Our latest “Game Changers” review of important news developments looks at recent changes that are impacting both old and new media in a positive way.  Here are four transformations worth keeping an eye on.    

The New York Times and Paid Content

The New York Times announced last week that it will begin charging for online content starting in January 2011.  The Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports and a handful of other publications already charge for some or all of their content.  PM Digital’s Chris Paradysz predicted in a prior blog post that this would become a trend in 2010 – the NY Times move announced this week supports that.  As a long-time reader of the NY Times, I have watched the steady shrinkage of the paper.  Some of this has been due to cost-cutting and, more recently, fewer advertisements.  Circulation is down, too.  Surely the NY Times needs a new business model to withstand these circumstances. Should the paper ever wither away and shut down, it would be a real loss of quality content.  I support the Times’ new fee structure and definitely plan on paying for it.

Text Donations and the Evolution of Payment

Texted donations brought millions of dollars in aid for Haiti.  American Red Cross’ 90999 and UNICEF’s 20222 raised considerable sums though this method.   Based on the amount of individual donations received through texting, it appears that the simplicity and speed millions experienced in making their donations this way is appealing.  Another success driver is ease of advertising, which was done widely on TV.  Also notable is that the 90%+ abandon rates typically seen with website  donations were not a factor with the texting method. 

After it’s all been tallied, my guess is that the donations themselves would have been higher had they been placed online.  It’s also worth noting that nonprofits won’t have future access to the donor names for cultivation efforts since the carriers won’t release texting donor data to the charities.  What we don’t know is if texting yielded donations from people who would never have given otherwise.  If so, texting represents a brand new universe created with a new response mechanism.   We may be on the cusp of other uses for cell phones with the carriers doing the payment collection.  Was this a one shot or the future?   Consider other payment evolutions.  Cash was replaced by checks, which were in turn replaced by credit/debit cards. While we’re seeing texting as a new front-end acquisition method, the backend evolution may turn out to be an even bigger story.       

Super Bowl Ads Go Long with Social Media

Super Bowl advertising will be getting lots of play this year making the $3 million spent per 30-second ad go further than it ever has in the past.  Since it’s also an Olympics year, these ads will be shown repeatedly from now through at least mid-February.  As has been the case for the past few years, YouTube will make the ads available for viewing in one fell swoop, and this year they’ll be hoping for even more engagement by adding contests and ratings.  Twitter will play a big roll this year too, with the ads being tweeted and retweeted by the marketers who paid for them and (hopefully) by viewers as well.  Will the viral distribution be as big as the advertisers hope or will people get tired of the hype?  If these ads do have legs, the social media component could be a very nice value-add to the advertisers.  What’s likely is that those with a quality product will get wide distribution. 

A New Device from Apple

The iTablet, iPad, iSlate, TabletMac – whatever the name turns out to be — is the latest exciting development from Apple.  We could be looking at a new device that garners the type of love shown for the iPod and iPhone.  Not to mention the Kindle.  In fact, the iTunes store – already the number one shopping destination for music – has no doubt made Apple’s new device of particular interest to content providers like The New York Times.   I am not sure yet if I personally am ready for another device but this one should definitely be worth checking out.  January 27^th is the date the specifics should be announced.

Suzy Sandberg is President of PM Digital.

Last week was a busy one in the search world. Bing and Google both announced new relationships with Twitter, soon making all public tweets indexable and searchable from your favorite search engine. Bing also announced that Facebook updates would be part of the search experience.

This is the first step in a MASSIVE change in the way search works.

Why is this a massive change? With these true torrents of content emerging from Twitter and Facebook, it will be impossible for the search engines to use their traditional metrics to determine what is an authoritative search result. The traditional authority-based algorithm becomes significantly less relevant.

Today, you can see what is happening at Twitter through Bing at http://www.bing.com/twitter. This isn’t a true integration with search results, as it is a separate search experience, but as search engines move to some kind of universal search experience (see my post talking about Google’s Bento Box Search Experience), it is inevitable that these real-time search updates will compete for prominence with the “traditional” search results.

So why does this matter?

Natural search engine results are ordered through a complex algorithm, but one of the primary indicators of authority (and therefore more likely to appear at the top of the listings) is how many quality links point to a page. Typically, the higher the number of quality links to the page, the higher the page shows up in search results. But in the new world of torrents from Twitter and Facebook, there is no time for any tweet or FB posting to grow this link-based authority. So, other than timeliness, how will the torrent be ranked in authority?

There are dozens of ways to think about this. Perhaps it is the number of Facebook friends or Twitter followers that help you gain authority? But that seems ripe for abuse by spammers. Or maybe it is how long you’ve been tweeting or Facebooking? But that seems a silly way to determine authority in a real time world.

