Video-hosting site YouTube recently unveiled a set of new features aimed at helping online marketing campaigns better target their potential customers.

The website – owned by search engine giant Google – has implemented new video and channel exclusion options, which YouTube senior product manager Baljeet Singh said would be of great use to online advertising creatives and marketing managers, giving them far more control over where their adverts will show up. Before the new options, online marketing depended on using YouTube’s own marketing services to select which clips should be targeted with a company’s adverts.

Now, however, the new features allow individual companies or brands to decide if particular videos – or even entire channels – should be excluded from the campaign. By doing this, online marketing experts will be able to prevent adverts from appearing next to videos that are at odds with their customer demographic.

Two examples that Mr Singh gave were that of a vegan battery being able to exclude FootNetworkTV videos about meat dishes and beer companies giving the swerve to videos aimed at those too young to enjoy a tipple.

“Alternatively, if your ads are appearing on a video that perhaps isn’t performing in terms of clickthrough rate or conversions, you can optimise your campaign by using this new feature to exclude it,” Mr Singh went on to suggest on the YouTube blog.

He added: “Google has also been investing significantly in ensuring brand safety, transparency and control for advertisers across the Google Display Network. We’re hoping that these added layers of control will make your campaign targeting even more precise.”

Despite being described as “the best tool to aid stalking since Facebook,” location-based social media platform Foursquare will prove a massive boon to online marketing companies, one expert has suggested.

Judith Lewis, head of search at media consultancy Beyond, told readers of Marketing Week that in fact Foursquare is the “king of social media marketing.”

After downloading the application, iPhone or other smartphone users can to be located using the phone’s own GPS system. Foursquare then gives them local locations of possible interest and the option to “check in”. Security concerns have been raised because this can be broadcast on other social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, which could give stalkers and other criminals valuable personal information as to a burglary or stalking victim’s whereabouts. However, Foursquare does make available the option to prevent this, so it is up to the user to stay secure while using the app.

Many businesses have already seen its vast potential as an online marketing tool, Ms Lewis pointed out. Famous brands such as Starbucks, Domino’s Pizza, Pho, Hummos Bros, The Breakfast Club, Evans Cycles and many others have added their businesses to the network in order to ensure that their nearest branch is always pointed out to Foursquare users.

But they also use it to do more than that. Ms Evans stressed that such companies have“realised that the future of interaction in “real life” is becoming firmly based within the digital world.”

“For these and other businesses, Foursquare has become a valuable way of interacting with, and rewarding, regulars,” she pointed out.

“While one of the most difficult things to measure is how much online marketing drives purchasers to offline shops, Foursquare is one tool a marketer can use to help measure, as well as engage with, this customer.”

With its seamless integration of online and offline behaviour and the growing popularity of smartphones, Ms Lewis concluded that Foursquare “is set to be the new dominant force.”

We have had our apple ipad up and running for a month or so now and putting my Internet marketing head on I wanted to discuss the ipad influence over browsers online. The size and ease of use element lends this platform to longer browsing trends. Not only that the integration between emails and automated updates or even remote desktop viewing from the ipad means the overlaps between use for pleasure and business will be there.

Longer tail phrases and reviews of products will be used by browsers so for example “ipad review” or even product specific “ipad wifi 32GB plus 3g” will be copied and pasted into the address bar. This is a good thing to consider when setting up your title tags and descriptions for pages. Longer tail product specific searches are well worth consideration and at times can be much less competitive to achieve good first page rankings.

So what is the ipads position in the household it has so many different functions the “mobile me” function from apple is a fantastic way of achieving the effects of file sharing that would come with a business server for very little expenditure. Another clever internet marketing trick is to look at the browsing trends of users on safari and compare these statistics with other browsers I would go as far to say 95% of ipad users will use safari to browse online. You can view the browsing trends of safari users in the google analytics browser section.

A new report from eMarketer has revealed that the USA is leading the way when it comes to the ascendancy of online marketing across a variety of different platforms.

The organisation said that some 6.7 per cent of all online advertising budgets this year will be earmarked for social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, thanks to the slow but steady economic recovery in the US and the focus among marketers of reaching the millions of users of social media.

Researchers estimated that this year will see over $1.68 billion spent by US advertisers on Twitter and other social networking sites in 2010, which represents an increase of more than 20 per cent compared to last year. By 2011 this figure will have rocketed to over $2 billion, they added.

