Updated: 3 Steps to Improve Your Social Network

Being a sociable person is more important than ever. And I don’t mean just with your family at the holidays.

It’s not like you don’t know that. As a marketer, social media is an important part of your everyday habits (I hope), and it’s one of the most engagging and effective tactics you have at your disposal. And now more than ever, it’s an important part of being a business professional, whether you’re in marketing or any other profession.

Back in May 2009, I wrote a post about steps you can take to improve your social network. So much has changed since then that it’s time to take a good, long look and update those original steps. It’s important not just in the sense of building a network of people — it’s a key part of becoming an effective and knowledgable business professional in today’s real-time world. You have to sell yourself and your ideas to your peers and your customers (cause if you’re in marketing, you’re in sales), you have to sell your experience to potential employers, you have to connect with peers in your field, and you definitely have build your Brand Y-O-U.

Hence, here are 3 steps you need to take right now to do just that:

• Build a network of references — An important part of building a personal brand is not only having a track record of experience and achievement, but having allies who can and will attest to it. And given the legal risk that companies now face with managers providing online references, it’s important to have references that go beyond your LinkedIn profile. Certainly ensure some references on LinkedIn from key managers, direct reports, colleagues and others as you can — yet also secure letters from key contacts (if possible) and promises to serve as telephone references as well. Some executives avoid providing written recommendations of your work on social networks, yet will certainly provide references to your personal priniciples and business acumen over the phone. Don’t discount LinkedIn, and continue to build a powerful list of LinkedIn contacts and references — yet have a strong list in the background of people who will put their mouths to work saying what their corporate counsel won’t let them write.
• Engage social influencers in your field — As you know, there are plenty of social communities and outposts where you can listen and learn a whole helluva lot about marketing or whatever vertical market(s) you’re in. (If you actually don’t know that, you need to go to work on Google right this second and figure it out!) Yet while it’s wholeheartedly critical that you listen and learn, it’s now equally valuable to engage the social leaders and influencers in your field. You want your voice heard? Then engage the people talking the loudest and smartest. Comment on their blogs, share ideas, ask thought-provoking questions. Become part of the conversation and make your thoughts heard, put them in the social record. Let them get indexed and searched and read. It does more than just build your personal brand — social influencers are hubs of knowledge, and if you’re in their network you benefit from that. You learn about jobs that come open, new research, compelling content, receive introductions, and more. Alll valuable commerce in the context of building your own network.
• Keep your network active — Much like we engage our customers in social media, engage your network along the same lines. Share content with it, challenge it with thought-provoking questions, throw ideas at it. Don’t let social influencers languish, or the information they share with you languishes also. Many times people lose sight of this simple necessity as the responsibilities of our jobs outweigh the time in our days. Yet you must carve out a section of your day precisely for activating your network, it’s vital to building a personal Brand Y-O-U. Much like our brands, we have to engage our contacts and social influencers with the same principles we use to engage our customers in social media. And just like marketing, using a mix is important — Twitter, LinkedIn (both profile updates and status updates), targeted emails, blog posts, Facebook, comments, social sharing of news and content, etc.

These basic steps will have your social network humming in no time. If you listened to the advice in my original post from last year, you’re ahead of the game and you’ll add to an already-strong network. There are still other things you can do — start your own blog, seek speaking opportunities, and become a social influencer yourself. Either way, the steps above are important since a strong, active network is now a must-have for any savvy professional. You can start the proverbial business in your garage, but to be successful it can no longer stay there in a vacuum.

I’ll leave you with the same advice I left you with in my original post:

You’ve invested the time, money and effort in being a good marketer — don’t let it go to waste because you didn’t invest in your social network and Brand Y-O-U.

Take the steps above and charge ahead starting now.

The New Four P’s of Marketing — Part 2

So we’ve discussed Proof and why it’s critical to demonstrate that what you do and what you say means something to customers.

Now let’s discuss what you can do to demonstrate that Proof — go get yourself some Presence.

