John Battelle's Searchblog

Facebook's opening up even more, as CNet reports. Facebook has posted an update to its "Publisher" settings - basically, the instrumentation to your status updates - that makes it possible to broadcast the value you create in the social web through composition - of a status update, a blog post, or any other action that you might wish to declare. You can instrument it to be seen only by your network, or your network's network, or everyone - and it's that everyone part that makes Facebook a lot more like Twitter in terms of the ability for developers to create interesting executions based on that firehose. Think about what Microsoft did with ExecTweets, but with Facebook scale. Of course, that's just the tip o' the iceberg. Exciting stuff.

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.

This is another step in what I've been calling the conversational interface...

It had to happen, and it has. Twitter's unbelievable growth numbers have flatlined, or even gone down, if you look at Quantcast (the site is not Quantified).  

This was predictable, given all the media hype and new folks, and the very real newbie problem I outlined in this post last month.

I predict Twitter will address this issue, and growth will resume, but at a more moderate and sustainable pace. But this is a very clear sign that Twitter, which made the cover of Time magazine last week, is on the other, less happy side of a traditional hype cycle.

As a reminder, here's what I said in a post just a month ago, noting the incredible growth of Twitter:

I think this is both Twitter's most important and dangerous phase of its young life. The retention problem must be addressed, and quickly. In my previous post about Twitter adding value to new users, I suggested Twitter incorporate some structure around its suggested users feature.

But with an inflection like this, I think it's time to swallow hard and embrace some serious social media jujitsu. In short, Twitter should integrate Facebook Connect in its signup process, and offer it as a feature for current users.

For the past few days I've been focused on a final draft of an essay, co-authored with Tim O'Reilly, focusing on the theme of this year's Web 2.0 Summit. It's rewarding work, reminiscent of the early days of Wired, when I'd regularly edit or write long form pieces focusing on big ideas and the future, but grounded in real world examples from today.  

But writing and editing this kind of stuff is also challenging work, and I often procrastinate, as I am right now, by writing a blog post or skimming the web for interesting tidbits. And boy, did I find a funny one today. According to CNN, the term "Web 2.0" is not only now an "official word" in the English language, it's also the millionth one, of all things. (This according to the Global Language Monitor, a website that uses algorithms to determine when words enter the language.)

Too funny!

The theme for this year's conference is "Web Squared," a very real nod to the idea that "Web 2.0," five years in, needs to be refreshed. From the draft Tim and I are working on:

The Web is evolving so quickly, it’s clear the “versioning” terminology that we borrowed from the software industry – Version 1.0, 2.0, etc. – no longer captures the pace and impact of the Web’s true nature. The web opportunity is no longer growing arithmetically, it’s growing exponentially. Hence our theme for this year: Web Squared.

We plan to post a draft of this paper soon, and will be asking for all your input in making it better. Meanwhile, it's kind of cool that a term Tim and his partner Dale Dougherty coined way back in 2003 has made it into the history books. I wonder if and when "Web Squared" might make it in?! I guess we'll know in five or so years...

Gian Fulgoni, Executive Chair of Comscore, has an interesting analysis of what's happening in paid search lately. It's germane to my earlier posts about paid search share sliding and Google's decision to allow trademark ad bidding.

In his post, Gian notes that overall search queries are up dramatically (68% over two years) but:

if one looks at the number of paid clicks, the growth rate is a lower 18%, which raises the question: why have paid clicks grown 3x slower than the total number of queries?

Gian answers:

The reason appears to be that the ad coverage (i.e. the percent of search results pages with a paid ad) has dropped from 64% to 51% of searches.

Here's where it gets interesting. Why has ad coverage dropped? Gian has two hypotheses. First, search engines are getting better to reduce less relevant advertisers from the mix. But the second reason points to a more important potential breakdown in the AdWords model:

An analysis of comScore data shows that search queries are actually getting longer and that as searchers become more experienced they are using more words per search query. And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization.

