Have you ever played the what if game? What if I won the lottery? What if there was a phone that did my laundry? What if we could effectively merge television and the internet? That last what if is a dream that many companies have strived for (and many geeks long for), but Google is making a good stab at it right now.

Although the information about Google TV is pretty new, we do know a few things about it. If you are interested in a basic FAQ relating to the topic, then I suggest reading Greg Sterling’s article “FAQ: What We Know So Far About Google TV”. The biggest questions are what is it and when will we see it? And Sterling answers that concisely with “an open platform that unites TV programming and the internet. It supports Flash and makes the full internet available…on TVs.” The general consensus seems to be that Google TV will be available in the fall of 2010.

Some of the bigger questions for those in the online marketing sector are: will it replace cable TV? and will there be advertising? and will there be tracking like the online sites? Like with any new product, we will have to wait to see how successful it will be. So no one can predict whether or not it will replace cable TV. I know I would bet that Google if planning and hoping that its long-term success will include being a serious contender for cable. However, we do know that there will be advertising and that Google TV include “tracking and data collection, partly for personalization and partly for ad ROI accountability and targeting” although they are also offering an “incognito” option as well.

Knowing that advertising and tracking will be a part of this new initiative for Google means that we are already thinking about search and how this will fit into our marketing methods for online search. As Chris Crum points out, for now we can only focus on a few concerns when preparing for Google TV:

- Optimize your video content, both by making the quality of your video top notch and by ensuring that your videos come up in search results for Google and YouTube.
- Make sure your site looks good on big screen TVs.
- Ensure that your search results are top-notch for Google. “If you thought Google had a great deal of market share before, imagine how many more searches Google would get from the TV set, if this thing really takes off.”
- If you haven’t begun to incorporate Android apps into your marketing plan, now is the time, as Android apps will be accessible through Google TV.

Although most of this is a wait and see game at this point, there are some angles to consider and preparations we can make for Google TV.

I’ve been poking around, looking at different news items on Google and Bing, perusing new Android applications, checking out whether or not people say “Bing It”, and even reading an article about applying Google analytics to your site. It’s all fascinating stuff, and yet I found it a little bit hard to focus on any one item today. We all have those days, so I am not that worried about it. But in my meandering on the internet, I came across a website that focuses on dealing with clutter. It occurs to me that in marketing your business there can be clutter too. A fair bit of it, if you try every new aspect of online marketing you can find. So it is fair to talk about uncluttering your online marketing efforts too.

Some of these tactics are going to seem like such simple ideas, and you will probably think “of course”. That’s fine with me. Remember the last time you walked around all day thinking that you’d forgotten something? When you remembered it, I would bet you had that “of course” moment then too.

First, let’s talk about your audience. Who do you want to sell your goods and services to? If your business is aimed at selling to teenagers, then social media will be your best choice to access them. Do your research and find out where your audience spends their online time. Then market to that area, be it Twitter, Facebook, websites, blogs, or even forums.

Once you’ve found your audience, speak their language. If you are selling golf equipment to the retiree set, it seems unlikely that you’ll find them on Twitter. Nor will you want to use the shorthand that is used by today’s teen set. I can guarantee you that my 67 year old uncle has no idea what my 17 year old cousin is texting on her phone, so slogans and other marketing communications need to be appropriate to your audience. Well written websites, perhaps even with a well written blog that focuses on golf tips, are much more likely to appeal to my retired, golfing uncle. Speak to your audience in terms they understand.

Once you’ve found your audience and are speaking to them in terms that they understand, make a list of topics to cover to invite them in and pique their interest. Think about your online marketing as a trail of breadcrumbs to your business: the topics you cover must be relevant, whether they are covered through a blog, PPC advertising, or social media.

How is thinking about your audience, finding them online, and speaking to them in their language uncluttering your online marketing efforts, you ask. Once you know who you are talking to, how to talk to them, and where to talk to them, you eliminate all distractions and make your efforts simpler.

Almost every profession and niche market has its own myths. Certainly, not all police officers fill up on donuts and not all kindergarten teachers are covered in glitter glue. The same is true of SEO: there are myths and misunderstandings galore. Stephan Spencer has had his hands full the last little while, writing articles about just these myths with “”36 SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To” and “36 More SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To”. Although I would love to talk about all 72 of the myths that Spencer has uncovered, I’m just going to cover a few of them.

