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 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.

From the guys behind diapers.com: “We’re trying to build a brand,” says Bharara. “That’s hard to do when you’re just a search box on Google.” Make that impossible. And that is the one small thing they are right about.

Diapers.com is a “pre-revenue” start-up with $50+ million in VC money. Diapers deliver no margins. They make their margins on other baby stuff. The two founders own about 8% each of their company. Who knew it took that much money to build a diaper dispensary?  If I were a venture capitalist putting up that much dough I’d want a lion’s share too, but this is a bet that’s riskier than just about anything I’ve ever heard of before.

Online retail is in for a crash landing. If you don’t manufacture something original, you will have  no margins in a heart beat. Thanks to the power of search marketing, online retail has been experiencing a race to the bottom for a long time.

And THESE guys are blowing 8% a year on advertising an online retail business that sells a commodity who’s only differentiator is great service? That’s just NUTS! The only reason they still exist is because of the crazy venture capitalists!

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.