What if people could watch a movie or television show from the comfort of their own home, but interact in a social network-type setting? They can. It's called Xbox Live. After finding a patent that allows users to do just that, Bill Slawski asks if social networks will invade invade the TV. The patent holder Embarq, now CenturyLink, provides business-class voice, data and network services.

Marketers now need more than back links to rank in organic search listings. The content needs "votes" such as Twitter tweets, Facebook likes, Google +1s, and other social signals. Guillaume Bouchard gives us a rundown on sharable content, Facebook seeding, and social news sites. He reminds us that social content seeding for SEO is all about social signals, not traffic.

Bing gave five people who follow the handle on Twitter the opportunity to win $100 each through a sweepstakes the search engine ran earlier this week. The promotion, called "Friends Don't Let Friends Decide Alone," is intended to call attention to Bing's recently launched social features. The question needed answering: "What decision can you not make without your friends?" Folks had until midnight to reply with the hashtag #decisions.

Michael Gray makes an interesting comment in a recent blog post: "Getting Facebook fans and Facebook likes may have even eclipsed link buying as the new black hat way of gaming the system." He shares some interesting stats, such as that consumers spend an extra $71.84 when describing themselves as fans of a product or brand -- and tells us the better long-term options for improving organic rankings through Facebook likes.

Twitter launched search features this week to help users find tweets, images and videos. Its engineers lay out the specs in a lengthy post. The company's engineers explain that to build the features they needed to support relevance-filtering for search results and the identification of relevant images and photos. For starters, the engineering group used Blender and Earlybird to support the project. The long post details removing duplicates, images and videos in search, and the next step.

John Doherty takes a stab at explaining how Twitter influences ranking for organic search engine results. After pointing to a variety of articles written on the subject during the past year, Doherty explains his findings using his Twitter account and data from the Web site he worked on as an in-house SEO professional. He outlines six studies and than shares his conclusion.

Camille Canon interviews Mike Jarvinen, vice president of marketing at The Search Agents. The two talk about MediaPost's Search Insider Summit in Captiva, Fla. last month; key mistakes marketers repeatedly make in their search campaigns; and insights into the topic for a webinar he will spearhead this month.

Setting up a paid-search campaign might seem complicated, but here are eight easy steps to get marketers started. The step-by-step directions are intended to show how easy it is to get a campaign up and running when choosing the correct tools, building processes, and creating ad groups. Begin by customizing a landing page and generating a keyword list.

Twitter acknowledged Tuesday that it has purchased AdGrok, a keyword-bidding platform, for an undisclosed sum. Christopher Heine believes the deal, made to acquire talent and technology, could help marketers better target Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts, and Promoted Trends advertising.

Geordie Carswell shares some results on early click-through rate tests for Google's paid-search ad placement above the organic search engine results listings (SERPs). He believes the changes "dilute the value of a good-quality headline" and ponders whether the move is part of a mandate by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to help people searching for content better identify a landing page before they click through a paid-search ad.