Omniture And Facebook Partner On Add Data

Online analytics firm Omniture and Facebook said today they have partnered to offer marketers tools to improve Facebook as a marketing channel.

Initially the two companies will focus on the ability to automate Facebook media buying and access analytics that measure customer engagement on Facebook. The partnership builds on Facebook analytics the companies introduced last year to help marketers join the conversation and have more relevant interactions with their customers.

The partnership is aimed at helping companies more easily integrate Facebook as a marketing channel in an effort to connect and have relevant conversations with Facebook’s more than 400 million users.

“Working with us, Omniture has been able to develop a rich and immersive set of tools that will help our clients better understand the value of their Facebook advertising campaigns,” said Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president of business development and monetization.

“By creating a single dashboard to plan, deliver and measure campaigns, Omniture can make advertising on Facebook easier and ultimately increase ROI for clients.”

Omniture customers can now use the company’s SearchCenter Plus, a combination of its search engine marketing management application with added functionality for buying Facebook Ads.

In addition, Omniture customers can now generate reports specifically designed to understand ad effectiveness for some of the unique elements of Facebook such as pages and applications.
 

Omniture And Facebook Partner On Ad Data

Online analytics firm Omniture and Facebook said today they have partnered to offer marketers tools to improve Facebook as a marketing channel.

Initially the two companies will focus on the ability to automate Facebook media buying and access analytics that measure customer engagement on Facebook. The partnership builds on Facebook analytics the companies introduced last year to help marketers join the conversation and have more relevant interactions with their customers.

The partnership is aimed at helping companies more easily integrate Facebook as a marketing channel in an effort to connect and have relevant conversations with Facebook’s more than 400 million users.

“Working with us, Omniture has been able to develop a rich and immersive set of tools that will help our clients better understand the value of their Facebook advertising campaigns,” said Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president of business development and monetization.

“By creating a single dashboard to plan, deliver and measure campaigns, Omniture can make advertising on Facebook easier and ultimately increase ROI for clients.”

Omniture customers can now use the company’s SearchCenter Plus, a combination of its search engine marketing management application with added functionality for buying Facebook Ads.

In addition, Omniture customers can now generate reports specifically designed to understand ad effectiveness for some of the unique elements of Facebook such as pages and applications.
 

Will Bing Powering Yahoo Make SEO Easier?

There is an interesting discussion going on in our WebProWorld forum about search engine optimization post Microsoft-Yahoo deal. For those unfamiliar with the topic, Microsoft and Yahoo recently gained regulatory approval on a search and advertising deal announced last year, which will see Yahoo using Bing's algorithm in its search results. The discussion is about whether or not this means businesses and webmasters will only have to worry about optimizing for 2 search engines (Google/Bing) rather than 3 (Google, Yahoo, and Bing).

Will you focus your efforts more heavily on Bing? Discuss.

What Bing Coming to Yahoo Means

It's important to note that Microsoft and Yahoo still have plenty of details to work out before anyone knows just how the product of this deal will function. We know that Bing will be used in the back-end of searches on Yahoo, but we don't know what other elements Yahoo will still be incorporating into the search experience. For example, Yahoo said last week that the companies will still be discussing how SearchMonkey and BOSS figure into the mix.

Optimizing for Yahoo is not going to be limited to showing up in Bing's results. That's not to say that showing up in Bing's results won't have its advantages for Yahoo search, but there is a lot more going on at Yahoo than that. The company has been stressing that it is still very much focused on search, and under the deal with Microsoft, Yahoo will still be controlling the user experience at Yahoo.com.

Right now, Yahoo.com has plenty of elements to consider, from news and trending topics, to a whole slew of "applications" that users can customize on their Yahoo homepage. Among these are Facebook and Flickr. If you want to get in front of Yahoo users, it's not limited to Yahoo search results. That said, Yahoo search results also have their own thing going on. Keep an eye on the box that appears under the search box after you enter a query. It contains related queries, and "related concepts". This is one area that could conceivably be independent from Bing (although that remains to be seen at this point). Yahoo is not shy about putting brands in these "related concepts" either. You can find WebProNews in there for a query like "ebusiness news".



The point is, Yahoo has made it clear that it will continue to control the user experience, and that means there should be plenty of areas within Yahoo that are out of Bing's control. This leads me to presume that Yahoo will not be something you'll want to ignore, just because Bing is integrated into it. Remember that at this point, Yahoo controls a much greater percentage of the search market than Bing.

