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NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — News Corp.’s talk about listing its sites exclusively on Microsoft’s Bing sounds unpromising in several ways, but all of Rupert Murdoch’s recent agitation and exploration are at least pushing one fact back to the fore: Web traffic only gets publishers so far in their quest for digital ad dollars. After a certain point, actually, traffic may not even matter.

More traffic means more bragging rights and helps attract advertisers who need to reach a lot of people quickly, but each new increment of visitors is something less than a new gold mine. Most sites, for one thing, already have much more inventory than they can sell.

Would giving up some search traffic mean giving up a proportionate amount of ad revenue? “Right now it would not,” said Jim Spanfeller, president-CEO of The Spanfeller Group and former president-CEO of Forbes.com. “Because no one’s sold out.”

“In this climate, most sites are probably sold out through maybe 40%,” he added.

And ad networks typically deliver pennies for every thousand more visitors that publishers attract. “Most ad networks deliver between 16 cents and $1 for a thousand,” Mr. Spanfeller said. “So even if you were taking that strategy and working with ad networks, the impact of what search was driving would be minimal.”

What’s more, not all traffic is equal. Readers who arrive via search are predominantly “one-and-done” visitors, not the people advertisers most want.

News Corp’s. Wall Street Journal Online got 17.4% of its unique visitors in October through Google and less than 1% from Bing, according to Compete.com. But there’s no way pulling out of Google would mean losing anything like 17.4% of its ad revenue.

“What’s the point of having someone come [to us] occasionally who likes a headline they see in Google?” Mr. Murdoch asked in his recent Sky News interview. “Sure we go out and say ‘We’ve got so many millions of visitors, you had better advertise’ and so on. The fact is, there’s not enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the websites profitable.”

LONDON (AdAge.com) — Some 300 attendees gathered at the Saatchi Gallery last week for Ad Age sibling Creativity’s technology conference, Creativity and Technology, were treated to musings on bleeding-edge digital communication from Europe’s top talent in advertising, technology and design. Speakers ranged from agency creatives and technologists to writers such as Adam Greenfield, author of “Everyware” and head of design direction at Nokia.

Here are a eight takeaways from the conference if you missed it.

Curation is key
In a world of too many choices, both online and off, use your expertise to give consumers a small set of options in order to manage expectations. Choice is not always healthy, said Marko Balabanovic, head of innovation at Last Minute Labs, the exploration arm of travel site LastMinute.com. For the travel category, disappointment is inevitable in a digital, searchable world with too many choices — every selection could result in a consumer asking, “Could I have made a better decision?” But, if you don’t have overwhelming choice, you can’t regret making the wrong one. Read Rest of Article

From Pete Blackshaw for AdAge:

As the high season of holiday shopping pain (or gain) arrives, I find myself fixated — perhaps irrationally, and certainly emotionally — on Best Buy’s Twelpforce.

This is the viral army of 2,200 Best Buy employees who answer questions and solve customer problems via the customer-care channel we know as Twitter. Self described as “a collective force of Best Buy tech pros offering tech advice in Tweet form,” the program has nearly 15,000 “followers” and it’s growing. Think Apple Genius Bar but without the physical counter.

There’s more going on here than meets the eye, a point reinforced last week while spending time with John Bernier (@Bernierjohn), the leader of the Twelpforce program, at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) summit. John anchored a keynote panel I moderated on the growing relationship between customer service and word-of-mouth that also included Frank Eliason of Comcast (aka @comcastcares), Tom Asher, head of consumer relations for Levis, and Lisa McCloud, VP of Marketing for coffee-equipment manufacturer Bunn.

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From Michael Learmonth:

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Bing has a long way to go to catch Google, but six months after the site’s launch, the numbers show it’s heading in the right direction. The question is: Will its gains last once the ubiquitous, $100 million TV and web advertising stops?

