Google obviously does not want to be in the search engine marketing business. This would create a constant conflict of interest inside Google and the company would hardly be able to keep up any appearance of objectivity.

As we reported in June, Google already rebranded the affiliate network side of Performics as the Google Affiliate Network. At that time, we noticed that this rebranding was only done half-heartedly, as Google basically only put a new store-front on the old Performics Affiliate Network. By now, the user interface has seen a refresh that is more in line with Google's regular properties.

For participating in the discussion, Scott you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Netflix Queue Widget.

Great post.

One of the questions I find most fascinating is how marketing will evolve to take advantage of the semantic web, whether it's in consumer or B2B plays. I think this is more than a linear extension of how marketers have been optimizing the web today, but something qualitatively different. I suggest that SEO + Semantic Web = SEO++ (after all, it is sort of an object-oriented paradigm shift).

Here are 7 possible missions for "semantic marketing":

1. Marketing becomes the champion of generating the underlying data.
2. Marketing views categorization, metadata, RDF graphs, relevant microformats, etc., as a new kind of market positioning and placement -- "semantic branding", if you will.
3. Marketing takes a much broader view of distribution and promotion of its semantic web data in search engines and vertical networks (SEO++), including the sponsorship or creation of new niche semantic networks.
4. Marketing comes up with new ways to incentivize the conversion of semantic web interactions in real business objectives.
5. Marketing will have a real challenge with tracking and attributing distributed data in the semantic web to measure its impact -- from multi-touch marketing to micro-touch marketing. Hard problem but entrepreneurial ingenuity will prevail.
6. Marketing will want to leverage other people's data in their own value-add mash-ups (interesting "joint venture" semantic data partnerships), as well as for internal-only apps focused on market research and competitive intelligence.
7. Marketing will need to be concerned with brand protection in the semantic web: quality control to watch for bad data, conflicting data, competitive misuse, etc.

If you're interested, http://www.chiefmartec.com/2008/03/marketing-in-th.html is the full post. Would love feedback from other marketers and semantic web afficionados.

Iskold's idea provides a pretty good way to visualize how information flows on Twitter. With that in mind, it is easy to see why the most successful marketing done via Twitter is of the "push" variety. Bloggers do this a lot when we tweet about posts we've just published. The hope is that the link will spread virally through the hubs and reach as many listeners as possible.

The key to successful push marketing on Twitter is to attract the right followers (people who have a lot of followers of their own and will retweet your message), and to make sure you don't do it too often. Unless, like the most popular person Twitter, your account is set up specifically for push marketing.

Twittermethis adds a layer of interactivity to push marketing that takes the idea to a new level. By including a call for response with his push marketing message, Kukral has created the building blocks for a potential community. It is easy to see how this type of push marketing could be big on a Twitter. Could this be a possible source of revenue for Twitter? Or could a smart marketing firm perhaps start selling clients on push campaigns via the service?

Even though Kukral says he has no expectations of making money on Twittermethis, there certainly is a potential to do so if he can grow his community large enough. How about sponsored questions, for example? That could be done subtley (i.e., "In what year was Tide Bleach introduced?") without harming the integrity of the game. Very clever indeed.

HubSpot used the new submission form on Jobwire, our site tracking new hires, to tell us about the move this morning.

It's that time of the week again, when I give my thanks to Marqui for sponsoring my blog for 3 months. Thanks! Anyway I thought I'd have a little fun with it this week and continue with the cut-up/remix theme I experimented with yesterday. I did a cut-up of recent Marqui coverage on blogs, using this method:

1) I'm subscribed to a PubSub search for the word "marqui". Using my Bloglines aggregator, I requested the last 48 hours worth of results from that feed (about 7,300 words).
2) I then ran it through the Grazulis Cut-up Machine 10 times, using the "random" setting.
3) Lastly, I condensed it to 100 words using Microsoft Word's nifty AutoSummarize feature.

The result was this, which came out rather poetic...

***start***

consumers
other marketing unspoken) posts. entrepreneurs program 
Marqui 

be Canter's Marqui product blogs small advertisers finally, some post:
experiment.

customers. blog):

financial and bloggers 
individual bloggers. about the time is company Marqui, their is paid? 
bloggers was participate in 
original highly Marqui. bloggers steps the marketing monster nicely.

