Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

Image Source: Google Earth Weather

Time for another Weekly Recap! Pretty spread out this week. No major trends but everyone seems to be plugging away with some new features and trying out some new things. I also added a link to some results from the viral Old Spice video campaign so that you don’t think I have forgotten about topics we talk about in the past.

Here is what I saw happen on the web this week:

YouTube Videos extended to 15 minutes, well except for Russians – This week, YouTube announced that they are increasing the length of YouTube videos to 15 minutes. You used to be able to only have videos 10 minutes long. My first impression was that I didn’t think this was necessary. I haven’t watched a YouTube video and thought, man I wish that was longer. Most YouTube videos are already longer than they need to be. After I thought about it some more, I considered how much online video is competing with television viewing and I bet the extra 5 minutes will be huge for ‘webisodes’. Of course none of this matters at all if you are in Russia, since YouTube has been banned in Russia for having a ‘racist’ video.

Google does the weather and checks in – Google had a few big announcements this week (as usual). One was that now with Google Earth you can get real time weather in the locations you are looking for. So all you wanna-be meteorologists can nerd out to some real time weather! They also mentioned that developers are working on a check-in system like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Facebook rolls out Questions – Have you ever used LinkedIn Answers? Well Facebook is currently rolling out a similar function, called Questions, so that you can ask your Facebook friends for help or their opinion. This could be a great opportunity for businesses if Questions adds hyperlinks in people’s answers or lets you link to their Faceboook fan page, if they have one.

Old Spice sees success from viral campaign – Whether you loved them or hated them, everyone wanted to know if the Old Spice viral videos did anything to move their bottom line. Looks like it did. This is great news to those desperate to tie social media to ROI.

Links I Liked This Week:

• Stop yourself from making egregious e-mail errors – CNN
• Back by popular demand: The Basics of Social Media R.O.I. – BrandBuilder
• B2B Mobile: 5 Questions Every Marketer Should Be Asking (And Answering) – CK’s Blog

We heard about it last year and now we’re finally seeing it action – partly, anyway.  As Amanda pointed out last week, up to 25% of  Yahoo’s organic search results in the U.S. are being powered by Bing and up to 3.5% may see paid listings from Microsoft adCenter.  The difference won’t be noticeable unless you’re one of the lucky searchers to see the “Powered by Bing” badge on the bottom of a results page (they’re currently testing this badge on just some of the results, but once it’s fully rolled out, it will be on the bottom of all the results pages).  I went to Yahoo to see if I could get a glimpse of a Bing-branded results page by performing a million (read: ten) searches but it was not to be.  Seriously, after 10 searches on Yahoo, I had to leave; I felt like a foreigner in a strange land (I’m a Googler).

When will it ALL be Bing?

Microsoft and Yahoo are currently doing tests for organic and paid results and if all goes well, the US and Canada will see all Bing-powered results in desktop and mobile searches as early as August (August/September is the current time frame).  The paid search platform transition to Microsoft adCenter will be undergoing a bit more testing, but is expected to be fully live by October.

Obviously, this is a pretty big transition, especially for those folks who currently use Yahoo Search Marketing for their PPC campaigns.  Yahoo is trying to make this as smooth of a transition as possible, and has a bunch of information regarding the change.  Not only do they have a complete site called the “Yahoo Transition Center” dedicated to it, there are also helpful posts on the Yahoo Search Marketing blog.

What about the rest of the world?

I haven’t read anything yet about when they plan to integrate the Bing-powered organic results internationally, but for PPC, international advertisers should see the move to Microsoft adCenter in early 2012.  Again, this will all be dependent on a successful roll out in the United States and Canada.

On the tail of this news, Yahoo Japan just announced that it plans to use Google’s search engine technology for their organic and paid search instead of Bing.  Although this may be a bit of a blow to Microsoft, Yahoo only holds a minority stake in Yahoo Japan and cannot stop them from using Google as an alternative.  This proves to be an interesting move, considering that comScore’s figures show that Japan has the third largest number of searches conducted as of December 2009 (behind the US and China).  A good portion of Japan’s searches could be Google-powered if everything goes as planned.

Are you excited about this change?  Are you mad because I dissed Yahoo?  Let me know!

Photo credit: nannetteturner

As I was putting together my Weekly Recap this week, I noticed a lot of the updates were about phone upgrades. Every generation has their technological advances that totally creep out the generation before theirs. I think right now we are watching not only the internet drastically changing how we work, but one of our most trusted and valued modes of communication is morphing, too – the phone. The phone was pretty stable for a long run and since the launch of cell phones, there are big new advances happening rapidly; texting, picture messages, voice over IP, video phones, etc. That is enough deep thoughts for me. Here are the biggest news stories I ran across this week in web:

iPhone “deals” with their reception issue – As we mentioned last week, Apple held a press conference last Friday. The boiled down version is there is an antenna problem and they are going to refund anyone who buys an iPhone bumper to help with the reception issues. The iPhone bumper is essentially a fancy rubber band you put around your phone so that you don’t lose a signal when you touch the metal band around the phone. There have been a few other fun alternatives to the bumper like the iPhone bandaid and, my favorite, the new End Call button.

