"So what happened to cashback?"

Facebook and Bing announced yesterday that they were deepening their relationship and releasing the fruits of their collaboration into the wild. The Bing crew and Zuck (sounds like a Saturday morning kiddie show, no?) were all smiles and mooney eyes, a clear sign that the Google folks ought to be worried about where this is going. This move represents the merger of two major online stories that have been dominating the year:

1) Search and Social belong together like a tasty Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup

2) Bing has finally bought some competitive fire to the Google-dominated search engine space

So, what did they announce, and what will the impact be on marketers? Read on friends, read on.

The first thing to know is that the integration is reciprocal. Bing is now powering Facebook’s built-in (and little used) web search and Facebook data is integrating more fully with Bing search results.  In practice this means that Bing users are already seeing new modules on results pages that highlight relevant friend’s “Likes” as well as links to Facebook pages.

While this is a significant step, what’s coming down the road in the near future could have a huge impact on how search engines operate. The Bing-a-lings on hand made it clear that they see social data as a key component in getting search past the “blue links” phase. This matches nicely to Facebook’s needs to make the data and information within their own site more usable and accessible to users. While Google will have access to the same data as part of Facebook’s Open Graph API and other sources, Bing will have a head start on seeing the way all of this stuff works in Facebook’s social environment and using that info to create better algorithms.

What this means to marketers:

1) There is no such thing as a social media strategy and a search strategy. They have to work together as part of an integrated whole. Ideally this is further integrated into a total marketing and business strategy that encompasses everything your business does.

2) You MUST give serious consideration to Facebook Like button integration on your website. It can’t be just a question of adding it to your homepage or sprinkling it around a few places like a spilled bag of Halloween candy. Be thoughtful and strategic about where these buttons go

3) Facebook is only one of the search and social integration points you have to be aware of – YouTube has long been a major factor and Twitter is already a prominent feature of Google and Bing results

4) Bing is developing as a serious and viable competitor to Google by differentiating the way results are served – Google Instant Search has actually helped to further the sense that these are two very different approaches. Expect these different approaches to lead to more divergence in how users behave and respond in both SEO and paid search environments on each site

5) SEO now must encompass your brand’s presence in social media as well as what happens on your owned sites. Your social profiles have just as much importance when it comes to visibility

6) Bringing social results closer to search means that many decision points that used to be discrete for consumers – professional reviews, friend’s recommendations, peer and user reviews, comparison shopping information, are all in the same place. The more these things are integrated on your brand sites and social media profiles the more likely you are to take a consumer from research to a decision to buy in an environment that is friendly to you

We like things fast in America – oatmeal, coffee, post-game analysis, and now search results. But does instant make any of those things better? When it comes to Google’s Instant Search product, it may depend on what side of the click you are on.

With Instant Search as users type in their search queries from Google’s homepage, they instantly begin seeing results from the very first letter. As they continue to type their query, the page shifts to bring up results based on what’s been typed so far along with Google’s other algorithmic tricks based on location and user behavior. Paid ads follow suit, leading to many more impressions.

As Techcrunch points out, the total number of results that a user sees has now exploded, rendering the idea of “first page” antiquated. Like roulette, it’s all about where the (eye) ball stops. This may have a profound effect on both Paid Search and SEO.

SEO

For SEO this means optimizing for partial words and phrases becomes a key tactic for Google results. This is compounded by the possibility that Google’s Suggest feature, which gives you longer tail search terms as suggestions to help complete your query, might become more useful when faced with ever-shifting results.

This also underscores the importance of site architecture – if a user can find what they are looking for within the organic result without having to type further, they are more likely to stop typing the query and jump to your site. Let’s say you are Sears. A user looking to buy new tires from Sears might start their query with the word “Sears” which should bring the organic listing for Sears up. If Google can read the site properly it can display destinations such as “Auto” or “Tires” on the sitemap below the main listing, giving users a reason to click without finishing the query.

For non brand terms, certain brands are going to have a big advantage. Think Toys ‘R’ Us, or Autotrader. Simply typing in the first part of either name may be enough to bring in a relevant result ahead of a competitor. This also has major ramifications for paid search.

