Well, it’s more than just the week and more than one flavor that is attracting attention from the media and marketers alike. The first is mobile marketing. iCrossing unveiled its mCrossing mobile unit this week, an announcement that piqued the interest of both advertising and wireless industry publications. We even got some play in the mobile blogosphere!

As a digital marketing agency with strong roots in search, the search portion of our mobile offering naturally was the focus of a lot of the inquiry, but the bigger story is how mobile marketing stands to be a powerful tool for truly connecting brands with their audiences. And as I said in an interview with ClickZ, we want to make sure we are in a position to go to our clients and recommend and then implement a full-fledged mobile solution without waiting for them to come to us.

Last week I had the distinguished opportunity to be part of a panel of search optimization experts at the Frost & Sullivan Internet Marketing Strategies Interactive Symposium event in Phoenix, AZ. The session topic covered when to use paid or organic (natural) search or both. It has always been my belief that both paid and natural techniques should be used in any website marketing campaign. Paid search offers speed to market and distribution channels beyond the search properties. Natural optimization provides long-lasting effects for the search rankings of a site (not to mention the fact that many studies find it provides more traffic than paid campaigns).

I won't go into the arguments for both, but I was pleased with the responses from the other members of the panel. The panel agreed, to some extent, that there is a time and place for paid and organic campaigns, but both should be considered for the job.

The end of the session opened the floor to questions from the audience. One question posed asked about each panelist's favorite optimization technique. My recommendation was two-fold. First, content: a website without content is no help to natural or paid campaigns. Content that is targeted for search will aid natural optimization, while well-written copy in a paid campaign can mean the difference between your ad getting the click or your competitor’s. Second, track both campaigns. If your current web analytics tool does not allow tracking of paid campaigns, comparisons between natural and paid, conversion tracking and the ability to use that information in your paid management applications, then you need to look for a new tracking system. If you can’t track the information, you can’t quantify the results, and if you can’t quantify, you can’t realistically expect to manage or improve your campaign.

JJ

With all the talk about Super Bowl ads, the average sports fan might be left wondering whether there's actually a football game to be played on Sunday. But let's face facts: Super Bowl ads have become a form of entertainment every much the equal of the game itself, and they attract viewers with little or no interest in football who might turn their attention elsewhere on game day.

Super Bowl advertisers, who are spending an estimated $83,333 per second according to today's New York Times, are rushing to capitalize on the multimedia frenzy surrounding their commercials. In an effort to extend the lifespan of the spots, they are making the commercials available online, through video-on-demand cable, on mobile networks, and, to cover all bases (and devices), for download to video iPods. It's a good bet that the best commercials will be replayed more often and by more people than the game highlights themselves. True fans can replay the ads on multiple devices at the same time, and some no doubt will.

By distributing the commercials across a range of channels both during and after the game, marketers have shown that they understand the opportunity before them to connect (and reconnect) with interested consumers. The next question is: have they prepared for the flood of search traffic they should expect from these interested consumers? Stay tuned for iCrossing's Super Bowl search preparedness report to find out which companies reached the endzone.

Blogs around the industry are aflutter with the news that Yahoo! has, in the words of Bloomberg News writer Jonathan Thaw, "capitulated to Google" in the quest for dominance in the increasingly competitive search marketplace. Yahoo!'s CFO, Susan Decker, was quoted as saying: "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."

On the face of it, this would appear to be a stunning admission. But pry beneath the surface and you'll find little more than an affirmation of Yahoo!'s long-in-the-works strategy to a) become both an aggregator and owner/creator of content, and b) monetize its content through search and usage fees. By contrast, Google, which has taken a sizable lead in overall global search volume, appears content to be the king of aggregators (not a bad thing by any means). I made similar distinctions between the two companies' strategies in my latest iMedia Connection column.

Does this mean that advertisers should de-emphasize Yahoo! in favor of Google? Not at all. Yahoo! still has a very sophisticated marketing platform, and the key there is platform. What Yahoo! gives up in quantity, it may be able to make up in terms of quality.

