After a sustained Social Media campaign of shaming Nestle’s use of controversially sourced palm oil, Greenpeace did the next best thing and crashed (video) the shareholder meeting, this time in ‘the real world.’

Nestle shareholders witnessed a Greenpeace activist rappelling into the meeting from the roof and raising the issues that have been all over Facebook for the last month.

This campaign has been a massive Social Media effort that sparked 200,000 emails and 1.3 million video views. But Social Media pressure may not be the most effective thing when trying to reach a very specific, influential, and relatively small group of people such as key shareholders. Even though not everyone is willing to make a splash like Greenpeace (and get arrested), but they seem to have mastered the art of applying digital and real world pressure on corporations and creating synergy between the two.

Nestle did issue a statement addressing the raised controversy several days prior to the shareholder meeting, but the issue now seems to be about the perceived urgency and timing.

It is difficult to ignore an organization both in the digital realm and ‘the real world.’

The Social Media backlash against Nestle’s use of questionably sourced Palm Oil in its products, as raised by Greenpeace, has seemed massive but its true impact is unclear.

Yes it is true that Nestle has been obviously caught off guard, and was slow to respond while its Facebook page was overwhelmed by negative comments.

But is this a real customer crisis that will affect sales or just a spike of negative buzz?

The meaningful answers will come in due time when Nestle releases its financial results. In the meantime, the Social Media monitoring technology firm Crimson Hexagon has just released current social perception data and digital conversation themes surrounding Nestle.

Of the identified categories, there is an obvious negative segment that is quite significant at 30% of the conversation. It is likely that this sentiment and new segment can be directly attributed to this crisis.

But, the segments like ‘Social Media is powerful’ and the ‘Handling of the situation’ are not as significant. These conversation themes are more interested in the social media side of the story, much like this blog post, rather than the customer side which could affect sales and perhaps company reputation. Aggregating the neutral conversation themes comes to approximately 50% of the conversation, and this type of chatter is not likely to scare the company.

Similarly, when Domino’s had their own social media crisis last April due to employees posting their inappropriate product handling exploits on YouTube, sales slid 1%-2% that quarter. Only time will tell if this crisis has similar or any impact on the company, but its reputation has seemed take a slight hit according to Crimson Hexagon’s data.

While the massive amount of content and the storage space required is truly difficult for one to grasp, it is no surprise that YouTube is a superstar in the Google portfolio of brands. This portfolio has taken some bad hits recently with underperforming Google Buzz, Wave, and even the mobile entry Nexus One. Earlier this week, Hitwise even announced that Facebook overtook Google as the most visited website.

What better time to remind everyone that Google has a user engagement superstar in its portfolio.

Forrester Research finally announced the launch of its official analyst blog and social platform.

It has been about a month since Forrester sparked controversy with its decision to disallow their analysts to operate independent blogs (decision does not involve purely personal interest blogs).

There were many well known blogs affected by this decision, some examples being The Heretic by Tom Grant, Mobile Strategy by Julie Ask, and other Forrester employed individuals that maintained and cultivated their blogs outside of the official Forrester web property. While Forrester’s logic was well explained by Josh Bernoff, the issue at the center of the conflict seems to be personal exposure vs. benefit to the employer.

The new platform is being positioned as a customer focused improvement over the previous unregulated collection of blogs. From a customer perspective the consolidation does seem an improvement, but it remains to be seen if the analysts themselves have suffered any loss of motivation from this experience.

The reason for doing this is simple: news breaks via social media more and more frequently. Just this week, for example, director of Liverpool Football Club, resigned because of a ridiculous and abusive reply email he sent to a fan. The story was originally a blurb in the ‘sports rumor’ category but then gathered enough steam and attention to make it to virtually every UK front page and forcing the resignation.

Another story that gained momentum with far reaching implications is the Facebook ‘Bra Color’ viral debacle. No one knows the origin of the Facebook idea that encourages women to post their bra color to somehow raise breast cancer awareness. Yet, this prompted many prominent bloggers to bring attention to the phenomenon and question its worth, and furthermore justly questioning the line between marketing and the pink ribbon campaign/real charity/real contributions to breast cancer awareness. As the dominos keep falling, the spotlight shifted to questioning participation of certain companies in promoting or tying their products to Breast Cancer Awareness month/campaign. So it starts with an anonymous campaign and ends up bringing companies like BMW and Eli Lilly into an unwanted spotlight.

