John Battelle's Searchblog

I like to do this exercise from time to time - asking how my predictions for the year are holding up given six months have passed since I posted them.  

Well, let's see, shall we?

1. We'll see an end to the recession, taken literally, by Q4 09.

I think most folks agree this will happen. I'm not saying it has, just that the consensus is we're on the way there.

2. The online media space will be hit hard by the economic downturn in the first half, but by year's end, will have chalked up moderate gains over last year in terms of gross spend.

Jury's out, hard to call this one, but my own experience indicates this has a good chance of happening.

3. Google will see search share decline significantly for the first time ever. It will also struggle to find an answer to the question of how it diversifies its revenue in 2009.

Ok, so is this significant?! Well, yes - it's the first share slip Google's had, and it happened this year, but it's tiny. Hey, it's a start. As for the answer to how it diversifies revenue? Well, the jury is out, but it's still all AdWords, all the time, so far. YouTube is struggling with a model, Google admits. Meanwhile, Facebook seems to have found one (in self service)...

4. Despite #3 above, Google stock will soar in by Q3-4 of 2009, mainly because demand will pick up, and when demand picks up, it's like rain on a field of newly sown wheat.

This is already starting to happen - GOOG has moved from below 300 in March to well over 400 now. But we'll see if it continues. Several analysts are predicting a return to 600 or 650, in fact.

5. Tied to #3 above, Microsoft will gain at least five points of search share in 2009, perhaps as much as 10.

I know, I'm crazy, right? But the company did release Bing just last month, already won two or so points of share, and has a 100mm marketing war chest, and its major distribution deals have yet to hit Comscore. Wait and see....

6. Yahoo and AOL will merge.

This one I may be wrong on, because first, AOL has to spin out. Or maybe it almost does but then combines with Yahoo this year....

7. ... in the second half of the year, Microsoft will buy its search monetization from the combined company.

Well...again, this takes longer to develop that this year, I'm guessing. I probably have egg on my face here.

8. Apple will see a significant reversal of recent fortunes.

Wow, I am so wrong on this so far. Even with Job's health issues, which are not what I meant when I wrote this. There is always the second half of the year.

9. Major brands will continue to struggle with the best way to interact with "social media."

True so far, but wow, what a great, great opportunity for folks who run companies in this space. Cough.

10. Agencies will increasingly see their role as that of publishers. Publishers will increasingly see their role as that of agencies.

I think this one has become obvious. I'll hope to prove it when I do my annual round up at the end of the year.

11. Twitter will continue its meteoric rise.

Remember, I said this back in January. Twitter was at 5.9mm uniques according to Compete. It's now broken 20mm there, and we all know it's way bigger than that. It took a pause last month, and we're all waiting to see what June's numbers look like....

12. Facebook will do something entirely shocking and unpredictable....As I think about it, it might be as simple as making Facebook Connect truly open, and changing its policies to make it drop dead easy to get data out of the service. Also, Facebook will build a Twitter competitor, but it will never leave beta and will ultimately be abandoned as not worth the time. Instead, Facebook will "friend" Twitter and the two companies will become strong partners.

Wow. They did it. At least the first part of it. We'll see about the second part.

13. Lucky #13 is reserved for my eternal mobile prediction: 2009 will see the year mobility becomes presumptive in every aspect of the web.

I think finally, this one will be true.

14. Lastly, I promise, I will have sold my book and will be hard at work on it.

Well, we'll see....

Thanks for keeping me honest!

Many folks have asked me when CM Summit videos would be posted, several are up now. They include the opener, above, in which I give a short overview of the state of online marketing from my perspective - start at about 6 mins in if you want to miss the throat clearing of setting up the show and thanking folks I've worked with. Perhaps the key thoughts: People Don't Join Ad Networks, and Publishers Are Communities of Mind.

I'm in the air on the way to the CM Summit, which FM hosts in New York Monday and Tuesday. The conference is sold out, but you can follow it via the #cmsummit search on Twitter. From my opening notes:

- Extraordinary content. Five conversations: A leader thinker in the VC world and investor in Twitter, the man responsible for Microsoft’s advertising strategy, the woman who faced the press on behalf of the White House as the entire media world shifted to digital, a chief marketer at Intel charged with moving billions to digital, and the founder and CEO of one of the largest social networks in the world.

- A focus on case studies, as promised. Cases from some of the biggest brands and most interesting thinkers in media, from GE, P&G, Amex, Microsoft, Google, and many more.

