Speaking at the recent Le Web Internet conference in Paris on December 9-10, 2008, Google’s Marissa Mayer offered a simple, yet powerful, tip for hiring staff.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington reports that Marissa Mayer said she likes to hire people with two key traits: they’re smart, and they get things done.

For his part, Michael Arrington says such people are rare, but are worth spending the time to find. But don’t expect interviews and reference checks to sort out these people from the rest. TechCrunch tries most people it hires for a month before hiring them permanently and also uses internships as a hiring ground.

I used to think that as long as you provided good training and comprehensive operational systems, the best staff to hire were those who could follow instructions. While that may be true for some kinds of jobs, it certainly isn’t appropriate for jobs requiring people to make important decisions in challenging and ever-changing environments. Operational systems are still ideal for taking the thinking out of routine tasks and processes, but they can never replace thinking.

Moreover, you can’t expect people to make the right decisions if they expect manuals to give them the answers. You need people who are naturally inclined to find answers to complex questions, and who then take action on those answers.

Which, of course, can be summarized as… people who are smart and get things done!

Source: Michael Arrington, “Marissa Mayer’s Simple Advice On Who To Hire: Smart People Who Get Things Done,” TechCrunch, December 10, 2008

Not only can you use Google Book Search to search millions of archived books and newspapers, but you can now use it to search magazines.

Covering all kinds of magazines – New York Magazine, Jet, Ebony, Vegetarian Times, Popular Mechanics and Popular Science to name a handful – Google has digitized millions of pages of archived magazines.

Source: Erick Schonfeld, “Google Adds Print Magazines To Book Search,” December 9, 2008

Despite indications that online advertising expenditure, including search engine advertising is either down or flattening, AdGooroo reports that first page advertising activity on all three major search engines was up sharply during the first two months of the fourth quarter of 2008.

Not only was first page spending up during this period, but the growth in first-page advertisers was substantially higher than that in the fourth quarter of 2007. Here are the growth percentages:

AdGooroo points out that while advertiser counts are higher on all three search engines, Google’s 55 percent increase is beyond what can be expected from seasonality alone. It attributes the remaining increase to Google expanding its ad coverage.

Meanwhile, AdGooroo estimates that Microsoft has increased its advertiser share from 11.5 percent in Q3 to about 15.8 percent in Q4 (a 37 percent increase). This brings Microsoft much closer to Yahoo in terms of being the preferred search engine channel for search engine marketers. Currently, Yahoo has a 22.1 percent share, while Google has an 80.3 percent share.

Source: AdGooroo, “AdGooroo Mid-Quarter Search Engine Update - Q408″, AdGooroo, December 4, 2008

Either Google is kindly responding to its customers’ requests… or is looking for more and more revenue opportunities… or both, but the search engine has decided to allow Internet marketers to display ads that mention hard alcohol and liqueurs on Google Adwords.

In a follow-up to its decision to allow beer advertising in autumn this year, Google will now allow search engine marketers to advertise information about hard alcohol and liqueurs that target the U.S.

Advertisers will not, however, be allowed to directly promote the SALE of hard alcohol and liqueurs. They will need to comply with Google’s updated hard alcohol and liqueurs policy, which, among other things, states that they may use Google Adwords to promote information about hard alcohol and liqueurs that their websites contain, such as recipes and brand messages.

While ads that directly promote the sale of hard alcohol and liqueurs won’t be allowed on Google Adwords, ads for beer MAY directly promote its sale.

So, in simple terms, a Google Ads advertiser:

MAY offer a beer for sale at a certain price… MAY promote information about hard alcohol e.g. 50 Great Cocktail Ideas MAY NOT offer a liqueur for sale at a certain price.

Source: Amanda Kelly, “An update to the AdWords alcohol policy,” Inside AdWords crew Monday, December 08, 2008

One of the great appeals of Internet marketing is the ability to test, track and ultimately improve results. The Internet is a direct response marketer’s ‘dream marketing medium.’

But what about social media? Can you measure results across blogs… social networks such as Facebook and MySpace… micro-blogging sites such as Twitter… and other such media?

According to Dave Evans, author of “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day” and contributor to The ClickZ Network, the answer is emphatically YES. And there are a variety of tools - free and paid - to help you do so.

Before you do anything, though, it’s important to measure what’s happening NOW. Once you have a baseline, you can then monitor and evaluate the impact of various initiatives.

Evans points to a number of tools for measuring social content, i.e. the ‘conversations’ about you that are currently taking place across the Internet. Free tools include Google Alerts and my recent favorite, URLFan.

You can set up Google Alerts, for example, to send you emails notifying you of mentions of your brand, website, name, product, etc in Google. But don’t just let them come into your inbox. Dave Evans recommends tracking the results in a spreadsheet. That way you can monitor changes over time.

Paid tools such as Nielsen BuzzMetrics, TNS Cymfony and Umbria are ‘turnkey’ systems that remove the requirement for you to manually record and track alerts.

In between the free tools and the turnkey, paid options, are paid tools such as Techrigy’s SM2, Radian6, and KD Paine’s DIY Dashboard from KD Paine. These allow you to finetune your intelligence searches over time and largely automate the reporting process.

Evans, however, suggests starting with manually monitoring the conversations over a 30 day period. That way you can see what kinds of things are circulating about you, which in turn, can give you an indication of what you need to track and which tool may be best for that.

Once you begin tracking your ’social media impact’ you can also start to look for correlations, trends and patterns. In particular, you might start to see correlations between the level of social media conversations, your search engine rankings, and the level of traffic to your website.

