Online marketers have long been advised to use social media sites – including MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo! and Google Groups, Gather, MeetUps.com, Craig’s List et. al — to achieve search marketing goals:

• To learn real users’ real search terms for your products and services, in order to build PPC Keyword Ad Groups;
• To leverage the Better Crede of user-generated product reviews, recommendations and community-rated content related to your line of business;
• To build believable link-ins from non-commercial social sites that just might bump up your site traffic, search results page ranking or big engine quality ratings;
• To get authority site links from industry, category or vertical search blogs and meeting spaces;
• Even to monitor social media sites for pre-emptive damage control, such as early warning via complaints by toy gift buyers, as they avoid imported toys on gift lists this year.

Bids and buy-outs, new advertising spaces and new applications announced over the past several weeks has increased the return on marketers’ investments in using social media sites for SEO and SEM. Here’s a wrap-up of social media announcements the past month. Some may surprise you. (Check out “MySpy” at the end.)

Serving Video Results

YouTube, acquired by Google in 2006, has long been viewed as an entertainment video social media site. YouTube enables video exchanges of wide-ranging content and quality, offering popularity (number of downloads) as a rough metric of usefulness. In fact, an offline advertiser of car insurance (the one with a spokes-gekko) runs ads that poke fun at just how “wide-ranging” the quality of YouTube videos can be. After showing a few frames of inane behaviors shown on uploaded videos, the voiceover intoned that your online time might be better spent on getting lower insurance rates.

Google responded recently with a program of context-relevant video serves, extending select YouTube videos to its paid AdSense network of publishers. Relevant, targeted videos are served through Google’s content (rather than search) network. Triggered by a match between video content and the site publisher’s page content, advertisers pay for relevant videos returned to their site users by purchasing ads on the embedded video player, which Google AdSense delivers to users who click on an ad. This content network video media buy will charge on either a cost-per-click or cost-per-impression basis.

The greater interactivity of relevant video content is expected to keep visitors on a web site longer and to engage them more as potential conversions.

Serving Multimedia Results

In early October we noted the rush by the Big Three (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search) as well as Tier Two engines like Ask.com to offer Universal Search Results. (See “Universal Search and Relevance” at http://www.toptenwholesalenews.com/seo-sem/universal-search-and-relevance.htm .) Universal Search Results offer multimedia opportunities for online marketers – returning images, videos, catalog PDFs, interactive games and relevant audio feeds, in addition to organic and pay-per-click text results to searchers. But universal search results promised by many search engines also offer many more index-able, spidered “feed” opportunities for marketers. Multimedia search results returned to users have a far greater chance of returning content from a wider range of sites, including from a marketer’s links to and from various social media sites and a marketer’s uploads of useful videos and tools to social sites.

Everybody Wants To Own Social Sites

If the value of online communities is measured in buy-out dollars, then social media site Facebook is appraised as potentially worth $15 billion. Facebook started up as a college student meeting place just over three years ago, offering community connection, user applications called widgets and tools for sharing photos, videos and music. Facebook is growing faster than larger social media site, MySpace, which Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought in 2005 for a cool $580 million.

Facebook expects to expand its worldwide audience to over 300 million users, according to new minority owner Microsoft. (Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent share of Facebook, based on that bright $15 billion future appraisal.)

So, we know Facebook turned down Yahoo’s $1 billion buy-out offer, and Facebook’s current revenues don’t even top $200 million. Why would Microsoft pay $240 million for less than two percent of a site that isn’t number one in social media space and brings in only $150 million a year?

The answer is: Future online advertising revenues. Microsoft inked a marketing relationship with Facebook in 2006; now its minority ownership enables Microsoft to sell online advertising outside the U.S., where Facebook has a rapidly growing world audience. The deal makes Microsoft a player in the social media space; and a player with a chance to compete for worldwide ad revenue with its dominant competitor Google.

The founder of Facebook turned down not only Yahoo’s billion dollar offer, but also Google’s money, because “everybody knows” Google is building its own social media division. Google’s social network site Orkut has not spread far outside South America. But Google is known to buy its expertise, rather than grow its own. And that total absorption by dominant Google did not entice Facebook’s founder.

What Facebook founder Zuckerman is counting on is Microsoft’s need to enter the social media space, and the opportunity that minority share ownership gives Microsoft to close the gap in online advertising sales with Google. (As of fiscal year end June 2007, Google ad revenue grew to $13.3 billion, while Microsoft’s rose over 20 percent to reach “only” $1.84 billion.)

Spies Seeking Like-Minded Intell Agents?

Though A-Space may not offer search marketers new opportunities to sell bugs, high-tech wiretapping devices or personal security equipment, it does underscore the value of online community in the drive to win users and influence minds. The U.S. Directorate of National Intelligence announced December launch of an intelligence-sharing tool modeled after the largest social media site MySpace.

Called A-Space, the social media network for intelligence analysts and on-the-ground field analysts working on national intelligence gathering is supposed to widen the decision-making pool and input. The payback on expanding those backroom, top clearance discussions to include everyone up and down the chain is to avoid “groupthink” … the narrow, self-reflecting process that makes everyone talk and walk the same way, even down the wrong path. Examples cited in trade coverage included false claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the failed invasion of Cuba known as Bay of Pigs, and the inevitable financial collapse of Enron due to criminal behavior of a small secret group.

Independent homeland security and crisis consultant David Stephenson acknowledges security concerns (exposure of undercover agents) and resistance to A-Space by more Old Guard elements of the intelligence agencies (what Stephenson calls fear of loss of control and authority).

The latter is nothing new to online marketers, who promote new means and methods of connecting to potential customers and like-minded social community members, while offline traditional marketing media shovel against the Internet waves.