Planning a thoughtful search strategy for the holiday season can mean the difference between a load of presents under the tree or coal in the stocking of our retail clients.

To get a jump on the festive season, Razorfish dispatched Laura Landesman to attend Google’s Think Holiday conference.  She reports back on two of the hottest presentations:

State of Shopping 2010

Google’s State of Shopping 2010 presentation showcased four main trends:

• Shopping starts early and ends late: many shoppers start their holiday shopping as early as May and others wait until the weekend before Christmas.
• Coupons still reign: people are trained like Pavlov’s dog to look for deals online and, since everyone is doing them, to remain competitive it is necessary to have deals.
• Shopping early…in the week: online shopping will continue to perform as it typically does with days at the beginning of the week remaining the most high trafficked days.
• Deciding who to buy from: people already know what they want to buy (i.e. clothes, electronics, etc.), but not necessarily the brand.  It is our job to tell them what brand and why.

The Post-Crisis Consumer

John Gerzema, author of upcoming book Spend Shift, presented on the topic of “how the post-crisis values revolution is changing the way we buy, sell and live.”  In this presentation he explained his belief that we are entering an era where values now define consumerism and competitive advantage.  This is a shift from mindless consumption to mindful consumption as people are scaling back.  This is giving the consumer more control and is causing (smart) companies to demonstrate their value.  Gerzema’s presentation also focused on the need for companies to be transparent instead of illusive, to play fair, and to portray values, empathy and respect.

The real question is: will this trend last once the economy rebounds?  Gerzema believes, at least for the near future, that the consumer’s focus will remain on this almost 1950′s approach to buying.

Our very own Maaria Husain recently attended the Twitter & Automation session at SES San Francisco. There was a lot of debate around Twitter automation and whether or not it is actually effective.  The key learning is that a campaign should focus on the quality of Twitter followers, and not the quantity.

Communication entrepreneur Jeff Pulver opened up the session claiming “follower count” is a flawed metric, and that the key impact Twitter has had on this world is its “homogenization of communication channels.”  Pulver drew upon examples of national disasters, e.g., how Twitter closed the communication gap during the Haiti earthquake, and how it could have benefited relief efforts during 9/11.  We appreciate his take on Twitter; the reason it’s so sticky is the level of authenticity and realness it provides to users.

The discussion started heating up as Tracy Falke of Freestyle Interactive took the stage. Her take on Twitter is that users should spend time upfront understanding the space and then create a customized Twitter campaign.  Falke promotes launching, then “listening;” rather than having a CMO, businesses should have a CLO (Chief Listening Office).  Here Jeff Pulver disagreed, questioning how many hours a day she spends monitoring the tweets and retweets.  Tracy responded with the 80/20 rule (nothing new), where 80% of effort is spent creating content and pushing it out, and 20% is “checking in on the content responses.”

What Husain found most useful were some of tools Falke uses to monitor and manage Twitter.  Here are her top three:

1)      Cotweet: Tweets between different brands

2)      Hootsuite: Allows you to segment across different issues or topics (e.g., defects with new iPhone 4)

3)      Social Oomph: Automated segmentation platform (pick time of day, day of week, promos, etc., upload and push out via social oomph)

The last speaker up was Paul Madden of Automatica.   Their business model is based on making a Twitterbot look like a real person. Frankly, this turned me off, as it seems to defeat the whole point of Twitter, which is all about communication with real-time authenticity.  Madden went into some technical details, but all in all it was packaging black hat tactics in a pretty box.

While many people and brands feel like they need massive Twitter campaigns with large numbers of followers, we agree with Jeff Pulver:  Twitter should be used as a communication platform, simulating an in-person conversation, expressing yourself to individuals who care about your brand or opinion.

We leave you with a favorite Pulver quote from the session: “It’s loneliness and laziness that lead people to innovation.”

Today Aaron Goldman visits SearchShots as part of his Googley Lessons blog tour promoting his new book, “Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned from Google.” He has a little fun with numbers, and the math adds up: his book will cost you a week’s worth of Starbuck’s lattes and it’s 1,131 pages shorter than “War & Peace.”

Check out the video to witness his impressive freestyle rap and improv skills.

At the Mashable Media Summit yesterday, Adam Ostrow of Mashable interviewed Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare, who got the crowd excited about his company’s plans.

This year, the company raised capital, hired 25 people and made some money. Still, Foursquare has yet to make any profit because, as Crowley explained, being profitable is not a focus right now. Instead the team is focused on innovating new features and building an infrastructure to support their impressive growth.

According to Crowley, the Foursquare team has so many ideas they ran out of whiteboards at the office. For users, this may mean more badges, city travel guides based on your friends’ favorite places, more “to-do” features, the ability to connect with people at your location, retail rewards for check-ins and maybe even another title to strive for in addition to Mayor. For businesses, this may mean more partnership opportunities, more input on badge creation, greater access to customer data and the ability to design rewards for check-ins or mayors.

When asked about Foursquare haters (Time magazine labeled Foursquare among the 50 worst inventions), Crowley politely countered with the notion that people like software challenging you to do something, inspiring you to do it and rewarding you when you achieve it.

If you’re attending a lot of Internet Week events, don’t forget to check in and get your badge!

Yesterday Mashable hosted its first conference, marking the significant growth the social media blog has experienced over the past year. The agenda was packed with presentations and interviews designed to make you think a little differently about how digital channels can help your brand.

Ricky Van Veen, co-founder of CollegeHumor and CEO of Notional, shared 10 myths about online content. While some of the myths Van Veen spoke about were basic considering what we know today, there’s no denying the fact that his understanding of what makes digital content so appealing is what made CollegeHumor a success. And talk about foresight – the site was founded in 1999!

Here are two myths that stuck out:

1. Myth: We have no idea why things go viral. Van Veen definitely knows why things go viral. Good online content provides a person a reason to pass it on. The act of sharing a link is a way for someone to say something about themselves (I’m smart/ funny/interesting/edgy), so the content needs to hit that emotional appeal. Van Veen says a successful viral video will have “candy corn.” What’s candy corn? The thing that everyone knows about but doesn’t necessarily think about all the time. Check out this video for Van Veen’s example of good digital candy corn.
2. Myth: Experience leads documentation. According to Van Veen, documentation leads experience. Technology has broken down barriers to content creation and people want to document (and experience) moments. He likened the Facebook and Twitter phenomenon to high-tech bragging: people want to show off how cool/smart/interesting they are.

Over the next few days, we’ll continue to share highlights from the conference.