The morning session here at SES San Jose on global B2B SEM drew a decent sized crowd where iCrossing’s Jeff Pruitt was joined by President of SmartSearch Marketing, Patricia Hursh and Didit CEO Kevin Lee to discuss strategies for global B2B search marketing. Below is a re-cap of highlights from the session:

Patricia Hursh, President of SmartSearch Marketing opened the session with a global B2B SEM 101, laying down a foundation for approaching global SEM initiatives:

1. Understand how/where to focus efforts: She points out that while Google may own 75% of the US market share, that may not be the case with your global markets. Do your homework and understand the search habits of those you are targeting, including engines of choice.

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Search engine marketers are very aware that Google has always been protective of its data and functionality, and concerned about website publishers using that information to the detriment of the search engine and its users. Since its earliest days, Google has treated its partners and customers like somebody that’s been hurt in a romantic relationship, and now is too afraid to trust anyone. As a search engine marketer, I can personally attest to the urge to say to Google, “Please don’t close off – I’m not that guy! I’m not the guy that hurt you!” Full Story

To a good extent, you can’t control what other people write online about you or your company. But as recent news illustrates, you can take some simple precautions to at least mitigate negative search effects. It starts with focusing on the proactive steps that can help prevent bad news from being highly visible in natural search queries for your brand name or important personnel. We know that URLs play a big role in a page achieving high natural visibility for a given keyword. We also know that your company domain can only rank so many times on the first page of search results for that keyword. You can start with some defensive moves. Full Story

As SES ‘08 is quickly approaching in San Jose, I took the opportunity to catch up with Matt McGowan, Vice President of Marketing for Incisive Media’s Interactive division. I wanted to mine his brain for some thoughts on the changing landscape of digital marketing, and in particular, to get his thoughts on the role of social media and emerging technologies. He shared a lot of great insight, which I’m passing along to you. Read the full interview below.

1. Matt, as companies increasingly-adopt social initiatives as part of their digital marketing mix, what recommendations would you make to those wanting to “go social”?

Consumers are now creating, critiquing, controlling and distributing messages and content, and are no longer passively accepting marketing messages, at least not like they used to. Full Story

I was reading about the recent Wikimania 2008 gathering in Alexandria, Egypt, that brought over 650 Wikipedians from 45 countries together. And it got me thinking. There seems to be a trend recognizing the importance of fostering offline, physical connections in order to build a true Web 2.0 community. In addition to Wikimania, I’m talking about regular local events like Tweet-ups, Flickr parties, and Mashable MashMeets that are more casual than, say, the huge corporate-sponsored events like eBay Live. Full Story

Shelley Ellis, one of our iCrossing paid search and media specialists, was interviewed on Monday for the Internet radio show, PPC Rockstars. Shelley discussed tips and techniques for using Google AdWords content targeting, specifically the just-announced enhanced online campaigns capabilities. She also discussed how placement targeting is a quick way to tap into social media sites like Facebook, MySpace and Linkedin.

If you missed the show, you can catch the recorded interview online. Full Story

So everyone’s drunk the kool aid on social….they’ve heard the cries of social media strategists everywhere (ahem) that the WEB IS SOCIAL! Ok! everyone’s all fired up and inboxes are overflowing with requests for “social”…

For those wanting to “go social” a few things to consider, swallow, accept or dismiss before firing the guns (lists are oh so handy!):

1. Forget the “campaign”. It’s about having a holistic digital program that includes leveraging social technologies over the long haul. Get ready to begin socializing your brand. Full Story

Last Thursday, I attended the SWAT Summit in San Francisco that focuses on advertising on social networks. There was no shortage of tech start-ups trying to get a piece of the Web 2.0 gold or to be the next Facebook by riding on Facebook’s coat tails. There were also lots of presentations on case studies and what’s cool out there. One of the more interesting discussions was leveraging existing applications or widgets as an advertising vehicle.

Here’s the deal. We often are approached by our clients to build a widget. Those who read my previous posting on Ad Widgets know I feel strongly that a company (or agency) should not build a widget just because they can, or because they have some extra budget lying around at the end of the quarter! Full Story

Around the office one day we were been talking about what the word “analytics” really means, specifically marketing or website analytics.

Supposedly the word was created a few short centuries ago in the 1580s, when the word committee decided they needed a word for “the science of logical analysis.”

These days we usually just think of analytics as a bunch of reports showing the activity trends on a website. But that doesn’t seem to rise up to the level of being a science of analysis.

