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It looks like Deutschland has a bee in its bonnet about Google. Apparently it is using the dreaded M word “monopol” which, according to Google’s own translation tool is the German form of the English word monopoly. The Germans are concerned that Google is looking like Microsoft and they are not happy. Somebody needs to get in their Mercedes and take a ride on the Autobahn to cool off, maybe? We learned of the Reuters report from Search Engine Land . Apparently the German justice minister is upset that Google isn’t transparent enough. I thought monopolies are about cornering markets and not transparency but maybe I am missing something in the translation. Here’s her thoughts from Reuters In an interview with weekly magazine Der Spiegel, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said she was concerned the firm was accruing too much power and information about citizens via programmes like Google Earth and Google Books. “All in all, what’s taking shape there to a large extent is a giant monopoly, similar to Microsoft,” the minister said. “My initial response is not to ban something or stop something. But I do want to create more transparency and ensure that users know what is going on with their data,” she added. “I think the companies have an obligation here, and a lot of things ought to be improved. If that doesn’t happen soon we may have to take action as legislators.” Once again I have to ask the question does Google actually monopolize anything? According to Dictionary.com monopoly is: a board game in which a player attempts to gain a monopoly of real estate by advancing around the board and purchasing property, acquiring capital by collecting rent from other players whose pieces land on that property. Oooops. Wrong one. Here’s the one that works for our purposes here: 1. exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices. 2. the market condition that exists when there is only one seller. I think this is where people are getting confused. Microsoft and the desktop smelled of monopoly because no one else could play. Google, on the other hand, is not the only player in nearly everything it has its tentacles in. It just does things bigger and, most times, better than the rest. That’s called cleaning the competition’s clock, not a monopoly. I am sure there will be plenty of arguments that Google is a monopoly and I welcome all of them here. Just be sure that when you are using Google and monopoly in the same sentence you are not just complaining that Google does more things and they do them better. They have to prevent competition from taking place to be a real monopoly and I don’t see that like others might. Did you hear Google cry that Lycos, AltaVista and Yahoo were “monopolies” when it was in its infancy and seen as the new kid on the block with the goofy name? Nope. They went out and did things the old fashioned way: they innovated and gave the public what they wanted and in the process laid waste to things that didn’t work as well as they did. If that’s a monopoly then I’m all for it.

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Germany Cries Monopoly and Doesn’t Even Collect $200

In an attempt to give our readers some real world application of all this social media theory swirling about we will be occasionally speaking with some real people who do the real work. How about that? Today we look at social media and the sports world. Regular readers of this blog know that I am a bit of a sports fan. I say a bit because I am no longer playing any fantasy leagues etc so I am not a sports fanatic. I am primarily a New York area sports fan but not the usual kind (Giants, Mets, Devils. I could care less about the NBA). People in that area are pretty passionate about their sports and that’s how I learned to be a fan. Now times have changed considerably. It is difficult for the everyday fan to afford attending actual games (especially if a family is involved). As a result the connection to sports is changing and social media is creating a whole new channel for the fans to interact and be a part of the action that they may not get at the stadium or the ballpark. Pat Coyle of Coyle Media has been involved in the social side of sports for quite a while now. Pat has worked as the Director of Marketing for the Indianapolis Colts and helped create MyColts.net, which is an active online community for the fans of the NFL franchise. I talked to Pat about this and other social media projects he has underway. Frank : Since most people in the social media industry came from somewhere else what is your background? Pat : I have always had an interest in ways technology impacts human communication. I am a Chicago native came out of a direct marketing and sales career to be the Director of marketing for the Colts. I left to start a company and returned to the Colts after five years to be the Director of Digital Business for four years. Coyle Media, my consultancy to the sports industry, is now 2 years old. Frank : So tell us about Coyle Media and what you are doing? Pat : Coyle Media has two legs at this point. One is Sports 2.0, which has its own community at sportsmarketing20.com . The focus of my sports practice is to help teams (and other properties) make money through digital media. The main revenue sources we assist with are sponsorship, ticket sales and community building. The other part of Coyle Media is a social media platform called SmallerIndiana.com , which is a hyper-local online community we launched 2 years ago. It has grown to 8,000 members, and is driven by a sponsorship business model. The consulting business keeps me very busy so the communities, while growing, could use more of my time. That’s the nature of the online community business but I’m not complaining. Frank : You started and have grown MyColts.net. Tell us about that. Pat : The theory is simple: connect fans to each other and you connect them closer to your brand. Colts fans want to socialize with other fans. They want to be seen and recognized and they want to feel like they’re getting inside access. MyColts.net was designed to give fans all three of these things. We figured if we could engage fans through social media, it would give us another way to help sponsors engage with fans and it would give us another channel through which we can sell merchandise and tickets. So far the site has over 28,000 registered members. Research showed as well that while there are ticket buying fans that are in the Indianapolis region the greater number of Colts fans actually reside throughout the country. This site gives them a chance to become more involved in the team without ever likely being able to attend a game. Frank : What are your thoughts on the NFL and their attempts to limit social media interaction with the athletes and fans? Pat : I run a little counter to the “let it be wide-open” crowd. I can see the side of ownership and the need to protect their investments. While most think that the owners are just rich guys getting richer, they are actually taking on all the risk so their desire to keep things contained to protect the brand are less about being “old school’ and more about doing good business. I do, however, think ownership must face the fact that fans are gaining control, so their habit of controlling content may have to evolve rapidly in order to allow fans to do what they do. While it will be an interesting transition it will be best for everyone in the long run. Frank : How will social media effect how sports are marketed and sold in the future? Pat : There is a HUGE opportunity to tap Facebook and Twitter in combination with team social communities in order to add value to fans’ experiences, create opportunities for sponsors and make money for the team. But these things won’t happen by accident. Teams need to make them happen. So far, most teams do not have anyone running their digital channels. I think that needs to change if teams are going to tap the full potential of digital. I hope to see teams begin to optimize their sites for sponsorship and ticket sales. In fact, that’s the focus of my Sports 2.0 service…to help teams optimize their digital channels to drive profits. The biggest idea in my brain right now is a way to help teams sell tickets through the social graph. I am working on this one and will let you know more when it’s ready. I am really excited about the prospects for sports teams as a result and I think the future of sports marketing will be heavily concentrated here. Frank : Thanks for your time. We look forward to seeing how the sports industry embraces social media and how you will help shape the way we interact with sports teams in the future. You can see more of Pat’s thoughts on these subjects at patcoyle.net