Ultimately it will all come down to REPUTATION.  Reputation is the new PageRank.

Although this is speculation on my part, I think that based on who follows you, and the relative importance of YOU in the context of your follower’s entire social network, your authority will come from how reputable you are to your social network. If every follower clicks on a link that you publish or if you have a bigger share of voice inside your social network than others, you would score highly in a reputation index.

The higher your reputation index, the more relevant, the more authoritative and the more visible your social stream will be in the search results.

The next step from reputation is localized reputation and personalized search results.  But we will save that story for another day.

Tim Kilroy is Vice President of Natural Search at PM Digital. This article first appeared in MediaPost.

Outbound links. If your site includes a social bookmark or sharing tool, measuring usage of this tool can help answer…

• Which social sites are my customers using to share my content?
• Which types of content are customers sharing most?  Should frequently shared content be more prominently featured?
• What type of customer is sharing content on social media outlets? Is your business benefiting from this?

Usage data from sharing tools provides insight into which social spaces customers are active in and what content most interests them.  Tracking this activity within your analytics package (Google Analytics, SiteCatalyst, etc.) allows you to view this data alongside other site metrics and use it for segmenting visitors.  Alternatively, many sharing widgets offer free reporting on how visitors are using them.  If your site offers a bookmark/sharing tool, consider tagging the shared URLs with tracking parameters to more reliably measure visitors arriving at your site from these links.

Inbound traffic from social media. Measuring traffic arriving at your site from social media can help answer questions like…

• Which social media sites are visitors and customers using to access my site?
• Which content sections of my site are generating the most social-initiated visits?
• Is traffic originating from social sites trending upward?

Inbound traffic from social media sites provides another view of where conversations are occurring and which content is generating interest.  Keep in mind that traffic from these sources, even click-based traffic, can present tracking challenges due to the many ways that visitors can reach your site.  Traffic from Twitter can be especially susceptible to under-reporting due in part to the many ways people use this service, such as the Twitter website itself or desktop and mobile clients like Tweetie and Twitterific.  (SearchEngineLand recently outlined some factors affecting the under-reporting of Twitter traffic by analytics packages.)  While tracking is still imperfect, analyzing trends in activity from social media can improve understanding of customer behavior and provide insight into the content that is driving traffic.

Brand mention monitoring. Measuring brand mentions within the social media space can help answer questions like…

• Do brand mentions correlate with traffic increases to my website?
• Are the conversations around my brand increasing?  Are they becoming more positive?
• What are consumers discussing about my brand and how can we remain sensitive to feedback?

Measuring and monitoring brand mentions in the social space provides valuable insight into consumers’ experiences with your brand, both good and bad.  Social sites like Twitter offer advanced search functionalityand APIs for searching the conversations taking place.  Dozens of tools have cropped up to help companies monitor and evaluate brand mentions on Twitter alone, and traditional web analytics providers have joined the fray by offering solutions to import this data into their platforms (see Omniture Integrates Data from Twitter).  Expect to see similar tools for other social sites as they provide APIs for accessing data.

Even if your company doesn’t have an official Facebook fan page or Twitter account, chances are high that your brand is already part of the social media world.  For better or worse, social media is changing your customers, which in turn will change your business.  While far from perfect, marketers must tackle the issue of social media measurement head-on or risk being left behind.

Anthony Avolio is Director of Web Analytics at PM Digital.

There was an article in the New York Times recently saying how small businesses are effectively using Twitter to grow their sales through mass, simple, quick communication with their customers (at no cost – a model small businesses love).  We do know that larger companies are less nimble, harder ships to steer, and as such, have been slower to adopt.  If you consider what these smaller businesses have done — neighborhood food carts significantly leveraging sales (a highly competitive field here in NYC) — it’s pretty compelling.  Larger companies with way more resources should be able to do better, but I’m not sure how many have.

What is striking in the more recent conversations I’ve had with clients on social marketing, though, is that there is pretty monumental shift from “if” to “when.”   Better, there is a widening acceptance of the benefits of having a social presence beyond the inability to track through traditional means.  If you look at these benefits through a direct marketing lens, it could be considered akin to a two-step.  Social marketing is a way to obtain client feedback, disseminate product and promotional info easily en masse, and cultivate conversations with customers which could lead to product improvements and newer, different forms of marketing.  Acting on this communication could be more than just goodwill.  From an ROI perspective, the impact on the bottom line could be significant, and the metrics are there, albeit different.

