An Emarketer analysis this week of two research studies concluded that social media was going to be a big focus on web marketing expansion by small businesses.

Our experience on the ground selling our DigitalSherpa service confirms the direction of the surveys.  Once we get into a discussion about how content marketing and digital networking can help their firm, local business people quickly move past questions about “why” to questions about “how?”

There’s a fundamental problem, though, that the research doesn’t get at.  Local businesses don’t have an interactive strategy that is geared to acquiring and converting qualified leads.

In most aspects of local business marketing, the lack of sophistication around leads acquisition and conversion isn’t that important.  But in internet marketing, it’s critical.

Take a look at the research first.  According to the “Third Annual FedEx Office Signs of the Times Small Business Survey” (that’s a mouthful), use of social media is the fastest growing tactic small business owners cite in their marketing planning.  The primary area of focus continues to be improving online presence, signaling that SMB owners consider this an area where improvement can is needed.

eMarketer then cites a Constant Contact study that shows that websites and e-mail marketing are the two most prevalent tactics or tools that SMB owners rely on to market their business.

The high penetration of Facebook makes for an attention-getting headline, but the nuts and bolts of the marketing program are in the website and continuing contact to the prospect and customer database.

The challenge is how these SMB owners are making decisions about the effectiveness of these tactics.

It doesn’t sound hard:  track web traffic, measure leads and conversions and then select the most efficient sources.

But making these kind of analytical decisions are challenges to the largest businesses in America.  Another recent survey concluded that the biggest obstacle to effective web tracking at larger companies was finding the talent to do the analytics.  If large companies can’t get to the answer, how can small companies expect to?

In traditional marketing campaigns, these kind of analytics were not as important.   A local marketing initiative drove the consumers to one of two places:  a phone number or a physical location.  At the other end of the interaction was a real person, who would ask questions, engage and impart information.  The interaction was more discursive and exploratory, and the experience of the person representing the business in adapting answers to the knowledge and personality of the person asking was critical to driving sales.

With web marketing a primary goal of the program is to drive a person to a web site where they can get information that will inspire them to either act directly or reach out for more information.

If that web site isn’t designed the right way, then you’re not going to get the return on your investment that you should expect.

One of the things that we’ve learned in our business is that creating a web site that can drive conversions is a science, not an art.  Like any science, it requires constant experimentation and adaptation.

The challenge facing SMB’s is not just putting focus on internet marketing; it’s figuring out how to find partners who have the knowledge, expertise and interest to help them participate in a science that challenges even the largest firms.

Related articles by Zemanta

• ReachLocal’s IPO Indicative of SMB Internet Market (marketingpilgrim.com)
• Pump Up Your Digital Footprint: NCI Launches HealthFIT Sherpa, A Social Media Marketing Solution (eon.businesswire.com)
• Be a Relationship Manager (marketingpr.suite101.com)

A basic form of web currency that gets discussed more and more frequently is Google Juice.

Say the words “Google Juice” and people are likely to nod their head knowingly. Getting Google Juice is a dark art, easy to understand and hard to execute. People hear Google Juice and they think, Page 1.

As we’ve driven our business at NCI more and more into a Web 2.0 world, the concept of Google Juice becomes the axis point for many discussions. Too often the dialogue settles into a pattern of defining Google Juice as an outcome of highly-specific tactics designed to influence Google’s behavior.

These conversations are flawed. Google Juice is an ongoing by-product of a consistent content strategy that connects with a specific audience. As my colleague Todd Dubner points out, when you try to game Google, you end up gaming yourself. But when you try to serve a market with consistent content, even with a marketing emphasis, you’ll accrue a natural level of Google Juice that will differentiate you from the market.

Last week I spent a couple of hours with our top management team taking them through a case study in Google Juice.

The subject of the study was this blog.

As regular readers know, the purpose of the blog is to provide an outlet for structured thinking and analysis about business issues that I face in my professional life. The blog is not about the company I work for. It isn’t designed to advance any brand goals. It has no commercial bent — I don’t run ads, I don’t sell consulting. It is primarily a strategy and business information workspace.

