As a marketing consultant, I move between industries and get exposed to different voices. Looking at new marketing techniques through a ’sports marketing’ lens gives a different view of the world from an SEO point of view. This week, a couple of reports based on statistical rigour from companies like Forrester and ComScore have shown that the effect of social media might be less than first thought and that location based services are well and truly the bleeding edge of marketing.

My hunch is that had these reports been positive, then the self appointed Social Media gurus / experts / specialists / consultants would have been retweeting and digging and backslapping all round, but instead – relative silence.

The ComScore Report about online shopping behaviour shows that very few people consult social media or blogs in the first instance when buying a computer or consumer electronics. Instead - manufacturer sites and search engines are the driving force.

The Forrester report looks at location based services and the results shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone who lives outside of a metropolis like London or New York or Melbourne. Forrester finds that 96% of U.S. online adults have never used location-based mobile apps such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt and of those who do, 99%  don’t update these services more than once per week. In fact, only 16% of respondents have never heard of such apps, leaving the vast majority of Americans online still in the dark about location-based apps, which have had the marketing world obsessing over them in recent months.

Apart from the lack of utility that these services provide people, letting your location be known in real time to a large number of people quite a big behaviour change in societies where privacy is highly valued. Nevertheless, in some markets there may be a brand fit between the audience for location based services and a company’s target market. If you are looking to target men between the ages of 19 and 35 who have college degrees, then location based services might be an interesting test for a fraction of your marketing budget.

With all the hype, real numbers based on research and not hearsay get lost, especially when they don’t help the nascent social media ‘industry’ sell consulting.  The lesson, apart from sticking to the fundamentals and viewing new technology as one of many promotional tools, is to widen the voices you listen to.

Nevertheless, there are still many businesses who don’t prioritise the internet as a source of revenue, who have been conditioned to think that a company’s web presence is a job for the guy in IT or that agency that charges more than the lawyers.

This week I have seen headlines in traditional media with headlines like ‘Why you should consider Internet marketing’ as if it was still the bleeding edge of promotional activity – as if there was some reason why you might not do internet marketing.

Functions that are fundamental to business are still being marginalised internally and that provides technology companies that can explain the business benefits of their services an opportunity.

Take search. Even a 5 year old entrepreneur with a lemonade stand knows that location is important. If nobody knows where to find you, no-one can buy from you. Nowadays, even passing trade can be hijacked by competitors making real-time offers to tempt your customers down the street using location based services, but your customer’s journey probably started much earlier – with an internet search.

Why then, do savvy business people who understand that location is important, not think about the location of their website in a page of search results?

Perhaps it’s too hard. Perhaps the mystery built up by the ’search industry’ has convinced business owners that they are powerless to have an effect on the corporate machinery of sites like Google, bing and Yahoo!

Even if that is the case, why aren’t search experts then given the same priority as an accountant or lawyer?

In fact, it’s not the case that search is hard. While Google is not as transparent as the yellow pages, there are simple rules that have not changed for several years that almost anyone can follow to get the basics right.

Like accountancy or tax, there is a level of expertise that will meet basic requirements and then there are more complicated issues that require more expert knowledge to make the most of the system.

(It’s at this point that I feel like starting this blog again, having come up with the analogy between search and tax, but that will have to be another post!)

If you accept that location is a fundamental business requirement, then how you rank in search engines becomes a priority ahead of many other business functions. You page rank in relation to your key search terms or keywords needs to be a metric that has the same importance as your sales conversions or gross margin.

What if you could have a tool that did for search what MYOB or Sage does for accounting or what SalesForce does for CRM? What if you could do search engine optimisation (SEO) ‘the Google way’ in a step by step way that demystified the process but provided real business benefits?

What would you want from that service suite?