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.

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.

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.

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.

OK, I see a recurring pattern with Google. It’s Microsoft circa 1995-7 all over again. Remember when there were browser wars that people really cared about? Gradually and as surely as the sun rises, Microsoft used its gigantic resources – development, market reach, war chest – to displace Netscape as the world’s #1 browser and render all challengers impotent.

Of course there are situational differences, but today’s Google seems to succeed by doing the same with all things search. As soon as any competitor gets a little traction with a new search wrinkle, Google either buys them out or co-opts the new approach, releasing the same or superior capabilities to their massive user base and integrating into their suite of functionality, thus ensuring their position as the first stop for information online is indefinitely retained.

Case in point: Google’s new Social Search. It competes directly or indirectly with a host of similar relatively new Social Media information aggregation ventures, including GetGlue, Bing Twitter Search, FriendFeed, Cliqset, and many, many others.

So what is Social Search?

Basically, Google figures out people you trust and then makes content from them show up in your search results:

It’s a simple idea. Companies have approached this in various ways (see Search 4.0: Social Search Engines & Putting Humans Back In Search). Typically, the social concepts for refining results have been to allow people to form social networks, then:

• Refine search results based on actual search activity within their network
• Share results with each other
• Define only certain sites that should be included in their results

The first two have privacy concerns, among other issues. The last two especially involved work on the part of users. Users have to actively choose to share results or actively define a set of sites they want to search against. Not many people would be likely to do this. And with Google Social Search, there’s still some work required, but  it’s minimal if you already use of Twitter, Flickr or an existing public social network. In fact, if you use Gmail or Google Reader, you may already be social-search ready.

What Social Search Means for Users and Marketers

Although it’s early, I believe this is mostly good for both users and marketers. Instead of having to worry about registering, interacting, etc. with dozens of functionally overlapping aggregators, users can have Google Social Search pull some this into the same search routine most people use most often today. For marketers, it means Social Media will be even harder to ignore in coming months, as more users use input from their social network to help them make purchasing decisions. For more on this aspect, please check out: The Rise Of Help Engines: Twitter & Aardvark.

How has the phenomenal growth of Minneapolis-based content strategy agency Brain Traffic come to pass? Serendipity? Hard work? Probably a bit of both?

Kristina hit on something that has been horribly askew with online marketing, and she’s been remarkably successful at evangelizing a better way. In building web-based marketing assets (websites, microsites, web-delivered applications, etc.) marketers have made great online content an exception, rather than the rule. Yet success still depends on creating great user experiences, and that means marketers must relearn the art of incorporating and managing great content. Good to see this trend happening, as it should improve the web for everyone:

Check out this great SlideShare presentation on LinkedIn titled SMAWG – Social Media Overview. Andrew Eklund is a friend and former colleague of mine who owns a local web marketing consultancy. The last several slides in particular demonstrate an unusually deep understanding of how Social Media is changing the online marketing landscape, as well as where it “fits” contextually relative to user behavior and marketing philosophy. When it comes to putting Social Media to work for business, Andrew sure knows his stuff.