According to comScore, Google still has nearly two-thirds of the U.S. search market, but dropped a fraction of a percent from 65.7% in Dec 2009 to 65.4% in Jan 2010 [source: Information Week]. While Google is still the leader in the search space, and Facebook only accounted for just under 400 million searches in January, that is a gain of 13% over December. If this trend continues, Google may have ample reason to fear Facebook.   

The Compete data shows that Facebook is the second most popular site in the US with 134m unique visiter in January 2010, ahead of Yahoo! and just behind Google.

Facebook is in the ascendancy but the company must make changes to its own Search engine if it is to become a genuine rival to Google, the vastly dominant player in the space. 

Facebook, like other social networks, represents opportunity for brands because of the simple fact that this is where a lot of the action is taking place online, as demonstrated by slews and rising traffic.  Switched on brands are  already tapping into the Facebook community.  But Facebook Search serves marketers poorly today as a place of discovery.  Check out my search results for ‘mobile handset’:

Not particularly useful.  Three users groups with 210 members between them.

No sign of the brand sponsored pages where Facebook Users can learn about new products, participate in competitions and promotions, chat with other users and potential customers, communicate directly with the company and link through to relevant pages on the Web.

The Sony Ericsson WorldPage has more than 445,ooo Fans (Sony Ericsson is a client) but the way that Facebook Search works prevents this page, which is clearly relevant to the search term, from appearing. 

This is an issue for Facebook.  

We see the same issue if we run a search for ’sneakers’:

The retailer Sole Provider Sneakers comes out on top here, simply by virtue of having the search term embedded in its company name (also the name of the Page).  Yet Sole Provider Sneakers sells a lot of Nike trainers and a search for ‘Nike’ would not have produced their Page in its results.

Facebook has to play a delicate balancing act here.  Ultimately, user activity, personal profiles, user content, sharing and discussion are the currency of social networks such as Facebook.  The company needs to avoid giving users the impression that they are being marketed to via the network, failure to do this could well become its undoing.

One way around this could be for Facebook to adopt a model similar to Google’s Universal Search, which would allow users to chose and filter the types of results that are presented to them via Facebook Search.  This could be built into the privacy settings that Facebook has been so keen to promote recently.

Interestingly, Google listed Facebook as a formal competitor for the first time in a recent 10K filing, as reported by SearchEngineLand:

Our business is characterized by rapid change and converging, as well as new and disruptive, technologies. We face formidable competition in every aspect of our business, particularly from companies that seek to connect people with information on the web and provide them with relevant advertising. We face competition from:

•   Traditional search engines, such as Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corporation’s Bing.
• Vertical search engines and e-commerce sites, such as WebMD (for health queries), Kayak (travel queries), Monster.com (job queries), and Amazon.com and eBay (commerce). We compete with these sites because they, like us, are trying to attract users to their web sites to search for product or service information, and some users will navigate directly to those sites rather than go through Google.  
• Social networks, such as Facebook, Yelp, or Twitter. Some users are relying more on social networks for product or service referrals, rather than seeking information through traditional search engines. (my emphasis)

Some subtle and simple changes to Facebook Search would accelerate the trend towards Facebook and other social networks as a primary channel for Search. 

The challenge for marketers will (continue to be) to resist the tempation to sell via social networks and to engage with social networking users in a way that adds value, build relationships, earns trust and facilitates creativity and connectivity.  Facebook will have to manage the sensitivities of its users delicately but if managed well Facebook could become a natural home to Search, delivering value to users and marketers alike. 

The FT reported today that News Corp and Microsoft are in ‘discussions’.  Microsoft is determined or desperate to catch up with Google in search, the latter being streets ahead.  Microsoft has made it clear that it will invest heavily to achieve its goals. 

Could Microsoft turn the tide in search through exclusive partnerships with publishers? 

Update: Some interesting perspectives on today’s developments…  

Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher: Is Murdoch Setting Up a Bidding War for News Corp. Index?

