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:

1. Social signals such as shares and likes are now a central element in search. The more you can enable visitors to your website – or visitors to your offline venues – to like, share, +1 or otherwise recommend your products, services or venues, the more visible you will be. So if you aren’t yet using sharing buttons on your website, or registering your business with Google Places, Facebook Places, Foursquare, get on it. A side-effect of this is that you’ll immediately become more visible through your fans than through more generic use of keywords on your website. So if you’re not targeting your fans and online influencers as part of your marketing outreach, it would be a good idea to factor this into your 2012 plans.

2. Internal comms is becoming important for external comms. When it became a mainstream activity, the rules of search made online marketing teams focus on inbound links and keywords. These are still important, but human activity is far less predictable than affiliate linking or writing web copy and tags. With that in mind, you need to generate as much sharing activity around your brand or online content as you can, as often as you can. One of the biggest assets you have is your people. If you’re a multinational company, you probably have tens or hundreds of thousands of potential online advocates on your payroll. The days of banning Facebook in the workplace are well and truly over. You now need to find ways to harness the power of your people. Internal comms has never been so important for external communications.

3. Content is beyond king. One of the oldest adages in marketing, that content is king, has now been given a shot of extremely powerful steroids. The power of content for search can no longer be overlooked. One of the main reasons for this is that the sharing actions you need to move up the search rankings tend to take place in the short period after information is published. So the moment you tweet or post to Facebook, you have a matter of hours until that content is old and will no longer be actively shared or recommended. Therefore, publishing a steady stream of easily sharable and well-targeted content is crucial to your online visibility both on social media, and now increasingly on search. It explains why organisations have been hiring journalists to manage their web presence.

We’re excited by the changes, but they will mean different things to different brands or businesses. If you’d like to discuss how these changes will affect you, please get in touch.

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

• Interest graph
• Putting your business on the map
• How tablets are changing communication
• Who are the new social media celebrities?
• The socialising of TV and music
• Social media and internal communications
• How cashless payments could unlock a wave of innovation
• Gamification
• Forums
• Automotive app stores

You can view and download the latest trends paper below. We hope it makes for some insightful reading and proves to be useful for all digital PRs.

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.

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.

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.

Trying harder

Today, Facebook has launched Facebook for Business.  On the face of it (no pun intended), this is little more than a web page that will help Facebook sell its wares to small businesses.  It’s not that big a deal.

But the surprising thing is that, for many small businesses, this will be the first time they’ve been explicitly catered to by the social networking giant.  Until now, keeping track of changes to the Facebook platform has been like trying to decypher a coded message.  You have to reverse engineer the way it works, and spot unannounced changes by listening to people moaning about them on Twitter.  In converse to this experience, from today, it seems small businesses are starting to feel the Facebook love.

There was a similar experience recently when Twitter launched Twitter for Newsrooms.  It contained nothing new at all, but rather packaged up in one place everything a media organisation might need to know about using Twitter.  TfN contains some great, handy hints about using and searching Twitter, and is worth a look.

Why has Facebook launched for business now?

Both these are simple, old-school PR tactics and they work nicely.  But why are these Silicon Valley behemoths getting so personal now?

Arguably, it’s not before time.  But for social media watchers like us, the timing in itself contains some intrigue.  Could it be that a little bird told Facebook that Google+ for business will launch within the next few days?

Watch this space, we say.  And in the meantime, enjoy the competition.

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.

There is quite some significance in this latest development. There have recently been rumours of Twitter launching its own photo hosting service, which would compete with third party options such as TwitPic. I recently wrote about this myself, although since then we’ve seen that the rumours have been slightly mistaken.

In fact, Twitter has decided to team up with Photobucket. This means that the service is likely to become first choice among users from now on and likely to be given preferable position in official apps. Unless third party Twitter photo services adapt, this may just be the beginning of the end for their run.

Check out Twitter’s video of photo search on YouTube here.

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.

Word cloud of 'Olympics' on Twitter. (Word Olympics removed to highlight conversation).

Social media activity peaked on Twitter at 9am, with 8am showing the second highest volume. The top tweets were from influencers including Richard Bacon and Paul Waugh and the resounding sentiment was that the ticket lottery system had failed.

What can we learn from this? Timing of a trending story is early in the day, and should the Olympics Committee have wanted to engage (which would of course never have happened, but if they did want to) then some lessons around fostering more positives than negatives can be taken from this.

Yesterday the Olympics was talked about more than it has been all year, and for all the wrong reasons. And what will come next? Expect the big peak to be around what tickets people actually got…

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!