Google changed Search forever with the introduction of AdWords. Allowing advertisers to choose when and where their adverts appear worked out great for the advertisers and even better for Google. The search engine caught rivals on the hop and the competition is still losing ground eight years later.

Microsoft has been looking for a new angle for years now and may finally have stumbled upon a great solution for both advertisers and shoppers.

As any B2B salesperson will tell you, everyone loves guaranteed results. This is effectively what Microsoft are offering e-commerce clients; instead of charging Per Visitor, as Google do, they are charging Per Conversion. This is a no-lose situation for retailers and is a real incentive to consider running non-Google alternatives alongside AdWords and SEO.

In addition to this, Microsoft are offering cashback for searchers who purchase through the Live engine. Purchasers need to set up a Paypal style account with Microsoft, into which the cash is refunded. From there, it can be dispatched into a traditional bank account.

Not many people in the UK actually use Live Search. We are a nation of Google lovers. Will this be enough to draw advertisers away from Google? Unlikely, but it does offer another way of looking at Paid Search.

“Have you seen this video… hur hur…” – something that is, not often, but sometimes heard across the massive Upstream headquarters here in New York, well maybe not New York, and maybe not massive, but I feel you’ll forgive my exaggeration when you see this video that is doing the rounds across the Upstream office this morning.

This is incredible… enjoy!

MUTO – a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

For more of this artist’s amazing work, check out his site here.

Talk about clichés.

There we were, waiting ages for a cross-platform device to soak up and share our profiles from social networking sites and suddenly three turn up at once.

Fortunately, the three in question all have tremendous potential. Google Friend Connect, MySpace Data Availability and Facebook Connect take some of Facebook’s most endearing original features – the option to port in your contacts and third party API’s – to the next level, allowing you to create a kind of unified, “webwide” profile.

The premise of all three is that your personal data from one site can be securely shared with another, so, for example, with Facebook Connect you can pair up your Facebook and Digg profiles. MySpace now allows you to share your identity with Twitter, Yahoo and Ebay (with more to come). Google’s aims, naturally, are even further reaching… they want to create the protocol by which people store and transport their personal data.

The portability of data is nothing new, of course – Facebook’s API has been sharing your data with third party developers since 2006 (with your permission), but the new offerings take this idea to the next level. Facebook describes Connect as allowing users to “bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the Web”.

There are definitely benefits for website owners. Google’s technology is being made available for developers to use in their own sites, making it easier for users to “get started” on a new networking site. Facebook’s strength comes from the fact that almost everybody seems to use it – imagine being able to “borrow” organically constructed networks wholesale.

These tools are going to change the way we use the internet. They are a huge step towards the idea of a unified online presence for the individual.

But the three projects are not without their problems.

Facebook have thrown a spanner in Google’s works by not allowing access to their records over data protection concerns. Admittedly, this seems to be a temporary glitch, as greater integration is in everyone’s interests.

More importantly, do we really want to create a single, unified online presence? Personally, I’m not sure. How many people choose to use the same username and avatar for every forum on which they post? Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Bebo – all of these sites offer plenty of opportunity for users to link to their profiles on other sites, but how many people choose to do this?

For better or worse, one of the great appeals of the internet for many people is the option of cultivating multiple personae, so you have a different location to visit according to your mood. This won’t, however, stop Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect and Data Portability from being hugely successful. They will change our interaction with the internet for good.

The unspoken goal of all three is to encourage users to store the most valuable 21^st century commodity – personal data – in a particular place by making it easier to do so. But how much should we really be sharing?

We often talk about keywords in this industry.

“Social Media Optimisation” is one of the big keywords for progressive SEO companies in 2008.

It is still something of a tricky concept for people to get their heads around. While the benefits of SEO are measurable and highly visible, SMO is often viewed as more like traditional marketing; ie harder to measure. Actually, this is something of a sweeping statement, as certain aspects of SMO can be easily measured, while others, admittedly, cannot. If you are looking increasing traffic to your website, for example, or linkbaiting, this is all just as easy to measure as traditional linkbuilding work. Of course, you are putting yourself on the line a little more by releasing material into the public sphere, but a well planned and controlled project can be very rewarding.

Blogs, file sharing, social bookmarking, forums. The internet facilitates the transfer of information. Interacting with Social Media allows a brand to influence at least some of the information that is being passed around. Many people are afraid of potential negative comments harming their brand, as opposed to building it, but a well managed complaint can be a real positive.

Think about it. If you have had a complaint about a product or service in the past, what do you remember about it now? The fault itself or the way your complaint was dealt with? It’s probably a mix of the two. If you had a complaint that was badly dealt with, it is unlikely that you stayed loyal to that brand. If the complaint was handled with thought and care, it is likely that you remember that good service.

Don’t be afraid of Social Media!

For all its public travails, nobody can accuse Yahoo!’s developers from slacking off. We were quite excited to see del.icio.us results being integrated into SERPs a couple of months ago, and are very excited to learn about SearchMonkey.

