According to White-Liard:

I just finished reading an interesting post by Dave Allen called, “The Problem with Location Technology is Us”. This is a good discussion of the pros/cons of LBS services and as an early adopter of Foursquare, Gowalla etc., I can see why it has not been roundly adopted by the general populace. Besides the general privacy concerns (read this interesting article about a reporter who stalked a woman he’d never met through her 4sq checkins), there doesn’t seem to be a compelling justification for using it…at least not yet.

The funny thing is that it used to be that brands would be one of the last adopters of new technologies…and social media is a prime example. It was only last year we were having to justify every dollar spent on Twitter or Facebook, whereas now there is a rush to participate, and although metrics are important, they are not paramount to execution. I remember saying the new meaning for ROI was not return on investment (because positive financial gain could not be proven) but risk of ignorance (because by not participating an intangible negative value could be proven).

Read the full post on Heather’s blog, howlvenice.

Effects of this algorithm change:

1. For manufacturers and official brand or product sites, expect Google branded traffic to increase
More of your pages are being returned for your branded queries, which should lead to more site traffic from those terms. Examine which pages are being displayed for the most popular branded queries to ensure you are presenting the most desirable pages to searchers.     

2. For retailers/aggregators, expect challenges to maintain first-page visibility for some branded terms
If you are a retailer, aggregator, reseller, affiliate or anyone that sells products or services of another brand, you may now have to compete with up to eight results from the official brand or product site, pushing your visibility much lower on the first page or off the page completely. For products without strong manufacturer sites, search results may be unchanged with this update, so monitor your entire keyword set to detect changes.

3. Your reputation management efforts get a boost
Having more results on the first page from your domain means that negative third-party sites have less visibility for your branded keywords. If you were pleased with positive third-party sites that reinforced your reputation, those may also now be pushed down. Be aware that this change currently only impacts Google.com, so continue to monitor other engines and any applicable international Google sites.

4. For Google, expect more paid search activity
While Google’s stated motivation for this algorithm change is to show users what Google believes they are looking for, a clear side benefit is that retailers who previously ranked high naturally for certain branded keywords may decide to increase paid spend for those keywords to compensate for the lost traffic.

5. For Bing, an opportunity?
For many branded keywords, the Google set of natural results now looks very different from that served on Bing or Yahoo!. If users don’t find the multitude of single-site results in Google appealing, will they continue to page two of Google’s results, or increasingly shift their searching to another engine?

Jon Maxson (@jmaxson1) is director, natural search for iCrossing.

Clark Griswold:

So there I was… 3:00am in the morning driving around Sun Valley, Idaho, with my then two-year-old daughter trying to lull her back to sleep. I was so tired, I think I may have been crying a little. You see, traveling with little kids is painful. I mean, kick you in the groin painful. Or, I need a vacation from my vacation painful. It was that night that I came up with the Grizwold Index. So, this index is for that poor guy you see carrying the pack-n-play and the car seat through the airport. Or those haggard parents you see driving out of town with their minivan packed to the gills. Heaven help them.

The index is pretty simple. It takes into consideration the actual enjoyment the parents are going to have plus the memories the kids will make. This is divided by the hassle factor and cost of the trip. If you end up with a score that is greater than 2 you should go on the trip. A score between 0 and 2 you should travel at your own risk, while a trip that receives a score that is less than 0 should be avoided at all costs. I mean, you should stay home and save your kids and yourself from the mental scaring that will inevitably occur.

I went to lunch the other day with a friend that described trips that receive a score that is less than zero as “Oblications.” That is, an “obligation-vacation.” These trips generally involve in-laws, tense moments and lots of crying from both children and parents. Phrases like “I’m going to pull the car over right here” or “if you do that one more time I’m gonna…” or “just kill me now” are phases commonly uttered during these trips.

Try running a previous trip through the equation and keep this index in mind the next time you plan a trip. Happy trails.

