The long anticipated data point that Facebook has just passed the 500 millionth user mark was greeted by a flurry of press reaction and an outage on the Facebook site….maybe the half billionth user was one too many for a while. With more members than the entire populations of the US and Brazil put together we should perhaps just declare them a separate country and be done with it…my suggestion is the Peoples Republic of Facebookonia.

The phenomenon which is Facebook prompted my hero the King of All Media, Howard Stern to rant for about half an hour this morning about the demise of traditional media, in his case terrestrial radio. His logic was “If you can reach half a billion people with an ad on Facebook why would anyone ever use radio.” It’s an interesting argument, but there is still a way to go…online media is still only 10% of all ad spend…and search is the largest component of that. Search is already significantly larger than magazines as a medium.

Will Facebook evolve into a media powerhouse? No doubt. Will it get bigger than magazines or radio for that matter in the immediate future? Beats me. However, in the world we currently inhabit (as opposed to Facebookonia) search remains the best way for companies to reach customers…and at least for now, we’ll use social components to increase the reach of our products and stay focused on driving a huge amount of visibility to local businesses through search.

~Tim Judd
President and CEO of eLocal Listing, the nation’s leading provider of internet marketing.
www.elocallisting.com

Facebook recently announced changes in their search offerings which have been seen by some as them declaring war on the mighty Google with their Facebook’s search strategy and their recent statement that “all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them”.

I thought I’d just try it out …. I was in Vegas so I thought I’d check out the hotel I saw a show at. A search for Rio Hotel Las Vegas on Facebook yielded two results neither of which were the actual hotel, but both were masquerading as such. I then searched for ‘Pen and Teller’ and got a bunch of likes from various people, but not until I searched for ‘Penn and Teller Rio Las Vegas’ did I get any results which might have helped me go see their show at the Rio…and they were provided by Bing.

Needless to say, any of those queries done on Google yielded just about perfect results for both the hotel and the show. Facebook  is following (in part) the premise that a “like” on Facebook is similar to a “link” as counted by Google. It’s an interesting idea, but at first glance I would have thought that’s an approach which is highly prone to spam…in the same way that Digg seems to be….but they are the guys with the war chest of cash so what would I know?

I’m a fan of both Facebook and Google (no pun intended). Google has tried some interesting social media stuff of late, to very mixed reviews, and it makes sense that Facebook would want to take a swing at the massive piñata that is Search. This is obviously early days and if I were Google I’d be concerned that someone with as much traffic as Facebook came after my cookie jar. I’m probably a bit on the old side to really use Facebook, I tend to watch on the sidelines at the fascinating lives led by people I know, but I use search all day, every day and I like to think I know enough about it to be dangerous.

In terms of getting our customers new business through Social Media we’ll continue to integrate as much social content as we can with our products. The opinion of others is enormously important when it comes to choosing a product or a service, but when it comes to getting found through search then Facebook has a very long way to go if it intends to compete with the mighty G.

Meantime….if you happen to be in Vegas and want to see an  amazing show those magical funsters Penn and Teller at the Rio are worth every penny.

~Tim Judd
President and CEO of eLocal Listing, the nation’s leading provider of internet marketing.
www.elocallisting.com

Recently eLocal Listing was a sponsor at the Local Search Summit conference during SES San Jose. Local Search Summit was one of the first conferences with it’s main focus being local search. Some of the highlighted speakers were Jason Calcanis (Mahalo), Steve Stukenborg (Google), Jeremy Stoppleman (Yelp), Jennifer Chin (Google), Sarah Smith (Facebook), and plenty of others.

Since Local Search Summit was only one day each panel was jammed packed with today’s thought leaders on local search, social media, and mobile technology.  Steve Espinosa moderated quite a few panels, and eLocal’s Todd Johnson made an appearance on the panel about “What kind of products do small businesses really need” and shared his sales experience and knowledge with the crowd. I personally was honored to share a panel with Will Scott of Search Influence, and Sarah Smith of Facebook where we discussed social media’s impact on the ability to drive and convert leads for small businesses. You can see my presentation here, and Sarah’s presentation here. (make sure to turn up your volume, as the audio is a bit low).

Overall I enjoyed every session and was able to take away something valuable from each one. eLocal’s Own Steve Espinosa headed up the conference and was well applauded for a great event that ended up being the talk of SES San Jose.

