Robert Scoble:

The writing is on the wall. Small business marketing is moving away from focusing on SEO. Why do I say that? Because, well, Google and Bing are changing the rules so often and are getting so good at figuring out the real businesses that deserve to be on pages. Search Half Moon Bay Sushi and you get real answers from sites that didn’t focus on SEO. Yeah, there are exceptions, but they are increasingly getting rare.

With other searches, like one for Tiger Woods, you’ll get a page filled with stuff that SEO just doesn’t affect much anymore. In the middle of that page is a real time box that brings items from Twitter and Google News. It no longer is good enough to be just an SEO expert to get items onto pages like these. You’ve gotta be great at creating content that gets Google’s algorithms to trust it enough to shove it onto these new hybrid pages.

But there’s something deeper going on. Google has built systems that aren’t Page Rank controlled anymore and are giving far better analytics to small businesses than they did a year ago. They know a LOT more about your behavior now other than you clicked on a link, even to the extent that they know whether you called that business or bought something and THAT is changing the skills SEO/SEM types need to have.

No longer is it about optimizing search engine results and the new breed is going beyond just search engines to provide holistic systems that find and track customers not only on search engines like Google and Bing, but on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

I see the same thing.  I do very little SEO/SEM work on my employer's blog or main website, but our search performance has skyrocketed over the past year.

Why?

As near as I can tell, consistent content creation.  As a company that believes in engaging its community and customers, we try to post something to that blog every weekday, and we’ve done a pretty good job of it all year.  No author of that blog writes for keyword karma: we simply post content that we think will be useful or interesting to our customers, prospects and industry colleagues.  The rest just happens, and I attribute that to consistency.

Of course, our company has aircover from its Twitter and Facebook activity too, and as the new real-time web emerges, new content developed through these channels will factor into search performance.  Early this year, I was telling people how consistent, quality tweeting was important to draw new followers through Twitter’s official search engine.  Now, as 2010 approaches and social content is being integrated into Google and Bing search results, the importance simply cannot be overstated.

The ground is shifting away from static SEO keyword saturation and more towards behavior-driven merit systems.  Google and Bing are getting smarter at weeding out SEO farming sites (save a few examples, like appliance searches), and during 2010 I think we’ll see the semantic web in the sense that search engines will understand intent much better than they do now.  That’s not to say the system won’t be gamed anymore, but increasingly new content, interaction and effort will be rewarded rather than metadata and keyword concentrations on business websites.

So.  All that said, what’s the real value of intelligent, consistent social media activity for business?  If it wasn’t massive before, it is now.

(crosspost)

Every year, Michigan’s Oakland County is home to the Woodward Dream Cruise, a weekend-long celebration of muscle cars of all stripes.  If you have even a passing interest in performance cars and live in Michigan, you will be doing yourself a great disservice by not making your way down to Woodward Avenue.

This year’s Dream Cruise is officially on August 15, but anyone who is familiar with the Dream Cruise knows that the muscleheads start coming out several weeks beforehand.  And, as you might imagine, the billboards along Woodward are purchased and changed in anticipation of the 1-million-plus visitors the Dream Cruise draws.

Here are this year’s billboards that will be lining Woodward.  As you can see, GM is going all in with some excellent spots.  As a guy who believes every car should have 400 HP and at least one turbo, this is advertising at its finest.

Usually corporate surveys piss me off. They're self-serving, boring and exhibit a complete disrespect for the survey-taker's time. So when I saw The Deck's readership survey, I pretty much scoffed. "Sure, I'll take your shitty little survey, but mainly because I dig Field Note journals, and I see they're a possible prize." Full stop: I was wrong. Here's a clever example of a survey done right. Among the sample questions:

Are you one of those people who thinks you're right all the time, and that if everybody would just listen to you things would be a whole lot better?

And

If you were to become romantically involved with a typeface, which one would it be?

And

Where are you, emotionally speaking?

There's even a trigonometry question that I did my best to solve, but probably buggered to high hell.

AppleInsider reports that Microsoft, fed up with Apple's "Get a Mac" campaign, is planning a major anti-Apple advertising blitz to help build the image of Vista, Redmond's flagship OS. This is amusing on several levels, not the least of which is the fact that a push like this is roughly a year late. And Vista has turned out to be a fairly nauseating disaster and users are begging for XP to hang around. And Microsoft has actually created a Vista SKU that's a downgrade license to XP but can still be tallied as a Vista sale. Aside from those, yes, Vista's woes are all about insufficient advertising. When in doubt, blame marketing. Is this what happens when Bill is gone? Some key quips from the AI article:

The company's VP of Vista marketing, Brad Brooks, told attendees at a Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference on Tuesday that the next few months will see a major advertising push that promises to "free the people" through what Vista has to offer and that Microsoft wouldn't take Apple's repeated attacks on Vista reliability without a fight.

