Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Will Google Kill Its Cash Cow by 2020?

Will search still be the driving force of digital media usage and revenues? Probably not.

Consider the driving forces of the internet over the past few decades:

1980s: Bulletin Board Services (BBS) and early internet service providers - generally message boards, text-based games, and a few other add-ons

1990s: AOL and the closed internet service provider communities, with Yahoo leading the directory-based browseable web

2000s: Google heralding the age of search, followed by Facebook popularizing the social web

2010s: Well, we're still in the 2000s mode. It hasn't fully played itself out yet, but search and social remain dominant, and mobility is rapidly changing how we engage with media, commerce, and each other.

So what will media be like in 2020? That's the premise of my latest post in Ad Age, Google's Fight to Kill Search by 2020: 

There's a quiet war brewing among technology companies – one that, if successful, will shift billions of dollars of media spending while upending the fundamentals that underpin how marketers reach consumers today. It's the war on search, a war whose most interesting battle will be the one Google is waging against itself...

There are several intersecting trends that may contribute to a future where the need to search is minimized and preempted. All of the trends center on the availability of data, which will in turn be processed, analyzed, and applied in ways to anticipate consumers' needs before those needs are expressed. The biggest contributor of data is consumers' mobility, and the precise location beacons will contribute to the precision of the predictive analytics.

Read the full piece at Ad Age and let me know what you think.

 

 

Your Google+ Strategy Calculator

Your Google+ Strategy Calculator
originally pubished in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

When brands are invited to participate in Google+, it's going to get weird. Marketers will face challenges they've never had to deal with before in social media. Without knowing specific details of what Google+ brand pages will look like, enough of the variables are known so that you can create a formula that works for you. Here's a primer.

Addition: The biggest change marketers will encounter is the addition of search engine optimization to their social media strategies. Yes, I know social media optimization has been around for years, but it's had a relatively minimal impact on community management so far. Just look at Facebook's one-pager on SEO; it's using best practices established a decade ago. That will change as Google incorporates users' +1 activity to further refine, reorder, and personalize search engine results pages. Marketers focused on SEO who never cared about community management will evaluate the opportunity that Google+ presents. This is a major shift, and it's quite possibly the most significant change to community management since the practice as we know it was founded in the past decade or so.

Multiplication: The challenges of managing communities on Google+ are bound to multiply. Is it a community with SEO benefits, or is it SEO developed through community engagement? What if it's both? Imagine if every status update from a brand will require both a community manager and an SEO manager working together to optimize each word. Like any dance, someone will have to lead.

Division: Get ready to divide and conquer. What will the division of labor look like? Some of it is clear up front, with SEO leads best suited for organizing the overall structure of the page, and community managers owning day-to-day posts and interactions, ideally with training and regular review from the SEO team. It won't always be clear, though, especially for some SEO-driven marketers that are laser focused on +1s and don't care about any of the other benefits of relationship building.

Subtraction: It's time to subtract silos from your community management. This is a classic case of addition by subtraction, as your social program should wind up stronger when SEO experts are involved. How many other silos can you subtract? Who else in your organization isn't yet benefiting from what you're doing on the community front?

Geometry: Marketers will have to understand Circles inside and out. The biggest question marketers will have is how well they can create Circles of consumers to target them specifically. Ideally, some Circles will be auto-generated, such as Circles of people by geography or age, since Google encourages users to create rich profile data.

Trigonometry: Trigonometry is the study of angles. Marketers, what will be your angle on Google+? What will make you stand out from every other brand page? What value will you provide? You'll need your own angle going into it, but you can also triangulate some aspects by plotting your positioning in conjunction with Google's offerings and what your fans respond to.

Calculus: I don't remember much about calculus, largely because once math started dealing with imaginary numbers, I found it very hard to pay attention. Aren't real numbers confusing enough? Marketers will become well acquainted with imaginary numbers when they start operating on Google+. What do all these +1s mean anyway? When top brands start getting added to the Circles of more than one million people, how will that help the overarching strategy? As a marketer, you should pressure Google and your agencies to figure out why this matters for you.

