Advertisers trade in adjectives and adverbs. Campaigns and creative executions are filled with them. However, with all content increasingly filtered through social networks, it’s what people do with advertising rather than what they say about it that will make all the difference this year. Guaranteed.

The change started last September when Facebook revealed that the ubiquitous “like” and “share” features will soon be joined by all kinds of verbs. Two of these — “read” and “listen” — are already live. Others are coming soon with the debut of Facebook Actions. “Buy” and “watched” are likely to be two.

Facebook users who install certain news and music applications such as Spotify and The Washington Post social news reader can opt to share their actions. In other words, read news or listen to music on the social network and it gets broadcast to friends friction-free.

The arithmetic, therefore, is simple. The more marketers can evoke social actions, the more likely it is that their wonderfully crafted narrative will stick to people’s screens.

The empirical evidence is already there.

Increasing Traffic

Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow estimates that sites that simply add an optional Facebook share capability to common online applications, such as an online poll, can increase traffic 12.98%. (Yes, he’s done the math.)

Media early adopters have already seen strong results from their embrace of verbs. The Guardian has garnered 1 million additional monthly page views since it launched a revamped Facebook presence last fall. Yahoo is so pleased with its early results that it has expanded its relationship with Facebook to 26 more sites. The social network is already deeply embedded into Yahoo News.

It’s not just Facebook though. Technology companies have long understood that pointing and grunting are arguably the most innate human gestures. It’s something children do at a very early age. Cavemen basically invented both. So they’re building these natural interfaces at the core.

Siri on the iPhone and Kinect on Xbox* are two early implementations: users talk or point. But soon similar gesture-based media will show up everywhere. These will drive a lot more frictionless sharing. The social networks and search engines will gobble up the data and use these signals to shape the algorithms that already guide so much of what we pay attention to.

Here are three strategies to consider:

Build verb hooks everywhere

You wouldn’t think that people want to share that they completed an online poll or registered to enter a contest, but data prove the contrary. A small percentage will, and this generates a network effect that pays off big. Look for ways to attach social verbs to even basic online features.

Here’s why this matters to marketers: If they adopt the verb structure and API’s into their assets, they are more likely to surface through Facebook’s algorithms. For example, Ford should consider adopting the “watch” API for any video content on its site.

Consider the lens of friends

Content finds us though the lens of our friends. This means no two people see the same web. It’s all personalized. Execs need to think hard about their audiences and pay particular attention to psychographics. This can help guide decisions about the language and creative that will generate verbs, not just awareness.

Prioritize media that think in verbs

When making a media buy, look for partners that get the power of natural gestures and have started to build it into their armada. Insist that they add social functionality to even basic banner ads and rich-media executions.

Your mission this year is not just to be heard but to inspire action. Tapping into the network effects of verbs is a must in a social digital age.

Image credit: sAeroZar

*Microsoft is an Edelman client.

In the early 1990s when I began my career in PR there were clip reports. These were physical books that contained press clips. It seems downright archaic now but that’s how I learned about the press – by cutting, pasting up and photocopying clippings. My fascination with the media never abated.

Today my role is to form insights into how the entire overlapped media landscape – the pros, social channels, and corporate content – is rapidly evolving and to help Edelman clients turn these learnings into actionable strategies. As part of this effort, I spend a lot of time with not only the social platforms but journalists and media execs.

I have relaunched my Tumblr site with a new name, a new focus and a new format. The site, now called The Clip Report, is a virtual scrapbook about the emerging future of media. It will be visual in nature with more frequent postings in the form of scrapbook pages. These pages will feature a mash-up of text and images, just like a real scrapbook.

It all kicks off with a 15-page installment of The Clip Report. The full PDF version is available here or on Slideshare. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Google this week launched The Google+ project – an ambitious new product that aims to take on Facebook. Now that I have had a preview, below is a brief POV of my initial impressions. In short, I believe that once it rolls out, consumers will be nonplussed over Google+.

At launch, Google+ includes three core features that are described in detail here:

• Circles – an easy way to curate list of contacts based on contexts such as family, friends, coworkers, etc. and to facilitate more intimate sharing and connections with these circles

• Hangouts – a rich group messaging functionality that is deeply integrated into the mobile experience, built on top of the Circles feature and heavily utilizes video on the desktop

• Sparks – an aggregator of blog, news and video content that can be searched by topic and serves as a robust feeder for sharing

If this all seems familiar. it should. Google+ emulates many of Facebook’s core features and functions – and leaves much out.

