I have been saying for years that Google is over. Judging by the looks of disbelief I got from clients and colleagues, I realized that for 99% of the population my statement was outrageous! Heresy! How can Google be over? It is making so much money! It is so large! It dominates the Internet landscape!

That is precisely why Google is over. Here is the evidence:

Being the largest game in town, black hats need only focus on on guy to game and that’s Google. And Google is losing the arms race, it is the Elephant killed by a billion ants! The increasingly poor results served up on Search Engine Results Pages is proof. Every search delivers large spammy selections from content farms: broad shallow sites filled with vapid information. About.com is the most legit among the villains! (Shame on you NY Times Corporation!) But thousands of others are even more guilty: black hats hiring low wage/slave wage cut and paste workers copy information onto millions of pages so the site owners can sell Google Ads. (A shout out to a crowd of bloggers who since Jan 1 have been rapidly building momentum on this topic: Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail, On the increasing uselessness of Google, Trouble in the House of Google

If you deliver spammy results you train your visitors to seek answers elsewhere. And as I predicted years ago, vertical search engines and upstarts are gaining ground. Bing delivers beautifully. Blekko delivers better. Wikki answers the homework questions. And when shopping, hell, just start at Amazon or Ebay and move on from there. Vertical social media and tightly focused message boards still deliver some of the best answers to questions asked and answered by passionate individuals. Need a special undershirt that won’t chafe for a child wearing a scoliosis brace? The answer can be found on a message board – because the brace company that sells it has been crowded out of the Google SERP by other inane sites all served up by our infamous friend GoogleBot who simply CANNOT differentiate between quality information and web trash.

Google stopped innovating long ago. We empowered Google by going to it and clicking on its ads. After their initial eureka moment, they bought all other innovations by acquiring companies. Their SaaS offerings of little spreadsheet ditties and social marketing confections are so disjointed and insecure they could pass as Open Source! My question is how can a company so big lack so much vision? Google is clearly distressed about this, note the latest change in leadership at the top. But going back to the founders is a mistake. Steve Jobs may have had the hutzpah to pull a Phoenix with Apple – but in my view that is a rarity!

What does this mean for businesses trying to be found?
1. SEO within reason, that means follow Google Web Master Guidelines, but don’t obsess.
2. NEVER, ever undertake an SEO effort beyond Google Web Master Guidelines unless it has an additional benefit such as lead generation, sales or enhancement of your web site experience. That way if your effort may give you a temporal SEO bump but it will also deliver a lasting marketing lift.
3. Create really useful content for humans. Understand WHEN they need your product and look for blogs and other platforms whose content is associated with that moment of need.
4. Solve problems where your clients look for solutions: message boards, blogs, user groups, associations etc.
5. When considering SEO do not ignore Bing or Blekko and others.
6. Beware of the Social Media sink hole! Where do your customers congregate? Go there. Just because “everyone is on Facebook” doesn’t mean your customers are there, or care to hear about you there. TAKE NOTE: If Google was over in my mind five years ago, Facebook was over two years ago! Vertical social media is here. But that is a topic for another day!

Happy Hunting!

Is it any wonder that the last four major programs rumbling through the corridors of Camarès have heavy print components? Is it any wonder that the major thrust of many of our clients’ 2011 marketing plans is to go to trade shows/events/conferences  and actually meet prospective customers? No. Having ridden the waves of Paid Search and Social Media since the early 2000‘s and discovered an unstoppable increase in pricing for paid clicks across all search engines and social media advertising there is no ROI left for mid-sized businesses in online marketing.

Did I just say that? I did.

Online advertising has quickly lost its promise. Why?

1. It over promised.

2. Google trained us all NOT to use Google. With a poor user experience (half a dozen tries to get close to the answer you needed) and dozens of vertical competitors. Now if you want to buy something you got to your brand name store with a smart online presence. If you want to get an answer for your homework, you go straight to Wikipedia. By pass Google, go direct. Why pay for search ads?

