Compete Pro Enhancements were just announced today by Compete.com, and I can’t wait to try them (I have a Compete Pro Account- though it doesn’t allow me to view all the enhancements annouced here - and I’ll ask Compete to allow me to view the new features so I can write about them).

Here’s the new features as announced by Compete.com:

New Compete PRO Enterprise Enhancements Launched!
Exciting news today from Compete, as we take another leap forward in delivering the actionable data that you need to drive business decisions.

We’ve made some major enhancements over the past few months to Compete PRO Enterprise, our most powerful PRO offering, and continue to roll out new consumer and competitive data that make it easier for you to discover, take action, and measure online marketing performance.

Our latest addition: Category Profiles, that provide a web wide view of traffic, search, and engagement metrics across 220+ industry categories and 45 Behavioral Segments.

As always, our goal is to make complex data simple to use. Categories does just that, transforming a complex universe of digital data into a solution that is simple and actionable:

“Clients rely on us for timely and comprehensive insights into what is happening in their markets…Having access to a tool that makes it easy to spot more effective customer acquisition partners or to stave off threats from a new competitor in their industry helps ensure that we’re always meeting clients’ needs.” - Adam Lavelle, Chief Strategy Officer of i-Crossing

How Compete PRO Enterprise can help you:
Track Market Share: Use Compete’s Category Profiles to track market share and understand daily changes across your competitive landscape. For instance, the graph below shows how market share of visitors has changed over a two-year period for five leading car rental companies in the Car Rental category.

Benchmark Performance: Use Compete’s Category Profiles to benchmark your own traffic and engagement performance against the industry and identify fast-moving longer tail sites within the group. The graph below shows how trends in page views of four different cooking websites compare to all page views captured by the Cooking category.

Take Action: Use Compete’s Categorie Profiles and Behavioral Segments to understand and design specific media plans and campaigns to reach unique consumer groups. For instance, you can see all the search keywords that are driving traffic to sites in a specific category (Cooking Industry keywords shown below) or behavioral segment and make sure you have incorporated them into your SEM campaigns.

I just took a quick look at The 2009 Clickable Guru’s Guide To Better Search Engine Marketing - looks pretty comprehensive guide to using Google to run Paid Search Advertising, but with the idea of covering all the steps in between each interface you need to deal with and the strategy behind all of them.

The 2009 Clickable Guru’s Guide To Better Search Engine Marketing - is free, and you can become a “Clickable Guru” if you want - here’s the details which I got from Max Kalehoff, VP Marketing at Clickable, who is also a friend and supporter of my blog.

This book is simple and accessible to beginners, yet equally valuable for advanced online marketing professionals. You can download the free electronic version (http://bit.ly/qE14V), or let me know your snail-mail address and we’ll send you a hardcopy. If you like it, all we ask is that you tell your friends and pass along the link on Facebook, Twitter, or your blog.

Who Are The Gurus? The Guru’s Guide is an anthology of teachings from our team of search evangelists, who worked undercover for the past year to help struggling marketers. Their work gives back to the community, while helping us make better online advertising products. Online video is one of my hobbies, so I channeled my ninja skills to create this Guru Video Blog Post: http://bit.ly/1RExLe.

Become A Guru! We also launched a contest to identify the next Clickable Guru. Details are in our newly launched Forums, a new venue for interactive marketers to get help and connect with the Clickable Gurus and our product team. Visit: http://bit.ly/Az2oJ

There’s also an official announcement on the Clickable Blog -

I’ve been to several Clickable events, mostly the Interesting Cafe series including the last one with Peter Thum.  The video of Peter Thum’s talk about Ethos Water was quite inspiring and he let out a gem, but something mostly unrelated to his product (wish I had the video to point to what the said) - here’s the gist of it, as I recall it.