- And a few curveballs, new technologies and companies that will open our minds to new approaches to marketing, media and beyond...

Posting will be light here, as it has been for the past week. I'm heading to LA after three days in NYC to speak at my old high school graduation. It's very hard to believe it's been 26 years since that day for me. Wow.

Just wrote a long-ish post on FM over at the FM blog....from it:

One of the greatest challenges we face here at FM is answering a very simple question: What kind of a business are you?

When a reporter, partner, or colleague asks me this question, it's usually followed by a deep intake of breath on my part, because my answer often runs for quite some time. Federated Media wasn't built to answer easy questions, and our business isn't easy to define. Quite purposefully, we have built our business in the center of some swiftly changing currents at the nexus of media, marketing, and technology.

But if you don't take the time to define your brand publicly, others will. Over the past few months FM has been called a social media network, a blog network, a vertical ad network, an advertising rep firm, a media services firm, and even a new kind of advertising agency.

The truth is, FM incorporates aspects of all these businesses. What we are not, however, is any one of them alone.

Hence, our problem (I prefer opportunity, being eternally an optimist...)

So for the record, let me state what we believe FM *is*: FM is a media company, founded on an evolving definition of the word "media."

Well that took a long time. I've had something of a week, to be honest. I hope to be writing again soon. Not only did I lose my hard drive, I also has some family issues arise which distracted me from writing.

I'm finally pulling out of it, thanks to many folks. My blog software is reinstalled, and I'm almost there with the rest of my digital life.

Missing a week of writing (and normal work flow) made me realize how much I like to think out loud in this space. When I don't, it feels rather like when I miss a few days of exercise - I get edgy and irritable.

So hopefully, I'll be back to my calm, well exercised self soon.

Over at the HP SMB marketing site, my second post is up. Now, for most of you, this stuff will not be particularly new, but it's good to recall that just 42% of all SMBs have websites, and most of those are not particularly social in nature. From my post:

Most small business websites are not very good. That means you have a chance to really stand out. And that's a huge competitive advantage.

At this point you're probably rolling your eyes and saying "Yeah, right. Now I have to spend thousands of dollars making something that's just going to break in a few months, and then I'll have to pay another grand to fix it."

Not true. With small business and the web, the best way to start is to start small, and start social. Your business is a network of relationships - between vendors, clients, colleagues, and co workers. So instead of worrying about boiling your website ocean, trying simmering the social seas instead.

My computer died last night, and my phone is acting, as I said on Twitter, like a teen on bad booze. So posting will be light, as I have to use the web interface and I'm not a fan of it, compared to composing in Ecto. I expect to be back to normal by the weekend, but my hard drive is in the shop. I hope it comes back.

I'm traveling this week, and most likely quiet on the site, though one never knows. .... follow me on Twitter if you want the blow by blow, I'm in NY for an Amex small business event...I'll post more on Twitter once I have details.

Fridays have become days where I catch up on all that I've missed during a hectic week of travel and focused meetings with the team at FM and tons of really interesting partners.

The past week has been particularly rich in travel and meetings, which means I've not noted nearly all the things I'd like to here.

So in no particular order, here are a few thoughts about things I've seen lately.

First, I've been talking with Richard Rosenblatt at Demand Media quite a bit, he has a model that is really gathering momentum. A caveat, we share an investor in Oak, but it wasn't Oak that created the lucky coincidence of Richard and I sharing a flight from LA to San Jose earlier in the week. Demand is based in LA, and like many successful companies there, is often overlooked up here in the Valley or out in New York. But Richard and his team are quietly building a major media company in the flats of Santa Monica. I won't give away all of Richard's secret sauce, but he has a content strategy that really groks search and social media (you can see on example of it here, with YouTube, and get a sense of what he's all about here, in his talk at Web 2 last year).

Next, I met with the CEO and CTO of Aardvark this week. There is a really, really, really long post in that company and its platform, and how it changes the framing and the game in terms of mixing conversational interfaces, out-of-the box approaches to scale, and more. A few big ideas: leveraging the deep knowledge that is buried not in the web, but in each of our heads (real time, conversational search platform); building a service that is not in any way dependent upon becoming a destination; giving someone your email is the equivalent of allowing them to add something to your To Do list; the implications of the data that this service creates; and much more. My spidey senses go off about once every year or two. They are off the chart on this company.

