We’ve been hearing about mobile marketing for years. But until recently most pundits would only point the misty future and say “It’s coming! We just don’t know when it will be here!”

At last, it is safe to say mobile is most definitely in play. But we tend to see a wide range of interest and knowledge among marketers, which reminds me of social media circa 2008/9. Back then, most were asking fairly basic questions about social - what it is, what it means, etc. The usage numbers back then were rapidly increasing and already so astonishingly huge at that time that it really shocked marketers; the ensuing scramble for knowledge and understanding is still playing itself out to this day. That said, almost no one raises an eyebrow anymore when you mention “social media strategy”. They might ask you to be more specific, but they don’t question the concept or the need.

But that’s not necessarily so today when it comes to mobile. Does your organization have a mobile strategy? Based on experience, I’d have to bet it doesn’t. You may have run one or two pilot projects, and by now have an app or a mobile-ready website. But no long-term, holistic plan.

And the thing is, mobile is already plenty big enough to merit having a plan. And it’s going to keep getting bigger.

1. Most experts suggest that by 2014, more internet sessions will happen on mobile devices than on PCs. There are 5.3 billion mobile subscribers (that’s 77 percent of the world population). Growth is led by China and India.What other medium offers that reach?
2. Mobile devices sales rose in 2010, with smartphones showing strongest growth, Nokia remains number one in both smartphones and mobile phones, but Android is expected to become the top OS for new smartphones in 2011.
3. Feature phones sales (let alone ownership) still outnumber smartphones 4:1. If your mobile strategy doesn’t include feature phones, it doesn’t include most of your customers.
4. Top mobile network operator for subscribers and revenues is China Mobile; for average revenue per user is 3UK; for lowest monthly churn is NTT DOCOMO Japan; and for proportion of revenues from data is Smart Philippines. But it’s not all good news. Mobile operators in developed countries could run out of profit in the next two to four years if they do not change their business models.
   (source: Mobithinking.com)

In light of all this, here are a few interesting (disturbing?) things you should probably already be addressing:

• Mobile IS social: 91% of mobile internet access is to socialize. Are your Facebook apps mobile-ready? Is any aspect of your Facebook experience mobile-purposed? These questions are merely examples. There are more than 350 million active users [44 percent] currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook as non-mobile users. – Facebook official statistics (November, 2011).
• The mobile marketing universe has probably expanded since you last looked. What haven’t you yet tried/considered? Near-Field Communication (NFC), Mobile device security, Mobile cities, Device detection, Mobile health (m-health), B2B mobile marketing, Mobile research (m-research), Mobile barcodes, Mobile applications: native v Web apps, Design for mobile, SMS marketing, Mobile social networking. Lot of potential ground to cover here.
• The way people use search is going to change because they will increasingly be doing so on mobile rather than a PC. This represents a huge threat and concurrent opportunity for Internet marketers, and it is only those that can truly appreciate how the Internet will be consumed via these various new mobile devices that will prosper. A few examples*:
• Using mobile to type-search. Using a traditional keyboard to enter a search query into Google is usually easier and quicker than doing the same on a mobile device. It is highly likely therefore that users will search for shorter keyword strings on mobile devices, or rely more heavily on tools such as predictive text or Google Suggest. This will likely influence the way sites optimise their content and carry out their link building.
• Search by image. Tools such as Google Goggles allow users to very quickly search the Web using images on their phone or photos taken on the fly. Applications of this technology include taking a picture of a book in a store to find the best price, or using the picture of a restaurant front to find customer reviews. Ensuring your content and imagery are optimised for this form of search is likely to become increasingly important.
• Sociability.  91% of mobile Internet access is to socialize, compared to 79% on desktops. If Internet marketers haven’t been listening to the “search turning social” talk of recent years, then they certainly should be now. If they still cannot engage with individuals and groups on a social level they will be missing out on a massive proportion of mobile Internet usage.
  (*Source: Duncan Heath via Forbes.com)

Let us know if you’d like to talk mobile strategy. We’re all ears (and thumbs!)

This post was also published to the Gage Marketing Blog.

So, my last post was about how the integration of search and social has the potential to transform search in a good way. Scott Bryden, my analytics counterpart at Gage, then wrote me the following note:

Hi Chris,

I read your blog post.  Good stuff man.  I have a question for you.  After the webinar, it occurred to me that if Google incorporates their +1’s into search results, what’s to stop someone from trying to “artificially” manipulate this variable as well.  Will you be able to run a promotion and require someone to +1 your site as consideration for entry?  Or have they already thought through that and it’s not allowed as part of the terms and conditions?

