Marketing podcast with Vanessa Fox (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is ex Googler Vanessa Fox. Fox is the author of Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy Is Your Business Strategy.

While at Google Fox built Webmaster Central, which provides tools, information, and community for site owners about how their sites are performing in Google’s search engine. She also was instrumental in the sitemaps.org alliance of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. (Both really good things!)

I’ve begun to state quite passionately in recent presentations that digital interactivity has moved to the center of marketing and perhaps to the center of all business activity in general and Fox’s assertion about online being the business certainly supports this growing notion.

Search permeates offline and online behavior and become woven into everything we do. It drives my wife crazy when we are chatting about something and she asks a question and I pull out my phone and dial up the answer. Offline advertising is driving web behavior and then influencing how people interact with organizations.

Search and social media are completely woven and no longer the next big thing. Social search has become the norm and really is just a part of marketing and a large part of the new era of customer engagement. If your customers are talking about you online then search greatly amplifies these conversations.

Organizations must make search and social media strategy connected to development, business and marketing strategy and tear down the silos between those creating content, social engagement, optimization and message.

Grab this complete list of keyword research tools from Vanessa’s blog.

Great book – great guest!