Here are some links to other blogs that covered the events and their feedback/wrap up’s.

SES San Jose YouTube Chanel

Local Search News Wrap Up

Aaron Irizarry Social Media Session and Q&A

Expand 2 Web by Don Campbell Summit Wrap up

Facebook‘s strategy in acquiring friendfeed is very interesting. Look at the lineup of the people involved in the friendfeed project, who are mostly ex-Googlers: Paul Buchheit,Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. With an arsenal of lethal talent, where can we expect to see future of the facebook go. Only time will tell. Here are some hot quotes from other sources:

FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said in a release. “Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,”We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.” -cnet.com

“But the biggest win here for Facebook is the FriendFeed team, which includes an all-star cast of ex-Googlers. Perhaps best known of these is Paul Buchheit, who is responsible for creating Gmail, pioneering some of Google’s early (and incredibly lucrative) advertising products, and coining Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto. Other ex-Googler co-founders include Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. And so begins the next step in Facebook’s assault on Twitter.” -TechCrunch.com

However twitter has just recently changed there whole brand image from “What are you doing?” to “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” This is twitter now saying” Hey World! I’m a real-time search engine. So the next wave search is coming to be. These are Real time conversations where users must learn to lead, engage, and influence. Stay tuned to see how this impacts small businesses who want to use twitter as part of there Internet Marketing Strategy.

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Last Friday Oprah dedicated her show to Facebook, the social networking phenomenon that now boasts over 175 million active users, of which I am one.  Founded in 2004 by a bunch of very smart (check out how many of them went to Harvard), YOUNG entrepreneurs (and I emphasize young), who were able to see monetary value in a social utility that “helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family, and coworkers.”

Now, you know if you have a Facebook account that they ask a lot of questions; they want to know who you are so that they can drive targeted advertising/marketing to your page and to that of your friends who they assume share some of the same interests, and well, let’s face it, buying patterns.  Facebook strategically places seemingly non-intrusive ads on your “wall.”   The ads are simply an image and some text .. I almost didn’t realize that they were ads! Isn’t that part of the power of subliminal marketing strategy used by so many companies to lure consumers in to purchasing ..

Take a beautiful young lady , who is in the “marrying age” and “in a serious relationship”, what type of ads do you think appear on her page .. Diamond ads, no pressure here.  … My husband, a Kiwi, has a Quantas ad and well, me, I am a little disappointed with the ad that appears on my home page;  Belisi Skin Tightener. I knew I should have had Aaron touch up that photo, but none the less, they “knew” that she was young and maybe knew that I wasn’t quite so young.

Targeted, focused advertising .. seems national advertisers have caught the Facebook Advertising bug, but isn’t there an opportunity for small businesses who rely on local exposure, local customers, and local dollars.  Yes, the answer is yes.  Facebook’s ad bidding tools allow businesses to narrowly target consumers by using the IP address and a member’s profile information (and their friends’ profile information as well) to determine a user’s location, interest, age, employment and even favorite television show.   This is targeted, focused marketing at its best.  Much better than other traditional advertising because you not only know who sees your ad, but who clicks on it and how/when it converts.  This is a great opportunity for local businesses to spend their dwindling advertising budget on a very focused audience at an affordable price.  eLocal Listing includes “social marketing aspects” in our product offerings and is currently offering Social Advertising to its Corporate Strategic Alliance Partners, as well as local business reviews.

I will write more about advertising on Facebook in another post, but for now I have to get online and buy that skin tightener I saw on my Profile.

The Nielsen Online research guys have just come up with some very interesting data on the growth of social media.Last year 67% of online users visited social media sites which makes those sites more popular than personal email.

Anybody with a college age kid will be painfully familiar with Facebook, but in 2008 it went mainstream with 30% of online users visiting it at least once per month. The social space appears to be maturing; the parents of the early adopters are getting in on the act, the fastest growing sector is the 35-49 group. The trend appears to be global with strong growth across Europe, many Asian countries such as South Korea have been heavy users for many years.

Figuring out how we can plug into this rapid growth to help drive customers for local businesses is firmly on our agenda and we’ll keep you posted on these initiatives as they progress.

Meantime even an old dog like me can learn new tricks, and (if you really want to) you can follow me on Twitter or swing by www.timjudd.com.

You can read the full Nielsen report here