As a result, I cover an eclectic number of topics somewhat consistently. I write about that loose focus here. I am not focusing at all on optimizing against specific topics or categories.

But I am consistent in creating content. That makes the way that my blog behaves in search engines a direct by-product of the consistency of the content that I create and its relevance to the audience that has developed around it. Dan McCarthy’s ViralHousingFix is a good study in how powerful Google Juice can be.

More than one-third of the traffic to this blog each month comes from search. Let’s see how that breaks down.

First, some basics about the blog.

It was launched on December 2008. I set it up on Blue Host and built it in WordPress. I use the Thesis theme and a number of different plugins. The five that are most relevant to the blog’s Google performance is the All-in-One SEO plug-in, the Google XML site maps plug-in, Calais’ Tagaroo semantic tag plug-in and plug-ins that integrate WordPress with Twitter and Facebook Connect.

Over the past year, I’ve published 361 posts, about 1 per day. The level of engagement on the site is low: there have been 431 comments.

The site has a digital footprint of about 7000 or so individuals. I get 3000 to 5000 unique visits a month. I have 580 fans to the ViralHousingFix Facebook page, which is used a content distribution point. I have another 650 friends on my Facebook profile; I redistribute about half of the content to my personal profile. My personal Twitter account has 1230 followers; I do 7 to 10 Tweets per day. These are mostly focused on sharing content, either from the blog or from other sources that I find interesting. I’ve got another 1000 connections across various site.

Each time I publish a blog post, I distribute it across my digital footprint. I’m not an active commenter nor am I an active solicitor of links across multiple sites. Generally, I’ve focused on initiating and maintaining my digital links to my Community of Interest, a topic I’ve written a fair amount about in the last couple of months.

This activity generates a lot of link activity: Google identified more than 2300 links coming into ViralHousingFix. A disproportionate percentage of those links come from a couple of blogs, like The Kelsey Group blog and WineZag, that update their content frequently and that list ViralHousingFix in their blog rolls.

The sum of this activity is that ViralHousingFix has a high visibility in some intuitive Google searches that help consistently drive traffic to the site. As Google has indexed the site, it has identified a handful of keywords that help it direct search results. These are show in the chart to the right.

“Media” and “social” are the two primary terms, an accurate reflection of one topic I write about frequently.

The next chart shows the 14 top search queries that drove users to ViralHousingFix in December. (Again, these figures are from Google’s Webmaster tools.)

The table shows the percentage of unique visitors from search to the site that were driven by the term. For instance, 14% of unique users from searches to the site typed in “viral housing fix.” The third column the text of the query and the last column shows where on the search page the ViralHousingFix link showed up.

For instance, 11% of visitors from search in December typed in the words “current state of the economy.” The results that were served up had a ViralHousingFix post in the 6th position on the search page.

This is the essence of Google Juice. When someone searches to learn about State Farm’s social media program, they see ViralHousingFix in the second position. Type in the words “Comscore rental” and you’ll see a post from this blog at number 4. Search for results around “multi-platform marketing” and you’ll see this blog at number 1.

The impact of this becomes more tangible when you look at specific search results. Here are examples of six searches that drove traffic to ViralHousingFix last week.

The first is a query about GDP.

The second is a query about State Farm. My post from last April is the third result on the page.

The third is a query about the current state of the economy. Google served up a post from October.

The fourth is a query about social media case studies in real estate.

The fifth is a query about print advertising leads.

The last is a query about Print or Web advertising in real estate. I find this one interesting. This question is a galvanizing topic in real estate, and one about which we have a very strong point of view at NCI. Search for this on Google and four results come up that are highly relevant to the question: a realtor who advocates cutting back print, a question and answer sequence on Google Answers, and a post from ViralHousingFix speaking to the impact print advertising has on web traffic.

The fact that this post, which is not specific to the real estate industry, shows up so high in the results speaks to the power of the Google Juice that this blog has developed. Google associates a high level of relevance and credibility to the blog around real estate, marketing, advertising, media and marketing. The confluence of these categories of relevance, combined with the incidence of words in my post that are consistent with the search terms, brings the ViralHousingFix post high up in the sequence.

