At the risk of sounding like a Give-Us-You-Money-And-We’ll-Spend-It Media Strategist, the most impactful solution to this question is….keep spending.  During recession periods, marketing budgets are typically first on the chopping block (especially within big companies), however, remaining visible during a downturned economy can be incredibly important in keeping a company profitable during these times (as well as paying dividends once the economy begins to improve).

Historical data shows us that there is a significant messaging void during slumps in the economy (due to the aforementioned budget cuts) and that the impact of brand messaging and Direct Marketing efforts can be more impactful because, well….there’s just not as many people on the playground.  Marketing within this recessionary void can increase brand share of voice and promote “company health” to consumers, avoiding the feeling of “abandonment” that consumers can feel if a brand’s messaging goes silent all of a sudden for extended periods of time (see Guns’N’Roses, Chinese Democracy).

During the Great Depression, brands such as GM, Proctor & Gamble, and Camel cigarettes became brand leaders and survived the economic downturn by increasing marketing efforts while their competitors panicked.  Moving forward, I still see budget cuts….but (for the brands willing to make the investment in the future) a big opportunity for brand awareness and, ultimately, conversion.

Although I would love to see SEO on the frontpage of everypaper everyday, I am not sure this is what I had in mind.  So a potentially bad or missing meta description (or number of other minor elements) may have inadvertently cost a major American corporation a billion dollars.

As more details on this failure become available I will follow up with greater analysis here as to what companies must do to ensure that there content is correctly labelled as “past due”.  In the meantime I will leave you with the thought that a minor piece of code almost single handedly cost thousands of individuals thier jobs and a company its very exsistance.  I guess I picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue.

maybe even an Apple TV? Well, it looks like there are too many “boxes” taking up your TV stand space and I ha ve to say Panasonic is coming out with a solution that might help your situation. Panasonic’s new Plasma TV series, TH-PZ850U, features their latest technology called, Viera Cast, which is an interface that includes a live access to YouTube and Picasa as well as widgets such as stock ticker (courtesy of Bloomberg) and a weather widget (provided by The Weather Channel).

For the YouTube feature, the user can actually search by keyword, sort videos by popularity, or access your own list of “favorites.” According to Panasonic, although the entire collection of YouTube videos are available through Viera Cast, it may take a day or two to view the new videos.  Secondly, this TV can access Google’s photo sharing site, Picasa and view digital photos stored at your Picasa account directly on the TV screen.  At this time, Panasonic did not confirm any additional features or partners on Viera Cast but the main menu interface does show “coming soon” sections for additional cool features!

The concept and the idea of Panasonic’s Viera Cast mirrors the idea of Apple TV but keep in mind that this is all within the TV!  The fact that this TV doesn’t need a PC but directly connects to Internet with an Ethernet jack, it is simply convenient and user-friendly.  Although, there are few things that compare to Apple TV, such as a hard-drive where you can store your own music or movies, I still believe Panasonic took a huge step to incorporate such technology in a TV.  This is only the beginning of the exciting new adventure that is Viera Cast. We’ll see whether this technology will blast off and start a new trend in  TV business, OR just a small bump and a failure…

Many questions came up at the conference, but one was recurring; “What tool should I use to track my clients in the Social Space?” As usual the same answers were coming up as I have heard so many times before. Google Blog Search, Google Alerts, Technorati, Blog Pulse, etc. These are extremely important tools however I wanted to learn about programs like, Radian6 which is a buzz tracking tool available for purchase. I am always interested in new ways to track buzz.

A few questions that came from the crowd were really important ones; “How do I track new social platforms?”, “How do I produce metrics?”, “How can I prevent poor brand reputation?” Now we got to the good stuff. Using Summize Sentiment, Summize, Ask.com’s Blog Search, as well as some other hot new tools are great ways to track progress of your clients in the social space. There is yet to be a fully functional tool outside of Page Manager to track your clients Facebook metrics, as well as many restrictions on doing so. Friend Feed, was not voted on as being helpful as of yet, but still a really cool tool to see what large groups of social networks are doing as a whole.

While I was at the conference, Trackur was released by Andy Beal. It has been released with a two week free trial that is fluff free. This tool searches images, blogs, articles, and video all at once. It also has the power to search Twitter statuses which is so important to us and our clients being the buzzword of the year.

It can be expensive depending on the rate you need it. The pricing ranges from $18 to $197 per month depending on the amount of keywords you need tracked. It comes from somebody as trusted as Andy Beal, so there is no going wrong. I have seen him speak at previous conferences and his intelligence should be rewarded. Beal admits; there is no big office and he operating Trackur from his home. Additionally, he is definitely readily available for questions and comments on the tool.

After trying the tool out for two weeks, I find the tool extremely useful and important. This tool might be outdated in a few months by the next tool but in the meantime it is great for brand management, news alerts, competition analysis, and blog research. The only noted downside is the lack of a noise filter. Trackur will return lots of noise surrounding your keywords, while Google Alerts can filter out garbage. However, the amazing upsides to this tool that goes beyond all other tools are described well in the Trackur FAQ:

* Trackur can cover data sources outside of Google’s Index;
* Trackur has a more sophisticated management, web-based interface (Google Alerts just uses email;)
* Trackur allows you to store a history of alerts, whereas for Google you have to keep holding onto emails; and
* Trackur shows you a larger list of sources that mention your keywords – Google Alerts only shows you up to five items that appear in a 24-hour period.

