SEMPO has just released its 2012 marketer survey, and there are many interesting findings among categories of spending, practice, and other key industry data. Just as in last year's survey, there is another point about search and social synergy that sticks out to me, but this time it is not about paid media. It is about how agencies and in-house marketers differ in their approaches to interdependent search and social marketing

"That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." -- Garrison Keillor. How good are you? How intelligent, how talented, how kind, how patient? You can give me your opinion, but just like the citizens of Lake Wobegon, you'll be making those judgments in a vacuum unless you compare yourself to others. Hence the importance of benchmarking.

A little over a month ago, Google introduced a new report into Webmaster Tools: Structured Data. This new report allows website owners to access the types and amount of structured data that Google finds on the website. Why would Google create this report? What is its benefit to webmasters?

Earlier this year I wrote a column, Paging Doctor Google, where I noted my recent career move into the healthcare marketing space. There are several adjectives I could use to describe my to-date experience in this new field -- "challenging" would be definitely be chief among them. My perception heading in was that the marketing and advertising world was divided between B2C and B2B communications. You either market to consumers or businesses. Simple enough, right? My subsequent experiences have caused me to rethink that mentality, and place healthcare marketing in its own class.

Back in May, Google announced that its newly branded Google Shopping service would soon become an exclusively paid service in which product listings are ranked by a combination of bid price and relevance. Google positioned the change as a good thing for online retailers and product searchers alike. But online retailer are justified in expressing frustration that Google's massive change is coming right now -- at the beginning of the frenetically competitive Xmas shopping season. Managing the transition to paid listings isn't going to be easy, even for experienced e-commerce players. Still, there are things that you can do. Here …

It's long been said that, "consumers are multichannel." And we are. But true multichannel retailing always seemed just out of reach until the mobile revolution changed everything. With the swipe of an iPhone, the technological, organizational, and structural impediments to multichannel retail were blown away. But because consumers have led the revolution, it hasn't turned out exactly as retailers envisioned. The recent rise of "showrooming" has pushed multichannel reality into an unforgiving spotlight. But the multichannel revolution cuts both ways, and unanticipated consequences will surely surface online as well. My bet is on generalized, multichannel product search. Because why should …

I made it! I got through the summer without writing too many "filler" columns triggered by the realization it was already Wednesday and my editor was expecting something in her inbox by end of day. Of course, now that we're safely past Labor Day, all that comes to a crashing halt. Because, yet again, it's Wednesday (as of the time I'm writing) and, yet again, the well is dry. So, it was sad yet somehow consoling that I read the final column of David Berkowitz, the one MediaPost writer I know who has actually logged more columns (400) than I …

Tis the season to start prepping for the holiday season! Here are some tips for making sure you've got all the right ingredients to get your pay-per-click (PPC) search campaigns cooking.

On Monday of this week, fellow Search Insider Ryan DeShazer bravely threw his hat back in the ring regarding this question: Is Google better or worse off because of SEO? DeShazer confessed to being vilified after a previous column indicated that Google owed us something. I admit I have a column penned but never submitted that Ryan could have added to the "vilify" side of that particular tally. But in his Monday column, Ryan touches on a very relevant point: "What is the thin line between White Hat and Black Hat SEO?"

Back in June, I detailed the sun setting on Google Website Optimizer in favor of the new Google AdWords Experiments. For the most part, I've been really happy with the new Experiments option -- there are real benefits to the new approach. However, I have encountered a small glitch that testers using Experiments should take into account.