Consumers can easily share content on Google+ from either a mobile device or anywhere in the Google Network via a new navigation bar that also debuted. In addition, users can “+1” content from their circles just as they can via searches on Google.com and elsewhere using Google’s version of the Facebook Like button.

This is Google’s effort to bring consumers more deeply into its fold as they very slowly slip away from the searchable web, which they monetize, and into walled gardens it cannot as easily see. This includes mobile applications and Facebook. It is their strongest play in social yet. And given the way it is deeply bolted into the Google ecosystem – Contacts, Profiles, Picasa, YouTube, GMail and Google Talk – it will likely get a big push off the ground once it launches more widely.

On the plus side, pun intended, the company has clearly rethought how people may want to share and they have learned. Google+ is basically what Google Buzz should have been. However, unlike its predecessor, there’s no easy way for consumers to pull in content from other networks – at least for now.

However, at least where we sit today, I believe that Google+ will leave consumers nonplussed – e.g. bewildered. While the interface is terrific and Circles and Hangouts both offer a strong value proposition, Google+ doesn’t solve a consumer problem that Facebook already hasn’t – or soon will – solve.

What’s more Google today is a mature brand that many view as a utility – search, apps and operating systems – not a place to facilitate stronger connections. Facebook, and to some degree Twitter and Tumblr for those who wish to be public, have assumed this role and are deeply embedded habits.

So, in sum, watch this space. The key here is branding. Does Google+ offer enough value so that consumers will see them in a whole new way? I don’t believe they will.

The Google Doodle is – arguably – one of the biggest PR coups in the world. Not only does it include a prime placement on the single most popular landing page on Earth, but it also can drive a ton of traffic to sites that rank highly on the search term Google ties to it. Just how much traffic? How about 2M page views or more if your web page is the top result. Let’s take a closer look at the data.

Most Google Doodles are tied to holidays, historical events or iconic figures from history. Some are regional in nature, others are global. You can find a list of them here. Given their broad nature, most of the searches that the Doodles link to tend to rank Wikipedia articles very highly. Therefore, if we look at the amount of traffic these Wikipedia pages get on Doodle Day, we can get a sense for just how powerful they are as a traffic driver.

That’s where stats.grok.se comes in. The tool, which was developed by Henrik – a loyal Wikipedia user from Sweden, uses publicly available data to chart the daily traffic that any article on Wikipedia receives. Using this site, if we compare traffic on Doodle day vs. the monthly norms, we can get a sense for the power of the Doodle.

Here’s a random sampling that examines the traffic to three recent Google doodles and how they fared in driving traffic to Wikipedia articles that ranked first, second and third – at least on my screen…

May 9, 2011 – Roger Hargreaves (Wikipedia page is the first result)

3,500 article views for all of April 2011

1.9M article views on Doodle Day (and another 200k the following day!)

April 26, 2011 – John James Audubon (Wikipedia page is the third result)

14,491 article views for all of March 2011

1.1M article views on Doodle Day

April 3, 2011 – Ice Cream Sundae (Wikipedia page ranks second)

10,366 article views for all of March 2011

481,000 article views on Doodle Day

As far as I know, you can’t convince Google to create a Doodle for you. However, should you get lucky, you better be ready to turn on the bandwidth. All hail the Doodle.

For years the mighty hypertext link has served as the web’s traffic signal network. Links guide where our clicks, attention and, therefore, money flows. It has given rise to multi-billion-dollar businesses and even entire industries. As the blockbuster AOL/HuffingtonPost deal shows, we truly do live in what Jeff Jarvis calls “The Link Economy.” But maybe just maybe that economy could be peaking.

More recently it appears that an equally powerful network of signals has emerged just as certain kinds of links are being called into question in the mainstream press. Enter the like, which Facebook CTO Brett Taylor embraced in 2007 while with Friendfeed and Facebook copied in 2009. It has since flourished under Taylor’s lead at Facebook as it mushroomed to 600 million users. These millions have not only emphatically embraced the like on the social network itself, but more importantly across the millions of sites that use Facebook’s social plug-ins. Some 65 million Facebook users like things daily.

Unlike the link, however, likes arguably are arguably easier to create. Moreover, they are explicit endorsements rather than implicit ones. Therefore, they carry more weight once they are pulled through the lens of our friends. More so than links, this new network of signals allows content to find you, rather than you having to go find it. The rise of likes, just as links before it, will create all kinds of new businesses. And we’re just getting started.

Still, this poses an interesting question: could the like, one day come to dominate links as the primary way we find and engage with content? Is Facebook’s EdgeRank the new Google PageRank? It may seem improbable now but history is filled with metaphors.

