Big Brand Media Wants A Google Bailout

It seems like almost everyone in Big Business is looking for a bailout these days. That’s certainly true of several big brand media companies who, according to an AdAge article today, have told Google they deserve higher rankings in Google’s search results. Not only that, but one executive has also labeled the rest of the content-producing web — including bloggers like us — as “parasites” who “benefit disproportionately” from Google’s ranking algorithm.

This collection of media companies, AdAge reports, includes The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Inc, Hearst, ESPN, and others — all of whom belong to Google’s Publishers Advisory Council.

(Did you even know Google had such a council? The article describes it as “a small, invitation-only group for professional publishers to pow-wow confidentially with the search giant.” Cue small publisher anger in 3…2…1.)

The big media companies’ complaints include:

• Google’s search algorithm in general, which they say “penalizes paid content”
• PageRank specifically, because it places too much of an emphasis on links
• The appearance of Google’s search results, which hurts big brands because every result looks the same

AdAge says the publishers are pushing their Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), a machine-readable language for indicating copyright permissions that online crawlers can understand, as a means to gain leverage on Google. But Google’s Josh Cohen recently dismissed ACAP:

“Acap only addresses the small minority of content owners and [it has] major technical issues. We can’t accept it in its current form. There are a number of challenges with Acap.”

The irony in all this, of course, is that Google’s so-called Vince update earlier this year supposedly promoted big brands that have more trust and authority than their smaller counterparts — something that should clearly benefit the complaining members of the Publishers Advisory Council.

Steve Rubel has already done a fine job of refuting the argument that big media is any more deserving of high search engine visibility than blogs just by virtue of their size. And at least one publisher quoted in the AdAge article recognizes that the media companies themselves are at least partly to blame for any lack of visibility in Google’s search results:

“They don’t owe us that we show up a particular way. They do publish a whole lot about how to make your site show up as much as possible. If people haven’t taken action on it, that’s their own damn fault.”

Indeed. It was just two weeks ago that I wrote that the Fortune 500 is “largely invisible” in natural search. Perhaps the big media companies should be asking an SEO consultant for bailout help, not Google.

There’s more discussion on Techmeme.

via Big Brand Media Wants A Google Bailout

Twitter Changes Prioritize Search, Trends And Featured Users

San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. has added a more powerful and prominent search function to its popular free micro-blogging service, along with new features for tracking the service’s most-discussed trends and users, in an expansion of a limited test begun last month. On Friday Twitter began rolling out the new features, contained in a redesigned area prominently featured at the top of the company’s Web site, to its users in an as-yet-unannounced upgrade.

Expanded Search Bar Added To Twitter Redesign

Twitter has rapidly grown to become the third-largest online social networking service, trailing only Facebook and MySpace, according to figures released by Web traffic analysis company Compete. By some measures Twitter has seen traffic increases of nearly 1000 percent over the past year, with most users first signing up to use the service in 2008 according to a recent survey from research company HubSpot.

Twitter has increasingly gained a more mainstream user base which some believe could lead Twitter to begin challenging Internet giant and search leader Google on some fronts. The Friday addition of new features including a more powerful search function only strengthen such assertions.

Users of Twitter write short 140-or-fewer-character messages that other users of the service can read if they have made a connection with one another, leaving a sizable amount of Twitter information untapped to users who have not been able to make use of the service’s previously limited and difficult to find search feature, a shortcoming the Friday changes sought to address.

Replacing the small text link that had been at the bottom of the Twitter Web site, the changes that were made public Friday placed a new search text-entry box in a position at the top right of the site, capable of searching not just for other Twitter users with names that match the search query, but for all discussion on Twitter about search terms.

Featured User List Among Twitter Overhaul Additions

Over the previous weeks Twitter had reduced the size of its logo atop the site, a move that made room for the new search box and a drop-down “Trends” feature that analyzes what Twitter users are writing about most frequently and displays a list of the ten most popular topics.

A new feature showing off certain featured Twitter users has also been added in the redesigned homepage layout, highlighting a selection of popular Twitter users who have a wide following on the service.

Details on how a Twitter user gained a listing on the new featured user list had not yet been made available, however among those listed Friday were Twitter users with 10,000 or more fellow Twitter “followers.”

Twitter users featured in the new layout appeared to have been chosen by the company, and were accompanied by short biographies.

The new Twitter search feature was derived in part from technology developed by Summarize, a start-up the microblogging service purchased last year. The new search features were available at search.twitter.com for Twitter users not yet seeing the search box at the top of the site’s homepage.

In order to make space for the new features on the top of the page Twitter repositioned links to several functions, including the profile and settings options, which have been moved to an area below where the user’s name was displayed on the Twitter site.

Changes At Twitter Come On Heels Of $35 Funding Round

While some early testers using the new search functionality have noted a marked improvement from what had been available previously, others wished that the new search feature could provide the most relevant search results, and not only the most recent ones, an area Twitter is considered likely to address as it makes searching a more prominent portion of the Twitter experience.

Many Twitter users were unlikely to notice the new changes that began rolling out Friday, as a sizable proportion of the service’s users interact with Twitter using stand-alone applications developed by various third-party companies, with names such Twhirl and TweetDeck.

After Twitter received $35 million in third round funding last month, co-founder Biz Stone said the company was well-positioned for increased growth. “We are now positioned extremely well to support the accelerating growth of our service,” Stone said, and added that Twitter was also well positioned to “begin building revenue-generating products.”

