on the internet, lots of people lack adequate knee protection

The growth of digital media is nothing short of phenomenal, from altavista (anyone remember them? Also, hands up those who went to check altavista.com right about… now) back in 1995, to this massive thing we call the internet now.

It has come from something geeks played around with that nobody understood, to the playground of the masses where cats rule and where a sinister group of Anonymous hackers routinely terrorize corporations deemed “bad” while donning deceptively cute Guy Fawkes masks.

With giants like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Linkedin making their fortunes entirely online, the medium has truly become a force to be reckoned with. When you think about facebook having a user base of 800 million as of now, and fast approaching 1 billion by august 2012 (estimates), its just staggering against a world population of about 7 billion.

Its no wonder every company and their house cat are clamouring to jump onto the facebook bandwagon (shame if you haven’t done so). With the rise of these networks, vast improvements in the network infrastructure and high speed internet connections allowing a relatively high penetration of online video, marketers have begun to pour serious money in digital spend.

In fact, digital spend in the US is set to surpass that of print this year, in 2012! So assuming we all survive past the Mayan calendar, it will be interesting to note the advertising landscape from next year.

That said, Asian markets seem to still prefer traditional channels, and from personal experience, most marketers are not keen to place beyond 10% of their marketing budgets into the digital bucket.

I really hope this will change soon, especially the view that digital/social media is “cheap”, such that their expectations of ROI fall way beyond the spend amount, and thereby incorrectly coming to the conclusion that digital is a waste of time and effort.

I would love to see online spend rise in Asia, and justify spends in this medium given how much value they can bring to the brand.

If you don’t know this yet, Google is about to start rolling out results from Google+ and picasa in their search results page, in a bid to make your search experience more personal, and hopefully, more relevant than before.

Now that’s opened a can of worms, called Facebook and Twitter. We all know that when it comes to social relevance, facebook and twitter would definitely come before Google+ simply because the google+ traction has not gone full steam ahead, and in terms of sheer numbers, are dwarfed by facebook’s 800 million and counting.

But because facebook is practically a walled garden, and twitter’s deal to filter its results in google’s search pages expired and july, the majority of the social results would logically only include Google+. Hopefully, this will change in future when facebook and twitter finally come round to it.

This move by google certainly pushes marketers to sit up and take notice of Google+, and as more brands and more users sign up to the service, social search and results will take a much stronger position in the later half of 2012.

No matter what you think of google’s move though, you have to admit, they do nice ads.