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land: Why an Exclusive WSJ Deal Wouldn’t Help Bing

On the other hand, Twitter needs to be sensitive to perceptions around privacy of information.  Twitter uses may not be entirely comfortable with Twitter selling information about their preferences, interests, habits etc. to third parties – particularly to Microsoft and/or Google.   

Twitter would gain added legitimacy if it were added as a Vertical Search option in Google alongisde Images, News, Blogs, Maps etc.  Ultimately, Google and Microsoft are attempting to improve their access to the worldwide Web and extend the usefulness and reach of their search engines. For more on the Real-Time Web check this post by ReadWriteWeb.

The ongoing debate about who ‘owns social media’ continues apace. Here is my pitch for the PR industry, which I believe has a very strong claim.

Ultimately, all of the back and forth is irrelevant. The sector (or individuals) that gets closest to owning social media will be the one that delivers the most value over time.

Here are my thoughts…

1. PR’s heritage isn’t selling. It seeks to influence and build relationships. This makes it more suited and better equipped to initiate, engage and hold a conversation.
2. PR is expert in content creation. They can’t be blamed for trying to get involved with social media but what expertise do media buying agencies have in content creation? Content creation is a central component of marketing and specifically social media.
3. The advertising industry is focused on promotions, launches and campaigns. I heard an advertising executive at a conference last year talk about their ability to ‘turn on’ and ‘turn off’ the community that they had successfully built for an FMCG client. This is a great illustration of the point.  This attitude shows a high degree of arrogance and a low degree of empathy.  The community would quickly see through this kind of approach to managing relationships. The advertising industry isn’t set up culturally or operationally (including its fee structure) to maintain an ongoing or continuous dialogue.
4. The PR industry is subtle. The sector gets a lot of flack for spinning but subtlety is at the core of spin. Digital media requires subtlety, including the ability to understand context and respond accordingly.
5. The PR industry is close to the business leaders. The C-suite calls on PR in a crisis and is reliant on PR when the organisation’s reputation is threatened. PR has a central role to play in educating the C-suite about the benefits of social media and is a trusted advisor on reputation management, unlike other marketing disciplines.
6. The PR industry is something of a sole operator when compared with the other marketing disciplines. Communication often functions as a stand-alone department along side Marketing but is part of the mix. One of the key challenges for the social media strategists is that they are on the outside, they may have deep expertise in their field but few things operate in a vacuum and its clear that social media is most effective when  integrated with offline marketing efforts.
7. Strategy is at the heart of good PR. It could be argued that PR has a been a little slow to come to the  (socialmedia) party. There are lots of reasons for this. PR’s approach is always circumspect, it has to add value when your dealing with corporate reputations otherwise its not worth doing. I think  this will play out well for the PR industry in the long term.
8. The culture of the PR industry is to allow others to create content. i.e. journalists. The industry has been built on this fundamental characteristic. The key message is designed to assert as much control as possible over the process of content creation. The approach changes in the context of social media but I think this is one of the strongest arguments in PRs favour. PR has never had control of the message when it comes to the end result.
9. Search. I think the PR industry has a long way to go in this space but that content is fundamental to search strategy – see point 2. Search seeks to ‘game a system’. The tool of the gaming is content, which has to be of the highest quality.
10. Most (all?) organisations need to adapt culturally to engage their customers in authentic conversations. I genuinely believe that the businesses that most effectively listen to customers and is able to incorporate their insights into product development and services will be the most successful. This requires an organisational change and is not something that a snazzy social media program can deliver. This, for me, is PRs biggest opportunity as the function that advises and implements change management strategies. PR has a great opportunity to take the lead in making this change happen – the outbound social media campaigns will become the natural output and realisation of this cultural and organisational change in business.

As ever, keen to hear your thoughts and disagreements. Here is a good analysis of the debate from the AdAge.