I spent a good couple of hours at HP this week as well. FM has done business with nearly every division of HP over the past four years, and it's remarkable to spend time simmering in the culture of a company that is, in just about every way possible, Really Grown Up. HP has more than 300K employees, but it was founded on the base principles (and with the base narrative) to which nearly every Valley startup aspires. Every time I visit I am struck by the sterility and grayness of the company's initial appearance, and then how warm, innovative, and driven the people working there turn out to be.

Which leads me to Google. I've been getting a lot of feedback from folks about troubles and growing pains there, and have done a fair amount of thinking about it. I've been sort of hard on the company of late, but there is a much longer thought piece to be written along the lines of themes I've been all about for the past five years - how does the company become, well, more like HP? I met this week with Katie Stanton Jacobs, a former Google who is now Director of Citizen Participation at the White House. (How cool is that title?!). Our conversation reinforced my thinking about the pros and the cons of working at Google now. The company has a very hard transition to make, to my mind, in terms of talent retention and management style. But that's not endemic to Google, it's endemic to any great company that has reached the lofty position in which Google finds itself. And by the way, what Katie is doing - leaving a very good job with tons of stock to work for the government and try to really change the world - well that's just really, really inspiring.

I gave a keynote earlier in the week at the OMMA conference, and then sat on a panel about social media. OMMA was pretty well attended, just as IAB was in February, reminding me once again that our industry, while deeply impacted by this recession, continues to be optimistic and focused on investment in the future.

While in LA I met with several large clients, including an auto manufacturer, a major New York agency and brand, and representatives of several large entertainment brands. I can't say much about the meetings other than to report that while the economy may be in the dumper, there is still a lot of spending, a lot of innovation, and a lot of excitement about the future.

Earlier I met with the founders of Livescribe and am currently testing their Pulse pen. This device initially seems like a "nice to have" gadget but the implications are profound. Like Aardvark, it pushes the web and computing out of the boxes we are comfortable with. Ideas to note: the paper Internet; capturing the investment of hundreds of years of writing culture (in all its manifestations as reflective of our minds and fingers); binaural microphone and privacy/social implications; "pencasting" and the concept of "authoring a flash movie using pen and paper." Mind bending. Both companies will be at our CM Summit, FWIW.

Speaking of Summits, I did a lot of work on both the CM and Web 2 Summits this week. The lineups for both is really coming together. I don't write much about how I do this kind of work, but it's a lot like reporting - I make a lot of phone calls to a lot of people, and brainstorm about who might have something to say that will resonate with the program. This was a particularly fruitful week on both conferences, we're nearly through blocking out the entire CM Summit program, and we're very close to announcing the theme and initial line up of speakers for Web 2. Stay tuned, as they say.

Oh, and it was a big week for innovation with Twitter. With our partners McCann and Microsoft, we launched a first - ExecTweets, an experiment in collaborative publishing that reflects a lot of innovative (and ongoing) thinking - big props to Marc Ruxin at McCann and his partner at Microsoft Bill Capodanno, who both had the vision to lean into this program in a way that works for the Twitterverse, and are committed to ongoing iteration and learning.

We launched a second Twitter program yesterday as well - MarchTweetness, which is focused on college basketball, as you might expect, and big props go out to AT&T for also seeing the value of adding value to the Twitterverse.

Now, on to more writing, thinking, and Friday-ing. Hope yours is going well, and have a great weekend.

Thanks to the hard working folks at Six Apart and Ivan at FM, Searchblog now lets you comment using your Facebook login. This makes it a lot easier to leave comments if you're already on Facebook. Now, if I can only get the Facebook comments on my tweets of these posts to populate on this blog (hint hint, Facebook), the loop will be complete!  

Our annual event in New York, The Conversational Marketing Summit, has just announced its initial lineup. It's going to be very, very good. I host this event each year in New York and this year we are focusing on answering a simple question: What Works?  

Speakers include:

Fred Wilson, who I can't wait to talk to about his investments in Twitter, Comscore, Tacoda, Boxee, Clickable, Etsy, Tumblr, and tons of other really intersting CM companies.

Bonnie Fuller, the world's most successful women's interest editor, who is striking out on her own, a la Arianna Huffington.

Speaking of which, Betsy Morgan, CEO of HuffPo, will also be on hand to discuss that property's extraordinary growth.

Representing the majors will be Mike Hoefflinger, who left Intel (where he ran $1 billion of partner marketing programs) to head up product marketing at Facebook, and Eileen Naugton, who directs brand initiatives across Google.

