Following on from our May 2011 newsletter where we reported on Google’s move into social networking with the “+1″ button, they have now launched a full social networking service called Google+. At the moment this remains in a beta version and is gradually being rolled out, but initial estimates are indicating a rapid take-up of the service.

It appears that Google+ is not shaping up to be a flop, like “Buzz” and “Wave” – the company’s previous forays into social/shared content. At least one independent study indicates that Google+ is growing at rates that rival those seen by Facebook. The author of this study, Paul Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com, suggests that by mid-July, there could be as many as 20 million users signed up to Google+.

Allen based his work by counting surnames on Google+ and then comparing that count to Census Bureau data. If his figures are correct, then more than one million new people per day have signed up to Google+ since its launch on June 28th. According to The New York Times, in 2009 Facebook was gaining nearly a million new users a day. However, Google has not announced officially how many users are on Google+ at the moment.

Allen’s data does involve some assumptions, for example, that there were 2.12 non-US users for every American on Google+, so cannot be deemed as entirely accurate (and neither does he claim it to be). But he believes that his figures are in the approximate vicinity and this is sufficient to portray such amazing growth.

The reason for this could be due to the recent publicity for Google+ in the technical press which has prompted many sign-ups. Whether or not these users are actually active or will continue to use the new service is a key question and one that will determine whether Google+ will really challenge Facebook or head the same way as Buzz and Wave.

If you would like to know more about Google+, or how social media marketing can enhance the success of your business, contact us now for details.

With social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter becoming ever more popular, as well as a wide variety of other social interaction websites, so the huge amount of traffic that they generate has attracted the usual attention of virus writers and cyber criminals who want to target unsuspecting users. Scams on these types of sites are becoming more prevalent, so here 5 of the most common ones, as ranked by Symantec.

Chain Letters
These have been around since pre-computer days and the online version is very similar, with messages asking the receiver to pass it onto their contacts for some kind of reward. In the social media world these can now take the form of ‘re-tweeting’ on Twitter. The likelihood is, however, that both the reason for ‘retweeting’ the message and the reward for doing so would be fake, so the usual advice is to break the chain by simply ignoring it! The reasons scammers perpetrate such chain letters is usually for financial gain, or to get a list of naïve ‘friends’ to sell to, or target in the future.

Requests for Cash
Humans are sociable by nature and generally like to help others in need, especially friends. Many scammers take advantage of this generosity of nature by sending requests to ‘friends’ on social networks for financial solutions to serious problems. For example, a request from a real friend, or social networking acquaintance could be: ‘I’ve lost my wallet on holiday and need some cash to get home.’

Before responding to such a request, you should think how well you know this acquaintance, or whether the request is actually coming from a real friend. Even though it could come from his email address or profile, his computer may have been hi-jacked with malware that is sending it out to everyone in his contact list. The best course of action is to call your friend or acquaintance to ensure that it’s genuine. If not, then virus scan your computer to ensure that it hasn’t been affected as well.

Hidden Charges in Quizzes
There are many add-on programs within social network sites that encourage you to take part in a quiz. Some of your genuine friends may have participated and then sent you a link to it. Wanting to beat their score, or to see how you perform in comparison, you too participate in answering some questions that require you to input your mobile phone number to enter, so you can be contacted in case you win.

You then discover on your monthly bill that the ‘fun, free service’ that you un-wittingly subscribed to has extortionate sign-up and on-going fees. Some of these premium call or text services thrive on social sites and can be extremely difficult to un-subscribe from. So, the best course of action is to never give out your phone number unless you know the service or person that requests it very well.

‘Phishing’ Scams
These widespread scams have been very successful for criminals and involve fake social (and other) sites that look identical to the original ones. You receive a message on a social site, or by email, that provides an irresistible offer if you click on the link provided. You’re then taken to a duplicate site where you enter your log-in details and possibly also bank account or credit card details. The cyber criminal now has your password, sensitive financial details and full control over your account.

The recommended practice in this case is to ensure that your anti-virus protection software has anti-phishing defences that will automatically recognise these requests from its regularly updated database and instantly delete them. A secondary precaution, as some of these types of messages can sometimes fall through the safety net, is to never enter your details into a site that you’ve arrived at through a link in a message. Always do a secondary search for that site and go to it directly, as search engines are good at picking up and removing fake versions of sites.

