While we’re confident in our data analysis, we’re left to speculate as to why Bing brings better value.

Microsoft Bing

#3 – Top Display Area – In Bing, paid results for some search queries are stacked 4 deep at the top of the page, vs. 0-3 deep on most Google AdWords display pages. It would be very interesting to see Bing’s SERP heat maps illustrating what percentage of visitors actually make it past these first four rows of paid ads to get to organic results.

#2 – Simpler Interface – Google has always had a lot of irons in the fire. Now, however, its myriad ambitions and partners are crowding its search engine results pages. Paid text ads are now competing for call to actions for both unrelated and related items in Google Shopping, related categories in Google Books, Google News, related search items and even social media results. This means that paid ads are increasingly crowded out of the equation. While Bing is hardly focused solely on organic and paid search results, its display is still far simpler, increasing the chances that a user will click on text ads.

#1 – Less Competition – Perhaps because of Bing’s smaller market share, there are typically 20-30% fewer paid search competitors on each SERP compared to Google. Less competition nearly always equates to higher conversion rates in paid search. Time will tell whether the conversion needle will move as Bing’s merger with Yahoo is completed later this year. It’s a no-brainer that many existing Yahoo advertisers will be folded into the Bing model, bringing a much larger market share along with increased competition. With luck, Bing will keep its SERPS stripped down and reasonably free of clutter.

In late 2009, DemandResults began using Bing for legal industry paid search ads. Once our team got past the Bing/MSN Ad Center’s archaic user interface, we were able to focus on results that were, initially, so much higher than Google’s that we thought it might be a fluke.

We increased our spend, and in a matter of weeks were able to confidentially identify Bing as the best value for lead generation in that particular industry.

In early 2010, we began using Bing as part of an overall paid search strategy in several healthcare-related verticals. After several months of combined PPC testing in these verticals, we know that while we can still get more leads through Google AdWords due to its sheer size, we get proportionally far more conversions from Bing than you could reasonably expect given its current market share (12.1%, according to ComCast’s May figures). In addition, cost-per-conversion levels in Bing have been substantially lower than Google: 24% for the legal industry, and 85% in healthcare.

Keep in mind that these are true apples-to-apples tests, running the same ads, keywords, landing pages and geo-targeted settings in Google and Bing campaigns. Conversions were tracked both via form submissions and call tracking. The results are lopsided enough that we are executing an all we can eat strategy in Bing, whereas we’re actively limiting our spend in Google.
While we like the outcomes, we’re still left to speculate as to exactly why Bing delivers better results. We’ll ponder these findings and blog about that next time.

This is a particularly important question to social media marketers because customers are increasingly turning to social media channels for customer support as much as for interaction. On a daily basis we witness our clients’ customers reaching out to Facebook, Twitter and blog comment areas to offer new product ideas, propose business partnerships, and yes, air grievances when traditional customer support channels aren’t responsive enough.

Heads should explode when customers post things in Facebook like “I see you here every day but you still haven’t fixed my software,” yet these posts go unattended for hours, days and weeks. I think this happens for two primary reasons:

-There’s nobody home. Companies buy into creating a presence on social channels, but still don’t fully understand how much of the communities they build shape their public image.

-There’s somebody home, but they don’t feel that dealing with customers within their job description. Marketers don’t view customer service as core to their job, and they don’t bother contacting someone in the company who is.

What we need to realize is that customers view social channels as fully integrated entities – a direct line to the company’s major decision makers. To some, this may be just a cute delusion. But it shouldn’t be. It should be a wake-up call that companies need to spend less time in traditional channels and look at social as more than just another place to issue press releases.

The project is aptly called Business Model Generation, and includes 470 visionaries and business leaders from around the globe. The result is an amazing book and website that literally illustrates (in hand-sketched diagrams and vivid, full-color images) the process for canvas-based business model innovation for myriad industries and the challenges they face.

