After listening to the rumor mills roar and authoring hundreds of emails with my friends at Facebook it can finally be said that Facebook has launched their location-based check-in service dubbed Facebook Places. And, while location-based services like this are certainly interesting to me I’m writing this for you because Facebook is using Bing Maps to pinpoint everyone’s location-based experiences on Facebook.com. When using Facebook Places from your mobile device, users will have the opportunity to check-in to a specific place such as a restaurant, hotel or other place of interest. No, you don’t need a reservation since this isn’t that kind of check-in. This is basically an update you provide your friends where you are. If you use Facebook today, you update your friends on how you’re feeling, what you’re doing or why you’re having a horrible day (usually related to love, right?). Well, now you can provide location context as to where you are when you are experiencing these things, as well. And, hey, these are your friends! If you're somewhere special, they'll know why you feel the way you do.

So, fire up the Facebook for iPhone application or touch.facebook.com site on your mobile device. Select the Places button, find the location where you are and check-in. Just like that, the check-in will flow to your profile on Facebook.com complete with a Bing Map, a pin of your location and any commentary you’ve added to your check-in. Places also includes the ability to see where your friends have checked in, a link to get directions to a place (via Bing Maps) and a Like button for the respective place page. The place information bubbles up to the actual Places page which has a larger map experience, plus an update for you to see all of your friends who’ve visited that location. This means you can see where your friends are checking and discover new places.

500 million users overnight have the ability to check-in to locations providing a wealth of information to you and your friends about businesses, common places to visit and who of your friends is going to the most random locations. Smart move, Facebook peeps. Smart move.

Search engines are changing. You may have noticed that any time you search for something in your area, you get more than the usual list of results, you get a map with some links next to it.

In Google, the map is called the “One Box” and the links next to it are called the “10-Pack” and clearly, the links are different there than in the regular “organic” listings below. If traditional SEO (content and inbound links) helps you in the organic, what helps you in the One Box and 10-pack? Evidence suggests that creating/claiming your local listings is a good start.

So here are the basic steps to claiming, creating and managing your local listing. We’re also showing you 19 places where you can do this. Most are Internet Yellow Pages sites (IYPs) and others are local directories and the search engines themselves.

Help Yourself

You don’t need an expert to help you create and claim your listings. In fact, it’s best if you do this yourself.

Over the life of your business, you may update your site many times – at least every 3-5 years – and you may work with different companies on different generations of your website, but some things should always stay within your control. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t get help from experts, but just as you should be in control of your domain name, you may also want control over your local listings.

Pick Your Battles…

There are so many IYPs and local directories to choose from! Here are a few ways to find the best ones for you:

Where’s the Competition Listed?

From Google Maps, find competitors, click “more info,” then click the “websites” tab. You may find other places to add your listing.

Where are you located?

Many IYPs are still based on the databases they use for their printed phone books, which means that not all of them are relevant in all places. If the company doesn’t have a phone book in your region (such as Dex), it may not be possible to manage your listing on their site.

19 IYPs and other places for local listings
YellowPages.com

Largest IYP, provides listings to AOL Yellow Pages, MSN Yellow Pages. Owned by AT&T.
SuperPages.com

Second largest IYP, provides listings to SwitchBoard.com and InfoSpace.com. Owned by Idearc Media, a Verizon spinoff.
Google
Bing

Formerly MSN Yellow Pages.
Yahoo! Yellow Pages
InsiderPages

Owned by CitySearch.com
Localeze

Provides listings to yellowpages.com, dexknows.com and yellowbook.com
InfoUSA

Provides listings to CitySearch.com and Yahoo.com
CitySearch

This is a good one but it’s “paid inclusion.”  They get listings from infoUSA and they share info with yellowpages.com, superpages.com, insiderpages.com and merchantcircle.com
LinkedIn
Best of the Web – Local

This is a new “paid-inclusion” directory but the “jumpstart” listing is free.
Yelp

The most important of all review sites
JudysBook

This local business review website provides ratings to Bing.com
Spoke

This is mostly a peer-to-peer networking site, but there are business listings that can be managed
Jigsaw

This site is really a tool to get contact information for people in businesses, but you can manage business listings
MerchantCircle

A listing on this site can include all kinds of things including galleries, a blog, a newsletter and a network of other businesses. (Citysearch profiles migrate automatically in several business categories)
Manta
Dexknows
Dun and Bradstreet

Keep it organized

To create or claim listings at all these locations, you’ll need to create accounts in a lot of places. I recommend keeping a spreadsheet with all the login info for all of your IYP and directory listings.

