The Caffeine update was brought upon by the inability of real time search in Google. Twitter and Facebook were extensively used in Iran during a political crisis last year; a number of news sites were banned. Search engine results could not keep pace with real time developments.

As a result, Google now leases an API feed from Twitter as well as a Member Profile feed from Facebook to update its index, to provide real time search results. Sites and new content is now being crawled at a faster rate. To accomplish the rapid processing of information Google also upgraded their data center infrastructure.

What does the Caffeine Update mean for Marketers?

1. New pages and new content finds itself in the Google search results faster

2. Duplicate content is being penalized by not appearing in the Google index

a. Unique copy will have an increased opportunity resulting in a link in Google SERPS

b. If contractual agreements allow, copy received from vendors could be massaged

c. Canonical tagging is increasingly crucial for site content

d. Absolute links for content will help in seeding the content when picked up by other sites

3. Site speed is now part of the Google algorithm. (Google wants a good user experience for users)

a. Site speed will assist in an elevated ranking for sites

4. Social Media can be leveraged by digital marketers in real time

a) Twitter and Facebook’s real time search results appearance in Google can now be integrated in marketing campaigns (other than brand marketing)

Google has removed the sandbox for developers and word is, that the caffeine update will initially roll out to one single datacenter and then populate the other datacenters “after the holidays”.

Anyway, my expectation is that the 2 major updates to make the most impact shall be ‘real time news events‘ and ‘twitter updates’. The ‘News‘ and ‘Information‘ categories are going to be very prominent after this next update. Twitter updates will definitely be indexed fast, to show up in Google Search results.

Google’s vulnerability was evident when they could not display real time links during the ‘Iran voting crisis’ earlier this summer. As soon as Bing announced their agreement with Twitter, Google rapidly followed. It appears they are licensing their data feed instead of connecting via the regular public API. Where does Facebook stand in all this?

Additionally, there may be fewer search results displayed – I believe someone may have noticed, most searchers do not go past the first five search results, let alone the first page.

UPDATE 08/16/2014: The Radian6 acquisition by Salesforce has propelled the listening offering into a mighty contender with a Salesforce Marketing Cloud coupling it with publishing (Buddy Media), email (Exact target), Ad buys (Social.com) and just this week the acquisition of RelateIQ, a big data player puts it ahead of the pack.

Another project oriented noteworthy listening insights contender out of Boston is Crimson Hexagon.

End Update

While enterprise marketing software, search, email and web analytics are fairly mature, the listening platforms for social media are beginning to take shape, to gather and provide insights from conversations. The brand and reputation management sentiment has not yet translated into meaningful trend shaping insights for marketers. The metrics surround themselves around mentions, reach and discussion volume.

There are some players in the listening platforms space which the recent paper by Forester has identified as making some movement in narrowing the insights gap. Among those listed in the report were Nielsen Buzz Metrics and TNS Cymfony which offer the best balance between technology, insight, delivery, and strategy. Nielsen got top honors for strong analytical and insight capability which TNS Cymfony appeared to excel in data collection and media coverage.

Some of the other players in the report were Biz 360, DowJones Insight, JDPA, Visible Technologies and Radian6. Visible Technologies is identified to best positioned to extend its capabilities into CRM systems.

As the natural language processing algorithms improve for the platforms we will hopefully see some metrics which present insight value. Currently, the measurement and results for Social Media are growing in maturity but still vague. Seemingly, more effort has been made into making pretty dashboards than meaningful metrics. Long way to go. It shall be exciting to watch as maturity sets in – they certainly are the toughest analytics yet, to conquer.

While I was thinking about this I decided I would pen this crucial divergence that often results in conflicting results for the digital marketing group.

The interplay between e-commerce and Digital Marketing came up in a conversation with Rob Swint, Director of Marketing @ Endeca, which by the way has a superb enterprise search product.

For example: there is a purchase decision to be made for an Enterprise Search product. By the way here is Gartner’s take on the picture if you are interested in learning more about Enterprise Search and more – http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/endeca/169927.html

Foreground:
There is tremendous dependence on the eCommerce folks for technology which directly impacts Digital Marketing. More often than not, the purchase decision does not rest with Digital Marketing; digital marketing is the primary beneficiary.

