A Protest Screws Santorum in Search
Back in 2003, sex advice columnist and outspoken gay rights activist Dan Savage created a protest site about then-Senator Rick Santorum’s anti-gay rights views. The site (spreadingsantorum.com) is based on a sexual neologism proposed by Savage’s radio audience, and redefines the now-Presidential candidate’s name as “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex.” Heavens.

Savage admits it’s a crass joke, but one intended to sting.  And now, nine years after the site’s creation, its causing Santorum real grief, as the protest site has eclipsed even his own campaign page in search results on his surname.

Who Is Responsible When You Don’t Like Your Search Results?
Santorum says these negative search results are another sign of liberal media bias, equating Google’s refusal to censor the search result as allowing something akin to hate speech. Santorum told Fox News, “If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country.”

Of course as Danny Sullivan aptly points out, this isn’t a “Google” problem. Its a Bing, Yahoo, and Ask problem too. In fact, on Bing, Santorum’s official campaign page doesn’t even make the first page of search results. To reframe Santorum’s complaint, “If  you’re a responsible candidate with a team dedicated to electronic marketing, you don’t let things like this happen.” And you certainly don’t make it worse by limiting your own site to just two Flash pages.

Santorum’s SEO Suicide
After winning Iowa, the Santorum campaign tried to optimize donations by effectively moving their campaign site, and having all traffic hit a two-page Flash site focused on donations. That kind of content won’t draw a lot of links, for a start. And let’s face it: a donation form is a lot less remarkable than the attack site SpreadingSantorum.com. The campaign has since shifted back to running a campaign site on Santorum’s name, but it’s too late.

When the Law Isn’t with You.
There’s a saying in government: “If the law isn’t with you, use public sentiment, and if you don’t have that, argue public policy.” That’s what Santorum is doing here. He’s asking Google to fiddle with its results — to allow politics dictate their results. Which, ironically, is just what he initially accused them of doing.

What does Santorum have to say about the fallout from Dan Savage’s work? Last year he told Roll Call: ”It’s one guy. You know who it is. The Internet allows for this type of vulgarity to circulate.”

In this, he is fully wrong: If this were just about Dan Savage, SpreadingSantorum would be nowhere near the top of the search results.

SpreadingSantorum is a far older domain that RickSantorum.com; it has been actively updated for years. Senator Santorum should have started a site on his own name in response years ago. The site also has thousands more links from blogs like this, and the media, as this story spreads.

Sadly for the Santorum team, each link, mention, or tweet about posts like this just makes the situation worse. So there, now you can vote, in in the primary but on who you is responsible for Rick Santorum not controlling the top listing on his own name.

Google +1  is the critical priority of the year for our friends at Google. Accordingly, they’ve invested their most prized asset in this effort: space on every single paid and organic search result.

(To get a quick explanation of +1, see the video below.)

Why So Much Urgency?
I see two large drivers for the urgency behind this launch, which makes this akin to Apple launching a new iPad.

Google is Desperate to Be a Social Platform
Google has tried a series of social initiatives: starring results, blocking results, side-wiki and Google Buzz, but none have achieved mass success. Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare and others have cracked the code on the social Web 2.0 networked world. Google is still the hub of Web 1.0 webpages. But the social graph lives on platforms that others control, and that’s a threat to Google.

Google Seeks to Restore Integrity to its Search Results via Social Markers
As I noted a few weeks ago, crappy organic search results are a threat to the value position of Google’s paid results. That’s the lion’s share of their revenue.

Google has been off inventing cars that drive themselves and devices that could replace television networks, but along the way they let SEO gamers lower the integrity of their organic search results. Adding social signals to the search formula is a step away from factors that SEO gamers control, such as link farms and exact match domains.

