Start your engines.

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I. Everything Marketers do is held accountable to up to (4) core measurements. They are:

1. Revenue
2. CPA
3. Profit
4. ROI

If you're not working to at least (2) of those with the first one included, that's an attribution challenge that needs solving before you deploy your next campaign.

II. There are (4) core business models on the Web. They are:

1. Lead Gen
2. eCommerce
3. Branding & Advertising
4. Customer Service & Support

Each of those has overlapping nonetheless distinct KPI sets, so the best returns come from working methodically yet without getting too cookie-cutter.

III. There are (4) stages of the customer lifecycle. Often in any given situation some need hence get more attention than others, but normally all are critical. They are:

1. Reach
2. Acquisition
3. Conversion
4. Retention

Of that list, the second one means getting Traffic. A lot of people get that confused. If you're a Director of Acquisition and your job's mainly about winning converts, ask for "Customer" to be added into your title.

IV. Online Marketers should focus on a maximum of (4) channels at any given point, typically for durations of at least a year at a time i.e. changing up the set no less infrequently.

The selections can and should vary per situation. Examples:

a. If you're working for a large enterprise it might be [Search (SEO, PPC), Email, Display, Social Media]. You've got an established brand to maintain and corporate reputation to protect, and the wherewithal to work across the gamut of channels from the tried n' true to the newer.

b. If you're rolling more SMB it might look more like [Search (SEO), Search (PPC), Email, Mobile]. You can do some advertising and list buys but not gobs, yet you still need to reach a sizable market. You can do it, just not without staying very targeted with every channel.

c. If you're a Sole Proprietor or Small Business, chances are your mix will lean more [Search (SEO), Affiliates, Email, Social Media]. Advertising is largely cost-prohibitive so you need to work only the normally most financially efficient and/or inexpensive. Even if one of those is somewhat immature, everything has trade-offs (and besides, if your doors are just freshly opened your business isn't exactly matured yet either, so that's all good).

In any case though, the rule about keeping most if not all one's time and effort on a limited number of channels applies. Doing a few things but well always trumps trying to do it all but generally sucking.

* * *

Whatever your chosen online marketing route is, driving with this 4x4 is a great way to help ensure you get to where you're trying to go.

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I've been putting off taking a stab at deploying some tools: Not ones that are laborious or take a long time to use or produce, also not ones that are just another take on some item everyone's seen a million different expressions of already. The best tools address the interesting questions, those concentrating on the realm of how clear and effective ownership paves the way for clear and effective execution.

Though it's one of the tougher ones, the budgeting issue is an important part of addressing the ROI equation. One can't frame how to set goals around desired Return if one doesn't have sufficient confidence in the Investment methodology. For Marketers, having a hand in both sides of the equation is a critical component of determining intelligently how to best deliver business impact, setting and committing to aggressive nonetheless realistically attainable goals, and managing expectations accordingly. Regardless of whether one is working client-side or services-side, the difference between asking "What's my/your budget?" vs. "How is budgeting being approached given the business model and goals?" can set much of the stage for how to pick strategies for success.

As a Marketer, knowing mainly just however much money you do(n't) have on-hand doesn't cut it. Also, often the size of a given budget isn't nearly as important as the budget definition criteria, when entering into the online space and/or a given channel within. When allocations aren't made properly it can place success out of reach, and lead to a self-perpetuating cycle of budgets never becoming sizable absent foundations of success being found. Everything starts somewhere so it's about starting smart to avoid over-allocations here yet under-allocations there, not just of cash but of time and effort.

In principle, the thinking is just like how the best Analysts know the difference between analysis and reporting, so they take lead on guiding what metrics are relevant to report on in the first place based on the details of any given engagement. They don't put it on their clients to dictate it, nor do they try to dictate it themselves in a vacuum. Rather, they partner with them to translate the bottom and/or top-line needs into a map of what details actually matter (so their clients can then sleep easy, staying largely out of the details).

As a business decision maker (read: signature authority):

• Are you ever questioning if the right calls are being made about how much to spend on online vs. traditional marketing?
• Are you managing an online marketing budget but not sure how to best allocate it across channels, in part because some channels' ROI (like SEO) is just damn hard to nail down?
• Are you managing just a couple channels in particular (like both paid and organic search) but frequently trying to find the right balance?

If you answered "Yes" to any of these questions, this post is for ye.