The cumulative impact of this Google Juice is that ViralHousingFix has a degree of brand authority that makes its reach much larger than its actual traffic. The table below shows the Compete traffic results for ViralHousingFix.com over the past year. Contrast that audience of a few thousand with the visibility of ViralHousingFix in relatively general searches online for information about the economy, marketing, social media and advertising.

This is the tangible impact of a social media marketing program. When I speak to groups around the country, I use this example to help them understand how developing a smart content program, and creating a consistent distribution network, will give them increased engagement with their Community of Interest and increased relevance within Google. Over time, they will be rewarded with more visibility on Google.

The difference in a marketing program is that the topics are designed to be more consistent with your business goals. We talked about this during the management workshop. The single most effective way to generate increased visibility and Google Juice is to find out what people are asking about that is relevant to your business goals.

The quickest way to do that is to begin typing a search into Google. I demonstrated this for the management team.

We sell advertising services in The Real Estate Book. We maintain a brand-specific blog at blog.therealestatebook.com. We know that there are some basic topics that we want to cover: The continued value of print advertising integrated with internet advertising to real estate agents who want to have a visible footprint in their market; the importance of advertising even in a down market; and the ways that real estate agents can take advantage of social media to build their business.

If we wanted to improve our ability to intersect with people who are searching for information about real estate advertising, we would begin to share our point of view about the most popular searches. What are great real estate advertising slogans? What are new real estate advertising ideas? What are some key tips to successful real estate advertising?

There is nuance required. If we were to slavishly write about these topics, we would lose the relevance that we’ve established with our current audience, our Community of Interest. But, using Google can help focus what is on the mind of the broader audience and help a brand drive a content strategy that gives it even more Google Juice.

Looking over the search logs made me aware of one thing: I owe the people who are coming to this blog an update on State Farm’s social media strategy. It’s been too long since I’ve looked at it and the post that is served up in search is stale.

In his 2010 projections, John Battelle touches on search:

7. Traditional search results will deteriorate to the point that folks begin to question search’s validity as a service. This does not mean people will stop using search – habits do not die that quickly and search will continue to have significant utility. But we are in the midst of a significant transition in search – as I’ve recently written, we are asking far more complicated questions of search, ones that search is simply not set up to answer. This incongruence is not really fair to blame on search, but so it goes. Add to this the problem of an entire ecosystem set up to game AdWords, and the table is set. Google will take most of the brand blame, but also do the most to address the issue in 2010.

This dovetails nicely with David Carr’s rumination on Twitter in this Sunday’s New York Times. Despite his initial skepticism and subsequent floundering, Twitter has become Carr’s de facto information stream.

At first, Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while. Much of what I need to know is in that cup: if it looks like Apple is going to demo its new tablet, or Amazon sold more Kindles than actual books at Christmas, or the final vote in the Senate gets locked in on health care, I almost always learn about it first on Twitter.

What’s going on?

The divergence between the basic premise of Google and the basic interests of people is becoming more clear.

Google has a clear underlying industrial logic: to organize all the world’s information. It’s a meta-Library of Congress, real-time, ubiquitous and, in its most pristine expression, neutral.

A storehouse of information is a really cool and useful thing.

But when I want to find something out, I like knowing what other people are saying. What’s a good restaurant? What’s the best Droid phone to get? Who’s making some interesting music?

These are the kinds of questions that get answered in the give and take of social dialogue, daily interactions between each of us and the people who we know and that we meet. These interactions have got dimensionality that allow us to give them relative weight. Some we pay close attention to, some less.

“Search” is a highly functioning technological artifact that solves a specific problem presented by the design limitations of web-based information data bases.

My social graph, in all of its various permutations, has a design that is more closely aligned with the human bias of social interactions. Social media, as Carr observes of Twitter, keeps me in the flow and lets me pick and choose from the flow when I need to.

That’s a dynamic, people-based activity set that does things that Search can’t ever hope to do and that technology solutions will only be able to offer a faint shadow of.

10 doesn’t sound like a big number, but when you start looking back over a decade, 10 years of an ever-expanding and innovating world, 10 years feels huge and unwieldy.