3. Facebook devalued the meaning of friends. Having snookered millions out of personal information, its ads simply do not return sales. Why? Facebook is boring. Most folks are self-censoring their posts or using FB for businesses and professional reasons. Dull Dull Dull! Facebook may have buckets of personal information but if users don’t use the service its got bupkis.

And all the misguided venture capital backed offspring of Google/Facebook: Foursquare, Yelp…you name it, are now twisting in the wind. Its not just the recession folks, we would have arrived here without it, it just would have taken more time to get here.
What are the indicators? Google is advertising about advertising on Google. Let me repeat that: Google is advertising about advertising on Google. Let that sink in. Oh, and they are not advertising about advertising on Google ON GOOGLE. No, they are advertising in print, on television and at trade shows.

And that brings it all back to Face Time: a true measure of a prospective customer’s engagement with your company, your brand is if they take the time to meet you face-to-face. And the value of that interaction is far more impactful than anything else you can do as a company.

What happens next? Online marketing will become far more complex and demanding: the place where those face-to-face relationships are tethered until the next face-to-face encounter.
That is the next chapter in online marketing. Stay tuned!

Sometimes words escape me. But the folks over at XtraNormal gave me the tools to say what I really mean in animation.  What fun! Here it is folks, a visit to the Temple of Google. Enjoy!

I am on a hunt. A hunt for real numbers. Can Google, Bing, Yahoo and Facebook be transparent?

Print publications had this problem in the early days and so the BPA provided circulation audits. Yes media kits still whipped up the marketing spin, but as a planner you could lay those green sheets and yellow sheets side by side and make some objective baseline judgements.

This is not too much to ask from media companies today.

After BPA came broadcast and Nielson, boxes on sets reported back to the home office. Beyond that Nielson ratings were a bit shaky but overall, they provided a level playing field.

With perhaps the exception of Life Magazine, (and that is a stretch) no print publication ever came close to the monopolistic power of Google and now Facebook. Even Hearst, with all his power was puny by today’s standards.

And Broadcast bloomed and diluted into 200 channels in three short decades. But that was after the FCC came in and regulated local markets carefully limiting cross media ownership of local licenses.

Monopolies are bad for business.

Today we have ventured into far more dangerous waters. Marketers have become cheerleaders for the media monopolies that are frankly, stealing money from our clients — and frankly from all of us too.

Marketers have always tended to self-delusion and selling self delusion to clients. Those  of us truth tellers in this business are truly misfits. But when you work with a mid-sized B-to-B operation. When you are sitting across the table from the guy who is pulling those dollars out of his own wallet, if you want to earn his trust you’d better speak the truth. You and your client are on the frontlines. If you and your clients play in this very large slice of the market, you’ve taken your knocks. You can smell BS from 20 paces.

And here is what we smell:

Social Media is NOT effective in many cases, Facebook has not provided any answers on true activity. Who will benefit? Why we should buy? They have provided so many reasons NOT to trust them, their “auction” pricing is the least of it!

Search is no longer right for many companies — increasing cost is a huge factor. Google could help by making its auction far more transparent. When you buy shares on the NYSE you know the volume, the last tick — that’s the least Google could do. Who is bidding, how much and when? Why should I trust Google?

SEO has always been smoke and mirrors populated by hyperventilating “experts” who jump tag any twitch of the needle as a Google conspiracy. And yet, marketers are fixated by it! I was at a pre-Bing meeting at Microsoft. The guys there were promising a different sort of search engine, far more open. I said, “Really? How long will that really last?” Not long. It ended when we left the room.

When media companies are making what Google, Facebook et al. are they will never succumb to a tepid third-party audit scheme. Say what you want about Hitwise and Alexa they are not delivering what only the horse’s mouth can.

The only way to get what we need is with swift and sharp government regulation — don’t hold your breadth.

In the meantime what do the truth tellers do? They find their client’s True North. Judiciously, with care, testing, analyzing, tweaking programs and never, ever, following the marketing lemmings.

