Yet, as a collective industry, there is a list of things we continue to allow to hinder us. Limiting mindsets; lack of understanding, commitment or investment; complacency; or even the exaggeration of our limitations themselves. You may have heard the famous Richard Bach quote — argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.

And, when you look at the specifics, at this point of our professed evolution, most of these shortcoming are just too bad. And solvable. Let’s start at the beginning.

We Are Embarrassed By Our Own Websites

Almost any company I can think of — in almost any category — will tell you their website is off. It’s ugly, incomplete, confusing, un-optimized or outright broken. In fact, I’ve heard this self-disparagement five times in the past weeks alone.

Despite the fact that we are now certifiably a cross-channel, multi-platform communications, community and transactional universe, our original state of being — the domain — is for all intents and purposes, still a mess. Why? Because we never took the time to decide the purpose of the platform in the first place, with the right people at the table. We designed and built without a sense of that purpose.

Is it a communications platform? A lead generation tool? For the community? For commerce? And, we did not leave real room for change, over time, to support our own business growth. Granted, for most of us, the domain is now part of a much bigger, more distributed picture. But, it’s never too late to regroup on purpose — refresh design, visual presentation, visible content, and utility — and then take steps to optimize it. At least do what it takes to eliminate confusion at a glance.

We Have Not Organized For Content

Most companies have come to terms with the “idea” of being media companies — that content plays a very real role in how we market our services, companies, and brands. But, for most of us, this remains an abstract concept. It’s anything but. Content is an actual asset that takes many forms, but it’s our primary, living, breathing asset. And, we must organize and equip to tend to it.

So, what are we waiting for? Well, the work can be daunting. Divisions, organization charts, roles must be dialed in. We must acquire and train talent; we must hone expertise. And, on some level, we must consider our investments — content management and curation systems. But, until we go there, it seems we tolerate operating in a disjointed uncommitted state of affairs.

The best news is there are some really fantastic examples of companies and leadership that took the time to get it right: with models, org structures, systems and more — all flowing from a unified Content Strategy. Look no further than Altimeter Group’s Rebecca Lieb‘s latest report, Organizing for Content: Models to Incorporate Content Strategy and Content Marketing in the Enterprise, for guidance and real world illustration of best practices in each of these areas.

We Defer To Kids & Gurus

We assume both know more than they do because they are so into it. Social media should no more be entirely relegated to the isolated intern ensconced in the corner with ear buds and 2,000 friends, without training and collaborative team work — than we should trust the guru, just because he tells you he’s the one.

This one is easy to fix. Take your talent plan seriously, vet your options and build a team. Not a stack of self-professed specialists. You want a thriving mix of experience, personalities, talents and skills that benefits by that mix.

We Believe Our Audience Is A Static Object

How many marketers have you met that can tell you exactly who their audience is? The answer is: a lot. Most brands will tell you exactly who their consumer is, by demographics and maybe a few lifestyle points. This glib marketer is common. He or she moves around in this limited state, not having embraced the power of audience-based planning, buying and optimization — simply placing media against a fixed snapshot.

Thanks to today’s systems, tools and state of data analytics options — we are able to target and optimize our known audience but also uncover entirely new, productive audiences. So, why in the world wouldn’t we? That learning-based approach — tapping the combination of machines plus smart people among us — allows us to scale on targeted reach. And that’s the ultimate — right?

What else? We think mobility equals the smart phone and the smart phone alone; we focus on brand advertising instead of brand experience; we awfulize Big Data instead of realizing it doesn’t take much to learn a lot. The list goes on and on.

All of the above and numerous other things are the things that, despite our self love as an industry, we don’t love or respect enough about our own enterprises to do the work to make it right. We boast and love our progress; yet, in a million little ways that add way up, we seem to fear it.

Disclaimer:  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real businesses, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Failure is a key part of success, or at least an important step on the road to becoming successful. When the still-young search industry witnesses a failure of any kind, it seems to revel in exploiting the collapse for personal gain, personal indulgence and the ability to say, “I told you so.”

Without getting into names and details that will only initiate more drama and, dare I say, schadenfreude, I’ve noticed an overabundance of loony behavior in the search business of late, mainly in the realm of how failure is depicted and exploited.

I have extensive experience in this arena — so, if you’ll indulge me, here’s my unsolicited advice on how to handle tough situations and what it takes to pick yourself (and those around you) up after falling.

Sour Grapes Sourcing

I check in from time to time on start-ups, particularly in the agency world, and I’m often called upon to offer advice to them. The life phase arch associated with launch, hype and the seemingly inevitable implosion has become so common, its cliché. Here’s how it goes:

1. Company launch, lots of press releases, the “super firm” is born
2. Big parties are thrown, lots of money spent
3. Success is positioned throughout the business with sponsorships and speaking engagements
4. A culture is born, young professionals are enthralled
5. Information begins to leak on the demise, 15 minutes of disaster fame begins, and those not throwing rocks are “super concerned” about the people involved

The reason people seem to love jumping on the bashing bandwagon has more to do with the very natural human desire for revenge. By the time the “super firm” fails, industry colleagues have spent months or even years choking on countless nauseating press releases and blog posts about just how wonderful this company is and how they are doing it better than everyone else.

All Good Intentions

In the most recent editions of failure, how to not execute and ultimately, how to make a self-indulgent exit, I am reminded of James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson:

“Patriotism having become one of our topicks, Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong determined tone, an apophthegm, at which many will start: ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ But let it be considered that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak of self-interest.’ (Wikiquote)

I’ve seen some real doozies in my time, but today’s socially enriched world, enhanced by deep indexing and no delete button search engines, makes any failure play out in public ways which were previously unimaginable. You have to hear about it on LinkedIn, Facebook and everywhere else — such is the way of the world, and you can’t change our broadcast-it-everywhere culture. But, what I’ve found particularly sad about it is how people choose to insert themselves into the conversation.

Please file the following under bad behavior:

1. Blog posts offering to “help” underprivileged, suddenly underemployed people and track every available job acting as the personal placement specialist
2. Inserting into a comment thread a description of how your competing company (based in Podunk, Idaho) really takes care of its people so if anyone wants a job from the failing company (based in Gnobot, Alaska), you should really reach out
3. Taking the opportunity to insert yourself into a social discussion thread expressing your “concern” while casually mentioning the amazing work your company did for the failing company

Number 1 paints you as the concerned humanitarian. Number 2 is blatant self promotion and “man down kickage.” And number 3, well…number 3 is just sad display of desperate attention grabbing.