Clark: Oh, you can’t think I’d do this on purpose? Look… I tied him to the rear bumper while I was packing the car. It was very confusing. I must have forgot. I’m very sorry, I feel terrible.
Motorcycle Cop: How do you think that little dog feels?
Clark: Look, I told you I was sorry. It really was an accident.
Motorcycle Cop: Well, I guess I can buy that, sir. But it is a shame. I had a pooch like this when I was a kid.
[both Clark and the motorcycle cop sorrowfully look at the empty road behind them]
Motorcycle Cop: Poor little guy. Probably kept up with you for a mile or so. [tearing up]
Motorcycle Cop: Tough little mutt…

Chuck Sharp (@chucklsharp) is senior vice president of analytics at iCrossing.

According to Garner:

A frequent warning heard from sociologists and network theorists is that “exclusion from networks” represents one of the greatest sociological and economic threats that future global societies could possibly encounter. In light of the recent pact between Google and Verizon on net neutrality, and their combined position that somehow “wireless internet networks are different,” one of the societies now at the crossroads of this dilemma is the United States.

While the Google-Verizon pact is not law by any means, many experts and people in government view this development as the first key domino to fall toward non-neutrality via legislation.  Keeping networks “neutral” means that there is open and free access to the Internet in the U.S.  This is significant to the Web as we know it, and impacts the life of U.S. citizens directly for a number of reasons.

Read the full post on MediaPost’s Search Insider.

Dana Mellecker is senior public relations director at iCrossing.

Here’s a little bit about the proposed panel, from Alisa herself:

For too long SEO and social pundits have battled it out – “social media creates links and visibility in search!” ”social is about conversation and engagement, screw search!” Will there ever be a true synergy between these two? The engines certainly think so and now more than ever search really does need social and social impacts search more than ever.

Click here to read the full post on Alisa’s blog, The Web is Social.

This year, we’re looking to expand the iCrossing reach even further by hosting six different panels! But to get there, we’ll need your help! We’ve submitted our panel ideas, but WE’LL NEED YOUR VOTES to make sure they get chosen! Read on to check out the panels, or vote at the SXSW.2011 Panel Picker.

Each panelist will be explaining their panel in a video, and we’re kicking it off with the Mayor of Huckelberry Cafe, Heather White Laird: http://www.youtube.com/icrossing
Stay tuned for more videos!

Curious what we’re offering? Here’s a brief description of all the iCrossing panels:

Marketing in the Moment by Rob Garner (@robgarner, http://www.rgarner.com/ )
While brands have become increasingly networked, they fail to maintain the fluidity and agility of the average user, many major brands are at risk at failing in their marketing efforts, or succumbing to more agile competitor. This session lays out the new marketing landscape, and demonstrates how brands will need to reinvent themselves.

Real-Time Marketing Strategy: Surviving Daily Change by Adam Lavelle (@alavelle, http://adamlavelle.com/)
Many marketers have still been stuck with the contradiction of taking the time to set a strategy in place, while knowing that everything might be changing around them. We’re left with a simple question, but a huge challenge: can you develop a marketing strategy that prepares you for the chaos and unpredictability of the real-time net?

Poked, Liked & Re-Tweeted: A Google Love Story by Alisa Leonard (@alisamleo, http://thewebissocial.com)
For too long SEO and social pundits have battled it out – “social media creates links and visibility in search!”…”social is about conversation and engagement, screw search!” Will there ever be a true synergy between these two? Alisa Leonard and Rob Garner of iCrossing present a compelling narrative and case studies that illustrate just how the long awaited synergy between search and social is real and how it can be leveraged to drive performance and results.

Me and My Web Shadow: Online Reputation Management by Antony Mayfield (@amayfield, http://antonymayfield.com)
What happens when someone puts your name into Google? Or Facebook? If you don’t know, it’s time you found out, and discovered your web shadow. Your web shadow is the mark you make on the web, the trace of you that people can see there. It is the sum of your online presence. Me and My Web Shadow, helps you to understand how what’s said about you on the Web can affect your job, your business and your personal life, both positively and negatively.

Without a Mobile Strategy You’re Screwed! by Rachel Pasqua (@rachelpasqua, http://www.rachelpasqua.com/)
There is no such thing as mobile media – or social media for that matter. Rather, the way we use the web is increasingly social and our means of accessing it and each other, increasingly mobile. For the next wave of internet users, mobile will be their first – and for many, their only – web experience.

