Search Insider took a stab the other day at answering the question, “What defines a great in-house search marketer?” They started by defining the actual tasks an in-house search marketer must perform, and broke them down like so:

75 percent: Evangelizing and selling to internal management
15 percent: Performing search marketing related activities
10 percent: Educating internal resources

Think about a company whose internal management has embraced search marketing and doesn’t need to be sold. Maybe that 75% gets cut to 25% — and the search marketer gets to spend 65% of the day on search marketing instead of 15%. How much more successful will that company’s search efforts be vs. the company that’s spending its time on internal evangelizing?

Takeaway for marketers: Get management to buy in. Quickly. Then get to work.

“Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.”
—Samuel Butler

The New York Times has an article today on a salacious buzz marketing campaign for mobile content provider Oasys Mobile that can be seen at Pherotones.com.

The article notes that nearly 80% of marketers spend money on buzz marketing, that buzz marketing is a $100-$150 million industry, and that Pherotones.com is averaging 10,000 page views a day. However, the success or failure of the campaign remains to be seen: Pherotones is only today linking over to Oasys. (Uh, why the wait?). A quarter-million dollars was spent developing this fake site and getting the word out. That’s a lot of of ringtone and wallpaper sales that need to be generated.

One of the most interesting elements here is the search engine optimization piece of the puzzle. The Oasys home page uses “ringtones” as a meta keyword a dozen times, which is likely to be viewed as trying to spam the search engines. Meanwhile, a peek at the meta keywords for the Pherotones home page reveals that users might come across Pherotones.com while searching for: Pheromone, Pherotone, Sex, Attraction, Dating, Mating, Matting, Enhancer, Enhanser, Sexy, Ringtones, Hot, Attracting men, Attracting women, Funny, Scientific, Feromones, Pheramones, Pheremone, Cell phone, Texting, Horny, Humping grandma, Wedding kiss, Gay wedding, Over eighteen, Auditory, pherotones.

How a search for “humping grandma” translates into a ringtone sale is beyond me … but hey, they made the business section of the Times. I guess that counts for something.

As it is in so many other areas of life, semantics is one of the highest barriers to substantive discussion about online marketing strategies and tactics. “Search engine optimization” can mean many things to many people. (In any case, it should not mean black hat SEO techniques.) There’s disagreement on whether “word of mouth” is a tactic or an outcome. (It’s an outcome — of coupling a superior product with exemplary customer service.) And then there’s “viral marketing.”

Step one in every online marketing plan seems to be: “Let’s do something viral,” but there’s little agreement or understanding on what “viral” is. For example, Nike gets all excited about “going viral” over here, but there’s nothing viral at all about it, so marketing professionals react with a “wow, that sucked” or a yawn (which is probably worse).

I think creative technologist Kevin Glennon does a good job of laying it out here, where he explains, “a viral advertising element is simply something that requires you to do stuff in order to make it work.” The full article is worth reading.

This C|Net article talks about Vista, Microsoft’s next Windows upgrade. A lot of attention is given to Sidebar (here’s a link to a larger screenshot), which seems to be pretty much the same deal as the sidebar in the Google Desktop.

I wonder how difficult it will be to turn Vista’s toolbar on and off. Google’s sidebar is a nice feature … at first. But it sucks up a lot of resources. Having weather, headlines and a slide show on my desktop all the time simply isn’t worth slowing down my whole system.