Brick Marketing

• Location: Boston and Medford, MA
• Number of Employees: 10
• Notable Clients: Somerset Industries, Data Direct and Century 21
• URL:Website:  http://www.brickmarketing.com/

Brick Marketing is a full service search engine marketing (SEM) firm that helps companies of all sizes and types increase sales through SEO and internet marketing.  With offices in Boston and Medford, Massachusetts, the firm is comprised of a knowledgeable team with vast experience in a broad range of business backgrounds, allowing them to effectively execute marketing strategies based on the needs of each individual client.  Sitting on a diverse portfolio of solutions, Brick Marketing has a little something for everyone, whether it is a start -up or Fortune 500 Company.

Contel Bradford of DMB recently caught up with Nick Stamoulis, Brick Marketing founder, to get his thoughts on marketing in the era of the social web.

What keeps Brick Marketing thriving in the highly competitive internet marketing business?
The internet marketing industry is very competitive, but we have built a nice niche by staying small, providing great results and service for all of our clients.  I think another nice aspect that we have built is our helpful SEO newsletter (with over 100,000 opt-in subscribers and my SEO blog the Search Engine Optimization Journal.  Click the link for more information about the Brick Marketing SEO newsletter – http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs044/1101650496996/archive/1102429142755.html.

Click the link for more information about the Brick Marketing SEO Blog.

In your opinion, how could a business benefit by implementing a three-pronged marketing strategy that involves email, search, and social media marketing? And what are the challenges of such an approach?
Search engine optimization, opt-in email marketing and social media marketing are all long term internet marketing channels.  They all help build trust and a solid reputation over time.  I think the biggest challenge of building a newsletter list or your organic visitors from the search engines is that these approaches take time and an extreme amount of commitment and patience.  This is an area that I see many clients’ struggle with, but overcome as well!  Personally, I think these approaches together are truly a triple punch that works well for most businesses.  But to clarify, SEO is something that works well for EVERY type of business, it’s not a matter of should I optimize my website it’s a matter of when!

How is Brick Marketing helping organizations capitalize on the social media frenzy?
At Brick Marketing, we offer 3 different types of service:  Full Service, Custom Training and Custom Consulting.  For social media marketing, over the past several years we have provided companies with these customized solutions based on their specific business and needs.  There are a few mistakes that I always see companies making with their social media marketing campaigns.  The first challenge is they don’t personalize their social media outlets.  Social media marketing is about people and communication. The second area of improvement for many companies is they tend to waste too much time on certain social media activities.  Social media marketing is the type of medium that you get out what you put in, but it is very easy to waste time on non-performing areas and/or not give it enough time to work.

What are the challenges of measuring social media marketing ROI?
Measuring the ROI of social media marketing is always very challenging because of the long term and sometime intangible nature.  I think social media marketing (like all other forms of internet marketing) has its place within each organization and is not the end all be all.  Many people are under the impression that social media will solve all of their sales problems.  This is generally not the case.  When you measure your social media, in my eyes it is simple, are you looking to increase your brand awareness in your industry?  Or are you looking to communicate to your customers and potential client?  Or are you looking to increase visitors over time?  The point here is measuring social media marketing is very different for every type of business but it should be tested accordingly.

With the social web continually changing the marketing landscape, what improvements do you think can be made to better measure campaign performance?
That is a loaded question and honestly I am not sure.  I think social media will certainly continue to change and the reporting metrics will change with it.  The bottom line in my mind and the best advice that I can give companies looking to building the social media or search engine presence is NEVER put all of your web marketing eggs in one basket, diversify your marketing portfolio!

Google Search Seeks Speed

Amit Singhal discusses the future of search at the SABEW conference./Chris Prentice

By Matt Robinson

Google is synonymous with search, but could be onto to something greater: inference. Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and tweaker of Google’s search algorithm since 2001, says search is beyond key words and at the door step of understanding language. Singhal, speaking at the annual Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference in Phoenix held in late March, used some examples. If you google “GM cars,” you get General Motors, but if you google “GM food,” you get genetically-modified. “Search is about matching meaning to what users want,” he says.

Another example, if you google “panasonic lock TV,” you get hits about “parental control.” Singhal says marketers probably didn’t like the word “lock” and went with the nicer “control.” But Google infers the difference. Other points made at the conference include:

• Information wants to be free he says, but that doesn’t mean websites shouldn’t impose a pay wall, citing that good content costs money. But differentiating that good content from “McContent” - quick, cheap generated content - is difficult since the language between the two is often similar.

• Web content is suppose to be free. And citizens with information are better ones. Singhal sees China inhibiting its best interest by restricting search.

