The short and skinny of what is to follow is this:

Understanding humans better benefits business
Think overall strategy, not just tactics
Twitter has good search placement (tactic)
Twitter is a goldmine of permission-based marketing (strategy)
Building relationships also builds trust and opportunities
Niches are inevitable (and present); find yours
One-to-many communication is efficient and on your terms

Previously, I and others suggested Twitter was destined for spamminess, or at least some kind of deceptive marketing. Indeed it is and indeed it has already begun. That’s not a reason, though, to avoid it. Use it while it still has value.

Also previously, I waxed existential about Twitter being, for me, a place to observe and learn from humanity. While that doesn’t seem immediately useful (if you’re old school, it seems like a real waste of time), a very large part of marketing is not just identifying your market, but understanding it better. Twitter provides a perch from which to observe and learn. A new app called Twittearth makes that perch that much more intriguing.

Search Engine Guide’s Jennifer Laycock referred to it as "acceptable eavesdropping." From this perch, you can exercise a novel concept in marketing: listening. This is the difference between you and a spammer or spaghetti-against-the-wall message-pounder, always with his mouth open and his ears shut.

"Personally," says Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss in a blog post on the difference between strategy and tactics, "I’ve felt that by providing glimpses into user behavior, I can help provide a lens to help see things from the outside in, an essential perspective for strategic evaluation. Part of any strategy in marketing always depends on gaining a deeper understanding of the common denominator, humans."

So what’s the difference between a strategy and a tactic? A tactic would include actions like ones used by the aforementioned loud-mouth spammer, who, if we’re just talking Twitter, would either never be followed to begin with or would be unfollowed as soon as he betrayed a Twitterer’s trust. Or, it could include utility of the knowledge that Twitter, like Wikipedia, now ranks very well in Google’s search results.

Rocketboom’s Andrew Baron showed us this when he noted that only eight people ranked for "I got a call from eBay." Sure enough, there’s more to it than the one freak occurrence. At Shoemoney, AJ Vaynerchuk shows how well Twitter users’ personal brands ranked in Google’s search results. Twitter profiles appeared on the first page almost without fail. Tactic: Establish a brand on Twitter, a site with high trust (the creator is a Googler, by the way), and you could establish some visibility in the SERPs.

What good does that do you? None if you don’t have something to offer. But it could fall into the greater strategy of connecting with people and building relationships. The deeper, harder to crack usefulness of Twitter is via the oft theorized but little focused on concept of permission-based marketing. Twitter followers and followees are in your network by choice, and if you’ve earned it, they’ll listen.

"It also gives you some insight into who companies and bloggers are as people; their likes, their dislikes, their personalities," says Ms. Laycock. "This can be invaluable when it comes to putting together pitches and building relationships both inside and outside of your industry.”

In a small survey of online marketers done by SmallBizTrends, two social networks popped up most when asked which were the best for small businesses to use: Twitter and Facebook. That’s because they allow you to unobtrusively interact with your market to build relationships and trust within – and here’s the important part – your niche. You’ll see more and more niche-based networks pop up and those will be useful too, but in the meantime, there’s a good chance your niche is already hanging out at Twitter or Facebook or even LinkedIn.

Messages are short and to the point, which people like, and those same people have given you permission to interact with them. It doesn’t have to be a marketing message (besides, nobody likes a pitch they can smell), but a genuine relationship to build trust. Think carefully about trust: When buying a car, you’d be more likely to deal with the guy your dad has dealt with for 30 years than you would with the kid that just shook your hand on the lot, right? It works the same way. People are more likely to do business with people they are already familiar with.

And you don’t build that familiarity with on-message bombardments people are likely to ignore or resent. You build it by understanding them better and by helping them understand you better. Tweet to tell your audience about recent successes, about what happened on the way to dropping the kids off at school, about your thoughts on current events, about a really kick-butt blog post.

Really, that’s the best part about these sprouting one-to-many, permission-based communication channels: It’s your message on your terms. Just ask the Prime Minister of Britain, whose team has a Twitter account to deliver his messages without the media’s filter/translation/supposed bias. You can wax about whether you can trust anything coming out of a governmental office, but the idea makes a lot of sense. Others have used it for free giveaways and to answer customer questions.

Hopefully, this illustrates how businesses can use Twitter and other social networks in a meaningful, strategic way; hopefully, how you apply the knowledge will foster two-way, permission-based relationships, not marketer-versus-customer tactics. Remember that box you’re supposed to think outside of? Welcome to the outside.

• David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i
• Aaron Goldman, Director of Client Strategy & Development, Resolution Media
• Bob Heyman, Chief Search Officer, Mediasmith
• Gord Hotchkiss, CEO & President, Enquiro

Will there be a Google killer?

