This July, Facebook began beta-testing its new Q&A feature, joining the likes of Yahoo!, Answers, Ask.com, Quora and Aardvark (recently acquired by Google) allowing users to seek answers to their questions from their social network or the online community at large. Indeed, as more and more Q&A services enter the market, businesses should pay attention and get into the conversation.
Here’s why:
For one, online search is evolving. To optimize their rankings in search results, businesses must keep up with the latest keywords to use, as well as where to use them. Search engines like Google and Bing now include “social search” – a type of Web search that aims to deliver more relevant results by drawing content from a user’s social network – including Q&A forums, blogs, subscribed RSS feeds, status updates, tweets, etc. This gives businesses plenty of opportunity to build and manage their brand presence online, especially considering the huge amount of data shared on social networking sites (Note that as of June 2010, Americans now spend most of their online time on social networks compared to other online activities like gaming, e-mailing and watching videos, according to research firm The Nielsen Company).
Secondly, while users are indeed amping up social networking activity, they are also searching for advice from credentialed sources, not just their peers. According to The 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer (a trust and credibility survey by public relations firm Edelman), when it comes to getting information about a company, trust in “conversations with friends and peers,” along with trust in traditional media, declined over the past year in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). On the other hand, trust in a CEO as company spokesperson is recovering, while academics, industry experts and financial analysts continue to be seen as the most credible sources of company news.
This means that so long as companies don’t appear self-serving and don’t resort to market-speak, they might earn “brownie points” by offering their knowledge and expertise in Q&A forums and by cultivating a wide network of expert spokespeople who can address consumer questions regarding topics that relate to the company, its products and the broader industry in general.
Third, Q&A discussions can reveal consumer preferences and other valuable data that companies can use to generate leads and provide targeted advertising. Facebook’s “self-service ad system,” for example, already allows companies to deliver ads to a targeted group of users, based on their profiles and the stuff that they “like.” Facebook’s new Q&A feature, which will allow users to add polls – e.g., Which is better for your 8-year old cousin: Nintendo Wii or Xbox? – can only enhance the site’s algorithm and improve product recommendations, benefiting advertisers and consumers alike.
Of course, as in any good conversation, listening is key. Businesses that want to make the most of social search and Q&A sites should take the time to understand not just what’s being asked, but also why, so as to provide the best service to consumers, and to make the most sense when they do speak up.
Is Facebook a threat to Google? First Facebook buys FriendFeed, a service that instantaneously aggregates information from social media sites. Then Facebook rolls out an improved search system, enabling users to browse through posts by friends, by Facebook users who have elected to go public, and by Web results — all in real time.
Asking whether or not Facebook is a threat to Google is key because as social networking is gaining popularity — unique visitors to Twitter, for example, grew 950 percent in the past year, according to July data from Web analytics firm Compete — more and more people are sharing information in real time, whether through status updates, tweets, photos or links. The need to track and sort through everything that has been posted is changing “search” as we know it. How?
First: The increased need for speed. While Twitter hasn’t replaced traditional journalism, for example, it has become a hub for breaking stories, with users tweeting about events like the February Turkish Airlines crash as it happened. Services like FriendFeed collect updates like this from sites like Twitter, notifies you about them, and allows you to search through all the posted data instantly. Meanwhile, traditional search, such as the kind Google does, indexes information from the Web only periodically. Google might therefore need to speed up its indexing to strengthen its market lead.
In an interview earlier this year with TechCrunch, Google Co-Founder Larry Page admitted: "I have always thought we needed to index the Web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it."
But why did Facebook, which already had a service akin to Friendfeed — its News Feed — still buy the company? Some, like CNET News and BusinessWeek, say that it’s a talent acquisition, as FriendFeed engineers are mostly ex-Googlers who helped build Web services like Google Talk, Google Maps, and Gmail. In any case, Facebook stands to learn and benefit from FriendFeed’s features. In the official press release, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor noted that they will “bring many of the innovations…developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”
Second: The increased need for relevancy. When the World Health Organization raised the pandemic alert on swine flu in April, social media blog Mashable reported more than 10,000 tweets per hour about the virus. Indeed, the constant stream of updates on sites like Facebook or Twitter makes it difficult to monitor relevant posts or sift through data. It’s crucial, therefore, to have an advanced search function that enables users to filter noise from news — a technology such as the one offered by FriendFeed, where you can even search for keywords.
Google already has an advanced search function, but it doesn’t have real-time results just yet. That is why analysts from media and technology publications like TechCrunch and BoomTown think a Google/Twitter team-up would be the right move, especially as Facebook’s reach expands. While Google has kept mum on this possibility, it did recently unveil “Google Caffeine,” an upgraded version that speeds up its search results and promises improved accuracy, size and comprehensiveness.
For now, it’s too early to see whether Facebook will be able to do in search what it had done in social networking. Nevertheless, Google needs to speed up searches to real time if it wants to stay ahead in the rapidly-evolving search race.
Once the king of social networking, MySpace continues to bleed subscribers to archrival Facebook, which grew 221 percent over last year, while MySpace inched up less than half of a percent, according to July data from Web analytics firm Compete. Rupert Murdoch, CEO of MySpace parent company NewsCorp, blamed himself for the mess in an interview with TheStreet.com, and declared that MySpace is getting things right and will be a strong force in many ways. But could it? Let’s take a closer look.
One company strategy is to launch in the near future MySpace Mail, enabling users to send and receive multi-media messages using a dedicated account — something Facebook doesn’t offer and doesn’t seem to be considering. MySpace says this potentially makes it the second biggest e-mail provider in the U.S. But a recent report by online widget-maker AddToAny notes that more users favor sharing content through Facebook over e-mailing anyway. So is MySpace Mail a threat to Facebook? Probably not.
Another strategy is to strengthen its video game platform. "MySpace is and will be more in the future a gaming platform," said Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller at the recent Fortune Brainstorm: TECH conference. Seems like a wise move, as users pay to access premium content on their favorite games, customize their avatars, or send virtual gifts. In fact, roughly 12 percent of Americans bought a virtual item at some point in the last 12 months, according to research firm Frank N. Magid Associates.
Facebook, however, currently has more applications than MySpace, and has already rolled out its own micropayment system allowing users to buy virtual credits. What’s more, according to media and marketing research firm Nielsen, total minutes spent on Facebook increased 699 percent year-over-year in April, while time spent on MySpace fell 31 percent. Combined with Facebook’s sheer number of users, guess which company would be more attractive to game developers?
There are, however, two areas where MySpace still takes a lead. The first is videos: Nielsen reports that MySpace ranked first among social media sites with 120.1 million total video streams as of June, compared to Facebook’s 54 million. However, Nielsen also noted that Facebook was the fastest-growing site for both total video streams and unique viewers of video, growing 434 and 397 percent year-over-year respectively.
The second is music: Since its launch last September, MySpace Music grew its unique visitors 190 percent, from 4.2 million to 12.1 million as of June, according to Nielsen. While Facebook has a popular music application (iLike, a third party app, which has been renamed to “Music” on the site), it doesn’t have its own dedicated music service — unless it buys iLike, which some, including CNET News, consider a possibility.
The verdict? While MySpace loses out on social networking traffic, it still has an upper hand on assets like videos and music. But Facebook is catching up quickly even on these, and MySpace has to focus on making its good points more attractive to advertisers, developers and users while it still can, if it wants to hold on to its lead.
