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The Year in Search and Social Media: Predictions 2009

Written By Noah Mallin | December 31, 2008 | Share This |

Profile Optimization

After a tumultuous and fascinating 2008, what might be in store for 2009? We interrogated our best sources using enhanced techniques (bright lights, bamboo and the music of John Mayer were all deployed) before turning to the entrails of a goat (the vegans on our staff settled for an artichoke) to bring you our predictions for the world of search and social media in 2009. We make no guarantee of actuality. Void where prohibited.

In the Year 2009…

Horizontal is the New Vertical - The first wave of vertical search engines such as Business.com or Shopping.com was launched with the intention of starting search businesses from the get go.  What’s interesting about the new breed of search engines is that they weren’t originally intended to be search engines at all. Instead, they were born out of the need to sift through the mass volume of content being produced on social media sites.

The need to retrieve and categorize user created content is already leading many social media platforms to become alternative and relevant search indices for specific needs beyond the general search engine results page. For example, Twitter search gives you visibility into “now”, Facebook search scours people (while LinkedIn offers more professionally oriented  info), Flickr search delivers a better, more diverse image result set than Google images while YouTube features superior video search results.

Marketers will take notice of this trend to the horizontal in 2009 and these platforms will respond with more compelling SEM offerings to help lure them in.

The World of Online Ad Networks will Finally Consolidate – with many companies merging in an effort to survive, while others disappear altogether.  This gives Google AdSense the opportunity to suck up even more of this market, resulting in:

1.      Higher overall revenues for Google, but…

2.      Lower revenue shares for smaller online publishers as Google takes a bigger cut of the pie and it becomes harder for them to monetize.

3.      The collapse of online companies with no clear monetization plans.

Analytics becomes the Chocolate to Social Media’s Peanut Butter – Spending on social media marketing will rise despite the recession as more marketers discover useful analytics tools to measure success across the distributed web. Clients will be impressed by YouTube visitor counts, bit.ly’s url tracking and Omniture’s ability to track behavior in iPhone apps.  This improved capability to test social media campaigns and see results before committing to major spends, helps open the floodgates and deliver real meaningful value - and revenue – for the first time.

Social Media Will Help Make Us Better Citizens  - Phase one of online activism was powered by applications that allowed people to spread the word about their causes (e.g. Facebook “Causes”), phase two will be powered by microgiving services (e.g. Tipjoy and Microgiving) that allow people to put their money where their mouth is.  As a result, funds given to charity through social networks will finally get more in line with the number of people who profess to be interested in them.  The integration of Paypal into these services will help facilitate these transactions.

Furthermore, as the recession drags on and access to credit becomes increasingly difficult, Paypal will play a larger role in many online transactions including peer-to-peer lending, replacing some traditional banking services.

Is the Domain Friendfilter.com Taken? - As “friending” continues to gain momentum (and dilute its real life meaning), context becomes more important than ever.  Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed will need to empower users with more parametric filters so that they can publish – and parse - information to and from different groups of people.  For example, a person may have various interests ranging from social software to hockey to comic books – giving that individual more control of the distribution and consumption process will eliminate noise from the social graph and provide more meaningful connections.  The web is filled with nooks and crannies of niche content, so there’s no reason the social networks, or the ecosystem born of out of them (for instance, services like Stocktwits) shouldn’t better enable those subject specific communities.

Mobile Voice Search Increases its Long Tail – People don’t speak the same way they type – we tend to be fluid and wordy instead of terse and structured. When you mosey down to the car dealer to look for a new ride (or a “whip” as the kids call them), the tendency is to ask something like “What do you have that gets good mileage but can haul a kid’s bedroom set and won’t make me look like a total tool?” rather than to use Search-ese like “SUV, fuel efficient?”  Therefore, it stands to reason that as voice recognition software creeps into mobile search apps, the searches we conduct on our cell phones are going to start to look a lot less like those from traditional search engines. Spoken questions are longer and phrased differently than online search. Advertisers who hope to simply use their existing search keyword lists to reach mobile users are going to be in for a surprise.

Then again, we might be getting ahead of ourselves – 2009 will not be the year that advertising for voice search takes off. The user experience still needs too much work for mainstream adoption.

Yahoo is Broken Up  – No year-end list is complete without a gratuitous Yahoo swipe – here’s ours: Microsoft reunites many Yahoo search refugees’ posteriors with their former chairs by acquiring Yahoo’s search business at a fire sale price.

The Phrase “Google Killer” Will Become the New “Munson” – The term becomes synonymous in hip-hop to describe a hyped young rapper who steps to the big guns only to come up short and be forgotten. When was the last time you used Cuil?

Mobile Gets More Social - Time spent logging into social networks from a mobile device will approach 50% of total time spent on social networks in ‘09. In a related event, incidences of hit and run accidents and people walking into open manhole covers will rise dramatically in ‘09 as they use their fancy new iPhones and G1 Android phones to throw snowballs at each other on Facebook.

