Rumour has it that an official announcement is imminent for Google's development of a social networking site to rival Facebook.

The Internet giant has had talks with online gaming companies including Playdom Inc and EA Games to include some of their games on the site.

Following the recent announcement of Facebook's 500 million user success, it's only natural that Kings of Search, Google Inc have decided to develop what could be the next social media phenomenon.

This may well work in their favour to once again dominate the web for all search queries. In recent years, social networking sites have become more intimate and trustworthy than search engines when making decisions, such as finding the best restaurants or choosing a city break.  Real reviews and recommendations via social networking sites have taken the lead - results almost seem as though they come from someone you know.

Users have now come to expect a more personal, descriptive answer to their online search query, as opposed to a simple list of sites, and there's a strong trend for preferred choice of options that come from within a users social circle. As Google would agree, social networking is certainly the way forward.

Coca Cola saw phenomenal results this week when they joined an online discussion using Twitter’s “promoted tweets”.

Where the usual number of visitors to click on a regular ad is around 0.02%, Coke saw impressive stats with an engagement rate of 6%.

Twitter first introduced the new advertising system in April, allowing companies such as Starbucks and Sony Pictures to pay to display their postings on pages of search results for popular topics. Disney Pixar became the first company to buy an ad within its “trending topic” section just last week.

Unlike search results, this form of sponsorship appears on the main page Twitter users see when they are logged into the service, at the bottom of the user-generated list of the 10 most popular talking points on the site.

Coke tweeted messages congratulating the England and US teams, linked to videos on YouTube and invited people to celebrate their teams’ success.

Naturally, many advertisers are now excited about the potential of social networks to promote word-of-mouth recommendations of their products.Using social networks as a business tool allows great opportunities to establish relationships with consumers that can’t be achieved through TV and press.

Facebook and Twitter get a lot of the credit for all of the conversation that’s going on around the web these days, and quite rightly so - they certainly account for a great deal of it! However there’s still public conversation happening in many other channels - blogs, Q&A sites, news sites, YouTube, other social networks, and forums.

Google's newly redesigned SERPs place a great deal of emphasis on conversations, as I mentioned in my previous blog post. The new ‘Discussions’ option lets users refine their search results by time, relevance or date and they’re given the option for all discussions, forums or Q&As.

They can refine this even further by filtering for discussions of any length, short, medium, or long. In addition, they can sort by standard results, sites with images, and page previews, and by all results and results from nearby locations. That's some pretty deep down drilling!

Anyway, no matter which parameters you choose to search by under discussions, the non-everything options are Forums and Q&A.

Businesses looking to increase their exposure and visibility ought to consider answering questions from consumers in areas that they are qualified. This has always been something to consider for a successful online marketing strategy, but now forums and Q&A sites not only attract targeted traffic, but appear in search results. Not to mention they help you sell your expertise in your line of work. The difference now is increased visibility. Google's search options may not be new, but they're more visible now, and you can pretty much count on them getting used a lot more.

Q&A sites are also not new, but lately it seems that we're seeing an increased focus on them from a variety of players. Yahoo, the top Q&A site recently served its billionth answer, but others are bringing different elements to the Q&A table. Some are integrating local business listings with them to provide. Others are finding their own unique spin. Google itself even purchased Q&A property Aardvark recently. It will be interesting to see if this becomes more heavily integrated with the Discussions option.

With Google’s newly redesigned SERP pages, users don't have any choice but to notice the options that are available. They're not too different from Bing or Yahoo but the difference is that way more people search with Google on a regular basis.

The new SERPs are likely to shake up SEO efforts, simply because users will start going to the different options Google provides them, taking them to different sets of results. Now that the options are clear to see, users are more likely to use them.

When Yahoo added features to their left-hand navigation bar, engagement increased. So we can't imagine why Google wouldn't also see an engagement increase for certain features that are now more visible. What it's going to come down to is evaluating the different options for any given query that you wish to rank for, and focusing efforts upon those.

The options in the left panel pulls in everything including: classic Google results, blogs from Google Blog Search, Books from Google Books (which includes magazines), Images from Google Image Search, News from Google News, Maps from Google Maps, Shopping from Google Product Search, Videos from Google Video (which includes videos from YouTube and other sources), and Updates from Google's real-time search.

That last one is particularly interesting because before users generally only saw Google's real-time search in action on select queries unless they hunted them down. Real-time search for any query is now much more accessible, which makes real-time search a bigger deal for search marketing.

The new SERPs also place much more emphasis on social search results. The same goes for location. Google has also taken an interest in engaging in conversation throughout the web so forum participation could be a valuable use of your time.

What it comes down to though is how you, through all of Google's different search engines, can get more traffic from Google. Traffic to sites listed in any of these should look forward to a significant increase. Just think; if Yahoo was seeing increased engagement, imagine what Google will attract.

