by Chris Boudreaux and Adam Edwards

Update (August 16, 2010): Google PR phoned this afternoon to let us know that this screen shot was an experiment, and that the search results below the ads are organic; they’re just mixed with results from Google Maps. Our point was that the results seemed to exclude traditional organic search results, and that the page appeared dominated by organic results from Google Maps.

Yesterday, for the first time, we saw a standard Google web search results page, without any standard web search results.   That is,  a search for “car rental nyc” returned a Universal Results page showing a map alongside results from paid, local, and books categories (see screen shot below). Not one standard organic result appeared on the first page of results.

(click image to enlarge)

As it expands its Universal Results strategy, Google is testing lots of changes to their main search results page. Most of the significant changes occur in searches that contain a localized search term (such as a city).

First, Google added a “sticky map” in the upper right, which maintained a constant position on the screen, as the user scrolled down the page.  The sticky map appeared to disadvantage paid search results appearing below the third slot, which disappeared behind the map as users scrolled down the page.

In the search results we saw yesterday, there were no organic results until the second page.  When we performed the same search today, we found a single organic search result at the bottom of the first page.

This could be a watershed moment for Google, and it could force local or franchise businesses to use AdWords and Google Places (formerly Local Business Center).

Creating a great web site with strong SEO may no longer take you into the first page of local search results.

The big conversation at the iMedia Summit today has been focusing on the Superbowl advertisements – no surprise really given the event kicked off with a Superbowl party & Bob Garfield’s opening keynote was a deconstruction of the ads.

The biggest talking point with this crowd: Google’s ad. Most love it (in fact I just polled 24 brand marketers & 15 loved it while only 2 didn’t like it). Yesterday during the Superbowl my CEO Rob Key leant over to Craig Daitch & I seconds after the spot aired and said “how long until we see a parody of that online?”

Well, Slate didn’t disappoint with this satirical take on the ad seen through the eyes of Tiger Wood’s search history after that fateful day in November:

Hat tip to our good friends at Agency Spy! And stay tuned to our @Converseon Twitter account for updates from the conference.

Maureen Heymans, Technical Lead for Google Social Search says:

“We think there’s tremendous potential for social information to improve search, and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface.”

Watch this video to find out why:

We think Google Social Search is only going to continue to gain traction.  Expanding your company’s and employee’s social presence could begin to have a much more meaningful impact on search rankings, that goes beyond social media’s current influence on rankings.

Ignore your Google Profile at your own risk!

In this interview our Senior SEO Analyst Ted Ulle, otherwise known as “Tedster”, the Google forum moderator on WebmasterWorld, explains why your customer’s online conversations are a crucial component to a comprehensive search engine optimization strategy.  Ted also discusses Converseon’s approach to Enterprise SEO and the need for organizational consulting, clearly explained by our Chief Strategist, Mike Moran, in his best selling book Search Engine Marketing, Inc.  The interview took place at last years PubCon Search Marketing Conference in Las Vegas, where Ted is a regular speaker.

How is your social media listening impacting your SEO strategy? Share your experiences and advice below…

This week the Converseon team is sponsoring, speaking and attending the iMedia Brand Summit in San Diego – certainly one of the online marketing industry’s premier events.

The event has a strong mix of senior brand marketers, leading thinkers and the online media companies leading innovation in the industry. Our Converseon CEO Rob Key is presenting ‘social media from the inside out’ at 10.40am tomorrow join an extremely strong cast of speakers.

Today’s content was headlined by Northwestern University researcher and integrated marketing thought leader Don Shultz, who predictably stole the show. You can tell the quality of a speaker’s presentation by the volume of Twittering during the session, and Don was so on point I nearly wore out my iPhone keypad while racing to keep up with him.

Don had a strong message that marketers need to drive “effectiveness not efficiency” by focusing on influencing the audience based on their media consumption, rather than planning based on media distribution. Don’s own words did best, so here is a series of our tweets from his session:

Another standout session saw comScore chairman and founder Gian Fulgoni and Starcom’s Kim McCarthy run through some in-depth research in ‘The click remains irrelevant: ‘Natural Born Clickers’ Return’. Drawing from data from over 200 different comScore studies they made a compelling case for why marketers need to look beyond just a simple ‘click’ on online ads as a measure of success.

Fulgoni pointed out that 84% of internet users never click on an online ad, and 85% of the clicks on advertisements came from only 8% of internet users. He also called out the disconnect that while 98.9% of ads in any campaign are never clicked on, Forrester have shown that 35% of marketers still measure that way.

Now while the low click through numbers might drive some marketers to despair, the wider comScore data paints a better picture of the real value of online advertising. For example, comScore’s data shows that the top 82% of online campaigns generate an average 22% lift in sales and more widely that online display ads have been proven to be as effective as TV for boosting retail sales in CPG brands, leading to opportunities for a wealth of brands who found TV advertising costs prohibitive but can now drive similar results.

