I was at the flex for the Campfire One event last night to mingle with the Blogarazzi, drink hot chocolate while being regaled with Guacamole recipes and tales of how Google’s new friend connect was going to allow anyone to add social features to their website with only rudimentary html experience. Google has jumped from gadgets to widget by leveraging all the work done to support their Open Social and Open Auth to make it easy for web-masters and web-apprentices to go social.

It’s not the quality of the widget that bothers me or even trade offs that webmasters make when they join a platform. I don’t mind that Google is leveraging open source to meet Facebook’s platform play. Facebook has lots of dough and lots of hubris.

I am bothered by the sudden lack of oxygen in the room as Google inhales whatever momentum social networking has left and makes sure that the next phase of social networking companies will suddenly need to be Google Centric. Microsoft used vaporware and some very predatory contracts to drive competitors out of business. Open Social, Google App Engine and now Friend Connect demonstrates that Google has perfected the art of co-opting everyone else’s efforts by offering them an infrastructure umbrella.

Google has absorbed the best ideas of the emerging social web for pennies on the dollar while making sure they have the inside track on monetization. They have done it with a team of hard working, dedicated engineers who want to make the web a better place. Unless you are a cynical search marketer or your start-up is suddenly having trouble breathing, you won’t even notice.

What’s the difference between great link bait and spam?

Complaints to Google from sites you outrank seems to be the most important factor. Consider the two widgets below. The first sites ranks #1 for "online dating" while the second has been banned by Google for using spammy, off topic widgets after Google received some complaints about them. The second site has essentially been smoted from the index.

OK Cupid

Your Score: Read Minds

We’ve discovered your super power! Hope you like it…

You’re a psychic and you can read minds! But please don’t read my mind right now, because I’m imagining you naked. Of course, you’re probably already used to people doing that. Ah, the joys of being a psychic. At least you’ll always ace interviews and pass your college exams with no problems.

JustSayHi

81%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

Free Online Dating

In fairness to Google, the folks at JustSayHi did stray into the dark side. After they ranked number 1 for most dating terms, they started promoting other domains with their widgets. They crossed the line with Google’s TOS. On the other hand, after a couple of failed re-inclusions, they decided to start over with a new domain and rebuild an entirely white hat site at One Plus You using the same quiz widgets. It turns out that Google considers the One Plus You quiz results widgets to be Spammy and Off Topic when they include the anchor text of "Free Online Dating".
The challenge for marketers is to know where to draw the line between very effective link bait and spammy, off topic link bait. As long as the algorithm rewards targeted anchor text, marketers will continue to find a way to get people to link to them using preferred anchor text.

In Candidates Need SEO , Scott Willoughby examined the need for political parties and candidates to begin serious search marketing. Scott’s analysis is excellent as far as it went, but he missed the big picture. SEO and PPC for candidate sites is a tiny piece of the potential of search expertise to impact elections.

Joe Trippi, the former campaign manager for Howard Dean and current campaign manager for John Edwards, pioneered the use of the internet in presidential campaign. He was very successful raising money through small donations and using the internet to coordinate local supporters and events. Groups such as Move On have taken that example and refined the model to develop virtual communities and infrastructure that brings together supporters into physical meetings.

Candidates from both parties have borrowed heavily from these ideas. Their sites offer calls to action: donate money, volunteer, create a personalized version of the site (McCainSpace, my.barackobama.com), plan or attend an event, register for emails, download flyers and other ways to harness the energy of their base. The Edwards campaign even has a section on “Action For Bloggers”, although it is unclear what they have in mind.

Candidates and parties need to broaden their view of the internet and see beyond the fund raising channel and a way to interact with supporters, so they can unleash the power of Electronic Grass Roots. Political pundits and organizers frequently refer to the grass roots and the ground game as important factors in winning elections. They stress the ability to get people on the streets, knocking on doors and engaging their friends and family to support the candidate. The internet provides new vehicles for individuals to impact the outcome of an election.

Individual Persuasion :

Individual users, bloggers and webmasters can influence others through posts, comments and discussions. Virtual conversations take place over time and without the pressure of a face-to-face interaction. They can be viewed by thousands of people and provoke additional discussion threads. Virtual campaigning by individuals can be at least as powerful as persuading people by knocking on doors.

Social Media Action:

Political operatives have not begun to understand the collective power of a group of hundreds of thousands of people as social media activists. Reddit, Digg and other crowd sourcing platforms are among the most heavily trafficked sites in America. It only takes 50 or 100 votes on these sites to make an article “popular” and perhaps a couple of thousand votes to keep it on the homepage for a day or more. Even the “marginal” presidential candidates can muster enough support to generate exposure for their point of view or to promote articles and sites that support them into the public discussion.

