Social Media impacts every aspect of our cultures, from business, politics, journalism, media, and advertising. Within just the business realm, it impacts research, marketing, support, product development and employees within the firewall. Despite the vast impacts of this shift “power has shifted from large organizations to individual participants” as humans connect with other humans, we often forget to see the larger picture.

Aaron Wall is someone I respect, he is certainly a domain expert in search marketing, in his recent post The Inconvienent Truth About Social Media Marketing, he gives a perspective –that’s limited from a search marketers perspective –is bearish on social media marketing. Several people asked me to blog my responses, so here it is:

[Social media marketing has it’s challenges, yet success should not be measured on ’search marketing’ alone]

Social media has many problems on it’s own (and I’ll frequently point them out) but we should remember that while search monetization is a dominant form in our industry, it’s not the only way websites are monetizes, in fact the complete list is here of the many forms of web marketing.

We’re seeing many more cases where marketers don’t want to monetize directly with ads, but would rather be part of a community of dialog with customers, so they can listen to the marketplace and learn. Also, we’re seeing examples where companies want the message about a product to spread (but not from their own mouth) but from word of mouth marketing. Companies like Dell want to build next-generation products using tools like IdeaStorm –where the customers define the product specs –in order to build better.

In each of the above cases, social media is used in a way much more than just search marketing and advertising.

[The greatest opportunities lie where companies be part of communities where ads may not even be present]

So before we suggest that social media marketing is ineffective, we should first look at the bigger picture, and perhaps revisit the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

Think bigger my friends. (Update: Steve Rubel is)

For over a month, my blog was not being indexed by Google. I recently upgraded to a dedicated server, and apparently something wasn’t toggled correctly, and some websites found my blog to be a 403, permission issues. Although I was being indexed by Yahoo, MSN, ASK and others, google was no longer displaying my blog in any search results.

I’ve never spent money on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) nor do I go to any great efforts other than blogging best practices, to make sure I score well. I’ve been using Google as the main way to find my own blog posts, as it’s the fastest way, the native blog search returns way to many values, and not necessarily sorted by relevance. I wasn’t the only one, as a few readers emailed me and told me they couldn’t find my blog, apparently they use search to find me, rather than bookmark or subscribe.

Thanks to the various folks that have tried to offer some advice, although I ultimately found the solution by logging into Google’s webmaster and doing a site verify (have you done that?). I then contacted my host, and a few days later, it’s now easily found in the search results. Here’s what my web host said:

“Ah!, i found that you have any ip starting from 66.249 blocked, im not sure why this is here, probably to block google when you site was hosted on shared. I dont have any notes on your account that we did this for any issues on your private server, so i`ll go ahead and remove it.”

It’s now fixed. While many social media purists look down on SEO, one only realizes how important something is once it’s gone.

Update: I suggested to Dreamhost that this was an opportunity loss for me and it would be appreciated if they credited me a reasonable amount, they did, thanks, that was the right thing to do.

I’ve lost my mojo!

I used to tell people the easiest way to find me was to Google search “Web Strategy”, or even search for “Jeremiah”. In the last few days, I’ve noticed that I’ve fallen off the search results. What’s interesting is that my old blog that I’ve not updated in 1.5 years on blogspot (a Google property) scores high in the results, and this blog on wordpress (which I update daily) isn’t even on the first page.

Strangely, I still have many incoming links, increased traffic (according to Google analytics) and I’ve not changed my posting behavior. I certainly don’t do any black hat (or even white hat) SEO, what you see is what you get. I know things have been only going up for this blog as according to compete.com I get more visitors than Gartner.com.

I’ve been looking for answers, and some of my Google friends directed me to Matt’s blog, which I’ve been reading Matt Cutts blog (he’s the top blogger at Google, focused on search) but I’m not sure quite sure what to do. The other thought is that everyone else has just become more relevant than me. Thoughts?

Click To Play

Brian Keith (of Portent) and I have been interacting online from blogs, emails, and phonecalls for quite sometime. I’m glad to finally meet him in San Francisco on a roofop terrace at the FamilyOven headquarters. He’s involve with Search Marketing, and I asked him some key questions. And yes, he was avoiding the sun, those Seattle need to get out more.

