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PLUSThe year of the social business 6Picking the right mobile tactics 20iPadvertising: What to expect 22No one cares about your products 28

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Is it time to go under the hood and remove the “engine” altogether? p. 12

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contentsA

Follow SES Magazine attwitter.com/sesmag

May 2010

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features

columns

12 SEarch EnginE MarkETing vS. SEarch MarkETingShouldn’t we broaden the definition of search marketing to include all forms of marketing, media, and advertising that capture consumers who have expressed search intent? §

15 SES TOrOnTO SnEak prEviEwFrom social to video and local to mobile, the new online marketing frontier is here. Learn how to connect the dots at next month’s Search Engine Strategies conference. Learn about the speakers, sessions, and workshops that make SES Toronto a must-attend event. §

32 gLOSSarYTerms and acronyms every search marketer should know. §

10 TipS fOr TaLking TO YOur bOSS abOuT SOciaL MEdiaHow to research, plan, and budget for your social media presence — and how to present your findings and ideas to your manager. §

24 caLL Tracking SiMpLifiEdCall tracking allows businesses to optimize their marketing activities for those methods that generate the highest quality conversions. §

20 picking ThE righT MObiLE TacTicSA cheat sheet on some of the mobile marketing tactics that are available to marketers today. §

26 4 waYS TO waSTE EvEn MOrE TiME On cLiEnT rEpOrTSFour cornerstones of lazy agencies. Avoid these senseless practices to better serve your clients. §

22 ipadvErTiSing: whaT TO ExpEcTWill publishers embrace the iPad? Will they charge for content? How will ads differ from current online and mobile models? §

28 nO OnE carES abOuT YOur prOducTSPeople don’t care what you say about your services or products. They want to know what other people say about your products. §

30 Managing gLObaL wEbSiTESIt’s a lot of work to manage a global program, but the more you can make it uniform, measure it, and provide best practices to markets with little to no resources, you will have greater opportunities for success. §

become an SES affiliate today!Are you a blogger or publisher? Do you post about SES events?

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4 ShOuLd YOu wOrrY abOuT rEaL-TiME SEarch?As an online marketer, you need provide the content that’s in demand. Here’s what to consider on real-time search, including the roles of SEO and online reputation management. §

6 2010 and wEb 3.0: ThE YEar Of ThE SOciaL buSinESSThis year brings an opportunity for savvy businesses to chart their paths into the global consumer markets that are just now emerging. §

8 canadian MarkETErS ScOrE wiTh SOciaL MEdiaTwo campaigns where marketers used sporting events and social media to entice their target audiences to engage with the brands. §

A

Advertiser Index

advertiser pageAcquisio ......................................................... C2Brafton CustomNews ....................................... 3ClickZ.com iPhone app .................................. 14ClickZ.com iReviews ...................................... C3DMAT............................................................. 29iContact ......................................................... 23LinkWorth ........................................................ 5

advertiser pageNVI ................................................................ 11OneDegree.ca ................................................ 25Outrider Canada ............................................... 9Search Engine People .................................... 19SES World Tour .............................................. 31topseos.com .................................................. 21Wiley Publishing ............................................ C4

s n e a k previewses torontojune 9-11, 2010

SearchEngineStrategies.com May 2010

$3.01

PLUSThe year of the social business 6

Picking the right mobile tactics 20

iPadvertising: What to expect 22

No one cares about your products 28

LEARN MORE

about next month’s event!

p. 15-18

Is it time to go under the hood and remove the “engine” altogether? p. 12vs.Search Engine

Marketing

SearchMarketing

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For information about advertising in future issues, please contact sales [email protected] or (212) 457-4993.

Staff

SES: Volume 4, Issue 4 | May 2010© 2010 IncIsIve MedIa plc

enviroink.indd 1 10/1/08 10:44:38 AM

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Staff

Managing EditorContributors

Drew EastmeadEric Bader, Kathleen Colan,Dave Evans, Kevin Gibbons,Bill Hunt, Kevin Lee,Sage Lewis, Robin Neifield, Marc Poirier, Gary Stein, Tessa Wegert

MagazinE

VP, Content DevelopmentSenior Program Director

Program Coordinator

Stewart QuealyMarilyn CraftsJackie Ortez

prOgraM dEvELOpMEnT

SaLES & MarkETingSales Directors

Account Executives

Director, Client ServicesMarketing Director

Marketing ManagerWeb Designer

Online Operations ManagerOnline Operations Assoc.

Andrew KatzElaine MershonElaine RomeoPeter WesterholmElizabeth HustonKatie O’HeaJoAnn SimonelliAngela ManChristian GeorgeouRebecca HolzLouise LabergeAleksey Gershin

Executive Editor, ClickZDirector, SEW

Managing Editor, NewsSenior Editor, News

Staff WriterStaff WriterCopy Editor

Anna Maria VirziJonathan AllenZach RodgersKate KayeChristopher HeineJack MarshallCaitlin Rossman

Chief ExecutiveGroup Managing Director

Tim WellerJames Hanbury

cLickz & SEarch EnginE waTch

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Director, OperationsOperations Manager

Michele McDermottDan Hoskins

OpEraTiOnS

Matt McgowanPublisher, Head of U.S.

Mike grehanVP, Global Content Director

SES advisory boardComprised of both industry thought leaders and real-world practitioners, the Search Engine Strategies advisory board brings together top players in the field of interactive media and search. The team works to deliver continually cutting-edge search techniques, more integrated and relevant content, and professional development resources to SES attendees.

Matthew baileyPresidentSiteLogic

Thomas bindlFounder & CEORefined Labs GmbH

Mikel chertudiVP, Demand & Online MarketingOmniture

brett crosbyGroup PPMGoogle

bryan EisenbergBestselling authorbryaneisenberg.com

Jeff fergusonSr. Director, Online MarketingLocal.com

andrew goodmanPrincipalPage Zero Media

Mike grehan, co-chairVP & Global Content DirectorIncisive Media

bill huntPresidentBack Azimuth Consulting

anne kennedyManaging PartnerBeyond Ink

John MarshallCTOBeyond Ink

Jon MyersHead of Search/Assoc. DirectorMediavest

Lee OddenCEOTopRank Online Marketing

pauline OresSr. Marketing Mgr, Social MediaIBM Corporation

Stewart Quealy, co-chairVP, Content DevelopmentIncisive Media

Erica SchmidtGlobal Search DirectorIsobar

crispin SheridanSr. Director of Search Marketing Strategy, SAP Marketing

drew Eastmead | Managing Editor

about SES MagazineSES Magazine, now in its fourth year, is brought to you by ClickZ, the leading online

destination for news and expert advice in digital marketing. In this issue, you’ll find articles on the latest online trends, as well as a preview of our upcoming event, SES Toronto (June 9-11).

We are grateful to our contributors and readers alike, and we’re always interested to hear your feedback and learn about what topics you’d like to see (e-mail us at [email protected]).

For more information on advertising, subscribing, and contributing, or to view past issues, visit www.SearchEngineStrategies.com/ses-magazine.

You can also follow us on Twitter: @sesmag.

4 SES § May 2010 {ToronTo prevIew}

§ FOCUS: what’s next

Should you worry about real-time search?By Kevin Gibbons

Last year, there was a lot of buzz around real-time search, but so far there appears to have been less enthusiasm this spring. In recent discussions at search

events, several people have told me that the service has been a flop and hasn’t really changed our industry.

Clearly, Google feels it needs to provide real-time search to improve the relevancy of its results for breaking news, topical stories/events, and popular queries. But is it some-thing online marketers need to be concerned with?

Real-time search services allow you to look for information online as it’s published, meaning you can watch updates as they are made.

Normally, search engine spiders will crawl a website periodically, meaning it can take some time to find new content through a search engine. News and blog content is picked up much quicker, but it still relies on that content being written and published online, so there is an obvious time lag between how quickly a tweet and a blog post or news article can be written.

However, when it comes to rapidly-written, rapidly-published updates such as tweets on Twitter, there’s little point reading them five hours after they’ve been made — the situation could well have changed. You need to see them as they happen, and that’s what real-time search allows you to do.

what the search engines offerWhich search engines actually offer real-

time search? Bing moved quickly, partner-ing with Twitter to produce a results page just for that one platform. To try it, type in a trending topic from Twitter into Google or Bing, and you’ll quickly see a scrolling box of real-time search results appearing.

Because of the frequency of tweets, you’re likely to see the most recent updates every few seconds.