Twitter Changes Prioritize Search, Trends And Featured Users

Previously Stone has suggested that Twitter was considering a variety of methods to generate revenue. “We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them,” Stone told United Kingdom-based trade publication Marketing Magazine’s Fiona Ramsay in a February report. “We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts,” Stone added.

Some industry observers have seen paid sponsor-driven search results or featured user listings as possible methods Twitter could use as it begins to implement a revenue-generating business model.

A growing number of businesses have been using Twitter to connect to customers and to provide quick customer support, including Starbucks, Comcast and Amazon, while reputation management has increasingly been the goal of some companies with Twitter accounts, such as Web hosting firm GoDaddy and shoe-seller Zappos.

via Twitter Changes Prioritize Search, Trends And Featured Users

User info stolen from music site

The music streaming service Spotify has been targeted by hackers.

The Swedish company says people’s personal details, including e-mail addresses, dates of birth and billing addresses, were all stolen.

However, it is thought credit-card details, which were handled by a third party, have remained secure.

Spotify has apologised for the security lapse and advised users who registered on the site before 19 December 2008 to change their passwords.

It is thought hackers gained access to user data at the end of 2008, although the security breach only came to light at the end of last week.

In the dark

Spotify’s communications manager, Jim Butcher, told BBC News the company had only become aware of the attack after receiving a message from the hackers.

“We haven’t had direct contact, it’s all via third-party sources, so we don’t know who they are and we don’t know where they are from.

“This wasn’t some kid playing on a computer, someone has spent hundreds of hours looking to hack into our system.”

“We’re still trying to find out the reasons they actually hacked our site, so it’s difficult for me to say what they want at the present time.”

Rory Cellan-Jones on Spotify

Launched in 2006, Spotify has more than one million registered users.

Instead of receiving a pay-per-download service, users can access the music for free, with tunes interrupted by advertising, or they can pay £10 a month for an ad-free service.

It is thought there are more than 250,000 users registered in the UK, but Spotify stressed that the number of compromised accounts was small.

“We think about 10,000 accounts [could be] at risk, although we are 95% sure it is a fraction of that,” said Mr Butcher.

In a blog posting, the company explained how the hack actually took place.

“The information that may have been exposed when our protocols were compromised is the password hashes [codes].

“As stated, we never store passwords, and they have never been sent over the internet unencrypted, but the combination of the bug and the group’s reverse-engineering of our encrypted streaming protocol may have given outsiders access to individual hashes.”

The company has apologised for the security lapse and promised users that it was making efforts to ensure the hack was not repeated.

viaUser info stolen from music site.

Report: Growth Of Paid Search Budgets Decline While SEO Budgets Increase

eMarketer’s latest report named Search Marketing Trends: Back to Basics says that in the realm of search marketing budgets, SEO budgets will increase in the next five years, while paid search budgets will decline relative to the overall marketing budgets for companies.

MediaPost reports the growth for SEO campaigns will increase from 17.7% in 2009 to 20.3% in 2013. At the same time, growth for paid search campaigns will decline from 15.9% in 2009 to 11.3% in 2013. Growth for both SEO and paid search both will decline between 2008 and 2009, due to the economy.

Here is a chart with those percentage breakdowns:

Search marketing will continue to grow over the years, reaching $23.4 billion by 2013, up from 12.2 billion in 2008. SEO spend will grow from 1.5 billion in 2008 to 3.85 billion in 2013, while paid search will grow from 7.7 billion in 2008 to 14.7 billion in 2013. By 2013, SEO will account for more than contextual ads, which will be earning just 3.6 billion, compared to SEO at 3.85 billion.

Here is a chart with the dollar breakdowns:

viaReport: Growth Of Paid Search Budgets Decline While SEO Budgets Increase.

Brand loyalty doesn’t come cheap

The economy may be pushing prices lower, but when it comes to brand loyalty consumers still aspire to lofty expectations. That’s the conclusion of the latest BrandKeys customer loyalty survey and it could portend a strategy change in internet marketing for brands that are trying to hold the high ground.

Brand value, according to BrandKeys CEO Robert Passikoff, means a lot more than brand pricing. The just-released index says that consumer expectations regarding brand value went up 20% this year versus last. Passikoff believes that in the ninth year of his survey of more than 60,000 consumers, that the expectation of a brand means much more than a steep discount. Value has been more important than ever among the 62 categories the survey covers.

Examples: In the insurance category, Allstate, which positions itself as the trusted rather than cheapest brand, was the winner. For beer, Sam Adams, the most expensive, beat Bud, the cheapest. For hospitality, W Hotels beat out brands that offer lodging for than 50 percent less. Price has been neutralized by expectations of value, trust, and brand differentiation.

For internet marketing this could signal a dramatic shift in strategy. Brands that have built their foundation on value pricing will need to continue that approach. After all, McDonald’s still won the fast food category. But the economic trends that are pointing brands such as Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom’s, and AT&T toward discounts could be reconsidered. Example: AT&T’s current internet campaign emphasizes offers for free phones. Nordstrom’s website is hawking 40 percent off designer accessories. If Passikoff’s survey is applicable, maybe AT&T should focus on building trust and value, and leave the free phones to other brands. Maybe Nordstrom’s should communicate selection and brands over pricing.

viaBrand loyalty doesn’t come cheap.