Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Your Google+ Strategy Calculator

Your Google+ Strategy Calculator
originally pubished in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

When brands are invited to participate in Google+, it's going to get weird. Marketers will face challenges they've never had to deal with before in social media. Without knowing specific details of what Google+ brand pages will look like, enough of the variables are known so that you can create a formula that works for you. Here's a primer.

Addition: The biggest change marketers will encounter is the addition of search engine optimization to their social media strategies. Yes, I know social media optimization has been around for years, but it's had a relatively minimal impact on community management so far. Just look at Facebook's one-pager on SEO; it's using best practices established a decade ago. That will change as Google incorporates users' +1 activity to further refine, reorder, and personalize search engine results pages. Marketers focused on SEO who never cared about community management will evaluate the opportunity that Google+ presents. This is a major shift, and it's quite possibly the most significant change to community management since the practice as we know it was founded in the past decade or so.

Multiplication: The challenges of managing communities on Google+ are bound to multiply. Is it a community with SEO benefits, or is it SEO developed through community engagement? What if it's both? Imagine if every status update from a brand will require both a community manager and an SEO manager working together to optimize each word. Like any dance, someone will have to lead.

Division: Get ready to divide and conquer. What will the division of labor look like? Some of it is clear up front, with SEO leads best suited for organizing the overall structure of the page, and community managers owning day-to-day posts and interactions, ideally with training and regular review from the SEO team. It won't always be clear, though, especially for some SEO-driven marketers that are laser focused on +1s and don't care about any of the other benefits of relationship building.

Subtraction: It's time to subtract silos from your community management. This is a classic case of addition by subtraction, as your social program should wind up stronger when SEO experts are involved. How many other silos can you subtract? Who else in your organization isn't yet benefiting from what you're doing on the community front?

Geometry: Marketers will have to understand Circles inside and out. The biggest question marketers will have is how well they can create Circles of consumers to target them specifically. Ideally, some Circles will be auto-generated, such as Circles of people by geography or age, since Google encourages users to create rich profile data.

Trigonometry: Trigonometry is the study of angles. Marketers, what will be your angle on Google+? What will make you stand out from every other brand page? What value will you provide? You'll need your own angle going into it, but you can also triangulate some aspects by plotting your positioning in conjunction with Google's offerings and what your fans respond to.

Calculus: I don't remember much about calculus, largely because once math started dealing with imaginary numbers, I found it very hard to pay attention. Aren't real numbers confusing enough? Marketers will become well acquainted with imaginary numbers when they start operating on Google+. What do all these +1s mean anyway? When top brands start getting added to the Circles of more than one million people, how will that help the overarching strategy? As a marketer, you should pressure Google and your agencies to figure out why this matters for you.

Chaos Theory: I can only predict so much. A safe bet is that when SEO starts driving social media strategy, brush up on chaos theory -- because anything can happen from here

The Future of Search Engines from the Search Insider Summit

One of the toughest things to do as a speaker or moderator is covering your own panel. I have to try though, since my panelists had a few interesting things to share about search, mobile marketing, and social media.

In light of the fact that I was moderating the panel, I’m not going to try fully quote anyone or even attribute everything that came up. With any luck this will capture some of what transpired.

The panel was Search as We See It, “Search Insiders’ view of the Future: Industry Trends, Challenges and things to keep an eye on.” The panelists included:

• Ron Belanger, VP, Worldwide Agency Sales, Omniture
• Daniel Boberg, VP, Advertiser & Agency Professional Services, Yahoo 
• Brian Boland, Director, Media Auctions, Microsoft Advertising
• John Nicoletti, Head of Agency Operations, Google

Q: What was different compared to the Search Insider Summit in May 2008?

Everyone mentioned the economy to some extent, often to the full extent. Ron said profit optimization was big, as was customer retention. Yahoo mentioned that the economy has led to declines in click-through rates for commercial times, and lower order sizes. John noted economic issues, brought up the expanded use of universal search, and plugged Google Flu Trends (the only swine flu reference I recall hearing at the events.

Q: What will we be talking about a year from now that wasn’t well covered here?

Ron noted search will be used even more for campaign planning. Brian expected a greater emphasis on contextual advertising and performance display. John said we’ll hear more about mobile (which was barely touched on at all this event). Dan thought semantic structuring would play a bigger role, and was bullish on Rich Ads in Search (the Yahoo push, also mirrored by Google, to start including images and video in search ads).

