Both definitely want ‘in on’ the others ‘domain’. Facebook want to integrate web searching and buying, and Google wants to integrate our social lives into the SERPs. If either succeed they will make a serious dent into the others market. Google will increasingly use social criteria to enhance the relevance of the results and therefore increase their significance for advertises. If Facebook on the other hand, can integrate searching and buying activity within their community to effectively harness e-commerce across communities they will act as a huge super-affiliate; a ramped up Groupon, and then some.

I love Google for making my life easier by organising and filtering the web, but then I also love ‘social media’ –the term generally defined to mean social interaction on the web. Both could and will get ‘better’ by increasing the ease and relevance with which they provide their services to me, but I cannot accept that Facebook, or any other social or community platform will make Google superfluous.

I’ve read numerous comment declaring how Facebook is highly relevant and how Google just isn’t as relevant for brands/business/advertisers as it was because of social platforms. They point to how Facebook is capturing more and more advertising budget because of their demographic targeting used in conjunction with the community effect. I agree, a well executed campaign can be enormously successful, but to make Google irrelevant, really?

But it is not the norm for successful business to be able to execute successfully in Facebook, and certainly not without considerable effort, whereas advertising in Google is (or certainly should be if the website is designed and built to convert users into sales) simple. Google’s advertising auction concept was revolutionary, Facebook is merely word of mouth on speed.

My comparison is a little unfair I grant you, but the point is that whereas an advertiser can use Google to convert users and drive sales, they must use Facebook for branding and awareness, to deliver trust first and foremost. Sales come as a result of that, and other activity.

Until Facebook can deliver sales (or conversions) for business on huge scale it cannot be considered as an advertising alternative to Google. It should be considered as complementary, but that is no bad thing for advertisers. A campaign that blends social and search into an integrated campaign that aggressively targets users where they are whilst being transparent, open and valuable is how a business should market themselves. Right now where better to start than Google and Facebook?

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Nitro will be attending DigiPharm London 2010 this week (29^th and 30^th September).

We’re excited to be attending this 2^nd annual DigiPharm event, which will be home to the largest gathering of pharma marketing and communications professionals in Europe for the next two days. Digital marketing issues for pharma, such as the regulatory framework; how to measure ROI; which analytical tools are the best to use; and the most effective online strategies will all be discussed.

With marketing specialist speakers from companies such as Lundbeck, Janssen-Cilag, GSK, Schering Plough, Boehringer Ingelheim, Pfizer (Wyeth), Genzyme and Merck Serono, DigiPharm London 2010 is definitely an event not to be missed by anyone working in pharma communications.  These industry experts have in-depth, first-hand knowledge of what the trends are in digital marketing for pharma and we’re looking forward to chatting with the speakers after the talks.

Will you be attending DigiPharm London 2010? If so, contact us to let us know @NitroDigital (on Twitter using the hashtag #digipharm) or by Facebook/Email.

We’ll also be exhibiting, so make sure to come by our stand (no.8) opposite the bar and say hello. You’ll be able to find out more about the services we provide, and we may even offer you a drink!

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You can see the original post here at ‘information is beautiful‘.

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I’m fascinated by the sheer vastness of the universe with its interconnection of galaxies, planets, suns and moons, and after watching Horizon’s programme ‘Infinity’ last week I couldn’t help being drawn back into this ultimately mind aching thought process. If space is expanding, into what is it expanding and just how big is it exactly?

Just as the universe is expanding, so too is the web. It’s an enormous and continually growing mass of interconnected static and dynamic websites with communities and links that bind it all together. Here’s a visualisation of the web universe. Attempts to figure out how big exactly are probably as difficult as calculating the size of the universe, well almost. Google had found 1 trillion URLs by the end of 2009, and the ‘WayBackMachine’ that archives most of the net has 2 ‘quadrillion’ bytes of information consisting of just regular pages that exclude, for instance, video content.

In the beginning Yahoo! was able to index most of what was important on the web in its directory of links, but it was never going to be able to cope with the tide of people and information that surged to it over the late 1990’s and since. Not only are organisations moving their content and records online for people to access, but users are increasingly contributing their own content. We’re all authors now, which is incredible. Our day to day lives recorded for posterity.

Technology has developed at such an incredible rate over the last 300 years, and the pace of development is only getting more rapid. We’re now hurtling towards quantum computing which will harness atoms and molecules to perform calculations more rapidly than we can imagine, certainly via the current silicon versions. The web landscape itself has also changed shape even during its short life, evolving over last two or three years in particular into a place where it’s not just about computing power but people who are interacting more and more online. This trend, or shift in culture, has not come about due technology developing specifically, so much as the way that we’re harnessing it. We’re all doing what comes naturally.

Look at the estimated 275,000 people working on open source projects. People are writing code, building parts of an application that ultimately contribute to previously unseen whole. For free. Linux, the operating system, is the probably the best example of this. These people, I imagine, do it mostly for the kudos and to a lesser extent the experience, but it’s Marxian in its concept isn’t it? People working for the good of ‘the people’.

Social networking websites have developed at an astonishing rate over the last couple of years. The ‘sun’ of the community world, ‘Facebook’ has now reached over 400,000,000 users worldwide and has overtaken Yahoo! as the second most popular website in the U.S.1 Facebook could quite possibly have reached its zenith and burn out in two years, but the reason it became so hot in the first place will not. Facebook would simply be replaced by other websites that allowed people to interact more easily and more intuitively.

One of the reasons Facebook -and multiple other websites that enable interaction- are as popular as they are because they allow us to communicate one to one but also in a way that would have previously been very difficult indeed. They allow us to keep on top of what’s happening, and whose doing what on an unprecedented scale that ignores time, geography and physical relationships. Consequently we’re all becoming more connected, and it’s a trend that will not diminish. The momentum for TV, internet and mobile to converge into one lovely anarchical mesh of interconnected people and platforms that all create, consume and cultivate content and information is growing all of the time.

All of the time Google’s machines are recording the content that we are creating in a manner unprecedented in human history. Recording, analysing, understanding, indexing and subsequently returning that content to other users in their search results. The web ‘machine’ is continually learning from us, so we’re all contributing to each other’s development. Times really have changed. We don’t just consume information and advertising anymore, we want to be part of the conversation. It’s in our nature, and woes betides companies that think that these cultural shifts don’t affect them. Companies that persist in a communicating one way as the web universe grows will find themselves increasingly disconnected from the websites where people discuss them. They won’t be invited to the conversation anymore, and they will wield increasingly less influence within everyone’s personal galaxies…

1. (Compete.com.)

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