In short, our queries are getting closer to real conversation, real natural language, and Google's algorithms are having a harder time keeping up - matching advertiser demand to our increasingly complex queries.

As Gian said, fascinating.

Also worth noting, my pal Chas's analysis of what the decline in paid search means for brand advertising.

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.

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.

I have been thinking about this a lot. How we are finally taking technology and making it serve our evolution, the two major breakthroughs of being human - our fingers - finely tuned gesticulation as a reflection of our minds - and our voices - again, finally tuned expression of our minds.

This post is really a bookmark of sorts, for more thinking that I've been doing about how this relates to search, real time search, and interface.
Props to Jeff Kravitz (among others) who reminded me how important this is. Jeff is a wonderful photographer, check out his work here.

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 !

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.

This is going to be a very big deal. Or forgettable.

I am not sure which.

I had a conversation with a NYT reporter about this today. (Story here, but I was not quoted). It made me think. First off, this product was not launched by Eric, Sergey, or Larry. So who knows if this is a Big Deal Inside Google, or Pasta Against the Walls?

You all know how much I love the idea of the Conversation Economy. It's where my nose is taking me these days. So the concept of Google boiling the vast Oceania Vox is very, very compelling.

But then again....I find it hard to trust Google is really serious about this market.

For example, how many real live customer service reps does the company plan to have tasked to this product? That, to me, is a Very Important Question.

It's the essential human question that drives Google. I bring it up all the time. Community. Media. People. How do you make people scale?! How does Google, a company driven by algorithms and scale, find its Voice?

It can't be all algorithms. Things that Work Perfectly Because You Get How To Make It Work Even If Your Non Technical Pals Can't don't scale. Things that Really Do Work Without Customer Service can (this is Google search, or Amazon, or....etc.).

I just wonder if Google Voice is one of those disruptors. If it's effortless, if it works without having to call someone to help me make it work, well, it's a huge, huge hit. But this is telecommunications. I have a hunch it's harder than that.

I for one very much want it to work. I love the idea of Google Voice.

I just wonder about the execution.

(By the way, compare Google search to Twitter search for "Google Voice." Innaresting.)

Found in this Wired piece on Comcast:

Thanks to Famous Frank (here's Searchblog's interview), Comcast began thinking about going even further. The weekend that the company published its response to the FCC—outlining how it managed its network and how it planned to change—one of Roberts' lieutenants suggested something even more radical: having ordinary company engineers go on message boards to answer questions. It was the kind of proposal that violated every tenet of the old cable code of business, and the matter could be settled only at an executive board meeting on the 52nd floor.

Roberts, sitting with his back to the window, listened to both sides. Then he declared it was time to be a bit more transparent. He finally got it. He was turning a page. "I think we should do this, but we all have to have thick skins," he said. "People are going to vent. But that's all right."

Comcast is joining the conversation, and that is a major, major shift for Big Business. It won't be an easy shift, it'll be way easier to go back to old habits. But it's encouraging to see Really Big Companies making the transition to the Conversation Economy.

(Hat tip, @TheJames)

This is priceless: (via Boing Boing)

At San Francisco's Pizzeria Delfina, they know how to own their pain. Rather than wringing their hands over Internet sourpusses who give them one-star Yelp ratings, they've printed up tees with excerpts from the most scathing reviews ("This place sucks") and given them to the staff to wear.

I call this practice "conversational jujitsu" - take the negative force of complaints, embrace them, and use them to your advantage. Just wait until really large companies start to do this. Then we'll see remarkable change in this economy.

More as ... I write the book.

Search, and Google in particular, was the first true language of the Web. But I've often called it a toddler's language - intentional, but not fully voiced. This past few weeks folks are noticing an important trend - the share of traffic referred to their sites is shifting. Facebook (and for some, like this site, Twitter) is becoming a primary source of traffic.

Why? Well, two big reasons. One, Facebook has metastasized to a size that rivals Google. And two, Facebook Connect has come into its own. People are sharing what they are reading, where they are going, and what they are doing, and the amplification of all that social intention is spreading across the web.