Effectively, SearchMonkey allows developers and webmasters to affect how their sites appear in SERPs. Of course, this has always been possible through meta description tags, but Yahoo! are now pushing this to the next level.

SearchMonkey allows you to make incredibly visual listings, as illustrated above.

The potential of this is huge for driving qualified traffic – the goal of most SEO work. Would you be more likely to click on a plain, old textual entry, or a visual one with more information?

As a site owner, you have to provide Yahoo! with structured data to create these listings, according to the guidelines laid out here. Once you structure the information as Yahoo! want to see it, you can include user reviews, addresses, phone numbers, prices, photos and smarter page summaries in your listing.

With this and del.icio.us intergration, Yahoo! are giving us a glimpse into their vision of search in the coming years. It will be very interesting to see Google’s response – while they still hold a 90% market share in the UK and much of Europe, advances like this could well threaten the hegemony in the medium to long term. Yahoo!’s market share in the States is still much higher than in Europe – around 20% in April 2008.

Search Engine Optimisation is more than just getting top positions – it is making sure that this visibility converts into visits and sales. We are keeping a close eye on this cheeky SearchMonkey.

I’ve been busy writing about internet marketing for Sussex’s daily paid paper The Argus. Here’s today’s offering:

For the past week, Google UK has allowed Adwords users to bid on trademarked names. Advertisers still can’t use the trademark in their advert (unless the trademark is theirs, of course) but can bid to have their advert appear when someone searches for the name in Google.

For example, two weeks ago, a search for “iPod” brought up only two paid advertisers: Apple’s own online store and a price comparison site. Now, all of the major names like Argos, Dixons, Curry’s and Comet are bidding on the keyword, alongside niche websites (paying an average of around 60p per click).

This matters on a local scale too. One of Brighton’s many small estate agents, for example, could now bid on the name of a higher profile rival. “Gentlemen’s Agreements” not to bid on each others’ names are technically illegal (although there are murmurs that the large car companies are doing just this).

Google’s motivation for this change is clear: money, and lots of it. But where does this leave businesses? Not only can rivals now advertise on the strength of your reputation but, as the owner of a trademark, you now have to allocate more money to your own Adwords campaign to ensure that you still appear top!

Fortunately, there are some ways that you can put yourself at an advantage when bidding for your trademark (or any keyword). Firstly, word your advert carefully. Google will automatically give your advert a “Quality Score”, which is based on how relevant your advert is for a particular search. The higher your Quality Score, the less you have to pay to get high positions for your ads.

Also, remember that the content of your website itself is very important: have a sitemap and contact page on there, and make sure that there is text about the product you are selling. Search engines like text that they can read easily, so html is much better than flash.

If your website is well optimised for the search engines, this also has a positive effect on the cost of Adwords. Elements like site structure and which other sites link to it are very important. This is known as search engine optimisation, or SEO. Being at the top of Google’s natural results also brings a lot of visitors.

One very good (and easy) idea is to set up a selection of different adverts for the same search and see which one performs best over a couple of weeks. This is a great way of finding the right wording for your ad.

If you are confused, there are lots of online forums that can offer advice. Just search Google!

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Big developments are in the pipeline for our paid search consultancy. Keep your eyes peeled!

We’re all Mozilla Firefox users in the Upstream office. Let’s not get into why.

A month ago Mozilla released the 5th beta of the latest version of Firefox (v3), rumoured to be the last beta before the first RC appears. Having tested it for a couple of weeks now, I have to say, it’s superb. Not only is it a huge upgrade from the latest v2 build, but Mozilla claim to have made over 750 improvements since beta 4, so you can tell they’re working hard on delivering one hell of a browser.

The buzzwords for the v3 beta are the same old ones you’ll hear with every release of pretty much every browser, be it Internet Explorer, FF, Opera, Safari or any other: “more secure” – citing the Site Identification button as its most visually obvious upgrade – “easier to use”, “more personal”, and “improved performance”.

The thing is, for the first time since I had a go on the IE5 beta all those years ago, the upgrades are actually noticeable. Even with all my extensions still installed, Firefox 3 beta 5 flies along at an almost scary rate – it really is noticeably quicker; both in startup and in rendering web pages. The download manager has inline search – something woefully lacking in previous versions (though those who enjoy that kind of thing would probably have grabbed the pretty-much-must-have Download Statusbar extension by now). Smart Bookmarks tracks your most-visited pages and does all the work for you, a functionality only achievable in earlier versions with extensions.

One of the most popular complaints with Firefox is its memory leak issue – but right now, with 20 tabs open and numerous downloads, firefox.exe is using a mere 97,000Kb of RAM. Not bad considering if I load the exact same tabs into my current 2.0.0.14 build, I get RAM usage of over 250Mb.

And what’s more, unlike most other betas I’ve been happy to play around with, Firefox 3 has not crashed on me. In 2 weeks. Not once.

Bravo, Mozilla. Download your copy of the beta right here; but if you’re happy with 2.0.0.14 for your casual browsing and fear the upgrade may disable some of your favourite extensions, probably best to wait for the finished article to be released – according to the Mozilla wiki, we can probably expect a mid-summer release!