Search Concepts

Posted by Search Concepts on July 1st, 2010 View Comments
Posted in Social Media |

Two Internet powerhouses, Google and Twitter, are on the move to develop their respective online empires with their latest individual developments that will have a great impact in the competitive Internet industry. Google has just recently acquired another company called Plink to expand its line of services, and Twitter has officially launched “promoted tweets” in the hopes to give the social networking site a commercial aspect and add more venues to grow profits.

Google Acquires Visual Search Engine Plink

Google has just recently made another acquisition in an attempt to revolutionize the company and strengthen its ever-growing influence in the virtual world and information technology industry. The search engine giant has just bought Plink, a British company that provides a visual search engine. This move was aimed to kick Google’s business operations into high gear following the economic downturn. The actual amount for which Google bought out the rights to Plink has not been publicly disclosed. Certainly, the figure has to be an attractive sum; according to a blog post by Plink founders Mark Cummins and James Philbin, who just launched their own search engine only four months ago, this deal for them is “exciting news.” The Plink acquisition signals the first ever British product of its kind that Google purchased.

PlinkArt

Plink first caught Google’s attention when they developed a mobile application for Android called PlinkArt, which allows users to capture photos of works of art through their smart phones and upload the images. Once submitted to the search query, Plink would then identify the photos and give details about the pieces of art and their artists. Users can also share those photos of artwork with their details to other people through their mobile devices. This mobile app became such a huge success among Android users that it got more than 50,000 downloads in just a span of four weeks.

Google has been successful with its conventional search engine, and Plink brings in the needed innovation that will change the way users experience search engines. Instead of keying in keywords or phrases as the search query, Plink uses visuals, as described above.

A New Partnership and the Future for Visual Search Engines

Plink was created by Cummins and Philbin at Oxford University’s, Department of Engineering Science while they were still graduate students. The founders are the only employees of Plink, and the recent acquisition also calls for Cummins and Philbin’s services for Google to further work on the development of Google Goggles, an Android application from Google that also allows users to photograph through their mobile devices and perform searches to identify images.

This development will allow Google to explore the unchartered market for mobile and visual search services and improve on a new technology that has so much potential for success in the future. With Plink under its wing, Google is now facing new possibilities. Albeit the development, Google Goggles still has a long way to go. Nonetheless, this new partnership between Plink creators and Google will surely bring in revolutionizing visual search engines that will work for everything you see around you, and not just for works of art.

Promoted Tweets: Twitter’s New Advertising Platform

Despite Twitter’s resounding global popularity with an estimated site valuation of an astounding amount of one billion dollars, Twitter has yet to turn to traditional advertising as means of gaining profit from its social networking site in the four years since its inception. It made a lot of people asking how it would make more money. However, it seems that Twitter is now exploring on more money-making opportunities and has officially decided to jump in the bandwagon of traditional advertising. They have officially started their venture in advertising with the launch of their new advertising platform, promoted tweets.

Promoted tweets are basically ordinary tweets that businesses and organizations want to promote to a wider audience. They are given high priority in the site. These sponsored tweets will appear at the top of the Twitter search results pages, in a similar style to Google’s advertising platform, Google AdWords. Advertisements will show up based upon search keywords. However, unlike Google AdWords and other ad platforms by Bing or Yahoo, there will only ever be on promoted tweet displayed in the page at a time. Promoted tweets allow companies to start conversations. Businesses can also buy keywords to keep their statements, taglines or questions directed towards potential customers on top of a search that turns up those results.

Twitter will also integrate the issue of relevance of an ad to users in their advertising model. The site will allow users to re-tweet an advertisement, but if users choose not to respond or re-tweet to a certain ad, the promoted tweet will automatically disappear. This would hopefully eliminate any irrelevant advertising that would arise and could potentially spoil user experience.

Capitalizing off Twitter’s Popularity

According to Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, the move was influenced by utilizing a business model that will ride on Twitter’s booming popularity on the Internet. Twitter handles a volume of 50 million tweets per day. The site is also heavily used for search queries. During the four year of its existence, Twitter resisted introducing a traditional web advertising model because they wanted to prioritize value before profit. However, Twitter’s technology allows the open exchange of information and thus creates opportunities for individuals, organizations, and businesses alike. Twitter recognized the value in this exchange and planned to maximize it in a purposeful and relevant manner, thus leading to the unveiling of their advertising platform.

Well-established companies Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin have already started posting promoted tweets on Twitter and the site is still awaiting how quickly other companies will jump on the bandwagon.

Twitter said that its priority following its launch will be to take its time with the new model and test it out in the market. Quick profitability is not the main concern for the first year, but rather the focal point is on the user experience. They want to further refine the user experience towards the promoted tweets. Ads will be sold on a cost per thousand impression basis, but the company is already considering a performance-based pricing strategy supported by a metric called “resonance” as well.

Criticisms

Recently, there have been a lot of mixed reactions to the launching of promoted tweets. Many experts in the marketing industry are unsure of how Twitter would perform as a marketing tool. Also, many people have been wary of how Twitter users would respond to the commercialization of the site. Many commercial brands have been able to utilize Twitter as customer service tool to answer queries of clients and fix problems – and this has been embraced by users positively.

However, some marketing experts say that users could react differently to the promotional mechanism of the branded tweets. Not all Twitter users are on a buying mode, and thus this approach to profit-mindedness could annoy a lot of users. Many people use Twitter as a means for social interaction and a channel for sharing ideas, and not in the spirit of consumerism.

On the other hand, according to other marketing analysts, Twitter has a big potential as a marketing tool to create viral buzz around a product or service. Using promoted tweets is a feasible business model that will help both Twitter and partner companies gain profits in the long run. Since Twitter also has costs in running the site, one cannot blame Twitter for taking advantage of its ever-expanding user base. And aside from encouraging customer interaction, Twitter can help companies get in touch with a wider audience more quickly since this can all be done in real time. A word of caution however, brands should position themselves very carefully as to not irritate user experience.

Tags: google, Plink, Twitter

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.