowser, a discovery layer product, to enable more libraries to use the modern, visual interface. It launched at a breakfast event at the Public Library Association Conference in Portland, Ore., on March 25. AquaBrowser is still billed as an “inviting, easy, intuitive” interface that “meets the demands and expectations of today’s web-wise user (or impatient novices) who want immediate results and relevant content from a variety of sources,” according to its promotional materials. What’s different in this new version is that it takes what used to be a library-run product with a la carte extras and changes it to a vendor-hosted product that has many more features included in a lower subscription price.

“We’ve maintained the strong suits of previous AquaBrowser products … and designed a solution that provides a rich development framework, while eliminating the implementation, maintenance, and hosting barriers found at many libraries,” explained Rob Mercer, Serials Solutions general manager. One of those barriers was the old start-up price; another was need for technical library staff members who could update and maintain the product. The SaaS model means that the library staff doesn’t have to do any of that. With this hosted model, the vendor staff can do continuous upgrades, allowing the new AquaBrowser to be more accessible, flexible, and up-to-date.

The previous AquaBrowser had already allowed patrons to search easily and returned results pages that looked more like those on Amazon.com, with color, book images, and word clouds. The SaaS version incorporates a number of new features to make it even more user-centric:

* An interface for mobile devices
* LibraryThing tags, ratings, and reviews
* Incorporating two data sources (in addition to the local catalog)
* Federated search integration with subscription databases
* Embedded video clips and music from Syndetics
* “Graphical date refinement” that lets users refine results by date with graphs
* Hovering over a title in initial results to see bibliographic data without clicking through
* Display of availability by library location on initial results screen

AquaBrowser works with any major integrated library system, including open source ILSs. It uses a single search box to integrate federated searching of local electronic subscriptions. This allows users to search more of the holdings that librarians typically store in separate silos without having to understand that different resources are in different places, therefore making more of the collection visible. The product also supports multiple languages and complies with ADA/Section 508 standards for accessibility.

The price of AquaBrowser SaaS is tiered according to population served. Corrine Kuhl, Serials Solutions’ discovery solutions specialist for public libraries, revealed that soon there will be a web-based form where potential buyers can input their population data and get a ballpark figure on their price. The company believes this will remove one of the barriers that can keep interested parties from exploring new tools.

Library technology expert and author Marshall Breeding had this to say about the new delivery platform: “Overall, I think that it makes great sense for Serials Solutions to offer AquaBrowser through SaaS. Serials Solutions has focused on SaaS all along as their strategic approach for delivering their products. While there may be some libraries that still demand the ability to run software on their own local servers, I’m seeing SaaS deployment as increasingly accepted by libraries. It saves them the burden of operating local servers.”

At the launch breakfast, Kuhl explained some of the thinking behind the product development. She reminded attendees that most people just want to find answers with keywords and a couple of clicks, and cited research that claimed that, if a starter-search is unsuccessful, 60% of users never do a second search. Instead, they’re likely to default to Google or something with which they’re very comfortable. “We”re just never going to change user behavior,” Kuhl acknowledged.

Hence, the simple AquaBrowser search that allows results from many collections to be returned in one place, with the added help of “Did you mean?” suggestions and clouds of related words to help visual learners. Another feature that makes this product more like non-library tools is having 60 million tags, one million reviews, and eight million ratings from LibraryThing to allowing social-networking types of user interactions. All of this, Kuhl suggested, gives users a “better perception of your library.”

Also at the launch event, satisfied customer Carolyn Anthony, director of Skokie (Ill.) Public Library, told listeners about her experience with choosing and implementing AquaBrowser. When searching for a discovery layer product, Skokie’s short wish list consisted of these items:

1. Ease of use

2. Good relevance ranking

3. Can integrate with website and catalog

4. Can integrate journals and other electronic collections

5. Price

Anthony explained that AquaBrowser met all the criteria and passed the tests of staff members (and their siblings and children) who tried it out.

One thing she strongly recommended for choosing any such patron product is to watch how they use it and interact with it. You can ask testers what they think, but they won’t always tell the truth (because they’re not able to understand or articulate it). But when you watch what they actually do with a product, you’ll understand their usage tendencies much better. Anthony claimed that, even though she has not quantitatively measured user satisfaction, anecdotal data indicates that her patrons like AquaBrowser’s simplicity and that they’re doing successful searches.

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An unofficial Facebook application has surged to the top of the iTunes charts after charging $2.99 for the only Facebook iPad application currently available. While it’s not clear whether or not Facebook will force the developers to shut the application down due to trademark infractions, it’s clear that hundreds, if not thousands of people have been duped. All that Joe Hewitt, the original developer of the official Facebook iPhone app could say is “#7 paid app is the 2.99 ‘Facebook Ultimate!’…. Sigh.”

I think the real issue with this application is that people who download the application might actually think that they are getting an official Facebook application, which it isn’t. It not only starts off with the Facebook name, but it also has a similar logo. Additionally, it doesn’t specifically state that it’s not an official app. While we’d assume that Facebook is considering development of an iPad app, this one is definitely not an application you’ll want to grab. Some developer has clearly made a decent amount from selling this app as it has been in the top 10 paid iPad applications for the past 24 hours.

There’s no doubt that having the ability to navigate through Facebook on the iPad would be useful. For now though, you can simply visit the website and it isn’t too much trouble thanks to the large screen. With around 1 million devices sold, there’s no way of telling how popular the device will become and while many popular sites have developed iPad applications, many others are still on the sidelines.

If you want to pay $3 to access Facebook through an application that makes Facebook harder to use, go grab Facebook Ultimate!. Otherwise, wait on Facebook to make an official version, or deal with browsing Facebook through your internet browser.

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