If your job involves marketing on the web, it’s likely that a significant chunk of your career will be spent piecing together data about your customers (and potential customers) likes, dislikes, interests and intentions. Buying email lists, coaxing contact information out of website visitors, reading cookies to understand browsing history – it’s all a complicated and broken game.

Because this data is broken up and spread across thousands of disconnected databases all across the web, getting the data is often a messy, expensive and inefficient process. For instance, Google owns my search history on Google. Bing owns my search history on Bing. Every website I’ve ever visited owns data on the pages I’ve visited there, and how I interact with their site. Every data source comes from a different intermediary, has its own conventions for how it can be used, and worst of all, none of these data sources can be reconciled with one another. Let’s face it – all marketers get right now is a fleeting glimpse at the audiences they are targeting on the web. This may be the norm, but the norm sucks.

There has to be a better way. We’ve seen some early efforts to marry up these different data sources – efforts that are still in their infancy, but often have stunningly positive results. So let’s take it a step further.

What if consumers themselves owned, controlled, and brokered their own complete datasets? It’s a valid question and an idea that isn’t all that far fetched. This New York Times article broaches the idea (and was the impetus for this post.)

Moral debates about ownership of data aside, a future where one unified database of marketing data exists (regardless of who owns it) could mean a huge leap forward for marketers. Rather than negotiate with hundreds of data providers for disconnected “tastes” of data on an anonymous user, why not negotiate directly with one source – the user – for data straight from the source? A platform that allows for this to happen could (if done right) represent a huge leap forward in efficiency, effectiveness, and even ethics.

Need an irony-laden example of how broken marketing on the web is today, and how something like this could fix it? Take a look at a screenshot of the New York Times article mentioned above. While reading, I was staring down a wall of retargeted ads for tires. Little does the New York Times know that I bought tires the day before, and that my attention has shifted elsewhere. It’s a missed opportunity to serve me relevant content, and it makes for a poor user experience. And think about it – these ads were served using what is commonly thought as a somewhat new and highly effective marketing tactic (ad retargeting/remarketing.)

Most users, if properly incentivized, would prefer to own and share their own data when it could prevent inefficiencies like this for sites they know and regularly patronize. It’s a fair trade that benefits everyone – users control their data, marketers get data that’s far and away better. Intermediaries lose, I guess.

It might not be long before marketers have to shift their attention from toiling with disconnected data sources to actually messaging real product benefits to seriously interested consumers. Isn’t that what marketing is really all about?

On Tuesday, Google rolled out its long-awaited social product. Google+ (Google Plus) as we’ve been told to call it, is the larger name for a variety of social tools and enhancements of Google search. There is an excellent rundown of the product at SearchEngineLand.

While they would neither confirm nor deny, the fact that Google was working on a social product for some time was no secret. Bits of information trickled out over the past 12 months, some giving us a pretty good idea of what Google+ would ultimately come to look like.

For a number of reasons, I’m really rooting for Google+. It’s been cliche to say that Google doesn’t “get” social for a long time now, but I think they got a lot of things right this time… and they are making some big bets on what the future of the social web will look like.

Circles is the most compelling feature of Google+

With the rollout of Google+, Google has drawn a line in the sand that sets it apart from Facebook in an important way: Circles.

Facebook is centered around a singular timeline that includes all of your friends and connections. For the most part, sharing something means sharing it with everyone, and consuming your timeline means reading one set of updates from all of your friends. While it’s possible to limit the reach of what you share from reaching certain people, doing so seems intentionally opaque and clunky in Facebook. Not surprising based on Mark Zuckerberg’s public stance on online identity and his open opposition to users managing different “personas” online.

Circles, on the other hand, makes managing your different online personas easy. It gives you the capability to segment your friends into different groups and choose who sees what on a post-by-post basis. That’s a pretty compelling feature that is often painfully absent from Facebook; having no choice but to share everything with everyone is flawed for a number of reasons.