And that’s just for starters. Once you have a system for tracking your social media impact, the next step is to use the insights gained from tracking to work out how to INFLUENCE that social media impact.

Source: Dave Evans, “Social Media: Why Measurement Is Key,” ClickZ, December 10, 2008

Research by comScore shows that U.S. Internet users viewed 13.5 billion online videos in October, 2008 - an increase of 45 percent over the number in October 2007.

Google owned sites attracted the vast majority of video viewers. Internet users watched nearly 5.4 billion videos - or 40 percent of all online videos viewed - on Google sites. Practically all (i.e. more than 98 percent) of such videos were on the Google-owned YouTube.com.

Fox Interactive Media had a 3.8 percent share of online videos viewed, or 520 million videos. It was followed by Yahoo! Sites with 363 million (2.7 percent) videos viewed, and Viacom Digital with 305 million (2.3 percent) videos viewed.

Hulu, a joint venture between NBC and Fox featuring full-length broadcast TV programs, ranked sixth with 235 million videos viewed (1.7 percent).

Source: comScore, “YouTube Attracts 100 Million U.S. Online Video Viewers in October 2008,” Press Release

Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry predicts Google’s revenues will decline over the next three years. He forecasts the company’s revenues will drop from $15.71 billion in 2008… to $15.23 billion in 2009… to $14.57 billion in 2010.

Chowdry’s pessimism derives from research indicating that the challenging economic conditions will impede Google’s online advertising business. Already, he says, the number of keywords sold by Google is down 2-5 percent, with bids on keywords down by as much as 20 percent.

What’s more, Google is focusing more and more on cutting costs and boosting revenues. Over the last few months, the search giant has not only canceled plans to build a data center in Oregon, but has also cut expenditure on food, travel, contractors and Friday afternoon parties.

At the same time the company is aggressively pursuing new revenue opportunities, having opened up new ad channels including Google News, Google Maps, Google Image Search and YouTube.

Presumably, however, Chowdhry regards these moves as insufficient to avoid his predicted three year decline in sales.

Source: Nicholas Carlson, “Google Revenues To Shrink Through 2010″, Silicon Alley Insider, December 2, 2008

Yahoo has introduced thumbnail previews for its image searches. The new feature will allow searchers to quickly see the results of their searches and, if dissatisfied with the results, modify their searches accordingly.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft has released its own image search innovation this week. You can now use an image on Microsoft’s search engine, Live, to look for similar images online.

Source: Jason Kincaid, “Yahoo Search Assist Adds Image Previews; I Wish Google Had This”, December 3, 2008, TechCrunch

TechCrunch reports that YouTube is cracking down on sexually explicit videos (porn is already banned) and, in what should put Internet marketers on notice, ’spam videos’ with misleading titles and descriptions.

A popular tactic among those in-the-know is to use titles and descriptions for their YouTube videos that tie in with popular search phrases… but may not exactly reflect the content of a given video.

It’s not clear that YouTube plans to combat that kind of thing per se - it seems more interested in overtly spammy and misleading videos - but it may be on the cards. YouTube’s owner is, after all, Google.

Source: Erick Schonfeld, “YouTube Cracks Down On Sexy, Spammy Videos And Ning Closes Its Red Light District”, TechCrunch, December 2, 2008

American Airlines has brought an action against Yahoo accusing it of trade mark infringement. Why? Because, not too long ago, when someone searched on ‘American Airlines’, Yahoo allowed ads by other companies to appear in the paid search results.

Hmmm… does that ring in any bells for any pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers? Like… alarm bells?

American Airlines sued Google over the same thing last year. The parties settled, however, so it’s not clear who’s likely to win this one. The Silicon Alley Insider indicates that Yahoo may be fighting a losing battle because of the murkiness of the law regarding concepts of “nominative fair use”, “commercial referential trademark use,” and other such concepts.

But for now, Yahoo ain’t settling, and Internet marketers - specifically those who run pay-per-click campaigns will want to keep a close eye on this case.

Sure, Yahoo has a major incentive to win - the more freedom it has to run PPC ads, the more money it will make.

Internet marketers, however, also have a MAJOR vested interest in the outcome. Whether you tend to side with American Airlines i.e. that not just anyone should be able to run an ad in response to a search phrase incorporating a trade mark… or you side with Yahoo and believe that you should have the freedom to run ads in response to people’s searches, regardless of whether or not those searches include trade marked terms.

Want to know how close to home this is? Consider everyone who runs ads using the name of some Internet marketing guru. What if that guru has obtained a trade mark for his or her name? If the case is decided in American Airlines’ favor then search engines will no longer be allowed to display ads in response to a ‘trade marked’ search phrase other than those of the trade mark holder or its licensees…

Which means – for better or worse - you can say goodbye to all those ads.

And just to clarify - we’re not talking about running ads that necessarily INCLUDE the trade mark in the ad. We’re talking about ads that say ANYTHING, but that have a link to a site that is not owned or affiliated with the trade mark owner.

Trust me – bidding on trade marked terms is rife. In fact, a little test using both Yahoo and Google (localized to Australian results) generated two ads by non-Amazon affiliated Australian bookstores.

Oh, in case you’re wondering why Google didn’t fight American Airlines over the same issue… well, I don’t know… but it may well be that Google was worried that the court would decide in American Airlines’ favor… which would create a legal precedent that it would have to follow in respect of other advertisers…

If only one company has a problem, why rock the boat and potentially lose a hefty chunk of business?

Source: Eric Krangel, “Yahoo Fighting American Airlines Search Ads Lawsuit. What’s The Upside?” Silicon Alley Insider, December 1, 2008, Silicon Alley Insider