Paid Search

These same brands may want to alter their negative match strategy to prevent ads showing up on generic terms like “Toys.” If the user doesn’t click on the ad it can impact click through rate (CTR), a major factor in Google’s quality score algorithm. That can have a serious effect on cost per click.

This is a big, big deal.

Google acknowledges that Instant Search will drive overall impressions up, so to mitigate this they are altering what constitutes an impression for the purposes of more “accurately” measuring CTR.  Here is what Google has told us will count as an impression for these purposes:

• The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
• The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
• The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds

Whoa, now. What was that last one again?

The three second pause is how Google intends to distinguish between a user who has found that what they see is irrelevant and thus merits a lower CTR, and a user who has instantly found satisfaction. Whether or not this accurately reflects real user behavior (we think it doesn’t) we are fairly certain that in many cases the impact on CTR will be negative which means advertiser’s costs go up. And Google makes more money.

What can also drive costs up is the desire by advertisers to get that click before people have gotten too far into their query, especially if you have a competitor out there. In theory more people will be clicking, or at least pausing for three seconds, before completing what might have been a longer tail query.

To capture the potential earlier click you might need to buy head terms. For instance, the CPC for the term “birth control pill” is $1.98. For just “Birth Control” the price goes up to a whopping $9.00. And Google makes more money. Sensing a pattern here?

Don’t get me wrong – to paraphrase Sally Struthers we all want to make more money. I don’t begrudge Google making profits and fattening their margins.

I do wonder whether this really alters the user experience in a positive way, or simply presents more options that in all likelihood are actually less relevant to the user. This is a complete reversal of Google’s emphasis on the user’s ability to find what they need with a minimum of fuss. Instead we have an ever-shifting pattern of clickable items that, for the ADD user, can lead to a rabbit hole far away from their original intent.

So is Instant Search a clever tool designed to increase spending on pricy head terms? A wedge to part advertisers from more of their money by driving down CTR’s? A way to help users formulate their queries more rapidly?

The only way we will know for sure is by looking very carefully at the real world results in both our Paid Search and SEO campaigns and doing rigorous testing and experimenting to make sure that campaigns are as efficient as possible.

On last Sunday’s episode of AMC’s period ad drama Mad Men, John Slattery’s World War II vet Roger Sterling exploded in rage at the prospect of pitching to a Japanese client: “Why don’t we just bring Dr. Lyle Evans in here?”

The other characters draw a blank on who exactly Dr. Lyle Evans is.

As Vanity Fair and others pointed out within minutes the Internet surged with the same question — who is Dr. Lyle Evans? Google searches on the name skyrocketed.

Initial speculation was that Mad Men creator Matt Weiner and the show’s writers had created the name as a so-called “Google bomb”, a prank intended to drive a made-up name into trending search charts. So far that still seems to be the case, though some have pointed (check the comments in the Vanity Fair link) to the character of Evan Llewellyn Evans played by Sydney Greenstreet in the classic ad movie The Hucksters as the source of the reference.

If it was planted on purpose though, could it also have been for another reason beyond the fun of influencing the behavior of a large group of strangers online?

This is entirely speculative, but consider the value of product placement within television shows, a practice that has been on the upswing of late. Typically though the results of such placements can be hard to measure, especially when the product is woven organically into the show’s storyline (as it should be.) How do you prove effectiveness?

Search engine queries are a great start. The immediate online response of a big swath of viewers to a show that already offers a dense tapestry of historical references and Easter eggs is hard to beat. What better way to show this influence over fans?

This got me to thinking on a broader level about how my fellow modern day ad colleagues look at data to guide strategy and measure results. Sometimes it can be helpful to go off the beaten path and look at non-traditional sources of measurement for inspiration.

Take a blog post I read recently about a press release from GM’s OnStar division, which offers drivers turn-by-turn navigation to destinations. The press release listed the Top 10 destinations drivers had used OnStar to search for by brand:

1. Wal-Mart
2. Holiday Inn
3. Home Depot
4. Walgreens
5. Marriott
6. McDonald’s
7. Bank of America
8. Starbucks
9. Target
10. Hampton Inn

My first thought was that people may need gas but they don’t seem to care what brand they get it from. The second was that every single one of the brands in the Top 10 ought to be thinking about the power of locally-targeted mobile search ads. Plenty of people use their smart phones to find local destinations while driving (hopefully with the help of a non-driving passenger). What a great additional proof point to bring this home.