It’s as much a guidebook for how to – through workshops and creative visualization – graphically analyze risk/reward models as much as it is an unfinished work of art that invites answers (in one section, the CEO of a service-based consultancy invites readers to contact him with new approaches to the tried and true services billing model).

If it isn’t obvious, we’re big fans of the canvas approach. When we work with clients to automate certain aspects of their marketing operations, we often begin with SWOT exercises (workshops containing cross-functional teams designed to get to the bottom of the company’s operational strengths and weaknesses in sales and marketing). The answers are always surprising, and end up delivering value to customers and new revenue opportunities to the company. Likewise, when working with sales teams to create better content, we develop content matrices that generate specific pieces of content for every state of the buying cycle.

The Business Model Generation project is full of similar exercises designed to improve and change organizations. I hope you’ll check it out, or at least try the free 72-page download at BusinessModelGeneration.com.

In short, they’re great for social search because they make your tweets much more visible in social search than they might be otherwise, and may draw quality followers who are interested in the broad topics you tweet about.

But there’s also a downside. As Google revealed in early 2010, the search giant has deemed hashtags a red flag for spam, and consider it a negative ranking factor. This means that if you use hashtags, your tweets are much less likely to show up in Google’s real-time search results. Until now, I’ve clung to hashtags because (a) I believed Google’s assertion that hashtags were spammy was ludicrous, and might soon be overturned, and (b) I also believed that the benefits of being more visible in Twitter outweighed search visibility. Now with Google’s real-time search in full swing, however, traditional search’s reach can no longer be ignored. I’m going cold turkey.

Here’s how to compensate for a hashtag-free existence:

•Keyword-Centric Profile – Take care to make your profile keyword-rich, including broad topics that you hope to be found for within social search. In other words, if you tweet about the housing market, include “real estate” in the description of yourself.

•Keyword-Centric Headlines – Like any good SEO copywriter, utilize broad keywords within your headline. This may mean that certain keywords get utilized over and over again in your headlines, but that’s an acceptable tradeoff to not being found.

•Consider Custom-Shortened URLs – If you have high-value keywords in your domain name that you feel may help people find your tweets in traditional search, consider utilizing a custom URL shortener from a service like Awe.sm that allows your primary URL to be recognizable.

Facebook's new 'like' button

The game-changing feature, however, is the new ability for Web publishers to add the Like button to virtually any piece of content on any Web property. For example, let’s imagine that you operate a music blog, and you’ve posted a video reviewing the new MGMT album. You also add the Like button to this video that is associated with a subcategory “MGMT” on your site. Anytime someone comes to your site who is also simultaneously logged into Facebook, that person can Like the video. When they do this, it will show up as an item in their news feed, enabling their friends to find your content from Facebook as well. In addition, using the new plugin, it’s possible to view anyone else in their network who has liked that content without even going to Facebook (they’ll be able to see it from your music blog).

Using our example, when important news about MGMT comes out again, you could push a message into the news feed of anyone who Liked the original video and potentially drive them back to your site. They would of course be able to unsubscribe to these messages, so it will be extremely important to stay 100% on message. In other words, this enables you to send users who Liked MGMT content only that content, as opposed to also sending them content about Bob Dylan, Brahams and Ke$ha.

This is a total revolution for both market segmentation and permission-based marketing. It’s difficult to imagine, two years from now, many Web marketers who would still prefer to manage dozens of targeted email lists when it’s possible to allow Facebook users to opt into an unlimited number of topics and digest them anywhere on the Web. This is a critical addition to the social media optimization toolkit.

While embracing these concepts is important, it’s important not to get too locked into any single piece of SMO strategy or functionality in the near term. Facebook will no doubt be making many adjustments and wholesale changes to these new tentacles as they essentially focus test these on its more than 400 million users and the thousands of Web publishers that will no doubt jump in with both feet right away.

