Who’s in it with me? I’ve worked with tens of dozens of companies in my career but there are only a few with leadership willing to take that risk. And for those that have I have made them hugely successful. It’s not a brag. OK well maybe a little. But it’s true. It takes a special kind of business owner, manager, executive to passionately embrace the terrifyingly new. And it takes a special kind of agency, that would be me, who has the jaundiced eye, depth of experience and enthusiasm to steer that company in the right direction. When it works, we make so much more than money, we take businesses to completely new places.

Who’s next? You? Call me. 973-539-6000

That is precisely why Google is over. Here is the evidence:

Being the largest game in town, black hats need only focus on on guy to game and that’s Google. And Google is losing the arms race, it is the Elephant killed by a billion ants! The increasingly poor results served up on Search Engine Results Pages is proof. Every search delivers large spammy selections from content farms: broad shallow sites filled with vapid information. About.com is the most legit among the villains! (Shame on you NY Times Corporation!) But thousands of others are even more guilty: black hats hiring low wage/slave wage cut and paste workers copy information onto millions of pages so the site owners can sell Google Ads. (A shout out to a crowd of bloggers who since Jan 1 have been rapidly building momentum on this topic: Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail, On the increasing uselessness of Google, Trouble in the House of Google

If you deliver spammy results you train your visitors to seek answers elsewhere. And as I predicted years ago, vertical search engines and upstarts are gaining ground. Bing delivers beautifully. Blekko delivers better. Wikki answers the homework questions. And when shopping, hell, just start at Amazon or Ebay and move on from there. Vertical social media and tightly focused message boards still deliver some of the best answers to questions asked and answered by passionate individuals. Need a special undershirt that won’t chafe for a child wearing a scoliosis brace? The answer can be found on a message board – because the brace company that sells it has been crowded out of the Google SERP by other inane sites all served up by our infamous friend GoogleBot who simply CANNOT differentiate between quality information and web trash.

Google stopped innovating long ago. We empowered Google by going to it and clicking on its ads. After their initial eureka moment, they bought all other innovations by acquiring companies. Their SaaS offerings of little spreadsheet ditties and social marketing confections are so disjointed and insecure they could pass as Open Source! My question is how can a company so big lack so much vision? Google is clearly distressed about this, note the latest change in leadership at the top. But going back to the founders is a mistake. Steve Jobs may have had the hutzpah to pull a Phoenix with Apple – but in my view that is a rarity!

What does this mean for businesses trying to be found?
1. SEO within reason, that means follow Google Web Master Guidelines, but don’t obsess.
2. NEVER, ever undertake an SEO effort beyond Google Web Master Guidelines unless it has an additional benefit such as lead generation, sales or enhancement of your web site experience. That way if your effort may give you a temporal SEO bump but it will also deliver a lasting marketing lift.
3. Create really useful content for humans. Understand WHEN they need your product and look for blogs and other platforms whose content is associated with that moment of need.
4. Solve problems where your clients look for solutions: message boards, blogs, user groups, associations etc.
5. When considering SEO do not ignore Bing or Blekko and others.
6. Beware of the Social Media sink hole! Where do your customers congregate? Go there. Just because “everyone is on Facebook” doesn’t mean your customers are there, or care to hear about you there. TAKE NOTE: If Google was over in my mind five years ago, Facebook was over two years ago! Vertical social media is here. But that is a topic for another day!

Happy Hunting!

Did I just say that? I did.

Online advertising has quickly lost its promise. Why?

1. It over promised.

2. Google trained us all NOT to use Google. With a poor user experience (half a dozen tries to get close to the answer you needed) and dozens of vertical competitors. Now if you want to buy something you got to your brand name store with a smart online presence. If you want to get an answer for your homework, you go straight to Wikipedia. By pass Google, go direct. Why pay for search ads?

3. Facebook devalued the meaning of friends. Having snookered millions out of personal information, its ads simply do not return sales. Why? Facebook is boring. Most folks are self-censoring their posts or using FB for businesses and professional reasons. Dull Dull Dull! Facebook may have buckets of personal information but if users don’t use the service its got bupkis.