Aaron: In the short term, I don’t see that happening. Can someone cobble together assets that they already have? Can somebody potentially put together the pieces to put together the next wave of web monetization? I think so. I don’t see anybody taking away from Google’s core business. But I see Facebook, if they can get their act together, doing that.

Gord: As long as Google stays good at its core, I don’t see that. But we’re breaking down the silos. Search is going to change in its function as the web becomes richer. But I think it’s misleading to think that search as we know it now will be the same for a long time.

David: Looking at MySpace with twice the traffic of Ask; YouTube search rivals some search properties’ traffic. With Hakia—I can’t figure out how to use it (and he’s spent a fair amount of time with new search engines). Powerset & Powerlabs—they do their own search of Wikipedia—I could barely tell the difference. To be better than Google at search, you have to be SO much better. Google could just be okay with search for a while and people will still keep using it.

Bob: I predict that anything that gets labeled a Google killer or an iPod killer won’t kill anything. In video, Google search doesn’t really have a cross-platform search.

David: YouTube doesn’t want us to think of them as a search.

Greg: I see it moving more and more to a mobile platform. I was talking to Max Kalvinov (sp?): the incumbency effect. For something to bump us out of our rut, it has to be a quantum leap better.

David: Look at the number of people still on Hotmail: people’s habits are ingrained (also convenience of not porting data). People will stick with something inferior for a long time.

I was kicked off Google for too much search volume (they thought he must be a bot), so he went to Ask. There are lots of other ways that they can kill their marketshare.

Gord: Looking at Ask—they don’t want to be a Google killer, they have some relevancy issues, but they’re good for alternate search.

Ideas to take advantage of Wikipedia. A year ago, I used to go in there as an SEO/SEM to maintain links, but now nofollowed, I passed that to the PR team.

Aaron: It’s a different lens, but they’re still value. Having a presence, having your company in there, as long as you’re represented. Build up your own involvement in Wikipedia, have your own authority. I look at it as this whole notion of ceding control. Being there in Wikipedia is a second chance at the top 10.

David: We do a lot of work with Comedy Central—Stephen Colbert tries to mess with Wikipedia, and that drives traffic to CC site, Wikipedia gets traffic. Also interesting when other companies try to tap into the Wiki model: Amapedia.

Will SEMs ever ‘get’ display? Will you be able to work with it?

Gord: I think we already are. We’re all looking at integrating display. Because we do a lot of usability testing with different forms of engagement—the assumption marketers make is the more ‘bandwidth’ the more effective—I’m not so sure that’s the case. I’m not so sure that when we’re looking for information on a search page and we’re starting to see universal results come into that, I don’t know how they react to that. We’ve seen test ads kick as far as performance goes across a lot of channels.

Aaron: I see too many firms jumping into display just to grow their revenue. It’s just going to cause clutter.

Bob: We think search is a medium that should be planned with display and interactive.

Aaron: I think it’s interesting that it’s led by search. I’d like to see that happen with larger holding companies as they acquire more SEMs.

Will we get to a point where people will enter personally identifiable information directly on the SERP (auto insurance)?

Gord: Search is about satisificing: quickly narrowing down to 4-5 brands to consider. Start building your consideration set, often with a generic search. Unless it’s a totally commoditized product (ie it doesn’t matter where you get it from).

How is the global market impacting your businesses? Effectiveness across campaigns, esp. where search engine marketshare doesn’t mirror US’s.

Aaron: Makes it a lot harder for us. Depending on the space there’s a lot of differences in savviness. The biggest challenge is who leads that process. If US-led, have people on the ground in the important regions. Standardization is the biggest challenge. It’s a whole different set of realities that you have to plan against. More often than not, it is led here in the US, because we lead SEM.

Bob: Google dominates more outside the US than in—but in China, you can’t buy into Baidu unless you speak Mandarin and have someone in China, basically.

Gord: When you talk to Chinese users, they’re using Baidu for different purposes. Baidu is great for MP3 downloads. Looking for facts, go to Google. To get those nuances, you have to be on the ground and understand where you need to get your buy.

Bob: Don’t underestimate the language challenges, too. Note that in languages like Dutch/German: same words are twice as long, and you have the same character limits.

We’ve heard a lot that organic is 80% of the traffic, but paid search just dominates—everybody is just focused on paid search. What can we do to help get us away from paid search?

Aaron: Therapy. Paid search is the crack of SEM. We have to tell them that eventually they’ll burn out, but it’s great to see those instant results.

Bob: SEO is just too slow for some people. PPC gives you time to get your value proposition, etc., in.

