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The search engine landscape is ever changing. We covered that. However, while there are multiple players involved in facilitating that change, there is one that drives it far more than the rest of the competition. Obviously, we’re talking about Google.

Is there a point where adapting to Google’s changes becomes impossible? Share your thoughts.

To a very drastic extent, Google drives how the search engine marketing industry operates. With Google holding such a dominant share of the search market, it’s not hard to figure out why. While some may tell you it’s not the most productive use of your marketing time, businesses who hope to find success in driving people to their website (or even brick and mortar store) often hang on every word Google says and every change Google makes to its search engine and/or search results.

Liz Gannes with the tech blog GigaOm recently spoke with Google Engineering Director David Glazer about Google’s approach to social for 2010. And we come back to that changing search landscape. Social plays a huge role in it, and Glazer acknowledged just that. Gannes reports:

In 2010, Google plans to expose and elicit more of the social network built into the tools that many of us already use — Gmail, Google Talk, etc. If you use Google products, the company already knows who your most important contacts are, what your core interests are, and where your default locations are. Glazer said to expect many product and feature launches that start to connect that information in useful ways.

What does "social" mean to Google? "Who I am, who do I know, what do I do," said Glazer. (emphasis added)

Back in October, Google released its experimental Social Search feature, which Google said would help users "find more relevant public content from their broader social circle."

Relevance of social search has been questioned though. WebProNews recently discussed search trends for 2010 and beyond with comScore’s "Search Evangelist" Eli Goodman. Believe it or not, social search is counted among these trends, and he mentions such a lack of relevance in social search results.

The real question is: is SEO going to become less relevant? Before you get all worked up, I will acknowledge that SEO is based on adaptation and changing along with the search engines. In fact, that was essentially the topic of a recent WebProNews article. Hear me out.

Right now, search engine optimization as we know it is still very relevant for businesses, but as Google learns more about who people are, they’re going to direct them to what they think is right. Social search and personalized search are very closely related.

Think about Google’s universal search, which aims to deliver results Google thinks you might want. These results draw from a wide variety of different places – Google News, Google’s real-time index, YouTube, etc. Each set of universal results takes more attention away from the regular old organic results. How long until social search (or something like it) becomes a part of this.

And let’s not forget about mobile. Smartphones are taking the world by storm, and Google is doing everything in its power to take over this market (though it still has work to do). Google knows your location if you let it. Then you have Google Latitude. Google knows your friends’ locations if they let it. Then, what happens when Chrome OS (Google’s Operating System) comes out. It may not catch on as much as Google would like, but then again it may. It starts on netbooks, but how long until that grows into something bigger?

Google just keeps on releasing more products. More products means more opportunities for the company to encourage use of other Google products. They also keep acquiring more companies by the way, and that includes the recent acquisition of a mobile advertising agency and an attempted acquisition of Yelp (the failure of which, was quickly compensated for to some extent by Google’s release of the "Near me Now" feature).

As Gannes notes, Google has this month brought on strategists Joseph Smarr and Chris Messina, who she says are "widely known for their advocacy of the open social web." This likely will lead to more social and personalized experiences related to search.

Chris Brogan, one of the posterboys for social media, read the article too, and makes some pretty good points for businesses. Rather, he asks questions. Questions like:

- Does your company know how you are?
- Do they know who you know?
- Do they know what you do?

Questions like these are already important for a business looking to establish its identity (not to mention tell its story), but they could become increasingly important in an era of new SEO strategies.

"People expect a certain level of customer service as table stakes to the game," says Brogan. "In the new, much more wired world, I believe we’re asking for more. I want my airlines to know just how often I fly, which seat I tend to choose, how often I upgrade, and whether I normally check my bag. Think about how helpful they could be if they did something with that information."

Naturally, privacy plays a big role in the scheme of things, and as Brogan notes, that means opt-in. However, I think people generally trust Google (the search engine), at least to the extent that they will continue using it for the foreseeable future. I am well aware that many people do NOT trust Google, but within the broad spectrum of the general public, people trust it. Google’s search market share is evidence of that.