– Scott

Great point, Scott. First the short answer: we don’t know yet. Google hasn’t given any explicit guidance that I could find on what brands can and can’t do to entice users to “+1″ them, or add them to their Google+ Circles (by the way, you heard it here first: “Circle me!” is probably going to take on a whole new meaning once Business get active in G+). I do know that shadowy types are already offering clandestine services to game the +1 system. So it has already begun…

But let’s consider the dark side of integrating search+social more broadly. I used this PPT slide in a recent pitch to illustrate a point on Facebook strategy:

Makes sense, right? Brands that put out a Facebook presence dominated by salesy deals and such to win fans will naturally tend to attract low-value, “mercenary” fans who will seldom if ever do anything valuable for them. Conversely, brands that cater to and encourage a bona-fide fan base will attract fans that will actually do something of value for the brand if asked. Of course the challenge is then to put ways to generate value in front of those true fans, e.g, activities that help build awareness, increase engagement, drive conversions and advocate for you.

But because of its implications on search, the integration of social + search has the potential to turn this paradigm into a much more mercenary thing – for example, a brand in Google+ won’t necessarily have a business obligation to care at all why you +1 or add them to your G+ Circles, because those acts are beneficial ends in and of themselves. Each “end” has a direct immediate potential benefit to their search outcomes – regardless of what you, the fan, might choose to do at any time thereafter.

Note that the Actual Value to Business was once a green triangle – but now it’s a fat trapezoid. This is obviously different than the Facebook model, where you still have the essential task of coaxing a new fan to do things of actual value before you can make any statement about the business benefit you’re getting from them. A dark side, indeed.

On the other hand, you could make the argument that adopting a totally mercenary strategy in G+ will be transparent to audiences and turn them off. But surely, effectiveness for G+ will end up being somewhere north of the level of “mercenary-ness” that represents the virtual ideal for a brand in FB? What do you think?

Note: This post was also published on the Gage Marketing blog.

A few thousand people saw our Google+ slideshow in one of  its various incarnations on SlideShare, volume which blew anything we’d done in the past away. I also did a webinar last week for Gage clients and a blog post last week on the upshot of G+ for marketers – you can check that here.

To briefly recap the webinar, we believe G+ is indeed going to work, for a few specific reasons. Brands who are dependent on SEO and PPC in Google (which owns 70% of the search market) will flock there because they will feel they have to, even though the network only has about 25 million users. The smarter brands will try hard to get their fans on Twitter and Facebook to come over to G+ and engage there as well, offering them exclusive interactions, promotions, etc. They’ll do this mostly to protect and (maybe) improve their Google search results, but also because the connection between +1s, G+, and search outcomes will be made clear in the analytics package that comes with G+ Profiles for Business (a nice departure from Facebook). Meanwhile Google also bought Motorola. Now Google will have a much greater ability to dictate to android OS handset makers to build experiences on par or better than what they can (and will) build themselves. The Motorola acquisition also gives Google a huge leg up in the battle with Apple over control of the home. But I digress.

In a year, G+ will have 100 million-plus members and we’ll all be wondering again at the incredible speed of massive change in this crazy business. It’s all well and good.

I want to talk now about what will happen next: the total integration of search and social.

You know who Facebook has a strategic partnership with? B-I-N-G. Microsoft chose to ally itself with Facebook years ago after acquiring a small ($240 million, ~1.5%) piece of the startup. I think it’s a pretty safe bet that Bing and Facebook will find themselves increasingly driven into each other’s arms as Google+ takes off.  Microsoft’s purchase of Skype came only weeks before Facebook unveiled a video chat client using the technology. Bing has already fully integrated Facebook’s social graph to show which friends have liked your search results. Even Windows Phone 7’s “People” tab has deeper integration with Zuckerberg’s social network than any competing OS. Bing and Facebook  will roll all this out with increasing urgency to compete with the sudden huge threat coming from Google. If Facebook is smart, they’ll work a Bing deal in such a way that they can also integrate personal recommendations into Yahoo and Ask and putting Google in search/social in the same boat as Apple is in the mobile market – vertically integrated, but isolated too.

