Who is this guy? In a list of people who affect our daily lives or, at least, our daily internet experience, he's right up there. You probably use his work every working day of your life. And when you search on Google and the answer that you get is what you want, then there's a good chance that you have this guy to thank. But who is he?

His name is Matt Cutts and he is the head of the department within Google which is responsible for filtering out web spam. His job is to make sure that what you see is what you want, undistorted by the efforts that companies put in to get their names up the rankings. If Search Engine Optimisation is an arms race and those countless emails that flood into my inbox everyday offering me link exchanges are a manifestation of the bad guys, the so-called Black Hat brigade, then Matt Cutts is the White Hat guy, person charged with stopping them.

He's the one who tweaks the algorithm to try to filter out hidden links, to downgrade people who flood their pages with repeated references to their chosen keywords and put white on white content on their sites to try to trick the Google crawlers. Matt Cutts is the guy who downgraded Google itself for breaking its own rules when it came to promoting Chrome, which, in turn lead to the browser having its first decline in market share for two years.

Despite the widespread suspicions of many people, Cutts insists that whether you buy adverts on Google has no impact on your rankings. I, for one, believe him despite the fact that there was a flutter in the blogosphere when a new Google employee Jonathan Rockway said on an industry bulletin board that "It's a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads and Google is trying to fix that bug" only to rapidly retract his position with this subsequent post I shouldn't have mentioned ads here. Position on the results page should only depend on the quality of your content; if your site has the best content on the Internet for the user's search terms, you should be the top result. You shouldn't be able to change your position in the organic results any other way, like by exploiting bugs in Google's ranking algorithm. The specifics of the ranking algorithm may change, but if your site is the best, you won't have to worry about it. Poor chap. He only joined Google on 3rd January. Oh to be a fly on the wall at his review at the end of his probationary period!

So for all the change that Google has had to live through since1998, one thing has remained constant and that is to provide the very best, relevant search results to their users. And with a market share of 91.07% of all UK searches, they seem to be doing a pretty good job of it.

And a chunk of the credit for that has to go to Matt Cutts.

Lo how the mighty are fallen. The Gods of Industry humbled by technology. Perhaps the first to go was Big Steel. The mighty Andrew Carnegie built up US Steel to be the largest corporation in the world. Now commentators talk about the Rust Belt. Big Auto was brought low by the competition from the Eastern car manufacturers, especially the Japanese. Big Oil has had its troubles too with the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Royal Dutch Shell's overstatement of its oil reserves. Even Big Pharma, seen as the archetypal modern industry, has been showing signs of strain as patents expire, the flow of blockbuster drugs dry up and Western Governments start cutting back the cost of their healthcare systems.

But now there are hints that we might be seeing the eclipse of Big Marketing. Not so much the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about, we might say, as the FMCG complex; that intersection of consumer goods manufacturers, TV stations, advertising and marketing companies. Some say that it started with Bass Beer, a simple Red triangle that communicated to the punter that the beer was of good quality, but Big Marketing really got off the ground in the immediate post war period. There were men coming back from the war and their wives going back into the kitchen and what they both wanted was more stuff. TVs. Cars. Washing Powder. Margarine. Cigarettes. Soft Drinks. And Big Marketing delivered.

The formula was very simple, the manufacturer made the product, and spent 10% or more of their revenues to tell people about it through advertising, principally on TV. We complain about the BBC licence fee, without noticing that that about 10% of the cost of a supermarket shop every week was another such fee – and our favourite programmes got interrupted into the bargain.

And it worked. The adverts created the desire to own the products. The bigger the budget the bigger the sales and the higher the profits of the advertising agencies and the TV Stations. Careers were built. The job of the brand manager was created and new products were launched every year. The companies accumulated huge value: Coca Cola, after 126 years of trading is worth $156bn; Proctor and Gamble after 175 years, $175bn. We've spoken before on this blog about the extra weight that consumers place on third party endorsement, how they discount much of what the manufacturer says as simple self-promotion, but in the beginning, it didn't seem to matter.

Budgets went up in the good times, as the marketer argued that you needed to maintain your share of voice and budgets went up in the bad times as marketers argued that there was share to be grabbed or maintained. But now it seems to be slipping away as the new marketing takes hold...

Forget the companies with more than 100 years of equity: how do you set about building value today? Facebook and Google have both built real value and it hasn't been through advertising, it's been through word of mouth and utility. And boy, what value they've built. At the time of writing, Google's market capitalisation is just under $200bn, Facebook will shortly float with an implied valuation of around $100bn. So Google, founded in 1998, is now bigger than Coke. That's the scale of the change we're talking about.

