Yesterday, I upped the ante in my campaign to get the SEO Rapper to battle me on stage at a trade show with the video call-out below.

On Wednesday, I’ll keep after him in my Search Insider column and suggest the upcoming Search Insider Summit in Florida as the venue.

Let’s see if Chuck bites or if he’s all bark.

Update: see the video at the bottom of the post… Chuck bit… hard!

Lyrics:

Wassup, how ya doin’, it’s the Lyrical G,
Masquerading as the PPC MC.

Bursting on the scene to battle SEO.
Reppin’ paid search with my smooth flow.

See SEO can land your brand in the crapper.
Just ask JC Penney or the SEO Rapper.

Maybe he could help ’em get links honestly.
But I can manage reputation with PPC.

Get ’em an instant listing right there on the side.
‘Til they can fix their organic and stem the tide.

See PPC’s the one with instant ROI.
And I’m the one rapper that is supa supa fly.

So I’m throwing down the challenge, right here, right now.
SEO or PPC, which one is the cash cow.

Big Chuck, if you’re watching, I’m coming for you.
PPC’s my game over at Kenshoo.

I want to battle at the next trade show.
Just you, me and a mic, c’mon dude, let’s go!

Cash Money Baby!

Today’s Montreal Gazette has a great piece exploring the “Risky Business of Google.” I shared a wide range of opinions and sound bytes with Jason Magder as he prepared this column. Here are some of the ones he used:

“Many of the new initiatives that Google launches can still somehow be tied backed to monetization from search advertising.”

“With the social network movement, people are now finding new ways to get information online that doesn’t require Googling it.”

“Goldman said he believes there is no limit to Google’s growth. He believes the company will figure out how to bring a social context to searches, and can have success in virtually every product it develops. He sees the company as becoming an all-encompassing life tool, that will power everything from televisions to computers, phones and cars.”

“Google has the advantage of having 5 million advertisers behind it, so it can go into pretty much any market it wants and find a way to monetize it with its slew of advertisers.”

To balance my seemingly eternal optimism, Magder includes some points-of-view that are a little more skeptical about Google’s future.

“If they lose relevancy, they’ll lose everything.” — Christian Russell, Dangerous Tactics.

“The company has spread itself too thin.”  — Ian Lurie, Portent Interactive.

“Google’s biggest problem is that it has consistently failed to produce any new lines of business apart from keyword-related advertising, which still produces over 90 per cent of its income.” — Matthew Ingram, GigaOm

“Maybe they can’t innovate anymore. It takes them meetings and processes to make decisions. Things don’t get launched as quickly.” — Fred Wilson, venture capitalist.

“They also tried to get into social networking and failed, so they’re not impregnable,” Ken Auletta, Googled.

There’s definitely no question that Google will face increasingly bigger challenges in the coming years — from Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and itself as it grows bigger still. For what it’s worth I think Google’s future will bring new ventures that are at times risky (as in the imminent launch of a new social network), at times frisky (as in the frivolous pursuit of self-driving cars), and at times briskly (as in the pace of innovation and new product releases).

Let’s just hope we never see Larry or Sergey emulating Risky Business too closely…

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In August of 2008, I wrote a column titled, “If I Were Running Google.”

Two weeks ago, I revisited that column to see what came of my ideas.

Yesterday, I wrote a new column offering 5 things I’d do If I Were Google CEO.

We’ll see if Larry Page takes me up on any of these. My guess is he’s too busy running Google right now to do much reading.

If you can spare a few minutes, though, I suggest queuing up this track as background music. And this song would work too if you added a few zeros.

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