So what will THAT mean for marketers? WOM recommendations are going to be more important for businesses than they already were, because they’re going to matter in “e” at the point of attraction and conversion. It’s going to be really hard to be a “quiet” company – especially a “quietly bad” company – anymore. It also means that more and more, every time a company has a good transaction with a customer, they are going to have to ask that customer to undertake a dizzying array of follow-on WOM activities, such as:

• Like us on Facebook (needed to keep those Bing results up, you know)
• Add us to your Circles on G+ (needed to keep Google search results healthy)
• +1 this service on the webpage that describes it. Oh, and could you “Like” it, too?
• Share it with your friends on countless other social networks, email, SMS, etc.

If they’re particularly enlightened (and wired), they’ll offer the customer a discount on the next transaction for each of these activities as well.

Until now, search results have been driven by two core variables: Relevance and Popularity. In the new era of the Person, you will have relevance, popularity, and  personal recommendations. And I think that’s a good thing. Search is a bit of a mess these days – in SEO, there are all kinds of bizarre actions sometimes recommended by practitioners to improve perceived relevance and popularity. A lot of it is a lot of work, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the business itself. With PPC, results are mostly just a function of the highest bidder. Both of these fields are currently such a far cry from rewarding the company with the best product or service and who is most pleasant to work with, it makes you wonder. Personal recommendations, at least for now, are hard to fake, and are directly related to the quality of the product or service offered as experienced by someone you trust.

Strikes me as a probable improvement.

Note: This post was also published on the Gage Marketing Blog.

The deck below was created for a webinar conducted for Gage clients on 8/11:

The “ah-ha” was (finally) getting to a logical vision of Google’s underlying strategy for G+: in other words, how +1′s, Google+ and Google search are intended to work together to essentially force brands to “care” about G+, and be active there to defend and/or improve their own paid and organic search results.

Here’s how and why the land rush is going happen:

1. Opportunistic brands will see the imperative to defend and/or improve their Google search-based conversions (Google owns 85% of search, so this is relevant to pretty much every brand) and realize the importance of making early investments on Google+ for Business to attract and engage users. They will set up Business Profiles as soon as they are available. This will happen in 8-10 weeks, probably early/mid October 2011.

2. Opportunistic brands will immediately use every means at their disposal – especially exclusive promotions – to lure fans to their brand on G+, because it will be obviously worth it to them to do so, thanks to the value-oriented analytics Google+ Profiles for Business will almost surely bring to the table. More cautious brands will not understand for a while why their Google search performance is declining. And when they do figure it out, it will probably take quite a while for them to take effective action. So there will definitely be a first-mover advantage here.

3. #2, in turn, will result in a lot of everyday social users gradually shifting their activity away from Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin to G+, because all the best brands are going to be doing and offering a lot of cool, exclusive stuff in G+ to attract them.

One funny thing about this is that even if the search implications weren’t there, brands will trip all over themselves to get up and running in G+. The evidence of that is plain from the brouhaha over companies’ setting up personal profiles – against Google’s clearly-stated wishes – shortly after the G+ beta launched on June 28.

So: G+ is coming. Are you ready?

One of the more interesting things learned at last week’s Social Media ROI Salon in Redmond, WA concerned the latest changes to Facebook Pages.

With the changes, the default setting of the News Feed will only show status updates from friends and posts from Pages you’ve recently engaged with in some way. Users will have to know how to change this to make it work like it used to. Also, it will become much easier to “Hide” or “Unlike” a page (the earlier design tacitly discouraged such things by making it relatively difficult to do so).

Sounds innocent enough, but it isn’t. For marketers, it means what once was free and easy is now going to be harder and/or cost money. It’s practically analogous to what happened when Google started offering paid search listings alongside organic ones (remember that?!).

One of the best things about Facebook had been its inherent excellence at generating free viral spread of content through “Liker”‘s News Feeds. If a user “Liked” a brand, it meant that brand’s subsequent posts and activity would show up in their Feeds indefinitely unless or until the user “Unliked” the brand… which statistics indicate hasn’t tended to happen more than 1-3% of the time. So as long as you just managed publishing and interaction well, you stood a good chance of growing a good following through viral spread of posted content alone.