Is there a better reason to mandate Social Media monitoring?

• Burst of the free content bubble: Free content and access has been a bubble that is bursting as we speak.  More content will go behind walls with a resulting loss of web traffic.  This may not be a long-term solution, but because of the current competition between Google and Microsoft, content providers can access a revenue stream that makes sense for their brand and quality of content and does not solely depend on traffic figures.  Google vs. Microsoft war makes it possible for publishers to maneuver between the two and actually make money. Be ready for more protected content.

• True user centricity: User experience, more than ever, is about speed and user engagement.  Users expect immediate access even on a mobile platform.  Google’s blog recently had an interesting write-up on how important speed is to user experience; even minor slowdowns cause very high page abandonment.  Everything on a page will be sacrificed for speed.Prompts for immediate user input on the huge platforms (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Google, Seesmic, etc…) have trained users to expect a similar experience across the web.  ‘What do you want?’ What are you doing?’ are the immediate and central questions.  Even brochure- like corporate sites will have to change their strategy to prioritize for these expectations.  Prompts of what users want will become central in favor of featured content and animation.
  Immediacy and engagement will be key to web experience more than ever.

We shall see what happens in 2010, see you then!

So here are some educated guesses/predictions for the upcoming year.  Please voice your feedback or add your own.

• Commoditization of services: Loyalty towards providers/publishers will erode for convenience.  The huge success of products like Seesmic (which allow you to use Facebook, Twitter, etc… from one dashboard) account for large amounts of activity and this is likely to grow.  So is it about Twitter or is it about status updates? Is it about Facebook or staying in touch with your network?  Is it about the actual iPhone or the apps?There are so many services and so much pressure to open the gates in order to stay competitive that it is the commodity services that work across platforms like Seesmic, similar dashboards, and app providers that will grow rapidly as a result.
  
  The service will become more important than the provider.

• Exclusive deals, not acquisitions: This goes back to an earlier post about the ‘Cold War’ between Microsoft and Google, and is rooted in content/service providers being able to play Google and Microsoft against one another.  Much like during the actual Cold War when various countries could go back and forth in their loyalties in order to get the best benefits and aid, in a similar way, publishers can forge relationships knowing they have options between the two.Because such conflicts are long-term, the publishers (e.g.. Yelp, Twitter, etc…) know they have time and are in no rush to sell off their complete sovereignty and would rather sign short term access deals to show revenue potential (precisely as Twitter has done recently). So therefore do not expect huge acquisitions.

Stay tuned for Part II…

What must be realized is that this is becoming bigger than ‘search’ and bigger than revenue drivers.  This is not about Bing and Google Search.   This seems like a long-term competition between two giants battling for position as the preferred technology brand for consumers.  Both will use their core business to expand into other areas and it is important to analyze events and success outside of the ‘revenue’ lens.

This is now truly resembling beginnings of a technological Cold War.  Much like in any long-term conflict, it is important view events with the big picture in mind.  This is now a conflict of pre-emptive moves, territorial encroachments, tricky alliances, posturing, and battles for the ‘hearts and minds’ of consumers.

Let’s analyze the situation through the 3 ‘Cold War’ points mentioned above:

Encroachment
Google: Just announced its own browser based operating system, its office suite has been around for a while now, as well as its own browser.   All areas that have been very important to Microsoft.

Microsoft: Bing is its major search initiative and encroachment into Google’s core area of expertise

Alliances
The potential news content (News Corp., and perhaps AP, Reuters) being available through Bing only is an interesting, yet tricky proposition.  What is a definite outcome of such a deal is a huge loss of traffic for any property that excludes Google.  According to Compete, Google holds 73% of the search market share.  Excluding that traffic would obviously lead to lower page views and that is still the main monetization model of news sites.  It would be interesting to see how much Microsoft is willing to offer news publishers to offset that.

This ‘blockade’ of Google can backfire quite easily because many news providers use AP and Reuters content such as The New York Times.  So it seems that the content would still be accessible, just from a different destination.