Chaos Theory: I can only predict so much. A safe bet is that when SEO starts driving social media strategy, brush up on chaos theory -- because anything can happen from here

Google Voice Voicemail Transcription Partially Useful, Unintentionally Hilarious

I recently gave Google Voice another shot. I was an early user that never used it much, partially because I didn't like my phone number much.

I checked it out again and paid $10 to switch my number to something more memorable. You can even search for number strings in your preferred area code, like any numbers with 1111 in it or some memorable sequence.

One of the benefits of Google Voice is voicemail transcription. I'm particularly bad about checking voicemail so I loved having this as an option. Here is the complete text of a voicemail I received on Friday:

Hi David, show look like early evening on Friday. Hope you guys are doing well. 
Wanted to catch up with you. Well, I'll try and I know, we're having tons getting, in reply to that 
and would love to try that dosomething with you guys so wanted to see what your schedules like 
the conclusion make that work, so give us a call. I'm going to make this my phone calls now 
and if you have a pretty wiped out. I think wemight just try to watch a movie later or something 
but but give me a try. And if you had left not getting. We directly and how that he says clear 
sense of times of might work of that and let me know, otherwisewe'll just talk to soon, okay. 
Take care bye bye.

As you can imagine, the person who left the message was older than an infant, and he's even a college professor. Some of the message sounds nothing at all like the transcription. I did at least get the gist of it, so it served some benefit. It's just not exactly a personal secretary yet.

Vote on Questions to Ask Google's Dylan Casey at TWTRCON

Today I'm interviewing Google Search Product Manager Dylan Casey (right) at TWTRCON, an event about the real-time Web. As a first, I'm sharing my questions in advance not just with Dylan, but with everyone. You don't just get to see them - you get to vote on them. Go here: http://bit.ly/twtrconDC

I can't promise I'll ask them in order of popularity, but if there are any clear winners, I'll definitely ask them.

Submit your own questions if you like and they'll be part of the mix; anyone can vote on those too if they're signed in.

Real Takes on Real-Time Search

Image by Evan Hamilton via Flickr

Okay, not the best blog post title, but it was a big day, being featured in both The Wall Street Journal and USA Today on the same topic: real-time search. For newcomers to the field, it's the very hot field where Google, Microsoft's Bing, and a range of startups are trying to best index all of the rapidly updated statuses across Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.

The WSJ's Jessica Vascellaro reported on real-time search in the context of a new Yahoo deal with One Riot and included my take at the end (note: subscription required to read the whole story):

David Berkowitz, senior director of emerging media and innovation at digital marketing agency 360i, said he believes the value of real-time search data for businesses is greater than the appeal of data to advertisers. He predicts that one of the biggest uses of "real-time search engines" that produce results based on what's popular on the Web right now, will be for queries related to breaking news. But reaching users searching for news is far less interesting to advertisers than reaching searchers who are looking to buy something, he said.

Jon Swartz in USA Today took a broader approach on the subject, in what was a front page story in their Money section. I also got to close out the article:

The new services are confident that the market can support them. Search "is a huge driver of online traffic, shopping, content discovery," says David Berkowitz, senior director of emerging media and innovation at digital-marketing agency 360i.

The topic is still fairly new as far as the media and public consciousness goes (even if technologists and academics have followed it for longer), and I had fun addressing it recently at an OMMA panel, so I'm sure I'll have more to say about it, and I definitely have a lot more to learn.

Go Deeper into the Real-Time Search Panel at OMMA Global

At MediaPost's OMMA Global conference, I have the pleasure of moderating an amazing panel focused on real-time search. Below you can find the panelists on Twitter, along with recommended reading to learn more about the panelists' perspectives on the subject.

Update: Read coverage of the panel in MediaPost.