This is not to mention the obvious implications for local SEO and individual store listings on platforms like Google Places, Yelp, and increasingly Foursquare. With Facebook rolling out location-based check-ins, some brands might even consider local Facebook profiles for individual stores. Many already have.

The fact that an in-car navigation system can tell us about the potential of advertising on mobile devices, and search volume on Google can give insight into the behavior of television viewers brings home the fact that we tend to be doing many things at once these days. We search (and make phone calls) while driving and watching TV, we watch TV and buy things online simultaneously, we work and chat with pals on Facebook at the same time. As our activities multiply, the need to vary the data sources that help us understand this is vital.

"How dare you bid on my Earlybird day..."

Twitter has just launched their newest beta advertising program @Earlybird, an official profile designed to tweet exclusive deals and special offers. When talking to Twitter about this in the last few weeks leading up to launch it struck me that this could be where auction-based ad pricing makes it’s way to the Twitter platform.

When I first started working in social media (back in the pioneer days of the “Numma Numma” guy)  the concept of “advertising” in social spaces was looked on with disdain by community managers and savvy marketers. The reasons for this were simple – ad units sucked. There was little connection between awful banners and pop-ups and the actual behavior of users in social spaces – whether it be message boards or MySpace.

Things certainly have changed since then- a combination of smarter, more site-specific ad units coupled with better metrics to measure success are beginning to transform best practices in social media leading to a combination of paid and organic marketing (or earned and paid media in PR speak). If this sounds to you like the search universe of SEM and SEO then you are on the right track.

After all, Facebook is pushing CPC ads targeting users based on Likes and Interests and status updates (essentially a keyword based medium), Twitter’s new Promoted Tweets is a keyword triggered search ad (for now) and the new and improved metrics across the big three platforms of Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are clearly derived from the rich data available from search campaigns. Even more striking is the similarity between Facebook “Like” button targeting and search re-targeting and Twitter’s “Resonance Score” (designed to show the relative effectiveness of a Tweet) and Google Page Rank.

What has been missing in action so far  is a social media equivalent to the search engine auction in which advertisers bid on keywords. With the advent of Earlybird however, this could be changing.

How so?

Earlybird is built on value and scarcity – the value of the deal and the scarcity of knowing that the window of availability is 24 hours (or less if the deal is for something that has limited supply). Right now advertisers reserve their days in advance with Twitter and essentially own that 24 hour window.

So what happens when this model meets high-demand days like Black Friday, or Cyber Monday, or Super Bowl Sunday?

Twitter hasn’t addressed this scenario yet, but it’s not a stretch to imagine pricing based on what the market will bear rather than a one-price-fits-all approach. Why not have advertisers bid on these days?

Buzz is designed to allow Gmail users to tap into social media activity and updates from their existing social contacts, without leaving the popular e-mail platform.

What struck me about Buzz is that it is the connective membrane between several Google initiatives. It’s geolocation feature which allows users to tag updates with their location ties together Google’s push into mobile with mail, and the Buzz overlay brings in Google Maps functionality so you can see, for instance, folks posting about bad traffic ahead. It even ties into Google voice by allowing users to speak updates into their phones rather than typing them (soon to be a menace to drunk updaters and their contacts everywhere if it takes off.)

Whether or not you use a mobile device, Buzz also ties in Google’s profiles since so far you need to have one to use Buzz. Here is Google’s YouTube video that talks about Buzz and mobile platforms.

Google’s photo sharing site Picasa and the Google Reader news feed are tied in with easy sharing functionality, as is their YouTube service and all of this benefits from the design and tools first shown in their wave product.

So how does the core Google search product factor in?