I company. Blog Service
idea of Marqui 

of authorís Marqui changes 

activity pay. products. Marqui's with Weblog

already marketing own experiments.

A products.

launched products about? blogger

I marketing).

blogger).

Ladyís to bloggers link. talking points

***finish***

p.s. I think this 'blog for dollars' program is working out very well for Marqui, no matter what the bloggers actually write. Which is to say - the coverage Marqui is getting from this program is more important to its success than the words being written about them.

The company says that creative professionals like the service because it can handle large files, is compatible with 400 different file formats and doesn't require software to be installed. There's also a mobile version, including for iPhone. The system is most likely to be used as a replacement to email or FTP, given that its main benefit is being able to send and collaborate around large media files.

MuseWorx has a free, entry-level version, a digital asset management tool with 100 MB of storage. It also has a partner network, through which it distributes the product. Museworx runs on Windows, Mac and Linux - the only other technical requirement is Adobe Flash 9.

Our Take

Essentially MuseWorx is an asset management system for creative professionals. We're not so impressed with the term "marketing OS", which seems fairly meaningless. You could argue that using the term "cloud computing" is also nebulous, although founder David Fritsche makes a good case for it in his blog Cloud Computing for Marketing.

MuseWorx claims to be "the first marketing automation system to leverage cloud computing" and in October it reported having more than 250,000 users. So whatever you think of the marketing claims for the product, it seems to be successful so far. Tell us what you think in the comments.

Through short videos from some of the top industry minds including Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Lauder Professor at The Wharton School Jerry Wind and AAAA CEO Nancy Hill, the group hopes to challenge marketers to take risks and create better campaigns. For now, the site comes up short as the videos appear to answer questions in a very general manner with few specifics in terms of tactics and strategy. The most promising component of the site appears to be the "Free Tools" section with a list of resources including links to a website optimizer, search insights and 3rd party trends data from Facebook and Twitter. Nevertheless, as of this review, all of those links are dead. The first rule of marketing: test your product.

While this is a good site to get inspiration, social media marketers and PR pros who are looking for new strategies and specifics might be better off visiting Building43, PR 2.0 or asking questions through LinkedIn's online groups. Other great resources include the Social Media Club events and social marketing-related Meetups.

Email Marketing a Top Priority

Those companies that are seeing the current downturn as a chance to expand and that are planning to spend more on their online efforts this year, say that they will focus their investments on search (80%), email (65%), and social marketing (60%). According to this report, these businesses see email as one of the most important means to communicate with their customers and most plan to use it to inform customers of new product launches, promotions, and to get customer feedback. 90% of all respondents listed a focus on email marketing as a top priority.

Companies Won't Scale Back Social Media Campaigns

Interestingly, the study also found that those companies that are growing faster than expected during this downturn are also more likely to embrace social media. Even those companies that are planning to scale back their online operations this year still plan to experiment with social media campaigns.

Imaged used courtesy of Flickr user jakerome.

• Session 1: Social Media Marketing Fundamentals
• Session 2: Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
• Session 3: Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
• Session 4: A Marketer‚Äôs Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
• Session 5: Keynote Q & A with Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
• Session 6: Effectively Leveraging Social Networking
• Session 7: Evangelist - The Marketer‚Äôs Role in SMM
• Session 8: Micro Communities
• Session 9: Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and Answer Sharing
• Session 10: Final Session - Wikipedia Clinic

Holland-based CoffeeCompany is starting to market their menu items via their Wi-Fi networks. If you head to any of their coffee shops don't be surprised to see networks with names such as 'OrderAnotherCoffeeAlready' or 'TodaysSpecialExpresso1.60Euro'. With the help of THEY, CoffeeCompany is promoting their specials of the day and more, while humorously guilt tripping patrons accessing their Wi-Fi networks to grab another cup of coffee. Did anyone suggest this to Starbucks yet?

Will it Increase Business?

There haven't been any reports of an increase in business, but we think the idea is great! Would it tempt us to buy another cup of joe? Once we could control our laughter at the creative network names we'd be more than happy to. While it won't stop most from free-loading, we think CoffeeCompany might be on to something with this marketing technique. What creative network names would you use to market your products or services via a Wi-Fi network?

