61 Percent of World’s Top Brands Create Google+ Pages in One Week

Even Biggest Brands Attract Fewer than 150,000 Google+ Followers in First Week, Compared to 300 Million Facebook Fans They’ve Already Established

San Mateo, Calif – November 16, 2011 – BrightEdge, the leading site, search and social management platform for global enterprises, today released an analysis that shows almost two-thirds, or 61 percent, of the world’s Top 100 brands had pages on Google+ less than a week after the search company allowed them but only about 13 percent of the brands that created these pages displayed a link to them on their home page, a major factor in driving traffic and visibility for the new social web presence.

In this early phase of a Google+ presence, brands appeared to be having mixed success at building social networks around their Google+ presence. In fact, Google had the largest fan contingent of any brand on Google+, having attracted more than 65,000 fans. But other consumer brand stalwarts like Coke, McDonalds and Verizon had only dozens of fans, all just a shadow of the millions of Facebook fans these brands have already connected with. In fact, a review of Facebook and Google+ properties for all 100 brands showed a collective total of almost 300 million Facebook fans for these top brands, compared to approximately 148,000 Google+ followers for these same brands.

“Brands have been quick to embrace a presence on Google+, but clearly there is a long way to go in establishing social networks that really have scale and deep user engagement,” said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. “Now the real work begins for these brands if they want to extend their social presence on the Web from Facebook to the new Google+. And it will be interesting to see how these communication and marketing channels will grow in a way that remains meaningful for the world’s top brands.”

The BrightEdge analysis showed that 94 percent of the Top 100 brands have a presence on Facebook.

And while brands appeared to be quick to adopt a Google+ page, they were somewhat slow to embed on their home page any kind of link to the Google+ page. Only 12 percent of brands that had opened a Google+ page were displaying a link to it on their home page. About 53 percent of the Top 100 brands display a link on their home page to their Facebook page.

For any brand, Google search will remain a primary means for consumer discovery. And Google+ appears to be getting very good ranking despite being in its early stages. BrightEdge's analytics showed Google+ pages on average appeared in the top 12 Google search results for the corresponding brand, while the brand’s Facebook pages on average appeared in the top 13 or 14 listed results.

Only one Top 100 global brand, Marlboro, has no social media presence on either Facebook or Goolge+. To learn more about the Google+ analysis, please visit BrightEdge SocialShare to view and download the full report.

Adobe Genesis Accredited Integration & Adobe Digital Marketing Suite

BrightEdge and Adobe Genesis collaboration delivers seamless integration between BrightEdge SEO and Adobe SiteCatalyst and Adobe SearchCenter+

San Mateo, Calif – November 28, 2011 – BrightEdge, the leading site, search and social management platform for global enterprises, today announced release of its BrightEdge Adobe® Genesis™ integration with the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite. Through Adobe Genesis integration with BrightEdge, customers will now get side-by-side views and deeper insights into critical marketing information including BrightEdge SEO performance metrics, Adobe web analytics, and both organic and paid search results across both companies. The solution is Adobe Genesis Accredited on the latest Adobe Genesis 3.0 release.

The BrightEdge and Adobe Genesis partnership gives customers integration across BrightEdge SEO and both Adobe® SiteCatalyst® and Adobe® SearchCenter+. BrightEdge-Genesis combines global enterprise BrightEdge SEO technology & breakthrough social media tools with Adobe's industry- leading Digital Marketing Suite in a streamlined integration to deliver maximum impact and higher ROI. This collaboration will allow customers insight into competitor traffic volume and enable them to successfully stay at the forefront of SEO, web analytics, and paid search.

“Digital marketers can seamlessly integrate site traffic, conversion and paid search marketing data with organic search marketing tools,” says Christopher Parkin, Strategic Alliances and Genesis Solutions at Adobe. “By combining the comprehensive search engine coverage and international support BrightEdge S3 offers with the Adobe SiteCatalyst, marketers can easily align organic search traffic data with other key business metrics. This value is further amplified for search marketers using the integration between the BrightEdge S3 platform and Adobe SearchCenter+, as they can now easily create bid strategies based on both paid and organic keyword activity as well as deliver unified reports and rich keyword expansion opportunities.

“We commend BrightEdge on its Adobe Genesis Accreditation, which is a rigorous process that has become the industry ‘gold standard’, ensuring the joint solution is technologically sound, repeatable, and proven to deliver tangible ROI to our mutual customers,” added Parkin. “The BrightEdge team was great to work with throughout the joint development and successful, multi-customer beta.”

“We are excited to work with Adobe, as this partnership and integration will make it easy for marketers to gain global insights into their site, as well as paid and organic search marketing,” says Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. “Additionally, it will also yield improved site and search performance and help customers gain a competitive edge in the long run.”

