Jansen’s latest book, Understanding Sponsored Search, is a great pickup for anyone interested in the foundational elements behind search marketing.

Capture the Conversation: How is search marketing affected by social media like Facebook and Twitter?
Jim Jansen: Social media has already had an impact on search marketing. Facebook’s online advertising platform seems to be working well, with their demographic targeting. The viral component of social media, on Facebook and Twitter, seems to be an effective marketing and advertising medium. So, social media aspects will probably be more closely connected in the future.

CTC: Will Google+ have a big impact on search results and Google advertising?
JJ: Personally, don’t know if Google+ is disruptive enough to change the marketplace any, relative to what Facebook and Twitter are already doing. However, the ability of Google to link all their products within a browser is or can be a key advantage. We’ll see though. To me, it doesn’t seem like a disruptive enough technology to make much (i.e. >10%) of a difference.

CTC: With location-based deals becoming a popular means of marketing, how do search marketers react?
JJ: The location deals are really popular because they are really targeted geographically. One might see an even more tightening and targeting by location and interests. For example, I like the restaurant offers now. Not keen on the spa treatments. I see this as another avenue of marketing for commercial entity. Everything doesn’t have to fit in the sponsored search/keyword advertising box.

CTC: How do search marketers prepare for the rise of the mobile web?
JJ: After years of predicting “this is the year of mobile,” mobile is already here. And search engine marketers should already be working this aspect into their normal routines. Mobile, combined with the smart phone technology, has change the way people interact with the web.

CTC: Do you have any tips or unique ideas to build off-page links?
JJ: Provide good content and a great user experience first!

About the author: Jim Jansen is an associate professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of several books, most recently UNDERSTANDING SPONSORED SEARCH (Cambridge University Press, September 1, 2011). He is currently a senior fellow at the Pew Internet and American Life Project, where he studies the uses and affordances of the Web for information searching and ecommerce, with a focus on the interaction between the person and the technology.

I recently heard a CEO refer to LinkedIn as the sleeping giant of social networks. With last week’s announcement of 100 million members, the SEC filing in January (in preparation of going public) and 2010 being LinkedIn’s first profitable year since the company’s eight-year existence — I’d say the giant has awakened.

For those of us active on LinkedIn, it’s obvious the company is moving aggressively. Even this week, you may have received an email invitation to spend your first $50 worth of advertising free of charge via LinkedIn Ads (formerly called DirectAds).

Still, there’s a lot to be discovered about how to best utilize this social network. Would you believe the most popular advice about using LinkedIn begins with making sure your account profile/setup is designated “100 percent complete,” including the upload of a real picture of yourself?

Sure, that’s valuable advice — but a bit elementary, don’t you think? Hopefully, you’ll find some of the tips described herein even more useful.

Tip 1: Sharing is Caring

LinkedIn began releasing tools in early 2010 to enable new ways to share, but the end-of-year launch of the LinkedIn share button was a game changer — essentially catching LinkedIn up to Facebook in its ease of bringing outside content in.

As marketers we want our content shared on LinkedIn just as we want it shared on Facebook. The newness of LinkedIn Share Buttons means we don’t yet have hard usage stats. Regardless, the recommendation is to start implementing them around appropriately shareable (especially blog-related) content.

Tip 2: Do Your Detective Work

If we agree that knowledge is power, this should become a fundamental exercise in preparing for meetings, calls, insights and talking points. As best stated by Lindsey Pollak: “look up everyone.” Even having small amounts of information about people can break the ice in conversations, giving you an edge in presentations or sales calls.

As a helpful reminder, I use the Rapportive plugin in my web browser, giving me fast access (via the right column of my Gmail account) to a person’s LinkedIn, Facebook, recent Tweets and more.

Tip 3: Leverage Expert Content with Advertising

Last year, Guy Kawasaki not only pointed to the prospect of winning new business via LinkedIn by answering questions associated with your expertise — but also recommended promoting unique (blog) content using LinkedIn’s small text ads. As of late January 2011, these text ads enable targeting by job title, company and groups.

Whether you’re part of a small emerging business or a Fortune 500, the value of establishing and maintaining thought leadership is priceless. If you have the right (expert) content, promoting it in conjunction with the new ad targeting features is a winning approach.

