Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

A couple of days ago Google launched their much anticipated social media / wiki search initiative: SearchWiki. SearchWiki allows logged-in Google users to customize their search results by promoting, commenting, deleting or even adding specific SERP results. These new features are nothing ground breaking, social media services like Digg have been allowing interaction with SERP’s for years and Wikia Search has been doing the same thing for awhile now. However, when it comes to Google anything they do becomes a game changer based on the pure volume of people who use the service and the amount of companies that rely on the organic traffic it generates.

Here is a screen shot of SearchWiki at work with one of my affiliate websites. As you can see next to the title there is an up and down arrow. By “promoting” my site for the search term “college football jerseys” my site went from the 11th spot to #1 in my search results. At the bottom of the listing there is the comment option which allows you to make whatever comment about that specific search result you want - this comment is public, meaning anyone can see what I wrote about the search result.

Here is a screen shot of how to add a site to your SERP. The below option shows up in the footer and allows you to add a specific URL that will show up the next time you search for that specific keyword. If the URL you add is in the Google search index you will see it show up like a normal listing, however if the URL is not indexed you will see just the URL. This raises the question whether or not adding a URL that isn’t indexed would expedite the URL being crawled and added to the index quicker then with other methods.

Obviously everyone within the search business, especially those involved in SEO, are keeping a close eye on SearchWiki. Google is making it very clear that the changes users make to their SERP are seen only by them and does not affect the overall public ranking of a website. However, Google can do whatever they want and it is conceivable that they add how many people promote / remove a website to the overall ranking algorithm - they could even take into account the publicly available comments based on things like keywords. For SEO’s anything and everything has to be planned for.

The real and immediate impact SearchWiki will have is for reputation management, product reviews and customer feedback. SearchWiki will allow customers, fans, clients and anyone else who is logged-in to leave their opinion - good or bad - about a product, company, offering or person. Screw over some people? You better be prepared for anyone who searches for you seeing those negative comments. If anything this shows the increased importance of companies having a comprehensive online communication and customer interaction strategy in place.

Google seems to be working out some of the bugs with program as SearchWiki sometimes goes away for me. I expect to see fluctuations in the service for some time as this is a massive undertaking on the both the technical and strategic side.

For additional information check out the offical Google SearchWiki video:

Google announced on their AdWords blog that they are testing an updated web interface for AdWords. The changes being made are not going to affect how ads run, bidding, ranking, quality score or any other AdWords elements. Seems as though Google is looking to make some superficial interface changes - I am guessing along the lines of the recent changes made to the Google Analytics UI.

From the AdWords blog:

“We’re testing changes to the ways that AdWords advertisers see and manage the data in their accounts. These changes should make it easier to tackle common tasks, like navigating between campaigns and editing keywords across several ad groups. We hope the updates will give advertisers clearer insights into their ad campaigns and simpler ways to act on those insights.”

No information was available on when any changes would be made available to every AdWords user.

The monetization of traffic goliath YouTube has been a hot topic ever since Google bought the online video destination a few years back. This week YouTube made two big announcements in regards to new revenue streams that not only make business sense but more importantly doesn’t impact the user-experience.

On Wednesday YouTube announced YouTube Sponsored Videos, basically the same sponsored links strategy tied to Google web search but specific to YouTube content. “Sponsored Videos is a self-serve advertising platform that will allow you to promote your video to the audience you are interested in reaching in an easy, effective, democratic, and affordable way. Then, when people use YouTube to search for videos, YouTube will display the most relevant, compelling videos alongside the search results. These videos are clearly labeled as “sponsored videos” and are priced on a cost-per-click basis.”

Here is the offical video explaining how Sponsored Videos works:



Yesterday YouTube also announced that they will be serving overlay ads in their embedded partner videos. This obviously wont have the same impact as YouTube Sponsored Videos but is a strategy that makes sense regardless of how much revenue it adds to the bottom line. Up until this announcement was made YouTube only ran overlay ads against partner videos running on YouTube, allowing the monetization of partner videos no matter where the video is being played is a win-win for both YouTube and the content producer.

With the holiday season fast approaching and the state of the economy in doubt consumers are flocking to coupon and discount sites looking to save money wherever they can. Yahoo is looking to help consumers find the latest and greatest deals with the launch of their latest shopping destination called Yahoo Deals.

Yahoo Deals, which is part of the Yahoo Shopping platform, offers coupons, notices of store wide sales, digital circulars and daily deals. Here is a run down of what a shopper will find on Yahoo Deals:

• Handpicked daily deals from partners like Woot!, Amazon and BradsDeals.
• Thousands of coupons from retailers like Macys, The Gap, Nike and Apple.
• Comprehensive list of store wide sales.
• Digital versions of weekly store circulars from some of the biggest retailers..

Yahoo Deals is a good site offering a needed service, however it isn’t anything original and I have to ask what took so long? Yahoo should have had this site up and running years ago.

I am a big fan of attending conferences and events that offer some value beyond networking - meaning the agenda, keynote and speakers offer something different, yet are highly informative. Nowadays there are too many conferences that just offer the same old people talking about the same old topics - nothing new or ground breaking is being discussed. However, Elite Retreat is a breath of fresh air when it comes to an event that can truly educate professionals of any digital marketing level and cause them to leave with a whole new level of knowledge they can use in the real world.

To see the value of attending the 2009 Elite Retreat you just have to check out the full Agenda or see who is speaking:

• Gary Vaynerchuk: Wine Library TV host and online / social media entrepreneur
• Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker: Digital marketing expert
• Neil Patel: Internet Marketing consultant and web entrepreneur
• Andy Liu: CEO of BuddyTV
• Stephan Spencer: President of Netconcepts
• Kris Jones: CEO of Pepperjam

That is a power-house lineup of digital marketing professionals you wont find anywhere else. For more information on the speakers check out their full Elite Retreat Speakers bios.

The 2009 Elite Retreat is taking place in San Francisco from February 18th to the 20th - click here to learn more about the Elite Retreat and how to attend.