This Beta Is Still Half-baked, But It Deserves Your Attention Now
The rush to release the beta is evident, as all the elements in +1 which take place off the search engine results pages (SERPs) aren’t yet ready.  That’s too bad, because without them, +1 fails; that’s why its a beta.  After all, the purpose of a search page is to get people to content, not to survey them to see if they like what’s described in the search result.

The place where +1 will fly or fail is on the websites of potentially millions of users who will install the +1 button. Yet, just like the iPad2, if you’d like to add a +1 button to your website, “there’s a line for that.”

The other missing element is the special tab in your Google profile that shows people what you’ve +1’ed.  This may be soon to come, but until it does, this beta isn’t very social. Once people can Tweet and link to their list of +1s, and promote the program on their own sites, it will be legitimately social. For the time being, this is just a design shift on SERP pages, and a glimpse of what’s ahead.

In the Long Term, Google +1 Is Promising to Marketers
This promises social proof to validate firms’ search results. Further, there’s the potential of future influence on natural search engine rankings or the quality score of ads (SEO agencies, start your engines).  And if profile pages become social hubs, marketers can gain additional awareness and traffic through social sharing on these.

+1 Is Also Promising to Google’s Future
1. It gives searchers a reason to use Google when they’re signed in, rather than anonymously. This means Google can build richer records of individuals’ use of search and better target ads.
2. It expands the public use for the Google profile page, which can be built into a future social networking play.
3. It is an answer to Facebook’s Like button, which is already on about 2 million websites.
4. It is an innovation that moves the public spotlight off Google’s struggle with link farms and SEO gamesmanship.

Unanswered Questions and Unintended Consequences

Will This Initially Decrease Conversion Rates?
If you follow the UsefulArts Twitter feed,  SEO pro Andy Komack @akomack raised the question of the unintended conversion distraction that Google+1 introduces.  Currently the +1 box is a distraction from the core purpose of search pages: channeling traffic to content.  If a social opportunity interrupts the search experience, click-throughs could in fact decline. This might change over time, but I agree with his concern.

How Will Participation Change Search Engine Results?
Will sites with the +1 box on their pages gain an advantage in SERP rankings? Will sites with more +1s move up in rankings, or end up paying less for PPC placement?

Bold Prediction: This is the start of Google the Social Network
I see this as a move in a more expansive social play, in which Google will combine its Profile Pages, the +1 Button, Google Buzz, Google Chat, Google Phone, Gmail and its RSS Reader into an integrated social network. I suspect we will see these point services substantially repackaged into an aggregated offering. What do you think?

That’s my take on this now day-old initiative.
I’d love to hear your view, so please comment away here or email me your take.

Post update: April 1, 2011, 9pm: after an instance of the +1 button was found “in the wild” running on a non-google website, Google announced it would withdraw the public test of the button. All information in this post continues to be accurate – and this illustrates again Google’s urgency to accelerate this launch while attempting to manage marketers interest in this initiative. (details)

Think about this for a moment. Google is in both the Rankings and Advertising business. That’s a problem, because while both these activities shape opinion, they do so in mutually eroding ways.

Advertising’s ubiquity and scale makes it a cultural role model. That’s the opposite of rankings, which get their power from a perception that they are an objective, authoritative view. Advertising may be expensive, but rankings need to be seen having a scarcity “beyond” commerce. That’s what makes them valuable.

SEO is Human Nature’s Reaction to Rankings
Once commerce gets tied up in rankings or scores, entire sub-industries spring up to help “optimize” results for clients. This isn’t unique to search, or the Internet. There are very few rankings that don’t have a revenue back door.

• Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and Forrester’s Wave inspire a big chunk of Analyst Relations spending, and occasional lawsuits from those who doubt the purity of analysts’ opinions.
• The New York Times Best-Sellers list gets gamed when followers of authors like Mitt Romney, L Ron Hubbard and others buy their books for the PR lift and legitimacy.
• US News and World Report’s university rankings have actually caused schools to change class structure and admissions strategy gain better scores.
• Even movie box office receipts are gamed for PR.

