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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I do believe if you saw me today, you’d say that I’m absolutely beaming with delight.  We had a large paid search campaign for a client of ours targeting the Thanksgiving holiday and now that all the data is in, I’m pleased as punch to say that for a campaign that had impression levels that were above the Account average, we scored double digit CTR’s. Excellent work, pat ourselves on our backs, a job well done, correct?

Well, no. Actually, it should be a “NO!,” and definitely a “NOOO!” if you ask my boss.  But I don’t know if I can write that.  The reason that the buck doesn’t stop at the CTR’s performance is because we are well beyond the era of judging a campaign by impressions, clicks and CTR. We’re not doing ads in newspapers, radios and magazines, we’re Search Marketing, and quite frankly, search marketing should be held to a gold standard because of its ability to exact a response or action beyond any other marketing medium (in general) besides perhaps face-to-face sampling programs.

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New York City is an incredible place when you consider the incredible mix of people and their varying levels of personality, experience and insanity.  What’s even more amazing are the things you’ll overhear people discussing in the most mundane places.  The incident that inspired my writing this entry was my having lunch in a pizza joint one cool September afternoon when two people sat down at the table in front of me engaged in a heated debate.

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Keyword research, much like national opinion surveys, can illuminate the perils and opportunities for a client or completely lead them  astray, plummeting what once was a promising opportunity to the land where poorly researched search campaigns go to die.  Let there be no mistake, everyone manipulates data to tell a story (usually a story that is favorable to your POV).  As search is so heavily data driven, it does not take a far stretch of the imagination to see how illogically concocted paid search strategies coupled with incomplete search data can result in misleading information.

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Well, isn’t this a doozey? So I write an entry about what I think are Twitter’s five and ten year plan, and all of a sudden, TechCrunch comes out with enough inside information on Twitter’s goal for global domination that I had no option but to revise my initial entry. Then, as I submit this for publication, Reuters manages to scoop an interview with Biz Stone prior to his appearance at the Fortune Brainstorm: TECH conference.

So here’s the deal – Twitter is growing up (read as: Twitter is working on being monetizable) and every major player in the Internet/Entertainment space wants to be its surrogate parent. Facebook already made a play for Twitter but was rejected like Madonna in Malawi. Google’s taking the slower approach and looking for more integrated solutions. Now, from the flurry of information I just read on TechCrunch, everyone else from Microsoft to Oprah want a piece of the action. But Biz Stone made it clear that Twitter will not be bought and assimilated, but rather will work as a stand alone partner whose capabilities can complement any of the other companies.

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