Aspiring inbound marketers should start booking seats for the ConnectNow conference to be held in Sydney 7-9 April, 2010. The line-up of speakers includes Gary Vaynerchuk, Brian Solis, Darren Rowse, Tara Hunt and Debs Shultz.

About the conference:
ConnectNow is a marketing and communications conference focusing on the convergence of social media, emerging technologies and enterprise. The three-day event brings together visionaries and specialists in the field of new media marketing, community management and social technologies covering the latest strategies, tools and best practices in marketing innovation.

Topics will include innovative trends such as online/offline integration, geo-tagging and location-based services, mobile’s growing dominance, augmented reality, ubiquitous computing, social search, SEO and the importance of trust and social capital in relationship marketing.

Some of the presentations of particular interest to inbound marketers will be:

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From Ben Parr at Mashable

We know that Twitter believes that businesses are central to helping grow and monetize the microblogging service; recent integrations with Citysearch and LinkedIn have foretold its interest in the space.

Today though, Twitter (Twitter) has begun to take its biggest steps in providing new features to businesses and monetizing those features. In a blog post, the company announced that it has begun beta testing its first feature made specifically for businesses: “Contributors.”

An explanation of the contributors feature

Contributors is a feature that focuses on creating more authentic engagement for business accounts. With Contributors, a business account with multiple contributors (say, for example, the @Twitter feed) can add the specific user that tweeted on behalf of the business to the byline.

Here’s Twitter’s explanation of the new feature in testing:

“The feature we are beta testing is called ‘Contributors’ – it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.”

The other big revelation by the company is that Contributors is just the first of several business features, some of which will be visible by users, and some which will be internal for businesses.

Twitter’s getting serious about ramping up its business presence. This may just be the beginning of the Twitter business model. We’ll have more answers soon enough.

Online search has already revolutionised the way many companies do business and how we as consumers find the things we need. Smart marketers have used search engine optimisation to ensure their website are easily found by search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Yet it is amazing how many organisations are still lagging behind when it comes to search and missing valuable business.

Well now Google is launching an initiative that will see the smart marketers move further ahead and the laggards choking on dust: real-time search.

According to Mashable, Google real-time search updates as stuff is happening around the Web – for example, live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles and Web pages now stream in on the actual result pages for your query. It works on mobile too (at least iPhone and Android for now).

That’s not all, though. Google’s announced that they’ve inked partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace to pull in data in real-time. For Facebook, that means public Facebook Pages, and for MySpace, it means any stream data that is publicly available. This is on top of the partnership that the company announced with Twitter back in October.

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