And all the misguided venture capital backed offspring of Google/Facebook: Foursquare, Yelp…you name it, are now twisting in the wind. Its not just the recession folks, we would have arrived here without it, it just would have taken more time to get here.
What are the indicators? Google is advertising about advertising on Google. Let me repeat that: Google is advertising about advertising on Google. Let that sink in. Oh, and they are not advertising about advertising on Google ON GOOGLE. No, they are advertising in print, on television and at trade shows.

And that brings it all back to Face Time: a true measure of a prospective customer’s engagement with your company, your brand is if they take the time to meet you face-to-face. And the value of that interaction is far more impactful than anything else you can do as a company.

What happens next? Online marketing will become far more complex and demanding: the place where those face-to-face relationships are tethered until the next face-to-face encounter.
That is the next chapter in online marketing. Stay tuned!

Print publications had this problem in the early days and so the BPA provided circulation audits. Yes media kits still whipped up the marketing spin, but as a planner you could lay those green sheets and yellow sheets side by side and make some objective baseline judgements.

This is not too much to ask from media companies today.

After BPA came broadcast and Nielson, boxes on sets reported back to the home office. Beyond that Nielson ratings were a bit shaky but overall, they provided a level playing field.

With perhaps the exception of Life Magazine, (and that is a stretch) no print publication ever came close to the monopolistic power of Google and now Facebook. Even Hearst, with all his power was puny by today’s standards.

And Broadcast bloomed and diluted into 200 channels in three short decades. But that was after the FCC came in and regulated local markets carefully limiting cross media ownership of local licenses.

Monopolies are bad for business.

Today we have ventured into far more dangerous waters. Marketers have become cheerleaders for the media monopolies that are frankly, stealing money from our clients — and frankly from all of us too.

Marketers have always tended to self-delusion and selling self delusion to clients. Those  of us truth tellers in this business are truly misfits. But when you work with a mid-sized B-to-B operation. When you are sitting across the table from the guy who is pulling those dollars out of his own wallet, if you want to earn his trust you’d better speak the truth. You and your client are on the frontlines. If you and your clients play in this very large slice of the market, you’ve taken your knocks. You can smell BS from 20 paces.

And here is what we smell:

Social Media is NOT effective in many cases, Facebook has not provided any answers on true activity. Who will benefit? Why we should buy? They have provided so many reasons NOT to trust them, their “auction” pricing is the least of it!

Search is no longer right for many companies — increasing cost is a huge factor. Google could help by making its auction far more transparent. When you buy shares on the NYSE you know the volume, the last tick — that’s the least Google could do. Who is bidding, how much and when? Why should I trust Google?

SEO has always been smoke and mirrors populated by hyperventilating “experts” who jump tag any twitch of the needle as a Google conspiracy. And yet, marketers are fixated by it! I was at a pre-Bing meeting at Microsoft. The guys there were promising a different sort of search engine, far more open. I said, “Really? How long will that really last?” Not long. It ended when we left the room.

When media companies are making what Google, Facebook et al. are they will never succumb to a tepid third-party audit scheme. Say what you want about Hitwise and Alexa they are not delivering what only the horse’s mouth can.

The only way to get what we need is with swift and sharp government regulation — don’t hold your breadth.

In the meantime what do the truth tellers do? They find their client’s True North. Judiciously, with care, testing, analyzing, tweaking programs and never, ever, following the marketing lemmings.

Activity by Age No date range, no trending, no numbers. Essentially meaningless.

All charts about Men v. Women Ditto. And the claim that women “Get Talked To More” by whom? Other women or by men? By businesses? Those are completely different dynamics.

Facebook “Factbook” Facts? Hardly. Over the last six years people have spent 55 minutes a day on Facebook. That tells us nothing. What are they spending RIGHT NOW on Facebook and is it trending upwards or downwards (I strongly suspect the latter). And the only people who care about FB’s valuation are talking heads who want to see who’s in on the IPO. Consider it gossip futures.

As of August 2009 (ancient history in web time) 50% of users were active. How about fresh data and overlaying it with demographics: age, gender, location. And how about trending that data. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there are millions of FB deadbeats who sign on and never come back or comeback infrequently. We all have them on our accounts — no photo, two posts, five friends.

Facebook Users Like Food Pages OK Hubspot are you a site of real value or the cover of 17 Magazine? Where’s the beef?

Facebook Pages & Buzzwords Wow, let’s play Madlibs! How can any marketer with a straight face recite these to a client?

Facts about Facebook Infographic No dates, all hype and judging by the most popular FB pages more ancient history.