In December last year, eMarketer said that there would be some $1.3 billion spent on online advertising across social networks during 2010, but online marketing across these platforms has been so successful – particularly on Facebook – that analysts have been forced to drastically revise their forecasts upward.

The eMarketer report said that around half of all advertising spending on social networks will go to Facebook, due to the continuing eclipsing of MySpace by the site. Twitter has become part of the eMarketer calculations for the first time, after launching its advertising arm earlier this year.

The group said that while 2010 will see relatively little spent on Twitter by online marketing campaigns, its potential to grow over the next few years is massive.

Just over a year ago, the Tweetmeme company decided to add another dimension to social networking – and opportunities for online marketing – by providing a single place for retweets.

This gifted content providers with a whole new stream of traffic and soon soared in popularity, leading to this week’s announcement by Twitter that it will officially be taking over operation of the retweet button, known properly as wp-tweet-button.

Tweetmeme’s retweet button currently receives more than 750 million hits a day, and its runaway success has unsurprisingly led to its transferral to an in-house feature on the Twitter site.

The new wp-tweet-button function is little changed from the Tweetmeme original, apart from a new design and colour scheme. Nevertheless, the are some new functions which will help content providers and online marketing experts promote their own brands, sites and services on Twitter.

Once the button is used to retweet, the user will see a list of suggested Twitter accounts to follow, which can be taken up by the website itself for its own promotional purposes, helping to make a retweet the next viral sensation.

Twitter has got a lot of interest going already about the new button, with the likes of YouTube and news outlets such as CNN, USA Today and the Huffington Post all ready to add it to their own sites.

On the company’s blog, Tweetmeme chief executive Nick Halstead revealed that his firm would be assisting Twitter with the switch.

“This will manifest itself in the launch of a number of new products and the first of these is being unveiled today,” he said.

One of these is EDataSift, which will allow website developers to create “streams of data” from the millions of tweets held on Twitter’s database.

Time and time again speaking to new people looking to improve there fortunes online the point of view of the individuals situation is different. Many companies may start from using Google Adwords and progress due to increasing costs to Search Engine Optimisation or Vice Versa. One common situation is companies are either pro SEO or pro Cost per click and it is very rare where you will find a company willing to embrace both mediums. It is without question or doubt the need for both areas to be fully covered accordingly is vitally important if your company is to work to its full potential online.

It is said Google Adwords takes up to 40% of any incoming traffic generated for any keyword and can you really see this changing ? We certainly can’t so straight away by discounting something like adwords you are cutting out 40% of your potential audience. This could be taken from the other perspective and given a SEO bias what we are trying to say to the UK business community is take a step back from your current online marketing plan could you potentially “not see the wood for the trees” due to the unbiased push towards one particular form of online marketing.

We have found that many companies are doing and have been doing this for over a decade at times. Now we have another perspective that of social networking and this can be a real gold mine for many different industries online . Using this in a way to help engage with the audience is a fantastic way of increasing traffic and unlike other forms of advertising online this is a real longterm project.

Take that step back and consider the whole picture  for the future thinking of your presence online. You may well be losing out on a large percentage of your audience online.

A factor we all take for granted as we progress through life is keeping of photographs and mementos from the past. A factor that the Internet will effect in a massive way in the next 50 to 100 years time the typical shoe boxes full of manually processed photographs from the 70′s, 80′s and 1990′s will be replaced by face book pages and twitter accounts. The ability to store old photographs and even messages and comments will provide an interesting time capsule type source into the past. Already if we look back at the history of the Internet in the websites it has generated in the late 90′s the blocky style front page designs which in some cases still displays this old Internet age.

The indulgence in the use of flash which is now reserved to niche design industries as a result of the poor value these site provided from a search engine optimisation point of view. Consider your sites current site theme and design are you up to date or lagging behind with an old design paralleled to a pair of 1970′s flared trousers. This is why a blog and social networking is such an amazing tool for your company not just today but in 10 years time. Visual proof of the progress you have made and continue to make can be archived online for future business generations.

Consider a health check find an Internet marketing company that can investigate the full In’s and outs of the direction your company is moving. Internet marketing is no longer centred upon strict search engine optimisation and cost per click advertising the increase of social networking is changing the whole behaviour of Internet users.