This is all part of the shift from static to real time search. Social is the fundamental element of that shift. What are YOU doing? What is on YOUR mind? Who do YOU want to SHARE it with?

Social search has been predicted (and funded) for years. It's finally happening. The conversation is evolving, from short bursts of declared intent inside a query bar, to ongoing, ambient declaration of social actions. Both will continue, but it's increasingly clear why Google's obsessed with Facebook (and Facebook with Twitter). And they are not alone.

As I think through the major themes of the book I hope to write over the next year, the word "horizontal" keeps coming up, over and over and over.

It comes up in nearly every conversation I have with marketers. More often than not, when you get to the heart of an innovative marketing program, you find a block that can be summed up thusly: "That's not what we do."

In other words, "We're the marketing group. That's a great idea, John, but it requires we work with the (customer service, IT, business development, human relations, public affairs, product development, legal) department. And while we'd love to do that, well, we've (have never done that, have tried it before and it didn't work, don't like those guys, been told not to do it, don't have budgets that cross departments, etc. etc. etc.)."

But marketing is, in its essence, a horizontal practice. (I wrote more about this on the American Express Open Forum site.) Every customer interaction is marketing. Every partnership is marketing. Every employee is a marketer.

And all your data, well, that's marketing too.

Case in point: Mashery. I had a good conversation today with Mashery's CEO Oren Michels. Mashery has a smart (and very Web 2) model: It provides API infrastructure for enterprises looking to turn their businesses into platforms. In other words, business who are smart enough to realize they need to join the conversation economy.

But joining the conversation economy means more than skinning your corporate website with Twitter search results (though I commend Skittles for doing it). It means taking your core assets - the data that drives value and knowledge inside your enterprise - and offering it as fuel for the collective intelligence of all your partners - your channel, your vendors, and, ultimately, your customers.

What does that look like? Well, Mashery has plenty of examples, including the New York Times and Best Buy. It's late and I wish I could write a lot more, but let me sum it up this way: Companies that create platforms which enable customers to leverage internal data with collective intelligence will win. Those that don't, will lose.

Oren had a very telling insight, one that plays to the issue of "horizontal versus vertical." Most enterprises see his services as "IT", and push him to "talk to the CTO." But most CTOs don't care about creating new channels of distribution, new business rules, and opening new markets. They see their job as servicing that which already exists. That's a recipe for epic fail.

Mashery is not an IT play, it's a business development play. Smart companies understand that.

More on this soon.

Love this:

http://skittles.com/

The home page is literally a Twitter search for "skittles". That's a brand embracing the conversation. Well done.

(Thanks Matt J)

Yesterday at the NAPTE show TiVo CEO issued a call to action to the television business: get a new business model, or suffer the same fate as the newspaper.
I think he's right, and I've got some ideas about what that model should be. I'll be posting more on this, but the short overview is this: Television should respond to the exhaustive knowledge it has of our viewing habits, and create a model that trades value for engagement. I sketched this out a while back in my post "TV and Search Merge" but that was more than four years ago. A lot has changed, and I've learned a lot more about how marketing works. So look for another Friday sketch, tommorrow, outlining my more considered thoughts on the subject.

Michael Hirschorn, who I have worked with on failed print endeavors (Inside, the magazine, back in 2000), writes a thoughtful piece on the end of print journalism, and in particular the New York Times, in - irony alert - the Feb. issue of the Atlantic, which - double irony alert - I read online and would never have seen otherwise, given I no longer subscribe to the print version.

The NYT Co. is an investor in my company. I wish them only well. But I do differ somewhat with Michael when he writes:

Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. And it will likely have plenty of company.

I believe the print edition will continue, but in a very different form. Print, as I've been saying since the days of Wired, will continue in the digital age, but it will have to pass new tests of value before it can survive. Print has to justify the costs associated with print, now that there are options for information beyond print.

