2010 is fast coming to an end. Which can only mean one thing… bold predictions from marketers about what may transpire in 2011! Last year my predictions were a little left of centre, so this time round I've taken the topic a little more seriously. In particular, I've focused my attention towards the questions of what Google may do in the next 12 months. I identified five trends around which I expect them to focus extensive energy – local search, mobile search, social search, integrated search & search speed. Hardly crystal-ball gazing, I know, but I have taken a stab at where I think the big G may take each facet of search in 2011.

If that sounds like a whole lot of fun, check out What Would Google Do? over at Search Engine People

Google sure knows how to shake up the search industry! Just weeks after rocking the SEO industry with the localisation of organic search results, Google served the paid search industry a similar dose of instant evolution by releasing Product Listing Ads out of beta phase.

For the uninitiated, this video provides an overview of exactly how Google’s new Product Listing Ads work:

As someone who helps manage paid search for an online retailer with 10,000+ products, Google’s new Product Listing Ads are incredibly exciting. However, it’s also important to note that Product Listing Ads are likely to have considerable implications on the search landscape. I’ve identified five key implications for search marketers below:

1. Paid search ads become more visible

Google itself boasts that Product Listing Ads are twice as likely to attract a click than a standard text ad in the same position. Which makes perfect sense when you consider that Product Listing Ads integrate product imagery. Images attract attention.
My hunch is that the new ad format will cannibalise clicks from organic search.

Retail sectors in particular will see strong adoption, and product imagery will draw searchers away from organic listings (where multimedia is less prevalent). Users will be drawn to the paid listings when product imagery matches their search query. A moderate shift towards paid search results is likely, which you’d have to think is Google’s intent.

2. Google becomes a price comparison engine

By integrating price directly into Product Listing Ads, Google has immediately transformed itself into the world’s largest price comparison engine. Which is a HUGE deal for online retailers (and a pretty significant problem for existing price comparison engines). Make no mistake – the integration of price points will influence user behaviour in a significant way.

Brand awareness and brand equity will retain slightly less importance as price competitiveness becomes a primary motivation in earning the click. If an online retailer isn’t price competitive, they’ll be eliminated from the consideration set before the consumer even reaches their site. Quite simply, retailers with over-inflated prices will be exposed.

3. Product descriptions matter!

Many online retailers treat product descriptions with disdain. Indeed, most tend to copy and paste descriptions provided by their suppliers, which results in duplication of product description content across competing retailers. While this isn’t ideal from an SEO perspective, it doesn’t do any great harm either. However, the importance of product description content increases significantly with Product Listing Ads.

Unlike standard text ads, advertisers don’t create the text displayed to the searcher for each ad. Instead, ad content is pulled directly from product descriptions uploaded to Google Merchant Center. Use the standard description content provided by your supplier, and you’re likely to see bland text that mirrors your competitor’s ads. While the task is laborious, there is now a real incentive to write customised and persuasive product descriptions.

4. Reconsideration of culled keywords

Culling non-performing keywords is common practice in the optimisation of a paid search campaign. However, the change in landscape warrants reconsideration of products and keywords that have been culled due to poor performance.
In particular, the integration of pricing information will change user behaviour. Insights gained through the history of the campaign need to be re-evaluated with new elements influencing click behaviour. The game has changed. Failing to re-test products that have performed poorly in the past may simply make them more profitable for your competitors.

5. Online retailers set to prevail

If you don’t sell products online, Google’s Product Listing Ads will be unavailable to you. Which gives online retailers a significant advantage over businesses without ecommerce capabilities. If Product Listing Ads are truly twice as likely to be clicked, competitors maintaining standard text ads will find it increasingly difficult to attract clicks.

All of which places businesses without an online retailing capability at a distinct disadvantage in the paid search environment. Retailers without ecommerce capabilities may quickly find themselves turning to SEO for redemption.
 