Image courtesy of Adrants

- Overview of common Web 2.0 apps like Flickr, del.icio.us and Wikipedia
- Introduction to blogging for a business audience
- Social Networks Connect Users into Communities of Trust (or interests)
- RSS Adoption is Small Currently, But it Could be an Attractive Tool for Niche Marketers
- Introduction to RSS and RSS Readers, using examples
- Users Who Are Using Web 2.0 Apps are Highly Engaged, Active and Attractive to Marketers
- Tactical Opportunities for Early Adopters & Marketers

Full marks to Jim for translating Web 2.0 trends and opportunities to a marketing and business-focused audience. There's also a podcast available, from Garrick Van Buren, featuring some interesting chit-chat with Jim and members of the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association. However the audio from Jim's presentation itself was hard to pick up, so I didn't listen the whole way through. Still, nicely done by both Jim and Garrick and I hope others will follow their example and publish similar business-focused presentations about Web 2.0.

Surely the teachers in those classrooms will at least give a passing nod to competing ad networks, right?

According to a good write up on ClickZ Google's initial goal was to have a modest 200 schools participate. So far more than 700 schools have signed up, though, and there's two weeks left to register. The Challenge has been open for some time but was just announced officially this week. A Google Map of the participating schools show that the program has extended to every continent on the planet. Janet Driscoll Miller visited a participating school yesterday and has a good write up on MarketingPilgram.

If there are 30 students at each of the 700 schools, that's 21,000 students consuming the Google curriculum. A global crop of newly experienced students and small businesses introduced to AdWords for a mere $140k in free "product"? Sounds like a good program for Google. While I'm sure all of these young people were likely to pay very close attention to Google advertising programs anyway, there's something a bit funny about this kind of corporate influence over the souls of...marketing students. Ok, so maybe this isn't as ominous as many other corporate sponsorships in schools these days.

Contest winners will receive a Golden Ticket good for a week long trip to the Googleplex. It's a little bit creepy, but it does sound like a very good idea.

Today, we realized that the most popular posts from those blogs may be useful resources for many folk, so we created our own OPML file. Ah, the beauty of the Web.

Chris liked the list; didn't like that it wasn't offered as an OPML file, so he added the feeds and removed those he didn't like - a gift to himself he says, and a gift for you to download and share.

Using AideRSS PostRank, ReadWriteWeb has created an OPML file of the greatest hits from each of those 150 blogs; the top 20 percent of the most popular posts from each site. You can grab it here.

If you're not familiar with OPML, take a look at this OPML primer or read Marshall's how (and why) to create an OPML file.

Earlier this year we compiled a list of ReadWriteWeb OPML resources; take a look if you're interested in what we are reading, or come join us on FriendFeed, where incidentally we first noticed this story, and we can discuss other cool things we find on the Web.

"Companies in general don't value social media marketing as much as they should," said Noff. "They're afraid of it; they don't understand it; and therefore, they just don't do it. Yet it's the most cost-efficient way of marketing there is."

We also talked to Noff about the infinite measurement possibilities inherent in social media and the kinds of tools marketers should be using to optimize their online campaigns. She also spoke about the occasional difficulty of measuring specific conversion metrics for social media marketing campaigns, and she gave a good word to consultants in the social space.

In light of recent comments on video posts and out of respect for Ms. Noff, commenters are particularly requested to omit the words "hot" and "chick" and other terms of that general timbre from their musings below. Thanks for doing your part to keep ReadWriteWeb classy.

Searches for "home depot" registered one of the most stunning declines in paid clicks, as only 0.83% of searches went to a paid listing in the last four weeks, compared to just over 39% a year ago.

Recession? Or are Companies Getting Smarter About Search?

In part, this decline can be explained by the current economic climate, which has led many companies to reduce their search marketing spend. In its latest quarterly earnings report, Google noted that paid clicks across all of its AdSense partners only increased by 3% in the last quarter of 2008, though the search giant didn't release any detailed statistics about paid search traffic.

However, as Andy Beal points out, this reduction in spending on search could also mean that some of the large brands like Orbitz or Home Depot have simply figured out that, given that they are already the #1 search term for their respective brands, there is really no need to spend a lot on paid advertising.

As we reported earlier this month, some retailers have been shifting their budgets away from search-engine marketing and towards email and social marketing. At the same time, though, small number of companies are also looking at the current downturn as a chance to break into new markets, by expanding their spend on search marketing while their competitors are cutting back their spend in these areas.