Yesterday, Google publicly acknowledged that, when it comes to determining the relevance of information on the web, there is a challenger to its famous PageRank algorithm.

Please take a bow, for the challenger is … you and me.

That’s right. Google has finally recognised that people’s recommendations are potentially just as powerful as its algorithm for indicating relevance. That’s why the search giant has taken the plunge and launched social search, something it first mooted in 2009.

As well as delivering information in the search engine results pages (SERPs) based on PageRank, Google will from now on show information based on how much it has been recommended by your friends. In its first iteration, when you search, Google will return web pages and information shared by people in your Circles on Google+ as well as pictures shared by those people on Picasa, Google’s picture sharing service. Later iterations, you can be sure, will include search results based on social hints such as mentions in other Google services, such as Gmail and Docs, and eventually perhaps, non-Google services, such as Twitter. Or maybe not.

One area Google will struggle to integrate into its social search is Facebook. The biggest social network already has a strong partnership with Microsoft. These two are still working on powering Bing social search results with Facebook’s Instant Personalisation. What this means is that, much as Google does with Google+, Bing results will include web pages and information deemed relevant to your search based on sharing activity by your Facebook friends. This is a powerful combination, and we can’t wait to see how the partnership, first announced in 2010, pans out when it becomes fully operative.

How it affects brands and companies

Once social search becomes the norm, it will render traditional SEO an anachronism. Don’t worry, SEO companies have been changing their approach for years, so this will not render their advice worthless.

But there are broader lessons here for brands and companies wanting to connect with people via search. Here are three things you need to consider if you’re a brand with an online presence:
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Today we held an event to announce our third annual trends paper, looking at the 10 trends we believe will be essential for PR professionals in 2012.

We’ve been looking at the newest driving forces in social media, and our top ten list for 2012 includes:

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Twitter today announced their brand new web analytics system, which will be a key indicator for publications, blogs and PRs to find out how much their site or article has been shared, how many clicks it received and how effective the official tweet button has been.

The development comes of the back of Twitter’s acquisition of BackType - once a third party tool used to measure how many times a URL was shared on Twitter and Facebook, how many clicks the link received on those platforms and what the impression volume was.

BackType is still live, however the search now returns results from BackTweets - a tool by the same developers that lists all the tweets containing a certain link. Still useful of course.

BackType is a great tool, however there were reliability issues at times and the service was limited unless you signed up. The news that Twitter has developed their new analytics system of the back of this means the tool should be very well polished and free to use.

‘Twitter Web Analytics’ is being rolled out this week to a few pilot partners, however it shouldn’t be long before it is offered to all site owners. There is good news for developers too, as the API will be made available at some point in the future.

Click here to see Twitter’s official announcement. This has also been posted on David’s personal blog.

The eagle-eyed may have seen that Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo has been giving a talk to staff this evening on the current size and scale of Twitter, along with some pointers as to the future direction of the social network. Twitter’s comms team has been tweeting the highlights and we thought a summary would be useful to share.

Twitter stat attack:

• 100 million active users
• 55% of active users are active on mobiles
• 400 million unique users per month to Twitter.com, up from 250 million in January 2011
• 40% of active users do not tweet

Strategic direction for how Twitter looks and works:

• Simplify the Twitter interface
• Standardise Twitter across all devices
• ‘Tighten feedback loops’ - with feedback referring to favouriting tweets or new friends signing up
• Surface more content from outside of your followers / following

These stats and pointers come from Twitter.com/twitterglobalpr and are current as of the time of posting this blog. This has also been posted on the Hotwire blog.

This week Twitter was rife with people calling out LinkedIn for changing its privacy settings so it could use information about you in third-party advertising.

I saw two or three people in my network tweeting about this supposedly underhand behaviour, and immediately logged onto LinkedIn to change my privacy settings.  After all, you trust people in your network, don’t you?  Worryingly, however, this also changed my perceptions of LinkedIn – and not in a good way.

Learning from experience

Why does this keep happening?  Facebook has come under fire again and again for making changes to its privacy settings, even reaching the desks of US regulator the Federal Trade Commission in 2009 thanks to a complaint from a consumer rights group.

Partly, this is unavoidable.  Social networks are young companies and services and clearly they need to make changes to their business and service models as they go.  A good example is the launch of the activity stream announced by Twitter this week.  This updates the way Twitter serves you information about who’s retweeting, favouriting and following you, and so far, everyone seems happy enough about it.