For some it’s about privacy, and keeping separate groups of friends or aspects of themselves separate. Fair enough. But even moreso than privacy, it’s an issue of relevancy. What’s relevant to social connections I have at work is often irrelevant to my friends and family, and vice versa.

That’s part of the problem with the Facebook timeline. Sure, it’s filtered to some extent to show me people who I find interesting, but not the topics I care about. That makes my timeline a much less compelling read than it could be, and it discourages me from sharing things I think will be lost on certain members of my audience.

A big bet on content curation going mainstream

The idea of content curation is still in its infancy. Google+ is the first service to offer a meaningful answer to many of the problems inherent with the way we share content today.

In tech circles we love to share content, so it’s easy to forget how much less common and how much less sophisticated most users are when it comes to sharing content. For many Facebook users, the way they share content is occasional, random, and often irrelevant to their connections (outside of the fact that it was shared by someone they know.) For the most part, it’s a novelty and not a utility.

It might be exciting and relevant to you that you just had a fantastic meal at restaurant X while visiting friends in New York, but it isn’t all that interesting to me right now (in fact, it often seems obnoxious.) On the other hand, that would be supremely relevant to me the next time I’m visiting New York. And that article on your favorite mommy blog about infant development you just read? Might be best left shared with your friends who recently had kids. But whose to say that your endorsement of this article won’t be helpful to me in the future, should I ever have kids?

That’s where search benefits social in a huge way, and that’s how +1 fits into the equation. Over time, sharing (or +1-ing) content makes you more influential amongst your group of friends as they find your recommendations to be useful. For a lot of people, this could make sharing an addictive activity.

The idea of sharing and curating the web and the rest of the world  isn’t a new idea, but it’s something that nobody has properly executed in the past. The Like button was the first step, but up until now it’s been little more than a lazy way to push an update to Facebook. Search capability, Google’s bread and butter, is what makes the difference.

Deep social integration is a sign of things to come

It’s comical to think back to a time only 8 or so months ago when a major point of contention in the SEO industry was whether or not social signals would find a permanent home as part of the algorithm.

So much has happened since then. First, the engines outright announced that they are leveraging data from social networks to rank content. Then came Panda – a major shift in the way Google leverages universal user data (engagement metrics like time on site, clickthrough rates, etc.) to promote higher quality content. Somewhere in there, Google +1 came along – an awkward product on its own, but an important precursor to what we now see as Google+.

For Google, entering the social space in such a forceful way isn’t only an obvious answer to the dominance of Facebook, it’s a necessary step in the evolution of their core product. Google+ is full of cues about the direction Google plans to guide search. That’s an entire topic in itself that I’ll dig into in another post.

“Correlation does not imply causation.”

That statement might as well be the scrolling fine print at the end of a 15 second car commercial. No matter how carefully prefaced a blog post or piece of research on SEO is, it seems as though most people just don’t understand – or don’t want to understand – what this means.

A good example of this is how a recent piece of research from SEOMoz continues to be misconstrued by many bloggers and SEOs. In case you aren’t familiar, SEOMoz published data showing strong correlation between Facebook shares and rankings on Google. Unsurprisingly, what many people often seem to take away from the research is that Facebook shares have a strong and direct impact on rankings.

There’s an important difference between those two statements. SEOMoz’s research is interesting, likely sound, and definitely useful – and they guarded carefully against misinterpretation in the original post describing their findings. But if the action item you took away was to beg, plead, or pay for Facebook shares, you are seriously missing the point. And you aren’t alone.

What the research really says

It’s entirely possible that Facebook shares correlate with rankings, even if Google isn’t using Facebook shares to calculate rankings (maybe they are, maybe they aren’t.) The important thing to understand is that there are other factors at play that could be impacting both rankings and Facebook shares in a similar way, even if there is no direct connection. Maybe it has something to do with whether or not people actually like your content and naturally send many other signals indicating this to the engines? Unfortunately, there is no way for us to prove either way.

