Flickr
The Year in Search and Social Media: Predictions 2009
|
Written By Noah Mallin | December 31, 2008 | Share This
|
|
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.
SEO and Social Media: My Friend Flickr
|
Written By Miguel Cancino | September 15, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Last week I wrote a post about the SEO benefits of Twitter but today I’d like to discuss the SEO benefits of Flickr and how you can optimize your Flickr profiles. In fact, last week’s post made me realize how rarely businesses consider the integration of Social Media into their larger SEO strategy. We touched on this when we talked to AdAge “Editor at Large” Matt Creamer about Reprise Media’s optimization of his name across several platforms, but corporations and individuals continue to view Social Media strictly in terms of engagement and reputation management. While Social Media Marketing is excellent for these purposes, Social Media offers great SEO benefits as well.
While Flickr’s SEO benefits decreased several months ago when they decided to add “nofollow” tags to picture captions and comments, the site still allows for a number of ways to boost SEO. First of all, Flickr has not added nofollow tags to discussion boards, groups or personal profiles. Flickr has an awesome, active community with a wealth of conversation taking place on discussion boards around photography and other topics. If you have content on your site that is relevant to a discussion, including a link back to that content allows you to benefit from the substantial “link juice” that Flickr can provide. The same applies for personal profiles and group pages. And of course, don’t forget to embed those links in keyword-researched and targeted anchor text.
Flickr Adds Video
|
Written By Sepideh Saremi | April 10, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Photo sharing site Flickr this week added the ability for its paid users to upload short videos, or what it’s calling “long photos.” Like video site Vimeo, Flickr wants users to upload original content. But video length is capped at 90 seconds, which will help it distinguish itself from YouTube, et al. Flickr’s Heather Champ explains:
While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share.
Gizmodo’s given it thumbs-up:
A quick test finds that the service is no more difficult than uploading photos, and it’s pretty quick to boot. Also, advanced embedding functions allow for users to choose their preferred width or height for the video and the service will calculate the dimensions and update the code accordingly. That sounds like a small touch. It is, but it’s also a pretty good one lacking in just about all video on the web.
Flickr’s strategy of keeping videos short is good, though users are up in arms over the addition of video.
FriendFeed Consolidates Social Media Activities
|
Written By Miguel Cancino | October 2, 2007 | Share This
|
|
The New York Times reported the beta launch yesterday of FriendFeed, a new social site that consolidates your friends’ activities on the Web into a single ‘Feed’. Says founder Bret Taylor,
“[FriendFeed] gives you a snapshot of what people you know think is interesting. It’s kind of a blog that writes itself.”
FriendFeed currently supports 23 social web services, including Digg, Flickr, YouTube, and Last.fm. Users create their own network of friends whose activity updates can be tracked in a continuous stream of notifications. The streaming content can be embedded within user’s Facebook pages or their personal web page or blog.
FriendFeed is not the first social media site to allow users to distribute their internet-activity with friends. Similar services like Kaboodle (shopping) and Google’s Shared Stuff have already carved a niche in this voyeuristic market. FriendFeed is hoping that their simple and effortless sharing process (users don’t have to do anything to share updates) will lead to the site’s success. Writes the New York Times,
“The creators of FriendFeed say their system is intended to be as simple as possible. ‘I like this because it doesn’t require me to do anything new,’ Mr. Taylor said.”
Though a compelling concept, FriendFeed’s automatic updates could provoke privacy concerns among wary users. Unless FriendFeed implements comprehensive privacy settings for their site announcements, I doubt many Feeders will be eager to ‘automatically’ broadcast their personal information.