ReadWriteBiz

MasterCard and Microsoft announced a new strategic initiative to market and sell Microsoft's cloud productivity service, Office 365. You can get an automatic 10% discount when you buy through their easysavings.com discount program and use your MasterCard. There are several plans that start at $6 per user per month for less than 50 seats (undiscounted).

Many small businesses don't have much depth when it comes to IT support, and Symantec's Norton division is here to help with its first 24/7 online help desk.

What can you call them about? A lot of different problems: virus infections, of course, but also solving network connection issues, general PC tuneups, hooking up a printer or a scanner, and general consultative help. Yes, there are lots of local VARs that offer this service, but the Norton name carries a certain cachet. (For those of you too young to remember, Peter Norton pictured above, was an early utility software pioneer, and is now a patron of the arts.)

If your business is looking to webinars to reach potential customers, Bob Darabant of Astaro has a couple of tips that might keep your cast from falling flat. Hint: Making it sales-focused is probably not the answer. Darabant, VP of Astaro Americas, has a handful of suggestions for making webcasts work for VARs – but these apply pretty well to any business that might be pondering a webcast.

It may have only launched a mere month ago, but Google Plus is already showing signs of promise to online marketers, especially in its ability to drive traffic to other Websites.

Google's brand new social product has a long way to go before it poses a realistic threat to Facebook's massive marketshare, but having surpassed the 20 million user mark in under a month, its growth has been impressive. By comparison, it took Facebook and Twitter a few years to reach the same milestone.

In its ongoing quest to capture more local ad dollars, Google yesterday announced the launch of AdWords Express, a simplified version of their search advertising platform. This new advertising product aims to streamline the process of purchasing search ads, enabling smaller, local businesses to get on board.

If AdWords Express looks familiar, that's because it was originally launched in select markets last October under the name Google Boost.

Companies clamoring to build a presence on Google's new social network have a few more months to wait. Business profiles are coming to Google Plus around the third quarter of this year, according to a story on VentureBeat.

While Google hasn't revealed many details about what the brand profiles will include, a Google representative told VentureBeat that users should expect "a level of analytics and measurement that you'd typically find in Google products," hinting at the inclusion of analytics in business accounts.

The increasingly digital world in which we now not only live, but also work, gives rise to a whole new set of questions about professional etiquette. When working from a public cafe, is it rude to jump on that conference call? Should you friend your boss on Facebook? Is using emoticons weird?

These are a few of the questions asked in a survey published recently by Harris Interactive and Intermedia. The survey found that 66% of respondents thought connecting with one's boss via social networking sites like Facebook is inappropriate (presumably, LinkedIn is another story).

The price of advertising on the world's biggest social network appears to be on the rise.

The average cost of purchasing pay-per-click ads on Facebook rose by 22% in a single quarter, according to a new report by digital marketing platform provider Efficient Frontier.

As social marketing continues to grow in importance for brands of all sizes, should businesses consider outsourcing social media tasks to offshore third parties?

It might sound like a questionable idea to some, but doing so can decrease the costs of Facebook page management by as much as 60% , according to a post on All Facebook.

It happens to us all at some point. You're reviewing your credit card statement when you come across a charge or two whose origin is not immediately obvious. Even if the company's name can be deciphered, you still just may not recall exactly what the charge was for.

As a small or medium-sized business owner who does business online, you may not only be on the receiving end of such a mysterious charge, but you may also be a culprit, depending on how your business's name is represented on customers' credit card statements.