Recently, the Internet giants Microsoft and Google entered the eHealth business. Microsoft’s HealthVault was launched in October 2008 (still in beta version) and at this moment the system is available only for US users using a Live ID login. Microsoft has already partnered with a list of companies that make products of offer services compatible with HealthVault. The company plans to make money by selling ads alongside search results promoting medical products and services.

Google Health was unveiled on February 2008. It is still in the development phase with no login page live yet but everything else is functional. Google announced that its future partners (Aetna, Duane Reade, Walgreens) can connect their proprietary closed health records with the user’s account and upload the data. Google does not plan to sell ads at this moment although they don’t exclude the possibility in the future. Instead, it automatically generates links to discussion groups with topics closely related with the user’s medical condition.

The introduction of SiteSearch could cause a problem for sites that sell advertising space because the impressions they are promising may not be generated if fewer people are using the search functions on the site. Also problematic is that sites will lose the ability to capture people in their own site search with features such as; you may also like, or related products or stories that show up when using a site’s internal search function. All in all, for Google, this is great because increasing numbers of ads will be served whereas for the advertisers whose site Google is navigating will be losing ad impressions and in turn dollars.

One such segmentation is coming by way of Sony with the implementation of Playstation Home later this year. Playstation Home will be a 3D social networking service accessible though your PS3. There, gamers from around the world can get together to communicate through video or voice, join in online games, shop or even share content. In Home the question about what this virtual world is about is easily answered – it’s a community of gamers. From this standpoint it makes the pitch to your clients much easier to describe why their brand or service fits. Take a look at some of the early beta features that will be available in Playstation Home.

In game advertising is already at the $400M mark. It will be hard to ignore this presence for too long, and with the addition of Sony’s ambitious effort the virtual world discussion can once again be stoked.

Thanks to cloud computing and advances of processing the current search model paradigm will shift to individual preferences rather then algorithmic approximations.

With the current model based solely on keywords and geography in the form of internet provider, a stock answer tends to be returned regardless of the individual’s preferences when any general term is queried.

I believe that in the not to distant future a more efficient model will evolve in that all search is based off of a social platform (Facebook for example). Each return is quantified on specific ques that are located with in the individuals network.
So if for example my social page indicates that I was born in New Jersey, attended Rutgers University, and most of my “friends” are fans of the NY Football Giants than my return for the search “Football Jersey” would be unique to me.

The ad model that would follow thanks to universal search would perhaps be a NY Giants Jersey (Eli’s of course) or the chance to purchase tickets to the next RU home game. My natural return may even provide video highlights of NJ high school football of the previous weekend.

These returns would all be specific to me and thus exponentially increase their likelihood of effectiveness.
I have included two brief diagrams of how I see search today and in the future. I did them both in keynote on the train home so please forgive the rudimentary nature of them.

When I get time I would like to spend more time on this topic, so if you have any ideas please drop a comment.

For me the Keynotes at these events tend to be the most entertaining and informative. This year was no exception, with an explosive panel tackling “Universal Search” and the outcome that may result from the eventual transition. I think that there is some further ground to be covered on this topic but I will save it for a future post.

Day 2 also gave us a presentation by author Nick Carr covering the topic of his latest book “The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google”. Besides being an engaging speaker, Nick posed some interesting ideas to the crowd that day. Mr. Carr elaborated on the evolution of the computer from mainframe to PC and beyond. Mr. Carr did a great job of providing scale to the future of computing and the effects that cloud computing will have on individuals. Pretty cool stuff and again I think more great ideas for a later post by me.

Day 3 was highlighted with a Q&A of Jason Calacanis the CEO of Mahalo.com. Mr. Calacanis has a rather well known reputation for being (um, well, for being Jason Calacanis). With that being said I am know a big fan of the man. Although he may be a tough boss to work for, I liked his approach and demeanor. Maybe its because I will always be a just a guy from Jersey, but I was picking up what he was putting down. He also spoke of how he had learned of an individual stalking him, yet still provided the audience his email address. Whether he really reads that or not is irrelevant, I get the idea.

So all in all I benefited from the event. Besides reinforcing a lot of ideas I already had, it was an opportunity to enjoy the search community and reconnect with some old colleagues.

I just graduated in May, and as an advertising major, interactive marketing was barely touched on in my 4 years of college. In a semester break down filled with print and TV, the syllabus usually set aside one class to discuss the internet. With professors who worked in the agency realm 30 years ago, we lectured on the wow factor of agencies like BBDO and Saatchi & Saatchi, with almost every class using the “Got milk?” ads to set the bar as a basis for comparison across the board. In our campaign projects, we would create an idea and carry it across different mediums…the mediums being magazine, newspapers, TV, radio, and direct mail. Even for my final project senior year, which was only 9 months ago, interactive was not a component.

Post graduation when all I wanted to do was get a job at an agency and move to NYC, two places I interviewed with that were at the top of my list were Morpheus and Digitas, both interactive agencies. It was/is exciting to be part of such a new, fast growing field, at a place that is ahead of the curve, and where everything was new and exciting to me.
For homework in college we would have to read articles from AdAge and, like in our classes, we would learn about print and TV. Now when you go to the AdAge homepage there is a whole section dedicated to digital with a “Search Fact Pack” for 2007 showing stats of what is going on in the SEM world and how big a part of advertising it has become. It shows the top searches and sites and interactive marketing agencies and much more. It is a good starting point for people trying to learn about digital advertising.

I hope that universities are making sure to stay on top of this trend and preparing their students for what the advertising world really is about in 2008, with widgets and wikis and mobile, as Morpheus has done for me.