Infoserve Group

My colleague came across an article in Marketing Magazine about how paid-for search is suffering as brands reduce online spend.

This is despite paid-for search being “hailed by the IAB as ‘the advertising recession-buster’, with more customers searching online for cheaper goods and services.”

We left a comment (how could we be expected to resist?) about how Infoserve disagrees. We wrote how we are

“…experiencing record levels of new customers who are turning to the internet to market themselves. Within the SME sector, paid for search obviously presents a huge opportunity to target local searchers looking for specific goods and services, and businesses are finding the ROI that online advertising can provide incredibly useful when budgets are tight.”

It’s also worth reading the last couple of paragraphs of the Marketing Magazine article about social networking sites and advertising, which pretty much reiterates what I wrote about last week.

Whilst Twitter is taking the world by storm, and is the hottest topic on most people’s lips at the moment, whether - and how - we can ever “successfully monetise” social networking sites is the million dollar question. Literally.

I think this is one of the best explanations I’ve read recently about how powerful Twitter could be:

“Over the last couple months we have heard many different ideas on how Twitter can successfully monetise their surge in popularity, growing user base, and overall traffic. The ideas range from charging for an account, charging for premium accounts, simply adding Adsense, and the list goes on. What we haven’t heard is how Twitter could add local search into their business model, monetise it successfully, and create more user generated content.” [local search news]

What do you think? It seems wherever I turn at the moment, it’s Twitter this and Facebook that, but how can businesses ever judge the real effectiveness of an online presence?

Increased sales? Maybe. The usual indicator of a successful online campaign - measurable results from advertising - seems to fall a long way short on social network sites.

I’ve posted before about how effective social networking can be for businesses and I still not convinced how far it can go. After all, we aren’t there to search for something but be sociable, aren’t we? Will we ever find a way to engage with businesses and measure success via Twitter and Facebook the way we do through search engine advertising?