Another year has come and gone and once again, the big breakout in mobile marketing has failed to materialize. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that in a report I wrote at the beginning of the year while I was still at eMarketer, I was among those who predicted that the big buzz around mobile marketing would become more than just big buzz in the 2005-2006 timeframe. In my own defense, I did caution that a "hit or miss" environment would prevail in this initial period and that some marketers might become disenchanted with the medium before it grew to maturity at the end of the decade.

At this point, with a new year stretching out before us, a more circumspect approach seems destined to win out. In its predictions for 2006, wireless blog MobHappy, citing demographic shifts (among both consumers and marketers) and fresh interest in mobile from mainstream agencies (as traditional ad formats continue to wane in effectiveness), stressed that the year ahead will see the beginning of the “sea change” but not an explosion in mobile marketing.

Sounds reasonable. As brand advertisers look for new and improved ways to engage customers and prospects, there will be renewed focus on creating full-fledged mobile experiences that go well beyond condensing, converting and repurposing existing content. Being able to reach customers (and, in turn, enabling them to reach you) whenever and wherever they show interest entails first building a mobile presence optimized specifically for mobile devices and mobile search, then driving connections with those interested customers using a full arsenal of mobile marketing campaign tools, from messaging to couponing to multimedia integration, and finally quantifying the results and refining the campaign based on insights gleaned from analytics. As cooler heads prevail in 2006, expect to see more emphasis on the create-connect-quantify-refine mobile marketing model.

As an ex-retail buyer, Black Friday, White Monday and the Christmas shopping season brings back vivid retail memories. The Christmas of ‘87 still haunts me to this day. The Broadway Department Stores had just introduced Black Christmas boxes. I was the poor guy behind the wrap desk trying to convince the horrified pack of stressed shoppers that black Christmas boxes were not the work of Satan.

As the Paid Search Director for iCrossing, I am often asked what elements are needed for a search marketing campaign to be effective. My best answer remains “the same things you need to do to be an effective merchant”. (This includes offering more traditional Christmas Boxes or avoiding One Day Sales every day of the week). The performance of a search marketing campaign is inherently linked with the customer’s perception of the retailer itself. Successful retailers are not only efficient in their operations but innovative in terms of marketing and merchandising.

Paid Search marketing is such an innovation. By focusing marketing spend only where the customer has already shown interest in the product or service - the marketing process is inherently more efficient. (Reverse Direct Marketing) Unfortunately a search campaign by itself is not going to make a retailer more effective. Search campaigns add the most value when the following online commerce fundamentals are being executed:

Commerce Model
Seems somewhat obvious - but a large number of online companies still subscribe to the popular .com theory of losing a little on every sale but making it up on volume. Today companies that are growing online – are making money online. Unless you have a very healthy retention rate and LTV; paying 50 cents for a customer that nets 10 cents is always going to be a losing proposition.

Brand Awareness
Brand has a huge effect on the effectiveness of a search campaign. A company with a known brand is more likely to be clicked and is much more likely to get the sale compared to a company with little or no brand awareness. Paid Search can also be used to monitor the effects of marketing events.

Paid and Natural Search
There seems to be some confusion as to whether companies should budget money on natural or paid search. The short answer is that any retailer who wants to dominate online channel needs to be participating in both in a coordinated fashion.
- Paid search allows for conversion testing to inform and improve the effectiveness of a natural search build-out.
- Natural search is needed to allow visibility on expensive high volume terms
Used together companies can deliver a larger number of qualified customers to a site or store.

Landing Page / Shopping Environment
Back in my retail days we spent a lot effort devising “race tracks” to best guide our customers through the store and to the cash register. You can imagine management’s horror when they scientifically tested traffic and found the vast majority of our visitors were using the store as a cut through to the mall. Many online stores are the same way. If the site does not do its job and convert visitors to shoppers to buyers additional search traffic is not going to lead to greater sales. Ideally all search traffic:
- Land on pages that are as relevant as possible to the search query
- Receives a consistent message on the search ad and the landing page
- Encourages the visitor towards taking action and making the purchase

Merchandising
Timing and speed to market is everything in retail. Had the Broadway brought out black boxes in 1991 they would have been a big fashion hit instead of a holiday nightmare. The difference between what works and what does not work can just be a matter of seasonality.