Bing shows the links relating to your search that are being shared the most — effectively, it’s the closest thing we have to peer-reviewed search engine results.

Google’s offering came a little later, but it’s a competitive live-search service. When you run a search for a popular term, you

can see loads of stuff. There are generic search results, but there are also news stories, plus breaking news if relevant.

You can also click “options” and “latest” to watch real-time results as they

come in. These are updated with Facebook comments, MySpace content, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca, and Twitter.

Yahoo has also signed a deal with Twitter; it will pay the microblogging site so its users can access their Twitter feeds within Yahoo properties, as well as see real-time updates in search results.

what does it mean for SEO?Any online marketer needs to provide the

content that’s in demand. So, get active on Twitter and other social media platforms (although, mostly Twitter, at least at the moment).

Don’t spam — you need to protect your reputation, as well as get brand mentions.

Keep up organic optimization efforts like blogging, and promote these articles through Twitter and other social media. If an online buzz is created around something you’ve written, then you’ll benefit from real-time search. As always, quality matters more than sheer numbers.

Of course, one issue with real-time search results is that they can force natural results further down the page — certainly with

Google. That means many firms will be tempted to plough more of their resources into PPC, helping them secure a more promi-nent place in the SERPs.

However, companies have to remember that people trust the organic search results more than paid advertising space. Devot-ing some time to both the natural results and PPC is still the best way to attract the maxi-mum number of visitors.

criticismsReal-time search isn’t popular with every-

one. Many SEO experts have complained that it values quantity over quality — just be the most recent person to Tweet around an issue if you want to secure a top listing in the search results.

Others think it’s effectively enabling real-time spam. That’s a real danger to an extent, but as the service grows in popularity, expect the engines to invest more money in keep-ing the results clear of valueless content. Somehow.

what else should i consider?Real-time search has many more implica-

tions for online reputation management than it does for optimization efforts.

As Twitter starts to buzz with indignation or amusement when a company screws up, that buzz isn’t contained to the micro-blog-ging platform. It’s spilling out into the search results, meaning even people who don’t use services like Twitter will see them.

That makes it imperative that companies monitor online buzz, and react swiftly and decisively to any criticisms. §

Kevin Gibbons is founder and di-rector of search at U.K. search agency SEOptimise. A highly re-spected blogger on search engine marketing and social media, Kevin writes frequently for SEOptimise and Econsultancy and can often be found actively contributing on Sphinn and Twitter. @kevgibbo

Real-time search has many more implications

for online reputation management than it does

for optimization efforts.

5SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

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The new year is underway, and “social media market-ing” nomenclature is fast giving way to “what’s real.” So, what’s real? For starters,

the core technologies of web 2.0, aka “the social web.” They are part of the main-stream Internet use around the world, and their impact on business — worldwide — is significant. The continued evolution of the web-based technology — whether deployed on a desktop, laptop, netbook, or smartphone — is pushing businesses to reconsider business design. The shift extends to the entire C-suite, not just the marketing department.

Living and working in India, it’s strik-ing how closely the Americas, Europe, and India parallel each other for those who have adopted and regularly use broadband social applications. Outside of these Inter-net users, the three are worlds apart. But for the creators and adopters of online social technology, the distinctions are minimal at best, and in most cases essentially non-existent. No less than eight chapters of Social Media Club have sprung up in India in the past six months. Philips, based in Amsterdam, has an incredible awareness of its own social presence. Starbucks and Dell in the U.S. are practically cliché examples of social media and the impact of connected

consumers on these businesses — and far beyond the marketing departments.

Compared with the mass markets, where undifferentiated goods and services are still sold on little more than price, the “social” markets have armed consumers with the information needed to make holistic deci-sions. These “informed” markets are grow-ing, too, as low-cost technology pushes richer information deeper into the market. In a striking example of technology adop-tion, India is poised to go to 11-digit mobile phone numbers in 2010: the country’s combined operators have issued roughly 800 million phone numbers to date. With 30 new market entrants vying for a share of India’s 3G spectrum, the capacity limit of one billion phone numbers (all mobile numbers in India begin with “9”) will surely be crossed in 2010. This kind of latent technology acceptance can dramati-cally — and rapidly — change marketplace dynamics.

But why wait? The current digital/social market is already in place. Take half the U.S. market and a good chunk of Europe — call it 100 million people, give or take — and then add to that 5 percent of the Indian market — which is to say, “add 50 million more.” Throw in savvy Internet users in Canada and Latin America, and a growing segment in China, and you’re

2010 and web 3.0: The year of the social businessBy Dave Evans


probably up to around 250 million regular users of advanced, social web technology worldwide. As a business that is looking for global growth, you’ve got the beginning of a real market. These 250 million consumers are surprisingly homogenous too: largely English-speaking (outside the U.S., typically with the command of one or two additional world languages) and upwardly mobile (the Indian economy is booming; it is creating a significant upper middle class that is more alike than different, no matter where you are). These consumers are largely within the important 15- to-45-year-old age bracket. They are very aware of the technologies that facilitate smart purchases, and of the global issues they face. They are connected, and they think collectively.

2010 brings an opportunity for savvy businesses — adopting nothing short of comprehensive social business design — to chart their paths into the global consumer markets that are just now emerging. To be sure, we’ve had global, multi-national busi-nesses for years: centrally-run, they have approached national markets as distinct — citing regional and cultural differences. But a sense of shared experience — of commonality versus exclusivity — is also developing and is powered in a large part by global social communities. Facebook has 400 million members worldwide, in some-thing approaching 50 languages. Travel and discovery is no longer about going some-place far away and bringing back artifacts of exotic foreign experiences that friends and family have never heard of. Now, it’s more about going some place far away to connect in person with someone you’ve already virtually met, and to experience what you’ve become familiar with through shared personal media and online social interaction. For the digitally aware, the social web offers the world — travel just makes it real.

PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi is a powerful example of just this kind of transformative approach to global business leadership. The Chennai, India-born 50-something execu-tive was formerly associated with the Boston Consulting Group. Raised as a vegetarian, she now heads a soft drink and snack foods firm. She visited China recently and chose locations outside the typical corporate must-sees purposely to “understand what makes China’s markets tick.” She’s the new model of a global executive.

Consider the impact getting China right will have on Pepsi: average soft drink consumption in China last year amounted to about 35 eight-ounce servings per person — less than one soda per week — compared

with 125 worldwide and a whopping 789 — or roughly three sodas per day — in the U.S. And that’s just the soft drink busi-ness. Personally, I’ve become a big fan of Kurkure (pronounced KER-ker-ay), a PepsiCo snack food in India that would be a smash hit as a part of U.S. football tailgate parties. Combined with its introduction of fully compostable packaging, Pepsi’s global awareness is tapping the connectedness and sensibilities of the emerging social markets: By smartly innovating and participating through well-designed social applications, Pepsi is building the organic conversations that will drive its continued success.

Let’s dial it back to the development of marketing and business programs that lever-age the increasingly connected and social nature of marketplace interactions. The contemporary social business builds on this — call it web 2.0 — and then takes it one step further: It uses the information gained through the extraction of meaning to shape and evolve the busi-ness itself. In other words, the business feeds off of what its customers are saying by connecting the substance of the conver-sation to its own employees, suppliers, and business partners. This is the emergence of Web 3.0 — the semantic or “meaning-based” web — and the application of consumer-driven business design. What might this look like in practice?

Consider the “Good Guide,” a socially connected mobile application that pres-ents itself as a marketing application, but in reality carries a stick that reaches far beyond the CMO. Mobile applications for smartphones that scan barcodes and present pricing data along with customer reviews are becoming common, and in particular within this 250 million-strong and growing globally-connected consumer base. I used my Android-based G1 to scan the barcodes in the aisles at Target when I was looking for a portable spin-style toothbrush for my travel kit. If I’m doing it, trust me: Everyone is doing it.

In addition to features and reviews, the Good Guide serves up health, environmen-tal, and societal impact ratings. A high score on “society,” for example, means the prod-uct in question is offered by a company with responsible investment polices, equitable hiring practices, an appropriate commitment to philanthropy, and a firm policy toward workplace diversity. Say what? Yes, all of

the above are now in-store purchase deci-sion factors. For those who have attended my American Marketing Association social media workshops, you’ve heard me talk about “carbon footprint” as the decision factor for household purchases.

