Who owns your personal data in social media? Right now, it’s not you.

Recent comments about posts regarding data portability between social media sites have all been clamoring about Google, MySpace and Facebook. The big question is who owns the data, and who can make it easy for data to be shared across platforms for people to make one update and all other platforms are updated.

This has also been an issue in the web analytics arena regarding proprietary data storage making it damn near impossible to switch analytics providers.

Ultimately, the web is an open living environment where data is meant to be shared. Just look back around 6-7 years and what Napster did to file sharing. Now its just about how personal data is shared and stored. Rather than making people go to Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, MySPace and others, people want it all in one repository. In the end, the user wants to own the data and use Facebook or MySpace as a way of displaying not, not the other way around.

For a long time, marketers that needed a quick result or boost were stuck with PPC. They could build out the campaign and have a campaign live and generating traffic in minutes. However, upgrades to blogging software is now allowing SEO efforts to be realized much faster. Blogs use correct title tags, headlines, urls and linking structure. Search engines are now indexing blogs much faster now. Also, blogs are inexpensive and easy to set up.

So next time the SEO component of a campaign gets pushed off due to costs, lack of speed, and difficult to measure, make sure that blogs are brought up in the conversation and explain how they can be utilized to help see quick benefits.

Microsoft announced that they will no longer seek to acquire Yahoo whether it be a friendly acquisition or a proxy battle. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made the announcement Saturday and the reason was that the economics demanded by Yahoo did not make sense. He also made a pass at the recent partnership with Google, and that the partnership would make an acquisition undesirable for several reasons.

The question now is, will Google come out further ahead now that Microsoft has passed. Google has already shown success with Yahoo on the small test of search results in the past few months. Google can now deal with Yahoo knowing that Microsoft is not going to be in the near future, and look to expand their display capabilities.

Microsoft states that web advertising is still their goal, and that they will just go about it on their own. Stay tuned, sure someone in the big three will be in a M&A mood.

Google is continuing to make moves to become the advertising hub for agencies and clients who have in-house teams. They have opened their TV buying capabilities to all advertisers as its been in beta for around a year. Advertisers can buy TV spots through AdWords by markets, dayparts, specific programs and program content.

The interesting component is that they offer analytics through set-top box such as seconds tuned per impression and the number of people who watched the spot from beginning to end. Will be interesting to see if they look at tracking spot times and search queries in the same market to report how offline media drives people to the web for more information.

Modernista’s new website is absolutely brilliant and cutting edge. There have been many conversations about absolutely loving it or hating it.  I am definitely a fan and think it is brilliant coming from an ad agency in the land of web 2.0. They truly can show that the internet is a breathing living organism of its own and they understand it.

I”m guessing it took a large set of guts to move forward with it, but I believe the payoff is absolutely worth it. Well sone to the innovators at Modernista! Check out their site here.

No kidding…. The Google CEO made this comment at the recent American Association of Advertising Agencies Leadership Conference in Laguna Niguel. This is a no brainer comment coming from the leader of the market leader in online marketing.Just consider how much more data is available through online marketing than traditional print, tv and radio. All this data allows technology firms to be close to the hip to agencies and media companies to provide analysis and reporting.

He predicted firms will look to hire new skill sets to maximize the ever growing potential of online marketing and the vast amounts of data that can be collected depending on the client and goal of the campaign. I see this as nothing new, as Curt Hecht made it clear at teh recent ad:tech keynote speach that Starcom has already made the transition to new skill sets and has Ph.D’s in their office providing analysis and recommendations for their clients. The money is in the data! No longer can agencies just say they provide creative solutions. They need to understand the data and be able to find interesting tidbits to make actionable suggestions. Clients continue to ask harder and harder questions that agencies must be able to answer.

So even though Eric said it, its nothing new. If this is news to agencies, they are in trouble!

There has been a lot of talk recently about Google and CPG marketers around the value of search as it relates to branding. However, as brands and retailers bid on the same keywords, it drives up the cost and ultimately hurts both parties. So, some companies have looked more closely at co-op search marketing where certain terms are off limits to various parties involved, thus reducing the competition and costs.

Other companies have tried to create search copy that does not elicit a click, searching for the ‘free impression’ but Google’s algorithm will reduce rank or remove completely if there is not enough click volume. After all, Google knows how they make money and will only serve ads that are likely to get clicks.

This question is also raised is in the ad network space. If I can buy inventory on a CPC basis and remove any call to action, it is likely that the CTR will decrease dramatically, thus extending the reach of the buy for branding purposes. I see this as smart buying. The current situation in the market allows people to complete this kind of buy, of course, with client approval. If the client is expecting clicks, you better have a prominent call to action, brand logo in every frame and other ways to increase the CTR. Overall, the industry is young and it seems like Google wrote the rules first, but that doesn’t mean that they will be around forever and that they are the golden rule for all online media. Until I see that this is truly gaming the system and unfairly punishing someone, I think it is a smart strategy for certain campaigns.

A recent court case determined that people can use trademarked terms in their meta keywords in hopes that search engines query their page and use these to help determine page rank. We all know that most search engines quit using meta keywords for a major part of their search results awhile ago, and the judge agreed. The court ruled that most search engines bypass the meta keywords inserted by site owners and look at other factors to determine rank. This means that webmasters can use whatever terms that they want in the meta tags.

Although this only relates to the meta tags, it will be interesting to see if this case is referenced in cases about paid keywords and trademark infringement.

TRA and Publicis Groupe’s Mediavest are making a major step forward in measuring ROI from offline media campaigns. TRA has developed a technology to match what advertisements people see and what products they buy. This is a great move in the right direction for marketers to be able to see if the TV campaign really generated sales or not. In the past, they have bought on sex and demographic data, now they can look at sales data as well.

Mediavest is the only agency to currently use this technology. The new technology is a big win for TV, since it has recently been under a lot of pressure for not being able to be measured like online.

Google is being sued by David Almeida, for supposedly tricking him into running ads through the AdSense network when he only wanted to run ads on the results page. Almeida is stating that the AdSense network is demonstrably worse, and by not filling in a bid when he created the account, he believed his ads would not show on the AdSense network. This will be interesting if Google just settles out of court, as I have heard personal stories of similar misfortune regarding content match, geo-targeting and other ways to “enhance” a campaign that were not correctly implemented by first timers.

I really don’t think there is much ground for the lawsuit as its pretty self explanatory in the AdWords interface and Google has a great help section that David could have referenced. If this lawsuit makes it to court, I can see several other first timers claiming the “me too” claim. I wonder if agencies made the mistake, will clients push on them to stand in line for the settlement if there is one.

My thoughts are, make sure your comfortable doing it and be willing to pay the price if your not. If he believes its that confusing as the lawsuit alledges, pay someone who knows better.