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?

It can be difficult to explain the value of going to SXSW. I’ve been back for over a month now and I’m still processing information and insights from sessions like this one…

Session: Got great UGC, poor monetization?

Mundane though the point may be, SXSW is far from infallible when it comes to selecting panelists.  The session was billed as presenting ways to monetize user-generated content (UGC). The Lockerz people who did the session actually had no business addressing this topic because their platform is not about monetizing UGC – it’s about monetizing 13-30 year old eyeballs by offering brands a channel to reach these people (a.k.a. Generation Z) through Lockerz’ eStore and through on-site display ads.

Lockerz home page.

How the platform works

However, the Lockerz platform is interesting. It appeals to young people by leading with the promise of a monetary reward – deals on cool stuff kids want. It gives them these deals by rewarding them with points for practically every single action they take on the site. Users get points for uploading pictures, watching videos (yes, watching videos), answering trivia questions, listening to music, inviting friends to join, and of course, buying things. At any time, users can “cash in” the points they accumulate and buy something – and if they have enough points, discounts can be as high as 100% (you can check out the company’s intro video on YouTube here).

Does it work? Well, in just under a year, the site has amassed 17 million members. And presenters claimed that 25-30% of them log in at least once a day. Serious numbers.

Two things make this model interesting:

1. It doggedly “fronts” itself to the outside world as a community, not as a loyalty program or an ad platform or an eStore, even though it is clearly actually these things moreso than a community. In that sense Lockerz duped #SXSW in suggesting they are a community that monetizes UGC. A quick run through the site during the session made it obvious to me and to others that UGC is not the focus at all. UGC is in fact strictly a sideshow. I think this is sad, because it isn’t honest. And I can only assume the owners are being less than honest because they are afraid – afraid that if parents and advertisers knew the extent to which children were being manipulated into thinking they are part of a “community” there would be outrage. And maybe they’re right. It is a very 1984-feeling model. And I hate to say it, but my guess is this is just an awkward prototype compared to sleeker versions on virtual drawing boards today. After all, young people are both consistently coveted as a demographic and relatively easy to manipulate – and the success of Lockerz shows how these facts can be exploited to advantage.
2. Lockerz apparently supports itself mainly through advertising and through other paid product and media placements from major companies desperate to reach Generation Z. The platform is interesting in that it combines game theory, loyalty, e-commerce, and sharing in a way that seems to be working. They probably don’t make make much on the products sold in the store, but they are subsidizing those sales through online advertising and product/media placements, which are probably selling like hotcakes and for a very pretty penny (again, there is no demographic more coveted by advertisers today). That’s why it makes sense for them to try so hard to get and keep kids on the site as long as possible and as often as possible. But presenting the site as a “community” focused on UGC is just not accurate. The site and its users derive little or no benefit from the vast majority of UGC concerned. There is no real collaboration, idea sharing, life sharing, etc. between members. UGC here is strictly about either exposing kids to media/products or keeping them on the site and/or showing advertisers how “engaged” they are through their activity – thus justifying what are likely some of the steepest online ad fees you’ll find anywhere.

Is it just me or is this creepy?

Prototype for an Orwellian nightmare? Or just a kids’ version of your typical loyalty platform in fancy ”dudz”? You tell me…

Editor’s Note: This post was also published to the Gage Marketing blog.

That headline has been bouncing around in my head quite a bit. Given I happen to be blogging from the momentary center of the interactive punditry universe – a.k.a. SXSW 2011 – it’s even more immediate.

Too often pundits (and the legions of pundit aspirants) spend more time crafting a controversial headline or capitalizing on a popular event, buzzword, or news item than trying to shine any real light on a subject.

It’s not that there isn’t any information on, well, pretty much whatever you want to learn about. And that’s a good thing. What’s not is that too much of what’s out there is not particularly accurate. Or insightful. Or useful. Or honest.

I have no answer to this problem. It’s a problem that doesn’t get written about much online (can’t imagine why!). In that sense it’s an elephant in the room that the concentric social circles of interactive punditry pretends isn’t there.

Why the elephant? A few thoughts:

• Visibility pays. Purchasers of consulting services find security in the idea that the person they hire is well-known and highly visible. But visibility and effectiveness are two different things, aren’t they? Here’s a little truism: in this business, those who focus on self-promotion are seldom very good at execution. The opposite is also usually true.
• Deadline frequency is much higher than “original thought or idea” frequency.
• Writers don’t have time to dig deeply into complex issues and/or do original research…
• …Or maybe they don’t know how… How many writers at the places you follow studied journalism and/or business?
• …Or care. How many even think adding real value is key to long term success? I wonder.
• A lot of authors that dominate the thought landscape aren’t doing much other than speaking, writing, etc. These people inevitably are talking about doing work much more than they are actually working.
• Authors are paid to generate content that gets clickthroughs – not to enlighten us. Readers are lured to content in myriad ways – often only to be disappointed and (occasionally) misinformed. But by the time a reader realizes they’ve been suckered, it’s too late. Time has been wasted, the page has a hit, and the only recourse left is to leave a scathing comment…but in this brave new online media world, that comment can be culled. Later it can be counted, summed with other comments, and put in an “engagement” chart (Twain’s “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” is in full force).

…So, other than personal ethics, there ain’t much incentive to avoid doing unhelpful things like:

• Writing a post that is equivalent to re-posting someone else’s original thoughts.
• Writing a post that doesn’t mention the likely bias of one or more sources because the conclusions derived are assumed to be well-received by readers.
• Writing a post with a headline that has been twisted for “maximum provocation” and has no relation to the article which follows it.
• Writing a post such that anyone remotely educated on the topic would find it so biased as to be worthless.

Not sure there’s an answer to this. Still – with apologies to Michael Stipe and R.E.M. – I feel better having screamed. Don’t you?

Editor’s Note: This post has also been published to the Gage Marketing blog.

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.

Social Media is being eaten alive. The interactive marketing universe is slowly swallowing it like a python might swallow a deer.

BazaarVoice, Pluck, Gowalla, FourSquare, Groundtruth, Flickr, Digg, Twitter, Salesforce, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, Covario, ExactTarget, CoTweet, WordPress, Limelight, Meteor, Magnify, Radian6, Omniture, etc., etc. Are these marketing tech “nouns” and the functions they perform not all part and parcel of the same overall interactive marketing solution space? Can you possibly succeed as an interactive marketer and ignore – or be ignorant of – any of these?

Enterprise software solutions like Pluck and Salesforce and BazaarVoice promise to make connections with owned social media properties seamless. Geo-targeted marketing is not optional for business with physical storefronts anymore – in fact businesses that haven’t already experimented here are behind the curve. Want to succeed in online marketing? Kind of have to include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging, and video site networking to the plan these days.

Facebook, by the way, has become so enmeshed in peoples’ everyday lives that they are addicted. Facebook is the new “front end” of user experiences, partially displacing search in the war for attention.

Optimized SEO is not possible without use of social media. An effective web presence is not possible without use of social media and community-oriented tools and tactics. Direct marketing and CRM are not done well without integration with social media either.

Eaten. Alive.

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.