Search Advisory

Earlier this month, Facebook announced a new feature called “Graph Search,” currently in beta, which will allow users to run searches on information specific to Facebook and thus off-limits to Google, Yahoo, or Bing.  Graph Search will let you, for example, search for which restaurants your friends who live in San Francisco have visited.  You’ll be able to search for friends of friends who work for a particular company.  You’ll even have the ability to find which bands your friends Mary and John both like, prior to setting them up on a blind date.

Currently, Facebook handles about 1 billion search queries per day (roughly a fifth of Google’s volume), although most of those are probably for specific people or business pages.  If Facebook can change our collective searching habits, it may well steal some search market share from Google.  But it’ll have to do one thing first. Read more…

Facebook’s new Premium Ads are a boon to marketers, who now have a way to slyly insert their ads into the news feeds of non-fans.  The way it works is that companies can turn a post on their Facebook page into a “sponsored story.”   Before, these advertisements would appear among other ads in the right hand column for fans.  Now they can also appear directly in fans’ news feeds as “featured stories”.  And if the fan interacts with the featured story by commenting on it or liking it, the ad will then also appear in their friends’ news feeds.

Over half of Facebook’s users access the system via a mobile device.  Previously, there was no way to serve up ads to these 425 million people (source).  Now that the ads are actually in

the news feed instead of on the right rail, they are suddenly visible to mobile users.

In addition, Facebook has shrunk the size of regular ads on the right rail so they can squeeze in seven instead of the former six.  And they’ve begun selling the real estate on the page that appears after users log out.  These are very large ads that can include video.  Since Facebook is preparing for an IPO soon, it appears they’re attempting to squeeze every nickel out of the platform that they can.

Will Facebook users object?  Will they notice that the “posts” appearing in their news feeds from trusted brands are often actually ads?  Will they care that their friends will see ads from brands that they like?  Will the friends have any idea that they’re reading ads-disguised-as-posts based on their friends’ behavior?  Will anyone care? Read more…

Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto has been quite a punchline for years, as Google continues to find new and creative ways to separate advertisers from their money. It appears that Facebook has taken a page from Google’s playbook:

• Cr
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  eate Unique, Quality Relevant Content (the best search engine / the best social media site)

• Get People Totally Hooked (70%+ market share / 850 million users worldwide)
• Get Brands Totally Hooked on Free Exposure (SEO / Facebook’s brand pages)
• Severely Limit Free Exposure (more paid ads, Google Places & other content in the search engine results that push down regular organic listings / “Edgerank” & the new Timeline for Pages)
• Force Companies to cialis canadian pharmacy Pay for Exposure (PPC ads for both
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  Google & Facebook)

First, Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm started limiting how many of a company’s fans to see its posts in their newsfeeds. Now, with the rollout of Timeline for Pages, businesses can’t have fans land immediately on their branded content, game, poll or whatever. Fans will instead have to click on a tab to bypass the new timeline home page.

For more on this, read this post by “Friend of PPI” Nan Dawkins: Facebook’s New Brand Pages: Combined With Edgerank, a Final Solution That Forces “Pay to Play”.

Well played, Facebook. Well played.

Tom Shivers from Capture Commerce recently interviewed me about how social media impacts search engine optimization.  This was prompted by last month's AiMA/SEMPO Atlanta event (our coverage here).  Listen to the podcast here<

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Topics I cover in about 10 minutes:

• How social media has changed the search landscape
• Google+ and what marketers think about its chance for success
• How businesses can improve the SEO value of their Facebook page
• How businesses can get more marketing value with their use of Twitter
• How Newell-Rubbermaid has pioneered product reviews to impact search rank, marketing, product development, retail shelf space and sales

The Interwebs have been abuzz since yesterday about a public relations scandal that pits Facebook against Google.  Apparently, Facebook hired PR giant Burson-Marsteller to anonymously represent them in an effort to have privacy advocates shed light on Google’s questionable privacy practices.  Plenty of articles have already been published about this situation – here’s the Wall Street Journal’s take.

