This is increasingly ever more challenging with digital marketing, since new channels or micro channels seem to appear with a head of steam almost every day.  Combine this with the ever changing nature of existing digital channels make budgeting in the 21st century nothing short of a stress induced headache.

In the ideal world, each business and marketing head, comes up with their own way to judge and measure their budgeting, allocating appropriate amounts to each channel (hopefully with some logic and research) and then optimizing their segmented marketing channels as traffic and results begin to come in.

My tried and tested method when launching campaigns and even more so when I’ve been tasked with the responsibility for building marketing departments ground up is the 30-30-30 rule.  Since every campaign will respond differently to a different company or destination goal, no matter your previous experience it’s important to set a phase 1 methodology. the 30-30-30 works well in all initial decision making.  The logic is simple, fragment your top tier decisions into 3 and allocate budget accordingly.

So for example, when starting out and planning required to strategize investment in people, services and media, simply go 30-30-30.  This obviously can become complex and as such further decisions need to made as to which function will take care of which channel.

For me, a typical marketing department allocation of resources should comprise:

30% to employment of personnel
30% to traffic purchasing
30% to outsourced services

The reason for this logic is that it allows (and in some cases forces) me to make tough decisions on prioritizing and managing functions or campaigns.

Within each of these allocations, the 30-30-30 rule is applied again (traffic purchase investment will be split equally between; SEO investment (long term), Affiliate support (medium term) and media buying (short term)

The same logic should then follow through in other areas, for example.  When building a marketing team, 30% should be ‘Money-Men’ (employees who’s work is directly measurable by bottom line results), 30% ‘Internal-Support’ (those who provide critical services to the team, including; analysts, designers, webmasters) and 30% to strategists (these often overlap the previous two, and will include middle managers and product managers)

By now you should be questioning the missing 10%.  To be honest, this is both my favorite part and the most important to the mix.  In every initial planning decision and ongoing optimization it’s essential to have a buffer. This is the ‘spare’ resources used to cover situations when you just know you’ll need an extra few bucks for a campaign but cannot be sure when or where. It’s the spare cash you need when a campaign needs an extra boost or when natural growth in a specific function necessitates the ability to expand without going back to the marketing plan and rewriting.

This 10% is also the fun part of marketing.  It’s the place where creativity flows and experimentation begins.  Without this 10% you’ll be forever bound by the preconceptions you begun with and the tight preconditions that result.

Despite the fact that recent figures show Facebook growth slowing in developed countries (2011 saw a mere 4% growth in USA) Facebook take up amongst 3rd parties is surging to the point of explosion.  Personally I find almost every new website launched includes the option (sometimes the only option) to register using Facebook or twitter access protocols.  Web savvy companies understand the fastest way to build brand exposure and users it to adopt existing technology creating a harmonious and symbiotic relationship between themselves and leading social networks.

2012 will see utter and complete domination by 3 companies; Facebook, Twitter and Google (in that order)

Facebook Domination: Already with over 800 million users (even if we assume only half of those are real active users) represents the most powerful single platform for social engagement.  Facebook arguably knows more about us than Google as we pour our lives into the system to create and sustain our lives.  This power will see Facebook continue to ease itself a growing ad market share (currently around 24% of display ads are served through FB, I see that rising to 35-40 by the end of the year)

Twitter Domination: CEO Dick Costolo in a recent interview outlined his accepted understanding that 40% of twitter users never tweet, it’s a one way Social Broadcast Network.  This is a stunning revelation and positioning, Twitter need not worry that a significant percentage of users never tweet, why? because these people are using the system as a source of information only and this in itself brings it’s own power and potential ad revenue wealth.

Google Domination: Focusing here only on the Google+ since they already dominate every other major market their in.  The aggressive release of SPY World and the subsequent rewriting of the SEO rulebook to dominate the future of search results will place Google firmly at the center of the Social Engagement Paradigm.  As soon as agreements (or loopholes) are reached to work with and not against Twitter and Facebook, we’ll see a new world of information sourcing.

So where does that leave the average company striving to find it’s way on the web?  straight forward and simple… to ignore active social engagement is to not only miss an opportunity (that was missed if you didn’t get on the ball in 2011), it’s now a perilous decision to not engage with customers, clients and potential target market.