Hidden Website Addresses
Social networking sites – especially Twitter – have shortened website addresses (or URLs) posted all over them. These hide the full location, so you don’t know exactly to where you’ll be directed if you click on them. Cyber criminals take advantage of these hidden URLs by landing you on a phishing site, or one that installs malware on your computer. The best defence against these is to have up-to-date anti-virus software installed which will detect these kinds of sites.

There are of course numerous other scams that might be doing the rounds, but all of the above have proven to be very effective, as the cyber criminals have progressed from creating viruses that might have been put onto your computer through ‘backdoors’, to implementing more current techniques that act maliciously online through attracting the social networking sites’ huge volumes of traffic. You therefore need to be alert to these practices and make sure that your anti-virus software is effective and up to date.

If you’d like to know more about these types of social networking scams and how they could adversely affect your business, please contact us now.

At the end of March, Google launched their “+1″ button, which enables people to recommend content on the web. Widely compared to Facebook’s “Like” button, this is seen as another attempt by Google to enter the social networking space, after the poor response to Buzz last year.

The Google +1 service (pronounced “Plus One”) is gradually being rolled out from its beta development stage and is mainly available to users in the US at the moment. It’s designed for people who are logged in to their Google account to recommend web pages and other content to their social networks and Google hopes that this will become a widely accepted and used system.

Searchers will see the +1 button against all search results in time – both organic and from Google AdWords – and these will be greyed out. Once a user clicks the button it will appear as a coloured icon and the recommendation will be logged against the user’s Google profile, so that they will have a record of the recommendation and their network of friends will also see these details. The user will also see those sites that their friends have recommended as being tagged with the coloured +1 button.

In addition to the +1 button showing up in the search results, Google will be also be making a +1 button available for web users to recommend something without leaving a website. This is part of Google’s goal of providing quality search content on the web and thus will allow good quality content that is shared to positively impact its SEO rankings. This is expected to have a significant effect upon SEO, as content that has many +1 “stamps of approval” will probably rank better in the search results, at least as one of the signals used by the search engine.

There has been much talk about how the elements of social networking will be used to contribute to search results, in the same way that links do at the moment. However, after the initial “buzz” around the launch of +1, Google has to get this system accepted and used by people and +1′s will clearly face an uphill struggle to compete with “Likes” from the Facebook system.

If you’d like to know more about the Google +1 button and what impact this may have on search results in the future, contact us now.

We have made some more predictions for the main trends we expect to see this year in terms of web search and online marketing. As usual, the online market continues to develop at a fast rate and new websites or services can change the landscape in a short space of time, but these are our expectations for 2011:

1) Rising CPCs encourage more creativity: the gradually increasing Cost-per-Click (CPC) within PPC advertising campaigns – notably on Google – means that companies have to become more creative to get the best results from their advertising spend. This means getting more targeted with the use of search terms and also increasing the conversion rate from the visitors to the site. With the former, Google already provides a good collection of tools to improve the targeting of an AdWords campaign and to test the best approaches, plus new data segmentation and keyword tools introduced in 2010 should provide more focus. When it comes to conversions, the use of website analytics and conversion testing tools can help companies improve their conversion rates and so maintain the cost-effectiveness of their search engine marketing activity, despite more competitors entering the field.

2) Mobile marketing becomes more prominent: we’ve predicted this before several times and it still hasn’t really happened yet, so will 2011 be the changing point? The signs are certainly there, the technology is in place and the use of Internet-capable mobile phones is rapidly growing. It seems to be more of the mindset of advertisers to harness this new area, particularly for local advertisers, yet with the combination of social media tools (see below) and the integration of PPC advertising on the mobile platform, the opportunities are there. It’s now more a question of the creativity of using mobile marketing and, in some cases, adapting websites to be more accessible on mobile phones, which will herald the rapid growth of this sector, which is forecast by some to grow at a faster rate than the initial take-up of web usage.

3) Location marketing will be a big new opportunity: in the same way that local search marketing has developed over the past few years, companies that are targeting a local catchment area now need to take advantage of location tools – that are accessed through mobile phones and via social networking sites – to attract new business. The initial use of sites like Foursquare started to gain some traction, but the launch of Facebook Places at the end of 2010 is likely to really shake up the market for local businesses. As users of these social networking services identify their location to friends, companies can now use this geo-targeting to provide offers and rewards in a flexible and targeted way that hasn’t been possible before.