The answer to the first question is easy – in the short term, it will affect your search ranking very little. On his personal blog, Google’s Matt Cutts has been very clear about site speed’s impact on search rankings, saying that “fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking.” Far more important are page content relevance, site reputation and other high-impact search factors. But just because it’s a low priority item now, doesn’t mean it will be low down the road.

Should you choose to measure your site’s speed, we recommend doing so on a per-page basis using a free tool such as Google’s page speed tool . If your site score seems low (70s-80s), take heart. Here are index page speeds from some of the world’s most popular Web sites according to Google’s page speed tool.

• CNN.com – 67/100
• Salesforce.com – 76/100
• WebProNews – 77/100
• Espn.com – 82/100
• Facebook.com – 85/100
• YouTube.com – 85/100

The answer to the second question really depends what where you are in your overall SEO program. Since site speed is actually measurable, it’s an attractive item to tackle and improve upon. However, you should only do so if you’ve already covered many more of the high-impact SEO items.

There are also plenty of non-SEO-related reasons to improve site speed. It seems clear that Web users like faster Web experiences. A faster experience may increase the likability of your Web site, and in some small way, encourage more Web conversions. Also, remember that
If you choose to tackle Web speed, commonly needed areas of improvement involve combining external Javascript, minimizing DNS lookups and specifying page image dimensions.

If you didn’t see Matt Cutt’s video blog on the matter back in February, now might be a good time to revisit it:

For years, search marketers have been utilizing search data trends to make predictions that help calculate the probability that certain marketing messages might connect with audiences. As one small example, you have no doubt noticed an increase in Fortune 500 companies using the term “Cloud Computing” as of late. Although this term is still somewhat esoteric to some, search strategists began noticing a sharp upward trend among certain geographic regions – notably in parts of India and the San Francisco Bay Area – back in 2008.

“In the cloud,” domineers began snapping up cloud-based domain names, and search strategists began optimizing Web properties for related terms. Suddenly, as journalists began decoding the term for small business audiences, it became nearly common vernacular.

Now there is a second measuring stick that may prove to be nearly as useful to business: Social Search. While there aren’t currently any widely available tools that accurately measure social search (but there are plenty that look promising), HP Labs analyzed nearly 3 million Twitter updates that mentioned 24-major releases over a three-month period. The researchers factored in the date of a movie’s release and the number of theatres where it opened, predicting ticket sales with 97.3% accuracy. By measuring sentiment (e.g. customer reviews), they predicted the following weekend’s returns with 94% accuracy.

As an example, the researchers predicted that the new film Dear John would earn $30.71 million on the first weekend ( actual: $30.46 million). For the film The Crazies, the firm predicted $16.8 million (actual: $16.07 million).

We’re following up with the researchers to find out more about how they sorted the data (presumably from the Twitter API) and what common tools they used, if any, to make their measurements. Social search has come a long way in the past 9 months, bolstered by Twitter and Facebook deals with Bing and Google), greatly enhancing our insight into social network sentiment and chatter. Free services such as SocialMention offer a hint of what may be available in the future to help marketers prophesize which concepts will resonate with consumers.

Banning social media from the workplace doesn’t only create resentment and a feeling that management is operating in an old business model. It also deprives the business of valuable exposure on social networks and also limits employees from creating valuable relationships with company suppliers, contractors and potential clients. Since many small businesses and services are placing their primary emphasis on Facebook and Twitter, rather than into traditional Web sites, it also impairs your employees from doing the type of research and due diligence that will make them competitive.

This is to say nothing about your current employees’ ability to refer new hires into the company. With an average cost of $8,000-$12,000 to make a traditional hire (add it up – creating job descriptions, posting ads, doing interviews, management time, etc), the money you’ll save when your employees are maintaining relationships online is considerable. Not only will it be easier for your current employees to help you fill positions using their network on LinkedIn or Facebook, but it’ll be far easier to land those candidates (note to overzealous IT Director: you’re scaring away the best candidates by not letting them log into Facebook at work).

