Is Google the Roman Empire?  Devin Coldewey of CrunchGear thinks so and penned a piece  Google, Rome, and Empire comparing Chrome OS, Google’s new cloud based OS, with Rome’s invention of roadways:

” … In the year MMIX Google revealed Chrome OS to the world. It was no more remarkable to onlookers than a single stone-paved road might have been to a Roman citizen in 400 BC. A decade or two from now, an historian might look back on the first few years of Google’s expansion and think: how similar was that Roman’s limited scope of observation to our own! For he saw a road, not the beginnings of an infrastructure which would span continents. And we see a suite of products, vessels for selling ads, not the start of a greater endeavor: a blueprint for connecting humanity in the 21st century.”

And just imagine what this chart (below) from Compete Search Analytics , measuring which sites get the most traffic on the term “social media monitoring”, will change into when Google occupies the top slot on the list…

According to the CrunchGear post, Google is conquering mobile, rules  Search and soon, will probably own Social Media ….. but that may be what Social Media Monitoring needs … a dominant player.

What comes to mind is a conversation I had today with a reader of my blog and Slideshare presentation, Dennis Muscato, about the state of Social Media Monitoring and how Google’s entrance, into it, would be good for the industry.

I made a point there are no standards for sentiment analysis for vendors, only standards from organizations such as the  IAB, for Social and Video Advertising.  Dennis pointed out…

you  get “standards” when there is one “dominant” player in an industry, with the standards being imposed. Google did that for Search Optimization and Search Marketing because it’s the dominant player – but there is no dominant company/platform in Social Media monitoring, today.

If Google got involved in Social Media Monitoring – it would be a replay of Google’s purchase of Urchin software and the evolution of Google Analytics – which is the leading platform in the Web Analytics space today, such as it is. For example – here’s what a typical standard might look like if a standards body like the Web Analytics Association or IAB might write it (I’m just making this up based on what I’d like to see):

Measure: Sentiment Analysis Definition: A expressed opinion about a measured topic Implementation: 1) examine content 2) detection expressed emotion (opinion) 3) test if emotion (opinion) is about the topic subject 4) if “yes” save.  if “no” put in “uncategorized” bucket

No where would anyone be told how to code, on a low level, just what steps to take – but it won’t happen till Google jumps in and forces every other vendor, by sheer size of what Google is – is conform, or die – just as Web Analytics vendors have had to do. There is a belief that the Google tide or “Wave” would lift many boats – Google’s entrance into Social Monitoring will force standards on most social media vendors (in order to survive and thrive) and solve Social Media ROI by making significant dents into cross channel marketing, optimization and measurement. Why? Because Google already has all the data it needs – it just has to merge it with Google Analytics (see slide 15).  While there is no evidence Google is planning to release it’s own social media monitoring platform, it makes perfect sense for them to do so,  and I’m 99% certain that such work  is under way because it makes sense. By the way, SEOMoz points out – due to personalized search, we should …

Get More Visitors (Any Way We Can) Depending on how Google is counting visits and traffic (which they haven’t and probably won’t ever fully disclose), any way you can drag a visitor to your site and give them a good experience is likely to positively contribute to your chances of ranking better in personalized results. More Tightly Integrate Metrics w/ Rank Tracking Again, this has been a wise move long before personalization, but with the expansion comes renewed need for weaving together the 3rd-party tracking of rankings with the traffic metrics from your analytics to provide a full picture of how your site is performing in the search engines.

Perhaps, using Social Media – if you  can just get people to visit a site (I guess Paid Search works as well, to get people to a site in a quick and dirty way) which will then be a preference in search results using Google’s personalized search. But … since Google has ALL that data, doesn’t just make sense for them to merge it for us – don’t they profit the most from it? Google’s entrance into Social Media Monitoring is a forgone conclusion -  but “when” it gets released – I pegged it as 2010 – though it could be 2011.