Gord: The hard thing is that it’s tough to fight with the clients like that. There’s not nearly the mismatch of expectations in paid. I agree completely with you on the power of organic. We still do a a lot of organic optimization. But I have yet to have “the dream optimization” project. I would hate to see that advantage die because we’re tired of butting heads.

David: It’s so easy to define ‘media.’

Gord: From the pure business perspective, it’s not a great business. There’s a long learning curve, decreasing returns Unless you’re passionate about it as a practice, it’s not an attractive model.

David: Although PPC has its own challenges, too. The margins aren’t so that people are dying to get into it.

Gord: But aren’t we failing as an industry into Arron’s analogy. Yeah, it’s hard, it’s micromanaging, but relative to organic, it’s a walk in the park on a sunny day.

Point: I see SEO as a workaround. Telling the CEO that the site that he loves actually sucks isn’t fun (and doesn’t work). You have CEOs that have built up their experience from TV, they see text-based sites and say, “Huh?” You’re going in there changing the business models.

Gord: Example from yesterday’s site review. You’re going to have to make a decision. How important is organic visibility to you as a business decision? Are you going down this path?

Bob: Good design and good SEO are still antithetical.

How do you feel about paying to appear inorganic results (ie Yahoo shortcuts)?

Aaron: we’ll do it as long as they let us.

Bob: Yahoo wouldn’t sell it to us for a news aggregator because it works too well for news. Overall it’s yesterday’s product

Gord: It’s a weird anomaly in the space.

Paid versus organic. Is there a different clientèle in paid versus natural—do 80% of clicks = 80% sales, or does 20% of paid clicks = 50% of sales?

Gord: I personally think the 80/20 thing is because we’re not doing a good job of matching our messages to our customers. They’re in the wrong phase of the funnel. I think that’s why there’s disproportionate organic clicks, but as we match intent better, we’ll see those ratios drop.

Bob: I’d love to see % of clicks and conversions. Paid search is successful because you can link it back to conversions.

David: I’ll disagree with Gord here because I think marketers have come a long way with how they’re segmenting intent, etc. As the ads are generally very relevant to them, they’ll still get clicks, but people are training themselves not to look at advertising as much. There has been some research in the past for, say, retail queries get more clicks on ads.

Aaron: As we’re seeing the move toward universal search—the eye goes right to the image then sniffs around. As that happens more and more, that will get more eyeballs in the organic results. The biggest click factor is image ads in the SERPs could again change the clicking behavior.

Gord: Scanning behavior is going to change a lot as they change formats.

Comments

Just a little kidding, there.

Nielsen is famous for his preference for simplicity and leaving well-enough alone, arguing that it serves the end-user better. So asking him about how much a Web interface will or should change, seems a bit, well, counterproductive. Forecasting requires a little optimism, even wild idealism at times, neither of which seem to be Nielsen’s strong suit.

Regardless, he has a lot to say on the matter, and I think he may be right about much of it, especially since Gord’s questions centered on what happens within the next three years. Nielsen think reinventing the SERP is like reinventing the wheel.

 A Behavioral Shift

In the past decade, SERPs have switched from "an information retrieval oriented relevance ranking" to "a popularity relevance ranking," with a strong dependency on the number of links a source gets.

"I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs," he said and, in my imagination, wiped his eye with his middle finger.

"…. So I think that with counting links and all of that, there may be a change and we may go into a more behavioral judgment as to which sites actually solve people’s problems, and they will tend to be more highly ranked."

Personal Problems

Many have said that personalization will solve relevancy problems in the future, with each individual user dictating what kind of results he or she wants to a learning machine. Nielsen doesn’t think that will happen within this decade, or even the next.

"All this stuff..all this talk about personalization, that is incredibly hard to do. Partly because it’s not just personalization, based on a user model, which is hard enough already. You have to guess that this person prefers this style of content and so on.  But furthermore, you have to guess as to what this person’s “in this minute” interest is and that is almost impossible to do. I’m not too optimistic on the ability to do that.

And as for relying on people to tweak an engine to their preferences to make them better, Nielsen harkens back to sliders and other modifiers of search engine past that required too much work on the user side.

"So people are inherently lazy and don’t want to exert themselves. Picking from a set of choices is one of the least effortful interaction styles, which is why this point and click interaction in general seems to work very well."

Agreed. People are lazy, selfish little monkeys.  (The above is taken a little out of context, so be sure, if you’re interested, in reading all of Nielsen’s statement about evolutionary development and the role of laziness in it.)

