At the risk of sounding sexist, I wonder if women might make better marketers then men? If you'll remember, I proposed a new way of defining the job description of a marketer in last week's column: "to understand the customer's reality, focusing on those areas where we can solve their problems and improve that reality." If we're painting with incredibly broad strokes here - which we are - and we had to attach that description to one gender, which gender would you pick?

The sudden disappearance of organic keyword data available in Google Analytics is a startling realization that keyword data measurements for SEO success are rapidly changing. The industry's reaction has been widespread, with an outcry from cynics and advocates alike; SEO vendors touting their wares as a critical solution to the problem; and many senior-level marketers resuming charge of SEO initiatives.

New search behaviors are on the rise, and this year marketers are going to see search shift beyond typing a query in a search engine box. From real-time to voice search, here are four new search opportunities that will help marketers drive performance and remain ahead in an increasingly diverse search landscape:

If you've never heard of Yaron Galai, don't worry, you're not alone. Galai doesn't keynote tech conferences or write a wildly popular blog. Actually, I did discover that he at least has a blog, but he's posted three times since 2011. And unless you're an SEM oldtimer (pre-2007), you've probably never heard of the company Galai co-founded: Quigo. When Quigo launched its "AdSonar" ad network back in 2003, the Google Display Network (then called the Google Content Network) was known for its ability to drive high-volume, low-quality traffic. Quigo flipped this equation on its head with one simple innovation: It …

I couldn't help but notice that last week's column, where I railed against marketers' obsession with tricks, loopholes and pat sound bites, got a fair number of retweets. The irony? At least a third of those retweets twisted my whole point: that six seconds (or any arbitrary length of message) isn't the secret to getting a prospect engaged. The secret is giving him something he wants to engage with.

It seems to me there are two distinct, even divergent camps emerging among digital marketing futurists. On the one hand, there are a number of marketers who are now evangelizing the growing importance of content marketing. These are practitioners who have historically been labeled SEOs or social media marketers. As those channels evolved and became more crowded, the elite began to go go by swanky new titles like "content engineer" or "content strategist." This group believes that rich, content-driven experiences are the true path to consumer engagement, building trust and even affinity over time. I think they're right.

Apparently, the new official time limit for customer engagement is six seconds, according to a recent post on real-time marketing. How did we come up with six? Well, in the world of social media engagement it seemed like a good number -- and no one has called bullshit on it yet, so six it is.

Louis CK would have been proud. A few weeks ago, instead of lamenting the fact that I was on a plane with no WiFi, I gave praise to the heavens that I was in a chair flying in the sky -- and that I'd downloaded some extra apps for my kids before taking off. Watching my little ones (ages 5, 2, and 2) maneuver the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch gave me a good sense of what marketing will look like in 10 years. Here's what to expect:

Last week, I talked about our ability to ignore data. I positioned this as a bad thing. But Pete Austin called me on it, with an excellent counterpoint: "Ignoring data is the most important thing we do. Only the people who could ignore the trees and see the tiger, in real time, survived to become our ancestors."

What seems like an eternity ago (last October), I was fortunate to join an elite group of digital marketers in Redmond, Wash. at Microsoft headquarters. We were hosted by the Bing Ads team, and shown previews of new advertising products including the Hero Ads format , which was recently introduced as part of Smart Search in Windows 8.1. The elephant in the room, was this: Can Bing compete with Google? I mean, REALLY compete?