BTW the Portent website has baby pictures of them, and it reads “We were born for Internet Marketing” clever!

Find out what the web strategist should know about Search Marketing before getting started.

Today Facebook announced that it will allow Google and other search engines to crawl it’s index pages. Previously, Facebook was a private network.

What’s the big impact to society?

For most folks (non-bloggers), when someone searches on their name (perhaps at the next job screening) their Facebook profile could come up higher than their business LinkedIn profile.

Brace yourself, personal and business lives are colliding.

Click To Play

I had the rare pleasure of having my friend David Berkowitz, who writes the Marketers Studio and a column on MediaPost visit me from New York. David and I have become fast friends as we share our passion for the web, it’s technology, social media (which he calls emerging media…whatever that means) and celebrated at last Jan’s BlogHaus.

David’s one of the most respected voices in the Search Marketing space, he was in from NY to speak at Google. If you’re reading this in email or a feedreader, access the post to see the embedded video interview.

Colleague Robert Scoble (who doesn’t want to be on Techmeme) suggests that human type systems (like the social graph) will be better at finding and delivering relevant information. It’s suggested that Google is already dead, but doesn’t realize it.

MacroSearch engines are too slow to adopt to MicroSearch engines that are looking at small groups of poeple, their network, and how the share information.

Watch his video and let me know what you think –I really believe he’s onto something again.

(Update: On a related vein, we should also be paying attention to the growing discussion about LifeStreams, a way of aggregating personal information. Done correctly, this could aid the social graph in finally organizing our personal and network data)

I know some of the top SEO consultants in the United States, he confided that he makes up to $500 an hour for his service, and clients are paying for it. The return? A website that is easier to find in Google and other search engine results. Previously, there has been challenges to this emerging industry, and the SEO industry stood back up and declared legitmacy.

I realize the benefits of being found quickly and easily through keywords that you’re tied to, I watch my logs and am able to see which keywords are yielding new visitors.

Oh, and if your corporation is launching a new product, I highly recommend you buy the keywords associated with the product, or optimize your product and get it crawled quickly. Why? Because at my previous company, when our competitor launched a new product, we blogged about it, and was in the top search results –above the competitor.

Where should you put your dollars? Paid or organic? At this session, I learned the most effective campaigns use a combination of both.

Not sure what to pay? read this report on SEO Pricing & Costs - What Should You Charge / How Much Should You Pay?

Neil Patel or Pronet Advertising has been helping me optimize my site, he’s shown me how to look at incoming keyword traffic and how to match and optimize my site to achieve maximum results. If you’ve questions, his blog is a good place to start.

Recommended reading from the last 7 days:

Marshall gives out some great ideas on how to launch a product using social media

Plenty of wallflowers: extension from Forrester’s research on Technographics

The impacts of Citizen Journalism in a recent bridge collapse

Online ad budgets to overtake newspaper budgets by 2011

Social Interaction Design White Papers by Adrian Chan

Stats: Usage of Social Networks by continent

Case study on Dell’s blog warrior

Search Engine optimization of Wordpress (be sure to see PPT)

Pew: Men are from Google, Women are from Yahoo

Dennis Howlett suggests data can be pulled out of Facebook

Ian from Conversation Marketing has a great video and “how to” on understanding what users want on your website.

What could you do with this data? Find out what users content they want, how they phrase their terms, what content is missing. Also analyze from where and when they used the search bar, it could provide some clues on what they’re looking for.

[Analyzing search logs right on one’s site is a an easy way to understand what users are looking for]

Yes another way to evaluate the user experience. Louis Rosenfeld has a speech, research, and a book on the same topic.

The following is live blogging while listening to the the Best Promo Show radio show.

John Meloche and Jim Turner on a live Talk Radio Show deidicated to Marketing and Making Money on the Internet it’s called The Best Promo Sohw

They’ve giving a series of questions to ask an SEO you plan to hire, be a savvy and armed consumer and know what to look for.

Question to ask SEOs during interview process:

How long have you been in business?If someone tells you they’ve been doing it for 10 years, likely it didn’t exist then. So they may be a fraud

What is your background? Do you have a background in marketing or sales?