Navigating the Obstacle Course

One of the favorite difference people like to cite for Google’s success is its clean, simple interface. Text advertisements are a testament to this as well, as the problem of "banner blindness" was largely eradicated in the SERPs.

Hotchkiss mentions Marissa Mayer’s rather spooky avoidance of the question about whether banner ads would be reinstituted at Google. But we’ll be optimistic and assume that won’t happen.  

But we wonder, if images and videos and news and clutter start showing up on Google’s clean interface, will another instance of banner blindness occur. Only if they’re deemed irrelevant, says Nielsen.

"Images turn out to be repelling if people start feeling like they are irrelevant. It’s a similar effect to banner blindness. If there’s any type of design element that people start perceiving as being irrelevant to their needs, then they will start to avoid that design element."

Gord Hotchkiss made a few observations about personalization changing search. Personalization is an approach that Google wants people to embrace through its Web History service.

Gord thinks optimizing through personalization will be more about themes that keywords. Beneficial sites will work on understanding user behavior better to provide them more relevant results. Black hats will try to take advantage of emerging issues and create buzz sites that certain personalized searches will find.

Michael Gray pointed out something regarding Google. Although Google’s guidelines say one should not use software to increase a ranking, he thinks using Google’s Toolbar and its personalized search do that anyway.

Michael has a bit of an issue with Google. He thinks Google is using personalized search to create Google junkies of people subscribing to Google product after Google product to influence and enhance their searches.

Tim Mayer of Yahoo Search looked at the broader concepts of personalization, and talked about how Yahoo sees the concept. To them, social media is in some ways an offshoot of personalized search. However, there is the element of user trust that isn’t taken into account with that view.

“One of the big trends we see in search right now is understanding the user query better,” he said of Yahoo’s observations.

Tim also suggested that for SEO, one should be thinking about giving the search engines enough content to determine the topicality of the page. Socially influenced results are simply going to play a larger role in search, inspiring a need for better content as well.

Matt Cutts said personalization should not be a surprise to search observers, as it has been discussed for a long time now. Personalization will not be the death of SEO, either, as some believe.

If anything, he remarked, personalization changes the game a little bit.

Although Michael remarked that the Web History service is difficult to turn off in Google, Matt noted how the attribute [&pws=0] can be appended to any Google query (ex. http://www.google.com/search?q=guild+wars&pws=0) and personalized search will be off for it.

This paradigm change is being driven by the economics of the search engines, which are engaged in a battle for market supremacy. To date, Google has been best at squeezing every possible penny from its clicks, but Yahoo and MSN are not far behind. Every possible weapon will be used in this battle, and one of the greatest, least utilized weapons possessed by each engine lies in its terabytes of data relating to user search behavior profiles.

Search profiles, assembled using the click-behavior of millions of users give the engines a a way to match searchers and advertisers that is light years beyond the capability offered by keywords. Engines can essentially offer marketers a way to pre-qualify customers that creates less waste and more value. Marketers will be able to bid more aggressively to reach potential customers whose historical behavior indicates a high chance of being in-market for a given product or service. Users, whose SERPs will present results, both organic and paid, which reflect one’s profile-indicated preferences, will have a better user experience.

So everybody wins, except, perhaps for SEM practitioners whose traditional definition of success, both in the paid and organic arenas, remains on selling services based on SERP position. These practitioners will no longer able to charge on the basis of position alone, but must begin to think about what they are actually offering their clients in terms of reaching each’s target audience. This is, in my view, a very healthy trend: even today, we see marketers obsessed with achieving top ranks, without considering the question which personalized SERPS impose: top rank for which audience group?

Some SEO’s seem to regard the advent of personalized SERPs as an apocalyptic event, because it so complicates their position-focused sales pitch. Those SEO’s whose service offering essentially consists of tactics meant to "add relevancy" for clients who really have no business achieving high (albeit irrelevant) rankings on SERPS certainly do have something to fear, because the search engines, armed with billions in cash, are going to use personalization as an additional filter to weed out irrelevant results.

But there is no reason why the advent of personalized search should trouble ethical SEO practitioners, because the thrust of personalized results is increased, not decreased relevancy. Marketers who have practiced the ethos of relevance in terms of designing information-rich, engaging websites will have nothing to fear from the rise of personalized search: in fact, they should welcome it, because it further separates the "signal" from the "noise" in the search channel. The same is true for marketers using PPC, because personalization provides a better shield against wasteful, non-converting clicks.

Someday, we may all look back on the era of today, in which search engines served up "one SERP fits all"-style pages and laugh at how clumsy and irrelevant such results were, and how imprecise today’s targeting tools are. If the recent moves of Google, Yahoo, and MSN are any indication, that day might occur sooner than many anticipate.

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