Time-challenged web publishers in various commercial and industry segments provided their insights on staying on top of business information, getting the most useful business information quickly and staying up-to-date.

·        Go Vertical for Search Needs.  Search engines and databases that specialize in a business or interest segment bypass more generalized search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search. Information overload has fragmented even the general search engines into special-focus verticals that are consumer targeted, such as in travel (Hotels.com, Expedia), used vehicles (Autotrader) and books, electronics, entertainment (Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble Online).

But it’s the time-challenged business user who needs to find specialized and relevant information as quickly as possible to find the trend shifts affecting their industries and to focus their advertising, marketing and sales efforts to the most targeted potential buyers and sellers.

Specialized, niche-targeted vertical search sites are the fastest path to the busy business searcher’s goals. Piper Jaffray Investment Research dubbed verticals the new “golden portals” of online search, because of their rapid growth in meeting specialized searchers’ needs.

As noted in Vertical Search Report 2008, 93% of those surveyed said they would be “very” or “quite likely” to use a search engine that focused on their specific business and workplace needs. More than half (53%) listed faster access to desired information as a major benefit of vertical search; half cited “focus on their business interests and workflow” as a major advantage.

·        Pull Niche-Targeted Trend Data. General business publications, like general and consumer-centric major search engines, lack the granular data and trend tracking of a vertical search engine and industry-specific search site.

Professionals who need summaries and data on trends specific to their industries turn to specialized professional publications and, if they offer the feature, an affiliated search site. For example, engineers turn to GlobalSpec; science researchers turn to Scirus and healthcare professionals turn to SearchMedica.

Media and marketing trends watchers turn to professional tracking sites, such as Nielsen/Net Ratings and Google Trend Alerts. 

Online retailers turn to Nielsen Business Media, Internet Retailer and Retail Industry.com. Wholesalers of apparel, footwear, jewelry, accessories and general merchandise connect to buyers and sellers through this site (TopTenWholesale.com) and its affiliate search sites, OffPriceNetwork.com, Wholezilla.com and WholesaleU.com.

Check the new trend index for wholesale products at www.TopTenWholesaleTrends.com. Top Ten Trends Wholesale Index displays search demands over any date range entered by wholesale buyers and sellers employing Top Ten Wholesale’s vertical search, auction and advertising networks. Get a graphic snapshot of the most demanded search terms, products and categories … as it happens.

·        Use Industry-Specific Feeds.  The Vertical Search Report 2008 — surveying publishers, advertisers, marketers and financial service providers in what Convera labeled an “early adopter audience” – noted a high level of awareness about industry and sector-specific knowledge feeds. Such feeds include RSS – Real Simple Syndication – customized news feeds to which a business professional can subscribe at industry or vertical search sites. RSS feeds automatically serve latest news and commentary on preferred topics.

Another automated way to get important business information is through desktop widgets, a custom tool that serves alerts, trends and business info with vertical search functions.

The option of customizing a user home page lets busy professionals assemble top-level home page access to most used web sites and resources.

Convera and E-consulting concluded 90% of their survey respondents knew about the automatic and specialized knowledge feeds noted above. Up to 90% received custom RSS industry feeds; over 56% used customized home pages; and over 48% used desktop widgets or tools available from industry sites.

Given gasoline prices and transportation costs, combined with buyer behaviors that favor local sources, it should be no surprise that buyer, wholesaler and retailer advertising is focusing on regional/local media as well.

Buyers seeking merchandise supply sources are as influenced by local or regional warehouses for faster and less costly shipments, as they are by opportunities to target specific regions with styles and features favored by local potential customers.

At the retail level, jewelry, handbag and accessories purchasers may favor online sources; but apparel and footwear buyers are concerned about sizing and fit. (So notes an eBay product analyst to explain more auction activity on fashion accessories.) Thus, sales of some categories of apparel and footwear may rely more on search marketing that links up potential customers with local offline sellers, in order to complete the conversion-to-sale equation. This same drill-down to link up local buyers with local retailers has long been needed in big-ticket categories, such as automotive sales.

According to Sterling Market Intelligence, marketers increasingly use online advertising to drive local offline sales, using search ad and online display advertising to help buyers find products more easily within their region. This drive to localize closes the marketing circuit on national brands available at the local level. As Greg Sterling noted in a recent Tech Trends NewsFactor article, the classic example in this use of online advertising is to drive a viewer of a national Honda auto ad through narrower gates, to a specific area dealer or local distributor. This drill down activity has been missing from national brand online advertisers who were largely disconnected from local dealers; while the local dealers traditionally relied on local offline advertising to close the sale.

 Not Dead Yet: Local Media Properties

It’s no news that newspapers, radio and TV stations, cable companies and yellow pages directory publishers are losing market share to online advertising and search marketing opportunities. Ad watchers predict demise of all the above traditional advertising channels – or at the least fatal revenue declines compared to online search ad and display ad marketing – by the year 2011. However, local media properties are not sporting “The End Is Near” sandwich boards.

What is newsworthy is the willingness by local media properties to link up with so-called Internet Pure Play companies to provide localized online search advertising. Also, local media venues appear to be investing more in teams of specialized online sales representatives, rather than assign traditional print or TV time sales reps to sell their online advertising offerings.

