Here on the last day of SES San Francisco, we had a panel of folks discussing the convergence of search, social, and content marketing. Depending on your view of these three topics, you see them as either forming the trifecta of online marketing or the unholy trinity of time suck. Determining which one it is for your company is an important first step.

Mobile marketing is already big and its going to be huge. But is it just a bunch of male tech geeks using these phones to look up the GoDaddy girl during the Super Bowl? Paul Cushman of Yahoo says, No, were beyond that and states that they have 55 million unique users per month. Notably, he did indicate that, in short, the users are there and by the end of 2012, one-third of all mobile phones will be smartphones. So, what does the opportunity look like here?

Mobile marketing is already big and its going to be huge. But is it just a bunch of male tech geeks using these phones to look up the GoDaddy girl during the Super Bowl? Paul Cushman of Yahoo says, No, were beyond that and states that they have 55 million unique users per month. Notably, he did indicate that, in short, the users are there and by the end of 2012, one-third of all mobile phones will be smartphones. So, what does the opportunity look like here?

Here on the last day of SES San Francisco, we had a panel of folks discussing the convergence of search, social, and content marketing. Depending on your view of these three topics, you see them as either forming the trifecta of online marketing or the unholy trinity of time suck. Determining which one it is for your company is an important first step.

Did you know that A Rose is a Rose is not always true? At least its not to adCenter. What adCenter sees is actually Rose Rose...why is that? At todays session we heard this and other nuggets about adCenter and the Search Alliance and some of the idiosyncrasies and genuinely cool things that exist in adCenter. A few examples of things you may not have known that were discussed: adCenter ignores common conjunctions and prepositions such as: a, about, an, at, by, for,

Ad optimization is part art and part science. The art part deals with the actual ad - whether its a search ad comprised of all text or a display ad or something in-between. The creative part is the art, and it can be notoriously hard to bottle success here, but you can get smarter about it through persuasion marketing and psychological triggers which were discussed at the keynote this morning.

This morning, Susan Bratton, Co-Founder and CEO of Personal Life Media kicked off SES San Francisco with a tour de force of online marketing related to persuasion marketing and conversion triggers. She quoted some of my favorite marketers when discussing what makes people convert, including the great Joe Sugarman. Joe Sugarman is to copy writing what Benjamin Graham is to value investing they are both brains worth picking if you want to get ahead of the competition. So,

We put together a motley crew for dinner at SES last night in NYC that included Americans, a Brit, and a couple Icelanders. One of the Americans was a sharp young lady from Minnesota. As we were chatting about where we are all from she mentioned that her heritage was Norwegian and that she knew how to say a prayer in Norwegian. At this point Kristjan Hauksson of Nordic eMarketing said that he could speak some Norwegian and would love to hear the prayer.

Quality Score is not exactly a new concept in the online advertising world but its an ever evolving one and one which is coming to adCenter soon so I thought Id highlight some of the questions customers are asking about Quality Score here at SES NY today. But first, a little primer on the items that can contribute to quality score: Ad text Landing page relevance Keyword relevance CTR Historical performance and more!

Today at SES New York, Jeffrey Eisenberg talked at length about the challenges and solutions to converting customers across different social media channels and how we need to rethink how we, as marketers, measure success. Jeffrey contends that the average company spends $92 to bring a customer to their website and then $1 to convert. He goes on to cite Jeff Bezos saying that creating a truly compelling customer experience is the best way that you can spend your dollars.

Today I attended a great customer forum in NYC where Y! and Microsoft Search executives talked about the state of the union. And, like any good State of the Union speech overall things are going well. But dont take my word for it, lets look.

Do you work at a company where if you added up all of the revenue that the different marketing and communications teams took credit for that the number would look vastly different then what the finance department says? In other words, do you take the time to actually attribute the correct percentage of sales to the correct outreach method? According to the panel for the Channel Surfing: Tracking Profit and ROI Across Channels at SES today,

There was an interesting session today on how companies that are used to doing search advertising can dip their toes in the water with display advertising. The session highlighted some of the major differences and advancements in display, and the potential mine fields to watch out for. While I expected to walk away from the session with a few simple bullet points on how to get started,

Industry pundits at search conventions have been predicting the future of search for as long as search conventions have been around. You have to admit that when asked to predict the future it is never an easy task and one just slightly prone to error. Aptly, one of the presenters acknowledged this point by using a Magic 8 Ball on a slide. So, put on your tinfoil hats, break out your Nostradamus CliffsNotes,