• Presence — You can’t prove anything to anyone without having a Presence. And not just in terms of being there when there’s a need, or having an ad in the right place, or dropping a direct mail piece at the right time. Presence is also being there when there’s not a need. Presence means providing knowledge. It means creating or defining needs in addition to meeting needs — for example, by providing content and establishing credibility as an expert.  Or using customer interaction and knowledge to develop meaningful solutions. Presence helps you deliver the Proof.
  There are many ways to have Presence — and you need to be knowledgable about all of them, from traditional tactics like emails and direct mail, to online tactics like Google keywords, to social media engagement tools like Twitter. Maybe you don’t need them all, depending on your audience, but you better know their strengths and weaknesses. 
  And you better make sure your Presence evolves with your customers.  Otherwise, they move on and your Presence is meaningless.  There are alot of things you should be doing to stay up-to-date on new aspects of social media that allow interaction and dialogue with customers. Like Google Wave, for example. Your customers may be in all these social media nooks and crannies, and if you’re not there with them as part of the conversation then you have no Presence.
  Sure, you can still have 20th century Presence.  We still need it!  You can still send direct mail and email, run ads, hand out samples and all the other marketing tactics we develop and refine with great effort.  Hell, traditional marketing works wonders when done right. Yet if your bag of tactics has not expanded to include social media in whatever ways and websites and widgets your customers love and interact with — then you will now find that your traditional marketing has alot tougher time succeeding.  Competitors who create interaction are too easy to find, and they’ll steal your business with with their Presence.
  Presence is scalable, and it depends on your customers.  It may require people who live and breathe social media every minute of every day — bloggers, Tweeters, Tumblrs and Diggers. Or it may require a simple Facebook fan page.  And it certainly requires a mix of traditional marketing in some form.  So it must be guided by someone with comfortable vision of both traditional and new.

Next post discusses the third P: Persuasion.

7 Things To Do in the Next 7 Days — Part Two

Hopefully you’ve been able to make some progress on the first three to-do’s posted not too long ago. Or, at the very least, you plan to start on them now, then come back to these four after. Anyway, here you go — four more things you need to do for the latter part of the next seven days, for all the reasons discussed here.

4. Open a Twitter account and watch the conversation.
Ok, I know for a fact alot of people think Twitter is just plain crazy. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “I just don’t get it.” However, if you’re anti-Twitter, you’re anti-customer. You’re anti-being-informed. You’re…anti-marketing.

Let me explain. Love it or hate it, customer conversation occurs on Twitter every day. Check that…every minute. And you don’t want to be part of that?

If you’re not on Twitter already, you need to open an account right now, on Day 4. Don’t like the concept? Fine, don’t even participate then, just watch the conversation. You read stuff to stay up-to-speed right? The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, or now the five blogs you’ve already lined up, per my earlier post. Isn’t a huge group of potential customers talking amonst each other valuable too? So start the account and watch the conversation. Follow hashtags relevant to your business, products or customers, and see what’s being said. There is powerful dialogue going on and powerful sharing of thoughts, gripes, praise and ideas that you need to know about. Here’s a good WSJ tune-up article, and a video below.

You need to do this — what you learn from the dialogue impacts your marketing strategy AND your knowledge of customer needs. Guaranteed.

5. Find information about Google Wave and read it start to finish.
Part of our jobs as marketers goes beyond just using what tool are available today, like Twitter. We need to stay aware of what’s coming next, so we understand what can help us be more effective, help make our messaging more impactful, and get us closer to our customers. Enter Google Wave.

Google Wave is positioned to be a ridiculously cool new communication tool. Incredibly powerful, and alot of promise for empowering web-based conversation on a whole new level between people and among groups. Here’s an excellent article to start with, and another article that’s a preview for developers on the Official Google Blog. Mashable also has a nicely detailed article.

After those, find a few more and read those too. As marketers, when this launches, we need to be ready to use it. It’s customer dialogue on steroids. The world of social media moves at a speed unseen before, and we need to move just as fast. What’s next after Wave, what will be the next cool tool that helps us be more effective? Do your homework and you tell me.

6. Look at your current marketing spend — are you over-invested in a particular area? Fix it.
I’m not a big advocate of change for the sake of change. Yet even though the lion’s share of your customers or sales may come from one place (and by place, I mean channel or medium), you need to fix your budget and strategy if you’re spending too many of your dollars in that one place.

Being over-invested right now likely means you’re sending too much direct mail, running too many print ads, or most importantly sending too much email. You need balance — more than ever, customers have different habits, different preferences. Don’t discount channels until you’ve tested. “It’s always worked the way it is” is not a valid enough reason anymore to avoid trying and testing different channels or different messaging. Mail less, test some creative. Hell, try sending LESS email for a few months that has more relevant messaging. You may be pleasantly surprised.