For a growing segment of your market, it’s no longer just price and availability. As a CMO, what is your strategy for dealing with an “advocate mom” who is making her deci-sion — and influencing her friends — based on your firm’s hiring practices, investment policies, and social impact and hiring poli-cies? Your strategy had better involve the

CEO, COO, and the rest of the C-suite. And it should defi-nitely involve your customers, suppliers, and employees.

If this seems a stretch, consider that 250 million globally

connected, influential customers are moving up fast on Maslow’s triangle. For them, the factors driving a purchase decision are not limited to price, proximity, and basic features. More and more it’s about larger issues with personal relevance, about the way in which this immediate decision plays out over a lifetime of consequence, of shared global responsibility, and the realization that the world around us is the world we make it. The evolution of the social business — and the Web 3.0 technologies that will power it — are built out of this shared and collective knowledge. Make 2010 the year you put it to work in the design and operation of your business. §

Dave is the Consulting Director with 2020Social, based in New Delhi, India, and the author of “So-cial Media Marketing: An Hour a Day,” a practical, hands-on guide to implementing and measuring social media as part of an inte-grated marketing program. Build-

ing on the approach he outlines in his book, Dave lis-tens to what a client’s business communications needs are, then evaluates current operations, market-ing, and management processes. Working alongside his clients, Dave develops an effective, measured ap-proach to using social media and achieving organiza-tional and business goals. @evansdave

Travel today is about going some place far away to connect with someone

or something you’ve already virtually met.

FOCUS: social §

want to learn more?SES Toronto will feature several sessions onsocial, including “Successfully IntegratingSearch & Social Media.” For more information, visit

SearchEngineStrategies.com/toronto


§ FOCUS: social

Canadian marketers score with social mediaBy Tessa Wegert

This year’s Super Bowl provided ample examples of how to successfully integrate a tradi-tional TV media buy with social media to drive online visits that

promote consumer interaction. Advertisers that scored big with this strategy included Budweiser, which invited consumers to vote on Facebook for their pick of three possible Super Bowl spots.

While much of the attention Budweiser received was related to its campaign in the

American market, Canadian consum-ers got their own taste of the brand, and it was just as reliant on social media.

In the Cana-dian campaign, the brand used a one-day contest to further encour-age visits to the Budweiser Canada Facebook Page. The brand ran a series of four

15-second Super Bowl spots related to Bud Canada’s ongoing “Bud Plane Flight Atten-dants” effort. Each ad drove viewers to Face-book, where they could sign up for a chance to win premium seats aboard the Bud Plane — a jet that takes winners from Budweiser contests to the Super Bowl — to next year’s event.

According to Labatt Breweries of Canada, the campaign, which was created with inter-active agency Grip Limited of Toronto, generated more than 30,000 new Budweiser Canada Facebook page fans in one day (for

a total of about 126,000), as well as several thousand contest entries. Although the brand officially launched the contest at the begin-ning of the day, the huge jump in entries came only after the first spot had aired during the game.

During the following week, the focus shifted from the Super Bowl to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, where inte-grated ad campaigns from Canadian market-ers also appeared.

Among them was the Canadian Tour-ism Commission’s (CTC) “Locals Know” campaign. Unlike the Canadian tourism campaign seen on the American networks, this one invited resi-dents to explore their own country’s exotic and exciting sights, from Québec’s ice hotel to British Columbia’s hot springs. Like any successful modern-day cross-media campaign, this one, created by DDB Canada, included TV spots airing on local stations during the Olympic coverage, print ads, and an online presence. Offline creative acts as a teaser for online offerings, with enticing imagery of a mystery location and messaging like, “Where is this? LocalsKnow.ca.”

This microsite has done a terrific job of relaying the campaign message and inte-grating social media. Visitors to the site can view specific destinations from across the country, read consumer-generated reviews and commentary, and even upload their own photographs and videos to help build out the site in the style of a wiki. Travel offers provided by the CTC’s partners deliver the impetus visitors need to go from idly brows-ing the site to actively planning a vacation.

To further encourage consumer-gener-ated submissions, site users are invited to tender their own picks for must-see Cana-dian places in an “ultimate upload” contest that could win them a vacation to one of the site’s locations. But the use of social media extends beyond consumer-generated

material; the microsite also links to a Twitter feed featuring daily photos that help promote the contest, a Flickr gallery, and a YouTube channel that plays to out-of-country visitors in addition to Canadians.

Like Budweiser with its Super Bowl contest, the CTC gives consumers a good reason to visit its Facebook page. Fans can take a quiz about local spots to determine how well they know their country and post their score to their Facebook wall or directly to Twitter as a tweet.

The “Locals Know” effort isn’t new; it’s an extension of a campaign that ran last summer. While the CTC hasn’t yet released

data on the results of this winter itera-tion, reports state that the original micro-site attracted 55,000 unique visitors each week and, accord-ing to the CTC, ulti-mately resulted in

about 200,000 Canadians choosing to plan domestic vacations instead of going abroad. And just in case those stats weren’t enough, “Locals Know” was also named one of the top tourism campaigns in the world by Forbes.com.

Increasingly, social media is proving to be the missing link between television and the web. Whereas past initiatives drove consum-ers to a site and left them at a loss for what to do next, social media allows marketers to entice their target audiences with any number of interactive activities that extend their engagement with the brand. §

Tessa Wegert is an interactive me-dia strategist with Enlighten, one of the first full-service digital mar-keting strategy and services agencies, serving such brands as Food Network, Hunter Douglas, and Jergens. An industry veteran, Tessa has worked in online media

buying and planning, marketing, and online copywrit-ing since 1999. She is an active freelance writer, is frequently quoted as an industry expert, and speaks regularly at conferences and events. @tessawegert

Increasingly, social media is proving to be

the missing link between television and the web.

39.5%Google-owned properties,

including YouTube, accounted for 39.5 percent online video views in January 2010. Hulu

ranked second with 2.8 percent, followed by Microsoft and Yahoo sites, respectively.

Source: comScore

A For more details, check outClickZ Stats.

want to learn more?SES Toronto will feature several Canadian-centric sessions, including “Canada-SpecificSEO & PPC Issues.” For more information, visit



3/31/10 9:21 AM


§ FOCUS: social

Tips for talking to your boss about social mediaBy Robin Neifield

Back in the early digital days, we often fielded panicked calls from in-house market-ing personnel whose C-level executive demanded that they

secure the top organic search listings in the major search engines. Thank God most busi-ness people now understand both the value and difficulty of that feat.

Today’s equivalent is the overworked, understaffed, and stressed out in-house marketing departments that are asked to start tweeting or launch a Facebook page — yesterday. When your boss comes blowing into the room demand-ing that you make an immediate splash in social media, deflect any attempt at forcing an ill-conceived tactical launch by asking for a short period of time to gather and present your research, plan, and budget.

The homework § Create an organizational chart of all the different departments or divisions that a social media effort might touch. Think HR, PR, legal, marketing, customer service, and others. Find out who else in those departments was issued an edict, and partner with them to share the load. Create a best-practice approach to a successful social media program that meets enterprise needs.

§ Create an audience profile; then spend time understanding how your audience uses the web and social media, and what they would find relevant and valuable associated with your brand or company. This will form the foundation of your effort.

§ Check out the direct competition in social media as well as others who share your audience. Find what appears to be successful efforts, and try to estimate the effort associated with their work. Double it — I am certain

you underestimated it. Ask your boss about budgetary support because these efforts are not free. Strategy, creative, outreach, internal training, and many other items come into play, and they all require an outright expense or the use of expensive and scarce resources to support.

§ Find the aimless, ill-conceived, or abandoned efforts in the reviewed competitive field, and highlight them as well. We can learn from failed

experiments just as surely as successful ones. § Bring in the

creative team. There is thought required to build the best program or campaign. It takes time and special skill

sets — not least of which is experience in social media.

§ Develop both a content strategy and a content plan with resources outlined. Social media programs require care and feeding. Conversations must be nurtured and followed.

§ Put together a realistic launch timeline that allows for iterations of learning.

§ Identify a monitoring and listening tool to help you regularly report on and tweak your program. Develop a mock dashboard for your boss that will capture and show key metrics from your social media efforts.

§ Create a set of guiding principles, and defend it from the temptations of others to use the channels you are so carefully crafting as push vehicles for marketing messages. If you have to, distribute daily leaflets that state: “Our social media program is about our customers — not about us.”

The conversation § Ask your manager if you can count on his support for this effort and budget for at least two years. Social media is

about building relationships over time, and you don’t want to abandon this prematurely.