But some changes – particularly those relating to privacy – don’t go down as well.  In the main, these public outcries are driven by a conflict between the urgency with which social networks run their businesses, and the amount of time it takes to communicate effectively to hundreds of millions of geographically dispersed users, particularly on sensitive subjects.

Governments have learned this lesson well over centuries, and often take decades to persuade countries to consider, then adopt, controversial policies.  Of course, with fierce competition between social networks, they don’t have decades or even years to push through change.  They see the world in terms of weeks and months.

LinkedIn blogged today about its new social advertising policies.  “We told you about this already,” they claim, with some justification.  LinkedIn did publish two blog post in June flagging changes to the privacy policy and the launch of social ads.  That and some outreach to industry blogs seems to have been the extent of LinkedIn’s communication of these changes.

The value of trust for social networks

So far, the big social networks seem to be taking the view that, so long as they don’t lose members in droves, they can probably get away with pushing through changes like this.  However, with public trust at such a premium after years of relentless focus on banking, politicians’ expenses and media malpractice, I’d argue that social networks could benefit from being seen as trustworthy sources of information.

And with that in mind, perhaps making a bit more effort to explain the changes they plan to make, and being seen to listen to users feelings before they implement changes, might not be such a bad idea.

Everyone knows that competition is good.  While that’s obviously true for the consumers of products and services who enjoy lower prices and better quality of service, it’s ultimately true for producers and providers too.

Take Facebook.  Riding high in a near social network monopoly, Facebook has hardly gone out of its way to explain and communicate with users.  Don’t think I’m complaining about this - I’m not.  It’s been running a tight, fast-growing ship, which must be challenge enough without the headache of building a highly responsive communications function.

But, just as you may have read more and more about Sheryl Sandberg in recent months, it seems Facebook is slowly cranking into gear a marketing and communications function that befits its global position.  And we blame competition for this turn for the better.

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New stats just in from The Next Web break down the top 20 brands on Facebook based on size of following. The new figures give an idea as to what it takes to go properly big on Facebook and the types of pages and global focus.

With Coca-Cola breaking the 30m follower mark, it’s interesting to see the kind of communities brands are building and the different types of content being used to engage fans.

The new leaderboard looks like this:

1. Coca-Cola, 31.7m fans, started by the fans and not the brand
2. Disney, 26.6m, boasting 196m fans across its various pages in total
3. Starbucks, 23.5m, with a focus on coffee card and recruitment
4. Oreo, 21.8m, focus on recipes
5. Red Bull, 21.2m, highly engaging content
6. Converse All Stars, 19.8m, one of two similar pages
7. Converse, 18.9m, as above
8. Skittles, 18.3m, ‘quirky’ with plenty of apps
9. Playstation, 16.2m, focus on game previews
10. iTunes, 15.8m, uses live content streams

Last week, Twitter announced a very useful addition to its search functionality. Searching on Twitter will now show up top images and videos; with the option to view plenty more in a visually pleasing gallery, should the search term be popular enough.

We are big fans of photography at 33 Digital and many of us use phone apps to our pictures with the world on Twitter. But images and video shared on Twitter have further importance in our work. We don’t just search what is being said about our clients, we also check what images and videos people post - using services such as PicFog. Thanks to Twitter, our job just became a little easier.

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Yesterday the nation found out its fate: were we or were we not destined to get a ticket to see the Olympics. Throughout the day the media covered the nation’s reactions to the sums of money disappearing from bank accounts as the only clue as to what exactly the lucky few hundred thousand would be seeing in 2012 when the Olympic Games come to town.

Looking at social media, the trends were fascinating to see unfold. We thought it would be a good idea to do a roundup of what we were tracking.

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When you put in exceptionally hard work and show real passion for the work you do, it is nice to be rewarded every once in a while.

For PRs, there is an annual book that highlights these types of people. With only 500 in the list, the PR Week’s Power Book lists the top 1% of the industry’s best. And for the second year in a row, 33 Digital’s Drew Benvie has been added to that list.

Drew is also listed as one of the top 5 influencers in digital PR - a position which this year was voted for by the Power Book’s 500 professionals themselves.

Now Drew isn’t the sort of guy to go on about this, which is why I’ve (like Phil did last year) gone under the radar to show our appreciation of having Drew as our MD. Congratulations fella!