7. Stop planning “monologue” marketing campaigns and create campaigns based on “dialogue” instead.
My friend Alex Krawchick said this a few weeks back, and it stuck with me. His actual quote was:

I’ve had it. If I see one more “industry thought leader” pontificate about how to “…use Twitter to increase awareness of your business…”, I’m seriously going to lose it. You s are completely missing the point. Twitter (and FB… and LinkedIn) was built as a tool for dialogue. The days of the marketing and advertising ‘monologue’ are over. Move on. Or just shut up already. Either way, smarten up.

I don’t think I need to add to that much. Well said. If you have a Twitter account, blog or other social media endeavor, use it for what it’s meant for, not as a megaphone for a one-sided message.

So there you go. Seven things to do in the next week that can make a great impact. Charge ahead.

Another Letter to Marketing Professors

Dear Business School Marketing Professors–

How are you doing? I haven’t had time to drop you a letter since my last one in April, but I took a good, long look at something today that made me think of you.

Leave it to the guru, Seth Godin, to write another blog post that makes it all clear (you guys might want to consider recruiting him and turning him into the President of Professors). His post is about the textbooks you guys use to educate these kids you send out here. You may want to rethink the whole concept, as he suggests.

I’ll tell you why I agree with his ideas. Re-read the last letter and think about the skills these kids lack when you send them out here. You can’t teach that stuff in a textbook. These kids need real-world skills and perspective, not definitions and false belief that they’re equipped with what it takes to succeed. Seth is right, let Wikipedia have the definitions — their definitions are much deeper and broader than anything in a textbook anyway.

Plus, when do kids ever learn things like people skills with customers, time management and managing expectations from a textbook? I know, I know, you guys do that all the time — but I keep reminding you, you’re academics, you’re j-o-b is to write, read and learn from books and studies and papers. I don’t give out a how-to book to people out here, you’ve gotta figure it out on your own, and quickly. But c’mon, a marketing textbook for a class in 2009 with no mention of Google? How is that in anyone’s best interest? The folks who write your books don’t know about Google yet?

Listen, give Seth a call, invite him to your next conference. Hell, read his latest book, and use that as the textbook in your next class. If nothing else, go Google some information on Google.

Let’s keep working to make sure the kids you send out here charge ahead with the best idea on what it takes to get ahead, create a strong personal brand, and build a career.

I’ll be in touch again soon.

The Real World

Steps to Improve Your Social Network

This may be preaching to the choir, but clearly I am not against that in this blog. You know this.

Marketers are, by and large, good networkers. This is probably due to the fact that, like I said in a recent post, we are in sales as much as we are in marketing. We’re accustomed to seeking and finding customers on an hourly basis, so seeking and finding others like ourselves either comes naturally or comes through experience. And as part of Brand Y-O-U, your personal brand, networking is critically important to the vitality of your career.

Yet for young marketers, those who’ve been in a particular job or field for a long time, those who are not either natural or trained networkers, or those executives who are not in marketing, you need to take a good, long look at your social network and get up-to-speed quickly with the power of social networking. And specifically, building the power of your own social network — the generalities and statistics and cool factor about social networking are great, but the ROI in social networking needs to include some tangible benefits for you and your personal brand, right?

Make no mistake — investing some of your time in establishing a strong social network for yourself is just as important as investing time to understand the social networking tools you use to engage and acquire customers. And it’s important to invest this time when you’re:

At an experienced career level, in the growth stages of your career, or just starting out

In a strong employment position, rather than just when you’re looking for a job

That’s because when you’re out of a job, of course you’re reaching out to people — and it’s perceived that way. You’re out of your comfort zone — and if you’re not a regular networker, you’re viewed as putting on a persona that’s not normally you.

So, now that we’ve got the reasoning for networking out of the way, here’s the whole purpose of this post. A brief list of things you can do to be a marketer with a strong social network:

Build a power profile on LinkedIn — Keep it updated to-the-minute with all your experience, connect to people you work with and know, and ask people to recommend you. Sure, it may be a little cliche now, yet it’s the easiest and first thing to do, and it’s recognized by all. Make your profile a place you can send people to easily learn about your credentials. (Use my profile as a reference)

Read and comment on blogs — You need to read blogs for their valuable perspective and insights, so comment on them to put your thoughts on record, build a search-engine friendly way to find you, and establish your expertise. If you don’t have your own website or blog (which, if you’re considering starting a blog, ask yourself these questions first), link back to your LinkedIn profile.