§ Ask what he is willing to give. Most often the core elements of the successful programs you found in your homework offered something of value to the audience. Is your company prepared to invest in building a program and offering content, tools, discounts, entertainment, access to other like members, or something else in exchange for goodwill and engagement?

§ Talk goals. Like any other marketing effort, unless you have a road map, you will be forever lost. Insist on defining clear goals for the proposed program well before you talk about any specific tactics.

§ Remove “viral” from your vocabulary. You can’t reasonably plan to get viral uptake — so don’t plan on it. It is as much a strategy as a lottery ticket is a retirement plan. Lots of smart, relevant, entertaining, and useful content never makes it past a small audience.

§ Set regular check-in meetings where you can discuss the program performance against the goals you set.

No boss can fail to be impressed by your preparation and the smart approach you will have outlined. This will balance an urgent request with an action plan that puts business goals and audience needs first. §

Robin Neifield is the CEO and co-founder of NetPlus Marketing Inc., a top 50 interactive agency estab-lished in 1996 to focus exclusively on online marketing and advertis-ing best practices. Robin brings innovative strategy and a depth and breadth of marketing experi-

ence to the agency. She is a frequent speaker at na-tional industry events, including ad:tech, Search En-gine Strategies, and Online Marketing Summit, and she is a sought-after resource for industry publications for her insights on digital strategy, social media mar-keting, and behavioral targeting. @rneifield

Your social media program is about

your customers —not about you.


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Is it time to go under the hood and remove the “engine” altogether?

vs.Search Engine Marketing

SearchMarketing


The recently released 2010 SEMPO “State of Search Engine Marketing Report” is a whopping 110 pages long. If you want to know what your

competitors and colleagues are thinking and doing, it’s a great read, and it could make the difference between success and failure for your campaigns and initiatives this year. The survey report and results were made available at no cost to SEMPO members and those who responded to the survey. In addition, the report can be purchased online, so if you want one you’ll have to decide whether to join SEMPO or, for a bit less money, get the report from Econsultancy. (As a SEMPO board member, you can guess my recommendation.)

Take the ‘engine’ out of SEMBefore looking at some highlights of the

report, I’m compelled to rant on an issue that I’ve been thinking about for a while. It’s time we kill the word “engine” in the phrase “search engine marketing.” Why? Many of the forms of search marketing that we as marketers engage in are now independent of the search engine results page (SERP) and even of the search engines themselves.

So, we must broaden the definition of search marketing to include all forms of marketing, media, or advertising that capture consumers who have recently expressed either search intent or a desire to learn more about a specific subject or keyword. Every year, more dollars will flow into forms of search marketing that extend beyond the SERP.

This of course creates a quandary for the acronym “SEM.” Assuming we want to keep this acronym, we as an industry

need to clarify that search engine market-ing (SEM) signifies not just pay-per-click (PPC) search, but is a term that includes all forms of search marketing: organic search engine optimization (SEO), social media search marketing, PPC search advertising, directory advertising, Internet yellow page advertising, comparison shopping engines, search-behavior driven display advertising, video search advertising, and more.

Ironically, one of the areas of search marketing that is perhaps furthest from “pure search” is contextual keyword-driven advertising, something that has been included by most marketers within the definition of SEM, mostly due to Google being the primary supplier of contextual text-link, keyword-driven ad placements with its AdSense for the Google Content Network.

Yet, even in the instance of AdSense, one can make the argu-ment that when advertising is charged on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, the consumer has telegraphed search intent based on the combination of context (driven-off keywords, phrases, and concepts) and the fact that the consumer chose the ad by click-ing on it — thereby demonstrating clear curiosity about what lies on the other side of the ad.

Where does it stop? Should all advertising that results in curious consumer behavior be considered search? Clearly not, and the lines are going to remain fuzzy for some time, particularly given that even printed yellow page directories could easily be defined as search marketing under a strict definition of “search.”

On a side note, the day I wrote this column, I got an e-mail notification that Yahoo is shutting down YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network) — its attempt at a self-serve contextual ad platform for publishers. I don’t doubt that the upcoming Microsoft integration has something to do with this announcement.

highlights of SEMpO’s annual report

Let’s take a closer look at the SEMPO report that got me thinking about the

boundaries of SEM. Since Google’s Q4 numbers have been available for a while, it should come as no surprise that the search industry (where revenues are made up primarily of PPC search advertising) has grown, even in 2009, when the economy took a severe beating. Paid search wasn’t the

only form of search marketing to grow, and — per my earlier point — because more forms of marketing are being classified as search marketing, the growth came from

experimentation in these new areas as well.The key takeaway from SEMPO’s “State

of Search Engine Marketing Report” is that the North American search engine market-ing industry is estimated to grow 14 percent, from $14.6 billion in 2009 to $16.6 billion by the end of 2010. Clearly, some of this growth will be accomplished more easily because 2009 was a slower year of growth than prior years (8 percent).

Bottom line: if you expect to coast though the year with less competition in the paid search markets, clearly you are mistaken. You had better have your teams and resources ready. §

Kevin Lee, Didit cofounder and executive chairman, has been an acknowledged search engine marketing expert since 1995. His latest book, “Search Engine Ad-vertising,” has been widely praised. Industry leadership in-cludes being a founding board

member of SEMPO and its first elected chairman. The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, The New York Times, USA Today, and other press quote Kevin regu-larly. He lectures at leading industry conferences, plus New York, Columbia, Fordham, and Pace universities. Kevin earned his MBA from the Yale School of Man-agement in 1992 and lives in Manhattan with his wife and children. @Kevin_Lee_QED

The search industry grew even in 2009, when many Western economies took

a severe beating.

COVER STORY / FOCUS: the state of search §

how new is the data in the SEMpO report?To avoid any potential confusion, I’d like to point out that due to the timing of the report this year, the SEMPO research committee called it a 2010 report because the data was collected primarily in 2010, unlike prior years when data was gathered late in the year prior to release. However, the longitudinal data is still fairly accurate, even though it looks like SEMPO skipped a year if you look at prior results. It was more of a naming convention.

how can i purchase the report?Those interested in acquiring the 2010 SEMPO State of Search Engine Marketing Report have two options: A Join SEMPO A Purchase it from Econsultancy athttp://econsultancy.com/reports/state-of-search


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Search Engine Strategies is the pioneer of search education. It’s the conference where industry visionaries and leaders gather each year to discuss the newest trends, share insights, and present the strategic action plans you need.

agenda

Thursday, June 10

Link Building Basics Speaking Geek: How MarketersCan Work with Web Developers Managing a Global SEO Campaign

Sponsored Session Bringing SEO In-House: The Pros & Cons Augmented Reality: A New World Order

9-10:15a

10:15-11a

11a-12p

1-2p

2:30-3:30p

3:45-5p

5-6p

SEO Then & Now:What’s the Same? What’s New? Video: The Next Marketing Frontier 21 Secrets of Top-Converting Websites

Information Architecture,Site Performance Tuning, & SEO

Successfully IntegratingSearch & Social Media Sponsored Session

conference welcome & Opening keynote: Peter Morville, President, Semantic Studios

Grand Opening of the Expo Hall (open 10a-6p)

networking cocktail reception — Expo Hall

Track 1 Track 2 Track 3Track

Friday, June 11

Introduction to Information Retrievalon the Web Canada-Specific SEO & PPC Issues Search Ads & Landing Page Clinic

Search, PR & the Social Butterfly Reserved for Late-Breaking Topic Tough Love: Get Your Site Tuned Up!

9-10a

10:30-11:30a

11:45a-12:45p

1:45-2:45p

3:15-4:15p

4:15-5:15p

SEO Super Tools Eye-Tacking Research Update Twitter Nation

Introduction to Paid Search Meaningful SEO Metrics Sponsored Session

Morning keynote: Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google

Open Mic: Black Hat White Hat — Does it Really Matter Anymore?

Track 1 Track 2 Track 3Track


Keynote Speakers

Peter Morville is acknowledged as a father of information architecture. He has authored the best-selling books, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Ambient Findability. as a key innovator, Peter will be bringing ideas on the changing nature of organic and paid search, ensuring attendees with go away with new strategies for implementing their marketing programs.

as a developer programs tech lead, Maile coordinates google Webmaster central outreach efforts, such as the Webmaster central Blog. Previously, she was a systems integration consultant for several pharmaceutical and technology companies and the Department of Defense. Maile earned a B.a. in cognitive science with a computer science emphasis from the university of california at Berkeley.

