Sullivan on search trends, strategies

By Carol Krol
Compiled from B2B Online

Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Third Door Media’s Search Engine Land, an online portal for search marketers, has been chronicling the explosion in search engine marketing since the early days. Although still a relatively young industry, innovation continues in search marketing, much of it coming from the search engines themselves, which relentlessly introduce new products and tools for searchers and marketers alike.

BtoB spoke with Sullivan last week about what b-to-b search marketers can do to keep up:

BtoB: How has search changed in the past six months?

Sullivan: Last year, blended search was a revolution. There’s a lot of buzz around the whole blended search space. I think people are still trying to get their head around what that means for them. They only had one entrance point until now, and so [the question is] which door do I walk through?

If you want to be in the top listings at Google, you need to consider [other searchable content such as] video. There are several new doorways to the front page. Blog search, news search, video search, image search, shopping search and book search. Google is integrating these into search results much more than it did.

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Going green for PR sake

By Kate Maddox
Compiled from B2B Online

If you think that companies introducing green marketing initiatives are being purely altruistic, think again. According to a recent survey by Renegade Marketing, New York, the primary goal for green marketing is not saving the planet but generating favorable PR.

Generating PR impressions for green initiatives was cited by 33% of marketers, followed by reaching a specific target (25%). Saving the earth was the third-ranked goal (17%), followed by increasing revenue (16%). Nine percent of respondents said they are not going green in 2008.

The survey also found that 33% of marketers ranked green initiatives high on their list of marketing priorities this year, 25% said they were of medium importance, 25% ranked them as a low priority and 8% ranked green initiatives as very high. The remaining 9% said green initiatives were not in their marketing plan this year.

Cloud computing initiatives being floated

By J. Bonasia
Investor's Business Daily

Compiled from Media 2.0 by Robb Hecht, Duct Tape Marketing Blog Channel

It's time for tech investors to get their heads in a cloud.

Cloud computing is one of those tech buzzwords that surface, usually in Silicon Valley, and float around the periphery -- until suddenly becoming a solid piece of the technology lexicon. Think virtualization, Web 2.0 or cleantech, among recent examples.
Yes, the verbiage is part of the hype machine. But in all these cases, the buzzwords speak about tech fields that could produce future corporate winners.

This time, the buzz is about cloud computing. The idea is for computer users to tap resources via the Web, rather than your own computer hard drive.

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