Birmingham University is introducing a Social Networking Masters Degree, with costs starting at 4,400GBP for the year. The course would teach students how to use Facebook and Twitter for marketing and communications purposes.

Criticism is of course rife, with accusations that it is too basic and teaching stuff that could easily be self taught.  I think there is a place in a marketing degree for a subject on social networking, and how it could be used for marketing purposes, however, a whole year? No wonder it is basic, you would have to stretch it out over 26 weeks.

Add to this the fact that social media is an infant of a subject – it is still evolving at a rapid pace. This time last year no one even knew what Twitter was, and now it is being discussed in lectures? No time left to see if it is a simple flash in the pan? And what about MySpace? That was the social media tool of choice two years ago and has been totally subsumed by Facebook now. If you study for a year in this Masters, would what you learnt even be relevant a week after you graduate?

The convener of the course, Jon Hickman, does not endear himself to me with this quote:

    “It’s not for freaks or IT geeks, the tools learnt on this course will be accessible to many people.”

Which is a strange quote, and kind of offensive insinuating that the normal users of Twitter and Facebook are freaks or IT Geeks (and if this was true, what kind of marketing strategy does this guy have in mind?)

I do agree that social media is of use to marketers, business owners, PR people, journalists and other people working in communciations, however, this degree seems akin to a degree in how you can use a telephone. In this day and age, social networking is a basic tool that millions of people are using, and if you can’t use other social media (i.e. blogs, forums, etc), to find out more and teach yourself, then that should be an automatic fail anyway!

A quick search on Twitter is not showing any support for the idea of a social media degree. With comments like “I thought my degree in PR was bad”.

Last night while driving I heard the following advertisement on the radio (it isn’t exactly verbatim, but you will get the gist…)

Or something like that. The point was, of course, to advertise radio ad space and to emphasise to marketers the importance of keeping your marketing spend up during a recession or financial crisis.

During a financial crisis, consumers, like companies, want to rationalise their spend. They want to cut back on consumption, or change brands to save money. The big revenue pie will shrink during these times, meaning everyone gets a smaller piece.

What makes this worse for businesses is if they also decide that this is the time to cut their marketing spend. In this case, not only has the pie decreased, but their proportion has decreased also, meaning that they are hit even harder than their competitors. Then, when the good times do come again, it is uncertain whether people will return to their old spending habits, or if by that time they will have become won over, and accustomed to their new brand.

This is even more pertinent for SEO spend. The reason being, that SEO is a long term strategy, it benefits early adopters. The cuts you make now, will influence your rankings many months from now. By cutting your spend today you are not only delaying your high rankings, but it isn’t like you can just switch it on later as soon as the economy has recovered. Once you increase your marketing spend in the future, THEN it will be months before the effects take place.

Meanwhile, your competitors may continue their SEO campaign, entrenching them at the top of the rankings, gaining market share, and making it difficult for you to knock them off the top spot in the future.

Despite this, many marketers will decide, or will be forced to, cut their marketing spend at this time. Since online marketing, and SEO in particular, is such a new area of marketing for Australian companies, it may feel the chop more than most (despite it being one of the most measurable of all advertising mediums).

This can work to the advantage of savvy marketers. By investing in SEO now, while others are cutting back, it could be easier for your site to make it to the top of the rankings, and increase your online market share.  This will hold you in good stead for the future, as high ranking sites, with sustainable SEO campaigns, are difficult to remove from the top spots.

I have been a bit behind the ball here. At least twice in the last month I have blogged about mobile search, but neither time did I mention the iphone tracking now available in Google Analytics – purely because I hadn’t noticed it had gone up.

So, now you can track users who viewed your site from the iPhone, simply by using this new advanced segment.

While this doesn’t track all mobile users, you can still try and use screen resolution stats to try and figure that out (listed under the visits stats).

