You know when someone writes a post entitled ‘On the increasing uselessness of Google‘ that all is not right in Web Land. Citing another blogger who ran into all sorts of junk when searching for a new dishwasher:

Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches — from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons — churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you’re done. On the web, no-one knows you’re a content-grinder.

The result, however, is awful. Pages and pages of Google results that are just, for practical purposes, advertisements in the loose guise of articles, original or re-purposed. It hearkens back to the dark days of 1999, before Google arrived, when search had become largely useless, with results completely overwhelmed by spam and info-clutter.

Well said, dishwasher-seeker. The first page of Google is no longer the clean, clear landscape it once was. Too many companies have realized that finding consumers with AdWords alone is like fighting a dragon with a dull-tipped sword, face on. Best to sneak around from behind and attack from a better place: hence, the raging popularity of so-called content strategy in online marketing.

It’s not just SEO anymore, clearly. With content farms run by Demand Media and sketchy link-buying techniques, everyone is in a race to own keywords, and they’ll do it any way they can. But what are consumers doing? That’s right, they’re getting wise and giving up. People are no longer looking on Google for answers, writes the Washington Post. They’re using (gasp!) Twitter and (another gasp!) Facebook, putting out queries and requests for recommendations from friends — and getting exactly what they need.

So here’s my proposal. To companies: Follow the consumer; find an authentic way to reach them via social media. To consumers: Know how to filter out the junk in Google results, and don’t rely solely on your “friends” to solve your problems. To that next group of bright-eyed engineers or MBAs leaving school: build the framework for a series of vertical search engines, and put them in a central directory until everyone knows the destinations by heart. Searching for a new dishwasher? Then go to the Kitchen Appliance Search Site. Sometimes it’s better to completely reinvent something — using a tried and true concept — then fix what’s broken.

The Post notes that Microsoft thinks the next big thing is going to be social search — scouring data from user accounts to show up in basic search. Okay, that might work. But I think there’s still a market out there for qualified advice, for “real” articles written by scholars, field experts, and yes even marketers and salespeople.

Friday July 22– Fortune Brainstorm Tech, @ The Aspen Institute

At the branding panel with Wes Nichols, (Marketshare Partners), Tom Bedecarre (AKQA), Brian McAndrews, (now a VC) Barry Saltzman (Google)

Room full of investors, agency CEOs, analysts all agreeing that social media will be the engine that finally moves big media dollars online.

From Press Release land .. and the The Wall Street Journal

"The U.S. online ad market started a turnaround in the second half of
last year, says research from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Interactive
Advertising Bureau:"

Well, what else would they say?

"U.S. online ad spending for the fourth quarter totaled a
record $6.3 billion — a rise of 2.6%."

OK, that's good.  The interesting thing about "online ad spending" numbers is that they massively understate the dollars that are spent in online marketing.  The IAB (the web publisher's advocacy group and don't forget it) is naturally going to tell Price-Waterhouse to define "online ad spending" as transactions between an advertiser and a web publisher. Fair enough. But, big but, the definition of what constitutes "online ad spending" could be looked at in a much different way.

What if we defined online ad spending as any transaction that creates an impression, whether it is a transaction between a publisher and an advertiser or between a consultant and an advertiser.  By this I mean that as dollars have flowed (and plenty have) into "social media" and the old standby "web development" and various kinds of "optimization", none of that gets recorded as "online ad spending."  And yet all of those dollars are doing exactly what ad dollars are supposed to be doing.

This creates some interesting winners and losers:

The Winners: Social Media & Optimization budgets

The winners are optimization-focused and social savvy agencies (of all kinds, btw) and consultants who understand that their economic future and their clients' both get better every time they can convert a dollar earmarked for traditional "media" into fees for services such as ghost twittering, landing page optimization, content creation and on and on.

The other winners are the advertisers who recognize this. At a recent OMMA panel moderated by AKQA's @TomBed, Marty Collins of Microsoft's Windows answered my question regarding their ROI tracking on cost-per-impression for social media versus the cost-per-impression for traditional media by saying, "social media blows traditional away.  It's not even close."  (To be fair, she went on to add that her view, which I agree with is that not all impressions are created equal.) 

The Online Ad Losers: Web Publishers

The losers, oddly, and notwithstanding the $6.3 billion "measured" by the IAB, are the publishers.  Smart media consultants, ad agencies and PR agencies are recognizing that for fees that stay with them they can create impressions at a fraction of the cost of "traditional" online media.  All the better if they get to keep a much larger portion of the "media" budget as fees –rather than acting as a bank for the advertisers and skimming, at best, 15% off the top.  So the smart gatekeepers over online spending are rapidly building rationales for massive cuts to the "online ad" spending the IAB is boasting about

Will this turns into a wave?  Is it possible that "online ad spending" is the wriong metric.  Maybe it's online ad spending + fees collected by smart agencies and consultants.  And, my guess is that that (unmeasurable) number is growing at a way faster pace than 2.6%.

