Marketing Pilgrim

It’s a good day for reputation management consultants everywhere–we just got Google’s official endorsement!

Yep, Google has come off the fence and wholeheartedly endorsed the creation of positive web content to try and outrank anything negative. In the Google post, the search engine does an admirable job of creating a primer for Google Reputation Management which includes this endorsement of creating positive web pages:

Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don’t want them to see, you’ll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.
(emphasis Google’s)

I have followed the SMB market for a little while now. I am considered an SMB myself and I certainly was when I had a small Internet marketing agency / practice as recently as a year ago. As a result, I know the small and medium business market pretty well. I find the typical small business owner / marketer equal parts fascinating and frustrating and a puzzle that seems to want to be solved but never likes to give you all of the pieces to solve it. That is why I see surveys that claim 45% of SMB’s are using social media with a slightly skeptical eye.

After getting the Google Voice App blocked on the iPhone and the FCC to scrutinize Google Voice, you’d think AT&T could sit back and rest assured. But not so. Yesterday, they fired another volley in their war against the Internet-based telephony service with a 13-page letter to the FCC.

It’s like they read the comment section of the Google Public Policy blog post about all this the other day. Their letter reflects some of the anti-Google sentiments there—especially the undercurrent of “Why are you stifling competition, Google?”:

Google’s been saying they’re entering the eBook arena since June. While their Google Books offerings were clearly part of the plan, it hasn’t always been clear exactly what, if anything, they were planning to do for hardware. Well, it looks like they’ve made up their mind (at this point): they’re going ahead with offering eBooks to any reader with a web browser.

In the first half of next year, Google plans to launch Google Editions, offering its library of about half a million books (including those that are out of print, out of copyright or with whose publishers have an agreement). Google will host the books and make them searchable.

Google’s director of strategic partnerships, Tom Turvey, said “We’re not focused on a dedicated e-reader or device of any kind.” By selling the books, however, Google will make its first non-affiliate money off its Books initiatives:

As Internet marketers and social media users / practitioners we are always digging and trying to find out more. Since most of what is related to social media is happening on the fly the innovation comes more often from good intention rather than good planning. One common theme that occurs, however, is the apparent lack of understanding of social media and its business impact in the upper levels of most companies.

In particular, the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) gets the brunt of the complaints of “They don’t get social media!” or “They are afraid of what they don’t know!” This is true in a lot of cases. That is changing, though, with the help of people like Kent Huffman, CMO of BearCom Wireless. Haven’t heard of BearCom? You’re not alone but that is changing through Kent’s efforts on Twitter and his campaign to bring the CMO to the social media discussion before his / her average 23 month tenure expires.

According to new predictions from Coda Research Consultancy, the “Year of the Mobile” will be funded by search and display ads, not the current “go to” channel SMS.

In fact, SMS (text messages) are likely become the mobile equivalent of Paul Michael Glaser–once the hottest thing around, but now trying to eek out a paycheck from cameos and debt-reduction infomercials doing a fantastic job of continuing his acting career!.

The chart below tells the whole story:

I can see the logic behind the reduction in SMS’s role in mobile advertising–smart phones mean better handsets for other types of ads–but I’m not sure that search will be so much more dominant than display. I personally still find myself “browsing” on my mobile phone, rather than hardcore “searching”–but maybe that’s just me.