4) The line between social media and search becomes blurred: as the previous 2 predictions have shown, we are expecting big changes for this year to come from mobile marketing and social media tools. Social media – now dominated by Facebook – is undoubtedly changing the way people use the web and therefore it provides new opportunities for advertisers, although few have yet to find a solution that can be as cost-effective as search marketing. However, social networking tools are clearly going to develop, by introducing new tools and services to users and advertisers, and therefore can’t be ignored. Microsoft’s Bing search results are now integrated within Facebook, while Google is looking at ways to get more involved in the social networking sector and is therefore likely to become a bigger player, either by innovation or acquisition. Google has also confirmed that social media ‘signals’ are now being used to some extent within search results, so that companies need to consider how to use search and social together, in the most cost-effective way.

5) Video marketing and advertising gains market share: although still a relatively small share of the online advertising sector, video advertising is growing at a rapid pace and provides many new opportunities for advertisers to reach their market in different ways – either through the use of the medium of their websites, or through viral marketing, or by advertising to the online video audience. Google has provided new advertising opportunities and tools through YouTube so that companies can target this massive user base, although of course targeting of the right audience remains essential. Video can also be used as an information or marketing tool on a website, and although different techniques have been tested over the past few years, companies need to find the best use of this medium to suit their market and users.

Recent articles from The Marketing Workbench

The Marketing Workbench is our regular web marketing blog covering news and comment on Internet marketing events and trends. If you want to keep track of current stories you can visit this section of our website on a regular basis, or set up an RSS feed. These are just some of the items posted over the past month:

• Online ad value now exceeds newspapers
• Twitter raises $200m funding
• New enhancements in Google AdWords
• Automated Rules for Google AdWords
• Skipping Ads on YouTube

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this month’s issue and found some useful information for your business. Please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance. Also, if there are any issues you would like to see in future editions of this newsletter, please submit your suggestions to us.



What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is the new trend for online businesses and a new angle on the role of word-of-mouth marketing. By harnessing the growing popularity and usage of social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, social media marketing can be used to develop networks and business leads through the sharing of information and contacts. However, it’s also a difficult medium to make work effectively, since social media sites are used differently to other types of website – such as search engines or online shopping sites – so that companies need to commit time and have a clearly planned strategy in place for using these tools.

Which are the most popular Social Media sites?

Social media websites are usually defined by their ability for interaction, so that users can add comments and reviews, or interact in the form of an online community. The original social media sites were discussion forums and community sites, and these were then followed by blogs for online content publication and discussion. Social bookmarking sites (such as Delicious) and news publication sites (such as Digg) have enjoyed periods of popularity, but the enormous growth in the use of social networking sites in the last few years has been focused around Facebook, Twitter and, for the business community, LinkedIn.

What are the advantages of Social Media for businesses?

The best strategy for social media is to build an audience of people that are receptive to purchasing your products and services – locally and globally – in a quick and highly effective way. By communicating with this audience it can ensure that your business remains ‘front of mind’ and creates a channel for new business leads. Social media also facilitates rapid feedback for businesses to improve their products and services and some companies are using this as listening platforms to monitor the conversations about their brands. They realise that a personal touch brings benefits, so that customer service and interaction with businesses is becoming social.

And the disadvantages?

Social media marketing can be time-consuming and it can sometimes be hard to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the effort that needs to be put into it. Any social media marketing campaign requires a clear strategy from the outset, an allocated resource to manage it, and a policy for every eventuality. There are numerous stories of large companies that have mishandled the social media platform and created a PR disaster, but there are also many companies that are now using this medium extremely effectively as a communication and marketing channel. Whatever approach your business takes, social media can’t be ignored and the importance of monitoring and managing your online reputation is now an essential element of an overall marketing approach.

What are the core elements of a social media marketing strategy?

As noted above, the importance of having a clear strategy from the outset can’t be over-emphasised – who is your target market, what do you want to achieve, and how are you going to do it. Building a network is the first stage, and a relevant community is more important than a high number of followers for the sake of it. You need to develop an integrated marketing approach to attract followers and to sustain these with relevant content – such as news, advice, product updates or offers. Participating in social media is also a two-way conversation and so you need to monitor comments and discussions and to respond appropriately. It’s also important to know the different tools available, how people use them, and what are the various options available to get the most from your marketing efforts.

How can Facebook be used effectively?