The bl.asphemo.us Online Marketing Budget Estimator

The following tool is a quick, high-level business questionnaire. It will dish out no hard dollar numbers whatsoever. Instead, it offers relational estimates based on situational attributes. Beyond a basic law of averages it draws on probabilities as I've tapped from a number of different sources, some of whom you've probably heard of but all of whom I'll leave unnamed, hoping you'll trust me when I say they're reliable and reflective of an actionable sampling pool (i.e. a few recent years' worth in particular). I don't normally do any strictly original research but I do survey surveyors (so to speak), and weight their conclusions based on the scopes of their studies and how much I trust their methods for gathering and interpreting data and the overall quality of the sources themselves. Then I draw my own conclusions and develop normally basic models in suit.

Try the Estimator and compare its suggestions to your experience, needs and challenges, past to present. Naturally it's just one method; this one's a top-line (Revenue) approach whereas another way would most likely work up more from a Profit aims perspective... Anywho, it will take just a few minutes to give it a spin.

Looking forward to feedback!

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It just got more complicated. In case you haven't noticed, right now Google and Facebook are in a scrap over the issue of which one can position itself to appear less untrustworthy in the marketplace when it comes to matters of handling users' privacy. Off on the sidelines, other brands like Apple, Amazon and others are getting to watch and learn from whatever mistakes they might make, as they continue to grow their businesses online.

Google's latest move, within the past 48-72 hours roughly, has been the unveiling of SSL Search as available at https://www.google.com. It's in Beta, which I suppose helps excuse the glaring canonical issue of how https://google.com doesn't redirect to it as of this writing. Also at the moment, their SSL Search is now coming to Chrome as an option.

The Guardian recently published a bit on how this "casts shadow on web analytics," also Danny Sullivan published an article examining how it might be the "Death of Web Analytics" wherein he admits that like many of us in this business, myself included, he blocks his own referrers from going outbound anyway.

in the wake of that and catching up with a bit of associated chirping in the Twittersphere, I spent a little time this morning digging into this. My take is basically that the sky isn't falling, but it sure is getting more cloudy. I ran a few tests using a super-simple criteria of trying to determine if, when users visit sites from Google, referrers would get stripped all of the time or just some of the time.

My checks worked like this (though I didn't test every combination as that wouldn't be applicable much):

1. Secure (search) to Secure (URL)
2. Secure (search) to Clear (URL)
3. Clear (search) to Secure (URL)
4. Clear (search) to Clear (URL)

I hit a few different sites using FireFox with WASP enabled, visiting some of my favorite local peeps (South Beach posse in da hooouuusssee!) to see how various publishers' installations of packages like Google Analytics, Omniture and Webtrends responded. Being that I know offhand that they're among a number of sites that currently use a mix of HTTP and HTTPS on their domain, I also added in Lending Club's site to this morning's survey.

Understanding the responses:

• In OMTR, when a referrer is passed it'll appear as "referrer (r)" under "Traffic Source" whereas if it's not passed it won't appear.
• In GA, the referrer variable is "Referrer (utmr)" under "Content". When a referrer is not passed, it will appear but its value will show as "-".
• In WebTrends, the referrer variable is "dcsref" under "SDC-Parameter Override." When a referrer is not passed, it won't appear.

Some screen captures, wherein when possible, I've highlighted captured referrers as well as their keyword portions:

Test A:

Subject: AKQA; Clear (search) to Clear (URL)

Test B:

Subject: AKQA; Secure (search) to Clear (URL)

Test C:

Subject: BigDeal.com; Secure (search) to Clear (URL)

Test D:

Subject: Expensify; Secure (search) to Secure (URL)

Test E:

Subject: Lending Club; Secure (search) to Secure (URL)

Conclusion

So there you have it. As you can see, sites who are already serving all their pages on HTTPS don't have anything new to worry about, seemingly. If you're in this situation, you should still be able to pick up Search visitors' referring engines and keywords details as you always have.

If you're not in this camp though, think about how all this might take a chunk of visibility away from your Web Analytics. For companies whose business relies significantly on referrers hand-off, i.e. market analysis providers, this looks like a can of worms. For publishers and webmasters whose direct concerns are more just on the sites they own and manage, there are some more controllable things they can do to minimize how disruptive this change needs to be.

Up until this point I held the position that defaulting to HTTP, and using HTTPS only if/as really needed in select areas of a given site, was the best thing to do. I'm not so sure I do anymore. Back then that was at least partly on behalf of avoiding potential impairment of select 3rd-party services, e.g. Alexa etc. ... but if SSL Search starts to get wired into more and more places and starts to look increasingly pervasive... well, forget that. Situations where everyone needs to focus on retooling their own stuff to roll as much as possible with disruptive change, they are what they are.