The key issue Michael raises is "how will great journalism get done without institutions like the New York Times?" He goes on to answer that the model of journalism itself is due for an overhaul, and I cannnot agree more. In fact I'd go way, way further than he's gone. More on that in an upcoming post.

One of my readers noted that I've written a lot of off-blog stuff, and I'm rather proud of it. And I've noted (in my "How did I do 2008" post) that I did not really make the progress I wish I had on my book. But working with partners like Amex, I wrote nearly 20 column-sized pieces - around 15,000 words - and nearly all of them are sketches toward the book I hope to write. Here are some of the pieces I wrote elsewhere this year:

American Express Open Forum Blog

It’s Time to Put This Myth To Rest
In which I argue that marketing works in social media.

Leadership In Troubled Times
When things go wrong, take responsibility.

As The World Turns..Inside Out
My opening post on the economic troubles this past Fall.

Think Local, Act Conversational - It Just Might Save Your Business
How conversant is your small business?

Product Development IS Marketing, And Vice Versa
The title says it all.

Take 48!
A new policy we put in place at FM, picked up on by the WSJ.

Every Great Business Is An Argument
What's your argument?

Three Steps to Becoming A Web Conversationalist
Some tips on getting conversant.

More On Search and Your Business
A few "Search 101" tips.

Linking Search, Conversation, And Your Site
How it all fits together.

The Successful Business Owner Is a Great Conversationalist
How good are you?

You’re In the Media Business Now.
This is my core argument for all businesses, regardless of industry.

Future of Search - Sponsored by Reuters

Is Microsoft Cashback the Future of Search?
Where Microsoft got it right, and wrong.

A Search Is Not Just A Search
Toward a new interface in search.

Thought Leadership Series - Looksmart

Shifting Search from Static to Real-time
My Twitter moment.

Algorithms and Community: Voice Wins
At the end of the day, we're people first.

What We Lose As Search Gets Personal

A case for a common search experience.

Pete Spande, who runs the East for FM and therefore toward whom I am favorably inclined, has written a brief but very true post on the myth that marketing in social media should somehow be free. It's not free, just like throwing a great social event isn't free, but it can be very efficient and it can certainly help get marketers to their goals, if done right.

Social Media Marketing is like entertaining in the physical world. If you want to share an experience with a group of people (either personally or professionally) you need to go to where the people are and get their attention or entice them to come to you. In either case, you have to invest something to get a return.

Pete argues there are various ways to get this done. Many marketers take his first approach (pull out all the stops), usually by attaching themselves to well known celebrities (come hang with LeBron in our Officially Sanctioned NBA social media play! (ooops, this site is no longer active!).

This approach (have the Foo Fighters play! Let folks know Britney will be showing up!) usually fails, and has given social marketing a bad name inside many major brands. "Hey, we tried a deal with (Facebook, MSN, Google, etc) and while a lot of people showed up, no needles really moved, and it all seemed to dissipate as quickly as it started."

That's because this approach is pretty much more of the same old sh*t - create a social media execution that has very little value as an organic community, pay a large site a fair chunk of dough to push traffic at it, and then watch as the traffic bounces off it as if it were a heat shield.

There's another way to do it. A few in fact. I'm particularly a fan of two approaches: First, finding the true leaders of a community you care about, and engaging them in a dialog about how best to join the conversation they lead. What you come up with just might be something like HP's VoicePosts, Intel's embedding code and support of BB's OffWorld, or American Express' Open Forum.

Secondly, I like the approach of determining you have something valuable to add on your own, and you might become a publisher in your own right, as long as what you build is truly valuable. That's how you end up with Microsoft's CrowdFire, or Asus' WePC.com (or come to think of it, American Express' Open Forum again.)

Social media marketing is about brands acting, well, social. Which means they need to show up to the party with a nice bottle of wine, if that's what the party calls for. They need to come ready to have a dialog, and add value to the event. Of course, if they show up with Britney, we won't complain, if she respects the vibe of the community. If she can't, well, she probably shouldn't come in the first place.