Peter morvillePresidentSemantic Studios

maile ohyeSr. Developer Programs EngineerGoogle

Sample SessionsWednesday, June 9 (training)

Partnered training (Bruce Clay):Search Engine Optimization (SEO) TrainingThis course covers SEO methodology, concepts, and strategies, providing the process needed to achieve significant traffic.

Partnered training (Page Zero Media):paid Search Training: core concepts + resources for relentless improvementToo many companies fail to capitalize on PPC op-portunities. Paid search is highly profitable if fully optimized, but it can also be a ticking time bomb.

Search Engine Strategies training courses:google adwords Tactics to improve Your rOiIncrease your AdWords profitability — we’ll dive into the psychology of search, determine how to choose the correct keywords, and learn how effective ad copy can generate more clicks and increase conversions.

building a content Strategy to Maximize Your Search & Social EffortsTurn a solid list of targeted keywords into a strategic search and social outreach plan designed to inform, persuade, and ultimately convert your target market.

thursday, June 10video: The next Marketing frontierVideo has found its way into the daily routines of most Internet users. This panel will cover the latest developments in video-based marketing, including ad networks, formats, and more.

Successfully integrating Search & Social MediaWith blogs, user-generated content, tweets, and Facebook/LinkedIn profiles ranking highly in Google, what is more important than integrating your search and social media strategies to ensure brand reach, integrity, and of course rankings?

Link building basicsDiscover how search engines rely on link analysis as an important component for ranking web pages. You will also learn how to increase traffic to your site.

Managing a global SEO campaignAs the world becomes smaller and search marketing becomes more complex, the era of “ranking well in Google” is over. This session tackles issues critical to successfully developing, optimizing, and managing the global campaigns that will meet next-generation marketing goals, without losing control or your mind.

friday, June 11Twitter nationLearn why subtle, suggestive marketing works best on Twitter — and how to automate effectively. Plus, strategies to outpace your competitors.

introduction to paid SearchPaid placement is a form of search advertising that provides a top ranking in return for payment. Every major search engine offers a paid placement program. Learn what’s available in this session that is especially geared toward beginners, with details from major providers and advice on how to succeed.

canada-Specific SEO & ppc issuesWhile many SEO matters are common globally, Cana-dian companies face a unique collection of issues due to our proximity to the United States. Panelists offer a variety of practical approaches to dealing with a host of Canada-specific SEO and PPC challenges.

Search ads & Landing page clinicYour ad copy and landing page contents should be aligned for a smooth and profitable visitor experience. This clinic will examine actual ads and landing pages offered up by volunteers from the audience.

Sponsors & ExhibitorsFor the most up-to-date list of SES Toronto sponsors and exhibitors, visitSearchEngineStrategies.com/toronto

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Marketwire, Inc.

Microsoft presents Bing

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Outrider Canada

Search Engine People Inc.

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Phone +1 (800) 955-2719

mail Search Engine Strategies 120 Broadway, 6th Floor new york, ny 10271

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pass dates Early bird rate (through May 21) regular rate (after May 21)

Platinum Passport 2 days $1,095 SavingS Of $200! $1,295

One-Day Pass Any 1 day $695 SavingS Of $100! $795

Expo Only Pass June 10-11 Free in advance $50 on site

SEM Training June 9 Full day $1,195, Half-day $695

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§ FOCUS: mobile

Picking the right mobile tactics By Eric Bader

Mobile marketing pres-ents a dizzying array of opportunities for brands to invest in, but as any marketer will tell you,

the hardest part isn’t deciding whether to do mobile, but what kind of mobile marketing to do. Here’s a cheat sheet on some of the mobile marketing tactics that are available to marketers today.

SMSSMS, also known as text messaging, is an

excellent way to generate a response from a consumer. Tag your other media with a short code and a keyword, provide a clear message of purpose that motivates the consumer to act, and you’ve got a response, a contest entry, and a name in a database in a just a couple of easy steps. SMS interactions are in real time, at the relevant location, and in context with the message.

And no, SMS isn’t “old technology,” in light of all the new mobile technologies that seemingly launch every week. SMS can reach nearly every mobile device user worldwide. With that ubiquity, along with the fact that most people text every day with friends and colleagues, you’ve got a proven, easy-to-use channel that produces interactions and valu-able user data with every program.

Mobile websitesMobile websites are essential to using

mobile for brand marketing. Your customers need some place to land after you’ve engaged them with your message. A well-optimized mobile website efficiently moves consumers to the content or functionality that pays off the campaign messaging and allows market-ers to complete the loop on the engagement, including sales, leads, and a phone call — all

with rich data about each action.Most importantly, brand marketers

shouldn’t just rely on their online site serv-ing the needs of their mobile interactions with consumers. Most online sites look and operate terribly on a mobile browser and can either kill or impede the intended marketing experience for consumers. Unless your site is optimized for the unique dimensions and uses of mobile, it’s generally going to look cluttered, the buttons will be tiny, the pages will be too long and wide, and applications such as Flash won’t work most of the time.

Even if it’s just a mobile landing page that handles consumer traffic driven by your mobile advertising, it’s a worthy invest-ment for the benefit of consumer experience, completing the program, and generating valuable user data.

augmented realityAugmented reality is one of the newer

technology applications that marketers are being pitched more and more. But it actu-ally isn’t that new. On TV, for example,

augmented reality is used for the first down markers that you see overlaid on the screen during football games. It’s not really there on the field, but it

enhances the experience for the viewers by mixing real life and computer-generated or applied information.

In mobile, augmented reality is used to overlay information (e.g., data and advertis-ing on top of real-life images). Some uses include ways to allow a consumer to use a camera phone to view a street, for exam-ple, and an augmented reality application enhances the view by overlaying contextu-ally relevant data — information about busi-nesses, prices, promotions, and even video that refers to what the device is looking at.

Augmented reality is compelling because it brings together some of the most valu-able tactics that marketers want in engag-ing consumers: real-time data, contextual relevance, and highly visual communica-tions. But it hasn’t reached critical mass yet in terms of how many consumers can and do use it when it’s made available. In the

next year or two, it’s worth marketers’ time to concentrate on how it will move their marketing forward.

appsThere are merits and limitations to

brands offering applications to consum-ers. Well-developed apps can be immersive and productive for brands, helping to drive brand awareness, interest, and sales. In many cases, consumers demand and expect to see your brand’s app being offered in their app store of choice.

But apps are also hard to produce, distrib-ute, and advertise. They require a smart, efficient plan, the right investment in promo-tion, and frequent updates and upgrades to succeed. Brands must provide apps to each of the major device platforms in order to get reach — notably iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. And if your brand wants to reach consumers globally, consider that Nokia, running the Symbian operating system, still has that largest installed base in the world.

Creating apps for each platform can be time-, resource-, and budget-consuming. Also, once you’ve developed and distrib-uted your app, there’s a highly fickle and fragmented audience, divided across the various platforms and devices. Even though billions of apps have been downloaded from app stores by millions of consumers, data shows that most consumers use just a few apps regularly and often drop apps after using them once or twice. Stickiness has to be central to any app marketing plan.

Certainly, dozens of other mobile tactics warrant consideration by brand marketers, but as with the ones discussed above, find-ing the right tactics is a matter of having a detailed strategic plan and a good under-standing of the needs and behaviors of your target consumer audiences. §

Eric Bader is a partner in Brand-InHand, a full-service mobile marketing and media company that serves clients in the con-sumer goods, financial services, technology, and retail industries. Previously, Bader was managing director of digital at MediaVest

Worldwide, head of online enterprises at CSTV Net-works (now CBSSports), and executive director of in-teractive marketing at Ogilvy.

Most online sites lookand operate terribly on

a mobile browser.

want to learn more?SES Toronto will feature several sessions onmobile, including “Augmented Reality: A NewWorld Order.” For more information, visit



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§ FOCUS: mobile

iPadvertising: What to expect By Gary Stein

Apple’s breakthrough new device, the iPad, came out earlier this month, and a handful of magazine and newspaper publishers are

already offering content specifically created for it. While many uncertainties surround the iPad, here is what we do know:

§ A small number of large publishers offered iPad versions of their content during the week that the device launched. One example is Hearst’s iPad version of the April issue of Esquire.

§ These publishers will charge for this content. Some will charge a single download fee, while others will offer a subscription package. But make no mistake: Content is not going to be free here.

§ These publications will be ad supported, and the ads will take advantage of the inherent interactivity

and connectivity of the iPad. § Publishers

are selling these ads based on a model that borrows more from print than from online. They are selling space in publication, not impressions.