Say what you want about Facebook management, but they aren’t dumb. Most of the changes we’re seeing appear intended to:

• Make marketers “pay to play” (News Feed, Unlike/Hide)
• Increase marketers’ level of control over their own Facebook presence to increase willingness to shift development dollars away from traditional platforms (e.g., websites) and toward Facebook (FBML deprecation, adoption of iFrames)
• Make Facebook increasingly critical by offering easy, effective intercommunication between brands’ non-Facebook (e.g., website) and Facebook presences, and between users who engage with those presences and their extended social networks (commenting Plug-in)

The changes mean marketers are going to have to work much harder – and pay! – to get attention in Facebook. It also means brands who have already built a large following are now at a decided advantage over their slower-moving competitors, because the slow movers will have a much tougher time building a similar level of fans. With Facebook’s new intercommunication plug-in, brands will also have to adopt more integration between Facebook and their web pages, further insinuating Facebook into users’ online lives, and making it much harder for any brand to ignore Facebook publishing and engagement in budgeting.

Brands also have to be aware of some very specific things these changes are likely to cause:

• First, brands’ “unlike” rate is going to go up. Now, all it takes is one undesirable post, and the user can “unlike” or “hide” you. The links are right next to the post itself – couldn’t be any easier for users:
  
• Second, brands’ organic “like” growth rate is likely to go down. It’s going to be more difficult to get viral impressions now, and that’s going to affect all value-generating metrics in Facebook – awareness and engagement in particular are going to be harder to come by.

How to respond? First, there’s not much marketers can do about the overall situation. As long as Facebook continues to command the attention of our target audiences, it also demands our attention. The power lies with the people, and, for now at least, the people have chosen Facebook.

Marketers are going to have to play the hand we’re dealt. To wit:

• Use the new tools. Increase the conversation happening on websites to offset the disadvantages of changes to the News Feed.
• Choose a great engagement and publishing platform and provider. Careful management of content publishing and engagement management is now even more important. If you don’t use a platform that lets you measure fan engagement, active fans and
  interactions by post, you might want to consider investing in one now. And be sure choose someone you can trust to watch and optimize your publishing and engagement activity (like Gage!).
• Step up efforts to win engagement. To avoid disappearing from your fans’ News Feeds, it is more important than ever to keep fans engaging through compelling content, applications, and promotions that get them interacting and sharing with friends.

Alas, the gap between Facebook Haves and Have Nots is about to widen considerably; make sure you’ve done what you can to ensure your brand is on the right side of that divide.

Got comments, questions, or cries of outrage? Fire away!

Note: This post was also published on the Gage Marketing Blog.

Recently the inimitable pundit Brian Solis published a “Twitterverse” graphic. You can see it below and also where I originally found it here. 

I saw this because I was looking at a different solutions company that purports to connect marketers and advertisers with “influencers” across social media on a moment to moment basis through channels and brand platforms we all know. I’m constantly evaluating things like this for my clients. 

So, I read their limited website content and then decided to throw them a bone and follow them on Twitter. [This is what I consider to be the lowest form of affinity a user might opt into, by the way. It can be a way of saying, "I don't really know for sure whether your little venture is relevant, but I'll give you a shot on Twitter and maybe you'll put something great in front of me at some point. If you don't, well, no big deal. I'll just ignore your posts and/or maybe even unfollow you later." Of course other times I follow much more enthusiastically, but that's usually a more personally-prompted connection.] 

Anyway, the solutions company’s Twitter feed included something that caught my eye: yet another Brian Solis social media infographic, this time about the universe of solutions available to marketers for Twitter. 

I had to click on it, of course. This is what I saw when I got there: 

Graphic depiction of various solutions associated with Twitter

 Question for you: whose job is it in your company to know all these names and what they do? Who do you think knows the most about what all these things can do to make you a successful online marketer? The eMarketing Manager? The PR department, perhaps? Or more likely, the agencies you work with? What are we to make of this mess of options?

I believe that right now, none of these people have a solid grip on this stuff – and that includes Brian Solis (it takes more than basic categorization, alas). And this goes not only for the “Twitterverse”, but for the eMarketing solutions universe as a whole. The reason why is because it’s too damn big and it changes way too fast – and it’s growing at an ever-increasing rate. And guess what? No one has it in their job description to spend most of their time researching this stuff. We end up doing it as a (small) part of our real jobs and/or in our spare time. And we can’t keep up. And it’s getting worse. eMarketers are thus in a tough spot. 