I also think all this stuff about the potential demise of the referrer... the whole idea of it does spoil some of the fun, as far as occasionally pushing snarky fake stuff into competitors' logs like "http://youcannotbeat.us/because-yourcompany-sucks&we=rule" goes.

Ha ha, I kid you! I'm a kidder...

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Here are a few popular myths, some of which may not have yet been given a good poking at:

01. Myth: Being really social online is the mark of a Social Media Marketing expert.

Prelude: "Those who can do, those who can't teach." (Yeah, it's a dogmatic adage but please bear with me for a moment...)

Fact: Socially, people usually converge and carry themselves online as they to offline, for the most part. Being really social online might make you Type A, outgoing or friendly, and it might even make you an evangelist (not to be confused with a promoter / guerilla cheerleader). It does not however, necessarily make you an influencer to any degree i.e. someone who has experience in methodically generating customer acquisition, if not at least traffic / buzz, without spending money on advertising. Beyond the obvious PR considerations, that's the real point of social media marketing. Principally, while it can often be about building relationships it's much less often about making friends, and in any case it's about doing a job. It's about doing things that help elevate companies' business, directly and/or indirectly. It's about getting customers and/or things that help make it happen such as measured, increased brand visibility and Web presence, paying mind of how social campaigns can easily and/or frequently crash and burn, or yield marginal returns (e.g. traffic, nonetheless limited actual leads).

Some of the smartest social media marketers I think I've ever known keep at least relatively low profiles. They don't spend a lot of time Tweeting or proliferating photos of themselves getting drunk at conferences (not that that doesn't have its place within limits), some don't Tweet at all, and as far as I can tell keep relatively small and tight, trusted personal and professional circles. They often don't like to spill the beans into the blogosphere when they find tactics - whether new or old - that are working for them because they don't want it ruined and rendered useless fast by copycats jumping all over it. They like to make a point of not spending their whole lives online, as well.

02. Myth: Having well-ranking personal sites is the mark of a good SEO.

Fact: Not all experienced professional SEOs spend a lot of time building up their directly-owned domains. Not all SEOs can technically be presumed to even have them (though it's highly unusual). Not all SEOs are self-employed affiliate marketers. Being an experienced SEO isn't the same thing as being an experienced self-promoter. Sometimes it means one has spent most if not all their career promoting not their own stuff, but that of others. Often, it moreover means one has spent much more time doing some things within the field of SEO than in others.

At the time of this writing, this blog's Google PageRank has dropped to "Unranked" / 0. Maybe it was something I said (Were I to ever get into any debacles running my mouth about something online, this would probably be the place). Maybe its PageRank will return in a couple days or weeks. Or maybe I need to audit its outbound links to see if they're pointing to places that might now be considered "bad neighborhoods." Or maybe it's just that I've only a little over a hundred inbound links to it, only a portion of which are passing PageRank and few if any of which contain keyword-targeted anchor text. Maybe you get the point.

That said, short of disclosing confidential information of course, all successful SEOs should obviously be able to speak to online successes they've had, demonstrate their expertise and/or be willing to have it measured and tested.

03. Myth: Being a frequent blogger is the mark of a good Social Media Marketer.

Fact: One can be a good social media marketer without blogging frequently, if even at all. When I first heard that statistics started appearing about a year or more ago that the blogosphere's growth was starting to slow, I was kind of glad. We're not living in the Information Age anymore. We're living in the Noise Age. There's a ton of great stuff on the blogosphere, but much of it is also a big echo chamber with - to put it diplomatically - spatters of spam. There's something to be said for publishing not just to uniqueness, but quality over frequency or quantity. Just sayin.

04. Myth: When it comes to building links, old-school methods like dofollow link exchanges and forum signature links are useless and have been for years.

Fact: Quite the opposite. Devalued, sure I'd normally say so... but last I checked, valuation of links was one of the trickiest and most nebulous things one could try to tackle in SEO. The point is, if one just buckles down and does one's homework, sure it's laborious and "low-end" but it can also be helpful, sometimes surprisingly so.

I do totally concur with the idea that one great link can trump a thousand not-so-great links. I'll also say however, that in recent weeks for one project, I took a site optimized for a particularly targeted and competitive keyword from the bottom of SERP 6 to the top of SERP 3 for that keyword on basically just a partial-weekend's worth of targeted link exchanges (start to finish). From there, I took it from the top of 3rd SERP to the bottom of 1st SERP over a week or two of making occasional postings in forums. These are all ranks that have been holding consistently, moreover, as served to searchers nationwide. Was making this happen particularly intellectually stimulating? No, but because all the domains involved had a reasonable amount of trust, history and unique, relevant content all in between, it got done. There probably wasn't a single domain involved without a PageRank of 4 or less BTW. Nonetheless, having improved ranking on the keyword has, for the one I was building links to, become pivotal for growing and sustaining its profitability.