Reach out to other professionals who are like you — Create relationships with people you can learn from, bounce ideas off of, and share insights with. They may work for your company, your vendors, other companies in your industry, or even your competitors. That’s right — competitors. Fostering a strong social network and empowering a give-and-take of knowledge is more beneficial than erecting barriers that diminish your network’s reach. Find these people on LinkedIn, at industry events, on blogs, on blog comments, on Twitter, on Google, on company websites, and via other colleagues in your social network. Reach out to them with an invitation to share expertise and discuss issues.

Stay in touch with your network — Don’t meet people and then just let the relationships wilt. Stay in touch with your network, where they are, what they do, and more importantly what and who they know. Find relevant reasons to communicate — share ideas, forward data and articles, set up meetings, propose partnerships.

These are the basics. There are other things you can do — start a blog, seek speaking opportunities, and more. If you’re new to being a social networker, start slow. Build a good foundation for your network before you charge ahead into the world of blogging and advanced social media.

You’ve invested the time, money and effort in being a good marketer — don’t let it go to waste because you didn’t invest in your social network and Brand Y-O-U.

New Study Tells Same Old News

I love it when a new press release or article comes out for a new study that tells you the same old things you already knew. I mean, nothing wrong with some good spin and PR, who am I to hate on that?

But c’mon, I don’t need a new IBM study to tell me about the convergence of direct marketing and branding.

Return-on-investment direct marketing and traditional brand advertising are converging online, according to “Beyond Advertising: Choosing a Strategic Path to the Digital Consumer,” a report released Monday by IBM Global Business Services.

Hasn’t direct marketing, and every other form of direct-response, always converged with branding? It has for me. Probably you too. Maybe we’ve always just been on the cutting-edge. Don’t you always ensure brand messaging is consistent across channels? Don’t you have a brand style guide to ensure visuals are consistent across all media? Doesn’t customer experience begin at the moment the customer reaches a touchpoint and extend all the way through post-sale?

So I was thinking “This is old news.” Not even worth a good, long look. Then a little Google search turns up Fox Business coverage that provides more robust perspective and analysis that came from the study (kinda disappointed in the B2B article cited above…focused on that one little snippet that was old news anyway…why?). Now this tells me something interesting:

According to the study, today’s suppliers (agencies, content networks and distributors) are not ready to meet the demands of the digital consumer and advertiser. Eighty percent of advertising industry participants interviewed for the study expect the industry to be at least five years away from being able to deliver true cross-platform advertising (including sales, delivery, measurement and analysis).

Surely our advertising and media delivery systems evolve on a damn-near daily basis now. It’s interesting to know that the “suppliers” recognize the shifting demands of both consumers and how to reach them, and are charging ahead with solutions to make brand messaging and measurement truly seamless.

If success at that endeavor, according to them, is five years away, I wonder how far away it’ll be in five years? It’s not like evolving demands will cease at present day.

What Matters Right Now? (and Other Key Questions)

Have you taken a good, long look lately at your mix of tactics? At your communication frequency? Your investment (time and money) in social media? Do you know what tactics matter most right now to your customers?

Everything in your strategy has to be up for re-election in this economy. If it’s not making the grade, or more importantly, if you can find better ROI elsewhere…throw that tactic out of office!

Social media is becoming more important than ever according to several sources. That has to change things. You have to find your way into more places where customers are sharing and experiencing and passionate. What’s your plan to do that? Is it Facebook, LinkedIn, or somewhere more niche? Is social media an acquisition tactic for you, or an experiment? Is it authentic and customer-driven, or are you turning users off with brand messages?

There’s also word that email marketing will increase. Really? How is that a good thing? Isn’t it enough right now? I’m not sure how more email could be good in any way — despite its offer of lower costs for tighter budgets. I know I’m not increasing my email no matter what, but I will be increasing the relevance of my messaging, that’s for sure. I’m going to let my competition email more, annoy people, and get opted out. And my less frequent, more relevant emails will be the last man standing, showing up at the right time in a pristine inbox (sounds like a fairy tale, no?). Same for my keywords — I’m gonna drill down, find those long tail keywords that provide return, and fine-tune my strategy on Google and other search engines.

Working on a great whitepaper on Web 2.0 for B2B media companies. Stay tuned for that next week.

The Mall — Revisited

A short time ago I wrote a post that talked about the evolution of event marketing venues and the impact that alternative venues have had on the mainstay event venue of the last several decades, the American mall.