At the beginning of this past decade (the first decade of the 21th Century…how cool!) I was working with an Internet company called Themestream, started by a group of engineers out of Netscape.  They had made up the core team that  built the Open Directory.  Their vision was to take the human-filtered experience of the Open Directory and put simple content tools in the hands of the people who had the energy and vision to create content. This was an early blogging and community model. We weren’t successful: too many parts of the web were still undeveloped, but foundation assumptions of that initiative, as envisioned by Bill Turpin and Rafhael Cedeno, were dead on.

Fast forward 10 years later and the world of media and marketing is still grappling with the issues of content and community in a digital, interactive world.

The thing is, we’re at an inflection point where everything is possible. The tools are easy and effective. Consumers are willing to use them. The underlying processes of doing commerce, building online inventory, managing databases, driving audience have all been refined and tested. The challenges we all face now are how to apply these tools in logical and simple ways in order to create business models that offer sensible pricing to consumers and allow for acceptable profit margins to creators.

I think it’s really exciting.

Impressions of a decade

When I sat down to jot down some themes for this post, I could see it getting out of control. The notes have lots of questions about what was the scale of the Internet in 1999 and 2009; who were the biggest Internet companies then and now; what were the biggest themes.

Here are some of the highlights:

• US internet usage doubled in the decade to something over 160 million users. Worldwide internet usage topped 1 billion users.
• AOL acquired Time-Warner in 2000 for $117 billion. AOL had 21 million subscribers in 1999. In 2009, Time Warner spun AOL to shareholders for a fraction of the 2000 value.
• Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.6 billion. GeoCities closed in October 2009.
• In the 2000 Super Bowl, 17 Internet companies spent more than $20 million to advertise. This year? Go figure.
• At the end of the decade, a handful of companies had established what appear to be embedded positions in the infrastructure of the web. Google, Amazon and Facebook are the big three, covering information, commerce and community.

Are these companies likely to have the same positions at the end of the coming decade? The early history of the web teaches us that the ubiquity of access create few obstacles to consumer switching from one service to another. Market leaders have to sustain their positions through innovation, optimal service and an unerring focus on consumer benefits. Of the three big market footholds occupied by Google, Amazon and Facebook, the only one that can create value out of creating a highly transparent and efficient engagement with the consumer is Amazon. Google and Facebook rely on inefficiencies in the consumer experience to create value.

So, here are the notes that I made as I tried to organize my impressions of what happened and what lies ahead.

First, the decade of change.

The greatest change? Connectedness.

The Dispersion of Geekiness. Technological facility isn’t a pejorative any longer.

Fidelity. I think this phenomenon doesn’t gain enough attention. Media companies of that past controlled distribution in part because they had access to tools of production that created high-fidelity replications of content, whether it was music, video or photography. Today, everyone has access to easy-to-learn tools that allow them to create true fidelity: they perform into digital formats and are able to mix, clean, assemble and share high-quality content. This trend is only going to accelerate. As a result, distribution platforms are exploding: beneath the behemoths like YouTube there are all kinds of specialty platforms for sharing high-fidelity content. Today, you can build a simple blog and use multiple plug-ins to create an exceptional sharing platform. Media companies are going to have to demonstrate the ability to add value beyond production, replication and distribution.

Composition. The idea of what a composed media experience is has changed radically. A magazine, or a magazine article, is one artifact within a wide panoply of content types. A CD is the same. A song is the same. Consumers are changing the definition of composition, shifting it to include all kinds of types. Here’s a sample. In writing, there are standard artifacts: a short story, a novel, a poem, an epic poem, an essay, a review, a sketch. Writers who wanted to reach an audience needed to define their work within artifacts that were largely dictated by the production requirements of the media provider. Today, a writer can explore new modalities of composition, gather their own audience around their own content imperative. The publishing world can’t really replicate the unique experience. Want an example? Go look at Boing Boing. It’s all there.

The value of audience. All of the economics of media in the 20th century were embodied in the value of audience. It cost a certain amount to aggregate an audience in various media. That cost was passed along, with a markup, to advertisers or to content creators. The ability to amass audience and deliver content was at the core of creating economic value. That equation has been disrupted by the rapid shape-shifting of audience on the Internet. Google and Amazon are the exceptions over the past decade to a brutal lesson: Audience aggregation is ephemeral and doesn’t support long-term brand value on the web. I believe this was a transitional phase, and that we’re moving into a new ecosystem where the concept of audience will be replaced by a community of connections. [Not an original thought, by the way.]

