I’m young, and there’s no remedy for that other than time. There are lots of great things about that–I don’t know that many of them are in the business sphere, though. Experience and authority encourage a lot more client confidence than youthful innovation does. The one thing that I bring the thunder with is all of this business with blogs and social media and conversations taking place far beyond the grasping tentacles of corporate PR departments. It’s knowledge and experience I acquired without any aims toward making myself marketable or valuable.

The stuff is interesting, and when it started, so much of the user community and viral promotion of it was with high school and college students. It’s old-hat by the time it winds its way up and out to where you’re hearing about it widely. Facebook? I had a profile for a few years, got bored of it, and deleted over a year ago. What percentage of its current users think it’s new? And I’m not even an uber geek with this stuff…

RefreshWeb had a blog for a few years before this one, but it was hosted off-site, neglected, totally under-utilized. With the new site, I pushed for a company blog where most of us post. Gradually, we had one up and running–and it got handed to me to manage. I had been thinking, “This is great! We can all write about marketing. It’ll be well-rounded because we’re all good at different stuff!” When the “Okay! Start posting guys!” announcement went out, half the people freaked out a little bit. I wrote a long email explaining why this is a good idea, which prompted a request for me to do a little presentation on blogging. It’s a very strange thing when the youth that usually works against you suddenly becomes the thing that makes you the expert in the room.

Throwing together a little PowerPoint before the meeting, it surprised me how much I knew about this, how much subconscious ruminating had been going on and fitted itself into something cohesive. My instincts tend to tell me I’m a failure if what I do isn’t the absolute biggest and best out there. Since my own personal blog sports 100-200 readers a week (depending on my current hobby’s popularity), rather than the thousands that read the big dogs, I considered it to be something not very successful. Then I realized that those people almost all come directly–not through search–to read me ramble about my life. And they come back over and over, for months and years. It’s humbling.

The crazy thing is, this self-indulgent hobby of mine has turned into an actual skill. I have been blogging since 2000, though the early ones were secretly written under a pen name and totally fictitious. In the three full years (in a month!) that I’ve had my blog at Typepad, I’ve built a sturdy little readership. It’s mostly not my real-life friends, who actually don’t read me, but people I don’t know. And I’m kind of like Seinfeld–about nothing in particular. It awes me a little that I can use these skills to do really positive things for RefreshWeb, and in turn for our clients who want to go in this direction and aren’t sure how to proceed. In many ways, business blogging is far easier than personal blogging.

I’m reworking my PowerPoint and will share it when I’m done.

I enjoyed reading the recent post by Gord Hotchkiss, titled, “Will Agencies Get Search: Don’t Hold Your Breath.” He’s right about several things:
1) Companies (advertisers) are allocating a fraction of their small online budgets for Search…because they should be investing in Search. Everybody says so.
2) It IS better now than it was even a few years ago.
3) And – he really nailed this one – agencies don’t “get” Search because they see Search as small.

Search does not lend itself to high-falutin’ campaigns or creative graphics. It’s not sexy. And even though pay-per-click (PPC) Search is advertising (right up an agency’s alley), it is not glamorous. The creatives don’t find Search stimulating. There’s nothing there for a copywriter to sink his teeth into, and the art directors aren’t even invited.

There is money in it for an agency, though. A percentage of media spend. As more advertisers dictate that budgets (however small) be allocated to Search, the agencies will “get” Search. As long as Search means PPC.

What agencies won’t ever get is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the killer app for advertisers – not so much for agencies.

SEO, even less glamorous than PPC, requires lots of research and patience. Not fun. You do get to do a little bit of brainstorming, but then it’s more research and patience. It’s all about implementing, waiting, measuring, and then tweaking and waiting some more. The lion’s share of SEO work for a site is done upfront, and the results take longer than PPC. Then, you follow up with more of those tweaks I mentioned. That’s not profitable for the agency.

SEO requires access to the company website. Not always an easy task. And company websites are almost never accessible to an agency. Typically, the agency’s client (probably a marketing or advertising manager) has to wait – sometimes weeks – for the “owners” of the site (probably the IT folks) to make recommended SEO changes. Then they can start the waiting and watching stage, only to wait weeks for the next set of tweaks to be put into place by the site owners. Very tedious. And, not something an agency can charge for.

