There have been numerous articles commenting on the search efforts of major advertisers like the presidential candidates, and sponsors of blockbuster events like the Olympics and the Super Bowl. It is almost too easy to pick apart the efforts of others, so today I would like to commend those search marketers who have taken advantage of major spending in television and media hype and applied some innovative strategies to their own SEM campaigns.

We are social creatures. One of the reasons humans have flourished on earth is because we take advantage of the power of groups. We have built extremely sophisticated heuristic rules to help us know when to trust and when to be wary. In our past, human survival depended on the passing of information from those we trusted and ignoring information from less trustworthy sources. While the survival value of word of mouth might not be as critical to us now (unless knowing a good Chinese restaurant or mechanic is a matter of life and death) those evolutionary mechanisms are still …

With the OMMA NY Global Conference & Expo kicking off tomorrow, I thought it'd be interesting to compare the agendas of the past 2 shows to this one and see what insights can be gleaned regarding the state of search. To be sure, this is an exercise I performed not only as fodder for this column but as part of my duties as the programming chair for the Search Insider track at the cnference

At the Social Ad Summit this week in New York City, Facebook may have been the most buzzed-about company on stage, with everyone from agency execs to application developers discussing their thoughts on the belle of the network ball. JP Morgan's Deborah Korb Maizner was the most direct, saying that when her company used social networks for recruiting, Facebook had the right caliber of candidates, while MySpace users weren't in the same league. While the comment reeks of elitism, Quantcast backs her up, noting Facebook users have significantly higher education and income levels than MySpace users.

This week I was excited to learn that Google and NBC Universal struck a deal to allow Google to sell select TV inventory by leveraging its Google TV platform and Dish Network set-top-box data. Although the deal will only provide advertisers with the ability to buy inventory on the Sci Fi, Oxygen, MSNBC, Sleuth and Chiller channels, I believe this deal signals the next generation of media buying. Fortunately, for search marketers living in a world where strategic planning and campaign management already beats to a data-centric, real-time, technology-driven drum, we're all positioned nicely to capitalize on this evolution (and …

Google's Chrome browser launched last week amid the dramatic fanfare you'd expect from the debut of a Google browser. Unlike recent, less successful launches (Cuil comes to mind), Chrome's been well received. I myself am pretty happy with it, although my Search Insider colleague David Berkowitz switched back to Firefox less than a day after switching forward.

I've talked about how powerful our mental brand beliefs can be, even to the point of altering the physical taste of Coke. But where do these brand beliefs come from? How do they get embedded in the first place?

While tag cloud generators are all the rage for visually analyzing the text content of various popular Web sites and documents, I decided to go back to an old-fashioned "keyword density" analyzer tool to take a look at Obama's and McCain's recent party nomination acceptance speeches. Keyword density tools have been used by search optimizers for many years to determine the keyword frequency and weight of words and phrases on a Web page.

The longest vacation I've taken was my summer trip contributing to MediaPost's Online Spin. Over the past three months, I explored the jungles of the elusive SearchMonkey, went shopping for precious Chrome, and tried to avoid coming down with a nasty case of Jewdar. If you haven't checked out Spin, here's a chance to catch up. If you've been reading all along, this includes some updates and reflection on what happened, so it's not your typical highlight reel.

As Advertising Week approaches (Sept. 22-26 in New York http://www.advertisingweek.com/), it's a good time for us in SEM to take stock of what we do, and how we fit into the larger world of advertising. Are we really part of it? (A lot of "real world" advertising people would say no: our whole industry is just a part of the "below the line" DR/promotional end of it). Do we even want to be part of it? (Say every nasty thing you want about us gear-heads, but at least we don't advise our clients to waste clients' money on unmeasurable media, …