Everybody wants a write off and charitable contributions top the list for most consumers - and businesses. But, did you know those philanthropic contributions and activities could also give a brand boost? According to a recent report, charitable actions can lead consumers to action.

The report finds that nearly three-quarters of consumers have purchased a brand because it supported a cause they believed in. Corporations reported seeing an increase in sales of more than 25% after the public relations from helping a favored cause.

When you add this historical data to the new offerings of the Internet, cause marketing can have an even greater effect.

Consider the recent Haagen Dazs viral promotion to let consumers know the honey bee was in danger. The ice cream company, which relies on honey bees for a number of it’s flavors, launched a multi-platform campaign which included television and print ads as well as an online video featuring “b-boys” dancing. The video quickly became viral with teens and young adults sharing content and adding the video to their own social network profiles.

Two weeks after the launch on August 1, the video had 2 million views and 3500 comments as well as a 4 ½ star review on YouTube. About 150 websites and blogs have also picked up the video, which increased hits to the Haagen Dazs branded micro site.

While the plight of the bees is still up in the air, the effect on Haagen Dazs brand can already be seen in the increased consumer interest to the ice cream maker’s site and the hits to the video.

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer on Thursday defended Microsoft Corp’s need to make heavy investments in its Internet businesses but said the company was “done,” for now, with pursuing Yahoo Inc . “There’s nothing under discussion between the two of us,” Ballmer told investors of how six months of various talks had reached an impasse earlier in July.

“We had a set of principles, we talked about them, it didn’t work out,” he said. “Fine, we’re done. We can move on.”

The message for Microsoft’s annual meeting with Wall Street analysts, an all-day affair at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, was that it had a post-Yahoo plan to turn around its online services division and a strategy to take advantage of future opportunities, even as its Internet chief departs.

“There is this huge, huge, huge new opportunity around the Internet and online and we have to embrace that opportunity and invest in that opportunity,” Ballmer said.

Shares of Microsoft have fallen 8 percent over the last week since the company forecast an outlook below Wall Street estimates and revealed an additional $500 million investment into its online unit, even as it chalked up further losses.

Charles Di Bona, a software research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said Ballmer’s comments did not give enough details about how that additional investment will be spent and how the company arrived at that decision.

“It’s spending $500 million dollars and then it says we’ll tell you later how we’ll spend it,” said Di Bona, who has an “outperform” rating on Microsoft. “The market’s concern is not about how it is running its core business. It’s about decisions about larger chunks of money that people can’t track.”

Ballmer said Microsoft is willing to endure online division operating losses that amount to between 5 percent to 10 percent of the company’s total operating income, which reached $22.5 billion in fiscal year 2008, until the search and advertising business reaches “scale.

The British are heading online to shop in ever increasing numbers, according to new figures from IMRG/Capgemini. Twenty percent of U.K. consumers now do their shopping on the Internet. Almost $54 billion was spent by Brits on Internet shopping in the first half of this year. That’s a rise of 38% compared with last year, revealed IMRG/Capgemini in its latest e-Retail Sales Index.

“Online shopping growth continues to out-perform the high street, as tight budgets and poor weather keep people at home where they can shop online for bargains,” said IMRG CEO James Roper. Just over half also believe that shopping online is environmentally friendly, a view shared by their movie-watching U.S. cousins.

IMRG Capgemini predicts that sustainability issues will drive between 30% and 50% of all British retail online in the next five years. “This is because, as online reaches 20% of all retail sales, retailers experience a tipping point which forces them to seriously re-think the future viability of their business model,” said Mike Petevinos, head of consulting for retail for Capgemini UK.

UK Internet visits to www.twitter.com have increased by 631% over the last 12 months, with 485% of that growth coming this year. Twitter is more popular with Brits than Americans: last week the site’s share of UK Internet visits was 70% higher its share of visits in America.

Twitter’s size is notoriously difficult to measure, as there are so many access points (mobile phones in particular), so if anything our measurement of internet visits under-estimates platform’s popularity. In her post Heather Hopkins argues that Twitter cannot yet be considered mainstream in the USA, but in the UK it’s getting there. Last week Twitter entered our rankings of the top 50 Social Networking and Forums websites for the first time, and the demographics are also pointing towards more wide-spread adoption. Overr the last 4 weeks, visitors were split 50/50 male/female, while only 15% were from London. 25-34 year olds are still the most over represented age group visiting the site, but 37% of visitors to the site are now 45 and over.

Looking at the Experian Mosaic lifestyle data for Twitter over the same period also paints an interesting picture. The two most over represented types are still both typical early adopters: City Adventurers (High-salaried, twenty-something singles in smart flats in inner urban areas) and Town Gown Transition (Students and academics mix with young professionals in terraces relatively close to universities). However, there are a number of other over-represented types that would imply a more mainstream appeal, in particular Settled Minorities (Young families and singles of varied ethnic decent, in high density, pleasant urban terraces) and White Van Culture (Younger owners, many in good quality ex-council properties, take advantage of local economic opportunities).

