John Yi, strategic manager of APIs for Facebook, just shared some interesting data from Group M which suggests that social media and search marketing are indeed naturally complementary and mutually reinforcing. Group M found that click-through rates for campaigns combining social-influenced search results and paid search results average 7.5%, compared to 3.9% for paid search alone.

There often comes a moment of clarity and common sense in discussions of marketing, where everyone reminds each other that it doesn't matter how well you sell something to people, if that thing sucks. So: don't sell people crap, because that's the foundation of all effective marketing campaigns. But then how do you explain Justin Bieber?

Apparently people are feeling protective of Bing, the newcomer challenging Google's monopoly of search marketing. Panel moderator Elisabeth Osmeloski asked -- innocently enough, I think -- "does anyone actually use Bing?" and triggered a wave of "hey now" audience grumbles. Personally I've used Bing for my own searches (not marketing campaigns or anything) but I think it's a fair question. The latest data I can find has Bing taking 11.5% of all searches in the U.S. in October 2010, compared to 64% for Google.

Are we still talking about pot? Jeff MacGum, senior manager, Covario, is talking about effective strategies for sparking social campaigns to produce more sticky links.

Weintraub clarifies that the reason he has cannabis on his mind is a recent success story from the U.K.: a client succeeded in getting a 3% coupon download rate for sugary cereals when they targeted the ads to Facebook users who like whacky tobaccky late at night. My only question concerns the definition of "sugary": are we talking Cap'n Crunch, or does Honey Bunches of Oats also qualify? Cuz I love that stuff (HBOO). Especially with almonds.

One of the big sub-disciplines of search marketing is adducing synonyms for likely search terms and using those to reach searchers at lower cost. Same goes for social search, according to Marty Weintraub of aimClear, who noted, "Just because you find it called 'marijuana' on Facebook doesn't mean you won't find more people who call it 'weed' or 'Mary Jane.'" Indeed.

Dave Tan, VP, innovation, product development & content solutions at Resolution Media, brings up something which has bothered me: can't we get a broader range of sentiment beyond Facebook's vanilla, milquetoast "Like"? "Can I have a 'I hate with a burning passion'? 'I love'? 'I adore'?" Well, can we?

Elisabeth Osmeloski, managing editor of Search Engine Land, started the panel on social search with a shameless plug for Search Engine Land, which she considers the "industry-leading trade publication," but doffed her imaginary hat to MediaPost, which is "pretty awesome" too. Thanks, Elisabeth! We think you're super too.

If you are optimizing landing pages and the searcher is 65+, you should show them images of people in middle age because they still think they are in middle age, and they get annoyed if you remind them that they are, well, old.

Goldman just dropped some more knowledge indicating that people are finding Google Instant useful, and that it is indeed making search more efficient: after it launched in September, the average length of search queries dropped 39% to 14 characters typed. So I guess that either means they're finding what they want faster, or they're getting annoyed and quitting (kidding).