Buzz will recommend posts based on your interests or on what’s been popular with your friends whether or not the post is from someone you are connected with. The ability to do this is clearly developed from both the algorithms used to match relevant search advertising with user queries on the engine as well as to display ads contextually in the Gmail platform based on the content of mail.

Even though Google Buzz allows users to share updates privately with friends, it also allows these updates to be public and presumably, available to be read and displayed by anyone using Google search provided they are relevant. This ties in nicely to Google’s recent launch of their Google Social Search tool.

It will be interesting to see how Google aggregates all of their data on an individual user once they are signed into the system, and whether this will have a further effect on the results they see in search as well as Buzz.

It’s too early to know yet whether the possibilities inherent in Buzz will come to full fruition. Right now your Twitter updates can be shared with your Buzz followers. Oddly, as Mashable points out, you can’t share Buzz updates (yet) through Twitter so functionality is somewhat hobbled. More importantly, Facebook isn’t integrated at all and for most Americans there isn’t really another comparable social network.

While I expect Twitter to become more fully integrated Facebook has shown a traditional reluctance to open up access to their platform on a similar level. As Mashable also points out, the existence of Facebook’s own under-development e-mail platform complicates things further.

Whether or not this means that a showdown with Facebook is in the cards, if Google can deliver fully on what this product taps into – namely almost every other Google product – it could have a value beyond even the sum of it’s parts.

Follow Noah Mallin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nmallin

View this article on: The Huffington Post

After all, it’s not just about AdMob’s ad-serving platform. So much of Google’s success in the world of search advertising has been built on the back of analytics – how they cull and act on data in-house and what they offer to advertisers and consumers as a benefit of service. There is no doubt that whether or not Google’s own mobile OS dominates, AdMob’s platform agnostic nature gives them directional insight into mobile as a whole.

Here are the basics that every marketer and advertiser should know:

Background on the deal

On November 9, 2009 Google announced an agreement to acquire AdMob, a leading mobile display advertising company, for $750 million. The acquisition is Google’s largest since its $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick in March, 2008, and its third-largest ever after the $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition in 2006. Founded in 2006, AdMob has served more than 125 billion mobile ads on nearly every major consumer mobile OS, including both iPhone and Android.

Why we think this took place

Google believes that the future of mobile has arrived. With the aquisition of AdMob, the search giant is positioned to leverage a powerful publishing, advertising, and distribution platform in the ever-expanding mobile ecosystem, greatly accelerating Google’s previously anemic efforts in the mobile display space. Like the DoubleClick and YouTube acquisitions, Google has bought into a platform that is an industry leader. Along with scalable technology, AdMob gives Google:

• Publisher relationships that garner significant distribution (think AdSense for your phone).
• Data and insights into how consumers interact with mobile apps, which in turn yields smarter analytics invaluable in shaping the continual development of not only Android applications but also the underlying platform

Implications of this announcement

Both advertisers and users will benefit from more mobile content and more relevant, targeted ads. Specifically:

• This acquisition will allow Google’s advertising partners to better target their ads to mobile users, by marrying AdMob’s mobile publisher network with Google’s large network of advertisers.
• By combining the ad targeting technologies of AdMob and Google, this acquisition is likely to yield better ad performance on mobile applications and websites.
• This will further the evolution of location-based targeting for retail and local business helping to fulfill the promise of connecting digital with offline services and purchases.
• Google’s advertising partners will continue to have a choice of more than a dozen mobile ad networks to use in placing their ads on mobile platforms.
• It offers advertisers the convenience of a one-stop shop to increasingly plan and optimize mobile efforts in tandem with other digital media channels including search, display, and video.

The potential downside is that in the absence of competition on this scale, prices in the mobile ad space could go higher in the short term. It should be noted however that to-date, Google’s performance for advertisers seems to undercut this notion.

We believe that this deal signifies the arrival of mobile marketing as a mainstream marketing tactic. Although this channel is just getting started, today’s short-term opportunities in the space represent tomorrow’s core marketing capability.

Before diving into the implications of real time and social search integration to the biggest search engines (excluding YouTube), it’s important to know the basics and the background to what these new deals mean to marketers and the brands who love them. Presented below is everything marketers need to know about the Bing and Google social search deals.