Even if Facebook shares do directly impact rankings, chances are that a half-hearted attempt at forcing them as opposed to growing them organically wouldn’t have much of an impact anyway. (Sorry, but that Mechanical Turk squadron you hired to amass 3,000 Facebook shares isn’t hard for the engines to spot.)

The real takeaway from the research isn’t that Facebook shares influence rankings (they may or may not be.) For me, it’s that search results may finally be evolving to the point where the best indicator of rankings is just how much people actually want to consume your content. That’s valuable, actionable insight that should be guiding your SEO efforts every day.

Hearing what you want to hear

So why the disconnect? Sure, headlines get shortened and twisted. That’s part of the problem. But there’s something bigger at work here – a persistent problem that plays out in the SEO community over and over again.

In some ways, it’s a case of self-serving interpretation. Many choose to misinterpret SEOMoz’s findings because it’s just easier. It’s easier to define your client’s “SEO problem” with a number of links, likes, or Facebook shares. It’s easier to get budget for a quantifiable fix rather than something as intangible as creating high quality content. It’s also easier to keep doing what you’ve always done rather than shift your perspective and your tactics.

I wonder if this attitude isn’t an unfortunate side effect of the history of the industry. SEO was once a kind of shortcut to getting traffic and attention that was heavy on the technical details and light on the marketing. At the time, that was all well and good.

Of course, things have changed. Search engines are far more sophisticated, webmaster friendly, and much more closely attuned to what their users actually like. Technical soundness is still important, but technical tricks and manipulating non-human metrics just doesn’t work in the same way that it used to. And with the incorporation of more social and user metrics, we are seeing another big shift toward the importance of marketing skills, and away from technical hacks.

No doubt that it’s a tough jump to make from working with machines to working with people, but that’s the evolution that SEO faces as a discipline. Effective SEO now requires marketing abilities in addition to technical skills and the ability to amass links, shares or likes. You can either avoid that fact and keep it up with the wheel spinning, or step up to the plate and start marketing.

Take a look at my first post on the HubSpot blog – 5 Steps to Google Places Optimization Zen. Tweets, comments, and the like are obviously appreciated!

Bear with me as I make some changes to the format and layout of this site. When all is said and done, I’m hoping to have a site that’s more conducive to shorter, more frequent posts of various types, a-la Tumblr. In addition to the occasional long post, I’ll be mixing in some more important tweets, comments and writing I’ve left elsewhere on the web, photos, links, and a lot more.

In the meantime, excuse the mess please

The 800lb content farm in the room – eHow

• Substantial drops for several sites like ezinearticles and Hubpages;
• Clear evidence that eHow was not affected.

A breakout of the data I collected on eHow is below. (Average positions are calculated from the best of two trials before and after the change was rolled out, which is easier to compare.)

Needless to say I was scratching my head when I saw that eHow had seen modest improvements over the course of the update on my set of queries. To be exact, more queries improved than fell, most stayed the same, and the average position went from 5.17 to 5.00. Not a huge improvement, but steady rankings nonetheless.

Why did eHow escape?

If eHow is the often-cited example of a content farm, then why weren’t they adversely impacted by this change? Some bring up the possibility that Google gives certain sites a pass because they run a lot of AdSense ads that make Google a lot of money. I’m skeptical of this argument – It’s a convenient explanation, and it isn’t in line with Google’s best interests over the long-term. So what are some other possible explanations?

The user signals Google gets from eHow might actually be positive. The common argument put forth by eHow’s owners at Demand Media is that eHow “fills in the gaps” on the web by covering content that nobody else has written. In many cases, this is true – even a mediocre article from eHow is often the best resource for the type of hyper-specific informational queries that nobody else has a motivation to write and update. In this sense, some of eHow’s content is useful and worthy of being ranked.

There is no good way to algorithmically detect this type of content. On the flip side, there are a lot of cases where eHow is just one of many relevant resources, and it often isn’t the best. That’s just the nature of their business model – an article on baking an apple pie that was researched and written over the course of an hour simply can’t stand up to an article on a niche site written by someone who has devoted their life to baking apple pies.