Heal Thyselves

New generation “senior managers” should consider leaving the indulgent peanut gallery stuff behind. All the finger pointing and melodrama serves no one. The junior employees so eagerly recruited into the super firm are going to find jobs; it’s not hard to find digital marketing jobs. Seems to me if anyone was in the slightest bit actually worried about them, the last possible way I’d see of expressing concern is through self-indulgent blog posts whining about what could have been and how painful it is to leave.

I’ve looked over junior employee comments left to be judged on the social stage; it sounds to me that many of them believed the hype that was being spewed unto them. Will they be able to approach the next job with as much enthusiasm? Will you? How will you march into the next gig now, carrying the knowledge (and perhaps some of the financial debt) of how badly something like this can go wrong? Will you do it again? Will you be as driven to be successful?

Will you measure success by the number of press releases you write in a short a time? How about how many panels you spoke on at easily forgotten tradeshows? Will you spend some time trying to understand what went wrong, isolate it, then come back and give it another try?

Perhaps the next one (or the one after that) will go better. If you can power through your failures and learn from them without jading yourself to the point of hopelessness – if you can keep working at it until you get it right — then you may have something. Until then, cut the self-indulgent crap and get back to work.

Feature roll-outs with APIs and a little bit of insanity in trying to get your numbers to match up are all necessary bumps on the road to truly optimizing. This yields the way for Google (and subsequently, every publisher) to ultimately optimize on a person-by-person basis. Campaigns will be customized not just by device, but by the very essence of what makes us solid, human targets for advertisers.

Device Vs. People Targeting

Once we get beyond the tactical components, like shifts in ad formats, we can look to a brighter future in a more efficient, sponsored digital communications environment.

One of the core pain points in moving from device to people targeting is the inevitable conversation with upper management communicating the contradictory marketing tactics the Enhanced environment has forced upon us. Like Google+ or the ever-changing technical guidelines for healthy SEO, we have little choice in implementing Enhanced tactics. Yet, we’ve been programming marketers to believe that device-centered approaches in communicating messaging and seeking desired actions was the best marketing practice.

People-Centric Focus

Simply abandoning a device-centric approach would be irresponsible, as it has been proven that these tactics are effective. Generally speaking, losing money while your media vendor tries to sort out its ad management platform doesn’t excite any of the CMOs I know. Dismantling or configuring existing technology to accommodate the people-centric focus is going to take time.

Shifting strategy is an enormous, painful undertaking, but changing tactics is a demanding and necessary task in the online marketing universe. A solid, long-term strategic framework for a brand lies in communicating a message that provides a creative experience on a personal level. Publishers aim to net premium prices for ad inventory, and more effective, timelier ad consumption experiences for people will get them there.

A people-centric approach is the best way to do that. The only questions lie in the timing of adoption, stability of the product road map and Google’s ability to keep marketers informed about the decisions they will have to make. Failure in this effort, I fear, will have big consequences.

As we absorb and implement the road map and evolve our tactics to become more people focused, Google will no longer be so reliant on search ad revenue, and we’ll have a truer picture of how our target customers take the actions we desire.

I get a sense from talking to brands and publishers selling ad inventory that we all want the same things. However you might feel about migrating tactics, Google’s enhanced tides will help a lot of ships out of some dangerous shallow water.

Content Consumption Experience Dilemma

A consistent content consumption experience for me would be delivering the same experience as I move between environments: automotive, home, office and anywhere else I go.

Right now, we have multiple devices; tomorrow, we may still have multiple devices, but we’ll have a consistent experience while we move through each environment. Ultimately, we’ll have better means to attribute the path to desired action in our marketing efforts.

Right now, we don’t have people — we have devices. It’s baffling to me that with all the data we are getting, we don’t seem to be getting the right data — but, I have high hopes.

Marketers have been a little too quick to label people as “android” or “apple” by observing simple reactive analysis of behavior based on imperfect data coming from imperfect devices on imperfect platforms. For example, if purchase incidents are higher for a particular product, like a luxury brand or considered purchase, it’s easy to assume that Apple people buy more because they are savvier than say, your average Galaxy Tab user. Well, that’s not entirely true since apps, sites, landing pages and ads appear and function differently on both devices. The Android user may be moving to a bigger screen, better text input platform or device he trusts more, like his keyboard-enabled device.

I’d love to be able to move from room to room with a consistent experience without logging into multiple devices and worrying about whether or not my identity is safe on this OS or experiencing spotty coverage on a device or driving myself crazy trying to orient a screen by constantly adjusting it.

The people-targeting strategy also supports the simple, unavoidable, harsh truth that devices fail, apps function imperfectly and multi-device (or omni-channel, if you are playing along with the buzzword bingo home game) consumption still isn’t as reliable as it should be.

When I turn on my television, I push a button, and 99.9% of the time when I select a channel, it goes there. That’s all I want from my content-consumption devices. Once we have a consistent experience, we’ll have a better way to give people what they want and advertisers what they need.

Everyone in the digital marketing business knows it sucks, and efforts to turn the place into Google have yet to achieve fruition. Sure, the stock got a bump when Marissa came in, but that’s largely due to her status as one of the original Googlers.

Home page redesign and human resource parlor tricks like that free lunch thing aside, Yahoo’s corporate culture is akin to the Balboa camp right after Mr. T pounded the stallion into submission in Rocky 3.

Nothing To See Here

They need to turn this ship around and the latest memo (on home workers) was pure marketing communications genius, right out of the brilliant Google public relations playbook.

The internal email, which may as well had been marked “Confidential: Do NOT forward to Kara Swisher,” and it’s off to the races with major media coverage.

Whoever leaked that memo did Yahoo a huge favor. The media was covering the insensitive “let them eat cake Mommy-ing” and the role of telecommuting in the workplace instead of just how bad things are at Yahoo. Like I said, pure genius.

Instead of focusing on how it’s darn near impossible to get a Yahoo rep on the phone to discuss anything other than how much they hate their jobs, the media coverage focused attention on telecommuting,  commuting’s impact on fuel consumption and how Marissa has lost touch with the common (wo)man.

Moving Chess Pieces Across The Board

Marissa hasn’t lost touch with anything; she’s moving chess pieces around the board while the world thinks she’s moving the deck chairs around the Titanic. One piece I read in a national publication mentioned her model-like appearance and correlated it to her overall acceptance as a leader. As long as they aren’t talking about how bad it is at Yahoo, I call that a successful execution.

No sane male journalist would comment on the whole “woman in charge,” or worse, “mom” discussion, and risk being instantly branded a misogynist — because we didn’t have moms and therefore can’t comment — so that takes care of more or less half of the press who would be complaining; again, unadulterated genius.