By the end of the year it’s a reasonable assumption that our appetitite for non-recommended information or products will be close to finished.  With the average facebook user connected to 150 friends and using the Linkedin metric of degrees of connection, this means the average person has connections to over 1,000 ,000 people to gain accurate, reliable recommendation.  Factor in that more and more people are segmenting their social connections correctly (Friends in FB, Business in LinkedIn, and everyone in Twitter) we can assume we on average can call upon the voices and opinions of over 5,000,000 people!!

Placing trust in ads from the richest advertisers or visiting sites based on the best SEO will become a thing of the past.  The way to dominate the web in 2012 will be to embrace the voices and hearts of those 25,000 connections and incentivize them to become product evangelists.  Not only will this lead to measurable ROI but importantly the search results will reflect these social voices rather than the highest bidder for ad placement.

The final question to be answered is ‘how can I embrace and incentivize?’ lets get serious on this, we just need to do what we should be doing; provide products and services that people really want, delivered in a way they want them, followed up by good customer service.  The final key to the puzzle is the simplest, give these people the tools to shout about it! these tools are already on offer and will continue to be enhanced by the 3 aforementioned dominating companies.

I wrote last that SEO is Dead, so it’s only right I justify that position with some explanation and personal thoughts on what to replace it with.

So much is changing on a daily basis in the world of online marketing that just keeping up with the latest trends demands significant investment of time and dedication.  Even with the advent of smartphones and news aggregators the task of keeping abreast with opportunities and avoiding the pitfalls of being labelled a black hatter is becoming somewhat tiresome, to the point of indifference.

To be honest, this is where I arrived some months ago.  Trying to second guess Google’s bot and spam team together with endless demands by scrupulous vendors to offer me SEO services and online marketing platforms left me with an unpleasant taste in my mouth. So, I abandoned it all and went marketed naively and this is where I recommend everyone position themselves.

This is not to devalue the increadible think tanks and opinion leaders int he industry, I’m not trying to set out to discredit the unmistakeable acheivements that these people claim and that are acheivable and presentable by any Marketing Manager.  My point is that by getting to obsessed with algorithms, keyword ranking, onpage optimization and the like it will make you lose sight of your purpose as someone responsible for heading a marketing function.

My attitude is simple.  I took the simple advice from Google and let it permeate all my planning and decision making.  Give visitors a top-notch experience and your sure to grow your bottom line.  For too many years, I like many marketers became too wrapped up in keyword research, ranking and click through rates. In optimizing the flow from search to landing page to ensure maximum conversion rates.  It works well and I’ll not challenge this for a second, but I began to miss the point of marketing in itself ‘Understand what your customers want and give it to them in a effective manner (and do it profitably)’

Many years ago when studying Marketing I was taught the most basic premise of marketing, something we all know but often forget.

If you make one customer happy, he’ll share his experience and soon word of mouth will deliver the cheapest marketing campaigns you could hope to create.  

For many marketers this has by necessity been abandoned because for so long the web had ineffective tools, or the tools adopted by the masses were not accepted by the boss as viable and worthy of investment.

I believe this changed last year and 2012 will be the year Social Marketing replaces SEO as the most invested in channel outside traditional media spend.

Ignoring Social Marketing now is a mistake for any company.  Embracing it now is an opportunity like embracing SEO 10 years back.

Facebook and Twitter have become the defacto social engagement and broadcast networks, I believe this is now wrapped up like Google did with Search so many years back.  What changed in the last year is the adoption of Facebook & Twitter login tools to power so many new related and unrelated services.  As Matt Cutts said that his only regret in closing his Facebook account is he now finds himself unable to register for other sites.  This speaks volumes about the power these networks have obtained in our lives.  Indeed millions of dollars are being invested and earned every day based on the technology provided by these networks to power 3rd party sites.

Combine this with the release of Google+ which in a few short weeks is too young to predict it’s actual impact but the way Google have already integrated it into their main services we can be sure that it’s here to stay.  The advent of Google + Your World is the basis of the game changer, this is the opportunity that if missed will have us kicking ourselves in coming years.  G+YW has the potential to reset the way search results are delivered rendering years of SEO work obsolete and opening a new door to owning the 1st page of search results.  It’s name is social, it’s based on your social circles and the growing voices and experiences within them.

