In about three weeks, we'll be gathering in Park City, Utah for another Search Insider Summit. Between now and then, I'll be providing a sneak peek at some of the content that will be covered. On Day 1 of the Summit, Jordan Rohan from Clearmeadow Partners and Mark Mahaney from Citi Investment Research will look both backward and forward six months to help us get a fix on lessons learned and what we should be paying attention to. I asked both Jordan and Mark to provide some hints of what they're seeing in their rearview mirrors and what's coming down …

For all of the focus on crawler and social layers, paid search has largely been ignored in the ongoing discussion of real-time search. This is a bit ironic in that it represents one of the most direct opportunities for marketers in a "right now" or "near right-now" scenario. Considering how one might engage in real-time paid search provides many answers about how it might also be approached in other real-time instances (many of which are TBD because real-time search is still developing).

In the months straddling 2000-2001, I had the good fortune to lead the ParentsConnected Nationwide Seminar Tour alongside my business partner, Ken. One segment of our show, Hewlett-Packard Marble Madness, involved hiding a marble of a particular shade of blue in a bowl of 4,500 other multicolored marbles. Contestants would come up on stage and have 20 seconds to try to find the correct blue marble, and match it to the "control" marble. If they found it, they won a computer. The educational message of Marble Madness was simple: searching on the Internet is like searching for the blue marble. …

At Ad:Tech last week, one message I heard, over and over again, is that people seem exhausted by the huge inefficiencies in marketing today. This is particularly true for Web marketing, including display, search and especially social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) Specifically regarding search, the overwhelming sense I got is that it is still so mysterious. There's real confusion among everyday businesspeople and rank-and-file marketers about how things work, despite the many blogs, newsletters and columns on the topic.

We are closing in on the end of 2009, and if this year is anything like years past (Q4 2008 aside), we should soon see advertisers asking for advice on smart ways to spend incremental budgets before year-end. If you are a retailer, you'll have no problem identifying qualified search marketing opportunities for incremental spending. But for advertisers in most other categories, the economics and scale for search marketing in the holiday period are not necessarily improved. For some categories like travel, for example, the fourth quarter is a seasonally weak time period. If your search campaign is fully scaled, …

In just under one month, we'll be gathering on the frosty ski hills of Park City, Utah for the Search Insider Summit. Between now and then, I'll give you a sneak preview of some of the main topic areas we'll be tackling in the meeting rooms of the Silver Lake Chateau. Today: How do you sell search to the C-Suite?

OK, kids. Class is back in session. Once again, we're studying business lessons learned from Google. As you'll recall, last time we covered these five Google-isms: 1. Innovate or die. 2. Automate or die. 3. Tap the long tail. 4. Keep your head in the cloud. 5. Don't scare users. Today, we'll discuss numbers six through eight. So get those pens and papers ready...

How many times has a client come to you and said, "I want a campaign that's going to go viral!"? If I had a nickel... I'm not knocking the desire for a campaign to go viral. It's just that, well, it's kind of stating the obvious. It's like saying, "I want my business to be really successful!" or "I want a product that people are going to love!" The critical question is, what makes viral viral?

Nobody's arguing that SEM (both in its paid and organic subspecialties) can deliver ROI. But viewing ROI as a primary and exclusive goal for your organization's search campaigns is dangerously myopic. Here's why.