These kinds of techniques go by many names, such as black hat SEO, spamdexing, or simple spamming. And many techniques that clever people use aren’t expressly against the search engines’ terms of service, anyway. So, it’s not a question of morality here. You are free to do what you think is right without any advice from me.

But I am going deeper than that. My opinion is that most search marketers need to pursue approaches that work for all three parties in the search transaction: the searcher, the search engine, and the search marketer. Now, most of us have no trouble pursuing tactics that work for us, the search marketers, but we sometimes forget that our tactics need to work for searchers and for search engines, too, if we expect them to work long term.

Techniques that help search marketers but nobody else won’t last. Eventually Google will shut it down. Don’t believe me? Google stopped keyword spamming and PageRank sculpting already. And PageRank sculpting was never against the terms of service. If paid links get to be enough of a problem, Google might stop using links altogether.

Now, many people can make a good living fooling Google and searchers and everyone else, and if you can do that, more power to you. But most people will never be that clever and don’t even have the time to devote to such a pursuit—they have businesses to run. And if you are running a business, you might not want to be so clever, anyway, for several reasons:

• It’s not your image. If you have made your business special by serving your customers above all else, then this goes against your brand image.<.li>
• It’s not your speed.. When the algorithm changes, invalidating a technique you’ve incorporated, you need to move fast. Is it realistic that your business can change that rapidly?
• It’s not you. These clever tactics require a lot of work to keep up with what’s going on and it requires a stomach for risk. You need to decide if you are that kind of person.

I am not here to give you advice on what to do here. I just want to share my opinion that doing whatever works has a dark side, where you have more ups and downs. Just go in with your eyes open.

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As the story goes, Canadian law holds a pet owner responsible for damage caused by the pet, so State Farm sent the pet owners a bill for $1700 to cover the damage to the car that struck and killed their dog.

At a certain level, this makes sense. After all, anytime someone is at fault in an accident, the insurance company needs to make them pay. Failing to do so raises everyone’s insurance rates. But in this situation, the public relations damage of a heartless insurance company going after the dog’s grief-stricken owners seemed right out of central casting. And social media message boards and bloggers soon jumped in, and State Farm is there. But not looking like a good neighbor.

If you’re feeling a bit smug as you read this, wipe that look off your face. State Farm has a generally positive image inside and outside social media. Many insurance companies would have done the exact same thing, and many other businesses have policies in place that employees adhere to without considering the extenuating circumstances. Maybe yours does, too.

So this isn’t a story about State Farm. It’s a story about you. Do your employees know how to operate in public? It’s likely that the poor claims adjusters whose quick decision started this imbroglio didn’t even consider that they are working in the public eye. I am confident that they didn’t consider what people would think. They were just following procedures and sending a private letter to someone.

We all need to remember that everything we do in the age of social media can be publicized without our permission, and that the reaction to what we do forms a new kind of pressure of public opinion that none of us are accustomed to.

Some small business owners have told me that they are too small for anyone to make a stink over what they do, but that’s just whistling past the graveyard. True, your public relations mess wouldn’t get picked up by the New York Times, but does that matter? Social media makes it easy for your customers to hear all about it, even if mainstream media never mentions it.

No matter how large or small your business, your employees need to understand that everything they do now is in public, whether they want it to be or not. Every seemingly private communication can become public at any moment. Do you want your employees shackled to a set of procedures in those situations, or do you want them deputized to act in the best interests of the company? Or do you at least want them to think about the public relations implications of their actions and ask for advice before blindly acting in accordance with procedure?

Your public relations day in hell is coming if you don’t.

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I am a big fan of David’s, and if you read his last book, you would be too. So, I recognized David’s voice in places throughout the book, especially when it explains how to detect the difference between tuned-in and tuned-out marketing.

But I also recognize the voices of Craig and Phil, because I am a certified product manager from their company, Pragmatic Marketing. So when the book differentiates between listening to your customers and listening to your overall market, I hear them. When they tell you that you need to get out and talk to people to identify the ideas that will resonate, I remember hearing in class: “Nothing good ever happens in the office.”

So, nothing this book said really surprised me. And that’s the real genius of the book. So often, a really great book says something that seems completely obvious-right after you hear it. This book is one of those.

Well of course you need to talk to your whole market and not just your existing customers. Well sure you’d rather have real information on which to base your decisions than “gut feel.” Certainly innovation for innovation’s sake is doomed to failure.

There are these kind of “Well, duh!” ideas on every page. But they are obvious only in retrospect. Most companies don’t act as if these ideas are obvious-just the opposite.

In my last book, I tried to help people take these approaches in Internet marketing. This book has a bigger agenda, where the authors help you see how to succeed in all the parts of an offering, from product development to marketing. And they succeed, both because of these blowhard-skewering truths and because they have a rich set of stories that put these ideas in action.

I was fascinated by the case study for Zipcar, I business I was aware of but had never tried. The way they first identified the needs of city dwellers who occasionally need a car, but don’t need the hassles of owning one, was an eye-opener for me. But I was even more surpsied to hear about how they’ve targeted other groups to help them, ranging from politicians interested in telling a green story to landlords looking to add Zipcars as a differentiator against other rental properties.

Zipcar is just one of dozens of stories that bring the Tuned In principles to life. If you’ve ever wondered why your company is stultified in its strategy, and why it strangles every successful product idea before it ever sees the light of day, read this book. It will challenge you to transform your company or leave it.

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It left us with two kinds of businesses: those that can’t afford market research and those that can’t afford enough market research. If you’re ready to learn how any company can begin conducting market research using the Internet, read on.

Whether you are a big company or a small one, market research is the lifeblood of your company, because unless you know what your market wants, you can’t make it and you can’t persuade people to buy it. Although the Web has been lauded as a low-cost way to market and sell products, I think that it’s gotten too little attention as a cheap way to do market research.

So, whenever I think that a cheap way to do something has gotten too little attention, it’s time to roll out another in the series of Skinflint Internet Marketing Guides. To find out how you can take advantage of cheap (or even free) ways to collect market research on the Web, check out the Skinflint Guide to Market Research.

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