Search Results As Truth:

For most people, (even the few Americans who are not search professionals ) the internet has become the way to get more information about almost any topic. The top 10 or maybe 20 results are the entire consideration set for people who want to learn about an issue or the candidates.

The true power in Electronic Grass Roots is the ability to affect search results. The power of a few hundred sites to influence search results has been demonstrated over and over again. We’re not talking about Google Bombing, we are talking about SEO and reputation management strategies combined with an organizied effort that influences link acquisition and/or distribution.

An army of hundreds of thousands supporters — orchestrated by a party, a presidential candidate or an interest group with a sophisticated knowledge of search optimization — has the ability to promote virtually any websites, articles and position it near the top of the search results for a given query.

The ham handed political SEO might focus on Rudolph Giuliani in drag, kissing Donald Trump or the fact that Giuliani , a Roman Catholic, demonstrated the strength of his convictions by getting divorced twice, including an annulment after 18 years of being married to his cousin. Ranking a YouTube video or a Wikipedia entry would not require a Herculean effort. Likewise, John McCain cannot escape his defense of Bush’s War in Iraq or the fact that McCain has new bedfellows the Right Wing, such as Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

The subtle operative will recognize that this strategy is also effective when employed with a subtle hand. It is much more powerful to assassinate someone character by talking about a $400 haircut than attack John Edwards on the environment .

Pushing a highly negative article from a right wing pundit to the top will be much less effective at reinforcing peoples’ reservations about Hillary Clinton than promoting the New York Times article about Bill Clinton being Strategist in Chief . Equally important, it wouldn’t take a lot of external validation to rank an article from the Times that already contains plenty of content and keywords.

As for Barack Obama , his early opposition to the war in Iraq will have the manipulators of the Right pushing stories linking him with the NAACP in supporting immigrants’ rights .

Who needs talking points when you can get Google, Yahoo and MSN to tell your story. That’s the power of Electronic Grass Roots.

Have you noticed the plus sign within some Google SERP that started showing up next to invitations to map an address or get a stock quote a month ago?

Pundits are quick to conclude that this is a portal feature and that Google.com is compromizing their search-only philosophy to become a “portalized non-portal.” (RC Jordan) They accept the obvious explanation that Google is embedding portal content in SERPs to improve stickiness and deprive competitors of traffic while extending the Google brand.

It is easy to dismiss these UI changes as a strategy for Google to gain market share for services that are not performing well. Leveraging a dominant platform to gain market share for another product or service isn’t new or particularly exciting—even if it can be very effective. Despite Google’s successes in search and online advertising, many of their other properties are not performing well. Google Finance, for example, didn’t make the top ten according the Center For Media Research’s January 2007 data. Hitwise data from May 2006 shows Google Maps a distant third to Mapquest and Yahoo.

PlusBox is not intended to be a competitive sledgehammer, although it may serve that purpose. Google has successfully resisted the siren call of manipulating organic search in favor of its own properties and those of its partners for eight years. Search for photo editing software and Picasa doesn’t make the top 10 for organic SERP.

PlusBox is more important than bolstering finance or maps; it offers a glimpse into the future of search. Search engines have dramatically improved over the last decade, but some of the improvement in relevancy is driven by how we search. Users don’t tell the engines what we are looking for; we enter queries for key words that we have learned will help the engine differentiate what we want from other sites.

Plus box joins Onebox and Sitelink as the first steps to go beyond the user query terms and provide real relevancy. Using complex algorithms to create a statistical approximation of artificial intelligence that incrementally improves results — discovering what we are actually looking for and providing it within the SERP

A search a few weeks back for Children of Men illustrates the distinction. Google (and Ask) correctly determined the search was for a movie. The OneBox result in Google contained an invitation to get show times near me in Berkeley by entering a zip code. Ask offered reviews, show times and a link to the official site within their version of OneBox (along with an interesting assortment of suggestions in their “Narrow Your Search”). Yahoo and MSN showed a Yahoo News story followed by the official site for the movie.

Enriching SERPs with results that predict intent can be accomplished with a statistical analysis of user behavior. Google acknowledged that they monitor user click response to UI experiments. Melissa Mayer, Google VP, Search Products & User Experience, in a recent interview in Search Engine Land, describes the process, “We hold them (OneBox results) to a very high click through rate expectation and if they don’t meet that click through rate, the OneBox gets turned off on that particular query. We have an automated system that looks at click through rates per OneBox presentation per query. “

How hard is it to imagine that Google is leveraging this understanding to predict user intent and provide what we really want instead of the page that matches the search term we enter?

Google has been adding UI feature to its SERP’s lately by expanding on the One Box concept. This is a very powerful way to make inroads into some of the popular properties controlled by Yahoo, among others. In addition to the widely discussed addition of stock quotes showing up for a company search, they have also added a show times feature for movie searches.