Note: LinkedIn states that “good ads” in their network will have a click-through rate (CTR) greater than 0.025 percent. Yes, it’s low — but arguably consistent with what many report on the lower-end CTR performance of their Facebook ad campaigns. LinkedIn offers some insight to best practices for advertising here.

Tip 4: Be Part of the New News

Beyond promoting your content with ads, the simple sharing of it may also extend the reach of your expertise, thanks to the new LinkedIn Today news delivery format.

This new feature aggregates and delivers shared headlines from your network and industry via tweets and LinkedIn sharing. It also enables topic search functions with categorical filtering through industries, companies, etc.

The connection/algorithm between LinkedIn share buttons and what appears in LinkedIn Today content isn’t clear — but given the nature of how content is shared in LinkedIn Groups, it’s certainly high time you join and begin contributing to at least one.

Tip 5: Get Radical with Recruiting

It would be remiss to skip mentioning LinkedIn as a recruiting tool. From resume searching to identification of funding sources, finding people to fill your knowledge gaps is critical to business growth.

Although you may not see firsthand use of companies targeting their competitor’s employees for hire, Marty Weintraub’s step-by-step tutorial demonstrates how the guerilla nature of acquiring talent just got kicked up a notch.

With this “awakening,” LinkedIn continues demonstrating it warrants our business attention. If you still find yourself in the process of making friends with this giant, I’d love to hear more about how you are getting along. For quickly ramping up your LinkedIn strategy, also consider tapping into some of the starter resources out there from folks like Lewis Howes.

Five years ago, search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising were only beginning to take shape as legitimate lead generation and marketing strategies. At the time, SEO and PPC were cutting edge marketing strategies – many brands and companies had heard the buzz surrounding SEO and PPC, but were unable to pinpoint strategy or purpose behind it.

Today, SEO and PPC have evolved into common marketing strategies for brands to place their marketing budget. Companies understand the huge opportunities that exist within search marketing for return on investment. Social media, conversely, exists much like SEO and PPC did five years ago. Companies and brands are keen to explore the social media space, but are often unable to define social media marketing success or execute a defined strategy.

Within our niche in the industry, we execute both search marketing and social media marketing for clients. As such, there exists a unique opportunity to take learnings and success from search marketing efforts and transition into the social media space. This is what happened with an opportunistic client of ours.

We were initially hired to restructure The Client’s AdWords account and increase conversion volume. They had managed their PPC efforts internally, and reached out to us to take their account to the next level. After much research and testing, we were able to determine what converted within their account – what calls to action best resonated with users, what keywords and themes were most effective, and what landing page variations were most conducive to converting. We branched out their PPC efforts into Yahoo! and Bing with continued success. Eventually, The Client began asking, “what next?” – their PPC accounts were converting in record numbers at the lowest cost per conversion yet.

Moving forward, we thoroughly researched The Client and their presence online and saw a huge opportunity for them to improve their organic search rankings. Therefore, our next step in their overall strategy was an SEO overhaul. We were able to construct an SEO blueprint based upon their PCC successes and laid out a clear strategy with actionable goals. This SEO strategy is still being executed, but we have already seen important gains in organic search results for several search terms. Recently, The Client again asked “what next?” with their sights set on entering into the space of social media.

The next phase in the overall strategy for The Client was taking the business intelligence learned from successful PPC and SEO implementation and applying it into the space of social media. Sometimes, depending on what industry you are looking to engage with, simply setting up a Facebook page or a Twitter handle is not a priority for a client. After all, you cannot fit a square peg into a round hole. With The Client being in a niche industry, there simply was not enough chatter or interest on Facebook or Twitter to warrant developing a strategy. Therefore, we researched alternative, more relevant opportunities in the social media space for The Client to engage with.

After meeting with key stakeholders and discussing goals, we were able to conclude that the next logical step was for The Client to begin a blog. A blog strategy presented the best opportunity to base conversation in the social media space around learnings from search marketing. Why? Because through search marketing, we are able to pinpoint what inspires potential customers to engage with the company. The Client will be able to create engaging conversations based around these learnings through a blog. They will be able to reach their target audience, reach industry influencers who act as information-hungry word of mouth propellers,as well as comment on other niche blogs, message boards and forums.