• The future of Web search is still based on the what made google popular: speed. “We are crazy about speed,” Singhal says. He noted that if a user’s is slowed down by 200 milliseconds, the site will end up losing traffic. Relevant algorithms are now more important than ever, he says. “As the amount of information has exploded, the importance of relevance has gone through the roof,” he says.

• The kind of information that people seek on phones is much different than what people search for on their computer. Singhal sees a future in location-based advertising.

(Images from home page are courtesy of the Tuscon Citizen.)

Hulu Hops Onto Caption Search Technology

By Dave Fidlin

With the Internet maturing and online video become the norm - not a novelty item - enhancements are being created for streaming content. Caption searching, one of those enhancements, was added recently to the popular site Hulu. But a smattering of smaller companies had already been offering a similar service before Hulu added the feature to its site in late December.

Hulu Labs, the online video portal’s development arm, is running the feature in beta while engineers continue to work on perfecting the technology.

In a statement, Eugene Wei, Hulu’s vice president of product, says the feature will enable users to search for captions of thousands of videos across hundreds of shows. For now, Wei says users can access the feature through Hulu Labs’ website. Eventually, a feature tab will be included on all Hulu shows that have captions.

Wei points out how captions search might be beneficial to a viewer of an online video. Wei says he was watching an episode of “House” recently, and a joke between main character Dr. Foreman and Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin took place. Wei says he was in a quandary when he wanted to watch the episode a second time.

“I couldn’t remember which episode it was in, let alone which moment within the episode,” Wei says in the statement. “With the new caption search, I just type in ‘Mike Tomlin,’ and voila.”

Jason Blackwell, practice director with ABI Research, says features like Hulu’s caption search will be an asset to users with online content growing exponentially each year.

“It’s going to be important for all service providers,” Blackwell says. “I think (Hulu’s caption search) is an important step in what will become the future.”

Blackwell says ABI will soon begin to study features like caption search and examine specifically how it can be beneficial not only to online video, but other specialized services, such as pay TV and other cable and satellite services with a user interface.

While Hulu’s caption search is breaking new ground for the company, it is not a pioneer in the technology. Numerous smaller companies have offered similar services, some as long as five years.

One of those companies, Realtime Transcription Inc., offers a service called Transendia. Tanya Ward English, technology director for Realtime Transcription, says Transendia offers a video search based on the full text of a transcript, in addition to glossary tags for non-spoken information within a video.

Ward English says Transendia caters to a higher-end market. Many of the company’s clients do not want videos hosted on such public sites as YouTube. Instead, she says, those clients opt to use a customized player with full search and playing options from Transendia.

“One of the most useful and unique things about our technology, I think, is something upon which we have a patent pending,” Ward English says. “That’s the ability go pin-point search video or audio files directly from a text search engine like Google or Bing.”

Ward English, a self-described advocate for people with hearing loss, says caption search technology is especially beneficial for online users who have such a condition.

Blinkx, another smaller, specialized company, was launched in 2005 and went public two years later. Suranga Chandratillake, CEO and founder of Blinkx, says his company offers an advanced video search engine feature that gives online video users an opportunity to not only search for captions within a program, but to look for titles and episode names of particular programs.

“We can extract a lot of information from what’s going on inside a video,” Chandratillake says. “Our video search engine doesn’t just work on our own site. It can also get results from other sites like YouTube, or any other site with video out there.”

Chandratillake says Blinkx has been a popular service with advertisers, and revenue has doubled in the past three years.

More companies are sure to join Hulu, Realtime Transcription, Blinkx and others as the quest continues to make caption search technology an integral part of online video.

UK Launches Semantic Data Site: Will the Rest of the World Follow?

By Linda Broughton

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, credited with conceptualizing if not inventing the World Wide Web, is not finished yet.

Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, both appointed as Information Advisors to the UK Government, are coordinating Data.gov.uk. Data.gov.uk plans to provide the general public with a single access point to all the United Kingdom’s national, regional and local statistics, surveys and studies - all the information in the UK collected under the umbrella of the national government.

In a passionate speech at TED, Berners-Lee explains that no data is an island - it’s the relationships between different data that make the data valuable, insightful and useful. And these relationships are not often visible to the human eye - if anything, our own preconceptions and individual personalities often interpret rather than understand the relationships between different data, closing us off to real social trends and concerns.

Berners-Lee wants to use the Web to bypass the human attempts to dress up data for personal or political purposes. Instead, he wants the Data.gov.uk platform to expose the real significance buried within the data-to-data relationships through encouraging the digital mapping of raw, unadulterated social, political and economic data. Berners-Lee calls this ‘linked data,’ a precursor to the semantic Web that he believes will one day explain the meaning behind how we collect, calculate, evaluate and use the data that we post online.

