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.

One of the most discussed and possibly hyped topics of 2007 was the continued rise of social networking sites, such as Facebook. However, recent news coverage of this sector now seems to be declaring that the popularity of social networking may be on the decline.

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With the popularity of social networking websites – where people collaborate and exchange information online – it was only a matter of time before this power of human interaction is harnessed within search engines. This month has seen the launch of the alpha test version of the new Wikia Search tool, as well as reports that Yahoo! is testing the integration of del.icio.us bookmarking tags within their search listings.

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This time last year we made 5 predictions for 2007 and so here’s a quick summary of our list and what actually happened (you can read the originals in more detail in our January 2007 Newsletter):

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Looking for another channel to market your company online? You might want to consider using one of the many new community sites or "social media networks", like Facebook, to target potential customers.

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