Stay tuned to our Converseon twitter account for more coverage of this event tomorrow, and we’ll be sure to share more insights from the conference and detail on Rob’s presence right here on the blog.

We are proud to announce that Mike Moran, our Chief Strategist has done it again. This month he and co-writer Bill Hunt published the second edition of Search Engine Marketing, Inc which you can purchase on Amazon here.

The second edition edition of Mike’s highly regarded book address some of the changes seen in the search industry in the last few years along with increased focus on social media. Already, the book is on the Top Ten List for retailing books by Amazon.com and has received good press and dozens of positive reviews

This week, our Fall intern, Lindsey Loughman, sat down with Mike to get his input on the book, the future of search and his role here at Converseon:

If you like to skip ahead to a particular question (although we recommend the entire interview), here are the show notes:

0:00 Intro
0:12 What is the Book About?
1:30 What Updates are in the New Book?
3:44 Who Will Get the Most Out of the Book?
5:00 Why is Search Important ?
6:35 What is the Future of Search Marketing?
8:51 How Are You Using Search at Converseon?

“The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.”
-George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

We’re happy to announce that we will be hosting the second installment of the Social Media Measurement Roundtable at our New York City headquarters on Thursday August 7. This intimate event will feature a select crowd of leading social media measurement thinkers and doers and follows on from the success of the first such event in Toronto earlier this year.

Katie Paine, author of Measuring Public Relationships and CEO of KDPaine & Partners will be assisting in leading discussion at the roundtable. She will also be joined by Marshall Sponder, the Chair of the Web Analytics Association`s Community and Social Media committee and Converseon’s Director of Social Media Constantin Basturea. Social media professionals, PR practicioners and web analytics experts will be present to discuss the methodologies and resources available today in measuring PR and social media initiatives.

Here are the details:

Date: Thursday August 7, 2008

Time: 5:00 – 7:00pm

Location:
Converseon
53 West 36th Street, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10018

We’d love for you to join us and throw your two cents on this topic. However, space is limited and it is essential to RSVP for this event, so if you’d like to attend please RSVP as soon as possible to Chrissie Hsu (chsu AT converseon.com)

Cymfony’s new social media study just reaffirms what we’ve already been seeing: Traditional marketers are struggling to come to terms with social media.

Converseon was founded nearly seven years ago based on the premise that traditional communication approaches, technologies and agency models were largely ill equipped to deal with the rise of social media. Clearly not much has changed.

The natural question we may collectively ask is, “why?” Our response is both simple and complex. The simple response is due to a truism of human nature: if one has a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Humans, and agencies, tend to do what they best understand and gravitate away from the new and complex. It has been argued by some that we’re just very good pattern matching machines and naturally are quick to arrange all things new into comfortable old categories.

The second part of that answer is a little more complex. Social media strategies require a view of the world (and a skill set) that transcends traditional marketing disciplines. Speaking from experience, within larger, traditional agency environments, I’ve found that the infrastructure is often so firmly cemented that it can’t effectively accommodate innovation. Compound that with the emphasis on “making numbers” in a public company environment, there is a natural bias towards pushing services with proven revenue streams rather pushing forward with the new and innovative. How many agencies truly have an R&D budget? Some of the larger agencies have created new groups to experiment with innovation. The challenge of infusing it back into the parent though still remains.

When Converseon was first formed, a leading member of the board of a holding company (who I’ll leave nameless) said to us that the unfortunate truth was that it was easier to let a company spin out, be successful and then acquire them, than to innovate from within. The challenges of established, larger organizations collaborating across marketing disciplines, across separate P&L structures, added to the natural inertia of organizations and the fear of the unknown makes it difficult to evolve. For far too many, a new piece of business sets off a wrangling for budgets where the most influential groups (i.e. “more established”) often emerge dusty but triumphant.

So while agencies are increasingly using the right social media words, and issuing press releases about new social media capabilities, there clearly is often far more style than substance. While size and heft is useful when negotiating large media buys, it is something of a hindrance in the more nimble world of social media.

As in biological evolution, different species form in the presence of changing environments. Adaptation occurs through the development of new species rather than trying to morph old species into new ones (although indeed have common ancestors).

At the risk of making Stephen Jay Gould turn in his grave, the advent of social media to communications and marketing is akin of changing of transformation of the Toyonian to the Cambrian period (and the resultant explosion of new forms of life).

And in those periods, it is hard for organisms and organizations to adapt. Even today, there is very little cross pollination across marketing disciplines. PR folks tend to go to PR conferences for example. Direct marketers tend to gravitate to the DMA. Advertising talks to advertising. We’ve created mini, marketing discipline specific echo chambers.