Not all of these data relationships will be obviously significant - imagine an application that maps the relationship between data discussing the annual amount of Cadbury chocolate sold in Yorkshire and the corresponding annual number of failed marriages within the same geographical location and time period. However, the project is expected to help identify unexpected and insightful data relationships, insights that would normally take several decades and hundreds or thousands of brilliant socialist scientists, statisticians, psychologists, focus groups and public policy experts to simply suspect.

The automatic data relationship mapping will allow the UK government and the UK public to discover connections, trends and causal relationships that will inform public policy for decades to come. If implemented properly, Data.gov.uk could come very close to comprehensively mapping and explaining the past and real-time behavior of the public - and thus allow platform users to accurately plan the future of a society.

Of course, the key to the concept is the raw data. Currently, there are already third-party applications that map roads and potholes in the UK, provide statistics and information about the location of doctors throughout the UK, and give up-to-date information about local schools. This is useful data to aggregate but it is not yet generating anything that a few quick, targeted searches online can’t. The next push will encourage interested developers to create applications linking the different data to generate data relationship maps that give researchers at think tanks and academic institutions something to ponder and investigate.

Supporters of the open data movement are urging private businesses to follow the UK government’s example and release their raw data to the public. If the private sector keeps its data too close and too secret, the sector risks losing potential profits that would arise from information generated by an external comparison and review of their aggregated data. Moreover, the private sector makes up an important part of modern society. Accurately identifying, explaining and impacting public trends requires more than the government’s analysis of the population’s behavior, it requires an accurate understanding of the public’s practices in commerce and industry.

Data.gov.uk may soon be the way for the UK government (and anyone else interested) to keep several fingers not only on the pulse of modern UK society, but on its stomach, windpipe, eyes, mouth, ears, etc. The platform and its third-party applications may soon provide an in-depth and automatic monitor of modern British, Scottish and Northern Irish daily public life. Do the industries want to jump in now, developing their own applications and supplying their own data to complete the public picture, or will there always be a yawning gap in the data buried in the private sector’s own digital databanks?

http://www.opte.org/maps/tests/

A Mind of Its Own: Search Engine Technology Ever Pervasive

By James Zipadelli

Americans performed more than 15 billion searches in January, which is up 3 percent from the month before, the audience measurement service comScore says. The latest search engine rankings show that Google is still king when it comes to search engines. “Google Sites accounted for 9.9 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.6 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.7 billion), Ask Network (574 million) and AOL LLC (375 million),” the release says.

Although Google spokesperson Nate Tyler declined to comment on Google’s numbers, he did say that Google Suggest Technology is an effective way to help users search for what they are looking for.

“As you type into the search box on Google Web Search, Google Suggest offers searches similar to the one you’re typing. Start to type [ new york ] — even just [ new y ] — and you’ll be able to pick searches for New York City, New York Times, and New York University (to name just a few). Type some more, and you may see a link straight to the site Google thinks you’re looking for — all from the search box,” Google’s Help Forum says. (Ask.com and Microsoft were not available for comment at press time.)

Kevin McFall, co-founder of the vertical search engine RushmoreDrive.com, says the level of difficulty “is pretty high” for anyone trying to gain a share in the search engine market because established search engines spend large amounts of money on marketing and advertising. However, he says there are ways a new search engine can differentiate themselves from their competition. RushmoreDrive.com was a sister site of Ask.com and was shut down in June 2009 due to the recession.

“One must position the value of one’s search in such a way as to change existing behaviors and habits of those who already use Google, Yahoo, AOL or Bing by offering them a reason to change and then delivering a rich enough experience to warrant their frequent return,” McFall says. “One must also realize that instead of taking on the major search players head on, one must find a way to backdoor them to get a slice of the market share instead of trying to compete directly.”

According to McFall, he was able to do this with Rushmore Drive.com by marketing his website as a discovery engine and a search engine. “We achieved the ability to deliver a richer and more relevant set of results through our unique index and page ranking algorithm, along with a distinguished universal results page, which delivered text, image, video and blog results all in one page,” McFall says.

He also suggested search engines that have a social component would be more successful long-term.

There are also specialized websites that find search engine technology useful. For example, Healthline Networks uses search engine technology to help customers with health and drug information.

Healthline Networks CEO West Shell says, “We’ve found out that consumer search can be complicated when it comes to health. Consumers and doctors speak different languages, and often consumers don’t know what to look for when they start.”

