“Life gets a bit easier when your Google products work well together…”

DOES IT COME WITH CHROME?

Any serious foray into the Google Cloud should begin with the adoption of the company’s flagship browser, Google Chrome. With a reported 37% of global web browser usage, Chrome is the most popular web browser on the planet. According to Google, this is because it offers speed, simplicity, and security. I can’t say I disagree, however as a newly converted Google “Clouder,” I think Chrome’s main usefulness lies in its integration with Google’s expanding myriad of stuff.

By my last count, Google boasts nearly 200 products and services (189, to be exact-go ahead and try counting for yourself); this is no mean feat, especially when you consider that many of these are major efforts – YouTube is but one product offering.

SIDE NOTE: {A more informal but no less compelling measure of Google’s breadth and depth can be found in the polite admonition one first encounters on the “Google Drive” page in Wikipedia: “Not to be confused with GMail Drive or Google driverless car.” In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find too many other companies that need bother distinguish their cloud storage platform from their email service and robotic automotive offering; it’s the little things that makes Google, well, Google.}

When you are logged into your Chrome browser, you are plugged in to the entire panoply of Google-ness, including access to a growing multitude of Chrome app extensions. This really makes life a bit easier, for both you and Google: the more context-driven data you give the company, the more it is able to tailor your experiences and add to its short and long-term bottom line (think ad dollars and AI).

You can’t get much more streamlined than that.

NB: When you are taking advantage of the Chrome cloudiness by logging into your Chrome profile from another computer, don’t forget to log off; you never know who’s surfing the net at your local coffee shop these days.

I WANT GOOGLE NOW

Never one late to the party, Google is also seeking to dominate the burgeoning field of predictive apps with its Google Now offering, available on the Android Jelly Bean 4.1 and 4.2 and Apple iOS 5 and 6 operating systems. Billed as a proto-robotic personal assistant (my phrase), the app is engineered to learn about an individual based on his or her online footprint over other Google products like Search, Gmail, and Google+, use this data to predict when a person is about to take certain actions, and then offer assistance.

Predictive apps like Google Now are really cool or a bit creepy, depending upon your viewpoint.

DATA DRIVEN

In the end, the Google cloud experience is all about the data, which brings us to Google Drive. Drive is a file storage and synchronization service which enables user cloud storage, file sharing and collaborative editing. It’s also the new home of Google Docs, a suite of productivity applications for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. In other words, it is the centralized place on the Google Cloud in which every Google user can store their stuff. It even works offline with or without the Chrome browser, although if you use Chrome, offline is already set up for you.

Google’s ability to integrate its cloud-based data storage service with the most popular web browser on Earth (Chrome), and its other ubiquitous offerings like Google Docs and Now suggests that Google is getting closer to becoming indispensable. In an era characterized by technology integration and big data, the company that can offer the widest breadth and depth of services over the cloud, social, and mobile – i.e. real seamless integration – will win the day.

As a case in point, take the popular note-taking service Google Keep. Originating as a mobile app, Keep syncs with Drive to provide users “a seamless transition from phone to computer.”

By computer, Google means its Chrome browser, which is enabled through a handy Chrome extension for Keep.

Thus we have an emerging formula: Mobile+ Cloud+Browser= Android+Drive+Chrome (or Chromebook).

Other evidence of Google’s cloud-based integration can be found in the tagline for Google Cloud Print: “Print Anywhere, From Any Device.”

DATA DEPENDENT

Back to the inspiration for this post, the unification of Google’s free data storage options, Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+. Google’s own copy describes the utility of this particular integration (for users and for Google):

With this new combined storage space, you won’t have to worry about how much you’re storing and where…We’ll also be making updates to the Google Drive storage page, so you can better understand how you’re using storage space…And if you need more storage, this is your place to upgrade, with plans starting at $4.99/month for 100 GB.

With quarterly revenues higher than ever (up over $14 Billion in Q1 2013), I don’t see Google slowing down anytime soon, which means I am, along with millions of others, likely to become ever-more dependent on my favorite tech behemoth in the future.

What’s the only downside of this Google dependency? If Google goes down, or cuts me off, I’m totally screwed.

Sergei, I love Google Glass – no, really, I do.

What is a MOFU offer? Product Webinars, Case Studies, Data Sheets, FAQs, and free demos are example of evaluation-stage offers. With MOFU enhancement in mind, here are 10 prevalent social media advertising options for businesses.

Facebook Sponsored Stories – With this tool, you can pay to highlight a post or action from a Facebook fan (business pages have “fans”) of your business. By doing so, the post is shown to all of that person’s friends, either in the sidebar or News Feed. This allows you to highlight positive feedback from a fan of your business. The most popular form of Sponsored Story is a page “like,” although the tool can be used for check-ins or any other type of user action.

Facebook Promoted Posts – Your business is can extend the reach of any post on your Facebook business page, such as photos, status updates, offers, videos, and questions. Promoted Posts have the ability to reach not only fans of your business but also the friends of people who have shared, commented, or liked the post. NB: your business must have at least 100 fans to use this option.

Facebook Page Post Ads – A great way to promote your best content or an event, Page Post Ads are advertisements that begin as posts on a fan page but get additional paid distribution among fans, friends of fans, or even non fans within the sidebar or News Feed.

Facebook Offers – With Offers, your business can send coupons or other promotions directly to the News Feed your fans. When a fan obtains an Offer, a story about it is added to his or her timeline, which by default is visible to the fan’s friends. Fans can share offers with whomever they choose by clicking the “share offer” link beneath the story. Though initially free, Facebook now charges a minimum of $5 on related ads to promote each Facebook Offer to your targeted audience of fans and friends of fans.

Twitter Promoted Tweets – This versatile tool allows you to target users when they are searching on Twitter, or to amplify specific tweets from your own timeline to your followers or users like your followers. By doing the latter, you can extend the reach of your brand to users who are, in theory, similar to your followers.

Twitter Promoted Accounts - You can use this option to quickly build up followers interested in the type of product or service your brand provides. Each Promoted Account is featured in both search results and Twitter’s “Who to Follow” account recommendation engine.

LinkedIn Ads – The nice thing about this tool is you can really micro-target who sees your ads. You can define your audience by job title, job function, industry, geography, age, gender, company name, company size, or LinkedIn Group. You only pay for the clicks or impressions that you receive.

Google+ Social Extensions – Google offers an indirect way of social advertisement on its Google+ social search platform. Companies with a Google+ Business Page can include a social extension to any Google Adwords campaign, which adds the red “+1” button to selected advertisements. According to Google, search ads with the +1 recommendation button average 5-10% more clicks.

YouTube Ads – Many people don’t realize this, but YouTube is the 2^nd biggest search engine on the planet behind Google. Broad consumer adoption of mobile devices is proving to be a big driver of video consumption. According to new statistics, YouTube has more than 1 billion unique visitors a month watching over six billion hours of video (up from 4 billion hours just last year). Businesses are taking notice of this trend. According to a post from eMarketer, digital video advertising spending in the U.S. will hit $4.14 billion this year, up from $2.93 billion last year.

YouTube’s best social advertising offering for SMBs is probably its TrueView suite, which is actually part of Google’s Adwords for video. By doing so, Google has streamlined the process of advertising on YouTube, integrating it with business’ Adwords account. One nice thing about TrueView is that you only pay when a viewer actually chooses to watch your video. The service also provides four options for advertisers, In-stream, In-slate, In-search and In-Display; here’s a link to YouTube’s advertiser page that provides more information on each option.

Yelp Ads – The location-based social search app and website has grown by leaps and bounds – now boasting over 84 million unique monthly visitors. Yelp’s success is largely attributed to its massive collection of user-generated reviews of local businesses. Yelp Ads allow your brand to appear at the top of its search engine in your category. They also give you a chance to advertise on the business pages of local competitors and remove competitor ads from your Yelp page.

Using one or many of these social media advertising options, you’ll be able to not only increase brand awareness, but also capture prospects in the critical MOFU evaluation stage. Good Luck.

WHAT IS SoLoMo?

The first thing to understand about SoLoMo is that it’s definition, and by extension its utility, differs depending on whether you’re a consumer or a business.

Consumer Perspective: SoLoMo is an acronym that applies to the integration of one’s social media platforms and physical location with one’s mobile device. An example of SoLoMo integration would be a social mobile app that is aware of your physical location and that you can interact with from your mobile device, both to input information (check-ins, posts, status updates, ratings and reviews, etc) and to receive information (store hours, products and services, ratings and reviews, coupons and promotions of nearby businesses).

Business Perspective: For businesses, SoLoMo represents an opportunity to micro-target prospects and consumers wherever, whenever, with contextually-relevant content, information or promotion that is also designed to be shared on social media.

Put another way, from a business perspective,

Social Media is the platform you use to promote your message and engage with your target audience;

Local is your area of concentration or relevant proximity; this can be physical or even online.

Mobile is the medium of connection between your brand and its prospects and customers.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

So why is SoLoMo Important? To answer this, we need to think about how we got here.

In the past, a company’s social, local, and mobile marketing efforts have been silo-ed. You had social media marketing campaigns, geo-centric marketing initiatives and mobile marketing, the latter being largely comprised of SMS text messaging.

However, the widespread consumer adoption of smartphones and tablets has changed all of this forever. One obvious but fundamental point many of us fail to fully realize is that smartphones and tablets are essentially pint-sized mini-computers. In fact, most of these devices have processing speeds and advanced capabilities that would eclipse many desktops or laptops still in use today. I, for one, freely admit that I am using only a small percentage of the available features of my smartphone.

The advanced functionality of smartphones and tablets provides the on-the-go consumer numerous options and capabilities, empowering them as never before. In this way, while the ascendency of high-tech mobile devices is largely seen as a cornucopia for consumers, it’s created a bit of a Pandora’s Box for businesses and marketers. We now must contend with the ever-increasing expectations and demands of sophisticated mobile users who, with smartphone or tablet in hand, want what they want when – and where – they want it.

So what’s the bottom line? The explosion of mobile technology has elevated the concept of contextual relevance in digital marketing; mobile users now expect businesses to provide contextually relevant online resources that inform, entertain, or resolve. In short, SoLoMo has shifted power to the consumers, and they know it.

To stay relevant, businesses need to get social, think local, and spend on mobile.

I live in Minnesota, where we are just now coming through a prolonged season of wintery weather that has dumped an unprecedented amount of April snow onto our yards. The temperature finally climbed above freezing just this week, rapidly turning my snowy yard into a muddy swamp.

Some quick background: most houses in Minnesota have below-ground basements. To avoid groundwater flooding, many houses, mine included, have built-in drain tiling that redirects groundwater to a central repository where an electronic pump (sump pump) discharges it back into the yard (sounds kind of stupid, I know; but hey, it works). Here’s the upshot: if your sump pump craps out as the snows are melting, it’s a safe bet you’ll need a canoe to navigate your basement.

That is exactly what happened to me.

HIGH WATER MARK

Like most home-upkeep SNAFUs, this one came at the worst possible time. I awoke at the crack of dawn, hoping to get to the office before everyone else to put a dent in my To Do list before our morning meeting. As I passed the basement door, I heard the telltale beeping of the sump pump’s emergency battery backup, a high-pitched intermittent droning sound that, were it translatable, would be saying, “dude, you better fix this now, or your screwed.” I dashed down the basement stairs and into the utility room, only to find the sump pump inert, its plastic housing a mere foot away from overflowing.

At this point I should mention that I am not the handiest of men. Ten or twenty years ago, my options would have been few: a) call a plumber, b) grab a cup of java and head to the garage to fish out that  canoe I bought in college. “But the year is 2013,” I reflected, “I now have the Internet, social, and mobile to see me through.”

IN SEARCH OF

Emboldened, I dashed to my laptop. It was clear I needed to do two things very quickly: 1) find a nearby store that carried a decent sump pump at a good price, 2) figure out how to install said sump pump. In need of speed, I was looking for information that was clear and actionable; I needed a solution that was proximate and convenient.

Ideally, was looking for a one-stop shop.

I knew there were three big home improvement stores near me: Home Depot, Lowes, and Menards. I visited each site in turn. All three had the requisite ecommerce site must-haves: internal search engine, store locator, and information tied to each searchable product showing all purchase options (online, in-store, current inventory).

However, the Home Depot site had everything integrated nicely on each search engine results page. When I typed “sump pump” into the Home Depot search box, I was brought to a page that had all of the available products; there was a clickable “check store inventory” tab under the products that were available in my local store, updated in real time.

What one me over, though, was the “Related Resources” tab on the left-hand side the screen. This one tab had links to everything I needed: customer reviews, product Q&A, how-to buying guides and project guides. It even had a few how-to videos, but only for a specific brand of sump pump that I wasn’t buying. After taking a few minutes to pouring over customer reviews, I chose a sump pump that seemed like the best bang for the buck. Happily, the in-store inventory link showed there were 22 in stock.

My lucky day.

DOWNLOADING AND DRIVING

Now that I knew which sump pump I would buy, I needed to quickly figure out how to install it. I decided to sort this out in the car on the way to the store. Before leaving my house, I took a quick pic of the current sump pump set up in case I needed to clarify anything in the store.

Here it is:

Before driving off, I pulled up my YouTube app and searched “sump pump installation.” Ten minutes later I arrived at Home Depot, having already listened to two vids describing how to replace a sump pump. It seemed easy enough.

Heading to the “plumbing” section of the store, I was able to find my model within two minutes. Taking a second listen of the vids on the way back, I was home 15 minutes later, ready to install my new sump pump. Just to be safe, I pulled up one of the YouTube install videos on my tablet, setting it beside me as I got down and dirty (hey, the tablet’s still under warranty). Within 15 minutes, my new sump pump was draining away. I felt like Bob Villa.

A TWO-WAY STREET

From initial discovery to install, the whole ordeal took just over an hour. No kiddin.’

The sump pump experience helped me realize that SoLoMo is a two-way street: turning to the Internet for needs discovery, I was able to leverage the consumer product reviews and real-time inventory updates found on Home Depot’s interactive website to select the right product for my needs, saving me time and money; easy access to YouTube via my mobile device allowed me to leverage the knowledge of others at no cost and at my own convenience.

Prior to SoLoMo, I would’ve spent hours waiting to shell out hundreds of dollars on a plumber; with SoLoMo, I didn’t make it to work early as initially planned, but I did make it on time.

The only negative? It would’ve been nice to take a few laps in that old canoe of mine…

ONLINE IS THE PLACE TO BE

The first piece, written by reputable marketing-tech analytics firm eMarketer, based its analysis on the findings of a survey of over 2,000 US female internet users in March 2013 conducted by Women’s network SheSpeaks and female-oriented marketing firm Lippe Taylor; in the survey, only 6% of respondents reported still researching products primarily in-store; the majority of the rest (89%) did their browsing mostly on the web, either via desktop (71%) or on mobile devices (18%).

From these numbers, the eMarketer article drew the following conclusion: “there is no question that for retailers trying to reach women early in the purchase path, online is the place to be.” Seems sensible enough; OK, fine, got it.

THE IN-STORE EXPERIENCE RULES

However, then I read the second article, this one from equally reputable Wired.com. The Wired post based its analysis on a recent survey conducted by Forrester Research of 4,500 U.S. adults online, which found that in every major consumer category other than travel, shoppers said visiting a store served as the most important source of research before buying.

Now wait just a minute here…

INTERPRETING THE DATA

Reading these two articles got me thinking, how does one go about reconciling seemingly discrepant data, anyway? Remembering that the devil is often in the details, I assumed clarification could be found by analyzing the parameters of the surveys in greater depth. I started with the Forrester one. According to the Wired.com article, it involved “4,500 U.S. adults online.” Hmmm, does this mean they surveyed 4,500 adult online users or 4,500 adults though online means. I wasn’t sure. The one thing I did know was that I was too cheap to pony up the $499 Forrester was asking to access the full study and clarify this question. Sorry, gang – a blogger’s salary ain’t what it used to be.

Absent a detailed understanding of survey methodology, I thought I could turn to deductive reasoning. Because the SheSpeaks study indicated such an overwhelming connection between women and online research (89%), while the Forrester study suggested a strong correlation between US adults and in-store research, one could deduce that somehow Forrester forgot to include women in its sampling. However, with roughly half of the US population being female, and a sampling size of 4,500 respondents, this seemed a fairly unlikely oversight.

Further commentary from the Wired.com post hinted at a darker possibility:

“In all, Forrester’s findings suggest no one in the selling business can afford to ignore the primal satisfaction of touching holding something in your hand before you buy. Human toolmaking and trade both started as hands-on endeavors…”

Given this excerpt, I was tempted to conclude that Forrester does not regard female online users as human. This one seemed a bit of a head scratcher, though. After all, I presume there are plenty of women employed within the Forrester ranks who might raise an eyebrow at such exclusionary methodology; I know many women, my wife for one, who would surely take exception.

FINDING RELEVENT MEANING IN THE DATA

All silliness aside, this tale of two disparate data sets reveals perhaps the biggest challenge big data poses for businesses and marketers – how to glean accurate, relevant and actionable insight from the numbers.

A really interesting article on the science of data recently published in FastCoLabs touches on this very issue. In the post, author Ciara Byrne quotes data scientist Jake Kyamka as saying, “Data science is not just about number-crunching… It’s all about people. The data comes from what people are doing, great data scientists have an ability to understand people and the ideal result is something which is going to help people.”

This seems sensible enough. In the examples cited above, we have two discrete data sets from which two radically different conclusions have been drawn, each meant to help a certain subset of people glean meaning from data, usually to bolster their pre-conceived notion, argument, or perspective.

As such, the devil is not in the data, but rather in how it is sliced and diced, how it is interpreted and relayed.

In an era rife with data, the greatest challenge for businesses and marketers lies not in the data itself, but in its meaningful interpretation.

For those nodding their heads in agreement, here is a 10-point checklist to help ensure your website is built for c-o-n-v-e-r-s-i-o-n.

Compelling: First and foremost, your website should encapsulate the best of your brand, merging crisp visuals with concise, well-written copy that promotes your unique value proposition. Your site must do more than give out information about your products and services – it must successfully make the case why people should consider, or continue, working with you.

Original: Be transparent, and be yourself. Share testimonials, case studies, and/or samples of your work. If you’re a start-up, emphasize your vision and values. Humanize your brand with an About Us page that tells your brand story, ideally with pictures and videos. Show your face: familiarity builds trust and fosters brand affinity.

Navigable: Your navigation system is one of the most important elements of your company’s website. A clear navigation tells your user where they are on your site at any given time. Give hierarchy to navigation to tell people what the site contains and where they should go next. If the route through the website isn’t clear, it’s more likely your user will feel confused and leave.

Versatile: Make sure your website messaging and content reflects the multi-dimensional nature of your brand. Don’t shy away from audio and visual content. Try new things, and put in some honest effort. Think of your website as your online storefront; put as much thought into the online experience as you would the in-store or in-office experience. As the cornerstone of your brand’s Internet presence, your website should be as vibrant and versatile as you are (if you aren’t very vibrant and versatile, try putting your best digital foot forward).

Educational: Many people are coming to your site for information; they’re trying to resolve a want or a need, or gain a better understanding of what it is you do or what you have to offer. Don’t disappoint. A business blog is a great educational tool: think of each blog as an open letter to your target audience. Other types of educational content, such as eBooks, infographics, and how-to videos, can provide insight that informs as well as entertains.

Reliable: Stability and reliability breed trust. This begins with consistent web-based messaging and formatting. Do what you say, and say what you do. Make sure your website is reliable for search engines as it is for people. Index your site with the major search engines, and delete redundant copy and duplicate pages. Make sure your brand message, content, look, and feel are consistent over all media.

Simple: People are coming to your site for a reason. Help, don’t hinder them. Offer a clear site structure and layout. Create an exceptional user experience for your target audience. If relevant, provide a clear path to the sale. Remember, you may only get one chance at this.

Integrated:  Keying off this last point, you want to synch your website with other elements of your digital presence, especially social media platforms. Embed social share buttons in relevant site pages and other web-based content assets. As consumers integrate the Internet, social, and mobile into their daily lives, you need to do the same

Optimized: As more consumers turn to mobile, you must make sure your brand is optimized for devices of all shapes and sizes. A responsive web design (RWD) may be the most efficient way to provide visitors the best user experience possible regardless of how they reach your site.

Nurturing: Like most businesses, you are probably selling some type of product or service. If so, your website should also function as your top online sales rep. Arm your best content with attractive CTAs that link to actionable landing pages. Guide prospects down the sales funnel with sophisticated email lead-nurturing campaigns. Manage your efforts with marketing automation software; analyze your performance with web analytics.

There was a time when all a company needed was a sexy, visually-stunning brochure website; that time has long since passed. As we continue to fully integrate technology into every aspect of our lives, the lines separating online and offline are blurring. In this hybrid business environment, your company website must be built for conversion on all levels, turning visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into brand loyalists.

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LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

In the April 11^th blog, Crowley outlined his company’s intention of becoming the SoLoMo app of apps, saying, “We’re building tools for local businesses to connect with their customers. We’re making search better, every single day. We’re building that location layer for the internet – the platform that all other companies use to power location in their apps.”

Whether or not Crowley is able to deliver on this promise largely depends on whether Foursquare can use its contextual framework to help businesses divine not only where users are checking in, but where they are likely to go or want to do next.

The hyper-adoption of mobile devices and growing familiarity with SoLoMo search options on the part of consumers will help too.

SEARCH MOBILE 

A recent study of 2012 mobile phone and tablet user search activity conducted by comScore on behalf of 15miles and Neustar Localeze showed that in only eight months, the number of overall US searches on mobile phones and tablets rose 21%. In December 2012, total searches add up to 113.1 million for mobile phones and 38.7 million for tablets.

Moreover, in December 2012, nearly 86 million people searched for information on local businesses via mobile, a 25% increase over the beginning of the eight-month study period. Here’s the most significant finding: more than half of these mobile local searchers said they researched on the devices because they were on the go and needed immediate information.

Check out this video taken from a Venture Beat post showing the ubiquity of mobile check-ins on Foursquare; I think it really underscores the possibilities of advertising on the platform:

To date, Foursquare hasn’t really tried too hard to sell advertising. If done properly, I think Foursquare is going to make a lot of money helping businesses connect with prospects when it is most valuable to do so – when they are physically proximate.

What would proximity-based advertising a la Foursquare mean to consumers? As Bloomberg Business Week notes, “By the end of the year, users who check in at stores or restaurants may get ads related to their location. That means when a shopper goes to Best Buy (BBY), Samsung will be able to send them an ad for its TVs.”

Again, if done properly, I think targeted ads the potential to enhance the user experience. Imagine a person is out TV shopping, and after checking in at Best Buy, he or she receives a promotion or discount for buying in-store. If I were said consumer, I’d probably check-in just to see what deals might be on offer.

The devil, such as it is, will be in the big data. If users are bombarded with random ads for products and services they have no interest in every time they check in to a business on Foursquare, there might be a backlash. However, if the ads are generally non-invasive and, more important, relevant, then it is likely they will be accepted by most users.

THE TAKEAWAY

Businesses interested in reaching local-area consumers should keep an eye on Foursquare’s development in the coming months. With SoLoMo friendly functionalities like context-driven search and personalized recommendations, Foursquare is looking more attractive than ever for brands. Throw in a sophisticated, cross-platform ad targeting function, and the social app may become downright indispensable.

THE INTERNET OF THINGS

The Internet is not going away; in fact, it’s rapidly growing. Advances in technology are paving the way for the “Internet of things,” a world where virtually everything around us will be connected in some way to the net. In the Internet of things, almost every business is going to need a fully integrated online presence that includes – and does hide from or silo – mobile.

It’s important to remember that the term “mobile” refers to a set of devices, not a movement or a culture. An argument could be made that the term “digital” has sufficient breadth to be regarded as a cultural movement or a new way of thinking. The term “mobile,” on the other hand, refers to an enabling technology or access point to the digital realm – a world in which the fundamental anchor is the Internet.

For mobile to be defined in terms other than “device,” say as “location,” marketers would have to start re-classifying their analytical metrics, somehow tracking location-based, rather than device-based, consumer behavior. But how would one do this? What would an organizing principle or classification system based on location even look like? Isn’t a stationary location, such as the desk at work where ones PC resides, a location too?

MOBILE CONVERGENCE

More confounding still, the convergence of Internet-enabled devices (smartphones are getting bigger, tablets smaller, laptops with touchscreen capabilities, etc.), weakens our ability to classify based on device, “mobile” or otherwise. Google support of device agnosticism in the recent switch to Adwords Enhanced Campaigns could be regarded as a tacit acknowledgement of this new integrated reality.

As device sizes converge for the anywhere, anytime consumer, the Internet remains the only constant in the chaos. Increasingly, the Internet will serve as the sole organizing principle for all mobile (and most digital) devices.

Admittedly, mobile technologies such as SMS text, native apps, and geofences work offline. However, the majority of non-telephone mobile device usage relies on an Internet connection. This is especially true for any kind of meaningful aggregation of “big data” from mobile devices.

From a business marketing perspective, these arguments lead to two broad conclusions:

1. The company website is a brand’s primary or secondary (for some, social is the primary) hub – the core of its online presence,
2. As such, every brand should have a website that is fully optimized for as many mobile devices as possible.

From here, one is left only to decide the best approach to website optimization for mobile. In my opinion, it is Responsive Web Design.

WHY RESPONSIVE?

Responsive Web Design resolves a number of issues for businesses. Designing responsively eliminates the need to create a separate mobile site, saving time and money. It also provides users with a seamless experience across devices, offering the same information no matter how they access a brand’s website. This helps companies maintain brand integrity by delivering consistent messaging to any web user.

Like the Internet, mobile is not going away, at least not in the foreseeable future. Most companies, especially small businesses, are pressed for time and resources. The prospect of grappling with the complexities of marketing over innumerable mobile devices is daunting, often leading to inertia.

With Responsive Web Design, brands can integrate mobile into their online presence to create a truly cohesive user experience, an experience focused on people rather than on devices.

Isn’t that the whole point?

Things get really interesting when you compare the IDC data from the newly released Neustar Localeze/15miles/comScore Local Search Study cited in a recent Search Engine Land post. The study, which sampled 3,000 US adults who use smartphones to search for local businesses, found that the total number of U.S. searchers using mobile phones grew 26% between March 2012 and December 2012, from 90.1 million to 113.1 million, while tablet searches were up 19% between April 2012 and December 2012.

While mobile searches have risen, desktop searches have declined- 6% between November 2011 and November 2012.

HOW YOU CAN BENEFIT

The shift away from the “traditional” search engine portals in favor of mobile-friendly alternatives will likely continue to grow apace as mobile device usage outstrips that of desktops and PCs. For companies that want to get found in today’s mobile environment, here are some quick tips to optimize your business for local search.

Portal Sites: Make sure your company has submitted an accurate website sitemap to the major search engines, Google and Bing (Bing covers Yahoo). Doing so will ensure your site is fully indexed, which will help you get found when people are using portal sites to search for your business.

IYP Sites: Depending on the cost, you may want to consider listing your business with all of the major IYP sites. This is especially true if you have a local retail-based business.

Local Search Sites: If you haven’t already, your business needs to set up a profile on Google+ and Google Maps/Local. Though the process can be a bit confusing, having a fully completed Google profile will help your business get found on Google’s all powerful search engine and, perhaps more importantly, many of the popular apps on its ubiquitous Android mobile platform. In addition, you may want to experiment with social local search/review/check-in sites like Yelp and Foursquare.

Social Networking Sites: As Facebook continues to roll out its Social Graph, its users will increasingly rely on the social network for local business information, opting for tools like Facebook Nearby for business ratings, reviews, and recommendations from friends and family. To capitalize on this, make sure your business page is fully updated to include basic information like your address, store hours, phone number, and details about your business in the About section. Consider running a Check-In Deal to encourage fans to engage and promote your business.

Customer Review/Ratings Sites: Many mobile users look to reviews and ratings from friends, family, and even strangers when making a purchase decision. Sites like Yelp, Merchant Circle, Yahoo Local, Trip Advisor, Open Table, Angie’s List, etc., are dedicated to helping online users find what they’re looking for. Educate yourself on the major customer review/ratings sites relevant to your industry, utilizing them as time and resources allow. If nothing else, police these sites for negative reviews of your business, so you can address them before they cause too much damage.

As we dive deeper into the mobile era, businesses of all types and sizes need to adopt a Social Local Mobile mindset. Optimizing your brand for local search is a sensible first step.

Digital Merges with Traditional Marketing

The main driver of corporate adoption of digital marketing is the consumer adoption of digital- specifically, the shift to communicating and buying through digital channels. As consumers continue to embrace the Internet, social, and mobile, companies are scrambling to beef up their online presence, spending on external marketing services such as search, web design, content creation and management, social media, and mobile marketing.

According to the survey, 28% of marketers say they’ve reduced their traditional advertising budget to fund digital marketing activities. This is especially true among high-tech companies, where 34% have done as much. Many companies are not reallocating traditional budgets to digital, but simply merging the two together. A significant number (20%) of companies surveyed have already integrated digital and traditional marketing budgets and functions.

A big reason marketing execs are shifting to digital is that it is proving to be more cost effective than traditional marketing. Fully 40% of marketers acknowledge they are realizing savings from digital marketing; many are reinvesting these savings into more digital marketing.

Content Fuels Inbound Marketing

Recognizing the utility of inbound marketing channels such as social networks, customer forums, and web-based blogs, marketers are spending heavily on inbound and on the content that fuels it. As marketing automation technologies grow in sophistication, marketers are expected to deliver content that speaks to each element of the company’s target audience in just the right place at just the right time.

As consumers continue to integrate digital into their daily lives, the demand for multi-channel content marketing will grow apace, putting more pressure on marketing organizations to deliver greater amounts of high-quality content.

Companies are Outsourcing their Digital Marketing

Given the increased demand for inbound marketing and content creation, coupled with the rapid pace of technological change, many companies are opting to outsource some, if not all, of their digital marketing. In fact, the companies in the Gartner survey are outsourcing up to 50% of all digital marketing activities.

Here’s a breakdown:

Website, Social, and Digital Advertising Most Effective

When asked which three digital marketing activities are most important to their success, the marketers surveyed listed a corporate website, digital advertising, and a presence on social media. Not surprisingly, web optimization is top of mind for most marketers, as they experiment with customized landing pages and different types of marketing content.

Interestingly, only 9% of survey respondents said that analytics is most important to their success. The disparity between content creation and the maintenance of a corporate blog is also noteworthy. Answers like these remind us that we’re still in the early days of digital marketing.

The Rise of the Chief Marketing Technologist

The technological complexity of digital marketing has created a need for a new type of marketing leader, the Chief Marketing Technologist (CMT). Somewhat surprisingly, 70% of companies in the Gartner survey have a CMT; 80% of them report to marketing. As one might expect, the CMT is familiar with marketing techniques and the technologies that underpin them, including marketing software, data, and analytics, social and mobile platforms, digital advertising networks, and website design.

As businesses become more dependent on technology to attract, acquire, and retain customers, they must have digital marketing leadership who knows how to design the customer experience across web, social and mobile, integrate data into the decision-making process, and manage paid and organic search, social, mobile marketing campaigns.

The Bottom Line

The rapid pace of technological innovation will continue to drive the shift to digital marketing. As SMBs struggle to figure out how best to adopt digital, they can glean insight from bigger corporations. Here are a few takeaways:

• Understand the importance of establishing and maintaining a digital presence, which includes a fully optimized business website, active profiles on the relevant social media channels, and a seamless user experience across web, social, and mobile. Make sure you have the appropriate marketing technologies in place to measure results. Apply lessons learned to constantly refine your digital marketing.
• Put together a digital marketing team who is adept at doing all of the above. If you don’t have the internal talent or resources, outsource to a company that specializes in integrated digital marketing.
• Stay in the loop. Keep tracking emerging digital trends, especially those relevant to your target audience. Remain abreast of the latest marketing technologies, analyzing how they can help improve your digital marketing efforts.

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In many ways, bloggery is the business extension of academic snobbery. To me, bloggery is nothing more than a kind of intellectually elitist snobbery that comes from a longtime study of other people’s ideas. Like academic snobbery, bloggery tends to breed a way of thinking that is long on criticism and short on original insight.

Lest you think I am a blowhard on the subject, let me assure you, I do know something of academic snobbery. I spent considerable time in college at two elite British Universities, Oxford and St. Andrews, two institutions teaming with entrenched intellectual/academic snobbery (I still love ‘em both!). Having identified my bona fides on the subject (a necessity in the world of bloggery), I feel like I can say that bloggery is alive and well on the net – and from what I’m seeing, it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.

The Roots of Bloggery

In part, bloggery is a natural consequence of the massive, nigh on hysterical, adoption of content marketing the world over by businesses great and small. It may also have something to do with the recent infusion of journalism into the content marketing mix. I know plenty of snobby journalists, which I’ve always considered ironic, because when I was in grad school we sort of looked down upon journalists, viewing them as “intellectual tradespersons.” Journalism was a field you could try your hand at if you failed as an academic.

This of course is not my current view; journalists don’t hate me, I was young and naïve.

Or perhaps the uptick in bloggery is reactionary in nature- a lashing out from the internet academy of early adapter-bloggers (early adaptors of anything tend to be the most zealous) to what they see as a surfeit of sub-par content of dubious origin. I can most sympathize with this group – there is a lot of crap blog content floating around the internet that is begging to be denounced, if not deleted.

However, the ends rarely justify the means. As such, do even the most woeful acts of blogging malfeasance deserve even the mildest dose of bloggery? I cannot say. I will leave such heady questions to those far more qualified than I to judge.

Bloggery Unmasked

For the curious mind, here is a quick (and by no means exhaustive) list of what I consider to be some characteristic examples of internet bloggery. Feel free to use these as loose guidelines when trying to identify any incidence of bloggery in your own writing or in that of others.

The How-To

On the main, the “How To” blog can be very useful, helping small businesses and newbie content marketers hone their blogger skills. However, because of its demonstrative nature, this type of content can be rife with bloggery. Constructive criticism is fine as long as it does not appear too imperious. Language such as “try to avoid” or “consider instead” is usually not suggestive of bloggery.

However, beware of the subtle whiles of the snob-in-blogger’s clothing, who may try to lure you in with gentle language when in fact his or her primary intention is to engage in shameless bloggery. Nasty ones, these.

The Rant

This not-so-subtle form of bloggery relies invective and insult to deliver its message, which is usually focused on trashing other bloggers for “doing it wrong.” Appealing to the lowest common denominator, this is bloggery at its worst.

The Name Dropper

A personal favorite. Riddled with shout outs to industry luminaries, this blog is meant to show the world its author is cool and connected. Name dropper blogs are often used to promote or recap an event or product such as a tradeshow or a new book. Either way, the name dropper is usually rife with unabashed bloggery.

The Word Dropper

Similar to the name dropper; instead of peppering the reader with names, this blog overwhelms the reader with industry-specific jargon. Meant to establish the writer as a thought leader or industry expert, the word-dropper post often does little more than expose the author’s inherent bloggery. A shame, really.

The Uber-Obscure Topic

Ever read an industry-relevant blog that just makes no sense? You know you should understand it, and recognize that it might be useful information, but as hard as you try, you just can’t puzzle out what the author is talking about? It’s important to remember that the uber-obscure topic post may be innocent – merely an example of over-zealous blogging fueled by a passion for one’s craft; or nefarious – clear evidence of bloggery.

Doubtless there are many other examples of bloggery in action. If any come to mind, please share yours in the comments section below. By staying vigilant and standing together, we can root out bloggery once and for all. Who’s with me?

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WARNING: EDITORIAL SIDEBAR. NOT NECESSARY TO READ: {By the way, what happened to the demographers? Did they just get lazy after the Boomer generation? Was a copywriter position eliminated? After a series of subtle, artistic turns of phrase that seemed to aptly capture L’esprit du temps – epitaphs such as the Lost Generation, The Silent Generation, The Greatest Generation and The Baby Boomers – the living essence of the last three generations has been reduced to the back end of the Roman alphabet, namely, Generations X, Y, and Z.}

FEEL FREE TO CONTINUE HERE: Setting aside the fascinating subject of generational entymology, to better understand how Gen C is impacting the existing consumer paradigm, a brief review of US generational demographics may be instructive.

How We Got Here

Trying to pinpoint generational timelines is a muddy business; in fact, there doesn’t seem to be any universally-accepted timeline in existence. Having said that, here is my very own un-authoritative timeline, based on an unscientific mashup of information culled from the internet over lunch; it seems to represent a generally accepted, though admittedly squishy, semi-consensus:

• Baby Boomers: 1946-mid 60’s
• Generation X: mid-60’s to late 70’s/early 80’s
• Generation Y (aka Millennials, or Generation C): late 70’s/early 80’s- early 2000s
• Generation Z: early 2000s-present

Borrowing heavily from a blog on Gen Z written by Claire Raines, here is a quick generational summary of the last 100 years or so. Between 1932 and 1946, US birthrates remained fairly steady, hovering around 2.5 million births per year. In the years following WWII, however, birthrates skyrocketed, reaching an average of 4 million births per year during the peak boom years of 1954-1964. Things tapered off considerably after that, dropping below 4 million annually for the next 23 years. Starting in about 1980, birth rates began to steadily rise once again, bolstered by a surge of children immigrating to the US (nearly 8% of new immigrants were children, nearly twice that of the two previous generations).

This boost in immigration helped propel Gen C past the Boomers to become the largest generational demographic in US history. By 2000, they totaled over 87 million, making them larger than Baby Boomers by 11 million and Gen X by 31 million.

The demographic surge came to an end with Generation Z. Thanks to changes in immigration policy and a prolonged economic downturn, Gen Z, like Gen X, is on track to be dramatically smaller than its immediate predecessor

In a nutshell, even though today’s consumer paradigm includes four generations, it is increasingly being shaped by one, namely, Gen C.

Characteristics of the Gen C- Driven Model

The defining characteristic of Generation Connected is, not surprisingly, digital connectivity. They see the world through a digital lens, relying on devices to consume media, socialize, and share experiences.

Taken from the aforementioned post in Mashable, Nielsen and NM Incite’s U.S. Digital Consumer Report includes the following observations about Gen C:

“Their ownership and use of connected devices makes them incredibly unique consumers, representing both a challenge and opportunity for marketers and content providers alike…Generation C is engaging in new ways and there are more touch points for marketers to reach them.”

According to YouTube, Gen C’ers have grown up consuming content “where and when they want.” They’re deeply engaged with online video, and they’re deeply connected to the idea of online community.

Take the term “digital.” For many Gen C’ers, digital is not a set of things, objects, or technological tools; digital is more organic, inherent, innate.

It’s a lifestyle, a perspective, a way of life.

Some statistics from a new survey by Pew Research on technology use among 12-17 year-olds (technically at the tail-end of Gen C) may help explain this phenomenon:

• 78% of teens now have a cell phone, and almost half (47%) of them own smartphones.
• 95% of teens use the internet.
• 93% of teens have a computer or have access to one at home.

Unlike generations before them, for Gen C’ers, digital is in their blood.

C’ers Serving Boomers

An interesting sub-plot within this evolving consumer paradigm is the developing relationship dynamics between the upstart Gen C’ers and the aging Baby Boomers. As the original mega-generation continues its diaspora out of the workforce and into retirement, today’s C’ers will be largely responsible for producing the very products and services the Baby Boomers will consume. I see plenty of inter-generational conflict here, especially as time slowly swings the consumer pendulum away from the Boomers and toward the Millennials.

Gen X: Torn Between Two Demographics

As the Boomers and C’ers fight a pitched battle over the future of US consumerism, Gen X-the unlikely demographic group caught in a generational squeeze – is left holding the bag. In this reality, the discarded and disdainful X’ers are the demographic equivalent of the forgotten middle child sandwiched between two domineering siblings, the bossy and bold Boomer and the cheeky and confident C’er.

An unenviable position. After all, nobody wants to part of the glossed-over consumer demographic.

Gen Z: Living in the Shadows

Following in the wake of Gen C, Gen Z will have their hands full navigating the challenges of living in a highly-competitive, technologically advanced, and truly globalized world. It’s impossible to know how these forces will shape them, other than to say that they will likely be living in a state of practical dependency vis a vis the Millennials, forced to live in the shadows of a world largely molded by their numerous Gen C forbearers.

The New Model

Digital technologies, ranging from the internet to social media and mobile devices, have shifted the balance of power from the producer to the consumer. Operating in their natural ecosystem, Generation C’ers are poised to dominate this digital-centric business environment, reshaping the consumer paradigm to reflect a world characterized by inescapable transparency, virtual communalism, ceaseless integration, continual advancement, and constant disruption.

A world fully connected.

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Twitter Logic

Lest you think I am engaging in some kind of dread digital marketing voodoo, the logic is simple: people are more inclined to follow you on Twitter if they have a reason to, such as when they have just finished reading your (doubtless high-quality) content piece. Why? Because for one fleeting moment, you have achieved the pinnacle of marketing self-promotion: you are “top of mind” vis-à-vis your target audience.

Cool. But what are you going to do to capitalize on your 15 seconds of fame? You have to options. You can a) take the artist’s path, and have so much confidence in the transcendent nature of your prose that you will wait for your adoring readers to find you in the vast cockles of the Twitter-verse, or b) you will take the practical route, call a spade a spade (you and I both know you want more followers out of each content piece), and slap a “Follow @chrshorton CTA after your post (shameless self-promotion for demonstration purposes only).

Follows and Shares

A secondary benefit to this latter course of action is that it also tends to stimulate social sharing of your content piece. Why this is, I can offer no evidence and must instead appeal to human nature. When you follow somebody, you are giving something up – a social endorsement of sorts. By following, you are essentially saying, “I like what this person has to say.”

There is another implied aspect of this unwritten contract, though; namely, the “I think you might like this too” element when you socially share the piece with your Twitter followers.

Follows and shares. That, my friends, is the name of the game.

For some firsthand evidence, here are a few snapshots of my Twitter “mentions” feed in the wake of a recent blog I wrote, entitled, “Why Every Business Should be on Pinterest.”

The Proof is in the Follows

In these snapshots, you can see a happy mix of mentions, re-tweets, and follows, including a handful of shares from new followers. Now admittedly, I cannot prove that these follows were generated from the Follow @chrshorton button at the bottom of the post, although if I were a betting man, I’d say having the button there didn’t hurt.

So there you have it- the Twitter Follow button. Nothing too profound, nothing too magical: just a simple man sharing a simple trick to help you generate more Twitter followers and social shares.

PS: If you found this blog informative, entertaining, or otherwise useful, please follow me on Twitter by clicking on the link below :)

This is potentially big news, as businesses and marketers try to figure out the best way to approach the fast-growing social network. At a time when marketers are scrambling to improve social conversion rates by offering personalized user content, Pinterest Web Analytics should be well received.

As the lion’s share of marketers wake up to the utility of personalized content marketing implementation, many organizations are still figuring out how they can efficiently (read cost-effectively) do so. According to data from Adobe/eConsultancy’s latest Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing, purchase history is only leveraged by 21% of marketing organizations, even though 77% of those say it has a “high impact on ROI;” moreover, behavioral data is employed by only 20%, while fully 68% acknowledge it is tied to strong ROI.

Back to Pinterest. For retailers especially, anecdotal evidence suggests there is a correlation between on-site content offerings and user spending levels. For example, data from e-commerce consultant RichRelevance shows that Pinterest shoppers, on average, spend roughly $170 per browsing session, a huge increase over that of Facebook ($95) and Twitter ($70) users.

The very layout and structure of the Pinterest site lends to its sales action-ability. A recent article from Reuters confirms this notion by quoting Kyla Brennan, chief executive of a Santa Monica-based company that analyzes Pinterest usage habits, as saying, “It’s a huge window-shopping platform… it helps people find what they really like. Does it encourage people to be a little impulsive? Of course.”

Music to retailers’ ears, I should think.

The secret to Pinterest’s rampant success- and the key to its inherent value for businesses and marketers- can be found somewhere along the intersection of user affinity and sales action-ability. People want two things from brands: affinity, or likeability, and action-ability. To get consumers to purchase a product or service, businesses must first give them a reason to buy, and then provide an easy way to do it.

Pinterest offers brands a unique platform to accomplish both of these.

To this point, a different Reuters article quotes the perspective of an average Pinterest user, 26 year-old Becca Bijoch from Minneapolis- young, female, well-educated, with disposable income.

Although interesting enough to read that she has bought many things after seeing them on Pinterest, it is the way Becca explains her user experience on the site that is most instructive: “I’m probably spending more now. I’m on the couch at night, after having two glasses of wine… I tell everyone that Pinterest has changed my life.”

For Becca, and countless others like her, Pinterest more than just a social platform, it is a way of life.

To the extent Pinterest Web Analytics allows this pinning zeitgeist to be tapped into, analyzed, quantified, and replicated, it can be worth a lot of money for retailers and other businesses. Importantly, it may also provide an ad-free monetization strategy to Pinterest. Such a strategy would likely go a long way in preserving the natural and structural integrity of the site – a novel feat among the social networks.

Affinity, Intent, Proximity, Action

Without getting too opaque myself, I believe that affinity informs intent. In the commercial realm, if I like a certain someone (brand) or something (product or service), I am more likely to feel a connection, and in turn take a commercial (read consumer)-oriented action, than if I am indifferent to or negatively-disposed toward that someone or something.

Moreover, proximity helps transform intent into action. If I am craving a hoagie and there is a deli around the corner (proximate to me), I will probably stop in and purchase a hoagie; if however, the nearest hoagie shop is 10 miles away, odds are I will end up eating something else.

If, therefore, affinity drives intent and proximity drives action, the name of the game for businesses great and small is to be likeable and accessible to ones target audience.

Pinterest is Sales-Actionable

That’s where Pinterest comes in. I honestly believe that every business- regardless of size or market orientation- should be on Pinterest. Why? Because the site’s very structure makes it the most sales-actionable social media platform around. The sole focus of Pinterest is to allow users to visually express (pin) the things they enjoy and then share them with others of like inclination. As such, the site is rife with pools of “affinity,” each one full of latent intent. Brands showcasing products and services on Pinterest are creating ready proximity to these pools, the missing ingredient needed to stimulate consumer action.

Setting philosophy aside, here are some hard numbers in support my contention that Pinterest is the most sales-actionable social network out there. Many of these stats were taken from econsultancy’s recent eBook, “Pinterest for Business: A Best Practice Guide.”

Favorable User Demographics

• Pinterest has more than 20 million monthly active users spending on average over 90 minutes on the site each month; there are 12 million users in the US alone.
• Pinterest is now the 3^rd highest-trafficked social media site in US.
• 80% of Pinterest users are women; 50% of all Pinterest users have children. Source: Search Engine Journal

Pinterest Users are Especially Social

• Pinterest Pins with likes get 36% more Re-pins than those without. Source: Shopify
• Over 80% of Pins are Re-pins. Source: Media Bistro
• The average user has 35 boards and 2,500 Re-pins. Source: Repinly 

Pinterest Users are Brand-Focused

• 43% of Pinterest members agree that they use Pinterest to “associate with retailers or brands with which I identify”, compared to just 24% of Facebook users who agree to the same use with Facebook. Source: Bizrate Insights

• Also in the Bizrate report, 70% of users say they are on Pinterest to get inspiration on what to buy. By contrast, only 17% use Facebook for the same.

Pinterest Users are Sales-Ready

• 69% of online consumers who visit Pinterest have found an item they’ve purchased or wanted to purchase. This is compared with only 40% of online consumers who visit Facebook. Source: Bizrate Insights
• Research from Rich Relevence shows the average sale resulting from a Pinterest user following an image back to its source and then buying the item is $180, compared with $80 for Facebook users and $70 for Twitter users. Source: FastCoDesign
• Pinterest referrals spend 70% more than visitors referred from non-social sites. Source: Search Engine Journal

Marketing Takeaway

I think every business should have a presence on Pinterest. This is especially true for companies with an e-commerce function, given that images appearing on a company’s boards can be linked to external URLs (for example, if a user clicks on an image, he or she can be brought to the company’s ecommerce site checkout page). Businesses selling directly to consumers (B2C) also should be on Pinterest, using the power of interactive visual imagery to foster brand affinity and increase sales conversion.

The utility of Pinterest for businesses selling to other businesses (B2B), though, is less clear. Frankly, I’ve heard many social media managers and digital marketers say it’s a waste of time. I disagree with this notion, as my thoughts about consumer behavior outlined above (affinity leading to intent, and proximity to action) attest.

This is why. Employees, executives, and owners of every B2B company on the planet have two things in common: they are human (hopefully), and they are consumers.

As human consumers, B2B-ers act just like the rest of us, perusing social networks such as Pinterest, guided by interest and affinity. If they have any love of their job or profession (and hopefully they do), these B2B-ers will likely be drawn to Pinboards, Pins, and Repins which are in some way related to their trade. Finding something of interest (affinity/proximity), it’s not a terrible leap of logic to assume that they’ll take some form of action, such as Repin a blog or check out the brand’s website (intent/action). This kind of convergence is a hallmark of the digital age.

So what’s the bottom line? Every business should be on Pinterest, period.

P.S. Businesses interested in learning how to get started on Pinterest should check out either this blog post or infographic.

Just ask bricks-and-mortar tech retailer Best Buy. Once a Wall Street darling, the company is now fighting to stay in business. The consumer shift to a social, local, mobile (SoLoMo) paradigm, aided by Internet-enabled mobile devices, represents an existential threat to bricks and mortar retailers such as Best Buy worldwide. Led by Amazon.com, online eTailers are sucking the life out of retailers one click at a time, reducing them to little more than showrooms for would-be consumers to check out products firsthand before going online and buying them via the likes of Amazon.

THE SHOWROOM FLOOR

In a dramatic move to attenuate the negative effect of this practice (aptly known as “showrooming”), last month Best Buy announced a permanent price matching policy, agreeing to honor the prices of local retail competitors as well as 19 online eTailers, including Amazon. Only time will tell whether the move proves inspired or merely desperate. In war as in business, mimicking the tactical approach of an enemy soundly defeating you is seldom a recipe for success, mostly because they’re likely better at it than you.

ASSIMILATION POLICY

As if to underscore this point, Walmart, the greatest retailer of them all, has opted for a wholly different approach to combating the threat of the emerging eTailer: instead of mimicking, it is assimilating what works for companies like Amazon into what works for Walmart. Put another way, Walmart is merging offline, online, and mobile commerce together to create what has been termed a “clicks-and-mortar” approach to retail. As President and CEO Joel Anderson noted in a recent interview with Wired, “You’ve got to go where the customer wants you to go. We live in the age of the customer…”

Hard to argue that one.

To execute its novel strategy, Walmart has embraced SoLoMo technologies, utilizing in-store geo-fencing to automatically detect its location-aware mobile app as customers enter any Walmart retail chain. Inside, customers can easily switch the app from online to store mode, allowing them to enjoy interactive in-store experiences like scanning bar codes for pricing, accessing Walmart’s interactive in-store circular, and keeping a tally of everything they’ve bought to track overall spending.The ability to switch from online to store mode also gives Walmart app users a chance to buy out-of-stock items online or even compare prices with Walmart’s own eTail site.

This last bit is reminiscent of an old salesroom tactic, whereby a salesperson offers a prospect multiple product options in order to get him or her so focused on deciding which version to buy the prospect forgets that he or she doesn’t actually have to buy from the salesperson in the first place. With its nifty mobile app, Walmart is hoping consumers get so wrapped up in comparing in-store to online Walmart pricing that they forget to check other eTailer options.

THE BOTTOM LINE
So far, it looks like Walmart’s innovative approach to SoLoMo is working. In October of 2012, Walmart said the company expects to meet its $9 billion online sales projection for the fiscal year ending January 2014; while not close to Amazon’s 62 billion in net sales, it is nearly double Walmart’s 2011 online sales of $4.9 billion.¹

In the face of disruption, Walmart has embraced change, relying on fundamental SoLoMo technologies to provide customers a simple, integrated user experience across multiple channels, making it easy for them to get what they want when, and where, they want it.