What’s next?

Here’s what got scribbled down on the next page in the notebook.

Mobile. Mobile doesn’t just mean place-based. If you want to understand the next iteration of the interactive ecosystem, spend time with your iPhone. That’s the whole thing, all bundled up, right there. It is the first truly futuristic device of the Interactive revolution. Think about it. The guys on Star Trek couldn’t even have imagined what the iPhone does, how it works, how it becomes the operating system for your life. Mobile beens portable and interoperable. It means adaptable and intelligent. It means instantaneous and flexible. It’s a synthesis of all of the beneficial functionality that has been developed on the web over the past 20 years. Mobile is so big that it isn’t even its own thing: it’s the ultimate expression of everything.

OK. Get ready for this, because I wrote it down, but I’m not a 100% sure what it means, even though I’m a 100% sure it’s right.

Information/Entertainment/Content as the operating system.

This is the reverse engineering of the mobile experience onto the web. My iPhone interface, in its modularity and integration, is superior to anything that I’m able to accomplish with my laptop. The entire operating system is designed around the I/E/C paradigm, with an emphasis on easy functionality. The iPhone is the fastest adopted media platform in history. It’s lessons are more than Mobile; they are about what is necessary for ubiquitous consumer adoption.

Identity & Community. The trends that we see in social networks today are a point in time of a long-term evolution. These trends will continue to evolve because they satisfy a kind of use that all of us are looking for in our personal technology: How can it help me communicate easily across multiple shifting communities, without having to make radical changes in my behavior and while still managing my personal boundaries within the multiple groups.

Filtering. Get all this information and all these people connected in all these ways and the concept of filtering becomes more and more important. One of the most interesting developments of the past 12 months is how primitive Google has come to look. Google’s search is nowhere near as elegant or as filtered as the output of a well-developed social graph. We’re at the beginning of something large in filtering. How large? Imagine if I were able to search all of the content consumed by my social graph, with the different results coded against the different cohorts that I am connected with. I ask a question about media trends, and I first see the results of content that people in my social graph have accessed and consumed, possibly rated by them as well. The results are weighted by the frequency of my interaction with certain people. And then, when I look for an accountant in Fairfield County, CT, I see results that are filtered through another prism of my social graph. I would know that everything that I am looking at has been favorably interacted with by someone that I have a connection with. That’s an elegant filter.

And then, the last one:

The Quantum Theory of Content.

For companies to establish connections with consumers that can result in some economic benefit to both parties, the entire process of creating and distributing content will change. If you’ve read this far, you probably have read other things I’ve written, and you are familiar with some of the crude thinking I’ve done along these lines. Content needs to be conceived of on a molecular level, with the understanding that this content will combine and re-combine with other discrete content objects. The force that will drive this recombinant nature of content will be the interactive consumer. [This phenomenon includes marketing content as well.]

The content imperative of social media is the starting point for this re-envisioning. What it will look like in 10 years is anyone’s guess.

This isn’t the death knell of long-form content. It’s not the end of traditional media formats. It’s not the end of advertising and marketing.

However, if you want to be a relevant content brand in the next decade, you need to have direct connections with consumers — you need them to invite you into their social graph. The art will be in the kind of content that you share, the way that you share it and the degree to which the consumer feels that the sharing is open and conforms to their habits and needs. If you are able to do this, you’ll have the kind of access to consumers that will support your overarching business goals.

There you have: some impressions of what the themes of the next 10 years will be. I’m looking forward to sorting out practical applications for my businesses. I’m looking forward to being creative in this milieux. And, I’m especially looking forward to experiencing the vast realm of things that I didn’t see coming.

Have a Happy New Year.

As the year winds down, I was curious which posts over the course of the year were the most popular. I was pleased to see that the posts that had resonated the most with all of you were ones that I felt like I’d achieved some clarity around an idea that I’d been working through. (It’s also interesting that these posts are among the most frequently accessed through search.)