05. Myth: SEO should be a strategic priority for everyone trying to build a successful site.

Fact: Not if the larger online marketing strategy doesn't include developing substantial content and domain(s) history, it doesn't. For example, I've occasionally had folks come to me asking about SEO with sites built mostly or all in Flash, which in some cases where basically campaign properties meant to drive traffic to something that lacked temporal permanence, an event like a concert or a movie or record release. Thinking about SEO is due diligence for online marketing. It's not something everyone needs to make a top priority of. Maybe it's taboo for me, a guy who sells SEO services, to say it. It doesn't make it any less true.

06. Myth: Search marketing, whether paid or organic, is all about catching existing demand and not about generating demand.

Fact: This can be true in strict theory, but that theory is so strict that it discounts the increasing intersection between SEO, PR and Social Media marketing. I mulled over this occasionally in recent months, after one brief discussion with a couple people working for a pretty hot company (and I do use the phrase very, very rarely) who posited this basic notion. I thought it had merit as a thoughtful point at first. Upon thinking critically about it at the application / production level afterward (where real work gets done), I have to call it at best heavily caveated, at worst significantly flawed and ignorant. It's the kind of thinking that can come off as authoritative and decisive to all sitting around a management table, nonetheless is dismissive enough to be strategically errant in leading to missed opportunities. There's a reason we have such a thing as "linkbaiting," even if for most of us 9 times out of 10 it doesn't automagically work if even at all. The best linkbait generates not just links, but also demand, because when people choose to link to something there's a chance they did so out of it being something they liked enough to want to see more of (and will hope for, from the found source).

07. Myth: SEO and Affiliate Marketing should be segmented / sandboxed, never mixed.

Fact: That's up to every advertiser running an affiliate program to decide for themselves. Keeping tracking between channels and campaigns clean isn't the same thing as blatantly ignoring or disregarding potential cross-channel benefits. Myself, whenever I'm working on the advertiser end, even though my main concern when working with affiliates is direct conversions I'm nonetheless extremely interested in the organic quality of their sites. Worst case, if a given individual affiliate sends me few or no customers but is still sending me link juice, that alone can still be worth keeping him or her in the fold. Plus, think about it this way: When both advertiser and publisher can each walk the walk (not just talk the talk) in a given arrangement, sometimes it can go a long way in building a potentially valuable relationship.

08. Myth: Having any kind of certification from Google makes one a good SEO, and/or is directly representative of any degree of substantive hands-on, real-world Search marketing or Web Analytics experience gained.

Fact: Google's Professional Certification Program for individuals and companies is for demonstrating proficiency in using Google's advertising platform (AdWords) and related services such as Google Analytics, Conversion Optimizer and Website Optimizer. Prominent members of the SEO community have occasionally openly and freely admitted that they're "terrible with PPC." I've been doing SEO and PPC since 2002. I didn't pick up my AdWords Certification(s), fortunately passing each respective test on first attempt, until just within the past week or so. Late bloomer perhaps, I'm nonetheless happy to have finally gotten it done.

* * *

Fact: This post technically contains far more opinions than facts.

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For example, with reputation management campaigns (which are basically search / social media oriented PR campaigns), typically they come down to being either positive or negative in nature. With positive campaigns it's about spreading good vibes about a given brand (using the term very loosely to mean that which can be a company, product, person, meme or concept). With negative campaigns... you guessed it. Promotion vs. demotion, either way systematic and methodical. For me, the latter are only things I might be up for in cases where the target IMHO really does deserve some negative attention and such a campaign can be justifiably seen as a public service. In other words like most people, companies and otherwise, in terms of delivering results I do much better work when I actually believe (in) my own hype - whatever it is I'm hyping up/down at a given moment.

While some things in SEO come down to being about trying to gain "unfair" advantages according to some, I tend to think it's actually totally fair when the nature of the Web can bring things to a level about just your brains vs. your opponent's. When resources and incentives are relatively matched, that's what it oft boils down to. Regardless, y'know... Karma. The Web rewards what it sees as transparency and authenticity so it's good to keep it real in the long run despite whatever tactical vehicles along the way.