Another sign of maturity is that mainstream media organizations are starting to pick up traffic from Twitter. For example, BBC News accounts for 1.46% of the site’s upstream traffic but 1.73% of its downstream traffic - i.e. the Beeb is receiving more traffic from Twitter than it sends there. Other BBC properties in Twitter’s top 20 downstream sites include BBC Sport (1.34%) and the BBC Homepage (0.71%). The BBC Sport feed is very popular: over the last 4 weeks ‘bbc sport’ was the second most popular search term sending traffic to Twitter. As the table below illustrates, it accounted for 5.92% of search traffic to the site, and was joined in the top 10 by two other BBC-related search terms, ‘bbc news’ and ‘bbcsport’.

The other interesting thing that the table above highlights is the growing tail of people search terms sending traffic to Twitter, something that we’ve highlighted before with regards to another social network, Linkedin. This most recent top 10 includes Kevin Rose (founder of Digg, drinker of tea), the blogger Los Havros, and Molly Wood (executive editor of CNET’s Buzz Report).

Google recently commented that social media will become a “big part” of Internet marketing strategies in the future. New research from Deloitte suggests that before businesses implement such strategies they need to fully understand what drives social media to gain maximum benefit.

In partnership with Beeline Labs, Deloitte’s Ed Moran researched businesses that have started to use social media and build online communities. He found that many social media sites were failing to realize the full potential of their communities. For some, said Moran, it was the inability to reach the critical mass of involvement required and for others it was focusing on the bottom line instead of what their community needed.

Social media requires time, great community managers and providing what the community wants, yet many businesses start off by throwing money at online social technologies. Of the 140 or so businesses that Moran studied, 6% spent over $1 million on building social communities yet “a disturbingly high number of these sites fail,” said Moran (via WSJ ).

To maximize social media activity it’s imperative to build up a strong community both in numbers and commitment. The use of dedicated staff that have time to be involved in the community instead of tacking it onto their other marketing responsibilities will also ensure consistency and engagement and businesses should look to measure success not by the number of visits, but by increased loyalty and word of mouth impact.

A few key findings from the report, “2008 Tribalization of Business”, include:

- 37% of the communities have been running for 6 months or less

- 27% of the communities have 101-500 members (37% have less than 100)

- 13% of the communities are run by 2-5 full-time managers

- 52% of the companies surveyed plan to increase spending on community

E-commerce in Brazil, like many other Internet activities in that country, is maturing quickly. Between the first half of 2005 and 2008, e-commerce revenues as reported in e-bit’s “Web Shoppers” study nearly quadrupled to reach BRL3.8 billion ($2.2 billion). According to Valor Economico, in 2007 alone the market expanded by 43%. In terms of the number of individuals buying online, the figures are almost as dramatic, with 2.6 million buyers in 2003 rising to 9.5 million in 2007.

More likely than not, adult Internet users in Brazil have purchased something online, according to a December 2007 study by Symantec.

Brazil’s 79% of users who have purchased online is in the upper reaches of worldwide rates, comparable to such advanced Internet players as Japan (82%), the UK (79%) and Germany (78%). In contrast, only 63% of US Internet users have made an online purchase. Simply put, Brazilians who use the Internet tend to use it for everything, including e-commerce.

Online buyers in Brazil are huge media consumers. Books, magazines and newspapers ranked as the top e-commerce categories with a 17% market share in 2007, according to e-bit.

Almost one-half (49.47%) of Brazil’s online buyers use a credit card to make their purchases, versus 39.06% who use a banking ticket to buy online. Other payment methods, including debit or electronic transfer, and payment on delivery, were each favored by less than 10% of respondents to an Ipsos Public Affairs survey.

Females, who make up almost one-half of Internet users in Brazil, are a key factor driving the explosion of e-commerce. A study from e-bit reported in Business News Americas found that online transactions by females increased nearly 10% since 2000.

Product placement and corporate sponsorships have been seeping into new, user-generated turf lately. Last year, Dr Pepper sponsored production of a music video by YouTube star Tay Zonday, who is Web famous for his song “Chocolate Rain.” This year, Sprint Nextel is offering a few bucks to people who incorporate a new Samsung phone into a home video and post the results to YouTube. The first 1,000 videos to incorporate the Instinct phone get $20 apiece, and one grand prize-winning entry will win $10,000.

“There are lots of people making a pretty good living off of being Internet famous,” said Tim Hwang, organizer of a recent conference in Cambridge, Mass., dedicated to semi-serious discussions about Web culture. “Matt’s a notable example because he’s been able to do it for so long.”

Internet culture, Hwang said, has spent most of its existence in its own in-jokey world, but that’s changing quickly. And as deep-pocketed corporate entities turn to user-generated channels looking for attention, there’s no telling how things will play out.