Right now, no one really knows how many people will see the ads or interact with

them. But, something just feels right about selling advertising on iPad content this way. I think it has to do with how people will think about the device and what it means to them personally.

visit vs. ownYou visit a website, but you own a maga-

zine. Or you get a newspaper. Whatever the verb, there is some sense of “having” when you deal with content in the real world that has always been lacking in the online space. The great hope of the iPad — and the other devices that will follow it — is that it will bridge the incredible power of having content digitally, with the incredible satis-faction of having your content with you.

This gets us into a place where we can begin to imagine what advertising will come to look and feel like within the context of these devices. I am sure that not all of the advertiser/publisher relationships will look like they do now, at launch. But there are some things we can understand and expect:

§ There will be free content, and that content will have ads. It simply must. There will be publishers that either want to give their work out without an initial charge, or there will be publishers who want to challenge the big guys, and will do so with the content model that we have come to expect online.

§ There will be interactivity in the ads, but not the way we’re used to. Because the iPad won’t do Flash, there will have to be some workarounds. Interactive ads will need to be programmed from scratch, using Apple’s software development kit, or (potentially) created using HTML5. But, soon we can expect that the companies that have built efficiencies around the creation of interactive ads online will apply their thinking to the iPad.

§ Contextual advertising will find its way in.

§ Behavioral advertising will get a massive boost. The power of the mobile format, coupled with the integration with a device you always have, will present a treasure trove of data to the behavioral targeting guys, and they will generate some great new stuff.

§ Ad networks will emerge, modeled after the ad networks that connect games. Since much content will be downloaded and installed, a network that will allow a single advertiser to put an ad into many different spaces will be necessary.

The one other thing, though, is that we don’t quite know what we’ll see. This is a new device. I don’t know if it deserves the triple scoop of hype that it received, but it definitely will introduce some new thinking around what an ad is, as well as what online and offline is. And what fixed and mobile is. Which means that somewhere, someone is coming up with a completely new model. §

Gary Stein is VP of strategy for Ammo Marketing. He has been working in interactive advertising for nearly a decade. Gary lives in San Francisco with his family.

@garyst3in

21%Although just 21 percent of

U.S. wireless subscribers were using smartphones in Q4 2009, Nielsen predicts

these will surpass “feature phones” by Q3 2011.

Source: The NielSeN compaNy

A For more details, check outClickZ Stats.

The great hope of the iPad is that it will bridge

the power of seeing content digitally with the satisfaction of “having” your content with you.


§ FOCUS: measurement

Call tracking simplified By Kathleen Colan

Many marketers are frus-trated with the current, limited methods of analyz-ing and measuring online to offline (web to phone)

conversions. They believe today’s tech-nology cannot deliver a complete picture of actual sales-ready leads, and this won’t justify online ad spending. Without call tracking, there’s no easy way to understand which online marketing efforts are driving phone calls.

Call tracking allows businesses to calcu-late success for every form of advertising. With call tracking, marketers now have an increasingly powerful tool to not only measure — but also analyze — offline conversions in an effort to more effectively determine success and make informed spend-ing decisions.

Research indicates that 46 percent of local online searchers contacted a business by telephone follow-ing their web research (TMP Directional and ComScore Study, summer 2009).

what is call tracking? Call tracking is the ability to trace phone

calls back to the person calling you, as well as their buying behaviors. You can account for the marketing effort that led each consumer to call you, whether it’s your website, e-mail campaign, print ad, or television spot. As an example, every time an online advertisement delivers a phone call, the call is recorded, traced back to the web visitor’s actions, and then logged into real-time, detailed reports such as Google Analytics or Omniture Site Catalyst.

This allows businesses to optimize their marketing activities for those methods that generate the highest quality conversions compared to guessing on the outcome.

The advertising industry maxim is that 50 percent of ad spending is wasted on leads that do not convert into sales.

Call tracking supplies clients with reliable, clear, and actionable data encompassing the entire sales cycle from customer brows-ing through completed sale. For example, call tracking illuminates which campaigns, keywords, and marketing tactics are driving calls and, more importantly, which calls are generating revenue — online and offline.

The history of call trackingTraditional call tracking services have

been around for more than 10 years. Only recently has call tracking moved beyond the traditional service where a tracking number

was placed in a campaign ad and calls were reported from a simple detail report. In the past, there was a disconnect between visitor behaviors and phone calls that resulted in an action to the actual sale.

Today, this gap has been bridged. Over the past two years, the call tracking industry has worked to develop tools that integrate their systems with popular online paid search services, such as Google AdWords, Micro-soft AdCenter, and Yahoo Search Marketing, thus displaying data in a familiar, easy-to-read format. The goal of these integrations is to layer actionable call tracking data into existing business processes and systems.

Now, integrated data can be related directly to the behav-ior, page, or ad that drove the call. Addi-tionally, data can be consolidated into the most popular report-ing environments used by marketers, reduc-

ing the learning curve substantially. Stud-ies indicate marketers achieve leveraged gain through integration. These include web analytics packages, bid management soft-ware, and customer relationship manage-ment (CRM) software.

With integration into reporting and CRM environments, the offline conversion data can be compared against other marketing channels for maximum utility. Integration brings measurement, and measurement brings clarity surrounding online perfor-mance and future spending, as well as deci-sions around content and design.

Basic questions that all Internet marketing managers have, such as, “Which keywords drove calls?” and “How many units were sold as a result of my online paid search spending?” and “What pages are causing an action to occur?” can finally be answered.

With the advancements in call-track-ing technology and industry integration into third-party systems, Internet market-ers finally have the tools to tie together a complete picture surrounding their online paid search spending and the resulting offline call performance. Having clarity surround-ing your marketing performance equates to better spending decisions and ultimately higher returns on marketing dollars.

how call tracking worksIt’s much more than recording the number

of calls received. The call tracking software is part of a sophisticated marketing method-ology that ties results directly to costs and gives clients accurate, real-time campaign effectiveness figures.

Call tracking allocates a discrete phone

number — local or toll-free — for each unique source you want to track. These tracking sources can be keywords, affiliate IDs, search engines, or any other identifiers. When a visitor arrives at your site, the soft-ware conducts a dynamic lookup to deter-mine which phone number is associated with the visitor’s origin page. That phone number is allocated and then cookied within the visi-tor’s browser.

As a result, call tracking gives clients actionable data that allows them to optimize PPC campaigns, SEO, and other offline marketing efforts. Instead of associating a phone number with a particular campaign, ad group, or keyword, call tracking assigns a tracking number to each unique visitor session. By tracking each unique visitor, clients are able to see granular data associ-ated with the call.

Call data is then logged into a central data-base system that can also export the collected data directly into many popular web analyt-ics programs. Additionally, reports can be exported into a spreadsheet or XML feed. Clients looking for even more granular data can integrate call tracking directly into their CRM database using the API feature. Some popular analytics packages that comple-ment call tracking include Google Analytics, Webtrends, Omniture, and Coremetrics.

Key benefits of call tracking include: § Optimizing online campaigns: Know which campaigns, keywords, and marketing tactics drive callers — and whether those calls generate revenue, offline or online.

§ Improve site design: Understand which pages drive calls. Customers may be confused, and there may be opportunities for site usability improvement.

§ Save money: Find new ways to more effectively close business online and reduce call volume.

§ Save time: Integrated reporting environments save time in analysis by consolidating call information with analytics, CRM, and bid management providers. §

Kathleen Colan is a professional, freelance journalist and director of marketing and content for Mon-goose Metrics, an enterprise-level call tracking solutions provider based in Cleveland. She writes about web analytics and general lifestyle topics for newspapers,

magazines, and websites. She is confident that call tracking technology will put the final nail in the coffin of traditional media. Learn more about her at www.kathleencolan.com.

Call tracking illuminates which campaigns,

keywords, and marketing tactics are driving calls.


§ FOCUS: customer service

4 ways to waste even more time on client reports By Marc Poirier

So you’re finding the month-end report-ing process too easy, huh? Let me introduce your agency to some great new ways to waste even more of your disposable time in the never-ending quest to provide all of your clients with their monthly reports as late and creatively as possible. That way you look like you’re working hard.

Reports are your last priority.Of course! That’s why you

should only start working on them once clients threaten to

hold payment. In fact, the best approach is to learn to send the report just before the threat comes in. That always works to diffuse the anger (because nobody likes an angry client).

Now if the client threatens to walk away, don’t worry. You told them you’re the only expert in town, and they could never possi-bly consider bringing this stuff in-house.