Now that Bill Gates is giving his money away he’s Mr. Nice Guy. Truth is he got there by being a ruthless bully, putting start up competitors out of business (and relentlessly holding onto his money for two decades so that he could bully companies out of business). Now Steve Jobs is taking his place, from his petty stance on Adobe Flash to his convoluted restrictions on app analytics.

The result, as we all experience every day, is truly lousy software. Would you buy a car that crashed every time it hit a pebble? Why do we continue to buy Microsoft products? Why do we continue to run like star struck lemmings to Apple? Why do we continue to query Google when it can’t give us the answer to our query? Why do we share our lives on Facebook when they relentlessly leverage our dignity for their gain?

Why is it OK for companies to give us somewhat functional products that deliver a modicum of efficiency? Why do we give them a pass? Our monopoly laws only bruise these behemoths, none truly stop them in their path.

In the meantime, we all lose and we lose big. Competition is stifled so we pay too much for too little. Innovation is snuffed out and great new ideas never see the light of day.

I am really disgusted with Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft – but that does not compare to my disgust with our hapless, toothless government. All talk, no action while the marketplace delivers garbage and our lives, community and the world are gutted.

It is time to chose and to chose critically. Ask yourself: do I really need this software? Is free really free? What is Facebook really good for? Should I really be paying to advertise here? Will I really get the results I need for my business? Is what I am doing, right now, for me, my company, my community, honorable?

Question. Question to discover what will make our world truly more productive.

I have been a huge proponent of Bing — amazing since I will eternally despise Microsoft for inflicting impossible inelegant kloogy software on all us worker bees. But Bing is the one thing Microsoft has done right. It is the National Geographic of the 21st century. Breathtaking in both aesthetics and usefulness. Useful that is if you use it to buy plane tickets (love that buy-o-meter!) or shop for the lowest prices.

Its major failing has been search. Bing’s search simply has not been as granular as Google’s.  Today’s new announcement will help: Bing will start including status updates from Facebook. Even though most FB updates are drivel, many retailers are now actively using FB for promotions so this will help shoppers for one, but it will also fill out the Bing search experience with more rich media content among other things.

It is high time that Google had a tough competitor and if Bing stays on top of the improvements small advertisers may see some relief. Click inflation, the relenting up tick in Google CPCs is absolutely killing small businesses and businesses selling products at lower price points. If Bing becomes a contender in search we will see Google blink and start to offer more promotions to small advertisers. I believe that Google loyalty is eroding and I predict the tipping point for Google is well inside five years. FB has already surpassed it. And Google’s chronic lack of positive user experience (it should not take 200,000 answers for one stupid question) has trained users to go elsewhere: Wikipedia, Amazon…and Bing.

Media Post has confirmed what my Alexa toolbar has been telling me for months. Facebook is the Big Number 2 on the web. As frustrated as I have been with FB and its kloogy interface for users and advertisers alike, I have to give them credit for re-inventing the Web.

Love it or hate it Facebook is the elephant in the room. Funny, I said that about Google back in 2004. Speaking of which, I should remind everyone, that Google will become increasingly less relevant and sooner than we think. Google will face that Microsoft Moment. That Windows vs. Mac moment. I’ve been saying this and writing about it for a long time.

Typical of tech cycles, we work from chaotic fragmentation to behemoth to orderly fragmentation. Facebook will be going there too, not to long after Google has its moment of truth.

For at least five years have been writing and talking about how search will eventually move to vertical portals. It is official, it has.

I was speaking to a family member. A savvy young woman in her early 40s who I would call an average computer user. Her work does not keep her at her screen 10 hours a day, in fact she uses her computer to augment her work and to support her personal needs (kids’ homework, occasional shopping, email etc). The rest of the time she works face-to-face with retail customers.  Here is what she said, “I hate Google, because when I go there to help my kids on their homework I just get shopping information. I don’t want to buy, I want to know. I use Wikkipedia.”

And there you have it. A regular Joe/Josephine who has discovered that there are other more effective places to get answers than Google. Google will go the way of the IBM. Too big, too cumbersome, too out of touch. Too worried about being gamed on a meta scale to deliver anything relevant on the user scale.