In one fell swoop, Facebook may have wounded the popularity of Twitter’s retweets with the launch of a universal “Like” button and built a personalisation engine that allows Facebook to rival Google in both search and advertising.

It's a simple yet powerful feature that delivers a significant blow to rival Twitter. Once the network effects take hold, it's hard to imagine how any company could unseat Facebook's social networking dominance in the months to come. Let the battle commence…

-    Size Matters

Twitter has so far been unable to match the social network's growth rate of Facebook. Twitter has 100 million users; Facebook has 400 million. The size of the network is important, since users want their products and services to gain the most exposure possible.
If it’s a choice between a Twitter "Retweet" button or a Facebook "Like" button, given that the majority of Web site visitors have Facebook accounts, the choice becomes easy. Not to mention that Facebook's button's are far more powerful – telling visitors how many friends ‘like’ a story and suggesting other stories you might like.
It’s extremely likely that conversion rates will be higher for those sites that choose Facebook because, in every case, the biggest site wins.

-    Twitter's Developer Troubles

Twitter's relationship with its developer community, those who fuelled its growth by creating applications for phones and the desktop, has hit a rough patch.
Twitter is struggling to convince developers that building Twitter applications is worthwhile, whilst Facebook's ‘Like’ buttons and new tools, by contrast, offer endless possibilities.

-    Personalised Search

Facebook looks set to challenge Google with their new-found ability to target search results and ads.
Facebook is in a position to build the world's best search engine: One that delivers results based on your friendships and interests. The launch of the "Like" button means that Facebook will know more about your individual preferences than ever before. Google doesn't have a complete list of your friends, combined with a list of their interests. Facebook does.

-    The World's Best Ad Network?

Google makes the vast majority of its money from ads that typically match your search terms but its knowledge of your friends and interests is more limited than Facebook's. The data gained from thousands of Facebook Like buttons around the web could make for an ad network that rivals Google's AdSense.

-    Google's Social Stumbles

If Google is to maintain its lead in search and advertising, they need to perfect social networking and unfortunately Google Buzz has so far failed to catch on.
If Google is to fend off the Facebook threat, it needs new ways to learn a user's interests and social connections. In simple terms; they should to buy Twitter.

-    Facebook's Success is Not Guaranteed

Success for Facebook is by no means guaranteed. Twitter is set to release "annotations", a way to append extra information to Tweets. Google has enough money on hand to buy, well, whatever it wants.

And Facebook's user base is volatile: They may one day decide to embark on a mass exodus, causing Facebook to fall like MySpace and Friendster before it.

Google has began to share more detailed data for each individual search query in the Top search queries feature in Webmaster Tools.  Users can now click on a given search query to see a breakdown of the number of impressions (number of times your site's pages appeared in the results for the query), as well as the amount of clickthrough (number of times searchers clicked on that query’s search results to visit a page from your site) for each position your site's pages appeared at in the results associated with that query.

In the past, the data in Webmaster Tools hasn’t been all that helpful other than the occasional finding of a crawl error. Their inaccurate information has often caused people to wonder what they're doing wrong and in some cases they even panic or waste time 'fixing' things that were not broken in the first place, just because they believe everything that comes out of Google.

This new data, assuming it will be accurate, will hopefully provide a new layer of information beyond that which we can typically get elsewhere. There's no other way to know the actual number of times an organic listing in Google is shown to people for a given keyword phrase. That's pretty interesting and important information.

Where we’ll see the real value though, is in conversion rate optimisation. Just knowing what your clickthrough conversion rate actually is, is a whole new set of data that we never had before.

Whilst there are going to be some questions around how precise the information is, the bottom line is Webmaster Tools are now  great deal more useful to a lot of site owners. In fact, a lot more site owners may soon be using Webmaster Tools for the first time.

Three Google executives have been convicted by a judge in Italy over a video uploaded to YouTube that shows a group of school children bullying an autistic child. The case could pose serious implications for social media and the web in general.

Google worked with the Italian authorities in order to help ID the person responsible for uploading the video and the other participants from the video, who were sentenced all to community service. But now, Google executives David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes have been convicted for "failure to comply with the Italian privacy code."

The ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. Google will now appeal this decision, saying ‘the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question.’

But can a business really be held accountable for user-generated content? After all the whole web is pretty much generated by users. Should company owners be penalised, even if they comply with requests to remove such content? Think about the following:

•    What if YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. had to shut down because it couldn't control the things users post?
•    What if every blogging platform had to do the same?
•    What if you went to jail for comments posted on your blog?

Now, whilst you're not likely going to go to jail for comments posted on your blog, the point is, that by allowing people to post comments on your blog, you are allowing user-generated content that you can't control until after it's been posted. Google is being held accountable for content that users uploaded, which was not in their control - YouTube users upload 20 hours of video every minute.

