iCrossing founder returns to search marketing

Jeff Herzog founded Internet marketing firm iCrossing in 1998 and turned his fervor for search engine marketing into a company that the Hearst Corporation bought for more than $325 million in a deal that closed earlier this year.

For the past two years, Herzog has been working on ZooLoo, a social network service I described as “Tumblr Pro” earlier this year. I was surprised to receive a press release this week announcing the sale of ZooLoo to an unnamed group of investors for an unnamed price. So I got Herzog on the phone to explain what’s going on.

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It’s this simple: His non-compete contract with iCrossing has expired. Jeff Herzog is coming back to the search marketing business. Zog Media, the 20-person Scottsdale, Ariz., company that built ZooLoo, will now become a search marketing upstart with plans to expand into America’s Midwest and the East Coast regions in the coming year.

“I spent ten years helping define search marketing,” an audibly excited Herzog told me in a phone interview this afternoon. “There’s been a lack of innovation in the last few years. The platforms have all been built. But you haven’t seen that real twist of innovation.”

Herzog’s new post-SEO strategy won’t be about tag farms. It’s about a corporate strategy he sums up as “design to be found.” Companies first need to figure out what they want and don’t want to have discovered online. The info they do want to be found now needs to be findable in more places than Google. The info they don’t want leaked, needs to be pruned. Think Facebook, Twitter, and many other hubs such as LinkedIn that don’t get as much press as the big social networks, yet have a substantial base of influential users.

Herzog said Zog will still be strategically partnered with ZooLoo, which may get a rebranding. “Search is a lot more closely tied to social than people think,” he said. That may be why the unnamed investors Herzog sought out ended up not funding ZooLoo but buying it.