Well, the New York Times has an insightful article that also takes a good, long look at the evolving way consumers frequent the mall. It’s part microscope into the consumer’s mind, part reality check for the status of the mall in the consumer shopping hierarchy, and part hope for marketers.

The hope lies in the opportunity that the challenging economy (recession, if you will) presents for marketers. As the article notes:

We are reliably informed that whatever part of the economic crisis can’t be pinned on Wall Street — or on mortgage-related financial insanity — can be pinned on consumers who overspent. But personal consumption amounts to some 70 percent of the American economy. So if we don’t spend, we don’t recover. Fiscal health isn’t possible until money is again sloshing into cash registers, including those at this mall and every other retailer.

In other words, shopping was part of the problem and now it’s part of the cure. And once we’re cured, economists report, we really need to learn how to save, which suggests that we will need to quit shopping again.

What that means is that old cliche — that true market leaders keep marketing through the downtimes so that they emerge stronger than ever when good times come back — is true. Times may be tough, but if you have customers — more importantly, if you want more customers in the future — you can’t go dark right now. Improve and fine-tune your brand and value proposition, ratchet up your customer service, look deeply at your ROI and spend on what works, get up-to-speed with SEO and Google and other channels you’re currently not in, focus your message on key benefits most important to your customers — just make sure you have a message out there. Be consistent, be seen, be reliable and flexible and accomodating to your customers.

Because good times will charge ahead again at some point, and if you stay strong now you’ll be even stronger then.

Further Update on Targeting AdWords to Mobile Devices

Just a brief mention that Search Insider has an insightful post on the benefits of AdWords targeting to mobile devices. It elucidates some of the differences between iPhone and G1 and underscores the main points that a) the number of mobile devices is only going to grow; and b) it includes other devices, now and future, beyond the pillars we typically think of (iPhone, G1, Storm). Enjoy.

Google Continues to Connect Marketers with Customers

A terrible economy is a great time to make life easier for marketers.

Enter Google yet again. On Monday the giant announced an option that lets AdWords users target ads to mobile devices with full-HTML browsers like the iPhone and G1.

You can even target campaigns specificially to mobile device owners. And not only is Google investing time on the front end to customize results pages for the iPhone, they’re also providing broken-out performance reporting on the back end so you can take a good, long look at ROI for your mobile ads. That’s a good thing, given that impactful statistics are yet to surface on how users interact with AdWords results on mobile devices. Although one study says upward of 50 percent of iPhone users conduct searches on their devices.

There’s some Web debate over the mobile ads driving users to desktop landing pages, instead of mobile-optimized ones. And there is valid concern over that. At the same time, enabling non-mobile-savvy marketers to charge ahead into mobile search — without becoming savvy at mobile optimization of landing pages overnight — is a good thing, especially in this economy when all businesses are dying for customers. Not to mention channel-specific reporting, so evaluating ROI on mobile search is easy to do.

An Interesting Option From YouTube (Yet Probably Thought of by Google)

We knew it was only a matter of time before the advertiser-friendly wisdom of Google seeped deep into the business model at YouTube.

Well, that time has come. YouTube is selling video ads against its search volume. For YouTube, it’s another effort to monetize its search volume and sizeable user base — they’ve also done a few other things recently with the same purpose. It’s a play for the paid search dollars we’re all pouring more of our budgets into right now.

Sponsored video ads appear at the top of search results

For marketers, it could be an opportunity to stand out amongst a tech-savvy, diverse audience. And the concept works, feels and sounds very similar to another language we all currently understand: AdWords.

What? You don’t understand AdWords you say? I don’t believe you. Every marketer worth their salt understands how paid search works, and AdWords is the biggest kid on the paid search block.

(If you read that last paragraph and it sounds like a conversation that you could seriously be a part of, then type in http://www.google.com and go take a good, long look at AdWords right now.)

More Reasons to Hone Your SEM Skills

Take a good, long look at David Carr’s article in New York Times about the continued decline of traditional media companies.

Companies from the Christian Science Monitor to the Los Angeles Times to the Tribune Company are hemmorrhaging people, dollars and advertisers. Of course, the reason is the shift of both consumers and ad dollars online.

The paradox of all these announcements is that newspapers and magazines do not have an audience problem — newspaper Web sites are a vital source of news, and growing — but they do have a consumer problem.
Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in the minority. This same information is available to many more millions on this paper’s Web site, in RSS feeds, on hand-held devices, linked and summarized all over the Web.

