Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Social Media Advertising: the Final Frontier?

THE KILLER ADVERTISING PLATFORM?



Google has tried to buy Facebook several times but has always been thwarted by Mark Zuckerberg who owns the major part of Facebook shares. Further to the annoyance of Google is the fact that Facebook has allowed Microsoft to be a substantial investor: so no doubt the BING Search Engine may have a role to play in the future.


Currently no search engine is allowed into Facebook to catalogue its content.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg





SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING - Versus – SEO: Search Engine Optimisation linked advertising.


Over 500 million users and growing: that’s Facebook


With Facebook it is possible to locate user groups with common interests that are friends of friends, who might pass on useful information: this equals word of mouth recommendations. This is the best that a product or a service can get, it’s the circle squared and the advertisers dream. Google can only estimate what users want from a search based upon input keyword descriptions which often misses the mark: link based ranking can falsely reach top positioned but not be what the searcher seeks. Mining the links was once input by people making these links somewhat meaningful, now its automated and low quality (e.g. MechanicalTurk).


Facebook is still the ‘next big thing’ and set to get bigger: with more integrated applications reaching special interest groups. If you want to reach all the people interested in a certain thing you can find them on Facebook. How do you locate and provide your service to all the people in a location that are interested in fly fishing, or people who like a certain genre of music? There all categorised on Facebook and can be reached with specifically targeted and quality tailored options to reach them, to interest them = less or no Spam. There is in fact no need to search outside of quality sites that give you the material – subject that your are seeking (see the Blekko video on the Spam, Spam, Spam article). So quality sites with integrated links to & fro in Facebook look a likely new killer Ap for it.


Also outlined in the last Splodge (Spam, Spam, and Spam) I mentioned that Google was putting up barriers to stop some of the existing methods that SEO advertisers utilise to favour their clients; by feeding keyword back-links to Google to get better positions for their clients.


A practice that has generated good fees for Google, but know it seems that Google has decided to forgo such revenues in favour of better more honest and accurate search returns for its users, is this all altruistic or is Google forced to do so because other ‘upstart’ search engines are focusing on Spam removal (Blekko) and thus could be a threat to the mighty Google?


Google may not even have to police some sites e.g. HubPages; because out of thier GoogleFear they have started to do so themselves with genuine and borderline Hubbers getting this message on their edit pages:
NEEDS REVISION


A red highlighted instruction appears on your HubPage edit and this is followed up with an automated email explanation of the infringement – it could be too many back-links (two maximum?) or content considered to be duplicating content on a none Hubpage site.
I tried investigating this and one way around it is to put the content first onto a HubPage and then a few days later, secondly onto another location, they then, don’t seem to mind! Ho Hum.


There may be other Social Network sites to come in the future but right now Facebook dominates.


Returning from my detour: all this well intentioned fuss may be just noise from Google because I can predict that savvy Internet advertisers will be moving in droves to Facebook once it is fully realised the power of that method over Google’s Spamful results.


Simply put Google has to guess by number crunching and matching keywords to ‘interests’ products and services, and its results are shamefully Spamful. Whereas Social Networks KNOW lots about their users and can match in an analogue fashion (people powered) and beside this can be placed very relevant adverts too potential clients.


Now ad this to the idea of Crowd Source Build Slash Tags (Blekko) and you get far less Spam, a better more accurate Internet, and more accurate advertising!


You heard it first from SPLODGE.

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