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.
As gatekeepers to the Internet, browsers play a key role in the battle for online dominance. Browsers enable us to access Web sites. They control how Web pages are displayed. They can set search engine defaults. Google, for example, pays to be the default search engine on Firefox, Safari and Opera browsers. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Bing search engine is defaulted on both Yahoo! and its own Internet Explorer browsers. If left unchanged by users, defaulted search engines gain an edge in Web traffic, and consequently, advertising revenues. This is because companies pay search engines to have their ads displayed next to search results, and also pay when users click on them.
And as technology improves, so do the possibilities. Now, browsers are faster and more powerful than ever, and are able to integrate an increasing number of “plug-ins” and run third-party apps. Users get more features and online productivity tools, while companies and developers get a platform to promote and distribute their products. In fact, there’s widespread belief in the industry that soon, all users will really need is a basic operating system and a powerful Web browser. Then, they can access all their data, run software and do all their computing activities online, diminishing the need for expensive, software-laden or resource-intensive computers. It’s called “cloud computing.”
“Many, many applications can be delivered through the browser and what that does for our costs is stunning,” said VP of Google Engineering Vic Gundotra at the recent MobileBeat conference in San Francisco. “We believe the Web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”
Google recently announced that they are launching a Google Chrome operating system (OS) as a companion to their existing Google Chrome browser. The OS will be opened up to developers later this year. It will initially be targeted to netbooks (which are basic, inexpensive laptops) and will be made available to consumers in the second half of 2010.
Google, however, is not the only company planning to capitalize on the Web browser’s developing role as hub of all user activity. Microsoft’s research unit released a paper earlier this year on a project it calls “Gazelle.” The paper describes Gazelle as a secure browser that would act like the Windows operating system, ensuring that different Web applications run in separate processes. This ensures that the Web applications are protected from each other in cases of failure, even if they are run within the same site. While Gazelle is not yet under implementation, Microsoft researcher Helen Wang tells CNET News: "We’re really trying to leverage the decades of operating system experience and apply that in the Web and browser setting."
Other competitors are also lining up. Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape (one of the first browsers and largely credited to have popularized the Internet), is reportedly backing start-up RockMelt. Andreessen tells The New York Times that RockMelt is developing a browser that would keep pace with the evolution of the Web. Exactly how is unclear, as little detail has been released.
As the industry moves toward power browsers and Web-centric operating systems, however, a number of questions crop up. How will this affect the digital media value chain? Will these lightweight operating systems (such as Google Chrome and Gazelle) actually end up replacing or outdating their traditional, more powerful — and more expensive —counterparts (such as Windows OS or Mac OS)? Will developers, device manufacturers and retailers support the movement enough to make it work? Perhaps most importantly, will consumers be convinced enough to make the switch? What about security and privacy issues? These questions need to be addressed, and many hurdles still need to be overcome before anyone can say who will win the browser war, or even what the battlefield will end up looking like.
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.