Evolution at its finest.

¹ Internet Retailer, “Wal-Mart says its e-commerce push is working”

The general consensus from the Wharton study is that the one-directional mass media ad campaign model is going the way of the Dodo. To get ahead in 2020, agencies and the brands they work for will have to ditch the campaign model in favor of an “on-demand” approach to marketing. This, in turn, will compel ad agencies and marketing departments to operate more like newsrooms, churning out mass quantities of data-driven content that is relevant and useful to their target audience.

Sounds a lot like integrated digital marketing, but I digress…

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE “NEW” ADVERTISING MODEL

• Consumer Oriented - According to the Harvard Business Review, the old ad campaign model was brand-focused, replete with companies telling their stories. The new model is consumer oriented, with brands asking more questions instead of offering unsolicited answers.  
• Highly-Personalized & Targeted Content - To get ahead in 2020, brands are going to have to become multi-media content mavens, churning out an endless stream of info-tainment tailored for every audience demographic.
• Inbound over Outbound - Instead of ramming would-be customers down a linear purchase funnel, advertisers and brands will need to take a passive role, objectively nurturing prospects through what Wharton’s 2020 report calls “an iterative purchase decision journey.”
• Interactive and Accessible - Tomorrow’s social, mobile, local consumer will demand 24/7 accessibility from brands. Advances in data analytics and mobile device technology already enable businesses to interact with prospects and customers wherever, whenever. This will continue to be somewhat of a Pandora’s Box for advertisers and marketers expected to meet the challenge of delivering around-the-clock ROI.
• Tech Fueled, Data Driven - Big data. Analytics. More big data. More analytics. Technology will continue to act as the great change agent, as advertisers and marketers become ever-more reliant on quantifiable information to measure current initiatives and inform future ones.

WHAT BRANDS MUST DO TO COMPETE

• Become a Super-Publisher - As interactive technologies pervade every aspect of our lives, from the cars we drive to the clothes we wear, there will be a proliferation of “interaction points” in which brands will be able to deliver just the right type of content at the just the right time in just the right place. In this always-on-demand environment, advertisers and marketers will have to shift their attention from buying paid media to creating content over numerous opt-in channels that they must control and manage themselves. The future of marketing is all about managing engagement and experience flow, and then measuring results and refining the process. The overarching goal? Providing genuine value to the consumer.
• Operate Like a Tech Company - As the Wharton study points out, what we consider big data today will be nothing in 2020. Data aggregation and segmentation technologies will drive advertising and marketing to exponentially greater complexity. Brands will rely on mind numbingly sophisticated CRMs and other smart systems to manage it all. Creatives, or “experience managers,” will have to work closely will mathematicians and IT to deliver content that informs and entertains in a deeply competitive environment.
• Become Trustees of the Consumer - With personal data all but a thing of the past, the criticality of trust between brands and consumers will rise to the fore. Marketers will need to learn how to fulfill a myriad of consumer wants and needs in an utterly transparent manner.

IN OTHER WORDS…

Here’s my take on what the Harvard Business Review and Wharton 2020 Study are essentially saying about the future of advertising and marketing:

To stay competitive, businesses must form meaningful connections with the people who matter most: those who find value in their brand. They can do this by producing large quantities of original content that is exceptional, personalized, and relevant, optimizing it for any platform or device on which it could potentially be viewed or consumed. They must then engage with their audience in real time over multiple channels. Finally, relying on user feedback and data analytics, companies need to constantly tweak content and messaging to fit the ever-changing demands of each target audience segment.

In other words, the future is integrated digital marketing.

More than a mere reflection of the future of HR, I think Google’s approach to creating employee happiness serves as a microcosm of the future of marketing.

MEASURING HAPPINESS ONE BIT AT A TIME

Google’s employee-centric ethos is widely cited by many an HR manager as the acme of good corporate governance. Whether it’s the free gourmet food or the generous compensation packages for beneficiaries of deceased Googlers, the search giant has always taken care of its own.¹

Google’s use of quantitative data to maximize happiness, however, suggests that someone over there has been reading their Mills or Bentham. At the root of it all is POPS – the colloquial acronym-nickname of Google’s branded HR function, “People Operations.” As one might expect, POPS is driven by a high-tech data tracking program that analyzes employee responses to various benefits. This data even helps determine the company’s Googlegeist – Google’s very own happiness metric (No, I didn’t make this up).¹

Aside from setting Googlegeist, POPS uses big data to analyze – and subsequently influence – virtually every aspect of Google employees’ lives, from how much they should invest in their retirement portfolios to how much they should eat at the cafeteria. POPS even figured out that the ideal lunch line is 3-4 minutes long (doesn’t waste time, but long enough to meet new people), and that 8-inch plates are preferable to 12-inch ones, as they encourage workers to eat smaller portions.¹

Talk about stealthy micro-managing…

USING BIG DATA TO REFINE THE PROCESS

In 2009, a group of hardcore number crunchers from Google launched Project Oxygen, a plan to mine large amounts of internal POPS data to quantifiably determine the characteristics of effective managers. They gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers using over 100 variables, and then coded the comments to discover patterns in the data.²

Patterns they found; eight of them, in fact. After discovering the eight characteristics that make an effective manager at Google, they implemented a comprehensive training program to transform data into action. It worked. Google was able to demonstrate a statistically significant improvement in manager quality in 75% of its worst-performing managers.²

In other words, Google used data analytics to refine an internal process which in turn positively impacted a key performance indicator.

MARKETING TAKEAWAY

Google was able to utilize the data collected on its employees accomplish two  objectives: 1) influence the behavior of its target audience, in this case Google employees, and 2) improve a key performance indicator, in this case the quality of its managers.

To be sure, the future of marketing is digital, integrated, and data driven. To meet the ever-increasing demands of today’s tech-enabled social, local, mobile consumer, businesses are turning to new marketing technologies such as ad retargeting, predictive recommendations, and anticipatory computing engines. All of these rely on the ability to take existing data to influence future action.

Consumers want efficiency, simplicity, and convenience; they are willing to be influenced, as long as the experience is relevant. They are essentially saying, “You should know what I want. Get it right – give me what I want when and where I want it, and I will give you my business.”

Just as Google is using employee data to optimize the employee experience, your brand should be using target audience data to optimize the consumer experience.

Or, as Prasad Setty, head of POP’s “people analytics” group notes, “What we try to do is bring the same level of rigor to people decisions that we do to engineering decisions. Our mission is to have all people decisions be informed by data.”¹

Welcome to the future of marketing.

¹ Slate, “The Happiness Machine”

² New York Times, “Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss”

THE CONSUMER IS DRIVING DIGITAL

The shift to digital marketing is largely consumer driven, as technologies such as the Internet, social media, and mobile devices empower them to demand more out of brands and marketers. Consumers want what they want when and where they want it, expecting simplicity, convenience, and real-time, personalized interaction with brands over multiple digital channels. To compete, businesses face a devil’s bargain: on the one hand, they are expected to participate in numerous granular interactions to foster long-term relationships with each disparate segment of their target audience; on the other, they must deftly mine vast troves of data to measure the ROI of these interactions.

To efficiently navigate such Herculean demands, businesses are becoming more reliant on integrated digital marketing.

TOP DIGITAL MARKETING TOOLS

For the marketers surveyed in the Report, content is king, as 70% of company marketers and 72% of agency marketers plan on raising their content marketing budgets. Interestingly, 65% of company marketers are spending more on organic SEO, this in spite of concerns over its measurability in the face of increasing HTTPS encryption on the part of Google. Allocation in social media and email marketing, for both engagement/retention and acquisition remain strong, as does spending on mobile marketing. Other popular digital marketing investments include lead generation, video advertising, PPC, and webinars.

Evidencing the pervasive role of technology in marketing, the Report lists a host of digital marketing technologies used by the marketers surveyed; the three most popular are business analytics and web analytics software (46%), CRMs (45%), and content management systems (41%). In addition to these, the survey respondents are turning to various other marketing technologies, such as social media management systems, paid search/bid management and ad retargeting systems, to help measure digital marketing ROI.

THE GREATER NEED FOR DIGITAL MARKETERS

The complexity of the emerging digital marketing landscape requires a new set of interdisciplinary skills that are hard to find. The Econsultancy Report cited a recent IBM study relating that across the four technology areas they explored – mobile, business analytics, cloud and social business – only one in ten organizations has all the skills it needs.

This skills gap has led to an interesting paradox: many companies are reluctant to invest in digital marketing because they lack the human capital to maximize the value of the investment. Indeed, the pace of change in various digital marketing technologies is likely exacerbating this trend.

On a practical level, highly complex and fully integrated digital marketing campaigns require adaptable personalities who perform well in environments of constant change, uncertainty, and downright chaos.

From my experience in the digital marketing trenches, the best teams are made up of cross-functional individuals each with some combination of the following attributes or skills:

Creativity (perhaps more important than ever); excellent verbal/writing skills; graphic design; web development and front-end design; statistics and data analytics; project/process management; digital proclivity; critical thinking; intuition and perspective.

Much like an elite special forces unit, an elite integrated digital marketing team is made up of small packs of highly trained and talented individuals. Given the difficulties associated with hiring and maintaining such talent, many companies are finding it more cost-effective to outsource some or all of their digital marketing to specialized groups.

THE BOTTOM LINE

According to the Report, digital marketing is all about lead generation and customer acquisition and retention by way of engagement over website, email, social, and mobile channels. Don’t believe me? Check out this handy Wordle of most common survey responses to the question, “What is the single most important area of digital focus for your organization / clients in 2013?”

In this case, a picture truly is worth a thousand words.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

As Alistair Dent points out in a SearchEngine Watch post, the move to Enhanced Campaigns shows Google is becoming more contextually aware. Using data gleaned from various elements of the Google universe, combined with the geo-positioning capabilities of your mobile device, Google is getting better at distinguishing whether you are browsing at home or work, or somewhere else.

With this information, Google is redefining the term “mobile” as proximity based rather than device based. In other words, being on a smartphone or tablet per se does not make a user mobile – being on a device away from a static location such as home or work does. Enhanced Campaign’s “mobile preferred” feature takes this into account, allowing businesses to queue up location-based ads to truly mobile users.

The mobile preferred feature is probably more useful for advertisers and marketers working with SMBs than for bigger companies. SMBs tend to have fewer resources to throw at highly-sophisticated marketing campaigns which micro target audience segments based on specific mobile device usage. In fact, Enhanced Campaigns does away with the distinction between smartphones and tablets altogether.