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Social Media and the Future of Sports

It’s hard to believe that 2009 is finally coming to an end. As is always a very popular practice the media likes to take us on a stroll down Memory Lane but make sure we take a brief turn onto Morbid Court. Why? Because it is important to recap what celebrities either died or train-wrecked their lives in the past year. I admit that I read these lists more often than I should and often have the “I didn’t know they died!” moments which do literally nothing to make life better. They just happen. So why not look at how advertisers may have or could have benefited from celebrity news that range from death to sordid trysts to you name it? Search Engine Watch has spoken to Blogads CEO Henry Copeland and came away with this The sudden death of actress Brittany Murphy this week tied a morbid bow on a big 2009 trend — that of celebrities dying and falling from grace. According to Blogads CEO Henry Copeland, the unfortunate events provided advertisers on his network, at times, with a considerable amount of additional exposure at no cost. At this point there are a million places to go with this one and most are not complimentary. I am going to stay on the purely business side of this one though which is sordid enough. Basically, there appears to be a little disappointment from CEO Copeland in the structure of the advertising world as agencies and red tape don’t allow for advertisers to fully take advantage of traffic spikes due to these ‘events’. Though Copeland explained that his company could get campaigns “up and running in a matter of hours,” he said that Blogads didn’t receive any calls from marketers during the celebrity events. “Most major brand campaigns are planned weeks or months…ahead of time. So we haven’t had any ‘drive-by’ advertisers hop on a hot story.” He continued, “We don’t anticipate this kind of demand going forward because of the way the ad agencies and their clients are structured… There’s just [too many] decision-makers and [too much] budgeting, time-lag, and iterative looping built into the process. A really agile and smart advertiser should jump into these stories; but the structure of the ad industry makes it almost impossible.” Well, this just seems too good of an idea to pass up! I have the solution to this and I sure hope that no one takes this one and runs with it. I am going to hang out my shingle for my new ad agency called “Advertising Ambulance Chasers”. I think I will add the tag line: “We Get You There Even Before the Lawyers”. I understand traffic is critical for advertisers but are we going to be heading down this road to make sure that we advertise around tragedy because its good business? I hope not. We can leave that to the cable news networks who don’t realize just how pathetic they look when they make all of their pretty graphics and pithy sayings around the major headlines of the day which are always about some form of pain and suffering. Maybe I am just being naive and it doesn’t really matter how you get the exposure just as long as you do. Imagine though, that people get used to your brand showing up around tragic events? Just seems odd to me. As an advertiser or just an Internet marketer in general, what are your thoughts on trying to be ‘agile enough’ to advertise where the trouble is? Is this how you would like to have your brand known? Is there any potential harm in trying to be a morbidly opportunistic marketer? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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Celebrity Death and Misfortune May Help Advertisers