True story: I’ve heard of agencies that actually stopped reporting altogether, mostly because the girl who took care of it left the company (because, apparently, she was overly stimulated with all the Excel innova-tion opportunities she was given).

And when you get on the path of making clients wait for their reports, another side effect is that you start having less reports to do, because you have less clients to serve. Yep. Pretty soon, it’s retirement.

Get everyone involved.Just like meetings, reporting is

so much better when everyone has something to do with it.

First, you have to get the interns to fetch the data. Everyone knows these young

interns are experts at lesser tasks (as one of our own interns says, he is the lesser task overlord). It makes them feel great to do loads of meaningless work that could prob-ably be done by robots. Why is that? They’re probably afraid robots could actually steal their jobs, so they’re all about those lesser tasks. Bring it!

But interns are just one part of the equa-tion. You always need a great copywriter to explain away discrepancies, why the reports took so long to get out, and why you still aren’t working on those text ads and new landing pages you promised four months ago.

The role of the copywriter here is to create the illusion that writing new text ads is a long, intellectual exercise that only the elite can perform. And if it takes months, well then it just goes to show that the value is much higher.

Also, be sure to use them to notify your clients that you have to increase your fees yet again, because hiring all these interns is costly (but don’t call them interns in front of your clients; the term “data analysts” is much more conducive to getting paid).

Next, throw in a great designer to lay out each client’s report into an original design that is unique to each client, and unique to each report. Always create something new. That way, the clients will feel like you pay attention to detail.

Last in line is the analyst. You know, that evil geek who wants to do his own copywrit-ing, and get a platform to replace some of the interns and eliminate the designer. Come to think of it, maybe you don’t need an analyst. Just hire three more interns and increase your fees. (Use the copywriter for that again. See? More money!)

Use your clients’ goals as an exercise in memory development.

An excellent way to develop

your pay-per-click mnemonic skills is by trying to memorize everything you ever said to all of your clients, and everything they say to you, including all their KPIs and business goals for the month. Make a song out of it.

Even better, try to visualize them — imag-ine your client’s face with a huge $55 CPA tattoo on their forehead. Then, each time you need to start writing a report, use those skills to compare what you’ve achieved to what they expected.

Not only does this help develop your memory, but it’s also a fantastic way to explain away discrepancies between what the client actually remembers (“this month we have to break even”) and what you remember (“this month we have to spend three times more than the month before”). Blame it on the client’s memory, and suggest that they practice a little more mnemonics themselves.

Calculators (and mental gymnastics) are your friend.

Keep pulling out your trusty old calculator every month, and

punch in those formulas for all your calcu-lated metrics. It’s even better if you can do the math in your head.

Don’t bother getting “organized” with any campaign management platforms (remem-ber job solidarity?). Besides, you took accounting in high school. Calculators are always right, and they cost next to nothing. Maybe you should get a backup in case you spill coffee on your old TI. §

Marc Poirier is a professional search engine marketing expert with more than a decade of expe-rience in the search industry. He is co-founder and CMO of Acquisio, where he leads all marketing activities. Previously, Marc was founder and president at Cana-

lytics, a boutique SEM and SEO agency that’s one of the world’s most active Google Analytics authorized consultancies.

1

2

4

3want to learn more?

SES Toronto will feature several sessions onanalytics, including “Meaningful SEO Metrics.”For more information, visit



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§ FOCUS: user-generated content

No one cares about your products By Sage Lewis

No one cares about your prod-ucts. That was the message that really hit me at the recent Search Engine Strate-gies event in New York. The

message was delivered by keynote speaker and bestselling author David Meerman Scott, writer of the new book “World Wide Rave.”

While sentiment isn’t really revolution-ary, the profound truth of it is probably more relevant than any time in the past. Let me tell you a story.

My friend Greg and I had been talking all week about getting some good pizza in the big city. This is no easy task. If you look at virtually any online map, it’s very clear that Manhattan is infested with pizza places. If you’re only going to eat pizza one night, choosing the “best” place is daunting.

Actually, for the last couple years during SES New York, I simply glanced at Google Maps’ first page of results and selected the location with the best (and most) comments. For two years in a row that was John’s Pizze-ria. It currently has 234 reviews listed in Google, with an average of three and a half stars.

But it’s not the stars that kept me coming back. It was the actual comments people left, such as:

§ The BEST...Hands down.By Kelly - Mar 2, 2010This is the best pizza in NY. If not the entire world. I have tried them all and this is the WINNER.

§ John’s Pizzeria - FantasticBy A TripAdvisor Member - Jan 15, 2010We went there for dinner 3 times during our holiday in New York and the food and the service were consistently excellent and we just wish we had gone there every evening! Definitely try it out!!!!

§ gorgeousBy A TripAdvisor Member - Jan 7, 2010the doorman at our hotel recommended to go here for some good pizza. we weren’t disap-pointed, the first night we went we were

seated in the first part of the restaurant and didn’t realise how big it was until we went back the 2nd time.

That’s all I needed to hear. These people came to New York with endless choices of restaurants, and they went to John’s Pizze-ria multiple times. I went once and loved it. The next year I brought a party of 10 people there. And they loved it. The user reviews were spot on.

This year I thought it would be fun to try something different. Greg dug a little deeper into the results and came up with Keste Pizzeria & Vino. Granted, it “only” had 36 reviews, compared to John’s 234. But its overall rating was a solid four out of five stars. But that wasn’t what pushed him to select this place. Check out some of these reviews:

§ Bellissimo!!By TheBigOne - Jan 17, 2010Took my fiancee there tonight. We are both ‘hardcore’ foodies. VERY friendly staff. Service was great. Pizzas were some of the best I have ever had. Cooked to perfection. Ingredients tasted extremely fresh.

§ Best Pizza - ever!By msasala - Nov 29, 2009We ate lunch there today — it was by far the best meal we have had in NYC! We remem-bered Roberto from when he was in Pitts-burgh and made sure to stop by. It was so good!

§ The pizza is delicious, refreshingly...By TonyB1196736 - Aug 7, 2009different and indisputably authentic. The reasonably priced wine list (of wines that are actually good on their own and as comple-ments to the meal) and the interesting selec-tion of beers make Keste a standout lunch or casual dinner destination.

This looked like an underground treasure

of the city. And you know what? Those anonymous reviewers I’ve never met in my life once again did not disappoint. The place rocked.

But here’s where the story gets interest-ing. I asked Greg if he went to Keste’s Web

site. His answer was, “I accidentally clicked on it. But it was all Flash and annoying, so I just backed out and got back to Google.”

This interested me to no end. As I thought about how David

Meerman Scott said no one cares about your product, I realized there is transformation happening.

People don’t care what you say about your products. They want to know what other people say about your products.

If we don’t realize this, I believe our websites will become obsolete.

People simply won’t go to your site because they know it’s just filled with puff-ery, marketing-speak, and straight-up mean-ingless content.

Another quote I got from David Meerman Scott was, “Stop talking about the product. Talk about the people who are buying the product.”

If you want to have any relevance in the conversation that is going on about your brand, you would do well giving your pros-pects some straight-up truth about who you are and what you sell.

All of this is reflected in the search engine results. User-generated reviews and blog posts increasingly dominate the top results for your brand name. We all need to be think-ing of off-site optimization in this brave new world of search engine optimization, in the second decade of the 21st century. §

Sage Lewis is the president of SageRock Digital Marketing. He speaks nationally with Search En-gine Strategies and other web marketing organizations. From coast to coast, Sage has trained, coached, and consulted with some of the largest brands and

conferences in the country. @sagerock

User-generated reviews and blog posts increasingly dominatethe top results for your

brand name.


§ FOCUS: international

Managing global websites By Bill Hunt

Attendees from a recent SES event asked me to write a quick primer on how to effectively manage global search programs. Manag-

ing global sites across dozens of markets is a complex process and can’t be summed up in a single article; the following are the key elements essential to the success of any global program.

have an executive sponsorThe right executive sponsor is always one

of the key factors to success. The execu-tive sponsor has to strike fear in the hearts and minds of the local market partners, but also must be a mediator and problem solver. Many times you need help from other areas, which requires the right level of manage-ment savvy to motivate them to participate.