In a recent client meeting, I was introduced to the guy managing their social strategy.  Prior to his employment with this firm, he had amassed 7,000 fans on a Facebook page he had independently created for them.  As a result, they tracked him down and hired him (good move!)  I asked him why he did it initially, and he simply said he loved the brand.  In another meeting I had the same day, the client told me that hundreds of people had created Facebook fan pages on their behalf.  Their mission was how to reign in control of their brand. With these stories emerging (two for me in one day!), I suspect the adoption of social marketing among all brands will be rapid from this point on, even among the most tried-and-true direct marketers.

Suzy Sandberg is President of PM Digital.

But as Marissa Mayer was introducing the 2009 version of Google’s Universal Search, she mentioned that it was like a “Bento Box” of search results.

A Bento Box is a Japanese lunch tradition, where delicious sushi and a few other unimportant items are presented in a cool box. So I am thinking about this presentation as search sushi. Search sushi is a mix of traditional natural search results, video search results, image search results, local search results, map search results, paid search results, sometimes blog search results, sometimes product search results, sometimes book search results, and now forum and review search results and more. For the marketer, suddenly the world is a LOT more complicated. There are now over a dozen kinds of search results that can be presented to the searcher at one time. So how does the marketer handle this? How do you leverage the bento box for your benefit?

It really requires a mind shift. Search is no longer just about natural search results. It is about context, intent and multiple options. So, Google (and all other search engines) has discovered that their most effective approach is to segment all of their indexed items, present them, and let the user apply human intelligence to find the right medium to get the result. Google has changed the “last mile” of search. Rather than presenting an authoritative marker that they have delivered the exact right answer to your query, they give you options to choose the result that is right for you. This is great stuff.

But how do marketers take advantage of this opportunity, given that it is hard enough to get a good search position in Google? Here are 5 tips:

1. Get Writing: The new temporal searches inside of Google mean that new content has its own showcase. Get blogging, get press releasing, get writing. New content is just as relevant (maybe even more so) than old, well-indexed content. Get exposure by being fresh!
2. Get Video: Video is hot stuff. According to comScore, YouTube represents 25% of Google queries (that makes YouTube about as big as Yahoo, MSN and Ask, combined).  And videos are hot searches — great, deep opportunities to engage with your customers. So get product previews on video, start a video blog, do whatever and get it on video.
3. Get Blogging: Blog search results are hot. Blogs typically get indexed more often than a traditional retailer web site because there is fresher content there, and a quality blog that talks about your products, your brands and your company (and its terrific customers) is a great way to get a piece of sushi in the bento box
4. Get Social: Now that forums and reviews are an essential part of the Google search cadre, and temporal versions of search are searching things in real time (or near real time), it is critical for marketers to be Tweeting, Facebooking and have a truly benevolent presence in consumer forums. Be there to answer questions, give advice and drop a few links now and then. All of those things get indexed and will be available as part of the sushi smorgasbord of search.
5. Get Local: Locality is a huge part of context. If you have an office or a store, you need to get local. Many prefer to buy and interact locally. Get all of your locations listed and you can have the incredible benefit of getting a premiere spot in the bento box.

It’s almost lunchtime. I am going to use Google to find a great sushi place nearby!

Despite good intentions, there may be technical limitations, branding priorities and business rules that have prevented a retailer from optimizing their site well enough to jump over these sources.  You may have also recently noticed that Twitter, YouTube, blogs and Facebook are all bumping down traditional, retailer-specific natural search listings even further.

(Note:  As of the past few weeks, Google has moved their top three Product Search listings from just below the top paid listings and above natural listings to the bottom of Page 1, so Google Product Search will have less of an impact in pulling traffic away from highly-ranked natural keywords.)

An interesting and effective tactic is to attempt to own as much of the Page 1 Google real estate as possible.  If a keyword is very important to you and is rife with competition (in the apparel vertical “cashmere” would fall into this category), retailers should consider focusing tactics to be highly ranked beyond just SEM and SEO and experiment with optimization through these other sources if the goal is to own Page 1.

Experiment with this:  pull out a video camera and make a rough, not necessarily slick because it doesn’t always have to be, video of the core product you want to promote and list it on YouTube making sure it’s tagged appropriately. Next, write about the product in a blog. Then feature it on a Facebook page and tweet about it, too. To be visible within Google Product Search top 3 placement, optimize your datafeed and make sure it’s submitted daily to Google.

There is no guarantee that you’ll make it within the top 3 placements, but these tactics will go a long way toward achieving that.  Lastly, if there are internal issues preventing your site from being well optimized, try focusing SEO efforts on just this keyword in order to move it up the rankings in natural search.

If all these tactics are done correctly, you will be visible multiple places on Page 1, owning a much larger portion of the real estate for that important product, and your sales will climb as a result. Future efforts should be focused on the next highest revenue-generating products and so forth.

Suzy Sandberg is President of PM Digital.