Q: Where is mobile search now?

Overall, there was a lot of skepticism for how big this will get how fast. Brian surveyed the audience and fairly few in the room conducted mobile searches on a daily basis, and this was more of an early adopter crowd, especially for search. Ron noted the searches on mobile are far more directional, such as for Facebook and MySpace and news/weather sites, and the commercial searches are more for local listings and services like movies and other spots nearby. Ron said mobile display presents the much bigger opportunity.

As for will it all be Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft in mobile search, panelists from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft collectively said, “Yes.” They all noted the challenges of creating a viable search rival. During the audience Q&A, there was some optimism for voice search, where Google and Microsoft both have live offerings.

Q: Here I channeled my inner James Lipton (better than I expected to) – as covered by Joe Mandese on MediaPost’s blog, and asked, What does social search mean to you?

Panelists didn’t have great answers for this one, and two didn’t answer at all. That’s a sign for a moderator that the question sucked. Ron discussed a bit of how social actions already inform search rankings, but as this wasn’t a favorite topic of the panelists so I wasn’t pressing here. During Q&A, John reiterated the importance of universal search, and Dan noted his

Q: What about Wolfram Alpha, the highly buzzed about search engine? I noted that when Stephen Wolfram sneezes, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington gets him a tissue. Is it a Google killer? The holy grail of search? The next Cuil?

Again, panelists were largely nonplused by this, seeing it more as an academic solution rather than something most consumers will find useful. I asked Brian if he could share anything about what Microsoft was doing with Powerset, the one-time rumored Google killer that Microsoft acquired. Yes, Microsoft was doing something with it. No, he couldn’t talk about it here.

There was one other question I had to cover. I’ll return to MediaPost’s coverage:

“Can I ask how much each of your companies has bid for Twitter,” Berkowitz inquired of the Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Omniture dais. No answer.

“I just watched Frost/Nixon,” Berkowitz explained, adding, “So I’m trying to bring people to tears now.” Mainly, they laughed.

 

 

Technorati Tags: mpsis,search insider summit,conferences,search engines,google,yahoo,microsoft,msn,omniture

You Can STILL Handle These SEO Truths - Rebecca Lieb Interview Continues

Still Rebecca Lieb

This week's Search Insider from MediaPost:

Last week, author Rebecca Lieb managed to distill her new book "The Truth about Search Engine Optimization," from 51 chapters into a single truth. How can she top that? In the continuation of the interview, she first addresses what truth means in this context. Then she tackles the biggest SEO myth. She closes with answering a few questions submitted via Twitter, but I didn't limit her response to 140 characters.

Search Insider: Which chapter do you find marketers have the hardest time wrapping their heads around?

Rebecca Lieb: It all depends on the needs of the individual reader, of course, but I think the chapters on using SEO in social media, or in tandem with blogging, online PR, and reputation management, are of particular interest now that the spotlight's on social media in general. Another reason people will appreciate those chapters is because they provide a pretty clear roadmap for highly optimizing messaging with a minimum of expenditure. Budgets are tight these days, have you heard?

SI: Did you ever grapple with whether to call these chapters truths? For instance, one's "The Jury is Out on Paid Links," and another is "In-House or Outsource," where there aren't truths but rather two sides to the issue.

RL: Funny you should ask. Initially, I did grapple with some of these titles and tried hard to write all 51 chapter headers as absolute truths. Luckily, my clear-thinking editor let me relax the absolutes when logic dictated they're not so absolute. Your readers are marketers, so they're well acquainted with the biggest truth in anything marketing-related, which is, "It depends." But really, it is the truth to tell people that paid links have both advantages and disadvantages, and to weigh both arguments. This is, after all, a book, not a consulting engagement.

I hope readers will find the pro and con arguments in chapters such as paid links, in-house or outsourcing, or even the whole concept of what it means to be in number one in search rankings helpful. When there isn't an absolute truth -- and face it, sometimes there just isn't -- I hope I provide enough guidance for people to make educated, informed decisions.

SI: Again, since it's a book of truths, what's the biggest lie or myth you'd love to counter here?