Here’s another good example – do two eHow pages really deserve to rank above the State Department’s excellent resource on passport renewal?

In these cases, sites like eHow are able to muscle their way to the top with their hyper-relevant content and the domain authority that comes with having millions of pieces of content that sometimes are the best resource. This is a confounding problem for search engines, because judging the true quality of content isn’t easy.

The startup search engine Blekko has taken an aggressive approach by manually banning indvidual domains that it labels as content farms. While it’s a tempting tactic, I don’t know if it’s scalable or will be effective in the long run. It changes the game by taking incentive away from building large-scale content farms like eHow, but it doesn’t do much to address the underlying problem of low quality content written only to rank and show ads against.

Why should you care?

The more prominence that content farms are allowed to gain, the higher the bar is to compete. The plumber with 20 years of experience and a new site writing detailed tips and resources probably deserves to rank above a farmed article written by someone who has never picked up a wrench, but that isn’t what will likely happen by default. This entire situation is probably the best piece of evidence that writing excellent content is never enough.

Dissatisfaction on the part of users is also an important thing to watch. Is the dissatisfaction genuine amongst every day people, or is it a meme that’s pretty much limited to tech circles? If this discussion doesn’t go away, it could spell trouble for Google and create an opening for new players with new approaches.

I’ve been spending more and more time answering questions on Quora lately. There is something about the combination of structured blogging, the format, and the built-in audience that really appeals to me. Regardless of what you think of Quora as the social network of the minute, check out some of my answers… vote, comment, and leave follow up answers if you agree or disagree on anything. I’d love to get some more feedback!

Something that never fails to amaze me is how often SEO is underfunded and ignored. SEO is visible everywhere on the web, which might lead you to think that most large organizations see the value and sieze the opportunity that SEO presents. But all too often, this isn’t the case.

At first glance, this problem seems nonsensical. A well executed search campaign is loaded with potential – when done right, it can become an entirely new, long-lasting stream of revenue/leads/clients. So why does it often go ignored or paid only a token amount of attention?

Reason #1 – The safe route usually wins.

When given the choice between allocating budget to a known channel that is likely to generate a mediocre incremental return or devoting it to a new channel, the choice for many decision makers isn’t a difficult one. The safe route often wins, even if it isn’t the best long term option.

Paid search, for instance, generates known returns at a consistent efficiency. It’s easy to start, stop, and measure. SEO is risky by comparison. The returns it will generate are unknown (at first), as is the time it will take to achieve rankings.

Suggestion: Minimize ambiguity, maximize transparency.

• Be clear about the returns an SEO effort could generate. Learn to estimate realistic position and traffic gains, and translate those into a meaningful metric (conversions, revenue, or leads.) Be upfront about accuracy and don’t hesitate to give a wide range, but it’s important to boil down the results of a successful SEO engagement to a real metric that speaks to decision makers.
  
• Report on what matters. Keep your ultimate projections in mind, and regularly report on progress. Rankings are fine, but they miss the most important part of the story – how have actual business metrics changed over the course of your effort? Think conversions and revenue, not just rankings and traffic.

Reason #2 – SEO has a “black box” reputation.

Here’s a conversation many SEOs have probably had at one time or another…

A question like this is a worthy one, but it is impossible to answer accurately. With so many variables at play, tying specific improvements in metrics to changes on your site, before or after the fact, is an inexact science and a road that many SEOs rightly hesitate to venture down.

Suggestion – Stick to a process, establish cause and effect.
SEO isn’t usually about one specific action that moves the needle, it’s about consistency and doing as many things right as possible. That being said, there are things you can do to prove your value and move past the black box label SEO often unfairly is given.

• Stick to a defined process. Marketing software providers like SEOMoz and Hubspot are so successful in part because they have a very clearly defined process at the heart of their respective products. Mirror this approach – explain SEO to decision makers with a road map in hand. Define the key activities that are necessary to move the needle, and keep a list of implementation goals that are tied to specific dates.
• Do your best to establish cause and effect. Graph improvements in rankings and metrics, and annotate your graph with the relative dates when changes were made. While it’s near impossible to accurately correlate specific changes on your site to specific events in rankings and metrics, drawing some general cause and effect lines through the process can be very helpful in proving your value.
  