As it was with search marketing five years ago, social media marketing today poses a conundrum for brands – they realize that they should probably participate in the space, but are unclear how to enter in and achieve success. For a company like The Client, calculated steps and a logical progression from search engine marketing to social media marketing proved to be the best strategy. The calls to action that have worked best through SEO and PPC now act as a road map for content creation we know will be relevant to prospects, customers and influencers in the social media space.

Has anyone else had success transitioning learnings from search engine marketing into social media? Have any questions or comments? Leave them here!

• Forces the search engines to choose which page is the most “authoritative” or relevant to that subject on your site.
• Creates additional competition for rankings – you’re vying against yourself for position in the SERPs.
• Dilutes the potential ranking ability of a single phrase by spreading link power, keyword targeting, and anchor text on your site across multiple pages.

Speaking of keywords, an interesting new service called HitTail was recently brought to my attention. This free service (for low to medium traffic sites) tracks every search hit that leads to your site and then pulls out the keywords. The underperforming, or long tail, keywords are given to you as suggestions to incorporate in your editorial content, such as blogs. The idea is that the collective demand for the less popular keywords (the long tail) can exceed the most popular terms added together. By using these under performing keywords, you can help out your natural search results and bring more qualified traffic to your site. These less competitive long tail keywords could also be very beneficial to a PPC campaign and likely result in a higher click through rate, lower cost per click, and more pre-qualified traffic.

- Navigate your account quickly and easily
- Make bulk changes to keywords and ad text
- Work offline, then upload your changes
- Copy and paste keywords and ad text
- Circulate proposed changes and get feedback

I am most excited about the increased speed of editing Adwords accounts on a desktop application versus online. Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time navigating and editing Adwords campaigns online has felt the frustration of the Adwords website crawling.

The Adwords Desktop editor is easy to navigate and definitely speeds up the campaign editing process. Just make your changes, click "Post Changes" and you are done. This free tool is especially helpful for advertisers with large accounts and multiple campaigns. You will need to be careful not to overwrite updated information if multiple people have access and are updating the same account.

Direct from the Google Help Center, here’s what the ads look like: Mobile ads contain two lines of text, with a limit of 12 or 18 characters per line, depending on the language in which you write your ad. Your destination URL appears on a third line if you choose to enter one. If you select the option that allows customers to directly connect to your business phone, a Call link will appear next to your destination URL. You can also set daily budgets and establish scheduled marketing messages.

The big advantage could be for advertisers looking to draw in local customers. For example, people who are on the road traveling and looking for a restaurant, hotel or service. David Utter from WebProNews.com commented on Google’s strategy: “We know that Google and its competitors have been actively engaged in a battle for dominance in the local search arena. It makes sense to corner the mobile search market for advertising if possible.”

Businesses purchase the ads through the Adwords interface, and must have either a mobile web site for pay-per-click ads, or a toll-free phone number for pay-per-call ads.

Now that mobile phones are fully integrated into mainstream America with over 200 million subscribers, mobile phones are and will continue to be an important place to deliver advertising.

With Google's new Link Unit feature, you can place links to ads on your site without displaying the ads themselves. This provides a less obtrusive way to earn money from advertising on your website, and potentially a more relevant path for people to locate topic-specific information.

Why is this kind of thing important? Just ask someone like our good friend, Tim Carter, from askthebuilder.com who clears $30,000/month from Adsense revenues alone. There is also a growing population of companies from India who have come to rely on Adsense revenue to make up eighty percent or more of their entire operating incomes. Any advantage Google can offer to increase click through rates is a good one.

If you are a mall-loathing online shopper like me, you’ll enjoy Google’s new Checkout feature which simplifies the check out process, enabling you to purchase from many stores with one login – no more entering the same info each time you buy, and no more having to remember different usernames and passwords for each store.

Google’s official blog entry explains how Google Checkout works with Adwords, offering online stores a more complete solution to attract customers and process sales. When Checkout is combined with Adwords, a small green shopping cart icon appears next to the display URL in the Adwords ad text (see picture). Now if I have a super-easy-to-use Google Checkout account and see that little green icon in the ad text, you bet I will be more likely to follow that link than one without this functionality.

As the creation of effective Adwords ad text and display URLs has become a science, it will be interesting to see if you will have the ability in to split test ads with the icon vs. without. Overall the set up process was painless and the checkout/purchase history interface is very google-esque – simple, clean, and uniform – I’m down.