12/21 Update: It was announced yesterday (12/20) that Yelp walked away from the $550 million dollar deal with Google.

Yesterday evening, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch reported that Google was in advanced talks to acquire Yelp for at least $500 million dollars. It seems like a big business move, even for Google, so let’s try to break it down. Why does this potential purchase matter?

For Google, the benefit of the acquisition would be ad revenue. If this deal is confirmed, Google will inherit Yelp’s extensive network of local ad-buying businesses. They’ll also be able to take Yelp’s 8 million+ user reviews and integrate them into Google’s Place Pages – which will give Google even more opportunity for ad revenue with keyword searches.

For Yelp, a buyout from Google means that direct links to Yelp listings will show up in Google’s search results. These are not just links to Yelp’s search results page, but links taking you directly to the Yelp page for say, Bi-Rite Creamery. Oh, and of course, there’s the money. Yelp is reporting $30 million in revenue this year, but rumor has it that Google will purchase the company for half a billion dollars.

For local businesses, the acquisition is important because with Google’s backing, Yelp reviews will have the potential to reach much larger audiences. If your business isn’t already on Yelp, what are you waiting for? You can use your Yelp listing to serve as the landing page for your company if you don’t have the budget to build your own personal website. Customer reviews have always been a popular social activity on the Internet, and Yelp has fostered an intimate community of reviewers who could be spreading the news about your business for you.

For social media users, the acquisition ties together the two popular trends of location-based social networking and mobile devices. Consumers could use their mobile phones to locate information through Google about nearby businesses on Yelp. Now armed with a large arsenal of local content, Google could push for more advanced mobile apps that allow users to instantly connect with others in local spaces – much like Foursquare.

With this move, Google is illustrating their play for acquiring community-based websites, and trying to magnify their presence in social networking. It’ll be interesting to see if this deal pulls through. I’ll definitely be on the lookout for confirmation.

Twitter announced a new feature today called Contributors.   The new feature will allow multiple people to post Tweets on behalf of a company.  Although corporate Twitter feeds like Bing are already using this with a caret plus initials (^CO), official support from Twitter will change the perception of a Twitter feed as a source of corporate communication.

There is an ongoing debate among social media professionals about whether a corporate Twitter feed needs a single voice, a single persona, ideally managed by a single person.  In my opinion, the new contributors feature ends the debate.  When the contributors feature comes out of beta, corporate Twitter feeds will move to having multiple people post information, similar to how a corporate blog has multiple posters, each with their own voice.  Just as with blogs, there will be a need for individuals to have their own personal Twitter feed.

The Twitter contributors feature will be supported by the Twitter API, which will enable a wide range of commercial Twitter tools to offer even more management features for multiple people that are managing a single Twitter feed.

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Craig Oda   http://twitter.com/codawork

http://socialmediasurfer.com

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

By now, most of you have heard about the launch of Google’s real-time search, which pulls live updates from websites like Twitter and Facebook and features them alongside traditional search results.

From a social media professional’s vantage point, Google’s real-time search is a big step forward in illustrating the true impact of social media. Inclusions of live Twitter and Facebook mentions for a Google search stresses the value of having a social media presence to foster positive conversations about a brand or product. Hopefully this will convince companies who have not yet dove into the social media pool to jump in head-first off the high dive.

As real-time searches become accessible to a much wider audience, monitoring and tracking also becomes an invaluable service provided by social media professionals. Social media was once believed to be a setting for casual conversation. More and more, it’s becoming an official space for brand management and monitoring. If a person searching on Google instantly sees a negative comment about their search term, they will form an initial impression about the term before visiting its official website. It’s also noteworthy that people are more inclined to be influenced by a fellow customer than a corporate website.

Google’s real-time search is definitely a legitimizing move for the social media industry. Now it’s up to the social media professionals to develop the best strategies to leverage these new functions, and of course, be prepared for the next thing in social media.

“Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent,” said Bertrand Russell. And while his words are typically poured over by philosophers as opposed to the Technorati, his idea can be applied to pretty much every part of human history. We are an inherently skeptical population, it seems. Especially when it comes to technology.

Feature adoption is often met with an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude. But two new pieces of technology, one big and one small, from Google and Twitter respectively got me thinking recently about what it really takes to change people’s social media habits.

Twitter’s official retweet function has been met with a lot of fanfare, but hardly the kind Twitter wanted. Until now, “retweeting” was always an unofficial function, a meme perpetuated by users who needed a system with which to quote one another. Seeing this user behavior, Twitter took steps to codify retweeting by making it an actual feature. In doing so, however, they’ve inadvertently disturbed the flexibility and editability inherent to the unofficial function. People have protested on Twitter in two ways: by voicing their hatred for the new function, and by continuing to retweet the old-fashioned way.

Old-fashioned communication is what Google is trying to evolve, as well, but on a much more grandiose scale. Google Wave has been billed as the next evolution in online communication, a highly collaborative and expandable platform that will “bring together e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking.” And as with every new Google product, there’s been a scramble to procure beta invites. But from my personal experience, excitement quickly gives way to confusion. The first line of any wave is almost always something resembling “I’m in the wave,” quickly followed by “I don’t get it.”

So are the official retweet and Google Wave failures? Hardly (if history has taught us anything…). I was recently Gchatting with a friend about Google Wave. There were a lot of questions about why it exists, what it does, and whether or not we’d ever use it…the only conversations that really seem to be going on about Wave right now. Then she forwarded me her very first Gchat from a few days after the Gchat feature was launched:

My Friend:
testing…
i just saw the green light.
and this is the first time i’ve used this moderately silly feature.

Her Friend:
yeah it doesn’t seem like a winner to me, but i tend to accept google’s ingenuity unconditionally

Almost three years and literally thousands of chats later, her friend’s words ring true with a sort of prescience. And my friend’s conclusion about Wave? “[I] may have to continue to hold judgment on Wave.”

Such patience when it comes to technology is certainly a virtue, especially given the social media public’s tendency to rapidly warm up to new shiny toys. After Facebook implemented the newsfeed, there was a tremendous backlash (as every Facebook redesign has experienced since), but Mark Zuckerberg stood his ground. Now it’s a central feature. Looking back on this event, Zuckerberg summed up social media users’ skepticism-turned-adoption quite lucidly and succinctly: “A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”

That said, the only sure bet that can be made is that the final draft of Google Wave and Twitter’s official retweet will have to go through a number of revisions before people consider mass adoption. But human stubbornness works both ways. Google and Twitter will be just as determined to perfect these new features as people are reluctant to start using them. And if history’s shown us anything, it’s that time is on their side.

We write a lot here about the new ground Page One PR is forging with social media, but to run a well-rounded successful PR program, which means staying on top of editorial calendar, speaking and award opportunities, still takes a lot of shoe leather and sweat – or at least a really robust tickler file.

We also write here about the free tools that we use to make our jobs a little bit easier. Here’s a new one: ITMemos from ITDatabase. (Disclosure: ITDatabase is a client)

We’ve already waxed poetic about the benefits of ITDatabase’s resources for tech companies wanting to keep in the know about what reporters are covering. With ITMemos, newsletter recipients are provided links to new speaking opportunities, given the heads up on upcoming editorial calendar opportunities and share reminders of impending award deadlines. All in one place. And by the way, these opportunities are vetted prior, so you’re not receiving crap.

ITMemos is worth taking a look. It will save you time… and it’s free.