Tom Daly, Group Manager, Strategy & Planning, The Coca-Cola Company - @travelingparent  

• Coca-Cola Page on Facebook

Rob Garner, Search Strategy Director, iCrossing - @robgarner

• Column: Real-Time Search is Much Bigger Than Twitter
• Column archives at MediaPost

Jonathan Mendez, Founder & CEO, RAMP Digital – @jonathanmendez

• Blog post: Misguided Notions: A Study of Value Creation in Real-Time Search
• Blog post: Google Will Own Real-Time Search by Indexing, Filtering, and Ranking Tweets Better Than Twitter

Tobias Peggs, General Manager, OneRiot - @tobiaspeggs

• White paper: The Inner Workings of a Real-Time Search Engine
• OneRiot.com

Stephanie Sarka, Strategic Advisor, Wowd - @wowd

• White paper: Real-Time Search: Discovering the Web in Real-Time
• Wowd Blog

Moderator: David Berkowitz, Senior Director of Emerging Media & Innovation, 360i - @dberkowitz

• Blogs: MarketersStudio.com and 360i's Digital Connections

Also, here are the slides that accompanied the panel (note: the presentation is updated on SlideShare but you need to click to view it there, as the old version keeps showing up here):

Real-Time Search Panel at OMMA Global 2009

View more presentations from David Berkowitz.

New Forecasts, Animated Maps on Google Trends

I just saw Google’s latest Facebook update that Google Insights for Search has some new features. They include keyword forecasting, shown in the first example, and a way to watch global search interest trend over time. The top example here is for “prom dress” while the bottom one is for “twitter.”

Update: the top graph doesn’t embed the forecast. You have to click through to see it. Very crafty, Google. Grr.

Free online screen recorder

A Couple Quick Thoughts on Facebook's FriendFeed Acquisition

I'll save writing a custom post on this as I'm on the road at an event at the moment (surprise), but between some train rides and cocktail hours I managed to share a few thoughts in Ad Age and BusinessWeek. 

In BusinessWeek, I basically make FriendFeed sound like search crack for marketers. I think the quote's accurate.

More effective search of current conversations and popular topics could lead to more profits for Facebook, which has taken criticism for focusing more on growth in the number of its users than in generating revenue. "Being able to get a taste of what consumers are doing on 50 different sites can be very powerful," says David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy for digital marketing agency 360i, of FriendFeed's search. By contrast, he says Facebook's search tools have not been as effective for marketers.

In Ad Age, I go into greater detail about what this means for marketers. Here's an excerpt, but the full post is much longer.

After a late 2008 growth spurt, FriendFeed's audience leveled off, according to Compete data, hitting 902,000 unique visitors in January 2009 and attracting 918,000 in July 2009. During the same span in 2009, Compete says Facebook added 54 million U.S. visitors. That growth has led a lot of marketers to ignore FriendFeed, and it's hard to blame them for fishing where the fish are.

Aggregating social identities
It's a shame, though, because FriendFeed is a valuable service, and it will only be more valuable as consumers participate with more social-media properties. On FriendFeed, users can aggregate updates from 58 services including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, SlideShare, Pandora and Amazon. Those users can follow each other across the range of those services to get all of their updates in one place.

Two other notes: 

1) I'm on Facebook at www.facebook.com/dberkowitz and FriendFeed at www.friendfeed.com/davidberkowitz

2) Read more about FriendFeed's value for marketers in 360i's Social Marketing Playbook (in the Arenas chapter)

Wave Riding over Bing

Google Wave Team celebrates - by niallkennedy via Flickr

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

In the future, my dad will be a blogger. He'll create wikis. He'll have his work translated into languages spoken across Europe, Asia, and South America. He'll accomplish it effortlessly with Google Wave. I watched the 80-minute developer preview of Wave, and it's going to make nearly everyone a social media creator.

Seth Godin made the point that "the real next Google" is Google, thanks to what it's doing with Wave. He contrasted that with Microsoft Bing, a search engine with a few features that Google can easily copy.

One of the problems with Bing is that it's anti-social. That's a dangerous proposition for a new digital brand. Microsoft says in its press release, "The explosive growth of online content has continued unabated, and Bing was developed as a tool to help people more easily navigate through the information overload." But that "explosive growth" is largely due to the proliferation of social media, while the tool is still largely standard search functionality.