But SEO is effective. And profitable…for the client. Amazingly so. Often, when SEO starts working, clients can reduce PPC budgets substantially and still increase Search traffic to the site. Incremental traffic starts coming in “for free.” So much for the agency’s percent of media spend, I’m afraid.

I understand how an agency makes its money. I’ve worked for – and with – some great agencies. But they aren’t going to get SEO because they can’t see how it improves their bottom line. It’s not fun. It’s not sexy. It’s a lot of hard work.

But SEO really is sexy. It’s a little bit technology. A little bit marketing. A little bit sales. And a whole lot CREATIVE. It’s a giant jigsaw puzzle, and when the final pieces fall in place and the metrics start their upward climb, it’s a beautiful picture. Clients see the results and, sure enough, funnel more budget to Search. Next thing you know, they’ll be allocating some of their Search budget to Advertising.

Welcome back from Thanksgiving. Did you go out and splurge at the Black Friday sales? I didn’t—I didn’t leave the house until Sunday afternoon, and it was glorious. It only took one marathon Friday a few years ago to put me off jumping into the melee. I was shopping for myself anyway—no kids, and what I buy for my friends and parents are never the kinds of things you get standing in line outside the big chain store at 3:00 in the morning. If I’m shopping with a mission, I’m an online girl all the way.

So when I see articles like the one in the New York Times today, bemoaning how people spent $348 apiece this year, down from $360 last year, I’m not sure what to think. Of course the economy’s funky right now, and a lot of people are in mortgage crisis mode. And I’m sure the economists have adjusted for online sales since the internet isn’t exactly new now. The guy they interviewed to lend insight into those crazy consumers is saying that people came out because of the gimmicks the stores create with crazy discounts and special hours, not because they’re there to drop a lot of money.

It’s funny how people are so instinctual sometimes. Oh, they’re open at 5:00 instead of 10:00! If we aren’t there first they won’t have anything left for us to buy! Oh no! We need to be there at 4:00—no! 2:00!! As though there would be no Christmas, did we not get out to make this crazy shopping day happen. Even though, yes, there are special crazy bargain things you won’t get when you roll into the store after a lunch of leftovers, I seriously doubt you’d have gotten one of them if you’d shown up twelve hours earlier. Stores advertise loss-leader products to get people in: the rest of the stuff isn’t necessarily a bargain. When you see $30 DVD players, there aren’t innumerable cases of them, there are fifty units. But since you’re there, you might as well buy this $90 one instead.

After years of this kind of manipulation, increasing pressure, and escalating tactics of manipulating people into feeling the need to shop at the fight-or-flight level, are consumers getting tired of it? These kinds of gimmicky sales seem to be more suited to the days of Tickle Me Elmo and Furby toys with their fighting parents and eager reporters. How many years does it take for a fair proportion of shoppers to realize that they might as well stay in and shop online? Burt Flickinger, the retail consultant the Times interviewed, has a different reason. He says, “American consumers are trying to outsmart the stores and wait for desperation discounts.” That’s ascribing too much (slightly) malicious forethought to consumers.

In marketing, we hear and navigate the fast-evolving customer who often seems to outgrow a tactic as soon as we get its implementation down pat. The internet seems to be the chief giver of Darwin awards for marketing strategies. We have to adapt so quickly compared to brick and mortar stores. Consumer interest waning away from the real life version of a flashing banner ad doesn’t seem surprising to me at all. The Times said that online shopping for the big Thanksgiving weekend was 32% this year, up from 23% in 2006. They also noted that the big discount items were smaller things (mixers, for example) over last year’s flat screen televisions. As with any phenomenon, there’s more than one force at play.

What do you think about the evolving relationship between people’s online shopping attention span and their real-life shopping habits?

Once your site is optimized, there are all these important keyword terms embedded in your content, but only the search engines know how they fit into the information architecture of your site. Unless you have unique content, they won’t begin to PREFER your site until other people link to it…preferably using the very keyword phrases you have worked so hard to integrate. Links are equally important to getting good rankings from your SEO efforts on content and architecture.