Google TV Ties Together Recessionary Threads – The two most resilient places for advertising in a recession turn out to be search and TV. How convenient for Google’s fledging offline ad biz as the search model of targeting, accountability, and responsiveness continues to migrate to offline platforms in ‘09. The timing is now.

Fame is Measured in 140 Characters Instead of 15 Minutes – Twitter celebs (plane crash guy, Egyptian jail guy) find fame far more fleeting in ‘09 – it lasts as long as it takes to refresh your screen.

Facebook Connect Takes Off – Brands and marketers embrace the ability to use Facebook Connect as a way to socialize websites cheaply. In fact, it’s already starting to.

Twitter Will Surprise Their Critics With Their Ability to Monetize – We’d explain what that monetization plan will look like in more detail, but unfortunately, we only have 140 characters.

News: Welcoming HUGE to IPG

Huge

IPG announced that they are acquiring a strategic interest in online business creator HUGE. It’s with a great deal of pleasure that we welcome HUGE to the Interpublic Group family. We are big fans of their award-winning cutting edge websites for clients such as Ikea, JetBlue, and Scholastic among many others.

Like HUGE, we at Reprise Media value our ability within IPG to retain our nimble client-centric culture while also having access to the worldwide resources that have made Interpublic Group a leading global organization of advertising agencies and marketing services companies.

We think this statement from Interpublic Chairman and CEO Michael I. Roth lays out an important part of both Reprise Media and HUGE’s approach : ”…clients no longer think of digital as just a messaging medium - they view it as a proven tool which provides users with experiences and functionality that drive their businesses.”

Live-Twitting the Search Insider Summit

Written By Drupad Sil | May 19, 2008 | Share This |

Search Insider Summit

Our very own Brooklahn, aka Reprise Media Director of Marketing Anthony Iaffaldano, is attending the Search Insider Summit, held at lovely Captiva Island till Wednesday. With attendees from across the industry, the summit provides some great debate and discussion on search marketing. Follow all the action from Anthony’s twitter feed or get the digested session notes here.

The Value of Persistence

Written By Drupad Sil | May 15, 2008 | Share This |

MediaPost

How many times have you seen a seasonal-ad on TV, forgotten about it for a few days (or weeks) and then gone to research it on the Internet only to find that, well, it’s impossible to find? There’s a perception among many marketers that once a campaign’s objectives have been met, it’s time to dial back the presence until they have another benchmark to hit, missing out on a chunk of their potential customers who search for their products during this downtime.

Reprise Media’s own Joshua Stylman, Managing Partner, extols the Value of Persistence in search advertising in this article at MediaPost:

“The solution is maintaining a persistent search presence, sometimes referred to as an evergreen campaign. There’s little risk associated with maintaining this type of campaign: After all, you only pay when a qualified prospect clicks through to your site. It’s efficient and effective, allowing marketers to continually stay top of mind with their potential customers.

Furthermore, search engines reward campaigns for running over a long period of time. Performance history is a key factor in determining an ad’s Quality Score – the algorithm that Google and other engines use to set minimum bids for their keyword auctions. Consistent campaign performance can often lower your bid prices over time, making it even more economical to keep those campaigns active.”

Get the rest of the article.

What Are the Right Keywords? Anyone? Anyone?

Written By Drupad Sil | April 30, 2008 | Share This |

MediaPost

Knowing your customer and knowing your brand are two keys to effective marketing. For online advertising, this means not just knowing what you call your product, but how customers refer to them – frequently, they turn out to be very different, and that difference makes a significant difference in traffic volume. It’s a situation we at Reprise Media have seen play out over and over again.

MediaPost has posted an article by Managing Partner Peter Hershberg on the importance of understanding how your customer searches for your products. More from Peter:

“In paid search marketing, buying keywords that no one searches for can be a huge misstep, causing marketers to miss out on valuable traffic and reduce the impact of their campaign. In search engine optimization (SEO), creating website copy and title tags (the words that show up on the top bar of the browser only) that don’t resonate with searchers means the site is less likely to come up when it’s most relevant to the audience.

Instead, marketers should learn from the mistake of brands like Wachovia, which includes a page for vehicle loans on its site. Though it’s an accurate umbrella term for what Wachovia offers, the phrase ‘vehicle loan’ just doesn’t have the same volume as ‘car loan’. Again, while this may be how Wachovia defines its services, it’s not what customers look for.”

Read the rest.

AdWords Displaying Ad Scores on Domestic Searches

Written By Drupad Sil | April 29, 2008 | Share This |

Google

Some interesting happenings on Google. Earlier today, SearchEngineRoundtable reported on a forum thread started when one advertiser noticed Google displaying three scores under a Google Netherlands ad. The scores listed are Pscore, mCPC, and thresh. The article goes on to suggest that mCPC is minimum cost-per-click, while Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineLand guesses that thresh may refer to a threshold score for the ad display while the Pscore may be a quality score metric related to PageRank.

Contrary to other reports, it’s not just for international searches, however. At Reprise, we noticed the numbers appearing under domestic searches. In the screenshot below, a search at 11:35 EST for “grand theft auto” pulled up two sponsored links, with the scores displayed between them (boxed in red).