What would it take to raise analytics to the level of a science? It would have to start with a hypothesis, such as “All of those banner ads I will run had better be worth more than I plan to spend on them.” Or “I hope that we don’t waste all of our time on this site redesign.” Full Story

On Tuesday, July 1, 2008, Adobe published an article announcing that they have been working closely with Google and Yahoo! to make content contained within SWF files accessible to search engines. Immediately Google will begin indexing SWF files with Yahoo! soon to follow.* It comes as no surprise that the buzz surrounding this announcement has been huge. However, the reality falls significantly short of a practical solution, and the claims made in the article are somewhat misleading. Full Story

Adobe’s announcement that they have been working with Google and Yahoo! to make Flash content more accessible to search engines has generated discussion about whether Flash is now an acceptable standalone design method now for search visibility. The answer, clearly, is no.

My colleague in the U.K. has said much on the topic already. Notably, there are significant design and SEO considerations for scalable, maintainable Flash sites that make the Adobe announcement merely a step in the right direction, rather than the end of the journey for optimal Flash indexing. Full Story

As a continuation of my post a few weeks ago about brand monitoring. I wanted to share some examples of ways to leverage your brand monitoring program. Because I’m sure I convinced all of you to go out and start monitoring immediately!

Many companies want to engage bloggers, but you have to listen and learn before diving in. Where are they? Who are they? What will resonate with them and what level of engagement should you pursue? It’s like a 21st century online stakeout! Watch their every move until you are ready to move in.

With the Internet and today’s user-generated content world, there is a new challenge and opportunity for brand reputation monitoring. It is not uncommon for bloggers to break big news stories before the mainstream press does. Full Story

Search is getting personal. That’s no surprise, of course. Personalization has been a hot topic for more than a year, since Google started modifying the search results of users signed in to their Google accounts.

New developments in personalized search are on the horizon, however. Google plans to expand its “Previous Query” project from its paid ads, where it’s already live, to natural search results (even if you’re not logged in). If you search for [spain] followed by a separate search for [travel], for example, Google would display results relevant to your presumed intent, [spain travel]. Full Story

Marketing has always been full of blind spots – those elusive locations and moments of activity that you can’t quite measure. You try to fill them with whatever information you can find - anecdotes, survey responses, panel studies, etc. But filling in that missing information is expensive and time consuming.

In traditional marketing, the blind spots were the size of Texas:

We know we sold 200,000 tubes of toothpaste last month, but why? Is anyone really watching all of those toothpaste ads on TV? And what are the consumers thinking when they stand in front of the grocery shelf, surveying all of those glittery boxes of whitening/refreshing miracle pastes?

What do we see clearly, sitting at toothpaste headquarters? Sales volume and revenue. What is the blind spot? Pretty much everything else. Full Story

The current state of the web, beyond pages, is an ecosystem of services/applications that promote connectivity and utility. This follows the evolution of social computing– moving from singular, contained activity to shared (collaborative) and portable activity. (Portable = the ability to access data from any device - not just from the device on which the data file was created - and, in turn, the ability to access data from any app, not just the app in which the file was created.) Indeed, the Web is social (as it was always intended to be).

The key elements of this connectivity are the content we create, and the personal data we store and share via social technologies. This elevates the internet economy from “eyeballs and clicks” on pages to the buzz-concept of “consumer engagement” - the user journey within applications and across the Web. As so precisely explained by Forrester, this shift has occurred due to:
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I’ve been watching how people make decisions. I don’t want to go into some deep discussion of decision theory, but it is interesting to see how we scrutinize and debate the smallest decisions (like which digital camera to buy) for months, while making major decisions (like buying a car or changing jobs) without any of the same rigor. Why the disconnect?

Think of a big decision you made recently, in your personal or professional life - selecting an agency or contractor; buying a car; making vacation plans; creating a media plan for the next year. How did you make the final choice? How many people did you talk to? If you did consult with others, what questions did you ask?

Every decision we make has a combination of emotional, financial, political, and practical considerations. The question is, which of those considerations rules? Full Story

So after the hub-bub of the original 3 announcements by MySpace, Facebook, and Google on the various “data portability” initiatives I’ve had time to investigate a little deeper into each initiative.

I will state first, that while all three implementations of so-called data portability are lacking — in some cases more than others. And while some barely qualify as actually porting one’s data and accessing it wherever they please, I do think there is still one important thing to be said for all of it: at least we’re starting on the road to get there.

Yes, Goog’s Friend Connect is nothing more than a bunch of iframes and their agenda is to push their open social apps; yes MySpace’s data availability doesn’t actually allow sites to cache any information (and thus not actually allowing for portability — but to be fair they do call it “availability” because they make data available, not portable); and yes, now in the name of “user privacy protection” Facebook is not allowing Goog’s Friend Connect to access its API (Mother Facebook apparently knows better than us who we want to share our data with). But it’s a step. A baby step now fraught with embattled players, but a step nonetheless. Full Story

Does great creative design have to compete with great search engine optimization? Do exciting plans for a stylish user experience and research-driven content mean that no one will find the site through search engines? Does a search engine optimized site have to look like it was pasted into the browser straight from Notepad?