What do you think?

You know those ever so cautious, ever so serious emails or phone calls. The one's where they say that they have been retained by a "very important" company to conduct a "top secret" job search and they are wondering if you might have some recommendations for them.  We all know that this is usually a headhunterspeak for "we're not really interested in your friends but we don't want to offend you by assuming you are unhappy, but would you be interested in interviewing for this job?"

Turns out the same Internets that fed these guys your name might well taketh their lunch.

Jesse Hempel writes about the impact of LinkedIn on the headhunting business in this week's cover story in Fortune at  http://ow.ly/1qS7h .

Other tidbits from Jesse's piece:

• "The average <LinkedIn> member is a college-educated 43-year-old making $107,000"
• Accenture will hire 40% of its new employees this yeat via online searches

And, you've gotta' love this one. There is an actual, real-life professional online presence consultant out there making real cash money dollars giving would be LinkedIn users advice on selecting profile photos like this gem:

• "Don't use dogs, horses, cats, or cows in the background,"

Who knew?  Better check your profiles for cows everyone.  Mine has bricks.

Mobile Social Networking site and Thief Notification Service, Foursquare, has cut a small (dollar-wise) but big (brand recognition-wise) deal with a Rye, New York manufacturer of carbonated soda.

I've been using Foursquare for about two months and  I am so very proud to be the mayor of my own company. How badly would it suck if I wasn't?

Why do I use Foursquare?  Well it's my job. I'm supposed to be an early adopter. So, now we have a bunch of internet consultants, agency people and marketing types, 300,000 of them evidently, all following each other around.  Like all new things on the web which will someday be huge, it is still a mystery to me as to whether this will take off (which means that it, no doubt, will). 

I can see the benefits of knowing who is where and who is around you and when.  But, I have to admit that, however respected an industry denizen he might be, I do not need to have my iPhone tell me where Cory Trefilletti is every moment of the day.  All I know is that Cory gets to work earlier than I do (or at least he remembers to check in earlier) although I will say is not making it to the gym any more than I do.  Come on Cory, you can do better than that.

The other problem, coming soon to a hysterical Nancy Grace show near you, is that Foursquare seems like an invitation to tabloid hell. When Cory checks in at the gym, were I an axe murderer or second story man, that would be my cue to head over to his house (I know where that is because he checks in there) and treat myself to a nice evening of axe murdering or cleaning out his stereo equipment. Not that I personally have the time or inclination but, I'm just saying.

Anyway, Like Twitter, Like Facebook, Like everything else, this will take off if and when everybody buys in — I'm just not completely sure they will. Unlike Facebook which invites TMI that won't affect your health and home, Foursquare provides TMI which could be physically dangerous in the wrong hands.

Kraft Food has launched a "social media" campaign in the UK to promote their coffee brand, Mellow Bird's. It is part of a larger repositioning of the brand to reach a younger audience, according to Brand Republic.

Sounds like a good idea, right? But don't start patting Kraft on the back just yet, says John Bell in Social Media Today. The campaign is mediocre at best, in both strategy and execution. They want to "target students and give the campaign an anti-corporate feeling" — which he notes is a terrible language to use in a PR announcement — and the game itself on Facebook (where they only had 146 fans) is seeing how many times the user can hit the space bar within 10 seconds. And we wonder why kids brains are turning to mush.

Conclusion? It's nice that large consumer brands are seeing the value of social media and dedicating  budgets towards it, but c'mon Kraft. Don't do things half-assed. A good social media campaign is not cheap. It needs to be thought out correctly, by the right people, and executed correctly, by the right people, or it's going to blow up and turn off CMOs forever. "Well, Bob, that didn't work, now did it. Back to search!"

Says Bell: "Social media
is not a channel. It is a fundamental shift in consumer behavior. It is
time for even 'first-timers' to adopt a true social media strategy."

Last year we saw a enormous amount of deals struck between search giants and real-time data providers, aka social networks and microblogging sites.

• In October, Microsoft signed search deals with Facebook and
  Twitter to integrate real-time status updates and tweets
  into Bing's search results.
• Google followed suit in early December with the announcement that public updates from social media sites Twitter, Facebook and MySpace will start showing up in Google's general search results, a particularly nifty feature for smartphones.
• Even more proof in the pudding, this time from M&A (via TheDeal.com): Real-time search engine developer OneRiot Inc. closed its $7 million Series C, bringing the total venture capital raised to $27 million.