For example, no one in the 1970s could have ever imagined a day when homes would be built without rooftop TV antennas. Nor, back then, could we have envisioned a world when the three primary broadcast networks that drove the Golden Age of Television would be less relevant. But that’s exactly what happened once mainstream adoption of digital cable and satellite services achieved a critical mass in the 1990s. The FCC ended analog TV broadcasts in 2009.

To be sure, links will remain a powerful signal for years to come – perhaps forever. Link-based algorithms like Google PageRank continue to power how search engines rank different sites. And, of course, with the rise of social media, links spread information (and misinformation) like wildfire. And Google and Bing aren’t sitting on the sidelines either. Both are increasingly relying on social ranking factors. (Microsoft is an Edelman client)

However, links as we know can be gamed – and more easily than likes. This has been going on for years. However, for the first time, the media is beginning to expose both best and worst practices. The drumbeat is getting louder.

So far, trust in search engines hasn’t eroded. In fact, opinion elites turn to search engines for news online more than online news sources, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.

Still, the winds of change are blowing. And it may take years to play out. However, if you squint, you can already see how the seemingly innocent like is poised to shake things up.

Image credit: afagen on Flickr.

This posts covers a new Edelman Digital Insights package we’re releasing today on “Attentionomics.” You can find the deck below and on Slideshare.

The essence of this deck is that attention is linked with economic value creation. However, with infinite content options (space) yet finite attention (time) and personalized social algorithms curating it all for us, it’s going to be increasingly challenging to stand out.

Let’s consider Twitter, for example. They are seeing a staggering 110 million tweets per day. And the volume is growing. But therein lies the challenge. Each tweet decays almost as soon as it is released. Some 92% of all retweets (and 97% of replies) are within the first 60 minutes according to Sysomos.

The situation in some ways is worse on Facebook where a highly personalized algorithm called EdgeRank curates our feed based on personal affinities, content formats and timeliness. There’s not just one Facebook but 500M Facebooks. And, according to Vitrue, the majority of us participate at top and bottom of the hour. This means that anything you post to your Facebook page needs to create a social surge well before then.

So how do you make this work in your favor? Simple, businesses must obey the laws of attentionomics (e.g.) time and space. In the deck above you will find two sets of solutions.

The first set of solutions covers space. It explains how to scale their surface area via digital embassies by…

• Hand-crafting your content for each embassy

• Activating employees as thought leaders

• Tightly integrating owned and social assets

The second section covers time and how to make it your ally through “dayparted engagement.” The action steps here include:

• Practicing mindfulness with bifocal awareness (different than, but related to monitoring)
• Optimizing for the best times to engage
• Testing, planning and measuring

If you’re an Edelman client you will also get access to specific tools and techniques, but I will share one with you today. Check out Timely, a brand new tool from Flowtown that helps you optimize your tweets and track their performance. It’s a good start and they are planning to add some Pro services soon that I hope will elevate this into a must-use tool.

As always, we are eager to hear your feedback on this important topic.

One of the most interesting parts of my job is working with David Armano each January to curate what the firm sees as the key trends that we think our clients and teams need to think about in the year ahead. This is the second time David and I collaborated on this effort.

For this year’s installment, we identified eleven trends. The first five are mine and the remaining six are David’s. If there’s a common theme that runs through it all it’s that there will increasingly be a lot of information coming at us, yet the same amount of time to digest it all. This, as Auggie Ray from Forrester notes, will make standing out more challenging.

In the deck above you will find the same recommendations we are sharing with our clients and helping them bake into their strategies. Client examples in this deck include eBay, HP and Qualcomm. The others are best practices from around the industry.

The 11 curated trends are summarized below:

• Attentionomics - Marketers begin to realize the value of attention and not just reach in driving conversion
• Digital Curation – The plethora of content will give rise to digital curators who can separate art from junk
• Developer Engagement – Marketers typically don’t try to court developers, but that’s all about to change
• Transmedia Storytelling – If there’s one constant it’s that humans crave stories. Technology creates new expectations
• Thought Leadership – Companies recognize they must activate credible individual expert voices who can create content
• The Integration Economy – Social media efforts can no longer exist in fragmented, non-formal initiatives. They begin to integrate
• Ubiquitous Social Computing – As competition heats up mobile devices, consumers closer to being socially connected anywhere
• Location, Location, Facebook – If 2010 belonged to solely Foursquare, it’s likely that Facebook will rain on their parade in 2011
• Social Media Schizophrenia – Social overload is no longer a problem for tech mavens, but a broader population
• Google Strikes Back – Google proves that the best way to beat Facebook & Twitter is to do what they do best: index them to pieces
• Viva La Social Web Site – Businesses realize that integrating social functionality into their existing web sites is what users now expect

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, we’re all ears.

Originally posted on Advertising Age.

All of the social media hype has, to some degree, diverted attention from the bigger storyline to emerge over the last few years – the meteoric rise of long-form, streaming video viewing.

Unlike Twitter and YouTube, which propelled ordinary geeks and moms to cult-like status, the Hollywood content community here has been the runaway winner. There’s more demand than ever for professionally created and curated content.

However, a new dynamic is emerging that could completely upend the economics – that is if it doesn’t break the Internet first.

First, a look at the trend lines.

For years streaming video was a two-foot viewing experience that took place largely at desks via PCs. While YouTube’s user-generated and viral clips dominate short fare, long-form streaming video is coming into its own and on different platforms.

The entertainment community – with the help of partners and in a race against piracy – has been aggressive in making their content available as on-demand streams rather than solely as downloads. This means that studio content is now far more widely available than ever before – and it’s “couch friendly” too. Online video has become a seamless archipelago that spans a one-foot experience on smartphones and tablets to a ten-foot experience on set-top-enabled TVs.

Consider Netflix, for example. The company’s on-demand video rental service is available on dozens of connected devices. This includes everything from the Roku set-top box to mobile and tablet devices.  By one measure, Americans are eating it up.

Sandvine reported last week that Netflix alone represents a staggering 20 percent of all downstream US Internet traffic during what’s normally primetime (between eight and 10 p.m.) This is remarkable given that the overwhelming majority of Netflix subscribers – 98% according to Sandvine – are not streaming content yet.

Xbox Live, which carries Netflix and other content, is seeing a similar pattern. Larry Hryb (aka Major Nelson), Xbox Live’s Director of Programming, blogged last week that 42 percent of Xbox Live’s more active 25 million US users are streaming an average of an hour of television and movies per day. (Disclosure: Microsoft is an Edelman client)

Digital primetime is here. Madison Avenue should be giddy with excitement. Hulu served nearly 800,000 ads in July, comScore reports. What’s more, the proliferation of interruptions are not stopping Hulu users from watching an average of 2.6 hours of video per month.

But there are potential challenges ahead as Xbox, Netlfix and Hulu supplant the TV nets as the new kings of primetime.

For starters, as more Americans become “cord cutters” we may opt for ad-free on-demand rentals or all-you-can eat subscriptions. The appeal is interruption-free viewing. Some 13% of Americans intend to cut the cord in the next 12 months, according to Strategy Analytics – a market research firm.

However, the more scary scenario is that all of this video consumption and cord cutting could push the Internet to a breaking point.

Nielsen reports that 64 million people watched at least part of the World Cup online. That’s a drop in the bucket by what we’ll see in 2014 when Brazil hosts the event. The Internet may not be ready for it.

Akamai President David Kenny says that in five years the average user will consume two hours a day of HD video. To accommodate this insatiable demand, the Internet will need to increase capacity 548 times from where it is today. Factor in net neutrality debates, cable companies squaring off with TV networks and it’s easy to be pessimistic that there’s enough “shovel-ready” broadband projects underway to pave the way.

Advertisers, not just the content community and distributors, have a significant stake in the future of Internet video. However, the debates around net neutrality and capacity aren’t front page concerns for most us. They need to be.

The danger is that the ad community will be left out of the debate. Even worse it may not have a voice in creating viable ad-supported ways for the providers to invest in infrastructure, just as millions of cord cutters flee cable TV for ad-free content and push the Net to the limit.

Image credit: jeffgunn

One of the more profound shifts over the last five years is the transformation of the Internet from a web of connected static pages to an avalanche of real-time communication streams. According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, every two days we fill the web with enough new data to equal all the information created between the dawn of civilization and 2003. Therefore, it’s becoming critical that communicators monitor the entire web – and do so in real-time.

The good news is that both Google and Bing (Microsoft is an Edelman client) have recently added several powerful real-time features that make this more manageable – and free. Neither replaces high-end monitoring/analysis tools. But both are outstanding for maintaining real-time situational awareness.

Google Realtime

Recently Google unveiled a number of enhancements to its realtime search tools, which can be accessed directly via http://www.google.com/realtime or by clicking on the “Updates” link in the left-side navigation bar after you’ve entered in terms on Google.com.

Once you’ve entered a query, Google Realtime will present results in two columns. The left side will continuously drip in all tweets, publicly exposed Facebook status updates as well as streams from Myspace and other social sites as soon as they hit the web. In addition, a small link underneath each result will thread the conversation if it’s in response to someone else.

