In honor of the 2012 games in London, I thought it would be fun to compare the various Olympic sports to relevant search marketing themes.

Look at any graphic representation of a social network, and you will see a somewhat globular cluster of nodes -- and, at the center, you'll find the subject or owner of the network. The density of the nodes will be greater near the center, but there will be small clusters of interconnected nodes that will appear throughout the map. This pattern, the visual interpretation of human connection, looks much the same now as it did for tribal humans 100,000 years ago. But there is one important difference. Then, you probably only had one network you belonged to, which was defined …

I spent a good amount of time over the weekend poring over Altimeter Group's recent report, "The Converged Media Imperative." The research is highly recommended reading if you haven't yet downloaded it yourself. Authors Rebecca Lieb and Jeremiah Owyang unpack their findings over 26 slides, identifying throughout the requirement to connect with audiences through a combination of paid, earned, and owned media.

An oft-quoted line is "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." This is just as true for digital marketing and search as it is for the lowly BLT. Marketers who understand the interdependence between digital channels (paid search, organic search, display, social, etc.) can optimize their efforts based on holistic data instead of siloed sets of data. By looking at the whole picture, marketers can benefit from more scalable, sustainable and profitable results.

There is not a lot of overlap between the universes of Gord Hotchkiss and Marissa Mayer, but our orbits have intersected on a few occasions in the past. I've had the opportunity to talk to Mayer about various aspects of search on a handful of occasions, so it was with some interest that I watched the announcement and subsequent buzz about her appointment as Yahoo CEO.

In the week that's passed since Marissa Mayer was named CEO of Yahoo, it seems like she's been getting unsolicited advice from everyone and their mother -- including advice on how to be a mother! Back in 2008, I wrote a column outlining 10 things I'd do if I were running Yahoo. As it turns out, four of my wish list items came to be -- but the company's no better off than when I wrote them, so I guess that means I wasn't qualified to be Yahoo CEO.

Over the past week, Google was at it again, challenging the sanity and stress levels of SEOs everywhere. Last week, many Webmasters received a message in Google Webmaster Tools that seemed to threaten site removal from the Google index.

I have a theory. I believe that any company, across any industry vertical, can take advantage of the early-mover opportunity that Google's Authorship markup protocol provides. This opportunity would allow organizations to position themselves as THE forward-thinkers of their category, with both Google results and social sentiment closely following. How exactly can organizations accomplish this? By instructing content to be built by the company's leading thinkers. Let me explain.

As potential customers, we expect companies to have their digital acts together. More than this, it appears we're ready to reward companies that aggressively invest in raising the bar of their own connected maturity level. Why, then, are companies so loath to place significant bets on their own digital future? I deal with big companies all the time, and when it comes to investing in their own websites, online marketing, web support platforms and other planks in their digital platform, they seem to prefer hedging their bets, squeezing out miserly budgets at a level that would make Ebenezer Scrooge seem …

Yesterday may have been Yahoo's best day in the last five years. Marissa Mayer will be CEO, and Yahoo couldn't have found a better person to guide it.