The case is subject to appeal, but if it is not overturned, what will this mean for the web? Tell us what you think.

If rulings like this become commonplace, how much do you think that would affect the social media industry? Companies like Google, Facebook, MySpace, etc. couldn't let users upload content, which essentially means social media couldn't exist. User-generated content couldn't exist. How could you blog? How could you leave a status update on Facebook, or upload a family photo?

That's why Google is not only upset about the ruling against its executives, but calls it a "serious threat to the web.

1.       Create a simple, clean website that includes keywords about your business so that people looking for your products or services can find you easily.

2.       List your business on all free directory sites available to you: Google Local Business Centre, Yahoo! Local, Yelp, YellowPages.com, and SuperPages. These are just some of the online business directory services that allow you to create a free listing. Add details such as your company website URL, a map, phone numbers, or business hours.

3.       An email newsletter is a great way to connect with your loyal customers. Create an email that includes a quick update on new products or services, and perhaps a printable coupon or promotional code. You can also add an image, a link to your website or a video you’ve posted on YouTube.

4.       Social networking is here to stay, so your company needs to get involved. Start by creating a Facebook business page and a Twitter account in your company’s name; both are free. If you have video content about your business, create a free “video channel” on YouTube. Encourage your customers to sign up for your pages by printing your Facebook address and Twitter handle on all your marketing materials.

5.       Try offering different types of promotions: downloadable and printable coupons that people can bring in to your shop or office, a 10%-off coupon for signing up for your email newsletter or a refer-a-friend discount to be redeemed online. You can promote these discounts via your email newsletter, in-store banners, Twitter, and Facebook.

6.       Use Google, Twitter, Facebook, and other search engines to find similar businesses in your city and in other areas to see what marketing tricks your competitors are using. Check out their social networking pages, websites and latest promotions. Sign up for their email newsletters. You’ll be able to see what’s worked for companies you admire, and fine-tune your own marketing strategies to compete with them.

7.       There are many sites where experts can provide answers to people asking questions: Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers are some of the most popular. Search all of these sites for questions related to your business or service expertise, and then provide answers to them. Offer thoughtful, expert advice people can really use; that’s great PR for your business.

8.       Most people prefer to 'see' something rather than 'read' something – so create some videos for your business! Create simple marketing videos for free then add your company’s URL, phone number and address. Post your videos on your Facebook Page and on YouTube, and use them on your website and in your email marketing campaigns.

Google has come up with a tool to help small organisations advertise on YouTube.

The new feature will let advertisers use simple templates to create InVideo overlays and companion ads on YouTube.  (An InVideo ad is an animated flash overlay that appears at the bottom part of a video that a user is watching.)

Now, advertisers can use the Display Ad Builder to turn their adverts into overlays and run a campaign on YouTube in minutes.

Overlays can be bought depending on the type of campaign the advertiser wants to run. The two options are CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions,) either can be matched to YouTube videos based on numerous criteria such as demographics, content categories or even on a video by video level.

Considering that takeover ads on the YouTube homepage are said to be sold in advance of hundreds of thousands of pounds, this could prove to be a very popular option.  The move also earns brownie points for being low risk, since it probably didn't take much in the way of resources to execute and it doesn't cut any privacy corners.

Now we just get to guess how much Google will actually make from the feature but here’s a pause for thought for you: a Citigroup analyst has estimated that YouTube will pull in about $1 billion in gross revenue this year. Cha-ching!

When you think about search and social media, I bet you spend most of your time thinking about traffic, customer engagement and brand awareness. Whilst you’re not wrong, there may be more to that last one that you haven’t considered before.

Brand awareness isn’t just about having a random customer find you via Google or Facebook. Have you ever thought about how channels such as search and social media are used by journalists? The fact is journalists and media outlets utilise both to a great extent.

Search and social media play significant roles in PR and you don’t want to forget this when it comes to getting your project or site in front of them. What can you do as a marketer to make it easier for the journalist to do their job?

One way you can potentially increase your media coverage and in turn increase your brand awareness, is to optimise your content for what you think a journalist is looking for.

Online journalists often have tighter deadlines therefore turn to blogs and social networks for instant sources of information. For example, the real-time nature of a Twitter search is what a journalist needs to find someone who’s talking about the subject they’re writing about.

Which is why Google’s real-time search can help for the same reason, and most journalists use Google anyway to research what they’re writing about. If what they’re looking for happens to be related to a news-worthy topic then they might see Google’s real-time results before anything else. If that topic happens to be something you’re talking about, then you might just be the one they pick from those results.

The point is, if you’re looking for increased media coverage then there are ways to increase your chance of getting in front of the right people. If journalists are now using their contacts within their social networks to find sources, then now is a great reason for you to be engaging in social media on a regular basis.