Surprisingly, it’s not hiring Jennifer Lopez to pose next to your car, or spending millions on a Super Bowl commercial.

No. In fact, it’s simply one person recommending a product to another person.

That, my friends, is called Word of Mouth.

Over the past decade, the Internet and social media have completely changed how Word of Mouth works.

And in one quick update called “Search, Plus Your World”, Google made Word of Mouth and social media marketing 100 times more essential.

But before we get to that, let’s take a walk back in time, to one hundred years ago, when we all lived on farms.

Frank, a local farmer, recently purchased a new rifle. Ted, his neighbor, stops by to admire the rifle.

“How’s the new rifle?” Ted asks Frank.

“Probably the best there is,” Frank replies. “I’ve had 20 rifles in my life, and this by far is the best.”

Ted’s been thinking about buying a new rifle, but couldn’t decide which to get. But because of Frank’s recommendation, Ted buys that rifle.

Word of Mouth advertising.

Flash forward to 2010. Beth and Sarah are high school friends. They’ve moved to opposite sides of the country to attend college, but kept in touch through Facebook.

Beth will be spending Spring Break in a beautiful hotel in New York City. She wants to show her friends where she’ll be staying, so she goes to the hotel’s Facebook page and shares some of the photos on her own Facebook page. “Look where I’ll be staying!” she exclaims in the photo captions.

Ashley wants to visit New York as well, but hadn’t decided where to stay. She spots the pictures Beth shared and visits the hotel’s website. She loves the look and decides to make a reservation.

Now here’s the magic of social media that differs from what it was 100 years ago: not only did Ashley see Beth’s post, but so did Beth’s 700 other friends.

Instead of a one to one recommendation, it’s now one to 700.

Word of Mouth advertising and Social Media Marketing.

And finally, let’s flash forward to the present day, with Google’s latest update: Search, Plus Your World. Now, when you search on Google, you will not only see the search results you’re used to seeing, but you will also see what YOUR friends have said and shared about what you are searching for.

Let’s look at an example:

Mary is looking for information on a dish detergent. So she does a search on Google.

As always, she sees a bunch of search results for dish detergents. But mixed in there are stories from her friends: one friend has posted before and after pictures of clothing she used a new detergent on. Another wrote a quick post saying how happy she was with that same detergent.

And finally, a third friend has shared something special: a coupon that the same dish detergent company posted on it’s profile.

Mary trusts her friends’ recommendations. She downloads the coupon and goes to the store to purchase the dish detergent.

Word of Mouth advertising and social media marketing, revolutionized.

Top companies are now engaging in social media marketing as a way to spur Word of Mouth advertising through social networks. And not surprising, it’s been working.

But now, with Google’s new update, social media marketing MUST be an ESSENTIAL part of your overall marketing and advertising plan.

Because if you’re not doing it, your competitors will be…and they’ll be stealing your sales.

Image Credit: Some rights reserved by Sean MacEntee

You know, Groupon, the Chicago based company that went from zero to 1/2 billion in revenue within two years? Groupon, the company Google won’t confirm, but is most likely buying for a mere 2.5 billion dollars? Oh them. The email coupon company.

Email coupon company or not, Groupon has made a a loud boom in the world of online marketing. Loud enough for the likes of Google to pay attention to with their big fat wallet. Especially because small and medium businesses are expected to spend 10% less on Google’s core paid search in the next five years, according to Borrell Associates. In fact, email marketing is projected to double by 2015 while paid local-search spending is expected to plummet. Last month, Google even moved star exec Marissa Mayer to the helm of local services from search products. For those of us who understand the inner workings of Google, that’s a major event.

“Google has known for years that local is the major untapped area for online advertising,” said David Hallerman, eMarketer principal analyst. Today’s online consumers are searching for their local online nesting areas, e-communities and virtual neighborhood hangouts. And, no surprise, Google wants to offer the small town solution in cyber space that can bring them additional local revenue.

But don’t forget, the online world of marketing success is all about data. Data beyond email addresses. Data that says “Sue likes this, and hates that. Sue shops in the mornings and loves dogs, and buys coupons for Thai Bistros, and supports local non-profits for blind children.” For Google to have Groupon as part of the company would mean having ten times more local data like this at their fingertips. And he who has more of this data wins. So 2.5 billion dollars may be a bargain. Unreal, huh?