Feedback from customers has been very positive. Jason Price, Executive Vice President at Hospitality E-Business Strategies who has been testing the integration for a leading hospitality industry client said, “The integration of organic and paid search plus web analytics delivers a complete picture of what the data really means. With this integration, SearchCenter bid rules can return higher ROI because we better understand the true value of a keyword, rather than just its paid search value.” And for Nathan Janitz at Resolution Media “Genesis’ integration of BrightEdge S3 into the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite allows us to have one interface to manage our clients SEO and analytic performance.”

The BrightEdge and Adobe Genesis collaboration will provide customers new capabilities, including:

• 2-way integration of web analytics and SEO, combining Adobe SiteCatalyst and BrightEdge SEO so users can see paid and organic rank, onsite engagement or conversions metrics in one report
• Paid and Organic results integrated so users can better optimize Adobe SearchCenter+ paid search bidding rules
• Support for the latest Genesis release - Genesis 3.0
• Support for unlimited numbers of SEO keywords, keyword groups, and business units
• SEO results for over 40 countries and major search engines from the ISO-security-certified BrightEdge platform

The integration is available today for all customers. For more information, please visit the Adobe Genesis Showcase, go to www.brightedge.com, or contact your BrightEdge sales representative.

BrightEdge Unifies Search and Social Marketing with Signal Stream

BrightEdge S3 Adopted by Leading Companies Including Twitter, VMWare and Williams-Sonoma

San Mateo, Calif – October 11, 2011 – BrightEdge, the leading site, search and social management platform for global enterprises, today announced the launch of BridgeEdge S3, the first application to offer a unified cloud-based solution for site, search and social marketing. Building on BrightEdge’s industry leadership in search engine optimization (SEO), BridgeEdge S3 is an insightful and actionable solution for marketing organizations looking to harness the voluminous site, search and social signal stream to complement existing search strategies for user driven marketing.

BrightEdge S3 is offered in response to an industry-wide shift in how marketing is traditionally done. During the past 15 years, customers have driven an ever-increasing volume of signals across the web. The signal stream has grown tremendously as billions of customers enter information on websites, perform searches on search engines, and share interests on social networks. The sheer scale of the signal stream is massive: 200 million tweets daily, and more than two billion Facebook posts per day.

“The Internet is changing how companies engage with customers, and the rise of social networks and sharing is accelerating a user driven approach to marketing,” said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. “Just as strategies to manage and optimize search were essential for marketers during the past decade, CMOs will now require new tools in the next 10 years to leverage the torrent of data their customers generate everyday across site, search and social channels. We are proud to be working with some of the world’s leading brands, such as Microsoft, VMWare and Williams-Sonoma to deliver our vision of this future today with the launch of BridgeEdge S3.”

“Technology to address the scale of customer web sites, searches across the globe and nearly a billion social network users has only recently been possible, but BrightEdge S3 is built to scale in the cloud using the same big data technologies pioneered at Google and Facebook,” said Lemuel Park, CTO of BrightEdge.

The BrightEdge S3 platform provides marketers with a complete business value-driven approach to analyzing all activity across sites, search, and social channels while delivering actionable insight to complement any brand campaign. It offers a full range of functionality for executing comprehensive search and social site audits, creating global dashboard reports, automating workflow across teams and providing custom recommendations to improve social, search and site performance.

New features offered by the BrightEdge S3 platform include:

• Social Site Audit – Provides custom recommendations to help companies properly adopt extended Facebook open graph tags and better leverage customer engagement
• Social Signal Measurement – Enables marketers to measure, manage and take action on Tweets and Facebook Likes, which directly impact search rankings
• Facebook Page Recommendations – Provides proven recommendations to help companies’ Facebook pages rank higher in search
• Search ROI Comparison – Enables marketers to measure the true value of their organic and paid search efforts
• Collaborative SEO – Allows cross-departmental teams to work more efficiently by assigning tasks and workflow along with proven SEO recommendations to increase search rankings

BrightEdge’s S3 Platform Now Enterprise-Grade

BrightEdge Platform Now Offers Redundant Data Centers, ISO/IEC 27001 Standards, Certification, and Hadoop Clusters

San Mateo, Calif – December 14, 2011 – BrightEdge, the leading site, search and social management platform for global enterprises, today unveiled that it has added enterprise-grade readiness to its BrightEdge S3 platform, making it the first offering to include redundant data centers, ISO/IEC 27001 standards, Hadoop clusters, and certification.

The robust offering is a response to leading organizations’ expectation of BrightEdge to provide secure, reliable and scalable enterprise-grade infrastructure to support their digital marketing efforts. In a survey of more than 300 leading retailers, publishers, consumer brands, 84 percent indicated that they require enterprise-grade infrastructure for the SEO operations. Similar to the early SaaS vendors, who were the first to focus on development of enterprise-ready platforms, customers’ now expect leading cloud software companies to safeguard their investments.

