Schizophrenia: an online marketing disease

Two snippets of online marketing facts got some attention recently and, when tied together, they make the job of a well-done integrated online marketing campaign a work of geniuses, or schizophrenics. Well, in fact, it is not just snippets. We are talking about major moves of the two major online marketing platforms, namely Google and Facebook.
Google launched the "Plus, search your world" feature for its reknown search engine. This is a logical step by Google, trying to jump on the social train they have missed in the past. Of course, there is this troublesome relation between Google and its two main contenders on that market, Facebook and Twitter. And, yes, in an ideal world, we would love to have only Facebook and Twitter, both adequately indexed in Google's search platform. But the world is not so ideal, so Google launched Google+ and now has the perfect tool to force online marketeers into Google+. If you do want to show up high in the search results, you better start creating nice content in Google+. This argument is well explained, for instance, at copyblogger.

No problem...? We just link everything, true integrated marketing communication style, and do one big "social thing" with Facebook, Twitter and Google+ ! No, we will not.

And here is why...

The other not so trivial snippet deals with Facebook's strategy. As can be read in the Q4 2011 Facebook Advertising report by TBGDigital, Facebook actually encourages advertising to stay within Facebook. So, if your campaign is Facebook only, you'll have up to 45% reduction rates in cost-per-click. Again, this is a logical step in the evolution of Facebook as they are trying to become a kind of world-wide-web on their own. Yet again, it makes the online marketer's task really troublesome when conceiving an integrated online marketing campaign.