The number one post was from March: Social Media Can be A Marketing Platform. This was when we were taking Network Communications into its Project Massive Network, an effort to get every person in the company using social media to broaden and intensify their professional connections.

Through the year, I kept meaning to come back to the concept of Evangelist. The word too easily connotes intense passion, while I believe that the most effective Evangelists are the ones who have completely integrated their nature with their passions, so that they communicate a relaxed enthusiasm that inspires and attracts others. Evangelism is too often associated with a mania and mono-focus that can be off-putting.

The number two most-popular post was a very detailed case study that I did in June about migrating our marketing strategy at Apartment Finder to a social media focus. My intent with this post was to demonstrate each of the steps that we had taken to extend our communications with the multi-family marketplace to multiple platforms, and our efforts to modify and adapt our messaging to the unique attributes to the platforms. This effort continues today and deserves a follow-up: the most challenging aspect of the initiative is maintaining continuity and assessing its effectiveness. Despite our intent focus, we have areas of spotty execution with our own program.

The third most-popular post was my first attempt to consolidate the thinking that I’d been doing about how a traditional publishing content workflow needed to adapt to accommodate the inclusion of social media platforms. In Thoughts on Evolving the Content Strategy in Publishing to Leverage Social Media I outlined the Sharing Model of content creation. This model outlined here as served as a framework for developing new processes at our regional home design brands, and in some instances we’ve seen significant impact on audience and enthusiasm. The process is a living work in progress.

The fourth most frequently viewed post is an down-and-dirty analysis of State Farm’s presence on Facebook. This was a period when I was trying to understand the challenges that face traditional marketing departments when implementing social media programs. The post was published in April and is one of the two most-frequently accessed posts through Google search. I recently re-visited the State Farm Facebook sites and little had changed.

In the Spring, I was doing a lot of work to try to quantify the impact of the economic decline on consumer spending, marketing outlays and media allocations. In an early April post, I pointed out the contradiction between industry research showing the effectiveness of TV and magazine advertising and the steep declines in revenue. The point: When marketing budgets shrink, the most expensive media goes first.

I’m kind of proud that a self-serving post doesn’t show up until the number 6 spot. Over a period of 6 months, we radically shifted our traffic strategy at ApartmentFinder.com in order to leverage what we percieved as our core strengths. This shift was rewarded in April when Comscore reported ApartmentFinder was solidly in the top 5 destinations for apartment shoppers on the Internet. Our work put us solidly in the consideration set for online-only marketing in the multi-family industry, and we did it despite being heavily outspent on search engine marketing traffic by our competitors.

The seventh most-popular post, from July, demonstrates how powerful social media can be. I described a disappointing customer service experience with American Express. A couple of days later, I heard from the Chairman’s Office. It doesn’t match Jarvis’ Dell experience, but it was an instructive moment in the new age of marketing and media.

A May post reporting on research that shows how effective print advertising is in driving web traffic came in at number 8. Despite multiple instances of independent research like this, many people insist of maintaing a very simplistic “Print Is Dead” position. At this point, I just shake my head and wonder why the concept of using multiple platforms to intersect with consumers to drive business activity is so hard to accept. [I very accepting of marketers who say they don't have the money to invest in premium marketing choices, whether they are online or offline. Then we can have a conversation about how to leverage their marketing resources to build their business. Just sitting around arguing about living or dead media gets old very fast.]

An October post made the top 10 and is a big search favorite: The Current State of the Economy in 5 Pictures. I realized doing this analysis that I should update the post in January to reflect the fourth quarter results. Lesson: People like pictures.

The number 10 position is taken by a post where I ranged outside of my limited sphere of knowledge to speculate about how social media platforms would change the way that people searched for information. The premise was that “human search” would develop through the filtering of content by overlapping social graphs. This is happening on Twitter and is expressed by many as crowd-sourcing. I had fun thinking about the problem and putting together the schematics. The post attracted a broad readership and started many conversations. I’m sure that those followers soon dropped off as I returned to my more mundane noodling about business models, business processing and marketing approaches.

