Integration. If you are keeping score at home, it's the buzzword bingo center square. You know, the free one that everyone claims before the game actually begins....

Word of mouth is powerful in marketing. In the last two weeks, we've seen how the opinions of others can cause us to change our own beliefs to match. We've also seen how the speed at which the word spreads is a function not only of the structure of the network itself, but also the value of the message and its impact on the people in the network, as well as how much they stand to gain (or lose) by spreading the word.

At Friday's keynote during the OMMA conference, Nigel Morris of Isobar relayed this quote from a conversation he had with Google's country manager in Belgium: "All agencies are [the] middleman and we want to destroy you." Now I'd like to think I know good British humor when I see it -- I'll take David Brent over Michael Scott any day --- but I couldn't tell if Mr. Morris was joking here. Regardless, it got me thinking about the context in which we'll be talking about Google -- and search -- at future OMMA shows. So here's a glimpse of what …

Everything you need to know about the future of search engine marketing you learned in the 1990s. That's an overstatement, of course, but the basics of SEO and SEM -- the very first things you probably learned -- now are more important than they've been in years for bringing people back to your Web site. It's all thanks to the new browser wars among Firefox 3, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, all of which are generally evolving in the same direction.

I spent some time at the MIXX Conference & Expo in New York this week. It was one of those trade shows that -- like the whole advertising business to which it caters -- isn't really geared toward search at all. In fact, if the only information you had came from exhibitors and attendees, you'd walk out of the show with the bizarre impression that Google, search, and the whole industry we call SEM didn't even exist. A couple of days later, I had to laugh when TNS Media Intelligence's Jon Swallen, presiding over a gloomy report on ad spending, …

A few weeks ago, I was asked to describe the single biggest mistake that search marketers continue to make. When advertisers do not measure search campaign value correctly, no amount of tactical expertise can make up for this shortfall. Budgets are misallocated, keywords are optimized incorrectly, and entire segments of query opportunity are ignored or passed over because their worth is not effectively captured. Here are three fundamentals for correctly assessing the impact of search marketing campaigns that every search marketer should consider.

What makes up buzz? And what determines how fast it travels? Last week, I talked about how important the opinions of others are in shaping our brand beliefs. Today, I want to look at one category of word of mouth, the juicy tidbit, recently christened "buzz," and see what makes it leap from person to person.

Recently, the Google Webmaster Central blog has featured several posts that de-emphasize the risks and impact of various well-known and accepted search obstacles. Among them, they say that Flash is now fully search-engine friendly. Google has said that there is no "penalty" for duplicate content. And yesterday, the company recommended that Webmasters should not rewrite dynamic URLs, suggesting that it might not be a legitimate tactic. I want to apply a bit of critical thinking to help those who may tend to just scan the headlines, and are being led to believe that all of the above statements are totally …

Whenever I'm talking to marketers about how to listen to their brands, blog search engines always come up as a good starting point. I've been having the same conversations for years, and with minor exceptions, I'd do fine using the same slides I've used since I started. Here are some examples of the blog search engine landscape....

Because this column is entitled "Search Insider," I always try abide by its primary mission: to offer information from the perspective of somebody in the trenches of the SEM industry. And right now, friends, the view I see from my foxhole isn't very pretty: in fact, one could say it's damn near apocaplyptic. And the saddest thing of all is that we in the industry have brought this mess on ourselves.