Examples of Local Media Strikes Back:

 ·        Rather than sell out to Google, which coveted its local business and retail assets, Yellow Pages converted hundreds of metropolitan directories to dual access: traditional print and online-accessible YellowPages.com. The local directory/database publisher then inked media selling contracts with former bidder Google, and Yahoo! and Microsoft. (Nothing like covering all bases.)

·        A vertical example is Business.com’s acquisition by R. H. Donnelly – a publisher of local business directories – narrowing the gap between online and offline advertising opportunities for business professional services.

·        In traditionally local ad categories, according to recent research conducted by local media research firm Borrell Associates, the key advertising segments for 2008 will be automotive, employment, real estate and health-related services.

Local Ad Growth Predicted

All the signs point to local ad growth. E-marketer projected U.S. local online advertising to increase to $7.8 Billion within the next three years. The Kelsey Group combined local search and online “classified” advertising (the categories cited above of autos, employment, real estate) to project increases to over $30 Billion by 2010. Local media researcher Borrell Associates saw more modest increases in local search advertising to $5 Billion in 2008. But that represents a doubling of what Borrell tracks as current local search ad spending; and it still points the ad compass to local advertising.

Local media channels are highly motivated these days. The Big G, Google, has announced in bits and pieces its intent to become an ad broker beyond Internet ad media.  Google is most likely to go after traditional media buying and selling for the lucrative and local auto ad market first. A good marketing strategy argues drilling down to local access, whether the sale is closed online or offline.

For example, Ask.com paced the big tier-one search engines (Google in May, Yahoo! and Microsoft by September) by offering Universal Search Results: Returning multimedia (video, images, maps, audio feeds) plus localized search results. Like the Big 3 engines, Ask no longer asks search users to click on the “right” database to search on Videos or Maps; and some local searches no longer demand localization keywords, like city or zip code. (You may have seen Ask’s offline electronic advertising on this universal search feature. Spots were themed “Instant Get-ification” and closed with the challenge: Can your search engine do this?)

Ensuring Privacy by Erasing the Breadcrumb Trail

Next, Ask.com proactively addressed concerns about privacy of search user data — search behaviors, search histories, identities, IP addresses, session IDs and all those behavioral beacons, cookies and personally identifiable stored data. That’s the breadcrumb trail data that powers the engines of personalized search marketing.

Ask worked with consumer advocates seeking more control over personal data used for web searches and online advertising. Earlier this year, Ask announced a data retention policy that promised to “disassociate” users’ search histories from user IP addresses and identities … after 18 months.

Ask also sided with Microsoft, tech leaders and watchdog academics (such as Harvard University’s Ben Edelman, interviewed by Tech News World) to push for global privacy principles for data collection, use and protection.  (If you do any pay-per-click or paid advertising in Europe, you know the European Union’s privacy and data-retention standards are much stricter than what passes privacy muster in these wilder western markets of North America.)

Erasing All Traces?

Now Ask offers a new tool called the “AskEraser.” When activated by a search user’s click at Ask’s home page, the AskEraser deletes cookies, search queries, text entered in the search box, IP addresses and User/Session IDs from Ask.com servers.  Erasing that personally identifiable data trail should satisfy the most stringent user privacy advocates, who are concerned about the linking, tracking and association of databases for future profiling, email promotions and online ad targeting.

Of course, the AskEraser is less welcome to online marketers, as the erasures tend to block the best programmed plans for personalization and web behavior analytics. (Remember advertising industry gasps over home video recordings that let viewers fast forward through taped commercials – skip right over them!! Think of the AskEraser as a high-tech, digital fast forward button on the remote, in terms of the sand it throws in advertising tracking gears.)

Enter the Ad Revenue Goliath Google

“Ask is in a tough spot,” Harvard University professor Edelman noted to TechNewsWorld. Because Ask.com feeds Google Sponsored Ads into its search results, and because Ask still passes user search data on to its partner Google, that AskEraser only works on Ask’s data servers.

Ask’s arrangement to share search data for Google ad-serving programs means Ask.com has already transferred its users’ search data to Google’s servers … before users ever activate the AskEraser. The fine print in an Ask.com statement admits that the new tool cannot erase a user’s search activity from third-party servers on which sponsored search results and other features rely. 

At fiscal year-end June 2007, Google’s ad revenue had grown to $13.3 Billion, ranking it first among the Big Three search engines. No surprise there; but the top-heavy nature of Google’s dominance of search ads is somewhat more surprising. Faster-growing Microsoft ranks third in the contests, with only one-seventh of Google’s ad revenues ($1.84 Billion). That’s what Microsoft legal counsel Brad Smith said to a Congressional committee investigating whether Google’s bid to buy DoubleClick display (not search) ad-serving network should be blocked as anticompetitive. Smith noted that Google already dominates search advertising; and the DoubleClick sale would give Google a dominant gateway position over all online advertising.

So while Ask.com has taken valuable steps to give its search users more control over their own online data privacy, Ask’s contract obligations for Google search results served on its site takes its privacy initiatives a couple steps backwards.

 AskEraser David meets Goliath Google. Perhaps the bottom line here is that online privacy protection cannot be tackled unilaterally, one company at a time. Is it time for those “global privacy principles for data collection” noted above?