Often when a company thinks about participating in social media, whether it be a site like Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, the in-house marketing folks try to figure out what their online message should be, how it should fit into their offline message, how they can enhance their brand through linking and posting and friending and widgets and then they all collapse from the exhaustion of saying all of this, let alone doing it.

Back in the late 90s the only thing we worried about in the White House was a certain dry cleaning bill and a gentleman's proper cigar etiquette . Yes, times were different. Back then Microsoft was perceived by some as the next great monopoly, with Bill Gates as Cornelius Vanderbilt ready to dominate the desktops of every man, woman, child, and wildebeest.

Thank you Thomas Jefferson for winning us Americans the freedom to do our weekly wrap-up posts a day early. That's what it's all about isn't it? Oh yeah and blowing off your pinkie with a firecracker â€" what, just me?

Google's Q & A page on SEO has been a first destination for plenty of folks looking to dip their toes in the SEO water. Until now the section on SEO firms mostly covered the myriad ways they could totally mess you up. The picture it painted of SEO was like the Lifetime movie version where the firm you hire ends up tanking your site rankings by getting banned from Google for link spamming while sleeping with your husband and pimping out your teenaged daughter.

Does Bartle Bogle Hegarty really not believe in search? Do you, Steve Harty, Chairman of BBH, really think that your clients and prospects don't Google? Yesterday there was a lot of talk around our office about your quote in a recent AdWeek article by Andrew McMains )we attributed it to Brian Morrissey due to an error in their content management system(. For those who didn't see the quote,

AdWeek today has an interesting article by Brian Morrissey examining how big agencies use or don't use Search Marketing to market themselves. The thrust was that few of them do - which seems to me like a real wasted opportunity. I was almost done with the piece when I got to this quote from Bartle Bogle Hegarty )BBH( Chairman Steve Harty: "We're not convinced that the people we are marketing to are using that as a channel'We have a more targeted strategy than,

Once again Search Views is using this forum to lay some crazy knowledge on you. These are all stories that we could have spun out into long posts provided we didn't need to sleep, eat, or interact with loved ones. AtticusFinch.Com or Law and Order: Search Victims Unit Like something out of a James M. Cain novel if James M. Cain had been an intern at Yahoo, a fellow named Entwistle who did not play bass for The Who was convicted of the murder of his wife .

Search is a sacred place where online and offline, consumer and brand, meet and join together in holy matrimony. Can I get an "Amen?" Except when it's more like The Lockhorns and your online and offline messages end up tripping over each other instead of amplifying your brand story.

Advocacy and political groups aren't the only organizations exploring new ways to use the Internet- national governments too have begun experimenting with new media as a civic resource. On Day Two of the Personal Democracy Forum , speakers addressed the question of: Now that we've built a vibrant political community in blogs, forums and social networks, " What's Next? " For many luminaries, like Vint Cerf or Lawrence Lessig ,

Google's announcement of their new Ad Planner product today sounded innocuous enough: " To make your life easier, we're introducing Google Ad Planner , a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites )both on and off the Google content network ( that your audience is likely to visit.

The Personal Democracy Forum is a chance every year for advocacy and political groups to find out how the internet can help them connect to their audience. I had the pleasure of attending Day One of the conference today at New York 's TimeWarner building and to hear the thoughts of folks like Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington , Chuck DeFeo of Townhall.com and Yahoo Political Advertising honcho Diane Rinaldo.

This here jam goes out to all the marketers who want to lay some search industry knowledge on their peeps at the water cooler, rolling in their whip in the carpool or even in the boss's office sippin' a latte frappe with your kicks all up on the desk. With that in mind each of these stories are follow-ups to posts earlier in the week. We've also made it easy by serving up a predigested opinion you can trot out for each one. To the Bat-ticker!

One of the great things about social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace is the ability to see what your old buddies are up to without actually having to talk to them. Hey, that guy who wore a skirt and mascara in college is a corporate lawyer now! On the other hand, sometimes you want to do more than just accumulate "friends", you actually want to network and do some online schmoozing. LinkedIn ,

So I'm stalking this girl who rejected me in high school and Google just isn't delivering the detailed, timely information I need to stake out her current place of residence and/or job. What's a mentally imbalanced loner to do? This morning my colleague Ruth Nightengale, Vice President of Account Management at Reprise Media, sent me a blog post by Marci Albomer at the New York Times . Well Marci,

The recent kerfuffle involving bloggers and the AP fired some interesting connections in my neural net. The attempt to levy a tax on bloggers for the right )nay the privilege!( of linking to the AP's content smells a lot like the recent attempt of a few internet service providers to charge extra to high-bandwidth users. The common thread between these two hair-brained schemes is an attempt to force old-school ideas about economics onto the new world of the internet.

After hustling, begging, pleading and cajoling for every link we can get, it comes as a shock to find a content provider so out-to-lunch that they actually begrudge the link love. What's up with that, Associated Press? The old media consortium of umpty-ump newspapers and other dying media types issued a blogger fatwa on Friday that temporarily got drowned out by GooHoo and Tim Russert's death. Seems that the AP sent a nasty latter to the operators of Drudge Retort ,

Papa can you hear me? The idea of indexing raw information and data and using a simple retrieval tool to access this wealth of knowledge has many fathers )we're looking at you Al Gore( , not unlike the brood on TV's Full House . Most of us know who Sergey Brin and Jerry Yang are )especially Carl Icahn.( In fact, thanks to their YahOogle adventure we couldn't get this out on time for Father's Day " so here's your belated tie.

Well it's hard to avoid addressing the big news that broke yesterday evening in the world of Search. YouTube engineer Geoff Stearns did indeed accede to his girlfriend's pleas and got himself a haircut. Oh yeah, there was also some to-do about Yahoo and stuff. It goes a little something like this: In an effort to forestall a shareholder revolt and growing signs of irrelevancy in their core market Yahoo attempted a Doug Henning like slight-of-hand,