1. Keep giving and contributing more than the competition. Pay back will be huge.
2. Every tweet, blog entry, comment and status update will be saved forever and is permanently part of your brand.
3. Before permission to market comes permission to connect. There’s a lot of trust building in between.
4. Make it easy for people to find you. While you’re out looking for business there is an entire market looking for you.
5. It’s not about B2B or B2C it’s about person to person marketing in social media.
6. Use the back links function in Google to see who is linking to your competitors. Reach out to those connectors.
7. Go wide with social media then build strong deep networks by going deep with the phone, Skype, webinars or in-person.
8. Twitter search and tools like Twellow.com can dampen the noise down from millions on voices to the exact ones you’re targeting.
9. Picking a fight publicly stays on record long after the battle is done. Rarely is it worth it.
10. Not getting the results you want? Are you asking for help often enough? It’s about community. Reach out.
11. Share and give more than you think is practical… then do it again. It will build positive momentum for your brand.
12. When partnering with other social media influencers start by making sure your values and principles are aligned.

You have those who don’t like Google, fearing it will take over the world. They’re already ragging on Buzz. Then you have the rest of us. The other 98% who say, aha, here’s where Twitter, Facebook and their long tail cousins might actually come together as one. Here’s where the noise that has become way too loud for most of us can get filtered. Best of all by the one company that knows how to do it best.

But let’s back up for a second and quit talking like everyone on the planet uses Facebook and Twitter. Let’s talk about the most used tool on the Internet that even non-techies use every day. It’s called e-mail. That’s where Buzz is brilliant. It’s right there with your email, on your desktop, laptop AND mobile device. It’s in an environment where the vast majority of online users still spend most of their time. It’s using Google search algorithms to help filter out content that you’re not interested in, and it’s quickly addressing the privacy issues that caused such a ruckus with Facebook users a while back.

So, do we need one more social publishing service? No. We need a few less. Maybe, just maybe, this will be it.

Android. Google Earth. Google Maps. Adwords. Adsense. YouTube. Ad Planner. Google News. Google TV. Chrome. Google Docs. Orkut. Picasa. Knol. G-Mail. Google phone (aka non-virtual hardware). Wave. Google 411. Google Images, etc., etc. etc. You get the idea.

Google. First of all, is Google a “them” or an “it”? For conversation sake here, let’s just call them/it Googzilla.

I just finished reading “Googled – The End of the World as We Know It”. Absolutely fascinating. The author, Ken Auletta, gave an interesting inside view of Google that I would say is mostly unbiased, and certainly daunting when you realize how many things Google has its virtual hand in.

The pervading message throughout the book was Google’s ability to abuse their power and knowledge if they ever choose to do the opposite of their corporate mantra, “Don’t be evil”. Yet this message is countered with the consistent theme from founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, also often chimed by Eric Schmidt (Google’s CEO), that they just want to help make interactive technology a great, user friendly, reliable, relevant, safe resource.

But here’s the twist – every step Google takes to be more useful is often because they’ve learned more about us. For example, search relevance improves via behavioral targeting because they’re watching us closer. Our continued diminishing privacy makes the web more convenient for us. Not to mention that opting out is a lot more complicated than opting in. The trillion dollar question is – do we really care?

It comes down to this simple dividing line. There are those who trust Google and those who don’t. And, as long as there are more that do, Google will continue to grow and own the online world. Could that change? Sure. If they mess up. If I had to bet, I’d say they probably won’t. But then again, in spite of all their algorithms, PhD’s, and rocket scientists, they’re only human.

What do you think?

I saw my Mac desktop computer with Facebook pulled up. I was in the process of sending a client a virtual piece of birthday cake. It was his birthday the next day, of which I’d been reminded by Facebook, Plaxo and Linked-In via email. Facebook was waiting for me to complete the virtual birthday cake purchase transaction, because a piece of virtual birthday cake now costs money. The $1.99 charge was being billed to me through my AT&T iPhone account, and I was waiting for a text message with a PIN that I had to input into the Facebook page in order to send the virtual piece of birthday cake.

My iPhone was situated on my desk in between my Mac desktop computer and my Mac Book Pro laptop computer. As I was keeping an eye out for the text with the PIN to come through on my iPhone, I was listening to a live podcast (from Germany) via my Mac desktop computer. The podcast was giving me instructions for using the new Google Social Media Search technology that I had just joined as a beta tester by signing up via Twitter that morning. As I was listening to the podcast, I was simultaneously downloading a recent Brandtailers video from my Flip camcorder onto my Mac Book Pro laptop, which I was going to quickly edit and upload to You Tube.

