The more I work in social media, the louder the chant becomes.

It’s a chant that has the power to make any social media practitioner cringe – the befuddled mantra of social media naysayers echoing: “What’s so hard about Social Media? I can just get a college student to do it for free, right?”

Wrong.

Many feel that social media should be entrusted to a select few who play all day on Facebook and are fluent in the OMG LOL dialect. However, what many professionals who are new to social media don’t understand is the complex nature of social media and that building a social program is much like building a house. As it is in every marketing practice, social media has many levels, ranging from tactical execution and everyday maintenance to strategic planning and program evolution. When artfully crafted, these levels exist in a co-dependent state, creating a strong and resilient structure that is both simple and innately complex.

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This post was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search – The Americas, and published in MediaPost’s Search Insider, Friday, February 5, 2010

This weekend, the Colts and Saints will battle to determine the king of the football hill during Super Bowl XLIV. A month into 2010, there are battle lines across the search landscape that also bear watching. These battles will shape the devices, platforms and consumer experience for this year and many to come. Here’s your quick primer of the battles, the stakes and what to watch for to determine who has the upper hand.

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I was reading a post by Sarah Tillitt the other day regarding conquesting campaigns (search campaigns where companies buy the branded terms of competitors) and her entry struck a chord with me because conquesting campaigns and reputation management invariably come up during the course of any search marketer’s career.  It’s one of those sticky points where brands get really fired up about, but aren’t really sure how to respond to. I was fortunate enough where the first incident I had to handle had a three month window of time. This is most often not the case.  I was doing search for a very large pharmaceutical company whose patent for a flagship drug was coming to an end and they needed a search strategy to protect against the attack of the generics. 

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In a recent post, I covered what took place on Google’s press call for the Nexus One and how the device sizes up against the iPhone.  There has been plenty of talk around many smartphone releases and whether each one would be the iPhone killer.  This brings us to the natural question of what does great competition for Apple’s smartphone and smartphone wars at large mean for advertisers?  As marketers, we need to get that discussion going.

But before I jump into the implications of the smartphone war, let’s quickly recap life before the iPhone. 

The chart below shows us that search access from the mobile browser was pretty flat until the inception of the iPhone in June of 2007. And for the most part, it has been on a steady incline since.

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It’s common for businesses to ask how SEO is going to help their paid search efforts. This is an often misunderstood relationship, and when working with Fortune 500 companies, you can’t simply say because I said so. So, I thought I’d tackle this with a three-fold approach:

1. Market Share

2. Improved Metrics

3. Revenue

Market Share

For small service-oriented or e-Commerce businesses, click-through-rate and conversions are paramount. However, for large companies, brand recognition is an equally important component of search marketing. Combining organic search with paid campaigns increases exposure for important branded and non-branded key phrases, ensuring that you are in front of your target audience at critical times. It’s pretty simple math – more listings means more chances someone will see one of your listings and associate your company with the search term. When presented with a viable opportunity to increase exposure and position your company as the industry leader, why wouldn’t you?

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