The Boston Globe recently asked me if Klout scores (a social media ranking) were valid and objective measures of social influence. I just laughed, because once the people who pay me believe a measure is valid, then it is in fact driving the influence which is most important to me.

There is no objectively valid way to rank social influence. Social influence is by definition a subjective thing. That said, any way you rank influence becomes valid – as soon as it creates market belief. Remember Second Life? It was valid and essential … until it wasn’t. Twitter wasn’t valid and essential … until suddenly it was.

The value of money is determined by what people believe it to be worth. So is social influence. And so are organic results. If people come to believe the rankings are based on tricks that Google is blind to, or that they turn a blind eye when their advertisers use such tricks, the value of Google’s results will decrease. And along with that decline, will be a decrease in value for the paid (PPC) results which are associated to them by their positioning on search engine results pages.

A perception of crappy organic results is a threat to the valued position of paid results, which is the lion’s share of Google’s revenue. Google must restore the authority and scarcity of organic listings, so they can be leveraged for AdWords.

Is SEO Greed Good?
There’s been naive shock in the media that brands like JC Penney, Overstock and Fortune have dared to take steps to game Google search for higher results. And faux shock by the firms themselves to learn that their teams have been using tactics to inflate their rank with Google.

Last year I asked, Is it time to sunset the very idea of an SEO agency? Why? Not because SEO is bad, evil, or ineffective. Quite the opposite. What the firms I just listed have done is rational, legal, and beneficial to their businesses.  Google has every right to fix its algorithm, or exclude results its finds suspect, but wrapping this in moral terms of “black and white hat” is nonsensical.

Stripped down to economic terms, Google has made a market to connect searchers and content publishers. However, obvious imperfections to Google’s system remain, and these have kept SEO firms in business for a decade. Firms like Penney and Overstock are monetizing what an economist might call inefficiencies.

The SEO Arms Race in Competitive Markets
When one company in a contested area starts manufacturing “optimizing” success markers for Google, it causes a marketing arms race as competitors must either must give up valuable search traffic or join in a spending contest. As a result, firms then waste resources trying to beat each other in these ultimately worthless measures. And by “waste,” I mean once they are used they are entirely useless.  What are the fake links Penney invested in worth now? And how about the value of the crappy content written for SEO from the linking sites?

My objection to the SEO sub-industry is fundamental. Marketing seeks to build persistent market advantages. SEO in heavily contested spaces has become nothing more than a short-term arbitrage based on taking often valueless actions that Google overvalues.

Competitive SEO no longer adds persistent advantage and value to firms. It only exists because Google’s slow search innovation has allowed this sub-industry of SEO tricksters to blossom. Given that Google exploits the system it created for its own profit, the company shouldn’t then blame those who are trying to do the same.

This year will see a change in how search engine rankings are decided as Google relies more on social proof. This will — hopefully ? make it harder to generate rankings through mechanized efforts as real people will rank what they find helpful. Real people are even less likely to be impressed by link farm sites than Google’s bots.

2011 is shaping up to be the year that Google rediscovered search as an innovation priority. Its business depends on it.

It’s not surprising that there was a gaggle of press attention over Google’s release of a new version of its Gmail product.

No surprise, either, that Google produced plenty of graphics so reporters wouldn’t have to figure out how make a screen shot. The graphic shows a typical Gmail in-box as it would look with some of the new themes. Of course, the emails shown have the names of the people who sent them, just as your Gmail does.

Now this is where the surprising and creepy thing happens: Instead of dummying up a version of the interface with a fake name (like every spammer uses), Google used a real person’s emails.

I know they did this because that real person – Anna Bolotovsky – is a friend of mine.

Anna, and the rest of the world, found out about this because it was used on CNN and beyond. This was not some sort of weird name coincidence thing. Google her and you’ll find that she is the one and only person online with this name. Further proof this wasn’t a weird coincidence: The subject line was from an email she had sent.

