It’s the age old dilemma… should you hire a kick-ass search engine marketing company (Visiture) to manage your search engine advertising or bring someone in-house? Well, we have to acknowledge our bias in answering this question, but here are a few legitimate reasons why you should hire an agency Visiture.

1) Hiring a search marketing firm will often be cheaper that hiring a full-time in-house employee with the adequate expertise and experience needed to manage your online marketing initiatives/account(s).

2) If you don’t spend more than $1,000,000 in ppc/search engine per year), if your marketing efforts would require several Internet advertising account managers and a team leader to get the job done — but you aren’t so large that you need your own PPC army — hire a firm.  Firms have the proper team structure in place already and will be operate more efficiently.

3) You want things done right.  We also have established relationships with measurement tools like Mongoose Metrics and Kenshoo that can give us all kinds of wonderful insight into your account and help us fine tune it all the time.

The Visiture team has been managing search engine advertising since the industry’s infancy. In short, we’ve got this. We are certified by the search engines and have a deep well of situational history and a broad range of experience at our disposal.

Still, you might be thinking…

BUT someone in-house will be more in-tune with my brand, will care more, and for those reasons may do a better job.

1) You are crazy dreaming if you think we don’t stress over or care about your pay-per-click/impression campaigns as much as you do.  It’s basically our lives.

2) We’re aren’t complacent or bored with managing only your same one single account every minute of the day (like your in-house employees would be).

3) Our diverse, independent, unbiased perspective will help improve your campaign performance. We’ve “been-there, done-that” and have knowledge from years of experience and different industries to apply to managing your accounts.  This fresh perspective will help us better optimize your account(s) to perform.

And remember: you don’t have to fire your marketing manager or marketing department to hire us. You should have a main marketing coordinator – a knowledgable point person for us to ensure we are representing to help us represent your brand appropriately and accurately. Search engine advertising should be just one piece of your overall marketing strategy.

Since Google and Facebook are feuding, it seems like a great time for Bing to announce that they are changing their algorithm to lean heavy on Facebook.  To create a more social search experience for users, Bing will now place Facebook page results that their friends have liked higher in the search results when you’re logged into Facebook while searching on Bing.  If you’re not logged in, Bing will still Facebook pages with more likes in higher spots.  The reason being is that it can be assumed that the more likes a fan page has, the more relevant the content must be.  If you are logged in, Bing is aiming to bring you the pages that your friends recommend.

In short, “Bing is bringing the collective IQ of the Web together with the opinions of the people you trust most, to bring the ‘Friend Effect’ to search,” Microsoft search executive Yusuf Mehdi wrote in a Monday blog post.  Are you finding this kind of personalized search helpful or creepy?

Many clients have a hard time grasping what it is that a social media strategy is trying to accomplish.  I think the most prevalent words I’ve heard dropped in the preliminary meetings are “stupid” and “pointless.”  And it’s true that the weight of social media is still being experimented with and leveraged, but it is also true that many companies are benefitting from their social media initiatives in a real way (as in, real dollars).

You’ve heard that content is king (if not from anyone else, from us about a million times), but it’s difficult to figure out how to make your content social.  For some, it is downright implausible to think that a piece of content is going to go viral.  Some content is just more interesting than other’s.  However, it is what you do with that content that matters.

Firstly, you want to be retweeted, but not arbitrarily.  It is likely that your article will be found if the correct keywords are found within your original tweet and retweets.

Secondly, people aren’t going to promote a completely self-serving post.  Providing useful information is your niche is what you need to aim for.

Thirdly, don’t forget about Facebook.  When people “like” your page, this will show up in their friend’s search results (in Bing).

Basically, just think of Twitter and Facebook as an easier way to get word-of-mouth buzz generated about your business.  The more information that people can find out about your business, the better.  This means promoting your business philosophies, goals, your employees, space, community, etc.

A tech nerd, Christopher Soghoian, has ripped off Facebook’s plan to sabotage Google.  Ok, that’s a bit overdramatic.  No one is taking down America’s favorite verb with a few measly negative comments (after all, we still haven’t forgotten about Lindsay Lohan), but it sure has ended up looking unfavorably upon Facebook.  Soghoian was asked to write a piece about “Google’s sweeping violations of user privacy. Google, as you know, has a well-known history of infringing on the privacy rights of America’s Internet users. Not a year has gone by since the founding of the company where it has not been the focus of front-page news detailing its zealous approach to gathering information – in many cases private and identifiable information – about online users.”  I believe that last sentence is called ‘leading the witness.’

He declined, because like all nerds, he lights a candle at his Google shrine when he goes home every night.  So he did the only logical thing and posted the e-mails for everyone to see!  The result?  Facebook looks like a needy, desperate tween picked last for the Sadie Hawkins Dance.  Let’s hope Google has a doodle up its sleeve for later this week.

Carnegie’s 6 Keys to Success (as referenced by Search Engine Watch):

Become genuinely interested in other people. The last thing you want to do is seem 100% self-serving.

Smile. Sure your customers can’t see you, but they can tell if your company is a happy place to work/patronize by your updates, tweets and website.

Remember that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language. Reply, tag, and use it whenever possible!

Be a good listener. Encourage people to respond with their opinions and converse with you and others.  This can also be helpful if you use social media as a customer service tool.

Talk in terms of the other person’s interest.

Make the other person feel important — and do it sincerely. Don’t be afraid to get personal with your customers and potential customers – learn about their interests and talk candidly with them.  This will help you ascertain what drew them to your company, what you can improve, and just generally let them know that you care.