The point is, in most SEOs' careers there are times when there's potential to do "evil" and with those moments can also come opportunities to offset that, at least in theory. For example, for every brand one does damage to, one could make a point to say something nice about a number of other equally deserving brands. In tossing mud on a One, one can simultaneously send flowers to a Many and all in a quantified way. Effectively, in campaigning one can find oneself accumulating an ED, or "Evil Density" rating.

Are you an SEO, social media marketer and/or crowdhacker? If so, how much ED do you currently have in light whatever you're working on right now? If you don't know, calculating can be simple. Here's just one option:

([# brands attacking]*[their avg. market cap])/([# brands promoting]*[their avg. market cap])

Obviously, more complex variations on the theme can be rendered. One could do all kinds of fancy stuff like try to factor in estimations of average in-market customer values, maybe put in some LTV weighting in cases where one is working on big campaigns in light of how it can take companies a few years on average to recover from major PR crises (which various major PR firms can attest to), etc.; one can spec for one's own situation... keeping in mind also that, if one is running a business, getting caught doing stuff like posting fake reviews hyping your stuff - or other forms of self-serving sentiment fraud - can get you fined. Another money thing being, even getting away with it still may not make any contributions to revenues.

Obviously not everyone spends a lunch break like this, or even thinking about this stuff. Marketers who don't really ever try pushing the envelope with their skills and operate within the confines of dogma often don't ever need to. On a related note as for reputation management as a core concept BTW, I think anyone who dismisses clients of such services as people who must have something to hide is probably selling something themselves, or at least has a really narrow view and a lack of imagination. For example, an already comfortably retired SEO might easily spend a chunk of their time shifting their skills more to volunteer activism, doing pro-bono work for non-profits or others struggling in the economic downturn such as their favorite neighborhood small businesses who could use a competitive edge to help keep their doors open. Tactics are tactics, and they apply to objectives that can go beyond just trying to push bad news down onto SERPs 2-3 or below. How they're applied and why is a different consideration set, more often than not.

For me anyway, unscientific as they are, being a long way from retirement I've found little exercises like this help in the rare cases where I'm contemplating at length whether or not to accept a certain project in the first place. Sometimes it pays to take whatever work comes that one has bandwidth for, but in those "could vs. should" moments it pays more to know that one way or another one has thought comfortably through how much help vs. hurt one is really setting out to do to the bigger picture. It's also important with reputation management matters, especially if it's about troubleshooting in some form, to mind the difference between treating root causes and treating symptoms. Most of the time, Marketing folks are positioned to try to address just symptoms.

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Not long thereafter, Todd posted an announcement of how he's taking his own consulting services in more of an expanded online business management direction. He proposed that SEO consultants' online marketing services aren't fundamentally that different than those offered by many global networks, names with which most businesses are familiar On that point and per my own experience I basically agree... [Sidebar: with the slight caveat that one player he mentioned which I'll not call out here, I should hope the average SEO consultant has it much more together than they do.].

Today, Rand announced SEOmoz is no longer taking on new consulting clients, formally partnering with Distilled in that area, and shifting its own focus toward its tools suite. It's a good idea. After a foray into building its own search database, SEOmoz has made significant changes in reworking and diversifying its tools. Like a lot of SEOs, a Pro account with SEOmoz is one of the many things I've kept in my bag since 2005. When I use their stuff I use it heavily, often pounding away on their servers for a few days around the clock mining data for juxtaposition against other sources. As more people have become users of their tools over the years, I've felt their platform occasionally strain on and off under the increased demand, coupled with the inherent challenges in scraping data from search engines. Focusing on keeping their stuff not just up and responsive but also moving in the directions power users need them to go, on their quest to come up with a software platform that bodes well more to notions like "enterprise class" and "industry standard" - making and growing data partnerships along the way as needed - is the right direction for their product strategy.

What's most noteworthy to me however, is these events are indicators of larger trends:

1) Tools: More of these is not what SEOs, social media marketers and marketing analysts most need. The market, in the SEO area especially, has gone from saturated to over-saturated. I could probably load this blog full of a new tool review every day and be occupied for at least 4 months if I wanted.

