I note from the Convera sponsored E-consultancy survey of professional search behavior, titled the "Vertical Search Report 2008", that Google is particularly dominant amongst those who use Web search a lot.  Business people who use Web search engines between 1 and 5 times per day, according to the survey, are more likely to use Yahoo! or a vertical search engine from a B2B website. Google only ranks third amongst this group.  In contrast, professionals who deploy more than 20 Web searches per day almost always use Google.

One interpretation of this result could be as follows:  The people who search more than 20 times a day are likely to be involved in some kind of internet marketing activity, where Google is centric to their business, be they an advertiser, publisher, SEO practitioner or other kind of internet marketer.  The people deploying 1 - 5 searches a day may be a more diverse group of professionals whose world does not revolve around the Web.  They are a more likely target audience for specialist vertical search plays, who will likely find encouragement in these numbers. 

A free copy of the full Vertical Search Report 2008 can be downloaded here

Following on from yesterday's article about the use of private data in the targeting of advertising, the EU it seems now want to take an interest in how advertising systems use private data to boost online advertising revenue.  A part of the European Union that regulates the protection of consumer data is to begin investigating BT, reports Reuters

Further information can be found at MediaPost

Google’s newly announced open social networking platform OpenSocial is a set of API's that allows developers to create applications that work on any social network that joins Google’s open partnership – newly announced members include Orkut, LinkedIn, MySpace, hi5, XING, Friendster, Plaxo, Ning, Salesforce.com and Oracle.

This strategy follows Facebook’s rapid growth based on opening its “social graph” to developers and Microsoft’s $240 million investment for 1.6 percent of the company. However, unlike Google, Facebook doesn’t open its API’s to support other social networks.

For Google, the economics of facilitating open source API’s is simple - more applications, means more users, which means more searches, leading to more ad revenue. Facebook may have the early lead, but OpenSocial applications will be easier to develop than Facebook applications (HTML vs FBML) and will also work across a range of social networks. Google’s strategy will be to integrate its AdSense and DoubleClick advertising services based on utilising the OpenSocial API's that work across all the partner social networks. This will challenge the advertising strategy of Facebook, which is developing a behaviorial targeted ad service. OpenSocial could create an identity layer for the Internet–with user profile data, relationships, social graph, community, group and brands easily transferable between “play” and “work” social networks.

B2B publishers should be concerned that their print communities don’t become social networks for the OpenSocial partnership to target as they migrate online – otherwise what is their future? B2B publishers can fight back with an integrated platform of print, events and online with vertical search as a key integrated component to boost their online advertising revenue.

As the growth of media channels proliferates, the reputation of governments, businesses and brands can quickly be affected by negative coverage in the press and online media.

But the links from authoritative sites generated by such stories create search engine optimisation opportunities.

As we all know, links play a very important role in determining positions in the search engine results and the more inbound links from authorative sites, the higher the rankings - so any serious SEO campaign will have a significant effort in link building.

The recent Mattel story regarding the retailing of dangerous toys from China created a huge amount of negative coverage for Mattel, but many of the links came from authoritative news sites from around the world. But Mattel have used e-PR and SEO very effectively - consumers are blaming China, not Mattel. Indeed, the sentiment towards Mattel management is becoming positive, due to the way the crisis was handled.

The Google relevancy algorithm assumes that an authoritative link makes a company/business "trustworthy" - Google cannot determine the difference between positive or negative sentiment.  However, negative stories are damaging if they appear in keyword search results.

But savvy marketeers can use the elevated negative ranking to great effect - by using a press page and RSS to push out "positive" sentiment and utilising blogs, sub-domains and alternate corporate sites - the negative enhanced ranking can be topped up by "positive" stories that drown out the negative items, and as users tend to only look at the first page of search results, "negative" sentiment can be quickly buried.

So, in the future governments, businesses and individuals may need to consider using PR and SEO as an integrated strategy - SEO can also be used as a radar determining via keyword research what negative phrases could be used against you.

So what does all this mean?

Authoritative news sites are popular and any news story negative or positive will bring a spike in web traffic.  News stories spread. Other media comment on the story, and blogging creates instant reaction - these together provide links. The resulting links influence Google results and will send a story up the search engine rankings.

So when a negative story breaks about your company, do the SEO work on your website to make sure that your "positive" story appears in search engine results. Monitor the appearance of negative stories in search engines results, particularly for your main keywords where their appearance in the results can do you most damage.

Then get your PR team to brief journalists, issue statements, use RSS and blogs ensuring the "positive" keywords are reiterated as keywords that will help the crawlers index the stories so they are found on Google – as a result the "negative" gets buried, the "positive" sits on top of the enhanced linking - more people will read the story and more journalists/bloggers will pick up on the "positive" story.

Google will not change its algorithm to differentiate between good or bad.