The result is that the disciplines tend to view social media from the biased lens of their discipline. This means 30 second spots on YouTube, or an extension of media relations to blogger relations. These are just incremental extensions of current core competencies. It does not get to the heart of what true social media is: community. The result is some traditional agencies awkwardly positioning themselves as something that they’re not quite. Little pieces strewn together awkwardly that may give the appearance of social media adeptness, but look more like the assemblage of incompatible parts upon closer scrutiny: what we call the Frankenagency.

This is not to say that there isn’t interesting work coming from traditional agencies: indeed there is. And there are some very smart people. However, as the survey and our own experience shows, truly effective social media strategies requires new entities with new skills, technologies, infrastructures and cultures designed specifically for this new environment. It is not simply an “add on” to existing services.

Social media clearly is a different. It isn’t just a new channel or a new technology. It requires new cultures with new skill sets and a break with the traditional command and control marketing structures that have governed traditional agencies over the last generation. Some of our most sophisticated clients understand this. They have an advertising agency, a PR agency and a social media agency. They understand the differences.

These new social media entities, like evolutionary biology, do have common, but diverse, ancestors. Converseon has grown in part because of the alchemy that occurs when bringing together search, public relations, computer scientists, direct marketers, advertising creatives, issues management experts, independent film makers, and more. Out of this combination of the diverse comes mutation; and, from mutation, evolution.

And of course, as brands become more immersed in social media, we are seeing a second law of evolution kicks in: that of natural selection. For as long as brands select and cultivate these new entities, they will grow and evolve and be reflective and natural residents of the new social media world.

Image Dr Frankenstein and his Monster, uploaded by DuneChaser

Thanks to Thanksgiving and the yearly mad rush for Black Friday we’ve got some catching up to do with the Friday Link List. We’ve got a diverse selection for your perusal this week. Or if you don’t feel like reading, just click through to Free Rice to see a simple yet powerful concept executed with aplomb online.

Coming Soon: A Small Move By Facebook With Big Implications

it’ll be interesting to see how this develops.  if applications start appearing in the indices, you better believe that EVERY programmer, marketer, and trend-follower will jump on the bandwagon, and start releasing new apps with fervor.

Attention? I Don’t Want Your Freakin’ Attention!

This imaginary conversation between consumer & ‘consumer relations’ cuts to the very core of why Converseon exists and what we’re trying to achieve each and every day.

I’m a Faux Social Media Expert: Hear Me Roar!

Canadian Colin McKay’s post highlights the roadblocks social media evangelists will face. To truly succeed with social media it is essential for companies (which really means the people within them) to embrace change and innovation. Say “Yes, how?” not “No, too hard.”

Digg: Hilarious ‘Don’t Give Up On Vista’ Ad From Apple

3,663 Diggs for an Apple commercial indicates how consumer evangelists can spread your message widely online – if you provide them with compelling content.

As per the headline, we’re extremely proud to have been selected by the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association as one of their four WOMMIE Award winners for 2007.

The art of Word of Mouth Marketing online is continually evolving and we’re having a great time working at the coalface. Rob Key will be presenting our case study at the WOMMA Summit on November 14-15 in Las Vegas – but in the mean time you can learn from the great case studies hosted at the WOMMA site. In the meantime, we’re happy to be recognized like this:

“I was thrilled to see the caliber of work considered this year for the Wommie Awards, particularly when comparing them against last year’s submissions,” said Amanda Van Nuys, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Organic, Inc. and Wommie Awards judge. “Collectively, the case studies clearly demonstrate how word of mouth marketing has grown up over the last few years as it transitions from its adolescence and into a more evolved and disciplined marketing practice.”

On To The Friday Links!

This week the Converseon team have had a mix of social networking and smart technology catch our eye. The content below has already sparked some deep thinking and conversation amongst our team, please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Photosynth Demonstration (RSS Readers, click through for video)

This technology is mind blowing. As they say: “Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images”Consumer 3.0: New Trends in CGM

Pete Blackshaw gives a general overview of the current state of CGM marketing, including some links to good examples.

Facebook Facts that will blow your marketing mind

Mitch Joel shares some stats on Facebook from the Canadian Marketing Association conference:

1. The average Facebook user spends about twenty-one minutes plus per day at the online social network.
2. The average Facebook user visits four times per day.
3. Facebook is adding about three hundred and fifty thousand new users every day.
4. Just this morning Facebook surpassed fifty million worldwide community members.
5. Facebook’s size doubles every six months.

Can Facebook feed its ad brains?

Facebook is expected to tap artificial intelligence to deliver ads to its 49 million members. This is a good real world example of the challenges that companies face in serving the right ads to the right people in real time.

A Series of Podcasts with Lee Odden and Mike Moran

Some great discussion here about Mike Moran’s new book “Do It Wrong Quickly: How The Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules”

Explaining OpenSocial to your Executives

A good analysis of what Google’s new OpenSocial can allow you to do to help share great content with your key audiences.