Facebook helps businesses to develop relationships with their customers and raise the visibility of their company by helping it to connect and grow. It’s more effective for building quality relationships with potential customers rather than generating immediate sales and this can be done by setting up a business page and/or by creating groups. Good, or interesting, news travels fast, so it can be an extremely effective medium for spreading the word and improving the ‘buzz’ about a business if you can get the “word-of-mouth” process to work. Facebook advertising is also available which can be used to target users by location and interests, and is charged on a Cost-Per-Click or Cost-Per-Thousand basis.
If you’d like to know more about Facebook marketing, please contact us for our free factsheet.

What opportunities are there with LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is designed to build up a business network for interaction and communication. It’s very useful for recruiting, business networking, development and research, although LinkedIn also offers several paid advertising options for organisations to target specific groups of users. You can exchange information, ideas and opportunities with those in complementary industries and stay informed about your contacts and industry, find the people you need and control your professional identity online. LinkedIn can deliver tremendous reach to business professionals for a relatively small investment and it has changed the traditional membership directory from a standard “phone list” to a much more personalised and interactive approach.
If you’d like to know more about LinkedIn marketing, please contact us for our free factsheet.

Is Twitter an effective marketing tool?

Twitter is a micro-blogging site which is now used extensively for business and leisure. Its primary use in business is to exchange information in real time, rather than market directly, so that companies can listen to their audience, know what they’re saying about the business and, in return, provide information and updates as a customer service. Twitter breaks news faster than other sources and is a rapid way to spread news about a company, product or service through word of mouth. This means it can be used to create a local or global network of potentially loyal followers as a communication channel, which can in turn reflect well on the business if handled correctly.
If you’d like to know more about Twitter marketing, please contact us for our free factsheet.

How measurable is social media marketing?

Measuring the effect of your online activities on sales (both online and offline) is vital, particularly if there are ways that you can then increase your conversion rates. SMM is beginning to take an increasingly larger slice of a business’s marketing budget, so measuring and tracking the ROI (return-on-investment) should play a big part in a social media marketing campaign. This can sometimes appear difficult and may require a longer term view, but you can also track referral activity within your website analytics. Facebook offers some analytics data for active users and Twitter has recently launched a version of analytics as they begin to focus on the commercial development of the service. In the future, the winning social media platform will be the ones with the best analytics tools so that companies can effectively measure the outcomes being generated.

Where is SMM heading?

Usage of Facebook and Twitter, in particular, continue to grow at a rapid rate. Both services are trying to develop income streams without impacting their core user base, who largely resent advertising and overtly commercial activities. The rate at which the mobile Internet is growing is also truly staggering, easily overtaking the speed of growth of all preceding media. Usage of Facebook and Twitter via mobile phones has grown by triple digits in the past year and mobile advertising is becoming a major source of revenue and big business for social media platforms. Location-based services are also developing rapidly, so that targeting a well-planned social media marketing strategy towards this explosion of mobile social network engagement – particularly for locally targeted companies – is critical to the success of a forward-thinking business.

If you’d like any further information about Social Media Marketing and how the Web Marketing Workshop can help to improve your business’s online marketing, please contact us now.

As the popular “micro-blogging” service Twitter continues to grow its user base at a rapid rate, the main search engines have now recognised the need to provide “real time” search results from this service. During October both Bing and Google announced new ways of providing their users with access to the information being posted on Twitter.

On October 21st Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, announced that it had made a deal with Twitter to include their “Tweets” in its search results and released its “Bing Twitter” search engine. That same day, Google announced that its inclusion of the real time messages into its index would be coming out soon, although there was a feeling that this announcement was rushed out as plans for Google’s own “Twitter search engine” or some form of more general real time search engine were less specific.

Microsoft’s version of Bing Twitter is only currently available when the searchable locale is set to the US, but undoubtedly more international versions will be available soon. There is also a slight delay in displaying the “Tweets”, which are 2 minutes old on Bing, when compared to Twitter’s own search facility that displays them within 30 seconds. This, according to Microsoft, is due to “trying to remove duplicates, filter out adult content and do some other processing”, the speed of which it hopes to improve shortly, as the Beta version has only just begun to run live.

This acknowledgement by the two prominent search engine companies of the importance of this more up-to-date socially-based information being made available to users will provide a great leap forward in the mainstream awareness and demand for fresh searchable networking information on the Internet. Although Microsoft and Google are both coming slightly late to real-time Twitter search – as there are already companies such as OneRiot, Crowdeye and Collecta that provide feeds from Twitter, as well as a Firefox plugin that displays Twitter results above Google’s main results – it is a notable move and one that may add more functionality to a search of this type of information.