All of that said, you may want to pay closer attention to your Bing rankings if you haven't done so in the past, because while Yahoo will still be Yahoo to its users, the deal also means there will be significantly more eyeballs on what Bing determines to be the most relevant results to searches.

Why Stop at Google, Yahoo, and Bing?

These may be the biggest three search engines in terms of market share in the United States, but there are still plenty of people using others. For one thing, YouTube is number 2. Not Yahoo or Bing. If you are concerned about simply being found where people are searching, you should have a YouTube presence. That of course means having a video strategy, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have to have a huge video budget.

There are still people using Ask as well. In search industry coverage, it often gets overshadowed by the others, but there are still a lot of people using it. In fact, the Ask Network's market share grew by 6% from December to January. Ask.com's market share grew by 1%. A lot of people search with AOL. AOL's search is powered by Google, but it doesn't always return the same results as Google.

Facebook's search market share grew by 13% in that same period of time. You may not think about Facebook for search as much, but people are spending more and more time on Facebook, and it stands to reason that they'll be conducting more and more searches from Facebook. Granted, Facebook's web search feature is powered by Bing, but that's only a piece of the Facebook Search puzzle. If you don't have a Facebook strategy, you may be missing out on a lot more searches. By the way, did you know that Facebook recently passed Yahoo as the 2nd most visited site (just under Google)?

These are just a few examples. People are searching from a lot more places. Rather than just optimizing for Google, Yahoo, and Bing, perhaps you should think about all of the places where your site/business would make sense when a user searches (consider niche sites as well).

Does the Yahoo/Bing deal make optimization easier? Weigh in with your thoughts.

Will Google Buzz Change the Social Media Game?

Update 2: Buzz has gotten off to a great start in terms of attracting users. Google said in a blog post yesterday that over 9 million posts and comments had been created, and they were seeing over 200 posts per minute. Both numbers have likely grown since then.

In the post, Google addresses some of the privacy concerns people have been having, and improvements they're making based on user feedback.

Update: Google has uploaded the entire Google Buzz launch event. If you are interested in seeing the new product unveiled, you can watch it below:

Article starts: Google held a press event to announce the most "buzzed" topic of the week - Google Buzz. This is Google's new product, which is being compared to social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It is integrated with Gmail and other Google products, and appears to be one of the missing links in tying Google together as a social network, a concept we've discussed repatedly.

Do you think Google could make an impact on social media with this release? Share your thoughts.

Editor's Note: The bulk of this article was written before the announcement was made and has been adjusted to reflect the announcement itself, after liveblogging the press event.

 

Google says Buzz has five key elements:

1. Auto Following
2. Rich, Fast Sharing experience...
3. Support for public and private sharing....
4. In-box integration
5. Just the good stuff...

Watch the video below to get a general idea of what Buzz does.

Buzz will show a thumbnail of a YouTube video and make it easy to play in line. With photos, they will show thumbnails, but Google built a custom photo viewer, which lets you flip through pictures and see them "big and fast". If you share links, it will automatically fetch headlines and photos from the post (similar to Facebook). You can "like" and "unlike" stuff, and expand comments. It works with keyword shortcuts from Gmail.

Public/Private sharing - The post box will let you post updates publicly or privately. If it's public, it will go to your Google profile, and is indexed by Google's real-time search. You can share privately, and it will let you send to groups and custom groups.

In your in-box, you will see buzz notifications that contain real-time comments. It sits in the same in-box as your regular email, but you can move between your regular in-box and your Buzz stuff. It integrates it right into Gmail.You can also use "@" for replies like with Twitter.

While Google Buzz is presented as a Gmail feature, it goes well beyond Gmail. For one, all public updates you post will be posted to your Google profile page, (which is searchable). In addition, Google launched three new mobile products for Buzz:

1. The ability to use Buzz from www.Google.com on iPhone/Android
2. Brand new app at buzz.google.com
3.  Maps Update for Nokia Symbian/ Android.

Mobile could be one of the biggest keys to the success of this product. Google says Google.com is the world's most popular mobile home page, and Buzz can be accessed from there on iPhone and Android devices. Android's popularity is growing quickly too.

Buzz will find your location (if you let it) and snap your updates to that location. With the Google Maps feature, you can see what people are saying based on location. You can even use voice recognition to post buzz updates by voice.

