In yesterday’s MediaPost Search Insider column (+10 and -10 for Google +1), I shared 10 things I love and 10 things I hate about Google +1. It just so happens that the lists contained the same 10 things. Behold the definition of a love/hate relationship!

In Chapter 19 (Make Your Company a Great Story), I cover all of Google’s April Fools Day gags over the years and the amazing amount of free press they drum up (not to mention, employee engagement). Yesterday, Google outdid itself with no less than 16 jokes. Matt McGree has a great roundup for Search Engine Land (my personal favorite is Chromercise).

In an effort to practice what I preach in the book and make Kenshoo a great story, we announced the release of a “cloudvertizing” platform. I think there are more puns in the press release than the 343 pages of my book combined! This is the very definition of “fluff” news…

Just got word that the book won the Gold medal in the “Advertising/Marketing/PR/Event Planning” category from the Axiom Business Book Awards. No cash prize but will be receiving one of these fancy medals.

Very honored and appreciative but seems like a miss that these guys don’t give out online badges for winners to display on their websites. As covered in chapter 7 (Act Like Content) this is a great opportunity to build up link juice by offering something of value that people would be happy to put on their sites along with a link to the authoritative domain.

The Ultimate SEO PPC Rap Battle continues and it looks like we’re a lock to do this live at the next Search Insider Summit in Captiva. Giddyup!

Lyrics below.

Update: Chuck came back strong… see the bottom of this post for his response.

Alright stop whatcha doin’
Cuz I’m about to ruin
The rapper known as Mo Serious.
See he came after me
The PPC MC
With some rhymes that were quite delirious.
Talkin’ bout I’m on drugs and other crazy things.
The only drug I’m on is Charlie Sheen.
Winning!
Yeah, I may be a diva but I earned that right.
I got more screaming fans than those dudes on Twilight.
Maybe I should quit rapping and stick to writing books,
But I can aways get by on these good looks.
You’re like the cat from Jersey Shore that nobody missed,
With that way in every video that you’re pumpin’ your fist.
C’mon, what is that move, Chuck? Seriously!
But enough about you and enough about me.
Let’s get back to SEO and PPC.
Chuck, you backed the wrong horse, now you’re going down.
I’m gonna slay you in Florida and steal your crown.
Cuz PPC’s the one that pays the bills.
SEO’s for them with those hacker skills.
You’ll do anything for links, beg, borrow or bait ‘em,
You worship Matt Cutts. Man it looks like you ate him!
You’re obsessed with position, aways tryin’ to get on the top.
But with PPC you buy your way in like K-Fed with hip hop.
Yeah, I may look like that dude. Hell I’m probably whiter.
But I can guarantee you that my rhymes are tighter.
“Oops I did it again” is what you say when you screw up,
Get your client blacklisted when your link farm blew up.
PPC’s more controlled. Sure you pay the price.
But I’d rather do that then roll them SEO dice.
It can take IT forever to update your website.
But with PPC your ad is up overnight.
Now I’m gonna save somethin’ up for when we battle in Captiva,
You best stay out the sun so you don’t catch a fever.
When we go live, we’ll all see what you’re worth.
You call yourself the King? More like Colin Firth.
S, S, SEO… heeeell no.
Chuck, you’re quite the producer. I ain’t gonna lie,
But let’s see what happens when we go on the fly.
No machines, no rehearsals, no do-overs,
And I know the SIS crowd won’t be sober.
It’ll be like 8 Mile and I’m B-rabbit.
I’m gonna make owning you my personal habit.
That’s all I got, Chuck. Time to take your lumps.
And while we all fade out, let’s do Chuck’s fist pumps.
C’mon. Pump it up. Pump it up.
I got him.
Peace.

I haven’t been using Google Apps much since I joined Kenshoo but I was a power-user with Connectual.

Today I logged in to my Google Apps account on a whim to see if anything had changed a lo and behold, I was greeted with the message below.

This got my thinking about how valuable an asset it is to Google to have over 3 million businesses using Google products to power their internal operations. And why Facebook needs more small/medium business (SMB) apps if it wants to continue growing it’s share of the digital advertising pie — which is already growing quite nicely, mind you, with 1 in 5 online display ad dollars going to Facebook this year per eMarketer.

By working its way into the SMB infrastructure, Google makes itself indispensable to businesses. And with that level of penetration, cross-selling advertising products becomes much easier. Just check this box to send traffic to your domain!

I was talking to a friend the other day who works for Facebook and joking with him about why Facebook doesn’t use its own messaging system for internal corporate communication. Then the light bulb went off. Why not create an messaging app for SMBs? They gave everyone a Facebook email address. Why not let people use Facebook to manage messages to their own domains? And do it for free to trump Google App’s $50 a year.