In late February, Google made some changes to it’s algorithm (apparently NOT an update), which was rumoured to assist Big Brands in achieving search rankings. Of course Google denied this vehemently, saying their algorithm doesn’t even consider brand, and that instead it is still largely based on trust, authority, reputation, high quality and page rank.

Today, Search Engine Land reports on a coalition of big brands (The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Inc, Hearst, ESPN), who want Google to go further and actually explicitly help out with their rankings.

All the above brands are members of the Google Publishers network, and I suppose as they are such large members, expect to have some clout with Google. One of their main gripes is that they resent the components of Google’s algorithm, for example, Page Rank, as they think this criteria enables “parasites off the true producers of content” to benefit disproportionately.

A report by AdAge describes an example that these publishers used – When typing in Gaza into Google, apparently they were outraged that Wikipedia entries, BBC articles, The CIA Factbook entry on Gaza, a Twitter entry (bizarre) and a YouTube video ranked ahead of a Times news story on the conflict.

They were also outraged that all these results were presented in an identical manner, so that their brand could not easily be identified. Although complaining about the uniform presentation of results and the Google algorithm, (both of which aim to show no preference other than ‘relevance’ to a query), seems to be immature and displaying a lack of knowledge about the point of a search engine, the very basis of their complaint did not seem unreasonable to me. That is, that they think the original publishers of content should be rewarded for publishing it.

However, this then becomes an argument between the relative value of original and derivative content. Of course original content is necessary, because independent bloggers don’t necessarily have the clout and budget to have reporters everywhere (or even anywhere sometimes). However, derivative content often has a lot of added value which might mean that searchers prefer it to the original content. For example:

• A derivative article might summarise and link to an original article, making it more digestible.
• It often has differing perspectives, and could be seen as more impartial, when not associated with a big brand or politically friendly publisher.
• Writers of derivative content have more time to consider arguments, positions and facts due to the fact that they aren’t fighting to a deadline, so have the advantage of timely consideration.
• They are more likely able to link to many other published pieces on the subject and be an all in one resource (for example, Wikipedia).
• Derivative articles often offer interaction, allowing comments and participation.

If Google does try to continue to develop their algorithm so that original content is given a bit more help (which of course is what they are doing), that is fine, as long as it also continues to value other aspects like those listed above, that searchers also like to view.

These Big Brands could also help themselves somewhat, by doing some more  SEO for their sites. One of the publishers listed in the Ad Age article acknowledged this through the following comment:

Google has announced 2 new changes to its search algorithm. The first doesn’t seem new to me, although perhaps there is some nuance I am missing. This is the change whereby they suggest similar searches to help you with your query. Like this…

This is the second step in the Google arsenal to help users change or refine their query. The first is in the predictive text in the search box, where they try to complete your query (in beta testing).

I am not sure where the suggestions are coming from. It seems to be a selection of some of the search terms as per the Google keyword tool, but doesn’t seem to be just the top ones, and some of the suggestions aren’t high volume at all.

The majority of the suggestions here seem to be from branded terms. Which is strange, because if the consumer wanted to choose a brand, surely they would look at the list of search results for car insurance, rather than type in one specific brand in their query. And if they did want to search for a brand, they surely would have done that in the first place?

The technology might be better explained in this post from Search Engine Land, which goes into more detail regarding the new Orion technology which has made these changes to search possible.  While I am not initially impressed by this announcement (as it doesn’t seem useful to me, or ‘new’), I will suspend my judgement as they say they will be doing ongoing refinement which could result in something better.

The second change is that if you type a long query into the search box, Google will now offer you a longer snippet, so that you can see how all the words in your big long query are addressed on the page.  Check out this big long 4 line snippet here…blog-pic5

I wouldn’t expect that this longer snippet will have much of an impact on search at first, considering that such a small proportion of people type in search queries longer than three words. However, as the internet gets bigger, more crowded, and users become more discerning, perhaps longer queries will be the way forward, and Google is just getting a jump on that.