The release further notes that Bing, the "Decision Engine," is "providing customers with a first step in moving beyond search to help make faster, more informed decisions." First of all, I've spent some time with Bing, and while it offers many new ways to refine searches, it doesn't move beyond search in the slightest. On another note, one obvious way to help consumers make informed decisions would be to build in elements that tap their social networks and user-generated content. One start-up, Hunch, aims to do exactly that, by combining user contributions and personalization to help people make smarter decisions. Whether or not Hunch succeeds, it's a real step beyond search.

Bing is anti-social to the point that it lets you watch Hulu videos within the search results (it feels more like a search portal than a decision engine), but it doesn't let you share the clips. Contrast this with Google Wave, which is all social.

That's the simplest way to understand it: Wave makes everything social. It incorporates some elements of other social applications -- Gmail, Google Talk, Blogger, collaborative functions of Google Docs -- and blends them together to create live and time-shifted social experiences.

The ultimate power of Wave won't be known for a while. Google is opening up the service for developers to build on, so much of the functionality will develop over time, making it comparable to Twitter. Still, there are some general principles of Wave that should hold true and improve. Here are a dozen highlights:

• Everything created in this new service is a Wave.
• A Wave can be private, much like an email string or an instant message conversation, or it can be public, like a blog entry or wiki.
• Waves can be edited in real time, so that everyone who can access the Wave can see the updates appear character by character.
• Any kind of portable content (including some forms that may not have been easily portable previously) can be incorporated into Waves, including photos, videos, and maps.
• All such forms of content can benefit from Waves' collaborative capabilities, such as having multiple people upload photos to a communal album and collectively provide captions.
• Changes to Waves can be played back so it's easy to see the evolution of a Wave over time.
• Games become social, and even competitive.
• Mobile integration is built in, so Waves can be edited from anywhere.
• Waves can instantly translate among dozens of languages on the fly, so that collaborators who natively speak Chinese and Hebrew, for example, can effortlessly communicate with each other.
• Contextual spell-checking happens instantly, with the example shown of "Icland is an icland" turning into "Iceland is an island." This feature isn't that social, but it makes contributors look more intelligent when they share the Waves.
• Comments turn into conversations. Many blog tools do this already, but this applies to every form of commenting, from those made during document edits to comments on photos.
• Waves can integrate with other social services such as Twitter and Orkut, plus many more to come.

Not all of this might make sense to someone like my dad, but I couldn't have explained Gmail to him either in terms of how it groups together email conversations and uses labels instead of folders. I'm pretty confident, however, that once he starts using Wave, he'll wind up creating photo blogs while having seamless conversations with relatives in France, Israel, and Brazil.

Wave will redefine the "lean-forward" experience of the Web. When you need a break and want to lean back, though, you can watch those Hulu videos on Bing.

Microsoft Bing: The World's First Search Portal

Image via CrunchBase

I just shared a post on Ad Age's DigitalNext blog showing how Microsoft's new search engine Bing is really a search portal, even if it calls itself a decision engine:

I've spent the last few days trying out a live preview of Bing, and it's much better categorized as a "search portal." The idea of a search engine is to get you where you want to go fast, based on the queries you enter. The idea of a portal is to give you all the content you need so you don't have to go anywhere else. Bing is a hybrid, a search portal that lets you keep searching and refining your query without ever leaving the site until you absolutely have to.

A couple examples are included:

• Search for "30 Rock" on Bing and the first natural link is for NBC.com, but the link below for "videos of 30 rock" brings up the Bing video guide. Almost all listings on the first page come from Hulu and clicking one lets you watch the Hulu episode right on Bing. You can then further refine the search for factors like content length and resolution.
• Search Bing for "asthma" and the first natural result offers a brief description from the Mayo Clinic, with a link to "full article and more." Click that, and the full article appears on Bing. Click to enlarge the first image beside the lengthy article, and you're still on Bing.

Read the post for the whole thing, including other examples, and let me know what you think.

You can also read and watch more Bing coverage on the blog here:

• Bing's image and video search
• My first Bing webcast
• Roundup of comments to the press
• The Bing Bang - first thoughts on the engine