Do you see yourself using Google Buzz from your mobile device? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends....

Search Implications

Buzz posts get indexed by search from the page that its posted to (the Google Profile page), just like anything else on the web. Google says they don't do anything special to promote it in SERPs.

Google didn't really talk about social search with regards to Buzz, but it would not be surprising to see Buzz updates integrated these into social search, which recently became part of the web search norm. Your Gmail contacts are the first people listed in your "social circle" that Google draws from for these results.

If Buzz content appears in both real-time search results and social search results, that's two good-sized chunks of SERP real-estate. Not all SERPs have both or either, but it opens some additional search marketing doors. The feature would also open up more reputation management issues,  as simply an additional place to monitor, not to mention other ways businesses are currently using services like Facebook and Twitter for marketing.

Do you think Google Buzz will be important to search marketing? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends... what you think.

How Else Could Google Buzz Be Used for Business?

Buzz may benefit businesses as an orgnizational tool. The first thing that comes to mind is the expansion of communication with existing contacts. When you're frequently seeing what your Gmail contacts are saying, it will not only keep those people fresh in your mind, but it can cultivate further communication.

The feature could possibly lend to better organization of your communication, which could in turn save time. Again, depending on how many of the possibilities (if any) mentioned in this article actually come to fruition, it could become a central place for that communication. The more services Buzz gets integrated with, the better it could become for organization.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin says he wrote an op-ed piece, posted it to Google Buzz, and quickly had 50 comments, and edited based on feedback. He finds it efficient as an editing tool.

Competition

Before it even launched, a lot of people suggested that Google's product could never compete with Facebook and Twitter, but I was not and am still not so quick to rule out the possibility. No, it's not likely to come out and kill those two, but that's not to say that it can't co-exist, and gain popularity of its own, if Google makes the right moves in integrating it with its other products. It's already off to a good start on that (especially with the Google mobile home page).

How well the product can compete is directly related to what possibilities Google explores. Even if a lot of options aren't explored immediately, that's not to say they won't be slowly. Google has a way of adding a feature here, and adding a feature there to its different products. Before you know it, things are more connected than you may have realized.

It's not all bout Gmail. According to comScore, Gmail had 176 million unique visitors in December, but how many people have actual GOOGLE accounts? You don't have to be a Gmail user to have one, and Google is increasingly finding more ways to draw people in through various products.

Facebook is supposedly working on its own email product, which could directly compete with Gmail. Between that and Google Buzz, the competition might be heating up between the two companies more than ever, but it still doesn't mean they can't co-exist. Will it even matter as more third-party apps begin supporting everything? It's very possible that these updates will be portable among all of these different services anyway, and they could even support each other in the future. Facebook has had no problem with posting updates to Twitter. Last year, Google actually made a big deal about its initiative to make user data as portable as possible. They formed the Data Liberation Front to "make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products."

More Possibilities for Google Buzz

Google says it wants Buzz to be as open as possible. That means there is plenty of room to grow and increase integration with different services. The company says it will be wired up to other parts of Google and other parts of the Internet. Facebook Connect integration is "something they'll think about", but it's not happening yet. Google says it will bring Twitter content in, but will not yet let you push it out to Twitter...yett. That could change in time. Think about being able to do all of your social media and email communication from one place. That is something Mozilla is trying to develop with its in-progress Raindrop project. What if Google was able to do it with an established product like Gmail? Google says theyr'e "just getting started" with Buzz. 

I think it's safe to expect Buzz integration with a lot of other Google features. Google has already said that it places Wave as "high on the list of things they can do" as far as integration.

Google could potentially integrate the feature with any product it chooses (and it has a lot to choose from). What if it became available with the click of a button on the Chrome browser (which is gaining popularity)? It's already integrated with Google Reader. What about Google Docs? Wave? There could be a Google gadget, for users' iGoogle home pages. There are a lot of ways tha Google could potentially get people using Buzz. Google says Buzz will be launched as an enterprise product eventually as well.

On a sidenote, it's pretty interesting that Google and Yahoo both now have products called "Buzz."

Do you see the potential for Google Buzz to be successful? Would you use it? Please share your opinions.
 

Have You Read This?

> Is Google Launching a Competitor for Facebook/Twitter?

> Is Google Bad at Social Media or Really, Really Good at it?

> Is Gmail Google's Real Social Network?

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