If you're trying to come up with a cool new SEO tool, ask if it's the most important thing you should be doing with your development skills. If it is, hopefully you're making something that will be more than slightly different than other things already out there. It had better be something really specialized or otherwise compelling. Do you make a keyword research tool? Show me one that lets me trace records to pools of customer psychographics (or vice-versa) that, if it must cost me tens of thousands of dollars per year, offers me a free trial and lets me subscribe on a pay-per-month model. Do you make something nasty that scrapes data or other assets from social network profiles? Show me something nastier that can not just grab photos but can intelligently aggregate, remix and then regenerate entire user profiles. Do you make buzz monitoring software? Show me something that beyond monitoring brand mentions lets me cross-reference sentiment accurately while sourcing back to Tweeters who not only have high Follower counts but moreover whose profiles link to blogs that have high Feedburner counts as well as affiliate footprints on them. Bottom line? Show me a way to connect the dots that's compelling because it's faster and smarter, running deeper and wider. Do things like this even at the proof-of-concept level and you'll have me at "hello" in terms of how you're thinking, which goes a long way toward me potentially becoming a customer and for the long term. Show me new ways one person can do in 2010 what was the work of 3-5+ people in 2009. That's what tech-savvy Web marketers need more of, nowadays especially. In the meantime, nobody needs another web page that checks to see if our sites' Title tags are unique, with our brand mentions as the suffix instead of the prefix and keeping within 60 characters or less. Please.

With tools, probably what online marketers of various ilks need most is to focus on integrating the ways that they use and apply what they get out of them, and mapping all that more definitively and clearly to business benefits. For example, SEOs should be able to show that they can do more than just drive ranking and traffic improvements. They should be able to show that they can actually increase conversion rates from organic search. In some cases that might even have comparatively more business benefit (though today it still all-too-rarely occurs to marketers to question whether the highest-volume queries within their clients' niches are really the most important ones for them to put highest priority on).

2) Consulting: I think in the coming years the increased demand for SEO and social media marketing expertise won't necessarily trigger a proliferation of boutique firms or independent contractors or consultants. This is an area where there's also been saturation, albeit more recently and for different, primarily economic reasons. Where this space is going is probably going to be characterized by a few things:

• Partnerships and Consolidation. Watch for more buddying-up, from global networks to mom n' pop shops.
• Vertical Consultants. The sun is probably setting a bit on the days of the individual SEO generalist. Likewise, the next time you see anyone touting the word "guru" on their business card or LinkedIn profile, there's a 75% chance that will be reason to stick your finger down your throat and then click on. Just as boutiques have for a long time often built their businesses specializing in certain spaces, expect to see more individual SEO and social media consultants doing the same. This started at least a few years ago with areas like Real Estate and Health and Wellness, and has been around even longer in close correlation with competitive affiliate marketing niches. 2010 will see more individual consultants positioning themselves specifically to cater to areas like Tech, Finance, Consumer Products and perhaps others, also not just by industry but by market (read: Local). Some of the smartest SEOs I know have been focusing all their direct time on just 1-3 niches for years. That's not just because of repeat business. Symbiotically, progress with a given situation takes time, also can build upon itself which is often easier than starting into a new project in a whole new space. That's especially true if the client is themselves a new entrant into said space.
• Consultants Expanding Scope. When it comes to SEO, social media and PR, whether these areas are on a convergence or a collision course just depends on whether the person you ask is competent or not. Consultants who "get it" will keep positioning themselves as higher-level online business (marketing and sales) operatives. Similarly, in-house SEOs and social buzz builders will be reaching out to their PR departments and/or agencies to align agendas, as part of advocating more than ever that their trades don't just impact all facets of online marketing - they underscore them. Conversely, of those who aren't in tune with where the Web is moving, social media tricksters and cheerleaders will continue to run themselves ragged through the churn n' burn of dog n' pony shows, falling into the no-man's land between transparency and irrelevance, becoming that dude(ess) you eventually Unfriend because 9/10 of their status updates is them hyping their own crap. Likewise, over in the PR world the old guard will continue to go stale, leaving clients too much to the mercy of the Web, in essentially reactive market positions and in worst cases prepared for potential reputation management crises armed with little more than a sheet of stodgy, boilerplate talking points.

There's a world of opportunity out there, but it will be reserved for brands who not just buy off on the core concept of deep SEO, social media and PR integration but who actually apply it. It takes work; probably above all aggressive nonetheless careful planning and clear thinking. First impressions matter and damage done takes a while to undo, so this includes looking first hard inward before projecting hard outward. This also includes grasping the basic mechanics enough to get a sense for how to tell the people whose hands are actually on the engines of perception apart from those who have been spending more time pondering, gossiping, running surveys, giving presentations or otherwise talking about social media marketing than they have been actually implementing it (whether loudly or behind-the-scenes) for clients or other employers. At the end of the day, clients who look carefully enough to not confuse careful comparative shopping for simple popularity contests: FTW.