Keep it consistent

It’s ideal to have all of your listings be the same, if not identical. This will help seach engines know that each listing is yours. Make sure the business name is exactly the same in each listing. For the address, they should all have the same info in each field.  Suppose your address is 123 Elm Street, Suite 4. Make sure that “Suite 4” is always in the “address two” field and that it doesn’t appear as “Unit 4” or “#4” in some IYPs but not others.

Select Categories Carefully

Many of these directories and IYPs will give you the opportunity to select categories for your business. Take your time doing this, making sure to choose all the most relevant categories. Be thorough.

A good way to start is to first search for businesses like yours in that IYP. See what categories appear first. This will help guide you toward the categories that bring the most traffic to your industry.

The best categories are those with names that include the words you’re targeting for search engines. For example, if your business is a car wash, categories that have the word “car” are generally better than those with “automotive.”

Also, it’s worthwhile to choose categories that aren’t already full of the competition’s listings. When a visitor browses through a directory, you want to be on page one, not page three. So look around to find categories that aren’t as crowded.

You may find that your company doesn’t fit easily into the categories provided (ours often doesn’t). This may be because they are using “Standard Industrial Classification” (SIC) codes. It looks like these classifications haven’t been updated in a long time…

Add Logos, Pictures, Videos, Certifications, etc.

Whenever possible, enhance the listing with as much information as you can. Many sites now let you add a lot of things to your listings. Our recommendation: add them all. Upload your logo, add descriptions, keywords, hours, payment methods, and anything else you can think of. More is better.

Remove Duplicates

This step may take awhile. If there are multiple listings within an IYP for your business, claim one and request that the other be removed. These requests sometimes take weeks to process. But it’s important. You don’t want to confuse search engines by having more than one listing in any of the IYPs.

Why can’t I do all this from one place?

Supposedly, this is now possible. It’s called the Universal Business Listing. The idea is that you manage your local listing here, and they send the info to databases all over the place. I counted 44 different partners, including some that don’t let you manage your listing directly, like Acxiom. The downside? It costs $30.

What’s next?

Setting up and managing your local listings isn’t a one-step process. It may take weeks to remove duplicates and get some reviews. In fact, having your biggest fans submit reviews for you will become a lifetime process that you always have in the back of your mind. You may even find creative ways to give people an incentive to give you nice (but honest) reviews.

BONUS:  Yellow Pages Trivia…

Back in the day, AT&T heavily marketed the term “Yellow Pages” and the walking fingers logo. But they never filed a trademark application, so it’s in the public domain. If you see this logo in marketing, keep in mind that anyone can use it so it doesn’t denote any kind of authority. There are lots of stories about people who paid a company to be listed in the “yellow pages” and later found out it was a small, insignificant directory or an outright scam.

But if you ever want to use that logo of the walking fingers in your marketing … well, go ahead!

Today Bing Maps updated their base Road style tiles, the results are amazing.

New:

Old:

The new map symbology is significantly cleaner, easier to read and more appropriate for us to rendering data over the top.

We often ran into issues where the vibrate orange roads were to dominant and if, for example, we wanted to draw the user’s attention to the route of a vehicle we had to make they visualisation louder. With the new style we can be more subtle, we can use colours that compliment the users site.

Overall Bing has made a significant investment in adding some high quality to design to all of its assets. I’m very proud that the Bing Maps team have been able to take on a significant challenge like this and deliver.

View the new style yourself and see if your location is easier to find, clearer and works better for your application:

http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/ 

Today, we’d like to introduce our first extension for Safari: Bing Highlights.

Bing Highlights brings intelligent, contextually sensitive information to the web pages you’re reading. Using it is easy: just highlight text on a web page. Bing Highlights will recognize interesting information (or “entities” in information science-speak) and offer you some smart choices.

For example, here’s what may happen if you highlight a U.S. formatted address:

You can interact with the map in the pane, and get driving directions.

If you highlight some text in a foreign language, you can get translations. You can even hear the text spoken by clicking on the icons.

You can also get up-to-date flight status information by highlighting a flight number:

And, of course, you can easily get search results from Bing for any text that you select. This extension helps bring the power of Bing one step closer to your fingertips.