"As a cloud company we get how important enterprise-grade infrastructure is," said Andrew Taylor, Search Marketing Manager, Citrix Systems. "Any amount of down-time from our partners is unacceptable and our SEO and social monitoring operations is no exception. BrightEdge has shown from day-one that they are deeply committed to providing the necessary tools to protect our investments."

“Our executive team comes from an enterprise background, and know how important it is to provide clients with robust infrastructure for global, mission critical operations,” said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. “Our customers have been very clear that they require enterprise-grade infrastructure to ensure that their businesses are protected. I’m very pleased to be able to offer them with a robust infrastructure to provide them with peace of mind.”

• Secure – Customers are provided with secure protection on par with global and local standards – complying with ISO/IEC 27001 standards – as certified by British Standards Institution ensuring security of BrightEdge customer’s data in our information systems.
• Reliable – Five-fold replication of data delivers a high level of redundancy and fail over, resulting in an uptime of more than 99.99 percent. BrightEdge disaster recovery tools and alternative data centers – far removed from existing data centers – provides uninterrupted availability for app and data.
• Scalable – Multi-pod architecture distributes loads across five pods in North America and Europe, ensuring that each pod scales with customer needs without impacting performance. A Big Data foundation based on Hadoop clusters, means BrightEdge can deliver actionable analytics-driven insights based on a crawl, and analysis of unlimited keywords, pages and back links.

Learn more about enterprise grade SEO at www.brightedge.com/enterprise-seo

Brand-Centric Google+ Pages Gaining Ground on Facebook

77 Percent of Top 100 Brands Now Have Google+ Pages, Up From 61 Percent Last Month

San Mateo, Calif - December 21, 2011 - BrightEdge, the leading site, search and social management platform for global enterprises, today released analysis showing that Google+ page creation amongst the world.s top 100 brands jumped in the last month from 61 percent to 77 percent (93 percent of top 100 brands are on Facebook), while the number of people in circles increased over 50 percent from 147k to 222k.

It is still early days as top 100 brands determine how best to establish a Google+ presence, while continuing to attract more people in circles. Google continues to have the largest fan contingent of any brand with more than 77k fans, up from 65k just one month before. Brands like Starbucks nearly quadrupled their social followers in the last month and H&M and Pepsi broke into 20k plus people in circles, which is still a shadow of the millions of Facebook fans these brands have already connected with. In fact, a review of Facebook and Google+ properties for all top 100 brands, showed a collective total of almost 300 million Facebook fans for these top brands, compared to approximately 148k Google+ followers for these same brands.

"Google is embedding their popular new product with its dominant search marketing position, replicating the tie between social and search channels, just as Facebook.s Open Graph tied sites and search together earlier this year, blurring the lines between social and search engagement," said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. "Top 100 brands are realizing that they now need to address both channels. Now the real work begins, if they want to extend their social presence on the Web from Facebook to the new Google+."

To learn more about the Google+ analysis, please visit BrightEdge SocialShare to view and download the full report here.

BrightEdge: Search Marketers Want Tools to Interpret Social Signals

With a variety of digital marketing tools at their disposal, 73 percent of search marketing decision makers still plan to increase their focus on search engine marketing in the coming year

San Mateo, Calif - January 11, 2012 - BrightEdge, the leading site, search and social management platform for global enterprises, today issued the findings from their annual search marketers survey. Assessing the priorities for more than 300 leading brand search marketers and retailers, the 2012 survey found that marketers plan to invest more in search engine marketing (73 percent), and need both better tools to interpret social signals/data (83 percent) and an enterprise-grade infrastructure with redundant data centers, and ISO certification.

When it comes to top SEO priorities, digital brand executives are making sure that they understand the impact on search marketing and optimize for social signals including Likes, tweets and Google +1s, indicating that they have an increasing need for tools to leverage these insights in the coming year. In the past year it has become widely recognized that social signals are a new form of backlinks that drive search rankings, and leaders are committed to succeeding in this new arena.

The report also uncovered that brands are expecting their search marketing systems to have the enterprise-grade technology championed by cloud pioneers like salesforce.com. This includes security and associated certifications like ISO 27001, reliability and proven strategies for disaster recovery, and scalability to support customer needs.

The need for global support increased by more than 55 percent, with more than 70 percent indicating that their search programs are being run in multiple countries.

"The fact that so many executives are looking for things like enterprise-grade infrastructure, social signal measurement and global reach means that brands are focused on leveraging this technology for mission critical operations," said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. "At BrightEdge we have focused our technology team to be sure that we have what leading search marketers need in 2012."

For more on BrightEdge's annual search marketers survey, please visit www.brightedge.com/2012-search-marketers-survey-results. To join the discussion about the findings, please visit us at www.facebook.com/seoplatform, or follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/brightedge.