Most Liked and Least Liked Facebook Page Types Meaningless data based on averages. See yesterday’s post.

Facebook v. the United States Data so old its useless and again, nothing is trended.

I am a professional marketer who tells the truth, speaks with bell ringing clarity. I fight to give my clients the most clear, fact-based info possible, because their success and ultimately mine depends on it. It’s their money for goodness sake and they are paying me to advise them wisely.

Hubspot you are undermining our profession by purveying this vacuous baloney as gospel.

Here’s what we’d do: First we’d present the document to Joe and say, “Hey Joe, every member of the team has seen the document and likes it, how do you feel about it?” of course Joe would say, “well if everyone else thinks its O.K. I do too”. Then we’d go to Jane and repeat the process. At some point, the document achieved Religious Significance, no one had any more to say about it since no one else had anything to say about it and, well, then it was gospel, and we considered it approved. Amen.

Now here we are AB (AFTER the BUBBLE) and the Internet is providing that same experience on mass scale with a twist, I call it: Crowd Religious Significancing.

There is no better example than a recent Hubspot article: Least Liked Facebook Page Types.

It features a chart based on data from “a proprietary program”. Start worrying. (Who wrote it? What were the parameters? Has the program been tested?) And this program delivered these results: it counted and averaged the number of LIKES on Facebook Pages and organized them by category. Oh dear. There is not much there, there. Watch it unravel:

The first respondent to the article was a Christian group who was rightly up in arms about the results. It showed religious groups as part of the “least liked” pages chart on Facebook.

It all sounds very middle school to me: Who’s the most liked? Who’s the least liked? When in fact the chart simply shows the AVERAGE number of people who “liked” pages in a certain category. It does not show the number of pages in the category so the data is totally unreliable.

One person did note the data was hardly viable and cogently explained why. BUT that was ignored by the majority. Here is a typical response: “Thanks for this information. I am surprised that Religion is the least like facebook page. Anyways thanks Hubspot for this findings.”

Findings???? FINDINGS????  These are more like SCRATCHINGS.  And here is where Crowd Religious Signficancing begins. Tissue thin “findings” are presented by self-proclaimed “experts”, then tweeted and retweeted (160 times at last count in this case) and suddenly it is gospel! And this is all because the folks with the REAL solid data refuse to release it to the people who need it most: their customers. (I’ve written about this “Basic Questions Facebook Must Answer”)

Facebook, Google et. al. are holding their cards so close that all that’s left is a world of sketchy experts scratching away at nothing to fabricate facts.

Well here is one fact for you: No one knows anything.

Start there, test with care and you’ll come to know some of what need to know – for you.

What’s the killer data in this chart?  Social Media is a total time sink. Lots of effort, little return.  It is no surprise that it disappeared from the EXCERPT, because it is pretty incendiary to all those Social Media proponents out there.

Thank you Marketing Sherpa for confirming what I have been saying for months on end — and teaching at Zebworks.com! Thank you! And here is the kicker, blogging — that old fashioned practice takes lots of energy BUT delivers much better return. This re-affirms the advice we have been giving clients for years. Center your social media program around blogging.  Yes! Booyah! Bravo Sherpa! I hope the rest of the report is as compelling!

The result, as we all experience every day, is truly lousy software. Would you buy a car that crashed every time it hit a pebble? Why do we continue to buy Microsoft products? Why do we continue to run like star struck lemmings to Apple? Why do we continue to query Google when it can’t give us the answer to our query? Why do we share our lives on Facebook when they relentlessly leverage our dignity for their gain?

Why is it OK for companies to give us somewhat functional products that deliver a modicum of efficiency? Why do we give them a pass? Our monopoly laws only bruise these behemoths, none truly stop them in their path.

In the meantime, we all lose and we lose big. Competition is stifled so we pay too much for too little. Innovation is snuffed out and great new ideas never see the light of day.

I am really disgusted with Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft – but that does not compare to my disgust with our hapless, toothless government. All talk, no action while the marketplace delivers garbage and our lives, community and the world are gutted.

It is time to chose and to chose critically. Ask yourself: do I really need this software? Is free really free? What is Facebook really good for? Should I really be paying to advertise here? Will I really get the results I need for my business? Is what I am doing, right now, for me, my company, my community, honorable?

Question. Question to discover what will make our world truly more productive.