The morning keynote started off with a laugh when the moderator and panelists walked onstage literally wearing big wigs (photos with and without wigs). Chris Sherman moderated, and Greg Boser, Jack Menzel (Google), Sara Holoubek, Julie Sun (MTV), Kristine Segrist (Outrider) and Andrew Goodman were the panelists. Summary of main points:
Recession: Every marketing dollar is more accountable now; there’s a more rigorous tracking of the money spent and measuring all results, even offline. For agencies, the sales cycle for gaining new clients is longer. Jack from Google reported that search volume continues to grow even during the recession – the audience is still there.
Although budgets are moving from traditional media to digital, it’s not a dollar to dollar transition – overall budgets are lower. And traditional media is not going away, it’s just morphing. It’s often driving people online to continue interaction and engagement, such as TV commercials asking viewers to follow them on Twitter.
Social Media: Search and social are interrelated in a healthy and exciting way. Marketers can use search insights to benefit social, such as watching what people are searching for in order to determine which conversations to follow on social media or what content they should be creating. Both are very malleable and fast-moving media, so if there’s a breaking issue, companies can jump on it fast through search and social.
It’s hard for companies to know where social fits internally, since it’s a marketing vehicle as well as a customer service vehicle, etc. Organic search has become skewed toward big brands (since the engines prefer older, more established sites), but there’s no such bias in social media, where even small companies can thrive (and often do more so than the big guys).
Twitter was described by one panelist as the “CB radio of the 21st century” and by another as “a combination of RSS feeds and email marketing on steroids.”
Searcher Privacy: Chris cited a recent survey stating that 60% of respondents are concerned about online privacy issues. But are they really? It’s one thing to state that you’re upset about something that it seems like you should be upset about, but in reality, marketers tracking online behavior doesn’t seem to affect most people’s daily lives, and most people don’t seem to know or care about it. It was pointed out that the next generation in particular is used to having all kinds of information published online, so this is really more of an “old people’s” debate. Still, it’s important to give users absolute control over information that they allow to be collected and be transparent about what that data is used for.
Personalization is less creepy when marketers give users exactly what they’re searching for. As an industry, we should control the language more and talk about “tailored” advertising rather than “targeted.” The biggest concerns are with display (banner-type) advertising and remarketing (for example, someone searches for a widget on Google and the next day is shown a banner ad about Acme Widgets).
It’s ironic that of all the companies and media collecting consumer data, search is getting the most scrutiny. Credit card companies know a lot more about your behavior, marketers can buy voter registration data and know your political party and when you voted, and if you buy from a catalog once you’ll receive that catalog the rest of your life.
Bing/Yahoo deal: Some think it will be good to have two main search engines, as Bing/Yahoo will be able to challenge Google more. It’ll be a slow transition over the next 24 months – hopefully they’ll keep the best of Microsoft’s technology and Yahoo’s sales force. Search is far from solved. We’re still crying for a game-changing challenger to enter the market that will stand everything on its head. People are starting to search across different channels (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) – any repository of information is a searchable database.
Crystal Ball (what will we be talking about in 5 years?): The importance of trusted peer networks (social media) will continue to increase and will be codified into apps. Online will become more like traditional as video and images become more integrated into search results.
Attribution (deciding which touchpoint/media/campaign gets credit for an online conversion or sale) will become more complex and the “last click” attribution will be dead. (Most analytics software today gives the last click credit for the online lead or sale - take someone who ran a search and came to a site, and then later saw a banner ad and visited again and converted – the banner ad would get credit for that rather than the search.)
One panelist can’t wait for the keyboard to disappear – voice recognition and no more search results pages full of blue text links. Search engines will get better at determining searcher intent and serving up relevant results really quickly…but people will still have angst and not be satisfied with their performance. There will be a complete integration of data streams so you can manage all your data and social media in one central location – this may be Google Wave or something like it.