The words “social media expert/guru/strategist” are practically insults these days. And you’d have to say with fairly good reason. The web is awash with “social media experts” making bold claims of how it will change  business  and marketing as we know it. And to a certain extent they’re right. It has made businesses more accountable for their actions. It has changed the way people make purchase decisions (ratings & reviews). And it has opened a new range of corporate communication channels. But… like any marketing channel it has its strengths and weaknesses. And it seems that amongst the hype, the weaknesses are often glossed over. This post aims address some of those shortcomings via a real life case study.

The inspiration for the post came to me as I read one of the most interesting articles I’d seen for a while. It was by Julian Cole and it analysed a social media campaign that didn’t meet the defined objectives. Imagine that! It’s exactly the type of post you never see from the self-proclaimed “social media experts”. They’re generally more busy talking in these terms (hilarious vid, but comes with a language warning):

So kudos must go to Julian for having the courage to publish his case study. And following in the spirit of honest and open analysis of social media campaigns, I’m bringing my own to the table which also fell short of fulfilling some of the campaign objectives.

The Case Study – Social Media Master Class

Back in September I was involved with Social Media Master Class with US author David Meerman Scott, which was organised by the wonderful Jennifer Frahm. Next Digital (my employer) were the major sponsors of the conference, and as a result I took on the role of marketing the event. My first task in developing the marketing plan was to identify the target audience for the event. Two distinct audiences were identified:

1. Social media professionals and enthusiasts
2. Senior marketing and business managers looking to understand social media

The core objectives of the marketing plan were pretty straightforward:

1. Create awareness and interest in the event amongst the target audiences
2. Convert that interest into ticket sales

Given the vastly different media consumption habits of the two audiences, a marketing plan was devised for each:

The Marketing Plan for Social Media Enthusiasts

It didn’t take Einstein to determine that the ideal place to reach the social media professionals and enthusiasts was within social media itself, particularly given the subject matter of the conference. A range of different channels were established to reach this audience:

• An event blog was created to serve as the hub for all event information
• A Twitter account was also created and used in a number of ways to (a) link to relevant content, (b) disperse event info and (c) host event related promotions (book & ticket giveaways)
• An outreach campaign saw prominent industry bloggers sent a copy of David’s new book and invited to an ‘invitation only’ event to meet David
• A 20 minute podcast with David was created by Trevor Young (who managed PR for the event)
• A partnership with Sydney’s Social Media Club (SMCSYD) was established, which culminated in a speaking appearance for David at a SMCSYD event. A discount offer was also created for all SMCSYD members.
• A Facebook page was created, although rarely used

The Marketing Plan for Senior Managers

While social media was ideal for reaching enthusiasts, it was quickly recognised that it would be ineffective in penetrating the senior manager market. Subsequently, a more traditional (yet still primarily digital) marketing plan was devised:

• Display advertising space was co-ordinated throughout Marketing Mag’s web site (an event sponsor)
• Promotional banners were purchased within the email newsletters of key industry publications including Marketing Mag, Mumbrella, Anthill and B&T
• A search marketing campaign was implemented to target people searching for keywords related to social media
• Display advertisements were placed within Google’s content network
• Dedicated email campaigns were executed to a range of marketing and public relations industry bodies

The Results

If you had told me the numbers we would achieve at the start of the campaign, I would have expected the event to be a resounding success. At the height of the marketing activity, the blog was receiving between 100-150 unique visitors a day, which is considerable for a niche event. The Twitter account also gained traction quickly with over 600 followers generated in around 6 weeks. Indeed, by the end of the campaign, Twitter had sent more traffic to the event blog than any paid media source. Cool. So far, so good.

But… did that hive of activity help us achieve our objective…? Did it actually sell any tickets?

Yes. But not a whole lot. In fact, the Sydney event had to be cancelled due to a lack of demand. Of course, there were a range of external factors that influenced our ability to convert awareness into sales:

• Awareness of David’s work isn’t as high in Australia as it is internationally
• At around $900 a pop, the tickets weren’t exactly cheap and that pesky Global Financial Crisis didn’t help
• A limited marketing budget restricted our paid marketing options

The fact that we were still able to host a full Melbourne event was evidence that we did something right (and the feedback from all attendees was resoundingly positive).  Indeed, a competing event hosted by Marketing Now with speakers of the calibre of Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse & David Armano seemed to succumb to similar pressures, eventually giving their tickets away for free. So the campaign certainly achieved an element of success in a difficult environment.

