There are only so many times a person can beat his head against a brick wall (or coach Terrell Owens) that after a while the damage becomes irreversible. In the world of search engines, Google is the equivalent of The Wall, with a market share of queries that could be anywhere from 45 to 80 percent of the market, depending on who you ask.

We have seen a tactical shift taking place with Google’s major search competitors, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask. They have pursued readily available resources to varying degrees of effort and success, rather than just trying to recreate Google’s secret sauce.

That may be the best strategy for the trio. Wharton marketing professor J. Scott Armstrong crafted a paper about the pursuit of market share; an overview of it appeared at Knowledge@Wharton.

From the days of the Industrial Revolution to the middle of the 20th Century, companies pursued a zero-sum strategy: a win for you is a loss for me, so we can’t have you winning. Over time, scholars have questioned that practice.

Armstrong has been one of those researchers, delving into the concept that market share targets are counter-productive. A look at some companies a decade ago provided a boost to his argument:

There is a disconnect between market share and profitability, Armstrong believes, although those who have watched Google amass a nine-figure market cap may beg to differ. It may be time for Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer to stop worrying about the fight for search share; it could be time to recognize the wisdom of Yahoo’s Susan Decker, who said the company was happy with second place in search share.

Wouldn’t that be a surprise?

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

In the latest edition of Knowledge (at) Wharton, Wharton management professor Lori Rosenkopf says that mapping social networks can be useful in many ways, but there are at least two reasons why corporate interest in the subject is growing: Companies want to be able to identify key performers and get a better understanding of the nature of the interaction among employees.

“Hopefully, you have organized your company the best way to get the job done,” she says. “But mapping out a network will give you a sense of whether actual work flow and communication flow match what you hope to achieve. Maybe there are bottlenecks where one person is managing all interactions. If you expect two groups to work together closely, and you don’t see them doing this, you might want to create liaison roles or other relationships to make information flow better. On the other hand, you may see groups talking to each other too much. When managers see network diagrams, they often realize they need to reconfigure their organizational chart.”

Network maps may also unearth what are known as “cosmopolitans” – the employees who are most critical to information flow in the company. “The formal organizational structure [in companies] does not necessarily describe who talks to whom,” says Valery Yakubovich, a University of Chicago professor who will join Wharton’s management department this summer. “Even if some jobs in an organization are designed to coordinate across different functional areas, it’s difficult to figure out who coordinates where in reality. So you ask people directly whom they go to for advice and who gives them the most valuable information to get things done. Then you map the whole network. Often you find that people you might not even think of as very valuable turn out to be important links in the structure of the organization.”

Despite the benefits that can be derived from analyzing social networks, the Wharton researchers say that corporations have only begun to scratch the surface of its potential.

Rosenkopf says that applied research on social networking in still in its infancy and that top leaders of many larger firms have still not been exposed to the idea in a signficant way.

“They may be aware of things like small worlds and The Tipping Point. It’s not yet reached the point where companies are using these ideas for business process reengineering. But I do think it’s coming.”

Read the whole article here.

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Jerry Bowles has more than 30 years of varied experience as a writer, editor, marketing consultant, corporate communications director and blogger. For the past 20 years, he has produced and written special supplements on new technologies for a number of magazines, including Forbes, Fortune and Newsweek.

http://www.enterpriseweb2.com

It’s been noted in Compete Inc’s paper on Social Commerce that marketers are facing the challenge of Social Saturation:

“While social networking sites continue to grow, online socialites are reaching the limit of how many online communities they want to participate in. The average online socialite currently frequents three social networking sites; when polled, these same socialites stated they would consider participation in up to four communities.”

I’ve often that it would be a great if people could port their digital persona from network to network; then the burnout rate would be lower. Wouldn’t you love to go over to a new social network and be able to have the basics of your digital identity and related network contacts added without much work on your end?

In a Knowledge at Wharton Podcast earlier this year, on the topic of portable reputation and identity across communities Julie Herendeen, vice president of Network Products at Yahoo, said:

“Openness is the direction that the web is moving. Identity does belong to the user and we really want to be as open as possible with identify while protecting users privacy. What can syndicate in identity? And what things remain unique to the site?”