One cause of this proliferation is that emerging media continues to evolve and grow in cool new directions. Every time something new materializes, a bevy of point solutions sprouts up practically overnight. This happens because programming and product development techniques have evolved to the point that new SaaS products and services can be created so cheaply and quickly that literally thousands of garage ventures with bona fide value-added point solutions can – and do – sprout. Overnight. 

One of the implications of this is that it’s hard to compare one social media service provider to another. The impossibility of any one of them really knowing the universe of technology solutions out there is only part of it. 

It’s also a question of results measurement. Social media impact can be measured, but you can’t really measure the benefit of one social media practitioner’s benefit against another’s. Oh sure, it’s possible – but ultimately it’s impractical. All one can really say is, “I use X practitioner, they do Y things for me, and they are getting me Z results.” 

Given the situation, another practitioner can always come along and take advantage of victims’ ignorance – by asking questions such as “Are you using the [insert esoteric technology solution here] or the [insert far-from-an-established-benefit keyword-seeding technique here]?” And the client is left without an answer and trying to decide what to do. Is the new provider really better or are they just telling you what they think you need to hear to convince you to switch? 

It’s a tough world out there, and a lot of snake oil salesmen (and women!). Having pointed this out, all I can suggest to marketing services buyers out there is to be wary. Talk to some of their current clients. Are the good to work with? Responsive? Do they bring well-researched, good ideas to you? Are they trying to understand your business and your role as a marketer? Do you trust them? Are they obsessed with getting you meaningful results (your definition of meaningful is what counts, by the way, not theirs)? And, I might add: Do they spend their Saturdays researching new stuff on your behalf? 

It’s not a perfect way to make such decisions, but it ought to be more pleasant than shopping for snake oil.

Excerpt from a recent project…

___

Hi Chris and Lisa,

Here is the final deck. Chris based on our conversation on Tuesday, I made the following edits to the deck:

*Added slide 9 to show a listing of “Likes” with the top 20+ [client name] branded Facebook pages. You’ll see that [client brand name] has the lowest number of Likes. I put this slide in the Exec Summary and it may not belong there, but it tells a good story about integrating with the product groups regardless of where you put it
*Changed slide titles on slides 14 & 15
*Added [client name] [client brand name] to the comparison grid on slide 45
*Added estimated reach (friends, followers, likes) for each of the Partner SM presences on slide 70

If you have any questions please let me know–happy to help!
Thanks,
R
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deck_final_1711.ppt
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Chris McLaren Fri, 7 Jan at 9:22am via email | Edit (for another 0 minutes)

Can’t access. Need a login.

_CM

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Chris McLaren Fri, 7 Jan at 9:27am | Edit (for another 4 minutes)

Never mind. I had a login, tried it off the email you sent with the file, didn’t work. Then I gave up. Then I tried to log in to Basecamp myself from the OTHER email you sent intended to provide access, which showed up in my inbox after the first one. Then I clicked the link provided for users who already have an account, and lo and behold, your account is now connected to my other accounts! Jason Fried, you’re a goddamn usability genius.

_CM

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[vendor partner name] Fri, 7 Jan at 9:31am via email

You should have gotten an email invite from Basecamp to set up a login, but if you didn’t it looks like Lisa put it out on your share drive.

Thanks! R

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Chris McLaren Fri, 7 Jan at 9:32am via email | Edit (for another 10 minutes)

Check my comment, maybe if you log in you’ll see it

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[vendor partner name] Fri, 7 Jan at 9:36am

Great comment–you should almost Tweet a condensed version of it ‘cuz it’s damn funny!

____________________________________________________________

I’ll do you one better, my friend…

_CM

If you Google Sears Sucks, you’ll get about 317,000 results. So I’m hardly breaking new ground here. What I’d like to do is tell you is provide an example as to why Sears sucks, give you an opportunity to vent your spleen about Sears, and hopefully convince a few executives to pay attention and/or a few people to give up on Sears and shop elsewhere.