This article, from an old media bastion like New York Times (itself losing staff due to declines), should be the only cue you need to hone up on whatever traditional online tactics, Web 2.0 technologies, mobile targeting capabilities, new Google products, and social media strategies you aren’t comfortable with right now. The shift is only growing stronger, as you know, yet when these slow-movers really focus on the online space the pace of consumer shift will pickup rapidly.

Will you be ahead of the game? Then now is the time to move.

Does Your Message Make Anybody Take Notice?

Besides yourself, that is. We all think our own ads, materials and messages are the best thing ever.

Yet you need to bury that fondness for the spiffy copy you just wrote, and remain objective about every piece of marketing you put out there. Because it’s real tough to get noticed by customers, and if you’re in love with a message or a design or a strategy that isn’t effective, someone is going to notice when your results are paltry.

In my current role, my main target audience is physicians. Do you know all the things physicians do during the day (besides save lives and make people better, that is)? Let’s take a good, long look. Well, they have plenty of chances to interact with advertising…they check email, they access mobile devices, they receive mail, they access media. Just like many of your target customers do.

Yet, also like your customers, physicians do all that stuff in nanosecond spurts. Check 10 emails between patient visits. Visit a few websites during lunch, maybe for news. Maybe do a few Goggle searches. Grab the mail and give it a 5-second sort, then throw what looks good enough to stay in a pile for later. Come back to email for an hour or so, just to sort through and respond to what’s important before the next appointment. Never mind all the external distractions and other messages that they’re bombarded with throughout the day, and how they process those. Sound like that could be your customers too? Think a small business owner or high-level executive has the same kind of day?

That kind of day just doesn’t make for a target that’s gonna put any time into digesting a marketing message. At the time we decide to send them an email, or when a direct mail piece ends up in a pile. It may be days or weeks before they get to our messages.

We really need to ask a few questions, constantly, of our work as marketers.

Is our message really compelling? Compelling enough to make someone read it in the middle of that busy day described above?

Is our message unique? What are we saying to differentiate it from what else shows up in the inbox, mailbox or elsewhere at the same time?

Are we using the right channels to deliver the message? Does our target use another place more religiously than the one we’re in?

That kind of oversimplifies it…there are dozens other questions to ask. We’ll get to that later. The questions above are where you need to start if you’re not there now. Charge ahead.

Once Again Another Great Option From Google

The marketer’s best friend brings us yet another metric-centric marketing option worth a good, long look.

Last week Google and Bloomberg announced a deal that delivers Google TV ads to Bloomberg TV. Ok, big deal you say. Yes, they’ve already done this with NBC and Dish Network. Yet the interesting thing to emphasize again is that it brings Google’s metric-centric reporting technology (and subsequent ROI expectations) to a new medium.

Google TV ad technology can tell advertisers which ads the audience is watching second by second. The technology uses data from millions of anonymized set-top boxes, Google said. And as with Google’s search ads, for which advertisers pay only when users click, TV ads incur costs based on impressions actually delivered.

TV ads based on actual impressions and not the sheer privilege of owning a spot on some network’s precious airwaves? Now there’s a concept.

Google continues to charge ahead and become more and more of a sensible budget option for marketers. You’d be wise to take note.

This Blog Is Like Search Marketing

No, no, not because it gets no respect compared to other flashier blogs that reach the masses.

It’s like search marketing in the sense that at times it builds on others’ efforts and capitalizes on them. As this post from Search Insider points out:

…how could we let things get to a point where competitors are free to swoop in and steal your best customers after you’ve invested so much in them? You can see why so many people hate search’s model and liken it more to hijacking and hostage-taking than good old-fashioned marketing.

Yeah, many of the topics here build on others comment,thoughts and ideas. Hell, much of marketing, as you know, is built on taking a good, long look at data, history and research and figuring out how to build a strategy that works better. And it’s important to have that perspective as you build your understanding and investment in search — know where your competitors position themselves, know what they say about themselves, know where their niches are. And then plant your Google (and other search engine) keywords and SEO efforts in those niches, and steal their customers at the last click when they’re searching for information and in the mood to buy.

So yes, SEM and SEO can complement your own spend in other channels nicely — yet when you’re making them charge ahead and work for you on the other guy’s dime, that’s an even better solution.