Enter Bing. A compelling hybrid. Ironically this Microsoft product learned a lesson from Apple: Beautiful to look at, solving a chosen group of user needs. It is clear that the folks at Bing asked themselves: what do users use search engines for most? The answer: Entertainment, News, Travel and Shopping. “Let’s place ourselves there in a most aesthetically pleasing and robust manner.” Bing will become the go-to consumer search site. But don’t go there to research your term paper, or to conduct any other type of muscular search. It just won’t return good information. And the truth is, neither does Google. It is only slightly better than Bing in that department. Doing robust deep research still involves endlessly long search phrases and serious poking around over an extended period of time.

We are actively engaged in researching new technologies here at Camarès and we are finding that it can take weeks and hundreds of searches on Google alone – never mind Wikkipedia, YouTube and other engines. Invariably we find our answers nested deep in blogs that are linked to each other and NOT as a direct result of a Google or Bing search. Our Josephine described the essence of the problem: “Half the time I don’t know the right question to ask.” Well the truth is she does know the right question and so do we at Camarès, it is the engines themselves that are not indexing information in a way that humans actually search for it. I call this the Nuance Gap. Humans are nuanced, search engines are not. And it is the one place that Google has consistently failed the user since day one.

Until Google bridges this gap (and my bet it will never, ever be able to do this) it will die a slow twisting death, nibbled away by more compelling vertical competitors. Right now it is skating on its huge cash reserves and the fact that companies are willing to auction up the price of keywords beyond anything that is affordable. It is also skating on all the other Joes & Josephines who have not yet changed their behavior, but will over time.  Traffic will diminish – in fact it already is. Right now, Google may simply be calling it “market saturation” but if it were doing its job right, it would have out Binged, Bing a long time ago.

I wish I had written today’s op-ed in the NY Times. I am glad to see that my concerns regarding Google’s supremacy are shared. Adam Raff talks at length about his business being “disappeared” by Google’s indexing bots. His self-interest in the problem doesn’t make his concerns any less important. Google’s indexes are a monopolistic gateway and the practice of Search Engine Optimization has never been more dicey.

The truth is that most companies are shunted off to Google’s Siberia indexes – making paid search a necessity for many. And there in lies the source of the monumental rip-off that is Google. I used to laugh: “Google won’t show you organically, then they add insult to injury and ask you to pay for the top slot.” That in and of itself should make us all very concerned, but the manner in which Google Adwords are sold makes things even worse: it has always been cloaked in secrecy and has become increasingly so over the years (see my previous post).

Google Adwords is not an auction at all but rather an Extortionist’s Ball.  The FTC ought to be looking long and hard into Google’s Adwords practices. If Adwords was a the NYSE, even the SEC would shut it down.

Think about this: When you go to buy a stock, you know the last purchase price, the volume of shares traded and the type of shares being sold — among many other things.

Now when you buy a keyword or key phrase at “auction” on Google or Bing or any other search engine, you know nothing, zero. After awhile of spending money and watching closely you can gauge how much you need to spend to get to your desired position. BUT…

You don’t know

• The volume of clicks.
• The latest bid.
• What is being purchased (exact, phrase or broad) among many other items.

Yes, Google rates your ads and landing pages, but they don’t tell you HOW they are rating them. And they are allegedly applying better pricing to better ads — but what does that mean? We really don’t know their parameters.

Imagine buying a stock and not knowing the last tick? Or the trading volume?

You wouldn’t participate would you?

Google’s closed auction is much more akin to a Vegas gambling game: the house ALWAYS wins. Scott Cleland over at Precursor.org doesn’t even think it should be called an auction at all. “If Google were interested in fair representation and truth in advertising, Google would represent Adwords as Google’s algorithmic secret selection process or GASSP.”

I love the acronym, because that is exactly what advertisers are doing right now gasping for breath as prices go ever higher and Google Adsense makes less sense than ever before. Yes a searcher is the most motivated buyer on the planet BUT the value of that click depends on your product price point, conversion rates and margins.