Online Marketing Blog

After hearing at several sessions and in the media about the rise of online video, I decided to try something different here at SES San Jose. Armed with a slick Sony Cybershot camera that takes decent video, I’ve started to ask people what they think of this year’s SES San Jose conference. These are very short clips, 30 seconds to 1 min, but provide an interesting view of the people at the conference on what’s happening and what they think.

Here’s one with Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable in the conference Press Room:

Here is another with Jim Boykin of WeBuildPages at the Google Dance:

And another with Mike McDonald of WebProNews.

Moderated by Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ with presentations by Matt Bailey of SiteLogic and Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs. First up is Shari who answered questions about usability and search.

What is usability? Shows term highlighting in Google search results. Titles, snippets and web address.

Web site usability serves two purposes: Relevancy and encouraging clicks to your site.

Usability addresses all search behaviors.
- Querying (refining, expanding)
- Browsing, surfing
- Pogo-sticking (Jared Spool)
- Foraging
- Scanning
- Reading

What is web site usability? Shari believes usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use (Jakob Nielsen). Usability is task oriented. Usability meets a balance between satisfying users and business goals.

Barbara Coll headed up moderator duties for this panel that includes familiar faces Bill Hunt of Global Strategies International and Marshall Simmonnds of the New York Times. It also includes Kara Jariwaia from Cisco.

First up is Bill Hunt.

Audience poll: How many of you are big brands? Over half.
How many of you have multiple people attending? About half

Bill mentions he’s seen this as a trend.

IBM current results, 55 million pages in Google, 5,000 terms in top 5, search is 25% of all traffic, keyword research in all marketing.

Search as we know it (meta tag edits) is over. Times are changing. Multiple people are attending conferences, many brands are hiring in-house search marketers.

New product launches make search critical.

I was able to take a good number of photos at the Google Dance last night as well as a bit of video. Here are some of my favorites.

Waiting for the bus to the Google Dance

Googleplex

Danny Sullivan

Volleyball at the Googleplex

Green Screen Karaoke

Robot Wars

Ice Cream

Google Cafe

The Band

Lee Odden and Matt Cutts in a white hat

Goodbye!

You can see all or most of them on Flickr using the tag, “googledance“. Thanks Google!

Yahoo has updated their Site Explorer tool to offer some very Google Sitemap-like tools including the ability to track more than one site, display the last crawl date, easier feed submission and an update notification service. These services require a Yahoo account to login.

The Google Dance is getting started and I’m leaving in a few minutes. According to Google, here’s what to expect:

• Join the Meet the Engineers forum and come face to face with the people who make it all happen – Google Engineers
• Eat great food prepared by the Google Kitchen
• Socialize and network with industry peers
• Listen to cool sounds coming from our own Google DJ’s, as well as enjoy some live music in Club G
• Have fun in the Google Labs technology playground area, where you’ll be able to meet people who work on our products
• Make your own Google Doodle
• Eat ice cream – lots of ice cream
• Karaoke
• Put on the newest t-shirt in your collection

This session moderated by Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media, is near and dear as press release optimization and online PR are big pieces of TopRank’s internet marketing consulting practice. This session included: Greg Jarboe from SEO PR, Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus, and Nan Dawkins of Red Boots Consulting.

First up is Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR who starts off by relating a metaphor for press release optimization as a shortcut. People initially looked at news search SEO as a shortcut tactic into search results. But the search engines have devalued links within press releases. However, there are opportunities and they are not shortcuts.

Classic model of communications was Pavlovian. “Who says what in what channel to whom with what effect?”

I have to say, when I walked into the exhibit hall this am for a quick look, I was impressed! Lots of space and lots of exhibitors. Incisive Media has done a bang up job. Here are a few candids:

Google Booth

Yahoo Booth

Microsoft adCenter Booth

Ask.com Booth

Daron Babin and Greg Hartnet

SEMPO Booth

Mick Jolly and David McInnis of PRWeb

Fionn Downhill and a co-worker from Elixr Systems

Giving away a car?

An animated Rand Fishkin

Moderated by Detlev Johnson of Position Tech, this panel included: Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts, Rick Klau of FeedBurner and Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit.

First up was Amanda with yet again, a unique presentation. There is still lots of unclaimed territory with blogs.

Less than 6% of Fortune 500 companies are blogging according to SocialText. 35% of companies plan to start a blog in the next year.

RSS distributes content and drives traffic.

Build your feeds right from the start. Questions to ask:
- How many feeds are necessary
- How much content is needed to keep it fresh
- Should you publish an excerpt or the full feed
- Will the feed include other media
- How will you propagate the feeds initially and on an ongoing basis
- How to measure performance

Yesterday I sat in on two sessions: Leveraging Social Media (not posted yet) and Branding and Search and did an interview with Eurekster CEO Steven Marder. There were also two excellent announcements: Newsforce and the PRWeb acquisition by Vocus.

After all of that it was off to the Yahoo party at the DeAnza Hotel in a sort of outdoor/indoor courtyard. It started out pretty small but gained steam with lemony “Yahootinis” and an array of finger food. Yahoo chose to get rid of the remaining Yahoo logo’d martini glasses that were left over from the 10th anniversary party they threw at SES New York in 2005. Lots of people left with one or two white boxes.

Super SEO Bloggers Aaron Wall and Loren Baker

The Branding and Search session started out with Barbara Coll moderating and the following cast of characters: Ron Belanger from Yahoo! Search Marketing, Jonathan Mendez from OTTO Digital, Chris Copeland from Outrider Search Marketing, Mike Margolin from Targeted Marketing, RPA and Jenny Howell American Honda Motor Co. who did not speak, but was the topic of Mark Margolin’s presentation.

Just before this session started I ran into a prominent search marketer and we talked about some of the common questions related to search and branding. How do you sell clients on search marketing for branding purposes? Also, how do you best measure it? These questions and more were answered by the panel.

The joy of having a blog is the fact that’s it’s easy to subscribe to and easy to get your thoughts out there. However, if you go on a rant, be ready for some backlash.

I was reading Phill Ryu’s blog the other day when he went off on a rant about someone else in the industry. It was a well thought out post and was very personal. In the comments, the talk was mixed. Some agreed with Phill’s viewpoints, others slammed him for creating such a negative and personal blog post. So when is it ok? When is it not?

Where there is no definite answer, but there is one good determining rule; is it a personal or professional blog? If the blog is your own blog, and not directly associated with a business, then you are able to post whatever you want. Praise one thing, blast another. Freedom of speech, you can do that.