About Face: When Will Facebook Fail? by Heather White Laird (@howlvenice, http://howlvenice.com/)
Do the natural laws of business and technology apply to Facebook? The Law of Large Numbers implies that the larger a company becomes, the harder it becomes for it to continue to grow. So where does that leave Facebook in five years? Does Facebook have immunity from these natural laws of selection? This panel of international brilliant thought leaders will discuss the future of Facebook.

To read more about the panels, cast your vote, and recommend topics that you want to see covered during the panels, visit the sxsw voting panels here: http://bit.ly/iCsxsw2011

Sarah Gay (@sarahgay) is a Senior Analyst, Strategy, for iCrossing and wants to see our panels at SXSW Interactive 2011.

For example, take Trident Gum. The other day I heard a radio ad for Trident. The call to action at the end? Find us on Facebook.com for more details. Even their banner ads drive to Facebook!

Toyota used YouTube as a major part of its marketing communication strategy for their Sienna minivan for a while. Even their iPad ads drive readers to Youtube.com/sienna. The Swagger Wagon rap videos are pretty hilarious. They have over 3 million channel views!  

And let’s not forget Ford’s bold move to reveal the new Ford Explorer exclusively on Facebook a few weeks ago, which generated lots of buzz among the digerati.

Why is this happening?

Yes, social media is growing and marketers are fishing where the fish are. Facebook has more than 500 millions users. YouTube is the no. 2 search engine behind Google. Blah blah blah.

But I think there’s more at play here inside companies. In my experience, lots of online marketers used to launch microsites because they wanted to break away from the IT’ departments “rigid” site architecture and layout of the brand’s .com website. Or they wanted a vanity URL or not some long cryptic URL from the .com site. Even if it costs them serious $ to pay for digital marketing agencies (Thanks, by the way) to build these microsites, it was worth it because they could get to market faster and not deal with internal IT teams.

Official brand presences on social media sites have replaced these custom microsite builds. Some of these sites already offer a decent user experience with little programming. For example, a decent YouTube brand channel can be launched pretty easily, assuming you have the media budget. Facebook requires a little more work for custom tabs.

But marketers can turn to agencies again for help. They’ve got another “excuse” to go externally because many companies still haven’t figure out who owns social media internally. IT? PR? Marketing? Opportunistic marketers are going to just hire an agency, build it and launch it until the dust settles internally.

If you want to minimize agency costs, there are crops of startups that aim to help marketers launch “Facebook tabs in a box,” such as Wildfire or FanPageEngine on the cheap.

Bottom line: R.I.P. Microsites

Edmund Wong (@edmundw) is senior vice president of strategy and planning for iCrossing.

Yes, many a naysayer is downplaying the impact that Google TV will have, even anticipating its inevitable failure, pointing to what seems to be a general disdain for set-top boxes (TiVo. Replay TV, Roku. Vudu, etc.) Conversely, just as many industry insiders believe that it will be a force to be reckoned with in the search market… one that will open up an entirely new can of spiders, so to speak, when it comes to connecting brands with their targeted audiences.

With that said, from a search perspective, there are a few things we may want to focus on leading up to the launch of Google TV:

Better Video Optimization – The melding of a search browser with television will, no doubt, put even more of an emphasis on video optimization. There should be a bigger focus on the quality of the videos themselves, and their ability to achieve higher ranking in search results. During the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle a few months ago, Google guru Matt Cutts encouraged anyone who publishes videos to quickly create sitemaps:

“…it’s in everybody’s interest that all the videos that are on the web be able to be very discoverable and very searchable. We want to be able to crawl and find all the video across the entire web…and so I think we are going to be putting more and more weight on video sitemaps going forward, like this fall and into the future.” – Matt Cutts

Big-Screen Makeovers – Just as we encourage clients to optimize their websites for mobile, we should urge them to optimize for Google TV. Google TV will run on the Android-based platform (2.1) and developers will be able to optimize websites for browsing and build their own apps. So clients should be encouraged to invest in their own Android app to make the most of this TV/Web experience, as it will become more critical than ever. In a nutshell, we need to help our clients make sure their content is up to par – no matter where people are viewing it.