Excerpted from the recent annals of Sears’ home service web chat exit survey, which I recently took time to complete:

OK, if high-quality, efficient customer service is the point of all this, I have to laugh. First thing I did was Google “Sears service” plus my Sears’ location, hoping to find a direct number to call. No service number. Only a general number for the location. So I called that number. I then waded through a preposterously poorly designed phone bank – Service, which I found out is only findable directly if you happen to know in advance it’s called “Parts, Service & Repair” – might want to make the voice-recognition system recognize parts of that compound name and or similar names; got news for you Sears, no one is likely to know your precious little term for this offhand. Then I’m in “Waitsville” for about 20 minutes. While waiting, I thought I’d try to find something online and discovered the home services site. But there’s nothing in the UX that tells me where to go to get status on a repair!! So after several fruitless clicks, a chat invite automatically pops up. Note any UX person worth their salt will tell you that auto-triggered chat popups are a last-ditch option for bad websites seeking not to fail users completely. Nevertheless, still on hold, figured I might as well give it a try. Lo and behold, though I had to give the chat person more information than he should have needed to find the status – location and last name should have been plenty, not that plus phone and home address which they ALREADY HAVE – collecting it again for “security reasons” for an appliance repair is preposterous) he DID get the status eventually; ironically, I got my answer literally at the same moment as someone finally took my phone call. I hung up when they said hello. Elapsed time: 33 minutes of my precious Saturday, just to find out if my vacuum was ready to pick up. Now, I ask you: is this good customer service?

More to the point, is that really the best a struggling American corporation can do for its’ customers??? What the heck going on over there??

I’ve found myself asked this a few times of late by divergent questioners, from a small business marketer to a marketing executive at one of the world’s largest global companies.

It occurs to me that SEO appears to many to be people a dark, murky, misty part of the online marketing world – something like that swampy area outside of Mordor in Lord Of The Rings which the protagonists had to slog through to get to their destination. People know it’s important they move in this territory but they don’t know what’s there, and aren’t sure they want to find out.

OK, so what is SEO? The definition is simple, actually. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the practice of improving the performance of web properties by crafting webpages (and their links) to “optimize” the chance that these pages will appear in the first few pages of a search engine’s results page (SERP) for a given keyword search.

There. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Now for the inevitable wrinkles:

1. Back in the mid-90s when they really began to come into their own with the public, search engines used to only rank web pages for a given search based on eacg page’s content relevance to keywords users entered. Then SEO tacticians got good at fooling search engines into ranking their pages highly using what are called “Black Hat”- or illegitimate – tactics such as spamming. So in 1998, Google and their competitive ilk came up with a new way to rank pages that measured popularity in addition to relevance. Google calls their version of this methodology – one of the first of its kind and by far the most commercially successful – PageRank.
2. Lately (last 2-3 years) the focus in SEO has shifted from improving search engines’ popularity and relevance rankings for a given page by using link, title, meta, and keyword-rich content, to doing this PLUS adding Web 2.0 and Social Media platforms such as blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to improve popularity rankings and thus increase SERP rankings. These new tools and approaches work because popularity is (simply expressed) a function of how many visitors your site gets, how many sites linking to your site (and the popularity score of those sites, too), and in terms of relevance, how often your content is regularly refreshed (e.g., via blog posts or Twitter feeds).
3. Because 1 and 2 are not universally known, people hear bad things about SEO and believe them, which only increases the fear and loathing of SEO and fails to increase anyone’s knowledge or understanding. People hear bad things because there are still a lot of Black Hat practitioners out there, and SEO is also good fodder for pot-stirring online marketing bloggers who write provocative headlines like “All SEO practitioners are worthless” or “The only SEO you need is from developers” to get traffic and readers. Sad to say, such posts are generally successful at driving traffic because so many marketers are interested in SEO and so many of those are new to it and are highly impressionable.
4. Ethical SEO involves giving clients sound advice, such as the best way to display text and label pictures and tags. Ethical practioners also encourage clients to develop and maintain good web content (and show them how) and use back-linking techniques to increase the number of incoming links to a page, which in turn boost’s that page’s popularity score. Ethical SEOs also warn clients off from practices that might be seen by search engines as spamming. Ethical SEOs and search engines consider themselves partners who, by exchanging information and tips, together improve search quality. However, unethical SEOs and search engines are continually in a state of battle. Every time one side seems to have the upper hand, the other side comes up with a new way to regain an advantage. And although their relationship is adversarial, some believe they are an essential part of the web food chain, because they drive innovation and search R&D.

Simply referencing Jim Cuene’s recent post on how to create advocates for your business online. It’s so simple and intuitive, yet critical to operate from this starting point. And enough companies are unsure of how to approach ORM and brand advocacy online that it bears repeating. Enjoy.