The answer (of course) is no. Web design and SEO are increasingly converging into accessible best practices that benefit designers, optimizers, and most importantly, users. Full Story

Like many in this space, I have been sucked into the universe that is Twitter. I still don’t really understand how using Twitter makes me cooler than someone hanging out in an AOL chat room, but consider me a convert (at least until the “next new thing” comes along).

I’ve come to the conclusion, after browsing through the tweet history for a few folks, that there are really only five types of Twitter posts. If your tweets include a little of each, you can come off as an interesting, well-rounded person. If you only use Twitter for single purpose, however, it can tell a different story.

The Creed: Fans of The Office know Creed Bratton. He is the seeming everyman who occasionally blurts out head-scratching, out-of-context statements (e.g. “Animals don’t feel pain.”) that make you wonder about the dark side this person is unsuccessfully trying to hide. I actually find tweets like these incredibly entertaining and am guilty of more than a few Creedisms myself. When viewed as a whole, however, they can come off as, well, just plain scary.

Occasional tweets: “This guy is a funny, creative, Dada-esque thinker”

You only tweet like this: “Next time he visits, I’m hiding the steak knives.”
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We’re not at social computing utopia yet, but the latest announcements from MySpace, Facebook and Google on their various data portability initiatives are exciting. After months of being members of the Data Portability Workgroup, these announcements (although made separately) appear to be the first of what I hope to be many:

On the premise that “users are in control of their data,” MySpace was first out of the gate with their Data Availability announcement. Inside this opt-in framework users will be able to dynamically share their data with third-party sites, data and content including:
(1) Publicly-available basic profile information, (2) MySpace photos, (3) MySpaceTV videos, and (4) friend networks. Launch partners for this initiative include Ebay, Twitter, Yahoo!, and MySpace’s own subsidiary, Photobucket. Full Story

Do you remember the graduation party scene in the classic movie The Graduate - the one where Benjamin, played by Dustin Hoffman, is cornered by his father’s overbearing friend who whispers confidentially that the future is all about “plastics”? Well, rumors abound lately about a remake and it got me to thinking about what advice Benjamin would get in this updated version… Hedge funds? Alternative fuels? Facebook widgets? There are plenty of possibilities but were it up to me, my single word of advice would be preferences.

Preference-based advertising is on my mind a lot lately but the recent announcement of Google’s $500 million investment in Sprint/Nextel and Clearwire’s WiMax initiative got me to thinking about it even more. For Google, anything that will possibly increase wireless data usage is a good thing and this certainly has potential. But there are a lot of ‘ifs” in this venture and $500 million is an exorbitant sum to risk on ifs. Full Story

This week, Clearwire, Sprint, and a consortium of other high-tech companies announced their plans to build out a national WiMax network in the U.S. I think the WiMax technology is very promising, if it’s going to be WiFi on steroids. WiFi hotspots are so popular now, but lack decent coverage. So, I hope this actually happens. Here’s what’s at stake for the big boys:

GOOGLE: No secret Google wants to enter the mobile space. It failed to launch a major metro WiFi network in SF by partnering with Earthlink. It’s rolling out the Android mobile OS and phones for partners later this year. It threatened to bid in the latest FCC airwaves spectrum auction and scored a major coup to force carriers to keep part of the spectrum “open” (which was what they really wanted in the end). Joining the Clearwire consortium will give them a major seat at the table for what could be the next-gen network in the U.S.
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OMG! So much data viz! If you’re a data viz junkie like me, this just might be the pick-me-up that you need…enjoy!

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If you’re like me, you had Facebook app fatigue long before Scrabulous. But in my recent hunt for nifty third-party apps I stumbled upon (no pun intended) Nexus. (Which is not necessarily just for Facebook…check out www.summize.com - a much better way to Twitter search than Tweetscan.com) Nexus is a “friend grapher” app which visualizes your personal network. Okay, so it may be mildly interesting and more social media navel gazing - unless, of course, you use Nexus for that branded business page your client has, that you wish you had more data on.

By analyzing your Fan base through Nexus, Influencer Nodes can begin to be identified (note: this is strictly a visualization and it doesn’t provide any actual metrics). Full Story

A new study published in New Scientist magazine suggests that social technologies such as blogs, networking sites and instant messaging services are more reliable during emergencies for information and updates than traditional media channels, and that more and more people are turning to these alternative sources in times of crises.

