It’s one thing to make money from adverts served to and targeted at your audience based on their behavior and connections on your site. Most people accept that this is how sites like Facebook intend to kick start a revenue stream. We allow sites to serve us adverts based on our preferences, past behavior, groups we join, friends we have and interests we disclose under the knowledge that this is now happening across the web on most advertising funded websites.

Now we’re told (via the Telegraph) that Facebook has a new revenue model, by turning the platform into a tool corporates can use for market research. Facebook will (says the Telegraph) allow companies to selectively target Facebook users to research their new products. They say companies will be able to pose questions to selected members, using the social network as a kind of straw poll. That’s great for companies, it can take a long time to get the right people selected for a survey or focus group, but you can make the selection process much quicker when you have access to the kind of data Facebook has about users.

So, what incentive for the users? I don’t know about you, but if I start getting random questions popping up in Facebook from brands who want my opinion I’m unlikely to respond unless I feel there’s some value in me doing so. If brands are going to use me to improve their product offering; and out of that Facebook is going to make some money, then should they be paying users for their time and opinions?

So we’re officially in a recession now (according to official government figures via the BBC) with no sign of things getting better anytime soon. Marketing budgets are being slashed by many and redundancies are spreading like wildfire. So, if you want to either make the most of your marketing budget, or if you’re in marketing and you want to hold onto your job, where should you be putting your money in online?

It’s pretty simple to be honest, just keep spending but make sure it’s working for you!

Something I’ve been doing for many years is capping all my online marketing spend through the use of a CPA (cost per acquisition) limit. Work out what you can afford to spend per sale/referral/lead and still make a profit, optimise your use of the various marketing channels available to keep your cost per acquisition under the limit, and then keep spending!

Hard to justify in the current climate? Just build a business model to show your boss (or yourself) which demonstrates the returns available by keeping spend tied to a CPA.

This is one of my bugbears, especially with regards to PPC (paid search). If it’s working for you, your campaigns are optimised continuously, and you’re coming in under your CPA, then why not throw more money at the campaign? Yes, you have to be diligent to ensure that your CPA limits are adhered to, but once you have it embedded as a process in your organisation it’s not that difficult to grow your spend and as a result your return.

So where should the marketing spend go (in online)? Well, into channels which are measurable and where you can track the returns. Paid search, affiliate marketing, banners (yes, you can work to a CPA if you use the right tools), social media campaigns, viral and of course natural search (search engine optimisation). Of course SEO deserves a different CPA to other channels as it’s naturally cheaper to do as long as you stick to the principles and don’t get sold by an agency looking to charge you the earth for something that costs nothing but common sense.

Free linking is the lifeblood of the web, without it there would be no interconnections between websites in fact the web wouldn’t be so much a web as a load of separate entity sites which only come together in a list of search results. Imagine you had to get approval for every link you wanted to refer to? That could kill the web, couldn’t it?

There’s a court case going on in the U.S. which could decide the future for this. To me it seems impossible that this could ever get a ruling in favor of the plaintiff, but what if it did? Where would you see the web a year after linking was outlawed?

Court case details here (on The Boston Globe)… oops, that’s a link!

Search engine marketers aren’t having an easy time with Google these days.

Google have made a change to the search results interface which aims to make it more Digg/Wiki like by allowing users to move results up and down the list, delete sites from a results set and even add sites into a set of results.

For the user this is actually a really nice piece of functionality as it allows you to tailor search results to make them more relevant to you, I’m assuming it’s all stored in your web history so future searches keep the customisation.

What this does do is make it really hard for a search engine marketer to know whether what they see as the top ten results on Google is what the users are seeing. In most cases the answer is probably no now.

I think it’s a great move though and could actually help to focus the search engine optimisation industry on making pages more relevant through improving content and engaging users as that is what will encourage them to keep a result high up their list!

Full details on the Google Blog.

Two of my favourite blogs are Techcrunch and Mashable, both tend to cover the same topics a lot of the time. If a post goes up on one it will usually appear on the other soon after, which isn’t a problem really given their unique take on the topics. They both put their own spin on the stories which is interesting to see how their opinions compare. That said, the volume of posts which are similar between the two blogs is very high and surely this must affect their readership numbers, given that some readers will naturally choose one over the other.