“It’s still an open question whether big business is going to play Internet culture’s game, or if Internet culture is going to play the big business game,” Hwang said.

It’s easy to understand why sites like YouTube are attractive to advertisers and corporate sponsors. Getting a 30-second commercial on the air in front of a prime-time audience costs hundreds of thousands of dollars; uploading a video to YouTube costs nothing. Big-name entities from Revlon to Coldplay have recently sponsored contests on the video site.

Greg Sterling, analyst at marketing research firm Sterling Market Intelligence, said that it’s sometimes tough to determine whether popular phenomena like Harding’s dancing videos result in actual sales. The California Raisins commercials were a hit in the ’80s, for example, but the Claymation marketing campaign did little for the sale of actual California raisins.

In terms of brand recognition, though, Stride’s sponsorship would have to be considered a success, he said. After all, we’re talking about it. “I’d never heard of Stride gum before; had you?” he asks. (I had not.)

Among the thousands of comments posted on the sites discussing Harding’s video, a few say they’re now going to buy Stride gum because of the company’s support for the project. But most log on to declare their affection for the video. “I’m pretty sure that is the best thing I’ve ever seen on the internet,” writes one anonymous viewer, in one of thousands of similar reactions posted to the Web. “How can something that goofy be that moving?”

So much buzz for a video? What about the product? Maximizing exposure, minimizing costs and having a satisfied and happy audience. Maybe this is the new ad trend for Youtube.com especially now that ad revenue has been decreased.

Search engines are probably the single most effective way to generate traffic to your web page. Because of this, web owners will inevitably complete with each other in order to get a higher ranking. But how would then do this? Well, a lot of e-books, blogs, websites, podcasts, and other kinds of content are dedicated to this topic. But there will always be web masters who complain that they are not getting visitors from search engines. This can be due to different factors but some of the most common reasons I know of include:

New Website – when your site is new, you should expect that it will not perform that well with search engines. Take note that there are over 30 billion pages on the internet and a lot of these can be categorized as “spam”. Before search engines start to give your site a good ranking, they need to achieve a certain level of trust with you and this will grow over time as you build your content, traffic, and one way links.

Black Hat SEO Techniques – very few people want to be called a black hat marketer; or in layman’s term, a spammer. But no one can deny that being a black hat marketer does have its own appeal because of its immediate results. If you decide to take this route, you should realize that you can be hit by a penalty or in some cases, banned altogether.

Useless Content – even if you invest a lot in creating your website, it would not matter if you don’t have good content. Searchers are exactly that, they search for information that is relevant to their needs over the internet. In addition, good content will generate a lot of links which are “votes” for your website.

Duplicate Content – some people debate on the impact of using duplicate content on their websites. But as far as I’m concerned, search engines love fresh content and it will reward websites and blogs that frequently posts new and original articles.

According to industry reports, in five years, more than 30% of mobile phone subscribers in China will be reading books and newspapers through their phones. The combination of greater 3G adoption and a marked increase in made-for-mobile content will drive mobile entertainment revenues to almost $48 billion by 2010.

Reports additionally forecast that 90% of Chinese newspapers would have digital editions by 2013. Perhaps it’s not an exaggeration to say that print media will move to mobile phones, especially when every other type of digital content already has.

With an estimated 600 million mobile users, according to iResearch - China has seen its mobile search users grow to 61 million at the end of 2007 and will hit 117 million by 2008 and pass 200 million by 2010.

The world of 3G connectivity is expected to change the way how interaction-technology functions, how we shop, how we share information, and in general how we use handheld devices. The how(s) remaining to get explored seem at this point, almost infinite.

Nothing represents the changing of the guard as much as how the Big Three Portals have fallen from grace. Don’t get me wrong: from an operational standpoint, Yahoo! (YHOO) is a fine property, but that company is a bit of a… how do you say, disaster.

MSN is there, trekking along, costing Microsoft (MSFT) billions in losses over the years without really making a push for #1. Sort of like all other MSFT products not named Windows or Office, basically.

Meanwhile, Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL is drifting along, buying up more and more assets - some smart, some not - but now putting itself up for sale. While the company sold a 5% stake of itself to Google (GOOG) for a $1B sum - valuing itself for a tidy $20B - word is that it might be content with a $15B offer… which means either Yahoo!, MSFT, News Corp. (NWS), or Comcast (CMCSA) would show an interest.

While some will be quick to say the portals lost to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, make no mistake about it, they lost to search. Revenues matter, everything else is noise. Google has the web ecosystem in the bag, and considering that Google’s YouTube is more dominating in video than Google is in search - and that video is the next high growth opportunity after search’s decade - then you have to wonder how much more hurting Google can put on the Web.

When you consider how leadership in search helped Google propel itself to King of the Web, you sort of understand why MSFT just shelled out $100M for something that basically can be summed up as Wikipedia site search.