RL: That SEO is a set-it-and-forget-it item you tick off a to-do list. SEO is an ongoing process that's both strategic and tactical. Probably the biggest value in my book is, it illustrates why. There are so many ways to optimize a Web site, and many of them challenge you to look at and think differently about your business. This means thinking from a searcher's perspective, of course (actually, from many searchers' perspectives). But it also means knowing about all the styles and flavors search comes in: local, vertical, directory, images, video, audio, personal -- the list just keeps getting longer. All this innovation is more complicated, sure. But at the same time, it exponentially expands the opportunities to get visible in new ways and in new places, as well as to maintain that visibility.

And if you'll indulge me a second, there's another myth I'd like to bust: that search is for geeks and techno-nerds. I'm not a developer; I'm a writer and editor, but search turns me on. Maybe it's because I'm weird, but maybe it's also because there's just so much interesting strategy and content behind the concepts. Search can really get both brain hemispheres revved -- right and left!

SI: This question comes from @matt_mcgowan on Twitter: How does social media marketing fit in with search engine optimization?

RL: Social media, particularly user-generated content, benefits SEO in myriad ways depending, of course, on the social media channel. Consumer reviews on an ecommerce site Web page, or a review site like Citysearch or Yelp, not only expand keyword-rich text, but provide added credibility for buyers and browsers. Blog platforms are built to be easily crawled and spidered by search engines, so blog content is incredibly search friendly. Social media allows users to provide their own metadata, not only to images and video on sites like Flickr and YouTube, but also directly to product pages on sites such as Amazon. In a sense, social media can be considered a great, collaborative effort to make almost anything on the Web more search-engine-friendly, including sites, images, video, products, and text.

SI: The final question, also via Twitter, comes from @annatalerico: Should companies measure ROI from SEO, and if so, how?

RL: Of course companies should measure ROI from SEO. The how is a bit stickier to answer, because measurement is tied to goals, and every company and Web site has different goals and objectives. These might include more search visibility for important keywords and phrases, e.g. ranking higher in organic search results. But a more ROI-related metric would be tracking not only the traffic that found your site or pages via organic search results, but also tracking how much of that traffic converted into a desired action such as a click or a sale. Other factors play into this, of course, such as optimized landing pages, compelling copy, and a clear call-to-action. Search won't do all that heavy lifting! But if searchers can't find you, they can't take action, so using your analytics package to track changes in search-engine-generated traffic, and the keywords searchers are using to find your pages, are an essential first step in calculating ROI.

If you want to find out more about Lieb and her book, visit RebeccaLieb.com.

You CAN Handle These SEO Truths - Interview with Author Rebecca Lieb

Image of Rebecca Lieb

Here's this week's colun from MediaPost's Search Insider. It's a Part 1 of 2. For Part 2, please share any other questions you have for Rebecca in the blog's comments, via email to marketersstudio @ gmail . com or Twitter at @dberkowitz . If there are too many, I will still run the answers on the blog. Please submit questions by Friday so I can run them in the Tuesday column.

You CAN Handle These SEO Truths

If you're looking to make sure you're covering all bases with search engine optimization, a good place to start is Rebecca Lieb's new book, "The Truth about Search Engine Optimization." You'll find 51 truths in this book, covering everything from link development to video optimization. They're bite-sized chunks, and if you feel well-versed in some areas but want some help with others, it's easy to flip around and read it in the order that matters most to you.

Lieb, vice president of U.S. operations for Econsultancy, was previously editor in chief of ClickZ Network and also ran Search Engine Watch during some of her tenure there, so she's seen quite a few truths emerge. You can find out more at RebeccaLieb.com.

Meanwhile, it's time to get to the truth behind "The Truth." We'll continue this interview next week, so if you have other questions, post them in the comments or e-mail me and I'll work some into the second round. (Thanks for your questions on Twitter, Anna Talerico (@annatalerico) and Matt McGowan (@matt_mcgowan).

Search Insider: How did you decide on these 51 truths and techniques? Were there any you left off that you really wanted to include? Or did you come across a point where you wanted to stop at, say, 37 and the publisher said, "Give me 51 or no book deal"?

