I got a reviewers copy of Honest Seduction last week in the mail and am somewhat familiar with Ion Interactive (they are present at most of the SES and SMX conferences, but I don’t recall ever speaking with Scott Brinker, Anna or Justin Talerico). Nevertheless, they must have wanted me to read their book, or else, they would not send a copy to me, so I obliged, and read the book this week).

My first impression – Honest Seduction sounds a lot like FutureNowInc.com, GrokDotCom.com, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg type of stuff but with more of a focus on Search Marketing instead of Usability.

For example, the Eisenbergs will often point out campaigns that don’t work or where marketing messages are mismatched. Along the same lines, Anna Talerico rants about an IBM Infoprint color technology page with no clear call to action (on page 47) and with a message mismatch.

However, what Is left out of the rant, from my point of view, is the dysfunctional ways marketing works in companies like IBM, which is the real problem, the message mismatch is but a symptom of a much larger problem, but the book’s subject matter stays away from probing beyond failing campaigns.

This book is really a collected series of published columns spanning 9 years, it’s not new material, but since I haven’t read any of it, I tried to get out of it, what I could, but noticed it got better as it got closer to the present day. In fact, I attended some of the same conferences, such as SES NYC 08, SES San Jose 08 and SMX East 08, but our paths never crossed.

There’s several nice snippets of information later on in the book such as “Search is perceived as an undifferentiated commodity business” on page 283, the Search Marketing Maturity Model on page 320 draft that divides Search Maturity into 5 stages, ad-hoc, engaged, structured, managed, optimized; they do the same thing with landing pages, but divide the pages into 5 types, production, coordination, granularity, optimization and testing (on page 333).

In fact, you’ll want to see my comments about the similarity between Ion’s book and what the Eisenbergs and Tim Ash put out, near the bottom of the this post.

Arguments around a structured SEM approach (shotgun search approach yields 337% ROI vs. Surgical search ROI of 572%) on page 337, is often used as a selling point for ION’s and other paid search providers services.

Honest Seduction ends with the introduction of a series of online ROI calculators that some might find useful (on page 344).

I really liked a chapter on 3-Dimensional Post-Click Marketing (page 75 and 76) where it’s mentioned we are trained to simplify most of our analysis into 2 dimensions, but many young children think more 3 dimensionally, till they are socialized to think in 2D. Scott Brinker suggests search marketers can learn to apply 3D post click marketing.  I think the whole 3D Visualization approach appeals to me because I’m also an artist.

Anyway, Honest Seduction is a good book for a very narrow, specialized subject, SEM and optimization.

One more thing – my own inclination in writing a book like this – would be to avoid trying to make it too narrow – make sure the reason the book exists goes beyond trying to sell your own services and product.   I have nothing against selling product and services – I just think it’s more authentic to be totally transparent about why a book is written, and what it’s for.

In the cluttered world of Search Marketing, it’s not that clear to me what the differences are between what Honest Seduction sells vs. what Eisenbergs sell, vs. what Tim Ash is selling in Landing Page Optimization – a book I reviewed last year.  In other words, we’re more intelligent than “stimulus-response” – Pavlov’s dog – the bar has been raised and people want to move beyond a technical specialty and solve the underlying problems – that’s why Obama got elected – so while Scott Brinker, Anna Talerico and  Justin Talerico wrote interesting articles – I think more could have been done with the material than sticking it into a book – but that’s just me.

After all, I’m someone that’s hard to please – I like authors to do something to transform the material and make it extra specially relevent – like if ION could have showed how these principals helped campaigns succeed (even Political ones, like Obama’s, I’d have responded to the book much more).

Still, Honest Seduction wasn’t a bad book -and someone who runs Paid Search Campaigns and looking to improve them, might want to read it.

Problem, is, that person, isn’t me.  Still, I got something out of reading the book.