Lots of discussion this week about Google Caffeine and the impact that it will have on search results. There is a useful post by Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer.

Back links are one part of the search equation. Keywords are another.

Here are a few tools for assessing keyword density and usage. They can help you analyse your competitors (i.e. the people that rank higher than you) and inform your own keyword strategy. Thanks to @jimboot for some of these tips – Jim puts out a series of very useful search videos, which can be found on YouTube.

Here goes:

• To understand what the most often used keywords within a specific website use TagCrowd. This can help you identify the words that are ranking for a competitive site.
• For a different angle on keyword density use Keyword Counter.  You can run an analysis of an entire website.
• For identifying related keywords use the Google Wonder wheel, which can be found in the left hand options column on any Google search results page. The Wonder wheel link can be found under ‘Standard View’. It creates a clickable spider diagram of keywords related to your original search term.
• To check comparative results in the hottest search engines go to Bing vs. Google. Pre-Caffeine results.
• The Google sandbox for running test searches against the new Caffeine code.

There are a plethora of tools for analysing and optimising keywords, we use Keyword Discovery and have trialled Market Samurai.

The updates – named Caffeine – are described by Google as “a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search“.

Thanks to my old colleague Ged Carroll and his RT for Stephen Waddington to this econsultancy.com article via Twitter.

Google describes the changes as “the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

Google has opened up a web developer preview to collect feedback: www2.sandbox.google.com/

Google is inviting feedback: Engineers will be reading the feedback, but we won’t have the cycles to send replies.

I ran a few searches against my name (daniel young) and found that:

• My Facebook profile result goes from 5 in old Google to 2 with Caffeine
• My FriendFeed profiles goes from 29 in old Google to 8 with Caffeine
• My Twitter profile goes from 18 in old Google to 14 with Caffeine
• This blog goes from 7 in old Google to 24 with Caffeine

Caffeine seems to be:

1. Favouring the sites that are updated more frequently
2. or, favouring social networks over other content
3. or, both of the above – since they are inter-related

The jump in FriendFeed could be attributed to the Facebook acquisition and the increased importance on real-time properties is most likely a counter strategy to the launch of Bing and Facebook’s real-time search capabilities.

Take a look at the results in Caffeine when we use the search term ‘pr agency’:

• Top result is the same in Caffeine and old Google – Punch PR
• GlobalCom PR replaces Yetis 10 at number 3 in Caffeine. Yetis 10 drops to rank 51!  Down 48 places.
• Edelman drops out of the top ten with Caffeine
• VitisPR, Brands2Life, Berkeley PR enter the top ten with Caffeine
• At the expense of Edelman, About PR.net (directory) and The Publicity Agency

My sites are fairly inconsequential but changes to the way that Google produces search results could result in lost business opportunities for organisations that have invested heavily in the Web or are reliant upon it.

The secrecy surrounding the Google algorithm is legendary but it seems odd that Google is asking the user community to tell it about the impact that the change is having on search results.

Does Google not have an obligation or duty to let organisations and individuals know what impact the changes will have on their web properties?

The changes aren’t objective – Google is making subjective decisions about the value of different types of content, sites, activity, formats and so on. These subjective judgements take on particular significance in the context of Google’s extraordinary market position – in excess of 90 per cent market share here in Australia.

This goes to the nub of an issue, which was explored in some detail at today’s AIMIA event in Sydney: ‘Advertiser’s Rights and Consumer Privacy‘.

The event focused on deceptive advertising techniques and unethical practice online.

Unfortunately for Google , it bears the brunt of much of the criticism due in part to its market dominance but also due to its lack of transparency.

The whole value chain came under scrutiny this morning – search engines (Yahoo!, Ask), aggregators, mobile carriers, social networks and digital advertising networks.

Speakers argued that there is a significant lack of accountability in the sector, which is characterised by very complex networks and inter-relationships.