For this reason, I abandoned SEO and am now exploring the uncharted territory of Social Marketing.

Regardless of personalized results based on your browsing preferences (which for sure proves SEO is Dead) there’s a new killer in town who goes by the name Google+ (G+)

Lets put aside the recent social failures of; Orkut, OpenSocial, Buzz and to some degree Wave the present iteration of Google attempting to understand and dominate the social space may just have hit the mark.  Not least because this time instead of rolling out beta’s, invite only or over complicated integrations…. this time Google+ in our faces before we’ve even accepted and internalized the notion of Search + Your World

Quietly, deviously but with usual intelligence we’ve come to expect from the guys at mountainview, Google+ is going to rewrite the books on SEO, Online Marketing and indeed the very way we consider search and discovering information.  The underlying concept of Social Marketing that Google now understands clearly is that we care less about what’s pushed upon us through advertising or savvy SEO’ers and more about the recommendations, incidental thoughts and musings of those people WE CHOOSE to put in our social circles.

Now, depending on how much we use Google, how much we as individuals have adopted social networks as our source of engagement and discovery will dictate how much G+ will change our lives.  If we presume that we (or at the very least the emerging socially aware generation) have opted to share our lives on FB / Twitter then the simplicity of organizing our contacts into Circles is a no-brainer.

Now, consider the scenario where we have enough like minded friends in circles to cover any interesting query we may have, then there’s every chance that in the coming year or three the entire SERPS for any query will be filled with answers from people we’ve pre-chosen to trust.  SEO’ers and Spammers start to worry just about now!

It means a devaluation of standard SEO a devaluation of any content not pre-approved (or +1′nd) by one of our nearest and dearests, it means a devaluation of Adwords (althought the clever introduction of +1 on Adwords should cover the concern Google accountants may have over a drop in a few billion ad revenue bucks.

For smart marketers, there’s significant opportunity here and it comes in the way of two things (and this folks is where I love Google for coming full circle to return marketing to an honest endeavor)

1. Provide users with good experience

• Lots of quality content
• A quality product or service at a good price
• Excellent customer service

2. Encourage users to share

• Create an online social funnel (FB Page, + Page, Tweet)
• Like / Follow / +1 Buttons on-site
• Incentivize sharing

And there we have it, Google+ comes to life,  SEO is dead but the fundamental work flow of White-hat SEO lives on in the social universe.

So lets look at the components of the image.

myhouse.google.com  : already here in the form of Google Aps, hundreds of thousands of individuals, businesses and non-profits are already using the ‘My-Google-Services’ as their solution for mail, collaboration and engagement.

Image Search : Google Search is integrated with the ever more powerful Images and the maturing Google Goggles is every more able to identify tangible objects from a flat image.  Google can recognize ‘my keys’ able to distinguish from ‘someone-elses-keys’

Natural Search : Using everyday language has always been a mainstay of the power of Google, identifying and removing obscenities from search string is bread and butter.  Even better to add an obscenity as a tag can serve to help Google identify the natural meaning intended.

Location : Items, images, people have already come together under Google Places, the ultimate location tagging system that drives engagement and navigation through the Google plateau of services.

Okay, so a crude review of components and I’m quite satisfied that the technology is in place to deliver the accurate results (including an image) when you search ‘my F***ing keys’ the question is do we have a solution (or how far away are we) to combine these systems to deliver such a profound result?

And this is where are, it can be done, but currently isn’t.  Individual can simply photograph their life, tag everything and piece it all together but this is obviously not a viable solution.  So a mashup opportunity is out there. I look forward to seeing the final piece, and I don’t expect it to take a further 12 years!

SEO has just recently had it’s bells rung as Google launched Search + Your World and with it we can now see a future where search results are 100% socially driven (as long as your ‘circles’ are big enough to answer your search query)

Facebook and Twitter are here to stay and making money !

Android now exists and is already poised to be the real menace to iPhone we all hoped it would be.

More thoughts as often as I can.