Do you have long terms clients? Are they satisfied? Ask them to prove it with case studies and references, and even tried keyword searches

What made your competition get the first seaerch results, what made them get the top search results?

What’s a realistic traffic uptake I can expect? Ask them to provide a breakdown of previous keywords and projected ones in the future.

Finding a good SEO
A good test is to find an SEO that comes up top when you type SEO. Duh!

Getting banned, not good
Tip: Getting banned is horrible for your domain, and you may want to consider shutting it down. Getting into the sandbox is not so bad.

Pricing SEO, what are market prices?
It varies on keywords that you’re aiming for

What really matters?
Organic is what matters, content is king

Great show, great resource

Patricia Hursh of SmartSearch Corporation is our presenter, a veteran of search for nine years, I’m here at the Frost and Sullivan conference in Alexandria Virginia, a few miles from the White House. It was interesting to note that when I did a search for “smartsearch” a PPC ad came up, I clicked on it and it went to a unique homepage with a unique URL, they’re certainly practicing best practices.

Getting crawled and submitting to Search
What’s a great way for content to be found? Crawlers are effective, but the savvy web manager should be submitting their site map to Google webmaster. I did a review of these tools, when I covered Google Developer day. Properly optimized sites will get crawled, just a single link to you will help the process.

Link Building (aka linkbaiting)
Many vendors require their partners and customers to link to them, this can aid the overall effect. Engines look at over 50 different attributes to measure the quality of a link, so there’s a variety of factors.

A healthy organic search strategy is to create a process that encourages companies, partners, within their network.

Advanced strategies
Audience suggested that engines that see a lot of heavy linking from one server IP area may be frowned upon.

Also consider what content really belongs behind registration, by putting them behind a login they won’t be crawled.

Online and offline strategies? Case Study of Oprah mentioning a product on her show will result in large search queries the next day.

As you launch a product (or your competitor) there’s clever ways to drive traffic your way.

User Behavior on Google results
Drop off points, users are more likely to click on results that appear high in results. More results can be found from eye tracking
There’s a few major drop off points:

Below the fold of page one is a big drop of

Followed by page 2

After page 3 is virtually none

What do users click on?
Within search results, in B2B user clicks were the following:

Organic 74%

Paid Ads 19%

Why do users prefer organic over paid? Specific content types and perhaps trust. We don’t have the numbers for B2C, but the numbers aren’t as dramatic. Others in the audience suggested that PPC outperforms their Organic.

PPC vs SEO
Factors in determining your resource allocation

Type of Attribute: PPC vs SEO
Budget: Media budget | SEO is not free, requires resources
Speed to Market: Fast | SEO may take longer
Control over message: Lots of control | Less control
Flexibility: Strong | Less flexible
Longevity: Depends on budget | Longer term
Credibility: These may be co-dependent
Branding: These may be co-dependent
Competitive Market: Understanding how customers find your competitiors –leverage that to your benefit

Lee has session notes, be sure to check those out.

Google is growing, and folks are concernced it will favor it’s own tools and data over that of others

Dave Winer audaciously claims that Google will prefer and favor it’s own tools and applications than other third-party applications.

Dave Winer puts fear in my heart for a world where Google won’t support feeds from other than it’s recent acquisition, Feedburner:

“It could end up meaning “doesn’t work at all.” It’s quite possible in the second or third iteration that Google drops support for non-Feedburner feeds. It wouldn’t be unprecedented, far from it. Google Blogoscoped created a long list of Google products that “prefer” other Google products. I’ve never seen Google not do this when they had the chance.”

Dave also gives an example of Blogger, which was acquired by Google:

“The instant they bought Blogger they tied it to their toolbar. If they had used an open API the toolbar would have worked with all blogging tools. Google just doesn’t think that way, sorry to say.”

I’ve got my own findings: My previous blog was on blogspot, which I stopped publishing to over a year ago, it’s technorati Authority is 56 compared my current wordpress with 1356. This wordpress blog has 24 times that authority (incoming links) of my Blogspot site.

Yet, when I do a Google search on “Web Strategy” the blogspot URL comes up top.

