Many companies who invest marketing dollars in search engine strategies, social networking sites and online communities are wasting their money.

That’s according to Seth Godin, marketing guru and best-selling author who gave a keynote address Tuesday at the 2007 Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago.  Godin told approximately 3,000 marketers that many of their clients simply throw money at the Web in ways ill-suited for their businesses.

What's more, the onus falls on Internet marketers to help companies reconfigure their businesses from the bottom up to suit new media marketing.

“There’s something really, really big happening, and it’s going to be messy,” Godin said.

Internet advertising grew 36 percent in 2006 in the United States, according to research firm eMarketer. Although online spending as a segment accounted for only 6 percent of global ad spending totals, that number has been projected to grow to 10 percent by 2009, according to an October study by ZenithOptimedia, a United Kingdom-based research firm.

Meanwhile, much of the shift in dollars towards search marketing strategies, as well as other new media tools such as blogging or social networking, hasn't been properly utilized, Godin said. He cited Wal-Mart's efforts to found a social networking site to compete with MySpace, as well as other failed attempts to cash in quick on the latest Web 2.0 trend.

Another failed try, he said, is St. Louis-based brewer Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc. “Budweiser is all about being true to the TV revolution,” Godin said of the Anheuser-Busch’s domestic beer, which represents an “average product for an average person,” and is better suited for the mass marketing television achieves.

“When BudTV spends $40 million dollars,” Godin said, referring to the company’s online video site, it’s burning money on a Web site that can't compete with YouTube.

The disconnect between Web savvy new media marketers and their clients resonated at the conference.

“It’s important for the client to embrace the Web,” said William Lees, president of Internet Marketing Logic in Bonita Springs, Fla.

“It’s an opportunity to get more business. Many of my clients look at it as a branding opportunity,” he said, emphasizing that companies underestimate how they must adapt essential functions such as customer service to the speed of a Web-dominated world.

Many marketers said big companies realize there’s a new marketing paradigm ahead of them, but they struggle to find solutions that work.

“You have to do it the right way,” said Eric Enge, president of Massachusetts-based  Stone Temple Consulting.

Helping companies figure out how to reconfigure their businesses around new marketing, as Godin advocated, however, hasn’t been the role of traditional marketers.

One company doing it the right way, according to multiple speakers and attendees on Monday and Tuesday, is Blendtec, a 30-year-old manufacturer of blenders. The Utah-based company achieved viral video fame with a clever online spot in which founder Tom Dickson showcased the power of his blenders by pureeing an iPhone.

Achieving that level of exposure on the Web lures many companies to invest more online.

Another thorny issue for Internet marketers, and search engine marketers in particular, is integrating with a company’s traditional television or direct marketing efforts, according to Don Schultz, integrated marketing communications professor at Northwestern University.

“If you’re going to succeed in the marketplace,” Schultz told conference attendees, “you’d better figure out how you fit in the whole marketing system.”

These concerns, however, do little to temper the excitement many Internet marketers feel.

 “For this industry, for everyone who is in it, it’s been growing like a weed,” Enge said.