The Google Monster

This whole rant/post is going to come off kind of strange, considering my income is fairly dependent on effective advertising via Google, but it’s just something I want to toss out there and see what others might think on this topic.

Google scares the crap out of me.

They know far too much about us, and the vast majority of Google users aren’t even aware of how their behavior, data, everything is being used by Google.  ”Big Brother” is not a myth.

Google knows a LOT about us.  I think the depth of the information may surprise you.  I’m really not comfortable with Google watching every move I make…  you know, like that Sting guy did when he was with the Police.

Okay, back to the topic – how do you go about educating the general public to be savvy about what not only Google, but any Internet company knows about them? Considering that we live in a world where someone can put out a kiosk that says “Win a FREE Boat!” and many people will give their name and address freely, not thinking of how their info will be used, it’s not likely. It’s likely many people care far less about this than I do.

I’ve experienced extreme privacy freaks in my day – people who will not accept cookies on their browser at any cost, even though some cookies simply enhance a site experience. They’d rather not risk their information being captured at all. I’m sure they are the same with the way their personal info is handled offline. These people feel that all information collected on them will be used in “evil” ways. Even though marketers can all attest that the information is being helped to improve user experience, you still have to wonder about how much a company that can follow so many unaware people as they go from website to website, and stores the information for future use.

Right now, I don’t think Google’s intentions are evil. I really think that they are looking at all the ways they can make life better. They are providing a lot of services and products that are useful to people, often free of cost. However, at what point does Google decide that all of this information they control should be used for the “greater good?” What does that even mean to them? Are we headed towards a future where ads are everywhere, and they are all personalized for you? Think Minority Report.

Somehow, Google has gotten this far with things by keeping a relatively low profile, even though Eric Schmidt has recently made some fairly inflammatory comments about how Google views our privacy on the Web.

Microsoft has been smacked in the nose how many times?  When will Google finally get theirs?

Just some food for thought as we head into the weekend. My advice – be savvy about how you do things on the Internet – don’t put all your eggs in one basket, even if one company makes it extremely easy to do so.

10 Predictions for Online Marketing in 2010

I’m really going out on a limb here, so wish me luck:

1. Someone will declare SEO dead.  Again.
2. Google will create more than 100 new products.  2 will be of any use to a significant number of people.
3. Twitter will see a decline in post activity by human posters (in other words, more spamming, more people leaving for greener pastures).
4. Hulu will begin charging for premium content.  No one will buy in.
5. Hyperlocal newspapers begin to grow online, utilizing local bloggers and the strength of highly relevant content for their readers.
6. Advertisers will continue moving more of their budgets to online.
7. More companies are going to realize the value of social media, but not understand the necessity of engaging customers, not just throwing specials and sales announcements at them.
8. Agencies will see significant growth in number of social media clients after numerous companies struggle to build a compelling online identity for themselves.
9. The first pair of fashionable Augmented Reality glasses will become available.
10. Bing will gain 5% of search share from Google.

Only halfway serious on these, but it will be fun to see if any of them become true.  ;)

Social Media’s Going to the Geriatrics!

Yesterday, I tweeted about an article that says the 55+ demographic grew by almost 514 percent in 2009. While I’m not sure what this means in terms of what 2010 has in store for social media trends, it will be interesting to watch the growth of demographics on sites like Facebook over the next 35-40 years to see how the 55+ demo grows (or shrinks).

My initial thought is that with more parents moving into the social space, kids are going to move to the next big thing, as referenced in a blog post a while back. What sort of platform that might be, I don’t know, but with the rapid adoption of mobile internet, it’s likely that it will be mobile based.

What do you think? Will Twitter and Facebook weather the emergence of the 55+ set and keep the younger demographic? As with anything, if you lose the younger set, you’re probably not long for this world.

Keeping It Simple – Client Communication

Having been doing search marketing for a while, I’ve come across a plethora of possibilities – what could be wrong, what is wrong, what to do to fix what’s wrong, what’s working, what’s not working, and what to do to make what’s not working work better.

Once again, I think I just confused myself with that last paragraph.

Sometimes it’s easy to inundate a client with too much information in reports and feedback that we give them. It’s always a good practice to keep in mind that most of the time, they are not as well versed in SEM as we are, and they just need to know the numbers that are most relevant to the overall performance of their campaigns, not the deep and dirty details. If you give them too much, they might be left wondering which metrics really matter, and get the wrong impression on what truly defines success or failure of a campaign.

By no means am I implying that you hold back on information. Always make the client aware that you can provide any data they might want (as long as it’s available, of course).

Follow-Up: Southwest Airlines Rapping Attendant

I just got this link passed on to me today. The Southwest Airlines Rapping Attendant explains Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) at the company’s Dallas headquarters.

