The Big Money: According to Compete.com, Google lags behind Facebook in driving traffic to major portals like Yahoo, AOL and MSN.

Silicon Alley Insider: This report last year claimed 19% of Google traffic came from Facebook (and that number is growing).

Compete.com: As you can see below, Facebook is rapidly gaining ground on Google. Golden question is what proportion of this audience are clicking on links taking them out of the blue-walled garden and into the wider web?

Anecdotally, I’ve heard on the web manager grapevine that a larger proportion of traffic appears to be coming from social media – eating into the portion of the pie previously reserved for traditional search engines. Another indication of this is the number and attendance of social search sessions at major SEO events like SES.

What does this mean? Whoever owns the largest share of our life streams (the current killer app of social media) enjoys the strongest visibility and all the financial frills that follow. Also, given that we show strong signs of adopting a crowd mentality when being ’social’ online, the chances of the market fragmenting look slim. We will all congeal our content around a handful of platforms (if that) at the top of this lucrative pile.

And then there’s all those paychecks tied to Google’s golden egg – here I’m thinking more of the huge search marketing industry that has risen up over the last 10 years. Skill sets will shift away from the technical aspects of SEO (goodbye masters of canonical URLs and 301 redirects) to more touchy-feely PR (hello reputation managers and online community builders). Key concepts in SEO are still relevant, like creating modular topic-based content, but there will be some shifts. Rather than looking for links from authoritative sites, we’ll need to understand more about who are the authoritative figures in a network.

Where will Google be in all of this? It looks like the search giant is hedging its bets with the launch of Gmail Buzz: a lifestreaming service that sits atop the versatile Gmail email client. The future is looking distinctly social.

I’ve only had personal experience with CoTweet which works particularly well for our small marketing team:

The one thing the BtoB article provides is an excellent feature-set to consider when looking at these tools:

Multi-account support: The ability to log into and manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single application or tool

Multi-user support: Putting the team into ‘team tools’, multi-user support lets multiple tweeters work in the same environment and, if necessary, be individually identified

Statistics: Once you start pumping multiple Twitter streams, lists and contributors through a single app, the available statistics and metrics to mine begin to get interesting

Scheduled Tweets: When managing multiple accounts, at times it’s easier to batch social media work, then send it out to the world over time

List management: If you are a managing multiple accounts while trying to track different communities of interest via Twitter lists, good list management creation and tracking features are a must

So there you have it. A simple wish-list when it comes to using a team to monitor a Twitter account.

Apart from dealing with the obvious stuff you’d cover with any agency engagement, such as agency background and their past experience in this area, the RFP also covers the following areas:

• Integration of social media across marketing/communications functions
• Social media channels employed
• Reputation management and social media monitoring
• Establishing social media profiles
• Influencer outreach
• Crisis management
• Social media training
• Compliance with legal requirements
• Metrics and measurement

I’d say this list is equally valid if you are in the situation of having to prepare a job description for a social media manager or associated role.

Download the report

SMG also run the hugely popular Social Media Today blog aggregator. If you write in this space, you should definitely hook up your blog!

So, how do businesses make the most of this medium for their purposes?

This Thursday, Hubspot will be running a webinar addressing this subject. Registration details:

Title: How Businesses are using Twitter
Time: Thursday, January 21, 2010, 1:00 PM ET
Register now

Unfortunately I have a prior commitment so won’t be able to attend but hopefully will be able to catch up with what happens on Twitter.

Wibiya is a service that allows you to add all this functionality to a toolbar at the foot of your blog within minutes. Literally minutes.

I run Wordpress and the steps were this simple:

1. Setup an account on Wibiya
2. Choose your theme
3. Choose which applications you want on your toolbar
4. Download the Wordpress plugin
5. Upload the Wordpress plugin to your blog
6. Activate the plugin and enter the ID in the settings (under ‘Appearance’)
7. View your blog to see the new features you’ve now added!

At this stage, you can go back to Wibiya and change the theme or add any new features as necessary. You can see it in action at the foot of this blog.

One big advantage of using a toolbar like this is that if you relegate these elements to this footer toolbar, you can save some real estate on your navigation: all those links to the RSS feed, Twitter, and other services can be dropped (I’ll keep mine for the time being).

One thing that would be nice to see is some kind of API so that the applications listed on the bar could come from popular services such as ShareThis or potentially Disqus.  It will be interesting to see how this service develops…

(BTW, I should point out that Wibiya is not a new service in 2010 – however it is a new feature on CagedEther

Still, if you watch this presentation from Epipheo Labs, this may help go someway to see that there could be much more to this beyond the hype:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/rDu2A3WzQpo" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]

Oh, and if that doesn’t have your iPhone in a tizzy, check out this handy guide from Mashable (it seems hardly a blog post can pass without making reference to the mighty Mashable).

And yes, I’m in that not-so-small coterie trying to get their hands on an account.

