So it is the end of the year, and it seems that at the end of every year, every man and his dog is doing either a retrospective of the past year or guess-work about next year.

Since you obviously survived 2009, I am not going to bore you with a re-cap of that. But, since the beginning of a new year always raises curiosity and hopes about what the new year will bring, I thought I would come up with a prediction for the new year, but just one.

2010, according to me, is going to be the year of TRUST. With an explosion of forums, blogs and social media sites on the web, there has never been a better time to say what you want to a huge online audience. But, when you are looking for recommendations, or unbiased product reviews, how do you know who to trust?

Maybe the positive one IS written by them or their friends/family. Maybe the negative ones are written by their competition. Don't you prefer to have recommendations from people you know and trust?

This is why I think in 2010, online marketing is going to have to embrace social media even more. Using your existing networks, and that of trusted friends, to find products and services. Using the reviews of regular commenters, or bloggers, whom you trust - and maybe the ones they recommend.

For every person, there is a 'trust network' of people they could rely on for honest opinions, and this network is now existing and growing online. Businesses and marketers need to learn the importance of this, and figure out how to participate. For example, do they want brand advocates? Do they want to offer freebies? Do they want regular commenters or bloggers to do paid reviews?

One other thing that businesses will have to do to ensure they have the trust of their customers, is to employ AUTHENTICITY. Cutting through the PR-speak and making it more subtle. Making themselves accessible, (maybe through online chat or Twitter), and allowing their faults to be discussed openly so you can understand those negative reviews.

And that's how I see 2010.

In November, Google launched Adwords Sitelinks. Site Links are already seen in the natural search results, and this is where there are a list of internal site links under the main link for a search result. Here you can see it now live in Adwords, for Cathay Pacific:



SiteLinks help your user find the part of the website that they are after - this is most useful for branded searches where you aren't exactly sure where someone is wanting to go on your site.

You can have up to 4 additional destination URLs on search-based text ads. For the organic listings you suggest some internal site links through Webmaster Tools, but there is no guarantee that these will get used. Google might use whichever ones are relevant.

In Google Adwords, Ad Sitelinks will only be an available feature for advertisers whose ads meet a 'high quality threshold'.  I am not sure what this means, but from the look and sound of it, it seems that large spenders, or big brands, may be the only ones to benefit from this feature. To check if your account has it, look for it in your campaigns tab as "Show Additional links to my site".

Google has launched it's own URL shortener, in the style of bit.ly and tinyurl. The new service, goo.gl, is currently available only for Google products use, but I assume unless something goes awry, it will be extended out to general use in the future.

So far, I always use tinyurl, because I have always found it to be reliable, plus, the links can be tracked by most analytics packages. I commonly tag a link with Google Analytics tags, and then tinyurl it, for campaigns on Twitter or any others which won't let me use anchor text. Bit.ly won't get tracked unless you tag it with Google analytics tags, so you need to remember to do that if you use bit.ly.

I assume that Goo.gl links will be trackable in Google analytics, like tinyurl, but being a Google service, maybe it will have even better inbuilt tracking?

Check out this Sidewiki that appeared on the Goo.gl web page - someone pre-advertising their own product, pretty tricky...good on him!






 

It used to be that Google would answer any query you entered with a simple list of 10 relevant web pages.

Now, check out how many different types of Google results there are - just on the front page, and without you 'clicking' on any extra features.

Among the normal Wikipedia, Guardian and Org sites for the search of 'Copenhagen Climate', we also get a tonne of other entry types we could click on



And, here is a closer look at the new Google Real Time search, in case you haven't seen it. Check out the scroll bar. This list updates constantly as new stories are added, but you can also click on Pause if you want it to stop.

The list includes Tweets, as well as blog entries and news stories, so your news story has the potential to be twice on the first page, in Google News and Google Real TIme. Also, while Google is trying hard to avoid spam in Google Real TIme, there is the potential for if your news isn't eligible for Google News, if it is super up to date, you could get into the Google Real TIme section.

On Monday this week Google announced the arrival of Google Real Time Search (I would put a link to the announcement, but I am currently working from China and thus have no blogspot, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.).

While Twitter was heralded as the 'real time' search engine, there are problems with using it as a real time search engine due to spam and the extremely fast pace of the Twitter feed (as demonstrated last week when Tony Abbott became liberal leader).

Google real time search is going to utilise Twitter among other things, but apparently will be able to filter out the spam, and include only powerful Tweets. They are still in negotiations with Facebook to utilise Facebook results.

Bing already integrates Tweets and Facebook into their search results, with Bing having a Twitter beta search engine (again, I can't show that here right now, because I can't get onto Twitter in China, but go to www.bing.com/twitter).

Google is likely to include Tweets, Google news, new web pages and relevant blog posts in real time feed, although I hear on the grape vine that at the moment it is mostly Tweets. Real time won't be instantly shown for every search, but rather when Google notices a 'trending topic'.

To optimise for real time search then, it is important to have relevant and timely content, but also that it needs to be on 'trending' topics, which would be difficult to anticipate, so would require vigilance if you want to be a part of it.