So, moving into the future, as Google makes efforts to tailor the user experience to a more social and more personalized one, where does that leave traditional SEO? Can it survive? It’s always been about adaptation and will continue to be, but is there a breaking point where SEO will be trumped by who users know and where they are? Who they are? Can you optimize for every individual customer? That’s where things could get tricky.

If you have thoughts on the matter, we would love to hear them in the comments.

Related Articles:

> Google Launches Social Search Experiment

> Optimizing for Mixed Media Search Results

> Succeeding In SEO Requires Change

I probably don’t have to tell you that many businesses are still struggling with the concept of using social media. Many simply can’t find a good reason to use it at all, and many more find themselves using it but struggling to validate that use. They can’t find the ROI. They feel that too much time is being wasted. Basically, they’re just using social networks because they feel like they’re supposed to. They just want to keep up.

Many businesses are even banning social media from the workplace entirely. In fact, a great deal of our readers have expressed that they feel that social media doesn’t belong in the workplace because employees are there to "work," not "goof off."

Well, that may be the case, and perhaps social media doesn’t fit into your business at all, but considering your general business goals can help you decide whether or not there is a place for social media, and whether or not your employees can fit into that puzzle.

As social media enthusiast Chris Brogan told WebProNews in a recent interview, it’s time to get over the touristy part of social media and start getting down to business.

He says it’s not "Gee whiz, it’s cool" anymore. It’s "What are we gonna do with it?"

"Great you can type. Now what?" he says.

Here are some sample goals a business owner or manager might set for social media use. Once the goal is considered, then you can look at the tools that are out there and evaluate which ones will give you the best shot of achieving those goals.

20 Possible Goals

1. I’m a content provider, and I want to expand my reach.

2. I want my customers to be able to stay updated with news about my company.

3. I want to get to know my customers.

4. I want to promote my product.

5. I want to stay abreast of current news and trends.

6. I want to share my ideas with likeminded individuals.

7. I want to increase brand awareness.

8. I want to provide customer service and support easily.

9. I want to find a job.

10. I want to recruit.

11. I want people to like my brand.

12. I want to collaborate on business projects.

13. I want to directly sell a product.

14. I want to earn respect within my industry.

15. I am getting information overload, and I want to get organized.

16. I want to drive traffic to my site.

17. I want to attract advertisers and make money.

18. I want to get more involved with local prospects.

19. I want to get more involved with people on an international and global level.

20. I want to keep up with my competitors.

There are certainly more possible goals for business social media use out there. I’ve probably not even scratched the surface. What goals do you set for your social media efforts? Discuss here.

Related Articles:

> How Big Brands Use Social Media

> Some Brands Have Good Ideas For Social Media. Do You?

> Using Facebook Traffic to Drive Brand Loyalty

Blogging, social networking and email newsletters all have one thing in common, they fall under the umbrella of Internet marketing.

(Coverage of the BlogWorld conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

In the session "Internet Marketing for Smart People," the panel discussed the various ways to reach an audience online.

Chris Brogan

Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger, said, "there’s always things and people you can learn marketing from."

Chris Brogan, President of New Marketing Labs, said, "email marketing is far from dead."

Darren Rowse, founder of ProBlogger, started email marketing for his dad with the intention he thought RSS would kill email. His email marketing has been successful and now they forcefully push it. Email allows them to connect and engage with customers.

Darren Rowse

Clark said email is a different environment than a feed reader. It builds trust and it takes a lot for people to hand over their email address.

When it comes to blogging, Rowse said the more you can get your readers to interact with each other, the more you as the blogger become the match-maker. You can build relationships with your readers. It’s important to allow them to interact and connect. Give them as many opportunities as you can to do this.

Brogan said community is a privilege, not a right. It’s a whole lot easier to market when you don’t have to. Smaller blogs that have great content are sometimes more effective than mega blogs.