Magid Abraham, CEO of Comscore, will give us insight on measurement, and we've got a pride of senior agency and media folks: Sean Finnegan, President and Chief Digital Officer of Starcom, Marc Ruxin, EVP and Chief Innovation Officer of McCaan, Richard Kang, EVP at MTV Networks.

And major brands will be well represented: Lou Paskalis, VP Global Media at American Express, Jen Walsh, Global Director of Digital Media for GE, Lucas Watson, Global Team Leader for Digital at P&G, and many many more.

And of course you know I love innovative companies, so joining us will be Max Ventilla, CEO of Aardvark, Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery, and Seth Goldstein, CEO of Social Media.

And that's just a taste. Join me in New York, to kick off Internet Week, June 1-2. Register here !

This morning marks the launch of ExecTweets, a platform my company has built working with Microsoft, its sponsor, and Twitter. I'm proud of the work here, it reflects a lot of thinking about how to use conversations like Twitter to fuel what I hope is a value-added experience. In this case, we're filtering for business-realated content from senior execs in various industries, like retail, healthcare, government, and more, and we've created a platform for community conversation, voting, input, and recommendations. (FM blog post here).

It's a first effort, and we're already working on the next iteration. Microsoft has been a great partner because they understand the concept of marketing as conversational media, not just as "campaigns to be flighted." And it's been great to work with Twitter, which in its blog post announcing ExecTweets notes: "our focused commitment to Twitter itself means we don't have much time or resources to build these interesting topical experiences. It turns out the folks over at Federated Media have both the resources and the expertise. So if you're a major brand and you want to sponsor a topic-focused social media experience with Twitter, we suggest Federated Media—they'll fix you up right."

Appreciate the shout out. And yes, as Mashable notes, this is partially a business model for Twitter, but it's not one of the major legs of the stool, (directionally, it is for FM, but it's not a cornerstone for Twitter - more of my thoughts on TweetSense and other Twitter models here). Twitter has a history of promoting applications and projects they think are interesting, relevant, or valuable regardless of any financial arrangement. Federated Media felt that Twitter should share some of the revenue associated with ExecTweets since this project is made possible using their open platform.

We hope to do a lot more projects along these lines, please let me know what you think, and how we can improve them.

My former partner at the Industry Standard has been building something important out in the expanses of Montana (caveat - I am a very minor investor - the only such investment I've ever made - and sometimes offer my counsel to Jonathan). It's called New West, and for the past four years he's taken what he's learned over more than 20 years as a journalist and entrepreneur and applied it to the same "problem" that has elicited so much hand wringing in the traditional print world. He wrote a great piece today about his experiences. From it:

We started this company in 2005 partly on the premise that the news business would be changing in profound ways, and that would create opportunities. We were also very interested in what we considered a very big story - the dramatic transformation of the Rocky Mountain West from an under-populated, resource-dependent region to a dynamic, fast-growing hub of the emerging “amenity” and technology economies. We thought the story was regional in scope, but at the same time we were very conscious of the fact that people relate most closely to what’s most local, so we established NewWest.Net as a regional online magazine with local sites in key markets.

The editorial model relies on a combination of professional journalism (currently two full-time and four part-time professionals, as well as a number of freelancers); what we think of as semi-professional journalism (talented writers or subject-matter experts who do something else for their day job); and citizen journalism (bloggers and others who contribute on specific topics, sometimes for small sums of money). We don’t have copy editors, but rather copyedit each others’ stuff. We’re direct and conversational in our style, which is actually easier and quicker once you get used to it, and more appealing to readers than old-style newspaper formulas.

We have a very active photo group on Flickr, and get great feature photography from that. We mostly use Google for fact-checking - not fool-proof, but it works. We use Twitter and Facebook and RSS to push our stories out into the world. We do great video-driven stories when we can, and happily link to others’ videos. In fact, we happily link to a lot of stuff, sometimes in combination with our own reporting and sometimes not. We have lively comment threads, which we manage with as light a hand as we can and which are often additive to the stories in addition to being entertaining. We have very active event calendars in our local markets - separate from our main sites but well-integrated, and with a dedicated editor. We’re experimenting with a new social media site in Missoula, and we’ll see where that goes.

Our coverage is far from comprehensive, and we rarely write about sports or TV or movies (except when the big documentary film festival is in town). Big investigative projects are few and far between. We’re not a “paper of record,” and we’re not (or at least not yet) a replacement for local newspapers. Still, if you ask people around here where they go for smart coverage of growth and development, land-use issues, local food, regional politics, and community culture, a lot of people would say NewWest.Net. On some big stories, such as the boom and bust of the regional real estate market and the bankruptcy of the Yellowstone Club and other high-end resorts, we have been way ahead of the pack.