You see kids, the whole WFH WTF press mishigas is just about getting rid of the people who aren’t carrying their weight. For those folks still earning their keep and who still want to work from home, I wouldn’t worry. Once Yahoo drops the slackers, I’d wager a fair amount of money they’ll re-institute a policy offering a bit more freedom to those who “deserve” it.

Why all the memos? Well, let’s just say the State of California, and many others Yahoo operates in, don’t make it easy to cut a lot of people loose without it costing them a ton of money. So, they make the undesirables miserable enough to quit, then keep the good people, and bang… shareholder value goes up. Everybody wins! Well, not everybody.

Why From HR?

My only gripe with the leaked memo was that it came from some nudnik in human resources instead of Yahoo’s fearless leader. Over the last decade or so I’ve noticed HR moving from a care- or advocacy-driven profession to something more akin to a terrorist vocation. They use fear to motivate decision makers into making gaffes like the one we saw last week, in which the company’s CEO ends up looking like a feckless pawn instead of a strong leader.

Would the press coverage have been different if it had come from the CEO’s office? I think so. The conversation would have moved much more quickly to the other topics. The “let them eat cake” perception of Marissa’s attitude toward parenting and all the telecommuting banter was really just icing on a much larger pastry. Enjoy your cake.

Should Facebook Show Everything?

The issue of Facebook deciding what to show people in their Facebook news feed came up this week when Nick Bilton of the New York Times wrote about how over the past year, the engagement on his posts had dropped, despite his having gained a huge increase in Facebook followers.

That echoed concerns from Star Trek alum and social media extraordinaire George Takei, who last year was alarmed that his Facebook engagement was down. He wondered, as Bilton did, if this was perhaps something Facebook was doing to get him and others to pay for better visibility. Billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, also got in on the criticisms last year.

I used to be in the “Facebook should show everything” camp. For example, when the Subscribe feature (now called Follow) launched in 2011, I wished it was available for Facebook Pages, not just for people, so that the visibility of content from those pages didn’t feel so out-of-control for the publisher.

As I wrote:

If someone wants to follow a publication or website on Facebook, they shouldn’t have to hope that they’re not going to miss content they may want to see, because Facebook decided something wasn’t important enough to show.

Since then, I’ve come to realize that I don’t want Facebook to show me everything in the same way that Twitter does. Moreover, even though Twitter shows me everything, I don’t actually see everything. Time to unpack the TV metaphors.

The “Live TV” Of Twitter

When you follow accounts on Twitter, everything they post flows into your Twitter timeline. You’re going to see it all. Twitter’s not sitting behind the scenes trying to decide what non-paid tweets it thinks are more important and should be shown nor what should be held back. In short, Twitter’s not trying to separate out the signal from the noise.

That’s not to say that “noise” is bad. Twitter, to me, is like having a TV on in the background while I work. I glance to it from time to time, and if something big or important happens, I look up and pay attention.

For example, when that meteor exploded over Russia last month, my timeline exploded with the news. I was glad of that, because places like CNN weren’t covering it at all:

In Russia today, a meteorite tragically destroyed any remaining value CNN had left for breaking news twitter.com/dannysullivan/…

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 15, 2013

Twitter shows you everything posted by those you follow: news, thoughts from friends, pictures and more. You dip in and out as you like. But similar to live TV, when you turn it off — when you’re not actively watching Twitter — then you’re missing everything.

Those 10 or 100 or 1,000 accounts you follow? Even though Twitter shows you everything from them, unlike Facebook, you’ll largely miss whatever they do if you’re not watching Twitter constantly.

Facebook As A Social Media DVR

In contrast to Twitter, Facebook acts more like a DVR. Yes, you can view your Facebook news feed and see things appearing in a timely manner. But Facebook also does what Twitter does not — effectively records your social media for you. Some items shown may be hours old.

Hours old doesn’t mean they aren’t relevant. It’s more like how you might record a show and watch it when you’re ready through a DVR.

I like live TV, for when I want live TV. I love having a DVR to catch things I’ve missed. One isn’t necessarily better than the other. They’re just different things — and Facebook and Twitter are also different things.

Facebook could do what Nick Bilton or George Takei want and show every post they make to their followers. Facebook could become more Twitter-like. But, that would fundamentally change how Facebook works, maybe for the better, but maybe not.

Showing Everything Wouldn’t Show Everything

More important, showing every post to followers wouldn’t ensure that people would see Bilton’s or Takei’s posts more often. As with Twitter, it would only ensure they’d be seen if someone had Facebook “on” at a particular moment.

There are ways for Facebook users to increase visibility of posts from those they follow, if they know where to look and change defaults settings. I suspect most don’t know where to look or fail to make changes, relying instead on the DVR-nature of Facebook. Or more likely, they really don’t register that Facebook is making selective choices.

For those users who care, Facebook has an entire help area with information about how news feed works. I’m going to focus below on things from a publisher point-of-view, because unlike Facebook users, publishers think intensively about what gets seen and why.

Ranking The Content

Time for another metaphor. Think of Facebook as Google. Do a search on Google, and it comes back with millions of matching results for many topics. But, Google doesn’t just dump all those results at you without order. Nor does it list them in order of most recent. It tries to figure out what’s the most relevant material to show, using its search algorithm (often called PageRank, but PageRank is just part of overall algorithm). That algorithm examines many different ranking factors.

Facebook has its own algorithm known as “EdgeRank” that looks at various factors to decide what might be relevant to show in a particular person’s news feed. How closely are they connected to someone; how often do they like content from a person or page; how often do they comment on or share content from a person or page? These things can increase the odds they’ll see more from a particular source.

It can be a pain as a publisher to try figure what Facebook now thinks deserves rewarding. Use more pictures! Ask more questions! But that’s social media optimization — that’s Facebook optimization — and it’s all part of marketing.

PR professionals know that PR done right can increase news coverage. Search marketers know that SEO done right can increase search visibility. Publishers that want success with Facebook have to keep up with what’s rewarded there (and our Facebook Marketing column can help).

Facebook Optimization

I always think it’s a smart move to encourage those who follow you to like your posts, to ensure they’ll increase the odds of being seen.

A post like, “Want to see more posts from us? Like this post, and that helps Facebook know you want more from us in your news feed,” is easy to do from time-to-time. It helps spread the word, at least to the percentage of followers you have that Facebook feels the message is relevant for!

Another option is for those with personal accounts to remind people they can choose to get more notifications. Consider this:

When someone follows an account, they can click again on the “Follow” button, select “Settings,” and then choose to change from the default “Most Updates” to instead get “All Updates” from that page.