But the exercise made it abundantly clear to me that social media’s strength is not in direct response (a belief I’ve stated a number of times on this blog). Some companies such as Dell have made it work for their business, yet most organisations that approach social media with an advertising or promotional approach walk away disappointed. Social media is not an advertising tool. It is a communications tool. It is best suited to objectives related to customer awareness, customer engagement and customer retention, rather than pure acquisition/conversion.

The star performer of the marketing campaign was email. Yes… good old-fashioned email (although I should clarify that dedicated emails outperformed paid banners in third party newsletters by a significant margin). It was by far the most effective direct response channel. Despite the hype around sexy new mediums such as social media and augmented reality, it should never be forgotten that email consistently delivers a superior ROI than any other marketing channel. Time after time. Don’t forget it.

The biggest lesson of the campaign

In hindsight, the marketing plan had an overreliance on web marketing tactics. While effective in reaching the social media enthusiasts, it failed in delivering the message to our second audience of senior managers. Online activity alone (let alone just social activity) simply wasn’t enough to fulfill the marketing objectives. Proclaiming the death of rival media sources is a favourite hobby of many “social media gurus”. Yet all that proves is that the “guru” has never actually executed a serious marketing campaign.

Social media should now be a valid part of the marketing mix for many companies, but it compliments rather than replaces other elements (and it’s not necessary for everyone). A good social media approach aligns activity with objectives from a broader marketing strategy. Indeed, the social media strategy itself is simply a subsidiary of the marketing strategy. It will rarely succeed in isolation or without support from other media channels.

So in summary… there’s no question social media is emerging as an important marketing channel. But let’s not all get lost in the hype.

Have we just seen the beginning of the great local search war? Quite possibly. Last week Google brought out a new iPhone application. And if doesn’t have the team at the Yellow Pages checking their pants for traces of leakage, I don’t know what will. The application is called the Google mobile app, and it has major implications for anyone playing in the search directory market (yes… that means you Yellow Pages). A two minute demo of the awesome new application in action can be seen below.

Looks pretty darn cool huh…? To this point most people have focused on the voice recognition software, and in particular the accuracy of the voice driven search queries. Despite reports that the application struggles to recognise international accents, I’ve found the application gives me accurate results roughly 75% of the time for basic one & two word queries. Perhaps I’m not as Aussie as I thought I was…

But what I find a whole lot more exciting about the tool is the fact that for the first time, Google is delivering truly accurate local search results. My favourite feature of the iPhone is the GPS tracking. In fact, my recent holiday to Tasmania was guided solely by my iPhone. No maps necessary. The new application uses the iPhone’s GPS tracking to pinpoint your location, and serve results matched to that area. Cool! It works best when you’re looking for local services such as restaurants, cinemas and my personal favourite… the pub. Which could be where a whole lot of Yellow Pages execs may find themselves spending a lot more time soon. Because Google just cracked their local advertising market.

Google says to small business – ‘How you doin’?’

There’s no doubt that Google’s algorithm does a great job returning accurate search results at a broad level. A generic search for the word ‘supermarket’ returns the biggest brands in the industry. However, what Google hasn’t done well historically is tell me who my local supermarkets are and where I can find them. True geographic relevance is a problem they never quite mastered (although the integration of Google maps into search results did initiate a step in the right direction).

As a result, Google’s advertising platform was rarely relevant for small business. Many small businesses are restricted by geographic boundaries, particularly service based industries. A hairdresser in Melbourne simply can’t service a customer in Sydney. The inability to localise search results effectively ruled many businesses out of advertising within Google. Instead, most stuck with traditional directories like the Yellow Pages because they applied a more effective local search process. Until now…

The new application seems to resolve Google’s local search dilemma. The iPhone’s GPS tracking allows a user’s location to be accurately pin pointed. Google’s mobile app does the rest. No matter where I am, results are localised for that region. Of course, this type of search was possible with the iPhone previously via Google Maps. But I doubt many people were aware of it. Introducing it to the search engine brings the capability into the mainstream.