The worlds of search and social media are colliding. During the Web 2.0 Conference on October 20, Bing and Google announced separate partnerships which will bring real-time updates from social networks to their search results pages.

These announcements reinforce a major shift in the way marketers must approach content on social networks. Now, more than ever, the visibility and perception of brands will be filtered through search results pages.

Bing Twitter

Bing announced a partnership in which users will be able to search Twitter status updates directly from Bing.com, at http://www.bing.com/twitter. The homepage of the new service allows users to either search twitter updates, or navigate the most popular topics currently being discussed on Twitter via a tag cloud.

Fig1. – Screenshot of Bing Twitter homepage

Bing Twitter search results updates span the last seven days, and are organized into two categories: Full Twitter updates (otherwise known as Tweets) and frequently shared links:

Fig 2. – Screenshot of Bing Twitter results for “Windows 7”

These updates are visible on search results pages as soon as they are published on Twitter. While Twitter updates are currently only featured on Bing’s designated Twitter page, we expect that these real-time results will eventually be integrated directly into the main Bing reply page.

Bing also revealed plans to integrate Facebook data in a similar way, although Microsoft officials stated that data from Facebook would “come at a later date.”

Google Social Search

Shortly after Bing’s announcement, Google unveiled a similar partnership with Twitter. This agreement is a core component of the launch of a larger system called Google Social Search. Google Social Search presents users with a personalized set of search results based on updates from their network of friends and followers.

Once logged in to their Google account, users can access social search as part of Google’s “options side bar.” (see Fig. 3)

Fig. 3 –Google’s Social Search tool is currently accessed via their “More Options” sidebar

In many ways, this announcement pits Google directly against Facebook in the battle for a user’s “official” online identity. The service will be managed through a user’s Google Profile, and will allow them to plug directly into several different services, including Twitter. At this time, Google has only revealed Twitter’s involvement and claims that additional social services will be included over the next few months.

Fig. 4 – Google Social Search allows you to search for information posted by your
network of contacts via their blogs, Twitter profiles and other social networks

While these results are currently delivered via a specific page on Google, the company has stated plans to show relevant social search results at the bottom of its general search results page.

The one drawback to Google’s service seems to be its total reliance on a user’s existing social network connections to return results. Users must both log into a Google account and link their social accounts via their Google Profile page in order to see any results from the Social Search tab. This could potentially slow the growth of what would otherwise be an interesting addition to Google results pages, as users may not fully understand the mechanics and benefits of linking their accounts in this way.

Fig. 5 – Google Social Search results for the same query as Fig. 4, with user logged out of their profile

Who Benefits, and Why?

Consumers: Perhaps the most obvious benefit of these partnerships is the ability for consumers to access a rich, personalized data stream of real-time updates about the world around them. This information stream has the potential to significantly change the way people perceive search engines and the information that can be pulled from them.

The Search Engines: For Microsoft and Google, these deals are ultimately about defending market share and building user loyalty by presenting users with a broader scope of content that is more personally relevant to them – an important part of the escalating war between the two search giants. While the engines will essentially have access to the same stream of data, the differentiation will be in the way they parse and present that data within the rest of their site experience, a trend that we will see play out over time.

Twitter: The real winner of these deals is Twitter – their strategy is reminiscent of one used by Wikipedia. By focusing on search engine optimization, Wikipedia was able to make itself ubiquitous within the search engines, and introduce millions of people to their service. It’s expected that Twitter will find itself in a similar situation, and the additional visibility should help them break out of the recent flattening of their user growth trends.

What Do These Announcements Mean For Marketers?

While search has proven invaluable to consumers, it has traditionally had limitations when dealing with current events. In order for information to show up in a search engine, it needed to have been published to a website that the engine was aware of, and then crawled.

In comparison, social networks such as Twitter and Facebook allow users to publish brief status updates which become immediately available and searchable. This real-time access played out famously through recent events like the plane crash in the Hudson River and terrorist attacks in Mumbai, where individuals living near the events were able to quickly share news, photos and information about the incidents much faster than the traditional news media. This same platform gives marketers the ability to engage directly with their customers and fan and get broader exposure for those conversations through search engines.

