To many, Google appears to be losing its coolness. Which is pretty ironic now that its co-founder is lecturing world leaders on “hipness.”

Seriously. Google just launched another massive update (Hurricane “Austin”), and this one is worse than Florida. For many searches, the results are simply terrible. According to the chatter, Internet users are abandoning Google as their primary search engine like crazy. And people still using Google are clicking on the ads more and more, trying to find relevant results. I guess Google doesn’t mind this — they just completed an audit and are talking about having their IPO at the end of April now. (The extra revenues during the run-up, though not intentional, certainly won’t hurt.)

It’s pretty ironic that on the day this horrible “update” was unleashed, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, was lecturing attendees of the World Economic Forum on the secrets of hipness. Among his tips, “If you have to think about being hip, you’re never going to be hip.

Like the embedded reporters in Iraq, I make the case today that marketers can observe and analyze their web site statistics better if they’re up close and personal. Specifically, this article discusses how to use the free or inexpensive Live Person tracking tool to observe your site stats from the front lines on a user-by-user level. If you want to know what’s really going on with users on your web site, become an embed!

Eurekster opens to the public today. One of many to come in the area of “personalized search” based on the searches of people in your “network.”

Super Bowl ads are going for $2.3 million per 30-second spot this year. If that’s a little out of your budget, you can advertise on the final, final Friends finale for only $2 million per spot. Except they’re sold out.

The federal government is currently solicting suggestions from members of the public on how to sentence people convicted of violating the CAN-SPAM act. For example, should prison time be based on numbers of emails sent, how the emails were obtained (harvested off web sites and forums or randomly generated), or type of spam sent (child pornography is worse than Viagra).

Unfortunately, most of my suggestions are already illegal in most states:

• Boiling in oil
• Burning at the Stake
• The Rack
• Firing Squad

If you have suggestions for the Feds, they only take snail mail:

United States Sentencing Commission, One Columbus Circle, NE., Suite 2-500, Washington, DC 20002-8002, Attention: Public Affairs

I’m in Orlando for two days at a seminar for Internet marketing. Surprisingly, one of the biggest takeaways so far has been the importance of following up offline with leads generated online. Of course, most of the traditional (offline) businesses I consult with were not even following up with a sequential autoresponder at all before we started working together. So from an 80/20 standpoint, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit just doing the basics. (That, in fact, is the thesis of my book: www.bradfallon.com/book.html)

In actuality, most businesses are not even doing a good job capturing email addresses from their own customers (Doh!). But once you start getting leads from your web site, try following up offline as well and see what happens.

On a side note, one of the Internet marketers there seems to be making a pretty good loving selling e-books on how to give speeches for $10.00. Zero product cost and I guess more people than you would think are looking for help on things like wedding toasts and eulogies. Here is an example: Eulogy Speech. He is spending a fortune on Google AdWords, but I told him he’d be overrun with traffic if I linked to him from my blog. Just kidding, but you never know. If you need to give a eulogy, click one of the links below:

Sample eulogies to make a eulogy speech

• Eulogy samples
• Funeral speeches and eulogies

“In place of old rhetoric about democracy, let us opt for a new realism in foreign affairs. Because the overriding objective of any national security policy should be national security.”

Interesting article about the marketing of CAN-SPAM compliance. Peope will jump on anything in the news to make a buck, but that’s generally a good PR strategy — be topical. On the other hand, the scare tactics of these opportunistic marketers are almost as bad as the spam itself. (But at least they don’t clog your inbox.) Here’s a recent press release quote from one company marketing “CAN-SPAM Compliance”:

“With fines that can run to $6 million and a couple years in prison, anyone who doesn’t…act now to comply is making a big mistake.”

Wow, I had no idea. Let me give the awyer who wrote it some money quickly, before I get fined $6 million. As the article linked above points out, invoking this fear of financial loss and personal liberty is an appeal just slightly less blatant than the tone of many spam e-mails.

Really, the rules are simple. And anyone sending email should have been doing these things anyway:

• Provide an opt-out tool for recipients. (Duh.)
• Process opt-out requests within ten business days. (There’s excuse for not having it be instant. If you’re so big that you have so many people sending emails on your behalf that you can’t tell them about your opt-out’s every day, then either (1) you need a new email partner, (2) your’re sending too much email for your capability. It’s not that tough.)
• Use truthful subject lines. (Duh again.)
• Use legitimate return e-mail addresses. (Double duh. If you needed to be told these things, you are already evil. There are just rules for criminals. )
• Include physical postal addresses in messages. (This is where it gets kind of dumb. If you have a link to your real web site which contains your real address, what’s the point of wasting the bandwidth. This one thing is probably the biggest “change” for most legitimate companies using email to communicate with prospects and customers. (And if an otherwise-legitimate company has, say, their real phone number in an amail or a link to their real web site with an address, but forgets to include their address, I don’t think anybody’s going to jail. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that only the most egregious spammers see any “government action” at all, and no one will be fined for not having an address if there’s a link to their real web site.
• Clearly label commercial e-mail as advertising. (But it does NOT have to be in the subject line, e,g., “adv:” and for most people the “Click here to buy generic Viagra” will be a good clue.)

The more interesting story, of course, is whethe the law will do anything to lessen actual spam sent and received. Already, AOL has reported that the spam sent from outside the U.S. has immediately jumped 10%. Blah. By the way, if you want to lower your own spam, DON’T USE AOL!

To make sure you don’t make other newbie mistakes to encourage the evil spammers, click here for a good article by Evan Maloney.

Have you used a wiki yet? Know what one is? Wiki wiki is Hawaiian for “quick” but it is also the name of a type of web page that is gaining favor as a way to help “companies and work teams to trade ideas, share intelligence and track projects.” Reported by Michael Totty in The Wall Street Journal.

The idea is that any visitor to the web site can easily make updates and post changes. With low cost or free software like twiki.og, any company or group can start using this cross between email and a web site. Unlike email, everyone has immediate access to the conversations. Unlike a web site, every visitor can make changes. Cool.

Did you know you can use Google in other languages if you prefer? You probably knew about Spanish, German, Japanese, etc. But did you know you can Google in Klingon, Pig Latin, and even Elmer Fudd?