The obvious next step for Google is to expand the advertising platform beyond keyword targeting to also include location targeting (notwithstanding Google’s current attempt at geo-targeting which sucks pretty badly). Location targeting would allow a Melbourne based hairdresser to set up ads that only appear to people located within a 10km radius of the salon. That’s pretty damn powerful. And the end result…

Google advertising suddenly becomes a whole lot more relevant for small business. And Yellow Pages advertising becomes more and more unnecessary (and irrelevant). Who still pays for placement these days anyway for goodness sakes…?!?!

Getting the local search revenue model right

While we’re talking about pay for placement vs pay-per-click advertising, it’s worth pondering just how Google will monetise local ads. My experience in local search is quite different from standard search, and I expect it will be typical of most people. The key difference is intent.

When I’m searching on my laptop, information gathering is my primary intent. I’m generally trying to learn more about a particular topic. Which means that when I get to Google’s search results, I need to click through to achieve my goal. Google’s results simply don’t give me enough information. Thus the pay-per-click model works perfectly.

However, my experience with local search is quite different. When I’m out and about, I rarely engage in traditional Google searches (unless I’m on the train). Instead, I use Google for simple searches. My intent is to locate, not to learn. Mobile searches are generally for the purpose of finding local services such as car washes, restaurants and yes… the pub.

The interesting thing is that Google’s mobile application provides truly awesome local search results. Perhaps a little too good. I’m given the address, phone number and a link to generate directions. But in most cases I suspect I’ll need little more than the address. You see the problem? I don’t need to click. I’m not after more information. My intent was to locate. Which means the pay-per-click model isn’t likely to generate the maximum revenue for Google.

Is a pay-per-call model coming?

The solution to Google’s dilemma may be in a premium priced pay-per-call model. One of the cool features of Google’s local search is that users can call local businesses directly from the search results. All they need to do is click on the phone number. It seems logical to me that a phone call (driven by local search) is worth a hell of a lot more than a click from a generic Google search. The purchase intent is significantly higher. Therefore, the value of the lead is higher as well.

The wash up

Of course, this is just the beginning of the local search wars. A whole lot of water has to pass under the bridge before Google truly sends the Yellow Pages out of business. Smart phones such as the iPhone need to reach critical mass in terms of adoption. Google needs to find a way to integrate sponsored ads into iPhone search (that small screen doesn’t particularly lend itself well to two columns). And of course, a specific localised version of Adwords needs to be developed with geo-targeting capabilities.

But one thing is for sure. Google has signaled their intentions. And they are local. If I were a Yellow Pages exec right now, I suspect my pants would be turning a shade of yellow themselves…

Unless you’ve had your head up your backside for the last 6 months, you’d be well aware that the global economy is sliding towards a recession. D’oh! Troubled economic times are never fun for us marketers… as we are often at the top of the ‘dispensable’ resources list. Over the past few months there have been a sh*tload of recession related articles published, with search marketers particularly vocal in pondering the impact it may have on the industry. Yet at the same time, social media marketers have barely raised a whimper on the topic. So what is the likely verdict for social media during economic hardship…?

One of my favourite social media analysts Jeremiah Owyang raised the issue via his blog last week. But rather than give an overt opinion, Jeremiah simply asked for feedback on a number of questions. In particular, two were poignant:

1. Will consumer usage of social media increase or decrease during recession?
2. Will brands/marketers increase spending on an unproven marketing channel?

While I’m a little slow to respond to Jeremiah’s post, it’s better late than never right…? Here’s my thoughts:

Social media usage

Jeremiah’s first question is particularly interesting. In times of economic turmoil, consumer habits typically change. Spending habits become more conservative and greater consideration is given to each purchase as disposable income declines. However, is there any reason to expect social media usage to also decline during a recession. I doubt it… why would it when social media is free.

