Topics for the 12/12/09 Show

Here are the proposed topics for this week's episode of The BeanCast, and as usual we'd love to hear your thoughts and questions.

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Please keep your comments succinct. Wordy comments need to be interpreted and I may not capture the essence of what you are asking. That's why I encourage the Tweet option to help keep the question or thought targeted.

This week's panel will be Joseph Jaffe (Crayon), Matt McDermott (Renegade), Lee Odden (TopRankMarketing.com) and Aaron Strout (Powered, Inc.).

TOPICS

Big Doin's In Search: Luckily Bill isn't on the show this week or he'd have my head for all the search topics we're going to cover. But the past two weeks were monumental on the topic of search. And topping that list for me was Google's nearly completely overlooked announcement about personalized results. What does this mean for search, Lee? Will this make SEO impossible to game, now that your search results will most likely be different from mine on the same term? Why is this being so ignored by the ad media? What do SEO professionals need to do to adjust to this new "normal?" Also this week, Google has opened the flood gates on live updates to search results. This is their long awaited entry into social search and if you're like me, you Google Alerts have been going through the roof. Is this a good implementation of social search or just a good first step? What does this mean for optimization? Do SEO experts now need to be social experts as well? Is there any danger to the SEO pro who stays focused on core SEO efforts without incorporating social optimization? And what about Google's so-called "physical world" search? Are barcode decals for businesses really good idea for mobile search? What is the advantage, if any, to a retailers? Google even had news about a beta test for a news-by-topic service they are testing with the New York Times and Washington Post. Why would they do this? Why this partnering attitude with publishers who have been railing against them? And in the midst of all this Google news, we find that Bing users are more ad hungry that Google users. A Chitika study found that Bing users are 76% more likely to click on ad after a search. Is this news significant or just an anomaly?

Astroturfing: Here's a story that makes me ashamed to call myself a marketing professional. Apparently a health insurance industry trade group is using the incentive of virtual cash in games like Farmville, to get people to take a survey that automatically emails their objection to Obama's healthcare legislation to their congressman and senator. The practice is called astroturfing, since it's artificial grassroots marketing. What do you think: innovative play or ethical nightmare? How can this be legal? Do practices like this drag down perceptions of all marketers or just lobbying groups?

A Debate Over Lecherous Bubbles: We reported a few weeks back on the Droga5 online effort for Method. And since then a controversy has brewed that led to the brand pulling the ad because of some consumer protest. Now the ad community is debating: Should the brand have caved to this pressure? Was the ad really as offensive as some claim? We all know ads can't really be pulled from the offline space. Does pulling it make it more effective in the end, without saddling the brand with negatives? How about when an unapproved ad shows up online, like the Yellow Snow ad for Miller that's making the rounds or the infamous WWF ad? What controls does a brand really have over it's image in the online space with such liabilities?

The Over-Hyping of Augmented Reality: A great opinion piece was in Ad Age this week, stating that over-hyping of Augmented Reality might be killing an effective tool. We all know about the Esquire cover. Are gimmicks good or bad for introducing the possibilities of this tech? When does it cross the line and become a burden for the consumer? There are some great examples in the Ad Age piece about some good executions of AR. Should the focus be on applying it toward relationship efforts and stay away from using it for prospecting?

Getting The Most From That Super-Bowl Effort: Abbey Klaassen has an interesting piece up about how to get the most from your super bowl buy. What's most fascinating about it all is how the spot itself seems to no longer needs to be the center-piece of the campaign. What stands out most for you on this list of suggestions?