I mention this because I've written quite about about the "death of journalism" (see here, here, for example) and have always had in mind pointing to the work Jonathan and his team has done. Now he's written the piece for me!

I could not make the event, but FM had two participants. Chas summed it up this way: "the format is like a reality TV show: A contest among groups of digital marketing experts, Apprentice-style, in an effort to tap social media tools to sell Tide t-shirts for charity."

It was a fun night, from what I've heard, and $100,000 was raised for charity, which is really cool.

But I really liked what Peter Kim said about how it was an important event not just for charity and team building, but also for P&G as a company, learning to become more social. Just like with Comcast, here's another example of a massive company learning new tricks. From Peter's post:

At the end of the evening, P&G's CMO Marc Pritchard remarked that in the future, all employees should get involved in activating connections similar to what had just been witnessed.

The significance of that idea is staggeringly huge. This is a company with 138,000 employees starting to realize the value from having all of its constituents connected and activated. They're also learning about new tools to change the process of engagement. Events like "Digital Night" help recalibrate the company's mindset.

P&G is taking steps to make social business a reality.

Sure, it also meant a massive promotion for Tide. I don't have any problem with that. I got shirts for all of FM's staff. And it felt good to do it.

Mondays are not always easy. But today some news about my main work at FM makes me so happy I have to tell you all - Federated Media has been named "Publisher of the Year" by Ave A/Razorfish, along with Yahoo and the New York Times. I'm beaming!

Who doesn't do a vanity search once in a while? My fixation on real time search has only heightened my otherwise occasional check into the funhouse mirror of search. What I found tonight:

Google:

The results are pretty up to date. The second result is my "hottest" post in recent days. Only one ad, however. (Update: Today the hottest post is my 2009 predictions. Innaresting.)

Yahoo:

Note the other suggested searches. Also, second result is a far longer fuse on "hot post" - my predictions from a year ago. Lots of ads!

Microsoft:

Love all those images! Also doing the suggested searches. Especially love the image at the far right. But alas...no ads. Sigh. Pretty consistent with revenues, I must say. Oh, and the idea of "xRank" is new to me (I am sure I missed it earlier), it's a ranking of "notable people". It's moved from 103 to 56 this morning. Hmmm.

Conclusion: For this blogger, it's clear Google is paying attention to getting as close as is realistic to real time search.

But mark my words: The real target in real time search, for Google anyway, is Facebook. That is an opening for Twitter.

As part of a partnership with HP, I'm writing over at their new Small Business Marketing Guide. Longtime readers know I always am transparent about these deals, as I was with my work at American Express. I love this work, because it lets me write longer form, and never tells me what to write about.

Here's an excerpt of the piece:

We humans are all wired for a great story. We love narrative, it’s how we relate to each other and the world. Over the course of the past 20 years I’ve been involved in naming a lot of new things - from the early days at Wired (more on that in a minute) to Web 2.0, to my current work at Federated Media. And as I review all the names and brands I’ve been involved in starting or advising, one thing becomes crystal clear to me: the best names are ones that have a great story buried inside.

It’s often said that a brand is a “vessel waiting to be filled.” In other words, you can call a new product or service anything, and after a while, if your product is successful, that brand will come mean whatever experience it ends up delivering. While I generally agree with the thesis, I’ve found that having a great story is a very good way to jumpstart a new brand, and a great way to help sell it and keep defining it in the long term.

Read the entire post here.

I just noticed, thanks to my crack net admin Ken, that http://www.battellemedia.net/ (I'm not going to link to it and give it juice) is being parked, skinned, and used to make money. Yuck. Help - what do you all suggest I do about it? I must have forgotten to renew it, or perhaps I never bought it. Ick.

Registration for this year's Conversational Marketing Summit, thrice sold out, is now open. Register here!

Our theme this year is "What Works: The Case Studies." As we write on the site:

Two years ago, the first Conversational Marketing Summit made the case for a new kind of engagement with audiences. Now we have real cases to study. Join us for a chance to look back at what the creative pioneers have learned and turn that experience into great ideas for the next stage of Conversational Marketing.

Presenters this year are listed here and we already have a great early lineup, but I am now soliciting ideas, and want yours. There are so many great examples of smart digital marketing to talk about. What are your favorites?

For a quick look at some of our past speakers and insights, here's a video our conference director put together:

Oops, went on vacation and forgot to put up a note! See you all next week....