As the Chinese say, "Turn poison into medicine" 

Research released by Ofcom, the UK media regulator showed UK online ad revenue surpassed ITV1 and Channel 4's combined ad sales last year, as internet consumption ate into TV audiences.

Google’s UK turnover of £800m was equivalent to 80% of ITV1, Channel 4 and Five’s total ad revenues. But while TV ad revenues fell 2.2% last year to £3.47bn, earnings from TV subscriptions, like Sky TV, exceeded £4bn.

These findings are consistent with other industry research and confirm UK consumers’ and advertisers' gradual shift away from traditional media. The amount of time consumers spent watching TV fell 4% between 2002 and last year, while radio listening dropped 2%.

The Ofcom report also highlighted the increasing use of digital video recorders, saying that of the 15% of all UK households who use them, 78% said they used the devices to skip commercial breaks.

Ofcom said eBay was still the most popular UK web destination, although Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube were all in the Top 10 sites by time spent. 

Facebook is developing a new advertising platform to deliver video, display and contextual ads based on behavourial targeting to its 40m members. The Wall Street Journal reports that the system is the social networking site’s “top priority” and will show display ads as banners in members’ pages, while brands will bid for keywords via a PPC system similar to Google Adwords.  Analysts suggest this will allow Facebook to raise its current average $10CPM rates to $15CPM .

In response Google is launching in-video ads on YouTube.  Google has been testing several ad types on YouTube over recent months, and has finally opted for animated overlays, rather than the pre-roll format that has been adopted much more widely by other video content providers.

The ads will appear in the bottom 20% of the screen 15 seconds after a viewer starts watching a clip, offering them the option to see a commercial while the video is paused. If the viewer doesn't click on the ad, it disappears within 10 seconds.

Google has previously expressed fears that pre-roll ads could damage the user experience to the 130m YouTube user community, and says results of the in-video trials have been promising. Google is also considering introducing an advertsing revenue share model for the video content - to drive new content creation.   

eMarketer recently predicted that $775m would be spent on video advertising this year, up 89% from last year, and the market will have grown to $4.3bn by 2011

This further fragmentation of traditional media to lifestyle niches is good news for B2B and STM publishers - advertisers need to find stable, affluent and influential audiences.   

A Q&A with Steve Ennen of American Business Media
August 7, 2007

Steve Ennen is Vice President of Digital Business Strategies for American Business Media. Steve’s primary role is to assess the digital landscape—including changes in user habits, new tools and media/information delivery systems—and educate member companies on how these issues affect their business structure and growth.

What are the key trends you see in how business professionals are consuming media?

There are two primary trends. One is the fact that they have the ability to speak back. With the adoption of blogs and the increased sophistication of social networks—what we call vertical digital communities—professionals have a greater ability to interact in multi-channel dialogues about key issues. At the same time, these conversations are becoming more niche, as very specialized people are finding each other and communicating to solve problems.

The second trend is the ubiquity of devices and services. Handhelds, laptops and wireless broadband Internet access have proliferated throughout the globe and really enable point number one more fully. Now, business professionals can search for answers online from anywhere at anytime.

The challenge to business information providers is to understand where people are going for information. Quite often, they go to search engines first. If business information providers don’t appear in the search results they stand the risk of being overshadowed by others who do.

How important is having a vertical search capability for a business publisher?

It’s absolutely vital. If business information providers want to be destinations for information seekers, they have to have a robust and efficient search system so people can access the information they need, when they need it.

What advantage would a publisher have over a mainstream search engine?

What I say about that is that as long as there has been business media, the stewards of that media have known their topics intimately. Editors are still the experts out there. The credibility that established media brands have is tremendous. Nobody is going to know the industries content as well as those people who live and breathe it. That’s why it is important to have that content accessed and apparent in a world with many search engines.

Do you think publishers need to wean professionals off of Google?

No, I don’t necessarily think so. I think the brands will offer such detailed information that they will separate themselves just by use. Google and Yahoo! and MSN and Ask are just tools. It may also be that at a point the business professional bookmarks the deep vertical site and circumvents the major search engines.

Google could break down their business across 160 business verticals if it so chose but it’s going to be hard for them to catch up on 150 years of editorial expertise. They will never have the reputation that these other brands have within their verticals. Some of these verticals are very complex, it would be difficult to come in as an outsider and really understand these verticals. 

Do business professionals search the same way as consumers?

I think multi-layer searching is evolving as information seekers become more sophisticated. They’re used to the idea that one piece of information might take them to another that is as valuable or more valuable. Whether we’re talking about broad search or vertical search, they both need to work in concert with each other.

What is it going to take to drive traffic to vertical search site?

This is an area of expertise that every brand is going to have to pick up to make itself heard in the digital din. The best way to do that is having an effective SEO/SEM strategy.

That being said, there are also other platforms available to business information providers, like events, print and handheld devices. We’re looking at four platforms that have the potential for driving traffic to the vertical search site.