So, here are a few SEO myths and the correct information to go with them:

• Having an XML Sitemap will boost your Google rankings. Google uses sitemaps files for discovery and potentially as canonicalization hints, if a site has duplicate content. However, sitemaps do not give a URL a boost on Google rankings.
• Since the advent of personalization, there is no such thing as being ranked #1 anymore because everyone sees different results. Yes, Google does personalize search results based on the user’s search history, but the differences between personalized results and non-personalized results are minor. Check for yourself by re-running your query — the second time adding &pws=0 to the end of Google SERP URL — and observing the results.
• SEO is a black art. This one made me actually laugh. Because, I imagined how much more interesting my life would be if it was as Spencer said, “it’s done, usually in a dark room, by some rogue SEO consultant, without requiring the involvement of the client/rest of the company. If SEO were like that, our lives would read like spy novels.” SEO fun, interesting and challenging, but nothing that mysterious, for sure.
• SEO is a one-time activity you complete and are then done with. There would be no need for me to write this blog at all, if that were the case, but many people and companies do believe this one. SEO is ongoing. Website development is ongoing. Your business changes and grows, so your website and SEO tactics should too.
• SEO is a subset of Social Media. Since we talk about social media and other tactics for marketing regularly, I wanted to broach this one. SEO is it’s own animal with its own concerns. While social media can also grow your business and provide linking for SEO purposes , SEO is not a subordinate to social media. They work in tandem.
• It’s either SEO or PPC. This is just not true. Both of these avenues can both be employed in your marketing plan.

There are a lot of myths about who is the best choice for SEO services, from IT departments to a person with one year’s experience to someone overseas in a faceless company. Remember that you get what you pay for and that a comprehensive marketing plan for your company, with experienced and knowledgeable people working with your business to create the best results will yield the most fruit.

Back in the day when businesses first decided to tap into the explosive growth in social media sites for marketing purposes, most efforts failed miserably. One of the many problems was that staid old businesses failed to recognize one of the core concepts driving social media participation – it’s fun! Most businesses have a hard time thinking “fun”; preferring instead to think “money.”

In addition, businesses failed to understand another core concept – involvement and participation. Social media enthusiasts aren’t interested in being “told” things. They think they have something to say as well and want the chance to contribute and participate in a two-way conversation.

Businesses have begun to crack the social media code and companies like Dell and Starbucks report generating millions of dollars in revenue from their social media marketing campaigns. They and others like them have achieved success by recognizing that social media sites are communities and to benefit from the community you must first join it by contributing with something of value and inviting the participation of others.

If your business has reached the level of being a recognized and valued member of the community here are two relatively simple things you can do to excite and involve others – Contests and Discounts

Contests

There’s nothing more fun and exciting than a challenging contest that allows members of the community to get involved and compete with each other, having a good deal of fun along the way. You’ll need a little creativity to come up with something interesting, involving, and exciting, but here are a few thoughts about things to include.

First, keeping the contest on the site opens the possibility of going viral. For example, suppose contestants are asked to post their answer to a question like “Why I love (fill in one of your products); or “Ten ways I use (fill in one of your products)”. The winner is determined by the number of comments received. In concept this contest is simple and elegant and potentially very viral.

Although you’ll have to come up with an interesting prize, a contest that goes viral can be its own reward. People feel like winners because they have a good time joining in and following the contest. There are endless variations on the kinds of questions you can pose for the contest. For complex products you might want to use something like “5 Things I’d like to see added to (fill in one of your products).” With a contest like this you could involve some of your own employees as judges, with the contest winner being determined partly by the highest number of comments received from the community and party by judges’ scores.

Everyone likes to get a special break on things, especially when the discount or special offer they get is not open to everyone – only to those members of a select group. Discounts not only reward visitors for being a part of the community, they also drive sales!

Link building can seem like a long process. With a myriad of articles and books on the subject, it can feel like the research alone takes forever, let alone actually going through the process. Some online marketing gurus specialize in just this aspect of the business and they guide us through the process and provide much-needed shortcuts. Garrett French, who wrote the article “How to Build Links Faster: 5 Tips for Faster Link Qualification”, is one of those gurus.