Rather than distance your business from the future of business communications, create a smart, pro-business and pro-employee social networking policy as a permanent part of your company handbook.

Step 1 – Define Company-Sponsored Messaging Guidelines
Make a clear distinction between company-sponsored usage and personal usage, and create different guidelines for each group. Your employees that are blogging, tweeting, networking or posting on behalf of the company need a clear set of guidelines so that your brand and corporate image is always consistent, regardless of the channel they use. Focus first on the most likely potential areas of friction:

• Publishing schedule – Are employees obligated to create a posting plan in advance that will be reviewed by managers, or are they free to wing it?
• Authorized posting topics – Should your companies stick to company-focused topics only, or will you give them room to improvise?
• Non-authorized posting topics – Which topics should never be addressed?
• Authorized profile images – May employees use their personal profile pictures? If so, what’s acceptable and what isn’t acceptable?
• Participation policies – How to handle others that comment on your post or tweet, and define whether your employees are allowed to comment on other social sites on behalf of the company)
• Handling negative sentiment – Define how publicly visible negative comments about your company will be handled by your social media-focused employees.

Step 2 – Define Tools and Objectives
Define a common set of tools (social media management software) that will be adopted by the entire group doing social media on behalf of the company. This will make it much easier to share knowledge and be more productive. You should include at least one Facebook/Twitter management tool, such as Seesmic, as well as a social media monitoring tool, such as SocialMention. It may also be prudent to define how you will measure success. Do you care most about Fan/Follower acquisition? Retweets? Commerce derived from certain social campaigns? Traffic from social properties to your main Web site? Be clear.

Step 3 – Define Rules for Networking with Clients, Suppliers and Partners
Deepening connections with business associates can be the best thing for your business. However, it can also lead to a tremendous amount of anxiety and friction. For example, it can be extremely awkward when clients “Friend” your employees in Facebook or other sites; your employees’ first worry is that something on their personal social space might be harshly judged and cost your company business or relationships. These fears are completely legitimate.

You need to state clearly that you are fully supportive of your employees’ right to ignore or accept a social networking invitation from a colleague, client or partner. It’s their choice. You can also provide them with ideas for handling circumstances with finesse. In Facebook, it may be acceptable to Friend a client but also limit their access to less personal content. Another suggestion is to re-route the connection to a business-focused site such as LinkedIn or, in some cases, Twitter.

Step 4 – Define Rules for Limited Personal Use
This is actually the easy part, where most issues are black and white. Here are the major friction points you’ll want to address:

• Limited personal use while at work (during breaks, or at lunch) – acceptable.
• Airing grievances online with the Company or other employees (even in a closed personal network of friends) – unacceptable.
• Discussing sensitive company matters – unacceptable.
• Discussing sensitive Client information – unacceptable.
• Accepting a social networking request from another employee – acceptable.
• Ignoring a social networking request from another employee – acceptable.

As a final step, it may be wise to encourage employees to explore filtering techniques that exist within Facebook and LinkedIn so that they can handle their social networking with some degree of nuance. An example might be organizing their contacts into groups so that some more sensitive groups (clients, partners) are limited from some content.

Furthermore, year over year increases in social media spend are expected, with CMOs cited in the study projecting that social media will consume over 17% of their total budget by 2015. Much of the spending patterns between B2Bs and B2Cs are similar, with heavy emphasis on branding, CRM and service promotions. Projected B2B spend over the next 12 months to promote company services is even slightly greater than B2C spending for the same category (11% vs. 10.7%).

Much in the same way that B2Cs followed their consumers to Facebook and Twitter, B2Bs are realizing that the decision makers and business executives inhabit the same space. B2B spend in social media is here to stay and planning now to accommodate its future growth is crucial.

What’s not yet clear is whether most B2B’s have clear ROI expectations, or whether they’re making an investment simply because they need to get a foothold in an increasingly important space.