Take two examples cited in today’s event, which featured Ben Edelman – an assistant professor at Harvard Business School:

1. Deceptive advertising tactics are widespread to the point of ubiquity within paid search. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an “interactive computer service” who publish information provided by others:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

This means that online publishers are not responsible for the content they publish, no matter how misleading or deceptive it may be – resulting in many instances of dishonest and misleading search marketing tactics.

Search engines are, as a result, failing to take proactive action to clear out these deceptive practices.

2. Google and its partners inflate conversions to claim credit for traffic that advertisers would otherwise have received for free. Edelman outlines four examples of this here.

I don’t believe that Google is an evil enterprise but I am convinced that it has excessive market power and that this is not in the long term interests of our digital economy or the broader community. Perhaps it gets a hard time as a result of its market dominance but leaders in every field have a duty of care and obligation to do the right thing.

Google is pervasive yet untouchable. Mr. Edelman provided an example of this when he highlighted a laughable  and ironic complaints and claims process for Adwords.

The following is taken from Google Adwords Terms and Conditions for Australian customers:

10 Miscellaneous. The Agreement must be construed as if both parties jointly wrote it, governed by California law except for its conflicts of laws principles and adjudicated in Santa Clara County, California. The Agreement constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the subject matter hereof, and supersedes and replaces any other applicable agreements, terms and conditions applicable to the subject matter hereof. Any conflicting or additional terms contained in additional documents (e.g. reference to a purchase order number) or oral discussions are void. Each party shall not disclose the terms or conditions of these Terms to any third party, except to its professional advisors under a strict duty of confidentiality or as necessary to comply with a government law, rule or regulation.  Customer may grant approvals, permissions, extensions and consents by email, but any modifications by Customer to the Agreement must be made in a writing executed by both parties. Any notices to Google must be sent to Google Ireland Limited, AdWords Program, 1st & 2nd Floor, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland, with a copy to Legal Department, via confirmed facsimile, with a copy sent via first class or air mail or overnight courier, and are deemed given upon receipt.  Notice to Customer may be effected by sending email to the email address specified in Customer’s account, or by posting a message to Customer’s account interface, and is deemed received when sent (for email) or no more than 15 days after having been posted (for messages in Customer’s account interface).

In short, please send an email to the Google engineers if you want to provide feedback on Caffeine, the new search algorithm (but don’t expect a reply), and submit notices regarding modifications to Adwords agreements by snail mail to their office in Dublin, Ireland.

In the same edition WARC reported on a 15% reduction in global advertising revenue – across the board i.e. digital and traditional media.  

The ‘measurability’ of digital marketing remains one of the key drivers for investment in the Web by marketers and this will continue to be the case while the industry matures and develops a method for measuring and tracking engagement and influence (i.e. qualitiative metrics).

The traditional media sector is obviously already suffering at the hands of digital. To the digital advertising sector – and particularly the massively dominant Google - the measurability of digitial advertising is a major strategic advantage. 

As competition for marketing budgets increase, I think we can expect to see companies like Google and others making more and more user data available in order to maximise their share of the total overall investment. At no cost and at the touch of a button, these organisations can enhance their strategic advantage over traditional media.  

There is a strong lobby arguing that this strategic advantage comes at the expense of consumer privacy but Google has been commended in parts for its approach.  

Could the launch of Google Voice be a strategy designed to overshadow media interest in targetted advertising.

The New York times provides a guide to Google’s privacy controls here. Industry standard story < there and an interesting counter view for Gawker here.

I think of this as a type of Content Application Integration and thikn that we are likely to see many more examples of this.

New media is driving increases in the usage of audio, video and imagery (rich media) and so it makes a lot of sense to build features into creative applications that offer search functionality, access to the Web and easy one-click insertion. See my earlier post on a related topic.

CAI (CAI) offers many potential applications… imagine, for example, being able to click on any word in a working document (a Word doc say, or PowerPoint) and going straight to the Wikipedia page for that word or opting to open a search in a Web browser on that term. This would be a variation on the linking strategy that underpins Web collaboration and sharing.