When it comes to the recent FTC guidelines for bloggers, Rowse said he had been expecting rules for a long time and there is no reason why endorsement rules would not apply to bloggers. The FTC rules validate bloggers as media.

WebProNews Video reporter Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

A lot of activity on Twitter might well consist of bots talking to each other, according to a new report.  Sysomos – which last month pointed out that 5 percent of Twitter’s users account for 75 percent of the site’s activity – has now indicated that many of the most dedicated users aren’t human. 

Alex Cheng and Mark Evans wrote, "We found that 32% of all tweets made by the most active Twitter users were generated by machine bots that posted more than 150 tweets/day.  The actual percentage of machine-generated tweets among the most active users is probably higher than 32% because there many bots that update less than 150 times/day."

But anyway, the pair continued, "Based on our previous ‘Inside Twitter’ report and this report on the most active users, 24% or one-quarter of all tweets overall, are generated by these very active bots."

That may wind up being either a bad or good thing.  Although folks who head to Twitter for human interaction are obviously in trouble, the prevalence of bots could go to show that legitimate companies are getting the hang of the site.  And from Twitter’s perspective, they should represent a crowd ripe for monetization.

If you’d like to hear often from someone with an actual heart and soul, though, there are some options.  Cheng and Evans found that Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan with an average of 43 tweets per day), Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki, 39 tweets daily), Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano, 37 tweets daily), and Jonathan Ross (@wossy, 37 tweets daily) are some of the leading human Twitter users.

Posts for pay, reviews for cash or whatever you want to call them are a part of the blogosphere and have been for quite some time. The amount of attention that it gets is often directly related to the amount of other news that is happening in the space at the time. Well, we are in the middle of the summer and other than Twitter running around with its security briefs around its ankles there has little news to truly examine.

Enter Ad Age and its video feature “Three Minute Ad Age” which interviews BlogHer co-founder and COO Elisa Camahort Page on the eve of their 5th annual conference in Chicago. While many turn up their noses at the idea of ‘mommy-bloggers’ there is power in numbers whether it is real or perceived. Ask Motrin. BlogHer.com is a online community that gets 15 million unique visitors per month so there is nothing to sneeze at there from a pure quantity measure.

The focus of this interview is ‘blogola’ or the practice of being paid for a review of a specific product or service. Others like Chris Brogan have gone through some significant debates about the merits or demerits of this practice. BlogHer’s Page is anticipating that the subject will be top of mind during the conference because many influential mommy-bloggers can help sell a lot of products for companies if they mention and / or review a product on their blog.

While everyone agrees that full disclosure is paramount, Page is seeing that the context of the review is critical as well. In other words, disclosure is not enough. To that end, the BlogHer community cordons off the reviews in separate review logs where there is no advertising sold. These ‘sponsored conversations’ are clearly defined as such because Page that not only disclosure but context matters when it comes to paid posts.

I agree for the most part. The only real crime to me in this type of environment is if there is literally no mention or a very weak mention of ‘blogola (which by the way is a dumb name, anyone have anything better they would like to ‘coin’ here?). As long as the post is clearly marked as a paid discussion or whatever at the start and the conclusion of the post then there should be little trouble. Where you get into trouble is if the mention is brief and buried in the middle of the text or simply non-existent. Having a title that reads “You Have to Get Brand X!” may be all that someone reads so there needs to be the best shot of someone seeing that the post is paid for. Otherwise, we are in a gray area where a blogger can say they mentioned the nature of the post but didn’t make it really obvious. Starts to sound like a sleazy sales practice at that point.

So Pilgrims, on this fine Monday, what is your take? Should bloggers ever take pay for posts? If they do how should it be handled? What are best / worst practices you have seen? What are the potential consequences? Not surprisingly, the government has chimed in through the FTC on the matter so we better pay attention (I guess).

A discussion amongst the type of readers that come here could beneficial to all so please let us know your thoughts.

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