Last month, Razorfish Search kicked off Practical Steps Towards Integrated Direct-Response Marketing, a POV series written by Adam Heimlich, Group Search Director at Razorfish, in collaboration with Google and vertical experts within Razorfish.

This month, we’re pleased to bring you Part Two of the series: Integrated DR Marketing for Multi-Channel Retailers. Co-authored by Adam Heimlich (Razorfish) and Brett Goffin (Google), the whitepaper outlines steps to integrate digital into the existing acquisition and retention efforts of multi-channel retailers. We want to hear from you, so read it and share your thoughts.

In case you missed it, here’s Part One of the series: Google’s Development Roadmap: More Info in More Places

We credit an improv class at from Upright Citizens Brigade for a new perspective on search marketing. It’s inspiring enough to share.

Yes… and

The first lesson in improv is to always “Yes…and” everything. Your improve partner tells you your name is Ichabod? “Yes, and… I’m the sixth in a long line of Ichabods.” She sets the story in ancient Rome? “Yes, and… everyone’s hygiene here could use a little work.” The premise behind the rule is that a story can’t go on unless open minds allow it to go on. If someone comes up with a brand new idea, and all you say is, “No,” there’s nowhere to go from there. If the response to a new idea is, “Yes…and tell me more,” the story evolves.

Search is a constantly evolving field, so if you’re not open to new ideas, you’ll fall behind. Search marketers learn through constant testing how a single additional word in ad copy can lead to a significant improvement in results. Keeping an open mind about new searching habits is rewarding because we can always test to see if a different approach works better than the original. The key is not to disregard something as a failure right off the bat, because you never know how the story is going to develop.

Add new elements

In improv, everyone starts off with zero information and builds from what other people say. Saying “Yes…” establishes that what was said in the past is part of a story. The function of “and” is to make sure each statement adds new information to the scene.

Your search accounts are a treasure trove of data. You might as well just draw a giant X on your computer screen because that’s the place to start digging for the first fact in a story. If impressions rose after you launched a set of keywords, “Yes… and” why? What else happened? The story could go anywhere from that point. The way to make something happen next is to add new information by extrapolating from your data set or running more tests to establish more facts.

Truth in Comedy and Search

As Del Close and Charna Halpern stressed in their book Truth in Comedy, nothing is more impactful than the truth. For improv, the truth is where we find humor. When was the last time you were on the floor with tears streaming down your face while clutching your stomach in a fit of laughter? Was it because you were watching a comedian on TV? Or was it that the situation you were in was extraordinarily hilarious? Because comedy comes from everyday life, the funniest improv always mimics ordinary circumstances.

In search, the truth is where we enhance results. Search is the only medium where people are trying to tell us what they want. SEM experts are closer to a true connection with consumers than everyone else in marketing. The way to be true to customers is to provide a satisfying experience. No gimmicks. No tricks. Just relevance and service. As improv stories earn the gift of laughter, search connections are rewarded with happy customers and exceptional results.

Practical Steps Toward Integrated Direct-Response Marketing is a series of whitepapers offering clear instructions on how to improve ROI this year. Developed by Razorfish Search in collaboration with vertical experts from Google and marketers from Razorfish’s Media, Analytics, CRM and Ad Exchange departments, the series aims to cut through the hyperbole surrounding new advertising technology by telling executives exactly what they need to know. Razorfish believes a rare opportunity is at hand, and that sound guidance on measuring cross-channel activity, unifying views of the customer, testing contact strategies and optimizing creative are required for early success. Practical Steps… brings the broad experience of digital natives to bear on the core challenges of large marketing organizations.

Part 1 of the series is “Google’s Development Roadmap: More Info in More Places,” currently available at Razorfish.com. Forthcoming chapters will focus on specific verticals, starting with retail. All whitepapers in the series take an evolution-not-revolution approach, delivering recommendations on how to enhance offline direct-response efforts with online data. Razorfish believes success at integrated marketing is less a matter of tearing down traditional DR than of achieving the ability to learn new tactics that provide reproducible results.

We want to hear from you! Post comments or email us at razorfishsearch@razorfish.com

Baidu’s share of searches in China increased 6% from Q4 to Q1. Google redirecting visitors from mainland China to their Hong Kong site doesn’t seem a likely factor for this growth, given that Google’s change didn’t happen until March 22nd. It looks more like the increasing number of Chinese internet users is responsible. The share of Chinese citizens regularly accessing the internet was less than 30% in 2009. Internet penetration is increasing a lot faster in China than in the US, where penetration is now above 75%.

Employees at Razorfish’s offices in Beijing and Shanghai report that Google users are loyal, citing the accuracy and relevance Google is trusted to provide. Also, Google is necessary for searching for English-language pages in China.  Baidu results are only available in Chinese. Google will have a significant market in China until Baidu makes a big strategy shift.

Baidu’s strategy is to increase query share by concentrating on new users, rather than stealing from Google. Baidu also hopes to capture more of the mobile search share in China. This week, executives from Baidu explained their ambition to achieve the same query share from mobile as they have on PCs. With less than 1% of their sales teams dedicated to international business, it’s clear Baidu is not looking to the West.

Google finally launched its Caffeine update. For those unfamiliar with updates in the SEO world: Google traditionally launches a major change every two years, with a name seemingly chosen at some late-night Google engineers’ meeting.  These updates typically strike fear into the hearts of SEO engineers because they might shift the focus of the algorithm, resulting in major losses in rankings for sites that aren’t prepared.  Here’s a basic explanation of what happened with Caffeine:

The first and most important thing to remember is Caffeine is not an algorithm update, so rankings will not be directly affected by this change. Rather, it changes (1) the speed at which Google can crawl and index information to make it available to users in search results and (2) the amount of data Google can store in its index at once.

Prior to Caffeine, the Google crawling process would go as follows:

1. Googlebot crawled a site and pulled all crawled information into the Google index.
2. The newly indexed information was processed through the algorithm to determine the rank of pages for particular keywords.
3. Once this data was processed, the updated index was pushed out to hundreds of data centers in batches — a process that took over three months.

The data center you hit when you enter a search into Google is dependent on where you sit in the world and the load that a data center is currently experiencing. That’s why it’s said that SEO recommendations take up to three months to show results.

With the Caffeine update, Google is able to process indexed information through the algorithm and push it out to all data centers almost instantly.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that pages are being crawled more quickly — just that Google is able to get webpage updates out to all data centers more quickly.

The second focus of Caffeine is on storage capabilities. User-generated content has skyrocketed over the past two years, which became a problem for Google since there was so much more info to crawl and index. The update has increased storage capabilities so Google can index more information. Information can be as basic as a new web page or attribution to a page of credit for incoming links. The attribution model for links hasn’t changed. Google is just able to store more information for a longer time now.

Since this isn’t an algorithm update and there isn’t a ranking benefit, there is nothing in your optimization efforts that needs to change. The benefit to Razorfish clients is that updates will be processed almost instantaneously, so results of optimizations should show more quickly than before. Improved storage capabilities also increases the value of smart optimizations, as it gives Google a better view of interconnections among linked sites.