To cap it all we saw an announcement today from Proctor and Gamble. The granddaddy of FMCG – they spend $10bn per year on advertising. Yet they are looking to moderate their spend after they saw that they could achieve more exposure and better results from Facebook.

The cost of this change? To begin with it's the jobs of 1,600 employees at P&G, but what's to come? I predict rather shorter lunches on Madison Avenue and in London's Adland...

Don't you just love the French? I know that I do. I love the wine. I love the countryside, I love the food. The list just goes on. But if there's one legacy that Napoleon has given us that resonates down to the current day is a preference in economic matters for the Continental System. The system was essentially conceived out of necessity, since the Royal Navy was blockading the Continent. Napoleon decreed that there should be no trade with Britain – the objective was to starve Britain of trade, but the result was that France ended up trading within a Continental block (and that a lot of smugglers got rich by subverting the controls)

Since that time there has been in France more of a preference for trade within the continent of Europe and for protectionist measures to be employed to defend the intra-continental trade from competition coming from outside. There are quotas in the entertainment industry insisting on a certain percentage of local language content and production; low interest loans to important industries, such as Airbus; and various other wheezes such as banning external competition on health and safety grounds or by asserting that they are not compliant with local standards. There is even a book written on the subject!

But one thing that the French do seem to have imported from the US is a tendency to use the law courts to try to make progress on trade related issues. And this seems to be a weapon of choice that French companies take against Google.

First we had the news that French Search Engine Ejustice.fr owner 1Plusv sued Google in France for €295m for abusing its market position in France to shut them out. The claim was that Google had blacklisted the results of their specialist legal website. Fair enough. If someone's abusing their position they should be brought to account.

Encouraged by this Navx the French provider of Enriched Geolocation Content had successfully sued Google for alleging abuses on its Adwords account. The Court ordered Google to change its practices. Navx is now suing for €23m in damages.

Neither of these cases have, as yet, resulted in actual damages being paid. They could be characterised as technical breaches of regulations, but now a new case has broken through. Bottin Cartographes have successfully received a payout of €500,000 and Google has also received a €15,000 fine. Their crime? Providing maps for free. Apparently, the French court takes the view that this is anticompetitive behaviour designed to kill French mapping companies.

Their lawyer Jean-David Scemmama said: "We proved the illegality of (Google's) strategy to remove its competitors... the court recognised the unfair and abusive character of the methods used and allocated Bottin Cartographes all it claimed."

Where does it end? Will Facebook be banned from providing social networking services for free? Or Twitter, for their micro-blogging? And what about Open Maps. The whole purpose of that site is to provide Maps for free, will a collaborative effort be banned too?

If it does, you know who you can blame – Napoleon.

OK it's somewhat out of date, but I still thought that it was worth posting this infographic from Digital Surgeons showing the differences between Twitter and Facebook. The data show some of the differences between the two social networks and the core messages are still true today.

The first and most obvious thing is that Facebook is a helluva lot bigger than Twitter. When this data was collected Facebook had five times as many users at 500 million vs. 106 million for Twitter. The figures right now are a little closer with Twitter growing to 300m users against Facebook's 800m. The demographics of the users of the two sites are pretty similar with similar income profiles and 70% of their users aged between 18 and 44. Twitter users are a little more educated (or at least in college).

To find some differences you need to dig into frequency of use and update and into the user propensity to interact with brands. Facebook users, somewhat surprisingly to me, login more frequently more than two fifths (41%) login every day as opposed to just over a quarter (27%)of Twitter users. Twitter users as a whole are much less engaged by the network. When then do use it, though, it's the Twitter guys who get stick in, with their status being updated half the time. Facebook users are more likely to be lurkers... watching the updates of their friends; only one in eight logins on that network resulted in a status update.

Likewise on a commercial level, there's a similar story of fewer more engaged users on Twitter and Facebook users being more standoff-ish. 40% of Facebook users follow a company, whereas only a quarter of Twitter users do so. According to this data, though, the two thirds of Twitter users who follow a brand actually use it as against only half of Facebook users. Presumably there's more Facebook folk following aspirational brands like Ferrari, than Twitterati.

The lesson for businesses seems to be that you'll get fewer, higher quality interactions on Twitter, but that reach more people through Facebook.

Here's something that passed me by as I was tucking into my turkey – the biggest e-shopping day of the year doesn't come in the run up to Christmas. It actually falls – according to Experian Hitwise on Boxing Day. Now if you really look into the data you can see that what Experian Hitwise measure is visits rather than actual purchases. They're claiming that ecommerce was at its peak on Boxing Day on the basis of the fact that there were 96m visits by UK visitors to shopping sites spending a total of 13m hours doing so.