But real-time search is "not there yet," as proven by the magnitude 4.1 earthquake that took place in our ever-shifting city this week. At 10am on Thursday, a small earthquake shook the Bay Area, and within 6 minutes Google search was reflecting the event in the form of Twitter updates, according to Stephen Shankland
at CNET. (Google claims it was just 2 minutes, and Shankland attributes the lag to the fact that he was in Detroit at the time. And clearly, people in Detroit don't give a hoot about California.)

But while we can quibble over minutes, the takeaway here is that real-time search is certainly where it's at for the coming year, but it's going to be up to marketers to figure out how that can work for their brand. To be honest, it's a little scary that a real-time tweet about your company from some Joe in Minnesota can trump your hard-earned spot for your company website, blog, newsletter, video, or special deal — though it does introduce some exciting possibilities, like having access to top sellers and current sentiment data, and eventually, pairing real-time news with real-time ads.

Twitter and Linked In announced yesterday that they are integrating their platforms so that LinkedIn users can "amplify" their status updates to the Twittersphere, and Twitter users could feed their updates (hashtagged #in) into the professional networking site. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone apparently referred to the match as a "perfect combination," like "peanut butter and chocolate." Image courtesy of PC World.

Putting aside the clear confusion Mr. Stone has over what makes a perfect combination — he is clearly not familiar with the stunning combination of pretzels and ice cream, or Speculoos and bananas — let's stop for a moment to really talk about integration. It seems every social web service these days is working on some big-deal partnership with another social web service. Why? Theoretically, integration is for users, so that they don't have to visit more than one site, or post to multiple platforms, in order to spread their message with the largest number of people.

But despite what you may read in the companies' quirky blog posts, integration is not just for users, just like Kix is not just for kids. Integration is first and foremost for the company's benefit; joining forces makes them bigger, stronger, and broadens their reach, which ultimately means more revenue from business or premium memberships, and often from ad revenues. No one really knows the true benefits of this new deal, however, since the financial details (just like those of Microsoft and Google last month) are undisclosed, reports the NY Times.

Call me crazy, but this is starting to make me think of Wal-Mart, the ultimate one-stop shop. Because isn't that what web services are trying to do? Combine forces to offer consumers everything they want in one place, and make themselves more money while doing it? And we all know what that has done to us. Bye bye neighborhood butcher, hello pre-packaged salami — with a side of crayons.

But that may be a little too far ahead to think about on a Tuesday. In the short term, heed this warning from PC World: Twitter and LinkedIn are two different animals. If you integrate the two accounts, be sure to make smart choices about what you
share across the services — what's perfectly acceptable on one
network may not work on the other.

"If you're in advertising, you'd better learn to speak digital, because that's the way the world is going."

Those words come from Josh Bernoff's Groundswell blog today, summing up Forrester Research's just completed five-year interactive marketing forecast. Over 70% of the marketers they surveyed expected the effectiveness of channels like created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase, while the effectiveness of direct mail, television, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease.

They expect digital marketing to grow to about 21%  of advertising spend in five
years, while overall budgets are declining. And of all aspects of digital marketing, social media is the area expected to show the greatest growth, growing from $716 million this year to $3 billion in five years, between social networking campaigns and agency fees. (And this doesn't include ads on social networks, because those are considered display ads.)

What does all this mean for you, dear friends? Time to get your digital on. Old school just won't cut it for much longer.

We leave you with this eulogy from, well, a social media site:

Yes, we hear about Twitter every single day. The latest? Twitter may have ruined opening weekend grosses for Bruno. OK, we'll give Twitter some props when it comes to real-time influence.

But when it comes to long-term value? Facebook has become the one with the sticking power, at least according to these recent numbers from Anderson Analytics: New Social Media Study: Facebook Trumps Other Social Media as Most Valuable; Majority of Users Can’t Do Without Popular Site.

The bit that especially caught our eye was this: 43% of respondents said they could do without Twitter, as compared to only 29% for Facebook. Even MySpace did better than Twitter, with just 35% saying they could do without it. In other words, people see real value in Facebook, even if they are twittering all day.

Respondents also see value in LinkedIn (only about 29% said they could do with out the business-oriented site), however they don't visit it as frequently.

Keep your eye on Facebook. Your audience is there, and they aren't leaving. OK, they aren't necessarily clicking on ads, yet, but we have faith.

Fun facts about Facebook: