SEARCH CLINIC

The sharp drop at MySpace follows a further round of major redundancies at the start of 2011 and the continued growth of Facebook, which now has 30 million registered users in the UK.According to the latest comScore figures, Rupert Murdock’s MySpace lost 10 million unique users between January and February of this year, going from 73 million to 63 million in a matter of four weeks.

This time last year, when site began the first in a series of major relaunches, MySpace attracted 95 million unique users.

Parent company News Corporation is reportedly still trying to offload the ailing social network – which had hopes to reinvent itself through its streaming service, MySpace Music and its renewed focus on entertainment content.

At the start of the year Mike Jones, MySpace’s chief executive announced that the company was making 500 staff members redundant and slashing its international operation to a skeleton staff.

The site, which is owned by News Corporation, has been struggling to keep up with Facebook for the last two years.

However, despite having made a major round of redundancies last year, which saw its US workforce reduced by 400 jobs to around 1,000 and its international operation reduced from 450 to 150 personnel, more cost cutting has been needed to make up for its big financial losses.

The troubled site, which saw its UK audience halve to 3.3 million monthly visitors in July 2010, is pinning its hopes of renewed success with a return to its music and content roots.

News Corporation bought MySpace for £373 million in 2008. The website was briefly valued at £7.7 billion when News Corp attempted to merge it with Yahoo in 2007, but it’s value- as well as it’s traffic has been heading south ever since.

LinkedIn- the professional social network, has reached over 100 million members worldwide, adding a new member every second of each day, it claims.
The site, which aims to facilitate professional networking in the digital space, has been adding roughly one million new members every 12 days- the equivalent of one new member joining every second.

In December 2010, the site had attracted five million plus members in the UK and 20 million in Europe.

LinkedIn launched in 2003 and started out in the living room of co-founder Reid Hoffman.

It took 494 days to sign up the first million members. More than half of its members are now located outside of the US.

Two weeks ago LinkedIn launched a personalised news service in a bid to attract more of its users to the site with greater frequency.

LinkedIn Today aggregates news from around the web, serving up a range of stories based on a user’s professional interests and the articles which have proved popular amongst a user’s friends.

Stories are ordered based on how many people in a user’s LinkedIn network tweeted or shared them.

There is also a dropdown box which on LinkedIn Today which allows users to personalise the story by industry.

Analysts believe the site is trying to boost its traffic and user engagement rate and subsequently its advertising revenues, ahead of its expected IPO (Initial Public Offering) on the US stock market.

Although LinkedIn’s membership numbers have reached a new high, many people do not visit the site or look at their profiles every day in the way that they do with other networking sites, such as Facebook.

Last week a new study found that the majority of FTSE 100 companies have failed to fully embrace social media sites, such as LinkedIn, and risk being overtaken digitally by smaller and more agile firms.

Twitter had its fifth birthday yesterday- 21 st March 2011.And in it’s five years it has helped to transform the world- with it’s simple communications channel being cited by the protesters in Egypt leading to the overthrow of President Mubarak and the subsequent political reformation.

Since its first ever tweet by co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2006 (“Just setting up my twttr”) the social media website has grown to become one of the most important online marketing and communications tools of a generation – which many people claim is second only to Facebook.

It now hosts more than 1 billion tweets a week and is estimated to be worth around £6 billion.

Dr Search recounts some of the landmarks in its five year history:
* March 2006 First tweet posted by co-founder Jack Dorsey
* November 2008 Barack Obama thanks supporters via Twitter after winning the US presidential election.
* January 2009 Twitter users break news about a plane crash landing in New York’s Hudson River, with pictures.
* April 2009 Universal Pictures, Virgin Media and Gorrilaz among first brands to launch commercial services on the site.
* June 2009 Showbiz website TMZ breaks story about Michael Jackson’s death on Twitter.
* September 2010 Twitter receives more UK visits than MySpace for the first time.
* September 2010 Twitter overhauls home page design and partners with YouTube, Yahoo! and Flickr to embed content on site.
* October 2010 Dick Costolo replaces co-founder Evan Williams as CEO.
* December 2010 Twitter valued at £2.3 billion after fresh investment.
* December 2010 Twitter says more than 25 billion tweets were sent in 2010.
* January 2011 Over 40% of all Twitter posts are made by a mobile phone, says Costolo.
* February 2011 Costolo says Twitter is “already making money”.
* February 2011 Charlie Sheen becomes the quickest tweeter to reach 1 million followers (achieving this in 25 hours, 17 minutes).

UK internet users now find social networking sites like Facebook more popular than pornographic ones, according to new figures from Experian Hitwise.
The internet research company says that in January sites like Facebook accounted for 12.46% of all online traffic.

That’s the equivalent of 2.4 billion hits or one eighth of all web visits.

In comparison entertainment websites, including pornographic ones, accounted for 12.18% of traffic.

It’s the first time social networking has overtaken entertainment in terms of popularity.

Of those, social network site Facebook accounted for more than half, or 56%, of visits.