Don’t be alarmed, but we are running out of internet – We are not running out of space, or website addresses but apparently we are running out of IP addresses, according to experts. Your IP addresses essentially tells the internet who and where you are and it is a series of numbers. They just are coming to a point where they are going to run out of numbers. So much like when phone numbers got maxed out we had to add area codes to make the numbers longer, they may have to make IP addresses longer too. Why is it important? I’m not sure but it is interesting that we have so many people accessing the internet now, that we are running out of IP addresses. With other news this week like Facebook announcing that they are up to 5 million users and Foursquare counts it’s 100 million checkins A DAY Microsoft sells 175 million copies of Windows 7 in nine months, I am beginning to think this whole internet thing isn’t a fad.

Skype is changing the game – Skype, the internet calling service, announced that you can not only now use Skype to make calls on your iPhone but you run it in the ‘background’ so you can use other applications at the same time. What does that mean? It means you have more control using Skype to make a call than you do using your cell phone service; you can check the internet, play a game, write a note while you make a call. Skype lets you make free calls to other Skype users and you can make calls to landlines and cell phone with a minimal fee (often less than a cell phone contract). What would cell phones be like without cell phone carriers like AT&T, Sprint etc.? That is where this has the possibility of going.

Yahoo tests out displaying Bing results – In a move we have all known about for awhile, Yahoo has made an agreement with Microsoft to have their search engine, Bing, power Yahoo searches. They started testing it out in organic and paid search by letting Bing power 25% of Yahoo’s search traffic.

Google gives image search a makeover – From the other search corner, Google launched a new Google image search. We like it better. It displays more images and doesn’t take up too much space giving you too much information. To see where the image is from or the context, you just click on the image or hover over it. You can also see results for similar images which I could see being very useful.

Links I liked this week:

• 7 Steps For a Successful Social Media Strategy – Social Media Examiner
• Debunking the Myths of Social Selling for B2B – Socialmediab2b
• Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood Throughout the Day inferred from Twitter Video
• Google Voice Gets Faster For BlackBerry and Android Users

Picture it: You’re at Google, searching for more fun facts about Justin Bieber (let’s face it, who isn’t?) and as you look at the search results that are presented to you, you move your mouse over the results as you read.  So could the movements of your mouse determine which of those pages are going to get ranked higher in another search for the same information?

Maybe.

Ranking Factors

Late last year, Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) mentioned that there are over 200 variables used in Google’s algorithm to determine how a web page ranks in the search results pages.  We already know some of those variables, such as the quantity and quality of backlinks to the page, use of keywords in title tag and copy, and even how long it takes for the page to load.  For obvious reasons, we’ll never know all the ranking factors and Google changes its algorithm on a daily basis (yes, daily).  However, Google was just granted a patent on something new that could be incorporated into its algorithm: mouse movements.

Why Mouse Movements?

If you use your mouse to help keep you focused on the descriptions that you’re reading in the search engine results, your mouse may be hovering over some search results longer than others because you are more interested in that particular result.  Perhaps you’re even getting an answer to your question in the that text description of the web page, so there’s no need to click on it even though it gave you an answer to your search (when is Justin Bieber’s birthday?!?!).

Part of the patent’s abstract, which was actually filed for in 2005 but just granted last week, states: “Sometimes, a user may review multiple informational items responsive to a search query, moving a pointer over or near each of the informational items that the user reviews. These various pointer activities can provide another way to evaluate the user’s feedback with respect to a particular informational item.”  In a nutshell, the pointer (mouse) may be a tell-tale sign of which results the searcher values.

Is This Really a Good Ranking Signal?

When I first read about this, my reaction was “no way”.  I don’t think that someone moving their mouse along the page as they read is a good measurement of the quality of the results, or the intent of the searcher.  Google also indicates that “a typical user’s behavior is to move the mouse pointer (or any other pointing indicator) over or near a target informational item, keep the mouse pointer there for a period of time while the user reads the item’s information.”  For me, this is not typical behavior.  I keep my mouse to the side of the text and use my scroll wheel to move down the page as I read, and I’m sure that I’m not the only person who does this.  Granted, Google may have this patent and not even want to use it anymore, or maybe they will incorporate it into a more broad consortium of user behavior data they’re collecting.  There’s really no way of knowing how they plan to use this patent.

What do you think, is this a good indication of search result interest?  Do you use your mouse to follow along as you read?  I’d love to hear your thoughts!