Razorfish is pleased to announce fellow ‘fish Lindsay Blankenship has been accepted to SEMPO’s 2012 – 2014 Board of Directors. Lindsay was one of thirteen Board seats selected from thirty-seven extremely qualified candidates.

“I would like to thank all our nominees for their commitment and willingness to serve the organization” said, SEMPO Chairman Jeff Pruitt. “We are impressed by the enthusiasm you have for SEMPO – and we urge you all to stay engaged within the organization. We have lots to accomplish and we cannot succeed without you.”

The Chairman also said the organization received an impressive number of votes across all 37 candidates, representing the commitment of the members to the organization.

The following new Board of Directors will take office on March 22:

• Lindsay Blankenship – Director, Search Marketing Razorfish
• Chris Boggs – Director Search Media and Thought Leadership Rosetta
• Bruce Clay – President Bruce Clay, Inc.
• Mike Corak – EVP, Strategy ethology
• Rob Garner – Vice President, Strategy iCrossing
• Mike Grehan – Global VP, Content incisivemedia
• Michael Gullaksen – SVP, Managing Director Covario
• Brian Kaminski – COO iProspect
• Frank Lee – Head of Sales DataPop
• Ian Lurie – CEO Portent, Inc.
• Kristjan Mar Hauksson – Founder/Director Nordic e-Marketing
• John Nicoletti – Director, Agency Development Google, Inc.
• Michael Xu – SVP Beijing Gridsum Technology

Feel free to follow Lindsay on Twitter at @lcblankenship.

How Google Could Sell More

Many of us at Razorfish Search enjoyed the pep talk Google’s John Nicoletti delivered to search marketers in this week’s AdAge. We hope we will indeed be perceived by clients to be “masterminds” and “the next generation of Mad Men.”

Nicoletti’s point is that SEM, an oddball medium for many years, is starting to look like the first 21^st-Century marketing channel. Client interest in “always-on” campaigns is suddenly intense. The value of search marketers’ ability to orchestrate real-time interaction with engaged customers, utilizing creative informed by rigorous quantitative measurement, is intensifying right along with it. We’d quibble with Nicoletti’s characterization of accountable digital display as new (it’s new to Google, foundational for Razorfish), but couldn’t agree more with his conclusion that the emerging market for integrated digital services rightfully belongs to those who’ve already driven great results through strategic activation in an auction environment, mastery of optimization technology and actionable analytics.

It occurred to us, after reading the piece, that Google’s position mirrors that of its agency partners. That is, Google must also transition from a search-centric approach to meet rising demand for stellar mobile, social and display performance. So we thought we’d return the favor and try to pep Google up for the parallel challenge it faces.

The reigning chief organizer of all the world’s information has a dazzling product roadmap but no guaranteed advertiser dollars beyond search. It’s less clear what Google is selling in 2011 than today’s hot media product, Facebook. Everything Facebook creates will be placed in the trendy “Social Media” category. To compete long-term, Google is going to have to bring the same degree of focus it brought to selling search to selling a much broader array of ad units. The company’s tradition of hiring only the best and brightest should serve it well during this period of transition. Google can thrive by paying more attention to how media decisions are actually made, and by operationalizing a more nimble approach to sales.

Identify the best customers. When presenting its display, mobile and social innovations to large organizations, Google is selling into a maelstrom of competing client and agency interests. To navigate the churning waters of this volatile new market, Google should place strategic bets on certain organizations and individuals, investing in multi-sales-cycle relationships by gradually earning trust. Specifically, Google should put its relationship chips on executives and agencies most likely to own integrated measurement.

Appreciate the toolset. Until large marketing organizations integrate their online, offline, short-term and lifetime-value measurement platforms, the business sense of any cross-platform or social advertising initiative will be less than clear. Google has in the past seemed to want to own measurement, and Facebook might make the same mistake – a non-starter for enterprise clients. The best approach is to provide free tools that help with measurement, and train your sales team in all the tagging and tracking tools their clients utilize. A free, enterprise version of Google Analytics would be ideal. If that can’t happen, Google should make sure its sales pitches come with tailored tracking instructions for the client’s toolset.

Leave Analytics to the Consultants. The notion of a major advertiser changing its media mix because of a free study conducted by an interested publisher is so obviously silly, it took a company of engineering geniuses to try and bring it to life. We love Google’s PhDs, but positioning a custom analysis to satisfy the political needs of a big company is outside their skill set. Agencies are experts in client politics, and lots of companies get paid for an unbiased perspective on large data sets. If a client can’t invest in digital media without an expensive analysis he won’t pay for, that’s a big problem – but it’s not a math problem.

Innovate downstream. Google’s engineers seem determined to address every possible scenario of consumer curiosity with a handy utility. At times, it looks like Google hopes to market this wildly diverse suite of products according to plans designed without client contact in Mountain View and Chelsea. What works better for Google are sales experts empowered to meet large advertisers where they are. By lending its client-facing sales reps more control over what they sell, when and to whom (and which agency they partner with and even what they call the products), Google can reap valuable feedback that a more pushy approach bypasses. By reducing top-down directives, they’ll also learn who on their staff has what it takes to read the changing market and reel in big sales.