 

Strange Google

 

Strangely, subsequent searches were unable to replicate the result, and as of noon EST it seems the scores are gone from international searches as well. We’ll be keeping an eye out for any Google updates on the issue.

Send in the ‘Clouds’

Written By Drupad Sil | April 28, 2008 | Share This |

MediaPost

Everywhere we turn, it seems that Google has established a foothold in another product or service. From iGoogle to Google Docs, YouTube to Maps, Google has stepped beyond the mere label of search engine to offer a suite of services that makes it resemble a true web portal. Why is it doing this? As the engine with the lion’s share of the market, is this what’s next for search?

Reprise Media Managing Partner Peter Hershberg offers his thoughts with this article on Mediaweek:

“In less than a decade, search engine marketing has grown from a little understood and even derided concept (“who would ever want to pay to be in search results?”) into the single biggest sector in online advertising. With all that change and upheaval, it’s only natural for advertisers to start asking: What’s next for search?

In many ways, when you ask that question, you can’t help but focus on the industry’s largest player. With Google commanding 70 percent of the market, all eyes are on the biggest kid in class in order to figure out where we’re heading next. So what is Google doing?”

Read the rest here.

Rules of Engagement: Time Spent and New Metrics

Written By Drupad Sil | April 17, 2008 | Share This |

MediaPost

Web site metrics are an indispensable asset to any online marketing campaign, but there is hardly a standardized method for their use. This is due partly to disagreement over the relative importance of certain metrics, and also to inaccurate measurement techniques. Furthermore, the constant evolution of online advertising forces the creation of new metrics to accurately capture their effectiveness.

Reprise Media’s Managing Partner Peter Hershberg weighs in on the metrics debate with an article on MediaPost:

“As the online experience becomes richer, it’s also becoming difficult to define meaningful interactions, and even more difficult for analytics tools to aggregate all this data. Very soon, those tools will need to measure feed subscribers, Twitter followers, and the number of Facebook wall posts alongside more traditional site statistics such as unique visitors, page views and time spent. The challenge marketers face is making sense of all that data and applying that information to the way they buy ads now (currently page views and impressions–although this will change soon, too), both online and across their broader marketing mix.”

Get the rest of the article

Welcoming Ansible to the IPG Futures Marketing Group

Interpublic_Group_logo

We’re very excited to welcome Ansible as the newest addition to the Interpublic group of companies. This week, Ansible joined Reprise Media, Facebook, Spotrunner, Spongecell and the IPG Emerging Media Lab in the Futures Marketing Group of IPG. Ansible will operate as a stand-alone mobile marketing agency in a joint venture with leading mobile technology partner Velti, and will provide marketing solutions to Interpublic agencies and clients.

When Reprise Media first joined IPG and the vision for the Futures Marketing Group was laid out, we recognized that mobile technology would be a lynchpin to the the FMG strategy. We’re extremely pleased to see mobile marketing finally finding a place in the Future’s Marketing Group and look forward to future collaborations between Ansible and our own search and social media services.

(more…)

History Lesson for Mahalo

Written By Peter Hershberg | May 31, 2007 | Share This |

mahalo.gif

Jason Calcanis officially launched his “people-powered search engine,” Mahalo, yesterday.

“Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.”

Mahalo’s press release features a Q&A section, wherein it outlines the differences between the company’s business model/processes and those of some other “comparable” companies, including About.com, DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, and Wikipedia. Interestingly enough, there’s no mention of the company that, in my mind, most closely resembles Mahalo – Ask Jeeves.

I worked at AJ from 1998-2002, during which time we employed over 100 human editors. Those editors – who, btw, were all well-versed in their assigned vertical categories – were responsible for hand-selecting the best answers to the site’s most frequently asked questions on an ongoing basis. The thought was that 80% of the people asked the same 20% questions all the time. By using humans to direct users to sites that most effectively answered each question, we’d be able to ensure the web’s most relevant search experience.

Needless to say, Jeeves’ original business model failed for a variety of reasons and I suspect that, based on Mahalo’s processes as they exist today, the new engine will likely suffer a similar fate. Here’s why:

Calcanis understands Mahalo’s scalability issues and has decided to backfill long-tail searches with results from Google. This certainly provides a better overall user experience, but once again history would suggest that it won’t go far enough. Ask Jeeves tried backfilling results from engines including About.com, AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, and Webcrawler, Direct Hit, and finally Teoma. The problem was, backfilled results were always treated secondary to any possible human-edited match, which meant that the most relevant answers were often buried in the back pages of search engine results.

Not long after acquiring Teoma, Ask dropped its “human” element and decided instead to feature only algorithmic search results. If Mahalo continues to lean heavily on the human-powered model, I predict it will eventually come to the same realization that Ask made in 2002. Especially with the emergence of image, video, audio, and user-generated content, Mahalo will have an extremely hard time maintaining relevancy. Though Mahalo might reach a balancing point between ad revenue and operational costs, I predict that it will never generate a loyal user base that extends far beyond Calcanis’ circle of friends.

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