But is openness the direction of Social Networks?

Ever since I blogged about ID+ last year – which would have reproduced inter-personal networks on digital accounts that were connected in an open peer-to-peer network, enabling new and more effective ways of working – I’ve been waiting with baited breath (well not quite “baited breath” but you get the point) for the day when an online persona could be taken across platforms. Alas, the ID+ site seems to have disappeared; and if Jay Stevens, vice president of sales and operations with MySpace, comments about Bebo, Facebook and MySpace being “unlikely to ever offer an open platform for users to integrate the services offered by these sites” at a recent Marketing conference are any indication, openness is not the direction that Social Networks are moving.

I had a conversation with Alf Watt of iStumbler (which I will cover in my recap of the SF New Tech November Meetup and the SF Tech Session on Social Bookmarking) on the train ride home about the very topic of Social Network burnout. Alf, who also works at the Social Networking site imeem (which combines Social Networking with Instant messaging) burst my bubble on the whole idea by pointing out the privacy issues. I guess we can still dare to dream.

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

Online Marketing Ranks Second to In-Person for B2B in 2008 – “Business to Business marketing, in order to be competitive in the Web 2.0 environment, has to be ahead of the trends. According to the Direct Marketing Association, says the report, by 2008 online marketing efforts will be the dominant media for business-to-business initiatives. Traditional direct mail, industry print, and events and promotions will take a back seat to more efficient and sophisticated online efforts.” (Download PDF). See also: Marketing 2.0 : Omniture to Unveil “Plug and Play” Online Marketing Technology

Plugging In: Can E-Commerce Leverage Social Networks? (via: Media 2.0) “Across the rest of the Internet, meanwhile, including the Web 2.0 realm of social networking, eBay is extending its reach thanks to the work of some of its 1,000 third-party developers.

The developers program, now in its sixth year, has created scores of plug-ins and other tools to help people sell, with 25 percent of all eBay listings now being generated through third-party tools.” See also: Can’t Find That Dress on the Rack? Retailers Are Pushing More Shoppers to the Web “Daniel Corsten, a former visiting professor at Wharton who now teaches at the London Business School, says he’s not convinced the new strategy of pushing in-store customers to the Internet will work. What happens is the store turns an impulse buy into rational buying. You come into the store and you want to buy something, but it is not there. You realize you were intrigued about buying [the item], but now you have to rationalize it. This breaks the purchasing process. All of a sudden you think twice.’” While I would general argue that it is a great idea for retailers to push low-selling merchandise and special orders via the web, I can’t help but agree with the quote above.

A Role for Time and Query Quality in Search Results – “I’ve had people ask me if it was worth keeping older articles and documents on their web sites, especially when information in those documents might become outdated. My response has been that as long as the pages clearly indicate what time periods they are relevant to, and that if the site owners include updated information, it’s easy for people to know that, and find that new information, it can be helpful to them to keep those pages.” Measuring the Quality of Queries, Adding Time to the Determination of Quality and Yahoo Temporal Relevance, oh my. It is posts like this that make Bill’s Blog a must read.

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

Second-Life Makes the (Virtual) Travel Section of the New York Times. See also: Drawing Up a Virtual Marketing Plan (via: Managing the Gray)

Yahoo! Search Crawler (Yahoo! Slurp) – Supporting wildcards in robots.txt

SEO Salaries – How Much Should You Make

Landing Pages for SEO

The Too Cool: goes to Timeline. The Ajax Widget for Visualizing Time-based Data. From the site, “Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information.” (via: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/11/timeline_ajax_w.html)

“I hope you’re eating something that will fill your soul and mind – I Know – Raphael Saadiq

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Natasha
Robinson is an Online Marketing Strategist who helps clients
implement holistic online marketing campaigns at href="http://www.webassociates.com">Web Associates, Inc.; a
professional services firm that designs, develops, integrates and
markets enterprise Web systems for global organizations.