Time will better judge this potential alliance/blockade but the initial thinking about its financial success is skeptical in terms of revenue, yet it may not be about that.  This may be a step to deny Google their stated goal of indexing all of the world’s information.

Similarly, speculation of who will acquire Twitter in 2010 is something to watch (no matter what is currently said) and again this will not be about revenue generation much like Google’s purchase of YouTube. Twitter and YouTube’s monetization is far from proven as has been seen.  So these are all big picture, defensive in nature moves and are not necessarily about revenue generation.

It seems that these are just skirmishes for what is ahead, and that is the battle for the ‘Hearts and Minds’ of consumers to become their preferred technology brand.

Although it seems that Google has an advantage because its product development model lets it release a multitude of diverse products that live in the ‘cloud’ (Gmail, Wave, Voice, Maps, Profile, Docs, Calendar, Reader, etc…), the flaw may be precisely in the way how these products are developed – by individual teams that seem to have difficulties integrating their products together.  Few of the products come together in any meaningful away and Google will have to overcome that challenge.

Microsoft’s has the track record in creating integrated user experiences across various services, yet its challenge will remain in moving and monetizing their services and products in the ‘cloud.’

Much like during the Cold War when U.S. and U.S.S.R. battled over distant developing countries, achievements in space, and weapons races, similarly this technology conflict will take both companies into new places. Both will venture far and wide across many aspects of technology,  so watch out mobile, music, GPS, telecoms, display ads, video, RFID, etc… This will be interesting, drawn out, high stakes, difficult to analyze, yet interesting.

1. The ‘Search Wiki’ results page where users can rearrange the results they are getting – true personalized results

2. Integration with Twitter search which will deliver more real-time Twitter content into the search results page

3. ‘Social Search’ which puts content from your personal network into the search results page

This is all disrupting one of the primary tenants of SEO: the relatively stable search results page that is arranged by an algorithm that ranks results on their relevancy to the search query.

However, these new products are really shifting the control of the search results page to the user, their personal preferences, live results, and content from their social networks. For SEO purposes, we may not even know what the search results page looks like from user to user. These are additional levels of complexity that simply cannot be overcome by “content optimization” and “link building.”

Even though adoption of these features still needs to increase, SEO specialists will need to expand their worldview and join the other types of marketers that are all converging on Social Media whether they are advertisers, PR, SEO, direct response, and other types of specialists.

Although it is extremely worthwhile to read the entire article and draw your own conclusions, here are the points which resonated with me:

• Experiment with new content formats and user participation: Blog posts are not just columns and op-ed pieces. Stephen M. Walt of the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that he could actually develop ongoing pieces based on live developments and included multiple perspectives. Instead of his own single perspective on a certain battle in Afghanistan, he actually began to interact with the battle participants and integrating their perspectives into the analysis. So don’t be limited to column format pieces and truly push the medium.
• Be ready to be challenged and let go of being a perfectionist: Pieces are developed with short lead times and that presents an additional challenge as bloggers: “have to have a much thicker skin because the response is so instantaneous you’re likely to be wrong more often than you would with something you spend months or years working on.” Again, a great piece of insight from Stephen M. Walt. The feedback will range from absurd, to supportive, to challenging so be flexible.
• Don’t be afraid of strong positions and perhaps a bit of sensationalism: Bloggers note that taking on controversial topics gained the most attention and feedback. While not necessarily surprising, it may make sense to create a balance between posts that take on controversial topics that would provide a boost in overall readership.
• Be ready for a real commitment and time investment: This seems to be the biggest challenge. David J. Rothkoff of the Carnegie Endowment found: “My main goal when I started was that it shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes a day. That was not successful.” Evgeny Morozov of the Open Society Institute also noted the key challenge of “feeding the beast.” “Sometimes I wake up and just think ‘I’ve got nothin’. I have to do a lot of prior planning. I have a notebook where I keep ideas, and sometimes I’ll incubate something for several weeks.” Being a frequent blogger is quite a time investment so make sure you’re ready for that type of commitment and idea generation is another key challenge.

Blogging is a great platform to take a thought leadership position within an online space and it makes sense to do it especially since most organizations have such a wealth brain power locked away behind the company walls. However, before opening up these points and challenges are worth addressing, otherwise failure is a very real option.