Click to download Bing Highlights from Apple’s Safari Extension Gallery. It works with Safari 5.0.1 or newer, for both Mac and PC.

Creating this extension was fun, and we are excited to continue working closely with Apple in bringing visually compelling Bing experiences to Safari.

In order to get indexed well by BING and get more search engine traffic from it you should submit sitemap. It helps the BING bot to crawl through your site and index the content easily and help you get traffic from Bing.com

These are two ways you can submit your sitemap to BING:

1) Login to BING Webmaster Tools

Add your site and submit the sitemap.

To create Sitemap you can use: Google XML Sitemap Plugin For Wordpress

2) And the easier way:

Copy Paste the below link into your browser address bar and replace the bold part with your blog sitemap address.

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.socialnetupdate.com/sitemap.xml

Bing.com is offering a pretty good cashback percentage on your Sears shopping this weekend. This weekend – Friday, July 2 through Monday, July 5 –  on Sears.com through their Bing log-in and earn 15% cashback. It is a smart and easy way to save money when they shop at Sears.com. With Bing cashback you'll earn a percentage of your purchase price as cash back.


Here's what you need to do if you're interested:
1. SEARCH: Use Bing.com – the nation’s fastest growing search engine to search for items you’ll want to buy.
2. SHOP: Shop Sears.com like always; Look for the Sears.com ad with the Bing Cashback Logo. Click Through and shop as normal. 
3. CHECKOUT: Your cashback amount and instructions for how to claim your cashback will be displayed at checkout. 
4. CONFIRM: Once you get your order confirmation from Sears, follow the steps to register for cashback.
5. CASHBACK: Sign in (up) and claim your cashback.

Sears is also offering this deal on books:

Sunday July 4th, when you buy 3 books, you get the 4th free and you can ship any book for 99¢! Enter coupon code FIREWORKS at checkout. http://www.sears.com

At least according to the latest report from Experian Hitwise, that is. Google continues to hold 71.65% of search share, while Yahoo remained steady at 14%.

Percentage of U.S. searches among leading search engine providers
Domain	May 2010	June 2010	Month-over-month percentage change
www.google.com	72.17%	71.65%	-1%
search.yahoo.com	14.43%	14.37%	-0%
www.bing.com*	9.23%	9.85%	7%
www.ask.com	2.14%	2.19%	2%
Note: Data is based on four-week rolling periods (ending May 29, 2010 and June 26, 2010) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users.Figures are for Web searches only.
*This includes executed searches on Bing.com but does not include searches on Club.Live.com.
Source: Experian Hitwise

During June 2010, Bing rolled out a number of new features which garnered a fair amount of consumer and media attention, namely new Entertainment search features and a popular appearance on Stephen Colbert, but additionally Bing introduced deep content in search results, new Health features, Bing Social Search and also prompted iPhone users to change their default search engine to Bing. Potentially adding to the increase in June traffic as well, includes Bing’s special World Cup Visual Search galleries, among other soccer related features in Bing Maps. On the negative side, Bing also announced the demise of Cashback during 2010.

Nonetheless, Bing showed significant growth in its first full year, no doubt due in part to its aggressive marketing campaigns.

According to Hitwise, in June 2010 Bing has experienced triple digit growth in three main categories: Automotive (197%), Shopping (199%), Travel (196%) and 94% in Health since June 2009, when Bing officially launched.

(**This includes executed searches on Bing.com, Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com.)

Meanwhile for year over year change in the same categories, Google is down 8% in Health, Travel only increased 4%, Automotive 9% and the biggest change was in the Shopping category at 13%.

Like Google search operators, Microsoft’s Bing also offers some powerful search operators to search effectively. You can use these operators to use Bing smartly. Here are some selected operators for a quick introduction :

• define  Triggers an Instant Answer definition for the specified word. Use-Define Word    
• domain: Limits results to the specified domain. Use- domain:google.com
• intitle: Returns web pages that contain the specified term in the metadata title of the site. Use- intitle:ipod
• filetype: Returns only web pages of the specified file type. Use- india filetype:pdf
• language: Returns web pages written in a specific language. You need to use language code along with this operator. For example, language codefor Hindi is hi. Use- ipod language:hi
• location: Returns web pages from a specific country or region. Again, you need to specify the country or region code directly after the location:operator. For the complete list of valid codes, refer Bing API documentation. Use- twitter location:in

The complete list of Bing.com search operators can be viewed here.

