5 Minutes With… David Berkowitz, Director of 360i’s Emerging Media Practice

What types of emerging media are among the best ways to reach consumers?

There’s a broad range. That’s why we have strategists, researchers, and others here dedicated to executing such programs for clients in conjunction with search marketing. Some forms of emerging media are very social, such as social networks, virtual worlds, wikis, and other types of online communities. Others are more interactive, targeted versions of traditional media where there’s more of a distinction between the content producer and the consumer, such as with blogs and podcasts. All have their value, especially if they’re integrated with broader marketing campaigns.

How do you integrate emerging media strategies with natural and paid search marketing?

Any form of emerging media marketing connects to search marketing when properly executed. For example, if you’re running paid search campaigns, you can apply the messaging, landing pages, and other elements to ad campaigns on blogs, podcasts, and social networks. Additionally, if you’re creating profiles on social networks, submitting videos, adding community elements to your site, blogging, or creating other new forms of content, you can optimize all of that to expand your brand’s visibility in the search engines.

Even advertising on blogs can have natural search benefits. 360i ran a blog advertising campaign for a retailer in Q4. When you search for that retailer’s brand name in Google, the feed for the ad on one of the blogs included in the campaign ranks on the first page of results. Blogs are so well optimized for search engines, and the most popular ones have so much visibility, that advertising on them has the potential to reap exponentially more impressions through natural search.

Are these emerging media channels threats or opportunities for the major search engines?

In many ways, they’re opportunities. Consider the acquisitions by Google (YouTube, JotSpot, Blogger), Yahoo (flickr, del.icio.us), Microsoft (Massive), along with the advertising partnerships, such as Google serving ads on MySpace. These are tremendous ways for the engines to gain reach.

Still, these channels are becoming search engines in their own right. For instance, Hitwise reported in Q3 that MySpace sent more traffic to online retail sites than MSN. Social networks, video and photo sharing sites, news aggregators, and even gaming sites and virtual worlds are becoming search engines in their own right. Search is spreading beyond the engines, but no matter where the search originates, the marketer’s goal remains the same: to be there when consumers are conducting relevant searches.