These partnerships dramatically increase the average consumer’s exposure to social media, making it essential for marketers to engage with consumers and consider how the interaction will play out on search results pages. Any sentiment – positive or negative – about a product or service that is shared on Twitter or Facebook now has the opportunity to appear side-by-side with general search results, influencing public perception and giving companies vital information in areas ranging from corporate reputation management to customer service and product development.

For companies with corporate Twitter accounts, this added exposure could also mean a dramatic increase in followers, as more people are introduced to the service as part of their every day search experience.

Recommended Reading:

Google’s New Social Search Is a Big Chess Move Against Facebook
ReadWriteWeb

Google Social Search is Coming & More on Google-Twitter
SearchEngineLand

Social Search: Customers Influence Search Results Over Brands
Altimeter Group

Oh  yes, and I had the negative tweets there to prove it.

I won’t go into the details of my horror story on Delta Airlines which prompted this outburst, but you can read more about it here on the Huffington Post.

The important thing to remember is that my Tweets (I did several of them), angry Facebook updates, and now a blog posting here and on The Huffington Post all become part of a company’s reputation online, a reputation that can cling and trail along like seaweed on a boat’s propeller. Too much seaweed and that propeller stops turning.

Delta’s bread and butter are business travelers looking for the least expensive way to get to a destination.When the negative customer reaction starts to clog up search reply pages and consumer reviews sites (as well as Twitter and Facebook) it becomes a question of whether you will even get to your destination in time for a meeting. A conference call is cheaper yet and more reliable.

Delta didn’t respond at all on Twitter – not a  cardinal sin  but not a surprise either considering their awful real world response. The lesson here is that other brands in industries that generate a lot of customer service issues such as Comcast have taken to Twitter as way to revitalize their customer service with a great deal of success.

In fact I was on my way to meet with a brand that we helped to set up a specific customer service Twitter feed for, and they couldn’t be more impressed with the results.

Mix tapes. Yes, mix tapes.

As I wrote in the Huffington Post the culture of customizing your own melange of information and sharing it is one of the great things about social media.Even more so, a great mix tape would get copied and re-copied spreading just like a viral video does now on YouTube.

Something to think about for the weekend!

In fact, Car used to have a wonderful columnist named George Bishop (who is sadly now in the great beyond) who would fill his column with the intimate behind the scenes details of the lavish car launch junkets manufacturers would throw for journalists – often involving trips to exotic locales, free lodging and meals, and copious behind the wheel boozing. All the other journalists were taking part in the fun too, it’s just that Bishop saw fit to weave the freebies into his articles.

While these events have been toned-down considerably for the auto industry some version of these launch junkets still exist in other industries and free samples or products are a matter of course for any company seeking to see their product in print.

It’s interesting then that the FTC has decided to clamp down on bloggers who review products for money in a way that seems to be more onerous than the standard that journalists are held to.

Make no mistake, the meat of the ruling  codifies the best practices I tell our clients about every day: transparency and authenticity. Paying bloggers for coverage should always merit disclosure.

Where it gets a bit tricky is what exactly constitutes payment. While Spin magazine writers get free CDs in order to write reviews, they are under no expectation to disclose this in every article. Yet, under the FTC regs it appears that bloggers who do the same could be seen as receiving an in-kind payment and be liable for an $11,000 fine.

While I applaud the FTC for rightfully cracking down on the practice of blogger payola, the wiggle room in the rules actually reinforces a divide between mainstream journalism and blogging that is becoming more arbitrary with each passing day.

While this will have little effect on the social media campaigns we  run for our clients, it fosters confusion as to the role bloggers can play in promoting brands and products. Are they paid shills, journalists without advertising dollars, adversaries, allies? We get asked all of these questions.

They can be any of these things but in my experience as both a blogger and a marketer the most valuable blogs for most brands appreciate being treated  with the same care and deference that any top media outlet or journalist would be treated with. That means a personal touch, no spam, a recognition of what they prefer to cover and write about and who their audience is.

It’s a shame the FTC didn’t take the same approach in writing their new rules.