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Google’s positioning as an auction conductor has emerged as a central defense to the increasing antitrust attention being paid to Google’s remarkable share of the search advertising market. However, Google’s positioning breaks down when Google buys house ads via AdWords.

Google is right now perhaps at the zenith of its power in the market. But the company risks its reputation if it continues to have a “tin ear” regarding key consumer issues.

I can't see what Google expects to gain by launching and operating a new social network, even if it succeeds in toppling Facebook, or at least taking some of its market share (a big if, given Facebook's scale and momentum).

MarkNet, a private online social network, has overhauled the way we do marketing at GE.

Minor holidays offer a wealth of opportunities to flex your creative muscles and do something different from your competitors. Here are some of my favorite minor holiday-themed emails from the past few years.

At a time when Google is moving into new services in which users have more options and are used to more experienced design, it might want to try to pick up a trick or two about human product experience design from the best in class on this subject.

If Facebook's search can garner better results than Google, then there is some trouble ahead for Mountain View.

Data from Famecount shows that the top five brands on Facebook people "Like" are food and drink brands. But do the number of Facebook likes matter? Not always. Here's why.

There may be pros and cons to Google's new Caffeine web indexing system, but marketers who use Google to search and find relevant results can find some definite advantages. Find out how to make the most of Caffeine to perk up your site.

Can you be the best in your industry without first inspiring your employees? Companies like Motorola, GE and Xerox don't think so. While customer engagement is critical, employee engagement must come first. Read more about this and other takeaways from the recent Business Marketing Association conference in Chicago.

If McDonald’s, one of the biggest and most successful corporations in the world, makes it okay for someone to “come as you are” to their place of business, it creates an underlying wave of unification and acceptance about one another’s differences.

Lincoln Barrett, vice president for guest marketing and alliances, shared that, for IHG, building a customer-centric marketing strategy hinged on three different, but overlapping, initiatives.

We believe most analysts are currently underestimating the mobile opportunity at Google and the foundation the company is putting in place, which should enable it to be a major player in the mobile ad market and could eventually represent an additional growth driver at the company.

I think Apple intends to own the ad market for its app ecosystem.

For marketers looking to optimize their social media, here are a few reasons to join the bandwagon and embrace Facebook's new Open Graph Protocol.

Apple is exhibiting a spectacular amount of tone-deafness in its handling of the case of the lost iPhone prototype.

This strikes me as a second try at Facebook's ill-fated advertising platform, Beacon. Although advertising isn't integrated into Open Graph yet, the similarities are hard to ignore.

It wasn't the taste that doomed New Coke, it was the idea of messing with a 100-year-old piece of Americana that had become as sacred to some as Mom and apple pie. Identifying and amplifying sentiments of that nature is one of the Internet's most finely honed skills.

Jeremiah Owyang gives his firsthand take on the f8 developer conference hosted by Facebook this week. Check out the conference highlights and how certain announcements could impact your marketing.

No business does more to turn off their customers than America’s airlines. They talk the talk, but rarely walk the walk.

Omnicom B2B specialty agency Doremus announced yesterday that its series of viral video for HP won a BtoB magazine award for best social media marketing program. The set of three videos follows Alex the IT guy as the HP machines around him start reminding him it is time to renew the company's service contract

What does your company do to retain customers? Do you have systems in place to find trouble spots in customer relationships and fix them? This author's experience with one brand teaches a valuable lesson on customer retention.

Would you rather own a brand, or are you content to just take a piece of "genre pie"? Last year, the Sci-Fi Channel decided it wanted to own its brand. To determine whether this re-branding was a success from a search perspective, ComScore digs into the data.

After Facebook asked its consumers about loosening its privacy policy, users are wondering what the social media site do with all of the feedback. Read on for lessons to be learned on how marketers can address negative input from consumers.