When I try Yahoo, I get significantly different results, this domain comes up top

The same thing will likely happen for videos published on all networks. Google will start to favor it’s YouTube videos before any other network, I mean why wouldn’t they?

As Google continues to acquire more and more applications, the web becomes somewhat less democratized and those who align with Google products are more likely to succeed.

Dave’s not so audacious as it may first seem, he’s right, this will only continue as Google continues to grow.

Is this Right or Wrong? Should Google favor it’s own applications?

1) Wrong: standards or a governing body should impartially cleanse this, this is a vicious cycle, stop being Gevil.
2) Right: Google is building the best software network the world’s ever seen, the more power to them.
3) Indifferent: Laissez-faire, it’s what happens in free markets, let’s let it happen naturally.
4) Other thoughts: Leave a comment below

Update: Adam from Google has responded in my comments, be sure to read his perspective.

Small business’s realize that what happens on the web may impact customers. For example, restaurants that don’t create their own website will often have a review site (like yelp, chowhound, or yahoo reviews) be the top listed site for their business.

Here’s a few resources:

Make sure your website shows exactly what you site does, address information, contact info. Download Squad has 10 tips for small businesses. I’ve also suggested to friends with restaurants to consider using pictures of their restaurant and food. But again, contact info should go right up on first page, as users are often seeking how to get to your establishment.

SF Gate has some suggestions on search strategies, well narrow ones at that. By staying focused, your small business may have an opportunity in beating out larger companies in your region.

I’ve also started to notice that there are more cafe’s and restaurants live streaming their establishment. Often, these bustling small companies may benefit from showing the world they are hub’s of energy and activity.

Small businesses may also benefit from finding other online communities and connecting with peers, partners, or customers. I’ve heard some several folks that Intuit’s Quickbooks has a thriving online community for small businesses.

Lastly, check out Duct Tape Marketing blog, which has a constant stream of high quality content.

Leave a comment if you can suggest some other links.

I’m watching Andy Beal’s live show that he recorded live a few hours ago with Ustream, I was particularly glad when I saw he was going to do this, as I’ve been advising Ustream, they know how to reach the top bloggers. If you don’t know who Andy is, he’s pretty influential in the search space, Google and Yahoo employees read his blog.

If you’re short on time, and you want to find out what’s happening in the Internet Marketing space, you can turn on Andy’s show, Marketing Pilgrim Live turn up the volume and multi-task. I asked Andy about his show, and he said it’s:

“Marketing Pilgrim Live: Internet marketing consultant Andy Beal shares his thoughts on the week’s recent internet marketing news. In this week’s show, Andy discusses Facebook, Google’s law suits, web metrics and much more. “

What’s really interesting is that he said he’s giving up podcasting, because now he doesn’t have to edit. He wishes that Ustream would have a timer, to show how long they’ve been broadcasting. He also thinks it’s amazing that there’s 80 people watching Chris Pirillo’s live show, even when he’s doing nothing. He asks “Chris, what do you do when you want to pick your nose?”

Good stuff Andy, I’m really caught up now.

(Update: Other interesting video shows? Check out this wrapup show from Techno Marketer of all things social media and web)

Facebook is a closed garden with one-way doors.

This means that data comes in, but it’s not coming out –yet. I predict that Facebook will continue to have mass user adoption at the consumer level, when they get smart, they’ll use their online identity system as a widget, and it will be what Microsoft Passport never was.

In this following post from Inside Facebook, they suggests that Google is not relevant in Facebook, Facebook has it’s own news and feed ranking indexes and systems. Facebook has it’s own search tool, it’s own social network to find information.

[Future information finding systems will evolve to use data from your social network, yielding results based upon your trusted peers]

If search evolves, will we rely on personal social network features (what do my friends think and recommend) over search? Will we evolve to smaller network based searches? In many ways, this is what Mahalo was trying to overcome, the problem with that is that I don’t know (and therefore don’t trust) the editors creating the Mahalo data. This is why so many thought leaders are already thinking about their Facebook strategy.

Although Google continues to evolve it’s AI to build better search tools, trust continues to be the leading factor in finding information, that’s why I think that Google search results have much to be desired: popular is not the same as correct.

The future of search will contain human elements in addition to algorithms.