Sound great? Well, two issues. First, it’s unclear to me how exactly Facebook ensures people see “All Updates,” since by default, it’s going to show people a news feed set to display “Top Stories.” My assumption is that this ensures any posts from an “All Updates” account are considered Top Stories-worthy.

The other issue is that this only works for personal accounts. For someone like Nick Bilton, who shares off his personal account, encouraging people to go “All Updates” may help. But George Takei uses a Facebook Page, and it lacks this type of option.

That’s where the Page Notification option comes in. If your page visitors know to enable this, and if they know to go to the special “Pages Feed” area, they can see all your page updates. (Similarly, there’s a Close Friends feed to help you get all updates from your close friends — if you know where to look).

News Feed Changes Coming

That’s a lot of ifs. It’s also why there’s good reason to think that when Facebook announces news feed changes on Thursday, it might try to simplify much of this, in order to make it easier for users to control what they want to see while addressing some publisher concerns. TechCrunch has some speculation on how things may change.

We’ll be at the event live blogging it, plus providing coverage out of it, so stay tuned.

The Messy Issue Of Paid Posts

Of course, just like with Google, if you want a guaranteed way to increase visibility of your posts on Facebook, you can pay for it. You can promote your post to your followers to increase its visibility. You can even promote a post to people who don’t follow you.

And just like with Google, there are concerns that Facebook might try to degrade the relevancy of its news feed to encourage people to pay for visibility. Google always denies these types of things (and I’d say it has an excellent track record of not doing them). Similarly, Facebook has said in the past that the drops in engagement some see on “free” posts are due to improvements it’s making to news feed relevancy, and it repeated that again this week.

Obviously, not everyone will believe Facebook, just as not everyone believes Google. We’re also likely going to see people assume that future changes to news feed are designed to benefit Facebook’s bottom line, just as some are certain that Google changes like the Panda Update or the Penguin Update – changes Google says are designed to improve its search results — were just meant to improve Google’s revenue.

Indeed, perhaps we’re heading toward a future where Facebook will have a series of news feed “updates” that are commonly discussed. If so, you can bet that those hurt by them will scream loudly over unfairness, while those who gain — if the Google experience is any guide — won’t talk about their gains.

One solution could be to separate out all the paid content from the unpaid stuff. For example, Google and Bing show paid ads “inline” or in the same column as unpaid listings, but these are grouped just above or below. Does Facebook need to consider perhaps further separation or delineation? And could your post appear in two areas, both in the paid area if you pay, as well as in the free area?

Will Social Media Go DVR?

In the end, the real judge is the Facebook user. If they’re not getting the content they want, they’ll move on to something else. And, getting what they want is going to require changes to news feed, because how we share and what we share continue to change.

My guess is that we’re going to see Facebook become even more DVR-like going forward. It makes sense. As more and more are posting, sharing, competing for attention, the noise threatens to drown out the signal. Nor do I think Facebook will be alone.

For example, we’ve seen Twitter doing similar things with its personalized Discover area that saw big growth last year. Just as Twitter injects sponsored tweets into its timeline, I wouldn’t be surprised if it decides that some of the unpaid “Discover” content should also get mixed in. I do think, however, that Twitter will continue to have a heavy emphasis on immediacy, because so many use the service for that particular type of “live” experience.

I haven’t mentioned Google+ until now (or in the headline) because I’ve been trying to draw a clear distinction between the idea that if a social media service shows someone everything from those they follow, that doesn’t mean everything is actually seen. It’s not, unless you’re watching that service 24/7.

Google+, right now, is somewhat closer to Facebook the DVR than Twitter the live TV. It doesn’t show everything from all those you follow. It also inserts some content from its “Explore” area into your home stream. Ultimately, I think it will move more toward the Facebook model — giving up some of the focus on showing the most immediate posts and trying to show more of the important ones.

NOTE: Previously I’d written that Google+ did show all posts, but Allen Firstenberg kindly corrected me on Google+. It’s had a few changes — and that filtering, by the way, isn’t clearly explained on the help page about Google+ streams.

If the future does become more DVR-like for social media, that’s not necessarily to be feared. Potentially, it provides for more visibility than a “show everything” model does.

If you’ve been wondering what the search marketing connection is in all this, given I’m writing it for our Search Marketing Column here on Marketing Land, thanks for hanging with me for so long.

The answer is that “discovery” is the kissing cousin to search. People with search-intent discover content through social media, sometimes content that fulfills a need they hadn’t yet put into a search. Being discovered means being in these social media services and understanding the how and why they make you visible.

Extend Through Social Media, But Own Your Own “Home”

Finally, in Bilton’s follow-up piece about Facebook visibility, he cites a small company that “built most of its business” around Facebook, in particular, buying fans there.

That leads to advice I’ve given many times before. Don’t build yourself too heavily on any of these services. Facebook’s not your website. Facebook is where you extend your website. Nor is Twitter or Google+ your website. Buying followers or buying to drive people to your pages in these services is no guarantee you really “own” those contacts.

Extend through these channels, but stay diversified, and whenever possible, get your fans to become real fans, connected to your actual website and company in ways you have direct control over: RSS, email and even old-school phone numbers and mailing addresses.

Now that marketers have concluded this is a worthwhile investment, they’re doling out the cash. At least, they’re supposed to be. While Google’s Q4 earnings beat Wall Street estimates, we haven’t seen a Google Shopping line item to see if this was a boost to the bottom line. Based on several conversations I’ve had with marketers, Shopping may not have brought in revenue like Google hoped.

Google Shopping Is A Must

I’ve been fortunate enough to spend the past few weeks in the company of a few senior brand managers. The overwhelming consensus among retail brands was that they had to invest in Shopping results. So they simply did the easy thing, and shifted (up to) 25 percent of their paid search budgets to shopping. For Google, this is a case of robbing from Peter to pay Paul.

Diverting money from one search channel to another is sound marketing strategy, especially if you haven’t budgeted for a new channel. As one person confided, shifting money out of paid search may be one of the dumbest things he’s done, but he had no choice because competitors were doing the same thing.

While Shopping results were successful at driving conversions (hence the outcry when they switched to a paid format), they do not have a long history of returning the investment into the paid units, an important distinction.

Brands Shift Budget To Shopping

Brand managers have their search budgets, and the very sophisticated ones can forecast conversions on a monthly basis. Now, there’s a panic rush to the shopping results, and CMOs can’t be left out. The easy solution is to allot the same amount of budget to line item Google, and divert some to the new tool to keep up with the Joneses. That should be the biggest of Google’s worries right now, as it’s potentially dangerous.