ReadWriteWeb has an exclusive excerpt of the study (to be published 5.2.08) which includes research during last year’s California wildfires:

During the wildfires, the team found that people were using Twitter to spread updates about where the fires were to friends and family, and Google maps mashups were hacked together to keep people informed of new fires and schools and businesses that were closed. This information was was being disseminated far more quickly than via official governmental channels, according to the report. Full Story

The recent Forrester Conference held in LA saw a gathering of top brands and marketers from all over discussing what Forrester has decreed as “marketing’s new imperative” - engagement. This little term has brought on more blogosphere debates than JakobandJulia.com, as the very definition of engagement and its merits have been argued (and let us not forget Microsoft’s recent claim to solving the “engagement issue”).

However, as “engagement” is thrust into the marketing limelight as no longer feel good fluff-speak, but rather as an important objective of marketers everywhere, focused attention to solving the engagement issue will be paramount. The biggest task at hand is not only defining engagement, its objectives the strategy and execution of such campaigns, but establishing definitive engagement metrics. Full Story

I can not wait to find out what is going on with Meredith Grey over at good ole’ Seattle Grace. I don’t know what happened yet because the newest episode is still waiting for me on DVR. But I do know that when I go to watch it, I will be fast forwarding through every commercial to get to the next drama-packed scene. Commercials that advertisers paid top dollar for won’t be seen by this consumer. So was the ad spend worth it?

After a recent trip to ad:tech San Francisco, I learned that I am not alone in my TiVo behavior. Todd Juenger, the Vice President of Audience Research and Measurement at TiVo sat on a panel talking about the next generation of TV advertising. He said that Grey’s is the most TiVo’d show on television, and, just like me, 75 percent of viewers will be fast forwarding right through the ads. Full Story

A few weeks ago, one of my favorite bloggers, and one of the most vocal proponents of the wireless web ,threw in the towel. Russell Beatty, erstwhile mobile evangelist for Yahoo!, and strategic guru extraordinaire, declared the mobile Web dead. In a blog post announcing the cessation of active development on Mowser, his mobile browser project, he stated that he doesn’t “actually believe in the mobile Web anymore” and that those who are building xHTML MP sites and designing for two inch screens are wasting their time.

I can’t blame Russ for being cynical. Mowser, a mobile browser and directory that performed on-the fly transcoding had been on the market for about a year without attracting much of an audience, despite a very satisfying user experience. It was clearly a labor of love - one that used up the time and resources typical of the average startup without ever generating enough traffic to make it all worthwhile. Anyone who’s been through the folding of such a personal project would be deeply disillusioned. But seeing one of biggest voices in mobile leave the stage is disappointing because as he illustrates at the end of his post, Russ was one of the very few in industry who really got it. Full Story

The recent acquisition by J.D. Powers of Umbria, a brand monitoring firm, is proof that online brand monitoring is becoming a critical part of market research and understanding the voice of the customer. (Recall that TNS Media bought Cymfony and Nielsen bought Buzzmetrics a while back.)

It is ironic that companies are willing to spend lots of money on “traditional” market research, such as surveys and focus groups. But they do not necessarily engage in online brand monitoring. This is a critical basic first step for engaging in social spaces and developing one’s social media strategy.

Such tools and services are great for understanding:

- How aware are users of your brand in your industry?
- Who is talking about your brand?
- What are people saying about your brand?
- What improvements can you make to the customer experience, marketing, PR, etc.?

Now, repeat for your competitors. This can not be overlooked. While you may think you have a good handle on your brand, who can’t use more competitive intelligence?

These are questions brand marketers have always tracked through market research, usually on a regular basis as a brand tracking study. But these studies can be expensive and don’t seem to be released often enough.

PR folks know that you have to stay on top of the latest issues all the time. You can’t wait for a research report to come out in two months! Full Story

Paid Search for Press Releases and Media CoverageYou spent months working on your paid search campaign and it is perfect. But wait! Your marketing department just sent out a press release and the local news decided to do a story on your company. With everyone jumping online to get more information, will your paid search ads show up for all the searches that the media will generate for you? Even though you may have great brand coverage set up in your pay-per-click campaigns, there is a good chance that you may be missing out on search traffic generated from different types of media coverage.

Here are some suggestions to help you get ready for any type of media coverage you may encounter:

Expand your keywords before the press release or story goes live: If your press release is about how your company is going to donate computers to a local organization, add keywords like ‘XYZ company donation’ or ‘donated by XYZ company’ or ‘XYZ company donates computers’. If the news coverage is about John Doe who happens to work for your company, make sure that you bid on John Doe’s name and keywords relevant to the news story. Full Story