Inventory
I wonder how many online retailers this year are paying for iPod terms when they don’t have any inventory. Apple seems to be faring very well selling the new units directly at the expense of its channel partners who are doing all the promotion for them. The online retail market is even more fickle than the offline one. If you don’t have what your customer is looking for the next shop is just a click away.

CRM
Once you have paid for a new customer it is vital that you keep that customer over the long run. It is obvious that a higher customer LTV leads to a higher ROI on a search campaign. Yet many businesses do not have an effective retention system in place - forcing them to repay for traffic that should already be theirs.

Testing
One of the retail lessons I was taught back in the 80’s was “Test, Validate, and Expand”. This is also the ideal mantra for search marketing. Companies that thrive online are constantly testing new keywords creative’s, and landing pages. Search is not just an effective form of marketing but a real time marketing test environment that allows the marketer to see exactly what messages the customer responds to.

Had there been an internet back in 1987-the Broadway could have tested customer demand for black boxes through search ads...and avoided the mistake that ruined my Christmas season.

Google appears to be the winner in the long-brewing contest for a piece of AOL. In what can be seen in part as a very expensive customer retention move, Google reportedly will pay $1 billion to get a 5% stake in AOL and a guarantee of its biggest customer's continued business. While the deal gives new meaning to the term "buying traffic," it also changes the game for Microsoft, essentially complicating the software giant's attempt to break into the top ranks of the paid search business. Although Google certainly would not have wanted to lose AOL's business, and least of all to a competitor, MSN needed the inventory far more than Google. By all signs, Microsoft has a good product on its hands in adCenter; it just needs the inventory to compete with its two major rivals.

As an aside, before the news of the AOL deal broke, I was gearing up to post about Google Music, a quintessentially Google-ian approach to the concept of the online music store -- really more of store window than an actual store. It's not so much a function of name that tune, but definitely a matter of "find that tune." Great service (and it is decidedly a service, not a product, as Jupiter's Gary Stein noted this week) and a mark of what Google does best: connecting searchers with the content they're seeking. But where's the product? Relationships with online merchants are the source of monetization for now. The only Google-ian hallmark that's missing is the familiar presence of highly targeted music ads.

This week I'm blogging from halfway around the world. I'm in Geneva to chair a UN expert meeting on information and communication technology (ICT) and tourism for development. That sounds like a mouthful, and in fact, it is: a topic too vast to digest in just three days. And if it seems that I'm headed off on a tangent that has little or nothing to do with search, fear not. The theme of "winning connections" that I took up a little over a month ago provides the crucial link.

Although the speaker lineup was quite diverse, comprising representatives from industry, government agencies and non-governmental institutions from both developed and developing countries, the conference primarily was geared towards representatives of destination marketing organizations (DMOs) from the so-called "least developed countries" (LDCs). The goal was to share strategies, case studies and best practices that can help DMOs in these countries adopt appropriate e-business practices and utilize ICT to spur the growth of their tourism industries.

While the issue of technology implementation (and cost) was a recurrent topic, many participants cited marketing and branding as points of concern, particularly in terms of the Internet. To circle back to the question of search, DMOs, tour operators and travel suppliers down to the smallest hotel or restaurant are all about making winning connections. Establishing and marketing a compelling brand, with the right message targeted at the right audience, lie at the heart of what all of these members of the travel value chain can and must do. And when the goal is to attract tourists coming from abroad, those same tourists that start their travel planning with an online search, site optimization and paid media campaigns become even more vital.

Application of ICT and search engine marketing techniques won't be a cure-all for the tourism sector in developing countries, but when used effectively, they can help to bring suppliers a littler closer to their desired customers.