I’ve been intrigued by the dynamics of the online audiences in the primary markets that we serve at NCI. In the past, I’ve written about the surprisingly low overlap among the visitors to the leading online apartment aggregators (termed ILS’s in the multi-family industry.)

We’re finishing up some interesting research on the different ways that consumers use media across multiple channels when they are shopping for a home or apartment. Not surprisingly, people will consumer information wherever they can get it, in print or online. The key driver of usage is availability: Can the consumer easily find it and use it?

Some of the research results got me wondering again about the attributes of the online audience. I went back to Comscore/Media Metrix and did an analysis of the cross visits among four of the leading rental sites. The performance of the three integrated media players was of particular interest, since we all have substantial advantages in terms of promoting our internet brands in our print publications. Apartments.com is a joint venture of a consortium of newspaper companies and also enjoys some of this advantage.

The results for September were interesting. First, and in a pleasant surprise, ApartmentFinder.com had the lowest instance of cross visits among the group of four, despite being at the bottom in terms of overall traffic. What does that mean? First, we have to acknowledge some margin of error, given the sample size within Media Metrix’ panel. But, the results suggest that ApartmentFinder.com has the same size unique audience as its three peers.

Why do we have a lower instance of overlap? Our theory is that our strategy of focusing on longer search terms helps to drive a different type of apartment shopper. If you search the key shopping terms, like “Apartments for Rent,” our competitors have a larger share of voice than we do. (They also spend substantially more on search marketing dollars than we do.) Search longer terms, like “garden apartment for rent someplace specific in a specific state” and ApartmentFinder.com is more likely to come up as one of the first options in organic search.

Some more research showed me that while this conclusion was generally true, our traffic has also been driven by our social media marketing strategy. Compete! shows that Facebook was the largest referrer of ApartmentFinder.com traffic in September by a factor of 2 over Google.

I suspect that helps to create a unique audience in the apartment space. As my colleague Todd Dubner has pointed out, the relatively low audience overlap among the leading internet service providers in the apartment space argues for broad distribution by apartment communities of their basic listings, in order to create the largest digital footprint to draw prospects from.

Rupert Murdoch declares he’s going to shun Google.

Google says, We don’t care.

The world cries out that Rupert is misguided.

An enterprising blogger goes onto Compete.com’s site and tries to sort out just how dependent Murdoch’s web properties are on Google’s traffic. His answer? Not as dependent as it might seem:

The screenshot to the right shows the News Corp. assets for which Google is the top referrer, and News Corp. assets for which other sites are the top referrer.

The conclusion is that News Corp. is as reliant on Google traffic one might assume, and, as blogger Vedrashko observes, is less reliant than other news sites on Google.

A look at ComScore’s source/loss analysis for the Wall Street Journal support Vedrashko’s observations. Of WSJ.com’s 6.7 million unique visitors in September, 30% came from Yahoo, with 70% of the Yahoo traffic being driven from Yahoo’s home page. 13% of WSJ.com traffic was driven by Google search.

One other interesting note from the Compete figures: the biggest referrer of traffic to MySpace is Facebook.

Also, don’t miss Mark Cuban weighing in on the issue.

I came across a great series of slides by Tom Smith, the founder & director of Trendstream, based on research from the Global Web Index. The results are based on research of 32,000 consumers in 16 countries around the globe. The results are particularly interesting in terms of focusing what the primary motivators and satisfiers are for consumers related to their web activity.

What follows is an excerpt of some of the slides that most vividly paint a portrait of the online consumer.

First: the three most important drivers of going online are to learn things, to find things and to connect.

To find and learn, we all turn to search.

Increasingly, we look to information from our peers to find the information we want.

How we define our peers is broadening. Our network of digital connections is larger than our network of in-person connections.

We “know” people differently online: we will communicate and trust the digital content of our digital connections, but we’re only willing to pick up the phone to talk with a small percentage of the group.

Brands that want to influence our perception and our actions will be more successful if they penetrate our social graph and offer us information on a web site that keeps us engaged.

And if a brand wants to engage with us online, they need to think in terms of new information, new ideas and new utility. That’s the key to making a connection with the post-digital web consumer.

The entire slide show can be accessed here.