The current issue of Wired magazine has a fascinating story about Facebook and how it plans to crush Google as the master of internet.

And actually, they just might get away with it.

I might have mentioned to some of you before that over the last six months, Facebook has become the number 1 referring site for our agency website. Bigger than the AAAA’s, than Google, than anything else.

The basic tenet behind Facebook’s domination plan is that people would rather get referrals from friends than go through an unscrubbed Google search to find something they need.
The company believes that people will begin to search on Facebook instead of google when they’re looking for something.
It works too.

Try putting “iPhone” in your Facebook search and you’ll see what I mean.
Or maybe it’s just MY friends?!

And Facebook has 40,000 servers filled with all our rich personal information; none of it accessible by Google’s spiders.

No one knows how this will shake out.
Could Twitter become the Edsel of the internet?
Will Google look like Yahoo in 2 years?
Hard to know–but clearly Social Media is beyond a transient trend.

I bring this to your attention today just to prepare you for the fact that executing a social media strategy effectively is going to be time consuming.

In essence we’re starting out micro-casting, building a foundation that will be a big asset for us as we move forward.
At least in the beginning, there’s going to be a lot of effort for not much tangible reward.

We’re going to show you how we can re-purpose and leverage every piece of content we produce to its maximum extent, but at the end of the day, this will require effort from you as an individual for it to be successful. Read the full article here.

The Google Content Network is a topic that has been debated endlessly as to it’s effectiveness, and I’m often asked for my opinion on the subject. I haven’t had as much success with the Content Network as I have with traditional search and search partners, but depending on the client and the business objectives it may work. What I recommend doing for clients who want to experiment by advertising through the content network is to create a campaign that I typically call Content Network and then create individual ad groups for each site that I specify with placement targeting. This allows me to specifically monitor sites as to their performance instead of lumping everyone together in the Content Network. Those that perform I’ll pull out and create a specific campaign for in order to control budget, geo targeting, etc. Those that don’t are simply replaced. You can even go deeper as to specify specific placement on sites such as being only on the homepage, or only in sports, etc. This allows for complete transparency as to how each site performs and allows for informed business decisions to be made going forward as to whether to continue with the Content Network.

eMarketer has released revised metrics for online advertising growth over the next 5 years. Although we’re in the middle of a global slowdown, and the growth in online advertising has slowed with the rest of the world, there still appears to be growth ahead in the online advertising space.

Over the next 5 years, we’re still looking at roughly a double in the areas of online marketing that HEILBrice focuses on such as search engine marketing and optimization, display and rich media. When we look at online video, eMarketer is predicting a dramatic 8-fold spending increase.

US Online Advertising Spending Growth -$

When we look at these same metrics on a percentage basis, it looks as follows:

US Online Advertising Spending Growth - %