Want to advertise to the friends of the people who are already fans of your company on Facebook? Now you can, thanks to the “friends of connections� targeting feature that was just rolled out by the social networking site.

According to a note posted to the Facebook Ads Page, the functionality allows you to “expand your audience reach by delivering your ads to the friends of people already connected with your Page, Application, Group or Event.� When those people see the ad, they’ll see that their friends are fans.

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Technology powerhouse Hewlett Packard (HP) has just announced that it has struck a deal to acquire 3Com, one of the world’s leading networking hardware and software companies, for a giant $2.7 billion price tag.

The deal, if it goes through, will bring HP into direct competition with Cisco and its networking business. 3com builds WiFi access points, networking switches, routers, and IP voice systems that countless businesses rely on every day. It also comes two years after a failed acquisition by Bain Capital.

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During meetings with my clients, a common misconception regarding Google Adwords advertising is that, “the more I bid for my keywords, the high my ad’s position will be.� This is only half of the truth, as quality score plays a crucial part as well.

Google recently added a Quality Score Guide to their Adwords, which is a beginners guide to inform advertisers about what is quality score. Check out this informative video here!

5 Things to take away from this video:

1) You are NOT buying clicks, you are bidding for them.

2) Quality Score = Keyword’s CTR + Relevancy of Ad’s relevance to keyword + Landing Page Quality

3) Your Ad Rank = Maximum CPC Bid x Quality Score

4) Your Ad’s Position is determined by your Ad Rank vs your competitors’ Ad Rank.

5) Your Actual CPC Cost = Ad Rank of Next lower Competitor / Your Quality Score

Basically, quality score is all about relevance between your keyword, the ad text that appears, and the landing page that you end up at when you click. When the user’s experience from searching a keyword to landing on your webpage makes sense to the web user, you are on the right track.

Do check out the Search Ads Quality Guide to gain a better understanding about Quality Score!

It’s Google’s 11th birthday on Sunday, September 27th: to celebrate, the company has changed its logo to a version that turns the letter “L� into the number 11. The logo is already viewable in Europe.

What’s interesting about the logo change is that Google’sGoogleGoogle official birthday is somewhat disputed: some often declare the company was born on September 15th 1997, the day the Google.com domain was registered. Meanwhile, Google filed for incorporation in September 1998: the papers were filed on September 4th, but Google has been known to celebrate on both September 7th and September 27th. Read the rest of this entry »