I’m often pressured to come up with just the right photo to tell the story of a business or a company within the banner of their website. It’s one of the most difficult things that I do.

Jonathon Klein of Getty Images – one of the amazing stock photo houses of this century and the past few decades does a terrific job of explaining just how powerful images can be… but, I digress. Watch this video for the details.

The bottom line is that we see Google as generally a higher referrer to enterprise sites, and while Yahoo and Bing are significantly lower in terms of overall share, the gap between the two is narrowing at a quick pace.

The chart below presents enterprise search share performance in views of both year-over-year, as well as month-over-month.

Google hits 80% market share for enterprise level businesses

Google increased month-over-month to command an 80.17 % natural search traffic share to enterprise-level Web sites, while Bing share increased slightly from January to February by 0.09%, to 7.16% overall. Yahoo decreased to a 9.34% share, losing 2.9% search market share year-over-year.

AOL declined in share year-over-year, from 1.95 % in February 2009, down to 1.49 % market share in February 2010. AOL share remained stable month-over-month. Ask.com’s search market share increased slightly in month-over-month share by 0.01%, going from 0.37% up to 0.39 %.

In the month-over-month view, again only Bing and Google made any significant gain in market share. AOL and Ask.com somewhat surprisingly leveled off month-over-month.

Bing making an impact, and preparing to overtake Yahoo

Overall, Bing’s gain in share has had the greatest impact on both Yahoo and AOL. While Yahoo’s loss of almost 3% of the search market is significant, AOL search users are migrating elsewhere, with AOL losing almost 25% of the entire search business. That 0.45 % loss in search market share is a blink and blip for Google, but a much bigger chunk for AOL.

I’ve also been monitoring trend data in the search share race, particularly what I believe to be the inevitable catch-up in market share for Bing (against Yahoo). Based on current trends, we see them overtaking Yahoo later this year, possibly even before there is any kind of direct syndication of Bing results into Yahoo properties.

Read the full article here >

Not all entrepreneurs succeed the first time out of the gate. In fact, most have many failures behind them before they actually do hit the ball out of the park. It’s always inspiring to me to hear other people’s stories as I, myself, move from fear to love. What I mean by that is as we fail – - we can choose to be afraid to move forward – - or, we can embrace our mistake, learn from it and love ourselves.

These people from Cambridge Who’s Who tell it like it is and I’m guessing it’s not very different from your own story.

Love to hear your comments!

A national survey, conducted by Cision and Don Bates of The George Washington University, found that an overwhelming majority of reporters and editors now depend on social media sources when researching their stories. Among the journalists surveyed, 89% said they turn to blogs for story research, 65% to social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and 52% to microblogging services such as Twitter. The survey also found that 61% use Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia.

Most journalists said that social media were important or somewhat important for reporting and producing the stories they wrote.

Data In Response To Social Media Resources

The groups placing the highest levels of importance on social media for reporting and producing stories were journalists who spend most of their professional time writing for Websites . Those at Newspapers  and Magazines  reported this less often. The differences between Magazine journalists and Website journalists is statistically significant.

• Journalists who spend most of their professional time writing for Websites (69%) reported this the most often, and significantly more so than those at Magazines (48%)
• 89% of journalists reported using Blogs for their online research. Only Corporate websites (96%) is used by more journalists when doing online research for a story
• Approximately two-thirds reported using Social Networking sites and just over half make use of Twitter for online research. Newspaper journalists (72%) and those writing for Websites (75%) use Social Networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook for online research significantly more often than those at Magazines (58%)

While the results demonstrate the fast growth of social media as a well-used source of information for mainstream journalists, the survey also made it clear that reporters and editors are acutely aware of the need to verify information they get from social media.

• 84% said social media sources were “slightly less” or “much less” reliable than traditional media
• 49% say social media suffers from “lack of fact checking, verification and reporting standards

Heidi Sullivan, Vice President of Research for Cision, says “Mainstream media have hit a tipping point in their reliance on social media for their research and reporting…however… it is not replacing editors’ and reporters’ reliance on primary sources, fact-checking and other traditional best practices in journalism.”

According to the survey, most journalists turn to public relations professionals for assistance in their primary research:

• 44% of editors and reporters surveyed said they depend on PR professionals for “interviews and access to sources and experts”
• 23% for “answers to questions and targeted information”
• 17% for “perspective, information in context, and background information”

Don Bates, founding director of the GWU Strategic Public Relations program, cautions that, though “Social media provides a wealth of new information for journalists… getting the story right is as important as ever… PR professionals… have a responsibility… to ensure the information they provide journalists is accurate and timely… ”

For a copy of the complete survey results, please go here > http://us.cision.com/campaigns/2010_journalist_survey_pr/request.asp