Internet access is now widely considered an essential requirement of modern living. I doubt very many people would consider taking themselves offline in order to save a few pennies. Indeed, if anything, it’s likely that people will spend more time online as they look for cost effective forms of entertainment. Social media could in fact experience an increase in usage for a number of reasons:

• People may choose to connect with friends and colleagues via social networks and IM rather than meet in person to save on entertainment and travel costs.
• People may dedicate more time to consolidating professional networks via LinkedIn due to concerns/ paranoia about job security.
• As unemployment increases, people may turn to the Internet for income opportunities, with social media providing a free source of promotion & traffic.
• With more free time, people may look to become active contributors/publishers via blogs and other social media tools.

So given that social media usage isn’t likely to decline, is it reasonable to expect corporate social media budgets to maintain a status quo? Not bloody likely. In fact, social media is likely to be the first place marketing managers look when slashing their budgets…

Corporate spending on social media

Jeremiah’s second question asked whether brands were likely to abort their social media initiatives in the face of diminishing marketing budgets. In short, the answer is… you betcha! While social media has risen to capture the attention of millions of users worldwide, few businesses have been able to translate that into corporate success. Hell… Facebook hasn’t even got a viable revenue model. So is it any surprise that the brick and mortar companies of the world haven’t figured out how to leverage social media as yet.

There is little doubt that social media is yet to comprehensively prove itself as a channel that can deliver a tangible ROI. Which means it is directly in the firing line when marketing budgets get slashed. While many companies have tested the waters over the past few years, there aren’t a lot of documented success stories to provide marketers with the confidence they need to continue to invest in social media. Indeed, many of the benefits of social media participation are fuzzy intangibles that are hard to link to ROI, such as:

• An enhanced understanding of customer needs
• The establishment of deeper customer relationships and increased loyalty
• The creation of a community of customer advocates
• Positive word of mouth and referrals
• Opening new channels of customer communication

Other benefits are more tangible, but still have negative connotations during recession:

• Traffic surges from Digg & StumbleUpon look great but rarely lead to increased product sales.
• Great social content attracts inbound links, but this longer term SEO strategy may be abandoned to focus on short-term acquisition campaigns.

With adversity comes opportunity

It’s probably clear by now that I don’t hold a lot of hope for corporate social media budgets. Quite simply, social media is an easy target. In fact, if I was in charge of a marketing budget at the moment I suspect I’d cut back on social media and invest in paid search, SEO & email. But I work for a digital agency, so my only budgetary concern whether any of our client will slash their online budget… yikes!

But with adversity comes opportunity. Despite the economic realities, there are a myriad of business related applications for organisations savvy enough to recognise them. Some opportunities that come to mind include:

• Cutting back on market research budgets by using social media to gather free (and unbiased) customer insights & intelligence
• Creating a customer facing blog to reduce reliance on other costly forms of communication (postal mail & telephone)
• Using social networks such as LinkedIn & Facebook for employee recruitment purposes
• Creating instructional/educational product demo videos and posting them to YouTube to reduce reliance on customer support staff.

There must be a million more… So while big businesses cut marketing budgets in the quest for ROI, smaller organisations are likely to continue to experiment and innovate within social media. Because while it may well be unproven… it’s also free. And that’s worth a lot too. Just ask Google, YouTube & Facebook. They never started with big marketing budgets…

Or for a truly inspirational story on how the really small business can benefit, check out Mark Hayward’s case study on social media for small businesses.

If you read my blog regularly enough, you’ll know I enjoy using social media. I owe a hell of a lot to it. In fact, I’d probably still be waiting for my first visitor if it weren’t for StumbleUpon & Sphinn. However… lately I have been pondering its applicability as a legitimate corporate marketing tactic. Sure, social media works beautifully in driving traffic to tech and marketing blogs, but can it really stand up as a genuine tactic in the marketing mix…?