Of course, creating business products like this would require a ton of new development around security and other protocols that are critical to servicing SMBs but, in the long run, this would really pay out for Facebook by getting businesses more active on the platform beyond managing pages. And once they’re more active on the platform, getting SMBs to fork over some ad dollars would become a much easier proposition.

Penetrating SMBs is the key to Facebook doing better than 1 in 5 display ad dollars and closer to the nearly 1 in 2 total online ad dollars that Google gets today per eMarketer. Now that would give Facebook investors something to really like!

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…

Image Source

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.

Image Source

As a leading provider of digital marketing software used to direct over $15 billion USD in online sales, my company, Kenshoo, has access to a treasure trove of data. As a way to help marketers benchmark their online advertising efforts, we’ve begun aggregating and analyzing performance data across our retail customer base, which includes 5 of the top 10 global retailers per Forbes and 5 of the top 10 U.S. retailers per NRF.

Earlier this month, we released some of this research in the Kenshoo 2010 Online Retail Holiday Shopping Report. Beyond helping online marketers see how their campaigns measured up to the Kenshoo U.S. Retail Index, this report provides a great look into key consumer online shopping trends.

In all, we assessed over 3 billion total search advertising impressions, 60 million clicks and 3 million online sales transactions for the period beginning 21 days prior to Thanksgiving and ending the weekend after New Year’s Day in 2009 and 2010.

Here are the key findings:

Here are the major trends we identified:

And here is 1 of the 23 pretty charts including in the report that you can cut and paste into your next presentation (with proper attribution, of course):

The full report is available for download here and also includes 7 actionable implications for marketers and 5 predictions for search marketing and online advertising in 2011. Spoiler alert: it’s going to be a Googley year!

It’s 8:05pm est and today’s deal on LivingSocial just passed 1 million sales. In case you’ve been living under a rock, the deal was a $20 Amazon gift card for $10. And in case you’ve been living under a really big rock, LivingSocial is a Groupon-esque deal-of-the-day company.

Like a million other deal-seekers, I bought mine but what caught my eye was this disclaimer…

Unlike the deals I’m used to seeing from Groupon and the like, the brand promoted in this deal (Amazon) was apparently not involved. From what I can gather, LivingSocial just bought a bunch of Amazon gift cards through an affiliate and sold them for half the value. Maybe there was some sort of discount for bulk purchase, but it’s possible LivingSocial paid as much as $10 million to acquire 1 million new customers.

To be sure, not all of these people who bought this deal are first-time LivingSocial customers but the last reported subscriber-count for LivingSocial was 10 million, so this promotion could have bumped LivingSocial’s list by over 10%.

Add in all the great PR LivingSocial has received from this deal and this could rank as one of the best awareness and acquisition campaigns any company has run in a long time. Forgetting about the free media impressions and just looking at the sales metrics, LivingSocial’s cost per acquisition here was $10. That’s $10 for a customer that has now given permission to LivingSocial to send a deal of the day every day until he or she unsubscribes. (I wonder if LivingSocial’s unsubscribe experience is as memorable as Groupon’s per chapter 19 of the book?)

It’s difficult to quantify lifetime value of a new customer for LivingSocial, unless you work at LivingSocial, but it’s easy to surmise that the figure is above $10. If LivingSocial’s deal terms and margins are similar to Groupon’s, we’re looking at 50% of the spread between what customers pay and merchant’s value. It’s likely LivingSocial will make back that $10 acquisition cost and then some the very next time a subscriber makes a purchase.

And who knows what the impact all this PR and the 1 million subscriber adds will have on LivingSocial’s valuation but one can easily see  it climbing much higher than an incremental $10 million as a result of today’s deal.

Now, I could be very wrong about all this. Amazon could have sanctioned this deal. After all, it is an investor in LivingSocial. And/or Amazon could have sold the gift cards to LivingSocial at a bigger discount or done some back-end revenue-share  making the acquisition costs for LivingSocial much lower or potentially even driving this deal into stand-alone profitability. It would make sense for Amazon. I’m sure many of the one million buyers will never end up using the gift card and, those that do, may spend much more than $20 with their purchase. Not to mention all the branding and PR mentions that Amazon has gotten out of this deal.

Regardless of how the deal went down, this seems to be a true win-win for LivingSocial and Amazon. And it’s a testament to the power of the deal-a-day business. Surely, LivingSocial and Groupon are more than “just coupon websites.” And it’s easy to see why these companies matter and why Google is so eager to get into this business.

It’s now 9:29pm est and another 80,000 sales have been made. And there’s still another 10 1/2 hours left in the promotion.

Update Jan. 20: So much for lifetime value. LivingSocial just sent out the instructions for redeeming the gift card at 12:04am est, officially not making good on its promise yesterday to notify me “tomorrow” with that information. Apparently, I’m not the only one who was eagerly awaiting my gift card as the LivingSocial site seems to have crashed completely. Not a good first experience. Might need to update the title of this post to “How LivingSocial Lost 1 Million New Subscribers.”