Shell says the technology Healthline Networks uses is based on “semantic taxonomy,” or classification, of health information. He also says the technology is always being updated to ensure customers have the latest information available and that they are partners with health carriers like Aetna.

Rich Kahn, CEO of the search engine eZanga.com, says his search engine is being redesigned and should be finished by late 2010.

The redesign allows eZanga.com to “significantly increase the number of sources we pull information from, improve our relevancy algorithm so that our results will be more accurate to the queries performed by our users [and] designing new technologies, that are not used by any other search engine at present, that will improve how we display our results to users in a way that will be more useful to our users,” Kahn says.

Google & Microsoft: Top Ad Networks See Double-Digit Increases

By Ron Callari

When audience measurement service, comScore, released its ranking of the top 15 advertising networks among U.S. Internet users, Microsoft Media Networks US and Google were the only two tech companies that posted double-digit growth in 2009 over the previous year.

With a 31-percent increase year over year, Microsoft was the fastest growing ad network according to this analysis. When approached for this article, several executives indicated they “never comment on comScore studies,” and “Microsoft does not have information to share regarding this.”

Neil Strother, practice director for ABI Research, indicates that large players like Microsoft are often reticent about validating or debating these types of stats. So Strother helped DMB by sharing his thoughts on comScore’s stats. He believes that the reason for Microsoft’s success this past year was due to the company “integrating their network across their four platforms: PC, Mobile, Gaming and Digital TV.” This combined synergy helped tit focus and allowed advertisers to dip into any of the company’s media properties such as MSN, XBox, Windows Live, Office Live and others,” without having to strike separate deals with each entity.

Strother also feels that during “economic downturns, advertisers and brands “will seek out the larger networks like Microsoft and Google because they are perceived as ’safe havens’ to conduct their business.” In so doing, while total ad networks increased 8 percent year over year, Microsoft most likely obtained a portion of its increase from “a market share shift from some of the smaller players like ValueClick, Tribal Fusion and AOL Advertising.”

Additionally Strother notes, since all networks showed increases year over year except for Traffic Marketplace and the Adconion Media Group, “Microsoft also benefitted in general by the increase in digital advertising over traditional media,” particularly with legacy newspaper ad revenues estimated to have fallen as much as 12 percent in 2009.

Google, on the other hand, did share some insights regarding the comScore report. And while Rachel Nearnberg, Google’s global communications spokesperson couldn’t “speak to the data point increase [13 percent] listed in the report,” she could report some of the reasons for the growth they have been experiencing. Attracting top line advertisers is a main reason, Nearnberg notes. For the “last 12 months, 94 of the top 100 Ad Age advertisers have advertised on the Google Content Network,” she says.

Google’s strategy is looking to help both brand and direct advertisers reach consumers through several innovative means. According to Nearnberg:

• Google has made recent improvements to its targeting tools on the Google Content Network to help advertisers match ad to content across the Web.
• Over the summer, Google launched contextual targeting that enables advertisers to focus on specific themes.
• Google launched view-through conversions in September 2009 to help advertisers better measure the impact of their display ad campaigns for those instances when an ad is seen, but not immediately clicked on.
• Google also launched a tool called Campaign Insights October 2009 to give advertisers reliable data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness, or active user interest, in a particular product or service. It looks beyond the traditional measures of clicks and conversions to calculate the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits that result from a display ad campaign.

With the recent controversy in China whether or not Google will be pulling out of the country due to censorship issues and attacks on several of its users’ Gmail accounts, Nearnberg looks favorably on the future growth for Google and China. In another comScore study pertaining to the growth in the global search market, it showed China’s searches at 13.3 billion was second to the United States globally.

According to Nearnberg, “Asia [in general] has over 40 percent of the world’s Internet users and is an important region for Google.” Particularly in countries like China, “we’re excited about the opportunity for Chinese exporters to use Google’s ad tools to reach a global market.” She also adds that “the pace of mobile innovation in Asia is also extremely rapid, and mobile advertising is already a strong business for us, particularly in countries like Japan, which has a strong culture of mobile commerce.”

ABI’s Strother sees a “detente” eventually reached between the search engine giant and the superpower. With public critiques by Bill Gates and others who see this issue as overplayed in the media, Strother feels that both parties will acquiesce and over the long haul solve their differences behind “closed doors in quiet agreements.” According to Strother, “in the advertising space, there is too much at stake with wireless coming on very strong in China.”

While there are a lot of competing interests in play here and the world can applaud Google on taking the moral high ground, after the dust clears, this is “big business,” and Google will take all that into consideration in order to maintain its double-digit ad network increases in 2010.

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