Rebecca Lieb: I'm glad to say that not only is the book about organic search, but the chapter count is totally organic too. That is to say, in writing it, I sat down and made a list of the topics people need to be at least briefed on to approach the subject of SEO holistically. The list totaled 51, and no one at FT Press gave me any arguments -- and neither did the book's highly knowledgeable technical editor, Amanda Watlington.

SI: Who needs this book the most?

RL: Anyone who needs to wrap their head around SEO. This isn't a book about how to code a Web page; it's a book about the concepts of being found online. Tons of people behind a myriad of Web sites are interested in that, from solo bloggers to Fortune 100 companies. It's not a book that's going to throw coding skills or high levels of technical expertise at you, but it will help you understand what makes a Web site "findable." That's useful information for someone not directly involved in SEO, but who's running, say, a marketing department and in the course of their job must have semi-coherent discussions with the people who are doing the nuts-and-bolts SEO stuff.

SI: If you had to write a book called "The One Truth of SEO," what would that one truth be?

RL: Content is king. But content covers a whole lot of bases: there's copy, there are title tags and meta data, there's local and vertical content -- even links can be regarded as content. Behind every great SEO initiative is a solid and sustainable content strategy.

SI: If content is king, where do links fit in the kingdom?

RL: Links point to content, and do so contextually -- at least, the best ones do. Implicitly, links say, "Hey, think this is interesting? Want to know more? Then look over here." A publishing analogy might be that links are the table of contents and footnotes all rolled into one. And links don't just say that to users, they convey the same message to search engine spiders as well. Well-executed and strategically placed links help spiders to better understand and index content. Links also help pave the way for spiders to find related and relevant content. Links are critical to the way you surf the Web, and search engines follow those same paths.

SI: You've been involved in covering this field for some time now. Is there anything that was really new or surprising to you as you put all this together? 

RL: You're right -- I've lived in this space for quite a while, since people were wondering what Google's revenue model was going to be! In the book I've worked hard to underscore the fact that SEO is a continually evolving process that's never done. It can always be improved upon. And that, of course, is because search is new and rapidly evolving. While writing this book, I kept a close eye on developments in universal search, local, vertical, video, and the other newer forms of search that are gaining in importance, both on the Web and to SEO strategies.

Minor Miracles And Major Feats of First-Page Rankings

I originally planned on calling today's MediaPost column "Feeding the 5,000, Ten Plagues, and First-Page Rankings," in a reference to miracles. My wife thought it was too obscure and wordy. I let MediaPost's editors break the tie and they agreed. So, now that it has a more logical title, enjoy the rest of the column, originally published in MediaPost.

Minor Miracles And Major Feats of First-Page Rankings

Nate Elliott by Alex Dunne via Flickr

Videos are more likely than text to get on the first page of Google's search results, according to Forrester Research's Nate Elliott. This is a huge story, but there's an even bigger angle: getting on the first page of Google's search results is really, really hard.

I missed Nate's initial blog post, but fortunately caught the subsequent NewTeeVee analysis. NewTeeVee reported, "Videos are 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results than text pages..." In a single sentence, this sums up the need for the importance of including videos as part of a search engine optimization program. Done -- I'm sold.

Read the comments to Nate's post for a few other perspectives, like Max Kalehoff describing how the viral nature of great videos makes them search engine bait, and Billy Ye noting how video results have a relatively fleeting presence in the top rankings compared to Web sites that maintain their authority more consistently. All of this matters, but if you have any video assets, you must consider how you're optimizing them. Say Nate's analysis is off and the real effect is 23x or 10x instead of 53x. Would you treat the study any differently? I wouldn't.

The numbers grew even more staggering. Nate blogged, "There were an average of 4.7 million text pages competing for a place on results pages with an average of just 9.4 text results -- giving each text page about a 500,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of results." Odds are, since you're reading this, you probably have a professional or deep personal connection to some Web site or another. I'd say the odds of you Googling that site from time to time are pretty high too. If you Google a popular query and the site ranks on the first page, you're witnessing a minor technological miracle, and a marvel of dedication by the rocket scientists you have working with you.

Nate looked at 40 of the most popular queries, so his study is focused on terms that are extremely popular. These are areas where there are massive amounts of content developed, both intentionally (to compete for prime search engine rankings) and organically (almost as a rule, popular queries will also be popular subjects for people and businesses to naturally create content around).