It seems I’m not the only one considering the issue. Dave Harry wrote an excellent post a few days ago questioning the value of social media as a professional (and chargeable) service. He’s gathering feedback from some of the web’s most influential social marketing gurus to help understand measurement metrics used and the ROI of social media. Undoubtedly, their input will carry far more weight than mine, but I thought I’d chime in to the discussion nonetheless. After all, social media is the only medium I’ve utilised to drive my blog. So I think I can contribute a nice little case study.

So… let’s get down and dirty. While I’m not a web analytics guru, here’s what I consider important in measuring the value of the social media traffic I have generated:

• Engagement – How long are visitors spending on my web site? Are they going on to read other pages?
• Loyalty – Do the visitors return to my site after initially finding me via social media?
• Inbound links – Was the content considered valuable enough to draw links from other bloggers?
• Conversion – Do visitors subscribe to my blog? Not a perfect or typical measure of conversion as Dave points out (blogs aren’t structured with subscription as a primary action). But we have little else in terms of a transaction. So it will have to do.

Let’s have a look at the stats:

Engagement

Length of visit:

Page Views:

Hmmm…. it seems the social media folk are a fickle bunch. Wham, bam and thank you maam… online versions of the two minute man. Actually, most would be happy with two minutes. Three quarters of visitors don’t stay longer than a minute. Perhaps they need some of that nasal spray stuff…

But wait… I hear you ask. The page views are encouraging. Over 57% of visitors are going on to view a second or third page. Wrong! This is a strange StumbleUpon phenomenon I’ve never really been able to explain. It seems StumbleUpon users are particularly fond of the refresh button. A closer look at the navigational paths on a good traffic day reveals this trend. In the shot below I’ve analysed the traffic for one of the more popular posts ‘The importance of blogging frequency’.

Ho-hum… 39.91% of the 41.28% to ‘visit another page’ seem to have hit the refresh button. They actually haven’t gone anywhere. D’oh! I think it’s safe to say at this point that engagement isn’t a forte of my social media traffic.

This is hardly groundbreaking research. It’s fairly common knowledge that most social media consumers are drive-by readers. And I can hardly blame them. After all… that’s exactly the way I consume most social media aside from a handful of my favourite blogs. Pot meet kettle…

Loyalty

Number of times each unique visitor has viewed the blog:

Not good news here either I’m afraid. Almost 93% of visitors have failed to return. And three quarters of those stayed less than a minute. It’s a little sobering when you think of it like that…

Inbound Links

Ummm… do we have to discuss this…? Fine… it’s zero. Let’s never mention it again.

Conversion

At this point in time my humble little blog has 10 subscribers. Don’t snicker please… it is new after all ? You can laugh if this count is similar in July. My conversion rate looks something like this:

Unique visitors – 592
RSS Subscribers – 10
Conversion rate = 10 / 592 = 1.7%

Hmmm… are we on to something here…? A 1.7% conversion rate ain’t that bad right… particularly in the absence of a clear call-to-action. After all, most ecommerce sites convert at around 2-3%. Surely a little site optimisation could get me up to the standard conversion rate… That may well be true, but it all comes down to ROI.

I haven’t been tracking my hours, but I suspect I’ve invested well over 50 this year on the following tasks:

1. Setting up the WordPress platform
2. Organising a domain name and hosting
3. Writing and researching new articles
4. Reading other blogs and commenting on them
5. Contributing in Sphinn & StumbleUpon
6. Struggling through the various associated technical problems (and I mean really struggling!)

Now, I’m not a digital marketing consultant. So I don’t have an established hourly rate. But let’s just say for arguments sake that I charge $50 an hour (pretty damn cheap for an online marketer).

$50 x 50 hours = $2500
$2500 / 10 subscribers = $250 per acquisition

Ouch! I don’t know too many marketer’s who’d be happy with a cost per acquisition of $250. And if they did… they’d be out of business. Naturally, this equation will improve with the technical infrastructure now in place. I’d also like to think that participation in social media over time will bring economies of scale, whereby I work less for more traffic. But I’m a long way from that point…

So where does this leave social media?

By now it probably seems as if I’ve given up on social media. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reason is that I know it works in my niche. Social media delivers results (both traffic and authority) in the digital marketing industry if you are persistent enough to establish a real presence.