It is often pointed out that the disconnect from those in the social media trenches to those in the C-level corner offices is significant and often damaging to the marketing efforts of many companies. While it can be fun to generalize and then make those at the top of the marketing food chain the culprits in the “Great Social Media Under-utilization Caper” it is starting to become much less accurate. One way to see that CMO’s are taking a real interest in social media and user generated media as part of their overall marketing efforts is to see the results of a recent study done by the CMO Club. That’s right. CMO’s hang out in a club while you slave away at your community building efforts. It’s all cigars and mahogany furniture around the fireplace for the CMO set. Just kidding. In fact, The CMO Club and Bazaarvoice surveyed 133 active CMO’s to get their real world take on social media. Here’s how the respondents were broken out Of these, 42% focus on business-to-consumer marketing, 41% focus on business-to-business marketing, and 17% market to both consumers and businesses. Leading participating industries include software/hardware (17%), finance/insurance (9%), travel/hospitality (9%), media/publishing (9%), consumer goods (8%), and retail (7.5%), among others. Annual revenues ranged from $6 to $50 million (25%), $51 to $999 million (42%), and over $1 billion (23%). So what did they find? This chart is pretty telling as they attack the three letters that keep most CMO’s up at night: ROI. ROI is certainly the Holy Grail of the C-suite with regard to every facet of marketing. What makes it difficult for social media is that there are not real clearly defined measurements or metrics that create a line to what is termed social commerce. Whether you are a C-level marketer or a day-to-day social media practitioner what are your thoughts on measurement in the social media space? What do you use for tools where are you having success and where are you having trouble? Feel free to download a white paper synopsis of some of the findings of the survey. Maybe the more that C-level marketers and the ‘rank and file’ of marketing work together there can be more advancement in this emerging field. Is that a reality at your work or is that just a fantasy?

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The CMO Club Lets You In On Their Social Media Thinking

While it’s easy for us to predict the decline, and ultimate death of mainstream media, I wonder if we know what we’re letting ourselves in for. Take, for example, the recent incident that involved a Washington D.C. detective and a “tweetup” snowball fight. Mashable alerted me to the story . With a couple of pics and a video, it’s easy to believe that the cop overreacted and should lose his job: Now, I’m certainly not bashing Mashable here–they took the social media angle that appealed to their readers–but let’s look at the “citizen journalism” side of this. Viewing the photographs and cell phone video, you might confidently predict that there’s not much the police officer can say to defend his actions. He pulled a gun on a bunch of kids having a snowball fight! But, if you take the time to read the Washington Post’s lengthy account of the incident, and you learn that this was, at worse, a misunderstanding and, at best, the correct reaction for a cop being pummeled with snowballs. Personally, I still believe the cop overreacted–and should face some kind of discipline–but that’s part of my point. I’m a citizen journalist–aka blogger–and I make my living by imparting my subjective views on you, our readers. The Washington Post however, while not able to shake completely the latent bias of its journalists, does a much better job of presenting the facts–and leaving the reader to form their own opinion. In Radically Transparent , we talk about “professional detractors”–those that are paid to report on your misfortune, yet without any apparent modus operandi –such as journalists. While we may not like what they write about us, we know that we can somewhat trust their structured gathering of information and procedures for correcting any erroneous reporting. As citizen journalism continues to take the place of professional journalism, I wonder how this will affect reputation management. Are we ready for a world of biased reporting? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Cop Draws Gun at Tweetup Snowball Fight; Is It So Clear-Cut?