Philosophically, paying is a good idea for advertisers. But Google’s issue is that there’s no proof in the pudding that Shopping generates more revenue. The Q4 earnings didn’t show a boost in revenue caused specifically by shopping, and that’s telling. If the end of the year is about one thing, well, it’s shopping. It’s also the period when Google began charging for shopping placements, and I know from multiple conversations that no one chose to ignore the program when it made the jump.

The onus is now firmly on Google to demonstrate that Shopping results deserve more investment. As nearly everyone I spoke with attests, there is no decision-making process about buying Google Shopping. If you’re in retail or e-commerce, you have to do it, full stop. Great news, except for the fact that no one bothered to up the total amount of money they were sending to Google.

So now, Google is in relatively unfamiliar territory, forced to prove the value of a new product. Google’s goal is the same as every other ad tech vendor: bleed money out of a brand budget that was previously earmarked to go elsewhere, whether its TV, print, or radio. They’ve been remarkably successful building a business around search, and now they need this Shopping search product to differentiate itself. Otherwise, they’re just running a product that cuts into their own paid search dollars.

Will Shopping Boost The Bottom Line?

The goal of charging for the shopping ads was to boost the bottom line with a new product, so they’re obviously trying to steal those brand dollars. They would not have flipped the switch from organic to paid if they had other intentions. Moving money from one channel to another doesn’t do shareholders any favors, which is why Google needs to demonstrate some ROI, and fast.

In the short term, Google isn’t going to lose any money or credibility, because the money going to Shopping was meant for paid search anyway. But in the long term, the company stands to make a lot more profit.

I’m not naïve enough to sit here and say that the product won’t work. With all the engineers and brainpower at Google, they’ll rejigger the system so that it delivers ROI for the customers buying space in shopping results. They already have a sizable advantage over any other ad technology companies, which is that they’ve convinced the ad buyers that this is a must-buy. Now, they just need to prove that it justifies the dollars going in.

Missing: The Official Site

The official site is nowhere to be found in Google’s search results, as this screenshot I took yesterday shows:

Of course, there are several ways you could search for the film, such as “fast and the furious” or “fast & furious 6.” I focused on  ”fast and furious 6,” as shown above, because that’s currently the top way that Google prompts people to finish searching, when they type in “fast,” as you can see below:

However, even when I searched using some of the alternative terms, those didn’t bring up the official site.

First To Blame: Google & Bing

Most of the blame for this, I place on Google. It’s not uncommon for movie websites to think little about search engine optimization basics. But people will be seeking them, and Google’s job is to make up for the deficiencies. I found it incredibly surprising, actually, that Google failed to list the site — and that Bing had the same problem.

HTML Title Tag: Good!

In good news, the Fast 6 site has some of the basics down right. The HTML title tag, one of the most important ranking factors in helping a page gain visibility, reads:

Fast & Furious 6 Movie | Official Site for the Fast & Furious 6 Film | In Theaters May 24, 2013

That has all the key details, and it’s hard to find any fault.

Failing At Content 101

Now, for the bad news. The site itself doesn’t really have much content about the movie. The home page, which is pretty much the only page in the site, relies on pulling in content shared by the film’s social media accounts, as well as from social media accounts by others, such as actors and fans. So, when you see this:

Google’s actually seeing this:

That’s relatively minimal content, much of it pulled in from fan tweets and Facebook posts. Would it really have been that hard for Universal Pictures to have made a page for each actor, each character, a synopsis of what the film is about, a recap of the previous films in the series? That’s just Content 101, and having a site with compelling content is another key factor to winning with search rankings.

Google+ Letdown

Another key thing that’s recommended is making sure that a site is tied into Google+, since Google+ information gets integrated into Google’s search results in various ways.

The good news here is that Fast & Furious has its own Google+ page, one that’s even been verified as real by Google. That’s getting the Google+ page into Google’s top search results, even though the official site doesn’t make it. Unfortunately, Google’s implementation of this is pretty bad:

See that “Recent Posts” section? That’s Google putting posts from the official page within the Knowledge Graph box of information it has about the film. Really, Google? You can’t list the official site, and the official Google+ page gets sandwiched between all that Knowledge Graph stuff? How about perhaps showing the name of the account and the number of followers, like you do with other searches such as for Top Gear:

That would make the page far more prominent.

From Google+ To Facebook?

Back to ways that Fast & Furious doesn’t help itself. Let’s look at its Google+ page:

See the arrow? It’s pointing to the URL that Fast & Furious has listed for its website. That URL points to Facebook.

Here’s a little advice. The people who use Google+, and there are plenty, are often there because they don’t like Facebook. They can get downright hostile about Facebook. Many love Google and Google+. So, if you’re trying to promote yourself on Google+, it’s pretty dumb to be making people jump from Google+ to Facebook.

In addition, Google+ is expressly a way for publishers to tell Google what their websites are. So, when Fast & Furious does this on its About page:

It’s not only failing to give Google the address of its real website in the designated “website” area, but it’s also failing to give Google any link to the website at all in the “Links” areas. “All roads lead to this,” is the movie’s tag line, but no roads lead to its official site.

Facebook Is Not Your Website

Facebook isn’t your website. It’s not. It’s a place to promote your website, sure. But I believe every major company should have their own website in addition to their social media profiles. At the very least, it ensures that if a social media site decides it wants to change terms of service, or charge you to be more visibile or goes belly-up, your own site remains.

Having said that, let’s now follow the link from the Fast & Furious page at Google+ over to its Facebook page:

See the arrow? It’s pointing to a URL that Fast & Furious is making visible which jumps people from Facebook to to its Instagram account. Not to the film’s official site, where there might be more information, but to Instagram.

Now, I can see some sense in this. With over 24 million Facebook fans, why not get some of them to also follow you in the hot, happening place that is Instagram? And to Fast & Furious’s credit, the website does get listed in the actual website area at Facebook, when you drill down:

Still, maybe pointing to the actual website from the Facebook page, rather than to Instagram, might help with visibility in search engines.

It won’t directly, because that link is tagged as “nofollow,” which means Facebook is using a mechanism to prevent the link from influencing Google and Bing’s results (most likely for spam protection reasons, which is why nofollow exists). But the visibility to humans might get more of them linking to the official site, which in turn might help with the search results.

