Of late, we’ve been reading numerous articles and press releases about Bing pushing new features out to the market, integrating search results with Facebook data and even rolling out a mobile browser that further integrates the search results with Facebook users preferences.
How about Facebook itself and Twitter then? Even LinkedIn has started to invade the space?
They are the (fairly) new kids on the advertising revenue block – and definitely the ones to watch out for!
These guys seem to come up with various CPC and CPM models, twitter even has ‘sponsored tweets’ and ‘promoted trends’ nowadays.
The world of simple (well, let’s be honest, it’s always been rather complex!) PPC marketing is fading away and we are faced with multi-channel, multi-social and multi-integrated (is that even a word?!) marketing channels to choose from.
User behaviour is also changing – it’s all about being social and transparent now, what we like, what we dislike and who recommends and shares what.
Thumbs up and Thumbs down method seem to be the way forward – and it’s a highly powerful tool to drive sales or kill sales.
Not to be forgotten, this doesn’t only apply to the consumers, it’s imperative that the brands are interacting with their consumer base actively and encaging them in conversations, good or bad (well, goes without saying – try and fix whatever bad has been said!).
After all that – we are still none the wiser who’s the King of the Castle.
The race for the crown is still on.
Will it be a search engine, social platform or a mix of all? Perhaps we will witness one of the Search giants (Google?) combining all of the above elements in the future?
Watch this space – I’m sure keeping my eyes peeled!
Posted by Terry 12th April 2012
Terry is Operations Director at Mahon Digital. From HR to credit control, web design to IT troubleshooting, you name it, he's done it.