I think many SMBs will benefit from the simplicity of running single Adwords campaign across all devices, especially when coupled with the ability to target specific mobile-local users.

In addition, the Enhanced Campaigns “mobile bid multiplier,” enables businesses to pay more for customers closer to their physical business. This is especially relevant for retailers and companies selling products and services to a local consumer base.

KEYWORD CONVERGENCE

Admittedly, one negative aspect of the simplicity of Enhanced Campaigns is the loss of keyword segmentation between mobile and desktop. As a general rule, longer-tail keywords often work better on desktop searches and shorter keywords on mobile (given the difficulties of typing on mobile). With Enhanced Campaigns, all keywords will apply to both desktop and mobile search. Though sure to rankle SEOs and digital marketers right now, I don’t see it as having a big impact in the long-run, especially when you factor in the inevitable shift to voice-enabled search.

{As a side note, Google’s slow march to HTTPS encryption on its search engine coupled with its tossing out of desktop-mobile keyword distinction in Enhanced Campaigns seem to reflect Google’s continuing de-emphasis of keywords in search.}

KILLING TWO BIRDS WITH ONE PHONE

So why is Google making these changes? Like everything the company does, it seems as though there is more than one reason.

On a user level, the rollout of Enhanced Campaigns is a recognition that we now live in a multi-screen world, and as such the lines which have distinguished one device from another continue to blur. Moreover, many consumers now own multiple devices of varying sizes, and are beginning to integrate them into their daily tasks. In August of 2012, Google issued a study of multi-device consumers which found that 90% move sequentially between several screens to accomplish a task.

On a business level, Enhanced Campaigns represents a companywide acknowledgement that the times they are a changing.’ Google’s ad revenue model is based on desktop search. For Google, CPCs on desktop are higher than on mobile. Unfortunately, the world is going mobile, and quickly. So how does Google prop up its ad revenue model when mobile CPCs are lower than desktop?

Why, combine the two Adwords sectors into one “enhanced” Adwords, of course.

MAKE MONEY, STAY RELEVENT

What’s the bottom line? I think Google is doing what it has to do to stay competitive and relevant in a fast-moving world. In the short run, the changes to Adwords will benefit SMBs more than larger corporations; in the long run, the changes won’t matter much, as new technologies such as voice recognition, predictive analytics, and anticipatory computing work to completely disrupt search as we know it.

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“What gift do you think a good servant has that separates them from the others? It’s the gift of anticipation…I know when they’ll be hungry…I know it before they know it themselves.”

This quote from the 2001 movie Gosford Park reminds us of the greatest attribute of a servant/personal assistant – the ability to anticipate the wants and needs of his or her master before they are fully realized. This truism from early 20^th century England still resonates today, and serves as the organizing principle around one of the hottest trends in marketing technology: anticipatory computing.

Imagine a world in which your mobile device is able to listen to and understand your conversations and, much like the silent, ever-present servant in the shadows, immediately act on them by providing relevant news, information, and recommendations?

Forget Ask Jeeves, your mobile device will have become Jeeves.

San Francisco-based Expect Labs looks to be on the verge of turning imagination into reality with its much-vaunted MindMeld iPad app, which is powered by an anticipatory search engine (ACE) that represents the perfect convergence of three emerging technologies: mobile, voice recognition, and big data.

PUTTING THE SMART IN SMARTPHONE

It seems as though Expect Labs recognizes the massive consumer shift to mobile has fundamentally changed information discovery. Typing in text-based queries is not as convenient on smartphones and tablets as it is on PCs and laptops.

Instead, the company focuses on harnessing the ability of mobile devices to capture ambient audio, visual, and location-based information (so-called “soft signals”) to interpret “meaning and intent from multiple different streams of sensor data.”

To fully appreciate the implications of this, it’s helpful to understand that one of the biggest challenges of using “big data” is to figure out how to elicit meaningful context out of a mountain of unstructured data. Thanks to advancements in cloud computing, context-based search engines, and data aggregation, we now have access to unprecedented levels of raw information. The difficulty lies in drawing useful meaning out of it all. In a way, it’s like trying to understand what one person is saying when 1 billion other people are talking at the same time.

However, sophisticated machine learning algos are now enabling computer programs to analyze real-time conversations to derive intent. With time, and enough listening, these programs can even anticipate information that may be relevant in the future. Just like good old Jeeves- the longer he observes and listens, the better able he is to anticipate your wants and needs-often before you do.

A more technical term for this phenomenon is “continuous predictive modeling.” When programs are able to access tons of Internet, social, mobile, and geo-local data, or (“Proactive Information Discovery”), and then filter and categorize it, they can predict or anticipate future actions.

Or, as Event Labs puts it, “analyzing and understanding a conversation over time can sometimes make it possible to anticipate information that may be relevant in the future.”

Too true.

According to Event Labs, ACE is merely the first step toward its over-arching goal of creating a general-purpose conversation assistant.

I especially like the last sentence in the “technology” section of the company website: As a result of these advances, we think that in just a few years, we may all look back and recall how old-fashioned it was that we had to type queries at our keyboard to find the information we needed.

I couldn’t agree more.

NUANCED BUT FACTUAL

To make its anticipatory search engine more accurate, in December of 2012 Event Labs teamed up with voice recognition technology firm Nuance, whose software also powers the voice recognition systems Google Now and Siri; to make its anticipatory search engine smarter, Event Labs recently inked a deal with Factual, Inc, a big data darling that apparently has access to data on 58 million local businesses and points of interest in 50 countries.

The reason I point this out is that I think Event Labs is ahead of its time, representing the vanguard of what will eventually become the dominant paradigm for search: mobile + voice recognition + big data = ACE.

ROBOTIC PAs?

On a larger scale, the convergence of these technologies with robotics and artificial intelligence will eventually conspire to create very lifelike, robotic personal assistants that are smart as a whip and strong as an ox. Don’t believe me? You might be surprised at the speed of advancement of human-like robots, or androids, which has been lead in large part by Japanese researchers.

Check out this brief YouTube video to see what I mean:

That’s all well and good, you might say, but androids will never be as smart as humans. It’s not like they have brains or anything, right?

Well, I’m not so sure about that either. A team of over 200 top-level researchers from 80 institutions worldwide has just secured $1.6 Billion in funding for the Human Brain Project, a colossal effort to artificially re-create the human brain. Located in Lausanne, Switzerland, it is already being called the “CERN for the brain.” (Remember CERN, also located in Switzerland? It is home of the Large Hadron Collider, the last international effort to discover something seemingly undiscoverable, in that case the Higgs-boson, or “God particle.” They did it in two years – with the machine at only half power).

The group hopes that the project will also speed up advancements in super computing, which I will go on record as saying it probably will. With advancements in such areas as parallel processing and quantum computing, it is not inconceivable that the Human Brain Project will be successful sooner rather than later.

If and when they are, the path will be cleared for the creation of the anatomically correct android PA. Heck, you’ll probably be able to buy it on Amazon (I don’t know about free shipping).

In the short run, I’m bullish on ACE; in the long run, on Android PAs. Why? As the last 30 years have borne out, technological advancement is more often than not exponential rather than linear.

Given that we are living in the now and not in the future, you may want to keep a close eye on the upcoming release of Event Lab’s MindMeld app and give it a spin.

It may be the future of search.

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If you happen to disagree with this notion, feel free to either a) read this post on the subject, b) read on anyway, or c) stop reading now.

For those of you still with me, I’d like to point out a broad trend emerging from data gathered by two respected digital media sources, eMarketer and Gartner – as a percentage of overall media ad spend, few businesses are thowing money at mobile.

And I don’t understand why.

NUMBERS DON’T LIE

First, let’s look at the data. This nifty graphic from eMarketer depicts total projected media ad spending worldwide through 2016:

The endnote at the bottom of the graphic lists all of the media included in the projections, which for my money pretty much covers every type of media likely used by businesses.

To add to the analysis, here are some data from Gartner projecting worldwide mobile ad revenues through the same period (2016):

Mobile Advertising Revenue by Region, Worldwide, 2012-2016 (Millions of Dollars)

When taken together, these two data sets reveal the miniscule nature of worldwide mobile ad spend as a percentage of total media ad spend:

• 2012: 1.8% – Yikes!
• 2016: 3.9% – Better, but not by much.

Looking at the US alone, here are some numbers published by eMarketer in September of 2012 comparing total media ad spend to mobile ad spend:

• 2012: 1.6%*
• 2016: 6.3%*

These are much better than the global average, but suggest that mobile garners only a tiny portion of total media ad spend in the US.

(*eMarketer data from December of 2012 racheted these percentages up significantly, to 2.4% and 11%, respectively. Regardless, the numbers remain quite low).

According to Gartner, different types of mobile advertising are evolving in different ways. For example, spending on location-based mobile search ad spend will markedly increase over the next few years, before slowly tapering off. Gartner predicts that eventually, mobile display ads on mobile web browsers will dominate.

Interestingly, Gartner also noted that the rapid consumer adoption of mobile devices is creating a glut of ad space inventory, as business ad spend lags behind consumer mobile usage. To me, this suggests that advertising on mobile is likely to be much cheaper now than it will be in the future.

WHY MOBILE MATTERS

Here’s a stat that summarizes why mobile advertising matters:

• According to a 2012 survey from Hipcricket, 46% of smartphone owners have viewed a mobile ad; among them, 64% have completed at least one purchase as a result of doing so. However, fully 74% of smartphone users say their favorite brands have not yet advertised to them via mobile. Among those who have made a purchase as a result of a mobile ad, 45% have referred a product or service to a friend or colleague.

Early feedback from Facebook mobile Sponsored Stories corroborates the utility of advertising on mobile:

• A recent study by several of Facebook Ads API partners, Facebook’s mobile Sponsored Stories are getting over 13X the click-through rates and earn 11.2X the money per-impression on mobile compared to Facebook’s desktop ads.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Here’s the irony: for businesses, mobile advertising is still in the early stages of adoption; for users, mobile advertising is tolerated and in some cases welcomed.

This fundamental disconnect presents a significant opportunity for businesses that incorporate mobile ads into their digital marketing mix sooner rather than later. In fact, brands need to embrace social, local, mobile (SoLoMo), recognizing each as fundamental to a broader integrated digital marketing strategy.

Early data from mobile advertising would seem to underscore these very sentiments.

Fast forward a year and some change; last week, Inbound Marketing Agency Hubspot put out a blog relating that about 55% of the organic search it gets per month is now encrypted; worse, Hubspot has seen this percentage steadily rise by about 4% each month. Given that Hubspot has produced a massive amount of high-quality content geared toward organic search queries, its findings should not be taken with a grain of salt. What does it mean? In a nutshell, encrypted search renders the ability to track individual keywords impossible, effectively killing organic SEO.

