As I’ve talked about before, the future of “social media’s” success formula will have nothing to do with the amount of people following you on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, your RSS feed, etc.
The future of social media success will have to do with Likes, Favorites or Thumbs Up. Companies, marketers and advertisers will scramble to produce content that will receive the most Likes possible rather than just amassing non-interactive followers.
Google Reader has made a step towards that future today by making the Shared Items feature a real-time experience both within Google Reader and places such as FriendFeed where the Like mechanism is so important for discovery and relevancy in that particular community:
We’re therefore happy to announce that Reader has begun adoption of the PubSubHubbub protocol, beginning with the publishing of our shared items. All shared item pages have feeds, and now all of those feeds will ping a hub (and there’s a element in them). This means that if you (as a web app developer) would like to more efficiently and quickly monitor Reader shares, you just have to subscribe at the hub to be notified of changes in real-time. If you want to learn more about PubSubHubbub and how it works, see the site and protocol definition.
Affiliate marketers need to start positioning their content, sites, items, feeds, etc to better integrate with the real-time and “likable” future where discovery will be dependent on the metric of Likes.
SEJ was one of the first online marketing blogs I stumbled upon and I’ve kept up my RSS subscription ever since.
Loren announces their nice new (and clean) redesign today:
I’m very happy to announce this morning that Search Engine Journal is launching the first of multiple redesign and restructuring phases, which have been underway now for about 4 months of planning and acquiring feedback from our readers.
Google Wave, Chrome, thoughts on Twitter, Bing, competitors, threats and the future of search get covered in this video.
I love Mayer’s comparison of search to 15th century science and its limited capabilities to see the big picture since there is no perfected search microscope or search telescope yet.
If you have 20 minutes to listen while this plays in the background, give it a hear:
Fun stuff. I can’t wait to see what Wave means to the web ecosystem and how Bing continues to morph.
July 31, 2009 at 3:56 pm · Filed under Search, google
It was just two years ago that a Google Slap (what you get when you cross the bridge to the web without Mountain View’s approval), a penalty assessed by Google for mischievous behavior resulting in a lowered PageRank number, was a big deal. A slap was a major sting for sites depending on selling via search since a landing page was a large part of the PPC game in ‘06 and ‘07.
Some things never change… search affiliates still push the limits and Google is still responding with slaps:
Like many affiliates in the past few weeks, I got the Google slap on a few of my top running PPC campaigns which felt like getting my faced kicked repeatedly from Chuck Norris wearing a football cleat. Being a bit upset over losing a big part of my income I had to step back and look at things differently than I have lately.
However, does the Google Slap really hurt that much anymore? Sure, it hurts your hard fought (or not) PageRank, but the PPC and search advertising business has morphed in such a way that landing pages aren’t what they used to be (and arbitrage has dwindled in popularity to much more efficient methods of return).
It seems to me that Google has reached a tenuous point with search publishers and is in a tricky situation regarding punishments and banishments for TOS violations. They can’t appear to be too draconian and risk tipping the paid search apple cart, but they can’t continue the detante that has been reached with the envelope-pushing crowd.
To be clear, I think most publishers who get slapped deserve what they get. The rules are pretty clear. Sure, you can say it’s unfair, but it’s Google’s web at the moment. And if you’re going to dance, you gotta pay the band.
As Google continues to offer new products, creep into the OS space, find a solid footing in the enterprise suite world and inculcate a whole generation of students with Google Apps, and face (temporary) pressure from Bing! it will be interesting to track just how Google deals with search affiliates and publishers that will inevitably continue to test the boundaries.