French’s 5 suggested tips for faster link qualification are as follows:

1. Align link prospecting methods with linkable assets: your linkable assets need to line up with your link prospecting methods, so that they are pre-qualified as link prospects. Doing this will shortening the time it takes to decide whether or not to add them to what French calls your “outreach list”.
2. Check the tool-based URL quality scores: there are link prospect sources, such as Linkscape and MajesticSEO, which provide a scoring method that estimates the value or trust that given pages have earned. This information allows you to weed through your prospects and focus on the ones that give the best returns. French recommends saving it all though, as “today’s trash could be tomorrow’s treasure when you create and launch new linkable assets!”
3. Count URL, hostname occurrences in SERPs and competitor backlinks: “The number of times a URL and/or hostname appears can be a vital signal of quality. If you’re using queries for your link prospecting, we highly recommend running them through the URL and Hostname Counter Tool and the process outlined in Analyzing SERP Dominators For Link Opportunities. If you use link building queries in place of your targeted SEO keywords, you will more-quickly discover larger numbers of qualified prospects.” The key to this approach is focusing on a single linkable asset and working through each one. This is not a time for multi-tasking.
4. Remove duplicate hostname occurrences from big lists: use the “Remove URLs with Duplicate Hosts” tool to ensure a concise list of hostnames. This way you will get the top URLs from each website, rather than an overload of the same URLs over and over again. Think of this as your big weeding out stage.
5. Make quicker visits to each URL for final decision making: the first steps have been about removing the excess and getting a list of quality URLs. Now the tedious part of qualifying each URL by hand comes in. There are a few steps that can make it faster, including disabling the imaged in your browses, using something like the “URL Reviewer” to open a list of URLs in new tabs in your browser, and then running through them individually.

Once you’ve built your list of links, remember to also make a list of prospects that you don’t want, so you can avoid those URLs in the future. Link building is still not an instant process, but following these tips will help streamline it and make it a little less overwhelming.

Even a year ago, if you had talked about searching on a blog or in an SEO article, you’d have been talking about searching on Google or Yahoo or one of their competitors. Search for information was almost exclusively in the domain of search engines and linking for SEO purposes was done to increase your visibility on those search engines. These days, searching and linking have become more and more prominent on social networking sites, like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook, and the acknowledgement of this change is becoming apparent through rankings on Google, which are taking some of these social networking links into consideration. Discussions of these features, both as stand alone features and as part of the bigger picture seem to be cropping up all over the place.

Using Facebook likes and Twitter retweets to build awareness of your business will not take the place of traditional linking entirely, but it can be another avenue to explore for SEO purposes. So it is advisable for us to remember to keep an eye on the progress of these features and the link between social media and search. I was especially interested in a discussion between WebProNews and Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz about this issue:

LINK:

More WebProNews Videos

Chris Crum sums it all up succinctly by saying that “the way people are obtaining information online is diversifying…Google’s real competition isn’t coming from other search engines. It’s coming from different avenues of information access.” With social networking playing a far greater role in linking and information in general, it is important to keep in mind that in all of your business endeavours, including SEO, you have to maintain and grow your social connections. While word of mouth was the best advertising for pre-internet business endeavours, social media is filling that spot handily these days. It’s the electronic version of word of mouth! Acquiring likes for your Facebook page, retweets on Twitter and links to get the attention of Google’s search parameters are all about the same thing: exposing your business to customers and potential customers.

No matter what your product or service, you have to remember your audience and focus on their needs first. If you are marketing to an audience of 10 year old American girls, you will need to have a completely different approach (from language to usage to packaging) than if you are marketing your products to 45 year old Australian men. This is true of print and television marketing, so we need to keep in mind that when promoting social marketing not every group will find the same features and functions appealing.

This is exactly the case with social media in Europe. Although on this side of the pond, we North Americans tend to think that our way of approaching and using social media is the only way it is done, those who create the programs we use for it need to be aware that Europeans do it a bit differently. Bas van den Beld writes about just this issue in his article “How Europeans Engage With Social Media”.

Although Europeans are online and do use social media, they “are using social media in very practical way, they are looking for news updates, to do research before shopping or for their jobs, and to find “how-tos.” The actual “social element”—staying in touch with friends online—is only the third most popular activity (behind search and email) when looking at what Europeans are doing online.” And although Europeans do use sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn, they have a definite preference for locally grown social media applications.

And, broken down country by country, Europeans have different tastes and needs for their online experiences. While the UK, Russia, and Spain are the most active in the social media scene, Italy uses social media for education purposes, and both the UK and Germany use it mostly for research. Germany and France are the least active social media users in Europe.

Bas van den Beld points out that when attempting to make inroads into European markets, social media creators need to keep the following points in mind:
- Europeans like to research, so make sure they can find that information they are looking for, and use searching to funnel traffic to your social media efforts.
- It might initially be difficult to get Europeans to share, but if you get them involved they will.
- Create social applications that provide a benefit and be there with a purpose; Europeans want to see a reason for committing their time.
- Give Europeans relevant news and information.
- Europeans like to see European initiatives, so try sponsoring local efforts.
- And finally, don’t think every European is the same—we’re all different and you need to satisfy our different needs to be successful.