Reason #3 – SEO requires on-the-ground work within an organization.

Writing a bigger check for paid search or picking up the phone to schedule a media buy are easy ways to spend a marketing budget. SEO, on the other hand, requires a lot of footwork. Doing it right requires cooperation at many levels and in many departments – and orchestrating this cooperation is often the hardest part of the process.

Suggestion: Act as a project manager, not a consultant. Too many SEOs think and act as though their responsibility ends at delivering recommendations. If you want to move the needle, you can’t be afraid to get your hands dirty – whether you are acting as an outside consultant, or are actually making the changes yourself. If you are in an agency  working with one contact at a large client, make yourself indispensable to them. Change the way you define your role if you really want to drive results.

Screen scraping isn’t a new idea, but the means to do so is now more available than ever. Tools like Outwit, Mozenda, and Needlebase open up an endless number of new ways for SEOs and social marketers to optimize by making data collection quick and scalable. My recent guest post at SEOROI covers the ins and outs of these three fantastic tools and a few ideas on how to start leveraging them.

Partly for fun and partly because I think there is value in going out on a limb from time to time, I’m trying my hand at some predictions on what is on the horizon for search & social in 2011. At the end of the year, I’ll of course take a look back and see how my predictions stacked up.

#1 – The influence of social signals and reputation on search rankings will become harder to ignore.

Google recently confirmed that signals from social media sites are being used as a search ranking factor. While a lot of SEOs seem intent on writing this off as a fad or a minor development, I beg to differ. Social signals may be used “relatively lightly” at this point, but they will continue to gain importance and visibillity in the search results over the course of 2011. Forward thinking SEOs and social media consultants will focus more on reputation in social media in an effort to better understand how to further “optimize” social media for maximum search benefit.

#2 – The relationship between Facebook and Bing will grow stronger.

At a time when the links between search and social are growing quickly, partnership is a winning combination for Bing and Facebook (especially while Google continues to stumble in the social space.) While Bing has been cautious in its rollout of liked search results, I’m willing to guess that we will see more and more instances of Facebook integration on Bing. Liked results will become commonplace, and the two will find other ways of leveraging one another (topic experts from Facebook appearing on Bing? More opportunities to share search results from Bing back to Facebook?)
I also wouldn’t be surprised to see some cooperation on the paid ads side. While Bing and Facebook each have their own ad-serving platform, they are more complementary than competitors. Why not offer users cross-platform ad serving through Microsoft AdCenter?

#3 – Search engines will further consolidate or obscure the long tail.

2010 brought two major changes on Google that could impact the long tail – the introduction of instant search, and the rollout of the new keyword tool (which eliminated “non-commercial” keyword suggestions and chopped off most of the long-tail results.) While we can argue about what impact (if any) instant search has had on the long tail to date, the changes to the keyword tool make Google’s intentions pretty clear.
It makes sense from a strategic perspective. On the paid search side, head and mid-tail search terms are generally more competitive, have higher CPCs, and as a result generate more revenue for the search engines. Conversely, giving advertisers access to a healthy long tail of search queries allows them extremely granular control and the ability to save a lot of money. It will be interesting to see if the engines make more subtle changes that impact the long tail in 2011.

#4 – Static content continues to die.

The release of Google’s Caffeine index really shook things up in 2010 – The old, definitive resource pages from authoritative domains that reliably ranked well were unseated by fresh, “living documents” riding on social buzz and recent links. While the Caffeine update may have come to the detriment of many sites (and the anger of many webmasters), Caffeine was only the beginning. The days when one piece of content would sit in first place indefinitely are over – all content now has a shelf life. In 2011, we will likely see more movement in favor of recent content and constantly evolving pages that are always being updated and curated.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments – what do you think will be big in 2011?