All Roads Lead To Facebook

Meanwhile, the use of Facebook as a substitute website madness continues. Over at Instagram, Fast & Furious doesn’t point at its website, but instead back to Facebook:

At Twitter, it’s the same thing:

The website URL does at least get shown as an image in the top left corner, but it’s the Facebook URL that’s used as a clickable link.

The good news is that Twitter users don’t seem to be as rabid Facebook haters as Google+ users. But personally, I find it annoying to be bounced from one social media site to the other, especially if I’m trying to find more general information about a movie, product or service. Meanwhile, the issue that Fast & Furious isn’t making it easy to get to the official site might again go to people failing to link there — which may hurt its search visibility.

Getting It Right At YouTube

One place Fast & Furious gets it right is with YouTube. That’s good, because its trailer on YouTube does make the top Google results:

If you go to view that trailer, the official site URL is prominently listed:

Fast’s main YouTube page also lists the official site clearly:

Why Not Have The Best Of Both Worlds?

It’s always difficult doing this type of review from afar, because things that may seem like dumb moves or oversights might be done purposely for a good reason. For instance, perhaps the movie promoters feel that pushing much of the attention to the Facebook page is a good strategy. Maybe that’s working.

But, from my perspective, it feels like if Fast & Furious spent a little more time pointing to its official site, that might help the site rise more in Google and Bing, along with perhaps one or more of its social media accounts. Consider this for Man Of Steel:

Both that film’s official site and its Facebook page are listed. Shouldn’t that be the goal — to have the best of both worlds? Or three worlds, if you get your YouTube page ranking well. Or four worlds if your Twitter account makes it?

I will add that after reviewing a number of movie searches on Google, it’s unusual for a film to take more than two of the listings. IMDB, Wikipedia and Apple trailers all sometimes feel mandatory. But the official sites almost always do make it into the top results, and I think that’s a good thing — and a goal to aim for.

For those who don’t run film sites, the big takeaway remains this. Social media is a great way to extend your brand’s website. But, don’t forget your brand website as part of that.

Now, go enjoy the Fast & Furious 6 trailer:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related Articles

• What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?
• What Is Search Engine Optimization? The Three Minute SEO Video!
• The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors
• Why People Hate SEO
• Facebook Continues To Tighten Organic Page Post Reach
• The Definitive Guide To Google Authorship Markup

The much larger debate, the industry’s familiar old cold sore, is the “pay or no pay” argument. Every time there’s a case where a free product suddenly becomes a pay-for-play, it receives a media flare up, regardless of the outcome.

Look at Google Shopping. Adobe recently revealed that nearly 11 percent of its paid search retail spend went toward Google Shopping in Q4 2012, even after marketers were so vocal about the inconvenience of this change.

It’s Easy to Experiment When It’s Free

This illuminates the fact that marketers will always exploit free tools as much as they can, because they are free, but refuse to invest later.

In fact, free is one of the only ways to get marketers to actually experiment in digital, because they are so beholden to ROI. The return is always going to be high if marketers put nothing into it. So, if a retailer gets a boost through organic shopping recommendations because its other marketing channels are succeeding and driving shares, that retailer will love it.

The larger problem is that marketers are so fearful of losing money on a new ad tool or strategy that they almost never invest in the early stages. This is why the display landscape is still stuck on the click. Everyone knows it’s not an effective measurement, but advertisers don’t want to invest in new measurement tools or try a new approach. Agencies are so scared at the thought of  losing  clients that they don’t really push back, either.

Give a marketer something for free, and they’ll certainly experiment. In the online world, most of the media players give their partners value adds to show them what’s capable on new channels or delivery systems. Mobile advertising and connected TV are two of the most popular right now, especially for the pure-play video ad networks.

Marketers Abandon The No-Longer-Free

Marketers love experimenting with free tools and services, which is why so many beta tests are given away. Product marketing learned a long time ago that you could identify potential customers and improve products by giving them to the people most likely to pay for them in the future. The irony here is that once products suddenly cost money, no one wants to pay for them anymore.

It’s a basic tenet of marketing – build demand for something, watch it grow in popularity and then sell it. Adobe had $2 billion in search spend under its control in 2012, so even 10 percent is a big chunk of change. The shopping recommendations showed advertisers that they were an effective way of driving page traffic and sales, and retailers clearly thought it was worth the investment to buy this ad space.  It’s somewhat amazing that marketers always respond to product marketing 101 by throwing their hands up and complaining.

Again, there’s experimentation with free products because no one will lose their job if the results are poor. There’s an old tenet in advertising – one I won’t repeat – that makes it clear that no one knows how much of his or her advertising actually works. Why then, are CMOs so hesitant to devote a small portion of budget to experimentation? Why are we so determined to hold on to our free products and then complain when a tech company suddenly wants to be paid for something that adds value?

Create A Risk-Taking Atmosphere

The problem won’t necessarily work itself out, but we can avoid all of this by actually encouraging an atmosphere where a few risks are encouraged. Agencies should probably push their clients to experiment more, while CMOs can free up some budget for innovation. And everyone else, for his or her own health and well being, needs to stop the public outcry.

If there was a free tool, one you did not need to pay for, that contributed greatly to your success, then it probably makes sense to invest in that product. You’ll never know how 100 percent of your budget performs, but if one segment is a clear winner, it’s worth the time. That’s basic marketing.

Every few months, someone seems to attack search engine optimization. SEOs are often quick to rise in defense of their profession. I’ve done that plenty myself, in the past. But a barrage of recent cold-call SEO pitches in my inbox even has me hating SEO.

Of course, I don’t really hate SEO. That’s because I know the difference between:

• SEO and search engine spam
• SEO and snake-oil promises

SEO remains the act of gaining free traffic from search engines, and also to me, gaining that traffic in ways that don’t put you at risk of being banned or penalized by those search engines. It’s a perfectly acceptable activity that even the search engines encourage. That’s why Google itself offers a guide to SEO.

White Hat, Black Hat & No Hat SEO

OK, then we have two types of SEO, “white hat” and “black hat.” And it’s black hat SEO alone that cause all the problems, right? Nope. That’s because you’ve also got some supposed “white hats” who don’t violate any rules but also don’t actually provide any SEO value. Let’s call them “no hats.”

The No Hat Pitch

I’m pretty sick of no hat SEOs. That’s because they send me crud like this:

The end of the year is quickly approaching, which means holidays, parties, family, friends, and a lost chance to save money on search engine marketing, Website Designing/Development.

We saved the best promotion for the end of the year! ONLY $50!! HuRRy UP!!

Search Engine Optimization. Love your website? Save initial SEO setup fee and see your website on first page of search engines.

No Black-hat methods.