Robin Goad, Experian Hitwise’s Research Director said: “While social networks of course compete amongst themselves for users, many of those users have a presence on multiple networks.

“One in every eight people leaving a social network visits another one immediately after.

“Facebook, for example, is a key source of traffic for many smaller social networks, while almost a fifth of people leaving Twitter go on to visit another social network”.

The Search Clinic has long been warning that pay per clicks- and Google’s AdWords in particular are not your magic online marketing channel, now new research proves my caution.

Online searching has become a nearly ubiquitous online activity and Google remains the undisputed king—receiving the largest share of search ad revenue and traffic.

But an eye-tracking study by user experience research firm User Centric adds a new perspective.

Its research indicates that most search users overlook search ads almost entirely.

The findings showed organic search results were viewed 100% of the time, and participants spent an average of 14.7 and 10.7 seconds looking at organic search results on Google and Bing, respectively.

However, only 28% of participants looked at right side ads on Google, and just 21% did the same on Bing—spending around 1 second viewing all ads combined on each search engine.

To put this in perspective, searchers who viewed the left hand site navigation spent more time doing so than they did viewing ads on both search engines.
Viewing Metrics for Search Results on Google and Bing, July-Aug 2010 (% of participants and time spent (seconds))

With users spending nearly all their time viewing organic search results, Hitwise’s latest numbers give some further insight.

Bing and Yahoo!’s success rates, meaning searches that resulted in a click, are just over 81% whereas Google sits much lower at 65.6% in December 2010 and January 2011.
Although the sheer volume of searches Google handles may bring down its success rate, the difference been Google and Bing is still large enough to draw conclusions.

First, users were shown to spend the vast majority of their time looking at organic search results on both search engines, and Bing’s success rate is 16 percentage points higher than Google’s.

Therefore, even though Google has more traffic than Bing, the Microsoft search engine generates a greater share of relevant traffic per search.

Additionally, this data indicates that SEO is more essential than ever. Users have learned to overlook search ads, and they will continue to ignore such ads as they become even more search-savvy over time.

SEO will become increasingly challenging as users start to rely on search engines for different reasons.

A recent study from Forrester Research found that internet users were 22 percentage points less likely in 2010 to rely on search engines to find websites than they were in 2004.

Although this doesn’t mean people are using search engines less to find information about product types or branded goods, it does mean that they are relying on search less to find websites specifically.
Perhaps this change is because internet users are becoming more knowledgeable and do not need to rely on search to find popular sites such as Facebook and YouTube.

Also, they may be relying on social media more to find websites. No matter the reason, this data indicates that search users’ behavior is in constant flux.

As search users continue to change their behavior, marketers will need to adjust their SEO strategy to keep up.

This research was initially published on: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008270&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

The Spotify online music service has announced that it now has one million paying subscribers across Europe.News of the milestone comes as Spotify continues a fund-raising from investors in advance of a launch in the US.

Spotify’s co-founders Spotify’s founders Martin Lorentzon and Daniel Ek are in the middle of a $100m fund raising.

The Anglo Swedish company now has 6.67 million users- the majority of whom use a free service subsidised by adverts.

Spotify’s profitability depends on users switching to it’s premium services that remove adverts and allow listeners to use smartphones.

Spotify’s website’s blog announced: “It seems like only yesterday we were hatching ideas for a new music service in a tiny office-cum-apartment with a broken coffee machine. So it’s with a sense of real pride and excitement that we can announce a new milestone today, having welcomed our millionth paying subscriber to the service. ”

Spotify is in the process of a funding round that analysts estimate values the company at  approx £600 million ($ 1 billion).

The company’s plans to launch in the US have been delayed by concerns at the big music labels about the success of its business model.

Spotify pays royalties each time a song is played on its service.

Last year, it was estimated that the subscriber base represented about 7%-8% of Spotify’s total user base.

But with one million subscribers, that percentage has now risen to about 15%, the company said.

From 1 March, Britons will be able to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which has been given on new powers to regulate commercial websites.
Up to now the ASA has only been able to monitor traditional advertising- these were generally on billboards, newspapers or on television.

UK consumers will be able to make official objections about false, indecent or misleading information on the internet.

From the start of March, the ASA will be able to regulate any statement on a company’s website which could be interpreted as marketing, even if it is not a paid for advert.

These new powers will of course also cover anything that you write on social media websites like Twitter or Facebook.

The principle that marketing has to be legal, decent, honest and truthful is now going to extend to companies’ claims on their own websites.

Anyone with a website needs to have a fresh look at it, and ask themselves “am I totally happy about that?”

Certainly if you have had a claim ruled against you by the ASA, now is a very good time to put that right before 1 March.

The ASA has spent a year preparing for the change, and is expecting a large number of extra complaints.

Last year 2,500 people complained about website content, but under the old rules their objections were not admissible.

Nevertheless the ASA is expanding staff numbers by 10%, to cope with the extra workload.

