Socialistas, Wizards & 21st Century Madmen

How Search Marketing Can Lead the Integration of SEO & Social Media

If an SEO ‘Wizard’ and Social Media ‘Socialista’ hooked up at a party, they’d make strange bedfellows. But in a corporate structure, bedfellows are exactly what these two groups must become, if their respective channels are to reach their full potential within Google’s new time-delimited landscape. Paid Search’s ‘21st Century Madmen’ can provide insights into how organizations can effectively manage these fledgling marketing programs.

As the digital version of AMC’s take on 1960’s advertising industry, 21st Century  Madmen/ women are the proven organizational leaders who cut their teeth on Paid Search’s prime directive, which is that marketing is a measureable investment and not a cost center. Managing investments requires business acumen, relationship management and analytical rigor – disciplines that organizations can leverage to integrate SEO and the marketing aspect of Social Media, two seemingly disparate, but fundamentally complementary, advertising channels.

It has become very fashionable to state that Search and Social must somehow be integrated, as both advertising channels are used in the dual role of promoting brands and measuring consumer activity surrounding brands. Every self-proclaimed ‘expert’ in the online ad space has championed this integration. But all this lip service has added up to no more than educated conjecture until last month when Google launched its ‘Latest’ search filter link, along with other time-delimited filters. That move made every would-be Search-Social pundit proud to be part of the visionaries’ caravan. Their prognostications have been validated, because now search engine optimization is no longer just about linking, crawl-ability and content. It is also about recency (so recent a term that it’s not even in Webster’s Dictionary yet) – or how Social Media is driving the most recent content, which now appears, for all intents and purposes, on ‘Page 2’ of Google’s results.

So now what?

Now large organizations know undeniably that, at least for a certain percentage of Google searchers, ‘Page 2’ will be ‘Page 1’ filtered by time – its rankings will be driven by the most recent tweet, social network comment or blog post containing the appropriate search term.  So logically, it’s a good thing to somehow align the activities of the light and chatty Social Media in-crowd with the activities of the dark and brooding SEO folks in an attempt to own part of the two most valuable pieces of virtual real estate in the Search landscape.

So how does an organization go about doing this?

Although Social Media and SEO are culturally different, they are both resigned to a nomadic space within their organizations, straddling functional core competencies and never truly, completely claimed by one department. Depending on whom you ask, SEO is either in IT or Marketing. Social Media is ingrained in multiple aspects of an organization – Customer Service, Supply Chain, Training & Education, Recruiting, Marketing and Public Relations. But strictly in terms of the Google landscape, both Social Media and SEO are burgeoning marketing programs that provide downstream value as forms of branding, as well as upstream value as online channels that measure the efficacy of branding campaigns through offline and other online advertising channels.  Another commonality is that neither likes to measure itself, nor is either naturally prone to doing so, except on metrics situated higher up the sales funnel (traffic/ tweet volume), amorphous metrics (sentiment), or strict yet volatile metrics (page rank). In order to get the Socialistas and the Wizards to play nicely together toward a common purpose, what’s needed is an objective framework to measure the success of each activity on its own and how each one influences each other as well as the other marketing activities. Covario’s name for this framework is the ‘Digital Center of Excellence’.

An organization’s 21st Century Madman/woman, regardless of whether their background is specifically in Paid Search, is the best candidate for leading the DCoE. While it is not necessary that Socialistas and Wizards report directly to the Madman/woman, they should be required to follow the DCoE’s common success metrics and ‘flighting’ schedules. Down the road, the Madman/woman can lead further coordination amongst Social Media, SEO, Paid Search and Display campaigns – measuring cross-media effectiveness, tweaking campaigns, adjusting spend and finding inefficiencies to exploit.

To attain and maintain a highly visible presence on Google’s Page 1 and the new Page 2, a 21st Century Madman/ woman is needed to get the Socialistas and Wizards to stop looking down their respective noses at each other by creating common goals, a digital roadmap and clear success metrics.

Actionable Insight 1: Find a digital leader that takes a financial approach to marketing in order to connect the SEO and Social Media groups.

Actionable Insight 2: Create a Digital Center of Excellence that provides a framework for all online media groups and efforts.

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