If you don't know who your target audience is, or what they're doing online, your chances of success diminish. However, when you identify the demographics and psychographics of your audience, your chances for success in the marketplace increase!

Analyst firm Forrester has some very detailed research about how people use social media. This information can really help you put together strategies to target specific audiences.

Read the whole story at socialsmallbiz.com.

All of us use Google search, most of us use it multiple times every day. Some of us can't imagine how we got our work done before we had Google search. But how many of us know how use the 'power features' of Google? Google search can actually do far more sophisticated searches than most people ever attempt. By learning a few very simple techniques you can take advantage of the inner workings of the Google search engine and perform all kinds of advanced searches that will return what you are looking for faster and more reliably. For example:

Search exactly as is (+).
Google employs synonyms automatically, so that it finds pages that mention, for example, childcare for the query [ child care ] (with a space), or California history for the query [ ca history ]. But sometimes Google helps out a little too much and gives you a synonym when you don't really want it. By attaching a + immediately before a word (remember, don't add a space after the +), you are telling Google to match that word precisely as you typed it. Putting double quotes around a single word will do the same thing.

See more Google Search tricks here.

Google is proving to be much more than just a search engine. I think we all have learned to rely on Google for a variety of things that we used to do in much more cumbersome ways, but that we now do effortlessly with this amazing service. Here are some special Google features you may not know about that make things even easier. Trust me, some of these are amazing:

See the whole list of Special Google Features here

When the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, due to come on stream in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

This shift from information scarcity to surfeit has broad effects. "What we are seeing is the ability to have economies form around the data--and that to me is the big change at a societal and even macroeconomic level," says Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy at Microsoft. Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour. "Every day I wake up and ask, 'how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyse data better?" says Rollin Ford, the CIO of Wal-Mart.

Read the whole story in The Economist

Customer service inquires are part of the job when utilizing social media in your business strategy. Here are 5 tips on how to handle praise, criticism and customer feedback.

1. Be quick
2. Be polite
3. Be helpful
4. Be ready to admit defeat
5. Be proactive in building relationships

For more details on each tip, visit socialsmallbiz.com