Apparently, Facebook doesn’t like how Google’s “Social Circle” results can pull data from Facebook.  Rather than confront the problem directly, Facebook turned this into a privacy issue – one that presumably the public would care about more than one behemoth using another behemoth’s data.  But Facebook couldn’t poke at Google’s privacy lapses directly since Facebook’s own privacy policies are arguably worse.  Hence the subterfuge, which blew up in Facebook’s, well, FACE, when one of the bloggers that Burson-Marsteller approached smelled a rat and published the email exchange online.

Facebook claims that it was just trying to focus attention on publicly-available information, and Burson-Marsteller is now saying that withholding its client’s name was not their standard operating procedure and that they should have declined the assignment.

What was that saying about glass houses, again?

I’ve been watching Yahoo’s slow decline for about a decade now.  A recent article on ClickZ by Sage Lewis put a lot of my feelings into words (read “Dear Yahoo, I Hate You“).  Sage does a great job of listing all the Yahoo properties that have been closed down (including AltaVista, AllTheWeb.com, GeoCities and more), as well as recapping many of the layoffs.

Sage ends by begging Yahoo not to close Flickr, to which I wholeheartedly agree.  And let me add Yahoo Web Analytics to that list as well.  We started using this product back in 2004 when it was an independent company called IndexTools.  It was an outstanding product at that time – it was affordable and offered functionality that many other web analytics software didn’t offer (and still don’t).  Once Yahoo bought IndexTools and made it free of charge…the product changed from a revenue producer to a cost center, and both the quality of the product and the customer support deteriorated over time.  Attention, Yahoo: we’d gladly pay to get the “old” IndexTools back!

In any case, Yahoo’s decline is sad not only because of all its early promise, and all the wonderful assets it has had over the years, but because it’s a competitor that Google desperately needs.  At least we can look to Facebook and other social media sites to challenge Google and try to keep it from becoming a total monopoly – it’s just too bad that no search engine has been able to do so successfully.

I wonder if they lined up the speakers in that order on purpose.  The panelists were (left to right):

• AOL:  Jim Norton, VP of AOL Advance
• Google:  Jay Bowden, Head of Industry, Retail
• Facebook:  Mike Haynes, Regional VP of Sales

When these gentlemen were introduced, it was with the note that they were seated in order of company longevity (16 years, 12 years, and 7 years respectively).  Perhaps not coincidentally, the novelty and excitement of their presentations (or lack thereof) could have been predicted by the age of their companies.  In Internet marketing, of course, companies can age even faster than “dog years.”

We were at last week's “Best Bets for Digital Marketing for 2011” event put on by the Marketing Technology SIG of the American Marketing Association (Atlanta chapter).  It was hosted by Google, who graciously opened up their fun Midtown offices for the event.  The topic was new media marketing platforms and technology.

AOL

I've got to hand it to Jim Norton – the man can spin like nobody's business.  Read more…

Best practices, guidelines, industry standards, rules of thumb…are they meaningful in a rapidly-changing environment like Internet marketing?

Yes and no. Best practices and industry standards are necessary in order to put our arms around a bewildering, amorphous space.  Some of you may remember how, 10-15 years ago, Internet marketing was chaos!  There were no standards or best practices.  It led to a bad user experience, a lot of reinventing the wheel, and wasted time and effort on the part of us marketers.  As we all got more sophisticated with this new, interactive world, guidelines evolved, and both content creators and content consumers are now better off.

That being said…best practices are just a starting point.  As the online environment and consumers’ sophistication continues to grow, it becomes more important than ever to test, test, test.

We’ve seen it over and over again.  Us smart marketers can sit in our groovy offices (the hipster equivalent of an ivory tower) and predict what a target audience will respond to, based on best practices.  This wording, this offer, this landing page, etc.  But we’ll be wrong about as often as we’re right…best practices or no best practices.

Here are just a few things we’ve learned through running tests on our clients’ search engine marketing campaigns.  Note that some of these tactics follow best practices…and others definitely don’t! Read more…

SEOmoz has published their 2010 Industry Survey, which gives a sneak peek into the details of how search marketers spend their time, which tools they use, and what their priorities are.  With over 10,000 respondents, the data should be quite reliable. 

The statistics that jumped out at me include: Read more…