Solution:
For an effective solution that has true enterprise benefits, the Digital group may have to conduct its own research when seeking technology solutions which directly impact it. Perhaps, eCommerce may be more concerned with the ease of integration, ease of implementation and how the technology fits into the existing framework, integration with Sharepoint, etc. Conversely Digital marketing may consider how the technology results increase traffic, integrate with behavioral marketing analytics, other existing analytics packages, CRM tools, and reporting tools.

To optimize the purchase decision the ideal process solution would be if the research were done by the two individual business units (ecommerce and digital) separately and then converge upon a solution.
Digital Marketing is the resulting beneficiary of the action and its individual take and involvement in assessing the most viable option is paramount.

Ok, Behavioral targeting has been in the news and apparently is under further scrutiny as 10 consumer *and privacy organizations* (list below) on September 1, called on congress to enact legislation limiting and preventing behavior targeting and tracking.

What is out there? – There are onsite advertising decision providers like Omniture, Audience Science etc? After all, there are no third party cookies to be blocked, the load time is quicker. Hardly, the third party cookie advertising targeting systems guys like Double Click, Value Click, Tribal Fusion, etc are still the best game in town for ecommerce companies who are reliant on advertising as their core revenue generator, like publishing. Since they serve advertising across a spectrum of sites they have a reservoir of personas and demographics – a great advantage. Additionally, they have a readymade data set.

The onsite advertising decision providers do provide value and an advantage in the authenticated space like financial institutions, online banking, etc. Once a user is logged in, there is a lot more personal information that that can be added on to develop a target dataset. However, to track a user over time, takes time.

Online advertising continues to walk that fine line. Well, let’s see how it all plays out.

*Center for Digital Democracy
*Consumer Federation of America
*Consumers Union
*Consumer Watchdog
*Electronic Frontier Foundation
*Privacy Lives
*Privacy Rights Clearinghouse
*Privacy Times
*U.S. Public Interest Research Group
*The World Privacy Forum

Ok, all you Digital Marketing gurus, Product Managers and Campaign Managers take heed. An integrated campaign means that all e-vehicles ( excluding TV, Radio, mail, etc) will be used for a specific product campaign and weight measured for the campaign success .

When finalizing the marketing brief and sending it across for governance approval there should be inclusions of not only the product message, the creative type,  the audience/personas/geo/data files but a supporting document listing which lateral e-vehicles are to be utlised. A pre developed workflow would be utlized to push the documents forward (you can construct a visio workflow doc conforming to your digital marketing organizational strength).

Now assuming you have governance approval for the campaign, begin your inventory and push the docs forward to the e-vehicle arms of your organization. Some e-vehicle operational arms may be outside your organization, however the coordination and timing has to be on the money across the board. This is important so the campaign analytics can reflect the appropriate weight measurements for tracking and trending.     

Item 1: Website Page/s Creation

• Approved Wireframe or creative
• Approved CTA placement
• Approved Anchor text
• Approved Images
   -If Flash or Ajax – HTML file for Tags & ADA Compliance
• Alt Tags for the images
• 4 semantic pieces of the same Web content (included would be the 4 keywords with density)
• Meta Tags
• 4 Target Keywords
• Description
• Site Map location for Link

…to be continued

There are some initial differences which are slowly becoming apparent.
Before you rush to optimize for Bing, keep in mind the Bing algorithm is still being tweaked however below are some of the early differences I have found.
1. Bing appears to give less priority to Keyword Density.
2. Bing seems to give less priority to Link Denisty as well.
3. For Bing domain age is major (this is one of the early algorithms, since their game has just begun and apparently seem to think the domains which have been around a while are to be trusted. In my opinion, this will change).
4. For Bing Anchor texts carry more weight than Google.
5. Social site links are weighted less by Bing
6. Bing weighs in heavier for the H-Tag

I am personally not going to be optimizing specifically for Bing. It is just good to be aware why the SERPs are the way they are. I am going to watch the battle between these two in the coming months and tweak accordingly. At least for now the battle is being fought with ad dollars not with sparkling search results.