When I met Neil Patel at Searchnomics, I knew he was something special. Check out this podcast interview of Neil on Marketing Voices with Jennifer Jones.

Who’s Neil? He’s one of the top Social Media Optimizers and Search Engine Optimizers, in fact he’s even offered to help improve my blog, and we’ll demonstrate a change by making my analytics public. I’ll let you know more as I get closer to that project.

In any case, listen in and learn from Neil, he’s helped TechCrunch, Guy Kawasaki, and Jason Calcanis (after Jason said that SEO was a fraud, Neil took on the challenge and showed a 30% increase from organic traffic) What’s the secret to being a top blogger? Neil says it’s about having great content.

Google results are crap, but we use them anyways.

Many people are trying to game Google. In fact there’s a whole industry called Search Engine Optimization that focuses on doing this, many of them I know personally.

Here’s two reasons why Google Search results suck:

Google Results return most Popular
The problem with Google search results is that it returns the most “Popular” content, which doesn’t mean it’s always the “Right” content.

For example, Scoble often tells folks he’s “The number one Robert on Google”, yet there are Roberts that are more well known than him, such as Robert Redford or Robert Dinero.

Google yields content only on Web
This leads to problem two: Google delivers the most popular webpages or sites that exist on the internet, and it you’re not on the internet, do you matter? The problem is, Robert Redford and Robert Dinero have a stronger precence on the silver screen and TV than they do on the internet.

I come up top for Web Strategist, and Social Media Measurement, but does that mean I’m the best? the most accurate? nope, not at all.

So what will happen? How will we evolve? Boss John Furrier suggests that we look at social networks, communities, and those we trust to find information. I’ll bet part of the answer is there.

I’ve been given a login to the private version of Spock from friend Dave McClure a vertical search engine and was actually very pleased to see what was going on. While I’m often very cautious of people recreating existing communities this one is doing something different and doing something that matters.

Spock is a search engine for people. It has the ability to organize all of one’s personal information and aggreagate on to one page. I had a few questions after I had cruised around the application, think of it as like a wiki or tagging for individuals.

Here’s what I think are some key advantages for Spock: The platform lets us organize information around a person, rather than the applications that collect the data. Users can submit keywords about different individuals, so it’s really a peer based review. Great way for seeing how others think about an individual. You can also find other individuals with similar keywords and features, while there are certainly too many social networks out there this could potentially aggregate all that data for one profile. I see an opportunity to partner with other identity and profile networks like LinkedIn, Plaxo, and even OpenID. At some point the web will need a verifiable identity for individuals, it would be nice to have the option of coupling it with this data from Spock.

Dave connected me with Jay Bhatti, the co-founder and VP of Product, who was able to answer my questions. The intro that matters, are the keywords on his Spock profile:

smartvote Co-Founder of SPOCK.COMvote Wharton School of Businessvote Spock teamvote Spock board membervote product managervote liger lovervote athleticvote not just any bhattivote born in indiavote Accenturevote Wharton MBAvote Co-founder SPOCKvote smelly shirtsvote brown eyes

Jeremiah: I’m checking out Spock it looks interesting, it was great for my ‘ego surf’, as well as find out about others that share similar interests. So what is Spock? And how’d you get that catchy name?

Jay: Spock is a search application that organizes information around people to enable discovery and learning. We got the name in a open domain name auction. The original register did not renew the domain and it was bought by someone who put it up on sale and we had the winning bid

Jeremiah: Why Spock? What’s broken? What does Spock do that Google or Wikipedia can’t?

Jay: Searching for information around people is hard and broken. For example, you probably have thousands of people in your address book, but you could not quickly and easily find those that went to Stanford and work at Google (unless you spend hours organizing all this in your address book). Spock will solve the problem for you to easily and quickly organize the people in your world with minimal effort (Spock and the community will do most of the work in organizing this information for you).

Google organizes info around web documents, we organize information around people. which requires a much different approach (man and machine contribution) and much more sophisticated algorithms (how do we know a page is about a person and not a car? Google does not care what the web document is about, only its relevant keywords. Spock really cares about if the document is about a person, and that is hard to do).

Wikipedia is only for famous people. Spock is about every person on the planet. So, if your looking for a dentist in Sacramento who went to Stanford Dental school, you would use Spock, not Wikipedia.