Microsoft’s search share was up to 9.9%, a record high, in October, according to ComScore. However, Google’s market share has also never been higher, at 65.4% in the U.S. that month. And both stole from Yahoo, whose share slid to 18%, from 20% last year. Yahoo’s slide means it and Microsoft combined still have less than 30% share, a figure that doesn’t bode well as they plan to merge their search businesses — with Bing powering Yahoo search — over the next two years.

One area of gain
Yet, there is one area in which Microsoft has been able to grow its share as well as nick a bit of Google’s, and that’s local advertising.

In the third quarter, Google’s share of local search-advertising spending dropped by 5% as Bing and Yahoo grabbed spending, according to a report from WebVisible.

The report looks at spending among the local advertisers running through WebVisible’s system. WebVisible is an enterprise-level technology provider that companies such as AT&T and The New York Times use to sell marketing services to local merchants.

Fueling Bing, in particular, were higher click-through rates by consumers and lower costs per click incurred by the advertiser, by as much as 30% in some verticals. In search, marketers track their advertising performance not just by the click but by whether that click converted, or resulted in the desired action, be it an e-mail sign-up, a sales lead or a purchase.

“It’s not Google is lessening its performance, it’s that Yahoo and Bing have increased their performance capabilities,” said Kirsten Mangers, CEO of WebVisible. “Advertising follows audience and spend follows results. We’re simply following the results.”

And indeed, Google’s dominance is hard to ignore. In the third quarter, Google still had 60.4% of all local search spending. Yahoo accounted for 26.2%, Bing for 10.5% and Ask for 2.4%. And not every local search provider saw the same movement. Clickable, another provider of campaign-management technology for small- and medium-size businesses, said Google’s share held steady at around 80%. Read Rest of Article

From Brian Morrissey at AdWeek:

The run-of-the-mill holiday sweepstakes is getting a social twist with the addition of sharing features brands hope will extend their reach.

Brands like Microsoft, Sephora, Nascar and Comcast have kicked off Twitter sweepstakes promotions this month, in the hopes of luring customers into chatting up their brands on the hot social network.

Microsoft this week is promoting the launch of its new line Windows Server 2008 R2 with a competition for users to Tweet haikus about them. The R2Haiku takes submissions via Tweets entered on the contest Web site that are then broadcast to a submitter’s network.  Read Remainder of Article

From Aaron Kahlow at ClickZ:

Unequivocally, the biggest questions of the year are: “Where does social media fit into my search and marketing plan?” and “Where’s the ROI (define) going to come from to CYA (define) for the spend?” Answers to these questions will be addressed during the panel session, “PR, Social Media, and Search” at SES Chicago next month. This topic has me so pumped, that I’m flying from California to Chicago in the heart of December.

Looking at major brands like Dell, Southwest Airlines, Cisco, and more, our panel explores the boomerang effect of social media on PR efforts, SEO, and all things in between. It’s been stated that social media is the single biggest differentiator in the SEO world today. Those that harness unique user-generated content, the links from the blogosphere and forums, as well as the buzz created from retweets, Facebook updates, and YouTube videos, will reap benefits — if done correctly. READ REST OF ARTICLE

Great Article from Valeria Maltoni –

During our conversation at the Inbound Marketing Summit, we talked about writing engaging content for the next web and the socializing of information. One of the slides in my deck visualized the customer contribution part of content, which we said gives you permission to connect. I stack ranked the ideas in order of complexity – with the simplest being a “like” button.

I think many companies are not implementing that on their Web sites because they’re somewhat anxious that nobody will like their pages. So why, oh why, is the site still static and displaying the same stale content? What if you were courageous and led with the information that makes your reader look smart with his peers and then built a path with her and for her to get to the technical stuff? READ REST OF BLOG POST

(CNN) — Sarah Palin appears on Oprah on Monday to mark the launch of her book, “Going Rogue.” She’ll follow up with an extensive interview with Barbara Walters, a multicity book tour and appearances on the Fox News Channel and talk radio.

She’ll grab plenty of headlines. As you read about Palin’s old-media tour, it’s important to remember that she’s also a pioneer in the political use of new social media. Not that she gets any credit. Read Rest of Article