• Moving Away From The Standardized Approach
    Until now, there have been two schools of thought about search customization. One school of thought says that, since search engines and bid optimizations all work on a core set of principles, you can treat every campaign as essentially the same. Then there's the opposite school of thought: since every business and every customer segment is unique, the best campaigns are customized to leverage that uniqueness.
  • Finding A Cure For Newsitis
    An exchange last week with my significant other summed up a lot of what I'm hearing right now about the fast and furious developments in the interactive industry....
  • Online Marketing For Brand Building
    When you think of search marketing, most of us consider conversions as the true metric of success, driving actual leads and sales through the web site. However, in a recent Radar Research Study, over 62 percent of executive respondents said that building brand awareness was their top objective. Online marketing and brand building are not mutually exclusive ideas.
  • Welcome To The Search Marketing Sweat Shop
    In the latest Business Week, buried on page 70, there's a story about outsourcing in search marketing. The story is titled "Life on the Web's Factory Floor," and it's about the thriving business in assembling search marketing ads. From the description, it sounds like search marketing is nothing more than a big Scrabble game....
  • Relevant Segmentation of Consumer Search: Part Two
    Last month I penned an article discussing the notion that keywords alone as a marketing vehicle are setting marketers up for failure. Keywords are simply how consumers express themselves, and we speak to consumers--not to keywords. So, what does this really mean?
  • Researching the Process of Search
    Thanks to a range of business intelligence tools both freely and commercially available, we have countless ways to examine what people are searching for. Historically, what has been harder to document is the process of how people search. A growing body of research sheds light on this subject, and these studies give marketers a roadmap for what they can learn about their customers
  • For the New Search Workforce, Offer A Career
    With SEM maturing into a full-fledged industry, I think it's time we began a conversation on managing the search workforce in our new era. Much more than offering jobs alone, we need to invest in our employees' careers: we need to help them navigate from where they are now--be they newbies or veterans--to where their role in search can take them next.
  • One-Woman Brand Management
    A few months ago, I found out that my name was on a petition going around Boston--a petition that I hadn't actually signed myself....
  • A Conversation With Ask's CEO, Jim Lanzone
    Last week, I had the chance to spend some time talking to Ask's new CEO, Jim Lanzone. The first thing that become very clear is that Lanzone is tired of his company's being compared to Google, MSN and Yahoo....
  • Search Marketing Spotlight: Search is 'Element'-al for Honda
    There has been a lot of buzz about RPA's very cute campaign for the Honda Element. Search was used, along with television and a Web site to encourage viewers to interact with a group of adorable critters that included a possum, a platypus, a talking crab and a lizard....
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