If you want, you can be alerted every single time Google finds something new on Twitter or Facebook or even the entire web by clicking on the Alerts link at the bottom of the page or by setting alerts up manually at http://www.google.com/alerts. Rather than set up a broad match – e.g. all mentions a word – it’s best to narrow down to a more specific set of words that you might want to track in real-time.

All of the above services are available in 40 languages. But there’s more.

The right side of Google’s Realtime results page lists the most shared links that have your keywords in the title. Up top there’s a graph that reveals the relative volume of conversation by time of day over the past 24 hours. You can also browse by month retroactively going back to February.

Both of these features are invaluable. If you bookmark a search page and revisit it daily you will gain a keen sense for what time of day particular themes are discussed as well as the news and blog sites that tend to reverberate the most across the social web within a given vertical.

Bing Social

Not to be outdone, Microsoft has been on a tear lately in adding features to Bing.

Starting at http://www.bing.com/social you can see a list of the hottest topics of the moment on both Twitter and Facebook. Unlike Google, you can even drill down by source for Twitter or Facebook. Over time it makes it easy to see just how the two social networks are very different.

Like Google Realtime, once you’ve entered in a query on Bing Social if you click on the link that says “Shared Links” Microsoft will present a view of the most popular news stories that are being shared on this topic across Twitter and Facebook combined – or separately if you chose one or the other in left side navigation bar. The key advantage here, over Google Realtime, is the ability to drill down by network. Unlike Google, however, Bing does not offer email/RSS alerts.

Pulling It All Together

Start by setting up some specific searches on Google Realtime and funnel them into daily or instantaneous email alerts, depending on your needs.

In addition, consider bookmarking several Google Realtime and Bing Social pages for your keywords and visit them daily. This, over time, will help you build situational awareness around a given topic.

It’s no secret that information is exploding, but just how much may shock you.

Americans consume 100,500 words a day, according to a study by the University of California at San Diego – and that doesn’t include any information at work.

What’s worse, as more content is digested digitally, we now scan and skim. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen found that on the average web page users read at most 28% of the words.

While both of these studies focus only on the US, the “Attention Crash” is a global problem – and it’s not going to get any better. This means that the single biggest challenge PR professionals will face in the next 10 years (and perhaps beyond) is in how to secure enough “surface area” to create behavior change.

The good news is that we’re not alone. The media too is struggling to capture fleeting attention spans. Consider this: the average Internet user spends six hours a month on Facebook, according to Nielsen (no relation to Jakob). Most news sites are lucky if they get 20 minutes of a user’s time per month.

However, the media, more so than the PR industry, is successfully coping with these changes by increasingly turning to traffic-generating search engine optimization tactics. Page-view journalism, like it or hate it, is the new reality. And we can learn from the media.

Writers and editors at Hearst Media, for example, use a tool that suggests relevant Google-friendly keywords. The Huffington Post runs two different headlines on a story as it’s published to determine which is stronger – and then it abandons the weaker one. Bloggers change their headlines weeks later to cater to Google. And a rising assortment of content mills (AOL’s Seed.com, Demand Media and Yahoo’s Associated Content) assign thousands of stories to amateur scribes. Payment rates are based on keyword volumes/search demand – i.e. their traffic potential. (The image below shows how AOL uses Seed.com to recruit writers for its network.)

With this in mind, here are three simple tips to help you implement a more traffic-friendly PR campaign.

Use search data to inform message development/story ideas

Google knows more about me than my own mother. The same is true for you. If you’re thinking about breaking up with your significant other, Google knows. Looking for a new car? Google knows. You get the idea. Put your sailboat into these winds and your programs will go further.
 
Start with Google Insights. On this site you can see how the world thinks and searches. This information can be used to help shape messaging strategies and program that increase the likelihood that any earned media will find its way into high-value search results. View Google as media.

Write web-friendly copy

Brevity rules online. Web users are very mission-oriented. This means that any messages that are meant to be consumed/reverberated by others via screens need to be very clear and literal. This is especially key for content that you hope to see spread on Twitter. Write headlines like tweets. For more, see this forthcoming book from Yahoo.

Create and generate socially connected content

Content is king today. If a company isn’t creating or effecting content on a regular basis, they will be invisible. However, in a world where everyone can create, it’s becoming critical that all of the content we generate be socially connected.
 
Three great resources here are rich media sites like Flickr, YouTube and SlideShare. Consider prioritizing these sites over traditional press rooms and/or turn to emerging services like Presslift that already have strong SEO.