The research makes certain case studies seem all the more remarkable. One of my favorite SEO practitioners is a doctor in Dallas who has been optimizing listings around Google long before many of his patients were finding him that way. As I was writing this, I ran a search on "dallas botox," a popular and competitive term; Google Trends notes that five of the top-10 cities in Texas indexed for searches on "Botox" are in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. This doctor appeared as the top local business result and four of the top-10 organic listings, translating to five first-page rankings. I didn't see any ads for him this time, presumably because he calculated that with five first-page rankings, he can allocate his budget elsewhere.

Google says 92,700 results are competing for a spot on the first page, and while I'll allow Nate to calculate the odds of the doctor's feat, Dr. Adelglass should be pretty proud of himself. The odds of getting just one first-page ranking are daunting enough, but five? I'm not just applauding him because he's my father-in-law (if I really wanted to kiss up to him, I'd plug his main site, Skintastic.com, which is all about "making you more beautiful™"; on that note, please don't ask for the slogan of my father's gastroenterology practice). I just happen to be related to a guy who epitomizes what you can achieve in the face of these now quantifiably insurmountable odds.

There's a lot you can do with Nate's research. He provides a roadmap for the opportunity for video optimization, and you can go to town supporting your video strategy with YouTube Insights, as I described in a previous column. As with any research study, I also keep thinking of the follow-ups I'd like to see. How well do videos appear in the less frequent mid-tail searches? And what if this was applied beyond video? What are the odds of a business ranking on the first page of Google above the main natural search results in the local index, as my father-in-law does? And then there are books, images, products, and news, to name a few other universal search categories.

After reading over Nate's work and the related coverage, I'm left amazed by the odds against marketers, and it gives me even greater appreciation for this field I've been involved with now for half a decade. I'm even all the more impressed with the Skintastics out there who saw this coming long before "Google" was a verb.

Search Trends To Watch In 2009

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeHere's my last column of the year for MediaPost. Thanks for your readership, and I look forward to your feedback on my posts to come in 2009.

Between the economy affecting stock prices and the potential mergers and acquisitions discussed among several of the major search engines, there is a lot of uncertainty as we head into 2009. Yet we can anticipate several shifts in search based on what we've seen over the past decade and other signs in the media ecosystem. Here are some major changes to anticipate:

 Holistic -- In Every Sense

The word "holistic" should play out in a number of ways:

First, any significant media campaign or offline event drives search volume, so marketers must capture that demand by integrating search with other media planning.

Next, paid search and SEO should be planned in tandem for the best results. Several studies show that by integrating search engine marketing with search engine optimization, results are greater than the sum of its parts.

Lastly, expect the major search engines and others to push forward with new ways to infuse paid search listings with display and video media. This will make search also about engagement and not just clicks and conversions. To some degree, these new search engine offerings will be motivated by more concentrated efforts to attract large brand marketers . Additionally, given how effective search engine marketing is, the engines and portals will want to have a steady stream of upsell options. In the coming year, consumers may experience the most dramatic shift in the format of search engine results pages since the basic template was established roughly a decade ago.

Search Fragmentation

While the search engine landscape continues to be dominated by one player, new complexities keep emerging as search migrates far beyond the traditional engines.

This fall, comScore and Ad Age reported that YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the second-largest search engine; within days, YouTube announced its new search advertising platform. What's more, MySpace (563 million U.S. queries in October 2008, according to comScore) is a bigger search engine than both AOL (424 million) and Ask.com (362 million). Queries on eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon combined (980 million) nearly rival MSN.com (1.04 billion).

What does all of this mean for marketers?

It's true that not all queries are created equally. A searcher on a social network or video sharing site often wants something different than what they’re looking for on a standard search engine. But given the volume of consumer search activity (among other interactions) on these nontraditional search sources, it's important for marketers to be positioned the best way possible where those searches are happening.

New Models for SEO

These other search sources don't just operate in a vacuum; they impact the major search engines, too. Search engine optimization is shifting, from a focus of entirely maximizing a site's rank in the engines, to maximizing a site's reach across all the top-ranked listings on a search engine's results page. While many consumers go directly to a marketers' site, which should be positioned as prominently as possible in search engine results pages, many more consumers reach marketers through intermediary properties. These include blogs, social networks, photo sharing sites, Twitter, Wikipedia, and countless other social sites that tend to rank increasingly well in search engines. That means marketers have to shift their mindset from optimizing their Web site to optimizing their Web presence.