All of the above occurred within a five minute period.

For some of you reading this you’re saying, “No way. I’ll never be like that.” For others reading this you’re saying, “Yeah, so what. I call that Tuesday.” Well, guess what? The “I call that Tuesday” readers win. Because it’s where we will all be very soon. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, recently gave his predictions for what the Internet will look like in the next five years. This one particular prediction says it all… “Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.”

You can embrace this technology or ignore it, but you can’t stop it. 2010 marks the year of No Going Back. I choose to embrace, participate, and use it for doing good. How about you?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve given web stats to a client and they’ve looked at the unique visitors number and asked me, “Is that a good amount?” It all depends. Compared to Amazon.com, probably not, but we’re not competing with Amazon. I’m relieved that most of the people writing about web analytics now admit that the page view & unique visitors numbers are meaningless on their own.

Here are a couple of other numbers you can safely ignore: Twitter Followers and Google Page Rank.

Twitter Followers

Twitter is the new, bright shiny object. Seems like everyone is on it and one of the numbers easily available for all to see is number of followers. Seems like more = better, right? Not really. What are you trying to do on Twitter? Are you trying to influence millions (perhaps start a new religion)? Then more followers is better. Are you doing research into who’s talking about your product? Then who cares who follows you. Are you trying to become an authoritative voice in your field (usually social media)? You need followers. Are you giving your company a presence where you can make announcements? Well, it might be nice if someone is listening, but Twitter is searchable, so those announcements will become part of the web.

PageRank

This one’s a little more obscure, but you’ll see it thrown around when talking about SEO. I’ve always been a big suspicious of it, but that may be because I tend to work with smaller websites. We rarely even show up on PageRank. What is it, you ask? It’s a way to measure a page’s popularity and authority on the web. A number created by Google that may reflect whether one site ranks higher on a search result than another site. Note that I said ‘may,’ as with everything with Google search algorithms, we’re all guessing here.

There is one time when  PageRank does matter: if you’re selling links from your site to others or getting links from other sites. The ‘juice’ those links have is probably affected by the site’s PageRank.

Other than that, it’s much more important to actually look at where your site ranks for your targeted keywords (as many  SEO experts have said and keep saying).

Oh, and by the way, it’s not called PageRank because it ranks pages, but because it’s named after Larry Page, at least according to the Wikipedia entry on PageRank.

We were there with another fifty-or-so people from agencies our size, all invited by Google to be schmoozed, thanked for our existence, get our business pulses checked, and to be trained on some new “agency tools”. After a nice but fairly basic keynote presentation, we were broken up into small groups for one-on-one time with their specific team experts. Twenty minutes into an update on some new AdWords tools, I had agency leaders in my group saying they really didn’t understand how AdWords worked. Some knew a little, some knew nothing. My agency knew much more. My head swelled.

Then we moved on to Google Analytics. That got really interesting. Turns out the agency leaders that didn’t know much about AdWords knew even less about Analytics.  Or AdSense. Or Google Maps. And they sure didn’t know about Wave or Chrome OS. By lunchtime my head was pretty big. But as I chowed down their five-star free-cafeteria cuisine I remembered my virtual mentors like Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott, CC Chapman, and a few guys named Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt. I quickly slapped myself back to reality. Compared to the people I study and learn from every day, I know nothing.

This trip to Google’s headquarters confirmed for me that it’s all relative. People’s levels of knowledge and understanding about the online world are as broad and varied as the businesses they run. In my world terms like Social Media, the Long Tail, and The Cloud are thrown around every day by the digital gurus I follow, but the vast majority of well-educated Americans don’t know what any of this means. Yet.

For now just knowing that you need to know it is a good start. The day will come (and I say it’s very soon) where the digital world will be the life blood of most businesses. The trick to learning it is not being afraid to ask questions. Yes, it can be intimidating. But yes, it does start to make sense pretty quickly once you get all the puzzle pieces in front of you. I get several people a week asking me, “So what’s this Twitter thing?” At first I think, wow, I can’t believe they’re asking me this. But then I say to myself, “That’s great. They asked. They know that they need to know.” It’s the first step.