Last June, Microsoft launched a revamped version of its search engine, Live Search, and dubbed it "Bing, The Decision Engine." Since Bing's introduction, it has become the fastest growing search engine on the Internet according to Nielsen, accounting for 10.7 percent of all online searches, gaining ground on Yahoo's number two position, but still far behind Google and its 65.7 percent of the search share.


But Stefan Weitz, director for Bing, said Microsoft is not out to dethrone Google. Its goals with Bing are much higher: Microsoft wants to redefine search altogether.


On the surface Bing appears to work like the competition, but it is packed full of novel search features like a recipe search, cashback for shopping and Farecaster, which predicts the likelihood of an airline ticket price going up or down over the next seven days.

How we search

Many Bing users, however, don't even know these functions exist. Weitz acknowledged that using Bing for the first time can be confusing, but said he thinks the problem lies in the way people have been programmed to search.

"The problem is that people have become accustomed to only doing certain things on search engines," Weitz told TechNewsDaily. "And those things are generally looking for a website. I can ask a search engine what's happening this weekend, but people just don't think they can ask those kinds of questions."

Weitz said people have been programmed over the last decade or so to think of search in a very particular way: They enter a keyword and they get back a bunch of blue links. Weitz characterized search before Bing as very DOS-like – a reference to an early computer operating system that preceded Windows – functional but requiring a lot of work on the part of the user.

Data gathered by web analytics firm OneStat confirms these patterns. Of all the search queries worldwide, 33.65 percent of people use two-word phrases, 26.27 percent use three-word phrases and 15.52 percent use a one-word phrase.

Think Different

Bing designers want people to rethink search. Instead of searching for a Web page by a keyword or two that may or may not provide the desired result, Bing users are encouraged to ask questions in search the same way they might ask someone sitting next to them.

Weitz pointed out the reference tab in Bing and said, "It uses natural language search. We can actually understand the questions." Instead of expecting pages of Websites to cull through, Bing users should expect an answer then and there, cutting search times by half or more.

"The whole premise behind Bing was that we wanted to drive the experience based on the user's intent," said Weitz. "We have a lot of features that fire when we detect a particular intent, like looking at airfare, buying a product, looking at what's happening this weekend or checking out the weather."

Weitz and the folks at Bing want people to realize, "Oh, wow! I can do more than I thought I could." But Weitz admits that retraining people to expect more from their search engines is going to take time.

Weitz and his marketing team at Bing are starting by reaching out to groups they have identified as having a high affinity with search and with one another, including teachers, crafters and scientists. Weitz travels the country speaking to these groups and shows them how Bing can be relevant to their particular fields. Weitz is counting on these individuals to tell their friends and  colleagues how to use the features that are most relevant to their group.

Lessons from a 5-year-old

Weitz's own 5-year-old daughter has taught him that it's also important for people to question search results.

"I know she puts in a query and assumes the results are accurate and not spammy, but we know that for many queries, there's a lot of ambiguity," he said.

As a result, part of the Bing mission is to help kids and adults critically think through the results they get back, look at the source of the information, and look at the other writings on a Web site to assess its overall reliability. "We think there's a lot of work we can do to help kids be safer and more knowledgeable on the Web," Weitz said.

Weitz said he spends a lot of time with Bing engineers to figure out how the search engine can showmore authoritative results, but he is careful that that Bing does not bias the results.

"You don't want [the search engine] to drive conversation," he said. "You run the risk of setting news rather than reporting it, which is a problem."

Exclusive or open?

Recently, American entrepreneur and HDNet chairman Mark Cuban suggested that Microsoft pay news sites to "go exclusive with Bing" after Rupert Murdock threatened to delist all of his news from Google by July 2010.

But it's unclear what the benefits of such a move would be, Weitz said. "We have to ask the question, does having an exclusive lock on information benefit the user at the end?" he said in a telephone interview. "And I struggle to figure out the scenario where that does benefit the user."

The near future for Bing involves adding more niche search engines. Already Bing can provide direct answers to travel, recipe, shopping, and health queries. The longer-term future for Bing involves retraining people in the way they search while making Bing even better at identifying user intent, Weitz said.

"We are trying to expand the universe of things people can do with a search engine. We want people to say, let me go Bing it."