For example; right now the latest 10 posts on Techcrunch are:

• Facebooks verified app program
• Macbooks new anti-piracy features
• Google’s mobile voice search app
• A Flash gaming collective
• Twitter being down
• Amazon CloudFront
• Google’s mobile voice search app (again)
• The iFun iPhone app
• Jerry Yang stepping down at Yahoo
• Facebooks verified app program (again)

The latest 10 posts on Mashable are:

• Digg recommendation engine (been covered before on Techcrunch)
• YouTube vs Hulu (lot’s of coverage on both blogs in the past)
• NewsJunk folding
• The iFun iPhone app
• Jerry Yang stepping down at Yahoo
• Facebooks verified app program
• Sites you can sell old gadgets on
• Mogees, an app store middle man
• Google Analytics for Flash (covered yesterday on Techcrunch)
• How not to build your Twitter community

The ones in red are covering the same topics on both blogs. The ones in blue have been covered before on the other blog. This shows the huge crossover between these massively popular blogs.

Now, I’m not saying this is a bad thing at all. I’m all for diversity and choice and I enjoy reading both blogs and the angle they take on the tech news of the day. I’m interested in whether you think that a merger between the two could actually be a good thing? I wonder what would be lost by this, whether Techcrunch could swallow up Mashable, cover the mainstream stuff still and allow Mashable a channel of their own (like Crunchgear) to continue their great lists of useful links and apps.

What do you think? Is it time to reduce duplication in the big blogs?

Sometimes even a mega-company like Google casn get beaten to the mark with a new piece of functionality that they should really be providing themselves. The reasons for this? Perhaps they overstretch themselves with their range of products and can’t focus enough to add the bells and whistles we’d all like? Or maybe they get a product to the point where it gets traction and keeps acquiring users and then leave it open for the rest of us to add the bells and whistles functional pieces?

Whatever the reason, there are occasions when great additions are made to their services which they aren’t responsible. The latest of these that I’ve come across is something called Glync which has been created by a company called Virante.

It’s a Firefox plugin which grants them access to store your data from Google Webmaster Tools to enable them to show you a graph showing the history of incoming links to your site and how that changes over time. An extremely useful tool, but in my opinion one which should be a standard feature of Googles webmaster tool set.

How long will this plugin be useful? Until Google decides to offer it themselves I’d say. That said, it is a very nice piece of functionality and the free version is most useful.

One thing that really annoys me in the online world is missed opportunity. Too often there are two companies with different offerings who refuse to acknowledge the potential synergies between them, and therefore miss revenue opportunity. Even worse is when it’s two brands of the same business!

If synergies exist and there’s no potential conflicts of interest then why not embrace the opportunity?

The opportunity might be a chance to merchandise your product on the other brands site, come up with some sort of joint offering or simply acquire traffic via them.

Whatever the opportunity, these mutually profitable opportunities are not to be sniffed at.

Mozilla have announced on their blog that Firefox usage hit 20% for two weeks in October. The figures come from a report by Market Share from Net Applications. It’s a milestone for Firefox use so they rightly shout about it.

There seem to be a few negative blog posts about this saying ’so what’ and ‘more to do’ etc but I actually think this is a massive achievement given that their main competitor gets bundled into home PC’s and is widely distributed on businesses desktops. And the fact that Mozilla haven’t bundled it with adverts or overtly tried to create a revenue stream from this audience should be commended in my opinion.

In my experience of running websites for the financial services and travel industries I have never experienced a site which had more than 10% of it’s users on Firefox, so Mozilla still have to break into some areas. I’d be really interested to know what their penetration for different categories of sites was, anyone know?

Troogle? TravGoogle? GooTravel? Whatever you want to imagine the name may be the thought of Google jumping into the travel arena has operators and agents either salivating with the thought of the traffic and sales it could drive or quaking with fear at the thought of them owning the customer experience. Rumours keep appearing of the intentions of Google, but up till now there hasn’t been any obvious functionality leaking out of Googleplex which could support a serious move into travel. That is, until now (at least I’ve only just found it)…

There’s a new(ish) beta on Google for a Merchant search (only appears when you’re in the right place searching the right thing). This is basically a price comparison engine, currently only serving the loan market. My question is, could this power a travel price comparison engine and so switch users to this type of interface and functionality if they search for the right travel related keywords? Could Google then become an affiliate to travel companies? I’d imagine TravelSupermarket would hope not!!

The buzz around semantic web keeps on growing. Here’s a really good article from Scientific American titled ‘The Semantic Web in Action‘, first published in December ‘07. Also worth a read is the latest post on the Nodalities blog ‘Semantic What?‘.