Also at the end of October, Google announced that “Google Social Search” would be coming soon. This service was in development before the Twitter deal was announced and is unrelated, as social search provides ‘trusted’ search results, which is only applicable to users who are logged in via their Google account. When a user searches, Google will identify the people you trust, then ensures that you see relevant content from them showing up in your search results, such as reviews or other comments.

Back at Bing, their “Social Search Team” have also indicated that there will be a Bing powered Facebook search engine soon also, which is likely to be incorporated with the Twitter one, into an all-encompassing social-search engine. It seems that both of these search engines are now competing to trump each other with new services and announcements, which can only be a good thing for the web user!

To find out more about the new Twitter Search and Social Search tools from Google and Bing – and what they could mean for your business – please contact us now.

During April, the popular micro-blogging service Twitter announced a new advertising model that they hope will start earning some significant revenue for the company. Called Promoted Tweets, the ads will appear at the top of results for searches users conduct on Twitter. Eventually, they may appear in the stream of posts users see when they log into the site.

Twitter is gradually rolling out this advertising to users and there are 10 initial advertisers taking part, including Starbucks, Virgin America and Best Buy. The company will start by charging marketers per thousand impressions of their ads. Over time, it plans to move to a more complex model, charging based on how users interact with the messages.

Advertisers and users have been waiting for some time for Twitter to settle on a formula for ads. While the company has tens of millions of users and has raised hoards of venture capital, most recently at a $1 billion valuation, it has only recently begun to earn revenue from providing its ‘Tweets’ to larger Internet companies like Google and Microsoft.

For now, Twitter’s ad-matching and pricing formula is a work in progress, but could soon appeal to the millions of businesses who have created accounts on the service to share deals and other corporate updates. Instead of getting users to follow their messages, they will now be able to push their message to users who search any keyword they buy.

What impact this advertising will have on Twitter’s millions of users will have to be seen, however. Twitter’s Chief Executive, Evan Williams and co-founder Biz Stone have been publicly lukewarm about advertising, suggesting it could irritate users. They emphasised that they were exploring a range of monetisation models, including enhanced services for businesses. Advertising executives have been sceptical that Twitter could build a formula that would appeal to advertisers more than Google’s search ads or other display or banner ads.

If you’d like to know how Promoted Tweets could help the marketing of your business, please contact us for more details.

In February Google announced a new service that aims to compete in the social networking space, to take on the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Google “Buzz” has been initially launched for Gmail users or through a mobile phone application and aims to provide another communication method within social networks.

If you are a Gmail user then you will have seen a new option appear in your account, allowing you to share information with other contacts, including photos, videos and links, or you can follow the posts added by your chosen contacts. On mobile phones, Google “Buzz” adds the component of location to the information being shared, so that posts tagged with geographical information have an extra dimension of context.

There is an option to share information either publicly or privately, although when “Buzz” was first launched at the start if the month, the default option was set to publicly. This raised some serious privacy issues because if you didn’t edit any of the default settings after you created your profile in “Buzz”, someone could visit your profile and see the people you email and chat with most (provided you didn’t edit this list during profile creation).

This enabled Google to present users with recommended comments or links from other people that are deemed to be relevant, but without clearly indicating they will be exposing that they might be following people they don’t want the world to know they’re following. For example, a couple of unwanted scenarios would be if a wife discovers that her husband emails and chats with an old girlfriend a lot, or a boss discovers a subordinate emails with executives at a competitor.

Blog posts and articles were quick to criticise the way Google has set “Buzz” up and the company was quick to amend the settings to address these concerns. The importance of making shared information always an “opt-in” rather than “opt-out” setting, should really be understood by web services providers by now, especially after valuable lessons have been learnt by services such as Facebook, and the backlash it faced from changes to privacy settings. It seems that Google initially ignored these guidelines to get “Buzz” into the market and to become an active social network as soon as possible.

Google has since gone through several revisions of the “Buzz” settings and now has replaced the opt-out feature and auto-following, with an opt-in feature and auto-suggesting. In reality Google probably rushed this product out too quickly and hadn’t considered the serious privacy concerns that were raised. The impact of the publicity and subsequent changes has affected Google’s attempt to compete in the social networking space within the first few weeks and the ongoing impact may well stymie any serious usage of the “Buzz” tool. Many people also question why they need another new service when they are already using Facebook, Twitter and other accounts.

However, if you have a Gmail account and you’d like more information about “Buzz” or how other social networking tools can help to market you business, please contact us.