Rethink C-level access. It’s not quite enough for Google to contact the right customer, customize pitches for clients’ platforms and position advertising products squarely against client goals. There’s also a question of timing. Google can seem careless with its access to bigshots. Experiences over the past two years should clarify for Google the difference between being the hot media property and having a real chance to influence the way large marketing organizations operate. The good news for Google is that their brainpower guarantees them credibility as the aura of hotness inevitably moves on. The trick now is to treat executive access as a non-renewable resource, and exhibit the courage to hold off on big pitches until the preconditions for organizational change have been met.

The vision of users digitally engaged as they research, shop, kill time, travel, advise, complain and socialize is already realized. Every consumer-focused company is working toward an upside for them, but none are as well positioned as Google. Seizing the opportunity to transcend its success in search could be a simple matter of partnering better.

Check out this tribute: Razorfish employees share their stories

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

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.

Today Razorfish released the sixth annual Razorfish Outlook Report.

The report drives home the fact that digital is on center stage right now. Consumers and technology are responsible for the shift  — marketers need to keep up.

Search VP Josh Palau provides the outlook for search. Explaining the concept “Search Everywhere,”  he points out that as consumers expect more and more information at their fingertips, smart marketers will make sure search is integrated into all aspects of marketing, not a standalone tactic.

We encourage you to explore the full report and check out the graphics on flickr.

This year, the Razorfish Search team sent Shawn Cheng, Search Account Manager at Razorfish, to SXSW Interactive and he returned rejuvenated. We’re excited to share his thoughts on his first trip to the festival in Austin, TX and we particularly love his SXSW Approval Matrix (with apologies and thanks to New York Magazine).

Being this was my first SXSW and the conference has been going on since 1987, I had a lot of catching up to do. SXSW has been a music festival since 1987. In 1994, the Film and Interactive portions were born. Tech evangelists, serious start ups and hordes of VCs make pilgrimages to Austin to check out the newest technology.

The back of every SXSW’I program lists attendees by company. I noticed that most companies only had a handful of representatives, but under ‘R’ there was a fat block of 40 Razorfishers, demonstrating our commitment to innovation. We were born digital, we bleed digital and we’re looking for people with the same passion. Did I mention we’re hiring?

I was lucky enough to be a part of SXSW history, as the Interactive attendance of 12,000+ outnumbered the Music portion for the first time in the festival’s 23-year history. I created this SXSW Approval Matrix to capture the spirit of my experience at the festival.

SXSW Interactive Approval Matrix

If you attended, I want to hear from you! Did I miss any noteworthy events that deserve a place in one of the four quadrants? Do you think I misclassified something?

We’re so pleased to have been able to participate in a Q&A session with an experienced search engineer, we’re going to forgive the narcissism required to pack yet another all-day event almost entirely with content irrelevant to everyone not infatuated with Google. The agency-relations team saved this one by drafting Daniel Dulitz, one of its few engineers who works on both paid and natural search, to represent the company for a few precious minutes. There’s nothing like hearing how something works from someone who helped build it. It’s all the more satisfying given how much Razorfish has contributed, by driving the growth of search marketing within so many large organizations, to Google’s reinvention of media and advertising. Thanks, Google, for finally looping us back in.

Though we can’t disclose what we learned, we’re pleased to share that one sneaking suspicion we’ve had about Google was ruled out: Last year, when Google banned A/B testing of landing pages across multiple domains, it was NOT because Google forgot that the $14-billion-per-year SEM industry pretty much grew up on A/B testing.

We spent a good minute scratching the ol’ noggin over these two charts from SEMPO’s 2010 “State of Search Engine Marketing” report. They show that this year, 47% of surveyed businesses said they handle search in-house. Last year, no one said they handle search in house. A careful read reveals a note stating that “in house” wasn’t an option last year. Since none of the other answers are appropriate for respondents running search in-house, and we don’t have one of those handy “n=” captions tipping us off as to whether in-house search marketers skipped the question or entered a misleading answer last year, we can’t actually compare results year-over-year. So why even publish the 2009 chart?

Focusing on 2010 hardly clarifies the issue. We’re very curious about search provider choices, but this categorization is confusing. How would Razorfish Search’s clients respond? With 96 full-time search people and an average tenure over three years, we undoubtedly qualify as a “paid search specialist” and a “SEO specialist.” Though search is only one of many digital services Razorfish provides, some clients perceive us as a “search agency” because help with search is what they originally came to us for. “Digital Marketing Agency” might seem to be the best fit, unless our client considers that Razorfish is a leader in experience design, site creative and technology — projects that don’t fit neatly under the “Marketing Agency” header. At least we can rule out “PR agency”!

One question for our friend Sara Holoubek of the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization: Did you outsource your search survey to a “survey expert” or a “search expert”?