Simpler, More Concise Copy – SEO Copywriters should also know the rules of optimizing for Google TV. Since the content will be coming into the homes of viewers, it’s even more important that, much like writing for mobile, the copy should be highly targeted, relevant, concise and focused on users’ needs. Google offers the following advice when designing/writing for Google TV:

-  Limit each paragraph to no more than 90 words
-  Break text into small chunks that can be read at a glance
-  Keep line length at about 5-7 words per line, never go shorter than three or longer than 12
-  Add more leading (larger line spacing) for onscreen text than print text

Fiercely Targeted Marketing – No official word yet on how Google’s ad services will play out on Google TV, but we know that clients utilizing pay-per-click and display ads will have exposure on Google TV, just like they do on the internet. That means, since these ads will now be coming into the family room, it’s even more important for them to be highly targeted and relevant, without being annoying or intrusive.

Just in Time for the Holidays…

The first companion box for Google TV, which will be known as the “Logitech Revue,” will be available in the fall at Best Buy stores, as will Sony’s Google TV sets and Blu-ray players. Also announced is the launch of the YouTube LeanBack, a personalized channel that you can access on Google TV and the web, which lets users customize their viewing experience and gives them access to full HD videos. The idea being, you can just “lean back,” relax and enjoy. The BETA version is already here, but the actual service will be released in cahoots with the above fall launches.

Also coming down the pipe, rumors of a deal between Google and Verizon Wireless to create a so-called “Chrome Tablet”, which, the Financial Times has hinted, is a 10-inch Android tablet that’s thinner and lighter than the iPad… Google TV anyone? It would reportedly utilize Verizon’s FiOS digital pay-television service and could take a bite out of Apple’s iPad.

While no one knows for sure how Google TV will play out, the coming months should prove to be a pretty interesting, if not exciting, time.

Beth Fox is a senior search copywriter at iCrossing.

As is often the case, Google is leading the way with feature enhancements and we would wager that MSN will follow suit. Initial benefits gleaned from leveraging this in Google will likely pay-off with similar, proportional impact on MSN (which will be powering Y! search by end of year, in all likelihood).

We are leveraging this feature in both our technology and keyword bid differentiation strategy. Merchantize is designed to mirror keywords by multiple dimensions so that we may differentiate bids based on cross-sections of performance, and make micro-investments in areas with the greatest marginal return. The new match type gives us another layer of differentiation to focus investment on the most profitable search queries.

One way that modified broad match is already helping our clients is by decreasing the media cost incurred in the process of discovering appropriate negative keywords. Previously, it was necessary to collect limited clicks on unwanted synonyms and related terms in order to identify them as recommended negative keywords. By launching with a plus sign next to ambiguity-prone keywords, the likelihood of serving ads for irrelevant search queries diminishes.

Based on our experience so far, the feature has greater potential benefit for new launches than existing campaigns. Typically, our existing campaigns are already serving the vast amount of traffic through exact match keywords and blocking thousands of irrelevant search queries. In contrast, newly launched campaigns go through a period of data collection during which the modified broad match feature can be leveraged to drive stronger ROI.

Ty Martin is senior media strategist at iCrossing.

First, if it’s enough to get two arch rivals together at the same table (putting aside their red and blue coverage maps), it’s serious.

Second, the stock price of both Visa and Mastercard, who control 82% of credit card transactions, took a 1.5-3.5% hit yesterday on this news because they are on the losing end of such a venture.

Third, smartphone adoption is growing like gang busters. The iPhone 4 is selling like hotcakes despite its antenna issue, and every hot new Android phone (e.g., Droid Incredible, Evo, Droid X) is on back-order soon after launch. Research firm Canalys predicts smartphone adoption will reach 48% by 2013 in the U.S.

Fourth, consumers are getting used to mobile banking. According to Mercatus, more than half of U.S. consumers will use mobile financial services within five years.

To be sure, this is no slam dunk. Visa and Mastercard and the plastic card status quo is not easy to supplant. They have distribution systems and merchant relationships in place. Merchants would have to get new readers and handset OEMs would need to embed new chips.

The catch-22 is they may not want to make that kind of investment until consumers show real interest in using it. But that only comes when consumers find enough merchants who accept such payment methods.

Now this is a BIG deal because I saw the same thing happen 10 years ago when smart cards had the potential to take the U.S. by storm and it never really did. I just hope history does not repeat itself.

Edmund Wong (@edmundw) is senior vice president of strategy and planning for iCrossing.