Wired published a very interesting article yesterday on the social media / web identity landgrab. I’d highly recommend reading it.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/07/cloud-wars-goog-msft-fb/all/1

We’ve been experimenting with Google+ since getting an early trial invite and like what we see so far. Hurry up with the API and business pages please Google!

eMarketer has quite dramatically reduced its social networking ad spend forecast for 2009 as Michael Learmonth noted on AdAge.com:
http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=133147

The notable thing about this for me is that the forecast is still predicting growth of 8.3%. While that may seem unremarkable for us digital types used to seeing much bigger numbers, I think it’s safe to say that most sectors would be delighted to see growth predictions like this given the current economic circumstances.

Om Malik wrote an interesting short article last week on Microsoft’s efforts online and how they continue to bleed market share even as they funnel vast amounts of cash into their loss-making online division.

http://gigaom.com/2008/11/26/why-microsoft-fails-to-win-online/

Om talks about Microsoft’s structural issues and the gimmicky marketing of the Live search engine.

Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro has penned an interesting column on searchengineland.com:

http://searchengineland.com/who-owns-the-search-page-15720.php

He talks about ‘ownership’ of the results page and differentiates nicely between brand communications and direct-response search advertising.

Businessandleadership.com published an article yesterday on JP Morgan’s predictions for the paid search marketing sector in 2009. The JP Morgan team was lead by internet analyst Imran Khan and the full article is available below:

http://www.businessandleadership.com/news/article/12177/marketing/measurability-key-to-search-growth-in-2009

Some interesting points are raised. In 2009 marketing budgets in many organisations will face pressure as companies seek to cut costs and minimise profitability erosion.

Imran predicts that newspaper and radio advertising will take the biggest hit and that performance-driven advertising channels like search will do well as measurability becomes the watchword.

The overall prediction for the global paid search marketing sector in 2009 is 12% growth which is a pretty good figure in the current economic climate where many industries are facing shrinkage.

This will be driven by the aforementioned growth in search advertising’s share of marketing budget along with a global increase in query inventory of over 20% as consumers and business research their purchases online to achieve cost savings.

Now is not the time to stop marketing but it certainly makes sense to squeeze every last bit out of your spend and to make cuts in non-performing areas.

Search advertising is measurable, proven, performance-driven channel that delivers awesome return on investment. That is more valuable now than ever.