Your Car Engine's Your Search Engine

The biggest change in 2009 and beyond is that the device consumers search from will start to matter even more than which engine they use. Image via Wikipedia

The most obvious manifestation of this is mobile consumption. New mobile devices and platforms such as the iPhone and Google Android are focused on improving the search and Web experience. This will fuel searches from mobile devices; iPhone users enter a disproportionate number of mobile search queries, though other devices are catching up.

Marketers need to adapt their strategies to reach their target audiences on these devices, such as by optimizing messaging and landing pages, and providing more consumer value by leveraging the unique features of these devices. For instance, mobile devices support integration with SMS (text messaging), click-to-call, mobile couponing, and location-based services, all of which take advantage of the mobile platform in ways that aren't as natural for PC-based Web advertising.

Over time, this trend of searches shifting beyond the PC will encompass far more than mobile phones. Consider the new set-top boxes and television models that make it easier to search from the TV, while delivering a hybrid TV-Web experience. Then there's vehicle telematics -- anyone who's searched for a restaurant, attraction, or drug store via a GPS device on the road will appreciate how valuable that can be. With all of these examples, and others to come, the device plays a significant role in how and why consumers search.

Jakob Nielsen, What Are You Smoking?

Here's today's column, originally in MediaPost.

Dear Jakob Nielsen,

I almost missed the last newsletter you sent me, as it was delivered directly to my junk mail folder. Maybe Microsoft was so dismayed by your recent commentary that Outlook rebelled against you. Whatever the reason, I’m of two minds about your section on “What MS Can Do Without Y!” First, I thought you were joking and dismissed it outright. Then, I thought that if you were serious, someone needed to provide a rebuttal.

In your newsletter, you turn to Microsoft’s future and what it should do with the $50 billion which you say Steve Ballmer “needs to do something else with” now that it won’t acquire Yahoo (though you don’t mention why). Your entire enterprise is devoted to how publishers, marketers, and others can improve themselves by focusing on the consumer’s experience, but your ideas here would do the opposite: They’re in the worst interests of the consumer and they’d cripple Microsoft. I’ll address your points one by one.

Your concept overall is that you want Ballmer “to refund some of the outrageous sums harvested by search engines.” If Yahoo and Microsoft were making such outrageous sums, why would they need to join forces? Shouldn’t you address this letter to Google, which is making the most outrageous sums of anyone in online advertising? And if you did turn to Google, would you chide Google (and its sister nonprofit Google.org) for investing in such potentially beneficial technologies as WiMax, electric cars, and aerospace? What about giving back by hiring and paying taxes? How much needs to be refunded anyway?

Then you write what Ballmer should do. First, “Give back to the websites that create the content that search engines currently scrape for free: pay sites for only being indexed in one search engine and refuse the other engines. In particular, allow access to deep link archives of value-added content for users entering from your search engine. Value proportion [sic] to users: When you search on engine X, you find stuff that’s otherwise not available.”

Wouldn’t users achieve the best value by being able access the entire Web from multiple sources? How would users even remember what’s in which engine? Instead, Microsoft and other engines could learn from vertical search engines and better tailor results pages to vertical-specific queries. Just look at search engines such as Retrevo for consumer electronics and Kosmix for various verticals, including health, and how they add layers of intelligence about the query to improve the user experience. Then again, Microsoft acquired health search site Medstory and shopping site Jellyfish, so maybe it’s just an issue of using those assets better.

Here’s your next idea: “Give back to the users. For example, pay IT departments for redirecting all searches emanating from their company to engine X. Value prop to advertisers: if you want to reach the B2B audience, you need placement on our SERPs [search engine results pages] because that’s all business users see in 70% of the Fortune 500.”

I’m not a big fan of IT departments. It’s a really bad idea for me to write this publicly since no one will ever fix my computer again, but most IT people I’ve worked with are so condescending and insulting that I’d rather call Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for tech support than deal with them. They have this great way of giving me shoddy machinery and blaming it on me when it breaks. Your idea accomplishes one feat I never thought possible: You found a way that would make me loathe IT people even more.