Take a trial for just $50 and get linked with 100 quality websites having page rank up to 5.

Our team works directly with you to meet our target which is #1 position on search engines. We sincerely believe that the above services will merit with the requirements of your Organization

I’m pretty sure spending $50 will do absolutely nothing for me or anyone using this firm. Maybe they’ll somehow place 100 links on the web, and maybe, just maybe, they really will do it without “black hat” methods.

But those links probably won’t really give my site any benefit. What’s the anchor text going to be? If it’s the same for each page, going up all at the same time, might that trigger some unnatural link warning from Google? And even with low cost labor being used, $50 simply doesn’t cover the necessary time to understand what a site is about, to research other sites and then engage in communication to obtain quality links.

Another No Hat Pitch

Here’s another, sent to me and all the Marketing Land editors through our contact form:

I thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not getting enough organic & social media traffic on your website.

I would like to update you that your website is still not ranked on the top pages of Google SERPs for your popular keywords (Products). Your loss is your competitor’s gain i.e. the traffic which could have generated quality sales for you goes to your competitors as they rank well in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) organically. Reasons:

1. HTML and other on-page errors are present on your website.
2. Low number of internal and external quality links present on your website.
3. Duplicate or low quality contents present in your website without any regular update.
4. Need to update fresh contents on your website and blogs as per the latest Google guideline.
5. Broken Links and Poison words might be present in your website.
6. Social media profile needs to be updated regularly.

Long gone are the days when Google used to give priority to websites of keyword based domains or websites with huge number of links. Now Google counts each and every detail to verify if your website is relevant to the keywords you are promoting for. A single un-wanted link or a duplicate content can lead your website to be penalized by Google.

We are a leading website promotion company providing online promotion, SMO, Reputation Management, Content (both web and promotional content) fixing services to clients.

We have a team of 240+ SEO professional working 24*7. Our team of dedicated Google Analytic and Adwords certified professionals excel in promoting and increasing the visibility of a website in various search engines (including the latest Google Panda and Penguin updates), which will directly help in increasing traffics for your website.

Unlike other SEO companies we do not believe in talking rather we believe in delivering what we promise to our clients. We provide guaranteed services or money back-guarantee to all our clients who consider working with us.

If you are getting rigid by paying a huge amount in PPC then Organic listing by using white hat technique will be definitely a right choice for you. As the rate of conversion is more in organic listing as compared to PPC, eventually it will be an absolute gain for you.

This email just tells you the fraction of things we do, our optimization process involves many other technical factors which can be sent to you on your request. If you would like to know more about our services then please write us back else you can give us a call us in our number below.

The email is crap right from the first sentence, given that the person sending this has no idea what keywords are important to our site.

The itemization of problems isn’t correct, but then again, neither is some of the grammar in the itemization. But some people might believe this, in the way they might believe someone pitching an unnecessary product to remove mold in their home or to prevent a car from developing rust.

If this company really does have a team of certified Google Analytics and Google AdWords people, I’d hope Google would pull those certifications, which mean nothing in terms of guaranteeing SEO results. It’s like saying you have a team of certified carpenters and electricians who are going to try and fix your plumbing problems.

The Terrible Public Faces Of “SEO”

Pitches like these cause some people to hate SEO simply because they’re so so damn annoying. Others end up hating SEO because they’re taken in and waste their money on something they thought was SEO but wasn’t. Either way, it’s not a pretty public face that some associate with SEO.

This leads to what I’ve called crap hat SEO. Crap hat SEO produces the second terrible public face that people see.

Crap Hat SEO

A crap hat SEO doesn’t give a damn about anything. They may be generating hundreds or thousands of pages of nonsensical copy using software, then using more software to comment spam the hell out of sites and pretty much not caring about what type of mess they leave behind, as long as they rank.

And mess it is. Publishers who own those comment spammed sites have to deal with the garbage, and they blame the damn “SEOs” for causing it. You also have some searchers who encounter junk pages that don’t really deliver what they’re looking for eventually realize there’s this “SEO thing” that screwed everything up.

The SEO Reputation Problem

I wish I had an easy solution for these things, but I don’t. What I can say is that SEO is not alone among industries where some bad actors can give the entire profession a terrible reputation.

For example, anyone who’s ever taken out a home loan knows that in the following weeks, you’ll get inundated with “official letters” of all types, stamped “time sensitive” or “important notice” and sounding authoritative by listing your loan balance or lender.

These pitches for insurance policies or refinancing offers are crap, public facing crap that give the insurance and mortgage industries a bad name.

But both industries provide necessary services, and there are good people and companies in those industries. That’s why they continue on, and it’s why SEO continues on despite every few months someone writing an article declaring that it’s going to die.

The Attack & Response Pattern

I pretty much stopped responding to those types of articles back in 2011. After I’d written things like these:

• Worthless Shady Criminals: A Defense Of SEO (2005)
• Yes Virginia, SEO Is Rocket Science – Defending Search Engine Optimization Once Again (2006)
• From My Inbox: More Defense Of SEO (2007)
• A Bad Month For SEO’s Reputation (2008)
• Thoughts On Web Developers, SEO & Reputation Problems (2009)
• SEO Is Here To Stay, It Will Never Die (2010)
• SEO Remains A Viable Marketing Strategy For Anyone (2011)

What else was there to say? And that’s just a sampling. I’d written many more articles on this topic stretching back into the late 1990s.

In the end, I decided to generally ignore articles that are often written by people who really don’t understand what SEO is about. In the past, I might have fired up a 3,000 word response to such things. Now, at best, I might leave a comment.

Someone on Forbes wants to declare SEO will be dead in two years? It’s not worth the effort. Anyone with any real knowledge of the SEO space knows that’s absurd. And anyway, it’s not a real Forbes writer. It’s just one what I call Fake Forbes writers, where that publication that had a name that once meant something now seems to let anyone write anything for page views.

Some designer wants to warn the world against why a good designer is all you need for SEO? Hey, I was heartened to see Bill Slawski and Will Critchlow step up with a response. But how many times do we have to do this? Wasn’t 2004 enough? How about 2009? Does it have to always repeat? Why on earth doesn’t anyone gripe about how the development and design industries continue to fail to get SEO over and over again?

Well, part of it is that bad designers and bad developers aren’t crapping all over the web in ways that are easily seen and pinned to those industries. You encounter a bad web site. You blame the site, or a code error, not the people that created it, who aren’t associated with those annoying emails you get.

Part of it is also due to the fact that plenty of designers and developers do get SEO, get the need to either understand it and use best practices themselves or work with actual professional SEOs who do.