If this doesn’t bother you, try putting yourself in her place: You look up at the TV and there, for the world to see, is your email, which you sent with some basic expectation of privacy. While people have differing ideas about online privacy, I think we can all pretty much agree that having your emails used for marketing is beyond the pale.

Now I’m far from an extremist about Google. I have far more enmity toward airlines who play with their prices to screw me at every turn. Google has provided me free or cheap useful products, and put the power of advertising in the hands of small and large business alike. I’m a Google certified analytics pro, and have made professional bones in SEO in the news and culture business. Google’s been good to me.

And I know that Google makes its money by dicing and slicing and reselling – in one way or another – information about me and everyone else on the planet. For the most part I don’t mind, because I have felt it’s a fair trade. They sell the contextual ads that appear next to my emails and I get free and reliable email with pretty much unlimited storage. And, to be honest, sometimes I find those ads useful and sometimes they’re so far off the mark that they are like reading fortune cookieis.

But I’ve always understood this to be a fairly anonymous process. Some machine scans the email for keywords or terms and voila! – the ad is placed. That feels like I’m a distant participant in their marketing. But what happened to Anna is just creepy.

Now Google is many things, but dumb isn’t one of them. So we’re left with two possible explanations for how this came to pass.

1. Marketing was lazy and screwed up.
2. Something in the Terms of Use agreement that no one (except the company’s lawyers) have ever read makes this “legal.”

Terms of Use agreements are a fascinating and underexplored art form. I doubt one in a million users actually reads the damn things. Using iTunes may very well mean Apple now has dibs on my soul, for all I know.

In lieu of our souls, most of these agreements claim that users have excused the service provider from even the most negligent or malfeasant acts. Some agreements say users agree to address disputes in forums that can be highly biased towards the firm.  All this with a click of a button. And though they may claim your soul in their grant of use, there are a ton reasons these may be unenforceable.

When Marketing and Legal Are Bait-and-Switch
Now obscuring these claims is a two-pronged effort. One part is by burying the actual terms under a mountain of legalese. The other is that the marketing portrays an entirely different picture. Google’s marketing likely portrays happy users getting their email conveniently in the service’s promotional materials, without disclosing that the cost for this was a grant to sell our data or encroach on our otherwise protected right of publicity.

For the sake of argument, imagine that such absurdly broad terms included a codicil allowing the firm to physically sneak in to its users’ homes after dark. Would you imagine such an agreement to be conscionable without a fair exchange of value, and without an exceptionally clear meeting of the minds around such terms? I for one would expect to see such unusual costs and benefits in marketing’s description of the service, not just the legal department’s six-point font.

The aggregate damage of the thousand cuts of firms trading people’s private information can allow the equivalent of strangers to enter your personal life. You may recall the post where I described how just three pieces of non-private data (gender, birthday and zip code) can be used to uniquely identify a person and connect to their social security number for data mining. As an aside, consider how many store discount programs know this and more about you.

As a non-lawyer, I suggest that no matter what Google’s terms of use say, Anna didn’t waive her right to privacy, because the non-legal reality of Google (which after all is a service provider) created the reasonable expectation that they’d provide a suitable service. And no jury of my peers would construe having my name and examples of my personal email released to CNN as suitable. Would yours?

Last week, buying lead management companies was all the rage.  Now Marin Software, a Paid Search (SEM) Marketing Platform, completed another financing round, bringing in $11 million.  (That’s $33 million for them to date.)

And SEM agency iCrossing has been purchased by Hearst Media for a reported $325 million. The deal could increase to more than $400 million depending on performance goals.

So, as we predicted back in December, digital marketing firms are hot investment and sales targets. The market is dyspeptic, so demand may not be taking form in IPO activity. However, that’s not stopping investors from grabbing on to digital as funds shift from traditional media businesses.

Last month, the mayor of Topeka, Kansas, stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google.