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• Winners of reality show competitions
• Tipping points in musicians' careers
• Market share trade-offs between social networks

...there are a lot of other examples of how smaller, more tactical and hence perhaps more readily-actionable things can be done to both monitor and mold marketplaces (including planning and optimizing strategies and campaigns).

Some of the juicier bits:

If I could place my vote for Web 3.0, the need I see created by the consumer-generated content coming from Web 2.0 is a method to filter all of that information for a similarity of viewpoint, reputation and accuracy. Until that occurs, all of this content faces the prospect of becoming a collection of noise that we may not bother to rely on in the future.

We had great success at directionally predicting company revenues. While the results were in no way definitive, any edge that a trader can get in guessing the market's direction on a specific issue can be an extremely valuable tool.

...while Innovators might appear to be the target for a marketer's interest, it's the Early Adopters who have proven to be the catalyst by which a new product moves from being an exciting innovation to dominating the market by achieving mainstream adoption.

Perfect information is a theory; the true state of perfect information is unattainable in real life.

Isn't this technology, which has so much potential to bring us together as a society by improving our communication, in some cases actually isolating us?

My only peeve if any, is a minor detail in the writing style. It's written such that each chapter literally closes with a segue into the next. After the first couple chapters the predictability of that becomes a bit of a distraction. No doubt there was a reason for that, though. I'd wager it was to position the book as one that might be a single-sitting read. Personally, I don't like to read anything that's a real book in a single sitting. I'm more likely to pick it up on and off over a period of days, weeks or even months, taking however much time I have for it to really absorb its content.

Anyway, the other important thing to note in advance is of course that the book serves significantly as a promotional piece for Hitwise. That's not at all its main purpose I believe, but it's important to keep in mind. I don't think running out and grabbing a Hitwise license goes hand-in-hand with loving this book, but the book itself does help illustrate very well how Hitwise can and should be used by firms who invest diligently in online analytics (and the people who know how to think about it).

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Though it's not quite to the degree of what Google has allegedly done internally... assign actual dollar values to individual organic positions as part of both selling and supporting AdWords... the basic premise of SEO being great ROI is more than just sound. Egghead's example shows how, with a bit of work, operational value can be directly attributed to an individual businesses' organic search strength. Those who are familiar with the more generalized facts about click shares (e.g. that the top 3 positions take >40%, etc.) do well to take things to the next level of wiring all the data together.

Moreover, it further validates the idea of links themselves as the key component of organic ranking carrying equity... That paid links are increasingly being put to the death grip doesn't negate that. It just means that compared to a year or three ago paid links have become riskier to try and harder to get any traction from (along the way, notable consultancies and customers who've been monitoring their returns over time have been gradually moving on more to other methods).

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i. There will be (2) top-tier IPOs in the world of social media, but they won't both be social networks, technically.

ii. Bing will take 15% market share.

iii. The first head-on i.e. in-class challenger to the Toyota Prius will hit the market, with first-generation take-up rates among early adopters rivaling those of the 2005 Prius. By pure coincidence the online promos for this new brand's first vehicle will not be narrated by Jeff Goldblum (as was the case with the 2005 Prius), but by a Goldblum family friend.

iv. In the mobile space a new device will be prototyped which will have a game-changing physical interface, leveraging the best of both the new and the old in terms of how people interact with hand-held information.

v. A major new milestone in the field of cloning technology will be marked. Regarding matters of eventual application, it will be in the area of cosmetics.

vi. Domestically, laws on gay marriage will be passed in (4) more states, though the back-and-forth of that process in terms of legislative battles will span (6) states. How opposing activists use the Web in between will be a distinguishing factor, with tactical correlations eventually becoming evident in-context of geo-targeting.

vii. A leading PR firm will make a strategic partnership with, and subsequently an actual acquisition of, a major Search marketing agency. Part of the idea will be to evangelize, standardize and then capitalize upon an expanded definition of “reputation management.” It won’t be so much a matter of introducing new concepts as it will be one of simply organizing existing ones, also repackaging terms like “social engineering” that easily come off as frightfully Orwellian to those who aren’t already getting their jollys through crowd-hacking or phishing.

viii. One of the 100 richest people on the planet will take a spill down some stairs, however sustaining just minor injuries as it will be a short flight of stairs. Though it will be reported to the media, the incident will not make it onto YouTube by the end of the year. Nonetheless, a few cartoons, parodies and other UGC imaginations thereof will. Most will be highly unfunny, but a select few will have their (15) minutes - days, actually - of fame on Reddit and Twitter.

