Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Making Room on the Mantle

As I'm just getting back into things, pardon one more post of personal pride (following the wedding announcement earlier).

360i, the indirect patrons of this blog and my work home for nearly two years now, has just been named MediaPost's Search Agency of the Year. I take a lot of pride in what 360i's doing, and they've been doing award-winning work for years (I joined them for a reason), so the award's a welcome token of recognition. The only thing more rewarding is the feedback that comes from our clients, like one who wrote us saying, "Congratulations again on this recognition, you guys really are the best and I am honored to be a client" and another who just told us, "Thanks for being exceptional partners. I love working with you all."

Honored? Love? Feedback like that is even harder to earn than an award.

But I'll take the formal recognition too.

UPDATE: MediaPost's full write-up of why 360i won the award is live, and also in the extended entry.

Take SEMPO's Definitive Survey on Search Engine Marketing

SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, wants people involved with SEM to take its 4th annual State of the Market survey. Marketers have come to eagerly await this, as it's the single most thorough resource on SEM trends that any firm puts out, and the past few years it has kept getting better in regards to the depth and breadth.

From SEMPO:

Why should you take the survey?
 

• Taking the survey will actually stimulate you to think about the    resources you devote to SEO and paid search - which is a valuable exercise    in itself.
• First dibs - you will receive the preliminary survey results before    they are released to SEMPO's membership.
• Support the SEM industry - this survey is highly regarded as a valuable    resource for the industry.
• 10% discount to Sprinkles Cupcakes with every five entries

Okay, the last bullet's mine, not SEMPO's, so don't hold them to it. The other three reasons are good enough.

 

Discount to Search Engine Marketing Standard Magazine

As a special treat for readers of this blog, Search Marketing Standard, the print magazine covering the search industry, is providing a 56% discount so you can get a full year of the magazine for $4.95, or $6.60 internationally. Use coupon code HOLIDAY67 when you subscribe at https://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/subscribe.html .

I am a regular reader of the mag, and it usually has at least a couple articles I'll read in full, if not more, so even if you find just one per issue, it's worth the price and time to skim through it.

As a bonus, the publication is donating $1 to Toys for Tots for every subscriber who uses this coupon code between now and the promotion's expiration December 10.

And in case there's any confusion at all, for full disclosure I'm just a reader of the magazine and a blogger; I gain nothing at all from this other than having my readers more informed about search engine marketing.

Thanks to the standard's Boris Mordkovich for the discount.

Mashable Misspeaks: Manipulating "AdSense" Not That Easy for Rudy Detractors

Mashable has a rare misstep today with its post "The Crowd Finally Gets It: They Can Group Up And Manipulate AdSense." The gist: People are using social media to urge others to engage in click fraud with Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaigh ads.

There are a few problems with this post, and with the strategy itself:

• Mashable refers to AdSense, which is the contextual program, rather than AdWords, the search-triggered ads in Google. It took me a minute to figure out how anyone could plan a movement to click contextual ads en masse unless they stumble on a marketer with an infinite budget and set up a fraudulent page to trigger the ads.
• This movement doesn't have legs. It's a flash mob, at best. And since advertising these days is so dynamic, Rudy's online marketing manager can just suspend the ads for a couple days until this gets straightened out.
• This will easily trigger Google's click fraud detection, so it's likely that even if the Rudy AdWords campaign keeps running, Google won't charge for the vast majority of the invalid clicks, and even if Google somehow didn't pick up on it, Rudy 08 should easily have enough evidence for a refund if a ton of people clicked.
• Stan Schroeder from Mashable writes "AdSense is just too easy to abuse." Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. First of all, AdSense is incredibly hard to abuse; he's referring to AdWords. Second, Rudy 08 can pause the campaign if they detect anything funny and have it run again. This is a long "purchase cycle" if you will; a couple days off won't affect the polls much. Third, Google detects click fraud. Fourth, marketers have recourse if it doesn't.

This is just sloppy coverage, and while Mashable may not be in favor of pulling its posts, it should offer a number of corrections.

What Facebook Learned from Search

Is Facebook really trying to steal Google's fire? Should we just call it Faceboogle? Maybe not. See the full post in the extended entry; it was originally published in MediaPost.

