The Battle for Online Earth

So, a new year -  a new decade even – jumps amongst us and I’m sat wondering what would make a good first post on my new blog? Like everyone, I seem to ponder and contemplate often at the turn of the year and I do wonder what this year will bring  to the online world?

Last year saw the rise of the mighty Twitter. Here in the UK we saw a ten fold increase in the use of Twitter. Much of that fuelled by our celebrities, football players, musicians and everyone else who found you could become significantly more famous simply by ‘tweeting’.

There were some more intriguing uses of Twitter too. In September last year, I found myself at the fabulous A4U Conference in London. Here, all seminars were conducted with a live Twitter page sharing space with the actual presentation onscreen. As the ‘speaker’ spoke, the audience ‘tweeted’ questions directly to the presentation screen. Most speakers responded to ‘tweets’ impressively on the fly and I think we may see this use of Twitter expand out from the web geek & freak events I look to attend!

The success of Twitter last year, really made anyone with an online mind think much harder about social media. I think this trend will continue and Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn will become a stronger part of the overall web marketing mix. What interests me most about social media is that it allows us the ability to generate traffic outside of the major search engines. Certain industries, like travel, music, & mobile communications, have live daily leads awaiting fruition straight from the pages of Twitter (which I believe to be the most powerful of the social media players). However, this is certainly not the case for many other less ‘fashionable’ industries.  As social media doesn’t, to date, really play any part in helping you rank higher within conventional search engines, Google SEO and Google Adwords will continue to be the most profitable form of online marketing for most in 2010.

However, towards the end of the year this may well start to change.  Last year’s deals struck between Twitter Google & Bing mean that both of these search engines ‘intend’ to start offering Tweets, Facebook posts and other social media comments within their SE results. That really is an interesting concept and hopefully this year, we should really begin to see how that takes shape.

You may have noticed above that Twitter only bothered to strike deals with Google and Bing, two of the traditional big three search engines. Sadly, last year also saw the beginning of the end for Yahoo Search. Their deal with Microsoft really falls into Microsoft’s strategy to beef up Bing and take on Google. So, whilst I sit here on the 5th January and ‘the big three’ still exist,  this might very well fall down to ‘the big two’ by the end of 2010.

Seeing the two most powerful organisations over the last 20 years go head to head in a search engine battle might well prove to be the online equivalent to Tolkien’s Battle For Middle Earth. Google certainly has the advantage, can Bing really catch up? I doubt that, but I do believe Bing will push Google to greater things. A ‘deeper magic’ Tolkien might say….’social media magic’ might be more apt.

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