ix. While other comparatively familiar major issues in science and medicine such as stem cell research will remain in relative remission, significant new evidence in the Autism/Vaccines debate will be brought to light. This news will be all over the blogosphere for nearly a full business day before any major TV or terrestrial radio network reports it.

x. One of the Web's leading online commerce hubs – not necessarily a website - will be down for approximately 17 hours, almost completely (i.e. with fleeting moments of uptime for some customers in between). The cause will not be a DDOS attack. (M)s of $ in revenue will be lost, (10)s of (K)s of users will be affected, and (3) people will be fired: (2) for having screwed up, and the other (1) for having been s/he whom had earlier "told (them) so."

xi. A popular social media blog will get crudely vandalized by someone who has had seriously enough already of link-baiting via tired “Top 10” lists, declaring such has now officially become social media marketing code for “I’m a douche.” After all, all the cool kids nowadays know that running “Top 11” lists on extremely low-traffic blogs that only an elite handful of even cooler kids ever chance by… That, man, that’s the shizzle.

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In today's world governed by the Internet, everybody wants to build a website and the major question comes in: How? The research begins, most of the times on the same media you're trying to break in and you end up with more questions than answers. How should you handle this amount of information? The opinions of those that are already in are always different and you end up lost like in the beginning.

(...)

By learning HTML, you are better equipped to be able to change how your blog or website is presented. And doing this can help you stand out from the rest.

(...)

5 reasons to attend

• You will learn tools for creating HTML documents.
• You will be able to create and edit a web page.
• You will explore creating a home page.
• You will look at creating tables in a website.
• You will learn how easy HTML can be.

We all know of course, learning HTML is so very strategic. And the kicker? I can attend this audio conference for just $149 USD!!!

To-day's Confession (I think I've not published this here yet, anyway):

When I was finishing college in the mid/late 90s, I was coming out of design school partially unprepared for the bustling job market that was happening just outside my university's walls. In other words, I didn't know HTML. Though I'd spent time in my classes working things like Photoshop and Illustrator into my class projects, with the exception of one Digital Illustration class (elective) I'd taken, all that had been of my own volition and sometimes to the scoffs of some of my professors. That was where things were at with my school, ironically "in the heart of the Silicon Valley"...

I spent some time initially doing technical illustration and desktop publishing temp work, and to this day I'm very grateful to those who gave me that. After doing that, I recognized after a few interviews that nobody was buying my touch 'o bullshit: "HTML? Oh, no... I'm a Designer. I should leave that to the Engineers." As if to imply coding was beneath me or something; as if I came out of the box already accomplished as a designer or anything else for that matter. It was a classic case of "if you don't believe it, nobody else will either." It was time to suck it up, get over my half-codephobic / half-laziness whatever self and hit the online tutorials that were all over the Web and available for viewing for free. And so I did, with my 28.8 kbps dial-up modem over my PC Computing Power Mac clone. I pretty much picked up what I needed to land my first Web job - just in time for my being short of enough money to pay my next month's rent - in a single afternoon. During my first week or two on that job, other than getting used to using Windows I had to very briefly tap one of my fellow designers for a little help trouble-shooting my tables and framesets across browsers (a major one was AOL's at the time), but other than that I was fine.

At that early kick-off of my professional life I was ecstatic. Eventually recognizing that having had a lack of exposure and guidance had held back my Web career getting started by 1-2 years - potentially very pivotal / critical years given the boom time - and then getting past the respective "what if"s and slight bitterness came much later.

The morale(s)?

1. Timing is everything.
2. While one can only do so much about time, that doesn't mean what happens is all just dumb luck. What we do with our time is up to us and every moment is precious. If your time isn't being used fully and/or properly, remember at the end of the day you're your own permanent client. If nothing else, when it comes to matters of ownership an area where nobody can ultimately deprive you of it is with your own career and life path.
3. Time isn't money. It's worth way more than money. Still, though both are finite it's the money part that for most of us is the one that's more so. So just as with time, be smart about what you do with your money. Know how to think hard along the way about when to pay your dues, conversely when dues are actually owed to you, and when and how to know the difference.
4. Know when to get off the Web (and the damn computer in general) for a while in favor of reading a book. When you really need to absorb something, it's often much better than trying to short-cut it via attending some comparatively pricey webinar or downloading some podcast. Got RSIs? All the more reason.

Currently reading: Click by Bill Tancer, Pro SQL Server Analytics by Brian Paulen

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