Jeremiah: What can we expect in the future from Spock? Will this expand to other verticals?

Jay: We will stay focused on people. Spock will not expand into other verticals. We want to be the number 1 search application for people in the world. In the future, we will expand the richness of information around people with features like news and videos organized around people.

I hope this helps.

Jeremiah: Thanks Jay, it does help, good clarifications and segmentations, I look forward to seeing it more widely adopted.

Screenshots
Since most folks can’t login to Spock yet, I’ve been given permission to share a few screenshots, take a look:

Final Thoughts:
Spock was fun for the ego search, I could also find folks with common interests, that was helpful and interesting. I find Wikipedia restrictive and non-fun, Spock fulfills this. I see Spock has some interesting ways of aggregating ‘Universal Personal’ info but I would be a bit concerned that Google could easily offer this with some of their new “Universal Search” directions. Most important questions: Would I use Spock? Yes. Would I tell others? Yes. Would I invest money into it? There’s not enough with the current feature set.

Marrissa Mayar was the closing Keynote at Searchonomics today in Santa Clara, she gave an overview of all the Search tools as well as an announcement of a new program, read on to find out.

The Google Search Inventory:

Language Translator “Clear”
Google is investing heavily in automated translation, why? This technology can break down languages barriers. They’ve launched “Clear”, the slides showed Arabic translated to English. This tool will provide powerful results in multiple languages

Google Book Search
Google is working on crawling high quality content, such as their library program of 16 libraries and over a dozen publishers. For books that are not scanned, extensive metadata is being crawled and organized. A location based tool will help identify which libraries have the book you need available. For scanned books, Google will allow viewing of books of “limited preview” or “view all”. Additional metadata “About this book” will be improved. Lastly, a really interesting feature is a Google Mashup, “Places mentioned in this book”

Images and Video
Many improvements made over summer, including YouTube integration.

Speech Recognition empowers Video Search
Have you heard of “1800-GOOG-411” Users can call this phone number and do voice search. Voice to text can even empower for speech recognition over video for transcripts. Facial search is not far along.

Universal Search
Local books, news, and media appear more like an encyclopedia, it’s a content aggregator. Blogs maybe included by the end of year, Podcasts may take more time as less metadata available.

Mobile Search
Usually during summer google.com has a dip in usage, however this year, the analytics for mobile access has increased. Universal search will be present here.

Maps and Local
Google maps currently has traffic maps, data is from third parties to measure congestion, and also available on mobile devices. Streetview, although somewhat controversial, can save users time to navigation a local search experience.

Google APIs, Gears, Gadgets
These tools provide hooks into multiple applications. Users and developers can run their applications on a faster user experience. Google reader is now supported by Google Gears. Google Gadgets spans the desktop to the web experiences

iGoogle
Will provide a customized and personalized homepage for users, it also has skins. Some of the skins track the time zone and match sunrise and sunset and movement of celestial bodies. This will tie with Gadgets, the web becomes modular. The Gadget Wizard will allow develoepers to create new applications and gadgets. One of the most successful developers was 17 year old Caleb, who developed for his community, high school users, he’s received 6.5 Million views a week. What did they access? A periodic table, and other school-centric tools. Developing these tools is free.

“Gadgets are a new form of advertising, and that’s the type of interaction we want to foster”

Announcement: Google Gadget Ventures

Google sees an interesting trend in the Gadget network. There’s an industry showing early growth trends such as SEO and Ad Sense. This will encourage business ventures that rely on the Gadget platform.

Grants to develop Gadgets will be provided in two phases:

Tier 1) 250,000 page views will be tier 1, $5,000

Tier 2) Seed investment of $100,000, must have received tier 1 grant and must present a business plan

Google is going to fund the small developer to build on their platform, this is one of the first of it’s kind in an open network. The details about Google Gadget Ventures are here. Are you qualified? Read the FAQ. Or check the official Google Blog.

Related Sessions I covered at Searchnomics:

Searchnomics Conference: Social Networking User Generated Content and Search

Searchnomics Conference: Video Search Optimization and Marketing

Search meets Web Analytics at Searchnomics Conference