Google recently announced that they have added increased functionality to their Maps service, in the form of Place Pages. These pages now supplement the location details about a place with information on businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighbourhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world.

According to Google, the new Place Pages “allows a viewer to now see all the information about one place in one place”. Users can access a Place Page by clicking on “more info” in the Google Maps search results, or by clicking “more info” in the mini-bubble that appears over the map image. This enables you to get much more information about a place, including photos, videos, a StreetView preview, nearby transit stops, reviews and related websites. The information is aggregated information from places such as Citysearch, as well as other local review sources and should be a great tool for searchers, as well as local businesses to promote their services.

This new layout also benefits business listings, with more information being provided about the location and company, including details provided by the business owner, images and reviews from customers. There is a wider and longer new layout to the Maps results and major prominence is now being given to a link titled “edit this place,” which draws a new level of attention to the fact that Google views Maps as an editable, Wiki-like entity. Like Wikipedia though, this may at some time in the future raise doubts as to the reliability of some of the data within Place Pages – particularly the reviews.

The new pages are useful if you’re searching for more than just an address, and they make Google Map searches more like browsing a travel guide using than a search tool. However, they impact your ability to quickly and easily compare the search results, because Google Maps has changed the behaviour of the “more info” links in search results, resulting in a more detailed view of individual listings, rather than numerous ones for the one location that can allow comparisons and selections to be made.

The new behaviour works well for destinations, but not so well if you’re trying to compare business listing results, since you need to keep hitting the back button to get back to the list of results. While Place Pages are quite useful for more in-depth detail and personalised reviews, losing the old version of the “more info” link was a bad decision and hopefully one Google will correct in the future.

Contact us if you’d like more information about Google Maps and how to add or update your business listing through Google’s Local Business Center.

Many of the trends likely to have an impact in 2009 have already started, but what are our predictions for some of the key developments this coming year?

1) The economic slowdown focuses attention online: there is little doubt that the economic impact of the ‘credit crunch’ in 2008 will have a significant impact on business in 2009, particularly in the US and Europe. Progressive companies will still need to maintain and grow their business in the face of any downturn and therefore even if marketing spend is cut back, the focus on online marketing will be greater, due to the measurability and proven cost-effectiveness of this form of advertising for many businesses. Search advertising will still see an overall growth in spend and market share of online advertising and despite some companies withdrawing from this sector, many others will put more spend into this targeted advertising to support their business.

2) Analytics becomes more mainstream: partly because of the widespread uptake of Google’s free Analytics tool and partly because of the greater need for advertising spend to be effective in 2009, the use of website statistics or analytics is expected to become more common, even for small companies. However, the interpretation of the data and the way that understanding can be used will still be the most important aspect of this trend, but companies can now access much better data on their online activities which in turn can help to improve their website and marketing strategy to get the most from their online spend.

3) Yahoo won’t survive in its current form: it seems inevitable that Yahoo’s ongoing saga that was the source of much news coverage in 2008 will come to some sort of conclusion in 2009. Whether this is with Microsoft eventually coming back on the scene and buying Yahoo’s search business, or some other form of takeover by another leading online brand, it’s likely that Yahoo won’t be able to survive the next 12 months in their current form, despite – or maybe because of – the change in their CEO. It would be a shame for Yahoo to lose more search market share, as Google needs a stronger competitor, but with the economic problems in the US, it’s hard to see Yahoo surviving much longer as a key player and we can expect more developments here sooner rather than later.

4) Video becomes the new marketing tool: as mentioned above, with the growth and impact of ‘universal’ search, video is now playing a more visible role within search and in 2009 this is likely to see a bigger impact in the business sector. Companies need to think about ways they can effectively use video to drive traffic and new business to their website, as it is becoming a more widespread medium and one that can play a bigger role within search and advertising channels. The ‘optimisation’ of video will be as important as the production if the effort of creating videos is to reap the rewards expected, particularly against the massive growth of user generated video content on sites like YouTube, but the creative use and marketing of videos will become more mainstream this year.

5) Reputation management becomes a core service: we’ve covered this issue before, but with the increasing growth and focus on user-generated content sites – such as review sites, blogs and comments on social networks – the need for companies to monitor what is being said about their business and brands, and to respond effectively to that content, will become a bigger requirement in 2009 as more businesses realise the potential dangers as well as the advantages of this trend. Online reputation management will therefore become a service in much demand from PR companies and search engine marketing firms, as web content is monitored and responded to in a more effective manner.