If I’m trying to search on my favorite engine and it redirects to an engine I did not want to use, I will raise hell, and I may even start interviewing with other companies where the first question I’ll ask them is, “Can I use whatever search engine I want here?” I’m sure advertisers will pay a premium to reach these frustrated users wondering where their favorite search engine went. You’re essentially advising a corporate version of state-sponsored censorship.

Lastly, you write, “Finally, and most importantly: improve basic search performance. For example by creating human-readable summaries of the search results instead of the horrible 2-line snippets currently used. One idea is to hire a million people (probably no more than ~$1B/year) to use an instrumented browser that requires them to pass judgment on the usefulness of every search hit they visit. This data could allow sorting the SERP by usefulness instead of popularity and thus vastly improve the quality of searches.”

I agree with the “improve basic search performance part,” but you miss the boat on the rest. First of all, site owners can already improve those snippets by engaging in basic search engine optimization. Yahoo’s Open Search initiatives give sites even more power to make listings more useful, and other engines should follow suit. Why would some random person earning minimum wage (or the going rate in their home country) provide a better result description? For non-optimized listings, engines can still use their technology to better craft those descriptions automatically. Finally, search engines sort SERPs primarily by relevance and not popularity, which the engines need to do to minimize the results being gamed.

Jakob, please stop giving search engines unsolicited advice. I’m not a huge fan of Steve Ballmer; ever since I saw that monkey dance video of him, it’s been hard to take him seriously. But I clearly don’t hate him as much as you do. Apparently, I think more highly of consumers, too. Hey, it’s not all bad; I’m sure you’re at least winning more points with IT departments.

Your Favorite Search Insider (or one of ‘em),

David

Looking Back on the Future of Mobile

Here's today's column, originally published in MediaPost and continuing in the extended entry. If you're doing anything interesting with mobile marketing or the mobile web, I'd love to hear from you - post a comment or write me at marketersstudio [at] gmail [dot] com.

Looking Back on the Future of Mobile

Everyone’s had visions for the future of mobile, and now that the buzz on mobile marketing is back again, it’s a good time to do a spot check on my own prognosticating on mobile search.

The timing’s especially relevant for me, as I’ve finally joined the ranks of mobile Web surfers in earnest, with a recent upgrade to a smartphone (namely the Samsung SCH-i760 from Verizon). As I started surfing and searching, accessing Google’s mobile portal and downloading Yahoo Go, it brought back memories of a column I wrote in April 2005, “The Mobile-Local Redundancy,” which, for the record, is the only MediaPost column to ever reference the brilliant character actor Stephen Tobolowsky. More on that in a minute.

The 2005 column laid out what to expect for mobile, focusing on how central local search would be. I wrote, “Over the next several years, people won’t use Mobile-Local to make an online purchase; they’ll use it to find stores. They won’t purchase airline tickets; they’ll find transportation options to and from the hotel. It will facilitate spontaneity. Just as people use mobile phones to talk with people they might not otherwise bother calling, they’ll use mobile search to look for people, places, and things they might not have otherwise thought to look for at the moment.”

Nearly three years after writing that, I find the prediction has aged well over time. I’ll focus on two examples.

Does Anyone Still Doubt SEO?

For anyone who questions the importance of search engine optimization, and for anyone who wants a great read on how business is evolving, read Kevin Kelly's "Better Than Free." The search junkie in me loves this brief excerpt:

No matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention -- and most of it free -- being found is valuable.

Thanks to colleague Jesse Shaver for the link.

Search Like Its 1985

Via Organic's ThreeMinds blog, a German car rental company found a way to make their text ads stand out by turning them into ASCII art - the old-school method of creating pictures based on standard text characters.

This is brilliant for its creativity. Three thoughts:
1) Google won't allow this for the long haul. This should be relatively easy to flag. It's one of those campaigns you can only get away with so often. Though I wouldn't be surprised if a florist tried the classic rose ---'--,--@ or something of the sort soon.
2) The case study on BannerBlog mentions a 47% increase in the click-through rate. Great, but what did it do for conversions?
3) This is an interesting precursor for when Google expectedly experiments with images in the search ads. It's a tricky situation to manage, but expect the engines to test this out soon.

One aside: ThreeMinds is one of my favorite blogs to find interesting examples that I don't see everywhere else. Great work.