HOW DOES HTTPS AFFECT ORGANIC SEO?

Quick Definition: HTTPS uses the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocol to provide secure, encrypted Internet communications for services like web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers.

To clarify, I said Google’s HTTPS encryption is killing organic SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, not organic search itself. This is because HTTPS encryption wipes out the all-important referrer header URL information, instead only passing along the domain name of its origin.

For example, let’s say I go onto Google and search “pink plastic watering can,” and your company, a purveyor of said cans, is displayed in the organic portion of my search engine results page (SERP). Before encryption, my computer’s browser would forward the full URL of the SERP page as the referrer header. Your website’s analytics could then parse out the URL to deduce that it came from an organic search that used the words “pink plastic watering can.” With encryption, your site would receive only the domain name of the search origin, in this case https://www.google.com.

Encryption does not kill organic search outright, but rather the ability to track the results of organic search queries. For businesses and marketers, this is a big deal.

As Hubspot notes in an excellent blog on the topic, in the beginning, HTTPs encryption only applied to users logged in to Google. Unfortunately, now it has become the default on Google’s Chrome and Safari iOS6 browsers, which happen to be the most popular browsers on earth for desktop/laptop and mobile devices, respectively.

Interestingly, neither Bing nor Yahoo has instituted HTTPS/SSL encryption.

So why has Google?

THE COMPANY LINE

Here is what Google says about SSL encryption on its support page on the subject:

Searching over SSL provides you with a more secure and private search experience. As we make SSL available, SSL search will be the default when you’re signed in.

Like many things Google says, this sounds perfectly sensible, except that it isn’t.

By its very nature, there is not a lot of user-specific privacy data in a keyword search; moreover, keyword search data is only forwarded to the websites that users click on. Even the staunchest of privacy advocates don’t tend to complain about the sharing of organic search query data, but rather data shared for targeted advertising.

HTTPS encryption does not protect users from sharing data with its advertisers. If anything, it has the perverse effect of encouraging more targeted advertising. For example, if I am a marketer working for a client and cannot prove ROI by tracking organic keyword performance, I am forced into the welcoming arms of Google’s paid advertising. Rest assured SSL encryption does not impact Google Adwords from tracking organic search data.

Maybe this is the very point.

OF PRIVACY AND ADVERTISING

Back on Google’s SSL help page, the search giant goes on to promise that if you click on an ad on its Google search engine results page, the browser will send an unencrypted referrer that includes your query to the advertiser’s site. Why? … “to provide a mechanism to the advertiser so that the advertiser can improve the relevancy of the ads that are presented to you.”

Ahh, of course. Thanks.

An aspiring benevolent tech monopoly, Google likes to assure people every action is in the users’ best interest.

Convincing users of Google’s noble intent is often far easier than convincing that of the tech punditry. Back in October of 2011, WebProNews published an article containing reactions from SEOs to Google HTTPS. In the post, Rebecca Lieb, the Digital Advertising and Media Analyst at the Altimeter Group, went as far as to call Google’s move “evil.”

After noting the hypocrisy of Google’s privacy motive, Todd Friesen, the Director of SEO at Performics, added, “Google doesn’t do anything on a whim…there’s definitely a bigger plan behind it, and it’s probably big and scary with teeth and claws.”

Rebecca and Todd are sure to be on Google’s naughty list.

Rather than getting angry, I’ve always taken a sort of semi-nervous, whistling-in-the-graveyard approach to Google’s various monopolistic ambitions; after all, if the tech giant someday does become the benevolent tech dictator I think it may, the pragmatist in me knows it’s better to be seen as a collaborator than a revolutionary (or rebel).

HOW WE GOT HERE

To provide greater context to the full import of Google’s HTTPS encryption, here’s a quick review some key moves made by the search giant over the past few years:

• February 2011- Introduction of the Panda algorithm update, penalizing low-quality sites and favoring sites featuring high-quality, fresh and original content.
• October 2011- Rollout of HTTPS encryption for searches of logged-in Google users.
• January, 2012 - Announcement of Search, Plus Your World, which elevated the relevance of social signals in search queries.
• March 2012 - Application of changes to its privacy policy allowing Google to track user data over all platforms, including Gmail and YouTube; Google said it was to help personalize search query results.
• April, 2012 - Penguin Algorithm update, which further solidified Google’s emphasis on quality content.
• May of 2012 - Announcement of new “Knowledge Graph” semantic search function. Touted as “the next generation of search,” Google’s Knowledge Graph algorithm collects tons of data about people, places and things, and then forms its own context based on the relationships that exist between the data.

Here’s my pithy interpretation of this timeline:

• Google’s Panda encourages fresh and original content creation in part to feed its AI search engine.
• Google introduces Search, Plus Your World (SPYW) to collect more data to improve its AI search engine.
• The presumed amount of private data derived SPYW ostensibly forces Google to tighten up security and encryption via HTTPS/SSL. This move slowly kills organic search, forcing companies and marketers to use track-able paid alternatives such as AdWords, as its analytics are not affected by HTTPs encryption.
• Google plays both sides, gets everyone to create more content for its AI search engine and profiting from the resulting higher ad spend.

Lest you think I’ve up and joined the howling anti-Google mob, here is some great data from Covario which helps illuminate why Google may want to encourage paid advertising as an alternative to organic search:

• According to Covario’s Global Search Advertising Spend Analysis, advertiser spending on paid search rose 18% in 2012.
• In Q4 2012, Google reaped 86.5% of all global paid search spend and 93% of impressions. Advertisers spent 13% more on search spending with Google than they did a year ago.

THE BROADER PICTURE: SEO FRAGMENTS; SOLOMO RULES

Google has a catlike agility in the tech marketplace. Its tendency to quietly test and then seismically shift, often without serious prior warning, has fueled the company’s success with the wider populace while at the same time breeding mistrust among the tech punditry. As evidence of this fact, one needs only to recall Google’s switch to Search, Plus Your World, or the rather abrupt discontinuation of its Feedburner RSS feed.

Google knows that the rise of mobile devices and social media are slowly letting the air out of “traditional” search. In an increasingly fragmented needs discovery environment characterized by a greater consumer use of social mobile apps and social search, coupled with a growing business appetite for more sophisticated paid alternatives such as ad retargeting and predictive recommendations, the utility of the browser-based search engines is waning. Per usual, Google saw the writing on the wall long ago; the move to HTTPS encryption, as well as its Panda, Penguin, and SPYW algorithm updates seem to confirm this notion.

Thanks to the widespread consumer adoption of the Internet and social media, coupled with the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, consumers are now social, local, mobile (SoLoMo). Google is poised to greatly benefit from this paradigm shift.

A great post from Marketing Profs shares some revealing numbers about the ascendancy of Google’s Android mobile operating system:

• 75% of all smartphones worldwide use the Android operating system.
• Roughly ½ billion Android devices have flooded the market. 1.3 million Android devices are activated worldwide each day.
• Tablet ownership among US adults doubled between 2011 and 2012. In that same period, Android’s share of the tablet market more than tripled—from 15% to 48%.
• On a worldwide basis, more Facebook users now use Android smartphones: 189.7 million vs. 178.3 million.

According to 2012 data from Pew Research, half of all adults access the Internet through a mobile device. These consumers are warming up to mobile advertising. A 2012 survey from Hipcricket showed that 46% of smartphone owners have viewed a mobile ad; among them, 64% have completed at least one purchase as a result of doing so. Among those who have made a purchase as a result of a mobile ad, 45% have referred a product or service to a friend or colleague.

OF SEISMIC SHIFTS AND TREMORS

Google controls the smartphones; eventually, it will control the lion’s share of the tablets. It controls the two largest search engines on the planet (Google and YouTube). Google’s search algorithm changes have cajoled businesses and marketers to feed its context-based AI search engine with ever-more fresh and original content. It uses this data to improve its AI context-based search engine, which in turn provides future monetization opportunities in advertising and new technologies such as voice search. Google is poised to capitalize on the seismic shift to mobile and video marketing too, cashing in on massive ad dollars over both media.

In the face of all of this the shift to HTTPS encryption, while seismic for marketers, is but a tremor little felt by the gang at Mountain View.

Integrated digital marketers (IDMs) rely heavily on data analytics to track campaign performance over website, social, and mobile channels. To ensure each initiative is achieving the desired effect, they may track various performance management metrics, including website bounce rates; keyword performance rankings; eMail open rates; landing page conversions; visitor-to-lead, lead-to-customer, and customer retention ratios; and ad click-through-rates and costs-per-impression. Striving for perfection, IDMs rely heavily on user data to compare marketing initiatives with real-world results.

In other words, they keep their EAR to the ground.

Here are three ways to do the same:

Engage - The first step is to collect both external and internal feedback on each IDM campaign initiative. Marketers should reach out to the people who interact with prospects and customers on a daily basis. This could be members of a company’s sales or account team, CSRs, or strategic partners such as affiliates or distributors. This kind of “3rd party” input can be invaluable, especially when compared against internal feedback garnered from the IDM group’s social media manager(s). Doing so also helps mitigate the myopia that often comes when a business is too reliant on the sole perspective of the marketing team.

Analyze - With the aid of new technologies such as marketing automation software, today’s IDMs can review and dissect numerous data points from a company’s web, social, and local-mobile marketing initiatives.

IDMs are most effective when they combine both inductive and deductive reasoning to data analysis:

1. The inductive approach relies on specific data to form broader generalizations: “When we offered W piece of content to X audience segment on Y medium, we got Z response rate. Therefore, we would do well to offer more W-type content to X segment in the future.”

2. The deductive approach uses data to arrive at specific conclusions gleaned from broad generalizations: “Typically, audience segment X seems to like W-type content over all media. Therefore, if we offer this new piece of W content on Y medium, we expect to get a favorable response rate from X.”

Refine - When used properly, data can breathe meaning into past efforts by creating a framework to assess the success or failure of specific campaigns; its conclusions can also inform how future marketing initiatives can be tweaked to produce better results. By combining feedback from external resources with internal data analysis, brands can improve upon existing digital strategies and formulate new ones.

Integrated digital marketing is disruptive and dynamic, constantly shattering the status quo. To succeed, its practitioners must always focus on performance management, relying on high-tech marketing software and tactics to efficiently track key performance indicators (KPIs); by doing so, IDMs can nimbly tweak campaign elements to respond to changes in consumer demand.

For today’s integrated digital marketers, performance management is all about keeping your EAR to the ground.