But…

That’s my personal decision. I’m not measuring ROI. All I’m investing is my own time… as valuable as it is. And I’m not in it for monetary gain.

Corporations are a different story. Social media participation is just a one more tactic in the overall marketing mix (albeit a tactic generating a lot of buzz). I tend to think my experiences are completely typical of anyone starting out with blogs and social media. How many marketeers will persist with it after those first 50 hours. Not many I would think… Why would they when they can set up a PPC or affiliate campaign that generates a similar conversion rate (if not better) and takes just a few hours to set up?

There’s also the question of how much traction social media can generate in industries with lower participation levels. We must remember that as digital marketers we are unique. Most people don’t Stumble and they don’t Digg… and they never will. How many people are going to vote for blue chip content addressing the latest developments in steel and iron ore? Not many… which is a shame because blue chip organisations are probably amongst the rare few with the budget to invest in social media.

In the end it will all comes down to reach. Can social media ever reach a saturation point when content voting and submission becomes a standard part of online behaviour for your average Joe? It’s only at this point that social media benefits will be transferable to a broad range of industries and truly become a genuine marketing tactic for the corporate world. I’m sceptical…

A final word

Aaron Wall wrote an interesting and provocative article on SEO Book this week comparing SEO with PPC. He chided most companies for focusing on short term tactics such as PPC at the expense of SEO, which delivers a true long term competitive advantage.

The same may be true for social media. Some corporations will undoubtedly make it work. Video in particular holds real potential. Those with the vision, dedication and customer focus have the potential to reap the long term benefits of traffic and authority. However, I suspect most will dabble, and write it off as a failure within months of inception…

For now I hold little hope for social media in the corporate marketing mix. But who knows what the future holds? After all, few would have predicted the rise and rise of corporate blogs at the turn of the millennium. Never say never…

With del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon & other forms of social media exploding in popularity, it was only a matter of time before the search engines joined the party. So it’s not surprising to hear Yahoo announce that del.icio.us results will soon be incorporated into their search results. But can social media really improve search engine accuracy…? Not just yet…

Social media is the online equivalent of Australian Idol. It is a popularity contest. Digg allows users to vote on their favourite articles on the web. StumbleUpon & del.icio.us allow users to vote on their favourite web sites. In both cases the article/site with the most votes reaps the rewards – aka massive exposure and traffic via their front page. Human participation is the key to social media. And it is the integration of human authority to the search engine algorithms that has a lot of people excited. Finally… a way to incorporate human feedback & behaviour into the search engine results.

Tech Crunch has a screen shot of how Yahoo intends to use the del.icio.us results. The benefit is fairly obvious. The search engine produces the results, and the del.icio.us data can be used to assess the ‘human credibility’ of each page (the more votes the better). The premise is good, but it’s not exactly a new one. In fact, it is essentially just PageRank rebranded. At a very basic level, the premise of PageRank was that each inbound link to a particular site was perceived as a vote of confidence. Indeed, links were the primitive form of social media and social voting.

The key issue at the moment is that the del.icio.us voting system is wide open to abuse. Unlike Digg and Stumble Upon it does not have a procedure to vote/bury spam. So while the integration of del.icio.us votes would initially provide an improvement to search results, it would not be long before black hat SEO’s begun the mass bookmark process (if they haven’t already…). Even if the number of del.icio.us votes did not directly impact the order of Yahoo’s rankings, there would still be a perceived benefit in accumulating the most votes in a particular industry. It wouldn’t be long before the del.icio.us data lost its credibility.

So while Yahoo’s initiative is a step in the right direction, it won’t solve the search engine accuracy issues overnight. Until a downward voting system is introduced for del.icio.us it will be open to abuse by black hat spammers (presuming people still care about optimising for Yahoo). Ebay may be the big winner out of all of this. As the owner of StumbleUpon, which maintains a more credible voting system, they may well own the Internet’s most valuable social data. Which means they may find themselves in the centre of a bidding war between Google and Yahoo… Ching Ching…$$