These functional capabilities are available today but CAI would make the integration between the productivity applications and content engines much tighter – furthering enabling the development and creation of multi-media content.

It would seem that Google has a much stronger position in this space as it is suited more to Web based applications as opposed to on-premise apps.

Chrome’s stripped down interface maximises the viewing space on the screen. It looks like Fisher Price had a hand in the design – big rounded buttons and basic icons, which is very pleasing to the eye and fresh.

It 0ffers the ability to search in the address bar – which is cool. I think Firefox does this too. Chrome will provide prompts for Web pages and search terms, these are quite slow to pop up I found.Users are presented with a graphical list of the most recently visited Web pages when the application starts up – an innovative and cute design feature.

Tests conducted by others have found that it does well against IE but is not as quick as Firefox or Safari.You can do some cool stuff with the tabs – change the order, pull them out of the window so that they are stand alone instances of the browser and put them back in. Tabs operate independently which prevents one page bringing down the whole browser – a problem I often encounter with IE.

Google explains why they got into this space here.

This is clearly a competitive play with regard to Microsoft IE, which still accounts for 75% of the browser market. It will allow Google to maintain the integrity of its search engine – Microsoft could for example make changes to IE which favoured its search engine over Google. Google retains control with Chrome.It also enables Google to get closer to users and will provide them access to a different type of user information, which provides the basis to their advertising business.Chrome offers an incognito mode – users can surf and withold their usage data from Google.

It will be interesting to see how Google will promote Chrome to the mass market. To most consumers IE is THE web browser – these users haven’t thought about why they use IE, they just do. It comes pre-loaded on their new machines – it does what’s required. It’s familiar and easy.  Google have added a download link for Chrome to their famously minimalist home page.

Chrome is only available for XP and Vista at the moment, Linux and Mac to follow.

There are a few things missing from the application, such as a progress bar. Google will obviously be developing this further – this is an open source app which is based on some of the other open source browsers but which according to Google represents the next generation of browsers and an up to date platform for Web applications.

A quick scan of blogs and media shows that Chrome has had a generally positive reception.Interestingly, Google pre-announced Chrome using an online comic, which you can see here. The comic features the RL Google design team.

It’s not the first time that Microsoft has tried to find ways to work with Yahoo!

There are obvious synergies and opportunities for Microsoft. The deal would give Microsoft’s advertising sales division – which has been recently bolstered by the acquisition of aQuantive and other small online ad sales players – a vast amount of well trafficed Web property to sell. Online advertising sales are expected to double in the next three years to US$80bn.

The deal would provide an established channel for a Web based version of Office to compete with Google Docs and there would be value – potentially – in combining the Hotmail and Yahoo! email constituencies.

The following section is from Yahoo! Finance:

Yahoo would give Microsoft dominance in Web banner ads used by corporate brand advertisers. It also attracts more than 500 million people monthly to sites devoted to news, finance and sports, and Yahoo Mail is the No. 1 consumer e-mail service.

On the topic of email, I must say that I wasn’t impressed by the new Yahoo! mail service and have reverted to the ‘Classic’ product.

On the down side, you’d have to wonder how easy it would be to align the diverse cultures of these two companies and how keen the Yahoo! employees would be to work for the dark empire Microsoft (Will the talent leave? Hello Google!). Also, Microsoft’s cultural leaning towards software release cycles wouldn’t represent a good fit with the dotcom ethos where innovation and development is a part of every working day.

Search is clearly a massive lead generator for an Internet company and Microsoft pursues this market aggressively and keenly. One wonders if two companies that have struggled in search, or at least have failed to take the lead, would represent an effective competitor to Google anytime soon.

If the bid is successful, both companies will take their eye off of the ball while they deal with the integration of the two companies, providing Google with an opportunity to extend its lead. Google already has a 75% market share in search advertising compared to Yahoo!’s 9%.