Commenting on web pages has become a part of our online lives since being popularized by the growth in blogs and has been adopted by many web publishers for other types of content. Google Sidewiki extends this feature beyond the reach of web publishers, allowing visitors to comment on any page across the web (as long as you have Google Sidewiki installed).For instance, here are the comments on Microsoft Bing, a major Google competitor in the search space:

(See actual page)

This tool raises a number of issues such as comment moderation and ranking (Google says it uses automated scripts and the nebulous measure of authority for this), and the ability of web publishers to control commenting on their pages. However, I’d like to center on one issue that is by no means restricted to Google Sidewiki but is definitely highlighted by this service. That is the issue of comment and feedback proliferation.

Proliferation of commenting systems

As was pointed out in the FIR podcast, there are already a number of ways of sharing comments on content. Let’s highlight some of these:

• A website’s own commenting system (as ships as standard with most blogging platforms)
• Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Posterous, etc.
• Comment networks like Disqus
  
• And now browser-based systems like Google Sidewiki

Will Google Sidewiki be the last entrant into this space? Probably not. The upshot is that it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor these conversations and the multiple threads that can roll out of them. These systems are by their very nature distributed and autonomous. If, for instance, a comment thread grows on Google Sidewiki, someone browsing through the Disqus comments on a blog page who doesn’t happen to have Google Toolbar would remain blissfully unaware of this.

The problem has been around for some time on social networks. For instance, there are a number of services that allow you to post to Facebook from Twitter, so your Tweets appear to both audiences. Now if a Tweet that appears on Facebook attracts a number of comments, these aren’t passed back to your Twitter followers. So although your original missives are shared across the networks, the ensuing comments and conversations are not.

No easy solution presents itself, largely due a lack of standards when it comes to this form of communications. Going back to that earlier example, comments on Facebook are a completely different format and can be much longer than a reply on Twitter. Now throwing Google Sidewiki into the equation complicates the situation further, given that this system is browser-based and not strictly web-based.

So whilst Google Sidewiki throws up an enticing proposition (that of being able to comment on any page across the web), it really adds to the growing problem of comment system proliferation. Are we just building ourselves a fresh new Tower of Babel where online streams of conversations grow up in isolation of each other?

More on Google Sidewiki

Install Google Sidewiki
Google Sidewiki and Google Wave integration (VB SEO)
Google Sidewiki vs Brands in Public (Tim Aldiss)
Google Sidewiki explained (Search Newz)

As an example, here’s the homepage for Home Depot:

(see the actual page)

Released last week, the service did draw some ire around the original plan to post pages irrespective of whether or not brand owners consented. In addition, brand owners have to pay Brands in Public $400 a month for the privilege of excercising editorial control (including moderating comments) over their pages. Seth has since relented and Brands in Public is now opt-in.

There has been a lot of discussion around this project primarilly discussing the ethics and what this could mean for brands and their online presence. I’m interested in focussing on one aspect: that of brand ownership.

Brand ownership

One thing Brands in Public highlighted is just how easy it is to set up a page focused on a brand you don’t own and populate it with the wealth of social media content that exists out there.

So brand owners better beware! If these pages are tied together into networks (as Brands in Public has done by tying up with Seth’s already well-placed Squidoo site), they will rank highly for brand searches on Google and the other major search engines. In effect, Brands in Public takes some control of the online brand image away from brand owners.

In terms of the creation of these types of pages, as was pointed out on the FIR podcast, you too could be a Seth Godin and go ahead and use services like Netvibes to mock-up similar pages very quickly with little expense. This raises the issue of brandjacking, something which anyone who was involved in the wild west of domain registration 10 years ago is no doubt aware.

However, in this instance the social aspect introduces a new dimension. If such systems become highly popular, brands can end up in an uncomfortable position and may find themselves having to relent to the crowds.

Brand owners already find themselves dealing with similar issues around brand pages on Wikipedia. The difference in this case is that a collection of social media soundbites has the potential to become much more emotive: the intent of the medium isn’t to be instructional or informative, it’s to display conversation in all its vibrant tone and color. If the crowds dictate they want these village square-like properties that allow them to pillor brands, how far can brands go to limit this, before they are accused of trampling established netiquette? If the conversation around your brand heads southwards, how exactly should you react?

Regardless of the ethics of this, if these types of aggregation pages become more prevalent, companies are going to have to consider this aspect of their web presence and find a way to deal with it. Pleading brandjacking may fall on deaf ears as lack of participation is viewed by your prospects and customers as a sign of defensiveness.

Whlst Brands in Public has brought this issue to the fore, regardless of whether it survives or not, I don’t believe we’ve heard the end of this subject.

More on Brands in Public:

Squidoo Backs Down On ‘Brand Campaign’ As Many Are ‘Not so Happy’ About It (TechCrunch)

Launching Brands in Public (Seth’s Blog)

Squiddo, Brands in Public & the risks of aggregation blackmail (Dan McCarthy)