Ideally, this should be the global CEO or CMO because they have the authority over the geographies. In many cases, the executive sponsor is in the HQ market and has no operational or fiscal responsibility for the global outcome, which marginalizes his ability to motivate and/or force deployment.

develop a search center of excellence (cOE)

The search center of excellence (COE) should focus on improving the content creation workflow practices, compliance levels, uniform best practices, policies, awareness, and measurement across the program. It’s also highly focused on building a culture of search marketing excellence that will have a measurable impact on the bottom line. Your COE should bring together varied people and skills that promote collaboration and best practice usage to drive incremental business results.

I’m always amazed when companies

don’t coordinate and rally all their web and search efforts around the world. Bring all of the roles together. Many of these people have never worked together, or even met, but their combined efforts will make the site a better search and consumer experience.

Set up a meeting or meetings, and notify all the marketing, sales, technology, commu-nications, and brand teams around the world about it, and then get your executive sponsor to “encourage” them to attend. Once they do, you’ll find people already working or inter-ested in search all around the world.

Leverage force multipliersThese are things you do once that impact

all the sites. Often the easiest and most effec-tive activity is to make your site templates search-friendly and then push those opti-mized templates out to all of the countries.

In many cases, these templates will have near perfect on-page optimiza-tion elements, thereby eliminating the need for those efforts in countries. This is help-ful in markets where there are no web

resources or budgets to make search-related changes.

Building on optimized templates and integration of search best practices into the localization process can help with econo-mies of scale and reduction of costs. Larger companies use keyword research and searcher demand to help prioritize content.

For example, one large multinational recently used global keyword research to see what phrases globally had the high-est demand across the most countries. This allowed them to reuse content more effec-tively by multiple countries rather than each doing their own localization and duplicating efforts.

Manage local sites with google webmaster Tools

If you haven’t done so already, and espe-cially if you deploy a dot-com portal for your global site, it’s critical you set Google’s geographical targeting. This Webmaster Tools feature will allow you to tell Google that content segments of your site are for a

specific country.Set up a master global account and manage

it centrally, so that you know it has been set correctly, and also monitor messages and performance globally.

Measure performance with scorecards

Global scorecards are an effective way to “motivate” local managers to participate in your search efforts. These can be as simple as monitoring traffic and/or ranking perfor-mance and encouraging improvement to specific goals and objectives that everyone is measured against.

One of my favorite scorecards that we used at Global Strategies was called the “Always On Scorecard.” It mandated, for a set number of words, that each market/brand needed to either maintain a top five organic listing or ensure they had allocated sufficient paid search budget to achieve 80 percent share of voice in paid search impres-sions/clicks. This scorecard ensured that the most important words were “always repre-sented” when someone searched. When set up correctly, each country could choose their own keyword phrases for the program, but the same number of words in each market allowed for uniform measurement.

This sort of scorecard methodology fosters a workflow management focusing on highest value keywords and pages first resulting in a monthly to-do list of pages to be audited for optimization or addition to a PPC campaign.

It’s a lot of work to manage a global program, but the more you can make it uniform, measure it, and provide best prac-tices to markets with little to no resources, you will have greater opportunities for success. §

Bill Hunt is considered a top thought leader on global search engine marketing and social me-dia. Corporate leaders frequently seek his advice. Bill was previ-ously CEO of two of the largest global search marketing firms, Global Strategies and Outrider,

both of which were acquired by WPP. He grew both companies, oversaw global expansion, and provided strategic search marketing services for Fortune 100 companies. Bill is on the board of directors of SEMPO and is a veteran of the Marine Corps. @billhunt

The combined efforts ofyour employees from

around the globe will make the site a better search and

consumer experience.

want to learn more?SES Toronto will feature several sessions oninternational campaign management, including “Managing a Global SEO Campaign.” To learn more, visit



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A

advertising network: A service where ads are bought centrally through one company, and displayed on multiple websites that contract with that company for a share of revenue generated by ads served on their site.

algorithm: The technology that a search engine uses to deliver results to a query. Search engines utilize several algorithms in tandem to deliver a page of search results or keyword-targeted search ads.

anchor text: The clickable text part of a hyper-link. The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about.

click through rate (CTR): The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an ad. This is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of ad impressions. CTR is an important metric for Internet marketers to measure the performance of an ad campaign.

content network: A group of websites that agree to show ads on their site, served by an ad network, in exchange for a share of the revenue generated by those ads. Examples include Google AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network.

contextual advertising: Advertising that is targeted to a web page based on the page’s content, keywords, or category. Ads in most content networks are targeted contextually.

cost per action (CPA): A form of advertising where payment is dependent upon an action that a user performs as a result of the ad. The action could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or asking for a follow-up call. An advertiser pays a set fee to the publisher based on the number of visitors who take action. Many affiliate programs use the CPA model.

cost per click (CPC): Also called pay-per-click (PPC). A performance-based advertising model where the advertiser pays a set fee for every click on an ad. The majority of text ads sold by search engines are billed under the CPC model.

cost per thousand (CPM): An ad model that charges advertisers every time an ad is displayed to a user, whether the user clicks on the ad or not. The fee is based on every 1,000 ad impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). Most display ads, such as banner ads, are sold by CPM.

geo-targeting: Delivery of ads specific to the geographic location of the searcher. Geo-targeting allows the advertiser to specify where ads will or won’t be shown based on the searcher’s location, enabling more localized and personalized results.

Googlebot: Google uses several user-agents to crawl and index content in the Google.com search engine. Googlebot describes all Google spiders. All Google bots begin with “Googlebot”;

for example, Googlebot-Mobile: crawls pages for Google’s mobile index; Googlebot-Image: crawls pages for Google’s image index.

inbound link: An inbound link is a hyperlink to a particular web page from an outside site, bring-ing traffic to that web page. Inbound links are an important element that most search engine algo-rithms use to measure the popularity of a web page.

invisible web: A term that refers to the vast amount of information on the web that isn’t indexed by search engines. Coined in 1994 by Dr. Jill Ellsworth.

keyword: A word or phrase entered into a search engine in an effort to get the search engine to return matching and relevant results. Many websites offer advertising targeted by keywords, so an ad will only show when a specific keyword is entered.

link bait: Editorial content, often sensational in nature, posted on a web page and submitted to social media sites in hopes of building inbound links from other sites. Or, as Matt Cutts of Google says, “something interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”

link building: The process of getting quality websites to link to your websites, in order to improve search engine rankings. Link building techniques can include buying links, reciprocal linking, or entering barter arrangements.

meta tags: Information placed in the HTML header of a web page, providing information that is not visible to browsers, but can be used in vary-ing degrees by search engines to index a page. Common meta tags used in search engine market-ing are title, description, and keyword tags.

pay per click (PPC): See cost per click (CPC).

quality score: A score assigned by search engines that is calculated by measuring an ad’s click-through rate, analyzing the relevance of the land-ing page, and considering other factors used to determine the quality of a site and reward those of higher quality with top placement and lower bid requirements. Some factors that make up a qual-ity score are historical keyword performance, the quality of an ad’s landing page, and other undis-closed attributes. All of the major search engines now use some form of quality score in their search ad algorithm.

return on investment (ROI): The amount of money an advertiser earns from their ads compared to the amount of money the advertiser spends on their ads.

search advertising: Also called paid search. An advertiser bids for the chance to have their ad display when a user searches for a given keyword. These are usually text ads, which are displayed

above or to the right of the algorithmic (organic) search results. Most search ads are sold by the PPC model, where the advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad or text link.

search engine marketing (SEM): The process of building and marketing a site with the goal of improving its position in search engine results. SEM includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising, or paid search.

search engine optimization (SEO): The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

search engine results pages (SERPs): The page searchers see after they’ve entered their query into the search box. This page lists several web pages related to the searcher’s query, sorted by relevance. Increasingly, search engines are return-ing blended search results, which include images, videos, and results from specialty databases on their SERPs.

social media: A category of sites based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, social news sites like Digg or Reddit, and other sites that are centered on user interaction.

spider: A search engine spider is a program that crawls the web, visiting web pages to collect information to add to or update a search engine’s index. The major search engines on the web all have such a program, which is also known as a “crawler” or a “bot.”

title tag: An HTML meta tag with text describing a specific web page. The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page, since many search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages. The title tag should also make sense to humans, since it is usually the text link to the page displayed in search engine results.

universal search: Also known as blended, or federated search results, universal search pulls data from multiple databases to display on the same page. Results can include images, videos, and results from specialty databases like maps and local information, product information, or news stories.

web 2.0: A term that refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services. These usually include tools that let people collaborate and share information online, such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies.

glossary Below you will find commonly-used terms that everysearch marketer should know. Keep this list handy!

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