Education Does Help

And part of it is that yes, I suppose the wheel will keep having to go around and around, that education will always be needed. Personally, I’ll likely continue to ignore the flare-ups from places that don’t deserve attention. But in places where education might indeed help, maybe the good fight continues to be worth waging.

Along these lines, it would be nice if the largest industry body associated with SEO, SEMPO, actually seemed to be doing some of that outbound education when these flare-ups happen rather than individual SEOs themselves having to step forward.

Education won’t stop the crap that’s out there, of course. But maybe it will help people understand how to distinguish the crap they assume is SEO from the real SEO that is beneficial. Maybe it will help the professionals who provide quality SEO get more of the respect they deserve.

One thing I know. Bad reputation or not, SEO has continued on despite 15 years now of people declaring it will die. I fully expect it’ll keep going for another 15 years, if not many more.

Related Articles

• Infographic: The Death Of SEO, Failed Predictions Over The Years
• SEO Gets Dissed by CBS TV Series “The Good Wife”
• Importance Of SEO Makes Front Page Of Los Angeles Times
• Survey Says SEO The Single Most Important Marketing Channel For SMBs
• Search Industry Well Represented On Annual List Of Fastest-Growing US Companies; SEO Cited As A Top ROI Tactic
• Google Says SEO Is Not Spam
• What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?
• What Is Search Engine Optimization? The Three Minute SEO Video!
• The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors

I never thought I would write a “Things We Learned” type article because of a dreadful fear that I only recently learned something the rest of the world has known for years.

Similarly, I never thought I would write a “resolutions” or “predictions” article because I am not very good at keeping them or accurately predicting things, thus making the article just a bit more useful than the Jurassic Park VHS box set you got from Santa this year. But, combine all those things into one super list, and we may be on to something. So, with extra year-end bitterness and a dose of optimism for 2013, here goes nothing!

Accomplishments

2012 was a great year for digital and our industry accomplished a ton. Here are four achievements I found particularly great:

1. Digital Keeps Growing. Whether you choose the $37 billion number eMarketer uses as the digital ad spend for 2012 or the 18% growth rate comScore offers, 2012 was a great time to be in digital advertising, plain and simple.

2. A Return To Testing. If nothing else, 2012 seemed to be the year clients got over all the fear caused by the financial collapse (and the imminent doom of the world) and began testing again. Sure, we are still a ways off from our heyday so many years ago, but anytime the overall climate leans toward more liberal testing, better, more innovative opportunities follow – which is great for everyone involved in digital advertising.

3. Nimble Advertising Outlets. Gone are the days of vendors showing you options, then only being able to customize them 1/10^thof a percent. Here are the days of sites like Refinery 29 that work with you to build customized content surrounding your advertising or IntoTheGloss.com that will actually go out, find a model, put your product on said model, do a photoshoot, and write honest content (not fake-sounding advertorial) for you. This isn’t new, but the rigid lines the big, old sites were trying to hold seem to be blurring rather quickly.

4. Innovation. This seems like a boring one; but, at this point, we can more or less target any person, place, behavior, browsing history, shoe size, hair color, favorite food, height, weight, or anything else you want. Ok, some of those may be a stretch, but you get the point. What we can do today compared to what we could do even just two years ago is astounding and something we should all be proud of.

Complaints

As with anything in life, 2012 wasn’t all rainbows and lollipops, either. There are more than a few things to complain about – especially from bitter, old me – but I will limit it to four:

1. Bing Is Still Bing. Remember when we all got so excited about Bing and how we might have a real competitor to Google on our hands? There were all sorts of fancy background images at Bing.com, fancy ad campaigns (remember Scroogled? Don’t worry, most people don’t), and lots of fanfare and excitement.

But here we are, years into this Bing thing, and we are still waiting for a true competitor to Google. Yes, there has been some improvement (and I am super thankful for it), but most of it is simply trying to catch up to what Google already has. I am not asking for a revolution of search marketing; I just want a legitimate contender to keep Google from resting on its laurels. Heck, I would even be happy if the Bing desktop tool worked on Macs at this point.

2. Google’s Algorithm & Shopping Changes. The algorithm change was supposed to clean up natural results – I get that, and I love it. But I now know far less about the people coming to my site through natural than I ever have before, due to the lack of tracking. Maybe that was Google’s goal the whole time, but as a marketer, I hate it.

Couple that with a Google Base/Froogle/Shopping change to a paid model, and it was like a double whammy. Now that I think of it, maybe Bing does have a few things going for it.

3. Paralysis By Analysis. This is sort of inherent to our line of work, but as we get more data, clients require more analysis. The problem is that in most cases, clients want 100% clear info that gives the exact direction they should go in – and in most cases, we can only get to 95%, so we end up losing time and money.

I won’t give the old “you hold no other channel to this type of scrutiny” argument, but… yeah… digital is the only channel scrutinized to this extent and it slows progress.

4. Search Agencies Pretending To Be Digital Agencies. I wrote a long tirade on this last month – which you can read here – so I will spare you the details, but in short: either be a search agency and specialize in it or be a digital agency and be strong in more than just search. End of story.

Predictions

This is the fun part of the article where I get to make predictions for the industry as a whole (sort of) that no one will hold me accountable for because they will all be long forgotten by the time they all end up being wrong.

1. RTB Media Will Take Over. Real Time Bidded media is growing at an extremely quick rate and seems to be a better option than using a network in many cases. I predict in 2013, RTB media will become the biggest chunk of display spending.

2. Direct Response & Brand Will Become One. So, maybe this is more of a dream/hope than a prediction, but if ever there was a year for it, it’s 2013. Combining brand and direct response is a true 1+1=3 scenario – now if only clients and agencies would see that, too.

3. Extinction Of PPT Decks That Are Glorified Reports. Does anyone really need another poorly-colored chart showing the trend of CPCs over the course of 18 months in poorly designed slide format? 2013 is the year Microsoft releases an update to Office, preventing agencies and clients alike from building these slides.

4. English Language Change. The phrases “dovetail, low-hanging fruit, ecosystem (when referencing advertising), shopportunity, haircut (when referencing pricing), and cast a wider net” will be stricken from the English language. If Congress can get just this one thing done, I will forgive all their other missteps.

And, if there is one resolution I could add on top, it would be to be more optimistic.

2012 was a great year for digital from almost all angles, and while dealing with some of the frustrating little nuances that come with working in the industry can make one a bit bitter, we are still in the fastest growing, most innovative, and arguably, most fun sector of advertising that exists. And that is something we should all be celebrating.

Stock image used by permission of Shutterstock.