Back in July, Facebook was challenged by the Canadian government about some privacy concerns around third party apps and information shared that was taken about users. Many wondered how the social media giant would handle the situation. Would they thumb their nose at the information police? Would they stand up to the Canucks? Well, that was answered in August when they folded like a cheap card table and rewrote their policies to meet Canadian concerns . Well, if that was a precedent then the folks who run the Facebook Legal team fan page (Is there really one of these? I just made that up) are about to get real busy. You see there are several privacy groups who are up in arms about the latest privacy policies handed down by Zuck and the boys. According to the WSJ’s MarketWatch Ten privacy and consumer groups announced Thursday they’ve filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission alleging that Facebook Inc.’s privacy-policy changes violate federal law. The Electronic Privacy Information Center said in a statement that it and nine other groups are urging the FTC “to open an investigation into the recent changes made by Facebook … and to require Facebook to restore privacy safeguards.” These kinds of things usually sound a lot worse when they are first brought to light. Ok, so let’s stand in Facebook’s shoes and let this one sit for a second and let the scariness of the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) being called on to investigate your company’s privacy policies go away. Hmmm. Doesn’t seem to be working this time. Why? Well, because this could be a real serious deal for Facebook. They went from cruising along and just gathering more and more steam in their quest to become a money making machine to now being a social media whipping boy……again. While what they have been accused of lately (breaking a valued trust with their users by making their information, all of it, public unless opted-out) isn’t sleazy on a Tiger Woods like level, it is a serious issue. That’s not good. Now add on the possibility of the US government (you know the one that thinks it can do everything for everyone so no one needs to think for themselves anymore) being asked by not one but 10 privacy advocates to take a look at your policies. There probably were happier endings envisioned by the Facebook folks on this one, like huge profits from data being available to mine and sell. EPIC said in its statement that the service “should not be allowed to turn down the privacy dial on so many American consumers,” adding that the changes “violate federal consumer-protection law.” As they say in some parts of the world “Them thar is fightin’ words!” Of course Facebook has something to say about all of this. In a statement, a Facebook spokesman said: “We’ve had productive discussions with dozens of organizations around the world about the recent changes, and we’re disappointed that EPIC has chosen to share their concerns with the FTC while refusing to talk to us about them.” The spokesman, Andrew Noyes, also said that Facebook discussed its privacy program with regulators “including the FTC” prior to its launch. Well, shame on EPIC for telling on Facebook after the company worked so hard to grease the skids to prevent this very thing from happening. By the way, how productive a meeting is can be pretty subjective. In other words, there is no mention of groups endorsing what Facebook did, just a statement that they met and talked. Look this may turn out to be a non-issue. The FTC may decide to not act on the request of these groups but it might be hard for them to do so. Of course, with Facebook letting the world know that they spoke to the FTC before this move was made may make some wonder just what kind of ‘agreements and understandings’ may have been reached. Whatever they were, they may now be null and void if there is enough of a stink raised. So what looked like a pretty strong year for Facebook may end on a sour note. They’ll get over though just like they did with Beacon. Apparently that gaffe was either forgotten or it’s the policy of the company to see just what it can get away with until someone slaps their hands or slaps them with an investigation. Your thoughts? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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Facebook’s Privacy Policy Produces Plea to FTC

While Google’s CEO is experimenting with the wonders of Twitter (which by the way has been switched to @ericschmidt and has over 10k followers so adjust accordingly) the mothership, Google, is announcing some new search additions that are, well, timely. Today Google made the announcements from the Computer History Museum in Mountain view. The official Google blog tells us Be sure to check out the video there as well. First, we’re introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page. Wow, this has been a rough day for SEO’s for sure. First, personalization is made the norm by Google for all users and now more front page real estate is threatened by the real time search offer. Of course, this type of offering will be more useful in some areas since searches like “injection die mold” won’t have much current activity around it (or will it?). There is a lot to digest with this new offering and it looks pretty comprehensive. I think it’s better for Google to tell you so here you are. Click on “Latest results” or select “Latest” from the search options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling right on Google. You can also filter your results to see only “Updates” from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others. Latest results and the new search options are also designed for iPhone and Android devices when you need them on the go, be it a quick glance at changing information like ski conditions or opening night chatter about a new movie — right when you’re in line to buy tickets. And, as part of our launch of real-time on Google search, we’ve added “hot topics” to Google Trends to show the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time. With this improvement and a series of other interface enhancements, Google Trends is graduating from Labs. Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we’re announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago. You can go to Google Trends and click on a hot topic to test out these new features which will be available in English over the next few days. This addition to Trends also marks its graduation from Google Labs. Sniff, sniff, our little application is growing up so fast sob, sob. So as to try to out do themselves, Google also announced mobile search changes as well. We have also made some new strides with mobile search. Today’s sensor-rich smartphones are redefining what “query” means. Beyond text, you can now search by a number of new modes including voice, location and sight — all from a mobile device. So we’ve been working to improve technology that takes advantage of these capabilities. Well, today could prove to be a watershed day in search as Google is now changing the game in a way that only Google can. What does this mean to the way you do business? How to you see these changes impacting your SEO practice? Is this a true game-changer or just another step along the way? Let’s hear your thoughts.

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Google Announces New Offerings in Real-Time, Mobile and Social Search