What Facebook Learned from Search

Imagine if Picasso painted a search engine results page from Google. It would probably wind up looking like Facebook, which continually draws inspiration from search engines as it rolls out its services for marketers.

What Facebook did was take the classic search channels of paid search, natural search, and paid inclusion and adapt them to its own platform. Compared to search, Facebook’s ad targeting isn’t quite as precise as advertising to people who explicitly express interest with their queries. Yet compared to contextual advertising, Facebook offers the proposition of targeting to explicitly expressed interests on members’ profiles, and marketing is further amplified with the web of member connections often described as the “social graph.”

Natural Search: News Feed

The News Feed on Facebook is the differentiator (for now) that makes Facebook best positioned to make great content go viral. In case you’ve avoided Facebook for fear of learning your colleagues are in relationship situations they can only describe as “it’s complicated,” the News Feed, which serves as the homepage when Facebook members log in, is an update of what a selection of your friends are doing on the site. You see notices when friends add other friends, post public messages, add or interact with applications, post photos, join groups, and engage in other activities.

The News Feed, updated with 40 to 60 listings per day, parallels search engines’ natural search listings and always answers the query “What are my friends doing on Facebook today?” Facebook actually wants to take this a step further, retooling the question to “What are my friends doing online today?” That’s the point of Beacon, one of Facebook’s newest innovations where select publishers allow consumers to broadcast their actions on those sites to their Facebook profile. When you rent a movie at Blockbuster.com, for instance and you’re also logged in to Facebook, you’ll see an alert that your movie selection will be shared on Facebook, with an opt-out mechanism available. Some of your friends will then see that in your News Feed, and others will see it when they visit your profile page.

Striking and Searching

Today's column was originally published in MediaPost and continues in the extended entry.

THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA launched its long-awaited strike. How will this event affect marketers, search engines, and consumers' online media behavior? SEMCO, the union for search engine marketing columnists, hasn't quite caught on, so I'm remaining on the job to answer these questions and more.

Most consumers aren't going to care about the WGA strike, and they're not going to notice it anytime soon. Google's Hot Trends showed no mention of the strike or the WGA Friday, Saturday (when the strike was announced), or Sunday. On Monday November 5, the term "writers strike" finally made an appearance at number 52 at "medium hotness," or a mere two bars out of five, well behind other entries that day including references to Food Network star Giada de Laurentiis expecting a baby girl, Google's Android mobile platform announcement, and the shooting of a rare albino deer in Minnesota. As much as Americans love TV, our patience quickly tires of labor disputes unless they're mediated by Oprah, Dr. Phil, or Kim Kardashian (an aside: a colleague came in here while I was Googling Kardashian's name to check the spelling, leading me to wonder whether my colleague or Google is my greater privacy concern).

Here are some predictions of what should happen with search and online media if this strike lasts a few months:

Ad Age's Search Marketing Fact Pack is Here

For all the numbers and reference materials you could possibly digest on your average New York to Chicago flight, check out Ad Age's annual Search Marketing Fact Pack, which just arrived. You'll find 50 pages of stats and articles on everything from the top search engines and keywords to innovative search marketing examples.

If you're so inclined, you can also read a two-page article I contributed to on how social media and emerging media are impacting search trends on p.40-41. I welcome your thoughts on it, so comment away if you have a moment, even if it takes some time to get to reading all of it.

I've really been impressed with Ad Age's coverage of interactive media, and this is one more prime example. In general, Ad Age is one of my few must-reads from the established press (as opposed to blogs), along with MediaPost and fairly few other such sources. It also strikes a great balance of just the right amount of content - it's enough to inform you without delivering so much that it overwhelms you. That's becoming an increasingly important criteria of media for me - how well does it respect my time when I have a decreasing amount to spare?

Unearthing Your Hidden SEO Gurus

This is the most recent column penned for MediaPost's Search Insider; it continues in the extended entry.

HOW MANY of these actions have you conducted in a professional capacity for your company or a client?

* Posted a video to YouTube with a few tags and a remotely descriptive title.