I wasn't convinced, I knew lots of people who'd been making purchases in the run up to Christmas, but I didn't know anyone who was buying something on Boxing Day. So I thought I'd take a look at our data and they tell a rather different story. Far from being the biggest shopping day, as claimed by Experian/Hitwise, in fact sales on Boxing Day were the lowest of any Monday throughout the entire holiday season. Sales on the peak day were five times as high as Boxing Day! You can't confuse website visits with purchases.

Maybe there's a clue when you actually look at the shopping terms that the consumers were actually searching: • Amazon Kindle
• iPad 2
• Lego
• iPod Touch
• Amazon Books
• iPhone 4s
• Ugg Boots
• iPad 2 Cases
• Hunter Wellies
• Xbox 360

I think that I know what was going on: far from actually buying, most people had obviously received them as gifts and were looking up the manuals (or maybe even trying to see how much their loved ones had paid. There are only two items that leap off the list as exceptions to that particular hypothesis. That is the Ugg Boots and the Hunter Wellies.

On this blog we have previously covered the popularity of Boots as a shopping search term: When I blogged in March of last year about the most popular search terms, boots were the top term then. And it's boots that break through on Boxing Day.

The fact of the matter is that when the media paints this stereotype of women as being obsessed with killer heels, they've got it wrong. Women do like footwear, that's true, but not Jimmy Choos. Give a girl Ugg Boots or Hunter Wellies.

That's the real route to her heart.

In the past marketeers used to talk about the distinction between advertising, where you paid to get your message across and PR, where third parties talked about your product. With paid-for advertising you controlled the message, but there was a certain cynicism from the reader. The person seeing the ad knew that the advertiser was only going to tell you the good bits and discounted a lot of the message. With PR on the other hand – and many brands have been built primarily on the strength of PR, think Virgin for example – you get the vital currency of third party validation. If someone else says that your product is good, then the consumer is far more likely to believe it. But things don't get into the paper by chance or solely through the energy of the journalist. For years, the PR industry has exploited the fact that newspapers and TV Channels had pages and airwaves to fill on ever smaller budgets. Journalists became churnalists – lazily recycling the press releases that they were fed. And somehow consumers cottoned on and the efficacy of PR has declined somewhat.

But with Web 2.0 and interactivity, the caravan has moved on. We have talked previously about the reviews but that too is a space that is semi controlled, it's only in the wild spaces of Twitter and Facebook and in the blogosphere, where comment is free, that consumers can see real validation. The new PR is about getting positive mentions: Social Media marketing agencies work night and day not for column inches any more but for blog posts and they will die to get their clients trending on Twitter.

The whole point about the third party referral, the power of endorsement by an independent person, is that it can all go wrong. That far from endorsing your product or service, the Twitterati might turn on you and since schadenfreude is baked into the human condition we all prefer it when we see a muck up. And a muck upis what McDonald's got when they launched their latest Twitter campaign. Things were going so well – they had more than 280,000 followers on Twitter handing on their every word (Ok, maybe that's an exaggeration...) and so they decided to "engage" with them, to get some feedback, to interact with the community, just like everybody told them that they need to do in the new interactive media.

They launched a campaign based around the hashtag #MeetTheFarmers. The general idea was to try to highlight the wholesome nature of the farmers producing the meat for the burgers and so on as part of their wider campaign to recover from the "Supersize me" image that they had in the past. The campaign started so well with hagiographic stuff about three generations of the Foglesong family who together happily to raise the beef.

Similar puffs followed for the lettuce farmers and the potato guys. And then it started to go wrong. For some reason they thought that they should encourage people to share their McDonald's stories under the hashtag #McDStories. It rapidly got out of control. People started tweeting about rats in the buns, fingernails in the burgers, getting food poisoning, weight gain and so on. Not exactly the sort of stories that they were aiming for.

The McDonald's spokesman, Rick Wion, did acknowledge, with commendable understatement, that the campaign had backfired.

It's not entirely clear what the lessons from this episode are: you can't ignore the social media, you do need to get your message out there. And the whole point of this type of communication is that you can't rely on everybody being nice (a subject to which I shall return in a future post). You can minimise the chances of a "fail". The #MeetTheFarmers hashtag worked because it was narrowly focussed and the purpose was clear #McDStories didn't because it was generic. But realistically, I think that in the social media you simply have to accept that you can't get it right 100% of the time, that sometime customers will make comments that you don't like and to recognise that this lends authenticity to your campaign.

As the old style PR guys used to say "There's no such thing as bad publicity"