Now Google has honored that gesture by changing its name name to Topeka for April Fools’ Day. This makes Bill Bunten the Mayor of Google and Eric Schmidt the CEO of Topeka, Inc.

Of course, marks as famous as Topeka and Google require brand standards. So the announcement was accompanied by this usage guide.

This evening, Facebook rolled out a feature that lets users repost each other ’s shared items, with a “via” link attached for attribution back to your friend.

All you do is find a posted item in your news feed and click “share” as shown to the right just below my post. This adds a post with a “via [your friend’s name],” which you have the option to remove, to your own News Feed. Your friends will see this in their News Feeds, and so a new viral loop begins.

Facebook and LinkedIn Vie for Real-Time Search
Since the most frequent use of retweets on Twitter is links,  and since aggregators like Tweetmeme watch which stories get retweeted the most, it’s a move that make Facebook more Twitter-like.  In contrast, last month LinkedIn provided a level of Twitter integration by establishing the #li tag, which allows tweets to appear on the site, and a check box to repost FB items.

Both moves position the networks to make the viral loops of social conversations more visible and repeatable. The benefit to users is that their content can escape the walled gardens of these networks.  Meanwhile, the networks benefit by gaining greater search visibility. Both networks have moved from sharing only between tighter private networks, to more viral associations, which catches up to Twitter users’ increased expectation to see their content shared and repeated through social publishing.

Finding videos via search isn’t new, but playing them inside ad listings is.

For example, if you enter the word “Fame” in Google, you may have the option to play the movie trailer, which will roll surrounded by all the other search results. Google expects increasing video in ad results.

This gets searchers to video content more quickly. It also benefits Google by keeping searchers on Google’s site, so after watching the video, they can easily click on other results or initiate a new search.

If search engines find video in results is better for users (and their business model), they’ll factor this into their pricing and positioning algorithms. This could fuel video efforts, just as factoring site quality into PPC pricing spawned a generation of overnight SEM gurus.

There is a growing disconnect between the legal staff who write terms of use for websites, those who operate the site, and site visitors. I’ve come to believe that each level of disconnection introduces new sets of legal risks, which this story only start to illustrate.

Chris Soghoian observed in CNET that

Google’s terms of service, thick with legalese, state that:

“You may not use … Google’s products, software, services and web sites … and may not accept the Terms if … you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google.

Of course if you’re in the US that means that anyone under 18 is accessing Google’s computer system in violation of its terms of service. And this applies to all Google services, YouTube, Gmail, and Image Search.

Ignoring Legal Risks Leads to Selective Prosecution
Federal prosecutors recently used the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to selectively prosecute Lori Drew as a hacker for violating MySpace’s terms of service. She lied about her identity, and harassed a troubled minor who was also using the system under a false identity. After the child committed suicide, a media and political frenzy resulted in federal prosecutors turning a breach of the site’s terms, which might not have even been civilly enforcable, in to a federal criminal case.

Ignoring the Disconnect Between Terms and Practice May Partly Void the Agreement
Obviously, online services retain the right to modify their own terms of use.  You may begin a user experience with a minimal grant of rights and a maximum of restrictions when reflexively accepting terms. However, when site staff clearly operate to the contrary to those terms, and in some instances assure users that terms in the TOS won’t be enforced, isn’t the contract being modified within the user experience?

Smoking Gun: Google for Kids
Google in fact provides safe-search resources just for kids. There’s no easily accessible link to terms of service, so arriving new users aren’t even exposed to them.

Question 1: By creating this site and its other practices, doesn’t Google by their own practice modify their terms?

Question 2: Could any reasonable person believe that a new visitor to the Google Directory for Kids and Teens should be bound by these unseen terms, which even Google seems to disregard?

Question 3: What risk is created by the gap between the lawyers who wrote the TOU, site management who follows their own drummer, and visitors who ignore the terms are entirely disconnected.

Are such TOU’s unenforcable sharades posing as contracts?