Okay Brad. Free the people? Really? Does anyone know what that even means? And what exactly prompted you to start fighting back on Vista's behalf a year into reams of bad press and unprecedented Mac marketshare/mindshare gains? The people have been freed, and they're making personal technology choices that don't involve Microsoft. Hate to say this, but I think it's pretty clear Vista's going down without much of a fight. If it weren't, you wouldn't have so much talk about Windows 7 already.

"You thought the sleeping giant was still sleeping, well we woke it up and it's time to take our message forward," Brooks warns Apple. "There's a conversation going on in the marketplace today and it's just plain awful. We've got to get back on the front foot."

My god. Let's see, you have a tired Pearl Harbor cliche, some management horseshit about 'taking a message forward,' a trendy reference to the modern word-of-mouth marketplace where companies don't get to tell us what to think about their products anymore, and finally some more meaningless management speak. Hey Apple, are you listening? Are you? Well we're sick of your shit! We're sick of Justin Long and John Hodgman! We are gonna place ads, boy, and this here sleeping giant who is, um, no longer sleeping is going to grab a quick coffee and take our message forward! We're going to take it forward right up your ass!

He acknowledges, however, that Vista's rough launch has cost the company significant ground and that the ads will as much be about damage control as touting the brand. In a rare glimpse into Microsoft's own view of the launch, Brooks recognizes that Vista "broke a lot of things" and triggered "a lot of pain" in partners trying to support the newer Windows edition.

Oh, absolutely. I think this is a stellar approach. An OS with an admittedly 'rough start' that 'broke a lot of things' and 'caused a lot of pain' will yield an ad campaign that will be about 'damage control' and 'making up lost ground.' Nothing like 'touting your brand' when you're already a few miles underwater. I have an idea, Microsoft. Hear me out. Instead of announcing that you're going to do something, how about you just do it and dispense with the saber-rattling? Because honestly, at this point along the Vista adoption curve, nobody worth his salt is taking you seriously.

The greed of mobile phone companies and their willingness to fuck their customers at every turn never ceases to amaze me.  Somewhere, up on high in some boardroom, a bunch of clueless idiots come up with these plans, laugh their bloated laughs, and think about their bonuses. Know what?  Fuck you.  Take a swim in some seriously hardcore negative word-of-mouth. Fuck You Rogers: An Online Petition also Check out the signatures and comments Update: behold the beautiful power of word-of-mouth.  Go interwebs. (via DF)

Not only do the Germans make fine cars, but they also have clever commercials nailed.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mTLO2F_ERY]

Beats the hell out of this overplayed, let's-ruin-the-NHL-playoffs-on-TV tripe, yes?

(via clusterflock)

I think the suits fucked this one up: FedEx will record a $700M charge to drop the name Kinko's from its FedEx Kinko's locations.

The non-cash charge of $2.22 a share will be taken in the fiscal fourth quarter, which ended on May 31, FedEx said today in a statement. The cost, linked to use of the Kinko's name and goodwill from the unit's 2004 acquisition, will be $891 million before taxes, the Memphis, Tennessee-based company said.

The new name is FedEx Office, which isn't entirely bad.  But my question is this: did the Kinko's brand -- which is imminently recognizable, and I mean hugely, galactically recognizable  -- really detract from the overall image/brand identification of FedEx's retail locations?

$700M worth of detraction?

I know most of the analyst wonks out there are applauding this move, but I don't get it.  It does solidify the FedEx brand and removes multibrand dilution, but $700M is a lot of coin for a rebrand that wasn't necessary.

It'll be interesting to see what FedEx does in the wake of the rebrand to better focus on backoffice services for small businesses.

(thx Jim)

I've never before seen such an embarrassing internal marketing video.  It's nearly impossible to get much worse than this, and if you didn't know better, you'd swear it's a bad YouTube joke.

It's not.  It's real, and supposed to be clever.

Microsoft marketing is officially dead.  Notice all the suits in the video: that's Microsoft's remaining stronghold.  That's their lifeblood, and here's your tacit admission of such.  Problem is, this is so stupidly campy that it won't resonate with anyone, let alone enterprises or MS enterprise sales reps.

The video is so bad that I refuse to embed it.  If you want to see it for yourself, see here and keep the bad juju away from me.