Testing PPC is Good

MarketingSherpa has some tips on researching and determining a budget for new PPC clients (or existing, if you are re-evaluating the existing budget). It’s pretty informative and just reconfirms what most experienced PPC marketers already know and practice.

The one part in this article that really jumped out at me was creating a 10-15% portion of the budget for testing. This is key in growing business with any client. In quite a few cases, you can get maxed out on spending, and even to the point where optimizations don’t make a significant difference in CPC or anything else to allow you to get more traffic to a client’s site. Adding a test portion to the budget means that you have a little more elbow room to add keywords, change bids, etc. and not affect the base performance of the campaign. I really like this idea. Testing is good. It’s the only way to get a competitive edge. If you create the campaign and change very little moving forward, you can do fine, even great… but you’ll always just be treading water.

April Fool’s Day

Pretty much anywhere you go on the Web, there’s going to be an April Fool’s thing. Here’s a few of my favorites from today:

1. Nine Inch Nails announce release of new album TODAY! – Trent Reznor cleverly uses Twitter to spread the word.

2. Google announces CADIE: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity as a new feature. It can do things better than you (which I believe Google thinks, so that’s not part of the joke). Be sure to check out CADIE’s homepage. It’s so beautiful!

3. Google also announces Google Chrome in 3D! Download it now!

4. A CADIE feature is added to Gmail. It just never stops!

5. Of course, we are all expecting the armageddon brought down upon us by Conficker (at least, according to the media, who went into a y2k like frenzy over it). Wired has a frequently updated blog about possible Conficker-related events.

6. Honestly, I’m going to hand this off to someone who has already done the gruntwork. Here’s AprilFoolsDayOntheWeb.com.

Hope your day was fun!

Friday Music!

Here’s a video to cap off the week with:

Urban Flight 2.0

Several conversations I’ve had recently have surrounded the staying power of Twitter. While I tend to be mostly focused on Twitter while they search for a good revenue model, this also applies to all other social media. It’s been interesting to see how the landscape has evolved over the years. With the recent revelation that Facebook is looking for some more money, it got me to thinking about how effective even their ad inventory might be.

This is completely a rant, devoid of good, solid facts or anything else. It’s just how I perceive things happening on things like Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter. So please, let me know what you think.

We know about banner blindness. If you’re not on a search engine actively looking for something, then odds are that you are completely looking past ads on the page of the blog, article, or whatever content you are looking at. Sure, we can get clicks and conversions from those sources, but when you look at the number of impressions vs. search, you know just how much lower the response rate is in that area. We’ve all gotten adjusted to the fact that the ads are there, we just don’t acknowledge them as much.

When I’m on Facebook, I barely even notice the ads. In fact, their new layout actually detracts from their own ads, if you notice how the ad includes an image, it appears almost like the other notifications that run down the right side on the homepage after you log in. That’s neither here nor there for this topic, but something to munch on, Facebook peoples.

People don’t like spam. Period. We know that. Myspace is rampant with them. Twitter is as well, though you can mostly avoid them. Eventually, the spammers will learn how to game the system more if Twitter isn’t proactive about it. Facebook has proven a little more spammer unfriendly.

Once spammers move in, people tend to move out. Not everyone, mind you, but enough that it’s significant. It reminds me of urban flight. For those who aren’t familiar with it, urban flight is the effect of people moving away from urban areas as crime, cost of living, etc. increase.

As the spammers start to take over the last big thing, the next big thing arises and everyone runs over to it. The next big thing, however, is so new that they haven’t established a revenue model or anything. They’re more interested in building a user base to prove their clout to investors. After they secure some money, they’ll create a revenue model (obviously, there’s no rush).

The issue is that as your user base expands, so does your potential for being targeted by spammers and everything else. You have to stay out in front of them and proactively combat it. If you don’t, people will get frustrated, then comes another next big thing, and a lot of people start to move on. Rinse and repeat.

Myspace was a lot of fun a few years ago, but the more spammy it got, the more I stayed away from it. Now, I have a profile, but it’s there just to follow bands and concert announcements. I check it once a month at best. Facebook and Twitter, I’m all over. I love them. They are both great ways to communicate and collaborate, but what’s their staying power? They have to make money to survive. Can they do it without employing tactics that will drive people away? Time will tell.

Let me know what you think. Can Facebook and Twitter find a model that can sustain them, or will they succumb to urban flight 2.0?

Southwest Airlines Rapping Attendant

Here’s a great (and most likely cheap) way to get exposure for you company through a viral campaign, notably video. To top it all off, there are multiple videos made by CUSTOMERS that have made David Holmes, a Southwest Airlines flight attendant, an internet sensation. What a great way to show how fun your company is, and encourage people to see what you are all about. Who can resist a company that allows their employees to have so much fun while doing their job? We should all be allowed to have this kind of fun (as long as we stay productive, of course!).