Google is doing what it does best again – diving into an area of Internet services that it hasn’t yet touched, and doing it big while challenging MSN’s, Yahoo’s, and AOL’s market share, and even Skype in online telephony. Google Talk, recently launched, offers a variety of online communication tools, including instant messaging, which includes an easy way to switch to voice or video chat, a voicemail system for unavailable contacts, unlimited file transfer with no bandwidth restrictions, and the ability to chat with a limited number of other IM clients, among other features.

Unlike any of the competitors, Google is building a universal communications system that touches all online communication markets, and is currently in beta. They’re also giving away the service for free … sort of. By offering Google Talk, Google is hoping to increase the amount of Gmail users, and Google users overall, and thus its ad revenue. As of now, the chat window itself is not displaying ads, but it’s not a stretch to assume Google will take advantage of this space in the future and find creative ways to leverage their new offering.

Anyone who uses Gmail is familiar with the way Google serves ads – by picking up keywords in the text of emails and serving related ads alongside the email screen. Whether they can use similar technology to “read” phone messages will be interesting to discover, though such a technology may raise questions about privacy; how Google handles ad placement for this service may be a bit trickier than the system it uses for email. There is no question, however, that Google’s motivation for providing this service is to increase their revenue along with their online market share. The tag line for the offering is “They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free.”  And while the service is free to users, perhaps it will be at the expense of marketers.

Article by Josh Spiegel

Integrating media by defining objectives is not news; matter of fact, everyone on a conceptual level seems to get it. But the question seems to be when and how do you build a productive integrated strategy. It sounds great on paper, but for the time and resources needed for a successful integrated search strategy, execution is fundamentally critical and brands need a paradigm shift regarding how marketing works in the 21st century. To simplify and not get into case studies or tactical quagmires, let’s break our strategic recipe into three distinct buckets that, essentially, lead to a successful integrated strategy.

Objective Reach: Traditional media can be utilized as an awesome strategy to reach eyes. Display advertising is based on a reach (impression-based) model. The whole point to Reach tactics is to display your brand message/products to as many eyes as possible.

Objective Engage: Engagement strategy is the most feared tactic brands pursue, and often a brand will omit an engagement tactic from fear of losing control. Social Media/Networking is the modern day engagement mechanism. Utilizing them creates a brand personality; without engagement you are a faceless entity behind a logo.

Objective Convert: The secret is not thinking a radio spot, display ad, or social profile are your sole conversion tactics – they aren’t. They help build the brand associations and relationship to keywords that attribution assigns as ‘pre-click converters.’ As your prospect navigates through the search engines they utilize keywords associated to your search targeting via PPC and SEO. Optimizing effectively on the engines creates additional touch points, which are heightened because of brand association your reach and engagement objectives accomplished.

Connecting the Dots
Whether it is pursuing common Web 2.0 tactics, or moving into the 3.0 era of optimizing based on vertical search, lack of attribution and proper objective-based integration of strategy have put a lot of marketers behind the curve. According to Microsoft’s Atlas Institute, “typically, between 93-95% of audience engagements with online advertising receive no credit at all when advertisers review campaign ROI.”

All the while there is plenty of data that supports how a true integrated approach is the power of any marketing initiative. Even if you simply apply attribution aspects between PPC and SEO, you always see how the two play hand in hand, and in some cases marketers have reported up to 9x the amount of conversions. According to ComScore, in Q4 2008 brand searches increased, illustrating these connections by testing users exposed to display ads. The report found a lift of 52% for brand-related traffic after week one, and beyond this first exposure they reported a “latent branding effect” that concluded the month with a lift of 27% in conversions online, and offline converts had a lift of 17%. Rachel Andersen, in a recent post on SEJ summed up the conclusion the best by saying, “effectively illustrating these connections will soften CFOs, empower marketers and fuel the search marketing industry on a new level.”

Article by Gabe Gayhart