I Heart You

Oh Saint Valentine, you slay me. A day dedicated to intimate companions expressing their adoration and companionship, what a thoughtful proposition! Sometimes camaraderie is just so cumbersome; V-day is necessary for jaded couples to remind each other, and their selves, of why they are meant to be together. This jovial date also creates a serendipitous bonus for singles: getting all of the couples out of the way so that other singles can be easily spotted…a personal independence day if you will.

With the way it is celebrated today, you would think Valentine’s Day was a brilliant big idea spawned into a societal norm by an advertising agency. I can see it so clearly, a conference room full of suits (perhaps for a jeweler), eyes wide, while the pony tailed t-shirter opines “Love is about commitment. It is about giving. It is about sacrifice! Sacrificing your heart, your soul, your paycheck. Because nothing says I love you, like a box of chocolates and a diamond.” Even if it wasn’t created by advertisers, it is often a favorite point to focus a campaign flight around.

Couldn’t make it to the store in time for a card, flowers, or jewelry? Well, you’re probably out of luck, and a bed tonight. But Google might help mollify the strife with its map your valentine initiative!  Google always knows what’s up, and is proving its expert prowess again with a poignant combination of location and sentiment. This same formula could be imitated for a powerful search engine marketing tactic, by combining geo-targeting, personalization, and location based ads with relevant messages that provoke meaningful memories or induce nostalgia. Think of how much more interested you would be in an ad that showed say, a bicycle, which was displayed with a picture of your favorite park. Or even better, your favorite park as a kid! Okay that is a little creepy, but creepiness is becoming a lot less significant and a lot more ubiquitous nowadays.

– Ken Hurta

Google’s famous informal slogan rings in my ear every time I see its vibrant logo. Monolith corporations the size of Google are far too often shrouded in iniquity and questionable ethical dealings. But Google started with the standard to be good. Good to its employees, good to its customers, good to its clients. Perhaps it is the technical industry which Google operates in that is good, or at least less bad, than the others we have grown accustomed to seeing on the news. When was the last time you saw a tech company committing violations of human rights or running its own nation’s economy into the ground with its jobbery?  Not Google, but is this cuddly search do-gooder really as exemplary as it seems?

Reputation management. Also called public relations or good publicity. Google is a guru at managing its own reputation. Even when it saw controversies in the past, most of them passed in and out of the echo-sphere rather quietly.

Google has created a model of reputation management that any success-seeking business should imitate. ORM is especially important for search engine marketing, as more than ever search engines are taking social trends into account when indexing sites. What people are saying about you matters, a lot. Just one bad review can have dire repercussions for your brand if you don’t do anything about it. Brands should be proactive, as opposed to preemptive, when managing online reputation.

Start your business with good practices as a standard, not just a mission, and it will all be easier. ‘Social’ is one of those buzz words that cannot be ignored and will not go away, thus making the coordination of social media and search campaigns extremely pertinent. Use this immense network of connectivity that we all take for granted to your advantage by reaching out to your customers, following up with them, directly providing personalized special features, and whatever else you can think of to engage your fans! Everyone is just waiting for the next cool or convenient thing that is worthy of sharing with friends. The more you are talked about online, the more crawlable information to be indexed and affect your rankings. But remember this goes both ways. So for your sake and everyone else’s, don’t be evil.

-Kenneth Hurta