The Advertising Standards Authority can be contacted at: http://www.asa.org.uk/

SMEs and small businesses can compete even more aggressively as local and niche search strategies and social media help them develop remote customers- which means you often offer better or more personal service.
Foursquare is a location based application and Groupon (who turned down an offer from Google to buy them for $5 billion last month) offers daily deals to customers and delivers customers to local merchants who sign up.

Groupon has turnover already of £325 million and has recruited an army of sales people to sign up local merchants.

Google was looking to combine Groupon’s expertise and relationships with merchants and consumers with its ad platform and its location-based assets like Maps and Places.

Groupon’s growth is spectacular: ComScore say 6.4 million people visited Groupon.com in the U.S. in October 2010, up 657% from 849,000 people a year earlier.

Such significant shifts in how things may be requires foresight and looking at how to support future customer needs.

It requires rebalancing your budgets – cutting marketing spend in slower channels and increasing funds to fast growing areas.

You need to ask yourself:
* What experiences will customers be looking for in 2015/2020?
* What are the most effective ways access customers? Sure we need a site and ecommerce platform but what ‘external tools’ do we integrate with that?
* How are we going to ensure people convert as well as look? At present large hotel chains look at competitors rates regularly during the day to see how the rate changes with occupancy. Supermarkets check their competitors’ prices. New business intelligence tools provided by companies such Peer39 will make sure that customer profile and pricing data can be changed rapidly.

Of course it’s really quite impossible to predict the future – especially in today’s economy.

But all retailers getting into or already using ecommerce need to have a well thought out strategy and well defined goals and objectives to ensure long term growth and success.

A sophisticated ecommerce platform will be essential to meet the growing needs and expectations of customers. However an effective marketing strategy is equally important.

Too many retailers concentrate on just the technology when they venture in to ecommerce. But ecommerce is marketing.

How many retailers would ever decide on and specify the camera to be used for the TV commercial or the printing machine for the brochure before the style of photography and tone of voice for their copy?

But when it comes to the internet and websites that’s what too many people concentrate on – the technology.

The technology may be part of it, but the marketing elements are even more important.

After all- it’s not the computers that are making the purchasing decisions- it’s people.

Google and Bing have recently confirmed that social media reactions are a ranking factor with both search engines.
It may be stating the bloomin’ obvious, but search engines- in the business of delivering quality search results, would not ignore these signals.

Are Twitter and Facebook just other sites that are/may be treated specially by search engines, the idea of a social graph as a current reality being a trendy spin on something has existed in some form for a while, or are they a completely new type of influence on organic results?

Before Twitter and Facebook, for a number of years the vast majority of social online discussion was carried out on various bulletin boards and forums. Google can identify discussion results of this type, and it seems plausible that links from such pages could be treated differently to the rest of the web.

The same could be true of links in blog comments. If Akismet can identify which comments are spam, would it not be conceivably possible for Google to do so too?

After learning of their reasonable surfer patent, granted earlier this year, we know that spiders can identify different areas of content on a page and process them by different standards.

Historically, we don’t know how Google has treated links from sites like Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us, many of which were around before Twitter and Facebook.

They could be handled the same as any other website, but as social bookmarking became more and more significant in shaping the content people view and consider to be notable, does it not stand to reason that someone at Google would have considered factoring the role of these sites into ranking algorithms?

Social discussion online in itself is obviously not new. Usenet used to be a particularly social platform, distinguished from walled off forums by being decentralised and entirely public.

The same metrics used to grade the value of Tweets and Tweeters could be used in any other public arena of social discussion where links or their equivalent are shared.

There’s no reason search engines couldn’t already have been using methods like these to determine quality of article submissions and submitters on, say, Digg for a long time already, but unless a specific announcement was made the SEO community would be in the dark.

No SEO person outside of the search engines knows all the intimate details of Google’s ranking algorithms, either currently or historically.

I think many in web marketing mistake this information void as evidence that ranking algorithms are simpler than they likely are in reality, and see info like this as announcement of something that’s new.

Whatever the case, it won’t change the fact that producing unique, compelling content and marketing it well is the simplest strategy to attracting online traffic.

Companies that sign up celebrities to advertise products on Twitter are being warned by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) to be clear about their marketing.
The OFT says celebse should make it clear if they’re being paid either in cash or with gifts to tweet about something.

Celebrities like Lily Allen, Liz Hurley and Peter Andre have millions of followers that companies are keen to advertise to.

But now the OFT says what it describes as “deceptive” advertising must stop.

In a statement it said: “Online advertising and marketing practices that do not disclose they include paid for promotions are deceptive under trading laws.”

In America this type of advertising is already big business.

Stars like Kim Kardashian, who has nearly six million followers, can earn thousands of pounds for online endorsements on the site.

Snoop Dogg and Lindsay Lohan have also cashed in.

But the law governing this type of social media advertising is much more clear in America than in the UK.

The US Federal Trade Commission insists that stars must include the word “ad” or “spon” to show if something they’re talking about is an advert or sponsored.

That way there’s no question of anything being deceptive.