After experiencing water crises while working in South Africa, Peter Thum left his job to found Ethos Water. His mission: Address the world water crisis and help children get clean water. He led Ethos through its acquisition by Starbucks in 2005. Ethos humanitarian water grants will reach $10 million by 2010. All are welcomed to join the Clickable team to hear Peter’s inspiring story at Interesting Cafe, our monthly community and culture event. As always, we’ll have beer and wine bar, and refreshments.

Know someone who’s be interested in this talk? Feel free to share the link.

When: June 30, 2009, from 6:30pm - 8:30pm

Where: Clickable New York Headquarters, 7 West 22nd Street, New York City

What Peter Thum said - as we move farther up the chain of our “marketing message” it has to be shorter and shorter - so that it becomes a “catch phrase” - and this would relate very well to Search Marketing and the kind of campaigns you can run in AdWords and monitor and optimize using Clickable’s interface.  At the top of the pyramid,  you providing very little information, mostly a phrase, you are trying to catch a fish that has already bitten, taken the bait, and reel them in - you don’t want too much data to confuse a prospect that is ready to decide.

However, Social Media, being closer to the “base” of the pyramid, and involved in affinities and undeclared likes and dislikes,  allows much more information and dissemination of information, conversation.  Can Social Media be taught?  I don’t know for sure, but I think there’s a continuum that starts with Social Media and ends with Search (with another “inverted pyramid” where Social Media is done on your “Search” Customers - but that’s the subject of another post on another day).

Of course, I’m not sure my description is totally what Peter Thum said - or at least, my interpretation of it, but it explained how Ethos Water needed to refine their message to a catch phase - figure out who the target audience was and what they would respond to - and the knowledge of how to do this, the Branding around it, was quite complex - as is the Branding Message of Ethos Water.

Getting back to the Clickable Guru’s Guide to Search Marketing - the Guru’s Guide gets you to the point where you can articulate the “catch phrases” you want to advertise on, artfully, using Google’s and Clickable’s interfaces - to the point where you can excel, if you want to, at Search Marketing.

I was at the The “Twitter for Dummies” and Baveo.com Party! tonight and got a peak at the book, which I’ll pick up, and got to talk with one of the authors, Michael Gruen, of Twitter for Dummies.  The Twitter for Dummies book was published yesterday, July 7th, 2009 (funny, isn’t that the same date that Chris Anderson’s FREE book came out? - see my recent post on“Free” Problems and Social Media Forensics using Radian6 and Blogpulse for my take on Chris Anderson and the whole “Free” thing - which you can read for “free” here).

While we didn’t talk about Twitter, or really, much about the book (and that’s the funny thing, but sometimes Tweetups tend to be “unstructured” and there is a role for announcements - and maybe a short talk about the book, as part of a PR event, having some books on hand, would be optimal).

Laura Fitton, @Pistachio,  wasn’t at the Twitter for Dummies Tweetup, but she’s probably smiling because her new startup got funded last month - and I did see her speak at Jeff Pulver’s 140 Conference around the same time, as well.

Laura “Pistachio” Fitton’s TechStars project, OneForty, has received an angel round of funding to the tune of around $250,000 just 15 days into the business accelerator session.

Getting back to the Twitter for Dummies book - according to the Amazon Description - it covers…:

Twitter, the simple-to-use microblogging service, offers immense benefits for businesses and organizations. Fire departments, political candidates, and C0EOs have used Twitter to share up-to-the-minute information. Laura Fitton, maybe better known by her Twitter handle - @Pistachio, has more than 10,000 followers on Twitter, and gives presentations on how to use Twitter to build business and personal opportunity. She’s joined by Michael Gruen and Leslie Poston to share Twitter expertise in this easy-to-follow guide.

Here’s co-author of Twitter for Dummies book,  Michael Gruen and a friend, Cecilia, showing off the new book - it’s about time we had a Twitter for Dummies book as we’ve had so many other of the Dummies series - and I’ve bought a few over the years, even the Web Analytics for Dummies book - which was good, at the time it was published.

In fact, I just bought Twitter for Dummies for my iPhone (Kindle Reader) and when I’m done reading the book I’ll review it here.