It's a bird. It's a plane. It's Twitter! Click to read the rest of this post.

Last week, Avinash Kaushik opened SES London with a superb keynote presentation about web analytics - see this video interview if you missed it. There's some good writeups following this, but one of the parts I found interesting was the examples of how brands perform using search. Marks & Spencer One of Avinahs's examples included an M&S paid search ad,

YouTube's a site that's been used by nonprofit organizations to address serious human rights issues. It's also a site that's been used to exhibit children kicking adults in the crotch. Now, in a move that sort of bridges the gap, Tufts University has started allowing applicants to post clips featuring themselves. "Lee Coffin, Tufts' dean of admissions, says the clips showcase a creativity and personality that would be hard to convey on paper," according to Tracy Jan .

Last week, during our Holiday Recap webinar, we examined how the demographic profiles of the visitors to the Retail 500 shifted in 2009 as compared to the previous year. When looking at the household income of visitors during the peak weeks of the holiday seasons, there was an increase in those earning $100k and over. Visitors that earned over $150k increased 21% and those that earned between $100k and $149k increased 8%. Similarly,

You might already know that Steve Ballmer is opening the show at SMX West in a little more than a week in California. But wait... there's more. Raj Kapoor , global director of product planning and marketing for Mobile Advertising, will be speaking in a session Tuesday morning: Mobile Paid Search Ads: Real Opportunities. "Mobile ad spend will surpass $6.5 billion in 2012.

Amazon.com is the top performing brand in the U.S. based on "trust" and "recommendation," according to a new report from Milward Brown. The report titled "Beyond Trust: Engaging Consumers in the Post-Recession World" was conducted in partnership with The Futures Company and introduces "TrustR," a new metric for understanding the relationship between consumers and brands.

Since the launch of Google Buzz, there has been a seemingly endless amount of chatter about the things that are wrong with it. Privacy concerns and other gripes have kind of taken center stage, even though Buzz usage was impressive pretty much right out of the box. Still, to truly get to mainstream usage, people are going to have to understand it (people finally seem to be getting there with Twitter ),

[Intro by Ann] With social media marketing, engagement is the most important but it is still should be done right. This post is te collection of video interviews our guest contributor Neal Rodriguez interview top Internet marketing experts on tracking and managing social media campaigns,  social media reputation management, Tweitter marketing,

by Mike Krumboltz NBC loves panning its cameras to the Olympic athletes' families as they watch their loved ones compete. At the Vancouver Games, Apolo Anton Ohno 's father, Yuki , has been shown numerous times, cheering on his son. However, Ohno's mother has been notably absent. This hasn't gone unnoticed by viewers. Web searches on " apolo anton ohno mom " and " apolo ohno mother " have both surged into breakout status this past week. Also buzzing in the Yahoo!

Another tip, or FAQ, from our support engineering team: Since the release of adCenter API v6, we've gotten some questions about the use of CustomerID in getting and setting campaign level targeting. "Why is CustomerID mandatory for this API and not for the others?" In the version 6 release, targeting was enabled at the campaign-level, and using the object model, the target setting can be refined at the ad group level. Shamit Patel, our program manager for API,