* Rated your company's video on YouTube (or related video sites from Google, Yahoo, or MSN).

* Submitted a press release to some online newswire (or a traditional newswire that also posts releases online).

* Tagged photos on Flickr (owned by Yahoo).

* Posted an event to Upcoming.org (owned by Yahoo).

* Added a local listing to Google Base.

Okay, maybe you haven't done any of this, but if you serve in a marketing role, you probably will before long, and all of these actions can provide greater exposure for your Web presence in the major engines.

Search's MySpace Age Arrives

Here's the latest Search Insider column, via MediaPost. The original working title was "Yo Momma's a Search Engine," but it was a little too much of a stretch, especially tying that into the intro and conclusion. As always, it continues in the extended entry.

Search's MySpace Age Arrives
By David Berkowitz
MediaPost's Search Insider

QUICK: WHAT'S THE fourth-largest search engine? The good news is, the answer is suddenly less clear than it's ever been, thanks to a comScore announcement from late August that reported, "With search becoming a more ubiquitous activity across the Web, comScore is expanding the market view of the search universe to encompass other searches that occur on the Internet." It's about time.

I've been waiting for this day since August 2006, when I published a column on "Search's MySpace Age." I wrote, "MySpace is much bigger than just a social network; it's also a search engine. ComScore has at times listed it as the sixth largest engine, albeit with less than one percent of searches." The column continued, "The growth of MySpace, which now has more than 100 million registered users, leads me to wonder what would happen if MySpace emerged as one of the top four search engines (my prediction: it will)."

The prediction took a year to come true. ComScore's latest data shows MySpace capturing 551 million searches in July 2007, compared to 438 million for AOL (the whole Time Warner Network, which includes Mapquest, had 971 million searches) and 219 million for Ask.com (the whole Ask Network, including MyWebSearch, had 449 million). By this tally, MySpace only trails Google, Yahoo, and MSN Windows Live when comparing it to the five major search engines.

The prediction wasn't perfect. YouTube had more searches than MySpace -- albeit commandingly, with just over 1 billion searches. By that standard, MySpace is really the fifth-largest engine, topping MapQuest and other AOL properties (which had 533 million searches), eBay (468 million), Craigslist (170 million), and Amazon sites (144 million). (In some ways I've waited two and a half years for this news; I considered branding eBay a search engine in a March 2005 column.)

Meanwhile, MySpace's share of searches has grown exponentially, as it captured 4.12% of all 13.4 billion Internet searches. To compare the figure to last year when comScore briefly included MySpace as the sixth largest search engine, MySpace would have captured over 7% of searches if it was included in the July 2007 "core search" category, ten times the 0.7% share it garnered in May 2006.

Search Gold in Dem Dar iHollywood Hills

Today's column will give you a sense of deja vu if you read through the notes I took while at iHollywood July 19-20, but I did a lot of organizing, editing, and analysis to provide context for all these points, so it still may be worth skimming the list. And if it's new to you, be happy you didn't read it in its raw form before (if you do want the originals, check this search via the Rollyo custom search box).

As per the usual notice, it continues in the extended entry, and it was originally published in MediaPost. As per an unusual notice, this is appearing on the blog the same day it came out in MediaPost, so I'm on time for once.

Search Gold in Dem Dar iHollywood Hills

WHEN AN IHOLLYWOOD FORUM EVENT can spend a day and a half covering search engine marketing, a single column can't cover all the highlights. Last week, I discussed how important it is for consumers to discover video rather than just search for it. This week, I'll go much broader, offering fourteen search-themed insights from a number of speakers and panels.

To make the attributions easier, company names are listed with each takeaway, and the speakers are credited by name at the end.

1) Search planning is starting earlier. Google is talking to movie studios now about marketing films coming out next May.

2) Branding lives. Showtime said branding, awareness, and driving tune-in are critical for them. They need to rank high in natural results, and high rankings in paid results offer other positive effects for the brand.

3) Paid search builds brands before SEO kicks in. Showtime said that many of its shows are generic terms ("Weeds," "Meadowlands," "Dexter"), so as it works on optimization, it buys search ads when news of the show breaks.