Articles disseminated across the web are a great way to plant these seeds. On a regular basis, write short articles (600-1000 words), put them on your site, and then offer them up for people to use as content on their blogs, in newsletters, etc. Sites that specialize in this include ezinearticles.com, articlesbase.com, articlesfactory.com, contentdesk.com and ideamarketers.com. When people reproduce your content, they pick up the links, and often will link to the article on your site.

The very best mentions are on pages with relevant content on authority sites, because these links are seen as most significant. We recently participated in an online survey from Business.com on B2B search marketing, and were quoted in the resulting white paper. Of course you can buy links from a big vertical search engine, but by helping them gather good data and providing a thoughtful little snippet, we have fresh new links to our site:

In this case, we didn’t get a keyword phrase as the link, which would have been more beneficial, but they also are distributing this white paper to all their advertisers, so the prominent mention at the top of the section on B2B SEO is even more valuable…prospects can click right through to the site.

This excellent article by Scott Buresh on Marketing Profs is worth a read. It’s on some of the SEO problems new sites face, and some solutions for them. If you’ve been in SEO a while, you’re going to be familiar with the problems and solutions. Buresh writes and reasons the solutions so well, you should go steal his lines for when you have to explain to clients why they can’t be number one on Google for “highlighter” or “furniture” tomorrow.

The solutions are, of course, geared toward new sites. I found that they apply to most unoptimized sites. Because while you might have a site, if you’re not popular or optimized, you have most of the same problems as someone who hasn’t even registered the domain for their site yet. What are the odds your site is popular, well-linked, and sees good traffic if it’s not optimized at least a little? Most people do a lot of work, put something up, and don’t update it. It’s not unusual to have to peel things back down to the bare bones, fix the structure, and rebuild.

That’s why this article is so good. The solutions are brief and clear, free of the search lingo it’s easy to start throwing around. How SEO works isn’t a secret, and it’s in everyone’s best interest to educate the client. This is enough to talk to the boss without overwhelming, and a great starting place for strategy with the people who you’ll be working with inside the company.

Everything seems to have a small pool of people who do the bulk of the using. Whether it’s eating fast food or working out, there’s a loyal core. Who wasn’t grossed out in Supersize Me when they revealed that there are “heavy users” at McDonald’s that eat all three meals there several times a week? There are people who eat at Jack In A Box more times in a week than I have in 25 years. The advent of something that enables a certain lifestyle has changed how heavy users function in the world; it’s created a reliance.

Search is no different. The answer to anything is available at any time, any place. It’s changed the way some people operate their lives, how they use their brains, what they feel the need to remember and what can be transient. I have an engineer friend who always seems to have new gadgets, and he (of course) has a phone with PDA/browser/music/camera. He’s always online, Googling stuff mid-conversation as he thinks of questions about the topic at hand. I haven’t gotten a similar phone as a discipline to step away from the screen, not because it’s not something I’d use constantly.

I’ve talked about search with my friends (job hazard), and found that we don’t conform to the usual search behavior reported in studies and assumed when doing SEO work. Admittedly, we’re younger, more tech-savvy, more educated than the average American computer user. Nobody uses defaults, everyone exclusively uses Google for search. We don’t go down into the results if it’s not in the first page (30 results for me), but rather we refine the query. We don’t use information, we text Google for free to get the numbers and addresses.

When I write, I search words through the Answers.com add-on to the Google toolbar to get the thesaurus and make sure I’m picking the one with the right nuances. In conversation, when someone starts off with, “I wonder…”, half the time someone’s reaching for their notebook to find out the answer immediately. It’s a radically different way of life and operating. Battelle talks about this study from Complete in regard to who the big three have in mind when designing their tools–the 20% of people who do 70-75% of the searches, or the people who do a few searches a week? That’s the practical, business application, and an interesting question. I’m more interested in the trending toward the search volume of power searchers becoming the norm as the generations raised with technology come of age. What does it mean for information? What does it mean for search and the industry that has grown up around it?